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i dunno. duly elected, but utterly lawless, which detracts from any claims of due-ness.

the most insidious propaganda by mainstream media is how it cheerfully chatters the days away as though we are living through ordinary times rather than a desperate national emergency.

i just want to say @nytpitchbot.bsky.social, whoever they may be, is a certain kind of genius.

juan valdez didn’t contribute to the inauguration fund.

as a lay reader of the constitution, it seems to me the document explicitly envisions the structuring of the executive branch as a collaboration between the president and Congress. how does this Supreme Court justify expanding claims that Congress cannot structure offices of the executive branch?

a combination of taxing payouts to foreign securities holders (an indirect, incrementally titratable trade barrier that doesn’t discriminate between nations or goods) and subsidies of strategic industries, structured to ensure competition rather than build national champions, would do it.

every university should offer students whose visas are arbitrarily rescinded pathways to complete their degrees via remote learning.

a hard man, sizing up his new cellmate: “so, what’re you in for?” new cellmate: “finger painting”

i hope not.

kind of surprised administration flunkies aren’t hawking tawking points about how interest rates are rising because markets can anticipate the huge boom the president’s policies will bring, but stocks are down because tariffs will cut into Wall Street fat cat margins.

so it becomes move fast and break everything…

some of us might describe this as the work of the “neo” prefix liberalism picked up for a while. if you let liberalism collapse into exaltation of market logics, then you sell out when the price is right.

“move fast and break things” is good strategy to gain first-mover advantage in winner-take-all markets. it’s not a good strategy for developing high quality goods. (winner-take-all markets do not reliably reward quality. they reward speed, subject to some minimal quality constraint.)

it’s weird how the mishandling of COVID is so many people’s excuse for supporting the guy who mishandled COVID.

no source of authority beyond a boot or a rifle, is what they are after. because they can persuade no one, but they know how to stomp.

is there a more banality-of-evil phrase than "ICE quota"?

i mean, how does reducing civilian deaths "facilitate lethality"?

right. the US in Indochina and Korea was pretty awful about this stuff! we had, in recent memory, fought and won a "total war", whose totality seemed to leave little moral stain. that taught our military bad lessons. "Vietnam syndrome" taught different lessons. that made a real difference!