Monthly Archives: February 2021

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 1 Comment

by John Walters

Greene Party

The judges, to be frank, did not know where to go with this one. GOP: Greene’s Own Party? Or how about The House Marjorie Tea (Party) Leader? I mean, Q-Anonsense is so last year, after all.

Anyway, America’s Ultimate Karen, Marjorie Taylor Greene, rose to speak to a Republican House caucus yesterday and reportedly half of those gathered gave her a standing ovation. Later, House Minority Leader (and it must steam his tea to have “minority” anywhere near his name) Kevin McCarthy duplicitously claimed he had no knowledge of Q-Anon or the Georgia congresswoman’s endorsement of such.

Yesterday Canada declared the Proud Boys a terrorist organization. The GOP calls these same people its base.

French Open*

We do not know if Carla Bruni was among those in the party, but we don’t know that she wasn’t, either

*The judges also like “Menage A Trois A Trois A Trois A Trois” and “Voulez-Vous Coucher Stadium”

Outside Paris, police bust an 81-person sex orgy for 1) taking place after curfew and 2) failing to observe social distancing regulations. The latter, well, that’s fairly difficult to avoid during a sex orgy.

The math geek in us loves the total number of attendees here. Eighty-one is equal to 3 x 3 x 3 x 3, which means that it was possible for 27 menage a trois to be taking place simultaneously. Someone phone the editors at Guinness.

Winter Stormings

Two weekdays, two months, one winter.

On January 6th a violent mob stormed a stronghold of democracy in Washington, fueled by irrational rage and ignorance.

On February 2nd (or 3rd, we’re not sure) a frolicsome group of New Yorkers, in a storm, engaged in a snowball fight in Washington Square Park, fueled by irrational exuberance and, most likely, cabin fever.

Who would you rather be?

Roaring Kitty Goes To Washington

From MarketWatch.com:

Rep. Maxine Waters, the chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, told Cheddar TV that Robinhood Co-CEO Vladimir Tenev and Keith Gill, the investor who popularized the GameStop trade on Reddit, will testify later this month.

Gill, as readers of this blog and many non-readers of this blog know, goes by the Reddit message board pseudonym of Roaring Kitty. This is like having Mr. Spiccoli appear in front of the House Education Committee, except that when Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education, that likely would have been a step up.

The irony here is that Gill may be nearly as wealthy as DeVos is now. Probably not, but it’s funny to think so.

Use Your Illusion

Down The Reds

Every sportswriter’s favorite Premier League club, Liverpool F.C., has suddenly fallen upon hard times. The Reds lost at Anfield, their home, yesterday 1-0 to lowly Brighton Hove & Albion, which sounds less like a football club than it does a particularly tweedy white-shoe law firm.

This was Liverpool’s second consecutive home defeat, and once again to a club in the bottom fourth of the Premier League’s 20-team field (a loss to Burnley in late January). To put these bizarre defeats in perspective, the 2019 Premier League champs had gone 68 home matches in a row without a defeat before its last two matches. It hadn’t suffered consecutive home losses since 2012.

Suddenly their manager is Jurgen Kerplopp.

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

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by John Walters

Haven’t We Seen This Movie Before?*a.k.a. “Citizen Jeff”

Born in the Mountain Time Zone region. From a poor family but his mom finds a way to raise his stake in a better future. Preternaturally brilliant, he builds an empire in a newfangled industry from scratch. Marries a gorgeous brunette as he becomes the world’s wealthiest man. Divorces the brunette for a cheap floozy in the entertainment biz. Steps down from an everyday role in the company he built. What’s next?

For Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), it was political aspirations, namely, governor of New York. What will Jeff Bezos, who is only 57, do next?

Here’s the curious twist: Kane was a newspaper magnate who then had everything imaginable shipped to his dream palace, Xanadu. Bezos is a shipping magnate who used some of his fortune to buy one of the nation’s two most respected daily newspapers, The Washington Post. If he makes a political run, how will his own paper cover it?

Here’s an idea: Bezos announcing he’s running for the House in AOC’s district and promises everyone who votes for him $1,000 $10,000. He could easily afford it.

Queens Gambit

When you read the story, it seems that Trump impeachment defense attorney Eric Herschmann may have just saved democracy

We’re only now catching up to this insane Axios story, by Jonathan Swan, about what was transpiring inside the Oval Office as Donald Trump (from Queens) listened to pitches crazier and crazier from minions and sycophants. to overturn the election. A MUST-read. Cannot wait for the movie.

The money quote (among many): “When Rudy’s the voice of reason, you know the meeting’s not going well.”

My Pillow Talk

Last weekend Saturday Night Live attempted a My Pillow bit on “Weekend Update” (with Beck Bennett as CEO Mike Lindell). It was okay, but nowhere near as funny as the actual Lindell’s appearance on a Newsmax program last night. As someone noted on Twitter, the utter irony of Lindell appearing in a segment about his right to speak freely (on Twitter) and then having his mic volume turned down because he was uttering crazy talk on that very segment

My Pillows may also be used to muffle mouths, no?

Right On The Mark

https://twitter.com/ChrisCorbellini/status/1356644126037573638?s=20

Yesterday morning CNBC had billionaire Mark Cuban (likely still smarting from his team’s second straight home loss to the Phoenix Suns, the latter on a Devin Booker three with 1.5 seconds to play) on to talk the GameStop saga, etc.

Cuban said something that was so self-evident to this “retail investor” and yet seemed to take co-host Jon Fortt and whoever else was on air for CNBC by surprise. Cuban’s point, and I entirely agree, is that the idea that there’s an inherent value in a stock is almost entirely myth. Yes, sure, technically one could own enough shares of a stock to find a seat on the board and influence policy, but no one you or I know is ever going to be in that position.

I’m trying to quote Cuban as closely as possible here, but what he said was this: “A stock only has two points of value. One is the dividend, which many companies don’t even offer. The second is what you can get someone else to pay for it (above what you did).”

BOOM. Yes. Fort challenged Cuban, asking about fundamentals and balance sheets and P/E ratios and basically asking, “So you’re saying all the homework that we all do is meaningless?” And Cuban said, “Um, yeah.”

And I agree. You MAY do all that homework if you like. And technically, you’re correct. But here’s how the stock market is different than, say, analytics: If 99 of 100 people say 2+2= 5, your knowledge of arithmetic is enough to declare that they are wrong. And you, the one, are right with your answer of 4.

However, if in the stock market 99 people say 2+2= 5 and you insist on it being 4, well, they’ve moved the needle to it being 5. And they’ve made money while you stood there shouting into the abyss.

Honoring Brian Sicknick

President Biden took a few moments after most men his age’s bedtime to ride down to the U.S. Capitol and pay his respects to the Officer Brian Sicknick, who was killed during the January 6 insurrection. His body is lying in state there.

As he did so, this screen grab compares what CNN and MSNBC and C-SPAN were covering live with what Fox News was.

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 1 Comment

by John Walters

Tweet Life People

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Dual Dustin Diamond Departures

One day after we learn of the all-too-early death of Dustin Diamond, whom you know as Screech from Saved By The Bell, Boston Red Sox 2nd baseman Dustin Pedroia announces his retirement.

So, yes, that is dual Dustin diamond departures. Diamond was only 44 and went from spindly pre-pubescent to hulking adult. But he never really ever landed, or particularly needed, future acting gigs.

Pedroia, 35, is an intriguing case. Only 5’9″, he carved out a career where for more than a decade he was the toughest out on a Red Sox team that won two World Series (2007, 2013). Pedroia received a third ring for Boston’s 2018 World Series title but only appeared in three games that season.

Is Pedroia a Hall of Famer? He retires as a Rookie of the year, one-time MVP, with four All-Star appearances. Only 1,805 hits, but 394 doubles. Intriguingly, at least to me, he retires a .299 hitter, but if not for 31 total plate appearances in 2018 and 2019, when still trying to recover from knee surgery, in which he went 3 for 31, he’d technically be a .300 hitter. For someone as competitive as Pedroia was, and that’s what he was, a complete red ass on the diamond, that has to smart.

It was too bad that Pedroia got injured when still in his prime. His career came to a screeching halt.

Telling quote as he retires: “I wish I enjoyed it a little more at the time.” A quote we should all think about every day on this planet.

Myanmar-A-Lago

In Myanmar, formerly Burma, a military coup in recent days has demonstrated just what might have happened here less than a month ago.

Last November the National League for Democracy, Myanmar’s leading civilian party, won 83 percent of the body’s available seats. Seems like quite a few.

Alas, Myanmar’s military refused to accept the results of the vote, which was widely seen as a referendum on the popularity of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, the head of the N.L.D., has been the country’s de facto civilian leader since taking office in 2015.

So the military staged a coup d’etat, complete with canceling all domestic and international flights, seizing the internet and controlling the media. They also might have said something about Jewish space lasers, I’m not sure.

I’m particularly interested in this because one of my closest friends in high school, the wittiest note-passer I have ever known and someone with whom I’ve remained friends all my life, just became the U.S. ambassador to Myanmar. Really. He just arrived there a couple of weeks ago. So I’m hoping for his and his family’s safety and yet I also am confident that he is someone fully able to deal with this situation. He’s always been a prince among men.

Still, it makes you realize how fragile democracy is. Especially when last month our own hastily installed Sec. of Defense was actively plotting, in sycophantic worship of his new boss, to prevent any defense of the U.S. Capitol.

AOC-SPAN

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez found time yesterday to tape an impactful Instagram Live video and also to hyphen shame her shameless House counterpart, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

https://twitter.com/thekjohnston/status/1356334849213165569?s=20

We have not been able to watch AOC’s video in full, but this insight bears repeating:

“The tactics used by people who are telling us all to ‘move on,’ those are the same tactics used by abusers. The folks who are saying we should move on, we shouldn’t have accountability, etc., are saying: ‘Can you just forget about this so that we can do it again?’…I’m not going t

o let it happen to me again … and I’m not going to let it happen to our country.”

GOP Schism

Speaking of Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose first two initials connote “empty,” she’s even managed to alienate Top GOP Mitch McConnell. Though he did not mention her directly, the Senate minority leader said this yesterday:

“Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country,” Mr. McConnell said. “Somebody who’s suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.’s airplane is not living in reality. This has nothing to do with the challenges facing American families or the robust debates on substance that can strengthen our party.”

I’m so old I can remember when the GOP was admonishing Democrats for not being fostering a sense of unity. Now they can’t even find unity amongst themselves.

MTG and others are clearly courting the fringe McVeigh-style Republicans who think that fair play is a sucker’s game. Here was her reply, which was extremely Trumpian:

MTG is an ugly stain not only on Georgia, but on America. You can see the hate and the mean in her face.

Mitch, as sinister as he has been dating back to the very night that Barack Obama was elected in 2008, at least saw fit to distance himself from MTG and also to defend Liz Cheney, a GOP who voted for impeachment (and is the daughter of our de facto 43rd president).

You should read this opinion column in The Washington Post, “Trumpism Is American Fascism,” by a Republican operative. Key passage:

What type of citizen has Trump — and his supportive partisan media — produced? Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) still holds her job in Congress because she is representative of ascendant MAGA radicalism. Those who reflect her overt racism, her unhinged conspiracy thinking and her endorsement of violence against public figures are now treated as a serious political constituency within the Republican Party.

Hands-Free Device

Nike’s new Go FlyEase ($120) hits the market.. You won’t have your hands full figuring out how to put them on or take them off…

https://twitter.com/GoodNewsCorres1/status/1356455146373414915?s=20

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | Leave a comment

by John Walters

Wizards Of Ahs

So I arrive home last night to see this footage of Washington guard Bradley Beal—the NBA’s leading scorer at 34.9 ppg—not particularly seeming to care about his team’s outing against the Brooklyn Nets… the East’s most loaded team. You’d think that he might.

And then, 90 minutes or so later, I check the score. The Wizards, who had trailed by as much as 18 in the first half (when Beal was effecting his Pouting Kobe act), outscored Brooklyn 8-0 in the final nine seconds to win 149-146.

And Bradley Beal? He finished with 37 points, 10 rebounds and 8 assists (teammate Russell Westbrook scored a game-high 41) as the Wizards scored 48 fourth-quarter points.

Washington (4-12) remains in last place in the East. Perhaps this turns them around?

Winter Is Here

There was something magical and surreal about attending college not far from this Great Lake. I truly loved winter in northern Indiana (until the end of February). It’s the best studying weather, first of all, and the world is a harsh but beautiful place. Don’t forget your gloves, though.

Roaring Kitty Has Claws

If you want to put a face on the Reddit Revolution, here it is: Keith Gill, better known on Reddit message boards as “Roaring Kitty.” A 34 year-old from Massachusetts who in college booked a 4:03 mile (that alone is a lifetime achievement), Gill announced on a message board in 2019 that he’d put a $53,000 stake in GameStop stock.

At the time, it seemed silly.

Last Tuesday, Gill’s $53,000 wager had morphed into $48 million. And his own proselytizing about GME—on message boards, via YouTube and TikTok videos—played a major role in shares of the stock soaring like a rocket.

How long will Roaring Kitty consider his GME’s shares the cat’s meow? Will he at some point short them? Stay tuned.

Detour

If you’ve driven the Pacific Coast Highway near Big Sur, you know that it is among the most scenic drives in the USA (if not the most scenic). It’s also quite treacherous after the Golden State receives a good rinsing from the heavens. No vehicles were damaged in this erosion. Will they build another scenic bridge? How long will the PCH be closed and will snowy owls return as it’s down?

White Lies

Remember when the term “white lie” connoted a fib that was relatively harmless? No more. Let’s use the term to connote prevarications told by Donald Trump and his followers that are helping to divide the nation. Let’s begin with the biggest: with the serially debunked duplicity that somehow the election was stolen from Trump.

Here’s The New York Times with a deep dig on it.