I think long term, the changes in scientific research will be the big story. They made it so grants can only request something like 15% of facilities funding. Some universities can eat the cost of a lab but 95% can’t. So, it’s going to destroy any sort of research that’s mostly done in labs.

To give a hypothetical example, you could imagine a novel battery chemistry that really only needs a few humans to run the experiments but an expensive lab to just run the battery through 10,000 charge/discharge cycles to see if it degrades. That research probably won’t be done in the United States.

The executive order allows wavers so maybe it won’t be batteries — Elon Musk needs those — but a lot of basic science research will be done in Europe, Canada, China, etc. who are more than happy to accept brilliant scientists and fund their research. It’s basically pocket change in the context of a national budget and the payoffs are potentially huge.

For international readers or Americans unfamiliar, Wisconsin has a state Supreme Court vote. It’s probably 50/50 and is the important one. Florida has 2 special elections for vacated House of Representative seats in Congress. The districts both voted heavily for Trump so the Republican candidate should win.

So, in Florida, don’t necessarily expect the Democrats to win. But if it’s even close, Republicans will be filling some diapers. They should be winning these districts by 20 or 30 points. Winning with 53% or whatever would be a really bad result for Republicans.

We’re aware. People who get all their news from Fox or ignore politics in general probably aren’t but even my conservative family members are embarrassed about the threats to Canada and Greenland. Canadians are generally considered super nice and polite by Americans so pissing them off crossed a line. Even apolitical people probably know the U.S. National Anthem is being booed at sporting events.

There’s elections in several states today that will provide some data to know more. Louisiana had an election on Saturday and rejected 4 constitutional amendments supported by Republicans. None even got 40%. Louisiana is an oddball state so I’m not sure it’s a harbinger of today’s elections but if voters in Wisconsin and elsewhere vote like Louisiana, it’ll be very telling.

If anyone really wanted to find government waste, fraud, and abuse, they’d be looking at state and local governments. Federal employees are usually underpaid, if anything, and could make more in the private sector.

The highest paid government employees in basically every state are college sports coaches — who are typically actually paid by foundations funded by insane fans — and 4 cops who somehow clocked more overtime hours than is physically possible without a gravity well and a deep understanding of general relativity.

Do they have volunteer positions in Antarctica? I’ll clean the beakers and be nice to penguins.

I think we should deport me to the Amalfi Coast or the Cayman Islands. I’m a snake handler who works with voodoo priestesses. I’ll convert to Judaism if they’re willing to deport me to a tropical paradise where all news and social media sites are inaccessible except one day a week.

I’m less worried about the closure of offices than Musk thinking he can modernize the SSA administration’s computer systems in 3 months. None of his lackeys have ever worked on anything of this scale/complexity and I’m pretty sure none of them know COBOL since they’re apparently mostly around 25. (And retired COBOL experts likely don’t know more modern languages well enough to translate.)

Don’t get me wrong, the public and private sectors should modernize aging, critical systems that use code written in languages almost no one under 60 has learned, much less mastered. But 3 months probably isn’t even enough time to get through the planning and hiring stage of a project like this. If it were cheap and easy to update those systems, it’d have been done already.

You gotta spend money to lose money.

All the amendments were also weirdly worded on the ballot when I voted today. I do at least a little bit of research before I vote in our elections and they were trying to sneak some power grabs past voters. But no state trusts its politicians less than Louisiana. We have the finest record of both corruption and ignoring laws in North America, if not the hemisphere.

Nola.com has a paywall now but this one should be free: https://lailluminator.com/2025/03/29/louisiana-amendments-3/

France is an interesting choice as the first ones to threaten. They might be the country most willing to tell America to fuck off and spend an evening lighting Teslas on fire.

DEI initiatives don’t really exist there like they do in the United States. Their constitution already bans employers from making distinctions based on race, gender, religion, etc. The closest thing France has that I know of is a requirement for corporate boards to be 40% women. They aren’t going to change that law because Trump threw a hissy fit.

Plus, DEI doesn’t even really mean anything specific in the United States anymore. It’s just a dog whistle (like “woke”) Republicans use to signal that they’re racist and sexist and stir up racial animus. They use it when it doesn’t even make sense. Trump blamed “DEI hires” when an ARMY helicopter crashed into a passenger jet even though all the pilots and the air traffic controllers were white men. He blamed the LA wildfires on DEI.

Kristi Noem kills puppies and I’ll debate with you about whether that makes her a hideous troll who eats Billy goats under a bridge. But Marjorie Taylor Greene is haggard and I feel no remorse when I reduce her to someone who looks like a Family Dollar ass Shrek toy.

You’re right. Possums are the last surviving marsupials in the western hemisphere. Game recognize game. I also survive in the Western hemisphere.

I forget who but someone in Trumpworld is dating her and I threw up a little bit in my mouth imagining that concept. She looks like a possum that no one asked to prom.

I think it’d be better but not ideal. America obviously needs reforms but a 4 year reprieve from the dumbest dumbfucks in recorded history trying to annex Greenland and cut off funding for cancer research would be nice.

Gov. Beshear could absolutely be president if we still have free and fair elections in 2028. I, personally, wouldn’t be thrilled by a centrist Democrat bringing us further to the right via compromises where the left gets a shit sandwich. But he’s very good at being a politician.

Well, I guess the mission was successful if you don’t care about civilians. The 23 year-old pilots were apparently very competent. Houthi leadership gets no sympathy from me and I hope they go home and be family men.

I wouldn’t have made that trade-off, though. I don’t care if there’s 40 of my worst enemies holed up at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. I wouldn’t bomb it, much less treat it like a game. That’s sociopath behavior.

For the record, I’m from Louisiana so I hate Texas. Especially Texas A&M. There’s a small part of me that wants to bomb anyone wearing a cowboy costume who lives in a suburb and has never even touched a cow. I hate all their sports teams. But if they catch a hurricane, we go help them. They help us when tragedy strikes. That should be the maximum level of hate people have toward each other. I hope Texas A&M explodes with no civilian casualties. (The students who cosplay as fascists are fair game. Grow up.)

I was raised in a very Catholic region. Our football team is called The Saints. We called the (then new) Protestant church “Mary Queen of the Parking Lot” because it was in a strip mall. Even now, I have no idea what the Protestant megachurch by the interstate is called because everyone calls it “Six Flags Over Jesus.” I’ve been to weddings there and I don’t know the name.

I say all that to say no one is weirder than people who convert to Catholicism. I’m agnostic and I try to follow the teachings of Jesus (as a philosopher) more than weird ass adult converts like JD Vance. Like, help the poor and turn the other cheek. Forgiveness is as much a blessing for you as it is for the person you’re forgiving. And JD Vance is like, “The Crusades were cool.” No! They sucked!

The most cringe part is JD Vance saying he’ll pray. Pray for what? That no fighter jets crash? That the bombs intended to kill one guy only destroy a few apartment complexes of civilians?

I don’t know if the strike was a good or bad decision or how precise it was. Adding a journalist to the group chat was bad enough. Don’t bring God into the group chat about killing people. Vance converted to Catholicism and I’m pretty sure there’s a line in the Catholic version of the Bible about how thou shalt not kill. It’s not an ambiguous verse like Deuteronomy where you can convince yourself it’s fine to eat crabs because of the New Testament.

I swear to God (good version), the only people who read the Bible are curious atheists and priests. Self-professed Christians are there for the potlucks and networking opportunities.