Michael F. Pearson

Occasional commentary on craft beer, sports, economics, current events, and other musings.

[Michael F. Pearson @MFPearson]

@itsbrianbarrett Totally nailed this in your postgame. Made zero sense in the moment. 🤦🏼‍♂️

[Michael F. Pearson @MFPearson]

@nytimes @TheAthletic The author was triggered by her own biases and woefully misinterpreted the campaign. The ad said nothing about women’s sports or the seriousness of female athletes and was simply an appeal for male attention to use an online sports book…which are disproportionately used by men.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

I'm a fan of govt experimentation, but I don't think this is a very good idea.

The problem isn't that grocery stores are greedy. The problem is that food got expensive. The Producer Price Index for all foods—avg price paid to domestic producers for food—jumped 30% between 2021 and 2023. Since then, grocery prices have continued to climb, in part due to increases in wages and housing costs.

Without strong evidence that NYC bodegas and groceries stores are colluding to protect double-digit net profit margins, the reasonable assumption is that these businesses are operating with <3% margins after rent, labor, and utilities.

So, a plan to sell some food with a 30% discount seems like a plan to create very long lines to buy a very small number of subsidized groceries. We'll see how that goes. But I don't think literal bread lines are the image that a socialist mayor wants to cultivate.

As Keynes said in 1926, "the important thing for government is not to do things which individuals are doing already ... but to do those things which at present are not done at all." Bodegas are something we're doing already. Large grocers like Trader Joes are really really good at managing supply chains and keeping prices down, whatever you may think of their other policies. I do not trust a busy municipal govt trying to do 1,001 things to be better at groceries than grocers. But I guess we'll find out.

[Rob Perez @WorldWideWob]

Fox going to the rim there the most LeRoy Jenkins thing ive seen on a basketball court since 2016 Kyrie.

[Michael F. Pearson @MFPearson]

@adamtaggart @NancyMace I assume you’d say increase sales tax to make up the difference? Is this a better or worse system for lower income who don’t own property and spend a higher portion of their income on taxable goods vs top 10% who will more easily put funds toward saving/investing with no tax.

[Michael F. Pearson @MFPearson]

@WorldWideWob They have potential, but it’s an infuriating brand of basketball. Offense gets lazy, not enough patience and too many 3’s. I’m tired of living and dying by the 3 and whether or not we’re hot or cold on any given night. Only way to win and it’s frustrating.

[Michael F. Pearson @MFPearson]

@adamtaggart @ABC11_WTVD Adam, this is intellectually lazy on your part.

[Michael F. Pearson @MFPearson]

@DKThomp Thought you missed a data point in your pod re: job market for young people—underemployment. While I find the suggestion that nobody can find work in their field compelling, was surprised the data confirmed current rates are consistent with historicals. https://t.co/R4bhhf7P7v

[Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump]

While our wonderful president was out playing golf all day, the TSA is falling apart, just like our government! Airports a total disaster!

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Rory Johnston @Rory_Johnston]

Two weeks in, folks.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can't defend this war in public.

I obviously can't disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are.

1/ Here's what I can share:

[Michael F. Pearson @MFPearson]

@Dr_Gingerballs Oh that! Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about that…

[Michael F. Pearson @MFPearson]

@SahilBloom In the workplace—it’s not how old you are but the value you bring that others respect.

[Michael F. Pearson @MFPearson]

@VolatilityVIX 1. They don’t earn enough to move beyond paycheck-to-paycheck.
2. They don’t automate contributions. Likely this is not 401K related but for those with IRAs who don’t contribute early and often and think they’ll catch up later but never do.

[Michael F. Pearson @MFPearson]

@WorldWideWob No other team gives up 20 point leads like the Celtics…this series could have been so different had they just handled their business in games 1 &amp; 2. Too many 3’s, especially Tatum early in the shot clock. Porzingis being a zero and everyone knowing it but coach Mazz was rough.

[Michael F. Pearson @MFPearson]

The photo/caption combo here by @YahooFinance is chef’s kiss brilliant

[Kakashii @kakashiii111]

This is in another level. just amazing.

[Michael F. Pearson @MFPearson]

@DKThomp was so on point here

[RiskReversal Media @RiskReversal]

Great guest, or greatest guest?? @DKThomp

https://t.co/NqhaANn5q7

[Michael F. Pearson @MFPearson]

@adamtaggart Short CVNA, TSLA, NVDA, PLTR, COIN and that made up for some brutal hits to precious metal miners, shipping, and energy stocks