The latest non-scandal

I don’t care about this guy at all.

The right wing has flared up in another desperate attempt to crank up the hysteria over Hunter Biden. It’s a non-starter. All I get from it is a sense of how obsessed these loons are.

The source is Elon Musk, of course. He has dug up some boring internal documents from Twitter, then fed them to Matt Taibbi, who then shat them out onto Twitter again, claiming that they reveal First Amendment violations and that Twitter, before Musk, was in bed with the liberal Left. I already don’t care.

Musk is an ass.

Taibbi…my contempt for Matt Taibbi knows no bounds. I can never trust anything he ever writes.

As for Hunter Biden, I DON’T CARE. He’s the son of our current president, and that’s about it, and Joe Biden seems to love his son, which is only to be expected. Hunter seems to be a bumbling opportunist, but his profile in government is limited and he’s been given no power. Contrast him with Ivanka, Donald Trump’s daughter, who was brought along to all kinds of confidential meetings, and who, with her husband Jared, has profited mightily. Talk to me again when Hunter Biden scoops up $2 billion from the Saudis.

I might believe that Hunter Biden has done wicked things, but that doesn’t affect me or the US government. If there is evidence that he’s a bad guy, lock him up…but that’s where it ends. These wingnuts are only seeing a way to torment a president they don’t like. All the evidence they have consists of wild conspiracy theories about a laptop dropped off for repair that they claim contains all kinds of revealing information, but none of the stories are backed up with a solid connection to Hunter Biden.

There’s nothing there, but Musk & Taibbi blew it up into an absurd dark tale that falls apart on even casual inspection.

Elon Musk released the anticlimatic “Twitter Files” about “free speech suppression” by the social-media platform on Friday evening. On Monday, he teased the release, writing, “The public deserves to know what really happened …”

What followed after was a series of tweeted snippets detailing what the public has known—and what Twitter executives themselves have detailed over the past two years—about the company’s deliberation surrounding the New York Post’s publication of files from Hunter Biden shortly before the 2020 election.

“What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter,” Matt Taibbi, Substack writer and former longtime Rolling Stone writer, darkly intoned Friday evening. But contrary to the melodramatic billing, the files mostly show what’s already been documented: that Twitter removed links to the Post’s story and files from Hunter Biden’s laptop and struggled with how to react to the surprise revelation of the leak of files from a presidential candidate’s son.

Right. The New York Post story, which claimed that a laptop abandoned at a repair shop was full of secrets, was not credible, and Twitter dithered over whether they should allow such nonsense to be promoted. The story was comparable to that Pizzagate crap, which claimed that a child porn & murder ring was operating the basement of a pizza parlor which did not have a basement. Unless you’re some faux free speech absolutist, that’s the kind of thing that should definitely be quashed on the grounds that it is a lie.

Furthermore, much of what Twitter censored out seem to have been photoshopped dick pics of Hunter Biden.

In examples of what Taibbi characterized as wrongly removed content, the Substack blogger cited a number of tweets containing non-consensually posted intimate imagery of the former Vice President’s son, commonly referred to as “revenge porn.”

That says nothing but that there was some surprisingly obsessive behavior by the MAGA nitwits.

Also, as far as the claim that Joe Biden and the state were intentionally compromising free speech to suppress ‘information’ about the President’s son — take note that all the terrible tinkering with Twitter stories occurred prior to 2020. I know, we’d all like to forget who was president then, but it wasn’t Joe Biden. It was Trump.

More details: this was a revelation that Musk made a pinned tweet and claimed was a violation of the Constitution’s first amendment. It was a series of blocked tweets that contained:

The offending material that Taibbi revealed was removed by Twitter at the Biden campaign’s request turns out to have been a bunch of links to Hunter Biden in the buff.

There was a tweet from a Chinese account featuring a naked woman on top of Hunter Biden, as well as a family photo. Two pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis, one with another woman in the background. Taibbi’s next list of material was removed by Twitter after being flagged by the Democratic National Committee. They include a picture of Hunter Biden smoking crack and getting his feet rubbed and a link to a Hunter Biden sex tape.

And that’s the big hubbub. Social media company removes unwanted dick pics: News at 11.

Constitutional crisis!

The War on Christmas — are we the baddies?

It’s December First, time to resume the battle. Except, uh-oh, there are some uncomfortable associations with my side in the battle. You know, we atheists aren’t trying to get rid of Christmas — we like parties — we’re just trying to escape the religious implications of the season.

Who else tried to remove the Christian element from the holiday? Hitler, that’s who.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazis did their best to transform Germany’s beloved Christmas traditions into Nazi ones. Though Hitler’s attempts to create a national church failed, his party’s attempt to redefine religious celebrations was more successful. To do this, they used ideology and propaganda to put the holiday in line with the national socialists’ anti-Semitic values.

The Nazis’ problem with Christmas was baked into Christmas itself. After all, Jesus was a Jew—and both anti-Semitism and the goal of eradicating Jews and Jewishness were at the very core of Nazi ideology.

OK, it’s true we’d like to subvert the religious associations, but it’s not for the purpose of anti-semitism (a significant difference, I think), it’s to make the holiday more inclusive. You want to celebrate a traditional, conservative Christian Christmas? Fine, go ahead, I’m happy for you. You want to strip naked and dance in the moonlight on the solstice? Also good, you do you. But nobody should try to swap the participants in those two rituals. And it’s possible to go too far in distancing yourself from basic civil behavior during the season. Like Nazis.

Among the most important was the celebration of the winter solstice. The Nazis attempted to move the date of Christmas to the solstice instead and mounted large performances and community bonfires that supposedly drew on pre-Christian rituals. They also tried to redefine St. Nicholas as Wotan, the ancient Germanic deity.

As the years went on, Nazi attempts to take over Christmas intensified. The Nazis rewrote the lyrics of “Silent Night” to remove all attempts to religion or Christ. They distributed Advent calendars for kids filled with propaganda and militaristic imagery. They even tried to rewrite Handel’s Messiah. Mothers were encouraged to bake swastika-shaped cookies. Even the familiar star that topped millions of Christmas trees was replaced by a sunburst that looked less like the Star of David.

Replacing Santa with Wotan? OK, but you’re going to make the kids cry harder.

Rewriting “Silent Night”? I also approve. Nice slow melody, but man, those lyrics are thoroughly soaked in god-shit. You can sing it however you want, but I personally can’t stand the words to the song.

Swastika-shaped Christmas cookies, there I draw the line.

Also, it’s more Nazi-like to tell me I can’t say “Happy Holidays” and force me to abide by every sacred nuance of your peculiar religious tradition.

Somebody has a filthy mind

Is it the French? See that image on the right? That’s a Phrygian cap, and it was the inspiration for the mascot for the 2024 Paris Olympics.

“It’s the symbol of liberty, and it’s also a very strong message linked to the revolution that we want for those games. We want those games (to be) a big success,” says three-time Olympic champion canoeist Tony Estanguet, who is the Paris 2024 president.

Silly, but cute. But wait. There’s a different interpretation.

Fair enough, Mr Estanguet, but on closer inspection, it’s also a very strong message linked to the female anatomy. Because the mascots – quite aside from looking like lunatic Smurf hats – unmistakably resemble gurning plush clitorises with the cold dead eyes of a killer, who could be right at home in a particularly traumatic Cronenbergian fever dream.

Huh? What? That’s a stretch. It only fits if you have an image of a vivisected, chopped out deep chunk of a woman’s genitalia in your head. I don’t. That’s not at all what I picture if I try to visualize a clitoris. Somebody has the gross mind of a serial killer.

But I was wrong. It’s not the French. The people responsible for bringing up this stupid comparison are the English at the Vagina Museum, a London-based exhibition. The English are trying to corrupt the innocent French!

OH NO ELON NO

Given his recent demonstrations of incompetence, would you allow Elon Musk to perform brain surgery on you? Not that he, personally, would wield the knife (probably…although he also has had a machine built to do the surgery, and he might want to push buttons), but one of the companies he owns and mismanages would be in charge. That’s what he wants to do with Neuralink.

It’s been six years since Tesla, SpaceX (and now Twitter) CEO Elon Musk co-founded brain-control interfaces (BCI) startup, Neuralink. It’s been three years since the company first demonstrated its “sewing machine-like” implantation robot, two years since the company stuck its technology into the heads of pigs — and just over 19 months since they did the same to primates, an effort that allegedly killed 15 out of 23 test subjects. After a month-long delay in October, Neuralink held its third “show and tell” event on Wednesday where CEO Elon Musk announced, “we think probably in about six months, we should be able to have a Neuralink installed in a human.”

Let’s also mention the self-driving software for his cars, which is going to be killing people soon. Would you want Musk software in your head? Or consider the Boring Company fiasco, which has failed to produce any useful transportation solutions.

And, don’t forget, it’s been about a year since he successfully impregnated a Neuralink executive. That’s the one thing I’d trust Elon Musk to do — fucking someone up.

I skimmed through his 2 3/4 hour tech demo. I was unimpressed. He showed off the pong-playing monkey again, with Elon providing narration to reassure us that all of his monkeys are happy. He had a dummy on an operating table, its head encased in a machine. They had the machine poking needles into an imitation brain. They did nothing to reassure us that long-term implantation was safe. They had no new, concrete, specific results.

One thing I noticed is that all of the engineers who were trotted out were well-spoken and well-rehearsed, kind of the minimum I’d expect…which made Musk’s off-the-cuff, clumsy speaking style more prominent. It was a lot of halting “uhh”s and “umm”s. He’s terrible. A charisma-vacuum. Fortunately for him, he had a paid claque on hand to whoop and holler at his every pronouncement, which just made the whole presentation even more annoying.

That also exposed how bad the content of what he was saying. Here’s a medical device that he claims will help the blind see and the paralyzed walk again (not that that was demonstrated), and what does he think is important? Defeating the long-term risk of AI.

Musk, however, also tends to emphasize non-medical uses, such as using brain implants to even the playing field, if digital artificial intelligence becomes smarter than any human.

“How do we mitigate that risk? At a species level?” Musk asked Wednesday. “Even in a benign scenario, where the AI is very, very benevolent — then how do we go along for the ride?”

This is not a real thing. We are not threatened by AI, and the kinds of clumsy tech Musk is playing with won’t mitigate his imagined existential future danger. He has no grasp of what his hired engineers are doing — he lives in a sci-fi fantasy world in his head.

The worst, though, is his stated purpose for the demo.

Musk noted during the “show and tell” event that the primary goal of the evening was to recruit talent to Neuralink.

“A lot of the time people think that they couldn’t really work at Neuralink because they don’t know anything about biology or how the brain works,” Musk said. “The thing we really want to emphasize here is that you don’t need to because when you break down the skills that are needed to make Neuralink work, it’s actually many of the same skills that are required to make a smartwatch or modern phone work.”

NO. NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOO. That is all wrong. It’s what a stupid pseudo-engineer would say. The first priority has to be safety, and long-term stability, and building a functional interface with an immensely complex biological organ. These are all medical and biological problems. The engineering…jesus, his major accomplishment has been training a monkey to play Pong. Pong is not difficult. It is not an engineering triumph. The tricky part is the biology. Any ethical review board ought to read that quote and immediately reject his proposal for human trials in 6 months.

He thinks it’s a gadget problem rather than a medical problem.

“In many ways it’s like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires,” Musk said of Neuralink’s device during the 2021 livestream event.

The Fitbit part is relatively trivial, the tiny wires are easy, it’s using them to muck around in a person’s brain that is hard. I don’t think Musk appreciates the difficulty at all.

There are people who are desperate for something to treat the catastrophic medical problems of ALS or spinal cord energy, and that’s Musk’s market. He’s going to gouge them for everything they’re worth and provide dangerous and minimal solutions, all while he’s dreaming of someday uploading his brain to a computer. Don’t fall for it. Don’t let a bumbling narcissistic billionaire get in your skull, especially since his efforts so far have a 65% mortality rate.

Hasta la vista, European Twitter

Light up another one, Elon

The other day, we were concerned that Twitter would lose its Apple app, with a devastating loss to its revenue. What about losing Europe?

The European Union has reportedly threatened to ban Twitter unless Elon Musk abides by its strict content moderation rules.

The warning, which has been reported by The Financial Times, could be the start of a regulatory battle over the future of the social media platform across Europe.

EU industry chief Thierry Breton made the threat during a video meeting with Musk on Wednesday, the news outlet said, citing people with knowledge of the conversation.

Breton told the world’s richest man he must adhere to a checklist of rules which are set out in the EU’s new Digital Services Act.

According to the report, these include a requirement to ditch an “arbitrary” approach to reinstating banned users and to agree to an “extensive independent audit” of the platform by next year.

The landmark law aims to set the global standard for how tech giants must police content on the internet.

In a readout of the conversation provided by Breton, he told Musk: “There is still huge work ahead, as Twitter will have to implement transparent user policies, significantly reinforce content moderation and protect freedom of speech, tackle disinformation with resolve, and limit targeted advertising.”

The impressive incompetence of the “world’s richest man” continues to be staggeringly entertaining. I look forward to the incoherent tantrum that will be incoming.

Another lesson in how millionaires can alienate your base

Here in Minnesota, the most reliable supporters of Republicans are gun owners, hunters, and fishing fanatics. Even our Democratic governor made appeasing that demographic a key part of his electoral success, and I don’t mind — it’s a bridge to environmental action, you know. I also have roots in the Western US, where a major issue is individual liberty to use local resources.

Here’s an interesting case of private interference in individual liberty.

OnX is an app that’s intended to help hunters find public land so they can go after deer, elk, or whatever they happen to be hunting. At first glance, that may not seem like news, but users of that app get an invaluable view of just who owns the property around them, which is critical when trying to reach public lands where hunting is legal. They have also gotten a very clear view of something that is otherwise hidden from the public: how corporations, millionaires, and billionaires have blocked out huge chunks of public property so that they alone can access it—without paying a dime.

They do this by creating public land “islands,” areas that are surrounded by privately held property. The public lands in these islands become de facto parts of the surrounding property. In most states, there is absolutely no rule that says the property owners have to do anything to allow access to that island of land.

One of their tactics is to divide the land into a checkerboard — squares of private ownership around public land that are in contact at only their corners. The rich want to make it illegal to step across any of those corners!

Well aware of how prickly many land owners are about hunters crossing their property, Cape located an area of “checkerboard” control. That is, the land is divided into one mile-by-one mile sections, half of which are public property, half of which are privately owned, like the black and white squares on a checkboard.

At one place on this checkboard map, Eshelman controlled two squares that met at a corner. The other two squares were public property. Using OnX, Cape mapped out the exact location and led three friends in stepping across the corner from one public square to the other. They not only didn’t step on Eshelman’s land, the area of his property they crossed was infinitely small. Not one state has laws against this “corner crossing,” which is common in areas where grants of public land were once given to railroad companies in an effort to “open up” the West.

The rich guy who has bought up these parcels of land, drug company executive Fredric Eshelman, is upset at this simple privilege. He’s an extraordinarily greedy person.

Eshelman owns 23,277 acres near Elk Mountain, but in prosecuting this case against corner-crossing, he attempted to block access to 1.6 million acres of public land.

So he’s suing four hunters who stepped across the mathematically infinitesimal corner boundary for $7 million. He lost a criminal trial against them — it would have been difficult to show that they’d deprived him of anything — so he’s making a civil case of it, and since he’s rich, he can harass the hunters with lawsuits until he wins. Sadly, people in Wyoming (Wyoming! Deeply Republican Wyoming!) think the hunters will eventually lose.

No matter how ridiculous this may all seem, and no matter the quick outcome of the jury trial, Wyoming officials are convinced that the landowners will win in the end. According to a Republican attorney who formerly worked for the state attorney general’s office, if the hunters win, “it would not surprise me at all that the Legislature would come back and pass a law saying corner crossing is illegal. It’s sort of if you win, you lose, and if you lose, you lose.”

This is the kind of case that ought to unite everyone, Republican rednecks, environmentalists, Democrats, people who want to look for spiders, just everyone, in opposing this scheme. I don’t like the idea that filthy rich assholes can wall off huge chunks of public land to create private game hunting parks for themselves. Unfortunately, there are also lots of ranchers who exploit the Wyoming checkerboard for their personal gain.

By the way, Eshelman is a hard right Republican donor.

Well, that turned me away from Post pretty quick

Most boring logo ever.

As the general exodus from Twitter continues, new alternatives have been springing up. I’m using Mastodon, but I’ve also been seeing some attention paid to another option, an app called Post. I know nothing about it, but I was willing to give it a try, until I read more about where Post comes from. The article was more about a tech journalist, Kara Swisher, who has been a cheerleader for Elon Musk until recently, when she’s been trying to bury her past sycophancy in a memory hole.

Swisher also recently pushed people toward a new social network called “Post,” a site backed by Andreessen Horowitz. You may remember A16Z from last year, when they attempted to pump and dump worthless social network Clubhouse, while also aiding in the direct harassment of Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz (who was at the New York Times at the time). Worse still, on an episode of her Pivot podcast she admitted that she’s an advisor in Post, and that her co-host Scott Galloway is an investor. From what I can see, Swisher was pushing people toward a product – on November 17, and again November 21 – that she would only reveal her involvement with four days later.

Post has recently gained attention for claiming to “allow users to read premium news from multiple publishers,” only to offer you the chance to pay for news that is otherwise free elsewhere. And up until recently, Post had intimated that it was against their Terms of Service to make fun of people for their net worth.

Post cries for a return to civility, where the public squares are not quite as public and the powerful are not quite as criticized. Swisher benefits by being one of the biggest new names on a platform, hedging her bets against Twitter (note: Andreessen Horowitz financed part of the Twitter deal and general partner Sriram Krishnan temporarily helped out Musk in his first days at the company) at the time when it’s most convenient to do so.

It’s also a naked attempt by venture capital to recreate the world in their image, and it proves – as has been proven, as will be proven again – that these people have no idea how normal people act or what they want.

I guess I won’t bother with Post, then. Venture capitalists can get fucked.

Less novel, the article also has a nice rant against Elon Musk.

As I’ve related above, Musk has been an irascible shithead for many years, but his overwhelming clout with the media meant that he could, effectively push through any idea his little mind desired. A flamethrower? Sure. $420 Tequila? Of course. Landing humans on Mars? He said 2022, but everybody was fine with saying “within five years” or “2029.”

Musk has gotten away with a mixture of half-truths and outright lies enough times that he believed that he had the popularity to do anything, another condition afflicted upon those with billions of dollars. When he bought Twitter, I truly think that he believed everybody would be behind him, because up until that point most of the media had been. Kara Swisher gave an interview in May about how smart Elon was. Jessica Lessin of The Information described the acquisition as “like watching a business school case study on how to make money on the internet.” Hell, he was able to con banks and investors into raising $13 billion for him. Musk still had the ability to manipulate the media – and still does, in the sense that he can still get a bunch of stories about literally anything he does – but couldn’t change the reality that he did not have a plan for the website that he tied his entire financial future to.

That’s why he seems so utterly pathetic. Musk may have had no plan, but he also appears to have never considered the eventuality that most people would dislike his choices. For someone supposedly tuned into “the future,” he continually fails to adapt to his changing circumstances, picking and losing fights and taking that as proof that his cause is just rather than his ideas being bad. And now his closest allies are wobbling sycophants like David Sacks, who accidentally ended up on the right side of the antitrust debate in an attempt to kiss up to his boss.

What we are likely seeing is society turning its backs on the ultra-rich, and are beginning to see that being able to spend a lot of money does not make someone smart, right or just. The common narrative of the abusively powerful is that they are victims, and that victimization is key to their narrative – except the last three years have chewed through much of the sympathy that a regular person would have for anyone with a billion dollars. It used to be convenient to kiss up to these people – comfortable, even – but “having a billion dollars” no longer guarantees that someone is worthy of adulation.

Many, but not all, journalists have given Musk a free pass for years — I guess they were seduced by the prospect of access to a person with more money than sanity. The rest of us, including me, saw right through him, but then there wasn’t a chance we’d get any money from him, or even a dinner invitation. I am glad to see his reputation shrivel now, though.

More good news!

Yet more good news? Be still my heart.

A federal jury on Tuesday convicted Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and a top deputy of seditious conspiracy for leading a months-long plot to unleash political violence to prevent the inauguration of President Biden, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The panel of seven men and five women deliberated for three days before finding Rhodes and lead Florida Oath Keeper Kelly Meggs guilty of conspiring to oppose by force the lawful transition of presidential power. But three other associates were not convicted of the historically rare and politically freighted sedition count. All five were convicted of obstructing Congress as it met to confirm the results of the 2020 election. Both offenses are punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Lock him up!

Although, I’m sad to say, it looks we can anticipate a little less happy news from these court cases in the future.

Rhodes and his co-defendants were the first accused of seditious conspiracy and the first to face trial and be convicted on any conspiracy charge to date in the massive Jan. 6 investigation. He is the highest-profile figure to face trial in connection with rioting by angry Trump supporters who injured scores of officers, ransacked offices and forced lawmakers to evacuate the U.S. Capitol.

What? That angry dork is the “highest-profile figure” arrested in the insurrection plot? That doesn’t seem right. I can think of a few members of congress and one ex-president who ought to be on the docket.

In case you’re wondering about the fierce pirate fashion statement, Rhodes did not lose an eye in gallant action. He dropped a loaded gun, it went off, and put out his eye. Yeah, he’s one of those bumbling gun-fondling dumb-asses.

Good news this morning!

The Senate passed the “Respect for Marriage” Act, which would be a federal law protecting the right of gay marriage and interracial marriage. It’s amazing to me that this could be an issue anymore, but all the Democrats voted for it, and they persuaded 12 whole Republicans to join them. Twelve is looking at the glass as a quarter full, I guess; we could also note that 36 Republicans voted against it. We really have to get rid of those ugly antiques.

Now do the same thing and pass a federal law protecting abortion rights, OK?