DL Open Thread: Thursday, August 3, 2023

Fox Begs Trump To Show Up At Their Debate.  Maybe he’ll agree if Fox makes its ‘fair and balanced’ coverage even more fair and balanced:

Shortly after learning he was being indicted a third time, former President Donald J. Trump had a private dinner with the top leadership at Fox News as they lobbied him to attend the first Republican presidential primary debate this month, three people familiar with the event said.

The dinner between Mr. Trump, the Fox News president Jay Wallace and the network’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, was held in a private dining room at Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., according to two of the people familiar with the event. The dinner was scheduled before the indictment news.

Wonder if the terms ‘appearance fees’, ‘softball questions’, ‘no follow-ups’, came up. Along with, no doubt, several others.  Like, say, ‘no Chris Christie’.

The Senatorial Co-Conspirators.  They all stood on the floor of the Senate and made claims they knew were false.  The lead co-conspirator?: Ron Johnson:

A top aide to Sen. Ron Johnson attempted to arrange a handoff of false, pro-Trump electors from the senator to Mike Pence just minutes before the then-vice president began to count electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021.

The aide, Sean Riley, told Pence’s legislative director Chris Hodgson that Johnson wanted to hand Pence lists of the fake electors from Michigan and Wisconsin for Pence to introduce during the counting of electoral votes that certified Joe Biden’s win. The attempt was revealed in text messages obtained by the Jan. 6 select committee during its fourth public hearing on Tuesday.

The attempted handoff shows just how much former President Donald Trump and his allies tried to lean on Pence to introduce false slates of electors that could have thrown the 2020 election from Biden to Donald Trump. The committee laid out an intense pressure campaign, led primarily by Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani, to push state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors and override the will of voters in their states.

In video and live testimony, state legislative leaders in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan — all Republicans — described repeated, sometimes daily pressure from Trump and his allies in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Michigan State Senate leader Mike Shirkey recalled in video testimony how, after Trump tweeted out his phone number, he received thousands of messages from Trump supporters asking him to appoint Michigan’s electors through the legislature.

The ‘Good’ Republicans?  All of these Republicans, several of them members of Trump’s administration, told him that the Big Lie was bogus.

Picky, Picky, Picky: Can a certain bad habit lead to Covid?  Oh, nose!:

But despite all these efforts to reduce the virus’ spread, medical providers were still tempted to engage in a likely risky but all-too-common habit: Nose picking.

In a study of hundreds of hospital health care workers in the Netherlands, scientists found for the first time that nose picking was associated with an increased risk of catching SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in the pandemic’s early days.

Out of about 220 people who completed the survey, nearly 85% said they picked their nose either daily, weekly or monthly, and these individuals were more likely to be younger and male than those who reported not picking their nose. Importantly, nose picking respondents had a 17.3% chance of being infected with SARS-CoV-2, compared with 5.9% for those who didn’t. No association was found between the other behavioral and physical variables studied and catching COVID-19.

“Hypothetically, if you have the virus on your finger and you introduce it inside your nose, in combination with damaging the mucosa [the tissue that lines the nose], you might facilitate easier entrance [of the virus into the body],” Lavell noted. “But we only looked at associations, so we can’t say for sure that if you put your dirty finger in your nose that you’ll get COVID-19.”

Just thought you’d like to know.  Could be wrong, though…

The Bronze Age Pervert.  If you haven’t taken your daily microdose yet, do so now.  Wait about 10 minutes, then read this piece in its entirety.  This lead-in should be enough to keep you interested:

In 2014, the actor B. J. Novak, best known as Ryan, the weaselly temp from The Office, went on the Late Show With David Letterman and confessed to a small role he’d played 17 years earlier in the history of the American far right. The significance of this role could not have been obvious at the time, either to Novak (who was in high school) or to its victims, the bewildered patrons of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Novak had recruited a Romanian classmate with a deep voice, and together they’d recorded an audio tour for the exhibition “Tales From the Land of Dragons: 1,000 Years of Chinese Painting.” With the help of friends, they then slipped cassettes containing their tour into the museum’s official audio guides.

Art lovers must have wondered about the thick Eastern European accent that greeted them, over the twang of a Chinese string instrument. The Romanian soon became opinionated (“Personally,” he said, “I think this painting is a piece of crap”), then deranged. He alluded to his “disgusting anatomical abnormalities.” He called his listeners “decadent imperialist maggots” and confessed a desire to smash a glass case with a sledgehammer and “rip [a] scroll to shreds with my teeth, which, by the way, are extremely long and sharp … more like fangs than human teeth.” At last he offered an interlude of “idiot music” while he fumbled with his script. “This should keep you occupied, you drooling imbecile!” he bellowed at the listeners, by now either amused or complaining to management. The last several minutes were a cha-cha by Tito Puente.

I wish I’d thought of that.  But, I digress:

Exit Novak from the stage of American fascism. (His last known political donation was $1,000 to Hillary Clinton in 2016.) But the Romanian has kept in character, complete with the peevish attitude and hammed-up accent. About the time Novak went on Letterman, the Romanian began posting on social media as “Bronze Age Pervert,” a mad-in-both-senses weirdo who had escaped the Museum of Fine Arts and now aimed to take over the world. His message, delivered in tweets, podcasts, and a self-published book, mixes ultra-far-right politics, unabashed racism, and a deep knowledge of ancient Greece. He has never shown his face or admitted his real name. But I know Bronze Age Pervert, and have known him almost as long as B. J. Novak has. He’s an MIT graduate who grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. His name is Costin Alamariu.

It is hard to convey precisely what BAP believes, in part because his views are so outlandish that even when stated simply, they sound like incoherent ranting. America’s civic religion holds that all humans have inherent and equal worth, that they should not be graded according to beauty or nobility, and that they should not aim to destroy one another. BAP says this orthodoxy is exactly wrong. He argues that the natural and desirable condition of life is the domination of the weak and ugly by the strong and noble. He considers American cities a “wasteland” run by Jews and Black people, though the words he uses to denote these groups are considerably less genteel than these.

If by now you have posited that BAP has become highly-influential in the right-wing nut-o-sphere, you would be correct.  This is a great read. So, read it!

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