The Bureau of Labor Statistics report covering October came out Friday. October is a month where the economy usually adds around a million jobs in the run up to the end of the year holidays. Seasonally unadjusted as in what really happened, total nonfarm jobs, that is the public and private sector combined, increased by 1,558 million, or about a half million better than expected, to 149.217 million. Of these, 1.292 million were in the private sector.
Looking at the effects of covid, October 2019 was the last pre-covid October, that is two Octobers ago. Total nonfarm jobs, not seasonally adjusted, in October 2019 were 152.500 million. I get an estimate for the two years of October to October jobs gains since then by taking the average October to October jobs gains starting with October 2013 up to October 2019. I then double this number and add it to the October 2019 figure. That is I take the last pre-covid October jobs number and add in the two subsequent Octobers based on the past October to October jobs performance.
152.500 million + 2(2.4165 million) = 157.333 million jobs or where we might expect to be if there had been no covid. That gives an ongoing jobs shortfall of 8.116 million, a half million decline from the previous month, but October was an exceptional month and we would need another 15 1/2 such months to erase the covid jobs shortfall.
“…the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed, and it’s very much a mixed bag.”
Pfft. As we say in Oakland: Negro, please.
It’s pitiful. They fed over $28 trillion to the world’s bankers and financial asset holders after the GFC in 2008.
Now in 2021, after prolonged wailing and gnashing of teeth, they’ve ponied up a paltry $1 trillion for an infrastructure bill that’s going to be woofed down by big business anyway.
This is a ruling class that’s incapable of learning anything. Let it come down, like the Second Murderer in Macbeth says.
And the other bill, the Build Back Bitter bill, will not pass at all. It probably will never even come up for a vote.
The House DemProgs lose much credibility by double-crossing their own promise to vote on both finished bills at the same time, or vote against the Infrastructure bill.
The following was stunning enough to add it to r/bad_science_culture, even though it breaks the mold:
Ten red flags in the FDA’s risk-benefit analysis of Pfizer’s EUA application to inject American children 5 to 11 with its mRNA product
Rogers’ substack article : tobyrogers.substack dot com/p/ten-red-flags-in-the-fdas-risk-benefit
Gary Null reading this article on The Gary Null Show
prn dot fm/84987-2/ (starting at 40:00)
I’m mostly breaking the thrust of this website, by posting about specific scientific issues, rather than the cultural matrix that makes for dysfunction in producing questionable science. I justify this by the following: 1) this is SO bad, and for such an important societal issue, that it points to systemic failure, and furthermore makes attributing causality somewhat irrelevant 2) the underlying causes for these outrages is touched on by Rogers:
“corporations that were trying to get tax breaks, contracts, and other concessions from local government”
Rogers’ introductory remarks:
Where to even begin with the FDA’s preposterous risk-benefit analysis of Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 “vaccine” in children ages 5 to 11?
Let’s start with my bona fides. I have a year of undergraduate statistics at one of the best liberal arts colleges in America (Swarthmore). I have a year of graduate statistics at the masters program rated #1 for policy analysis (UC Berkeley). And I have a Ph.D. in political economy from one of the top universities in the world (University of Sydney). My research focus is on corruption in the pharmaceutical industry so I’ve read scientific studies in connection with vaccines nearly every day for 5 years. Earlier in my career I worked professionally tearing apart shoddy cost-benefit analyses prepared by corporations that were trying to get tax breaks, contracts, and other concessions from local government. Suffice it to say I’ve thought a lot about risk-benefit analysis and I’m better equipped than most to read one of these documents.
The FDA’s risk-benefit analysis in connection with Pfizer’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) application to inject children ages 5 to 11 with their COVID-19 vaccine is one of the shoddiest documents I’ve ever seen.
Support for EV charging and incentives for people to get EVs
People are so naive about electric vehicles and what this implies. It means transportation in the future will only be for the wealthy and their PMC minions. The rest of us, if we live, will be relegated to ghettoes because our mobility and thus our options will be effectively eliminated. Get a grip. Face reality. The future doesn’t include the unwashed. It belongs to the wealthy elite and their enablers. The rest of us are useless eaters. A drag. Something that requires a Final Solution.
My diabetic brother (Type 2) who was on the waiting list for a kidney finally got his transplant. This is a guy who abused his body his entire life and was a fat pig who wouldn’t change his eating habits until he was near death and even then begrudgingly. He’s also an asshole and we’re estranged. In fact, I’m estranged from my entire family with the exception of one of my younger brothers and secretly I wish he just wouldn’t text me any more so I can forget all of them forever and never have to hear about them again. Out of text (once was sight but no longer because times change), out of mind.
Welp, shortages and high prices continue to worsen.
Over at Walmart, more and more product is being placed within locked cases that some tired and harassed employee must be found to open when the customer wants something in the case. Customer is only willing to wait so long before saying “fuck it” and leaves. Ordering stuff online is catch as catch can. You never know whether it will arrive at all, nor how long it will take, or if it will wait patiently on your doorstep until you get home from a job you hate, or if it will be stolen the way so many packages tend to be these days.
Re: Covid. If I get it — or even suspect I have it — I am to call my doctor immediately. He will prescribe a course of monoclonal antibody treatment as it is the only thing that seems to work on immunocompromised individuals like my own self, and I am not to delay even a minute, as once the patient is in the ICU, it’s too late.
Re: utilities. Our natural gas bill has increased 80%. Our gas bill is averaged over the year, so we’ve been paying the same amount each month, adjusted annually based on actual usage. This year, however, we received notice that our October and subsequent bills would be raised 80% due to anticipated increases in supply costs. If costs do not go up that much, we’d get an adjustment next June. Otherwise, too bad, so sad.
That’s not something poor people around here can deal with at all. What are they to do? Freeze? There are pitifully inadequate programs to partially pay unaffordable utility bills for those on limited incomes, but this winter is going to be tough for a lot of folks. Some already go (almost) without heat during the winter — heating only one or two rooms in their houses. For the moment electric heat is the least expensive, but that will no doubt change. Those with wood stoves who stocked up during the summer will be OK, I think. But most people in this area are not in that position. We’re keeping tabs on some neighbors who are literally terrified of what can happen.
The upshot is that the poor and lower middle class are being squeezed hard by the Overlords for no particular reason except they can, so why not?
The tendency to deny the reality of what’s going on is pretty universal. If reality is acknowledged at all, it’s commonplace to dismiss the importance of factors that are having a severe impact on some segment of the population if it isn’t directly affecting one’s own self. This is something our politics especially simply refuses to face. But that attitude does not originate with politicians.
We ought to look at the bright side about the BIF/BBB debacle. Sure, there’s not one bit in any of it that raises taxes on the rich who have made a bundle during this pandemic … and in fact they’ll likely get a tax cut in the BBB via SALT “corrections” if Joe Mansion’s yacht club pal Nelson Peltz allows him to vote for it and if the sponsors of the Senate’s Kyrazy from AZ (D-Sinema) buy off on it and continue to “supplement” her income as a vineyard intern … but Status Quo Joe did keep his solemn promise to our rulers that nothing would fundamentally change so at least his son Hunter has secured the opportunity to be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for blowing paint bubbles on canvas and we all know by the irrefutable Newtonian laws of economics that that money will eventually trickle down to us via the consumer spending of prostitutes and coke dealers.
We just got to be patient, that’s all. The political process is not broken. Sure, when our largess finally arrives we’ll have to unroll the bills, scrape the dried snot and shake the coke flakes off of it and then flatten them under hardbound dictionaries (anvils work too!), but it still spends. And know this as well: by the wealth being concentrated in the .01% of our population the rest of us don’t have to worry about inflation so much so we’re making out that way also.
I agree with different clue. Congressional progressives sold us out. Almost everything they have been doing for the last several weeks has been yelling to us that they were going to. Cutting their bill in half and then in half again, no bottom lines, no dead lines, no attempt to sell their bill to the American people, passing the infrastructure bill first, and on and on. This was one enormous set up from the start. The Republican-Sinema-Manchin plan to blow up Biden and the Democrats has worked wonderfully, but the progressives blew themselves up on their own with no help from anyone.
“Human impacts on the environment are almost always viewed as threats to ecological health.
But this framing ignores the fact that Indigenous and local peoples have been actively creating, managing and maintaining most of the Earth’s landscapes for thousands of years. “
What are you to do? In the shortest run, and the narrowest sense, skilled symbol-manipulators such as yourself might see if they have any contacts within the better-off do-gooder community. If there is one in your area.
If there is one, and you or people you know have contacts within it, you or people you know might see if your regional do-gooder community is willing to entertain the possibility that the very best actual good they could do would be to super-up-retro insulate the houses of all those people who will find this gas price rise to be difficult.
Perhaps the do-gooder community could even start a do-gooder-subsidised volunteer group of skilled people who will up-insulate every lower-middle-class-and-below house that wants it and that they can get to. They could even call their organization ” Insulated Habitat for Humanity”. If your area has a Habitat for Humanity group, maybe that group itself could do a bunch of up-insulating with do-gooder support.
About home heat conservation in the absence of good inbuilt-insulation . . .
Years ago my younger brother and his fiancee-at-the-time lived in a trailer on a rancher’s land east of Aurora, Colorado, on the High Plains. To help keep the trailer less cold in winter, the rancher was nice enough to stack a bunch of haybales like bricks against the most windward side of the trailer for natural hay-based insulation.
I’d say Status Quo Joe got pretty much what he wanted: to portray himself to the public as doing his best to help out the working class while in actuality placating the “donor class”.
He certainly didn’t dig very deep into his executive power tool bag to try to make Manchin and Sinema change their minds but apparently he pressured progressives to cave.
Biden has been talking up his bipartisanship ever since he’s been in the Senate and that always leads to one thing: legislation that pleases the donor class. If Obama’s old vice was interested in changing the results he would have changed his methods.
He even had to be shamed by Donald T into doing a COVID package.
Jon Stewart has a new shoe on AppleTV+ service, called, The Problem With Jon Stewart and its advent has occasioned some essays tracing Jon Stewart’s impact over the decades on how the political center-left sees itself and its impact on the world.
Constance Grady, a culture editor at Vox, offered, How seriously should we take Jon Stewart? and it was interesting to me, because the essay reports positively enough on Jon Stewart’s most noted interventions and on Stewart’s own philosophic take on his own efforts, but then judges Stewart’s politics harshly.
It is very revealing of the self-righteous attitude of mainstream neoliberal upper class “left”.
Jon Stewart’s take on himself comes in two servings.
“The ethos of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes,’ that always spoke to me,” Stewart told the New York Times this September. “The idea that when there was a group delusion or a spell to be broken, that you could break it with an honest assessment or a funny dagger or something along those lines. And you would say, ‘Hey man, this [expletive] is naked.’ And everyone would go, ‘Oh my god, that’s right, the tyranny is over.’”
[…]
“You never expect that you live in a world where the boy would say, ‘But the emperor is wearing no clothes!’ And everyone would turn and say, ‘You’re the enemy of the people! That’s fake news! You run a pedophile ring out of a pizza shop!’” Stewart went on. “You’re like, wait, what? You’re not prepared for that moment to have no impact.”
The second serving of Stewart’s philosophy centers on the cautionary notes he sounds on his own and his medium’s limited power to change anything.
Z, Biden called for party unity from the progressives when he wanted to settle up. From Sinema and Manchin, not so much. They are all lying, Biden, Trump, the Republicans, the Democrats, Sinema, Manchin, the progressives. All we can do is try to keep the lies straight and suss out what they really mean. It all has a deckchairs on the Titanic quality about it. We’re looking at the icebergs. They’re telling us to get serious and look at the deckchairs.
It may be that national level electoral politics is run by its owners as a powerful magnet to get all the iron filings to line up around it in patterns pleasing to the owners.
If that is what we end up deciding that national electoral politics means, then perhaps we should see whether “voting” can still sabotage the system if carried out with sabotage in mind.
And voting at the state and/or substate level can still be pursued with getting “results” in mind to see if that still works, or whether the attitude towards voting at the state and substate levels should also be changed to one of sabotage.
And peoples’ primary effort should be on crafting survival lifeboat mini-economies with other like minded people right where they live. And learning survival life-boat subsistence skills which make sense in our densely populated world of today.
In the present state of the public discourse, with the dedication of journalism to tribalist narratives and blacking out everything else, a plurality of the electorate sensibly does not vote at all and those who do vote from partisan identification or leaning essentially vote at random, their understanding “of the issues” and “candidates” polluted with so much ignorance and disinformation that votes in the aggregate reflect only such coordination as the manipulative PR industry imposes thru its contested efforts.
When COVID-19 struck, the Federal Reserve stepped in to try to avert economic crisis. As the country’s central bank continues to pump billions of dollars into the financial system daily, who is benefiting and at what cost?
The film traces how an experiment the Fed began after the 2008 crash has been dramatically changing the American economy — exploring criticisms that, while well-intentioned, the Fed’s efforts have contributed to wealth inequality, helped today’s financial world grow far removed from the real-world economy, and prompted fears of growing inflation and an impending crash.
“The Republican-Sinema-Manchin plan to blow up Biden and the Democrats provide cover so Biden could do what he wanted to do anyway has worked wonderfully”
“Human impacts on the environment are almost always viewed as threats to ecological health.”
Depends on what impacts are being done. Clear cutting a forest versus controlled burn of the deadwood in an area prone to fires are two different things, but both have impacts on the health of the forest. And this is why we should be studying nature. It is seriously “learning” about us, and “impacts” are incoming.
Speaking of learning, last time I checked, ignorance is the lack of something but maybe in more rarified air, it’s the presence of something and can therefore pollute one’s mind. Certainly many minds are polluted, on that I agree.
Chuck, the Fed has been waging a war on workers’ wages since Volcker in 1979. It helped set up the 2008 meltdown by not regulating, believing that markets would self-regulate, instituting the Greenspan put, and encouraging the housing bubble and the “financial innovation” that multiplied the damages and blew up the financial system. There were no good intentions involved.
The modern definition of unemployed has been largely meaningless since at least 2008, and probably before. The BLS definition is based on an actor jobseeker model, specifically someone who has looked for a job sometime in the 30 days preceding when the BLS survey is taken which usually occurs in the week of the month containing the 12th, if memory serves. If someone stops looking because they did not qualify for or ran out of unemployment insurance and there are no jobs for them to look for, they are said to have left the workforce as if it was some whim or voluntary decision on their part, and are no longer counted as unemployed, problem solved!
As most realize here, the democrats and republicans are not opposition parties, they are dancing partners. The democrats reach out their hand to the republicans before every supposed political conflict and offer their bipartisanship because they know that the republicans won’t settle for anything that doesn’t please their donors … and when I say their donors, I am referring to both the democrats’ and republicans’ donors because they essentially serve the same interests … and then the democrats follow the republicans’ lead and swoon to their demands and then tell their demozombie supporters that they were forced into it by the unreasonable republicans.
The music may change, but the dance moves remain the same and they certainly won’t change with Handjob-Across-the-Aisle Joe Biden.
Our house was one of the first built in this area. It was started about 1900, built mostly from adobe dug, formed and cured on the property. It’s been added to and remodeled periodically but never really subjected to an up-to-date renovation, so it’s not well insulated in most rooms, though the mass of the adobe moderates cold in the winter, heat in the summer.
Most of the places in this area were either built between 1955-1985, or were trucked in mobile or manufactured homes dating from the ’80s to now. One of our neighbors just brought in his “trophy” mobile home, he says it was built in 1963, and it’s a time capsule. Not well insulated though.
The newer site-built houses are relatively well insulated but it gets cold here, down to zero and below sometimes, and heating costs are high in normal times, let alone astronomical as they are now. As I’ve said, costs are so high — no matter the fuel if you can’t cut wood on your own place — some people don’t heat more than one or two rooms in their houses during the winter. I’ve known a few folks who don’t heat their houses at all. To me that’s crazy but that’s how they deal.
So far as I know, there are only minimal programs to assist people who can’t afford utility costs. There are no programs in this area to retrofit houses. The ricos out our way are pretty kind all in all; some are quite generous — particularly with their churches — but I’d say most consider this problem beyond them, at least for now. Which doesn’t mean nothing will happen in the by and bye. If conditions get really bad, we’ll see some stepping up to help.
The question is whether the ordinary folks around here can start a program of their own to handle this among so many other crises. Possibly. The problem, I’d say, is that plain cussedness and cowboy logic (heh) is liable to prevent much good work that might otherwise take place. People will help one another in a pinch, but beyond that, not much.
People are used to toughing it out on their own or with close family, not cooperating with strangers. This is going to be a tough winter. Really tough. If someone needs help, they’ll get it more than likely. But as for more than minimal organized help? I don’t see it.
The Federal Reserve offers a drive-up window to our rulers to protect their wealth, which is primarily in assets. The Fed supports those assets both directly by buying them and also indirectly by hooking up their helium hose to Larry’s and Stanley’s Fun Factory BlackRock and letting them inflate the value of those assets.
Then our rulers route their subjects through the rigged obstacle course of Congress to get any financial relief, through a immovable pro-business republican block that is bought off to all vote the same and the democrats who are balkanized by blackmail and bribery.
The corruption of the Congressional Republicans works as follows: they vote as a block and as long as they continue to do so they will benefit from the legal bribery in our political system but they won’t have anyone crawling up their ass to try to find grounds to blackmail them unless they’re a House or Senate leader like Hassert or McConnell who gives directions to the Republican block. For instance, there’s probably glory-hole cams installed in every interstate truck stop between Lexington and DC to capture Let Them Eat Shit Mitch’s chin reverberating sexual exploits while Gaetz only got pinched because his coke pal Greenberg told on him to save his own ass.
The corruption of the Congressional Democrats works like this: they are balkanized against acting in the interests of the U.S. working class and poor because they had the bribery and blackmail brothers, and Centerview business partners, Rahm Emanuel and Robert Rubin working their carrot-and-stick dark magic within the party. Emanuel worked in Congress and the executive office and probably used private Israeli intelligence companies and the Mossad to dig up and use dirt against democratic politicians and troublesome federal staff to blackmail them while Robber Rubin worked the kinder bribery side of their operations with all his Wall Street contacts. The Fed and financial markets are dominated by forces that ally themselves with Rubin and Emanuel.
Put the dynamics of the two parties together and there is absolutely nothing pro-worker of any lasting significance that will ever pass through Congress that will benefit the vast majority of U.S. citizens and remove the heavy boot of capital and debt off of our necks. At least not before the country falls apart due to infrastructure breakdown and global warming and they’re forced to to maintain order.
Then our rulers blame their subjects’ financial problems on their subjects themselves. We don’t work hard enough, we’re too lazy, too greedy, etc..
Oh, and we don’t vote hard enough when they’ve assembled this rigged Congress and have arranged to have Handjob-Across-The-Aisle Joe Biden (age 78, on a cocktail of drugs and still half-out on his feet), Speed Queen Nancy P (age 81 and still gnawing on her lips), and the deceitful Chucky Schumer (D-Wall Street) running the show for the democrats and a supporting rotating carousel of villains such as the Senate’s Kyrazy from AZ (D-Sinema) and Nelson Peltz’ yacht boy Joe Manchin to insure that this current economic order is not altered in any meaningful way.
But vote harder plebes! Grab that stylus and stab it through that perforated square next to D like you’re Anthony Perkins in Psycho! You gotta want it bad enough …
Status Quo Joe could relieve tens of millions of people from the financial and psychological burdens of student debt with a stroke of his pen but he’d rather please our rulers in order to secure the future earnings potential of his son Hunter to get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Burisma for breathing and hundreds of thousands more by the “donor class” for blowing paint bubbles on canvas, money which Hunter has proven, it’s actually been documented on video and narrated by Hunter himself, he will partially spend on hookers he’ll hoover cocaine with and buying computers to replace the ones he leaves unattended in hotel rooms or in random computer repair shops.
But Status Quo Joe preaches the dignity of work to the working class …
Some math. Remember how the House progressive caucus chaired by Pramila Jayapal (WA-07) wasn’t going to vote on the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill until their already halved reconciliation bill to help ordinary Americans and address climate change passed?
Well, about that infrastructure bill, it contains only $550 billion in new spending, and that’s spread over 5 years. And it passed 228-206 with Pelosi’s and Jayapal’s blessings before the Build Back Better reconciliation bill was even finalized, let alone voted on.
Now keep in mind the House progressive caucus contains 94 voting Representatives. They had the votes to execute their plan of both bills or no bill. If they had wanted to. They didn’t. I know this will come as a shock and surprise to many here /s, they caved, ran away, took a dive, disappeared, exited stage left.
Only six Democrats voted against this sellout. And theirs was a real, no
t a cosmetic vote, because it could cost them. They were the members of the Squad: Jamaal Bowman (NY-16), Cori Bush (MO-01), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14), Ilhan Omar (MN-05), Ayanna Pressley (MA-07, and Rashiida Tlaib (MI-13). These were the only members out of 435 who actually stood for something and voted their conscience, and also to get real help to their constituents.
Should read “not” and “Rashida”. The comment box went haywire while I was typing. Not sure what Jayapal is going to do with her trashed progressive reputation. Probably do a Pelosi and declare victory.
I read that Ayanna Pressley only voted no after the required amount of votes were there, assisted by 13 republicans, to pass it.
I trust Cori Bush more than any of them. At least she was willing to make a spectacle of herself on the steps of Capitol Hill in order to extend the eviction moratorium. None of the others were until she did.
Fortunately, I was able to ascertain some meaning of the term after sifting through my husband’s dusty collection of Hustler magazines.
I regret not choosing Larry Flynt as my write-in candidate last election. He would have perished soon after taking office, leaving his vice presidential pick, Woody Harrelson, to clean up the country. Harrelson, of course, is the actor who played Flynt on the big screen, an irony lost on most non-USians.
The same Cori Bush who turned on music and encouraged people to start dancing instead of engaging in a conversation with constituents about to be made homeless?:
You should be putting the fear of god in these people. Instead you’re reduced to finding one who maybe you can trust a little more than the others. Pitiful.
Some say that Joe Biden is a hologram hiding within an algorithm. Myself, I think he’s just a doped up old man with a calloused right palm and tricky tennis elbow from “reaching” across the aisle for damn near five decades who is unwittingly playing the lead stiff of Weekend at Biden’s.
Glad that you were able to find an answer to your question in your husband’s home library.
At least Ms. Bush doesn’t dirty dance for Let Them Eat Shit Mitch (see Sinema, Kyrsten) or reach across the aisle like Biden to give him a handie and lend a lift to each of Mitch’s five chins until he breaks into a greedy little smile.
Interesting, there is already an addition to all six Squad members’ wikis saying they voted with a majority of Republicans and against the infrastructure bill. Only Cori Bush’s wiki adds that she did so because the infrastructure bill was not accompanied by the BBB bill. Jayapal’s wiki has zilch on her vote,
Now I’m not insinuating that Handjob-Across-The-Aisle Joe Biden isn’t still sharp. No, I don’t mean to imply that because that might be unfair to him.
In fact, rumor is is that Joe can actually cite by memory the precise girth of each Republicans’ rod who has served in the hallowed halls of the Senate over the past 40 some years right down to the millimeter!
The best scenario we can reasonably hope for is for Status Quo Joe to drown in a bowl of corn pops one morning while Jill’s doing her hair and his personal Secret Service agent is squatting in the john and then after they find him dead, rinse his face off, and hand him over to the White House physician to render the ol’ dignified head of state fatal heart attack cause of death diagnosis … “he died working too hard for the American people, it’s the just way Joe would have wanted to go” *sniff* *sniff* … have Kamalala take over in dire need of a massive turnaround in public support in order to avoid being humiliated by a double digit delegate tally in 2024 and her only available means to gain that support is to use her executive powers to please the people.
It could happen if Joe would only take that fateful dive into a deep bowl of corn pops one morning. Cause Kamalala Harris is much more malleable than he/bipartisan Joe Biden.
I suppose we’ll find out soon whether eighty-one year old Speed Queen Nancy P will finally retire from office or run again to pursue her rumored ambitions to become the first transhuman Speaker of the House.
Fact: If you placed the Senate’s Kyrazy from AZ (D-Sinema) under hypnosis and asked her why she truly ever wanted to become a U.S. senator … what motivated her … she’d tell you it’s because it’s the only club she could find in which she’d be the hottest member of.
Look, those corn pops are just like little floating pillows, Joe. Feeling a bit drowwwwwwwsy now? Don’t they look comfy? Them little yellow pillows fluffed and floating there …
Hugh
The Bureau of Labor Statistics report covering October came out Friday. October is a month where the economy usually adds around a million jobs in the run up to the end of the year holidays. Seasonally unadjusted as in what really happened, total nonfarm jobs, that is the public and private sector combined, increased by 1,558 million, or about a half million better than expected, to 149.217 million. Of these, 1.292 million were in the private sector.
Looking at the effects of covid, October 2019 was the last pre-covid October, that is two Octobers ago. Total nonfarm jobs, not seasonally adjusted, in October 2019 were 152.500 million. I get an estimate for the two years of October to October jobs gains since then by taking the average October to October jobs gains starting with October 2013 up to October 2019. I then double this number and add it to the October 2019 figure. That is I take the last pre-covid October jobs number and add in the two subsequent Octobers based on the past October to October jobs performance.
152.500 million + 2(2.4165 million) = 157.333 million jobs or where we might expect to be if there had been no covid. That gives an ongoing jobs shortfall of 8.116 million, a half million decline from the previous month, but October was an exceptional month and we would need another 15 1/2 such months to erase the covid jobs shortfall.
NR
Well the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed, and it’s very much a mixed bag.
Good things:
Support for bicycling, trains, and busses
Fixing bridges and building up electric infrastructure
Support for EV charging and incentives for people to get EVs
Some support for improving infrastructure for poor communities, rural communities, and communities of color.
Bad Things:
Support for more pipelines and lack of environmental review for their approval
No direct support for alternative energy sources like Solar and Wind
Mark Pontin
“…the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed, and it’s very much a mixed bag.”
Pfft. As we say in Oakland: Negro, please.
It’s pitiful. They fed over $28 trillion to the world’s bankers and financial asset holders after the GFC in 2008.
Now in 2021, after prolonged wailing and gnashing of teeth, they’ve ponied up a paltry $1 trillion for an infrastructure bill that’s going to be woofed down by big business anyway.
This is a ruling class that’s incapable of learning anything. Let it come down, like the Second Murderer in Macbeth says.
different clue
And the other bill, the Build Back Bitter bill, will not pass at all. It probably will never even come up for a vote.
The House DemProgs lose much credibility by double-crossing their own promise to vote on both finished bills at the same time, or vote against the Infrastructure bill.
metamars
The following was stunning enough to add it to r/bad_science_culture, even though it breaks the mold:
Ten red flags in the FDA’s risk-benefit analysis of Pfizer’s EUA application to inject American children 5 to 11 with its mRNA product
Rogers’ substack article : tobyrogers.substack dot com/p/ten-red-flags-in-the-fdas-risk-benefit
Gary Null reading this article on The Gary Null Show
prn dot fm/84987-2/ (starting at 40:00)
I’m mostly breaking the thrust of this website, by posting about specific scientific issues, rather than the cultural matrix that makes for dysfunction in producing questionable science. I justify this by the following: 1) this is SO bad, and for such an important societal issue, that it points to systemic failure, and furthermore makes attributing causality somewhat irrelevant 2) the underlying causes for these outrages is touched on by Rogers:
“corporations that were trying to get tax breaks, contracts, and other concessions from local government”
Rogers’ introductory remarks:
(emphasis mine)
Plague Species
People are so naive about electric vehicles and what this implies. It means transportation in the future will only be for the wealthy and their PMC minions. The rest of us, if we live, will be relegated to ghettoes because our mobility and thus our options will be effectively eliminated. Get a grip. Face reality. The future doesn’t include the unwashed. It belongs to the wealthy elite and their enablers. The rest of us are useless eaters. A drag. Something that requires a Final Solution.
Plague Species
The Kidney
Ché Pasa
Welp, shortages and high prices continue to worsen.
Over at Walmart, more and more product is being placed within locked cases that some tired and harassed employee must be found to open when the customer wants something in the case. Customer is only willing to wait so long before saying “fuck it” and leaves. Ordering stuff online is catch as catch can. You never know whether it will arrive at all, nor how long it will take, or if it will wait patiently on your doorstep until you get home from a job you hate, or if it will be stolen the way so many packages tend to be these days.
Re: Covid. If I get it — or even suspect I have it — I am to call my doctor immediately. He will prescribe a course of monoclonal antibody treatment as it is the only thing that seems to work on immunocompromised individuals like my own self, and I am not to delay even a minute, as once the patient is in the ICU, it’s too late.
Re: utilities. Our natural gas bill has increased 80%. Our gas bill is averaged over the year, so we’ve been paying the same amount each month, adjusted annually based on actual usage. This year, however, we received notice that our October and subsequent bills would be raised 80% due to anticipated increases in supply costs. If costs do not go up that much, we’d get an adjustment next June. Otherwise, too bad, so sad.
That’s not something poor people around here can deal with at all. What are they to do? Freeze? There are pitifully inadequate programs to partially pay unaffordable utility bills for those on limited incomes, but this winter is going to be tough for a lot of folks. Some already go (almost) without heat during the winter — heating only one or two rooms in their houses. For the moment electric heat is the least expensive, but that will no doubt change. Those with wood stoves who stocked up during the summer will be OK, I think. But most people in this area are not in that position. We’re keeping tabs on some neighbors who are literally terrified of what can happen.
The upshot is that the poor and lower middle class are being squeezed hard by the Overlords for no particular reason except they can, so why not?
The tendency to deny the reality of what’s going on is pretty universal. If reality is acknowledged at all, it’s commonplace to dismiss the importance of factors that are having a severe impact on some segment of the population if it isn’t directly affecting one’s own self. This is something our politics especially simply refuses to face. But that attitude does not originate with politicians.
What are we to do?
Z
We ought to look at the bright side about the BIF/BBB debacle. Sure, there’s not one bit in any of it that raises taxes on the rich who have made a bundle during this pandemic … and in fact they’ll likely get a tax cut in the BBB via SALT “corrections” if Joe Mansion’s yacht club pal Nelson Peltz allows him to vote for it and if the sponsors of the Senate’s Kyrazy from AZ (D-Sinema) buy off on it and continue to “supplement” her income as a vineyard intern … but Status Quo Joe did keep his solemn promise to our rulers that nothing would fundamentally change so at least his son Hunter has secured the opportunity to be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for blowing paint bubbles on canvas and we all know by the irrefutable Newtonian laws of economics that that money will eventually trickle down to us via the consumer spending of prostitutes and coke dealers.
We just got to be patient, that’s all. The political process is not broken. Sure, when our largess finally arrives we’ll have to unroll the bills, scrape the dried snot and shake the coke flakes off of it and then flatten them under hardbound dictionaries (anvils work too!), but it still spends. And know this as well: by the wealth being concentrated in the .01% of our population the rest of us don’t have to worry about inflation so much so we’re making out that way also.
Z
Thomas B Golladay
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-04/labor-shortage-ups-union-drivers-give-delivery-service-edge-over-fedex-fdx
FedEx is hoisted by its own petard while UPS laughs all the way to the bank with its Unionized Workforce.
A rare case of CEOs working with Unions and being on the same page.
Hugh
I agree with different clue. Congressional progressives sold us out. Almost everything they have been doing for the last several weeks has been yelling to us that they were going to. Cutting their bill in half and then in half again, no bottom lines, no dead lines, no attempt to sell their bill to the American people, passing the infrastructure bill first, and on and on. This was one enormous set up from the start. The Republican-Sinema-Manchin plan to blow up Biden and the Democrats has worked wonderfully, but the progressives blew themselves up on their own with no help from anyone.
someofparts
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/indigenous-knowledge-and-the-myth-of-wilderness
“Human impacts on the environment are almost always viewed as threats to ecological health.
But this framing ignores the fact that Indigenous and local peoples have been actively creating, managing and maintaining most of the Earth’s landscapes for thousands of years. “
someofparts
https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/
Find out what is in your local tapwater.
different clue
@Che Pasa’
What are you to do? In the shortest run, and the narrowest sense, skilled symbol-manipulators such as yourself might see if they have any contacts within the better-off do-gooder community. If there is one in your area.
If there is one, and you or people you know have contacts within it, you or people you know might see if your regional do-gooder community is willing to entertain the possibility that the very best actual good they could do would be to super-up-retro insulate the houses of all those people who will find this gas price rise to be difficult.
Perhaps the do-gooder community could even start a do-gooder-subsidised volunteer group of skilled people who will up-insulate every lower-middle-class-and-below house that wants it and that they can get to. They could even call their organization ” Insulated Habitat for Humanity”. If your area has a Habitat for Humanity group, maybe that group itself could do a bunch of up-insulating with do-gooder support.
different clue
About home heat conservation in the absence of good inbuilt-insulation . . .
Years ago my younger brother and his fiancee-at-the-time lived in a trailer on a rancher’s land east of Aurora, Colorado, on the High Plains. To help keep the trailer less cold in winter, the rancher was nice enough to stack a bunch of haybales like bricks against the most windward side of the trailer for natural hay-based insulation.
Z
Hugh,
I’d say Status Quo Joe got pretty much what he wanted: to portray himself to the public as doing his best to help out the working class while in actuality placating the “donor class”.
He certainly didn’t dig very deep into his executive power tool bag to try to make Manchin and Sinema change their minds but apparently he pressured progressives to cave.
Z
Z
Biden has been talking up his bipartisanship ever since he’s been in the Senate and that always leads to one thing: legislation that pleases the donor class. If Obama’s old vice was interested in changing the results he would have changed his methods.
He even had to be shamed by Donald T into doing a COVID package.
Z
bruce wilder
Jon Stewart has a new shoe on AppleTV+ service, called, The Problem With Jon Stewart and its advent has occasioned some essays tracing Jon Stewart’s impact over the decades on how the political center-left sees itself and its impact on the world.
Constance Grady, a culture editor at Vox, offered, How seriously should we take Jon Stewart? and it was interesting to me, because the essay reports positively enough on Jon Stewart’s most noted interventions and on Stewart’s own philosophic take on his own efforts, but then judges Stewart’s politics harshly.
It is very revealing of the self-righteous attitude of mainstream neoliberal upper class “left”.
Jon Stewart’s take on himself comes in two servings.
The second serving of Stewart’s philosophy centers on the cautionary notes he sounds on his own and his medium’s limited power to change anything.
And all the essayist can come with is her own
Hugh
Z, Biden called for party unity from the progressives when he wanted to settle up. From Sinema and Manchin, not so much. They are all lying, Biden, Trump, the Republicans, the Democrats, Sinema, Manchin, the progressives. All we can do is try to keep the lies straight and suss out what they really mean. It all has a deckchairs on the Titanic quality about it. We’re looking at the icebergs. They’re telling us to get serious and look at the deckchairs.
different clue
It may be that national level electoral politics is run by its owners as a powerful magnet to get all the iron filings to line up around it in patterns pleasing to the owners.
If that is what we end up deciding that national electoral politics means, then perhaps we should see whether “voting” can still sabotage the system if carried out with sabotage in mind.
And voting at the state and/or substate level can still be pursued with getting “results” in mind to see if that still works, or whether the attitude towards voting at the state and substate levels should also be changed to one of sabotage.
And peoples’ primary effort should be on crafting survival lifeboat mini-economies with other like minded people right where they live. And learning survival life-boat subsistence skills which make sense in our densely populated world of today.
bruce wilder
In the present state of the public discourse, with the dedication of journalism to tribalist narratives and blacking out everything else, a plurality of the electorate sensibly does not vote at all and those who do vote from partisan identification or leaning essentially vote at random, their understanding “of the issues” and “candidates” polluted with so much ignorance and disinformation that votes in the aggregate reflect only such coordination as the manipulative PR industry imposes thru its contested efforts.
Chuck Mire
All the stock market indexes recently closed at record highs.
Meanwhile, this analysis of the TRUE U.S. unemployment rate is sobering.
👉 What the US unemployment rate doesn’t tell you 👈
The true measure of unemployment depends on who you ask
You may want to watch this 53 minute PBS documentary to better understand why 👇
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RbL8lTsITY
When COVID-19 struck, the Federal Reserve stepped in to try to avert economic crisis. As the country’s central bank continues to pump billions of dollars into the financial system daily, who is benefiting and at what cost?
The film traces how an experiment the Fed began after the 2008 crash has been dramatically changing the American economy — exploring criticisms that, while well-intentioned, the Fed’s efforts have contributed to wealth inequality, helped today’s financial world grow far removed from the real-world economy, and prompted fears of growing inflation and an impending crash.
Chuck Mire
Here is the link to my previous post:
The true measure of unemployment depends on who you ask:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/10/us-unemployment-rate
Trinity
“The Republican-Sinema-Manchin plan to
blow up Biden and the Democratsprovide cover so Biden could do what he wanted to do anyway has worked wonderfully”“Human impacts on the environment are almost always viewed as threats to ecological health.”
Depends on what impacts are being done. Clear cutting a forest versus controlled burn of the deadwood in an area prone to fires are two different things, but both have impacts on the health of the forest. And this is why we should be studying nature. It is seriously “learning” about us, and “impacts” are incoming.
Speaking of learning, last time I checked, ignorance is the lack of something but maybe in more rarified air, it’s the presence of something and can therefore pollute one’s mind. Certainly many minds are polluted, on that I agree.
Hugh
Chuck, the Fed has been waging a war on workers’ wages since Volcker in 1979. It helped set up the 2008 meltdown by not regulating, believing that markets would self-regulate, instituting the Greenspan put, and encouraging the housing bubble and the “financial innovation” that multiplied the damages and blew up the financial system. There were no good intentions involved.
The modern definition of unemployed has been largely meaningless since at least 2008, and probably before. The BLS definition is based on an actor jobseeker model, specifically someone who has looked for a job sometime in the 30 days preceding when the BLS survey is taken which usually occurs in the week of the month containing the 12th, if memory serves. If someone stops looking because they did not qualify for or ran out of unemployment insurance and there are no jobs for them to look for, they are said to have left the workforce as if it was some whim or voluntary decision on their part, and are no longer counted as unemployed, problem solved!
Hugh
“actor” should read “active” jobseeker model.
Z
As most realize here, the democrats and republicans are not opposition parties, they are dancing partners. The democrats reach out their hand to the republicans before every supposed political conflict and offer their bipartisanship because they know that the republicans won’t settle for anything that doesn’t please their donors … and when I say their donors, I am referring to both the democrats’ and republicans’ donors because they essentially serve the same interests … and then the democrats follow the republicans’ lead and swoon to their demands and then tell their demozombie supporters that they were forced into it by the unreasonable republicans.
The music may change, but the dance moves remain the same and they certainly won’t change with Handjob-Across-the-Aisle Joe Biden.
Z
Ché Pasa
Our house was one of the first built in this area. It was started about 1900, built mostly from adobe dug, formed and cured on the property. It’s been added to and remodeled periodically but never really subjected to an up-to-date renovation, so it’s not well insulated in most rooms, though the mass of the adobe moderates cold in the winter, heat in the summer.
Most of the places in this area were either built between 1955-1985, or were trucked in mobile or manufactured homes dating from the ’80s to now. One of our neighbors just brought in his “trophy” mobile home, he says it was built in 1963, and it’s a time capsule. Not well insulated though.
The newer site-built houses are relatively well insulated but it gets cold here, down to zero and below sometimes, and heating costs are high in normal times, let alone astronomical as they are now. As I’ve said, costs are so high — no matter the fuel if you can’t cut wood on your own place — some people don’t heat more than one or two rooms in their houses during the winter. I’ve known a few folks who don’t heat their houses at all. To me that’s crazy but that’s how they deal.
So far as I know, there are only minimal programs to assist people who can’t afford utility costs. There are no programs in this area to retrofit houses. The ricos out our way are pretty kind all in all; some are quite generous — particularly with their churches — but I’d say most consider this problem beyond them, at least for now. Which doesn’t mean nothing will happen in the by and bye. If conditions get really bad, we’ll see some stepping up to help.
The question is whether the ordinary folks around here can start a program of their own to handle this among so many other crises. Possibly. The problem, I’d say, is that plain cussedness and cowboy logic (heh) is liable to prevent much good work that might otherwise take place. People will help one another in a pinch, but beyond that, not much.
People are used to toughing it out on their own or with close family, not cooperating with strangers. This is going to be a tough winter. Really tough. If someone needs help, they’ll get it more than likely. But as for more than minimal organized help? I don’t see it.
Z
The Federal Reserve offers a drive-up window to our rulers to protect their wealth, which is primarily in assets. The Fed supports those assets both directly by buying them and also indirectly by hooking up their helium hose to Larry’s and Stanley’s Fun Factory BlackRock and letting them inflate the value of those assets.
Then our rulers route their subjects through the rigged obstacle course of Congress to get any financial relief, through a immovable pro-business republican block that is bought off to all vote the same and the democrats who are balkanized by blackmail and bribery.
Z
Z
The corruption of the Congressional Republicans works as follows: they vote as a block and as long as they continue to do so they will benefit from the legal bribery in our political system but they won’t have anyone crawling up their ass to try to find grounds to blackmail them unless they’re a House or Senate leader like Hassert or McConnell who gives directions to the Republican block. For instance, there’s probably glory-hole cams installed in every interstate truck stop between Lexington and DC to capture Let Them Eat Shit Mitch’s chin reverberating sexual exploits while Gaetz only got pinched because his coke pal Greenberg told on him to save his own ass.
The corruption of the Congressional Democrats works like this: they are balkanized against acting in the interests of the U.S. working class and poor because they had the bribery and blackmail brothers, and Centerview business partners, Rahm Emanuel and Robert Rubin working their carrot-and-stick dark magic within the party. Emanuel worked in Congress and the executive office and probably used private Israeli intelligence companies and the Mossad to dig up and use dirt against democratic politicians and troublesome federal staff to blackmail them while Robber Rubin worked the kinder bribery side of their operations with all his Wall Street contacts. The Fed and financial markets are dominated by forces that ally themselves with Rubin and Emanuel.
Put the dynamics of the two parties together and there is absolutely nothing pro-worker of any lasting significance that will ever pass through Congress that will benefit the vast majority of U.S. citizens and remove the heavy boot of capital and debt off of our necks. At least not before the country falls apart due to infrastructure breakdown and global warming and they’re forced to to maintain order.
Z
Z
Then our rulers blame their subjects’ financial problems on their subjects themselves. We don’t work hard enough, we’re too lazy, too greedy, etc..
Oh, and we don’t vote hard enough when they’ve assembled this rigged Congress and have arranged to have Handjob-Across-The-Aisle Joe Biden (age 78, on a cocktail of drugs and still half-out on his feet), Speed Queen Nancy P (age 81 and still gnawing on her lips), and the deceitful Chucky Schumer (D-Wall Street) running the show for the democrats and a supporting rotating carousel of villains such as the Senate’s Kyrazy from AZ (D-Sinema) and Nelson Peltz’ yacht boy Joe Manchin to insure that this current economic order is not altered in any meaningful way.
But yeah, it’s our fault that these folks win elections when our rulers heavily rig the process towards that outcome and folks like Sinema betray their campaign promises once in office after they’ve somehow grown their wealth from $35K to over one million in the three years since they’ve joined the corrupt country club of Congress (https://moguldom.com/375562/democrat-senator-sinema-under-scrutiny-over-net-worth-exploding-from-35k-to-1-million/).
But vote harder plebes! Grab that stylus and stab it through that perforated square next to D like you’re Anthony Perkins in Psycho! You gotta want it bad enough …
Z
Mrs Weatherbee
What’s a glory hole?
Z
Status Quo Joe could relieve tens of millions of people from the financial and psychological burdens of student debt with a stroke of his pen but he’d rather please our rulers in order to secure the future earnings potential of his son Hunter to get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Burisma for breathing and hundreds of thousands more by the “donor class” for blowing paint bubbles on canvas, money which Hunter has proven, it’s actually been documented on video and narrated by Hunter himself, he will partially spend on hookers he’ll hoover cocaine with and buying computers to replace the ones he leaves unattended in hotel rooms or in random computer repair shops.
But Status Quo Joe preaches the dignity of work to the working class …
Z
Z
Mrs Weatherbee,
What’s google?
Z
Hugh
Some math. Remember how the House progressive caucus chaired by Pramila Jayapal (WA-07) wasn’t going to vote on the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill until their already halved reconciliation bill to help ordinary Americans and address climate change passed?
Well, about that infrastructure bill, it contains only $550 billion in new spending, and that’s spread over 5 years. And it passed 228-206 with Pelosi’s and Jayapal’s blessings before the Build Back Better reconciliation bill was even finalized, let alone voted on.
Now keep in mind the House progressive caucus contains 94 voting Representatives. They had the votes to execute their plan of both bills or no bill. If they had wanted to. They didn’t. I know this will come as a shock and surprise to many here /s, they caved, ran away, took a dive, disappeared, exited stage left.
Only six Democrats voted against this sellout. And theirs was a real, no
t a cosmetic vote, because it could cost them. They were the members of the Squad: Jamaal Bowman (NY-16), Cori Bush (MO-01), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14), Ilhan Omar (MN-05), Ayanna Pressley (MA-07, and Rashiida Tlaib (MI-13). These were the only members out of 435 who actually stood for something and voted their conscience, and also to get real help to their constituents.
Hugh
Should read “not” and “Rashida”. The comment box went haywire while I was typing. Not sure what Jayapal is going to do with her trashed progressive reputation. Probably do a Pelosi and declare victory.
Z
Hugh,
I read that Ayanna Pressley only voted no after the required amount of votes were there, assisted by 13 republicans, to pass it.
I trust Cori Bush more than any of them. At least she was willing to make a spectacle of herself on the steps of Capitol Hill in order to extend the eviction moratorium. None of the others were until she did.
Z
Mrs Weatherbee
Z,
google is an algorithm.
Fortunately, I was able to ascertain some meaning of the term after sifting through my husband’s dusty collection of Hustler magazines.
I regret not choosing Larry Flynt as my write-in candidate last election. He would have perished soon after taking office, leaving his vice presidential pick, Woody Harrelson, to clean up the country. Harrelson, of course, is the actor who played Flynt on the big screen, an irony lost on most non-USians.
Anyway, pot would be legal.
Mrs Weatherbee
I trust Cori Bush more than any of them.
The same Cori Bush who turned on music and encouraged people to start dancing instead of engaging in a conversation with constituents about to be made homeless?:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI3TqgC8uME&list=PLBeDLbL2RdxnaIonhmVOPmcQnxYwcyOIr&index=142
Good luck.
You should be putting the fear of god in these people. Instead you’re reduced to finding one who maybe you can trust a little more than the others. Pitiful.
Z
Mrs Weatherbee,
Some say that Joe Biden is a hologram hiding within an algorithm. Myself, I think he’s just a doped up old man with a calloused right palm and tricky tennis elbow from “reaching” across the aisle for damn near five decades who is unwittingly playing the lead stiff of Weekend at Biden’s.
Glad that you were able to find an answer to your question in your husband’s home library.
Z
Z
Mrs Weatherbee,
At least Ms. Bush doesn’t dirty dance for Let Them Eat Shit Mitch (see Sinema, Kyrsten) or reach across the aisle like Biden to give him a handie and lend a lift to each of Mitch’s five chins until he breaks into a greedy little smile.
Z
Hugh
Interesting, there is already an addition to all six Squad members’ wikis saying they voted with a majority of Republicans and against the infrastructure bill. Only Cori Bush’s wiki adds that she did so because the infrastructure bill was not accompanied by the BBB bill. Jayapal’s wiki has zilch on her vote,
Z
Now I’m not insinuating that Handjob-Across-The-Aisle Joe Biden isn’t still sharp. No, I don’t mean to imply that because that might be unfair to him.
In fact, rumor is is that Joe can actually cite by memory the precise girth of each Republicans’ rod who has served in the hallowed halls of the Senate over the past 40 some years right down to the millimeter!
Z
Z
in metric or standard …
Z
Z
Joe’s proud of his bipartisanship …
Z
Z
Sincerely,
President Joe Biden
he/bipartisan
Z
Z
The best scenario we can reasonably hope for is for Status Quo Joe to drown in a bowl of corn pops one morning while Jill’s doing her hair and his personal Secret Service agent is squatting in the john and then after they find him dead, rinse his face off, and hand him over to the White House physician to render the ol’ dignified head of state fatal heart attack cause of death diagnosis … “he died working too hard for the American people, it’s the just way Joe would have wanted to go” *sniff* *sniff* … have Kamalala take over in dire need of a massive turnaround in public support in order to avoid being humiliated by a double digit delegate tally in 2024 and her only available means to gain that support is to use her executive powers to please the people.
It could happen if Joe would only take that fateful dive into a deep bowl of corn pops one morning. Cause Kamalala Harris is much more malleable than he/bipartisan Joe Biden.
Z
Z
I suppose we’ll find out soon whether eighty-one year old Speed Queen Nancy P will finally retire from office or run again to pursue her rumored ambitions to become the first transhuman Speaker of the House.
Z
Z
Fact: If you placed the Senate’s Kyrazy from AZ (D-Sinema) under hypnosis and asked her why she truly ever wanted to become a U.S. senator … what motivated her … she’d tell you it’s because it’s the only club she could find in which she’d be the hottest member of.
Z
Z
Look, those corn pops are just like little floating pillows, Joe. Feeling a bit drowwwwwwwsy now? Don’t they look comfy? Them little yellow pillows fluffed and floating there …
Z