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Bad ideas can be cured easily but it begins with the free flow of information. If your position is that you need to control what grown men and women see and hear because you believe it is your moral duty to do so, then that says more about the degradation of your character than it does of our society. It says that you believe yourself above others and that you know better.

You don’t. You’re just a fallible human like the rest of us, and no amount of makeup chairs, wardrobes, camera time, assistants, and staff changes that fact.

Was this election rigged? According to precedents set by our State Department, the answer is “yes.”

OANN Chief White House correspondent Chanel Rion tweeted out an interesting tidbit of information that Americans, and even their own government, may find interesting.

Going to the State Department’s own website, we can see back in 2004 that our government was monitoring the Ukrainian elections and, after witnessing events that took place there, qualified the election as “rigged.” Why? Because Ukraine experienced a wave of oddities that mirror exactly what happened during the 2020 election here in America. Rion highlights the relevant part with a screenshot.

“Bottom Line: According to our own State Dept’s assessment of corrupt foreign elections, the 2020 US elections do not meet its own standards,” tweeted Rion.

Confronted with evidence (which they – and the rest of the world – would be welcome to examine), reminded of their duty to their constituents, and empowered by Article II Section 1 of the Constitution of the United States, the legislators – particularly Republican legislators in the majority – will now have to make a decision.

1. Do nothing, and acquiesce to the blatant and open disenfranchisement of their constituents,
2. Order new elections with strong voter verification and ballot integrity measures,
3. Allocate the state’s slate of electors per Congressional District in the state (as done in ME and NE), or,
4. Discount the erring county’s tallies entirely and send a Republican slate of electors.

A Republic, if you can keep it, said Benjamin Franklin. That leaves no room for election theft.

On a bright fall morning at Stanford, Tom Mullaney is telling me what’s wrong with QWERTY keyboards. Mullaney is not a technologist, nor is he one of those Dvorak keyboard enthusiasts. He’s a historian of modern China and we’re perusing his exhibit of Chinese typewriters and keyboards, the curation of which has led Mullaney to the conclusion that China is rising ahead technologically while the West falls behind, clinging to its QWERTY keyboard.

Now this was and still is an unusual view because Chinese—with its 75,000 individual characters rather than an alphabet—had historically been the language considered incompatible with modern technology. //

But, Mullaney argues, the invention of the computer could turn China’s enormous catalog of characters into an advantage. //

Typing English on a QWERTY computer keyboard, he says, “is about the most basic rudimentary way you can use a keyboard.” You press the “a” key and “a” appears on your screen. “It doesn't make use of a computer’s processing power and memory and the cheapening thereof.” Type “a” on a QWERTY keyboard hooked up to a Chinese computer, on the other hand, and the computer is off anticipating the next characters. Typing in Chinese requires mediation from a layer of software that is obvious to the user.

In other words, to type a Chinese character is essentially to punch in a set of instructions—a code if you will, to retrieve a specific character. Mullaney calls Chinese typists “code conscious.” Dozens of ways to input Chinese now exist, but the Western world mostly remains stuck typing letter-by-letter on a computer keyboard, without taking full advantage of software-augmented shortcuts.

What happened today, and what prompted Pilger to “quit” was that AG Barr said to US Attorneys – “If you have substantial allegations of election fraud in your district, you have authority to investigate that.” Basically, Barr cut Pilger and Election Crimes Branch out of the picture as “gatekeepers” to starting investigations in places like Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Atlanta. //

I worked with Pilger… He was so arrogant and never let us pull the trigger on election fraud cases. He resigned because of this right here… Barr told “prosecutors they could take investigative steps such as interviewing witnesses during a period that they would normally need permission from the elections crimes section.” Before Barr’s annoucement, that permission came directly and solely from Pilger. He was arrogant and lazy… He lost the power today so now he’s walking. Good riddance.

In 2013, Bill Gates admitted ctrl+alt+del was a mistake and blamed IBM. Here’s the story of how the key combination became famous in the first place. //

In the spring of 1981, David Bradley was part of a select team working from a nondescript office building in Boca Raton, Fla. His task: to help build IBM’s new personal computer. Because Apple and RadioShack were already selling small stand-alone computers, the project (code name: Acorn) was a rush job. Instead of the typical three- to five-year turnaround, Acorn had to be completed in a single year. //

In 2001, hundreds of people packed into the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the IBM PC. In two decades, the company had moved more than 500 million PCs worldwide. After dinner, industry luminaries, including Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, sat down for a panel discussion. But the first question didn’t go to Gates; it went to David Bradley. The programmer, who has always been surprised by how popular those five minutes spent creating ctrl+alt+del made him, was quick to deflect the glory.

“I have to share the credit,” Bradley joked. “I may have invented it, but I think Bill made it famous.”

Tom Cotton
@TomCottonAR

US Senate candidate, AR
All of these headlines are true.

"Misinformation" = facts liberal journalists don't like.

Kevin Roose
@kevinroose
Facebook is absolutely teeming with right-wing misinformation right now. These are all among the 10 most-engaged URLs on the platform over the last 24 hours (per @NewsWhip data)

Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald
Key detail in this @NYMag story on the pro-censorship movement inside NYT by its own employees: NYT tech reporters were angry that the anti-censorship posture of NYT editors would impede their campaign to pressure Silicon Valley to censor more robustly:

Wayne County, Republican poll watchers were denied their legal right to monitor the election and purposely kept in the dark, both literally and figuratively. Election workers blocked windows and padlocked doors.

There are thousands of reports of poll watchers being intimidated and unable to do their job, and as of 4 pm this afternoon 131 affidavits have been completed just in Michigan, with over 2800 incident reports that have been submitted to us since Election Day.

None of this is being hidden. Some of it is on video. And the national media are reporting that this is usual, that it is common for a tranche of 20+ thousand ballots to arrive without a single dissenting vote among them.

This is being done to win an election, for sure. But the larger message is “your vote doesn’t matter.” They want people in states and counties controlled by Democrats to know that no matter how many people vote, the decision has already been made. That they are adhering to that policy attributed to Josef Stalin, “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.”