Category: Current Events

Larry Correia Blogs That Since Musk Bought Twitter His Account’s Been Unthrottled

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Larry Correia wrote a post on the unthrottling of conservative accounts on Twitter this week.

“So everybody knows about Elon buying Twitter, and we all know that Twitter has been a bunch of biased, censorious assholes.

What we did not know however was just how bad they really were. For years when conservatives/libertarians/non-progs complained, we got gas lit and told it was in our imagination. When our followers vanished, said they didn’t see our tweets, or our follower counts seemed to freeze and never grow, we were told that was just because we suck, and nobody wanted to listen to our evil right wing lies.”…

But now that Musk bought Twitter they unthrottled his account

“Then I started getting tweets from followers who are like, whoa, Larry is back on Twitter!

So I got curious and started asking about this, and then the posts started coming. Dozens of them. Oh yeah, I thought you weren’t on here! I thought you only posted like once a month! I never see you post. So on and so forth. It was remarkably consistent.

I knew I was throttled, but I had not realized just how bad it was. It was way harder than I thought.”

Well, it sounded so hopeful that I opened an account on Twitter.  I’m @orionscoldfire and I’ve posted one of my pictures and of course added my website address and the link to my photo account at Fine Art America (gotta make the donuts after all).

 

Free Speech or Not

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Watching the various talking heads screech and howl about Musk’s purchase of Twitter has been immensely amusing.  The lack of self-awareness (or the absolute lack of honesty, whichever it really is) has been breathtaking.  All of the things they are accusing Elon Musk of planning to do are all things they have been doing to conservative Twitter users for years.  Projection.

But all of this is happening at the same time that psychopaths in the administration, the Europeans and lying hypocrites like Obama are calling for even more restrictions on free speech.  Their smokescreen around misinformation and disinformation is a pretext for ending free speech.  They want to completely control the narrative around government actions like the COVID lockdowns and the BLM riots.

The timing of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter may be quite inconvenient for the Democrats.  I’m guessing they were depending on staging some shenanigans around the election to try and steal some seats.  If Twitter can’t be completely controlled it might interfere with their illicit operations.  And with Rumble now as an alternative to YouTube it seems possible that millions of people could be reached with information on all the dirt that is coming out on Hunter Biden, the election fraud investigations, the COVID disaster and all the bad news for the economy.

We’re living in interesting times.  The outrageous abuses that have occurred in the last two years, the lockdowns, the riots, voter fraud, the breakdown of law and order and now the stagflation crisis have shocked the usually complacent population into realizing just how radical the Left has become.  But at the same time the Left now owns all the power centers in the United States, and indeed the whole western world.  Because of this it may no longer be possible to fix our system.

We will have to watch from now to election day to see if the voter outrage will provide a powerful rejection of Democrat rule.  And then if it does occur, we have to watch what the Republicans can do with their new power over Congress to shape the actions of Biden’s policies.

Perhaps Twitter could play a role in helping people survive the rest of the Biden presidency.  If Musk can figure out a way to protect the Right from the crazies that run Twitter, then it really will be that public square he’s always talking about.  And without the crazies putting their thumbs on the scale, who knows, it might even be a place where little fish like me could get heard.

We’ll hear more about all of this soon enough.  Some early signs to watch for will be if Musk reinstates all the thousands of conservative accounts that were cancelled during the COVID pandemic and during the election fraud dust ups.  The next thing to watch after that is how much flak he gets from the government agencies trying to prevent free speech.  The Europeans are erecting barriers to free speech.  Twitter might have to build a wall isolating them from “disinformation.”  If he doesn’t then the European standards will destroy Twitter as a free speech site.

Twitter, Musk Redux

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Well, it appears that Elon Musk will get to buy Twitter and bring it private.  I hope it works out for him.  It seems like a crazy risk of a ton of money.  But what the hell do I know about any of this stuff?  There are two extra commas involved in his net worth versus mine.  So, kudos, you magnificent nerd and may you turn Twitter into some kind of futuristic electronic town hall where even Deplorables feel like they have a corner to congregate in.

But I fully expect that the Justice Department and the FDA will be plaguing Musk over every tweet that calls Fauci or Garland fascists.  But first things first.  Musk should immediately invite POTUS 45 back to his natural environment.  Trump needs to be tweeting 24/7/365 about all the things that were unfair and wrong.

The only problem is Trump is trying to tout his own social media site, Truth.  How is he supposed to replace Twitter if he goes back on it?  And how about the Gab guys?  What happens to them if Twitter becomes a viable option for social media for the Right.  It’s all very confusing.

And what about me?  Does this mean I have to start tweeting and hawking my products; my photos and my books on Musk’s free speech paradise?  Well, I don’t know.  I’ve never really figured out how to have my stuff discovered on mainstream platforms.  I’ve always done better in a rightwing ghetto.  It’s so much easier to be a slightly less small fish in a small pond.

I wonder how long it will take to find out if Musk can make this thing work.  Will he have to fire thousands of the blue-haired wine aunts and cat ladies that work for him in order to stop them from banning anyone who says that old bald fat men in wigs and dresses aren’t women?  Will the government shut him down if he allows scientists and medical doctors to speak the truth about what really happened during the COVID fraud?

Honestly, I have serious doubts whether he won’t regret throwing away that obscene amount of money for a company that doesn’t produce any tangible product and caters to a generation of crazy people who believe in things that even a village idiot thinks are too way out there.  I mean what happens if this is a scam and now Musk discovers after a few months that he just pays useless people to run a mad house that no one needs or even likes?  I mean, wouldn’t that make him the stupidest rich guy in the world?  I guess he’d still have the satisfaction of firing Jack Dorsey and fumigating his old office to cleanse it of the bedbugs that must infest that ratty looking beard of his.  And maybe if he fires 95% of the staff there, he could get the thing working efficiently.

So, as you can probably tell I’m conflicted about Musk’s Twitter play.  But in the back of my mind, I’m a little bit hopeful that a guy as smart as Musk is supposed to be, sees the diamond in the rough that Twitter represents and has a plan to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

But somehow, I think he would have been better off buying a 49% stake in Orion’s Cold Fire.  I would have settled for one billion.

Ferraris, Dessert and Women Irked by Trump

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I was out of pocket today.  AWOL, off the reservation, footloose and fancy free.  I was communing, consorting and other wise hobnobbing with my fellow wizards.  We went to this car show in a very ritzy town.  The cars were parked up and down two sides of the street in this town.  Hundreds of them.  It had a lot of extremely expensive cars.  Ferraris, Jaguars, Lamborghinis, Porsches, Bentleys and even less familiar luxury cars.  There were also some antique cars from the 30’s like Packards and some very cool old Fords.  And some high-performance cars from the 60’s; Stingrays and such.  I walked for hours and took a million pictures.

Then we got back to our host’s home and his gracious wife feasted us on an Italian meal.  It was one delicacy after another ending off with some delicious pastries.  And in between we talked politics.  There were two camps of thought.  One group said that DeSantis should be president.  The other said we need Trump.  I’m a big fan of DeSantis’s but I was in the second camp.  One of the attendants mirrored my thinking.  He said we need Trump because he motivates the Deplorables.  And he knows how to avoid being played by the Left.  He also pummels the Establishment Republicans when they get in the way.

The DeSantis camp basically are afraid that Trump will lose by scaring off moderates.  I clarified by saying they’re afraid he’ll scare off women.  I contended that Trump irks women.  And one of the wives who was present confirmed this assertion.  She said, “That’s right, he irks me and I think he irks a lot of women.”

And that’s a basic truth about Donald Trump.  He irks women.  He irks some other people too but the fact that he irks women is diagnostic.  Trump irks women because he says rude things, mean things, cruel things.  But many of the cruel things he says are true.  As a rule, women are more social than men.  They pay more attention to the impact on other people’s emotions of the things they say.  Women are more polite, more diplomatic.  They are the opposite of Donald Trump.  Trump says things to get a reaction.  Insulting his enemies and even his “allies” that aren’t aligned with his goals is a minute-to-minute calculation.  He is always saying “mean things” on Twitter.

But we need that.  Badly.  I tried to make the point that we need Trump to win in 2024.  We also need DeSantis to be his Vice President, almost his Co-President.  And I think Trump actually needs DeSantis more than DeSantis needs him.  We need someone who can drain the swamp.  Donald Trump tried in 2017 – 2021 and completely failed.  Maybe Pence was part of the reason for that failure.  Maybe this time DeSantis can be the surgeon Trump needs to lobotomize the Deep State.

At least that’s my read on what is needed.  Trump knows the policies he wants but he needs someone who can translate that agenda into an assault on the insurrectionist agencies of the Executive Branch in order to make those policies happen.

Was I able to change any minds?  I don’t know but I made my case and I could see some of the reasons why Trump has so many detractors on the Right.  Americans, and American women especially are polite, friendly people.  They don’t want to be attacked, especially not by friends.  But what it is time to do is to point out to these people that sometimes the truth is cruel and hurts some people.  And that the truth is its own defense.  Ignoring or denying the truth because it is ugly, hurtful or cruel isn’t going to make it go away.

The Democrats won’t be able to ignore or deny the truth of what they have done to this country.  And just because it is Donald Trump who will be pointing these things out in his own inimitable and caustic way won’t allow them to ignore what is being said.  It’s just too ugly for politeness to bandage over.

In 2024 Trump will be the bitter medicine for those who voted for Biden in 2020.  I don’t know if there’s any sugar that can make it easier to swallow.  And I don’t care.

Huzzah!!!! I’m a Gosh Darned Capitalist at Last.

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I finally figured out how to sell stuff at Fine Arts America and I’ve added the link to that button at top that says “Stuff to Buy.”

All this stuff is a pain in the neck but I guess it’s the first step to becoming fabulously wealthy.

Here’s a copy of the link if you’d like to go to my page there and heckle me.

https://fineartamerica.com/art/pho+tog?searchType=artistname

 

Taking Advantage of Catastrophe

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Joe Biden is openly mocked by half the country and viewed with panic by the Left.  The idea that circumstances have spun out of his control have sent large swaths of his coalition in search of someone better to save them.  Hispanics, Asians, even Millennials see the crumbling of normalcy and economic stability all around them.  Add in the truly frightening levels of urban crime and you might assume that this can’t go on for long.  But if you assume that I think you might be wrong.

I think this mess will go on the way it’s going for a good long time.  There isn’t a mechanism for fixing it.  Dementia Joe was installed in January 2021 and he’ll be there (barring a slip in the bath tub or other disqualifying event) until January 2025.  That’s a hell of a long time.  So, it’s worth thinking about what will be going on in America in the meantime.

The situation we’re in is sufficiently dire that it provides an opportunity for a smart man to take advantage of the situation and use one of the states as a staging ground for a new thing.  I think that’s what DeSantis is trying to do in Florida.  Being the governor of a big state is a pretty powerful office.  There are resources and with a friendly legislature he can have a big influence on the lives of the people living under his administration.

He can attempt to nullify or at least mitigate some of the harmful policies and initiatives that the feds sponsor and support.  For instance, last year Texas had an energy crisis because their power grid was modified to rely on solar and wind energy for an illogical percentage of the total electrical capacity.  And all of this was driven by some federal directive that involved funding to increase green energy.  A smart leader would make it a policy of his administration to reject any federal interference that can be shown to damage the interests of the people of his state, no matter how large the bribe that is attached to the bad policy.

And there are even larger things that can be done.  He can attract industry to his state by use of the tax laws that will encourage a company to hire employees in that state.  By the same token he can also make sure that the employees are Americans.  Cracking down on companies that employ illegal immigrants should be one of the highest priorities of anyone who is thinking of replacing Joe Biden in 2025.

Another thing that will make his state a better place is minimizing the number of people on the welfare rolls.  Dependency of all kinds, drug addiction, joblessness and all other forms of dysfunction should be addressed by the laws and also from the bully pulpit.  In this spirit what DeSantis is doing when attacking this child grooming and transgender madness is extremely smart.  Parents are the most important constituency because they have the most invested in a stable society.  They will respond to someone trying to help their kids survive the madness that the Democrats foster.

So, what I see Ron DeSantis doing tells me he wants to make the clearest contrast in people’s minds between the disaster being unleashed by the Biden regime and the positive and constructive things happening under his administration in Florida.  By 2024 he wants people to equate his track record with what the whole country needs going forward.  I think it’s a good plan.  They always talk about the states being laboratories for experiments that can be transferred to the national level.  DeSantis is on the right track.

 

To my mind, short of a revolution, this is the best that can be expected while we wait for the clock to run out on the awful era of Biden in Washington.

Biotech Company Testing Gene Therapy to Cure Heart Disease

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This article reviews a gene therapy that prevents clogged arteries in people who have a genetic basis for high levels of low density lipoprotein cholesterol.

Later this year, Verve Therapeutics of Cambridge, Ma., will initiate Phase 1 clinical trials to test VERVE-101, a new medication that, if successful, will employ gene editing to significantly reduce low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, or LDL.

…

The medication is targeted specifically for patients who have a genetic form of high cholesterol known as heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia, or FH, caused by expression of a gene called PCSK9. Verve also plans to develop a program to silence a gene called ANGPTL3 for patients with FH and possibly those with or at risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

They’ve done the testing in monkeys and soon they’ll be trying it out on humans.  This is getting closer to the stuff that was science fiction fifty years ago.  A single intravenous treatment alters the DNA sequence of the patient’s liver cells and permanently cures a condition that would otherwise require statins and dieting and eventually stents and surgery to keep the patient alive.

I’m waiting for the gene therapy to cure my congenital laziness.  But the work-ethic-impaired never get consideration for our disease.  So unfair.

 

 

 

 

 

The Leftist Journalists are Starting to Cover the New Right

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I just read an article in, of all places, Vanity Fair.  The writer went to the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando back in October and interviewed Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance and Blake Masters.  He was trying to find out what the New Right is all about.  The journalist sounds like a progressive, which would be no surprise.  But it is apparent he has figured out the nuance that differentiates the New Right from what passed for conservatives back before 2016.  And so, the very long article (about 9,600 words!) provides an interesting account of the New Right through the eyes of a member of the leftist media elite.

The writer was surprised at how many of the attendees were in their twenties.  I found it amusing to hear how shocking it was for him to see all these young and hip people “falling under the spell” of evil Nazis.  Of course, a lot of this shock may be for the benefit of his leftist readers at Vanity Fair.  If he didn’t feign surprise that young people could find fault with the world that the Left has created, he might be drummed out of Vanity Fair and have to get a real job.

But beside the entertainment value of this mirror on the New Right, I was excited to know that the Left has become extremely worried about the increasing popularity of what they think of as extreme right-wing politics.  Or maybe they’ve been aware all along and they hoped if they ignored it, then it would go away.

One thing I notice is that the part of the New Right that this reporter covered is the least threatening branch.  Specifically, Peter Thiel and his proteges are the most respectable, least controversial group that could still be labelled as part of the New Right.  Even Curtis Yarvin, for all the screeching that the Left has done about his “racist” statements in the past, is more of an intellectual figure than a revolutionary.

By keeping the rest of the New Right out of the mainstream media’s view maybe they’re trying to preselect who is acceptable and thereby limit the damage from the upcoming elections.  But either way, the Left knows that anger and disgust over what they’ve done in the last two years is pervasive and is creating a groundswell of support for the new ideas coming out of the New Right.

But as much as I’m interested in the success of New Right candidates in the November election, I’m much more focused on the concrete steps that red state leaders are making to push back against unconstitutional federal laws and actions.  Inevitably there will be a showdown between Washington and these rebellious local leaders.  I think this is where we’ll see the first true test of cultural resistance to the globalist, anti-freedom regime.  And the state leader who gets the feds to blink is going to be man to watch in the future.  Maybe it’ll be DeSantis, maybe someone else.

Until then it’s interesting to see these first indications of the Left’s panic.  The network pundits now openly admit Biden’s poll numbers are abysmal.  And they list all the same factors that we’ve been talking about for more than a year.  Inflation, crime, foreign policy incompetence, supply chain failures, COVID tyranny and woke lunacy.  So, this act that they’ve kept up, that all of this is just a COVID hangover, has collapsed and at this point they’re praying for the Stupid Party to implode.  Usually, I’d think this likely.  But somehow, I think we’ve finally reached critical mass and things are going to change in a meaningful way.  All I have to do is hold out until November and things will come into clearer focus.  Fingers crossed.

Warner Bros. Cancels CNN+. Chris Wallace Vying for Fredo’s Old Job

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Sometimes the Universe proves it has a sense of humor.

Insufferable elitist and phony “straight journalist” Chris Wallace lost his gig at CNN+  when the rug was pulled out from under that fledgling crap journalism outlet by their new owner.  Imagine!  Warner Bros. Discover didn’t want to pay a billion dollars to run a streaming service that only a hundred thousand viewers signed up for.  By my math each viewer would have to bring in more than ten thousand dollars in revenue each year to make that break even.  Do you think there is anyone who would pay ten grand to watch Anderson Cooper give parenting advice or Don Lemon interviewing drag queens or Chris Wallace telling us how much smarter than us he is.

With any luck the cancelled “stars” will have to compete against each other to snag the few slots available on the incredibly shrinking network CNN.  Of course if they’d like to squeeze a little extra revenue out of the situation they could televise the competition.  I could imagine Cooper and Lemon squaring off in the ring with those weapons from the classic Star Trek episode “The Gamesters of Triskelion.”   Those two losers mincing around the stage attacking each other with giant can openers would be worth a few bucks I guess.

Well, things are looking up.