I dont think it’s goal actually is “savings.” Come on, NY Times, stop parroting the propaganda!
One of its goals is apparently an accelerationist one – the end of the world as we know it. They’re all too glad to destroy federal services that harm and kill people. The quicker collapse happens, the better for them!
The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.
That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers. These bunkers are brutal in their determination to expel and imprison unwanted humans (even if that requires indefinite confinement in extra-national penal colonies from Manus Island to Guantánamo Bay) and equally ruthless in their willingness to violently claim the land and resources (water, energy, critical minerals) they deem necessary to weather the coming shocks.
Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.
A friend of a friend in BC, a board member of one or more corporations, well educated and well spoken, travels to Maine often (maybe to see relatives, maybe for vacations, I don’t know). On his last trip he was interviewed, then the customs officer asked “What do you think of Trump?”
The man wisely hedged and said he didn’t really follow US politics, but then incautiously added “But my wife isn’t a fan.”.
His wife is now banned from entering the US for five years.
When a person’s salary - and ongoing employment - depends on mentioning something the boss absolutely wants mentioned, the person simply says “please dictate, while I copy down what you say”.
I am not proficient in English, much less in the jargon used in official documents and other bureaucratic communications, but it seems to me that nothing here suggests the fentanyl tariff.
(~april 2nd)
In a late-night tirade against top Senate Republicans, President Donald Trump—repeating a claim he made earlier in the week—insisted that smuggled fentanyl can be subjected to tariffs, drawing widespread ridicule, including from conservatives. He offered no explanation for how such a policy would work, nor did he clarify whether traffickers are expected to declare illegal drugs at the border.
(wonder if congress will ever bother demanding to know when/if any substantive tariffs have actually been collected and where…?)
I think about 3/4 of the post was about how the press is malicious, how China is evil, how dishonest they are, how Americans have been made fools of and how in the blink of an eye this will change and the United States will go back to being the promised land (I think this time without those dirty immigrants and their dangerous ideas).
He must have thought something along the lines of the righteous paying for the sinners. The tariffs imposed on countries would serve as punishment for having allowed something bad to happen. Although I think he considers all foreigners to be guilty.
Yeah the tarrifs are meant to be retaliatory to punish them for producing fentanyl. Not that much saner and also still more a rhetoric thing than an economic thing in reality. But punishing anyone but the sacklers for your brother’s addiction is the maga way.
