Lil Nas X is officially expecting a “baby” — due Sept. 17. Tap the link for the exclusive “scoop” and his over-the-top announcement photos! https://t.co/mAXuinAMZi @LilNasX pic.twitter.com/3G3POjgh5a
— People (@people) September 2, 2021
I am not qualified* to judge his musical gifts, but a 22-year-old who can get People magazine to publish his pregnancy-prOn-parody album publicity shots, at this particular historic moment, understands timimg.
*Not a slur on the genre, I’m just too old & unmusical to understand rap.
Baud
Now that guy should definitely stay away from Texas.
prostratedragon
Musically he’s at least country adjacent or bringing rap and country together, so might have some unexpected fans there. That is a bizarrely funny ad campaign. Artists often refer to a work as their baby, but …
SiubhanDuinne
An O/T O/T: When will Medium Cool with BG in CHI resume? Do we have a date, or at least a rough idea?
trollhattan
@Baud: Only [checks notes] five weeks so he’s fine.
Shakti
Bless Lil Nas X’s superb trolling/attention bait game. I’m sure the usual suspects will start frothing at the mouth upon viewing this mpreg baby shower glam shoot. Right after they can stop freaking out about children’s shows.
He looks good. :-p
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: It should be very soon. But we’re keeping it loose since these are the last weeks of summer.
Delk
He’s trolling Drake. They both have new albums ready to drop. Drake’s album cover is a grid of pregnant women emojis and Nas X tweeted a pic of a grid of pregnant men emojis.
aliasofwestgate
@Shakti: I’m sure he’s laughing all the way to the bank at the freakouts. More though, i love that he’s succeeding and having a ball doing so. He’s been absolutely unapologetic since he was outed and has gone on to roaring good sales too.
prostratedragon
@trollhattan: D’oh! Forgot about the new dispensation down there. But then it sounds like he’s terminating naturally.
prostratedragon
@Delk: That makes it even funnier.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: My understanding is that it will be sometime this month. Unless the anticipatory excitement over Paris-Roubaix incapacitates BG. It could happen.
Delk
The NSFW video of his new single:
Industry Baby
Mike in NC
As Dubya said of the Orange Clown’s horrific inaugural address: “That was some weird shit.”
The Lodger
There’s already a Da Baby. Looks like this one might be an improvement.
SiubhanDuinne
@WaterGirl:
Thanks, WG! I was just curious.
different-church-lady
I’ve never been happier to be old and out of touch.
eclare
He is incredibly talented and an amazing performer. Pushes the edge constantly.
Leslie
I love Lil Nas X.
Benw
Lil Nas X is fucking great.
Weird music industry tidbit: Old Town Road sampled the banjo not from a bluegrass record but from the Nine Inch Nails track 34 Ghosts IV. Which means that Trent freaking Reznor is a co-writer on the longest-running number one song in Billboard history. Wild
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/trent-reznor-old-town-road-903889/
Mary G
I love Lil Nas X. I watch his videos – the music isn’t terrible, but the videos are works of art designed to piss off righties, and boy do they lose it. Dreher has had some spectacular meltdowns.
Wow! I did a blockquote inside another blockquote!
Omnes Omnibus
Don’t get cocky, kid.
SiubhanDuinne
Watching Maddow, who points out that the day Roe v. Wade was decided in January 1973, the lead story was the Paris Peace Talks, and then the Roe story was scooped by the breaking news that LBJ had died (*waves to Raven*).
I must have known that — I was working the board at WUSF-FM when the Johnson news broke — but I had completely forgotten the juxtaposition of those stories until just now.
Baud
@Mary G:
Mary G
More evil:
Mom of a beautiful baby girl lost in the shooting:
Mary G
@Baud: Nobody likes a show off.
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
Urban Suburbanite
This isn’t exactly related, but this is a great way to impede the obsessive snitches Texas’ new chickenshit abortion law relies upon (every part of this thing was an exercise in collective cowardice, including the Supreme Court’s non-decision). The more energy invested into stopping people from spamming the system, the less damage these craven apparatchiks can do.
https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/z3x9ba/tiktok-texas-abortion-law-bot-site-ios-shortcut?__twitter_impression=true
Omnes Omnibus
@Mary G: It won’t work. They lost their fucking children. All this will do is piss them off more.
eclare
@Mary G: That is unbelievably fucking cruel.
Martin
Yeah, *I’m* the one trying to burn the world down.
Ken
In other news, the lawyer for the “QAnon Shaman” says that his client doesn’t want to be known as the “QAnon Shaman” anymore. If either of them figure out how to make that happen, there’s a few million high-schoolers with horrible nicknames who will pay for the secret.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: No one said you were the only one.
debbie
@SiubhanDuinne:
It was a very busy time.
debbie
@Mary G:
Good god. They were first graders.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: I was in third grade.
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: I would guess 3 weeks max, but more likely 2.
We’re going with Sunday nights again, though I have offered BG the option of starting a little later than we did before. We’ll see what he wants to do.
WaterGirl
@Mary G: Go you!
Ken
@SiubhanDuinne: Careful. HTML-3 plus CSS is Turing-complete, so you might stumble into an infinitely-nested blockquote.
Just kidding. Surely the editor and commenting system wouldn’t allow the necessary <style> directives through…
WaterGirl
@Baud: Show off!
Suzanne
@Mary G: Anything that freaks out Rod Dreher is excellent.
WaterGirl
@Mary G: What right does Remington (whoever the hell that is) have to that information.
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: very nice!
Martin
@Urban Suburbanite: I’ll note that if Democrats are successful here, it won’t be without its own damage. Civil courts are already slammed, and this is going to make things a lot worse. A lot of parents trying to resolve custody battles, women will have a harder time getting a protective order (civil court) as civil courts try to unwind all of this.
This is what I’ve been referring to. This is a kind of civic violence, constraining how civil courts can respond to otherwise important matters (both the TX law and flooding the zone with false claims) simply by overwhelming them. Both actions will add to pain and suffering. Just because we don’t look fully at the ramifications doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
I don’t oppose the effort – I support it. But I support it knowing the damage it will cause, because there’s really no way to avoid it.
Ken
@WaterGirl: I think that’s Remington Arms, the weapons manufacturer. Are the parents suing them for the murders? That might give them some legal claim on the information, though what they would imagine they could do with it — or how they’re going to handle the public relations nightmare — is beyond me.
mrmoshpotato
@Mary G: What the fuuuuuuck?
dexwood
@different-church-lady: I live the truth of this daily.
WaterGirl
@Mary G: OT, but are you the person who suggested the LEVOIT air purifier?
I just ordered one. I think someone suggested the pet filter? No fires here in IL, so I don’t think I need the chemical filter.
They had a newer one for $129 (vs. $99) but I went with the older model that was recommended. The $129 model works with Alexa but since I will never have Alexa or anything similar in my house, I figured the previous model would be better.
My dad used to grouse about things saying “they new-and-improved it.”
Gin & Tonic
@Ken: They make and sell guns. You think bad PR is something they worry about?
WaterGirl
@Ken: You have to be right. Fuck those guys.
Gee, I bet one of those 6-year-olds probably talked in class once when they weren’t supposed to, so they deserved to be murdered and shredded by bullets.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: They don’t. It is entirely irrelevant to the lawsuit. No judge should allow it.
Urban Suburbanite
@Martin:
That’s true. And I don’t know if there’s a way to avoid that. The problem is that I don’t see it stopping – the people behind this have no fucking clue how to actually govern (and I mean the boring as fuck work of actually ensuring things works). That kind of expertise is effectively absent from the Republican party – if it doesn’t involve fucking someone over or keeping their desperate grip on power, they have no clue whatsoever. This is all their only skillset. And that’s a fundamental problem that may not be possible to resolve.
eachother
“Old Town Road” was my Covid-19 2020 morning restoration/respiration song. Youtube had 1 hour and 10 hour loops of the song. After a few replays, it always made me feel better. It is a storied billboard song and pushed the envelope to a better place.
Delk
And this is after Remington took 7 years to gave the Sandy Hook attorneys 40,000 pages of garbage.
joel hanes
@Omnes Omnibus:
The classics never truly go out of style.
mrmoshpotato
@Ken: LOL! Does Dump also want me to stop calling him the Kremlin’s orange fascist shitstain and a Soviet shitpile mobster conman?
Peale
@Ken: I think they want proof that the kids went to the school and weren’t crisis actors. They’ve hired Alex Jones legal team.
Mike in NC
Five minutes until the new season of “What We Do In The Shadows” comes on (FX).
Martin
@Urban Suburbanite: It’s a fairly common practice of public policy to add or remove friction/cost to activities in order to deter/encourage behavior.
I would posit that the GOP knows exactly what they’re doing. They’re adding financial risk to virtually everything in order to shape behavior. And they’re fine fucking up civil courts in the process. And they know we’ll have to do more harm in order to fight them, and they’re okay with that. It’s just the cost of action. But own the cost. Don’t pretend it’s not happening.
phdesmond
@Urban Suburbanite:
i wish the hackers success.
brendancalling
The first time I heard LNX was when Tyler Mahon Coe—the estranged son of country singer David Allen Coe who hosts the truly indispensable podcast “Cocaine and Rhinestones”, a history of 20th century country music—tweeted that “Old Town Road” was more country than any of pop-country star Jason Aldean’s music, particularly “Dirt Road Anthem.” At the time LNX had been kicked off the country charts as “not country” and there was a big to-do.
Anyway, I played the two songs (neither of which I’d heard before) on, back to back. Sure enough, LNX was more country. Banjos deep in the mix, I think a steel (neither of which were on Aldean’s song), and both of them rapping. Basically it’s country interpreted through hip hop—which I’ve heard is a thing among some younger Black folks down south since there IS so much crossover in terms of beats and production.
On a side note: Billy Ray Cyrus, who was also originally panned by the country music industry, stepped up after LNX got booted fro the charts, and they did a new version together w/BRC adding a verse. Which meant it HAD to be on the country charts after that. Fantastic thumb to the nose!
brendancalling
@Mary G: YOUR HONOR THE RECORD WILL SHOW THAT BILLY PUT GUM IN SALLY’S HAIR—SO HOW INNOCENT WAS HE, REALLY??
these people make me sick.
NotMax
Pop culture?
Whether it turns out to be a piece o’ formulaic crap peppered with splodey stuff or not is irrelevant, it’s got SuperUltraMegaHit written all over it regardless.
(Personally will be giving it a hard pass.)
Scout211
@WaterGirl:
I posted that I had purchased the Levoit and was happy with it and Mary G posted that she had purchased one last year and was still happy with hers.
No smart home here, either. My internet isn’t stable or fast enough, even if I could figure out the smartness part. LOL
dexwood
@WaterGirl: Bought one for the living room more than a year ago. Happy with it. Put one in the bedroom a few months ago.
Peale
I’m thinking that the Lil Nas X photos would be banned from Chinese media as of today. Lordy, they are not pleased with what the youth are into these days.
Mary G
@WaterGirl: Ditto about Alexa. I have the $99 one.
HumboldtBlue
@Benw:
That’s a helluva data point.
Martin
Speaking of terrible people.
Urban Suburbanite
@Martin:
For sure. And my point about the GOP (and I’m including McConnell here. He and Pelosi are historically important Congressional leaders, but for very different reasons) is that they’re good at those two things, but that’s it.
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Y’all hush.
Mary G
Louie Gohmert or Ted Cruz?
HumboldtBlue
@Martin:
I just watched that video.
opiejeanne
@SiubhanDuinne: I was 12.
dm
@NotMax: I’m kinda pissed that they use the title Red Notice, unless it accidentally boosts sales of Bill Browder’s book about Sergei Magnitsky.
….Also, I hope they didn’t use all the jokes in the trailer.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: So Remington has subpoenaed the records, but the families can challenge that with a judge, who should tell Remington to fuck off? In legal terms, of course.
mrmoshpotato
@SiubhanDuinne: ?
WaterGirl
@dexwood: Did you get the $99 model or the $129 model?
Do you know?
WaterGirl
@Mary G: Oh, good. thank you
mrmoshpotato
@WaterGirl: Who’s their lawyer – Ghouliani? Because wow! How incredibly ghoulish!
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: Un-fucking-believable.
Don’t any of these people have children who can tell them what ghouls they are? And that they are ashamed to have these people as parents???
SiubhanDuinne
@opiejeanne:
Sigh. So was I, once.
mrmoshpotato
@WaterGirl: Yeah. Really anyone in their lives that would just glare at them when told “We filed a subpoena for the school records of dead children.”
dexwood
@WaterGirl: 99
Chetan Murthy
@mrmoshpotato: Remington lawyers: “I don’t make the decisions; I just do as I’m told by my client”
Remington execs: “I don’t decide these things; I’m just following the advice of our lawyers”
WaterGirl
@dexwood: Okay, good. Sounds like you all got the $99 model, I can go to sleep now, fairly confident that i made the better choice.
I always want the latest and greatest. Well, usually.
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: They should have shown photos on TV of the tiny bodies shredded with bullets. Let’s see who could have not cared about little children being murdered, then.
Not that I want to see anything that gruesome, but dammit, some reality might change the equation.
Look what a difference the George Floyd video made. You can’t unsee something once you’ve seen it. I thought Trayvon Martin opened my eyes, but that was just the beginning.
Mary G
@WaterGirl: The $129 is two decibels less than the $99, so a skosh quieter. I don’t mind, but there is a whirring noise I quickly got used to.
WaterGirl
@Mary G: I had noticed that, and I am really sensitive to sound. But it looked like they had changed the controls between the two models, and since you guys all liked yours, I figured they had probably taken away some feature that everyone had liked.
Restaurants are always taking the one thing off their menu that I loved.
Fair Economist
@WaterGirl: At least one of the parents had an open casket funeral to try to force the media to show pics of the horrors of gun ownership.
Media still refused.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Benw: up there with joe cocker’s credit on “california love”
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Mary G: yo dawg i heard you like blockquotes so we put blockquotes in your blockquotes so you can blockquote when you blockquote
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Baud: defense presents xzibit no. 69
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Mary G: how do the attendance records & report cards exist if the kids were crisis actors?
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: More or less, yes.
Chetan Murthy
@MontyTheClipArtMongoose: The conspiracy goes all the way up to the superintendent’s office!!!!! dun-DUNH!
But seriously, I don’t think it’s about somehow proving the poor kids were crisis actors. It’s about shocking, horrifying, triggering, and otherwise (ahem) “persuading” the parents to drop out of the lawsuit. It’s litigation as a weapon of terror.
WaterGirl
@Fair Economist: Now that you say that, I do remember that they did that. I am ready to nuke most of the media into orbit.
WaterGirl
@Chetan Murthy:
Just like TX is now.
Chetan Murthy
@WaterGirl: Indeed, WG. Indeed. And it’s working.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Martin: will the principal be held pending showtrial at lauren boebert’s bar n’ grille
prostratedragon
@Mary G:
More evil
Unspeakable.
Elsewhere in the Inferno queue, NY Review of Books has sprung a 2018 article about the origins of the Republican anti-abortion movement from behind the paywall. It’s a review of the documentary Reversing Roe:
I’m reminded that I knew an observant Catholic, Baghdad born and against both the war and Saddam, who generally preferred Democratic policies, but was vehement against voting for John Kerry because Kerry took a pro-choice stance despite being a Catholic.
[Edited for spelling]
prostratedragon
@Martin: I know that Vail is the domicile of the Elect and all, but they must press charges against these dangerous oafs.
Martin
@prostratedragon: There’s an old article that covers that, which Bill Moyers has always endorsed.
In it they describe a kind of bargain to bring evangelicals toward the anti choice movement in connection to the ongoing efforts to keep Christian universities segregated. The real motivator to the evangelicals was ongoing segregation, but segregation wasn’t a winning argument, so this was a run at using religious liberty as an argument and abortion was a great issue to pair with that.
prostratedragon
@Fair Economist: Someone around there must have remembered how effective Emmitt Till’s open casket was. No historical memory my ass.
prostratedragon
@Martin: Yes, that was the southern strategy part of it. I was in my teens then, and at least somewhat paying attention. The wooing of Catholics was to make inroads into the mostly Democratic northern cities. Chicago was and is immovable there, but there were successes elsewhere at least for a time.
chopper
i also understand timimg
Another Scott
ObOpenThread.
Good, good. Keep going – there’s more out there.
Cheers,
Scott.
gene108
Recommendation from Hillary on a court reform org she supports.
https://mobile.twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1433455897389502464
gene108
@Another Scott:
Shouldn’t $7 billion in back taxes land a person in jail?
Doesn’t seem right or fair that he’s not going to jail.
MisterForkbeard
@Martin: Can you be arrested for threatening assault and false-imprisonment? Because that’s what this sounds like.
Martin
@gene108: Yeah, no shit. I lose so much sleep over whether I’m paying enough in quarterly taxes. Maybe if I owed many orders of magnitudes more I could sleep better.
Martin
@MisterForkbeard: Sure. Oh, wait, they’re white. So, no.
West of the Rockies
@Martin:
I’d expect no less from a smug, utopian blue-stater. Did I mention the smugness?//
mrmoshpotato
@WaterGirl:
I get where you’re coming from, but there would be so many problems with that.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Martin: It’s possible the GOP thinks they are being cunning and phoning in a the same time. From what I’ve seen the GOP has been acting like a cargo cult more and more; they perform rituals they’ve seen others do without understand how it works.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Martin: I can’t find but Talking Points Memo has a deep dive on the law, this some grass roots thing from the Texas pan handle and it really sounds like a bunch of old godbothers out in deep red Hickistian who want an excuse to harass their grandkids for being unbelievers and don’t give a damn about anything else. If that article is right, you are right about it’s meant to induce friction, but not in the meta way you are suggesting. It’s more of the kind of mentality of a child abuser; society is wicked so it must be punished.
dm
@Mary G: Not only that, but any corporation that puts a pollutant into the environment that a pregnant woman might be exposed to which might potentially cause her to have a miscarriage. Those should be reported.
Steeplejack (phone)
@opiejeanne:
Okay, Norma Desmond. Based on what you’ve said here before, you were more like 22 in 1973. ?
quakerinabasement
@Suzanne: You should follow Roy Edroso on Twitter. He keeps tabs on Dreher.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Looks like I picked the wrong week to get knocked up
Mary G
@dm: CA has been doing that for 34 years:
There are little yellow stickers on gas pumps and at Lowe’s & Home Depot. They are so ubiquitous that I doubt many people pay attention, except for pregnant people. I hope.
JoyceH
Anybody still awake? Because I just had a Scathingly Brilliant Idea. I know how we can turn the midterms from a squeaker to a Dem landslide! Ready for this?
Here’s the plan. Around about October of 2022, we release a scrupulously non-partisan unquestionably patriotic PSA, simply urging everyone to get out there and vote.
It will star Doctor Fauci.
eclare
@JoyceH: Also SCOTUS decision in Dobbs should come out in June 2022.
JoyceH
@eclare:
Is it utterly cynical of me to think that maybe the Supreme Court’s recent decision not to block Texas’ abortion ban pending appeal was a finger in the wind?
Look, they allow this utterly draconian monstrosity to go into effect, with the option to toss it later – and then sit back and see what happens. Nothing much and they overturn Roe. But if it turns into a nationwide kicked over the beehive moment that appears likely to destroy the Republican Party for at least a generation and maybe a century, then they can backtrack, toss the Texas law, write some weasel words that don’t quite overturn Roe to keep the base fired up, and hope the pro-choice movement goes back to sleep.
Am I suggesting that the Sups are political? Gasp! Heaven forfend!
Chris Johnson
@JoyceH: Desperately tacking INTO the wind.
Bear in mind that, as is increasingly obvious, all this is just leaning farther and farther into fascism. It’s not about building a functioning society: it’s about setting up the power centers, the brownshirts, the vigilantes for ruling an unwilling country by force.
I would say be damn careful what you wish for.
It’s possible to do that, and once you get it, it lasts for less time than two presidential terms, which the Republicans were already unable to get no matter how hard they cheated… and that was the EASY way. They seem to think they can double down, because they think they have to, but it is the single dumbest thing they could be doing and they’re doing it.
Fixing to be the Cow-Turd Reich. They’ll be able to do it for a shockingly brief time and then they’re history. Fascism is NOT a stable end point, it’s a recipe for getting overthrown.
They think they can rule by force. They really do. There’s an expiration date on that for anybody fool enough to try.
Miss Bianca
@Mary G: Disciplinary records of kindergartners at Sandy Hook? For what fucking purpose? So they can prove that those five-year-old thugs had it coming to them?
WaterGirl
@Miss Bianca: That was my first thought, too. Then I realized the goal is to inflict more pain on the families.
How dare they sue us, the gun manufacturers? Who the hell do these people think they are??? (this is what I believe the gun manufacturers are thinking)
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@WaterGirl: Exactly – this is intimidation.