Today's Tweet

Our kids are the heroes we hoped we could be.

My 14 yr old just told me,
“ I told a kid to shut the fuck up yesterday because he called my friend the N word , in case the school calls”

— jonathan slater (@slater_jona) February 1, 2022

I Get It

He wanted to make the announcement himself, and not let some little prick like Adam Schefter get the scoop. but when he says, in effect, "No, I'm not retiring" over the week end, and then Tuesday comes around and he says, "I'm retiring" - it just points up the perfect ending to Tom Brady's perfectly prima donna career. What a great footballing asshole that guy is.

Reuters:

Brady announces retirement from NFL after record-setting career

Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, widely considered the greatest player in NFL history, announced his retirement on Tuesday after a career during which he won a record seven Super Bowl championships.

The 44-year-old Brady spent 20 seasons with the New England Patriots, winning six Super Bowl titles, before relocating to Tampa Bay and leading the Bucs to a championship last season.

"I have always believed the sport of football is an 'all-in' proposition - if a 100% competitive commitment isn't there, you won't succeed, and success is what I love so much about our game," Brady wrote on Twitter.

"There is a physical, mental, and emotional challenge EVERY single day that has allowed me to maximize my highest potential. And I have tried my very best these past 22 years. There are no shortcuts to success on the field or in life.

"This is difficult for me to write, but here it goes: I am not going to make that competitive commitment anymore. I have loved my NFL career, and now it is time to focus my time and energy on other things that require my attention."

No hat tip to the hundreds of guys who fought and bled - and were likely crippled in some way - so he could do what he did. No thought for coaching. None for trainers or staff (or ballboys, ahem), or even for the fans who paid him the millions that line his fucking pockets.

Just Brady - always and only Brady.

Black American History #1

USAmerica inc is an amalgam of different peoples from different places, with different stories.

And it's not like we're completely different from every other "country". Everyone everywhere came from somewhere else - or from someone else. It's just that here in the western hemisphere, the migration seems to date to a more recent past, and so we think we can get our heads around the history a little easier(?), knowing we don't have to trace our origins back to a time before about 20,000 years ago.

The point there being that everything is derivative. Everything came out of something else - we don't have any kind of history that belongs solely to us.

So we don't have American History without Black History.

Crash Courses - Dr Clint Smith, PhD

The TransAtlantic Slave Trade

Jan6 Stuff

The guys on the top rungs may get splashed a little, but it's more than likely the really smart ones all had a patsy one rung below them to take the hit, and just enough plausible deniability to mount a workable defense.

Elie makes the point:

It's possible that the top guys will get away with it, and we have to be ready for that.

Ari Melber, MSNBC with Elie Mystal

They came close - so fucking close

It's A Participation Kinda Thing

de·moc·ra·cy

/dəˈmäkrəsē/

Learn to pronounce

(noun) a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

Run For Something:

Throw everything you know about politics out the window.
You’re qualified to run for local office – we’re here to help.

What kind of candidate are we looking for? Run for Something works exclusively with progressive Millennials and Gen-Zers running for local office for the first or second time.

Progressive

We help people who are pro-choice, pro-universal health care, pro-LGBTQ equality, pro-criminal justice reform; pro-working families and organized labor, pro-voting rights, pro-campaign finance reform, who focus on inequality, fair wages, and job creation; who acknowledge that climate change is real, man-made, and our responsibility to fight; and who will fight to reduce gun violence in their community. That being said: We are NOT the purity police. A progressive in Louisiana is different than a progressive in California. We help candidates run for the places they’re in.

Diverse

From 2017 to 2021, we endorsed over 1,800 candidates and helped elect 637 all-stars. Of our elected candidates: 56% identify as women, 21% identify as members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and 58% are people of color.

We work with candidates from all backgrounds — teachers, nurses, scientists, activists, artists, musicians, chiefs, and rodeo stars. If you are passionate about making a difference, we will support you.

Connected

We’re looking for candidates with deep ties to their community. Folks who are already in their district — volunteering, organizing, mentoring, and doing the work. We don’t want to convince someone to move home to run — we want someone who calls a place home to step up and run.

That “X” factor

The past few election cycles have taught us that who the candidate is matters. How well they communicate online and in person, how comfortable they are in their skin, and how “authentic” they can be are all important factors.

We’re willing to invest in good talent wherever it is.

The Same Ol' Question

Ever notice how some politicians

claim they're being smeared

when you tell the truth about their records?

Today's Beau

Trump had 2 weeks to pardon those Jan6 assholes. He didn't.

And now he's getting a good look at the effects of "in politics, if you wanna friend, get a dog", as the people who needed him and used him for political gain are becoming more popular than him, and are now distancing themselves from him.

(we'll see how that goes - it's always been hard to wash off that Trump Stank)

 Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

Today's Pix

click a pic to embiggen

COVID-19 Update

WaPo: (freebie)

Spotify to add content advisories to podcasts after pandemic misinformation complaints

Spotify will start adding content advisories to podcast episodes about covid-19, the streaming service announced Sunday, after Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and other artists demanded the platform remove their music, saying it allows misinformation to spread about the pandemic and vaccines.

Their objections put the spotlight on provocative podcaster Joe Rogan, who has suggested that healthy, young people shouldn’t get vaccinated and praised unproven treatments for the coronavirus, such as the anti-parasite drug ivermectin. An open letter signed by medical and scientific professionals recently called on Spotify to “immediately establish a clear and public policy to moderate misinformation on its platform.”

Other platforms, including social media giants Facebook and Twitter, have employed disclaimers similar to the one Spotify has promised, as they have struggled to find and take down anti-vaccine propaganda. But false claims continue to proliferate.

In a video posted after Spotify’s announcement, Rogan praised the platform’s decision to add the disclaimer, which according to Spotify will direct users to a hub of “data-driven facts.” At the same time, he questioned the use of the term “misinformation” and defended his decision to invite guests who “have an opinion that’s different from the mainstream narrative.”

Here’s what to know

• White House frustrations are growing over top health official Xavier Becerra’s handling of the pandemic.
• The Beijing Olympics start Friday, with few in-person spectators and strict rules for participants to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Here’s what you should know about the Games.

Up Closer

Like love and all things natural, when seen from a distance, business - and particularly business investment - looks plush and serene and beautiful. While up close, it can be brutal and cruel and bloody.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion by Helaine Olen: A speculative frenzy in meme stocks and crypto is coming to an end — but you’ve probably got nothing to worry about

I’ve learned a few things in more than two decades of writing about personal finance and investment culture. Most takeaways are fairly simple, the sorts of things that can be put on an index card. Here’s one rule that never fails: If you hear someone saying “this time is different,” pause. Take a deep breath. And then remember: This time is never different.

Unfortunately, many people don’t do that. Which goes a long way toward explaining what’s been happening in the markets, especially in tech stocks and cryptocurrencies.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index fell Wednesday, after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell reiterated plans to raise interest rates to combat resurgent inflation. At the end of a very topsy-turvy week, the S&P is down slightly more than 7 percent since the beginning of the year. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is in full correction territory.

But others have fared worse — in some cases much, much worse. Now that many people are #DoneWithCovid, pandemic favorite Peloton has fallen more than 80 percent from its high point since late 2020. Stonks — aka meme stocks — are also collapsing; GameStop and AMC have fallen by more than 50 percent since late November. Cryptos are in bad shape, too, with the overall market for digital currencies having shed $1.3 trillion — again, almost half their value — in the same period of time.

Here’s the good news: If, like half of all individual investors, you simply placed money in an index fund that replicates the broader stock market, you shouldn’t feel shaky. That’s because the S&P 500, for all the recent declines, was, at the close of the market Friday, still as high as it was in mid-October. If you felt satisfied with your portfolio then — and chances are pretty good you did — you should be happy now.

But others were led astray, in part by self-appointed TikTok and YouTube investor consiglieres, many of whom were infants when the dotcom bubble blew. Some of them fell hard for gamified stock market apps such as Robinhood, which lured them in with free trades and then quickly encouraged its often less than financially literate traders to invest in complicated options.

These newbie traders who congregated on Reddit boards let themselves be convinced that they could harness new technology to trade the stocks of fading retailers such as GameStop and take part in a heroic investor revolution, striking a blow against the 1 percent.

Au contraire. They were minnows who got sold on the idea they were sharks. As the Wall Street Journal’s Spencer Jakab recounts in the excellent new book “The Revolution That Wasn’t: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors,” many meme stock traders lost money.

The same was true for minnows who invested in special-purpose acquisition companies, known as SPACs. Those are companies that go public to raise money in order to acquire a yet-to-be-determined business. This permits the latter business to go public without the broad scrutiny an IPO normally gets.

People were sold on the idea that SPACs would let them invest like multimillionaires. Instead, they are discovering that if a company doesn’t want to fully expose its financials — like it would if it did an initial public offering — that’s often a warning sign of a less-than-promising business model, not a diamond in the financial rough.

And then there are cryptocurrencies, the much-heralded digital money. Does it have its uses? Absolutely. But beyond allowing celebrities (Kim Kardashian, Matt Damon) to make a quick paycheck promoting the stuff, it’s difficult to name a legitimate one that most of us here in the United States can’t do another way, easier and quicker. But should Dogecoin — a cryptocurrency started as a joke — really have increased more than 12,000 percent in value? Probably not, since it has subsequently given back more than three-quarters of that gain. Bitcoin, down a mere 45 percent, seems like a savvy buy in comparison.

Here’s the core truth in all this: The combination of pandemic-era low interest rates and a flood of government stimulus did more than rescue the Americans left jobless, and even homeless, by shutdowns. A lot of that money flowed to Wall Street — some in the form of money meant to prop up small businesses that instead went to much larger firms, some via stimulus checks that investors put in the market. Now that money is going away.

As a result, a lot of people are learning an expensive lesson. They convinced themselves that their ability to pick winning stocks or speculate successfully in crypto was due to their skills and smarts, not the temporary circumstance of speculating in markets where almost everything was going up at a rapid clip. Next time, most of those investors should check out an index fund instead. As wise heads have known for a long time, they’ll almost certainly do better in the long run.

Always remember that most of these investment guys are trained to be predatory scavengers, and as such, they have no regard for what happens if the thing they're selling you craters and goes straight down the shitter. They're simply there to take a few pennies off the top as they siphon money out of your pocket and funnel it into their boss's secret account in Panama.