The selling of you. And me. And…

Facebook got everything it wanted out of Australia by being willing to do what the other guy wouldn’t

"What they don’t want to give up is the power: the power to pick winners (whether via algorithm or cash transfer), the power to decide what it’s willing to pay, and — most importantly — the power to maintain their main advantage as platforms, which is to aggregate huge amounts of free information and profit from all the ways they can organize, distribute, and monetize it all."

Brillant

Ron Johnson just dropped a ridiculous conspiracy theory at the Senate Capitol attack hearing

"Although the crowd represented a broad cross-section of Americans, mostly working-class by their appearance and manner of speech, some people stood out. A very few didn't share the jovial, friendly, earnest demeanor of the great majority."

 

Johnson is a Republican senator from Wisconsin, home of a great many jovial, friendly, earnest people notible for wearing cheese on their heads. (A number of them, over the years, have been my friends.)

The meaning of everything

This 105-Year-Old Beat Covid. She Credits Gin-Soaked Raisins.

“Fill a jar,” she explained. “Nine raisins a day after it sits for nine days.”

Doesn't happen like this in the movies

An “ammunition customer” walked into a gun shop in Louisiana the other day and started shooting. “I don’t know why,” says the sheriff. According to the Associated Press, here’s what happened next:

 

Seven other people, all firearms-trained employees of the gun store and shooting range, fired at Williams [the aforementioned customer] before he was killed outside the building, Lopinto [the sheriff] said. Two people were wounded.

 

So much for the “good guys with guns” solution to gun violence favored by the NRA and other “pro-2nd Amendment” folks. Seven firearms trained employees returned fire and six seem to have missed (maybe all seven, it really isn’t clear), two people wounded in the exchange. Imagine being caught in that crossfire.

 

Long ago in a now nearly forgotten century when my hands were a little steadier than they are now I could shoot expert ratings with rifles but still couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with a handgun, and that was on static ranges where nothing was moving and nobody was shooting back. It isn’t easy. Most shots in a firefight, except in the movies or at point-blank range, miss. Anyone in the neighborhood’s at risk. 

 

Duck. Better, run.

Awww

Supreme Court won’t halt turnover of Trump’s tax records

Some guys just can’t catch a break.

The world according to nobody

Larry Kudlow Suggests Texas Power Outages 'Consequence' of Biden's Presidency

"He's gone after the energy sector. You saw some of the consequences in Texas. That's just the tip of the iceberg."

And yes…thanks for asking…I am including Larry Kudlow as nobody.

In today's poultry news…

Teen’s Civil War reenacting chicken found in Alabama

“I went back into the Cracker Barrel and it was very hard for me to say this with a straight face, even though I was panicking: ‘Do you have cameras in the parking lot? I think someone stole my chicken…'”

If you're running out of things to obsessively worry about…

…or just want to see a collection of cool maps and graphs, not to mention be reassured the governmet does, in spite of everything, do some impressively excellent work when given the chance, drop by NOAA’s climate.gov web site when you have a bit of spare time .

Woes abound…

…at the Associated Press this Sunday morning: Headlines in just the first two sections of its web site include “electric woes,” “virus woes,” “water woes,” “winter storm woes,” and “power and water woes.” Admittedly, some of those woes occur in the same woeful state and all in the same woeful month.

 

I understand. February has always been my personal Kryptonite, and this year no different. But now it’s just one week until the end of it. And things are starting to look a little less woeful already.