- Ladies and gentlemen, your elected officials. George Santos is a fascinating story, but one that tracks just perfectly if you think about the long, downward spiral that seems to be our government. Imagine you’re a regular person interviewing for a normal office job and you just invent a whole basket full of shit about yourself and totally fake your resume in order to nail the role. And your game face is so strong and convincing that everyone falls for it and you get the gig. Now, you probably don’t know what the hell you’re doing when take a seat in the role, but who cares? Fake it ’till you make it! Now imagine it’s Congress! How can you not help but laugh at the level of insanity that is going on right now? I, for one, can’t get enough of the Santos memes that are going around on social media, because they are hilarious. All you need to do is do a hashtag search and you’re in for endless amounts of fun. The below image, though, is not a meme. It’s a real story! Santos, the people’s representative from New York, stole money from a dying dog. The truth is indeed stranger than fiction!
- One of my favorite news sources of late is The Free Press. You have to pay for the full boat of content (and it’s worth it), but if you sign up for their emails you can get a good tasting. They recently ran a piece mentioning another total clown, FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, our latest example of what seems like an entitled 30-year-old in a 16-year-old’s body. The article isn’t about the billions (with a b) frittered away irresponsibly or the minefield that is crypto right now. It’s more about one of my favorite topics – age. Namely, how a 30-year old human man should probably be less sheepish, childish and dumb. What I find most interesting isn’t that the boomers are largely still in charge and the millenials are taking it on the chin a little and living with their parents. Oh, no. What I find most interesting is that yet again, there is not one single mention of the Gen-X’ers. It is almost like that generation is just floating out in space, or tucked away in a quiet, dark corner. Or left at home by themselves after school to…oh wait – that part is actually what we WERE. Anyway, back to Bankman-Fried. Don’t let me try to explain it, because the professional journalist will do it much better than I will:
Bankman-Fried’s fate will now be decided by the Southern District of New York, but his media charade of aw-shucks interviews and congressional testimony laced with brogrammer idioms built a public persona that we’ve largely come to accept: SBF is just a kid. Indeed, he’s so young that his law school professor parents were involved in his business and political dealings. (In this, they embody the helicopter style of child-rearing favored by nearly the entire Boomer elite.)
The reality, of course, is that SBF is a grown-ass, 30-year-old man. He is twelve years older than many of the men and women we sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Twelve years older than the adults we encourage to swallow hundreds of thousands of dollars in college debt before even declaring a major. And, if we’re serious about the math, SBF is a mere eight years away from the half-life of the average adult American man, who boasts a provisional life expectancy of only 76 years, according to the CDC. At 38, SBF would have already lived most of his life on Earth.
Katherine Boyle, The Free Press, January 17, 2023
- Finally, it’s with great appreciation and interest that I read about John Laroquette, he of 1980s Night Court fame, who confirms that yes, he was paid in weed for his part in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We need more of this today. I want Woody Harrelson to only accept a role (as a crazed banjo-playing dean of students at an Ivy League college) if he can wheel a barrow full of weed out the door after the production is complete.