Good morning one and all to another incredible day and to the morning links!
U.S. Government to Soon Pay More on Interest on Debt Than Defense
Joe Biden Spent More Than 1/3 Of 2023 On Vacation, In Delaware, Or At Camp David
Report: Bill Clinton to Be Identified as “John Doe 36” in Jeffrey Epstein Documents
U.S. Savings Continued Falling in 2023
John Fetterman Says Social Media an “Accelerant” in Worsening His Depression
Nearly 200 Christians Massacred in Nigeria
Washington fends off Texas’ comeback, will face Michigan in CFP National Championship
That’s all I got for today. I’ll leave you with a song and move along with my day.
I thought interest already passed defense last year.
No one was interested.
America has an attention deficit disorder.
That does seem to be the compounding defense.
Probably budgeted vs. what we actually spent shovelling money to Ukraine as well.
Good point. It’s easy to balance a budget when you ignore it.
Morning, Banjos.
Doesn’t this mean he’s already been identified?
Probably missing an allegedly in that headline.
Why do I suspect this is another hit by the Obama faction of the Democrats against the remnants of the Clinton faction?
Considering this Biden era is just Obama 3.0, I wouldn’t be surprised the Clintons are pissed at black Jesus for fucking it all up for them yet again…
I actually would have guessed half, so “Good job, Brandon”? I suppose…. Not that with the “lids” and whatnot he’s really there even when he is there — and not like we really want him there when he tries to be… but since it is almost certainly his handlers more than him, tomayto, tomahto….
Morning, Banjos — thanks for the links. Morning all.
Quiet quitting is for the young only.
I would characterize Biden being on vacation a third of the time as “a good start”. G’wan, make it100% and pocket veto all legislation.
Part of me wants to joke “Former President Clinton suffers a tragic sudden heart attack in a follow-on story” — but honestly, I assume Hillary knows that when Bill dies the last shred of anyone paying attention to her presumably (hopefully!) dies out. Well, maybe a few 60+ year old screaming harpies… but I assume the younger harpies and harpies-in-training or transitioning have moved on to AOC or some other golden calf to worship.
It’s also a matter of he was already known as a womanizer and rapist, so there’s not much more reputational damage that can be done.
Nah, she has a bigger fan base than he does.
She definitely has a more devoted one. No so sure about “bigger” given the 1992 v. 2016 election results.
Derp. 1996.
Voting for the non-Republican doesn’t mean a prog actually likes that fucking (insert expletive here).
They’re on track to destroy American consumerism and the consumer driven economy in the name of Gaia and having no middle class to disrupt their policies, in other words. Yay.
What the hell — is The Lump like an increasingly well trained AI and it is starting to make sense? Because social media would depress anyone, after all.
More seriously — maybe he’s actually finally recovering from the stroke (I know the brain can rewire itself — not all the time, and it takes time often… but it does happen. If so, I hope his recovery continues – I don’t actually wish the man ill.
In the past wasn’t he known for being a blue collar type Dem? I think while he was recovering it was a Feinstein type “just vote yes” situation.
Blue collar progressive, lets be clear.
Fake blue collar, etc. He come from money and has never gotten dirt under his fingernails, as far as I know.
He slummed, man, he slummed with the best of ’em.
“The US debt mountain is growing so fast the government could soon be spending more on interest payments than on defense”
That’s a doozy of a headline. Will right wingers ever admit that the reason interest is so high is *because* of decades of sky high defense spending?
In part, yes, but we’ve spent a lot more on welfare than defense over the last couple of generations. I’m quite confident you could cut our defense budget in half, of course, without compromising the actual security of the actual United States one bit.
Was gonna say, isn’t SS/Medicare insanely higher than our defense budget? Something like 4 to 1
But, but, but Al Gore was gonna put SS in a lock box.
It would be comical if it wasn’t so serious. We have the deficit spending, all the welfare projects, a president running on low unemployment, politicians congratulating themselves for raising the minimum wage and protesters determined to destroy what’s left by outlawing productive energy.
The New Economics is a bunch of add-on invented words that have no definitions.
They are about $2T combined.
So what I’m hearing from you is that we need to increase defense spending, right?
Defense hasn’t been the top spending superfunction since about 1970. It is now 12-13% of spending compared to 42% in 1970 and higher before that. At the function level it is behind Social Security, Health, and Income Security and slightly ahead of Medicare. Today’s debt is primarily driven by jacking up spending about 50% because you don’t let an emergency go to waste.
Yup — the idea that we can’t roll back to 2019 or so as a minimum (which means that all the “emergency” spending is normalized with the massive deficit we’re at) really makes the vein on my forehead stand out. That should be the Stupid Party’s Position number One as a no-brainer… but of course, that would reduce pork to throw back to their districts and actually move to rein in the federal government, so contrary to the platitudes Yertle and his ilk toss come election time, that’s not going to happen.
I’m quite confident that one of the best ways to improve the actual security of the actual United States would be to knock about 90% off of the welfare budget.
Replace the welfare state with a safety net for the productive in bad times, and you would basically cut more than half our spending today as well as half the government bureaucracy and other shit.
Isn’t that how most of this crap started? “Just a safety net for the elderly because of the Depression”… “Just a safety net for the poor widows and/or orphans”… “Just a safety net for the unemployed to help them stay afloat while they get their next job”
In a perfect world, I’m right there with you — but all of these benefits always seem to be sold with the best of intentions and then metastasize.
I would disagree. FDR was a lover of socialism (and especially fascism until Japan bombed us) and he knew exactly what he was doing with this shit. So did Johnson. Besides, the problem is not the safety net, but government overreach and evil people that pretend to want to do good by making everyone dependent on government handouts. We should be able to have nice things AND control the crooks that want to expand that shit into bad things.
“We should be able to have nice things AND control the crooks…”
Not as long as our system produces an educational system that reinforces a broken bureaucratic political system.
We’re lacking that 20 year reset that Jefferson spoke of.
I have no love of FDR, but to be fair to him, his idea for SS was acturarially* balanced. His problem was refusing to fight back when congress fucked it up. Because he cared about passing it more than passing it “correctly”.
*is that a word? If so, is it spelled right? It looks all kind of wrong.
“Actuarially” is a perfectly good word. You just dropped an extra letter in there.
Of course, that government safety net comes with the moral hazard/perverse incentive that people stop providing their own safety net, which means the government safety net has more to fund, more often. And away we go.
The idea that you can have large government programs passing out cash without “crooks” or waste, fraud and abuse is not supported by the historical record.
I’ll also add that, even at its best, welfare is a check cut to a person who may be in the position they’re in for any number of reasons. Many of the most common reasons are not in any way assisted by the influx of cash (e.g. addiction, poverty mindset). The impersonality of the program enables a whole lot of vices.
That kind of welfare doesn’t hold a candle to SS/MC.
I’d go with “knock the right 90% of spending off the budget”. Pretty sure just vetoing any unconstitutional stuff would get you that budget.
I’d argue that our “defense” spending is actually making us less safe. But that’s a fair point. I’ve seen graphs that show defense as the highest expenditure but that also depends on how expenditures are categorized together (ie lumping SS together with medicare makes that category look bigger).
Then you have the effects of the Fed keeping rates artificially low for two decades and counting to pay for the terror wars. I hate the government so much bros, it’s unreal.
SS alone is estimated at 1.196 trillion as of FY22. Defense budget was estimated at 747 billion (excluding Afghanistan/Iraq funds as was put into law in 2001; sneaky fuckers)
Follow up question because I’m honestly curious now. Do defense contracts to Boeing, Raytheon, etc count towards the “defense budget”?
I would assume it is the baseline budget to include contracts unless they separate out those contracts as mentioned into the Overseas Contingency Planning.
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/u-s-military-budget-components-challenges-growth-3306320#toc-defense-department-base-budget
Site does a fairly good job of detailing the FY2022 proposed budget.
Yes. Defense has the following subfunctions:
Military Personnel
Operation and Maintenance
Procurement
Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation
Military Construction
Family Housing
Other
What it no longer has is paying to store overseas soldier’s possessions.. They needed that money for Ukraine’s racket.
I remind people here that a large chunk of that Ukraine military aid sent to Zelensky was then “invested” in FTX – yes, of Bankmen-Fried infamy – for some reason. Then it also is confirmed that FTX doled out a YUGE amount of cash – 95% of it to democrats – right before the 2022 election. Right after that they got in trouble and declared bankruptcy (fucking over most of their clients). And just the other day the DOJ run by Garland decided to drop all charges related to criminal donations to politicians…
Do not let them act as if the Biden family being a low intelligence criminal entity is not the norm, because the democrat party for sure is a crime syndicate. And it is obvious a lot of the old republican guard – the never Trumper types -are also involved.
“What’s the use of having all this defense/weaponry if we don’t used it.”
Paraphrasing SecState Albright
Defense isn’t the highest even when broken down to function or combining with veteran’s benefits. The latest actual numbers are for 2022: (functions > $250B)
Social Security: $1.2T
Health: $914B
Income Security: $866B
Defense: $765B
Medicare: $755B
Education: $677B
Interest: $476
Veterans Benefits: $274B
Debt Increase: $2.5T
Education: $677B
$6700 for each of the 102M people under the age of 25 in this country.
And that’s just fed gov funding.
$518B was for higher education which includes vote buying. It is estimated to drop to less elevated numbers as the evil, obstructionist Republicans refuse to renew “emergency” spending.
You probably saw graphs of discressionary spending labeled as just spending. This is a lie often told as debt interest, SS, Medicare and large swaths of the welfare state don’t get included.
It is something like 25% of spending. Everything else is on autopilot.
Cut defense in half, and, at the same time, cut bennies in half. Do it right, ie weed out the grifters and padding, and no taxpayers will miss anything. Now, the parasites will miss a paycheck, but I am OK with that.
Is it? I mean — yeah, that’s part of it…. but I was under the impression entitlements were and have been a bigger part of the budget since at least Reagan — often just with funny accounting like the “IOUs in the supposed SS trust fund” type crap.
But I wouldn’t hold my breath — you have idiots like this still citing “Intelligence Community experts” that the Intelligence Community is vital (gee, what a surprise there… next up, Teachers say teachers are the most important profession, etc!) and efforts to rein it in are just being “dupes of foreign powers”, so the military-intelligence-industrial complex will keep right on finding cheerleaders.
Novel insights into federal accounting make for lovely sidebars, but our simple and central concerns should be the destruction of the value of our currency as a vector towards centralizing an unholy fraction of our culture: savers are being destroyed so that the government can be as large and evil as possible.
The debt in and of itself can be resolved with less spending and more taxes, but neither party is interested; indeed, it is all fun at Glibs dot com to rightfully point at Democrats and decry policies and budgets that got us here while carrying water for Republicans who have done bupkis to fix any of this. The uniparty are destroying the fabric of our nation by moving more of our culture and expenditure under bureaucratic umbrellas while most of America plays identity politics over the crumbs.
The accounting doesn’t matter. The ratios don’t matter. The priorities don’t matter. The SIZE matters, and both parties are killing you.
TBH the size doesn’t really matter either. We’re on a course and there’s no turning around from it. What matters is how we manage the inevitable consequences. Given that 2/3 of the country is still pretending there will be no consequences, it’s a matter of personal responsibility for us to be prepared for what’s coming when the dollar isn’t nearly as valuable as it is right now.
we don’t disagree, really….seldom do
there’s no turning around is the same thing as saying size did matter, and now we’re reaping the whirlwind
The only rational choices left are what to talk about: if constitutionally constrained government has sailed, all the news is moot; if personal freedom is lost, it hardly matters who was on which plane/island or who gave which hooker $250k. In a irresistible, absurd world, there arguably is nothing at all worth talking about.
I think it’s intellectually healthy to point back to principles, to highlight good thinking, and to criticize the hysterical culture wars. What ought be is a healthy subject even if 90% of America has lost their way. And what ought not be is a a government comprised of 33% of the economy.
we don’t disagree, really….seldom do
*clinks beer glass*
Agreed. Sometimes I’m too quick to point out the nuance I’m trying to emphasize without sufficiently making the point that I largely agree with the statement I’m responding to.
Wait — we’re carrying water for Republicans? Really?
I mean — just upthread:
And I’m pretty sure most folks around here consider the Stupid Party a wing of the Uniparty and all…. so not really sure where you’re seeing this zeitgeist.
I see the relative support for the Republicans around here as “Well, at least they’re less likely to shoot me in the head and maybe some day we might get one who actually believes this stuff and isn’t immediately neutered by the DC Honeypot Traps or whatnot”, but certainly not “Rah Rah They Really Stand For Small Government!”
The unfortunate reality of all the non-Uniparty parties sucking royally, frankly. (Which is probably by design, granted…)
Ok… once the song kicked in, it didn’t sound as much like it — but that intro made me wonder who exhumed poor Johnny Cash and forced him to sing again. Nice selection, Banjos — seems more than a little apt given the Arlington monument stories recently.
Depressing headlines lately (wtf, Nigeria??)
But the cover GIF of a kitten catching snow was a good little dose of antidote.
Thanks, Banjos.
Catching snow? I thought it was a little devil swatting Angels out of the sky to promote Chaos… 😉
G’Gugvuntt-Vl’Hurg invasion fleets?
Heh… now there’s a detail I didn’t remember… but no, that would be a Good Boy dealing with them. Kittens are Avatars of Pure Chaos in the disguise of fluffy cuteness…
“wtf, Nigeria??”
Anyone really surprised this is happening in another place where the people can’t fight back against the monsters?
Now do Sudan..
“If it ain’t one thing (place) it’s another”
/Roseanna
Nigeria has always been that way. Maybe one day Christians around the world will give it the same attention we do Israel.
Who am I kidding?
They will start paying attention about the same time as the left starts paying attention to Uighurs, and other Muslims groups affected by the policies they perfer.
re: the Epstein list and pending openness
I’m suspecting that once it’s “out” (whole? redacted?) there’ll be an effort in multiple parts to continue protecting the names on the list through a combination of smoke-screens, obfuscation, and hand-waving-away. Like:
1) Clinton’s on it? Well of course he is. Didn’t everybody already know that? And so what – old news.
2) So _____ is on the list. So what? That just means they had ordinary business/social dealings with that crowd, and their participation was innocent/legit. You don’t really think ALL the goings-on were shady, did you? I mean yeah some were, but not what my guy was doing.
3) This list is a falsehood released by that ultra-MAGA judge, etc. so of course you shouldn’t believe it. You can tell it’s false because my innocent guy is on there just to be smeared by that ultra-MAGA judge and you can tell he’s an ultra-MAGA judge because he put my guy’s name on there.
4) Fake list to smoke-screen the real list. The guilty and their useful idiots will accuse all their political opponents of being on there with no evidence.
Hillary will just use that same line she did on congress when they pointed out she was an idiot responsible for Benghazi and that she had committed national security crimes sending secret shit on that fake email she had (and all other Obama admin people too as we now find out). No not the one about baking cookies. That was when she was questioned about Bill playing with chubby interns and cigars. Not the one about her hot sauce being in her bag either. The other one…
‘You don’t really think ALL the goings-on were shady, did you? I mean yeah some were, but not what my guy was doing.’
This, in a nutshell. See:Congress’s historically low approval rating yet the extremely high reelection percentage. “Everybody sucks except for my guy and even if they do suck the other option is literally evil incarnate!”
Moral relativism is killing this country.
FTA
So nothing really new…
So..nothing really and expect full throated defense of releasing these since it will expose accusers and alleged victims.
Epstein was running this huge sex trafficking enterprise without any actual clients, it seems.
Sometimes you just want to set up the proof of concept first.
Small ray of sunshine from the WSJ.
Add Flour and Salt and Assimilate
https://www.wsj.com/articles/add-flour-and-salt-and-assimilate-culture-migration-europe-france-sri-lanka-tamil-efd79f89?st=ysovgbypbyys73p&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
The Great European Melting Pot would be a lot better than the model of “Keep them in ghettos for generations”, true. Not sure either side of the Pond can do it any more given the rhetoric and emphasis on dividing people.
I do not doubt non muslims can assimilate in Europe. That is not the issue.
That’s nice but “assimilate” is long since a dirty word for the left, because it doesn’t lead to the chaos that is their ultimate goal.
Yes – far more likely to end in war than assimilation. The Reconquista ended the last wave of immigration into Europe with expulsion.
Assimilation is going on right now. The question is which set of cultural values individuals choose.
Given the values a whole lot of Cubans hold due to bitter memories under Castro, I not entirely sure that the majority of people fleeing socialist shiteholes like Venezuela are gonna be overly fond of leftists.
I mean, one of the better governors we have now, DeSantis, is Cuban. If he can convince Trump to make him VP, there’s a non-zero chance the Republicans will have the first Latino president.
Hard to say, but the columns of young men waving the flags of the socialist shitholes they are leaving doesn’t inspire confidence that they are proto-libertarians.
Given the values a whole lot of Cubans hold due to bitter memories under Castro, I not entirely sure that the majority of people fleeing socialist shiteholes like Venezuela are gonna be overly fond of leftists.
It’s the California conundrum. In some ways, the California emigrants are not particularly fond of the leftists, but they bring that socialist millieu in the form of a thousand little “I’m conservative, but” positions.
Not my best day. Such is life.
I played https://squaredle.com/xp 01/02:
*21/21 words (+3 bonus words)
🎯 In the top 19% by accuracy
I played https://squaredle.com 01/02:
*37/37 words (+3 bonus words)
🎯 In the top 9% by accuracy
🔥 Solve streak: 163
I played https://squaredle.com/xp 01/02:
21/21 words (+8 bonus words)
📖 In the top 3% by bonus words
I played https://squaredle.com 01/02:
*37/37 words (+6 bonus words)
⏱️ In the top 36% by speed
🔥 Solve streak: 100
I had a cat who liked to catch snowflakes. He jumped a lot higher.
I imagine given the social scene these days there’s more than one cougar catching snowflakes out there.
The cougars I know have difficulty walking.
We’re borrowing money to pay off our credit card balance.
Better than getting another credit card and transferring the balance, right?
Government, social assistance and healthcare made up most, and in some cases more than all, of the net new jobs over the past year in California (61%), New Jersey (81%), Oregon (89%), Michigan (113%), Illinois (113%) and New York (121%).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-welfare-industrial-complex-is-booming-3a7ad15c?st=r31glmwmg9r2up0&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Gee, there’s something about those states….
As I said to a co-worker, it’s all good if you are Keynesian.
You mean that government spending can prop up the economy?
Sure, until the bills come due.
Buying munitions and giving them to Ukraine also increases GDP. Why do you people want to decrease GDP?
This is where things go off the rails.
This.
If the governments in those cities were to say, hey, better find a job because we’re not gonna “tend” to you at all, the immigrants would probably make better citizens than the natives.
Not gonna happen, of course.
And the “we’re a city of immigrants!” crowd completely hand-waves away the fact that that is the way it used to be.
That only works if the death rates in the cities are high enough that it clears at a rate higher than the birth rate and thus is able to soak up the excess people flowing into it.
Cities are the trash heaps of civilization.
Montana Ranch For Sale – Cromwell Island
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuxKtynkRFM
Flathead Lake, with almost 200 square miles of surface area and 185 miles of shoreline, is the largest natural freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River — Yes, even bigger than Lake Tahoe! To our knowledge, Cromwell Island, with almost 350 acres and nearly three miles of shoreline, is the largest private island in freshwater west of the Mississippi River that is under a single ownership.
Cromwell Island was purchased in the late 1980s by Robert M. Lee, a renowned automobile and antique arms collector, explorer, author, and conservationist. Before his death in 2016, Mr. Lee and his wife, Anne, partially completed construction of a monumental structure including over 45,000 square feet of living space that was to serve as their home full-time. Even in its unfinished state, it has a magnitude of presence reminiscent of Versailles.
The mystique endures as Cromwell Island is now for sale and, with so many possibilities, a new owner will have the opportunity to write the next chapter of a storied place.
$72,000,000 Dayton, MT 348± Deeded Acres
72 mil is a chunk of change, why a fella could buy a Manhattan penthouse for that kind of scratch
Shame they planted a medium sized hotel on it. The guest villa looks like more than enough for me.
Huh, looks nice. I’ll check my bank statement and give them a call.
That’s a lot of qualifiers to make “largest” true.
Meanwhile in the pub
https://twitter.com/footbalIfights/status/1741616165129007603
They must have taken a lesson from you Euros and your soccer fans…
Happy New Year everyone!
Is sloopy now on double suicide watch?
Should we worry about him next Monday?
Alexanderplatz in 1925 (colorised) #berlin
https://twitter.com/slowberlin/status/1742125790106361907
From Sensei’s link:
Such advocates—some supported by taxpayer dollars—have sued local governments to stop encampments from being cleared. During the Biden presidency, employment at “social advocacy organizations” has exploded. Every migrant, vagrant and endangered species apparently needs an advocate.
Booming.
My favorite read of 2023 was @jasonhickel
‘s The Double Objective of Democratic Ecosocialism.
In accessible yet rigorous fashion, he points to the root cause of our ecosocial crisis & offers a program for conquering our bread within planetary boundaries
Alstom Citadis Compact awaiting departure towards Gare d’Aubagne
https://twitter.com/PoliticOfNature/status/1741887560446513564
you will never guess what the causes and the solutions are
Wow, that website is a goldmine of derp.
Daily Ray of Sunshine
Good for those lads and their teacher. Hope he takes them to a dog track and the dogs can chase the rabbit while the boys chase the dogs.
President Biden won’t admit it, but he has Republican states to thank for the increase in productive jobs in private industry. The administration’s bet is that government spending on welfare and entitlements can continue to power the U.S. labor market even as job growth in manufacturing, tech, retail and other industries flags. But social make-work projects don’t improve American living standards.
But look at the GDP.
Those windows won’t break themselves!
“Joe Biden Spent More Than 1/3 Of 2023 On Vacation, In Delaware, Or At Camp David”
Yeah, but how much time did he spend golfing? Huh? /Actually seen on Twitter
“Americans’ Finances Took A Beating In 2023 Amidst Persistent Inflation And High Interest Rates”
No kidding. I mentioned it this weekend, but just as we start a new business, we get a double nut punch. Thanks to good old workin’ class Joe from Scranton, who by the way is still telling us the economy is the best it’s ever been.
Hope you clean up and sign up a bunch of new customers in the next week or so.
This is the Time of New Sneakers at the gym. Yesterday at the gym I was amused at all the people waiting to sign up for a membership.
My wife goes early morning to avoid the New Year crowds.
I accidentally got into a “discussion” with someone over the weekend about sending money to Ukraine and Israel. Their point was that it wasn’t really “spending” because that money was used to buy stuff from our defense contractors.
My response was that if it was really such a great deal, why were we limiting ourselves to just Ukraine and Israel? We should be sending money to Russia and Hamas too so they can stimulate our economy.
I don’t feel like I managed to persuade him.
Why not have the government pay somebody to make me a nice domestic car or truck? Same argument – which boils down to socialist corporatism.
Even worse, at least those cars and trucks would be driving around on the road. This is like paying carmakers to make cars and truck and then blowing them up.
It only helps if we’re not financing the material being shipped. Now if we were selling arms paid for with foreign monies, that would be of help. Giving away arms paid for with our own monies just drains the coffers.
Thanks to good old workin’ class Joe from Scranton, who by the way is still telling us the economy is the best it’s ever been.
He has a pen and a credit card. Life is good.
I hate this kind of anachronistic zoomer nonsense. There were no flags or ideologies in the ancient world!!
https://twitter.com/JJ_McCullough/status/1741604493484253241
Stupid uneducated, and brainwashed people outnumber the rest of us…
This is a perfectly fine and normal thing. The problem is when they’re given “self-esteem” and told that their opinion on [insert topic here] actually matters. There’s nothing worse than an openly opinionated midwit.
And Twatter gives them a forum to reach the masses with.
I give up.
What is JJ trying to say?
The consumer is very strapped for cash right now. It’s difficult to find any honest metric that shows Americans had a good year in 2023. At best, the year was less negative than the previous year.
My take is that we’re in a quiet depression. The macro numbers are being massaged to make it look better than it is, but the problem is wider than that. We’re seeing a substantial decline off of an economy that hasn’t been quite right since 2008, and has been running on a couple of dead cylinders since 2020. Most of the “good times” over the past 15 years have been subsidized by cheap debt and declining lending standards. Now that the consequences of the funny money era are coming fast and hot, people are left in even worse positions than they would have otherwise been.
We were in a recession before they changed the definition. So yeah, we might have slipped into a depression since then.
I’m concerned that we’re still seeing stripped shelves at grocery stores. I’m still seeing as much as half of the meat section empty at big regional chains like Food Lion and Kroger. We’ve switched over almost all groceries to Sam’s Club, and even then there are days when Sam’s has no chicken breasts or [insert common cut of beef].
Other than for a very short time during natural disasters and then during the Covid lockdown, I can’t ever recall seeing stripped shelves at grocery stores or not being able to find household staples.
Must be regional issues. Haven’t seen that here in NKY and only in Nevada because we had the only grocery store for an exploding population within 5 miles.
Yeah no shortages here in upstate NY.
Not that I’m under any illusion that this can’t change at any time.
Yep. While not quiet soviet-level bad, this is very disturbing. Also, inflation is allegedly down, but eggs are still double the Trump-era prices.
Most everything is double the Trump Era prices because the dollar has been devalued by half since then.
Prices keep going up, but the shelves are stocked in SC.
I haven’t noticed supply issues recently, but I have noticed that a ton of people are struggling to make ends meet, especially at the grocery.
We just did our annual rejigger of our budget, and my entire CoL raise ended up in the grocery budget. IOW, given the inflation in other areas of life, I got a pay cut.
I cant imagine what life’s like right now for the dual car loan, massive student loans, maxed credit card crowd. Now is not a great time to be running on zero margin.
We’re seeing odd, random empty spots on the shelves at our local Safeway.
I’m pretty sure the mediocre Mexican restaurant in the same strip mall is responsible for the chronic shortage of our favorite tortilla chips, though.
Just like eggs, it’s price increases not an actual shortage. Distributors and retailers have budgets, and food has very narrow margins. Not selling something you don’t have is a known cost, buying something at a higher price is an unknown cost.
The consumer is very strapped for cash right now. It’s difficult to find any honest metric that shows Americans had a good year in 2023. At best, the year was less negative than the previous year.
It seems as if every time I turn around I see an article about how wage growth is totally overcoming inflation. I don’t know who they’re talking about; specific unions, maybe, or all those freshly minted social workers and community advocates.
What they don’t want to talk about is all of that wage growth is based on artificial needs; in other words, it isn’t based on needed sector growth, but on fiat.
I’m looking forward to Sloopy’s coverage of the Professional Women’s Hockey League in his sports roundups.
I wonder how much of this decision was because they need content to fill out 24/7 programming? Or how much of it was to get some sort of Woke points?
A bit of both. See also the link from yesterday’s open post about Nike chasing girl dollars at the cost of its core customer base. They’re not the only ones in the sports industry to make that mistake.
I don’t know what level of IQ it takes to think 19th century India had a lower poverty rate than modern America.
https://twitter.com/AdrienBoieldieu/status/1603593182050222080
This in the paper is arguably even stupider than the India graph. Poverty increased from ZERO to almost 70% in a span of 5 years, and nothing happened? – apparently in china poverty was 0 in 1990
As was pointed out above, the problem is that we started telling stupid people that their opinions counted because of self esteem and thus ended up with them preaching to the masses. Back in my consulting days I remember telling an employer’s bosslady that had just told me everyone had to be allowed to say their thing because every opinion had merit, that I had never heard anything dumber in my lifetime, but that it explained why this particular company was imploding and they kept going out to hire consultants to come fix the shitshow this crap created.
Dude. Step away from the communism.
Both parties have contributed to the situation. Republicans have passed large tax cuts. Democrats have enacted ambitious climate and health care initiatives. Both funneled money to Americans in response to the Covid pandemic.
If it wasn’t for those darn Republican tax cuts…
Paywall
The Debt Matters Again
The changing economy has made federal debt a bigger problem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/briefing/national-debt.html
They always seem to pair the tax cuts with spending increases… which obliterates any benefits of the increased revenue from the tax cuts. Yay morons.
/retards: If you let people keep more of that government money some employer gives them for working, you are killing Gaia and pushing grandma in a wheelchair over the cliff!
civilized Europe does not have republican tax cuts. just sayin’
Civilized Europe is long dead.
Decadent Europe is where you live.
That is because you have already submitted.
Taxes can only raise a finite amount of money.
Deficit spending means there is literally no imitation on that side of the ledger.
just print infinite money
Video: a Japanese driver stopped their car during today’s earthquake and observed river water swaying back and forth.
https://twitter.com/mrjeffu/status/1741729441385177125
That is white supremacy at work right there. Newton cannot be trusted.
Interesting twist..I have always been an INTP when taking those assessments and just did one while I work on my training and career planning and I have slipped into ISTP. Not by much and I wasn’t heavily in the intuition category. I would guess life experience moved that one.
or it is all nonsense.
Could very well be. I did rank social sciences as irrelevant on one of the required assessments I took.
It is slightly less nonsense than astrology.
How DARE you sirrah?
Astrology is a venerable science with a vastly better track record than sociology, pedagogy, psychology, political science, economics…
🤣
The track record isn’t better.
I’ll compare my record of predictions against Krugman’s any day. And I don’t even have a Nobel prize!
No fair cherry picking easy opponants.
Notice he omitted the auguring of entrails.
This isn’t an article on making sausages.
I thought you got the entrails pre-augred.
The auguring is the fun part…
Talking about Clinton and Epstein (and being protected from statutory rape charges for 30 years) and Garland….
The other day I saw a tweet talking about Garland being the prosecutor in the Whitewater case.
No way, I thought. So I Google it. Google hands me a CNN article about Elena Kagan and her key role in the whitewater prosecution, along with Garland.
Obama makes 2 Supreme Court nominations that both prosecuted whitewater???
Also… the whitewater documents were destroyed in the Oklahoma City bombing…..
Then…. the same characters show up in the Epstein case….
For almost my entire life, conspiracy theories were dumb and nobody believed them.
Now? The coincidences are so outlandish that you can’t ignore them. FBI agents uncovered assassination plots in Michigan by deep undercover work in michigan…. and then the exact same guys manage to be inside a supposed coup attempt in Washington DC after only a few weeks involvement? After also being in Florida?
Even CSI Miami would have been a little less obvious about things
don’t dwell on this sort of things it’s not good for you
Both parties have contributed to the situation. Republicans have passed large tax cuts. Democrats have enacted ambitious climate and health care initiatives. Both funneled money to Americans in response to the Covid pandemic.
Fuck you, cut spending.
there is nothing left too cut.
Interesting read though preaching to the choir here. I’m sure they’re already on a list next to school board parents and Catholics who aren’t keen on post-Vatican II and all.
You can’t make this stuff up.
A Maryland county claims under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, it can create a school board seat that only illegal immigrants can vote for, according to reports.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/maryland-county-claims-school-board-create-seat-only-illegal-immigrants-vote-reports
WTF??
civilized Europe does not have republican tax cuts. just sayin’
And now you have a global minimum corporate tax. So very civilized.
Yeah, that we bought into (and didn’t they sneak it into Build Back Bitter or one of the other stupid bills in 2021 — so we can’t even complain that the Senate didn’t ratify things…)? In my fantasies — the Russians get over their love of strong men, keep their culture but flip the bird to the world and exploit the hell out of their Siberian resources with low corporate tax rates and mirror the America of the late 1800s to mid 1900s…
I don’t think you can ratify a treaty obligation with less than 2/3 vote. Build Back Better was passed by 51-50.
I’m expecting the subject was known to law enforcement in the next few days.
If not for the Uber driver getting hit by this person, sounds like it could have been much worse.
What happened to just eating the business end of a shotgun and leaving innocents out of it?
Very little notoriety in that.
Dayum. I’ve been to that place – when I was around six.
/skims over links
I think I’ll just go back to work. At least it is a short week for me.
The Senate heard room anal escapades have kinda disappeared from the news so I did a little googling to see if the “top” was ever found out. The name that comes up is Georg Gauger but most of the search results are not exactly mainstream links so I haven’t clicked through. Has anyone seen any reporting on Georg Gauger?
Show us your tits
ESPN apologized Monday night for a video clip of a woman baring her breast that was shown during the broadcast of the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans.
It was aired coming out of a commercial during the second half of Washington’s 37-31 victory over Texas in a semifinal game of the College Football Playoff. A clip of people wandering on Bourbon Street in New Orleans showed a woman pulling down her top to expose her breast.
“We regret that this happened and apologize that the video aired in the telecast,” ESPN’s Bill Hofheimer said in a statement to The Associated Press.
I thought tits were legal on cable.
Today on the No shit, Sherlock front.
It worked last time, and outside a few hearings that nobody watches, there has been zero accountability. I would be more surprised to read a story about it stopping.
King of the dunghill
BYD overtook Tesla to become the world’s biggest electric car company in the final quarter of 2023.
The Chinese company sold a record number of cars last year, including 525,409 battery electric vehicles (BEVs) in the three-month period to December 31, according to a stock exchange filing. Tesla said Tuesday it delivered 484,507 — also a record — during the quarter.
Over the year as a whole Elon Musk’s Tesla (TSLA) still outpaced BYD, selling 1.8 million electric cars. BYD sold 1.57 million electric vehicles, up 73% on 2022, as well as 1.44 million hybrids.
But who is losing more money?
BYD gets just as much government support if not more.
“Report: Bill Clinton to Be Identified as “John Doe 36” in Jeffrey Epstein Documents”
To be fair, have you seen his wife?
Don’t even need to look, just hear the sound of velcro separating.
“Nearly 200 Christians Massacred in Nigeria ”
Your tax dollars at work.
Man breaks into Colorado Supreme Court overnight and opens fire, police say
A man was arrested early Tuesday after he broke into the Colorado Supreme Court overnight and opened fire inside the building, state police said in a news release.
The incident was not believed to be “associated with previous threats to the Colorado Supreme Court Justices,” the Colorado State Patrol said.
The break-in comes two weeks after the court ruled 4-3 to remove former President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 ballot, finding he was ineligible to hold office under the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban.”
That’s what they wanted.
Shut down the election. Declare Biden the winner.
Every Republican is an insurrectionist. Arrest anyone in leadership and who donated money to the party, and put everyone who ever voted R on a watch list.
A nighttime shooting of the building?
False flag. Call me when the whole court is wiped out
The actual insurrectionists are the people trying to “win” the election by taking the minority party candidate off the ballot without even a pretense of due process. It’s not an insurrection if zero people arrested on that basis are convicted of insurrection.
Trump was acquitted of the impeachment charge of insurrection.
BYD gets just as much government support if not more.
I assume more. I also assume the cars are cheaper with a lot less technowizardry.
BYD is in Communist China, so “government support” is more of a misdirection than anything. They are more of a government subsidiary, I would expect.
And, again because commies, no telling how many actual functioning vehicles they delivered to actual paying customers.
Every driveway in their fake cities will have one!
They export European compliant vehicles with allegedly stolen IP from Tesla for their autonomous driving.
They go from cheap to expensive.
Heh, I bet this turns out to be an understatement….
Brave New World…
She couldn’t just take off the headset?
OFFS.
What’s next, the police investigate virtual murders in FPS games?
There really is no peak derp.
“You’re hereby under arrest for spawn camping”
“Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s ‘no whites’ party did not violate law, Massachusetts AG’s office says”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12919191/Boston-Mayor-Michelle-Wus-whites-party-did-not-violate-law-Massachusetts-AGs-office-says.html
Black lawyer approves tax-funded segregation.
Yes, Dems being racist is a longstanding tradition. That’s the problem.