Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I really should read my own blog.

There is one struggling party in US right now, and it’s not the Democrats.

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

Let me file that under fuck it.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Everyone is in a bubble, but some bubbles model reality far better than others!

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

If you’re looking for someone who’s young and athletic, go watch a fucking movie.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

‘Museums aren’t America’s attic for its racist shit.’

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

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Late Night Open Thread: Completely #Musked

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You ask me, Musk wasn’t happy about his old running buddy Peter Thiel being lauded by Respectable Media as ‘the dark genius‘ behind TFG’s undercard, when Elon has given — or at least promised — so many more millions to the Big Guy himself, to much less notice. But showing up at a quasi-religious rally to imitate a vision of being The Coolest Dude in the Room just led to an iconic-in-its-own-way photo of a lumpy manbaby apparently popping an umbilical hernia under his ill-fitting garanimals…

Dave Roth, at Defector — “Check Out These Cool Moves!”:

… Maybe the issue is that Trump is no longer much of a showman. He doesn’t really make jokes anymore and long ago stopped talking about anything but himself or whatever bit of pogrom-incitement is currently running on the channels he watches; it might be that the little Trumps who line up and stand around to watch the big one just get bored once they realize that they’re no longer a part of any story he’s likely to tell. Trump has a performer’s instinct for when something is not working, but he can also only ever do more of the one or two things he knows how to do. If the show is going to get any better, in short, it is not going to be because of anything he does, and so it might help to bring in some charismatic guest stars. A performer who can say all the vile shit that Trump says—there is no reason to mess with what works, there—but maybe in a more unsettling way, and if possible in an unplaceable accent and with the sort of pacing that suggests someone who is about to be hospitalized with a case of the hiccups. But where would the campaign find such a performer?

There is something kind of funny about Elon Musk and his fellow members of Silicon Valley’s defective alpha cohort investing heavily in Trump at what now seems like his absolute peak, although it won’t really be easy to laugh about it for some time. But there is something extremely funny about the idea of Musk, who is undeniably very rich and famous but also a world-historically wack and charmless individual, hyping up a crowd of foot-sore and increasingly bored small-business fascists standing around in a field. It is a testament to the awful movement that Trump has built that it can enfold both the least-trusted car dealers in every American county and 53-year-old tech reactionaries who use the word “based” as an adjective, but it does not really seem like a good idea to have them hang out…

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Sunday Evening Open Thread: What Happened to Elon Musk

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it's not a novel observation, but musk's lived for a long time at a level of wealth that i have to imagine resembles having some kind of delusional disorder. every single person who interacts with him in nearly every encounter has a vested interest in lying to him about whatever he wants.

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— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) September 28, 2024 at 3:08 PM

My personal opinion, Musk has always been a Sales Guy, and Sales Guys need to lie to themselves before they can successfully lie to their potential customers. But there’s no denying he’s gotten worse at distinguishing lies from fact over the last decade or so… At the Atlantic, Lora Kelley interviews Charlie Warzel:

Lora Kelley: Elon Musk has been crossing into the worlds of conspiracism and disinformation for a while—but he seems to be taking things even further lately. Why might he be going this far? What’s in it for him?

Charlie Warzel: It’s complicated, but it’s also deceptively simple. We can’t be inside this guy’s head, but he does seem to truly feed off of and love attention. Musk has been moving in a right-wing direction for a long time. But his purchase of Twitter and how he mishandled it—with advertisers, and de-verifying users—really alienated people and accelerated his turn. Many people used to think of him as the Thomas Edison of the 21st century. He was branded as this innovator and savvy businessman. When he walked into Twitter and made a mess of it, he lost cachet among this group of people who saw him as a genius. Now he’s trying very hard to appeal to the only people who really care about him anymore—including those who reside in the far right corners of the internet.

Lora: Why is Musk getting so involved in this presidential election, and with Trump (who apparently said he would give Musk a role leading a government-efficiency commission if he wins)? Is he making some kind of play to be a great man of history, or is he after power in a potential Trump administration?

Charlie: Elon Musk basically bought Donald Trump at the top. He endorsed him moments after the first assassination attempt, when Trump was riding a wave of positive attention, when Joe Biden was still in the race and it looked like Trump was probably going to dominate him. So much has changed since Musk endorsed Trump in July. If he were truly a savvy political operator, he would be hedging his bets right now, saying I can’t fully alienate myself from one political party, because I have all these government contracts and so many other interests that I need to be able to at least sit in a room with with Democrats.

I think the fact that he has effectively just become the in-house social-media team for Donald Trump speaks to the fact that he’s not just making a political calculation. He’s not playing a game of 3-D chess. It seems to me that he’s truly radicalized.

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Sunday Evening Open Thread: What Happened to Elon MuskPost + Comments (173)

Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: Everything Must Go!

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This, given the tenor of our times, is a hopeful sign. The autocrat’s family doesn’t start tearing the copper plumbing out of the palace walls, or stripping the gilding off the furniture, until they’re actually worried about being overthrown. Or, then again, maybe the Trump team has access to medical news which hasn’t been shared with us hoi polloi…

But we have perhaps solved the minor mystery of why Melania has been willing to attend Log Cabin Republican events even when she conspicuously avoided her husband’s performances. Per CNN, “Melania Trump was paid for a rare appearance at a political event. It’s not clear who cut the unusual six-figure check”:

Melania Trump has barely been seen on the campaign trail this year. One of the few times she has appeared at a political event, she’s received a six-figure paycheck – a highly unusual move for the spouse of a candidate.

The former first lady spoke at two political fundraisers for the Log Cabin Republicans this year, and she was paid $237,500 for an April event, according to former President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosure form. The payment was listed as a “speaking engagement.”

Trump’s latest disclosure form said Melania Trump was paid by the Log Cabin Republicans for the April fundraiser. But it’s a mystery who actually cut the check: Charles Moran, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, told CNN earlier this month the group did not put up the money for her to speak, and the disclosure form did not give any more information about the source of the payment.

Ahead of the other fundraiser in July for the conservative LGBTQ group, a person familiar said at least one request was made to a donor about a similar payment. It’s unclear whether Melania Trump was ultimately paid. The campaign has not put out the financial disclosure for that period. The source told CNN that Ric Grenell, former ambassador to Germany and a Trump ally, was the one who made the request on behalf of Melania Trump. Sources said Grenell has also helped the former first lady with other business ventures.

Campaign finance and government ethics experts say a payment to a presidential candidate’s spouse to appear at political fundraisers in an election is unusual, ethically questionable and should, at the very least, be properly noted in the disclosure forms…

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Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: <em>Everything Must Go!</em>Post + Comments (99)

Monday Evening Open Thread: Scorpions, Frogs, & the Tribute Vice Pays to Virtue

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Yes, I have enjoyed (and linked to) Olivia Nuzzi’s reporting, because she’s a good writer within the scope of her profession. But I’ve never forgotten that she jump-started her career in journalism as an intern in Anthony Weiner’s office, by sharing the ‘inappropriate sexual images’ he sent her. She never pretended to be other than she was.

Ben Smith, founder of Buzzfeed, now owner of Semafor, hasn’t exactly hidden his own reportorial biases towards the ‘savvy’, so his latest kinsley gaffe is not exactly a shock, either. As described by that renowned — okay, notorious — journalistic institution the New York Post:

… Writing in Semafor, Smith offered a “slightly contrarian view” by noting that “reporters have all sorts of compromising relationships with sources.”

“The most compromising of all, and the most common, is a reporter’s fealty to someone who gives them information,” Smith wrote.

“That’s the real coin of this realm. Sex barely rates.”

Smith made a comparison to the United Kingdom, where “if you’re not sleeping with someone in a position of power, how are you even a journalist?”

He then shared a text message that he received from an advice writer who observed that “the world would be much more exciting with more Nuzzis around, but alas the world is inhabited by anonymously emailing moralists instead!”…

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Friday Night Fights Open Thread: Christopher Rufo, Aspiring Sugar Daddy?

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Political activist Lauren Windsor, last seen cajoling Samuel Alito into admissions against his own interest, seems to have found right-wing smear merchant Christopher Rufo‘s Ashley Madison account. Since many prominent twitter users are, to use the technical term, sick of Rufo’s sh*t, this was a nice little treat for them in this week’s bounty of right-wing pervert stories…

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Friday Evening Bigfoot Bait Open Thread: American Apartheid’s Strongest Nepo-Babies

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Forget South Africans, apartheid is ‘viewed with nostalgia’ by far too many Americans. Most of us, I assume, knew that Apartheid Clyde, his mini-me fanboi David Sacks, and even JD Vance / Blake Masters sugar daddy Peter Thiel spent their formative years in a society where White supremacy was literally enforced by law, but I didn’t know the probable founder of QAnon was also a member of that select club. Per the Financial Times:

Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist who has become a fundraiser for Donald Trump and a troll of Ukraine, left aged five, and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent years of childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons. And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg, has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the originator of the QAnon conspiracy, which helped shape Trump’s Maga movement. (Furber denies being “Q”.)

In short, four of Maga’s most influential voices are fiftysomething white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa. This probably isn’t a coincidence…

So what connects these men’s southern African backgrounds with Maga today? Southern Africa under apartheid offered an extreme version of some of the main themes of American life today. First, there was tremendous inequality. The mine where Thiel’s father worked was “known for conditions not far removed from indentured servitude”, writes Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin. “White managers, like the Thiels, had access to a brand-new medical and dental centre in Swakopmund and membership in the company country club.” The mine’s black migrant workers lived in work camps.

To whites of a certain mindset, this inequality wasn’t due to apartheid. They thought it was inscribed in nature. Certain people were equipped to succeed in capitalism, while others weren’t. That was simply the way it was, and it was pointless to try to mess with nature. Two of Thiel’s contemporaries at Stanford in the 1980s recall him telling them that apartheid “works” and was “economically sound”. His spokesman has denied that he ever supported apartheid.

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Cold Grey Dawn Reality Open Thread: “We” Will Not Colonize Mars

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Since this magisterial takedown was discussed in our last installment… Here’s Albert Burneko, at Defector — “Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars”:

Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.

OK, so you still want to talk about Mars. Fine. Let’s imagine that Mars’s lack of a magnetic field somehow is not an issue. Would you like to try to simulate what life on Mars would be like? Step one is to clear out your freezer. Step two is to lock yourself inside of it. (You can bring your phone, if you like!) When you get desperately hungry, your loved ones on the outside may deliver some food to you no sooner than nine months after you ask for it. This nine-month wait will also apply when you start banging on the inside of the freezer, begging to be let out.

Congratulations: You have now simulated—you have now died, horribly, within a day or two, while simulating—what life on Mars might be like, once you solve the problem of it not having even one gasp worth of breathable air, anywhere on the entire planet. We will never live on Mars.

* * *

Let’s discuss the breathable-air problem. Earth’s atmosphere is rich with oxygen due in large part to all of the green plants photosynthesizing here. We got green plants out the ass. Some people have the idea that making Mars’s atmosphere breathable is as simple as introducing some green plants to it: They will eat up sunlight and produce oxygen, and then people can breathe it. That is uhhhhh the circle of life (?) or whatever. They call this idea “terraforming.”

At this point in our discussion I must acquaint you with two dear friends of mine. Their names are The South Pole, and The Summit Of Mount Everest…

Life on earth writ large, the grand network of life, is a greater and more dynamic terraforming engine than any person could ever conceive. It has been operating ceaselessly for several billions of years. It has not yet terraformed the South Pole or the summit of Mount Everest. On what type of timeframe were you imagining that the shoebox of lichen you send to Mars was going to transform Frozen Airless Radioactive Desert Hell into a place where people could grow wheat?

People have this idea that life is like some kind of magical force; that the reason Mars does not have life is that life has not yet gone there; that once life goes to a place, then it just figures out how to go on living there. This, I think, is a consequence of more people having gotten their science education from the movie character Ian Malcolm than from actual science classes. More generously, it is a testament to humans having formulated nearly all of their ideas about the nature of life from the absolute easiest (and only known) place to have life.

In any case Malcolm was exactly, precisely wrong when he said “Life … [Jeff Goldblum stammering] … finds a way.” Sure, yes, when “life” is “bacteria” and the challenge before it is how to propagate inside of my house, yes: In that case, life finds a way. In the bigger picture, no, life does not find a way. It has not found a way, even at the prokaryotic level, anywhere else humans have figured out how to look, except here on Earth…

None of what’s in the preceding 38 or however many exhausting paragraphs is unknown to Elon Musk, the mega-rich clod and dullard famous for buying things for more than they’re worth and then making them worse, who tweeted over the weekend some silly shit about his Martian colony, ah—what even is the word here? Plan? Vision? Intention? Anyway this is a thing that he thinks must and can and will happen. He sees his SpaceX company’s work as part of the endeavor to colonize Mars someday.

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