The body of Henry Kissinger was discovered in Davos, Switzerland yesterday, unfortunately still alive and urging the world’s rich and powerful to be nice to one of his fellow war criminals, Vladimir Putin, reports The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. Kissinger, an architect of death and suffering on a world-historical scale who wears the flesh of a kindly Opa over the blood drenched void where his soul should be, suggested that:
“Negotiations need to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome. Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante. Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself,” he said.
Unprovoked military invasion, mass rape, and the murder of children apparently aren’t acts that might create “tensions that will not be easily overcome” for Kissinger, who has certainly overcome his responsibility for worse.
Also Today in Terrible People: if you’ve been avoiding the hideous circus around the Johnny Depp / Amber Heard trial but you would like one relatively short and correct explanation of what the hell is going on, Jessica Winter wrote it for The New Yorker dot com.
In fact, if you spend enough time inhaling the sulfurous fumes of the Depp-Heard live stream, what it starts to resemble most is a high-budget, general-admission form of revenge porn, an act in which the person with the upper hand in a relationship forces the other to be complicit in the sharing and dissemination of raw, vulnerable, literally sensational moments for the delectation of an unseen audience.
In Mel, Miles Klee reports that the fascist-adjacent women of the TERF movement have discovered that the men of the fascist right are simply using them for political expedience, and don’t actually value any women, trans or otherwise. Whom’s’t could have predicted. And like a bad neighbor, State Farm is only there when it needs something from you.
Salamanders in a wind tunnel. Turbine-building robots. Woody Harrelson “doesn't believe in the germ theory.” Does cold water cure anxiety? “In Britain, wild swimming is like sex. Sometimes it’s a bit crap, but doing it matters less than cultivating a reputation as someone who does.” Is the arachnid trade in the furry pocket of Big Spider? “98% of species can be traded with no overarching regulations…” Forget it Jake, it’s Flavortown. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” ask John Fetterman’s voters. CJR profiled NYT Pitchbot. Here’s why that’s bad news for Joe Biden. Dragon of Death: a flying reptile the size of a giraffe that invented hunting from the air. Videogrep killed the radiogrep. And via Garbage Ryan and D.J. Cummerbund, a cross-generational banger:
Crypto is a way to take a normal thing and apply advanced technology to make it suck. For example, hotels are trying to make reservations into NFTs so instead of cancelling for a refund you now have the obligation to resell the reservation yourself. WeWork’s megalomaniacal ex-founder Adam Neumann, funded by Egg & Co, is using the blockchain to turn environmentalism into bullshit with the “Goddess Nature Token.” Previous projects in this vein have flooded the market with worthless carbon credits. And a scammer might have saved us all from Seth Green using NFTs to make the low budget “buddies hanging out” YouTube genre suck even worse. As Adi Robertson points out, the idea that stealing Green’s apes means he no longer holds their copyright is probably nonsense, but we can all hope he doesn’t know that. The preview looks awful, but thanks to crime this might be the first and last we see of it:
Das ist eine Biens?
Today’s Song: Neutral Milk Hotel, “Communist Daughter”
~ tabs careening from the clouds, the bridges burst and twist around ~
Standing on the seaweed water @fka_tabs. Wanting something warm and moving @TodayinTabs. Sweetness sings from every corner when you are a paid subscriber. Thanks to The Present Age’s Parker Molloy and Midjourney for the Neural Milk Hotel art.
And thank God it’s Friday! 🤗
Not a typo.