Category: Small hat sizes

There’s a new tariff in town

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
The “Rubáiyát of Owe-More Khayyám.”

Hoo-lawd. Anybody’s portfolio turn into a postcard yet?

In case you’ve missed Paul Krugman, he’s speculating over at Substack that Elon’s Hitler Youth may have cobbled together the tariff scheme using ChatGPT and/or other A.I. models.

In my post immediately following the Trump announcement I speculated that Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids might be responsible for those tariff numbers. That now looks like a distinct possibility.

Who makes policy this way? The key point is that Trump isn’t really trying to accomplish economic goals. This should all be seen as a dominance display, intended to shock and awe people and make them grovel, rather than policy in the normal sense.

Again, I’m not being snobbish here. When the fate of the world economy is on the line, the malignant stupidity of the policy process is arguably as important as the policies themselves. How can anyone, whether they’re businesspeople or foreign governments, trust anything coming out of an administration that behaves like this?

Good time to be heavily invested in the knee- and elbow-pad markets.

Saints preserve us

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

It being St. Me Day, and with a nod to The New York Times for its story on how the DOGEbags have been taking a shillelagh to the National Nuclear Security Administration — which is said to have lost “a huge cadre of scientists, engineers, safety experts, project officers, accountants and lawyers — all in the midst of its most ambitious endeavors in a generation” — we present The Bothy Band performing, “Old Hag You Have Killed Me.”

Ignorance is strength

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
“Hey, I said no DEI! Who wrote this?”

The FreeDummies have finally turned their beady little eyes to the Land of Enchantment.

According to Alaina Mencinger at The New Mexican, Los Alamos National Laboratory has been “suspending programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion and climate change and scrubbing old issues of the lab’s magazine that discuss these now-disfavored topics.”

LANL employees are federal contractors, not federal employees. Nevertheless, a review has determined that at least two of Dear Leader’s edicts apply to the lab’s DEI and affirmative-action programs, “and the lab is ending such programs as a result,” Mencinger writes.

The New Mexican apparently got its hands on some internal communications — a memo signed by lab director Thom Mason went out Thursday — and bits of this, that, and the other have already begun slip-sliding away down the old memory hole, among them issues of LANL’s National Security Science magazine, focused on anything and everything from climate to diversity, nuclear deterrence to manufacturing.

And it’s not just magazines getting fed into the shredder. According to Mason, LANL has “received guidance” to suspend climate action, sustainability and carbon-neutral energy programs. It goes without saying that LANL is also removing “relevant terminology” from external communications.

But, good news, comrades! “The removal of some content isn’t permanent,” according to the Ministry for Sit the Fuck Down and Shut the Fuck Up.

“To comply with recent direction from the Presidential administration, parts of our website are temporarily unavailable while they’re under construction. We appreciate your patience as we work to update and repost them. … You may notice changes to our website while we reconstruct pages and evaluate language.”

Huh. “Construction” and “update” are not the words I would have chosen for this odious project. As for “evaluating language,” I’d be inclined to leave that sort of thing to the smarties, who are very much not in evidence as the Stalinization of the federal government continues.

ICE, ICE, baby

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
He’s cold as ICE. Think someday he’ll pay the price?

The ICE boyos have brought a chill to Chicago, Aurora, and even the desert Southwest as Jesus Hitler starts making good on his promise of mass deportations.

Round up the usual suspects. A little song and war dance for the TV cameras. “Dr. Phil” even got in on the act in Chicago.

Shock and awe, baby. It works, for a while. But some folks just don’t take kindly to being shoved around.

Soon even the fanboys will find the price of admission to the Dingaling Bros-Barnum & Beelzebozo Circus (“There’s One Born Every Minute!) just keeps going up, as honest immigrant workers vanish alongside the bad guys, citizens decline to take their jobs in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, food processing and service industries, and goods and services get more expensive and/or harder to find.

But never fear. We’ll be annexing Canada! And Greenland! And the Sudetenland (whoops, wrong fascists, never mind). The Circus will roll on a Road of Bones until the world is under One Big Red White and Blue Tent (handmade by skilled artisans in border internment camps)!

While you await your own personal invitation to assist the authorities with this project (and their inquiries) you might as well listen to the latest All-American Episode of — yes, yes, yes — Radio Free Dogpatch. Could be the last one. You never know who’s lending us an ear, or why.

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a wash and brushup. The trailer theme from “Fort Apache” comes from YouTube, as do Rick’s conversations with Major Strasser and Sam in “Casablanca.” Bob and Doug McKenzie say “Good day” from SCTV’s YouTube page. The drum-heavy martial music (by Gregor Quendel) and “Out of Step” are both courtesy of Zapsplat. The Mescalero Apache tribe’s take on a member’s run-in with an ICE agent can be found here. The Guardian reports on a Navajo experience. Lawmakers from New Mexico and elsewhere view with alarm. The Associated Press covered immigration raids in Chicago. At The Atlantic Mark Leibovich had some fun visiting Greenland, soon to be our 52nd state. And at The New Republic Matt Ford shredded the pestilential ordure dropped on birthright citizenship. All the noisy, less-well-reasoned palaver comes from Your Humble Narrator.