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China’s Media Crackdown Spreads to Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s expulsion of a British journalist after he led a foreign correspondents’ meeting with a pro-independence activist is, first and foremost, an attempt by Beijing to tamp down any dissent in the former British colony.

Hong Kong officials have not given a reason for rejecting a journalist visa for Victor Mallet, the Asia news editor for The Financial Times. China’s only comment has been that Hong Kong authorities are within their right to do so. But that’s the typical legalistic evasiveness of authoritarian regimes when they do something they know is hard and embarrassing to defend.

The authorities have never criticized Mr. Mallet’s reporting. But he was the main spokesman for the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club in August when it hosted a talk by Andy Chan, head of a political party that called for Hong Kong’s independence from China. Hong Kong and Beijing officials blasted the event in advance and subsequently banned the party.

Beijing took back control of Hong Kong from the British in 1997 after nearly a century of colonial rule, and agitation toward independence has never pleased China’s leadership. Hong Kong as an “inalienable” part of China is written into the territory’s Basic Law.

UK says Hong Kong rejection of FT journalist visa politically motivated

The talk show hosts have blathered about #WalkAway for a few days now. Finally - I looked it up. Definitely interesting!

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/07/03/former_liberal_to_progressives_time_to_walk_away.html

Brandon Straka says that less than a year ago, he was a liberal. He explains why he changed his mind in this "viral video" encouraging other progressives to "walk away" from the remains of the Democratic Party.

"Once upon a time, I was a liberal,” the gay NYC hairdresser begins. "I felt I’d found a tribe.” But, he said, they will do “absolutely nothing for you."

The video is at least a month old, but Straka appeared on FNC's 'Tucker Carlson Tonight' on Monday to discuss what he means:

Watch the latest video at foxnews.com

Another story from an apparently Black Canadian woman who married an American.

https://www.redstate.com/kiradavis/2018/08/10/heres-chose-walkaway-liberalism/

My father-in-law was a popular local pastor, and also the first black man I’d ever met who called himself a Republican and a conservative. We were fast friends, and often talked politics. He would gently but intelligently challenge a lot of my notions and beliefs. I thought I knew a lot because I read a lot of headlines. He challenged me to read the actual stories. I thought I new a lot because I watched Bill Maher. He challenged me to watch the things going on around me. I thought I knew a lot because…well, I knew a lot! He challenged me to value results over talk. I wasn’t a convert, but I began to think that maybe I didn’t have the full picture when it came to my ideas about Republicans and conservatives. Could it be that I was depending too much on salacious headlines and raging talking heads for my opinions about conservatism?

Back to Brandon: http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/07/08/brandon-straka-walk-away-campaign-founder-denied-service-camera-store

Straka said the salesperson recognized him from his campaign and said that he couldn't sell anything to him because he did not support the "#WalkAway" campaign.

According to the movement's Facebook page, it's meant to "encourage and support those on the left to walk away from the divisive tenets."

Straka said following his encounter at the electronics store, he started "shaking" because he hadn't experienced negative backlash like that before.

"It took my breath away," he said.

Two videos, each of them very eloquent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Pjs7uoOkag&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQXW2Ob1PU&feature=youtu.be

GAB

Hello Everyone,

Yesterday Breitbart published a leaked internal Google briefing about the shift Silicon Valley is making towards more censorship online. This followed leaks earlier in the day from The Intercept, which show how Google is contradicting themselves in regards to the censored search engine they are building for the Chinese government. You can read the briefing that Breitbart published here: Google: "The Good Censor".

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/10/09/the-good-censor-leaked-google-briefing-admits-abandonment-of-free-speech-for-safety-and-civility/

https://theintercept.com/2018/10/09/google-china-censored-search-engine/

On page 53 of this internal Google briefing, Gab.com is cited as a "challenger app" and notes how users are moving to Gab in response to the censorship of Silicon Valley. Google argues for a "European" approach to speech standards on the internet, favoring "civility" over freedom.

Silicon Valley has shown their true colors, which is why they recognize Gab.com as a threat to their control and dominance over the internet. They are rejecting the cherished internet ideals of liberty and free expression in exchange for censorship and partnerships with the Chinese government.

This is why Gab is winning and will continue to win. We are adding tens of thousands of new users every week, and our funding round is being completely powered by you, The People. In about 20 days we have raised $670,000 and will quickly meet our goal of $1.07m. We are hiring more engineers to speed up product development, make the site more user friendly, and build out our own infrastructure to escape the chains of Silicon Valley.

If you're interested in investing and becoming a shareholder you can learn more here and invest as little as $252.

PS: developers please check out our new API.

Thanks for your continued support!

Click here to login to your account →

Thanks and remember to speak freely!

__________________________________________________________________

THIS is why there is a gab.ai people. Any more questions?

Monday evening I decided I'd take the bus to the Emergency Room after supper as I could feel Bipolar Mania coming on, but at the time it wasn't so bad that I felt the need to hurry, so I rang up my Mom to let her know where I'd be, and told her not to worry I know all about this stuff by now as I was diagnosed with Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder in 1985.

A half hour later I realized I was not competent to eat a bowl of homemade chicken soup so I decided to expedite that bus trip. Despite being way crowded the ER got me into the back right away, where I requested Haldol, a powerful antipsychotic which is generally used only for the most severely disturbed patients, as well as so far as I know, only used in hospitals, never outpatient.

"I think we can set you up with that," said my doctor with a smile.

Three hours later I was still unable to sleep so I asked for some more. "Once you've been given Haldol they don't want to give you any more. They don't want it to put you to sleep."

"When you're manic, your only hope is to sleep." And friends, my doctor agreed and in fact gave me four times as strong a dose than the first one, and for good measure some Ativan. Most commonly used for anxiety it's also used as a sleep aid, but I never ask for it other than in the hospital as Ativan is quite addictive.

Mid-afternoon yesterday - Tuesday - the ER staff work me up then gave me the boot. I went home, slept for five more hours then felt just fine so I came into downtown Portland to work through the night.

Well now it's four AM and I'm starting to feel wired again. I decided it would be best were I to go home when the transit starts running again at five, then to do my best to sleep. I'm going to take a few days off from work.

That's going to be hard for me as I am heavily into my work, but better stir crazy than Crazy crazy.

Tennessee death row inmate wants electric chair as 'lesser of two evils'

A condemned Tennessee inmate wants to die in the electric chair, rather than by lethal injection, calling electrocution the “lesser of two evils,” his lawyer said.

Edmund George Zagorski, 63, is set to pay the ultimate price on Thursday for the 1983 slayings of John Dotson and Jimmy Porter — 35-year-old victims who were planning to buy 100 pounds of marijuana from Zagorski.

Lethal injection is the primary form of execution in Tennessee, but inmates whose offenses happened before January 1999 may opt for the electric chair.

The Volunteer State is one of nine that still includes the electric chair as a form of execution.

Kelley Henry, Zagorki's defense lawyer, said lethal injection is a long, brutal process that can take up to 18 minutes.

“Faced with the choice of two unconstitutional methods of execution, Mr. Zagorski has indicated that if his execution is to move forward, he believes that the electric chair is the lesser of two evils,” Henry said. “Ten to 18 minutes of drowning, suffocation and chemical burning is unspeakable.”

Use of the electric chair is rare, with just 14 of the 871 executions happening via electrocution since 2000, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The last electrocution was in Virginia in January 2013.

After serving me well these past five years, my good old Nexus 7 is finally going to retire. I've gotten a new tablet, a Xiaomi Mi Pad 4, which is more or less the same form factor, just slightly bigger, and the hardware specs are really sweet. But I should have been a tad more careful reading of both the place I bought it from and the stuff on XDA about it. First off I'd bought a version that has a Chinese ROM. This shouldn't be such a big deal, except that the damn thing doesn't have Google Play or any sane app market. There's the Mi App Store, and while it has some of my essential tablet apps, some omissions are rather notable, not even including including something as basic as a workable FTP client. Since one of the main uses of my tablet is to play video files I download from a network storage server at home, this is essential. Maybe there is something there that could do that... if only I could read Chinese. F-Droid seems to help somewhat, except that there still isn't a simple FTP client that will let me download several files in a batch. The closest thing there seems to be Ghost Commander, but it downloads all the files in parallel and can't display progress for all of them. This is ridiculous. Even the web browsers like Firefox are in Chinese! The keyboard is also the Google Chinese keyboard, and there's something of a dearth of alternative keyboard apps, at least no keyboard that will let me type numbers on a password screen lock without pressing a modifier key. I fucking hate that. There is a lot of space on a 1920×1200 screen that is 8" across, I could use a row of number keys at the top thank you very much! There certainly seems to be nothing like the Hacker's Keyboard on Google Play, which you can actually use vi on a remote shell with because it gives you that all-important Esc key. :P

The other thing is that locked bootloader. I could have flashed a custom ROM to remove the useless Chinese cruft. While Xiaomi will allow me to unlock it if I want to (after giving them something like $250 for it I expect no less), they have an irksome requirement. They are making me wait 720 hours (yes a whole fucking month) before they will permit me to unlock. The fact that they impose this delay on you for your "protection" is extremely irritating and paternalistic. Sure, if the device is stolen it becomes essentially unusable if the bootloader is locked but there are better ways to make that happen I think. Given the lack of GPS or LTE circuitry in this version of the Mi Pad 4 I have, if that happens I don't think it's going to help. So do I own my device or not? Seems they want to hang onto it for a month longer before they'll actually give it to me.

In the meantime I've managed to sideload a few of the essentials after using Titanium Backup on my Nexus 7 to convert them into APKs. They largely seem to work.

My daughter was telling me about an app that day-cares and schools use to send photos of kids to 'helicopter' and panic parents and I tried explaining why that was a security issue:

How do you explain to people who don't realise the problem that there IS a problem.

I've tried using the Jewish registration at the Nazi police stations (what, 1939ish?).
I've tried hacker data stealing.
Data collection of kids through adulthood.....

What is a good argument to use against "App! Facebook! Wow! If you don't do anything wrong you have nothing to worry about"?

Anyone got a good speal?

I'll be just fine using only my Mac mini until it arrives.

Tomorrow I've set my alarm for 4:00 AM, then will register homeless people to vote at Vancouver's Share House. It is a men's shelter and a soup kitchen, restroom and shower facility for both men and women.

I've got 200 Washington State voter registration forms, the Secretary Of State has PDFs on their website.

I'm getting up so early so I'll have time to sit in a stupour for a while before setting out for West Vancouver. I always have an incredibly difficult time for the first hour after I get out of bad. That totally sucks but it eventually dissipates, then I feel just fine.

At 11:00 AM I'm going to register at a church in Central Vancouver; they serve lunch at 11:30-12:30.

During the afternoon I'm going to register at an apartment building that houses 55 veterans who were previously homeless or at risk for becoming so, then an apartment building for garden-variety homeless not far from my own apartment, then late afternoon I'll drop off the completed forms at the Clark County Elections Commissions in the big county building next to the courthouse and jail, also in West Vancouver.

Tuesday morning I'll go to the Multnomah County Elections Commission in South-East Portland to request a pack of 500 registration forms - Oregon doesn't provide PDFs. Then at 4:00 I'll register at the Blanchet House Of Hospitality in Oldtown, then at 5:30 at the Portland Rescue Mission. It's in Oldtown too.

Tomorrow is the last day for registering Washington residents but for Oregon I have until a week from Tuesday.

I'm very tired, I'll have an easy time getting to sleep. I'll go to bed in a half hour.

I had some leftover Kraft Dinner with diced tofu because I was quite hungry when I got home but after I post this I'll heat up some homemade chicken soup. The previous resident of my apartment left me lots of really great cookware including a three gallon stainless steel pot. I used five large chicken thighs, two large onions, a whole bunch of celery, lots of carrots and five medium russet potatoes.

Life Is Good

Rumor: New PlayStation 5 Feature Revealed

Earlier this week, a new patent filed by Sony suggested that it is planning on adding backwards compatibility to the PlayStation 5. Now, another patent has surfaced revealing possibly another feature the system will have.

Filed back in May by Sony Interactive Entertainment, and approved just a few days ago, the patent appears to suggest that hardware V-Sync will ship with the next Sony console.

Titled "Video Frame Rate Compensation Through Adjustment of Vertical Blanking," the patent is pretty extensive, but in short, it should help games run better on the system.

Great, patents for backward compatibility and V-Sync. WTF?