WTF-Beta

From Ilya Somin at Reason, one of the lawyers who brought the case.

https://reason.com/volokh/2025/08/29/federal-circuit-rules-against-trumps-massive-ieepa-tariffs-in-our-case-challenging-them/

Canada is a four hour drive

Wow. That’s cool.

But color me skeptical about running your congressional campaign on ending it.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/valentina-gomez-causes-outrage-extreme-135745141.html

Today’s the last day in the 80s for a while but still nice most of the day.

We solve cardiovascular disease and cancer that means everyone who doesn’t get hit by a bus dies of dementia.

And it’s mRNA so the magtards and Marin county granola chicks won’t take it. Sweet.

RFK to ban them outright?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-and-robert-f-kennedy-junior-to-ban-covid-19-vaccine-within-months/

@Nina said in Will you be able to get a COVID vaccine?:

But the idea that some worm -eaten science denier is making these decisions makes me want to scream.

I didn’t take one last year because I got Covid again in September so I skipped it when they came out. My intention was to get it a few months later but I forgot. This year I’ll be sure to get one if only as a FU to Kennedy. My immunosupressed status will get me on the list.

You’re not hallucinating. I actually freaked out about the news you were excited about. (And if anyone thinks they take a lot of medications, hold my beer…)

I agree of course that the imbalance whereby we subsidize drug development and the rest of the world pays something related to marginal cost is unfair and unsustainable. But like any large international imbalance it needs to be fixed very deliberately over time and would involve negotiations with other first world countries (most of us wouldn’t have an issue with very poor countries continuing to pay marginal cost I assume).

Anyway, ‘deliberate’, ‘negotiations with allies’, and ‘over time’ are not in Trump’s vocabulary so it would have been a shit show and therapeutic development would have been the immediate casualty.

If you want to make sense out of the two policies they are consistent from Trump’s viewpoint that the US gets ‘ripped off’ in international trade. He sees imports as us getting taken, and (far more rationally) sees us paying 5x what Europe pays for pharmaceuticals as us getting taken. It’s not really about lowering prices per se.

@Daniel. said in Adding to my bag collection:

I'd buy it in black but there is no black. So I'll buy it in brown.

There’s black.

Here’s ChatGPT’s summary. Ezra and Alex’s book came out in March and they did the podcast circuit then. You can find them on many podcasts describing it more.

Short version: it’s a faction of center-left wonks, politicians, and policy shops arguing that Democrats should be “the party that builds”—more homes, power plants, transit, factories—by fixing the rules that make building slow, scarce, and expensive. They call it the “abundance agenda” or “supply-side progressivism.”

What it wants
• Make more of the basics (housing, clean energy, transit, chips, medical innovation) by streamlining permitting/zoning, boosting state capacity, and investing public money where it unblocks private building.  
• Pair deregulation with investment, not laissez-faire: think Biden-era industrial policy (CHIPS/IRA) plus faster approvals and infrastructure delivery. Proponents dub this “modern supply-side economics.”  

Who’s pushing it
• Popularized by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson (NYT/The Atlantic), whose 2025 bestseller Abundance argues liberal process has choked outputs; they urge a “liberalism that builds.”   
• Backed by pro-housing/YIMBY currents and some centrist/progressive think tanks (e.g., Institute for Progress).  

Why it’s “recent”
• The term took off after Thompson’s 2022 Atlantic essay and Biden-era industrial policy; in 2025 the Klein/Thompson book made it a banner for intraparty debate. 
• You can see concrete fights in California, where Democrats moved to streamline CEQA for infill housing and infrastructure—explicitly framed as “abundance.”  

The split inside the party
• Supporters say abundance policies lower costs, speed decarbonization, and prove Democrats can deliver materially. 
• Skeptics on the left call it a gloss for deregulation or “neoliberal rebrand”; others say the agenda is too thin without stronger anti-corporate tools.  
• The rift is now showing up in messaging and housing battles; recent coverage frames it as a live Dem family fight. 

I think the Abundance Democrats are on to something - this is getting to the root of pocketbook issues that voters care about. Younger voters more than we old timers.

I mean the shift from class-based toward a focus on identity categories such as race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Both in building political alliances and in defining and promoting policy.

This move has fractured the democratic coalition and weakened its electoral success. Of course party leaders thought with increasing numbers of Hispanic voters this would lead to safe majorities in the long term. 2024 showed that to be wishful thinking (what I called their ‘theory of the case’ which was shattered last November).

@Bernard said in Is the time ripe for the progressive movement?:

So, jon-nyc, about those op-eds which you speak of. Where were the centrist Democrats? Why weren't they penning op-eds explaining the concept in less militant terms? I'll tell you where they were: Distancing themselves. Afraid they'll be labelled radical and apparently fearing they wouldn't be able to defend themselves against such accusations. Cowering in fear of the right, as usual.

Biden did specifically run against the ‘defund the police’ idea while explicitly calling for more community-oriented programs. I would say he steel-manned the (less extreme) concept while reject the label which is and always was repellent to the median voter.

I still believe the lesson centrist Democrats need to learn is that it won't work to continue shunning the progressive arm of the party. Party leadership had many opportunities to embrace progressives and work with them over the past decades but chose to distance themselves instead of engaging in dialogue and hashing out what's extreme and what's acceptable and what terms work best.

Despite how he ran in 2020, Biden decidedly did not shun the progressive wing as president. He let much of it dictate his policies. Many of these put us on the wrong side of 80-20 issues (open border, biological men in women’s sports, social transition of kids by schools without informing the parents, etc). There were exceptions, eg Israel/Palestine. But exceptions they were.

I'm pretty sure the election was not lost on social issues. The right wants everyone to believe we lost on social issues because it's a wedge they can rely on. Shame on Democrats who play into that narrative. We lost on economic issues--as is almost always the case. The right's playbook is to target a minority, demonize them and work up the conservative base and then accuse the left of harping on social issues when they come to defend the minorities. FTS.

I think it’s both. The democrats let identity trump class about 10-15 years ago which hurt the economic messaging as well as turned off a lot of voters on social issues. It eventually even backfired in some of the very minority communities it was supposed to attract.

An old man is watching a movie with his wife when the doorbell rings. He answers it and it’s his best friend- another old man.

The friend asks him what he’s up to and he says he’s watching a movie and it’s the best movie he’s seen in decades.

The friend asks him what the name of the movie is.

He stops and thinks for a bit, looking a little confused. Then a glimmer of light crosses his face and he’s about to speak up, only to pause again for a minute or two.

Finally he says to his friend, what’s the name of that flower that women love, you know, with all the thorns?

His friend says ‘you mean, a rose?’

He says, YES! Thanks!, He then turns around and screams “Hey Rose - what’s the name of that movie we’re watching?”

I think there’s a bit of a no-true-Scotsman fallacy in India’s thinking. There were plenty of op-eds that were titled things like “No, really, seriously, we mean literally abolish the police” along with disingenuous efforts to describe the very concept of policing as a byproduct of chattel slavery.

Add to this what we saw with progressive DAs that chose not to prosecute whole categories of crimes with predictable results. Hell, even San Francisco recalled their progressive DA over this issue.

Democrats have a real problem - we are on the wrong side of too many 80-20 social issues. Also the party’s entire theory of the case with respect to identity politics was proven spectacularly wrong in 2024.

Until we fix these issues we’ll stay in the wilderness nationally I do believe.

I feel her pain. 90% of people with my condition don’t get diagnosed. Doctors just assume it’s COPD (if you have a smoking history) or asthma (if you don’t). This despite the fact that both the College of Chest Physicians and the American Thoracic Society both say to test for my condition any patient with COPD.

Ok I fixed the labels.

I’ll post some video snippets this weekend