Diana Moskovitz at Defector reminds us that “Greed is Still the Problem” with internet media outlets blowing up like Buzzfeed’s news division just did. Everyone thinks it’s “news doesn’t make money” when the truth is that news doesn’t make unearned stupid-money for speculators. Yes, the Google/Facebook ad monopoly is also a major obstacle for internet media, but the main problem isn’t that they can’t literally charge people per screen view like they used to be able to charge people per newspaper, but that the banksters controlling internet media are used to making billions of dollars without doing any real work of any benefit to anyone, so they kill it off and drain their blood like the vampires they are. (And anyway, they could charge folks a buck – or less – a month for unlimited views and I suspect they’d be fine.)
At least six of our nine Supreme Court Justices are millionaires – worth at least $24 million as a group, not counting homes or retirement accounts, so that figure’s undoubtedly considerably larger. “Not counting homes or retirement accounts” may explain why Justice Thomas – in trouble for receiving free vacations from a "good friend" who might well have business before our Court – isn’t one of them; I could explain Justice Kavanaugh’s non-presence on that list differently, of course. Seriously, though, money corrupts; Justices Kagan and Sotomayor are landlords, and though they both voted to keep the Biden eviction moratorium, “their positions as landlords could have weakened their will to convince other justices to join their side.” At least in theory!
Count me as not caring that 44 percent of Republicans don’t want Donald Trump to run for President in 2024. He’ll get the 25% of the electorate who are bat-guano insane (I expect these folks comprise most, though not all, of the Republicans who’d say they want him to run for President), and he’ll easily get at least 20-22 more percentage points from people who “can’t stand him” but will “hold their nose” because of all their imaginary complaints about Joe Biden; as history has shown, that might be all he needs. Polls arguing that Democrats don’t want Joe Biden to run are meaningless for somewhat similar reasons (except that our complaints about Donald Trump are quite real).
I wonder if we should even keep pointing out that Ron DeSantis isn’t fighting Disney particularly effectively – Disney easily beat back his effort to take their relative independence away, and his “revenge” plan of maybe one day putting a prison near the park will hardly inconvenience them, but of course the drama he’s creating is not only the strategy, the drama is the point. The masturbatory-rage crowd won’t say he’s “petty” for demanding more monorail inspections, they’ll say he’s “sticking it” to the “woke” crowd. Of course, if Mr. DeSantis could govern, let alone lead, he wouldn’t need to create these dramas.
Finally, physicist Michio Kaku explains why we shouldn’t go very far out of our way to contact alien life forms disk – because they might crush us without feeling animosity toward us, or even noticing us. And that could well happen! But another possibility, one I entertain more frequently, is that we shouldn’t contact alien life forms because we’ll just infect them with all our decadent maladies. Perhaps I’m arrogant for thinking that, but thinking that is a better way to get us to change our ways that than thinking we’re just ants on a turtleshell.
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