About Last Week...
Flip Punctuation Pixels
If anyone had heard anything the Trump administration said before the imposition of the tariffs, they would have spotted multiple – many multiple – references to the concept of “negotiation points.”
As noted before ad nauseum, Trump is inherently a negotiator, he is transactional – he has certain core thoughts, but much of what he does is open for consideration.
In other words, Trump is not dogmatic, something that has served him well (for the most part) in life.
So the tariff timeline is this: they go into place, the stock world has 12 cows and 367 kittens, and then a couple days later some of the tarrifs seem to roll back a bit.
The media cries FOUL! -how dare you do something and then not continue to do it until the end of time?!?
Trump was therefore accused of being a “flip-flopper,” a weak confused president who didn’t understand what he was doing, a danger to babies and retirees and everyone else.
Now the Wall Street idiots who took this to heart and shorted a bunch of tariff-impacted stocks made money for about 27 hours – then, when the market rebounded they took it – literally - in the shorts.
Of course, accusations have been made Trump “flipped,” chickened out, and just maybe made sure his friends made money on the massive three-day swing.
As to the latter, any intentionality is very definitely doubtable because if you knew how to read PUBLIC STATEMENTS you knew exactly what was happening and about to happen.
The tariffs are/were/continue to be starting negotiating points open to tweaks and changes and have always been intended as such. For example, when – on the rare occasion – I have been offered a real job I say I want a billion dollars a year and a clone I can harvest for organs. I then immediately add that there may be some” wiggle room” to those demands.
Negotiating is not flip-flopping – it is a strategy to get as much as possible while understanding it will not always go exactly perfectly.
It’s astonishing that the media has – after a decade of Trump – not picked up on this fact.
Or maybe they have and just don’t want to admit it and need to keep their eyes and ears covered to the truth pretty much everyone else sees it order to justify the past ten years of abject lies.
Speaking of covering up, I pay for commercial-free YouTube.
I originally assumed that meant that no commercials would be aired (turns out to be true, save for the internal sponsor thingys) and that the vids would be shown unedited.
There I was wrong.
I watch a lot – I mean A LOT – of documentaries (and I know I should just get Magellan, or something so shut up) and have noticed that more and more and more things on YouTube are being pixelated of late.
A tiny side of me thinks that may be okay for some people, but 99% of me thinks that by literally covering up the video evidence of, for example, the Holocaust diminishes the suffering and makes it more difficult for people to truly understand the horror.
“Protecting” people from certain images is in fact protecting people from the truth.
An hysterically inappropriate example of this history cleanse is the following short from History Matters - a truly wonderful YouTuber – on post WWII Italy.
To ensure the vid was not demonetized by YouTube, he had to change “Mussolini” to “The Fez Wearing Italian Man!”
Without question, watch the clip – and “The Fez Wearing Italian Man!” Is not even the funniest bit…wait for” Whereas Italy was, just, well, Italy…”
As for this week’s epigram, I thought a discussion of punctuation made sense:
Truly inspired!
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