End of August Miscellany

Clearing some things from my mind the last days of August:

We pretty much stopped shopping at Amazon a couple years ago. (Not a 100% boycott, but pretty close.)  The New York Times piece really didn't contain much that's new.  We have a much clearer conscience shopping at Walmart than we do at Amazon.  And that's been true for a long time.

Radical religious extremists now control the governments in Israel, India, Iran (although, ironically, Iran's government is less radical than, say, ten years ago), and parts of Africa.  Some might add Pakistan and even Iraq.  And others--such as Turkey--are moving more and more in that direction.  In all these cases, the world is worse off.  In the US, radicals of the Religious Right would like to have the same thing happen here.  We used to have a Constitution to protect us from that happening, but with the current activist Supreme Court I am not as confident of that protection as I used to be.

During all the faux-scandals of the past few years (Fast and Furious, Benghazi, IRS, et al...I lost count), the hyper-ventilating Right would have you believe that the "Liberal" media simply covered things up.  On the contrary, these things were incessantly covered, way beyond anything dictated by reality.  They faded away because the Darrell Issas and Fox Newses of the world were unable to answer the question,"Where's the beef?"  They made up their own facts for a while but the public eventually just yawned.  The same thing will happen with the latest faux-Planned Parenthood scandal, and probably even the faux-Hillary Clinton email scandal.  As Kevin Drum says, there's no there there.

My wife has been on Social Security for much of Obama's presidency (early 2009 to now).  Her benefit has gone up an average of less than 1.5% per year.  I'm not complaining about that.  That's what the CPI has been.  My point is that Rick Santelli and other inflationistas have been panicking about inflation for most of those seven years and have been screaming for the Fed to raise rates.  I have two questions: (1) What inflation? (2)  Why is anyone still listening to people who have been so consistently wrong for seven years straight?