House GOP Fixin' To Screw Up Speaker Vote, Imperil Trump’s Inauguration, Cause Us To Die Laughing. Gary Legum at Wonkette: “It’s wild to think that at some point down the road, the fate of the planet could really hinge on what decision these fuckwits make here.”
The NYPD and New York City government are in freefall. Fun to watch, unless you live in New York, as Tim Cushing at Techdirt notes:
Ticket to the freakshow
Lately, I’m keeping in mind George Carlin’s line that when you’re born you get a ticket to the freakshow and when you are born in America you get a front-row seat.
Carlin was dark in his final years, or at least his stage persona was. And I don’t think you can maintain a persona for as much time as Carlin did without it being true. He cheered for mass death. He hated the human race but loved people, which are two views I am finding more sympathy for as I am now just eight years younger than he was when he died.
When I read the news, I am disgusted by the human race, but when I meet people in life or work, I’m more inclined to love them as they are, without judging them.
I started using my current barber soon after the pandemic lockdown ended. I’m pretty sure that at that time, they did not take Apple Pay, and they had an ancient, slow credit card reader, so I just paid them cash, because it was more convenient. The last time I went in for a haircut, I forgot to bring my wallet, so before I sat down, I asked if they take Apple Pay. They do now.
That’s the last place on Earth I paid cash for anything. I’m living the cash-free life now.
Brett’s @ttscoff@nojack.easydns.ca mention of Drafts as a place he stores lists makes me think I should use Drafts more as a place where some text lives, not just a place where it starts. Then I think that sometimes I like to save images too, which makes Drafts less useful to me. Then I think, should I use Bear? Then I think: Why use anything else when Apple Notes is right there?
This is far from the first time my brain has gone around this particular hamster wheel.
A brief Christmas report
Our stop was the Lafayette Hotel, which has been remodeled recently and looks delightfully bonkers, with an over-the-top early-midcentury theme.
Here’s a reproduction of the hotel in gingerbread.
And the view from the hotel lobby bar, where we sat for 15 minutes waiting for a table, with an estimated 25 minutes to go and getting hungry.
So we opted for the traditional Chinese food dinner.
Trump isn’t joking about wanting to control Greenland and the Panama Canal. Trump’s talk will push America’s allies closer to China.
Louisiana forbids public health workers from promoting COVID, flu and mpox shots. State health officials are spreading anti-vax lies that will kill many people and immiserate families.
RIP Michael Brewer, whose “One Toke Over the Line” was a hippie anthem.
Michael Brewer, half of the folk-rock duo Brewer & Shipley, who scored an unlikely Top 10 hit in 1971 with “One Toke Over the Line” — one of the most overt pop odes to marijuana of the hippie era and presumably the only one to be performed on the squeaky-clean “Lawrence Welk Show” — died on Tuesday at his home near Branson, Mo.
I had to put Minnie out in the backyard for a half hour this afternoon to keep her out of the way of the cleaners. She looked at me like I’d abandoned her on the side of the road in the North Dakota woods in February at midnight, where she would be eaten by bears.
I am reading: The Infernal Machine by Steven Johnson 📚. Published in May of this year, this book is a history of the violent anarchists of New York 110 years ago and the police investigations of them. The book has become timely with the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO and Luigi Mangione’s arrest.
“The Democratic Party needs to be the party of ‘fuck you.'"
Yes to this. No compromise with MAGA.
Tonight’s movie:
You called down the thunder, well now you’ve got it! … The cowboys are finished, you understand me? I see a red sash, I kill the man wearing it! So run, you cur! Run! Tell all the other curs the law’s coming. You tell ‘em I’m coming, and hell’s coming with me, you hear? Hell’s coming with me!
“When you regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook, all that will be left is Facebook."
The UK Online Safety Act is killing communities. Small, locally run communities cannot afford to comply. Only billion-dollar tech monopolies will survive.
Mike Masnick at Techdirt:
Policymakers have repeatedly brushed off warnings about these consequences, insisting that concerns are overblown or merely fear-mongering from big tech companies looking to avoid regulation. But it’s not. And we’re seeing the impact already.
The promise of the internet was supposed to be that it allowed anyone to set up whatever they wanted online, whether it’s a blog or a small forum. The UK has decided that the only forums that should remain online are those run by the largest companies in the world.
This trend is coming to the US too.
Elon Musk Boosting German Fascists, What Could Possibly Go Wrong
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: a bigoted industrialist who owns a giant car company has endorsed a far-right German political party full of Nazis that aims to purify Europe by casting out groups of people it considers to be its lessers, if not downright subhuman. Ha ha, no, it’s not Henry Ford, but we sure fooled you….
He’s a right-winger who grew up in apartheid-era South Africa, and one of his first actions when he bought Twitter two years ago was to let tons of racists and bigots the previous ownership had banned back onto the platform, such that it now resembles a Munich beer hall in 1933 or a meeting of the White Citizens Council in Alabama in the late 1950s….
So, we hate to engage in hyperbole or cause a scene, but we think it is maybe bad that Musk on Friday endorsed a far-right party full of neo-Nazis to take over Germany. Not to be too alarmist, but historically such takeovers have gone poorly not only for Germany and all of Europe, but also for the rest of the planet….
…
The endorsement falls neatly in line with the support the AfD has received from other people in Donald Trump’s orbit, who share the party’s virulent anti-immigrant views.
Trump’s first-term ambassador to Germany “famously pissed off the German government by cozying up to the Afd.” Steve Bannon “tried to recruit the party into his plan to unite all the far-right national populist parties in Europe to form a sort of supergroup” in the European Union Parliament a few years ago."
Imagine if Henry Ford had been Herbert Hoover’s closest advisor in 1931, at the same time the Nazis were on the rise. That would have been bad, right? Well, somehow that’s what America is getting. First time as tragedy, second time as farce, etc.