I’m not impressed with the fools who think the two on the left are equivalent to the crook on the right. Those two tell us that the system is sloppier and leakier than it ought to be, the guy on the right is directly practicing his personal criminal intent. It’s that simple.
Also, I think Luckovich’s caricature of Trump is the best out there.
The title of this article is a challenge: “I’m a corporate fraud investigator. You wouldn’t believe the hubris of the super-rich.” Oh yeah? Try me. You’d be hard-pressed to tell me about an excess of the wealthy that I wouldn’t believe. And I’m sorry, but the rest of the article is the expected litany of banal privilege: expensive cars, jets, and yachts, tax fraud, organized crime, lies, threats, growing corruption. Ho hum. There’s no such thing as an ethical multi-millionaire, as I expect we’ve all learned.
I did appreciate the core message, though.
There is something unique to our era that encourages the charlatan. As well as investigating corporations, I am also a novelist, and I think we live in the age of the corporate fairy-tale: a magical land of unicorns and eternal growth. “What’s the story?” investors like to ask about the latest hot start-up, willing the narrative to be true even as they live the myth of their own absolute rationality.
Elon Musk once said: “Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time.” Put another way, if the emperor believes he is wearing wonderful clothes, others will start to believe it too. When I was researching my debut novel, in which a tyrant’s wife stands trial for her husband’s corruption, I found someone else making an eerily similar point to Musk. It wasn’t from another business leader; it was Imelda Marcos. “Perception is real,” the wife of the former Philippines dictator said. “And the truth is not.”
The ultra-rich are all in the business of selling an illusion. All the criminality and corruption is leaving the illusion in tatters, though, let’s hope that more people will see through the game.
I may be old, but I still remember high school. Do you? The cliques, the drama, the petty squabbles, the abusive Mean Girls and jocks? It’s all coming back.
The Republican party supported Herschel Walker because he was a football player, never mind that he was as dumb as a post, and Oz, because he was rich.
They’re handing committee memberships to George Santos, despite the fact that he’s a constitutive liar who cheated his way into office.
It’s clear that the Republicans are the Superficials, the in-group of people who strive to look glossy and fashionable, no matter how dull their minds are. What clinched my recognition that we’re back in high school is that Boebert and Greene are bickering.
The crest of the battle was played out on Jan. 7 in the speaker’s lobby ladies’ room, The Daily Beast reports, when a source says, “Greene questioned Boebert’s loyalty to McCarthy.”
Another source reportedly said that Greene asked Boebert, “You were okay taking millions of dollars from McCarthy, but you refuse to vote for him for Speaker, Lauren?”
Unaware Boebert was in the bathroom when she emerged from the stall, the first source told The Daily Beast that Lauren said to Greene, “Don’t be ugly,” and then “ran out like a little schoolgirl.”
Fighting in the girls’ room. Oh, grow up.
What’s particularly appalling is that Jacinda Ardern is resigning from her position as prime minister of New Zealand. What a contrast.
Ardern won praise for her calm stewardship of the Pacific nation through a number of major events, including the coronavirus pandemic, a volcanic eruption and the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attack. She spearheaded legislation to ban military-style semiautomatic weapons and assault rifles just six days after the attack, in which more than 50 people were killed.
Can you imagine a Boebert or a Greene in a similar position? Oh hell no.
I want a transfer to that other high school on the far side of the Pacific Ocean.
Here’s a horrifying list of crimes committed, and admitted to, by one man in the UK.
24 counts of rape
nine counts of sexual assault
five counts of assault by penetration
three counts of coercive and controlling behaviour
three counts of false imprisonment
two counts of attempted rape
one count of attempted sexual assault by penetration
one count of causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent
one count of indecent assault
That’s bad enough, but to make it worse, he was a police officer who used his privileges to run a little corrupt empire of violence and abuse.
Must be a case of “one bad apple,” right? Except that this villain, David Carrick, had been on the police force for over 20 years, and had a history of abusive behavior.
The Met has apologised after it emerged he had come to the attention of police over nine incidents, including rape allegations, between 2000 and 2021.
A senior officer said his offending was “unprecedented in policing”.
Oh, really? “Unprecedented”? His fellow officers knew about his reputation, and joked about it; they had formal complaints about his crimes spread over two decades. They did nothing. Now members of the police force are standing around, shrugging, claiming they had no idea this sort of thing was going on, hrumph.
Assistant Commissioner Barbara Gray, the Met’s lead for professionalism, said: “We should have spotted his pattern of abusive behaviour and because we didn’t, we missed opportunities to remove him from the organisation.
“We are truly sorry that being able to continue to use his role as a police officer may have prolonged the suffering of his victims.
Everyone else knew, though.
Harriet Wistrich, director of campaign group the Centre for Women’s Justice, said: “We have known for some time that there has been a culture of impunity for such offending by police officers.
“Recent reports show a woefully deficient vetting and misconduct system and a largely unchallenged culture of misogyny in some sections of the Met.
“That Carrick could have not only become a police officer but remain a serving officer for so long whilst he perpetrated these horrific crimes against women, is terrifying.”
A first step: fire every police officer who has been charged with domestic violence immediately. Just as a start.
Oops, there goes 40% of the police force. That’s a good start, but probably not Draconian enough. What else can you do when the whole barrel is rotten, to the point the staves are decaying?
It sort of tells you all you need to know about the Republicans of Arkansas — that they would elect a whiny, lying, thin-skinned mouthpiece for the status quo with no administrative experience to a high position. What’s even more revealing, though, are her first acts in office.
Within hours of being sworn in as the new governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed an executive order Tuesday banning the term “Latinx” from official use in the state government.
It is one of the first, if not the first, executive order of its kind, Tabitha Bonilla, an associate professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University, told NBC News.
It was one of seven orders signed by Sanders, a Republican, right after taking the oath. The other ones focused on prohibiting Arkansas schools from teaching critical race theory, budgeting and spending as well as other government affairs.
That seems petty, that the first thing she does is have a snit over what some people call themselves. We must police the language, apparently, and that means dictating what words may be spoken and written in her presence, probably all in the name of free speech. It’s all about the “anti-woke agenda”.
For Ed Morales, the author of the book “Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture,” the governor’s seemingly sudden interest to ban the term Latinx — which is often derided by conservatives and debated among some Latinos — speaks to “this anti-woke agenda” the Republican Party has increasingly adopted.
“It is something that seems to be tied to things that they object to, which is really anything that prioritizes marginalized people and marginalized points of view,” Morales said.
Anti-woke is just another way of saying white supremacy. Every little thing she does is going to be about white supremacy, as you can tell from her first priorities.
There is no bar too low. A recently elected Republican representative from Florida, Anna Paulina Luna — you know this is a poor start to anything — is squabbling with a competitor, and has sued him to get him to retract defamatory claims.
A letter obtained by The Daily Beast reveals that the Florida Republican retained the high-powered law firm Holland & Knight to go after a would-be rival who leveled a series of outlandish allegations against Luna on the Bubba the Love Sponge radio show in the fall.
The letter demands that Matt Tito, a pal of Roger Stone who mulled challenging Luna in a primary, apologize on video for his accusations, which include claims that Luna was fired from a job—and that she had a sexual liaison with Rep. Matt Gaetz.
Oh, what a world…that a show called Bubba the Love Sponge would have any credibility, and that it would even exist, is an indictment of the Florida radio audience. OK, but I agree, an accusation that one had sex with that slimeball Matt Gaetz is grossly insulting. Focus on that…oh wait, she’s more concerned about a different accusation?
“You said that Ms. Luna (a devout Christian) practices witchcraft,” Lisko added.
“You are hereby demanded to publicly and immediately retract each and every defamatory statement you made about Ms. Luna on the show,” Lisko continued. “Because you do not have the ability to distribute your retraction widely on your social media, you are demanded to apologize and retract your statements on the Bubba the Love Sponge Show or by making a retraction and apology video that you send to me that Ms. Luna will distribute via her social media.”
Tito is not backing down. He claims to have evidence that she is a witch based on hearsay statements from “MAGA figures,” so we’re already relying on dubious sources.
Tito claimed he learned about Luna’s purported background from other MAGA figures.
According to Tito, Hispanics for Trump associate Paloma Zuniga said that “Luna practices witchcraft.”
“That is where I heard that from,” Tito said. “She puts spells on people.”
Their reasoning is remarkable.
Another failed California Republican congressional hopeful, Omar Navarro, suggested the unsubstantiated rumors must be accurate because so many people were repeating them.
“It has got to be true to a certain extent,” he told The Daily Beast. “It’s fair enough to say that it’s spread among people in the Republican Party.”
So Ted Cruz actually is the Zodiac killer? All it takes is enough people saying something is true for it to be true? If enough of us simply say that all Republicans are witches, they’ll all be run out of office, or they’ll use their sorcerous powers to enchant the public into believing them.
Who is to say that last possibility isn’t already true? Witches, every one.
Given their track record, pardon me for expecting the worst.
Also, hey look, they hired David French, meeting my very low expectations.
French served as a senior counsel for ADF, a legal advocacy group that has opposed any expansion of LGBTQ+ civil rights as an attack on so-called “religious freedom.” ADF has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
During his time as an ADF counsel, he defended a Georgia graduate student who sued her university after being told that her anti-gay “Christian beliefs” were incompatible with the standards of her desired profession as a psychological counselor. The student considered homosexuality an “immoral” “lifestyle choice.”
French signed onto a 2017 religious right document called the “Nashville Statement,” which said God designed marriage to be only between a man and a woman. The document also stated “it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism,” and called transgender identity and homosexuality a sin and “at odds with God.”
I seriously wonder how their hiring meetings operate. I’ve participated in a few here at the university, and they always being with a meeting with HR, where they go over our criteria, which are typically stuff like, “must teach organic chemistry,” with an HR person to remind us that nothing about our search criteria excludes women and minorities, and then when we’ve got a preliminary list of candidate for phone interviews, that list is sent to HR where they inspect it for bias (“why is your list only white men?”), and after we winnow the list down over the phone, we send it to HR for approval before we invite anyone for an in-person interview, while carefully justifying each exclusion (“did you drop this person from the pool because they have an accent?” “Heck no, it’s because they want to do quantum neurochemistry and we don’t have the facilities.”) Every thing is about making sure we do all our selection on the basis of assessment of ability.
The NY Times, on the other hand, seems to have a simple process in which they look for a conservative white dude, and then a Sulzberger rubber-stamps the name. “Oh, he’s a gormless bigot? Love him already.”
They still pay David Brooks for his babbling. Every choice they made after that is suspect.
Ever since the Trump administration, I’ve been standing in my shrine, chanting “BLOOD AND SOULS FOR MY LORD ARIOCH,” and leaving a chalice of blood on the altar, all in hopes of summoning the chaos lords to my aid. I may have miscalculated. I did not expect my ritual to be so effective.
The Republican party has descended into shrieking madness, unable to accomplish even the most basic tasks of governing. On the positive side, that may mean they’re going to be unable to implement the specifics of their evil agenda, but on the debit side, they’re also blocking one of the houses of congress from governing at all.
I was thinking maybe I should back off a bit on the ritual incantations, but Arioch does not treat weakness kindly, and the backlash against me, personally, would be unthinkable. I must continue. I will accept the blame if the house of representatives bursts into green flames, Lauren Boebert is elected speaker, and giant tentacled beasts manifest in the Potomac. But you knew this is where the Republicans were going all along, right?
One of the bonuses of being on Mastodon is the fediverse is actually strong about crushing bad actors. A shiny new newspaper out of Yorkshire trying to make it in an online world published a lazy, stupid opinion piece about trans people — it’s England, you know, the place is infested with transphobes — and got slammed hard for it.
Yeah, they tried to play the game of saying it didn’t break any of their rules, just like Twitter was always doing — using vague rules to allow clear-cut hatred to get a pass.
That didn’t go over at all well. The Yorkshire lights went out all over Mastodon as instance after instance killed their feed. You want to see the horror settling into the admin of this for-profit newspaper as they realize they may have just destroyed their audience? Look here.
That’s usually a good sign that you done fucked up when Nazis start camping on your doorstep. I wish more media could grasp that simple, straightforward clue.
I’d already known that “scientist” coined by William Whewell in the 19th century, but only today did I learn the context. The first scientist by name was Mary Somerville, and Whewell had to invent the term to describe her!
Months after the publication of Somerville’s Connexion, the English polymath William Whewell — then master of Trinity College, where Newton had once been a fellow, and previously pivotal in making Somerville’s Laplace book a requirement of the university’s higher mathematics curriculum — wrote a laudatory review of her work, in which he coined the word scientist to refer to her. The commonly used term up to that point — “man of science” — clearly couldn’t apply to a woman, nor to what Whewell considered “the peculiar illumination” of the female mind: the ability to synthesize ideas and connect seemingly disparate disciplines into a clear lens on reality. Because he couldn’t call her a physicist, a geologist, or a chemist — she had written with deep knowledge of all these disciplines and more — Whewell unified them all into scientist. Some scholars have suggested that he coined the term a year earlier in his correspondence with Coleridge, but no clear evidence survives. What does survive is his incontrovertible regard for Somerville, which remains printed in plain sight — in his review, he praises her as a “person of true science.”
He still managed to squeeze in some sexist stereotyping, but that’s cool. Read the whole article to find out what remarkable person Somerville was.
