Yup, the fight for the White House is intensifying. The BBC gives us ‘Biden challenges Trump with ‘Buy American’ economic plan’. Well that is a step we saw coming, in a stage where any corona virus hit nations will rely not merely on the export of goods, but on the locally required spending consumer base. With the FAANG group in its own world, the US democrats have decided on ‘Buy American’. It makes sense, although the claimed $700bn plan is likely to cost close to twice that amount and will only truly be a win if US export does not collapse whilst the US population will rely on US goods instead of importing. If those two parts are met then Joe Biden does have an optional working plan. The current president says that this plan will fail, but in light of all his claims, does anyone care what he thinks? So whilst the BBC gives us “Many voters are concerned by the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic. His divisive approach to the country’s recent wave of anti-racism protests has also come under sharp scrutiny” and they are correct, even as there are a few more issues surrounding Trump, there is a larger concern on his presidency and as the foundation of the Republican group are in a stage where they are doubting his presidency can show any positive impact for the Republicans, the idea that a Democratic win for them at present is better than the current White House occupant is also a larger concern as the elections draws near. Even as we see “Analysts have urged caution in over-interpreting the polls, but Mr Biden’s lead is far greater than that of Mr Trump’s 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton at the same point in the campaign” the analysts do have to some degree a point, the American population has NEVER EVER been this polarised before and as some see it, there is a much larger white power population, Al Jazeera showed ‘An Al Jazeera investigation identified some 120 pages belonging to bands with openly white supremacist and racist views’, which adds up to another issue that Mark Zuckerberg and his book of faces has been unable to deal with. And these pages tend to flow towards Trump, not Biden. (at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/07/exclusive-facebook-extensively-spread-neo-nazi-music-200710075507831.html) and that is merely the tip of the iceberg that is optionally the reason that the US Titanic will be sinking in unknown waters. The articles also gives us the PDF and “The 89-page report by civil rights experts heavily criticised Facebook, saying it needs to do more about anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish and other hate speech.” In this the article is important when we get to Chapter 6 (Algorithmic Bias), there we see “algorithms used to screen resumes to identify qualified candidates may only perpetuate existing gender or racial disparities if the data used to train the model on what a qualified candidate looks like is based on who chose to apply in the past and who the employer hired; in the case of Amazon the algorithm “learned” that references to being a woman (e.g., attending an all-female college, or membership in a women’s club) was a reason to downgrade the candidate.” Yet the same model could optionally be used to misinform (or disinform) the person through links that have ‘altered headlines’ One party could use it to flame to larger base of the other party and no matter what claims Facebook makes, the PDF report shows that they are seemingly clueless on how to stop it. You see, even if Facebook decides to block politics, it does not stop one account from posting an image, and even as the image might not be political, it can still impact the political base with the misinformation it spreads and Facebook would be largely unable to stop it until it was too late and as it optionally stops one side, the other side can make it worse, so here we see the application of Shareholder, Stakeholder and Sponsors, the S3 equation of big business.
So even as the news was that the FAANG group saw $58 billion wiped after Trump slammed the ‘immense power’ of big tech (Business Insider), we seem to forget that that same group saw their stocks rise in excess of of $637 billion, so they still made decently well over half a trillion dollars. When you consider that, who do you think that the FAANG group wants as the next president? In all this the entire China matter remains an issue as the US goes towards the polling booths, yet in the end, there is absolutely no guarantee that President Trump is a one term president, yes there is the wishful thinking group, but the issues seen in the economy and the soaring profits that the FAANG group is making is a much larger concern, especially as their voices are a lot more powerful than anyone realises. In all this, the final touch is that so far I have shown again and again that the media is massively sensitive to the needs of the S3 group they dance for, in all this, do you expect to get any neutral news? Consider this week the insincerity of Fox News with ‘Fox News apologises for cropping Trump out of Epstein and Maxwell photo’ and whilst the Guardian reports on this, not many did, and when we realise the byline “Network says it mistakenly eliminated Donald Trump from photo with Maxwell and Epstein at Mar-a-Lago in February 2000” take a moment to consider the choice of words ‘mistakenly eliminated’, which is bias, it is (in my personal view) a form of censoring, which is interesting as it is the media that are all in arms on ‘censoring’ which was shown by Lord Justice Leveson through a novel that exceeds War and Peace (an apt analogy), even as the media reflected on it like it was the horror story fo the century, we see that the media has no issues to ‘mistakenly eliminate’, optionally hoping that no one will notice and there is every chance that a lot of people remained unaware. So in light of all this, there is no way to predict the winner. Even as we hope that Joe Biden will be supported to a much larger degree and that it will be a fair fight, I am not so sure about either premise in this equation.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 