On this day in history, President Abraham Lincoln was fatally shot while attending a play.
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
This ad showed up in my feed. It’s a young man running for Governor of Colorado (so it most likely won’t show up for you).
What *I* found interesting is the “useless degrees” part. It seems like “useless degrees” is showing up more and more as a political talking point. It was merely an undercurrent for the debt forgiveness debate but now people who are running for political office are just up’n saying “useless degrees”.Report
He ran for congress last year IIRC and made headlines for shopping which seat to run forReport
He’s going out of his way to not mention his party affiliation.
Republicans would *NEVER* vote for a Democrat and Dems would *NEVER* vote red.
Independent? Hell, everybody would vote for an independent!Report
He is also almost certainly not going to win.Report
The Bukele presser is going about as horribly as one can imagineReport
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:sefgphqp2xqwh2hawaixykwz/post/3lms4dic6mk2l?ref_src=embed&ref_url=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com%252F2025%252F04%252Fan-elite-institution-finally-understands-the-shot
Harvard fights backReport
Trump asks Bukele to build prisons for American citizens. Don’t pretend Trump is just joking. He means this literally and seriously. El Salvador will be a gulag for American dissidents:
https://www.rawstory.com/will-trump-deport-american-citizens/Report
Poe’s Law is a harsh mistress: https://bsky.app/profile/virginmedianews.bsky.social/post/3lmrlfegsbo24
A crew of six women, including pop star Katy Perry and Jeff Bezos’s fiancé Lauren Sanchez, is set to blast off today on an 11-minute Blue Origin flight.
It marks the first all-female space mission in 60 years — hailed as a breakthrough for gender equality in space tourism.Report
While Trump buddies up with Elon Musk, it’s been Gwynne Shotwell that has built SpaceX into the powerhouse it is. She was employee #7, hired by Musk to find a COO. The story goes that whenever she suggested someone, Musk said, “They’re not as good as you are, why don’t you just take the job?” Eventually she did. According to folklore, she’s one of the very few people on Earth that if she says, “Elon, shut up and listen for a minute,” he shuts up and listens.Report
The online right is having their are we the baddies moment: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/opinion/dissident-right-trump.html
Nathan Cofnas, a right-wing philosophy professor and self-described “race realist” fixated on group differences in I.Q., wrote on X, “All over the world, almost everyone with more than half a brain is looking at the disaster of Trump (along with Putin, Yoon Suk Yeol, et al.) and drawing the very reasonable conclusion that right-wing, anti-woke parties are incapable of effective governance.” (Yoon Suk Yeol is South Korea’s recently impeached president.)
Scott Siskind, who blogs under the pseudonym Scott Alexander, has been an influential figure in Silicon Valley’s revolt against social justice ideology, though he’s never been a Trump supporter. Last week, he asked whether “edgy heterodox centrists” like himself paved the way for Trump by opening the door to once-verboten arguments. In an imaginary Socratic dialogue, he wrote, “We wanted a swift, lean government that stopped strangling innovation and infrastructure. Instead we got chain-saw-style firings, total devastation of state capacity in exactly the way most likely to strangle innovation more than ever, and the worst and dumbest people in the world gloating about how they solved the ‘grift’ of sending lifesaving medications to dying babies……
When liberalism was firmly entrenched, its discontents could treat authoritarian ideas as interesting avant-garde provocations. Authoritarianism in power, however, was always going to be crude and stupid.
Trump’s tariffs have pushed some to the breaking point because they reveal the immediate material cost of that stupidity. The decadent cynics of the new right could dismiss Trump’s lies about the 2020 election as mere hyperbole. It’s harder to be sanguine about a collapse in one’s own net worth and economic prospects. “It kind of made the consequences seem real,” Hanania said of the trade war.”Report
They doxxed him *AGAIN*. Jeez louise, those guys.Report
I think definitionally doxxing can only happen to someone once, right? After that there’s nothing new to reveal. Redox is a thing in chemistry but not so much in anonymity management.Report
Jan 6th was more than 4 years ago and proved conclusively that Trump was unfit for office. At that point ideology doesn’t really matter.
The flaws in “wokeness” are an issue but that’s a different conversation.Report
China is now doing what it can to undercut loudly rather than quietly.
There’s a bunch of people explaining that *REAL* Gucci or Hermes or whatever are made in Europe and that may be true, but the point is that China is saying “you can buy our replicas of the luxury items that cost a couple of orders of magnitude more elsewhere”.Report
China has suspended exports of rare earths and rare-earth magnets. Not just to the US, to the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/business/china-rare-earths-exports.htmlReport
Now would be a pretty good time to revisit the EPA regulations on rare earth processing.Report
Living downstream from mines that are still leaching toxic stuff into the surface water more than a century after they were abandoned, I’d be happier to see rapid commercialization of some of the new extraction technologies. Eg, the U of West Virginia has developed a method for extracting from the toxic runoff out of abandoned coal mines a couple of tons of rare earth elements per mine per year. A couple of public research universities, working with the DOE’s national labs, have methods for extracting REEs from coal ash ponds.
[sarcasm] But tending an extraction facility that uses somewhat sophisticated chemistry isn’t a manly job, like driving big earth movers to shovel whole mountain sides into giant ore crushers, and using a few million gallons per year of concentrated hydrochloric acid that no one knows how to dispose of nicely. [/sarcasm]Report
It depends on how badly we want the magnets, I guess.
If we can get by with vibes, we can get by with vibes.Report
It’s not an either-or situation. Well, I guess it is if you start from the position, “I want REEs mined and refined in the US to be as cheap as what China produces.” It doesn’t have to be an either-or situation. We can produce REEs in much cleaner fashion if we want to pay somewhat more.Report
“We” need only to declare a national emergency. That should speed things up bigly.Report
Just so I’m clear, because I’m curious, is the hydrochloric acid needed for the extraction process of mining REE’s or for the recycling REE’s from coal ash ponds?Report
HCl or other solvents are routine in the case of REEs in “normal” ores. In coal ash, they can take a different approach.Report
Trump is “completely underwater” & has broken his own record with the lowest net approval at this point among independents (-22 pts).
His economic net approval with indies at this pt is so low (-29 pts) it has “no historical analogy”.
Most indies (66%) oppose the new tariffs-Harry Enten on CNNReport
Good.Report
Columbia University seems to be developing a spine again: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/nyregion/columbia-trump-president-response.htmlReport
The law firm agreements are exactly what you expect: “One reason we know they’re not legally enforceable agreements is that what Trump is threatening is clearly illegal. Indeed, one can go quite a bit further than this, as TPM Reader AK suggests, and say that if the agreements are agreements then the agreements themselves look like bribery. Trump agrees to forego threatened illegal actions in exchange for $100 million or $125 million of services. That amounts to services of great value in exchange for government inaction and, critically, this part of the agreement is with Trump personally, not the U.S. government. It involves causes Trump supports, and this part of the agreement applies “during the Trump Administration and beyond.” So if you follow the purported logic, a 90-year-old ex-President Trump will still have pro bono work credits to assign in retirement.
But it’s also all just smoke and BS.
Almost every part of the agreements are worded in ways that make the purported commitments basically meaninglessness. So for instance, each agreement has the firm agreeing not to do “illegal DEI hiring.” But that’s easy for them to agree to, as far as they’re concerned, because they don’t think whatever DEI or affirmative action hiring they do is illegal. So whatever “illegal DEI hiring” might be, they don’t do it. End of story. And the same applies to pretty much all the other fairness-related commitments.
Even the pro bono work, which now includes “other free legal services,” is a bit less than it appears. I noted above that this part of the agreement appears to be with Trump himself apart from the presidency and continues past the duration of his administration. But the same language means that the notional commitment to either $100 million or $125 million in pro bono work is over an indefinite and actually unlimited period of time. So by the terms of the agreement, Kirkland & Ellis or Cadwalader can run down that commitment over a century. Or two. Any amount of time is okay. Maybe Trump will still be assigning free legal work when he’s 200. I think Ronny Jackson said he’d probably live that long.
My point here isn’t to say these agreements are fine. It’s that they amount to agreements to lie to each other. And everyone else. Except to the firm’s own staff. They get the real story. Or what the management committee believes is the real story. Or anyone else who says the firm has betrayed their principles. They get told the firm didn’t really agree to anything.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/whats-really-in-the-white-house-law-firm-agreementsReport
Dollar down 10% since inauguration day as investors abandoning it due to tariff chaos. Yikes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/04/15/dollar-investors-treasuries-safety/Report
Lovely. Just in time for my UK vacation. I wonder if the people who voted for Trump because they want “government ran like a business” stopped to consider the businessman they elected bankrupted a casino.Report