Given their track record, pardon me for expecting the worst.

Also, hey look, they hired David French, meeting my very low expectations.

French served as a senior counsel for ADF, a legal advocacy group that has opposed any expansion of LGBTQ+ civil rights as an attack on so-called “religious freedom.” ADF has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

During his time as an ADF counsel, he defended a Georgia graduate student who sued her university after being told that her anti-gay “Christian beliefs” were incompatible with the standards of her desired profession as a psychological counselor. The student considered homosexuality an “immoral” “lifestyle choice.”

French signed onto a 2017 religious right document called the “Nashville Statement,” which said God designed marriage to be only between a man and a woman. The document also stated “it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism,” and called transgender identity and homosexuality a sin and “at odds with God.”

I seriously wonder how their hiring meetings operate. I’ve participated in a few here at the university, and they always being with a meeting with HR, where they go over our criteria, which are typically stuff like, “must teach organic chemistry,” with an HR person to remind us that nothing about our search criteria excludes women and minorities, and then when we’ve got a preliminary list of candidate for phone interviews, that list is sent to HR where they inspect it for bias (“why is your list only white men?”), and after we winnow the list down over the phone, we send it to HR for approval before we invite anyone for an in-person interview, while carefully justifying each exclusion (“did you drop this person from the pool because they have an accent?” “Heck no, it’s because they want to do quantum neurochemistry and we don’t have the facilities.”) Every thing is about making sure we do all our selection on the basis of assessment of ability.

The NY Times, on the other hand, seems to have a simple process in which they look for a conservative white dude, and then a Sulzberger rubber-stamps the name. “Oh, he’s a gormless bigot? Love him already.”

They still pay David Brooks for his babbling. Every choice they made after that is suspect.

Ever since the Trump administration, I’ve been standing in my shrine, chanting “BLOOD AND SOULS FOR MY LORD ARIOCH,” and leaving a chalice of blood on the altar, all in hopes of summoning the chaos lords to my aid. I may have miscalculated. I did not expect my ritual to be so effective.

The Republican party has descended into shrieking madness, unable to accomplish even the most basic tasks of governing. On the positive side, that may mean they’re going to be unable to implement the specifics of their evil agenda, but on the debit side, they’re also blocking one of the houses of congress from governing at all.

I was thinking maybe I should back off a bit on the ritual incantations, but Arioch does not treat weakness kindly, and the backlash against me, personally, would be unthinkable. I must continue. I will accept the blame if the house of representatives bursts into green flames, Lauren Boebert is elected speaker, and giant tentacled beasts manifest in the Potomac. But you knew this is where the Republicans were going all along, right?

One of the bonuses of being on Mastodon is the fediverse is actually strong about crushing bad actors. A shiny new newspaper out of Yorkshire trying to make it in an online world published a lazy, stupid opinion piece about trans people — it’s England, you know, the place is infested with transphobes — and got slammed hard for it.

Yeah, they tried to play the game of saying it didn’t break any of their rules, just like Twitter was always doing — using vague rules to allow clear-cut hatred to get a pass.

That didn’t go over at all well. The Yorkshire lights went out all over Mastodon as instance after instance killed their feed. You want to see the horror settling into the admin of this for-profit newspaper as they realize they may have just destroyed their audience? Look here.

That’s usually a good sign that you done fucked up when Nazis start camping on your doorstep. I wish more media could grasp that simple, straightforward clue.

Well, the Republicans did it again.

Three buses dropped off dozens of migrants near Vice President Kamala Harris’s residence in Washington D.C. as the area experienced record low temperatures on Saturday night, per NBC News.

About 140 migrants from countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean arrived in D.C. from Texas, Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network organizer Madhvi Bahl told NBC News, calling the incident “awful.”

Some of the migrants that arrived had to battle the 18-degree weather wearing only t-shirts, according to CNN, and they were eventually given blankets and taken to local shelters in the area.

I’m not sure what game they’re playing. Is it “Be cartoonishly villainous”? Is it “Let Democrats be humane and kind”? Whatever game it is, could they please stop using innocent human beings as their pawns?

It seems the most likely asshole behind this cruel stunt is, of course, the governor of Texas. He isn’t issuing any denials, which is a little bit damning, and he isn’t claiming credit, because he knows it’s wicked. He probably spent his childhood pulling the wings off flies and hiding the evidence from his mom.

The White House placed the blame on Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has sent busses of migrants to northern cities in the past, though it has not been confirmed that Abbott send the buses that wound up at Harris’ residence. In a statement, the White House called the deployment of the buses a “cruel, dangerous and shameful stunt.”

Somebody needs to explain to the Republicans that the callous factory owners and poor house managers in Dickens novels were the bad guys.

We watched Glass Onion this weekend. It’s good, entertaining, a little bit off-kilter compared to most whodunnits, and expresses a contemporary point of view that’s clearly becoming more common. Most of the cast are playing the true detritus of society — influencers, fashion models, vapid sportsball types, etc. — and most of them aren’t very likeable. They’re spending a weekend at an extravagantly appointed Greek island that a ridiculously rich posturing fool, Miles Bron, had purchased, when, of course, murder occurs, and the brilliant detective Benoit Blanc has to figure out who the killer is. The key to the case is when he realized that he had assumed, like everyone else, that Miles Bron was a complicated genius. After all, he’s very very very rich. But the break in the case comes when he realizes that…Miles Bron is an idiot.

As were most of the people at this party. That’s not really a spoiler, because early on you should realize yourself that most of the likely killers are stupid and superficial.

You’ll probably also instantly recognize Miles Bron as a proxy for Elon Musk. Tech billionaire who clearly doesn’t understand anything? Elon Musk. Elon has become an archetype! Lots of people have noted that resemblance, but it’s not quite true (warning: there are actual spoilers at that link).

It all makes Miles Bron the perfect villain for 2022: a tycoon far dumber than he realizes.

Thanks to recent headlines, for many viewers, Bron’s mixture of bluster, hubris and half-baked ideas will likely bring to mind Twitter owner and part-time car enthusiast Elon Musk. But, as Norton has noted, he and writer-director Rian Johnson based Bron on multiple (unnamed) real-life billionaires and tech figures, not one specific person. The movie’s root conflict — Bron’s ouster of Helen’s sister Cassandra (Monáe) from the company they co-founded based on Cassandra’s idea — evokes Mark Zuckerberg’s battles in building Facebook. His proselytizing for a not-ready-for-prime-time technology — in this case, an unstable hydrogen fuel — recalls Elizabeth Holmes. His wardrobe of T-shirts and necklaces suggests Sam Bankman-Fried and other casually attired entrepreneurs.

Like all these figures, Bron is utterly convinced of his own genius. He speaks passionately of being a “disrupter.” He portrays himself as an innovator, even though he stole his co-founder’s ideas. His island is only accessible via a glass dock that looks impressive, but is only accessible at low tide, with the local police referring to it as a “piece of s—.” He brushes aside warnings that his hydrogen fuel is too unstable — heedlessness that literally blows up in his face.

This is a promising cultural shift, that many people are coming around to the realization, like Benoit Blanc, that billionaires are just greedy, wicked, dumbasses. It’s the one good thing Musk has accomplished.

Some bad guys are getting betrayal for Christmas. There are hints that Mark Meadows may have been turned. Meadows was Trump’s chief of staff, and there are already piles of incriminating memos and text messages during the insurrection that have turned up, so maybe he’s seeing some advantages of turning into a witness for the prosecution.

“There is a very tantalizing comment in the executive summary,” said Weissmann, a former assistant U.S. attorney who worked on Mueller’s team. “It’s hard to call it that because it’s 160 pages, but in that executive summary there’s a reference to why the Department of Justice may not have sought to charge Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino with contempt.”

“If you recall, they were both referred by the committee to the Department of Justice for contempt failing to comply with a subpoena, and one of the things the report says, is it sort of speculates, but odd that it says it may be that they’re already cooperating,” Weissmann added, “and with Mark Meadows, that would be huge. I mean, he is in the place to know everything so, obviously, if not cooperating already, there is a ton of pressure that is going to be put on him.”

Meadows is a real sleaze, but I’d be happy to trade him for a more robust criminal prosecution against the big orange guy.

Also in the news — Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested, but the question has been…where is his partner-in-crime, Caroline Ellison? While SBF has been babbling to everyone, including minor league youtubers as well as the big money press, Ellison has been lying low, silent. The answer has been revealed: she’s been singing like a canary to the feds.

Two former colleagues of disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges that they helped him orchestrate a years-long scheme to defraud investors in FTX, the crypto trading platform that collapsed last month, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York said Wednesday.

The executives — Caroline Ellison, who served as chief executive of Alameda Research, a hedge fund owned by Bankman-Fried, and Gary Wang, FTX’s former chief technology officer — are cooperating with prosecutors, said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams.

You dirty, yellow-bellied rat!

I’m not complaining. None of the rats will ever be trusted again.

Remember Harvey Weinstein? I thought he was done five years ago, but no! He has been getting slowly chewed up in the judicial system — I guess we need to learn to appreciate that the cycle doesn’t actually fit into the one-hour story of a Law & Order episode, where the crime is committed before the first commercial, the culprit is arrested by the second, and then we squeeze in a twist or two and get a quick clean conviction before the final credits roll.

So, just yesterday, on 19 December 2022, Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of rape. Again, not a simple result, though — some of his accusers dropped out early, he got a hung jury on multiple instances, but in one case he was convicted of “rape, forced oral copulation and another sexual misconduct count”, verdicts that are piled on top of prior convictions in New York. I won’t go into the details, but there was one satisfying moment.

Weinstein looked down at the table and appeared to put his face in his hands when the initial guilty counts were read. He looked forward as the rest of the verdict was read.

He faces up to 24 years in prison when he is sentenced. Prosecutors and defence attorneys had no immediate comment on the verdict.

“Harvey Weinstein will never be able to rape another woman. He will spend the rest of his life behind bars where he belongs,” Siebel Newsom said in a statement. “Throughout the trial, Weinstein’s lawyers used sexism, misogyny, and bullying tactics to intimidate, demean, and ridicule us survivors. The trial was a stark reminder that we as a society have work to do.”

I sometimes despair at the sluggishness of justice in this country. I just have to hope that maybe, in five years or so, there will be a moment where Donald Trump puts his face in his hands and gets to look forward to spending the remainder of his life in prison.

Although, knowing what we do of Trump, he probably wouldn’t be going with even that much dignity. There’d probably be squalling and cursing and lying on the floor kicking. Which will be even more satisfying.

Also, I’d like to be at the point where I’m wondering, “Who? Trump? They’re still trying him?” when I’m told he’s been convicted.

…Trump ought to be prosecuted.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol voted Monday to send to Justice Department prosecutors a recommendation that former president Donald Trump be charged with four crimes: inciting or assisting an insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to make a false statement. The move has no legal weight, but marks the first time Congress has made such a referral for a former president.

Will the Justice Dept. do anything about it? Will Trump be allowed to continue to run for president? Will there be any consequences at all?

I have no confidence in justice in this country anymore.