Why don’t they make coffee makers that make coffee hot enough anymore? You want hot coffee, you need a stove top percolator, but you sacrifice smoothness for a bitterness that some find a bit too hardcore. You’d have to add salt for that, but brewing coffee with proper salt isn’t easy to do. I daresay even five star restaurants don’t do it nowadays; they’re too fucking cheap and lazy.

Why does Starbucks make tepid coffee? I get a cup after checking out at the market, go outside where I can pull my mask down, and in a few chugs, it’s gone. Sure, it’s good coffee, especially blonde roast, and I get a marvo caffeine kick from it, but I should honestly be halfway home before I can sip the brew.

Nobody else ever complains; they want so much milk in their shit that it must turn into a coffee milkshake. And what’s up with caramel, cinnamon and other shit? I’m not knocking what people like so much as I’m wondering how it all came to this.

Years ago some person spilled coffee on themselves at a McDonald’s drive-thru and sued. And our esteemed media took off with the story like it was Doomsday (Don’t order coffee at McDonald’s, they tried to kill me!)

Fucking lawsuits. Who in their right mind would ever have sat next to a campfire in 1855 and imagined a time when people would demand money because they spilled coffee and burned their twat while sitting in a horseless coach? Even Jules Verne couldn’t have done anything like that and H.G. Welles would have laughed until he died of a stroke. Mark Twain would have written a letter to the victim with 200 goddams (sic) in it and said “What? That’s grounds for a court proceedin’? Let me tell you a thing or two. How about paying good money for a train berth and wakin’ up to find half your goddam arm was eaten by bedbugs? Shut up before the forces you invoke rain real harm down on you.”

Irwin Shaw and Ernest Hemingway would have been even more terse.

And that’s what happened to hot coffee, ladies and gentlemen. Not the plaintiff, who in honesty should either have been more careful or instead ordered one of those fake milkshakes from those machines McDonald’s employees never clean at night because they’re paid too little to bother or even think about what’s swimming around in the strawberry tank.

Nope. It was the fucking media on a slow news day that picked up the story and ran it into the ground. More lawsuits, some pretty goddamn stupid, followed and still get filed today. Like it or not, TV and radio news punk’d us all.

I suppose, on the other hand, that I should be grateful that I can still buy coffee at all. It isn’t widely known that droughts and global warming are causing a coffee shortage that’s going to raise prices too high for me to touch so much as a bean. Some of those immigrants coming to the United States from points south are coffee plantation workers who are jobless. And being jobless in South and Central America is no place you want to be. You’ve got decisions to make. None of them are particularly desirable.

Just once the news could tell the truth without blowing the facts to oblivion. Nah. The power their corporate owners have over people’s thoughts, opinions and emotions is too pervasive and they’ll never give that up. All have an agenda. All have people who choose what’s news and what’s not. More often it is pure bullshit. Facts surrounded by “expert’s opinions” to tell you how to think and feel.

Watch Morning Joe or whatever. Always has a “panel” of “experts” to keep you from assessing the facts for yourself and having your opinion instead of theirs.

Debate and real discussion is no longer possible; the polarized media won’t have it. And after the fact someone always publishes an article on how this representative or that reporter got “owned” or “humiliated” by a spokesperson for whoever. Well that’s the headline; the following video or article seldom manages to equal the hype.

The Palmer Report

My first encounter with the new war on truth was had by a Facebook hack named Bill Palmer. He seemed to come out of nowhere, then started a group. Then it turned into a site called Daily News Bin and from there The Palmer Report. And at first, because Hillary Clinton was being widely trashed and I didn’t like it, Bill Palmer seemed the perfect counterbalance. He was liberal, seemed to do research, and had something to say about everything in the 2016 campaign.

He quickly built a following, and man wasn’t it rabid, turning into what I couldn’t deny was a cult. Post one comment he or they didn’t like and you’d be set upon.

Having been kicked off his friends and group members lists multiple times, I suspected that someone (he or his unvetted writing staff) had a hard-on for me. Why, I never did find out. So then, yeah. All the signs of a selective information cult were there. When Snopes.com put up an entire category with his name, it should have been a red flag. It wasn’t. I defended him several times until, finally, I’d seen the light. Headlines like “Trump Just Hanged Himself” and “Trump’s Days Are Numbered” were followed by writing full of typos and bullshit, none of which added up to justify the headline. I commented on that: Why the hype, when your articles don’t even prove the claims?

I don’t recall ever getting a response.

But I wasn’t cool to my friends. They swore by him. I tried to tell them, “But you’re conditioned, brainwashed. He’s in your head, manipulating your anti-Trump emotions.” They didn’t want to hear it. Cult members, deliberately taking up for their god-like, bold and stalwart hero.

And then, I learned that Palmer wasn’t exactly small potatoes in the political disinformation arena. He was being closely watched, and lest you be tempted to think it was only by pro-Trump forces, I’ll tell you one very important fact.

He was compared to Infowars and found to be on equal ground. That is telling, folks. That is a harsh charge to make. Infowars is ridiculous and everyone knows it. To be compared to that sleaze, you really have to fuck up.

Here’s a link to Bill Palmer’s Wikipedia page and yes, he finally made it to the big leagues. Here’s hoping I never get a page on Wikipedia! Palmer is a zealot, a former school teacher who couldn’t cut it with the kiddies and conned his way to a Wikipedia page by peddling biased bullshit.

He is only one of many twisting brains into seeing nonexistent conspiracies when enough real ones already exist. They’re everywhere, waiting for you to stumble onto their site and be caught up in rhetoric and sleazy lies. They’re poison and the earthly kings of lies.

Avoid these charlatans, for they will stick a spike through your head, yank it out and pour lies into the hole that remains.

All I want is for you to have your own opinions, and to come by them honestly and on your own, being aware and critical of dead giveaways and obvious lies. And to assess how you feel while reading an article and watching a video. If you’ve been triggered to the extent that you could punch the wall, ask yourself why. Check the story against others. Fact check, then do it again as if you missed something. Because it’s true, the political party wars are something I do not believe can be peacefully brought to an end. The terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol proved it.

But it’s also true that the media, both left and right, fan the flames of hostility. And nothing is out of bounds anymore. Decades ago a hot cup of coffee changed everything about how we can get it, at a restaurant or a Starbucks. One burned twat after years of serving good, hot brew, and now the coffee is as tepid as a baby’s bathwater.

It’s so bad that I’m constantly looking for new and reliable sources. And I’ll never be finished. Hell of a shit show, ain’t it?

Be careful. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled off is making people believe he doesn’t exist.

Jesus called him the father of all lies.