“Beneath his facade of talking about healthy living and wellness, Kennedy is actually a eugenicist. He insists that viruses and bacteria only kill people who don’t eat healthy and exercise by his lights—essentially rejecting the germ theory of disease.”
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depends on your measure. mostly not meaningfully.
remember when we were a confident, generous, hopeful country?
under bukele it is starting to seem like "el salvador" was ironically named.
Florida, near Tampa.
so, we are living under a fascist administration, but at least this is legal.
Sandwich board advertising “THC SLUSHY”
i take this as a great time to reform our prisons to Norwegian standards, so that life imprisonment without parole becomes practical even or especially of elite offenders who, "naturally" or paradoxically, always command outsize empathy.
"since JFK and especially since Carter/Reagan…US has been losing its ability to tax the rich. It has increasingly chosen to tax the rest of the world, moving industry…to other countries [who] made what the US needed, and sold it to them in USD" @ianwelsh.bsky.social www.ianwelsh.net/the-proximat...
The Proximate Cause Of Revolutions Is Inability To Tax & The US Is Well Down The Road
Link Preview: The Proximate Cause Of Revolutions Is Inability To Tax & The US Is Well Down The Road: —And thus, inability to run the state. In the modern world this causes a great deal of confusion. I guarantee some MMT follower is gleefully planning a comment saying "a state's ability to spend is no...
“People are, in my opinion, usually sincere. That doesn’t mean right. It doesn’t mean praiseworthy, or good, or admirable. But people–even politicians–are not usually pursuing some deep, complex cynical scheme. When it seems like they are, it might just mean that they disagree with you.”
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every accusation is a confession, the early years.
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perhaps there is no problem. i suspect ants find algebra inconceivable. i just find considering existence or its alternative freaky in a does-not-compute kind of way.
existence is inconceivable, but so is its alternative.
yes. but even though the vast majority of the stock market is in very few hands doesn’t mean a substantial quantity of other people’s relatively meager savings isn’t affected by the stock market. let alone investment and employment in a macro sense.
if they openly defy SCOTUS and public and Congress shrug, that’s a bad, bad outcome. it may be fortunate that they are not only malign about matters that seem abstract to most people, but also incompetent about things that affect much of the public directly in their pocketbook.
Within a certain range of public sentiment. 1/
When public opinion gets sufficiently out-of-whack relative to the assumptions made by the gerrymanderers, when “efficiently” distributed reliable partisans start to turn less than reliable, it’s like a financial crisis. Safe seats turn speculative, everything becomes fluid. 2/
The flow of control is from the public to Congress to outcome. They’ve rigged things so the public needs to be pushed unfairly to extremes before Congress’ insulation is overcome. But the public might be pushed by events well beyond those extremes. /fin
no. i’m not trusting them. i think they are utterly craven. they will do only what they are forced to do. i’m saying the only way out is such public anger at this administration that these craven members of Congress are forced to do the right thing. 1/
Congress is supreme under our Constitution. you don’t go into a fascist takeover attempt with the Congress you wish you had, but it’s Congress, ultimately, on whose action or acquiescence the tale will turn. /fin
i think some are true believers, but the vast majority of even Republicans are just trying to hide in a corner. they know a lot of this shit is wrong and terrible, they think if they express that in any meaningful way they’ll get primaried with infinite MuskBucks at the very least. 1/
(for beyond the very least, consider that Murkowsi video that recently went viral.) /fin
i think the late for coffee metaphor here is really good.
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Project 2025 was an often self-contradictory grab-bag of weird extreme ideas from all over the R coalition. Lots of them are getting catastrophic trials! But it was never a coherent, disciplined plan to do much of anything. 1/
There is, definitely, a lot of voter suppression and undermining of elections. We should definitely be worries about that, and about right-wing takeover of media (but then, we are living more the consequence than the threat of that now). 2/
Andreeson is no wiser or more capable than Musk. Musk has this theory that if they control the information systems they can durably control the government, he’s exfiltrating data and having his kids inject chokepoints he controls. 3/
But that theory is wrong. If the information systems won’t do what Congress compels because Musk has ransomwared them, he’ll be threatened with prison and unlock the doors. The whole theory is as worthy of taking seriously as the one LLMs are ready to operate the government. Both risible. 4/
Ultimately all that matters in our system is Congress. Congress is supreme. Right now Congress is abdicating. The whole game is mobilizing the public to mobilize Congress in a positive direction. /fin
i don’t think this is all their carefully wrought plan working. i think it is just the flailings of two egomaniacs and the uncoordinated connivings of their sycophants and suitors.