FJB!
I'd try to Photoshop those wires out of this, but I think the grass would just come out looking weird.
This trailer was sitting on some farmer's land in western Iowa, facing the interstate. The farmer had vandalized his own property to make a statement, though I can only work out what he probably means to say by the Trump flags. My guess is this farmer wants to engage in sexual relations with President Joe Biden, though I don't trust the will of an adult who wants to express something but is too afraid to just say the word. I wrote about that at length one time a couple of years ago. (Trigger warning: If you don't like looking at the word, don't go to that post.) I finally ticked an aunt off enough a month or so ago to make her unfriend me on the Facebook because I used that same word in reference to Trump and the people who voted for him, though I don't know why she got all huffy about it. She and her dumbass husband said, "Let's go, Brandon" all the damned time, and to them, that means the same thing.
We happened to take this trip during a moment in history that in a hundred years will be the first bullet point kids write down when their high school history tests ask, "What are the three main factors that led to the Second Great Depression and the permanent collapse of the American economic empire?" I think going into this second Trump administration, one of the things I worried most about was that the dumbass would finally indulge his decades-long fixation on tariffs, which he based on a grade-school-level misunderstanding of how tariffs work. I (and pretty much anybody else with half an education) knew that blanket tariffs would cause the entire global financial network to short circuit and destroy the foundation upon which the last 80 years of American wealth had been built. Well, as your financial advisor probably knows, Trump pulled the trigger on that the day before I took this picture, enacting large tariffs on every country but Russia based on the most idiotic mathematical formula anyone could imagine. (The tariffs are reverse engineered off the trade deficit we maintain with each country, ignoring the fact that we buy a lot more from these countries than they buy from us because we're rich and they're not.) I watched on my telephone as Robin drove us across Iowa while the markets reacted the way you'd expect in the "find out" phase of -- to use Republican terminology -- "Let's go around and find out."
Things have calmed down with the stock market, but as Kai Ryssdal often tells me on NPR, the stock market is not the economy. The big problem here is the bond markets and the value of the dollar against other currencies. You know ... deep economic stuff. There's complicated academic theory of economics to explore there that I only sort of understand and am not going to get into, but the crux of the whole thing is that the world used to think of the American dollar was the safest bet on the planet. They no longer think that because Trump is an unstable whackadoodle with a moth-eaten brain who pulls financial policy out of his ass. The confidence the world had in the stability of the US financial system was the basis of what made us the richest nation in the world for my entire lifetime, and Trump undermined all that in the course of a week. And though Trump got scared and walked a lot of his tariffs back before we even got back from Colorado, he's still dangling them out there like a mad man. The world has lost confidence in us, and they won't even start to get it back as long as the idiot's in office. And even then, we've shown the world how easily we can be tossed into insanity. We're not coming back from this. The comfort I grew up in is in the process of evaporating. It will be much more difficult for my children to lead the kind of life I was able to lead.
So, I guess, FDT instead.
FJB!
I'd try to Photoshop those wires out of this, but I think the grass would just come out looking weird.
This trailer was sitting on some farmer's land in western Iowa, facing the interstate. The farmer had vandalized his own property to make a statement, though I can only work out what he probably means to say by the Trump flags. My guess is this farmer wants to engage in sexual relations with President Joe Biden, though I don't trust the will of an adult who wants to express something but is too afraid to just say the word. I wrote about that at length one time a couple of years ago. (Trigger warning: If you don't like looking at the word, don't go to that post.) I finally ticked an aunt off enough a month or so ago to make her unfriend me on the Facebook because I used that same word in reference to Trump and the people who voted for him, though I don't know why she got all huffy about it. She and her dumbass husband said, "Let's go, Brandon" all the damned time, and to them, that means the same thing.
We happened to take this trip during a moment in history that in a hundred years will be the first bullet point kids write down when their high school history tests ask, "What are the three main factors that led to the Second Great Depression and the permanent collapse of the American economic empire?" I think going into this second Trump administration, one of the things I worried most about was that the dumbass would finally indulge his decades-long fixation on tariffs, which he based on a grade-school-level misunderstanding of how tariffs work. I (and pretty much anybody else with half an education) knew that blanket tariffs would cause the entire global financial network to short circuit and destroy the foundation upon which the last 80 years of American wealth had been built. Well, as your financial advisor probably knows, Trump pulled the trigger on that the day before I took this picture, enacting large tariffs on every country but Russia based on the most idiotic mathematical formula anyone could imagine. (The tariffs are reverse engineered off the trade deficit we maintain with each country, ignoring the fact that we buy a lot more from these countries than they buy from us because we're rich and they're not.) I watched on my telephone as Robin drove us across Iowa while the markets reacted the way you'd expect in the "find out" phase of -- to use Republican terminology -- "Let's go around and find out."
Things have calmed down with the stock market, but as Kai Ryssdal often tells me on NPR, the stock market is not the economy. The big problem here is the bond markets and the value of the dollar against other currencies. You know ... deep economic stuff. There's complicated academic theory of economics to explore there that I only sort of understand and am not going to get into, but the crux of the whole thing is that the world used to think of the American dollar was the safest bet on the planet. They no longer think that because Trump is an unstable whackadoodle with a moth-eaten brain who pulls financial policy out of his ass. The confidence the world had in the stability of the US financial system was the basis of what made us the richest nation in the world for my entire lifetime, and Trump undermined all that in the course of a week. And though Trump got scared and walked a lot of his tariffs back before we even got back from Colorado, he's still dangling them out there like a mad man. The world has lost confidence in us, and they won't even start to get it back as long as the idiot's in office. And even then, we've shown the world how easily we can be tossed into insanity. We're not coming back from this. The comfort I grew up in is in the process of evaporating. It will be much more difficult for my children to lead the kind of life I was able to lead.
So, I guess, FDT instead.