I’ve never thought of there being an antisemitism crisis in the Labour party but rather think of it as part of a concerted attack on anyone opposing Israeli policy towards Palestinians, occupied territories and so on. There’s two reasons for this; one being that the intellectual base of left wing politics has historically has always included a lot of Jewish thinkers. The other is that we don’t have a Labour party here in the US but any organization that’s critical of these policies gets tarred in exactly the same way. Its a lazy ‘fill in the blanks’ approach that obviously does the job (because the media just takes up the banner and runs with it, it doesn’t hang around to ask questions) but at the same time its really easy to see through if you know what to look for.

my Facebook account has been suspended 5-6 times now for ‘breaching community standards’.

It’s almost like people who are capable of independent thought aren’t wanted there.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that.

see discussion of similar issues here:

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

So called “5G” encompasses a whole basket of technologies, some established and some still being tested. The role of the ITU is to set overall parameters for the technology with other industry groups dealing with the details. The process is well established, its used by all complex technologies that have to interoperate globally, and it invariably ends up with some kind of patent basket where participants share technologies (and spoils). (I’ve been involved peripherally in similar sorts of activities in the past so I’ve seen how these groups work.)

Since this technology is evolutionary rather than revolutionary its likely that equipment manufacturers will deliver it in phases so the race is to get your equipment placed because it can always be upgraded later (typically this will be firmware updates for the infrastructure kit). Here you notice that two of the big players in this are Chinese, they just happen to be ZTE and Huawei. One of the other players is Qualcomm, a company that you may not be familiar with but essentially had a stranglehold on previous generation wireless technology through its IP portfolio (it derives most of its income from licensing rather than manufacturing). Anyone who works in this business and figure out two plus two knows exactly what’s going on when the US government goes after Chinese manufacturers and spying, health and safety and what-have-you are definitely not the real reasons. (the H&S angle I’ve not heard of but since 5G will mostly use existing frequencies there’s no change — anyway the whole electromagnetic radiation thing is one of those voodoo things put out by people who never studied physics at school or beyond)(we can put this into another thread, it doesn’t belong here).

In many aspects of mobile technology the Chinese are, unfortunately, light years of us. (So are the Koreans, BTW.) Its a hard truth but one we must face if we’re to do anything about being competitive.

This is the classic way to insert stories in the main stream media. You use postings on Internet sites which reverberate — they get reposted (which you may do a bit of as well) so they build up a veneer of credibility. They are then quoted as ”authoritative” by more established media.

The technique isn’t new and its not confined to politics. This is how product marketing works, using a combination of press releases, ‘leaks’, ‘exclusive access’ and so on to get ‘buzz’ about the product. As with politics it often finds itself in a gray area where it might be marketing a product that doesn’t exist (yet), often to forestall a competitor’s advantage. (Disclaimer — I’ve never worked in marketing but I have spent my working life developing products and technologies. Sometimes what gets published about what you and your colleagues have developed is a bit of a surprise…..but that’s just how business works!)