The Fear of Elon Musk

by
Various people have expressed concern about the Elon Musk buy of Twitter, on grounds that it is dangerous to have such an important platform controlled by one very wealthy individual. I wonder if these people have noticed..

–One of the two most influential newspapers in the country, the Washington Post, is 100% owned by Jeff Bezos, who last I checked is also pretty well-off financially

–The other most-influential newspaper, The New York Times, has been controlled for decades by one wealthy and prominent family. Although The Times is owned by a publicly-traded corporation, the dual-class stock structure means that the control is with the family, not with the other shareholders.

–The largest social media platform, Meta/Facebook, is about 6 times larger than Twitter, based on market capitalization. Although Meta is a public company, it also has a dual-class stock structure, which gives Zuckerberg effective control with 53% of those Class B shares.

–The platform that seems to be getting the most traction among those under 35 or so is TikTok. It is owned by a Chinese company, which means it is required to do the bidding of the government of that country, which means in effect the CCP.

All of those things appear to be just fine with most of those people who are now expressing their upsetness about Musk/Twitter.

The Tipping Point Cometh? Maybe?

by

I speak of the tipping point, when toleration of what is euphemistically termed ‘gender-affirming medical care’ for minor children and teens (otherwise known as chemical and surgical mutilation) flips hard over from the trendy, laudable and even fashionable into the “Oh, Hell NO!” side, after so many years of being put out there as trendy, laudable, etc. by all super-tolerant, oh-so-progressive activists in the media, politics and the oh-so-superior intellectuals.

It all rather reminds me of the great satanic day-care ritual abuse panic of the mid-1980s, where a combination of guilt-stricken parents, manipulative “experts”, amoral prosecutors, buffaloed law enforcement and a news media panting for sensational headlines all combined in a great storm of panic … a panic which everyone eventually realized, with a sense of mild shame was wholly without grounds. But not before a lot of innocent people were railroaded, tried, found guilty and had their lives and livelihoods thoroughly wrecked. Only a very few news reporters stood against the panic. One of those few was a woman reporter for, of all things, New York’s uber-lefty tabloid, the Village Voice, who was following a local case, and basically saying, “Hello! How is this even remotely possible, the baroque and improbably ornate stories of abuse that these kids are reporting? Seriously are you all out of your minds?!” (Yes, I read the Village Voice the Stars and Stripes bookstore carried it, along with all the other periodicals. I liked Nat Hentoff’s column.)

Read more

Random Pic

by


Time for FREXIT?

by

France is being fined 500 million Euros by the EU because it didn’t meet its ‘renewable energy’ goals in 2020.

Yet the CO2 intensiveness of France’s electrical generation is running about 121gCO2/kWh, while Germany is at 647gCO2/kWh.   Apparently, nuclear doesn’t count as ‘renewable’ by EU standards.   (The numbers would have surely been even more favorable to France in 2020 than those based on this 2022 snapshot, given that so many French nuclear plants are down for maintenance at the present time)

Selfish, Personal Post: If You Were to Start Tomorrow, What e-mail service would you use?

by

After a day of waiting on hold with my new internet server (I “bundled” for considerable savings but also because our local cable provider had been swallowed in a buy-out),   the last techie informed me that it was surprising I still got any e-mails – not that they were disappearing from my inbox and from deleted, etc.   (And pretty soon I wouldn’t get any.)    Suddenlink addresses, apparently, were being sent to some black hole.   Meanwhile, Optimum does not provide that service.

I guess I need to move on.   Opinions are generally well supported (and not in short supply) among Chicagoboyz; what has your experience taught you?   I’d love anecdotes   but statements like – XX is wonderful or terrible will also help.    After all, who is more savvy than a Chicagoboy?   On the other hand, I’m incompetent and totally rely on the Greek Squad so simplicity and safety are my biggest concerns.