When Twitter banned the New York Post for accurately reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop story, the progressive media said nothing. When twitter suspended some “journalists” for doxxing Elon Musk… suddenly, that’s a threat to democracy. The world will fall into ruin unless journalists are allowed to violate the established Twitter terms of service.
President Trump was banned from Twitter while Jihadi/Islamist terrorists were allowed to remain and continue to spit hate and threats. So, no, some journalists finding that the rules apply to them too is not a “precede
A guy who made his billions by selling stuff is… selling stuff. Just… ridiculous stuff. This doesn’t really seem to be the actions of someone who thinks he’s destined to retake the White House.
She is an *acknowledged* drug-transporting criminal. Whether you agree with Russia’s laws on such things or not, those were the laws. And while the US went to the bizarre extreme of returning to Russia an arms dealer for Griner, the US has done doodly squat for other prisoners currently languishing in Russian penal colonies. Why? because Griner has various and sundry privileges that others don’t. see, for example, Marc Fogel. Very similar circumstances of bringing in a small amount of pot; almost no public outcry, no celebrities or TV NPCs shrieking about how the US needs to bring him back. Why? Feel free to guess.
But hey, at least the Russian get “The Merchant of Death” back.
That time was before beloved franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars and Lord of the Rings were converted into garbage message mechanisms for garbage ideologies. Now… anything that *might* be good is now viewed initially with skepticism, and more often than not finally with contempt.
So will “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” be any good? I have no reason for optimism. There are rumors that the plot involves time travel, and that the end of the movie has Harrison Ford’s Indy being erased from the timeline and replaced with Phoebe Waller Bridge as a female Indy. “The REAL Indy was a woman, all along!” This could be utterly wrong… but things have gotten so predictably bad that I won’t discount the distinct possibility.
Doutbless there are more than a few readers old enough to remember when “buying a star” was a thing. You’d send someone money, they’d send you a certificate telling you which of the bajillions of stars in the sky is now yours, and let you know that your name for it has been entered into some “star registry” or some such. I suspect most people of average-and-above intelligence knew that it wasn’t anything of any real seriousness; it had no force of law behind it and is wholly unrecognized by the International Astronomical Union. It was uncharitably a scam; charitably, a briefly amusing gag gift, maybe a nice gesture for a friend or family member.
Something similar has popped up in recent months: “Established Titles.” You can pay someone fifty bucks to buy one square foot of Scotland and call yourself “Lord” or “Lady.” The idea seems to have a *lot* of similarities with the star naming bit from decades past. I’m unschooled in British/Scottish law but I do know there’s this bit in the US Constitution:
Clause 8 Titles of Nobility and Foreign Emoluments
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
If I’m reading that correctly (who knows), this says two main things:
1) The UNITED STATES won’t issue titles such as “Lord” and “Lady,”
and
2) Nobody holding some sort of governmental office in the US will be allowed to accept such a title from a foreign power.
So (again assuming I’m reading this correctly), Joe Schmo can be freely granted a title of nobility from the Brits, no problem. But Representative Bill Yahoo or Senator Joe Schmuck is legally barred from doing so. It would, it seems, be a Federal crime for an officeholder to spend fitty bucks and buy themselves that one square foot. Shrug.
Me, personally, I’ve no interest in it. I’m an American; the basic idea of being called a “Lord” or being in any way associated with royalty is distasteful; any American who takes such a title seems to me to have something a little askew about them. But I have little problem with anyone else if they want to buy into this… just so they do so with adequate knowledge of what it really is.
YouTube has been *crawling* with “Established Titles” sponsorships for a few months now, rivaling the “World of Warships,” “World of Tanks,” “League of Legends” and “Raid Shadow Legends” sponsorships that lousy up so many videos. I’m just glad that YouTube has a fast forward function. > > > > Some YouTubers, though, are less sanguine about this. If you’ve been tempted to spend money on this, perhaps as Christmas gifts, maybe take a look. Some points:
1) These “souvenir plots” aren’t registered with the Scottish government, You don’t actually own the land.
2) You don’t actually become a “Lord” or “Lady.”
3) “Established Titles” is apparently a *Chinese* company. Send them $50, and you end up not actually owning a bit of Scotland, not actually being a “Lord,” and actually funding the Chinese Communist government.
And so on. Lots of lefties are screeching that this means Musk is opposed to free speech.
Here’s the thing, though. The accounts getting banned are “Blue Checks.” You will see a little blue check mark next to some Twitter accounts; these accounts have been verified through some process to be actually who they say they are. This might be a corporate account like Ford or Lockheed; this might be the President of the United States; this might be a journalist or an actor. For most people it doesn’t really matter. But if you’re making Big Money on Twitter and you want to make sure that people know that they can trust that You are in fact You, I guess that little blue check mark is important.
Great, whatever.
But the moment you take your blue check account and change the name to someone else’s – like, say, “Elon Musk” – and then start making posts impersonating that other person, you are committing fraud. The blue check is supposed to say that You are You, not You are Some Other Person.
So, it’s simple. If you want to have a parody account, great, go right ahead. Just don’t use your already established “blue check” to try to fool people into thinking you are someone else. I’m not sure how this was even supposed to be controversial.
Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended
And there is another issue with the “blue check verification.” It is supposed to be proof that you are who you say you are, and it is supposed to be an impartial procedure. But there are accusations that the verification was refused sometimes unless you paid someone a bribe. And the bribes were reportedly not small. For a celebrity, fifteen grand might be chump change; but for journalists or “lesser” notables, it was a lot of money. But it would have been worth the price for that little blue check mark. It might even have been *necessary* in some fields, like journalism. In some respects, it’s like a drivers license… needed to do your job, open and available to everyone on a supposedly even playing field. So finding that *anyone* can be verified for a mere eight buck after you blew fifteen large? Yeah, that’s gotta grate.
Somebody needs to explain to Putin that a bridge being used to transport materiel vital to a war effort is a valid target in a war zone, in war time. Unlike, say, slaughtering the civilians in a village.
Far-left extremist Lemon is being moved from his own prime-time show, bearing *his* name, to being one of three talking heads in a morning show that nobody’ll watch. he claims it’s a “promotion.” I suspect it’ll be a lot of him being quiet while getting nagged/shouted over by the other two.
I watched the first two episodes of Amazon’s “The Rings Of Power.” Is it as bad as feared/expected? In a word: yup. Here’s the thing, though: it is so far from Tolkein that it can’t really even be considered a bad interpretation of Tolkein. It’s just a bad fantasy series. And there have been a lot of those.
Beyond the well publicized problems of stunt casting and weird ethnicity swaps, the thing that jumped out at me the most was just how badly interpreted the elves are. The elves of the books and reasonably so of the movies are freakin’ *unearthly.* They are shaped like humans, but they are unrealistically beautiful; the light of the moon and especially the stars seems to fall on them at all times. They are *above* mankind. They are a different order of being. But in Rings of Power? They’re just a random assortment of actors with pointy ears. Many of whom have not just short hair – rather than the long hair elves were well known for – but actual buzz cuts. They are the same height as the bog-standard humans they occasionally stand next to. They might be fantasy elves… but they’re sure as hell not Tolkein elves. Given the billion dollars Amazon spent on this, they can’t claim poverty when explaining why they skimped out on these factors, especially since they *did* go to the bother of showing a “Harfoot” (a Hobbit stand-in species that is short like Hobbits, has large Hobbit feet, but otherwise don’t seem to be very much like Hobbits, which is fine because Hobbits haven;t evolved yet by this time in Middle Earth history) next to someone who will probably turn out to be Gandalf or Saruman (though, again, the wizards are centuries away from showing up in Middle Earth).
The whole thing is a weird mix of high production values – in particular the renderings of environments such as elvish and dwarvish cities – and low-effort CW-level acting and especially writing. It is, essentially, quite forgettable in the sort of way that Star Trek Discovery is enraging. I’ll probably end up watching the other episodes at some point, but likely mostly as background noise. I won’t be hate watching the series like modern horrible Star Trek. I don’t know if it’s because RoP is so far off the mark, or if it’s because so many franchises have been so badly mauled lately that I’m just kinda burned out.
There will be a number of glowing hagiographies shortly describing him in positive terms because he saw the peaceful end of the Soviet Union through “openness” and by not sending the tanks to crush the various smaller Communist countries when they split from the Soviet Union. But the thing to never, EVER forget: he was a Communist. His policies weren’t intended to see Estonia and Latvia and East Germany gain their freedom; those were unintended consequences. His plan was not for the Soviet Union to go away without firing a shot; his goal was to perpetuate the USSR and Communism for all time. His goal was not the end of the Cold War with the West left standing, but the conquest of the world and total subjugation to Communism. He was just kind of incompetent *and* not a complete monster. So, yes, he wasn’t the worst Communist. Kind of like how Admiral Doernitz wasn’t the worst Nazi. But a Nazi is still a Nazi, a Commie is still a Commie, even if they smile at you while planning on erasing your family from existence.
