McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said the “two-tier economy” was a major factor in the fast-food giant’s decision to revive its “Extra Value Meal” combos last month.

“Traffic for lower-income consumers is down double digits,” Kempczinski told CNBC in September. “We needed to step in.”

Cynically unsurprising that they decided they needed to “step in” by offering a menu of lower priced garbage instead of by paying their executives less and their employees more.

Clearly the underlying philosophy here isn’t “let’s respond to the increasing wealth gap by working for a solution,” but “let’s respond to the increasing wealth gap by figuring out ways to continue taking advantage of poor people even as they keep getting poorer.”

It wasn’t that long ago that I was generally too cynical. Now I can barely even keep up.

Funny that this is the exact same “logic” the libs use to try to defend running a pro-zionist, pro-corporate, pro-billionaire slimeball in the last US presidential election - “But Trump was worse!”

Shukran from Arabian Nights: Sabaku no Seirei Ou on the Super Famicom

Ifrit is a djinn who was once the king of the djinn. Then he was cursed and bound to a ring until he granted the wishes of 1000 people. He’s granted wishes to 999 people when his ring comes into the possession of an orphan girl named Shukran. Over the years he’s become bitter and cynical, and he just expects she’s going to want gold or such, but instead, to his surprise and dismay, she wishes to bring peace to the land. And she means it. So Ifrit has to first set out to find and recruit the most powerful of his former djinn subjects, and since he can’t stray far from the ring, Shukran has to come along.

She’s far and away the weakest character in the game, but at every turn, when it’s (eventually predictably) revealed that whichever djinn they’re trying to recruit at the moment has a well-deserved grudge against Ifrit and no intention of helping him with anything, it’s Shukran and her optimism, determination, honor and kindness that wins them over, and (after Shukran and Ifrit and their allies complete whatever trial or quest the djinn tasks them with) they end up swearing allegiance not to him, but to her. So while she herself remains ridiculously weak, she is very much the driving force behind the party. And over time she can summon more and more powerful djinn in battle, and they’re decidedly not weak.

In the spirit of the Defense Department being renamed the War Department, the Environmental Protection Agency needs to be renamed the Environmental Destruction Agency.

I’ve long believed that Trump himself is not a fascist, mostly because his brain just doesn’t work that way. He’s an ego-driven, sociopathic petty tyrant who just wants his own way, exactly as a four-year-old throwing a tantrum in a grocery store wants his own way. It’s not so much that he’s not a fascist as that the organized thinking and ongoing attention necessary to hold to any sort of ideology is simply beyond him.

And that in turn would mean that the actual problem is that he’s surrounded by sincere fascists (and other assorted opportunists) who are whispering in his ear and directing his limited attention to whatever will serve their interests. And since he’s psychologically and intellectually stunted, it generally works.

It’s easy to see what happened here too - a woman was nice to him, so he wanted to believe her. It’s really just that simple. Like most manbabies, there’s nothing that will turn him into mush faster than a woman being nice to him.

Which probably means it’s about time for Laura Loomer to pay another visit to the White House.

Imagine being so invested in bullshit that you have to censor any and all terms that contradict it.

Really, it’s no wonder that Trump and his cronies and minions are so filled with rage - they’re in a constant state of extreme cognitive dissonance.

And it makes sense in a way that they direct their rage at “woke” people and positions. From their limited, animalistic points of view, all they understand is that when they think of “woke,” they’re filled with rage. They aren’t conscious enough to understand that the source of the rage isn’t the positions or the people, but the cognitive dissonance they experience when they cling to their opposition to simple and obvious truths.

It has to be a miserable way to live, and if they weren’t an existential threat to me, my family and friends, and society as a whole, I’d feel sorry for them.

Yeah right.

The only question is which specific excuse(s) the Democrats are going to trot out after they do the bidding of their wealthy/corporate donors and cave. Again.

Just your daily reminder that the President of the United States is a deranged lunatic.

I’m entirely unsurprised that that’s on Piefed.

So… the same plan as before.

Of course he would - he jerks off to fantasies of mass murder.

The chance that this Supreme Court is going to rule against Trump is not coincidentally exactly equal to the amount of integrity its conservarive members possess - zero.

This weak diversion isn’t out there to try to sway their decision - their decision is a foregone conclusion. The point is just to provide a readymade rationale for some number of people, so they can excuse the Supreme Court’s inevitable betrayal of law, precedent and the Constitution with “Well, they had to do that - imagine how much money blah blah blah…”

And besides, if money really was an issue, the administration could easily make up the shortfall simply by making billionaires pay something approaching their fair share of taxes.

Mostly escapism.

I prefer stoicism, but it’s tough and I’m weak and lazy. So to the degree that I have to deal with the real world, I mostly rely on some combination of cynicism and fatalism.

But as much as possible, I escape.

Of course he did - that’s the sort of service they’ve paid him for.

Ah.

I’m betting that, like all too many people, he’s a binarist.

That seems to be the reasoning error at the heart of miasma theory.

The thing is that there’s some small measure of truth to it. Good health really does, to some degree, depend on good nutrition, good hygiene, a sound immune system and so on. But the way in which those things actually matter is the degree to which they help people fight off sickness (or to which their absence makes people more prone to sickness). The ultimate cause is, rather obviously, germs, viruses, etc., but we’re better able to resist them if we’re generally healthier, enjoying good nutrition and good hygiene and so on.

But that’s not the way Kennedy sees it. His simple-minded take on it is wholly binaristic, and essentially reactionary to boot. He can’t or won’t grasp the nuance of sickness being caused by germs and viruses and bacteria and things like poor nutrition and poor hygiene making us more susceptible to them - to him, it has to be entirely one or the other. And apparently mostly because disreputable people profit undeservedly from pretty standard capitalistic manipulations of health care based on germ theory, he’s decided that germ theory is entirely false and miasma theory thus entirely true.

So maybe not so much a lunatic as a shallow, confused snd deeply invested binaristic contrarian. Though I think a case could be made that that’s not far enough removed from lunatic to make any meaningful difference.

Kennedy’s an interesting case.

With the rest of Trump’s appointees, it’s tough to suss out exactly what they’re about. They’re generally some combination of corrupt, ideologically blinded, power-hungry, narcissistic and emotionally unstable, but it’s hard to be sure just how much of which they are.

But with Kennedy, it’s simple - he’s a raving lunatic.

I don’t mean to imply that Christians are necessarily white nationalists.

But I’m not the least bit surprised that the people who are supporting her self-evidently fancy themselves Christians.

I’ve always been confused by this whole concept of telling myself things about myself. I see it regularly in self-help things - “You just need to tell yourself ‘I’m a good person’” or whatever - but it doesn’t even begin to make sense to me.

I don’t understand how it’s supposed to work. I’m not two different people, so I can’t tell myself something that I don’t already know. If it’s true and I can say it to myself, that’s necessarily because I already know it. And it’s not as if I can bullshit myself without knowing that that’s what I’m doing.

Sorry - probably not the sort of response you were hoping for.

As of Tuesday, she had raised over $800,000 on the Christian fundraising platform GiveSendGo

Figures.

Leave it to the Christians to support a racist who bullied a child.

One of the very few satisfying things about gung ho murderous assholes is their self-righteous shock when the psychopaths they worship throw them under the bus.