Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

We still have time to mess this up!

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

“woke” is the new caravan.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

Find someone who loves you the way trump and maga love traitors.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

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How Stupid Are These People?

Tariffs and the End of the American Century*

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We should probably talk about the madness Trump unleashed this afternoon. As someone on Bluesky said (the actual author is now lost to endless flow of my timeline), the question of whether a nation could more thoroughly punch itself in the groin than the Brits did with Brexit has now been answered with a resounding “Yes.”

Tariffs and the End of the American Century* 4

I’m completely buried in book stuff–trying to finish a rapid turnaround short work on vaccines while promoting the almost-here tome on the history of germ theory (which has become waaaaaay too timely thanks to RFK Jr.)–if anyone’s in the neighborhood, I’ll be talking at the Oxford (UK) Literary Festival, on Sunday afternoon; love to see any UK Jackals. So I’m not going to add my gloss to the disaster we’re about to enjoy.

Instead, let me give you a random sample of Bluesky reactions as prompts to start the chat here. Have fun inventing invective of the ferocity Terry Pratchett would have placed in the mouths of Commander Vimes et al.

Tariffs and the End of the American Century* Tariffs and the End of the American Century* 1 Tariffs and the End of the American Century* 2

To add some grist to your mills, here’s an excerpt from a note Paul Krugman just posted on his Substack:

But you know that having once claimed that Europe charges tariffs more than 10 times as high as reality, Trump will never drop that claim. I don’t know how many people noticed, but he’s still claiming that we’re subsidizing Canada by $200 billion a year. Aside from the basic mistake of claiming that a Canadian trade surplus means that we’re somehow subsidizing Canada, he’s inflating the actual trade surplus by a factor of three. Many, many people have pointed out the error, but Trump is sticking with it, the same way Musk is sticking with the millions of dead Social Security beneficiaries thing.

If you had any hopes that Trump would step back from the brink, this announcement, between the very high tariff rates and the complete falsehoods about what other countries do, should kill them.

With that, this thread is open–but I rather hope it stays focused on the matter at hand.

*That outcome is now wildly overdetermined, to be sure.

Image: Angelo Bronzino, detail from Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time, 1540-1545

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The Jenny McCarthy Body Count Lives On in Spirit

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The Jenny McCarthy Body Count Lives On in Spirit

For you youths, there used to be a regularly updated website called the Jenny McCarthy Body Count that kept a running total of the number of people killed and injured by the anti-vax nonsense she spewed in the early aughts. It still exists, but I have no idea if it is updated. Regardless, there is another corpse to add to her tally and more on the way:

A school-age child has died of measles in West Texas, the first death from the disease in a decade in the United States. The child had not been vaccinated against measles, according to the city of Lubbock’s health department.

The death, confirmed by Katherine Wells, the Lubbock health department’s director of public health, is part of a fast-moving outbreak that’s infected at least 124 people — mostly children — in rural West Texas.

The official tally of people who have been hospitalized is 18, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.

That number isn’t up to date, said Dr. Lara Johnson, a pediatrician and the chief medical officer at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock.

Johnson said in an email that her team has cared for “around 20” kids with measles so far.

As with everything, this is going to get worse, both in this outbreak and in future ones.

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