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Yesterday, in the Oval Office:

RFK Jr: "A Democratic senator claimed it's mathematically impossible to have a drug drop by 600%. I said, 'Well, if the drug was $100 and it raises to $600, that would be a 600% rise. If it drops from $600 to $100, that's a 600% savings.'"

Trump: "Right"

Right.

And no one corrected either of them. Because no one can.

Oh, but, it gets so much worse...

The day before, RFK Jr testified in front of Congress: "President Trump has a different way of calculating percentages. If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that's a 600% reduction."

A different way of doing math.

Yeah, the wrong way.

Kennedy, of course, is confusing an increase of 6 *TIMES* for 600 percent. A basic mistake in logic sometimes made by grade school children and corrected at that level. A drop of $600 to $100 would be a reduction of 83% and you'd pay 17% of the original price. This is basic grade school math. Not advanced calculus or quantum mechanics. It's not even high school level math. It's the basic count-on-your-fingers stuff any 6th grader should be able to manage.

But, the most powerful men in the country can't.

Nor can far too many Americans.

Math isn't just about numbers.

Math is about how we think. Math is about logic. Math is about a structured method of reasoning and deduction. Math is about building a rational and verifiable worldview.

Math is about how you THINK.

Math is what separates us from the amoebas.

And that's Trump.

That's the ideology of MAGA. Amoebas.

You can see this abjectly demonstrated by RFK Jr and those who surround Trump, by the men in that image, every day. They can't do basic math (or if they can, they've given it up for craven access to power) and their resulting worldview is a bizarre construct of conspiracy, fantasy, self-aggrandizement, and opportunistic servile sycophantic groupthink utterly disassociated from actual provable reality.

That is the ideology of MAGA in a nutshell.

That is a government who tells you every day you're paying less just to live when you KNOW, when you can SEE it with your own eyes, when you can do the MATH, and know you're paying far more -- and yet, somehow, STILL believe you're paying less. That's MAGA.

That is a President who daily contradicts himself without a shred of self-awareness and who just expects reality to adjust around him.

And it DOES, because the rich and powerful and the dumb and ignorant alike make it so.

This is the result of allowing rich privileged sociopaths to pass K-12 and get a college degree without actually doing any work or learning anything and then putting them into position of power and authority. You're a Kennedy? Your dad is Fred Trump? You're Howard Lutnick? Or "Doctor" Oz? Here's your degree. Here's your CEO position. Here's your government job.

You're rich, white, male, you must be right -- even if the universe demonstrates every day that you are utterly wrong.

Every generation of this privileged overfed inbred aristocracy is more and more ignorant, more and more helpless, more and more insulated from brutal remorseless relentless reality, until they can't even wipe their own asses without paid help from the underclass.

National denial of objective reality is how a ragged bunch of otherwise professional military officers one day found themselves in a bunker beneath the ruins of Berlin listening to a demented psychopath raving at them about how a nonexistent last minute attack by nonexistent glorious Aryan heroes would somehow turn the tide of their utter defeat and win the war for Germany.

In the end, that demented madman took the only way out left to him rather than accept reality and those officers who were too cowardly to stop him when they could have found themselves facing the gallows at Nuremberg.

In the end, math doesn't care about your politics. If you jump off the roof believing you can fly, gravity will kill you whether you believe in it or not.

But the side effects of your violent ignorance are often damned unpleasant for those below.

Jim Wright

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aaliyah photographed by jim wright, 1999.

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