TGIF [DOT 16/2/24]

16/2/24 MegMegMcGee 58
"I've only had half of four bottles of wine."

Welcome to Friday gang! And, even better, the Friday before a long weekend.

Got anything fun going on? I’m going to a concert and my neighbor is having everyone over for tacos on Sunday. Other than that, nothing exciting planned.

#merica

Beloved DJ Lisa Lopez-Galvan killed in Kansas City parade shooting
https://wapo.st/3uzzEgz

This man is truly an idiot

Tucker Carlson Says Trip to Russian Grocery Store Has ‘Radicalized’ Him Against US Leaders: ‘Legitimately Angry’
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tucker-carlson-says-trip-russian-161319528.html

You couldn’t have waterboarded this information out of me

The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam.
https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warrants.html

Sprots!
OMG look at his face. He KNOWS they just won.

Stonks!

S&P 500 closes at record high, Dow gains 300 points in late-day rally
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/14/stock-market-today-live-updates.html

SET HIM FREE!

I saw a Deadsplinter favorite on Wednesday night. These guys put on a hell of a show. I definitly recommend if they come to your town. (That includes our international readers as well: https://www.thedeadsouth.com/tour)

Have a great weekend!

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58 Comments

  1. Oh no. The raccoon. Half a hot pocket.

    As for Tucker Carlson being radicalized by a trip to a Russian grocery store: Before the pandemic lockdown I used to visit at least one grocery store or market almost every day. I don’t remember being radicalized, but I do remember wishing for the promised Obama death panels, for either myself or my fellow customers in the checkout line.

  2. …wait…you’re having me on, right?

    …tucker carlson did not just shove his head so far up his ass it popped back out at the top again…did he?

    …because if misunderstanding the difference between relative & absolute parity of purchasing power in two economies with different currencies…one of which has been (& some might argue currently is in a few ways) a command economy…is enough to radicalize him

    …if his tiny mind doesn’t explode first that boy is going to be so radical he’ll have to do a whole after-school special on the threat he poses to the american way of life any day now

    …I mean…it’s true some profits are getting inflated beyond consumers taking an inflation hit in the pocketbook…but…really…he thinks he could buy 4x the shit if he just moved to russia?

    …be my fucking guest…shit…I’ll help pack for you & throw in for gas money

      • …yeah…they built out the original network maybe even better than the victorians worked over what’s under london…the art deco thing played a part, I think…or maybe I mean nouveau…think possibly people like this guy were at least tangentially something to do with how splendid they look but I don’t rightly know

        …honestly, though…first thing I wondered was what he meant by “it cost this much in $” was how literally he meant that

        …used to be commonplace when travelling in that part of the world to take dollars & not exchange them unless you had to…they held their value much better & were happily accepted in lots of places instead of rubles…& often so preferentially that you effectively got a discount that was a better deal than the commission you’d get changing the currency as a direct transaction…& the merchants could get a better rate on bigger sums when they wanted to do that…& at times the state took a rake in foreign currency to add to the forex coffers

        …so if, say, it were $400 in NY groceries & it might have cost $200+ in cashed out equivalent rubles…but they’d take a c-note in the hand instead instead of anything requiring shrubbery…that wouldn’t have surprised me…based on some outdated but broadly analogous recollections?

        • When I was commuting into East Berlin I was forced to buy 25 Reichsmarks every day. They’re absolutely worthless. If I had any left over after buying lunch I’d go to this bookstore on my way “home” (my budget hotel/youth hostel in West Berlin) and buy post cards, which I would duly show to the guards at Checkpoint Charlie. To think that there are Germans who lived through that and are still nostalgic for it.

          There’s one thing to be nostalgic for. In West Berlin, if your workplace was near the Wall you got a special financial supplement to put up with the mental distress. And concurrently the apartments, already cheap by European standards, were cheapest of all near the Wall. So if you could put up with it and lived and worked near the Wall you could have a pretty high standard of living.

          West Berlin was so heavily subsidized by the government. I think the subway cost like 10 cents. It was all an effort to keep Westerners there and not let it fall into East German hands. It was a very fun city, very fin de siècle, but it had been that way for a long time. “Cabaret” is not entirely fiction, it’s based on a memoir, and that memoir details events that took place almost a century ago.

          During the Wilhelmine period it had a reputation outside of Germany of being cold and dark and stuffy, which it could be. And the conditions of the working class were pretty grim. But it had a vibrant café culture, a thriving literary scene, and gay life galore, at least by 1890s standards. Oscar Wilde should have lived there. Unless of course he got mixed up with a member of the German nobility, and there were thousands of them, in which case his fate wouldn’t have been much different.

    • Tucker doesn’t understand money any more than a cocker spaniel does. He’s never had to look at a checking account with $200 in it and decide which bill gets paid and “how much do I hold back for food” and “I’ve got to find another part-time job because sleep is optional.” People who were born rich simply don’t have any concept of the work/money value equation. Money is just always there when they need it, just like somehow the cocker spaniel’s bowl gets filled every day.

      • When we first acquired Faithful Hound a decade ago I had to call in a dog trainer because he was such a disobedient puppy. He thought the sun rose and set on Better Half and that I was this useless impediment to his happiness, which mostly consisted of zooming around the apartment and chewing on everything in sight, while I, Bartleby the Scrivener, tried get some work done. BH had an on-site corporate job then so during the day it was a battle of wits between the two of us.

        She told me that one way to get a dog to respect you is to become the food-giver. It worked. After a couple of weeks of me doling out the kibble he became my boon companion and seldom lets me out of his sight. There’s also the theory that he thinks I’m such a moron that I’ll injure myself somehow and his food supply will be cut off.

    • It’s surprising he lived this long. Most of Putin’s critics go out the window drink radioactive tea get in a car crash have a surprise medical condition stumble onto a bomb disappear without warning much earlier in their protests. Maybe he thinks the Tucker interview went really well and he gave himself a little treat?

      • …navalny survived so many attempts it was like a slow-motion version of that story about rasputin…but he literally sent him to a gulag…the full life of ivan denisovich bit…as salutary efforts go you could make an argument it had some things in common with a cat playing with a mouse

        …but…yeah…that thing the other day that was talking about how support for whoever looks like the furthest thing from him working like a magnet needed some sort of pushback signifier…& the tucker carnival is clearly part of a whole project for him now that the chaos monkeys have successfully put the cash behind defying him in ukraine in the “uncertain” column…he’s out-producing the opposition in raw munitions…& backing a horse he’s trying & failing to rein in over jerusalem-wards is so helpfully both distracting from the old news war & threatening to bleed support from the less-chaos-would-be-nice candidate

        …I bet some days he sits in a big chair & strokes a white cat…& laughs his ass giddy

        …imagine how it would go for tucker & hannity & donnie’s friends on fox if you had a demon vlad instead of a dark brandon to contend with

        …& they can’t put the people who got their capitol over-run in or under a jail in less than a full presidential term?

        …what was it bill hicks said about the colonials fighting the indians

        “Are we winning?”
        It’s like, they fight the War on Drugs like the colonials fought the Indians, right? They’re walking in a straight line in red coats. Drug users are like Indians, they’re up in the trees going, “[puff puff puff puff] Are they fightin’ us? We’re not even in that fuckin’ field! I guess we’re winning by default! No combat, we’re ahead!”

        …miss that guy…speaking of which

        …save me a spot on the spaceship if you get there first?

        • I think they rightly understand that they and Putin are on the same side and are working toward similar goals. I don’t think they quite get that if they were to achieve those goals how precarious their positions would actually be. Putin ain’t out here dropping coked-up ALL CAPS rants on Twitter; he buries you, your family and maybe your family’s family just to be sure.

    • honestly between navalny getting killed and that opposition dude getting told yeah…you cant take part in the election coz faulty paperwork….im getting the impression that putin is feeling pretty insecure about his position and popularity right about now

  4. I have several skeptical questions about that woman’s story (in particular a freelance writer married to a nonprofit worker having $50,000 to toss in a shoebox seems extremely unusual even given her explanation) but good for her for being honest about it. More people should; it would really help against scams!

    People get taken for rides all the time, and everyone who just says “Oh I’d never fall for that” might be true for a scam you’ve heard of, but most people are deeply terrified of losing what they have and scammers have sophisticated tools to make you afraid. (Hell, what is racism but white people being deeply terrified of losing what they have? It doesn’t really make sense either, y’know? And there are lots of scammers — cough orange fella cough — who have tools to make those people afraid.)

    • Cokehead Narcissist took me for roughly the same amount over a year and half by threatening me and more importantly my family with her alleged posse of Russian mobsters and bikers aka extortion.

      When you’re scared out of your mind… well you capitulate. I used my Line of Credit to pay for it.

      It wasn’t till I showed some backbone and forced her to call her bluff that things changed.

      What I don’t understand is how the hell she got all that cash? My mom in her dementia addled mind pulled out over 100K from my parents accounts. Some of it was used to pay for renos, funeral plots and expenses, but she was hoarding cash. It seems she took out 3K a week over several months because that’s all the bank would allow.

      One of the first things I did was try to find that stash and put it into their accounts. I ended up finding about 50K in cash. When I deposited it, I felt like a damn drug dealer but fortunately the bank knew what mom had done (and advised her against it) so the desposit wasn’t tagged as suspicious activity.

      • Lots of people think they’re too clever for that too — “Well I’d never stay in an abusive relationship!” you know, you don’t really know until you’re there. Real life isn’t always cut and dry, and if you think it could never happen to you, welllllll, I know plenty of smart people who got involved with someone who was looking for a bad time and not all of them saw it for what it was right off the bat.

    • I hate to be the kind of guy who reflexively doubts personal stories, but that sounds unlikely as she says it.

      Banks don’t just raise an eyebrow before they hand over big wads of cash. $10K or more essentially sets off alarms in terms of Treasury Department financial fraud restrictions designed to track money laundering and tax evasion. Questions are going to be asked in a situation like that.

      Crooks know that, which is why they look to find a mark who hand over smaller amounts of cash first which don’t trigger attention, and then try to milk them over time.

      What’s more, she’s previously written in great detail about the ins and outs of fraud, including this article about someone getting ripped off for $30K.

      https://www.thecut.com/article/mom-lost-30k-bad-investments-help.html

      I have to wonder if there is something else going on about where that money went and what she was up to.

      • Yep. I worked for a bank. There’s no way you walk out with $50K in cash and don’t answer a LOT of questions. Most bankers are trained to look for this — somebody scared trying to take out a lot of cash. And you’re going to go through several people at the bank. Even if one doesn’t catch on that something is wrong, another will. We were all required to take monthly security courses, and I was in freaking marketing and never touched money.

        The other thing is that she just starts talking to this phone caller. The first thing you do is hang up and call the “supposed” person back — NEVER TRUST CALLER ID.

        (As an aside, my current company cyber-security people keep sending me fake emails trying to get me to click links. Like I’m gonna fall for that.)

        Anyway, there’s a ton of implausibilities in this story.

        • Yeah, my company started sending out those fake phishing emails last year.  I will admit to having gotten screwed by a couple of them specifically because they were referencing a specific project I was working on.  I got so pissed off I raised hell about it, telling them that if they want to send phishing emails asking us for our Verizon passwords, fine–but they need to stay the hell away from actual work that we do because then nobody will open anything.  Which, eventually, is exactly what started to happen so they stopped doing it.

          • It’s funny to me because they make us take an annual online course on cyber security. Like I said, the bank was monthly. And yes, we all memorized the questions and answers so that ultimately you just stopped reading or viewing it, but you know what? Drilling that stuff into you worked. The second anything weird happened, you just went on autopilot.

            The trigger amount was $10K in withdrawals or deposits, but any large transaction got scrutinized, because it’s the total that gets reported to the federal government. A lot of judgement goes into what you report to the feds. So if you asked for $9K, or $5K, or $2K, they’d check your withdrawal history to see if you were taking out more than $10K in small increments. And that’s looked at over time. If you took $2K every couple of days, you’d get reported.

            You need two thousand in cash? Sure, just let me get the manager because she has to authorize that. (Checks bank records, notes this is out of the customer’s spend pattern). Oh, the manager asked if you could step into her office while she signs the paperwork. Manager shuts door, “Are you in trouble? Is someone forcing you to withdraw money?”

            We had so many old people that were getting scammed, you really couldn’t look the other way when one came in with a strange request.

  5. This is pretty good right here: https://apnews.com/article/hunter-biden-burisma-fbi-informant-lying-6969656f6012780a23a4b8841ce2689b

    This guy’s accusation was the closest thing the GOP had in terms of “evidence” that the Biden family was doing what the Trump family does  taking million in bribes despite all other things showing the opposite being true. And it turns out — MILD SHOCK — he was lying his ass off the whole while, enough for the FBI to be like yeah, no, we’re gonna charge you because you wasted so much of our time.

    I’m sure this will convince the House that impeachment proceedings are a waste of time and they’ll rethink HAHAHAHA no, I’m kidding.

    • …they’re still pushing the mayorkas thing for so much more than it’s worth it ought to be funny

      …but the idea that they could get the entire DA’s office disallowed from prosecuting the electoral fraud charges in georgia behind roman plying his trade as a proponent of the oppo research approach to negative campaigning

      https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/11/trump-oppo-researcher-roman-403138

      …when mike roman is literally indicted in the same case

      https://www.inquirer.com/news/mike-roman-georgia-donald-trump-indictment-pennsylvania-20230815.html

      …& their beef with fani willis is conflict of fucking interest?

      …gimme a fucking break…how is that shit not straightforwardly admissible in the case that came first as grounds to expedite it in order to determine this one at a later date & if necessary review the findings…only one is a necessary requirement to determine if he has any trace of a right to his claimed status as a legitimate political candidate…& if he doesn’t the way it sure looks like he doesn’t…you can’t go back & take him off the damn ballot

      …again…if it didn’t make me so angry it’d be some funny shit?

      • They’re doing what they always do: Find one thing to hang their hat on as a disqualifying reason no matter how small potatoes or stupid or outrageous it is, and sell sell sell to the base. No matter what actually happens in the trial, for the rest of eternity, every racist uncle on Facebook will be like “BUT SHE WAS SLEEPING WITH THE GUY SO CONFLICT OF INTEREST” and nothing else will ever matter.

    • The thing that drives me nuts is that this is the second supposedly blockbuster witness for Comer to be indicted. Why has the press continued to treat this broken down clown car as a legitimate vehicle?

      I mentioned in the last NOT Comer’s supposedly earth shaking witness, Gal Luft, is on the run from the law. He turned out to be an arms dealing Chinese agent! (Or so the deep state says, according to the Murdoch press. Who knows?)

      https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/10/politics/gal-luft-charged-arms-trafficking/index.html

      But as soon as the dust settled from that arrest, the drumbeat of credulous process stories which buried the fact that Comer had less than zero continued.

      So now it’s happened again, and of course reporting on Smirnov ignores Luft. They have to pretend the dead parrot is only resting its eyes.

  6. …ok…if I get into it with links & shit I’ll be here all day & I actually need to be somewhere else doing something entirely different…but I need to get this off my chest

    …they put fucking farage back on the actual radio…because he’s the “honorary president” of the reform party…who, since he says they gave boris his leg up but currently stand for not endorsing the tories this go around…was already making himself out to be a combo king & rain-maker

    …but to hear him tell it…it’s “backed up by polling” that given a chance the tory electorate would vote for him as their leader sooner than they would sunak

    …so apparently the bar is now so low that nigel pint-&-a-fag fucking garage sale…can claim to be a for real éminence grise the way people like gove flatter themselves they are

    …fucking hell

    …where’s a dysfunctional quartet of fencers when you need ’em?

    • People have always talked a lot about sex and violence on TV being bad influences, but not nearly enough people talk about how reality TV is worse than either because it settles the equation in favor of “toxic person gets eyeballs, so put them on.”

      Dancing With The Stars would have put on Nazis had it existed in 1947.

      The Masked Singer would have offered Joseph McCarthy a costume in 1955.

      Celebrity Big Brother would have been thrilled to get Richard Nixon in the house in 1975.

      And so on and so on and so on until it turns out no matter how terrible these assholes are, you can never get rid of them completely.

        • I mean, too obvious, right?

          But it’s a free glow-up to anyone who wants it and certainly no TV executive is going to reckon with the broader issues of what they’re doing (if they’re even opposed to it; most of them like Mark Burnett are likely would-be Mango Unchained voters anyway so it’s all upside anyway).

      • What’s even crazier is how reality TV persists even as it’s driven the ratings and ad dollars of the networks into the dumpster.

        The Apprentice had a couple of good seasons of ratings and then it went down the drain for years, but Jeff Zucker kept it alive because he was an idiot as far as developing regular programming. He went from the mammoth profits of Must See TV to the pocket lint from late seasons of The Apprentice because he was a humorless hack.

        A couple of reality shows can boost a network’s bottom line, but too many will shrink it disastrously.

        What’s especially nuts is that people still love sitcoms and dramas and now resort to watching Friends reruns to get their fix. And the irony is that the lack of popular reruns of non-reality shows is what’s killing the network attempts to create streaming platforms. People will rewatch Friends five times, but they won’t rewatch The Apprentice once.

        • I watch 0 reality TV so I’m your huckleberry for this argument … even if I think there are much bigger structural issues in play, the cheapness of reality shows vs. the cost of scripted fare certainly showed what mattered to executives and how they’d so much rather spend a little money to make a little money but can’t imagine spending more money to make more money.

          • Almost everyone watches some reality TV, especially when you broaden the definition to things like cooking competitions and behind-the-scenes sports shows.

            But almost nobody watches as much reality TV as they used to watch scripted TV, and they definitely don’t rewatch it.

            You’re right about how the appeal to networks is it let them slash short term development and production costs. And now they’ve realized most of the potential gains from cost cutting and they have no easy way to get their audiences back. They would never dream of investing in talent.

            • Yes, reality shows don’t work in syndication and that’s where a lot of TV makes its money — reruns of Big Bang Theory or Friends or Medium or any other show are essentially free money. I think I’ve mentioned before that the Charley Brown Christmas Special is estimated to be the single most profitable half-hour of television ever — simply because it cost peanuts (pun intended) and has earned many, many millions over the decades.

              Reality shows generate a short-term profit but it’s a one-time deal.

            • Honestly? It’s still awful close to 0.0% for me on reality TV. I really do detest it, haha.

              The only reality-adjacent thing I watch is when I’m at my in-laws, they often have the Food Network on and because cable TV is no longer a profit center, networks don’t give a flying F what’s on, so there’s inevitably a marathon of a cooking competition on that I will glance at. That stuff is less detestable than anything involving celebrities.

  11. Manchin is announcing he’s no No Labels guy. Because he’s dense but not that dumb.

    https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/16/politics/joe-manchin-president/index.html

    This only underscores how idiotic the pundits who took No Labels seriously were. It was always a Mark Penn astroturf effort, and Penn has been a dishonest pro-GOP buffoon for years. It’s never been a secret.

    All they were doing by treating it like a serious movement was demonstrating how far backwards they’d bend for a rich dishonest hack. Which might have some tiny value except there are so many other hacks already, so why bother? It was always like shilling for the twelfth most popular cryptocurrency company.

    • I mean, yeah, it was dumb on her part.

      But it’s so fucking weird that nobody is going to touch the fact that she had to leave her home and go into hiding and that it happens to LITERALLY EVERYONE WHO TRUMP THREATENS. I will trade 157 “Biden is ollllllldddd” stories for literally one single national publication list of all the people who’ve had to go into hiding because that fash piece of shit winked and nodded threats at them.

      • …I like to think there’s a field office somewhere with binders of logs of threats received by federal & state employees…& someone who maintains a running list in a spreadsheet of when he & a few others…your roger stones & such…”put someone on blast”

        …because not too far in the future someone is going to graduate with all the honors off the back of the definitive case study of stochastic terrorism in a domestic context as their thesis

    • …plenty of time for that later…it’s going to take me until at least the weekend to stop laughing about the ways it sucks for the other guy

      …we’re most of the way to a half-billion on the liability sheet…& for all the constant grifting…& hat-tip to hanging a lampshade on the mrs not turning up much by talking about her never leaving his side despite all the unfair treatment as pretty much the top line of a “valentine”…offering the grateful public a chance to also send their love to melania…in the form of money…to her husband’s lawyers &/or political defense strategists…but his whole “empire” has been a debt-management plate-spinning exercise that looks a lot like when people think if they just keep card-hopping the grace period before the interest steps up means the money is free…for…a lot more than a hot minute…so he had an overhead to service that a bunch of that candidate money pre-declaring was helping keep topped off…somewhere up there with elon’s by some reckonings along the way…that he hasn’t kept at bay without help…at least some of which it’s a fair bet would be fodder for superseding indictments on further financial charges…& might have FISA implications

      …so…a lot of ketchup getting scrubbed off walls & broken flatware is presumably the order of the day?

    • So, not a law guy by any stretch, but I assume that this judgement is going to be immediately appealed and an injunction on its execution until the appeals run out some time in 3018.  Meaning he’ll get to keep running his scams in NY.

      • My understanding is that even if he appeals he has to put up a boatload of cash as a security, and his assets overall are under a court monitor and can’t be moved without permission.

        So basically he doesn’t get the full hammer, but has to come up with a lot of asset for this and the $80+ million for Carroll to start appeals.

        He probably can come up with the cash, but he’s not the most liquid guy. And he also can’t just put down some Monopoly deeds to cover the security, it has to be cash.

        It’s not a death blow, but it’sa real wound.

      • …me, neither…but as far as I can follow it…civil not criminal…so preponderance of evidence not beyond reasonable doubt

        …& something like 500 pages of preponderant evidence from witnesses with a few dozen more about specific instances of book-keeping

        …so…in terms of legal findings of fact…seems to be a fact he isn’t likely to appeal that he did the shit & profited from it

        …he’ll undoubtedly appeal… probably filed the intention to before I saw your comment…or at least that wouldn’t be surprising…but I’m guessing only the amount & every pretext he can offer to claim the penalties should be less onerous

        …whether the principle part about the principal issues determined means squat is a difficult question, I suspect…it’s like how with that case harry won in some ways & settled in others against the mirror group might not go on to pay him out in any big way…but he got a finding out of it that…transposed out of lawyer & into regular speech…piers morgan was neck deep in the exact shit he was accused of & has vehemently denied & making a good deal of money off the prodigious hypocrisy of it all

        …it matters to some people…but I rather suspect not the ones paying piers’ expenses these days?

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