TGIF! [DOT 7/6/24]

7/6/24 MegMegMcGee 28

I hear you guys were bereft without me! Hope everyone had a great week and a half. I’m back to like all your comments and do DOTs. I had an awesome time in Spain. Weather was great, food was amazing, I saw Taylor Swift from an unbelievable floor seat. Trump was convicted while I was away…
Flights were easy and on time & I couldn’t have had a better time logistically. All in all, a lovely vacation. Coming back to work on Wednesday was definitely painful.

No way lol

Judge rules Bannon must go to prison by July 1 while appealing contempt case
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/06/05/bannon-prison-hearing-contempt

Whoa

Suspected Gilgo Beach serial killer charged with two more murders
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/06/gilgo-beach-serial-killer

Sprots!

Paolini sweeps past Andreeva, Swiatek beats Gauff: French Open women’s semi-finals – live
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/live/2024/jun/06/french-open-womens-semi-finals-iga-swiatek-coco-gauff-jasmine-paolini-mirra-andreeva-live

Stonks!

U.S. regulators to open antitrust probes into Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/06/us-regulators-to-open-antitrust-probes-into-nvidia-microsoft-and-openai.html

OMG I love her

In case you were missing Fritz content:

Have an awesome Friday!

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28 Comments

  1. …so…err…for funsies(?)(…or in further evidence that I may not be of entirely sound mind first thing in the morning)…I went through this one by jamelle bouie

    Republicans Have a Criminal They’d Like to Coddle [NYT]

    …& removed as many names & such as I could to sort of text-montage the comments quoted…just to see what it sounded like if you were in a bar where they were all talking over each other…or something…I dunno…but…the result was…well, I found it interesting…so on the off chance anyone else might be weird like that…here it is?

    “[They] cheered as they convicted the leader of the opposing party on ridiculous charges. This was a purely political exercise, not a legal one.”

    “If the defendant were not [this individuasl], this case would never have been brought, the judge would have never issued similar rulings, and the jury would have never returned a guilty verdict,”

    “an outright mockery of the rule of law,”

    “Un-freaking-believable.”

    “Every facet of […] Party politics and power has to be used right now to go toe to toe with […] and beat these […]”

    “a demented man propped up by wicked and deranged people willing to destroy our country to remain in power.”

    “fight fire with fire.”

    “In order to prevent the case against […] from assuming a permanent place in the […] political system, […] will have to bring charges against […] officers, even presidents,”

    …so…anyway…aside from another demonstration that the topolgy of a cognitively dissonant mental landscape is not bound by mundane physics…it just sometimes amazes me how…but for the transitive property of projection…they can get *so close*?

    …so…maybe this is just me doing that…but despite being pretty close to a thing that’s been said in so many ways so many times it’s sort of tautologous to mention…I thought he put this part quite well this time?

    At no point, you’ll notice, do Republicans deny that Trump is a criminal. They’ve made no effort here to defend his honor or to say he’s innocent of the charges levied against him. They almost seem to accept, like most Americans, that the former president is guilty of fraud. But they don’t accept the verdict. They don’t accept the idea that Trump could be tried in a court of law on these charges. They reject the authority of the jury. For Republicans — no matter the law, no matter the evidence and no matter the testimony — the conviction is illegitimate. In their view, Trump is sovereign, and the law is not.

    This gets to one of the real transformations in American politics since Trump came down that escalator to announce his campaign for president nine years ago this month. Trump ran as the embodiment of the legitimate people of the United States. He governed on behalf of those people — a narrow, exclusive people defined in racial, religious and ideological terms — deemed them “the People,” to whom the country rightfully belongs. He tied his authority less to the Constitution than to this quasi-mystical connection. He was “the people” and “the people” were him, and he could do anything on their behalf, up to and including an effort to overturn the constitutional transfer of power. What is an election — what is the Constitution itself — when set against the people as embodied in Trump?
    […]
    Most of this effort to bend and break institutions in the name of Trump’s illiberal claim to personal authority is the opportunistic grasping of ideologues who see the former president as a vehicle for their aims. He will help them expel immigrants, destroy the welfare state and roll back the political and cultural settlements of the 1960s, the 1970s and beyond.

    …he closes by talking about how a chunk at the base of his base are motivated by fear & links to some stuff about evangelicals…& in between he outlines enough of the shenanigans they’ve hit on by retro-engineering claims to make in order to produce “counter-moves” so they can pretend they represent the famous “checks & balances”…& the whole thing is pretty solid if you can shrug off the gut punch because they’re all hits that first landed before you clicked through to this rendition…but…I may be letting the UK campaign season get to me…because it does rather loom at me that maybe the sense in which more & more people are willing to say they think “they” are in charge & from “our” point of view the game is unwinnable…in the sense that the best case scenario is that the least worst person prevails but the least worst option remains a losing proposition on more of the things you’d vote *for* than not…if you want to get people to switch horses mid-stream…or mid-firehose-of-bullshit

    …it almost feels like the pitch you’re working against is “they’re coming for us all in the end but these people will come for the likes of us last”…which is certainly an end-times sort of a mindset…& somehow you need to scale a massive cognitive overhang while carrying a full load of “they already came for you over & over & every time they said they were saving you”

    …I dunno…ignore me…but the ways that the coverage has been going in an election where rishi seemingly can’t stop stepping on rakes nobody made him step on…& nige’s lot are getting a market share in a lot of the baked in shit that stacks the odds in the favor of the (by local lights) right…even though actually putting reform in parliament would very much be like looking at MAGA reps in the US & saying “oh, yeah – that looks loads better, gimme some of that”…the common denominators of this stuff keeping pushing the envelope for lowest of the low?

  2. I wonder why Canadians felt the need to go to Florida in the heat to protest abortion, when they could have just joined their countrymen (countryfolk? Is that a word?) in deepest, most Catholic Québec or Alberta or somewhere. Sasky? That’s crazy too, isn’t it? You never hear much about Manitoba but I’m sure that’s full of freaks.

    Speaking of being full of freaks, we had our Board meeting last night. It was everything I could have wanted. It was like my own private “Real Housewives” episode. It went on for three hours, and there are only 50 apartments in this building, but people had insights.

    The best part, for me, was before the pandemic this lunatic (I call him an Auntie, because he’s a bitchy old Queen, like I can be sometimes) slipped onto the Board because no one else was interested. That Board, that we lived with for five or six years, installed a figurehead president but Auntie was really running things. No votes, no nothing, unilateral decisions for our own good, just like living under Handsy Andy.

    They, like any good Republican, kept the monthly payments stable by deferring costs while at the same time ladling out cash to—not to a defense contractor, but to a lawyer and an accountant. Now it’s come to bite us in the ass. Both were/are known to the Auntie. Neither are still receiving money from this building (or anywhere else, presumably.)

    My popcorn was a huge hit and at some point someone said, “Where is Auntie? He should be here to answer for himself!” And I stood up and waved my cane and said, “I know where he is. He never leaves his apartment except to harangue the door people. I’ll get him.”

    But Better Half intervened so I resumed my seat. It was an interesting seating situation, because it was like a little auditorium with a main seating set-up but then along the side wall there were a few chairs so that’s where I set up shop, for easy access and egress. Luckily I had perfected my Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced “Bou-Quet”) scowl of contempt so, in my Marcel Marceau-like silence, I could communicate my withering scorn about all of this.

    I cannot recommend condo/co-op living highly enough.

    • …ok…so now I’m imagining a scene out of parks & rec with the parks & the rec swapped out for an HOA bureaucracy…which is entirely more entertaining than the thing I’d been mulling over about ways to compare dotard-brand mobsterism with mafia-brand mobsterism & what the appeal is when it reaches the level of fetishization

      …so…thank you for that

      …but…on the first part…my guess is that those sorts of groups get parachuted into odd locations because the whole thing is framed as more or less being a missionary posting?

      …I know a few times I’ve been surprised in not-the-US to have some mormon teen with a southern accent randomly knock on the door…which is a good deal more innocuous…but my guess is that they know what kind of baggage they’d accrue trying to do the same thing locally…but can tell themselves that doesn’t matter when they’re out among the heathens from whom they shall be delivered once they’ve endured their time in purgatory…& they know miami is in florida & clearly that means the whole state is basically sodom & gomorrah & the acerbic lady is devil-sent to test their faith

      …she’s not wrong, though…they look like a pitiful bunch who don’t really understand what they’ve got themselves into?

        • …I did go to that one time, as it happens…& greatly enjoyed it…the “fuck you, god” song is probably my favorite bit but it was all pretty good

          …for that matter there’s a couple of episodes of south park that go to town on the mormons…& they’re also pretty great & have at least one good musical number about what-his-name & the tablet translation & how his mrs clearly knew it was a load of bollocks…the chorus is “dumb, dumb-dumb dumb, dumb”…except the times the verse is about her & it switches to “smart, smart-smart smart, smart”

          …but at least one of them ends with the kids being all “it’s clearly utter nonsense…but they’re really nice & I kinda wish life was more theirs”…which was unusually gracious for the lads who wrote that stuff…generally they don’t show that kind of mercy to their targets?

          • I have this weird feeling that one of the South Park guys is ex-LDS. They’re obsessed. There’s the Jewish family, who are treated with kid gloves, but then the Mormons…their Republicanism, maybe?

    • I will bore you further.

      So, the super was there, which he really shouldn’t have been, because we talk about his and the staff’s compensation and the super is actually the boss of all the building staff. So, that was a little weird. He’s involved in a little feud with this jackass owner (again, 50 apartments, not everyone showed up) so he had thoughtfully laid in crates of bottled water. When the jackass started speaking the super took out his box cutter and started ripping open the crates of bottled water and distributing, much to the audience’s delight. It was quite loud. I love our super. He walks Faithful Hound sometimes.

      I happened to be seated next to a very erudite fellow neighbor/friend who knows about the French Revolution. I said to her, “You know, we used to be part of the Ancien Régime. The boards and committees, now all shut down. [Auntie and his henchmen- and -women] came in and all was chaos. I wonder for what?”

      “Boredom. Shit-stirring. Petty power-mongering. Who knows. But for every revolution there’s a counter-revolution, and it seems like he’s going to be marched to the guillotine, like Robespierre. Can I steal some of your popcorn?”

      “I don’t want him beheaded, although I would watch that. He and his mentally ill co-dependent should just get their own house, or town house, and stop pretending that this whole building is their boarding house and we’re down on our luck tenants looking for agricultural day labor jobs like in ‘The Grapes of Wrath.'”

      “They’ll be gone soon enough, Mattie. Be patient.”

    • The fundies go there because that’s where the action is. They believe there is hope in US Amercia to permanently stop abortion whereas we heathen Canadians are just going to burn in hell with the spirit of dead feeti here.

      Not many people here want to engage anti-bortion types, not because we’re polite but mostly because they don’t need the attention.

      There were a couple of old geezers that protested abortions at the hospital where my friend was dying of cancer. They liked to hit the pedestrian light to stop traffic to get folks to pay attention to their message. All they did was set off road rage prone drivers. I casually flipped them the bird when I was right beside them. The next time it rained I hit the puddle next to them.

    • That’s a great article, and it goes into a lot of detail about how the reactionaries are pushing back:

      that groundswell of empowerment has also sparked a rising backlash that has left many women questioning their place in the church as the denomination struggles to balance traditional gender beliefs and a growing push for women in leadership.

      In the past couple years, the Nashville-based SBC disfellowshipped six churches in which women serve as pastors and a proposed measure to enshrine a ban on women pastors received initial approval. That measure will come before delegates, called messengers, for a second and final approval at the upcoming SBC annual meeting in Indianapolis on June 11-12.

      The Southern Baptists are facing some parallel problems to the Catholic Church. They have been torn up recently by revelations of massive sexual abuse scandals by church leadership. They are facing serious problems in terms of membership as members drop out due to lack of interest, or occasional poaching by more charismatic churches. And they’re also losing members – like the women described in this article – feel alienated by the hard core ideologues in power.

      The national political press likes to talk about conservative Christians as if they’re an amorphous blob, but there are some serious storylines they could be following if they weren’t so clueless.

      • …not to mention that trying to turn around a declining congregation by excising parishes from the count is…well, I’d say it was counter-productive but it clearly results in exactly the product they’re addicted to

        …pretty sure a denomination or two in the CoE spectrum had some similar problems with women being priests & the bits of the christian church that hail from the african continent posting bigger attendance numbers that meant at a “policy” level they couldn’t afford to not get crazy with it?

        • What the Southern Baptist and Catholic reactionaries don’t get is that a big part of their membership struggles are due to problems getting good pastors and priests in front of congregations. But you’re right that the leadership is scared of growth if it means any kind of change.

          Which is stupid because a shrunking core creates change all the same.

          • …pretty much…in so far as I follow the liturgical underpinnings…they start with “we’re getting less people showing up, we need more”, find out that if they let the women have some sway they get more people & that some of those are full of vim & vigor & have been banking suggestions & observations about what hasn’t been working for long enough to have quite a stockpile

            …& those aren’t the numbers they want their ranks swelled by…so they take refuge in bunkum with prodigious quantities of brylcream slicking back the fringe component…& the next thing you know you have “complementarianism”

            …gotta wonder…in a complementarianist analysis…do you think a woman counts as + or – 3/5 of a man

            …whichever way you stack it…that’s not the leap of faith for me?

  8. Welcome back MMM. I hope the backstage visit with Taylor and Travis met your expectations.

    The mess with top exec Will Lewis and the Washington Post gets dumber and dumberer. David Folkenflik of NPR has reported that Lewis twice tried to get the Post’s former top editor Sally Buzbee to kill stories discussing his involvement in cases in the UK involving Murdoch and illegal newsgathering.

    Buzbee was suddenly replaced recently in favor of two Lewis cronies.

    https://www.npr.org/2024/06/07/nx-s1-4995105/washington-post-will-lewis-tries-to-kill-story-buzbee

    What’s more, Folkenflik described how Lewis tried to get him to kill reporting too, offering him in exchange an exclusive interview on the Post’s future strategy. Folkenflik told him no.

    The NY Times to their credit has picked up on the story. Which makes sense from a number of angles, but in an era where they’ve happily assigned Jeremey Peters to blow smokescreens for Elon Musk, couldn’t be taken for granted.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/business/media/washington-post-will-lewis-npr.html

    This PR tactic by Lewis, by the way, is straight out of the tabloid playbook. When the National Enquirer got news of one of Bill Cosby’s rapes, they ended up killing the story in exchange for an unusual level of access to write stories on other, non-criminal subjects.

    One of the stupid things about Lewis is that in the meantime he’s offered nothing but vague ideas about how he would make the Post profitable, suggesting some kind of expansion into AI assisted stories outside of usual journalism would = dollars, because…. reasons? The Washington Post would be the winner in a wildly competitive field because of… why?

    In the meantime, he seems determined to throw away one of the few edges the Post has, which is a decent brand and a still effective corps of reporters. He’s attacked his newsroom and been personally dismissive of them, and he was somehow naive enough to think they wouldn’t start leaking to other outlets about him.

    He’s looking more and more like Chris Licht every day.

  9. Evangelicals who use kids like that as props fucking enrage me. The kids are just doing what their parents tell them to do, which basically makes this a form of child abuse. Those kids have no agency in this situation. They’re being ordered around, and it’s entirely likely they’ve been threatened by parents/church to keep them in line. I’ve been in similar though less extreme situations, and it’s only gotten worse since I was a teenager.

    • …not being funny…but

      In May, Kushner secured a massive $500 million contract with the state of Serbia to build a hotel on the memorialized ruins of a former military base in Belgrade, sparking protests in Belgrade against the deal. The contract is being bankrolled by Kushner’s Saudi-backed investment company, Affinity Partners. In defense of the contract, a Serbian government official described Kushner’s company, primarily funded by foreign interests, as a “reputable American company.”

      Prior to approval of the contract, public officials in Serbia heavily opposed the deal for its insensitivity and potential for political manipulation. Serbian politician Borko Stefanovic described the location as “one of the pearls of pre-war architecture” to The Daily Beast, noting, “Most Serbs believe this site should not be desecrated in any way.”The Yugoslav Ministry of Defense military complex was bombed by NATO forces in 1999 during a U.S.-backed campaign that killed an estimated 2,000 civilians and lasted until the Yugoslav Army retreated from Kosovo during the Kosovo War.

      Clark criticized the overall contract between Kushner’s company and the Serbian government in addition to the memorial clause, arguing that the contract is not just an opportunistic gambit but “part of a broader Russian intelligence movement to split, discredit and weaken NATO.” Kushner’s father-in-law and Kremlin ally Donald Trump has long sought to build a hotel on the military complex ruins and has heavily criticized NATO, with looming threats of the U.S. leaving the alliance if he regains the presidency.

      …so…the house of saud can strategically shave a monkey, slap a suit on it & call it jared…& then when they do a deal that furthers the goals of russia & generally foments discontent while siphoning cash out of a relatively small national economy to squirt it into already well-padded accounts…you can describe it as a deal with “a reputable US company”?

      …& there weren’t any thunderbolts & nobody wound up smote?

      …this is why I’m skeptical about the existence of deities

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