I have a t-shirt from Live 8, bought from a dude on the street, now usually worn while mowing my lawn. I only attended on the periphery in Philadelphia. It was a hot day.
Being in the middle of however-many-thousands of people wasn't appealing. But it was still a lot of fun hanging out in nearby establishments and cooling off in the AC. That whole part of town was jumping.
One thing that made me apoplectic was watching coverage from London of the Pink Floyd reunion in a slacker bar, when MTV decided to break in midsong during Comfortably Numb so some 20-year-old nitwit could yammer on about nothing.
I wanted to throw my glass at the TV, but it wasn't the bar's fault.
I've just finished watching the CNN/BBC three part documentary about the 40th anniversary of Live Aid, whose two concerts (London and Philadelphia) took place 40 years ago today and were watched by something like 1.5/2 billion people. The first part (all of which was very familiar to me) was mainly about how it all began, and the single Band Aid brought out, which also led to We Are The World. The second part was about the Live Aid concerts, and how they were organised and what happened, which again I knew a lot about (and had watched the whole thing).
The third part was about Live8, which led to the cancellation by the G8 of African debt payments, and vastly increased international aid budgets. I knew comparatively little about it, and it was completely fascinating, particularly politically, seeing the interviews with George W Bush, Blair, Condoleeza Rice et al, as well as hearing some of the criticisms. For anyone not interested enough in watching the first two parts, I nevertheless strongly recommend the third. Here is a guest link to a piece in today's NYT about the anniversary, and the documentary: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/13/arts/music/live-aid-bob-geldof-anniversary.html?unlocked_article_code=1.WE8.c0_h.2CwG2nKJUmpQ&smid=url-share
Further to russell's comments about Ringo, he (and others) might like this, by T Bone Burnett: "Ringo was the fire, totally the fire underneath that band. I think of what McCartney said, that the first song they played with Ringo, they all just looked at each other. Because he was the soul of rock ‘n’ roll, man. That cat, his energy was so beautiful and so exciting and wild — just his whole, his spirit is the thing he had. He played with Sister Rosetta Tharp, you know? He played with all of this ecstatic music that would come through Liverpool. And he is an ecstatic musician. The Beatles were all ecstatic musicians, you know, but Ringo was the fire under it.
"To me, he has as good a claim as anybody to the greatest rock ‘n’ roll drummer of all times, with his tones, the way he hit the drums, the type of beats he played, the way he would construct drum parts where nothing would be playing straight through . . . Ringo was an extraordinary musician."
Most western metro areas are constrained by "they're not making any more attractive land" for a long time. Boulder, CO began fencing itself in with permanent open space purchases back in the 1940s, I believe. Lots of empty land east of Denver, but (a) the climate degrades quickly as you go that way and (b) there are no meaningful water rights that come with the land. Many of the neighborhoods burned in the LA fires had been built right up to the foothills by the 1950s and 1960s.
There are a lot of pictures around of those neighborhoods with isolated houses still standing. Invariably, those houses are on lots where someone scraped off the old house and build new to contemporary codes. We know (and require) so much more in the way of fire resistance and energy efficiency than we used to.
We see similar pictures every time a hurricane goes through a piece of the Gulf Coast that hasn't been hit directly for 25-30 years. Everything flattened except where the old house was scraped off and replaced.
That's because you don't have Amazon Prime. Being #2, you aren't prime, which means you have to try harder.**
** For those outside the US, back in the day (and, for all I know, today) Hertz was the biggest car rental company. Avis, the next largest, advertised "We're #2, We try harder."
Used to work for a homebuilder in the Denver Metro. They were all about how much more a square foot of home was worth than a square foot of property. They'd buy a parcel of land and then figure out just how many homes they could tile onto it that were in the center of the bell curve for size and trendy features. They would pare down the lot sizes until they had the maximum number of (unnecessarily large) houses they could fit into the space.
FWIW, that's also the way of it in Southern California. The development philosophy is the same, but the climate and the demographics make for differences in home design.
But both places are run by the same real estate mafia.
And that's just the regional aspect.
My friend the anthropologist says that the suburbs of any two metro areas from Denver west are more alike than they are like anywhere else in the country. One way could be demonstrated once the Census Bureau made it possible to measure density based on "built area" rather than county area. Suburbs in the major metro areas in the West are just about twice as dense, on average, as suburbs in the rest of the country.
I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but when we were moving from New Jersey to the west Denver suburbs, my first observation was, "they really cram the houses close together here".
I can't wait for the ocean to swallow Mar-A-Lago like a bad case of reflux.
Personally, I'd like to see the site become a sewage treatment plant. (A real one, not a metaphor.) Give the cult a focus for pilgrimages.
But your alternative does have merit. Not to mention a high probability.
Meanwhile, in "stuff that pisses off nous": https://www.propublica.org/article/newtok-alaska-climate-relocation Federal auditors have warned for years that climate relocation projects need a lead agency to coordinate assistance and reduce the burden on local communities. The Biden administration tried to address those concerns by creating an interagency task force led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Interior Department. The task force’s report in December also called for more coordination and guidance across the federal government as well as long-term funding for relocations.
But the Trump administration has removed the group’s report from FEMA’s website and, as part of its withdrawal of climate funding, frozen millions in federal aid that was supposed to pay for housing construction in Mertarvik this summer. The administration did not respond to a request for comment.
These fucking people...
I can't wait for the ocean to swallow Mar-A-Lago like a bad case of reflux.
I am taking a break from this site.
We all need a break now and then.
Just chiming in to say it'd be our loss if you were to make that permanent.
Thanks for hanging with us.
Well, I'm up to just under 1500 miles on the electric mountain bike. No problems with it so far (Trek Fuel EXe), and just about to change tires for the first time. Had it in the bike shop once so far to get the suspension serviced - not an inexpensive prospect, but far less expensive than replacing a shock or a fork.
Just did my favorite ride again this week - 18 miles with a bit over 2000 feet of climbing. Went in the morning as soon as the trails open and passed a Great Horned Owl sitting beside the trail and staring at me.
Just ordered a 529 Garage shield to put on my bike to protect it from theft. Have it registered at project529.com in case it goes missing.
Been doing a bit of research for gravel/ bikepacking bikes or a dropbar MTB that I might want to pick up if we are forced to retire and move someplace more flat. If there is anything good to be said for getting a full suspension emtb, it's that once you shell out for that, the price of a fancy modern gravel bike seems completely reasonable and the mechanicals seem dead simple.
Thinking of getting some bike mechanic training for retirement. Might volunteer at a community bike shop.
FWIW, Donald, I didn't take lj's initial commentary as being aimed at you in particular, but rather being more meta-commentary about the current media environment.
Yes, I know it may have been a shock, I do meta-commentary so rarely that everyone was probably totally confused. (I am assuming we are all channelling Joni Ernst at this point)
I think you are quite well informed, Donald, and trust your information.
I do too, and I notice that when you are not particularly knowledgeable about a subject, you say so.
there are simply no "good" Republicans today, and they need to be politically neutralized root and branch, even the one's who wj avers are "good ones".
If they were "good" they would not be Republicans.
I'd agree with you that there are no good Republicans on the national level, I think the situation is a bit different on the local level. Not that there aren't a lot of terrible local Republican office holders. Just that there are also some good ones.
You suggest that, if they were good, they wouldn't be Republicans. But that's simplistic. In some areas, the Republican primary essentially is the general election. If you want to hold office and do some good, you run as a Republican. (If tilting at windmills is your thing, you run as a Democrat.) Gerrymandering has made that worse. But it would be true in a lot of places even without that.
The other thing is, most people find it hard to change parties. Call it psychological momentum or something. But even if their voting habits in the general election shift, they resist changing their party registration.
It's even harder if you are already an elected official. It can be done; my Congressman was originally elected to the state legislature as a Republican. But it's hard. And you probably need some years in office to build a personal brand to get you through.
I might accept that good young people, in a lot of places, would find it hard to look at the current Republican Party (especially as the national party is so high profile) and register with them. Twenty years down the line, that will make your observation more true. But there will still be places where you can't get elected and do good, especially the first few times, without the label.
I've been thinking about inequality and authoritarian voting and pondering what research has been done to measure this effect. I'm linking to this op ed in the Guardian from George Monbiot not so much for his opinion and commentary as for his having gathered a lot of useful and publicly available research on the topic. There is strong evidence of a causal association between growing inequality and the rise of populist authoritarian movements. A paper in the Journal of European Public Policy found that a one-unit rise in the Gini coefficient (a standard measure of inequality) increases support for demagogues by 1%.
Why might this be? There are various, related explanations: feelings of marginalisation, status anxiety and social threat, insecurity triggering an authoritarian reflex and a loss of trust in other social groups. At the root of some of these explanations, I feel, is something deeply embedded in the human psyche: if you can’t get even, get mean. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/13/trump-populists-human-nature-economic-growth
You can't see it in the excerpt I quoted above, but Monbiot links to eight academic studies to establish the claims he makes in these two paragraphs and to support his own claim that this is about disaffection.
I'll also add that there seems to be some argument in political science circles about whether it is inequality itself (measured by the Gini coefficient that Monbiot mentions), or if it is perceptions of fairness around the distribution of economic reward that most drives this shift towards support for retributive authoritarianism.
I think Monbiot has, as he often seems to me to do, oversimplified his conclusion (taking inequality as the marker and not taking on the arguments of which sorts of inequality are most driving the trend), but I also understand that it's hard not to oversimplify when trying to distill so much information and make it accessible in a short piece aimed at a popular press readership.
I suspect that the question is just how bad it will get, and how long it will take us to repair the damage.
The task now is triage. The trend to start reversing extreme concentration of wealth (HSH abv.) is first on the list. Both of our main political parties (aka "elites") have pushed for policies enabling this, but only one of them actively promotes this as a positive political and social goal. https://paulwaldman.substack.com/p/why-they-did-it
That is your Republican Party.
I appreciate wj's standing in for his ideosyncratic concept of "conservatism", but there are simply no "good" Republicans today, and they need to be politically neutralized root and branch, even the one's who wj avers are "good ones".
If they were "good" they would not be Republicans.
As we seem to be approaching the event horizon in our politics, those of us who care are required to take sides.
Gentle reader, I say unto you, "Pick one".
FWIW, Donald, I didn't take lj's initial commentary as being aimed at you in particular, but rather being more meta-commentary about the current media environment.
I agree with lj that the social media algorithms are having a distorting and divisive effect on public discourse and on public policy discussions. That does not mean that I think that there is no good information to be found on X or Substack, it just means that I think these sites make it harder for the average person to practice good media literacy, and that I prefer it when any particular writer/commenter takes the time to either follow information back closer to primary sources or to do some work to evaluate sources and show their reasons for selecting a particular source to cite. I value an ethos built on transparency of information and of biases.
I also recognize that this is a) a more academic, less mainstream attitude to take towards information and b) a lot of work that takes time, and that often pushes one out of the conversation as the back-and-forth of social media flows on.
Having said this, though, it doesn't mean that I think that other commenters and bloggers have poor media literacy skills and that their own views are inevitably biased because their sources do not match my preferences.
I think you are quite well informed, Donald, and trust your information. If I comment on the venue, it's because I want other readers and lurkers to think about their own information literacy practices and not get swept away in the algorithmic current. I know from teaching research that a lot of readers do end up getting swept away.
But we're still a prosperous country. People aren't pushing wheelbarrows full of cash to the grocery store because of hyperinflation. Unemployment remains low.
We're still a prosperous country for now. Whether we remain one rather depends on how Trump's trade wars play out. But individual areas are going to get hit hard, and sooner rather than later.
To take just one example, without USAid, the prairie states are going to get hammered starting next year. The silos are still pretty full from last year's harvest. This fall, they're not going to be able to buy what the farmers produce. Of course some of the grain might be diverted to cattle feed. Except that, with ICE rounding up all the workers from the slaughter houses, the market for cattle will be tanking also. Those states are going to be hurting big-time -- and while Trump might talk about "family farms" on the campaign trail, he's basically a city boy who just doesn't really relate.
Between that and the damage to the vegetable farming here and tariffs on imports from (mostly) Mexico, food prices will be going up. Probably not to hyperinflation levels, but enough that discretionary spending will drop, which will hurt industries far beyond the farm.
That, in turn, will join with the other side of the trade wars (why should they, or can they, buy our stuff if we won't buy theirs?) to kick unemployment up. Some of those unemployed might try some of the agriculture jobs that ICE is opening up. "Try" being the operative word. Farm work is nothing like office work -- I've done it, and I know. Some of the unemployed might eventually get in shape to do it. But even if you spend a lot of time in the gym, that's nothing like doing hard work 40+ hours a week.
Short story shorter, it's going to get ugly. Republican Congress critters may not feel the impact next year. But by 2028, they're going to join the ranks of the unemployed. (And their usual post-Congress positions as lobbyists aren't going to be interested -- few members to the next Congress are going to go anywhere near them.)
So, there's your summary predictions from the resident optimist.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
I have a t-shirt from Live 8, bought from a dude on the street, now usually worn while mowing my lawn. I only attended on the periphery in Philadelphia. It was a hot day.
Being in the middle of however-many-thousands of people wasn't appealing. But it was still a lot of fun hanging out in nearby establishments and cooling off in the AC. That whole part of town was jumping.
One thing that made me apoplectic was watching coverage from London of the Pink Floyd reunion in a slacker bar, when MTV decided to break in midsong during Comfortably Numb so some 20-year-old nitwit could yammer on about nothing.
I wanted to throw my glass at the TV, but it wasn't the bar's fault.
On “Like encountering stone age tribes in the Amazon”
I'm confident that 2 is, in fact, prime.
“This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”
On “An open thread on July 4th”
I've just finished watching the CNN/BBC three part documentary about the 40th anniversary of Live Aid, whose two concerts (London and Philadelphia) took place 40 years ago today and were watched by something like 1.5/2 billion people. The first part (all of which was very familiar to me) was mainly about how it all began, and the single Band Aid brought out, which also led to We Are The World. The second part was about the Live Aid concerts, and how they were organised and what happened, which again I knew a lot about (and had watched the whole thing).
The third part was about Live8, which led to the cancellation by the G8 of African debt payments, and vastly increased international aid budgets. I knew comparatively little about it, and it was completely fascinating, particularly politically, seeing the interviews with George W Bush, Blair, Condoleeza Rice et al, as well as hearing some of the criticisms. For anyone not interested enough in watching the first two parts, I nevertheless strongly recommend the third. Here is a guest link to a piece in today's NYT about the anniversary, and the documentary:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/13/arts/music/live-aid-bob-geldof-anniversary.html?unlocked_article_code=1.WE8.c0_h.2CwG2nKJUmpQ&smid=url-share
On “Like encountering stone age tribes in the Amazon”
I'm confident that 2 is, in fact, prime.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
Further to russell's comments about Ringo, he (and others) might like this, by T Bone Burnett:
"Ringo was the fire, totally the fire underneath that band. I think of what McCartney said, that the first song they played with Ringo, they all just looked at each other. Because he was the soul of rock ‘n’ roll, man. That cat, his energy was so beautiful and so exciting and wild — just his whole, his spirit is the thing he had. He played with Sister Rosetta Tharp, you know? He played with all of this ecstatic music that would come through Liverpool. And he is an ecstatic musician. The Beatles were all ecstatic musicians, you know, but Ringo was the fire under it.
"To me, he has as good a claim as anybody to the greatest rock ‘n’ roll drummer of all times, with his tones, the way he hit the drums, the type of beats he played, the way he would construct drum parts where nothing would be playing straight through . . . Ringo was an extraordinary musician."
On “Like encountering stone age tribes in the Amazon”
The same case with Casanunda the dwarf - the world's second greatest lover.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
Most western metro areas are constrained by "they're not making any more attractive land" for a long time. Boulder, CO began fencing itself in with permanent open space purchases back in the 1940s, I believe. Lots of empty land east of Denver, but (a) the climate degrades quickly as you go that way and (b) there are no meaningful water rights that come with the land. Many of the neighborhoods burned in the LA fires had been built right up to the foothills by the 1950s and 1960s.
There are a lot of pictures around of those neighborhoods with isolated houses still standing. Invariably, those houses are on lots where someone scraped off the old house and build new to contemporary codes. We know (and require) so much more in the way of fire resistance and energy efficiency than we used to.
We see similar pictures every time a hurricane goes through a piece of the Gulf Coast that hasn't been hit directly for 25-30 years. Everything flattened except where the old house was scraped off and replaced.
On “Like encountering stone age tribes in the Amazon”
That's because you don't have Amazon Prime. Being #2, you aren't prime, which means you have to try harder.**
** For those outside the US, back in the day (and, for all I know, today) Hertz was the biggest car rental company. Avis, the next largest, advertised "We're #2, We try harder."
"
I ordered a Stone-Age Tribe on the Amazon, but they said I couldn't get next-day delivery. Zero stars!
On “An open thread on July 4th”
Used to work for a homebuilder in the Denver Metro. They were all about how much more a square foot of home was worth than a square foot of property. They'd buy a parcel of land and then figure out just how many homes they could tile onto it that were in the center of the bell curve for size and trendy features. They would pare down the lot sizes until they had the maximum number of (unnecessarily large) houses they could fit into the space.
FWIW, that's also the way of it in Southern California. The development philosophy is the same, but the climate and the demographics make for differences in home design.
But both places are run by the same real estate mafia.
"
And that's just the regional aspect.
My friend the anthropologist says that the suburbs of any two metro areas from Denver west are more alike than they are like anywhere else in the country. One way could be demonstrated once the Census Bureau made it possible to measure density based on "built area" rather than county area. Suburbs in the major metro areas in the West are just about twice as dense, on average, as suburbs in the rest of the country.
I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but when we were moving from New Jersey to the west Denver suburbs, my first observation was, "they really cram the houses close together here".
On “Plus ça change…”
Maybe some of Musk's space vehicles could drop on it for starters (after installing Grok as steering software).
"
I can't wait for the ocean to swallow Mar-A-Lago like a bad case of reflux.
Personally, I'd like to see the site become a sewage treatment plant. (A real one, not a metaphor.) Give the cult a focus for pilgrimages.
But your alternative does have merit. Not to mention a high probability.
"
Meanwhile, in "stuff that pisses off nous":
https://www.propublica.org/article/newtok-alaska-climate-relocation
Federal auditors have warned for years that climate relocation projects need a lead agency to coordinate assistance and reduce the burden on local communities. The Biden administration tried to address those concerns by creating an interagency task force led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Interior Department. The task force’s report in December also called for more coordination and guidance across the federal government as well as long-term funding for relocations.
But the Trump administration has removed the group’s report from FEMA’s website and, as part of its withdrawal of climate funding, frozen millions in federal aid that was supposed to pay for housing construction in Mertarvik this summer. The administration did not respond to a request for comment.
These fucking people...
I can't wait for the ocean to swallow Mar-A-Lago like a bad case of reflux.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
What russell said.
"
I am taking a break from this site.
We all need a break now and then.
Just chiming in to say it'd be our loss if you were to make that permanent.
Thanks for hanging with us.
On “Plus ça change…”
Well, I'm up to just under 1500 miles on the electric mountain bike. No problems with it so far (Trek Fuel EXe), and just about to change tires for the first time. Had it in the bike shop once so far to get the suspension serviced - not an inexpensive prospect, but far less expensive than replacing a shock or a fork.
Just did my favorite ride again this week - 18 miles with a bit over 2000 feet of climbing. Went in the morning as soon as the trails open and passed a Great Horned Owl sitting beside the trail and staring at me.
Just ordered a 529 Garage shield to put on my bike to protect it from theft. Have it registered at project529.com in case it goes missing.
Been doing a bit of research for gravel/ bikepacking bikes or a dropbar MTB that I might want to pick up if we are forced to retire and move someplace more flat. If there is anything good to be said for getting a full suspension emtb, it's that once you shell out for that, the price of a fancy modern gravel bike seems completely reasonable and the mechanicals seem dead simple.
Thinking of getting some bike mechanic training for retirement. Might volunteer at a community bike shop.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
FWIW, Donald, I didn't take lj's initial commentary as being aimed at you in particular, but rather being more meta-commentary about the current media environment.
Yes, I know it may have been a shock, I do meta-commentary so rarely that everyone was probably totally confused. (I am assuming we are all channelling Joni Ernst at this point)
"
Sorry, that first sentence is a quote from nous, and should have been in italics.
"
I think you are quite well informed, Donald, and trust your information.
I do too, and I notice that when you are not particularly knowledgeable about a subject, you say so.
"
there are simply no "good" Republicans today, and they need to be politically neutralized root and branch, even the one's who wj avers are "good ones".
If they were "good" they would not be Republicans.
I'd agree with you that there are no good Republicans on the national level, I think the situation is a bit different on the local level. Not that there aren't a lot of terrible local Republican office holders. Just that there are also some good ones.
You suggest that, if they were good, they wouldn't be Republicans. But that's simplistic. In some areas, the Republican primary essentially is the general election. If you want to hold office and do some good, you run as a Republican. (If tilting at windmills is your thing, you run as a Democrat.) Gerrymandering has made that worse. But it would be true in a lot of places even without that.
The other thing is, most people find it hard to change parties. Call it psychological momentum or something. But even if their voting habits in the general election shift, they resist changing their party registration.
It's even harder if you are already an elected official. It can be done; my Congressman was originally elected to the state legislature as a Republican. But it's hard. And you probably need some years in office to build a personal brand to get you through.
I might accept that good young people, in a lot of places, would find it hard to look at the current Republican Party (especially as the national party is so high profile) and register with them. Twenty years down the line, that will make your observation more true. But there will still be places where you can't get elected and do good, especially the first few times, without the label.
"
I've been thinking about inequality and authoritarian voting and pondering what research has been done to measure this effect. I'm linking to this op ed in the Guardian from George Monbiot not so much for his opinion and commentary as for his having gathered a lot of useful and publicly available research on the topic.
There is strong evidence of a causal association between growing inequality and the rise of populist authoritarian movements. A paper in the Journal of European Public Policy found that a one-unit rise in the Gini coefficient (a standard measure of inequality) increases support for demagogues by 1%.
Why might this be? There are various, related explanations: feelings of marginalisation, status anxiety and social threat, insecurity triggering an authoritarian reflex and a loss of trust in other social groups. At the root of some of these explanations, I feel, is something deeply embedded in the human psyche: if you can’t get even, get mean.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/13/trump-populists-human-nature-economic-growth
You can't see it in the excerpt I quoted above, but Monbiot links to eight academic studies to establish the claims he makes in these two paragraphs and to support his own claim that this is about disaffection.
I'll also add that there seems to be some argument in political science circles about whether it is inequality itself (measured by the Gini coefficient that Monbiot mentions), or if it is perceptions of fairness around the distribution of economic reward that most drives this shift towards support for retributive authoritarianism.
I think Monbiot has, as he often seems to me to do, oversimplified his conclusion (taking inequality as the marker and not taking on the arguments of which sorts of inequality are most driving the trend), but I also understand that it's hard not to oversimplify when trying to distill so much information and make it accessible in a short piece aimed at a popular press readership.
"
I suspect that the question is just how bad it will get, and how long it will take us to repair the damage.
The task now is triage. The trend to start reversing extreme concentration of wealth (HSH abv.) is first on the list. Both of our main political parties (aka "elites") have pushed for policies enabling this, but only one of them actively promotes this as a positive political and social goal.
https://paulwaldman.substack.com/p/why-they-did-it
That is your Republican Party.
I appreciate wj's standing in for his ideosyncratic concept of "conservatism", but there are simply no "good" Republicans today, and they need to be politically neutralized root and branch, even the one's who wj avers are "good ones".
If they were "good" they would not be Republicans.
As we seem to be approaching the event horizon in our politics, those of us who care are required to take sides.
Gentle reader, I say unto you, "Pick one".
"
FWIW, Donald, I didn't take lj's initial commentary as being aimed at you in particular, but rather being more meta-commentary about the current media environment.
I agree with lj that the social media algorithms are having a distorting and divisive effect on public discourse and on public policy discussions. That does not mean that I think that there is no good information to be found on X or Substack, it just means that I think these sites make it harder for the average person to practice good media literacy, and that I prefer it when any particular writer/commenter takes the time to either follow information back closer to primary sources or to do some work to evaluate sources and show their reasons for selecting a particular source to cite. I value an ethos built on transparency of information and of biases.
I also recognize that this is a) a more academic, less mainstream attitude to take towards information and b) a lot of work that takes time, and that often pushes one out of the conversation as the back-and-forth of social media flows on.
Having said this, though, it doesn't mean that I think that other commenters and bloggers have poor media literacy skills and that their own views are inevitably biased because their sources do not match my preferences.
I think you are quite well informed, Donald, and trust your information. If I comment on the venue, it's because I want other readers and lurkers to think about their own information literacy practices and not get swept away in the algorithmic current. I know from teaching research that a lot of readers do end up getting swept away.
"
But we're still a prosperous country. People aren't pushing wheelbarrows full of cash to the grocery store because of hyperinflation. Unemployment remains low.
We're still a prosperous country for now. Whether we remain one rather depends on how Trump's trade wars play out. But individual areas are going to get hit hard, and sooner rather than later.
To take just one example, without USAid, the prairie states are going to get hammered starting next year. The silos are still pretty full from last year's harvest. This fall, they're not going to be able to buy what the farmers produce. Of course some of the grain might be diverted to cattle feed. Except that, with ICE rounding up all the workers from the slaughter houses, the market for cattle will be tanking also. Those states are going to be hurting big-time -- and while Trump might talk about "family farms" on the campaign trail, he's basically a city boy who just doesn't really relate.
Between that and the damage to the vegetable farming here and tariffs on imports from (mostly) Mexico, food prices will be going up. Probably not to hyperinflation levels, but enough that discretionary spending will drop, which will hurt industries far beyond the farm.
That, in turn, will join with the other side of the trade wars (why should they, or can they, buy our stuff if we won't buy theirs?) to kick unemployment up. Some of those unemployed might try some of the agriculture jobs that ICE is opening up. "Try" being the operative word. Farm work is nothing like office work -- I've done it, and I know. Some of the unemployed might eventually get in shape to do it. But even if you spend a lot of time in the gym, that's nothing like doing hard work 40+ hours a week.
Short story shorter, it's going to get ugly. Republican Congress critters may not feel the impact next year. But by 2028, they're going to join the ranks of the unemployed. (And their usual post-Congress positions as lobbyists aren't going to be interested -- few members to the next Congress are going to go anywhere near them.)
So, there's your summary predictions from the resident optimist.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.