Musk is appropriating 2017-era 4chan culture to impress 20-year-old girls. Sick pathetic pup, that guy.

Happy holidays everyone. One thing the Republicans are great at is "reverse marketing," that is, making the most brilliant, humanistic ideas sound stupid or too beneficial to citizens to be taken seriously. To them, full employment through government with an MMT strategy just "isn't how it works." They want us to embrace suffering and needless death from lack of healthcare.

The Democrats shouldn't have abandoned unions and consumer protections to compete with the GOP on free market strategies.

Masking & social distancing were what ended the "Spanish flu" of 1918. In San Francisco, people who refused to mask faced such punishments as fines, prison sentences and getting their names printed in the paper.

The rich, including San Francisco's mayor, were occasionally caught without masks but never went to jail.

It's a bit aggravating that there's always been a really unfair class angle to these things, like when elites got the first covid vaxes.

When labor organizers talk to employees about unionizing, they usually find that getting more money is a lot less important to them than getting their managers to stop treating them like disposable equipment in workplaces they completely hate going to. Respect for their skills - whatever they may be - is what they want.

Ron DeSantis info (apparently this made the rounds a while ago but it was news to me):

Empire Files interviewed a Guantanamo detainee who claims to know DeSantis on sight, as he helped to decide "legal" torture methods.

As a lawyer in Guantanamo during the worst US torture period, DeSantis' first duty *was* to his commander.

He's a monster.

@sugar0addict
Oh sure. The collective unhappiness of such a massive swath of humanity gets to me sometimes, that's really it.

@LastOfHisName
I definitely derive happiness from the people in my life and many things I do, but sometimes the cumulative edge is a bit too rough. All the human misery makes it too consistently revolting to stay consistently positive about our condition. Not trying to be dramatic, it just is what it is. I really don't like seeing people suffer. The only thing one can do is try to help individuals and families in deseperate need, which I already did this season. It's just never enough.

Lol just wondering, in the last couple of weeks, has anyone else said "Trump" when you actually meant to say "Musk?" I have.

I have no idea how anyone could possibly feel happy when there's misery everywhere and no one's doing anything about it. We're watching Friedman's unregulated free market experiment fail right in front of our eyes and the only ones who don't understand it are the ridiculously wealthy and a bunch of powerless politicians who eventually resort to insider trading like all the other really "successful" ones. Those are the real optics. That's what people see.

I dunno, did you already know that the ancient Peruvians made hundreds of huge, miles-wide drawings that can only be seen from way, way up in the air, and that we're still finding them? Whatever, I didn't, this is about as weird as it friggin gets.
Repeat, they're *still* finding them.
By flying over them.
In planes.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/new-nazca-lines-discovery-2231132

You know, maybe if Congresspersons didn't have to spend nearly all of their time begging wealthy ghouls for money and the rest of their time voting on names for post office buildings and increased military funding the military doesn't even particularly want, they'd actually do something to keep people from starving to death in a country made of millions of acres of corn.

The guy who owns the business where I work is a 90-year-old Ukrainian. He was a boy during Stalin's Holodomor, and his family was constantly trying to find food so they wouldn't starve. At one point he broke into a house and found a huge wheel of cheese. If that hadn't happened his entire family would have died.
Man's inhumanity never ceases to amaze, doesn't it?

@Darthbonn - Don't ya miss it though? Like, when people would start with you for no reason? 😹

@Jacki - That he's nothing but a lucky jackass? I would definitely agree with that.

@holon42 - Works for me. No idea what he's thinking. If he'd let Twitter alone he would have at least had some advertisers helping to pay for the, what is it, a $1 million monthly loan payment? What a colossal dunce.

@Darthbonn - Oh, trying to start trouble, ehhhhh? 😺

@holon42 - Lol, unbelievable isn't it.

@Myana - They really are great. Love that stuff. 😊

"There is no Tesla CEO today." 10 Tesla Investors Lose $132.5 Billion From Musk's Twitter Fiasco.

Pretty hurtin', folks. I hope he ends up living in a Maytag box under the overpass. Musk is nothing more than a fail machine.

https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/tesla-stock-investors-lose-132-5-billion-from-musks-twitter-fiasco/

Every year I put aside time during the holidays to read the ghost stories of MR. James (1862-1936).

He's known as the founder of the ‘antiquarian ghost story’ for centering them around very old objects that "harbour weird and unsettling associations for us."

He began writing the stories for a close circle of friends and colleagues at the University of Cambridge. He would read them aloud every Christmas Eve.

The stories are kind of Lovecraftian, but without a surrounding mythos (a la Cthulhu).