DL Open Thread: Friday, November 26, 2021

Filed in Featured, Open Thread by on November 26, 2021

In case you were wondering:

The first recorded use of the term “Black Friday” was applied not to post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping but to financial crisis: specifically, the crash of the U.S. gold market on September 24, 1869. Two notoriously ruthless Wall Street financiers, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, worked together to buy up as much as they could of the nation’s gold, hoping to drive the price sky-high and sell it for astonishing profits. On that Friday in September, the conspiracy finally unraveled, sending the stock market into free-fall and bankrupting everyone from Wall Street barons to farmers.

Obvious, yes, but, hey, it’s The Dan:

The story behind the song (channeling my Inner Al here):

Steely Dan’s version of the Black Friday story, however, is largely fictitious, centering around a made-up Australian investor deeply involved in the devious business scheme.

“When Black Friday comes, I’ll collect everything I’m owed,” sings Donald Fagen. “And before my friends find out, I’ll be on the road.”

The investor hightails it to Muswellbrook, a small rural town about two hours north of Sydney. Why? Even Fagen admits the choice was random, so long as it was as far away as possible.

“I think we had a map and put our finger down at the place that we thought would be the furthest away from New York or wherever we were at the time. That was it,” he said to Steely Dan Reader.

‘Fine, Steve, how about a real open thread, you know, news, topics’.   Sure, Dallas lost, making Thanksgiving even more enjoyable.  OK, I’ve vamped long enough. Getting coffee, be right back…hey, I’m unhurried now, don’t have to fit this in before work…a life without cortisol, you should try it.

Fertility Rates Falling.  Explain to me again–why is this bad news?:
A new Pew Research Center survey finds that a rising share of U.S. adults who are not already parents say they are unlikely to ever have children, and their reasons range from just not wanting to have kids to concerns about climate change and the environment.
Some 44% of non-parents ages 18 to 49 say it is not too or not at all likely that they will have children someday, an increase of 7 percentage points from the 37% who said the same in a 2018 survey. Meanwhile, 74% of adults younger than 50 who are already parents say they are unlikely to have more kids, virtually unchanged since 2018.
Iraq Veteran Infiltrates RWNJ 3%ers.  What he finds is terrifying, and is largely being ignored by law enforcement:
“Now I was joining them because I wanted to know what they were planning. And I joined the Three Percenters. During the screening, using basically my real profile as an Iraq veteran as background, they’re asking me questions about my weapon system, my secondary, meaning my handgun, how I was prepared to use it. What I would do in different tactical scenarios. They specifically asked, and I made recordings because these people are idiots, they were explicitly asking would you kill someone from Antifa or Black Lives Matter. This wasn’t an anomaly.”
They have been basically made afraid,” Goldsmith said of the law enforcement. “And especially with the Trump administration and Bill Barr’s Department of Justice. Law enforcement was afraid to watch these folks like I did. I’m not a law enforcement official. I can go and buddy up to these people online. Make a fake profile, a fake gab account. and just copy and paste their rhetoric. So, they think I’m one of them then you know, a few days go by of silence and the next thing you know, there are conversations that I recorded.”
The US Catholic Church Vs. Biden:  Bottom line: The younger bishops think the Pope is a candy-ass woke Pontiff:
Through the fall, the sparring continued. Conservative San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone launched a public prayer campaign calling on “all Catholics and others of goodwill” to pray for “the conversion” of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “maternal heart.” Los Angeles Archbishop Gomez delivered a polarizing public address at a conference in Spain arguing that “wokeness,” “social justice,” and “intersectionality” were “dangerous” and “atheistic…pseudo-religions” that “have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied.” Meanwhile, in Rome, the pope told reporters that he had “never refused the eucharist to anyone,” and later met with both Pelosi and Biden—Biden emerging from his visit with the report that the pope had told him to continue receiving communion.
On the whole, it found that the priesthood is becoming more conservative; that younger priests are most stridently opposed to the politics of their pope; and that clerics on both sides of the political spectrum believe things are getting worse, not better, in the US church.
If things are getting ‘worse’ in the US Catholic Church, I consider that progress.
How To Prepare–And To Not Prepare–For The Death Of The Coal Industry.  The good news? The coal industry is dying regardless.  Interesting article.
What do you want to talk about?

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  1. SussexAnon says:

    Russell Huxtable posted on the 20th RD Facebook page he will be running for the 6th Senate district.

  2. OH, NO! The day I had feared has finally come to pass.

    My all-time favorite composer, tops on my Musical Mt. Rushmore, the irreplaceable Stephen Sondheim, has died at the age of 91. I am beyond sad:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/theater/stephen-sondheim-dead.html