Alan Montecillo

People who talk breezily about the U.S. orchestrating "regime change" in China don't have the slightest grasp of even modern Chinese history, much less anything earlier. They live in a fantasy world of DC cocktail circuits.

Reading a summary of a book is cheating. A decent bluffer should be able to pretend to have read a book on the basis of reading the blurb, hearing about it at a dinner party, or just guessing from the title - most of us were doing that for years before this newfangled nonsense came along

Why do people keep pretending that there was some unbridgeable barrier between the United States and the People's Republic of China until three days ago? There are absolutely massive cultural and economic connections between the two countries, and have been for decades now.

Behind the scenes, the company was also quietly dismantling a system to prevent the spread of misinformation. When the company announced on Jan. 7 that it would end its fact-checking partnerships, the company also instructed teams responsible for ranking content in the company’s apps to stop penalizing misinformation, according to sources and an internal document obtained by Platformer. The result is that the sort of viral hoaxes that ran roughshod over the platform during the 2016 US presidential election — “Pope Francis endorses Trump,” Pizzagate, and all the rest — are now just as eligible for free amplification on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as true stories.

NEW: Meta has quietly dismantled the system that prevented misinformation from spreading in the United States. Machine-learning classifiers that once identified viral hoaxes and limited their reach have now been switched off, Platformer has learned www.platformer.news/meta-ends-mi...

I am here once again to complain about the enshitification of Google search. Maybe AI will kill us, maybe it’ll save us but meantime, it has taken one of mankind’s greatest accomplishments of last 40 years and ruined it.

There is huge variation in the strength of member stations. A KQED can lean on our community (and our staff) and survive. Small stations will be in really serious trouble.

Think Biden’s Unpopular? Check Out His Fellow Leaders. If floundering leaders and ineffectual democracies are the new norm, we’re in a very dangerous time.

Meyerson's thesis: corporations & companies have become global, beyond the reach of any national gov't; consequently, inequality has soared & people are unhappy; but people blame national gov'ts, punish democratic leaders, & look to autocrats for solutions. Grim.

prospect.org/world/2024-1...

i think it is very cool that the political press was basically uninterested in the fact that vance is openly adjacent to/pals around with far-right and Nazi-sympathetic maniacs

A 7-Eleven Heir’s $50 Billion Fight to Keep the Company in the Family A battle for control of the chain shows how traditional business models embraced by family owners are clashing with a more shareholder-centric approach.

Interesting article about the clash in corporate culture at 7-Eleven, where the Japanese founding family want to take control rather than sell. They value customers more than shareholder value. www.nytimes.com/2024/12/18/b...

Trump picks threaten more lawsuits over critical coverage

This is why you don’t settle defamation lawsuits by public figures.

Six Childhood Scourges We’ve Forgotten About, Thanks to Vaccines Most Americans, including doctors, have no memory of the devastating diseases that routinely threatened children until the 1960s.

Questions today about vaccines might just be a product of their success. Here’s what people should know about six once-common illnesses that vaccines have contained for decades.

to add to to this: I want journalists to know there are countless “content creators” using your reporting, misrepresenting it, erasing your existence & profiting from it. i found this podcast that literally PHOTOSHOPPED MY NAME OUT of my own fucking story. are we going to take this shit lying down?

A quote that a veteran Chicago reporter once told me be about newspaper owners that always sticks with me “No one ever bought a bicycle that they didn’t want to ride.”

An eventful five years at @kqednews.bsky.social!

Silicon Valley's Push Into Transportation Has Been a Miserable Failure The titans of tech brought plenty of disruption to our broken transportation system but delivered little in the way of innovation.

“Elon Musk admitted to his biographer that the reason the Hyperloop was announced—even though he had no intention of pursuing it—was to try to disrupt the California high-speed rail project to get in the way of that actually succeeding.” — @parismarx.com in @gizmodo.com gizmodo.com/silicon-vall...

In Downtown San Francisco, Hotel Workers Have Been Striking for Months | KQED KQED’s Farida Jhabvala Romero explains why this dispute has dragged on, and how everyone has a stake in what happens to the city’s hotel industry.

On today's episode of The Bay: San Francisco's hotel worker strike, which is on its 80th day. www.kqed.org/news/1201748...

Vlado Chernozemski, who assassinated King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, belonged in his youth to a club that was devoted to a game of regicide.

In the game, known as "chess," contestants subtly maneuver into a position that allows them to topple the opponent's monarch.

unrestricted pardon power is a good example of how the US, by virtue of being one of the first countries to abandon monarchy, retains far more elements of monarchic authority than most nations