Notes on Spite: (With apologies to Susan Sontag)
The Rich Are Not Like You and Me: That's a problem for social science. And more importantly for us - "The Trump administration is defending the US based tech economy and looking to extend it as a tool of power and influence. The tech owner class is increasingly willing to return the favor, and the idiosyncrasies of all involved are reshaping world politics."
The American chestnut tree is coming back. Who is it for? As federal agencies prepare to deregulate transgenic chestnuts, Indigenous nations are asserting their rights to access and care for them. - "The trees huddled along the Gulf Coast for some 8,000 years during the most recent ice age, sheltering in the relatively warm stretch from Florida to the Mississippi River, because mountain peaks even in the southernmost part of the Appalachians were too cold for chestnut trees to grow. Then, as the snow receded northward 20,000 ago, the trees slowly migrated from their coastal refuges. They worked their way up the Appalachian Mountains — helped by Indigenous peoples, whom they helped in turn."
D.C. Council’s compromise on tipped wages undermines voters’ will, advocates say: The council’s budget amendment will modify Initiative 82, which voters passed by an overwhelming majority in 2022. - "This month, the Economic Policy Institute conducted its own analysis of the full-service restaurant industry in the nation’s capital based on publicly available data. It found 'no evidence that increasing the tipped minimum wage has caused measurable harm to industry employment or business growth,' the EPI wrote in its report. 'If anything, D.C.’s restaurant industry has done well relative to most jurisdictions over this period.'"
The Belated Voices Against The U.S.-Israeli Genocide of The Palestinians: Why did the onset of famine, and not any of the previous 21 months of collective slaughter, not compel them to speak out? [ed. note: this is a joke. The Democratic Party has no power to stop anything that is happening anywhere, never mind Gaza. What has happened in the past six months is proof of the effort the Biden administration put into keeping Bibi under control.]
Does your city have too much of one kind of tree? That can be a problem.
The U.S. military is investing in this Pacific island. So is China.: New U.S. radar sites are designed to keep China in check. But Chinese developments, some with questionable connections, could create vulnerabilities. - "Analysts say it’s unclear what approach the Trump administration will take to the Pacific. The U.S. DOGE Service canceled the final months of a contract for some U.S. security assistance in Palau."
The Fescue Fighters: A toxic grass that threatens a quarter of U.S. cows is spreading. Can it be stopped? - "Between the cells in fescue grows an endophyte, a fungus living symbiotically inside the grass. The endophyte is what makes the fescue robust against drought and overgrazing, but it’s also what makes it toxic. When scientists engineered a version of fescue without the fungal endophyte, in 1982, its hardiness disappeared and ranchers saw it die out among their winter pastures. Farmers learned to live with the health impacts of the toxic version, and today it remains the primary pasture grass across 37 million acres of farmland.
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"And Patrick D. Keyser, the center’s director, says native grasses significantly outperform fescue in climate resiliency. Fescue, he says, wants it to be 73 degrees and rainy every other day. 'Think Oregon or Scotland,' he said. Native warm-season grasses in the fescue belt, on the other hand, can go weeks with blistering heat and drought without a problem. 'To them, the worst climate projections that we’re getting really aren’t a big deal. From a resiliency standpoint, they absolutely win.'
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"Saving money matters in the fescue belt. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, 60 percent of farms in Texas County, Missouri, run a deficit, and every state in the fescue belt loses money on agriculture, except for Illinois, which is largely a crop state."
The Worst-Kept Secret of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Trump turned a far-right fantasy—ethnic cleansing in Gaza—into U.S. policy. He needs to reject it. - "One of the more poorly kept secrets of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that many of those involved would prefer to take all the land and have the other side disappear. A 2011 poll found that two-thirds of Palestinians believed that their real goal should not be a two-state solution, but rather using that arrangement as a prelude to establishing 'one Palestinian state.' A 2016 survey found that nearly half of Israeli Jews agreed that 'Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.' A poll in 2000, conducted during negotiations toward a two-state solution, found that only 47 percent of Israelis and 10 percent of Palestinians supported a school curriculum that would educate students to 'give up aspirations for parts of the 'homeland' which are in the other state.'"
Why China Won’t Stop the Fentanyl Trade: The opioid that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year has become a source of political leverage that Beijing won’t easily give up. - "From one standpoint, China's actions are easy to understand. Its leadership is behaving as many other rational state actors would exploiting the power it possesses over a strategic competitor. But the grisly truth is that, in this case, China's power derives from mass death. Chinese leaders continue to use American lives to forward their political aims, rather than taking the small steps necessary to save them. That choice is one of the starkest demonstrations that the regime's priority of narrow self-interest over the global good won't be changing anytime soon."
A Democrat for the Trump Era: Jasmine Crockett is testing out the coarse style of politics that the GOP has embraced. - "Through her hearing-room quips and social-media insults, she's become known, at least in MSNBC-watching households, as a leading general in the battle against Trump. The president is aware of this. He has repeatedly called Crockett a 'low-IQ' individual; she has dubbed him a 'buffoon' and 'Putin's hoe.' Perhaps the best-known Crockett clapback came last year during a hearing, after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia made fun of Crockett's fake eyelashes. Crockett, seeming to relish the moment, leaned into the mic and blasted Greene's 'bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body.' Crockett trademarked the phrase which she now refers to as 'B6' and started selling T-shirts."
The Number Go Up Rule: Why America Refuses to Fix Anything: In the Booming Twenties, all decision-making is about protecting the value of financial assets held by older people. Therefore, the number must go up. And nothing else matters. - "Increasing the capitalization of the stock market at all costs has a number of implications about how our society works. Anything hindering short-term increases in profits, whether that’s higher wages, more factory investment, ending tax loopholes, rules to block being able to unsubscribe from Planet Fitness, transitioning to different energy sources, addressing an opioid crisis, or breaking Chinese control over the necessities of life, gets pushed out of the way. American life spans have plateaued or stagnated since 2015, which you’d think would be of concern. But it’s just not. There’s also something that distinguishes standard financial capitalism from ‘number go up.’ Financial capitalism implies risk. But in our era, the government guarantees financial returns with subsidies, regulations and bailouts. It’s a form of statecraft."
Finally, a Democrat Who Could Shine on Joe Rogan’s Show Hunter Biden is unrepentant.
‘College hazing’ or training? Amid shortage, air traffic recruits wash out.: Almost 20 percent of new hires fail to become a controller at the first facility they’re sent to. - "There is an ill-defined mystique associated with air traffic control, a belief among some controllers that people are essentially born to do the job. But the idea obscures the fact that skills controllers need can be readily taught.
"Controllers act like gatekeepers, demanding recruits prove they are worthy of entry to their club, said Linda Pierce, a retired FAA psychologist who studied how controllers are trained.
"'It’s this professional guild, but to me it also felt like a college hazing,' she said. 'It was hostile.'"
Harvard Paper Explores Possibility That Object Approaching From Beyond Solar System Is Hostile Alien Technology: "The consequences, should the... hypothesis turn out to be correct, could potentially be dire for humanity." - "Loeb is an interesting character: he's an enormously accomplished academic and the former chair of Harvard's prestigious astronomy department, but in recent years has often made headlines for suggesting that various detections in the cosmos might be alien spacecraft. In other words, he was almost bound to weigh in on this latest interstellar visitor, which is only the third ever detected."
Trump’s tariffs are promoting free trade — in Canada: Politicians and industry leaders have long pushed to remove barriers to interprovincial trade. Trump’s tariffs are giving the effort new momentum. - "With few exceptions, alcohol producers in one Canadian province are prohibited from selling directly to consumers in another. Vintners in British Columbia, for instance, can often more easily sell their merlots to oenophiles in other countries than within their own."
An American mega-influencer flew to Lithuania. Then the chaos began.: The streamer IShowSpeed drank pink soup in the Baltics and marveled at cars in China. Are his tours propaganda, or just good advertising? - "Speed’s lighthearted visits to China, Saudi Arabia and other countries have drawn criticism as propaganda exercises that promoted the countries in ways they wanted, rather than reckoning with their more complicated reality.
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"Speed’s sprint through the Baltics drew frustration from some locals, including in Latvia, where he did a backflip at the Freedom Monument honoring soldiers killed in the country’s 1918 war for independence and sung to fans from the balcony of the nation’s ailing public radio station. One journalist there wrote that the moment — in which 'an unregulated content creator [was] peacocking at the home of Latvian broadcasting' — offered a foreboding symbol of how modern media had changed."
Amy Sherald cancels major Smithsonian show over ‘censorship’: Painter Amy Sherald withdrew her exhibition “American Sublime” at the National Portrait Gallery. The Smithsonian denied trying to replace the painting in question. - "According to the Times, Sherald said she had been told that the museum — whose director, Kim Sajet, resigned after President Trump called for her ouster for being 'a highly partisan person' — might remove a painting that depicts a transgender Statue of Liberty from the exhibition 'American Sublime,' which was slated to open in September after touring at museums in San Francisco and New York. Sherald reportedly said Smithsonian head Lonnie G. Bunch III proposed replacing the painting with a video.
"But the Smithsonian spokesperson said that Bunch wanted the video to accompany the painting — not replace it. The spokesperson added that the museum offered to spend more time contextualizing her piece, but Sherald chose to remove herself from the show."
USDA will relocate most of its DC-based workforce: The agency will relocate about 2,600 employees to five other locations and shutter several key facilities in the capital region, including its main research center - "In the months following the 2019 relocation announcement, department data showed that two-thirds of USDA employees decided to leave their jobs rather than move, The Post reported at the time. A 2022 Government Accountability Office report found that USDA’s decision at the time 'omitted critical costs and economic effects from its analysis of taxpayer savings, such as costs related to potential attrition or disruption of activities for a period of time, which may have contributed to an unreliable estimate of savings from relocation.'"
"If he failed, their process failed": Inside the NFLPA meltdown
China’s strategy? Let Trump cook.: As President Donald Trump dismantles U.S. soft power and launches trade wars with allies, China is content to sit back and watch. - "'The United States, in their view, is dismantling its alliance relationships and alienating much of the world,' Gewirtz told the Wire China. 'It is dismantling aspects of the U.S. science and technology ecosystem, cutting funding to some of our great universities, and making it very unappealing, if not outright impossible, for foreign talent to come do research in those universities. And it is eliminating arms of U.S. influence around the world, from USAID to Voice of America. China’s view is that the United States is, in a sense, unilaterally disarming.'
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"[Economic historian]Tooze argued that the Americans have 'dropped the ball' here and the consequences will be vast. 'This is the material dethroning of the West as the central driver of world history,' he said. 'This is really what the provincialization of the West really looks like.'"
The Wrecking of the FBI The former FBI official Peter Strzok on how President Donald Trump is destroying U.S. counterintelligence from the inside. - "But they thought they had a deal. Bracket Trump, leave Trump out of the story, and Trump in turn would license them to go on a hunting expedition against all the people they really hated. A long list of liberal icons, people like—people whom they dislike for other reasons who were in the Epstein network. If Trump would just—they would stand back from Trump and he would then deliver to them justice against their ideological and other kinds of opponents. They’re mad, these people, because Trump reneged on that deal. In order to protect himself, he ended up protecting a lot of other people, too, or so people in MAGA world who are excited about this issue believe that this has been taken away from them. And for some of the people who are the loudest influencers, losing the Epstein file, having Donald Trump say, There are no records, there’s nothing to see here, everybody stand down, that’s not just a threat to their belief system. For many of them, it’s a threat to their livelihoods. For a lot of influencers, Epstein was central to their engagement strategies, very lucrative engagement strategies, and they now have the choice: If they accept the Donald Trump edict—if they say, Okay, we’ll stand down, as President Trump says—then what do they do for engagement?
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"This is a chronic—I think, going back to the 9/11 analogy, one of the things that happened after 9/11 was the decision was made to harden cockpit doors. What if somebody, a year and a half or two years before 9/11 said, You know, why don’t we harden the cockpit doors? Why don’t we do that? See how that maybe that would be an improvement. And they did it. We would probably now be studying that hardening of cockpit doors as an example of government waste. Right?
"Strzok: Yes.
"Frum: We hardened all the cockpit doors. It cost all this money. No one ever tried it. Nothing ever happened. Why did we ever do that in the first place? What a waste of time and money. Government overregulation hardening cockpit doors. This is the great injustice of government. No one ever knows what’s behind door number two, the thing that didn’t happen, the thing that you prevented."
This Is the Presidency John Roberts Has Built: The country is witnessing the creation of an all-powerful institution, and one man is responsible. - "Roberts has all but made at-will removal the president's constitutionally guaranteed prerogative, and his rhetoric goes further yet. His opinions taken together create a dangerously authoritarian and largely ahistorical narrative about the constitutional presidency."
What Trump’s Feud With Jerome Powell Is Really About: The president doesn’t think the Federal Reserve chair is bad at his job. He objects to the job itself. - "The Federal Reserve's assignment is to steward the long-term interests of the U.S. economy even at the occasional expense of short-term pain by balancing the twin objectives of suppressing inflation and managing the unemployment rate. Trump, however, believes that the Fed's objective should be to speed up the economy under Republican administrations and slow it down under Democratic ones. To the extent that the central bank balances unemployment and inflation, he would like to see the pain of high unemployment shifted onto Democratic administrations so that Republican ones can benefit from rapid economic growth."
In D.C., a toddler died of hunger and thirst. Why didn’t anybody save her?: The District’s child welfare agency was aware of Ebony Washington’s troubled history as a parent. And for months, relatives feared her daughter Kemy was in peril. Then tragedy struck. - "And he had another reason for not calling CFSA, he said: As a child, he had spent time in foster care, and he was determined to spare Kemy the emotional tumult that he had endured, landing in a stranger’s home.
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"He had chosen not to call CFSA when Kemy was alive, but he said he doesn’t dwell on that now."
Becoming Earth: Experimental Theology - "We humans emerge, walk around as if we were one thing, willingly oblivious to our true nature, and then we dissolve in order to emerge again in a wholly different form. Dissolution and reunification, forever and ever, amen."
Trump exempts more than 100 polluters from environmental standards
‘The ghost of Epstein is haunting Trump’s presidency’: inside the ‘Maga’ revolt
Here’s the most baffling part of the Republican budget bill: A last-second budget deal spares states from cuts to food assistance if they make more mistakes. - "A few examples: Based on 2024 error rates (the closest we can get to the 2025 error rates upon which the initial carve-out will ultimately be based), Florida, which has a high error rate, would avoid nearly $1 billion in cuts in the first year alone. At the same time, Texas would get hit with a more than $700 million bill because its error rate is too low. Because of its higher error rate, New York would avoid roughly $1 billion in cuts — while California, which has a lower error rate, would pay almost $1.85 billion."
The Paramount comics, Colbert and Stewart, are sharp critics of the '60 Minutes' deal: Stephen Colbert returned from vacation loaded for bear - "'I am offended,' Colbert said in his monologue Monday night. 'I don’t know if anything — anything — will repair my trust in this company. But, just taking a stab at it, I’d say $16 million would help.'"
The best TV show I’ve seen in a decade: Give ‘Adolescence’ all the Emmys.
D.C. protesters try a different tactic for spreading their message: Umbrellas
America, meet the Trump-Mamdani voter: Yes, such a person exists. Should anyone be surprised?
Kansas City poured millions into a grocery store. It still may close. More cities and states are experimenting with the concept of city-owned grocery stores, but these experiments often don’t account for social issues. - "At a community meeting last year, Pierson played videos of security incidents so graphic he gave a warning in advance — a naked woman parading through the store throwing bags of chips to the ground, another person urinating in the vestibule and a couple fornicating on the lawn of the library in broad daylight.
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"Part of the problem is the city’s lack of a jail, Young said. The left-leaning council closed the previous facility in 2009 as a cost-saving measure — a move the Kansas City Star has called a '$250 million mistake' — and so people arrested for minor crimes are quickly released instead of being held in rural counties miles away."
Everyone’s the hero of their own story: How to comprehend the incomprehensible - "If your goal is to actually change someone’s mind — not just to feel like you won, or produce a nice YouTube clip, but to actually change their mind — then you should be operating in the conversation as if you’re talking to the hero of the story, who is basically good but has been misled."
A developer promised a supermarket for a new neighborhood. Now it can’t deliver.: Developer Jair Lynch wants city to sign off on a smaller store after it says delays sunk deal with larger, full-service grocer. - "Kirby Vining, a Stronghold resident who helped lead Friends of McMillan Park’s opposition to the project, argues that Jair Lynch could have avoided overpromising and under-delivering. 'Be careful what you ask for and what you promise,' he said in a phone interview. If Jair Lynch had built flexibility into its original proposal, he argued, the developer 'could have building permits right now.'" [ed. note: counterpoint - if FoMP hadn't held up the process for years, Harris Teeter would never have pulled out of the project in the first place]
With Epstein conspiracy theories, Trump faces a crisis of his own making
Human Stigmergy: The world is my task list
China Is Putting Data Centers in the Ocean to Keep Them Cool China is pulling ahead of the rest of the world in sinking data centers that power AI into the ocean as an alternate way to keep them cool - "Many companies have sited their data centers in some of the driest regions of the world, including Arizona, parts of Spain, and the Middle East, because dry air reduces the risks of damage to the equipment from humidity, according to an investigation by the nonprofit journalist organization SourceMaterial and the Guardian. Partly to address water concerns, China is now putting a data center in the wettest place there is: the ocean. This June construction began on a wind-powered underwater data center about six miles off the coast of Shanghai, one of China’s AI hubs."
The Biggest Myth About the YIMBY Movement: There’s nothing centrist or conservative about the push to lower housing costs. - "This is what a populist antitrust effort in housing looks like: undoing regulatory capture, breaking up economic gatekeeping, and creating a fairer market. And yet, in a spectacular act of projection, NIMBYs accuse housing advocates of conservatism even as they defend the interests of wealthy landowners protecting their cultural and economic turf. This smear campaign is meant to freeze blue-state efforts to help people struggling to afford a place to live. And if the broader left fails to recognize this NIMBY misinformation for what it is, it might work."
Putin Needs to Believe He Can’t Win: The way to get a peace agreement is to change the battlefield.
My health and my politics walk into a doctor’s office …: My palliative care doctor and I have almost nothing in common. We’re still learning from each other. - "Her response included a touch of humor. 'I appreciate hearing more about how you were raised and how you view our standing in this life and beyond. But I guess it leaves me wondering, how is this working out for the world? And what happens to moral people when they die? If nothing happens after we die, what’s the point of striving for justice and caring about others in this life? Might as well be selfish, greedy, live the good life and then die.'" [ed. note: what are the morals of someone who strives for justice and cares for others in expectation of heavenly rewards? That makes the moral atheist a significantly greater person.]
Nursing homes struggle with Trump’s immigration crackdown
Trump’s Vietnam Agreement Bodes Poorly for Future Trade Deals
The Ruthless Ambition of Stephen Miller
FEMA removed dozens of Camp Mystic buildings from 100-year flood map before expansion, records show
How the rightwing sports bro conquered America
WHY MANY AMERICAN GARDENS ARE FULL OF MULCH?
Inside the Silicon Valley push to breed super-babies: Investors say genetic prediction services for embryos, used by Elon Musk and others, are a trust fund for future children. Many scientists are skeptical. - "But the paper laying out that breakthrough, published last year in the peer-reviewed journal F&S Reports, is fundamentally flawed, according to Stanford’s Yatsenko and Aleks Rajkovic, chief genomics officer at the University of California at San Francisco Health Center for Clinical Genetics and Genomics. It excluded results that didn’t fit its thesis, Yatsenko said, and both scientists said that by using Orchid’s own lab to check those results, its authors didn’t adhere to ideal scientific practice. Orchid said that the paper’s findings had been verified by independent labs and that there were 'zero discrepancies' in the results."
Senate Republicans divided over looming vote to rescind $9 billion in spending: The rescissions bill to claw back funding approved for foreign aid, NPR and PBS is a top Trump priority, but some Senate Republicans have raised concerns about the cuts. - "Democrats have cautioned that if Republicans cut spending that both parties have agreed to, it will make it much harder to strike a deal to fund the government in September, since Republicans could later rescind Democrats’ priorities unilaterally."
The CIA reveals more of its connections to Lee Harvey Oswald: New documents show an officer known only as Howard managed a Cuban group that interacted with Oswald in the months before the JFK assassination. - "He said a plausible theory was rogue CIA officers created the conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, unknown to the agency, and that 'the CIA covered it up not because they were involved, but because they were trying to hide the secrets of that period.' He said many in the CIA were angry with Kennedy after he withdrew support for the agency’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 as well as for his gradual move toward peace with the Soviet Union after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962."
A clinic blames its closing on Trump’s Medicaid cuts. Patients don’t buy it.: A clinic in rural Nebraska has become a political flash point after tying its looming closure to Trump’s law cutting Medicaid. - "Down the road on the town’s main street lined with American flags, Kerri Kemp said she didn’t like the Medicaid cuts either. The 47-year-old got Medicaid coverage after Nebraska voters chose to expand eligibility for the program in 2018, adopting an optional part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. But it was hard to document all her work as a bartender, county worker and rancher, and recently she’d struggled to submit the paperwork. Now she is uninsured.
"Work requirements could make it harder to qualify when they take effect in 2027, just after the 2026 midterms. But Kemp, a lifelong Republican and Trump supporter, doesn’t hold that against Trump and suggested he might change course. 'I really think he’s gonna do something,' she said." [ed. note: perfect, no notes]
California awaits disaster relief as GOP offers full support to Texas: California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), during a trip to South Carolina this week, highlighted the plight of Los Angeles-area communities still reeling from January’s devastating wildfires. - "President Donald Trump and other Republicans have so far withheld the funds, with many arguing that Newsom and other Democrats in the deep-blue state have mishandled the fires and should be forced to rescind liberal policies in exchange for aid.
"But now deadly floods have struck ruby-red Texas — and the Republican response is much different, with Trump and others promising unfettered and prompt federal support in the months and years to come.
"The contrast underscores the extent to which the Trump administration treats blue and red states differently, whether in disaster response or in targeting liberal areas for aggressive immigration enforcement."
A band of innovators reimagines the spy game for a world with no cover
Trump Loves ICE. Its Workforce Has Never Been So Miserable.: A “mission impossible” deportation campaign has left many employees burned out and morally conflicted. - "At ICE's Homeland Security Investigations division, which has long focused on cartels and major drug-trafficking operations, supervisors have waved agents off new cases so they have more time to make immigration-enforcement arrests, a veteran agent told me. 'No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,' the agent said. 'It's infuriating.' The longtime ICE employee is thinking about quitting rather than having to continue 'arresting gardeners.'"
To Save Nature, Make It Sacred: Beyond science and policy, the key to protecting Earth’s most vulnerable ecosystems may lie in the human capacity to treat certain places as sacred. - "The lake’s sacrosanct status does not rest on formal enforcement or economic incentives but on a moral orientation that has become embedded in the community’s relationship to place. Visitors care for the lake of their own accord; threat of punishment is not required."
Why Evangelicals Turned Their Back on PEPFAR: A religious movement that has so often taken public stands has been unusually quiet since Trump gutted the program to combat AIDS in Africa. - "The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, first authorized by Bush in 2003, was the largest commitment made by any nation to address a single disease. It was, the president said, 'a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa.' PEPFAR, which received strong bipartisan support, is credited with saving 26 million lives and enabling almost 8 million babies to be born without HIV. It transformed the landscape of the HIV epidemic and helped stabilize the African continent. Not only is PEPFAR the single most successful policy to date in U.S.-Africa relations; it is 'also one of the most successful foreign policy programs in U.S. history,' as Belinda Archibong, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote last year."
The Man Who Thinks Medicaid Cuts Won’t Cut Medicaid: In Kevin Hassett, the Trump administration has picked an especially unfortunate spokesperson. - "Hassett proceeded to serve as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the first Trump administration, where his capacity for optimistic projection again proved useful. During the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, in 2020, Hassett designed a "curve-fitting exercise" indicating that deaths from the virus would peak in April and trail off to almost zero by mid-May. That is not, in fact, what happened."
Trump’s big bill will snuff out Kansas hospitals and eviscerate Medicaid. Jerry Moran just shrugs.
Debacle in the desert: will the Athletics’ $1.75bn stadium on the Vegas Strip ever be built?
Trump World’s Wizard of Oz Problem: Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon don’t speak for Trump or his base. So why do people think they do? - "Few jobs in Trump world are more farcical than the position of 'architect' of 'America First': There are no MAGA intellectuals, just Trump and opportunistic ideologues attempting to hitch their pet projects to his brand. The self-styled thought leaders of the Trump movement are merely political entrepreneurs trying to appropriate the president for their own purposes and to recast his chaotic and idiosyncratic decisions as reflections of their personal worldview."
The Most Perverse Part of the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ :The Republican megabill could be setting America up for the worst energy-affordability crisis since the 1970s. - "Blackouts and grid outages will become more frequent. Power-intensive industries such as AI and manufacturing will struggle under the weight of higher energy costs. China will solidify its dominance over clean-energy supply chains. 'Just think of Trump's own priorities: lower energy prices, becoming an AI superpower, reindustrializing America, outcompeting China,' Princeton's Jenkins said. 'Getting rid of these credits hurts all of those goals.' But there is one priority missing from that list: owning the libs.
"Partisan polarization around clean energy has grown so extreme since the passage of the IRA that Trump and many other Republicans apparently see destroying it as an end in itself."
The Republican shift against American pluralism: From race to same-sex marriage, Republican voters are turning against inclusion. - "Saying that 'everyone is welcome' has become a political statement in the way that 'science is real' has become one. Not because these statement themselves are political or even particularly controversial. No, they are now tainted with politics because they reject the right’s rejections of both objectivity and pluralism."
A Big, Bad, Very Ugly Bill: “Beautiful” it is not.
A Classic Childhood Pastime Is Fading: Kids on bikes once filled the streets. Not anymore.
Twenty-Four Hours of Authoritarianism: Donald Trump had a very busy Tuesday. - "None of these moves is a one-off. All follow what has become standard practice in the second Trump term. The president has declared a new order in which the supporters of his insurrection have been vindicated and freed from any consequences for their crimes, the president claims sole authority over the government's powers of spending and regulation, and these powers are to be used only to punish his enemies and reward his friends."
Trump’s Betrayal of Ukraine: Bridget Brink, the former ambassador to Ukraine, on that country’s war with Russia, America’s betrayal of Ukraine, and why she resigned - "The United States has built, since 1945, an extraordinary system of peace and security embracing much of the planet. It is a system from which many countries benefit, but Americans too. That Americans do not need to learn a second language in most cases; that they can travel about the world with a feeling of security; that when they do business, they do business under legal systems that are often inspired by the American example; that when they travel as tourists or students or in any capacity, they can put down a credit card, and if they have a dispute, have that credit card dispute adjudicated, usually under American law - all of those things that we take for granted as we move about a world that is ever more accommodating to the American way of life and to American interests, all of that is one of the prizes for the American investment in global peace and security."
This pandemic holdover is ruining historic Georgetown: Georgetown’s historic streets are littered with old, plastic sidewalk extenders. It needs a permanent fix. [ed. note: car-worshipping psychopath appeals to Trump to "fix" it]
What an 8-mile stretch of dirt road says about the meaning of America’s public lands: A controversy in Utah over where off-road vehicles can drive has reached the White House. - "The dispute over off-road vehicles is steeped in years of litigation, and technicalities about vehicle types and road classes and decibel thresholds. But it also boils down to conflicting visions about whether wild landscapes are more a playground to be enjoyed or a treasure to be preserved."
Senate passes Trump’s tax bill, sending it to House for final passage: The bill extends tax cuts from Trump’s first term and slashes roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid and other health-care programs. - "Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) repeatedly vowed the bill would not pass without deeper spending cuts. Instead, the Senate Finance Committee wrote a bill hundreds of billions of dollars more expensive than the House’s, and simultaneously more punitive toward Medicaid."
Philadelphia Transit System Votes to Cut Service by 45%, Hike Fares
Private jet carbon emissions are soaring. Here’s who pollutes the most.: A new study found that the United States was responsible for 55 percent of the pollution emitted by private jets globally. - "'If you look at individual airports that are polluted from private jets, Van Nuys Airport [in Los Angeles] popped out,' Rutherford said.'“This is getting a lot of visibility because it’s where the celebrities and influencers are all parking their planes.'"
We are eating the Earth. The result will be catastrophic.: “We Are Eating the Earth,” argues for producing more food on less land to avert climate crisis. - "If it comes, disaster might be due to a lack of humility among eco-posers. Grunwald bravely challenges the dippy, but influential, cult of 'organic' farming and Luddite opposition to genetically modified foods. Nothing is more urgent for the climate’s future, he argues, than producing more food for a growing world on fewer square miles of land. We know how to do it, he shows, and we’re getting better all the time.
"Humans who love the planet should cheer scientific advances in agriculture; farms need more genetically engineered products, not fewer. Yet the fad is back-to-yesteryear. While “factory” farms feed millions with increasing care and efficiency, wasteful little Edens offshore the world’s hunger. The forests and peatlands destroyed are out of sight of Hollywood and the Hamptons."
The GOP’s big, fat warning sign to the bond market: This is not how budgeting should work. - "As I’ve explained before, this is not how budgets work. It’s like saying renewing your Netflix subscription should count as free, because you got used to having the streaming service already. Or each time you buy another Starbucks coffee, it doesn’t cost you anything, because you’ve enjoyed Frappuccinos before. Or if your current car lease expires, getting a new one is now complimentary, because you already got used to the convenience of having a car."
The Whole Country Is Starting to Look Like California: Housing prices are rising fast in red and purple states known for being easy places to build. How can that be? - "The Sun Belt, in short, is subject to the same antidevelopment forces as the coasts; it just took longer to trigger them. Cities in the South and Southwest have portrayed themselves as business-friendly, pro-growth metros. In reality, their land-use laws aren't so different from those in blue-state cities. According to a 2018 research paper, co-authored by Gyourko, that surveyed 44 major U.S. metro areas, land-use regulations in Miami and Phoenix both ranked in the top 10 most restrictive (just behind Washington, D.C., and L.A. and ahead of Boston), and Dallas and Nashville were in the top 25. Because the survey is based on responses from local governments, it might understate just how bad zoning in the Sun Belt is. 'When I first opened up the zoning code for Atlanta, I almost spit out my coffee,' Alex Armlovich, a senior housing-policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank, told me. 'It's almost identical to L.A. in the 1990s.'"
Trump Insults America—Again: The president of the United States seems to have no interest in appealing to a national sense of pride or honor. - "In my many travels to university campuses over the years, I have often heard that America is only one of many horrendous regimes in the world. Usually these pronouncements came from students trying out new intellectual clothes in the safety of an American classroom, or from radicals on the faculty for whom anti-Americanism was a central part of their academic credo. And I know, especially from studying the Cold War, that presidents in my lifetime did a lot of shady, immoral, and illegal things. But I have never heard a president of the United States sound like a graduate student who's woozy from imbibing too much Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn."
