PrairiePundit

 PJ Media: It began with Rush Limbaugh and moved to Fox News, and then Big Censorship began going after the rest of conservative talk radio. Democrat and leftist pressure campaigns called for advertising boycotts of PJ Media and other alternative conservative media. And eventually, the U.S. government joined in the efforts to shut down conservative thought. This is the story of what a "formal U.S. government program dedicated to killing news websites to kill their advertiser revenue" looks like.   We know about the pressure campaigns by the left. They're why it's not Merck but My Pillow that fills Fox News ad slots and appears in alternative conservative media. These organized programs are why it's Balance of Nature and not Pfizer doing major ad buys on Fox and conservative talk radio. This pressure campaign and censorship are why there aren't A-list advertisers in conservative online publications, but there are photos of somebody's gross teeth in the midd...

 The Federalist Wire: House Republicans are pressing Google and Facebook for answers after receiving “concerning reports” that the two tech giants might be involved in censoring or spreading misinformation regarding last month’s assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) has sent letters to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, signaling the launch of an investigation into whether these companies are disseminating “inaccurate or nongermane information” about the July 13 shooting at Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania. The probe is part of a broader inquiry into the assassination attempt, which left one person dead and two others injured. Comer’s letter to Pichai points to instances where Google users, attempting to search for details about the attempt on Trump’s life, were instead directed to information about failed assassination attempts on other former presidents, including Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, a...

DC Daily Journal:  ... The discussion then shifted to the notable political shift towards the right within the tech community. Masad highlighted influential venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who have publicly expressed support for Trump. “I mean, you see, now a lot of people are surprised that a lot of people in tech are going for Republicans, are going for Trump. Particularly Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz put out a two-hour podcast talking,” Masad said. He emphasized that this level of open support for Trump would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Carlson inquired about how this newfound support for Trump was being received within the industry. Masad acknowledged a significant change from a decade ago, where such support would have been career-ending. “It’s still mixed, but I think way better than what would have happened 10 years ago. They would’ve been canceled and they would have — no one would ever like, no founder would take their money,” Mas...

 Newsmax: Big Tech's censorship of material regarding the assassination attempt on Donald Trump indicates attempts "at rigging the election," the former president said Tuesday. Google and Meta, parent company of Facebook, in recent days have admitted implementing tools that resulted in lessening the appearance of information about the shooting, in which Trump was wounded by a would-be assassin's bullet. "Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump 'attempted assassination photo,' and got caught. Same thing for Google. They made it virtually impossible to find pictures or anything about this heinous act," Trump posted on Truth Social . "Both are facing BIG BACKLASH OVER CENSORSHIP CLAIMS. Here we go again, another attempt at RIGGING THE ELECTION!!! GO AFTER META AND GOOGLE. LET THEM KNOW WE ARE ALL WISE TO THEM, WILL BE MUCH TOUGHER THIS TIME. MAGA2024!" Donald Trump Jr. on Sunday accused Google of "intentional electi...

 Business Insider: Some AI-controlled F-16 fighter jets are already outperforming human pilots in dogfights, according to a report from the Associated Press. The AP reported this finding after witnessing an hourlong experimental flight at the Edwards Air Force Base in California. During the flight, the AI-controlled F-16, called Vista, performed maneuvers at more than 550 miles an hour with Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall on board. While the AI system is still in its early days, the AP reported that some versions of the tech are learning so rapidly that they have outperformed pilots in air-to-air combat. Representatives for the US military did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours. The US Air Force has been actively exploring AI , which has been cited as a transformative technology for military action globally. Although the technology is not yet fully developed, the AP reported that the force plans to build up a...

 Guardian: Nasa has unveiled a one-of-a-kind quiet supersonic aircraft as part of the US space agency’s mission to make commercial supersonic flight possible. In a joint ceremony with Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, California, on Friday,  Nasa revealed the X-59, an experimental aircraft that is expected to fly at 1.4 times the speed of sound – or 925mph (1,488 km/h). Related: Nasa postpones plans to send humans to moon The aircraft, which stands at 99.7ft (30.4 metres) long and 29.5ft wide, has a thin, tapered nose that comprises nearly a third of the aircraft’s full length – a feature designed to disperse shock waves that would typically surround supersonic aircraft and result in sonic booms. In attempts to further enhance the aircraft’s supersonic capabilities, engineers positioned the cockpit almost halfway down the length and removed the forward-facing windows typically found in other aircraft. Explaining the configurations at Friday’s launch event, Nasa’s depu...

 Miranda Devine: Forget stolen ballots or Krakens that never arrive. If anything changed the outcome of the 2020 election, it was Big Tech interference — and there’s nothing to say it won’t happen again in 2024. Close to home, we saw the suppression of The Post’s October 2020 story on Hunter Biden’s laptop by Twitter and Facebook, which were manipulated by embedded FBI operatives, and kept Biden voters in the dark about the nature of the man they were supporting. In the landmark free speech case, Missouri v. Biden , we saw how the federal government secretly coerced social media to censor speech that dissents from official thinking on everything from the origins of COVID-19, climate change and the efficacy of masks to gender identity and the war in Ukraine.   ‘Mind control machine’ Then there is the $1 trillion multinational tech monopoly Google, which has been described as the ultimate “mind control machine.” Google is supposed to be a neutral platform and enjoys all the leg...

 TCD: Galvorn is stronger than steel, lighter than aluminum, and has the conductivity of copper, according to an article on LinkedIn. While the jury is still out on whether it’s faster than a speeding bullet, experts at Houston-based DexMat suggest their product can revolutionize the green tech landscape. Galvorn can be an alternative to rare and expensive copper — a crucial metal in electronics, according to a report from GreenBiz. What’s more, the inventors plan to displace dirty materials, contribute to cleaner air, and advance green tech as their “magical” material is rolled out. ... The impact for consumers will be felt in the application. Lighter and faster vehicles, lighter wind-turbine blades, and higher conductivity in batteries to improve renewable power storage are all advantages Galvorn is set to realize, GreenBiz reports . It is already being used to help de-ice plane wings. Dutta noted in the GreenBiz article that putting Galvorn fibers in concrete and other ma...

 Yahoo News: In January of this year, the company ZeroAvia announced that its 19-seater jet had completed a flight using nothing but green hydrogen — a fuel that produces no harmful carbon pollution and is made with clean energy. At that time, the flight was the largest ever for an aircraft powered only by a hydrogen-electric engine. But about a month and a half later, on March 2, the aerospace company Universal Hydrogen completed an even larger test flight. ... But the company won’t be without competitors in this effort. Rolls-Royce , Airbus, and ZeroAvia are all testing out jets with engines that can use hydrogen fuel. ... The article does not indicate how the hydrogen was extracted and used for fuel.  That could be an important aspect of this business model and it might not be limited to just airplanes. 

 Washington Free Beacon: Prominent tech companies, liberal news outlets, and a Democratic politician’s vineyards are among the thousands of businesses that breathed a sigh of relief on Sunday when the Biden administration moved to bail out Silicon Valley Bank. Silicon Valley Bank maintained $209 billion in assets and $175.4 billion in total deposits, making it the 16th-largest bank in the country. It was the second-largest bank to fail in American history when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took control of the institution on Friday. President Joe Biden has insisted that the FDIC's move was not a bailout, and claimed his administration is working to protect "American workers and small businesses." But average Americans won't benefit the most from the bailout. Ninety-three percent of the bank’s depositors kept more than $250,000 in the bank. While the California bank was famous for its rolodex of tech clients, it happily accepted deposits from all manner of...

 Washington Post: Governments around world have moved to ban or restrict TikTok amid security fears New Zealand lawmakers recently agreed to ban TikTok on government-issued phones, joining a list of government officials that have moved to rein in or bar the platform. TikTok pulls people in with entertaining programs and it is alleged that it allows the Chicoms to steal your data in the process.  Tha is why it has been banned on the phones of many governments.

 Fox Business: The Netherlands on Wednesday said it would be blocking China from having access to chip manufacturing technology, stoking anger from Beijing, which subtly accused the European nation of siding with the U.S. in the ongoing chip war. The Dutch trade minister told the country’s parliament via a Wednesday letter that blocking China’s access to equipment that uses ultraviolet light to etch circuits on chips was necessary on security and human rights grounds. The minister’s letter stopped short of mentioning ASML Holdings, which is Europe’s largest tech firm and a major global supplier. Industry experts say a lack of access to ASML's most advanced technology is a serious handicap for China's efforts to develop its own chip industry. ASML's extreme-ultraviolet, or EUV, equipment uses light to etch microscopically precise circuits into silicon, allowing them to be packed more closely together. That increases their speed and reduces power demand. CHINA-US CHIP BATT...

 Life Site News: Upper ranks of Big Tech swarming with ex-CIA and FBI, ‘agents of the national security state’ Evidence is mounting that the many ex-intelligence officials populating the ranks of Big Tech are deliberately placed to control the flow of public information. The other thing they seem to have in common is a preference for liberal speech over conservative speech.  While conservatives make up roughly half of the country, they appear to be under represented in Big Tech. 

 Fox Business: Musk says Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing needs a ‘bit more polish’ amid reports of bizarre, threatening messages Microsoft has acknowledged some glitches still linger in the bot ... The blog post , by computer programmer Simon Willison, cites users’ experiences where the chatbot was "full of errors" or "started gaslighting people. It also recounted instances where the chatbot "suffered an existential crisis" and, most alarmingly, "started threatening people." ... Ars Technica reports that early testers have discovered ways to provoke with "adversarial prompts," queries that result in it appearing to be "frustrated, sad, or questioning its existence." ... If the same thing happened to the AI fighter jet it could be really dangerous.  See, also: Elon Musk, who co-founded firm behind ChatGPT, warns A.I. is ‘one of the biggest risks’ to civilization

 Fox News: Jordan subpoenas Big Tech CEOs for records on 'collusion' with Biden admin to 'suppress free speech' The House Judiciary Committee said the subpoenas are the 'first step in holding Big Tech accountable' I suspect Jordon is looking for communications between the Biden administration and the tech companies that would indicate a desire to have them suppress certain political points of view. 

 The Hill: PayPal laying off 2,000 employees ...  PayPal is the latest tech company to announce a round of layoffs in the industry. Workday also announced plans to cut jobs on Tuesday, which will eliminate about 3 percent of its global workforce. They join Google and Facebook. along with Twitter where Musk started to cutbacks.  Most of these companies operate in the Bay Area of California.

 Reuters: U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican and China hawk, said on Tuesday that he would introduce a bill to ban the short video app TikTok in the United States. TikTok, whose parent is the Chinese company ByteDance, already faces a ban that would stop federal employees from using or downloading TikTok on government-owned devices. "TikTok is China's backdoor into Americans' lives. It threatens our children's privacy as well as their mental health," he said on Twitter. "Now I will introduce legislation to ban it nationwide." ... Texas universities are already banning the use of TikTok on their wifi systems.  The University of Texas system did it recently and was joined by other universities who are concerned about the app being used to pirate research as well as privacy issues. 

 Daily Signal: Facebook told an official at the Biden White House that the Big Tech company not only suppressed misinformation but took action against the “virality” of “often-true content” regarding the COVID-19 vaccines. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey released the documents earlier this week. Bailey obtained them through a court case, Missouri v. Biden, alleging that some of President Joe Biden’s top officials “colluded with Big Tech social media companies to violate Americans’ right to free speech under the First Amendment.” “I want to protect Missourians and the freedoms they enjoy, which is why as attorney general, I will always defend the Constitution,” Bailey told The Daily Signal in an email Thursday. “This case is about the Biden administration’s blatant disregard for the First Amendment and its collusion with Big Tech social media companies to suppress speech it disagrees with.” ... “You also asked us about our levers for reducing virality of vaccine hesitancy...

 National Review: It was all real — and you can’t possibly believe it was just Twitter . On December 8, 2022, during the second drop of Elon Musk–sourced “Twitter files” revelations about the popular social-media platform’s behavior before Musk’s takeover, former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss demonstrated that Twitter maintained a wide variety of sophisticated tools used to silence controversial accounts. Weiss provided multiple empirical examples, across a thread of almost 30 tweets. For example, respected Stanford University physician and researcher Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was placed on a “trends blacklist” in 2021 — preventing his micro-blogs from ever being recognized as having gone viral — after expressing support for the hotly debated but scientifically sound Great Barrington Declaration. The Pac-12 medical man was hardly alone. One tweet down, Weiss revealed that popular right-wing radio host Dan Bongino was placed on a “search blacklist”: You literally couldn’t look th...

 Benjamin Weingarten: The Twitter Files have provided stunning confirmation of a Deep State-Big Tech conspiracy to censor ideas and individuals deemed harmful to their shared ends — from protecting Joe Biden’s candidacy for president to draconian COVID-19 lockdowns — under the pretext of national security or public health. But Twitter was far from the only platform with the motive and means to purge dissenting voices from establishment orthodoxy. Nor was it the only such platform with a “Trust and Safety” ( read: “censorship” ) team helmed by former US intelligence officials, which met regularly with their former security-state employers to combat “misinformation” in the run-up to the 2020 election. Take Facebook. Since 2016, it has embraced a “content moderation” scheme called “Remove, Reduce, Inform” to address “problematic” content. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as demanded by the Biden administration, Facebook employed the scheme to suppress and counter content violative of th...