Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Good lord, these people are nuts.

“woke” is the new caravan.

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

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

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

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

No Justins, No Peace

Let there be snark.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

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Tom has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.

Tom Levenson

Long Island Man Faces Time In The Barrel

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This has not been a slow news day:

US Representative George Santos, who faced outrage and mockery over a litany of fabrications about his heritage, education and professional pedigree, has been charged with federal criminal offenses, two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.

Long Island Man Faces Time In The Barre
Bemberg Fondation Toulouse – Le Charlatan – Pietro Longhi – Inv 1029

I hear that Barely Speaker McCarthy has walked back his pledge to get Santos’ resignation if he were charged. The goal posts have moved to being found guilty. Gotta keep that yawning mandate fed, as it were.

The indictments are under seal, so we don’t know yet exactly what sins the Feds believe they can nail down beyond a reasonable doubt.  But no doubt Santos, who, though not a lawyer, trained with Clarence Darrow, can handle  his defense with a brio and skill no one has previously encountered.

This thread is as open as a Best Buy on Black Friday.

Image: Pietro Longhi, The Mountebank, 1757

 

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What’s Wrong With This Lede? What’s Wrong With These People?

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Here’s the first paragraph from the top story on The Washington Post right now.

A man using an AR-15-style weapon shot and killed five people Friday, including an 8-year-old — an angry response to the neighbors’ request that he stop shooting in his yard while their baby was trying to sleep, Texas authorities said Saturday. The gunman then fled, prompting an ongoing manhunt.

What’s wrong with it?

I’ll tell you.  The reporter actually wrote that a mass murder is “an angry response.”

What's Wrong With This Lede? What's Wrong With These People

An angry response would have been if the gunman had shouted “Fuck you!” back at his neighbors.  Slaughtering a kid and four grownups is not angry. It’s many things–deranged, grotesque, evil, and the work not only of the killer himself, but every malign asshole in our recent history that has chosen to defend American gun madness against all comers.  So yeah–that means just about every elected Republican (and a very few Democrats), the Fox News apparatchiks and all the usual suspects.  They are accessories before and after the fact, never (usually) pulling the trigger, but ensuring that someone will.

But I digress.  “Angry”!?  What the fuck is that.

I’m out of words. Over to you. Open thread.

Image: Peter Paul Rubens, Kindermord, after 1611.*

*PS: it depressed the crap out of me that there’s no search time involved in pulling up a depiction of this scene for any post I do on guns. You’d think we’d get the point of the Biblical passage involved by now.  Hah! Sometimes I crack myself up.

PPS: Also too–Texas. It’s time to recognize that GOP led states have installed a state religion. Not Christianity, though they’re trying to impose a twisted version of same on the rest of us.  No. What’s already in place can only be described as Moloch worship.

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Ummm…What?

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Tucker’s an ex-Fox.

Ummm...What?

There are zero details yet about who did what to whom:  did Murdoch say to Carlson, “you’re fired?” Did Carlson say “you can’t fire me, I quit?”  Did some other billionaire offer the right’s masculinity maven yet more cash?  Is there something about to drop that would have compelled Tucker “to spend more time with his family?”

Is it irresponsible to speculate…

[All together, kids]

IT WOULD BE IRRESPONSIBLE NOT TO!!!!

Have fun in the comments, my fellow jackals.

Image: Edward Matthew Ward, The Disgrace of Lord Clarendon, after his Last Interview with the King, 1846

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Dominion and Fox Settle…

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Video at 11.*

I’m disappointed on multiple levels–I wanted to see Rupert on the stand being served his own intestines via a cross examination for the ages.

Dominion and Fox Settle...

I wanted to see F**ker Carlson allowed to spin on a spit over coals for hours. I wanted a jury award so large only scientific notation could handle it.  All Imma gonna say at this point is that I look forward to the terms of the settlement and hope that includes a continuous chryon reading “We Are Lying Shits” scrolling without end on every Fox broadcast and feed from now through November 2024 (at the least.)

The thread is, of course, open.

(And yeah–the post is drafted the way it is to evoke this image. You can thank me later.)

*The quaint notion that a news report would be held until some set hour reveals that yes, in fact, I am an old…

Image: Anonymous, Représentation d’un animal hideux qui a mangé beaucoup de monde dans un village nommé Singlais, situé à trois lieues de Caen, 1632.

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RIP Gordon Moore

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Some lives span an entire transformation, the complete journey from before to after.

Gordon Moore proposed Moore’s law in 1965: that the number of transistors that could be included on a chip would double roughly every two years.  That prediction held up for at least half a century, and may have a bit more road to run.

Mr. Moore cofounded Intel, one of the companies that turned his “law” into reality — but now, after a long, lucrative, and ultimately philanthropic life, has himself run out of road.

RIP Gordon Moore

Moore was one of “the traitorous eight” who abandoned William Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor and, later, a leading scientific racism advocate, to form a rival firm to Shockley’s, Fairchild Semiconductor.  Then with one other of the eight, Robert Noyce, schismed again to start Intel; the new company soon focused on the creation of what would be called integrated circuits–systems of transistors–on wafers of silicon…a concept that launched, among much else, just about every device that does computation today, including the one on which I write this.

He had a long life–when he died yesterday, he was 94–and a creative one.  I never met him, but I know some folks who did, and he seems to have been a good guy at the level of ordinary human interaction.  Along the way, he helped transform how humans live in the world. Crucially, in this age of tech-bro political assholery, he doesn’t seem to have seen his wealth as conferring on him the right to tell the rest of how to live in our new circumstances.  And he chose fairly early on to dispose of much of his wealth in the service of ends other than a new superyacht.

Moore came into this world in 1929, months before the start of the Great Depression.  He was a kid during World War II–the first war that pitted one side’s scientists against the other’s in a a war fought across intellectual and geographic front lines.  By the time he died there was almost no corner of the world in which he could not have found traces of his work.  Not bad.

RIP Gordon Moore.

The thread is open.

Image: James Seymour, Jumping the gate, before 1752.

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Am I The Only One?…(More Thread)

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Hey. Looks like we could use a new focus of discussion. So how about this:

When I feed my house panthers, I find myself (often, not always) bending down, and, like some over-familiar waiter at a restaurant trying too hard to be mellow, saying, “enjoy.”

I do realize that I am my cats’ servant…but everytime I do this, I have this sudden sense of being wholly ridiculous.

And then I do it again…

Is it just me?

Am I The Only One?...(More Thread) 2

And let’s have a couple of bonus images.

In case of emergency, pull cord (at your own considerable risk):

Am I The Only One?...(More Thread) 1

“You talking to us?”

Am I The Only One?...(More Thread)

This thread is so open.

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Quickie Muskrat Gigging.

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Musk is, of course, the gift that keeps on giving. Today’s Twitter outage is a case study in why most tech companies don’t fire most of their engineers in one go.

But there was another story that caught my eye, as an illustration of how little Musk-ish MoTUs grasp normal human emotion–despite what I’m sure some in the Muskverse see as further evidence of his business genius.

Quickie Muskrat Gigging.

That is: if you happen to want a Tesla Model S or X, you’re in luck: it’s a noticeably cheaper today than it was yesterday, and much less expensive than it was in at the turn of the year:

In 2022, a dual-motor all-wheel-drive Tesla Model S went for $104,990. In January, Tesla chopped about 10 percent off the price, dropping it to $94,990. Today, it’s another $5,000 cheaper at $89,990.

For those who want to go really fast, the Model S Plaid, which uses three motors for a sub-2-second 0–60 mph time and a 200 mph top speed, is now $109,990, $5,000 less than last week and $26,000 less than you’d have paid in 2022.

The Model X SUV sees even bigger discounts. After heavy price drops in January, Tesla has now cut an extra $10,000 from Model X prices. That means the all-wheel-drive dual-motor version now starts at $99,990, with the triple-motor Plaid Model X starting at $109,990.

All good, right? Unless you’re one of the (relatively few) poor suckers who took delivery in the last few weeks, not to say last year.

Which means, I guess, buy now. Or not. Or wait. Or not:

How long those prices will stay is anyone’s guess. Within less than a month of enacting its January price cuts, Tesla had already increased the prices of the Model Y crossover again.

Here’s the thing: I don’t know about you all–but I hate to feel dumb.  I hate to feel like I made a bad deal.  It’s one of the reason I (and everyone I know) hates car shopping, used, or new or whatever. It’s just so damn hard to know how badly I’m being schrod at any moment.

One of Tesla’s selling points is that you never had to wonder. It was direct to buyer, no dealer bullshit, fixed price–what you see is what you get.  That may not have been the decisive advantage for the new car maker, but it helped.

Now–not so much.

Tesla does make cars lots of people want, and they’re not terrible.  Hell, at current price-and-gov’t-incentives the Model 3 is actually kind of a bargain, almost an eveeryone’s electric vehicle.  Tesla also has the production capacity to deliver them to many more people than any of the legacy or start up car makers that have entered the EV market. I’ve bashed Tesla (and Musk) a lot, and will do so some more, but despite what many on these comment threads have said, their cars are not all even mostly farce.

But, but, but….brands and brand reputations accumulate over years. They can crumble much more quickly.  There’s nothing really special about Tesla offerings now. Rather, a growing number of choices are out there that do as well and often much better at meeting people’s transportation and coolness desires.  Every miss matters–and if you think buying a Tesla will make you feel like you’ve been cheated a year or a month from now, that’s not good business.

Or so it seems to me. But what do I know?

I drive a 2o13 plugn-in Priuus, AKA the most boring car known to humankind.

Open this thread!

Image: Advertisement, 1908

 

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