Unsightly Mental Blemishes

It was a very fast trade war.

Donald Trump assured Friday that his promise of 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico was ironclad. When asked if the countries could do anything to prevent them, Trump said: “No. Nothing. Not right now, no.” He said it was not a negotiating tool. “We’re not looking for a concession,” he added.

It turns out that wasn’t true. Just three days later, Trump paused the tariffs on both countries for 30 days, citing concessions they had made.

He did so as his tariffs — taxes on imported goods that are generally passed along to consumers — threatened to exacerbate inflation and spooked the stock market. Trump had repeatedly suggested before the deals that Americans should be prepared for potential economic “pain.” [WaPo]

President Trump’s strategy is out of focus.

His tariffs against China, on the other hand, are still in place.

I, just like everyone else, suspect that his entire tariffs gig is mostly just a head feint, an attempt to gain leverage over lesser opponents. China, whatever you may think of them, is certainly several steps up from Mexico and Canada, and they are both prideful and ambitious. As one of the very few surviving Communist nations, they are also conscious of their precarious situation, and that their reactions will be viewed by unaligned nations, such as those in Africa. A misstep could be fatal to those ambitions; a proper response may reassure potential allies.

And President Trump only seems to attract disreputable figures such as Putin, Orban, and others of that ilk.

And how much did Trump decide to settle for what appears to be achievements, but are not really? Author Aaron Blake quotes a number of concessions made by Canada, and then notes:

As we saw over the last couple of years, voters gave the edge to Democrats in special elections, but not so much in the general election. The first half of that predilection is continuing:

Iowa Democrats have flipped a state Senate seat vacated earlier this year by Chris Cournoyer [(R-IA)], who resigned to become the state’s new lieutenant governor.

Democrat Mike Zimmer has defeated Republican Kate Whittington in the special election for Senate District 35.

According to unofficial results from the Iowa Secretary of State’s website, Zimmer won with 52% of the vote to Whittington’s 48%. [Des Moines Register]

Cournoyer, incidentally, won this seat 61% to 39% in November. And who won this district in the Presidential election? From Sioux County Radio:

Democrat wins Iowa Senate seat in district Trump won by 21 points

What does it mean? Perhaps the Republican candidate is deeply repellent, perhaps the Democratic candidate is a local hero.

To read the goat entrails too deeply is to commit confirmation bias. This could be nothing. Or it could be the first sign of the fall of the 2024 November victors. But the signal is weak.

Here’s some memorable testimony, coming from nominee for FBI Director Kash Patel at his confirmation hearings:

Following criticisms by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, Patel rejected the characterization of his comments.

“In the collective, all of those statements are taken out of grotesque context,” he said. [CBS News]

Think about that. “Grotesque context.” I don’t even know what that might be, yet it’s so fucking evocative.

Maybe Patel should be a novelist. Although he’ll be a novel leader of the FBI.

While I know enshittification is a popular term, I have to wonder if Facebook is on its way to another, more vivid term now:

Body Farm. (Here’s a bit by mortician Caitlyn Doughty on body farm, although it’s not really applicable here.)

That is, it is becoming a mass of decaying accounts, populated with few, if any, live users, as more and more users are repelled by founder Zuckerberg’s ill-conceived management approach.

Well, it’s just a thought. In my experience, there are many approaches to managing social media, but the more active approaches are less scalable. It may turn out that national social media platforms are inherently unstable.

We’ll see what the future holds.

Deaccessioning:

Deaccessioning is when objects and art in museums are permanently and formally removed from the museum’s collections. [Columbia Library Journals]

Ah. Noted in “This go-to term for teamwork is now a no-no for the snobbery police,” Mark Lasswell, WaPo:

My apologies for no posts for the last few days; my excuses are burnout, nothing interesting to write about, and binging Only Murders In The Building. Ach, Lester! And trying, and failing, to write a political compendium. The last word is probably both proper and improper.

I’m in, what, my eleventh year of this silly hobby? It blows steam off nicely, but perhaps I approach the end.

For those who like windy, unlikely predictions, here’s one for you: President Trump is physically chased from the White House, not by enraged liberals, but by a MAGA-head mob who discover “owning the libs” isn’t half as impressive as 50% increases in the price of fresh produce due to draconian immigration policies, and general 10-15% price inflation due to tariffs, both imposed by the ambitious President Trump, who, for all his superior understanding of Americans, still doesn’t get them in the end.

Some more sculpting results:

I see names and perceptions are changing:

But spare a thought for the word “society” as it is abandoned by yet another organization. Last fall, the venerable New-York Historical Society dumped not only “society” but also that charming hyphen.

When the museum was founded in 1804, the city’s name was spelled “New-York”; preserving the punctuation across more than two centuries, until October, had seemed a deft way of honoring both the city’s history and the museum’s own. Now visitors to the “society”-less building on Central Park West encounter an institution that fashions itself “The New York Historical.” And that’s it.

“The shorthand can be, ‘Hey, I’ll see you at the Historical,’” said the museum’s “chief content officer,” who may soon be curating an exhibition on wishful thinking. [WaPo]

If the New Yorkers are smart, they’ll call it “The Dash,” instead.

Aaron Blake notes the data:

A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday had this stunning finding: While Americans were about evenly split in their views of the Republican Party (43 percent favorable to 45 percent unfavorable), negative views of the Democratic Party outpaced positive ones by 26 points — 31 percent favorable to 57 percent unfavorable. …

Tracking polling from YouGov, for instance, shows the Democratic Party more unpopular than at any point since January 2017.

Similarly, a CNN poll released last week showed that a record-low 33 percent of Americans had a favorable view of the party. [WaPo]

And what do they, the surveyed, recommend?

• Nearly 6 in 10 Democratic-leaning voters say the party needs either “major changes” or “to be completely reformed.”

How long will it take for the Democrats to figure it out? And who will lose the inevitable power struggle? Will they ever understand that Americans, even if they can’t articulate the foundations of society, recognize and assert their right to participate in major decisions?

As it says in the title.

Regurgitalite:

Regurgitalites, or sometimes Regurgitaliths, are the fossilized remains of stomach contents that have been regurgitated by an animal, such as an owl pellet. They are bromalite trace fossils and can be subdivided into ichnotaxa. Regurgitaliths might provide useful information on the diet of the animal, but are difficult to relate to any particular species. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Prehistoric puke offers clues about ancient sea predators’ diets,” Leo Sands, WaPo:

Scientists were able to determine that the remains were fossilized vomit — rather than a run-of-the-mill fossil — because of how the two crinoid species were so tightly concentrated in a round clump. Milan said the regurgitalite, the scientific name for fossilized vomit, was probably buried under chalk soon after being spewed out, preventing it from being torn apart by other animals on the seafloor.

Big headline on CNN/Business today:

A shocking Chinese AI advancement called DeepSeek is sending US stocks plunging

What’s going on?

US stocks were set for a steep selloff Monday morning after a surprise advancement from a Chinese artificial intelligence company, DeepSeek, threatened the aura of invincibility surrounding America’s technology industry.

DeepSeek, a one-year-old startup, last week showed off a stunning capability: It presented a ChatGPT-like AI model called R1, which has all the familiar abilities, operating at a fraction of the cost of OpenAI’s, Google’s or Meta’s popular AI models. The company said it had spent just $5.6 million training its newest AI model, compared with the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars US companies spend on their AI technologies.

That sent shockwaves through the tech sector Monday. Meta last week said it would spend upward of $65 billion this year on AI development. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, last year said the AI industry would need trillions of dollars in investment to support the development of in-demand chips needed to power the electricity-hungry data centers that run the sector’s complex models.

Don’t be so sure. When it comes to Communist China, they have a history of being misleading on money matters, and, in fact, anything they can mislead. Remember their 6% economic growth a few years back, that later turned out to be questionable at best? In a country where Mr Mendacity will tell us anything in order to get elected, we’re being awfully credulous about another.

During the Cold War, we learned early on that official Communist Party organ Pravda (translates to Truth) was anything but; it wasn’t truth, but victory at any moral cost, that mattered to the Soviets.

Which is a bit like the Republicans when you put it that way.

Incidentally, if you want some surreal puzzlement with your morning coffee, check out the News associated with Chinese company MicroCloud Hologram., a former, and potentially future, meme stock. Maybe a quantum physicist would nod with understanding, but, to me, and I do read about quantum computing, their PR announcements sounded like utter gibberish. In fact, now I’m wondering if the Chinese are trying to spark another spike in value, which they could then harvest for ready cash.

Its current market cap? $34 million. That’s a zero in today’s community of stocks, when some caps are over a trillion $. Tomorrow?

We’ll see.

If you’re a Trump voter and are wondering at the chaos in the Trump Administration and why non-Democratic Party voters for Biden Harris aren’t frantically declaring their loyalty to President Trump, you could do worse than read Dana Milbank’s roundup of the first six days:

The evidence that Donald Trump was truly, madly and deeply confused was worrisome when he was a candidate. It’s all the more so now that he is wielding the mighty apparatus of the U.S. government to pursue his fantasies. This is a classic case of garbage in, garbage out — but now he is making the country a landfill for his nonsensical policies.

Those 10,000 troops are being sent to the southern border to resolve a self-proclaimed “emergency,” even though illegal border crossings are lower now than when he left office in 2021. His administration has ordered personnel repurposed from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to support the same fabricated emergency, needlessly raising the danger of a terrorist attack. He declared another “national emergency” because of the “precariously inadequate” energy supply — even though domestic crude-oil production hit record highs under Biden and is still climbing. He’s refusing to implement a law banning TikTok, ignoring the threat to national security because “we won the young vote. I think I won it through TikTok.” (He lost among young voters, but never mind.) [WaPo]

To that last point, I recall seeing a clip where Trump claimed he won the young vote by 32 points. And you wonder why folks mistrust Trump? They want nothing to do with Trump because they foresee imminent disaster.

New Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

And they also mistrust these GOP Senators who are merrily confirming Pete Hegseth to the most important Cabinet post of the nation, for which President Trump no doubt nominated him because of his war record (Bronze Star) and his manly chin, while ignoring his troubling record of womanizing, misogyny, supporting those who were convicted of committing war crimes, and mismanagement of  non-profit organization budgets. Sure, give him control over a nearly trillion dollar budget, I dare ya. Kudos to Senators McConnell (R-KY), Murkowski (R-AL), and Collins (R-ME) for seeing through the threats from their fellow Republicans if they didn’t vote for Hegseth.

It’s all a travesty. And before you bellow, the Democrats certainly have their own share of blame, losing to this pack of fourth raters. Our political parties are vastly incompetent boobs, from McConnell to Schumer. Will we survive it?

I’ve brought up before the thought that pardoning for any crime before the investigation even begins may be a mistake, but President Biden, in the last hours of his Administration, did it. But President Trump thinks that he’s spotted a mistake:

When you can’t attend an important and illustrative event yourself – I’m employed, folks, and not as a journalist – that’s why you have to love reporters, even those with a bit of poetry in their soul, like Will Bunch:

The late Gov. Mario Cuomo famously said that “you campaign in poetry… [and] govern in prose,” but Trump was speaking in gibberish, and it was barely 1 p.m. He took his time checking off his list of grievances and grudges that his aides successfully kept out of his main speech, like calling his critic the ex-Rep. Liz Cheney “a crying lunatic.” But the words — the ones that weren’t slurred — came out in a singsong monotone. And then he spotted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in the audience, and went off on what seemed like an endless riff on border-wall design and technology.

“We had a fence structure that they worked on — we worked on, the governor worked on it with me — and I didn’t love it, to be honest. I wanted a nice, pre-cast concrete, like 40, 50 feet high. It could have been a ‘T’ shape or a ‘Y’ shape. I love construction…” This kind of talk went on for four minutes and 45 seconds, with riffs on steel rebar and anti-climb panels and with Vice President JD Vance standing behind him with a pained, constipated expression, occasionally forcing a laugh. Vance looked like a modern-day Ed McMahon as sidekick to a Carnac the Magnificent who’s rapidly losing his powers of cognition, let alone precognition. [The Philadelphia Inquirer]

I have already asked if President Trump’s VP and potential successor, Vice President Vance, has picked out his candidate for Vice President if he must move into the Oval Office after President Trump exits, whether he’s pushed out the door to waiting family, or trots out the door with a truly huge wheelbarrow of money.

Let’s face it: The President is the staggering horse upon which a horde of grifters and conmen-people have made their way into, and near, positions of power and influence, but he may be staggering badly. What will they do when Vance, a man of little charisma and, possibly, a bit more moral fiber, takes the tiller?

Simoleon:

It’s been quite a while since I checked-in on bitcoin. Back in March of 2024 it had a value of $68,507/coin. Today?

A respectable jump for 10 or 11 months – and that’s why it’s disqualified as a candidate to be a currency. Currency values shouldn’t jump – and fall – like that. See the thread for explanations.

But the big news of late was just-now-President Trump has his own cryptocurrency, called $TRUMP, which may cause illness in those aware that President Trump allegedly grew up in a prosperity theology church. Maybe he figures inadvertent chanting of “$TRUMP” will bring him more money?

And just how much money? Axios presents a quick analysis:

Why it matters: The stunning launch of $TRUMP caught the entire industry off-guard, and speaks to both his personal influence and the ascendancy of cryptocurrency in his administration.

• It also speaks to the nature of the crypto industry that someone could have more than $50 billion worth of something that literally did not exist 48 hours previously.
• Combined with the value of his social media business and his real estate holdings, it nominally makes Trump one of the world’s 25 wealthiest people.

It feels like the world’s biggest con, doesn’t it? And cryptocurrency enables it.

Some cryptocurrency advocates may be aware of it. Here’s Professor Richardson, quoting an anonymous source with no link:

CNN noted that the release of the meme coin had raised “serious ethics concerns,” but those who participate in the industry were less gentle. One wrote: “Trump’s sh*tcoin release has caused possibly the greatest overnight loss of credibility in presidential history. He made $60B. Great for Trump family, terrible for this country and hopes we had for the Trump presidency.”

Not so incidentally, that person, whoever they are, sounds rather like me last October in this post concerning the market cap of DJT, President Trump social media company. Minus the naivete.

Speaking of, did DJT benefit from $TRUMP’s release? Here’s a 1 month chart of DJT’s stock price:

Emphatically not, at least so far. But the Presidency is young and Mr Mendacity has yet to be deposed, by VP Vance or prosecutor Jack Smith, so …

This is what a mob boss does to warn everyone else to stay in line:

Within hours of taking office, President Donald Trump terminated the Secret Service detail that was assigned to his former national security adviser John Bolton, Bolton confirmed to CNN on Tuesday.

Bolton, who left the Trump White House in November 2019, has required ongoing US Secret Service protection because of threats against him from Iran. Trump initially terminated his protection after he left his administration in the first term, but President Joe Biden restored it once he took office. [CNN/Politics]

Honorable civil servants deserve necessary and obvious protections. I hope Bolton has a devastating surprise waiting if he is assassinated.

Andrew Sullivan picks up an unexpected reaction to the new Administration (paywall):

But attached to that nausea is something else: boredom. He just doesn’t get to me the way he used to. When I read about his provocations toward Canada and the Panama Canal, for example, I merely found my eyes rolling gently backward. Good one, Donnie. But you’re not gonna trigger my amygdala this time. You busted it already.

Same with the Bobby Kennedy nonsense and the Elon Musk madness — a man whose political judgment seems as finely honed as an autistic 14-year-old who just discovered TikTok.

I know I’ve been avoiding news concerning politics since Election Day, and it’s only a small portion of dread – there’s a lot of feeling like we’ve been down this path before. Trump will try to, say, kill off birthright citizenship, and a bunch of lawyers will file litigation to fight it.

Another four years of bombast and mendacity, accented by dementia? Oy.

Noted in this WaPo piece on Latino Trump voters:

He argued that he never really heard an economic plan from Harris and instead felt like she focused too much on LGBTQ+ issues. … “So [Trump] talking about being able to lower the cost of houses got my vote,” said Andy.

And then along comes this:

And what, pray tell, will this acting trio [of Mel Gibson, John Voight, and Sylvester Stallone, sent to Hollywood by President Trump,] do? “These three very talented people will be my eyes and ears, and I will get done what they suggest,” Trump added, concluding that the result will be a return to “The Golden Age of Hollywood!” [Maddowblog]

Uh oh. Is Trump really focused on the economy, or is he just going to cut business taxes again, proclaim victory, and ignore the Federal deficit, while trying to push studios into making movies that he prefers?

There was a surprising lack of useful pictures online.

Ghost In The Shell (2017) is basically a simple Corporations are evil! screed. Major Killian is a combination of a human brain with an artificial body – a cyborg. She works for a company that is developing and implementing anti-terrorism protocols, which makes for lots of shooting and explosions.

But Killian is bothered by hallucinations, and soon she needs to find out what’s going on. This leads to, well, unsavory revelations concerning her employer and potential competitors for her services. What happened to her parents, again?

Maybe you’d like to revise that testimony, eh?

Fun, younger audiences may find the implications a revelation; older audiences will nod in a display of non-surprise at the dubious morality displayed by upper management.

And those implied assertions are completely believable.

Enjoy.

This caught my attention:

President-elect Trump on Wednesday said he would not consider individuals affiliated with a host of Republican rivals and critics for jobs in his incoming administration, singling out former Vice President Mike Pence, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R), among others. [The Hill]

If the salient characteristic of your hires isn’t competence, but, instead, loyalty – especially loyalty to such a grossly incompetent as Mr Trump – it is virtually inevitable that competence isn’t only not at the top of the list, but doesn’t even make the list. Competence is the enemy of the grifter.

This is not how you Hire only the best. This is how you hire brown-nosers who, having found success and prestige by being as extreme as they possibly could be while shooting rivals in the back, are going to be bound and determined to repeat that performance when they find themselves occupying positions of national prominence.

And that Presidential Office will seem so close that they can touch it.

It’s gonna be a shitshow for the next four years, or at least until Vance takes Trump’s place due to mental incapacitation. If we’re lucky, Trump will try to sell us ‘scandal-counting apps’ in order to take advantage of suckers every which way.

Thermokarst lake:

Thermokarst lakes and drained lake basins are widespread in Arctic and sub-Arctic permafrost lowlands with ice-rich sediments. Thermokarst lake formation is a dominant mode of permafrost degradation and is linked to surface disturbance, subsequent melting of ground ice, surface subsidence, water impoundment, and positive feedbacks between lake growth and permafrost thaw, whereas lake drainage generally results in local permafrost aggradation. Thermokarst lakes characteristically have unique limnological, morphological, and biogeochemical characteristics that are closely tied to cold-climate conditions and permafrost properties. Thermokarst lakes also have a tendency toward complete or partial drainage through permafrost degradation and erosion. Thermokarst lake dynamics strongly affect the development of landscape geomorphology, hydrology, and the habitat characteristic of permafrost lowlands. [USGS]

Noted in “Permafrost thaw beneath Arctic lakes poses surprise pollution threat,” Madeleine Cuff, NewScientist (11 January 2025, paywall):

Thermokarst lakes are formed when permafrost thaws, creating hollows where meltwater collects. They are a common feature in Arctic landscapes, with some being hundreds of years old, and they are increasing in number as the world warms.

Water in thermokarst lakes transfers heat into the sediment below, accelerating the thaw of deep permafrost under the lakebed. Once thawed, microbial activity emerges in this ancient sediment, triggering the release of carbon dioxide and methane.

From Martin Luther King Jr’s last speech: