KC Confidential

Twitter Results are being misjudged…

Tomorrow the short-messaging social network will reveal its numbers and the analysts will gasp, the pundits will swoon, and everybody will say that Twitter needs to be fixed.

But that’s not the truth at all.

By Wall Street standards Twitter’s a diving joke. A company that’s hit a financial wall with no obvious upside.

By cultural standards it’s a juggernaut, far exceeding the impact of Facebook and Snapchat, even Instagram.

How can this be?

You see our nation has gone topsy-turvy, it’s all about the money.

It’s ruined the arts and it’s ruining business. If you’re not making a ton of dough and increasing the number every quarter you’re falling behind, out of the conversation. And yes, an entity needs cash flow to survive, but how much? And isn’t impact more important than money, especially when it comes to changing the conversation?

Look at Tesla.

Anemic by automobile standards, gargantuan regarding impact, it took the electric car off the shelf and put it back into the conversation.

But Tesla’s stock is through the roof, for now anyway, defying all realistic fundamentals. Let’s focus instead on BMW, which has lost the sales crown to Mercedes-Benz.

BMW is a juggernaut of innovation. Do you think we’d see all those features in Hondas and Chevys if it weren’t for the bleeding edge developers? Of course not!

Not that automobiles are a perfect analogy.

The point being, someone has got to lead. Someone has to move the conversation forward and that all happens on Twitter. Continue reading →

She’s the left wing explainer in chief…

I’ve become addicted to the news. Not just the papers which arrive every day, whose apps I’m constantly checking on my phone, but TV, which I mostly catch via satellite on Sirius XM.

That’s right, there’s everything from Fox, CNN and MSNBC to Bloomberg, NPR and the BBC. I want to know what’s going on.

And so does everybody else.

As George Drakoulias famously said, he used to fight over bands, now we all fight over politics.

I did not see this coming.

The long national primary season, which seemed to start immediately after President Obama’s last electoral victory, resulted in two candidates who fought hard with Donald Trump emerging victorious and now seemingly no one is happy.

And it’s hard to say it doesn’t matter.

Want an abortion? Want corporations out of politics? Then Gorsuch in the Supreme Court will keep you awake at night.

Want to get rid of Obamacare? Want to get rid of the welfare state? Well, that turns out to be much harder to do. Turns out talk is cheap and that wall ain’t gonna be erected anytime soon.

So what we’ve got is a lot of people yelling.

On TV and in person. Figuring if they just shout loud enough, they’ll win. Not realizing no one who disagrees with them is tuning in anyway.

Then we’ve got Rachel Maddow who takes a different tack.

Yes, yes, she was excoriated over her tedious buildup to the Trump tax return reveal. However the truth is the media builds you up and then destroys you and if you believe it all you’ve got enough whiplash to end up in physical therapy.

And it’s weird playing the home game. With a President who constantly contradicts himself. Not only in statement, but policy.

But the whole world is watching.

America used to be the leader. Continue reading →

No one is bigger than the system…

You may think you rise above – that you’re better than the rest of us, know more, are entitled to more – but that’s not true. Furthermore, the nature of human beings is they want to tear you down to their level if they think you’ve gotten too big for your britches.

Bill O’Reilly lost contact with the working man, the same person he said he was speaking to in his show. And what a show that was, one in which he said he slung it straight, but if you disagreed with him you couldn’t get a word in edgewise and were labeled a nitwit.

Do we blame O’Reilly for our present national condition, one in which facts don’t matter and rational discourse in search of truth is out the window?

Yes – along with the rest of the right wing blowhards who should realize if you live in a glass house, you shouldn’t throw stones.

Like Rush Limbaugh, who lost his hearing from overusing opiates after denigrating drug addicts. Turns out right wingers O.D. just like Democrats, but for a long time the Republicans did not agree.

Not until their kids started dying and they became compassionate.

And expect them to come around to global warming and gay rights and so much more. That’s right, Democratic/left wing principles win in the end, because they’re people-oriented as opposed to money-oriented, they’re more about love than hate.

Did you see the WaPo story saying Trump voters pulled the lever because of racism? I believe that. Hell, it even exists in the institutions of higher learning, wherein Asians are excluded. You work hard to get ahead and then those in power don’t like it, they want to keep you down.

And Bill O’Reilly, despite constantly saying he was defending the little man, was doing anything but.

What do these people want?

To exorcise the government from their lives, to eliminate taxes so the corporations can rape and pillage with no restrictions – not worrying about safety whatsoever – so you can sit on your porch self-satisfiedly believing you’re free.

Come on.

Yup, that’s the truth. Send me all the hate mail you want. Continue reading →

Am I the only one freaked out about this?

I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was only 9 years-old, but I was plenty scared. I remember visiting my grandparents in Peabody, Mass., lying on the sloping porch of their three story abode, asking my mother what was gonna happen.

She said if they dropped the bomb we’d all die, and not to worry about it.

Is that the genesis of all my problems right there? Because this only made me more afraid.

And I haven’t been that afraid this century.

Haven’t been afraid for decades. Yes, 9/11 happened, but that was in New York, the first stop for Europeans, a bit more of a hop, skip and a jump from the Middle East, but the centralized city, Manhattan, makes a perfect target.

However if they’re lobbing bombs from North Korea, L.A.’s the place.

Don’t tell me to be unafraid. It doesn’t work.

Just like in the instance of my mom above.

I laugh when I hear people in the heartland give up their rights in the name of protection from terrorism. The assailants are gonna go there last. They’re gonna start in the big cities, where they can have the most impact.

So I’m driving on the freeway and they’re going on about the Mother Of All Bombs. ISIS is comprised of bad guys, I get it. But aren’t we pissing them off by doing this, the ones who survive? Aren’t we imploring them to commit acts of terrorism, poison our water, kill our children? That’s the first thing that went through my mind, revenge. Some of these people have been pissed for centuries, they can hold a grudge. And the truth is no one can keep America safe, it just can’t be done. Continue reading →