Tag: Good Writing

Elon Musk!!!!! Space Karen!!!!

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I will never not laugh at Space Karen https://t.co/InvR5sTRMy pic.twitter.com/92vQfIyzHi

— dan hett (@danhett) November 16, 2020

Total 0wn493

Call it confirmation bias, but I think that my assesment of Elon Musk, that he is a privileged self-important stupid person’s idea of a smart person has been validated:

SpaceX boss Elon Musk was forced to miss his firm’s historic rocket launch after testing positive for Covid-19.

Four astronauts were blasted into orbit aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday night, marking the company’s first fully-fledged crewed mission to the International Space Station.

Mr Musk, who is usually present during major launches, could not attend after receiving two positive coronavirus tests and exhibiting minor symptoms of the virus.

Nasa rules forbid anyone from entering their facilities following a positive test, no matter what their position or role.

………

Mr Musk had previously questioned the legitimacy of the results, claiming that he had tested both positive and negative for Covid-19 on Thursday.

“Something extremely bogus is going on,” he tweeted. “Was tested for covid four times today. Two tests came back negative, two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse. Rapid antigen test.”

………

In March, Mr Musk declared that “the coronavirus pandemic is dumb.”

Since then, nearly more than 11 million people have been infected and nearly a quarter of a million people have died from the virus in the US alone.

One Twitter user dubbed him “Space Karen” for his perceived indifference towards the pandemic, causing the term to trend across the platform.

Dr Emma Bell responded to his tweet by noting that rapid antigen tests only detect Covid-19 “when you’re absolutely riddled with it”.

She tweeted: “What’s bogus is that Space Karen didn’t read up on the test before complaining to his millions of followers.”

Now, whenever I refer to Elon Musk in the future, he will be “Space Karen”.

Dr. Emma Bell should get a Pulitzer for that.

True

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Glenn Greenwald makes a very good point, that by any impartial measure George W. Bush was a more damaging to the US and the world:

That the liberal belief in and fear of a Trump-led fascist dictatorship and violent coup is actually a fantasy — a longing, a desire, a craving — has long been obvious.

The Democrats’ own actions proved that they never believed their own melodramatic and self-glorifying rhetoric about Trump as The New Hitler — from their leaders joining with the GOP to increase The Fascist Dictator’s domestic spying powers and military spending to their (correct) belief that the way to oust The Neo-Nazi Tyrant was through a peaceful and lawfully conducted democratic election in which vote totals and, if necessary, duly constituted courts would determine the next president.

………

I began writing about politics in 2005 as a reaction to the lawlessness, executive power transgressions and authoritarian Article II theories imposed by Bush/Cheney officials in the name of fighting terror. They claimed the right to violate Congressional statutes restricting how they could spy, detain, or even kill anyone, including American citizens, as long they justified it as helpful in the fight again terrorism.

They invented new theories of secrecy to hide virtually everything they did and, worse, to bar courts from subjecting their actions to legal or constitutional scrutiny. Josh Marshall’s entire career is based on a well-documented claim that the Bush White House and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fired U.S. Attorneys who were investigating their own associates, including those of Karl Rove. The Obama administration prosecuted more whistleblowers and sources under the 1917 Espionage Act — enacted by Woodrow Wilson to criminalize dissent from U.S. involvement in World War I — than all prior presidents combined.

………

That the War on Terror itself was racist and Islamophobic — how else to explain year after year of predominantly Muslim countries being bombed by the Bush and Obama administrations? — was barely disputed in liberal discourse. Karl Rove’s core campaign strategy in 2002 and 2004 was to place anti-gay referenda on as many state ballots as possible, and disseminate slanderous propaganda about same-sex couples, all to incentivize evangelicals to vote. And now we’re subjected to the revolting sanctimony of the very same same operatives and supporters who did that, trying to prove the unprecedented evil of Trump by insisting that at least prior administrations did not rely on bigoted tropes or racist rhetoric.

………

And even if Trump has lied more frequently and more blatantly than prior presidents — a conclusion I would probably accept — how do those lies compare to the one sustained over many years, from liberals’ most currently beloved neocon pundits and journalists, that convinced Americans that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear and biological weapons and was in an alliance with Al Qaeda and thus likely responsible for the 9/11 attack, leading to the invasion and destruction of a country of 26 million people and, ultimately, the rise of ISIS?

………

And even if Trump has lied more frequently and more blatantly than prior presidents — a conclusion I would probably accept — how do those lies compare to the one sustained over many years, from liberals’ most currently beloved neocon pundits and journalists, that convinced Americans that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear and biological weapons and was in an alliance with Al Qaeda and thus likely responsible for the 9/11 attack, leading to the invasion and destruction of a country of 26 million people and, ultimately, the rise of ISIS?

It is not an exaggeration to say that much of the division on the center-left over the past four years has been shaped by whether one sees Trump as a symptom of American pathologies or as its primary cause, of whether one views the return of pre-Trump “normalcy” as something to loathe or something to crave, of whether one views the Bush/Cheney years and War on Terror abuses (to say nothing of the horrors of the Cold War) as at least as bad as anything Trump has ushered in or whether one sees those pre-Trump evils as somehow more benign and less ignoble. 

Bush killed more people, Obama deported and assassinated more people, and both of them normalized the excesses of the US state security apparatus.

Trump is a lesson that can be learned from, because the evil that put him in power did not come from him, though he certainly has no lack of personal evil, it came from a broken and corrupt society.

No fundamental change means that in 4 or 8 years something worse, if just because it is more subtle and more competent, will be knocking at the orifices of the American body politic.

I Cannot Believe that I am Citing a Wall Street Journal Editorial Page

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But given that it’s clearly a part of an effort by their editorial page to foment conflict within the Democratic Party, it’s not a surprise.

That being said, progressive icon Cenk Uygur take on the Democratic party, that the current Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is incompetent and useless, is (IMNSHO) completely correct.

Schumer, Pelosi, and the rest of them are about as useful as tits on a bull:

Will there ever be accountability for Democrats? The establishment wing of the party blew one election to Donald Trump and came to the precipice of blowing another. Were there any lessons learned from 2016? Nope. Same guys, same mistakes. The band marches on.

Start with Chuck Schumer in the Senate. With more coronavirus cases and deaths than anywhere else in the world and a buffoonish Republican president, he couldn’t find a way to pick up three seats. That means Republicans can block any progressive legislation. Will Mr. Schumer face accountability? Of course not.

Nancy Pelosi lost seats in the House when every Democrat in the country thinks we have the worst president in history. There’s got to be some accountability for that, right? Nope. Not a chance. There is no more revered person in Washington than Mrs. Pelosi. The rest of the country sees her as a feckless elitist, but Washington sees her as a master legislator. She’s passed one major piece of legislation in her career: a health-care law whose central provision was conceived by the Heritage Foundation.

This is the same Democratic leadership that lost almost 1,000 state legislative seats nationwide to Republicans during the Obama era. That’s a large village in Kazakhstan. Was there any accountability after those failures? Nope. Still the same folks in charge.

………

The national media has seen all of this unfold but rarely commented on it. There was no reckoning after Hillary Clinton’s historic loss. It was blamed on James Comey, the Russians, the Bernie Bros., the weather, the dog that ate our votes. A question for the Democrats: Did you ever consider that maybe, just maybe, it was actually you? But the media didn’t ask. They’re all in the same establishment together. Criticizing the corporate wing of the Democratic Party would feel like criticizing themselves.

………

Will it happen now? Very unlikely. The members of this establishment all know and like each other. Most important, they have the same interest in protecting the status quo, which has empowered and enriched them. That’s why they’ll continue to pretend there is no problem and that the Democratic Party was always supposed to serve corporate donors and lose easy elections.

My name is Matthew Saroff, and I endorse this message.

Quote of the Day

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As for the Republicans — how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.

—H.P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillip did love him some long and florid paragraphs, but this is spot on.

Quote of the Day

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It’s really not complicated. Most hedge funds are brilliant vehicles designed to make their managers rich. That doesn’t mean they’re doing anything illegal, or maybe even unethical. It’s capitalism. It just means they’re generally a terrible investment, like a new car or a $30,000 handbag. Only with hedge funds, you don’t even get the car or the bag.

—Brett Arends at Marketwatch

This has been in plain sight for decades.  The only mystery us why so many people, and particularly nominally savvy investors, continue to throw their money away.

My theory is that there is corruption involved.

Clearly, Young Skywalker Has Completed His Training

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This is not just the best response to the debates, it’s the best possible response to the debates:

That debate was the worst thing I’ve ever seen & I was in The Star Wars Holiday Special.

— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) September 30, 2020

That being said, Weird Al Yankovic is a pretty close second:

It’s actually pretty impressive that he got together a song based on the actual event in such a short time.

Tweet of the Day

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Joe Biden is politely asking a group of cyborg T-1000 Terminators to follow their conscience https://t.co/DJggvsrUeX

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) September 20, 2020

This critique applies not only to Joe Biden, but to the whole of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), who have spent their time on the Sunday shows explaining how they are powerless to offer meaningful opposition to Trump’s and McConnell’s court packing.

A Good Take on Woke Politics

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I agree with the folks at Redline, “Wokies are the Establishment.”

It’s why we see things like the New York Chapter of DSA black-balling one of the foremost scholars of race and class in the nation, wokeness is a way that people with comfortable lives can pretend that they are doing something to resolve inequality and corruption in our society while benefiting from that inequality and corruption in our society:

In the absence of a better word with which to refer to the rabid activists who claim progressivism while demanding adherence to an increasingly prescriptive set of political beliefs, I call them “woke”. With its roots in Black American slang, the term originally denoted a person or a group who were enlightened on social justice issues and awake to the inequalities in America. As words do, it has evolved from a self-descriptor to more of a term the fed up masses use to describe the drivers of cancel culture and identity politics throughout the anglosphere and indeed most of the West.

Wokeism claims Marxism as not only an influence, but as foundational political doctrine on which their various social justice issues are based. So fierce are their claims on modern Marxism they have all but consumed many of the traditional Marxist organisations and re-educated the world on their new brand of socialist theory. However, even someone with the loosest understanding of the writings of Karl Marx and the complicated history of his movement is able to discern some serious flaws in the woke iteration. Not only does it differ from the previously accepted principles and aims of Marxism, stark contradictions can be seen in much of the behaviour exhibited by wokeists.

For a group of people with an aggressive aversion to binary concepts e.g. binary biological sex, wokeism has pounced on the binary tension between oppressor and oppressed that is at the core of Marxist theory. It is perhaps the only place in which they can be said to really resemble the political theory they have claimed. Unfortunately, however, these usually middle-upper class, educated elites have little time for the analysis of class that is supposed to underpin this exploiter/exploited and oppressor/oppressed concept. Rather they will apply it to whichever pet social justice issue they are espousing at the time.

The woke appropriate the struggles of various marginalised groups and collect their oppressions in order to rail against their perceived oppressors. They have entrenched themselves in the politics of race and transgenderism in particular and while there are of course some valid discussions to be had in regards to inequalities and discrimination faced by people of colour and transgender people, the narrative set by woke activists is riddled with disingenuity and gaslighting.

It is time that society catches up and realises that wokeism is not the movement for the disadvantaged and oppressed. Wokeism is the establishment. It is inextricably linked to corporate politics and capitalism. Woke activists have disproportionate social power in today’s fraught world. They are the establishment in the culture wars. Consider this:

………
 
Wokeism is performance. It is mostly educated, establishment youths LARPing the struggles of truly marginalised groups. It is time we stopped letting them pretend to be saviours when they’re just malignant power in a different outfit.

This critique strikes at the core of both “Wokism” and “Identity Politics.”

This

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Dean Baker makes a very good point: CEOs Maximize CEO Pay, Not Shareholder Returns. 

They act in their own self interest, not those of the company, which is why the insane pay arrangements for senior executives do not result in increased performance for any task involving thinking, which we have known for years, and was demonstrated by Dan Ariely over a decade ago:

It is a cult among policy types to say that CEOs maximize shareholder returns, as in this NYT piece. This is in spite of the fact that returns to shareholders have not been especially good in the last two decades. And, this is even though returns were boosted by a huge corporate tax cut in 2017 that increased after-tax profits by more than 10 percent, other things equal.

There is considerable evidence that CEOs do not earn their $20 million pay, in the sense of providing $20 million in additional returns to shareholders, compared to the next schmuck down the line. This matters in a big way because CEO pay influences pay structures throughout the economy. If CEOs got paid 20 to 30 times the pay of ordinary workers, like they did in the 1960s or 1970s, or around $2 million to $3 million a year, the next in line execs would likely get around $1.5 million and the third tier corporate execs would get in the high hundreds of thousands. That is a contrast from today when the CFO and other top tier execs might get close to $10 million and the third tier can easily make $2-$3 million.

Preach it, Brother.

Quote of the Day

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The future is always unpredictable but it’s hard not to think that aerial firefighting aircraft will be the most valuable kind of fighter aircraft in 2040.

It is an extreme optimist who prepares for a high-tech war in 2100.

—Hushkit

It’s a military aviation site, and even they get that we are facing a catastrophic, and perhaps extinction level, climate crisis.

Quote of the Day

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Trump is horrible, but as most commenters on this blog keep pointing out – he’s the stench, not the rot.

—Commenter a different chris in the comments section at Naked Capitalism.

Until people understand this, and people like consultants in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) make their salaries by NOT understanding this, things will not get any better.

Analogy of the Day

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The US Economy is Having a Wile E Coyote Moment

—Financial Times

The lead paragraph says it all:

In the well-known Looney Tunes cartoon, Wile E Coyote regularly runs off a cliff in pursuit of the Road Runner and is suspended in mid-air temporarily. When he looks down and realises his predicament, he falls into the canyon below. In real life, US consumers and businesses have just run straight off a cash cliff, now that extra federal assistance to small companies and unemployed workers has ended.

We are screwed, particularly when the heating season begins, and humidity drops, and viral infectivity increases.

Finest Journalist in the United States is a Brit

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I am referring, of course, to John Oliver.

He masterfully juxtaposes the lie fest at the RNC with the events in Kenosha.

It’s sad that a comedian is pretty much the only person in the main-stream-media providing good context and analysis.

As an aside, I think that John Oliver is much better than Jon Stewart ever was.

Stewart subscribed to the “View from nowhere”, and Oliver does not hide his opinions.

Tweet of the Day

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If modern Democrats were around in the 1800s their solution to slavery would be Black slave owners.

— Albert Lee for the People 🌹 (@AlbertLee2020) August 10, 2020

The reality of the situation is that much of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is allergic to any sort of move toward social justice, and so try to do nothing about the carceral state, predatory finance, and inequality.

Instead, they rely on Republican Party racism to define themselves as a party.

Tweet of the Day

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Rancid lawlessness has been happening in the white collar world for twenty years with no handcuffs so it’s not a surprise to see it everywhere else. The trickle down theory works apparently.

I mean Elon Musk openly committed securities fraud.

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) August 26, 2020

These days, it seems that about 80% of what goes on in Wall Street, and in Silicon Valley is unproductive bullsh%$ that is regulatory arbitrage at best, and more likely outright criminality.

As the saying goes, a fish rots from the head.