Yes, we are controlling the weather, thanks for noticing

I feel the need to start today’s post by issuing a mea culpa and an apology.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is right. We are controlling the weather. We’re just doing a really shitty job of it. And part of that falls on me.

As most of you probably know (at least, those of you who did not vote for Large Marge), the weather is an immensely complex system involving 1.2 x 10^44 molecules constantly banging into and tripping over each other in the earth’s atmosphere. 

For those of you who, like me, stopped paying attention in algebra after the arrival of puberty, that’s the number 1.2 followed by 44 zeroes. It’s a Very Big Number, is what I’m saying. And so it takes a lot of hands on the wheel to drive this thing.

I try to contribute as best I can. But mistakes were made. One time, for example, I meant to raise the temperature in Yuma by five degrees and ended up sending a cyclone to Ypsilanti instead. I totally fat-fingered that one. 

To be fair, the Jewish Space Lasers we’ve been using are really old and totally out of warranty. I mean, they still run on Windows XP, if that tells you anything. We’ve been asking for upgrades since Obama left office, but our IT guys are too busy trying to get George Soros’s wifi to work correctly. 

I think the greatest evidence that our weather control systems are failing is the fact that we keep sending monster hurricanes to Florida and yet still can’t seem to locate Mar-a-Lago or the governor’s residence on a map. But I feel like each cataclysmic climate event gets us a little closer, and eventually we’ll get there, if any of us are still above water by then.

You don’t need a weather, man

The Democrats Control The Weather meme is yet more evidence that we have achieved Maximum Stupidity (not that we needed more proof). The hard part here is figuring out who actually believes this stuff, and who’s just spreading disinformation for their own evil purposes. 

Are they really crazy, or are they just information zombies feasting on the atrophied brains of the extremely gullible? 

The manure spreader in chief is Elon Musk, who is using the platform he eviscerated acquired for $44 billion in Monopoly money to spread obvious falsehoods about hurricanes, FEMA, immigration, free and fair elections, and anything else he can dig up to rile up his 200 million devoted followers. [1]

While the notion that Serious Adults believe Democrats are controlling the weather is amusing in a dystopic sort of way, trying to convince people who are experiencing the worst moments of their lives to distrust the people who’ve been sent there to help them is just pure evil. Elon Musk has been vying to become the Biggest Asshole on the Planet for a long time, and right now there’s only one guy ahead of him. [2]

You can kind of forgive blatant stupidity. Blatant lying, not so much. Like the four rightwing podcasters working for Tenet Media, who were paid $100K per week to produce pro-Putin propaganda videos, then pretended to be shocked when it was revealed that the money was coming directly from Mother Russia. You’d think maybe getting paid in rubles and borscht might have been a clue. [3]

Whether you consider them Russian assets or merely useful idiots, these guys mostly reached people who were already three brain cells short of qualifying for paramecium status. As NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz writes, the useful idiots that do the most harm are the social media platforms that spread Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation, exposing them to people who might actually be influenced by it.

RT’s Tenet Media operation led to 16 million views of videos on YouTube. These videos also appeared on TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, and Rumble. These platforms benefit from the advertising revenues generated by the paid influencers. In other words, they profit from keeping their users ignorant about who’s feeding them the news on their platforms, even when it’s foreign propaganda.

Ugly little liars

Again, the biggest offender here is probably Musk’s Xitter, which – to its credit – publishes a list of the 100 accounts that have had the most Community Notes attached to their tweets. Community Notes is Elon Musk’s way of passing off content moderation to Xitter’s users after he fired the company’s trust and safety team. These random volunteers attempt to counter the firehose of bullshit with actual facts, god bless them.

Number 1 on the list, with 817 Community Notes, is a guy calling himself Concerned Citizen, whose Xitter handle is BGatesIsAPyscho – and yes, he misspelled psycho.

It’s a cornucopia of conspiracy theories about chemtrails, geo-engineered climate change, faked moon landings, 5G wireless signals killing butterflies, the evil machinations of the Rothschild family, 9/11 as an inside job, satanic globalism, and the inevitable anti-vaxx stuff. Pretty much an all-you-can-eat buffet of crazy.

As Meidas News’ Ron Filipkoswki points out, Musk himself is 55th on the list. Loyal Trump fluffer and rumored snuggle-bunny Laura Loomer is 15th. Putin Propagandist Benny Johnson is on the list (#81) followed closely by Large Marge (#82). White nationalists, notorious rightwing grifters, multiple Russian-media accounts, and the New York Post also made the top 100.

I think it’s admirable that people are attempting to fact check these liars, but that’s like using a bucket to bail out the Titanic. It puts a sheen of semi-respectability on a platform optimized to spread lies. And it’s damning proof that community moderation does not work – period, full stop.

But enough about all that. I’ve got to get back to cooking up a snowstorm over Oahu. It will be wild. 

Do you still use social media, and if so, why? Share your thoughts in the comments or email me: [email protected].

[1] Subtract the bots, nation state operators, useful idiots, and desperate Alpha Male Incels, and that number goes down to about 27.

[2] OK, maybe two guys ahead of Elon. And they’re BFFs!

[3] No, they were not paid directly in rubles. The money came via Russia Today and was laundered by Tenet Media.