Misfit was here!

But now he's not. There's just me flying solo now. This is just stuff. Stuff that an old dog in the mountains of Oregon finds of interest. Depending on your employer's POV, there may be entries that border on NSFW. All journeys end when we reach our destination but the journeying remains a thing apart, unique unto itself. Most of us make life’s journeys without understanding that the journeying is a separate thing. Enjoy the ride. Babydoll, I hope you enjoyed this journey as much as I.

[misfitwashere]

Glitter

“All journeys end when we reach our destination but the journeying remains a thing apart, unique unto itself. Most of us make life’s journeys without understanding that the journeying is a separate thing.”

Bob Hoover - The Grendel Saga

[kamogryadeshi]

‼️Russians strike Yagotynske for Children factory in Kyiv region: 4 workers killed, 7 injured.

Fire continues in administrative building at baby food factory.

Rescuers continue clearing rubble.

[misfitwashere]

russia is a terrorist state

#ukraine#russia is a terrorist state#russia invades ukraine#russian war crimes#russia ukraine war#russian invasion#russian agression#russian terrorism#russia must burn#fuck russia#russia#russian culture

russian culture

[cleverwordsandotherstuffilike]

[misfitwashere]

Morning meese

[misfitwashere]

June 4, 2026

The wheels are wobbling on the Trump administration bus.

June 4, 2026 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 5

READ IN APP

The wheels are wobbling on the Trump administration bus.

The administration has always been an alliance of groups and people that oppose the so-called liberal consensus: the idea that the U.S. government should regulate business, provide social welfare programs, promote infrastructure projects, protect civil rights, and support a rules-based international order.

Republicans had embraced that ideology since the 1980s, but for all their celebration of tax cuts and deregulation, leaders recognized that the modern American state depended on the free trade and defensive security systems of the international order, and that the American people liked infrastructure and social welfare programs.

Trump upended that system, promising to get rid of the federal government built around the liberal consensus, the government his voters thought they hated because they thought its protection of equality before the law gave Black Americans, Brown Americans, women, and gender or religious minorities a leg up on white Christian men. Or they thought funding for science wasted their money on the research that right-wing influencers mocked for wasting their money and intruding on their freedom. Or they thought the U.S. contribution to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and U.S. participation in alliances did not put “America First.”

In 2024, Trump cobbled together enough groups who thought that way to win the White House, and as soon as he took power, he set out to destroy the liberal consensus government with the help of loyalists he installed in key positions. In its place, he sought to establish an authoritarian government with himself and his family at its head.

Now the effects of his plans on the American people are filtering through to those who weren’t paying close attention. Trump’s initial tariffs of April 2025—his so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs—destroyed the foreign markets for U.S. agricultural products, while Trump’s war on Iran has sent the price of the diesel fuel farmers need skyrocketing and put the cost of fertilizer out of reach. Today Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins testified before the House Agriculture Committee, where she made the national cost of a government of loyalists determined to destroy the federal government clear.

Minnesota’s Representative Angie Craig, the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, grilled Rollins, who did not appear to know much about the industry she oversees. As Ron Filipkowski of Meidas+ reported, when Craig asked Rollins how many farms we lost in the U.S. last year, Rollins said about 315 had gone into bankruptcy. While the number of bankruptcies is correct, it does not reflect the loss of smaller farms to consolidation. That number, as Craig pointed out, is 15,000.

Craig continued to hammer Rollins with statistics: farm diesel has gone up 95% in the last year, to $5.41 a gallon; farmers lost $28 billion last year; 70% of farmers say they cannot afford fertilizer because of Trump’s war on Iran. Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) added that farmers in his district “have been totally screwed over by this administration. They are livid, they are mad, they are pissed off.”

He continued: They “can’t afford fertilizer; it’s at record highs because of your administration. They can’t afford diesel because of this president’s reckless, illegal war. They can’t afford farm equipment—it’s more expensive than ever because of the stupid tariffs.”

And now New World screwworm, a parasitic fly larva that had been eradicated in the U.S. since the 1960s, is back. In March 2025 the Trump administration cut funding for disease control and prevention, including that of New World screwworm. Today, news broke that the New World screwworm has been found in Texas for the first time since 1966. The screwworm burrows into the living flesh of animals—most maggots feast on dead flesh—and can kill them. Screwworms are a serious threat to livestock and can hurt food production.

“If we all work together and follow the animal treatment protocols and movement restriction guidance, there is no reason to believe that this incursion will result in an establishment of the pest in our country,” Rollins said last night.

Meanwhile, Jamie Smyth of the Financial Times reported yesterday that U.S. oil reserves are at their lowest level in twenty-two years. The administration has released them to try to control oil prices that are skyrocketing after Trump’s war on Iran prompted the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil passed before the war. Oil industry analysts warned that oil prices will shoot higher if the crisis isn’t resolved.

Today President Donald J. Trump appeared to fall asleep again at a meeting in the Oval Office.

But Trump’s interest in profiting off the presidency remains clear. Jonathan Edwards of the Washington Post reported today that 14 of the 27 known donors to Trump’s $400 million ballroom project have won new or expanded federal contracts totaling over $50 billion since they made their donations.

As the results of the Republican destruction of the liberal consensus become clear, Democrats are speaking up to defend it and to chart a different course for the nation. Today, for example, Democrats called out the $187 billion in cuts Republicans have made to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in their budget reconciliation bill of last July, the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

House Democrats criticized Agriculture Secretary Rollins’s repeated boasts that she has pushed more than 3.5 million people off SNAP, claiming that such cuts are a way to reduce “fraud” in the program. Representative Craig noted that Rollins appears to confuse the program’s error rate, which measures underpayments or overpayments, with fraud. Craig noted that SNAP has “the lowest fraud rate in any program in America.”

Although Congress itself makes the same distinction between error rates and fraud rates Craig did, and says that “SNAP fraud is rare,” Sydney Carruth of MS Now reported that Rollins told Craig: “You can’t be serious.”

More and more, Democrats are anchoring their opposition to MAGA Republican governance in their opposition to its extraordinary corruption that siphons taxpayer money into the pockets of a small group of wealthy elites and their loyalists. On Sunday, Georgia senator Jon Ossoff reminded an audience of Trump’s deal with his appointees at the Department of Justice to establish a slush fund of $1.776 billion to pay his supporters for their claims that the Biden administration “weaponized” the legal system against them by indicting them for crimes.

Ossoff called out Trump’s frantic pace of outlandish social media posts, then said, “[W]hen not posting, he’s been trying to rob us. Have you seen it? He sued the U.S. government he commands for $10 billion. Then he settled the suit with himself to create a $1.8 billion slush fund so he can cut checks to cronies and Jan[uary] 6 foot soldiers, the same men who sacked the Capitol to seize the presidency for Donald Trump, who beat police officers with flagpoles, built a gallows on the Capitol lawn, and hunted the vice president to lynch him. Donald Trump’s brownshirts. He pardoned them, and now he wants you to pay them.”

Ossoff continued: “He promised to bring down prices on day one. Instead, prices are soaring. Ground beef’s up 25% since Trump was sworn in. Coffee, 40%. The price of gas, 33%. Groceries, rent, health care, and the power bill hit their new all-time highs last month. And while you pay more for everything, Donald Trump wants your tax dollars for what many are calling the Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Ballroom.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York called out how the corruption of the administration perverts the nature of government by stealing from everyday Americans for the vanity projects of a leader. She told Scott MacFarlane of MacFarlane News that “when people see a ballroom and they see at the same time their health insurance getting cut off, they know that they are paying for that ballroom with no healthcare, higher grocery prices, and increasingly impossible-to-afford housing.” “[P]eople are pissed off about it,” she said, “and they should be. It’s wrong. This is a complete theft of our money.” Rather than paying for Trump’s ballroom or his splashy renovations in the nation’s capital, taxes should pay for “[b]etter roads, healthcare, more affordable housing.”

And when the Texas Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, James Talarico, spoke to supporters in the home county of his opponent, Ken Paxton, he made it clear that the corruption of MAGA Republicans must not stand. He noted that “Paxton’s mugshot was taken just a few miles from here at the Collin County courthouse, where he was indicted for investment fraud. He convinced his own friends to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into a tech company. But what he didn’t tell them was that he was making a commission off their investments. He was scamming his own friends. If Ken Paxton will sell out his own friends for a quick buck,” Talarico asked, “what makes you think he won’t sell you out in the United States Senate?”

In a telling echo of a different sort of rally almost a decade ago, the audience began to chant, “Lock him up! Lock him up!”

“Listen,” Talarico said. “Ken Paxton has escaped accountability, but accountability is coming on November 3rd.”

—

[vincent-van-gogh-paintings]

-Corridor in the asylum-

[misfitwashere]

Loving Vincent

[stanfave2]

Ukraine strikes St Peterburg as "Putin's Davos" kicks off.  - Newsweek

Ukraine strikes St Peterburg as "Putin's Davos" kicks off. 

The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Putin's home city has started under the shadow of drone strikes on a nearby oil terminal.

[misfitwashere]

Slava Ukraini

[robertreich]

The Extraordinary Importance of Negative Feedback https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-extraordinary-importance-of-giving

[misfitwashere]

Friends,

If you hadn’t noticed, Trump’s war in Iran is failing. Iran is more dangerous today than it was when he initiated it, and energy prices are far higher. 

Trump’s brutal efforts to crackdown on undocumented people in the United States have generated a huge backlash, including among Latinos who voted for him in 2024 but are moving into the Democratic camp. 

His attempt to cover up the Epstein files continues to rankle MAGA voters. 

His $1.8 billion “slush” fund and family immunization from future IRS audits, in “settlement” of his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, has drawn widespread bipartisan scorn and hit judicial roadblocks. 

I could go on, but you get the point. Trump’s failures are mounting. 

Why?

I’ve worked for three presidents and advised a fourth. All of them solicited honest feedback, including criticism. 

Trump solicits only praise. He relishes compliments. He needs everyone around him to pander to his egomaniacal need for admiration. He punishes the bearers of bad news. 

He promotes people who kiss his assets, such as Bill Pulte, the home-building heir Trump put in charge of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and who Trump is now making acting director of national intelligence.

Pulte has no known experience in national security. An equally large problem is he got the job because he told Trump exactly what Trump wanted to hear, and presumably — as the person in charge of national intelligence — will continue to tell Trump what he wants to hear. Rather than national intelligence, Trump will get untrammeled stupidity.

Trump has so many people “he could be listening to,” said a former Trump official, “and he listens to Pulte, who just continually f*cks things up.”

Pulte weaponized the Federal Housing Finance Agency to give Trump dirt on people Trump wanted dirt on, such as Fed governor Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James, whom Pulte accused of mortgage fraud. (In fact, there was no dirt; Pulte’s accusations weren’t found to be true in either case.)

Instead of telling Trump the truth — that these people did nothing wrong, and that Trump shouldn’t be using the agency to try to persecute innocent people — Pulte did the opposite. He’s an unprincipled hack.

So how does Trump make decisions if he doesn’t have people telling him the truth? 

He relies, he has said, on his gut. “My gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” He told The Washington Post that he reaches decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already have], plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense.”

In other words, he doesn’t listen to anyone — especially not anyone who tells him anything he doesn’t want to hear. 

Presto. He makes colossal mistakes. 

Trump doesn’t even want to admit he’s been warned that he’s wrong. When it was reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force General Dan Caine cautioned Trump that strikes against Iran could potentially draw the U.S. into a prolonged conflict, Trump described the report as “fake news” and posted: “General Caine, like all of us, would like not to see war, but, if a decision is made on going against Iran at a military level, it is his opinion that it will be something easily won.”

For many months, Trump tried to sit on the Epstein files. It took someone no longer in the Trump administration who had nothing left to lose — his first-term national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn — to plead with him to reconsider: “@realdonaldtrump please understand the EPSTEIN AFFAIR is not going away,” Flynn wrote, adding that failing to address unanswered Epstein questions would make facing other national challenges “much harder.”

Even normal people don’t like to get negative feedback. And most people don’t want to give it. 

Yet receiving and giving truthful feedback are absolutely essential in a complex world. 

If you have power over other people, it’s even more important to get negative feedback, because your mistakes could harm many others. Yet the more power you have, the less willing people are to give you negative feedback, since they have more reason to fear your reaction to it. Which means you have to go out of your way to solicit it. 

The best leaders I’ve had the privilege of serving during my nearly 60 years of working life have been people who have actively sought and rewarded negative feedback. 

Trump does just the opposite. Small wonder he’s one of the worst leaders the nation has ever endured. 

[materialist-scumbag]

Pepto-Bismol — undated, occurred to me at a drug store

So Pepto-Bismol started life in 1901 as an emergency cholera infantum remedy mixed up in a New York doctor's office, sold in bulk to other physicians, and called — until somebody at the marketing department realized this was a bad name for a consumer product — Bismosal: Mixture Cholera Infantum, which is to say, the original branding was the name of the disease it was supposed to treat in babies, who were in fact dying of it in industrial-scale numbers in American cities in 1901 because nobody had figured out pasteurization yet and infants drinking summer milk in a tenement were essentially playing Russian roulette with their own gut flora.

The standard story credits an unnamed physician working in New York and the formulation gets picked up commercially by Norwich Pharmacal Company in upstate New York, which spent the first half of the 20th century being the company that owned Pepto-Bismol and not much else of consequence. Norwich, the town, is sort of the pharmaceutical-industrial equivalent of one of those Saxon silver towns from the Agricola era — small place, one main product, a labor force trained specifically in the one thing that pays the bills there, and a downstream effect on local culture and architecture and prosperity that you can still see if you drive through the place in 2026, even though the company itself got absorbed into Procter & Gamble's portfolio in the 1980s and the pink-bottling operation moved away long ago.

The active ingredient is bismuth subsalicylate, which is two molecules doing two completely different jobs in your stomach simultaneously, and the genius of the formulation — to the extent there is one — is that the two jobs happen to be the two jobs you most need done when you're standing in a hotel bathroom in Cancun at three in the morning regretting the ceviche.

Bismuth is the heavy metal. (Heavy metal in the chemistry sense, atomic number 83, sitting right next to lead and polonium on the periodic table, although weirdly nontoxic in a way its neighbors very much aren't — bismuth is the heaviest stable element, sort of the friendly uncle of the dangerous part of the periodic table.) The subsalicylate is the salicylate, which is the same family of compounds aspirin belongs to, doing the anti-inflammatory and mildly antibacterial work. Together they coat the stomach lining and slow down everything in your GI tract by varying mechanisms that researchers were still publishing papers about as recently as the 2010s — the molecule has been in widespread use for 120 years and we are still working out exactly why it does the thing it does.

The pink is a dye.

An absolutely arbitrary aesthetic choice somebody at Norwich made in I think the 1920s, sticking with the kind of cake-frosting Pepto-pink that became so identified with the product that if you mix up a pure bismuth subsalicylate solution in a lab today, the natural color is sort of pale chalky white, which would not move units, hence the dye, hence the bottle, hence eighty years of children associating the color pink with stomachache relief in what has to be one of the more successful color-coded conditioning programs in the history of American consumer goods.

The bismuth itself is a story all by itself. Bismuth has historically been a byproduct metal — you don't mine bismuth, you mine for lead or copper or tin and you separate the bismuth out at the smelter, because bismuth occurs in the same ore bodies as those more economically important metals and is essentially what's left over after you've extracted the parts you actually wanted. The historic centers of bismuth production were the same Erzgebirge and Saxon mining districts where Agricola was working in the 1550s, because the silver-lead-copper polymetallic deposits of Central Europe happen to also be where the bismuth concentrates. The 20th century moved production around — Peru, Bolivia, Mexico — but in the current moment something like 80% of the world's bismuth supply comes out of China, almost all of it as a smelter byproduct from lead refining at facilities in Hunan and Jiangxi, which means the pink bottle on the shelf at your CVS is in some causal sense connected to lead-mining decisions made by Chinese state-owned enterprises and to environmental regulations in the lead-smelting business, neither of which has anything to do with what Pepto-Bismol is for.

Lead refining produces bismuth as a side effect. Bismuth subsalicylate quiets the runs. The supply chain runs from a tailings pond in Hunan to a tourist bathroom in Cancun, through a P&G plant in either Greensboro or Cincinnati depending on the year, and the price of your trip is partly set by Chinese lead policy.

You don't think about this. Nobody does.

(The Chinese near-monopoly is a recent thing — the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency used to maintain a strategic bismuth stockpile, because bismuth is also used in some specialty alloys and as a lead substitute in plumbing fixtures and shotgun pellets, and the Cold War theory was that if the lead-bismuth supply got disrupted you didn't want to be caught short. The stockpile got sold off in the 1990s on the theory that the global market had matured, which it had, except the global market then consolidated in one country, which is the thing global markets do whenever Western planners declare them mature.)

The salicylate side has its own arc. Salicylic acid, the parent compound, comes from willow bark — the Hippocratic tradition knew about willow bark as a fever reducer, German chemists isolated the active compound in the 19th century, Bayer turned it into aspirin in 1899, and the salicylate molecule then proliferated through 20th-century pharmacy as a base for a whole family of derivatives. Bismuth subsalicylate is one such derivative. The pairing of a heavy metal with a salicylate was the kind of thing turn-of-the-century pharmacists did all the time, throwing combinations against the wall to see what stuck, and most of those combinations got dropped within a decade. Pepto stuck because babies in 1901 actually stopped dying when they took it, which is the highest bar a product can clear.

Then a generation went by and the babies weren't dying anymore — pasteurization happened, milk supplies got cleaner, sanitation in cities improved, and the original use case essentially evaporated. Cholera infantum stopped being a leading cause of infant death in the United States. The Mixture Cholera Infantum was a remedy for a condition that no longer existed at scale.

A lesser product would have died with its disease.

What happened instead is what happens to a lot of products that survive the disappearance of their original problem — Norwich rebranded it, repositioned it, found a new use case, pushed it from the pediatric infant-mortality market into the adult upset-stomach market, which is a much bigger market and one that, crucially, will never go away, because every culture in the world produces foods that some fraction of the population can't digest and humans are going to keep eating the wrong thing at the wrong time until the species ends. By the 1940s Pepto-Bismol was an adult OTC product. The original use was vestigial — written on the label in tiny print, then gradually removed, until by the 1970s nobody under sixty remembered what the product had been for in the first place.

(There's a Reye's syndrome warning on the bottle now, precisely because the salicylate component shouldn't be given to children under twelve with viral infections, which means the product that was invented to save babies is now contraindicated for children. The pharmacology hasn't changed. The information about salicylates and viral encephalopathy has. The product survived by changing who it was for, three different ways across three different decades.)

And then in the 1980s Barry Marshall and Robin Warren in Australia worked out that stomach ulcers were caused by a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, a finding so heretical to the gastroenterology consensus of the day that Marshall had to drink a beaker of H. pylori culture himself, develop gastritis, and then cure himself, in order to get anyone to take the work seriously. They got the Nobel for it in 2005. And it turned out that one of the few cheap, readily available, over-the-counter compounds with actual bactericidal activity against H. pylori — antibiotics are the primary treatment, but as part of the quadruple-therapy regimens — is bismuth subsalicylate. The pink stuff. The cake-frosting-colored chalky pediatric remedy from 1901, originally aimed at a bacterial infection (the cholera-adjacent bacteria killing babies on summer milk) and then sold for fifty years as a non-specific stomach-soother, turned out to be doing actual antibacterial work against an actual specific bacterium all along, which the science only caught up to in the 21st century.

Nobody planned that.

This is the thing about long-tailed consumer pharmaceuticals — the ones that survive a hundred years are usually surviving because the underlying biochemistry turns out to do more than the original formulators understood, and the formulators got it on the shelf for one reason and the molecule keeps earning its shelf space for completely different reasons that get discovered decade by decade. Aspirin is the canonical example (heart-attack prevention was a 1970s discovery, four generations after the molecule went on sale). Pepto is the second-tier version of the same story.

The travel-diarrhea use case, which is most Americans' actual encounter with the product, is downstream of the postwar tourism boom, GIs coming back from the Pacific and Mediterranean theaters with chronic gut problems, the airline industry making intercontinental leisure travel a middle-class experience by the 1960s, and the discovery — by trial and error among American tourists in Mexico and India and Egypt — that the pink stuff worked. There were studies in the 1970s and 1980s that put numbers on the prophylactic effect, and for a while the medical guidance was actually that travelers should take Pepto preventively, which turned out to be a bad idea if you were doing it for weeks at a time because the bismuth accumulates and your tongue turns black, but that's a separate story.

(The black tongue thing, and the black stool, are bismuth sulfide — your gut bacteria react the bismuth with sulfur compounds in the digestive tract and you produce a thin layer of the same metal sulfide that occurs as a black crust on weathered bismuth ore. Your mouth becomes briefly a smelter. The mineralogy of bismuth is reenacting itself inside you.)

What I keep coming back to is the supply chain. The pink chalk in the bottle is, as a matter of physical history, a chunk of central Chinese lead-smelting byproduct combined with a derivative of willow-bark chemistry that was industrialized in Germany around the time of the Boer War, mixed with food-grade pink dye whose color was chosen by a marketing department in upstate New York during the Coolidge administration, and sold to you for the purpose of treating a condition that the original formulation was not designed for and whose underlying mechanism only got fully described in the mid-2000s. Each component of the product comes from a different century and a different country and a different industry, and the whole thing costs $7.99 at Walgreens.

Same as it ever was.

The product survives because the molecule is interesting and the molecule is interesting because three or four unrelated chemistries happen to converge in it, and consumer pharmacy is mostly the business of finding such molecules and then attaching them to whatever market is currently the largest. The cholera babies died off. The tourists arrived. The ulcer patients showed up. The molecule kept earning its keep through three different epidemiological eras by being three different things, and the bottle, the color, the chalky taste, those have stayed roughly the same since the dye choice in the 1920s, because the consumer relationship to the product is essentially nostalgic at this point. People reach for the pink because their parents reached for the pink. The pharmacology underneath the nostalgia is a moving target. The pink is the constant.

[materialist-scumbag]

reply to @gudamor , "Now explain why it's not legal in the EU"

Close enough that I won't fight you on it — the original-formula pink stuff really is hard to find across most of the EU. The one caveat is that there isn't a single EU-level law banning the molecule the way there's an EU withdrawal of, say, ranitidine. What you've actually got is a patchwork: France and Denmark ban the active ingredient outright, most other member states just never put it on the shelf, and the centralized European approval philosophy never had a reason to wave it through. But France is the load-bearing case, and the reason France killed it is better than "Europe is cautious," because the bismuth that poisoned France was a different compound than the one in the bottle.

In the mid-1970s France had an actual epidemic of bismuth encephalopathy. About a thousand people, roughly seventy dead, presenting with the full neurological horror show — people who couldn't walk or stand or write, myoclonic jerks, confusion, the works — and it took a while to even figure out the cause because nobody thinks the chalky stomach stuff is putting heavy metal in your brain.

And the thing is, the bismuth they were eating wasn't subsalicylate. It was subnitrate and subgallate and subcarbonate, the other inorganic bismuth salts, taken in grams per day for years as general GI cure-alls, which is a wildly higher exposure than anyone gets from Pepto. The salicylate version, the pink one, is the salt the pharmacology literature specifically flags as the LEAST likely to cross into your nervous system — gut absorption something like a tenth of a percent versus the others.

So what France actually banned was a class of compounds, and the regulatory shadow fell across the whole bismuth family, salicylate included, because in 1976 you do not have the autometallographic tissue assays to tell the regulator which salt is doing the damage. You have a thousand poisoned French people and a periodic-table column. You ban the column.

(The mechanism is still not fully nailed down fifty years later — one of the standard papers calls the French episode "unexplained" and floats co-factors, which is its own small monument to how confidently a regulator has to act on evidence that's still arguing with itself decades on.)

Then the precautionary principle does the rest. France never re-authorizes it, the salicylate-and-Reye's-syndrome literature gives the rest of Europe an independent reason to keep salicylates pharmacist-gated, and the molecule the science eventually clears as the safe one stays off the French shelf, grandfathered out by an epidemic it didn't cause.

The American version survives the same fifty years untouched because the United States never had the poisoning event. No bodies, no regulatory reflex, pink bottle stays on the open shelf at CVS.

Same molecule. Same half-century. France had its thousand casualties early and wrote them into the formulary forever, America didn't and didn't. The chemistry was never the variable.

[misfitwashere]

Long read. If you're curious, IMHO the read is worth it.

[doyourememberrocknrollradio]

Creedence Clearwater Revival - Lodi (Official Lyric Video)

[misfitwashere]

I love living in a rural area. Posted on the local bulletin board: Come get your pig, please.

[misfitwashere]

For those of a certain age.

[monamoni]

[misfitwashere]

Beavers shot

[classicalcanvas]

Moulin de la Galette (1886) by Vincent van Gogh

[misfitwashere]

Loving Vincent

[misfitwashere]

My friend sold his bus...

bringatrailer

[aboutoriginality]

[misfitwashere]

Thursday's child has far to go.

[misfitwashere]

June 3, 2026

Last night, in an unsigned opinion, the U.S.

June 3, 2026

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 4

READ IN APP

Last night, in an unsigned opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court expanded its finding in the recent Louisiana v. Callais decision. That decision overturned decades of law to declare that states could not construct majority-minority voting districts, as they had done under Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to ensure Black voters had the opportunity to elect members of Congress who would represent the interests of the Black community.

After handing down the Callais decision, the Supreme Court sent a case involving Alabama’s map back to the state. One lower court had ruled the 2023 map unconstitutional because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment and, in diluting Black voting by spreading Black voters across three districts, eliminated a majority-Black district in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

As Lawrence Hurley of NBC News reported, on May 26 a panel of three judges reaffirmed that the map showed intentional discrimination and was unconstitutional. The state took the case to the Supreme Court, and last night the right-wing justices allowed the state to use the 2023 map, saying it was likely to win its case that the map was lawfully drawn.

And so, Alabama will likely replace a Black Democratic lawmaker with a white Republican, using a map that previous courts have said violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Republican lawmakers currently in power appear to be trying to grab as much power as they can as President Donald J. Trump deteriorates both personally and politically.

Today, a day after visiting the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for what the White House said was a six-month physical that he said went “PERFECTLY,” the nearly 80-year-old Trump appeared in public for the first time since May 27. He seemed tired and vague.

In the House of Representatives, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio was testifying before the Foreign Relations Committee about Trump’s 2027 budget requests for the State Department, Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) played a video of Trump sleeping in two Cabinet meetings as Rubio was talking, and asked how the president could make good decisions about war if he couldn’t stay awake even during public events.

Rubio insisted he had never seen Trump asleep in a meeting, although in the instances Lieu showed, the president was sleeping in a chair directly beside him. Lieu accused Rubio of lying to Congress.

The weekend’s promises of an end to the war on Iran have fizzled, and the economy is slowing under the pressure of higher oil prices. The administration announced on Monday that it is dropping tariffs on imported farm and construction equipment from 25% to 15% to ease prices, proving—as critics have maintained all along—that the tariffs are in fact raising prices.

On Sunday, when Shannon Bream of the Fox News Channel asked Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett about a Wall Street Journal report that delinquent credit card balances are at their highest level in 15 years as people use their credit cards for necessities, Hassett centered not the American people but the credit card companies. “We talk to the CEOs of the credit card companies all the time, and we do see some increased stress like the numbers that the Wall Street Journal quotes, but for the most part…there’s not any kind of…financial threat to the credit card companies.”

Americans trying to navigate rising prices by putting necessities on their credit cards were not likely to be concerned about how their financial pain might hurt credit card companies.

As Trump and the administration falter, the MAGA leaders Trump has installed in the government are pushing their agenda as fast as they can. Russell Vought, the co-author of Project 2025 who directs the the Office of Management and Budget and who therefore has the power—although not the authority—to ignore the laws Congress has passed for the expenditure of money, proposed last Thursday, May 28, that political appointees in his office should have final say over research grants, including those for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other governmental science agencies.

The proposal promises to root out “a ‘woke’ policy agenda that deliberately favor[s] certain identity groups over others.” In addition to submitting scientific research to political approval, the new rules would also stop international research collaboration unless it was approved by political appointees.

Aligning with Project 2025, which criticizes federal science programs for paying too much attention to climate change, the Trump administration is also tearing out a $368 million deep-ocean observation system along the Pacific Coast that monitors marine ecosystems, coastal environments, and the ocean currents that affect climate change. Eric Niiler of the New York Timesreported that the U.S. began operating the system in 2016 and expected it to continue for 25 years.

Democrats have pledged to fight the plan to tear out the observation system.

While those empowered by his 2024 win are pushing through their agenda, Trump himself appears to have abandoned any pretense of governing and is focusing on his Ultimate Fighting Championship ring in front of the White House—today he suggested making it permanent—and the painting of the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Today he showed to reporters images of how the Reflecting Pool is longer than skyscrapers are tall and that he is having it painted “American Flag Blue.”

He is also trying to cement control over the government. Today Trump signed an executive order stripping nearly 10,000 career civil service workers of their protected status, making it possible for the president to fire them at will. This move was introduced late in Trump’s first term but rescinded under President Joe Biden, and was a key part of Project 2025.

Trump’s announcement yesterday that he is nominating the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William Pulte, as acting director of national intelligence (DNI) illustrated that he is willing to pervert one of the most important positions in the U.S. government to his own whims. Pulte has no experience in intelligence, but he has demonstrated a willingness to persecute Trump’s perceived political enemies. By making him an acting director, Trump can get around the requirement for Senate confirmation.

But lawmakers who will have to face the voters in November appear to be getting queasy at being tied to Trump’s actions. Pulte’s nomination could be a bridge too far. The nomination threatens the renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which expires on June 12. Right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec has called for Pulte to take control of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to “start digging in on the domestic side of terrorism as well as the international,” and Democratic lawmakers have said they will not renew the controversial Section 702 of FISA with Pulte as DNI.

Section 702 permits intelligence agencies to collect the communications of foreigners operating outside the U.S. without a judicial warrant. But in the process of that collection, the communications of U.S. citizens often get swept up. As Joseph Gedeon of The Guardian notes, the FBI used Section 702 to investigate protesters in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has led the charge against renewing FISA without significant protections for American citizens, warned that Pulte could use Section 702 as a political weapon, abusing surveillance powers for purposes of blackmail, smear campaigns, or attacks on lawmakers, nonprofits, or activists. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance added that Pulte could use his position to seize ballots or election equipment. Wyden urged lawmakers to refuse to reauthorize FISA “without strong new safeguards for Americans’ rights.”

Mark Warner (D-VA), the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and the person who can deliver the necessary Democratic votes for the renewal of FISA, warned that Pulte’s nomination could doom the measure’s reauthorization. Even Republicans, including former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), are objecting to Pulte, citing his lack of intelligence experience, which the law requires for a DNI head, as a deal-breaker.

House Republicans are also starting to balk at the administration’s actions.

Meredith Lee Hill and Calen Razor of Politico reported today that House leaders had to push back votes today when Republicans didn’t show up from their holiday week. The House has been at work 43 fewer days in this congressional session than the Senate has as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has avoided pushback against Trump in the House by keeping members away from Washington. The Republican majority in the House is so slim that attendance issues have forced Johnson to delay votes to prevent Democrats from defeating bills. Now that members don’t want to go on the record either against Trump or for him, the ability of the House to get through the work it needs to is in jeopardy.

Johnson’s slipping control over the House showed today when the House voted to pass a resolution, introduced by Democrats, telling Trump either to stop further strikes against Iran or to get congressional approval for them. Johnson sent House members home early before the Memorial Day holiday to keep such a measure from passing, but today it did, by a vote of 215 to 208. Although Johnson warned that the resolution was “very dangerous” and would “weaken” Trump’s ability to find a way out of the conflict, members passed it, likely noting that according to a recent New York Times–Siena College poll, 64% of registered voters think Trump’s decision to go to war was wrong, while only 30% approve of it.

Shortly after passing that measure, the House rebuked both Trump and Johnson a second time when it advanced a measure that would aid Ukraine in its war to repel Russia’s invasion by a vote of 218 to 204. If the measure now passes the House and then the Senate, it will provide $8 billion in loans and $300 million in security aid.

Trump does not appear to be taking his loss of power well, retreating to the traditional Republican position that anyone who disagrees with him is a communist. This afternoon, he posted on social media: “Communists always do well with the Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE, in the Early Years! But, in the end, the Country, State, or City, GOES TO HELL! Great Violence proceeds at levels never seen before, and the entity dissolves into Poverty, Squalor, and Crime. Remember, breathtaking ‘Popularity’ first, and then, guaranteed DEATH AND DESTRUCTION! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

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[bowlby4]