Oh No. MAGA Is Mad That The NYT Shared The Names Of DOGE Staffers. Don’t Share This! Would Be A Shame

« Typically, a crisis drives investors to the safe asset of Treasury bonds. But now a Trump-invented crisis is doing the opposite and driving them away. This is a major problem both because US interest payments on its debt will rise and because it heightens the risk of a financial crisis.

The reason for investors’ flight from US bonds seems obvious — a country run by a “madman” who’s willing to throw millions of business models into chaos on a whim does not seem particularly stable and reliable. The US’s global reputation was the safest place in a storm, but now, Trump is causing the storm, and investors are responding by fleeing the US. »

— Andrew Prokop at Vox.

Donald Trump's craziness is weakening the demand for US Treasury bonds. The alarming flight away from these bonds is what made him flip flop on a majority of tariffs.

In general, Trump is making the US economy look frightening rather than a safe haven.

This is what happens when you put a demented narcissistic nutcase with six bankruptcies in charge of the world's largest economy.

Stephen Miller is an unelected sledgehamner of human rights crimes. True evil.

just stumbled across Francisco Soria Aedo’s work and first off: really good painter, super talented. He mainly did portraits and neoclassical but I really like are his expressions, which do show up in his neoclassical work. lots of people smiling and having fun and it’s just very cute

this is one of my favorites

Why was I today years old when I learned that lead compounds taste SWEET and THAT'S why kids eating paint chips back in the day was a concern?

For the last goddamn time...

"Kill your darlings" means "if something is holding you back, get rid of it, even if it sounds pretty."

That's it! That's all it means! It means if you're stuck and stalled out on your story and you could fix the whole block by removing something but you're avoiding removing that thing because it's good, you remove that thing. That's the darling.

It does NOT mean

That you have to get rid of your self-indulgent writing

That you should delete something just because you like it (?wtf?)

That you need to kill off characters (??? what)

That you have to pare your story down to the absolute bare bones

That you have to delete anything whatsoever if you don't want to

The POINT is that you STOP FEELING GUILTY for throwing out good writing that isn't SERVING THE STORY.

The POINT is that you don't get so HUNG UP on the details that you lose sight of the BIG PICTURE.

Good grief....

The tragedy of my life is that I keep acquiring and displaying fetish art and having to be corrected by my friends.

Most recently, a friend came over my house and saw my computer background and went, "Wow, um, I didn't know you were into that." To which I look at the picture of the well drawn muscular female minotaur in historically accurate Greek clothing and I start geeking out about how I love the detail the artist did with the clothing and I point out the period appropriate folds and pins, how the artist even inserted the native plant that was used to dye the clothing this particular shade in the background, and even how the belt has technology AND historically accurate weaving patterns on it.

Then I start explaining how I love the muscular choices of the minotaur, that I was so impressed with the artist's anatomically correct depiction of the muscles converging into the neck. That many people get an upright cow's neck wrong because cow's don't have collarbones, so it can be very difficult to merge the upper arms and a chest of a human with a cow's body. I draw her attention to the beautiful way they've merged the pectoralis major so smoothly while also staying true to how muscular they've depicted the rest of the body.

I finish up with my thoughts on the artist's bold choice to depict the minotaur as a female, and despite the underlying themes of a minotaur being violence, child murder, strength, and muscles. I segue into how unlike bulls, cow are perceived as mothers. That they are the major source of milk in human culture, and that idyllic depictions of them in a field usually depict calves frolicking nearby, yet the minotaur kills and eats children.

I finish and there is a long pause.

"Urban, this is fetish art." and she takes me to the artist's twitter and god dammit it's fetish art, not a bold statement on cultural perceptions of women and violence throughout history. I have been tricked again.

Rest in power, Shelley.

Elizabeth and Larry OTP

Shelley Duvall's Bedtime Stories (1992) created, produced, and presented by Shelley herself