The Observations of Leaving the House Contradict Paul Krugman’s “Robust America”.

The Observations of Leaving the House Contradict Paul Krugman’s “Robust America”.

Yesterday when driving my spouse to a medical appointment in the south suburbs…

I noticed that there are miles of abandoned offices, and businesses that closed years ago and have not been replaced by anything else.

For a 50 mile stretch in the Chicagoland area, things are dead. The city proper apparently even has several empty Sears Tower-equivalents of empty office space.

The other day, Grindr (the gay sex app) made the news for a “not layoff layoff” whereby half the company (over 80 employees) resigned en masse over a “return to the office deadline”.

Some of them said that they wondered how, without their presence in the office, an app where people have been kidnapped and stabbed to death by a stalker, which the app told their location to, will “remain safe”. Yes, I wonder.

Roy Schestowitz commented that this is getting fairly common.

The managers impose deadlines and anyone who doesn’t come back is not technically a layoff and doesn’t qualify for any benefits.

We spoke of Walmart cutting people’s hours and how pressuring them to quit “also isn’t a layoff”.

I told him, Walmart absolutely lays people off and gives them severance, but only when they’re closing the entire store down with three days warning and they stick up a sign that says ‘Dear Shoplifters and Arsonists, valued Chicago customers, the store will close on Friday. Employees who can’t commute three hours to the nearest store will get a little bit of WARN Act Money. It’s been real, and it’s been fun, but it ain’t been real fun. C’ya!’.

(Not what the actual sign says, but it’s the thought that counts.)

Then we discussed the movies. I said, they wheeled Hiyao Miyazaki out (for those who don’t know, he’s been called the Japanese Walt Disney, because everything he touches sells like hotcakes) to make one last movie and the local theater has been hitting my email inbox hard with it because they know if people like me and my spouse go out to see a movie twice this year, one of them will be that one.

It’s just getting harder to justify movies.

It’s not only that barely any of them are worth watching at all, it’s that money is suddenly so tight for many Americans that something that costs $12 for two people on Tuesday isn’t even justifiable on a weekly basis anymore. You look at what’s out and 4-6 months goes by before you even consider watching the movie.

The local Marcus Cinema theater used to do $5 movie tickets on Tuesday, now it’s $6 and you have to use an app, and no Holidays, and some movies (the good ones) are special and are never $6.

So the “$6 Tuesday with an app that has dozens of spyware libraries in it” is a way to make theaters showing bad movies “not empty” so that they might sell a bucket of popcorn.

What I see unfolding in America right now is like the Second Great Depression, but even during the Depression the federal government admitted to everyone what was happening and enacted programs to help them muddle through.

Today, they cut programs. They tell disabled people in their late 50s “Go find work, bum!”, and with the cost of everything spiking, those lucky enough to have any work find themselves with almost all their money going out to rent and food and gasoline.

This last couple of months my electric bill was running 10% higher than it normally does this part of the year. I looked on my bill this month to find that the Democrats added $10 a month to my bill to save us from “the carbon”. Oh no, not carbon!

My extra $10 a month on the electric bill will certainly make the smog in India and China that’s as thick as pea soup better, and save the planet, the trees, the bees, the whales and snails, and the endangered horny toads.

His Excellency J.B. Pritzker, Lord above us in the high castle, is a very Progressive man.

He made $5 billion the old fashioned way, by inheriting a hotel fortune.

He strongly and earnestly believes in redistributing the wealth to people who don’t do anything except make babies.

Not his own wealth, but if I have an extra five bucks in my pocket that week, not for long if Morbidly Obese 400 pound “Health Expert” Lord Farquad (Seven COVID Shots and Counting) has anything to say about it.

This country is basically dying. What’s going on is the Democrats benefit from people who are too illiterate to understand the issues finding their way into a voting booth, so they enact policies where people who litter the place with unemployable children who will shoot at each other, deal drugs, and scare the taxpayers out of the State don’t have to use any of their own money to reproduce.

They then reduce school by getting rid of the arts and literature, and replacing an increasing amount of actual education with propaganda.

Then they make college so expensive that most people can only dream of going there, even though you’ll also be poor if you don’t.

They’re also the Party of Lockdown Fetishists who basically have wet dreams of killing more businesses, which still employ a few people, with taxes and another winter of discontent, because once all the businesses and taxpayers are gone, you can run a corrupt welfare State on nothing but loans from the Central Bank why not?

It’ll be paradise. Just wait and see!

The Democrat answer to the criminals shooting up the place is to make it difficult for law abiding citizens to arm themselves and shoot back.

The police around these parts are so dumb and corrupt, that the other day, a black man was shot in the head, and the cops ignored the bullet hole in his window, and the bullet in his head, dumped him on the funeral home, and wrote down in the police report that he fell and hit his head and died accidentally.

Yes, they will protect us all from the bad criminal people! You do not need a FOID card, dear friends!

Anyway, there’s hardly even a reason to leave the house anymore.

They’ve ruined just about everything you could possibly want to see. I mean, some people still walk around in the forest preserves because the Democrats only took the trees in open air parks away from people during “COVID Lockdowns” which they want to bring back this winter. But trees are still there. They don’t employ very many people, but the trees are still there.

At least the ones that didn’t get knocked over to make the suburbs, which are now rotting malls and empty offices.

It should be very interesting to see how long anyone keeps reading the KrugmanBot3000 in the New York Times and doesn’t wake up and see with their own eyes what is actually going on in America.

The New York Times Spins Up the KrugmanBot3000 to China-bash.

The New York Times Spins Up the KrugmanBot3000 to China-bash.

The crooked New York Times has made the KrugmanBot3000 write another article.

This time, the alleged Mr. Krugman, if indeed he is a person at all, and not just a Large Language Model for the Inner Party, claims that Chinese debt levels are unsustainable.

While the KrugmanBot3000 has unwaveringly said that the American federal debt that keeps growing and is about $33 trillion dollars right now is “manageable” and even recently blew off the fact that interest rates are rising and the interest on the national debt is going to crowd out more and more of the federal budget.

In fact, this will force deep and unpopular cuts to everything, including Social Security and Medicare, because there is no appetite to raise taxes on the rich.

The Democrats, which the KrugmanBot3000 is a tool of, did not repeal the part of Trump’s tax bill that gave the wealthy elite their bailouts, even though the debt explodes and there is no end in sight to the misery being suffered by the American people.

But in a China-bashing (and paywalled) article, the KrugmanBot3000 claims that Chinese debt is different, somehow.

I’m not confident enough in my understanding of China to judge whether it will manage to contain its Minsky moment, the point at which everyone suddenly realizes that unsustainable debt is, in fact, unsustainable. In fact, I’m not sure if anyone — including Chinese officials — knows the answer to that question.

But I think we can answer a more conditional question: If China does have a 2008-style crisis, will it spill over in a major way to the rest of the world, the United States in particular? And there the answer is pretty clearly no. Big as China’s economy is, America has remarkably little financial or trade exposure to China’s problems.

-Paul Krugman (KrugmanBot3000)

Now, I want you to stop and think how stupid that quote is from top to bottom.

So, American debt, which is horrific, is sustainable. EU and UK debt is horrific, but sustainable, Japanese debt is almost 300% of their annual economic output which is truly awful, but sustainable.

But Chinese debt is unsustainable and will push them over the edge into a massive economic failure? Oh boy. Maybe if they hurry up and be our allies, they too can have “sustainable (horrific) debt”. 😛

Then the alleged Krugman continues, by claiming that America, which is basically pretty much fully dependent on China for, oh Jesus. Have you ever LOOKED at the country of origin on anything at Walmart?

“Very little financial or trade exposure.”

Well, other than making almost everything you buy here, or increasingly what people set fire to the store and steal here because they can no longer afford Dollar Tree, after Bubba Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and put millions of Americans out of work (and put some cigars in Monica Lewinsky) and got “Free Trade” going, and other than owning so much of the US debt that they pretty much could ruin us by just letting it roll off the books and refusing to buy more “Treasury Securities”, sure. Awesome Possum.

I ran into a video the other day, should have saved it, about how the American media has been publishing Doom, Gloom, and Boom articles claiming China will come down like a sack of bricks in short order, for over 50 years.

As the United States has become an old age colony floating around in debt and Fentanyl, the shrieking and insistence that there’s no problem with us, only with the Chinese, has only gotten louder.

“Hell is Repetition”. Why I call Paul Krugman the “KrugmanBot3000”. The Current Actual State of America.

Stephen King’s character, Andre Linoge (Legion) in “Storm of the Century”, said, “Hell is Repitition.”.

I’ve been considering that a lot lately as the “news” uses the same terminology and phrases, over and over again, to convince people of The Big Lie. That America is okay and the economy is “robust”, and Biden has an “Economic Miracle”.

This is Soviet-style propaganda. Nazi-style propaganda. As the Nazis lost the war, they kept the public swimming in bad information about how things were progressing right up until the moment there was urban warfare in their streets and the Nazi Party was reduced to using child soldiers and giving them whatever weapons they could find laying around to make the Soviets fight for every block of Berlin.

I feel the same sort of thing is happening in America today with the state of the economy, the situation involving our social programs, and the War in Ukraine.

Hell is repetition. You repeat the “Big Lie” and eventually they come to accept it as gospel truth.

I’ve started referring to Paul Krugman in particular as “KrugmanBot3000” because his articles are all the same.

“Government debt doesn’t matter. Everything is fine.”

“<insert current Democrat president> is basically FDR.”

“Don’t worry about Social Security and Medicare. They’ll wave a magic wand and fix the trillions of dollars they stole from it with fairy dust and unicorn farts during the Biden Economic Miracle”

“Workers are doing great. Especially the poor ones. They had raises.” (The raise has been reversed by a factor of 2 by inflation, and Walmart closes stores and cuts hours.)

And it’s so formulaic it’s like listening to decades worth of ChaffBot Spew, but you know it’s probably Paul Krugman (or at least was up until a point where they licensed his name and asked ChatGPT how to recycle garbage and verbiage) because he was writing things before ChaffBots.

At this point, really, who cares if the Google WEI Attestation stops Paywall Busters from working? You get this crap from the New York Times after you tear it down and go “My God, people pay to read this? This is CNN without ads for Amazon products and luxury vacations during the Economic Crisis most people are living through! How are they in business?”

It’s one of life’s great mysteries.

When we went to Indiana recently for a convention, we sat down and ate dinner at one of the wholesome fixtures, MCL Cafeteria. They’re still pretty good, and have a predictable menu, although they are closing locations due to the fact that most Americans living in the “Biden Miracle” can’t afford to shop at malls anymore, so the mall where they were shut down.

There are some freestanding MCLs that are doing better, but the population that frequents them and likes good food is, about 20 years older than my husband and me.

As I went through the line, selecting my liver and onions, mashed potatoes and gravy, brussels sprouts, whole wheat roll with honey butter, and iced tea (unsweet with a lemon), I noticed that one of the other patrons had an actual print copy of the New York Times on his tray.

I wonder what the future prospects are considering younger people don’t get print news and can’t pay for news, and only eat “What in the name of the Devil’s asshole is quinoa?”.

Not good, I suspect. I was born to the wrong generation. They had it so good, I have it so terrible. I will never own a house, I will never drive a new car. The Democrats are making it $5 a gallon to fill up the one I own while they make my husband marginally employed and dump the State prisons out on top of us.

What is the future of a country such as this?

My Cat Is Sick With Hyperthyroidism And A Tumor. Also: Economic Gaslighting. Paywalls. Copyrights. Google WEI.

My Cat Is Sick…Hyperthyroidism And A Tumor.

Our black and white “tuxedo” cat is sick with hyperthyroidism and a tumor. The vet figures the tumor is probably benign, but we’re not going to wait and find out. We’re going to have it surgically removed.

She also did the labs and found hyperthyroidism starting to develop.

She informed me that my cat was probably older than I guessed (~9 or ~10) and that most cats don’t develop this until they’re around 12.

She said that for the hyperthyroidism we can do pills, which are cheap, or surgery to remove a different growth (which is almost exclusively benign), which is expensive. Like $3,000, which is a LOT of pills. More than the cat will ever need.

Fortunately, I bought a handy dandy secret weapon. A pill giver you load and then push into the cat’s mouth and pop the pill in with a plunger so you’re not getting bitten twice a day trying to keep the cat alive.

Twice a day, come pill time, it’s like the opening of Ghostbusters. “GRAB HER!”

Things are going in a bad direction economically due to the “Economic Miracle of Biden”, as told by “KrugmanBot3000” (with a Volvo) in the NY Times.

I too am sick, of being told of this “Miracle” that is unfolding, as people lose jobs, get their hours cut, and have to wonder how long they can even afford to take care of their pet cat or fill up the tank of their car.

It makes me depressed to read it even though I know it’s propaganda that would make Goebbels or Stalin blush.

The other day, they went so far as to blame people with low interest fixed-rate mortgages for still being able to spend a lot of money while the Fed bangs the poor into bankruptcy due to the wealthy panicking about inflation. This situation with the American media has never been worse.

What level of Freedom and Capitalism are we in where the media gleefully shouts “HAHAHAHAHA!!! It’s all working as planned. The Central Bank is killing American families with rigged interest rates. They can’t afford to buy a can of beans and they are losing their jobs! This will bring inflation to a very manageable 3% eventually!”

A troll in IRC told me he believed copyright should be abolished.

(If it was to be, then Microsoft can commit more code theft using Plagiarism as a Service, AKA CoPilot.)

Then another sockpuppet in IRC shamed me for reading the Times via Links or the Newswaffle.

I mentioned that their paywall is pretty much just there so that people on a Mac with Safari, or on an iPhone, can’t do anything about it. It was never going to stop smart people who can just drop to the terminal and type “links nytimes.com”.

The WEI “attestation” of Chrome is there to stop people from doing this. There will be two or three Web browsers that are “trusted”, and they will be “trusted” to prevent the user from doing anything at all to alter the display of “content”, on the client-side.

So in layman’s terms, no more “KrugmanBot3000” and “Miracles” because the browser has to attest that you have not done anything clever.

The only benefit is that these sites tend to be so bogus that nobody should pay for them anyway which is why they’re really dying.

Let me be frank, that considering that these places only ever post propaganda that benefits the wealthy elite and the American government’s gaslighting, you’d think taxpayers would be on the hook to directly subsidize all of them and not just NPR.

They could have packed it into the “Inflation Production Act” or something.

Microsoft Fired 50 Humans at MSN News and Turned It Over to a Chatbot, Which Posted an Article Saying “Visit the Food Bank Hungry.”

Microsoft fired 50 people at MSN News in 2020, then turned the “content” over to an “AI” Chaff Bot that told vacationers to Canada to visit a food pantry while they’re hungry.

This is not surprising. In fact, it’s to be expected. “AI” spew doesn’t cost them anything to post, they can put ads on it, and the audience is people who aren’t smart enough to remove Windows from their PC and get a real Web browser.

Microsoft is barely investing in their products and MSN News isn’t really even a corner case. Windows is decrepit and fading into irrelevance. They fire people tending to that corpse too, but can’t simply turn it over to a bot because bots don’t even know how to answer simple programming questions, much less replace programmers.

(Although many lose their jobs because of a bad economy, and the fact that they only had work because of low interest debt.)

Unfortunately, actual news sites are also looking into the “cost savings” side of Chaff Bot “content”.

The Chaff Bot Problem is helping the Dead Internet Theory along. No humans, just PR firms and Chaff Bot spew.

It’s not quite there yet, but the bots don’t have to sleep and can spew things all over the place that are morbid, stupid, incorrect, and low quality for corporations such as Microsoft to slap advertising on.

The article, which Microsoft removed, about Canada, was so low quality it was essentially a word salad like no human would ever write, cobbled together with random and low quality (even pixelated) images. (The one of the food bank was just a maple leaf.)

What’s also not helping is the fact that real Web browsers that are not designed by billion dollar corporations, are choking on an enormous amount of garbage invented mostly by Google. It’s amazing that SeaMonkey’s view of the Web platform is hardly a few years old, and already so much falls apart. Even trying to keep the Web working in a year under a still-supported version of Firefox ESR starts to become a problem.

The Web must be replaced.

It’s terrifying, depressing, how we all just walk around hitting up the same 5-10 sites, few of which are even people anymore. Most of them hosted on CloudFlare, which is the enemy of your privacy.

It takes no effort to flood the Web with crap, and companies like Microsoft (and their useful idiots) obviously have no reservations about doing it, which is why we need to take our cheese and leave.

It’s really aggravating to see what even the New York Times has decayed into, and they still expect you to pay money to read it. Imagine what happens when they replace Paul Krugman, who is a propagandist, who writes utterly predictable “content”, with a “KrugmanBot” that just blasts how, hey, sure your husband is losing all his hours at Walmart because nobody buys anything anymore while plenty of people are stealing things and setting the place on fire, and the economy under Biden is a miracle.

All day long, miracle. (No sleep. Just miracles, and ads.)

Web 4.0

Miracle.

Blame the Last Guy For Everything, Screw Things Up More, Then Leave. Politics and Business Management. (Walmart)

In American politics, and probably in general, you blame the last guy for everything that’s going wrong. Business works this way too.

When I was a child, I was a big fan of Babylon 5, still am.

(It’s being considered for a reboot.)

The author/producer, J. Michael Straczynski, managed to pull off a five season story arc, unheard of on shows like Star Trek, which were always so annoying in that they were off to some totally new thing every week like a Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers.

Sure, Star Trek had it’s great moments, but it’s got at least four or five bad or middling episodes for every great one.

Every Star Trek show also seems to suffer from one character that steals the show. Is obviously more capable than the others, more intelligent, and gets treated like a damn kitchen appliance.

For example, Data and The Doctor both show that they are single-handedly more capable than the rest of the crew combined, and should obviously be in command of the ship.

This is the way a lot of organizations are. The stupid and corrupt people float straight to the top, while the people who should be running the place get pummeled with shit work that doesn’t use 1% of their talent or abilities.

But the biggest failing of Star Trek is just how shallow it is.

Babylon 5 dropped some heavy stuff in there, and was just far more cynical.

I think one of my favorites was the episode where The Regent, possessed by a Drakh handler, tells Londo Mollari, “I’ll be dead soon, and when I am you can blame me for anything you want. Yes, you can say I was quite quite mad.”

May not be an exact quote, but it stuck with me in principle.

When leaders fail, or worse, when they are totally incompetent or even criminals, this is where they go first.

Presidents Obama and Biden started out with this, and it works for about a year, and when absolutely nothing gets better, they go to Stage 2.

President Biden’s Stage 2 is this:

“Not only did that last guy completely fuck everything up, you’re stuck with me because we’re putting him on trial now, on trial everywhere with all of the things. Also, if he does come back you’ll wish you had someone like me because I’m fucking you but holy shit will he fuck you worse! You’ve seen what he’s like.“

This is worse than usual for America. Usually it’s just “If they come back they’ll be worse than me.”

It’s gaslighting. It’s like two parents arguing in front of children about which one beats them more severely.

When abusers are afraid of losing control of their victim, they try to make them more afraid of leaving than they are of them.

When my parents were divorcing in 1999, my dad told my mom that she wouldn’t be able to live on her income and she’d come crawling back to him, then when she told him she’d rather live in an outhouse if she had to he realized he had pushed one too many times, so he turned around to me and said “You know, your mother already had cancer once. It’ll almost certainly come back and when it does you won’t have anywhere to live.”

(It never came back, but we see what he did there.)

After blaming someone else stops working and after they try to make you too afraid to leave them by letting your imagination run wild, it turns out that emotional abusers really don’t have a whole lot left in their arsenal.

Only in the case of American politics, you have two parties propped up by the wealthy elite and they tag team you and use these tricks, and it goes back and forth, and it’s never good for you.

Meanwhile the entire country keeps getting amazingly shittier as we all live under an amalgam of the policies they both manage to enact.

The United States got its debt rating downgraded about a week ago by Fitch, and of course fake economist Paul “I drove mah Volvo to the Nobel Prize and they said you shall not pass!” Krugman said he was horrified to watch that, and of course not about the national debt, which can keep soaring forever and ever with absolutely no negative consequences at all.

(Sarcasm) Debt works because everyone will lend you money forever without becoming concerned that half your population is unemployable and couldn’t pay taxes if it wanted to and it’s getting worse because that’s how it works.

Nobody will ever cut you off so just go on spending like there’s no tomorrow I’ve got a Volvo. (Paul Krugman) (/Sarcasm)

I honestly hate Paul Krugman the more I read him and after over twenty years that’s an amazingly long unbroken record.

Of course what made my blood boil this time is that while Walmart tries to get my spouse to quit by cutting his hours (and most people’s) and pulling people making minimum wage from the floor to do his job, Krugman, a Democrat Biden flackey, says that “Everyone at the low end got a raise, like grocery store workers.”

It would be great if someone took Krugman’s money from working the Democrat propaganda mill circuits like the New York Times and made him work in a grocery store. He could even drive his Volvo there, and get a “raise“.

(The 10% reduction in hours.)

It’s surreal that the New York Times is behind a paywall and posts utter bullshit, day in and day out. It’s basically Fox News for people who think they’re “cerebral” because “Democrats”.

Being a Democrat doesn’t make you intelligent. It just means you got gaslighted by the slightly less abusive shitty parent.

Back to Walmart. The local store has a different manager every year. They blame the old manager for everything and then give the new manager a year and fire them too.

“I’ll be dead soon, and when I am you can blame me for anything you want. Yes, you can say I was quite quite mad.”

It’s not the store manager’s fault that people steal TVs and set the store on fire as cover while they bolt.

It is, of course, also not the fault of the store employees who get their hours cut while Walmart turns around and tries to make everyone else suffer for the Democrat State’s Attorney’s failure to prosecute.

I asked my mom what we should do about them cutting my spouse’s hours while they pull people making minimum wage from the floor to do a job that should pay them more.

She said, “Oh just wait until they get their tax returns and quit because they have a thousand bucks and figure they never have to work again.”

Walmart definitely does cycle through people with this mentality.

It never ceases to amaze me what kind of a world we live in now under the current generation.

Every time I’m taking a dump in a public restroom with the door locked, people come up to it and try to shake the building apart trying to walk in, and you have to wonder if they were all born in a barn and never heard about knocking on the door.

About a year ago, some of my spouse’s co-workers got fired for having an orgy in the cissy bathroom and not one of four adults thought to lock the door, and of course they got one of those “today people” that doesn’t knock and just walks on in.

Needless to say, they all got fired.

Meanwhile, Walmart basically encourages MOAR of these people to apply while they cut your hours if you show up every day, never late, don’t do anything wrong, and do half again as much work as one of the usual suspects.

It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

I’m just glad we don’t have kids. That’s about the only way this shit sandwich could possibly get any worse.

Directly contradicting Paul “Economic Propaganda Minister” Krugman with “mah Volvo”, even CNBC admits that wage growth in the past 12 months is only a third of what inflation is.

Of course, it doesn’t matter what inflation is with the millions of layoffs and the reduced hours and people not having any money to spend. They always make the “unemployment” figure lower by counting anyone who works 1 hour a week at Taco Bell or has given up and ran out of benefits as “not unemployed”, and they do the same with inflation.

There’s no Izvestia in Pravda, and there’s no Pravda in Izvestia.

That was a good line. And a very dissident one, which could only be uttered among friends in a kitchen, the place for candid discussions in Soviet apartments.

In Russian, pravda means truth, while izvestia is a somewhat old-fashioned but still widely known word for news or more precisely news messages. The two words were used as names for two widely circulated newspapers. So the line would go:

There is no pravda in Izvestia and no izvestia in Pravda.

For the sake of the word play, the phrase targets one of the newspapers for having no truth in it and the other for having no news. In fact it was critical of all Soviet press for reporting neither news nor truth.

-Dmitry Budko (Born in the Soviet Union)

(But someone is clearly getting their wires crossed.)

“I suppose I will have to have to have that painted over.” -Prime Minister Londo Mollari