Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

He really is that stupid.

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

Let there be snark.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

You are here: Home / Open Threads / TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: New Reality Show Promo Just Dropped

TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: New Reality Show Promo Just Dropped

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What it means, as Axios would say: Elon has realized he’s not gonna go to Mars on the US government’s dime, which means he’s not going to Mars. Founding his own Jonestown wouldn’t be much of a consolation, but at least the blast of social-media applause from his fanbois will help smother the narcissistic wound of getting globally (& deservedly) pwned by an Icelandic dude with muscular dystrophy.

… In meetings with landowners and real-estate agents, Mr. Musk and employees of his companies have described his vision as a sort of Texas utopia along the Colorado River, where his employees could live and work.

Executives at the Boring Co., Mr. Musk’s tunnel operation, have discussed and researched incorporating the town in Bastrop County, about 35 miles from Austin, which would allow Mr. Musk to set some regulations in his own municipality and expedite his plans, according to people familiar with Mr. Musk’s projects.

They say Mr. Musk and his top executives want his Austin-area employees, including workers at Boring, electric-car maker Tesla Inc. and space and exploration company SpaceX, to be able to live in new homes with below-market rents…

The planned town is adjacent to Boring and SpaceX facilities now under construction. The site already includes a group of modular homes, a pool, an outdoor sports area and a gym, according to Facebook photos and people familiar with the town. Signs hanging from poles read “welcome, snailbrook, tx, est. 2021.”…

Under Texas law, a town needs at least 201 residents before it can apply to incorporate, then approval from a county judge. Bastrop County hasn’t received an application from Mr. Musk or any of his entities, a spokeswoman said…  

[None of this seems new, but the WSJ claims its highly laudatory article has been ‘updated’.]

With a ‘blessing’ from Murphy the Trickster God, I can foresee some top-rank posturing between the Apartheid Princeling and TFG, if only TFG can convince Young Jared’s Saudi benefactors to spread a little more fiduciary balm…

Reader Interactions

295Comments

  1. 1.

    BruceFromOhio

    … if only TFG can convince Young Jared’s Saudi benefactors to spread a little more fiduciary balm…

    Oh, so stolen, that one is.

    me and a bunch of stupid assholes are going to start a community in the middle of the desert to either die or prove a very important point

    Please proceed.

  2. 2.

    David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

     Fordlândia

    It was established by American industrialist Henry Ford in the Amazon Rainforest in 1928 as a prefabricated industrial town intended to be inhabited by 10,000 people to secure a source of cultivated rubber for the automobile manufacturing operations of the Ford Motor Company in the United States. Ford had negotiated a deal with the Brazilian government granting him a concession of 10,000 km2 (3,900 sq mi) of land on the banks of the Rio Tapajós near the city of Santarém, Brazil, in exchange for a 9% share in the profits generated.[2] Ford’s project failed, and the city was abandoned in 1934.

  3. 3.

    trnc

    A new proposed mill town. Awesome. I wonder how long the villagers will allow themselves to be strung along before they realize it will never get past the first stoplight, if that far.

  4. 4.

    oatler

    I am a dull and simple lad

    Cannot tell water from champaign

    And  have never met the queen

    And I wish I could have what he has got

    And I wish I could be like Elon Musk

    THERE’S NO WATER IN THE SOUTHWEST

  5. 5.

    Betsy

    Oh good, a whole city from the guy who thinks that {underground car ferries that take a single car at a time through a single subway tunnel from a single point at one end to a single point at the other end} are the way to address car congestion on city streets above ground.

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ACXaFyB_-8s

  11. 11.

    Kay

    The Dominion lawyers are just so great. They never let up. Rupert Murdoch and the multimillionaire Fox celebrities went after the wrong company. Rue the day…

    Lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems and a group of media outlets argue that Fox News abused the redaction process and blacked out more than is warranted in the thousands of pages of legal filings and evidence made public in the defamation case it’s facing.
    The new court filings call for the release of pages of evidence that Fox lawyers want to keep secret.
    The redactions are displayed as large chunks of blacked-out text in legal filings and evidence made public in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News and Fox Corp. If Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis agrees with the arguments by Dominion and the media organizations, he could unseal the once-secret passages before March 21.

  13. 13.

    NotMax

    Not that she’ll ever see this but a shout out happy birthday to Mom’s sister. She turns 101 today.

    Switching gears, sometimes you feel like a nut….
    ;)
    .

  15. 15.

    Lacuna Synecdoche

    What with the new robber-barons in our new gilded age, I suppose it was inevitable that company towns wouldn’t be far behind.

  16. 16.

    Baud

    I think the Boring Company needs to prove its worth and construct the whole town underground.

    They can call it Morlock City.

  17. 17.

    Kay

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I hope the Musk employees recognize that now if they quit or get fired they have to uproot their family and move in order to work anywhere else. They also have to sell their house to a different Musk employee. They’re basically entering into a hugely restrictive non compete where Elon Musk controls their whole life because they’re….free thinkers.

  18. 18.

    jefft452

    “Bastrop County hasn’t received an application from Mr. Musk or any of his entities, a spokeswoman said…  ”

     

    More vaporware

  19. 19.

    NotMax

    @mardam

    Hershey, Pennsylvania is pretty nice, and can be considered an exception. Milton Hershey built the town and its amenities first before building the factory.

    Good things can also be said regarding George Westinghouse and his employees.

  20. 20.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kay: All I can think is that anybody still working for Musk (or signing up for this monstrosity) is going to get exactly what they deserve, good and hard. I know that sounds cold and heartless, but what kind of idiot does one have to be to enter into employment with such a narcissistic asshole?​

    eta: it would not surprise me in the least if there was a clause in the sale contract that said, if they leave they must sell the property back to the company…. No doubt at a heavily discounted price.

  23. 23.

    Kay

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    We have trouble getting managers and professionals to move here to work for exactly that reason- their employer has too much control. If the job doesn’t work out there are very few other job options within commuting distance. Leaving a job is one thing- moving your kids, selling your house, etc is another.

    Musk’s anti regulatory Right wing dream town is…..anti competitive. It traps his employees. Maybe that’s the only way he can keep them.

  24. 24.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kay: I’ll bet this put a smile on your face: Two leading Ohio Republicans found guilty in $60m bribery scheme

  25. 25.

    satby

    @NotMax: Pullman, in Chicago (natch) is a designated National Monument, and still a going neighborhood.

    Edit to add link.

    Also to emphasize that Musk will never finish this vanity project either.

  26. 26.

    Kay

    Given how embarrassing the Dominion revelations have been for Fox News and the Fox New multimillionaire media celebrities imagine what they are trying to hide with the redactions.

    This lawsuit is a public service.

  28. 28.

    Brachiator

    Mr. Musk and employees of his companies have described his vision as a sort of Texas utopia along the Colorado River, where his employees could live and work.

    So Musk fires you and you have to vacate your office AND your house?

    No thanks.

  29. 29.

    Spanky

    Yeah, I’m seeing Muskbucks as the next step, the only currency accepted in Muskville.

  31. 31.

    Kay

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    The lawyers for the corrupt pols argued that stealing 1.6 billion dollars from Ohio citizens is legal under Citizens United. That was their only defense- Justice Roberts pro corruption, pro racketeering decisions.

    I wish Republicans would get tough on crime.

  32. 32.

    WereBear

    @Baud: It’s what they want the whole US to be.

    I would like to sit down a two-decade Fox viewer and give them a general knowledge test. You know, the dementia kind. The one TFG did so well on.

    I’m asking for science.

  35. 35.

    Central Planning

    I met a dudebro at a tech conference and he had similar plans for his employees at his company – company-built homes, grocery store, school, hospital, etc. Still creeps me out thinking about him.

    Sadly he had a decent product, but fortunately there won’t be enough volume to make them a bigcorp

  37. 37.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kay: Ahh, a surefire winning strategy! I guess with the evidence stacked so heavily against their clients, it was the best defense they could come up with.

  38. 38.

    Kay

    When Hall learned that her fetus was developing without a skull — a condition that meant it certainly would not live and also increased her risk of hemorrhaging — she was forced to travel to Seattle, the closest place she could find an abortion appointment.
    “I’m very concerned for people who don’t have those resources, who will be forced to wait to get sick enough for a Texas hospital to be willing to treat them,” Hall said. “It feels like I’ve lived here my entire life, I’ve built my life around Texas, I pay taxes. Why doesn’t the state also care about me?”

    Had to travel from Texas to Seattle during a health crisis for standard, best practices, modern health care in the United States. This is no longer a good country for women. They get substandard health care.
    Texas women are really in trouble because of the geography. We can get you from Ohio to Michigan or Indiana to Illinois fairly cheaply and easily. Texas to Colorado or Washington is a much bigger lift. They’re really not safe in that state.

  40. 40.

    Geminid

    If he can leave ideology out of it, I could see Musk’s planned city being a success.

    Trump’s proposal is just a fantasy, a poor knockoff of the Saudi’s grandiose planned city of Neum(sp?).

  41. 41.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kay: ​ We Miserians have easy access to the free states of Illinois and Kansas. Kansas.

    I never thought I’d say that.

  42. 42.

    Michael Bersin

    How late nineteenth century of him. Not exactly conducive to union organizing, for all the wrong reasons.

    “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops,
    taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church,
    and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell.” – Pullman worker, circa 1894.

  43. 43.

    Kay

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Householder is really arrogant – his seat is so gerrymandered he isn’t accountable at all to voters- he was re-elected after being indicted. He was insolent in the trial. Completely unashamed of his behavior and basically daring someone to stop him. So although the case doesn’t make Ohio citizens whole on the money that was stolen from them and doesn’t hold the corporate thieves accountable – they were fined 250k which is nothing, it snagged that one career criminal so is a win, I think.

  44. 44.

    Baud

    @Geminid:

    What does success mean in this situation?

    If he can leave ideology out of it

     

    The Twitter situation suggests he can’t.

  46. 46.

    Another Scott

    @Geminid: Real estate agents might like it, if there is some sort of exclusive deal to limit competition.

    I hope that they have a good fire department, but don’t expect it – that’s communism you know…  (Bastrop County Complex Fire)

    [ Stupid autocorrect… ]

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  47. 47.

    Baud

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and Flipping the Bird.

  52. 52.

    Kay

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    i never thought about it until I got involved. It’s a real advantage to the midwest- you have states with full rights for women right next to states with limited rights for women.

    I’ve been driving my husband’s Jeep SUV so much I’m thinking about getting my own. I always went with miser economy cars because I’m cheap but his big Jeep is pretty nice for me and the ladies plus it’s assembled in Detroit and union made:)

  54. 54.

    Kay

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Every 5th sentence in the Dominion pleadings describes Dominion as “an American company” just to sort of rub in that the repulsive, immoral Fox employees destroyed a US company to line their own pockets. Such a fun lawsuit for me! :)

  56. 56.

    Geminid

    @Baud:  By success, I  mean building a lot of houses people want to live in close to a lot of jobs people want to work. This being done all the time in Texas, but in a more haphazard way.

    You are right though; if Musk micromanages the project like he micromanages Twitter, there will be problems.

    But I think it is a sound concept. Texas has an abundance of flat, buildable land. It does not have an abundance of water but its not that scarce either.

  59. 59.

    hells littlest angel

    How much money is being offered to women to move into these incel towns? Because if it’s not at least six figures, they’ll have a 50-to-1 ratio of men to women.

  60. 60.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: I don’t think the Fox people realized what they were doing when they centered their criticisms on one particular company. They’ve been getting away with the lying crap for so long I guess they thought they’d get away with it this time, too.

  61. 61.

    Baud

    @Soprano2:

    I don’t think they invented the Dominion conspiracy theory, but once it was out there they had to play to their audience.

  65. 65.

    hells littlest angel

    Key to the “freedom cities” will be the flying cars, which residents will need every time they want to go somewhere that isn’t a shit-hole.

  66. 66.

    hells littlest angel

    @Baud:Every woman who moves there gets a free cybertruck.

     

    Clearly Musk knows what the ladies like.

  69. 69.

    WereBear

    When the three-part Atlas Shrugged movie came out it gave me endless hours of entertainment, but it was from movie reviewers showing all their comedy chops discussing this disaster.

    With both the book and the movie(s) they couldn’t make it work in FICTION.

  70. 70.

    FridayNext

    Isn’t the Colorado River drying up?

    Why yes it is, I am sure that won’t be a problem. Water’s not important.

  72. 72.

    oldgold

    Another day older and deeper in debt,
    Saint Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go,
    I owe my soul to the company store.

  73. 73.

    James E Powell

    @Kay:

    Given how embarrassing the Dominion revelations have been for Fox News and the Fox New multimillionaire media celebrities imagine what they are trying to hide with the redactions.

    Could be I missed it, but I haven’t seen the FTFNYT or anyone else visit any Ohio diners to find out what RealAmericans® think of all this. Or if they are even aware of it.

  74. 74.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Kay: What is the employee’s partner supposed to do if they don’t work for Musk?

    We sometimes had trouble recruiting faculty at Iowa State because Ames had few jobs for partners with careers.

  77. 77.

    Geminid

    @Baud: Mainly, Musk can add the jobs and the money for land acquisition. The planning and physical construction would not be that challenging. That’s all been done before, many times.

    The problem with Musk is that he often thinks there is a better way than “legacy” practices, and that he knows it.

  78. 78.

    Baud

    @James E Powell:

    Just a private dispute. No public interest. Now, back to the trans debate….

    ETA: The media would usually be the first in there seeking access to redacted information.

  79. 79.

    Anyway

    @p.a.:

    21st century American billionaire “culture”: “libertarians” objectively pro-serfdom.

    My term for the future that Rethugs and their fellow travelers envisage is neo-feudalism. Very little agency for the individual. Enlightenment – pshaw, what’s that?

  80. 80.

    Betty Cracker

    Michelle Goldberg’s NYT column today addresses the same topic we discussed in a thread yesterday, i.e., Leonard Leo’s “Federalist Society of everything” scheme. (unpaywalled link) Goldberg sees the obsessive focus on “wokeness” as a sign of weakness.

    The entire Republican Party is banging that same drum 24/7, and maybe it’s not the vote-getter they think it’s gonna be. Here’s how Goldberg puts it:

    …I’m skeptical that anti-wokeness can be the basis for a durable mass movement. That’s not just because a recent USA Today poll found that a majority of Americans see the term “woke” positively but because wokeness is too niche a concern. The Federalist Society trained many young meritocrats who were willing to devote their lives to fighting legalized abortion. It’s hard to imagine the battle against neopronouns and the 1619 Project inspiring the same sort of single-minded intensity. Ronald Reagan used to describe conservatism as a three-legged stool, comprising social conservatives, fiscal conservatives and defense hawks. These days it looks a lot more like a pogo stick

    That said, I don’t think the plutocrats will abandon the GOP anytime soon — for all the yapping about social issues during the Trump years, the only real policy accomplishments were deregulation and favorable tax treatment for rich people and corporations. Defense hawks on the GOP side still exist but are more of an endangered species.

  81. 81.

    Kay

    The best part about the anti cancel culture ninnies is how incredibly seriously they take themselves and how they constantly describe themselves as “courageous” and “brave”:

    Each summer, UATX gathers curious minds from around the world to cultivate the habits of civil discourse. Via small discussion-based seminars, lectures, and social activities, our students join courageous academics and leaders to explore the great questions of our time.
    This year’s Forbidden Courses entail advanced inquiries into science and religion, race, gender politics, Anglo-American grand strategy, our moral judgments, debates within conservatism, and the state of evolutionary biology. Students will enjoy ample opportunities to meet with leaders from tech, natural science, cultural criticism, academia, and journalism.

     

    Incidentally, despite the shamless bragging and self promotion by these folks none of these topics are “forbidden”.  They’re courses that start with an assumption that standard Right wing tropes are true.

    You could immerse yourself in this “scholarship” at CPAC or by reading any Right wing pols Twitter feed. Their belief that being standard, conventional conservative Republicans is somehow “forbidden” in the US is just nonsense. This would be a lot easier (and require a lot less self congratulatory filler) if they would just admit that they have started yet another conservatve think tank. It’s fine! They don’t have to be ashamed! There are LOTS AND LOTS of far Right Republicans. They espouse the views of Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz. No young person has to pay for that- it’s free. 

  82. 82.

    Ken

    I see several others also spotted the company store possibilities. I’m sure some exciting modernizations are planned. For example instead of scrip, they’ll pay employees with a digital token which can’t be used anywhere but in town, and will require installing a huge coal power plant to run the blockchain.

  83. 83.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    UATX gathers curious minds from around the world to cultivate the habits of civil discourse.

     
    Keynote speaker: Donald Trump.

  84. 84.

    artem1s

    They say Mr. Musk and his top executives want his Austin-area employees, including workers at Boring, electric-car maker Tesla Inc. and space and exploration company SpaceX, to be able to live in new homes with below-market rents…

    Jeebus help them. So basically he wants a Dust Bowl era Company Town where the employees can never leave because they forever indentured servants to the boss. I guess if his fanboys are dumb enough to fall for it…

    And good luck keeping a company going that can’t get access to a reliable power grid. The folks in Austin are going luv this guy the first time they overload the grid and take down half of the state with them.

  86. 86.

    Immanentize

    @OzarkHillbilly: The Texas Colorado is a meandering low water river which is often unnavigable in the summer. There is a series of hydro dams on the Colorado in the Austin Area ending with “Town Lake” — now, I think renamed to Lady Bird? Austin is up-river from Bastrop.

    Fun fact — EVERY lake in Texas but one (“Caddo” in East by God Texas) is actually man made — mostly by dammed rivers.

  87. 87.

    Geminid

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Partners who don’t work for Musk’s companies can always commute to Austin or it’s closer suburbs. There are jobs there, and I expect plenty of Austin’s workers are commuting from farther than 35 miles already.

  88. 88.

    Soprano2

    @OzarkHillbilly: I notice that the state legislature hasn’t brought up the idea of prosecuting women who are trying to leave the state to get an abortion this year. I hope they dropped that idiocy for good.

  90. 90.

    Kay

    @Betty Cracker:

    Maybe someone at the NYTimes will read her column about how antiwokeness is an elite indulgence because no institution has done more to promote this panic than the NYTimes.

    It’s a joke. Every week, 90% of their op ed writers. They actually hired a full time anti woke warrior.

    Little or no coverage or investment in that paper in covering how women have been pushed back 70 years but they’ll happily spend a million dollars paying the anti woke ninnies. It is now YEAR SEVEN of these people trying to convince Americans that the Oberlin College Student Council and students who misbehave at Yale Law school are an existential threat. Ninnies.

  91. 91.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: It’s a fun lawsuit for all of us, Kay. I can’t wait to see what’s under the redactions. My only disappointment so far is that the rest of the press stubbornly refuses to admit what we can all see now without question, which is that Fox “News” is an entertainment network, not a news network, and should be treated as such.

  92. 92.

    Soprano2

    @Baud: True, but they could have been smarter about it by being deliberately vague when they talked about it. Singling out Dominion in their reporting was a huge mistake. If they had a better legal department it never would have happened. Or maybe legal was screaming at them, and they did it anyway for ratings.

  93. 93.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    Sounds like an excellent place to build his space laser and destroy humanity.

  94. 94.

    Geminid

    @Immanentize: Virginia has only two natural lakes: Lake Drummond in the middle of the Great Dismal Swamp, and Mountain Lake west of Roanoke.

    There is good kayaking in Lake Drummond and the water’s around it.

  95. 95.

    Soprano2

    @Immanentize: What’s funniest about TFG’s idea is that he thinks somehow they can keep people out, and only have MAGA’s there. Of course it’s a non-starter anyway, because I think they’d have to change the law to allow building a city on public land. The “keep out stuff from China” is particularly funny, because that would mean no cell phones or computers! LOL

  96. 96.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    …which would allow Mr. Musk to set some regulations in his own municipality…

    “I owe my soul to the company store”.

    I’m certain that a pliant Texas legislature will be happy to limit wrongful termination/wrongful eviction damages in the Musk municipality to $1 and a kick in the Plaintiff’s nuts, said limitations to be given constitutional muster by ever cooperative Textard judges at the state and Federal trial and appellate levels.

  97. 97.

    Shalimar

    @Baud: Musk adds value because there are 10s of thousands of idiot fanbois like my brother who will move to a Musk-controlled city without even having a job.  Whether having that many drug-addled male lunatics in one place is a good thing….

  98. 98.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    This is their example of thought leaders who start with an open mind and no preconceived notions:

    At present, relations between men and women are shot through with a dreary political moralism. There is little sense of play, or delighting in sexual differences. How did we get to this point? Whence our determination to feminize the male, butch up the female, and conceive the act of love on the model of a legal contract?

    Facts not in evidence, Baud! WTF? The course BEGINS with an announcement that everything the antiwoke warriors believe is FACT? The whole catalog is like this.
    They’re bad thinkers. All their shit is contradictory and incoherent. They are EXACTLY what they accuse others of being, and it was inevitable that’s how it would be because their concept and theory is garbage. It won’t work.

  100. 100.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Immanentize: Yep, knew that about the lakes/reservoirs. I have never seen this Colorado, know very little about it other than it has several reservoirs on it. Does not surprise me in the least that it gets so low in the summer, it is Texas after all.

    I don’t know about any aquifer they might tap into. I’m pretty sure the Oglalla doesn’t get that far south and even if it does, it is shrinking fast because of over use for irrigated farming.

  107. 107.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Baud:

    What if NFTs were a town?

    I just want to give you some love on that one. I actually spit out my coffee.

  109. 109.

    Kay

    @Soprano2:

    They work for themselves. I mean, most of us do but we don’t run around pretending we’re holding up Liberal Democracy on our narrow, bowed shoulders.

    Obama poked fun at how seriously they take themselves, which is why they resented him so much:

    During Tuesday night’s Press Conference, President Obama teased a member of the press corps who tried to follow up on a colleague’s unanswered question. Obama asked Jake Tapper of ABC News: “Are you the ombudsman for the White House press corps?”

  110. 110.

    artem1s

    @OzarkHillbilly: ​
     

    they must sell the property back to the company

    LOL. Why do you imagine the serf will get to OWN their own property. The article didn’t say anything about owning homes. they referred to renting them. It’s probably going to be a month to month lease deal where the company can evict them at any time.

  111. 111.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    relations between men and women are shot through with a dreary political moralism. There is little sense of play, or delighting in sexual differences.

     

    My old college pick up line.

  114. 114.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: There are two teachers in our school system who are suing over mandatory diversity training. They just lost round 1 of their lawsuit. I asked one of my Jazzercize teachers who is also a teacher in Springfield what that training is like; she said it’s a two hour class. She also knows one of the teachers because they’re in the special ed area like she is; she said this woman is known as a shit-stirrer already. So for two hours these women had to listen to something they didn’t agree with and they decided that was something to sue over. Just whiny babies, every one of them, crying because they had to listen to something they didn’t agree with in order to have a job. They say they were asked to commit to equity and being “anti-racist educators”. Oh, the horror of having to promise not to be a racist!

  115. 115.

    Steeplejack

    @Soprano2:

    I think the Foxbots were led into singling out Dominion because that’s what their blowhard sources—e.g., Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani—kept yammering about.

  117. 117.

    Kay

    Whence our determination to feminize the male, butch up the female, and conceive the act of love on the model of a legal contract?

    I’m going to ask my 20 year old and his GF this and they’re going to tip their heads like inquisitive Golden Retrievers and just gaze benignly at me, like they’re indulging a nut case.

  119. 119.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Soprano2: Just whiny babies, every one of them, crying because they had to listen to something they didn’t agree with in order to have a job.

    Like anti-union training in the retail sector? Cry me a river.

    @Kay: Whence our determination to feminize the male, butch up the female, and conceive the act of love on the model of a legal contract?

    What the fuck is “whence?”  I refuse to Google this particular archaic term.

    Also, too, letting people choose their mode of self-expression does not feminize males or butch up women per se.

  120. 120.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @hells littlest angel:

    How much money is being offered to women to move into these incel towns? Because if it’s not at least six figures, they’ll have a 50-to-1 ratio of men to women

    As they used to say in Alaska, “the odds are good but the goods are odd”.

  121. 121.

    Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony

    @FridayNext: Austin is not that far from the Gulf of Mexico. It gets a decent amount of rain. It isn’t really desert.

  123. 123.

    artem1s

    @OzarkHillbilly: ​

    @Kay: I’ll bet this put a smile on your face: Two leading Ohio Republicans found guilty in $60m bribery scheme

    Baby steps. If they don’t go after First Energy and DeWine next then it won’t really help Ohioan’s who have gotten screwed by this Bill that was designed to help FE pay the upkeep on their failing nuke and coal plants. My electric bill doubled when this passed. And I’m not even a FE customer.​
    To date, neither Randazzo nor executives from FirstEnergy or FirstEnergy Solutions, now called Energy Harbor, have been charged with any crime.​​

  125. 125.

    jonas

    Up here near Syracuse, NY, the Oneida Indian nation operates a huge hotel-casino complex with a PGA golf course and everything, and this past year, they put up a bunch of apartments and townhomes near the casino in order to fill vacant jobs — esp. ones like housekeepers, bartenders, custodians, etc. It’s a semi-rural area with very little affordable housing for minimum-wage earners like these and so the tribe offers them subsidized housing to improve recruiting. They look pretty nice from the outside at least, but of course the deal is that you can only stay there as long as you work for the casino, so if you’re fired or quit, you also lose your affordable housing. Good deal for workers and their families? Or essentially trapping vulnerable people in jobs they might want to leave but now can’t? YMMV.

  126. 126.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: It’s just so crazy making that the people who are supposed to tell us about what’s happening in the news refuse to acknowledge huge news in their own industry, which is that a whole network that claimed to be a news organization is really just an entertainment channel. I mean a lot of us already thought this was true, but now we have definitive proof, and yet they still refuse to actually see it or admit what Fox is.

  127. 127.

    Ken

    @WereBear: When the three-part Atlas Shrugged movie

    Did they actually finish all three parts? I know there’ve been about three different projects, and that some flamed out after the first movie. Did they just bundle three Part Ones together and market it as the Atlas Shrugged Trilogy? That would be on-point for libertarianism.

    It would also be similar to the DVD edition of the animated Lord of the Rings that consists of the Rankin-Bass made-for-TV Hobbit and Return of the King movies, sandwiching Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings. As one reviewer said, imagine a parent who buys that for their kids…

  128. 128.

    Kay

    @Soprano2:

    Everyone should sue over all training, because no one is the boss of anyone else and no one has anything new to learn.

    I always feel really Pollyannaish over this RAGE at training because I sort of like continuing legal education. The fact is none of us would do it if it wasn’t required and I always learn something. I listen, take notes, you’re there anyway why not see if it’s worthwhile?

    Maybe these people know everything already. I’m embarrassed at teachers whose position is “I cannot be expected to learn anything”. Christ. Find another profession.

  129. 129.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @James E Powell:

    “In vacating this verdict and dismissing this case, we are distinguishing NYT vs Sullivan, holding that telling destructive lies for profit does not rise to the standard of maliciousness.”

    – Justice Samuel Alito, authoring the majority opinion

    Chief Justice Roberts concurs in result only.

  131. 131.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Soprano2: a whole network that claimed to be a news organization is really just an entertainment channel

    “Entertainment” is an odd term for performative outrage.

  134. 134.

    Kay

    @Soprano2:

    I think it hits really close to home. It hink it’s probably true that CNN delays election calls to juice ratings, which is one of the allegations that came out of this. There’s no real structure for accountability in media, as a profession. They don’t risk a license or some kind of oversight or discipline action. Nothing happens to them. They make huge errors and there is or isn’t a weak apology (mostly not even that- mostly just a defensive attack on the critic) and they all remain safely employed and it’s on to the next topic.

  135. 135.

    Geminid

    @Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Wikipedia tells me that Austin gets 34.2 inches of rain a year. That will be allow for a fair amount of growth once they get around to managing water use efficiently. They may eventually need to build more reservoirs in the Hill Country.

  137. 137.

    Betty

    @Soprano2: You have to wonder what kind of teachers they are with that attitude. One teaches special ed? One of the areas addressed by DEI training. Just wow.

  141. 141.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Geminid:

    Managing water use in denser exurbs is communism.  Every neighborhood is entitled to mandate exquisitely manicured landscaping, an 18 hole Jack Nicklaus-inspired golf course and a giant signature entrance at the locked gates.

  144. 144.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @OzarkHillbilly: I actually have a lot of complicated feeling about my own gender expression. I’m not Trans, precisely, and I don’t claim to fully understand what Trans people must go through. My own personal expression is very cis.

    Still, I can appreciate that people ought to be free to express the way they feel. Also, the same tools going after them are going after women, racial minorities, immigrants, my fellow homosexuals, and anyone who works for a living.

    Solidarity seems like it ought to be a priority.

  147. 147.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    Whence our determination to feminize the male, butch up the female, and conceive the act of love on the model of a legal contract?

     

    I bet it was because of these four libs.

    Imagine a group of four people sitting at the Harvard Club for lunch in midtown Manhattan,” he said in a 2020 Teneo video: “a billionaire hedge funder,” “a film producer,” “a Harvard professor” and “a New York Times writer.”

  148. 148.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @jonas:

    Recruiter pitch:

    “And in our company town of Muskville, each block has a rifle range with robotic lawn jockeys that you can shoot at as targets.  Sounds fun, right?”

  150. 150.

    Frankensteinbeck

    A Musk city is a hilarious non-starter.  If it somehow survived the construction phase, not enough people would want to live there, and their actions would destroy it, like every other Galt’s Gulch plan.  In this case, it would be management destroying it, since Musk would do his damnedest to force employees to live there.

    But it’s a literal non-starter, because I see he hasn’t filed for it and is just running his mouth again.

    @Baud:

    once it was out there they had to play to their audience.

    That’s specifically what they say in the released messages.  Fox has to repeat back to their viewers what the viewers believe, or they’ll leave Fox and go somewhere else.  That was the money angle, not it being a profitable story.

    @Kay:

    There is little sense of play, or delighting in sexual differences.

    In case anyone doesn’t speak conservative, ‘play’ means boys’ club sexual harassment.  Oh, and date rape.

  151. 151.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Baud:

    I bet it was because of these four libs.

    Imagine a group of four people sitting at the Harvard Club for lunch in midtown Manhattan,” he said in a 2020 Teneo video: “a billionaire hedge funder,” “a film producer,” “a Harvard professor” and “a New York Times writer.”

    That approximates the least woke gathering I can imagine.

  154. 154.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: One would think. Though the connection between the first amendment and clothing is less obvious than, say, the connection between the first amendment and buying politicians political ads.

    @Baud: Yeah, I saw that floating around yesterday. I just needed to point out how weak it is on the premise alone.

  155. 155.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @The Kropenhagen Interpretation: ​ people ought to be free to express the way they feel.

    And why would any one have a problem with it? It’s fear I guess. Fear of what? Catching it?

    My mother’s favorite cousin was a lesbian in a life time partner ship. One of the highlights of every visit to Dallas was seeing Bobby June and Maxine. Funny how none of us 6 kids caught the gay virus. The same for my sons who loved my lesbian roommate.

    eta in hindsight my Southern Baptist grandmother did not approve, but she never approved of most of the things Ma did and Ma didn’t give a shit.

  157. 157.

    Jinchi

    where his employees could live and work.

    Yikes! So he really does want to kick people out at will.

    Nothing says Utopia like your boss owning your house.

    How would you like to be calling HR asking why the biometric keys to your house no longer work.​

  159. 159.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: They say their First Amendment rights were violated because the trainer disagreed with things they said and told them they were wrong. The horror, they had to hear someone disagree with their viewpoint! These people who are upset because they had to take training that asked them not to be racists.

  160. 160.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @OzarkHillbilly: And why would any one have a problem with it? It’s fear I guess. Fear of what? Catching it?

    Specifically with respect to Trans people; the most common fear of the men I know who are the most vocal is that they will be attracted to a woman, undress them, and (gasp!) a penis.

    They might drop dead right on the spot.

    eta in hindsight my Southern Baptist grandmother did not approve, but she never approved of most of the things Ma did and Ma didn’t give a shit.

    Good.

  166. 166.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Baud:

    It’s only the right thing to do.

    As a condition of your employment, you live in Musk rental property (which includes utilities and an ISP that includes your cell service on a MuskPhone), all of  which will be conveniently deducted from your pay.  Your pay will go into your account at MuskBank, you will grocery shop at MuskCo, and your retirement savings will be through the town square brick-and-mortar MuskBroker. You will be allowed up to three visitors per week through the gate, no outside deliveries allowed….

  167. 167.

    Kay

    You really have to read the antiwokesters to fully appreciate how seriously they take themselves and hwo self congratulatory they are;

    After much consideration, I am tendering my resignation from The Daily Wire, a publication to which I dedicated my time and passion as an investigative reporter for the last six months.My interest in the transgender debate became all-consuming when I realized that so many of our trusted institutions—the mainstream media, government, academia, civil rights and gay rights organizations, big tech, and the medical establishment—were misled on this issue and were misleading the public in turn. As a pro-choice atheist who has consistently voted Democrat throughout my adult life, this realization, as I’ve written, was nothing short of world-rocking.

    You’ve probably never heard of her, because she writes for a far Right outlet with, I don’t know, maybe 100,000 readers but she felt the need to write a 1000 word essay about how principled she is when she changed jobs. Probably a good career move though- the anti trans nuts on the Right get nuttier every day. I don’t blame her for seeing that as a career risk, but do we all have to go along with her delusion that is somehow about Democracy and Debate? It’s her dumb career. We all have one. Maybe she could talk to her friends about leaving one far Right rag and moving to another? It’s not a matter of national interest.

    She has “devoted 6 months” to this. Guffaw. I just “devoted 6 months” to finding someone to add a bathroom to a house. I will now pen a 1000 word essay about it.

    Insufferable people.

  169. 169.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    On the” beautiful Colorado River”,  the Colorado that’s drying up and going to be subject to even uglier water rights wars as time goes on?  That Colorado River??

  170. 170.

    Albatrossity

    American oligarchs seem to have a thing about building their own version of Utopia. Just off the top of my head I can think of Fordlandia, Coltsville, and the lovely town of Post, TX.

    Wankers all.

  171. 171.

    Soprano2

    @OzarkHillbilly: My husband had a lawyer friend who I am convinced was a deeply, deeply in denial homosexual. He had a particularly vicious streak when it came to gay people, and he never had a good relationship with a woman as far as I knew.

  173. 173.

    OzarkHillbilly

    FTR: I am disappearing to NOLA for some serious granddaughters time for the next 11 or 12 days. Enjoy the peace and quiet my absence will bring you for as long as it lasts. I will be back.

  174. 174.

    JaneE

    Company towns?  Only rental housing because the company owns everything?  What could go wrong with that?

    Not a particularly good idea with the most altruistic and benign of bosses.  With madman Musk? You got to be kidding.

  176. 176.

    artem1s

    @OzarkHillbilly: ​
     
    The current OH AG isn’t going to do anything about First Energy’s corruption, He’s a OH MAGAt toady, just like DeWine. The OH GQP hated Householder because he wasn’t their chosen Speaker. He’s providing cover for FE – they threw his ass under the MAGAt bus long ago.
    But this is a perfect case for the DOJ to go after Citizen’s United. Householder’s lawyers literally claimed SCOTUS/Roberts gave them permission to bribe public officials under CU. And it’s a great case for a class action civil suit. FE has been mismanaging and causing harm to the citizen’s of Ohio since deregulation and dismantling of public utilities. Their lack of maintenance already caused one blackout that affected the entire east coast. They have been spewing coal ash across southern OH for decades because they refuse to shutter that coal plant. And they missed a football sized hole in the containment tank of the Davis Besse Toledo nuclear plant sitting the largest source of fresh water on the planet. That’s why all the citizens of the state are paying these extra electric fees. Because they don’t want to have to pay for it’s upkeep and won’t shut it down.

  178. 178.

    glory b

    @James E Powell: Can I once again air my bone to pick with this? They seem to always land in Youngstown OH, and speak only to white people.

    You’d never know that Youngstown is actually majority minority, would you?

  179. 179.

    Jinchi

    @Kay: ​
     “As a pro-choice atheist who has consistently voted Democrat throughout my adult life”

    This is an entirely believable statement from a woman who has dedicated the last six months of her life working for the Daily Wire attacking trans people.

    I now subscribe to all her views.

  184. 184.

    Kay

    @Jinchi:

    Oh, who knows, Maybe she’s telling the truth. Most people don’t announce their boring ideological shifts Right and tactical job changes like it’s earth changing news so we don’t really know how common this is.

    I don’t have any problem with ambitious careerists. I’m all for whatever makes people happy. I have a problem with people pretending that’s some kind of wildly courageous ethical stance. She worked for the Right wing outlet until it looked like the violent rhetoric around trans people might be career damaging in her new posture as “brave contrarian liberal”, so she quit. Big deal.

    Do they hear themselves? They’re insufferable. Give me the blue haired 20 year old social worker any day. She’s less annoying and not NEARLY as self important.

  187. 187.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @JaneE: A lot of bad ideas come around again because people forget why they were rejected in the old days. Company towns, unregulated financial institutions, child labor, poll taxes, and so on and so forth.

    (The good part about people trying to wipe out regulations is that it ends up providing object lessons in why those regulations were written in the first place (first draft in blood, as they say). The bad part is the widespread, catastrophic collateral damage caused in those object lessons.)

  189. 189.

    gene108

    @Soprano2:

    My only disappointment so far is that the rest of the press stubbornly refuses to admit what we can all see now without question, which is that Fox “News” is an entertainment network, not a news network,

    I gut feeling is Fox News isn’t the only “news” outlet where media personalities and columnists or producers or executives say a lot of shit in private that they really don’t want the public to know about.

    I doubt Fox News is unique in that CEO’s tell the rest of the organization what to cover or not cover based on ratings or not pissing off advertisers and so on.

  190. 190.

    Kay

    @Jinchi:

    She’s going to continue to work for a whole set of well funded Right wing groups including the Koch funded “Mothers Against Public Schools” or whatever. She’ll get paid. The antiwokes are flush with Right wing cash. We can now watch them all try to thread the needle between their allies who want to outlaw trans people and their supposedly “liberal” beliefs. We’ll see more carefully calculated distancing, I suspect.

  191. 191.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Soprano2: My family was friends with one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. He worked with my father for years. Then one day he broke off his engagement to a very lovely woman, quit his job and joined a seminary. Looking back with educated eyes it is now obvious that he was gay. It was not denial in his case, but an attempt to deal with his “sinful” thoughts and desires thru immersion in a religious life.

    Last I heard he was working at the Vatican. I would like to think he has found happiness there, he certainly deserves it, but I rather doubt one can live happily while denying the most basic parts of one’s self.

  192. 192.

    kalakal

    Musktown, Peonville, MuskyAcres? Whatever they should build a big, beautiful wall around it with only one entrance called…

    Elongate

    I’ll see myself out

  194. 194.

    Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)

    @Another Scott:  “I hope that they have a good fire department, but don’t expect it – that’s communism you know…”

    I’ve read that actually the most cost effective thing for fire departments in suburban areas to do is just have enough equiment and personell to prevent fires from spreading to adjacent dwellings and use the “big” savings for rebuilding the totaled houses. I’m sure that’s what the Musk-dwellers would want. What could go wrong?

  197. 197.

    rumpole

    MAL, right now.

    “Why didn’t I think of this?  Jr. you have no imagination.  Now give me those pageant pictures of your sister.”

  198. 198.

    Betty Cracker

    @Kay: I don’t think she’s read the room correctly. For people who want to monetize anti-trans panic, it’s not only okay to be a smug, self-righteous busybody like that woman is — it’s a requirement! But you’ve got to be willing to go whole hog. Even minor equivocation isn’t allowed. She’ll go broke.

  200. 200.

    kalakal

    The Cadbury’s built a ‘model village’ for their workers called Bournville

    It’s now a suburb of Birmingham and is pretty nice “one of the nicest places to live in the UK”. For 1893, height of Victorian grinding the poor, it’s amazing.

    One quirk is that the Cadbury’s are Quakers and it’s dry. These days the place is ringed with pubs and booze stores.

  206. 206.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @JaneE:

    Not a particularly good idea with the most altruistic and benign of bosses.

    The benign model of the company town always goes to shit the first time an employee dies and has a family living at the company house, shopping at the company store.

  210. 210.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @different-church-lady:

    Recruiter Pitch to young women:

    “We’re all family here in MuskVille. We encourage our people to socialize together and reward those relationships with added MuskHours on the high performance aspects of your Tesla. We even have conjugal rooms in the workplace for couples!”

  213. 213.

    Geminid

    @kalakal: Schuyler, Virginia had a small company town back when the soapstone quarries were operating. They even had a hospital/infirmary made out of soapstone. Some New Age people bought it about 1980. Their Chrismas parties were kind of different.

    Schuylur was the home of writer Earl Hamner, and the setting of The Waltons.

  224. 224.

    prostratedragon

    One can imagine years from now when the whole thing is but a dim memory, a semirehabilitated former Muskerton mayor whose body seized up like Strangelove’s with the desperate effort against breaking into a “Muskrat Ramble” one-step.

  225. 225.

    Geminid

    @Paul in KY: How about “Muskopolis?” I think Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is public domain now, so they wouldn’t even have to spend on new promotional videos.

  226. 226.

    scav

    Imagine the amenities (stores, restaurants) and infrastructure (roads, schools, parks, library, fire & police dept) and long-term stability of environment provided by a guy who tried to get Twitter employees to buy the houseplants at headquarters.

  227. 227.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @gene108: ​I [sic] gut feeling is Fox News isn’t the only “news” outlet where media personalities and columnists or producers or executives say a lot of shit in private that they really don’t want the public to know about.

    The Uncle Don Effect:

    …[A] popular urban legend is that Carney was fired after an embarrassing incident at the conclusion of a 1947 broadcast. According to the legend, after ending his program with his usual “Goodnight, little friends, good night” sign off, Carney thought he was off the air and exclaimed, “There! That ought to hold the little bastards”—but his microphone was still live, and his comment was broadcast to his radio audience. The legend goes on to state that public outrage caused Carney’s termination from radio.

    …[S]hortly after Carney’s death in the mid-1950s, a man by the name of Kermit Schaefer resurrected the story once again….. Schaefer was best known for his collection of “bloopers” – radio and television mistakes, gaffes, malaprops, spoonerisms, and tongue twisters….After Carney died, Schaefer featured a “recording” of the “little bastards” incident on his Bloopers album. The legend has since been proved to be just that, a legend. The “recording” was proven to be just a fabricated recreation of the legend.

    I heard the “recreation” years ago, courtesy of a former friend from college who had a collection of (IIRC) five LPs’ worth of Schaefer’s bloopers. It was ROTFLOL funny – precisely because one could readily imagine a yuuuge multitude of radio/TV hosts thinking exactly that, and many saying it out loud when (fortunately for their careers) the mike was, in fact, hors de combat…​​

  229. 229.

    kalakal

    @gene108:

    I doubt Fox News is unique in that CEO’s tell the rest of the organization what to cover or not cover based on ratings or not pissing off advertisers and so on.

    The Observer* was an interesting example of that before 1993 when it was bought by The Guardian.

    It was owned by a guy called  Rowland “Tiny” Rowland ne Furrhop who didn’t give a shit what it published except for when it came to his business interests. He had a lot of very tangled dealings in Africa and was best buds with a lot of very corrupt people so every so often the paper would have a 6 page puff piece about some dictator and the delights of an emerald/platinum mine. He went beserk when bidding for Harrods against Al-Fayad and the paper became a joke as it was little more than a vehicle for slagging off Al-Fayad for months. Weirdly the rest of the paper carried on as good pretty impartial journalism

    *It’s the world’s oldest sunday newspaper, since 1791

  230. 230.

    trnc

    @Brachiator: So Musk fires you and you have to vacate your office AND your house?

    At the rate he’s firing people now, he’s not going to have enough employees left to fill a duplex, much less a town.

  236. 236.

    trnc

    @WereBear:

    When the three-part Atlas Shrugged movie came out it gave me endless hours of entertainment, but it was from movie reviewers showing all their comedy chops discussing this disaster.

    With both the book and the movie(s) they couldn’t make it work in FICTION.

    From the IMDB trivia section:

    In spite of the free-market leanings of this film and its sequels, not one of them made their money back at the box office.

  239. 239.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Betty Cracker: Wanted to share this with you, for obvious reasons:

    Jones, the nonbinary parent of two young kids, has heard some people urge families to “stay and fight,” and Jones notes that many of those people are older, or don’t have children who are directly threatened by the laws of the state. “I try to explain that this is an incredibly privileged statement, because it’s showing me that enough of your life is safe and secure that you can comfortably stay,” Jones says. “It’s a different conversation for a parent who is looking at their 13-year-old, trying to make sure that their kid stays alive.”

    In moments when she feels overwhelmed and hopeless, Wynn has sometimes wondered if the state where she grew up is still salvageable. Then she remembers how fiercely she loves Sarasota, and how much her daughter loves it, too. She thinks about the nearby beach that is almost entirely composed of quartz crystals, the sand a brilliant, luminescent white. “And then the anger comes,” she says. “Because this is a magical place, and I will not give it up. I will not be bullied out.”

    Minor isn’t leaving, either, at least not yet. Her family’s history, her relatives and her community are in Florida. She also sees DeSantis’s policies spreading to other states across the country, and she isn’t sure where exactly she would go.

    “Where is it safe to raise a Black son and a Black daughter?” she says. “I know some people are so quick to judge Florida, and sometimes it’s hard to defend. We know we’re a punchline. ‘Florida Man,’ alligators in parking lots — that’s funny, right?” She exhales. “But this is our home. We deserve to live in a place that feels comfortable and safe, and to raise our kids like everyone else.”

  240. 240.

    kalakal

    I like the idea of going for the Ye Olde Englishe Touriste Trappe naming

    Nether Musk

    Elon-de-la-Zouche

    Muskness

    Musk-on-the-Wold

    Lower Musk

    Musk-on-the-Moor

    Muskwick

  242. 242.

    Kay

    @geg6:

    I’m west part of the state so we go west or north, but absolutely- Pennsylvania is a free state.

    They tease me for following weather in an obsessive way but I get a big kick out of timing trips around hourly forecasts and I’m good at it :)

    There’s windows but you have to pay attention to west/east and north/south. Modern weather forecasting is amazing. I’m very grateful for it.

  250. 250.

    kalakal

    @UncleEbeneezer: That is how I feel for so many of my friends & colleagues down here. She’s exactly right. Mrs kalakal and I are old and are privileged ( though as a Librarian life could take a dark turn) old, white, cis-het, the kids are in NJ. Not the case for my friends & colleagues with kids, who are LGBTQIA, and pretty soon no doubt, pregnant. Why the fuck should they leave? Can they leave? There is so much to love about Florida and I hate the bastards who are doing their best to turn it into an authoritarian hellhole

  251. 251.

    Mimi haha

    @satby: Pullman is lovely, but old George felt the need to be buried under railroad ties because he thought his workers might do something to avenge what he put them through.

  252. 252.

    catclub

    @BruceFromOhio: ​
     

    me and a bunch of stupid assholes are going to start a community in the middle of the desert to either die or prove a very important point

    Correction: to die AND prove a very important point.

  253. 253.

    Bill Arnold

    @The Kropenhagen Interpretation:

    “Entertainment” is an odd term for performative outrage.

    “Neokayfabe.” Recent NYTimes opinion piece, funny:
    The Best Way to Explain the G.O.P. Is Found in the W.W.E. (Feb. 26, 2023, Abraham Josephine Riesman)

    Old kayfabe was built on the solid, flat foundation of one big lie: that wrestling was real. Neokayfabe, on the other hand, rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment. After a while, the producers and the consumers of neokayfabe tend to lose the ability to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t. Wrestlers can become their characters; fans can become deluded obsessives who get off on arguing or total cynics who gobble it all up for the thrills, truth be damned.
    …
    I love pro wrestling, but I fear neokayfabe. It turns the world into a hall of mirrors from which it is nearly impossible to escape. It rots the mind and eats the soul. And yet, we cannot return to the world of old kayfabe, either — we know too much. Perhaps the only antidote to neokayfabe is radical honesty. It’s less fun, but it tends to do less material harm, in the long run.

  255. 255.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @catclub:

    Correction: to die AND prove a very important point.

    The point one sets out to prove and the point one ends up proving are often very different points.

  256. 256.

    geg6

    @Betty Cracker: ​
     
    My sister and I noticed on IMdB or some site that she has another one about British history. We’re going to queue that one up next. Pump up the volume! LOL!

  257. 257.

    kalakal

    @Baud: Don’t forget the Welsh

    ElonLlanfairpwllgwyngyllgogery

    chwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

    But with a Texas twang

  258. 258.

    Kay

    @Betty Cracker:

    I love how the ONLY corporate training the object to is DEI training. All other corporate training is apparently science-based, worthwhile and effective.

    I mean, come on! I get it- they consider it a huge imposition to talk about bias in the workplace and no one is the boss of them, but if they’re obediently trooping off to all other trainings (and they are) then we know what’s up with this.

    Just like the ONLY childrens medical issue they ever expressed any interest in is gender treatment. They’re fine with cosmetic surgery, growth hormones, crackpot religious denial of medical care, all of that. Just this ONE area triggers their love of “the children” and their weird override of the parents of these children.

    They all abandoned their intense interest in K-12 education the minute they announced the pandemic was over, too. WTF? Are public schools perfect now? What happened to all our Warriors For The Children?

  260. 260.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Bill Arnold: Perhaps the only antidote to neokayfabe is radical honesty.

    This was going to be one of my themes when I run for Congress as a Socialist(!) Republican(!!?!!). Why, yes, I totally plan on laying out my personal flaws for all to see and saying vote for me anyway.

    I better get my shit together before all the rest of the ideas I had become unoriginal from a public perspective.

  262. 262.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @kalakal: I haven’t visited Florida in decades.  As a Bostonian child, visiting FL in the winter, I thought it was absolute paradise because it was 80 degrees and not buried in snow!  Unfortunately most of my feelings about the state since, have all revolved around politics (the 2000 Election, Trayvon Martin and the sad right-wing shift into Fascism).  But good people shouldn’t HAVE TO leave the places they love.  That said, I can totally understand why those who can, do.  And I don’t think there is any shame in that.  We don’t shame people for moving somewhere for better weather, job etc.  It seems rather ridiculous to do so for people who are prioritizing their kids’ safety and identity.

  265. 265.

    Tony G

    Elon noticed that “The Last of Us” teevee show, and now he wants to make his own version.

  268. 268.

    Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)

    I’m still waiting to hear more about Glenn Beckistan, the model conservative town, and that walled city where the main job would be assembling AR-15s. Of course, I’m also waiting for the long-awaited Titanic II to show up in New York harbor

    And as a drunken Starets, I’m surprised no one mentioned Potemkin villages yet.

  269. 269.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Boris Rasputin (the evil twin): ​

    I’m surprised no one mentioned Potemkin villages yet.

    Good point. There has been a big run of ‘Throw together a superficial fake so the boss can continue thinking he’s a genius and not fire you.’ See: Metaverse, Cybertruck, that Amazon household robot nobody even remembers. Boring’s single tunnel might very well be an example of that. I wonder what the company town version would be?

  271. 271.

    wmd

    Just want to drop in a interesting encounter I had this week – I met a woman that worked for Musk as a nanny for 3 1/2 years Wednesday evening. She acknowledged the evident character flaws and limited conversation – “I don’t want to get into NDA territory”. At the end of the evening we’d conversed for about 2 hours and expressed an intent to become close friends.

  279. 279.

    kalakal

    @UncleEbeneezer:

    That said, I can totally understand why those who can, do.  And I don’t think there is any shame in that.  We don’t shame people for moving somewhere for better weather, job etc.  It seems rather ridiculous to do so for people who are prioritizing their kids’ safety and identity.

    Absolutely there’s no shame in it.

    I’m pissed off that people are being driven out for fear of their own, or their families lives. I don’t blame them for leaving at all. I’m furious that they are being put in that position.

  282. 282.

    jimmiraybob

    “…Founding his own Jonestown…”

    I assume that you meant “New Apartheid Johannesburg” on the plains.  A company town that will be different from the old-style company towns.

  284. 284.

    Paul in KY

    @Baud: Who will be ‘encouraged’ to wear Musk by Musk ™ when engaging in approved relations with her assigned Muskprole III Tech.

  288. 288.

    Paul in KY

    @kalakal: How about ‘Muskwich’? If not, that’s what he can name the chow at the canteen his proles will be using their Muskbucks at.

  290. 290.

    Kent

    Elon is building a subdivision.  In a suburb.  In Texas.  Wow.   No one has EVER thought of doing that before.  All that is missing is the Lennar sign advertising stainless appliances and granite.

    I feel so “owned” by the genius exhibited here.

  291. 291.

    columbusqueen

    @Ken: There’s a book on the project titled Fordlandia. I have it but can’t remember the author’s name. Check it out on Amazon.

  293. 293.

    misterpuff

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: There’s a book about it FORDLANDIA: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City.

    Major takeaway the trees that they were tapping for the rubber raw material grows wild in the Amazon, but didn’t take well to plantation cultivation (it needed the undergrowth and Canopy that the trees planted in rows would not provide).

    Plus it was deep in the Jungle, so tough to get to and out of.

  294. 294.

    Noskilz

    I suspect this is his usual announce a grandiose plan to distract from current failures. But if he is serious, I can only imagine what a disaster a company town commissioned by someone who seems to be as careless, erratic, and cheap as Musk will be.

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