As almost everyone who can read knows, the Mango Mussolini has inflicted tariffs on numerous countries around the world. However, several of the tariffs have been aimed at places with no trading relationship with the United States., two of which are Heard Island and the McDonald Islands1.
The electric car maker Tesla was created by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning who reputedly sought to make electric cars that were fast and fun to drive. The company was officially incorporated in 20031.
In January 2008, both Eberhard and Tarpenning were forced out of the company at the behest of investor Elon Musk, who subsequently took over as CEO2. Their departure was supposedly because of their inexperience in running such a company.
Everybody except those living under a bush know that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies and processes have been in the firing line of Trump’s uncontrolled assault on US democracy. This has manifested itself in numerous ways, with pressure being brought to bear on numerous organisations and businesses to dump their DEI policies.
QAnon is a multifarious conspiracy theory originating in forum posts on the far right wing website ‘4chan’ in October 2017.
A couple of years ago, I got into a discussion about Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a couple of people who write computer code (in Python) as part of their jobs. They suggested that I could use it to kick-start rants on this blog. At the time, ChatGPT was the AI version in the headlines, and they suggested that I should use it. Initially, I wanted to find out how I could get it to work for me, so I queried it about its capabilities.
The decline in religion is something that interests me greatly, as anyone who reads this blog can attest. I originally wrote about in in 2019, with an essay on the decline of religion in the Anglophone world, wherein I tracked the proportion of the population who, according to the census, had no religious affiliation. In 1966, only 0.8% of the population reportedly had no religious affiliation whereas, at the time the last census for which data was available (i.e.
In 1998, gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield and 12 of his colleagues published a case study in one of the most highly respected medical journals, the UK’s Lancet. This paper suggested that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine may predispose children to behavioural regression and pervasive developmental disorder (i.e. autism).
According to Yuri Shvets, who was posted to Washington by the USSR in the 1980s, Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow. Shvets was a key source for American Kompromat, a book by journalist Craig Unger. Shvets, a KGB major at the time, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass.
Alaric DeArment wrote an article in The New Republic in early 2023, where he noted that Americans from marginalised communities were looking to leave because of a rise in gun violence and far right (read Trump’s MAGA horde) politics. He wrote this article not long after he applied for German citizenship through his mother’s side of the family1.
After what happened in the US on January 20th and subsequently, I have found myself constantly scrolling through assorted writings on Substack, where a large number of reasonably literate Americans, and some very astute Australians (e.g. John Quiggin, Tim Dunlop) are fulminating, or at least aghast at the idiotic petulance from the Mango Mussolini. I also recently heard this sort of scrolling being appropriately termed ‘doomscrolling’.