Has the Tide Turned Yet?
Quite possibly
Wow, what a news day!
I can barely keep track of everything going on, but it really seems like what they call a sea change. It’s hard to believe how much has happened since the Democrats suddenly gave up lying about Joe Biden’s dementia a year ago, and the pace is only quickening.
Congress just voted to defund PBS and NPR, which I’m informed is the end of the world by the people who just lost their meal ticket.
Big Bird is reduced to turning tricks. Bert & Ernie have fled to Fire Island. Even the surviving cast members of Are You Being Served? are in mourning.
My favorite counterargument is that rural communities won’t know what to do without publicly funded radio and TV. Libs think everything between NY and LA is Deliverance.
The Late Show debuted on CBS in 1993, with a humiliated but reenergized David Letterman showing his hated rival Jay Leno how it was done. Three decades later, the show is nothing but spiteful “jokes” about Trump being bad, followed by dreary interviews with interchangeable Democrats licking their wounds. It’s not a comedy show, it’s a support group for thwarted libs.
I’m old enough to remember when Stephen Colbert was funny — Strangers with Candy, google it — and I take almost no pleasure in the news that his show is ending next year.
Can’t wait to not listen to his podcast!
Jimmy Kimmel is angry about Colbert getting cancelled, because he knows he’s next.
He also wants us to know how he’s spending his summer vacation: #Resisting with the whole family!
Kimmel was actually less creepy when he was just a drunken pervert.
Shane Gillis told some funny jokes at an awards show, and the usual suspects are mad. Except unlike the first time this happened to him, he isn’t getting cancelled because the scolds have lost their power.
Who let him talk about it? The Founding Fathers, that’s who. Sorry, journos!
Jaguar just laid off 500 employees. Presumably including these guys. Gals? Whatever.
I’m vaguely aware of the latest Epstein “news.” Something about a drawing Trump supposedly did for him? Okay. I’m sure the journos have got ‘im this time.
By now, you’ve probably heard about the married software CEO and his human resources director who got caught cuddling with each other on the “kiss cam” at a Coldplay concert.
But did you know you’re required by federal law to make a meme about it? Here’s mine:
Do you get the joke? Nobody gets my jokes.
Yesterday, there was a written statement from that disgraced CEO going around, but it was a fake from a parody account called “Peter Enis.” As in… “P. Enis.”
I caught the hoax, and none other than TMZ cited me. Yes, now I can say I’ve been in TMZ.
This week I’ve learned a valuable lesson: Don’t put all your eggs in one YouTube.
Okay, this one will take some ‘splaining. But I think there’s a lesson here, if you want to avoid the same hassle I’m experiencing right now…
If you read the previous edition of this newsletter, you know I had some gripes about the latest A.I. news. A lot of stuff is happening very fast, and I don’t particularly care for most of it.
At one point, I referenced the following tweet from Elon Musk:
He’s really excited about these creepy new A.I. “companions.” So I used his tweet, which has an embedded video, as an example of what nauseates me about the whole thing.
Okay, at one point in the not-too-distant past, Substack users could embed tweets in text. For example, here’s the URL for the above tweet:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1945403192046768437
Instead of just printing out the URL as you see here, Substack used to automatically show you the actual tweet. If there was an image or video within the tweet, you’d be able to interact with it. That’s how it used to work.
Then Musk stripped out that embedding functionality, claiming it had something to do with Substack’s “data scraping.” I don’t really get it, and of course there’s nothing I can do about it.
But I wanted you to see that video because it illustrated my point, so I uploaded it to YouTube. I had a channel there — had, past tense — with almost no subscribers and very little traffic. I didn’t make any money off it directly. I only used it to upload videos I wanted to talk about in this newsletter. It’s Fair Use.
Whenever you upload a video to YouTube, it goes through some sort of automated process to check for copyrighted stuff. I’ve never had a problem with any of that. I uploaded the video, it checked out okay, and I embedded it in my newsletter and published it.
That was on Wednesday evening.
On Thursday morning, I got an email that my YouTube channel has been deleted and I’m locked out of my account.
“Severe or repeated violations of our Community Guidelines.”
Well, that’s news to me. I’ve never gotten any warnings from YouTube about anything like that. It came out of the blue.
Which video or videos violated their guidelines? I don’t know. They didn’t tell me. There was a link to a page where I could appeal the decision, which I did. It’s kinda tough to make your case when you don’t even know what you’ve done wrong, which is what I told them.
Hello, Kafka!
And here’s where it gets really fun: I’m also locked out of YouTube TV, which is how I watch cable TV. Including the cable channel I currently write for.
When I open up YouTube TV, this is all I can see:
So: I’m currently waiting to find out when I’ll be granted access to the cable channels I’m paying YouTube TV to provide. Including the show that pays me. I have no idea why this has happened, or how long it will take to fix.
And the best part is, I’m sure none of these decisions were made by a human being. A.I. is punishing me for criticizing A.I.
This sure does remind me of the “social credit” system in China. Over there, your access to services is directly based on how much trouble you make for people with power over you. If you stay in line, you’re fine. If you piss off the wrong person, look out.
Oh, and if you’re one of the approximately 17 people who think my jokes are funny, there will be no Week Sauce this week. I can’t give you the jokes that didn’t make it on TV unless I know which jokes did. Great job, YouTube.
Seems like a good time to switch to Sling TV! Hell, maybe I’ll just go back to cable. As bad as Comcast is, at least they haven’t cut off my service over something I posted to the internet.
Yet.
Being locked out of access to content you paid for sounds like grounds for a fun lawsuit to me! Think of the comedy material you might unearth in discovery. Time to get in touch with fellow sub stacker Matt Taibbi - he did great work on the twitter files, pissed off Musk, and is almost as funny as you are. Go for it!
Colbert is probably going to start a Substack like every other failed journo.