Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

You are right the gap is unbridgeable.

So after you put to into this category 74 millions who voted for Trump how many genuine conservatives are left in your country? Three, four? No surprise you meet so few of them.

Let's talk about super rich. Democratic party is serving at the pleasure of messieurs Bezos, Dorsey, Zuckerberg, Cook, Google CEO, few names on Wall Street. If Bezos, Dorsey, Zuckerberg, Cook, Google CEO decided in June last year that Trump should be the president, he would be the president. Or Sanders would be the president.

 

This is right wing propaganda. These guys dont have much political power or influence. This is the “liberal elites” BS that people suddenly think exist because someone coined the term and then everyone repeated it constantly.

I did say the Democrats bow down to corporate interests too. But nothing compared to the corporations and super rich who control the GOP.

There’s only a handful of Democrats who do not follow the whims of corporate America. The rest of DC are puppets.

 

I am looking for the equivalent of RealMPG of inflation indexes. Do you folks know of any good alternatives to government CPI/RPI?

Also I know @purr1n upstream was fairly confident that we are not in another housing bubble, but when I see:



I wonder, even given the confounding factors of pandemic, etc.

 

I find housing bubbles maddening, because they are so location dependent...

In our area of PA, we've never seen a housing "bubble"... hell, we're lucky if housing prices have kept up with the CPI. But we still take a hit every time the bubble "bursts". To a certain extent, we are somewhat trapped here by our low housing prices... we've never had the appreciation that would allow us to purchase a comparable home in most other locations.

 

If it wasn't for the fact that the jobs are in the major metros for my line of work, I would love to live in smaller ruralish parts of PA that isn't too far away from like a smaller city/town or something like that.

I agree it is location dependent. Even if housing prices cools off a bit in the future, FL housing prices will continue to go up and up to the point that the prices for a house + property taxes are getting too similar to parts up in the Northeast. I'm like nope I don't wanna buy in FL, lol.

 

Actually this is turning out to be one of the most interesting times (in the old proverb kind of way) to be alive in a very long time when it comes to politics.

Coincidentally it all starts with the school boards. If people sleep on what’s happening (like Republicans did for the last few decades while they pandered to fat cats) then another generation of kids is going to be indoctrinated into a very un-American ideology that starts off with race essentialism and goes downhill from there. When the Senate votes on party lines to defeat an amendment to remove funding from universities that discriminate against Asian American students because they do too well in school then you know the country is headed in a very dark direction.

 

It's already illegal to discriminate against Asian-Americans in college applications. It may be happening, but if it is it's an enforcement problem, not a problem with current laws in that area being lacking, so both Cruz's amendment and the vote along party lines were more about politics and talking points than about real action.

On another note, I think people on both sides are too quick to label the actions of the other un-American or against America. If there is to be any compromise there needs to be acknowledgment that both sides are for America but just have different prescriptions for the path forward. There's a difference between political adversaries and domestic enemies that seems to increasingly be lost in politics right now.

And really in American politics at least the two parties aren't far enough apart that either being in power really tips the overall direction of the country disastrously in either direction. I mean in all the panic about Obama and then about Trump how much has really changed for the average person?

 

This is right, in that local cultural is where it all begins and ends. In my local small New Mexican city most of the populous votes Democratic, but they are regular Sunday family oriented going Catholics of a "conservative" Hispanic heritage for the most part. Yet, the local leadership on the school board and city/county boards are closer to the Saul Alinsky wing. How? Because those who are attracted to local Democratic party machine are motivated by their beliefs/agenda, and the rest just sort of let it happen. They just last week adopted CRT as policy/pedagogy, but were of course careful to change some of the language and deny (deny deny) that it is in fact CRT with the aid of local media.

Last summer when there was a sudden increased interest in Catholic education at the private Catholic school I send my daughters to (just kidding! Secular folks were trying to get their kids educated after the closure of the government schools), I brought up the issue of the influence of non-Catholic parents/kids, culture, and outside agenda's to our school board. Only the principal had actually thought of it as a possible issue. Folks are mostly unaware of how fragile local culture and circumstances can be.

Well stated.

 

It contravenes the 1964 Civil Rights Act but that only works if laws are enforced and as of now the DOJ is siding against the students who are being impacted because they’re the wrong kind of minority.

People are definitely too quick to see disagreement with anything outside their bubble as the trigger to us vs. them thinking but like the saying goes just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re aren’t after you.

I agree about Obama and Trump (and Clinton and Bush, etc.) but Biden and the DSA wing of the Democratic Party are ushering in a much more radical agenda.

 

The one thing I don't understand about the current inflation is that (to my uneducated in monetary theory head), inflation is a problem when you devalue your currency in respect to others. European and other countries printed as well. So *if* it's all relative, does it matter?

 

At a national/global level, maybe not. I'm sure there are global geopolitics involved that I don't understand or care about, to create winners and losers. But my concern, is what about the little guy? An already vulnerable individual whose income is not increasing with inflation? Those whose rents go up, their food goes up, their transport goes up.... Absolutely it matters to them. People on minimum wage, or fixed incomes that don't see the benefits of inflation, are surely boned.

It's quite funny really. In the US in particular there is such a vitriolic opposition to raising minimum wages because it will supposedly cause rampant inflation. But when overall fiscal policy is deliberately inflationary, it's universally seen as the lesser evil. I guess it all depends on the perspective of who is deemed worthy of receiving stimulus spending.

 

Yeah I totally get that as I am affected by it. Was trying to understand to "global" picture. Thanks!

 

An Ohio judge has ordered a hospital to treat a COVID-19 patient with ivermectin, despite FDA warnings against it.

Now, when the patient dies, do we get to charge the judge with murder?

 

Did the judge order this independently or was it that the judge was merely ruling in favour of someone else's desires? Law school is arduous from what I can tell but regardless of that difficulty a lawyer does not a person to give medical advice make (looking it up just now the US Constitution does not specifically mandate that judges possess a law degree?????????).

 

Yeah, big difference between a judge ruling that a patient get a specific treatment they aren’t requesting versus a judge ruling that a patient can be allowed to get the specific treatment they are requesting.