the Quarterly News: 2023-01
No AIs were consulted in the compilation of this Newslettr.
The news continues to be awful. And, yet, the Newslettr will continue to deliver it.
Occasionally.
and now, the week’s tisatsar’s1 past few months’ news.
Some Guy from Long Island: Name recognition is everything in politics. And of the 435 US House members, only one2 has more name recognition than George Santos. Despite this publicity, Santos received just one campaign donation in 2023Q1.
Some Other Guy from Long Island: Donald Trump was finally indicted for something. The charges seem “trumped-up” to me. They are, roughly, “making an accounting error as part of committing a felony elsewhere”. Except that second felony, “campaign finance violations”, is something he hasn’t been charged with.
Balloon Narrative: Remember that month where everybody was convinced that a random weather balloon was a secret Chinese spying program? ( ref. CBS ) I certainly didn’t, until I checked my notes. In short: it was always a weather balloon, but the Democrats, the Republicans, and the Media3 wanted to pretend otherwise. So they did.
Confidential Information Narrative: Remember that month where every national politician was discovered to have “classified documents” stored incorrectly? I certainly didn’t, until I checked my notes. Trump, Biden, Pence4 and others were involved. People pretended like it was a big deal, until we moved on.
More recently, a leak of various “Top Secret” documents on Discord has gotten attention. We aren’t looking at them directly5, but have heard that the documents are largely mundane world-affairs reporting, similar to that found in most newspapers.
Musk Madness: I have commented on multiple occasions that it seems like Elon Musk is deliberately6 destroying Twitter. Nothing that has happened in the last few months suggest otherwise. Recently, Twitter disabled the ability for Substack to have Twitter embeds, which will decrease our coverage of that site further.
Super-Villain Narrative: If you asked an 8-year old the worst thing a political candidate could do, “destroy Disney World and replace it with a prison” might be the response. Yet, for some reason, that seems to be Ron DeSantis’s fixation. Of course, he isn’t going to actually do that, and people are likely to forget about this before the 2024 primaries start.
This should disprove any narrative about DeSantis being a unique political genius. But his campaign was never based on that, it was based on “being the only GOP option other than Trump”. Which, he still7 is.
And Finally, a New Thunderdome: Substack has launched its Twitter competitor, Notes.
and finally: 2023 Chess Championship - the world chess championship is half done. There is a certain lack of excitement due to the absence of the current world champion, Magnus Carlsen. However, the matches have been much more exciting, with five decisive results out of seven.
lichess.org is running “Thematic World Championship Arena” tournaments, based on positions from the matches, such as this one for Game 7.
The good thing about the tisatsar as a unit of time is that “nineteen times per year” and “every nineteen days” mean, approximately, the same thing. The problem of “biannual” does not occur.
We presume Nancy Pelosi is still better-known. the Newslettr is forbidden by its editorial policy from conducting polling on this topic. Certainly Kevin McCarthy and Hakeem Jeffries are not more well-known. Possibly AOC and MTG are better-known?
I’m salty about this, but I am not complaining. The evening news is 30 minutes long regardless of whether there is any news. Why not have Balloon Week?
According to Substack data, nobody clicks the links. So I won’t bother finding them.
I don’t want to look at the classified document leaks, because I might notice something actually secret hidden among the mundane news that most of the documents appear to be.
Musk could be destroying Twitter as a visionary who groks the harms Twitter does to society and is defeating it at considerable personal cost, or as a madman who wants to be King Of The Idiots and is going to run off 90% of Twitter customers becoming that.
Regarding other candidates: Nikki Haley isn’t going to lose because of her ethnicity, but she will lose because she’s a woman. Nobody likes Mike Pence. Asa Hutchinson, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Perry Johnson are all running to be “people you have heard of” rather than president. As far as the Scotts (Tim, Rick, and Phil), I give one of them a 1% chance. That is about it so far, though there will probably be a dozen other also-rans.