Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

This fight is for everything.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

After roe, women are no longer free.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

People are complicated. Love is not.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Good lord, these people are nuts.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night Open Thread: Slouching Towards Bedlam

Late Night Open Thread: Slouching Towards Bedlam

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Rupert don’t care, he’ll be dead by the time even plutocrats will be inconvenienced by anthropogenic climate change, and from all evidence he’s not real fond of his kids.

Back in 1974, I signed up for a course in population ecology, which included a half-page-long equation for predicting when an exploding population of microbes, voles, or bunnies would reach the tipping point where a 90% collapse was inevitable. Some of my classmates ran the calculations for humans, and the Shite Gets Real date was somewhere between 1976 and 2000, depending on the difference between ‘official’ data points.

I already suspected I wasn’t best suited for motherhood, but that gave me a nice succinct excuse.

Reader Interactions

87Comments

  1. 1.

    SiubhanDuinne

    In a staffwide e-mail Monday, Gary Knell, the society’s chief executive, wrote that a restructuring plan would be announced Tuesday. He added ominously, “Please watch your inbox for important information about your employment status tomorrow.”

    Fucking heartless bastards.

  3. 3.

    srv

    Nat’l Geo has been on the ropes for a long time, Murdoch just picked up what was left of it.

    Murdoch is just doing what any smart businessman would do.

  4. 4.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    In retrospect, it really seems like a lot of the Population Zero scare stuff was written by men who didn’t understand how desperately women wanted to control their fertility and honestly thought women wanted 4 or 6 or 8 kids apiece.

    Yeah, not so much. Even China is apparently not getting a huge number of takers on their new two-child policy.

  5. 5.

    Nate Dawg

    Me and the husband moved into a new apartment today, and timed it just perfectly with a torrential downpour and thunderstorm. The dogs are pissy, to say the least.

  6. 6.

    greennotGreen

    Around 1971 I took a social geography course. The teacher informed us that there would be no more ice ages because human activity had raised the temperature of the planet beyond the necessary critical temperature for re-glaciation. 1971. In all the years since, conservatives still haven’t caught on.

  8. 8.

    BR

    Well, the most reasonable study on the direction of global industrial civilization, The Limits to Growth (and also much maligned by everyone from Poppy Bush to right-wing economists), had a baseline scenario that reflected what would happen if we didn’t change any of our environmental or social policies to become more sustainable. In that baseline scenario, which we’ve tracked closely, global industrial production (the closest proxy for “growth”) reaches its maximum somewhere around 2020, with a steady (but not calamitous) drop off after that. So maybe your classmates were a bit off the mark, but we don’t have a lot of time before things get ugly.

  9. 9.

    joel hanes

    the tipping point where a 90% collapse was inevitable. Some of my classmates ran the calculations for humans, and the Shite Gets Real date was somewhere between 1976 and 2000

    Yes.

    We go on as usual, because what choice do we have? but we’re probably already dreadfully fucked, past several tipping points that will only be visible in the rear-view-mirror. Our descendants, if any, will curse us for doing too little as half the species on Earth are lost.

  10. 10.

    redshirt

    So it’s clear the oligarchs are going to try and control all the major sources of media. The internet as well, eventually, I assume.

    Leaving us, where?

  13. 13.

    NotMax

    Slouching Towards Bedlam

    Bonaparte?

    Mr. Napoleon Bonaparte?

    Please pick up the padded white courtesy phone.

  14. 14.

    Steeplejack

    @Nate Dawg:

    Gotta say, my experience, be glad you’ve got dogs. They usually adapt quickly if they see that the pack is intact. Cats, on the other hand, can go all Samuel L. Jackson: “Aw, hell, no, you did not just fuck with my space!”

  16. 16.

    Steeplejack

    @lamh36:

    Happy birthday! I made a mental note earlier this week and am glad to catch you now. Many happy returns of the day.

  19. 19.

    The Raven on the Hill

    Anonymous’ OpKKK has dropped its report; a quick skim does not reveal any senior elected officials. The introduction and overview, I think, is the most interesting thing here. I would say the report is a genuine contribution to our knowledge of the Klan.

    Also, responses to the released text of the TPP are beginning. Not a lot of news, except that nothing’s been fixed from the leaked version – in fact, it seems to have been made worse.

  21. 21.

    Goblue72

    On the one hand, screw Murdoch.

    On the other hand, it’s been 20 years since I’ve seen a copy of NatGeo anywhere except a doctor’s reception area, or in a 5 cent bin at a yard sale.

  22. 22.

    Amir Khalid

    Wonkette reports that no one now working at Hewlett-Packard has donated more than $200 to Carly Fiorina’s presidential campaign, and that only two HP employees have donated any money at all. So much unanimity among so large a group — 300,000 people — is unusual, but in this case maybe not surprising.

  23. 23.

    Nate Dawg

    @Steeplejack: do cats freak out with thunder as well? My older one used to jump in the bathtub and shiver when it stormed, but she’s old now and has run out of fucks to give.

  24. 24.

    piratedan7

    @Goblue72: they were making some decent TV content but you can expect them to be Foxified now is my guess, unless Murdock just got it for filler fodder on his other networks.

  26. 26.

    Steeplejack

    @Goblue72:

    Up until a few years ago, I would occasionally buy one off the newsstand rack because it had a map in it that I wanted (an enclosed, separate one, not a map on one of the pages). I love National Geographic maps.

  27. 27.

    piratedan7

    @Amir Khalid: well considering her history and her unrepentant attitude regarding the destruction of lives, profit and reputation in her wake, I’m surprised that a couple of folks admitted to the donation at all….

  29. 29.

    Steeplejack

    @Nate Dawg:

    Eh, some do, some don’t. I had one cat that didn’t like loud, sharp noises of any kind.

    The current housecat, now dozing at her workstation by my side, is pretty copacetic about everything. But she is old and getting a little hard of hearing, I think. Occasionally she does a bit of a double-take if I come up behind her. So I try not to “sneak.”

  30. 30.

    redshirt

    @piratedan7: Seems like it, sadly.

    I’m sad because the paper medium is rather loosely controlled. No one will change the paper in your hand, nor is it likely someone will yank it from you.

    But if you have to read something electronically, who’s to say who can control that entire communication loop, from hardware to software to coding to cat videos. It can all be controlled, centrally, at that.

  31. 31.

    Origuy

    @piratedan7: When you make a political contribution, you have to list your employer. Many of those 300K employees are not US citizens, so it’s probably around 100K eligible to contribute. As an HP employee since the Compaq merger, though, I suspect those two contributors weren’t around in the Fiorina era.

  32. 32.

    Brachiator

    @joel hanes:

    Our descendants, if any, will curse us for doing too little as half the species on Earth are lost.

    Or they will laugh at us as perpetual gloomy gusses who whined and moaned while overlooking solutions to environmental problems.

    Climate change is real, and humans have wreaked havoc around the world. But “the end is near” folk, whether carrying signs scribbled with Scripture, or waving reams of scientific papers, have always been dead wrong about their dead certainty that doom was just around the corner.

  33. 33.

    Nate Dawg

    I’m just pissed I didn’t get to attend the party at Christina Aguileras house as Hillary’s guest of honor.

  35. 35.

    Nate Dawg

    @Steeplejack: yah that’s basically my dog. She’s a 7 lb Sheltie (so extremely small and skinny) and has always been a bit of a cat–aloof and above normal dog things. She does get real ornery if startled and will pathetically snap at you if you do happen to startle her. It’s pathetic because she doesn’t make contact, and if she does, it wouldn’t hurt. In fact, she once lost a tooth snapping at me when I went to pet her. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  37. 37.

    Ruckus

    @greennotGreen:
    1971?
    In conservative years that’s brand new, the shinny hasn’t even wore off yet. Conservatives want to go back a lot farther than that. So 44 yrs would be something like 1871 as there are approximately 3 1/4 negative conservative years to every actual year, close as I can tell.

  39. 39.

    Mike J

    @Amir Khalid:

    Wonkette reports that no one now working at Hewlett-Packard has donated more than $200 to Carly Fiorina’s presidential campaign, and that only two HP employees have donated any money at all.

    I counted 17 in the October quarterly report.

  40. 40.

    seaboogie

    @redshirt:

    Polynesian boobies too

    I’m going to just sit here and fondle my non-ethnically-specified-boobs, just because I can, and because you find mammaries so titllating. Yep.

  41. 41.

    Mike J

    @Mike J: Also wondering why somebody who really likes to go on about how she’s not a Washington person has her committee HQ in suburban DC rather than back home in California. Hillary’s committee is in NY, Bernie’s is in Burlington.

  49. 49.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @seaboogie: Dog paw and 4 columns on the left ankle, bear paws on the right angle, the Chinese character for love between my shoulder blades. I have a number of piercings, the one I was referring to related to your original comment.

    ETA: My ankle tats are for my undergrad and grad schools. UW left, UCLA right.

  51. 51.

    seaboogie

    @BillinGlendaleCA: I think it’s Omnes – he of the Brideshead floppy bangs hairdo*…

    *per Omnes, I might add, when he was making a sally at our dear 92-year-old SP&T while she was aiming for a sexual mercy mission with Tommy. It gets very complicated here sometimes.

  52. 52.

    Ruckus

    @Mike J:
    She really isn’t anything.
    And she’s done such a great job that HP grossly overpaid her to leave. OK that first sentence is misleading. She’s a perfect example of how not to run a company but she got so over paid for fucking up HP that in conservative’s lower circles she’s a business genius. After all IGMFY is a perfectly normal conservative ideal and may in fact be a basic belief requirement to join their side.

  53. 53.

    seaboogie

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    Dog paw and 4 columns on the left ankle, bear paws on the right angle, the Chinese character for love between my shoulder blades. I have a number of piercings, the one I was referring to related to your original comment.

    ETA: My ankle tats are for my undergrad and grad schools. UW left, UCLA right.

    I don’t think that I ever want to see you naked. Unless I find myself terribly drunk, and then only in your discrete parts. Nah, scratch that. Never. Not Ever. It would just make me sad. ;-)

  54. 54.

    seaboogie

    @BillinGlendaleCA: Might be redshirt. In fact, probably redshirt. I just thought he never rested – the energizer bunny of commenters…

    I was commenting between two threads and missed the reference. Def, rs.

  57. 57.

    seaboogie

    @BillinGlendaleCA: You really have tats and piercings, don’t you? The only holes I’ve added to my body since I was born are two – one in each earlobe.

    I appreciate body art, but for me that is kind of like going to University. I could never decide on a major, so I never went. Blank slate here. Very conventional, unconventional girl here.

  59. 59.

    seaboogie

    @BillinGlendaleCA: Yay you – for all of that! I am nearly a total midwestern wuss – except for all of the crazy life decisions that I have made that confound my conservative family, and almost surprise me in retrospect. Do you think that moving from Vancouver to Florida (while the 2000 election was still being decided by Jeb! and SCOTUS) for the love of someone who was in neurological intensive care and not yet divorced (and then befriending his wife and family) was more or less adventurous than inking myself?

    Lover passed away 12 days after I sold my home and moved to FLA.

  60. 60.

    Keith G

    Like many studying political science in college in the seventies, I spent time reading books authored (separately) by Garrett Hardin, Lester Brown, and the Club of Rome. One of the Brown’s books was called In the Human Interest. One of Hardin’s books was Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle.

    An oncoming Malthusian catastrophe had mankind on the brink of survival. It was pretty stern stuff for a college freshman to read.

  62. 62.

    seaboogie

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    More adventurous and sounds more painful.

    Likely so. At least piercings and body art are a tangible expression that you can see on the surface (depending on the site).

  66. 66.

    CASLondon

    My first job after college was fact checking National Geographic TV scripts. Fond memories of getting three sources for every assertion of fact even for Sir David Attenborough films, which led me to phone calling people at the British Antarctic Survey and to having lunch with Dudley Moore and supervising his voice overs for NGTV Kids shows. Lots of my fellow doc tv friends came from this era.

    Its sad to contemplate this institution’s inevitable decline

  67. 67.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @raven: We finally started getting some rain again after the hurricane came thru and dropped an inch on us, even got a little over the past 24 hrs but it’s still way too dry here.

  68. 68.

    raven

    @OzarkHillbilly: I’m just glad the exterior painting and gutters got done before this started. We got our almost last bill and we are WAY over budget but we had lots of changes so that is to be expected.

  70. 70.

    raven

    @NotMax: True dat. I took the old kitchen counter, cut it down, and made a work table out of it in the basement. We also had a half a dozen 16ft pieces of 3/4 pine flooring left so I built an overhead rack down there to get them off the floor. I’m trying to switch back to DOING shit after watching other people work for months.

  72. 72.

    Schlemazel

    @srv:
    The people were doomed anyway, all Eeichmann did was make a fast-rising career for himself by doing what any smart officer would do.

    Yeah, I went there. These masters of the universe like Rupert are killing us all and your support with with glib bullshit.

  74. 74.

    Schlemazel

    According to google today is Adolphe Sax’s birthday. I played his invention for years & love the sound. Interestingly enough they list his birth as Nov, 6 1184 and his death as Feb 7, 1894. Either this is a previously unreported miracle or a couple of those Nat Geo fact checkers should apply quick!

  77. 77.

    raven

    @JPL: I’m determined to go to the game tomorrow since we are ins such dire straights one here and we still may go over to the Flats to see the Hokies play the Jackets Thursday since Beamer is hanging it up.

  78. 78.

    Cervantes

    @Brachiator:

    waving reams of scientific papers, have always been dead wrong about their dead certainty that doom was just around the corner.

    Can you cite a scientific paper that said with “dead certainty that doom was just around the corner”? (Thanks.)

  80. 80.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Keith G: Hardin’s big thing was that we had to let the global poor die off in famines and plagues, to save the rest of us, because there was no way to get them to stop breeding like rabbits. He was also one of the signers of the advertorial supporting “The Bell Curve” and railed against affirmative action.

    Nice guy.

    The thing is, it’s the global rich who have an outsize impact on the environment.

  81. 81.

    randy khan

    Local D.C. reports indicate that NatGeo did the layoffs itself before the Murdoch takeover, which is scheduled for later this month, largely because it wanted to offer better termination benefits than they thought Murdoch would offer, and that the majority of the cuts were in places where they knew Murdoch would cut, like legal and admin. The NatGeo chief even said something like “We take care of our own.” The irony of that reasoning is pretty stark.

  85. 85.

    Karen

    The one silver lining is that unlike before the internet, there are more sources for information. Nat Geo hasn’t had the cachet it had for a long, long time. Murdoch is just feasting on the remnants.

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