Go Take a Flying Great Leap Forward!

 

Scott Bessent: Federal layoffs will help fill factory jobs created by Trump tariffs https://t.co/q2RE8JGYoF

— The Hill (@thehill) April 7, 2025

When the bureaucrats are manning the assembly lines, we will enter a time of prosperity in the reorganization. Next on the list, the decadent professors will be removed from their ivory towers and returned to the soil.

Farming?

If they are lucky!

I'm trying to be appropriately glib--I truly don't think we're listening to rational people in this administration. They see things are coming apart and have reached for a tube of strong glue. They then proceed to sniff it.

These are the same folks who will tell you that they foresee the factory pound-y-screw-y types of jobs will be done by robots, and the think-y-talk-y jobs will be done by AI. After all, you could solve most of your labor problems if you just didn't have people doing the labor, which is similar to the problems of voting. 

I'm still wondering about the sort of Field of Dreams approach to reindustrialization. If you build an empty space for the factories, will they come?

It has been a long, stupid day. I am very certain these people don't have a good handle on history.

Submitted for your Delectation or Rue

 

President Donald Trump justified his administration's mass firings of federal workers by claiming, without evidence, that many of them simply were collecting a paycheck and doing nothing, NBC4 Washington reported on Wednesday. https://t.co/mgU8CC9FgA

— Raw Story (@RawStory) March 13, 2025

So sayeth the Constant Golfer. But what of ElonWorld? 

Glad you asked: he's made sure he has a gaming system in his big boy DOGE government office. 

These are supposed to be people we take seriously. I don't even know how they take themselves seriously. 

(I've started writing science fiction (again!) over at one of my other places. Because sometimes fiction is easier to take seriously than whatever this is.  You don't have to read it. It's like my poetry, just another thing I turn to when I've got a lot of thoughts and practical outlets feel very awkward.) 

You Are What You Eat

 

You know, I would have bet anything that being Donald Trump's vice president, if nothing else, would involve eating a lot of shit. After all, he did try to get the last guy lynched. That said, I realized that JD Vance was just the guy for the job. Try to spin Trump's oddball pronouncements into something normal. Be willing to do anything for love of Trump. It's not that I like JD Vance--far from it.  

It's just that he has a very particular set of skills. 

So when Elon Musk has a racist manboy resign over making some very racist social media posts, we can see JD Vance fix his purty mouth to do that thing he does:

He "obviously disagrees" with the idea that marrying outside of your race is abhorrent and anti-Indian hate should be normalized--I assume? So says the JD Vance bio. But this is a kid, and his social media activity is "ruining a kid's life?" 

A 25-year-old posted that last year, player. 

Malicious Compliance?

 

Monday night, people became aware of a memo from the Trump Administration that halted payments regarding all sorts of things.  That memo said to pause "all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance." 

Well, that wasn't very specific. So maybe the memo was drafted by someone who didn't exactly know what all the programs were, but figured they were all suspect. Or maybe the memo was crafted by someone who really did want all the programs everywhere halted, but didn't know they would be leaving the Administration red-faced and red-assed.

Trump loves doing stuff, and also hates to be blamed for doing stuff. Somebody might get "you're fired'd" for this. I would like it to be Russell Vought, who hasn' t even been confirmed for OMB yet, but who is the Project 2025 guy who thought up this exact kind of thing, was singled out by the Trump Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt as the guy to contact, and is forever stuck in my mind as being the guy in the first Trump admin who halted the aid to Ukraine for the first Trump impeachment.

Flagpole Sitta

 

Samuel Alito—who wrote the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade—says his wife “makes her own decisions, and I have always respected her right to do so.” pic.twitter.com/r52Yjf35ih

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) May 29, 2024

Far be it for me to question how the Alitos manage their affairs at home--although Justice Alito certainly questions how American women and their families make other important decisions, for example, regarding their reproductive health care--but I love the idea that because the Mrs. is a property owner, he (also an owner of the same property) could not abrogate her important first amendment flag-raising choices by taking the thing down himself. 

Well, one hears of such things. A man can be, for example, top dog in his place of work, but be barely able to raise a peep, let alone lower a flag, in his own home. It appears, based on the report of the Alitos' neighbors, he might well have reason to fear her temper. 

She might have left him hardly able to comfortably sit on a bench, is what I'm getting at. Having foregone that particular conflict, however, he sees himself as still eminently qualified to rule from the highest bench in the country.

It's a matter of judgment.