Still more detail than a crease pattern.

So Israel was the laboratory of Fascism the whole time?

Hurhurhur they really thought I was gonna end the meat grinder hurhurhur

The thing about the scheming viziers is that I don’t think any of them are capable of ruling. The whole thing seems to be held together by Trump’s - for lack of a better term - charisma, and even Elon Musk, who seems to be somehow managing the same trick at Tesla, can’t match it. And, given the way that Trump changes his mind so often, if anyone with an actual agenda wants to fully implement it, they’ll have to get him out of the way, but then they won’t be able to fill the vacuum.

I’m less and less convinced there is one. Sure, there was one. There were actually many! Libertarian think tanks have been brainstorming ways to cut the federal government down to the military for decades, the theocrats have been working on their Dominion theory, the war hawks have been planning their wars against Iran and China, but the people calling the shots have no idea what they’re doing. They’re just acting out the most dumbed-down versions of those factions’ propaganda because that’s where their comprehension meets its limits. The entire edifice is becoming increasingly unmoored from reality and they’re all busy acting out their fever dreams in real life. It’s pure nihilism; destroy for destruction’s sake. And it’ll continue until it hits a resource constraint; until there’s a crisis because the ports are empty or the market finally crashes because the smart money’s done ripping the copper out of the walls and needs foreign safe havens to escape to, or someone’s itchy trigger finger starts a conflict that the country cannot win, and that’s when gravity’ll kick back in and everyone will feel the empty air beneath their feet and the scrambling will start.

So those of us who want to continue living in a shared and objective reality can just go fuck ourselves, I guess?

It’s a cetacean micturation week, huh?

Except now he’s unchickening out, probably after seeing the news that people think he chickened out. Infinite free energy will come to America the minute someone hooks up a dynamo to his oscillating positions.

He said the autonomous taxis will be ready by June.

It’s amazing how successful the grift has been. Robotaxis? Sure, it’s Elon. Autonomous humanoid robots? Elon’s a visionary, he’ll get 'em done. Massive amounts of money get flung his way on the flimsiest of claims. Apparently believing that capitalism is an efficient system for allocating productive resources to meeting the public’s needs primes you for many other chimeras.

One of the weapons added in the new post game content is an SEM.

In that same time frame, Zillow expects the weakest home price appreciation to occur in these 10 areas:
Houma, LA: -10.1%
Lake Charles, LA: -8.9%
New Orleans, LA: -7.6%
Lafayette, LA: -7.5%
Shreveport, LA: -7.0%
Alexandria, LA -7.0%
Beaumont, TX : -6.6%
Odessa, TX: -6.3%
Midland, TX: -5.7%
Monroe, LA: -5.5

Is this people discovering that being on the front lines of climate change isn’t going to be fun or something else?

Meanwhile our actual MIT engineer nerds are mostly doing crypto scams and trying to find ways to make people click on advertisements more frequently

So stocks and bonds are supposed to move inversely to one another because bonds are viewed as a “safe haven” when stocks are dropping. Theoretically the cash that’s being taken out of the market now should be parked in bonds to earn interest while people wait for the market to recover. Demand for bonds causes the interest rate to drop. Instead, it’s going up, implying that people are simultaneously selling stocks and bonds, which is viewed as a bad sign for the United States; it’s getting interpreted as a loss in confidence in US financial system. There are, however, several wrinkles.

1. A bunch of hedge funds had to liquidate their bonds to cover unexpected losses in stocks.
2. Inflation is still higher than what the Fed wants it to be and is probably going to rise as a result of tariffs. The bond interest rate has to cover inflation, otherwise no one would bother buying them.
3. The much-watched treasuries auctions earlier this month had robust demand and plenty of foreign buyers, suggesting that other governments and foreign investors are still confident parking their money with the treasury

If the rate continues to go up even as the stock market continues to drop, it will eventually become a problem. But, for now, it’s just something to keep an eye on. It is bad news for Trump because he’s been trying to get the Fed to lower interest rates so we can go back to the wild days of free money that caused the post-COVID bull market, but the people who (seem to) understand the financial system don’t appear to be surprised this is what’s going on. Trump’s current situation is like Wile E. Coyote running of a cliff. For reasons that appear to apply to Trump and no one else, he’s been able to defy gravity and keep running in empty air, but it appears he’s on the verge of looking down and seeing that there’s nothing under him. Who knows, though, nothing seems to go according to expectation these days.

'Cause, given Christianity’s cultural decline, the Protestants have realized they need Catholics on their side until they can reimpose cultural hegemony by force.

“He was only three centuries behind the times instead of the usual four!”

People dislike doing things that are unrewarding, more news at 11.

Twilight of American Empire Gothic

Yeah, I work on a college campus so I feel like those connections should be feasible, but I have a hard time keeping things going - I can get coffee and chat but then don’t know what to do next, or I ended up running afoul of my boss by trying to up skill with a side project and that ended up being a whole big thing.

There’s a group that meets around climate change but, while it is nice to have a place to gather and talk, it seems like conversation mostly sticks to what’s going on in the lab because it seems like folks are worried right now that they might not even be able to keep doing the research. I keep an eye out for ways to volunteer that are relevant to my expertise but haven’t really been able to make anything click.

The “he’s no angel” brigade is out in full force today because someone found a court order his then-girlfriend now-wife filed over a domestic violence accusation. The more honest ones include a statement from the wife herself explaining what happened and how they worked through it and then pointing out that that isn’t something that’s grounds for deportation to a concentration camp but ran the article with the inflammatory headline anyway.