#14 Translation: Ignorance is bliss - Excreted by the one, the only, TheBovineExcrement

#8 Parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and the panhandle of Texas can be found on the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Virginia/Maryland.

That's how powerful the Dust Bowl was.

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In June, J.D. Vance flew to Butte, MT, and then was taken by an SUV motorcade to a sprawling cattle operation outside of Yellowstone National Park. There he met the owner of the Beaverhead Ranch, a man you may have heard of: Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch bought the ranch from Billionaire Koch Brother Charles Koch for $200 million. There, Murdoch grazes cattle on 340,000 acres of land, two-thirds of which is public. Murdoch paid the government $25,000 last year to graze his cattle on the public land. That is 95% below market rates. There are more examples.

So a handful of wealthy ranchers are raising a lot of beef on Uncle Sam's dime. At least that increases the nation's meat supply, right? Yes, although there is plenty of private land they could use as well for grazing, only then they would have to pay market rates. However, because grazing fees are so low, they have too many head of cattle on the land, which is leading to erosion and degradation of the land. Overgrazing is part of what caused the great dust bowls of the 1930s, when large pieces of land in the Great Plains became useless and ranchers there were forced to move.

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...ProPublica found that rancher Stan Kroenke has a permit to graze his cattle on public land. For this, he pays about 15% of the grazing fees he would have to pay a private landowner in the area. He can also get cheap crop insurance, disaster insurance, funding for fences, and compensation for livestock lost to predators, and other benefits that actual private ranchers don't get. He doesn't really need this help since he is worth $20 billion and owns parts of multiple sports teams. This is not an isolated case. About 10% of the ranchers with federal grazing permits control over half of all federal grazing land. The 10% own two-thirds of the livestock eating for free on public lands. Before Kroenke bought the ranch, it was owned by a series of hobby ranchers who used it for multimillion-dollar tax deductions.

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You saw Donald Trump's 18th iteration of his affordability message yesterday, when he said of affordability, "It doesn't mean anything to anybody ... The word affordability is a con job by the Democrats."

The vibe is late Bourbon decadence and indifference, King Donald the Corpulent in his palace, while the peasantry starves. I'm going long on pitchforks and tumbrels.

At the precise moment when Americans are standing in the cereal aisle doing battlefield math over whether the kids get brand-name or generic Wheat-os, Donald J. Trump is obsessing over chandeliers, parquet floors, and the sightlines in his new, ever-expanding plan for a White House ballroom with the square footage of a large Costco.

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There is no universe, in this one or any alternate timeline, where "let's lock up the economic data and build a shiny new ballroom" is a winning affordability message.

Yet here we are.

#4 Which, in the case of certain MAGAts that you identified, a lifetime spent on very bad choices continues unabated with their choice to support of Trump.