Happy Wednesday! [DOT 10/5/23]

10/5/23 MegMegMcGee 50

Hope everyone is having as good a week as E. Jean Carroll.

Maybe this will throw the clot that kills him

Jury finds that Trump sexually abused E. Jean Carroll, awards $5 million in damages
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/05/09/e-jean-carroll-trump-trial-verdict/

The good news just keeps on coming…

Exclusive: Rep. George Santos charged by Justice Department in federal probe
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/09/politics/george-santos-charged-justice-department/index.html

Because OF COURSE

Republican who called drag shows a threat to kids quits after sex with intern
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/09/republican-drag-shows-danger-for-kids-resigns-misconduct-intern

This is wild, can you imagine?

An American expat raised a family in Australia. He was hiding a dark secret.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/05/09/murderer-iowa-prison-escape-australia/

Have a super day!

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50 Comments

  2. Extra fun about the Carroll verdict: It opens the door for Trump to keep screwing himself by continuing to defame her and to use illegal means to pay his tab, both of which I wish I could bet on because they’re 100% going to happen (and probably within the next 72 hours!)

    It’s been interesting to see the cope on the right, where there’s no way he could possibly get a fair trial, and all liberals on the jury, etc. etc. but also that it doesn’t matter because they didn’t find against him on the rape charge. So those evil liberals had all the power but decided to let him off on the big charge? Well. I’m sure it makes sense to them.

  4. It was just announced the inflation rate continues to drop, down to 4.9% which of course is bad news for Biden because unemployment remains extremely low, savings rates are up, and nothing is worse for a president than falling inflation while people have jobs and more money in the bank.

    • BORDER CRISIS! You’d be amazed at what an effective, hot-button issue this is. We’re a city of over 8 million people and last I heard we think we have an estimated 250,000 undocumented among us, so let’s double that because the city is horrendous at taking surveys like this. Recently we received our 60,000th migrant, and that apparently was the breaking point. We (Mayor Adams) will start busing them up to Rockland County, whose County Executive has said he refuses to take any of them. It isn’t because of racism or xenophobia, rest assured. He is concerned about human trafficking and lack of job and transportation opportunities. And fentanyl, of course. Apparently every man, woman, and child crossing the border is carrying kilos of it, which makes its way immediately into the public schools.

      Yeah, I don’t know how any of this works either, but I know it’s a vote getter. Our Governor almost lost her election because of this (among other things) and she was an incumbent Democrat facing off against a pro-life Trump supporter. In New York. In 2022. If it weren’t for the Working Families Party voters she would have lost (I think. I think I read that somewhere.) As it was we flipped four or five seats D -> R so you can all thank the New York State Democratic machine for Kevin McCarthy and the rise of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

      • …the “small boats” thing the tories are banging like a drum is the latest iteration of a broadly parallel phenomenon

        …once upon a time the variable that was going to stem the tide of the unacceptable component of immigration was cracking down on people crossing on ferries…they mostly did make that a lot harder…but not impossible…& then they built the tunnel…your guess is as good as mine what proportion of the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who “sneak in” at this point do it by hitching a ride on a eurostar or in the back of a lorry that’s in basically a ferry on rails…only worse because there’s nothing to see & you have to stay in your vehicle

        …but apparently that’s all solved…& for the love of god don’t start talking about a system that keeps track of who flies in & out to a point that would allow anything but a guess about who might overstay…look at these horrible bastards charging poor people thousands for the opportunity to be crammed with too many others on an underpowered, barely seaworthy cheap launch sourced from someplace like turkey-via-germany…you can’t complain that we want to stop them now, can you

        …so the best way to do that, right, is you make yourself famous for being a caricature of awful…come here & you’ll be in rwanda in no time & take a lifetime ban on coming back with you as door prize

        …never mind that even if they can get some planes actually going to rwanda they can’t fill ’em with enough people to put a dent in the numbers that are causing the problem they’re proclaiming this as a solution to…or the fact that they refuse to look up & see the vastly bigger numbers of people moving that our current trajectory looks like making a certainty

        …at least with bread & circuses you get dinner & a show?

        • Have you ever seen the show Years and Years? It’s a British six-part miniseries. I’ve never been so disturbed by anything in my life. Well, it’s up there in the Top Ten. It’s sci-fi, but in the very near-future, and it uncannily predicts some things that have come to pass, like the rise of AI and the overturning of Roe v Wade in the US. There’s a scene that takes place on one of those small boats, and the events leading up to it and the voyage itself haunt my nightmares.

          • …sort of rings a bell but I’m not sure I could hand on heart say I have?

            …saw a thing on stage once by a lady who used to write for spooks about migrants that mostly took place on an articulated slab of stage that was a deck in bad waters that I feel kinda similarly about, though…so I think I know what you’re driving at

            • I think the British cast is more widely known to a British audience, but Emma Thompson plays a Trump-like political figure who becomes PM. The climate crisis is addressed. Massive flooding, in the Severn area I think, and along the Channel coast.

              It also eerily predicted what kinds of “emergency measures” the British government could adopt, often with popular consent but sometimes without, and that played out in Britain and around the world during Covid. I’m not an RFK Jr.-esque anti-vaxxer, by any means, nor am I given much to conspiracies, but it was kind of astonishing to see how the lockdown policies played out, even as the evidence started rolling in that masks weren’t actually all that effective, and that second-graders were highly unlikely to kill grandma or their teachers, so maybe the schools shouldn’t have been entirely shut down, and that going to a closed-by-fiat restaurant or a bookstore was really no more dangerous than going to a big-box store to buy whatever you wanted.

              I just recently came across a vintage photo of a celebrity couple on a deserted beach and they were both wearing masks. That seems so strange now, but I know that two or three years ago I would have applauded them for staying safe. Safe from what, though? And at some point they would have had to remove their masks, presumably. But this all seemed admirable at the time.

              • …so…on the one hand it’s definitely the thing I thought you meant…which I think was maybe written or directed (or maybe just produced, I’m not sure) by one of the guys that’s been much admired for bringing back dr who…I wanna say russell (t?) davies?

                …sort of a blend of 2000AD (that’d be the comics that ran judge dredd & things by alan moore when he was a young & only mildly bearded weirdo) & the thick of it…nukes going off sort of dystopian stuff I think it was…& probably closer to the bone than I remember it

                …but…at least as I remember it…the mask thing did have a point…but it rather overlaps with the kids/school thing & it comes down to some unhelpful practicalities…I think?

                …evidence supports the fact that you can at minimum retard the rate of spread if you can follow some basic rules…one of which being that you try to limit how much of anything you might have being contributed to the shared air you’re mingling with in a confined space but out in the fresh air that moves where you can keep a bit of distance from the rest of the world it doesn’t do much for either end of the scale

                …& the general absence of the regular flu broadly indicated that if everyone washed their hands as often & as rigorously as we mostly claim to we wouldn’t communicate that so abundantly that it’s like a sign that the festive season approaches the way hay-fever & spring/summer go together

                …so…the masks had a point…& the sheer impracticalality of trying to pretend that distancing was an option for those with small kids meant that the well-known petrie dish effect of sending the kids to school was going to keep pumping that out to parents & teachers…so whether or not it proved successful…or even well-executed…I could see how ostensibly sound logic could get you there

                …but…I don’t know how you do a better job getting across to the individual people whose habits you need to modify en masse why it is they should respect this suggestion more than they do the rest of the stuff politicians tell them they can/can’t do…so maybe it’s unfair to say so…but I don’t see how you do a worse job than one where it becomes an article of faith to deny the efficacy of a vaccine that would be the fastest route to it no longer being a working definition of common courtesy to endure the mild discomfort of wearing a mask around others…as a statement of political affiliation

                …public health is not a thing that a sane society treats as a predetermined binary split along tribal borders

                • I agreed with all of it at the time, it was during the setting in of Covid that GroupThink shut down and I migrated over here, and I’m sure you can find posts of mine giving a figurative version of that strange Covid-era elbow bump that we were encouraged to do, to those who followed all “the science,” even when “the science” might have raised concerns about accuracy and efficacy but that was all shut down immediately.

                  Bad as we had it, here in New York under Emperor Andreus Marcus Maximus and his ever-capricious rules, I think the Brits had it a lot worse. Of course you had “Survivor” contestant/winner Matt Hancock, of whom the less said the better. I know that a couple of my friends, who live in a tony part of a lovely Home County, were under some constriction that they could only emerge once a day, recreationally, and at that they were confined to their garden. They used to slip away to the nearby Cotswolds, staying in their car, presumably masked, although it was only the two of them, just to see something. They were constantly afraid that they would be pulled over by some local constabulary, but the local authorities, apparently, were too busy fining pedestrians walking along high streets and entering shop(pe)s in defiance of some ever-changing edicts from Westminster and the local council.

                  It was madness. It must have saved a few lives, I guess, and Britain had a very high Covid death rate, so did the US, but that was partly the failure of our health systems and partly the appearance of, let’s say, a 94-old with advanced lung and bowel cancer who, in their last moments, tested positive for Covid. So the death was chalked up to Covid.

                  Don’t get me wrong. I’m double-vaxxed and boosted every six months, and have some possible co-morbidities myself, so I don’t take this lightly. But really. I know the vaccines can’t prevent you from having Covid, or passing it along, but they do seem to spare you from a painful death, mostly, so I can’t get enough of the boosters.

                  If only there was something out there that could boost my tingling leg(s)!

    • Funny on several levels. Tucker has a non-compete that he’s either paying a lot to get rid of or just trying it and waiting for a lawsuit. Twitter is a dying star. And Elmo has already shown that once a journalist he buys crosses him — see the hilarious implosion of the “Twitter Files” folks — he cuts them off and leaves them to die. Kinda sounds like a lose-lose. So I love it!

      • Twitter has been bleeding corporate advertising due to its growing rightwing kookiness and now they have a major presence from Carlson who lost all of his major corporate advertisers because he’s a right wing kook.

        I haven’t seen Bluesky yet but I’m seeing more and more references to popular people on Twitter moving there. It will be interesting to see if this ends up being a platform collapse on the scale of AOL or MySpace.

        • …pretty sure bluesky is still invite-only…but their T&Cs had some clauses that were troubling…along similar lines to the studios’ “we have all rights to all aspects of all of everything now & forever & ever, amen” thing…if they/you get hacked they promise…nothing…but they will make an attempt to contact you…a few other bits & bobs like that which could for all most people know already be terms they’ve accepted to use a different service

          …they do seem to be trying to run a domain-level verification system…so if you sign up with a .gov address people can see that you’re “that guy”

          …although for shits & giggles a few instances of managing to game/spoof that already made appearances

          …so…some teething issues…but @jack ought to have a better sense of how to get that sort of thing off the ground than elon seems to about not tailspinning it into the ground as some sort of phoenix parody for the lulz…so it could happen?

        • This is really off-topic but my oldest brother, the one who died, was an engineer and an early adopter of home email use. He had an AOL account that was so original that I think AOL assigned it to him. He kept it all his life. Those AOL addresses now have considerable cachet in the tech world, apparently. I bet his kids shut it down, more’s the pity. My brother used to say things like, “I was reading on AOL that…” His daughter has an AOL address that is an oblique reference to a job she gave up over 20 years ago. So AOL hasn’t quite gone away yet.

            • …this one has been known to stump me…but somewhere out there are these bundles of contact details for people that are traded around like leads in glengarry glen ross…& the more valuable ones are…for want of a better word…verified…they’re known to connect to a real person…& for bonus fish in a barrel points…a person who has successfully been scammed at least once

              …once they’re on that list the best thing they can do…depending on how they got done over…kind of runs a spectrum that trades off inconvenience for certainty…at the far end where people talk about faraday cages & the film the conversation comes up a lot…new everything

              …but for a certain generation changing a phone number is like moving house…& that goes double for their bank…it seems in some cases I’ve come across like the logic is flawed because the aggravation of changing everything short of the physical home address is less than the serial fraud issue…but I kinda get how holding onto the same landline number you’ve had for 50+ years isn’t nothing when there’s 50+ years of people you don’t want to not be able to call you when there’s a funeral you need to attend…& that mindset goes both ways so it’s not a figment of their imagination…even if it makes less sense in a mobile phone era, more than few of the people I’ve seen deal with that stuff still live in a world where a mobile phone is an afterthought that’s more than likely powered off to make sure it’s charged when they want it rather than a focal point of their online world

              …but an email address?

              …I don’t understand treating one of those that way…though…having said that…I know one or two people of a similar generation who could stand to run a few less parallel inboxes across a spectrum of devices & operating systems…if only because by the time something gets recursively out of kilter & I start having to field questions about why it’s not working trying to unpick the web of sign ins across different cloud services & backups to figure out what’s pulled them up against a data limit of some sort is about as much fun as hunting the minotaur?

            • I have an AOL email. We still use it for lots of things, but not anything related to business or finance. I was an early adopter long years ago, and it’s five letters @aol.com. So it’s easy to type in and spell out at stores and whatnot.

              I rattled it off to a kid in the Genius Bar once and he was awestruck. “That’s incredibly old.”

              Thanks, kid.

              • …if I understand that right you’re more or less saying it’s become the address you put on things that might spawn mailing lists & unsolicited junk but need to be trawled through sometimes for a receipt or a warranty or details of an appointment…rather than the one true & only email address you shall ever have through which everything has passed since time immemorial & shall henceforth unto perpetuity in this universe & beyond

                …your thing makes total sense to me

                …the other thing…not so much?

      • …from what I’ve managed to gather I think he was looking at 18months of being paid to take a seat in the back & keep his mouth shut…for the incredible sum of $30million

        …which oddly enough has echoes of some of the stuff about the fictional investment banker in the two johns sketches I posted yesterday but mostly brings me back to thinking it doesn’t sound like fox & tucker are really having much of a spat

        …fox announced something like $38million in losses for the quarter…& he just cancelled 3/4 of that from the outgoing side of the ledger…which seems like a hell of a favor

        …while elon is out there full-steam ahead leaning into making the dominant discourse on his platform look like an overton window tailored to start around fox news & extend out to stormfront

        …I know at least a few people who used twitter in a painstakingly curated way that have made it through this whole process with no discernible difference to their experience…but between the stuff he actually engages with & the algorithmic futzing about with ticks & promotion/demotion of visibility that only seems to be true for cases of finely tuned blinders having been previously installed

        …elon’s in the hole…both in the sense of being down a few sketchy rabbit holes but also in the debt sense…but I don’t see tucker putting his frozen dinner money where his mouth is…so if he wants to be the joe rogan of twitter…I want to know who he thinks is picking up the check

        …frankly I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to find out it was someone like harlan crow…or even a murdoch…but…as ever…there’s always peter I’m-not-donating-to-candidates-this-cycle thiel

        …except none of that is the fun kind of speculation so it mostly just makes me impatient to get to the part where we know how awful the reality is rather than imagine one that’s potentially even worse?

      • It’s also helpful to have the fascists, insurrectionists, white supremacists, and Christian nationalists all gather in one spot. Makes it easier to keep an eye on them.

        • …the part where he asked exorbitant fees for API access to major organizations & then comp’d some of those…which then grant the blue tick to subsidiary users…& in some cases forced the tick on a few high profile accounts as  way of pushing back against the tactic of using the blue tick as the basis of a global blocklist to improve user experience seems…telling

          …but then so much of what he’s up to seems telling…& yet he never seems to get told so I’m questioning who it is who’s supposed to get tattled to in order for action to ensue?

          …the germans manage to enforce some strictures on twitter content…so…it feels like a regulatory failure…which I think leaves me looking at the FCC & drumming my fingers…maybe the FCC?

          …there’s a lady trying to make the distinction between a lack of liability & total impunity in a series of section 230 cases to do with meta/facebook/instagram & sex-trafficking which is kind of an edge case but very much a principle that feels like it extends to a lot of this stuff?

          • The answer to that question is that Elmo is a shit businessman. Any success his companies have is predicated on someone distracting him with shiny objects while adults get work done.

            Beyond that, he’s a raging megalomaniac, and of course he must have the biggest and bestest social media megaphone to amplify his idiocy (which he thinks is the pinnacle of wisdom). He’s a little kid who thinks that if he can shout louder than everyone else, he can show them he’s always, always, always right. Twitter is ideal for a small child who wants to scream at everyone while plugging his own ears with his fingers, so that no one can contradict him.

            • …what’s been bothering me for a while though is what it is he’s actually good at…which seems like it has to be something to do with structuring debt & financing…despite the upside down nature of the twitter deal…in that he’s out there providing abundant evidence that he’s got his head all the way up his ass about the nuts & bolts of every enterprise he’s laid claim to…& yet he is the unicorn of unicorns

              …any one of paypal, tesla, space X & twitter are/were unicorn investments in tech related sectors…& he strung them together like harrison ford & movie franchises that blew up at the box office

              …so the other day I had a friend in somewhat devil’s advocate mode making an argument that perhaps given the speed we need some things to happen at on a scale we’ve not really ever pulled off before we might need more people like him…a sort of psycopaths-get-shit-done thesis…& somewhere in that mix is a thing they weren’t entirely kidding about

              …which troubles me…because they’re not dumb…pretty much the reverse where a lot of things are concerned…& yet apparently the evidence coming their way is that any potential benefits of elon musk seem not to be outweighed even on a purely utilitarian scale by the preponderance of evidence that he’s just a shitty person with a lot of toxic junk in his head who somehow marries up well enough with perverse incentives to have been rewarded on a historic scale for being the actual worst?

              • I would say:

                1. Don’t confuse luck and access with skill or talent.

                2. The startup ecosystem is very closed and extremely relationship-based. The vast majority of decisions, from what I can tell by working in it for the past two years, are arrived at purely subjectively. “Oh, I know that guy from grad school. Yeah, we can give him $50 million.” I’m not even exaggerating. It’s horrifying how many decisions have zero basis in objective facts. You or I could never do that, but some Ivy League schmuck can walk into a VC office with a nine-page PowerPoint and walk out with millions.

                3. The startup system is based on gambling. Venture capital funds will back 50 companies and 5 will succeed. Even the unsuccessful ones are often sold off, offsetting the losses, and that average is more than enough to keep the system going.

                4. Success is rewarded but so is failure. If your startup fails the “right” way, that’s considered “proof” that you know what you’re doing. Plus you’ve still got all that startup network to fall back on. There are very few unpardonable sins, and most have to do with blatantly stealing or squandering the money you got, or lying extensively about how well your company is doing.

                5. Elmo is “known,” and his associates are also “known.” In startup world that makes him an acceptable risk. He’ll find investors willing to gamble on him right up until he can’t.

                • …that all sounds pretty solid to me…but the part that nagged at me in the moment was that I couldn’t articulate what kind of filter/split/distinction I could offer that put together the attributes they were arguing we maybe need but which correlate with psychopathy the way sociopaths do with c-suites…willingness to take grandiose moonshots that might cause societal shifts on a seismic scale & leave a functional support system for a healthy, flourishing human race when the dust settles that isn’t hell-bent on choking itself & its host to death…that sort of thing

                  …from the banal awfulness of this kind of 4chan cult of me attitude being elevated to the level of a lifestyle or a philosophy & then propagated at scale…which is death by a thousand cuts territory as far as I can make out

                  …so…I’m stuck lacking a definition for what sort of person musk & his ilk probably aren’t that still could maybe complete the checklist of supposed “pros”?

                  …the feeling is similar to the time someone tried to explain to me that genghis khan had some policies that were arguably progressive for his time where women & single parenthood were concerned

                  …I don’t think it cancels out the bad parts but I can’t claim I don’t see how there’s some sort of truth to it that probably means something?

    • The best thing about The Talented Mr. Ripley was you saw that Gwyneth Paltrow really could act. That, and the many beefcake shots of Jude Law. And the plot, of course, but I’d already read the Highsmith book.

  7. What a great idea, I am sure this will end well!

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/marsha-blackburn-kayleigh-mcenaney-armed-grandparents_n_645b603fe4b094269bb0d9bd

    Ok, now that we got George let’s do MTG…

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/milo-yiannopoulos-caught-in-marjorie-taylor-greene-kanye-west-campaign-cash-scandal

    Hey look, a new sequel to Weekend at Bernies!

    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/dianne-feinstein-set-return-senate-nearly-3-month-absence-due-health-i-rcna83434

    • The part that’s so intentionally douchey for DeSantis here is that you could pass legislation that no non citizen or permanent resident could buy land in Florida and it would be fine. Like the 2 acres size is fine, it’s not like someone couldn’t still buy a house etc.

      But ohhh no it’s gotta be about the evil scary Chinese communism party!

      Signed,

      The dipshit republicans running Missouri have been ignoring how much of our farmland is owned by China for years and now suddenly seem to act like they’re caring.

    • A lot of prime Manhattan real estate, like in London and now I guess Florida, is owned by shady oligarchs the world over hiding behind shell-company LLCs registered “off-shore.” Locally, at least once a bill was introduced, not to forbid this practice, but to make the information of the owners of these shell companies known, not to the public at large, but to some city or state…I don’t know what. So many overlapping bureaucracies. It was soundly defeated. Then, of course, along came Covid, and any investment in New York was not only welcomed but lavishly subsidized through one means or another.

  10. …random observation…but…this confused me for a moment

    …not the tweet it was replying to but why someone thought I’d find it funny…took a bit of reading of various people suggesting there was one already & this guy had it beside his username before it became clear they paid for the tick…which currently isn’t showing

    …over/under on that being a manual adjustment prompted by someone not wishing to see that working definition of a blue tick go viral…maybe someone with a mysterious amount of expensive time to waste in the replies of conveniently deranged sycophants…I’d say, nah…but look at the people who he’s actually interact with…it’s not like they’re a better class of tweet than this shite?

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