Truer words were never spoken than when Mandolyna said "Takimag is nothing without you" I haven't bothered to pull it up since you left. I'm looking forward to reading all of these. Thanks, Dave.
Same here, went to Takimag to read Jim Goad, discovered David Cole there. Without these two no reason to visit. The eternal foid chased both away, oy vey!
Dave I know you couldn’t use the same name for that column. But a weekly rundown of strange news is not a unique concept; I think there was something like that in the Saturday edition of the paper where I grew up.
Unless you have a non compete for some lengthy amount of time you could do a similar column. In fact I’d say you should think about it because clearly a lot of people miss it.
I wonder if the city was worried about people drowning from reduced bouyancy in bathwater warm pools? I know a warm pool is not very attractive to me for that reason.
There's so many quotable things in this but my two favorites are:
"I don’t care much for Ron Unz. I don’t wish him harm; hell, every time the villagers chase him with torches, I’m the first to point out that he’s not an animal but a human being."
God damn that was savage lmao, if you had a street name it'd be David "Ice" Coled because that was ice cold holy shit lol. Thanks for the laugh, man.
And this:
"Also not a joke, this is a paper that ran a “political cartoon” showing Jews slitting the throats of gentiles and drinking their blood (the artist behind the cartoon was identified only as “C. Owens”)"
LOL
The whole compilation is full of top tier writing, as always of course but oh man those in particular got me good.
Not in the least bit surprised you were the main draw for readership of the site. Even when it had a slew of writers I liked before they started dropping like flies you were always the main draw. Always came to read your weekly article, then check out the others & since your departure I haven't been back since. Doesn't help that the search engine on there is about as functional as google search is so trying to look something up from one of your old articles is basically impossible.
Thanks for posting these articles, sharing what led up to you quitting as well as the resignation email. The curiosity was killing me lol.
Did you ever see the episode of Beef Squad where Jim spends the whole thing on his quitting TakiMag and just unloads on Mandolyna and just how awful and incompetent she was?
Also a bit of LA history: did you know that in 1941 the owners of the St Louis Browns planned to move their franchise to LA, but then Tojo got the bright idea to bomb Pearl Harbor. This scuttled the move and in 1954 they ended up relocating the team to Baltimore. If the original move had happened the Dodgers would still be in Brooklyn. Instead in 1957 Walter O'Malley announced he was moving the team to LA contingent on the new stadium approved, and through a corrupt campaign it barely got approved. The big losers in all of this besides Brooklyn: All the Mexicans who lived in Chavez Ravine who essentially had their entire neighborhood confiscated through eminent domain to build Dodger Stadium (which is why I found the team's anti ICE statement hilariously ironic).
Truth be told, initially I sympathized with her. Goad and I have been friends since 1992, and I know that sometimes he can be prickly. As he'd often point out, Mandolyna was essentially being forced by her dad to edit Takimag. She didn't WANT the job. I sympathized with that. But, being Mandolyna, she couldn't just sit back and let her writers write. Goad warned me that eventually she'd start micromanaging me. He was right.
She must be really clueless if she doesn't understand how taking pokes at RU could actually increase traffic from the UNZ site to her own. That really does sound like someone who is not interested in a media business.
My family is kind of like this except without the money. And probably with more toxicity.
When I moved & went no contact they did things like bad address changes in my name (resulting in me not getting a check for $2k) & called in bad ‘wellness checks’ on me.
Because I was no contact they once called one in to a building I hadn’t lived in for months. It was a control thing.
One of them admitted to lying about me in an email from their work account to my bestie. He sent it to me. Since the liar/harasser had a publicly funded job I screenshotted it and sent it to the city council where they live.
No problems since. They ALL stopped. But that was post pandemic. They harassed me because they couldn’t control me for over a decade. It was bad.
One person reported me to ‘the FBI’ (I googled the # & it was a realtor). At one point *I* called the FBI to report all this interstate harassment but nothing happened.
Some families will try to get back at you for saying no to things.
The ‘wellness checks’ were brutal. PDs don’t want to NOT do them. They’re like, ‘Well it’s your mom, she might really be concerned. What if we didn’t check and you actually were a suicide risk?’
Very hard to escape a family if they have some kind of hold on you. There’s always the love thing; my shrink is like “you have to stay away from them though, they enjoy hurting you.”
For Mandolyna her dad is a very wealthy & connected guy. I’m sure she loves him & wants to help him but he could probably also make her life difficult if he felt like it.
I didn't see the episode itself but I do remember Jim going off about her after he left to go write for CC. He basically did a brief synopsis of what would he said he would later detail more on the show.
From that I knew enough that if Dave ever let any details loose about quitting it was basically guaranteed involve her in some fashion. She sounds like real piece of work.
Wow! I had no idea what a shitshow it was to write for Takimag. Well, it's their loss if they can't handle and appreciate the genius that is David Cole. What's next? Is Mandolyna going to correct Sailer's math? Ramanujan wouldn't even try that one.
Steve was never as prolific as you. He seems to put out, on average, two pieces per month for Taki, occasionally three. He's a great writer but much more statistically bound than most, as he's pretty much a statistician in journalistic clothing. Steve is sort of the Voice of Ye' Old San Fernando Valley while you are the voice of the West Side if the West Side ever told the world what it was really thinking. Steve dishes out uncomfortable statistics with a calm voice; you are the iconoclast.
Having seen the shit my dad had to put up with in life chasing the almighty dollar, I scrimped and saved (and lent money at high interest) so I could quit in my late 50's and answer to no one.
It would be nice to fly first class once in awhile, though...
David Cole is a comic writer of brilliance. Said without irony or snark. Taki's loss.
By the way, is there not something quaintly naïve, or perhaps shockingly self-unaware, about a site that has variously employed or been run by, e.g. Richard Spencer, Jim Goad and David Cole, taking the position "we don't want to piss off the wrong people"?
Ultimately, this feels like an instance of generational decline in that Taki's handing off editorial control to his daughter represented a fundamental and detrimental shift in perspective regarding maintaining editorial distance and granting freedom to writers they (we thought) respect even at the risk of alienating this or that Important Person. I always pictured Taki as the kind of person who would have had a laugh with Baldwin or Musk over having published a piece pillorying them. The judo expert in him should love that sort of situation and dynamic.
I think you're right concerning generational decline. I don't know what goes on in the minds of Taki or his children, but a generational shift in weltanschauung is probably what's at work here. I sort of doubt his daughter, I'd guess an early Millennial, holds the same worldview as the son of a Greek business tycoon who remembers the Wehrmacht marching down his street as a child with fondness and who has rubbed elbows with some very rough characters. Generational wealth only gets cozier with time, and Mandolyna is more likely to hold the sensibilities of a softer generation and a cozy class.
At first I thought The Six Triple Eight film you described was something you made up!
I checked the cast list and Sommore is not in it. (I so miss those Comedy Central Roasts; on one of them Sommore was on the roast panel, and after she did her bit, Jeff Ross said, "Please, some less.")
Dave, No ox goes ungored, and thank God for that. This collection is a Molotov cocktail of satire, launched with the accuracy of a man who’s spent ten years perfecting the trajectory.
"A furious Mandolyna told me that she’s in Vienna, and neither of those stories resonated with that demographic."
You come from the wrong side of the Donaukanal. We who actually live and work inside the Ringstrasse do not greatly concern ourselves with the parochial opinions of places like Wiener Neustadt and Beverly Hills.
The horrific death of the 79-year-old woman on the drawbridge is heartbreaking. The horrors of affirmative action/DEI are more than we can imagine. It's like collateral damage in war.
I watched the video link and I'm not convinced it was directly a result of racially based hiring. More the case of just a simpleton who should never have been given a job in charge of heavy machinery or where others lives were in her hands but I wouldn't be surprised if there were more people in similar positions of responsibility due to the general reduction in requirements for competency.
Rather than Ms Paulk being explicitly favoured, I expect this is a secondary effect of DEI and affirmative action having stripped the rigor from hiring practices more generally. When benchmarks are so reduced or completely removed then there is no way of judging anyone effectively.
With long developed systems having been allowed to deteriorate we are going to get increasing examples of catastrophic failure like this. All those skilled and responsible people who managed to ameliorate the first generation of affirmative action are gone now. The people in charge today hark from the 90s, a time when rigour had been reduced for thirty years. It's not that there are not competent people still around it's just that on the face of it they are not readily distinguishable from the less- and incompetent. Advancement based on competency does not necessarily dovetail with representation and once the rot has entered the system it is very difficult to excise. Someone was responsible for actually giving this person the job and presumably they reported up a command chain that approved it-that's a lot of canker to remove.
So I feel a degree of sympathy for Paulk as she should never have been placed in a situation where she was in charge of anything and its patently obvious that she is too stupid to know this herself.
But I agree that this it is very much the case that these types of error are seen as collateral damage that is inconsequential when measured against the benefits of representation. And, sadly, we are likely to find that we are mostly all little people if we find ourselves unfortunate enough to get in the way of this type of (utterly avoidable) tragedy.
I'd put the (full effect of) LA fires in this same framework and yet it doesn't seem to have resulted in much in the way of change
If change comes due to the fires, it'll do so in a year - the June 2026 mayoral election. There was no reason to file a recall against Karen Bass; the process itself can take almost a year. So it would be a waste of time and money to go through the trouble when she's up for reelection anyway. Caruso will almost certainly run again, on a two-pronged campaign of the fire disaster and the fact that Bass is too incompetent to be trusted running the city during the 2028 Olympics.
I'm flashing back now to the Celtics-Lakers rivalry of the 1980s, the greatest sports rivalry of my lifetime. In the three championship bouts, El Lay won two, Bahstin one.....
L.A. mayors are weak in terms of actual power. The position was weakened a good 50 years ago due to excesses of our earlier mayors. Hence why Mayor Bradley couldn't fire Police Chief Daryl Gates after the Rodney Kind incident (Bradley HATED Gates, but the position of mayor had long ago been watered down). So Bradly basically just stood there like an inoffensive smiling oak tree. And we were fine with that. Riordan, the Republican, tried to bring activism back, firing incompetent school execs and installing a friendly school board. He won the bean vote and a second term handily. But then we got Hahn, weaker than powdered milk, then Villaraigosa, positioned by the Dems to be "the next big thing" until it turned out he couldn't stop fucking female reporters. Generally our mayors are disasters. Riordan was the only solid one in my lifetime. Caruso has a real chance next year. But this time the bastard needs to take my advice and mention "tough on crime," which he didn't do in 2022.
2028 will be an election summer. That will make the Olympic dynamics even more interesting. Remember that Hitler ordered a temporary end to anti-Jewish measures during the '36 games. Trump, not wanting to ruin Vance's chances, might be like "no ICE raids during the Olympics!" But I doubt that will quell the anger.
Vance is so weird of a guy that I don’t think he’s a viable candidate. I don’t think the plan is for him to be the candidate, because most of the public can’t stand him. He’s also not good-looking & doesn’t seem very personable. There’s a lot of ‘he killed the Pope’ jokes online in the same way Liz Truss was accused of killing QEII. I don’t think this is an electable guy; Trump has a cult of personality but Vance isn’t compelling like that.
He’s also the one Trump has been sending out to do the least popular stuff; the rudeness to Zelensky, the strange 3-hr trip to Greenland to I guess scare them, the threat to impeach judges based on how they interpret the law. I think Trump is already planning to Pence him.
I know Vance wants power, and I guess Thiel had a crush on him at some point back when he was skinnier, but he comes across like the fat kid who befriends a bully for protection.
There’s a tremendous amount of ill will towards him & the Rs probably need to look elsewhere if they want to win.
By the way, what is the deal with Taki and his daughter? From what I can piece together, from you, Goad and others who have written for him over the years, he's a wealthy Greek (?) gent who philanthropically supports right wing or libertarian causes -- which is great, thanks, sir -- and it quite elderly now. So his daughter is taking over his endeavors much like Murdoch's children, but, as we know, sometimes the second generation may not run the ship as adeptly as dear old dad did. So ... what to think of it all? I'm curious, genuinely.
Goad knew her in person. Me, only via email for ten years. So according to goad, Taki put her in charge of Takimag to teach her "responsibility." To give her a "real job," and she HATES it. It's a chore for her, slavery. But the funny thing is, with such a small stable of writers, she could quite literally just let them do their thing. Like she could've let ME do my thing. But she was compelled to micromanage us. It's what drove away Goad, and, eventually, me.
The politics of small publications are so bizarre.
My guess honestly would’ve been that she wanted to monetize it more or cut writer pay or something. I felt that the newish ‘this is a subscription service’ might’ve been her.
I felt like maybe *Taki* was the less realistic one, and maybe it was losing money and she wanted to try and turn it around. It’s very hard to find advertising for some conservative sites, especially mainstream advertisers.
Without this insider intel I would’ve also guessed that not offending Elon, Baldwin etc was about trying to cultivate them as guest columnists or even investors potentially.
Truer words were never spoken than when Mandolyna said "Takimag is nothing without you" I haven't bothered to pull it up since you left. I'm looking forward to reading all of these. Thanks, Dave.
Exactly. I make it a point not to read it.
Thank you, Gunther. And thank you for your readership.
I went "cold turnkey" on Drudge, now Taki's too.
Yea, when Taki's stopped being Cole, I was done!
Same here, went to Takimag to read Jim Goad, discovered David Cole there. Without these two no reason to visit. The eternal foid chased both away, oy vey!
Spot on, Kelly!
Thank YOU, Kelly. I very much appreciate the kind words.
Pure Gold Cole, pure gold!
Thank you Mike!
Reminds me of how much I miss the Cole TWTP.
I tried to read one, ONE, after you quit, didn’t even finish, and haven’t been back to Taki since.
You set the standard, and no replacement compares… but at least we’re getting a new book out of it!
Cheers man!
I love ya, Mike. That really means a lot.
High praise from a qualified assayer!
Meanwhile in Canada: Toronto shuts down public swimming pools due to heat (no, that's not a joke):
https://x.com/WeAreCanProud/status/1937232943488885163?t=PlFlgmpz9gBaslzQEdf_iw&s=19
What a Week story that would've made!
Dave I know you couldn’t use the same name for that column. But a weekly rundown of strange news is not a unique concept; I think there was something like that in the Saturday edition of the paper where I grew up.
Unless you have a non compete for some lengthy amount of time you could do a similar column. In fact I’d say you should think about it because clearly a lot of people miss it.
It's what Goad did; he started "The Worst Week Ever" column at Counter-Currents (basically just The Week That Perished but different name).
It's not a bad idea; I'll certainly consider it!
I wonder if the city was worried about people drowning from reduced bouyancy in bathwater warm pools? I know a warm pool is not very attractive to me for that reason.
On further examination, the lifeguards demanded "hazard pay" to sit in their chairs in the heat and the city did not want to pay.
There's so many quotable things in this but my two favorites are:
"I don’t care much for Ron Unz. I don’t wish him harm; hell, every time the villagers chase him with torches, I’m the first to point out that he’s not an animal but a human being."
God damn that was savage lmao, if you had a street name it'd be David "Ice" Coled because that was ice cold holy shit lol. Thanks for the laugh, man.
And this:
"Also not a joke, this is a paper that ran a “political cartoon” showing Jews slitting the throats of gentiles and drinking their blood (the artist behind the cartoon was identified only as “C. Owens”)"
LOL
The whole compilation is full of top tier writing, as always of course but oh man those in particular got me good.
Not in the least bit surprised you were the main draw for readership of the site. Even when it had a slew of writers I liked before they started dropping like flies you were always the main draw. Always came to read your weekly article, then check out the others & since your departure I haven't been back since. Doesn't help that the search engine on there is about as functional as google search is so trying to look something up from one of your old articles is basically impossible.
Thanks for posting these articles, sharing what led up to you quitting as well as the resignation email. The curiosity was killing me lol.
Yeah, I had to get it out of my system! Thank you for your very kind words about my writing, and thank you especially for your continued readership.
Threats of a late-night invasion by Unz from beneath the bed — that's the kind of story grandparents tell to scare the grandkids into compliance.
That'd certainly scare me into compliance, I'd shit myself if I ever saw that mug come out from under the bed.
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Did you ever see the episode of Beef Squad where Jim spends the whole thing on his quitting TakiMag and just unloads on Mandolyna and just how awful and incompetent she was?
Also a bit of LA history: did you know that in 1941 the owners of the St Louis Browns planned to move their franchise to LA, but then Tojo got the bright idea to bomb Pearl Harbor. This scuttled the move and in 1954 they ended up relocating the team to Baltimore. If the original move had happened the Dodgers would still be in Brooklyn. Instead in 1957 Walter O'Malley announced he was moving the team to LA contingent on the new stadium approved, and through a corrupt campaign it barely got approved. The big losers in all of this besides Brooklyn: All the Mexicans who lived in Chavez Ravine who essentially had their entire neighborhood confiscated through eminent domain to build Dodger Stadium (which is why I found the team's anti ICE statement hilariously ironic).
Truth be told, initially I sympathized with her. Goad and I have been friends since 1992, and I know that sometimes he can be prickly. As he'd often point out, Mandolyna was essentially being forced by her dad to edit Takimag. She didn't WANT the job. I sympathized with that. But, being Mandolyna, she couldn't just sit back and let her writers write. Goad warned me that eventually she'd start micromanaging me. He was right.
She must be really clueless if she doesn't understand how taking pokes at RU could actually increase traffic from the UNZ site to her own. That really does sound like someone who is not interested in a media business.
My family is kind of like this except without the money. And probably with more toxicity.
When I moved & went no contact they did things like bad address changes in my name (resulting in me not getting a check for $2k) & called in bad ‘wellness checks’ on me.
Because I was no contact they once called one in to a building I hadn’t lived in for months. It was a control thing.
One of them admitted to lying about me in an email from their work account to my bestie. He sent it to me. Since the liar/harasser had a publicly funded job I screenshotted it and sent it to the city council where they live.
No problems since. They ALL stopped. But that was post pandemic. They harassed me because they couldn’t control me for over a decade. It was bad.
One person reported me to ‘the FBI’ (I googled the # & it was a realtor). At one point *I* called the FBI to report all this interstate harassment but nothing happened.
Some families will try to get back at you for saying no to things.
The ‘wellness checks’ were brutal. PDs don’t want to NOT do them. They’re like, ‘Well it’s your mom, she might really be concerned. What if we didn’t check and you actually were a suicide risk?’
Very hard to escape a family if they have some kind of hold on you. There’s always the love thing; my shrink is like “you have to stay away from them though, they enjoy hurting you.”
For Mandolyna her dad is a very wealthy & connected guy. I’m sure she loves him & wants to help him but he could probably also make her life difficult if he felt like it.
I didn't see the episode itself but I do remember Jim going off about her after he left to go write for CC. He basically did a brief synopsis of what would he said he would later detail more on the show.
From that I knew enough that if Dave ever let any details loose about quitting it was basically guaranteed involve her in some fashion. She sounds like real piece of work.
She's an...acquired taste.
Is that what we're calling it now?
Wow! I had no idea what a shitshow it was to write for Takimag. Well, it's their loss if they can't handle and appreciate the genius that is David Cole. What's next? Is Mandolyna going to correct Sailer's math? Ramanujan wouldn't even try that one.
Yeah, I wonder why Steve hasn't been alienated yet....
Steve has a family. He's tried to migrate as much of his traffic as possible to Substack, and he left Unz, but he can't be as "devil may care" as I.
Steve was never as prolific as you. He seems to put out, on average, two pieces per month for Taki, occasionally three. He's a great writer but much more statistically bound than most, as he's pretty much a statistician in journalistic clothing. Steve is sort of the Voice of Ye' Old San Fernando Valley while you are the voice of the West Side if the West Side ever told the world what it was really thinking. Steve dishes out uncomfortable statistics with a calm voice; you are the iconoclast.
Much appreciated, Biff! Thank you.
Having seen the shit my dad had to put up with in life chasing the almighty dollar, I scrimped and saved (and lent money at high interest) so I could quit in my late 50's and answer to no one.
It would be nice to fly first class once in awhile, though...
David Cole is a comic writer of brilliance. Said without irony or snark. Taki's loss.
By the way, is there not something quaintly naïve, or perhaps shockingly self-unaware, about a site that has variously employed or been run by, e.g. Richard Spencer, Jim Goad and David Cole, taking the position "we don't want to piss off the wrong people"?
Ultimately, this feels like an instance of generational decline in that Taki's handing off editorial control to his daughter represented a fundamental and detrimental shift in perspective regarding maintaining editorial distance and granting freedom to writers they (we thought) respect even at the risk of alienating this or that Important Person. I always pictured Taki as the kind of person who would have had a laugh with Baldwin or Musk over having published a piece pillorying them. The judo expert in him should love that sort of situation and dynamic.
Thank you for the very kind words, Daniel. And your observations about Takimag are 100% spot-on.
I think you're right concerning generational decline. I don't know what goes on in the minds of Taki or his children, but a generational shift in weltanschauung is probably what's at work here. I sort of doubt his daughter, I'd guess an early Millennial, holds the same worldview as the son of a Greek business tycoon who remembers the Wehrmacht marching down his street as a child with fondness and who has rubbed elbows with some very rough characters. Generational wealth only gets cozier with time, and Mandolyna is more likely to hold the sensibilities of a softer generation and a cozy class.
Dave makes me, and the other me laugh like hell. Even all the way over here in Ulaanbaatar, my ass got laughed off.
PS I have a 'video hello' comin' soon, now that I got me a Unitel Sim. Fuckin AT&T, international roaming $35, shit don't work here.
And there are 05:30 leaf blowers around these parts too, just not beans running 'em !!!
Sonuvabitch! That's why my Week's suggestions never made it. Bitch was picking three stories herlself! Never again, Taki. Never again.
Thanks for posting all these, Dave.
That's what always hobbled me; I had to use her three stories. I did enjoy the challenge, but a lot of better stories were forced to go unmentioned.
At first I thought The Six Triple Eight film you described was something you made up!
I checked the cast list and Sommore is not in it. (I so miss those Comedy Central Roasts; on one of them Sommore was on the roast panel, and after she did her bit, Jeff Ross said, "Please, some less.")
Don't forget the REAL King Of The Roasts:
https://youtu.be/5wTujmZ1c0k?si=PtZbwtj_I0713xJV
Norm's freeze-takes were amazing!
One of my favorite comics of all time. Totally un-pc.
The VDARE website is accessible online again, though has no new content:
https://vdare.com/
Kind of disappointing that so much depends on who Taki does or doesn’t like personally.
Dave, No ox goes ungored, and thank God for that. This collection is a Molotov cocktail of satire, launched with the accuracy of a man who’s spent ten years perfecting the trajectory.
Wonderfully-put, Terry! Made my day! Thank you.
"A furious Mandolyna told me that she’s in Vienna, and neither of those stories resonated with that demographic."
You come from the wrong side of the Donaukanal. We who actually live and work inside the Ringstrasse do not greatly concern ourselves with the parochial opinions of places like Wiener Neustadt and Beverly Hills.
Nicky definitely owes her a response—she raised valid points about Dave’s connection with the Viennese crowd.
"I'm what counts out here! Not your
fuckin’ Viennese clubs or your fuckin'
Ringstrasse shows! And what the fuck are you
doin' in Vienna anyhow?!"
Funny enough, the last time I set foot anywhere in Austria was 1996. I wouldn't know how to write for that demographic if you paid me!
Also funny enough, Mandolyna, who'd choose three of The Week's five stories, never once sent me a story ABOUT Vienna.
That's what made her sudden obsession with it so odd.
Every arrogant prick dreams of conquering Vienna--Hello, Herr Salieri!
The horrific death of the 79-year-old woman on the drawbridge is heartbreaking. The horrors of affirmative action/DEI are more than we can imagine. It's like collateral damage in war.
As long as it's the little people---the poor and unknown---who get chewed up, nothing will change.
I watched the video link and I'm not convinced it was directly a result of racially based hiring. More the case of just a simpleton who should never have been given a job in charge of heavy machinery or where others lives were in her hands but I wouldn't be surprised if there were more people in similar positions of responsibility due to the general reduction in requirements for competency.
Rather than Ms Paulk being explicitly favoured, I expect this is a secondary effect of DEI and affirmative action having stripped the rigor from hiring practices more generally. When benchmarks are so reduced or completely removed then there is no way of judging anyone effectively.
With long developed systems having been allowed to deteriorate we are going to get increasing examples of catastrophic failure like this. All those skilled and responsible people who managed to ameliorate the first generation of affirmative action are gone now. The people in charge today hark from the 90s, a time when rigour had been reduced for thirty years. It's not that there are not competent people still around it's just that on the face of it they are not readily distinguishable from the less- and incompetent. Advancement based on competency does not necessarily dovetail with representation and once the rot has entered the system it is very difficult to excise. Someone was responsible for actually giving this person the job and presumably they reported up a command chain that approved it-that's a lot of canker to remove.
So I feel a degree of sympathy for Paulk as she should never have been placed in a situation where she was in charge of anything and its patently obvious that she is too stupid to know this herself.
But I agree that this it is very much the case that these types of error are seen as collateral damage that is inconsequential when measured against the benefits of representation. And, sadly, we are likely to find that we are mostly all little people if we find ourselves unfortunate enough to get in the way of this type of (utterly avoidable) tragedy.
I'd put the (full effect of) LA fires in this same framework and yet it doesn't seem to have resulted in much in the way of change
If change comes due to the fires, it'll do so in a year - the June 2026 mayoral election. There was no reason to file a recall against Karen Bass; the process itself can take almost a year. So it would be a waste of time and money to go through the trouble when she's up for reelection anyway. Caruso will almost certainly run again, on a two-pronged campaign of the fire disaster and the fact that Bass is too incompetent to be trusted running the city during the 2028 Olympics.
I was looking at a list of L.A. mayors, how did Tom Bradley stay in the job for 20 years? Was his reign an overall negative or positive?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_Los_Angeles
I'm flashing back now to the Celtics-Lakers rivalry of the 1980s, the greatest sports rivalry of my lifetime. In the three championship bouts, El Lay won two, Bahstin one.....
L.A. mayors are weak in terms of actual power. The position was weakened a good 50 years ago due to excesses of our earlier mayors. Hence why Mayor Bradley couldn't fire Police Chief Daryl Gates after the Rodney Kind incident (Bradley HATED Gates, but the position of mayor had long ago been watered down). So Bradly basically just stood there like an inoffensive smiling oak tree. And we were fine with that. Riordan, the Republican, tried to bring activism back, firing incompetent school execs and installing a friendly school board. He won the bean vote and a second term handily. But then we got Hahn, weaker than powdered milk, then Villaraigosa, positioned by the Dems to be "the next big thing" until it turned out he couldn't stop fucking female reporters. Generally our mayors are disasters. Riordan was the only solid one in my lifetime. Caruso has a real chance next year. But this time the bastard needs to take my advice and mention "tough on crime," which he didn't do in 2022.
Sam Yorty is the only "early mayor" I'd ever heard of, prolly b/c Hunter S. Thompson mocked him for running for Prez in 1972.
A great book from you would be El Lay: A Completely Unauthorized Biography of the City I Love (And Know Better Than Just About Everybody Else).
Mayor Bradley always seemed like a pompous guy.
As for Mayor V, how can you fault him for wanting to screw a pretty chick?
Do you think anyone will boycott the Olympics? They keep detaining people who have proper visas.
I know tourism is down significantly in places like Vegas & Colorado.
I don’t even know if there will be an LA Olympics in practical terms due to some of these Trump policies.
Whoever the mayor is has some local control but can’t actually influence THAT much
Even Newsom begging Canadians to keep going to Cali - they have to not get detained overnight by Feds. Why would they risk it?
Lots of tone deafness on the part of some CA politicians right now, Newsom in particular has been offending both the left and the right
2028 will be an election summer. That will make the Olympic dynamics even more interesting. Remember that Hitler ordered a temporary end to anti-Jewish measures during the '36 games. Trump, not wanting to ruin Vance's chances, might be like "no ICE raids during the Olympics!" But I doubt that will quell the anger.
You’re probably right.
Vance is so weird of a guy that I don’t think he’s a viable candidate. I don’t think the plan is for him to be the candidate, because most of the public can’t stand him. He’s also not good-looking & doesn’t seem very personable. There’s a lot of ‘he killed the Pope’ jokes online in the same way Liz Truss was accused of killing QEII. I don’t think this is an electable guy; Trump has a cult of personality but Vance isn’t compelling like that.
He’s also the one Trump has been sending out to do the least popular stuff; the rudeness to Zelensky, the strange 3-hr trip to Greenland to I guess scare them, the threat to impeach judges based on how they interpret the law. I think Trump is already planning to Pence him.
I know Vance wants power, and I guess Thiel had a crush on him at some point back when he was skinnier, but he comes across like the fat kid who befriends a bully for protection.
There’s a tremendous amount of ill will towards him & the Rs probably need to look elsewhere if they want to win.
By the way, what is the deal with Taki and his daughter? From what I can piece together, from you, Goad and others who have written for him over the years, he's a wealthy Greek (?) gent who philanthropically supports right wing or libertarian causes -- which is great, thanks, sir -- and it quite elderly now. So his daughter is taking over his endeavors much like Murdoch's children, but, as we know, sometimes the second generation may not run the ship as adeptly as dear old dad did. So ... what to think of it all? I'm curious, genuinely.
Goad knew her in person. Me, only via email for ten years. So according to goad, Taki put her in charge of Takimag to teach her "responsibility." To give her a "real job," and she HATES it. It's a chore for her, slavery. But the funny thing is, with such a small stable of writers, she could quite literally just let them do their thing. Like she could've let ME do my thing. But she was compelled to micromanage us. It's what drove away Goad, and, eventually, me.
It sounds like even Feral House and Taki's aren't immune from the consequences of nepo babies.
You and Goad = #TooHotForTakis
Good point. Yes, first Feral House, then Taki's. A terrible shame in both cases.
Innnteresting.
The politics of small publications are so bizarre.
My guess honestly would’ve been that she wanted to monetize it more or cut writer pay or something. I felt that the newish ‘this is a subscription service’ might’ve been her.
I felt like maybe *Taki* was the less realistic one, and maybe it was losing money and she wanted to try and turn it around. It’s very hard to find advertising for some conservative sites, especially mainstream advertisers.
Without this insider intel I would’ve also guessed that not offending Elon, Baldwin etc was about trying to cultivate them as guest columnists or even investors potentially.