Monday Mood [DOT 8/9/25]

8/9/25 MegMegMcGee 38

Hope everyone had a nice weekend. We had glorious weather here in the DC area. I did [more] yardwork. It’s never-ending it seems.

300 South Koreans detained at Hyundai plant in US to be released, says Seoul
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/07/300-south-koreans-detained-at-hyundai-plant-in-us-to-be-released-says-seoul

Yeah right

Trump says he expects to speak with Putin ‘very soon’ after Russia launches large-scale attack in Ukraine
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-administration-news-09-07-25

US treasury secretary denies Trump tariffs are tax on Americans
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/07/us-treasury-secretary-trump-tariffs

Love the tag line: “Billionaire Scott Bessent dismisses concerns about president’s levies and predicts ‘acceleration’ in US economy”

TACO

Trump walks back Chicago ‘war’ threat, but vows to ‘clean up’ cities
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/07/nx-s1-5533191/trump-chicago-threat-baltimore-new-orleans

Imagine being offended by, checks notes, Tom Hanks.

West Point alumni group scraps prestigious award celebrations honoring Tom Hanks
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/06/nx-s1-5532646/west-point-military-academy-alumni-group-scraps-award-celebrations-honoring-tom-hanks-sylvanus-thayer

Have a great day!

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38 Comments

  1. …I don’t so much feel like I try to stay up to speed with the onslaught of news as I do attempt to stay on my feet as the deluge constantly batters at me…so I don’t tend to beat myself up about not having known something was the case…& I figure I wouldn’t be alone in that…but…somehow…without watching the tennis I know orange foolius (a) had them put the trophy in his rolex-sponsored booth/box/suite/whatever rather than leave that where they usually would (b) hit up broadcasters in advance to tell them to adjust their soundtracks to eliminate the audible response to his presence (c) got his assed booed even while they were playing the national anthem

    …whereas

    I am from Missouri and do politics for my job, and am just now learning of this sit-in to protest attempted RW seat-stealing.

    I didn’t know about this, and if I didn’t know about this, then you probably didn’t either.This should be my entire feed and it’s not and that’s a problemThis sit in has now been going on over 48 hours and I am just hearing about it now1/

    — Ariella Elm (@ariellaelm.bsky.social) 2025-09-06T17:00:36.703Z

    and there’s barely any articles about it either the last one was 18 hours agoAnd I only know now because I saw this post from @bookersquared.bsky.social http://www.threads.com/@bookersquar...

    — Ariella Elm (@ariellaelm.bsky.social) 2025-09-06T17:00:36.704Z

      • …i dunno how many people made it all the way down that epic bluesky thread that might rival one of those DOTs I end up with if I pasted it out as a blockquote that I stuck the first post of in one of those the other day…though my guess would be few enough to pretty effectively make the case the guy laid out in it…either way…I think I might have done something similarly rage-induced-but-laughably-ineffective sometime last week when I said…in the hearing of friends that include a few who work in the news industry in some capacity or other…that decades of presenting farage & whatever not-new-but-newly-badged vehicle he was profitably driving in the same direction he’s only ever gone as though that’s not only “new” in the overnight-success sense but somehow the only thing addressing the disenfranchised & under-served elements of society he’s consistently made life nothing but worse for & thus presenting it as the natural home for people who don’t understand their own politics but know they have a legitimate grievance that gets oversimplified until it’s supposed to make them terrible people…might be a thing I’m losing patience with not calling an egregious fuckup of genuinely historic proportions…on course to make it to biblical any day now…& that it’s a colossal indictment of frankly all of us that we’ve failed this miserably to make the world we live in where that man’s career isn’t exclusively the province of cautionary comedy punchlines…instead of people just *loving* to get to call him “the most influential politician of a generation”

        …I grew up fucking british, fer’chris’sakes…fuck the swearing…hitting “losing patience with” is…like…DEFCON 2 or something…which is probably why nobody wanted to talk about that…so they just waited for someone to say clearly rayner’s mistake was buying property that wasn’t in london or her constituency & ticking a “primary residence” box about it…& anyway even if they wouldn’t vote for letting them amend the thing that way themselves isn’t it interesting that they don’t talk about amending that human rights convention so they can do like australia & render all the boat riding migrants illegal & push them offshore without people deciding the country is a fascist hellhole

        …while I try to resist the temptation to upset people I actually like by throwing in that other thread from the other day about what a certain stripe of political journalist is really good at is attending the right sort of inside-baseball social events…or the “bonus” (in some senses) josh johnson thing about the “is he dead?” thing

        …because that would constitute a failure to read that room on my part by the strictures of “being polite”…rather than spreading the word…&/or the love…for josh

        …that bunch aren’t all british…they don’t all live in britain…they don’t all work in that industry…but…all the same…most of them still feel residual smugness from having said leave would win the brexit referendum “because nobody takes seriously the sense of grievance & moral injury farage is so good at tapping into” & think everyone is just hopelessly naïve…except them

        …&…unironically…if this shit keeps up until I succumb to being the “debate me” meme…with *those* people…I might take seriously that we’ve been transported to the upsidedown from stranger things…or the apocalypse is under way

        …they’re real actual people I’ve known for years & like…I even like their kids…&…they’re demonstrably intelligent…a lot of them are considerably better informed in their respective fields than enough of the global population to file frontline politicians in multiple continents in the “know a lot less about X” column…one or two have maybe even hung out socially with politicians whose names & faces are recognisable even beyond the borders of their country…& journalists on multiple continents

        …& to date…while they prefer to leave me hanging if I sound like I might be working up to sounding off…which even I don’t struggle to understand wanting to do…they consistently claim that the one who as a teen sounded most like he’d be down with something like blowing a possibly-venezuelan-boatload-of-people-&-maybe-some-drugs-I-guess-we’ll-never-know out of international waters…since they said pretty similar stuff would be ok in an IRA-related context…has stuck to their recreational-devil’s-advocate paradigm to become “the most left wing person we know”…in a group that literally contains someone with a decades-long career keeping a left-wing publisher out of the red

        …I dunno…but the achievement of self-satisfaction is quite possibly higher up the extinction-capable threat matrix for humanity than I really want to admit?

        • Same idea, slightly different spin: What is the one trait that upwardly mobile people in every single industry all have in common?

          Spare me your “hard work” or your “intellect” or whatever … the answer is much easier. It’s that they know how to (and are able to) please their bosses. It is the No. 1 indicator for promotions, for mobility, everything. And as those people then become the bosses themselves, the cycle renews below them while they look upward at what they see as their social betters and keep climbing.

          And once your put those glasses on, like in “They Live” you know, you really can’t stop seeing it. Why is AI such A Thing? Well, Silicon Valley is making it sound like it’s the next iPhone/internet/TV/radio and if they’re saying it, well those eager-to-please bosses are gonna say it too and those eager-to-please wannabe-bosses are onboard too and does any of it actually work … you know, Johnson uses AI all the time and we like that and think he’s probably going to move to assistant manager over you.

          The media is no different. Of course they know better. But their professional lives turn on them denying that so, they do.

           

          • …so…in what I think is a pretty good fit for a similar “same thing from a perspective only a side-step away” deal…that’s very nearly a paraphrase from a thing one of that crowd once spoke quite interestingly (to me) about…this would have been maybe 10 or more years ago…not 100% but my memory would have me believe it was before brexit happened

            …either way they’d got to a point in their career where they had had to interview enough people for enough positions to have been somewhat bowled over to discover how accurate it seemed to them when someone wrote a piece somewhere about the fundamental flaw most interviewers suffer from that they are blind to (it would not amuse this person to have that described as “implicit bias” but…functionally I can’t see a lot of daylight myself) is that they unconsciously default to assessing the applicant not with respect to the post being offered (about which they may or may not have much depth of knowledge not based on hazy recollections of past parallels from their own career) but how well they think the applicant could do *their* job…& how they’d likely do that & to what extent that aligns with their own self-perceived strengths &/or aims

            …&…like…I do genuinely like these folks…I don’t want them to feel bad…but that conflicts with the part of me that does feel bad about things I frankly think we all ought to feel bad about because if they don’t make you feel bad either you’re…not a good person…or you’re successfully doing what basically all of us are doing to a greater or lesser extent & supressing your awareness of until you are far enough away from looking like a gibbering wreck to mostly not make people around you uncomfortable about how hard you make it for them to be successful at that in the moment

            …&…I don’t even think that’s inherently a bad thing…the miracle by which so many of us get to spend so much of our time living in a world that has things that make life worth living & doesn’t force you to think about the things that make living at all a constant pre-occupation without which you won’t is, like, maybe my favorite part of being born as late in the game as I was…& if we break that part significantly I’m pretty sure we’d be killing ourselves as a species

            …so I’m not trying to begrudge folks whatever accomodations they’ve negotiated with their personal reality in order to be able to be a functional member of a society they engage & interact with…or make them feel bad for making a decent living for them &/or theirs

            …I just also find it increasingly hard to not feel increasingly sure that in terms of overall peril in the short-, medium-, & long-term to humanity…we haven’t looked this screwed in at minimum my entire life…& plausibly ever in recorded history…& that at some point “ah, well…life goes on” & “come & swim in the lethe with us, the water’s lovely” stop sounding different to me

            …& that continues to not be fun for me?

            • Like look, obviously racism and sexism and bigotry, et. al. animate the anti-DEI push — which I’ll use even though there are 1,000 better ways of putting it but whatever, everyone gets what I’m going after here — and people who describe the backlash to equality in those terms are not wrong.

              That said, among the upper classes, I think there’s a just as big (if not bigger!) distaste with DEI because it forces them to confront those very biases of which you speak. They get a little sickened by the idea that maybe all those young can’t-miss go-getters weren’t necessarily “the best possible candidate” but something a little less noble and a lot closer to home than their own self-image would like. And then it’s the Simpsons “Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong” meme and problem solved, it’s not that you just happened to hire a person who looks like you and reminds you of yourself at that age, it’s the woke left for pointing out the problem! If they didn’t do that, why, there would be no problem at all!

              Also to your idea of what you do to get by, I mean, not to be full Onward Glorious Revolution Comrade here but if you say “I have to fire some employees” nobody bats an eyelash but if I was just like “I’m going to bankrupt that family over there today” you know there’d be some police calls and mental tests and maybe a stay at a locked facility of some sort. But “business” you say? Well you can have a pass for whatever sort of anti-social behavior you’d like, and that’s just… well, business.

              • …&…we’re back to josh

                …not trying to 2nd guess if you had time to take in that set…but…”he’s a businessman”…repeated enough times to threaten to lose meaning…followed by “even *you* [person anecdotally defending their vote for *gestures wildly* all this] “didn’t say *good* businessman”

                …& I’m not proud…I’ll take my laughs where I can find them & count myself grateful to be able to laugh at all about anything, tbh

                …but the longer it gets from the first time I read watchmen…which, for the record, was a good few years later than I read stuff like the man who was thursday…or, hell, the red badge of courage…the less the comedian’s portrayal of…given the way the man’s material is composed of so many reflexive riffs you eventually get “supreme“…a state-sponsored joker in the vein of the killing joke…after people arguably missed what he thought the point was of that

                TIL Alan Moore didn’t like The Killing Joke and regretted inspiring a bleak and violent depiction of Batman [r/comicbooks]

                …seems less & less like alan meant me to see that as a joke in watchmen…which…not for nothing…originally came out in (iirc) 12 issues with covers on which the doomsday clock from the atomic scientists periodical ticked down to midnight

                …&…alan might also self-describe as a practising magician…&/or have some pretty out-there ideas I don’t know as I’d sign on to…but…I bet he’s fun to hang out in a pub with if you manage not to piss him off…& he knows a lot of stuff about a wide range of wondrous nonsense…so…pinch of salt or whatever…but I keep catching myself accidentally thinking “V for Vendetta is sort of the optimistic one of his, isn’t it?” these days…& that…probably isn’t a good sign in terms of reflections of the ambient environment visible from somewhere with arguably less problems than everyplace you can see from here in terms of keeping body & soul together & weather permitting probably the wolf from the door to boot

                …he once said he wrote that one by starting with the premise that an election which historically went labour’s way had instead kept it in the tory family & never let it leave thereafter…spun up to start at its inevitable end & back-filling the evil-contains-the-seed-of-its-own-destruction plot points draped over something that showcases both the brutally bereft sensibilities of a genuinely intolerant captured state & the delights of the fuller world that contains the myriad of cultural references the thing is too densely stacked with to fully attribute without accidentally writing some sort of doctoral thesis

                […uh…significant spoiler alert, I guess…if you like comics enough to want to avoid those while threading the needle of not having read these ones already?]

                …but in the end (iirc) the disillusioned policeman that finally figures it all out after resorting to tripping balls to make the dots he wasn’t privy to line up…provides the somebody who knows the truth…while the anti-hero does a dread pirate roberts exit bequeathing the popular capital behind the costume to a woman far worse than scorned that still wouldn’t cross the lines it took to give it to her

                …& I’d argue that’s actually a more optimistic take than “supervillain actually cracks the science necessary to teleport organic entities…& to lab-grow one with telepathic properties…that can be scripted so that when the lethal aspect of the whole teleportation thing turns it into dead meat as it incorporates in time square during rush hour…in its death throes it will push enough utterly fabricated “aliens are real & they hate us & they’re coming to kill us all” direct to the brainstem of enough people for the idea to gain full-traction as “this is the way we live now” & usher in an enlightened age of “let’s maybe not go extinct””…which is how watchmen ended before it was a movie

                …which…may say more about me than alan, now that I think about it…but…having thought about…I think maybe I do think, at that?

    • You’ll recall that when you put democratic ballot initiatives on our Missouri ballots (separate from democrat candidates), they almost always pass. Refusing becoming a right to work state (twice), raising minimum wage, paid sick leave (fuckers in Jeff City overturned that), making abortion legal again (fuckers in Jeff City overturned that and it went to state supreme court), etc etc.

      So they want to make it to where each of the 8 districts has to pass on amendments and shit, vs majority. Seeing as Kansas City and St Louis are only 2 districts, we’re fucked as a state when this passes. And I say when, because it will.

      Also fuck that St Charles fucker quoted in that article. I’m looking at St Charles from my office building in St Louis. They’re a suburb full of republican assholes who are too good to say they’re from St Louis yet get all the cultural, educational, medical, and sports benefits of being the adjacent county to us. They can get fucked and stay fucked.

      • And listen I know I sound exceptionally riled up, even for me, about fucking St Charles people. I went to college in northern Missouri and every fucking one of them gets their ass hurt if you say they’re from St Louis. Like introducing them to someone from another state “oh yes, have you met Paul and Jennifer? They’re also from St Louis.” And they’ll sure as shit stinks be like “no, we’re from St Charles.” You know, because someone from another state knows what that means or even cares. Like excuuuuuuse me, should I have introduced myself as “hi yes I’m from unincorporated St Louis County”? No. That’s stupidly confusing, I am from St Louis. They really do annoy the fuck out of me in St Charles. Also whenever a friend decided to move out there, it’s like byyyeee friendship since wahh wahh they won’t ever come back across the river.

      • Thank you for being my anger translator this morning. I have to get my ass showered and dressed so that I can drive out to one of the many red districts and do it for real.

        • On the flipside, though, I had to go to St. Charles to interpret for a civil case at the end of last month. I got there a few minutes before the judge called the parties’ names on the docket for that morning, and when neither of them responded, he dismissed the case. I was in and out of there in about five minutes or so, and now sitting on the desk here is a check for $150.

          • Oh, and speaking of shenanigans from our fair state, today’s the day that we get a new Attorney General, now that Andrew Bailey’s managed to fail his way eastward to become co-deputy director of the FBI, along with that pissbaby podcaster Dan Bongino, less than a year after he was elected.

  2. Welcome to today’s edition of Krazy Kat Komix. This is from Politico:

    QUOTE OF THE DAY: “I have to stand up as the governor and say, ‘I’m not letting the people of my state crash out. You’re not going to divide us. We will be stronger in the face of what you are doing to us, Mr. President.’ And don’t underestimate a woman from Buffalo who gets really — and I’m not going to say the word, but I am … who gets really pissed off about what you’re doing to my people, [emphasis mine] OK?” — Gov. Kathy Hochul in Buffalo on Sunday with some words for Trump.

    You tell him Krazy Kat! Ein Volk, ein Staat, ein Krazy Kat! Which reminds me. I have been to the Nazi Party Rally Grounds at Nuremberg twice! Once was a university-sponsored “Never forget!” breast-beating struggle session where Germans of all ages express their self-loathing. The other time was for their world-famous Christmas market (the Kristkindlmarkt) where the Glühwein flows like water and you can buy enough kitschy hand-carved Christmas ornaments to decorate all the trees that Melania is going to stuff into the White House this year. (It’s true, Mel. Who gives a shit about Christmas? Although your Yuletide trolling is non pareil.)

    Anyway, to wrap this up, the Nuremberg Rally Grounds, which have not been used for 80+ years for obvious reasons, is still far more impressive than that ghastly new Buffalo Bills stadium that Krazy Kat foisted upon us and left us with a (Buffalo) bill of $1 billion, yes, billion, with a b…

      • …if it helps at all…for me “QUOTE OF THE DAY“, “you’re doing to my people” & “Kathy Hochul” all show up in bold type…so the [emphasis mine] makes sense

        …the vagaries of device/OS/browser roulette combined with whatever dislocation wordpress & the comment section are currently fucking with one another over are probably still more opaque than not to me but my guess is the gremlin responsible is chuckling away somewhere in that morass?

        • It’s true. It’s fine on my phone and my tablet but not on my computer setup. I guess no one sits at a desk and stares at a monitor anymore. Which, by the way, my monitor is so old that I can watch videos, all kinds of content, but there’s no camera so no one can watch me. This was invaluable during the COVID-19 plague, when everyone wanted to hop on Zoom calls and meanwhile I grew out a Santa-worthy COVID-19 facial hair set-up that would frighten small children (the masking didn’t help.)

          • …several people I know pretty much literally grew the first beard they’d ever kept past stubble-length specifically on the grounds that it made wearing the masks more comfortable…& in one case less apt to leave a seam at the top seemingly designed for keeping a constant film of fog across their specs

            …true story

            …I bet it was a glorious beard of which a dwarven mine-king would be proud

  3. 300 Koreans and 23 folks of Mexican origin… working at a Hyundai plant in… Georgia.

    Good job ICE, rounding up “criminals.”

    If I’m the folks in Hyundai or other multinationals then I’d be reconsidering basing anything in Murrica. There’s usually a lot of folks from the home office working at the plant. Depending on the quality of the local workers, you may only need a handful or you need alot. 

    That was the way it was at Nortel. Raleigh Triangle Park seemed it needed A LOT of Canadian Ex-pats to function…

    • …hi, tom

      …sorry to hear about that west point thing being too threatening to the “president”‘s ego for them to be able to award you another award

      …but I do appreciate the upgrade to my six degrees of kevin bacon handicap?

    • Trump Admin Fake blond number 453 behind him is also asleep?

      What will be her punishment? Having to pay actual taxes? Banned from buying hair dye products?

      Also that’s some pretty impressive fat rolls on Preznit Jiggles. Zoidberg-esque.

    • …I don’t know if we’ve overshot the rubicon for pictures or video counting as proof rather than likely-custom-generated…but…I’m pretty sure there are images out there for which carbon-date-able physical film negatives originally existed since they pre-date digital cameras…in which the twice-white-house-resident is clearly kissing what at least looks like a visibly underage girl…at least one I feel like I saw a copy of floating about somewhere in the last few weeks had the back of one such girl’s head…as she leaned across to the completely visible guy-who-later-dropped-a-dime-on-epstein…make it almost impossible to tell that it was that epstein who had his arm around her as she sat on his lap right next to his friend who was doing the kissing…à la “they let you”/”moved on her like a bitch”…per his…uhh…signature playbook?

      …so…despite the part where it makes me feel like a parody of a person keeping a tin-foil tailor in full-time work…I struggle not to take seriously the take that he fucked jeff over on a real estate thing & then jeff poached a young lady or two off the staff roster at his spa…& then they threatened each other with exposure of some sort right up to the time jeff incorporated talk about the overlap between the other guy’s debt management strategy & how that parlayed into cosmetic wealth & what- & who-all underwrote that & what those might have in common with his latest mrs…& then jeff got arrested for realsies in florida…&…sometime after getting picked up again for breaching the sweetest of sweetheart deals the florida DA could make happen for them (wonder what happened to her?) jeff mysteriously dies…sorry…tops himself

      …&…I know it sounds nuts…but…I think the epstein-files-induced terror he has, really…the one that is wrecking his shit on the inside…might not be about the salacious side of his degenerate record?

        • …I’m not sure I need an attempt to figure it out by going looking for a copy of the one I’m at best vaguely recalling in my algorithm-swaying search history…but…iirc…to me…who is not an expert on the consequences to the viewer of lighting & camera angles…could have been?

          …if anyone wants to hunt it down or offer candidates for “do you mean this?”…they’re seated on a sofa that looks like the sort with a corner…want to say somewhere in the red/pink spectrum…the orange guy is on our left that would be at the right hand of the guy sitting just the other side of the corner so their legs/shoulders pretty much touch…there’s people milling about in the background not paying much attention that I don’t remember being in focus…which would track with the shot-on-film thing or make it “sophisticated” if it’s AI-generated, I guess…the girl’s blond…can’t speak to natural or otherwise…wearing a mostly-or-entirely black dress…on its face & without anything remotely resembling an accurate read on how old he looks & how old that’d make a matching ivanka…the name didn’t spring to mind for me until you asked?

      • I’m not sure if there are pictures but I find it highly unlikely that Orange didn’t indulge in Epstein’s crimes. And Epstein was known to have extensively wired all his properties for surveillance. I’d give it about a 80% chance that compromising footage existed at some point. Whether or not he’s been able to eliminate it is the question. A president, even an incompetent one, has a LOT of resources. But if anybody would have copies, it would be Vlad.

        Honestly, to me the actual existence is secondary to the fact that people keep talking about him and Epstein. Conjecture is just fine as long as it drives him into incoherent rage. Sooner or later all those hamberders will take their toll.

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