For those of a morbid turn of mind

I’ve been seeing examples of those old bills of mortality going around — the lists of causes of death, week by week, in 17th century London. I thought you should know you can go straight to the source and find all the death statistics you could dream of. It’s shocking how often infectious disease is slaughtering people — plague, fever, tiffick (tuberculosis), cholera, spotted fever, smallpox, the French pox, etc. — and you wouldn’t want to be an infant, they were dropping like flies.

What’s interesting, too, is what isn’t killing them. Cancer is rare. You can find an occasional murder (or rather, “murther”), but it isn’t common. Gun deaths are noted with details (“Shot with a pistol at Saviours Southwark”) and are less frequent than executions. Everything else was killing them first. Apparently, if you really hated someone back then, it was a greater revenge to sit back and wait for them to die a miserable death from worms or a bloody flux.

There are definitely some advantages to living in the 21st century.

Oh, no! Not the geoducks!

I really don’t understand the logic of Trump’s trade war. Throwing up trade barriers might be a great idea if you’re trying to build up an internal industry in a relatively undeveloped economy, but the US has a mature economy. I could sort of see it if we were looking at how our homegrown semiconductor manufactory had declined and moved to Asia, and we wanted to build it back up, but that’s not what we’re doing: Trump seems to think we need to grow our coal and oil industry. Is our future tied to work that doesn’t require much education or deep, complicated infrastructure? It’s looking backwards.

But I’m not an economist. Feel free to explain the logic here, if there is any.

Also, now that the Chinese trade retaliation has kicked in, it seems to be having all kinds of unexpected side effects…like on the geoducks. The Washington state geoduck harvest is in trouble!

The People’s Republic of China announced last month a 25 percent tariff on American seafood products, including geoduck, in response to tariffs instituted by The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. China’s announcement that the tariffs would take effect July 6 came shortly after a May 30 auction by DNR, which awarded eight companies the rights to harvest wild geoduck from tracts in Puget Sound between July 3 and Sept. 28, 2018.

DNR auctions the right to harvest geoduck from state-owned aquatic lands four times a year, generating more than $21 million annually. That money is used to restore and enhance Washington’s aquatic lands. The May 30 auction generated $5,491,256.

To minimize the impacts from the tariffs on Washington’s geoduck industry, DNR notified successful bidders on June 26 they may be entitled to refunds if the tariffs hurt geoduck sales.

This is a big business, and it’s focused largely on Asian markets.

According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, the U.S. Customs counted over five million kilograms of geoduck leaving Washington last year, for a total of $75.8 million in geoduck exports. Of that amount, $69.5 million were made in shipments to China and Vietnam alone. Increasing demand has encouraged shellfish farmers to pressure the state to expand access to geoduck beds.

Meat from a geoduck is considered a delicacy in China and it can be sold for around $100 per pound in foreign markets. Stateside, companies bid hundreds of thousands of dollars to gain access to plots of land for harvesting.

On the bright side, this ought to have some positive environmental benefits — less commercial mollusc murder. But our current administration doesn’t exactly have a reputation for caring about the environment. It does have a reputation of supporting business interests uber alles, but this kind of decision actively harms capitalist exploitation. Somebody explain this to me, because it all sounds stupid and backwards and destructive of any principles this Republican fascism might have.

Maybe the simplest explanation is that they don’t have any principles.

Ded now

Can’t go on. I’ve been laid low by an irony cannonball in the Second American Civil War. Tell my family I was thinking of them as I bled out in the hedgerow.

(The Keen Report, as is obvious from the context, is a Trumpian Maga-lovin’ Twitter account. Tony Schwartz is…the ghost-writer who actually wrote The Art of the Deal.)

Projection isn’t a modern fallacy

Note to all: remember, this paragraph exists in the Declaration of Independence.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

And the Boston Tea Party began our great American tradition of committing crimes and blaming them on minorities.

Don’t forget the gigantic omission, either. In a grand document declaring Liberty and Freedom and Independence, slavery was ignored. Swept under the rug. “all men are created equal” except the ones we don’t mention, and oh, yeah, women aren’t.

Hope I haven’t put a damper on your cookouts and picnics.

So civil!

Kristin Mink confronted Scott Pruitt at a restaurant.

We deserve to have someone at the EPA who actually does protect our environment, somebody who believes in climate change and takes it seriously for the benefit of all of us, including our children. So, I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out.

Polite, honest, and accurate. She didn’t punch him, throw his table over, or kick him in the balls, even though he deserves all of that. It was an effective protest.

If you see one of Trump’s lackeys in public, and you don’t lean over and tell them, “Resign!”, you aren’t as brave as Kristin Mink.

Make ’em cringe a bit when they’re out in public. It’s the least you can do.

Just how corrupt is the US government?

Here’s another fun fact: Anthony Kennedy, who had a reputation as the “swing justice” on the Supreme court (he wasn’t), had closer ties to Trump than I could have imagined.

Retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s son loaned President Donald Trump over a billion dollars for his real estate projects, The New York Times reported.

Justin Kennedy was the head of Deutsche Bank’s real estate capital markets division and loaned to Trump when other banks wouldn’t.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

But don’t you worry. The crook who has profited most off of all these connections now has the power to appoint new judges who will then handle his crimes.

And don’t forget, the crook is confident that he has the power to pardon everyone who is guilty, including himself.

Milo finds a way to make the news again

If anything, he has a phenomenal sense of bad timing. He opened his mouth again a short while ago.

Now, Observer is reporting that Yiannopoulos’ descent into the political gutter continues apace. Asked by Observer to comment on a story, Yiannopoulos texted, “I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.” He sent a similar comment to a Daily Beast writer.

Yiannopoulos has also sent anti-Semitic messages to the writer and fact checker Talia Lavin. “This past weekend, the nationalist bragged on Facebook and Instagram that he’d sent $14.88 to The New Yorker‘s former fact checker Talia Lavin,” Observer notes. (1488 being a notorious code used by white supremacists to hail each other).

Amid the current brouhaha over civility, it is important to remember that so noxious a figure as Yiannopoulos was once courted and promoted by a White House aide and major Republican donors. The successful campaign to shun and marginalize Yiannopoulos, made in the wake of the BuzzFeed story, now seems more justified than ever.

And then, what do you know, Someone shoots up a newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Maryland, killing 5 people.

Police have confirmed five people are dead and a gunman is in custody after a shooting in the Capital Gazette building in Annapolis.

The exact number of casualties remains unclear, but several are gravely injured, Anne Arundel County police said.

Only one suspect was involved, police said.

“We’re still talking to the individual, we’re engaging the individual, we’re trying to find a motive,” Anne Arundel County police spokesman Lt. Ryan Frashure said.

Alas for Milo’s fame, the shooter was not inspired by him. He was — I know, you’re going to be shocked and surprised by this — an entitled white man with a history of misogynist stalking who was very angry with the newspaper for reporting on his abuse. He was also a Trump fan. I know! Who ever heard of such a thing?

McCarthy said the harassment and stalking began around 2009, after they became friends on Facebook. In 2011, she took him to court, where he pleaded guilty to criminal harassment and was placed on 18-months’ probation. Five days later, the Capital Gazette wrote a story titled, “Jarrod wants to be your friend.” It outlined Ramos’ alleged erratic behavior and included alleged emails he sent, telling McCarthy’s client: “go hang yourself,” “you’re going to need a restraining order now,” and “you can’t make me stop.”

“Mr. Ramos was obsessively angry about this particular story,” McCarthy said.

But don’t you worry. This will finally be the mass murder that will stir Republicans into action. Marco Rubio was quite upset that one of the survivors, with a shocked quaver in her voice, said “Thanks for your prayers, but I couldn’t give a fuck about them if there’s nothing else.”

Expect immediate legislation to bring an end to this incivility. Expect the Supreme Court to rubber-stamp all attempts to silence people who survive shootings. Expect the president to continue to call out reporters for violence.

Expect the Nazis to continue to thrive.