Bulletins and News Discussion from April 14th to April 20th, 2025 - The Lamentations of a Levy-Loving Leader

Image is of Trump's initial set of reciprocal tariffs. Source is CNN and Reuters.

It's difficult to keep up with the news around the tariffs; they get instated, then dropped, then reinstated... for example, on Friday, Trump said that certain electronics like smartphones would be exempt, causing markets to rally a great deal, but now the Commerce Secretary has said that they might not be exempt? The state of play right now, if you haven't been keeping up this week, is that the US recently announced a 90-day global pause on implementing the tariffs he had planned (that is, 25% on certain Canadian and Mexican goods, and at least 10% on every other nation) but nonetheless increased tariffs on China to 145%.

Meanwhile, China has been - quite remarkably - standing their ground, increasing tariffs on the US to 125%, and putting restrictions on rare earths. Xi Jinping has been in Vietnam and has made statements against a tariff war there, saying that it would have no winners. Meanwhile, a Chinese spokesperson has essentially said that China can endure the tariff war due to the increasing demand from its domestic market in combination with its growing economic ties with other countries.

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A deadly E. coli outbreak hit 15 states, but the FDA chose not to publicize it

We are continuing down the eugenics "let disease cull the weak" path. They will probably unrecommend vaccines next, so insurance will stop covering them, and people will be priced out of vaccine access like they've done with uninsured people and covid vaccines. Dr. Brianworm will say they cause autism, and disease makes you strong, and that will be that.
- US pioneering what I like to call "indirect eugenics" via austerity and denial of basic health/labor protections.
  Same result as direct eugenics, just now with plausible deniability.
  
  tbf I think that's a ~~british~~ brutish invention
- We're really going full speed ahead with the germ theory denialism, aren't we? I look forward to the spirited debates about whether miasma theory is true or whether the oppressive smell from untreated sewage collecting everywhere is actually good for you.
  It's not even eugenics at this point, eugenicists had a coherent ideology, albeit one that needs to be destroyed. This is a reaction against the notion of public health, against the idea that social determinants of health exist, that health is anything but a consequence of an individual's choices as a consumer and their personal virtue. Anyone who dies from an easily preventable disease deserves it for not being a rugged enough individualist.
  Any intervention on a scale larger than whatever some crank on social media is selling is basically communism and must be destroyed. This is an ideology that can only take root in people who have been the benificiaries of hundreds of years of millions of people's labor spent so they would have the privilege of not seeing infant and childhood mortality rates at pre-modern levels. It's pro-suffering for the sake of suffering.
  Eugenics is tragedy, this is farce. A humane society would put people who sincerely believe this shit to work doing disease eradication. Let them go down to the countryside and live with the people their idealism is killing.
  
  Even miasma theory is somewhat connected to observable reality (people who spend lots of time around yucky smelly stuff tends to get sick more often) and believing in miasma theory can lead to demand for public health measures (get rid of all the yucky smelly stuff). I think they will go right to using a mixture of moralising and conspiracy theories to explain disease: "You (a bad person) got sick because you were not a high value alpha male with the right hustle grindset" and "I (a good person) got sick because of the woke DEI poisoning the wells". This explanation leads to policy outcomes the far right wants: no public health provisions and persecution of their enemies.
  
  I don't think we're actually going to recapitulate all the prior theories of illness leading up to germ theory, the reality of having the prosperity gospel guiding public health policy in the US is far worse. All this for what? What's even going to be left to rule over? I don't know that anyone's even thought that far ahead, all the clear-eyed ghouls who were pulling the levers of power are gone and the slapdicks who replaced them all seem to sincerely believe the shit they're peddling. I don't think they understand that the infinite variety of contagious diseases we're letting run rampant don't care how rich you are, or how many precautions you take that you won't let the masses have access to. Like the IRA told Margaret Thatcher: we only have to get lucky once, you have to get lucky every time. Plagues don't discriminate. Will it fuel pogroms? Sure, but it doesn't keep the instigators of those pogroms from dying agonizing, preventable deaths.
  I don't know if miasma theory is completely off the tables, actually. I could see libs adopting it as some kind of counterproductive attempt to triangulate some kind of public health policy while ceding material reality to the fascists, that's their whole thing. Why organize effective resistance when you can fight battles already won and lost while chuckling at how clever you are?

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