But now a leaked transcript of a July 18 presentation by search chief
Ben Gomes has the executive congratulating the Project Dragonfly team
and predicting launch in six to nine months, and holding out the
possibility of a launch in as little as three months.
On September 23, Gomes lied to a BBC reporter and said that Dragonfly
was just a plan on the drawing board, saying “all we’ve done is some
exploration” and “we don’t have any plans to launch something.”
This lie apparently prompted angry googlers to leak the transcript of
Gomes’s remarks to The Intercept. Gomes refused to comment to the
Intercept and when they called him, he twice claimed that the connection
was so bad that he couldn’t understand their questions.
Project Dragonfly has also cost Google key engineers and has been the source of mass discontent inside the company, especially when news broke that the censored tool was designed to personally identify
searchers who looked up banned topics like “student protests” and
“democracy” and to deliver these identities to China’s security
establishment.
“I visited the
pumpkin patch yesterday and decided to bring home a pumpkin that in
shape appeared to be a penguin. Friends and family were mystified until I
started painting him.“
America has a gun problem: the proliferation of guns in American homes
has led to a largely silent epidemic of accidental shootings, intimate
partner murders, and suicides.
While the sky-high fatalities from these everyday shootings are
personal, quiet tragedies, the extremely public tragedies of mass
shootings are both statistical outliers and rallying points for sensible
gun policies in line with the rest of the world.
As welcome as the attention from high-profile atrocities is, there is
danger that they will shift our focus to the extremely low likelihood
that you will be shot by a deranged stranger in a public place and away
from the much higher likelihood that someone you know (possibly you,
yourself) will shoot you in your home.
One way this manifests is in an emphasis on “protecting” schools from
mass shootings. At first, this was a minor hustle, with some petty
grifters picking up small-money contracts designing “active shooter
lockdown drills” for schools.
But after the Parkland shooting, the gun lobby and its purchased
lawmakers came up with a new talking point: the solution to gun violence
was to flood our schools with heavily armed mercenaries (or, worse yet,
teachers!) who would execute would-be shooters. This strategy could be
backstopped by buying all kinds of “anti-shooter” fixes, like
bulletproof doors, bulletproof coffins that children could cower inside
of, and Batman utility-belt gadgets like smoke cannons that could flood a
school with choking, blinding clouds as a countermeasure against
shooters.
This was a evilly brilliant move: by creating a “solution” that was tied
to high-ticket procurements, the gun lobby created a self-perpetuating
lobby machine for tooling up the schools of America – hucksters who
would divert some of their profits to pressuring governments to
diverting more education dollars to weapons and armor, generating new
profits and thus new lobbying dollars – lather, rinse, repeat.
The hive of scum and villainy that is the tooled-up school industry is
the sort of thing to make you vomit in your mouth: it is an unholy
alliance of lying dickheads like “Joe the Plumber”
(yes, that fucking guy is back) and a former US Army Ranger whose sales
patter includes warnings that ISIS terrorists might start hurling
molotov cocktails inside of schools. These military-industrial grifters
are in a weird alliance with one of the Parkland parents, whose response
to the tragic loss of his son is to advocate for massive school
expenditures on these gadgets and guns.
It’s working. Across America, the cash-starved schools are spending
money they can’t find for books, computers, desks, black mold
remediation, art class, and other fripperies on armored doors, armed
school guards, and yeah, actual literal smoke cannons.
