Actor in clown costume (1869). Credit: Weir Collection.

Executives of other oil companies describe Exxon Mobil as “ruthless, self-isolating and inscrutable … priggish Presbyterian deacons” who maintain “kind of a 1950s Southern religious culture. They’re all engineers, mostly white males, mostly from the South. … They shared a belief in the One Right Answer.”

At ExxonMobil, top leadership operates in a cult-like fashion, and likely Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all but grew up in it. It'll be interesting to have a cult leader as our chief diplomat.
↩︎ In These Times
Jan 18, 2017

Peter Thiel wants to use the government to develop vampirism, maybe

One of Trump's top advisors is the unfortunate Silicon Valley cyborg concept of a human being Peter Thiel, who—in addition to advocating for going Galt in the middle of the ocean, allegedly taking advice on the Presidential transition from alleged floor-shitting troll Chuck Johnson, being anti-women's suffrage, and, of course, running a yearslong covert legal operation to shut down Gawker—is interested in injecting young blood in his body to stay alive forever.

As J.K. Trotter noted, Thiel's support of Trump becomes "much more legible if you begin with the premise that he is endorsing Trump not because he believes in the candidate’s particular policy prescriptions—such as the systemic victimization of an entire religion—but because he wants to instrumentalize Trump in an effort to propagate his vision of a political future in which elites are liberated to radically remake the system of governance to better serve their interests."

See also: When asked, Anne Rice voiced support for Thiel's proposed slow transformation into vampire.

Jan 18, 2017

This is incoming Small Business Administration head Linda McMahon.

The eighties were Trump’s era, where he still seemed to live. But he was also reminiscent of the older comics who once roamed the Catskills, those dark and angry men who provided a cathartic outlet for harsh ideas that both broke and reinforced taboos, about the war between men and women, especially. Trump was that hostile-jaunty guy in the big flappy suit, with the vaudeville hair, the pursed lips, and the glare. There’s always been an audience for that guy.

Basically, Trump is the very worst kind of comedian.
↩︎ The New Yorker
Jan 18, 2017
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