For the past decade, I have followed the antics of Catherine Engelbrecht, a woman who began her career as a voting critic right here in my neck of the woods. We were neighbors in a small rural community that shared a county commissioner when she appeared on the wings of Lady Vote Hack to lead something she called True the Vote and I called Screw the Vote.

We butted heads many times over the years as she made it clear that her purpose was to become an election denier and make a poop load of money doing it.  She is pretty, blonde, and plenty terrified of anyone who isn’t, and can lie convincingly with a straight face. So, she soared in Republican circles.

Here’s pretty much a semi- complete breakdown of the years of coverage I gave Ms. Engelbrecht over the years, including when she called my editor and told her that she would never interview with our newspaper again.  My favorite was when we were able to prove that her favored Republican candidate for local county commissioner voted twice – once in Texas and once in Pennsylvania – in three elections.

Recently she’s was hired and paid $2 million to prove there was voter fraud in the 2020 election. She took the money and did diddle squat. She got sued for that.

And now she’s up to her eyebrows in a civil suit, resulting in her being hauled off to the pokey in federal court for refusing to identify a source in a defamation suit. Most rational people believe the source does not exist. She’s using it to raise money.

She was sent to jail by U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt, a Ronald Reagan appointee.

And yeah, I’m feeling pretty prissy about it.

A group is advertising against Joe Biden and his support of Ukraine. They have mentioned how we have given Ukraine 66 billion dollars and how we could be using “all that” money at home to solve our own problems. They are calling themselves common sense for something or other, so I thought I would take a look at their arguments in case you have friends and family uttering the same things.

I should say first that we should ignore the name of this organization. They know very well what they are arguing and it has little to do with common sense. It always pays to look up who is supporting them financially and where their support is going politically. Do they have ties to Russia? I could spend time on that, but there are earnest people making the same arguments, so we will focus on that.

Let’s start with the sum of money. 66 billion dollars is a lot of money and it sounds like a huge sum. In 2022, 6.27 trillion dollars has been allocated. That means that the 66 billion referenced accounts for a little more than one percent of the federal budget. Let’s remember that the aforementioned Biden (or really Congress since they pass the budget) has cut the deficit by a heftier percentage than at any time in history. So, it’s not like we are talking about runaway spending here.

This is not an annual expenditure. It obviously is in response to the crisis. So, let’s focus on common sense. This is what we often call a “straw man” argument. Why are we ignoring these problems at home when we help Ukraine? Well, when you are talking less than one percent of the budget you should clue yourself in that this is a false choice. It isn’t help Ukraine or feed the hungry. It isn’t help Ukraine or clothe the naked. It isn’t help Ukraine or fight “uncontrollable” crime at home. You can easily do all of those things and I think most people would acknowledge that it would take far more than 66 billion to address all of those concerns.

In point of fact, this is anything but common sense. We live in an ever shrinking world and we see a better life economically and in terms of our security when democracies are allowed to thrive. Boil this down and you have one country that wants its own autonomy while the other wants to control it. Deciding to help or not help isn’t about common sense. It is about whether it is in our best interest to help. Is it a better world if we allow Russia to do whatever it wants? It is the same question as with China and it’s neighboring countries. It’s the same as the Middle East. Pick any region of the world and ask the same questions.

This is where one of those friends or family will point out that we can’t afford to help everyone. This is absolutely true, but any decision about who we support cannot be boiled down to common sense. It is much more intricate than that. There are all kinds of factors that go into deciding to help Ukraine and not some other country.

They want the 66 billion spent here. Would they go to the family starving on the street and help them? Well, why do you choose to help this family but not that family? Is it really common sense or is there something else at play here? Again, this is for your earnest family and friends. I suspect we know for those that are creating this ad and we know it has nothing to do with common sense.

I’ve never been much of a Twitter user, primarily finding it occasionally useful to follow breaking stories.  When Elon took over the platform, though, I decided to follow him and others to see the effects on the platform itself as he consolidated power in the company.  My conclusions, as you can imagine, are not good.  First, just an observation, and it’s no secret – Twitter is already an open sewer of nonsense, misinformation, and dumbasses who don’t know how many hours are in a day, those who can’t do simple arithmetic, and those who have very low reading comprehension.

Then Elon took over, and it’s gotten worse.  A lot worse.  First, Musk is as impulsive and immature as a high school freshman complete with erratic behavior and childish judgment.  Add that to the fact that he has no guardrails to guide him, and being the richest man in the world there’s no one around him to keep him from acting out his worst tendencies.  After the takeover on Thursday, he fired the senior management team including those in charge of moderation of the platform, and has been hinting at massive layoffs of other employees.  He’s also on record of being opposed to blocking racists, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists, anti-semites, and outright weirdos.  He’s more than hinted that he’ll let TFG and Kanye West back on the platform.  Use of the N-word on Twitter  is up over 500% since he took over.  Worse, he’s participating in misinformation himself retweeting, then later deleting an idiotic homophobic conspiracy theory that Paul Pelosi’s attacker was actually a male prostitute that Pelosi had brought to the house. His deleted retweet was directed at…wait for it…Hillary Clinton.  That’s right, the “Chief Twit” showed such poor judgment that he amplified this idiocy to his 112 MILLION followers.

Elon’s control of Twitter has a LOT more downside than upside for not only him financially, but for simple common decency.  Twitter is highly influential over global society and it’s critical that it gets it right between balancing free speech principles against threatening language and intentional disinformation.  He’s demonstrated that he has no qualifications to not just manage this issue, but even to recognize it exists.

I am not hopeful for any good coming from this takeover, and can only hope that twitter goes the way of MySpace and Lotus 123.

UPDATED:

TFG is back.  One of Elon’s first moves upon taking over Twitter yesterday (after stupidly carrying a bathroom sink into Twitter’s offices and firing the entire senior management team) was to restore TFG’s twitter account, effective as early as Monday.  He did it after announcing a new “content moderation council”, adding that no changes would be made until the council convenes.  So much for that strategy.  In classic style, TFG is already gloating through a surrogate.

https://twitter.com/altnavigation/status/1585812009094119424?s=20&t=NQIprbgbvmxM8yoxWvZGqg

After the announcement, Musk backtracked, saying that “no decisions will be made until the council convenes”.  Right. I can predict how THAT will turn out.

To be super clear, we have not yet made any changes to Twitter’s content moderation policies https://t.co/k4guTsXOIu

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 29, 2022

General Motors has already suspended all advertising on Twitter in response to Musk’s takeover.
Apparently, Musk’s “free speech” ideology extends to defamation, insurrection, and getting people killed.  So the shitstorm begins.

UPDATE:

Twitter is now being flooded by MAGAt trolls, spewing the same racist hate and misinformation they were before the insurrection on January 6, 2021.  One watchdog has reported that racist tweets are up 500% since Musk took control of Twitter.

Evidence suggests that bad actors are trying to test the limits on @Twitter. Several posts on 4chan encourage users to amplify derogatory slurs.

For example, over the last 12 hours, the use of the n-word has increased nearly 500% from the previous average. pic.twitter.com/mEqziaWuMF

— Network Contagion Research Institute (@ncri_io) October 28, 2022

Welcome to the cowardly new world aided by the world’s richest man.  When’s he going to Mars?

And …

Just too close and weird to be a coincidence.

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