American Oligarchs Are Assholes.

"What, go help a plebian? Excuse me, you must be joking."

That's pretty much Zuck's attitude.

A small cruise ship operating in Southeast Alaska made an unexpected detour on Monday night to help a 21-foot skiff that ran out of fuel between Petersburg and Juneau.

Michael Love, a software developer from New York City, was a passenger aboard the cruise ship and described the event on social media.

What got his attention the most wasn’t the rescue itself — it was when the captain announced that the yacht of billionaire Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg was closer and hadn’t answered the radio call for help.

“There was near unanimous booing when the captain announced this,” he said in a post on the social media network Bluesky.

Vessel tracking services in the area back up that account — they show the $300 million, 387-foot yacht Launchpad slowing to a halt outside Farragut Bay as the UnCruise Adventures ship Wilderness Legacy steams around and past the Launchpad, stops at the apparent site of the skiff, then tows it into sheltered Farragut Bay.

I'm sure Zucky-Boy and his minions have a lot of excuses to justify their blatant assholery. Whenever you're in trouble, you can be sure that a member of the American Oligarchy will be there to yawn and watch you die.

Right-Wing Rich Asshole Retreats Because He Might be Sued into a Double-Wide

Celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary is walking back comments he made about people and organizations in Utah that have mounted opposition to his Box Elder County data center proposal.

“Recently I appeared on various news programs and would like to clarify that I have no evidence that Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Gabrielle Finlayson, Taylor Knuth or Josh Kanter are funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party,” O’Leary posted on his Facebook account Thursday afternoon.

Ah, sue him, anyway. Fucking asshole knew he was lying and one measly retraction on Facebook hardly reaches the audience that he had for his defamitory comments.

Affluenza: Poorer and in Prison

A Los Angeles county jury has found the socialite Rebecca Grossman and former MLB player Scott Erickson negligent in the deaths of two young brothers who were struck by Grossman’s vehicle in Westlake Village in September 2020.

Following an eight-week civil trial, the jury on Wednesday awarded $176m to the family of 11-year-old Mark Iskander and his eight-year-old brother, Jacob. The boys were crossing the street with a skateboard and inline skates when Grossman fatally hit them with her car.

Without seeing the transcripts, I'd bet that those sleazebags were still trying to blame the kids and their parents for the kids being killed, or anyone else they could think of.

(Earlier posts.)

Oh. Monsieur Roth, You Have No Idea

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to tax the city’s ultra-rich residents to help patch a $5.4 billion fiscal hole is getting pushback from the ultra-rich, at least one of whom believes “tax the rich” is akin to a racial slur.

Steven Roth, the CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, used his company’s earnings call on Tuesday to complain about Mamdani’s rhetoric.

“I must say that I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich,’ quote, tax the rich, when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs ― and even the phrase ‘from the river to the sea,’” Roth told investors on the call.

He has no idea how much the ultra-rich are despised. He doesn't have a clue that we know that they've been getting richer and richer while the rest of us have been scraping by.

This graph goes to only 2015, but it shows the trend.

2017:

Housing costs keep going up:

Since 1980, median family income has risen by about 50%, the income of the rich have more than doubled. People who know the constant struggle of paying rent, buying food, health insurance and fuel know that things aren't getting any better for them. But it's getting better for the rich.

But to putzim like Roth, pointing this out is hate speech. Taxing the rich at a higher rate is hate speech.

Well, if he thinks that's hate speech, then here's a response for him:

Every One of These Clowns Should be Identified, Prosecuted and Executed

During the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, wealthy European hunters paid tens of thousands of dollars to go on a "Sarajevo Safari" and shoot people who were in the city of Sarajevo. They paid bonuses to be able to shoot pregnant women. The Italians are formally investigating this.

Everybody involved should do the Tyburn Jig. Their fortunes should be liquidated and paid to the people of Sarajevo, for they are all Nazi-grade war criminals

Paying Your Taxes This Season?

Big Trumpy companies like Tesla and Palantir pay nothing.

Billionaires, on a percentage basis, mostly pay dogshit in taxes.

And they give nothing back:

On a percentage basis, I'll bet that most readers of this blog have given more to charity over 2025 than Musk has given in his fucking life. And you, Gentle Reader, didn't give to a self-serving personal foundation, like Musk likely does (and Trump did).

More Epstein

Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers will immediately leave his role as an instructor at Harvard while the University investigates his ties to child sex trafficker Jeffrey E. Epstein.

It wasn't just a few emails. They were in long-term contact, with Summers asking Epstein for advice about Summers hitting on a much younger whoman who he was mentoring.

Rich white guys always think they're invulnerable. Until they aren't.

A Drop in the Bucket and Corporate Welfare (Updated with OpenAI Losses)

Wal-Mart is donating $500K to food banks. They have 4,600 stores, so they're donating less than $110 per store.

They are seriously cheap fucks. Brookshire Grocery, which has about 200 stores, is donating half a million.

If you donated a load of groceries to a food bank, the chances are that you, proportionately, did more to help people needing food than did Wal-Mart.

Keep in mind that SNAP, the ACA and Medicare work also as subsidies to labor exploiters like Wal-Mart, which thereby don't need to pay a living wage to their workers.

Meanwhile, OpenAI, which is backed by billionaires and large tech giants, wants the government to back their loans, so they will have nothing at risk. (OpenAI lost about $12 billion last quarter.)

Sam Altman read the room and realized that asking for a few hundred billion in loan guarantees wasn't a good sell when tens of millions of Americans are going hungry, so he walked that back.

For now. Corporations and oligarchs always seem to want the government to guarantee their shit, while deriding those at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Socialism for the rich, same as it ever was.

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.

Napster vs. AI

Remember Napster and other file-sharing systems? The music industry went batshit. The threatened and, in some cases brought, legal action against people who downloaded music. They threatened criminal action.

But when you're a billionaire and have an AI company, you can get away with vacuuming up millions of copyrighted works in order to train your program and you don't have to pay a fucking nickel for that.

Once again, laws and rules are only for little people to obey.

Another Streisand Effect Lesson

It’s been almost three years since a San Francisco judge sealed the record of tech executive Maury Blackman’s 2021 arrest for domestic violence. But the allegations still show up in his Google search results, thanks to an independent journalist — one who Blackman is now suing for $25 million.

On Dec. 22, 2021, Blackman, a self-described venture capitalist and former chief executive officer at intelligence contractor Premise Data, was arrested by San Francisco police after an altercation with his girlfriend in their apartment in the Mission Bay neighborhood.

Nothing says "I wanna keep this quiet" like suing someone for talking about it. Especialy when the person you're suing is a reporter.

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.

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.

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,

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.

Will Space Karen Now Sue Former Twitter Users?

After all, if he's thick in the head enough to think he can sue former advertisers, why not sue former users of Twitter?

That might be difficult, since there was no contractual obligation between the parties to begin with and users weren't paying anything to be there, nor were they paid to be there. But no doubt that Space Karen can find some cyber equivalent of an ambulance chaser (or copyright/patent troll) to do his filthy work for him.

Space Karen Has a Mad!

He hired lawyers to stamp their feet and whine for him.

Elon Musk’s social media platform X has sued a group of advertisers, alleging that a “massive advertiser boycott” deprived the company of billions of dollars in revenue and violated antitrust laws.

Boycotts, last time I checked, whether organized or not, are considered to be free speech. Space Karen is no different from the segregationists who brought criminal charges against Dr. King because of the Montgomery bus boycott.

It might be worth remembering that the first boycott was against an economic thug with that name. In that one, the British occupiers also sought to jail the boycott organizers (and failed).

Musk is just another right-wing wannabee tyrant who believes that "freedom of speech" means "freedom to agree with me." He's no different from the Christian Talibanistas, who believe that only they have the freedom of religion and everyone else has to believe as they do under the pain of death.

So I hope that not only will Space Karen lose his case, that he then has to pay the legal fees of those he sued.

Meanwhile, the QAnon Shaman is getting back his spear and magic helmet.

Democrats Who Buy a Tesla Have Rocks in Their Heads

Technology billionaire Elon Musk donated to a super PAC supporting the reelection efforts of former President Trump, according to reporting from Bloomberg.

MAGA Republicans, especially the FOFF, have been very dismissive of electric cars. Space Karen doesn't care about that, he's just more interested in keeping the Billionaires Protection Society going.

So why would any thinking person buy a Tesla from here on out? Let Space Karen sell his cars to Texans, since he's so in love with that state.

Apparently, Tesla owners can buy bumperstickers to deflect criticism about buying a car from that wealthy Christianofascist.

Meanwhile, Tam points out that Space Karen, who styles himself to be a "free speech absolutist", wants people who are mean to him to be sent to prison. He's a typical fascist free speech guy: It's OK to speak your mind as long as you agree with him. That doesn't make him much different from most dictators, or the various iterations of the Taliban, both Muslim and Christian, who think that anyone who doesn't follow their particular flavor of religion deserves to die.