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Crusading against evil since ...
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Inspired by Chris’s recent photo-blogging post, I thought I’d share a less well known little gem about (the original) Ravenna: not a byzantine church interior full of mosaics, but the submerged crypt of an early medieval Church (the Basilica of San Francesco), populated by goldfish (and the inevitable coins thrown in for good luck).
Incidentally, it’s also the church where Dante Alighieri’s funeral was celebrated (he was exiled in Ravenna).
Democracy did not die in November of 2024 but the billionaire assholes have their knives out and it's up to us to keep them from their bloody work. Stay strong. We beat the fascists once and we’ll fucking do it again.
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This really isn’t the most important story right now. Trump is festering in the White House, being puppeted by billionaires. The fascists around the bloated felon are having their useful idiot sign hundreds of executive orders. The United States is, for the moment, a white nationalist oligarchy and things are going to get ugly. Elon Musk being outed as a fucking clown isn’t exactly top priority. But it’s good to know exactly just how shallow and pathetic these people are.
And it’s embarrassing for Musk, who is desperate for attention and adoration. So that’s a bonus.
But let’s rewind for a moment and get you up to speed on the sheer stupidity of this Musk story. Here we go. Once upon a time, poor little Elon so badly wanted to sit at the cool kid’s table. But even though he’s the richest man in the world and arguably has done a lot of good things1 (albeit in scumbag ways and not for the right reasons), that wasn’t enough.
You see, Elon had to be “cool.” He was a gamer, maaaaan! Just like the cool kids. Now, Musk is my age and he almost certainly games for real. He was a computer nerd in high school and college and a computer nerd who doesn’t play video games is like a jock who doesn’t sexually assault drunken girls.2
But, again, just playing video games wasn’t enough for little Elon. He had to be The Best Gamer Ever.™ Some people are naturals. Others get good from playing them obsessively. I was a game tester at Acclaim back in the mid-90s and became freakishly good at every version of NBA Jam Extreme, console and arcade. So much so that I could “cheat”3 the same way the computer could and crush it.
But that was me playing eight hours a day, five days a week (and getting paid for it!). I was also an idiot savant for that particular game. Watch me play any other basketball game for the comedy, not the skill (cause there ain’t none). So…did Musk put in the time to get that good? Did he play hours a day to become the best? Is he an idiot savant and just naturally excelled because he’s just so incredible?
Nah. He just has a lot of money and no shame.
Last year on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk claimed to be one of the world’s best Diablo IV players – and surprisingly, the leaderboards backed him up. For those that haven’t had the pleasure, Diablo is one of the most mercilessly time-intensive video games out there; you build a character and carve through armies of demons, spending hundreds of hours refining skills and equipment for maximum hellspawn-cleansing efficiency. I played it for maybe five hours last year and immediately quit, for fear that it would consume my life. Most of the people who play it are young, often male, and have plenty of time to themselves to spend on the internet and playing games – so, the exact demographic of many Musk stans.
“Hundreds of hours” is not an exaggeration. I played World of Warcraft 16 years ago and quit after a year because it was consuming my life. These games are extremely addictive and time-intensive. I was literally neglecting every other aspect of my life and realized I could either be a hardcore gamer or a good parent. I couldn’t do both.4
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Musk also claimed to be an expert player in Elden Ring, another timesink of a game. Wow! Isn’t Elon soooo cool! He’s the billionaire CEO of several companies who also spends more time on social media than any three teens put together AND a master of video games!
But when one is high on their own supply, one inevitably does something intensely stupid and Musk did exactly that:
On 7 January, Musk played Path of Exile 2, a very Diablo-like hack-and-slash game that came out towards the end of last year. His character was extremely well-equipped; suspiciously so. Viewers noted that he had better gear than some of the professional streamers who play this game all day every day, and he didn’t seem to know what their stats meant. I have not played Path of Exile 2 and so I can’t independently assess these claims – unlike Musk, apparently, I am quite happy to admit when I’m not an expert on a particular game – but within a few hours the many inconsistencies in his play and commentary were laid out exactingly on Reddit and in YouTube videos.
It’s important to understand that a lot of these games allow you to spend real-world money to buy top-tier equipment. That’s frowned upon by gamers. If you didn’t earn it, you’re a poser. Musk apparently thought having a character with all the goodies would let him fake his way through the game. But that’s like buying a jet plane to impress a girl and only knowing how to fly a Cessna. Sure, you own the jet but that doesn’t mean you know a goddamn thing about how to operate it. These games get complicated at the higher levels. That’s kind of the point of leveling up.
Musk made an even stupider mistake later. After people started to question his credibility, he kept being a fucking moron. While he was very publicly at the inauguration, someone was online playing “Musk’s” character. In other words, someone else has been putting in the time to build up little Elon’s accounts so he looks like a master gamer.
When called out on it, Musk resorted to his usual whiny little bitch routine:
Musk is unrepentant about his boosting and doesn't think he owes anyone anything: "What would I be apologizing for?" But of course he's being a bit of a naughty boy: If he really didn't care about this stuff, he would've made it clear when he was streaming with these characters, rather than being dragged into the admission by his undeniable lack of knowledge about the game and internet sleuths putting two-and-two together.
He went on to complain that "It's impossible to beat the players in Asia if you don't, as they do!" Cool story, bro. But you’re not beating anyone if someone is doing it for you.
OK, so why does this matter? On its own, it doesn’t. A fake-ass gamer being caught doesn’t really matter outside of the gaming community.
But take a step back and this tells us something about what kind of petty little bitch Elon Musk is. How needy and sad and pathetic.
I’ve written about how the losers of the right, especially Elon Musk, are just joyless and miserable. Nothing can ever fill the void in their souls. They can spend the next 20 years turning America into the theocratic Nazi fetish theme park of their dreams and they'll still be lonely and angry and miserable. It’s who they are.
Musk being so desperate for adoration that he had to pose as a master gamer is one of the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life. He is literally the richest man to ever exist and he is still small and petty. Such is the story of the Trump regime.
These are fundamentally unserious people driven by petty grievances
At the end of the day, they’re children pulling the wings off of flies and setting ants on fire with a magnifying glass because the girls at school laughed at them and daddy didn’t hug them enough. Broken little men desperate for admiration. Angry at everyone because the world doesn’t give them the respect they demand.
That doesn’t make them any less dangerous but it does make them objects of ridicule and if there is one thing fascists cannot stand, it’s being laughed at. Maybe the GOP should have thought of that before hitching their wagon to an imbecile wearing orange clown makeup and selling out to a doped-up Nazi-saluting doofus who has to cheat at video games to feel important.
There are 286 days until the first Blue Wave and it starts in Virginia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
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Teslas are crappy cars but Musk lied and cheated a broadly accepted EV market into existence. If he had stopped there, he would be remembered as the Henry Ford of our generation (and we would have glossed over the virulent racism, just like we do with Ford).
Aren’t stereotypes awful?
Games ramp up the difficulty to match your skill level. Poorly programmed games (and EVERY Acclaim game was poorly programmed) resorted to cheating if you got too good in order to make things more “challenging.”
Three years later, I logged back on for a project for a college course and it was like an alcoholic “just having one drink.” It took an immense amount of willpower not to start playing again and I dreamed about the game for weeks afterwards.
The only thing he didn’t do was invoke Hannibal Lecter.
The rest of the pieces of Donald Trump’s standard rally speech were there for his second inaugural address Monday: the meaningless lies, the empty chest-beating threats, the insane repetition of “as never before” braggadocio, a pandemic of pandering and self-promotion.
There were high points in the grotesquerie – he’s going to “take back” the Panama Canal because we have been “treated so badly” and somehow China owns it now, or something – he’s going to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, which means, we must assume, another map assaulted by a Trump sharpie, and by God, that will be that!
Designating the cartels as terrorist organizations, as he pledged, is so empty a threat, it’s as if a piece of paper in Washington D.C. will scare guys wearing respirators in a fentanyl lab down in Zacatecas. Feeding red meat to the Christian Nationalist right that there will now be two “official” genders is not just a rhetorical bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos, it will have real effects on the lives of real transgender people —and in the Rotunda of the nation’s Capitol on Martin Luther King Remembrance Day, it got a rousing cheer.
If you were looking for a theme to the new Trump presidency, he gave us one: “A new golden age of America,” which for me, anyway, invoked images of the Trump Tower lobby’s mix of knick-knacks and 80’s “luxury” writ large. It’s all he can do, really – sell an alleged idea like real estate. It’s the biggest, it’s the tallest, it’s got more floors, it’s the most expensive, it’s got more gold leaf, and as we know from Donald Trump’s past, a likelihood of bankruptcy therefore looms.
That’s the problem with bragging: you set expectations so high, there is no possible way to meet them. Ten million deportations? Gone – Poof! Drill baby drill? The oil companies have already drilled so much we’ve got more than enough oil, and he can’t add to U.S. fossil fuel production without significantly driving down the price of gas and oil and hitting his billionaire donors where it hurts: their wallets.
And Trump’s inaugural address omitted one of his greatest expectations, repeated time and again on the campaign trail, that he would end the war in Ukraine before he was inaugurated. That one slipped down the memory hole without even a whisper. He gave us a hint today that his answer to a lot of intractable problems is to do nothing at all.
This is an excerpt from my weekly Salon column. To read the rest, follow this link:
Less that 12 hours in and it’s as bad as we all feared. Withdrawal from the Paris Accords, 25% tariff on Canadian and Mexican imports, withdrawal from the WHO, AND he just pardoned 1,600 insurrectionists including the worst of the worst. Buckle up, Buttercup.
Images from the return of the first three women Israeli hostages, aged 24, 27 and 31, from Hamas captivity in Gaza after 471 days were joyful, yet worried about those still to be freed in a complicated, fragile ceasefire deal that could fall apart at any time. No one is sure how many hostages, including three Americans, remain alive.
Likewise, the pictures of bittersweet celebrations in the streets of Gaza where civilians were able to return to ruined homes and receive the first of 250 aid trucks queued up on the border were a welcome relief from the daily images of bombings. Ninety women and minor Palestinians were released as well.
As with the ceasefire announcement earlier in the week, this moment surely was one to savor — regardless of the politics and decades of strife on all sides. Among the noxious tools of war, the holding of civilian hostages without information is a clear violation of whatever morality governs even conflict.
At the designated time, the ceasefire just started — no fanfare or ceremony. Israeli troops withdrew from two Gazan towns. The guns had continued firing even into the preceding hours. Israel maintains eyes on border crossings from Israel and Egypt.
The reminders were everywhere that there always is time for renewed hostility in some new form. In Israel, rightist members of the government coalition said they were resigning in protest of stopping the fighting before it could lead to Jewish settlement and annexation of Gaza and the West Bank. Among Hamas and its related militias outside Gaza, despite significant Hamas losses, there already was bragging that a new generation of fighters already was stirring. Masked Hamas fighters were parading in Gaza’s streets, seemingly to say they were intact as a rebel force.
No one knows how the region will be governed or even how the globe can assure keeping this peace even through 42 days and release of 30 more women and children toward the next tier of negotiated hostage-for-prisoner trades, with about 30 Palestinian prisoners for each Israeli.
In Washington, supporters of outgoing Joe Biden and incoming Donald Trump continued sparring over credit for a plan that Biden had outlined months ago, but that Trump had threatened a cryptic “hell to pay” unless accepted before Monday — Gaza already is flattened. At this point, who cares about credit? Bloviating aside, it wouldn’t have happened without the agreement of the warring parties.
Maybe for once we can put the security, dignity and feeding of all the civilians involved first.
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The post Joy for Freed Hostages appeared first on DCReport.org.
Here at the Institute we are hunkering down and preparing for a blast of arctic air over the next two days. The Board of Directors gets tomorrow off in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., which is the only thing happening tomorrow that I expect to pay attention to.
A reminder that you can always help amplify stuff by posting it throughout your various social media channels. As someone who's able to track activity through at least one of my outlets, I can tell you that one just never knows where a particular post or article will catch fire. Your share could make a big difference in how widely something is read. Help folks out and share their stuff.
I am also happy to get recommendations. I read a lot, but I don't read everything, and I don't always get everything I've read into this weekly digest. So suggestions are always welcome. I had originally dreamt that maybe the comments section of these posts would fill up with "You should also read--" comments, and that hasn't happened, but the dream still lives.
In the meantime, here's this week's list.
‘Their Kind of Indoctrination’
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