That 'Hunter Biden's laptop' story was/is falling apart comically mere hours after being reported. It's still like the top 12 stories on FoxNews.com of course.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-wh...arre-interview

The Post is the trashy outlet that Fox uses to test run and break stories while trying to maintain the high ground for journalism (as much as that exists at Fox.)

The Real Origins of the Religious Right - POLITICO Magazine

This is a really interesting article. SOme stuff in there on a timeline even before I was politically aware. Where I grew up, Carter was nothing but a punchline to a joke, southerners were totally made fun of. Especially building steam for the Reagan era.

And this was BFE Indiana

I paid good money for Russian disinformation...

and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

You didn't dial Yakov Smirnov's 1-900 Russian Joke-a-day number did you?

But Fox News loves them this story - all over the front page.

SI

So here's my only thought on this Hunter Biden e-mail deep fake or whatever this is:

I see lots of commentators clutching their pearls about Facebook and Twitter banning accounts or fact-checking/suppressing this story.

And I'm like this: if it's okay to make naked displays of raw power on your side (i.e., ramming your Supreme Court justice through), then you also have to allow that it's okay for the other side to do the same. If the liberals control the media and the big tech companies you've come to rely on, that's *your* problem. You put all of your eggs in the political basket and ignored the cultural/tech/media baskets.

If it's okay for conservative business owners to say conservative things or hold conservative positions in their business models and get a pass (lookin' at you, Chik-fil-A), then it's okay for liberal companies and business owners to apply their positions to their business models.

It's like none of these people have ever gone for a Cultural victory in Civ, for fuck's sake.

another email story...hard pass...

Mitch McConnell Laughs When Confronted On Senate Inaction Over Coronavirus | HuffPost

I expected his lizard tongue to come zipping out

In Soviet Russia, the emails find you.

I guess I am to the point where I am just grasping for silver linings after four years of this. But thanks to Trump being so repulsive and so anti-immigration, support for increasing legal immigration is the highest it has been since Gallup started recording. And, for the first time ever, it is higher than support for decreasing legal immigration.

Leave aside the debate over the cultural impact of increased immigration. (I think that more heterogeneity is great and should be encouraged. But I understand that it a hot button issue for a lot of people).

The economic impact of massively increased immigration is an unalloyed good and could lead to another century of American dominance. Simply put. We. Are. Not. Having. Enough. Babies. In a generation, we will not have enough working age people to support all of us in retirement. GDP will shrivel. Other than climate change, it is the biggest problem facing us that no one want to do anything about. Massive immigration would solve it. Congress could pass one law that would do more to grow the economy than anything else they could do. But they haven't been able to because of all of the "They'll take your job" rhetoric out there confusing people. Now, maybe, hopefully, Trump has poisoned the anti-immigrant position so much that we have a chance of actually doing some real good here.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx

See also Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration by Bryan Caplan

Thank you :)
:D

The speed with which this insane conspiracy about Seal Team 6 and Osama bin Laden has planted roots among conservatives is shocking and deprssing.

QAnon is an abhorrent wart on the ass of America, but even worse are the idiots that buy a word they say. I hope the source of this trash is identified and rooted out at some point.

If you want a glimpse into the world of Q and how it hits families, I've been lurking at r/QAnonCasualties. You can get a feel for just how people are being sucked in and families pulverized. It's disheartening, but the support that people have there is very good. This ties in with the fear and longing for a powerful leader article that I posted earlier. This is a very real subset of our society. This isn't going anywhere, anytime soon. It very well could consume the R party and all right leaning media.

Nailed it

That is a sad indictment on the ability of so many people in this society to be independent thinkers and apply simple logic and common sense. It is like Jonestown on a national scale.

Sounds like Fascism to me.

https://marker.medium.com/forget-shu...y-3062e94c122e

In what should be a surprise to no one who has been paying attention, a bunch of MAGA governors waving their magic wand and declaring their economy "OPEN" didn't do shit.

The economy is crumbling because there's a contagious virus out there that gives people "COVID fog" even if they manage to not die from it, so a bunch of people are rightly choosing not to engage in behaviors that make them more likely to catch it.

Unless and until we get the virus under control, the economy will remain hobbled.

I saw yesterday some polling where 70% of people said they were uncomfortable going to movies or using public transportation and 60% said the same about malls and restaurants.

At least the government will support public transportation. Malls, restaurants, theaters - there is going to be some big closures and changes. Things had been trending away from indoor malls to outdoor ones - that may accelerate.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Donald Trump Says China Will Pay for Stimulus Bill: 'They're the Ones That Caused This Problem'

I'm sure they'll pay right after Mexico pays for the wall.

When nothing else works keep playing the hits.

Ain't no one going to a Trump rally to hear shit off his new album.

Well, he's got a new album to promote, but no new songs yet. But two weeks from now, he's gonna blow your socks off with the greatest song you've ever heard.

I'm confused - Trump went out of his way to secure a national TV audience opposite Biden to humiliate him, and now he's back to playing victim about a town hall he asked for and got? Is he having second thoughts about his ability to out-draw Biden? Or did he find out they rejected the campaign's insistence to allow them to choose who sits in the audience?

"I'm being set up tonight," Trump says of his NBC town hall, says its parent company is "CONcast, C-O-Ncast," and that the network is "home of Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd."

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 15, 2020

Also - Sleepy Eyes? Really? That's the best he's got now?

He is literally so stupid he doesn't know when to shut up. There are legit questions about the death of Reinoehl and President Moron says this out loud.

Trump: We sent in the US Marshals, took 15 minutes and it was over... They knew who he was, they didn’t want to arrest him and 15 minutes that ended pic.twitter.com/fJA5BsJVeF

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) October 15, 2020

There's going to be a huge commercial real estate bust, or, rather, an acceleration of what was already going on. The economy 10 years from now is going to look totally different than it does now in many dimensions - there are going to be far fewer competitors in the few sectors that hadn't already consolidated into monopolies/oligopolies since the 80s. Consumers are going to be totally screwed but it's going to take a while to notice.

Then again, I'm not sure what the economy next year looks like. I'm still a bit concerned with the prediction I saw back in March or April: "The economy is already dead - we just don't know it yet"

SI

It's an incredible time we live in when Barr isn't corrupt enough and is likely out the door if Trump gets a 2nd term.

I'm sure that trump will be super excited to hear this:

Rupert Murdoch Predicts a Landslide Win for Biden

Somehow my state government has a record surplus, 10 times what was projected before COVID.

I'm sure it won't look as good next fiscal year. And there's certainly been a lot of businesses which have closed forever. But others have adapted (we have new pedestrian-only areas with outdoor dining downtown that they're going to make permanent), real estate in the urban parts of the state is booming, population is increasing, unemployment is back to pre-COVID levels.

We still have restrictions in Boise and most everyone wears masks, though they're rare in the rural parts of the state. New COVID cases are about at their peak (so far), but deaths and hospitalizations are low.

I guess in a state like this we didn't have a lot of regular tourism to lose, or a lot of big events to cancel. Meanwhile tourism from neighboring states to rural areas and small towns here seems to have gone up this year, as people are taking more road trips. Yellowstone just had its biggest September ever. Places like McCall and Sun Valley in Idaho had huge summers too, and it was impossible to find a campground or cabin the state and national parks.

He's guaranteed to have a bigger audience. Biden is on ABC and ABC streaming while Trump is on NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, and all those streaming options. Trump's just permanently aggrieved.

I saw a prediction from one of the big financial companies that business travel will be back to pre-COVID levels...

in 2024.

When big companies have to cut back, travel is always first on the chopping block. And that's not even factoring in a possible ongoing health situation as a reason not to travel.

My wifes company is booming and they still have not only cut all travel, but also are organizing to go to a work from anywhere model and will save millions on real estate.

MSNBC is showing it. TV guide is telling me that Shark Tank is on CNBC

I wonder if Trump expected to hand-pick the audience and NBC insisted on having at least a few undecided/Dem voter ask questions. That might be why he's calling it a set-up.

That's what I was thinking. He moved so quick on it that the details were just being ironed out today.

My company is planning for 2023 right now.

Did Christie die yet?

Things might have changed. What I posted was the deal from yesterday.

When I worked at AIG, I was ahead on the work from home model. I would not move for the job so I lived an hour away and worked from home 3-4 days a week. When Superstorm Sandy hit NYC, AIG learned quickly about remote work. Then they scaled back their real estate leases in Manhattan and had people hotelling in the remaining office space. Many companies are basically going through the same forced realization of savings thanks to Covid. I ended taking a job in downtown Louisville (same drive as AIG which was across the river in Indiana) and I'm doing the same thing here as well.

Well, maybe Trump was right - he set himself up on this Town Hall.

Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk

Man, the first time he gets a tough question he completely talks down to the female moderator.

This exchange was all I need for tonight’s belly laugh.

Guthrie then asked Trump why he had retweeted this week a random Twitter user who suggested an unfounded conspiracy that former president Barack Obama and Biden had killed the Navy SEAL team that had killed Osama bin Laden to cover up the fact that it had actually killed a body double.
“I know nothing about it,” Trump said. “That was a retweet. That was an opinion from somebody. I’ll put it out there — people can decide.”
“I don’t get that,” Guthrie replied. “You’re the president, not somebody’s crazy uncle."

But is the economy dead, or is the economy as we knew it dead... - there's definitely a lot of real negative effects, but I think it's also greatly accelerated trends towards work from home/telecommuting as companies that are still by & large run by an older generation are forced to do it & realize oh shoot it's actually not that bad, and even has some benefits!

Definitely would not want to own downtown commercial real estate in major cities, though I think there is an opening there to branch out to whoever jumps on it first. Turn commercial real estate towers in to residential in cities like Boston/NY/SF? Turn low rise development into green space (or better transportation?) COVID is going away, there will always be a market where people want to live in a walkable neighborhood and that was priced out in the bigger cities the last 20-30 years, I wonder if that comes back & you start to see in a Boston where younger/single people live in the city, older people/families live in the suburbs, but even the whitest collar jobs migrate more to the 95 corridor.

I think the fact that the unemployment rate has gone down five consecutive months and is better now than a lot of predictions thought it would be by the end of 2021 is significant there. We'll see what the winter holds but I think economically we've done much better than I expected.