House of Spades

Hello, everyone, I'm MizufallsfromKumo, or Mizu for short. I'm a Graphic/Web designer, artist, and writer (on occasion).

[thepromiscuousfinger]

[chaifootsteps]

#Please little bird

[meriwetherwrites]

I love that the modern-day tumblr post equivalent of chain emails only requires me to reblog a relatively pleasant image instead of forward an email to a bunch of my friends and family members to quell my raging anxiety.

[catchymemes]

[elliesgaymachete]

i hope every single one of you outlives these hateful fucks on the news right now. i hope each and every one of you is able to find joy and support throughout these tumultuous times and i hope you get to live so fiercely as yourself. i hope you wake up one day to news that you’ve outlived those pieces of absolute shit and whether that brings you joy or relief or hope or what have you, i hope you live to see that day

[yesornopolls]

Opinion | Don’t Believe Him

Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s second term and you’ll see something very different than what he wants you to see.

The article is under the cut because paywalls suck

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to — Michael Kirk: What was the word? Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter  Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

[magess]

These men just stole the personal information of everyone in America AND control the Treasury. Link to article.

Akash Bobba

Edward Coristine

Luke Farritor

Gautier Cole Killian

Gavin Kliger

Ethan Shaotran

Spread their names!

[capricornluna-deactivated201810]

this blog hates donald trump

[pearlmarley]

Look how many people hate him. I’m pretty damn happy about that 😁😁😁😁😁😁

[aggressivetapdancing]

I’ve never reblogged something so fast

[whitepeopletwitter]

[blanketfortarchitect]

[mizufallsfromkumo]

AAAHHHH! I just accepted a job offer! I am so excited, no more being unemployed after being let go from a job I adored. They literally offered me everything I hoped they would offer me.

[johnny-depp-is-loved]

Please, spread this for those who might need it right now

U.S. suicide hotline: call or text 988 (available 24 hours)

U.S. trans lifeline: [phone] (when you call, you’ll speak to a trans/nonbinary peer operator. full anonymity and confidentiality)

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline: 1-800-662-HELP (4357) – provides 24/7 confidential support and referrals for individuals and families facing mental health and substance use disorders, including panic attacks and anxiety.

LGBT National Help Center: [phone]

Trevor Project: Call [phone], text START to 678-678, or chat online.

Take care of yourself and each other. Please stay safe ♡

[catchymemes]

[infinitydivine]

I am not taking a risk

[darlingsstern]

Not risking it pals

[doralimasstuff]

U know what I want potato of luck

[shrewreadings]

Damn right I’m reblogging. See previous post re wrath of whatever from high atop the thing.

[topshelf2112-blog]

Don’t give up.

It’s okay to grieve. It’s okay to feel bewildered and ashamed of whatever it is that is currently gripping the American psyche. But people have - and do - endure and care for one another and do good work under horrible regimes.

Take care of yourself. Take care of others.

And start again.

[ms-demeanor]

Hey, also, all the anarchist shit aside, tomorrow I want you to make something.

I forced myself to draw something after the 2016 election. I forced myself to draw something when my mother died in 2018. I forced myself to draw something when my spouse was hospitalized for multiple organ failure in 2021.

When you are miserable, make something. Add a row to your project, bake a box cake, draw on a sheet of lined paper, write a poem on a napkin, fold an origami shirt out of a dollar bill, make your favorite recipe for dinner, but make something with your hands, something that you can hold and look at engage your senses in.

It won't fix the world, but it will change the world. You will have made something that didn't exist before. You will have impacted your reality, even in a very small way. And it is going to be something you made *after.* Something bad happened, something shook you, and you made something after, in spite of it.

[claraknight]

Oh wow okay. Waking up to these news fucking stings.

[claraknight]

Yeah no, not okay, say what. To all my American followers and mutuals, and to all the non-American ones, too, who may/will be impacted by this, in a way or another. I love you so much. I'm so sorry things are the way they are. And I hold you all so dearly. But please, don't let this be an end on its own. Take the time for yourself, and then. Keep on fighting. Fight, bite, maim, kill, you know what they say. Allow yourself to be upset, frustrated, angry. Those are dire times, and it's absolutely not the moment to lose hope or turn numb to all of this. No doom-scrolling. No doom-talking. We can't let down the people who are already suffering. Stay united and close to your loved ones. The situation is far too important for us all to fall into despair.

[milo-hypno]

I'm certain this is on Tumblr somewhere, but I haven't seen it around, so I'm sharing it myself

[mizufallsfromkumo]

Hey Everyone,

The storm passed yesterday and everything were I currently am is fine. It was a long night on Wednesday, but where I am was really, really, really lucky. Where I am staying has power and internet.

My house is completely fine it just, last I checked, has no power. Which I will happily take, and I was able to clear out my fridge and bring everything over to where I am staying.

Everyone we have heard from so fair is doing alright, and it's mainly no power and some down branches and trees. But no extensive damage. Thankfully the weather had been nice, and everyone is working back towards normalcy.

My heart goes out to everyone who was more affected by the storm, and that everyone is staying safe.

[mizufallsfromkumo]

So, a huge storm is headed towards the area where I live. It's still like two days, but it's expected to have huge impacts, like power outages, and I am just expecting damage to my home (just preemptively). I am sort of evacuating, right now it's playing a lot of stuff by ear.

[mizufallsfromkumo]

I finished reading Tangled Up in You by Christina Lauren and I will say it was good and enjoyable. I mean I checked it out on Hoopla yesterday after work and stayed up until midnight to finish. (The headache I got doing so is a little bit worth it).

The book both read like a fanfic and it's own thing, which was nice. Like I could easily swap out Ren and Fitz's names with Rapunzel and Eugene while reading, yet at the same time they were there own characters. And it really scratch that itch for a modern New Dream AU I have been craving for like that last few weeks. Plus it felt like it had influence from both the movie and the series. (No one will unconvince me Miriam is basically Cassandra even with how minor of a character she is). Which was nice too.

I wouldn't say it was a groundbreaking read, but it was enjoyable and fun. That's all I can ask for really. And like I am considering going to the store to buy the book to just kind of have to reread if the need arises.

I've but my thoughts on things I liked and disliked under the cut so if anyone wants to read the book you won't get spoiled.

Okay here are the things I like

Fitz calls Ren "Sunshine" - Like for the first third of the book he calls her something else, but then calls her Sunshine like on half a whim then doesn't stop. I sort of screamed with a saw it.

Both Ren and Ftiz being smart. Like yes, at one point Fitz cheats because he flunked a test because he was like annoyed Ren existed and was smart. But it's kind of implied it's his first time actually doing what he does in the book.

"There is only one room/one bed" trope is so strong and well executed. It happens every time they stop to rest on their trip but it doesn't feel overdone or overused at all. (Like there is a valid reason they share rooms, and that reason is basically money.)

The characterization for Ren and Fitz are on point. They do so many things that I was like "yup they would do that". - The scene with the floor bed was one of theses scenes. Ren makes her self a spare bed on the floor with extra pillows and blankets while Fitz showers. When they swap, Fitz sees the bed and is like "oh that was nice of her to make me a bed" and just lays down on the floor. Only for Ren to come out of the shower and tell him he stole her bed, and he just wiggles in it claim it as his. I was so like Eugene would so do that it's not even funny how actuate it feels. (Because again Fitz both feels like a character simply inspired by Eugene, and also is Eugene.)

Their first introductions to each other was great.

This books version of the Snuggly Duckling is great, and the fact that Ren tells jokes everyone to get out the situation they were in.

Their first kiss was so nice.

They did a nice job of Ren's hair cutting scene. It was Ren's choice to cut her hair, yet Fitz was the one to cut it. It was nice little combo.

Here are some of the things I disliked about the book. (They are minor things in the scope of things, and I am sure more have to do there being a line of book being a "reimagined modern version of Disney's Tangled" and not a modern AU fanfic cause copyright and stuff)

Ren knowing a ton of languages. Its kind of briefly mentioned book, but it sat so weird to me that she knew like seven languages, and not Fitz. The way the book felt like it nods to the series, that sat really weird with me, given the series made Eugene the more linguistically versed character being fully fluent in Italian enough to catch on to an art thief. For Ren to know so many languages (even with the self-taught angle) felt so weird and took me out of a moment. (Now, I didn't mind her knowing like the literal linguistic roots of words and info dumping a bit to people in that regards, that felt in characters.)

Fitz real name. This is kind of a bigger one from me for me, especially the more I think about. The name Fitz comes from his adoptive last name. Fitz in the book doesn't like his adoptive father, like it's part of his plot why he doesn't like him. It to have Fitz come from that felt off, I wish the last name more along the lines of Rider, or his name something closer to Flynn Rider and "Fitz" is just a nickname he has everyone call him and no knows where it comes from. Like he is none as [Name] "Ftiz" [Name], but everyone calls him just Fitz. Also Edward, I kept reading as Edmund, and I felt weird in a way. Even though Edward and Eugene kind of have the same name meanings (so like take it my weirdness with a grain of salt). But I don't know I wish his "birth name" was Edward Fitzsimmons instead of Fitzsimmons coming from his adoptive family. And the nickname Fitz can be the ever so nod to Eugene being Flynn Rider as name because of the Tales of Flynnigan Rider books. This doesn't make or break the book for me, it's more a wish because it felt weird given that it really a nod to Fitzherbert, only for it to be a name he basically got from someone else.

I wish there were a little more nods to the movie. I feel like so many fanfic writers in AU (and that's what this basically is at the end of the day) have away of infusing Canon events, sayings, the feel scenes or songs into moments in a fic so beautifully it feels natural. There are some nods, don't get me wrong, but they felt small looking back. And yes, it was easy in some scenes to be like "oh that's this part in the movie" but kind of a big key nod just wasn't in the book (ei. I See the Light). And could all very easily be the walking of the very thin line of "reimagined book" and "AU fanfiction", so it's fine. It didn't ruin things, I just want a little more and that's okay.

Fitz doesn't get harm in the end. Like again, I get it, skirting the line of being reimagining and an AU, this fine. But that is like Eugene dying is such a point of the movie, narratively and character wise. That like I expected him to get physically hurt in the book, maybe not fatally but like pretty severely. And then he just didn't, I was little disappointed. Like okay, Ren's trauma for the end of things gets addressed and is more of a focus, so maybe not having that happen was not to have more piled on. But I don't know it felt like a let down in a way.

Ren birth mother being an alcoholic. That might just be because I like Arianna so much that I was like not willing to accept that different version of her. However it felt unnecessary even though it kind played a role in some of the reasoning of her abduction by Gloria and Steve. But like it could have just been a nasty divorce (which would still feel weird, but whatever) and still worked.

Those are just my thoughts. Do what you will with them.

Over all I really enjoyed the book, it was fun read. And wonderfully executed the balance of being a Tangled's story retold and it's own thing. Like I said am considering buying it, since I borrowed the book to from the Library.