Perhaps we can console each other as we watch our country start to disintegrate. We can share experiences of our MAGA encounters.
Here's my latest.
I've lately been keeping up with the unsettling accounts of DOGE government invasions, and especially the latest news about their attempted incursions at the SSA HQ in Woodlawn, MD. Former SSA commissioner Martin O'Malley was recently interviewed, noting that the employee buy-out offers and firings at SSA would leave the agency short of experts who knew COBOL and the architecture of the SSA's automated systems. He predicted a higher chance of an outage, causing delays or undelivered benefit payments. SSA hasn't failed to deliver a benefit check to the eligible in its history of 80+ years.
Every day, I go down to a small park to make my one-mile walk. Seniors should walk a mile every day, or 150 minutes a week.
Next to the park, there is a grocery store which has the best butcher counter in town, and so I pick up some things there before going home. As I entered the store, a couple who were perhaps 10 years younger than I followed me in. They appeared to be old enough to collect SS benefits, so I asked -- and they did get their benefits. So I tried to advise them, telling them that O'Malley urged people to save money to avert the problem of a delayed benefit check or deposit.
They reacted. "That's propaganda!" they said. "He'd never do that!" -- perhaps addressing the thought that Trump would deliberately cause SS benefit payments to be interrupted. I attempted to advise them further, but I went my way, and they went theirs.
Later, I returned to the checkout counter. The cashier asked me how I was doing. "Not bad! Pretty good! About the same! But the stock market is in the toilet!" [You can check the DJ and S&P500 indexes for March 11, but one cannot miss these announcements on the TV news channels or Bloomberg.
I hadn't noticed at first that the same couple were behind me, but the man sharply remarked "No it isn't!" To that, I had to ask "What planet are you from?" I'd lost half of the gains in my guided investment fund over the previous year. I have a friend who lost $7,000 in the past couple weeks.
So. What planet are they from?
Here's my latest.
I've lately been keeping up with the unsettling accounts of DOGE government invasions, and especially the latest news about their attempted incursions at the SSA HQ in Woodlawn, MD. Former SSA commissioner Martin O'Malley was recently interviewed, noting that the employee buy-out offers and firings at SSA would leave the agency short of experts who knew COBOL and the architecture of the SSA's automated systems. He predicted a higher chance of an outage, causing delays or undelivered benefit payments. SSA hasn't failed to deliver a benefit check to the eligible in its history of 80+ years.
Every day, I go down to a small park to make my one-mile walk. Seniors should walk a mile every day, or 150 minutes a week.
Next to the park, there is a grocery store which has the best butcher counter in town, and so I pick up some things there before going home. As I entered the store, a couple who were perhaps 10 years younger than I followed me in. They appeared to be old enough to collect SS benefits, so I asked -- and they did get their benefits. So I tried to advise them, telling them that O'Malley urged people to save money to avert the problem of a delayed benefit check or deposit.
They reacted. "That's propaganda!" they said. "He'd never do that!" -- perhaps addressing the thought that Trump would deliberately cause SS benefit payments to be interrupted. I attempted to advise them further, but I went my way, and they went theirs.
Later, I returned to the checkout counter. The cashier asked me how I was doing. "Not bad! Pretty good! About the same! But the stock market is in the toilet!" [You can check the DJ and S&P500 indexes for March 11, but one cannot miss these announcements on the TV news channels or Bloomberg.
I hadn't noticed at first that the same couple were behind me, but the man sharply remarked "No it isn't!" To that, I had to ask "What planet are you from?" I'd lost half of the gains in my guided investment fund over the previous year. I have a friend who lost $7,000 in the past couple weeks.
So. What planet are they from?