The act or practice of grossly misleading someone

All this week the Marketplace Morning Report on NPR has been marking the 75th birthday of the transistor. The birth happened on Dec. 16, 1947 at Bell Labs in New Jersey. Yes, a great deal of modern technology is based on the transistor, which became the silicon chip – I’m using silicon chips as I type this. I heard the series in five minute segments. I believe here is the whole 25 minutes. As I scanned through Leah McElrath’s twitter feed yesterday I saw several tweets of accounts of journalists being suspended. Since each is an individual tweet and she didn’t gather them into a thread I don’t have something there I can link to. She’s still there – for now. As one who has been critical of Elon Musk she is aware her account may be next. Suspending journalists from Twitter is enough of a big deal that Mark Sumner of Daily Kos wrote about it.

On Thursday night, Twitter—abruptly, and without notice or warning—began banning or permanently suspending the accounts of journalists. Those known to be affected so far span a wide variety of leading media platforms, including CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, as well as online platforms like substack. All that these writers appear to have in common is that they recently reported on stories connected to Twitter CEO Elon Musk.

Yeah, so much for Musk being a free speech absolutist. A few days ago Kos of Kos wrote that Musk is making a stupid mistake. Who buys Teslas? Liberals. It certainly isn’t conservative who hate the idea of a car that doesn’t run on fossil fuels. Who is Musk denigrating as he opens Twitter to a far right free for all? Liberals. Yup, the favorability score for Teslas has been dropping and is now negative. And that favorability is dropping faster among Democrats. Not surprisingly, Tesla stock is about 42% of its value earlier this year. Tesla shareholders are not pleased. In a post from two weeks ago Dartagnan of the Kos community reported:

The numbers are now coming in. Elon Musk’s quest to turn his newly owned social media platform into a welcome haven for Nazis, bigots, misogynists, and hate groups—all cuddling together beneath the trademark Blue Bird and defiantly waving the flag of “free speech”—is proceeding exactly as almost everyone predicted.

Dartagnan quoted a report by Sheera Frengel and Kate Conger for the New York Times based on research done by several organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. They added some numbers.

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day. Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Mr. Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day.

Twitter now seems to be the home of QAnon and Islamic State, among other bad actors. Dartagnan concluded:

Yes, there are ways to navigate around or ignore these scummy people but at some point, as Musk’s cesspool becomes more and more polluted, many will begin to ask themselves whether the benefits of using Twitter really outweigh the negatives.

Justine Musk, who web searches describe as Elon’s first wife (and sites will gladly share the full list of wives, girlfriends, and children), tweeted:

So let me get this straight. We are now supposed to step into the "marketplace of ideas" to debate + discuss if Hitler behaved poorly, or if women should be "raped + locked in cages"? Because these are conversations the culture needs to be having?

Back when I was in college – decades ago – I heard and mentioned in some class assignment that fusion energy would be a great thing in energy production. Unlike nuclear fission, fusion didn’t give off any pollutants. But that source of energy was still a few decades out. Lawrence Livermore National Lab made a big announcement this week of a milestone in fusion research. NPR reported they had achieved getting more energy out of fusion than the energy they used to make it happen. But then that report said they didn’t account for this energy need and for that one. So maybe that wasn’t the milestone. The US Department of Energy tweeted about the milestone, saying they had achieved fusion ignition. That is certainly a great accomplishment. That tweet led me to the press release put out by the lab. But commercially available energy from fusion is still a few decades out. April Siese of Kos reported renewable energy has reached an inflection point. An Energy Information Administration report says the US has 7.8 gigawatts of battery storage, expects to have another 1.4 GW online by the end of the year (in two weeks?), and a total of 20.8 GW of storage by the end of 2025. Battery storage is critical because solar panels produce nothing at night and wind turbines don’t spin when there is no wind. This big jump in storage is thanks to Biden and the Inflation Reduction Act he signed. Meteor Blades of Kos reported that in the Congress that begins in January there will be 149 Republicans who deny the science that says our climate is getting catastrophically warmer and human activity is the cause. That number is about 55% of all Republicans in Congress. It’s 110 in the House (19 of them newly elected) and 39 in the Senate (4 new).

It would be bad enough if all these lawmakers were merely fools. However, most of them know climatologists’ warnings aren’t fake news. This doesn’t stop them from continuing to regurgitate debunked propaganda that the fossil fuel industry has for four decades been paying shills to disinform the public about. Nor does it spur them to take legislative action to address what scientists say we must. They don’t care. And if fattening their wallet accompanies their not caring, so much the better.

In my opinion the situation is worse than them not caring – though that is still quite bad. I understand that for them a climate that wreaks havoc on those who aren’t them and their donors is a perfectly fine way to oppress people. Matt Wuerker of Politico tweeted a cartoon spoofing the announcement of fusion ignition. One scientist explains:

We took Elon’s ego and Trump’s narcissism and smashed them together ... It’s a bottomless source of energy!

Cleaning out browser tabs and sharing a couple of them. Bill in Portland, Maine, in a Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, reported Merriam Webster reported its 2022 word of the year is gaslighting. The definition is: “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.” The reason why the word was chosen is, “2022 saw a 1740% increase in lookups for gaslighting, with high interest throughout the year.” In a time when a lot of politicians push fake news the interest in this word makes sense. Because I occasionally listen to the podcast Gaslit Nation I’ve known about this word for quite a while. Amazing Maps tweeted a map of obesity in North America. About 30% of Michigan’s residents are obese. The worst states are Alabama, Kentucky, and West Virginia, which are at least 40% obese. A swath in the middle of the country – Texas to Iowa – plus a few more are about 38% obese. The least obese in America are California, Colorado, and Connecticut at about 28% obese. Most of Canada is the same or better than the US, with British Columbia and Quebec under 20% obese. Mexico is about 36% obese.