In America, a warehouse store. A fully roasted chicken costs five dollars, the raw chicken beside it costs seven, and I stood between them like a man between two truths.
Golden. Hot. Seasoned. Spinning in glory under the lights, in a line of its brothers. Four dollars and ninety-nine cents.
I checked the raw birds. Seven dollars. Pale. Cold. You must do everything yourself.
This is not commerce. Commerce does not move backward. Somewhere in this building, mathematics lies defeated.
I asked the man at the counter. "How is the cooked bird cheaper than the raw bird?"
"Been five bucks forever. They keep it that way."
"But the store loses."
"Yep. On purpose."
On purpose. I held my receipt with both hands.
In my land, a lord who lowered the price of rice in a hard winter was remembered for generations. They built him a small shrine. This store does it every day, with chicken, and tells no one.
A woman behind me grew tired of my reverence. "It's just a chicken, sir."
It is not just a chicken. It is a wound the merchant takes on purpose, so that anyone, on any day, with five dollars, eats like a lord. The bird is the message. The price is the vow.
I will confess: I bought two. I did not need two. The second was not hunger. It was gratitude, and it was delicious.
Some prices are not prices. They are promises.
I return every week now. I take one bird. I bow toward the deli, briefly, so as not to alarm the staff. They have begun nodding back.
The vow holds. The bird turns. Five dollars.
Long may it spin.
NYT out with a jaw dropping investigative report on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. 60 Minutes reported last Sunday on some of this, too. The NYT report is a must-read, the 60 Minutes report should then be watched. 1/3
@cptdankkk This is indispensable advice - all these years I should have been hoarding Brunello Cucinelli’s for my kids and grandkids to squabble over instead of shopping Burlington Coat Factory.
‼️🚨 BREAKING: Kash Patel's apparel website is reportedly hosting ClickFix malware, according to multiple visitors.
A fake Cloudflare verification page is tricking users into pasting OS-specific "verification" commands that execute malware. The macOS path fetches an infostealer targeting Keychain, browser data, session tokens, and crypto wallets.
Source: @dm4uz3
‼️🚨 BREAKING: Kash Patel's apparel website is reportedly hosting ClickFix malware, according to multiple visitors.
A fake Cloudflare verification page is tricking users into pasting OS-specific "verification" commands that execute malware. The macOS path fetches an infostealer targeting Keychain, browser data, session tokens, and crypto wallets.
Source: @dm4uz3
Abraham Lincoln got shot in the head and still managed to keep the country together. Franklin Roosevelt ran the entire Second World War from a wheelchair. Eisenhower defeated Hitler and then, just to stay busy, built 48,000 miles of motorway. Kennedy looked at the moon, said “we’ll have that,” and inside a decade they did. Reagan stared down the Soviet Union until it simply gave up and went home.
Two hundred and fifty years. Forty-six men. Men who stormed beaches, split atoms, faced down nuclear annihilation over breakfast and then filed sensible paperwork about it afterward.
And then, after all of that, the entire accumulated weight of American history, the most consequential democratic experiment the world has ever seen, produced this.
A television review.
No Mars landing. No cure for cancer. No Soviet empire dissolved before lunch. Just a man in the White House, in the year 2026, informing the internet that a CBS chat show host had no talent.
That is what 250 years of American greatness built. America should be deeply, permanently ashamed of itself.
If you like what you read, follow Gandalv on Substack:
https://t.co/M6CNAnz656
Here's how the corruption works:
Thursday: RJ Reynolds donates $5M to Trump
Saturday: Trump invites RJR execs to Mar a Lago; execs ask to loosen regs on flavored vapes; Trump calls up RFK Jr. and tells him to change it
Friday: FDA changes the policy
https://t.co/Udu1RhYtKI
Trump: We lost 13 people. In other wars, you lost hundreds of thousands of people. I get a kick when I look at somebody on television and they say, 'he's lost 13 people.'