Bezos, Zuckerberg, Pichai, and Cook testify in Congressional Hearing

Google still wants to be over there so bad. Zucc knows he doesn't have a chance in hell, so gets to say whatever he wants. https://t.co/0hZhmsqvJX

— Littlefoot (@LTF_01) July 30, 2020

"Almost there. Give it a week!"

Scott Adams tweeted,

I did not appreciate how profitable fake news could be for Jeff Bezos. If the Washington Post can support the protestors long enough, there will be no retail store competition for Amazon. Almost there. I’d give it a week.

Bezos and Amazon refuse to allow viewpoint diversity

In PJ Media, Tyler O'Neill looks into the accusation that

Amazon Is 'Expressing Public and Open Hostility Toward Conservative and Religious Organizations'

Read the whole thing here.

Entitled Hypocrisy: "His greed and megalomania may have cost him $68 billion."

Daniel Greenfield writes in FrontPge Magazine,

...The insistence of the Amazon boss that a foreign government and Trump supporters are responsible for his private messages leaking online is really no different than the Clinton conspiracy theory about Russia and Trump.

Hillary Clinton tried to shift the blame to Trump and the Russians after wasting $1.2 billion on her failed campaign. A divorce may cost Bezos as much as $68 billion and undermine confidence in Amazon and his leadership. Blaming Trump, Russia and the Saudis redeems acts of otherwise unforgivable stupidity. It transforms abusers like Hillary Clinton and Bezos into victims by blaming their folly on a conspiracy.

...Bezos and the Washington Post had no objection when Qatari hackers passed on the emails of Elliott Broidy, a deputy finance chairman for the Republican National Committee, to reporters revealing his own private life. Instead the Post gleefully featured some of these hacked emails. When Bezos demands sympathy as the innocent victim of foreign hackers, he is guilty of the worst sort of entitled hypocrisy.

...The Washington Post weaponized allegations of sexual misconduct in political warfare. Bezos whines that his affair, which did happen, was wrongly made public. Meanwhile the Post falsely accused Justice Kavanaugh (among other Republicans) of sexual misconduct that never happened. And it did cover up rape allegations against Justin Fairfax, the Democrat Lt. Governor, which appear to have happened.

...Bezos may just be collateral damage in the complete lack of ethics shown by his media investment.

...Victims don’t own papers that gleefully publish other people’s hacked emails and affairs, but whine when it happens to them. Bezos didn’t just betray his wife, he betrayed every basic principle of ethics. His Medium post and his spin doctors claim the ultimate privilege, that of the abuser from retaliation.

Jeff Bezos thought that the Washington Post’s collusion with Qatar, that the hacks and smears of Republicans, served his economic interests. His greed and megalomania may have cost him $68 billion.

Read more here.

Amazon pulls out of New York

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is happy that her Queens District lost out on getting the Amazon headquarters. She is even losing the support of the talking heads at MSNBC!

No, wait!

"No, No! Alexa, stop! Wait!!" pic.twitter.com/WoGRD2RLmS

— Andrew Malcolm (@AHMalcolm) February 11, 2019

He does the dishes every night in Seattle, but he seems to be spending a lot of time in L.A., too.

Bezos with his wife. They have four children.

Bezos with his mistress.

Erich Schwartzel, Alexandra Berzon and Laura Stevens write in the Wall Street Journal about Jeff Bezo's journey from private family man to tabloid sensation.

"one of the world’s greatest privacy invaders just had his privacy invaded."

In the Intercept, Glenn Greenwald writes about the dispute between Jeff Bezos and the National Enquirer. Bezos wants to know how the Enquirer got pictures of his private parts that he sent via iPhone to a L.A. t.v. personality with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Greenwald writes,

IF BEZOS WERE the political victim of surveillance state abuses, it would be scandalous and dangerous. It would also be deeply ironic.

That’s because Amazon, the company that has made Bezos the planet’s richest human being, is a critical partner for the U.S. Government in building an ever-more invasive, militarized and sprawling surveillance state. Indeed, one of the largest components of Amazon’s business, and thus one of the most important sources of Bezos’ vast wealth and power, is working with the Pentagon and the NSA to empower the U.S. Government with more potent and more sophisticated weapons, including surveillance weapons.

In December, 2017, Amazon boasted that it had perfected new face-recognition software for crowds, which it called Rekognition. It explained that the product is intended, in large part, for use by governments and police forces around the world. The ACLU quickly warned that the product is “dangerous” and that Amazon “is actively helping governments deploy it.”

“Powered by artificial intelligence,” wrote the ACLU, “Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces.” The group warned: “Amazon’s Rekognition raises profound civil liberties and civil rights concerns.” In a separate advisory, the ACLU said of this face-recognition software that Amazon’s “marketing materials read like a user manual for the type of authoritarian surveillance you can currently see in China.”

...Then there are the serious privacy dangers posed by Amazon’s “Ring” camera products, revealed in the Intercept last month by Sam Biddle. As he reported, Amazon’s Ring, intended to be a home security system, has “a history of lax, sloppy oversight when it comes to deciding who has access to some of the most precious, intimate data belonging to any person: a live, high-definition feed from around — and perhaps inside — their house.”

...About the Ring surveillance in particular, the ACLU explained:

Imagine if a neighborhood was set up with these doorbell cameras. Simply walking up to a friend’s house could result in your face, your fingerprint, or your voice being flagged as “suspicious” and delivered to a government database without your knowledge or consent. With Amazon selling the devices, operating the servers, and pushing the technology on law enforcement, the company is building all the pieces of a surveillance network, reaching from the government all the way to our front doors.

...Then there’s the patent Amazon obtained last October, as reported by the Intercept, “that would allow its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics and emotional state based on their voice.” In particular, it would enable anyone using the product to determine a person’s accent and likely place of origin: “The algorithm would also consider a customer’s physical location — based on their IP address, primary shipping address, and browser settings — to help determine their accent.”

...Bezos’ relationship with the military and spying agencies of the U.S. Government, and law enforcement agencies around the world, predates his purchase of the Washington Post and has become a central prong of Amazon’s business growth. Back in 2014, Amazon secured a massive contract with the CIA when the spy agency agreed to pay it $600 million for computing cloud software. As the Atlantic noted at the time, Amazon’s software “will begin servicing all 17 agencies that make up the intelligence community.”

Given how vital the military and spy agencies now are to Amazon’s business, it’s unsurprising that the amount Amazon pays to lobbyists to serve its interests in Washington has exploded: quadrupling since 2013 from $3 million to almost $15 million last year, according to Open Secrets.

...But Bezos, given how much he works and profits to destroy the privacy of everyone else (to say nothing of the labor abuses of his company), is about the least sympathetic victim imaginable of privacy invasion. In the past, hard-core surveillance cheerleaders in Congress such as Dianne Feinstein, Pete Hoekstra, and Jane Harman became overnight, indignant privacy advocates when they learned that the surveillance state apparatus they long cheered had been turned against them.

Perhaps being a victim of privacy invasion will help Jeff Bezos realize the evils of what his company is enabling. Only time will tell. As of now, one of the world’s greatest privacy invaders just had his privacy invaded. As the ACLU put it: “Amazon is building the tools for authoritarian surveillance that advocates, activists, community leaders, politicians, and experts have repeatedly warned against.”

Read more here.

Kissing up to Bezos

Who owns the main distributer for the National Enquirer? Amazon.com! Shapiro spends the first 12 minutes of this video kissing up to Jeff Bezos, the adulterer owner of the Washington Post and Amazon.

Another Manhattan Infidel exclusive: the Bezos texts!

Satirical blogger Manhattan Infidel has another exclusive, or at least he is the only one brave enough to publish texts between Jeff Bezos and his lover. Read them here, including exclusive photos of his junk!

Three billionaires who made terrible investments

Ira Stoll writes in the New York Sun,

It’s the sort of brazen move that might ordinarily trigger a front-page news story or an outraged editorial — a bunch of rich individuals asking Congress to write them a law that would give them better negotiating power against other rich individuals.

Yet in this case, the rich individuals wanting special treatment are the newspaper owners themselves. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos (worth $83.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index), New York Times owner Carlos Slim (worth $61.1 billion), and Buffalo News owner Warren Buffett ($76.9 billion), publicly pleading poverty, are asking Congress for a helping hand in their negotiations with Google, controlled by Sergey Brin ($45.6 billion) and Larry Page ($46.8 billion).

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, David Chavern, president and chief executive of the News Media Alliance, whose board has representatives of Bezos-Slim- and Buffett-backed papers, complained about what he called “an economically squeezed news industry.” The Times, in a column sympathetic to the effort, likened the news providers to “serfs.”

Maybe Serf Bezos should have considered the economics of the news industry when he bought the Washington Post, or Serf Slim when he bought his stake in the New York Times. The idea that Congress needs to roll to the rescue of “serfs” like Messrs. Bezos, Buffett, and Slim to bail them out of bad investments just doesn’t pass the laugh test.

...Even if you buy the questionable idea that more expensive news automatically equals better news, it’s a further, and even more tenuous, logical leap from that idea to the notion that Congress ought to interpose itself on one side of a set of business negotiations to make it easier for the publishers to make their news more expensive to consumers, or their ads more expensive to advertisers.

If publishers want to permit competing suppliers to negotiate prices and terms on a cooperative basis, then let them support changing the law to allow it in every industry, without special treatment for journalistic enterprises.

The Google-Facebook world has taken advertising and subscription revenue dollars out of publisher pockets. But it’s been a huge boon to marketers and to readers. Advertisers can now reach targets more efficiently at a fraction of what they used to pay for print ads, and readers can now get news from a variety of sites and editors and journalists, from Matt Drudge to Mike Allen to Glenn Reynolds, rather than having to rely on the judgment of their one hometown newspaper editor.

Not even Congress has the power to turn back that clock to the old days. Nor would anyone with any sense want it to, other than someone lucky (or unlucky) enough to have inherited a newspaper, or foolish enough to have overpaid for one.

Read more here.