For the first time in a long time, I have enough in the URL hopper to categorize like I used to.
Speaking of “used to,” just don’t get used to this, because you won’t have it around for that much longer.
LOCAL AND REGIONAL
* Near this same Schnucks was the Matt Quain Knockout Martin Luther King event. It’s that genuinely diverse part of the city I’ve referenced here often, the Grand-Chippewa-Gravois area, where true Shannon-Weaver Index diversity converges.
* Speaking of grocery stores, I’m not surprised Shop-n-Save, which has closed a few stores in the area recently, is on hard times. Its main problem now is that it is being demographically crowded out from below. SnS’s demo has been working-lower-middle class whites. And they’re bleeding off to Wal-Martinez and Aldi big time for food shopping.
Speaking of Aldi, and this is a sneak peek of the travelogue I may never get to write in full:
Essen, as a proper noun, is the name of a major city constituent of the Rhine-Ruhr Region. However, as a common noun, essen means “food,” and as a verb, essen means “to eat.” So it is only apropos that, just after the end of WWII, a pair of brothers in Essen named Albrecht borrowed on their parents’ experience in the grocery business in the previous generation, to start a zero frills necessary-basics-only small footprint standardized layout grocery store business, which was very necessary in post-WWII bombed out Allied-occupied Germany. The brothers called their stores Albrecht Diskont (“Diskont” = discounted items). Or, (AL)brecht (DI)skont, (AL)(DI), Aldi.
And now, like I have wrote here often, Aldi’s American operations, which didn’t start until 1976, and 1979 was its first St. Louis store, in fact, that was along Virginia Avenue not far north of Bates, and I remember as a very little kid my mother taking me into it to shop, is only one of three American retailers that truly moves the needle these days, the other two being Wal-Martinez and Amazon. I also wrote here about one of those networking suppers I went to, this one was just before my 40th birthday, (because I remember having the forty fever), so it was March 2017. At that one, someone else in attendance told us about the similar gathering he was at before that one, and at it were two mucks from the local-regional Wal-Mart corporate bureaucracy. One was chewing the other out about his decision to put St. Louis’s newest W-M (at the time, it’s the one on Watson near Kenrick on the west side of the Frisco overpass), “next to a fucking Aldi,” and that was supposed to be an exact quote. I was mystified at first, wondering why W-M cared that much about Aldi. But it was my first inclination that that something was up. Well, in the next few months, it broke all over the business news media that W-M and Amazon fear each other and fear Aldi at the same time. Around that time, Lidl, Aldi’s chief Aldi-style European competitor, (of which I saw quite a few in Germany and Czechia), announced its moving into the American market.
When we were in Essen, we saw the outside of Aldi’s world HQ building, and also Aldi’s first ever location in the same city, which is still open and an Aldi to this day, though it has presumably been remodeled and renovated several times. We went into it, and the layout is rather but not perfectly similar to the American Aldi layout. The prices are significantly higher, even though in all countries, Aldi is the low price leader. Which is one of many many many hints I got to how expensive is Germany.
* “Off his meds.” In an earlier saner time, he would have been institutionalized permanently, and therefore not have been this kind of bother on the streets.
* It is my observation and intelligence guided by admittedly tangential experience that, in instances like these, yes, the slumlords are a problem, but the slum tenants are also a problem. The better way to think about these things is that the slumlords and the slum tenants have a dynamic race-to-the-bottom relationship with each other. They dynamically feed off of each other. However, the reason why it’s taboo to blame slum tenants is because that would be “punching down” in Trudeauese.
* If that’s how he treats his drinking buddies, I’d hate to see what he would do to his avowed rivals.
CHICAGO
* Duh, because the ambulances are busy chasing around dindus who make holes in each other.
NATIONAL
* Amazing what people will admit to when you give them half a chance.
* Who other than your ever-lovin’ blogmeister is not buying this notion that the NRA is on the brink of financial ruin? I happen to think some (cough cough, Strolling Bone magazine, cough cough), are incorrectly and in a “wishful thinking” sense misinterpreting some things. With all the NRA’s members, and also the funding it gets from manufacturers, I can ill imagine any of this sky-is-falling speculation is true.
OTOH, some of these people want you to think that some cute Russian blonde going to an NRA convention is supposed to mean ZOMG PUTIN.
* I wrote here earlier this week that “living (your/our/their) best life” is the new “ballin’ out.” Because 2017 street slang is just not on fleek anymore, it’s obsolete, yesterday’s news, no longer a thing. Get thee into the current year. Anyway, we have a small example. And yet more proof that, when it came to predicting that how the Obamas would behave in his post-Presidency, my prediction rather than Rush Limbaugh’s turned out to be the correct one, and Rush himself even had to admit how wrong his prediction is turning out.
* Something we’ve all known for a long time. A certain political party sees to it that verification and punishment mechanisms in this stead are so weak as to be practically non-existent.
* Yes, Jim, but those were back in the days before you and your ilk connived to bust the border wide open. We were “on the same team” precisely because we were the same team.
Even though between you me and the gatepost, Acosta is too romantic about the past. My natural inclination here in my middle age is to look sideways at all this glorification of the past, precisely because I myself am hearing “good ole days” romanticization of years where I was both alive and very coherent, and funny I don’t remember those days being so “good ole.” The people doing that weren’t even alive during those particular years.
* My first reaction was that I was surprised the mainline media allowed the conflation of homosexual men and illicit drugs. But then I read further, and this openly admitted it. But…Pat Robertson’s fault…or something like that.
* Read closely, and read between the lines, and in this, you will discover why modern day American organized labor is on such hard times. It’s because today’s labor leaders, who largely did not matriculate from their own unions’ ranks-and-files, are more concerned about transphobia on Twitter than advocating for their members. In the particular case of teachers’ unions, it’s the neoliberal leadership in the very party they usually endorse that’s throwing them under the bus, but you can’t get them to admit that. Randi Weingarten herself should know better, because she was the counterpoint against Davis Guggenheim and the neolib-ed-reformist mentality in Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman.
INTERNATIONAL
* When I read the headline, not only did the WRPT kick in, I also knew it was Orly (aka Charles de Gaulle), and not Roissy. Obviously, we didn’t go to Paris on the voyage. But word gets around about airports. And we found out that Orly is in a dindu dump part of Paris, while Roissy is in the first world. Unfortunately, Roissy only handles domestic and intra-European hauls. Any trans-continental traffic in and out of Paris goes through Orly.
* And I bet that there are STILL overdue books from this library, which have accumulated one hell of a fine in the last 1900 years.
* What is she thinking?
The problem with the German left in general is that, because everyone but an extreme unelectable fringe in German politics already support a big welfare state and a equitable-to-labor-and-production policy when it comes to business-employee relations, this boxes out the left from being able to exploit those issues to win elections. Fraulein here seems to want to start a leftist party that is also opposed to open borders. But all that would make it pretty much the carbon copy of the AfD. And the rest of the left is open borders but isn’t needed for that point, because Merkel already fills that need. On the voyage, I was surprised to see that the newspaper Neues Deutschland (“New Germany”) is still being published. It was the house organ of the one party of the one-party East German state; In that, it was the analogue to Pravda. After reunification, ND rebooted to democratic socialism under the tutelage of the Left Party, which is the very party Fraulein here is abandoning to start her new venture. But as I thumbed through today’s modern day ND, I saw a bunch of immigration cheerleading. I ask myself: Why? What for? You don’t need ND for that when you’ve got Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (“Frankfurt General Public Newspaper” or “FAZ”), and considering which city it’s published, one could easily predict that it’s Germany’s equivalent of the WSJ, and that I can confirm. FAZ is open borders for the same reason the WSJ is. That’s where Merkel takes her immigration policy cues, as well as most of the rest of what she does politically, which should put all our sector’s conspiratorializing about Merkel and East Germany to bed forever. And why do you need the Left Party for open borders when you already have Merkel and the CDU for that?
I think Fraulein here is just angling in for her fifteen.
MISC STUFF
* No comment, none necessary, never.