I know that it's hardly worth commenting on whatever new inanity Tucker Carlson spews into the world each day. He's just this decade's Glenn Beck, and he'll disappear soon enough.
But today's inanity got me curious about a tiny thing. Tucker started out tonight by blathering for a while about the sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines off the coast of Sweden. He was apparently unaware that the pipelines are already out of operation, so he began his segment by expressing shock at the potential loss of marine life from the gas leaks and the catastrophic effect all this leaking methane will have on climate change. Crocodile tears flowed.
As it happens, neither of these things is even remotely an issue, but whatever. Next, Tucker rambled on to the question of who sabotaged the pipelines, and eventually concluded that it was probably the United States—which is crazy, but not entirely impossible to believe. Then he got to thinking about how Russia might hit back:
Why wouldn't Russia sever undersea internet cables? What would happen if they did that? What would happen if banks in London couldn't communicate with banks in New York? Just that one piece of it—leaving aside its potential effects on our power grid.
What is that supposed to mean? How would severing transatlantic internet cables affect our power grid? Does anyone have any idea what he's thinking here?
Yeah, yeah, I know this is about the least important part of what he said. But I'm still curious.
Sorry Kevin, I tried to watch to the part you said but that moron is too inane to sit through more than 2 minutes of. What a greaseball
That being said I am also wondering why Russia would do that? They decided to say it was a malfunction, so I can only assume they did it (they’d be whining if it was someone else). But it does seem weird. Maybe motivated somehow by internal politics? Hardliners are important in Moscow these days and I don’t really know what they want
An excuse to cut Europe off completely? Not really sure they need an excuse. But I would guess their O&G lobby is pretty important given it’s most their economy. Maybe pre-empting Gazprom’s whining when they start losing money? It’s curious in any case
Why?
For the same reasons the security services executed a terror bombing in Moscow and blamed the Chechens.
1) The area is at the crossroads with Baltic pipeline - Norway - Poland. It sends a message of vulnerability as well as to Europe a message that we (Russia) can do this, here's a sample. [with some thin shreds of plausible deniability as their own inactive asset]
2) It will drive NatGas prices up, reinforcing the Russian play to break European solidarity with Ukraine by using energy as the breaker, a play that has real plausible chances of success, particularly if there is a cold winter, thus reinforcing pressure and pain near winter is a win
3) the actual asset is stranded, there is no hope of near term use, it is not 'cutting off, it is sending a message'via a disused asset at this time (Putin is unconcerned about mere repair costs, trivial compared to his direct war costs)
4) gas flowing into Ukraine is going to a customer sub-set, not to W. Europe, it remains a useful lever to keep people like Orban on-board.
The idea there is a functioning business lobby now in Russia is so very charmingly naivete à l'Americaine. There is no "business lobby" - Putin will literally kill you with a polonium shot or send you away to Siberia if you speak out.
This makes a lot of sense.
A suggestion: If you are going to ask about Carlson, you might provide a link to the transcript as well as the video, for the benefit of those of us who find Carlson slightly less unpalatable in print.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-what-happened-nord-stream-pipeline
As for your question: There are underseas power cables, but the United States doesn't depend on them except for very short runs to offshore wind farms, and in any case Carlson refers specifically to internet cables. Cutting underseas internet cables could conceivably interfere with the operation of a power grid by blocking data communications used to control the grid, but again this isn't applicable to the power grids in the United States because none of them span an ocean. My take is that near the end of his opening segment, Carlson stops trying to make his bullshit sound even vaguely plausible.
I don’t know how this sounds, but it reads like Traitor Carlson using lies and snark to say that Biden is awful and Putin is great. I’m sure his fans eat this shit up.
What's that old Monty Python line? "Up to clearly includes the figure nought." So Carlson can claim that technically he's not said anying untrue or incorrect. IOW, just his usually skeevy straddling the line patter he can smugly deny if 'the libs' call him on it.
Shirley the Rothschilds control the US power grid via remote Internet connections?
"Shirley the Rothchilds"....is she a new grunge rapper?
Part of the Clod Future.
Shirley da Rothschild --pregnant stripper from Ohio, turned out she was just fat but kept it up so long it became a conspiracy theory.
& the butt baby she birthed grew into J.D. ANTIVAXXX.
& now you know the rest of the story.
Ha! You beat me to it!
More evidence that Twitter makes people stupid: Polish MEP Radek Sikorskin posting “Thank you. USA” in response to the news that the pipeline was sabotaged. A bit more than four hours later, he posted another tweet suggesting that Russia was responsible. No evidence for either accusation, but the first may have inspired the Carlson monologue.
Unlikely. Rather international knee jerk that CIA does everything.
Not really putting those Pollack jokes to rest, eh, Radek?
I bet I could kill him by telling him Liberace was one of theirs...
Carlson is a fag
Our rating now has it as a 40% chance Tucker Carlson is a homosexual, & Nate ranks the top Pride Month themed microwave meals. All that & more on the next 538 Vibescast.
I have my vote. 😀😀
It doesn't need to make any sense. It's kayfabe all the way down.
bingo
And without the wrestling entertainment.
Tucker going away like Glenn Beck? Hardly. The man has led a charmed lamestream journo life. His big, heterodox break was his profile of then-presidential candidate W. Bush in September 1999, & earning points from all corners of the lamestream echochamber for lamenting Born Again W's mockery of a clemency seeking death row inmate Christian convert's piety. Tucker then played that into a recurring role on MSDSA as foil to Bill Press, & after that was cancelled, ended up on the last iteration of CNN CrossFire. He finally leveled up to FOX after having proved his libz-ownership bona fides... But he doesn't appear to have lost anything there.
If anything, Tuck's endgame would seem to be ending up a venerable travel journo on some Sunday morning magazine program, as the Charles Kuralt to Matt Taibbi's Hunter Thompson.
Heck, I remember when *ucker was churning out dishonest but plausible-sounding drek for the Reader's Digest.
It definitely wasn't Humor in Uniform, though.
Tuck's endgame would seem to be ending up a venerable travel journo on some Sunday morning magazine program, as the Charles Kuralt to Matt Taibbi's Hunter Thompson.
He can travel Russia in a beat-up motorhome talking to folks in diners about how their kids all got killed fighting the Great Patriotic War II in Ukraine.
The Shelby Foote of Russian Revisionism.
Ugh. No, just, ugh. Though frighteningly plausible, I'm afraid.
It's simple. He is just using buzzwords to “trigger” his audience, doesn't matter if it is true or not, as long as the audience gets mad is all that matters. I think the crazy/dangerous/sad part is his blame America first default argument. Like America forced Russia to invade the Ukraine.
Also, the part you are talking about “leaving aside its potential effects on our power grid." might be a way to show that this event might actually affect the TV viewer directly with energy prices. Thus creating rage in them for an event that might seem a bit distant and unconnected to their daily life.
I'll go with the obvious answer and say it would have no effect on our power grid and tucker is just spouting complete bullshit as per usual.
How anyone can stand to listen to this guy for more than 15 seconds is beyond me.
It's his tone. He's perfected the sound of a truculent and petulant 14-year-old instructing the stupid grownups on how the real world works. "This is all so obvious how can you not see it? Can you be that stupid?"
In fact I think that's his secret. The olds just can't resist being lectured and abused by someone who sounds like their ingrate of a grandkid who's still the apple of their eye.
Tucker is Ross Douthat is Robert Costa is Dave Weigel is Matt Gaetz is...
& they all resemble, more or less, the Randroid metalhead on my high school debate team who became a late 90s/early 00s NO WTO guy thinking it would get him the girl he liked.
For me the difference with tuckums is that his game is to get inside his viewers' heads so they can't stop watching him so he can get ever more outrageous contracts so he can get ever more of his most expensive wine, champagne, caviar, cigars, silk slippers, lounging pajamas, and maybe another country retreat. And I have to give him this, he works really hard honing his technique.
IOW what he says and how he says it are just the tools he uses to get the good stuff he really wants, not anything he cares about in themselves. If walking the other side of the street politically would bring him what he wants, he'd do that. Maybe on the same day.
In that sense he's kind of like Karl Rove, who wanted to see whether and how he could break our political system just as an intellectual exercise.
Tuckems isn't worth worrying about too much, from a semantic perspective. He's too arrogant to consult with skilled propagandists, and he isn't a natural like Father Coughlin.
He's just a replacement-level louche toady who had the bad luck to bet on a shitty excuse for a dictator.
That was just his mental jumble falling out of his mouth. Probably thought "wires... electricity..." and ran with it, not even knowing that undersea data is optical. (Although to be a bit nerdy, many runs also are partially electrified to power monitoring systems).
Tucker is Whit Stillman minus the charm & eye for cinema & story.
His audience is mostly the techphopic elderly
https://youtu.be/g4Gh_IcK8UM
Also doubles as a Tucker Carlson focus group.
Without a doubt. My stepfather is a huge fan of Tucker's -- and this is a grown man who has opened countless attachments/viruses over the years. Its like he has a compulsion for it.
Apropos of nothing, I wonder how his ball-irradiating sideline biz is going.
It was going well til it was found out the tanning apparatus was produced by the same firm as the Hebraic Space Laser.
Roflmao!
Sounds to me like old Tuck got confused regarding what he heard from his handlers at the Russian mission to the UN and is warning us Putin's next move is not nukes but using software hacks to shut down the US power grid.
Googling about this I noticed something we've all already forgotten. Only 15 months ago hackers shut down a gas pipeline on the east coast and for a weekend it was unclear if anyone on the east coast would have access to gasoline!
Anyway, I think Tuck had a bad lacrosse dream the night before and just got mixed up.
I know that it's hardly worth commenting on whatever new inanity Tucker Carlson spews into the world each day.
And yet Kevin couldn't help himself.
Everybody likes to punish themselves, sometimes - and only after that do they deign to ask themselves, "WTF was I thinking?"
It happens even to me, but not by watching that guy. Kevin, what did you do that makes you think you have to watch him even for a minute? 😉
The US power grid *is* vulnerable, but mostly to cyberattacks on network operators, not equipment sabotage. It's hard to tell sometimes with Carlson if he's really that stupid, or if he just knows his audience is a bunch of idiots who will believe anything like the US getting its power from some undersea cable leading from....I dunno, some secret, underwater power station where we get all our electricity or something?
I suspect his is stupid but his producers are not.
The options are not mutually exclusive. He really is that stupid, but he also knows his audience is made of a bunch of idiots.
This is the guy that when dragged into court actually used the defense "no rational person would consider anything I say is true or factual", and yet his audience has only grown since then.
Just another DeSantis like act. Both Carlson and his Adored.
Well, severing transatlantic cables would clog up transpacific cables and make it a few microseconds harder for Russian hackers to attack US computer systems, so . . .
Who blew it up?
Honestly it could have been anyone, it could plausibly have been Ukraine, or Greenpeace.
You got an advance copy of Michael Tracey's adversarial, heterodox, Substack journalism on this story?
I have read from multiple sources and have seen photos of gas "boiling" to the surface. Is Kevin wrong about them being decommissioned or is there still a lot of gas still in the pipelines?
The pipelines were full of natural gas; it just wasn't flowing. With the pipelines ruptured, sea water can enter the pipelines and the natural gas can escape.
How about Macron? Surely, the French are behind this. They have their own nuclear power and don't want neighbors under Russian control.
I could have said Uganda, but I doubt they have the tech to do this.
Tucker Carlson hasn't thought since he got spanked by Jon Stewart.
The irony being, as each Gen X thoughtleader, Jonathon Stewart Liebowitz & Tucker Swanson Carlson, moves into pre-retirement dosage, they actually agree more than not. Get them on a Friedersdorkian Anti-Woke Warpath, & watch out. Whole campuses will burn.
I know of few intelligence agencies who warn others about potential sabotage and then actually commit the sabotage.
You mentioned Glenn Beck and I think it a good anaology. Don't forget Beck that was once so popular with his whole "Sept. 12Movement" bullshit that it drew over a half-million people for a rally in D.C. back in 2010. The same people now who are either Carlson fans or are in QAnon circles. As soon as Beck lost his Fox News outlet i.e. as he began to bit the hand that fed him ala Roger Ailes, he just faded away. The Blaze was supposed to be his independent outlet for his "brand" and over time it has no more relevance, influence or power than say, OAN. And maybe he likes it that way: can say what he wants, out of the limelight and not a target for anyone and still make money. He may have realized the power he had and its danger and backed away from it.
Which left Carlson to fill that vacuumn of Right-media poobah when Trump got elected and Limbaugh's health went into decline. What's fascinating to me, although I don't watch the show, is how much I've heard from other media observers who have watched it it's more monalouging than a newsmaker/interview show when it first began in 2016. That's amazing when you think about it for television (you mean someone wants to watch Carlson just sit there and talk for 30 minutes to an hour?). And then I realized, it's a TV version of a Right-wing radio talk show. The chryons and the graphics and the playbacks keep the visual interest going and what "Mr. Blame America First" says draws the Fox audience. He somehow figured out that those who consume media on the Right are drawn to this format the way flies are drawn to shit and thus changed the presentation of his program to fit it, especially with national syndicated, terrestrial talk-radio programming is in decline. I think others like him have followed suit. It's all about TV now especially as the last radio primary generation dies off.
Part of me still thinks it's all performance art/kayfabe for him but even wrestlers will tell you sometimes you can just get lost in the character or it just takes over your life because that's the way you want to live it. And at some point he's either going to say something that an awful event is going to tie itself to, or Rupert, before he croaks, is going to get so tired and offended of his crap that he'll fire him and that there's so many non-competitive clauses in his contract to keep him on ice or he will, as Beck has, fade away. Biden gets re-elected, Putin falls, the economy improves and tensions die down, people lose interest in Qanon as they did the Tea Party and internal incoherence tears everything apart. But don't feel sorry for "Mr. Blame America First." He'll be well enconsed in his luxury retirement home spending the rest of his days counting all his money and saying "Hey, a man's got to right to earn a living don't they? It's not my fault there's so many suckers out there."
Certainly doesn't hurt Tucker's usurpation of the Limbaugh space that El Rushbo's chosen heirs, KKKlay Travis & Kukk Sexton, are two of the lamest people in radio-televisual media this side of Jiminy Glick.
& if you like this comment, get similar talks @sh1tclaysays (formerly project grifter).
1.Biden is never running for reelection
2.Q is already dead
3.The economy is already improved
Your point is dead. Most people smell a grift. Using idiots is a American past time.
Great YouTube snapshot. With the red YT icon right over Carlson's nose he looks like a cross-eyed Bozo the Clown with the red ball nose.