It seems like so much of the news I've read today concerns people behaving stupidly, but thinking they're behaving intelligently. Sadly, it's mostly the same group of people:
Finally, people in Bridgeport and other Southwest Side neighborhoods have fallen in love with a rotund beaver who lives with her family on the Chicago River. Some have suggested naming the beaver Lori Heavyfoot or Dam Ryan. I hope she doesn't meet up with one of the city's other charismatic megafauna...
The OAFPOTUS's principal motivation has always been self-enrichment. He has scammed and grifted his whole life, though he sucks at it so hard he managed to burn through so much of his inheritance that he'd have been better off stuffing it in a savings account.
So it should come as no surprise that the first few weeks of his second term have seen remarkable gifts to other grifters and scammers worldwide, not to mention our adversaries:
In other stupidity directly attributable to the OAFPOTUS:
But hey, he's really intelligent, isn't he? He's the Weave-Meister! The Weave-o-Matic! Weavy Wonder! And he really does inspire all the people with sub-100 IQs out there that, someday, they too could be president.
The damage he's done in the last three weeks to our standing in the world is a gift to Russia, China, and everyone else who wants to end Pax Americana. As Krugman said yesterday, "what we’re seeing is what you’d expect if China and Russia had somehow managed to install people who wanted to sabotage America’s international position at the highest levels of the U.S. government."
It's also a testament to the Republican Party's 50-year endeavor to destroy public education. Makes me proud to be an American.
I find it absolutely hilarious that the OAFPOTUS has resurrected a meme from the first season of The West Wing:
On Sunday night, Mr. Trump said he had ordered the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, to stop producing new pennies, a move that he said would help reduce unnecessary government spending.
“Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,” he said in a post on Truth Social, adding that pennies “literally cost us more than 2 cents.”
It is unclear whether Mr. Trump has the power to do this. It is Congress, not the Treasury or the Federal Reserve, that authorizes the manufacture of the nation’s coins, according to the U.S. Mint.
Once again, he has trouble seeing that the laws are faithfully executed, but that's what the whole Administration is about. In this case, however, he is probably a stopped clock.
For those of you who missed out on The West Wing, here's the original:
Topping the link round-up this afternoon, my go-to brewery Spiteful fears for its business if it has to pay a 25% tariff on imported aluminum cans. If the OAFPOTUS drives Spiteful out of business for no fucking reason I will be quite put out.
In other news:
Other than the Neil Gaiman thing, which pains me deeply, this all goes to show that President Camacho will be a Republican.
Demonstrating one more time that the OAFPOTUS is all hat and no cattle, the White House announced that it will "postpone" the crippling and needless tariffs he had threatened to impose on our second-biggest trading partner in exchange for...something Mexico would have done anyway. Avocados will continue to flow north, and dollars will continue to flow south.
Canada, meanwhile, has taken a more hardline position on the threat, which James Fallows calls "an international lesson in leadership." Perhaps Canada will agree to increased anti-coca-production efforts in exchange for the OAFPOTUS "pausing" the tariffs that it seems he never really intended to impose in the first place. Because of course he didn't.
The OAFPOTUS is a con man, and this was a grift, just like everything else he does. Or maybe, as Timothy Noah suggested, it's a simple protection racket.
Meanwhile:
And finally, the New Yorker has a cautionary tale about a real-estate deal that (quite literally) went sideways.
Update, 15:52 CST: Yeah, called it. Tariffs against Canada also paused, "in exchange" for Canada allocating 10,000 staff to policing the border—which I'm pretty sure they had already planned to do.
Since I live in a dense urban environment and drive a plug-in hybrid, I can go a long time without buying gasoline.
Last night, I broke down and put 35 liters of gas in the car, because I'm concerned the OAFPOTUS's tariffs against Canada will cause petrol prices to spike in the Midwest. In fairness, I only had 3 liters left, but still: I could have gone another month!
I last filled up coming back from watching the eclipse on April 8th. So I did set a new personal record for time between refueling: 300 days. Sadly, the 2,863 km between fuel stops didn't get all the way to my PR of 3,116 km or the Holy Grail of 3,219 km (2,000 miles). And hey, 1.2 L/100 km (194.3 MPG) really doesn't suck. Since buying the car six years ago, I've spent less than $600 on gas. That also doesn't suck.
Still, I'm annoyed that politics interfered. The OAFPOTUS continues to present as the dumbest person ever to sit in the Oval Office by at least 20 IQ points.
It's hard to see the OAFPOTUS's actions towards our two biggest trading partners, Canada and Mexico, as in the interests of the United States. So far, the White House hasn't actually issued a (probably unlawful) order imposing steep tariffs that would undo our free-trade agreements, but just the threat has caused a lot of damage already:
As I wrote the other day, in the three decades since NAFTA went into effect, North American manufacturing has evolved into a highly integrated system whose products — autos in particular, but manufactured goods more broadly — typically contain components from all three members of the pact, which may be shipped across the borders multiple times. Manufacturers developed this system not just because tariffs were low or zero, but because they thought they had a guarantee that tariffs would stay low.
One way of saying this is that until just the other day there was really no such thing as U.S. manufacturing, Canadian manufacturing or Mexican manufacturing, just North American manufacturing — a highly efficient, mutually beneficial system that sprawled across the three nations’ borders.
But now we have a U.S. president saying that a duly negotiated and signed trade pact isn’t worth the paper it was printed on — that he can impose high tariffs on the other signatories whenever he feels like it. And even if the tariffs go away, the private sector will know that they can always come back; the credibility of this trade agreement, or any future trade agreement, will be lost. So North American manufacturing will disintegrate — that is, dis-integrate — reverting to inefficient, fragmented national industries.
And to think that many people imagined that Trump would be good for business.
We have, by a very narrow margin and with less than a majority of the vote, managed to put the most corrupt and possibly stupidest person in history into this office. If an adversary threatened to disrupt North American trade as much as this clown has, we'd threaten war.
And before you start wondering how long it will take for average Americans to get nervous, well, that's already happened: the only newly-inaugurated president in modern history with a lower approval rating was, of course, the same guy 8 years ago. (He has the highest disapprovals in history right now, though.)
Only 1,449 days to go...
I had a delightful 2-hour lunch with a friend I've not seen in a while, after a morning of non-stop meetings. I also updated a piece of software that gets deployed tomorrow. I've got about 20 minutes now to jot down all of the things I hope to read later today:
Finally, singer Marianne Faithfull has died at 78. She will be missed.
First: the good. My friend Kat Kruse has a new book of her short stories coming out. She let me read a couple of them, and I couldn't wait to pre-order the entire collection. I should get it on February 17th.
Still on the good things—or at least the things that don't seem so bad, considering:
Now for the bad:
And, of course, the stupid:
I might as well finish with a good thing. The temperature has gotten all the way up to 6.2°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ and 7.8°C at O'Hare. It was last this warm at WHQ on December 29th. If O'Hare can get up to 11.1°C, it will eke past December 27th.
While doing a routine upgrade of NuGet packages in Weather Now, I discovered that Montreal-based Xceed Software has acquired a component called Fluent Assertions. They claim they will "will continue to honour free licenses for open-source, non-commercial projects," but they also now spam log files every time the component is invoked with a "buy a license" message.
Well, I don't want all that log spam, I don't want to pay $130 a year for one testing component, and I have no idea how long they will honor the Apache-2.0 license that existed through v7.1 (released yesterday), so I just downgraded to v7.1. (Apache licenses are permanent, so as long as I'm happy staying at v7.1, the new commercial license doesn't apply.)
Also, as Devclass points out, "A common question is whether Fluent Assertions is sufficiently critical to survive as a commercial project. It is well liked, but relatively easy to replace with native .NET functionality that comes for free." So I will be looking into the equivalent packages soon, possibly this weekend when I'm stuck inside most of the time.
Bastards. I mean, I'm happy that the developers finally got paid for their work and all. Still: Bastards.
(Someone posted a bug in GitHub on the change, so if you want to see how many developers this change has angered just in the last 48 hours, it's worth a read.)