by liberal japonicus
Allons-y!
"This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . "
"This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . "
by liberal japonicus
Allons-y!
First an update on my rehab… This morning was the first morning back on my bike since the end of June. Not very adventurous riding, and not without pain, but it was a couple of miles. Wrist was tender still, and I had to two-finger the right brake like a noob, but I got it done. Hoping the grip and vibrations help break up the joint adhesions in my hand.
But where I really wanted to go with an open thread was here – Goldzilla may as well rename all of America “Teapot Dome” while he’s on his renaming jag, cos that’s where we are at…
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/31/trumps-plan-to-sell-off-a-part-of-yosemite-is-what-oligarchy-looks-like
And all of this is going on in the open, with nary a peep from the same cynical fuckers who called the Bidens a crime family, and swore that America was being controlled by a rich elite who were exploiting the rest of us with impunity. My brother used to compare Yosemite and Yellowstone to the grand cathedrals of Europe as our monuments to the divine. I can’t even… Guess those save-the-fetus indulgences that Goldzilla bought himself have earned him blanket absolution.
So many whirlwinds to be reaped.
He knows he’s running out of time and is just grabbing whatever he can.
I just hope that, if you does sell off access thru Yosemite, it gets reversed and the scum who paid him to sell to them not only lose out, but get charged for whatever remediation is required. That kind of thing is all that might scare off some of the vultures.
Not with the orange-ified (or GOP-ified) courts. “Pacta sunt servanda”. If at all, the companies will have to get compensated for the losses since they bought their profitable vandalizing licences ‘in good faith’.
And all the blame will fall on the Dems of course.
I’m surprised he hasn’t renamed the San Andreas Fault to Joe Biden’s Fault…
He knows he’s running out of time and is just grabbing whatever he can.
For himself and others. There are some large oil refineries on the US Gulf Coast that were designed specifically to process heavy sour Venezuelan crude. Keeping them properly supplied has been a problem ever since Venezuela’s oil production started to collapse around 2015. Last year, some of those refineries were purchased by a large Trump donor. Using US government dollars to increase the amount of cheap Venezuelan oil available — “at cost” is synonymous with cheap, no? — is the kind of favor a Mafia boss would do.
No one ever warned me about how much paperwork there is to deal with when your spouse dies.
Likely as much as would be needed to fuel a full cremation or fabricate a full size coffin out of (There are or at least were regions with those as a cheap option).
In German chemical engineering there is a joke that next to any new plant a hall of the same size has to be built to house the paperwork of the proceedings relating to the permission.
I have to whine somewhere…
I spent a good chunk of my morning on the phone with Capital One customer service, making sure the Discover account stayed sane after my wife’s death. If she had died two months ago, before Capital One purchased the Discover brand and customer accounts, Discover would have removed her name and left the other things alone. If Capital One had not converted the account to their system yet — many Discover accounts have not been converted — Discover would have removed her name from the account and left the other things alone. Because Capital One had converted the account, from Discover’s one number per account system to Capital One’s one number per person system, I had to accept a new card number.
The woman I spent most the time with told me, “Thank you for choosing to stay with Capital One. That said, I don’t care if they’re recording the call, I’ve spent my whole day talking to pissed-off Discover customers who are cancelling their accounts because they have to take a number change and I don’t blame them.”
Spent a chunk of the afternoon going online or making phone calls to change the number at lots of places. Service never gets better, it only gets worse. Put a note in my tickle file to keep reminding me to be more conscientious about the “what to do when I die” notebook for my kids.
>No one ever warned me about how much paperwork there is to deal with when your spouse dies.
it is absolutely insane.
but it does occupy the mind.
I’ve long had some dark amusement at the Capital One ads “Capital One. Who’s in your wallet?”
…and uncomfortable about their takeover of Discover.
UNTIL the news came out that Capital One had pushed out TrumpCo accounts because of suspicions of money laundering. Okay! A point in their favor.
Of course, Trump is suing. At least until the “discovery” phase is set to discover some criminal stuff.
I believe that the administrative burden on the average person is becoming unmanageable in many areas of modern life. And I tend to think it all flows from the uber-wealthy people running things finding every possible way to siphon more and more money out of the economy for themselves. It’s the only way I can make sense of the nonsense.
Hope the Teamsters kick this whorish shitgibbon to the curb at their earliest opportunity. He’s selling them all down the river:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/02/teamsters-union-republican-endorsement
Meanwhile, I finally managed to touch the far side of my palm with my thumb last night. Barely. Still a lot of range-of-motion to get back, but it’s getting better with time.
Sprains are all still reporting back to me.
My new theory, based on an examination of my bike, is that I broke my thumb not while reaching out to break my fall, but when the ground caught my handlebars and torqued my hand straight off the bars and into the ground. Don’t know that I ever had a chance to let go, and the thumb could have broken from the kinetic energy of being forced off of the bar while still gripping it.
Yikes.
So that may be why the hand is still sprained. Doubt I’ll ever know what exactly happened in that ögonblick.
I’ll still take this slow healing over y’all’s slow mourning and mountains of paperwork.
i was at the bank yesterday trying to figure out if i needed to do anything with our various accounts (including a small biz account she had in her name only). the banker basically said i can just leave it all the way it is. it will be easier than trying to get her name off certain things (like credit cards).
then he told me he was recently helping a woman who lost her husband and who had never done any kind of household banking/admin/etc. in her life. her husband had done it all and she never knew anything about any of it. then suddenly, not only does she not have a husband, she has to learn how to deal with bills and credit and accounts and all of that stuff. agony upon misery.
Good news on the hand improvement, nous.
cleek and Michael, I very much feel you. The admin burden after a spouse dies certainly doesn’t make anything easier. But, as cleek says, it does occupy the mind.
In case you’ve never dealt with it, a sibling’s estate isn’t a walk in the park either. With a spouse, at least in a community property state, there are (believe it or not) a lot of details that you don’t have to deal with.
For example, I’ve been enormously grateful that my brother thought to put my name on his bank accounts. Makes it possible to pay off the final bills directly, rather than jumping thru hoops to get money from the bank accounts to the credit card bills, etc.
“And I tend to think it all flows from the uber-wealthy people running things finding every possible way to siphon more and more money out of the economy for themselves.”
As opposed to the government finding every possible way to siphon more and more money out of the economy for itself?
We’d taken out a mortgage jointly because my salary wasn’t quite enough and the mortgage company didn’t want to include bonuses. When my wife died, the mortgage guys wanted to terminate the mortgage (and offer a new one). I was pleasantly surprised when they eventually agreed not to.
Today’s Capital One adventure has been their online banking system refuses to let me set things up from my desktop computer. They want to do two-factor authentication — fine — but claim that they cannot send text messages to my phone number. Everyone else seems to be able to do that. I installed the Capital One phone app and it lets me log in. But I refuse to do financial stuff using my phone, so tomorrow it’ll be more time with the customer service people.
For the first time in 40+ years, the “Discover” service is less than sterling. I may start shopping for a different credit card.
My new theory, based on an examination of my bike, is that I broke my thumb not while reaching out to break my fall, but when the ground caught my handlebars and torqued my hand straight off the bars and into the ground.
The most common injuries in sport fencing are to the thumb. All foil and epee weapon handles other than the French provide structure to wrap your thumb around to increase leverage (eg, the Belgium grip shown below). When things go wrong, the same leverage advantage pushes your thumb in ways it doesn’t want to go. Russian epee handles are big blocky rough-cut things; the fencer is expected to reshape the handle to suit their needs. Handle preference is sort of a religious thing. I was a real heretic, using a Russian handle with the thumb lever cut off.
Challenging as it can be, getting money back out of the government and spread around the economy is rather easier than getting it out of the uber-wealthy. Not to mention that the government can’t just up and relocate its assets to another country.
How are the uber-wealthy siphoning money out of the economy? Are they piling it up in Scrooge McDuck vaults?
Uber-wealthy entrepreneurs create about 50 times their personal wealth for other people.
…in concentrated pockets around themselves, and not in the slightest raising all boats. And all that wealth concentrates power and influence in their hands.
The SpaceX IPO created about 1,400 millionaires. Some of them were the company’s cafeteria workers. That number may have dropped a bit when the stock declined from the IPO price.
Some of the wealth created ends up in employees’ pockets, teacher retirement funds, and the customers of the goods and services that businesses create.
Yes, Charles, that would be one of those pockets I was talking about. There are ripples, but the ripples are small and concentrated. It will enrich a community, and not do much for anyone much farther away.
That wealth has low utility value for society as a whole.
>When my wife died, the mortgage guys wanted to terminate the mortgage
we have a joint mortgage, so i went to Chase bank the other day, armed with the precious death certificate, fully expecting to get buried in paperwork when i told them what was up. instead they said “do nothing. you have a good rate, you certainly don’t want to get a new mortgage loan now. just do nothing.”
when i asked my checking/savings bank what to do about our joint credit card, they said i would have to close the CC and apply for a new one if i wanted an account without her name on it. and it’s not that i want that, it’s that i thought the bank would want that. but they actually don’t care that there’s a name on the account that can’t be legally responsible for anything.
the ways of the bureaucracy are impenetrable.
The SpaceX IPO created about 1,400 millionaires.
The population of the US is about 342 million, so those 1,400 millionaires is about 0.0004086% AI tells me that this is 4 drops of water in a standard 50-gallon bathtub or the lifetime chance of being struck by lightning in one’s lifetime, assuming one lives to 80 years old.
>The SpaceX IPO created about 1,400 millionaires.
there are 24,000,000 millionaires in the US today.
on average we add 1,000 every day.
but of course being a millionaire today is quite different from being a millionaire when the word was coined. you aren’t necessarily Thurston Howell III, you might just be a middle class* guy who owns an average home in a booming real estate market.
* definition disputed
Whether the government is doing everything it can to siphon money out of the economy for itself (weird!) has nothing to do with large corporations offloading costs (time, money, effort) to consumers to funnel money upward to executives and investors. And, even if the government is doing its own siphoning, thanks to the wild west of campaign donations, chunks of the government’s money go to people like ElMu in the form of subsidies and government contracts. So, either way, bend over average people.
Meanwhile, cheery news for some of us who hadn’t kept fully across this:
Republicans Try, and Fail, to Set Number of Justices at 9
By John Light | 09.03.26
WASHINGTON, DC – SEPTEMBER 02: U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) (C) speaks to members of the media as he leaves a meeting with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and House Republicans at the U.S. Capitol building on September 02, 2026 in Washington, DC. Greer was meeting with Republican House members to brief them on trade talks with Canada. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Republicans Remind Everyone That Number of Supreme Court Justices Is Not in Constitution
Amid signs Democrats may be more seriously mulling the possibility of some kind of Supreme Court reform, Republicans put forward an effort to set the number of justices at nine. I’m not sure it worked out exactly the way they hoped.
As context, you likely saw that over the weekend, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), a high-profile Democrat who has in the past held various positions in leadership, endorsed the idea of expanding the Court from nine justices to 13. Various court reformers have offered up the number 13 as a reasonable one to match the number of federal circuit courts. “I would hope we would get people on the court who will follow the constitutional underpinnings of this great nation of ours,” Clyburn said.
At the same time, Republicans in the House rolled out an attempt to set the number of justices at nine: a joint House-Senate resolution reading, “The Supreme Court of the United States shall be composed of nine justices consisting of one chief justice and eight associate justices.” It was sponsored by Rep. Andy Biggs, a member of the House Freedom Caucus who is running for governor of Arizona.
The resolution would have needed a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate to pass, something that would have perhaps been achievable in another time, if you imagine a Democratic Party seeking to ostracize those radical Court reformers in their left flank. Instead, it barely achieved a simple majority, with a vote of 212 to 206. One Democrat — Don Davis of North Carolina — voted with Republicans, while Kevin Kiley, a Republican-turned-independent who still caucuses with his former party, voted against the resolution.
House Democratic leadership encouraged members to vote against the bill, with Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA), the House whip, writing, “This proposed constitutional amendment would permanently fix the number of Supreme Court justices at nine, stripping Congress of yet another constitutional authority that is meant to be controlled by the American people’s representatives,” per NBC.
What the gambit effectively achieved, as Supreme Court reporter Lawrence Hurley pointed out, was to underscore that the number of justices is not, in fact, enshrined in the Constitution, that the number of justices can at any moment be changed by Congress, and that there is not support in Congress to change that.