Mastodawn

New in PN: Trump's brain is gone

"Trump’s competence has always left a lot to be desired, but recent interviews show a president who’s no longer capable of even the veneer of mental acuity. Meanwhile, his party behaves like courtiers to a mad king." https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-cognitive-state

Trump's brain is gone

It really should be a bigger story.

Public Notice

Western Infidels 1d ago

I've raised a child from babyhood to teen-ager-hood.

But it was the freaking *cat* that caused me to wipe coffee off the ceiling for the first time today.

Show thread

Western Infidels 1d ago

More seriously, we have set ourselves up with a mad king, and so the courtiers, who know his weakness firsthand, alternately flatter him and manipulate him. The attorney general made this assertion in public, but the stupid numbers and the carnival-barker "are you ready for this, media" phrasing were designed to appeal to an audience of one elderly narcissist.

Western Infidels 1d ago

Look here, there's nothing wrong with the attorney general's numbers. Why, I was very likely to die of fentanyl overdose at least 10 million times myself. But now, that will be impossible!

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pam-bondi-makes-head-spinning-claim-trump-saved-258m-american-lives/

#uspolitics

Pam Bondi Makes Head-Spinning Claim Trump Saved 258M American Lives

The Department of Justice later explained how she arrived at that number.

The Daily Beast

Western Infidels 2d ago

Jay Kuo 2d ago

A tale of two stock markets.

Western Infidels 2d ago

Whether Garcia has "MS13" tattooed on his hand or not (and he does not), he still has a right to due process, and he's not getting it.

Whether the many other men in that concentration camp are MS13 members or not (and many of them are not), they all still have a right to due process, and they're not getting it.

TFG is spreading lies about an issue that wouldn't even excuse his behavior, to move the point of contention away from rigidly defined principles like facts and laws, and toward more malleable affairs like the mood of mobs.

#uspolitics

Western Infidels 3d ago

Sometimes we hear the slang and the fads the youth have come up with and we call it "brainrot" because we find it unappealing.

But in my view it's a certain group of grown-ups who are making the best case for a "brainrot" crisis today.

https://www.latintimes.com/rfk-jr-end-godsend-narcan-program-that-helped-reduce-overdose-deaths-despite-his-past-heroin-581846

RFK Jr. to End 'Godsend' Narcan Program That Helped Reduce Overdose Deaths Despite His Past Heroin Addiction

Despite overcoming heroin addiction himself, RFK Jr. is backing plans to cut a critical Narcan program that helped reduce overdose deaths.

Latin Times

Western Infidels 3d ago

I saw the news about the big power outage in Spain and Portugal, and I wondered how the Barcelona-based, solar-powered website solar.lowtechmagazine.com was doing. I sort of expected the editor there to crow about the advantages of its unique off-grid infrastructure.

But of course, with power out across the country, the Internet there is out, and the site is not available, whether the solar-powered web server is working at this moment or not.

If more of the Internet infrastructure were solar-powered in the same way that Low Tech Magazine is, sections of it would go out more often. Yet in accidents and catastrophes, *some* parts of it might be expected to keep working. A solar-powered Internet might demonstrate more of the resilience that the early Internet engineers were so eager to claim and laud.

Western Infidels 3d ago

Robert Reich 3d ago

Gore on Trump https://robertreich.substack.com/p/gore-on-trump?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Gore on Trump

Friends,

Robert Reich

Western Infidels 3d ago

Zompist's E-Z rant page 3d ago

Fash watch 3: Resist!

Time for another update on the ongoing catastrophe. But the takeaway is that the fascists have not triumphed. They can be opposed, and resistance works. And if resistance works, then neither capitulation nor despair are in order.

So first let’s look at positives.

The biggest one is the Republicans’ pause on tariffs. Essentially: the stock market barfed, and the Republicans retreated. They’re still scared of, y’know, a total market crash that they caused. From the beginning of the year to April 8, the Dow Jones lost 1/6 of its value. It recovered a bit after the pause, but it’s still down 10%.

Normally when the stock market falls, investors put money into US Treasury bonds. That didn’t happen: quite the reverse, people started selling bonds, which raised the yields on bonds, which means the US can’t borrow money as cheaply. Someone got it into Trump’s thick head that this was really bad, and the absurd tariffs were “paused”, except for those on China.

China, rather than backing down, raised tariffs on imports to match the Repubs’ tariffs on them. It’s also been ramping up diplomacy: talking to Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, Europe, and Canada. In RepubWorld, the tariffs are supposed to mark out China as a global bad guy. Instead China is looking stable and reasonable, a better trade partner than the US. China also cut off the US’s supply of rare earths, needed for electronics… the Republicans do not realize, and Xi Jinping does, that Xi holds the better hand in this game.

Columbia gave into Republican demands in hopes of restoring its funding… and its funding wasn’t restored. Perhaps putting two and two together, Harvard decided to stand up for academic freedom and its own independence instead. And the Republicans backed down, pretending that the demands made to Harvard were a mistake or a prank or something. Now over 150 colleges have signed a letter protesting “unprecedented government overreach and political interference”.

The Republicans declared that thousands of foreign students woudl have their visa status terminated. This caused so much outcry, and so many lawsuits, that the policy was reversed.

The worst Kennedy ever, Robert F Jr., has proposed a national registry of anyone with autism. Government indexes of people the government doesn’t like are bad, mmkay? Again, there was a national outcry and the registry was canceled.

I should note that a lot of conlangers are somewhere on the spectrum, so I find Kennedy’s ignorance (claiming that people with autism can’t get a job or “write a poem”) extremely offensive.

Judges ruled against the Republicans in eleven cases in just one week.

Susan Crawford was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court despite Musk’s millions.

The Republicans’ pointless and unprovoked aggression has reignited Canadian patriotism. The Liberals were likely to lose, but Trump Lite candidate Pierre Poilievre was suddenly radioactive, giving the election to Liberal Mark Carney. The Republicans have trashed one of our oldest and surest allies, and Canada is unlikely to ever completely trust the US and its market again.

Trump’s 100-day approval rating is 39%, less than any president on record. (The second-place winner is himself, in 2017, with 42%.) 64% think he’s trying to expand presidential powers too much; 72% think he’s going to cause a recession. (It should be noted that there is a long-term trend for voters to disapprove of their presidents more and more. Still, this isn’t a competition you should be happy to lose.)

Repubs told a European energy conference that clean energy is bad actually and fossil fuels are good, and got met with a unanimous shrug. A former State Dept official commented, “We’re just shredding our credibility with so many other important partners and allies.”

Also worth noting is this list of companies which have not bent the knee to the Republicans orders on white supremacy:

About 3 million people joined the 50501 protests on April 5, in over 1300 locations.

Almost exactly 80 years ago, Mussolini was machine-gunned to death by partisans, and two days later Hitler killed himself. Fascist dictators generally don’t end well. Now, it took a world war to get these two to that point, but that doesn’t mean we need one today. Now of all times, Americans need to understand that they are not the only country in the world; all of this has happened before, and not infrequently the authoritarians are sent packing– most recently by Poland in 2023. This advice from a Polish activist is well worth reading.

On the negative side– this list is by no means exhaustive, it’s just a sampling:

A recession is still likely because of the remaining tariffs and the cutoff of trade with China.
The Republicans want to spread Covid.
Hegseth shared more military secrets with his pals. Where are the “but her e-mails” people now?
The Republicans opened an investigation into Democratic fundraising.
The Republican administration is defying judges’ orders to return people wrongly deported to their concentration camp in El Salvador. Oh, and they arrested a judge for not kowtowing to ICE (the immigration goons).
The UK Supreme Court embraced pseudo-science and declared that only sex assigned at birth is legal. Not the Republicans this time, not even the Tories, but the Republicans are pursuing the same vicious agenda based on the same non-science.
The US is bombing Yemen now, daily. Something to think about for the tankies who thought that Republicans would end the American empire.

And on the “wtf but probably bad” side, there’s Russia’s war on Ukraine. Trump seems to change his mind on this every month: since meeting with Zelensky at the Vatican, Trump has been criticizing Putin. This should not be taken as a return to opposing the Russian invasion, but it’s better than cheerleading it, I guess.

We already have enough evidence to start analyzing why the Republicans are failing. Many reasons, but the biggest is simply that they are seizing a once-in-a-lifetime chance to act on all their conspiracy theories, and since their theories are batshit insane, reality is refusing to cooperate. We can set out a list of what was supposed to happen, and what does happen.

“Tariffs will bring back 1950s US manufacturing!” No, they would never do that on their own– you’d need federal investment support, worker retraining (at higher wages), a stable business environment.

“Tariffs will make countries negotiate!” See China. No, all the Republicans are doing is teaching the world that it can do without American trade.

“Tariffs will raise so much money!” Though it’s interesting that Republicans have found a tax increase that they love, doubling the price of things or more means that people will buy way less of them.

“Vaccines are bad actually!” No they’re not, they keep people from disease, and all the Republicans will accomplish is to give a lot of their own supporters measles, Covid, or mumps. Maybe they could call them the Donald Mumps.

“The rest of world will respect us!” No, they’ll stop buying from us, stop visiting us, and stop listening to us.

“We can save so much money!” The best estimate so far is that DOGE has lost the government half a billion dollars a year from ending IRS enforcement.

“Our interns can make this system better!” Omigod no. Programmers looking at a complex working system always think they can do better, quickly. They’re always wrong. Systems get complicated not because of incompetence, but because of a long list of real-world problems that had to be taken care of, that the noob programmers do not know about.

“Global warming is a hoax!” Only it isn’t, and the people who realize it aren’t interested in burning the ecosphere with us.

“No one will fight back!” The jury is still out, and that’s up to you and me and all of us. But people are fighting back, and winning. We don’t know what it will take yet, but we need to keep the pressure rising.