133 Comments

Unfortunately, the hit being taken by the U.S. on the international trade circuit will last a long time, because other nations cannot trust American voters.

So, yeah, Trump is a dipshit, but the American electorate is no batch of Einsteins.

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40+ years of the Republicans repeated drastic cuts to education budgets will do that.

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Not to mention school nutrition when the schools can't buy fresh produce for lunches. I thought RF[u]K was all about healthy eating instead of vaccines.

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And I remember taking cod liver oil as a child. Surely science has progressed in 70+ years!

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Science? Isn’t that just too, too DEI and Marxist and trans?

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Hey! I doesn't wanna here aboat no woke sience.

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lol

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I have to believe other nations are just as aghast as we are and are rooting for America to come back from this hostile takeover. Many who voted for the orange stain that I know are openly admitting they made a grave error in judgment in voting for him. I think those voters will be much more likely to listen the next time we warn them. Admittedly tho it's going to take awhile to recover from this term.

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Hoping "this term" is just four years and that he has not screwed up the election more than it is now. Would hate to see "this term" extend beyond four years.

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I’m glad to hear that at least some of those who voted for Trump are openly admitting the mistake they made but I personally haven’t seen or heard that amongst the people I come across whom voted for him. To the contrary, they continue to defend him and berate me as a “nut job” liberal, of which I’m actually a more centrist with a small tilt to the left or right depending on the issue/policy. Let’s hope the midterms bring more sense and rationality from American voters.

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The road to privatization and ai

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& cryptocurrency & fascist tyranny.

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Techbrocracy. Just look at the arrogance they show in their little "private country" in Honduras, where they scoff at the country's government who want them to break laws less than they do.

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Watching our government slowly turn into a capitalistic democracy and hitting the middle class particularly hard has been difficult for many people.

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Turning into an oligarchy

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We're no longer a democracy. We've been classified as an anocracy. But we also fit the definition of a corporatocracy & plutocracy, veering towards autocracy & theocracy & especially kleptocracy, idiocracy & kakistocracy.

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"I think it should be great for us" SHOULD be?!?!? You THINK?!?!?

"We’re gonna have jobs, we’re gonna have factories, it’s gonna be great." We've got jobs!! We've got factories!! It was great on Jan 20, 11:59am, ya orange dimwit!

Let measles run its course? We tried that when I was a kid, pre-vaccine, with deadly results.

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And let's not even mention that the measles are a immune system reset. All your previous immunities, all your existing vaccinations? Officially useless from the moment you're infected.

RFK Jr killed millions in Somalia with this bullshit and now he's trying to do it again for you.

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Somalia or Samoa?

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Samoa was "only" 80-some deaths, but they don't even have a million people (population is ~200,000), and the outbreak only infected a few thousand. I'm not sure what the Somalia reference was about.

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My apologies, I got the data mixed up. He has killed a shitload more people than any one person should ever have on their conscience though.

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And yet he's head of our HHS

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"...measles are an immune system reset"? Your source for that, please.

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https://asm.org/articles/2019/may/measles-and-immune-amnesia

It's actually a pretty well-known thing, officially discovered in 2012 but has been speculated about to various degrees since the late 1980s.

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Thanks, I found the same source - I trust the microbiologists!

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Wow. I had no idea.

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Interesting.

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Thanks for the article. I want to pass that along to my primary care doctor and get his opinion on that as well. I was so saddened with RFK’s appointment.

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Do you mean American Samoa and dozens? Hadn't heard anything about Somalia. Or your "immune system reset" after getting measles. The immune system is pretty smart about differentiating between viruses - getting measles doesn't mean you're suddenly at risk for contracting chicken pox, mumps, or polio.

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https://asm.org/articles/2019/may/measles-and-immune-amnesia

I have already acknowledged my stuff-up in this thread, but yeah Immune Amnesia is a real thing and measles is one of the things that causes it. It's genuinely horrifying.

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Out of 208 cases in NM and TX, there have already been two deaths (as of last time I checked the stats). That's about on par for measles, which historically has had a 1-2% death rate, which is why (despite what antivaxxers claim) there have NEVER been "measles parties".

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No, that was something that used to be done with the chicken pox before the vaccine for that was made widely available. (I was just old enough to have caught it through exposure at a children's day at the local museum just two months before I would've gotten vaccinated and my mum's explanation to my dad was how I discovered my first curse words. XD) I don't know when the anti-vaxxers stole the story and changed it but I do not approve.

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I live ten miles away from Intel's new facility in Licking County, Ohio. It was supposed to be partially operational by the end of this year and received huge tax breaks from Governor De Wine. Licking County is a deeply MAGA county with the possible exceptions of my village (home to a private, well-respected university) and New Albany (home of Les Wexner). The county is not at all wealthy. Democrats can get elected to the school boards and town councils, but not much more.

Here's where we are as of today: Intel's bottom line is sputtering, the project's start date has been significantly moved back, the feds held back on a much needed payment, and now the administration is going after the CHIPs Act (one of Biden's signatures, and what got the Intel project started to begin with. At ground-breaking Biden was there with De Wine (a Republican, obviously). The county has bent over backwards because of Intel. People were displaced at the site location. The only jobs that thrived were in construction, deeply hurting new home starts as skilled workers went and took the huge pay Intel was offering, leaving contractors with plans but no workers. Real estate inventory, county-wide, is practically nill, schools are maxed out and have had funding cut by both the federal and state government, but are now being asked to absorb "the anticipated" influx of workers for Intel. About the only good thing to come from this fiasco was that *all* of our highways leading to the Intel site were upgraded under CHIPs.

Now it is beginning to look like the whole thing is not going to happen. And kind of like the Longaberger Basket building (google it -- I promise you it is worth it for the laugh), Licking County will now have acres and acres of viable farmland covered in concrete.

They paved paradise, put up a parking lot

With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin' hot spot

Don't it always seem to go

That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone

--Joni Mitchell

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I checked out the Longaberger Basket building like you said. Very interesting. Thanks. I knew about the baskets from the 1990's, but not the building.

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I don't think you can blame that on politics, though. Intel has been a shadow of its former self for quite a while. The only really valuable part left is the name. Kind of like what happened to Texas Instruments and Motorola (and a lot of other companies) before them.

Intel also canceled fab builds in other countries where there never was a CHIPS act.

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You can't blame it all on politics. But it was the stupidity of politicians that left us with this mess. All I was pointing out that this hot mess could have been averted before our politics headed south.

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Thanks Jay for the update. It's really disheartening to see what they are doing to this country and how quickly they are doing it. But we have to fight them on each and every issue. We can't sacrifice any of our values. It's exhausting but it has to be done. I recently retired and I had thought now is the time to travel and enjoy life. Silly me thinking our country was finally headed in the right direction. In less than two months all the good things have been destroyed by a petulant president and his children followers. But one thing that helps is knowing that there are more decent people in this country. We are not alone and together we will overcome them. So keep on calling and writing and protesting and doing whatever you can.

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It's absolutely what we have to do as that's all we've got at present. I too am retired and hope we have enough years left for our retirements to recover from this fiasco. I write my blimey red Florida Congressional leaders multiple times daily about a plethora of issues.

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Short-term pain for the many, long- term gain for the few...and what else is new?

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But will it be short term pain? I think these repercussions are going to last a very long time. Along with trashing 80 years of mutual support and goodwill among NATO nations is going to have some very serious repercussions as well. Trumpism stinks, Krasnov stinks even more and those who voted for the stinky fool are the dumbest people on Earth.

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The US lost a similar amount of goodwill when we dragged the rest of the world into the Iraq war under false pretenses. Back then, that led to Germany cozying up to Russia (at the time Putin wasn't as crazy as he is today) specifically to have an alternative to being too US dependent.

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I really hate that man.

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Is "despise" stronger than "hate?"

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"Loathe" is also pretty useful in the context of the cheeto Jesus.

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Not sure but I do know the level with which I hate him is at DEFCON 2.

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I loathe, abhor, detest, despise, abominate, those dirty guys!

Actually, per my mother and aunt, this was something about “dried apple pies”. But whatever works. 😁🤪😁

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I agree with your sentiment. If it's a JG quote, I love it even more.

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Did anyone else notice that Tesla and Amazon stocks *skyrocketed* out of the gates this morning, for exactly 20 minutes and then both crashed. I imagine the same pattern could be found elsewhere in techbro land. Looks to me like an attempt to rally the market that just didn't have enough stamina to overcome Elump. Or is there another explanation? Was it the quarterly crops report getting leaked? :D

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I wonder if the tech bros are buying back their stock cheap?

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So did Meta, hmmm

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Stocks are *not* cheap. There has been an absolutely crazy run-up in stock prices for several years, and even Tesla is still more expensive now than it was a year ago.

Also, buying stock back cheap only makes sense when either you expect them to rise again, or when you are covering shorts.

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Bingo!

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I call trump and elon: Mump.

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Pump and dump: It's not just for crypto scams anymore! (Yes, I know the term was used for stock runs long before crypto "money" was a thing. It's just that these days it is more associated with the less and less regulated crypto "market"/chaos)

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Fairly routine thing. Probably people trying to take advantage of lower stock price, possibly triggered automatically by limit orders. It can be a sound strategy, basically dollar-cost averaging in reverse.

The more surprising thing is how short-lived these bounces are. Even during the extreme drop in early Covid, there were whole days when the market was up.

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No one has mentioned the harm to pregnant women who get measles and sometimes they have babies with long term issues. I don't think RFK has mentioned that.

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And the small percentage that get SSPE (subacute sclerosing panencephalitis), a late rare complication of measles that has no cure and invariably leads to death. It's more common in those who were younger at the time they caught measles. Guess what, the vaccine does NOT have this complication.

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The risk to birth defects is if their mother gets rubella (the "R" in the MMR vaccine), which was called the "3-day" or even "German" measles when I was a child. However, from Penn Medicine: "Measles infections during pregnancy do not cause birth defects, but pregnant women and newborns are more susceptible to medical complications from measles than the general population. These complications include pneumonia and hospitalization. Measles infections during pregnancy may also cause miscarriage, stillbirth, low birth weight, and an increased risk of preterm delivery."

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When I was young, my dad (a physician) had me go to a friend's house to try and catch German measles, with the idea being that it was better to catch it then, than risk getting it many years later while pregnant.

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RFK is directly responsible for millions of measles deaths in Somalia by peddling his anti-vaxx insanity to their government. And now he's trying to do it to you.

Frankly if someone shot him I be relieved.

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Tristam...it was Samoa, not Somalia.

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Thank you and sorry! I unfortunately have a very frustrating mental blind spot about names, I need to write stuff down more. (I got diagnosed with ADHD recently, I'm still learning ways to deal with it.)

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No worries--I have a similar problem when I skim an article too fast and don't slow down long enough to get the names right.

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83 measles deaths in Samoa. Far too many, but not the millions.

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Thank you for the correction. Either I had a brain glitch on the numbers or my initial source was overstating the damage. The names I can absolutely blame on ADHD and a bad habit of not writing them down.

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Happens to the best of us! I'm hyper-alert to the mistakes we make these days, even though facts are sooo 2024.

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Sooo…AGAIN again trump displays assertive abysmal ignorance : of the economy, health care & disease spread, of tariffs (“we all will have so much money we won’t know what to spend it on”), of the mutual trade benefits with our neighbors, of the reality of the lack of necessary minerals, of who REALLY builds our houses, plants & harvests our crops…oh and the tumbling stock market. But we are just supposed to “trust him”! So much destruction in so little time. I have never been so terrified!!!

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Perhaps this is all by design? I know he's not smart enough to think of that himself, but he is dumb enough to go along with it if someone promises him a lollipop and a trip to the toy store afterwards. Tank the economy, decimate the public sector, then buy everything back. Perfect, you have now privatized the American economy and fascism.

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The vaccine for measles is not very effective if you already have it. The cod liver oil is rich in vitamin A, which is why RFK Jr. is pushing it. However, with Americans ability to over do something like this, it is important to note that vitamin A is toxic at high levels.

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Unfortunately, RFK has led people to believe vitamin A can PREVENT measles (my clinic has already had several families call requesting vitamin A for their kids so they don't catch measles).

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Sigh.

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And any vaccines or natural immunities will be obliterated by the measles, because on top of being just a nasty potentially lethal little bugger, it has a lovely little quirk that RESETS YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM.

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I did not know that, thank you!

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Yeah, it's absolutely wild. Immune Amnesia is a terrifying thing and some diseases can just... inflict it. And nobody quite knows how or why yet.

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I just read a short article about it; crazy.

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Decades ago, children with a kidney condition called nephrotic syndrome were actually exposed to measles. There was no treatment back then for this renal condition which can kill. Because measles resets/lowers immunity, it actually sometimes reset the cells that were producing the cytokine (immune protein) that damaged the kidneys, and some kids who caught measles would go into remission. Of course, back then docs had no knowledge of the cytokine or how the immune system was affected by measles, all they knew is some kids saw their kidney condition resolve if they caught measles (and lived of course). Nowadays, there are lots of medical treatments for nephrotic syndrome, and measles exposure is no longer considered an acceptable treatment.

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Wow, that's genuinely awesome! The wild things people manage to pull off with medicine never cease to amaze me.

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Can you provide some documentation of this? It does not seem to jive with my understanding our immune systems.

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I’m referring to Tristram’s assertion about resetting your immune system.

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As ever, Jay, you simplify the complex without oversimplifying. Thank you.

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Well put!

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I believe that chaos is the objective so that when people really get mad and take to the streets he can declare martial law and we will then be fully under a dictatorship.

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A terrifying thought!

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"In construction, there are some 1.3 million undocumented workers. The loss of these workers would result in immediate project delays, meaning increased costs and even fewer available houses..."

In Florida a few years back, DeSantis did everything he could to get rid of all of the undocumented laborers, and he was pretty successful. Then Hurricane Ian hit Ft. Myers Beach and, while a lot the houses there were on pilings so that they were still standing, everything underneath them was swept away. Two years after Ian, most of those houses still didn't even have stairs up yet. And more than three years later, most businesses there are still closed. And all of those million dollar plus beach houses? Inaccessible and useless...

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Why hasn’t someone or another country tried to take this administration out? Iran? Hezbollah or Hamas or Houthi rebels or the Taliban? It’s not like the administration is doing anyone but themselves any good.

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18hEdited

Recall Napoleon's (or was it Sun Tzu's?) advice: Never interrupt your enemy when they are in the process of making a big mistake.

The USA is presently barrelling down the road to chaos, greatly diminished capacity, and widespread misery at the hands of an astoundingly ignorant, cruel, greedy figurehead wanna-be emperor, a greed- and hubris-addled billionaire with evil intentions, and a crew of willing soulless sycophants and fascist religious fanatics. Why would an adversary want to extend itself in any way when the current US régime (I can't call it an administration) is doing the adversary's work for them?

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19hEdited

Probably because removing him wouldn't be enough. There are too many knee-jerk morons in the executive branch who would retaliate toward the community, ethnicity or country of the person who pulled that off. They've already brought back firing squads. What's next? Nukes? Just imagine how awful it could be. He's like their god or something to them. It's not a good solution.

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Timing? 🤔

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I have wondered that.

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Let’s not go there. That’s NOT the world we want to live in!

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Wondering the same thing myself

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Thank you for the helpful nickel cobalt platinum example of resources that we simply don’t have and can’t adequately create or develop in the US. This will help me and, I hope, others to explain to doubters 🙄 in a very clear way why these tariffs are a terrible idea.

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tRump et al are doing everything they can to destroy confidence in the Government and the economy. tRump is an agent of chaos and agents of chaos are all he hires for his regime. People are rightly pulling back. I sold my mutual funds and have gone to cash equivalents and am guarding those. I decided not to install a whole-house generator - a $13,000+ project. I know Donnie is dumb as a doorknob, but this seems coordinated and deliberate...

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