Gee, I wonder which political party they belong to…

More than a dozen mayors from the main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, and hundreds of municipal officials have been arrested in recent months for alleged corruption…

Yup, there we go.

It’s always sad to lose a friend, but even with a new administration, nobody can really trust USA anymore, USA is currently descending deeper into a authoritarian regime, and resistance is effectively being systematically removed. As it is, there seems to be little hope that USA will ever become a functional democracy.

I hope that a better US administration will come after this one and that it will improve the things that can be improved easily (tariffs, visas, rhetoric, and other transactional policies), but at this point Trump has poisoned the well and it will take a generation of good (or at least understandable and workable) behavior by both US parties to rebuild a fraction of the trust and soft power the orange idiot has squandered in barely half a year.

Oh hey, it’s that magic time period somebody clearly explained to Donald once when he was younger!

I’m not going to claim to fully understand the nuances, but the sea ice will melt at about -2C and glacial melt will deposit ~1C water into the system. If the deep water is steady at 3C or 4C, sending it up could accelerate melting of both.

Nope.

That is, instead of sinking into the depths, surface water is being replaced by deep water masses rising to the surface, bringing with them heat and carbon dioxide (CO₂) that had been trapped for centuries.

I had to look up that last part, as it seemed counter-intuitive, but apparently deep ocean water bottoms out at 4 degrees C.

Utahns generally don’t like to draw attention to themselves as firebrands (e.g. Mitt Romney, Orrin Hatch), so methinks the Senator is planning to get into the 2028 presidential primary.

Yup. I joked that we’re still on Constitutional Republic version 2.27, and not only is the next point release long overdue, but we should really have upgraded to version 3 or 4 by now.

I think a huge part of the problem is that it’s run on Gentlemen’s agreements but we pretend it’s not. The UK’s “Constitution” is a hodgepodge of laws and court cases and things that probably closer to treaties than anything else. It’s a mess, but they know it’s a mess so there’s a very real sense that the gentlemen’s agreements are important and as real as anything else.

In America, we worship our Constitution like a holy text, but so many of our institutional controls depend on Judicial Review (which is not technically mentioned in the constitution), on following along with the presumed intent, and on fudging around the edges when it’s obvious the machinery of the state would grind to a halt if we had to amend it every time a novel situation arose. Yet, nevertheless, we have an entire school of thought built around the idea of shallow surface readings. The “originalists,” not to put too fine a point on it, are fucking idiots.

If you get the idea that the only important thing is the blackletter text agreed to by a gaggle of 18th century provincials, many of whom were intelligent and well-intentioned, but all of whom were elites and either slave-owners or okay with hanging out with slave owners, then you have a recipe for considering stupid shit like presidential immunity or having a speaker of the house who’s not a Congressperson and who can become president despite already serving two full terms, because it doesn’t explicitly say you can’t. It’s childish and dangerous, and their ascendancy in the judicial branch is a travesty.

I do unironically believe the Mercator projection has influenced how much he talks about Greenland.

Yeah, I guess just assuming ill intent and fascism makes it a simpler discussion that’s still perfectly reasonable.

I assume certain short-term things will get better with anyone less crazy than Trump, but I agree the US is no longer reliable for anything long-term, and no other country should deal with us on the assumption that we’ll give up certain short-term advantages for a long term stability within our sphere of influence. It’s not even that the US was “good” (though I imagine the next hegemonic power could easily be worse), but across administrations, the US was generally intelligent about how to leverage its influence but retain enough goodwill to continue to do so indefinitely.

I like to idly game this out because it truly reflects how narcissistic and uninformed he is. So, he’s talking about admitting Canada as a single state. Lets assume somehow that happens, even though the Canadians themselves would undoubtedly push for as many states as possible if joining the US were the only option.

You’ve now got a new largest state by both population and area, and one that has ridiculous reserves of resources and a coast-to-coast infrastructure. It instantly becomes the most important state. It’s also full of millions of people who didn’t want to be Americans and who’ve had a hundred years of more progressive governance than the US. Congratulations, Republicans, you’ve just skewed the Senate and completely fucked yourself in the House for a generation or more. You’ve also got 8 or 9 million Francophones who weren’t even entirely sure they wanted to be CANADIANS, much less Americans, to say nothing of being Americans in a MAGA world. This is how real troubles begin.

So, in return for dubious “improvements” to the trade deficit, and certain (what?) administrative conveniences (I guess) for a military that already had basically all the access anyone would ever need, as well as a giant buffer territory you’re not politically committed to defending with the same gusto you would your own soil, you completely upset the balance of power in Congress to your own party’s detriment and add a huge population that hates their situation. Brilliant.

Although, I guess if you’re just done with free and fair elections then a lot of these concerns evaporate…

If you raise the tariffs to a billion percent then the US will get a billion dollars revenue for every $100 TV that comes from China! There will be so many millions of billions!!! Why wasn’t anyone smart enough to do this before???

But, you see, he looks like a secretary of defense, so therefore he must be an excellent one!

The natural resources, a tacit admission that Global Warming is real, continued control over a strategic area even after completely fucking over the perfectly good allies the US has now, and even though it’s under the second largest ice sheet in the world, the island is just a tiny bit larger than the Louisiana Purchase, so I’m sure there’s a huge ego factor.

I suppose it’s a relief they’re not talking about invading (for now), but Jesus what beatdown this all is.

Hey! The workers in the cell phone factory aren’t that fat!

”hope that our relationship will only grow stronger in the coming years”

This hits different given the rhetoric of her husband and his (nominal) boss.

I mean, people will still trade with the US, but no exporter is going to eat those tariffs out of the goodness of their heart or fear of the Orange Menace, so prices in the US will go up, likely a bit more than the amount of the tariffs as suddenly volumes are lower and administrative overhead is higher. Then the US economy slows in a way that will not rebound quickly, and investment in the US becomes much less attractive due to low customer buying power and the inability to move goods freely. All of this of course reduces the amount actually collected in tariffs. Reduced economic activity may ultimately have positive knock-on effects for many, but the direct economic impact worldwide, distributed, will definitely be negative.

I don’t see a single way this is good for anyone, aside from those who can directly benefit from access to the levers of power and/or just want to watch the country burn (or at a minimum, smolder).

That’s the other galling side of this. It’s just so fucking dumb even as a way to “do” capitalism. Yes, theoretically one of the options in the face of tariffs is that an exporter can choose to eat the cost and both the importer and its country “win,” but that presupposes a market with few buyers and exporters with big enough profit margins that they can eat the cost. In reality of course, the exporter will instantly seek out other customers and if none can be found, they might eat some of the costs, but also pivoting their production to (previously) less profitable goods now makes much more sense because of the artificial barrier, and in the extreme case simply shutting down and liquidating assets is better than losing money on every sale. Then of course there are retaliatory tariffs, which work much better than the initial ones because they are targeted and leave the remainder of the global market available to country levying them.