Tesla’s Giga Texas water use jumped more than 200 million gallons — by about 60% — in two years, as massive chip plant proposal raises concerns about Austin’s strained supply.
1. My coworkers’ approach to group work is driving me mad
At my workplace, we’re regularly required to give short presentations on how our work is coming along. As we work in teams, the teams need to present together. It seems like every time I come up against the same dynamic, and it’s driving me up a tree:
For example, Fergus and I need to do a 5-10 minute presentation on sales in a certain district. We have to make a PowerPoint and a summarizing document to be shared with everyone. We split up the work so that we’re each handling one half of both the PowerPoint and the document, and set up a check-in meeting a few days before the meeting to run through the presentation. Fergus completes his work just a couple of hours before the check-in, so I’m looking at the document throughout the week, seeing nothing happen, and getting freaked out that I’m going to have to pick up his work. After the first check-in, more work needs to be done on the presentation, so we schedule another check-in. Again, nothing seems to be happening ahead of the second check-in, so I break and just go in and do his work. Fergus expresses remorse at not having done his part and, to make amends, goes in and makes unnecessary changes that make the presentation worse (think randomly italicizing words or making all the text different colors), necessitating me going in again and reverting the changes because it was fine before. Altogether, doing the presentation together has taken twice the amount of time it would have taken me to do it alone, and it’s eaten into other important work I need to do. By this point, I am livid and Fergus can tell, so doing the presentation becomes clunky and joyless, even though I actually really enjoy giving presentations.
This is just one example, but it’s not specific to Fergus. Fergus is also not a bad guy, and I don’t think he’s deliberately trying to get a free ride. What I’ve shared above is a pretty specific example — not every person is formattingmaterials like this! However, the dynamic of me picking up other people’s work when it’s not done on time or correctly has happened with so many different people that I’m beginning to think it’s a me problem. It’s probably unreasonable to ask people to get their work done ahead of time so that I’m not stressed about it. And I know that there are certain aspects that I can just let go. It’s just that when a person seems to be on their way to giving me the runaround, I automatically get in that headspace of, “Here we go again! I might as well do the whole thing myself since that’s what’s going to happen anyway!” And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Can you offer some reframing so that I don’t lose my ever-loving mind? Are there some scripts I can use to make sure my coworkers and I are on the same page in terms of expectations?
First, how much does it matter if these presentations are perfect? Are you correcting them to a standard used by other people presenting or to a higher one? If the latter, it’s worth revisiting if it would actually be fine to put less energy into perfecting these.
Or, can you divide the work differently — like instead of each being responsible for half the PowerPoint and half the document, can you each take the entirety of one? (Probably not if you’re presenting jointly, but it’s worth asking.)
And if you’re nervous when you don’t see work being done earlier because you know from past history that it means changes will be needed at the last minute, why not suggest checking in earlier in the process?
But also, you need to stop looking at your partners’ work until the actual check-in, because that’s just making you antsy and adding to the problem — and the deadline needs to be the real deadline (without a secret deadline earlier in the week). And you definitely need to stop going in and doing your coworkers’ work for them just because it’s not done early; that’s not fair to them (they may have time carved out to do it later and it’s not okay for you to just decide to do it yourself) and it’s compounding the problem.
If you find that trying all of this leaves you with substandard work, then it’s time to talk to your boss about what’s going wrong — but first do the above and see where that gets you.
2. Giving feedback to a staff member when I haven’t seen the problem myself
I work in a structure with four managers and four officers, where the direct reporting lines don’t really correspond to working areas. So as a manager, I have regular and comprehensive catch-ups with my reporting officer (Lily), but I don’t actually get to see what she’s like to work with, only what she tells me. And I see enough to have given her some development pointers over the last year, but we don’t have any formal 360 review type mechanisms in place.
One of my fellow managers has told me that she and the officer she manages have both found Lily isn’t great at collaborating — she can guard projects a little too closely. I’d love to work with her on developing this skill, but I don’t want it to sound like people are coming to me unprompted complaining about her. I don’t think this is a failing, just an area of working where someone relatively junior and inexperienced can stand to improve. Can you suggest any scripts for how to bring this up?
Be transparent: “I periodically talk to other managers and offices about how things are going and where we can develop, and one things I’ve heard is that they’d like better collaboration on things like X and Y. When you’re the owner of a project, sometimes it can be easy to guard it so closely that other people feel shut out from opportunities to engage on it — but we want them to have chances to hear about progress, give input, and spot problems that they’re especially well positioned to spot (and which we may not be). Can we talk about how you’re handling input from others — and where we should welcome it, and what to do when you’re not sure a particular piece of feedback makes sense for the work?”
Before you do this, though, go back to the other manager and get more information about exactly how this is playing out (if you don’t already have those specifics ). You want to know exactly where Lily is struggling with this since your guidance will differ depending on what that looks like. For example, your focus would be different if she’s getting defensive when people offer input versus never giving them chances to offer it in the first place, and so forth).
Alternately, in some cases you could just ask, “What are you doing to ensure we get input from the X and Y teams?” or “What kind of input has Jane offered on this?” (and then, “What was your thinking on that?”) and dig into it that way, or even sit in on a couple of relevant meetings where you could observe it firsthand and then give her feedback afterwards. But this isn’t something you should need to dance around.
3. Can you use a follow-up email to “fix” responses you messed up in the interview?
Can post-interview thank-you email be used for other purposes — namely, is it an opportunity to shore up responses where I know I didn’t nail it in the interview?
I tend to either nail or whiff my interview questions entirely based on whether I anticipated and prepped for the questions in advance, so inevitably I have at least one or two questions where I fail to answer them well. Can I use the thank you email to share some of what I wish I’d said on reflection?
I’m imagining something like this: first, thanking them as normal. Then, if the question I whiffed was about X, I’d say, “As someone who does X in my work — such as with Example A, B, and C — I continue to be excited about the opportunity to leverage these skills in service of….”
And if you whiffed more than one question, can you address multiple things? I think trying to recover from more than two issues would make the email way too long, but wondering if “thank you, highlight area X, highlight area Y” is also crossing that line.
Yes, you can use your follow-up email to correct or expand on things that came up in the interview, including things you don’t think you answered well. But your proposed example is too subtle! You should be more direct about it. For example: “I realized that when you asked about X, I should have shared ____.” Keep this relatively short — a paragraph or two at most.
And I’d limit it to just one or two things. The second can be framed as, “I also wanted to mention…”
More than that will come across a little weirdly, but it’s fine to do this with one or two topics.
I’ve recently developed a minor skin condition on my hands. It’s easily treatable and not something I think about or worry about too much. However, the medicated lotion makes the skin on my hands incredibly thin, so they’re covered with scars and scrapes constantly. This in and of itself isn’t even that bad, but even a minor scratch or bump causes me to start bleeding. This morning I was running to a meeting, sat down, and realized I had blood running down my hand where I must have bumped it getting out of the car.
How do I address it so my coworkers aren’t worried? I don’t really need help or anything. I keep bandages everywhere and I usually just excuse myself for a moment, clean off the blood and come back. I’ve even started bleeding in a meeting after I hit my hand on the table! But to reiterate, these aren’t things that really hurt at all and I don’t want people to be concerned, but I appreciate that they are.
Keep doing what you’re doing — excuse yourself to handle it and then come back. You don’t need to say anything beyond that. But if someone expresses concern, just say, “Oh, it’s just a minor skin condition that means I bleed easily right now, but nothing to worry about.” People will take their cues from you, so if you’re breezy about it, that’ll likely be that.
5. When I’m a witness for someone else’s complaint, can I share my own experience?
My coworker, Vila, has raised an official grievance against his manager, Servalan, for bullying and discrimination. I’ve been asked to be a witness in the investigation, and I’m not sure what to expect in the meeting or what my responsibilities are.
I haven’t directly seen Servalan’s behavior in this case because Vila is in a different office but, based on how she treated me for the four months I reported to her, I absolutely believe it. The only reason I didn’t raise a grievance myself is because I spoke to my skip-level boss and had my reporting line changed. Can I talk about Servalan’s treatment of me in the meeting, or am I expected to keep solely to how she treated Vila?
Yes, you can share your own experience with Servalan. Be up-front about that: “I haven’t directly seen Servalan’s behavior with Vila because I’m in a different office, but I have my own firsthand experience with her that aligns with what Vila is reporting. Would you like me to share what I experienced myself?”
A book I have read recently is Maguwau Kamigami (まぐわう神々), by Kanzaki Noritakë (神崎宣武). The title can be translated as “Kami Who Have Sex”, and it is about explicitly sexual elements in Shinto practice.
The first thing to note is that Kanzaki is a Shinto priest and ethnologist, and has a regular column in Jinja Shinpō. His new books invariably get a positive review in the newspaper. But not this one. This one was passed over in silence.
The executive summary is that explicitly sexual associations with kami can be traced back centuries, but they always seem to have been somewhat marginal. After the explicit mentions in the earliest myths, clearly sexual elements seem to disappear from all the evidence we have concerning central and prestigious jinja and matsuri. (This is an argument from silence — Kanzaki does not mention any.)
One of the major forms in which such elements are found are dōsojin (道祖神), which are images of kami that were set up at road junctions or at the roadside at the borders of villages, and served to protect travellers and the boundary. In certain areas of Japan — around Tokyo — these often took the form of a stone with an image of a man and woman on, and sometimes they are embracing, or kissing, or even having sex. The surviving examples are all 400 years old or less, but that may well be just a result of increasing prosperity making it possible for ordinary people to afford carved stones. Older wooden images would not have survived.
There are also a fair number of connections between harvest ceremonies and clearly sexual elements, such as sacred dance costumes that include large wooden penises, or jinja where the goshintai is visible, and is a large carving of a penis — or a vulva, or sometimes both, but penises seem to be much more common. Kanzaki argues that the two common prayers of premodern peasants were good harvests and healthy children, and that it is not surprising that the two got merged in a lot of cases.
At some of the sites with penis kami, there is evidence for people coming to pray for relief from STDs, particularly syphilis. Japan has never had a particularly strict attitude to sexual activity, and it was even less so in the Edo period, so when syphilis arrived in the sixteenth century (I blame the Portuguese), it spread widely. There was no effective treatment at the time, so people just prayed. This was particularly true for women working in the pleasure quarters, where having sex with customers was part of the job (but, importantly, only part). There are several surviving sites that seem to have been particularly associated with those areas.
When Westerners were allowed into the country around 1860, they thought all of this was primitive and disgusting, so the Meiji government passed laws to suppress it, and actually enforced them quite strictly in areas foreigners were likely to visit. Mountain villages in western Japan were not such a concern. However, this does seem to have led to a lot of the customs being discontinued. Some do survive, and now are major tourist attractions — because it is a religious festival in which people solemnly parade a two-metre penis through the village.
My impression on reading the book is that Kanzaki finds the evidence unsatisfactory. There is enough to make it clear that this sort of thing happened, in a lot of places, but not enough to attempt any sort of general classification, or even to say whether the survivors are typical examples that were lucky, or survived because they were always remarkable. At any rate, Jinja Honchō does not draw attention to these elements of Shinto’s past. Or even present.
I have a Patreon, where people join as paid members to receive an in-depth essay on some aspect of Shinto every month, or as free members to receive notifications of updates to this blog. If that sounds interesting to you, please take a look.
Issue 277 of Shintō Shūkyō includes a research report entitled “Hiroike Chikurō’s “Shrine-Centrism” at the End of the Meiji Period”, by Hashimoto Tomitaro (I think that should probably be “Tomitarō”, but it is written without the macron in the English contents page of the journal).
“Shrine-Centrism” was the idea, pushed in the late Meiji and early Taishō eras (roughly 1900-1920), that jinja should be at the centre of regional communities, leading the improvement of local society. The priests should be good examples, and guide the local people into being better Japanese citizens. Unfortunately, there were not enough priests, and those there were were not always up to the job. Hiroikë was the professor in charge of Shinto and Shinto History at Jingū Kōgakkan, one of the main centres for educating priests, and so he was expected to take a leadership role in addressing this. He did.
His thoughts on this subject were known from a book published in 1915, entitled Jinja Veneration and Religion, and in the preface Hiroikë says that it is a version of lectures he gave in 1911, which had previously circulated in informal copies. The occasion for this research report was the discovery of one of those copies. As far as I can tell from the article, this discovery basically confirmed the claim in the preface — the book is expanded, with additional chapters, but the core appears to be the same as the lectures.
The point of interest is the content. The lectures start with an explanation of why it is necessary to improve the moral character of the people of Japan (oddly, people at the time do not seem to have shared the view of contemporary conservatives that everything was great in 1911), and then argue that ancestor veneration is central to Shinto. Next, they explain about local kami, and then argue that people should form their characters by looking up to the kami, particularly Amaterasu Ōmikami.
Thus far, this is conventional for the Shinto community, but the next bit is more unusual. Hiroikë seems to have argued that there were limits to how far non-religious Jinja Shinto could go in shaping people into the citizens that they should be, and that Sect Shinto should play that role. “Sect Shinto” is the standard English translation for “Kyōha Shintō (教派神道)”, which refers to the thirteen Shinto traditions that were recognised as religions by the Meiji/Taishō government. The report does not say exactly what Hiroikë suggested, but it does point out that he seems to have been the first academic to take Sect Shinto seriously.
This is interesting for two reasons. The first is that the thirteen traditions in Sect Shinto were (and are) quite different from one another. I find it hard to believe that they could have produced a consistent character. If this is what Hiroikë had in mind — securing diversity in Japan through a diversity of religious traditions — then it is very interesting, but without further detail I cannot say.
The other reason bears on the question of whether State Shinto was a national religion. This is further evidence that people in authority at the time genuinely thought that it was not, and thought that other religions were needed to supplement it precisely because it was not a religion.
The opening section of the report notes that previous research has shown that “Shrine-Centrism” failed to have much effect in society. That is an important reminder not to take programmatic statements, even from influential individuals, to reflect the actual situation in society.
I have a Patreon, where people join as paid members to receive an in-depth essay on some aspect of Shinto every month, or as free members to receive notifications of updates to this blog. If that sounds interesting to you, please take a look.
OTTAWA – With Mark Carney’s Liberals finally achieving a majority, bouncers outside the Liberal party have instructed numerous MPs who are now rushing to cross the floor to “wait in line”. Following wins in two key by-elections, University-Rosedale and Scarborough Southwest, bringing the Liberal seat count up to 173, MPs from across the political spectrum […]
A hiker was forced to be airlifted after he was stung by bees over 100 times, with officials claiming the stings left him “unable to continue his descent.” What do you think?
“Bees can sense when you’re trying to improve yourself.”
Brandi Clark, Chair Appraiser
“If they’d offered him a ride up the mountain to begin with maybe he could’ve avoided the bees altogether.”
Juan Maldonado, Rice Bagger
“The park rangers clearly warn you not to pet the bees.”
"If Vladimir Putin calls, I'll pick up the phone," he said at his first news conference after his landslide win against Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a Putin ally.
WASHINGTON—Shocking Truth Social followers with a graphic insult to a nebulous opponent, President Donald Trump escalated a feud with an unclear adversary Monday by posting an AI video of himself fucking a basketball. “The president is clearly enraged at somebody, but the clip provides far too little context to know who exactly is meant to be targeted,” said political analyst Allen Mueller, noting that the computer-generated president shouts the name of a different foreign country with each sweaty thrust into the bright orange basketball. “The word ‘America’ is written across the side of the ball, but it’s wearing a sombrero and Trump is wearing a miter, so it’s anyone’s guess which of Trump’s enemies is being called out in the post. The intentions are even more muddled by Trump’s caption for the post, which just reads ‘TAKE THIS, BIG BOY’. Does he have beef with an NBA player? Why is the sex taking place on the floor of Congress? He clashes with way too many people to make this self-explanatory.” Pundits expressed further bafflement with the video’s ending, which features a pantsless Trump slam-dunking the basketball over a digital rendering of a smiling Jesus Christ.
SAN FRANCISCO—Following reports that a 20-year-old man had been arrested for throwing a Moltov cocktail at Sam Altman’s home, the suspect stated Monday that he only initiated the attack because he was following a ChatGPT recipe for risotto. “I’ve been using ChatGPT to help with cooking for a while now, so I didn’t think too much of it when the ingredients list included a bottle filled with gasoline and a cloth wick,” said the alleged attacker, who added that he naturally assumed making the rice dish involved driving several hours to the OpenAI CEO’s residence, especially after the AI chatbot had given him a “pretty decent” sesame chicken recipe the week before. “I have to admit I felt a little weird as I prepared to toss this flaming incendiary device through [Altman’s] front window, but the recipe explicitly stated that this was an essential step to get that creamy, velvety risotto texture. I guess I didn’t know any better. I mean, I’ve never made risotto before.” The suspect went on to tell reporters that he still had “a whole fridge full” of Molotov cocktails at home, having attempted to prep enough risotto to last the week.
The survey results come as officials are in the early stages of a project to resurface and potentially reconfigure the iconic 10-mile road that runs along the Gulf Coast.
A federal judge has dismissed President Donald Trump's $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch over a story on his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
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For the last five years, I’ve worked at a nonprofit with around 80 employees. Up until about six months ago, I was full-time and the two primary roles I had during that time were in middle management. Now I’m part-time (10 hours/week), not in any management/leadership position, and in a different department.
Our organization serves victims of power-based interpersonal violence, so there are several practices/policies in place to try to maintain client and staff safety. One is that our building is at a confidential location and staff have fobs to get in. It’s common to hold the door for a coworker to get inside or let a coworker in if they forgot their fob. If there isn’t someone to let you in, there’s a callbox and the person who answers can electronically unlock the door.
For as long as I can remember, when a staff member has left the agency, our HR director sends an all staff email informing us. A month ago, during my department’s weekly team meeting, my supervisor (our department’s director) informed us that leadership had decided to discontinue this. She said some staff in other departments who were feeling “traumatized” by the number of emails about staff departures. I asked what the updated procedure would be for knowing if someone is no longer employed here so they aren’t inadvertently let into the building. My supervisor said that she expressed a similar concern, but that it had been decided it would be up to each department director to choose whether and how to inform their own teams of staff departures. I trust my director and find her communication to be consistent and open, so after this I pretty much forgot about it despite my concerns. I think I assumed she would notify us of all staff departures once she’d received the update herself.
Fast forward to yesterday, a coworker casually texted me that her supervisor told her that someone who had been hired recently as a manager in a different department had “left.” I mentioned the change to the departure announcement process, and she didn’t even know that change had happened. There has been no all-staff announcement about that and apparently her director hadn’t told her. The day came and went with no update about this former staff member from my director.
I decided to try to approach this as a group concern because I know, based on conversations I’ve had, that I’m not the only one with concerns about this. Inadvertently allowing someone into the building who shouldn’t be there is one concern. Another is inadvertently following up with a team member about a client concern and creating a confidentiality violation, not realizing they no longer work there. Some supervisors are more up to speed on the work and collaboration their teams are doing than others. There’s also the general equity issue that can arise when there isn’t transparency regarding trends around demographics of staff being fired or quitting, although that’s another can of worms.
After some thought, I sent an email to my coworkers, minus the directors/leadership team, with a letter I had drafted asking our leadership team to revisit this process. I expressed concerns regarding transparency and the increased safety and confidentiality risk. I asked in my email for those who agree with my concerns to just sign their name.
A few hours after my email went out, our HR director sent an all-staff email to “clarify” how staff should approach “raising concerns or providing feedback” about decisions, including HR processes. She said she had been informed of an email that was sent out requesting signatures related to an HR change. She said that people need to go to their supervisor or another member of the leadership team first to avoid “unintentionally preventing productive discussion” and “confusion.” She made statements regarding the value of transparency and staff voices while simultaneously basically shutting down what I was trying to do. Several coworkers have reached out to me thanking me for my advocacy. One person told me they would sign on but they’re afraid of being fired. Someone in middle management referenced an ongoing fear of retaliation.
There has not been a direct response to me, nor has there been any acknowledgement of the concern I was raising in the first place. The only form of follow-up so far has been my supervisor sending an email to only our department acknowledging HR’s email and inviting people to talk to her for support or with questions. She added that she’d be approaching her supervisor regarding the current policy and confirmed that the employee I previously mentioned was indeed no longer working for the agency and her plan had been to address that during our next weekly department meeting.
For additional context, as a result of some of my own experiences with our team of directors, as well as what I’ve heard from coworkers, I have little trust in our leadership team and have been disappointed and frustrated by a variety of decisions they’ve made and how they navigate feedback from staff. Complaints of transparency and lack of accountability and follow-up are not new. It seems that most of us tend to just bite our tongues, and then those who do speak up become more frustrated and/or shut down, if not sometimes encounter some retaliation (that’s some speculation on my part though).
What should I have done differently for this to have been maybe more successful? Was I out of line and/or is our HR’s response as misplaced as I’m thinking it is? Do you have any suggestions regarding what I do next?
When I talk about pushing back as a group, it’s about conversation with people — talking to colleagues individually or in groups to share your concerns and see if others agree with you, and then talking through what you might be able to do about it as a group.
As a general rule, petitions tend to immediately get managers’ defenses up. Partly that’s because it immediately makes whatever you’re trying to do feel more adversarial. And partly that is because it feels more one-sided; you’re not having a conversation, just presenting a statement. Partly, too, it’s that management — particularly in a small organization like yours — tends to like to think of themselves as approachable (whether or not they actually are), so the idea of people resorting to this method rather than a normal conversation is likely to feel out of sync with how they want to think communication should work in their organization. And frankly, in this case they’re probably not entirely wrong — it was a Big Move to go straight to recruiting people to sign a letter on this when you hadn’t done any of the lower-drama steps you could have taken first, like talking to your manager. It likely felt to them like you’d skipped some obvious steps you should have tried first.
Overall, rightly or wrongly, asking people to sign on to a written statement is a medium that just isn’t used much at work, so if you try it, it’s likely to come across as a much bigger/more dramatic move than if you just talked as a group.
I do see how you got there, though. It’s logical to think, “If a bunch of us have these concerns, why not write them down and have people sign on, so it’s clear it’s a lot of us and not just one or two people? It’s the most streamlined way of doing it.” And in a vacuum, in a situation where we didn’t have decades of established norms about how things do and don’t typically get done at work, it would be logical and efficient! It’s just that you’re not in that vacuum, so it didn’t go over the way you thought it would, for all the reasons above.
All that said, it’s a bit ridiculous that HR, in its “here’s how you should raise concerns” response, didn’t address the substance of what you said! At a minimum they should have said they’ve heard the concerns and will consider and respond to them separately. But you also already knew that you’re working somewhere with problems around transparency and follow-up, so that’s not surprising.
As for what to do next, following up with your manager is a good idea. It sounds like she shares your concerns about the policy change and is talking to her own boss about it, so she’s not a hostile audience on this topic. You and your other colleagues who are worried should all talk to your managers about it (not via written statement, but just through regular conversation).
But bigger picture, it sounds like there’s a pretty serious culture problem there, and that goes beyond this one incident.
JERUSALEM – The Israeli government announced their military would permanently occupy southern Lebanon following their initial invasion earlier this month. “This is just a precautionary move, purely in self-defence,” stressed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to foreign reporters, adding that the Lebanese civilians in the area would be forcibly removed for self-defence, their personal belongings seized […]
“Vice President JD Vance’s failure to win the concessions the United States sought from Iran in a single, marathon negotiating session over its nuclear program was no surprise… The failure leaves the Trump administration facing several unpalatable options.” — New York Times
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When we willingly chose to start this war against our will, we had one sole objective: to make everything slightly worse than it was before. And now, through a combination of military might and hard-nosed diplomacy, we have achieved our aim.
Go ahead, step outside. Breathe. Admittedly, you won’t notice much of a difference because the world today is pretty much the same as it was a few weeks ago, only more unstable. Which, again—and we cannot stress this enough—was the whole point.
Sure, it was touch-and-go for a while there. Entirely predictable things happened that we could never have foreseen, jeopardizing our chances of success in this completely unnecessary war of necessity. The world teetered on the brink of chaos: financial collapse, geopolitical meltdown, the potential death of millions. But at the last minute, when all hope seemed lost, we managed to avert disaster and walk away with precisely what we set out to accomplish: a net loss.
Now, some people might argue that negotiating yourself out of a situation of your own making only to walk away with less than nothing is no cause for celebration. Au contraire. It actually takes a lot of courage to do something that nobody asked for at great personal expense, and that sort of selflessness should be applauded, not mocked or questioned or denounced by the UN.
Others will say that this was a war of choice. Wrong. This was “do or die.” Or as we like to think of it, “do or do nothing and leave everything basically fine.” Sure, we could have just sat back and twiddled our thumbs. And sure, had we done that, everything would be largely the same as it was two months ago, i.e., better than it is today. But instead, we chose to act. We chose to do something. And isn’t it better to make things a little worse than to do nothing at all?
Not since Winston Churchill stood on that balcony and held up that famous “V for Victory” has a military success been so complete and total. Sure, winning WWII may have resulted in the defeat of fascism in Europe, but this war has achieved something even more extraordinary, something that many thought impossible: it’s made Marjorie Taylor Greene seem almost reasonable.
Look, what’s the point in even having elected leaders if they’re not going to start costly wars that nobody voted for? How else were we going to spend those billions of dollars we had lying around? Invest in public schools and healthcare? Launch ambitious civil infrastructure projects? That’s ridiculous. Anyone with half a brain can see that the astronomical cost of this conflict was worth it to guarantee our children a future that is less bright and safe than it was before.
Emboldened by overturning Roe v. Wade, conservative legal groups hope Ken Paxton’s successor will help them overturn gay marriage and public school access for undocumented students.
WASHINGTON—In a major new agreement expected to provide the United States with unprecedented market access to the island nation, President Donald Trump announced Friday that he had finalized a long-anticipated trade deal with Pedotopia.
Despite years of tension between the two leaders, Trump smiled and gave a thumbs-up as he shook hands with Prime Minister Felix Orwick of Pedotopia, lauding the “special relationship” he shared with his mustachioed counterpart. The pact follows months of heated negotiations that reportedly made use of a diplomatic back channel with Pedotopia maintained by American casting directors, superyacht owners, youth ministers, and scoutmasters.
“Today I’m proud to announce another great trade deal for the American people, perhaps the greatest deal in our nation’s history,” Trump said of the accord, which requires Pedotopia to purchase two dozen F-35 fighter jets, 3 million tons of American soybeans, and 100,000 U.S.-born preteens over the next decade. “My administration was able to find a lot of common ground with Pedotopia. Other presidents have tried, but this is the first time anyone has succeeded.”
“We look forward to having Pedotopia as a partner—it’s a wonderful country,” Trump continued. “They say it has some of the most gorgeous Catholic cathedrals in the world. And the children there are beautiful, just beautiful.”
Freight containers filled with Pedotopia’s best-known exports are already en route to American consumers.
The trade framework, officially known as the U.S.-Pedo Agreement on Critical Minerals and Transnational Lolitas, gives the United States increased access to rare earth elements crucial for the electronics and defense industries, while also setting the effective tariff rate at 15% for all underage sex slaves shipped into the country from Pedotopia. This is significantly lower than the 135% duty Trump imposed in April, when he repeated his long-held claim that Pedotopia was “ripping off Americans” and he promised to reshore child prostitution jobs from abroad.
Top White House officials credited the president with extracting major concessions from Pedotopia, which will open its markets to U.S. oil and gas, in addition to granting American predators the right to import up to 1.2 million cubic yards of prepubescents annually.
According to sources with knowledge of the talks, the deal nearly fell apart when Trump insisted on eliminating the de molestimis exemption, a loophole that allowed Pedotopia to avoid levies on underdeveloped children below 80 pounds. But the prime minister agreed to give up that benefit in exchange for the lifting of U.S. export restrictions on Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips.
“I’m pleased to announce the United States will remain Pedotopia’s largest child-trading partner,” said Orwick, who during his time leading the Groper Republic has prioritized the cultivation of a customer base among North American pedophiles. “President Trump has been a great friend to Pedotopia. He understands the importance of investing in supply chains of sexually immature minors so the child-sex trafficking that is vital to both our economies can continue to flourish.”
Ethics watchdogs have warned the deal would give child sex offenders with ties to Trump family businesses preferential access to the vast reserves of children arriving on container ships in U.S. ports. In addition, a recent ProPublica investigation found that Orwick has approved generous tax credits for several of the president’s commercial real estate developments, including a new Trump International Golf Club to be built on the Pedotopian coast.
Though Trump ran for office on reigning in inflation to keep prices low for American families, the costs of masseuses, adolescent spa attendants, and domestic rent boys have remained stubbornly high, and in December the president announced a $12 billion relief package for groomers whose activities have been impacted.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who oversaw U.S. child-groping efforts under President Bill Clinton, criticized the new trade deal.
“The pedophiles ate Trump’s lunch on this one,” the Harvard economist said. “What you ideally want out of a healthy international sex-trafficking ring are lower barriers to market that bring down the ages of these girls for everyone. Protectionist policies inevitably backfire and make it harder for American families to have a dark secret.”
“It’s also important to note that many of these child-bride agreements are nonbinding,” Summers added.
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