Yes, Donald, He Is Disrespecting You

 

Reporter: Do you believe Putin is disrespecting you by attacking Ukraine?

Trump: What did he do? Is he disrespecting me? Who are you with? pic.twitter.com/4tAwEQlRec

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 10, 2025

Desperate weak boychild Trump doesn't get it--Putin isn't his bestie. That's part of what made him so mad when President Zelenskyy quite correctly pointed out that Putin had violated ceasefires before. Trump was MAD, I tell you! Because who would dare to question the rilly rilly tight bestie relationship Trump had with the guy who very obviously did not support an entire bot/disinfo network to make him president as if he was a total fucking patsy who could be easily manipulated into rolling over for Russia by financial or conspiracy theory means? Putin thought he was a useful tool-a puppet? As if!

Trump has complained a few times lately that Putin went through the Mueller investigation (the "Russia, Russia, Russia hoax") and maybe is also pretty sure the first impeachment impacted on Putin as well. 

Was he on the phone with his bestie? Did Putin comfort him and tell him they were in it together? 

Because whatever Trump was going through, Putin was safe in Moscow laughing his ass off that the US was having some chaos. No way, no how, was Putin BOTHERED in any way about what happened to Trump. 

In Defense of Wonks

 

Klippenstein is a good reporter and a generally good egg, but my God, the juxtaposition of housing as a problem (which can be understood in terms of zoning, affordability, Nimby-ism, etc.) and matters of foreign policy, that are obviously understood as federal in nature, is just...

Look, I would like it if HUD had a strong hand and a strong plan for overriding local twattery that keeps housing unaffordable. But there are limits to what can be legally done at the executive level to demand housing access--it's complicated!

Foreign aid is a bit different, isn't it--it's one thing, it doesn't go through state and muni filters You're not dictating to developers and actual neighborhoods with people in them about what they do and don't want. It doesn't have a myriad of red tape things to fool about with. 

We're not talking about the difference between apples and oranges, but apples and eggs. Knowing the difference is very useful, because you really shouldn't expect apples to fall out of any aperture of a hen. Klippenstein isn't an idiot and isn't juxtaposing those things thinking otherwise. 

We Have Met the Stupid, and it is Us

 

I have talked about the stupidity of using polling as a "story" for news purposes before. People are measuring opinions, but you can't measure facts. If an opinion is just wrong as to the facts, what did you learn? People might not answer honestly. They might be just vibing and have never thought about your question before. It might be useful for a news organization to see what sorts of things the public needs to be more educated about--but is it news?

Look, the above chart is from two years ago, about when I wrote the post I linked to. Yougov.com found that people wildly misestimate the size of various groups. When you see that people are estimating 21% of the population is transgender, bathroom panic starts to make more sense, until you ask yourself if people responding to the question even really understand fractions. Do people really think one out of five people are trans? Do they think like one in four are Muslim, and that one in three are atheist? 

These numbers don't jibe with anything in people's actual lived experiences. What this poll shows is that people are innumerate. Their mental math is broken. They aren't converting their concept of how many people per are anything--they are just really bad contestants on "The Price is Right".  

School Re-Openings Appear to Be a Grim Farce

Earlier today, Trump said something so astonishingly untrue that social media companies had to call him on it (a rarity): he said that children were "virtually immune" to COVID-19.

Well, that certainly isn't true. They may not be as likely to get ill from the disease, but many still do and death is still a possibility. Some children experience grave immune reactions that can lead to organ dysfunction and death. And, given that this is a novel disease, we don't know what the long-term affects might be, but it appears that people who had mild cases may still experience heart, lung, and neurological consequences for long after--and it is not clear that experiencing an infection necessarily results in long-term immunity.

What is understood, and is pretty disturbing, is that children can carry high viral loads of COVID-19 and are pretty efficient at spreading it.  So, if you take a look at the graphic above, cadged from this Buzzfeed piece, you can understand pretty well how this ordinary school hallway could be a rich disease vector. All of these kids have teachers, counselors, maintenance staff, administrative staff at school that they come into contact with, and then they go home to their families--and no, it really isn't possible to truly socially distance from one's own kids. And kids can tragically lose their parents to this disease, which poses a danger for them even if they remain healthy themselves.

We've already seen how this will play out from episodes like a sleepaway camp where 260 kids became infected. In schools, however, there's more potential for disruption. Take cases where a handful of kids are identified as being infected at any point. That means some kids and likely some teachers will need to quarantine. How many? For how long? This disrupts part of the school year for them--and will be a recurring theme of the the school year. How many teachers/students being out of class due to illness or quarantine make the entire experiment pointless?

And another thing to consider: whether there is incentive for a school for whatever reason to be less than truthful about infection-rate, or to risk kids' and teachers' and parents' exposure for whatever reason. You know, for reasons like concerns about funding, or the importance of school athletics, etc.

Wanting things to be fine don't make them so. Wanting the pandemic to be over with and for life to go back to normal does not make it so. There needs to be a plan for more remote learning and more flexible school hours, and for ways for working parents to find non-school-related adult supervision for their kids. Those would be elements of a realistic school plan--not this forced-normality with barely even PPE requirements.