“How Gamers Eclipsed Spies as an Intelligence Threat”.
Hey, person named Kyle, what are you doing on May 21?
“While I’m not much of a believer in the idea that the young voters will save us — my own demographic, Gen X, is disturbingly favorable for MAGA candidates despite the fact we should know better — I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the Republican/conservative brand is toxic with the youth and even worse for those who haven’t hit voting age yet.”
“A top lawyer for Smartmatic, the voting technology company whose defamation lawsuit against Fox News is still pending, said Thursday that he won’t accept any settlement smaller than the $787 million Fox agreed to pay Dominion, and that his client needs a “full retraction” from the right-wing network disavowing the lies it spread about the 2020 presidential election.”
“Even if you could ignore all of that, there are still major red flags with the announcement of the Harry Potter TV reboot’s commitment to a “faithful adaptation” that didn’t just spring up out of nowhere after Rowling’s transphobia came out.”
The “forced grandma-ization exploit” that makes chatbots tell you things they’re not supposed to.
“How did the Twitter checkmark become toxic? It took multiple strokes of business failure: First by Musk making Twitter worse, second by charging more for Twitter Blue at the same time he was making the site worse, and third by making himself an unappealing person for people to associate themselves with in public. The masses are not balking at paying for Twitter Blue because they’re trying to shelter themselves within a crumbling elitist internet order, but because they think Musk is offering an unworthy product and is also a dickhead.”
RIP, Barry Humphries, comic actor best known for his Dame Edna Everage character.
“Gee, how come we don’t see liberal media outlets paying huge settlements in defamation lawsuits?”
“There was a one-of-a-kind reunion over the weekend at Arlington House — the national memorial to Robert E. Lee that sits atop a hill in Arlington National Cemetery. Descendants of the Confederate general gathered with the descendants of the people the Lee family once enslaved on the property in Virginia. Many of them are seeing one another in person for the first time after meeting virtually for the last two years in pursuit of racial understanding in what’s known as the Family Circle.”
See ya later, Tucker. Don’t let the door hit you, etc. Kind of amazing, given his long and disgusting history, all of which Fox News was fine with, but here we are. I’m posting these links on Monday and all this may become obsolete before Sunday, but at this time all the explanations for why this happened sound like BS. We’ll see if the shoe has dropped by the weekend.
“What Beck, O’Reilly and Kelly didn’t understand at the time, and what somebody should explain to Carlson this evening, is that Fox itself, which convenes the audience, is the star. And the star maker is whomever network owner Rupert Murdoch has assigned to run the joint. The nighttime hosts, as talented as they are — and Beck, O’Reilly, Kelly and Carlson are among some of the most talented broadcasters to slop the makeup on and speak into the camera — are as replaceable as the members of the bubblegum group the Archies, as interchangeable as the actors who’ve played James Bond, as expendable as the gifted musicians who played lead guitar for the Yardbirds.”
“Clarence Thomas’s Billionaire Friend Did Have Business Before the Supreme Court”.
“As a result, the Covid Crisis Group concluded that “Trump was a co-morbidity” with Covid. Comorbidity is a medical term meaning that a patient suffers from two or more chronic diseases simultaneously.”
RIP, Len Goodman, original judge on Dancing With The Stars and former judge on Strictly Come Dancing.
RIP, Harry Belafonte, legendary singer, actor, and civil rights activist.
“I don’t think I’m suggesting anything bold or controversial when I say that it’s a Good Thing that Plymouth’s town square is no longer dominated by a severed head on a pike. This is not to say that removing that spectacle absolved Plymouth of all of its sins or that it solved every other imaginable problem facing the place. No one is saying that. No one ever would say that any more than anyone has ever said that Bree Newsome magically ended all of South Carolina’s problems when she tore down the vile Klan-hankie decorating its capital.”
“The era of Nate Silver running FiveThirtyEight at ESPN/ABC News/Disney looks to be coming to a close amidst wider Disney layoffs.”
“Disney finds itself in this regrettable position because it expressed a viewpoint the Governor and his allies did not like. Disney wishes that things could have been resolved a different way. But Disney also knows that it is fortunate to have the resources to take a stand against the State’s retaliation – a stand smaller businesses and individuals might not be able to take when the State comes after them for expressing their own views. In America, the government cannot punish you for speaking your mind.”
“The College Board says changes will be made to its new AP African American studies course, after critics said the agency bowed to political pressure and removed several topics from the framework, including Black Lives Matter, slavery reparations and queer life.”
RIP, Jerry Springer, legendary talk show host, daytime TV star and and former mayor of Cincinnati.
Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman at the center of the Emmett Till murder, has died.
With regard to young people, pretty much everyone who has come of age since 2001 has suffered economically from Republican misgovernment on a scale not seen since young people in Herbert Hoover’s presidency. That’s not merely when the GOP held the presidency, but also when they used Congress, state governments and now the Supreme Court to block even small measures of relief. And for what it’s worth, that cadre remained more liberal and Democratic leaning than the population at large all the way to the grave (it included my parents, so I got lots of anecdotal evidence. By contrast, a lot of Gen Xers bought the “mourning in America” line in the 1980s; and my generation (more or less a Boomer) pretended to be anti-war in the 1960s, but proved to be only anti-draft.
The incident with childish jealousy over Super Bowl Tweets should tell you all you need to know about Elon Musk:
https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-super-bowl-joe-biden-tweet
He should have stuck with rockets and electric cars, then a whole lot of people would likely never have found out what a spoiled thin-skinned brat and asshole boss from hell he is.