Dinner last night with a gaggle of Prime’s friends. She gave me advance warning about one of them- “She’s a PBS junkie and she’ll talk your ear off!” Prime was not wrong. The friend, an extremely nice woman, was bubbling over with enthusiasm about the Resist rally she had attended earlier in the day. I smiled and nodded, not that I could have gotten a word in edgewise. When there was a pause for breath, I asked, “So what do you think you accomplished today?” She responded, “We made our voices heard!” then prattled on for a bit about all the Canadians who were at the rally (I’m sure they were very polite) and how wonderful all the signs and chants were.
Then she suddenly stopped and said, “I hope this doesn’t offend you because I don’t actually know…”
“Nope, don’t worry.”
But worries aside, there are birthdays today, but a deficit of ones I find Notable. Nonetheless, we can mention a guy whose birthday was also last week (how that happens is beyond me…); proof that the Irish can swing; a brilliant scientist who stepped on the third rail of honesty; a rancher who supplied Woody Allen; a guy who taught me that if you speak English with a German accent, you’ll make Germans think you’re speaking German; one of our better outlaws; one fourth of the funniest and cleverest quartet this side of Monty Python; the real secret identity of Pie; a cousin of mine who has made some of the best and worst films ever; a guy who knew everything; my dad’s fantasy woman (and she did have some spectacular assets); and the model for Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Unfortunately, the Links are no fantasy.
Lots of slogans, signs, and “making ourselves heard.”
It’s always populist economic ignorance.
Those damn Jews won’t let us in to help overthrow their state!
Those damn Americans won’t let us harass Jews. I’m thinking Bulgaria might be nice this time of year.
The phrasing of the headline is delicious irony. I hope they don’t hurriedly change it before the Links post.
Our old buddy Gordie is just killing it. Well done!
It’s Charlie Christian. It’s Benny Goodman. It’s absolutely wonderful. The Old Guy is just in heaven.
Hitler was Canadian?
I think Hitler is sugar-free.
Hitler is saccharine.
I was waiting for the punchline where that ended up being Tomb Raider and things got awkward.
I would have been interested to ask her “What, precisely are you Resisting anyway?” Just to hear the expected talking points most likely… but to see if there’s any actual thought behind it.
She actually seemed to be a very bright woman, but has for whatever reason limited her data input to government sources. So I assume that she has absorbed their rationales as well.
Amusingly, I am probably not much more supportive of Trump than she is, but for vastly different reasons.
That is one of my favorite conversation templates though! You start talking to a lefty about how bad Trump is, and they start gushing out their nonsense and then slowly the smile leaves their face as they realize the difference.
I’m still supportive of him as being very much the lesser of the two evils in the last election. And the insanity that still seems to grip the Left in general and controls the JackAss wing in particular doesn’t make me likely to support them in the future.
Since I don’t think we’ll ever see Massie or Rand with real power… thems the breaks.
Hah, that would have been a better story! Different cities, fortunately, so we haven’t had the opportunity to run into her.
Given that praying outside of a clinic is a federal crime, and punching a clinic worker would probably result in jail time, I think we need to be equitable in giving out maximum assault and battery charges for politically motivated battery in this case.
Happy birthday Michael Barrett?
Happy birthday Vlad the Impaler?
Happy birthday Dennis Kucinich?
Heh… sleeping the sleep of the just. Morning all.
So… You are saying… Maimonides, possibly the most influential Judaic theologian since Moses… was born again?
proof that the Irish can swing;
Happy birthday Pádraig Harrington!
Happy birthday Roger Casement?
Happy Birthday Michael Collins.
Interesting slogan for people who are shitting their pants over the government literally having fewer hands to lay upon them.
I have to wonder if the organizers / paymasters are intentionally evoking the wonderful morons of the Tea Party era that furnished us the “Government hands off my Medicare!” quote.
“It was my understanding that globalisation meant British and EU tariffs were OK and American tariffs were Nazism. The neoliberal consensus is lost!”
I personally think globalization has failed because (like the run up to WW1) — economic interest isn’t the only driver for individuals or nation states… and letting your enemies control your trade / resources is doomed to failure (in our case — in WW1’s case it was “trade routes aren’t enough to prevent opportunistic war by morons”).
From an economic perspective, I’m sure that’s populist and ignorant sure… but economics is not the sum total of existence. I still think the COVID era when we found that we wouldn’t even have aspirin or surgical gloves if China decided to keep production for itself (and since all Chinese companies are instruments of the state, they can) should have driven this lesson home. No, it likely won’t be as good as if everyone was a wonderful rational economic actor worldwide and we could all trade for maximum resource efficiency and all that… but we might as well assume spherical cows as work off of that model.
New Economic Man and New Soviet Man may not be brothers, but they share a common ancestor somewhere.
Magical thinking. The ancestor is magical thinking.
I think there’s Marxian DNA in both. The New Soviet Man is obvious, but New Economic Man also seems to come from the Marxian premise that everything is downstream of economics. New Economic Man and New Libertarian Man are (very?) closely related, of course.
I have the same take as SPF-7. As a libertarian, I think the tariffs are OK, as they have a better chance of leading to actual, and not BS, free trade. And to hell with Globalization, it failed to a) stop wars and b) was a handy excuse to fuck over fly-over country that the left loved. Man is not Homo Economicus, just like he was never Homo Soviet. And setting up a system that is guaranteed to fail, no matter the intentions of it, is just stupid even if the short term gains were good.
Agreed. IMHO “globalism” has been a disaster of a fantasy.
It sounded great when I was younger and more naive and ignorant of facts such as “culture matters”.
Globalism sounds wonderful on a surface level. Once you recognize that cultures are not equal and interchangeable it becomes a terrifying and evil idea. If the tariffs (and pulling back from NATO) have the effect of permanently killing the idea that the US should join in an EU style global order they will be worth the cost.
“Hey… they’re just using the same voice actor over and over… what kind of a cut rate production is this!”
Futurama?
Family Guy.
She certainly did like to live… dangerously!
I think that link went to take a shower.
Fixed. Thanks for the catch.
Sauce for the gander, considering the UK has blacklisted people like Michael Savage from entering the country for purely ideological reasons.
This is slimy regardless of who is doing it, and a court should rule it unconstitutional and void the agreement.
So Trumpian, bend power to your own ends rather than break it
Part of me can appreciate the schadenfreude, but regrettably, I still have principles.
Having grown up in the shadow of Smokey and the Bandit, when more than a couple of our neighbors were truck drivers (and made a solid living doing so), etc… I do find it odd that all the truck stops seem to have sprouted Indian restaurants over the last few years. I don’t begrudge them if they’re legal and this is what they really want to do (and they’re good at it)… I just find it more than a little odd that we apparently lacked domestic truck driving candidates…
Of course, the stories over the last few years about said US truck drivers being GPS and otherwise monitored by the companies and the government to the point of micromanagement might have a lot to do with that… if we went back to more free wheeling contracting to owner-operators, we might have less drone like efficiency but more domestic interest. No idea… just Gordie’s article made me wonder why the CDLs needed to be handed out like candy.
I do find it odd that all the truck stops seem to have sprouted Indian restaurants over the last few years.
I decamped from the West Coast over 15 years ago, but even then, the truckers were heavily Sikh. The advantage to me as a non-trucker plying the same highways was access to MUCH better food than roller dogs.
Unpossible! I was told that truckers are racist, mysogynist white supremacists with unacceptable views.
Sikh’s run short haul trucking on the west coast, which isn’t surprising as they have been buying up farms in the Central Valley* for decades, and need to get the product to market.
*at least in the northern part, all the orchards and rice paddies.
…at acceptable wages etc. etc. It’s about money, of course.
Looks like another case of you get what you pay for.
“Although I hate everything associated with the administration’s approach to immigration”
If I were god-emperor, I would do things differently, sure. Hard to argue with some of it, though, especially the whole “deport the criminals” thing. Now, sending them to El Salvador is a little dicey, but the alternatives are either unavailable (country of origin refuses to take them back) or have their own problems (likelihood of just continuing their criminal career, possible here again).
Of course, the big numbers are in all the “asylum-seekers” that need to self-deport. That will happen when their welfare is cut off, which means cutting off the NGOs that launder the federal funding for them. Not sure where he is on that.
That comment struck me as well – aligned with your response. Also efforts to curb ID theft, illegal voting, benefits theft, etc.
Sending them to one of the worst prisons in the world is clearly being used as a deterrent. He’s making an example out of “the worst of the worst” as a warning: the last guy let you in no problem and gave you lots of free shit, I’ll make you wish you were dead.
Five years ago it would have made me squirm, but TBH, the utter and complete disaster of Biden’s term has pretty much turned me into a border hawk. I no longer care about sob stories or due process for these people. Follow the rules and come in the right way or you can rot in prison for the rest of your life for all I care.
So, you are saying that you Pan Pie?
Not as good as Deep Dish.
On This Day: In 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, originally known as the Church of Christ, was founded between three groups of followers in Fayette, Manchester and Colesville, N.Y.
Mazel tov to our Glibs Mormon mafia.
When you fuck up your tags, but there’s still readable text with a clickable link.
[[[Mazel tov!]]]
Good thing she didn’t ask if she amused you.
“Am I a clown, here for your amusement?”
It was also my thought as to how OM could’ve answered… offended? Not at all, but I’m quite amused.
I dunno about the MS-13 stuff but he arrived illegally under false pretenses and got some mysterious protection from deportation anyway.
I also don’t know what is the unspecified “mistake” that happened here. Something stinks about this story.
“Multiple GoFundMe fundraisers have been taken offline after they claimed to be supporting Karmelo Anthony, the suspect charged with the murder of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf. The fundraisers raised over $16,000
Anthony has been charged with first-degree murder and his bond has been set at $1,000,000. Anthony reportedly claimed self-defense, and in reaction, there were multiple GoFundMe fundraisers set up, claiming to be paying for his legal defense, multiple have been deleted.”
https://thepostmillennial.com/fundraisers-for-karmelo-anthony-raise-over-16000-before-being-deleted-from-gofundme
I wonder how many GFM scams succeed?
Based on what I have seen, so grain of salt, the self-defense claim is pretty iffy. You don’t get to employ deadly force unless you have good reason* to believe you are in danger of being killed or seriously injured. And I just don’t see that in the run up to him pulling knife and stabbing someone in the chest, even if they laid hands on him first. Being kicked out of a rival team’s tent at a high school track meet just doesn’t meet the standard.
*This is looked at under the “objective” standard of “would a reasonably person believe that”.
I don’t see how it possibly could have been self-defense. Although, even guilty people should be allowed to raise money for their legal defense.
That punk has certainly been extensively trained to wrap the American left around his finger.
My two bits: you’re on a green card. Play nice or get the fuck out.
I heard an interesting (conspiracy?) theory that while this guy was still in school he was identified by USAID/FBI/Swamp Creatures as an excellent useful idiot, coached in the right talking points and fast-tracked from student visa to green card (he got a green card in what, like a year? I knew lots of foreign students in grad school who waited for close to a decade for a green card even after getting a job).
The theory goes that there are hundreds (thousands?) of others in a similar situation purposely built up as a fifth column by the Deep State.
Wouldn’t surprise me at all,
I read it was because he married a citizen.
““My name is Greisa Martinez Rosas,” she bragged at the rally. “I am an immigrant; I am undocumented, unafraid, queer, and unashamed!”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/04/trump-administration-puts-loud-mouthed-illegal-alien-notice/
You’re also fat.
“…she also receives a hefty salary from her organization…”
Heh.
Your penis is designed to scoop out the semen of the guy who had sex with her right before you.
https://archive.is/MPSdL
Slutty Sunday.
The optimal strategem is to bang pregnant chicks. You know she puts out and you can’t knock her up.
4 (who seems to be the same as woman as 11 and 12) has gaudy taste in wristwear, but I’m willing to overlook it. 14 has too many holes in her head, but I’m also willing to overlook it.
So. I will probably get raked over the coals and have my libertarian card revoked and cast into a pit of MAGA-ts for saying this but I don’t think the tariffs are as bad as they’re being made out.
I love free markets. However, there are a couple of problems with the status quo:
1. We don’t actually have free markets and
2. I think the past 20 years has proven that free markets are not actually desirable with regimes like the CCP
If the tariffs can leverage friendly countries to drop their tariffs (which in turn means we drop ours), then we’re closer to solving point 1. And to point 2, if I find out the grocery store where I do my shopping is using my money to hire hitmen to try and kill me, maybe I should shop somewhere else.
Yeah the market is taking it in the anus at the moment, but to my mind it’s evidence of just how dysfunctional our economy has been. The market has been inflated by government spending and by cheap trash from China. Prices will go up, I personally believe temporarily for most things as friendly nations drop their tariffs, and I also believe the market will recover with assets reallocated into more robust and stable things for longer term viability.
Without any doubt, there are short term downsides and it is somewhat of a gamble, but one thing is for certain; what we’ve been doing for the past 30 years hasn’t been working very well for large swaths of the population and if you want things to change, you’ve got to try something new.
Tariffs are always bad economic policy. As discussed above, nations also have non-economic policy objectives.
Multilateral free trade is better than unilateral free trade, but even unilateral free trade is more beneficial than multilateral protectionism. But again, that’s speaking purely in terms of economic outcomes. You can optimize for non-economic outcomes, and that’s a political question. The quantifiable total number of widgets available under various tariff rates may be less important than finding out that the total number of available widgets is zero if you piss off a trading partner who also happens to be an ideological or military foe, for example. Nobody bats an eye about sanctions on, say, Russia or Iran, but tariffs on China, who is at least as hostile to US interests as Russia, is beyond the pale. It’s arbitrary and silly, and based solely on the gratification of the collective American jones for cheap, imported shit.
Taxes in general are bad economic policy. It’s not clear to me that tariffs are a uniquely bad tax. Maybe they are. What I am seeing, and admittedly I am not looking that hard, seems to mostly handwaving and people worried about their rice bowls. What sort of structural issue that I can think of is that they seem to be prone to gaming (what counts as an import subject to the tariff?) and special dealing. Which is hardly unique to tariffs, of course.
Overall, the income tax is probably as bad or worse in terms of the market distortions it creates, but the problem with tariffs, economically speaking, is that they destroy useful economic information (which is all prices are) and lead to broad resource misallocations in terms of comparative advantage. Think of it like an inept student being paid by a wealthy benefactor to continue attending university in pursuit of a law degree, to eventually enter into a field in which he shows little aptitude, when he has a preternatural talent for music instead. That student’s time and resources would be better spent pursuing a career as a musician of some distinction than as an incompetent lawyer, but his benefactor’s largess has distorted his incentives. Naturally, national industry is not as straightforward as “skilled musician vs. incompetent lawyer,” but tariffs, by design, prevent competition from creating the price signals that would otherwise inform the market that capital could be better utilized elsewhere.
All that having been said, I have to circle back around to optimizing for non-economic outcomes again. To take the silly “bushels of apples vs. bushels of wheat” examples you always see in econ 101 texts on comparative advantage, if country A can produce bushels of apples more efficiently than bushels of wheat, and country B can produce bushels of wheat more efficiently than bushels of apples, economic logic dictates each country should export what it can most efficiently produce and import what the other can most efficiently produce. But even in that simple example, if country B is hostile to country A because of some non-economic triviality like, say, ethnic conflict, disputed borders, political expression, or different ideological systems, maximizing economic efficiency may not take the highest priority, and each country might choose to produce it’s own apples and wheat, respectively, in order to prevent their access to a commodity from being controlled by an enemy.
I think the issue is that the U.S. is neither producing apples or wheat, mostly because of regulations.
A good solution would be to drop the tarriffs against friendly countries, and shift production of cheap shit to them. No reason stuff has to come from China. There are other low cost labor markets in the world.
The market doesn’t “price” in anything other than money.
If you’re concerned about anything else, the market doesn’t give a shit.
I think the market will be fine and the recovery will start surprisingly soon. Economically my worry is that if we don’t get spending under control ASAP, we are in trouble in terms of currency/debt issues. Trade imbalances have insulated us from most of the consequences of the constant inflation in the money supply. A trade imbalance means dollars go overseas and goods come here. That simultaneously reduces the amount of dollars and increases the amount of goods acting to offset inflation. Those dollars overseas have been used to buy up our bonds, creating a dollar based world economy, and again enabling us to keep inflating our currency supply without reaping the full consequences. If that ends, which this situation makes very likely, we are in trouble.
Since as long as I can remember, the right has been screaming for Something To Be Done about big gummint, welfare, illegals, and the world that thinks we’re their baby daddy, defender, and ATM. (Oh, but not Social Security!) They screamed about “kicking the can down the road.”
I’ve always agreed. The difference between me and them is that I have always said, “You know that’s gonna hurt, right?” But hey, I have nothing, never had anything, and so I’ve got nothing to lose. Burn it all down.
(You know what I’ve noticed? I can’t shop like a billionaire on Temu anymore. Their prices have gone up. Dammit.)
Now it’s being done and the right is screaming because it hurts. WTF did they think would happen? It hurts exponentially WORSE because the gummint shut down the country for 2 years. A friend of mine said in astonishment, “You would rather all those people DIE so that businesses can stay open?” “Absolutely.” “You’re evil!” [She didn’t say it, but I bet you she was thinking it.] Not as evil as tanking an economy so the gummint can run its little social and economic experiment on how to best control its population.
I’m with Q on this.
Yeah. It hurts. But it’s gotta be done. The can is not being kicked as far down the road anymore.
I’d have substituted “Your false dichotomy is vacuous, you fearmongering retard” for “Absolutely,” but the result is pretty much the same.
I tend to go for concise and dramatic. I OWN it.
🤔 Maybe that’s why people assume what I think, stop listening, then get mad at me for it. 🤔
This is a very smart lady and who once was a conservatarian type. TDS got her BAD. I was terribly shocked at her short-sightedness. Like, you don’t see how this is going to kill everybody in some way?
t’s not the virus. It’s the government. Stop blaming the virus. It’s not sentient. It’s just the grim reaper and nothing we do is going to stop it.
And by the way, your dumb masks don’t do shit.
Oh, and if you were wanting to stop the anti-vax movement, forcing people to get a vaccine for a fucking VIRUS, after doctors spent the last 30 years telling you there is no such thing, was not the way to go.
The first vaccine was for a virus. It’s anti-biotics you are thinking of which don’t fight viruses.
I had a big long comment written out clarifying what I meant, but then realized that if I had to make a big long comment to clarify, I didn’t do a good job in the first place.
Apparently, my communication style of expecting people to just know what I meant is becoming a problem.
“Xinis on Friday ruled that the government must make arrangements to have Garcia back in the U.S. before Monday at midnight.”
Ummmm… how about no?
What are we supposed to do? Raid the prison where he is being held now to break him out?
Spy Game is a great movie.
Word. Something must be done – SCOTUS is making repeated demands on Executive actions.
Uh. Stay in your fucking lane. That one is *yours.* These other two? They *aren’t.*
Constitutional collision in progress. (Constitutional Collision. Not a bad band name. Also could be in a police report when two geezers run into each other taking their evening jaunts.)
Hands off my vast inefficient bureaucracy.
Laird and her neighbors said they formed a group chat after Trump took office this year. They use the group chat, named “Sisters of the resistance,” to coordinate attending protests together and offer support.
Will there be bake sales?
They would probably be gluten-free vegan bake sales, so nothing of interest.
Justice Dept. suspends lawyer who acknowledged deportation was a mistake
I wanted it bit more clarity that Fox News (surprise, surprise) article that lacked for why the attorney got tossed. I still can’t totally understand it. It reads like the DOJ (the team) that signed the filing made no attempt to defend the US.
I, being a fucking cog in the corporate machine, understand that sometimes you can’t get an answer from the powers above. They don’t give a shit what your deadlines are or what the fuck problems they will create for you. You are a little person and your job is to clean up their messes on their timetable not yours. I’m pretty sympathetic.
However, if your employer is throwing you under the bus and recognizing your “guild” responsibilities I’d think you’d make that your filing rather than saying the US of A done fucked up. I’m assuming that’s what pissed of Bondi.
“Erez Reuveni had worked at the Justice Department for nearly 15 years, most recently as the acting deputy director of the Office of Immigration Litigation”
Sounds as though this guy has been part of the immigration problem for a long time. Regardless of whether there was an error (essentially related to the absurd prior order regarding deportation to El Salvador specifically) it is 100% clear what the administration has stated as rationale for deportation. IANAL but this seems borderline willful…
DOJ has a long history of throwing cases, generally to set up court orders or settlements that launder money to the right people or create legal regimes that have neither statutory nor regulatory. I am quite willing to believe that a lifer at the DOJ would lay down in court to get the “right” result.
Whatever. Lawyers get fired for losing cases all the time. This isn’t some huge injustice. I doubt he’ll miss any meals.
Yes. He needs either make an argument in support or an argument that he needs more time because he can’t get information.
In a sense that is still throwing your employer under the bus, but he has to respond.
People get fired for shit all the time that isn’t their fault. I’m no fan of the powers above doing that. They have safety nets most under them don’t.
I was trying to figure out if that happened here. The WP is arguing the employer fucked him. It would be nice if Fox properly articulated he fucked his employer (ie us).
Fort Sumter lies in ruins
U.S. customs agents began collecting President Donald Trump’s unilateral 10% tariff on all imports from many countries on Saturday, with higher levies on goods from 57 larger trading partners due to start next week.
The initial 10% “baseline” tariff took effect at U.S. seaports, airports and customs warehouses at 12:01 a.m. ET (0401 GMT), ushering in Trump’s full rejection of the post-World War Two system of mutually agreed tariff rates.
“This is the single biggest trade action of our lifetime,” said Kelly Ann Shaw, a trade lawyer at Hogan Lovells and former White House trade adviser during Trump’s first term.
Shaw told a Brookings Institution event on Thursday that she expected the tariffs to evolve over time as countries seek to negotiate lower rates. “But this is huge. This is a pretty seismic and significant shift in the way that we trade with every country on earth,” she added.
No more guardrails.
CNN kinda showing both sides of awful/ the story?
One headline about a Palestinian teen who died in an Israeli prison. His autopsy reportedly showed he died with “likely prolonged malnutrition.”
Then another: “Palestinian family says son was tortured to death for publicly criticizing Hamas.”
I’m surprised to see them in the same block of stories.
Some tariffs, of course, being more “mutual” than others. And that’s just one high profile example. Even our misnamed “free trade” deals like NAFTA include thousands of tariffs, with rates being locked in by the agreement. Framing it like the whole world agreed to a flat tariff rate and then mean old Trump came along and arbitrarily raised them for no good reason is disingenuous beyond belief. The rest of the world has been imposing high tariffs on US goods for 30+ years, while we’ve historically imposed lower tariffs on foreign goods. To some extent our present standard of living is based upon that arrangement, and there have been benefits as well as costs, but the United States behaving in the same way most of its trading partners do is not blowing up some sacred international covenant.
I’m curious what the rationale is for Trump levying 10% tariffs on countries with no tariffs whatsoever.
Protectionism.
Right.
Haha.
*faints*
“The woman who socked a pro-life reporter in the face during a filmed interview offered an apology Saturday — but claimed her “antagonistic” victim goaded her into violence.
Brianna Rivers, of the Bronx, admitted she was wrong for slugging Savannah Craven Antao, a reporter for pro-life advocacy group Live Action.
“To Savannah, I sincerely apologize but cannot sit around and allow you to continue pushing this one sided narrative. I understand hands being put on someone is never the answer, but throwing rocks and hiding hands is worse,” Rivers wrote in a Facebook post.”
https://nypost.com/2025/04/05/us-news/woman-who-punched-pro-life-activist-claims-she-was-goaded-into-violence/
It doesn’t sound like she is being charged, and that also doesn’t sound like much of a defense.
Your speech is violence, my violence is speech. Same as it ever was. It’s all so tiresome.
“To Savannah, I sincerely apologize but cannot sit around and allow you to continue pushing this one sided narrative. I understand hands being put on someone is never the answer, but throwing rocks and hiding hands is worse,” Rivers wrote in a Facebook post.”
She never threw rocks. Her words are not rocks. You are lying about what happened to justify your actions.
It is infuriating. And she should absolutely be charged. Violence on tape, that she admitted to.
“Sorry not sorry.”
As always, the “but” negates everything that came before it.
“To Savannah, I sincerely apologize but . . . .”
Sorry but you deserved it.
Vital national interest
With U.S. companies such as Oracle and Amazon bidding over the platform this week and Trump’s decision to allow TikTok to keep operating despite Saturday’s deadline for its sale, the prevailing emotion among creators seems to be a despondent shrug of “Whateverness.”
“I literally have a career on this app. And I don’t care,” P.S. Cirina said in a post on Apr. 3. “And I don’t know if that’s what they want from us to not care so that we’re not fighting.”
“How many times are we going to do this?” Princess Milkyy wrote in a post on Tuesday headlined “Tired.”
“I’m done. I’m done. I’m tired,” Conner Babcock posted on Thursday. “ There are bigger things going on in the world. Why are we focused on TikTok? I don’t know. Take it. I’ll be a teacher. I’ll do something else.”
The fatigue experienced by TikTok creators can be viewed within the context of what’s happening more broadly in the country and the world.
“Everybody already has been exhausted by several chronic stressors, which started with the pandemic, a lot of wars around the world, and then the politics, which have been very divisive,” said Arash Javanbakht, director of the stress, trauma and anxiety research clinic at Wayne State University and the author of the book Afraid: Understanding the Purpose of Fear and Harnessing the Power of Anxiety.
It’s all President Cartoon Villain’s fault.
My guy, if you become immobilized with anxiety over the potential of losing the platform you use for peddling cheap Chinese shit to American teenagers with the attention span of a goldfish, you’re gonna fucking LOVE being a teacher…
Tik Tok is cancer.
Another cheap Chinese export.
No, Mo, it is intentionally designed as a weapon. The algorithm serves up toxic corrosive crap with the aim of undermining the user. That’s why the version deployed in China used almost the exact opposite algorithm.
We got hooked and undermined on cheap Chinese shit long ago. Fast fashion, chipboard flatpack furniture, plastic toys, scratchy bolts of fabric, etc. It was a cheap dopamine hit that we could buy lots of stuff cheap. It destroyed our sense of quality and destroyed livelihoods. Now even the expensive stuff is just cheap Chinese shit and nobody cares because we’re used to it and expect it.
TikTok is no different. Cheap dopamine hits for cheap.
TT is more like fentanyl.
This great country of ours is perfectly capable of producing toxic corrosive crap all by itself! See MSM/other social media besides TikTok.
https://img.ifunny.co/images/64597fdac9430954dd533ab35ee45daa280bc81392c98b72cddf0026e0ca9e73_1.jpg
The wrong kind of propaganda
“This is 100 percent illegal. Trump seems to be biding time to work out a deal where one of his political allies takes over TikTok and turns it into a MAGA propaganda machine,” Murphy wrote in a Saturday post on the social platform X.
Bezos’ ex wife should buy it, or Jobs’ widow. They’d use it to promote kindness and understanding and sneering anti-MAGA condescension.
“The project began in 2022 through a public-private partnership that brought together many organizations to cover the $92m in costs, according to Caltrans, the state transportation department. Research shows that wildlife crossings save money because it limits animal interactions with vehicles.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/06/la-wildlife-freeway-crossing
Good thing Los Angeles doesn’t have any other problems.
“The project aims to complete its work by the end of 2026.”
2040 headline: wildlife crossings work as well as fish ladders and other dam bypass methods
Working backwards from the desired outcome
This week, a French court found far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzling millions of euros of European Union funds and banned her from running for political office for five years – knocking the frontrunner out of the 2027 presidential race and enraging her supporters.
Coming so swiftly after Romania canceled the first-round election victory of a far-right candidate, Le Pen’s verdict has deepened a transatlantic debate about whether courts risk disenfranchising voters by removing a politician from electoral competition.
Le Pen’s case is becoming a political Rorschach test. Critics say the court’s decision is another instance of liberal elites weaponizing the judiciary to bar their political rivals from power. Supporters say the decision shows institutions working as designed, prosecuting any citizen who is guilty of a crime regardless of their political stripes and the potential backlash.
For the first camp, “the will of the people” ought to be supreme. For the second, adhering to the “rule of law” outweighs voters’ demands.
Far right Nazi sympathizers are notoriously crooked, unlike socialists. That’s just how the rule of law works.
The two cases have stoked fury among Europe’s right-wing nationalists, Donald Trump and many members of his administration, who feel the US president was subjected to similar acts of “lawfare” to try to stop him winning a second term. He is the first convicted felon to become president.
My god, we did everything we could think of, and the filthy ignorant rabble still voted for him!
He may be the first convicted felon to become President, but you just know he’s not the first felon to become President.
He is the first convicted felon to become president.
Speaking of which, anyone know where the appeals are at for the various pre-election cases against The Donald? On hold while he’s in office, or just too faint a blip on the radar compared to all the other shit-stirring going on?
Suppose the tariffs work as Trump proposes. China-US tariffs are both zero. Will that bring jobs back to Detroit? Obviously the answer is no. The same wage difference will continue to exist. American auto workers make $30 @ hour, Chinese $2 @ hour. There’s a reason jobs left the US.
The continuation of the US deficit spending will only increase the wage inflation. The road forward will be bumpy.
The elephant in the room is regulations. It’s too expensive to do anything here.
And way more important.
You’re not gonna overcome the fact that Chinese labor is currently worth about 1/8th of American labor unless you plan to maybe triple or quadruple the tariffs yours currently proposing.
Le Pen was convicted of embezzlement for using EU funds to pay her party’s political staff from 2004 to 2016, falsely claiming they were working as assistants to its members of the European Parliament. Her party, the National Rally (RN), was ordered to pay back the €4.1 million ($4.4 million) the court said it had embezzled, as well as €2 million in fines. Le Pen has said she will appeal the court ruling.
I’m sure this sort of thing is completely unprecedented in the history of the EU.
Fortunately that would never happen in the US ’cause we have laws against that sort of thing plus American politicians are honest.
It was a cheap dopamine hit that we could buy lots of stuff cheap. It destroyed our sense of quality and destroyed livelihoods. Now even the expensive stuff is just cheap Chinese shit and nobody cares because we’re used to it and expect it.
“Just throw it away and buy another one.” That’s how we keep the wheels of commerce turning.
The same wage difference will continue to exist. American auto workers make $30 @ hour, Chinese $2 @ hour. There’s a reason jobs left the US.
It’s not just the wages, it’s the overall burden of globalist NIMBY-ism which has strangled manufacturing and industrial processes in the “enlightened west”.
I don’t like the switches on this keyboard, they feel squishy and overly sensitive. I just had a long run of spaces added to a document I was working on because I didn’t realise my finger resting on the space bar had put enough pressure on it to start registering.
I’m going to have to get a different set of switches. Fortunately, the switches are hot swappable (though I’d probably unplug the thing anyway for the sake of not having a cable in the way).
Anyone know a good resource on the parameters of the various kinds of key switches?
Decent comparison of the Cherry MX switches here. The chinkshit knockoffs all more or less approximate the MX switches by color, so you can use that as a baseline.
Thank you.
Doug Emhoff publicly criticises his law firm for kowtowing to Trump.
Did he ragequit? If not, why not?