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Posted

That article is so good.  It's also a terrifying further acknowledgement that these people (all of them) exist on a different plane than the populace.  The idea that they (or anyone else in the truly-rich elite and those they politically support) have any clue what it's like to be a farmer in Nebraska, a single mother in Virginia, or even a (mere) millionaire doctor in Vermont is farce. 

We and they are a different species.  We, the people, may as well be an ant-farm sitting on a shelf to them.

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Posted
3 minutes ago, TexasHooch said:

That article is so good.  It's also a terrifying further acknowledgement that these people (all of them) exist on a different plane than the populace.

There are the grifters and the grifted.

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Posted
1 hour ago, TexasHooch said:

Nah.  That's putting it far too simply. 

Murdoch will be dead soon. It's not simply about grift to him and people in this sphere.  For people two and three notches down, like Barr and some of the folks in their orbit, sure.  For him, and the tech bros, and the hedge fund managers, It's a world view, which is devoid of any understanding (and therefore empathy) towards us.

Shortly after my wife and I got married, we traveled to Uganda as part of an aid group.  We went to the poorest district in the country, and then we went to the poorest family in the district- which was an orphaned teen-aged girl and her 3 much younger siblings living in a half roofed mud hut, their clothes literally falling off of them. We, of course, did have deep sympathy, and some of us immediately started to speculate on what they needed, or how we could help them directly, right there immediately.  Our hosts, however, quickly brought us to the reality that our experience was simply too far removed from theirs as to presume that we had any real understanding how to help them in any meaningful, sustained way.  Of course the aid organization we were there supporting was much closer to the ground, and therefore better placed to assist.  But us? Nope.

I tell that story because it occurs to me that the gap between the mega billionaires and us is actually greater than the gap between us and that family in Uganda.  At least we were close enough in our shared experience to share sympathy, if not true empathy.

That is a fantastic analogy (and an important one from both ends/perspectives -- see books like Toxic Charity).

Empathy is important.  It's beyond important, it's essential to functioning societies, and we have turned 180 degrees away from it.  But as a companion to empathy is the humility to realize and accept that sometimes, your experience/perspective absolutely prevent you from even starting to understand the perspective/needs of others.  Which is FINE.  What you have to do then is accept the word/wisdom from people who DO have the perspective and ability to understand the subject matter.  And that humility is hard, because when you're amped up on empathy, you want to save the world.  Letting the adrenaline subside, and realizing that you can't is really important.

And our two-way insanity of projecting our perspective onto billionaires ("they want to help us...because if I was a billionaire tomorrow, that's what I'd do!" is as insane as billionaires telling people "hey, if times are hard, sell a piece art!") is killing us.

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

Holy shit, what a read.

I'll gift link the article from the Atlantic below, but here's an intro to the story.  There's also an audio link on the page that's over an hour long, if you would rather listen to it:

GROWING UP MURDOCH

James Murdoch on mind games, sibling rivalry, and the war for the family media empire

 

Quote

When I first approached James Murdoch in early 2024 to pitch him on a series of in-depth interviews, I figured it was a long shot. Rupert Murdoch’s youngest son, the onetime heir apparent to the Murdoch media empire, almost never spoke to reporters. Still, I could only imagine the stories he had to tell.

In his 20 years working for the family business, he’d been inside rooms where decisions were made at the most powerful conservative-media empire in the world. He’d seen up close how his father’s British newspapers came to champion Brexit and how Fox News had helped deliver Donald Trump to the White House. There were signs that James had grown disillusioned with these aspects of how his family fortune had been made: In 2020, he’d abruptly resigned from News Corp’s board of directors with a cryptic letter citing “disagreements over certain editorial content.”

 

Quote

Might he finally be willing to elaborate? Sometimes, as a reporter, all you can do is ask.

What I didn’t know when we sat down for our first meeting was that the Murdochs were secretly fracturing. Rupert had decided, at age 94, to rewrite the irrevocable family trust to give sole control of the empire to his eldest son, Lachlan, rather than splitting it equally among his four oldest children as planned. A bitter (and not-yet-public) legal battle had commenced. James—liberated by what he saw as his father’s betrayal—decided, somewhat to my surprise, that he was ready to talk.

 

Quote

The conversation that started that day ended up lasting a year. I met more than a dozen times with James and his wife, Kathryn, as they told me stories that would shock even the most devoted viewer of HBO’s Succession. These interviews were wide-ranging, filled with revelations that help explain how America got to this fraught political moment. But the stories that stayed with me most were the intensely personal ones about the unraveling of a family.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/04/rupert-murdoch-family-succession-james-murdoch/681675/?gift=Q78T0P0cUu8jt3BNLSKmM6kGw_MgtMudBgbpHk5EgSc&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

 

 

 

 

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Posted
On 3/7/2025 at 6:16 AM, Bullneck said:

 

Ram vehicles are manufactured at five facilities; two in North America, one in Western Asia, and two in South America.

Sterling Heights Assembly, Sterling Heights, Michigan, United States. This facility was first built in 1953 as the Michigan Ordinance Missile Plant, operated by the US Army. Chrysler Corporation purchased the facility in 1983. The plant currently produces the Ram 1500 (Quad Cab and Crew Cab).[19]

Saltillo Truck Assembly Plant, Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico. The facility first opened in 1995. The plant manufactures the Ram 2500-5500 Heavy Duty and the Mexico-only DX Chassis Cab.[20]The plant has won numerous awards and has been recognized as the Chrysler groups best truck facility in terms of build quality.[21] The Saltillo stamping plant is also attached to the facility.

Tofaş, Bursa, Turkey. The plant produces vehicles primarily for the European market; however, the Ram ProMaster City is produced at Tofaş and imported into North America.

Goiana, Pernambuco, Brazil. The plant produces vehicles primarily for the Latin American market. The output consist of FCA Small Wide 4×4 and Small Wide 4×4 LWB platform based vehicles, the factory produces Jeep and Ram branded trucks and SUVs. The plant currently produces the Ram Rampageand Ram 1000 (the badge-engineered Fiat Toro), along with the Jeep Renegade, Jeep Compass, and the Meridian.

Betim, Minas Gerais, Brazil. A Fiat factory that produces the Ram ProMaster Rapid/Ram V700 Rapid (the Latin America-spec badge-engineered Fiat Fiorino) and the Ram 700 (the badge-engineered Fiat Strada).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Trucks
 

so, Maria, the American rams are made in America and Mexico, the south and Central American rams are made in Brazil and Mexico, and the asian/euro rams are made in turkye. 
 

so they are already doing what you suggest.  
 

More complex than a wiki page to break down where all the parts and components come from, but we aren’t going to build 10,000 auto part manufacturing facilities here. 

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  • 3 weeks later...
Posted

You ever wonder how much better a place the U.S. would be if the News Corp Building (and Rupert and Roger) had been blown up on 9/11 instead of the WTC? 

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Posted
21 minutes ago, Gap03 said:

You ever wonder how much better a place the U.S. would be if the News Corp Building (and Rupert and Roger) had been blown up on 9/11 instead of the WTC? 

Wonder.  Imagine.  Fervently wish.  Let's not get persnickity over word choice here.

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Posted

We could literally do one of these posts any given day of any week, but today seems appropriate given the insanity of Tariff/Measles 2025.

 

 

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  • 4 weeks later...
Posted
12 minutes ago, Ted Lange said:

 

Can someone please post some content showing her to be an insufferable POS like everyone else on Fox News so I don't have to feel bad about watching this over and over again laughing uncontrollably?

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Posted
36 minutes ago, Gap03 said:

Can someone please post some content showing her to be an insufferable POS like everyone else on Fox News so I don't have to feel bad about watching this over and over again laughing uncontrollably?

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

Jimmy Kimmel tonight shared an email that was sent to him from a “mole” at Fox News where a booking agent for Fox & Friends reached out to Kirstie Alley to see if she’d come on and do a short 3-5 minute interview about George Wendt passing away.

Posted

I visited the last remaining Delaware Subs in Austin today and they had FN on the tv there. I had to endure Ron Johnson bloviating about all the crimes and incompetence of the Biden admin and he was throwing out the idea of questioning Biden admin on his fitness for office, what they knew when, etc. It took all I had in me to not blurt out "motherfucker do you not know who is in the white house right now?" 30 minutes of FN sent me into a full rage. I can only imagine what it's doing to our elder citizens. pure and unadulterated lying and falsities. it's maddening.

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Posted
On 5/21/2025 at 10:58 PM, C-Man said:

Jimmy Kimmel tonight shared an email that was sent to him from a “mole” at Fox News where a booking agent for Fox & Friends reached out to Kirstie Alley to see if she’d come on and do a short 3-5 minute interview about George Wendt passing away.

image.gif.b7ca8446306b52d8c4fb54e9e10b6419.gif

Posted (edited)

At the in laws for memorial weekend. Turned on YouTube tv and, shocker, all the suggestions are Fox News, megyn Kelly, dotard press conference, etc. 

I asked MIL how her fantasy world tv was going. Her reply?

”I don’t watch it. That’s why it keeps suggesting it. If I watched it, it would go away.”

Either she doesn’t understand how algorithms work or she’s lying to me. I have a suspicion it might be both. 

Edited by Biff Tannen
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Posted
I visited the last remaining Delaware Subs in Austin today and they had FN on the tv there. I had to endure Ron Johnson bloviating about all the crimes and incompetence of the Biden admin and he was throwing out the idea of questioning Biden admin on his fitness for office, what they knew when, etc. It took all I had in me to not blurt out "motherfucker do you not know who is in the white house right now?" 30 minutes of FN sent me into a full rage. I can only imagine what it's doing to our elder citizens. pure and unadulterated lying and falsities. it's maddening.

Personally, I’d tell them that as long as they’re showing Fox News in their store, you’re not buying any more food from them.
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Posted
13 hours ago, C-Man said:


Personally, I’d tell them that as long as they’re showing Fox News in their store, you’re not buying any more food from them.

well, it was my first and only time to ever go. my FIL is in town and it was one of his favorite places to go. considering it's the last one, I don't think my chastising them about their tv choices is going to change much

  • 3 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

you motherfuckers better be sitting down when you read this, because you will be SHOCKED!

 

Spoiler

In the wake of Dominion Voting System’s stunning $787.5 million settlement in its defamation lawsuit against Fox News, all eyes turned to Smartmatic, another voting technology company that had filed its own lawsuit making similar claims that Fox News had made false and defamatory accusations that Smartmatic had engaged in fraud during the 2020 election.

This week, the Smartmatic litigation revealed another similarity with the Dominion case: discovery that has unveiled blunt and shocking admissions by Fox employees that they knew the election fraud claims made by President Donald Trump and his attorneys, surrogates, and other key supporters were false — along with a multitude of synonyms for crazy.

Both sides have filed motions for summary judgment, seeking to convince the judge that the other side’s case is too flawed and should be thrown out ahead of trial. The dueling motions have significant redactions, mostly done at Fox’s insistence and over Smartmatic’s objection. In a press release, Smartmatic addressed the arguments it was making in its latest pleadings and addressed the issue of redacted information in the parties’ motions:

Quote

[M]ost of the important information in the motions is currently redacted. Smartmatic has told the court that it supports transparency and believes most, if not all, of the information should be unredacted and available to the public. Fox has not. The New York Times recently filed a motion to gain access to the filings, a motion Smartmatic supports.

Fox’s motion attacks Smartmatic by accusing the company of building its complaint on “a myth” by seeking a “windfall” from “allegations that mostly concerned Dominion Voting Systems” and “negative public sentiment about the 2020 elections,” and claiming that Smartmatic was “a failing company that had not turned a meaningful profit in many years and had no real business prospects.”

This new motion was filed by Smartmatic’s legal team, led by Erik Connolly, and specifically opposes the factual claims and legal arguments in the motion for summary judgment filed by defendants Fox News Network, Fox Corporation, Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro, and the estate of Lou Dobbs (who passed away in July 2024), by arguing that defendants have misrepresented the facts and law in the case and omitting relevant evidence, including the specific quotes by Fox employees that were revealed in discovery.

Similarly, pre-trial discovery in the Dominion litigation revealed a trove of documents in which Fox’s on-air personalities and top executives exchanged emails and text messages acknowledging Trump had lost the 2020 election, that his claims the election was stolen from him via fraud were unfounded, and lamenting the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. An additional set of documents with previously redacted comments was released in March 2023. The case ended up settling the very morning trial was set to begin.

One more detail about the Dominion litigation that may be giving Fox’s legal team anxiety-induced insomnia is the summary judgment motion that Dominion won against Fox, in which the judge brought the hammer down on the media giant and ruled that all twenty of the “statements” that were aired on either Fox News or Fox Business about Dominion were statements of fact and not protected opinion, and further that it was “CRYSTAL clear” (emphasis in original) they were all false and constituted defamation per se. That ruling also rejected several of Fox’s legal defenses and efforts to limit damages, finding it a matter for the jury.

Unsurprisingly, Smartmatic cited the Dominion ruling to argue that that court had “already held many of the same statements [in dispute in the Smartmatic litigation] were false as a matter of law,” and accuses Fox of lying about that court holding and misstating New York law on this issue.

Smartmatic’s motion is scathing in its description of Fox’s defense strategy (to “bury the truth under an avalanche of misdirection and strawmen”) and seeks to focus the case on “a very simple truth: Fox knowingly lied about a company that did nothing wrong,” arguing that Fox’s defenses about freedom of the press are “misdirection” from the cable news network’s “damning patterns of misconduct so egregious” they justify ruling in Smartmatic’s favor to remedy “the assassination of a company by a media giant that traded truth for ratings, causing immeasurable harm to both Smartmatic and democracy itself.”

The motion goes on to argue that Fox’s “lies” were “particular reprehensible” because they were “deliberate deception,” accusing company owners Rupert Murdoch and his family of having “orchestrated a calculated campaign of lies,” even as their internal communications showed they knew President Joe Biden had legitimately won:

Quote

Fox executives and showrunners privately ridiculed the very conspiracy theories they publicly amplified, creating a huge gulf between what they knew and what they published. This wasn’t journalism—it was strategic deception. Fox executives and showrunners recognized their viewers’ disappointment over Trump’s loss and cynically exploited it, feeding them comforting lies rather than uncomfortable truths. The network prioritized viewer retention over integrity, treating facts as irrelevant and their audience as pawns in a ratings game.

According to Smartmatic, Fox’s defamation “wasn’t a one-day story but a month-long assault” that “included 66 television broadcasts and over 100 publications with social media” made on its “massive global platform” reaching “hundreds of millions” of people around the world. “Most damaging of all, Fox has never retracted these lies, allowing them to fester in the public consciousness years later,” Connolly added.

In the section addressing Fox’s defenses for actual malice claims, Connolly blasts the Fox attorneys for their “lies about the legal standard for actual malice by omitting the parts that establish its liability as a matter of law,” and argues that Smartmatic has “overwhelming” evidence that the defendants “did not just doubt the claims — it ridiculed them in private while promoting them in public”:

Quote

Not a single Fox witness testified they believed Smartmatic helped rig the 2020 election. In fact, all admitted they do not believe it. And there is both direct and circumstantial evidence that Fox executives and showrunners doubted the veracity of Giuliani and Powell and their incredible claims. Fox whitewashes the record by omitting all mention of the words its employees actually used to describe the claims they put on air and their sources: “crazy,” “really crazy,” “fucking crazy,” “[t]ons of crazy,” “so fucking cray,” “bullshit,” “bs,” “bonkers,” “kooky,” “wacky,” “bananas,” “more than fantastical,” “comic book stuff,” “insane,” “INCORRECT,” “conspiracy theories,” “ridiculous conspiracy theories,” “a complete nut,” “a bit nuts,” “so nuts,” “totally nuts,” and “just MINDBLOWINGLY NUTS.”

 

“If that does not prove actual malice, nothing does,” wrote Connolly.

Fox News released a statement in response to Smartmatic’s latest motion:

Quote

Smartmatic’s motion confirms that it does not have the facts to support its claims, and their rhetoric-first approach to summary judgment is a grotesque distortion of the record that is contrary to well-established New York and First Amendment law. There is no basis for liability, as today’s filing proves. Smartmatic was a failing company that had not turned a meaningful profit in many years and had no real business prospects heading into the 2020 election.

The claim in that statement that Smartmatic “was a failing company” with no “meaningful profit” and “no real business prospects” was quoted from Fox’s motion and was countered by arguments in Smartmatic’s motion, which states that before the allegedly defamatory attacks from Fox, “Smartmatic was the largest election technology and services company in the world” and “had earned nearly $3 billion in operating revenue,” including being able “to capture the largest contract in U.S. history when, in 2018, it was selected to partner with LA County for the 2020 election.”

Smartmatic’s motion also counters the claim that it had “no real business prospects” by arguing it “was poised to earn billions in operating revenue after the 2020 election as the industry entered another ‘buy-cycle’ for election technology and services,” a future that was “robbed” from the company by Fox when it promoted election fraud lies for a month “using the largest worldwide megaphone of any news organization in history.”

“Ironically,” wrote Connolly, “Fox made an identical argument against Dominion — a much smaller company — before paying $787.5 million to settle a week after the court denied Fox’s motion for summary judgment on damages.”

Mediaite reached out to Smartmatic for comment on the motion and Fox’s defenses, and Connolly issued the following statement:

Quote

First, Fox uses its lies to disrupt American democracy and public trust in the election system, and now it is attempting to cover up those lies by misrepresenting basic constitutional law. Simply put: the First Amendment does not protect intentional lies. Fox has found themselves trying to justify the unjustifiable — they knowingly lied to their viewers and the public for profit.

Read Smartmatic’s Memorandum of Law in Opposition to Defendants’ Motion for Summary Judgment below.

 

https://www.mediaite.com/lawcrime/new-smartmatic-filing-reveals-wild-admissions-by-fox-employees-2020-election-fraud-claims-were-so-fing-cray-and-mindblowingly-nuts/?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark

 

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