The Onion is America’s ONLY news source.
Desperate Employer Offers Basic Dignity To Incentivize New Hires
Calling the benefit the only way to lure employees back into the workforce following the pandemic, local employer Apex Insurance announced Wednesday that it would begin offering basic dignity as an incentive for new hires. ………
This is as true as taxes is. And nothing’s truer than them.
Protests make a difference. Case in point, the Keystone XL Pipeline is not canceled:
The Canadian pipeline company that had long sought to build the Keystone XL pipeline announced Wednesday that it had terminated the embattled project, which would have carried petroleum from Canadian tar sands to Nebraska.
The announcement was the death knell for a project that had been on life support since President Biden’s first day in office and had been stalled by legal battles for years before that, despite support from the Trump administration.
On the day he was inaugurated, Mr. Biden, who has vowed to make tackling climate change a centerpiece of his administration, rescinded the construction permit for the pipeline, which developers had sought to build for over a decade. That same day, TC Energy, the company behind the project, said it was suspending work on the line.
On Wednesday, the company wrote in a statement that it “will continue to coordinate with regulators, stakeholders and Indigenous groups to meet its environmental and regulatory commitments and ensure a safe termination of and exit from the project.”
The good guys won, for once.
And all you have to do is read United Healthcare’s latest which is that they will be doing deep dives on all ER visits with an eye to denying payouts.
All insurance companies are bastards, and any policies to fix healthcare in the United State that involved them are doomed:
Doctors and hospitals are condemning plans by UnitedHealthcare—the country’s largest health insurance company—to retroactively deny emergency medical care coverage to members if UHC decides the reason for the emergency medical care wasn’t actually an emergency.
In the future, if one of UHC’s 70 million members submits a claim for an emergency department visit, UHC will carefully review what health problems led to the visit, the “intensity of diagnostic services performed” at the emergency department (ED), and some context for the visit, like the member’s underlying health conditions and outside circumstances. If UHC decides the medical situation didn’t constitute an emergency, it will provide “no coverage or limited coverage,” depending on the member’s specific insurance plan.
Emergency medical doctors and hospitals were quick to rebuke the plan. They say it sets a dangerous precedent of requiring patients to assess their own medical problems before seeking emergency care, which could end up delaying or preventing critical and even lifesaving treatment.
The policy was initially set to take effect July 1. But in an email to Ars Thursday, UHC now says it is delaying the rollout amid the criticism—at least until the end of the pandemic.
They are implying that if you have symptoms that look like a heart attack, and it turns out that it’s heart burn, you will be facing thousands of dollars that they won’t cover, because they are evil bastards.
Doctors are having none of this:
………
The delay is unlikely to ease critics’ concerns. After the policy was first announced last week, doctors were quick to note that assessing the necessity of emergency care before it’s actually given is nearly impossible. Many serious conditions have symptoms that overlap with nonserious conditions. For instance, chest pain may simply be a symptom of acid reflux or a panic attack, but it could also be a sign of a life-threatening heart attack. A bad headache could just be a bad headache, or it could signal a dangerous brain bleed.
In a 2018 analysis published in JAMA Open Network, researchers found that up to 90 percent of the symptoms that prompted an adult to go to the emergency room overlapped with symptoms of nonurgent conditions, which may be denied coverage in the future. But those same symptoms could also be linked to life-threatening conditions.
That analysis was spurred when the second-largest insurance company, Anthem, instituted a similar policy to UHC’s and began denying ED coverage.
In an accompanying editorial, one of the authors of the analysis—Maria Raven, chief of emergency medicine at the University of California, San Francisco—noted how problematic it is to retroactively evaluate emergency medical care. “My colleagues and I examined whether a patient’s symptoms at presentation to the ED could be labeled reliably as a non-emergency based on the discharge diagnosis—the diagnosis that Anthem is currently using to determine medical necessity,” she wrote. “We found it was impossible.”
It’s more than evil, it’s a public health disaster.
A significant proportion of vaccination reticence in the United States is driven by people believing that the medical-insurance complex will f%$# them like a drunk sorority girl whatever promises are made by the US government.
Our system is beyond broken.
Not Enough Bullets.
Initial unemployment claims fell from fell to 376,000 from 385,000 last week, which is obviously good news, but year over year inflation jumped to 5%, which means the the usual suspects are going to start screaming for austerity.
As always, I’ll note that with 20+ states rolling back unemployment benefits, stimulus is going away sooner rather than later in those states, and in all 50 states at the end of September, so I will expect back-sliding when that happens.
As to the inflation, the core rate, which excludes food and energy is a lower at 3.8%, and it is dominated by a spike in used car prices, which are in turn driven by a massive shortage of new cars, which is in turn driven by an even more massive shortage of computer chips that go into new cars.
It’s a recovery, and inflation will spike, and quite honestly, with wages going up for people at the bottom end of the scale, it’s a good thing.
I’m waiting for the “Very Serious People” to try to start to screwing things up.
The Federal Reserve has been forced to warned Deutsche Bank that it is money laundering again.
The fix for this is very simple: Lock them out of the US, because they are not going to fix this.
This is BCCI with a German accent:
The Federal Reserve told Deutsche Bank AG in recent weeks that the lender is failing to address persistent shortcomings in its anti-money-laundering controls, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Fed’s frustration has escalated to a point that the bank could be fined, the people said.
Deutsche Bank has poured massive resources into addressing repeated shortcomings and penalties related to allowing suspect transactions. The Fed told Deutsche Bank that instead of making progress, the German lender with a large Wall Street presence is backsliding. The regulator has said that some of the anti-money-laundering control problems require immediate attention, according to the people.
………
The Fed’s harsh words contrast with the bank’s message that it has worked diligently to improve its systems and has put most of its legal troubles in the past.
The Fed’s latest warning comes four years after it classified Deutsche Bank’s U.S. operations as being in “troubled condition,” a rare rebuke for a major bank. In May 2020, it issued a fresh admonishment over the bank’s money-laundering controls.
………
Deutsche Bank is Germany’s largest lender and as a dollar clearing bank regulated by the Fed, is a major player in global financial transactions.
Shut down their dollar clearing operations. Problem solved, and the Germans can deal with following their own “No Bailouts” advice that they foist on the rest of the Euro Zone.
I’m not a big fan of the people that Barack Obama appointed when he was President, Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner particularly comes to mind, but generally they were light-years ahead of anyone that Trump appointed.
There is one exception though, and it’s a big one, because Jerome Powell, who Donald Trump appointed as Chairman of the Federal Reserve to replace Janet Yellen, is immeasurably better than the now Treasury Secretary.
Much as she did as Fed Chair, Secretary Yellen is reacting to non-existent inflation, and calling for rate hikes.
Powell, the first non-economist Fed Chair in Decades, gets it in a way that economists don’t:
Starting in 2018, President Trump harangued and hammered Fed Chair Jerome Powell to end Quantitative Tightening and to cut interest rates, and Powell buckled and did his infamous “180.” And now suddenly – unless this gets walked backed again tomorrow – we’ve got the opposite. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in an interview with Bloomberg News on Sunday that higher interest rates would “actually be a plus for society’s point of view and the Fed’s point of view.”
Under Fed Chair Yellen, the Fed hiked interest rates five times, starting in December 2015. Yellen departed in February 2018 as Trump had refused to reappoint her, and instead replaced her with Powell. At the time, the sixth rate-hike was already baked in for the March 2018 meeting. She is no stranger to rate hikes.
Now Yellen – presumably with the backing of President Biden – is supporting Powell on rate hikes, which is a dramatic shift from the prior administration.
I will reiterate something that I have said many times, “If you have a problem, the conventional wisdom is ALWAYS wrong, because if it were right, the problem would already have been fixed.”
Janet Yellen is relentlessly conventional, which means that she is relentlessly wrong.
The second most contemptible Democratic think tank in Washington, DC, Third Way, has an analysis of why Democrats performed poorly in the 2020 elections, and it comes down to the fact that Democrats stand for nothing.
When one considers the source, a group who has fought for years to ensure that the Democratic Party stand for nothing, this is telling:
In the months since the Democrats’ underwhelming performance in last year’s election, we’ve more or less been able to figure out why the party did so poorly despite a historically unpopular opponent and the two world-historical crises he presided over.
………
Surprise, surprise: a new 2020 postelection autopsy comes to many of these same conclusions — conclusions that observers on the Left have been stressing for months, pulling their hair out as the Democratic Party’s CIA caucus sought to publicly put the blame on the party’s handful of socialists, and popular, commonsense ideas like Medicare for All. But what genuinely is a surprise is who authored this particular autopsy: Third Way, the corporate- — especially Wall Street– — funded think tank that exists to shape Democratic policy for the benefit of tycoons like the Kochs.
………
Finally, there was the decision to cancel in-person canvassing, at the same time that the GOP launched a furious door-knocking and voter registration effort. “Many of those included in this analysis said in hindsight Democrats could have been on doors safely in more places — and Democrats would have won several close races if they had gone back on the doors either sooner or in a more robust way than they did,” states the report. This point was made repeatedly on the record by a host of the party’s leading lights after the election and was almost certainly responsible for not just the drop in support among Latinos but for the Republicans’ crucial triumphs at the state level.
Silly rabbit, the consultants don’t get their vig with door to door canvassing, and their payday is WAY more important than winning elections.
This is yet another confirmation of the Harry S Truman quote, “Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.”
French President Emmanuel Macron was working a crowd line, and someone in the crowd slapped the crap out of him.
At first, I thought that this was the feel good story of the day, because Macron has serious Backpfeifengesicht.*
Unfortunately, this man who slapped him is someone who is in serious need of a kick in the ass.
Emmanuel Macron was slapped in the face by a man during a walkabout in southern France.
The president’s security detail immediately pulled the man to the ground and moved Macron away from the crowd, though the president appeared unhurt and determined to continue meeting the public.
Afterwards, the French leader said the assault was “an isolated act” that should be “put into perspective”.
“We mustn’t let ultra-violent individuals take over the public debate … There can be no violence, no hatred, not in speech or action. Otherwise it’s democracy itself that is threatened.”
A video of the incident showed the president, in a white shirt and tie, approach onlookers waiting behind metal barriers at Tain-l’Hermitage in the Drôme department.
Macron, wearing a mask, is seen reaching out to shake hands with a man in a green T-shirt wearing glasses and a mask.
Reuters reported the man was heard shouting “à bas la Macronie” (down with Macronism) before he grabbed the president’s right arm and delivered a slap to the left side of his face. He was also reported to have shouted “Montjoie Saint Denis”, the battle cry of the French armies when the country was a monarchy.
The guy was almost certainly a right wing racist French Royalist. You know, the folks who still think that Albert Dreyfus was guilty, and they make Marine Le Pen (who, to her credit strongly condemned the attack) look like Rachel Maddow.
So, Macron gets slapped, and this douche bag ends up in the slam for a few months.
I can live with that, I guess.
*It’s German for, “A face that begs to be slapped.
Particularly when the Nazi is Andy Ngo, who showed to a protest in a weak disguise, and was pursued and beaten by a small group of the protesters until he fled into a hotel. (Report confirmed by Ngo here.)
I’m not going to get into an argument as to whether or not Ngo is a legitimate journalist, I think that those arguments are useless mental masturbation.
That he is a hack journalist is clear though, with numerous accounts of deliberately deceptive reporting is completely irrelevant. He qualifies as a journalist almost as much as I do.*
What is clear though is that Ngo is also a menace to public safety, doxxing protesters with a clear intent to invoke violence against them and their families:
People in a May 28 protest crowd in front of the Multnomah County Justice Center chased, tackled and punched someone they believed to be right-wing author Andy Ngo, pursuing him through the streets of Portland until he hid inside The Nines hotel.
The enraged group pulled on the hotel’s front doors and shouted, “You wanna kill us? You wanna kill us, Andy?” at The Nines staff while the hotel staff frantically tried to hold the entrance closed.
The person hiding in The Nines appeared to be Ngo to this reporter—who saw him in the light of an elevator as he entered it and faced the front before the doors closed. But Ngo has not responded to WW’s inquiries whether he was assaulted, and has released no public statements about the incident.………
Friday’s march concluded around 11:30 pm without much fanfare. Word began to spread that Ngo was in the crowd—disguised and wearing a Black Lives Matter flag around his shoulders.
A group of five to 10 people in identity-obscuring clothing called “black bloc” followed the person they suspected of being Ngo for blocks, inquiring who he was. At one point, the person they pursued said his name was Jake. In front of the AC Marriott, the group tried to unmask the unknown man. He ran for blocks until someone in the pursuing group tackled him—at Southwest 4th Avenue and Morrison Street—and punched him several times after his head hit the brick sidewalk.
A nearby man holding a skateboard admonished the group, saying that their quarry looked like he’d “had enough.” However, when someone nearby shouted that the person they were assaulting was Ngo, the skateboard-carrying man changed his attitude, swearing and joining the group.
………
Ngo’s willingness to post the mug shots and other personal information of arrested protesters has caused many of the people in Portland’s leftist movement to see him as something like an existential threat. In his reporting—via Twitter, the conservative news site The Post Millennial, and guest appearances on Fox News—Ngo has been regularly accused of sensationalizing the danger presented by anti-fascists and other left-wing groups.
It’s more than a willingness to post this information, he encourages his readers with a nudge and a wink to threaten the people that he reports on.
Ngo is a stochastic terrorist, and a bully, and both of those are categories of people to be fought tooth and nail.
*Why, yes, I AM aware that this is an INCREDIBLY low bar. Sy Hersch I ain;t.
New York State Senate has just passed a wide ranging antitrust law which appears to have some serious teeth.
It eschews Robert Bork’s corrupt and hypocritical sham that ignored the whole history, and recast antitrust as something that only applied when consumers were immediately charged more money.
The changes in the law:
There is a good primer here.
This has not passed the state assembly yet, and it is not clear if “Ratfaced Andy” would sign the bill into law.
You are getting a lot of bullsh%$ about how this will harm small business, but that’s a lie.
Business who would be subject to this would people like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and dominant hospitals in a regions, who all need to be taken down for the good of society:
The New York state Senate passed legislation Monday making it easier for plaintiffs to win antimonopoly lawsuits, in the latest state-led effort to rein in large technology companies in the absence of action by Congress.
The antitrust bill was opposed by business groups and backed by unions and other critics of corporate giants such as Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. To become law, it must also pass the state assembly and be signed by the governor.
Monday’s 43-20 party line vote represented an incremental victory for advocates of tougher antitrust laws, who will seek to use it as a springboard to tougher laws in other states and at the federal level.
“We have a problem in this country. We have a problem that there is tremendous market power in very, very few hands,” said New York state Sen. Michael Gianaris, a Democrat and the bill’s lead sponsor, at a virtual press conference Monday. “Small startups and medium-sized businesses don’t have the opportunity to grow and innovate.”
………
Mr. Gianaris said he would continue fighting for the New York bill if it doesn’t become law during the state legislature’s current session, which ends this week. No further legislative days are scheduled this year, although more could be added.
If the bill isn’t passed this year it would have to be reintroduced next year. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office had no immediate comment.
Congress is considering changes to federal antitrust law, but those efforts haven’t advanced significantly this year as lawmakers focus on other priorities. States including Maryland and Florida have enacted new statutes aimed at powerful tech companies.
The proposed New York law takes broader aim. It would make it unlawful for a company “with a dominant position in the conduct of any business…to abuse that dominant position.” A company would generally be presumed dominant if it had a greater than 40% market share.
That is a more plaintiff-friendly standard than current U.S. antitrust laws at the federal and state level. Generally under those laws, a company is considered a monopoly if it controls two-thirds of a market, and its conduct isn’t considered anticompetitive unless it can be shown to harm consumers.
It’s very late in the session, so there is a good chance that it won’t pass this year, but it should be back next year.
More crap advertising.
I don’t understand how Google™ Adsense™, given the enormous amount of data that they have on me, would think that I care one whit about dating Christian singles.
I’m married, and I’m Jewish.
If I were to troll some group looking for illicit hookups, I’d go with J-Date, but I don’t f%$# around.
I’m just an ordinary guy with ordinary tastes, “4 sets of identical twins, 2 gallons of Cool Whip, 5 quarts of chocolate syrup, 2-1/4 pounds of strawberries, satin sheets, a magnum of champagne, a trapeze, and a python.”
No link for my reader(s), because if you want to troll a Christian web site, I don’t want it to be tracked back to me.
Please note: once again, that I do not vet, nor do I endorse any ad that appears on my site, and I reserve the right to mock both the ads that appear on my site, as well as the advertisers.
Also, please note, this should be in no way construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.
Former Congressman Alan Grayson has filed to run for Senate against Marco Rubio in 2022.
Needless to say, the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is almost certain to go after him hammer and tongs, because that’s what happened last time, when they threw their weight behind a big bag of nothing, and former Republican, Patrick Murphy.
You cannot beat something with nothing, but Chuck Schumer now, and Harry Reid then, want to run a nothing, because they are nicer to big dollar donors.
Mike the Mad Biologist says something that I have been saying for years that the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is more interested in corruption and self dealing than they are in winning or governing:
To follow up on yesterday’s post about Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s decision to tank Senate bill S1, making it highly unlikely Democrats will hold either the House or the Senate in 2022, there is one way to still win elections. That is to massively increase voter turnout through organizing.
The problem is that the consultants picked by the Democratic Party leadership–and which are forced on Democratic candidates–have no incentive to do this. They don’t want to give ‘their money’ to a bunch of local and state organizers, who are typically unaffiliated with specific candidates or even the Democratic Party. That’s not the business model–the business model is running TV ads (sometimes online ads too) and getting a cut of the expenditure. Meanwhile the people on the ground who bang on doors are shortchanged.
With a Chief Justice on the Supreme Court who has dedicated his entire career to making sure that n*****s don’t vote, the old ways are not going to cut it.
Howard Dean’s 50 State Strategy, which devolved power and resources to state and local party groups, worked, but he was unceremoniously dumped by that avatar of establishment thinking Barack Obama, and everything went back to the dysfunctional normal.
The Democratic Party needs to:
It would also be nice if they could stop being afraid of their own shadows, but that’s probably too much to ask.
A woman had a miscarriage in Spokane, Washington and Spokane police treated it as a crime, and swore out a search warrant against her.
This sort of sh%$ needs to be slapped down hard by the Feds. The local US Attorney should make their lives hell:
In March, a woman miscarried in a Spokane hotel. Police investigated. They searched her room, told her they’d meet her at the hospital and found it suspicious when she did not show up. They filed a search warrant in hopes of finding her.
Considering the fetus her dependent, officers suspected that the woman could be guilty of criminal mistreatment of a child if she did not call 911 soon enough to potentially save her pregnancy, according to a warrant filed at the time.
Police later closed the investigation without pursuing criminal charges, but to Paul Dillon, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho, the move to investigate was “a huge violation of privacy and very stigmatizing.”
………
“Under Washington law, everything about this is discriminatory and potentially violating of constitutional rights,” Ainsworth said.
………
The case arises as reproductive freedoms have been restricted in Republican-led Legislatures from Texas to Idaho, and with the U.S. Supreme Court seemingly poised to curtail or even overturn the abortion rights enshrined in the landmark Roe v. Wade case. While abortion remains legal in all 50 states, Ainsworth said under Washington’s Equal Rights Amendment, investigating pregnancy losses could be discriminatory as such investigations are necessarily biased against women, Ainsworth said.
“Here this person is suffering, an ambulance is called to make sure they’re OK, then the police show up and the police are surprised they didn’t check themselves into a hospital,” Ainsworth said. “This person needed their autonomy and grief to be respected and instead there’s a search warrant.”
The goal here is to eventually make a miscarriage a matter for law enforcement, and it must be aggressively fought at every level, because any step back will be occupied by people who want to keep women in chains.
One of the most depressing things about Washington, DC is how the establishment zealously defends their prerogatives and immunity, even if they are completely unjustified.
You can talk about Ford pardoning Nixon, GHW Bush pardoning his Iran Contra co-conspirators, and now the Biden Department of Justice insisting that the government should defend Donald Trump from a libel suit, because they need to, “Protect the institution.”
The case involves behavior prior to Trump’s time in office, and the statements in question were made in a personal capacity, but the institution must be preserved.
It stinks to high heaven:
The Justice Department is keeping up the previous administration’s fight to defend former president Donald Trump against a private defamation lawsuit brought by a woman who accused him of rape — an effort that President Joe Biden had criticized on the campaign trail.
On Monday, lawyers for the Justice Department as well as Trump’s personal legal team were due to file the next round of briefs — marking the first major deadline for the department under the new administration to weigh in. In the government’s latest brief, the Justice Department lawyers continued to press arguments that the lower court judge got it wrong when he concluded that Trump wasn’t shielded from being sued and was acting within the scope of his official duties as president when he accused Carroll of lying.
“When members of the White House media asked then-President Trump to respond to Ms. Carroll’s serious allegations of wrongdoing, their questions were posed to him in his capacity as President,” the Justice Department wrote in Monday’s reply brief. “Elected public officials can — and often must — address allegations regarding personal wrongdoing that inspire doubt about their suitability for office.”
Bullsh%$.
The Justice Department under Biden inherited numerous pending Trump-era legal fights, but Carroll’s case was one of the few that Biden had offered an opinion about when he was running for office. A turnover in the White House can create sticky situations for DOJ to navigate — the department historically defends the authority of the executive branch and senior administration officials in court, even as the politics of the party in power changes across presidents.
………
DOJ’s effort to intervene in the case last fall was widely criticized as a misuse of government resources on behalf of Trump. During a nationally televised town hall event in October, Biden had highlighted the Carroll case as an example of Trump trying to use the Justice Department as his “own law firm.”
“Can you remember any Republican president going out there, or former Democratic president, ’Go find that guy and prosecute him’? You ever hear that? Or: ‘By the way, I’m being sued because a woman’s accused me of rape. Represent me. Represent me.’ … What’s that all about? What is that about?” Biden said at the time.
Biden was right then, and he is wrong now.
………
Carroll sued Trump in state court in New York in November 2019. Trump had litigated the case for months using privately retained lawyers. In September, however, DOJ filed notice that it was moving the case to federal court and intended to take over Trump’s legal defense on behalf of the US government.
The department argued at the time that Trump was covered by a federal law that protects federal employees from being sued as individuals over actions they take as part of their work, known as the Westfall Act. When Trump, as president, denied Carroll’s allegation and accused her of making it up to sell copies of her book, the Justice Department argued that this law applied.
If DOJ succeeded, the US government would become the defendant instead of Trump as an individual. That would likely end the lawsuit, since the government is shielded by a legal principle known as “sovereign immunity” against a range of civil claims, including libel.
And now the Biden DoJ has decided to try to extend this decision.
In an opinion in late October, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan found that Trump wasn’t a government “employee” under the Westfall Act, which refers to “officers or employees of any federal agency.” Even if Trump was an “employee” within the meaning of that law, the judge wrote, his comments about Carroll didn’t fall within the scope of his official duties as president, so the law still wouldn’t cover his situation.“A comment about government action, public policy, or even an election is categorically different than a comment about an alleged sexual assault that took place roughly twenty years before the president took office. And the public’s reasons for being interested in these comments are different as well,” Kaplan wrote in the opinion. “The president’s views on the former topics are interesting because they alert the public about what the government is up to. President Trump’s views on the plaintiff’s sexual assault allegation may be interesting to some, but they reveal nothing about the operation of government.”
………
Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan also issued a statement saying they were confident they’d win on appeal.
“It is horrific that Donald Trump raped E. Jean Carroll in a New York City department store many years ago. But it is truly shocking that the current Department of Justice would allow Donald Trump to get away with lying about it, thereby depriving our client of her day in court. The DOJ’s position is not only legally wrong, it is morally wrong since it would give federal officials free license to cover up private sexual misconduct by publicly brutalizing any woman who has the courage to come forward. Calling a woman you sexually assaulted a ‘liar,’ a ‘slut,’ or ‘not my type,’ as Donald Trump did here, is not the official act of an American president,” Kaplan said.
The Department of Justice is functioning as the personal lawyer for a government official, and not as a representative of the government, or the people here.
This is a disgrace.
As you may have heard, Amazon chief and Bat Boy look-alike Jeff Bezos plans to be on the first manned manned flight of his Blue Origin booster.
I guess he thinks that having more money than God qualifies him as a test pilot.
You give an egomaniac enough money, and they think that they are Buckaroo Banzai:
Jeff Bezos has already selected a hobby for his post-CEO life: space travel.
Just two weeks after he steps down as CEO of Amazon, Bezos will climb aboard a rocket made by his space exploration company Blue Origin.
“If you see the earth from space, it changes you. It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity. It’s one earth,” Bezos said in a video posted to Instagram on Monday morning.
“Ever since I was five years old, I’ve dreamed of traveling to space.”
I want to go into space, but this desire is NOT strong enough for me to share a space capsule with Jeff Bezos.
The Squirrel Obstacle Course, the squeak-ual:
My bad, here is an actual photo
Have you heard the one about the Texas church that worships the AR-15?
No, this is not a pitch for a bad movie that cribs unabashedly from the 1970 stinker Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and this is not The Onion, it’s just an ordinary Sunday service in Texas.
Can we give them back to Mexico?
A religious sect known for worshipping with AR-15s and its MAGA politics has purchased a sprawling, 40-acre compound in central Texas, which it hopes will offer a safe-haven for “patriots” from what they believe is an imminent war brought by the “deep state,” VICE News has learned.
The property, located in the small community of Thornton, 40 miles from Waco, was listed at just under $1 million. It’s been dubbed “Liberty Rock” by its new owners, the Sanctuary Church aka Rod of Iron Ministries, led by Pastor Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon. Members of the congregation often refer to him as “King.”
While Moon’s congregation, estimated to number in the hundreds, is relatively fringe, it’s a direct descendant of the much larger Unification Church, founded by his father, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a self-proclaimed messiah and accused cult leader whose adoring followers became known to outsiders as “Moonies.”
The younger Moon, who set up shop in 2017 in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, follows the doctrine of his late father—with a twist. Moon says he was inspired by a biblical passage in the Book of Revelation that talked about Jesus using a “rod of iron” to protect himself and others. He concluded this was a reference to AR-15s, and integrated high-powered firearms into regular church services, including wedding ceremonies. He founded the church with the support of his brother, Kook-jin “Justin” Moon, the CEO of Kahr Arms, a gun manufacturing company headquartered nearby.
BTW, he was at the insurrection on January 6, though it appears that he did not enter the Capitol, though he did get tear gassed.
The folks who write for The Onion really have their job cut out for them to top this one.
H/t ECop at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
‘Bipartisan’ Is How Republicans Say ‘Sucker!’
This is the truest headline that I have read in a very, VERY long time.
It appears that the wild swings in heavily shorted stocks, most recently for AMC movie theaters, is causing instabilities in the market that threaten the stability of index funds.
The solution to this is fairly straightforward, first and most importantly, enact a transaction tax for all financial transfers to increase the friction, and hence reduce the speculation.
It might also be a good idea to ban Payment for Flow Order, which is a Bernie Madoff inspired “Innovation” which is little more than an excuse for front running, where a broker executes their trades before those of their customers for their own personal profit.
Speculation is a cost we pay for investment, an evil that we tolerate in order to encourage investment.
A tax of between 10 and 50 basis points (⅒% — ½%) tax per transaction.
Even if it does not generate as much revenue as its supporters predict, it will produce a very real public good:
Index funds are supposed to cut out the human-driven craziness that periodically infects markets, but the recent meme-stock fever proved the $11 trillion industry is far from immune.
The remarkable surge in shares of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. and a handful of other stocks is showing up in multiple exchange-traded funds, skewing portfolios, altering risk profiles and exerting outsized influence on prices.
Take the $68 billion iShares Russell 2000 ETF (ticker IWM). In the past week through Thursday, AMC powered 70% of the product’s advance. The stock was responsible for less than a 10th of the fund’s return in the previous week.
It’s a timely reminder that even diversified funds on autopilot remain subject to the whims and eccentricities that frequently lash markets out of nowhere.
………
“For index investing, the appeal is that human decision-making, human emotions are taken out of it,” said Tom Essaye, a former Merrill Lynch trader who founded “the Sevens Report” newsletter. “That works all well and good until a stock that is supposed to be 50 basis points of the fund now becomes 6%.”
This is going to destroy us all.