2 More Sleeps [DOT 23/12/20]

23/12/20 MegMegMcGee 36

Things are starting to look a bit festive around here. We’ve got Christmas Songs, Ranked, Holiday Food, & More Music. It’s almost enough to make one’s heart grow 3 sizes!

But not if your name is Mike Pence; so very Christian-like of him this time of year.

‘Rona

Live updates: Pfizer and Trump administration nearing a deal for additional vaccine doses
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/12/22/coronavirus-covid-live-updates-us/

Double Yikes!!

US poised for deadliest year ever as pandemic cuts life expectancy, experts say
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/22/covid-coronavirus-us-life-expectancy-experts

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. (This is a real tweet, I checked.)

Stonks!

Dow futures fall 100 points as Trump calls Covid stimulus bill unsuitable
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/22/stock-market-futures-open-to-close-news.html

Fart Noise:

Trump grants clemency to 20 people, including three GOP former members of Congress and two men convicted in the Russia probe
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/george-papadopoulos-trump-pardon/2020/12/22/822f038e-30f4-11eb-96c2-aac3f162215d_story.html

The RESPECT. [Look at Keanu’s hand.]

Have a great day Deadsplinters!

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36 Comments

    • The theory is that people will immediately spend their $600, which will provide the flagging economy with a jolt. You can think of it as “trickle-up” economics, which actually works, unlike “trickle-down” or “voodoo” economics, which is Republican bullshit. 
       
      Of course it primarily “works” by stimulating corporations that are already fine (see Amazon), but there’s some small  business benefit too. So it’s not the worst idea, it’s just too small. Butcher’s plan (see his comment) would help more people and create greater benefits, and is absolutely what’s needed. But Republicans aren’t going to sign on to targeted relief for renters (who are typically lower-income than owners) because they are scum. 
       
      But hopefully some kids will get food and a Christmas, even if belated. I’m going to look to donating mine to deserving charities and see if I can get it to people who need it. 

        • But the rich R’s DO think we renters are Scum, too!!
           
          See TrumpCo., KushnerCo., et.al,–you know, the slumlord landlords, who get so frustrated that the scum who live in their buildings actually expect those buildings to be maintained!!! Or to have working heat, water, and habitable living conditions….
           
          Expecting adequate living conditions for the money we pay in rent….
           
          Sheesh!!! How’s a poor landlord supposed to amass ANY kind of fortune, if they have to keep SPENDING money, to maintain safe conditions….
          🤔🤔🤔

  7. I missed the Christmas Song Spectacular last night, so I’m putting this here.  Also, be sure to tune in for my Christmas-free DUAN tonight because your approval means more than anything to me.

    • I love Louis Prima. I had never heard of this song and in general I despise Christmas music but this is excellent. The only Christmas music I like is something written in 19th century at the latest, ideally performed by a chorus of hundreds, with a few soloists thrown in, and if children are involved so much the better. Otherwise, for example, Mariah Carey, “All I Want for Christmas” is to never hear that song again, from “Yooooouuuu.”

  9. I watched Jingle Jangle on Netflix, a new Christmas musical with a big (mostly Black) cast including Forest Whitaker, Keegan Michael Key and an animatronic Ricky Martin.
     
    I think this review sums it up pretty well — it’s hokey anachronistic dumb fun. If you want to turn off your brain for a couple of hours and let a lot of cool-looking song and dance numbers wash over you, this is a good pick.
     
    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/nov/12/jingle-jangle-a-christmas-journey-review-fantasy-inventor-netflix
     
    I was mainly disappointed there was no nod toward the “Baby Forest” sketch from Key and Peele.

  10. oh fuck…i should not read the local news rona liveblog
    https://www.businessinsider.co.za/south-africa-new-coronavirus-covid-variant-and-the-vaccine-2020-12
    apparently we have another new strain here wich is even more mutated and contagious than the english one
    in unrelated news.. seems over here the majority of hotspots are christian communities
    geee…. i wonder if deciding church isnt a public space and as such does not require mandatory masks has anything to do with that
    maybe i should just avoid the news all together until i go back to work…

  11. Clarifications on Pence’s claim that “Median Household incomes rose by the greatest amount since the 50’s (or ever, if that was his phasing?)”
     
    From Cato–please note the bit, where they explain that household SIZE impacts & that an increase in household size, will OFTEN mean an increase in household income/a decrease in size often =a decrease in income, simply because of the number of incomes now coming into that house;
    https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/winter-2019/us-median-household-income-has-risen-more-you-think
     
    So… in times like pandemics, when many folks move back home, “median household incomes might just go UP, even though ALL the adults in that household are *in fact, making LESS,* simply because there are less households, and more incomes  per household.
    🙄🙄🙄
     
    Also, there’s that whole “response bias” thing going on, because of the pandemic…. 
    Less folks responded tithe census. 
    Also, you HAD to have tech available–either a phone, or a computer, to fill out your census forms this year….
    That means poorer folks, with less incomes, and less stable housing may well have been left out and/or SEVERELY undercounted!!!🤔🤨😬
     
    And that would mean that the median can skew upward by a good amount…
    From the US census here;
    https://www.census.gov/library/working-papers/2020/demo/SEHSD-WP2020-10.html
     
    And a slightly easier to follow NPR story, here (where I got that Census link!);
    https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/09/15/913131697/american-incomes-were-rising-until-the-pandemic-hit
     

    • …there are/have been a lot of problems with the census this go around…a good portion of which is obviously the GOP’s attempts to game it so that less of the people they’d rather not acknowledge actually responded

      …but a big part of it is the same problem a lot of stuff has which is that not all that many people are capable of parsing the data for themselves & as a wise man once said “there are lies, damn lies & statistics”…& the majority of “analysis” tends not to show its working on account of that showing their hand in terms of bias &/or their choice of axe to grind

      …there’s useful data to be found in the census which it would be a good idea to base a lot of legislative thinking on…but it does seem often to be outmatched by tenous-to-spurious skewing of the underlying data to try to fit it to a hypothesis that someone considers politically expedient…which is crazy-making

    • Also, in that whole “Democrats want to make the poor more comfortable, We want to make everyone richer!” bullshit…..
       
      Obviously y’all, I’m SURE, caught the unspoken “BOOTSTRAPS!!!” implication that the D’s just want to let poor folks be “lazy”
      I also want to point out the fallacy of “we just want everyone to be richer….
       
      If EVERYONE is “richer” there ARE no rich folks…. 
       
      The R’s THRIVE on class warfare & instilling a belief in their followers, that they are just better and more deserving, than “those OTHER (lazy!) people.
       
      Their GIANT belief is that being RICH means you are a “Good” person, because “poor people are bad people, and make poor choices.”
       
      Not BAD choices.
       
      POOR CHOICES.
       
      I.o.w., poor folks are “Choosing” to BE POOR.
       
      Nevermind, that when you’re poor, it OFTEN means that you have housing insecurities/are unstable, that transportation may be a problem/ expense you can’t afford, that food access may be difficult, HEALTHY food even HARDER to come by (and then to have the time/tools/ability to cook!), that you may well be working 2+ jobs, to try to make your ends meet**
       
      I could rant for HOUR… WEEKS, about what it’s like to be poor…. growing UP poor (but incredibly lucky, in that the place where i was poor didn’t necessarily condemn me to ABJECT POVERTY for the rest of my life)… living on the edge of poverty as an adult… because–since i grew up poor, i didn’t  learn the “unspoken rules” that many folks just know about jobs.
       
      Things like, in “normal” jobs, it’s a pretty expected thing, to get regular reviews & raises–like at least once a year or so…
       
      In my first “real” job, I never got a raise after my second year there… in fact, I made LESS after my third year, than I did in my second, because of that “salaried position” offer i mentioned having been given, shortly before I got my tax statements for the year, discovering that–the previous year, I’d made 32K (the Salary offer was 29K).
       
      And unlike kids from wealthier backgrounds, who get TAUGHT to “negotiate or move on, to find better pay!”, poor kids are taught explicitly, “Be grateful for what you have, because it can ALWAYS be worse!”
       
      So, what happens is, you dig in, work your HARDEST, and hustle your ASS off, in the hopes that someone will see your hard work, value it for the gem it is, and then bump you up someday…
       
      Poor kids DON’T advocate for themselves in any other ways, though, because we don’t know we’re supposed to.
       
      So we end up in dead-end jobs, where we only get 1-2 raises in 7 years.
      Raises that don’t & can’t  keep up with inflation or the cost of living…
      And then, being poor, snd KNOWING that we HAVE to hustle, we pick up another gig, or just accept any extra hours that get thrown our way…
       
      Because we WEREN’T taught to ask for more…
      We were expressly taught/told NOT TO.
       
      So the poor keep getting poorer…. and the wealth gap opens up even MORE.
       
      And the rich assholes like Pence et. al, keep playing like it was OUR CHOICE  to just “be poor”
       
      And not an entirely rigged game, from the jump…
      A game we never even knew WAS a game… because we thought everyone was playing fair & by the same rules we had.
       
      Being poor, for THIS much of one’s life?
      Guys, it’s EXHAUSTING.
       
      And I REALLY wish to God, that SOMEONE in my younger years had just EXPLAINED how raises & promotions & “moving up at companies” typically happens, back when I was in my teens/twenties, and we had explanations of checking accounts, savings, etc.
       
      And that *somewhere* in the talk of “retirement accounts” when it was SO stressed to us, that it was VITAL to “start one when you’re young,” that ANYONE would have stepped up to *also explicitly say* the words, “If you CAN’T afford to start a retirement account (because you never get cost-of-living raises, and you start to find yourself NEEDING to take on additional jobs, just to cover the bills that used to get covered with this job,) YOU NEED to actually NEGOTIATE for raises at your company, or move on, to a better paying employer!”
       
      Because at that place where I was salaried at 29K, and made about $13.25 an hour, for 5 of my 7 years, with no overtime pay?
       
      I learned shortly before I left, that one of the guys I’d trained, who had about 1/3 of the job responsibilities i did, WAS negotiating his pay….
      And when he quit, because the bosses finally decided they weren’t going to pay him any higher?
       
      He was making around $18.50 an hour…
      More than $5.00 an hour more than I was, doing LESS work, and with FAR less responsibilities…
       
      And the thing is, when you’re at $13-ish an hour? The next place can offer you $14.50, and YOU think that’s amazing….
      You don’t know, that that company thinks it’s amazing, too…. but only because THEY have been keeping up with inflation, so *it’s AMAZING* that they ACTUALLY FOUND a *sucker* willing to work at that shitty pay rate.🙃
       
      (As Em waves👋👋👋 to y’all from the land of 2 jobs, as an adult who most of my adult/working life has had BOTH a full-time and a part-time job, if not a full time, and two part-time gigs!🙃
      when my car’s not broken, meaning all my money gets shoveled into an internal combustion engine, one job covers my rent, and the other allows me to live inside that space.)
       
       
       
       

    • Funny things can happen when you start playing around with means vs. medians.  Median income can rise even as significant portions of the bottom half see declines in income.
       
      In grad school I constructed a social indicator I called “income gap.”  What it demonstrated was that, from the early 70’s to the late 90’s, if you graphed the mean income of the top half of income earners and the mean income of the bottom half, the lines started pretty far apart and then diverged significantly.

      • He’s a Malignant Narcissist, with Antisocial Personality Disorder…
         
        He’ll try to burn down/ damage/ destroy the whole fucking White House, so that Biden can’t move in, if there’s a way to do so…. 
         
        Ffs, remember the “pee-tape” allegations? Much was made of Trump hiring sexworkers to pee on the bed–but he supposedly DID it to the bed Obama slept in…
         
        It’s about degrading/destroying things, JUST so that others can’t have them, if he doesn’t want them, or if can’t have them himself.

        • Frankly, if Papaya Pol Pot could Jim Jones his way out of what he probably sees as “just a bit of a pickle” by offing millions of us, my guess is, he  would.
           
          The thing that worries me/scares me a bit, is the Nuclear thing….
           
          Because I could see him calling a strike on American soil/territory, just to Wag The Dog, claiming it was China/North Korea, and using THAT as a ruse to declare Martial Law & deciding to *not* transfer power to Biden on Election day…
          Not likely-likely, but one could believe Trump would try.

          • i could see him try…i guess
            but i highly doubt the military would go along with that one
            tho…i wouldnt be hugely surprised if he starts another forever war on the way out just to make bidens life harder

        • i do remember the pee pee tape shit…
          i figure if its real it would have been out there already….hard to keep shit hidden nowadays… 
          i actually agree with you tho…i just have my doubts about that tape

    • Yep!!!
       
      And Pelosi, Schumer, and smart D’s can run FOREVVVVVVER on Republicans voting against helping desperate Americans facing homelessness, joblessness, and hunger on Christmas Eve, no less!!!!
      As “sandwich-generation” folks worry about their kids & the kids’ grandparents (their parents).

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