Notices by Kim Scheinberg (kims@mas.to), page 6

From the NYT obituary of Bernard Kerik:

"In 2004, he was named by the president to head the Department of Homeland Security. But he withdrew one week later because, he said, he had employed an undocumented immigrant as a babysitter and neglected to pay payroll taxes."

It is impossible for me to convince my kids who came of age during the Trump presidency that this was a normal thing that happened in politics

Even minor scandals were once considered career-limiting. Imagine...

Roy Wood Jr not pulling punches

"What words of encouragement do you have for America's youth?"

"Leave"

"Oh please..."

"Leave. America is one big homeowner's association. You can't even go to Canada because that's about to be America too, so you got to find somewhere else to go for a little while and give it a generation."

<sarc> "Thanks for those words"

"I don't say it to be pessimistic. I say it to hopefully activate people into seeing what's going on."

https://youtube.com/shorts/xmNhe1yL0Js?feature=shared

Pretty wild to be living in a time when humans are being forced to work in order to even be considered deserving of life or even to be considered human at all, while simultaneously human labor is being systematically eliminated from the concept of work.

The car dealer that cheats you on the inspection report for your car, cheats you again on your loan, and cheats you a third time on warranty service will have more money to advertise and market than the honest seller across the street. The supplement-pushing grifter has more money to spend on marketing than the company that makes real medicine.

28/

The scammers are lining up to get their scams okayed - like Verizon, which wants to bring back the long-banned practice of locking your phone so that it only works on their network and refusing to unlock it:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/verizon-tries-to-get-out-of-merger-condition-requiring-it-to-unlock-phones/

Verizon had to promise to unlock its customers' phones as a condition of being given exclusive control over billions' worth of the public spectrum, and in exchange for the right to buy its competitor Tracphone, in a nakedly anticompetitive merger.

11/

Donald Trump is many things: a racist, an authoritarian, a rapist... but what he is, and has always been, above all and from the very start, is a scammer:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donald-trump-alter-ego-barron/2016/05/12/02ac99ec-16fe-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/28/cheaters-ever-prosper/#caveat-america

1/

The election of Donald Trump feeds many needs in the right wing coalition: the libidinal pleasure of seeing trans people, migrants, and anyone who isn't white getting terrorized by masked thugs and swivel-eyed loons; massive tax cuts for the oligarch class, especially those who (like Trump) inherit their wealth; the gutting of public education and the destruction of the barrier between church and state.

2/

@jenniferplusplus @inthehands
You're right. I was stuck on a single memory of something he did a decade ago that made an indelible impression, and I needed this thread to update my priors

Thanks for pushing me along

@inthehands @jenniferplusplus
I was a Quora regular from 2012-17 and there were lots of, "What's it like to work for Elon Musk?" qs which often got first-hand replies

The general consensus was that he was a horrific boss at Tesla and an inspiring one at SpaceX. My guess is he was far more hands on at Tesla

That said, looking at more recent answers, his personalities seem to have aligned and he's a horror everywhere

So I still defend the behavior, but not Elon

@inthehands @jenniferplusplus
I guess what I'm trying to say is, if we separate the behavior from the actor, the behavior is something that most of us want more of, rather than less

Yet here we all are criticizing the behavior. Rather than think of it in terms of the always wrong stopped clock, I think of it more as, "Even a blind squirrel trips over an acorn once in a while"

What he's doing might be public deflection, but it's still a positive for his employees

This does not excuse the press coverage calling SpaceX's Starship failure a "partial success"

That said, I've had bosses who yelled at employees when something failed, and I've had bosses who took the, "Let's use this as a learning experience and get it right next time" approach

And let me tell you, the latter bosses were a joy to work for, and got much better long-term results. The tyrants were a nightmare

Reflexively criticizing the humane approach seems weird

@ai6yr @3janeTA
Every time I see adult diapers, I'm reminded that as of 2011, adult diapers have outsold baby diapers in Japan and continue to do so

@inthehands
I was just being playful with my subtoot comment. I know it was in good faith

You should do whatever best helps you communicate what you're trying to say. I put stuff out there for people to engage with how they choose. Link or not as you see fit

@inthehands
Took three years but I've finally been subtooted. Now I know I'm home...

@hth
It's also the (only?) country that did this

https://www.vox.com/2015/6/9/8751267/iceland-capital-controls

Ivies, those hotbeds of liberalism where >40% of graduates go into finance and consulting. Not sure why conservatives want to mess with that formula

"The Trump administration has demanded that Harvard hire additional conservative professors or risk losing even more of its federal funding. (Even as it made that demand, it insisted that Harvard adopt “merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof.”)"

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/conservative-professors-dei-initiatives/682944/?gift=hz3-sGceWBq1O6I5tAqH166RwZ2WPGtYI9PCRMlR6Ag&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

The city of Munich knows who the real heroes are

Freddie-Mercury Str. indeed!

@feelnotes @wdlindsy
That's fair criticism and it was inappropriate of me to comment based on reading the summary

@mathaetaes @ai6yr
I think one of the most disheartening lines in the piece is this one:

“She’s a person in our community that is needed, and we want her home — this is up to God to help bring Carol home.”

Yes, that's a great plan. Leave it to god rather than accepting your own culpability and agency in this

@wdlindsy
I spend a lot of time feeling and thinking about moral injury, but there's something grotesque about focusing on how devastating this is for Jews

The ability of colonizers to focus on how harmful the colonization is on *them* is a mind-boggling level of narcissism