CSotD: Give the people a light …

A bit of Black Friday humor from Frazz (AMS) to mark the day.

I’m having a little trouble with shopping options, given, as Frazz notes, that the era of the shopping mall is pretty well dead.

It sure didn’t last long, given the investment involved, but, then, it was a dubious concept to begin with: The developers wanted to create a climate-controlled replacement for downtown, but, then, didn’t want (young) people to just hang out there without spending anything.

Old people have always complained about young people hanging out. When the public libraries opened at the start of the 20th century, they were hailed as a place for young people, but, it quickly developed, only if they didn’t talk or make noise.

I also saw a complaining piece in the 20s about kids hanging out in the grand lobby of the federal-style post office, and another in the 40s about them congregating on streets and impeding decent folk from passing by.

So in the 80s, they built giant, bright, inviting shopping malls — replacing the neon caves they’d built in the 70s — and promptly put their mall cops in charge of running off the kids, who, by the way, were their chief source of labor.

Now, as she suggests, shopping has mostly gone on-line, and I’ve just made the mistake of buying something, so that I’m getting three or four emails a day from the same merchant reminding me that they have a sale on.

It’s enough to make me renounce geEzer-Mail myself, though my immediate solution is to wait for my package to arrive and then add a spam filter to make sure I never, ever hear from them again.

Not sure that’s their marketing goal, but it’s what they’ve achieved.

The good Black Friday news this year has been that the Great Resignation is making stores cut back their hours generally, which is a return to the Good Old Days, and I note that several were closed on Thanksgiving, ostensibly so their families could enjoy the holiday but mostly, I suspect, because they couldn’t get anyone to work.

I don’t care how it happened.

 

Juxtaposition of He Can’t Win

(Michael Ramirez – Creators)

(Matt Wuerker – Politico)

Joe Biden shook loose a little oil from the reserves and persuaded several of our allies to do the same, and now all the people who blamed him for doing nothing about gas prices are blaming him for doing something about them.

Ramirez either has no idea how gasoline prices work or is simply not interested in commenting on the facts, because shutting down the pipeline that Obama had shut down but Trump resurrected that isn’t bringing in oil that we’re going to turn into gasoline for domestic distribution and which wouldn’t have been completed for a very long time in any case has f-all to do with current gas prices.

And Biden is hardly the first president to negotiate with OPEC about their production quotas.

But who cares? The point is not to comment on reality but to sustain the drumbeat:

Biden is a failure, Biden is a failure, Biden is a failure.

That’s not exclusive to conservatives: Wuerker is dreaming if he thinks the move will result in “cheap gas” rather than a temporary sea anchor on current price increases until production — slowed by low demand during the pandemic — can catch up.

But he joins in the drum beat by accusing Biden of doing what people want him to do, which is a shameful thing indeed.

You snot-nosed little sumsabitches should be glad you’re not lining up to buy gas on odd and even days.

 

 

Meanwhile, elsewhere in our idiocracy

I like Kirk Walters (KFS)‘s general thesis here, though he surely can’t think the people in ignorant denial about the Rittenhouse verdict are the same people in ignorant denial of the coronavirus.

As noted before, I didn’t expect Rittenhouse to be convicted on all counts or to get off on all counts, but I did say from the start that it wasn’t an easy case, and what I did watch of the trial brought that home.

I also missed coverage of the Arbery murder trial, which left me puzzled about why the jury was out so long: Apparently what tied them up was the number of charges and details in each one, not any confusion about what had happened.

As Walters says, it’s a lot easier to have strong, certain opinions when you haven’t bothered to find out what’s going on.

It’s always been that way, but we’ve learned to weaponize ignorance:

Lauren Boebert was campaigning back home on a bigoted joke about Ilhan Omar and she doesn’t confine her astonishing sense of humor to enemies. She also challenged Madison Cawthorn to a foot race, and he’s supposedly on her side.

 

And Randy Bish reminds us that, when he was censured for joking about killing a US Representative, Congressman Paul Gosar compared himself to an American politician who was never actually censured but whose big mouth got him shot and killed, though not without inspiring a smash hit on Broadway.

 

(If you’re like me, you may be having trouble remembering who’s who. Here’s a handy guide, in alphabetical order.)

You may also need a reminder that Al Franken’s party forced him to resign over a joke photo taken back when he was a comedian. Which helps distinguish Democrats from Republicans.

Ah well. As Eukiah Heaph said, “Give the people a light and they’ll follow it anywhere.”

 

Emigration may not be a solution

Cathy Wilcox suggests that there is no political coreolis effect that sweeps everything in the opposite direction south of the Equator. Apparently life in Australia isn’t all that different than life up here, and only the names and faces change, not the issues and attitudes.

 

Though David Pope holds out the same hope as we’ve got up here, but with a far more optimistic view of the Silent Majority than I’m afraid I’ve got.

We could use a Jacqui Lambie or two.

Or maybe less poll-watching and on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other coverage from our media, and more exposure like this for the fighters we’ve got:

 

(Though people like her can’t get in until we get the money out.)