Category Archives: muttering to myself

Sports in a corporate culture

Trump sat behind bulletproof glass at Madison Square Garden with his fellow self-made son of a billionaire James Dolan. The cheapest seat in the building, outside of the suite of free luxury box seats provided to Trump, Lutnick and co., was the $1,500 standing room ticket NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani bought for himself. The average ticket price was over $10,000, maybe over $20,000 — VIP courtside seats were over $50,000 each.

The NBA championship brings in obscenely HUGE dollars for the owners and their corporate alter-egos. The NBA commissioner himself welcomed Trump’s visit that closed down ten square blocks around MSG, imposed TSA restrictions on the fans wealthy enough to attend the game and created even more traffic pressure and chaos in the already choked center of downtown (not to mention the loss of a ton of money for local businesses). Here’s NBA commish Adam Silver, from a blandly apolitical take on ESPN (owned by Dolan?):

Though Trump and high-profile basketball stars such as LeBron James have exchanged social media barbs over the years, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the president was a “genuine Knicks fan” who was “welcome” at the most-anticipated NBA game in New York since the Knicks’ last Finals appearance in 1999.

“What makes sports so special, especially when there’s so much that divides people, is that it’s something we have in common,” Silver told ESPN’s “Inside the NBA” during a pregame interview. “We should look for those things we have in common and build off that.” source

Inspiring words from this handsome corporate rascal:

Living in the modern world

We may not question that the greediest and most ruthless among us have every right to rule, since they are the fittest, the most motivated, the most special and the most entitled.   If you only have $100,000,000 there is no reason you shouldn’t have every right to go for ten, a hundred or a million times that.  It is only jealously on the part of losers that could account for a failure to realize that acquiring more money than you can spend in a hundred lifetimes is simply the highest expression of freedom.  Ask the Free Market, consult the Invisible Hand, consider the Finger.

Your new doctor agreed you were right to want to rule out cancer before undergoing another operation on the same organ.   You take an MRI.   A few days later a bot will send you the MRI results, because — of course they will.  If it’s bad news your doctor will call, and sure enough, the next Monday morning, his office calls to wake you with the news that your doctor needs to speak to you.  He can talk by video in one week.  You put it in your calendar and try not to worry until you get actual bad news.  A few days later the office calls to tell you that the doctor will be doing surgery during your appointment and will have to reschedule.  Of course.  He can talk to you the following week, they tell you.  You put it in your calendar and try not to consider it, though your sleep suddenly turns brittle and you wake exhausted each day.

You must get the idea of murderous corporate medicine out of your head.   Doctors have to work for large medical corporations in a capitalist system in order to practice medicine — the equipment and facilities they use are fantastically expensive.   If a doctor is too busy for two and a half weeks to give you bad news, whose fault is that?   He is busy saving lives and earning his keep at the corporation by performing surgery. It is absolutely nothing personal, and you have to understand that.   If you are a whiner who needs a doctor to hold your fucking hand, whose fault is that?  That’s why the market created “concierge doctors”.  Pay or quit whining.

This is simply the way the modern, end-stage capitalist world works.   You can bang your head against it or shut up about it.  Or you can write a meaningless blahg post that three or four people might read.  It’s really up to you, in this exceptional land of the free and home of the brave.

And good luck with your fucking fears, asshole.

2% of humans are psychopaths, corporations close to 100%

I wonder how high that percentage goes among human billionaires. The current examples we know suggest a high correlation of the major traits of psychopaths with the best of the best and most deserving of the deserving — ruthless focus on self-interest, manipulativeness, exploitativeness, zero empathy, no capacity for remorse.

It is beyond question that the alter egos of billionaires, the immortal American/global “persons” known as corporations, are almost 100% psychopathic. Here’s the list of their traits from the excellent documentary The Corporation. (watch it for free on YouTube, highly recommended)

Picture any member of Trump’s billionaire cabinet, or the fabulous CEOs who line up to kiss their asses —  Jeff “rent Venice for my next wedding” Bezos, Elon “virtually human, kill millions of brown children” Musk, Mark “go to the mat — and fuck democracy–  for my  right to be richest man in the world” Zuckerberg, etc.   Now, imagine them embodied in an entity of eternal life, the vampire that is the modern corporation.  This “person” owes allegiance to nothing but pathological greed and the compulsion to maximize and hoard profit.  

Starting in 1971, when a group of worried very wealthy psychopaths hired tobacco lobbyist Lewis Powell (soon thereafter placed on the Supreme Court by Nixon) to draft a game plan for ensuring their eternal dominion over puny human persons, we can draw a straight line to Project 2025, featuring corporatist John Roberts and his morally deformed reactionary five on the Supreme Court.   Here’s the most condensed version I’ve seen of that story:

You don’t have to be a psychopath, of course, to raise prices by 100% two years in a row. You only need to be shamelessly greedy and able to do it. If you are a corporation, any amount of money you need to spend to make laws that allow you to double your prices every year is money well-spent. A cost of doing business! And psychopath is such a judgmental word!! How about just “successful” and stop with the judgement. Like the NY Times does:

 

An illegally appointed US attorney illegally “continuing as US Attorney” becomes not a matter of law — her appointment was ruled constitutionally invalid by a federal judge — but the object of criticism from judges who are “critical” of an illegally appointed DOJ official being kept in office after the federal court ruled the appointment illegal.

You see what the New York Times is doing here?  Innocently sanitizing a fascistic disregard for American law and a good old fashioned ass-wipe with the Constitution. Why not? All the points of view that are fit to print.

Bravo, Grey Lady, another bullseye.

Robert Caro, whose lifelong interest as a writer and researcher is understanding power, how it is acquired and how it’s used, wrote that to see what someone will do with power, study what they did as they climbed to power. These Project 2025 fascists were once the “lunatic fringe” John Birch Society, rabid anti-Communist segregationists who made no attempt to hide the foam on their lips. Today, after a long, relentless, fantastically expensive climb to power, they control all three branches of our government. The “Trump White House” released a document, the 2025 National Security Strategy, traditionally used to announce US foreign policy, that says a forthright fuck you to the rest of the world and shits on anything but the business interests of America’s wealthiest. Read all about it, from Heather Cox Richardson.

Transactional love

And the temporary triumph of enraged, heedless incoherence marches on. It’s no surprise that the most obsessively greedy in our nation, and their counterparts in foreign nations, would fall in line with a Nazi-like mob boss who promises them even more wealth — or the loss of it, and worse, for the capital crime disobedience to the Leader. A solid 65% of Americans oppose this kind of open tyranny, the percentage is probably much higher in the case of individual Project 2025 policies (e.g., cutting federal funds and closing rural hospitals so MAGA members will die — to give even more to those who already have hundreds, or thousands, of millions).

It is crucial in this sickening moment in our history to keep our equanimity as much as possible. We face a true catastrophe, but it is not a catastrophe until the curtain actually comes down. The constant roaring threats from these irrational, incoherent fascists are not quite the same as them actually being in charge, firmly and finally in control. Their crazed desperation to seize lawless power and put troops on the streets in Anarchist Jurisdictions before our next election tells us the outcome of this battle for America’s future is far from settled.

We must do everything in our power to remain calm, strong, and reasoning, in the face of desperately violent incoherence. We owe ourselves and the future the preservation of conversation, debate and discussion, rather than a centrally run AI based dystopia where only 1% get to thrive and enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

A perfectly reasonable story

Here’s a little story to illustrate what a perfectly reasonable story is made of, particularly in our age of manipulative social media and the algorithms that keep everyone’s eyes glued to their phones to have our biases confirmed over and over, our outrage stoked.   

Here are the elements of a reasonable story:  the setup is something people can relate to, the unfolding tale is something that rings a bell of true life for them, the ending makes perfect sense in light of the rest of it.   If you trust the storyteller, the context of the story is familiar, and emotionally resonant, the story will be perfectly reasonable to most people.   A story that sounds perfectly reasonable, given the culture we live in , leaves you with no real questions.

So, yesterday I went into a big sporting goods store in a mall, a chain store.  There were two greeters at the door, a male and a female.  Neither one acknowledged me as I approached, neither one could be bothered to turn their heads one inch in my direction.  I was walking slowly with a cane, talking to them, and these two fitness models never even turned to look at me.  I wanted to know where the shoe department was.  I was looking for shoes with the greatest possible cushioning, to try to help my painful knees.  

Asking these two for help was like talking to a fucking wall.   I understand they don’t get paid much, probably minimum wage, and they are from a younger generation, one that doesn’t always make eye contact with humans as much as with screens, but I was asking very little of them, almost nothing.  “Excuse me, can you direct me to the shoe department?”

“Hello,” I said, trying to get their attention.  After the third or fourth attempt I got the message loud and clear.  I was very tempted to tell them to go fuck themselves, but just limped off to find the shoe department on my own.   

The salesman who helped me was very nice, and helpful, and I wound up finding a comfortable pair of very cushioning shoes.  I told him about the two greeters who had been so rude, literally pretending to be deaf and blind.  He smiled indulgently, sympathetically, what else could he actually do?

I didn’t hold it against him, there was nothing he could do about his rude colleagues.  He did his job well, made good recommendations, accurately predicted which of the three pairs of shoes he brought out for me to try on I’d wind up buying.  A very nice guy and I’m hopeful the shoes will help ease my painful bone on bone, metal on metal, knee caps.  If not, this chain has a very reasonable return policy of 90 days, as long as I don’t abuse the shoes during that time.  

I completely forgot about those two dick heads by the front door, until I had to pass them again on the way out.  I called out “goodbye” in a loud voice and neither of these robotic pricks so much as turned their heads to acknowledge I was there.

I took their picture before I left, so you can see what we are all up against in the greatest nation Jesus ever personally gave his blessings of peace and freedom, and the Second Amendment, to.

Grey Lady, pitch perfect

From a New York Times May Day editorial, entitled — There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab. Here they describe a few of his despicable acts of vengeance against a nation that rejected him by a large margin in 2020.

He has fired federal workers without the 30-day notice that the law requires.

Doesn’t this also mean he fired federal workers illegally? Can’t say it, can you?

He has tried to cut university funding by citing antisemitism without following the established procedures for such civil rights cases.

“Such civil rights cases?” More accurately: he has threatened universities, and unilaterally withheld their federally funding, on transparently baseless grounds.

He has issued executive orders punishing law firms for invented wrongdoing.

Well, no problem with that one.

I did have a real problem with this earlier paragraph:

The building of this coalition [to oppose a Trump dictatorship, which the Times apparently calls for] should start with an acknowledgment that Mr. Trump is the legitimate president and many of his actions are legal. Some may even prove effective. He won the presidency fairly last year, by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a comfortable margin in the Electoral College. On several key issues, his views were closer to public opinion than those of Democrats. Since taking office, he has largely closed the southern border, and many of his immigration policies are both legal and popular. He has reoriented federal programs to focus less on race, which many voters support. He has pressured Western Europe to stop billing American taxpayers for its defense. Among these policies are many that we strongly oppose — such as pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, cozying up to Vladimir Putin of Russia and undermining Ukraine — but that a president has the authority to enact. Elections have consequences.

The Grey Lady’s normalizing characterization of Trump’s ridiculous performance as president with a massive mandate is, to say the least, cherry-picked. His many destructive acts, his administration’s rampant lawlessness and contempt for truth, his unqualified, lie-spouting loyalist appointees in crucial positions leaving America open to ridicule and worse, the president’s unprecedented and well-earned unpopularity, all left out of the Grey Lady’s delicate balancing act, their attempt to treat a psychopath as a perfectly normal president just doing the job like any other duly elected president.

To take one example — did he win the election fairly? We all seem to accept it, in the name of affirming democracy as expressed at the ballot box, but to me the jury is out after every MAGA state suppressed voting with new laws making it harder to vote, Trump being the sole Republican to win in several swing states, and Russia literally calling in bomb threats to Democratic districts on election day. Also, I saw no reporting whatsoever (except for mine) on the 20,000,000 less mail-in ballots delivered by the Trump megadonor postmaster in the first election since 2008 when mail-in voting didn’t increase.

Then I read a line like this and just say “fuck you” and turn away:

We understand that Mr. Trump’s defenders believe that Democrats started this cycle by prosecuting him, and there are reasonable arguments against some of those cases.

We understand that the New York Times represents a certain well-invested segment of the status quo, so what else are they going to say? Still, the words “fuck you” ring in my head when I read this kind of pandering nonsense in the journal of record. “His defenders defend him against what they call political persecution and they make some reasonable arguments.” Can you give us one?

Heh, of course you can’t.

In other news that’s fit to print:

How a headline frames the story

This DOJ attorney, Erez Reuveni, was placed on leave by Trump’s DOJ and then summarily fired for being candid to a judge in a federal court.  His only struggle, as an officer of the court, was trying not to lie or be evasive in response to the judge’s questions. Reading it most charitably to ABC, the DOJ did struggle in Maryland migrant case, though Reuveni did not.

Or as the New York Times told it at the time:

Career lawyers representing the government have a long tradition of arguing for the goals of Republican or Democratic administrations, regardless of their personal views. What is different now, they say, is that they increasingly feel trapped between President Trump’s partisan political appointees, who insist on a maximalist approach, and judges who demand comprehensible answers to basic questions.

The most vivid example of this squeeze came on Saturday when one of the department’s senior immigration lawyers, Erez Reuveni, was suspended indefinitely after speaking candidly about the administration’s mistaken deportation of a Maryland man to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador. . .

. . . “Good clients listen to their lawyers,” the judge, Paula Xinis, said.

Instead, the client punished its lawyer. In a letter on Saturday, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said Mr. Reuveni had failed to follow orders and instead committed “conduct prejudicial to your client.”

A second senior immigration lawyer involved in the Abrego Garcia case, August Flentje, was also placed on administrative leave for his failure “to supervise a subordinate,” according to two officials familiar with the move.

source

But corporate media like ABC (who already wrote a fat check to Trump to settle a frivolous lawsuit the president brought against them for a truthful on air statement by one of their talking heads), you know they have to be so careful, because access and frivolous lawsuits and extortion and shakedowns and threatened shutdowns and loss of license, and baseless defamation claims, the threat of censorship and the demand to obey an advance and loss of sponsorships. 

Falling into corporate disfavor by alienating the powerful, and vengeful, is suicidal behavior for a corporation.  So you write the headline that frames it in the best light for the guy you just wrote the multimillion dollar check to Trump’s “library” to avoid a lawsuit you could have easily had dismissed. Hence: THE DOJ LAWYER WHO REFUSED TO LIE TO OR STONEWALL THE JUDGE STRUGGLED IN COURT.  

USA!  USA!!!

What is up with fucking homophobes?

It’s 2025 and there are still millions of insecure, angry men, and a large number of similar women, who hate homosexuals. Hate them. What threat does anyone in the LGBTQ+ world pose to anybody? You’d have to be a homophobe to dribble out an incoherent, hate-filled rationale.

I’d imagine anyone with basic common sense and common decency would understand that people who are not like them, speakers of other languages, people from other cultures, people with different ancestry, religion, do not pose any threat just because of these differences. You don’t like people who speak French? Don’t talk to them, mon ami. Homophobia is irrational hatred just like racism against Blacks, Asians, violent hatred against Muslims, Jews, Central Americans, war orphans. Why did this news from Heather Cox Richardson come as no surprise in the Age of Musk/Trump?

Protesters today packed Christopher Park in New York City’s Greenwich Village near the Stonewall National Monument after the Trump administration erased “TQ+” from the LGBTQ+ on the monument’s website. The Stonewall Uprising of 1969, six days of conflict between police and LGBTQ+ protesters after police raided the Stonewall Inn, brought the longstanding efforts of LGBTQ+ activists for civil rights to popular attention, making Stonewall a symbol of LGBTQ+ rights.

Trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera were key figures in the Stonewall Uprising. Acknowledging their contribution, one protester held a sign that read, “NATIONAL PARK SERVICE: YOU CAN’T SPELL HISTORY WITHOUT A ‘T’”

Former Republican operative Stuart Stevens had a different take. He posted: “When I see the sexual orientation hate come out of the Republican party under the pretext of just being anti-Trans, I am very tempted to name the Republican operatives and elected officials who are closeted gays. It’s not a short list.”

Famous closeted gay superstar mob lawyer Roy Cohn, a highly sexed and very promiscuous man, smiles at his peeps from the hot place. He’s still a bit hissy that his protegé, the handsome young Donald J. Trump, dropped him like a bad habit when Cohn was dying of AIDS. I can picture him bitching to Satan about this betrayal by the ungrateful son of a wealthy man he did so much for every chance he got.