Month: May 2025

Don’t Care

Corporate Fuckery, Retailing

Of course we saw this coming:

Walmart is warning it plans to raise prices due to tariffs, despite the fact April’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) showing President Donald Trump’s tariffs did not affect consumer prices.

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon issued the update during an earnings call on Thursday, stating that they will try to keep prices “low as possible,” but the reality is, they are unable to absorb all of the costs due to tariffs.

“But given the magnitude of the tariffs, even at the reduced levels announced this week, we aren’t able to absorb all the pressure given the reality of narrow retail margins,” McMillon stated, adding, “The higher tariffs will result in higher prices.” 

Utter bullshit.  As far as I can see, the tariffs may have affected the price of Chinese goods, but if anything, the goods made in places like Thailand, Taiwan and Pakistan should be reduced with all those other countries getting lower or non-existent tariffs.  So yeah, some of Walmart’s prices on Chinese merchandise should go up, but what they’ll do is raise all their prices to minimize the much-higher Chinese prices.  It’s called “spreading the load” in retail-speak.

Don’t care, because I’ll just stop buying non-foods at Walmart until things quieten down, and buy only the foodstuffs there that I absolutely cannot get anywhere else.  Last time I looked, that’s only one product, and amazingly, it’s made in the U.S.A. anyway.

Besides, if Walmart were truly committed to keeping prices lower, they’d improve their efficiency by ditching their fucking ultra-woke DEI practices — which would never have been instituted in the first place had Sam Walton still been around.  But they’re not going to do that, are they?

Feel free to do what you think is proper in your own circumstances.

But for me?  Toodle-oo, WallyWorld.

And So It Begins

Drive Time

Seems as though I’ve opened up a big ol’ can of Murkin worms in posting about the ’66 Mercury Comet last week.

Reader Brad_In_IL wrote:

On the way home from work the other day, I was passed by what I’d call “Purty Car”. And what was that fine ride you ask? Something of an American Classic. Twas a 1971 Buick Skylark convertible:

Fucking hell, that’s an ugly barge of a car.  Sorry, Brad — but my taste runs towards this kind of 1971 convertible:

That’s the Fiat Dino, with its Ferrari-inspired 2.46-liter V6 engine.

And Reader Clem C. added his experience:

We owned a ’91 Buick Reatta coupe.  Maybe you’ve heard of it.  I look forward to your take on the car.  We enjoyed it.

Actually, I don’t find that Reatta too appalling.  Although much larger, as is the American way, it compares quite favorably, shape-wise, to the 1990 Toyota MR2:

…although the actual performance of the Buick, when compared to that of the “Mister Two”, makes one understand why Buick only made the Reatta in small numbers for two years while Toyota made a zillion MR2 models over two decades.

(Actually, I prefer the chunkier 80s-style MR2:

…but that’s just me.  I’d drive one today, in original condition.  YMMV.)

In Comments to last week’s post, Reader Don C. spoke of his love for the brawny ’71 PontiaG GTO convertible:

…which would be, I agree, a better choice than that overpriced Mercury Comet, although I still think it’s hideously bloated.  But #MuscleCar, so it can be forgiven.

Reader Topcat loved him his Chevy Nova SS back in the day:

…which I think is easily one of the ugliest cars ever made, but I’ll accept the #MuscleCar excuse here too.

Although I have to say that the more I look at these things, the more I prefer my compact and nimbler Euro cars…

…and I’m not even talking about Ferraris, Lamborghinis or Maseratis.  That’s a 1971 Alfa Romeo Giulia GT 1750cc.

This topic is kinda fun, guys.  Keep them coming.

And tomorrow begins a weekly series of my personal experiences with American cars.

Cry Me A River

Marxists, Politics

Via Insty:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said New York City’s proposed $1 billion cut from the police department budget tiptoes around demands from activists who are asking for a reduced police presence.

Though the plan proposed by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) cuts one-sixth of the New York Police Department (NYPD) budget, activists note that much of it would be transferred to other city departments, including the Department of Education, where it could pay for police in schools. Activists have advocated for removing officers from schools altogether.

“Defunding police means defunding police,” the congresswoman said in a statement. “It does not mean budget tricks or funny math. It does not mean moving school police officers from the NYPD budget to the Department of Education’s budget so the exact same police remain in schools.”

—The Hill, June 30th, 2020, at the height of left’s riot, arson, and looting season.

How it’s going: The Fruits of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Labors: A 70% increase in Violent Crime in Her District.

Last year, AOC was hoping to be named to the top spot on the powerful Oversight Committee. Pelosi blocked her ascension,  proving to AOC that moving up in the Democratic Party will be harder than she thought.

Through all of this political maneuvering to further her career, AOC has forgotten the people who got her to where she is: her long-suffering constituents. From 2019 to 2025, murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and auto theft have jumped 70%.

You might claim that a congresswoman’s actions or inactions have little to do with the crime rate. That would be true if AOC hadn’t been a prominent voice in the “Defund the Police” movement.

“The 115th Precinct, which also serves part of Roosevelt Avenue in addition to Jackson Heights, East Elmhurst, and north Corona, saw major offenses rise by 85%” reports the New York Post.

Ocasio-Cortez’s district takes in two police districts that are among the worst in the city. And some residents are pointing the finger at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“She’s not doing shit. She doesn’t live in the neighborhood, she doesn’t care,” said Elmhurst resident Guadelupe Alvarez, who has lived in the neighborhood her entire life.

Here’s a quick question for “Elmhurst resident Guadelupe Alvarez”:

Did you vote for AOC in the past couple/three elections?

If you did, then you got what you wanted.

If you didn’t, then all the other people who did are also getting what they deserve*.

Vote for Commies, get government run according to Communist principles. 

Tell your sob story to someone who cares.

*Or, as H.L. Mencken once put it:  “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Secret Fears

Health

I am surprisingly sympathetic to this story from writer Bryony Gordon:

What if I had done something awful to someone on the Tube the evening before and blanked it out because I was secretly a psychopath? Had I accidentally sent my child to school with a water bottle full of bleach? Had I emailed a terrible, abusive message to her teacher and deleted it from my sent items to hide the evidence? 

The “blanked out” thing is what caught my attention.

Many years ago, I was afflicted with terrible PTSD dreams.  I mean the kind of dreams where you wake up shaking in terror — all horribly violent, all involving death (my own) — and they happened often, sometimes three times a week.  And they were also repetitive, revolving around being attacked by lions, and getting into a street fight being two examples.

But they weren’t the worst.  I actually learned to cope with those dreams after a while, by simply recognizing them as they began to unfold, and forcing myself to wake up before they got any worse.  Now, I only get them maybe once a year, and they’re easily overcome.

The worst of my dreams, however, is where I become two characters in a murder mystery:  a cop or investigator of some kind on the track of a serial killer, a killer whose murders are gruesome and revolting.  And part of the investigation is my seeming ability to visualize the murders as they’re taking place — as portrayed in the movie The Eyes Of Laura Mars. 

After a while (in the dream), the realization would begin to dawn that the reason I could visualize the gruesome murders was that I was the murderer, and this manifested itself in the dreadful fear of discovery.

I would wake up, and so realistic were the dreams that in process of awakening I would ask myself if I actually was a murderer in real life and had somehow managed to get away with the killing.  The feeling of horror (at being that kind of person and of being discovered) was as strong in my semi-wakened state as it had been in the dream.

It would take me a long time, as much as an hour of rational thinking, to dispel those fears.

Fortunately, I haven’t had one of those dreams in a couple of years.  Maybe they’re gone — I certainly hope so.

I cannot imagine that feeling of dread happening to me in an awakened state.  It must be awful, just terrible;  and that’s why I’m sympathetic towards Bryony Gordon.

Nobody deserves to have the mind play such foul tricks on them.

An afterthought:  many times, these kinds of dreams and hallucinations are caused by psychotropic drugs, taken to suppress things like feelings of panic or depression.  Mine weren’t, because I’ve never taken such drugs;  that’s why they’re all the more terrifying.

I’ve tried to analyze why I get them.  The most plausible explanation is that when writing fiction, writers have to envision the plot from both sides of the mystery so that the plot doesn’t have holes in it.  And even if I’m not in the process of writing a book, I’m always developing plots and storylines in my head.  I haven’t done any such writing for a while, now, and maybe that’s why I haven’t had those dreams recently.

I just hope that writing about them today doesn’t cause a re-occurrence.