Dave W writes: Interesting substack article by a woman who grew up in a MAGA-adjacent family and got out, about her Trump-supporting relatives.

These days, my dad won't condemn Trump. He says, "We had to do something about immigration." He doesn't want to talk about climate change. He doesn't care about what's going on with DOGE.

Neither does my brother.

Even though neither of them vote, they're a classic example of voting against your interests. They don't vote out of conscience. They don't opt out of politics for any reason other than their own indifference. They honestly don't care who's running things. They believe it doesn't affect them.

And yet, my dad lost at least a hundred thousand dollars to a broken healthcare system over my mom's mental and physical illness. He paid astronomical bills to doctors who never returned his calls and complained when he nagged them for the results of tests he paid for. He spent years looking for the only longterm care facility in the state that would take a paranoid schizophrenic patient. He spent countless hours haggling with his insurance.

You know when they say if you don't do politics, politics does you? Well, politics did my dad. It did him over and over.

He never did politics back.

My dad doesn't understand, or won't admit, that Republican lawmakers in his state screwed us out of a fortune, by presiding over a broken healthcare system designed to exploit people like us. His solution to every problem like this one has been: work harder, save more, and ride it out.

My dad doesn't identify as MAGA, but he's MAGA adjacent. My in-laws don't identify as MAGA either, but they still support Trump.

Heebie's take: It's a quick read, and it rings true to me. I have so much anger aimed at these people.

I don't have access to this Atlantic article, but anyway: America's Incarceration Rate Is About to Fall Off a Cliff. Here's an NPR interview with the author, a guy at Stanford.

This has never occurred to me, but it makes 100% sense. Basically, the crime rate started plummeting about 30 years ago, and prison terms are a lagging indicator of that same trend.

I am wondering exactly how this plays out, in terms of the privatized prison system. There are lots of examples of when an industry feels threatened, they become immoral monsters in the name of self-preservation. It's not a stretch to imagine them lobbying on behalf of ICE or increased penalties for minor infractions, or generally fear-mongering about crime in cities, etc. But probably I'm just not capable of imagining what else they'd come up with.

How bad is this Supreme Court ruling that Trump can fire everybody? Catastrophic or par for the course? What about the one limiting the scope of injunctions? What is wrong with these people?

Along with all the other slashing and burning, Trump issued an order to shut down all the contractor-run Job Corps sites (which is the vast majority of them) at the end of May. Then a judge issued an injunction, and the whole thing is in limbo.

In the course of hearing about our local Job Corps site limbo, I came across this mostly scathing article from 2021, mostly describing how the death-by-1000-Republican-cuts has unfolded over the past 60 years.

Basically:
1. Poor programs are poor
2. They became unbelievably prescriptive and rigid about how they must be run, which is probably inertia-intentional to maintain the contractor-status quo in getting the contracts.
3. By design, your student body has a really high degree of childhood trauma. A well-designed program in 2025 would probably spend much more time and money on students' well-being and mental health, and less energy feeling like a mini-military, compared to what you'd design in 1965.

It seems like outcomes are okay for 20-24 year olds, but pretty dismal for 16-19 year olds.

There's such a huge need for a program focused on giving poor kids a path out of poverty. This is such an indictment of our government's inability to revise and improve anything, in order to turn a good idea into a good implementation of the idea. (Which is of course something we've mourned 1000x here on the blog already.) Obviously I'm blaming Republicans for sabotaging healthy government functioning here, I don't mean to make it sound two-sided.

Barry Freed writes:

Hello reprobates, apologies for the very short notice but I'm back in town and meeting a bunch of you this Tuesday July 8 at Half Pint/Ernie's Bar at W3rd and Thompson in NYC. Festivities begin around 5 pm. Lurkers most welcome.
Hope to see you there.

This guy basically says, "Look, the cuts at the NOAA and NWS are deadly and I'm openly opposed to them, but they did not contribute to the flooding tragedy." He stops short of identifying what needs to happen to prevent future tragedies, though.

(I'm willing to blame Texas officials for not prioritizing funding for local emergency warning systems, although of course that specific bill wouldn't have helped this specific emergency.)