A presidential ticket for the ages

The political commentariat in the US is agog with a report of Donald Trump hosting a dinner at Mar-a-Lago for notorious white supremacist, misogynist, and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes and notorious nutcase and anti-Semite Kanye West aka Ye. Trump was apparently highly taken with Fuentes who flattered him by apparently being familiar with Trump’s speeches. When Trump said that he disliked the teleprompters that his advisors wanted him to use at his rallies in order to sound more presidential, Fuentes said that he liked it when Trump ad-libbed. His flattery seemed to work when Trump turned to Ye and said, “I really like this guy. He gets me.”

Trump, of course, loves anybody who fawns over him, however unsavory they may be. This has become such a well-known fact about his personality that everyone seeking his favors does it once they gain access to him. Trump seems to not be aware, or perhaps care, if they are being sincere or cynically exploiting this weakness. Such a character flaw requires a person to be surrounded by gatekeepers who will block such people from getting close to him but in Trump’s case, they seem to be ineffective.
[Read more…]

FIFA + Qatar = A marriage made in hell

FIFA, the controlling body of international football, has long been known to be utterly corrupt. The nation of Qatar has an appalling record on human rights including ,the criminalizing of homosexuality, brutal treatment of its migrant labor force, and violations of free speech rights among others. So when in 2010 FIFA selected Qatar as the host nation for the 2022 tournament despite its manifest unsuitability (for starters, the temperatures can rise to very high levels in the summers), there were immediate suspicions that bribery had been involved, with the Qatari rulers seeking to get good publicity by hosting this major international sporting event.

This article goes into great depth on the sordid history of FIFA and Qatar.
[Read more…]

Sarah Palin loses again

One of the last races for the House of Representatives has been called, that for the single congressional seat in Alaska. Democrat Mary Peltola beat Sarah Palin by 55% to 45%, a larger margin than the 3% margin in the special election held in August. Alaskan elections have an open primary in which people of all parties compete and the top four then move on the general election which is decided by ranked-choice voting of the four candidates. Peltola came close to getting 49% of first preference votes and thus would still have won if the election were decided by a plurality. The details of how the preferential votes were cast can be seen here.
[Read more…]

Violent crime dropped rapidly after elections!

Not really. It is just that right wing media suddenly loses interest in the story once it is no longer useful to scare their voter base into thinking that Democrats are ‘soft on crime’. But you can expect coverage of violent crime to rise again just before the 2024 elections, irrespective of the actual data.

While mass shootings like the two that occurred this week naturally get a lot of attention, violent crime in general in every major category has been on a steep decline since the early 1990s.

Run-off election for the Georgia senate is still important

Once control of the US Senate had been decided in favor of Democrats with the win by Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada that gave them a 50-49 edge, interest in the Georgia run-off election between Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and the batty Republican Herschel Walker dropped precipitously. If the Georgia race were still pivotal to control of the Senate, we would have had wall-to-wall coverage. Instead, now one has to seek out news about it.

But we should not think that this makes the race inconsequential. As this article explains, in practical terms there is a big difference between a 51-49 Democratic majority and a 50-50 tied body in which the vice-president breaks the tie in favor of the Democrats.

A 51-49 Senate would give Democrats an outright majority, meaning that [majority leader Chuck] Schumer wouldn’t have to negotiate a power-sharing agreement with Republican leader Mitch McConnell. The two parties had to do that two years ago and also in 2001, the last time the Senate was evenly split.

In early 2021, confirmations of new President Joe Biden’s nominees were stalled for several weeks while Schumer and McConnell worked out an agreement on how to split committees and move legislation on the Senate floor. Using the little leverage he had, McConnell threatened not to finalize a deal until Democrats promised that they wouldn’t try to kill the legislative filibuster that forces a 60-vote threshold.
[Read more…]

Expect House Republicans to investigate Hunter Biden

One of the first things that Republicans are likely to do after they take control of the House of Representatives on January 3rd is to launch investigations into Joe Biden’s son Hunter and whether he used his father’s name and influence in some shady dealings. There is a laptop involved that purportedly has evidence of this. It is being portrayed as either a storm in a teacup or a big deal. These hearings are going to be a rerun of the notorious Benghazi hearings from 2014 to 2016.
[Read more…]

A true MAGA warrior

In Arizona, Republicans Kari Lake lost her governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs and Republican Blake Master lost his senate race to Mark Kelly. Both are ardent Trumpists and as true devotees are now, of course, claiming the election was stolen from them. Lake is refusing to concede but Masters had previously conceded the race.

But in a race for the Arizona state House of representatives, a Republican who won has decided to take an even stronger stand.

In Arizona, Republican Liz Harris won her race for a seat in the state’s House of Representatives – but has pledged not to cast any votes until the entire 2022 election is redone, 12News reports.

“Although I stand to win my Legislative District race it has become obvious that we need to hold a new election immediately. There are clear signs of foul play from machine malfunctions, chain of custody issues and just blatant mathematical impossibilities. How can a Republican State Treasurer receive more votes than a Republican Gubernatorial or Senate candidate?” Harris wrote in a statement.

I have an answer! Maybe people liked the state treasurer more than they liked the gubernatorial and senate candidates? After all, they are separate votes, no?

There is no way that there is going to be a do-over for all the races in Arizona so I wonder how long Harris will stick to her guns, since the above article says,”If Harris follows through on the threat, it could cause some serious problems for her Republican colleagues. They control the Arizona House, but only by two votes.”

Maybe we should be like Larry

The collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX has been all over the news.

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which has filed for US bankruptcy court protection, said it owes its 50 biggest creditors nearly $3.1 billion.

The exchange owes about $1.45 billion to its top ten creditors, it said in a court filing on Saturday, without naming them.

FTX and its affiliates filed for bankruptcy in Delaware on Nov. 11 in one of the highest-profile crypto blowups, leaving an estimated 1 million customers and other investors facing total losses in the billions of dollars.

What seems to have happened is a lot like an old-fashioned bank run where too many depositors wanted their money back at the same time, exhausting the cash reserves of the company. But in the case of actual banks, they are regulated by the government and there are systems in place to assist individual banks weather such runs and protect depositors. In the unregulated crypto-world where they prided themselves on being independent of government entanglements, there are no such safeguards

The company has filed for bankruptcy and Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, has ben pushed out of the company and is now in the Bahamas.

The collapse of FTX has given a new lease of life for the ad the company aired during the last Super Bowl featuring Larry David.

The trolling of Musk goes on

I might as well join the pile on of trolling of Elon Musk. A prankster calling themselves a ‘projection activist’ projected a rolling caption with insults onto the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.

This prank was no doubt timed to coincide with Musk’s statement that he would be in the building over the weekend to meet personally with the remaining engineers in the company who were commanded to come there at short notice.

It is not clear what would be accomplished by such meetings. There is no way that Musk could properly gauge the quality of a person by seeing a few lines of code during a brief meeting, especially since Twitter is not like any of the companies he already runs and has an entirely different culture. It seems like Musk is jerking people around just because he can. It is a petty tyrant move whose only result is likely to make even more people quit.

There is an old saying that people do not leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers. And, boy, is Musk a lousy manager, at least as far as Twitter is concerned.. How the other companies he runs have survived so far beats me.

Goodbye, Twitter. Hello … Mastodon?

Social media sites start out as places where people can meet and interact online and form communities of like-minded people. These are all noble goals and these sites still do serve those goals. But over time, as these platforms become larger and larger, like Twitter and Facebook became, they grow toxic. It seems like that negative spiral is an inevitable consequence of the relentless logic that arises from their dependence on advertising revenue that leads to a Catch-22. To attract advertisers, they need a large user base and for those users to spend a lot of time on the site. That results in the companies creating algorithms that encourage so-called ‘virality’ where large numbers are drawn to some hot topic. This in turn encourages mean and vicious hot takes because that is what seems to get the attention of many people and so pretty soon it is nasty people who dominate the platform and this alienates advertisers who do not want to be associated with hateful content, and they leave.

Some disgruntled users of Twitter have been looking for another home and one that is getting some attention is another platform called Mastodon. This is a decentralized federated network run by volunteers, quite different to the behemoths of the other social media with their centralized management and operational structure and massive servers that are expensive to run. It is not ad-based and is specifically designed to discourage virality and to encourage small groups of like minded people to engage in more meaningful conversations with one another.
[Read more…]