He probably needed the salaries he cut to reimburse himself for all the cash he put into the Melania movie. You know that film will never earn back the money at the box office.
Seriously, though, I agree with every word of this, Roy. Bezos could float the paper AND cure world hunger without feeling so much as a pinch. This is a strategic, self-protective move.
The grocery store I shop at has been open for nearly a hundred years, family-run for most of them, but you know how it is, Dad dies and the last thing the kids wanna do is run a grocery store. Only in this case the store's workers, with the help of donations from the customers, bought the store and now it's run as a co-op, has been for more than 30 years. Nope, it's not makin' great profits - retail grocery is notoriously low-profit-margin - but it doesn't need to, right? Just make enough to keep the lights on and the employees paid, which is easier when you don't have to cover the owner's boat payments.
It's not at all about money, clearly never was. I'd more imagine Bezos shitting the bed (if you dare) if he angered his Orange Overlord enough to decry Amazon as a shill for China (which it is) and threaten 1500% tariffs on everything it imports and / or shut it down like TikTok... not that tmurp can "do" any of it in reality, but I reckon young-ish Bezos has a lot of life ahead of him and can only stomach so much bad press (sic) if he wants to expand his empire as he breeds (ick). Then again the public has chronic ADHD and would forget all about a feud like this in a matter of weeks if not days and go right back to using Amazon daily to shop and stream everything. But no, not at all about money. Controlling the narrative is his modus operandi.
I ackshually think it might be 'about the money', if Jeffie can wrangle a few paid-for puff pieces for the Uberspongehead. "Say there, Pres – you wanna editorial proclaiming your genius move on Greenland? Well, now, I've got a editorial board champin' ta git to it. But they don't work for free no mo..."
No reading necessary. Big Pictures. Bigly Man Smile. Lotsa Moneybags. Maybe Young Girls. And Wall. Big Wall. Many People In Concentration Camp. Bigly Man Smile. Big Smiles.
"reckon young-ish Bezos has a lot of life ahead of him" yeah one of the things Mountainhead got right was the obsession among these creeps with eternal life -- and not the kind Jesus offered either. Bezos is clearly huffing that.
If I could, I would love to grant Bezos eternal life. Literal immortality. He gets to live FOREVER. BUT . . .
. . . he also gets to continue aging. Even if he's amazingly sturdy, by the time he hits the century mark, he'll be debilitated. By 120, bedridden and immobile, incontinent and dependent on nurses to keep him from spending his eternity wallowing in his own waste. Live forever? Age forever.
I heard they went with “Democracy dies in darkness” because Bezos couldn’t decide if he wanted a journalistic principle: “WAPO - Because democracy dies in darkness” or a slogan: “WAPO - Where democracy dies in darkness!”
I view creative destruction like Swiss cheese. Punch a buncha holes in the cheese (therefore reducing the amount of actual cheese) and call the holes the creative part. It's just holes, making holes.
I dePosted myself a couple of years back: they were all in for Bush2 going into Iraq: D Broder ate K Rove's quail suppers and would emit stuff like "of course the Democrats are the anti Military party...
It is sad to see it's animated corpses , though.,,
Well, we know by now what I’d rant about this so to;dr: The importance of the WaPo died long ago. Speaking of dying, contra WaPo, democracy—at least ours—has been dying in the bright light of day—enabled in huge part by WaPo and its peers.
Damn straight. When the yoots start ragging on the Boomers—and I readily acknowledge that the contrast between my cohort’s rhetoric of fifty/sixty years ago and its performance in power is difficult to contemplate without flinching—I feel like reminding them that we didn’t fuck up the world all by ourselves: we stood on the shoulders of moral midgets.
I remember a couple years ago I opened up my substack feed and the first article was” I Blew Some Stranger at a Rave Last Night” . The second was “ Bush in a Bikini “. I was pretty depressed. Hard to compete with an old mule and some rescue dogs. I think I figured out it was a mostly AI. Still.
Once I get moved in I think I'm going to try a podcast. (Podcasting?) Which is kind of funny because I hate podcasts. I usually don’t want to go on living after I've listened to three or four minutes of one. Olbermann is really the only one I listen to you with any consistency..
Journalism is a boat you get on, knowing it will sink. I lived through three mergers and layoffs before I gave up and went into sales. But blogging got its hooks into me and I settled for writing for peanuts -- more like peanut shells.
The Village Voice had some of the best investigative journalism ever. I still miss it.
At least (having taken your class) they'll be able to tell their wretched ink-stained colleagues "Dude. You might wanna take another look at your estimate of the size of that crowd* before you go to print. Orders of magnitude add up."
*(or watershed, or pandemic...all of which I have pointed out to the authors of articles, blogs, textbooks, etc)
That rat bastard. And I don't get why these bozos want a Fourth Reich. Hell, Trump may replace the dollar with Trump bucks, and if anything happens to the dollar, those wankers are fucked fifteen ways from Sunday. These idiots "we gonna drown the government" Where do you think our money comes from? There Is No Currency Fairy.
And don't give me that it's impossible bullshit. Recent events should convince one there ain't no such a thing when it comes to this psycho.
The crazy thing (to me) is after he won a second term they really seemed to believe we were now in a NEW WORLD and they'd better get right up in front of the parade or they'd get left behind. A year in, Tubby's had his wins but he's also had his losses, and it's becoming clearer that Trump is not forever.
If I could dip into the billionaire-brain, I think what I'd find is that all these guys owe their billions to being at the right place at the right time, to catching a wave, and that leaves them perpetually looking for the NEXT wave. Imagine thinking that was Trump.
Them sumbitches better clap harder, because Der New World Order is crumbling as we speak. New World Order my hammy ass. Oh no ya don't, we tried that before. And geez Louise! America First? The name of the isolationists in WWII, I.e. let Shickelgruber have his way, offshoot of the German American Bund, straight up Nazis. Are they that stupid? Mostly. But I bet there are a few Millerites out there who are loving the jack booted stuff. Either way, traitors to this nation, heroes of the Confederate States Of America, part deux.
And you don't have to go all the way back to ancient Egypt, fer Chrissakes, does anyone remember a guy named George W. Bush? Like a Colossus, he stood upon the ruins of the Trade Center with his bullhorn, it was to be a New American Century, we we're going to remake Ozymandias' old stomping grounds, we weren't just a superpower, we were a HYPERPOWER! And then, in less than 10 years it all went to shit, Bush was an embarrassment to the Republican party a name not to be spoken in polite company.
But come on, all that was 20 years ago, who can remember it now, right?
They’re Yarvin acolytes: each figures that after Trump destroys democracy, they’ll be part of the inner circle that helps the king run the kingdom. Because they don’t know history, they don’t know how often a king decides to off his most loyal sycophants. Trump has shown time and again loyalty isn’t reciprocal and the same would be true of any fascist asshole who takes his place. Their lives and fortunes would be safer if they had bet on Kamala Harris. Part of being Stupid is not seeing that.
Also, not having such a strong attachment to democracy themselves, they really couldn't imagine millions of people would be willing to fight for it. Hitler had the same problem, I think.
Problem is, either you have to permanently subjugate your slaves (which never happens; see the history of every slave revolt worldwide), or you massacre them all and start over with a new batch (which destroys your economy and state in the process; never mind finding a new batch and from where).
The human mind is more comfortable with narratives of cause and effect and intention. Some of us like to believe we and others plan things and have solid agendas. Anyone who reflects on life authentically will see that is after-the-fact. The best laid plans, you know.
In the case of billionaires there is no risk in doing random and expensive things. Think of compulsive spending we peasants occasionally indulge in. Now give that a dose of the Incredible Hulk.
I'll go further. None of us really know what we're doing or why. Let alone a moron like Bezos. His situation has made him a distorted thing. He should hire some thugs to beat him into a coma. Or give away everything and live on the streets.
Regaining humanity when we have strayed so far from it is nigh impossible. Even I am far from the fire, the communal hearth of our ancestors. How can I write this when people are suffering near and far?
Andy Robinson's performance as the despicable, psychopathic killer in Dirty Harry is one of the most convincing portrayals of chaotic evil ever. I understand he got quite a few death threats after the film's release.
It is said that when 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘑𝘦𝘸𝘦𝘭 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘳𝘰𝘸𝘯 was first broadcast in the UK in the mid-eighties, Tim Piggot-Smith, whose loathsome colonial policeman “Ronald Merrick” was one of the central figures of the series, was occasionally railed at when he ventured forth on the streets and in the tubes of London.
Members of the public not being able to distinguish actors from roles they've played. Much like members of the public associating great wealth with genius.
Anna Gunn, who played Walt's wife in Breaking Bad, got all kinds of shit for not letting Walt have his way, shit from just exactly the kind of people you'd expect to be infuriated by Uppity Wife.
When the series goes full-circle and we see what a monster Walt really is, did any of these people have a rethink? No, of course not.
That's our monkey brain at work, the "willing suspenion of disbelief". Its the engine that powers social media. We want to believe cats can sing and dance, or Hatians eat pets.
On a more heartening note, the internet was built to be decentralized, as in after the bombs drops. It tries to route around censorship - that's built in from the ground up. They can get the brick and mortar stuff, but our geeks are better than their geeks. Probably already being formed, in fact. I was hanging out with guys that already had a variety of LLMs (Large Language Models) to throw at the Epstein Files, chomping at the bit. Feareth not, beloveds.
Oh, I did that the first time you said to do it. I was thinking logistics and planning comm security (old habits die hard). And an excellent example. Ground News is pretty good. I'm still rooting around.
Hmmmm... sports as a cultural and societal phenomenon. You mean the same way they've been covering politics? I guess we'll have to rely on the foreign press if we want to know all about how the KGB came to own Trump.
He probably needed the salaries he cut to reimburse himself for all the cash he put into the Melania movie. You know that film will never earn back the money at the box office.
Seriously, though, I agree with every word of this, Roy. Bezos could float the paper AND cure world hunger without feeling so much as a pinch. This is a strategic, self-protective move.
Eat the rich.
Democracy Dies in DC
Hello Darkness My Old Friend
I've come to curse at you again
We see the words of reporters are written on subway walls
and tenement halls
No longer in the WAPO
Melania as popular as pneumonia
$75 million Melatonin
The grocery store I shop at has been open for nearly a hundred years, family-run for most of them, but you know how it is, Dad dies and the last thing the kids wanna do is run a grocery store. Only in this case the store's workers, with the help of donations from the customers, bought the store and now it's run as a co-op, has been for more than 30 years. Nope, it's not makin' great profits - retail grocery is notoriously low-profit-margin - but it doesn't need to, right? Just make enough to keep the lights on and the employees paid, which is easier when you don't have to cover the owner's boat payments.
But but but line not go up? 😨
“Whither Pickleball”
2 marks.
Also, too: Stukas Over Kennedy Center.
“I had to destroy the Post in order to save it.”
For some WAAAYY outlier meaning of "save".
It’s not all bad, Roy. McMegan still has a column. Oh, wait, it is all bad. Never mind.
It's not at all about money, clearly never was. I'd more imagine Bezos shitting the bed (if you dare) if he angered his Orange Overlord enough to decry Amazon as a shill for China (which it is) and threaten 1500% tariffs on everything it imports and / or shut it down like TikTok... not that tmurp can "do" any of it in reality, but I reckon young-ish Bezos has a lot of life ahead of him and can only stomach so much bad press (sic) if he wants to expand his empire as he breeds (ick). Then again the public has chronic ADHD and would forget all about a feud like this in a matter of weeks if not days and go right back to using Amazon daily to shop and stream everything. But no, not at all about money. Controlling the narrative is his modus operandi.
I ackshually think it might be 'about the money', if Jeffie can wrangle a few paid-for puff pieces for the Uberspongehead. "Say there, Pres – you wanna editorial proclaiming your genius move on Greenland? Well, now, I've got a editorial board champin' ta git to it. But they don't work for free no mo..."
"Eh, who reads you?"
No reading necessary. Big Pictures. Bigly Man Smile. Lotsa Moneybags. Maybe Young Girls. And Wall. Big Wall. Many People In Concentration Camp. Bigly Man Smile. Big Smiles.
"reckon young-ish Bezos has a lot of life ahead of him" yeah one of the things Mountainhead got right was the obsession among these creeps with eternal life -- and not the kind Jesus offered either. Bezos is clearly huffing that.
I'd love to see him in the remake of Starship Troopers...
Raszak: "Come on, you apes... You wanna live forever?"
Baldy Warbucks: "Well, ackshually..."
Giant Bug: "SCHLUURP"
They'd keep the power armor suits in just to keep his face hidden.
If I could, I would love to grant Bezos eternal life. Literal immortality. He gets to live FOREVER. BUT . . .
. . . he also gets to continue aging. Even if he's amazingly sturdy, by the time he hits the century mark, he'll be debilitated. By 120, bedridden and immobile, incontinent and dependent on nurses to keep him from spending his eternity wallowing in his own waste. Live forever? Age forever.
+1 Tennyson's "Tithonus"
Struldbrug Bezos
PS the Melania movie (sic sick) is literally a bribe.
I heard they went with “Democracy dies in darkness” because Bezos couldn’t decide if he wanted a journalistic principle: “WAPO - Because democracy dies in darkness” or a slogan: “WAPO - Where democracy dies in darkness!”
"WAPO – It's SO DARK in here!"
[offstage, Democracy dies in darkness]
Curtain
Right now, democracy's dying right on stage, hammin' it up in a death scene that would make John Barrymore blush.
Dr Smith from Lost in Space
With a Wilhelm Scream thrown on top
Exit democracy, pursued by bears
To recycle a gag,
Washington Post: In order to ensure that Democracy does not die in darkness, we're going to kill it in broad daylight.
"Democracy Dies in Darkness. It's not a slogan. It's a headline."
(or, if you like, “creatively destructive”)
I view creative destruction like Swiss cheese. Punch a buncha holes in the cheese (therefore reducing the amount of actual cheese) and call the holes the creative part. It's just holes, making holes.
If you eliminate the cheese entirely, isn't it just one huge hole? 🤔
Clara Peller's new gig: "Where's the cheese?"
I dePosted myself a couple of years back: they were all in for Bush2 going into Iraq: D Broder ate K Rove's quail suppers and would emit stuff like "of course the Democrats are the anti Military party...
It is sad to see it's animated corpses , though.,,
Well, we know by now what I’d rant about this so to;dr: The importance of the WaPo died long ago. Speaking of dying, contra WaPo, democracy—at least ours—has been dying in the bright light of day—enabled in huge part by WaPo and its peers.
Such loss there is here happened long ago…
Huh. Greatest Generation® gotta lotta 'splainin' to do!
Damn straight. When the yoots start ragging on the Boomers—and I readily acknowledge that the contrast between my cohort’s rhetoric of fifty/sixty years ago and its performance in power is difficult to contemplate without flinching—I feel like reminding them that we didn’t fuck up the world all by ourselves: we stood on the shoulders of moral midgets.
Believe or not (😭), I have a Greatest Generation®️ ever ready to go…
You got the Greatest Generator? Fire that baby up! I gotta major electrical project just about ready to ... oh. Never mind.
I’ll never mind since I’m past the age of being able to generate anything…
Out of fuel and the motor wouldn’t work anyway…
"Hey, we fought fascism LAST time! Maybe it's time we tried it out!"
Great - 300 more hungry gunslingers cranking out timely and evocative substack pages.
They can stay on their own side of the street!
This town ain't big enough for the both of us!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUJ_ifjKopM
I remember a couple years ago I opened up my substack feed and the first article was” I Blew Some Stranger at a Rave Last Night” . The second was “ Bush in a Bikini “. I was pretty depressed. Hard to compete with an old mule and some rescue dogs. I think I figured out it was a mostly AI. Still.
Once I get moved in I think I'm going to try a podcast. (Podcasting?) Which is kind of funny because I hate podcasts. I usually don’t want to go on living after I've listened to three or four minutes of one. Olbermann is really the only one I listen to you with any consistency..
Hearted for not hearting podcasts [shiver]
Journalism is a boat you get on, knowing it will sink. I lived through three mergers and layoffs before I gave up and went into sales. But blogging got its hooks into me and I settled for writing for peanuts -- more like peanut shells.
The Village Voice had some of the best investigative journalism ever. I still miss it.
I still have students who tell me their plan is to major in journalism. I don't even know what to say.
“Don’t quit your day job”? “Buy a van and start a band”? “Plastics!”?
"Start a Substack now, why wait til you get laid off?"
At least (having taken your class) they'll be able to tell their wretched ink-stained colleagues "Dude. You might wanna take another look at your estimate of the size of that crowd* before you go to print. Orders of magnitude add up."
*(or watershed, or pandemic...all of which I have pointed out to the authors of articles, blogs, textbooks, etc)
That rat bastard. And I don't get why these bozos want a Fourth Reich. Hell, Trump may replace the dollar with Trump bucks, and if anything happens to the dollar, those wankers are fucked fifteen ways from Sunday. These idiots "we gonna drown the government" Where do you think our money comes from? There Is No Currency Fairy.
And don't give me that it's impossible bullshit. Recent events should convince one there ain't no such a thing when it comes to this psycho.
The crazy thing (to me) is after he won a second term they really seemed to believe we were now in a NEW WORLD and they'd better get right up in front of the parade or they'd get left behind. A year in, Tubby's had his wins but he's also had his losses, and it's becoming clearer that Trump is not forever.
If I could dip into the billionaire-brain, I think what I'd find is that all these guys owe their billions to being at the right place at the right time, to catching a wave, and that leaves them perpetually looking for the NEXT wave. Imagine thinking that was Trump.
Them sumbitches better clap harder, because Der New World Order is crumbling as we speak. New World Order my hammy ass. Oh no ya don't, we tried that before. And geez Louise! America First? The name of the isolationists in WWII, I.e. let Shickelgruber have his way, offshoot of the German American Bund, straight up Nazis. Are they that stupid? Mostly. But I bet there are a few Millerites out there who are loving the jack booted stuff. Either way, traitors to this nation, heroes of the Confederate States Of America, part deux.
Guess none of them ever read Ozymandias, huh?
Here’s an amusing (and short) account by Guy Davenport of how the poem came to be:
https://rcareaga.com/davenport_ozymandias.pdf
Thanks, I had no idea competitive sonnet-writing was a thing. Maybe we could bring it back for the Winter Olympics?
And you don't have to go all the way back to ancient Egypt, fer Chrissakes, does anyone remember a guy named George W. Bush? Like a Colossus, he stood upon the ruins of the Trade Center with his bullhorn, it was to be a New American Century, we we're going to remake Ozymandias' old stomping grounds, we weren't just a superpower, we were a HYPERPOWER! And then, in less than 10 years it all went to shit, Bush was an embarrassment to the Republican party a name not to be spoken in polite company.
But come on, all that was 20 years ago, who can remember it now, right?
They’re Yarvin acolytes: each figures that after Trump destroys democracy, they’ll be part of the inner circle that helps the king run the kingdom. Because they don’t know history, they don’t know how often a king decides to off his most loyal sycophants. Trump has shown time and again loyalty isn’t reciprocal and the same would be true of any fascist asshole who takes his place. Their lives and fortunes would be safer if they had bet on Kamala Harris. Part of being Stupid is not seeing that.
Also, not having such a strong attachment to democracy themselves, they really couldn't imagine millions of people would be willing to fight for it. Hitler had the same problem, I think.
They want slavery. Flat out.
Problem is, either you have to permanently subjugate your slaves (which never happens; see the history of every slave revolt worldwide), or you massacre them all and start over with a new batch (which destroys your economy and state in the process; never mind finding a new batch and from where).
Apparently they think the other seven billion people on the planet are the replacement pool.
The human mind is more comfortable with narratives of cause and effect and intention. Some of us like to believe we and others plan things and have solid agendas. Anyone who reflects on life authentically will see that is after-the-fact. The best laid plans, you know.
In the case of billionaires there is no risk in doing random and expensive things. Think of compulsive spending we peasants occasionally indulge in. Now give that a dose of the Incredible Hulk.
I'll go further. None of us really know what we're doing or why. Let alone a moron like Bezos. His situation has made him a distorted thing. He should hire some thugs to beat him into a coma. Or give away everything and live on the streets.
Regaining humanity when we have strayed so far from it is nigh impossible. Even I am far from the fire, the communal hearth of our ancestors. How can I write this when people are suffering near and far?
"He should hire some thugs to beat him into a coma." Puts me in mind of Dirty Harry when the villain pays a guy to mess him up:
"This one's on the house!"
"Anybody can see I didn't do it."
"Why?"
"Because he looks too damn good, that's why."
Andy Robinson's performance as the despicable, psychopathic killer in Dirty Harry is one of the most convincing portrayals of chaotic evil ever. I understand he got quite a few death threats after the film's release.
It is said that when 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘑𝘦𝘸𝘦𝘭 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘳𝘰𝘸𝘯 was first broadcast in the UK in the mid-eighties, Tim Piggot-Smith, whose loathsome colonial policeman “Ronald Merrick” was one of the central figures of the series, was occasionally railed at when he ventured forth on the streets and in the tubes of London.
Whenever I see him in any other role, I just laugh.
It ruined the poor guy.
Members of the public not being able to distinguish actors from roles they've played. Much like members of the public associating great wealth with genius.
Anna Gunn, who played Walt's wife in Breaking Bad, got all kinds of shit for not letting Walt have his way, shit from just exactly the kind of people you'd expect to be infuriated by Uppity Wife.
When the series goes full-circle and we see what a monster Walt really is, did any of these people have a rethink? No, of course not.
Acting out because they take the show for reality. And the real world is where they act out, or else are itching to.
That's our monkey brain at work, the "willing suspenion of disbelief". Its the engine that powers social media. We want to believe cats can sing and dance, or Hatians eat pets.
That reminds me of an exchange from 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘋𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 (Michael Gambon original from 1986):
𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗕𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗲𝘆: I’m not paying you to make me feel small, am I?
𝗣𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗽 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗹𝗼𝘄: Oh, you don’t have to do that. That’s thrown in without charge.
2 marks for Singing Detective.
On a more heartening note, the internet was built to be decentralized, as in after the bombs drops. It tries to route around censorship - that's built in from the ground up. They can get the brick and mortar stuff, but our geeks are better than their geeks. Probably already being formed, in fact. I was hanging out with guys that already had a variety of LLMs (Large Language Models) to throw at the Epstein Files, chomping at the bit. Feareth not, beloveds.
Like I said : subscribe to Foreign Exchanges (and - implied - other reliable INDEPENDENT news sources).
Oh, I did that the first time you said to do it. I was thinking logistics and planning comm security (old habits die hard). And an excellent example. Ground News is pretty good. I'm still rooting around.
Hmmmm... sports as a cultural and societal phenomenon. You mean the same way they've been covering politics? I guess we'll have to rely on the foreign press if we want to know all about how the KGB came to own Trump.
See Daily Mail 3 days ago...reads like the sidebar photos look...but entertaining fer sher.
I can't wait: "Some people say the Bears won the game, but let's go visit this diner full of Packers fans to see what THEY think...