Good morning. Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 69. Sunrise is 6:20 AM and sunset 7:31 PM for 13h 11m 39s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 80.2% of its visible disk illuminated. The canvass of the recent Whitewater Unified School District election takes place at 1…
Cats, Twitter
Friday Catblogging: Cats of Yore
by JOHN ADAMS •
“A hand-colored portrait of the Trimpey family cat, Fluffy, sitting in a basket.” https://t.co/BRhMwkCVLx pic.twitter.com/D3OfneCyZa — Cats of Yore (@CatsOfYore) December 26, 2022 Hillary Frey praises Cats of Yore as the The Best Cat Account on the Internet: My Twitter feed is kind of a mess lately. Whatever changes Elon Musk has made to the algorithm…
Business, City, Daily Bread, Ridiculousness, Twitter
Daily Bread for 12.20.22: Quite the Mess, Isn’t it?
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning. Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 25. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:23 PM for 9h 01m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 11.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM. On this day in 1987, in the worst peacetime…
Daily Bread, Economy, Free Markets, Labor, Social Media, Twitter
Daily Bread for 12.16.22: Markets Will Decide Musk’s Fate
by JOHN ADAMS •
Culture, Daily Bread, Populists, Twitter
Daily Bread for 11.26.22: The Weakness Implicit in Musk’s Culture War Question
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning. Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 54. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 4:23 PM for 9h 22m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 9.6% of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1838, the Wisconsin legislature assembles in Madison for the first time: On…
Business, Daily Bread, Social Media, Twitter
Daily Bread for 11.20.22: On Musk’s Multiple Misunderstandings and Mistakes
by JOHN ADAMS •
Daily Bread, Rhetoric, Twitter
Daily Bread for 11.6.22: A Scene from Twitter’s Turmoil (with Ocasio-Cortez Teaching Something About Rhetoric)
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning. Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny and breezy, with a high of 59. Sunrise is 6:36 AM and sunset 4:41 PM for 10h 03m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.1% of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1837, Burlington, Iowa selected as temporary capital: On this date,…
Daily Bread, Twitter
Daily Bread for 10.29.22: Musk’s Ownership of Twitter
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning. Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 64. Sunrise is 7:26 AM and sunset 5:50 PM for 10h 24m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 20.3% of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1969, the first-ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, the precursor to…
Authoritarianism, Freedom of Speech, Law, Liberty, Social Media, Trump, Twitter
Twitter’s (Perhaps Momentary) Advantage Over Trump
by JOHN ADAMS •
Trump, furious at a private company for exercising its right under the law to establish and enforce terms of service, now finds that Twitter has again placed warnings on another of his tweets, and also on his attempt to retweet that same message from the White House account. The recent Twitter response to a Trump…
Propaganda, Russia, Social Media, Twitter
The Ongoing Battle Against Russian Trolls
by JOHN ADAMS •
In The trolls are winning, says Russian troll hunter, Charles Maynes reports on the long – and sometimes inside – struggle against online Russian trolls: The journalist and 33-year-old mother of two, [Lyudmila] Savchuk started noticing websites and social media accounts attacking local opposition activists in her hometown of Saint Petersburg with a frequency she…
Mendacity, New Media, Twitter
The ‘Supersharers’ Speading Bogus Stories
by JOHN ADAMS •
Ben Guarino reports Older, right-leaning Twitter users spread the most fake news in 2016, study finds: The notion that fake news exists in its own universe turns out to be doubly true: One universe is the realm outside truth. The other is its own seedy pocket of social media. In a new study published Thursday…
Ocasio-Cortez, Scott Walker, Twitter
Walker v. Ocasio-Cortez On Twitter (Spoiler: She Shreds Him)
by JOHN ADAMS •
I’m a supporter of neither Scott Walker (an anti-market crony capitalist) nor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (an anti-market socialist), but a Twitter exchange between them was notable for being so one-sided: Cortez engaged and out-played Walker. In this post, I’ll analyze the exchange. Wholly apart from their politics, it’s obvious that Ocasio-Cortez is a talented communicator, while…
Mendacity, Politics, Reasoning, Twitter
The Post-Truth Crowd
by JOHN ADAMS •
Scottie Nell Hughes, a CNN political commentator and the political editor of Right Alerts, blithely declares that we’re in a post-truth era, where facts don’t exist apart from opinion: “It is an idea of an opinion. On one hand I hear half the media saying that these are lies but on the other half there are…
Press, Trump, Twitter
Blaming the Press Won’t Slake Trump’s Thirst
by JOHN ADAMS •
CNN Money’s Jill Disis writes that Trump attacks ‘fools’ at The New York Times. There’s a short self-life to attacks on the press. Admittedly, the attack’s good for a headline, and similar insults probably helped in his campaign. Yet, all campaigns blame the press, and the blamecasting is like a narcotic to which addicts slowly become…