The approach of October means the October issue of The Last Word is here!
This scoopy edition discusses my Minnesota trip, gentrification of comic books, NKU violating confidentiality laws, helicopter governing, blowing bubble gum bubbles with game pieces inside, and more!
So point your pooper here...
https://www.scribd.com/document/773893365/The-Last-Word-10-2024
If that doesn't work, glide on over here...
Today, I received an important e-mail saying that a woman spilled an entire 2-pound container of blueberries all over the floor in the checkout lane at Kroger. They were wosted. Either that, or they were sent to the store in Bellevue.
The e-mail also said that several celebrity look-alikes were sighted on a cruise. They included Walter Cronkite, Jared Polis, and Rosemary Clooney.
Hard to believe anyone thinks this might be politically advantageous or legally sound, but there's some strange people out there.
As Kroger attempts to merge with Albertsons, this anticompetitve move is cheered by the elitist media, but you'd think elected officials would be more politically savvy than to support it. Yet a group of 12 Republican state attorneys general - including Ohio's Dave Yost - have filed a court brief claiming the FTC's antitrust powers are unconstitutional.
As with other recent weird legal theories, the legal logic of this is completely incomprehensible. But if this brief succeeds in court, government antitrust powers - which are already used much too little - will be essentially gutted altogether.
Even some Republicans have supported antitrust efforts in the past few years. Sometimes it was for reasons you might think are questionable, but broadly speaking, I would have supported these breakups, because competition is vital. Yost himself has even overseen some antitrust suits. But the new brief by the Republican attorneys general would stymie all of these breakups.
The move to gut antitrust law is mirrored by Project 2025, a policy document that consists mostly of right-wing ideas that have bobbed along for the past 45 years. Project 2025 has one good idea, which is to abolish the Department of Homeland Security. The rest of it stinks.
This comes after a recent FTC report said Kroger, Walmart, and Amazon have been taking advantage of supply chain disruptions to jack up prices. It started during COVID-19 and has continued ever since. Grocery price gouging is real. It's gone on since before then and has only gotten worse. Grocery prices have increased 25% in 4 years.
Antitrust enforcement is one of the most basic charges of government. And it's in danger.
Yesterday, I went to Ploptoberfest in Cincinnati, and it's not quite what it used to be.
The good news is that they had a new space for it this year along the riverfront, which is far bigger than past years. It's certainly better than the years when they crammed it onto 2nd Street, though that era did produce a highlight in 2021 when people beered on the streetcar. Unfortunately, beverage choices this year were horrendous if you wanted to skip the beer because you had to drive home. They were hard to find too. I was about ready to pass out because of it.
Also, I was grimacing in agony for a while because of a medical condition.
This may be the last festival for me. I've become too weak to walk around at events like this.
Now, the ploppings. I went into one of the portable restrooms and noticed there were two ploppables plopped. Not for the first time, a metal lid to a pickle jar had been plopped. That's gonna do a number on their cleaning equipment! In the same dumper, someone had plopped a plastic water bottle (like for bottled water from the store).
The only celebrity look-alikes I saw were Judy Graubart and Dan Hill. Must have been '70s day!
This is the sort of story that makes you wish you never opened the newspaper this morning.
The Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in American history - and one of the worst in the world. An NIH report said that "total mortality was significantly elevated" after the 1979 meltdown, and a spike in birth defects was found in the area. The plant even had to pay a multimillion-dollar legal settlement.
The media has lately been engaged in a campaign of historical negationism to downplay the disaster, but nobody is fooled (idiots excepted). When the media isn't cheering foreign wars or demanding new COVID lockdowns or more cuts to Social Security, everything else it puts out sounds like a press release written by the nuclear power racket.
But now Constellation Energy has announced plans to restart Three Mile Island. All the energy generated by it will be sold to Microsoft - solely to power its artificial intelligence operations. Nobody who lives in the area will be able to use the power it generates - but their lives will be endangered again by the plant being nearby. The plant is scheduled to be restarted in 2028.
Instead of green energy, America is moving backwards towards filthy, dangerous energy that was in vogue over a half-century ago.
All of this is so Microsoft can run more AI. AI of course is the thing that comes up at the top of every Google search which I skip over because it's so full of inaccurate information. It's almost as inaccurate as the media's right-wing pro-nuke propaganda.
Back in 2013, the right-wing Florida Times-Union of Jacksonville ran an editorial charging that the Social Security disability program was being abused fluently. They demanded changes, dammit! They said that unless the government cracked down hard on disabled Americans, the program's reserves would run out by 2016.
Well, how did that prediction turn out?
Bullies make threats, and this is a good example.
The media gaslights the public by constantly claiming Social Security is the "third rail" of politics, which nobody wants to touch - yet it's always the first thing they touch.
Last night, I had a dream where we ate at a restaurant that was absolutely filthy.
A customer ordered iced tea, so a waiter put an ice cube in a cup of tea with his bare hands.
I walked out of the restaurant after seeing such a disgusting spectacle, but a family member stayed behind.
Indeed I did.
Also, people beered in violation of the all-encompassing Allowed Cloud. In fact, my shirt got beer spilled all over it when someone knocked over a folding chair that had a cup of beer on it.
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