After Elon Musk’s stupid endorsement of a blatantly antisemitic “x,” or whatever tweets are called these days, big name advertisers are fleeing the social media platform. Now Musk says he will file a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters for America first thing tomorrow.
Hitting back on Saturday at the exodus of advertisers on the platform, Mr Musk wrote a post in which he said: “Many of the largest advertisers are the greatest oppressors of your right to free speech.”
The Tesla founder added in a second post: “The split second court opens on Monday, X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and all those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.”
Musk blames Media Matters because it said X is placing ads for Amazon, NBA Mexico, NBCUniversal, and others next to content with white nationalist hashtags. Media Matters has screen captures.
President Biden has an op ed in the Washington Post explaining his position on Ukraine and Israel. “The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas,” he said. In brief, he says Gaza and the West Bank should be “reunited” under Palestinian authority and calls for a two-state solution.
It also appears the U.S. has brokered a deal to pause the war and free the hostages.
See also Biden Skillfully Handled Xi Jinping’s U.S. Visit in Ways Trump Simply Never Could. “The president was gracious but tough, candid but thoughtful, and unlike his predecessor, did not sell out the country to a dictator.”
If you can somehow get through The Atlantic paywall, I recommend “The Women Who Saw 9/11 Coming” by Liza Mundy. It turns out some CIA and other analysts, working together, had been tracking the rise of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden going back to the late 1980s. And all through the 1990s they were trying to get their superiors to pay attention and take the growing threat seriously. The problem is that these analysts were all women, so the good old boys just patted them on the head and asked them to fetch coffee. And I absolutely do believe this happened. (Note: If you can’t get through the paywall even in an incognito window, download the article from this link.)
Maha, as a subscriber to The Atlantic, I made the article in the final paragraph into a rich text file [.rtf], and any of your readers can download it at this link:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/vs0gdm9ps6a5cij/Sisterhood.rtf/file
Text only; I didn't include the graphic below the title.
RevZafod
Thank you. It really is worth reading.
Maha,
Maybe put the link in your next post, for people who don't read the comments and tried unsuccessfully to find it? I agree; definitely worth reading!
Interesting. Back in '95 or '96 a friend with connections at Langley told me about OBL and the type of mass-victim terrorism he was celebrated for. If the chronology of the article is accurate, I heard about OBL before a lot of senior people at the CIA, Congress, and the WH. People knew, but they weren't the people with the authority to take action. The people with access to the the people who could take action didn't take "the girls" seriously.
Musk proves he's an idiot. How on Earth did Musk think a retweet with an approving comment would go unnoticed when the content is a neon billboard that says, "I'm a white supremacist!" PLEASE – file the suit. That opens the door to Media Matters doing an investigation which Musk would be required to cooperate with. (Trump made the same stupid mistake by suing Michel Cohen, which allowed Cohen to require Trump appear for a deposition under oath. Trump withdrew the suit.)
But the punch line is the big advertisers walking. And the questions that will be asked of big advertisers who do NOT walk. This further depresses the value of Twitter – I would not be surprised of the CEO resigns. The task of turning around the losses went from challenging to impossible. Musk is blaming everyone but himself. At this moment in time, the CEO could resign as a matter of principle, even if she has none. If she stays, Musk will throw her under the bus for HIS failures.
Biden seems to know that a two-state solution is the path out of the mess Israel is in. He's got to be Sooooooo careful how he expresses himself. But he went there when I suspect a lot of PR flacks told Biden not to. Congress won't do what they NEED to do until a LOT of pressure from activists persuades Democrats to follow Biden's lead in a call for a secure homeland for Palestinians.
I understand that demonstrators in CA shut down a Democratic party convention demanding Democrats sign on to a cease-fire. This kind of mass non-violent civil disobedience is exactly what should be happening. An activist friend in AZ was arrested last week at Senator Kelly's office. Same demand. Non-violent, no property damage and it says to the Senator that people are willing to go to jail over the bloodletting in Gaza. Not an email petition. Risking jail to say how important this is. Democrats who thought they were safe by JUST backing Israel are rethinking a position that denounces violence that results in civilian deaths. I don't have stats about the composition of the activists. But are young people getting engaged? They have the power – us old liberals have been screaming that they have the power. Are they discovering it?
I'm just amazed at the blatant, full court press effort by MSM to present Biden's candidacy to voters as hopeless and his presidency as a complete failure. For every lukewarm positive Biden story (and those are the only kind that get created) there are 20 negative stories. It seems every MSM report on Biden is headlining one disastrous "poll" after another, designed to make voters think that Trump is all but guaranteed to win in 2024, so no point in voting for Biden. The latest is a poll that says Trump leads Biden among 18 to 34 year old voters. I don't believe all it took for them to "forget" why they voted against Trump in 2020 was a few years and Biden's "age," especially when, since then, Trump has doubled and tripled down on all the reasons voters had to vote against him then. It doesn't make sense.
It seems as if there is a real push to make sure Trump is president in 2024, regardless of his criminal trials. Trump is even starting to talk about his future plans as president, as if his reelection is a foregone conclusion,
I quit responding to polls and questioners years ago. I will make a rare exception or two but by in large such devices are really a poor way to do any research. Most you see have obvious flaws in their design. You can often tell the answers they are looking for by the way the questions are worded. Sometimes the lack of questions you would expect to find is obvious. I often wonder if those who attempt to bias the results in construction of a poll or survey would even hesitate to fudge results.
The big news that the MSM should be reporting is the failure of polls to predict voting results of late. I find it amusing that these polls report the range of confidence of their work at all. It is impossible for their estimates to be correct and for them to fail so miserably in their predictions. Never do I hear any serious review of what mistakes they made. Why is not the big story what are the polling problems they are trying to correct? Do not forget the Lake Wobegon effect. No school district will even buy a test that might show your districts' kids are below average. So too, the media sells ads, and close races sell more ads. What is the incentive for honest results? The incentive for fiction is obvious in most cases.