I hope you all have a good one. If you don’t, and many won’t, my condolences and best wishes that the next year is a better one for you.
I hope you all have a good one. If you don’t, and many won’t, my condolences and best wishes that the next year is a better one for you.
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén
metamars
Thanks. Likewise. I’ve felt the need to increasingly pray for the United States. Less often, I go larger, and pray for the entire world. Last I checked, Canada was part of the world, so there you go.
This past year I’ve become somewhat of a fan of movement teacher Ido Portal. In an interview by Lewis Howes, he was asked about his top 3 book recommendations. His picks were Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations”, “Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture”, and “Master to Yes” by Viktor Frankl. I don’t think there is a book by that title, so I assume he means Frankl’s “Yes to Life – In Spite of Everything”
Ten Bears
YULE!
This is the year I learned more about (modern) medicine than I ever wanted to know. Probably not a bad thing, when one has a reputation to uphold. Still, kinda’ weird, goes against the hunter/gather code, you know, the barbarian creed. Don’t know if there is a god, don’t care, but if so she sure points me in some weird directions.
I long ago stopped wishing for Peace on Earth.
We have to stop doing what we’re doing.
It isn’t working.
bruce wilder
Thank you for your call to kindness in the year past.
Laeta Saturnalia to all and that!
StewartM
Woke up to 12.5 cm of snow on the ground this morning…Merry Christmas y’all!
Trinity
Merry Christmas to all!
I appreciate all the articles, discussions, and perspectives. Stay safe as best you can.
nihil obstet
Merry Christmas. May the three ships dock in your port. The seven swans can swim in the water feature near me; you can have the twelve drummers. Be at peace.
anon y'mouse
Merry Christmas, Ian.
i would extend to the commentariat, but then would be accused of cultural imperialism again.
Eric Anderson
Merry festivus Ian, and to all who frequent his blog as well.
If you’re here, there’s hope.
Hugh
Joyeux Noël et bonne année. Meilleurs voeux de la saison.
someofparts
Merry Christmas Ian and to the commentariat, one and all.
Ché Pasa
Wishing Ian, Sterling, Tony and all the best of the Season.
Onward.
anon
“Nothing will fundamentally change.”
‘I’m going to get in trouble for saying this’: President-elect Biden disputes Democratic debt cancellation plan
https://us.yahoo.com/finance/news/biden-student-debt-loan-forgiveness-cancel-173246655.html
Fifty thousand in debt forgiveness was inadequate but a start in the right direction. Biden is now saying that won’t even happen.
Hugh
“Nothing will fundamentally change.”
The Democrats have done it often enough, It should be their motto. Back during the great healthcare debate of 2009 which led to the Affordable Care Act, Obama proposed a public option to get progressive support. The public option initially was supposed to cover tens of millions and look like a stepping stone to Medicare4All. It kept getting smaller and covered fewer people until its job of keeping progressives onboard done, Obama dumped it altogether.
A worker workinf 40 hours a week for 50 weeks works 2000 hours a year. A living wage in much of the country probably starts at $40,000 a year. Do the math, this comes out to $20 an hour. The Democrats started out in 2016 at $15/ hour. Hillary under pressure did the typical Clinton triangulation and tepidly supported $12/hour.
So now we see Biden, the big sponsor of an atrocious 2005 bill that exempted student debt from being covered by bankruptcy. Expect more of the same, either nothing or 50 cents in some Frankenstein means-tested program.
It’s what he and his party do.
Z
Creepy Joe will give the U.S. worker and poor nothing for free that he can package as something that the republicans conceded to in order to make concessions to them. He has to point to something he got from the republicans when he pushes the democrats to give in to “Let Them Eat Shit” Mitch for corporate immunity and especially SS and medicare cuts that multi-millionaire Biden has been pushing for four decades now.
Biden is a doped up freak. He gets off on f*cking over the U.S. worker and poor. Watch some CSpan videos of him popping around the Senate stage giving speeches bragging about his “tough” policies that he never pays the price for. He’s a lying scumbag. He’s salivating right now with the U.S. populace so desperate because the predator can take advantage of the situation and f*ck us over. One of the few good things about him becoming president is that he’ll have to stand front-and-center of the U.S. people he’s been pimping out for four decades and answer to them directly. It’s not going to go well for him.
The Biden-Harris administration is going to be a complete disaster. Very few can stand either one of them and they have no popular backing. They have no base because they’ve never done anything that didn’t benefit them the most. All the K-Hive is is a highly amplified and organized noise maker of DNC careerists with multiple user accounts to make it appear that they are a movement. Kamalala was stood up by Weinstein and company to replace Boxer and join Feinstein as California’s senators. She never even got one single delegate during the democratic primary and was slated to come in sixth place in her own state before she dropped out.
Z
Z
Oh, sorry. Merry Christmas everyone! It’s going to be a hell of a 2021.
Z
Ten Bears
Fuckin’ holiday is over … #1 overlooked story this year
“A Toothpick in a Tsunami”
US Big Oil Faces Bankruptcy as Prices Plunge 30% on Saudi Expansion:
It didn’t have to be this way, the 1916 Rauch & Lang Electric car had an 50-mile range at 20 mph and cost $2,800. About $65,000, an off-the-lot Tesla, today.
But for a few, greedy white-trash …
Oh! Look! Over there! Some dumb white broad is not wearing any underwear!
Willy
I’m home alone without any criminals to play with. With a lingering but improving cold, it’s better safe than sorry.
But Texas does lead the nation in renewable energy. So there’s that. And I’m seeing more Biden-pushback tweets from progressives/populists than I ever did four years ago, aside from the usual retarded TrumpHitler nutjobs.
My sisters kids all decided to have babies, all at the same time. They live within the evangelical prosperity gospel bubble, knowing all the right people and all, so thankfully, I’ll never have to employ their tribally protected/entitled selves. They’re pretty lazy ya-know. Yelling is no way to be a good uncle. But I did manage to train them on the wisdom of avoiding topics like religion and politics during the holidays. So there’s that.
js
Fauci mind-fing people again as with masks early on. No, no, no, don’t tell people what you think you should say to manipulate them to behaving like you want them to. Noone wants that. F Leo Strauss and the noble lie. And it tends to backfire as well, so it’s likely not even effective.
Just tell people what you know to the best of your understanding at the time, that most reasonable people will respect, even when it changes, even if it is uncertain, reasonable people know scientific understanding evolves. But noone likes to be lied to, even by their betters, which by the way don’t actually exist on a human level, Fauci has expertise, not superiority, and he should share that expertise honestly.
https://www.axios.com/fauci-goalposts-herd-immunity-c83c7500-d8f9-4960-a334-06cc03d9a220.html
Hugh
The Herd Immunity Threshold (HIT) varies by disease and depends upon the infectiousness of a disease in a given society plus or minus the precautions being taken. The truth is with the coronavirus, the HIT is a guesstimate and can change as we see with mutation and exposure to more infectious variants. I tend to cut Fauci some slack because he’s in an anti-science Administration and people are demanding absolute answers to things which do not have absolute answers and where being in a dynamic situation the answers even such as they are change . I do not know if is editing or Fauci, but it would be helpful to lay out a little more context in his responses. I can’t help thinking if Fauci weren’t 80, this would be easier to expect and easier for him to do.
Stirling S Newberry
I am sorry for all the people who hate 2020 – many cannot wait to have 2020 out their window. Many of them are close to me. I am not one of them.
Part of it is that I saw this early. Another part is that I stuck to my projects – things outside did what they wanted to do.
So, if you were hit with ill-will I am very sorry and that next year may be different for you. But there some few who will wish 2020 a fondly farewell, and I am one.
bruce wilder
I do not know that Fauci actually has relevant expertise. I see many reasons to doubt it: his age of course, his long career as an administrator not a working scientist, his penchant for manipulative lying among others.
Did you see what Kary Mullis said?
https://youtu.be/qt-jmy-_MDQ
Ten Bears
A Fond Farewell is the best kind. All in all, a year like any other.
Did you read about the studies showing how hate speech and revenge fantasies trigger dopamine reactions not unlike walking into a barroom or hanging out with other dopers?
Ché Pasa
Always remember every crisis is an opportunity. With Trump we get hourly crises, and there are plenty of those who have been taking advantage of each and every one to make money and/or acquire/consolidate power. That’s the deal. The whole damn country may be going to hell in a shit-lined handbasket, but that’s just fine as long as it benefits our rulers — and it does. Ruling a disaster-planet may not sound like much, but when it’s all there is to rule, it’s everything.
We’re never going back to the way things were. Or rather the way we falsely remember them.
What emerges, post-Trump, ie: in the longed for New Year, is still greatly in flux, but the outlines are crystalizing. It will be more authoritarian and be far less solicitous of and generous to the masses — who will be squeezed ever harder for whatever can be got out of them before their disposal. This would happen under Trump, and it will happen under whoever takes his place (possibly not Biden).
Rebellion from the rightist militias is certain, whereas a leftish rebellion isn’t. In fact, it’s practically impossible. The rightists demand is for the liberty to impose their authority without government interference, and government at every level will yield. Warlords then become the rule and the ruling class over the rabble — and every level of government. But they in turn will be the enforcers for a still-shadowy cabal of oligarchs and kleptocrats who hold the ultimate power.
And it will all happen as if it were an act of God or Nature.
Z
I’m not inclined like many are to blame Trump for unemployment benefits and eviction protections expiring because he didn’t cave to the extortion of having to sign a 5500 page spending bill in a week in order to prevent it. If the counter point is that Mnuchin negotiated it and was representing Trump at the time, do you truly believe that he ran all 5500 pages past Trump before that monstrosity was hauled in on a dolly and dumped on Trump’s desk?
Bernie and Hawley pressured Congress to include direct cash payments in the COVID bill. In all those 5500 pages of giveaways to corporate interests our enemies in Congress couldn’t find any room for that prior to those two speaking up about it. Trump has pretty consistently been for them as well and before the election publicly asked Nancy P the Speed Queen to send him a standalone bill for direct cash payments to citizens and she completely ignored him.
The bill that Creepy Joe wanted the democrats to pass was one in which there were no direct cash payments to U.S.ers. He was more than fine with that and interjected himself into the negotiations to press the democrats to accept a much lower impact bill than what they had been pushing for, presumably so that Creepy Joe could work his bipartisan black magic with “Let Them Eat Shit” Mitch, and we should know by now what that would have led to: uneven “shared” sacrifice in which U.S. workers and poor would essentially have food taken off their table due to SS and medicare cuts in exchange for our rulers “sacrificing” minor meaningless digits from their bank accounts. That’s the true extortion going on: Creepy Joe and company trying to keep the U.S. worker and poor in such dire straights that they can force feed us another one of their attacks on us as a rescue.
As f*cked as Trump is, and he is emotionally, cognitively, and psychologically unfit to have such power and would have never been elected in a sane country, his character is still higher than Creepy Joe’s because at least he doesn’t get off on f*cking over the U.S. worker like Freaky Joe does. I’m not saying Trump hasn’t done it, and done it often during his business career, but he hasn’t joyfully done it for over four decades while misrepresenting himself as a public servant.
Z