Month: December 2024

This year’s unlamented billionaire

WOOF.  That is quite the ratio. The late Brian Thompson has kind of turned into 2024’s Stockton Rush, an obscenely rich man who came to a premature end and no one seems unduly unhappy about that fact. The main difference is that this time someone else did it:

The CEO of UnitedHealthcare, one of the US’s largest health insurers, was shot dead on Wednesday in midtown Manhattan, police confirmed in a press conference.
Brian Thompson, 50, was shot outside the Hilton hotel at 1335 Avenue of the Americas just after 6.45am after arriving early for the company’s annual investor conference. A man wearing a mask approached him and fired at him repeatedly, police said.
Police said they believe Thompson was targeted in the attack. This was a “brazen, targeted attack”, New York’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said, adding that this “does not appear to be a random act of violence”. […]
Officials have said that no arrests have been made yet and that the investigation is continuing. The motive is currently unknown.
Thompson’s wife, Paulette Thompson, told NBC News her husband had received threats.
“There had been some threats,” she said. “Basically, I don’t know, a lack of coverage? I don’t know details. I just know that he said there were some people that had been threatening him.”

I can’t imagine why anyone would want to threaten this guy… oh, UnitedHealthcare is one of the worst health insurers in the US? Bad even by American standards?

Oh. I mean… I suppose that indicates they are paying two thirds of the claims they get, but still. From that Gizmodo article:

Other comments got more personal, with people sharing their stories of being denied coverage by UnitedHealthcare and having to pay large sums of money to survive: “My uncle paid you guys for 22 years without missing a single payment and then when he died you denied his life insurance claim. You even had the nerve to cash a check from him the week he died. Scum bags. Sometimes you get what you deserve. I hope all of you suffer the way my mom has for the past year she has had to endure the nightmare of losing her brother and then almost filing for bankruptcy due to your denial of a life insurance claim paid punctually and faithfully for 22 years. Then you turn around and spit on his corpse. Your empathy claim has been denied. I hope you all get what’s coming.” […]
UnitedHealthcare insures over 49 million Americans, and the company generated $281 billion in revenue last year, according to the Associated Press. The insurance giant is notorious for denying coverage, deploying an artificial intelligence tool that has an error rate of roughly 90%, according to a lawsuit filed last year.

Ah. Gizmodo also tries to rationalise why people are enjoying the show:

It makes sense that Americans might be more loose with their sense of decorum these days. The re-election of Donald Trump to the presidency signaled a kind of right-wing populist nihilism as the Republican leader embraced conspiracy theories, threatened to go after his political enemies, and demonized immigrants in wildly racist ways. The sometimes celebratory attitude of such a broad swath of Americans on Wednesday felt like an embrace of that same sort of nihilism.

But I don’t really believe that cos all this “lol, fuck this guy” reaction online is similar to what we saw last year with the whole Titan sub thing and I don’t think we can entirely blame that on Mushroom Cock’s ascension. Back when Titan happened, this piece speculated on the frankly unpleasant humour people found in it and noted that the amounts of money involved in buying a place on the death ship and how almost all of them were billionaires made it hard to empathise with them. Billionaires are so far removed from most people that even when something objectively terrible happens to them we just can’t care too much about them. I find myself feeling about this, too, like I did with the Titan story; I remain kind unhappy about the idea of actively enjoying someone’s murder, and I remain equally unable to extend fellow feelings towards Brian Thompson. Especially since the latter was actively involved in damaging other people’s lives.

Anyway, for some reason UHC appears to have scrubbed all the information about their other board members from its website, almost like they’re worried someone might go after them next or something. But, from what I read online, Thompson was in town for some company board meeting or something, and the meeting went ahead at the scheduled time anyway despite the fact that Thompson had, you know, just been murdered outside the building where the meeting was going ahead. If this bit is true, then that really gives this sort of vibe:

So maybe the board were less bothered about him than they were themselves? I don’t know. Fuck the lot of them. I’m out of thoughts and prayers for these people.

Young berks

It’s been a long time since I regularly watched TYT, which I was a lot more into back in the days of Mushroom Cock’s first go round, and I always thought they were basically good but inclined to shrillness. That was what put me off them rather than bad hot takes or anything like that. But the hot takes do seem to have been getting worse in the last few years, especially from Ana Kasparian who’s been on the same “leaving the left” trip she used to blast Dave Rubin for… and now it looks like brother Cenk is following a similar more TERFy course himself. Oof. Joe, my housemate, is particularly furious cos he was actually a paying member of their network for a while, so he feels quite betrayed, moreso than me cos he invested in them. I don’t blame him. Cenk fucking embarrassed himself on that appearance on his nephew’s channel, which is excerpted at some length in this video; Joe is especially incensed at him for accusing Sam Seder of being a grifter, and I’m sure that Sam’s not rigorously perfect but goddamn, “grifter” is the last word I’d use of him… but it is a word I think we’ll see aimed at TYT more often after this. I expect John Iadarola will quit TYT after this bullshit to focus on his own thing and I don’t think he’ll be the last one…

Go west no homo

Village People’s Victor Willis okay with ‘Y.M.C.A’ for Trump and the gays

Victor Willis, one of the Village People’s founders, posted to social media on Monday defending President-elect Donald Trump’s use of the song “Y.M.C.A.” and threatening legal action against any news organization that labels the iconic tune a gay anthem.
Willis, who portrayed the cop with a nightstick in the band, cowrote “Y.M.C.A.” with Jacques Morali who provided the music while Willis provided the lyrics. Morali died of AIDS-related illness in 1978*.
Willis acknowledged he had asked Trump to stop using the song after receiving “over a thousand complaints” from fans.
“With that many complaints, I decided to ask the President-Elect to stop using Y.M.C.A. because his use had become a nuisance to me,” Willis wrote in his post to social media on Monday.
Willis said he reconsidered his decision after seeing so many other artists withdraw the rights to their songs from the President-elect. He said the decision to reissue the licensing agreement with Trump proved financially sound.
“Y.M.C.A. has benefited greatly from use by the President Elect. For example, Y.M.C.A. was stuck at #2 on the Billboard chart prior to the President Elect’s use. However, the song finally made it to #1 on a Billboard chart after over 45 years (and held on to #1 for two weeks) due to the President Elect’s use,” Willis wrote. “The financial benefits have been great as well as Y.M.C.A. is estimated to gross several million dollars since the President Elect’s continued use of the song. Therefore, I’m glad I allowed the President Elect’s continued use of Y.M.C.A. And I thank him for choosing to use my song.”

(*sic. It was actually 1991.)

I like the bit at the end where he stresses he actually supported Kamala Harris in the recent debacle, it’s not like he approves of Trump… just the amount of money Trump’s made him. I like, too, that he’s happy for gay folks to consider it a “gay anthem”, but don’t you dare actually call it that or he’ll sue you.

As for another debacle that has “reached a fever pitch” amid Trump’s continued use of “Y.M.C.A.,” according to Willis, the singer wrote that any branding of the track as a “gay anthem” is “completely misguided” and “damaging to the song.” He also threatened legal action against “each and every news organization that falsely refers” to it as such starting in January 2025, although he personally doesn’t mind if “gays think of the song as their anthem.”
“This assumption is also based on the fact that the YMCA was apparently being used as some sort of gay hangout, and since one of the writers [Jacques Morali] was gay and some of the Village People are gay, the song must be a message to gay people,” Willis wrote. “To that I say, once again, get your minds out of the gutter. It is not … such notion is based solely on the song’s lyrics alluding to [illicit] activity for which it does not.”
“Y.M.C.A.” has indeed been widely adopted by the LGBTQ community over the years, with many interpreting the lyrics as references to the gym chain’s reputation as a popular cruising site back in the day — plus, the track comes from a 1978 album titled Cruisin’. Even so, Willis’ latest post is not the first time he’s sought to distance the track from the gay anthem label, writing in a 2020 Facebook post: “No one group can claim Y.M.C.A. as somehow belonging to them or somehow their anthem. I won’t allow my iconic song to be placed in a box like that.”

So you don’t really want teh pooves to claim the song as “their” anthem, but you’re fine with exploiting that demographic to make a career and a fortune out of them. Hope any lawsuit Victor does try gets laughed out of court. What a cunt.

Well THERE’s a shock

Leading Election Denier Finally Says the Quiet Part Out Loud
Dinesh D’Souza has admitted that “2,000 Mules” is based on junk information.

Unbelievable! A professional conspiracy theorist and useful idiot for the far right lied to promote the lie being pushed by liars about the 2020 election being stolen? Who’d have thought…

Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative filmmaker behind the election denialist fable 2,000 Mules, revealed that the data that underpinned his supposedly incontrovertible claims of fraudulent voting was actually a complete sham.
In the 2022 film, a Texas-based “election integrity” organization called True the Vote claimed to have reviewed cell phone geotracking data from five 2020 battleground states that traced the movements of ballot “mules” who had been paid by liberal nonprofits to stuff ballot boxes. D’Souza’s film purported that hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots had been cast, tipping the scales for Joe Biden. The movie has been widely debunked by pretty much everyone, now including its own filmmaker.
A statement from D’Souza, quietly posted to D’Souza Media’s website early Monday, revealed that the geolocation data that he called “the premise of the film” wasn’t actually real.
“During the production of this film, as a supplement to the geolocation data, True the Vote provided my team with ballot drop box surveillance footage that had been obtained through open records requests. We were assured that the surveillance videos had been linked to geolocation cell phone data, such that each video depicted an individual who had made at least 10 visits to drop boxes. Indeed, it is clear from the interviews within the film itself that True the Vote was correlating the videos to geolocation data,” D’Souza wrote.
“We recently learned that surveillance videos used in the film may not have actually been correlated with the geolocation data,” the statement read.
D’Souza downplayed this particular revelation’s impact on the integrity of True the Vote, and the film altogether.
“We operated in good faith and in reliance on True the Vote. We continue to have confidence in their work and also in the basic message of ‘2000 Mules,’” he wrote, adding that he would “continue to have faith” in the “underlying geolocation data and analysis.”

This admission comes as part of a statement apologising to someone that D’Souza seems to have been fool enough to actually identify as one of these “mules”; apparently the guy’s face is blurred in the film itself but not in the trailer and other promotional material… so this fellow was duly investigated and duly exonerated just before the film came out, whereupon he duly sued D’Souza and his publishers, who duly withdrew the film and an accompanying book from circulation. It’s really not much of an admission, though, cos Dinesh is basically just saying “sure, those guys (not us) kind of fucked up, but we were still right and we still believe True the Vote despite all that”… though for his sake I hope he was smart enough to not identify anyone else in his film, cos that’d probably be enough of an admission to sink him in court…