Category: Capitalist swine

The turn of the screw

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
“When I said ‘I’ll take it black,’ I didn’t mean this black. …”

Cost of coffee? Up nearly 21 percent. Cost of screws from Taiwan, America’s No. 1 supplier?

Just ask the Taiwanese, who make screws for everything from bathroom cabinets to data-center fans.

Margins are thin and getting thinner, as is the herd of manufacturers, thanks to The Pestilence’s 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, plus competition from mainland China on product and the homegrown computer-chip industry for workers and government support.

Kent Chen of Sheh Fung Screws Company told The New York Times that his orders are down 20 percent compared to this time last year.

“Everything is in pause mode. A lot of our customers said, ‘We’ll see,’ but then we didn’t receive many orders.”

Oh, he got his orders, all right. Same as the rest of us.

“Assume the position!”

We are so screwed. Ain’t enough coffee in the world for this bullshit. Especially at these prices.

‘No more fun of any kind!’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Disney CEO Vernon “Dean” Wormer pulls the plug on Jimmy Kimmel.

The Dean came for Jimmy Kimmel’s “Animal House” yesterday.

Nobody should be surprised, especially Kimmel, who has been attending the Hollywood School of Hard Knocks for the better part of quite some time and been sacked and/or compelled to apologize more than once over a long and checkered career.

Kimmel got his start in radio while still in high school, but didn’t land on America’s TV screens until 1977, when he provided the comic relief on “Win Ben Stein’s Money,” which aired on Comedy Central. “The Man Show” followed two years later.

And then in 2003 he got to hang out his own late-night shingle, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on ABC.

Maybe he felt safe there. Comedy Central would fall under the pinstriped shadow of Paramount, which earlier this year punked CBS News and Stephen Colbert to get its merger with Skydance approved.

But this year, ABC — a lesser rub-and-tug parlor in the Disney chain of cut-rate whorehouses — found itself caught between two rocks and a very hard place.

Two big owners of TV stations — Nexstar and Sinclair, the first seeking FCC approval to buy a rival, the second a right-wing white-noise machine — said they would suspend “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” after he addressed the killing of the recently canonized — or is that “cannonized?” — Charlie Kirk. Disney’s empty suits took notice and then gave same to Kimmel, reportedly as his audience was filing in for yesterday’s show.

If Kimmel didn’t see it coming, Calvin Coolidge certainly did. In an address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on January 17, 1925, the president said: “After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.”

Some of them are, for sure. And you’re only funny until you get in their way.

The straight poop

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
The Shit Show! Coming to a … well, it’s already here. Has been since Jan. 20.

Is there a wall left unbeshitted in the Benighted States? If he flings it, it might stick?

“Department of Defense” to be rebranded as “War Department?” OK, one syllable instead of two, so I suppose he might be able to say it without drooling all over his tie. And he could even spell it, maybe. The first word, anyway. If someone spots him the “W” and the “r.”

But when his country wanted him to go to war Cadet Bonespurs was all about playing defense, right here at home.

Hundreds of Koreans ICEd at the construction site of a Hyundai-LG battery plant in Georgia as our two nations struggle to negotiate one of his fabled “deals?” Are these the drug mules with cantaloupe-size calves that screeching racist dipshit Steve King was raving about when some folks — the press, mostly — gave a runny shit what he thought or had to say?

No, this lot had to cross an ocean instead of a river. Talk about your “bad hombres.”

And taking over the 9/11 memorial and museum in New York City? Which commemorate a disaster in which he did … fuck-all? Other than jack his jaw in complete and utterly pampered safety, like the REMF he is and always will be, that is.

Damn. Those Epstein files must really be the shit. He’d bomb Harvard to keep that story out of the news cycle.

Boom-boom or bye-bye?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
“Yo, I got your solar, wind, and geothermal technologies right here. …

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, etc.

The roving Eye of Mordor has fallen upon Sandia National Labs. And where the Eye goes, the Sword shall follow.

The deets remain elusive. But the gist of it is that Sandia plans “to reduce its workforce” by as many as 510 employees as part of a “restructuring effort aimed at cost reduction,” which may include a “voluntary separation program” and a hiring freeze.

This is PR-speak for “budget cuts, buyouts, and layoffs.”

One to three percent of the staff is not a huge bloodletting, unless you happen to be one of the 510 and have a couple kids in university, a parent in a nursing home, and the usual credit-card debt and home/auto/college loans outstanding.

Nevertheless, you may well ask, how is it that the Military-Industrial Complex is reduced to counting its pennies in these dark days?

Well, it seems as though the Military portion of the Complex is in tip-top shape. No shortage of comfy chairs, caviar, and Champagne in the Boom-Boom Room.

But the Industrial aspect? Well … it suffers from elevated levels of solar, wind, and geothermal technologies that don’t kill foreigners, DEI, or The Woke, and thus are not covered by MAGA Cross-Red Shield. So those have to come off, stat. And with a scimitar, not a scalpel.

Anesthesia, you ask? Ho, ho. Suck it up, Buttercup. Drugs are for Closers. And you posie-sniffing Poindexters wonder why you weren’t invited to the King’s Birthday Parade. You should’ve grabbed a chair in the Boom-Boom Room before the music stopped.

All hats, no cattle

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
A hat for each of his horns.

Famous sperm donor Elon Muskhat is returning to fucking up his companies instead of fucking up the government, according to The Atlantic.

And not a moment too soon.

Nobody is compelled to deal with this asshole’s companies. But it’s kind of hard to avoid dealing with the government. It’s always telling you where you can’t hike, or fucking poor people while blowing the Pentagon, or shipping your neighbors off to the Sheik of Yerbouti for challenging new careers as rare-earth miners and/or sexytime playthings.

He’s got his own town in Texas, I hear. Let him fuck that place up for a while.