When I read it my brain automatically did it in the voice of Mr. Torgue.

Today's new lie....the Trump campaign put out a snapchat add claiming to offer a giveaway of Trump swag and $10 cash for free, just pay 69¢ shipping cost that must be paid by credit card, but hidden in the tome of microscopic small print is the truth, you are signing up for the Trump4President2020 Club.” Members are automatically billed $142 every month, with no option for a refund." Hardly "free"....not just 69¢...Another Trump scam in a long long line of nothing but Trump scams.

This is your hero, @bobknight33...conning his own supporters out of their money again using the craziest of scam tactics....again. That's what he thinks of you, you're a rube who's money he can steal, because you aren't smart enough to see the scam.

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Oh yes, more video hosts support. Also, VS needs to automatically find Vimeo videos' thumbnails.!

I did read about 'doxxing' those artists but the owner of the Gallery is also quoted as saying she did NOT send it to Amerika, but published the list for everyone, and sounded like it was what she always did.

I am a skeptic, and I've too often seen people just lumping others into camps of either friend/foe, and then accelerating the process by identifying anyone that associates with a foe is obviously now a foe too.

I'm sorry, but evidence against the gallery and the guy in the video here looks pretty limited. Might be right, but also might be wrong and I've seen too much witch hunting in Canada where anyone not on board is automatically alt-right, and alt-right is really just code for nazi, and if you've called them alt-right long enough then you can just start calling them a nazi.

It's dishonest, divisive and dangerous.

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It's a nice thought, but I think we really you don't need to remember them at all, just their party. It's much easier to just remember Romney, the only remaining Republican who didn't sell out completely.
With luck we can soon forget the party's name too, remembered only as a historical warning to future political parties to reject the politics of fear, hate, and division or perish.


The CDC today recommended not having in person voting at all if possible due to continued, worsening Covid outbreaks, with the only alternative being vote by mail. Request your ballot, don't just assume you get one automatically...don't think you can get one last minute...they WILL be overwhelmed, they WILL fail to get ballots to every registered voter, they won't be able to accommodate last minute requests. This will almost certainly be by design in some areas, and will not be the case at all in others. It will be politicized and taken advantage of for political gains.

Don't be duped out of your vote. Request your mail in ballot today, site the CDC guidelines if your state requires a reason.

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)

True.

No we don't...some, like the president, never punish themselves, that requires empathy and a conscience. Not everyone has those traits.

We had a video of elderly on a seesaw recently that proves wisdom doesn't automatically come with age. ;-)

I'm ahead of the game then...I broke decades ago.

Mmmmmmm....hammock.

Yes, anger can be an excellent motivator. Focusing that motivation for good, that's the hard part.

Ok, sure, but the voices in my head aren't usually good company.

True, but you have that right. Really, I just like the line, I don't think of it as life instructions, just something funny.

If only we could transform it into electricity, we would be in an energy glut overnight!

If you wait for them to fall, 1/2 are lost to the dark side. It's totally prudent to give them a shove in the right direction while they're still moveable, imo.

Proof that wisdom doesn't automatically come with age.

Just fyi

The supposed sexual assault happeend in the middle of 1993 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/us/politics/joe-biden-tara-reade-sexual-assault-complaint.html

Isn't it a bit odd that the person who passed the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 (so he was lobbying to get it passed and the bill was introduced in January 1993), am I the only person who thinks its odd that he passed this bill:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_Against_Women_Act
see also https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/senate-bill/11 for the full text

So you mean to tell me
While he was co-sponsoring/writing/passing THAT PARTICULAR LAW that created the following:

--- established annual $1.6 billion toward investigation and prosecution of violent crimes against women

---codified sex crimes to make them Federal crimes

---imposed automatic and mandatory penalties on those convicted

---allowed civil cases to be brought in cases prosecutors chose to leave un-prosecuted

---created confidentiality protections for victims

---created a training program for judges to encourage them to prosecute sexual assault crimes against women


So WHILE he's making it easier to sue and bring charges against former employers and creates mandatory minimums for those found guilty and if the prosecutors don't want to do it, created a pathway for civil lawsuits to be brought - you're telling me that WHILE he's doing that, he sexually assaults one of his employees from his offices WHILE he's doing that?

That doesn't make any fucking sense.
That doesn't make any fucking sense.
That doesn't make any fucking sense.
That doesn't make any fucking sense.
That doesn't make any fucking sense.
That doesn't make any fucking sense.


That the best you got you little bitch?

It's really interesting to see comedians do these performances without an audience. John Oliver and Steven Colbert's first attempts at this from home were a little cringy because they were still pausing for applause. Bill probably watched his and decided he needed to add in the audience afterward because without it, the practiced pauses from comedians are hard to watch. John and Steven stopped the pauses after a little practice.

I also noticed Bill looking around while talking. During a real performance you expect they are reading the faces of their audience, but in this case he was just looking at the back of his house. It shows you how much of this type of performance is automatic for these guys.