Musk Confirms: Yes, Twitter Has Interfered in Elections
Newly minted Twitter CEO and owner Elon Musk revealed Wednesday that under previously leadership, the social media giant did in fact interfere in elections. Musk promised "Twitter 2.0" will change course and operate transparently on the issue.
Most infamously, Twitter banned any mention of Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell" in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. By default, they also censored Joe Biden's deep involvement and shady business dealings with foreign adversaries.
At the time platform executives, including then CEO Jack Dorsey, justified the multi-month banning of the account belonging to the New York Post -- the nation's oldest paper -- whose reporters broke the laptop story in October 2020. They also banned White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany after she shared the story, along with countless others who did the same.
During testimony on Capitol Hill in 2021, Dorsey admitted the social media platform had no factual basis for censoring the story.
Twitter doesn’t have a “censoring department” that blocked The Post from tweeting last fall, CEO Jack Dorsey said Thursday — but he wouldn’t reveal who was responsible for the blunder.
At a congressional hearing on misinformation and social media, Dorsey said Twitter made a “total mistake” by barring users from sharing The Post’s bombshell October report about Hunter Biden’s emails.
Twitter also locked The Post out of its account for more than two weeks over baseless charges that the exposé used hacked information — a decision Dorsey chalked up to a “process error.”
Polling taken after the 2020 presidential election showed a significant number of voters would not have cast their ballots for Biden if they had known about the contents of the laptop.
Nearly four of five Americans who’ve been following the Hunter Biden laptop scandal believe that “truthful” coverage would have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, according to a new poll.
A similar percentage also said they’re convinced that information on the computer is real, with just 11% saying they thought it was “created by Russia,” according to the survey conducted by the New Jersey-based Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics.
And an even higher number — 81% — said US Attorney General Merrick Garland should appoint a special counsel to investigate matters related to the first son’s infamous laptop, the existence of which was exclusively revealed by The Post in October 2020.
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Workers stand down as Apple store raided in California
Shocking footage has shown an Apple store in California being raided by a group of looters.
Viewers were stunned at the moment an Apple employee appeared to hand one of the thieves an iPad as they tore through the display units and shoved devices into backpacks.
Staff did not try to interfere with the thieves and were instead shepherding other customers away from the scene.
Video uploaded @CryptoKaleo said it was indicative that “society is broken in California”, referencing the nonchalant way the staff and public reacted to the striking scene.
However, others believed the Apple employees did the right thing, arguing they aren’t paid enough to put themselves in harm’s way to protect merchandise.
Others noted the display devices would be shut down by Apple remotely once they were reported stolen.
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The incorrect David Mamet
America’s most daring and insightful playwright tried to warn us that we were going haywire. By making him a hate object, American theater has made us all poorer.
In response to a positive review in The New York Times of the recent revival of David Mamet’s American Buffalo, one young theater maker, @harharharbour wrote, “Fuck Mamet, there’s nothing he has to say worth hearing. Stop giving racist transphobic playwrights platforms. This show is shit.”
This tweet epitomizes what is now an entirely mainstream, and in some circles mandatory, view of David Alan Mamet, 74, of Chicago, the great American writer of Glengarry Glen Ross, The Verdict, The Untouchables, Hoffa, Wag the Dog, Oleanna, and a mountain of other novels, books, essays, plays, and even cartoons. Mamet must be canceled. The “trash”—as Tony-winning actor and writer Colman Domingo writes—must be taken out. But as we Jews have learned all too often the hard way, silencing our prophets is usually a mistake.
Mamet’s most recent book, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch, came out in April. It’s very good, though on the surface at least not nearly as thrilling as his 2012 The Secret Knowledge, a book of political essays which in turn seemed cranky when it was first published but predicted with shocking acuity the cultural and political turmoil we now face.
Rereading The Secret Knowledge 10 years on it is impossible to deny that Mamet has a prophetic gift for understanding American life, honed in his drama, perfected in his prose, and that there’s a lot that Americans of all political leanings could probably stand to learn from reading his work. But for the past 14 years, the cognoscenti have ignored, shunned, and demonstratively not read, David Mamet. His crime? Abandoning his tribe.
Since Mamet’s 2008 essay in The Village Voice, “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal,” he has been subject to a towering wave of enmity from the community to which he has devoted his life. (There has always been the absurd accusation that he is a misogynist, a view presumably predicated on his ability to give idiomatic voice to male longings and terrors. That Speed-the-Plow, Oleanna, and Race all feature brilliant female roles, and that Boston Marriage and The Anarchist have all-female casts, affects this point of view not at all.)
A cursory Twitter search for “Hate Mamet” or simply “Mamet” reveals a consistent pattern of antipathy. The chief film critic of The Hollywood Reporter isn’t even able to get through an Anne Heche RIP post without mentioning that it pains him to “draw attention to a David Mamet movie these days.” In 2020, Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel made very clear she does not consider Mamet an “artist.” In April, Tony winner Jason Robert Brown retweeted a photo from outside the theater where American Buffalo is being performed on Broadway; someone has written on the sidewalk, “David Mamet Is An Asshole.”
These examples are contemporary, and so one might be fooled into thinking that the vitriol for Mamet from within his community (and the greater left) is due solely to his public adoration of President Trump, or his comments on schoolteachers and pedophilia (which have been grossly misrepresented as anti-gay, when in fact they might be characterized as anti-male), or some lack of interpersonal skills or worse that must be obvious to cognoscenti, if not to the rest of us.
But I can attest from personal experience that the Hate Mamet movement predates any of his recent offenses. When I was a student at Mamet’s Atlantic Acting School back in 2007-10, it was au courant to dunk on him. The mere act of announcing he’d had a political epiphany to the right was too much for the theater community to bear; we instantly wrote him off.
Meanwhile, we continued studying his and William H. Macy’s “Practical Aesthetics” acting technique—we weren’t going to allow our reflexive attitude toward conservatives to prevent us from becoming Great Actors!—and found that their method has a lot to offer. (When I recounted my memory of this to Mamet in a recent interview, telling him that in retrospect I felt I was young and stupid for writing him off, Mamet responded, “Yeah, well, as you said, young people are stupid.”)
In 2009, when his play Race came to Broadway, I did not go because I didn’t “want to hear David Mamet try to teach me about race.” I was studying at the acting school he founded, could very likely have gotten free tickets, and chose not to go. My loss. A recent reading of the play reveals it to be an American masterpiece, and probably his best play since Oleanna. The cast featured James Spader and David Alan Grier, two actors I adore. Yet I gladly deprived myself of the opportunity to spend an evening in the theater with two great actors while they performed a David Mamet play about America because, after all, it was David Mamet.
David Mamet’s excommunication was a warning that something nasty was brewing in our discourse. This new Puritanism has been brutal on the creative soul of this nation (and possibly Mr. Mamet’s work) but it is especially a pity that it sidelined Mamet, an American prophet with a profound mastery of the rhythms of American speech and thought. Are there two plays more in touch with the viscera of the American obsession than American Buffalo (1975) or Glengarry Glen Ross (1983)? Does not the avarice of the men in Glengarry—or perhaps better yet Speed-the-Plow (1988)—predict the decade in which it was written, the crash in 2000, the crash in 2008, the crash that will be coming by this year’s end or truthfully is already here? Is there a better play about the spiritual cost of being a part of those systems (and the resulting madness of the white American male) than Edmond (1982)? Is there a better play on the late-stage conflagrations of the ’60s’ campus revolution than Oleanna (1992)? Is there a better play on American race relations than Race (2009)?
None of Mamet’s plays are works of prophecy, of course. They are dramatic fictions. Mamet’s prophet’s mantle is The Secret Knowledge. I don’t remember when I first came to read it, sometime last year, only that in reading it I was struck by the near-constant prescience of his observations.
Toward the end of the book, Mamet opens a chapter by quoting Christopher Hollis from Foreigners Aren’t Fools, “The Left is atheist, and, simply because it is atheist, its religious fanaticism is worse than any of the other fanaticisms of history. For the romantic of the past has sometimes, if all too rarely, been restrained by the memory that God is Truth. But the atheist fanatic has no reason for such restraint.” That was written in 1936, and quoted by Mamet in 2012. Just this summer, noted atheist Sam Harris confirmed this insight by acknowledging that blatant suppression of truth is acceptable in certain circumstances, i.e., to prevent the reelection of Donald Trump. Hey, maybe David Mamet and his long-ago pals were onto something!
So if Mamet had his finger on the pulse of where we were headed so acutely in 2012, what truths is he sitting on in 2022? This summer, I called him on the phone to find out. I tried to get him to discuss prophets and prophecy, but he’s a wily subject. Contrary to the image of him frequently portrayed—as a bombastic and aggressive David Mamet character—I found him to be very thoughtful, measured, and full of humor and sincerity. When I told him that my father, a Chicago Jew of Mamet’s generation, loved his book, he said, “That means a lot.” When we concluded the call, he asked me to wish my father well. Like so many cultural boogeymen, it’s not that the person is actually dangerous or interpersonally threatening and obnoxious, but, most often, including in Mamet’s case, that his ideas threaten the comfort of the comfortable.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/fuck-david-mamet
****************************************************Under Biden America Has Become A Net Food Importer
In a recent edition of his must-read Unleash Prosperity Hotline, our friend Stephen Moore alerted us to another troubling data point about the Biden economy.
New USDA data as first reported by Fox News, indicates that for the first time in decades, the U.S. is now buying more food from the rest of the world than the amount of our domestic agriculture products that are sold abroad. In 2022 the U.S. is expected to end the year with a small net IMPORTER of food. If present trends continue, by 2032 the U.S. is expected to run a $75 billion annual agriculture trade DEFICIT.
And what a difference a year of Joe Biden as President has made.
In 2021 the American agricultural industry posted its highest annual export levels ever recorded. The final 2021 trade data published by the Department of Commerce on February 8, 2022 showed that exports of U.S. farm and food products to the world totaled $177 billion and the March 2022 FDA data pegged imports at almost $167 billion.
In one short year that $10 billion surplus has been wiped out.
For at least the last half-century America was the breadbasket of the world. We have by far the most productive Farmers and much of the world’s most bountiful farmland with massive livestock. We have fed the world.
For decades, reported Agriculture.com, ag exports turned a reliable surplus in a U.S. balance of trade that routinely ran an overall deficit, although there were small deficits on the ag ledger in fiscal 2019 and 2020. They got little notice. Exports provide 20¢ or more of each $1 of farm income, so the farm sector avidly follows export data. The United States is the largest agricultural exporter in the world. The productive capacity of U.S. agriculture often is regarded, at least in the industry, as a safeguard against domestic hunger and a cornucopia for less-fortunate nations.
Now, not so much.
As Stephen Moore noted, there are many disturbing reasons for this development, but one major one is rising energy costs during the Biden years here at home. So, we are now in the red on energy and food – which under Trump were major American exports. Good going, Joe!
https://www.conservativehq.org/post/under-biden-america-has-become-a-net-food-importer
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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