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flemmings) wrote2025-05-22 09:27 pm
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wtfjht_feed) wrote2025-05-22 03:54 pm1/ The House passed Trump’s tax and immigration package by a single vote after Speaker Mike Johnson made late-night concessions to win over Republican holdouts. The 1,000-page bill, called the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” extends the 2017 tax cuts, eliminates taxes on tips and overtime pay, raises the SALT deduction cap to $40,000, expands business tax breaks, temporarily increases the child tax credit to $2,500, repeals most clean energy tax credits from Biden’s 2022 climate law, cuts Medicaid and SNAP by more than $900 billion, and imposes new Medicaid work requirements starting in 2026. The Congressional Budget Office projected the bill would add $2.3 trillion to the debt and result in 8.6 million people losing health coverage over ten years. The bill also includes a $4 trillion increase to the debt ceiling, which the Treasury Department says is needed by August to avoid default, overhauls the student loan system by replacing existing repayment plans with two options, imposes a 21% tax on wealthy university endowments, allocates $150 billion for military spending, and $46.5 billion for border enforcement. The legislation also creates $1,000 federally funded “Trump accounts” for babies born between 2024 and 2028. Trump, who directly pressured lawmakers and threatened primary challenges, claimed victory, saying: “Now, it’s time for our friends in the United States Senate to get to work, and send this Bill to my desk AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!” Democrats, meanwhile, called the bill “one big broken promise,” citing CBO projections that the poorest 10% of households would lose 4% of their after-tax income while the top 10% would gain 2%. Senate Republicans, however, have already said they plan to rewrite major sections, including the Medicaid and tax provisions. The bill also faces additional constraints under reconciliation rules, and with key policies unresolved, Trump’s goal of signing it by July 4 is uncertain. (Bloomberg / New York Times / Washington Post / Associated Press / Politico / NBC News / Wall Street Journal / CNN / CNBC / Axios / ABC News)
2/ The Senate voted 51–44 to revoke California’s authority to ban sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035, eliminating a waiver granted by the EPA under Biden and overriding a legal opinion that said the repeal wasn’t allowed under the Congressional Review Act. Republicans, nevertheless, used a procedural workaround to bypass the Senate parliamentarian, who had said the waiver didn’t qualify. The vote also struck down two other California rules targeting truck emissions and smog pollutants. California’s ban had been adopted by 11 other states, together representing about 40% of the U.S. auto market. “The weaponization of the Congressional Review Act […] is just another part of the continuous, partisan campaign against California’s efforts,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said, who vowed to sue. (Politico / NPR / New York Times / Associated Press / Bloomberg / Washington Post / Wall Street Journal)
3/ A federal judge blocked Trump’s executive order to dismantle the Education Department, ordering the agency to reinstate over 1,300 fired employees. Judge Myong Joun issued a preliminary injunction, writing that the “record abundantly reveals that Defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the Department without an authorizing statute.” The ruling also barred the Trump administration from transferring federal education programs to other agencies. The Education Department said it would challenge the ruling, calling the decision “a dramatic overstep” by “a far-left judge.” (Associated Press / New York Times / Washington Post / Politico / NPR / CNN / Wall Street Journal / Axios / ABC News / NBC News / CNBC)
4/ The Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 on whether Oklahoma could create the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school, leaving in place a state court ruling that blocked the effort. With Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused, the tie allowed the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision to stand, which found the proposed St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School unconstitutional under both state and federal law. The ruling, however, didn’t set a national precedent, but stops a plan supporters said would “bring Catholic education to rural parts of the state” that critics called “a constitutional oxymoron.” Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who brought the suit, called the outcome “a resounding victory for religious liberty” and said it ensures “Oklahoma taxpayers will not be forced to fund radical Islamic schools.” [Editor’s note: Drummond’s comment reflects the argument from opponents that approving a Catholic charter school would force states to also allow religious schools of any kind.] (Associated Press / Politico / CNN / Wall Street Journal / ABC News / New York Times / NBC News / Washington Post / Axios)
5/ The Trump administration revoked Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, requiring nearly 6,800 current foreign students to transfer or lose their legal status. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said “It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students,” claiming – without evidence – that Harvard “fostered violence, antisemitism, and coordinated with the Chinese Communist Party.” Noem said Harvard “refused” to meet the Trump administration’s unusually broad demand for information on foreign students allegedly involved in “illegal and violent activities.” She added: “Let this serve as a warning to all universities.” Harvard called the move “unlawful” and “retaliatory,” saying it “threatens serious harm” and “undermines Harvard’s academic and research mission.” President Alan Garber said, “No government […] should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire.” (Washington Post / The Guardian / Bloomberg / CNBC / Reuters / New York Times)
poll/ 58% disapprove of Trump’s economic performance, while 42% approve. 63% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of tariff policies and 66% disapprove of his handling of inflation and the cost of living. (Politico)
The midterm elections are in 530 days.
The first report from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again Commission blamed childhood chronic illnesses on ultra-processed food, environmental toxins, overprescribed drugs, and corporate influence. It calls U.S. children “the sickest generation in American history” and warns that poor health threatens national security. The 69-page report, however, avoids major regulatory proposals, but does support stricter food stamp rules, new dietary guidelines, and more research on vaccines and pharmaceuticals. Kennedy called it a “radical consensus” and pledged full policy recommendations within 100 days. (Politico / Axios / New York Times / ABC News / NBC News / CNN / Bloomberg / Wall Street Journal)
House Republicans reopened their investigation into Biden’s mental fitness, requesting interviews with his former physician Kevin O’Connor and four ex-White House aides. The Oversight Committee, led by James Comer, revived last year’s inquiry, citing new books and audio recordings that raised concerns about Biden’s cognitive state. Comer also questioned Biden’s use of an autopen to sign official documents, implying others may have made key decisions during his presidency. The committee hasn’t issued new subpoenas but said interviews could begin this week. (Wall Street Journal / Politico / NBC News)
The Supreme Court allowed Trump to fire two Biden-appointed members of federal labor boards, despite laws protecting them from removal without cause. In a 6–3 order, the conservative majority paused lower court rulings that had reinstated Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board. The court’s majority said the boards wield “considerable executive power” and Trump is “likely to show” he has authority to remove such officials. The justices, however, emphasized their decision didn’t apply to the Federal Reserve, calling it a “uniquely structured, quasi-private entity.” Justice Kagan dissented, writing: “Today’s order favors the President over our precedent.” (ABC News / Politico / NBC News / Washington Post / Wall Street Journal)
Federal prosecutors charged Elias Rodriguez with murdering two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, calling it a targeted act of terror. Surveillance video showed Rodriguez shooting Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim in the back, then firing again as they lay on the ground. Rodriguez told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza,” and shouted “Free Palestine” as he was arrested inside the Capital Jewish Museum. Prosecutors said they’re treating the case as both a hate crime and an act of terrorism. (Associated Press / Washington Post / ABC News)
The Treasury Department will stop minting new pennies early next year – ending production of the coin after over 230 years. Each penny costs nearly four cents to produce, and the phaseout is expected to save $56 million annually. Businesses will be instructed to round cash transactions to the nearest five cents, while electronic payments will remain unchanged. (Wall Street Journal / NBC News)
Trump is scheduled to host his private, crypto-themed dinner tonight at the Trump National Golf Club in Washington, D.C. for 220 people who spent a combined $394 million on his memecoin, $TRUMP, which is mostly owned by two Trump-linked companies. The average participant spent over $1.7 million, with some paying as much as $37.7 million for access. About 72% of the winners appeared to be foreign nationals. Trump benefited financially through fees on every $TRUMP trade, which netted nearly $900,000 in the first two days. (NBC News)
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addme2025-05-23 06:18 am
cathrowan) wrote2025-05-22 03:39 pmbill_schubert) wrote2025-05-22 03:50 pmHi William, |
Thank you for bringing your concern to our attention. My team at USAA Federal Savings Bank works in conjunction with the CEO’s office, and I’m researching what occurred. I’ll contact you shortly to discuss this further.
If you need to reach me, please feel free to call me at 210-531-USAA (8722), 800-531-8722, (TTY:711/TRS) or #8722 on a mobile device and enter extension 54205 when prompted.
Sincerely,
Carolyn
Member Advocacy
USAA Federal Savings Bank
Very interesting. And thanks, again to Senator Warren. And fuck the MAGAs who undercut CFPB funding.
bill_schubert) wrote2025-05-22 03:34 pmysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-05-22 03:30 pm
longreadsrss_feed) wrote2025-05-22 07:14 pmWhat do you do when the world is so overwhelming that you can’t see the next step forward? You head to Peru for a week of guided ego death, courtesy of the powerful hallucinogenic plant ayahuasca. For n+1, Sarah Miller chronicles her journey to the center of the self. Spoiler: The self is a slippery beast, and Madre Ayahuasca isn’t interested in easy resolutions.
The head facilitator was a Romanian woman named Maria, who spoke six languages and was so hot that when someone mentioned her boyfriend, I thought, wow, there’s actually a person who gets to have sex with her, that’s crazy. Before a ceremony, pasajeros would meet with Maria or Kara to let them know what they wanted the shamans to “clean.” Having tried and failed to refrain from telling absolutely everyone how much I hated Kara, I was assigned to Maria. Then, not wanting anyone as hot and generally composed as Maria to know how catastrophically miserable I was, I kept my list short. It went something like: clean antidepressants, clean insecurity, clean deprimida del clima, tristeza por las guerras y estado del mundo. It amazed me how quickly she could compress my anguish into a few words that could be passed onto the shamans so they’d have a sense of what to address. Before the ceremonies, the facilitators came around and read the list out loud to each pasajero without fanfare, as if checking what you needed from the store.
longreadsrss_feed) wrote2025-05-22 06:17 pmFor The Paris Review, Nora Claire Miller reminds us of the purpose and whimsical creativity of the screen savers that protected early computer monitors from “burn-in,” a situation in which an image shown on screen for too long would be “tattooed to the pixels,” permanently disfiguring the screen. Miller considers the repetitive and often overlapping pattern of screen savers in analyzing dreamlike poetry by Bianca Rae Messinger.
The article explained that there was a new danger facing computers: “burn-in.” Basically, if a screen showed the same thing for too long, the shadow of its image would be tattooed to the pixels. A screen saver stirs the soup of the image to keep it from sticking to the screen.
The science behind burn-in is grotesque: picture swarms of electrons like locusts flinging themselves at the thin phosphor coating of a screen, chewing holes. A screen saver periodically smokes the locusts out, thereby saving the screen from the disfigurement of monotony.
But the poems talk about memory as though time itself were a screen saver—a series of recurring dreams that overlap.
languagehat_feed) wrote2025-05-22 07:23 pmLaura Spinney, a British science journalist, has come out with a book called Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, about my former area of specialization, Proto-Indo-European. Not having seen it, I can’t say how accurate it is, but Laura Miller’s Slate review makes it sound like Spinney has been keeping up with recent developments, anyway:
It’s astonishing how much we’ve discovered about these languages that have gone unspoken and unheard for millennia. In the past two decades, new DNA analysis technologies, combined with archaeological advances and linguistics, have solved many mysteries surrounding the spread of the Proto-Indo-European (or PIE). For example, Anatolian, a now-extinct group of languages, was once thought to be the earliest offshoot of PIE, the first instance in which a new language split off from the mother tongue. But in recent years, genealogical analysis of human remains from the period shows no genetic connection between the people who spoke the Anatolian languages and the Yamnaya, a people of the Pontic–Caspian steppe region north of the Black Sea—now considered the source of PIE. The presiding theory now is that Anatolian isn’t the daughter of PIE, but its sister, with both being the products of an even more ancient lingua obscura. […]
Fortunately, Spinney is a stylish and erudite writer; it’s the rare science book that quotes Keats, Seamus Heaney, and Ismail Kadare. She also has a keen sense of the romance of her subject. Her vivid scene-setting takes us from the vast, grassy steppes where the nomadic Yamnaya grazed the livestock whose meat and milk made them exceptionally tall and strong to the perplexing Tocharian culture on the western border of China—whose capital was regarded by the Chinese as filled with “heavy-drinking, decadent barbarians,” famed for its dancing girls and “the flock of a thousand peacocks upon which its nobles liked to feast.” This latter culture—and not Sanskrit, as was long thought—may even be the source for the English word “shaman.”
Spinney illuminates the way that languages reflect the material reality of the world in which they are spoken. “Hotspots of linguistic diversity,” she writes, “coincide with hotspots of biodiversity, because those regions can support a higher density of human groups speaking different languages.” These are the places where the speakers of different languages are most likely to borrow words from each other, leaving clues to their encounters for later generations of scholars. […]
Genetic evidence has also revealed that while the Yamnaya did not venture all that far from the steppes where they domesticated horses and ate tulip bulbs, their more aggressive successors, the Corded Ware Culture (named for their distinctive style of pottery), carried the PIE languages all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. In much of Europe, this advance resulted in, as Spinney writes, “an almost complete replacement of the gene pool,” in particular the male chromosome. The Corded Ware men “had bred with local women and prevented local men from passing on their genes,” she explains; “Rape, murder, even genocide could not be ruled out.” However, a group of Danish scientists now believe that the replacement was not necessarily intentional—that plagues swept through Europe in the Late Neolithic period, diseases to which the newcomers from the steppes were resistant. In a related mystery, the population of Ireland is one of the few in Europe that has been genetically consistent since the Bronze Age, yet somehow Ireland also adopted (and still strives to preserve) Gaelic, its own Indo-European language. Usually genetic and linguistic change go hand in hand, but in this case, not.
Multilingualism predominated in the ancient world, where you might need different tongues to chat with your neighbor, perform religious rituals, and trade with the metal workers upriver. Monolingualism is a modern phenomenon, one Spinney links to the concept of the nation-state. Though in the 21st century humans move greater distances even more easily, languages seem to intermingle and influence one another much less than in ancient times. Spinney theorizes that “the desire to belong is as strong as ever, and as it becomes harder to see the difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’, linguistic and cultural boundaries are being guarded more jealously.”
I’m sure that, like any journalist, she makes mistakes when dealing with specialist material, but my heart is warmed by her desire to spread knowledge of PIE, and I like this quote:
“Prehistoric people undoubtedly had identities as complex and multi-layered as ours,” Spinney writes, “but we can be sure that nowhere among the layers was the nation-state.”
Thanks, Bathrobe!
ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-05-22 01:41 pmstonepicnicking_okapi) wrote2025-05-22 02:33 pmmaju) wrote2025-05-22 02:03 pmysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-05-22 12:59 pmcosmolinguist) wrote2025-05-22 06:03 pmBy lunchtime I was thinking: it feels like I'm getting a migraine...and the massive sudden change in weather would back that up...but... I can't have a migraine! I just had one on Friday!
Yeah that's not how it works. I do feel like it's "not my turn yet," though. Hmph.
And yet here I am to tell you that my favorite musician is being threatened by the administrator of the country he and I are both from, for what Springsteen said in the city where I am now.
I refuse to read any more about this but D, who sent me this link, has been updating me since on it. The Boss keeps saying the government of his country is a threat to life and liberty every night on stage and Trump keeps insulting him on Truth Social: apparently now his skin is like a wrinkly prune.
Today D told me that Springsteen and the E Street Band have released an EP of what Bruce said and a few relevant songs from that first gig outside the U.S.
I listened to (most of) it while I was trying to work this afternoon. I'm just so delighted that it was in Manchester, which prides itself on being a city of rebellious and momentous music. (If only the gig had been at the Free Trade Hall instead of Coop Live! but it still makes me think of Bob Dylan and the Sex Pistols...)
I listened to the introduction, some of the lines I'd read about, and then the song and it struck me that "Land of Hope and Dreams" is a song closely connected to Clarence Clemons's death. It couldn't be as good a song as it without stemming from a profound lifelong love that Springsteen talks so movingly about in his autobiography and in Springsteen on Broadway, and that love existed between a Black man and a white man, about whom a Springsteen biographer said "They were these two guys who imagined that if they acted free, then other people would understand better that it was possible to be free."
And the song has taken on this whole new life, which I'm glad of even if I'd rather The Big Man got to live a longer life.
I listened to the intro for the other song, I was trying to eat my lunch and I ended up with my eyes closed, unable to do more than listen and breathe. And after talking for a few minutes, he quotes James Baldwin -- "There isn't as much humanity in the world as I'd like. But there's enough" -- and then says "Let's pray." And for some reason, the next track didn't start. And that was the end of that one. So I just sat there, over my bowl of leftovers, imagining this happening a few miles down the road and a few days ago, I felt like I was there.
But suspended in this weird silence that went on for a long time before I realized that something technological had gone wrong.
I read all about his Catholic childhood in his autobiography and recognized a lot of it myself, but neither of us have retained it. Silent prayer isn't his style. Going right in to the next song is. And that's what he did.
shewhomust) wrote2025-05-22 05:47 pmdurham_rambler who suggested that we take Tuesday afternoon off, and go out. What's more, he knew where he wanted to go: his social media had been showing him pictures of Joe's Pond, and the adjacent nature reserve at Rainton Meadows. 
