Weekend Vibes [4/11/23]

4/11/23 MegMegMcGee 16

Don’t forget to fall back tonight!

PS I know you guys may have already talked about this on Brain Drain, but is anyone watching The Fall of the House of Usher?!? I got grossed out by the first couple of deaths so I wiki’ed the rest, but if you like gothic horror type shit with a side of schadenfreude then you may like it.

Updates here:

Israel-Hamas war live: US working ‘extremely hard’ to get hostages out; UN says agency in Gaza ‘practically out of business’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/nov/03/israel-hamas-war-live-updates-un-blinken-expected-call-for-pauses-fighting-allow-aid-gaza-tel-aviv-visit

Big vote coming up in Ohio. Here’s hoping the home state is not an embarrassment for 5 minutes

Ohio purged 26,000 voters days before abortion referendum deadline
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/03/ohio-republican-election-secretary-of-state-voter-purge

Stonks!

Dow pops more than 200 points on Friday to cap the best week for stocks so far this year: Live updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/02/stock-market-today-live-updates.html

Sprots!

Have a great weekend!

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16 Comments

  1. The tortoise has poked his jiggling head out of his shell as it seems Mitch is just a touch upset that Dem Senators want to look into his buddies Leonard Leo and Harlan Crowe for influencing certain Supreme Court judges (cough Clarence and Sam cough.)

    • …it’s a topsy turvy time to be sure…like…I dunno that the (d) votes on not expelling santos weren’t a sort of a quid pro quo for the (r) votes that stopped them censuring tlaib…but the way mitch has been sounding about the turberville business has me thinking there could actually be some across the aisle reaching in the good sense rather than the way the GOP consistently reach for over-reach when that game is played?

      …& I’d admit that there’s a part of me that…while most of me thinks those people deserve what ought to be coming to them more than what probably is…there’s a non-zero chance that protecting that influence pipeline might be a quid for which they could be induced to provide a pretty substantial quo…& there’s a few of those to choose from that I’d be pretty happy to see gaining meaningful traction between now & next november?

    • Ol Harlan is also apparently the Money behind Dean Phillips’ Primates run against Biden…

      https://www.wonkette.com/p/harlan-crow-funded-rep-dean-phillips

      I’ve been seeing LOTS of folks talking about it over on our local Reddit subs, AND grousing about the fact that his campaign is being run by the same Steve Schmidt of The Lincoln Project, who pushed for Sarah Palin & drove John McCain’s Presidential Campaign directly into the ground…

      Back in 2017, folks on Twitter were saying,  “DON’T trust the Lincoln Project guys–YES, they’re *with* us right NOW, because they know Trump is awful–but as soon as they have a *chance,* they’re gonna be riiiiiggght back to their old tricks of fucking things up, throwing monkey wrenches, and trying to mess with the D’s, in order to get THEIR guys elected!!!”

      And ‘Ol Dean-the-Dumbell is too damn stupid, to notice it.🙄🙃😱

       

  2. I followed the Sammy Bank Fraud trial (because I’m curious how he did it but also how he failed) mostly via crypto blogger Tiffany Fong because at least she’s putting in her own personal opinions in the coverage and seems to be a much more reliable observer than say Michael Lewis who is a Bank Fraud PR flack at best and an apologist at worst.

    Tiffany pointed out that via her interactions with Sam that he thinks he’s the smartest guy in any room. I used to, too but then I discovered to my humbling dismay that I’m not and eventually stopped being a jackass about it. At least I didn’t find out the hard way at a criminal trial that I’m not (especially when it comes to legal matters.)

    Anyway Sammy is about to get a lesson in painful humility going to jail. I think he still believes he can lie his face off to us dipshit dummies AND we are going to believe him no matter what the actual evidence shows. Doubtful he ends up in a SuperMax.

    His parents should probably look into divesting themselves of Bahamian real estate (as ‘gifted’ by Bank Fraud) pretty soon and will have interesting legal interactions from pissed off FTX customers. I think they should be in jail with their wayward son, but with looming civil suits life outside might be worse than jail.

    • I probably mentioned this before but I worked for a very short time for a man convicted of what was then the largest payroll fraud in the US. He got 22 years in prison. The reason I bring it up was that he was a self-proclaimed genius and also the “smartest man in the room.” He was also eventually diagnosed with “a rapid-cycling variant of Bipolar 1 Disorder that includes [a] psychotic feature and chronic delusions.” (That’s from his appeal proceedings where he tried to claim innocence based on mental illness.)

      Sammy seems to be cut from the same cloth.

      • You can even legitimately be the smartest guy in the room, but the world is a lot bigger than any room, and it always ends up throwing more curveballs than anyone can handle.

        The other problem is smartest guys in the room always end up keeping people out of the room who know things they don’t.

        David Halberstam’s book The Best and Brightest is full of examples where the Secretary McNamara types locked out people who had real evidence which contradicted their theory-based policies.

        • I used to tell a friend who also thought he was smarter than everybody else: You may be smarter than almost anybody, but you’re not smarter than everybody. People know things that you don’t.

    • …I don’t know as it would necessarily accord with your thought process on the pros & cons of the smartest guy in the room™ approach…but a long time back…when I were a kid, even…I remember someone getting tired of somebody…probably me but it could have been a friend or a cousin or a sibling…going on & on about who was the biggest badass…forget if it was a batman/superman thing or a han solo/luke skywalker thing or a hulk/hercules thing or bruce lee/ali thing or whatever but it hinged on the part where what it seemed to boil down to was the one that was the best was the one who never lost a fight…which is different from an argument or the sort of conversation that has winners & losers…but I think I always figured the point they made applied broadly to both…& I don’t recall it verbatim but the gist of it went something like this (once I was older I figured out they recycled a lot of it from the sort of cowboy stories that are a lot like the ronin stuff)

      …if you make the foundation of your existence the fact that you can beat other people at something…particularly the sort of thing that people contest to the point of violence…you set yourself up for failure in a pascal’s wager sort of a way…there just isn’t a way that the probable outcome aligns with one that you’d want…but the way they put it so we’d get the point as children was by talking about bullies…& there’s a sense that intellectually bullying folks is something that people like sam “did you know einstein had crazy hair” bank-man fried seem to me to turn into their entire personality…musk does it, too…but is so very public & so very not up to the task that it literally requires an actual legion of people (mostly very online people) to work en masse 24/7 to keep the illusion intact enough to not collapse like a house of cards

      …the problem is…sort of like death & taxes…that sooner or later there always being a bigger bully that comes along is pretty much a certainty…& top of their agenda is…inevitably…toppling the occupant of that coveted top spot…if you’re a lone gunslinger/swordsman battling the forces of injustice it’s a heavily romanticized thing…although by the time you’re getting to something like afro-samurai it’s so involuted by genre conventions that making the number one spot a literal thing is some sort of meta-irony type statement rather than mere parody…so there’s a truly vertiginous quality to the iterative scale involved in how we parse this stuff in a lot of contexts…& I expect sam glanced off the whole icarus deal as a kid & probably never got nearer to the tale of the monkey king than the 70s tv show…but when people get told they can do/be anything enough…some of them start to overestimate themselves something fierce…it’s literally the stuff of archetypal cautionary tales

      …whereas oddly enough several of the people I’ve met over the years who I would happily describe as dizzyingly clever were unassuming to the point of humble…& my distinct & lasting impression was that they got that way…& as a result got to the heights of their in some cases pretty rarefied fields because they were more eager to learn than to teach?

  3. It’s almost certainly a nuisance suit, but Mark Meadows has been sued by his publisher for saying Trump lost the election fair and square, in contrast to how he claimed in his book that Trump won.

    https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4292647-mark-meadows-sued-by-book-publisher-over-false-election-claims/

    The publisher issues tons of conservative books, and they’re claiming that once stories circulated that Meadows had spoken with prosecutors, sales in the book dropped. Of course the news came out long after the book was published in 2021, and I would bet it had long been dumped on the dollar book market by then.

    The publisher claimed it had only sold 60,000 out of 200,000 printed, and I’d also bet the number of sales had been heavily inflated. Who would put down real money for Mark Meadows’s book? I’m guessing even his family waited around for comp copies.

    • …the gift copies thing I’m pretty sure goes both ways…at least the way I heard it from someone who worked in publishing is that some of those kinds of books make the bestseller lists the way, say, woodward writing about trump did…because a lot of people want to see what’s in them…or like obama’s before he got elected

      …but others are pretty self-aware about the only way they can achieve apparent parity of appeal is by gaming the numbers…so bulk orders are pretty much the equivalent to an in kind donation & they rely heavily on that kind of patronage…not to mention get a percentage of the back-end?

      • Yeah, it’s well known that “conservative bestsellers” are pushed onto the bestseller lists by bulk orders, usually from right-wing organizations that are trying to curry favor. They then say they give them out as “gifts.” I’d bet a bunch just end up in the trash.

        • …my bet is a bunch of those orders are big enough they defray the expense by going the same route that sees remaindered stock pulped & turned into something else the way that guy did with the da vinci code becoming 1984…but without the “it’s art” premium on the price tag of the result?

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