I Am Amused

It appears that Fox News has canceled Karl Rove for his criticism of Trump and MAGA.

So, the rat-f%$#er of his generation has been rat-f%$#ed by his descendants.

Good. 

Fox News political analyst Karl Rove has not appeared on his network’s weekday programming for the last three weeks, even as the midterm elections loom. Rove’s absence coincides with his newsmaking public statements warning about extremism within the Republican Party — and his denunciation by President Donald Trump.

While Rove appeared alongside Fox senior political analyst Juan Williams on the October 4 edition of Fox News Sunday (which airs on Fox broadcast stations and reairs later in the day on Fox News), he last appeared on a Fox weekday program on September 14, when anchor Martha MacCallum interviewed him on The Story.

Rove’s absence at a time when his analysis would theoretically be most useful is notable. He averaged seven weekday Fox appearances per month from March through August, and that interview on The Story was his 5th of September, according to a Media Matters review of our database.

………

Rove’s disappearance from Fox's weekday airwaves overlaps with his increasingly strident criticism of extremist elements in the GOP, which has drawn attention from other news outlets.

Two days after Rove’s most recent Fox weekday appearance, The Wall Street Journal published a column in which the veteran Republican strategist and former top aide to President George W. Bush called out the “raw, uncut bigotry” of Texas GOP candidate Bo French, vowed to “vote for only the second Democrat in my life” rather than support French’s campaign, and warned that “the GOP has a growing number of Bo Frenches—and not only in Texas.”

Rove doubled down during a September 26 appearance at the Texas Tribune Festival and drew more headlines for his lament that the Republican Party is “being infiltrated by people like Bo French” and the white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes, who he described as “a Nazi.”

Rove has been using racism as a political tool his entire career.

I have no sympathy for him. 

FAIL

Sarah Huckabee Sanders ran an ad about how taxpayers should not be funding lazy assholes who spend their days gaming and eating junk food.

The ad is controversial among the MAGAts, because the leeches are white guys in the campaign spot.

The usual suspect snowflakes are offended, because as we all know, white guys are never welfare queens. 

AmIright? 

The MAGA world is turning on one of its own.

Pro-Trump, far-right influencers attacked Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, who served as President Trump’s press secretary from 2017 to 2019, after she posted a campaign ad promoting her state’s work requirements for many Medicaid recipients.

In the ad, which Ms. Sanders posted on social media on Monday morning, an unkempt, young white man named Brad mashes the buttons of his video game controller. He throws cheese balls and potato chips into his mouth, often missing.

“Brad has turned relaxing into a full-time profession,” Ms. Sanders tells the camera. “But you, you actually work hard. You pay taxes to cover welfare for guys like Brad, who just choose not to work. That’s why I launched a welfare-to-work requirement.”

I know, this seems a totally anodyne Republican political commercial, but there is much butt-hurt.

………

The ad instantly drew blowback from the kinds of once-fringe figures that the Republican Party brought into the fold under Mr. Trump. Critics almost exclusively expressed anger that the protagonist was a white man. Several of them demanded that Ms. Sanders take down the ad, issue an apology and fire the staff members who helped produce the TV spot, accusing her of engaging in “anti-white racism.”

Jack Posobiec, a right-wing commentator best known for fueling the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory about a child abuse ring at a Washington restaurant, called the ad “Antiwhite” and criticized Ms. Sanders for airing it in the run-up to the midterm election, suggesting it would alienate white voters.

………

Will Chamberlain, a conservative lawyer and influencer who worked on Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, accused Ms. Sanders of “anti-white racism.” In a video posted on social media on Monday, he said the ad was “how you end a national political career before it even begins.”

Also joining in the criticism were Matt Walsh, a right-wing podcaster and prominent Trump supporter; Mike Cernovich, a Trump defender and far-right commentator; and Caleb Pascoe, a lobbyist for the American Principles Project, a social conservative advocacy group.

Won't someone think of the children?

Speaking of Elon

His car company is arguing in it's fine for the N-word being thrown around the workplace.

I guess you can take the psychopath out of Apartheid, but you cannot take Apartheid out of the psychopath.

Whatever special kind of brain worms have established themselves in Elon Musk’s noggin appear to be spreading throughout his companies.

In the midst of a state trial on behalf of over 6,000 Black workers at Tesla’s flagship factory in Fremont, California, attorneys for Musk’s electric vehicle argued that it’s acceptable to use the n-word in certain situations, insisting that it’s a “term of respect and endearment” in the Black community.

Sure, it’s true that many Black people have reclaimed the word. But the lawsuit is about non-Black Tesla employees and managers abusing Black workers — including allegedly hurling the slur at them in ways that don’t sound like anything resembling gestures of “respect and endearment.”

On top of that, the first witness called to the stand testified to the court that senior counsel for Tesla had tried to mislead him days before the trial, by claiming to represent the state, rather than the EV company, Electrek reported. Prosecutors allege four more potential witnesses were approached by Tesla’s lawyers prior to the case, who have since fallen “off our [the states attorneys’] radar” following possible deals, threats, or persuasion by the company’s counsel.

The jaw dropping gaffes emerged the first day of a major bench trial being prosecuted by the state of California, over an alleged pattern of rampant racism and negligence in Tesla’s massive production facility. Previously, Electrek reported that Black Tesla workers at the facility were subjected to racial prejudice by way of wage discrimination, segregation, and racial slurs.

Why Elon Musk has achieved success is beyond me.

I Love This

It's an all too common story, Nigel Farage conceals a multi-million Pound payoff gift from a crypto billionaire friend, and when Parliament starts looking into it, he resigns and announces that he will run for again in the by-election to replace himself.

The established political parties see this as a transparent political stunt, and so will not be putting forward a candidate to stand for election.

There is a candidate running against him, Count Binface, a perennial parody candidate whose platform includes, among other things, "Moving the hand dryer in the men's toilet at Uxbridge's Crown and Treaty pub to a more sensible position."

While it is almost certain that, for the first time ever, Count Binface will get his deposit back. the UK requires a £500.00 deposit to be refunded if the candidate gets more than 5% of the vote, to stand for election.

It also makes a mockery of the racist charlatan Farage. 

What had been an opportunity for self-aggrandizement is now a battle that he can only lose, because there is no way that he cannot underperform in the elction. 

Count Binface had been looking forward to a relaxing journey back to his home planet of Sigma IX when Nigel Farage dropped a political bombshell on Tuesday.

Instead, Britain’s hottest new political property said he was left with no choice but to perform a swift intergalactic handbrake turn when news broke that Farage had resigned as MP for Clacton, triggering the possibility of a byelection in the English coastal constituency he has represented since 2024.

Farage, the leader of the rightwing populist Reform UK party, has been accused of using the poll to shake off a deepening scandal over financial gifts he has received. But the plan appears to have backfired after his main rivals announced they would boycott the byelection. The Clacton byelection is now likely to be a two-man race between the Reform leader and Binface.

“I didn’t know old Farage was going to self detonate … did I?” said Binface, a veteran of British elections, where the parody candidate is something of a mainstay.The 5,900-year-old leader of the Recyclons is the creation of Jon Harvey, a comedian from Lewisham in south-east London, who has run against former prime ministers including Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson, as well as Theresa May in his previous incarnation as Lord Buckethead.

………

He said that he had been inundated over the past 48 hours with emails and messages from Binface activists offering to knock on doors and deliver leaflets on his behalf in what could yet emerge as an electoral shock on a par with when Hartlepool United’s mascot, H’Angus the Monkey, was elected as mayor of the northern English town. 

Demanding the Right to Murder Black Men

At the state convention Minnesota Republicans held a moment of silence for Derek Chauvan, who murdered George Floyd.

They are offended that white cops are not allowed to murder black men whenever they want.

The Minnesota Republican party’s decision to hold a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin, the former police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, has angered the state’s attorney general – who was the lead prosecutor in the case.

Keith Ellison, a Democrat, said Saturday’s gesture at the state Republicans’ annual convention in Duluth was “an act of profound cruelty” to Floyd’s family and “disrespectful” to Minnesota’s law enforcement personnel.

“This decision dishonors the memory of George Floyd and wounds his loved ones all over again,” Ellison said in a statement.

Alluding to how the murder had happened six years earlier almost exactly, Ellison added: “To honor the man convicted of murdering George Floyd – days after the very anniversary of that terrible day – is an act of profound cruelty to the Floyd family and to every Minnesotan who believes in accountability under law.

These are really truly awful people.

A Feature, Not a Bug

Much like when the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ used micro-targeting of its employment advertisements to exclude minorities, the news that AI algorithms reject minority job applicants at hire rates seems to me to be more of a deliberate choice than an accident.

AI algorithms exhibit racial bias in job candidate screening, and they discriminate more frequently against those applying for multiple jobs at different companies, according to Stanford-led researchers.

The boffins evaluated algorithmic hiring decisions across multiple employers that use the same hiring vendor. The resulting algorithmic monoculture, they say, is problematic.

The vendor in this instance was talent platform pymetrics, acquired by Harver in 2022. Harver did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nothing to see here, move along. 

Peak Elon

A judge has ruled that the DOGE was stupid and bigoted when it revoked thousands of grants.

Short version: They looked for words which implied non-white, non-mail, and non-Christian using AI, and when this turned up a positive result, they canceled it with no further review. 

The Department of Government Efficiency’s cancellation of over $100 million in grants was unconstitutional, according to a ruling on Thursday. In the 143-page decision, US District Judge Colleen McMahon cites DOGE’s process for eliminating grants, which involved using ChatGPT to determine if something is related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

The ruling, which stems from a 2025 lawsuit filed by humanities groups, says “it could not be more obvious that DOGE used the mere presence of particular, protected characteristics to disqualify grants from continued funding” from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Judge McMahon cites several instances in which DOGE appeared to use ChatGPT to scan and eliminate grants using their relation to characteristics like race, national origin, religion, and sexuality.

Here's a thought:  The statute of limitations for the over-broad and frequently misused RICO statutes is 4 years.

If the 2028 election goes the Dem's way, they would have about 4 mohths to file charges, take them into custody, and ship them to Gitmo. 

Headline of the Day

John Roberts Is George Wallace With A Harvard Law Degree

Crooks and Liars

It's pretty on point, and remarkably accurate.

The core of John Roberts' entire career can be summed up with the phrase, "N*****s should not vote." 

………

But the Court didn’t destroy the Civil Rights Act in a day. It was part of a lifelong mission by John Roberts to do so.

Starting as early as 1981, as a 26-year-old lawyer just three years out of Harvard Law School, Roberts began his campaign to undermine the Civil Rights Act. He got himself a job as Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General William French Smith. Congress was about to amend the Civil Rights Act to provide that state laws would be illegal if they had a racially discriminatory effect, without having to prove that they had a racially discriminatory intent—something almost impossible to prove.

Roberts zealously took on the assignment coming up with arguments against the Amendment. Roberts wrote over 25 memos opposing the Amendment. In one, he argued that the Civil Rights Act was “the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.”

 This is his life's mission.

Headline of the Day

The Justice Department Sides With the Ku Klux Klan

—The New Republic, on the disgraceful and corrupt prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center

As an FYI, the DoJ is accusing the SPLC of lying to donors because they used their money to pay confidential informants, which literally everyone who donated to the organization knew that they did this.

Also, they accused the SPLC of creating false racist organizations and false racist acts because there is no racism anymore, except against rich white guys. 

It's like a perverted version of Gilbert and Sullivan:

Ko-Ko. Not yet. You see, flirting is the only crime punishable with decapitation, and married men never flirt.

This is an accurate description of that behavior. 

The United States did not always have a Department of Justice. President Ulysses S. Grant founded it in 1870 to help suppress the Ku Klux Klan in the Southern states and enforce federal civil rights protections for formerly enslaved Americans. On Tuesday, Justice Department officials announced what may be the first Klan-friendly prosecution in the department’s history.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, is one of the most influential civil rights groups in the nation. Founded in 1971, it has spent the last five decades monitoring, documenting, and exposing hate groups and violent extremists. The group rose to national fame in the 1980s by financially breaking the modern Klan through strategic lawsuits on behalf of its victims. The SPLC’s most persistent targets have been white nationalist groups like the Klan and various neo-Nazi gangs, but its work has expanded over the years, as well. (More on that later.)

Trump Justice Department officials struck a much different note about the SPLC’s work when announcing the indictment. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed on Tuesday that the SPLC was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

This is what happens when lawlessness is excused in the name of, "Looking forware, not back."

Headline of the Day

Elon Musk Loves White People. Here’s Why That’s a Problem

—USA Today, in an OP/ED calling out the white supremacist proclivities of the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™

Elon Musk a racist?  Say it ain't so.  Don't you know that there were never were any racists in his native land of South Africa.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a guy whose social media platform most companies still use, is a BIG fan of White people. I mean … you could say he thinks White people are super. Maybe even “supreme.”

It's almost as if he supports some kind of ... White supreme-acy. Or something like that.

Responding to an X user who posted, “The Irish will become a minority in Ireland because Irish men are afraid of being called racist and upsetting people from the 3rd world,” Musk wrote on Feb. 11: “Such men are pathetic traitors.”

How subtle.

Yeah, imagine that.

The guy who told black workers at the Tesla plant to chill out about being called n****r is a racist?

Hoocoodanode? 

Headline of the Day

Monopoly With A Heaping Side Of Extra Racism 

—Karl Bode, on how the Trump administration is requiring racist policies as a condition of merger approval.

Making America Jim Crow again. 

One of the Trump administration's core policies is to not just approve giant and terrible mergers, but to make racism and sexism a condition companies must meet if they want regulatory approval.

The latest case in point: the Trump FCC rubber stamped yet another major merger in the telecom industry this week. This time the FCC approved the merger of Cox and Charter, two already massive cable companies, creating the biggest cable company in the nation. Just the sort of "populism" everybody asked for!

This kind of consolidation is always harmful to the public interest. U.S. telecom already sees muted competition at the hands of regional monopolies, resulting in high prices, spotty access, and generally terrible customer service.

………

That last bit, "no DEI discrimination," is a requirement by the companies that they eliminate already fairly pathetic company programs simply acknowledging that systemic racism and sexism exist. 

This is just awful.

In Related News, Water is Wet

The headline at Rolling Stone, "Miami Group Chat for Young Conservatives Riddled With Racism," says it all.

I am profoundly unsurprised. 

Today in the Halls of Ivy

The Harvard Salient, the right wing publication at the university, was just shut down for rampant bigotry.

We are talking racism, antisemitism, and Hitler fanbois:

When the Harvard Salient’s board of directors suspended the conservative student magazine in late October, they accused its student members of publishing “reprehensible” material and claimed they had received “deeply disturbing and credible complaints about the broader culture of the organization.”

Then, for more than a month, the board was silent.

But a series of documents obtained by The Crimson reveal what members of the Salient’s governing body were concerned about: variations of a racial slur used casually in a group chat of members; an unpublished issue featuring a call for mass executions; and draft versions of a September article, written by David F.X. Army ’28, that included two images of swastikas and a Nazi slogan in the subtitle.

After its publication, Army’s piece drew fire for a line — “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans” — that mirrored a phrase used by Adolf Hitler in a 1939 speech. The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Richard Y. Rodgers ’28, eventually issued a statement standing behind the piece and saying any invocation of Nazi language was unintentional.

But draft versions of the article suggest that, at the very least, members of the Salient were aware that the article’s contents invoked Nazi ideology.

The files, shared with The Crimson by two members of the Salient, include the editing history of two published articles along with screenshots and video recordings from an internal Signal thread used by the publication’s leaders and active members. In those messages, some Salient writers defend quoting Hitler, criticize extending voting rights to women, and use the n-word, replacing some letters with emojis.

The documents also include a copy of the Salient’s unreleased October edition, which was pulled by the publication’s board of directors before it could be distributed on campus. Articles in the unreleased issue include a call for the United States to “begin the implementation of the death penalty at a grand scale” and a defense of the Spanish Inquisition.

Many of the materials reviewed by The Crimson were shared with the Salient’s board of directors in October, prompting the board to announce the suspension of the magazine’s operations on Oct. 26. 

It's fascists all the way down.

Headline of the Day

Why Elon Musk Needs Dungeons & Dragons to Be Racist

—The Atlantic on why Elon Musk completely lost his sh%$ on the current owner of D&D releasing a book that admitted that the early stuff was just a bit racist.

Elon Musk does not object to being called a racist, he objects to people being offended by racism.

The fall of Constantinople wiped the last living Roman civilization from the Earth. The city’s refugees fled west, helping spark the Renaissance; its legacy shaped the religious traditions of millions and the modern map of Europe and the Middle East. The fall also inspired a book, which inspired a game, which inspired the world’s richest man to lash out because his favorite role-playing game wasn’t as racist and sexist as it used to be.

Last November, on X, the billionaire tycoon Elon Musk told the toy company Hasbro to “burn in hell.” Hasbro owns the company Wizards of the Coast, which produces the game Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards had just released a book on the making of the game that was critical of some of its creators’ old material. “Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash” the “geniuses who created Dungeons & Dragons,” Musk wrote. The book acknowledged that some earlier iterations of the game relied on racist and sexist stereotypes and included “a virtual catalog of insensitive and derogatory language.” After a designer at Wizards said that the company’s priority now was responding to “progressives and underrepresented groups who justly took offense” at those stereotypes, and not to “the ire of the grognards”—a reference to early fans such as Musk—Musk asked, “How much is Hasbro?,” suggesting that he might buy the company to impose his vision on it, as he’d done with Twitter.

………

D&D wouldn’t exist without J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, fantasy’s seminal 20th-century text, published in 1937. When Tolkien’s German publisher, to comply with Nazi racial laws, tried to determine whether the author was Jewish, Tolkien was outraged. A draft of his response reads: “If I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” He expressed his disgust to his British publisher: “I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.”

Unfortunately, a “pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine” permeated the era in which The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings series that followed it, were written, an era in which many Westerners believed that “races” shared particular natures, characteristics, and capabilities. That genetic determinism seeped into the books. Although uncountable readers were inspired by the tales of its diminutive heroes defying stereotypes to save the world, some drew other conclusions. The books, and the ideas embedded in them, would go on to have a magnetic appeal to the political forces Tolkien had rejected.

Today, we can see their influence on right-wing populists in business and politics all over the world.The billionaire Peter Thiel named his software company, Palantir, after the crystal ball in The Lord of the Rings, while his AI company, Anduril, is named for the sword of the human hero Aragorn. Joe Lonsdale, an investor in Anduril and Palantir, founded a crypto-focused bank called Erebor, after the dwarfs’ mountain fortress. Vice President J. D. Vance named his venture-capital firm Narya, after Gandalf’s magic ring. Giorgia Meloni, the far-right prime minister of Italy, and defender of “Italianity” against what she sees as the dilution of immigration, is a Tolkien obsessive who sees in hobbits, dwarfs, and elves the “value of specificity.” When Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning adaptation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out in the 2000s, conservative writers embraced the films as a metaphor for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.

………

If your identity was built around being a fan of a marginal pastime, de-geekification meant that suddenly, you weren’t as special anymore. Comic books, video games, fantasy and science fiction, role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons—they were all getting more popular, and trying to appeal to new audiences. Not everyone was happy with the changes that effort inspired.

Those who objected could be divided into two categories: people who found the simpler and more flexible game to be bland; and people who didn’t like the game getting “woke.” This is a slippery term, but it often boils down to things not being quite as racist or sexist as they used to be.

Racists don''t just want to be racism to be accepted, they demand that society continues to promulgate racism.

Clearly, Trump is Good for the Jews

In response to pressure from the Trump administration the US Coast Guard has announced that displaying nooses and swastikas will no longer be considered hate symbols.

Nothing says, "I'm not antisemitic," like being a Nazi:

The U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify the swastika — an emblem of fascism and white supremacy inextricably linked to the murder of millions of Jews and the deaths of more than 400,000 U.S. troops who died fighting in World War II — as a hate symbol, according to a new policy that takes effect next month.

Instead, the Coast Guard will classify the Nazi-era insignia as “potentially divisive” under its new guidelines. The policy, set to take effect Dec. 15, similarly downgrades the classification of nooses and the Confederate flag, though display of the latter remains banned, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

Certain historical displays or artwork where the Confederate flag is a minor element are still permissible, according to the policy.

Though the Coast Guard is not part of the Defense Department, the service has been reworking its policies to align with the Trump administration’s changing tolerances for hazing and harassment within the U.S. military. In September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed a review and overhaul of those policies, calling the military’s existing standards “overly broad” and saying they jeopardize troops’ combat readiness.

Objectively pro-Nazi.

……… 

A Coast Guard official who had seen the new wording called the policy changes chilling.

“We don’t deserve the trust of the nation if we’re unclear about the divisiveness of swastikas,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal. 

Gee, you think? 

Rather unsurprisingly, after the Washington Post reported this story, the Coast Guard reversed their reversal of policy in less than 24 hours.

Exposure to the light of day killed the policy change.

To quote P.C. Hodgell, "That Which Can Be Destroyed By the Truth, Should Be."

Headline of the Day

I tried Elon Musk's Wikipedia clone and boy is it racist 

SF Gate

I guess you can take the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ out of South Africa, but you cannot take the South Africa out of the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™.

Alibiing Hitler, Slavery, and (unsurprisingly) Elon Musk?  Hoocoodanode?

I Saw This Coming

Young Republicans private chats transcripts leaked, and in news that will surprise absolutely no one, they are racist Nazi fanbois.

I am only surprised that it leaked: 

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n--ga” and “n--guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

………

“Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic,” Joe Maligno, who previously identified himself as the general counsel for the New York State Young Republicans, wrote back.

“I’m ready to watch people burn now,” Annie Kaykaty, New York’s national committee member, said.

 The exchange is part of a trove of Telegram chats — obtained by POLITICO and spanning more than seven months of messages among Young Republican leaders in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont. The chat offers an unfiltered look at how a new generation of GOP activists talk when they think no one is listening.

………

Together, the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely — and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders.

Young Republicans have been this way since (at least) my college days.  They have always been racist unfunny dirt-bags.

Good that we have it in writing now. 

 

 

Worst Timeline Ever

Have you seen the Gizmodo article, "Silicon Valley's Obsession With Fertility Has Spawned 'Sperm Races?"

The hed is not perfect, the Silly-Con Valley obsession is about white (and to a much smaller degree Asian) fertility, because they are concerned about "mud people" outnumbering them.

It's racism, baby!

Are men okay? The answer is a resounding “No.” Case in point: a new sport is taking over Silicon Valley: Sperm Racing. The sport, if you want to call it that, works pretty much how you’d imagine: it’s like marble racing except with, well, the output of someone’s marbles. And the teenager who created it just raised $10 million in a (sigh) seed round to take the event mainstream, according to the San Francisco Standard.

So, Sperm Racing. How it works, according to the company, is that young men offer up their sperm, which are then “cleaned” and diluted until there are about 200 lively sperm cells ready to race. The microscopic racers are then placed on what has to be the world’s smallest racetrack, a mold made through a similar process to fabricating silicon computer chips. The sperm are then tracked via computer vision and given enhanced visuals, like when NHL broadcasts make the puck glow so you can track it.

 Men are OK.  Tech bros are not OK.  They have never been OK, and they will never be OK. 

I'm not sure right way to explain their pathologies, I'm an engineer, not a psychologist, dammit,* but there is something profoundly wrong with these folks.

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

This Is a Feature, Not a Bug

Why the fuss over a tiny bungalo?



In news that should surprise none of my reader(s) New York Attorney General Leticia James has sued the right wing racist anti-immigrant group VDARE for misappropriating funds.

Gee, what was the clue, that the founders used money from an alleged non profit to buy a literal castle?

Right wing charities are grifts:

Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, sued the anti-immigration nonprofit VDARE on Wednesday, saying that the husband and wife who run the group had drained more than $1 million from its coffers to pay themselves and to buy a medieval-style castle in West Virginia.

Peter and Lydia Brimelow, VDARE’s leaders, are longtime opponents of immigration whose blog has become a bridge between mainstream Republicans and the more overtly racist elements of the far right. Mr. Brimelow, 77, has referred to himself as the “god-uncle” of the alt-right, the dissident white nationalist movement that emerged during President Trump’s first term.

At the same time, Ms. James said, the pair had treated their tax-exempt charity as a “personal piggy bank,” using its money to pay for club memberships, international travel, home renovations and payments that benefited them and their relatives. She asked a New York state judge to force the Brimelows to pay back what they had taken, plus penalties, then dissolve VDARE and disperse its assets to other charities.

“Charities are intended to serve the public, not to bankroll castles or pad personal fortunes,” Ms. James said in a statement.

Ms. James, a Democrat, regulates charities registered in New York.

………

But Ms. James said that much of the group’s spending was actually funneled back to the Brimelows. She said the nonprofit paid Mr. Brimelow a salary of up to $345,000, rent for office space in the Brimelows’ Connecticut home, and for some home repairs there.

Then, in 2020, the nonprofit bought a castle.

The 9,300-square-foot home in the resort town of Berkeley Springs, W.Va., had been built in the 1880s with a medieval-style turret and battlements. Ms. James said that the Brimelows moved into the castle, using a charitable asset for their personal benefit. She said they did not seek permission from the group’s board, which at the time consisted of relatives and close friends of Peter Brimelow, or disclose that fact in public filings.

 If this story sounds familiar, it is because it's almost identical to the lawsuit against the National Rifle Association and its corrupt former Executive Director Wayne LaPierre.

I'm beginning to see a pattern. 

Support Your Local Police

In California, the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District (SMUD) was flagging customers with "suspiciously" high electricity usage and sending names and addresses to the cops so that the latter could harass people. 

Gee, surveillance state much?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has advanced a lawsuit in which it alleges the City of Sacramento misused energy records to accuse residents of growing cannabis, often with disastrous results.

According to a statement from the digital rights group, local law enforcement authorities have worked with local power company, the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District (SMUD), to find households using a suspiciously high amount of energy.

The EFF commenced legal action against SMUD two years ago. This week it finished its discovery and filed a petition [PDF] with the judge in the case along with thousands of pages of evidence, allowing it to move forward with an October hearing.

According to the petition, the Sacramento Police Department (SPS) requested SMUD identify customers in specific ZIP codes whose energy consumption exceeded a monthly threshold, on grounds that the lamps used to grow cannabis indoors use a lot of electrical power. 

Specific ZIP codes?  Only specific ZIP codes?  From a police department that has been repeatedly and successfully sued for using ethnic profiling to harass people?

Yeah, this stinks to high heaven, particularly given the fact that LED grow lights sufficient for a basement pot operation would likely be less than 100W incandescent.

Sounds to me like they were looking for an excuse to hassle Asians:

………

The discovery documents also suggest Sacramento authorities had a preoccupation with race. While law enforcement systematically requested details of suspicious customers, SMUD analysts would apparently ask them to request records for specific addresses. One such text message read: “Send me a request for [two particular addresses]. One is 10k plus, and the other is 4k, Asian….”.

Analysts would also look at credit databases and make racially charged judgments, citing an “interesting thing” about one address was “the multiple Asians that have reported there…” according to one communication from an analyst to law enforcement cited in the petition.

The EFF filed the lawsuit with the Asian American Liberation Network, which advocates for Asian American rights.

One other co-claimant is Alfonso Nguyen, who said police officers visited him and behaved abusively after receiving records from SMUD. Nguyen said he used medical equipment at home to regulate his body temperature. Police called him a liar, the petition says.

As an FYI, Mr. Nguyen is in a wheel chair because of a spinal injury, and needs aggressive air conditioning to control his body temperature.

The EFF mentioned another police visit that saw a resident walk out in his underwear to the sight of police carrying guns. He had been mining crypto.

……… 

This isn't the first time that the SPD has been in court for allegedly targeting Asian Americans for cannabis grow-ops, the document adds. It points to another 2019 case, Wang v. City of Sacramento. 

Yep, seems to me that there is a lot of racial profiling going on here.