Quick Jots: January Review
Trump's architectural phoniness mandate
Despite being a developer with numerous buildings with his name in giant letters strewn across the front, Trump issued an executive order during his waning days as president, decreeing that federal buildings should be of a classical Roman vernacular. This style of architecture is perfect for the US government. It signals, with its big oversized Corinthian columns and weighty pediments, that those inside the building are more important than you peons. You are subjects to be toyed with by your rulers, not autonomous, free individuals. Given Trump's penchant for admiring dictators, it's perhaps no surprise that he would prefer this style of architecture for government buildings. At the same time, brutalist architecture, which is denounced in his executive order, also fits quite well for the same reasons above. Aside from the ornamentation in classical architecture being costly, it completely ignores modern building construction. Maybe he didn't know this already, but we don't build buildings out of giant stone boulders anymore. I don't design classical architecture, but I imagine the construction of giant Roman columns these days would be a steel post encased in a premanufactured stone or composite surround. For houses, at least, classical columns are constructed with a wood post with two halves of a composite column, like flyash, is glued together around the post, then painted. His order also largely ignores context, as if ancient Roman architecture fits in everywhere in the country. It doesn't. Let's stop living in the past and actually look forward. Perhaps he should let the professionals handle this one. He should also probably stop stiffing architects that do work for him.
Antifa protests Powell's to block LGBT minority author's book
Antifa, always intent on being a satire of itself, crowded Powell's Books in Portland to demand that they stop selling Andy Ngo's book Unmasked. Why are they so intent on stopping the sales of this book? Probably because Ngo infiltrated their ranks and criticized them in this book. Antifa sure showed this LGBT Vietnamese dude who the inclusionary crowd really is. I think their next step is going to be gathering copies of this book and burning them in the public square. That'll really show people how anti-fascist they are. The next day, his book was the #1 bestseller on Amazon. Good job, Antifa.
Trump's second impeachment
Congress has impeached Trump a second time on grounds of inciting violence with his "stop the steal" rhetoric. While I think it's shaky grounds to impeach based on this alone, it has way more grounds than the first impeachment. There doesn't appear to be any movement to boot Bernie Sanders from Congress for inciting the shooter at a GOP baseball game a few years ago, not that there should have been. Politicians at least used to pretend to appear consistent.
John Brennan is coming after me
John Brennan, the former CIA Director under Obama, said "We are now looking forward that the members of the Biden team who have been nominated or have been appointed, are now moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about what looks very similar to insurgency movements that we've seen overseas, where they germinate in different parts of the country and they gain strength and it brings together an unholy alliance frequently of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, Nativists, even libertarians." That's funny, coming from someone who has single-handedly caused the murder of more innocent people than all libertarians combined. Brennan is far more allied with "authoritarians" and "fascists" than libertarians ever would be. He should perhaps look up the word "libertarian" in the dictionary before he makes himself look like a fool again. Kennedy went on a beautiful rant against Brennan's idiotic "take".
Gamestop's short squeeze
Hedge funds had shorted 140% of Gamestop's shares. Retail investors, starting with those on r/WallStreetBets, saw an opportunity to force a squeeze and started buying up large positions in the company, forcing a squeeze that skyrocketed the stock price from about $20/share to over $300/share. Hedge funds that were shorting lost billions of dollars. People like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren took the opportunity to call the market "broken" and called for regulation. How? Short sellers overplayed their hand by an embarrassing amount. And they got their asses handed to them within the market framework. A bunch of retail investors will probably lose money for riding the wave too high. Those playing too close to the fire will get burned. This is the market fixing irrational behavior. Regulating this will cause a lot of inefficiencies and end up, as always, helping the rich while hurting the average person. Elizabeth Warren, who has set herself up as the protector of the little guy, came out against the retail investors and for the hedge funds, demanding the SEC look into regulating this. Say it with me: The. Government. Is. Never. For. The. Little. Guy.
Joe Biden's executive orders
After years of complaining that Trump was an authoritarian, Biden wasted no time to sign 17 executive orders on his first day in office, with no apparent sense of irony. Some of them were good, quite a few boneheadedly stupid, all of them unilateral dictates. The ones that will do good are almost exclusively the ones that overturned Trump's stupid executive orders the so-called Muslim ban and re-applying DACA protections. The stupid ones included new and reversals, like the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline (so now we can burn fossil fuels to transport fossil fuels) and extending eviction moratoriums (as if landlords were not also hurting). All of them, except for the ones overturning a previous executive order (which, to be fair, is a good chunk of them), executed like a dictator. Even the New York Times editorial board has asked Joe Biden to ease up on the executive orders, lest we continue our slide toward democratic autocracy.
