They like the whole “super regressive tax on everyone who needs to buy anything other than soon-to-be/distressed assets like farmland and shuttered factories… meaning: great for billionaires; fck everyone else.
Anti-fascist science, physics, and finance dweeb who views tariffs the way an MD views bloodletting or phrenology. Low Brass player & general fact knower. I build things and I write things. Reclaim Woke, and Slava Ukraini!
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They like the whole “super regressive tax on everyone who needs to buy anything other than soon-to-be/distressed assets like farmland and shuttered factories… meaning: great for billionaires; fck everyone else.
I’ve long ago dispensed with simplistic notions: I am sure that - unlike Yahweh, Lucifer has the best lawyers :-)
I am also, sadly, amazed by the spectacle. It’s as if a generation of air-quote Conservatives never actually gave a $hit about that pocket constitution they waved in our faces, and millions of dolts bought the performance hook, line, and sinker. This is our country now.
If Trump can militarize the entire Southern border and get away with it, he can twist the Uniform Code of Military Justice to include civilians: making Assault with a Tasty Sandwich into a felony, or any other thing he wants. Autocrats do not recognize rules made by others: it’s in the definition.
If he can militarize the entire Southern border and get away with it, he can twist the Uniform Code of Military Justice to include civilians: making Assault with a Tasty Sandwich into a felony, or any other thing they want. Autocrats do not recognize rules made by others: it’s in the definition.
Won’t “dare to have” such a rival.
Despite the headline, he’s never going to any heaven that you ever read about, and Hell won’t have him because Lucifer won’t deal have such a rival. So, he’s like a struldbrug (you’re welcome) and will be here forever with a center of gravity and little else. And his shitshow circus will continue.
Despite the headline, he’s never going to any heaven that you ever read about, and Hell won’t have him because Lucifer won’t deal have such a rival. So, he’s like a struldbrug (you’re welcome) and will be here forever with a center of gravity and little else. And his shitshow circus will continue.
Speculating on a Vance regime: I think more of the same, with less accountability, and using all the iconography of the current movement. /1
He won’t suddenly become his “own man” in office: he instead will keep the cult going, allied with the same wrecking crew of Miller and Noem and Zeldin and Hegseth and even the shittiest Kennedy. /2
Because - he has no other path to keep power. He’s as charming as a ziplock bag with a broken zipper, and without Uncle Palantir’s zillions, he’d be a derpy private citizen. /3
Of course, I am ready to discount any rumors. Like Dick Cheney, Trump is never going to heaven, but he’s so bad that the Devil doesn’t want the competition in Hell. So - he persists. /fin
Mulching with sidearms. ‘Murica!!!
Like the Citrus Caesar, he’s gonna live forever since heaven won’t take him, but the Devil don’t want the competition in hell.
COVID is costing us 100+ lives a month, and it’s just ticking over. Da fuq is wrong with America that we can’t dislodge the shittiest Kennedy?
I run pricing ops for a large US based manufacturer with a significant export business. This regime laid illegal tariffs on RAW MATERIALS as well as finished goods, so we are always one EO from destruction. Offshoring would save us on both ends. Tariffs: regressive taxes costing American jobs.
When you harness the power of specialist minds, great things can happen!!
Math is the wokiest of wokety things. And I believe in math the way some people believe in flying saucers.
And scratch the surface of any specious argument, and you’ll see a fcking billionaire who wants to pay less in taxes.
Not happy to live under the shittiest Kennedy and his anti-science grift, but fortunate to live in a bordering state: “vaccine tourism”? AirBnBnMMR vacations? Hit me up: I am in!
^^^100% this. The cult will stay together and accelerate: the people who surround Trump are better at it, and are - in front of our faces - engineering multiple ways to never face voters again. We will be in this abyss for decades.
Maybe being added to the global Human Rights Watchlist has a correlation? Theater kids - foreign or domestic -are pretty woke, after all.
I worked on connected-home stuff starting decades ago through today. I have the same question now as I did in 2005: if my dishwasher could talk to my coffeemaker, what would they talk about?
They are smart and they know better - Vance, Stefanik, and most of the folks in the GOP: well educated vs. their base. They know better yet they tell the same lies in service in the same orange god: their shame will be all over the history books read by our grandchildren.
Are there not state (NY and FL) anti-trafficking laws that might apply? I know there is no way in hell it’ll be Florida, but NY maybe?
This thing happened??!?
Is the cheese slipping off the cracker? Oh, and Epstein. Forgot to mention the real reason we’re talking about this.
Ahahaha :-) love it when voice to text screwups get people triggered. (Unrelated - hate it when it transcribed me practicing my tuba… not sure I’ve ever used the word “boob” that many times in a sentence :-)
That must’ve really sucked. I grew up in the North and we had and have plenty of racists… but not like that. We hear how the racists feel discriminated against because [reasons] but even they know they’re making shit up. (No one clutches their purse when I walk by, which is… disempowering me??)
Why doesn’t the Smithsonian talk more about the upsides of child sex trafficking? I think Trump knows a gal who can help with that.
Trying to create a contract which has some out-year pricing actions tied to the Bureau of Labor Statistics-produced Producer’s Price Index, which… might get cooked by the new guy. So / one more bedrock thing in American data turns out to be as solid as an armload of gravy. Winning.
I think of this like the “last mile” robot problem: in the middle there is a dishwasher, which is an amazing (and, paradoxically both labor- and water-saving) device. But both ends (loading/unloading) is tediously manual. We solved that middle part with laundry but no robot match socks. A pity.
“Hamberders” for him… the rest dine on the bones of America. Not a lot of salad-eaters among them… true.
The regime has no moral compass, proving daily that it does not live up to its word. The guy nominally in charge is a salad bar of craven impulses; but his lackeys are singlemindedly driven to accomplish awful things. I can’t name one pet cabinet billionaire or ex TV host who is committed to good.
So true and so sad. The more enlightened ones knew it was a problem and We still live with that original sin two centuries later.
I’ve read too much dystopian history - but can’t keep quiet about these people and these days. I fear there will be a price paid but I can’t not say the true things.
I want AI to cut my grass so I can spend more time writing and thinking, instead of writing and thinking for me, leaving me the drudgery of cutting the grass. AI in school is an Orwellian dystopia: “Learn to write so you can learn to think. If you don’t learn to think, someone will do it for you.”
Until this MAGA fever passes, we are indeed an island. Decades will pass before we will be viewed as reliable allies since the fear of electing another authoritarian nihilist will linger. (I find myself frequently explaining gerrymandering and the Electoral College to my non-US friends these days.)
Former Scoutmaster here. On January 6, 2021, I addressed my Troop… that in the end, the Capitol is a building, but the US constitution, and the nation itself, is an idea worth fighting for… as many of our parents and grandparents have. This time is no different - but the war is here now.
It’s sad and 100% true that our children have no memory of a world when things worked. My son was born a few months before 9/11 and we have been at war his whole life… his only frame of reference is that us Old Farts are pining away for a world that never existed.
Happy that EU leaders are accompanying Zelenskyy to DC tomorrow, & hope it isn’t the “sellout summit” I fear. Overall, the EU needs be ready to put the US in the naughty chair for the next few years, & realize they are on their own, since the Russian-aligned regime is no longer relevant to them.)
I live in a border state, and when we visited in March at the height of “51st State” nonsense, we were looked at with great suspicion until we asked for his-and-hers matching “Elbows Up” shirts. Then? We felt like family.
“Can’t you afford to buy a suit?” was a particularly low point in the annals of America. Ukrainians are adaptable as a national characteristic, so I hope this plays out differently. But - there is no bottom for the regime, so still fearing the worse outcomes.
And now I had to look up who TF is Riley Gaines, and WTF are we still talking about ivermectin again? For actual parasitic diseases (ascaria, pinworm, etc.) it is the actual bomb. Reading this, it occurs to me that we need a broader-spectrum version to handle parasites of other kinds.
The EU needs to place the US in the naughty chair for the next few years, & realize they are on their own since our Russian-aligned regime is no longer relevant. Happy that EU leaders are accompanying Zelenskyy to DC tomorrow, & hope it isn’t the “sellout summit” I fear. We need a free Ukraine!
This regime tariffs RAW MATERIALS, some of which isn’t grown or mined here (eg. nickel or cobalt.) Everything we build now costs us lots more, and we don’t yet pass along 100% of the costs to customers, but we have to. Should we move jobs offshore to avoid tariffs? How does that work for America??
#Coffee-spit-laughing
I would love to be wrong about this, but I don’t think I am.
The One Weird Trick that Putin has is total control over the purse strings of a lawless state, so, while his country starves, he can focus his spending like a laser beam on destabilizing his adversaries and buying their leaders. So - until he is gone, I fear that nothing changes. Here, either.
100%. I think the EU needs to place the US in the naughty chair for the next few years, and realize they are on their own while our Russian-aligned regime is no longer relevant to them.
Agreed. I’d press the “like” button but there is nothing likeable about this. Gavin Newsome encapsulated this in his description of Trump (applicable to Putin as well, and paraphrasing): “he’s not playing by different rules. He doesn’t believe in rules.”
I truly don’t think Ukraine survives another meeting with Trump (now Monday?) Zelenskyy has nothing to offer the mob boss, & he’s smart enough to know that he’s not at the table: he’s on the table. Stating the obvious might help: our regime is aligned with a war criminal & no talks change that.
I truly don’t think Ukraine survives another meeting with Trump. Zelenskyy has nothing to offer the mob boss, and he’s smart enough to know that he’s not at the table: he’s on the table. Stating the obvious might help: the US regime is aligned with a war criminal. No talks will change that.
There’s no bottom with this regime. None with respect to law, statecraft, norms, humanity, science, or… respect. I would love someone to convince me it’s not a $hitshow from top to bottom, or to help me understand where the bottom even is.
I was buried all day in dealing with tariffs. Thank you for your posts from the real world :-)
I think Walmart and Dollar General are the only options for almost everyone in rural America. End-stage capitalism (where the means of production are controlled by a very few, so extraction becomes the model.)
Lowes if I need bulk lumber; my local hardware store if I need specialty items. No Amazon either. (I can order as late as midnight, and Amazon can have a 100’ roll of 12-3 cable on my stoop by 6am, at a good price. But they treat their workers like crap… so I pay more elsewhere.)
I drive (much) further afield for my building supplies, rather than give the big orange box a red cent. Let the fascists earn from others.
My youth mirrored yours in many ways, and I also migrated Left (slowly, then rapidly) from a GOP start. I believe in science and math the way some believe in flying saucers: that was OK yesterday’s GOP. Nixon, after all, started the EPA!) When the know-nothings and fundies took over, I was Out.
I will look forward to seeing the regime sages and hearing their always-rational explanations. Secretly, I will hope someone gets them to admit they know who pays the tariffs, but I know I wish for the moon and stars on a cracker, too.
This article was a supreme delight: grab a cup of tea, set aside 10 or 15 minutes, and enjoy this story about The Hardest Working Font in Manhattan. aresluna.org/the-hardest-... (via @ferociousj.bsky.social)
Can’t tell you how much I enjoyed reading every word of this… and I am not even a font nerd!! Thank you for sharing - much appreciated.
This reminds me about how the Washington Post went about selling discounted subscriptions after selling out to the fascists… hope it goes better for the AI guys; expect it won’t.
Josh Marshall. Not sure why my autocorrect got the name of a person I know vs. the one who wrote the article… but no editing on Blue Sky is allowed :-)
“A destination is optional: a direction is mandatory.” This seems not to be always obvious to the opposition… which happens to be our last hope of liberal democracy on the planet. Josh Foster nailed it here: join TPM if you can and support work like this. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-f...
There are a lot of committed Christians who actually see Jesus as an example to follow vs. a get-out-of-jail card. The Bible is not unclear on what Christians should be like. It’s just that the ascendent “Christianist” political types don’t actually give a shit about what Christ calls them to do.
What’s astounding to me is that Tim Cook is transparently bribing the President in return for preferential treatment. There’s not even a suggestion of the National Archives “owning” this artifact vs. it being the President’s personal property. And yet - this One Special Boy gets away with it.
Voltaire’s warning rings loudly… “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” And this is where we are now.
For those folks at home keeping score, it’s been six months of this nonsense before someone got a regime official to admit that the Americans pay the import tax. Let’s do better! Let’s ask this same question a hundred times until everyone in the regime has to say it’s so: make this barbarism end!
As I’ve told younger folk about economics: there is more than one economic system out there. While I don’t know leadership’s strategy, I imagine they were smarter than to expect to be 100% the next Twitter, especially as the algos are less focused on generative outrage so harder to monetize.
I am sad to learn that while courage is contagious, so is cruelty.
Tin-foil hat territory: he is a pet of billionaires and idolizes one particular Russian: all content to rule over rubble. This theory explains the destruction of the economy, destruction of our influence, (eg USAID) and the destruction of American science. No other theory fits the data as well.
I deal with tariffs for a living, and wish I didn’t have to. We are trying hard to keep jobs in the US but the economics just got way worse. Who the fck cares about workers anyway? (Answer: lots of Americans. But - not that Trump guy: he don’t give a $hit as long as you’re not talking Epstein.)
I would be able to pay attention to something other than WTF did Hair Fuehrer just step in?
If I were Emperor, I would start by outlawing capital letters.
Let’s let private equity investor-backed entities buy all the starter homes in our state! What a way to get long-term residuals from our sharecroppers I mean community! And, when those poor sods need services, let’s lobby the pols we bought and paid for to get lower Corporate taxes. Brilliant!
It’s tied to a lack of education spending. A toddler might think a bottle of the same height has the same volume. A third-grader, or an adult with a bit of “woke” education, would know the difference. So - no mystery why shrinkflation goes mostly unnoticed… it’s because on the whole we’re morons.
Love a guy with a head for stats :/)
@hntdove.bsky.social has GOT to write this… ready for pre-orders now!!
Now is a great time to dismantle our entire climate science community, amirite?
Today’s reminder: tariffs are stupid job killers, and yet Trump’s gaslighting goes unchallenged in the press: AMERICANS pay these tariffs. We sighted the iceberg in November, but stupidly decided to aim at it. Now we’re pretending everything’s OK while the engine room and lower decks are awash.
I’m already wealthy, but not much of my wealth is tied up in this “money” thing :-)
Learned from a wise waitress long ago: money is a personality amplifier. If you give money to a penniless entitled jerk, add FU money and they get even jerkier at scale. Give a nice person money and they are still nice on a larger platform. Once you have enough to live, it’s just an amplifier.
Sad and scary part is that Zeldin, as much as I might not care for him (he used to be our rep) has become this guy: he is not stupid but craven. Power and money does this to some people. Sad.
Followed you for this shirt alone :-) I deal with tariffs for a living (manufacturing sector) and we’re trying to keep jobs in the US, while the regime is laying tariffs on RAW MATERIALS as well as finished goods. Who could have thought this is a good idea? Never mind… I know who.
Reposted just for the awesome shirt!!
I am stunned that a 15% tariff (paid by US citizens), and charged on RAW MATERIALS as well as finished goods… is somehow cheered on & not going to kill jobs. (“Tell me again why I shouldn’t offshore production so my US company can continue to sell to the rest of the world?”)
15%. On finished goods and RAW MATERIALS, plus more on some raw materials like steel. Hugely regressive tax, and will lose, not create, jobs. (Trying to keep those jobs in the US, but this ain’t helping.). What maroon things tariffing raw materials is a good thing? Oh - never mind. I know who.
15%. They’re tariffing RAW MATERIALS, not just finished goods… so this still means we’re taxing ourselves and struggling to keep jobs in America. What a $hit show.
The first time he was elected, I had an awful foreboding: he will start a war to stay in power; in this case thwarted by the pandemic and a failed Jan 6 coup. Now? He won’t fail again, and will maneuver to keep his family in power - we are the best-armed banana republic on Earth now.
…GOP rep…
There’s a GOP named…. Marionette? How fitting!
Lots of older adults are not immunized against measles! If you were vaccinated before the mid 1970’s get tested if you can, or just get vaccinated again. I am a science geek so paid $400 to discover I needed a $0.90 MMR. Do your part while we are led by imbeciles.
If you grew up in a household with an evangelical right-wing parent, as I did, you already know that the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education, like the reversal of Roe v. Wade, is the culmination of a 50-year project.
Once gave a demo to Janet Jackson at an audio trade show All my colleagues were like “you were SO CHILL!” then 30 seconds later: “you don’t know who that was, right?” Nope. Grew up listening to the wrong radio stations, I guess. Not the same awkward as Sarah, but I was the butt of a few jokes.
These guys won’t stop at immigrants: once power is given it will not be given back. I only hope the states are as creative with legal contortions as the regime is. For the record: when the new department was named after 9/11, to me it was a fascist project, and I feared then what it could become.
These guys won’t stop at immigrants: once power is given it will not be given back. I only hope the states are as creative with legal contortions as the regime is. For the record: when the new department was named after 9/11, to me it was a fascist project, and I feared then what it could become.
"For my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law." While Bondi is dismissing charges against an anti-vaccine fraudster, her US attorney in NJ is subpoenaing the state's governor, a Democrat, over political speech: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/n... The rule of law dies a little more every day.
When I was a kid the GOP believed in science. What the HELL happened to us?
I am just happy with fewer Nazis and crypto boosters. And - while I can disagree with policy proposals and budget choices I see here, we can all agree that Trump is a global shame poured out upon America.