LOL

 Meanwhile, in his latest attempt to get more Eight Buck Chumps to sign up in the hope of making up for a fraction of the hemorrhage of Fortune 500 companies who don't want to see their ads next to Happy Merchant memes, Elmo decided that people who aren't logged in to Twitter can't read tweets.

Twitter has an "embed" function built into every tweet, and literally countless newspaper, TV news, blogs, substacks, journals...frickin' everything on the net...has ebedded Twitter code that is constantly being accessed by literally hundreds of millions of people who are not logged in to Twitter.

Ah, well, I'm done. Watching Elon "Please Think I'm Cool & Funny" Musk work out his family issues in real time has gotten old. It's not like cross-posting links on Twitter ever drove any traffic back to this place anyway, unlike Bookface, which provides a steady trickle while also serving as a de facto comments section for the blog.

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Great Thinkers of 2022

I mean, in fairness, almost nobody in February of '22 realized just how jacked up the Russian military was, but Benny was wrong with such smug confidence.

You gotta love it.

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Knee Deep in the Dead

Using a pile of his Wagner Group stiffs as a prop in the background, Yevgeny Prigozhin went on a rant, saying he was going to pull his forces out of the fight around Bakhmut because the Russian army wasn't giving him enough ammo and support.



If I were Progozhin, I'd be making a habit of avoiding windows any higher than the second floor for the near future.

Meanwhile...

I feel like it's a good time to remind everyone that tankers literally only want one thing, and it's disgusting. pic.twitter.com/PpA8zTWl4G

— Sean M. Smith (@ReallySeanSmith) May 5, 2023

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Schadenfreudelicious.

Hubris is followed by Nemesis, every single time.

"While being berated, Crowder’s wife, Hilary, repeatedly tries to reassure her husband that she loves him and is “committed.”

“I love you … but your abuse is sick,” she told him at one point — with him warning sternly: “Watch it. Watch it. F–king watch it.”

Crowder reportedly admitted to later inside the house threatening his wife: “I will f–k you up.”"

Ol' Crowder is on record as being strenuously opposed to "No Fault" divorce, but it looks like there's plenty of fault on his part here.

Wonder how many times that meme got made yesterday?

While he was busy stepping on his schlong and making grinding motions with his shoe, Crowder also made a whole bunch of tasteless jokes about the recently released Down's Syndrome Barbie.

Hey, you wanna know what the difference is between Right-Wing Social Media Commentators and people with Down's Syndrome?

I've never met a person with Down's Syndrome who was an asshole.

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Sad Trombone

"Imagine what it's like for McCarthy. He had to deny he ever said anything bad, like please end the riot, on the phone to President Donald Trump on January 6. He had to eat his words from a week later blaming Trump for the insurrection. He had to go begging at Mar-A-Lago for Trump's forgiveness, or was it an indulgence? He even had to suck up to the Trumpists with a failed attempt to sabotage the January 6 investigation by the House of Representatives.

This is the thanks he gets: a faction of his own caucus is showing him to be a weak and incapable leader unable to secure his own victory after bringing Republicans back into the majority."

It's hard not to get some schadenfreude here. McCarthy, a man who spent the last two years buying brown lipstick by the case in the hopes of sucking up into his dream job, may have kissed all that orange ass for nothing.

His best hope to break the stalemate at the moment literally would be the Democrats bailing him out by voting "present", which would torpedo his speakership right out of the gate.

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Pop Will Eat Itself

A couple years of doing business via Slack chats and Zoom meetings has apparently accelerated an already-existing culture of purity spiraling and infighting at progressive lobbying orgs. 

This article at The Intercept is a worthwhile...and slightly schadenfreudelicious...read.

Another leader said the strife has become so destructive that it feels like an op. “I’m not saying it’s a right-wing plot, because we are incredibly good at doing ourselves in, but — if you tried — you couldn’t conceive of a better right-wing plot to paralyze progressive leaders by catalyzing the existing culture where internal turmoil and microcampaigns are mistaken for strategic advancement of social impact for the millions of people depending on these organizations to stave off the crushing injustices coming our way,” said another longtime organization head. “Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the external battles in play. … Everyone is scared, and fear creates the inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular agenda.”

During the 2020 presidential campaign, as entry-level staffers for Sanders repeatedly agitated over internal dynamics, despite having already formed a staff union, the senator issued a directive to his campaign leadership: “Stop hiring activists.” Instead, Sanders implored, according to multiple campaign sources, the campaign should focus on bringing on people interested first and foremost in doing the job they’re hired to do.

There are obvious difficulties for the leadership of progressive organizations when it comes to pushing back against staff insurrections. The insurrections are done in the name of justice, and there are very real injustices at these organizations that need to be grappled with. Failing to give voice to that reality can leave the impression that group leaders are only interested in papering over internal problems and trying to hide their own failings behind the mission of the organization. And in an atmosphere of distrust, the worst intentions are assumed. Critics of this article will claim that its intention is to tell workers to sit down and shut up and suck up whatever indignities are doled out in the name of progress.

The reckoning has coincided with an awakened and belated appreciation for diversity in the upper ranks of progressive organizations. The mid-2010s saw an influx of women into top roles for the first time, many of them white, followed more recently by a slew of Black and brown leaders at most major organizations. One compared the collision of the belated respect for Black leaders and the upswell of turmoil inside institutions with the “hollow prize” thesis. The most common example of the hollow prize is the victory in the 1970s and ’80s of Black mayors across the country, just as cities were being hollowed out and disempowered. Or, for instance, salaries in the medical field collapsed just as women began graduating into the field.

“I just got the keys and y’all are gonna come after me on this shit?” one executive director who said he felt like a version of those ’70s-era mayors told The Intercept. “‘It’s white supremacy culture! It’s urgent!’ No motherfucker, it’s Election Day. We can’t move that day. Just do your job or go somewhere else.”

Busted!

Former Formula 1 impresario and all-'round solid gold douchebag* Bernie Ecclestone got busted in Brazil for an unregistered (in Brazil, I guess) Seecamp LWS-32 found in his bag as he was preparing to fly to Switzerland.

I'm not generally down with arresting people for guns or registering guns or most things that happened here, but I'm foursquare in favor of anything that makes Ecclestone's life even a tiny bit more miserable.

*Supposedly when the USGP was held here in Indy, Bernie wouldn't stay in town as our city wasn't cosmopolitan enough for his tastes. Instead he'd helicopter to and from the venue from Chicago.

...and people in hell want ice water.

Gun stores being deemed "essential" has got the usual suspects all assmad about it.

The head of Everytown for Gun Grabbing was given an op-ed at CNN.com to have his hissy fit:

"Much is still unknown about Covid-19, but one thing is certain: Owning a gun does not make you any safer from it. But that didn't stop the Trump administration from caving to the firearm industry by treating gun store workers just like the real frontline responders-- police, doctors, nurses-- in new advisory guidelines issued to state and local officials that designate who should be allowed to keep working during the pandemic."

I know you don't like to hear this, Feinblatt, but the ownership of firearms is a right enshrined in the Constitution and upheld by the Supreme Court. If you want to own one, you need to be able to buy one. Just because you don't like it and are threatening to hold your breath until you turn blue doesn't change that fact.
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If schadenfreude had calories, I'd weigh 500 lbs.

• "...that odious choad of a prima donna Lauer..."


• "I have a serious loathing for Matt, in case you can't tell. He's practically a caricature of the egotistical monster of a TV celeb... Compared to him, Robert Patrick's character in T2 was a paragon of empathic humanity."


• "...his shallow vacuity and clinical narcissism shine through even on the small screen."


• "...the most entertaining thing I'll likely see on my TV this morning, unless Matt Lauer catches fire or something."


• "Matt Lauer is on my television screen, warbling and emoting..." 


• "Mike Bloomberg gave Matt Lauer the tour. I assume the NBC cameraman had to use a special wide-angle lens to get both of their egos in the frame at once." 


• "So there was consummate Manhattanite Matt Lauer, hectoring teary Paula Deen on stage. You could see the mixture of contempt and glee on his face: Contempt for this Southern hick who had actually admitted to saying *gasp!* the "n-word" in the past and glee that here was someone he was so obviously Better Than."


• "Matt Lauer is interviewing Bill O'Reilly. That much egotistical douchebaggery is hard to appreciate on the small screen; it deserves Imax."

I felt a great disturbance in the Force...

...like thousands of hoplophobes crying out in panic and then suddenly silent.

Behold what Silencerco hath wrought:

What you are looking at is an integrally-suppressed .50 caliber rifle that is not a firearm, is fifty-state legal, and can be ordered right off Silencerco's webpage right here.

That sound you hear is Diane Feinstein's teeth grinding and Bloomberg's distal sphincter slamming shut. Glorious!
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It's like hippie Jade Helm...

I swear on the bones of Mises that this is the most schadenfreudelicious thing ever: https://t.co/EVxpHoUrGm

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 21, 2017

Today's gonna be a good day...

You know you got up on the right side of the bed when literally the first thing you hear on awaking is that Fidel Castro is smoking a camel turd in hell.

What a wonderful early Christmas present #FidelCastro got me! Thanks, Fidel! I didn't get you nothin'.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 26, 2016

...although it's always a little disappointing when a tyrant dies of old age instead of being stood against a wall by his victims. #castro

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 26, 2016

From the Bookface:

Day Twenty-Six:
Forgot to set alarm. Woke up to Bobbi's alarm and her bustling about long enough to absorb that 2016 had finally killed the right person, slept another hour.
Woke up again. Ate breakfast. Complained. Got dressed. Headed out for three laps. Very consciously taking it easy on the pace. Ankles very stiff and sore for first lap, but got a little better.
1.00 miles in 18:53 at an average heart rate of 130bpm.
Having to report to all y'all keeps me from punking out on mornings like today.

 Maybe go to the range this morning, then catch a movie and some food with Shootin' Buddy. I think it is going to be a fine day.

It sure started out good.

Is there any wine so sweet?

Apparently the Nazi Anime Fan wing of the internet has its jimmies thoroughly rustled by the fact that the genocidal founder of the Democrat party has been replaced on the Twenty by a gun-toting African-American Republican woman. And the Pinko Identity Politics wing of the internet doesn't even realize that's what just happened.

This is like sipping a martini made out of hippie and Nazi tears, shaken AND stirred.

Breaking: Treasury throws founder of the Democratic Party off $20 bill, replaces with gun-toting Republican pic.twitter.com/G9dVXpTaXv

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) April 20, 2016

Well...

If you're into schadenfreude, this election cycle has a lot going for it, from the sad college hippies watching their elderly cracker savior struggle for traction, to the liberal media losing their collective $#!+, to otherwise intelligent Conservatives publicly trying to convince themselves that this cat turd tastes delicious.

Pass me my fiddle. And a can of Brawndo.
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Wrapup...

My lawyers plead and they wheedle
Say I shouldn't get the needle
And it really wasn't all my fault
Say I'm a very nice guy
And I shouldn't have to fry
'Cause my brother planned the whole assault
If I'm gonna be candid
I know they caught me red-handed
And my case is looking pretty boned
It's a small consolation
And no cause for celebration
To've made the cover of the Rolling Stone...

(I guess the song needed a third verse.)
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Alert the Ministry of Irony.

Fake fur on clothes, especially when worn for "ethical reasons" by vocal PETAphiles, has always stumped me. If you think wearing the skins of animals is cruel and unethical, then why would you want to look like you were being cruel and unethical, but ha-ha it's okay 'cause it's fake?

Isn't that a little like... I dunno... driving around with a very realistic-looking (but totally fake ha-ha!) severed human head for a hood ornament? "Oh, it would be unethical and gross to have a severed human head for a hood ornament. Don't worry, though, because this one's not real, see?" *flicks glass eyeball with thumbnail*

So it's understandable that I squealed with delighted schadenfreude when this news report wafted out of the televisor this morning.

A Rossen Reports investigation found that some garments from major retailers billed as faux fur actually contained the fur of real animals, including rabbit, coyote and raccoon dog (a species of wild dog).

They meant the bad kind of supermajorities.

NPR (@wfyi) was doing a piece on "The Dangers Of Legislative Super Majorities!" yesterday afternoon. Oddly, it was not a re-run from '08.
— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 5, 2014

Waiting to hear Harry Reid's calls for restraint and bipartisanship.
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Awwww, who's the sad clown?

So, who else is planning on filling their mug by reading the comments section of the Palmer v. D.C. articles at HuffPo?

Don't you love it when people whine about "judicial activism" and "legislating from the bench"?
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Subject Matter Expert.

I often deride anti-gun legislators for being absolutely ignorant about guns, but I might have to eat my words when it comes to California's ardent foe of the Second Amendment, state senator Leland Yee. It looks like he was actually something of a subject matter expert on the topic of criminal misuse of firearms. Check out this tasty excerpt from page 84 of the 137-page indictment, the whole of which reads like a Tarantino production of an Elmore Leonard novel:

Click to Embiggen

Having waded through over three quarters of this sleaze-a-thon this morning, I'm surprised Yee didn't have little dust clouds following him around like that kid from the Charlie Brown cartoons; he was that dirty. This guy ranting about the dangers of the criminal misuse of firearms is like Jerry Sandusky railing against the touching of little boys.
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Good news, everyone!

Ninth Circuit strikes California’s restrictive rule against licensed carry of handguns

Bam.

Go pour yourself a nice glass of hippie tears and sip it with relish.
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