President Trump, speaking at the White House, gave direct and unproven medical advice contradicting decades of research about vaccines and the use of a common painkiller in pregnancy and infancy. … Medical experts, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, stressed that acetaminophen is safe.
Acetaminophen toxicity is the second most common cause of liver transplantation worldwide and the most common cause of liver failure in the United States. Responsible for 56,000 emergency department visits and 2600 hospitalizations, acetaminophen poisoning causes 500 deaths annually in the United States. Notably, around 50% of these poisonings are unintentional, often resulting from patients misinterpreting dosing instructions or unknowingly consuming multiple acetaminophen-containing products.
I recently purchased some acetaminophen. The CVS brand expired nearly a year after the Tylenol-brand Tylenol. Maybe it would be worth paying more money and accepting the shorter expiration date in exchange for a U.S.-made product? The CVS bottle said “Made in India”. The Tylenol-brand bottle said “Active ingredient made in India.” When did Americans forget how to make common chemicals such as this one?
As we all sit and think about the tariff decision today, let us all remember why this is being litigated in the first place. Anyone who has read a contract knows that the first part quite often contains definitions.
The law that is the Administration’s basis for the tariffs said that the President could “regulate” trade in certain circumstances. “Regulate” was not defined. So most of this was about whether the word “regulate” included tariffs.
All of this could have been avoided if any of the mediocre (or worse) lawyers in Congress had defined the word “regulate.” Instead billions of dollars of tariffs have been collected and industry has been put in turmoil because the idiotic mediocre lawyers in Congress could not define their terms.
So the next time you ask for these utter fools to pass a law to save the country, please remember this moment.
Years before Lisa Cook became President Trump’s latest target in his effort to exert control over the Federal Reserve, she wrote about her experience as one of a relative handful of Black women in a field long dominated by white men.
“Economics is neither a welcoming nor a supportive profession for women,” she and a colleague wrote in a New York Times opinion essay in 2019. She added, “But if economics is hostile to women, it is especially antagonistic to Black women.”
According to a new analysis of voter registration data, Democrat economists at the Federal Reserve outnumber Republicans 10 to 1. The imbalance is even larger among economists in leadership positions, among younger economists, and among female economists.
Previous studies look at the political ideologies of the broader economic profession. For instance, Langbert, Quain, and Klein (2016) report that Democrats outnumber Republicans 4.5:1 among economics faculty at 40 leading universities. In addition, Langbert (2020) finds a ratio of 4:1 among members of the American Economic Association (AEA), 4.1:1 among academic AEA members, and 2.5:1 among AEA members working outside academia and government. Earlier, Klein and Stern (2006) estimateds the ratio at 4.1:1 among public sector economists and 1.4:1 among private sector economists. McEachern (2006) shows Democrats outnumber Republicans 5.1:1 among AEA members in terms of political contributions.
I find that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among Fed economists is 10.4 to 1. The lack of political diversity is especially pronounced at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (48.5:1). Economists at regional Reserve banks range from 3:1 (Cleveland) to 12:1 (San Francisco). The lack of diversity is also noteworthy in leadership positions (22.25:1). Economists who are 40 years old or younger at the Fed are more likely to lean left (20.33:1), as are female economists (27.5:1). This suggests the Fed is likely to become even less politically diverse in time.
We are informed that if Republicans were eliminated (liquidated?) the U.S. would become a paradise of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Yet it seems that the discrimination that has kept and continues to keep qualified Black women from assuming leadership positions at the Fed has been almost entirely perpetrated by Democrats.
The righteous recently have complained that Donald Trump is trying to reduce crime in Washington, D.C. where the murder rate is only about 27 per 100,000 in the most recent statistics, down from 40 per 100,000 in 2023. That’s almost perfect safety, we are told, and therefore Trump is plainly motivated by a combination of racism (AP, below) and a grand plan to transition to full dictatorship.
The same people who say that D.C. is perfectly safe tell us that people from Colombia, Guatemala, South Sudan, Venezuela, El Salvador, Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan are entitled to asylum in the U.S. (and four generations of welfare if they want it) because their home countries aren’t safe. What do their home countries have in common? All have murder rates lower than Washington, D.C.’s (Wikipedia).
I’m still baffled by the Democrats who say that Donald Trump is Hitler 2.0 and yet won’t wish him dead. But at least some are logical.
For example, here’s a 2/28/2025 Facebook post from a Democrat (my late mother’s cousin) who previously explicitly compared Trump to Hitler and who makes the logical inference:
In mid-January, a colleague and I disagreed on when and why Elon Musk would leave the U.S. government. He said that Donald Trump would get into a fight with Elon and fire him. I said that Elon Musk would quit after he realized that it was impossible to cut federal spending because the enemy is mostly us (i.e., Americans who want the world’s largest welfare state, as a percentage of GDP (we were #2 behind France before the coronapanic enhancements)). We made a friendly bet that I would win if Elon hadn’t been fired by the end of February 2025.
Isn’t it my colleague/friend who lost the bet? Elon was still in Washington, D.C. at the end of February. That’s true, of course, but the fight between the two guys has become so personal that I think it is also fair to say that my friend was correct and I am the loser of the bet.
Which of these two is correct? Neither Elon Musk nor Donald Trump (nor anyone else) has a crystal ball and, therefore, neither one can be proven correct or incorrect. They have different assumptions about future GDP growth, apparently. I am a pessimist so I agree with Elon Musk. Given that the U.S. has turned itself into a shelter for tens of millions of humans from the world’s least successful societies (latest example: Mohamed Sabry Soliman plus his wife and five children; previous example: “Maryland father” Kilmar Abrego Garcia) I don’t see how we are going to have significant per capita GDP growth (even immigrants who earned as much as native-born Americans wouldn’t solve our fiscal problems; see “immigrants age too” in Aporia). But Trump the Optimist could turn out to be right, e.g., if the AI boom turns out to be real.
Although I agree with Elon on the likely deficit trajectory, I disagree with him on what is at stake. Congress isn’t locked into any particular tax or spending policy. If the GDP growth forecast by Donald Trump does not materialize, Congress and President AOC can work together to raise taxes, e.g., a 20 percent federal value-added tax plus a $1/mile fee to travel on interstate highways. Congress and President AOC could eliminate the current unlimited charitable deduction, which is enabling Bill Gates to deprive the U.S. Treasury of at least $40 billion in capital gains taxes as he sends all of his accumulated wealth to deserving Africans (DW). Congress could even, in some alternate universe, cut spending! Congress could say, for example, that no more than 10 percent of Americans can be on welfare (means-tested housing, Medicaid, SNAP/EBT, or Obamaphone) at any one time. The safety net would then be for unusual situations, not for the average American. (Of course, this is a fantasy!)
Related:
“The Medicaid program is the largest single source of health care coverage in the United States, covering nearly half of all children, over 40% of births” (source); i.e., nearly half of Americans are born via welfare and continue on welfare (imagine a circus with a “safety net” into which roughly half the performers fall)
Continuing our coverage of National Immigrant Heritage Month for those who celebrate…
Below is a friend who used to live in a 93% white part of Maskachusetts. He fled to a 95% white region of New Hampshire, a U.S. state that is perfect for those who wish to avoid encountering our Latinx brothers, sisters, and binary resisters. Wokipedia says that Keene, NH is enriched by only 1.6% Latinx. His Facebook post:
Spotted at the rally for democracy in Keene NH today. Note my hat showing support for Artificial Intelligence in our schools.
It’s a mystery to me that people who’ve chosen to live a Latinx-free lifestyle are this passionate about ensuring that other parts of the U.S. receive maximum enrichment. As part of my effort to be defriended by 100 percent of Facebook users, of course I asked “Nobody could persuade a Black or Latinx person to join the rally?” Response 1: “My wife tells me that I should just let it go and not engage with people who may not be well-informed, so I hereby disengage.” Response 2 (from one of his friends, with an unknown gender ID but a conventionally male Jewish name): “No pearls to swine!”
Here’s a video from Portland, Maine. Even after importing half of Somalia, the righteous Mainers apparently couldn’t find a single Black person to join their (mostly unmasked) mass gathering:
Hey @ICEgov, this woman who was speaking in Portland, Maine today was instructing people to interfere with and obstruct ICE.
Eighty-eight years ago today, on May 26, 1938, the Nazi Party’s union labor organization laid the foundation stone of the first Volkswagen factory. Adolf Hitler was present to witness this step in his 1933 vision becoming a reality. (DW) And, of course, today is Memorial Day where we remember Americans who died in our fight to strip the Germans of their empire (a fight that might not have been necessary if we and the British had stayed out of World War I?).
Let’s have a look at a cherished survivor of this company’s output, spotted here in Jupiter, Florida:
It seems to have one of the 5 mph bumpers that NHTSA required from 1973-1982 so perhaps it is a second generation (1967-79) bus, beloved by hippies, anti-war agitators, Grateful Dead fans, etc. Here’s the surprise…
A Facebook friend and social acquaintance from my Cambridge days, Lisa Randall, penned an article for the Boston Globe about how working class federal taxpayers should be forced to keep feeding a rich university in a rich state:
the Trump administration has done what has seldom been done before: unified the faculty behind a common, unwavering defense of academic freedom and their unrelenting belief in the value of universities, particularly their own.
(Remember that part of “academic freedom” is the freedom to use the peasants’ tax dollars to run racially segregated theaters, e.g., from 2021:
She posted a link to the article on Facebook. One of her friends, apparently a Deplorable, said “Not one penny of my tax$ for a $50B endowment woke factory thanks”. I trotted out my standard line about how it was unclear why Harvard, which officially says that inequality is “one of America’s most vexing problems”, would want or accept any federal money. Shouldn’t Harvard want to fund itself via donations from the rich and from state taxes and see federal money spent at universities that are in poorer-than-average states, e.g., in Michigan, Ohio, and Mississippi (stats on median household income by state; DC at the very top, of course, and Maskachusetts and New Jersey right underneath due to Medicare/Medicaid buying pharma and the Department of Education subsidizing universities)? I cited this 2016 piece from the Harvard Gazette, which calls itself “the official news website for Harvard University”.
The responses from her friends opened an interesting window into how academic elites think:
I was called “the dullest knife in the block” for thinking that an article in the Harvard Gazette by a “Harvard Staff Writer” and containing a series intro likely written by an editor was in any way related to an official Harvard position. It was an mere “opinion” piece and represented only the opinion of that one writer. (Which would mean that Harvard officially thinks that inequality is good? Or Harvard doesn’t think inequality is bad?)
Research grants should be allocated by merit and not by geography or wealth. An unstated assumption seemed to be that a Harvard lab couldn’t move if Harvard failed to secure private/state funding to replace the federal funding. Although it is, in fact, common for entire labs to move when a professor moves for whatever reason, the Harvard folks couldn’t imagine anyone leaving Harvard to follow the money. Our neighborhood here in Florida actually is periodically a destination for a moved lab, e.g., this neuroscience lab that moved in 2023 from University of California. Florida State University beat MIT in a competition to host the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in 1990 and the New York Times said FSU was “expected to draw scientists in biology, physics and engineering from all over the world”. Another NYT article said “M.I.T. felt that it deserved the project”. Today, the Chief Scientist down at FSU’s lab is Laura H. Greene while the hidebound MIT magnet lab is run by a white male, Robert Griffin.
A giant-brained Ph.D. participant from California disputed that Michigan was any poorer than Maskachusetts (Wokipedia says that MA median household income is nearly 50 percent higher than in MI). For those who only fly over the Midwest, it’s apparently plausible that the Rust Belt state and its biggest city of Detroit are both in prime fiscal condition.
The idea that the peasants of Michigan would benefit if $2 billion/year in federal money were redirected to, for example, University of Michigan from Harvard was questioned. Nobody but me was able to see that Michigan would be better off it were able to collect state income tax, property tax, and sales tax from the people paid by the $2 billion/year in grants. Nor that when those researchers went out to local retailers that the state would once again be able to collect more tax revenue as the retailers staffed up. (They would probably argue that the move of Citadel from Chicago to Miami didn’t hurt Chicago and didn’t help Miami (the Miami HQ for Citadel is expected to cost “$1 billion-plus” (translation: $2 billion?); imagine the cost for the building permit on this 54-story tower!).)
Here’s the HTML title tag for the Harvard Gazette:
<title>Harvard Gazette – Official news from Harvard University covering innovation in teaching, learning, and research — Harvard Gazette</title>
and here’s how it is rendered by Google when one searches:
Maybe the courts will block Donald Trump’s attempt to redirect the working class’s tax dollars to universities other than Harvard and similar. But if Trump does succeed, I think the elite schools and their elite graduates will be completely blindsided. Even after being told by the U.S. Supreme Court that they’re violating the U.S. Constitution by discriminating on the basis of race (especially against Asians), these schools imagine themselves to have gotten rich by being more virtuous than anyone else. A few fun points from the Boston Globe article…
We wouldn’t understand DNA if the working class didn’t fund Harvard:
The nature of DNA was discovered by an X-ray crystallographer, Rosalind Franklin, who was doing pure research to understand its molecular structure. Under the current funding crisis, Franklin might well have been laid off before making her groundbreaking discovery that accounts for much of modern medical research.
It is unclear how Rosalind Franklin, a British Jew working in pre-Islamic Britain with funding from a private company (Wokipedia says Turner & Newall), would have been disadvantaged by a change in where U.S. taxpayer money is spent.
The subtitle of the article is an interesting window into how elites think: “What happens when research is fully privatized?” There hasn’t been any proposal from the Trump dictatorship, or indeed anyone in Washington, D.C., to “fully privatize” research funding. The current dictatorship merely wants to take away money from the Queers for Palestine League schools that fail to comply with the dictator’s reading of the U.S. Constitution. Presumably the money taken away from Harvard would then be spent at schools that don’t engage in race discrimination, don’t support Hamas, etc. See, for example, “University of Florida denies appeal of pro-Palestinian student protester’s suspension” and “Protesters handcuffed, arrested at FSU amid nationwide demonstrations against Israel-Hamas War”.
With the hated dictator threatening to defund NPR (NBC), let’s have a quick survey regarding favorite NPR articles for the working class taxpayer to fund.
Here’s one that I received recently from a friend in San Francisco (he’s a closeted Deplorable because diversity is our biggest strength and also anyone who didn’t vote Democrat has to be fired):
The peasants had to pay the following elites, apparently, to obtain this valuable lesson:
“It’s Time To Up Your Mask Game” (NPR, August 2021): since every American who wants the proven-perfect COVID-19 vaccine has already had it… “Wear two masks”
