The Frankish Reich

Someone explain this to me. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/us/politics/melania-trump-nude-modeling.html The former first lady called her past work a “celebration of the human form” in a video, the latest in a series promoting her memoir and appearing to reflect her deeply held beliefs.

I have relatives who grew up in Cheektowaga near Town Park. It was a nice post-war neighborhood. Nothing fancy. No garage, but you didn't have to park on the street. We called it middle class, but in retrospect it was more working class or lower middle class. The dad worked in factories, the mom cleaned houses for rich people. We had moved out to Amherst ourselves. And you know what? My cousins - the kids of that "inner" Cheektowaga family - moved out to far flung Cheektowaga or Williamsville. The old aunts and uncles died, and the house was sold. It wasn't anything sinister. They had their own families and nobody wanted to raise them in a 950 square foot house with one bathroom. The moved up and out. The Buffalo metro area didn't suffer from that; they're still there. So what to do with the old Cheektowaga where apparently no one wants to live anymore? Well, it'll probably be populated by new arrivals, maybe refugees, maybe from Syria or Haiti. And they'll raise their own families there, and then their kids will want more space and they'll move out to Clarence. And the cycle will continue.

$10 million. No, I'm not being greedy. Enough to enjoy retirement, travel some before I get old, give my kids some help when they need it (down payments on a home). At that point I'd be done. I really don't understand the need some people feel to turn $10 million into 20 or even 100. At that point it's just an obsession about money rather than making sure you have no financial worries forever.

I would be willing to wager that in 20 years these Haitian families and their children will be better educated and have higher earnings than their native Springfield OH counterparts. You know who used to understand this? The JD Vance of Hillbilly Elegy days. The white trash cukture is far more of a problem than the Haitian immigrant culture.

Jerome Powell right now: "the economy is in a good place, and our intention is to keep it that way."

How was Buffalo able to turn it around, stabilize, and then begin to grow again? It shrunk. A lot. It had a population and industrial infrastructure necessary to support the economy of the first half of the 20th century. If we had propped it up and tried everything to stop the outmigration, it would still be in decline. My family left in the 70s and moved out wes, when I was a kid. Many others preceded and followed us, in search of new and growing regions. The market worked.

JD Vance has turned into the most despicable politician in America. That's not easy; the competition is fierce. But this guy just doesn't care what he says as long as it serves his personal interest of gaining power. He went from being smart, generally thoughtful, and decent to being what we see today, all for the purpose of pleasing his master, Donald J. Trump.

It's almost as if Miss Sassy the Cat was acting just like a cat.

Shocking news: cat disappears; mysteriously reemerges days later as if nothing happened.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/springfield-ohio-pet-eating-claims-haitian-migrants-04598d48?mod=WTRN_pos4&cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_163&cx_artPos=3 City Manager Bryan Heck fielded an unusual question at City Hall on the morning of Sept. 9, from a staff member of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance. The staffer called to ask if there was any truth to bizarre rumors about Haitian immigrants and pets in Springfield. “He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” recalled Heck. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.” By then, Vance had already posted about the rumors to his 1.9 million followers on X. Yet he kept the post up, and repeated an even more insistent version of the claim the next morning.

And that's what they're reduced to. Some Haitians in Haiti probably kill and eat domesticated animals. So if a real lot of Haitians come to America, it is statistically likely that one or more of them have continued to engage in this pratice. So the Springfield cat-eating story, even if not technically "true," might as well be true because it has probably happened somewhere else, even though we don't know for sure that it has and, if so, where and when it has.

Dems: "Trump is a threat to democracy" Repubs: "Harris is a Marxist." Last I checked, Marxism was about a dictatorship of the proletariat; i.e, not a democracy. Same thing.

And with the round of good pollsters showing Harris roughly +4, wait for Nate Silver's model to show her with at least even odds of winning. Followed by all our Trumpies turning on their best buddy Nate again. I spoke too soon. Silver's latest update. tl;dr = basically a toss-up in the electoral college, Harris with a significant uptick in national polling post-debate. https://www.natesilver.net/p/harris-is-gaining-in-post-debate

are you sure she's a chick? And yes, sadly, she seems to be history. She's Newsom's ex, Don Jr's ex, leaving only RFK Jr to conquer.

Simplest explanation: Trump was an unprepared old fool, spouting nonsense, refusing to stay on schedule. Kamala was an ordinarily competent/prepared lawyer. But the Trumpies can't accept that obvious fact.