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I forgot about the insider trading angle, that's a really good point! Though I have been reading today that Trump has been obsessed with tariffs since the 80s.

I'll be a little sad when the 'bring back woke' crowd on Wall Street Bets buys the dip because they also think it's an insider trading scheme, and they get left holding the bag.

Anyway it's a bit late but reminder that the Hands Off! Protests are today, Saturday, April 5th.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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A non New York Post source for how the tariffs rates were calculated:

It gets even stupider... In that post you'll find screenshots purporting to show that if you ask chatGPT et al 'how to easily impose tariffs' this plan is what they all come up with.

Did the admin use gen AI to make their tariff plan? Sure, why not? After pushing out every competent person for not being personally loyal enough to Trump they probably sprung this assignment on a junior staffer and told them they had a couple days to come up with something, and this was the sad result.

That, or they purposefully set out to make the stupidest plan they possibly could, to cause maximum damage to the USA's reputation and place in the center of global trade. Russia and China do want a multipolar world after all.

PS I enjoyed this article explaning why an external territory of Australia has one of the highest tariff rates on the chart:

In some cases involving Norfolk Island, which is 1,600km north-east of Sydney and has a population of 2,188, the confusion appears to have resulted from the fact that the company’s address or port of departure is Norfolk, UK, or the destination is Norfolk, Virginia in the US, or a company’s registered address in New Hampshire (NH) has been listed instead as Norfolk Island (NI).

This administration doesn't care about making good policy and they don't care about doing things right. They just don't.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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Oh hey, there's one of these five minutes away!

I didn't think I'd be able to attend a protest with Ms Newborn but now I think I can.... Awesome.

If you're in the US you should check the list - there are so many of these. Probably over 900 by now.

Everyone who can do this, should do this. We need the numbers to be absolutely massive.

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Oh hey, there's one of these five minutes away!

I didn't think I'd be able to attend a protest with Ms Newborn but now I think I can.... Awesome.

If you're in the US you should check the list - there are so many of these. Probably over 900 by now.

Everyone who can do this, should do this. We need the numbers to be absolutely massive.

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The way these tariffs were calculated, by the way, was more or less to take each country’s trade deficit* with the United States, divide it by two, and stick a percent sign at the end. 

*Where 'trade deficit' is only physical goods, not services. Cause as people have been pointing out, if you include services the US actually has a trade SURPLUS with Canada, and not much of a deficit with Europe (just for example)...

But you know which country we do not have a deficit with, and which is therefore not subject to US tariffs? That's right, Russia. I'm sure that's just a coincidence though.

Just lie on the slide and say it's a reciprocal tariff when it isn't, it's fine, my supporters are stupid and they won't notice.... The sheer level of contempt here....

Anyway, I'm enough of a conspiracy theorist to think that maybe levying huge tariffs against every country in the world EXCEPT Russia, Belarus, Cuba and North Korea was the entire point, and this whole 'trade deficit' thing is just a way to obfuscate that, and sell it to the base.

But, it might be even stupider than that. They might have just asked chatGPT:

These are the same people who are reportedly going to use "AI" to rewrite the entire Social Security administration codebase in a few months, by the way. I'm sure that won't break it. I'm sure that breaking it isn't the ENTIRE POINT of the exercise...

What a fucking stupid timeline we are living in. Can't believe I had to go to grad school after I lost my job in 2008, and change careers, only to end up in another career (education) that's currently seeing huge cuts in federal funding.

How wonderful it is that we are headed into a US and maybe worldwide recession, and all the fields that you might go into to hide from that recession (education, health, academia) are also being targeted.

Fucking fantastic.

10 rules for dealing with Trump’s demands for capitulation https://robertreich.substack.com/p/how-to-deal-with-trumps-demands-for

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Booker's speech was genuinely moving. None of it was meandering or just filling the time.

Think about that - Trump's done so much damage in his first less than 100 days in office that it could have filled MORE than 25 hours.

Anyway. Let's get in some good trouble. The protests on Saturday are going to be massive.

Cory Booker is reading letters from his constituents and tearing up repeatedly and it’s making me cry.

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That was moving ...

We all listened to the last few hours, by the end even the two year old was silent and listening.

Around 6pm I called to say thanks as Booker is my rep, but the mailbox was full.

All of that needed to be said; and more.

It's NOT business as usual, and we DO have to cause some good trouble.

Proud of the Dems tonight. Don't care if this was a "symbolic" move. Symbolic moves are important too.

NJ Democrat senator Cory Booker takes the floor in protest of Trump/Musk, "saying that he will keep going “'as long as I am physically able'.”

“I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able,” Booker said at the outset of his remarks. “I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis.”

“In just 71 days, the president of the United States has inflicted so much harm on Americans’ safety; financial stability; the core foundations of our democracy. “These are not normal times in America. And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate.” -source

I am posting this at 2:30am EST. He has been speaking since 7PM EST. This link (at this moment) is to a live stream.

FUCK YEAH, JERSEY!

So very proud of my state at the moment.

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"Um actually it's not technically a filibuster because he started at the close of business, this is purely symbolic..."

Okay, and now it's almost 2pm the next day and he's still speaking, so now it *is* a filibuster.

NJ Democrat senator Cory Booker takes the floor in protest of Trump/Musk, "saying that he will keep going “'as long as I am physically able'.”

“I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able,” Booker said at the outset of his remarks. “I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis.”

“In just 71 days, the president of the United States has inflicted so much harm on Americans’ safety; financial stability; the core foundations of our democracy. “These are not normal times in America. And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate.” -source

I am posting this at 2:30am EST. He has been speaking since 7PM EST. This link (at this moment) is to a live stream.

FUCK YEAH, JERSEY!

So very proud of my state at the moment.

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Doing some phonebanking with Ms. Newborn asleep on my lap, wish me luck.

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The crux of the anti trans movement is a war on bodily autonomy. They don't want you to have any agency over what you look like, how you dress, who you date, whether to have kids, etc.

They want total control over you. Not just trans people. Not just queer people. You. Everyone.

Trans people are just a scapegoat. They want total control over everyone's self expression. They want the right to mold you into their perfect little cog in their dehumanizing machine.

Happy Trans Day of Visibility. Our rights are your rights. Our destruction is your destruction.

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On this single day, four groups have come together: 50501, Indivisible, Hands Off, and Women’s March.

NOTE: As of Saturday night, 885 protests have been logged. Protests are being added daily.

With the exception of Alaska, every town is within 4 hours or less of at least one protest

This is going to be HUGE. Please attend if you can.

Just today a massive outage at SSA (social security administration) erased disability benefits for children from the online portal. Temporarily? Who knows? Musk and DOGE are reportedly using "AI" to rewrite the entire SSA codebase and these are kids who've never heard of test branches. Anything could happen.

Solidarity on April 5 https://robertreich.substack.com/p/april-5-hands-off-our-healthcare

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This is why you always follow the money.

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FAFO in the most literal sense!!!

Let’s see what happens

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Your body is an incredibly bizarre machine.

“What you see is a myosin protein dragging an endorphin along a filament to the inner part of the brain’s parietal cortex which creates happiness. Happiness. You’re looking at happiness.”

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Postman and a cow

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THE ERA OF VANISHING HAS BEGUN

They are not arresting people. They are vanishing them.

Rumeysa Ozturk wasn’t read her rights. She wasn’t told why she was being detained. She was walking to break her fast in Somerville, Massachusetts when masked men in an unmarked SUV pulled up, took her phone, slapped on handcuffs, and dragged her into a vehicle like she was some kind of national security threat.

She’s a doctoral student. A Fulbright scholar. A trauma researcher. But in Donald Trump’s America, she fit the profile: Muslim, foreign-born, sympathetic to Palestinians.

Now she’s locked in a for-profit detention center in Louisiana, hundreds of miles from her lawyer, after a federal judge specifically said she wasn’t to be moved.

They moved her anyway. Because rules no longer apply to those with badges — real or fake.

A MOVEMENT BUILT ON CHAINS AND COWARDS

Alireza Doroudi is gone too.

He’s a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, born in Iran, studying mechanical engineering. No criminal record. No warning. Just scooped off the grid.

ICE refuses to say where he’s being held. No public charge has been announced. His only crime appears to be existing in the wrong body, from the wrong country, in the wrong era.

Mahmoud Khalil was next — a Columbia student, arrested for leading pro-Palestinian protests. Trump labeled him a “radical foreign Hamas sympathizer” on Truth Social. Days later, he was gone.

Jeanette Vizguerra was taken from her Target shift in Colorado, chained at the waist.

Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, a farmworker organizer, was dragged from his car at dawn in Washington. His window was smashed by federal agents. His voice silenced.

These aren’t isolated incidents. These are deliberate acts of political intimidation.

They are testing the system — testing us — to see how many people they can disappear before we stop calling it democracy.

WHEN ICE IS A BADGE — AND A COSTUME

While the real ICE disappears scholars, organizers, and mothers, the fakes are circling like vultures.

In South Carolina, Sean-Michael Johnson posed as an ICE officer. He pulled over a van of Latino men, screamed slurs, jiggled their keys, and knocked a phone out of someone’s hand. “You’re going back to Mexico!” he shouted. He wasn’t an agent — but he played one with conviction.

In North Carolina, Carl Thomas Bennett used a fake badge to sexually assault a woman at a motel. He told her if she didn’t comply, he’d have her deported. He held up a counterfeit ID and pretended to be the state.

And in Philadelphia, a Temple University student in an “ICE” shirt tried to storm a dorm building with two accomplices. They were dressed for the part, intoxicated by the illusion of authority, emboldened by the climate.

This is what happens when the state makes cruelty a brand. When a badge becomes a fetish object. When the line between enforcement and cosplay disappears altogether.

THE WHOLE SYSTEM IS THE CRIME

Let’s stop pretending this is a coincidence.

This is a unified strategy. The Trump administration is using ICE like a personal strike force — targeting international students, protest leaders, organizers, and mothers with surgical precision.

They invoke secret designations. They bypass due process. They manufacture pretexts out of thin air and rely on the fog of bureaucracy to hide the blood on the floor.

The point isn’t law enforcement. The point is deterrence. Spectacle. Control.

This is what political cleansing looks like when it’s dressed up in the language of national security.

They’re showing the world that resistance has a cost — and the cost is your freedom, your voice, your visibility, your future.

SILENCE IS CONSENT. AND WE ARE LOUD.

There is no middle ground here. No fence to sit on. No neutral position when people are being kidnapped in the name of the state.

ICE doesn’t need your applause. It needs your silence. Every time a student vanishes and the media shrugs, every time a woman is cuffed and the public looks away, the machine gets stronger.

They are daring us to ignore it. They are counting on our numbness. They are betting that we’ll keep scrolling.

We cannot let them win.

This is not border policy. This is not visa enforcement. This is not safety.This is authoritarianism with a PowerPoint presentation.This is fascism disguised as formality.

This is the state stripping people from the land and pretending it’s order.

Let the record show:

They took people.

And we did not look away.

We saw it.

We named it.

We raised hell.

And we did not stop.

(I didn’t write this. Credit goes to Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge)

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Virtual town halls.

There's some other virtual events too, like phone banking for Wisconsin (to keep a dem majority on the state supreme court which will decide the voting maps for the next decade), or learning about changes to the dept of education.

Whether i can attend depends on Ms newborn, but I'm going to attend as many of these as I can. Especially since I can't do the in person protests ATM.