Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The words do not have to be perfect.

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

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Second rate reporter says what?

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Everybody saw this coming.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

I really should read my own blog.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Let there be snark.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

This really is a full service blog.

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Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Repub Bacchanalia

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Apparently a hapless living victim must be torn to pieces, to placate the Pale Gods of the GOP Death Cult…

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Late Night Open Thread: Andrew ‘Cobrataint’ Tate, Lousy International Houseguest

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Andrew Tate, ‘influencer’, seems to have made his fortune selling rape-culture fantasies and genuine pyramid schemes to teenage boys and other desperate incels. Given that, I assume he decided to ‘challenge’ Greta Thunberg as a can’t-lose publicity stunt — she’s a perpetual incel target, and for his social-media purposes even negative publicity would be ‘good’ publicity.

Turns out that’s not how his Romanian hosts understood the bargain, though!

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Late Night Open Thread: Is There Nothing the Billionaires Don’t Want to Ruin?

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Nothing gold can stay. From Sam McPheeters:

… In the 20th century, the label “rock star” was the ultimate statement of individuality, a license for generations of swaggering, staggering musical geniuses to trash greenrooms and hurl televisions off balconies. In this century, the term has an extra meaning. This new usage came from the workplace, and originally implied virtuosity, like “ninja” or “guru.” By the 2020s, however, the term seems to have further devolved into something closer to “productive.” In many offices around America, telling someone they’re a “rock star” is now the same thing as telling them they did a really good job, a verbal downgrade so widespread it’s rendered the term meaningless. A quick search on my local Craigslist jobs board found “rock star” applied to a dental sterilization technician, a Jimmy Johns delivery driver, and a commissary kitchen prep cook in Canoga Park. One board management software company markets itself with a web banner reading “Become a Compliance Rock Star.”

Another switch happened this century, one that feels related in ways visible only to future historians. The bosses are rocking out. The late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen played guitar in Paul Allen and the Underthinkers. Lamar McKay, BP oil executive, plays guitar in the pro-whiskey Southern Slang. Both bands sound like Home Depot commercials. The founder of Xerjoff hired Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi to jam with him on an instrumental track promoting a new line of perfume. David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, is also known as DJ D-Sol. His peppy EDM tracks sound like hold music for a Finnish airline. “No matter how much money you make or what you do, everybody wants to be Keith Richards,” Mangano Consulting CEO Charles Mangano said of his Rolling Stones cover band in a 2006 interview with The Wall Street Journal. Cablevision CEO James Dolan once booked his own band to open for the Eagles, at Madison Square Garden, which he owns…

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Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Going for the Diminished Responsibility Defense?

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Excellent Read: ‘Moving Fast and Breaking Things’

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I always enjoy Ed Zitron’s (free!) Substack posts, but how can anyone resist a screed that includes sections on Zucknarök and Elondämmerung?

When someone is suppressed, restrained or otherwise pushed into a corner, the aggressor tends to assume unlimited power. The feeling of isolation and power imbalance gives the oppressor a form of momentum – as long as they can control the rules of the system, they are unstoppable, able to bend and crack someone to their will, even as onlookers attempt to intervene.

This kind of loathsome creature — call them an aggressor, a bully, a narcissist, it’s up to you — thrives on belief, and seems so poisonous because they appear to be able to get away with anything. The pain they cause and the obviousness of their malice is obvious to anyone operating outside of the system, but it’s very difficult to break in and even harder to break out.

These people, however, always make two mistakes: they believe their system is transferrable, and never attribute anything they’re doing to luck. Nothing is by accident. Their successes are a result of fairly-won victories or fairly-won swindles against lesser creatures. People that weren’t smart enough to see them coming, or just collateral damage for their empire.

Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk, Changpeng Zhao, Do Kwon, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg and every ruinous cretin that I’ve written about in the last year has the same pattern – a laundry list of excuses that never involves true regard for another human being, a higher purpose that justifies their contempt for others as a necessary evil, and an ever-growing sense of outrage that they would be criticized. They have survived for a long time on work-adjacent success and superficial charm, because they’ve all found the right ways to get what they want.

And in every case, their failures are stemming from their unwillingness to cash out, to stop and take stock and say “I have it pretty good.” They are ever-greedy, ever-hungry, ever-empty souls that get worse as you learn more. They will never be happy, a burden they outsource to anybody unfortunate enough to stay too close.

That’s why it feels so incredibly satisfying to see them lose…

You Cannot Outrun Gravity
Every single executive I have criticized in the last year has shown the remarkable belief that they are not subject to the rules of reality that you and I face. This is in part because they’ve been able to escape abiding by said rules through unimaginable wealth and the power that it grants you, but also because such greed may be impossible to acquire without hubris.

They always believe that they alone are worthy. They never have a backup plan, because they have always prided themselves on “being good when the going gets tough.”

Yet they will always be deeply vulnerable to their own failures. They will always make mistakes, because they don’t believe they’ve ever made one. And when they start losing, they lack the capability to stop the world from falling down around them, because that starts at a point of introspection they’ve never had to reach…

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C.R.E.A.M. Open Thread: ‘The Eternal Mystery of A Rich Man’s Politics’

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Aaron Rupar, and at least some of his fellow banned journalists, are back on Twitter. The news organizations they work for tweeted right through yesterday’s controversy… because, at this particular moment, Twitter is not replaceable for them. And, apparently, Twitter can’t do without them!

Dave Roth, at Defector, always excellent:

… Online reactionary politics is a fan community before it is anything else; as with Donald Trump, the way to tell that Musk is an active participant is how obviously starstruck he is by the corny dingbats that make up its firmament. Where Trump lived for the approval of Fox News’s glitching poreless on-air goblins, Musk has been queasily quick with an “exactly” in the mentions of various reactionary influencers: the anti-trans activist that solicits bomb threats to children’s hospitals, or the one fellow from the Koch-backed Turning Point USA organization whose face seems to be shrinking, or Cat Turd 2. If it is embarrassing to know who these people are—and it is extremely embarrassing to know who those people are—it is more embarrassing still to have mistaken these relentlessly self-serving grifters for friends.

What all of that decidedly is not, however, is mysterious. Musk’s politics, however heterodox he himself might secretly be, appear very much to be those of an extremely wealthy 51-year-old man with an entirely commonplace conservative media diet. There are only so many interesting ways and even fewer interesting reasons to adopt these politics; the most common one, which again is the one that Musk seems to have chosen, is to simply let the combined inertia of your circumstances and incuriosity back you into them. That he is now someplace so strange—winking at QAnon shit, already—seems mostly to reflect how conservative politics have moved in that direction; Musk, typically, seems not to have given any of it much thought. The extremities of his wealth and strange upbringing, and his personal peculiarities and the limits of his capacities for empathy or insight all probably played some role, but this is true of every other butthead that ever aged into reactionary politics. In time, these people realize what they actually believed all along and embrace what has always mattered most to them. In this sense, too, Musk’s little blurts of umbrage and upset are just like those of all the other reactionary pilgrims on their own lonely journeys. Separately but in unison, they slough off everything and everyone that is not them, either out of principle or pique or just because they find themselves losing interest; instead of talking to the people they used to talk to, they just shout at everyone. Twitter has always been a good place for that.

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Friday Evening Open Thread: Always Another Sucker, & Two To Take Him

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But who’s the sucker here — the MAGAts market, or the walking caricature on the cards? The Washington Post‘s Phillip Bump, “Who convinced Donald Trump that Trump NFTs were a good idea?”:

It’s very easy to see how NFTs — non-fungible tokens, bits of digital art created to be unique — would appeal to Donald Trump. People were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for exclusive ownership of a drawing of a monkey! All you had to do was make a picture, hit some internet buttons somewhere, and suddenly you’re vacuuming up cash like there’s no tomorrow. For Donald Trump, a guy who used his name to sell everything from steaks to water, the idea would be irresistible.

So, on Thursday, the former president of the United States — a guy who two years ago oversaw the vast power of the American government, a man who at one time could command armies and navies as he saw fit — announced that he was getting into the NFT game.

There are … just a few problems.

The first is that those NFT creators weren’t vacuuming up cash but crypto — that is, digital currency that is only loosely tethered to the actual economy. A lot of those hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars sales were in currencies that have since lost a lot of value, making them, say, thousands-of-dollars sales.

The second is that people were paying lots of money for NFTs. Crypto went through a boom in 2021 that helped power the NFT market. By January, there were more than 322,000 sales of collectible NFTs a week, generating hundreds of millions of dollars. But by September, trading volume had collapsed by 97 percent. In the most recent week, according to NonFungible, there were only about 33,000 sales of collectible NFTs…

The third problem with Trump’s effort is that the entire thing is far more Trump Steak than Trump 2016. For all of his obsession with presenting a glamorous lifestyle, his aesthetic has long been more “Queen of Versailles” than Versailles. And the art in the NFT line largely consists of clumsily Photoshopping Trump’s head onto manly, svelte figures — not necessarily the sort of thing that someone might find worth an initial $99 investment…

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