New Breed Leader

New Breed Leader's Journal

April 14, 2022

Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter for $41B in hostile takeover

https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-offers-buy-twitter-5420-per-share-2022-04-14/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=twitter

"Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it," Musk said in a letter to Twitter's board on Wednesday, which was made public in a regulatory filing on Thursday.

....

The billionaire rejected an offer to join Twitter's board this week after disclosing his stake, a move which analysts said signaled his intention to take over the company as a board seat would have limited his stake to just under 15%. read more

"Since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company," Musk said in his letter to Twitter Chairman Bret Taylor.

Musk, who calls himself a free-speech absolutist, has been critical of the social media platform and its policies, and recently ran a poll on Twitter asking users if they believed it adheres to the principle of free speech.

Welp, when he takes over Twitter and brings Trump back, I'm gone.

Once again, the rich and powerful ruin everything for the rest of us.

April 14, 2022

Liberal Librarian: New Adventures in Cletus-Hunting

https://twitter.com/EstablshmentBar/status/1514559096883748866

The "Trump movement"—which involves evacuation of bowels—may have been a new phenomenon back in 2016. But the reason "in this Ohio diner" is such a cliché is because it was worn into the ground by reporters from the Papers of Record traversing the diners and truck stops of Red America to understand this curious new tribe. Of course, this tribe wasn't "new". It had always been there. But it had finally found in Trump a man after their own hearts: someone as stupid and full of hate as they were. The true question is what made them so hateful. And no, it wasn't "economic anxiety". It was decades of right-wing propaganda targeted at them, propaganda which inflamed already-held positions. Now that is the story: how first right-wing talk radio, and then Fox News, and now all the Fox News knockoffs existed only to fuel anger and despair, and how this was a danger to the survival of a democratic republic. But the media hardly ever went into that pool, because of course the likes of Fox News were part of the confraternity, and were not to be admonished lest the First Amendment be traduced.

March 25, 2022

Partisan gerrymandering is not ok unless we're doing it, says Md. Republicans

A Maryland judge has thrown out the state’s congressional map, calling it an “extreme partisan gerrymander” in what is a victory for Republicans who said Democrats in the state General Assembly sought to silence their votes.

The ruling Friday by Anne Arundel County Senior Judge Lynne A. Battaglia marks the first time in Maryland history a judge has found a congressional map violated the state constitution, deciding that it violated rules laid out in Maryland law traditionally applied to legislative districts requiring them to be compact and to give regard to political subdivisions. She also ruled that the map in turn violated the state constitution’s equal protection, free speech and free elections clauses.

She said the weight of the evidence “yields the conclusion that the 2021 Congressional Plan in Maryland is an ‘outlier,’ an extreme gerrymander that subordinates constitutional criteria to political considerations.”

In this case, Republican plaintiffs had argued that the congressional map — which passed the General Assembly on an overwhelming party-line vote in December — violated the Maryland Constitution’s protections of free speech, free and frequent elections and its equal protection clause by suppressing the strength of Republican voters.

Throughout the trial, witnesses for the Republican plaintiffs presented evidence that they said showed partisanship was the “dominant” consideration of map-drawers. Sean Trende, an elections analyst at RealClearPolitics, said the trend that he observed is that map-drawers apparently intended to “crack” the strength of Republican voters by spreading them out in heavily blue districts, where they are not likely to affect the outcome of an election. For example, map-drawers took Republican voters in Harford County out of the 1st District and put them in the blue 3rd District — while carving out blue Harford precincts near the Chesapeake Bay and keeping them in the 1st.

https://twitter.com/scotusreporter/status/1507411193837015043

February 11, 2022

Biologists take drastic measures to save FL manatees at risk of mass starvation

https://twitter.com/savethemanatee/status/1492143924919607296

and the FL state legislature has every intention of killing all of them.

February 4, 2022

Lauren Boebert is.....really not smart.

Her stupidity leaves me stunned.
https://twitter.com/laurenboebert/status/1488877987181301760?t=gNu4wI7-hfmrfMzJnMBGXw&s=19

February 3, 2022

Why Joe Rogan Matters

We are a culture which elevated a conman TV host to the presidency. We will be recovering from that for decades. And the sickness in which he trawled isn't cured. It's going stronger than ever, aided and abetted by a political party which has given itself over to nihilism.

What Neil Young and his peers are doing in reaction to Rogan is essential. It is the first grumbling of people being fed up with the decadence into which our society has fallen. Usually, talk of "decadence" is something which gets the right riled up. But we are in a decadent phase of our civilization. We honor people of no import, who contribute nothing to society except entertainment. Rogan was paid $100m by Spotify for exclusive rights to his podcast. People compete on Love Island, or Survivor, and become rich and famous. But we can't pay nurses or teachers what they're worth, what the jobs they do actually merit for the contributions they make to society.

Read the whole thing here:
https://establishmentbar.blogspot.com/2022/02/why-joe-rogan-matters.html

January 15, 2022