I mean, if we really wanted comic book movies to be faithful to the source material, rather than spending $100 million on one movie, what you’d do is give $20 million each to five different directors, release all five resulting movies in theatres at the same time, and make sure that each movie’s plot refers to the events of all the other movies’ plots in such a way that whichever of the five movies you watch first will be entirely incomprehensible and every possible viewing order is wrong.
The funny thing about the USAID thing is that it’s just. Such an own goal, and Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dumber just can’t possibly wrap their shriveled sociopathic brains around it. US international development aid is pretty much the only reason anyone in the developing world still likes us after all the, yknow, bombing, war crimes, coups, and government interference. You’d think that an actual America First policy (which these morons are not, but etc etc) would want to big up America as the Best Provider Of All Things, Love America, AMEERRICA.
But instead, because these withered braindead fascist toerags simply cannot tolerate the idea of less than 1% of the American federal budget being spent on (gasp) HELPING SCARY FOREIGNERS, they’ve chosen to ride in roughshod like the world’s worst destruct-o-clown show and make the entire country fucking FURIOUS at Musk and his band of juvenile delinquents because of it. (Also for stealing financial information belonging to the entire country, but yes. One thing at a time.)
Now, I don’t know what will happen, if they’re just trying to do their usual performative thing where they “shut” USAID down and then reconstitute it to fund money to their preferred terrible, terrible causes, but it makes total sense when you consider that Putin has wanted USAID killed for ages, precisely because it builds American soft power and creates pro-US goodwill in the exact areas that Russia also wants to influence/control. So all he had to do was order the Bloated Orange Bilge Monster and Felonious Muskrat to jump and/or chop it, and lo and behold, they have gotten themselves into a stupid, stupid mess about it. It would be much more amusing if they weren’t trying to destroy the country while they were at it, but y’know. Here we are.
NEW YORK (AP) — New York Attorney General Letitia James on Monday told hospitals that they would be violating state law if they stop offering gender-affirming care for people under age 19 in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump aimed at curtailing federal funding for such treatments.
In a letter, James, a Democrat, told health care facilities that refusing to provide the treatments would violate New York’s anti-discrimination laws.
“Regardless of the availability of federal funding, we write to further remind you of your obligations to comply with New York State laws,” her letter reads.
Everyone say thank you to NY Attorney General Letitia James!!!
I don’t know what Canada oil ate, but it might need a juice cleanse or something.
Trump is putting a 10% tariff on this shit.
This is called heavy sour crude oil. Because not all crude oil is the same. It can be light. It can be sweet. It can be heavy. It can be sour. Light and sweet is the easiest to refine. Heavy and sour (the Canada poop) is the most difficult.
But the US specializes in refining the shittiest crude. That’s why we import so much from Canada. We have developed the best technologies to turn this shitty tar sand oil into something useful. We buy it cheap from Canada, make it useful (gas, kerosene, plastics, asphalt, etc), and then resell it.
This ends up being about a $700 billion business that generates about $175 billion in tax revenue.
To make things more interesting, the US has a lot of its own oil. Which is why Trump loves to say “drill, baby, drill.” But our oil is light and sweet. It’s the good stuff. Easy to refine.
That’s good… right?
Not so fast!
Since no other countries are very good at processing the shit oil, we send our good stuff to Europe. They can easily refine it and we make a lot of money selling it to them.
Here’s the rub…
The US isn’t really set up to refine the good shit. Most of our refinery infrastructure is meant to process the Canada poop. So even though we technically have plenty of our own oil, we don’t really have a lot of places to process it.
So I guess we would have to send it to Europe and buy it back.
Or we would have to build new refineries.
Or we would have to get shit oil from other places.
And those places?
Russia and Venezuela.
I have no idea if Trump understands any of this. Or if he thinks all oil is the same. But I feel like fucking with a $700 billion industry is bad for the economy.
I really don’t understand why this is happening. I don’t know if Trump is going rogue and doing this on his own. Or if Putin set this up so we will buy oil from Russia. Or if there is some other special interest group that wants to torpedo our refinery economy.
None of this makes a lot of sense to me and I don’t see many people talking about this aspect of the tariff problem. I don’t think oil quality is well known to the general public and maybe Trump’s puppeteers are counting on that ignorance to do some sinister shit.
In any case, I imagine gas prices are going up. I’m sure the MAGA crowd, famous for being angry at gas prices, will finally see the light and turn on Trump.
I’m just kidding.
They will find some way to say it is a good thing and keep kicking themselves in the nuts.
First, this issue is probably much more complicated than my moderately researched little explainer. So please keep that in mind.
The only reason I knew about crude oil is because while my brother was in engineering school and learning about fuel and whatnot, I asked him why we wanted the oil in Kuwait so much that we were willing to go to war. He told me that we actually get most of our oil from Canada, but it was shitty and most of it went to making plastic and asphalt. But the oil in Kuwait is less shitty (medium sour) and doesn’t need to be extracted from tar sand (very difficult). Being a rich country, Kuwait had great refineries too, so it was fantastic after processing.
That conversation always stuck with me because I think it was one of the few politically charged conversations I had with my brother. I don’t think he is apolitical, but he rarely shared a political opinion out loud.
And in the 20+ years since that discussion, refining tech in the US has advanced to the point where we don’t have to just make plastic and asphalt from Canada poo.
Anyway… I’m pretty sure my broad generalization is fairly accurate. But it is a broad generalization and I encourage anyone interested to do further research if you want to speak on this with confidence.
As for why Trump is doing this… I think I figured it out.
He’s fucking serious about this.
I honestly thought this was the one thing he was joking about.
But he means it. I knew he thought he could just buy Greenland. But it seems he genuinely thinks he can absorb Canada.
In one of my quilt groups a member posted some pictures of how she made ruffled aprons for her granddaughters, and then was stumped on what to make for her grandsons. Oh, she thought, custom pillows!
Gentle reader, I saw red. The backstory here is that quilters are overwhelmingly white retired women, and they (or at least the ones who join FB quilting groups) tend to have some VERY old-fashioned views on men and women and girls and boys. (Lots of posts like “what ideas do you have for boy quilts?” and the comments will be full of pictures of quilts with tractors on them.) So I thought, I guess the message here is that girls are supposed to be working in the kitchen while the boys lounge around on their fancy pillows waiting to be served. I was ready to let her have it in the comments and risk getting booted from the group. But first I looked in the comments to see how the post was being received.
I was blown away by the comments. Comment after comment saying things like, “those are lovely, I make aprons for all my grandsons and they love to wear them when they help out in the kitchen!” “I made custom aprons for all my sons, and then more for their sons when they got old enough! They all love them!”
Then, after all these comments, here comes OP with one of her own: “I think next year I’ll make custom pillows for my granddaughters and ruffled aprons for my grandsons.” My comment: “That’s a great idea!”
Sometimes people surprise you.
And sometimes people just need a little nudge, not a flamethrower.
And sometimes people
just need a little nudge, not
a flamethrower.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
ALT
amhrancas 