Introducing Trump Math, a New System the President Uses to Convince Us He Lowered Drug Costs

(Alternate Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week for Your Holiday Enjoyment)

Trump Tower. Trump Taj Mahal. Trump University. Trump Vodka. Trump University. The Trump-Kennedy Center (That’s a new one.) And now ... Trump Math! Here’s Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick with the details! From the Independent:

“What he’s saying is … if a drug was $100 and you bring the drug down to $13 right? If you’re looking at it from $13 it’s down seven times …” Lutnick attempted to explain in a rambling response.“It’s 700 percent higher [than] before, it’s down 700 percent now, right? So $13 would have to go up 700 percent to get back to the old one,” Lutnick continued. “So it all depends on when you look at it. “You could say it’s down 87 percent or you could say … it would have to go up 700 percent to be the same one. So it just depends on what you look at it,” he repeated. “But basically what he’s saying, and we all know what he’s saying, is we are hammering the price of drugs down.”

Here with a rebuttal is veteran Broadway accountant Leo Bloom: “Max, you can only sell 100 percent of anything.”

Jesus, these people. My friend Angela V. Shelton of the Detroit Sheltons said it best Friday morning: If they named Planet Earth after him, he’d whine about the moon.

Oh, just shoot me now.

CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is ... launching a series of primetime town halls and debates alongside Weiss’s The Free Press under the banner “Things That Matter.” CBS says that Vice President JD Vance, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have all agreed to participate in the town halls, with the debates set to address topics like “Does America Need God?” “Has Feminism Failed Women?” and “Should Gen Z Believe in the American Dream? CBS has lined up people like Isabel Brown and Harry Sisson to debate the American dream, Steven Pinker and Ross Douthat to debate the God question, and Liz Plank and Allie Beth Stuckey to debate the feminism question.

I commend Ms. Weiss for assembling a body of experts even more boring than she is, which is quite a feat, and now the network that brought us Harvest of Shame, The Poisoned Air, and Biography of a Bookie Joint starring corrupt Boston cops—we were so proud—will bring us JD Vance, arguably live. The network on which Edward R. Murrow took on Joe McCarthy will give us Ross Douthat on God. And it will do all these things in pursuit of a goal as banal as it is false.

“We believe that the vast majority of Americans crave honest conversation and civil, passionate debate,” said Weiss in a statement. “This series is for them. In a moment in which people believe that truth is whatever they are served on their social media feed, we can think of nothing more important than insisting that the only way to get to the truth is by speaking to one another.”

Oh, bollocks. I get the feeling that the “vast majority of Americans” would like everybody to shut their traps for a while. And even if that isn’t true , maybe they’d prefer not to watch “honest conversation” conducted among the people in Bari Weiss’s DMs. She’s very bad at this job.

Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click

“Norris The Nocturnal Nutria” –Benny Grunch and the Bunch

Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives

Here, from 1963, is an underwater Christmas party in Japan. I like underwater Santa. He looks like the guy who brings the deoxygenizer down to kill Godzilla in the original movie. (break)

Well, this pretty much blows. From NPR:

Eduardo Flores-Ruiz was appearing in Dugan's court on misdemeanor battery charges. Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican national, was arrested outside the courthouse after a short chase by the immigration agents and has since been deported. A grand jury indicted Dugan the following month. She denied any wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty to the federal charges of obstructing a proceeding, a felony, and of concealing an individual to prevent an arrest, a misdemeanor. She was found not guilty of the misdemeanor charge.

During the trial, federal agents testified Dugan seemed "angry" when she approached them in the public hallway where they were waiting to arrest Flores-Ruiz after his hearing. They testified that she asked the agents if they had a judicial warrant, sent them to speak with the chief judge, rushed Flores-Ruiz's case through, and allowed him and his attorney to leave the courtroom through the jury door, which led back to a public hallway.

Her “obstruction of the proceedings” seems to the casual observe to consist of failing to genuflect to ICE operatives, asking them if they had a warrant, and sent them to see the chief judge, probably to get one, and then resolved the case before her quickly., and then allowed the defendant to leave the courtroom through a door 12 feet from where two ICE agents were waiting to arrest him outside the main courtroom door. Apparently, the contention of the prosecution was that the judge took all these completely legal steps as a ploy to get the defendant out of the courthouse before the ICE men could catch him. Of course, it they'd gotten the damn warrant in the first place, the strategy, if that what it was, would have failed. In addition, the defendant and his lawyer walked right past those ICE agents in the corridor on their way to an elevator. Courthouses are not traps. This entire matter has been a disgrace. This means you, too, jurypeople.

Discovery Corner

Hey, look what we found! From Archaeology Magazine:

According to a La Brujula Verde report, well-preserved dog remains and a polished bone dagger have been recovered from waterlogged sediments in the Logsjömossen wetland near Sweden’s Baltic Sea coast. The dog remains have been dated to about 5,000 years ago, when the site was a clear, shallow lake. ... Archaeologist Linus Hagberg of Arkeologerna said that the dog’s body may have been wrapped in a bag weighted with stones to sink it in the lake as an offering. “It had been deliberately lowered to the depth,” Hagberg said of the bundle. “The use of dogs in ritual practices during this period is a known phenomenon, but each discovery of this nature adds new nuances,” he explained.

There doesn’t seem to be much nuance in sinking Fido to the bottom of a lake, but I am not an ancient Swede, so what do I know?

Hey, The New York Times.Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

A nature photographer seeking shots of bearded vultures and red deer in the Italian Alps discovered a cache of dinosaur footprints that scientists are calling “remarkable. The finding in Stelvio National Park, near the Swiss border, that was unveiled Tuesday consists of thousands of fossilized footprints more than 200 million years old. The tracks, some of them stretching for hundreds of yards, are so well preserved that marks of toes and claws are visible. ... The tracks are thought to have been made by prosauropods, plant-eating dinosaurs with long necks from the late stages of the Triassic Period who are ancestors of the brontosaurus.

This find is in the general area of where they’re going to hold Winter Olympics events in February. I wonder if the IOC has found a way to turn a buck on it yet. If they find some dino luge tracks, I’ll be happy now.

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and the New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for the victims of the flooding in Washington, and of the windstorms in Idaho and Montana, and of Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica, and of the unspeakable violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and for everyone touched by the mass shootings in Australiam and in Michigan, North Carolina, Colorado, Minneapolis, NYC and Reno,the victims of the Manchester synagogue attack, and the family and friends of Rob and Michele Reiner, and everyone recovering from the flooding in Charleston, and in the Roanoke Valley, and in Wisconsin, and in Texas, and in North Carolina, and by earthquakes in Myanmar and Thailand, and in Turkey and Russia, and by the tornadoes throughout the Southeast, and for everyone touched by floods in Kentucky and in West Virginia, and Nigeria, and by the crash in Washington, and by the measles outbreak in the Southwest, and in the wildfire zone around Dallas, and in the fire zones in Napa, and in Las Vegas, Nashville, and Queens, who who were visited by the Crazy before the year had hardly begun, and the folks in Dallas and Tallahassee, and in Stockton, who were visited by the Crazy this week. And the people in drought-stricken north Alabama. And the victims of Tropical Storm Melissa in Haiti. And the folks caught in floods and tornadoes in Nebraska, and in Missouri. And the folks caught in “historic floods” in Kentucky. And in Oklahoma. And the folks in L.A., now fighting floods and mudslides exacerbated by the recent wildfires. And the folks in the wildfire zones in Pennsylvania, and in Minnesota. And the folks in Lahaina, who are still rebuilding. And the victims of the nightclub collapse in the Dominican Republic. And especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting. And for all of us, who will be getting exactly what we deserve. Thank you for your attention to this matter.