Deliberate Distraction Open Thread: The Great Bored Apes Caper

 

Hollywood guy, who made his fortune playing characters like ‘Dr. Evil’s son Scott’ in the Austin Powers movies, announces his plan to monetize those ‘Bored Apes’ NFTs for something more tangible than bragging rights.  Hilarity ensues!

Not even gonna try to TL; DR this mess, because if your interest is tweaked, you’ll wanna RTWT anyways…

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Thank you, Beto

Beto O’Rourke crashed Governor Abbott’s press conference in Uvalde, Texas today and dropped some truth bombs:

They kicked him out, but he wasn’t done:

Go Beto.

Open thread.

President Biden: Executive Order on Policing at 4 pm (LIVE)

The President signs a historic Executive Order to advance effective, accountable policing and strengthen public safety; The President and The Vice President deliver remarks.

NPR: Biden has a new executive order on policing, 2 years after George Floyd was killed

President Biden will sign an executive order on Wednesday requiring new use-of-force rules for federal law enforcement and encouraging local police departments to make similar changes.

The measure is the product of months of consultations with police professional groups and reform activists. The executive order is the fallback position for the administration after Congress failed to agree last year on a package of reforms dubbed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.

Senior administration officials say relatives of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, will be present for the signing. Both Floyd and Taylor died during police action — Floyd while in Minneapolis Police custody and Taylor during a fast-entry police raid of her home in Louisville, Ky.

The order does not apply to local police agencies.

The executive order instructs federal law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI and Customs and Border Protection, to revise their use-of-force policies. According to administration officials, the new federal minimum standard will allow force “only when no reasonably effective, safe and feasible alternative appears to exist.”

Biden does everything he can, but Republicans in Congress refuse to do their jobs.

Open thread.

Guest Post — Tony Jay, SCRATCHING AROUND IN THE SAME OLD HOLES

The latest Letter from Brexitannia:

It’s been a good long while since I last graced these august premises with a doggerel dump on the state of British politics, and it’s not because there’s been a dearth of things taking place over here for me to get angry and rant about. Au contraire, Mes Amis, this is, after all, late-stage Tory Britain we’re talking about, where on any given Tuesday you can always peek your peepers above the parapet to witness at least half a dozen examples of something heartbreakingly awful being inflicted on society’s most vulnerable by immensely privileged garbage who have never had to suffer a moment’s insecurity in their cossetted, buttersmooth lives, all soundtracked by media vandals (who would themselves benefit immensely from being volleyed repeatedly in the wormsack by a drunken kangaroo) being allowed to bray something imbecilic and horrible about it through a publicly funded megaphone.

The problem that I’ve had recently is that the above is basically the sum total of what Britain’s national political culture consists of these days; it’s just one endless, out-of-focus conveyor belt of soul-crushingly banal atrocity winding its way past the dead eyes and distorted faces of a million haggard proles like a sushi-bar in a Marilyn Manson video, except the fish are all rotted black, half of the plates have puppies nailed to them, and the other courses seem to consist mainly of boneless mice squirming about in bowls of cracked glass. Who in their right mind would ever want to write about that?

Hello. Pleased to meet you.

You may or may not recall from previous ranting episodes that the Anglosphere’s (current) least favourite KulturKrieging Kick-back machine has been drowning in disaster since pretty much the moment it installed a Russian-owned ethical void as its leader. They may have coasted to Absolute Power on the back of intense Media fluffing and a grinding, half-decade long, bipartisan campaign to paint the only alternative as some kind of folk devil on a par with Hitler, Stalin or Gwyneth Paltrow, but from there on it’s been the very definition of Downfall. From the insanity of its Brexit policy to the inhumanity of its Covid response and everything in between, when it comes to fucking up the country in the most corrupt and incompetent way imaginable the Tory Party of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson has gone above and beyond mere human rapacity to achieve something touching on the infernal. It’s been a tour de force of open larceny that I could compare to something like Alaric’s Visigoths sacking late-Imperial Rome, except that would be a grievous insult to both Alaric (who was by all accounts a popular and capable leader) and the Visigothic nation (who at least had the decency to move to Spain and invent tapas). It’s simply unparalleled.

This isn’t a Government, it’s an Occupation, and there ain’t no one coming from over there to liberate us because we did it to ourselves.

The laundry list of Tory shit-the-beds is so long it would tax the Magdalene Sisters, so I won’t even bother trying to detail all of them again. Suffice to say that on top of everything else there’s now a cost of living crisis eating away at the bank accounts of every non-millionaire in the UK, with energy bills, food bills, fuel bills, and every other bill you can think of accelerating to escape velocity so quickly it’s driven Elon Musk into a full-blown jealous breakdown, while at the same time the wages of everyone but the cutthroats of Pirate Capitalism Island lag in real terms and the much-touted promises of ‘levelling up’ funds for the most benighted (by consecutive Tory and Tory-lite regimes) areas have evaporated faster than a widow’s tears in a cremation oven. The only parts of the 2019 election manifesto that Tories haven’t abandoned are the ones cribbed from Labour’s offering, which says far more about the relative seriousness of each party’s policy ideas three years ago than anyone in the British Establishment is willing to admit.

And in all this race to the bottom of the barrel and beyond, the one constant is an echoing silence about a major driver in the UK’s plunge into failed state mode, namely Brexit. The national auto-asphyxiation episode masquerading as a policy debate that decided the 2019 Election and gave Flobalob the keys to the kingdom simply doesn’t get mentioned anymore in the world of capital N ‘News’.

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Wednesday Afternoon Open Thread: Don’t Say Curly

This was brilliant, if not sad that this is where we are:

Full speech here:

We see you, Zander. In all your curly hair bravery and greatness.

I do not have it in me to do a kindness post tonight. We’ll see how I’m feeling tomorrow. I have a few set aside, but can always use more.

This is an open thread

The Monsters Are Here on Maple Street

A young poet sums it up in just two sentences:

The U.S. Senate as currently configured is the obstacle to a solution, as usual. Pick your existential crisis — voting rights, women’s bodily autonomy, police reform, LGBTQ equality, climate change, tax reform, gun safety, whatever: the U.S. Senate is the cracked saucer where desperately needed legislation drains away.

Every Senate Republican will oppose doing anything to stop the next monster who will use a battlefield weapon to mow down schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, concert goers, movie viewers, etc. At least one but probably two Democrats will help them make sure nothing is done.

According to PawPaw Blacklung, letting a simple majority in the Senate pass legislation is “total insanity,” but apparently ongoing intolerable carnage is just the price we have to pay to maintain the glory that is the fucking filibuster.

Goddamn, I hate these people. All of them who refuse to address this, for whatever reason. I despise them jointly and severally.

This guy makes a good point:

Further, he said it’s all about which families are worth protecting, and he’s 100% correct. Brett Kavanaugh’s family is. The families in Uvalde, Texas aren’t. Yours and mine aren’t either.

I don’t know what to do with the anger and sadness anymore. Continue reading…

George Floyd: Two Years Ago Today

It’s been two years since George Floyd died.  No, that’s not right, it’s been two years since George Floyd was killed.  No, still not right… it’s been two years since George Floyd was murdered.

I can’t believe it’s been two years.  Two years and the fucking Republicans won’t allow a bill to be passed that will rein in the police.

Police brutality.  Children slaughtered in schools.  Gun violence.

It’s all related, and it’s a sickness.

Late Night Open Thread: Snippets Concerning Ukraine

 

 

Adam is irreplaceable, of course, but I can share a few things that turn up in my aggregation sweeps…

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