Category: Alternative News

My latest Deeper Dive dug into China’s failing commercial real-estate market, as well as other global commercial real-estate markets that are collapsing, laying out the corporate zombie apocalypse that is building particularly in office real estate, but also still deepening in retail real estate. It’s happening all over the world: Unprofitable companies that survived only because of cheap credit (zombies) — and even some profitable ones — are toppling as credit costs rise. The headlines supporting my summary analysis this weekend can…

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, desperate to show Wall St. that his company can make money, decided to lock away the information on Reddit behind a paywall by turning Reddit’s free API to paid, creating quite a mess. In response, thousands of subreddits went dark on Monday, with a plan for most (though not all) to come back today. But, on Tuesday, Huffman’s internal email to Reddit staff leaked to the Verge, in which Huffman continued with the same dismissive attitude…

Ukrainian forces have been met with strong resistance from Russian soldiers after attempting to penetrate enemy lines in the east of the country in the past couple days. US officials have described the losses, which included US-supplied MRAP armored vehicles, as “significant,” per CNN. Though Ukraine was able to push through Russian forces around Bakhmut, they were met with anti-tank missiles, grenades, and mortars from the Russian side. The report noted that Russian forces have trenched themselves several layers deep,…

The U.S. government has given Chinese and Russian entities at least $1.3 billion for various research programs over the past five years, according to an analysis released Wednesday by Republican Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst and watchdog group Open the Books. The analysis revealed that millions of taxpayer dollars have been given to, among others, a Chinese software developer for military tech support, a Russian health insurance provider that has since been sanctioned and Chinese agriculture companies. And it showed the federal government…

NEW YORK, May 30 (Reuters) – Bankrupt OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma can shield its owners, members of the wealthy Sackler family, from opioid lawsuits in exchange for a $6 billion contribution to the company’s broader bankruptcy settlement, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Tuesday. The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that U.S. bankruptcy law allows legal protections for non-bankrupt parties, like the Sacklers, in extraordinary circumstances. In a majority opinion written by 2nd Circuit Judge Eunice…

We’ve written a lot about AB 2273, California’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) that requires websites with users in California to try to determine the ages of all their visitors, write up dozens of reports on potential harms, and then seek to mitigate those harms. I’ve written about why it’s literally impossible to comply with the law. We’ve had posts on how it conflicts with privacy laws and how it’s a radical experimentation on children (ironically, the drafters of the…

We’ve written a few times about California’s “Journalism Protection Act” (CJPA) from state Rep. Buffy Wicks, and many times about the terrible concept of such link taxes. Unfortunately, it looks like California’s bill is moving forward, with buy-in from the big media orgs and their journalists that will get the free pay offs from such an unconstitutional link tax. In response, Meta has now announced (as it has done elsewhere) that if California passes the CJPA it will simply stop…

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines was the big star of a gala awards ceremony hosted by the Atlantic Council that was touted as the “Washington Oscars.” The Atlantic Council is a neo-conservative think tank, which has three former CIA directors on its board and another as a lifetime director. Paul Craig Roberts, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Ronald Reagan, called the Atlantic Council the “marketing arm of the military-security complex.” In 2015, it helped prepare a proposal to arm…

Governments around the world are cracking down on free speech. What they are demanding includes the ability to read private encrypted text messages and invade homes in search of wrongspeech. Their demands thus go far beyond what the Censorship Industrial Complex was able to get away with over the last six years. And things are getting worse. Last week, the European Union announced it would punish Twitter for withdrawing from its supposedly “voluntary” censorship laws. “Twitter leaves EU voluntary code…

The symposium that was to take place on Sunday aimed to honor the memory of Dominique Venner, a historian who took his life exactly 10 years ago in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris as a “sacrifice” to “break with the lethargy that is overwhelming us,” to “awaken slumbering consciences.” “I rebel against fate. I protest against poisons of the soul and the desires of invasive individuals to destroy the anchors of our identity, including the family, the intimate basis of our…

Covid showed us how corrupt the medical establishment has become not only in America but worldwide. Doctors know where their bread is buttered and rarely speak out of school or provide advice based on their own independent research. They will support almost any government health narrative if that’s what it takes to make sure the money continues to flow, even if it means violating their oath to “do no harm.” Next in line for top honors in terms of corruption,…

While we’ve talked a great deal now about Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, most of the focus has been on how three major regulatory bodies are handling approving, or not, the purchase. But those regulatory bodies are not the only ones challenging the purchase. A small group of gamers filed their own private suit to block the acquisition, arguing that they would be negatively impacted if it were approved. That was earlier this year and the judge dismissed the…

Lawmakers in the Alabama state legislature have voted for a bill that would require parental controls and NSFW content filters to be enabled on every phone and tablet sold in the state. House Bill (HB) 298, or the Protection of Minors from Unfiltered Devices Act, cleared the state House with an overwhelming 70-8 vote, with two dozen members abstaining from voting, last week. Now in the Senate, HB 298 is seeing success after the bill’s sole sponsor, state Rep. Chris…

For a brief moment of time, a judge in Arizona conspired with a vindictive politician to pretend the First Amendment didn’t exist. Senator Wendy Rogers — who was censured by the state senate last year for stating her political opponents should be hanged — took litigious offense at the methods deployed by journalist Camryn Sanchez, who covers the state senate for the Arizona Capitol Times. Sanchez wanted answers on Senator Rogers’ seemingly excessive travel expenses, something supposedly owed her because…

Most of us wouldn’t argue that private companies can’t run their businesses the way they prefer. The gold standard has been the right to refuse service to anyone — something that covers everything from refusing paper checks from certain customers to booting people off social media services for refusing to stop behaving like inveterate assholes. When private companies do things, they rarely mess with constitutional protections. There are guardrails in place to prevent discrimination against minorities and other historically oppressed…