Why do they always look like that?

Little Debbie is a hell of a drug.

correlation causation?

Translation: hey ladies, there's a finite quota of wrongs that can be done to you, don't waste it on trivial sexual assaults, gotta hold your fire for gang rapes and whatnot

Or for when somone wishes you happy holidays or asks you to press 1 for English.

i've seen this somewhere before. oh yeeeaaahhh...

America's Grandpas are going to have to cancel their LifeLock auto renewal payments and take out another reverse mortgage to afford a collection of those bad boys.

Since transactions on this site are contributions to Trump Make America Great Again Committee. and are not transactions for the purchase of goods, we unfortunately cannot offer credit card refunds.

Although all transactions made on shop.donaldjtrump.com are considered a donation to the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a small shipping and handling fee is charged at the lowest possible rate through the United States Postal Service (Priority Mail) to help cover the cost of shipping from our warehouse to your door.

I wouldn't recommend that after what happened with Equifax today

bronze? he deserves silver, he came in second. maybe his people are only counting the votes that weren't illegally placed by deep-cover russian spies

i'm gonna post this, nobody's gonna like it, c'est la vie

https://www.theatlantic.com/educatio...m_source=atltw

I don't have any problem with that article or its perspective at all. It's important to consider the impact of policies like Title 9 on the accused too and it's a tricky situation that can be overlooked.

What I do have a problem with is when tricky situations like this are left in the hands of people who are both wildly unqualified and have conflicting interests. And also, when these perspectives are hijacked by morons who are just looking to frame their misogyny a little bit because they're too chicken**** to ever say what they actually think. Which is a shame because most issues aren't as easy as something like whether Nazis are bad.

A reasoned article talking about what due process means for people accused? Perfectly fair. I read the Atlantic btw and it's pretty solid

Real or onion?

and

Jerry Moran, CEO of MedalCraft Mint

I know I'm repeating myself here, but it's just ****ing amazing that when Trump the career con artist is given the awesome powers of the presidency of the US that he engages in these penny-ante, Fox News-grade commemorative coin scams. That's pretty lazy grifting, bro. Like, imagine the Leo DeCarpiro Wolf of Wall Street character who's energetic and hungry being in the White House and think of all the billions and billions he could skim off the executive office.

Vladimir Putin is rumored to be the wealthiest person in the world in large part because he uses state power to gobble up entire oil companies whole and uses the FSB to murder anyone who starts ****. Of course Russia has fewer safeguards against grifting, but still just imagine Putin wasting his time selling $45 dollar coins.

Just ****ing embarrassing that the US invented hustling and we can't even hustle properly.

Putin made a commemorative coin for himself but he had to annex Crimea first.

I've ham handedly made this point before and will continue to make it tongue-in-cheek, but I am half serious. That is, I write some stuff below for humorous effect but I think it is genuinely a factor and worth remembering:

The left has to realize some of the extensions of their own criticisms. What do I mean by that?: well, if we acknowledge America has a garbage consumption economy built off of consuming cheap, disposable **** (a typical leftist criticism) and tons of wealth is sort of informally (or formally) and unfairly horded by whites due to inheritance and nepotism and racism and segregation (another leftist criticism) -- both of those factors (among others) inform and impact the nature of our grifts.

So, Putin's grifts are the old style smash and grab of extracted mineral and chemical resources and various extortion schemes because of the nature of their economy and the location of stored wealth. Putin has to seize oil and threaten business people because he can't scam ordinary Russians who are on average relatively poor when compared to the average American. Our middle class is shrinking but still extant. Putin uses the brute force approach and the direct victims are competing elites. Obviously downstream, the indirect victims are all Russians. When your country is basically a criminal syndicate, everyone loses.

But the point remains that it's a bit more of a classic criminal enterprise where the strongman threatens and seizes with force and the victims are usually competitive strongmen. Your moral calculations may vary as to the nature of this, I surely don't praise it, but imagine instead if Trump was shaking down Exxon or Goldman Sachs and how much sympathy you would have. Maybe some, maybe we'd frown, and acknowledge that it's bad, sure, and certainly the holistic degradation of their legal culture makes everyone suffer. But on the whole, I think you might feel better he was grifting other rich bozos and not dumb old whites. In either case, I'd just note the classical, more Marxist analysis of Putin is that he's sort of just an everyday criminal.

Yes, Trump is a lazy grifter and his hustles are embarrassing, but America's unscrupulous grifters spend so much time conning dumb olds because because America's dumb olds are where the money is at. And this is where we depart from Russia. The typical victims of America's Gifting Long Conners are the petite bourgoise and others who occupy the middle class. Sure, maybe we have some better legal protections and a more proactive legal culture that deters and prosecutes brazen extortion schemes and so perhaps America's Gifting Class isn't really engaged in subterfuge class warfare by calculation, only by necessity. But I'm not so sure.

But I think sorting out the meta factors are instructive. And I think America's jaunt into increasingly hyper competitive capitalism and the victims it creates are, minimally, interesting to watch. And I think the last 15-20 years of the increasing diversity, vibrancy, and new product development in the Scam Dumb Old Whites markets is very, very telling. Every few years brings new innovations and developments: commemorative coins, reverse mortgages, gold investments, identity theft protection, homeopathic medicines, herbal cancer cures, garbage Stansberry investment newsletters, really the whole right-wing longcon industry -- the entirety of AM radio and daytime Fox News ads -- is like right out of the late stage capitalist warfare strategy guide. The 1960s-1990s was the project of eroding the lower/middle class labor value, their real mechanism to generate wealth -- to generate income by working for it. The elites still need work done, but they don't want to pay that much for it. Crush labor, beat back the welfare state. Get the tax bills lower. They've had some successes there, and as such, it's hard to extract that much more from the middle class, the younger cohorts, and the lower classes. They've been subdued.

Now they're moving on. The modern Long Con is finding the next generation of victims: the old whites who got theirs while the gettin' was good and still have some disposable income in retirement. Obviously the hustle is lazy but it's important to know where the money is in the US vis a vis Russia and tons of middle and upper class older whites still have some wealth, and it's hard to grab it by force, it's too well distributed. Our Putins can't simply confiscate it the way Putin can just take over an oil company. So they extract it by other means. Our Grifters are lazy because extracting money from Dumb Old Whites is trivially easy, so why invest too much in it? That's not the interesting quality imo. It's that they've moved onto eating their own. It's the Trump/GOP tax plan to tax 401k contributions and **** so they could fund even more tax cuts for the mega wealthy that made us all do a quick double-take; that doesn't sound very Republican? Aren't the victims going to be all those middle class whites who have some money and investments and by and large are Republicans? Yeah, exactly.

You can only learn so much from like one commemorative coin on DonShop2020.gov or whatever the ****, so I don't invite us to conclude too much here. But I really don't think the laziness of it is the most interesting feature of these ****ty coins. It's the shifting of wealth from the buyers to the sellers that's much more interesting to watch, and the transparent way the sellers are less and less interested in providing any value whatsoever to their consumers that's more valuable to know.

Very interesting, but counterpoint. ..

More wealth is concentrated in fewer hands than since the gilded age.

The commemorative coin business is a ****ty business. Smart guys like Cheney got Haliburton $40B in government contracts and a who knows how many billion dollar loophole and made more than commemorative coin money. Trump is just a third rate con man and goes after third rate cons.

I think congress and state and local governments are too powerful for the POTUS to be able to shake down the mega-rich. They have too many other avenues to power. That and Trump still probably can't get away with murdering anyone who stands in his way.

Anyway, Trump is probably going to make billions off of all those trademarks and properties in China and who knows where else. He still can't stop selling steaks because he's dumb and mentally ill.

You con old people because it's like taking candy from a baby.

Daou tried to run a big con, but his kind is better at fooling themselves than anyone else, except maybe venture capitalists.

Ya, I gotta disagree with Dvaut. The real money in the US is in the corporate sector. Defense contractors, pharma, Silicon Valley. Using the White House to sell $45 plates to the LifeLock crowd is just bush league gritting.

I think Trump is just getting old and soft, he's not hungry anymore. He's not the inventive huckster he was when he founded Trump U, so he's just sticking with the tried and true hustles he's familiar with. A real pro would be running Mugabe-style schemes and funneling billions into his coffers.

The AC casino was pure grift on steroids. Transferring millions of personal debt to a failing company, selling junk bonds to unknowing casual investors using the trump "brand", gutting whatever equity was left by contracting his other companies (jet rental etc) at exorbitant rates. Leaving an entire city reeling in his wake. That was big time evil ****.

Don Jr. and Eric are probably collecting tribute all around the world as we speak. The small time grift is like kleptomania.

And Trump is insanely and cut off your nose to spite your face cheap. He's funding his campaign expenses. He will not spend a dollar of his own money flying around for these rallies.

But the bolded is my point. Perhaps poorly articulated. But it is, glibly: these coins are symbolic of pretty basic predatory class warfare. In Russia, it's dog eat dog among the elites. Now Putin is obviously a violent gangster but his targets are other elites and the other rich, because that's where the money is. He can't grift from Russia's rather meek middle classes because there ain't much there to commandeer.

In the US, the rich and elites started by eroding the position of the working class but they're pretty bled dry at this point, and most of the important extractions have been made there (deregulation, labor decimated, wages stagnant). But growth has to come from somewhere, so there's a whole cottage industry to grift olds and the people with small time wealth who can afford this kind of garbage. Because the upper classes and elites have formal and informal reasons and incentives not to **** each other over, they keep their hands off of each other. And because people with really modest means are at their tipping point, the elites are headed to the next rung up the ladder to prey on.

Basically:

Russia --> weak democracy, no middle class, weak capitalist conventions --> elites war with each other

US --> hyper capitalist liberal democracy, more robust middle class, strong statutory protections for elites --> elites collude --> wealth being grifted upward from below

The qualitative differences of the rackets are due to our different economic and legal constructs, not because Putin is hard-driving and Trump is soft and lazy. I mean I'm sure there's huge amounts of truth to that but the bigger picture are the more robust and far larger Long Con industries now preying on Republicans themselves. That is new and different and innovative relative to say 20+ years ago. Nixon and Reagan preyed on and waged war with the working class through the courts and the legislatures. The work now done there, the modern GOP is coming after their own voters to get what scraps they have.