The extreme attack on transgender youth we are witnessing from a governmental stage was enabled by The Atlantic and The New York Times.

Lily Allen's *West End Girl*.

This fucker is on his last legs and is trying to reorient all of U.S. foreign policy, ending the entire post-war order.

So much anti-New Deal propaganda has spewed out of the American business sector & the GOP for the last century, taking control of the narrative completely from 1980 onward. But it is false all the way down.

Sometimes I just can't believe that the fuckwit in charge actively brought back stagflation.

Arguably the reason we became a global superpower in the first place was the creation of the land grant universities, but sure, let's rip that shit up. What could go wrong?

Let's take a sledgehammer to everything that produces growth and creates stability, and bring back all the shit that we've tried before that didn't work like tariffs. Fucking brilliant.

The GOP has economic illiteracy written into its bones.

It is just mind-boggling to me that one recent innovation from a university - the mRNA vaccine - could have added $100 billion+ to the economy. But for some reason we spent the past year dismantling most of the research related to it.

Not to mention how many millions of lives it saved.

Do people understand how many innovations/patents & resulting economic growth comes from research at universities? Apparently not!

I feel I should walk around in a sandwich board that says: "The business cycle is a thing that exists."

My DC family calls it "National airport" and nothing else.

Somehow I particularly want @michaelhobbes.bsky.social to see this thread, because I plunged into a deep dive about the album after reading his comments on the lyrics. Pondering this question of whether they were just dumb, or... not.

These days she often expresses gratitude to fans for giving her the ability to buy back her masters. So who knows.

I also wonder how much of the "Blank Space"/meta quality of the album is hostile toward fans or the general public - because they seem to have been the cause of her break up with Healy.

This also raises the question of whether she is still trying to appeal to Healy's sensibility. Though I guess you could argue that she conceived of this idea several years ago - there was definitely some foreshadowing, as in the Showgirl being dressed in sparkly orange in "Anti-Hero."

Personally, I'd say Healy is a cautionary tale there, because again, he may not fully understand all his own impulses. I'm not at all sure he navigates the dichotomy well.

The thing that kind of clinched it for me was thinking about Matty Healy's fascination with The Truman Show and Andy Kaufman, and how is own edgelord persona is something of a bit.