Was that a question.

Lurid Keyaki also sent in this link on the show Yellowstone:

Everyone in the show's universe is obsessed with history--mainly with the idea that the Dutton family's way of life, as owners of a giant ranch adjacent to Yellowstone National Park, employers of many cowboys, and wielders of various kinds of local power, is deeply correct. The driving tension in the plot comes from the fact (undeniable in the show's universe) that this lifestyle is under threat because of the passage of time and the world's changing ways. This is not a subtle theme; it's something that characters say out loud, a lot. These threats come from every side: Capitalists with even more money and power than the Duttons are looking to buy their land for development. Militias with a grudge try to murder them.

I can't totally tell if the author actually likes the show.

Yet I can't stop watching this show, four seasons in, for the ways it portrays drama traditionally untapped by the kinds of media that critics are wont to cover. Yellowstone is totally obsessed with drawing lines between city slickers who watch Succession and the kinds of real people who are meant to be in Montana. In the first season, a California billionaire who has been trying to take over the Duttons' ranch dies, gasping out, "I have every right to be here. This is America." But he and his ilk obviously do not, since they died, and it's the strong who survive. The land, Yellowstone tells us, has some kind of knowledge of who is meant to be there, and if you're still alive in Montana, it must be because the land refused to cast you off. Urbanites could never stand a chance in this show's vision of the Wild West.

There are some plot spoilers at the link, but she gives you a head's up.

(Over the past few years I've become increasingly paralyzed by choice and unable to sit down and actually watch anything. I don't know what's wrong with me. Wasting time on something crappy feels like a terrible prospect, and so I never try anything out.)

This combination of pathological insecurity coupled with a complete lack of self-reflection is...actually very common? A winning formula for wealth and power? How you become president? I don't know; these people are fucking exhausting.

'Calendly' Etiquette is The Most Raw / Naked Display of Social Capital Dynamics in Business. pic.twitter.com/GEdYj6J6Rt

— sam lessin (@lessin) January 26, 2022

Maybe a retirement thread? I don't know if there's anything necessarily to discuss. Whether or not someone decides to try to scuttle Ketanji Brown Jackson's path to the Supreme Court?

Lurid Keyaki sends in this:

The growing militancy of the Republican right is less about an alliance of small business against big business than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.

(In order to have this conversation, you have to assume that the wild racism and sexism are automatically true and don't need to be established yet again.)

It's not an entirely new premise, but the article does a very deep dive all the way through the Tea Party, through the Chamber of Commerce, and back to Amway. There's a particular emphasis on the fetishization of family businesses.

I buy it. Republicans love all that shit about self-made men who can support their families and get to be their own boss and nobody can tell you what to do. Daddy issues all the way down.

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while. There is no way it could function as that sentence implies, but it's still nice to have a thread.

Episode Kobe thirteen.

Nworbie writes: Now that Sue Grey has referred some of her discoveries to the Metropolitan Police, they will formally investigate the crimes that we all knew took place during lockdown -- and the parties were crimes: outside Number Ten people were fined for breaking the regulations.

So Johnson is finally toast. I'm sure that what comes after will be in some senses even worse. Brexit and Covid between them have tested the whole Conservative party for competence and honesty and any who tested positive have been safely quarantined. But the longer term question is whether the party can hold together or if the two wings of the Brexit coalition will break apart and the tyranny of the Telegraph end.

Can we have a thread, please?

Heebie's take: here you go!

Moby Hick writes: So I don't accidentally stand between the wrong person and the wall when the revolution comes, I like to pay attention to labor issues by looking at antiwork. They are understandably up in arms about the ThedaCare lawsuit where a hospital, so far successfully, sued to block former staff members from taking a better job with a competing hospital. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't understand how this is legal. Did Scott Walker fuck over the state that much?

Heebie's take: This is nuts:

ThedaCare requested Thursday that an Outagamie County judge temporarily block seven of its employees who had applied for and accepted jobs at Ascension from beginning work there on Monday until the health system could find replacements for them.

Outagamie County Circuit Court Judge Mark McGinnis granted ThedaCare's request and held an initial hearing Friday morning. The case will get a longer hearing at 10 a.m. Monday.

McGinnis told lawyers for both health systems they should try to work out a temporary agreement by the end of the day Friday about the employees' status until Monday's hearing.

Otherwise, he said, the order prohibiting them from going to work at Ascension would be final until a further ruling was made. That means the seven health care workers would not be working at either hospital on Monday.