American Art Center, 2. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: “Here are our monsters,” without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
– Jacques Derrida
+ Musk and Trump’s intended Shock and Awe bombardment of the federal government has turned into an Opéra Bouffe of Schlock and Chainsaw.
+ Here is Trump’s Secretary of Commerce Howard (Net worth: $808 million) Lutnick’s message to seniors (whose ranks I have now reluctantly joined) on the gutting of the Social Security Administration: “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out your check this month. My mother-in-law, who is 94, wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up and will get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming and yelling and complaining.” As a writer who worked for decades as a freelancer, if I were to take my Social Security payments at the age of 65, the check would amount to about $40 a day. Try living on that for a month, never mind two months. The billionaire “economic populists” who are running the country haven’t the faintest clue how most of us live…
+ How many landlords are cool with you delaying your rent payment by a month and then not having enough left in the bank to pay the current rent?
+ Musk or Bust (Your Social Security checks)! Leland Dudek, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, has threatened to shut down the agency in response to a court ruling blocking Elon Musk’s DOGE demolition teams from accessing sensitive taxpayer data.
+ Financial journalist Michael Lewis (The Big Short) talking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on his new book, Who Is Government?:
When people throw around insults at federal bureaucrats, they’re really revealing they don’t know what goes on in federal government. It’s a mind-bendingly complicated place that does lots of different things, some of which they do very well and some less well. When you go in, you realize how hard fraud would be to perpetrate. Waste is different. Waste is more complicated. There are all sorts of inefficiencies that aren’t really the fault of the workers, that’s more the fault of the structure of the system. But you can’t take a federal worker to work and buy them a turkey sandwich. They just won’t take the money. They are watched every which way and they are conditioned to be very careful about what they do financially. If you said Mike, I’d like you to write a story about fraud; I’d much rather look for it in a private company…I worked on Wall Street. A million things happen every day in a Wall Street firm that if it happened in the civil service, it would be a scandal.
+ Even worse, DOGE’s mission is to defund and demolish the government agencies who are investigating fraud on Wall Street, while Trump issues executive orders and waivers removing any oversight for their own corrupt practices and conflicts of interest.
+ As Trump and Musk eviscerate the Federal Trade Commission, Public Citizen compiled a list of the donations made to the Trump campaign by corporations currently under investigation by the FTC…
Corporations currently facing FTC investigations & lawsuits that collectively gave $8,000,000 toward Trump’s inauguration:
Abbott $500K
Adobe $1M
Amazon $1M
Coca-Cola $250K
Meta $1M
Microsoft $1M
OpenAI $1M*
Syngenta $250K
Uber $2M**includes CEO donations
+ The Federal Trade Commission has erased from its website all content critical of Amazon, Microsoft, and AI companies published during the Biden administration.
+ This week, DOGE fired a disabled veteran who was working at the VA Medical Center in Salem, Virginia, despite excellent performance ratings. “This has put my wife and I in a terrible place mentally and financially…I’m being told by HR that I have lost everything.” And yet they want to require disabled, chronically ill, and injured people to work in order to qualify for Medicaid.”
+ Christopher Fasano, a former Senior Enforcement Attorney at the Consumer Financial Protection Board, on his firing by DOGE: “It happened on a Tuesday night at about 8:30. I got an email to my personal email address. It said that my skills and abilities did not meet the agency’s needs at that time. And that was it. And after that I was locked out of my computer and locked out of my work phone. And at that point, no longer employed by the CFPB. What really upsets me more than anything else is that all of the consumers I’ve spent my career defending are being left undefended at this moment. The worst companies, companies that Elon Musk runs, will be able to take advantage of them and commit all sorts of financial abuse and crimes.”
+ Illinois Governor JB Pritzker: “Trump has handed over the reins of power to Elon Musk and his fellow DOGE-bags.”
+ Earlier in the week, Lutnick told CBS News that Trump’s goal is to eliminate taxes for anyone earning less than $150,000 a year. He’s actually raising them for anyone earning less than $360,000 a year…
+ Trump has chosen Crystal Carey as the NLRB’s next general counsel. A former NLRB staffer, Canyon has been working at the union-busting law firm Morgan Lewis, one of whose biggest clients is Amazon.
Fortune reports that “finance leaders are losing faith in the economy, with optimism plummeting 20% since last quarter.”
Goldman Sachs: “Trump won’t lead to a capital markets boom on Wall Street.”
+ According to Bloomberg News, the head of the world’s biggest ocean carrier has said that proposed US fees on Chinese-built ships and the companies that own them could raise container rates by 25% if imposed.
+ The Hippie Pope may be on his deathbed, but he still sees capitalism for what it is.
+ US Treasury Secretary Bessent: “There’s going to be a de-tox period for the economy.”
“De-Tox Period”: A recession generated by Trump’s insane tariffs followed by austerity measures for the 99% and tax cuts for the 1%.
+ An analysis of the House GOP’s budget bill by the Yale Budget Lab shows that it will enable an enormous transfer of wealth from the lowest-income Americans to the richest…
Income Group / Minimum Income / Change in Income
Bottom 20% / $0 / -%1,125
2nd Quintile / $13,840 / -430
3rd Quintile/ $38,065 / $357
4th Quintile / $67,185 / $1.132
Top 20% / $125,010 / %6,222
Top 10% / $191,360 / $10,085
Top 5% / $272,065 / $16,835
Top 1% / $646,875 / $43,500
Top 0.1% / $3,265,655 / $180,910
+ Trump attacked the “globalist” Wall Street Journal…(though I don’t think “antiquated” is part of his standard 78-word vocabulary.)
+ Consumer confidence in the economy has now hit a 29-month low.
+ Deutsche Bank predicted that the market sell-off would continue for another 6% after steep declines in consumer and corporate confidence.
+ According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the GOP plan will increase the federal debt more than any measure in recent history, including the COVID relief and infrastructure bills.
+ Dark Lord Cheney: “Reagan taught us deficits don’t matter.” They only care about tax cuts and Pentagon spending and will use the deficits they create to justify further slashing federal social welfare spending.
+ According to Goldman Sachs, the recent plunges in the S&P 500 are “consistent with a market that is pricing in more recession risk.”
+++
+ Do you know what’s genuinely “inefficient”? The federal government not collecting income taxes from one of the world’s largest corporations…
+ By contrast, undocumented immigrants paid $59.4 billion in federal income taxes in 2022.
+ Tesla is recalling 48,000 Cybertrucks (one of the ugliest cars ever made) because the roof panels keep falling off while the vehicle is being driven. That’s 7 thousand more Cybertrucks than Tesla has sold (38,965)…
+ Pay of average Tesla worker: $27 an hour.
Musk’s income: $4 million an hour.
+ On the other hand, Musk has lost $120 billion of his personal wealth in the past month. That’s four billion a day or $166,666,666 every hour. Though I’m sure that comes as cold comfort to his underpaid workers.
+ As Tesla’s stock price continues its slide (down 53% since December and 35% in the last month), company insiders have begun dumping their shares:
Board Members / Value of shares sold
Kimbal Musk: $27 million
James Murdoch: $13 million
Robyn Denholm: $75 million
Company CO Vaibhav Taneja: $5 million
+ A poll of more than 100,000 Germans revealed that 94 percent wouldn’t buy a Tesla vehicle.
+ The Chicago Police Department sent about 50 cops to guard a Tesla dealership during an anti-Musk protest. If they’re standing in front of a Tesla showroom, they’re less likely to shoot a black kid walking home from playing hoops on the South Side…
+ After turning the White House driveway into a Tesla showroom, a stunt which seemed only to accelerate the collapse of Tesla’s stock, Trump took to Twitter and threatened to arrest kids who key-scratch Telsas as terrorists and have them thrown into Buekele’s dungeons-for-hire in El Salvador…
But given the cratering sales of Teslas, you’ve got to wonder how many of the arsons have been done by dealers looking to get an insurance payout…assuming the cars didn’t self-immolate as Teslas are prone to do.
+++
+ A six-year-old girl from West Texas became the first child to die in the US of measles in twenty years. The young caught the measles, which led to her contracting pneumonia. She was hospitalized, placed on a ventilator, and died. But in an interview with Bobby Kennedy, Jr.’s old group, Children’s Health Defense [sic], the child’s parents said they didn’t regret their decision not to vaccinate their daughter, saying that God had decided “it was her time” and that she was simply “too good for this Earth.” The girl’s mother warned others, “Don’t do the shots…[the measles] are not as bad as they’re making it out to be.” Is there something worse than the needless death of a six-year-old with a breathing tube stuck down her throat?
+ The girl’s father went even further into the realm of self-justifying fantasy, stating that “measles are good for the body,” fortify the immune system, and prevent cancer in adulthood.
+ According to the CDC, about 200 out of every 1,000 unvaccinated people who contract measles will end up in the hospital, one out of every 20 children who get measles will develop pneumonia, one out of every 1,000 children with measles will develop swelling of the brain (encephalitis). As many as 3 out of every 1000 kids who are sick with measles will die from respiratory or neurological complications.
+ The anti-vaxxers, of course, blamed the girl’s death, not on the parents or their own bogus claims, but on the hospital’s failure to treat the girl with massive doses of Vitamin A, a long-debunked snake oil con pushed by RFK, Jr, and others.
+ Ontario’s Public Health Department reports 470 measles cases since an outbreak began in October, an increase of 120 cases since March 14.
+ UNICEF: “In 2022, there were 941 measles cases throughout the WHO’s European region. In 2023, there were 61,000. In 2024, it was 127,350.”
+ Trump’s pick to run NIH, Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, has repeatedly claimed more children had died of flu than COVID. In reality, the American Academia of Pediatricians reported 133 pediatric COVID fatalities by November 2020, while there was only one pediatric influenza death that flu season.
+ “The only infectious disease that the United States accepts more than 10,000 deaths a year from is influenza — or at least it was, until now,” Dr. William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told the Washington Post. “We’ve still got considerably more than that with COVID.”
+ In 2024, at least 48,000 Americans died of COVID. By contrast, this year’s flu season, one of the worst in decades, has killed 22,000 Americans.
+ There’s no question that US AID has played a malign role in many operations to enforce US “soft power” foreign policy against reluctant nations across the last five or six decades. There’s also no question that USAID has provided life-saving medical aid to impoverished countries. The New York Times took a hard look at the potential human cost from the gutting of the Agency’s health care operations and the numbers are appalling…
Potential deaths from the elimination of USAID’s medical and humanitarian assistance programs
AIDS: 1.65 million
Lack lack of vaccines: 500,000
Lack of food: 550,000
Malaria: 290,000
TB.: 310,000
+ Nicholas Kristof:
Elon Musk says that no one has died because he slashed humanitarian aid. I went to South Sudan to check if that’s true. It’s not. Within an hour of starting the interviews, I had the names of a 10-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl who had died because of decisions by wealthy men in Washington.
The visit that moved me the most was to a remote area that used to have no health care, where women routinely died in childbirth. Then, a US-funded maternity clinic opened through UNFPA in December, and not one woman has died since. I showed up, and people mistakenly thought I was responsible for the clinic. One new mom wanted to name her baby for me, and the village elders thanked me and hailed America’s generosity. What they didn’t know was that Trump/Musk had cut all funding for UNFPA and that, as a result, the maternity clinic will close this month, and women will once again be bleeding to death in the dust.
Here’s a giftlink to my report from ground level about what the shutdown of USAID means.
+ Sophie Cousins writing in the LRB on TB: ‘Tuberculosis is the world’s most deadly infectious disease, killing more than a million people a year and infecting many millions more, even though treatment in the form of antibiotics has existed for seventy years. TB predominantly affects the poor in the Global South. As Paul Farmer wrote in Infections and Inequalities (1999), “the ‘forgotten plague’ was forgotten in large part because it ceased to bother the wealthy.”’
+ I’m reminded of the scene in Ali Abbasi‘s film The Apprentice, where Trump reacts with disgust at learning Roy Cohn’s lover has AIDS and then kicks him out of the Trump-owned hotel where he’d been living…
+ In anticipation that the Trump administration will soon end most research in the field, NIH officials have advised scientists to remove references to mRNA vaccines from their grant applications, even as the vaccines show promise against many forms of cancer.
+++
+ For the second consecutive month, the number of Canadians driving into the US has declined. Last month, it dropped by 23% from the previous. More and more Canadians are avoiding any travel to the US, including layovers at US airports.
+ Does Trump really think Canadians want to spend more than 30 days in this ever-deepening shithole of a country? Even the snowbirds are bypassing the US for more welcoming retreats in Mexico and the Caribbean.
+ In response to Trump’s barrage of threats against Canada, 45% of Canadians now support becoming a member of the European Union, while only 29% oppose doing so.
+ Petty, spiteful and stupid: “The U.S. government is closing the main Canadian access to the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, an iconic building that straddles the border between Quebec and Vermont, according to town and library officials.”
+ Canadian PM Mark Carney: “President Trump claims that Canada isn’t a real country. He wants to break us so America can own us. We will not let that happen. We’re over the shock of the betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons. We have to look out for ourselves.” Of course, as a central banker, we know who Carney will look out for first.
+ Ian Bremmer: “The world is witnessing a transition from a rules-based system of managed economic integration to one of coerced decoupling.”
+ François Holland, former President of France: “While the American people may still be our friends, the Trump administration is no longer our ally. It marks a fundamental break with the historical relationship between Europe and America. It is unfortunately, however, indisputable.”
+ Trump continues to threaten Greenland with an invasion of US troops, signaling he may intend to make it his very own Grenada: “Denmark is very far away. A boat landed there 200 years ago or something and they say they have rights to it. I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t think it is, actually …We really need it for national security … Maybe you’ll see more and more soldiers go there.”
+ Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Denmark’s Foreign Minister: “If you look at the NATO treaty, the UN charter or international law, Greenland is not open to annexation.”
+ Trump united all of Greenland’s political parties in a denunciation of his “unacceptable behavior.”
+++
+ Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: “The Defense Department doesn’t do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.” The US military emits more than 59 million tons of carbon a year, a carbon footprint that’s larger than many industrialized nations.
+ Last year, atmospheric C02 levels reached an 800,000-year high, leading to at least 151 “unprecedented” extreme weather events in 2024.
Two domed solar sensors at the Mauna Loa Observatory, Public Doman.
+ The Trump administration plans to pull the plug on the Mauna Loa Observatory, one of the world’s most crucial monitoring stations for atmospheric CO2.
+ The global average increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration in 2024 not only set a record at 3.7%, but represented a 25% increase over the previous record.
+ According to an IPSOS poll, climate activism continues to decline even as concerns about climate change increase.
+ A new report by the Boston Consulting Group and Cambridge University (Too Hot to Think Straight, Too Cold to Panic) predicts that by 2100, 13 major climate tipping points will be reached:
Greenland ice sheet collapse (1.5C)
West Antarctic ice sheet collapse (1.5C)
Extinction of tropical coral reefs (1.5C)
Abrupt thawing of permafrost (1.5C)
Barents Sea ice loss (1.6C)
North Atlantic subpolar gyre collapse (1.8C)
Tibetan Plateau snowmelt (2.0C)
West African monsoon shift (2.8C)
East Antarctic subglacial basins collapse (3.0C)
Boreal forest southern dieback (4.0C)
Gulf Stream disruption (4.0C)
Boreal forest northern retreat (4.0C).
+ At the onset of tornado season in the center lanes of tornado alley, the National Weather Service will be without weather balloons. Maybe the Chinese could loan them a couple (as long as the Air Force promises not to shoot them down this time)…
+ A recent study on congestion pricing in NYC (The Short-Run Effect of Congestion Pricing in New York City) documents increased commuter speeds and decreased emissions. The study found “no significant difference between neighborhoods with different incomes.”
+ Bees pollinate 70% of the world’s crops, but their population has dropped by 40% in the U.S. alone since 2006.
+ The Department of Energy estimates AI data centers could consume up to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028, up from just 4.4% in 2023.
+ While South Africa continues to generate 82% of its electricity from fossil fuels (mainly coal), Kenya has made a radical transition. It now generates 88% of its electricity from geothermal, wind, hydro, biofuels, and solar.
+ Javier Blas, energy columnist at Bloomberg News: “A senior executive of an American oil company told me, ‘We thought that Chris Wright, the energy secretary, was “our guy,” someone from the industry. And here in Houston we just realized that Mr. Wright is Trump’s guy. He’s not our guy. He’s going to do what the White House is telling us to do. And if that means $50 oil and bankruptcies in the oil patch, so be it.’”
+ The deglaciation of Glacier National Park is nearly complete: “In 1850, the area that is now Glacier National Park had approximately 80 glaciers; as of 2015, there were 26—all shrinking. In the last decade, 13 of those have broken apart and can no longer technically be considered glaciers.”
+ Paul Hawkins: “When people say we’re going to “fix” the climate … to me, it’s just so emblematic of this profound disconnection between self and other. We don’t have a climate crisis; the climate cannot have a crisis. We are the crisis”.
+ The Chinese EV maker BYD announced this week that its new line of cars can be fully charged in about the same time it takes to refill a gas-engine vehicle at the pump. It takes about 8 hours to fully charge a Tesla at home and up to 30 minutes to fully charge a Tesla at a “super-charging” station on the road…if you can find one.
+ Sandeep Vaheesan, author of Democracy in Power: “China pursues an abundance of tech while the United States opts for an abundance of tech billionaires.”
+ Elon Musk is sending rockets to deliver (and return) scientists to a space station where the kind of experiments being done are similar to the ones his DOGE wrecking crews are defunding back on Earth.
+ With the full backing of the Trump administration, Montana is escalating its vile war on wolves…
+ This week, some shithead in Oregon illegally shot a male breeding-age wolf outside the Cascade Mountains town of Sisters.
+++
+ Trump on Iran: “I’ve written them a letter saying, I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing for them.”
+ Trump White House: “Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon from this point forward as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of Iran.”
+ In the last 15 months, the U.S. Navy has used more missiles for “air defense” combat operations against the Houthi naval blockade in the Red Sea off the Yemeni coast than it has used in all years since Operation Desert Storm in the 1990s.
+ Before Trump began badgering European nations for “underfunding” their military, the armed forces in Europe had been in steady decline, much to the benefit of world peace and their own socio-economic well-being:
EU
1990: 3.4 million troops
2020: 2 million troopsGermany
1990: 500,000 troops
2020: 195,000 troopsFrance
1990: 560,000 troops
2020: 320,000 troopsUK
1990: 320,000 troops
2020: 150,000 troops
+ The Kremlin’s foreign policy advisor, Yuri Ushakov, on why Russia rejected Trump’s ceasefire deal that Ukraine had accepted: “It gives us nothing. It only gives the Ukrainians an opportunity to regroup, gain strength, and continue the same thing.”
+ After the Kremlin rejected the Trump/Zelensky ceasefire plan, Putin and Trump spoke by phone and supposedly hatched out a deal that would legitimize Russia’s seizure of Crimea and an agreement from Russia to stop attacking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which it has down consistently for more than 2 1/2 years, despite Sergey Lavrov’s laughable protestation that Russia has never attacked any energy sites.
+ Only minutes after the White House hailed Trump’s call with Putin as a “movement toward peace,’ Russia attacked Kyiv with drones and airstrikes, and Ukraine responded with attacks on Russian forces.
+ Poland’s President Duda on why he wants nuclear weapons based in Poland: “Russia did not even hesitate when they were relocating their nuclear weapons into Belarus…they didn’t ask anyone’s permission.”
+++
+ “WTF Chuck” Schumer, the leader of Resistance, Inc. in the Senate, folded to Trump last week on the Continuing Resolution he’d vowed to sink only a day earlier. That’s pretty definitive proof Schumer isn’t a Palestinian (according to Trump), after all…
+ Schumer is postponing his book tour amid the angry fallout from Democrats over his decision last week to pass the CR. Statement from Schumer’s office: “Due to security concerns, Senator Schumer’s book events are being rescheduled.” Other than the lobbyists who are prepared to buy anything with his name on it to curry favor with the Senator from Citibank, who even knew Schumer had a book coming until the backlash against him?
+ Perhaps some of the threats are coming from fellow senators. During a meeting before the vote, Sen. Michael Bennet angrily accused the Democratic leadership of having “No strategy, no plan, and no message on this spending bill.”
+ Here are the 10 Democratic senators who voted for the CR: Dick Durbin, Angus King (technically an independent who conferences with the Dems like Sanders), Brian Schatz, Chuck Schumer, Catherine Cortez Masto, Maggie Hassan John Fetterman, Peters, Kristen Gillibrand, Jean Shaheen.
+ Bernie Sanders on the capitulation of the Democratic Party leaders in the Senate: “In order to pass this legislation, the Republicans needed 60 votes, which meant that they had to have seven votes from Democrats — and they got them. Actually, they got ten votes. That’s sad. That is an absolute dereliction of duty on the part of the Democratic leadership. Nobody in the Senate should have voted for this dangerous bill.”
+ After losing to Trump twice and putting up little resistance to Trump’s agenda, the favorability of the Democratic party has fallen to a new low of 27 percent. And that’s only among registered voters.
+ Chuch Schumer: “Let me state unequivocally: I do not believe Donald Trump is an antisemite. But he all too frequently has created the feeling of safe harbor for far-right elements who unabashedly or in coded language express antisemitic sentiments.”
+ Unequivocally, Chuck? Set aside, for a moment, the Nazi-saluting, German neo-Nazi AfD party-supporting DOGE czar and check out this from Trump’s vice president:
+ Translation: If Germany takes in any more Jews, Roma or Sinti people, homosexuals, deviant Cubist painters, lesbian socialists, door-bell ringing Jehovah’s Witnesses, kids with Downs syndrome, or black jazz musicians, it will destroy itself (for the better)…
+ Although Schumer avers that Trump isn’t an antisemite, he apparently believes that American Jews who oppose Israel’s barbaric treatment of Palestinians are.
+ According to the latest NBC News poll, Trump’s approval rating is already underwater: 47/51
Border security/immigration 55/43
Foreign policy 45/53
Economy 44/54
Inflation/cost of living 42/55
Russia-Ukraine war 42/55
+ Trump’s disapproval rating on the economy is an all-time high; it never reached 50% in his first term.
+ In its DEI cleansing operation, the Pentagon has erased any mention of the Navajo code talkers and Jackie Robinson’s military career from Department of Defense websites. Jackie was a Republican his entire life. He even testified before HUAC against Paul Robeson, a decision he came to regret deeply. More proof this is about race, not ideology…except, of course, the ideology of race (white supremacy)…
+ Carol Miller, nurse and Green Party activist in northern New Mexico: “Erasing tribal sovereignty, the Code Talkers and putting all BIA facilities on the closure list within a few days is frightening. Magafascists have talked about deporting natives because they aren’t citizens in the Constitution. There is a lot of fear building in Indian Country, much more since last week.’
The Black Lives Matter mural on the road to the White House, as seen by the Planet Labs satellite orbiting overhead. – In Space, We Can Hear Your Screams. CC BY 2.0.
+ Making explicit what’s been implicit all along: Black Lives Don’t Matter to the government, not even in historically black cities like DC, which surrendered to Trump’s demand that it erases all traces of Black Lives Matter Plaza from the two pedestrian blocks of 16th Street, where it created in 2020 to commemorate the George Floyd Protests, which have so aggravated Trump and his MAGA supporters…
+ The Return of Apartheid in America, brought to you by someone who was born under apartheid, whose family got rich from apartheid, and who wants to bring it back to his native South Africa, as well…
+ In her ruling blocking Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military (there are only 4200 who identify as such, less than 0.2 percent of Pentagon personnel), federal Judge Ana Reyes wrote that the ban was based on little to no evidence and instead was “soaked in animus” and “dripping with pretext.” Reyes concluded her scathing ruling by saying that“the law does not demand that the Court rubber-stamp illogical judgments based on conjecture.”
+ Two days later, Trump ordered the revocation of $175 million in federal grants to his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, for its policies on transgender athletes.
+ Judith Butler: “Trump speaks in the name of science, but…he does so…to insist that God decreed the immutable character of the two sexes and that he, Trump, is decreeing it once more.”
+ Trump’s war on universities: First Gaza, now transgender people. What next, teaching about climate change? Evolution? Slavery? Women’s suffrage? The history of imperialism and colonization?
+ Speaking of education, under a new academic standard, Oklahoma teachers would be required to teach students that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump and have students “identify discrepancies in 2020 election results.”
+ As the Dodgers opened play in Tokyo against the Cubs, with both teams loaded with international talent, MLB baseball buckled to the Jim Crow-era demands of Trump and erased all mention of “diversity” from its website. Will they cancel Jackie Robinson Day (April 15), too?
+ Is it any wonder a Gallup poll of American youth reveals collapsing trust in government, social institutions and their own future…
Confidence in the federal government: 32% (- 20% since 2010)
Confidence in US judicial system: 45% (-20% since 2010)
Suitable affordable housing in their city: 37% (-25% since 2010)
Satisfaction with freedom in their life: 70% (-20% since 2010)
+++
+ Herbert Marcuse: “Do the technicians rule, or is their rule that of the others, who rely on the technicians as their planners and executors?” I ask myself this every morning when I fire up the Mac (or, possibly, it fires me up.)
+ Earlier this week, Trump ordered a bunch of Biden pardons rescinded because they were signed by an autopen. Now the Presidential autopen has run amuck again, signing the invocation of the Enemies Alien Act without Trump’s knowledge!! Trump: “I don’t know when it was signed ‘cause I didn’t sign it. Other people handled it. But Marco Rubio’s done a great job, and he wanted them out, and we go along with that.”
+ Won’t Shut Up and Won’t Play: The celebrated classical pianist, András Schiff, who lived in NYC for many years, announced this week the cancelation of all performances in the US in 2025/2026, citing a moral obligation to protest the “unprecedented political changes in the United States.”
+ The great mathematician Norbert Wiener (The Human Use of Human Beings) on the Manhattan Project scientists and the dropping of their monstrous creation on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The pressure to use the bomb, with its full killing power, was not merely great from a patriotic point of view but was quite as great from the point of view of the personal fortunes of people involved in its development. I was acquainted with more than one of these popes and cardinals of applied science, and I knew very well how they underrated aliens of all sorts, particularly those not of the European race.”
+ From Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams: “In 2015, Zuckerberg asked Xi Jinping if he would ‘do him the honor of naming his unborn child.’ Xi refused.”
+ For your “They Just Don’t Write Like That Anymore” collection: Lord Byron to Caroline Lamb, 1812: “You know I have always thought you the cleverest, most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous, fascinating little being that lives now or ought to have lived 2000 years ago.”
+ Athol Fugard, the great South African anti-Apartheidist playwright and director, who died last week at age 92, was more succinct and prosaic: “Bullshit, as usual.” (Master Harold…and the Boys)
Airplanes in formation, there’s a conflict in the sky,
Modern constellation choosing who can live and die
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
In Praise of Floods: the Untamed River and the Life It Brings
James C. Scott
(Yale)
Shark: The Illustrated Biography
Daniel Abel and Sophie A. Maycock
(Princeton)
Christopher Hill: the Life of a Radical Historian
Michael Braddick
(Verso)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
Here We Go Crazy
Bob Mould
(Granary)
Consentrik Quartet
Nels Cline
(Blue Note)
Oceanside Countryside
Neil Young
(Reprise)
An Age of Insecurity
“We have entered an age of insecurity—economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity. The fact that we are largely unaware of this is small comfort: few in 1914 predicted the utter collapse of their world and the economic and political catastrophes that followed. Insecurity breeds fear. And fear—fear of change, fear of decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world—is corroding the trust and interdependence on which civil societies rest.”
–Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land
