Stocking Stuffer? 🌻 🌻 🌻

WTF on Steroids: On Wednesday, the Florida Man, not the disturbingly anti-vaccine Governor but that other one, teased that he’d be making a MAJOR announcement on Thursday.  The pundit class and a lot of the rest of us immediately went into overdrive trying to predict what that announcement might be.  Some suggested he would announce a running mate with leading candidates including the bombastic, election denier and similarly defeated Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake or the increasingly powerful shadow Speaker Margie Q.  Others feared that he would announce that he was throwing his ring into the Speaker race, plausible as you don’t have to be a member of Congress to become Speaker and what better way to diss outgoing Speaker Pelosi while throwing a wrench into the functioning of government than to assume her mantle?  Well, as it turns out everyone’s prognostications were wrong. On Thursday, the man who was once president of the USA and leader of the free world announced the launch of a collection of digital trading cards depicting him in various “guises” including superhero, astronaut, and NASCAR driver. Not on my bingo card, yours?  Keeping with his usual grift, those non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, aren’t free, rather they cost $99 each with the promise that purchasing one gives the buyer a chance of winning a dinner with “their” president, presumably hamburgers loaded with ketchup, refillable cup of Diet Coke, and ice cream, one scoop only since those double portions are reserved for the faux superhero.  If you haven’t seen Trump’s NFTs, check them out online because there’s no way that words alone can describe their absurdity. The scary thing is that though Trump is slipping in the polls he still commands enough of his party’s support to stand a good chance of emerging from the Republican primaries as their candidate for president because as Congressman Adam Kinzinger said yesterday in his farewell speech “sheltering the ignorant and the racist” is what the Republican party is increasingly about these days.  Of course, it’s more than fair to assume that the money Trump raises by selling with this NFT grift won’t pay for his campaign, instead it will likely go towards sustaining his lifestyle, that Mar a Lago estate; his newly refurbished plane and his growing legal expenses are bigly expensive.  Trump’s announcement was widely mocked by many on both sides of the aisle including President Biden who tweeted that he “had some MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENTS the last couple of weeks too….” His list included the easing of inflation, the signing of the Respect for Marriage Act, bringing Brittney Griner home, lowering of gas prices, and the addition of 10,000 new jobs in Arizona.  But sure, Don, brag about those NFTs.

 

More Stupid: The Florida man isn’t the only one doing stupid things.  Chief Twit Elon Musk, who said when he bought Twitter that “I hope my worse critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech is” blocked the accounts of a bunch of journalists last night. The list of those “permanently suspended” includes independent left leaning journalist Aaron Rupar who has 500,000 plus followers as well as a group of prominent media/tech writers from the NY Times, the Washington Post and CNN.  Musk also blocked the account of Mastodon, one of the more prominent Twitter competitors, eliminating the ability of Twitter users to post anything to their Mastodon accounts.  The purge saga began with Musk first banning and then threatening to sue Jack Sweeney, a University of Central Florida college student who was sharing publicly accessible information to track Musk’s private jet flights in real time.  After Sweeney was banned from Twitter, the journalists covered the story, sharing links to the flight information in their tweets while Mastodon tweeted that anyone who wanted to see Sweeney’s missives could find them on their app. Musk justified his decision to ban Sweeney by claiming that the dissemination of the public flight information was putting his and his children’s lives in jeopardy, probably a bit of exaggeration but to be fair, Musk isn’t the first celebrity/business leader who’s been put in this position and none of them have been all too pleased with having their whereabouts shown in real time.  The difference is that they don’t run Twitter, where all kinds of haters are now allowed to, even encouraged to, continuously target everyone but the Chief Twit.  Anyway, it’s not clear whether these bans are really “permanent,” whether the affected news companies will stop their other journalists from tweeting until the bans are lifted and, maybe more importantly for Musk, how his action will affect his bottom line both at Twitter where advertising revenue is already way down and at Tesla where board members and activist investors are losing patience with his antics and their impact on Tesla’s stock price.  Though Musk and Twitter are getting a disproportionate amount of attention right now, TikTok is also in the news.  The Senate has approved legislation to ban its use on government devices, something some states have already done.  Legislation has also been introduced to block TikTok entirely. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company, the concern, which FBI Director Chris Wray expressed earlier this month, is that the Chinese government could gain access to user data through the app, deploying it to spread misinformation or worse.  That is the reason that Kara Swisher, the well-known, respected technology podcaster/writer keeps her TikTok account on a burner phone. The youth of America won’t be happy but absent a change in ownership or the housing of US data outside of the reach of the Chinese, the widely popular TikTok could go bye-bye at least for a while.

 

And:  More of former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows texts have been published. The bottom line is that not only did he fail to even try to control Trump, he and far too many Republican members of Congress were part of the insurrection. Name a virus and it’s out there right now, which explains why free COVID tests are now available again at COVIDtests.gov and also why the kiosk on my corner is offering convenient and quick turn around on COVID, flu and RSV tests right now.  

Happy Hannukah 🕎

Latkes and jelly donuts for all!