Clarence Doesn’t Pay

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Luxury trips, real estate, private school tuition for a dependent, payments to his wife with her name removed from the invoice to disguise it - Clarence Thomas is willing to take it all from rich benefactors without disclosing it.

It’s not the way our Supreme Court Justices should act.

A Sucker Born Every Minute?

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Alex Jones, infamous for his online show InfoWars, just lost a civil lawsuit for damages due to the parents of the children killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting. Alex Jones spread lies on his show about Sandy Hook being faked, that the kids weren’t actually killed, and the families were paid actors. Typical, ugly conspiracy theory bullshit.  Alex Jones is free to say these awful things; the First Amendment protects him from the government stopping him. It doesn’t protect him from liability for the damage he caused these private families.

A jury awarded the families $4.1 million in compensatory damages plus $45.2 million in punitive damages. Texas law might cut that way down.

The trial was a train wreck of stupidity, including Jones’s lawyers accidentally turning over a digital copy of Jones’s phone, health records, and text messages without claiming it as privileged information. All of which proved where Jones was lying.

But the real shock came when information was revealed about how much InfoWars was pulling in- at one point up to $800,000 per day.

From spreading lies and conspiracies. Oh, and selling unregulated and unproven “vitamins” and other pills (yes, including “male enhancement” pills). It’s all junk science. 21st Century snake oil.

And so many people bought his crap - both his lies on his show and the crap products - that it brought in millions.

And there are so many others running their own grift. So many people, so many suckers, so eager to give their money to these charlatans.

The approach is modern, but it’s a scam as old as time.

Gas Prices

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Yep, gas prices are crazy high. Lots of factors go into that- Russian oil bans due to their invasion of Ukraine has driven up oil prices. Decades without new US refinery construction has limited capacity. Further limited by shifting processing units to sustainable fuels and refineries closing as they became more expensive and troublesome to run.

Yes, oil companies are making huge profits but if it was driven just by their greed they would have raised prices a long time ago, so there’s more going on.

And Summer demand is high. Limited supply and high demand, price goes up.

But it’s not as simple as drilling for more oil. Without refining capacity (running near peak already), we can’t turn that crude oil into gasoline anyway. And that also works against the climate change goals we must prioritize.

Reduce demand and prices should go down.

It sucks, but maybe expensive gas is going to be around a while. And maybe the world needs that.