I hope everyone had a nice weekend and a nice Mother’s Day if that’s your jam. I power-washed my patio this weekend, so that was a fairly ambitious undertaking.
I work with a guy who looks just like Michael Cohen and it freaks me out
The Trump Trials: Waiting for Cohen
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/12/trump-trials-tracker-latest-news-michael-cohen
FFS
Trump praises fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter during rally speech
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/12/trump-rally-speech-hannibal-lecter
Updates here:
‘Strategic and moral mistakes’: US politicians step up condemnation of Israel
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/12/us-politicians-criticize-israel-gaza-war
Stonks!
Inflation is slowing. Here’s why prices still aren’t going down [Is it greed? I bet it’s corporate greed…]
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/12/inflation-is-slowing-heres-why-prices-still-arent-going-down.html
Sprots! [Isn’t he the one that was anti-vax? Shoulda been anti-water bottle instead!]
‘Nausea, dizziness, blood’: Djokovic will undergo tests for bottle injury after loss
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/may/12/novak-djokovic-water-bottle-italian-open-tennis
Have a great day!
No no no no no. It can’t be corporate greed. It has to be our fault because we’re still buying things. I mean, if we would just learn to live without food or energy or clothes, and live like monks, then none of this inflation would exist. Right? Right?!
It’s not greed! That’s absurd. It’s just data-driven algorithmic-adjusted synergistic pricing strategies! Totally different thing!
*The
Corporate LackeysMarket practically DEMANDS it, after all!Just to throw in my anecdata: I normally have an idea of food that I want to have in the house and to make. I just tell BH and he gets it for me. However, today he leaves for a confab and I’m on my own, so he asked me to go online and fill out a grocery order that would last me for a week. Cooking for one (plus the Ravenous Hound). I was horrified by how expensive all the food was. And this was from a warehouse club. The way we have our expenses divided he pays for all the food so I haven’t really been aware of what anything costs since before the pandemic, when I stopped visiting grocery stores (initially covid-freaking-out, then it combined with the onset of mobility problems.)
People have a right to be pissed. There are countries where food in general is much more expensive (Scandinavia, and especially Iceland, come to mind) but that’s because so much is imported and layered with taxes. In the US it’s…Archer-Daniel-Midlands, I guess? Tyson? Those dozen families that own pretty much all of California’s Central Valley? I know in New York there’s significant looting so maybe prices have risen to cover the theft costs? It’s all a mystery.
I’ll just note for the record that the same people telling us that it’s only inflation driving up prices is also the source for the “shoplifting is out of control!!!!!” news. So I’d take some of that hysteria causing the price hikes with several grains of salt. (I also have a good source in a well-known convenience store in NYC and what he’s told me about “shrinkage” is pretty hilariously not the same as what other executives in the company have told the media.)
I hesitated to throw in the looting/shoplifting angle because I know it raises hackles. This is from The City, hardly a right-wing lock-’em-up advocate, not The New York Post:
https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/02/21/shoplifting-surge-nyc-small-businesses/
No, it has definitely risen, and my guess would be that small shops are suffering more for it. Completely believable. It’s just not a reason that their suppliers would be raising prices and that’s where way more of the cost comes in than the in-house markup.
But this has been tracked before: If prices go up-up-up, theft tends to do the same (whether it’s desperation or opportunity). It’s a no-win situation for these stores because they can’t NOT price in their costs, but then the margins get even thinner. I’m much more skeptical about the Targets and Walgreens lamenting how they have to close stores because the criminals have won and then we find out a few months later that actually the store wasn’t doing well even back in 2019.
It’s ALL because us poors want those high-fallutin’ things like Refrigerators and Cell Phones…
If we’d just *learn* to live with good, old-fashioned technology like a little Spring House to keep our food cool-ish, and be *okay* with our Apple IIe’s, and dying of Dysentery and Cholera, as we trudge our way ever westward?
Then those Corporate Executives could just exist Guilt-Free, as they keep
bilking us poors“Creating *Value* For Shareholders!”, rather than being followed around by these *unseemly* accusations!🙄🙃🫠
I never knew that hippos could leap or gallop or whatever it is Baby Fritz is doing in the bottom-left photo!
Many people are saying, you hear it more and more, Camp Crystal Lake is better, folks, it was a mess. A disaster. But it got cleaned up. Took lots of work, but they got rid of all those bad apples. Now, it’s beautiful, perfect, like my perfect phone call. When I went to visit, big strong guy, wearing a hockey mask, he came up to me, tears on his mask, he goes, “Sir,” — that’s right, he called me “Sir” — he said “Sir, thank you for inspiring me to clean this place up” and I just think that’s great, don’t you folks?
Here’s a polling question: Would you rather:
1. Spend a weekend at Camp Crystal Lake
or
2. A golf outing with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago followed by dinner (guest list to be announced.)
Sooooooooo get killed or probably kill myself. Eeeeeesh.
The only way to win the game is to not play it.
As a woman who’s been seeing a *lot* of that sort of discussion, in the Autism & ADHD spaces online?
I would like to make *my* petition to face the Grizzly Bear, please and thank you?
Because at least a *few* months out of the year, they hibernate, *PLUS* we don’t have “Fat Bear Week” but for serial killers.
Trump also slagged the judge and the prosecutor again, but none of the reporting bothered to mention the gag order or the threats of jail for violating it again.
Well, let’s be clear: none of these judges are ever going to jail Trump for contempt. They will just keep saying “I’m warning you” like the world’s least effective parent, and then Trump will keep doing what he’s doing because he knows damned well that he doesn’t have to deal with the consequences of his actions.
My kingdom for one, singular fucking consequence for that asshole.
Alas.
That article drives me nuts because it does a really bad job of stating the basics. It feels like it was written by AI, but it sadly is what passes for CNBC’s typical reporting, which is just a jumble of vibes with random quotes thrown in.
Prices overall don’t go down in the long run. Neither do wages. A pound of hamburger is more now than it was in 2000 and so are average wages. That’s just how it goes.
The only time it doesn’t happen is when an economy crashes, as in the Great Depression.
That article is badly written as both a basic explainer and as a serious piece of economic analysis. It starts out as a vibes piece larded with quotes from a Youtube personality and then tries to throw in a few stats at the end which have no connection to anything.
It finally tries to get to the heart of the matter to make some vague point about wage growth, without even addressing that real wage growth is up, which is good.
What? A Trump aide openly bragging about committing crimes?
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-mcentee-secret-service/
Wow, NJ looks just like Copacabana beach! I may have to rethink my avoidance of the place!
Now if we can get her banned in the other 80%…
https://www.businessinsider.com/south-dakota-gov-kristi-noem-barred-nearly-20-state-2024-5
99% odds Stone knew that photo was fake.
Anne Applebaum has written about the “fire hose of falsehood” technique to modern propagandists.
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:3t37x6vfigdzzp2gjcfnzlz4/bafkreif5mixjacuyip5uygnvfszok6cgcjzjbkf6et5dx7rnedpunvm6hq@jpeg
She contrasts it to how authoritarians in the past worked by strictly limiting information and trying to make it seem real. The new ones just spew obvious lies to try to overwhelm reality.
That Trump rally in NJ was a loser on its own terms. Actual video of it showed limited attendance and big streams of people walking out 30 minutes after it began.
But the propaganda machine pumped out claims like the Stone photo or the “100,000” attendees. And these things flooded the feeds of the gullible.
People who are predisposed to believe it because they live in fantasy worlds get locked in tighter. People who try to debunk it get exhausted. They look at the people who swallow the lies uncritically and wonder what it takes to get past it.
And when the occasional lazy reporter just regurgitates the lie, the job gets even harder because the ultimate goal of the propagandists is to destroy the idea that an objective truth even exists.
It doesn’t even have to be a flat out endorsement – bothsides treatment of truth and lies ultimately causes confusion and advances the goal of the propagandists. If a big outlet keeps presenting what the GOP and Democrats say as some complicated debate with value and complications that are hard to untangle, what hope would an average person have of figuring out who is right?
100% hew knew, he also posted this, which looks nothing like the other one…
We are MAGAt, we are liars, we are morons made of carbon,
And we got to get ourselves to the garden state
By the time we got to NJ, we were half a billion strong,
And everywhere was a song and a celebration.
And I dreamed I saw the bomber jet planes riding shotgun in the sky,
Dropping bombs on blue states for our nation.
I don’t know how I missed this when it happened? Two of my favorites, Triumph & Chris Ballew!
Some of the existing lyrics are pretty applicable. No need to rewrite the whole song.