Twitter Cries Out!

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Supposedly Elon Musk is going to buy Twitter on Friday.  I don’t know if he is.  Things seem to go back and forth on the sale so often it’s hard to say for sure.  But I was interested in an article that quoted an open letter that some Twitter employees have released.  It addresses a rumor that Musk is going to lay off 75% of the employees of the company.

Now that caught my attention.  What a marvelous idea!  Reducing Twitter’s payroll to two thousand employees sounded like a brilliant way to focus the attention of those remaining employees on doing their jobs instead of practicing social justice.

But apparently not everyone views this situation the same.  The employees who wrote this open letter to Musk are not as thrilled as I am.  Here are some excerpts:

We, the undersigned Twitter workers, believe the public conversation is in jeopardy.

Elon Musk’s plan to lay off 75% of Twitter workers will hurt Twitter’s ability to serve the public conversation. A threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users’ and customers’ trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation…….

We demand of current and future leadership:

Respect: We demand leadership to respect the platform and the workers who maintain it by committing to preserving the current headcount.

Safety: We demand that leadership does not discriminate against workers on the basis of their race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or political beliefs. We also demand safety for workers on visas, who will be forced to leave the country they work in if they are laid off.

Protection: We demand Elon Musk explicitly commit to preserve our benefits, those both listed in the merger agreement and not (e.g. remote work). We demand leadership to establish and ensure fair severance policies for all workers before and after any change in ownership.

Dignity: We demand transparent, prompt and thoughtful communication around our working conditions. We demand to be treated with dignity, and to not be treated as mere pawns in a game played by billionaires.

You know, that’s a lot of demanding going on there.  I have to assume they are speaking from a position of great strength.  Otherwise, it might seem that they are painting bullseyes on their backs with respect to the new boss firing them.

Now the interesting thing is that they released this letter but refuse to release the identity of the signatories until some critical mass is reached.  My guess is that will be never.

So, what will Musk do?  Well, I can’t tell the richest man on Earth what to do.  But if I could I’d tell him to change it to 80%.  I’m on Twitter and as far as I can tell the algorithms are so rigged in favor of the wokesters that getting rid of almost everybody working there would be an enormous improvement.

I think the real challenge is to find the real bottom number for employment there.  After all isn’t the whole point of automation and artificial intelligence that you leverage machines to do the work.  Maybe the real number is one thousand or a hundred or even fifty.  I think that’s where Elon should invest his time.  He should figure out just how small a company is needed to run Twitter and that may tell him whether the whole thing even makes sense at all.  Maybe he needs to change the “business model” for Twitter altogether and build in something more useful than just a message board for random humans.

And I think that’s what he intends to do.  My guess is he thinks he can do better than Meta, YouTube and even Amazon.  Maybe we’re about to find out if he’s right.

NYS Supreme Court Reinstates All Unvaccinated State Employees With Backpay

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How sweet is this?  Should be a hell of a season for lawsuits.  This should be just the start.  Shouldn’t be long before all the other states join in and then the military gets into the act and after that the wrongful death suits over vaccine side-effects will be moving along quite nicely.

And just news of this should inject renewed anger into the mid-terms just in time for the New York and Michigan races to let people get some payback for the sadistic lockdowns those two states’ governors perpetrated.

Cuomo’s gone but his henchwoman Hochul is running and of course the evil stepmother of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer is in a dead heat with the Republican challenger.  Well it couldn’t happen to a nicer pair of witches this Halloween.

Manifest Destiny

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I read recently that globalists have a plan to combine Mexico, America and Canada into a North America Union.  I won’t go into why I think such a plan is bad for us.  But because of all the talk about unions I had an idea.  Let’s conquer Canada.

Not all of Canada.  We’ll leave Eastern Canada alone.  Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime Provinces don’t seem worth fighting over.  They’re filled with people who remind me of New Englanders.  We should annex the Western and Northern provinces.  And while we’re at it we might as well buy Greenland from Denmark.

Now hear me out.  I have a good reason.  I hate Justin Trudeau and I think most people in Western Canada hate him too.  Well, with the exception of Vancouver but we’ll just rename it North Seattle and fold it into the west coast exclusion zone (California, Oregon and Washington) that will be set up to prevent normal people from wandering in and suffering mental anguish from listening to crazy people.

So, we’ll liberate the good people of Western Canada and immediately begin intensive extraction of fossil fuels, radioactive minerals and anything else that will allow us to restore our civilization to a prosperous state.  Meanwhile we can allow Eastern Canada to feel virtuous that they are no longer responsible for the use of evil fossil fuels from underneath their territory and in fact will no longer have enough petroleum to keep themselves warm and will therefore sink back into a neolithic existence where they’ll feel most morally comfortable.  At that point the French and the English Canadians can resume their eighteenth-century war on a more equal footing and let the best man win.  Hopefully Justin Trudeau will be one of the first victims of that conflict.

Now with all the resources we need for the foreseeable future it would be time to institute the great plan.  A Manhattan Project to accomplish something worthwhile.  The plan is to resurrect and modernize the industrial base of the United States and thus make us self-sufficient again.  And while we’re at it we can figure out the energy resources that will get us through the next thousand years.  Things like that are the natural province of scientists, engineers and economists, not hysterical teenage girls, nitwits and pseudoscientists.

But as soon as the conquest of Western Canada is complete it will also be time to begin re-evaluating our relationship with the other nations of the Earth.  Our alliances have been fraught with dependence and dysfunction.  NATO is a ridiculous sideshow.  The first question to be asked is, does Russia have an interest in conquering Belgium?  The people in Belgium believe in things that the Russians find repugnant.  Their country is a tiny postage stamp that could fit in a suburb of Moscow.  Their only exports are overpriced chocolates and bureaucracy for which there is no demand.  Europe is putatively one of the richest and most technologically advanced regions on Earth.  I think we can leave them to their own devices to defend themselves from their neighbors.

Now China is a threat to Japan and Korea.  If we sell some ICBMs to these folks that should shore up the balance of power there and end our responsibility to these countries.  And for the rest of the world, I don’t have much interest.  Let the Indians and the Russians and the Chinese worry about the Iranians and the Arabs and the Turks.  I suppose the Africans will need some help but it can be on a private charity basis.  I figure the Australians and the New Zealanders can ask the Brits for nukes if they need them.  And we can insist that Mexico and the countries to the south must stop trying to move in with us.  We can’t figure out their problems for them.  They’re going to have to do that on their own.

So, there’s my whole plan for the world.  We can oversee northern North America (most of it) and let the rest of the world figure things out for themselves.  Needless to say, we’ll need to have a very capable military and cutting-edge weapons systems to make sure no one is tempted to cause us any trouble.  But for the most part we can mind our own business and make the lives of Americans the best they can be.

Maybe when we’ve done a really good job of raising the standard of living of the bulk of our people to middle class then we can think about interfering in other people’s affairs.  Until then let’s see if we can get back to post World War II levels first.  That would be the bench mark we can shoot for.  Take that Trudeau.

The Haunted Election

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Election Day this year is the night of the full moon and I just saw the first wolfsbane flowers in my yard.

 

Even a man who’s pure of heart

and says his prayers by night

may become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms

and the moon is full and bright

The damp cool autumnal weather certainly evokes a Halloween mood in my neighborhood.  We have our share of  jack o’lanterns festooning the house and the grandkids are already imagining their trick or treat loot.  But this year even Election Day has an unreal flavor to it.  Outlandish candidates like Fetterman and that creepy old ghoul haunting the White House add an Edgar Allan Poe tinge to even the political page.

Now am I claiming that werewolf John Fetterman will be lopsidedly prowling the woods of Pennsylvania in his stretched out hoodie tearing apart innocent Republican voters in his insane lust to become a United States Senator?  Well, read the poem and do the math yourself!  I’m going to add a little extra garlic to Camera Girl’s sauce this week and hope for the best.

Easy Does it in the Last Two Weeks

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I was talking to the boys at lunchtime today.  That’s one of the good things that came out of the whole COVID mess.  We set up a Monday Zoom meeting between the guys who I used to take the coffee walk with in the morning.  It’s surprisingly normal at this point.  There are the usual jokes about keeping our hands visible and wearing pants around the home office for some of us.  But it’s good comparing notes with the boys once a week.

I guess it was no surprise that confidence in a good outcome for the elections was pretty high.  In fact, it was too high.  It was way out of proportion.  But we were having a good time.  We were comparing notes on our favorite desperate Dem excuse for the bad polls.  Mine was when some hairdo in a short dress was asking Pelosi about people rating inflation the top problem.  The old bag said that when someone mentions inflation, she immediately stops him and changes the conversation by saying it’s not inflation it’s prices associated with the strong economy that the Democrats produced to save us from COVID.  When she was telling this to the “journalist” Pelosi’s face was contorted in some combination of rage and excitement that made me think she was having a stroke.  But no such luck.

One of the other guys was laughing about Kari Lake slamming Hillary Clinton for being a 2016 election denier.  One of the other guys was talking about a DeSantis/Lake ticket.  I put in my two cents.  I said I was pretty sure Trump and DeSantis would be the ones sitting down talking about who was going to be what in 2024.  And I reminded everyone that there’s at least 10-15% of the electorate that won’t even vote if Trump’s not running in 2024.  That quieted them down a bit.  And I think that’s about true.  Some folks don’t trust anyone else.  That’s a pretty important detail.

Now, do I think Trump could pass the torch?  Maybe.  But I still think it would dilute the enthusiasm for a bunch of his people.  And as far as having DeSantis as the Veep I don’t think that would be wasting him at all.  I have no doubt he would be doing a good deal of the behind the scenes work to put together the team out of his Florida administration.  In fact, I worry that it would do some damage to Florida on that account.

I told them I’d be working at the elections this year and they all wanted to know if I needed assistants.  And I asked, “What, to eat donuts and drink coffee?”  And they all wanted to know when the dumpsters full of fake ballots show up and I said after midnight was the schedule, I saw for Philadelphia in 2020 and we all got a rueful laugh about that.  And then the Zoom ended and we got back to our days.

Yeah, all the bad news for the Dems has been like a whiff of laughing gas.  We’re all a little giddy and a little too confident.  But this is just the run-up.  Two weeks is a very long time.  Every day I hear rumors coming out of Ukraine of a false flag dirty bomb by the Ukrainians to justify a NATO incursion and I think to myself that’s just the stupid trick Biden might welcome to distract the voters from the disaster he’s turned the economy into.

So easy does it.  Take it all in stride.  Don’t get too high or too low.  Let’s see what new monstrosity Dopey Joe has in store tomorrow.  But smell the coffee, get your own work done, laugh at the dopes in the news as their poll numbers plunge and at least make sure you get your votes in on time.  Everything else will develop like a polaroid picture, a little at a time.  You just have to be patient.