Author: Mark Alexander

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An apt description of Traitor 47 that came to me as I was falling asleep the other night…

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Wut?!

Every accusation is a confession:

"Here's the main thing you've got to understand. Republicans are independently minded. Democrats are monolithic sheep that follow the Führer Schumer's orders."

— Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH)

Fun fact: Chuck Schumer is jewish and just published a book titled,  Antisemitism in America: A Warning.

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The Economist On Felon47's Mindless Tariffs

The Economist:

On economics Mr Trump's assertions are flat-out nonsense. The president says tariffs are needed to close America's trade deficit, which he sees as a transfer of wealth to foreigners. Yet as any of the president's economists could have told him, this overall deficit arises because Americans choose to save less than their country invests — and, crucially, this long-running reality has not stopped its economy from outpacing the rest of the g7 for over three decades. There is no reason why his extra tariffs should eliminate the deficit. Insisting on balanced trade with every trading partner individually is bonkers — like suggesting that Texas would be richer if it insisted on balanced trade with each of the other 49 states, or asking a company to ensure that each of its suppliers is also a customer.

And Mr Trump's grasp of the technicalities was pathetic. He suggested that the new tariffs were based on an assessment of a country's tariffs against America, plus currency manipulation and other supposed distortions, such as value-added tax. But it looks as if officials set the tariffs using a formula that takes America's bilateral trade deficit as a share of goods imported from each country and halves it — which is almost as random as taxing you on the number of vowels in your name.

There is no way to report on these tariffs in a way that is honest and accurate without describing them as bonkers and nonsensical. News publications that are trying to present them as rational, or describing them as "reciprocal" just because that's the word the White House is using, are beclowning themselves.

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Felon47 Declares A Trade War On Uninhabited Islands, US Military, And Economic Logic

From Daring Fireball:

Mike Masnick has a great piece at TechDirt running down just how stupid everything about Trump's tariff trade war is:

Whoever on the Council of Economic Advisers used this formula should turn in their econ degree, because this is not how anything works. Even if they then go on to publish another version of the formula that looks all sophisticated and shit.

Brendan Duke, on X, shows that the fancier version of their formula — which is fancy in the way that Vertu phones are "fancy" — is even stupider, because the two Greek letters they chose to glam it up just cancel each other out.

Back to Masnick:

This is what happens when you ask ChatGPT to "make my wrong econ math look more scientific." The document even admits that they couldn't figure out the actual tariff rates, so they "proxied" them with this formula instead. That's a bit like saying you couldn't find your house keys, so you proxied them with a banana.

The fundamental problem here isn't just that the tariff numbers are wrong — though they absolutely are. It's that the entire premise rests on treating trade deficits as if they were tariffs. They're not the same thing. At all.

Let's back up for a moment and talk about trade deficits, because Trump has been getting this wrong for longer than some of his supporters have been alive. His logic appears to be:

        1. "Deficit" sounds bad.
        2. Therefore, trade deficits must be bad.
        3. Therefore, countries with whom we have trade deficits must be cheating us.
        4. Therefore, we should punish them with tariffs to "level the playing field."

This sounds like it must be an exaggeration for comic effect, but it's not. That's how Trump's mind works. This is what Trump has been saying about trade deficits for decades. It's like how he understands "asylum" to mean "insane asylum" and so when he talks about political asylum he starts talking about "the late great Hannibal Lecter".

We're not living in the Bad Place. We're living in the Stupid Place.

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Some Like It Hot

#someone pointed out once that he chose his female name because he liked it#whereas the other man just picked the female version of his existing name#because it was easier and that was his main concern#lot of interesting gender stuff going on here

Oh yeah there was a lot of "Hayes Code be damned, all of us making this film are queer/friends with queers and we're going to have some fun with gender identity" in this film. That's why it still holds up. It's not a story based around getting a laugh out of dressing men up as women so they can be clowns – there's an integrity to the cross-dressing. Daphne is an identity Jerry realized he had when he put on a dress. Every time he chooses to keep his wig and outfit on and maintain his feminine mannerisms while alone with Joe, it shows his comfort in this identity, and it elicits laughter from the audience through the dialogue, ie. the audience isn't laughing at the fact that a man is in a dress, but at the characters as fleshed out characters and human beings. The laughter comes from the situations the characters are put in and their reactions to them, not from a parody of womanhood presented through a male perspective. Similarly, Osgood's classic line at the end of the film is an affirmation that he likes Jerry as he is, even if he's Daphne. It's a way of getting the audience to say, "this is fine, we're comfortable" through laughter to something socially unacceptable in its time.

Joe's masculine identity, meanwhile, is used to highlight his misogyny and force him to understand it (and the same with Jerry, but as he's less of a womanizer, there's less of a point to be made with him). In a world where men and women often had separate social circles that overlapped only when romance was on the table, putting a man like Joe in a female space where he's privy to the conversations and emotions that his actions elicit gives him a lot to contend with and understand because he can see the consequences of his actions as raw pain and secondhand, instead of as anger being spewed directly at him. Again, the joke isn't that he's a man in a dress, or that he's parodying womanhood, it's that as a selfish misogynist he's put in situations where he's forced to empathize with the experience of womanhood in order to convincingly enact it for his own safety.

There's a whole lot more to unpack in the metaphor of these two men having to pass as women because their lives are at stake if they don't.

[Source]

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What A Fucking Asshole Enemy Of The People

He's going to destroy the U.S. economy. I'm not even sure this is the full list yet.

So basically almost every single country is going to have at least a 10% tariff tax on their imports. I haven't even heard of some of these countries.

He's calling it "reciprocal" because these countries will be imposing tariffs on us in return. Which is the opposite of what "reciprocal" means, but his fanbase won't understand that. And it's obvious HE still doesn't understand how tariffs work. ASSHOLE.

What's weird is that Canada and Mexico seems to be absent so far.

Of course Russia is also absent, but anybody who's paying attention already knew that it would be.

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I've Been Busy Today

I've been avoiding social media. Even Bluesky has turned into an endless stream of nothing but angst-producing horrific news.

So I jumped into my hobby headfirst today. Started going through my iTunes collection last night and made a list of what I wanted to transfer to physical media. And of course, once transferred, I had to make labels.

Labels, labels, labels…so many labels. Still, it keeps my mind off the imminent collapse of the United States and/or WW3.

And speaking of WW3…

Have a good evening!