Beehaw

These are some thoughts I had after meditating.

During Donald Trump’s first term, advisers who wanted to check his most dramatic impulses reliably turned to two places to act as guardrails: the stock market and cable news. If the markets reacted badly to something Trump did, they found, he would likely change course to match Wall Street’s moves. And television’s hold over Trump was so great that, at times, his aides would look to get booked on a cable-news show, believing that the president would be more receptive to an idea he heard there than one floated during an Oval Office meeting.

But Trump’s second term looks different. Taking further steps today to escalate his global trade war, the president has ignored the deep plunges on Wall Street that have cost the economy trillions of dollars and accelerated risks of a bear market. He has tuned out the wall-to-wall coverage, at least on some cable networks, about the self-inflicted wounds he has dealt the United States economy. And unlike eight years ago, few members of Trump’s team are looking to rein him in, and those who think differently have almost all opted against publicly voicing disagreement.

Trump is showing no signs—at least not yet—of being encumbered by political considerations as he makes the biggest bet of his presidency, according to three White House officials and two outside allies granted anonymity to discuss the president’s decision making. Emboldened by his historic comeback, he believes that launching a trade battle is his best chance of fundamentally remaking the American economy, elites and experts be damned.

“This man was politically dead and survived both four criminal cases and an assassination attempt to be president again. He really believes in this and is going to go big,” one of the outside allies told me. “His pain threshold is high to get this done.”

What’s not clear, even to some of those closest to him, is what will count as a victory.

The president has likened his tariffs to “medicine” for a sick patient, but they have caused widespread confusion—particularly over whether Trump is committed to keeping the plan in place for years to boost U.S. manufacturing or whether he is using the new tariffs as a negotiating ploy to force other countries to change their policies.

[Read: Trade will move on without the United States]

“We have many, many countries coming to negotiate deals with us, and they’re going to be fair deals,” Trump told reporters today in the Oval Office, adding that he will not pause the tariffs despite another day of Wall Street turbulence. “No other president’s going to do this, what I’m doing.”

Markets plunged around the globe today for the third-straight trading day after Trump announced the sweeping “Liberation Day” set of tariffs—imposed on nearly all of the world’s economies—that almost instantly remade the United States’ trading relationship with the rest of the world. He has said that Americans should expect short-term pain (“HANG TOUGH,” he declared on social media) as he attempts to make the U.S. economy less dependent on foreign-made goods.

The blowback has been extensive and relentless. Other nations have responded with retaliatory levies. Fears of a recession have spiked. CEOs, after panicking privately for days, are beginning to speak out. Most cable channels have been bathed in the red of graphs depicting plunging markets, the stock ticker in the corner falling ever downward. Even Fox News, which has downplayed the crisis, has begun carrying stories about the impact on Trump voters who are worried about shrinking retirement accounts and rising prices. GOP lawmakers, usually loath to cross the White House, are mulling trying to limit the president’s economic authority. Senator Ted Cruz worried that the tariffs will cause a 2026 midterms “bloodbath,” while seven other GOP senators, including Trump allies such as Chuck Grassley, signed on to a bipartisan bill that would require Congress to approve Trump’s steep tariffs on trading partners.

Trump has stayed committed to the tariffs, and he lashed out today on social media at wavering Republicans, declaring them “Weak and Stupid” and warning, “Don’t be a PANICAN,” while his staff promised a veto of the bipartisan bill.

Yet even within Trump’s administration, the president’s moves have caused widespread confusion about what he is trying to get out of the tariffs. Peter Navarro, one of the administration’s most influential voices on trade, wrote in the Financial Times , “This is not a negotiation. For the US, it is a national emergency triggered by trade deficits caused by a rigged system.” Just a short time later, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote on social media that he had been tasked by Trump to begin negotiations with Japan and that he looks “forward to our upcoming productive engagement regarding tariffs, non-tariff trade barriers, currency issues, and government subsidies.”

That public disconnect has brought private disagreements into the light, two of the White House officials and the other outside ally told me. Navarro and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller—who is perceived by many in Trump’s orbit as the most powerful aide on most issues—have embraced the idea that the tariffs should be permanent to erase trade deficits with other countries and even punish some nations, including China, for what the White House says are decades of unfair trade practices. Steve Bannon, the influential outside Trump adviser, has said on his podcast that bringing nations to the negotiating table is not enough and that the White House needs to insist that companies make commitments to bolster domestic manufacturing.

Bessent, a former hedge-fund manager who once worked for George Soros, has expressed some hesitancy behind closed doors about the tariffs, according to two of the White House officials. (The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) While stopping short of disagreeing with Trump, Bessent has tried in public interviews to soften the impact of the duties. Yesterday, he said on Meet the Press that “I see no reason that we have to price in a recession” and hinted that the tariffs could be temporary because a number of nations have already sought negotiations. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who to this point has been Trump’s most visible adviser, today posted a well-known video of the economist Milton Friedman touting free trade. That followed a weekend during which Musk took aim at Navarro, suggesting that his push for steep trade barriers is too extreme.

Trump himself hardly cleared up the inconsistent messaging when asked in the Oval Office this afternoon if the tariffs are a negotiating tool or are going to be permanent. “Well, they can both be true,” Trump said. “There can be permanent tariffs, and there can also be negotiations, because there are things that we need beyond tariffs.”

Earlier in the day, the confused messaging had a material impact on the markets: A social-media post misconstruing a comment by National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett to suggest that Trump might pause the tariffs for 90 days briefly sent markets upward. The White House clarified that no change in policy was planned, prompting markets to go back down.

That brief rally also seemed to reveal Wall Street’s wishful thinking that the president will soon back off the tariffs—the same sense of optimism that mistakenly led investors to hope before last week that Trump’s campaign rhetoric about tariffs was just a bluff or a negotiating tactic. In a lengthy social-media post yesterday, the hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, a staunch Trump supporter, wrote that the president needs to pause the tariffs or risk “a self-induced economic nuclear winter.”

[Annie Lowrey: Here are the places where the recession has already begun]

Many Republicans had hoped that Trump’s economic policy would focus on extending his 2017 tax cuts (which disproportionately helped businesses and the wealthy) while also tackling inflation. But although Trump has long possessed a flexible ideology, one of his few consistent principles, dating to at least the 1980s, is a belief in tariffs, even though many economists believe that tariffs are outdated and ineffective in an era of globalization.

Trump has done little to enact his campaign promise to bring down prices and has surprised some observers with his willingness to endanger his poll numbers by taking on such a risky tariff scheme. Although Trump is notorious for changing his mind on a whim, he is for now ignoring the complaints from business leaders and the warnings about the tariffs’ effect on his own voters.

There was another small marker recently of how Trump has changed from eight years ago. During his first administration, he regularly grew angry about any media coverage—particularly photographs—that portrayed him unflatteringly. Over the weekend, the front page of The Wall Street Journal carried a photo taken of Trump on Saturday, as he rode in the back of a vehicle wearing golf attire, waving, and talking on the phone, mouth open. The headline read: “Trump Heads to Golf Club Amid Tariff Turmoil.”

Yet Trump has not complained about the coverage, one of the White House officials told me. And he golfed again yesterday.

This is an insightful short video essay that talks about how we cope as people during these difficult times we are all facing.

I really enjoy the artistic style and editing of his videos as well which alone I think is worth sharing.

The Supreme Court is about to decide whether the Trump administration can exile Americans to a gulag overseas and then leave them there.

The Trump administration wants everyone to believe that the case challenging its deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s infamous Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, is about the government’s right to deport undocumented immigrants, or gang members, or terrorists. But it’s actually about whether the United States government can kidnap someone off the street and then maroon them, incommunicado, in a prison abroad with little hope of release. Human-rights groups have said that they have yet to find anyone freed from CECOT, and the Salvadoran government has previously said anyone imprisoned there will “never leave.”

Today, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to lift a federal-court order telling the administration to retrieve Abrego Garcia. This afternoon, Chief Justice John Roberts blocked the order temporarily, pending further decision. As my colleague Nick Miroff reported, the Trump administration acknowledged in court that Abrego Garcia was deported because of an “administrative error.” Abrego Garcia has been in the U.S. since he was 16, having fled El Salvador and come to the U.S. illegally after gangs threatened his family. He is married to an American citizen, and has a 5-year-old child. In 2019, a judge gave him a protected status known as “withdrawal of removal,” ordering the government not to send him back to El Salvador. The Trump administration has alleged that Abrego Garcia is a member of the gang MS-13, based on the word of a single anonymous informant six years ago, and the fact that Abrego Garcia was wearing Chicago Bulls attire.

[Adam Serwer: Trump’s Salvadoran gulag]

In its majority opinion rejecting the government’s argument, though, judges from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the record “shows that Abrego Garcia has no criminal history, in this country or anywhere else, and that Abrego Garcia is a gainfully employed family man who lives a law abiding and productive life,” and that “if the Government wanted to prove to the district court that Abrego Garcia was a ‘prominent’ member of MS-13, it has had ample opportunity to do so but has not—nor has it even bothered to try.” Abrego Garcia is not an exception—an analysis by CBS News found that three-quarters of the more than 200 men deported to El Salvador lacked criminal records.

Even though the Trump administration conceded that Abrego Garcia was deported by mistake, it is insisting that federal courts cannot order his return. “A judicial order that forces the Executive to engage with a foreign power in a certain way, let alone compel a certain action by a foreign sovereign, is constitutionally intolerable,” it said in a court filing. The implications of this argument may not be immediately obvious, but if federal courts cannot order the return of someone exiled to a foreign gulag by mistake, then the administration is free to exile citizens and then claim they did so in error, while leaving them to rot.

As the legal scholar Steve Vladeck wrote, “A world in which federal courts lacked the power to order the government to take every possible step to bring back to the United States individuals like Abrego Garcia is a world in which the government could send any of us to a Salvadoran prison without due process, claim that the misstep was a result of ‘administrative error,’ and thereby wash its hands of any responsibility for what happens next.” If the Trump administration prevails here, it could disappear anyone, even an American citizen. Several have already been swept up and detained in recent ICE raids. Whether you can imagine yourself in Abrego Garcia’s position or not, all of our fates are ultimately tied to his.

Deporting people without due process is what’s actually “constitutionally intolerable,” given that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee due process of law. Disappearing people off the street and exiling them is “constitutionally intolerable” for the same reasons. Sending people who have never been convicted of any crime to CECOT, a prison where advocates allege that inmates are routinely abused, may also be “constitutionally intolerable,” given the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. But whatever their constitutional status, all of these things should be morally intolerable to any decent human being.

[Read: An ‘administrative error’ sends a Maryland father to a Salvadoran prison]

This should be one of those cases in which the justices are unanimous. If the Constitution’s commitments to due process mean anything, they should mean that the government cannot send people to be imprisoned by a foreign nation without a shred of evidence that they’ve committed any crime. American “history and tradition” produced a system designed to reject arbitrary powers such as these, with the conscious fear that “parchment barriers” would provide little protection against an “overbearing majority” willing to violate rights. Nevertheless, I have little doubt that someone will try to argue that the Framers who wrote two due-process clauses into the Constitution actually loved disappearing people to foreign prisons.

“The facts of this case thus present the potential for a disturbing loophole: namely that the government could whisk individuals to foreign prisons in violation of court orders and then contend, invoking its Article II powers, that it is no longer their custodian, and there is nothing that can be done,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who was appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, wrote in his concurrence. “It takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness, one that courts cannot condone.”

This is eloquent and correct, but this lawlessness is happening precisely because the nation’s highest court condoned it in advance. The right-wing justices on the Roberts Court have repeatedly rewritten the Constitution to Donald Trump’s benefit, first by nullifying the anti-insurrection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, and then by inventing an imperial presidential immunity that is nowhere in the text of the document. It is no surprise that Trump is now acting as though he is above the law. After all, the Roberts Court all but granted him permission.

I know the title will trigger people but it's a short so please briefly hear her out. I've since given this a try and it's incredibly cool. It's a very different experience and provides much better information AFAICT

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.wtf/post/19256400

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20514746

photos by Lumicon

This plant should not be thriving in this environment. It is growing on compacted oxisol in an area that gets over 4 metres of rain. Yet here it is, growing completely out of control. Nothing makes sense. Climate change?

If so, which fruits and other plants are you growing?

What is currently producing?

How do you manage the size of your trees?

Do you make compost, or do you only use mulch to build soil fertility?

Which climate are you in?

I'm interested to know how popular fruit forests are in this community and how others are doing it.

https://archive.is/UrZ0a

This is Darkwave, electronic genre inspired by 80s goth. IMO essential Cyberpunk, but CD Projekt RED went for another direction for the game’s OST

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20512702

Wayback Machine

Really been enjoying this podcast. Highly recommend giving it a look! Most are paywalled unfortunately but they do a free one every month. They don't take sponsors though

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/25857740

This is INSANE! Trump is asking the Supreme Court to bless his administration screwing up TO THE POINT THEY CEEDED CUSTODY OF A PERSON THEY DIDN’T HAVE LEGAL CUSTODY OVER and not require them to fix it?

If SCOTUS backs Trump here, literally all is lost. Due process will have NO MEANING if this isn’t fixed ASAP.

Remember, if they did it to this guy the only thing stopping them from doing it to you or me is dumb luck.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32280023

Three young children huddle in front of a camera, cross-legged and cupping their hands. “Please support me. We are very poor,” says a boy, staring down the lens.

They appear to be in a mud-brick hut in Afghanistan, living in extreme poverty. But their live stream is reaching viewers in the UK and worldwide – via TikTok Live.

For hours, they beg for virtual “gifts” that can later be exchanged for money. When they get one, they clap politely. On another live stream, a girl jumps up and shouts: “Thank you, we love you!” after receiving a digital rose from a woman in the US, who bought it from TikTok for about 1p. By the time it’s cashed out it could be worth less than a third of a penny.

TikTok says it bans child begging and other forms of begging it considers exploitative, and says it has strict policies on users who go live.

But an Observer investigation has found the practice widespread. Begging live streams are actively promoted by the algorithm and TikTok profits from the content, taking fees and commission of up to 70%.

Olivier de Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, called the trend a “shocking development” and accused TikTok and middlemen of “profiting from people’s misery”. “Taking a cut of people’s suffering is nothing short of digital predation. I urge TikTok to take immediate action and enforce its own policies on exploitative begging and seriously question the ‘commission’ it is taking from the world’s most vulnerable people,” he said.

Jeffrey DeMarco, digital harm expert at Save the Children, said: “The documented practices represent significant abuses and immediate action must be taken to ensure platforms no longer allow, or benefit directly or indirectly, from content such as this.”

[...]

Fearing legal repercussions, online harassment and professional consequences, student journalists are retracting their names from published articles amid intensifying repression by the Trump administration targeting students perceived to be associated with the pro-Palestinian movement.

Editors at university newspapers say that anxiety among writers has risen since the arrest of the Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, who is currently in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention fighting efforts to deport her. While the government has not pointed to evidence supporting its decision to revoke her visa, she wrote an op-ed last year in a student newspaper critical of Israel, spurring fears that simply expressing views in writing is now viewed as sufficient grounds for deportation.

This is the definition of "chilling effect."

Popular e-commerce companies, including giants Shein and Temu, use the so-called "de minimis" exemption to ship tens of millions of packages — everything from end tables and lamps to shoes and underwear — to U.S. consumers every year.

So long as each individual package is worth $800 or less, they aren't required to pay import fees or go through typical customs inspections. But under an executive order signed by Trump Wednesday, that loophole will close on May 2.

These lower-value shipments will now face a tariff of 30% of the "value of the postal item containing goods for merchandise" with a minimum fee that will eventually rise to $50.

There goes AliExpress' business model ...

https://archive.is/MeJc6

Taylor Crittenden still feels “righteous rage” when she thinks about her experiences at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Crittenden, a nurse at a hospital in Texas, remembers staffing shortages, limitations on personal protective equipment like heavy-duty masks, and long hours as health facilities were being overrun with COVID patients.

“I was impacted by seeing all these people lose their lives,” Crittenden said. “I was also feeling frustrated and quite mad. We just needed more help on the floor. We were the ones in the rooms having these conversations with patients. We were their emotional support and their physical support. And managers and supervisors and directors were nowhere in sight.”

Two years later, Crittenden was among the hundreds of nurses at Ascension Seton Medical Center in Austin who voted to unionize. It was a snapshot of the worker power brewing within the health care industry — led in part by nurses, a workforce dominated by women — that received nearly daily public recognition of its crucial role in keeping people healthy and safe while grappling with realities like reduced resources, increasing burnout and health risks.

Now, as nurses mark the five-year anniversary of the first wave of the pandemic, they’re reflecting on their victories in securing protections but also new emerging challenges. Members of National Nurses United (NNU), the nation’s largest union for registered nurses, spoke with The 19th about their ongoing push for worker protections.

It’s arguably a waste of time to read Donald Trump’s books. In the first place, he didn’t write them; they weren’t even written by the same ghostwriter. His first three books, 1987’s The Art of the Deal, 1990’s Surviving at the Top (republished a year later as The Art of Survival, when Trump’s position could no longer be described as “at the top”), and 1997’s The Art of the Comeback, have three different authors standing in for the Donald: Tony Schwartz, Charles Leerhsen, and Kate Bohner.

Trump is also an inveterate liar, so there’s not much point in parsing the details of some triumphant deal as he recounts them: They have inevitably been altered to reflect favorably on him, so to try to figure out where he’s fudging is to engage in a useless and tedious fact-checking exercise. His Art of… books are works of advertisement—or, as we should say now with the benefit of hindsight, works of propaganda, the production of which is perhaps his main gift. And although these books are all nominally memoirs, Trump is not one for introspection, so we can’t hope to learn much about his inner depths, mostly because he has none: He’s a self-admittedly shallow person.