Susan Crawford Wins in Wisconsin

 

CNN calls the Wisconsin Supreme Court race for Susan Crawford pic.twitter.com/qtR9KqYanf

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 2, 2025

Elon Musk spent about $20 or 25million in Wisconsin on behalf of Brad Schimel, and while I won't go so far as to say his "assistance" was an absolute menace to his candidate, it surely did not help. 

I think it would be great if we could all point to the results here as basically a referendum on Musk and his influence with Trump itself, but I don't want to take away that message too cleanly. I think it's more like a referendum on whether Mr. Moneybags can just start throwing his weight around without people getting really suspicious as to why.

When some out-of-state clown with a cheese hat on wants to tell people a state Supreme Court seat is about the fate of civilization and pours millions out in a kind of ostentatiously scammy-looking sort of way, it kind of feels suspicious, doesn't it? 

Like, what makes it so important to HIM, anyway?

Anyway, that's just something everyone should keep in mind for next election. Maybe a whiff of Musk can be a problem for the GOP. 

Unauthorized Thoughts and Declined Prayers

 

Generally, when a stranger is murdered in cold blood, there's at least a muted "Damn shame!' sort of reaction. If a man with a family dies at the age of 50, why, you can certainly say "That's far too young, that poor man's family!" (Not that he was poor--unfortunate, but not poor.) You don't actually see people writing folk songs about the killer and posting them to social media, or see people back out of the search for the killer. 

What has happened, if one can at all "read the room", is that the murdered CEO has become a stand-in for a parasitical industry. Our health insurance system isn't a "health care system"--it's a promise to pay for protection. Some of your health care bill will be paid. Not all. Your course of treatment can be affected by your insurance company. 

This can and does result in bad (fatal or crippling) outcomes. Of course, people feel some way about that. 

And the result of that feeling may look very cold-blooded. It isn't. It's rather hot, actually.

Something Inauthentic Here

 

This is wild. Particularly the part where he says "my friends and I coordinated a bank run" followed by "so then I bought shares of the bank thinking I could profit off the run". pic.twitter.com/67iwCrE6yj

— @chimeracoder@mastodon.social🦦 🏳️‍🌈 (@chimeracoder) March 12, 2023

While I appreciate the idea that people with money in SVB aren't necessarily bad actors who deserve to lose their savings (above the insured amount) and that the majority should be "made whole", there is something that feels inauthentic about the collapse of this bank and Signature Bank (which has a lot of crypto money in it).  I don't trust what I'm looking at because of the people I'm looking at. There are people wealthy enough to lose some portion of their vast fortune and still be fine--a bank run is just an investment in fuckery.

I remember back in December I was snarky about a Russian bank run. These things can be precipitated by rumors. I feel like the bank management and certain investors need to be looked at. This bank run has nothing to do with "wokeness" specifically (how do you even connect the dots on that one? A bank certainly could do woke shit and be responsible enough to have a risk assessment officer--these guys didn't) so much as deregulation and gambling in the old savings establishment again. In the meanwhile, the people who served us junk bonds and the dot com and housing bubbles really don't have anything they need to be telling us about moral hazard right now. 

There is no good reason there should be any "contagion" from this thing. Doom-saying about it...feels inauthentic.