Imagine at one and the same time being paid 17 million dollars per year for your supposed knowledge, skill and intellect
AND
Being so childish, so unused to adversity in any form including the mildest of viewpoints divergent from your own, and so fucking massively unprofessional that you cry in a meeting when the company you work for is purchased by somebody with no plans to close it down.
This combination of spoilt entitlement and infantile lack of self control, of excessive reward for excessively adolescent behaviour, explains more than anything why the woke corporate business model is only possible via massive corruption.
These children couldn’t earn above the minimum wage if being judged solely on the basis of competence. And deep down, they know it too.”
Twitter’s top lawyer reassures staff, cries during meeting about Musk takeover
Vijaya Gadde, a key executive involved in decisions to remove former President Donald Trump and ban political advertising, expressed uncertainty about the future of the platform.
Monday was an emotional day at Twitter — even for its executives.
Shortly after billionaire Elon Musk bought the powerful social media platform, top Twitter lawyer Vijaya Gadde called a virtual meeting with the policy and legal teams she oversees to discuss what the new ownership could mean for them.
Gadde cried during the meeting as she expressed concerns about how the company could change, according to three people familiar with the meeting. She acknowledged that there are significant uncertainties about what the company will look like under Musk’s leadership. …
Gerard van der Leun remembers partying with Hunter Thompson back in the Day. Good times!
Warren liked to drink and spend other people’s money on himself and writers. Naturally, such a honey pot was going to attract Hunter Thompson. Thompson liked to drink, snort coke, and spend other people’s money on articles he might or might not write. A favorite item from the day was the time Hunter rented a car on Scanlan [Magazine]’s credit card. He then parked it next to one of his North Beach Beatnik bimbo’s apartments and went to and fro with it for a number of months. When the time came to return the car it was discovered that the rental fee would be much much more than Hinkle and Scanlan’s wanted to spend. Their solution? After a night of beer, bourbon, and bongs, they drove the car out to the end of a pier in San Francisco, stepped out, and let it drive itself into the bay. Then they reported it stolen.
Beer. Bourbon. Bongs. Bay. What can I say? Good times.
Sometimes the small staff working with me at Organ and the larger staff working the con with Warren at Scanlan’s would decide to drink together. We liked to drink at our bar of choice up at the end of the alley, Andre’s.
One night, when Hunter was in town, we all went up to Andre’s for a non-stop night of drinking.
Andre was an elegant French-Canadian who ran an elegant bar and restaurant. He was old-school and could mix any drink anyone could name and it was always perfect. He was polished, polite, and a good listener. But he was a pro and usually knew when you’d had enough. Then he politely asked you to leave. If you ignored him, he had a very large mallet with a three-foot handle behind the bar and you didn’t ignore that.
So there we were, eight or ten of us I think, hanging around and drinking with “Hunter S. Thompson, man!” And, as they would, Warren and Hunter got into a drinking contest — sort of like watching a match between Ali and Frazier in their prime.
It went on and on long past the point where I could or would keep up. It was getting late and Andre announced to the assembled cross-eyed drunks, that he was giving us our last round. The regulars took him at his word, but Hunter had to push the envelope. Except with Andre, there was no envelope. Just a polite, “Non.”
The next thing I know there’s a gun in Hunter’s hand and three rounds blasted into the ceiling of the bar. (Did I mention that there were apartments where people were sleeping above the bar?)
Then I think there was a blur of Andre, in suit and tie, coming over the bar with the mallet. Then more blurs and everybody is out on the street dragging a semi-conscious Hunter back down the alley mumbling something about getting his gun back. After that I don’t remember much and, frankly, haven’t thought all that much about Thompson in the nearly 50 years that have intervened.
Vijai Maheshwari, in the World edition of the Spectator, finds ordinary Russians in Moscow full of belligerence and resentment and concludes that Westerners had better get out of Russia before it’s too late.
Most Russian men consider Ukrainian women to be more beautiful, feminine, and kind than Russian women. Ukraine’s embrace of America and hatred of Russia thus strikes them as supremely tragic, because in many respects warmer and romantic Ukraine represents the best of Russia. Putin has always channelled Russia’s dark subconscious, and his obsession with Ukraine springs from a shared yearning for a lost paradise.
Ukraine is his Helen of Troy, seduced by the cunning Americans; the military build-up on his country’s border in February was his Trojan Horse. He had been certain that he would overrun the weaker Ukrainians with his surprise attack and subdue them with the shock and awe of his sophisticated missiles, but things haven’t gone to plan. He might not even be able to capture the Donbass, given his failure to take over Mariupol after weeks of brutal shelling. His economy is tanking, and he might have to eventually settle for an unpopular peace deal.
But now that the beast inside Russians has been unleashed, it can’t be corked back again. Most Russians floundered under capitalism. The average salary outside Moscow was just a few hundred dollars a month. They could handle the poverty but missed the glory of being a superpower that dominated the world. Russia’s great poet Anna Akhmatova summed up their thinking this way: “If I can’t have love, if I can’t have peace, give me a bitter glory.”
Since the onset of war, Russians have given up on capitalism and are now braying for empire again. And as Western brands scramble for the exits and time runs backwards, many will welcome a return to the past. They will not stop now despite the mounting costs. They have been primed for victory and Putin must deliver.
Moscow’s Westernized women are horrified but helpless to stop their grandfathers from turning back time. By the time I left Moscow for Dubai, and eventually New York, sixteen days after the invasion, Russia already smelled like the Soviet Union of yore.
Moscow was eerily silent, like New York during the pandemic, and felt again like the city I remembered from the early 1990s, its restaurants and public spaces deserted as its people stayed home and pondered the future darkly. The cinemas had stopped showing Hollywood films, the city’s gleaming modern art museums had paused exhibitions, the Westerners had mostly fled, and the only foreigners were from “friendly” countries like China or India. It was back to “vodka and selyodka” (vodka and picked herring), and I knew by then that a majority preferred this reality to a Russia enthralled by Western consumerism. Even the jokes now had the self-deprecating irony of those from the late Soviet era.
“Do you know why we’re now going to be the healthiest nation on earth?” joked my taxi driver on the way to the airport. “That’s because we don’t eat American fast food anymore.”
I called my landlord in Moscow from New York two weeks later to inform him that I wouldn’t be renewing the lease on my pricey flat in central Moscow. He wasn’t pleased that I’d left Moscow on such short notice but answered without missing a beat.
“You’ll come back to Russia. Life is better here.”
His confidence sent a chill through me, and I realized that neither Ukraine nor the West will live in peace so long as Russia remains proud and defiant. It’s clear that sanctions won’t change Russia’s mind; they’ll just encourage a backlash against the West. The recent meme of Russian glamor girls cutting up their expensive Gucci bags in protest over the luxury brand’s “Russophobia” is a symptom of this angry pushback against the West and its desire to cancel Russia.
For many years, Michel Houellebecq was patronized by the French literary establishment as an upstart, what with his background in agronomy rather than literature, his miserable demeanor, his predilection for science fiction and his gift for unyieldingly saying the unsayable, especially about relations between the sexes.
That’s all changed now. He won the Prix Goncourt in 2010 for The Map and the Territory and in 2019 was elevated to the Légion d’Honneur. The Nobel cannot be long delayed, the committee after all having honored the equally ornery V.S. Naipaul and J.M. Coetzee.
Houellebecq’s new novel Anéantir, published in January in a luxury edition of 300,000 copies, was a quasi-official event in France, heralded by a reverential two-part interview in Le Monde in which he confided that he was a bit of an alcoholic and quite the tart, since he wrote not for money or applause but to be loved.
Some 736 pages long, Anéantir begins as almost a spy thriller, set around the upcoming election, but then morphs into a study of the treatment of the old and helpless, followed by a harrowing account of fatal illness, alleviated only by the return of conjugal love to a couple long estranged. Houellebecq being Houellebecq, it is specified that the dying man enjoys a dreamy blowjob lasting three hours — but the novel is otherwise chaste and grave, Houellebecq signing off by saying it is time
Yet although widely translated in Europe already, no English version seems yet to be scheduled. That’s a pity, not only because it will appear after the period in which it is set, but it was the enthusiasm of English-language readers that did much to compel French critics to acknowledge that Houellebecq was, whether they liked it or not, their writer with most impact internationally. …
Kurt Schlichter contends (correctly) that losing to today’s Left would be simply too disgraceful.
Have you noticed the absolute freakshow quality of the people who want to keep us in chains? Perhaps it’s one thing to be repressed by people who are at least nominally badass, like Romans or Mongols. But these geebos who make up the Democrat Party’s loudmouth wing? The sexually hopeless toads outraged because other people who might someday know the loving touch of another human can’t whack their babies? No. Not only does their tyranny fail the freedom test, it fails the aesthetic test.
We simply cannot allow ourselves to be serfs toiling in the fields of a bunch of people who, in any just and sane society, would spend their lives living in fear of getting wedgies for being so bizarre.
Look, I’m not saying that our society should bring back bullying nerds. I am simply observing that when nerds were busy trying to avoid swirlies in the boys’ room, they did not have the time to devote to getting their groomer allies access to Kindergarteners. If Melvins and Pointdexters living in fear is the price of little kids not getting chatted up by pedo-adjacent strange-os, I say that’s a bargain.
All leftists are insufferable, but this current crop is insufferable in many diverse ways. It’s not just the ones who defile or mutilate themselves to get their parents’ attention. It also includes ones that don’t tatt up, who appear normal until they open up their kale holes. Think Nina Jankowicz. On the surface, she looks like any other childless, middle-aged Chardonnay-guzzler who is pushing 40 but has failed thus far to earn the love of a man. But when she starts talking, yikes. And just look at the antics of that fascist disinformation girl. She sings show tunes. She’s into Harry Potter – non-threatening sensitive and magical boys are sooooo dreamy. She’s also eager to shove you into a train car headed to a gulag, and as it pulls away from the station she’ll be shouting at you ruffians to use your inside voices.
That’s right – the mediocre girl who played the lead in your high school’s production of “Hello, Dolly!” – which you skipped to go pound Buds with your pals like normal people – is the harbinger of tyranny.
Ugh, that’s so sad. Tyranny is intolerable even if you are facing a worthy foe. But tyranny by this kind of over-credentialed, shame-free dork? No way. Never.
And that’s true of the rest of the salty commie crew. Pierced beings with blue hair. Fat-positive behemoths in spandex. Daddy-issue goofs of all genders who can’t do a push up. If we are going to lose our country and our freedom, it can’t be to this gallery of goblins. At least with proper enemies – like, say, the Hessians – you could get some satisfaction shoving a bayonet into their guts. With these weebles, you fail to call them by their bespoke pronouns and they collapse into a sobbing heap. Where’s the challenge?
We simply cannot lose to these people. It’s undignified.
And it’s unnecessary. The only way they win is if we let them win. They can’t take a punch, and the whole caste of them – which probably numbers a couple million across the country – collectively probably has access to about as many guns as the average Trump voter. The only threat they pose is to fetuses, and pretty soon only in Moloch-friendly states like Cali and New York. They talk big about revolutions and insurrections, but they have neither the cold steel or the upper body strength to pull it off.
What are they going to do – pester us into submission? Yes, that’s actually their plan. They really think that if they call us “racist” enough, if they moan enough about patriarchy, if they bleat enough about how us saying what we think is “unsafe” we will simply give up.
