A Declining Twitterverse and A Few Other Things
It’s going to be a short column today. I’ve got three cancer related doctor visits and I can hardly wait. They’ll be taking blood, checking in on my side effects, and infusing me with doses of chemotherapy and immunotherapy. It’s an all day sucker starting early, so my writing time is limited.
I’ve changed online reading habits since Twitter got sold to Elon Musk. News stories on Wednesday about the company losing two thirds of its value seem about right with me. I’m two thirds more likely to add to my knowledge via other destinations.
The Substack platform is where I and a whole lot of other people publish their thoughts. If people like (or hate) my commentary they’ll be tempted to subscribe (it’s free!) and maybe a little overwhelmed by the frequency of my postings. It’s okay to take a day off, folks; I can hardly keep up with myself at times.
(Didn’t I write about X last week?)
The thing I love about Substack are the opportunities to grow and learn regularly presented to me. The thing I hate about Substack is Elon Musk’s childish attempts to suppress my and anybody else's work on the platform. Some days my cross posts to Twitter appear, often they don’t.
Since the quality of the Twitter audience has declined so much, even articles that evade his deleting bots don’t help much with building the Words and Deeds audience. Facebook gets me 4 times as much attention, and it didn’t used to be that way.
Anyhow, yesterday I found Hamilton Nolan’s Substack How Things Work and immediately became a fan.
His latest post about real estate insurance was honest about the industry –a bunch of hyenas– and its role in making climate change real to a bunch of folks who used to not care.
… insurance can tell you things about reality. It resembles global investment firms in this: The people running them may be greedy, and the clients may be evil, but the business is all about understanding the true and unvarnished state of the world in order to manage risk in order to protect wealth, and therefore these firms do their very best to operate according to what is true, whereas politicians, for example, often do their very best to lie. This is why every leftist and revolutionary should read the Wall Street Journal. There are far fewer lies when money is involved.
The insurance industry is going to serve a very useful role in the climate apocalypse. It is going to be the tip of the spear that punches through all of the bullshit of climate denialism once and for all. Indeed, the process is very much underway already. Politicians and oil lobbyists can lie all they want, but their homeowners insurance rates are going up.
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Someday I’ll write an opus about how a big name real estate company treated us when we had the nerve to file a claim after an upstairs neighbor’s water heater decided to drop its load on my bedroom. The final check has cleared, but the sour taste in my mouth hasn’t.
The company, a contractor for GEICO, has already raised my rates and put my name on a “aha, I see you’ve had a claim” list should I want to take my business elsewhere.
But that’s a story for another day.
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Assorted News in the U.S.A.
Aide fired by George Santos says he got his job after sending money to Republican’s deputy. Via the Associated Press. Obviously, he didn’t pay enough.
A man who briefly worked as an aide to U.S. Rep. George Santos says he got his job after sending a series of payments to one of the Republican’s top deputies.
Derek Myers, 31, told staff of the House’s ethics subcommittee during an interview Wednesday that while he was trying to get a job in Santos’ congressional office in late January, he sent at least seven $150 payments to Santos’ director of operations, Vish Burra.
Myers shared details about the payments, including receipts and text messages, with The Associated Press. His account of how Burra helped him get hired hasn’t previously been reported and raises questions about potential ethical improprieties around Santos.
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DeSantis's new bigot bullhorn has shady associations. Via Progress Report. When Ron says "our way of life," he's not talking about multicultural democracy
“Our way of life” has been popping up more and more in speeches and conservative campaign literature. In 2021, Sen. Marco Rubio accused the left of running a “systematic effort to dismantle our society, our traditions, our economy, and our way of life.”
Sen. Josh Hawley used it over and over again in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2019 that cast Rockwellian midwestern small towns as “our way of life.”
In 2021, Rep. Bob Good, a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus, blamed “Big Tech, Hollywood elites, and Democrats” for seizing “unprecedented control over our speech, our culture, and our way of life.” The accusation came during a speech about a bill to ban trans girls from playing school sports, as if it weren’t clear enough that Republicans have never been concerned with the integrity of girls’ sports.
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The War on 'Woke' Via Reliable Sources, Welcome to Pride Month–take cover.
The Human Rights Campaign released a statement Wednesday, signed by more than 100 advocacy organizations and allies, condemning the right's use of the "extremist playbook of attacks."
"Their goal is clear: to prevent LGBTQ+ inclusion and representation, silence our allies and make our community invisible," the coalition said. "These attacks fuel hate against LGBTQ+ people, just as we’ve seen this year with more than 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills that restrict basic freedoms and aim to erase LGBTQ+ people."
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After Calling Joe Biden Senile, Republicans Complain He Outsmarted Them Via Huffpost.
In March, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s colleagues laughed as the California Republican mocked President Joe Biden’s age, saying he would bring Biden “soft food” so they could negotiate over the debt ceiling.
But McCarthy apparently did not bring Biden anything to eat during their talks, and the president chewed up the GOP’s debt limit proposal instead. Republicans aren’t laughing anymore.
“Republicans got outsmarted by a President who can’t find his pants,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) tweeted on Tuesday, making clear she opposed the compromise legislation that came out of Biden and McCarthy’s negotiations.
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God you write purdy! Best wishes on your treatments and recovery.