Things Are Going to Slide

 

Giggleheaded Goofus, Elon Musk, has not had a brilliant day. His Tesla stock did a really big slide. His Twitter acquisition, which he wants us to call "X", was shut down a lot because of an apparent DDOS attack. Musk wanted to allege that the IP addresses of the attack were from the "Ukraine area" and this is when, not for the first time, I understood Musk is a dumbass. Because really? Are the haxxors using their IP address and not masking with a VPN or whatever? And wouldn't it be wild if the haxxors were from the exact place kind of depending on Starlink to work, and are kind of mad at Elon, but not suicide-mad yet?

And how isn't the Ukraine area also possibly Russian invaders? Since Russia has competent cyberwarfare capabilities, not that our Department of Justice under Pam Bondi is fixing to bother with it. 

Would it just be a stitch if Russia decided to attack TrumpWorld just when they decided for the worst of all possible reasons it was time to make nicey-nice? 

Anyway, Teslas and their dealerships are being protested and vandalized. 

Almost as if that brand was the clearest signifier of Musk himself, and attacking it was the clearest way to attack him. And it could and probably is organic--even if Elon wants to insist on the idea of astroturfing. ActBlue--blah blah blah. George Soros, more blah blah blah. Musk isn't funny or original. 

Elites Bother Donald Trump

In a soon-to-be-deleted Tweet, the President-elect groused that the cast of the hit Broadway play Hamilton was somehow rude and insulting to VP-elect Mike Pence in delivering the short comment that was written when it became understood that some comment might be needed.

It is a pity that Brandon Victor Dixon, who gave those prepared remarks that weren't even really condescending or even rude, didn't have a TelePrompter handy to speak as prettily in public as we all know Donald Trump can sometimes do, but you know what? It doesn't even matter. Except maybe it does to Donald Trump? After all, keeping up appearances like being Presidential and not still on the profit-machine might matter. Stepping onto a national stage--not a mere Broadway stage, is scary, and maybe one needs to keep ones friends and family close. And maybe even ones future combatants/negotiators/allies/etc.  closer?  But it sometimes looks all wrong without the appropriate misdirection onto those big theater meanies who make Mike Pence feel bad.

Donald Trump needs to know he is the show now, and we are all watching him and his VP-Elect. Because Pennsylvania Ave is very different from Broadway, or Fifth Avenue. And he should expect to continue to be dogged by elites. And not-so-elites. That's democracy and free speech at work. And whining about it is very bad form.

The Trump Problem 2: What the Elites Don't Know, but the Base Understands

This morning, the Oracle of Wasilla Sarah Palin made a curse against Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and all his doin's, to the effect of her being in support of Rep. Ryan's being primaried and cast in the place of darkness, there to wail and gnash his teeth, like Eric Cantor was. 

This is not an absurd thing to say. There is a Republican challenger for Ryan's seat, and if I know anything about the good folks of Wisconsin, it's that they voted for Walker three times and produced a Glenn Grothman, so? Maybe the pride of Janesville should feel a little discomfort. (Or maybe, if freed from having to appeal to everybody as the guy both begged to become Speaker of the House and arm-twisted until he had to deny wanting to make a run at the convention for president in the event it was contested, the sigh of relief.) But how vast this former VP candidate's (Ryan, I mean, not Palin) heresy is depends on your POV.

After all, when I derided Paul Ryan's response to Trump's nomination as he was "just not ready" as being willing to be brought to "yes",  I considered that he was going to get there, eventually, but it was just possible that he was aware of a certain ticket with a flashy, but under-informed VP candidate with great right-wing bona fides, but which, nonetheless, lost to a celebrity-quality POC with a funny foreign name and a gaffe-prone 70's vintage Democrat Congresscritter.  And even Sarah Palin knows the weaknesses of that particular ticket. In other words--Ryan is just being cagey about whether the entire country is ready to swallow what the GOP base drinks in every day.

I remember when that very question was very much on the minds of a handful of high-profile names in the GOP circa 2009. Rep. Eric Cantor, former Gov. Mitt Romney, and former Gov. Jeb Bush were all keen to take what they learned from the post-mortems of the 2008 election and try to reconcile it with a listening tour of the Republican base.

There's a pretty impressive "Where are they now?" Romney lost in 2012, Rep. Cantor lost in a primary, and Jeb Bush's 2016 Presidential Primary bid was a subject of pity and awe. Whatever they were listening to--it could not help them.

Polls about Mississippi and Alabama and the Difficulty of Getting It

I share Heather's reservations about this clip from Bill Maher's show this past weekend:

Charles Murray has Discovered White People are Not a Monolith, Laments.

I am probably going to my library to read this one for teh lulz; the author, Charles Murray, who with Richard J. Herrnstein wrote the notorious The Bell Curve, has written a book on the startling notion that there is a difference between white people of different classes.

The rich, they're different.  Whodathunk?

Anywhoo, I found out about this thing of brilliance and scholastic achievement from both Roy Edroso and Erik Loomis today, and I am already astonished that this is where The Bell Curve's author wound up. Would working class whites like myself be better behaved if we spoke the same language as rich schmucks like Mitt Romney? Okay, player, you've got me. Or wait, is he saying they should learn how to talk down to us? Huh! Let me pause and reflect on that. If my betters, like George Herbert Walker Bush could only pretend to like pork rinds, or if his scion, could only be NASCAR-compatible, wouldn't we all get off the meth and lead more productive lives? 

Um, no?  But since I haven't read this, and all I really have is some of his recent dumbfuckery, let's look at some of that:

We are watching the maturation of the cognitive stratification that Richard J. Herrnstein and I described in "The Bell Curve" back in 1994. When educational and professional opportunities first opened up, we saw social churning galore, as youngsters benefited from opportunities that their parents had been denied. But that phase lasted only a generation or two, slowed by this inescapable paradox:

The more efficiently a society identifies the most able young people of both sexes, sends them to the best colleges, unleashes them into an economy that is tailor-made for people with their abilities and lets proximity take its course, the sooner a New Elite -- the "cognitive elite" that Herrnstein and I described -- becomes a class unto itself. It is by no means a closed club, as Barack Obama's example proves. But the credentials for admission are increasingly held by the children of those who are already members. An elite that passes only money to the next generation is evanescent ("Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations," as the adage has it). An elite that also passes on ability is more tenacious, and the chasm between it and the rest of society widens.

Oh fuck. He discovered the 1%, and now thinks they're a bloody meritocracy just because they've figured out the secret handshake.