#254: Ballz on Parade
Steve Ballmer's L.A. Confidential: it all really happens, everyone's an ugly liar, and your betters make up money anytime they goddamn please.
Comments (51)
https://www.instagram.com/stories/usafacts/3926675875876189634?utm_source=ig_story_item_share&igsh=NzIxcjlhYjRmZXBz today on Ballwatch — Steve is doing ad reads for some kind of PAC called USAfacts.
All I'm trying to say is anytime someone says "Donald Sterling" that's a jump scare
As a Lakers fan, I always knew this shit went so much deeper during that offseason, I knew there had to be a reason it ended up being *that* dramatic. I mostly played off the leaks about his demands from the Lakers as a little bit of cope from the ‘The poor Buss family’. So glad to these seeds start to sprout, even more hilariously than imagined. Great Ep!
Kahwi Leonard might have a relatively small role in this massive fraud but the Uncle Magic LLC details are really funny, and I appreciate that you included them.
KL2 Aspire LLC is arguably the most damning piece of evidence, I mean the name itself, because that's what Kawhi would call a fraud tax entity. Uhhhhh how about Me and My Number and Who Gives Me Money dot com? Huh-HUHHHHHH
https://youtu.be/ikUcRUbZbas?si=gY0gEpECcEqWgUYH
Introduced to you by ghost boy. Binged this episode twice. Subscribed for amazing content. Shout out to KC from the shithole known as the bootheel 🤝
Btw I have inside info from SDSU and I’m pretty sure he is on the spectrum. He probably has Asperger’s
Wait, from Sucking Dick Suckingdick University??
And here I was all to make a joke about where the water rights scandal is in this basketball Chinatown and these guys are out here pretending to build rivers.
Of all the great lines in that movie, the one that best sums up who & what it's about is when John Huston says "I don't see my daughter anymore," Jack NIcholson says "And who do you blame for that?," and John Huston says "... Well, I don't blame myself."
I made my first comment before listening to all the rest of this and what an incredible way to tell this story. From Microsoft to sustainability to the democratic party performance over my lifetime with only the pointedly token mention of Charlie Kirk with 2 and a half other hours for details. SALT BAE level chef's kiss
My guy, have you ever tapped into the works of Luis Alberto Spinetta? Argentinian rock, lots of bands and projects, all dense and beautiful. Curious to know what you think, dont see people as famous as him say that his lyrics were inspired by deleuze, at least not anymore. Sending love !
Not for a while, but I did a big Spinetta vs. Charly Garcia rundown when I was like 21. I remember liking Spinetta Jade, but not why, and Almendra was him too, right?, cos I still remember "Muchacha (ojos de papel)." And on Charly's side, I recall two things, namely that the (I think self-titled) Máquina de Hacer Pájaros album was really good, and that he allegedly once disinterred a corpse and waltzed it around a city square so he could get an insanity exemption from serving in the fascist military
I will never forget the time my year 12 english teacher had a 9/11 anniversary "wellbeing" discussion with the class where she invited people to share their feelings on the day and how a few girls in particular shared their anger and sadness, and I don't know how I got out of it while another boy in the class who didn't ever share his unsolicited opinion got cornered, but somehow the discussion pinned him into responding. His name was Asa and I believe he had some form of Asperger's or autism and was an extremely intelligent guy who taught me to play the black and white stone game "go" in Japan or "weiqi" in china, and he replied basically that he found the whole situation quite absurd and a lot of people seemed to have strong feelings about very narrow dimensions of the history while what has unfolded since was a frightening and serious explosion of irrationality mixed with dishonesty, and I will never forget the ensuing silence and glowing red eye death stares he received from the entire front of the room who turned around to look at him while he spoke.
The Sterling mention reminded me of that bizarre Barbara Walters interview with Stiviano: “I’m Mr. Sterling’s right-hand arm man. I’m Mr. Sterling’s everything. I’m his confidant, his best friend, his silly rabbit,”
She's maybe the ideal human embodiment of "a lot going on." I tried to figure out what the fuck is up with her, learned that she has apparently gone by V. Stiviano (her legal name now, just V), Vanessa Stiviano, Maria Vanessa Perez, Vanessa Maria Perez, Monica Gallegos, Maria Valdez, and Mariamonica Perez Gallegos, and that the bio on her (private) Instagram describes her as "Citizen of Humanity and Undercover Agent," and I realized I wasn't gonna figure it out by showtime
Im only 23 minutes in, but I just moved to KCMO and was wondering if could tip me off about any weird criminal shit that's gone down here.
Bob Berdella
Picturing each of the people or types or archons channeled by you and Adomian in a "choose your fighter" screen, would love to play Ballmer versus Gorka
Man I haven't heard from him in forever – is he doing public stuff? OK as far as you know? He was one of the first people outside of real-life friends/acquaintances/etc who followed me on Twitter, and I always have a certain level of respect for people who interact with whatever they think is funny, interesting, crazy, whatever, regardless of "status." That sounds like some incredibly internet-brained shit, oh look one of the Real People enjoyed my Lowbie Jests, but it's fuckin' amazing how many prominent people – even "prominent" within a very specific & small circle – won't do ANYTHING "not for important people" as soon as they get any attention at all
Also all this talk about Wall Street is making me think about ~irregular stock market activity in the days leading up to the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001~
DURING them, as a matter of fact, as recorded in WTC Building 7 (where they also had a CIA station), the only building in history to collapse from jealousy
Developers, developers, developers, developers.
I guess, at some point, we just have to accept that God will take any threadbare opportunity for a bleak language joke
Listened to this while cooking and laughed so hard at “is this your handwriting?” I almost cut my thumb off 👍🏻
It's one of the great moments in history. Sometimes I don't even laugh because I'm just watching the mathematical symphony of chances that we'd inherit the world that made it possible
There’s the NBA level, which Pablo Torres, followed now by herds of sports journalists, address. There’s the obscene financial chicanery level – the level of the hyperrich lich-class making themselves hyperricher by draining the body politic of the “public good” – that you lay bare so well here. And then there’s the nightmare miasma suffusing it all, saturating our brains with microplastics and the atmosphere and oceans with waste CO2 generated more and more by the cycling of ones and zeros through giant server farms, running code and algorithms and LLMs in service of the financialization, surveillance and weaponization of more and more of everything by and for said hyperrich – and turned so blatantly in this instance into hideous irony by way of the very idea of “sustainability“ in the form of “carbon markets“ and other means of creating the spectacle of “doing something“ about climate change, mass extinction, the infusion of novel man-made chemicals into the every last reach of the biosphere. The greenwashing/gaslighting involved in this Aspiration scam – and Project 2029-flavored shit like the “Abundance agenda” – take this from being a disgusting display of new Gilded Age depravity to a nightmare-world of mass-sociopathic-delusional ecocide for me. At least Trump and MAGA are blunt about abandoning the pretense of “climate action.” It’s these smug liberal Democrat operatives, insiders and donors with their performance of care and concern who really kill me. Plant a fucking apple tree and watch it die indeed
The most realistic thing I've ever read or heard about the actual state of "climate concern" among true elites was a piece, still findable I'm sure, anonymously written by a woman who works Davos every year as an escort, presumably the highest of "high-class" escorts. She said that the people who own the world have 1 of 2 attitudes on this question, nobody has both, and it's just about 50/50: the first kind, people who like to consider themselves "good," try to strike the tragic pose that they know, O! how terribly they know, if only they could DO something, but what is there to DO?, and thus expect to float toward apocalypse on the reliable tide of pussy (other genitals as needed) generated by their dark Wagnerian auras of doomed heroism. The second kind is people who don't give a fuck if anyone thinks they're "good," and who openly celebrate climate collapse, because it's going to destroy a lot of other people before it gets to us, and they're gonna live JUST long enough to loot the drowned world and die before the local drowning commences
I sincerely hope he (Pablo Torre) sees this bro
I don't know if he would be interested, insulted, or bemused, but I'd bring Pablo on, why not
The spider's web of NBA owners. Can't wait to get Ballz deep!
Ballz Deep is a place, and I'm afraid we all live there.
Pablo does have an ideology and it’s The Process
Bro thank you. As an NBA fanatic, I've been paying very close attention to the whole situation since Torre broke the story. But as details have begun trickling out and sketching an outline of the scale of things, I definitely began to suspect that cap circumvention was only the tip of the iceberg. Ramona Shelburne reported earlier this week that The Company Formerly Known as Aspiration reportedly DOUBLED Intuit's $550M bid for the dome's naming rights but that the Clippers "chose to go with the more well-established company & brand". How in the everloving FUCK could some tax-dodging sham run by felons put up $1.1B without some massive fraud bubbling just beneath the surface? And did someone with two brain cells in the Ballz Actuarial Army just say, "Whoa, come on now, pump the brakes -- we can't just accept a ten-figure sum from the tax avoidance fraud company and slap its name on the building"?
the idea that Steve Ballmer turned down a billion dollars out of anything but fear of federal charges is fucking nonsense
Learning and listening ❤️
As a born and raised Angeleno who is not a Lakers fan (long story/my father's fault), I adopted the Clips more-or-less ironically at first, in the late 90s. It's been everything I could have hoped. It's nice supporting a team that you can't reeeeeeeally support. I'm in MN now, so I'm free of them.
BTW, this was worth waiting an extra week for the EB premier, banger.
I was in 4th grade at catholic school and the nun teacher just locked us in the classroom unattended and left. I was very convinced is was Japan getting revenge 🤣👍
you know, in terms of on-the-day reactions, that's a pretty superb take
A friend of mine actually sent a link to that song for me… on 911… with the text, “all the feels”… I hate how even intelligent, hard working people have a huge blind spot in the second week of September
All 4 years at my Jesuit high school, we were forced to engage in 5 minutes of silence so they could use the intercom to play one of the worst songs Bruce Springsteen has ever recorded https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE02BunFtbo&list=RDNE02BunFtbo&start_radio=1
Dude the master shake thing had me dying. The success in big-money investing invariably makes me think of Warren Buffett. Mister humble, drinks a can of coke and eats a big mac every day and drives his used Volvo to work, averages a 20% yearly return. Gotta be something going on there.
Sucking me on the way to Mr. Koon's house
Remember 2005 the WWE wrestler “Muhammad Hassan” his heel gimmick was Arab terrorist. The dudes real name was Mark Copani, he was actually a guido from Jersey. So they decide to hire guys for his posse who were really of Arab descent to dial in the authenticity. Cause the heel heat levels were scorching. So WWE hired a guy who was Iranian. They figured close enough. To really up the ante and better sell the gimmick, they made the intro to his ring music the sound of a plane crash.
Wrestling contains multitudes.
Missed the cold open skits so much
Tremendous cold open
been pacing restlessly around my tiny apartment like a large cat in a too-small zoo enclosure waiting for this to drop. shrieked in joy seeing that it's 2+ hours long. massive fucking fraud!!!!!!! let's go!!!!!!!
that was the first time I've thought the words "Sarah Michelle Gellar" in at least 15 years, but the 9/11 aroma transported me to an ancient and mysterious dimension