atomic_fungus (atomic_fungus) wrote,
atomic_fungus
atomic_fungus

#4953: It sure looks like October out there to me.

Sunny weather for most of the past five days; when I get a weekend, cloudy and cold. *sigh*

I CONTROL THE WEATHER

* * *

In the "No shit, Sherlock!" department, the GOP leadership is out of touch with the base.
The social mood has shifted. What works when the voters are generally optimistic does not work when they are increasingly fearful, angry, and desperate. It's fun to speak knowledgeably of Ricardo and wax eloquent about how immigrants are enriching the economy when you're pulling down six digits at the office, but the cruel realities of supply and demand are a little more likely to strike home when you've been out of work for 18 months and haven't had an interview in your last ten job applications.
The GOP establishment simply does not understand what's going on, and they--and the elites in general--do not see the misery that has resulted from the ongoing depression.

It's easy to assume the economy is in great shape when you don't have trouble paying your bills, and you don't know anyone who does. For someone pulling down six figures, the rising price of food and energy isn't the problem that it is for someone making a tenth (more often a twentieth or a fiftieth!) as much.

The GOP establishment is confused because they think all they have to do is front "not democrat!" and they'll automatically get conservative votes. But when their guy is merely "Democrat lite" and everyone is hurting, it doesn't work that way. People remember George W. Bush, and not very fondly; I suspect I'm not the only one suffering from complete Bush Fatigue which renders one completely unwilling to vote for Yet Another Bush.

Absent 9/11 it seems likely Bush would have been a one-term President.

* * *

White teacher dresses up like Kanye West, complete with blackface. Okay, first off, way to go, dumbass, deliberately putting your foot on a landmine like that.

His biggest mistake, though, was apologizing for it, as Vox Day says. If the SJWs begin their "point and shriek" routine the worst thing you can do is to apologize, because that's an admission of guilt; the thing to do is double down: "Yeah, I dressed up like Kanye West, and my students thought it was hilarious."

Vox Day gets one--just one--thing wrong: "I don't know if it is true that the teacher lost his job," he says, "...that seems unlikely given the teachers unions have made it all but impossible to actually fire a teacher for anything short of serial killing students...."

Teachers' unions have made it impossible to fire teachers for being pedophiles, for being incompetent, for being illiterate, for being negligent, for being lazy...but a teachers' union would never stand in the way of firing a white teacher for doing something that might possibly be construed as hinting at the suggestion of being raciss.

Coming to school in blackface? The union probably rubber-stamped that termination request so fast it left scorch marks on the paper.

* * *

Cell phones? Rent-a-Center is doing poorly because they wrote down their stocks of old cell phones? And we're not talking about Motorola DynaTACs, here; we're talking about Samsung Galaxy S3s and iPhone 4s.

As the article notes, the older 4G phones are still valuable because people with lower income will buy them; also people like me who don't give a rat's ass about having "the latest and greatest" and who merely want a smartphone so they can check their e-mail occasionally. (Unless RAC is talking about disposing of basic phones and pre-Android smartphones, in which case the stockholders should be asking management why they held onto stock like that for so long.)

A cellular phone is almost-but-not-quite a necessity these days, and in general they're cheap enough that nearly everyone has one. If the bottom is dropping out of the cellular market--that's not a good thing. (And not just because I currently work in the cellular service industry.)

* * *

Economic doomsayers see a huge crash coming. If they are right--and I pray they are not--we are in for a bumpy ride.

I do expect that the illusion of prosperity cannot endure much longer. We're in a depression, and have been since 2009, and it has suited our aristocracy to pretend real hard that wasn't the case. (Besides, they're making money hand over fist; under Obama the rich have gotten richer while the poor have gotten poorer because of exactly the sort of crony capitalism the Democrats pretend mightily they despise.) This is the endgame of thirty years of defict spending, piling debt upon debt.

The thing is, what we're experiencing now is pretty much what the Great Depression was like, from 1929-1939. It's going to take longer for this one to clear because our politicians have spent the first eight years of it fapping around trying to pretend everything was rosy (they remember what happened to political careers during the last depression) and not doing anything to fix the situation.

The bad debts have to clear and deflation must be allowed to take place. The economy is cyclical, and the high part of the cycle cannot happen until and unless the low part is allowed to take place first.

Of course, if the low happens, a lot of politicians and bankers and other rich people lose their cushy lifestyles and end up flipping burgers. (Relatively speaking.) And they don't care who has to suffer as long as they do not.

* * *

Couple of chores to do today, nothing major, and one's already accomplished.

I spoke to the guy who bought the Fiero today. He told me his grandson took it for a drive, and said that it runs smoother than his BMW does. Meanwhile he's got a factory stock radio in it (the one that I gave him with the car was apparently not working right) and he's getting things fixed. He's even replaced the sail panels, something I never did in thirteen years of ownership.

Well, good. I'm happy that he's getting so much joy from it. As I said, if he gets half as much pleasure out of owning that car as I did, he got a bargain--because I sure did.
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