Month: May 2023

Schadenfreude Moment – Manchin To Be Bounced in 2024

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It’s a well documented fact that revenge and spite are meat and drink to me.  So you know I will put aside my disgust at the monumental voter fraud that will occur in November 2024 to celebrate the ejection of Joe Manchin from his West Virginia US Senate seat.  I hope he has saved up all of his graft and corruption funds because that will be the cutoff date.

Ya Gotta Laugh

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We live in such strange times.  Sometimes the headlines are a patchwork of tragedy, comedy and just plain weird.  I guess you’d have to call the Bud Light/Dylan Mulvaney story a comedy.  So is the Tucker Carlson story.  In each case you have a corporation applying the woke rules and shooting itself right in the groin.

Then there’s the story of the Marine who stopped a lunatic on a New York subway car by putting him in a chokehold.  Now he’s probably going to be put on trial for murder.  That sounds like a tragedy.  And everything else is somewhere in between.

The banking industry meltdown and the studiously ignored stagflation is a looming catastrophe that we’re supposed to shrug off.  And the daily appearance of another whistleblower to announce that the Biden administration is constantly breaking the law and simultaneously shielding itself from these crimes is a tragicomedy so outrageously obvious that no one would believe it if it were the plot of a movie.

And heaven only knows what tomorrow will reveal.  Today we heard that the Ukrainians launched a drone attack on the Kremlin to assassinate Vladimir Putin.  The repercussions of that attempt may turn out to be the biggest tragedy of the century.  As it is, the Ukraine war has the potential to destabilize the balance of power in the world.  This new twist may cause an escalation that takes on a life of its own.

But none of these things changes the fact that we all have to live.  We fret about the tragedies and wonder about the looming catastrophes that threaten from every side.  But we still have to laugh.

So, I read about Anheuser Busch’s corporate leaders declaring that all of this was a mistake and that there was no campaign to make Mulvaney a spokesman for Bud Light.  And they’ve promised to triple the advertising budget and fill up the television commercials with young people wearing cowboy hats at Zac Brown Band concerts.  And I can’t help but laugh.  Anheuser-Busch-InBev has hundreds of beer products.  They could have selected a dozen craft beers and dedicated them solely to transgender awareness and the drinkers of Bud Light would never have known or cared.  But someone at corporate, probably that ditz Alissa Heinerscheid or maybe her boss Daniel Blake, decided that it was time to replace all those rednecks with the millions of Audrey Hepburn impersonators who must drink Bud Light while soaking in the bathtub in full pancake makeup.

They just couldn’t help themselves.  When you’re a woke evangelist, you’re always fighting the good fight.  And so, they not only announced the Mulvaney sponsorship they released the video of Alissa Heinerscheid denigrating the present patrons of Bud Light as being not only benighted knuckle draggers who suffered from being terminal “fratty” but also were declining in numbers and therefore responsible for their product’s declining market share.  This will be a beautiful thing to watch.  Anheuser Busch won’t go out of business.  But this will be so painful that the people in the front office will never forget it.  And hopefully a lot of people who have right-wing customers for their products will also take note.  And I just have to laugh.  They did this to themselves, the chumps.

And right at the very same time Fox News fires Tucker Carlson.  The replacement for his show is getting 48% of the audience that he used to bring in.  And it’s had a knock-on effect on the rest of the line-up.  And it’s getting worse.  Enormous numbers of people are canceling their memberships in the premium plans that Tucker contributed to.  Fox is losing a lot of viewers.  And Tucker Carlson has the potential to take his audience wherever he decides to go next.  And I just have to laugh.  They did this to themselves, the mooks.

So, in the midst of the meltdown that is Joe Biden’s America there is still a way to have a laugh now and then.  It’s a wry chuckle and it’s mixed with a groan.  But it’s a laugh nonetheless.  And we go on and we live our lives.  So, until the Russian ICBMs start landing in Dunwich, I’ll continue doing my best to enjoy my life and share a laugh with you.  And Alissa Heinerscheid, this Bud’s for you, ya dope.

Can Powell and Yellen Thread the Needle?

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Trying to disguise the US economy’s virulent case of stagflation by alternately increasing interest rates and printing multi-trillions of dollars of phony money seems to be a very difficult balancing act.  Lately it has resulted in a string of large banks failing as the depositors pull out their cash to find interest bearing government bonds.

Now I hear they’re talking again about minting some “trillion-dollar coins” to get around a battle with the Republican House leadership about balancing the budget.

Will Biden and company be able to blame the crash of the economy on the Republicans?  Well, it wouldn’t surprise me too much.  Do I care?  No, not really.  There doesn’t seem to be any limit to how much damage the Democrats do to this country without any noticeable consequences to their re-election chances.

But it is interesting to speculate on exactly when the economy may collapse catastrophically.  Banks collapsing, even somewhat large ones doesn’t seem to worry the Masters of the Universe.  Apparently, we only need five or fewer ludicrously large banks to handle all the corrupt financial operations needed to facilitate wealth being sucked out of the rest of the country and into the coffers of the obscenely rich.

So, if it’s not collapsing banks, what will signal the final chapter of the country’s death spiral?  I suspect it will occur when the last of the middle-class disappears into poverty.  After all that was always this county’s strength.  And in fact, all the way back to 5th century BC Athens a large flourishing middle class was the engine of a healthy democracy.  Now that we’re no longer a democracy it makes sense that the priorities of the aristocracy will sooner or later kill off the golden goose that created their wealth.

And when that happens, I expect the aristocracy to start reducing their ranks to make their shrinking rents from the serfs stretch a little farther.  That’s going to be a rude shock for the bugmen who have groveled and scraped to remain in the various concentric circles of the outer hive.  Being forced out of the hive as winter sets in will be truly sad.  But the death by freezing of drones is a fact of life.

Of course, it’s likely the House Republicans will fold before much damage is done and give Biden his trillions out of fear but I have an almost morbid fascination with guessing when the death blow will fall.  Maybe the day is close now when the rot to the commercial sector becomes so pervasive that even the major banks like Morgan Stanley and Bank of America just can’t make the math work any longer.

At that point will the “people” finally revolt and beyond the scope of even ballot harvesting norms could the Democrats be hurled out of power?  I guess it could happen.  At that point probably the ultra-rich will gather up their assets in the form of tons of gold and platinum ingots and fly off to New Zealand to ride out the cannibal zombie apocalypse and plan their return to a pristine continent swept clean by the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Well anyway, let’s just enjoy the spectacle of “experts” explaining how bank runs are really a sign of strength in the banking sector.  And someone please put Jim Cramer out of his misery.