Today In The First Amendment

If I'm not mistaken, the head cheese of the WarnerBros./Discovery entertainment combine is some kind of fucking Nazi or another.

Oliver Darcy / Status:

Acosta at a Midnight Crossroads  —  CNN chief Mark Thompson wants Jim Acosta to take up the network's graveyard shift, delivering the anchor the proposal days before Donald Trump takes office. … Thompson, I'm told, delivered the veteran journalist a sudden and strange proposal: Move your show to midnight and anchor it until 2am ET.

Justin Baragona / The Independent:   CNN reportedly looking to bury Jim Acosta in graveyard shift to ‘throw a bone to Trump’

Rusty Weiss / RedState:   CNN's Jim Acosta Just Got Some Really Bad News Days Before Trump's Inauguration: Demoted and Exiled?

Sam J. / Twitchy:   WHOA ... Has Trump OFFICIALLY Defeated Fake News? Because CNN's Change with Acosta SUUURE Sounds Like it

Emily Crane / New York Post:   CNN wants to exile Jim Acosta's show to the ‘Siberia of television news’ to stop him annoying Trump

Charlie Nash / Mediaite:   CNN Reportedly Considering Exiling Jim Acosta's Show To Midnight ‘To Throw a Bone To Trump’

Brittany Chain / Daily Mail:   CNN moves to banish Jim Acosta to ‘Siberia of television news’ in advance of Trump's return to office

John Sexton / HotAir:   Is Jim Acosta Losing His Show at CNN?

Brian Steinberg / Variety:   CNN Eyes Moving Wolf Blitzer to Daytime Slot

Fake news shiteels like Sam J. of Twitchy (What is that? A tweakers' website?) have exposed their full non-committment to free speech. Hope the shoe is on the other foot very soon. And why not a noose around the neck after that? Hypocrisy is the greatest crime of all.

Move Along, Nothing To See Here But Massive Corruption

Where's the outrage?

Scoop: Trump's $500 million post-election windfall

Between the lines: Trump is transactional but not for sale, these sources say. In these meetings, they say, Trump has made it clear that this is a one-way street: They donate money to support his agenda, but he's not taking their money to support their agenda.

"A lot of these guys are going down [to Mar-a-Lago] taking victory laps because he's taking their money and they're in for a rude awakening," the company consultant said. "Sure, he'll throw an inaugural party with their money but he owes them nothing."

"He'll take your money and then tell you, 'I don't give a f**k what you want.' He did that during the campaign," said another Trump adviser. "He's going to do what he wants, what the base wants."

Even so, donors seem to be giving on the assumption that there's something in it for them.

No, really?

[Axios]

Closet Cases

Christian nationalist Michael Belch says that if Pete Hegseth had testified "truthfully" during his confirmation hearing, he would have told female senators that they don't belong in office: "This is a man's role. Go home."

Listen to sissy-boy there talk, & then tell me he's not in a closet. Scared of girls, all of them. And what's w/ the beards & ties? Trying to prove something here, boys? Or to deny something?

How much right-wing/Nazi/fascist madness is unresolved sexual issues mixed w/ religious repression & perversity?99 & 44/100ths, I'd guess. People need more sex & less gawd, esp. less of that gawd-of-Abraham we keep hearing about, who must have been one sick fuck.

[Right Wing Watch]

Today In Infrastructure

Everything is shit, except the crap.

Who's Murdering Whom, Now?

Color enhanced scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of dividing cancer cells.

Where's The Outrage?

Christiaan Hetzner / Fortune:

UnitedHealth, employer of slain exec Brian Thompson, found to have overcharged some cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

Maya Goldman / Axios:   PBMs made more than $7B marking up specialty generics: FTC

Ben Kesslen / Quartz:   CVS, Cigna, and UnitedHealth inflated cancer and HIV drug prices, FTC says

Do let us know should you hear anything about Republicans helping the "working people" they claim to champion instead of ensuring corporations enjoy obscene profits from the suffering of the middle-class. They are all, to coin a phrase, traffickers in human misery. Indeed, they are the real cancers killing America. String 'em up!!

Life Up Uranus

World Of Sodomy!

Murphy Anderson art, Planet Comics #50 (1947) Fiction House

Stick It!

Laff, or I'll cut off your oxygen!

Suck-Ups To Washington To Suck Up

“Apple CEO Tim Cook is planning to attend the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump next week, the latest in a wave of Silicon Valley leaders traveling to Washington for the ceremony,” Bloomberg reports.

“Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla, who has quickly become one of Trump’s foremost supporters and financial backers, are all also expected to attend.”

Wishing & hoping & praying for an inaugural attack on the inaugural. Start the Civil War now before it's too damn late!!(Hoping for the deaths of the evil is now acceptable on Zuckbook, right?)

You earthlings all know what you can suck up, don't you? Don't make me draw a picture. 

And stop buying Apple shit through Amazon, you fucking morons. You're signing your own death warrants, & probably murdering the planet while you're at it. Proud of yourselves, you brain-dead consuming sheep?

Wall, Brick, Another

Won't be any Superman to pulverize the real-world bricks squashing me.

Wishing a slow & painful death on the rat bastard who has a copy, clone or whatever of my debit card & attempted to get US$20.00 from an ATM in North Hills, some shithole in the Valley where I may never have been in my life. Certainly not consciously, possibly passed through on a freeway. Definitely not w/in the last 30 or so yrs. Anyway, fuck you, your relatives, your children & the horse you rode in on, you sack of shit.

Congrats to the credit union for catching this. Still have to wait several days for a new card. Just as well, I'd only waste money on bullshit like food & heroin. Two wks. into the yr. & it's all shit.

Second time this has happened. Not that it matters, but if one annihilates ones own species, is that genocide, or is there a more precise word? And is there any reward?

Murder In Space

There will always be an England, even in outer space.

Space Captain Dave Garratt, prosecutor, judge, jury & executioner. 

Down the rabbit hole to the story of RAF Flying Officer David Garratt (1930-1957) the namesake of the Space Captain character.

How Indeed?

New York Times:

How to Fix America's Two-Party Problem  —  Mr. Wegman is a member of the Times editorial board, where he writes about democracy, law and politics.  Mr. Drutman is a senior fellow at New America and the author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.”

Ned Foley / Election Law Blog:   Is PR the panacea?  —  The New York Times has a big piece posted this morning by Jesse Wegman …

Oh oh, I know, I know!! [dramatic pause takes a beat] Kill all the Republicans, right?I've better things to do w/ my admittedly empty & meaningless existence than read any of this, but I'll guess from the other headline that this is the usual idiotic horseshit & posturing from The NYT (Is there anything else?) & would make no difference even if implemented.

Mostly wanted to get the "Kill all the Republicans" joke in, because nothing matters & no one cares, & really, why should they?

Wake Up Before It's Too Late, Cretins

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid!

A study by Michael Gerlich at SBS Swiss Business School has found that increased reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) tools is linked to diminished critical thinking abilities. It points to cognitive offloading as a primary driver of the decline.

AI's influence is growing fast. A quick search of AI-related science stories reveals how fundamental a tool it has become. Thousands of AI-assisted, AI-supported and AI-driven analyses and decision-making tools help scientists improve their research.

AI has also become more integrated into daily activities, from virtual assistants to complex information and decision support. Increased usage is beginning to influence how people think, especially impactful among younger people, who are avid users of the technology in their personal lives.

An attractive aspect of AI tools is cognitive offloading, where individuals rely on the tools to reduce mental effort. As the technology is both very new and rapidly being adopted in unforeseeable ways, questions arise about its potential long-term impacts on cognitive functions like memory, attention, and problem-solving under prolonged periods or volume of cognitive offloading taking place.

Who am I kidding? It's already too late. "They made you a moron", to coin a phrase, except most of you were already.

[Phys.org]

You're Born Alone, You Die Alone

And In Between, Hell Is Other People

From Dentist Boy's Book of Faces:

3 days ago I called on some friends to help me because I don't drive and I was being evacuated now I know exactly who my friends are ... sometimes it's nice when the trash takes itself out.

Welcome to this reporter's nightmare, as lived 17 yrs. ago. People who "own" houses (&/or cars) are scum. I want to see the burned-out hulks of their plastic pollutionmobiles in the ash-covered driveways of the lots where their now reduced to nothing-but-a-fireplace-&-chimney houses once stood. Remember: You don't "own" anything you can't carry, pigs.

Oink Report

Take a deep fucking breath. Please.

Every Reason To Eat The Rich

Private firefighters in place to help Rick Caruso’s home and neighborhood: ‘He’s smart, he wants to be ready’

He's not "smart", he simply has grubbed more money than anyone needs or deserves & is a selfish prick, as well as a loud-mouthed asshole. He & his kind should be taxed w/in an inch of their greedy lives, so that all the people of Los Angeles can enjoy the non-discriminatory protection of adequately-financed public fire departments.

Speaking of people who have more money than they deserve, the publisher of the birdcage liner in which the above headlines first appeared is one of them.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Boxing Day, 1957. 26,000 acres.William Conrad on the voice over.

"String" Him Up!

Th' hell's wrong w/ stupid sumbitch & Sen. Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-Nowhere)? Why do these Republican creeps hate America so effing much?

Zach LaChance / Washington Examiner:

Barrasso vows no ‘blank check’ for wildfire aid

Alex Galbraith / Salon:   “There will be strings attached”: GOP Sen. says Los Angeles wildfire aid won't be “blank check”

Pam Key / Breitbart:   Barrasso Predicts ‘Strings Attached to Money’ for California Fire Aid

David McAfee / Raw Story:   'C'mon. We aren't idiots': Onlookers blast GOP lawmaker over conditions on L.A. fire funds

Mallory Wilson / Washington Times:   Los Angeles fire aid to come with ‘strings attached,’ Barrasso says

Tara Suter / The Hill:   Barrasso predicts ‘strings attached to money’ for California fire aid

I'd like to see Wyoming, the crudhole that sent Barrasso to Washington, turned into a much expanded Yellowstone National Park, w/ no more representation than say, the millions of Americans in Puerto Rico get, but not before the state has made up the difference between the federal taxes it pays & the money the state takes from the Federal Treasury. A state, we note, w/ a relative to California population of zero. (To be fully truthful, a minuscule population of absolute mental zeroes, & the home of Dick Cheney.)The version(s) we were looking for when we found the two above.

Sink Of Despair

To sleep at 0500, slept until 1420. I'd spend the rest of my life asleep if I didn't wake up every fucking hr.
(To piss on your graves!) Then confronted by this:

And I had a bloody nose. Bunker humidity is 36%; may be the capillaries of the aged, which is another reason to get cracking on my kill-them-all-before-I'm-too-wretched-to-kill-them-all plans.

Flames In The Night

Psychedelic Saturday

W/ Current Events Subtext

Pillar Of Fire

It really is like a war zone out there.So much for Pharoah, Egypt & Babylon: Nature has had it w/ your bullshit.

Sissy-Boy Zuckerberg Comes Out Of The Closet

S'posed to be funny & childish, not how to run one's giant fascist corporation.

The son of a dentist speaks: "Sweetie, there's just not enough 'masculine energy' in this dump." How long before the S-E-X scandal?

St. Nick on a stick, I have more than had it w/ the psychosexual problems of assholes w/ too much money dictating how fucked this country is going to be.

Riley Griffin / Bloomberg:

Zuckerberg Says Most Companies Need More ‘Masculine Energy’

Rachel Wolf / New York Post:   Mark Zuckerberg praises benefits of ‘masculine energy,’ says DEI ‘culturally neutered’ corporate America

Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:   Mark Zuckerberg defends Meta's latest pivot in three-hour Joe Rogan interview

Ann Althouse / Althouse:   Mark Zuckerberg talks to Joe Rogan about his dissatisfaction with the “neutered” corporate world.

Fox Business:   Zuckerberg praises benefits of ‘masculine energy,’ laments ‘culturally neutered’ corporate America

Sarah Arnold / Townhall:   Mark Zuckerberg Exposes Alarming Details About Biden Admin's Social Media Influence

Jay Peters / The Verge:   Zuckerberg trash talks Apple in interview with Joe Rogan

Todd Spangler / Variety:   Mark Zuckerberg Defends Meta's Fact-Checking Ban to Joe Rogan: Company Faced ‘Massive Institutional Pressure to Basically Start Censoring Content’

Brad Reed / Raw Story:   ‘So rich and yet so weak’: Vitriol unleashed as Mark Zuckerberg lauds Trump to Joe Rogan

Alice Tecotzky / Business Insider:   Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that he thinks Trump will protect American companies' ‘strategic advantage’

more at Techmeme »

"Neutered", eh? Who's stolen your masculine essence, Zucky? Maybe there's a cologne or something you could wear to restore it.

Hot off the news reader as we go to press: Digby excerpts/links to something else about what a weasel M.Z. is.

Smoke Over Century City