BREAKING: Trump's Truth Social Still Raging Tire Fire
Whodathunkit?
Yesterday Donald Trump's spokesloon Liz Harrington flounced off Twitter in a huff.
"I will soon no longer be posting on Twitter. This is a terrible website that is beyond fixing," she tweeted. "TRUTH will soon be available to everyone when its web application launches.
I will soon no longer be posting on Twitter. This is a terrible website that is beyond fixing.\n\nTRUTH will soon be available to everyone when its web application launches. \n\nBe sure to follow me there @realLizUSA pic.twitter.com/snZ79Ym3Rv— Liz Harrington (@Liz Harrington) 1652811260
Surely this will be a body blow for the platform. However will we get along without copypasta of Trump's rambling blog posts augmented by a steady stream of demented vitriol?
But it's probably not a coincidence that Harrington stomped off yesterday with a pointed reference to Truth Social finding a safe space on Al Gore's internet. You can bet she was responding at least in part to a piece from Rolling Stone's Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng on the janky social media's platform's failure to get into the Android app store.
“Is Google trying to fuck me?” Donald Trump wonders aloud to anyone stranded next to him in line at the Mar-a-Lago omelet bar.
Currently Truth Social, his crappy Twitter knock off, is only available on Apple devices. And Arty McDeals, that titan of industry, thinks he knows why.
“He keeps hearing about how Google and YouTube have it out for him … including on Truth Social, and I think he’s taking [it] seriously,” a source told RS.
Devin Nunes, the dairy farming congressman-turned-tech CEO, is apparently happy for his boss to believe there are shenanigans afoot over at Google.
“End of May we will launch PWA (Web Browser) this will allow access from any device,” Nunes "truthed". “After that we will launch an Android App... pending approval from Google!” (Yes, those fakeass tweets are really called "truths." We make a lot of jokes, but that one's 100 percent serious.)
Which is about as likely as my winning the Powerball jackpot, insofar as I have not bought a ticket. Because according to RS those cyber wizards over at Devin's shop haven't even submitted their app to Google for approval. And while it's true that Trump got booted off YouTube at the same time he lost his Twitter handle and Facebook page — i.e. five seconds after he sent an angry mob to overthrow the government — it's not Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai doing cancel cultures to Truth Social that's keeping the app off Android phones.
RS reports:
Recent Truth Social job postings suggest the Android app is still under development. The company also recently advertised a job for a developer who can assist with “bringing some of our core products to Android,” according to a posting on the TMTG’s website.
Who could have predicted such a shocking turn of events! Oh, right, Reuters, which reported a month ago that the company was hemorrhaging staff, with Josh Adams and Billy Boozer, the chiefs of technology and product development, making a beeline for the exit.
Things are not looking good, but never fear, because Team Truth has a secret weapon in reserve.
Things got bad enough that in recent weeks, the former president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was called in to take a lead role focused on trying to “fix” what was wrong with the company and the app performance, according to two people familiar with the situation. One of these sources frankly referred to what Trump Jr. was doing as an emergency “rescue mission.” (A spokesman for Trump Jr. declined to comment on this story.)
That's right, they're going to send in DJ to fix it once he finds someone to mop up the meat sweats he presumably gets consuming all Kimberly Guilfoyle's funky steaks. (Allegedly!)
Anyway, none of this is good news for our Devin, who just found out that Elon Musk is going to let Trump back on Twitter if and when he ever manages to buy the company and flush tens of billions of dollars down the toilet. Luckily Trump has said he's done with the blue bird, and we all know he's a man of his word.
Hahahahaha.
Well, good luck, little cowpoke. Surely you wont get put out to pasture in humiliating fashion via tweet after Elon Musk makes you as useless as teats on a bull.
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With Great Salt Lake Drying Up, Utah Lege Looks Into Pipeline From Pacific Ocean. Yes Really.
What about just buying up all the bottled water in the stores and dumping it into the lake bed?
Utah's Great Salt Lake is, like a lot of western lakes, drying up and shrinking at an alarming rate due to long-lasting drought that's intensified by climate change. Unlike Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the Now Just Adequate Salt Lake is a natural lake, not the result of damming the Colorado River (or damning it, as Ed Abbey used to say), but the calamitous drop in water levels results from similar causes: not enough water coming into the lake from rivers, plus lots of thirsty humans and their agriculture using upstream sources. In late April, state water officials projected the lake will once again hit a new record low water level this year, a good two feet lower than the previous record low level of 4,190 feet, set just in October 2021.
The Deseret News explains,
The projection is based on levels that flow into the lake from its core tributaries, like the Bear, Weber and Jordan rivers. Normally those rivers add about 3 feet of water during the irrigation offseason, while there’s a 2-foot reduction once the irrigation begins. That’s a net gain of about a foot per year.
But this year’s spring runoff is not looking good for the lake. The National Weather Service’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center announced last week that it adjusted its forecast to project a runoff at 60% of normal. It previously forecast a normal runoff at the start of the year.
Last year, instead of the usual off-season increase of a foot, the lake's level only rose by six inches. And the state's snowpack is far lower than normal due to the drought. Also, fun fact: because of mineral concentrations in the lakebed, the drier the lake gets, the greater the chance of toxic dust blowing into populated areas.
Yeah, that's bad. Here, have some video from a BOAT, mofo, with more walking than there oughta be on a boat tour.
In late April, Gov. Spencer Cox declared a drought emergency for the second year in a row, since apparently his admonition last summer for Utahns to "pray for rain" didn't quite do the job. The state legislature has passed a number of water conservation bills, including $450 million in water infrastructure projects, and also established a "Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Program" that will include a new $40 million water trust aimed at helping the lake. Other measures will offer financial aid to homeowners who replace grass lawns with more desert-friendly landscaping, which seems like a smart idea.
And then there's the plan to at least study the feasibility of building a 700-mile pipeline that would pump saltwater from the Pacific Ocean to the Salt Lake, because desperate times and all that. That's one of several ideas being explored by the Lege's Water Development Commission, although it's probably the most radical one; the Salt Lake Tribune reports other ideas being studied include
metering residential water connections in rural Utah; examining the impacts of new groundwater wells on senior water rights holders; limiting releases from Utah dams; reusing treated wastewater; re-evaluating diversions from the Weber to the Provo river; and altering Utah’s representation on interstate compact regarding the Bear River, which Utah shares with Idaho and Wyoming.
The package of study items also includes one measure that might even be more desperate than "pipeline," which would involve looking into "putting septic effluent into Utah’s water supply," which of course sounds gross but works great if you're on the International Space Station. It's treated, people.
State Sen. David Hinkins (R), co-chair of the Water Development Commission, did some logic on the pipeline idea, which would require getting the pipeline over the Sierra Nevada mountains and crossing the states of California and Nevada:
"There’s a lot of water in the ocean and we have very little in the Great Salt Lake." [...]
"It’s just an idea," cautioned Sen. Hinkins in an interview with FOX 13 News. "Other countries are doing it to fill their lakes because of the drought situations. We ought to know if there’s a feasibility or even if we’ll get right of ways for that sort of stuff, but get an idea of how much it’ll cost."
Now, before you go snottily pointing out that lakes are freshwater, the Salt Lake Trib explains Hinkins was talking about an Israeli proposal to pipe Mediterranean water to replenish the Dead Sea, which is getting deader all the time.
Hinkins also suggested that, on the downslope run from the Sierra Nevadas, the water could even be used to generate electricity, although that sounds kind of like a perpetual motion thingy to us, since you'd expend a lot of energy getting the water up there in the first place? We'll freely admit we are not a Doktor of Hydrostuff, though.
Lynn de Freitas, executive director of Friends of Great Salt Lake, was skeptical of the pipeline idea, and not solely the feasibility and cost of the damn thing. She argued
A pipeline would not only degrade the landscape it crosses but would also disrupt the terminal lake’s chemistry.
“Rather than bringing fresh water to a system already challenged by impacts from increased salinity concentrations, it would be bringing in even more salinity,” she wrote in a text. “What’s wrong with this picture?"
She suggested it would be smarter to reconsider a proposed project to divert water from the Bear River for municipal and industrial use, saying that project would "only exacerbate the effects of a mega drought and climate change on our Lake.”
State Rep. Joel Briscoe (D), didn't seem too gung ho on even the notion of studying the pipeline. Following Tuesday's meeting of the Water Development Commission, Briscoe
sighed loudly and said: "Why don't we try water conservation?"
Beyond the feasibility of it, Rep. Briscoe said he had concerns about the cost to taxpayers.
"I thought we were a state that respected frugality and efficiency," he said. "There’s no way you’re going to be able to afford pumping saline water from the Pacific to Utah."
Environmental advocates also criticized the idea as a "boondoggle," as if spending billions of dollars that would enrich construction companies was somehow not the best possible use of state money. They have a point. Heck, maybe it would be a better idea to put money into reducing use of fossil fuels, just to see if not warming the planet might do something to slow the effects of drought.
Haha, like anyone could afford that! Maybe the Utah Lege could start researching the feasibility of developing stillsuits.
[KSTU-TV / Salt Lake Tribune / Deseret News]
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Egad, A Dinesh D'Souza Movie LIED? Fetch Forth My Smelling Salts!
Next you'll say the movie's entire premise is bad just because it is.
Poor Dinesh D'Souza can't seem to get a break, apart from his pardon from Donald Trump, his constant appearances in rightwing media, and all the money he gets from adoring low-information fans. His latest documentary-shaped object, 2000 Mules, alleges there's evidence off rampant voting fraud in the 2020 election. But it's being ignored by Tucker Carlson and even Newsmax, and there's practically nothing too stupid or crazy for Newsmax.
Read More: No One Taking Dinesh D'Souza's Documentary Seriously, Except Other People Who Also Make Things Up
And now some snotty liberal fact checkers at NPR have confirmed that one of the film's central claims is just plain false. In the film, the bogus "election integrity" group True the Vote claims it used cellphone tracking data to prove massive voter fraud; to show just how reliable its methods are, the group claimed its data analysis even helped solve a MURDER that had police baffled.
But as NPR explains, hahaha LOL LMAO True the Vote didn't solve dick. (Slight paraphrase of NPR.) Also, have we mentioned D'Souza was himself convicted of election fraud? But he was pardoned, so now he's blameless.
The claim was so impressive that Donald Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington gushed that True the Vote
"solved a murder of a young little girl in Atlanta. I mean, they are heroes." Fans of the film have echoed that message on social media.
Unfortunately, that's a load of codswallop:
Authorities in Georgia arrested and secured indictments against two suspects in the murder of Secoriea Turner in August 2021.
In response to NPR's inquiries, True The Vote acknowledged it had contacted law enforcement more than two months later, meaning it played no role in those arrests or indictments.
That's not just NPR proving the claim is false; that's True the Vote admitting it didn't solve, as we say, dick.
Phone-y Business
The movie purports that True The Vote proved a massive vote fraud effort by analyzing a shitload of phone geolocation data purchased from companies what track location information from phones and other mobile devices. Supposedly, the data identifies around 2,000 people who made at least 10 visits each to absentee ballot drop boxes, many of them located in different parts of cities, as well as to a number of nonprofit groups. They're the "mules" of the title, because mail-in voting is just like drug dealing! (Yes, the movie refers to "ballot trafficking" and calls the nonprofits "stash houses," because of course it does. These may be terms Dinesh learned in prison.)
The phone data supposedly "proves" the nonprofit groups were paying people to pick up ballots and to stuff the drop boxes! But as fact checks by the AP, and by Politifact, and by the Washington Post have all pointed out, the tracking data can only indicate a general location. It isn't anywhere near granular enough to prove even that someone was standing next to a drop box, much less that they put ballots (legally or illegally) inside. And since elections authorities put drop boxes in places people are likely to find convenient, there are plenty of reasons one person might have been near those locations at various different times without going up to a ballot drop box. (In Atlanta, for instance, 28 of Fulton County's 36 drop boxes were at public libraries.)
Murder, They Vote
Now, back to the murder claim. In the movie, True the Vote's executive director Catherine Engelbrecht and board member Gregg Phillips (who also have executive producer credits on the film) claim their analysis was so good it helped solved not one but two murders, both of which were "ebbing on cold case status." But they only talk about one, the killing of eight-year-old Secoriea Turner in Atlanta on July 4, 2020.
Phillips says he and his team obtained device data from the area of the shooting, which showed "only a handful of unique devices that could have pulled the trigger...each of these devices has a unique device ID, and we turned the bulk of this information over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
"Now, I read they've arrested two suspects," D'Souza responds to Phillips.
"They have," Phillips says.
Also too, on a podcast flogging the film, D'Souza made an even more specific claim, that True The Vote gave its data to the FBI, and that the feds passed on the data to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
"Shortly after that," D'Souza said, "boom" - there were two arrests and indictments.
NPR contacted the GBI to fact-check this claim.
"The GBI did not receive information from True the Vote that connected to the Secoriea Turner investigation," said Nelly Miles, the GBI's Director of the Office of Public and Governmental Affairs.
Aha. Neither Engelbrecht nor Phillips would give NPR an interview, but Engelbrecht did send an email saying that she
"called a contact at the FBI" and Phillips gave him the information about the Turner case "on or about October 25, 2021."
That would have been about two months after both suspects had already been indicted, on August 13. And contrary to Engelbrecht's assertion that the case was nearly "cold," police had arrested one of the two suspects within two weeks of the murder. Indeed, he turned himself in. The second suspect was arrested in early August. As WaPo's Philip Bump points out, "There is no indication that geolocation data played a role in either arrest, much less data provided by Phillips’s team."
So nope, True the Vote didn't solve dick. Like, maybe its data did include the two suspects' phones? But by the time that analysis was done, the alleged killers' names were already in the news for a couple months. Oh look, you found their phones somehow.
Antifa Super Soldier Vote Mules!!!@!
NPR points out other problems with the movie's assertions, debunking a claim D'Souza made in an interview that the phone data also matched up with another organization's data, to prove that some of the "mules" had also been Antifa rioters!!!!!
"There is an international organization called ACLED [Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project] that monitors the cell phones of all violent rioters around the world," D'Souza said on the Dan Bongino Show. "What True The Vote did was they took the cell phone data on the mules and matched it against the ACLED data on the rioters. And guess what? There's a pretty big overlap."
In the film, Phillips also cites ACLED, which is a nonprofit research organization.
"There's an organization that tracks the device IDs across all violent protests around the world. We took a look at our 242 mules in Atlanta and, sure enough, dozens and dozens and dozens of our mules show up on the ACLED databases," Phillips says in the film. "This is not grandma out walking her dog, these are, you know, violent criminals sometimes."
First of all, that Dinesh D'Souza quote right there -- "There is an international organization called ACLED [Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project] that monitors the cell phones of all violent rioters around the world" -- can only be spoken by someone utterly confident that their target audience is absolutely fucking clueless about how everything in the entire works.
Even so, Sam Jones, a spox for ACLED, said both claims were "categorically false," and that it's "highly unlikely that these conclusions have any basis in fact." ACLED's director of research and innovation, Roudabeh Kishi, noted that the company "does not track device ID" at all.
And while ACLED does track riots and other violent incidents, plus peaceful protests,
Their data do not include specific locations inside a city - such as neighborhoods or city blocks - where protests took place. ACLED does not track the time of day of those incidents or generally note individual participants, except for high-profile leaders.
Kishi said nobody from the film had contacted the company at all.
Engelbrecht had an explanation, though! When Phillips said, "There's an organization that tracks the device IDs across all violent protests," he didn't mean ACLED, although she wouldn't identify where the supposed data proving "mules" had also been rioting came from. As for D'Souza's statement that the data came from ACLED, she wrote, "If you have questions about Dinesh's comments, my suggestion would be to ask Dinesh." Conveniently, D'Souza didn't respond to NPR's interview requests.
Dinesh Explains It (Not At) All
Now, we should at least note that D'Souza, grumpified by an earlier article Philip Bump wrote about the problems with trying to use phone data to prove "ballot trafficking," did sit down for an interview with Bump to explain why, logically, the movie's conclusions are 100 percent true. As Bump puts it, the takeaway is that the hourlong interview "can be summarized fairly succinctly: D’Souza admits his movie does not show evidence to prove his claims about ballots being collected and submitted."
D'Souza can't even prove that the "whistleblower" the movie claims blew the lid off the fraud scheme even exists. He never met the guy, who wanted to remain anonymous.
But he frequently tells Bump it's really unfair and illogical to demand he provide evidence that any of the "mules" the movie talks about submitted even a single illegal ballot, so that's amusing. He also accuses Bump of "armchair theorizing" about his great big MAGA fanfiction of a movie.
Read it only if you want to burn one of your free WaPo reads this month; it's not worth using one of my "gift" linkies for.
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Devin Nunes Pretty Sure Trump Won't Dump Him Once Elon Musk Wrecks Twitter. He's Fine. Totally Fine.
Think positive, little cowpoke!
The news that Elon Musk will let Donald Trump back on Twitter if and when he actually buys the platform has hit Devin Nunes hard. The former congressman-turned-CEO of Trump's Truth Social platform was already crying in his feed about the failure of the MAGA social media venture to topple its bigger rivals. And it had to chap his udders that Trump spent months refusing to post on his own site because “He wants it to be a hit first.”
Last week, Nunes released what SFGate called a "stream of cope" to Fox News's Martha MacCallum on the news that his boss might be getting back together with his one true love.
"Look, we’re very supportive of what Elon is saying," Nunes said. "The question is, will he accomplish what he’s saying, dealing with all the employees, dealing with all the algorithms. But the goal has been for us, for President Trump, is to give the American people their voice back, and open the internet back up, and that's what we're trying to create.
"I would just add, though, I think there's an important point that's lost on people: Truth Social is wide open right now in the Apple app store, and you don’t have to ask anyone’s opinion. There’s no big tech tyrant that can cancel you, you don’t have to go to a billionaire to ask permission. You’re let on: Democrat, Republican, whoever you are. And we’re not going to censor you for political speech, so we are accomplishing what the mission of our company is, which is to get this internet open back up, and we're glad that Elon is saying the right things. Let's see if he backs that up."
It's not yet in the Google store, because it's still a janky piece of crap. And while "there's no big tech tyrant that can cancel you" on Truth Social, there does appear to be someone there banning accounts for such thought crimes as making fun of Devin Nunes.
Nunes was back Sunday to whine to his good buddy Maria Bartiromo and call Twitter "a ghost town" again.
“I think you even said on your business show about a month ago that it's a house of cards. So for them to say they only have 5% that are bots and fake accounts, I think it's closer that they may only have 5% that are actually real people and real accounts," he said, referring to a bizarre theory floated by Musk over the weekend that "over 90% of daily active users" on Twitter might be bots.
(As of this writing, the tech CEO's pinned tweet is instructions on how to get a chronological Twitter feed, rather than curated via algorithm, and he just tweeted a poop emoji at Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. So this is fine.)
But Devin got some good news in an SEC filing by Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC), in preparation for its merger with Trump Media & Technology Group, Trump's media juggernaut that is theoretically going to put Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube out business, and which is the parent company of Truth Social. The document contains a clause labeled the “DJT/TMTG Social Media 6-Hour Exclusive," under which Trump has theoretically agreed not to cross-post the same content to Truth Social and Twitter at the same time, effectively giving Truth a six-hour exclusive on Trump's live tweets of "Fox & Friends."
Of course, he could simply change the phrasing slightly and get around the prohibition. (For instance, "You're fired, Devin!" could become "Devin Nunes is no longer an Employee of TMTG. Sad!") Or he could take advantage of the caveat allowing him to "post social media communications from his personal profile that specifically relates to political messaging, political fundraising or get-out-the-vote efforts at any time on any Non-TMTG social media platforms." After all, "political messaging" is kind of a broad catch-all for a guy who'll be running for president. Or he could just post the content directly to Twitter and bypass Truth altogether, LOL.
The filing is pretty funny, not least because of all the ways it contorts itself to disclose that the company plans to accommodate Trump and his proclivity to break shit, so the SEC can't say potential investors weren't warned.
Gallant corporate owners are expected not to tarnish the company brand. With Goofus, the bad behavior is pretty much baked in.
TMTG has entered into a license agreement with President Trump wherein neither the personal nor political conduct of President Trump, even if such conduct could negatively reflect on TMTG’s reputation or brand or be considered offensive, dishonest, illegal, immoral, or unethical, or otherwise harmful to TMTG’s brand or reputation, shall be considered a breach of the license agreement. TMTG expressly acknowledges the controversial nature of being associated with President Trump and the possibility of any associated controversies affecting TMTG adversely.
Meanwhile, in a section captioned "Risks Related to our Chairman President Donald J. Trump," TMTG's legal team has tried to cover all the ways shit could go sideways with Trump's manic hands on the rudder. Noting that many people have "adverse reactions to publicity relating to President Trump," the filing admits that "according to The Hill, only 30% of people surveyed would use a social media site associated with President Trump." On the flipside, there's a distinct downside to tying your entire brand to a septuagenarian who thinks exercise other than golf depletes the body like a battery.
Here's the section on Trump's "numerous lawsuits and other matters that could damage his reputation, cause him to be distracted from the business or could force him to resign from TMTG’s board of directors":
Also he tends to go bankrupt a lot and, hey, did they mention they can't terminate their relationship with him because "neither the personal nor political conduct of President Trump, even if such conduct could negatively reflect on TMTG’s reputation or brand or be considered offensive, dishonest, illegal, immoral, or unethical, or otherwise harmful to TMTG’s brand or reputation, shall be considered a breach of the license agreement"?
Oh wait, they did.
On the plus side, Devin's making $750,000 per year, plus a bonus if he hits his mark (hahahaha), and he gets to work with his old pal Kash Patel, who is also a director. So that's a bit of a sweetener for this massive cow pie.
[SFGate / Fox News / Newsmax / TMTG S-4]
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