NATIONAL DISCO DAY UPDATES
Mirror Balls UP!
-"Rate limit exceeded." Millions of Twitter users got this message yesterday and continue to today, and it means that said user can only look at about 600 Tweets in a given session, which can actually be exceeded quite easily if one is using the site to, say, track a live event or quickly catch up on a day's postings. The official reason for the issue, according to Twitter CEO and billionaire weirdo Elon Musk, was to try to safeguard users from "data scraping," which sounds bad - but multiple reports, including Business Insider/Bloomberg, report the REAL reason for the issue was data-throttling brought about by Twitter not paying its cloud bills to Google and Amazon, who own the servers on which Twitter is ever-shakingly housed. Usership in nascent Twitter competitors Mastodon, Post dot com and Spoutible all reported massive spikes in new members and usership, while the NHL complained that users could not use the Twitter platform to follow the first day of that league's free agency period. Add it up, and it is another chapter in How To Piss Away $44 Billion, or How To Turn A Vital Social Media Service Into MySpace In A Matter of Months ...
-Meanwhile, in better social media news, the Patriot Media Group and Internet Research Agency closed shop this week. Sounds innocuous enough, but these were the Russian-based companies whose troll farms were contracted to meddle with social media feeds to aid Twice-Indicted Ex-President (TIEP) Trump in the 2016 Presidential campaign (and was fully researched thanks to the not-in-any-way-shape-or-form debunked Mueller Report), and did so by spreading disinformation about Trump's opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton (who still managed to win the popular vote by a decent 3 million vote margin). The reason they closed? They were part of the Wagner Group!
-That's right, Yevgeny Prigozhin was given that contract by Vladimir Putin (in case you were wondering why Putin is literally the only person Trump has never, not once, not ever, mocked or derided in his rambling screeds he calls "campaign speeches" and "interviews"), and as part of the deal that stopped Prigozhin from attempting to overtake Moscow last week, the troll farms were cashed out as Prigozhin nestles in Belarus amid multiple food tasters and hunts for ranch-style buildings to not fall out of. FUN FACT: Mueller did indict Prigozhin for these troll farms, so Prigozhin also has to keep Mar-a-Lago off his list of destinations. Poor Yevgeny!
-Speaking of rambling screeds disguised as campaign appearances, Trump had one yesterday in South Carolina, and besides a promise to give his voters the ability to fire any school principal they wished - don't know, don't ask - the highlight was the eruption of booing that took place once Trump brought his favorite golf ball washer, Lindsay Graham, onto the dais. The booing was so intense it forced Graham to cut his speech off, while the booing carried on long after he left the podium, presumably to tend to Trump's putters.
-Your minds are SO in the gutter ...
-France is currently in turmoil after an incident rare in that country but far too normal in this one: a 17-year old Algerian, Nahel Merzouk, who was shot and killed in a traffic stop by a police officer in a Paris suburb who claimed he was afraid the teen would run someone over in the car he was driving. Even though the officer is in custody, protests erupted into rioting nightly since it happened on June 27. CNN reports French President Macron and local officials have mobilized over 40,000 police officers to crack down on the rioting, arresting over 2,000 while seeing over 500 officers injured in the melees. These protests occur shortly after a previous round of unrest occurred after Macron imposed a series of unpopular pension reforms, and this crisis is likely to force further discussions in that country of how police are trained and how racial tensions exacerbate said tensions. Just like America, sadly ...
-We shall close with sportsball media news, and the news of a rather surprising round of layoffs at ESPN that include some of their most prominent commentators, including Suzy Kulver, Jalen Rose, Jeff Van Gundy, and Steve Young, among others (and yet keeping the making-new-ways-to-be-obnoxious Stephen A. Smith). The moves happen as sports media continues to reel amid mass bankruptcies of regional sports networks, some teams (notably in Phoenix and Salt Lake City) planning to resume airing some games on non-cable and non-streaming local media, and the overall questioning by many investors of streaming- and app-based media sources whose business models "disrupted" the old methods of advertising and residuals as income drivers but replaced with internet-familiar monetizing (subscriptions! micro-ads!) that have not replaced those old income sources but have helped stock prices rise ... in other words, money is being redistributed and the industries are beginning realize not in a good way. Duh.
-On this date in 1881, James Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau. On this date in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt proposed a "New Deal for America" in accepting the Democratic Presidential nomination. On this date in 1937, an airplane piloted by Amelia Earhart disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean and was never found. On this date in 1962, the first Wal-Mart opened. On this date in 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed (and has been under attack ever since). On this date in 2002, the first solo flight around the world by balloon was completed by Steve Fossett. And on this date in 2007, MEN IN BLACK opened nationally.
-Happy Birthday to Hermann Hesse, Tyrone Guthrie, Rene Lacoste, Thurgood Marshall, Ken Curtis, Pierre Cardin, Medgar Evers, Brock Peters, Ahmad Jamal, Polly Holliday, Richard Petty, Vincente Fox, Larry David, Roy Bittan, Bret "The Hitman" Hart, Eric Daze, Johnny Weir, Ashley Tisdale, Lindsay Lohan, Alex Morgan, Margot Robbie, and Saweetie.
-Rest in Peace/Rest in Power to Nostradamus (if he's really dead), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ernest Hemingway, Betty Grable, Swede Savage, Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Bennett, Fred Gwynne, Jimmy Stewart, Mario Puzo, Jan Murray, Beverly Sills, Ben Davidson, Elie Wiesel, Michael Cimino, and Lee Iacocca.
-Feed the Worms: Imperial shoe fetishist Imelda Marcos and pioneer steroid user Jose Canseco entered Earth on this date.