Only one type of speech is properly prohibited and that is speech which seeks to censor others. A person who advocates censoring others should himself be censored. Censorship is needed, many will argue, citing the example of the one who yells “Fire” in a crowded theater. A person who commits such an act should be punished, but his speech cannot be the subject of before the fact censorship for the simple reason that it has not yet occurred.
The report of Jeffrey Stahl Ferris’ suicide after a federal jury found him guilty of terror-related charges in North Dakota seemed strange to me. Da’esh, that is, ISIS, has but a tenuous grasp of geography outside what were traditional Muslim lands. New York they know, Florida they know (because of Disney) and they know Washington. But that’s really about it. The plot to blow up the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower in Chicago was not hatched by those accused of planning the bombing, but by a Lebanese informant who was paid handsomely for the suggestion.
I spent a good deal of February researching and writing a brief volume titled, Saudi Arabia Privacy Law, anticipating the effective date of Saudi Arabia’s own personal data protection law, modeled after the European Union’s GDPR. Unfortunately for me, one day before the law was to take effect, the Saudi regulator postponed enforcement of the law for one year. Since the law itself contains a one-year enforcement grace period, that means the law won’t take effect until 17 March 2024.
The Houthis have substantially improved the accuracy of their targeting and hit an Aramco refinery in Jeddah. This is bad enough, but that refinery is supplied by Aramco’s East-West pipeline which carries 5 million barrels per day. If the refinery has to shut down operations or the storage facility where the oil is kept is compromised, the pipeline shuts down as well and 5 million bpd are lost to world markets.
Context: a few weeks ago, an influencer announced that he had obtained an exclusive interview with the press-shy prime minister of Thailand and posted a selfie as proof. He boasted about his a journalistic coup and preached to other journalists to “push harder.” No interview was immediately forthcoming and the foreign press was suspicious and began to question his claims. Finally, he posted the “interview,” such as it was. The prime minister’s only contribution was the word ‘thanks.
The Ukrainians have pledged to rebuild the An-225 six-engined superplanc transporter, the only one of its kind in the world. This is wishful thinking. It doesn’t take an aviation construction expert to see that this airframe is a total loss.
Facebook gets 15,000 applications for every announcement of a new job opening, You would need an army of screeners to review these applications; giving each one personal attention is out of the question. So the company, like most big companies these days, use algorithms to sift through the avalanche of applications that arrive. Fortunately, there is one way to make sure that your application is read by human beings. Indeed, using my system will insure that several humans will pay close attention to your cv.
It’s the best we can do.
Colonel Sanders, International Man of Mystery You may only know him as a Kentucky lawyer who came up with an internationally-recognized recipe for tasty fried chicken. What you don’t know is that in the 1970’s, at the request of the American government, the Colonel undertook several clandestine missions in the Middle East on behalf of his own and other governments. To this day, he is fondly remembered by certain governments, who in honor of his secret accomplishments, commemorate the connection with green buckets to carry the chicken cooked with the Colonel’s special blend of herbs and spices.
Usually at this point I would rant about McKinsey’s advice to US companies to offshore and outsource production to cut costs and so “increase shareholder value.” China is the greatest, though not the only beneficiary of this largesse. China’s economy now rivals that of the US. As a European friend once asked me when I told him of my experience riding a 300 km/hr Maglev train in Shanghai: “how many Maglev trains does the United States have?