It's no wonder the Pentagon is still supplying police with military equipment that they barely know how to use. It started with the War On Drugs, and now that free market capitalism is failing, it's the War On Poor People.

The NYC police are so flush with military equipment that they donated some of it to the Ukrainians, whose annual defense budget is smaller than the NYPD's.

You suppose they bring their rocket launchers when they have to evict families?

If it's insane, someone's made a custom Lego set of it.

The liberal media never goes after the right wing with any aplomb when the divide between the GOP's libertarian and Christian fundamentalist wings is exposed for all to see. For example when Caitlyn Jenner was pelted with transphobic abuse from a bible thumper at the 2021 CPAC, I was a bit surprised that the MSM didn't point out that such behavior is incompatible with libertarian beliefs about their beloved free market being an "open tent."

Maybe the MSM wants the culture wars to continue?

This country is so divided that literally anything could be the flashpoint of our next civil war. I'm making a Bingo card that lists all the things I predict will be involved when the US finally breaks down. So far I have a no smoking sign, a $10 lottery ticket, 5 cupcakes and a possum.

It used to be that liberals distrusted the CIA and conservatives trusted them but the script totally flipped after Trump. It's even worse now; the CIA uses "woke language" in their recruitment advertising and it's made liberals forget about COINTELPRO, constant surveillance, etc.

As opposed to the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), which is comprised of career intel workers whose first duty is to the US govt, the CIA is overloaded with greedy private contractors.

Keeping an eye out for any mutuals who came here from Twitter. I know this isn't what this place is about, but I'm following all back, mostly because I tend to watch the "My Friends" feed a little more closely than the Firehose. Just saying.

I announced today that my next political humor book will be titled Righting The Online Left: Common Sense Citizenship for the Dawn of the Independent Media Era, due for release in Feb 2024 (not 2023).

It will feature discussions on "political Twitter culture," the things that divide the working classes (including education levels and the PMC's hubris), MMT as free market capitalism's last gasp, etc.

More as I start the actual rollout.

ICYMI, from Brianna Wu on Twitter, 11/10:

Senior people at Twitter have resigned. We now now why. They said in private Slack channels that @elonmusk is so desperate to recoup his money, he’s taking crazy risks with YOUR privacy and safety.
Right now, Twitter is extremely hackable. That puts every user at extreme risk for DM leaks, identity theft and surveillance.

Elon doesn’t care. He wants his money. So they resigned. And top lawyers told Twitter employees to get whistleblower protections.

MSNBC says "stop covering Trump." That's like the Colonel saying "Fried chicken sucks." My irony-meter just cracked in half.

No, kidding, if they finally do stop talking about that Adderall-gobbling loon, that'd be great. Economist Mark Blyth recently commented that Vanity Fair still runs a Trump story every week. Before the 2020 election, he predicted that if Trump lost, CNN would lose half their viewership. He was off by only a few points.

Always ignore trolls. Especially big orange ones.

If this really is #GoodbyeTwitter, I think one huge takeaway will be that people are sick of Big Tech's algorithms: It's called "artificial intelligence" for a reason.

Sounds like Twitter had a huge team working on machine learning, which spells manipulating users and directing them to where the platforms want them to go, not to the things they look for.

That nonsense screws YouTube, Google and eBay.

Algorithms are so 2008. Give the people what they want and expect. First in first served.

Seems like even the big brains at Reddit's techie groups don't really have a great handle on what BlueSky is really about. Like it's just a glorified ActivityPub/Mastodon but "blah blah blockchain." I don't get it at all rn, like, I just see it as Usenet but with graphics in these early, relatively uninformed (for me) stages. But yes, I signed up for the beta. You know, because.

Boy, at this rate, Facebook and Twitter are both going to go bankrupt. Sure would stink if that happened, huh?

Corporate Social Media is a barter system. They get your info, you get ads and a crummy algorithm.
I'll take questions.

Gen Z gets most of their news from alternative, non-MSM-propagandist sources. Figures like Greta Thunberg and David Hogg are painfully aware of what needs to be done; their biggest obstacle is that the middle class is so propagandized by the mainstream media that commonsensical ideas seem like windmill chasing. They think all this constant abuse and neglect of working people is normal.

@th3j35t3r - #BugReport
Pretty sure I found a level 2 bug on this app. I tried to post something last night (and today) where there were at least 4 or 5 sets of short phrases enclosed in double-quotes. I hit "Post" and it didn't do anything, just shifted the frame up or down a little, no errorhandling or anything. I mistook it for server overload. I replaced the double quotes with single quotes and it posted normally.

Every time I mention this app either here or elsewhere I always have a burst of panic and run back to see if I put SoCo instead of CoSo. It's going to happen sooner or later, so I humbly apologize in advance.
It's owed to a traumatic memory you see: one time I drank an entire fifth of that swill when I was 17 and was sick for 4 days. My blood pressure was probably 3 over 4 or something.

Protip: never do that.

Nobody:

Fox news hosts: Seriously, why doesn't anyone care about the feelings of wealthy white guys?

Really hoping the same-old celebrities and mainstream media pundits don't start flocking to this app and clogging the servers with their weak LinkedIn-style nonsense. Get your own Twitter, blue-checks.