Welcome to the Observatory! Where one tends to travel all sorts across the Tumblr-sphere and the multiverse! Looking for all sorts of sights and sounds, all while often catering to a mad science wolf's tastes...
I have an elderly family member who was the target of a lonely-hart scam. Before they foolishly mailed the crooks two brand new Mac Book Pros, I provided them proof (using a reverse image lookup) that the photos they were being provided were all 100% fake. This person’s response was, “who cares, I am having fun”. One month later, they were crying on my shoulder telling about how they owed $4K which they did not have and could not afford to pay back. I had provided this person with concrete proof that they were being lied to, and they still chose to believe the lies and to become a willing victim. Not so coincidentally, this same family member is also a rabid MAGA supporter. Every Trump supporter (who is not part of the ultra wealth Epstein class) is just as clueless. Stop being a willing victim.
The company told a judge that it would not close until June 1 or until legal issues are resolved.
Blimey, I'm out for a few hours and this happens!
Basically Paramount are framing this as their choosing to eat the $7m a day ticking fee (resulting in a potential extra $600m or so extra to the shareholders), on the basis that they believe that an evidence-based trial will either determine an anti-trust issue to be at play OR if they can come to an agreement with the AGs and WGA (which is unlikely, as both groups flatly do not want the merger to happen).
So yeah, it's now either increasingly likely that Paramount may choose to just pay the $7bn fee to exit the merger... if Oracle/Paramount's finances continue to tank, as they have been doing.
Like, the one human, who is the guest/villain of the week is the one who kills a random muppet character.
Then it's up to (let's call him) Detective Columbia, to solve the case.
I can see Kermit, in his Sesame Street era "Reporter Kermit" outfit.
Mostly because "Reporter Kermit" wears a trench-coat.
But, really, for the wildness, the messiness the randomness, and the way he disarms people with his charm: I can also see Gonzo being the titular detective.
Honestly, I see Gonzo as Closer to Columbo than Kermit any day.
Expectations that prioritize privileged identities keep women and people of color from even running for office
Rachel Leingang and Lauren Gambino at The Guardian:
Since Kamala Harris’s defeat to Donald Trump in 2024, Democrats have chased candidates who exude an ever-elusive “authenticity”. For many on the left, the answer was Graham Platner, a military veteran turned oyster farmer with a gravelly voice and deep hostility toward the political establishment.
Even as controversy after controversy emerged – racist, sexist, homophobic online posts; a tattoo widely recognized as a Nazi symbol, which he later covered up; sexually explicit messages sent to other women while he was married; and allegations from former partners of toxic and threatening behavior, which he denied – Platner’s momentum didn’t slow. It was only after a woman accused Platner of rape – which he denies – that his political support collapsed.
In the wake of his withdrawal, Democrats are asking themselves many questions, chief among them, who will replace him as their party’s nominee in the marquee Senate race? But the saga has also revived a deeper debate over whose flaws are forgivable – and whose are disqualifying.
“White men get to fail,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits young, progressive candidates to run for office. “Women do not get to make mistakes. People of color do not get to make mistakes.”
Litman said the argument was not that serious allegations should be treated differently because of a candidate’s identity, but that Platner had been granted an unusual degree of latitude to recover from earlier controversies that a female candidate or a candidate of color would probably not have been afforded.
Litman said Platner was the “political equivalent of the Fyre fest guy or Adam Neuman” – high-profile men who continued to receive support for new ventures after spectacular failure. “It’s like there is inherent trust and faith in capabilities that they don’t have to prove,” she added.
Run for Something vets political candidates before offering their endorsement. As part of its endorsement application, Litman’s organization asks candidates to disclose what a background check might turn up, and what the opposition will find, Litman said.
After going through the vetting process, women and people of color are more likely to “self-censor” or decide they would rather not run at all, Litman said, adding: “The thing that I keep coming back to is, who has permission to be authentic?”
The result, according to candidates, strategists and scholars, is a political environment that often penalizes women and people of color more harshly than their white, male counterparts.
“Folks who have been identified as hardscrabble, populist, left-of-center white guys get far more leeway than folks like me, Black progressives,” Chris Rabb, who won a closely watched Democratic primary in a deep-blue Pennsylvania House district, said last month on the Breaking Points podcast. “And that’s a double standard that is largely based on race.”
Despite a record of contemptible behavior, Platner continued to raise large sums of money from grassroots donors, pushed a sitting governor out of the primary and cruised to the Democratic nomination.
[...]
When running for office, women, and particularly women of color, often start from a deficit, needing to prove not only that they are qualified but that they fit voters’ expectations of what leadership looks like, said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women in Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. “Who can best run authentically on all of their many identities are those whose identities are privileged across the board,” she said.
Dittmar pointed to research on how women decide whether to run in the first place. A 2008 survey of state legislators found women described their decision as “relationally embedded” – weighing how a campaign would affect their families, communities and careers – while men were more likely to run simply because they wanted the job.
Research has found that when women do run for office, they are more likely to face scrutiny over their personal lives. Women are held to a higher moral and ethical standard – a phenomenon the Barbara Lee Family Foundation called the “character pedestal”, in which voters expect women to be more honest and trustworthy than men. When women are accused of wrongdoing, “the fall from the pedestal is longer and harder”, Dittmar said, referencing the work of the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake.
As more women run for office, some see signs that political gender norms are changing, particularly since the 2016 presidential election, when the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server became a defining issue of her campaign – immortalized by the “but her emails” political meme – even as Trump faced a long record of controversies, including multiple accusations of sexual misconduct.
On the left, voters are bucking convention and embracing a new crop of unabashedly progressive – and decidedly aggressive – candidates. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist and the daughter of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, succeeded in toppling a senior Democratic incumbent in a New York congressional primary despite scrutiny over social media posts she had deleted, but had been archived. In the posts, she frequently and profanely disparaged the Democratic party and its leaders, including Kamala Harris, questioned the origins of Covid-19 and criticized interracial relationships.
As a first-time political candidate, Kat Abughazaleh spent months worrying that someone would unearth her “middle school livejournal fanfic account”.
Great article in The Guardian on why white men like Graham Platner are afforded many fuck-ups, while women and POC get far less latitude for mistakes.
Run For Something’s co-founder Amanda Litman said it best: “White men get to fail. Women do not get to make mistakes. People of color do not get to make mistakes.”
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles.
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database.
Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July.
Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.”
Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check.
A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas.
She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head.
A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April.
The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount.
And the cameras keep falling.
They let Garth Ennis do a sequel to the one-shot he did for the marvel zombies anthology a year or two ago, which centered on Frank Castle attempting to mercy kill a zombified Daredevil after the latter is captured by human survivors and made to participate in a zombie pit-fighting ring. “Undefeated” played against the (overblown, only conditionally accurate) idea that Garth Ennis hates superheroes, since the entire thematic backbone of the thing is that Frank is apparently the only guy left on earth to whom the character of the heroes while alive still means anything, and he’s taken it upon himself to punish the survivors who mock and degrade them in the aftermath of their failure to save the world.
The new short features a zombified hulk killing people with prehensile intestines (alluded to but never illustrated in the original short) and the comments on instagram are full of people doing the “this thing sucks (coolest thing ever)” song and dance. Where is your sense of malicious whimsy
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