The Hideous McMeganosity Of It All, Plus
Billionaires? Nobody'd miss 'em, plus music
Never even occurred to me to ask if all the salmon I was eating over there was farmed. Not that I knew how to ask.
The Hideous McMeganosity Of It All
I usually have the good sense not to read anything by Megan McArdle and here I went and read two things in one day over the weekend. The first and least offensive piece bemoaned the Democratic waging of partisan lawfare against Trump in the form of the cases brought against His Orange Pestilency by New York State attorney general Letitia James and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, both of which resulted in wins for the prosecution and in both of which McArdle finds some hint of merit before concluding that they were nevertheless just too too. How, she asks, can we expect our fascists to respect the rule of law when our Democrats sort of don’t?
The proximate inspiration for the column is the FBI raid on John Bolton’s home and office. Bolton, a horrible person and thus a long-time favorite of McArdle’s, may or may not have done anything wrong, at least in terms of legitimate offenses against the state; I have no idea and neither does McArdle, but if he didn’t, she says, blame for the regime’s prospectively political persecution of him will adhere partly to Democrats for prosecuting Trump’s actual crimes and helping to create an atmosphere where all us citizens just can’t trust the law’s impartiality.
This is obvious bullshit. Trump was charged, convicted and just last week got the massive fine arising from New York State’s case against him thrown out. The law seems to have worked as it should. Were these political prosecutions? Yeah, in the sense that all three major players, Trump, Bragg and Letitia James, are politicians, but Trump has spent most of his adult life bragging about skirting and breaking the law, and the New York cases aren’t the first time he’s been called out for it; just the first time he’s been convicted, if you don’t count the previous civil cases he’s lost.
(Meanwhile, in an egregious but unmentioned-by-McArdle instance, Trump-appointed federal judge Aileen Cannon committed assault and battery against the rule of law by creating laughable hoops, which went excoriated but unpunished by appeals court judges, for Trump’s classified documents prosecutors to jump through, ultimately succeeding in stalling the case to death, with an able assist from Biden AG Merrick Garland.)
Targeting Bolton may or may not be legitimate, but a big reason to question it is that he was an early entry on the regime’s official enemies list, along with a number of other people whose only known offenses were a lack of slavish loyalty to the regime, its leader and its aims, or simply having done things in the past that are retroactively deemed beyond forgiveness, like all the fired January 6 prosecutors. Democrats had nothing to do with that.
This is both-sidesing at its finest, but more than that, it ignores the reality that the rule of law applies unequally to rich and and not rich. Literally millions of people have gone to jail after being overcharged by prosecutors on the local, state and federal level because they couldn’t afford to fight it, and we read all the time about people who have pleaded down to lesser charges of which they’re not guilty in order to avoid the crap shoot of going to trial with inadequate representation.
That’s why people question the rule of law, and have done since long before Trump became the political force that he is now. Nobody with much life experience under their belt has not arrived independently at Anatole France’s 1894 observation:
It is the duty of the poor to support and sustain the rich in their power and idleness. In doing so, they have to work before the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
Although one has to say that the middle class, who aren’t usually sleeping rough and stealing bread, sometimes stubbornly resist the notion that they too are less, in the face of overwhelming evidence.
So that’s one thing. The other is much stupider, not to mention morally and ethically depraved. McArdle and two fellow travelers, Washington Post editorial board supervisor James Hohman and Manhattan Institute foamer-at-the-mouth Rafael Manguel, joined forces for a round table discussion in which the specter of John DiIulio and superpredators played an unspoken but leading role.
In policy, whatever problem you don’t have seems preferable to the problems you do have. When crime was broadly falling from the 1990s to the 2010s, mass incarceration seemed like a huge problem, so it was easy to forget about the problem that had driven it: the enormous spike in crime, especially violent crime, in the late 20th century. So people decided that policing and incarceration were bad. Then crime started to rise again, and incarceration fell, so we again got a shift toward thinking about the problem of crime and not the problems created by fighting crime.
That’s McCardle. Here’s Hohman in response:
It’s obviously good that the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction. Is there any risk it will go too far?
And here’s Manguel, blaming police violence and Draconian punishments on squishy liberals.
Trying to stay away from the unproductive extremes is harder to do when you have a lot of Serious People™️ saying we should empty jails and abolish the NYPD.
The kicker here is that they’re talking about crimes perpetrated by juveniles, no doubt inspired by the ass-kicking inflicted on Big Balls at 3AM by some youngsters in one commercialized part known for drug sales of an otherwise reasonably passive D.C. neighborhood, which was cited by the regime as part of their own inspiration for militarily occupying the city and federalizing the police force.
Don’t get me wrong: people should be able to buy their drugs, if that’s what Big Balls was doing, in safety (they should be able to do anything in safety!), and people in more or less adult bodies with juvenile minds can be scary. Big Balls himself is a juvenile-minded former DOGE employee charged with laying waste to programs keeping his elders and betters alive and safe from the depredations of rapacious adults and corporations, a job he approached with unbridled glee.
But with violent crime in D.C. at a 30-year low—something this crew of scocietal vampires is at pains to avoid noting, although they do give lip service to the drop in crime since 2023—calling for increasingly harsh treatment of mostly Black and poor juveniles speaks to a puritanical lust for class and racial vengeance.
All the hallmarks of reactionary thought are here: eliding statistics obviating their point, taking aim at the poorest segments of society, excoriating anybody who supports approaches other than increased police activity and longer, harsher jail or prison sentences—”Swifter [punishment] is important, but we can’t discount the harshness element, either,” says Manguel—and ignoring altogether the sociology of crime. It’s just grotesque.
Crime and punishment are in a hellish dialectic, you see, and it’s your fault and my fault for not arriving at an equilibrium twixt the two and sticking with it. Fuck eliminating poverty, racism, and inequality, as hard and viciously as possible.
I hate these people.
Billionaires? Nobody'd miss 'em
Billionaires aren’t uniquely stupid, twisted or just wrong, but the fallout from their stupidity and wrongness is outsized, affecting most of us at one point or another, and their exposure to appropriate consequences is minimal. Fitzgerald’s aphorism “The rich are different from you and me” may be apocryphal, but it’s true. They’re insulated from just about everything but mortality, and even there they tend to have a leg up on the rest of us.
So I read with some bemusement these two stories about billionaires doing stupid stuff to their own and, more important, other, non-rich people’s detriment.
The first is from the Rupert Murdoch tabloid which continues to be known as The Wall Street Journal, about the reversal of fortune befalling a billionaire heir to the Thomson Reuters fortune and a seemingly normal(ish) woman who had the misfortune of getting dragged into Taylor Thomson’s orbit. It opens thusly:
“OH, MY GOD,” said Taylor Thomson, clapping her eyes on Ashley Richardson for the first time. “You have those fabulous heroin-chic arms.”
It was 2009. Both women were lounging in the backyard at the Malibu home of Beau St. Clair, a film producer and mutual friend. Richardson, wearing a muscle tee over her bikini, basked in the sun while Thomson sat fully covered in a flowy outfit and a hat. Her then-10-year-old daughter clutched a hot-pink mini Birkin.
Richardson, a lanky, 6-foot-tall blonde, was a free spirit who went on to build a career designing social-media campaigns for companies like Ford Motor and McDonald’s. Thomson was an heiress to Canada’s wealthiest family. An eccentric with a self-deprecating sense of humor, she went to dinners and parties with wild hair and drapey, distressed clothes by California designer Rick Owens. “She was this subversive, secret billionaire,” says one mutual friend.
Heroin chic, jaysus! Mini-Birkins! “Subversive, secret billionaire!”
So you have Richardson, who had done very well by herself pursuing relatively normal professional worker stuff before the fateful meeting, and a billionaire who could very well afford to be eccentric and free-spirited and functionally unemployed for her entire life even after she lost a bunch of money to a crypto scam into which both she and her hapless satellite dove with both eyes open.
The result? Thomson is suing Richardson for tens of millions because the latter suggested she participate in this psychic-recommended, astrologer-approved scam. Richardson, meanwhile, is an Uber driver whose career as a consultant went into an alcohol- and benzo-fueled tailspin after she lost all of her money and Thomson, who blames Richardson for the whole thing, lost a small fraction (in the tens of millions) of her own net worth, with no impact whatever on her lifestyle or prospects.
Do we need Taylor Thomson? No. Would we all be safer and better served if her fortune, and the fortunes of her fellow billionaires, were taxed out of existence? I don’t actually know for sure, you can’t discount the cupidity of politicians ostensibly charged with improving the lot of the peasantry, but at least we’d be served a greater measure of schadenfreude. No harm in making the rich more like you and me.
The other story comes from Spy Magazine co-founder, Donald Trump-has-tiny-hands originator and former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s recently launched Air Mail newsletter, the target audience for which is . . . well, I don’t know who it is? Rich people who want to read about themselves doing stupid or ignorant or vicious or gloriously carefree shit, maybe? Aspirationally rich people who want to agonize over their own lack of freedom from the consequences of their own stupidity or carelessness or greed? In any event, really rich people have a major presence in the digital rag.
For many years, locals talked about Nantucket like it was still the sleepy whaling town it had been centuries ago. And they weren’t wrong. The clapboard houses, lightship baskets, and roses climbing up the side of Sconset roofs inspired a sense of permanence.
Lately, though, it has been getting harder to go on pretending things haven’t changed. As the rich get richer, they get more competitive, it seems, which means that real-estate prices on the island have exploded and space for private jets at the airport is getting harder to find. But that’s not the new part—that’s been happening for decades.
The change is that, in a twist that combines Lord of the Flies with And Then There Were None, and maybe also the New England gothic of Nathaniel Hawthorne, some of the well-off of Nantucket finally seem to be losing their minds—and much to the detriment of their neighbors.
The story goes on to detail a rash of billionaires and hundred-millionaires chopping down trees and otherwise committing guerilla landscaping offenses against the estates of their billionaire and hundred millionaire neighbors, including this one, truly egregious incident inexplicably aimed by a property owner at a preservationist buyer.
In December 2022, shortly after a 3.2-acre ocean-view property in the village of Sconset had agreed to be sold to the Sconset Trust, a preservation group, for $4.7 million, out came the chain saw. Soon after, the sellers, the DiMartino family, had chopped down 158 trees, including Japanese-black-pine trees and pitch-pine trees, in order to “open up their view of the waterfront,” according to the Nantucket Current. The sale to the Sconset Trust closed after the tree chopping had occurred. Six months later, the Nantucket Conservation Commission ordered the family to fully restore the property at its own expense, and then some, by planting 445 trees, shrubs, and other native plants over a three-year period.
But that’s really not the worst landscaping-related behavior, astonishingly enough.
On February 22 of this year, Jonathan Jacoby walked across his neighbors’ driveway at 1 Tautemo Way and proceeded to cut down 16 of their mature cedar, cherry, and Leyland-cypress trees. According to a subsequent lawsuit filed by the property owners, Patricia Belford and the Belford Family Trust, against Jacoby, “many [of the trees] … were over 30 feet in height and decades old.” Making matters worse, Jacoby, who felled the trees himself, appeared to make a hash of the job, as evidenced by the pictures included in the lawsuit, leaving large, jagged stumps strewn around the property.
…
In response to a Boston Globe reporter’s questions about the suit, Jacoby wrote a one-line e-mail: “I wasn’t trespassing, I was clearing out her crappy trees (which interfered with the ocean view from his own property).”
But he got to take a chain saw to an annoyance. If thine eye offend thee, vandalize somebody’s shit.
None of this stuff doesn’t happen elsewhere, but elsewhere isn’t a 50-square-mile island home to almost 10% of America’s plentiful billionaires and an unknown number of less but still stupidly wealthy property owners, who ought to be supremely happy with their lot, and lots, in life. And of course the normal people there, the people who are like you and me except they live on an island full of insanely, grotesquely rich people, are going homeless and hungry—and this includes teachers and Coast Guard personnel and other professionals—because their parasitical overlords are consuming all the limited resources and won’t pay the peasants, who can’t afford to flit in and out of the locale, enough to keep up.
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Music
Not that much today.
The Big Moon, Here is Everything, “2 Lines”
boygenius, The Record, “Satanist”
That’s it. Be well; take care.