Anyone who has tried to assemble IKEA furniture has stories to tell about trying to figure out the purely diagrammatic instructions and understanding what goes where and what to do when parts are left over.
But now the company has entered the tiny home market, selling a 187 sq. ft. home for around $50,000.
It is not clear if the home has to be assembled by the buyer.
After Sidney Powell was fired as a lawyer for the Trump campaign after making all manner of wild conspiracy theories about how the CIA and Hugo Chavez had worked with Dominion Voting Systems machines to swing the election against Trump, one could be forgiven for thinking that her 15 minutes of fame were over. But no.
She is back in the limelight for two reasons. One is that Dominion is threatening legal action against her unless she withdraws the allegations made against the company that they claim has damaged its reputation and resulted in its employees being threatened.
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It appears that the two facts that went in their favor in the past election, that Trump won 74 million votes, more than any other Republican in history, and that Republicans did not suffer major congressional losses, are enough to persuade party leaders that everything is just hunky-dory, even though Trump’s margin of defeat of seven million votes was two million larger than Mitt Romney’s in 2012. That loss triggered a huge post-mortem analysis as to what went wrong while this one is being ignored.
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The last days of the Trump presidency have seen one leak after another about how Trump is going nuts, lashing out at everybody, and making the most outlandish plans about what to do next. One should not take all these at face value. While I have no doubt that Trump is beside himself with fury, aides may be exaggerating things too, in order to ‘give good copy’ as the kids in the newspaper business say.
But that does not mean we cannot laugh at him and Seth Meyers looks at this latest absurdity and also the rot that has long infected the Republican Party.
As I expected, there has been some controversy about how to prioritize the order of who gets the vaccines. For example, health guidelines suggest that those who are for whatever reason forced to be in very confined spaces or have to deal with large numbers of people should get it even before older people like me who are low risk because we have little contact with people and have no complicating risk factors. That sounds reasonable enough but that list of people who should have higher priority includes prisoners because, for obvious reasons, prisons have been the source of some of the biggest outbreaks of covid-19 and those outbreaks have not stayed within their walls but have also spread to the nearby communities because prison employees and visitors go in and out of the place all the time, thus aiding the spread.
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A New York City paramedic was moonlighting as a nude model to earn some extra money and the New York Post, the Murdoch-owned rag that pretends to be a newspaper, upon discovering this, has made it out be some kind of scandal.
But as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rightly pointed out, the real scandal is that these emergency workers are paid so little that many of them are forced to take on second jobs.
The progressive New York congresswoman tweeted that instead of publishing a salacious article suggesting the woman isn’t adhering to “standards of personal ethics” while naming both her and her employer—reportedly against her wishes—the newspaper should have focused on “the actual scandalous headline…’Medics in the United States need two jobs to survive.'”
Now that the Electoral College has cast its votes for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to be president and vice-president respectively, the next step in the process is for the votes to be sent to Congress. A joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives will meet on January 6th to count the votes and this is where things get awkward for Pence.
Congress meets in joint session to count the electoral votes. The Vice President, as President of the Senate, presides over the count and announces the results of the Electoral College vote. The President of the Senate then declares which persons, if any, have been elected President and Vice President of the United States.
If any objections to the electoral votes are made, they must be submitted in writing and be signed by at least one member of the House and one Senator. If objections are presented, the House and Senate withdraw to their respective chambers to consider the merits of the objection(s) under procedures set out in Federal law.
Seth Meyers discusses how even Trump’s neighbors who live in the vicinity of his Mar-a-Lago resort don’t want to him to live there after he leaves the White House. Since New Yorkers don’t seem to want him either, one wonders where he will end up. I must say that given how much Trump likes to humiliate other people, I am really enjoying him suffering one indignity after another.
We may make fun of those who still cling, in the face of reality, to the idea that Trump won the election but was defrauded because of widespread cheating. But we have to realize that there will always be a few who decide that protesting is not enough and that they have a duty to take violent action based on that belief. The heavily armed man who went to ‘rescue’ children from the basement of a Washington DC pizza shop because he believe in the wild story that it was the location of a pedophile ring is a good example.
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