Bojo Catching A Djoko For Not "Playing By The Rules"

businessinsider |  As Conservative MPs returned to their constituencies after another week of fresh allegations of lockdown-busting parties at Downing Street, they were left wondering what reaction they would find back home. 

Boris Johnson, the man once seen as electoral dynamite, is now increasingly seen as politically toxic. The question his backbenchers will have to answer this weekend is whether his toxicity is terminal. 

The prime minister's apology to the House of Commons – in which he acknowledged the public "rage" caused by ITV's revelation of a "bring your own booze" garden party held in May 2020 — did little to quell the anger on Tory benches. But it did initially appear to buy him some time.

Then came another set of revelations. This time, two leaving parties, for which a No. 10 staffer was dispatched to buy a suitcase's worth of wine, were held in Downing Street on April 16, 2021, the night before Prince Philip's funeral.

NYTimes |

• Australia’s immigration minister revokes Djokovic’s visa on ‘health and good order’ grounds.

• Djokovic could be detained again on Saturday while he challenges the decision.

• What would Djokovic’s departure mean for the Australian Open bracket?

• Andy Murray: ‘I’m not going to sit here and start kicking Novak whilst he’s down.’

• In Serbia, Djokovic’s friends and family have fumed and waited.

• Just catching up with the Djokovic story? Here’s what you need to know.

• The Australian government took a stand for the public good, our correspondent writes.

Serial Mandater Gov. Gavin Newsome Laid Low By A Gob Of mRNA Goo?

childrenshealthdefense |  A source close to California Gov. Gavin Newsom today told The Defender the governor experienced an adverse reaction to the Moderna COVID vaccine he received Oct. 27.

The source, who asked not to be identified, said Newsom’s symptoms were similar to those associated with Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS), a known side effect of many vaccines.

GBS is a neurological disorder in which the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks part of its peripheral nervous system — the network of nerves located outside of the brain and spinal cord — and can range from a very mild case with brief weakness to paralysis to leaving the person unable to breathe independently.

The governor has not been seen in public since he was photographed Oct. 27 getting his COVID booster.

On Oct. 29, Newsom’s office issued a statement referring to unspecified “family obligations” as the reason the governor canceled his scheduled appearances, including his planned meetings at the global COP 26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

A local ABC News outlet reported that when “the surprising announcement was made,” a spokesperson said Newsom planned to participate virtually in the climate conference. However, Newsom’s name was removed from the schedule and he did not participate.

The Defender reached out to Newsom’s office today by phone and email, but the office did not respond before publication.

According to Fox News, Newsom’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, on Sunday tweeted — then quickly deleted — a message urging people to “stop hating” while her husband has been out of the public eye since canceling plans, including his appearances at COP 26.

 

MatterDaddy KarenWaffen Twitter Celebrates Fallout From The NeoVaccinoid Mandate

holy fucking shit, vaccine mandates are causing teachers who don't believe in science to quit, nurses who don't believe in medicine to quit, and cops who don't believe in public safety to quit. I'm failing to see the downside to this...,

folks: I hate tweet thieves and I hate it even more when the tweet thief turns out to be me. I have no memory of seeing @mbeisen's tweet but clearly I must have, and then regurgitated it as my own. UGH. folks, please retweet the hell out of the original: https://t.co/CBTmfH9JDe

— Jeff Tiedrich (@itsJeffTiedrich) October 13, 2021

Cuomo's A Dirty POS: Cuomosexuals Need To Stop Teabagging And Take The L...,

WaPo |  Two male aides who worked for Cuomo in the New York governor’s office say he routinely berated them with explicit language, making comments such as calling them “pussies” and saying, “You have no balls.”

And three women, all of whom worked in the governor’s office as young staffers in recent years, say Cuomo quizzed them about their dating lives. They say they did not view the encounters as propositions, but rather as part of an office culture they believed was degrading to young women.

The newest accounts of Cuomo’s workplace behavior by former aides in interviews with The Washington Post come after several women have publicly accused the New York governor of inappropriate personal comments or unwelcome physical contact. The allegations have engulfed one of the country’s top Democratic officials in crisis and put a sharp focus on the workplace culture he has fostered during his three decades in public office.

What Cuomo has touted as an “aggressive” style goes far beyond that behind the scenes, according to more than 20 people who have worked with him from the 1990s to the present. Many former aides and advisers described to The Post a toxic culture in which the governor unleashes searing verbal attacks on subordinates. Some said he seemed to delight in humiliating his employees, particularly in group meetings, and would mock male aides for not being tough enough.

The Post reached out to more than 150 former and current Cuomo staffers, stretching back to his time at HUD in Washington. Most did not respond. Among those who did, the majority spoke on the condition of anonymity, because they said they still fear his wrath and his power to destroy careers.

“I never knew at the time that I was making anyone feel uncomfortable,” he said. “I never, ever meant to offend anyone or hurt anyone or cause anyone pain.”

Former aides said they were infuriated by Cuomo’s attempt to minimize what they described as a pervasive effort to intimidate staff.

 

Protected Selected Corporate Fascist Chosen One Hoisted By His Pathetic Old Petard...,

As the Daily Mail noted on Thursday, CNN, ABC, CNN and MSNBC have devoted little to no time discussing Cuomo's nursing home scandal, or explosive new sexual harassment claims levied against the New York governor.

WATCH: CNN’s Jim Acosta confronted at CPAC over his network’s failure to cover Cuomo’s multiple scandals. pic.twitter.com/5AWGIeZ55F

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) February 26, 2021

ABC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC on Wednesday avoided discussing the explosive new sexual harassment claims against New York Gov Andrew Cuomo during their evening news broadcasts.  

Earlier on Wednesday, Lindsey Boylan, shared on Medium that during her more than three years in the Democrat's administration, Cuomo 'would go out of his way to touch me on my lower back, arms and legs,' compared her to one of his rumored ex-girlfriends and once remarked they should play strip poker. 

And according to Fox News, which cited Grabien transcripts, ABC's World News Tonight, CBS' Evening News, and NBC's Nightly News made no mention of Cuomo or the allegations against him. 

CNN and MSNBC also skipped over the allegations against the governor whose spokesperson Caitlin Girouard said that all Boylan's 'claims of inappropriate behavior are quite simply false'.

During CNN host Chris Cuomo's segment Wednesday night, he discussed why Democrats can't get a deal on pandemic relief, the January 6 Capitol riot and the Boeing 777 incident from last weekend.  

Maybe Marcus learned to interrupt people from Acosta?

I Googled Joe Rogan Freezing In Texas And Ran Into The Musk Fsckery....,

RT |  Texans may be suffering without electricity in bitter temperatures, but Young Turks host Cenk Uygur can see the bright side, as podcaster Joe Rogan and others who relocated to the state are “freezing their asses off.”

Two dozen Texans are dead, food supplies can’t reach supermarkets, and nearly 200,000 homes are still without power as of Friday morning, as freezing temperatures wreak havoc on the Lone Star State. So paralyzing is the weather that firefighters in San Antonio on Thursday were unable to extinguish a burning apartment block due to frozen fire hydrants.

Public watchdog Rachel @Maddow warned us about Putin's plans for the #TexasBlackout and we didn't listen https://t.co/2BicIelNAF

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) February 18, 2021

One pundit managed to find an upside, however. On Twitter, Uygur, a progressive commentator, celebrated the fact that Rogan, a libertarian podcast host who had recently moved to Texas from California, was likely suffering.

“Only upside of Texas power outages is people like @joerogan, who were so proud to leave CA and move to TX, freezing their asses off,” he tweeted on Thursday. “They said they wanted less government. Congrats, mission accomplished! I hope you're not asking the government to come help you. #Freedom”

Uygur was instantly hammered for his apparent gloating. Commenters reminded the progressive pundit that California, a byword for liberal statism, regularly suffers from blackouts and wildfires, while Texas, known for its economic libertarianism, just got hit with the cold snap of a century.

 

Incompetent Sock Puppet Politicians + Predatory Corporate Governance = TEXAS

NYTimes  |  The crisis dates back to the 1930s, when the Federal Power Commission gained the authority to regulate interstate transmission of electric power. But politicians in Texas, with their slavish devotion to the fossil fuel industry, didn’t want Washington regulating the electricity business and chipping away at those hefty profits.

So the business went entirely unregulated until the formation of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas in the 1970s. But ERCOT has been anything but reliable. While it is technically overseen by the state, its board is really just an industry club. Several of its members don’t even live in Texas.

On Saturday, Gov. Greg Abbott solemnly declared the state would not see another accident like Thursday’s deadly 100-plus-vehicle pileup on a frozen Fort Worth highway. On Monday, he reassured Texans that power would return. That day, two million people were plunged into darkness, and many into 8 degree weather. Then four million. By Tuesday, 10 people had died in the Houston and San Antonio areas alone. Water pipes burst across the state, forcing people without power to boil water just to drink it safely.

After taking a beating on Twitter, Mr. Abbott spun around on Tuesday and blamed the utilities. He promised an investigation into ERCOT. George P. Bush, the state land commissioner, cravenly blamed the renewable energy industry, a talking point that caught fire among conservatives.

It was all just cow pie, though: Renewables like wind and solar can contribute up to 20 percent of the Texas power grid, but they were forecast to account for just 7 percent of the winter grid, with some 80 percent of electricity in the state’s capacity projected to come from natural gas, coal and a bit of nuclear power. And while some wind turbines in Texas froze, many of them kept turning. By Tuesday, renewables were helping to get the power going again. But it wasn’t enough. Each time the power came back up on Tuesday, demand spiked, and the power supply ran right back down. The rolling blackouts would just keep on rolling.

On Wednesday, Mr. Abbott ordered natural gas producers not to let their supply out of the state until Sunday, and to instead send it to the electrical grid. How soon this could help the millions of Texans who continue to shiver in the darkness is unclear. ERCOT has, once again, ordered utilities to cut power.

“It feels colder than 25 degrees outside. I’m shivering in the house. … My hands are freezing. My feet are freezing, and my nose is freezing,” Laura Bettor, a psychologist in Austin, told me as she watched people ski down her street. “People’s phones are down because they can’t charge. And the government here? Everything about the state government here is stupid.”

Red And Black Ants Must NEVER SEE The Jar Or The Hand That Shakes It!!!

nakedcapitalism |  Something else is going on beneath the actual events, for sure. I happened across this story and took a gander at the WSB reddit board and was blown away by the amount of energy there — it was lively and real — something so foreign in an age of sleuths, slights and deception. It does not matter that what was being done would have minimal overall impact on HFs or the financial system in the grand scheme of things. All that matters was people came together spontaneously to do something with no regard for the consequences. And something did happen. Some brokerages halted trading of GME and other affected companies, and it drew quite the media attention as well as a flutter in congress. Maybe it is no big deal as Yves seems to think, but I disagree.

Consider for a moment that this was a somewhat random collection of people (and maybe some big money too) uniting for something that is foolish and self-defeating. People who can afford not to lose, and yet still choose to do so.

Consider also that social media, tech companies, and corporate interests are all geared to measure and predict public sentiment, or further, as for public relations, to shape it. This is predicated upon the continual cycle of researching, organizing, and staging an event (ie product release, new policy, crises) that the public is primed to react to, and upon the assumption that people will generally seek their own interest and well being, often irrationally.

What happens when people act spontaneously (without some widely publicized event or first mover), in tandem, against their own interest and well being? Obviously some people will stand to gain and some to lose. That’s not the point. What is, is that a good chunk of people, bought into their own game with no regard for how it ought to be played, and in the process they (for that moment) changed the rules. And for once they moved and everyone else reacted.

FORGET THE ARTICLE - THE REAL VALUE IS IN THE COMMENTS - OF WHICH THIS IS ONE

Here for contrast, is a great and highly detailed article detailing the hand that's shaking the jar.

AWWW SNAP Wall St. Elite - Unlike In 2008 - Ants Done Caught You Shaking The Jar!!!

 thehill |  Online messaging platform Discord on Wednesday banned the r/WallStreetBets (WSB) server, which became the center for discussions among amateur online traders who fueled an unexpected surge in GameStop’s stock this week. 

A Discord spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Hill that the decision to remove the server was due to users sharing “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings,” adding that it “did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks.”

“The server has been on our Trust & Safety team’s radar for some time due to occasional content that violates our Community Guidelines, including hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading misinformation,” the spokesperson added. 

The statement went on to say, “Discord welcomes a broad variety of personal finance discussions, from investment clubs and day traders to college students and professional financial advisors. We are monitoring this situation and in the event there are allegations of illegal activities, we will cooperate with authorities as appropriate.”

This comes after Discord in the days after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol banned a server called “The Donald,” a pro-Trump community linked to banned subreddit r/The_Donald and TheDonald.win. 

theverge |  Google is actively removing negative reviews of the Robinhood app from the Google Play Store, the company confirmed to The Verge. After some disgruntled Robinhood users organized campaigns to give the app a one-star review on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store — and succeeded in review-bombing it all the way down to a one-star rating — the company has now deleted enough reviews to bring it back up to nearly four stars.

Jesus Christ they really are going all in to reveal the extent of the cabal that runs this country and rigs the rules https://t.co/w0tSQypp9Z

— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) January 29, 2021

Robinhood came under intense scrutiny on Thursday, after the stock trading app announced it would block purchases of GameStop, AMC, and other stocks made popular by the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, and some users have already replaced their deleted one-star reviews with new ones to make their anger heard.

RT |  A popular stock trading chat group has been booted off Facebook due to alleged violations of its “sexual exploitation” rules, claims the page’s founder, who accused “major institutions” of trying to avenge the GameStop debacle.

The Robinhood Stock Traders group boasted more than 157,000 members before it was taken offline on Wednesday, its 23-year-old founder, Allen Tran, told Reuters, adding that the social media giant cited its policies surrounding “adult sexual exploitation.” A notification of the ban seen by Reuters included no further reasoning for what prompted the move.

The page has no formal affiliation with the stock trading app of the same name.

Tran, however, maintains that he has never seen explicit or sexual content on the page, arguing instead that the group was targeted by “major institutions” after members racked up thousands of dollars from trades first proposed in Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets community, which has driven a dramatic price surge in certain heavily shorted stocks, namely those of GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry and Nokia.

“The major institutions are attempting to silence our community. We are positively impacting people’s lives and they are attacking our group because we are more powerful than them,” Tran wrote in a Facebook post after the group’s ban, arguing “there is power in masses.”