I hate that it makes me sound like a biological determinist, but sometimes I think the relative separation from a day-to-day need either to do good reality-testing or else starve or get eaten by a leopard—which avoidance I certainly like for myself and want for everyone else, but—has allowed more and more of us to get by being nuts in an eventually non-survivable way.
(I mean by that distinction that previous generations were also largely religiously crazy, but crazy in a way that 0.) didn't kill _that_ many of us or get in the way of staying alive and 1.) might even have helped people keep going when the odds were bad, promote group cohesion, and so on.)
Nastier, right-wing-ish, remark: think of all the pro-Trump towns getting by on S.S.I. and S.S.D.I..
If you're a pig-farmer, as long as your crazy ideas don't extend into the area of pig-raising, you'll be fine. You could even think the village's Jews are kidnapping children and using their blood for matzoh and it won't have any effect on your ability to survive (although it will have an effect on the Jews' ability to survive.)
Everyone's weird in their own way. When last speaking with the current mental healthcare worker, when I said something about normal people, she scoffed that there was no such thing.
But Republican voters have elected legions of unfit politicians so they get a special dis for their tearing down the nation. (Yes, the New Deal/WWII/Great Society era was historically anomalous. But anyone who doesn't see that as the nation we should be should fuck off. At least.)
So that's why I expend all these efforts focusing on their pathological state.
Voting for Trump despite the nigh-infinite proof of his unfitness for office (Covid killings; J6; setting foreign policy based on remuneration; whatever): insane.
Believing Trump & co's serial lies and deny facts and stuff: insane.
Voting R because all one cares about is getting a tax cut no matter how minuscule one and despite the harm to nation and world: insane.
I do believe the above encompasses all Republican voters.
There's of course rationalizing voting for a Republican but no fact-based justification.
I've long thought that there was a _lot_ of 'Sixties-envy on the Right, if only because like Gilbert Shelton's NORBERT THE NARC they lusted after (to quote the character) 'them big-tittied hippie chicks'. This became clearer to me during the T.P. days when we got to see a bunch of people cosplay Minutemen as Abbie Hoffman used and to do and often try to be outrageous louts as many of the Yippies did.
I'm on that just now as a preface to saying that for some of them they know about the lies and the general unsuitability, but: Trump is their Pigasus.
Swift hubby Travis Kelce’s response to Leon’s gross incel+ Xit to TS about protecting her cats was quite effective in shutting him down. U could hear the gears burning in Blood Emerald Boy’s brain: a much more conventionally manly man, hugely popular, with enough money to not be easily intimidated claps back. Poor Musk reassumed his rightful place inside the hallway locker…
Yeah, the only appropriate response to Musk is "she's not your girlfriend and never would be, so maybe stop daydreaming and focus on fixing your piece of shit trucks that have nervous breakdowns every time someone looks at them the wrong way."
The Guardian had an article where they followed him through a full 24 hour period (145 tweets in all, longest period without tweeting was 3 hours) and they said "the crying-laughing emoji is his go-to response."
The word 'serpentine' means that someone is being shot-at in a movie being run by "Mystery Science Theatre 3000"—I gather it's a reference to "The In-Laws", a movie my parents evidently loved when first it ran.
My old fishing buddy couldn't drive our boat in a straight line to save himself, so the phrase "Serpentine, Shell! Serpentine!" became part of our fishing dialog.
Well, I really enjoyed that ( and I don't care what anybody says!)
The idea that "the richest people are the best people" is so evidently wrong. Leon should be stripped naked and dropped into Mogadishu, left to fend for himself.
[A naked, dark-skinned woman scrambles out from behind the desk and runs off.]
I've loved Gene Hackman's comic roles (e.g., the blind man in Young Frankenstein, but especially his Lex Luthor opposite Christopher Reeve in Superman) and Elno must, too, since he seems to have taken that Luthor as his role model.
Hackman’s Luthor is far too charming and fun for Elon to ever pull off. The guy is “awkward” personified. The closest comp I can think of offhand is Corey Stoll’s imho very underrated turn as Darren Cross, the baddie in the first Ant-Man film. His not quite right in the head, creepy stalker vibes performance is still a bit too charismatic for Elon, but it’s not a bad fit.
Because the pre-ops Mr Musk looked an awful lot like Charlie Brown all-grown-up, my mind goes to Gary Burghoff, who originated the rôle in "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown", and who supposèdly was hated by everyone else (and perhaps him too) in the cast of the inferior television version of "M*A*S*H".
It used to be there to hint that the 'e' was to be pronounced (so presumably it was added after we _stopped_ pronouncing 'ed' at the ends of words by default—back then, if it weren't to be pronounc'd one did what I just did). All those accents and diereses made English spelling _more_ intelligible, we lost them, I think once typewriting made them more difficult, but now we have Unicode—and SwiftKey® makes them easy to use.
Beside, I can only hope it confuses what are called 'conservatives' these days….
Looks like the kind of thing some wet-behind-the-ears political appointee who got two weeks training at Heritage should be able to navigate, no problem.
Poor, generic variable X was already hated by generation after generation of high school math students, now he does THIS to it. Can't a letter ever catch a break?
Now, let's be fair, he did raise a good point the other day, Biden and Harris need to have a couple of assassination attempts of their own, to be fair n' balanced.
We saw a "gold-plated" Cybertruck in the wild the other day, and it struck me how most Teslas are, design-wise, pouchy, pot-bellied blobs, while the 'truck is all planes and sharp angles--i.e., a 1950's teenager's idea of "futuristic." It reminds me of what Steve Jobs once said in an interview: "The thing about Microsoft is, they have no taste."
I think the tremendous success of the Model 3 was simply "car as appliance." It's a white box, you get in it and it takes you from A to B, and if you choose to check out almost entirely from the experience, it will mostly let you do that. And car guys never get that this is the experience most people want, car-wise. A car doesn't have to be your "identity", and more than your refrigerator. Then we get to the Cybertruck, which is a company completely misunderstanding - and losing - what made it a success in the first place.
And just from an engineering perspective, a curved piece of sheet metal will always be structurally superior to any flat piece of sheet metal. Look at a tape measure, notice how the blade isn't flat, its cross section has a slight curvature to it so it can be extended without flopping over. Seems like one of Elon's engineers could have shown that to him, being careful to include the phrase "can be extended without flopping over" to get through to this dick-obsessed dick.
L. Ron Musth is very much a "I've got money, I don't need to listen to no damn engineers" kind of person. The only laws he obeys are the laws he can buy his way out of. That he can't buy his way out of the laws of physics, or geometry, is a continual frustration to him.
Yes, and! Strictly from a branding perspective, you'd want your family of cars to share a few grace notes. The Porsche SUV is visually a cousin to the Carrera. How has Tesla produced cars in such extremely different kinds of ugly?
Anyway whenever I see a cybertruck in the wild, I feel like I am on the set of a science fiction movie aimed at 12-year-olds produced by Golan-Globus.
Plate of shrimp! We saw a Golan-Globus (aka Cannon Films) movie last weekend. It... wasn't good. It was a remake of one they had released in Israel, and they hadn't learned from their mistakes. "Last American Virgin" couldn't make its mind up whether to be a teen comedy or an abject lesson in who knows what.
I saw the clip of this idiot yesterday, telling an auditorium the tale of how he pitched jokes to SNL's professional joke-writers in the run-up to his appearance on that show. I also remember the time I was 22 and decided to regale a small party of my parents' age-40+ friends with a hi-larious tale, and relayed the one called The Night the Gang Drunkenly Put a Big Hole In the Wall of the Beach Rental. I had expected my fellow adults would think, "We've all been there, what a night it was, and well told in this instance!" Instead I got a blink-blink of uncomfortable silence. I grew up a year in that three seconds.
This idiot got big laughs out of his auditorium instead, and will never grow up -- but the truly weird part is that he was telling the story of how the SNL staff gave him an *even worse* uncomfortable silence than I got. And he and his auditorium walked away thinking he's still the gold standard in all things.
It boggles the mind, how these boggled minds work. (Which should help, but doesn't.)
I saw Gavin McInnes is doing some kind of "comedy" bit at University of South Carolina, the posters for the event included some slurs against Kamala Harris, because nothing says "funny" like the woman-hatin' slurs!
26,000 students have signed a petition saying "No thanks, asshole." And I have to wonder, isn't there an election coming up in a few weeks? Does Gavin think he's helping, or does he not care? Will they not be satisfied til they get the gender gap to 100%?
The Republican party and its fascist remora are leaning into the bubble. This is what "a choice, not an echo" really looks like, at long last. No compromise, no quarter, no metaphor or code switching, never never apologize.They will stand or fall on their own terms, and if they fall they will sue the refs and call in the hooligans. The Final Revenge of the John Birch Society.
I have a slightly different theory, which is that Gavin doesn't care about anything except More Attention for Gavin, and may even want Harris to win, because he knows his personal brand will thrive under a Black woman President.
"Turn the Crazy Knob Up To 13" is a great strategy if you're a YouTube influencer who can become a millionaire by just attracting 0.001% of YouTube's total viewership. Not so great for a political party, which needs to attract a majority (or near-majority) to win. This lesson is obscured by the fact that Trump did win, that one time, with the help of the Electoral College, causing many Republicans to jump to the collusion that you can say any crazy shit you want, LOL nothing matters. But a propensity for the crazy is like any other fault, it might be tolerable at some level, but then suddenly become disastrous for you at a higher level. Like a compulsive gambler who can still pay his rent vs. the compulsive gambler whose losses have reached the point where he's living in his car.
Our gracious host and our old pal Driftglass (no name but a few) have been using rather blunt language for a rather long time to claim the Republican party has been where we are all congratulating ourselves for noticing this year. No offense meant to anyone, including myself, on that, just that the party has been goose-stepping down this path a long while, draw the line where you please.
Through the Magic of Celebrity Trump has unleashed that Republican Id. The party has never had a fascist with absolutely no govenor or experience in government lead their party before. Goldwater was fucking Adali Stevenson compared to Trump. Being forced to grovel for money and votes will take the edge off of even a thug like Cruz, but Trump has only had people grovel before him (except for various mobsters and Putin, but I repeat myself). The Republican party is propping up Trump in every possjble way, from SCOTUS to the billionaire club to his minions in Congress without compromising a thing himself. "Why" is the
question that many books will be written about someday. Of course the MAGA politicians have hitched their wagons to his star, and he has installed family at the head of the Party to funnel money to him, but I believe a lot of the rank and file, like the many politicians who suddenly "retired", are keeping their heads down until Somebody Else deals with their Trump problem. NOBODY wants to alienate His base, which used to be theirs. They want to be able to walk in over the rubble, look them in the eye, and say "I'm all you've got, bitches" (h/t Charlie Pierce).
I wish I could believe that he weren't keeping it together, but it suddenly occurs to me that keeping it together were actually one of his skills, and this gives him a perverse incentive to create crises for which he gets to need to exercise it.
As we know, my new rant is that by some DSM definition or pathology or another, every single Republican is technically insane.
Not unrelated: our leadership caste is likewise. They're either crazy or enablers of the crazy ones.
As always, the exceptions to anything like them two ravings are far too few to matter. So "all" is in fact operative.
What about the U.S. population?
I hate that it makes me sound like a biological determinist, but sometimes I think the relative separation from a day-to-day need either to do good reality-testing or else starve or get eaten by a leopard—which avoidance I certainly like for myself and want for everyone else, but—has allowed more and more of us to get by being nuts in an eventually non-survivable way.
(I mean by that distinction that previous generations were also largely religiously crazy, but crazy in a way that 0.) didn't kill _that_ many of us or get in the way of staying alive and 1.) might even have helped people keep going when the odds were bad, promote group cohesion, and so on.)
Nastier, right-wing-ish, remark: think of all the pro-Trump towns getting by on S.S.I. and S.S.D.I..
If you're a pig-farmer, as long as your crazy ideas don't extend into the area of pig-raising, you'll be fine. You could even think the village's Jews are kidnapping children and using their blood for matzoh and it won't have any effect on your ability to survive (although it will have an effect on the Jews' ability to survive.)
Shhh!!! No one's supposed to know that killing of Xian babies for Passover matzoh is actually true and fact-based.
The latest confirmation and proof is at the Trump-Vance 2024 homepage.
Everyone's weird in their own way. When last speaking with the current mental healthcare worker, when I said something about normal people, she scoffed that there was no such thing.
But Republican voters have elected legions of unfit politicians so they get a special dis for their tearing down the nation. (Yes, the New Deal/WWII/Great Society era was historically anomalous. But anyone who doesn't see that as the nation we should be should fuck off. At least.)
So that's why I expend all these efforts focusing on their pathological state.
Voting for Trump despite the nigh-infinite proof of his unfitness for office (Covid killings; J6; setting foreign policy based on remuneration; whatever): insane.
Believing Trump & co's serial lies and deny facts and stuff: insane.
Voting R because all one cares about is getting a tax cut no matter how minuscule one and despite the harm to nation and world: insane.
I do believe the above encompasses all Republican voters.
There's of course rationalizing voting for a Republican but no fact-based justification.
I've long thought that there was a _lot_ of 'Sixties-envy on the Right, if only because like Gilbert Shelton's NORBERT THE NARC they lusted after (to quote the character) 'them big-tittied hippie chicks'. This became clearer to me during the T.P. days when we got to see a bunch of people cosplay Minutemen as Abbie Hoffman used and to do and often try to be outrageous louts as many of the Yippies did.
I'm on that just now as a preface to saying that for some of them they know about the lies and the general unsuitability, but: Trump is their Pigasus.
My belief that the entire party (with too few exceptions to matter) is let’s say post-Trump. Before then, yes, pretty much like you describe.
I laughed way too hard at this. Bravo, Roy!
Swift hubby Travis Kelce’s response to Leon’s gross incel+ Xit to TS about protecting her cats was quite effective in shutting him down. U could hear the gears burning in Blood Emerald Boy’s brain: a much more conventionally manly man, hugely popular, with enough money to not be easily intimidated claps back. Poor Musk reassumed his rightful place inside the hallway locker…
[edited after dr bill's gentle correction]
Yeah, the only appropriate response to Musk is "she's not your girlfriend and never would be, so maybe stop daydreaming and focus on fixing your piece of shit trucks that have nervous breakdowns every time someone looks at them the wrong way."
He tweets over a hundred times a day.
And every one, or at least every one I see via re-tweet, thinks it's terse and witty, and is in fact dumb and stoopid.
The Guardian had an article where they followed him through a full 24 hour period (145 tweets in all, longest period without tweeting was 3 hours) and they said "the crying-laughing emoji is his go-to response."
Whenever I see that, I smell desperation, "Oh, I am SO winning this argument! Can everyone not see what a WINNER I am?"
I hate that one.
He also likes that "thinking" emoji, thumb and forefinger thoughtfully placed on chin, because he's such a thinker himself.
Idiot wind.
Jason Kelce is the brother of Swift's boyfriend, Travis Kelce
MUSK: Do you know what parlous means?
BARKSIDE: Yes, sir.
MUSK: What’s it mean?
BARKSIDE: Dangerous or uncertain.
MUSK: Poes! What does “serpentine” mean?
BARKSIDE: Winding, like the movement of a serpent.
MUSK: This isn’t getting us anywhere!
That's just an excellent exchange!
The word 'serpentine' means that someone is being shot-at in a movie being run by "Mystery Science Theatre 3000"—I gather it's a reference to "The In-Laws", a movie my parents evidently loved when first it ran.
My old fishing buddy couldn't drive our boat in a straight line to save himself, so the phrase "Serpentine, Shell! Serpentine!" became part of our fishing dialog.
Those of us out here on the geologically mishmashed edge of the continent know serpentine for the greasy green rock that it is...
Well, I really enjoyed that ( and I don't care what anybody says!)
The idea that "the richest people are the best people" is so evidently wrong. Leon should be stripped naked and dropped into Mogadishu, left to fend for himself.
[A naked, dark-skinned woman scrambles out from behind the desk and runs off.]
Ain't that America?
I've loved Gene Hackman's comic roles (e.g., the blind man in Young Frankenstein, but especially his Lex Luthor opposite Christopher Reeve in Superman) and Elno must, too, since he seems to have taken that Luthor as his role model.
Hackman’s Luthor is far too charming and fun for Elon to ever pull off. The guy is “awkward” personified. The closest comp I can think of offhand is Corey Stoll’s imho very underrated turn as Darren Cross, the baddie in the first Ant-Man film. His not quite right in the head, creepy stalker vibes performance is still a bit too charismatic for Elon, but it’s not a bad fit.
A little bit of John Lithgow in Buckaroo Bonzai, too.
Because the pre-ops Mr Musk looked an awful lot like Charlie Brown all-grown-up, my mind goes to Gary Burghoff, who originated the rôle in "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown", and who supposèdly was hated by everyone else (and perhaps him too) in the cast of the inferior television version of "M*A*S*H".
hearted for that cute little accent grave
It used to be there to hint that the 'e' was to be pronounced (so presumably it was added after we _stopped_ pronouncing 'ed' at the ends of words by default—back then, if it weren't to be pronounc'd one did what I just did). All those accents and diereses made English spelling _more_ intelligible, we lost them, I think once typewriting made them more difficult, but now we have Unicode—and SwiftKey® makes them easy to use.
Beside, I can only hope it confuses what are called 'conservatives' these days….
I think you captured the Muskrat’s zen. And your readers appreciate the inlay work of getting up and Googling Afrikaaner swears.
Musk the pathetic dweeb with billions in US government contracts. Now that was a bad idea.
Wouldn't you love to sit in on the Biden administration's sessions devoted to untangling our military reliance on his systems?
I just hope they're holding the meetings.
Time for an emergency review of the FAR: https://www.acquisition.gov/content/far-index
Looks like the kind of thing some wet-behind-the-ears political appointee who got two weeks training at Heritage should be able to navigate, no problem.
They won't look at it
The flies on these walls are gonna go nuts, Cthulhu style!
At the Emerald Mines of Madness
Elon’s greatest fear: The Coloreds Out of Space.
“Buy eggs, sir?”
Aces. Nothing says gradeschool nerd “genius” like renaming a universally known product as the generic variable X.
Poor, generic variable X was already hated by generation after generation of high school math students, now he does THIS to it. Can't a letter ever catch a break?
Now, let's be fair, he did raise a good point the other day, Biden and Harris need to have a couple of assassination attempts of their own, to be fair n' balanced.
We saw a "gold-plated" Cybertruck in the wild the other day, and it struck me how most Teslas are, design-wise, pouchy, pot-bellied blobs, while the 'truck is all planes and sharp angles--i.e., a 1950's teenager's idea of "futuristic." It reminds me of what Steve Jobs once said in an interview: "The thing about Microsoft is, they have no taste."
I think the tremendous success of the Model 3 was simply "car as appliance." It's a white box, you get in it and it takes you from A to B, and if you choose to check out almost entirely from the experience, it will mostly let you do that. And car guys never get that this is the experience most people want, car-wise. A car doesn't have to be your "identity", and more than your refrigerator. Then we get to the Cybertruck, which is a company completely misunderstanding - and losing - what made it a success in the first place.
And just from an engineering perspective, a curved piece of sheet metal will always be structurally superior to any flat piece of sheet metal. Look at a tape measure, notice how the blade isn't flat, its cross section has a slight curvature to it so it can be extended without flopping over. Seems like one of Elon's engineers could have shown that to him, being careful to include the phrase "can be extended without flopping over" to get through to this dick-obsessed dick.
L. Ron Musth is very much a "I've got money, I don't need to listen to no damn engineers" kind of person. The only laws he obeys are the laws he can buy his way out of. That he can't buy his way out of the laws of physics, or geometry, is a continual frustration to him.
"I own the company, therefore I'm the Chief Engineer".
Yes, and! Strictly from a branding perspective, you'd want your family of cars to share a few grace notes. The Porsche SUV is visually a cousin to the Carrera. How has Tesla produced cars in such extremely different kinds of ugly?
Anyway whenever I see a cybertruck in the wild, I feel like I am on the set of a science fiction movie aimed at 12-year-olds produced by Golan-Globus.
I said elsewhere the other day it looks like a low-poly model from a 1993 computer game.
(Also: "a science fiction movie aimed at 12-year-olds produced by Golan-Globus"
So, a movie from Golan-Globus.)
Brevity is the etc.
I think you mean the Atari console game BattleZone with its wireframe vector graphics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1980_video_game)
Cheese wedge hot wheels
All a matter of taste, but I don't find the Model 3 and Model S to be unattractive, but they weren't designed by Elon.
I always want to shout out: “Gort! Klaatuu barada nikto!”
does it come out klaatuu barada (hand over mouth mumble)
Plate of shrimp! We saw a Golan-Globus (aka Cannon Films) movie last weekend. It... wasn't good. It was a remake of one they had released in Israel, and they hadn't learned from their mistakes. "Last American Virgin" couldn't make its mind up whether to be a teen comedy or an abject lesson in who knows what.
I saw the clip of this idiot yesterday, telling an auditorium the tale of how he pitched jokes to SNL's professional joke-writers in the run-up to his appearance on that show. I also remember the time I was 22 and decided to regale a small party of my parents' age-40+ friends with a hi-larious tale, and relayed the one called The Night the Gang Drunkenly Put a Big Hole In the Wall of the Beach Rental. I had expected my fellow adults would think, "We've all been there, what a night it was, and well told in this instance!" Instead I got a blink-blink of uncomfortable silence. I grew up a year in that three seconds.
This idiot got big laughs out of his auditorium instead, and will never grow up -- but the truly weird part is that he was telling the story of how the SNL staff gave him an *even worse* uncomfortable silence than I got. And he and his auditorium walked away thinking he's still the gold standard in all things.
It boggles the mind, how these boggled minds work. (Which should help, but doesn't.)
Because this roomful of professional comedy writers didn't get his jokes! He's on a level of funny far above our normal plane of human funny!
"Humorist", which is what right-wing wannabe comedians call themselves.
"I tried to be a comedian and didn't get any laughs -- I must be a humorist!"
Humorist. The humorest!
I saw Gavin McInnes is doing some kind of "comedy" bit at University of South Carolina, the posters for the event included some slurs against Kamala Harris, because nothing says "funny" like the woman-hatin' slurs!
26,000 students have signed a petition saying "No thanks, asshole." And I have to wonder, isn't there an election coming up in a few weeks? Does Gavin think he's helping, or does he not care? Will they not be satisfied til they get the gender gap to 100%?
The Republican party and its fascist remora are leaning into the bubble. This is what "a choice, not an echo" really looks like, at long last. No compromise, no quarter, no metaphor or code switching, never never apologize.They will stand or fall on their own terms, and if they fall they will sue the refs and call in the hooligans. The Final Revenge of the John Birch Society.
"Raise the flag! The ranks tightly closed!/The SA marches with calm, steady step. . ."
I have a slightly different theory, which is that Gavin doesn't care about anything except More Attention for Gavin, and may even want Harris to win, because he knows his personal brand will thrive under a Black woman President.
"Turn the Crazy Knob Up To 13" is a great strategy if you're a YouTube influencer who can become a millionaire by just attracting 0.001% of YouTube's total viewership. Not so great for a political party, which needs to attract a majority (or near-majority) to win. This lesson is obscured by the fact that Trump did win, that one time, with the help of the Electoral College, causing many Republicans to jump to the collusion that you can say any crazy shit you want, LOL nothing matters. But a propensity for the crazy is like any other fault, it might be tolerable at some level, but then suddenly become disastrous for you at a higher level. Like a compulsive gambler who can still pay his rent vs. the compulsive gambler whose losses have reached the point where he's living in his car.
Our gracious host and our old pal Driftglass (no name but a few) have been using rather blunt language for a rather long time to claim the Republican party has been where we are all congratulating ourselves for noticing this year. No offense meant to anyone, including myself, on that, just that the party has been goose-stepping down this path a long while, draw the line where you please.
Through the Magic of Celebrity Trump has unleashed that Republican Id. The party has never had a fascist with absolutely no govenor or experience in government lead their party before. Goldwater was fucking Adali Stevenson compared to Trump. Being forced to grovel for money and votes will take the edge off of even a thug like Cruz, but Trump has only had people grovel before him (except for various mobsters and Putin, but I repeat myself). The Republican party is propping up Trump in every possjble way, from SCOTUS to the billionaire club to his minions in Congress without compromising a thing himself. "Why" is the
question that many books will be written about someday. Of course the MAGA politicians have hitched their wagons to his star, and he has installed family at the head of the Party to funnel money to him, but I believe a lot of the rank and file, like the many politicians who suddenly "retired", are keeping their heads down until Somebody Else deals with their Trump problem. NOBODY wants to alienate His base, which used to be theirs. They want to be able to walk in over the rubble, look them in the eye, and say "I'm all you've got, bitches" (h/t Charlie Pierce).
I wish I could believe that he weren't keeping it together, but it suddenly occurs to me that keeping it together were actually one of his skills, and this gives him a perverse incentive to create crises for which he gets to need to exercise it.
Crisis Management (Where You Created The Crisis)