Out With the Old Gatekeeper

And in with the new:

Elon Musk has seized control of Twitter for $44 billion as weeks of rollercoaster negotiations finally came to a close Monday afternoon.

The billionaire agreed to pay shareholders $54.20 in cash for each share of common stock before the bombshell deal was struck.

The move shifts control of the social media platform populated by millions of users and global leaders to the world’s richest person.

Musk vowed to protect free speech on Twitter, ‘defeat the spam bots’ and ‘authenticate all humans’ as he welcomed the acquisition.

He also revealed he planned to ‘enhance the product with new features’ and ‘make the algorithms open source to increase trust’.

Elon Musk is not “the world’s richest person” because he’s a good guy or because he is dedicated to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Whatever god he serves is not God the Father of Jesus Christ. This is just the exchange of one set of gatekeepers for another.

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Those Who Live By the Party

May well see their political careers ended by the party. The British media is preparing the public for Boris Johnson’s long-overdue resignation:

Sue Gray’s long-awaited Partygate report will be so damning that Boris Johnson will have no choice but to resign as Prime Minister, a source has claimed.

A dossier of more than 300 images and 500 pages of information was handed to Scotland Yard by the senior civil servant, who led a Cabinet Office probe into the matter.

She was forced to delay the publication of her investigation into alleged parties held in Downing Street and Whitehall during England’s coronavirus lockdowns due to the Metropolitan Police commencing their own inquiry.

A total of 12 events are being investigated by the police, which include a ‘bring-your-own-booze’ garden party, a gathering in the Cabinet Office to mark Mr Johnson’s 56th birthday and a series of leaving dos.

In an interim report published in January, the Cabinet Office official said there had been ‘failures of leadership and judgment’ in No 10 over the so-called partygate saga.

The Times, citing an official it described as being familiar with the contents of the complete report, said Ms Gray’s full findings were even more personally critical of the Prime Minister and could end his premiership.

After leading the remnants of the British empire out of the European Union, Johnson could have been the Churchillian figure he dreamed of becoming. But unfortunately, he swallowed the Covid Kool-Aid, lurched from one media-driven crisis to the next, and arrogantly refused to follow the very rules he was imposing on the British people. His failure is entirely self-inflicted, and if Dominick Cummings is to be believed, was almost certainly inevitable due to his narcissistic character.

After being caught lying to Parliament; by centuries-old tradition, he should have resigned already.

The Funding Challenge

Karl Denninger reminds us that what appears to be a financial battle of rival capitalists is, in fact, absolutely nothing of the sort:

I do not believe for a second that, should Elon succeed, he will publish who decided what and on what basis; not algorithmically nor on a personal basis along with naming each and every person with a finger on the button. That data, by the way, I’m very certain Twitter has stored in their systems since every firm and organization that touches anything related to a customer always has an audit trail on it so you can fix errors — legitimate errors. In addition said audit trail is necessary for accountability because rogue employees do exist and its not at all uncommon to have to find out who did a given thing and take care of said person’s insolence.

Plenty of people point to Section 230 in this regard, but that’s not really the issue at all. Section 230 only addresses liability, not activity. I warned back when it was debated (and I was an Internet CEO at the time, thus knew damn well how this all intermeshed) that Section 230 was extraordinarily-poor in its crafting and would be abused for that reason. Bad laws are always abused. It was simply a matter of how, not what.

The real argument, as I pointed out back in the 1990s and have maintained (including in my filings to the FCC on net neutrality and in this column) is that there are multiple types of Internet services and they are not the same. We used to look at the character of services provided to determine if there was a common public interest in some sort of regulation. That all went down the toilet with the post-2000 craze of “social media”, along with the abuse of Section 230 which was in fact used to shield bad actors doing things that were blatantly illegal (such as promoting sex trafficking.)

The problem we have today is a function of the evolution of abuse enabled by that bad law. It is no longer possible to set up anything other than your own infrastructure to create a potential Twitter competitor, for example, because the existing firms control the infrastructure and will ban you. AWS and other “cloud” providers have proved this repeatedly.

Then, and this is the kicker, having spent money to build it you have to fund its operation somehow. Twitter, Facesucker, Google and similar do not set their policies in a vacuum; they set them based on how they fund their business. You can spend billions building infrastructure but if you can’t come up with a funding model that works you’re ultimately headed for bankruptcy. The real problem lies there and I’m reasonably certain Musk knows it.

I, too, am aware of this being the primary issue, which is why UATV, Castalia, and Arktoons are all built around a subscription model that relies upon their subscribers and prioritizes the interests of those subscribers over everything else. In a world that is fake, stupid, and gay, in which centralized financial giants propped up by governments and central banks determine the winners and the losers, going direct to the clients/customers/users and providing them with the goods and services they actually want is the only viable path for business anymore.

The contract economy is done. The advertising economy is done. The corpocracy cannot be trusted to live up to even the simplest and most basic of its obligations. Go local and/or go direct, or go under.

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This Could Not Be Verified

Not only is it impossible to verify Ukraine’s claims of Russian losses in the Special Military Operation, it is impossible to take them seriously on a statistical basis.

The scale of Russian troop losses in Ukraine has tipped 21,000 as Putin’s war rumbles into its third month today.

The latest statistics, published by the Ukrainian Land Forces this morning, suggest 21,800 Russian fighters have been killed amid bitter resistance from Ukraine’s armed forces and territorial defence units – though this figure could not be verified.

Meanwhile, the land forces claim to have dealt massive damage to Russia’s military equipment and machinery.

A total of 873 tanks are said to have been destroyed, along with 2238 armoured vehicles, 179 planes, 154 helicopters and 408 artillery systems.

According to the same article, “On February 24, Russia’s land army consisted of 280,000 full-time active soldiers compared with Ukraine’s 125,600.”

Now, the number of casualties in war is always a multiple of the number of fatalities. For example, the USA lost 407,316 KIA during WWII and 671,846 WIA out of 16.4 million troops, for a Cas/Fat ratio of 1.65. As medical science improved, this ratio increased over time, to 2.6 for Vietnam, 7.2 for Iraq, and 8.6 for Afghanistan.

So, if the most recent US war is a reasonable comparative, the Ukrainian claims would indicate an additional 180,600 wounded Russians for a total of 201,600 Russian casualties, which would mean that the Russian casualty rate of 72 percent exceeds that of the German, Japanese, and Soviet militaries during the entirety of World War II. And at 7.5 percent, the fatality rate is three times the US WWII fatality rate of 2.5 percent in just two months.

In other words, we can state with certainty that these reports are highly improbable, and logically conclude that they are false.

France Votes for Self-Extinction

It’s hard to feel much sympathy for the people of France, as after five years of disastrous rule by Emmanuel Macron, the French re-elected him.

Mr Macron, the 44-year-old centrist, won with a 58.5% share of the vote – beating the far-Right Ms Le Pen, 53, on 41.5%, according to exit polls.

In an ambitious victory speech, Mr Macron said: ‘From now on I am no longer the candidate for a party. I’m everyone’s President!’

He conceded that France was ‘full of anger and division’, but pledged: ‘Nobody will be left by the wayside.’

Mr Macron arrived at a rally on the Champ de Mars, underneath the Eiffel Tower, an hour-and-a-half after the result was called.

To rapturous cheers and applause, he held hands with his wife, Brigitte Macron, as Beethoven’s Ode to Joy – the European Union anthem – blasted out of speakers.

Making his way up to stage with giant screen behind it, he said: ‘Thankyou!

‘Thank you, dear friends, fellow citizens, here tonight in Paris, and everywhere in France and our overseas territories and abroad, before anything else let me say thank you.

‘After five years of difficult but happy transformation and exception challenged this date – 24 april 2024 – a majority amongst us chose me to pilot the Republic for the next five years.’

Wearing his trademark blue suit and tie, he continued: ‘Together we can make France more independent and Europe stronger. By freeing our creativity, we can make France a great, green nation.

‘I know a lot of people voted for me tonight, not because of my ideals, but to block the far-Right. I have been entrusted with their sense of duty for the next five years.’

Nobody will be left by the wayside. Except, of course, the native people of France, who are expected to suffer their ongoing invasion in humble silence.

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French Colonies Reject Macron

Arrivano i risultati delle Presidenziali Francia 2022 nei territori oltre oceano.
Probabilmente qui ha pesato l’opposizione locale al Green Pass.

Guyane : Le Pen 60,7 % – Macron 39,3 %
Guadeloupe : Le Pen 69,6 % – Macron 30,4 %
Martinique : Le Pen 60,87 % – Macron 39,13%

If France proper rejects Macron this overwhelmingly, we can be certain that the long-anticipated rise of the European nations has begun. The Italian interpretation is that this is due to the public’s hatred of the Covid passes imposed by Macron’s administration.

Europe Waves the White Flag

The EU member-states now have permission to pay for oil and natural gas in rubles:

The European Commission said Friday that EU companies may be able to comply with Russia’s proposed gas payment system, without running afoul of sanctions against Moscow.

Considering that democracy no longer means democracy and free trade no longer means free trade, there’s no reason why sanctions should actually mean sanctions.

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Southern Ukraine is with Russia

In which it is observed that the predicted uprising of the people against the Russian forces simply has not happened:

In the early parts of the SMO, a big deal was made by Kiev around this mythical partisan mobilization that was set to take place. Glorious campaigns of patriotic partisan fighters were heralded in various posters and clips, Molotov cocktail campaigns were paraded on western news channels and we were told that every Ukrainian citizen would rise up against the Russian invader. Each day there was a new announcement, such as Zelensky’s bid to pay citizens tens of thousands $$$ of dollars (funded by the West / CIA of course) for anyone who can kill/capture a Russian soldier or demonstrably destroy a Russian tank or armored vehicle. Similarly, upwards of $1 million dollars was offered to Russian servicemen who would defect and turn over their tank or plane to the AFU.

Not only did any of this ever take place, in fact we saw last time that it was the AFU itself who began selling their tanks to the Russians for Rubles. But the main point to be made is that the giant, widespread partisan uprising was in fact a complete and utter failure. Not only is the vast majority of the Ukrainian citizenry utterly apathetic/ambivalent towards their own armed forces, but there are more and more signs of internal uprisings and new anti-Kiev regime partisan ‘underground cells’ being formed in cities like Nikolayev and Kharkov. One in Kharkov even released a video, their faces masked, promising an uprising against the AFU forces holding them hostage, once Russian forces begin fully taking the city.

The truth is, the longer the conflict goes on, the more the Ukrainian citizenry turns against their own forces and government, not only because of mounting evidence of the AFU’s crimes against their own citizens/civilians but simply because they tire of the war and were never passionate about the utterly corrupt Zelensky regime and its criminal military forces anyway.

After the initial one or two Molotov videos against RF troops in the first week of the war, we never again saw any citizens attacking Russian troops and in fact see the opposite each day. Now whenever we see new Russian missile strikes filmed by Ukrainian citizens, it’s very often accompanied by a complete ambivalence or even quiet jubilation from the people filming.

It has to be recognized that the grand promised awakening of the Ukrainian state, and the large scale partisan uprising was a complete failure – just hollow psyop attempts from the Zelensky regime.

Why hasn’t it happened? Because many, if not most, of the people in the affected areas view the Zelensky regime as the enemy, not the Russians.

Now, the observations above could be dismissed as pro-Russian disinformation, were it not for the fact that the Zelensky regime is clearly alarmed by the possibility that Russia will permit the people of liberated/occupied Ukraine to freely vote on whether they would prefer to be governed by Moscow or Kiev. Which means that the information is legitimate, and the Special Military Operation is genuinely popular with the majority of the people of southern and eastern Ukraine.

“Ludmila Denisova, Ukrainian Parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights, says that the Russians are planning to hold an independence referendum in Kherson during May 1-May 10 to create another DNR and LNR like statelet in southern Ukraine. Ballots are reportedly being printed.”

“Crimean Tatars support the inclusion of Kherson and Zaporozhye regions in the Crimean Federal District. The Crimean Tatars proposed to recreate the Crimean Federal District with the inclusion of the south of Ukraine. This statement was made by the head of the regional national-cultural autonomy of the Crimean Tatars Eyvaz Umerov.”

“Residents of the Kherson and Azov parts of the Zaporozhye regions of Ukraine, who once belonged to the Tauride province together with Crimea, speak of their desire to return to Russia, because they no longer want to be under the yoke of Ukrainian nationalists

“At least 2/3 of the residents of southern Ukraine, in particular, Kherson oblast, parts of Nikolayev oblast and Zaporozhye, would vote in favor of joining Russia, if an appropriate referendum were to be held”, says Crimean senator of the Russian Federation Council Sergei Tsekov

Today Ukraine threatened that if ‘Russia holds a referendum for the Kherson People’s Republic, then Ukraine will withdraw from all negotiations with Russia.’

People don’t vote for people who “occupy” them, as the USA has learned in Iraq and Afghanistan. They prefer to vote for people who “liberate” them. Naturally, this application of self-determination and democracy will be condemned by the so-called Western democracies as “an attack on democracy”.

And this is why Russia has steadily refused to describe its actions as a war. Because, from the start, it has been signaling the people living within the Ukrainian borders that it has no desire to go to war with anyone who regards themselves as being Russian.

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