if they can get stallone to run, they should call the campaign rocky VII.

yes.

rocky, now an old man, comes out of retirement yet again under popular pressure because he's the only candidate that can win pennsylvania for the democrats. 

they should film it as a reality media mockumentary and make it heavily centered in philadelphia and heavily integrated with actual voters in real life.

that's how you beat a reality tv star, with more reality media. and, stallone is actually an underrated director, he could do this and do it well.

my father was about 25% or less italian, although he never told me until i was much older, and i eventually discovered the uncomfortable reality that i'm related to the gotti clan via a dna test. i was able to determine that his y-dna (direct paternal, male over male lineage) is austrian celt. the gottis were actually germans that moved south into italy; the name gotti appears to basically be the same word as 'goth', which is a generic medieval italian slur for germanic person that ultimately stems from a swedish group that migrated into northern italy from ukraine as they fled attila the hun.

i actually really, seriously appear to be relatively closely related to the gottis.

my father's mother was adopted because her parents were killed when they were "accidentally" hit by a train. one of my aunts did the research, and it seems like they were both tied to the tracks. people don't accidentally get tied to the railroad tracks, at least not outside of bugs bunny cartoons. it would seem like it was a mob hit.

that is legitimately all i know - my father's mother's parents were killed in an obvious mob hit in ottawa, canada and she was raised by a french family in ottawa's franco-ontarian community.

i don't really want to know much else.

but he knew he was part italian, and he made me watch all of the movies when i was a kid: all of the de niro, all of the pacino, all of the stallone. i'm actually about twenty years too young to remember this stuff otherwise, but it was seen as some kind of educational process.

i have actually long suspected that he knew more about the mob connection than he ever told me or ever told anyone else. he didn't want me to know, and i don't want to know.

i mean, there's an assumption that trump won't run for a third term.

that convention has been broken before.

i'm not predicting it, exactly, but i'd be ready for it.

trump also has a long-running feud with stallone, apparently.

you see where i'm going with this.

i'm just trying to help you win, s'all.

or, they could run anthony hopkins, and have him threaten to eat trump for breakfast when he wins.

(alas, no. hopkins was not born in the united states.)

de niro is old enough to run for president, at least.

that was fifty years ago.

it's not that de niro was type cast.

it was just a really good film.

you kids should sit down with it if you haven't seen it.

i think de niro would be an outstanding president. as a non-american, my primary concern is always foreign policy.

i could imagine de niro confronting putin.

eh. you lookin' at latvia? huh?

c'mere bitch.

you lookin' at finland?

huh?

don't you let me fucking catch you looking at poland.

people are having a hard time understanding how people could vote for donald trump on the basis of "the economy" by analyzing issues, and they're missing the point.

what does "the economy" even mean, exactly? it's a vague, undefined term.

the actual reason that such a large number of americans tell you that the right, not just trump, is good for "the economy" is that they've been bombarded with advertising telling them as much for their entire lives. what these exit polls are measuring is advertising reach rather than any kind of deconstructible economic logic.

i want to step in on the statistics that democrats are pushing, though.

gdp is worthless to an average person, and i'll cite joseph stiglitz on that point. the premise that increases in gdp and increases in growth benefit the average worker is the definition of trickle down economics. gdp per capita is better, but it's skewed by the inequality gap. measuring wages vs inflation actually obscures the inequality problem due to the way that real wages are measured as an average.

"The average personal income in the United States is about $54,000. But that number is significantly bumped up by the small number of people who make significantly more. The median personal income, on the other hand, is just under $36,000. This means that more than half of people in the US make less than $36,000, a significant drop from the $54,000 average. This difference is even more pronounced when you look at wealth. The median net worth of US households is $121,700, yet the average net worth is a whopping $748,800."

https://patrioticmillionaires.org/perspectives/statistics-matter-why-averages-arent-useful-when-talking-about-the-american-economy/

the harrisites are trying to argue that people were misled by fox news, but it's actually the democratic party statistics that are off base with reality. i am barely old enough to remember stiglitz having this exact argument with the clintonites during gore v bush. people didn't get it and it's because the statistics they were using sucked. worse, democratic voters have been trained to believe what they see on msnbc with as much faith as republican voters have in fox. there's no critical analysis; they just absorb it and repeat it, which is by design.

we all think we're better than the other guys. most of us are actually exactly the same.

if you inflate average wages using wonky averages then it looks like real wages increased faster than inflation, but tell that to the mother of three working at walmart that's had her mortgage doubled by an interest rate hike and seen the price of groceries go up 500%. that statistic is meaningless to that person.

that is not a "perception", that is a fact and it is a fact that the stats being thrown around do not and cannot capture at all.

i think i can convince most people of the basic truth of this, that the standard economic stats used are for investors and not workers and have no relevance to real people (even these so-called real wages, which are skewed by high income earners and would by the definition of what is being measured be skewed the most during periods of inflation, as high income earners would tend to benefit from inflation, as they get the profits from the higher profits, either directly through ownership or via investments like shares). stiglitz really is a really good source on this.

i was able to find an article at brookings that examines this issue, for popular consumption:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/has-pay-kept-up-with-inflation/

using this far more real statistic,

median real wages adjusted for inflation to 2023 dollars in q1 2021: $1136

median real wages adjusted for inflation to 2023 dollars in q4 2023: $1130

that is a decrease of $6 from biden's inauguration until the end of 2023, and then you need to factor in interest rates.

so, that's the actual empirical reality: the statistics you see on msnbc are propaganda, just like the stats you see on fox news. if you ask some more honest people, they'll present a different picture to you.

if we can agree that the cost of living right now is difficult, and that "the economy" is not working for normal people, how then do we get to the logical conclusion that trump is the better option?

the answer is that you don't, it's just advertising. maybe the advertising doesn't work as well when people aren't struggling, but it's just advertising. most people don't know how to write policies to better their material conditions and would not have an informed opinion if given a direct vote.

what they know is:

1. right now, this objectively and empirically sucks.

2. the tv says republicans are better for the economy.

3. therefore, vote republican.

you are making a mistake if you are trying to probe deeper into the thought process than this.

worse is that this record turnout data suggests that trump won because he's a tv star and there isn't anything more to it than that. republicans have figured this out: trump, arnie, reagan himself. celebrities get people off the couch, and trump got the zombies out to vote in record numbers.

the actual smart analysis is that the democrats should run an actor, like de niro or clooney. according to tarantino, clooney is washed up, so why not let him run for office himself? he'd probably win in a landslide.

they could also convert the process of picking your vp choice into a reality show like the bachelor. that would get people voting for sure.