This week, one of the bigger stories was Trump falling asleep at the Nicks game; best coverage probably from Kimmel this time around. He also covers the (still dragging on!) California primary (which we discussed last week). Of course, there was lots of coverage of him storming out of the Meet the Press interview (or at least as close to “storming out” as an overweight 80-year-old can manage); for that one, I’ll recommend Even More News, though Adam Kinzinger’s coverage is pretty good as well. But if you need to hear about both those at once, try Seth Meyers’ “Closer Look” from Monday.
And, look: I know that this picture is more than a week old at this point, but I’ve been waiting a week for someone to point this out, and no one has, so I have to do it myself before I explode. While showing the picture above, Trump says of the Empire State Building “So, if you lay it on its side, it would take two or three of them to fill it in.” Now I want you to look at the numbers on the chart. The Empire State Building is listed as 1,454 ft tall: twice that is 2,908 ft (much less thrice that, which would be 4,362 ft). The pool is listed as 2,030 ft. Now, I have no idea if any of these numbers are actually correct, but, you know what I do know? 2,908 ft would not fit in 2,030 ft. Math, people.
(Also, as Cody from Even More News pointed out, “Our Pool Is Bigger Than Skyscrapers” would be a pretty good band name.)
Other things you need to know this week:
- The last couple of weeks, Brian Tyler Cohen has been experimenting with bringing back his explicitly comedic segment titled “Another Day”. In general, BTC lacks the comedic chops of most of the folks I watch, so I haven’t been highlighting these segments here, but occasionally he gets off a good one. This week, that was the Friday episode, in which BTC (who recently was honored by the Trump regime by being added to an enemies list) covers the preparations for a UFC fight on White House lawn. A particularly funny one, well worth watching.
- On Thursday’s “Closer Look,” Seth Meyers notes that even Fox “News” seems frustrated with the Iran ceasfire edging.
- More Perfect Union took AOC to talk to conservative voters. You can see them realizing in real time that she’s not what they’ve been told she is. Go figure.
- Robert Reich has a short video this week on our current doomloop of Presidential elections. It’s an accurate, succinct description of our situation ... and how to fix it.
- On The Weekly Show this week, Jon Stewart interviews Quinn Slobodian, who wrote the book (literally) on Muskism. A lot of amazing historical perspective in this episode:
- Quinn: “So Donald Rumsfeld, September 10, 2001, stands in front of the brass at the Pentagon and says the Cold War is over, but there’s a new enemy. And the enemy is us. It’s like the old one: it’s top down, it’s hidebound, it’s too centralized, it’s not flexible, it can’t think on its feet. We need to now fight ourselves.” The next day the towers came down. The next year, Musk starts SpaceX. The year after that, Thiel starts Palantir.
- Quinn: “Interestingly enough, just six years later, Barack Obama comes into office ... as, of course, the anti-war president. And one of the forgotten things about that moment is, he said one of the ways we’re going to be less militaristic is we are going to make ourselves less dependent on fossil fuels. We’re going to unplug from Middle Eastern oil. ...” Jon: “How did that work out for us, Quinn?” Quinn: “Well, there was a world historical problem, which was fracking is discovered just a couple of years after that.”
- Insert your favorite facepalm emoji here.
- Meanwhile, on this week’s Some More News, Cody and crew talk about “What Happens When MAGA Is Confronted With Reality” (hint: it does not go well).
You may recall from week 71 that I warned you about Musk’s SpaceX IPO, and specifically pointed you at More Perfect Union explaining how he plans to make you fund it, by slipping it into the indexes that your retirement and investment funds are using, even though there’s usually a mandatory waiting period of a year or more. Even More News has an episode this week covering just how ridiculously inflated the IPO statements are. My favorite quote:
... this was in the New York Times today: Quote, “SpaceX has promised that its total addressable market, which is its revenue opportunity, if it captured all the demand across its various industries, is the largest in human history at 28.5 trillion dollars. The figure, which depends on SpaceX proving that it can put AI data centers in space and develop factories on the moon, dwarfs China’s annual gross domestic product by more than 8 trillion.” So, this is just like high fantasy shit.
Happily, the S&P 500 has rejected the proposed rule changes to fast-track SpaceX’s inclusion, but the Nasdaq-100 and the Russell 1000 have not. SpaceX will hit the Russell in September or December; it will enter the Nasdaq in just 15 days. At that point, if you have funds tied to either of those indexes, your retirement or investment money will begin depending, to an outsized degree, on Elon Musk’s fantasies. To make matters worse, indexes almost always have a “float requirement”, which means that a minimum amount of the stock must be available to the public. This amount is typically anywhere from 10% to 50%. But SpaceX’s float is closer to 3% to 5%: Musk and his cronies are hoarding the vast majority of the stock. So, when SpaceX becomes part of those indexes, all the funds that track those indexes will be forced to buy SpaceX, even though there’s a very limited pool of stocks to buy. Essentially, Musk has engineered a situation in which there will be low supply and high demand. Which means the price will go up. And, while there’s reporting that Musk himself can’t sell his shares for a year, his fellow early investors, atypically, ca
Look, I’m not here to offer you investment advice: that would be probably illegal and certainly unethical. I’m just letting you know that I, personally, will be scouring whatever meager funds I have (401k, HSA, etc) and making damned sure I’m not invested in anything that’s going to be forced to give money to the world’s first trillionaire, who is, sadly, not the world’s first not-so-secret Nazi billionaire.
You, of course, can do what you like.