I really don’t like Newsom much, but I have to admire his Trump-trolling skill.

McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said the “two-tier economy” was a major factor in the fast-food giant’s decision to revive its “Extra Value Meal” combos last month.

“Traffic for lower-income consumers is down double digits,” Kempczinski told CNBC in September. “We needed to step in.”

Cynically unsurprising that they decided they needed to “step in” by offering a menu of lower priced garbage instead of by paying their executives less and their employees more.

Clearly the underlying philosophy here isn’t “let’s respond to the increasing wealth gap by working for a solution,” but “let’s respond to the increasing wealth gap by figuring out ways to continue taking advantage of poor people even as they keep getting poorer.”

It wasn’t that long ago that I was generally too cynical. Now I can barely even keep up.

In the spirit of the Defense Department being renamed the War Department, the Environmental Protection Agency needs to be renamed the Environmental Destruction Agency.

I’ve long believed that Trump himself is not a fascist, mostly because his brain just doesn’t work that way. He’s an ego-driven, sociopathic petty tyrant who just wants his own way, exactly as a four-year-old throwing a tantrum in a grocery store wants his own way. It’s not so much that he’s not a fascist as that the organized thinking and ongoing attention necessary to hold to any sort of ideology is simply beyond him.

And that in turn would mean that the actual problem is that he’s surrounded by sincere fascists (and other assorted opportunists) who are whispering in his ear and directing his limited attention to whatever will serve their interests. And since he’s psychologically and intellectually stunted, it generally works.

It’s easy to see what happened here too - a woman was nice to him, so he wanted to believe her. It’s really just that simple. Like most manbabies, there’s nothing that will turn him into mush faster than a woman being nice to him.

Which probably means it’s about time for Laura Loomer to pay another visit to the White House.

Imagine being so invested in bullshit that you have to censor any and all terms that contradict it.

Really, it’s no wonder that Trump and his cronies and minions are so filled with rage - they’re in a constant state of extreme cognitive dissonance.

And it makes sense in a way that they direct their rage at “woke” people and positions. From their limited, animalistic points of view, all they understand is that when they think of “woke,” they’re filled with rage. They aren’t conscious enough to understand that the source of the rage isn’t the positions or the people, but the cognitive dissonance they experience when they cling to their opposition to simple and obvious truths.

It has to be a miserable way to live, and if they weren’t an existential threat to me, my family and friends, and society as a whole, I’d feel sorry for them.

Yeah right.

The only question is which specific excuse(s) the Democrats are going to trot out after they do the bidding of their wealthy/corporate donors and cave. Again.

Just your daily reminder that the President of the United States is a deranged lunatic.

We actually live in a world in which a corrupt psychopath overseeing a genocide unironically tries to characterize his opposition to the concession of simple human rights to the people he’s mass-murdering as some sort of moral high ground.

Humanity doesn’t need advances in technology - it needs advances in mental health.

I really don’t think there’s a single threat facing humanity that can’t be traced back to the fact that there are so many people in positions of power and influence who are so obviously so dangerously mentally ill that they shouldn’t even be allowed among the general public.

Sort of.

I mean - yes - corporations do it, but for them it’s a simple business strategy. It’s not a matter of whether they want to believe it or not - it’s just that that information getting out would hurt their profits and nothing matters more than their profits.

But for right-wingers, it’s some sort of weird cognitively dissonant delusional dogma thing - like if they can successfully hide the evidence to the contrary, that’ll somehow make their beliefs actually true. They’ll be able to face the new day, confident that their beliefs are true, because after all, nobody can prove otherwise, right?

That’s so perfectly typicsl for the right.

It’s really very simple - if the evidence shows that one of their beliefs is wrong, then their principles dictate that they have no choice but to… bury the evidence.

So… the same plan as before.

Of course he would - he jerks off to fantasies of mass murder.

The chance that this Supreme Court is going to rule against Trump is not coincidentally exactly equal to the amount of integrity its conservarive members possess - zero.

This weak diversion isn’t out there to try to sway their decision - their decision is a foregone conclusion. The point is just to provide a readymade rationale for some number of people, so they can excuse the Supreme Court’s inevitable betrayal of law, precedent and the Constitution with “Well, they had to do that - imagine how much money blah blah blah…”

And besides, if money really was an issue, the administration could easily make up the shortfall simply by making billionaires pay something approaching their fair share of taxes.

Of course he did - that’s the sort of service they’ve paid him for.

I don’t think it’s so much “believed” as “hoped.”

Specifically, people hoped that the staggeringly dangerous and destructive deranged megalomaniac currently destroying the US had died, since at this point, in a world in which virtually none of the politicians, government officials or journalists who are actually in a position to do anything to at least slow the US’s Trump-led sprint to neo-feudalism can be bothered to lift a finger, him dying is about the only hope we billions of ordinary prople have.

But of course, the NYT is at the forefront of the journalists who can’t be bothered to actually demonstrate any principles or integrity, so all we get from them is this bit of sycophantic pabulum.

Ah.

I’m betting that, like all too many people, he’s a binarist.

That seems to be the reasoning error at the heart of miasma theory.

The thing is that there’s some small measure of truth to it. Good health really does, to some degree, depend on good nutrition, good hygiene, a sound immune system and so on. But the way in which those things actually matter is the degree to which they help people fight off sickness (or to which their absence makes people more prone to sickness). The ultimate cause is, rather obviously, germs, viruses, etc., but we’re better able to resist them if we’re generally healthier, enjoying good nutrition and good hygiene and so on.

But that’s not the way Kennedy sees it. His simple-minded take on it is wholly binaristic, and essentially reactionary to boot. He can’t or won’t grasp the nuance of sickness being caused by germs and viruses and bacteria and things like poor nutrition and poor hygiene making us more susceptible to them - to him, it has to be entirely one or the other. And apparently mostly because disreputable people profit undeservedly from pretty standard capitalistic manipulations of health care based on germ theory, he’s decided that germ theory is entirely false and miasma theory thus entirely true.

So maybe not so much a lunatic as a shallow, confused snd deeply invested binaristic contrarian. Though I think a case could be made that that’s not far enough removed from lunatic to make any meaningful difference.

Kennedy’s an interesting case.

With the rest of Trump’s appointees, it’s tough to suss out exactly what they’re about. They’re generally some combination of corrupt, ideologically blinded, power-hungry, narcissistic and emotionally unstable, but it’s hard to be sure just how much of which they are.

But with Kennedy, it’s simple - he’s a raving lunatic.

I don’t mean to imply that Christians are necessarily white nationalists.

But I’m not the least bit surprised that the people who are supporting her self-evidently fancy themselves Christians.

As of Tuesday, she had raised over $800,000 on the Christian fundraising platform GiveSendGo

Figures.

Leave it to the Christians to support a racist who bullied a child.

Netanyahu pressed on with his attacks on Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in an interview broadcast Thursday, denouncing Canberra’s “appeasement” of terror groups and their supporters in the West.

He also vowed to go through with plans to take over all of Gaza militarily even if Hamas agrees to a ceasefire and hostage release deal.

Rarely see unintentional irony that vivid on that sort of scale.

Rather obviously, the actual “problem” is that after far too many years of appeasing the most violent and deadly terrorist organization in the Middle East, Australia has finally stopped.

And now the head of that terrorist organization is pissed.