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From Jeff Tiedrich:

weird how nothing is ever their fault

here’s a thought experiment.

let’s say that you had amassed the hugest fucking fortune ever known to humankind. now lets say that, in a ketamine-soaked haze, you set out to squander that fortune. how would you do it?

— would you back a presidential candidate hell-bent on wrecking the world’s economy, taking your own companies down with it?
— would you take a chainsaw to essential government services, triggering massive protests and boycotts against the janky products you sell?
— would you become the literal face of modern day Nazism?

if you’re the Space Nazi, lucky you! you’ve accomplished all three, and hit the trifecta! who says Elon isn’t a visionary?

Tesla’s profits fell 71% over the first three months of this year, a company earnings release on Tuesday showed. The company’s performance fell short of analysts’ expectations.

71%, is that a lot? I guess it must be, because now Elon is sad. so, so very sad. look at how completely fucking sad Elon is.

weird how even convincing a demented elderly golfer to turn the White House into a car dealership isn’t saving the Tesla brand.

I guess Elon forgot about the part where everything Donny touches, dies.

and the news just keeps getting worse for the Space Nazi.

Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, said on Tuesday that China’s halt on exports of certain magnets was affecting his plans to build humanoid robots, in the clearest signal yet that China’s action is beginning to affect big American businesses.

I’ll bet it totally fucking sucks when the fallout from President Tradewar’s boneheaded tariff polices rains down on one’s own ketamine-curdled head.

that sure was a quarter-billion dollars well spent, getting this guy elected, wasn’t it, Elon? you know that Elon totally figured he could control Donny through the sheer force of will — but he keeps forgetting about the part where everything Donny touches, dies.

here’s a fun new development: now that nobody likes Elon any more, he’s going to take all his toys and go home.

Elon Musk is reportedly set to leave his government role because he’s tired of what he sees as a litany of vicious and unethical attacks from the left, according to a report from The Washington Post.

do these tiresome diaper-babies never stop whining? can they never once take responsibility for their own fuck-ups?

spoiler alert: no, they can’t. in MAGA world, nothing is ever their own fault.

it’s always someone else. the women. the blacks. the immigrants. the gays. the transgenders.

in his own mind, Elon didn’t become one of the most-loathed people on the planet because he set out to destroy the one thing most people depend: essential government services. it wasn’t because he helped Donny Convict bring fascism to America. and it certainly wasn’t because he practically moved into Motel-a-Lago, where, high as a kite, he played with silverware like the privileged asshole he is, while the world burned.

no, it happened because of “vicious and unethical attacks from the left.”

oh, boo fucking hoo.

all I can say is, if Elon is actually leaving politics because of all the ‘attacks’ from the left, well then I’m pleased to have done my part.

let’s serenade Elon out with some of his favorite South African apartheid-era melodies, played on the world’s tiniest violin.

meanwhile, over at the Pentagon, here’s another mediocre white dude who can’t ever take responsibility for anything.

Plastered Pete Kegstand continues to dig himself ever deeper. remember two days ago, when we were all warned that even worse shit was about to come to light?

well, here’s the first drip of what will no doubt be a torrent.

long story short: you know all those war plans that Kegstand keeps claiming he never ever shared with his wife, family, lawyer, and a journalist from the Atlantic, while at the same time claiming that it was totes ok to share them, because they weren’t classified?

well, it turns out that yes indeedy, Kegstand got those war plans off a classified server, copied and pasted them onto his personal phone, and then oopsies! fumblefingered them all over the place.

But then Hegseth used his personal phone to send some of the same information Kurilla had given him to at least two group text chats on the Signal messaging app, three U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the exchanges told NBC News.

but here’s the one important thing you need to know about Kegstand’s breach of protocol: it wasn’t his fault — because nothing is never MAGA’s fault.

watch Fox News morning bobblehead Brian Kilmeade hand-wave all this shit away.

“it could be part of a learning curve.”

a learning curve. oh, okay. well, that clears everything up. this whole little ahem misunderstanding happened because nobody told Pete it was wrong to share classified war plans with randos in his contact list. he had to learn.

look, Piss-Drunk Pete has to plead ignorance on this thing. because if anyone had said anything at all to him when he first started at the Department of Defense that that sort of thing was frowned upon…

pro tip: when your only qualification for your job is that you’re a white dude with christofascist tattoos who Donny saw kissing his ass on Fox News, everything is a learning curve.

that’s the whole reason, y’know, that Secretary of Defense picks are generally lifetime military experts, and not Fox News chat-show dumb-asses who need to be schooled in the most basic aspects of classified document protocol.

but Plastered Pete isn’t going to let a silly little fuck-up keep him from doing what he imagines is his job.

“… and get along to go along. and, y’know, start doing Meet the Press, and going to the Council on Foreign Relations and spending time with all the new-cocktail sipping crowd. that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because President Trump asked me to bring warfighting back to the Pentagon, every single day. that is our focus.”

I can report that warfighting is fucking pumped to be back. when we last saw warfighting, it was rummaging around in the dumpsters behind the Lincoln Memorial, looking for scraps of food — but Plastered Pete rescued warfighting, cleaned it up, gave it a hot meal and an office at the Pentagon.

remember this, though, as the Signalgate scandal intensifies: stop being mean to Pete. none of this is his fault. it’s the disgruntled leakers. the hoaxers. the DEI. the learning curve. the Democrats.

here’s some tiny violin for you, too, Pete. it’s playing a Sousa military march as you decide who to blame next.

okay, let’s get the fuck out of here on a high note.

remember Sarah Palin? how could you not? she’s Ground Zero for how we got started in this mess. when she ran as John McCain’s veep in 2008, she ushered in a whole new era of Big Fucking Dumb, wherein the stupidest people on the planet realized they, too, could get their face on TV by going into politics.

a few years ago, Sarah Palin desperately grasped for that 16th minute of fame by suing The New York Times for defamation.

the Times’ crime? pointing out that it was a dumbfuck move to post a graphic of crosshairs over Democratic districts — including Gabby Giffords’, who, you’ll recall, ended up getting shot in the head by a would-be assassin.

The Times editorial argued there was a clear and direct link between the Arizona shooting and the political incitement arising from a digital graphic published in March 2010 by Palin’s political action committee. The graphic was a map that superimposed crosshairs over 20 congressional districts represented by Democrats, including Giffords’.

fast forward to yesterday: she fucking lost.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin lost her defamation retrial against The New York Times over a 2017 editorial she said damaged her reputation, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

The federal jury found the media company not liable after deliberating for about two hours.

enjoy your loss, Sarah. enjoy some tiny violin, while we serenade you back to well-earned obscurity.

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Okay, when I bought this Tascam MD-CD1MKIII deck I knew it looked mint, but until I started digging in the menus I never realized it had so few hours on it as well!

Damn, this thing was hardly touched!

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…in Hell, obviously, but nevertheless…

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How to Get On

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Thanks, Rick!

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From Mock Paper Scissors:

“We will support baby booms and we will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom. I want a baby boom.” — Adjudicated rapist, convicted felon and career criminal The Orange ????

The GOP’s corporate overlords need more underpaid children to work in their future factories? Sure, we’ll go with that.

White House Assesses Ways to Persuade Women to Have More Children

Baby bonuses and menstrual cycle classes are among the ideas pitched to Trump aides as they consider plans to try boosting the birthrate.

The White House has been hearing out a chorus of ideas in recent weeks for persuading Americans to get married and have more children, an early sign that the Trump administration will embrace a new cultural agenda pushed by many of its allies on the right to reverse declining birthrates and push conservative family values.

One proposal shared with aides would reserve 30 percent of scholarships for the Fulbright program, the prestigious, government-backed international fellowship, for applicants who are married or have children.

Another would give a $5,000 cash “baby bonus” to every American mother after delivery.

A third calls on the government to fund programs that educate women on their menstrual cycles — in part so they can better understand when they are ovulating and able to conceive.

But none of these ideas seem to address the elephant in the OBGYN: why do they want women want to have more children? (emphasis mine)

The coalition of people who want to see more babies born is broad and diverse. They are unified in their concerns about the U.S. birthrate, which has been falling since 2007, warning of a future in which a smaller work force cannot support an aging population and the social safety net. If the birthrate is not turned around, they fear, the country’s economy could collapse and, ultimately, human civilization could be at risk.

So they want more kids for a future workforce, but they don’t want women to be in the current workforce because they should be incubating the next generation? Do I have that right?

But many in the movement have different reasons for wanting people to have more kids — and often disagree on how to get there. Many Christian conservatives see declining birth and marriage rates as a cultural crisis brought on by forces in politics and the media that they say belittle the traditional family, encouraging women to prioritize work over children. They are pushing for more committed marriages and large families, while some who identify strictly as “pronatalists” are interested in exploring a variety of methods, including new reproductive technologies, to reach their goal of more babies.

The secondary issue is of course culture wars stuff. The wimmins are working, and the  ‘mos won’t procreate, so those marriages are not real marriages, did I get that right, too?

So, come-on ladies, quit your jobs, get hitched, and start pumping-out white, cis-gendered, Xristian babbies or the theocrats will chain you up to the tree out back during rutting season. It’s your patriotic duty to Hair Füror!

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From Steven Hackett:

Corruption Is Winning

On Friday’s episode of The Vergecast, there was an exchange that really caught my attention. David Pierce mentioned the photos of all the tech CEOs at Trump’s inauguration in January, to which Nilay Patel replied:

The thing that kills me at that is the expectation they had going into that photo was corruption. Right? Tim Cook is going to personally donate a million dollars to Trump’s library and that will take the DOJ case away from Apple. Naked corruption. That is a nakedly corrupt thought.

That’s fine in the sense that a lot of people believe the government is corrupt, and so Trump being even more corrupt does not offend them. But it’s not fine in the sense that like even when we were covering the Google case today, people on Bluesky were replying to me being like, “they’ll just buy him off.” What? That means that the system is collapsed. Like you don’t believe in it anymore. And maybe you didn’t before, but the level to which we have accepted that just naked corruption is how this works is a little more dangerous than I think people are giving it credit for.

If you believe that Google can be like, ah, screw it, write them a check and it’ll go away. Maybe you don’t think that’s right, but you think that is possible, it’s gone. You have to not believe that’s possible. You have to actually hold everybody to account and say, actually, that’s corruption. […] If you give into nihilism that the corruption is already won, you’ve just given in. You should not feel helpless; you should feel outraged that the expectation of that photograph was corruption.

I am sure if we were to poll the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, and Tim Cook, they would say that they are just trying to find ways to work with this administration. With Trump, that means money. That collection of dudes doesn’t like to think pay-for-play is a corrupting force, but it is.

None of this is new — just look at the army of paid lobbyists who make a living charging these companies a zillion dollars a year — but seeing it so nakedly (as Patel put it) is sobering. Tech CEOs may think they are doing what’s in the best interest of their companies and shareholders, but their actions do the rest of us — and the country — a disservice. They may be able to get what they want out of Trump (for now, at least) by writing checks and putting on a show, but the leopards are coming for their faces eventually.

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