17 thoughts on “The Monster Mash”

  1. David Horsey’s op ed in The Seattle Times Planet of the monster gazillionaires

    Elon Musk generally displays the maturity of a gawky 13-year-old boy who revels in incessant teasing and uninhibited flatulence (which may be why he included a fart-noise feature in his electric cars).
    One of Musk’s favorite targets for jibes and jokes is his fellow gazillionaire, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. In a dark-of-the-night post on his social media property, X, Musk recently passed along some gossip he picked up while hanging out with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago – an assertion that Bezos had told everyone in his circle that they should sell their Tesla and SpaceX stock because Trump was going to lose the presidential election.
    Bezos responded with a message that read, “Nope. 100% not true.” To which Musk answered, “Well, then, I stand corrected.” He added a laughter emoji to his post,  which suggests Musk may have known the story was bogus all along but intended to goad Bezos and get him in trouble with Trump.
    And trouble with Trump is something Bezos seems eager to avoid. As owner of The Washington Post, Bezos quashed the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, to the chagrin of Post journalists, as well as tens-of-thousands of incensed readers who cancelled their subscriptions to the newspaper.
    For his part, Musk contributed many millions of dollars to the Trump campaign and now has been put in charge of blowing up the federal bureaucracy. Many see the tycoon’s motives as less political than economic. Musk’s companies – the rocket-launching enterprise SpaceX; the electric automobile and energy storage behemoth Tesla; and the satellite system Starlink – can benefit significantly from a patron in the Oval Office.
    It just so happens that Bezos is a rival in all of those endeavors. Bezos has his own rocket company, Blue Origin. He is building his own satellite network through Amazon. And he is a major investor in Rivian, the fledgling electric car maker. In all of those, Bezos is playing catch-up with Musk. And Musk cannot resist rubbing it in.

  2. remember this news 3 days ago about huge asteroid on the way ?

    ever get the feeling we’ve seen this movie before?  big beasties rampage devouring all they want until even bigger asteroids wipe them out leaving only us little insects, frogs and such to pick up the pieces?  (talk about the weak and the meek inheriting the earth)

    a FYI review of it how it happened the first time around to the original oligarchs

    Dinosaurs have become legends and are often the topic of several scientific debates. Though the K-Pg mass extinction was not the largest of all extinctions, however, it caused the extinction of 75% of all living organisms on earth, including most species of dinosaurs. But did you know that certain species of animals survived this extinction event? Did you also know that descendants of some of these survivors still co-exist with us till today? Of all the theories proposed, which is the most plausible and probable cause of the K-Pg extinction? Join us as we provide the answers in this documentary.

     

  3. back to the here and now and other sh*t hitting our fan. Your choice:
    https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/musk-ramaswamy-discuss-their-doge-plans-with-republicans-in-congress/ar-AA1vm9f5?ocid=BingNewsSerp

    Colbert’s monologue “Merry Jackmass” 

    Jack in the Box kicked off the fast food holiday promo season, Stephen is disturbed by his Spotify Wrapped results, Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth denied having a drinking problem, and we have an update on South Carolina’s escaped research lab monkeys.

    and Kimmel’s monologue last night

    President Biden took part in the annual lighting of the White House Christmas tree, Flavor Flav was asked to leave the backstage area when meeting with the Backstreet Boys, NY Mayor Adams is out bragging about his Bitcoin, Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth is defending himself from allegations of sexual misconduct and drunken behavior, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy met with GOP leaders today, the British Board of Film Classification has issued a warning to viewers about Wicked, and Jimmy gets interrupted by an annoying matching pajama family.

     

  4. Since the 1960s when the Boomers started working, the top income tax rate has dropped from a high of 77% down to the current 37%.  This was possible because their payments in were in excess to the money paid out, so that huge excess was used to buy government securities.  There has never been a place to preserve that money to earn interest, so it all went into the General fund.  

    Now that they are starting to retire and wanting to collect on all that money paid in, it no longer exists because of covering up all the budgets of the past four decades.  Instead of allowing that top rate to rise again to pay them back, todays gazillionaires wants to cut those benefits.

    Social Security is not a charity.  It is a debt owed.  It hardly seems fair to penalize the people who have been carrying government expenses for four decades.  

     

  5. GOP Aims To Let Wall Street Take Over Social Security

    Jamie, there is a war against Social Security brewing. Sen. Mike Lee summed up the latest attack in a series of alarming posts on X this week (all re-posted by Elon Musk with high praise).

    His opening line:

    Of all the deceptive sales techniques the U.S. government has used on the American people, one of them — the Social Security Act — gets far too little attention. Buckle up because this is a wild ride.

    He goes on to call Social Security a “bill of goods”, saying that what we pay into to it is not “our money” but just tax revenue “gobbled up by the government itself”.

    His solution? “Americans should be able to invest in their own future”.

    In GOP speak that means turning over the money to Wall Street, their longtime goal — but now they’ve got the muscle to do it.

    Read his posts here:
    https://x.com/BasedMikeLee/status/1863771172485104124

  6. https://www.foxbusiness.com/healthcare/cvs-pulls-executive-photos-from-website-amid-manhunt-unitedhealthcare-ceo-killer

    “CVS Health has pulled photos of its executives off its website as the manhunt for UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s killer continues. UnitedHealthcare’s leadership page has also been taken down, with the URL now redirected to the company’s homepage.”
     
    Maybe change the way you do business because you are causing a lot of pain, and there are desperately angry folks out there…and this is ‘Merica, so guns.
     
     
     

  7. MAGAts want to privatize everything.
    Now is the time for Dems to make a lot of noise about single payer healthcare…not health insurance.  CARE.  
    Call it “Medicare for All” so folks understand it…and look at how Denmark does things.    
    Broadcast/free stream Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko,” about healthcare around the world.  
    Wound-licking time is over.   Start making big noise about what Orange Adolf & The Oligarchs (worst band, ever) are going to do…and make it impossible for them to carry out a single thing they try to do to unravel our democracy.
     
    FIGHT! 

  8. Ivy…  so sorry for your loss…  glad you’ve come back to this site.
     
    I LOVE color…   it was obvious to anyone who walked into my craft booth back when I was doing multiple fairs.
    The joke I would tell people that would exclaim about all that color was…. ” yeah… I’m not into people who think brown is a festive color.”   It always got them laughing and they would hang around longer and sometimes buy a scarf.

  9. Social Security was originally designed so that the majority of people wouldn’t live long enough to collect. This mean there were funds for widows and orphans of the WW II war dead.   Now that life expectancy has increased substantially and there are fewer war dead from the smaller coterie of Korea, Viet Nam and Iraq/Afghanistan etc. it then expanded to cover long term disabled.  

    There could possibly be some room for cuts to beneficiaries, but it would make more sense to tax wealth, stock trades etc rather than just relying on Income Tax to cover the ballooning shortfall.  

    If all stocks were taxed at the rate of a half penny per share traded, the government would collect 1.5 billion per year.  

  10. Yes, Elizabeth Warren has a plan to secure Social Security.   Tax the rich a tiny bit.  Oligarchs aren’t having it.  

    It really must be a sickness with them, to have more money than you could ever need and just hoard it for yourself.    Not caring about anyone but yourself, from cradle to grave.

    And, yeah, the oligarchs will all die, too, and they can’t take it with them.   They will be remembered for what they built, but on the backs of exploited employees (and with the benefit of government subsidies and infrastructure).  History will not be kind to them.   

    Their legacy will be greed and inhumanity.

  11. Just back from Birmingham. It was colder than Colorado.
    Thank you BID, Renee, Pogo for your kind words. In my last conversation with my daughter in the hospital with no suspicion she would be taken from us the following day, I asked her, what do you want us to tell people? Without a second of hesitation, she said, the truth, of course. 

  12. I’ve been hearing about privatizing social security since I was in HR in the 90s. Maybe it will happen this time since the gaggle of cabinet oligarchs have their greedy eyes on the money.
    A similar thing was done a while back in Maryland with the teachers pension fund. They were all happy to get fat checks when “Uncle Louie” gave them their money – made up of their accumulated contributions and interest – back. Not so happy when retirement time came, the original money was gone, and their puny checks showed up from the new and improved plan.

  13. BID

    I just read a former comment you made about CEO’s and laughed.  When I worked at the US Chamber of Commerce we had a joke called the CEO intelligence test.  There was an older meeting room with rather complicated directions to reach.

    1.  Front desk

    2.  Elevator

    3.  4th floor reception

    4.  Down left to door.

    5.  Landing with stair down to left or door across landing into the room.

    If you entered, got instructions and immediately found the room, you were a secretary.  If you got to the 4th floor but needed help you were middle management.  If you were confused by the landing you were a VP.  If you stopped on the first floor and demanded an escort, you were the CEO.

  14. LoL.  Yep, Elon saying CEOs create wealth is BS. The leaves at the top will wither and die without the roots.  Elon is so far up his own butt, it’s ridiculous.  He inherited wealth and bought Tesla, Starlink and Twitter. He’s not a genius.  He’s just evil. 

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