(A bad) sign of the times

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DoorDash, Klarna sign deal for deferred, installment food delivery payments.

DoorDash and Klarna, a company that offers “buy now, pay later” programs, have come together on a deal for deferred and installment food delivery payments.

“In the coming months, DoorDash customers will be able to enjoy Klarna’s seamless range of payment options when purchasing groceries, retail, and even DashPass Annual Plan – on DoorDash.com or through the DoorDash app,” according to a webpage on the deal on Klarna’s website.

It’s DoorDash’s first BNPL alliance and gives users of the restaurant delivery service a new way to pay for meals. Klarna said in a press release that DoorDash customers will be able to pay in full at checkout, split payments into four equal interest-free installments, or defer to dates that align conveniently with payday schedules.

“Our partnership with DoorDash marks an important milestone in Klarna’s expansion into everyday spending categories,” Klarna’s Chief Commercial Officer David Sykes said on the page.

“By offering smarter, more flexible payment solutions for groceries, takeout, and retail essentials, we’re making convenience even more accessible for millions of Americans,” Sykes added.

And as usual, reality marches behind The Bee:

HotAir’s Duane Patterson is less than lukewarm on this new way to finance a fast food meal:

No, no, no. A thousand times, no. Do not listen to the siren song of "pay the full amount in 7 days and it's interest-free." Do not fall for the APR starts at 0% line. Why? Because if you're occupying the station in life where you have to engage in the equivalent of a payroll advance loan for your chicken nugget meal, you're not qualifying for 0% APR. You're going to be at the other end of the spectrum, which is around 33%. And that's already on top of Klarna tacking on another 10% service charge on top of Door Dash's 10-15% delivery charge, which is on top of your fast food check, which is elevated to an absurd amount after paying entry-level employees $20 dollars an hour. Right here is where I draw the line. 

My goal is not normalizing snobbery. But the cold, hard reality is if you're feeling the need to finance your Happy Meal, literally adapting 100-year-old Wimpy economics meant to be a joke well into the 21st Century with all of its high-tech conveniences, it's time to think about stuff you can make at home. It's a hell of a lot cheaper, and it's an awful lot better for you, in most cases. 

Patterson certainly offers something to chew on.

"Unhinged" — sort of redundant, no?

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Unhinged trans-rights protester lunges at conservative NYC mom at off-the-rails education meeting

The troubling incident happened Wednesday at District 2’s Community Education Council meeting on the Upper East Side when an irate woman refused to let conservative parent advocate Maud Maron leave, video shows.

“She lunged at me, she barred the door with her body and she said I couldn’t leave,” said Maron, who is now calling on the feds to ensure safety at the group’s increasingly chaotic meetings.

The irate woman, a parent of two trans kids, and other protesters followed then followed Maron from the building and through the school yard.

Because who and what says “boys in girls’ shorts sports better than Hamas supporters and Covimaniacs?

Face masks, Palestinian scarves and birthday hats for the one-year anniversary of the protests, chanting and singing variations of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and the hymn “This Little Light of Mine” that focused on trans kids and voting out CEC members.

One more (and the last, until the next one)

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Burning Teslas

So the sum is that the vandals, the climate alarmism that boosts Tesla sales, the subsidy pushers in the federal government, and the owner-victims are all on the Left. Fewer Republicans have the money to buy such expensive vehicles, and anyway, they don’t want to switch from their internal combustion engine. They can mostly stand aside and watch incendiary lefties attack each other.

One consequence is that Tesla owners now festoon their cars and trucks with bumper stickers bearing such slogans as, “I bought this car before we knew Elon was crazy,” and “Vintage Tesla, pre-madness edition.” The stickers serve two purposes, one boastful and the other appeasing. They signal that the owner is of a liberal and tolerant ilk, hates Musk and Trump, and is thus on the side of the angels (and the fire bombers). They are also a sort of defensive manifesto, implying to the vandals, “Don’t wreck my ride; I’m on your side.”

Given the presumed political leanings of (most) Tesla owners, recent attacks on them and their cars are giving a new meaning to auto-phagy

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Trump has cut their allowance, and the Aussies are hopping mad

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And here’s a fun quote: Trump’s guilty of foreign interference by stopping the flow of U.S. taxpayers’ dollars to an authoritarian 3rd world government that locks up its citizens in COVID pens, criminalizes free speech, and disarms its sheepherding subjects? oooh, he’s so bad!

“Last week after it was revealed the universities had been asked to justify their funding, the National Tertiary Education Union called on the government to ‘guarantee Australian researchers would be protected’.

"The federal government must push back on the Trump administration's blatant foreign interference in our independent research in the strongest possible terms," NTEU president Alison Barnes said. 

$1.5 billion spent in 90 days, total failure: their appeal has become "more selective"

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‘Heartless’ marketing firm led by Kamala Harris aide lays off 10% of staff after election wipeout

Only 10%? Apparently, that’s just the starting course:

WASHINGTON — A large corporate marketing firm co-founded and led by Stephanie Cutter, a senior adviser to Kamala Harris’s failed presidential campaign, recently laid off 10% of its staff amid a steep revenue disruption following the Democrat’s loss, The Post has learned.

The nine-person layoff unleashed an outpouring of criticism about allegedly hypocritical treatment of employees by Precision Strategies, which is staffed by prominent Democrats and counts many of America’s top corporations and unions as clients.

“She was telling people that she lost a lot of business after the election. And she has also been telling people companies are being told by the [Trump] administration not to hire Democrats,” a source told The Post.

“I think some of it is saving face and the other part is she is not good. And she is very, very mean. I feel bad for her teams but she is truly a mean person and it is catching up with her,” added the source, who has not worked at the company.

“I suspect Cutter will live up to her last name more than ever — because it’s only cuts coming for has-been businesses like hers that offer anything but ‘precision’,” a different Democratic insider said.

“That 10% cut will only grow as clients look for strategists who offer better advice that solves problems, wins the day and wins elections.”

TDS has gripped the nation

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To the White House!

Way back in 1970, when I was a 16-year-old rabble rouser (my politics have changed; that hasn’t) My friend Kevin Brown and I would travel in my VW bus to various demonstrations in eastern cities: Mostly anti-war protests, but I recall one May Day pro-Bobby Seal/commie fun fest in New Haven, just to see what mischief we could stir up. One adventure in Washington is relevant to today’s political chaos:

Kevin and I, festooned with gas masks (borrowed from an unlocked sewage plant in Newtown, PA that Kevin knew of — a slight detour was required), I dressed in a football helmet and carrying a plastic child’s snow-saucer sled on which I’d painted Captain America’s shield logo, went to Washington to attend an anti-war rally/protest.

Making our way to the front of a huge, milling, clueless mob, we shouted “to the White House!” and charged down some random street. To our delight, several hundred sheep followed us, so after few blocks, we chose another street at random, in the opposite direction, and screamed “to the Pentagon!”. We gained, rather than lost members, so we continued, from time to time changing directions to all points of the compass while also changing our supposed destination: “To the Treasury!”, To the Capitol!”. “To the Library of Congress!” struck us as too wordy and obscure, but we came up with other targets, and the crowd continued to grow until we finally tired of the game and quit. I don’t know what happened to our mob — when we left, several were smashing store windows and stoning police cars — but Kevin and I went home.

That confession out of the way, I note that today’s befuddled leftists seem just as confused and stupid as their parents were (I say “were”, but some of those parents are still active, still dreaming of their days as right-on revolutionaries, even if they’re now retired stock brokers). And like Kevin’s and my “followers”, they shift direction on a dime, as instructed and urged on by their controllers. Remember “Occupy Wall Street”? The same people were succeeded by the Pink Pussies, a cause that was discarded in favor of COVID facemask Nazis, and hysterical demands for the mandatory internment of the unvaccinated. That panic was briefly interrupted by the emergence of wife-beater George Floyd parades and the BLM movement, supported by all proper white women (and Greenwich’s own Chief of Police). Then back to COVID until Russia invaded Ukraine, a concern of great import until Hamas murderers and terrorists slaughtered 1,200 Jews and shifted attention to a different direction. Now, the target is Elon Musk. These people have the attention span of gnats, and their manipulators take advantage of that.

The only thing that’s changed over the years is liberals’ increasing use or tolerance of violence; ANTIFA thugs and criminals are cheered on; the murderer Luigi Mangione is lionized; and these past two months, the Deep State has directed them to attack Elon Musk, because he threatens its decades-long reign of power. To the White House, to the Pentagon, hell, why not the library of Congress; what’s it matter to the sheeple?

This phenomenon has been noticed by others as well. Example:

Victor Davis Hanson Says Anti-Musk Domestic Terrorism is Building to a ‘Crescendo of Hate’

VDH calls out where the left's escalating attacks on Tesla are ultimately aimed:  “A direct attack on Elon Musk himself."

“It's getting to a very dangerous crescendo of hate."

"Go back 2 or 3 years ago, and he was an iconic Renaissance figure we were told, by the very people who are now calling him disloyal or not purely or not completely American."

"This is one of the strangest phenomena of our time. And it should it should cease. And the reason it should cease is if this rhetoric continues and if this organized — it really is a domestic terrorist campaign against Tesla — increases, somebody is going to do something stupid because they are lowering the bar of what's permissible."

"And we know what that stupid is. It's a direct attack on Elon Musk himself."

Remember this? November 2017:

2025: Global warming is so last year.

An intellectual (or what passes for one on the Left) and historian tells the Canadians to party on — you're gonna win, we're gonna lose!"

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Deep thoughts from the basement of a fired MNBC commentator:

You can't make Canada the 51st state without going to war with them. And let me explain how that worked out the last time we tried to go to war with Canada. They burned the White House to the ground in 1814! And won the war! Canada beat us in the War of 1812! They probably like their chances against us. We're not going to beat them in a war because we have never been able to do that.

David Strom has thoughts:

Delusion, Thy Name Is Joy Reid

…. Most of you thought that the War of 1812 couldn't have been fought with Canada for the simple reason that Canada did not exist as a separate political entity. I was taught that Canada became a separate Dominion of the British Empire in July of 1867, and the poor, ignorant Canadians have been taught that as well, celebrating "Dominion Day" every July 1. 

If Joy Reid hadn't exposed that malignant lie, we all might have thought that the US fought the British Empire in that war, making our defeat a bit less mysterious. 

Joy's logic that Canada could kick our butts in a war seems impeccable to me. After all, we have never beaten them in a war, and if you project that record out America's population of 330 million, far larger economy, and outstanding military would surely enable them to burn down the White House while wearing fancy uniforms with red coats.

Strom again:

Fortunately for us, I have a sneaking suspicion that Donald Trump, too, understands the peril we would be in should Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney decide to take us out with military might. Filled with fear and trembling, Trump likely has more modest goals than his bluster implies. 

I could be wrong, though, and if so, Americans could soon have access to universal, if bad, health care, doctors who enjoy killing the old, the weak, the depressed, and the poor, and a censorship regime that would please the Left. 

Unfortunately, we would also have a bunch of French speakers as our fellow citizens, and while that might ensure access to fine wine and cheeses, it also implies a dramatic increase in the number of snobs. Not to mention school requirements that our children learn French and how to speak through their noses.  ….