Best Of

Can’t argue with any of this.

Murphy: Six Weeks In, This White House Is On Its Way To Being The Most Corrupt In U.S. History

https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/murphy-six-weeks-in-this-white-house-is-on-its-way-to-being-the-most-corrupt-in-us-history
… I’m a big Boston Red Sox fan. One of the most famous players in Red Sox recent history is Manny Ramirez. Manny Ramirez was a good baseball player, but he had a habit of doing some pretty ridiculous things on the field and off the field that were really detrimental to the team, some really bizarre on-field behavior – cutting off throws from other outfielders before they got to the infield – bizarre off-the-field behavior that disrupted the team. It became so regular that a phrase was adopted among the Red Sox fans: ‘That's just Manny being Manny.’ Over the years it just was accepted that every year Manny Ramirez was going to do a whole bunch of stuff that was really detrimental to the team. And over time, it just kind of became accepted, that that was a fact of life, a way of life with Manny Ramirez. And as time went on, people reacted less hostilely. It barely got noticed in some cases when he was engaged in these detrimental forms of conduct.

“And I tell that story because it stands for kind of a universal concept: when bad behavior gets normalized, it no longer feels like bad behavior. Even if that behavior is hurting people. Today, the world is littered with corrupt governments, governments where the leaders and the really rich men who surround the leaders – the oligarchs – steal from people…

“Vladimir Putin, for instance, has never had a job outside of government, but he's reportedly worth $200 billion. … They've been doing this so openly and brazenly, they're so public in their corruption in Russia, that it's just accepted. It's just mainstream, the fact that Putin and his cronies steal from the Russian people.

“That's what's happening in America today. And it's heartbreaking for me to say this, but in the first six weeks of the Trump presidency, Trump and Elon Musk and their billionaire friends have engaged in a stunning rampage of open public corruption. It's not fundamentally different than what happened in Russia. These are efforts to steal from the American people to enrich themselves. And their strategy is to do it all out in the open, to do it at such a dizzying pace that the country just gets overwhelmed or anesthetized or dulled into a sense that we just all have to accept the corruption – or, maybe more charitably, that this is just how government works, that government is just corrupt, and so the fact that it's happening out in the open instead of happening secretly, well, it's really nothing new.

“But this is not how government works…

It is now.

It may be what is happening. But if government "works" like this, then the system collapses.

If the rule of law has indeed collapsed, then the entire basis of the American economy, from regulation to contract law is compromised.

The result is that US Asset prices fall from AAA reserve currency levels down to A rating price levels: effectively a 40% price fall. Then there is a permanent increase in US structural inflation as a result of a drastically less efficient economy and much higher borrowing costs.

A shock to confidence on that scale ca not be hidden and it is mot hypothetical. The strong rise in the Euro this week tells you that the bond market is putting the US under notice.

Reality will collide with the witless lies of this appalling administration. In the end I could see the Americans putting the whole lot of them against the wall: Trump, Vance, Musk et al.

Orwell pointed out that wars were useful for forcing leaders to engage with reality, keeping them a little bit sane. (We're seeing a little bit of that, in very slow motion, with Putin.) Nowadays, bond markets do much the same.

Even absolute political power, and Trump's political power is pretty close to absolute, isn't absolute power.

Trump might cow his adminstration, the US Congress, the Supreme Court, the media.

The one man he cannot buy off, intimidate, threaten - the one man who can bring down his simpleton economic mess - is Mister Market...

When I went to work in asset management I thought I was selling out - I had no idea that I was actually joining the fight against fascism.

Can’t argue with any of this.

Murphy: Six Weeks In, This White House Is On Its Way To Being The Most Corrupt In U.S. History

https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/murphy-six-weeks-in-this-white-house-is-on-its-way-to-being-the-most-corrupt-in-us-history
… I’m a big Boston Red Sox fan. One of the most famous players in Red Sox recent history is Manny Ramirez. Manny Ramirez was a good baseball player, but he had a habit of doing some pretty ridiculous things on the field and off the field that were really detrimental to the team, some really bizarre on-field behavior – cutting off throws from other outfielders before they got to the infield – bizarre off-the-field behavior that disrupted the team. It became so regular that a phrase was adopted among the Red Sox fans: ‘That's just Manny being Manny.’ Over the years it just was accepted that every year Manny Ramirez was going to do a whole bunch of stuff that was really detrimental to the team. And over time, it just kind of became accepted, that that was a fact of life, a way of life with Manny Ramirez. And as time went on, people reacted less hostilely. It barely got noticed in some cases when he was engaged in these detrimental forms of conduct.

“And I tell that story because it stands for kind of a universal concept: when bad behavior gets normalized, it no longer feels like bad behavior. Even if that behavior is hurting people. Today, the world is littered with corrupt governments, governments where the leaders and the really rich men who surround the leaders – the oligarchs – steal from people…

“Vladimir Putin, for instance, has never had a job outside of government, but he's reportedly worth $200 billion. … They've been doing this so openly and brazenly, they're so public in their corruption in Russia, that it's just accepted. It's just mainstream, the fact that Putin and his cronies steal from the Russian people.

“That's what's happening in America today. And it's heartbreaking for me to say this, but in the first six weeks of the Trump presidency, Trump and Elon Musk and their billionaire friends have engaged in a stunning rampage of open public corruption. It's not fundamentally different than what happened in Russia. These are efforts to steal from the American people to enrich themselves. And their strategy is to do it all out in the open, to do it at such a dizzying pace that the country just gets overwhelmed or anesthetized or dulled into a sense that we just all have to accept the corruption – or, maybe more charitably, that this is just how government works, that government is just corrupt, and so the fact that it's happening out in the open instead of happening secretly, well, it's really nothing new.

“But this is not how government works…

It is now.

It may be what is happening. But if government "works" like this, then the system collapses.

If the rule of law has indeed collapsed, then the entire basis of the American economy, from regulation to contract law is compromised.

The result is that US Asset prices fall from AAA reserve currency levels down to A rating price levels: effectively a 40% price fall. Then there is a permanent increase in US structural inflation as a result of a drastically less efficient economy and much higher borrowing costs.

A shock to confidence on that scale ca not be hidden and it is mot hypothetical. The strong rise in the Euro this week tells you that the bond market is putting the US under notice.

Reality will collide with the witless lies of this appalling administration. In the end I could see the Americans putting the whole lot of them against the wall: Trump, Vance, Musk et al.

William Atkinson's resignation article in ConHome. He's a bit...anguished.

https://conservativehome.com/2025/03/04/living-on-a-thin-line/

The social contract is broken. Before me lies a future of personal immiseration, demographic revolution, and global war. I just want the same lives my parents had. I want a Britain that is vaguely civilised, not a bankrupt, self-loathing, and crime-ridden Yookay

He may be disappointed in that case. But is definitely sounding the alarm.

Too many in our party don’t quite realise just how much we’re hated. MPs are blinded by survivorship bias. Labour’s travails lull them into a false sense of smug security, rather than waking them up to how volatile politics has become. They write Reform off as a passing fad, and assume that since we’ve made it through 300-odd years, that we have a divine right to exist.

We do not. We are dying on our feet.

That’s the problem.

So many people on the right have persuaded themselves that living in a flawed, but free and prosperous democracy, is the worst fate that can befall a nation.

It used to be the far left which was this fucking stupid.

Because your diagnosis of the uk is fucking bullshit

You’re a paranoid rich man, who’s persuaded himself he lives in the worst of times.

My grandparents faced much worse, with a lot more fortitude.

Unfortunately, Leon is “very online”.
It’s simply not mentally healthy.

Leon's life experience is varied but very non-standard.

Posh hotels and restaurants at one end together with druggie squats and being on remand for rape on the other.

Very top 10% and bottom 10% but not much of the 80% in the middle.

Its what made him for many years an interesting PBer but it does detach him from the ordinariness of the average life.

There's not much NOOM in the 9 to 5.

We need "Leon in Suburbia". Send him to Solihull for a year.

"After a week of this death, I started breaking up laurel hedges and setting fire to them and then breathing in deeply in a desperate attempt to get some kind of high; anything, something, to lift me out of this grey fog of hopeless, trudging, pointless defined-benefit pension land ubiquity.

Then I found out that hot suburban wives and mothers would occasionally meet for a cup of tea at the tennis courts with their young, gauchely made-up, slightly perspiring daughters in tight white skirts and I found a kind of hope..." [That's enough ed.]

The revolution will eat itself latest. MAGA turns on Trump appointed Supreme Court justice as she occasionally strays from ultra MAGA line of nothing is anything nor exists but The Donald.

https://news.sky.com/story/trump-supreme-court-judge-amy-coney-barrett-maga-13323251?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter

"Staunch conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett was appointed to America's highest court by Mr Trump in 2020 and has voted for major rulings, including striking down abortion rights."

That's the problem there. She is a staunch conservative. She believes in basic conservative values. Trump is not a conservative: he is tearing up the system.

No conservative should support Trump.

It is part of what is so depressing about all this and makes one despair at humanity: the way so many GOP people have just binned all they believe in in order to be part of a cult that stands for nothing but one man's ego.

Can’t argue with any of this.

Murphy: Six Weeks In, This White House Is On Its Way To Being The Most Corrupt In U.S. History

https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/murphy-six-weeks-in-this-white-house-is-on-its-way-to-being-the-most-corrupt-in-us-history
… I’m a big Boston Red Sox fan. One of the most famous players in Red Sox recent history is Manny Ramirez. Manny Ramirez was a good baseball player, but he had a habit of doing some pretty ridiculous things on the field and off the field that were really detrimental to the team, some really bizarre on-field behavior – cutting off throws from other outfielders before they got to the infield – bizarre off-the-field behavior that disrupted the team. It became so regular that a phrase was adopted among the Red Sox fans: ‘That's just Manny being Manny.’ Over the years it just was accepted that every year Manny Ramirez was going to do a whole bunch of stuff that was really detrimental to the team. And over time, it just kind of became accepted, that that was a fact of life, a way of life with Manny Ramirez. And as time went on, people reacted less hostilely. It barely got noticed in some cases when he was engaged in these detrimental forms of conduct.

“And I tell that story because it stands for kind of a universal concept: when bad behavior gets normalized, it no longer feels like bad behavior. Even if that behavior is hurting people. Today, the world is littered with corrupt governments, governments where the leaders and the really rich men who surround the leaders – the oligarchs – steal from people…

“Vladimir Putin, for instance, has never had a job outside of government, but he's reportedly worth $200 billion. … They've been doing this so openly and brazenly, they're so public in their corruption in Russia, that it's just accepted. It's just mainstream, the fact that Putin and his cronies steal from the Russian people.

“That's what's happening in America today. And it's heartbreaking for me to say this, but in the first six weeks of the Trump presidency, Trump and Elon Musk and their billionaire friends have engaged in a stunning rampage of open public corruption. It's not fundamentally different than what happened in Russia. These are efforts to steal from the American people to enrich themselves. And their strategy is to do it all out in the open, to do it at such a dizzying pace that the country just gets overwhelmed or anesthetized or dulled into a sense that we just all have to accept the corruption – or, maybe more charitably, that this is just how government works, that government is just corrupt, and so the fact that it's happening out in the open instead of happening secretly, well, it's really nothing new.

“But this is not how government works…

William Atkinson's resignation article in ConHome. He's a bit...anguished.

https://conservativehome.com/2025/03/04/living-on-a-thin-line/

The social contract is broken. Before me lies a future of personal immiseration, demographic revolution, and global war. I just want the same lives my parents had. I want a Britain that is vaguely civilised, not a bankrupt, self-loathing, and crime-ridden Yookay

He may be disappointed in that case. But is definitely sounding the alarm.

Too many in our party don’t quite realise just how much we’re hated. MPs are blinded by survivorship bias. Labour’s travails lull them into a false sense of smug security, rather than waking them up to how volatile politics has become. They write Reform off as a passing fad, and assume that since we’ve made it through 300-odd years, that we have a divine right to exist.

We do not. We are dying on our feet.

That’s the problem.

So many people on the right have persuaded themselves that living in a flawed, but free and prosperous democracy, is the worst fate that can befall a nation.

It used to be the far left which was this fucking stupid.

Because your diagnosis of the uk is fucking bullshit

You’re a paranoid rich man, who’s persuaded himself he lives in the worst of times.

My grandparents faced much worse, with a lot more fortitude.

William Atkinson's resignation article in ConHome. He's a bit...anguished.

https://conservativehome.com/2025/03/04/living-on-a-thin-line/

The social contract is broken. Before me lies a future of personal immiseration, demographic revolution, and global war. I just want the same lives my parents had. I want a Britain that is vaguely civilised, not a bankrupt, self-loathing, and crime-ridden Yookay

He may be disappointed in that case. But is definitely sounding the alarm.

Too many in our party don’t quite realise just how much we’re hated. MPs are blinded by survivorship bias. Labour’s travails lull them into a false sense of smug security, rather than waking them up to how volatile politics has become. They write Reform off as a passing fad, and assume that since we’ve made it through 300-odd years, that we have a divine right to exist.

We do not. We are dying on our feet.

That’s the problem.

So many people on the right have persuaded themselves that living in a flawed, but free and prosperous democracy, is the worst fate that can befall a nation.

It used to be the far left which was this fucking stupid.