Midweek Meh-Ness [DOT 17/1/24]

17/1/24 MegMegMcGee 49

Hope you guys are staying warm where you are. We had a fair amount of snow for us 4-5 inches I’d say.

I can’t keep up

U.S. strikes Yemen again as campaign to thwart Houthis intensifies
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/01/16/us-strikes-yemen-houthis/

I hope she gets everything

E. Jean Carroll defamation trial adjourns for the day; Carroll expected to testify Wednesday
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/01/16/e-jean-carroll-trump-trial/

Sprots!

Knicks owner set woman up for sexual assault by Harvey Weinstein, suit alleges
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/16/james-dolan-kellye-croft-harvey-weinstein-knicks-new-york

Stonks!

Judge blocks JetBlue-Spirit merger after DOJ’s antitrust challenge
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/16/jetblue-spirit-merger-block-in-win-for-bidens-justice-department.html

Fun!

She bought a brooch for $25. It could sell for $19,000.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2024/01/16/burges-brooch-auction-steel-antique/

If you’re cold, they’re cold

Have a good day!

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49 Comments

  1. Oh no, the Jeremy update. Stay warm, little buddy.

    Now that we’ve off-loaded Donald Trump to Palm Beach I think James Dolan might be the most despised man in New York. The lawsuits are flying and he was deploying facial recognition technology to keep his opponents out of Madison Square Garden. First of all, if you must watch sprots, do it at home in front of your 200-inch flat screen and don’t bother paying $200 to sit in an arena that feels like it’s 200 years old and hasn’t been cleaned since it was built. Also, the risk of having a Solo cup of overpriced domestic beer spilled on you and the warfare that breaks out among Long Islanders and Staten Islanders. Also, no matter what the season, it always smells so sweaty in the Garden. I don’t know what it is. It’s like they intentionally recreate the aroma of a locker room to enhance our experience or something.

  2. Let me guess: Trump never paid up on the first defamation suit he lost, right? So he’s certainly not going to pay for this one either.

    • He deposited $5 million with the court for the first case, although final transfer from the court to Carroll is on hold pending his appeal.

  3. In last night’s episode of “Hawaii 5-0” (and this was a very convoluted one) there’s a Chinese or Chinese-descended crime family. They break into a secure military facility, kill a few employees, and make off with a small device that can set off ICBM missiles! “The size of two packs of cigarettes,” Steve McGarrett helpfully describes it as. Now, I know what that would be, but I bet a lot of you don’t.

    Slowly but surely members of this crime family are picked off, until there’s one left, a young son who’s the anointed one. Turns out they are all actually Chinese Communists, so they address each other as Comrade and are accused of being Maoists. Meanwhile Detective Chin Ho is related to them! The anointed one is Chin Ho’s nephew!

    This is a great episode because we see a traditional Chinese tea ceremony and what I bet was a faithfully rendered traditional Chinese funerary ceremony. This is important because to get the ICBM device out of Hawaii and over to China (Taiwan, actually, which was not Communist and was hostile to Communism, and still is to this day, they don’t want to suffer the fate of Hong Kong?) they’re going to throw it into the coffin, where presumably it wouldn’t be searched by customs. That is actually ingenious.

    Meanwhile, Steve McGarrett and my boyfriend Danno Williams are letting their hair grow out, and more than one woman is still sporting a beehive. I had a flashback to the mother of one of my best friends who, in one of the bathrooms, had a little styrofoam bust with her beehive wig on it. A source of endless fascination for this 8-year-old or however old I was.

    • I suspect that a matter of national security wouldn’t be left to the whiles of the local police especially anything involving “special devices” as the National Security Apparatus is known to call nukes (even a supercop like Jack Lord.)

      I’m surprised that they didn’t have a serious looking white male in a buzzcut with a clipped voice (Jack Webb?) and arrogant manner (cause I’m an Ivy League grad and you’re not!) simply shove Danno and gang aside and let the Feds do their jobs.

      Ah, 1970s TV never made any actual sense.

      • Oh no, and there’s a twist, and this is a total spoiler alert. At the very end they’re able to round up the biggest kingpin of all, Woo Fat (or maybe Phat) and in the last three or four minutes an FBI (or CIA) agent swoops in and takes Woo Fat for himself. It turns out that in a Gary Powers replay an American pilot has gone down somewhere in China or Taiwan (I’m really shocked that they considered these two places basically the same thing. They’re not, not at all. World War III might erupt in the Strait of Taiwan) so they’re going to do a prisoner exchange. Steve is furious, natch, but Woo Fat walks out a free man and goes on his way to the Honolulu Airport.

    • And by the way dinner last night, while we were watching “Hawaii 5-0”, was unadorned cheeseburgers (i.e.; no bread or “fixin’s” except for mustard) and Tater Tots. The best little version of hash browns. We must have had a vegetable but I can’t remember what it was. Baby carrots, maybe. And then I went to make dessert but BH stopped me. “Neither of us need it.” “Of course we don’t, but we’re not ascetic monks.” But I abided by his wishes.

  4. …as a rule…I don’t put the tv on in the morning…over the years I’ve seen breakfast tv in a handful of countries…&…it’s not my cup of tea, I guess you could say

    …so…I’m biased…but I was not prepared for this headline?

    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/jan/17/ed-balls-kicks-susanna-reid-in-the-head-on-good-morning-britain

      • There are also Lord Sugar and Lord Adonis. I’m not joking.

      • A local guy named Richard Dick ran as a Tory three decades ago.

    • G-o-o-o-a-a-a-l!

      Could the Labour Party (and the Tories, for that matter) be any more clownish?

      • …never say never?

        …it’s getting to be a high bar, though…to quote john crace from the “if you give us money we can make news free for everyone” chunk of text I’ve seen at the foot of a good few guardian articles lately

        Here in the UK, the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, had promised us a government of stability and competence – not forgetting professionalism, integrity and accountability – after the rollercoaster ride of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Remember Liz? These days she seems like a long forgotten comedy act. Instead, Sunak took us even further through the looking-glass into the Conservative psychodrama.

        • …oh, & on a not altogether unrelated note…the tories are through another looking glass on that rwanda thing…haven’t a set of links to hand but iirc they were at least moderately embarrassed to have to concede that yes, in fact the country they wanted to pass legislation to declare a safe place to send people did sort of currently find itself on the list of countries from which people seek asylum in the UK…which may or may not be why they’ve taken to trying to gloss over the trouble they’ve had getting their first set of would-be immigrants redirected by arguing that the success of the policy should not be measured by how many people they send over on planes…or how many rwanda could accept (theoretically hundreds to begin with & maybe thousands once it’s been running for a year or two – out of either tens or hundreds of thousands depending on which sort you elect to count)…but instead by…& this is a doozy…the number of immigrants who don’t attempt to make it to the UK because of the chance they might get sent to a place they’d want to seek asylum from…why worry about the mere burden of proof when you might be able to spin a conjectural parallel to take advantage of a downtick in a proxy metric?

          …not that there aren’t all sorts giving them a run for their money in a host of places…but…you can’t have a proper circus without clowns?

          …I know historically they didn’t treat them well…but…it kind of makes me miss the days where they might have to stick their head in a lion’s mouth at some point

      • I should say, really, that when I try to sleep in the Faithful Hound will sometimes jump into bed with me and, I guess, as a test to see if I’m still alive, will paw or kick me in the head. So it’s not like I haven’t suffered the same thing.

  5. In Florida news, the Dems ain’t dead yet.

    Florida Democrats flip GOP seat, boosting party and humiliating DeSantis

    The winner, Keen, put the focus squarely on abortion. Now the Republicans are going to start hand-wringing and swear that if they could just make people understand that an “abortion ban” doesn’t “ban abortion,” they could win again.

  6. Speaking of hand wringing, Democrats need to calm TF down.

    Republicans Whistling Past the Graveyard, The Troubling Signs from Iowa’s Caucuses

    Quote:

    Despite being the closest thing to an incumbent in the GOP, Trump’s performance in Iowa raises questions with anyone who knows anything about politics, about his appeal among the party as a whole. Securing barely 51% of the vote. Translation: in record breaking subzero temperatures, nearly 50% of the base of the base risked their lives to vote against Donald Trump. To place that number in perspective, Joe Biden is leading his current opponents by as much as 70% in recent polls.

  7. …sigh…I am having…a less than productive day…& I’ve lost count of the number of things it feels like I’d struggle not to block quote in almost their entirety when I get around to tomorrow’s DOT…so…to get at least one of those off that risk assessment…going back to that john crace well…but an actual article not just a footnote

    Nothing illustrates the continuing meltdown of the Conservatives better than the Rwanda bill. The obsession with persisting with a scheme that you know is never going to work. That will send, at most, 200 unfortunate people to Africa. A scheme that ignores the findings of the supreme court that Rwanda is an unsafe country. That depends on bailing out of international treaties. That will put the UK on a par with Russia and Belarus. Happy days.

    But we are where we are. Locked into an ongoing psychodrama that is just a national embarrassment to the rest of us who are mere onlookers. Just think of the nonsense we are being expected to believe. Only a few weeks ago Chris Skidmore was denounced by Tories as a traitor to the cause for resigning as an MP because the party was reneging on its climate crisis promises. Now we’ve got about 60 backbenchers – plus bandwagon followers Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith – who are proclaiming themselves heroes for rebelling against the government.
    […]
    That wasn’t the end of it. To keep the rebels onside – no one was quite sure why; it wasn’t as if any of them had a gameplan because bringing down the government and forcing a general election where most of them would be out of a job was hardly an option – Sunak came up with the sort of rubbish that even the Post Office would reject as idiotic. Like magicking up 150 judges out of nowhere to deal with the Rwanda challenges. Like promising to break international law but only whispering it in case Rwanda somehow happened to be listening. The Tories have yet to discover the internet.
    […]
    We were lucky to have someone like him, insisted Honest Bob [Jenrick]. He could understand things that were beyond the comprehension of the little people. His was a truth only available to the incredibly dim. Rwanda was safe because we had said it was safe. That was a given. What he wanted was the legal freedom to redefine reality in whatever way he liked.

    Honest Bob added in a few other countries he didn’t much like. Lawyers that bothered to apply the law were unpatriotic lefties. Care4Calais was dismissed with a sneer. He really couldn’t understand why people might actually waste time on refugees. They were lowlifes. An underclass not worthy of the attention of a Brit.

    “Rwanda wants this scheme to work,” he said. Well, yes and no. Even Rwanda has its limits. One of them being international law. They quite like that. And they are twitchy about threats to break it. Also, it’s money for old rope as it is. Who wouldn’t pocket £400m for being asked to do precisely nothing? The government can send me three home secretaries for that. But Honest Bob was adamant. Now was the time for a futile gesture.

    Next up was the superannuated Bill Cash. He still can’t believe we aren’t still fighting the last world war. The refugee problem is all Germany’s fault. Them and the EU. It was as though the Brexit debates had never ended. He was a Brit, so he had a God-given right to do what he wanted. The supreme court was full of Trots. He’s never met a refugee he didn’t want to drown. Honest Bob nodded approvingly.

    That just left Edward Leigh. The idiot’s idiot. A man who makes Cash look like an intellectual giant. Any fool could make a claim that Rwanda was unsafe, he said. And it must be stopped. You just had to tweet that the president was a dictator. Then you’d be locked up for life. Er … yes. That’s precisely the point. Rwanda is unsafe. You can call Sunak a mindless clown and no one bats an eyelid.

    All the while, the handful of opposition MPs just looked on in amazement. Was this really a party of government? These just weren’t serious people. Rats in a sack. The amendments were going nowhere. And we would all be back tomorrow for more.

    [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/16/tories-reach-new-levels-of-derangement-as-mps-debate-rwanda-bill]

    • Oh, John Crace. Why don’t we have an American version?

      • …the man is an absolute treasure

        …if jon stewart had a slightly more dissolute past & knew an awful lot more about football he could have come close…but I think to wind up with the tone crace has you need to be steeped in the extra depth of pomp & ceremony that’s hard to replicate without at least a vestigial monarchy…to provide a starker contrast with the speak as you find down to earth-ness of the thing?

        …uhhh…so…yeah…I may have mentioned my day hasn’t been going especially in a productive direction…& I’m not at all sure that typing out a response to a rhetorical question is a demonstration that I can only blame myself…or evidence that I’m stuck twiddling my thumbs & even this seems more productive than that

        …how many times can you put the “maybe coffee will help” hypothesis to the test before you have to admit it in fact does not?

        …asking for…uhhh…a friend?

    • …well…shit…there goes the neighborhood?

    • Yeah, of all the people who instinctively understand the Palestinian plight, the Irish are way, way up there on the scale.

      One wonders if Biden is going to get it at some point.

    • 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

      Butcher Biden/Genocide Joe has no qualms about promoting the biased narrative in favor of Israelis. Not even a throw away comment in support of Palestinian Americans in Gaza? No mention that IDF/IOF murdered their own people/hostages in Gaza? Of course not.

      https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/01/14/statement-from-president-joe-biden-marking-100-days-of-captivity-for-hostages-in-gaza/#:~:text=Today%2C%20we%20mark%20a%20devastating,knowing%20what%20tomorrow%20will%20bring.

      • …I’m not entirely sold on it being a good idea to get into the nickname/epithet game…but it undermines solid moments like (going back a  couple of weeks)

        …when on this he is so seemingly tin-eared to so many people

        …I mean…I don’t get how a person could leap to the “better vote for trump” pile-on if that’s where they’re coming from…but in terms of stuff keeping people under the impression their conscience might go easier on them if they stay home & wash their hands of the whole voting business…mishandling his line on this is a bizarrely self-inflicted wound?

    • Thing is, she’s reaching pretty hard if she thinks Israel is on an express train to pariah state status.  There isn’t a single Western nation (short of Ireland…maybe) that will kick Israel to the curb.  They’ve got a free pass forever and they know it.  I think the only thing that might–might— change that is if they straight up nuked Gaza.

      • …unless I’m misinterpreting something it looks like the source for the embedded clip has been taken down…which would argue pretty strongly you’d be on the money, there?

  10. Trump is backing a primary challenge for new House “Freedom” Caucus chair Bob Good.

    Good won a primary a few years ago against another right wing Republican after Trump wanted the old guy out.

    It’s just the latest example of how Trump doesn’t win support by  engaging in any kind of real quid pro quo with rational decision makers.

    He finds deluded people who think they can trust him despite all of his history. It’s either deluded thinking that he cares about policy, or else the General Kelly delusion that they’re smart enough to control him.

    The obvious question is what does that make all of the present day consultants, pundits, and reporters who still think they can work with him, or triangulate their way through his mess.

  11. Is this just the natural result of nobody else will fuck them or does he just REALLY want to fuck his cousin?

    • Ironically, he looks like the former coworker who stabbed me in the back and then tried to reconnect (TWICE!) on Linkedin.

    • Ok so this is one of those things where I don’t disagree with him, despite finding the idea personally gross. There’s ethnic minorities where marriage to a cousin isn’t seen as inherently wrong, and so criminalizing it is forcing them away from some traditional beliefs. Also in some tribal groups, patrilineal kinship systems are also agnatic. So like parents have a son and a daughter, but only the son’s eventual children are considered part of the family lineage. In those groups, marrying a cousin by our definition of cousins might not apply by their definition of cousins.

      Anyways, I personally think anything with a first cousin is gross but I understand that a lot of other cultures don’t.

  12. Lemo Sukm demands more shares of Telsa or he’s going to take his geniuz ball and go home.

    Currently only “owns” 13%, wants 25%.

    Meanwhile Shitter is only worth 30% of what Lemo paid for it.

    • …so…rough & ready…when tesla was worth a round trillion bucks…he was “worth” about 25% of that…more or less…net…which included north of 20% of tesla’s shares

      …then he did that trying to be cute thing where he pretended flogging a chunk of stock for $5billion or so was just to do what a twitter poll told him & not somewhere between tax efficient & his only way not to have the IRS go after him…then he got high on his own supply & commenced the death by a thousand ineptitudes of twitter…by…among other things…further leveraging his tesla stock…which the board had already had to make him sign pledges about not further taking the piss out of as a mechanism lest it bankrupt the insanely over-valued thing the rest of them need to stay that way by tanking the shareprice that’s its most valuable asset…&…the year *before* he bought twitter with personal loans & secured some of those against his stock…& before he wound up offloading more of that stock until he was down to that 13% he wants to ratchet back up to 25…over 50% of his tesla stock was leveraged one way or another

      …I probably couldn’t do the math even if I could lay my hands on accurate figures for the current position…but…I genuinely wonder if any of that 13% isn’t stock he could be legally compelled to sell if called upon by creditors?

    • My only argument would be that Xitter is probably worth even less than that, and however over-leveraged he seems, it’s worse.

      I’m sure Tesla would LOVE for him to sell his stock.

      • …I imagine they’d be over the moon to see him divorced from the business…but…I find it hard to believe they’d love it as much as I’m pretty sure I’d love it if it turned out that being serially compelled to put actual money where his mouth is turned out to be enough to beggar the world’s richest man

        …like…to wind up immortalized à la ozymandius as the dictionary definition of “mouth writes checks ass can’t cash”…it’d be a worthy fixture in the annals of poetic irony…for my money, any road?

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