Today in everything wrong with everything:

Really? We couldn't make it through one, just one Black Friday without something like this? Yeah, someone, who is still at large, shot two people, killing one at a packed mall--the local news' word, not mine--in Sacramento. Which, a packed mall? 

Above: Cop cars and crime scene tape are fast replacing fake snow
and Christmas lights as signs that the Holiday Season has begun.

This donut and fried chicken sandwich
of course being the first sign of collapse.

Look, I'm sure we're all a little sick of me hypocritically railing against consumerism while at the same time totally continuing to buy shit like a chump, but I mean, last time I checked we're still in the midst of the worst pandemic in living memory. So why are people packing a mall in the first place? Sorry, I'm not trying to victims blame here. Like, the fact that Black Friday in America is invariably marked by violence is serious evidence that our civilization has been on the brink of collapse for years now, but I still want to know why anyone was at the mall in the first place.

Maybe they wanted to pick up a 98 inch Samsung TV that's, wait, are you sitting down? Ok, well, sit down. Why are you reading this standing up anyway? Anyway, there's a 98 inch television that's fifty-thousand dollars off for Black Friday.

Pictured: some Samsung spokespeople
showing off the $100,000 Q900 television.
Not pictured: even a hint of shame or irony.

Oh, right. On a pile of money.

How the-like, Fifty-thousand? It regularly costs one hundred thousand, so in a way that's a huge discount, but in another way, anyone who's dropping fifty grand, much less one hundred, on a television is a monster. And I mean, if the manufacturer can afford to drop the price of the thing by fifty thousand dollars, how much were they making on it in the first place? They must still be turning a profit at the reduced price, so how much does this cost to make? Fifty-bucks? How even do they sleep at night?

It's a video game where you roll this ball
and it sticks to things and gets bigger and here
click on this. I assure you it's an apt analogy.

Did you see that Elon Musk added another one hundred billion--yeah, billion with a "B"--to his already indecent wealth this year, pulling him ahead of Bill Gates as the world's second richest human, just behind Jeff "poverty wages for Amazon employees" Bezos and I just--like, how? How when millions of people are out of a job and there's a global pandemic and everything is shitty, is this guy katamari damacy-ing another $100 billion? And perhaps even more pressing, how are we not grabbing torches pitchforks and knocking on his door right now? 

"Well, you see there are uh, factors that uh-
you understand that-uh hey, look over there!"

-Jeff Bezos, before making a break for it

And this is where I turn into a crazy pinko let's redistribute some wealth person. I looked it up, and the pharmaceutical companies working on developing a vaccine for COVID are doing so under contracts with the government worth around one or two billion dollars each which, I mean, I'm sure I don't understand how these things work, but it kind of seems like if Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos had just put say, a hundred billion dollars or even half of that along with their respective company's resources and infrastructure into a vaccine on day one, wouldn't this have been over ages ago?

So like, why didn't they? The free market is great and all, but these two dudes along with the other one-percenters were soaking up billions and billions of the finite amount of dollars in the universe while the rest of us were arguing over masks and if science is real, and are shooting eachother over goddamn Black Friday deals.  Hey, you don't suppose that the wealth inequity that's so thoroughly baked in to our system is part of, or is maybe the root of, all of our problems do you?

"Yeah, but the savings!"

-Us