No Clue [DOT 28/12/22]

28/12/22 MegMegMcGee 13

I have no idea what’s going on. I was in a cheese/wine coma all weekend and then got thrown into year-end crises at the office. I’m just over here waiting for my next 3 day weekend.

Interesting or nah?

Donald Trumpโ€™s tax returns to be made public by US House panel on Friday
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/27/donald-trump-tax-returns-release-confirmation

OMG

New York winter storm death toll at 34 with more snow on the way
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/27/new-york-snowstorm-death-toll-us-winter-storm-buffalo

Imagine being this dumb

โ€˜Driving forceโ€™ in plot to kidnap Mich. governor sentenced to 16 years
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/12/27/whitmer-kidnap-plot-adam-fox-sentence/

Note to self: stay home this time of year

Southwest draws regulatory scrutiny as thousands more flights canceled
https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/12/27/southwest-airlines-cancellations-holiday-travel/

Stonks! (LOL)

Teslaโ€™s stock is headed for its worst month, quarter and year on record
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/27/teslas-stock-is-headed-for-its-worst-month-quarter-year-on-record.html

A peek into Elon’s future:

Sending to RIP for Xmas

A 1934 murder mysteryโ€™s pages were printed out of order. Now the world is obsessed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/12/26/solving-cains-jawbone-murder-mystery/

I could watch this woman spike this chair all day long

Have a great day!

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

13 Comments

    • Did I ever recommend to you a book called Knickerbocker’s History of New York, Complete? It’s by Washington Irving, who wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, among lots of other things. It’s a very scathing fictional (partly) history of the Dutch founding of Nieuw Amsterdam. You can download it for free if The Netherlands allows this Project Gutenberg link:

      https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13042

      • thank you very much, the link works so i’ll be giving it a read later and see how we go ๐Ÿ™‚

        but first i need to make a run for the bakery….before everyone takes all the good buns

  2. I wish that would happen to Elmo, but we live in realityโ€ฆ

    Unlike the Dukes, Elmoโ€™s got some of that Daddy Dearest (who is Woody Allen like he just had a kid with a โ€œformerโ€ step daughter) Emerald/real estate billions.

  3. Imagine being this dumb

    Dear god no.

    To be fair being smart and perceptive can be no prize either… as we end up being Cassandras.  But I’d rather be ignored than that fucking dumb.

    My worst Cassandra moment was just before Bear Stearns collapsed in March 08.  I actually sent an email to the CFO of Nortel asking if he’s doing anything to prepare for the coming credit crunch. It was fucking presumptuous of me to send that email, but I was concerned because I kept hearing how we were currently living off our line of credit (Ironically it would be something I would do some 4 years into the future.)

    I was told to not worry myself about such matters as (allegedly) greater minds than myself knew what the fuck they were doing.

    I sent another email just after Lehman Bros failed. Asking the same thing and reminded him of the email I sent 6 months earlier.  I didn’t get a reply.

    When we declared bankruptcy in Nov 08, all I heard from the C suite shitheads was “WE DIDN’T KNOW.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or go into the C Suite with a baseball bat. I eventually chose laugh because I wouldn’t go to jail for laughing as opposed to clubbing the shit out of execs.

    I knew… but I’m just a dumbass wireless engineer and not some fucking C suite shithead.

  5. Oremus:

    https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/28/europe/pope-benedict-sick-pope-francis-intl/index.html

    Did I ever tell you that when His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI (now known as “Pope Emeritus”) started bringing back pre-Vatican 2 norms I used to attend a Tridentine (traditional Latin) Mass because they emerged from the underground and were somewhat sanctioned again? So were exorcisms, but I never attended one of those.

    Yes. There was a church near our old apartment that began to offer them and I used to slip in, non-Catholic that I am, for…I don’t know what I was doing. Cultural tourism, I guess. I loved every minute of those Masses. The attendance shot through the roof so I’d crowd myself into a back pew. The Latin, the altar boys, the priest turning his back on us and, when he addressed us, the look of pure contempt on his face.

    The only problem was I couldn’t humbly line up and receive the Eucharist, because, you know, not Catholic, so when I got called out on it by some octogenarian in my pew I’d say, “I’m not in a state of grace; I haven’t been to Confession.” That was no lie.

    I think the current Pope is trying to clamp down on this practice, sadly, and Catholic churches in my new (14 years, not so new) neighborhood are few and far between. The folks here seem to like unaffiliated freelancers who rent (and then don’t pay the rent on) abandoned storefronts and riff on vaguely Christian themes. Even if I were interested in this aspect of ministry I’d stick out like a sore thumb. There is a French church that I went to once but my French was too shaky to really pull it off and it was me and maybe three elderly nuns in the congregation so I felt a little self-conscious.

    Personally, I believe that if there is an all-knowing and all-seeing God you could kind of contact Him mentally yourself, directly. BUT, with these Tridentine Masses, you come to understand the spectacle of the gatekeeping, and when your attention strays, as it will, you can look around and say to yourself, for example, “That Jesus on the Cross looks whiter than I am, and the Palestinians and Israelis I know aren’t blond, although there is that one wife of my acquaintance X, but I think she converted.”

    Much more interesting than the health care gatekeeping I’ve been going through in what I now believe is my own personal Hell. I must have been a true asshole in a previous life, now that I spend endless hours on the phone arranging appointments far into the future only to have them canceled by someone mumbling barely intelligible English at me, and navigating health care “portals” and suffering death by 1,000 cuts by bills from 1,000 different directions, each totaling less than $20.

    My God (Deus meus) this did go on a lot longer than I had expected. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

    • The Latin Mass debate is like a lot of those mysterious debates in the church, where outsiders can’t really crack the code, which is probably part of the point.

      Our local news has been covering for what seems like years the localย  Archbishop’s efforts to stage manage their response to abuse scandals. In public he’s been saying he supports fixes, but he keeps getting caught spending for lobbyists and lawyers to shut down investigations and block settlements.

      He’s pretty closely aligned with the Latin Mass movement behind the scenes, but in public he’s more ambiguous. I can guess at the broad connections betwen it all, but the details make as much sense to me as Alito’s legal positions on abortion or gay rights.

    • You’re thinking of the SSPX Catholics, Society of St. Pius X. They hated the modernization of Vatican II and wanted the old style Catholic church with Latin masses, women having to wear veils, women not allowed to wear pants typically, traditional family types where the husband constantly knocks up the stay at home wife to have massive families, etc etc.

      Their bishops were excommunicated by Pope John Paul II because they basically tried to schism the church.

      Not surprising to anyone, former Nazi youth pope (Benedict) reversed the excommunication because he wanted to ally the Catholic church with more conservative and fundie groups.

      “Hey look we’re bleeding young people to other denominations that aren’t so douchey and traditional, let’s be more like a fundie group and complain about gen Z and millennials.”

  7. Re: Trump tax returns

    Meh. Some people have seen them already. My understanding is that the returns show a lot of sketchy deductions (big surprise) and that his “businesses” generated no income and took huge losses (big surprise #2). The IRS gave him a pass on audits (scandal – big surprise #3) and apparently he is sitting on massive debts (big surprise #4).

    The biggest “concern” of the Trump camp (I guess there are a few left) is that it punctures the God-Emperor’s “aura of infallibility” and is a PR issue. I find that an unlikely concern — most MAGAs don’t have a particularly deep grasp of finance and won’t bother reading any disclosures about Trump’s finances anyway. Unless Fox News features it, it’s not a PR issue for MAGAs.

    The GQP seems to be studiously ignoring it. They’re too spineless to denounce Trump’s crookedness but they’re starting to tremble at the thought of not knowing to whom they need to grovel. If they try to protect Trump, will they piss DeSantis off? (Yes, and he’s an even more vindictive asshole than Trump ever was.) If theyย  don’t protect Trump, will they piss Trump off? (Yes, but he may forget their names in a couple weeks.)

    What, oh what, is a hapless GQPer to do? It’s hard out there for a sycophantic scumbag.

    • …his tax returns are intentionally a morass of obfuscatory detail but I think the thing that seems at least a bit surprising to me is how thin that detail really is?

      …like…he carried on doing shit he’d lost in court over the legality of…didn’t even try to change up his game…& making up paper corporations that only have losses with no indication of income or capital investment seems like just bad…what do you call it…tax-craft?

      …the whole thing he fights so hard to not let anyone see out in the open seems to be that he’s not outsmarting the taxman…he’s not even paying people to outsmart the taxman for him…though the game being rigged in favor of real estate “moguls” helps him out a lot his one trick pony seems to be…despite much of the sketchy stuff falling apart under very little scrutiny…scale…make auditing him the equivalent of auditing several hundred straight returns & rely on a lack of available resources to call him on his shit

      …it’s dry, boring & full of so many sets of double-entry back & forth bookkeeping in the style of three card monte that painting the bigger picture of how much of it either is or ought to be illegal may well not be something anyone can fit in a headline…or a tik tok clip…or a tweet

      …but if I had buy-twitter-money…I’d throw that shit at forensic accountants like it was going out of style…& after maybe three to five years & probably the same again on lawyers fees…I’m pretty sure I could see him behind bars

      …be nice to think the political will exists for the federal authorities to take & maintain that level of interest in him over this stuff…since it would seem as though he’s only ever gotten away with it by not being worth their while to pursue?

  8. Ngl, I would BELIEVE it, if Jen Landon said the young woman in the waffle house tweets was her inspiration for Teeter on Yellowstone!๐Ÿ˜‚๐Ÿคฃ

Leave a Reply