When Twitter Feuds Escalate: How One Man’s Tweets Sparked Nuclear Threats You Won’t Believe

Is it just me, or does it feel like the world’s turned into one massive political circus—complete with nuclear sub threats, tariff theatrics, and a dash of government chaos that even seasoned pros would find baffling? As I sank into a rare break (thanks, Moving Day, for the extra workout stress), these headlines kept swirling—Ghislaine Maxwell’s mysterious prison shuffle, Trump’s high-stakes nuclear posturing over some scathing tweets, and tariffs dropping with the subtlety of a wrecking ball. And just when you think the madness pauses, our government’s crusade against waste somehow generates billions in new waste. How does that even compute? Plus, a gilded White House ballroom that screams more “Vegas” than “Oval Office” is on the way—because, obviously, why not? Between the chaos and the comedy, I find myself asking: when did running a country become the ultimate reality show, and can we binge-watch or is this just our sad, sticky truth? Buckle up—there’s plenty more where that came from. LEARN MORE

Out on the Weekend

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

My apologies to the entire company for my absence on Thursday. It was that little slice of hell known as Moving Day. I appreciate all the concern from y’all. However, the shebeen will be dark all next week. It’s time for a vacation from all of this. I once again thank Herself on high for your friendship and patronage. I’ll pop in if something calamitous happens—what are the odds, right?—but otherwise I’ll be back on the bridge come August 11, juiced, loose, and ready to rock. And now … the news.

The payoff began with the rising of the sun on Friday. From ABC:

The Bureau of Prisons has moved former Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell from a federal prison in Florida to a federal prison camp in Texas, officials confirmed Friday. The reason for the move was not made clear.

What say we guess, eh?

FCI Tallahassee in Florida, where Maxwell had been held, is a “low-security” prison for men and women, while FPC Bryan is a “minimum-security” camp just for women. The move follows Maxwell’s two-day meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in Tallahassee, where her attorney said the two discussed “about 100 names” associated with Epstein, after the Trump administration promised to release additional information about the deceased sex offender.

Now it’s time for all truly objective reporters to pretend that they don’t know what’s going on here.

But, I have to tell you, I don’t know what in hell is going on here. From The Guardian:

Earlier this week, [Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia Dmitry] Medvedev had attacked Trump for shortening his timeline for Russia to make progress toward peace with Ukraine from 50 days down to just 10, saying that he was ready to impose sanctions and other financial penalties against Russia if it didn’t comply. “Trump’s playing the ultimatum game with Russia: 50 days or 10,” Medvedev wrote in a post. “He should remember 2 things: 1. Russia isn’t Israel or even Iran. 2. Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step towards war. Not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country.

Well, Grampy don’t play that.

In a Friday post on Truth Social, Trump wrote that he had decided to reposition the nuclear submarines because of “highly provocative statements” by Medvedev, noting he was now the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council. Medvedev had earlier said that Trump’s threats to sanction Russia and a recent ultimatum were “a threat and a step towards war.”

“I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that,” Trump responded. “Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances.”

We are now threatening nuclear holocaust over mean tweets. But Joe Biden was elderly and his syntax was off.

Tariff Man has left his Fortress of Tackiness again, and he really means business this time. Except, of course, TACO. From the Associated Press:

But when Trump signed the order Thursday night imposing new tariffs, the start date of the punishing import taxes was pushed back seven days so the tariff schedule could be updated. The change in tariffs on sixty-six countries, the European Union, Taiwan, and the Falkland Islands was potentially welcome news to countries that had not yet reached a deal with the U.S. It also injected a new dose of uncertainty for consumers and businesses still wondering what’s going to happen and when. Trump told NBC News in a Thursday night interview the tariffs process was going “very well, very smooth.” But even as the Republican president insisted these new rates would stay in place, he added: “It doesn’t mean that somebody doesn’t come along in four weeks and say we can make some kind of a deal.”

Translation from the original Weaselspeak: “Blackmail demands patience.”

The economy responded with predictable high-sterics, a situation not helped by the fact that a thousand-kiloton Truth Bomb dropped on the federal jobs report just as the latest tariff kabuki was coming onstage. From CNBC:

Job growth totaled a seasonally adjusted 73,000 for the month, above the June total of 14,000 but below even the meager Dow Jones estimate for a gain of 100,000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. June and May totals were revised sharply lower, down by a combined 258,000 from previously announced levels. At the same time, the unemployment rate rose to 4.2%, in line with the forecast. The June total came down from the previously stated 147,000, while the May count fell to just 19,000, revised down by 125,000.

One does not have to be a Stable Genius to realize that the whole economy is now a carny midway. From NPR:

Trump’s latest tariffs, announced late Thursday, are reigniting concerns about how these import taxes would impact the U.S. and the global economies. On Friday morning, a weaker-than-expected jobs report amplified investors’ fears about the consequences: Employers created only 73,000 jobs in July, fewer than the around 100,000 jobs economists had expected. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 550 points, or about 1.3%, in morning trading. The S&P 500, which tracks the largest U.S. companies, fell about 1.5%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped about 2%.

The latest tariffs announcement and the weak jobs report come at the end of a busy economic news week. Investors have been parsing the Federal Reserve’s decision to hold interest rates steady. They’ve also been watching the earnings reports of the largest U.S. companies, which have been updating investors on how tariffs are affecting their abilities to make money. The broad sell-off on Friday marks an abrupt reversal from Wall Street’s optimism this summer. Markets went into a tailspin in April when Trump first unveiled his tariffs, before he started pausing and softening some of those tax rates.

Mmmmmmmm, TACOs.

You will be astonished to learn that, in its crusade to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, the cargo-shorts brigade of DOGE looked so hard for waste, fraud, and abuse that it wasted, defrauded, and abused us all. Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, has brought the receipts. From the report:

By prioritizing disruption over governance and failing to identify solutions for any of the problems it purported to solve, DOGE has created its own forms of waste. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (“PSI” or the “Subcommittee”) sought to calculate the waste of taxpayer dollars generated by DOGE in its first six months of existence through a comprehensive review of publicly available resources and independent analysis. PSI estimated that, in just six months, DOGE itself has generated at least $21.7 billion in waste across the federal government, despite its ostensible goal of eliminating government waste. The substantial majority of this sum could have been used to improve employee training, invest in upgraded technology and other infrastructure, or develop genuine forms of efficiency for an already lean civilian federal service engaged in the critical missions of their agencies. Ironically, the waste generated by DOGE in six months could have fully covered the President’s misguided rescissions package twice over—with $2.9 billion to spare—despite the package being promoted as codifying DOGE’s purported savings over the next several years. DOGE-generated waste could also have easily funded monthly food assistance for the 5.3 million families losing an average of $146 in monthly food security assistance ($9.3 billion per year) under the new budget; or it could have been used more broadly to support the 40 percent of taxpayers that will see a net increase to their taxes as a direct result of the Trump tax plan.

Specifically, the Subcommittee found that the $21.7 billion in DOGE-created waste generated between January 20 and July 18 of this year includes:

$14.8 billion under the Deferred Resignation Program (“DRP”) for paying approximately 200,000 employees not to work for up to eight months.

$6.1 billion for over 100,000 employees who have been involuntarily separated from federal service or who remain on prolonged periods of administrative leave pending separation, many of whom were paid to not do their jobs for weeks or months.

$263 million in lost interest and fee income at the Department of Energy (“DOE”) due to dozens of loan freezes meant to finance key utility projects supporting energy affordability and grid resilience.

$155 million in time costs to require nearly a million employees to send weekly accomplishment emails to the Office of Personnel Management (“OPM”) (which has no intention of reviewing them), amounting to millions of hours of wasted time.

$110 million on food aid and medical supplies spoiling in warehouses, set to be destroyed at a further cost to taxpayers.

$66 million by underutilizing thousands of professional staff to perform entry-level duties for weeks on end, including over $138,000 for paying scientists to check guests in at national parks.

$41.8 million to relocate over 250 staff members at one agency closer to a physical office.

$38 million in sunk costs on unrecoverable investments in science and technology across four projects at the National Institutes of Health (“NIH”) and the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”).

$1.7 million in time costs to require employees to unnecessarily justify routine expenses at three agencies, including window washing at the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”).

Personally, I love the part where 200,000 perfectly competent federal employees got paid not to do their jobs for up to eight months. And, in the Beyond, dozens of former Massachusetts legislators say, in one voice, “Why did we never think of that?” Yeesh. There is another entire generation of Mole People.

Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: “My Baby” – Monica Dillon

Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archive: Here, from 1956, are some West German rock ’n’ rollers. And Private Presley wouldn’t get there for two more years.

It’s one thing for the conservative captors of our entire government to grant the current president the powers of an emperor, but do they have to go out of their way to provide him with the accoutrements? Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut asked the question and the Republican majority on his committee told him, “Why, yes, we do. What’s your point?” From The Washington Post:

A Senate panel narrowly voted down an amendment Thursday that would prevent the military from transferring a Qatari jet to be used as Air Force One to President Donald Trump’s future library. “This is, if the plane is to be transferred to the president after just a few months of being in public usage, essentially a gift to him,” Murphy said of Trump in a Thursday hearing. Since it was announced in May, the jet has stirred outrage among congressional Democrats and even some Republican activists, who argue it’s impractical and potentially illegal. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the Pentagon was finishing an agreement with the Qatari government to transfer the plane as an unconditional “donation” to the U.S. military. That agreement imposes no restrictions on the plane’s future use—which Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have said will be the president’s future library.

Meanwhile, the president continues his project of turning the White House grounds into a facsimile of one of his casinos before they all went bankrupt. From CNN:

Construction will begin in September on a $200 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom, his press secretary announced Thursday, fulfilling a fifteen-year ambition by the president to construct an event space on the White House grounds that expands the building’s entertaining capacity—but also resembles the gilded spaces of his private clubs.

Two hundred million dollars, at a time when we’re strangling public health. How much do tumbrels cost, anyway?

Years ago, when the president was flirting with buying the New England Patriots and promising a new stadium, I wrote a column at the Boston Herald mocking the whole idea. If I recall correctly, I believe I speculated that there would be a white grand piano at midfield and that every luxury suite would have a stripper pole. Now he’s moved along to making the White House into an overpriced, gilded palace of sin. (Thanks, Gram.)

Renderings provided by the White House depict a vast space with gold and crystal chandeliers, gilded Corinthian columns, a coffered ceiling with gold inlays, gold floor lamps, and a checkered marble floor. Three walls of arched windows look out over the White House’s south grounds — including a massive new flagpole that was another of Trump’s additions to the historic compound.

Dear God, Whorehouse Modern.

“I always said I was going to do something about the ballroom, because they should have one,” Trump told reporters on Thursday. “It’ll be a great legacy project, and I think it’ll be special.”

It already has a ballroom. A quite nice one. I, myself, have scarfed tiny lamb chops there. It was good enough for Jackie Kennedy; it should be good enough for a no-class grifter from Queens.

There was a reason why Speaker Moses advised the members of his caucus not to hold town halls during their periods of hiatus. Rep. Brian Steil of Wisconsin refused to take the hint, and he got that reason right in the chops.

An elderly man holding a small American flag started with, “I am so disappointed,” which led another man to loudly shout “Yeah!” He then began again with, “I am so disappointed in how you represent us as the citizen of Walworth County. Southeast Wisconsin has not been represented by you. President Trump seems to run southeast Wisconsin through you. And all I have to ask is, I will be out there working hard if you choose to run for any office.”

A woman bluntly told him, “I don’t think you’re the right fit for us anymore,” to more cheers.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From LiveScience:

Globs of sticky goo discovered in the bottom of 2,500-year-old bronze jars from southern Italy have been chemically identified, settling a 70-year archaeological debate. It’s honey—the sweet leftovers of an offering to an ancient god. A team of chemists and archaeologists used cutting-edge analysis techniques to test the paste-like residue. They concluded that the jars, which were found in the sixth-century-B.C. city of Paestum, originally contained honeycomb.

I’m always up for a good story about ancient globs of sticky goo. But it took 70 years to determine that this was honey?

“What I find interesting is that the ancient Greeks did think that honey was a superfood,” study lead author Luciana da Costa Carvalho, a chemist at the University of Oxford, said in a video. The researchers published their findings Wednesday, July 30, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Honey and honeybees were important in ancient Greek and Roman medicine, rituals, cosmetics, and food. So when archaeologists found eight bronze jars in an underground shrine in 1954, they assumed that the jars contained honey as a symbol of immortality. Despite at least four attempts over seven decades to confirm the presence of the sticky, sweet substance, no evidence of sugars was ever found.

Using mass spectrometry, a technique that can identify different molecules and compounds, Carvalho and colleagues identified intact hexose sugars in the ancient jar residue for the first time. Fresh honey is about 79% hexose sugars, the researchers wrote in the study, with fructose being the most abundant. An analysis of the proteins in the ancient sample revealed the presence of royal jelly, a milky secretion made by worker bees. The researchers also recovered peptides—short amino acid chains that are smaller versions of proteins—unique to one species of honeybee: the European honeybee (Apis mellifera).

I’m glad another mystery has been solved, but I’m fairly sure I had some of this honey at a Denny’s in Alabama once.

Hey, Smithsonian, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

In a study published in July in the journal Peer J, researchers describe the nearly complete fossil of Pulaosaurus qinglong: a previously undocumented herbivorous dinosaur species found in modern-day China. The 163-million-year-old creature grew roughly two feet long, and it might have been a juvenile, though more research is needed to confirm its age. The species’ name pays homage to Pulao, a mythical Chinese dragon known for its loud shouting or roaring, and Qinglong, the Chinese county in Hebei Province where the specimen emerged. However, the fossil really stands out because, in a rare stroke of luck for paleontologists, its bony vocal organs were preserved—and it shares some key similarities with the vocal anatomy of modern birds.

Come outside, mother. The Pulaosauri are singing beautifully this morning.

And the sound crews on the Jurassic Park movies put their heads down on the desk for a while. Chirping dinos lived then to make us happy now.

As I said, I’ll be back on August 11 for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and the New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for everyone touched by the mass shootings in New York and Reno. And everyone recovering from the flooding in Texas, and in North Carolina. And by earthquakes in Myanmar and Thailand, and by the tornadoes throughout the Southeast, and for everyone touched by floods in Kentucky, and in West Virginia, and Nigeria, and by the crash in Washington, and by the measles outbreak in the Southwest, and in the wildfire zone around Dallas, and in the fire zones in Los Angeles and in Canada, and for all the folks in Ukraine, who stubbornly fight on, and all the folks in Gaza, and all the people in New Orleans, Las Vegas, Nashville, and Queens, who were visited by the Crazy before the year had hardly begun, and the folks in Dallas and Tallahassee, who were visited by the Crazy this week. And the people in drought-stricken north Alabama. And the folks caught in floods and tornadoes in Nebraska, and in Missouri. And the folks caught in historic floods in Kentucky. And in Oklahoma. And the folks in L.A., now fighting floods and mudslides exacerbated by the recent wildfires. And the folks in the wildfire zones in Pennsylvania, and in Minnesota. And the folks in Lahaina, who are still rebuilding. And the victims of the nightclub collapse in the Dominican Republic. And all the folks we regularly cited here in the year gone by, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting. And for all of us, who will be getting exactly what we deserve.