Category: politics

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politics video games war

Ukrainian Government Calls for Video Game Sanctions on Russia & Belarus

The invasion of Ukraine has led to the Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine & Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine (that’s one person, Mykhailo Fedorov) requesting via Twitter that Microsoft’s Xbox division, and Sony’s PlayStation division, in addition to “all game development companies” and “esports platforms”, to temporarily block all games from accounts in Russia and Belarus and cancel esports events in Russia and Belarus:

There are a lot of strong and thoughtful arguments that sanctions are a bad idea, the rich are likely to be easily able to work around them so only the regular people may suffer. Without a democratically elected government how likely is it that further unrest in Russia will result in Vladimir Putin being deposed and this war ending? I don’t know, but I do want peace and it is good to sympathize with the Ukrainians and all victims of war. We will see if Sony, Microsoft, and the rest of the game industry join in on the wave of sanctions.

This isn’t the first request that the Ukrainian government has made via Twitter, they’ve also requested support from other countries, businesses and notably from the name-calling heir to a fortune from apartheid-era mining, Elon Musk. Who may have delivered some internet-providing Star Link satellite dishes but who knows if those worked or if the service can even be moved from one location to another which seems like it might be useful when you’re trying to avoid an invading military force.

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politics technology war

Microsoft Outfits Soldiers for AR Murder With Hololens

Lucas Matney writing for Tech Crunch:

Today, Microsoft announced that it has received a contract to outfit the United States Army with tens of thousands of augmented reality headsets based on the company’s HoloLens tech. This contract could be worth as much as $21.88 billion over 10 years, the company says.

Microsoft will be fulfilling an order for 120,000 AR headsets for the Army based on their Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) design. The modified design upgrades the capabilities of the HoloLens 2 for the needs of soldiers in the field.

Microsoft has a long history of working with the government to help murder people and their GitHub unit famously contracts with ICE and helps to cage children.

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politics

Getting Away With Murder

(content warning: the death penalty)

ProPublica’s Isaac Arnsdorf on how the murder factory at the combination White House/Justice Department that Trump and Barr are operating is hurrying through as many murders as it can before Biden takes over the murder factory and moves operations more exclusively overseas:

The Justice Department has killed 10 people since July, with three more executions scheduled before Biden’s inauguration. Most every federal agency is rushing to wrap up unfinished business, cementing policy objectives in ways that will make them harder for the incoming president to unwind. But the Justice Department’s pressing forward with executions, even after the election of a new president who opposes them, is uniquely irreversible.

This article goes into much more detail about what the government is using to kill, who is doing the murder for cash, and gives us details about the career staff that support the death penalty but as with all bad news lately, and if you’re like me and don’t get Trump’s emails you’ll find out this also serves to partially fulfill our national embarrassment’s ego and campaign.

The murders and other violence at the Capitol took over the news, and some Republicans may well be done with our national embarrassment over that and because there isn’t any functional process today that let them proceed with overturning the results of the election, but this kind of murder that is legally justified by a crooked set of Supreme Court Justices rushed through before a change in power is essential to the operation of the Republican party.

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politics

“…I love the Bangles!”

Michael Lewis writing about the national embarrassment’s transition to office:

Before any of the calls could be made, however, the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. “Trump was like … I love the Bangles! You know that song Walk Like an Egyptian?” recalled one of his advisers on the scene.

Vote the national embarrassment out of office if you’re in the US.

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politics

The Story of Otto Warmbier, As Best We Know It

Doug Bock Clark has an incredibly detailed account of Otto Warmbier’s time in North Korea as a hostage. This is the American whose torture and eventual death our national embarrassment used for justifying possible war with, and bellicose rambling at, North Korea.