Castle Magus

"Hi. What a day for Cody Johnston to have jury duty! On today's episode, Some More News head writer Dave Bell joins Katy and Jonathan to talk about all the angry, petty, childish tweets sent by two people who also happen to be the most powerful person and the richest person on the planet. (Also: Cody shows up for five minutes on his juror lunch break to join in the fun!)"

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Good hedge of bets to posit that they might be friends again by the time this video was released. However, fortunately for the rest of us, Trump and Musk are still not friends anymore. Hell, even I didn't know it had gotten quite so bad between these two gargantuan manbabies. But then, I don't have an account on either """""Truth""""" Social or on 卐, so... *shrug*

Here's something that occurred to me as I was watching this (and I kind of expected them to actually mention it, too, but they never did): rather than fighting Mark Zuckerberg, maybe Phony Stark could cage fight Dumbshit Jackass instead? I'd much rather see that fight than any Musk vs Zuck one (as long as it ended in permanently debilitating, possibly fatal injuries for both combatants).

(EDIT) And for all the liberals/Democrats writing "think" pieces about should we accept Musk "back," now that he's on the outs with Trump... hell to the fuck no on that one, good buddy. The Left never "had" Elon to start with. He's always been a shitheel. He just used to do a better job of hiding it. Let his ass twist in the wind. (/EDIT)

Also, guys, you do know you could do an episode specifically about Peter Thiel and Palantir[1], right? You're saying here that "nobody knows who Peter Thiel is" and that "maybe the guy backed by Peter Thiel probably shouldn't have been the vice president" and all that, so... make an episode explicitly about that shit. I mean, you've already mentioned it as asides in several other episodes, but do a whole-ass episode just about that topic. Granted, the eyes and ears that really need to see and hear it would never do so, but still, it's better than just lamenting that "nobody knows who Peter Thiel is."

[1] - Seriously, what is it with right-wing kooks and directly naming their asinine horseshit after easily corruptible and evil magical artifacts from fictional stories? What's next, Trump or Musk or somebody unveiling a literal Torment Nexus? (I mean, Trump just being the president is already a Torment Nexus in its own way, in all but name, but still.)

"He bristles at the acronym TACO, which stands for 'Trump always chickens out.'"

Poor widdle manbaby.

That photo of him at the top of the article depicts how everyone else feels about still being the SCROTUS IMPOTUS (at least those of us who aren't among his lickspittles, and maybe even them, at this point).

Anyway, to hell forever with Donald Trump, as usual.

"Hi. On today's episode, Katy, Cody, and Jonathan discuss the Trump administration's ongoing, lawless kidnappings, Kilmar Abrego Garcia and other disappeared individuals, and why Democrats should not avoid this issue. They also talk about Elon Musk's weird 'legion' compound and RFK Jr's offensive comments about people with autism."

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This is the first time I've watched an episode of the extra podcast associated with Some More News. I might start making this a regular thing. Maybe. I'd almost prefer it to the official show, in many respects. Certainly way less puppets (well, aside from Warmbo being creepily in the background of every fullscreen shot with Cody, anyway) and skits, at any rate.

Yeah, I read an article about Senator Chris Van Hollen's trip to El Salvador to see Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and the last sentence in that article was "Some high-profile Democrats have opted to keep the focus on the economic backlash to Trump's sweeping tariffs, which polling suggests is much more of a political liability to the president than his ongoing efforts to deport immigrants." Which is just asinine. Come on, guys, you can uselessly, performatively hand-wring and pearl-clutch about more than just one thing at a time, you know, you fucking milquetoast namby-pambies.

Ah... so that is real reason why Elon Musk bought Twitter? How fucking bizarre and putrid.

Also, holy shit, I've never actually heard RFK Jr. talk before. I mean, I kind of wanted to make fun of it, because RFK Jr. is a fucking ghoul, but I looked up the reason why, and I'm not going to mock the guy for having a neurological disorder. I'm not (thank the heavens) Donald Trump, after all. Besides, there's plenty of other things to mock RFK Jr. for, such as his completely dumbshit, vile beliefs about vaccines and autism.

"Hi. Uh oh! In this episode – which we wrote and shot before the current tariff/market troubles – we look at how the U.S. and other nations measure economic success, and how that often doesn't square with our individual experiences of The Economy."

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(Yes, I foresee that many future episodes will likely need a "Sorry, but we recorded this video before Trump went and made things even worse" disclaimer in front of it. Even without taking the most recent, even worse bullshit into consideration, though, the above video is still fucking dire.)

So people thought the economy was terrible during Biden's presidency, when it actually wasn't that bad? Gee, I wonder, could that be because Donald Trump and Donald Trump's asinine lickspittles spewed lies about it for four solid years (and, you know, actively torpedoed it during the previous four solid years [thanks in part to COVID and to Trump's abysmally nadiral response to COVID], as a kind of practice run for what they're doing now)? Yes, that is why.

And yeah, none of that really matters that much, because bragging that inflation is going down is, indeed, kind of like bragging that the amount of piss in the soup you serve is going down. Even if you weren't the one who pissed in all the soup to begin with. People are still going to blame you for serving piss-filled soup. And then, you know, maybe reelect the original soup-pisser, so that he can now not only piss in the soup but straight up take a diarrhetic shit in it, too. For some reason.

Or maybe we can switch up the metaphor from piss soup to instead be about a train speeding in the wrong direction, which Biden managed to slow down but not actually stop. A Trump Train, if you will. That works, too. And now, that guy has been put back in the driver's seat, again. Go goddamned figure.

I'll just say it, again (same as Cody says it here). If the economy was "good" under Trump (until he wrecked it), it was thanks to Obama. And if the economy was "bad" under Biden (until he kind of almost sort of fixed it but not really), it was "thanks" to Trump. And if the economy is "good" under Trump II... nah, I can't even finish that, because he hasn't even completed his "first 100 days" yet, and he's already fucking launched a trilithium missile at the economy. I wonder if Trump thinks the Nexus is going to absorb him as a result. Who knows? Trump is a delusional motherwannabe-daughterfucker, after all. In any case, he'll be leaving behind a shattered economy, regardless.

Democrats, generally, are better for the economy than the GQP is. Yet... we keep electing GQP dumbshits to positions of power. Why is that? *shrug* I'unno. I guess because, as Cody says, what the Democrats do is good, but not good enough. And, thus, fickle voters kick them out to give the other side a try, again, even though the other side has been consistently, demonstrably worse, every time. The only thing that has been truly consistent throughout the past 3 or 4 decades or more, though, is that the obscenely rich have gotten obscenely richer and the downtrodden poor have gotten more downtrodden and more poor. Prices continue to creep up and wages continue to remain mostly stagnant. And yeah, there are way more subscription services (and all that other stuff that Cody mentioned) than there used to be. *eye roll, but not really*

People (wrongly) see Trump as the solution to "the bigger picture," even though he clearly has made, clearly is making, and clearly will continue to make everything so very much worse. Because he's a liar and a grifter and a conman and a criminal who only cares about one person, and that person is Donald Trump. And he's also a complete and total fucking dumbass who has absolutely zero clue what the hell he's doing, being coattails-ridden and heavily influenced by vile, disgusting, evil shitsmears on the underwear of humanity who absolutely do know what they're doing, and what they're doing is vile, disgusting, and evil. There's that, too. (And that's not even bringing Putin into the picture, though that, too, is definitely a factor in play here. Very little would tickle Putin's pecker than to see the US economy bottom out as a direct result of the actions taken by his obvious puppet.)

Anyway, yeah, an economy based on all growth, all the time, is completely unsustainable in the long run. But... well, as long as it makes billionaires even richer in the short run... what can the rest of us do about it? *shrug* (Hmm, I wonder when Some More News will do a two-hour episode about Peter Thiel. Assuming they haven't already and I just missed it.)

I am shocked (shocked, I say) that Trump didn't include Russia in his daft tariffs. *eye roll*

A post on Whatever dot Scalzi dot com.

It's about Trump and Trump's atrocious tariffs and how Trump's atrocious tariffs (and every other heinous thing the Trump """""administration""""" is doing) are going to affect the average US citizen. It's certainly not great.

At least there's a picture of a cat at the end, I guess?