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.

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:

Elon Plays Business Buzzword Scrabble on Ketamine

Stonekettle explains, with an example.

The biggest con job is all of these billionaires who have convinced wage-earners that the billionaires really have the workers' best interests at heart.

Your Sunday Morning Jet Noise

Mriya, before the Russians destroyed it.

Too Many Shots to the Head

Seriously, dumbass?

The Last Journey

Jimmy Carter ‘s long public goodbye began Saturday in Georgia, with the 39th U.S. president’s flag-draped casket rolling through his tiny hometown and past his boyhood farmhouse on its way to Atlanta, where he climbed the political ladder and based his decades of humanitarian work after leaving the White House.

The former president’s six-day state funeral started in Americus at the Phoebe Sumter Medical Center, where current and former Secret Service agents who protected the late president loaded his remains into a black hearse and walked alongside as it rolled off the campus toward Plains.

If there was a single president in the last sixty years who put service to the nation and to the world above his own self-interest, it was James Earl Carter, Jr.

Fair winds and following seas, sir.

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.

Caturday

One of my feelings is that I'll see photos on the Internet, but I don't often track them back to where they originated.

So I don't know who first took this photo, or the names of the kittens. But they are certainly cute.

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.

Because It's Friday

And for fun:

Goldman Sachs, the Global Vampire Squid, Is Still a Hive of Evil and Villainy

Suffering is good for buisiness is the view of Goldman Sachs:

Goldman Sachs analysts attempted to address a touchy subject for biotech companies, especially those involved in the pioneering “gene therapy” treatment: cures could be bad for business in the long run.

“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” analysts ask in an April 10 report entitled “The Genome Revolution.”

“The potential to deliver ‘one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies,” analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday
...
“In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines … Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.”.

Curing disease is bad for business? I know that this is an old story, but does anyone truly believe that they have changed? Goldman Sachs was evil when they helped crash the global economy for fun and profit in 2007-8 and they're still evil now.

One of the real problems I have with President Obama is that his administration did little, if anything, to do anything about the greedy bastards like Goldman-Sachs. That was likely due to his letting the DoJ get captured by a Wall Street guy.

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.

Slashing These Down, Here

Musk Wants To Deny Americans Good Jobs So He Can Pay Dogshit Wages to Foreigners

Tesla has replaced some of its US employees who were let go as part of a big wave of layoffs earlier this year with foreign workers using H-1B visas, which CEO Elon Musk is now campaigning to increase.

So the "great replacement" is companies bringing in foreigners to work at skilled tech for less, thereby relegating American workers to the poorly-paid and harsh jobs formerly done by the migrants Trump will deport.

All this is being masterminded by the World's Richest Zillegal Immigrant, himself.

NO,LA

As you read the coverage of what happened in New Orleans last night, remember this: It's legal in Louisiana to run down and kill someone who is blocking the road.

That was a change in the law that was forced through by Republicans who wanted to be able to run over Black Lives Matter protesters.

Johnny Roberts and the Supremes Have a Sad

Chief Justice John Roberts issued a defense Tuesday of judicial independence, which he said is under threat from intimidation, disinformation and the prospect of public officials defying court orders.

Roberts laid out his concerns in his annual report on the federal judiciary. It was released after a year where the nation’s court system was unusually enmeshed in a closely fought presidential race, with then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump assailing the integrity of judges who ruled against him as he faced criminal charges for which he denied wrongdoing.

Here is a short and pithy response-- Dear Chief Justice: Go fuck yourself.

It was his court that opened the floodgates of money that have been corrupting our elections. It was his court that twisted the 14th Amendment to allow Trump to run again after trying to overthrow the government in 2021. It was his court that gutted the Voting Rights Acts, permitting his political party to engage in naked voter suppression. It was his court that effectively made a sitting president into a king, adopting Nixon's philosophy that if the president does it, it's legal. And it was his court that stripped the rights of women to have a say over their own health care.

Beyond that, he's done nothing to control judge-shopping, where litigants pick their judges by filing cases in courts with one or two judges, like Judge Tipton in Texas, who can be reliably counted upon to rule in a way that supports the most batshit conservative legal ideas imaginable.

And this doesn't even touch the fact that one of his fellow judges on the Supreme Court is so corrupt that he has his own emotional-support billionaire.

So Johnny Roberts would prefer that you close your eyes to all of this corrosion of our democracy that he has approved of and if you do point it out, you're a bad person.

Roberts has been rotting out the federal judiciary, he is an emperor with few, if any clothes, and all he can do is yell at those who point that out.

So yes, fuck him.

Cleveland: Dumb Then, Dumb Now

Cleveland is fighting over the NFL Browns's desire to leave the city for a proposed domed stadium in the 'burbs.

There was no shortage of people, at the time, who thought that the city was dumb as a truck of rocks for a) spend a third of a billion, in 1998 dollars, to build a stadium for a football team; and b) for making it an open-air stadium right next to Lake Erie. So they will, in the end, be stuck with a large lemon on the lake because some goddamned billionaire who could pay for a new stadium out of his pocket change wants a shiny new stadium so he can lord it over the other pro-team-owning billionaires.

Tax the motherfucking billionaires, AKA the Parasitic Class,