No, Justice? No! Peace.
CLARENCE THOMAS… CORRUPT?! Well… yes. It may shock you to learn that a recent Propublica report has revealed that Justice Clarence Thomas has for years been receiving millions of dollars in unreported gifts from a Nazi-fetishizing American billionaire named Harlan Crow. These included but were not exclusive to:
1) Exotic trips around the world for Thomas and his wife, some of which would have cost in the realm of $500,000 with their use of mega-yachts and private planes.
2) Purchasing Thomas’ mother’s house and letting her live there for free.
3) Paying the private school tuition of Thomas’ son.
4) Creating fake, make-work jobs for Ginni Thomas.
5) Trips to to the Mammon-worshipping Bohemian Grove with Crow and their buddies.
6) Building a bronze statue(?) to Thomas’ 8th grade Catholic school nun teacher.
7) Other shit that we can’t even imagine.
weighs 1,800 pounds with a 16,000 pound base and an incalculable weight in irony.
Ok, fine, so it’s actually not THAT surprising. The Republicans have simply discovered that the secret to controlling America is to bribe a bunch of judges who sit in an institution that most of the country has been conditioned to think of as beyond reproach. I suppose the ONLY surprise is how cheap a Justice is to buy in comparison to the power that they wield. It’s far more cost-effective than buying a Senator or Congressman. Whether it is Thomas’s long catalog above, the hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that (alleged rapist) Brett Kavanaugh had which vanished shortly before he was sworn in, or the recent revelations that John Roberts’ wife earned millions of undisclosed dollars hiring lawyers for firms that argued cases in front of the Supreme Court.
Why does this matter? Well, in the last decade alone, the Supreme Court veered to the hard right on a number of critical issues: They’ve ended federal abortion protections (Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women Health Organization), crippled the EPA’s ability to curb the emission of greenhouse gases (West Virginia Vs. EPA), gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and allowed employers to deny women access to birth control via their health insurance (Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby). The ultra-conservative court (6–3) has further designs on the Clean Water Act, any and all gun control laws, gay marriage, union membership, consumer protections and pretty much anything else you can think of in order to degrade human dignity and concentrate wealth into a even smaller number of people.
In any functioning democracy, the utter corruption of a branch of government might result in some public outrage followed by mass indictments/impeachments. But we don’t live in that world, we live in this one; where liberals and exhausted, 80-year-old centrist Democrats are loathe to take any drastic steps, because then they would have to face the fact that the fragile ‘meritocracy’ that’s made them so comfortable is extremely broken. Instead, it’s a collective shrug and a sigh and a ‘what can you do’ and ‘hopefully I can squirrel away enough before things start to get REALLY bad.’ As Senator Dick Durbin (D-Loserville) recently said, Democrats chose not to call Clarence Thomas before the Senate Judiciary Committee, because he ‘would have ignored us anyway.’ Or in the case of Justice John Roberts, ‘history will judge him.’
what a bolder man might do today.
GOVERNING AN AMERICAN CITY IS NO EASY TASK and you may find yourself laying awake some nights wondering if you’re going to be the first American mayor assassinated by your own police force because of some perceived slight. But New York City has engineered a clever work-around: Elect an ex-cop as who is so beholden to the local police force that he is indistinguishable from one of them. Mayor Eric Adams recently made waves with his new proposed city budget. Facing budget shortfalls, he proposed slashing 3% from CUNY and the Department of Education, 4% from all other city departments (closing many libraries on weekend), BUT found space to increase funding for the NYPD- bumping up salaries and instituting ‘flexible time’ so that patrolmen can work four days a week.
In fairness, Adams seems to be a genuinely dim man who-much like Trump- earnestly believes whatever the last thing a rich person told him: whether that’s the power of cryptocurrency after flying around on a crypto-billionaire’s private plane, that people need to stop tele-work and get back to the office to keep commercial real estate prices high, the idea that people don’t require windows in their bedrooms, that crime in NYC is out of control when it is still one of the top five safest cities in America, that his idiot brother should get a $210K job as ‘chief bodyguard’, etc.
This is not including whatever scandal eventually does lead to Adams’ downfall. It will be something stupid like, ‘all traffic lights in NYC stop working one day after he sold them off to a private equity firm that simply turns the power off to save money’; much like Mayor Rahm Emmanuel of Chicago privatizing its parking meters and costing the city billions of dollars in revenue.
I would not expect much help from the Federal government for NYC’s budgetary woes, given the media narrative of the past year that the city is a fetid shithole, circling the drain (aided by Adams’ own rhetoric). 9/11 sympathy is long gone and it is now safe for the rest of the country to avert their eyes from Babylon, lest they turn to pillars of salt when the Wrath of God comes a’burning.
AI… FILMS!? Hack non-auteurs The Russo Brothers (Avengers: Endgame, The Gray Man) have predicted AI films within two years; and by ‘predicted’ they mean ‘we are working to make this happen.’ “You could watch a film of yourself with Marilyn Monroe,” said one of them. Putting aside that they seem weirdly eager to put themselves out of work, while also despising their own medium as an expression of human creativity, it is striking that the Russos fundamentally misunderstand what it is that people like about film.
The average movie viewer does not, despite what they themselves think, actually want to see themselves onscreen with Marilyn Monroe. People want to see charismatic, larger-than-life performers and interesting characters that they can project themselves onto. This is why the movie stars and famous musicians and professional athletes are so powerful: viewers get to be them without the stress of actually having to be them, and in that projection they may find some commonality in the human condition.
And besides, no one wants to develop a parasocial relationship with themselves.
ALSO: I know I keep threatening it, but I’m working on setting up the substack for the Summer. I may transfer this newsletter over as well, since this site seems to be getting increasingly twitchy.
https://tinyletter.com/The_Oculus_Online
