- More about Pam Bondi’s nonsensical claim that Trump has saved 258 million lives by seizing fentanyl;
- Has it occurred to Red States to extend tariffs to Blue States, and only buy products from other Red States? How would that work out?
- How conservatives invent problems to be concerned about (while denying real, existential problems like climate change), currently busy passing laws against weather control and “furries” in classrooms.
In complete contrast to the brilliant men (and a few women) throughout history who have helped humanity understand its place in a vast, ancient universe that perhaps had no beginning at all (as recounted in the book I just summarized last post), are the politicians and their cronies that Americans keep electing to national office. Some of them anyway.
Plenty of people noticed that absurd claim by attorney general Pam Bondi that Trump has somehow saved 258 million lives, just in the first 100 days of his office, by seizing fentanyl laced pills. How to demonstrate credulity and innumeracy.
Slate, Jim Newell, 1 May 2025: The DOJ Says Trump Has Saved 258 Million Lives. I Asked Them What That’s Based On., subtitled “‘Are you ready for this, media?’ No, actually!”
Have all the people who “disapprove” of President Donald Trump considered that if he weren’t president, there’s a good chance they would have died in the past 100 days?
This is the message from the Justice Department, as Attorney General Pam Bondi has spent the week sharing some remarkable statistics.
Tuesday was Fentanyl Awareness Day. To mark the occasion, Bondi visited a Drug Enforcement Administration lab in northern Virginia where researchers are studying cartel tactics to traffic drugs across the border. In an X post from her official account that afternoon, Bondi observed, “In President Trump’s first 100 days we’ve seized over 22 million fentanyl laced pills, saving over 119 Million lives.”
Bondi’s claim that Trump had saved the lives of 1 in 3 Americans in his first 100 days was met with some skepticism. Dare we say, some rascals even made fun of her over it.
Bondi responded by daring the media to accept this information, and raised the stakes to “258 million lives.” And a spokesman for the DOJ even responded with the calculations that led to that number, quoted in the article.
It’s nonsense. Because even if the amount of fentanyl seized by the administration might *theoretically* have killed millions of people, if evenly distributed, doesn’t mean it *would* have, had it not been seized. Get a reality grip, people. Stop treating us like idiots.
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Thought for the day…
The Daily Beast, Grace Harrington, 18 Nov 2024: Marjorie Taylor Greene Wants ‘National Divorce’ From Trump Critics, subtitled “Greene has supported the idea of a split between red and blue states in the past.”
This piece is from months ago, but I saw that she said this again recently, though I can’t find that link just now.
Anyway. The thought. Since MAGA conservatives are enamored with “America First” and want everything built in America… I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Why don’t red states demand tariffs blue states, and only buy things made in other red states. How will that work out? Not well. Because of the same principle that won’t allow everything to be built in the United States again, ever.
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A running theme here is that conservatives are concerned about problems that aren’t actually problems, while ignoring existential threats that actually are problems. The reason is the latter are long-term threats, and fall off the radar of short-term conservative, conspiratorial, thinking. Two examples today.
JMG, 1 May 2025: DeSantis Gets QAnon Bill Banning Weather Control
Reality check: there is *no such thing* as weather control. It’s been an idea for decades, seeding clouds and so on, but has never worked out. And there have been ideas of “geoengineering” to ameliorate climate change, but these would be vast projects, of debated consequences, and are no where near ready for trial. If weather control *were* possible, don’t you think the government, or insurance companies, would have used it to avoid the vastly expensive costs of disaster cleanup after hurricanes and tornados…?
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This one is even more absurd.
JMG, 1 May 2025: Texas GOP Rep Sponsoring “FURRIES Act” Admits That There’s No Evidence Of Litter Boxes In Public Schools
I admit I don’t know how this conspiracy theory got started. In fact, there is a small segment of science fiction fandom that presents the Ursa Major Awards, aka the “Annual Anthropomorphic Literature and Arts Award,” for “excellence in the furry arts.” It’s a fringe award that I do not compile in my Science Fiction Awards Database, and I have no idea whether there’s any kind of “furry fandom” outside the sf/f community. I don’t care. The question is, what prompted easily-alarmed conservatives to think that children in school were using litter boxes? And even they admit, there’s no evidence!
