If ever you utter the words “election fraud” and are met with eyerolls, looks of pity and so on, feel free to repeat the content of this excellent historical infographic on the topic from Doug Ross. A sample:
And all those points are amplified, one by one.
Better still, the actions described are not only irrefutable — if anyone even attempts to refute them, their motives are to be questioned — they are all documented fact.
Apparently, Keef’s old Dino is on the market:
There’s no way I’d ever pay over $400 grand for a Dino — even if it is the car of my dreams — and especially not if it’s been home to Keef’s hairy ass. (Because you just know he drove it whilst naked, at least once.)
In reading an otherwise-interesting article about the looming collapse in commercial real estate, I hit a speed bump at top speed:
Yes, yes, yes I know that it’s the accepted accountancy practice to put the most recent number at the left of a chart, but it simply supports my thesis that non-grammarians (e.g. cops and accountants) should never be allowed to dictate literacy practices.
To wit: we go from A to B, from top to bottom, from bad to worse and similar fashion in any number of reading customs and idioms… because in the Western alphabet — in which this article was written — we read from left to right (and not to right from left). We are not Japanese, or Arabs, or Israelis, who are perfectly free to read diagonally across a page if they so wish, using their chicken-scratch pictograms, hieroglyphs or alphabets, but the language of commerce and industry is English.
Except when it comes to accountants.
So when I read the above chart — and I must remind Readers that reading charts was my métier for well over three decades — I couldn’t see what the fuss was about, until I realized that the fucking thing was written backwards.
I never understood nor cared for this accounting practice, which in non-accounting trend data makes the very next chart in the article perfectly comprehensible:
…simply by virtue of the fact that it follows the accepted timeline format whereby the first data point falls to the left, and the latest data point falls to the right of the trend.
Why accountants have to be different simply beats me.
Once I got past that, the article was extremely interesting:
One major hurdle for CRE (Commercial Real Estate — Kim) space is that “more than 50% of the $2.9 trillion in commercial mortgages will need to be renegotiated in the next 24 months when new lending rates are likely to be up by 350 to 450 basis points,” Lisa Shalett, chief investment officer for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, wrote in a note to clients. Shalett expects a “peak-to-trough CRE price decline of as much as 40%, worse than in the Great Financial Crisis.”
But, says BoA, we don’t have to worry:
Bank of America analysts expect challenges in the CRE space but noted, “They are manageable and do not represent a systemic risk to the US economy.”
…unless, of course, you’re a small bank, whose CRE investment exposure (from memory, anywhere from 10-15% of total assets) is typically much higher than that of GlobalMegaBankCorp (5% or less).
Fun times we live in, what? And not helped by stupid grammar.
A Texas woman was left with brutal injuries after she was viciously attacked by both a snake and a hawk while mowing her lawn.
Peggy Jones told how she’d been on a tractor mower when the snake fell out of the sky and landed on her at her home in Silsbee.
As it began to tighten around her arm, a hawk then swooped down, and began clawing at a defenseless Jones in an effort to grab its prey.
Beat THAT, Australia.
Here’s something that gets up my nose (#2,713):
Listen, fuckwits: “Türkiye” is what they call their country in their language; “Turkey” is how we spell and pronounce it, just as we change most place names to make them easier for our wooden Anglo vocal cords to pronounce.
I wouldn’t care, except of course that this isn’t done for every country (Deutschland, Russkiya, España etc.), and all they’re doing here is pandering to the Turko-Muzzies. If you’re going to do this kind of thing, at least try to be consistent.
Here’s a little oeuvre which deserves airing, despite the appalling grammar: Indiana Jones And The Last Franchise.
Even though I was not familiar with about 60% of his cultural allusions, the writing was enough to engage me. After all, you don’t need to be a military strategist to understand that combat is awful, bloody and destructive. I especially liked this little turn:
And, if you ever haul yourself out of bed and find that you have little to smile about… just look up Disney on Google News. It may not bring you joy, but the schadenfreude will most likely bring a smile to your face. At least a little grin.
That happens early in the piece, and it gets better. Here’s the pre-climax exposition:
My great-grandfather was a mason. A brick-layer, I mean, not the… well, you know the other type. He was a master of his craft. Back in the 20’s, his skill was in such high-demand that he was paid to travel the world and build structures in places like Shanghai and Glasgow that stand to this day. In an age of cheap, third-world labor, it can be a bit difficult to imagine the artistry, skill, and talent of a good mason. There’s more to it than slopping mortar onto a brick and stacking another on top. You just don’t see a lot of work like what he was doing, these days. Men like him labored to build cities not just for themselves, but their descendants. They spent their lives – some of them gave their lives – so that their descendants would live in a world that they themselves could scarcely imagine. They build us sprawling, glittering skylines of glass and steel and lights. Man-made miracles of engineering and architecture that would be, quite literally, incomprehensible to most humans from before a certain time.
Yet, the cities they built for us, that they left us, are no longer ours. My great-grandfather did most of his work in Pennsylvania and the North-East. He lived in Philadelphia, in a neighborhood his descendants can’t walk through, day or night. His house is still there. I don’t know who lives in it now, if anyone does. I don’t really want to know, either.
All I know is the fruits of his labors, his house, his city — it’s not just that they don’t belong to his descendants, and, arguably, the country he built them for. We can’t even enjoy them. They were wrested out of the hands of the people, and, without consent, broken, smashed, and destroyed by wicked people, who now hand us the smoldering ruins of our predecessors’ lifetime of work, and say with a smile, Here! We made it better! And, if you dare say otherwise, you’re an ungrateful asshole who should be grateful that they’re deigning to give you a damn thing.
Excellent stuff, and well worth the long read.