Musk is on trial right now!

Now he only wants to buy it to ban photos like this one.

How exciting! The court hearing in which Twitter argues for a fast-track trial, while Musk begs for time to dawdle and make jokes and trash-talk is happening right this minute!

Twitter Inc’s (TWTR.N) showdown with Elon Musk over his $44 billion takeover faces its first test on Tuesday, when a judge will weigh the company’s bid for a fast-tracked trial which it says it needs to ensure deal financing doesn’t come unraveled.

The San Francisco-based company is seeking to resolve months of uncertainty for its business as Musk tries to walk away from the deal over what he says are Twitter’s “spam” accounts that he says are fundamental to its value.

Wait, did I say “exciting”? I don’t think that’s the right word for a sense of dread combined with disgust at billionaires. Is there a good word for that? It would be very useful.

I think I want Twitter to win this round, so that the agony isn’t prolonged, and so Musk gets a preliminary slap in the face. But I don’t want Musk to be compelled to buy Twitter, because he’d just wreck it worse than it already is. The ideal ultimate solution would be if eventually Musk is let off the hook but has to pay a tremendous “fuck around and find out” penalty: a few billion to Twitter, and many billions more to public service, like a windfall to public libraries, for instance. Just dreaming here.

@Kolyin is live tweeting the hearing, if you want to follow along.

The hearing is over. The judge essentially decided in favor of Twitter, scheduling the big battle for 5 days in October. Man, I wish the lawsuit against us could have been resolved so speedily (yeah, that’s speedy for a trial.)

You don’t need to win elections to destroy the country

Nice library. Shame if something were to happen to it.

Here’s a great example of the chaos the right wing has brought down upon us, local libraries.

Residents of a small Iowa town criticized their library’s LGBTQ staff and their displaying of LGBTQ-related books until most of the staff quit. Now, the town’s library is closed for the foreseeable future.

After having the same library director for 32 years, the Vinton Public Library can’t seem to keep the position filled anymore. Since summer 2021, the Vinton Public Library has gone through two permanent directors and an interim director who has served in that role twice.

Located about 40 miles northwest of Cedar Rapids, the doors of the Vinton Public Library—housed in a brick and stone Carnegie—have been open to the public since 1904, but were shuttered on Friday, July 8, while the Vinton Library Board tries to sort out staffing issues seemingly brought on by local dalliances with the national culture wars.

It comes after a handful of locals whipped up a controversy first over the library displaying books about prominent Democrats, and later about it displaying LGBTQ books and having LGBTQ people on staff.

See? All it takes is a handful of local assholes to deprive an entire community of a valuable resource. Notice that the incident initially prompting this problem was displaying books about Democrats, which, last I heard, was still a legal political party.

I read through quite a few articles on this subject, and noticed a curious thing: while defenders of the library were named, none of the names of the people are brought up. All it is is librarians and others announcing that they can’t take it anymore, that they have to resign and get out of this sick town. At best we see phrases like “a handful of locals”.

Who are they? There has been an effective policy of harassment and abuse that has decimated the staff and made it impossible to keep the library open. GODDAMN IT, NAME THEM. This is asymmetric warfare where the oppressive forces get to thrive in concealment, an anonymity maintained by the media, while they get to assail the civic infrastructure. There is a serious problem flourishing in Vinton, Iowa, and everyone is pretending that the closure just happened passively. No. It was a targeted attack. Somebody organized it. Someone made harassing phone calls, or wrote abusive letters to the editor of the local paper, or denied employees service at the grocery store or pharmacy or whatever.

In the absence of any clarity here, I guess I’m just going to assume it was some vile conservative church. They’re usually the ones trying to impose their will on small towns. Given that Vinton, Iowa has a population of about 5,000, like Morris, and has at least 14 churches, I think that’s a safe bet.

Fool me once…

Panic. We really need to worry — the Republicans are playing innocent and saying they wouldn’t do that.

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling last month to overturn Roe v. Wade, Democrats are pushing to codify other rights that have been left vulnerable by the decision into federal law — including access to contraception, same-sex marriage, and potentially interracial marriage. “I do believe that we should move with urgency,” Hakeem Jeffries, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, told Axios Wednesday.

But they may have an uphill battle: Such measures seem to have little appeal to the GOP, whose members insist that those protections are unnecessary because those rights are not under threat. “I’ll worry about hypotheticals at the time we have it,” Ted Cruz told Axios. “I have no reason to believe these precedents are going to fall,” added Lindsey Graham. “Nothing like that should even be thought about by anybody because it’s not endangered in any way,” Chuck Grassley told the outlet.

“I don’t know why people would come to that conclusion,” he added.

Here we go again. They’re going to ban contraception, same sex marriage, and interracial marriage. 100%.

We have these people in Minnesota, too

It happened in Brooklyn Park, which has nothing to do with New York — it’s a Minneapolis suburb. Biden supporters/antifa/anarchists attacked this poor man, setting his truck on fire and defacing his garage with graffiti.

Oh, the vandalism! The destruction!

Molla reported to police that someone set fire to his camper “because it had a Trump 2020 flag displayed on it,” and spray painted the Antifa or anarchy symbol, “BLM” and “Biden 2020” on his garage door.

Those darn liberals. That’s an incoherent mess on that door — anarchists tend not to favor establishment politicians. Whoever painted that doesn’t even know how to spray paint an anarchy symbol properly. Like this, OK? It’s easy.

Except…it looks like the not-very-bright “victim,” Denis Vladmirovich Molla, was simply practicing a typical Republican grift that he learned from his masters.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office says Molla actually lit the fire and defaced the garage himself.

Court documents show that Molla then “submitted multiple insurance claims seeking coverage for the damage to his garage, camper, vehicles, and residence caused by the fire.”

Molla submitted insurance claims totaling more than $300,000, receiving only $61,000 in the process. He then accused his insurance company of “defrauding him.” Court documents show he also yielded more than $17,000 from two GoFundMe accounts.

Oops. Never mind.

At least they had good hygiene

The Uvalde police have released surveillance video of their actions in the school. It doesn’t help their case.

I’m not including the video, but it doesn’t contain much violence — quite the opposite actually. It’s edited down to a few minutes rather than over an hour, but it’s all inaction punctuated with occasional sounds of gunfire. Of course they could edit out the boring parts because there were lots of them — cops standing around in a hallway. At worst, your imagination is going to be horrified thinking about what’s going on in the classroom you can’t see when the burst of gunfire sounds.

At 12:21 p.m., 45 minutes after police first arrived on the scene, four shots are heard and at least a dozen officers move toward the classroom.

An officer can be heard saying, “They’re making entry.”

Yet they do not.

At 12:30, an officer wearing a helmet and ballistic vest pauses to squirt hand sanitizer from a wall-mounted dispenser and rubs his hands together. Other armed officers walk back and forth, and discuss the classroom doors and windows. The hunt for the keys continues. One officer eventually brings a sledgehammer. The audio from the surveillance camera at times is garbled, but it is loud in the crowded hallway.

At 12:41, a man wearing blue rubber gloves and a black shirt, khaki pants and a black baseball cap, with a stethoscope around his neck, arrives and speaks to officers. Other paramedics arrive with supplies. Two officers in camouflage fist-bump each other.

At 12:50, a cadre of officers crouches outside the classroom. A burst of gunfire is heard, and the video ends. Authorities have said a Border Patrol officer killed the gunman. Investigators are awaiting the results of an analysis from an Austin-based medical expert on how many victims died after police first arrived.

The guy who casually strolls across the hall to rub his hands with disinfectant is jarring. He’s holding a big gun, and he’s hearing the big gun going off in the classroom he’s avoiding entering, and I guess he was worried about getting COVID.

It’s missing the perspective of the kids in the classroom.

All the time the cops are idling in the hall, fidgeting with their gear, there are little kids desperately trying to pretend they’re dead to avoid the attention of the murderer who shoots anyone who makes a sound, watching their playground friends getting slaughtered.

Let’s hope he isn’t made a martyr to his cause

We shouldn’t forget who Shinzo Abe, good friend of Donald Trump, is.

Two of Abe’s Cabinet appointees were associated with Japan’s Nazi Party and several of his comrades wrote laudatory blurbs for a book called Hitler’s Election Strategy, published in 1994, and written by a member of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The book was banned after international criticism.

Comparisons with the Nazis are hard to brush off if your Cabinet members are looking up to them as role models.

Let’s not forget that Abe appointed an unrepentant racist, Eriko Yamatani, associated with the internationally condemned Zaitokukai, to oversee the National Police Agency. Neither the prime minister nor any of his senior Cabinet members openly opposed the discrimination against Japan’s Korean residents. Last month, the Cabinet announced in an approved written response to an opposition party’s question on the usage of Hitler’s Mein Kampf as teaching material in classrooms that it was completely acceptable.

After a public outcry, they made the obligatory comment that “if it were used as a tool to promote racism… that would be inappropriate.”

Initially, criticism erupted all over the country but the mainstream media practiced self-censorship and didn’t touch the issue until the outcry forced their hand as well.

Cabinet ministers this year also announced support for reintroducing the kamikaze-inspiring Imperial Rescript on Education back into the classroom. It was issued originally by the Meiji Era emperor in 1890 and advised citizens that the greatest moral good was to give their life for him or his successors. It was later used as part of the ideology that had Japan send soldiers out to die in airplanes as kamikaze pilots, die in small submarines as human torpedoes, and force Okinawans to commit mass suicide. After the war, the edict was declared null and void by Japan’s parliament in 1948, with a statement that it “clearly undermines basic human rights and calls into question Japan’s international fidelity.” Now, it’s on its way back. Indeed, it has been a good year for those nostalgic for prewar Japanese militarism. Bayonet practice will be making a comeback in education as well.

Absolutely none of that justifies murdering Abe, especially since he was out of power. Assassination ought to always be off the table.

Shootings in general are extraordinarily rare in Japan, thanks to their strict gun laws. The assassin here had to construct his own handmade weapon to carry out the evil deed.

Some are more equal than others

This could never happen in America!

Or…could it?

The witches have targeted Brett Kavanaugh, who was just trying to eat his expensive steak dinner, and their protests so disturbed him that he was able to have dessert and had to sneak out the back. Politics should not trample the freedom to congregate and have dinner!

The restaurant announced that Disturbing the dinner of all of our customers was an act of selfishness and void of decency. You know DINNER is not like the privilege of getting respectful treatment at a health clinic, or something.

I’m expecting a decision at the next court session protecting the sacred constitutional right of unelected officials appointed for life to never hear a contrary word ever, followed by a group of unelected christo-fascists with lifetime sinecures deciding that burning at the stake is not a cruel and unusual punishment.

Did anyone bring a hook? Get him off the stage.

A succinct summary of Boris Johnson’s concession speech:

Johnson says the government has much more to do. He wants to level up, because he believes talent is evenly spread.

He says he has tried to persuade colleagues that changing leader would be “eccentric”.

But he failed to persuade them, he admits – even though the party has a “vast mandate” and is only “a handful of points behind in the polls”.

He says in politics “no one is remotely indispensable”.

The “Darwinian” electoral system will produce a new leader, he says.

He knows there will be people who will be disappointed. And he says he is “sad to be giving up the best job in the world”.

He thanks his wife Carrie and his family, civil servant and staff who have helped him – referring to being “here at Chequers”, before he corrects himself. And he thanks his protection team – the one group who do not leak, he says.

He ends by saying the future is golden.

OK, fuck off now, Boris.

I didn’t like the “Darwinian” reference at all. His views are more crudely Spencerian than Darwinian, I think.

I prefer this summary, too.

Congratulations to the UK

Buh-bye, Boris!

I hear you’re finally getting rid of that wretched boob, Boris Johnson.

Boris Johnson is to resign as Conservative leader but will push to stay on as prime minister until the autumn, prompting a backlash from some Tory MPs who say he has to go now.

Johnson’s decision came after an extraordinary standoff with his cabinet, which ended after Nadhim Zahawi, his new chancellor, told him to quit. By that point, more than 50 ministers had walked out, citing his mishandling of a string of scandals and failure of ethics.

So that’s what a collapsing government looks like.

There are things I don’t understand here. So he’s going to resign from leadership of his political party, but he wants to stay on as prime minister of his country for a few more months? How does that work? His scandals and ethical failures are just too much for the oh-so-ethical Conservative party, but are entirely satisfactory for the leadership of the United Kingdom? He’s like the lingering stink of a pungent fart, he’s going to cling to whatever wisps of power he can grip, in spite of near-universal dislike. We’ve experienced that over here, with a criminal ex-president pretending to be in important figure of influence, but hey, at least the UK didn’t have a mob of yahoos storming Downing Street.

Oh, and he’s going to be replaced by Dominic Raab? Isn’t that just more of the same? All of your Tories seem to be as repugnant as our Republicans.

We aren’t done yet

I don’t feel much of a call to celebrate the Fourth of July. That first attempt at writing a bold statement about liberty in 1776 was 90% hogwash, undermined by the hypocrisy of supporting slavery, and in fact, eventually jiggering together a federal government that was designed to prop up slave states and give them enduring power.

The rationale behind the Fourth of July was seared away in the bloody Civil War. That war staggered us a few steps closer to a government of the people, by the people, and for the people — slaves were nominally freed, at least — but it left in place the political structures that were built to benefit wealthy slave owners. We’re still saddled with an electoral college and an unrepresentative senate, and we’ve added more biases that cripple our politics, such as laws that have turned elections into competitions in burning money, with corporations chortling as they contribute to the bonfire.

The date is still a good marker, though. In that Civil War, the climactic battle that broke the slave-owner army was the battle of Gettysburg, fought on July 1-3, 1863. We staved off the threat of total capitulation to an unmistakably authoritarian, aristocratic oligarchy at that time, although the failure to address the shortcomings of American government has crept back strongly. At least we had that moment in 1863, though. We here in Minnesota hold a relic of that war. That Virginia battle flag above.

Marshall Sherman was a 40-year-old house painter in St. Paul when he joined the 1st Minnesota Infantry as a private in the Union army. Described as a soft-spoken gentleman in historical accounts, Sherman fought in the Battle of Gettysburg alongside the rest of the 1st Minnesota.

This brutal confrontation became the site of the highest number of casualties of the Civil War. One Union soldier from Minnesota described the Battle of Gettysburg as such:

“If men ever become devils that was one of the times. We were crazy with the excitement of the fight. We just rushed in like wild beasts. Men swore and cursed and struggled and fought, grappled in hand-to-hand fight, threw stones, clubbed their muskets, kicked, yelled, and hurrahed.”

On the third and final day of fighting at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, Pvt Marshall Sherman took the Confederate battle flag belonging to 28th Virginia Infantry. After Pickett’s Charge, a massive turning point that led the Union to victory, Sherman emerged with the tattered flag. It was one of 25 Confederate flags captured by the Union Army that day.

We’ve still got it. The traitors who revere their ancestors role in the rebellion have begged for it back. They aren’t getting it.

Many Virginians became upset that Minnesota held on to one of their Confederate battle flags from the Civil War.

Roanoke Civil War reenactors who represented the 28th Virginia Infantry Regiment officially asked for the return of the flag in 1998. They appealed directly to the Minnesota Historical Society, who then asked the state attorney general office for help.

Minnesota’s assistant attorney general denied the Virginians’ request, but the word was out. Now, Virginia’s state lawmakers wanted to get involved.

In 2000, both the Virginia House and Senate passed a resolution that formally requested Minnesota return the flag. Again, the Minnesota Historical Society refused.

On February 29, 2000, Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura answered questions about the controversy concerning 28th Virginia’s battle flag. When asked if he would consider giving Sherman’s captured Confederate flag to Virginia, Ventura replied:

“Absolutely not. Why? I mean, we won.”

Ahead of the 150th anniversary of Gettysburg in 2013, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell requested the flag be loaned to his state to commemorate the Battle of Gettysburg. Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton denied that request, saying that returning the battle flag would be “sacrilege” to Union soldiers who died in the Civil War.

“It was something that was earned through the incredible courage and valor of men who gave their lives and risked their lives to obtain it,” Dayton said. “And as far as I’m concerned, it’s a closed subject.”

To this day, the Confederate battle flag that Union soldier Marshall Sherman captured more than 150 years ago remains in Minnesota’s possession.

That’s the right idea, but we’ve got to do more. It’s nice that we’re hanging on to a symbol, but people are still flying confederate flags. Tear them down and take them home as spoils of war. Let’s move beyond symbols and tear down more relics of the 18th century, starting with our corrupt and antiquated system of government. No more electoral college, no more privileged Senate, no more lobbyists, no more corporate buyouts, no more celebrations of our deep flaws. Tear them all down.

That battle flag is just a token and an unfulfilled promise. Finish the job. If you want to keep a few souvenirs of the old wickedness, I think there is a museum in Minnesota where they could be stored, next to a shameful old flag.