Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

In my day, never was longer.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

Petty moves from a petty man.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Republicans in disarray!

American history and black history cannot be separated.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

I really should read my own blog.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

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How Stupid Are These People?

Line Goes Up…

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Until it doesn’t.

I confess to a bit of schadenfreude at today’s Bitcoin news.

An almost 14% drop today to bring the mathy-equivalent of Beanie Babies down to below where it was when Trump took office.

Krugman has thoughtsKrugman has thoughts:

…today’s price action shouldn’t change your view about Bitcoin’s usefulness or lack thereof. If, like me, you consider the whole thing a delusion — BTC isn’t a medium of exchange, nor is it a reliable store of value — then you already knew that and the fact that we seem to be having a Wile E. Coyote moment isn’t information about the fundamentals. (There are no fundamentals.)

Line Goes Up…

And more thoughts:

….everyone who bought Bitcoin in the belief that Trump would make Bitcoin greater than ever has lost money, in many cases a lot of money. So this is another case of ETTD: everything Trump touches dies.

Exactly so. As Krugman goes on to say, this means there’s a political angle.  t of Trump’s most motivated supporters are now gonna have to lick some wounds. Quite possibly deep ones if the rout continues.

For some reason, I find myself unmoved by their plight.

This thread: it is as open as a SPAC IPO is for the next tranche of rubes.

Image: Victor Dubreuil, Barrels of Money,Barrels of Money, 1910 or earlier.

 

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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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