Matt Taibbi has learned that you can’t be friends with Elon Musk. He has posted some of the exchanges that he and Musk had after the failure of the #TwitterFiles nonsense. They are pretty much totally alienated from each other now.

“Elon, am I being shadowbanned?” the exchange begins. “We went on lockdown after discovering that Substack had stolen a massive amount of our data to prepopulate their Twitter rip-off,” Musk replied.

“Looks like there is still a blanket search ban. Should be fixed by tomorrow.” Musk added: “Going forward, tweets with Substack will not appear in For You unless it is paid advertising, just like FB/Insta/etc. They will appear in ‘Following.’”

Taibbi shot back with an exasperated response. “Elon, I’ve repeatedly declined to criticize you and have nothing to do with your beef with Substack,” he wrote. “Is there a reason why I’m being put in the middle of things? This really seems crazy.”

“You are dead to me,” Musk answered. “Please get off Twitter and just stay on Substack.”

Those two deserve each other.

You know that millionaire who has been posting regular updates for the press, claiming that his physical age is going backwards thanks to his bizarre health regime? He’s had a little setback.

This is a guy that tweets about every other health gain he says he is making. Most recently he has boasted he reduced his sperm age from 57 to 42.

Last summer he said he had reduced his epigenetic age by 5 years and that he has the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old and the lung capacity of an 18-year-old (which doesn’t appear to square with a 15% capacity reduction).

All those claims he makes? Self-serving lies. Their purpose is to get attention from the press, nothing more.

The sad thing is that he’s putting himself through all this:

“He rises at 4.30am, eats all his meals before 11am, and goes to bed – alone – at 8.30pm, without exception. He ingests more than 100 supplement pills daily and bathes his body in LED light. Two of the three meals he eats every day are exactly the same: boiled broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms and garlic, nuts and seeds. He takes 54 pills in the morning, and the rest in between skin treatments and red-light therapy. He doesn’t drink alcohol, and doesn’t go out in the evening. He experimented with injecting himself with blood plasma from his 18-year-old son Talmage.”

And for what? Ego. He’s draining the blood of his own son to feed his delusion.

An attempted mass shooting in a megachurch failed.

A woman in a trenchcoat opened fire with a long gun inside celebrity pastor Joel Osteen’s megachurch in Texas before being gunned down by two off-duty officers who confronted her and sending worshippers rushing out of the building between busy Sunday services, authorities said.

The woman, who entered the Houston church shortly before 2 p.m. local time, was accompanied by a five-year-old boy, who was shot and taken to hospital in critical condition.

The woman is dead. A bystander was wounded. The kid is in critical condition. Joel Osteen is devastated.

Osteen joined police at a news conference and said the church is “devastated.” But he added that the shooting could have been much worse if it had happened during the larger 11 a.m. service.

In case you’ve ever been curious about what a devastated, grieving Osteen would look like, here he is.

I think he has this reflex where whenever a camera points his way, he’s got to flash those choppers. It’s creepy and weird. The grim old guys surrounding him clearly lack the Osteen face.

Here he goes, again:

Nice words…but then I noticed the truck behind him. He’s just reading slogans off the signs around his megachurch!

I only realized after he got away…Joel Osteen is Keyser Söze! It all makes sense now.

Admittedly, playing the game in Las Vegas did give Satan an edge, so the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers, 25-22, and obviously God just threw up His hands at the galaxy of sin and pride beneath Him in overtime. See you all in Hell, He figured.

I could care less. However, I admit to favoring the 49ers a little bit, but only because my late Uncle Ed was a dedicated partisan of that team. He was always complaining about how they let him down, so nothing has changed.

I didn’t watch the game, so I don’t know…did Taylor Swift rise up in all her glory at the end and usher in a new millennium of Democratic tyranny by endorsing Joe Biden? Did CIA snipers take out a few San Francisco players to rig the game? I might have missed some epochal events.

I think there has been some cutthroat competition in the grocery business in my small town. When we first moved here, there were two grocery stores: the big supermarket, Willie’s, and a smaller store called Coborn’s. Coborn’s abruptly closed up, to everyone’s surprise — the story was that they were denied a liquor license to allow them to sell beer, and then they packed up and moved out. This town is dominated in some ways by the apostolic church, and they’re pretty strict on the blue law enforcement.

Then a few years ago, a new grocery store, Meadowland, opened up just a few blocks from Willie’s. It’s not a high-end place, it’s got a cheaper esthetic, has a substantial stock, but it’s all a hodge-podge of brands. You’d think it would fold up in the face of competition from the established store, but it’s hanging in there. It’s run by…the apostolic church, so it’s got that advantage.

There’s stuff going on behind the scenes, on the town council, in private meetings, and I know nothing about it. What I do know is that grocery prices have been steadily climbing, and there’s nothing I can do about it, because we’re a small town and competition isn’t much of an option. Buy from the supermarket which basically has a stranglehold on the county, or buy from the fundamentalist church-run business that would probably be even worse if they got a monopoly? What a choice.

Mike the Mad Biologist highlights a brief comment in the Washington Post:

But there is no immediate fix for policymakers. Grocery prices remain elevated due to a mixture of labor shortages tied to the pandemic, ongoing supply chain disruptions, droughts, avian flu and other factors far beyond the administration’s control. Robust consumer demand has also fueled a shift to more expensive groceries, and consolidation in the industry gives large chains the ability to keep prices high, economic policy experts say.

Yes, that’s our situation. We do not live in a food desert, other than the artificially constructed one. We are surrounded by farms — unfortunately, most of them are growing corn for feedstocks and alcohol — but we could do better. In the summer, we subscribed to a local farm service, and every week we got a big box of fresh produce. It was a bit overwhelming, since we’d get this diverse collection of unfamiliar vegetables and had to struggle to figure out what to do with it all, but there’s clearly a better alternative to all the pre-packaged overpriced stuff with get from the overly-familiar store.

I do wonder what Willie’s would do if local farms became a more popular source for groceries. We’d probably also be healthier.

Another social media app has opened up — you can now freely join BlueSky without waiting for an invitation. It was founded by the guy who initially created Twitter, which ought to give us all pause, but they promise to give us customizable control over the algorithm. We’ll see. I’m on most of these new social media apps, so I have opinions…amorphous, poorly formed opinions, because I’ve been distracted by too many apps.

So far, I like Mastodon best. It’s a bit of a tangled mess with the swarms of servers out there, but once you get settled in, it’s nice, especially since you don’t feel like you’re enabling some hidden corporate beast somewhere. I get reasonable engagement, the interface works, there’s a substantial volume of traffic since I’m promiscuous about who I’ll follow.

BlueSky is nice and slick and feels most like the old Twitter. Membership has been throttled for a year, and now that it has opened up, it may turn into the worst of old Twitter as the Nazis rush in. One nice feature is that early adopters included lots of scientists, who have built a lot of beachheads to science content.

You might already be on Threads if you have an Instagram account — they seem to be fusing into an unholy amalgam of text and photos. It is a stepchild of the wicked Zuck, so that’s a strike against it, but on the plus side, I am seeing more writing here — people telling stories over multiple posts, and actually taking care to build a narrative. It’s growing on me for that reason.

Of course, Twitter still exists, but I will look down on you if you continue to use it. Leave now. There are good alternatives available. We’re looking at a ‘Fall of the House of Musk’ scenario over there, and soon enough it’s going to be nothing but a crevasse populated with gibbering lost souls. (Well, it’s always been something like that, but you know what I mean, it’ll get worse.)

My recommendation for the people I used to follow: jump ship to BlueSky. It’ll be most familiar, and you’ll find ready-made groups with similar interests already building communities. Just be prepared to leap away if it becomes another xitter. You can’t make strong attachments in a time of chaos.

Stupid cat. Lately she’s taken to leaping into my lap and taking a nap when I’m trying to type.

It’d be fine if she weren’t crap at composing biology lectures.

Whoa.

That is an informative work of art. Why aren’t all labels like that?

Minnesota is shrinking? By about a millimeter a year?

I agree. Minnesota should not be squishy, and it’s going to be all we talk about around here.

In tangentially related headlines, the Washington Post announces that Tired of hostile Washington, China courts Indiana and Minnesota. I’m all for more international cooperation, but all they talk about is EV busses and exchange programs. There’s nothing about China helping us alleviate this terrible squishing.