Karma's a Motherfucking Bitch; Tesla Ed.

Billionaire Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company Tesla rejected a $60 million settlement proposal in a lawsuit over the 2019 fatal crash of an Autopilot-equipped Model S before a jury this month awarded a $243 million verdict in the case.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs disclosed the settlement proposal in a filing, opens new tab on Monday in the federal court in Miami, Florida, as part of a request for legal fees from Tesla.

Cry me a fucking river, Elon. For you just have to know that he personally kiboshed a settlement.

You Can Buy a Stake in a Buggy-Whip Factory!

The Los Angeles Times newspaper plans to go public within the next year, its owner Patrick Soon-Shiong said in a television interview, aiming to give the public ownership of the 143-year-old publication.

"We're literally going to take LA Times public and allow it to be democratized and allow the public to have ownership of this paper," Soon-Shiong said on "The Daily Show" in a taped interview with the host, Jon Stewart, on Monday.

The shitbird billionaire who owns the LAT has pretty much run it into the ground, gutting the newsroom and shifting the paper towards being a propaganda organ for the billionaires' project of turning the country into a autocracy. So now he's setting up an arrangement where the other billionaires and hedge fund pirates can control what's in the paper.

Which means that they'll be pouring more and more money into the paper as the subscriber base disappears.

In other "Oligarchs Control the News" news, Bezos may buy CNBC.

CBS News to Hire a Zampolit

Skydance has told the Federal Communications Commission that once its acquisition of Paramount Global is complete, it will initiate a “comprehensive review” of CBS to ensure that the network is operating in the public interest, and that it will hire an ombudsman that will report directly to the president of CBS News and “who will receive and evaluate any complaints of bias or other concerns” at the news division.

In short, they will hire a political officer to ensure that nothing goes on the air at CBS News that will annoy the Aged Orange Toddler. "The public interest", in this case means "Trump's interest."

The oligarchs are going to ensure that nothing airs that will upset their scheme of having an autocracy that serves their interests.

If you are a journalist at CBS News, your certification as a gutless quisling will be sent in the mail.

Bezos Bends His Knee, Again

The White House took aggressive aim at Amazon, with President Donald Trump putting in a call to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos Tuesday morning, after the company considered displaying the added cost of tariffs on certain items.

Trump called Bezos to complain about reports that Amazon was considering displaying the cost of US tariffs next to prices for certain products on the company's website, two senior White House officials told CNN. Trump later said it was a "good call."

"Jeff Bezos was very nice. He was terrific," Trump told reporters on Tuesday. "He solved the problem very quickly. Good guy."

Some really quick (and cowardly) knee-bending there, Jeffy. Even the Wall Street Journal was not amused.

Ah, the Irony

OpenAI is complaining that DeepSeek stole all of the data from OpenAI that OpenAI stole from everyone else.

No wonder Sam Altman wants to hang around with the bloated Felon: They're both thieves without a shred of self-awareness.

Private Equity Firms are Criminals and Should be Outlawed

Here's another case in point: A private equity firm jacked up the price of fire trucks.

Private equity firms and funds are nothing but amoral vultures and pirates. Maybe after we get through the next four years, we can have a correction and start doing something about these thieves.

Maybe involving the use of tumbrels?

WaPo's Going to Play Fast and Loose With the Facts

After [the Orange Shitbird] entered the White House in 2017, The Washington Post adopted a slogan that underscored the newspaper’s traditional role as a government watchdog: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

This week, as [the Felon] prepares to re-enter the White House, the newspaper debuted a mission statement that evokes a more expansive view of The Post’s journalism, without death or darkness: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”

There's an age-old saying of "never let the facts get in the way of telling a good story". Who are "riveting storytellers"-- Alistair MacLean, Frederick Forsythe, J.D. Rowling, Stephen King, etc. They all write fiction. Even those who have written popular histories have been accused of playing fast and loose with the facts in service of a good story. William Randolph Hearst never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Neither does Rupert Murdoch.

In short, the downhill slide of the WaPo continues unchecked.

The CEO and Majority Shareholder of Facebook is a Major-League, Whiny-Ass Pussy

Zuckerberg has been leaning into the pro-masculinity and pro-white-bigotry movements of the Trumpies.

So who does he blame for FB's DEI policies that the fascists hate? Not himself, of course, for he's only the boss and owner. Nosiree bob!

He's blaming Sheryl Sandberg, who left over two years ago.

That's a real masculine move to blame a woman who is long gone for his current problems.

What a fucking pussy. He owns the store, he could have changed things at any time and on a whim. But no, it's someone else's fault, isn't it.

Zuckerberg is the Frank Burns of the tech world.

Bezos and the Streisand Effect

I'm going to bet that this cartoon by Ann Telnaes is getting far wider circulation than it would have if his birdcage-liner of a paper had just printed it without a fuss.

ETA: Her fellow cartoonists have stepped up.

Bezos Finds Another Way to Suck Up

By greenlighting a biopic about a mediocre fashion model from Communist Eastern Europe who married a wealthy American sexual predator.
Harry Turtledove has a casting suggestion for the lead role:

WaPo Proves It's Subservient to the Felonious Orange Shitbag

Ann Telnaes was a Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post. She submitted his cartoon about billionaires paying tribute to the Felonious Orange Shitbag (FOS):

The Post killed the cartoon. She quit and explained why:

"I've worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations-and some differences-about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I've never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.

"The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/AI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner."

Thiis is her Substack post, which seems to be back online. But anyway, I don't believe that Bezos directly nixed the printing of the cartoon. But I do believe that he has made his desire known that the Post should do everything it can to make nice with the FOS in the hopes that said FOS doesn't fuck with Amazon's computing contracts and with Bezos's pet rocket enterprise.

That's how it works in authoritarian states: The dictator/tyrant doesn't have to lift a finger. Corporate and media bosses comply without a smidgen of coercion out of fear of omething bad happening to them. It's like in the old days, when the beat cop stood there, tapping his nightstick into the palm of his hand. He didn't have to make a threat, but you knew what was what.

And so do the oligarchs. The million-dollar docations to FOS's inaugural fund is nothing less than unsolicited tribute. So is going down to FL to kiss the FOS's ring at Bed Bugs and Beyond.

Our option in response is to not buy that paper. Or not buy shit from Amazon. There's pretty much nothing but second-rate garbage these days on his streaming channel.

Shorter Amazon: Fuck You and Your Injuries, Get Back to Work

A woman who was hit by the New Orleans Terror Truck and then shot in the foot was denied a leave of absence by the Amazon warehouse where she works.

Those billions Bezos has don't get added to by themselves.

It’s Really Sad

The World's Richest Apartheid Refugee is almost comically obsessed that people like him. He has a sock-puppet account on the Hellscape Formerly Known As Twitter, under the name of Adrian Dittmann. People who really know shit about cyberstuff have linked the two.

Anyhoo, Dittmann's purpose is to tell everyone what a great guy, no shit, Elon is, a real super and stable genius.

Musk should have paid attention to a Beatles' song: "Money Can't Buy Me Love." A half-trillion smackers and he has to create avatars in order to have friends. For it's clear that the only way he can have human friends is to rent them, witness his relationship with the Orange Shitbag.

The World's Richest Apartheid Refugee is Sad That Nobody Likes Him

Musk could change things for himself, if he wanted. Instead of his fake foundation, which sits on a pile of money and is mostly a tax dodge, Musk could, if he wanted, make real donations to causes that improved the lives of large numbers of people. He could give away five billion a year for the rest of his life and never miss it.

If he did that, he could transform himself into a beloved public figure, instead of what he is: A whiny, self-absorbed man-child whom most people would cheerfully punch in the face.

Found Elsewhere: An Open Letter to the World

Dear World,

Our incoming president is an unhinged lunatic.

He is fronting for a deranged oligarch who wants to establish a new world order of megalomaniacal oligarchs.

Sorry we screwed up. Again.

Please protect yourselves accordingly.

Sincerely,

America

No argument from me.

Taxation or Tumbrels

Lord Bezos's upcoming wedding might come in at about $600 million. He's denying it, but considering that he dropped $2.5 million on the engagement ring and proposed on a yacht so large that there were plans to dismantle a bridge to get it out to sea. (They didn't, but it's still so honking large it needs a support ship to follow it around like a nautical butler.)

As much as I don't give a fuck about the Teamsters, I wish them well in their fight against the second-richest man on Earth.

The super-rich are almost daring us to take action against them. There seems to be three paths ahead: A police state, where the oligarchs stamp on our faces for fun and profit; taxation to cut down their fortunes to merely filthy rich; or a revolution to take them all down. This level of inequity cannot stand.

Bezos may be a canary in the coal mine with this wedding. And so is Luigi Mangione. Oh, the press is out there telling everyone that Luigi is evil and emphasizing "OMG, he kilt somebody", but those who live the sub-millionaire life, which is most of us, know the truth. Insurers, for example, deny that prosthetic limbs are necessary, figuring that people can be just as productive and active in wheelchairs, on peg legs and with hooks for hands.

Things will change, someday. The question is can it be managed to bring about a fairer society without a lot of turmoil.

The easy fix is to tax the billionaires down to a merely obscene level of wealth, to bring taxation back to 1950s levels and to tax capital gains over a certain amount as ordinary income (and pay into Social security). But since the billionaires have captured the incoming administration and one of them owns the GOP, I don't see it changing. Trump and his circle want to bring back 1890s America, where workers didn't have unions, worked for pittance wages and the plutocrats lived free and untaxed lives. But what they may get is 1790s France, where the plutocrats got separated from their heads.

Nope, No Corruption Here. Move Along

Donald Trump’s transition team is reportedly considering scrapping a car-crash reporting requirement that Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk stongly opposes, according to a new report.

According to Reuters, which viewed a document reportedly proposing the change, the removal of the requirement could hamstring the government's ability to effectively investigate crashes and regulate the safety of vehicles with self-driving systems, like Musk's Teslas and Cybertrucks.

Musk, who is the world's richest man, used his vast wealth to pour a quarter of a billion dollars into Trump's 2024 campaign. If Trump's team does remove the accident reporting requirements, it would likely directly benefit Musk's Tesla, which has reported the majority of crashes — more than 1,500 — to federal safety regulators under the program.

There is no "likely" on this. Teslas are rolling pieces of shit and Dilbert Stark will do whatever he can to cover up that fact.

I don't need to snark on this, the corruption, the quid pro quo, is as obvious as the missing nose on the Ghoul's face. Musk has rented, if not bought, the Trump Administration and Donnie is paying off for him.

Why Trump Will Be On Board With Yanking Polio Vaccines

His asshole buddy, Dilbert Stark, is already working on a new design for iron lungs. One that will be leased, so either you pay or you die. And of course, Trump will get a piece of the action.

Charlie Stross has laid out the entire evil plan.

Shorter Musk: "I Bought This Government, Don't Fuck With Me."

That's his message, plain as day.

A week after President-elect Donald Trump’s victory, Elon Musk said his political action committee would “play a significant role in primaries.”

The following week, the billionaire responded to a report that he might fund challengers to GOP House members who don’t support Trump’s nominees. “How else? There is no other way,” Musk wrote on X, which he rebranded after purchasing Twitter and moving to boost conservative voices, including his own.

He thinks he now owns both the GOP and the Federal government and woe betide anyone who annoys his pinkie.

Musk's Pet Nazis Have Been Identified

This is them:

• Cyan Cruz, a 40-year-old marketing professional who appears to have lived in Austin and Amarillo and operates the X account TheOfficial1984; 
• Michael Gramer, a 42-year-old retired mechanical engineer who has lived in New Hampshire, operates the X account 9mm_SMG, and has claimed to have a house in Galveston and to be spending time in Dallas; 
• Robert “Bobby” Thorne, a 35-year-old vice president at JP Morgan Chase in Plano, who operates the account Noble1945 and previously operated the account Noble_x_x_; and 
• John Anthony Provenzano, a 30-year-old who appears to live in Virginia, operates the account utism_ (formerly known as JohnnyBullzeye), and, according to a tip and a records request response from the U.S. Navy, works at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indian Head, Maryland

Musk approves of their point of view. Which makes sense, as Musk comes from a line of Nazi racists.

The Nazi who works for JP Morgan Chase might be out of there, as the bank may not take kindly to being associated with a fucking Nazi. But maybe not, since he's in Texas where being a Nazi is close to official policy under Gov. Abbott's administration. And they'll probably be hired as VP of something at Tesla or another one of Widdle Elon's companies.