So cunning and so cold

I vowed not to look at my 401(k) account for at least the first six months of this year. I knew that it wouldn’t make me feel better, and also that there’s not much I can do about it except ride it out. At the end of last year, I asked my financial adviser whether I’d be okay through 25% tariffs coupled with a 2008-like market drop; he said I would be (and showed me the receipts), so that’s what I’m going with.

(I did, however, go to Wegmans last Tuesday, to use my $15-off-purchase-of-$75-or-more coupon on wine before the tariffs hit. Just in case.)

Even so, when the Kleptocrat announced them before an audience of barking seals on Wednesday, they exceeded all expectations for arbitrariness and idiocy. There’s no doubt in my mind that nations who’ve pissed him off (or just not extolled him to the degree to which he thinks he’s entitled) got higher tariffs, just because he’s president of the United States and he can do it. (Certainly he can as long as Congress rolls over and plays dead; which they are.) Or maybe he does not find their national flag esthetically appealing. Or he has it in mind that they’re a “shithole” country.

We all noticed, for instance, that Russia was not on the list. For the time being, the poodle isn’t going to bite its master.

But it did strike as strange everyone with three synapses firing in sequence that two “nations”—Heard Island and McDonald Islands—got hit with 10% tariffs, despite the fact that they are very small islands off the coast of Antarctica, with no human inhabitants. Yes—Stable Genius is showing penguins (and a few seals) who’s boss around here. He fer dang sure is.

But today is Gratitude Monday, and it’s also National Poetry Month. So my thanks goes to Janel Comeau, whom I follow on Bluesky. On Friday she [ta]riffed on the William Carlos Williams poem, “This Is Just to Say”, with absolute perfection. Viz:

We are talking chef’s kiss here; it was magnificent.

So were other memes.

And then Saturday, all over the US and the world, more than five million people turned out on city streets, in village squares and in front of Tesla dealerships, to tell the greedy bastards to keep their sticky mitts off our rights.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu