Man, am I growing weary of idiots.
Which ones? Let’s start with the pretty people behind “Ballerina Farm,” i.e. the stage set for Hannah and Daniel Neeleman, who have made a career out of, first, being trust funders (him) and later, online influencers, a combination that should make everyone with three working brain cells reel in terror. Why are they idiots? Well…
According to a new report from KPCW, shortly after the Neelemans opened their farm stand, the farm’s raw milk failed two safety tests. KPCW reviewed records from the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food and found that samples tested in May and June had high levels of coliform, the family of bacteria that includes E. coli.
Yes, the Neelemans, Bobby Brainworm and the co-editor of The Detroit News editorial page are all on the raw-milk bandwagon. And now the Neelemans have discovered what everyone who deals with dairy cows in any capacity learns within 24 hours of putting one in your pasture or barn: They are literal shit machines, and it gets on everything.
We’re all shit machines, of course. But I think it was Jim Harrison who quipped that cattle are a machine that turns grass into shit, and a lot of it. Raw-milk aficionados like to talk about how clean and well-cared-for the cows that produce their raw milk are, but I’ve never seen one that doesn’t produce pounds and pounds of poop, around the clock. What’s more, it’s wet and splattery. About the only good thing you can say about cow shit is that it doesn’t smell bad. But I’ve spent time in lots of barns, and the only one I’ve seen that was surprisingly clean was Select Sires, an outfit in Plain City, Ohio, where bovine sires live out their days being jacked off by people for the purpose of selling their semen. Honestly, the place was immaculate. I imagine they have staff who do nothing but wait for a tail to lift, then dash over with a shovel to catch it as it comes out.
Simply washing an udder before milking is not enough to combat a typical dairy barn’s germ array.
Get this quote, from Mr. Ballerina:
“Producing raw milk takes careful planning from a facility and infrastructure standpoint,” Daniel Neeleman said in a statement to The Cut. “Unfortunately, we learned this after the fact.”
You’d think someone intending to go into selling dairy products would learn it before the fact, but when you’ve got 10 million followers, and they hang on your every post, why bother?
So that’s idiot batch #1. Here’s #2:
From her roughly $50,000 annual salary as a data processor in San Diego, (Kiely) Reedy, 34, spends at least $200 to $300 a week on food delivery. Ordering in has eaten away at her savings, she said, and led her to socialize less. She tips generously, but worries that the delivery drivers are poorly paid.
“I feel reliant upon it,” she said, “but guilt for using it.”
Food delivery, which skyrocketed during the pandemic as a practical necessity, has become even more entrenched in the years since as a convenience, an everyday alternative to cooking or eating out. DoorDash is now a verb. And the new delivery economy is transforming the way Americans live — reshaping budgets, mealtimes and social habits.
Fifty thousand dollars isn’t a very big salary, especially in San Diego, but Reedy estimates she spends close to a grand a month on takeout? And not fancy takeout, either, but stuff like spaghetti with marinara sauce, a meal she could easily make at home with two pots, running water and the initiative to go to a grocery and buy a pound of pasta and a jar of Prego.
I shared this with some friends on a text chain earlier this week. Said one: “I hate everyone in this story.”
We don’t eat out much, but among my rituals on a self-care Saturday is to take myself out to breakfast at a Detroit Coney Island, all alone, and spend the 40 minutes or so letting someone else cook my eggs and pour my coffee while I read the news. I’m often astonished by the pile of styrofoam go-boxes on the counter, awaiting some delivery person’s pickup. Diner food has a shelf life maybe 40 seconds longer than fast food; imagine ordering McDonald’s or an omelet and then waiting 20 or 30 minutes past plating to actually eat it. We visited Toronto a few years ago, and starting around noon the bike lanes would be full of brown men pedaling away with giant cooler-boxes worn backpack-style. I thought then, and I think now: Thank you, mom, for teaching me how to make a sandwich.
I know, I know — that’s the privilege talking, and I don’t understand how hard people have to work now, and how cooking is a luxury now, and I get it. But if you’re impacting your own savings to afford mediocre delivery chow, I recommend you consider another line of work.
Maybe open a dairy farm, and sell raw milk.
Happy Wednesday, and a reminder that one member of the entrepreneurial class who gave us all of the above, influencing and social media and the gig economy, among other terrors, is today in the process of driving the Washington Post into a ditch. Move fast, break things, etc.
alex said on February 4, 2026 at 12:05 pm
We eat out a lot and tip generously ever since COVID because we want to support local businesses and waitstaff, and I must say that we definitely notice the huge number of delivery drivers picking up orders. In a few places it seems like it’s the majority of their business, but at least they’re still in business. We seldom have food delivered because I like to cook, and if I’m not cooking I’d rather get out of the house.
We’ve become reliant on Amazon, however. Despite the urge to boycott it, we find that retail stores these days don’t stock much of a selection of things even if they have them at all. A case in point: I spent days going around to different stores with a tape measure trying to find kitchen drawer organizers with the dimensions I wanted, and saw absolutely nothing suitable. I could type the dimensions in on Amazon and get hundreds of hits and get what I wanted the next day. Likewise with so many other things.
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Alan Stamm said on February 4, 2026 at 12:22 pm
Blundering Bezos is called out by Semafor newsletter media editor Max Tani.
The Post’s “downward spiral [was] vastly worsened by Bezos’ decision not to endorse then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election,” he writes.
“The move…may have pleased Trump world, but turned out to be disastrous for the Post’s business. The non-endorsement infuriated the left-leaning local and national audience, who felt betrayed by a paper that just a few years earlier had rolled out its ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ slogan. Subscribers jumped ship, as did journalistic and business talent.”
Jeff Stein, chief economics correspondent at the Post, tells Tani that reporters “are being punished for mistakes they did not cause.”
https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/02/04/2026/washington-post-to-make-significant-cuts-to-remake-paper
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Peter said on February 4, 2026 at 12:37 pm
“…But I’ve spent time in lots of barns, and the only one I’ve seen that was surprisingly clean was Select Sires, an outfit in Plain City, Ohio, where bovine sires live out their days being jacked off by people for the purpose of selling their semen…”
At first, I thought that when I’m old and needing money I would have to become a sales rep for the McDonald’s Corporation, but here’s a career opportunity I have to look into. Of course, by the time I’ll need the money, I’ll have to compete with Steven Miller and Pam Bondi for that job, but that’s a small price to pay to get back to a functioning democracy.
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nancy said on February 4, 2026 at 12:49 pm
Ha ha. I would imagine handing the AV — the A stands for artificial, the V is guess-what — is a job for a specialist, but I bet you’re trainable, Peter.
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Dave said on February 4, 2026 at 1:02 pm
I’m wondering about Dorothy’s daughter.
Bezos, truly an example of I’ll never get enough money so I’ll do whatever it takes to get more.
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Julie Robinson said on February 4, 2026 at 1:15 pm
My grandparents had a dairy farm and Nancy couldn’t be more correct about the shit situation. Their barn had a trough under their tails which collected most of it. Then a mechanical system carried it out to the manure pile, which he spread on the fields every single day of the year. The milk was pasteurized in a separate room, then everything was sluiced down with sanitizer and a hose. He was relentless, twice a day, every day of the year.
What they’ve done is unconscionable. I would hope they’d be prosecuted but I doubt they will.
There are so many food restrictions in this house that eating out is rare. The concept of paying someone to bring you food you have to warm up again? My Midwest thriftiness does not compute this.
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Nancy Friedman said on February 4, 2026 at 1:20 pm
Speaking of billionaires, here’s a tasty quote from Sean Burns, publisher of North Shore Movies (Gloucester, MA):
“Given the indignities these masters of the universe are willing to endure while groveling before Trump, I also wonder whatever happened to having ‘fuck you’ money? I thought the whole point of being wealthy was that you don’t have to kiss anyone’s ass anymore. The richer these guys get, the more it seems like it should be called ‘thank you sir, may I have another’ money.”
https://northshoremovies.wpcomstaging.com/2026/01/31/review-melania/
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Deborah said on February 4, 2026 at 1:59 pm
I was following Ballerina Farms on Instagram a while ago, because it was kind of a train wreck fascination. The life they lead in Utah with 8 kids is crazy. Hannah had a bunch of photos of herself in beauty pageants etc. She’s a lovely looking woman after having 8 kids she must have amazing genes to be able to get back in shape so quickly after each birth. They showed a million reels of her fixing food and carrying babies around nonstop. She gave birth to most of those kids at home, with no medical intervention except for midwives, I can’t even imagine what that must have been like over and over again. She had the last one basically on camera starting in her bath tub and ending almost in the toilet. Honestly, it was weird. After I quit Instagram and returned after about a year I had enough, I’ve gotten over the morbid curiosity of it all.
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Scout said on February 4, 2026 at 2:11 pm
We eat out way more than we should, especially since one of us is retired and the other (me) is semi-retired. Seems that instead of meal planning, shopping and prep we’d rather play pickleball and then go to happy hour with all our new dinker friends.
That said, we recently started subscribing to HomeChef. Once a week we get 3 meal packages with the exact amount of ingredients needed, prep time takes about a half hour, and the meals are restaurant quality delicious.
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Dorothuy said on February 4, 2026 at 2:19 pm
Thanks Dave. She is still employed, but knew this was coming. It’s just sickening. And she actually moved into a new position effective 2/1/26 so she is consumed with conflicted feelings, as you can imagine. I can’t go into details about her new job.
Anyone working at newspapers these days knows the writing is on the wall. For now she’s going to be all right. But she’ll be shoring up her savings and her feet on the ground going forward, as she always has been.
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Dexter Friend said on February 4, 2026 at 2:21 pm
On MSNOW they daily say “fuck”, “shit” and the granddaddy, “motherfucker”. Joe Scarborough started it, and even Mika said “fuck” last week, usually a quote, but when Joe gets rolling, man, he’ll scream out a loud “THESE FUCKERS…” frequently. In the past year, gentle Nicolle Wallace has read quotes using f-bombs weekly. I also love watching James Carville on YouTube, who talks like I do, meaning he lets it all flow, no censorship at all.
Last night on Toledo 13, a story with repeating video of a DoorDash fiasco. A woman of maybe 35 years delivered food to an apartment building which was structured with apartments inside a huge building, like a motel or hotel . 5 feet from the apartment door, the person stuck her hand into her crotch, I mean right in there to the genitals, I suppose getting up a good little lather , and spread it on the food bags. 13 played it like 6 times. I was eating dinner and well, half my dinner went into the garbage after that.
The customer recorded it, said she put on sanitary gloves and threw the stuff into the outside bin. DoorDash fired the creep, took the bill off the customer’s card, and gifted her $50. The resident said that $50 will never be used. She said nevermore, never again, no food deliveries.
Just yesterday my cousin from Ossian, IN emailed me, saying he can’t remember much from our childhood anymore. He’s nearly 79 now. I reminded him of a few things, one was how when we stayed a few days on the family farm of my grandparents we would have cereal with ice cold raw milk with the cream clogging the top of the bottle. My uncle milked the cows and every evening lug up a 2-gallon pail of warm milk up to the house to bottle for the next day. Sometimes we’d be offered a warm taste of fresh milk, and I mean fresh. I never could stand it, but never got enough of it when it was chilled to the brink of freezing.
Now I would never drink any of it, but the memories of Grandma’s fresh-baked from scratch chocolate chip cookies and ice cold raw milk comfort me . I don’t do much these days but take joy rides into the country but my memories 1955-1962 are still with me.
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Colleen said on February 4, 2026 at 2:27 pm
Guilty of too much eating out here. We don’t have it delivered. I work from home– I want to get out of the house.
I’m with Alex on Amazon. I don’t have it in me to traipse all over town looking for something I likely won’t be able to find when I can have multiple choices at my fingertips. I have started ordering some food staples from them as well….that box of cereal that’s 10 dollars at Publix can be had for 5 and change AND be delivered to my front porch.
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Suzanne said on February 4, 2026 at 2:32 pm
There is no doubt in my mind that Bezos bought the WaPo in order to destroy it. It’s not about the money, never has been. It’s about power. One would think that people like him would believe they have so much money that they could say a hale a hardy “F… You” to anyone and anything, but no. Bezos funds this Melania doc to curry favor with Trump because he thinks it will give him more power and shutting down the WaPo will do the same. But will it? Time will tell.
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