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whatyouwill
Monday, May 26, 2025
Time waits for no one...
The blog has been fitfully sleeping the last few months. But even in its somnambulant state it still moves by slow inertia under the weight of the over thirteen thousand posts I have written to date.
And in the next week or two I will have hit eight million views. Whooppee! Seems like we just cranked over the seven million viewer mark.
I have been watching my stats during my absence and a cool thing is happening. People are actually reading my short stories, a point of pride for me. I love to write short fiction although I daresay some of you think that everything I write is fiction. I get you. Anyway my short stories have been trending each week and that makes me happy.
I rarely can write short stories and need to be in a certain space that just doesn't happen very often. Hope you enjoy them. Something to remember me when I am gone.
Because none of us live forever.
I have lost several friends these last few months, some I am sure that I am forgetting. We lost our musician friend Barry Goldberg, shown here with his lovely wife Gail.
The founder of the Electric Flag, Barry loved Tiffany glass and kachinas and was cooler than cool. This picture was taken in my booth at the Bustamante show in Pasadena, I love my inventory back then! That bird has flown.
Remember, give your loved ones a hug at every possible opportunity, don't wait too long!
This movie doesn't last forever!
Worth a chuckle
Whatever side of the political fence you might inhabit it never hurts to laugh, even at yourself. I don't need to name names but a couple sisters I know had a funny thing happen a while back that I thought I would share with you.
By the way, I built and my father used to own the apartments that you see in the background.
Anyway, my friends parked offsite and got a ride in and gave their all in a vociferous protest against the evil Elon Musk with a whole bunch of like minded folks. Eventually they decided to split and called an uber to get them back to their car.
They walk a couple blocks away to wait for their ride, who shows up in, you guessed it, a Tesla. The driver, a young woman, asks them if they were at the protest and they answered affirmatively and she asks them why they were protesting?
They put together a fairly coherent answer and start the way back to their car but were then forced to drive by the very same congregation they had been demonstrating with minutes earlier.
My friend laughingly said that they put their heads down and shielded their faces as they drove by, not wanting to be recognized and receive the catcalls of their peers.
Ironic and hilarious.
Universe has a funny sense of humor.
Austin Powers
Looped
The problem is that, like many things, they are not making them like they used to and the belt loops are always breaking off at the bottom.
So I am faced with two possible choices when this occurs, either have a floppy belt loop, something somewhat frowned upon in the habitués of polite society that I frequent or take them to the cleaners to mend, which costs a cool five dollars a loop, a usurious outlay that I am loathe to pay.
I was returning a navajo squash blossom necklace to a friend the other day, my back right belt loop flopping in the wind like an injured seagull for all to see.
The couple ushered me in to their living room to chat for a moment when I spied a rack of thread spools on the wall behind Margaret.
A thought hit me.
"Hey you wouldn't happen to have a sharp needle and some black thread I could borrow, would you?"
Margaret said that she in fact did and her husband Jon was kind enough to fetch it for me. I told them that I would return it at my soonest opportunity. Then she said something that took me aback:
"You might as well drop trou and fix them here. I am blind you know?"
Good point.
I did know that and she was right. Margaret lost her sight a few years ago, poor thing. I took off my shoes, pulled off my pants and went to mending right then and there. John found a needle with an eye big enough to thread and we were in business.
He took a picture to commemorate the event.
Good to have friends you can get down to basics with. Jean problem solved!
Monday, May 19, 2025
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Saturday, May 17, 2025
Howard Lutnick is a yutz.
Our current Commerce Secretary is an absolute imbecile. Or maybe just a completely dishonest prevaricator.
Now there is no way that he can be stupid enough to believe what is coming out of his own piehole but he evidently thinks that we, the American public, are dumb enough to believe it.
This nogoodnick, Howard Lutnick, is a billionaire from Long Island who made his money playing the securities and equity game at Cantor Fitzgerald.
He has also had his nose firmly planted in forty seven's posterior for quite a long time.
He has said a lot of stupid stuff in the last several months and I would like to touch on a few things.
Lutnick is the guy who said that his 94 year old mom wouldn't mind missing a few social security payments and that those that did complain about missed payments were probably defrauding the system.
“Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the processes, who knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen, because whoever screams is the one stealing,” he said. “Because my mother-in-law’s not calling, come on, your mother, 80-year-olds, 90-year-olds, they trust the government.”
“So, the people who are getting that free money, stealing the money, inappropriately, getting the money, have an inside person who’s routing the money,” he said. “They are going to yell and scream.”
He also said that tariffs were a good idea, even if they lead to a recession.
Howard Yudnick is the guy who suggested that the tariffs will usher in a new golden age where people will be working at the new jobs of the future, fixing the robots. See Howard Lutnick says Trump’s tariffs will create ‘great jobs of the future’—fixing factory robots. Labor experts disagree.
The future of labor is providing maintenance for automated factory technology, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC. He posited that the growth of manufacturing in the U.S. as a result of President Donald Trump’s tariffs would spur more jobs in the form of factory work. Labor experts are dubious about the growth and sustainability of these jobs.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sees one positive byproduct of President Donald Trump’s tariff plan: a “manufacturing renaissance” in the U.S. that would lead to the next three generations of Americans holding factory jobs.
Lutnick suggested an increase in factory work—bolstered by automated robotic labor—would provide an opportunity for American workers to find stable and well-paying jobs, beginning at $70,000 to $80,000 per year.
“It’s time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future,” Lutnick told CNBC’s “The Exchange” earlier this week. “This is the new model, where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here.”
“You should see an auto plant,” he said. “It’s highly automated, but the people—the [4,000] or 5,000 people that work there—they are trained to take care of those robotic arms. They’re trained to keep the air conditioning [going].”
Because they never got that great job pillaging at some vulture equity fund like Nudnick did.
They instead will be assembling parts for the new death star on Narkina 5.
But forgetting the Social Security faceplant and his forecast for the end of upward mobility, his biggest gaffe came recently when he said that taxpayers don't pay for tariffs, countries and businesses do.
Really? In what world is that?
The Commerce Secretary went on CNN recently and insisted countries and businesses, and not consumers, would pay the tariff cost.
"We do expect a 10% baseline tariff to be in place for the foreseeable future — but don't buy the silly arguments that the U.S. consumer pays," Lutnick said on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.
This is of course, absolute bullshit and make believe.
I have had two vendors I work with tell me that their business stopped completely after the China tariffs, with their costs for raw materials doubling and tripling in some cases. Lutnick and Trump show a total ignorance regarding the plight of small business in America.
Small companies like my cohorts will simply close up shop, they do not have the financial wherewithal to eat the tariffs and neither do their customers.
And now Walmart has announced that they will have to pass down the price increases, to the consternation of the President and his minions.
NEW YORK (AP) — Walmart, which became the nation’s largest retailer by making low prices a priority, has found itself in a place it’s rarely been: Warning customers that prices will rise for goods ranging from bananas to car seats.
Executives at the $750 billion company told industry analysts Thursday that they’re doing everything in their power to absorb the higher costs from tariffs ordered by President Donald Trump.
Given the magnitude of the duties, however, the highest since the 1930s, higher prices are unavoidable, and they will hurt Walmart customers already buffeted by inflation over the past three years.
Trump’s threatened 145% import taxes on Chinese goods were reduced to 30% in a deal announced Monday, with some of the higher tariffs on pause for 90 days.
Those higher prices began to appear on Walmart shelves in late April and accelerated this month, Walmart executives said Thursday. However, a larger sting will start to be felt in June and July when the back-to-school shopping season goes into high gear.
Trump has of course, flipped out over this. He wants them to eat the tariffs, no matter the effect on profits.
President Donald Trump blasted Walmart on Saturday after the country’s largest retailer warned this week that it will have to raise prices because of tariffs.
“Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, “EAT THE TARIFFS,” and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. “I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!”
Sorry Donny, that's not how it works in the real world. Walmart may be able to lose money longer than the rest of us but they are capitalists and capitalists that don't pay attention to the bottom line don't stay in business for very long. Even big companies like Walmart.
The reality is that all these MAGA types who dream of dismantling the global economy need to understand that it takes decades to ramp up domestic manufacturing capabilities, not months or years. A lot of our businesses are used to low cost foreign labor and not easily weaned.
All Trump is going to succeed in doing is driving the greatest economic power in the world into recession and he looks like has is doing a great job at that.
Thankfully, being a man who never takes any personal responsibility for his own failures, if he is smart he will march Peter Navarro and Lutnick right out to the guillotines and pretend this tariff crap never happened before he does too much more damage.
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Oh and one more thing regarding Lutnick. He said that dockworkers and truck drivers worried about their jobs should have faith. Why? Because Trump said so and has truthed it out.
“You should be very optimistic and positive, and I am too,” Lutnick said. “Because the President truthed it out.”
Truthed it out? Since when did truth become a verb? Seriously? Are we in the United States of America or North Korea, the infallible great leader has truthed it out... Oh joy.