Favorites: From Ill-Fated Charges to Ill-Advised Cuts
February 23rd 2025. When policy zigzags and plane landings go south, it’s newsletter time
Trump stating that Ukraine shouldn’t have started the war with Russia. That’s backwards! Jeff Maurer published in response: Nicole Brown Simpson shouldn't have murdered OJ. MAGA folks also seem to be accidentally arguing that the Nazis didn't start WWII (cached)?
I’ve had to type a license plate number with both an o and a zero in it. Not sure adding slashed would have helped.
Getting rid of the lawyers is probably worse than firing the Joint Chiefs. Yglesias points to the breaking bad quote (cached): "You don't want a criminal lawyer, you want a "criminal" lawyer". One terrifying angle is that unlike the DOGE stuff, this is probably legal (cached) to do.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Someone Trump just appointed to the DoJ is quitting over being directed to drop charges against Eric Adams (src)(cached)
– DOGE went and cancelled a bunch of long running educational studies. What a complete waste (cached). One guy called it (cached) a "tamer Cultural Revolution filled with ill-informed fanatics". (src)(cached)
– Yglesias points out that cuts like what DOGE is doing will fall particularly hard on the large number of Veterans in the civil service. (src)(cached)
– Specific examples of wild property tax rates for various properties in the Bay Area. (src)(cached)
– Gruber highlights quotes from Wall Street bankers regarding their sudden realization about the Trump administration: "With hindsight we did not appreciate the nature of what the administration was going to be like" (src)
– Yet another plane crash, this time on landing. Here's an animation of what happened. Basically, they landed too hard. (src)(cached)
– Characteristic phrases of each major LLM. Gemini likes "here's a breakdown" and DeepSeek likes "certainly" (src)(cached)
– Trump admin is attempting to end NYC congestion pricing. Unclear if they legally have the authority. (src)(cached)
– Trump admin refusing to comply with federal court order to resume USAID funding. (src)(cached)
– China was trying to get their biotech sector to take off for a decade, but what finally worked was speeding up clinical trials. Now they’re quickly becoming a world leader. Now that's government efficiency (cached)! (src)(cached)
– Twitter is now censoring videos in which town hall attendees in a safe tropical district boo when the representative mentions DOGE (src)(cached)
– You already knew measles is bad, but did you know it wipes out the immune system memory, making the host vulnerable to everything again. (src)(cached)
– The sorts of things we're doing in Europe are what we'd do as concessions if we'd lost a war. (src)(cached)
– Benjamin Ryan: "People have been egging Teslas in New York and I want to know how they can afford to do so." (src)(cached)
– https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/no-evidence-of-mass-graves-or-genocide-in-residential-schools (src)(cached)
– Musk is calling for Ukraine to surrender so often it’s like a full time job. (src)(cached)
– SB 607 from Scott Wiener will significantly reform CEQA, but it’s far from a complete repeal (src)(cached)