“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions.” Because the US is a Russian ally (or satellite?) now I guess.
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Entries for February 2025
Trump Ejects Zelenskyy From White House
Trump just kicked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the White House after berating him for being “disrespectful” in the Oval Office.
The astonishing turn of events could scramble international affairs in Europe and around the globe. During his visit with Trump, Zelenskyy had planned to sign the deal allowing the U.S. greater access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, then hold a joint news conference.
Instead, Ukraine’s leader left the White House shortly after Trump shouted at him, showing open disdain. Untouched salad plates and other lunch items were being packed up outside the Cabinet room, where the lunch between Trump and Zelenskyy and their delegations was supposed to have taken place.
The White House said the Ukraine delegation was told to leave.
“You’re gambling with World War III, and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country that’s backed you far more than a lot of people say they should have,” Trump told Zelenskky.
My god, Trump and Vance are just total fucking assholes. The US is openly aligning themselves with Russia against Ukraine and Europe, a major shift in international relations that dates back to the 1940s. I am so embarrassed to be an American right now.
Update: The NY Times has some key excerpts from the meeting in the White House.
Vance: And do you think that it’s respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?
Zelensky: A lot of questions. Let’s start from the beginning.
Vance: Sure.
Zelensky: First of all, during the war, everybody has problems, even you. But you have nice ocean and don’t feel now, but you will feel it in the future.
Trump: You don’t know that.
Zelensky: God bless, you will not have a war.
Trump: Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.
Zelensky: I’m not telling you.
Trump: Because you’re in no position to dictate that. Remember this: You’re in no position to dictate what we’re going to feel. We’re going to feel very good.
Zelenskyy’s English is obviously not super strong but Trump sounds like a 4-year-old in full “you’re not the boss of me” mode here. So glad he has control of America’s armed forces and nuclear arsenal!
Elon Musk, Apartheid, and America’s New Boycott Movement. An excellent piece by Clara Jeffery on how boycotts can work to combat evil and the lessons we can take from the 80s boycott of South Africa.
Re: fighting back against this criminal & corrupt administration: AOC sent a letter to the US Attorney General asking whether she’s under investigation for “educating her community about their constitutional rights”. I love that she CC’d Trump.
Dana Milbank responds to the WaPo’s pivot to focusing on “personal liberties and free markets” with a piece *in the Post* calling Donald Trump “the single greatest threat to ‘personal liberties and free markets’ in the United States today”. 👏
From Zeynep Tufekci, a reminder that people who get the measles “lose much of their immune memory”, which leaves them “more vulnerable to many other diseases for years afterward”.
More good reporting from Wired on white nationalist Stephen Miller’s role the ongoing coup. “Miller is carrying out the daily work of governance while Trump serves as head of state, focusing on the fun parts of being president.”
How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy
This is excellent reporting by the Times (although at times it makes Musk’s actions sound heroic rather than unconstitutional, criminal, and treasonous) on how Elon Musk took over a huge chunk of the US government, which he still controls today. It began at a Republican fundraiser in September of 2023:
Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers.
Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?
Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.
Musk, motivated by the Biden administration’s regulation of his companies, went to work:
Seasoned conservative operatives like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought helped educate Mr. Musk about the workings of the bureaucracy. Soon, he stumbled on an opening. It was a little-known unit with reach across the government: the U.S. Digital Service, which President Barack Obama created in 2014 after the botched rollout of healthcare.gov.
Mr. Musk and his advisers — including Steve Davis, a cost cutter who worked with him at X and other companies — did not want to create a commission, as past budget hawks had done. They wanted direct, insider access to government systems. They realized they could use the digital office, whose staff had been focused on helping agencies fix technology problems, to quickly penetrate the federal government — and then decipher how to break it apart.
They would call it the U.S. DOGE Service, and they would not even have to change the initials.
They began their move on the digital service unit earlier than has previously been reported, The Times found, while President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was still in office — giving them the ability to operate on Mr. Trump’s first day.
And now here we are, an unelected private citizen in charge of the US government:
The team is now moving faster than many of the legal efforts to stop it, making drastic changes that could be hard to unwind even if they are ultimately constrained by the courts. Mr. Musk’s associates have pushed out workers, ignored civil service protections, torn up contracts and effectively shuttered an entire agency established by Congress: the U.S. Agency for International Development.
A month into Mr. Trump’s second term, Mr. Musk and his crew of more than 40 now have about all the passwords they could ever need.
His swift success has been fueled by the president, who handed him the hazy assignment of remaking the federal government shortly after the billionaire endorsed him last summer. Flattered that Mr. Musk wanted to work with him, Mr. Trump gave him broad leeway to design a strategy and execute it, showing little interest in the details.
Read the rest of it for how it was all hurriedly planned out ahead of time.
From Rolling Stone, a list of 20 essential movies starring Gene Hackman. The French Connection, The Conversation, Superman, No Way Out, Mississippi Burning, The Royal Tenenbaums. Phew.
Touch Grass is a screen time limiting app for iOS that requires photographic evidence of you actually touching grass to unblock apps on your phone. (Is there a “touch snow” option?)
How to Persuade the Vaccine Hesitant
I loved this short thread from Andrew Miller about how his pediatrician wife helps parents who are skeptical of vaccinating their children change their minds.
So my wife is a pediatrician and works in some hospitals with high vaccine and intervention hesitation (suburban ones). She has found *tremendous* success by just letting the families know she will have to document the higher risk of specific, and often fatal illness, in the chart of their child.
She explains that if their child goes to the ER, the ER might not think to ask about routine newborn care that the parents opted out of, so by putting it in the chart she might be saving the child from this very specific thing. But just as important it makes it feel REAL to the parents.
She identifies and describes the specific thing that their child is now more likely to die from. In detail, including symptoms to watch out for. It’s not abstract. It’s visceral.
In What We Trust?
The central point of Dr. Brooke Harrington’s essay about the destabilization of “basic systems we count on to make our society function” over the past month is bang on:
This promises to be a tough way for Americans to learn a critical fact too often overlooked: that one of our country’s greatest and least-appreciated assets has been public faith and trust in a variety of highly complex systems staffed by experts whose names we’ll never know. In fact, high levels of trust used to be one of our superpowers in the United States: specifically, that meant trust in our government to operate with reasonable competence and stability and without the kind of corruption that has hobbled other societies.
In this video, David Lynch talks about the effect of depression on creativity:
It stands to reason: the more you suffer, the less you want to create. If you’re truly depressed, they say you can’t even get out of bed, let alone create. It occupies the whole brain, poisons the artist, poisons the environment; little room for creativity.
But his assertion can be easily extended to how instability in one’s life leads to an inability to live fully. Stability and lack of corruption allows people to live their lives, make art, engage in commerce with each other, build families, and strive to be their best, authentic selves. The US has never been completely stable or uncorrupt, but we’re at real risk of losing something incredibly valuable here…and it’ll be difficult to get it back when it’s too far gone.
What Makes for an Effective Boycott?
From Choose Democracy and Build the Resistance, Boycott Central is a fledgling resource about boycotts. I found this checklist of requirements for effective boycotts really interesting & useful:
- a target (who is supposed to change behavior)
- a demand (so the target knows what they have to do to get the boycott to stop)
- boycotters (a lot of people who used to be customers refusing to be customers anymore)
- leadership/negotiation committee (people who can show the target they’re hurting their bottomline and negotiate over demands)
- a way to communicate with the boycotters (a structure and massive social reach!).
They go on to note that most of the recent boycotts, including the Feb 28th one, do not meet these criteria — but that we shouldn’t despair: “boycotts take some time to organize well”. As others have noted, the activism & organizing muscles of many Americans have atrophied in recent years, and it will take time to get ourselves into shape. Boycotts are like anything else…you need to practice in order to get better.
See also The Complete History of the Famed Delano Grape Strike. (via @prisonculture.bsky.social)
When Social Security checks stop showing up because of gov’t employee purges, millions of Americans will finally understand what’s going on. “It is no exaggeration to say this will kill people — mainly people who are elderly, disabled and/or poor.”
“Democracy Dies in Darkness” Wasn’t a Warning; It Was Our End Goal. “When it comes to choosing whether or not to resist authoritarianism, I believe Snyder meant to write, ‘Do not! Obey in advance!’”
DOGE’s Chaos Reaches Antarctica. “If the Antarctic program budget is cut, then they’ll…get to the point where they can’t even keep the station open. If the South Pole [station] is shut down, it’s basically nearly impossible to bring it back up.”
“The Covid Alarmists Were Closer to the Truth Than Anyone Else”
From David Wallace-Wells, a reminder that those who were considered alarmists at the beginning of the pandemic were ultimately proved right — it actually was an alarming situation.
Today, the official Covid death toll in the United States stands at 1.22 million. Excess mortality counts, which compare the total number of all-cause deaths to a projection of what they would have been without the pandemic, run a little higher — about 1.5 million.
In other words, the alarmists were closer to the truth than anyone else. That includes Anthony Fauci, who in March 2020 predicted 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths and was called hysterical for it. The same was true of the British scientist Neil Ferguson, whose Imperial College model suggested that the disease might ultimately infect more than 80 percent of Americans and kill 2.2 million of us. Thankfully, the country was vaccinated en masse long before 80 percent were infected…
I’m also going to point out that those who were labeled alarmists about the impact of Donald Trump’s presidencies were also “closer to the truth than anyone else”, certainly closer than all those centrist “pundits”. I’m particularly thinking of those who knew when they woke up on November 9th to a Trump victory that Roe v Wade was toast and that Americans’ civil rights would be taken away and were called “hysterical” (there’s that word again) for saying so.
Women Are Scared And Scrapping Their Baby Plans Under This Administration & For Good Reason. “I don’t want to die trying to have another baby. I don’t want to leave my own living child motherless.”
The February 28 Economic Blackout
A broad range of Americans are organizing a 24-hour economic boycott on February 28th to protest the ongoing actions of the Trump administration and to send a message to corporate America. From The People’s Union USA website, here are the details:
- The boycott runs all day on February 28th.
- People are urged to not make any purchases that day. No online shopping or in person.
- Do not spend money on: fast food, gas, or at major retailers. “No Amazon, no Walmart, no Best Buy.”
- If you need to buy essentials (food, medicine, emergency supplies), do so at small, local businesses and try to pay cash.
The idea is to show corporate America, using the thing they best understand (money), how much power Americans have when collectively organized. Organizers have billed this as an initial move (“if they don’t listen…we make the next blackout longer”) and have planned follow-up economic actions.
FDA cancels meeting to select flu strains for next season’s shots. “Deciding on the strains in the spring gives vaccine manufacturers enough time to produce the shots to be ready for the fall.”
The US Economic Policy Uncertainty Index is at its highest level since 2000 — higher than during 9/11, the 2007 financial crisis, and the pandemic. “It is a mystery as to why credit spreads and equities are still so well-behaved…”
The MacArthur Foundation will increase its giving over the next two years in response to Trump’s actions illegally freezing aid. “This is a major crisis for our sector and it’s a time when those of us who can do more should do more.”
The United States has fallen to a score of 65 (on a scale of 0-100) on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (calculated before Trump’s 2nd term). It’s fallen steadily since 2013 (score of 76), esp. during Trump’s 1st term.
Legendary actor Gene Hackman has died at the age of 95. Hackman, his wife Betsy Arakawa, and their dog were found dead at their home yesterday. “Foul play was not suspected.”
A Son Tries to Rescue His Dad From Conspiracy Theories
NPR’s Embedded podcast has a three-episode series from reporter Zach Mack about a year-long effort to convince his dad that all the conspiracy theories he (his dad) believes are bogus, in an attempt to save his family.
Reporter Zach Mack thinks his dad has gone all in on conspiracy theories, while his father thinks that Zach is the one being brainwashed.
In 2024, after the latest round of circular arguments, they decided to try something new, an attempt to pull each other out of the spell each of them thinks the other is under.
Can one family live in two realities?
You can listen to all three episodes at the NPR website for Embedded or wherever you get your podcasts. This abridged companion article covers the same ground as the podcast.
When I asked my dad whether he feels like the odd man out, he answered somberly, “It’s painful at times. It’s very sad for me.”
So what happens when your family and your friends don’t respect your beliefs? Perhaps you reach for a higher purpose — something existential.
This came up in a conversation with Charlie Safford, a researcher who designs therapeutic techniques for people who believe in far-right conspiracy theories. He believes that conspiracy theories are fundamentally emotional coping mechanisms.
“Even if your father doesn’t put the pieces together, there is some awakening of his own mortality that might be contributing to all of this,” he told me. “One of the ways that you come to terms is to look back and say, ‘Did my life have meaning?’”
See also:
- QAmom (“Sean Donnelly’s mother got sucked into the world of QAnon conspiracy theories, so he made a little video about it”)
- QAnon, Conspiracy Theories, and the Rise of Magical Thinking
- Living in a Conspiracy Nation
- What Can You Do About QAnon?
- George Monbiot interviews a conspiracy theorist
- My Dad, the Facebook Addict
- In Search of a Flat Earth
- Sacha Baron Cohen Says Tech Companies Built the “Greatest Propaganda Machine in History”
Oh and me in a tweet from July 2020:
The appeal of QAnon & conspiracy theories is simple: they turn politics & public health (boring things that happen *to* you) into something active and engaging: your own personal Da Vinci Code hunt for a secret truth.
(thx, tra)
Pedro Pascal responding to transphobia on social media: “I can’t think of anything more vile and small and pathetic than terrorizing the smallest, most vulnerable community of people who want nothing from you, except the right to exist.”
Eyes on the Prize III: We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest 1977-2015
Whoa, HBO has made a third installment of Eyes on the Prize, the landmark series on the American Civil Rights Movement. The trailer is above and you can watch the six-part series on HBO or Max right now.
The first two series, which are amongst the best television ever aired, covered events from 1954–1965 (part one) and 1965–1985 (part two). Eyes on the Prize III covers significant events from 1977-2015, including:
- Community activists in the South Bronx and Philadelphia fighting for fair housing and healthcare during the Carter administration
- Reaganomics and the AIDS crisis
- How the criminal justice system affected the Black community from 1989-1995 in Washington DC and South Central Los Angeles (the LA Uprising).
- The Million Man March in 1995.
- The environmental movement (1982-2011)
- “The complexities of affirmative action policies and how a changing demographic landscape affected school desegregation in new ways.”
- The soaring police brutality of the Obama years.
- The birth of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Featured participants include Angela Davis, Al Sharpton, congressman Kweisi Mfume, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Al Gore, Black Lives Matter co-founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, and dozens of other activists, scholars, and politicians.
In a review for the Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Fienberg writes:
Eyes on the Prize III is, as the title suggests, a formal sequel to Eyes on the Prize II, a six-hour exploration of the “aftermath” of the Civil Rights Movement that makes it very clear that the movement has never ended, just as its real concerns were never fully resolved. It’s an emotional, inspiring and righteously angry series of vignettes that looks backward, while very clearly intending to reflect upon and instigate conversations about our fraught current moment.
The series isn’t perfect, but it’s utterly essential, sometimes feeling disheartening for the immediacy of that necessity.
In a post on Bluesky, Fienberg says “nothing you could watch this week is better”.
Jeff Bezos declares opinions questioning “free markets” no longer welcome at The Washington Post. “Months after insisting he would never allow his personal interests to influence the Post’s content…” LOL, the underrepresented capitalist perspective…
A long but very interesting thread about how Trump & Russell Vought have started weaponizing the OMB to illegally impound funding appropriated by Congress (like he did in 2019, leading to his first impeachment).
Plan To Be More Positive Off To Shitty Fucking Start. “Well, I’m not even three days into giving optimism a shot, and it already sucks.” 🙃🫠😭
An unvaccinated child has died in the Texas measles outbreak. And before that, there had been only 2 measles deaths in the past 22 years: one in 2015 and one in 2003.
What do you do after you accidentally kill a child? This is wonderfully written….but also very hard to read.
The Great Resegregation
For the Atlantic, Adam Serwer writes about the Great Resegregation, the attempt by the Trump administration to reverse the civil rights movement.
If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.
Like CRT before it, DEI has become conservatives’ go-to cover for their discriminatory actions:
The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. Although it is easy to find examples of DEI efforts that are ill-conceived or ill-applied, some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.
Karen Attiah recently wrote about resegregation as well: The assault on DEI? It’s aimed at resegregation.
Across the United States, in government agencies and private corporations, leaders are scrambling to eliminate DEI programs. President Donald Trump is not only destroying any trace of diversity work within the government: He has ordered a review of federal contracts to identify any companies, nonprofits and foundations that do business with the government and keep their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and he has warned that they could be the target of investigations.
Let’s call this what it really is: resegregation.
This Is Not a Drill: How Universities Can Save DEI. “This is not just about education. It is about who gets to participate in shaping the future of this country.”
Let This Radicalize You Workbook. “This workbook is intended as an extension of the book Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba.”
On the lessons of the rise & fall of the KKK. “Fascism always fails. It is destructive and it is awful and not everyone lives to see the other side, but it always, always fails. It takes work. It takes fighting back.”
The War on Cars debuts an ad that extolls the freedom of cycling. “Who’s really more free? People beholden to traffic, gas prices, and the high cost of owning and maintaining a car or those who are able to choose another way?”
Slow Start Today…
It turns out when you get a flat tire after hitting a pothole in the middle of nowhere late at night and you don’t have a spare1 in a state where everyone goes to bed at 9:15pm, you’re just kinda shit outta luck? Huge thanks to Caroline and her sleepy, confused dog for coming to retrieve me. 💞
So yeah anyway, things might be a little wonky around here today because I got very little sleep and I need to see about that flat. 🤷♂️
- I’m gonna head everyone off at the pass here and tell you that I had a portable air compressor and an emergency puncture kit with me that were both useless for this type of flat unfortunately.↩
This weekend, JD Vance is visiting a small VT town near where I live and plans to ski at Sugarbush. The locals are understandably pissed — both at our fascist VP and the local businesses extending their welcome to him. Protests to come, I’m sure.
Trump Administration Litigation Tracker. “The table below tracks legal challenges to the Trump administration’s executive orders, as well as cases on behalf of the Trump administration to enforce them.”
As Facebook Abandons Fact-Checking, It’s Also Offering Bonuses for Viral Content. “The upshot: a likely resurgence of incendiary false stories on Facebook, some of them funded by Meta.”
Actress Hunter Schafer’s gender marker was changed to “male” on her US passport due to Trump’s anti-trans passport rules. “This is real…and no one, no matter their circumstance, no matter how wealthy or white or pretty or whatever, is excluded.”
Inalienable Rights vs. Conditional Privileges
From @existennialmemes on Tumblr:
Listen, if a Bad President can come in and take away our rights and we’re dependent on a Good President replacing them in four years to give us back our rights, then we do not have any rights.
If politicians can take or distribute them, then they’re not “inalienable” and they’re not “rights.”
We don’t have inalienable rights we have conditional privileges, divvied out according to the whims of whoever currently holds the reins.
And if we want to have actual rights, then we must build a system in which no one has the power to take them away to begin with.
I am wondering what a system like that would actually look like… (via @halaylah.bsky.social)
AOC Shows How to Fight Back and Stand Strong. “AOC’s stand for her constituents, and her public refusal to be intimidated, are models of resistance that other Democrats would do well to imitate.”
Andor Season Two Trailer
I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to watch an earnest show about an ultimately successful revolution against a fascist government. It will be interesting to see in this political climate whether Disney+ is the place to watch such a thing.
This website is tracking how many people have lost their jobs because of the USAID Stop-Work Order (55K confirmed, 100K+ estimated globally) and documenting other effects (people dying around the world).
From Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, a list of instructions on “how to change your settings to make yourself less valuable to Meta”.
A collection of videos of people fighting back against the Trump administration, incl. Maine governor Janet Mills, former NFL player Chris Kluwe, and AOC. It’s good to see this stuff and to take inspiration from it.
Fired NPS, USFS, BLM Employees Share Their Stories
The Guardian profiled a number of people fired from the agencies that manage federal lands - the US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, etc. — purged from their jobs by the Trump/Musk administration.
Victoria Winch, US Forest Service wilderness forestry technician, Flathead national forest, Spotted Bear ranger district, adjacent to Glacier national park, Montana:
People come on to these lands to hunt, to feed their families. People are allowed to get firewood. Outfitters, who are a big part of the local economy, use these trails.
But every single field person at Spotted Bear was terminated. Those trails won’t get cleared this year. And it takes less than one season for them to be totally impassable.
Nick Massey, USFS wilderness Ranger, Pisgah national forest, North Carolina:
We were very, very busy with public interaction, conversations, giving directions, educating. I would come up on folks quite often who were either lost or having some sort of emergency, and I’m also a member of two mountain rescue teams in the area.
I really loved seeing so many different people from different walks of life. Being able to be a part of that wilderness experience that people are having was really, truly magical.
Other fired federal land and National Park employees have been sharing their stories with media and on social media, highlighting how little these purges are about saving money and much more about all the services and benefits that Americans will be losing that we paid for. (Their stories also highlight the lies about employees not being fit for their jobs being used as the pretext to fire them. And the lack of due process. And, and, and…) Here are a few of those stories.
Brian Gibbs, Educational Park Ranger at Effigy Mounds National Monument:
I am a father, a loving husband, & dedicated civil servant.
I am an oath of office to defend and protect the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.
I am a work evaluation that reads “exceeds expectations.”
I am the “fat on the bone.”
I am being trimmed as the consequence of the popular vote
I am the United States flag raiser & folder
I am my son’s “Junior Ranger” idol
I am a college kid’s dream job
Today I lost my dream job as a permanent park ranger in the NPS. I’m still in shock, and completely devastated. I have dedicated my life to being a public servant, teacher, and advocate for places that we ALL cherish. I have saved lives and put my own life at risk to serve my community.
I honestly can’t imagine how the parks will operate without my position. I mean, they just can’t. I am the only EMT at my park and the first responder for any emergency. This is flat-out reckless.
The NY Times published an overview of the firings and their effect on federal land management, including interviews with purged employees:
Arianna Knight, 29, of Bozeman, Mont., the wilderness trails supervisor for the Yellowstone District of the Custer Gallatin National Forest, was let go on Feb. 14 along with more than 30 other Custer Gallatin employees. Ms. Knight said she and two workers under her supervision typically cleared 4,000 downed trees and logs from hundreds of miles of trails each year, often hiking and using hand tools for a week at a time in wilderness areas, where federal law prohibits motorized vehicles and mechanized tools like chain saws.
Now those trails won’t be cleared, Ms. Knight said, adding, “People are going to suffer.”
And:
While it may seem as if the cuts will mean fewer people trampling through the parks, allowing ecosystems to regenerate, some fear the opposite: that less oversight and control over huge crowds may damage the parks for seasons to come.
Adam Auerbach, 32, a former park ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park, said visitor numbers at the park has been climbing consistently for decades, to more than four million in 2023 from 2.6 million in 1990. The park has had to institute a timed-entry permit system to control the numbers.
With the new cuts, he said, “There will be fewer rangers on the ground to enforce regulations and fewer public educators to help the public even understand the regulations and the reasons for them in the first place.”
From a news release by the Association of National Park Rangers:
Rick Mossman, president of the Association of National Park Rangers (ANPR) said, “These actions will hurt visitors and the parks they travelled to see across the United States. If a visitor is involved in an automobile accident in Badlands National Park in South Dakota, or has their car broken into at a trailhead in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, there will be a delay in the response by a ranger to investigate — or perhaps no response at all. If a visitor suffers a medical emergency while hiking in Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, ranger response could be delayed.”
Mossman went on to say that visitors are likely to experience reduced hours or days — and even closures — of visitor centers and other public-use facilities. Ranger-led educational programs will be reduced or eliminated. Trash and litter may accumulate, and restrooms will be dirtier because of reduced maintenance and fewer custodial workers. There could even be complete closures of some parts of parks to protect visitors and those park resources.
From the National Parks Conservation Association:
In a phone interview, Moxley said she had to walk away from a year’s worth of research and work on wetland restoration, invasive plant documentation and funding efforts to save Harper Ferry’s remaining hemlock trees from a devastating invasive insect called a woolly adelgid.
Adding that she speaks on behalf of herself and not Harpers Ferry or the National Park Service, Moxley said parks — large and small — have behind-the-scenes staff who work to protect natural habitats, historic structures and museum objects and exhibits.
“Visitors don’t usually encounter us, but without us, there would not be sites to enjoy,” Moxley said. “Without staff, the National Park Service will be unable to carry out its 100+ year mission to leave the parks unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. This is a mission my colleagues and I take seriously.”
Following a public uproar, the Trump administration is walking back some of the purges of National Park Service employees.
From Eater, What Should You Do if ICE Comes to Your Restaurant? “We spoke to legal experts about what restaurant owners and workers can do to protect themselves from immigration raids.”
We the Builders is a site run by current and former federal employees about how “DOGE” is destroying the government. “They are destroyers. We are the builders. We don’t work for DOGE. We have always worked for you.”
When Your Only Job Is to Cuddle. “On that day, I rocked him for three hours. My left shoulder ached, my arm went numb, but I would not let go, for he and I had work to do, trust to build.”
Running Pong in 240 Browser Tabs. “That’s 240 browser tabs in a tight 8x30 grid. And they’re running pong!”
Speaking of Amy Sherald, she’s got an exhibition at The Whitney that opens on April 9th! “This exhibition includes a billboard across from the Museum’s entrance on Gansevoort Street.”
Roxane Gay’s lovely obituary for her mother Nicole: It Was Always Going to be Too Soon. “She had an unwavering moral code, a profound inclination toward justice, and her standards were exacting.”
A Quick Anniversary Note
Today somehow marks 20 years of writing/editing/designing/producing kottke.org as my full-time job (and almost 27 years in total).1 Here’s part of what I wrote five years ago to mark the 15th anniversary:
It seemed like madness at the time — I’d quit my web design job a few months earlier in preparation, pro blogs existed (Gawker was on its 3rd editor) but very few were personal, general, and non-topical like mine, and I was attempting to fund it via a then-largely-unproven method: crowdfunding. As I wrote on Twitter the other day, attempting this is “still the most bonkers I-don’t-know-if-this-is-going-to-work thing I’ve ever done”.
Thanks to everyone for reading and for all the support over the years.
Severance: Music To Refine To
Apple TV+ is streaming an 8-hour remix of the Severance theme by ODESZA that is perfect music for your innie to refine macrodata to. The workday-long video is a 23-minute mix that’s looped and set to footage from the show. Legit adding this to the work music rotation. (via @margarita.bsky.social)
A Robert Frost poem from 1918, ironically entitled “Nothing New”, has been published for the first time in the New Yorker’s 100th anniversary issue.
Amy Sherald and Michelle Obama
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this photo before, of artist Amy Sherald and former First Lady Michelle Obama sharing a hug during a session for Sherald’s iconic portrait of Obama. What a different time that was, huh?
“Egyptologists have discovered the first tomb of a pharaoh since Tutankhamun’s was uncovered over a century ago.”
The Sutro Tower in 3D
This is an amazingly realistic 3D model of San Francisco’s Sutro Tower that you can zoom, pan, fly through, and interact with. This model was made using a technique called Gaussian splatting; creator Vincent Woo explains:
This scan is made possible by recent advances in Gaussian Splatting. This is an emerging technology that lets us quickly create very detailed models just from photographs. For this model (or splat, as we call them), my friend Daylen and I flew our drones around Sutro Tower at a respectful distance for an afternoon until we had collected a few thousand photographs.
I then aligned these pictures in free software called RealityCapture. Alignment is the process that teaches the computer that a bunch of points in different images all actually correspond with the same point in real life. Then I used another piece of free software called gsplat to produce the 3D model itself.
The model looks amazing…I can’t believe it’s just stitched-together photos. (via @biddul.ph)
Craig Mod on how “leave no trace” and “pack it in, pack it out” is not just for campers and backpackers in Japan. “The Japanese way is the correct way. Be an adult. Own your garbage.”
Here’s what it’s like watching all 24 hours of Christian Marclay’s The Clock at MoMA. “Although I’m literally sitting in a clock, time is meaningless. One hour flies by and the next is like spending an afternoon at the DMV.”
ANXIETY: Doechii Raps Over Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know (2019)
I can already tell this is going to be my favorite thing of the day: Doechii singing and rapping about anxiety over Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know from 2019. If you didn’t know she could sing, well you do now.
If my math is right, Doechii was 21 in this video, living in NYC, vlogging about going to thrift stores (on her old YouTube channel that only has a little over 9,000 subscribers), and working hard on her music. I think it paid off?
P.S. This video from 2015 of Doechii in high school singing Do You Want to Build a Snowman? with her friends is super sweet.
Betty White is getting a stamp from the USPS that commemorates her “warmth, wit and charisma”. The first-day-of-issue event is being held at the LA Zoo on March 27 and is open to the public (RSVP info here).
I saw Paddington in Peru last weekend and so it’s been difficult to take Ben Whishaw seriously as a hitman in Black Doves.
Edith Zimmerman imagines books written by fairy tale and Disney princesses in their 40s, incl. “A Whole New World: Life With Bifocals” by Jasmine & “Where’s That Sea Witch When You Need Her? Turning Back Into a Mermaid Once the Kids Are Grown” by Ariel.
Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected. Big congratulations to Matt Webb on his blogging silver jubilee. His is one of the most active & creative minds on the internet.
Wind It Back
Hi. I’ve gotten a few notes recently about the shift in direction here at KDO, so I wanted to quickly point back to this post from a few weeks ago that explains what’s going on with the site:
As you might have noticed (and if my inbox is any indication, you have), I have pivoted to posting almost exclusively about the coup happening in the United States right now. My focus will be on this crisis for the foreseeable future. I don’t yet know to what extent other things will make it back into the mix. I still very much believe that we need art and beauty and laughter and distraction and all of that, but I also believe very strongly that this situation is too important and potentially dangerous to ignore.
And again, no hard feelings if that’s not what you’re here for and you need to step away or cancel your membership. Thank you to those of you who have written in with support, including folks who work for the government or for companies & organizations who are already being affected by the purges and illegal funding cuts. Hearing that my efforts here are useful in some way keeps me going.
That said, we’re doing Foolishness Friday again today. I miss this place as a source of creativity, a chronicle of the best that humanity is capable of, and somewhere folks can come to have a bit of a laugh. I don’t know if this is going to be a weekly thing or if some of this is going to be working its way back into the site on a regular basis — I guess we’ll find out together!
Anyway, how are things going with you all? I’ve grown tired of winter. We have so much snow here…last weekend it took me an hour and 15 min to shovel a path to my car and then to dig the car out. I’m reading Timothy Ryback’s book about Hitler’s rise to power (no reason), watching Black Doves on Amazon, and playing a lot of Fortnite (I think the new season is out soon/today?). This weekend, I’m hoping to spend some time with my daughter and going wild ice skating again.
Trump expected to take control of USPS, fire postal board. “This is something that does not belong to the president or the White House. It belongs to the American people.” That goes for everything else they’re trying to steal too.
An essay on the role of music in political change, with example from Belgium, Chile, the Baltic states, Russia, and the USA.
How to Organize Our Way Out of the Trump-Musk Putsch. “The one thing we know from historical fights against authoritarians is that success depends on a persistent, courageous, broad-based, and unified opposition.”
Surviving Fascism: Lessons from Jim Crow. “Accept that this is happening. Denial won’t change the outcome.”
Thing I should not be surprised by but I am somehow surprised by: a gold-framed photo of Trump’s mug shot on the cover of the NY Post hangs in an office near the Oval Office.
How Democracy Supporters Can Still Beat Back the Rising Tide of Fascism. “We are (still) in the majority. They are divided. Extreme levels of material inequality are eroding democracy. Knowledge is power. Organization matters.”
“Masses of enraged, terrified people are looking at the analog, slow-motion leadership of Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and the zero-calorie rhetoric of House leader Hakeem Jeffries and want them replaced by people who know how to fight.”
My Open Letter to Elon Musk. “I will use every tool at my disposal to protect this country from Trump. I will litigate to defend voting rights until there are no cases left to bring. I will speak out against authoritarianism until my last breath.”
A bunch of libertarians took over a small NH town and couldn’t stop the bear attacks. “Several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could.” Ah, FAFO strikes again.
Judith Butler: To Imagine a World After This, Democracy Needs the Humanities (and imagination). “The world we have known is the world that is bound up with the movement toward greater destruction. What about a world we are yet to know?”
Political scientist Adam Przeworski (born in Nazi-occupied Poland) is keeping a diary. “I am trying to find categories in which to place the current situation and historical precedents from which one could draw some enlightenment. I fail in both.”
“If you’re looking for some great databases of the ongoing resistance (as well as some other useful resources) here’s a thread of where to start.”
87% Of Loud Crashing Noises Are Nothing, Report Top Experts From Other Room. “Despite initially reporting ‘Dammit!’ and ‘God dammit!’ separated by several seconds…”
Microsoft claims they’ve made a significant breakthrough in quantum computing involving Majorana quasiparticles. “It’s theoretically possible for an electron to hide itself, with each half hiding at either end of the wire.” 😳
Where Do Trans Kids Go from Here? “I never thought that my country would want to disappear my child, and would want to essentially deny her existence as a person.” Heartbreaking, infuriating, cruel, immoral.
The Information Overwhelm
In the most recent issue of Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick writes about how Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” has been embraced by the Trump administration in both governance and in messaging.
The brain-breaking feeling you get watching something like the ASMR video or the time you waste trying to determine whether the image Musk shared is real or not is, like with Project 2025 and the executive orders, by design. It’s meant to initially trigger you and ultimately wear you down.
Stuff like this always makes me think of Hannah Arendt’s comments in this 1974 interview, particularly the last line (emphasis mine):
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
And of Toni Morrison on the true function of racism:
It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
Timothy Snyder writing in the aftermath of January 6th:
When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions.
“Firing civil servants and dismantling government departments is how aspiring strongmen consolidate personal power”. Here’s how that has played out recently in Türkiye, Benin, Hungary, and Venezuela.
“The odds of a city-killer asteroid impact in 2032 keep rising. Should we be worried?” If the JWST can’t rule out an impact in the next few months, we may have to wait until 2028 to know for sure. “Bit awkward, if so.”
Timothy Snyder recaps what he heard at the Munich Security Conference about the new foreign policy strategy being pursued by the Trump administration. He calls it “affirmative action for dictators” (of Russia and China).
They’re Purposefully Traumatizing the Federal Workforce
Russell Vought is a Christian nationalist, a significant contributor to Project 2025, the policy director of the RNC’s platform committee for the 2024 election, and is currently the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In 2023, he gave a private speech at a meeting of his Center for Renewing America think tank in which he describes the goal of the purge of governmental employees that’s happening right now. A short clip of the speech obtained by ProPublica:
A transcript:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
From the accompanying article:
In his 2024 speech, Vought said he was spending the majority of his time helping lead Project 2025 and drafting an agenda for a future Trump presidency. “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”
Vought laid out how his think tank is crafting the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that gives the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The Washington Post previously reported the issue was at the top of the Center for Renewing America’s priorities.
“We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do,’” he said. Vought held up the summer 2020 unrest following George Floyd’s murder as an example of when Trump ought to have had the ability to deploy the armed forces but was stymied.
In another video, Vought stated that the “entire apparatus” of the US government was vulnerable and “exposed to our strategy”. And in this one, he talks about the president’s need to be able to ignore laws.
Over at Vox, Zack Beauchamp wrote about Vought today too: The obscure manifesto that explains the Trump-Musk power grab.
In 2022, Vought published an essay in the American Mind, a publication of the arch-Trumpist Claremont Institution, that provides an answer to some of these questions. Read properly, it serves as kind of a Rosetta stone for the early days of the Trump administration — explaining the logic behind the contemptuous lawbreaking that has become its trademark.
Beauchamp continues:
Vought believes that executive agencies have, with Congress and the courts’ blessing, usurped so much power that the Constitution is no longer in effect. He believes that presidents have a duty to try and enforce the true constitution, using whatever novel arguments they can dream up, even if the rest of the government might reject them. And he believes that threatening to ignore the Supreme Court isn’t a lawless abuse of power, but rather the very means by which the separation of powers is defended.
Russell Vought can call this whatever he wants, but it’s fairly clear what it amounts to: a recipe for a constitutional crisis. And it’s one the president currently appears to be following to a tee.
You should read both articles in their entirety.
Part of what this underscores for me is that this is not just Elon Musk’s coup. Musk seems to be following his own playbook but it’s clear that there are multiple, intersecting, mutually beneficial things going on there with Trump, Musk, Vought, and many Republican members of Congress. As Osita Nwanevu wrote recently in the Guardian:
Democratic republican governance will never be secured in America without turning our attention to the structure of our economic system as well. Dismantling the federal government to prevent that from happening was a key object of the conservative project before Trump. It has remained so with him at the head of the Republican party and will remain so whenever his time is up.
Not sure what else to say about this…their plan is all laid out in Vought’s remarks and in Project 2025. They’ve crossed some of this stuff off of the checklist already, so I guess we should be on the lookout for the rest of it, e.g. when/if protesting ramps up as the weather warms, we should expect Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and attempt to use the US military to quell dissent.
If you’re wondering “where are all the protests?!”, they are happening all over the place. “From Stonewall to Tesla dealerships, protesters are pioneering a form of opposition that doesn’t necessarily center on Washington, D.C.”
Wokeness Is Not to Blame for Trump. “I believe that it’s we elites, who do not enjoy getting dogpiled on social media or having college students yell at us about settler colonialism, who are the most put off by the hyperwokeness of our era.”
Lizzie Wade’s forthcoming book is about human resilience in the face of cataclysm. “For millennia, the rich & powerful have conspired to conceal how resourceful, creative, and resilient humans beings are, and always have been, when the worst befalls us.”
Unbelievably Cruel ASMR Video by the White House of Deporting Immigrants
This afternoon on Twitter, the official White House account posted an ASMR video of an immigrant deportation flight. Elon Musk quoted-tweeted the video with “Haha wow 🧌🏅”. Here’s a screen recording I made of the video & tweet:
A popular genre on YouTube, ASMR videos are designed to trigger feelings of relaxation and low-grade euphoria through sounds and imagery. In this video, the Trump White House invites us to relax to the clinking of handcuffs, the rattling of chains, and other sounds of immigrants being shackled like criminals and placed on flights out of the country. Some of those being deported are not criminals, are being imprisoned in countries other than their own, could be sent to a detention center in Guantanamo Bay, or might be sent back to countries with autocratic regimes to face persecution or death.
This is unfathomably cruel and monstrous. Vile. Evil. The stuff of sadistic dictators and terrorists. Nazis. People who killed cats for fun when they were kids. From the top down, the people serving in the Trump administration are sick, inhuman, heartless. This video absolutely gutted me. I am so very ashamed to be an American today. (via @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social)
Over the past 20 years, archaeologists working in the Amazon have found evidence of an ancient civilization that reached a peak population of 1 million around 150 CE.
Good read. “Dismantling the federal government to prevent that from happening was a key object of the conservative project before Trump. It has remained so with him at the head of the Republican party and will remain so whenever his time is up.”
The War on DEI Is a Smoke Screen. “MAGA’s attacks on ‘wokeness’ and diversity, equity, and inclusion are a thinly veiled attack on the Civil Rights Movement itself.”
Ethan Marcotte resigned from his job at 18F (a GSA subsidiary) rather than participate in the Trump/Musk purge of gov’t employees. “I didn’t want to sit down with anyone involved in that, and pretend like any part of their work was lawful, legitimate, or moral.”
Musk and the Trump Administration are lying about not purging anyone from the FAA involved in safety. A fired FAA employee: “The danger to the national airspace can’t be understated. This is a very real threat to the American flying public.”
In case you need a new t-shirt: READ BOOKS PUNCH NAZIS. “All proceeds from this campaign are going to SafePlace International in Oakland.”
150-Year-Olds Aren’t Collecting Social Security
Elon Musk has claimed that his “DOGE” team has found evidence of “massive fraud” at the Social Security Administration, alleging that 150-year-old Americans were receiving benefit checks. I saw this claim easily debunked over the weekend, but Wired has a good writeup of it. Basically, the programming language that these systems are written in (COBOL) often uses an arbitrary date as a baseline…most commonly a date from 150 years ago.
Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure was not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.
COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it.
Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the “Convention du Mètre.”
These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.
The SSA also automatically stops benefit payments whenever someone reaches the age of 115.
Marisa Kabas: Elon Musk & his young acolytes are actual, open Nazis. “Whatever comes to mind when you think of a Nazi, that is for whom this country is currently being run.”
The Personal Toll of the Trump/Musk Government Purges
Brian Merchant, author of the excellent Blood in the Machine (about the Luddites), talked to a bunch of federal tech workers about the illegal purge of federal employees and shuttering of entire government agencies (also illegal): “what’s happening, how they’re processing it, and how they’re pushing back”.
“I will also say that as the Thursday deadline [for the initial fork in the road offers] approached OPM sent out these increasingly desperate emails that felt like nothing so much as a Democratic candidate at a fundraising deadline,” one worker told me. He says his team of over a dozen will soon be down to just a handful of employees. Another tells me that people of color are disproportionately being targeted for layoffs in their department. But DOGE is also trying to winnow staff through other means, too: Demanding a return to office, even for those hired as remote workers and who have never stepped foot in a government office, while at the same time, instructing the GSA to sell off or close federal buildings — making it even harder for employees to find an office to come into.
It all underlies the callousness at the heart of DOGE’s campaign, and the fact that this is an effort to hollow out the state, the firings unfurling often regardless of what a person or department really does.
“I am not a career-long gov employee by any means but even I can feel how the bedrock assumptions of what we do are being swept away,” a federal technologist told me. “Like clearly the people in charge have no interest in the missions of the agencies and there isn’t any recourse to stay the courts, as far as we can tell.”
“If they even sweep away USAID, the velvet glove of US imperialism, because they occasionally piss off Putin and Orban,” he adds, “then it’s not clear how much hope there is for things like clean air and food stamps.”
“I had BigBalls in a meeting,” another worker told me. “When I saw him I balked, and I thought ‘Oh hey, someone brought their teenaged son to work today.’ He showed up along with some others, and was not introduced as anything but an advisor.” In fact, that was one of the leading DOGE officials, wielding significant power over the US government.
(via the morning news)
“The future of the Department of Education — and of the students with disabilities who depend on it — will likely hinge […] on the world views of two billionaires who abhor what they perceive as weakness and waste.”
NBA star Victor Wembanyama brought a book with him to the All-Star Game and said that he reads before every game. My new favorite player! 📗❤️
The Global Economic Policy Uncertainty Index is at an all-time high right now, besting even the economic uncertainty at the start of the pandemic (May 2020).
“We, the opposition, are the majority. Take heart,” says Hamilton Nolan. “How do regimes manage to impose minority rule on enormous populations? By getting the majority to give up. Don’t do that.”
Amid shortages of air traffic controllers & fatal aircraft events, the Trump administration has purged several hundred FAA employees. Casual detail: the firing email came from a Microsoft email address, not a .gov one. (But her emails, etc.)
Elon Musk’s attack on key US government systems and agencies continues with the IRS: “US tax agency has received request for access to classified system containing personal financial records of US taxpayers”. Everyone’s tax records, nbd.
From Heather Cox Richardson, an overview of what the Trump administration is doing in terms of foreign policy. Their war on liberalism in the US is being matched by a war against liberal democracies.
The Evolution of Electronic Music (1929-2019). Interesting that it took so long for electronic music to creep into pop music and now you can barely find any music that doesn’t have electronic music in it.
Cool thing that I did not notice about The Wild Robot: at first the robot was computer-generated but gets more and more hand-painted throughout the film. “She literally begins to fuse with the island as she adapts and becomes a resident.”
New Evidence Suggests Humans Developed Written Language To Avoid Breaking Up In Person. “Early Mesopotamians created the first cuneiform tablets in 3200 BCE because they couldn’t bear the idea of looking their partner in the eye…”
My Recent Media Diet, the Endless January Edition
Hey look at this, a media diet post that’s not months and months since the last one! Phew, it’s a been a long-ass six weeks since the beginning of the year, hasn’t it? Here’s a list of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing to help get me through the days.
Nosferatu (2024). Not usually a fan of horror movies, but I liked this a lot. Great acting and cinematography. (A-)
Shōgun by James Clavell. This took a bit to get fully into, but I was riveted for the last 600-800 pages, even though I knew what was going to happen from having seen the TV show. So much more delicious detail in the book though. A great reading experience. (A)
September 5. Loved this. Solid journalism thriller in the vein of Spotlight, The Post, and All the President’s Men. (A)
Silo (season two). In agreement with many other viewers that the middle of the season was not all that compelling, but the final two episodes were great. (B+)
Not Like Us. For whatever reason, I ignored the Drake/Kendrick feud, so I got to this late but wow. “Hey, hey, hey, hey, run for your life…” (A)
Arca Tulum. Eating at this sort of restaurant should yield exclamations like “I’ve never tasted anything quite like this”. I thought this at least three times at Arca. But also: a pile of rocks is not the ideal plate for messy food. (A-)
Aldo’s. This is a Mexican gelato chain and they had a Biscoff-flavored gelato that was so good that I went back for it three more times. (A)
Antojitos La Chiapaneca. This is the only restaurant I ate at twice in Tulum — their al pastor tacos are so good. (A)
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. A quick read but very relevant to what’s happening in the world right now. In keeping with the theme, I left the book at my hotel for someone else to read. (B+)
Janet Planet. A little too contemplative for me. (B)
Abruzzo. Mario Carbone created the menu for this Italian place at the Newark Airport. I had the penne vodka and I think it was the best thing I have ever eaten at an airport? Is it insane that I kinda want to plan a trip with an EWR connection so that I can have it again? P.S. the Tripadvisor reviewers haaaated this place. (A)
Reservation Dogs (season three). I reviewed Res Dogs in the last media diet post (“I enjoyed the first season more than the subsequent two”) but I’d like another crack at it. The last three episodes of the show were fantastic, especially the hospital breakout and Elora meeting her dad. (A+)
Flow. Reminded me strongly of Studio Ghibli’s films, but this wonderful animated movie is also uniquely its own thing. (A+)
The Bends. My usual Radiohead fare tends towards Kid A and In Rainbows, but I’ve been listening to The Bends a lot lately and appreciating the less polished rockiness of it. (A-)
Wool. Since the book (more or less) covers the events of the first two seasons of the TV series, I read half of it after season one and the other half after the latest season. And…I think the TV series is much better? (B-)
Thelma. A gem of a film, like Mission Impossible crossed with About Schmidt (or maybe The Bucket List). June Squibb is *fantastic* in the lead role. (A)
The Great British Bake Off (2024). Overall I enjoyed this season — they recruited a selection of talented bakers and the changes they’ve made (e.g. getting away from stunt bakes). But I found the semifinal and final difficult to watch because one of the contestants forgot he was supposed to be entertaining on television and totally lost his composure. (B+)
GNX. I also reviewed this in the last media diet post but I’ve continued to listen and I think GNX may have moved past DAMN. as my favorite Kendrick album? (A+)
Hundreds of Beavers. Super fun and inventive…this is like an animated movie with video game elements made with live-action actors. If you’re the sort of person who loves movies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you’ll probably love this movie. (B+)
Orbital by Samantha Harvey. A reviewer complained that the final third of the book took on the style of a writing exercise and I agree. (B)
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I must have watched this 50 times on VHS as a teenager — I can still recite every line. (A)
Alligator Bites Never Heal. Love this album. (A)
The Penguin. Colin Farrell is unrecognizable (and great) as Oz, and Cristin Milioti is a chillingly fantastic Sofia Falcone. The first few episodes were really strong but I felt it slipped a bit as the season went on. (A-)
I’m also in progress on Severance season two and Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time — but more on those next time.
Past installments of my media diet are available here. What good things have you watched, read, or listened to lately?
How Trying Became Cool Again
Nathan Zed argues that a lack of effort and vulnerability has made art, media, design, music, and architecture boring — that everything has the “soulless, monotonous no-personality vibe”. But artists like Tyler, the Creator; Chappell Roan; Doechii; and Kendrick Lamar are making trying cool again.
It has become uncool to just try. Like, just to put in some effort. Don’t do too much, okay, it’s embarrassing — just be nonchalant, be cool, be effortless. This has made everything boring! Everyone is too scared to try because that would be vulnerable. I feel like only now are we seeing a shift back to people putting in effort and being rewarded for it.
Ken Burns’ Criterion Closet Picks include Seven Samurai, a Fellini box set, and Wim Wenders’ Pina.
Thought-provoking musings on AI from Robin Sloan. “The language model reads Everything, and leaves Everything untouched — yet suddenly this new thing exists, with strange and formidable powers. Is that okay?”
The Crazy Thing About Babies
man the crazy thing about babies is that like, some people would think that reading a baby a book about farm animals is teaching them about farm animals, but really it’s teaching them about the concept of a book and how there’s new information on each page of a single object, but really, beyond that, it’s teaching them how language works, and beyond that it’s really actually teaching them about human interaction, and really really it’s them learning about existing in a three-dimensional space and how they can navigate that space, but actually, above all it is teaching them that mama loves them.
Girls Who Code’s “Five by Five” strategic plan is “reaching 5 million girls, women, and nonbinary individuals by 2030” with their programs designed to educate girls, women, and NB folks for careers in technology.
I love this week-by-week map of Gina Trapani’s life. “This is a map of my life, where each week I’ve been alive is a little box. Tap a box to see what I was doing where that week.”
Allegra Goodman writes about the “life-saving power” of listening to audiobooks (Austen, Caro, Dumas, Voltaire) with her son. “We spent hundreds of hours together and had a respite from each other too.” I *love* listening to audiobooks w/ my kids.
Wes Anderson’s next movie is called The Phoenician Scheme, an “espionage comedy-drama thriller” that will be released in US theaters in May 2025. Stars Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, ScarJo, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe, etc.
Kevin Kelly’s 50 Years of Travel Tips
Kevin Kelly is the biggest traveller I know and he recently shared some of the advice he’s learned over his 50+ years on the road. Here are a few of my favorites:
If you hire a driver, or use a taxi, offer to pay the driver to take you to visit their mother. They will ordinarily jump at the chance.
Crash a wedding. You are not a nuisance; you are the celebrity guest!
When visiting a foreign city for the first time, take a street food tour.
Co-sign on the food tour. I’ve been doing this for the past few years and it’s such a good way to orient yourself in a new place.
The most significant criteria to use when selecting travel companions is: do they complain or not, even when complaints are justified? No complaining! Complaints are for the debriefing afterwards when travel is over.
Sketchy travel plans and travel to sketchy places are ok. Take a chance. If things fall apart, your vacation has just turned into an adventure. Perfection is for watches. Trips should be imperfect. There are no stories if nothing goes amiss.
It is always colder at night than you think it should be, especially in the tropics. Pack a layer no matter what.
I packed a warm layer for my recent trip to Mexico and was shocked that I didn’t need it for the whole 10 days I was there.
The hard-to-accept truth is that it is far better to spend more time in a few places than a little time in a bunch of places.
To book a train anywhere in the world outside your home country, your first stop should be The Man in Seat 61, a sprawling website which will conveniently help you book the train you want.
If you are starting out and have seen little of the world, you can double the time you spend traveling by heading to the places it is cheapest to travel. If you stay at the budget end, you can travel twice as long for half price.
When asking someone for a restaurant recommendation, don’t ask them where is a good place you should eat; ask them where they eat. Where did they eat the last time they ate out?
Kelly also breaks travel down into two modes: retreat or engage, which reminds me of this recent interview with Rick Steves.
Deadline: “Starz has acquired the rights to Miranda July’s buzzy novel All Fours to develop as a TV series.” I wonder if July herself will be starring…
From Nolan RoYAlty (cReAtor of oNE Million chEckBOXES), A globAL CAPS LOCK. “whenever AnYONE running the CLIENt Presses caPs LOck, it PRESSEs for everyone ELsE.” (i wrote tHIS POST WItH IT.)
Jerry Lawson was one of Silicon Valley’s first Black engineers and is known as “the father of the game cartridge”.
An Update
Hey, everyone. This week has been a little wonky/distracted for me — I was tending to a sick kid for a couple of days and am trying not to get sick myself, so I didn’t get to spend as much time as I would have liked here at KDO reporting on the coup and what we can do about it. As I said in this comment on the wild skating post, this feels like a new job to me and this week I was barely hanging on. I’m hoping to have a cleaner slate next week for getting a better handle on things.
That said, I am sensing that we could use a bit of a break from the NEWS. Or at least I do — it’s Friday and I feel like sharing some art, good news, and foolishness. Foolishness Friday or some such. Anyway, I’ll be back on Monday (or maybe over the weekend) with, uh, that other stuff. ✌️
How to stop Trump’s power grab. “Trump isn’t inevitable. Here’s a plan to keep democracy intact.”
The Venn Diagram of Trump’s Authoritarian Actions
Professor Christina Pagel of University College London has mapped the actions of the Trump administration’s first few weeks into a Venn diagram (above) with “five broad domains that correspond to features of proto-authoritarian states”:
- Undermining Democratic Institutions & Rule of Law; Dismantling federal government
- Dismantling Social Protections & Rights; Enrichment & Corruption
- Suppressing Dissent & Controlling Information
- Attacking Science, Environment, Health, Arts & Education
- Aggressive Foreign Policy & Global Destabilization
This diagram is available as a PDF and the information is also contained in this categorized table. Links and commentary from Pagel can be found on Bluesky as well.
Also very helpful is this list of authoritarian actions that the Trump administration has taken, each with a link to the relevant news story. I will be referring back to this list often in the coming weeks.
Really interesting essay about organizing: How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth? “If we cannot organize beyond the bounds of our comfort zones, we will never build movements large enough to combat the forces that would destroy us.”
“Fuck the Middle Ground”
Jessica Valenti on why there’s no room for compromise or middle ground on abortion rights.
Anyone still holding out hope for a ‘compromise’ on abortion rights needs to give it up. Right now.
Over the past few days, a Louisiana mother was arrested for getting abortion pills for her teenager, abortion reports became public records in Indiana, and Arkansas advanced a bill mandating an anti-abortion propaganda video be shown in public school classrooms.
Also in the last week, the new Trump administration erased information on reproductive health and privacy rights from government websites, Missouri Republicans moved to overturn a pro-choice amendment that voters approved in November, Idaho legislators proposed a bill that could punish abortion patients with the death penalty, and South Carolina lawmakers pushed legislation that wouldn’t just ban pro-choice websites—it would make it a felony to even talk about abortion with a pregnant person.
In the short amount of time Donald Trump has been in office, anti-abortion extremists have been told they can attack clinics without fear of arrest, and the Republican party who once claimed they’d never punish women for abortion now say bills to prosecute patients as murderers “inspire healthy dialogue.”
Do these sound like people interested in ‘compromise’? We’re watching conservatives dismantle democracy and force women back into the home — killing quite a few of us along the way. In what universe is the appropriate response finding common ground?
You don’t ask the guy with the boot on your neck to wear a softer shoe. You rip his fucking foot off.
This is a paywalled article but it includes the entire text — “It’s past time to act like it.” is the last line of the piece.
See also Rebecca Solnit: On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway and A.R. Moxon’s essay that reminds us the center between fascism and democracy is fascism. (thx, meg)
House GOP has reintroduced the SAVE Act, which would require voters to show a passport or birth cert. when voting as proof of citizenship. But 140M Americans don’t have a passport and 69M women don’t have a birth cert. matching their current last name.
Elie Mystal on Elon Musk’s vision of neo-apartheid. “First and most important, apartheid is a business plan. It’s a system designed to exploit cheap Black labor, without ever letting Black people reap the financial and social gains of hard work.”
Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream is a forthcoming book that’s “an exposé of private equity’s devastating impact on American lives, communities, and the economy”.
Is This the End of the American Constitution?
Jamelle Bouie has started posting video essays on his YouTube channel about the current US political crisis. His latest one is an adaptation of his NY Times piece, There Is No Going Back.
Now, even if Musk had been elected to office, this would still be one of the worst abuses of power in American history. That is unquestionable. No one in the executive branch has the legal authority to unilaterally cancel congressional appropriations. No one has the legal authority to turn the Treasury payment system into a means of political retribution. No one has the authority to summarily dismiss civil servants without cause. No one has the authority to take down and scrub Americans’ data unilaterally. And no private citizen has the authority to access some of the most sensitive data the government collects on private citizens for their own unknown and probably nefarious purposes.
Bouie has also regularly been posting videos to his Instagram (bio: “National program director of the CHUM Group”) and TikTok.
On a scale of +10 (full democracy) to -10 (full autocracy), the US now scores a 0, its lowest score since the Civil War. “The USA is no longer considered a democracy and lies at the cusp of autocracy.”
RFK Jr. confirmed as secretary of the Health and Human Services Department. There has been a lot of horrible news over the past month but this one is making me feel ill. I’m gonna log off for awhile.
Heather Cox Richardson on the history of the liberal consensus, from Lincoln to Eisenhower, and how the country has been turning back toward “the idea of a small government that serves the needs of a few wealthy people”.
What can I do to fight this coup? “We will succeed because millions of people do a couple things well, not because one person does a million things.”
Do Not Obey In Advance
Speaking of Timothy Snyder, Literary Hub published the first chapter (the one on not obeying in advance) of his 2017 book On Tyranny. It begins:
Do not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not at first have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another. After the German elections of 1932, which permitted Adolf Hitler to form a government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed.
It’s also worth reading the original list posted by Snyder in November 2016 that became the basis of On Tyranny: Fighting Authoritarianism: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century.
10. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.
11. Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down unnecessary social barriers, and come to understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.
12. Take responsibility for the face of the world. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.
13. Hinder the one-party state. The parties that took over states were once something else. They exploited a historical moment to make political life impossible for their rivals. Vote in local and state elections while you can.
You’re Allowed to Feel like Garbage. “If you are a remotely informed left-leaning person in America right now, why wouldn’t you be experiencing depression and anxiety?”
Trump’s Obsession With Immigration Is Really an Obsession With Segregation. His policies are a continuation of the 1790 Naturalization Act (only landowning white men were citizens), the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, etc.
Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba “is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe”.
“We Are Hurtling Towards Having a Russian-Type Regime”
Writing from Ukraine on his way to the front in the country’s war with Russia, Timothy Snyder muses about the differences in life & freedom on the Ukrainian & Russian sides of the war’s front line.
Yet, on this, the Ukrainian side of the line, people lead completely different lives than under Russian occupation or in Russia. Ukrainians say what they want, including about the war and about politics. Journalists cover the war and write about politics. There is fear, although less than you might think; but it is fear of bombs and missiles and violence from Russia, not of denunciations or oppression or of one’s own government. I have the strange feeling, this week in Kyiv, that Ukrainians are living freer lives now than Americans. At a book store where I was talking to a Ukrainian philosopher about freedom, a young woman put her hand on my arm and said “sorry about the U.S.”
Snyder then goes on to wonder if the United States is now headed towards a similar line:
I have in mind something deeper: the transformation of our public and private lives. As in Russia, we have let local newspapers and local media die. As in Russia, their place was taken by a few commercial operations. As in Russia, the media are owned by oligarchs, who then become close to government or submit to it (not all of the media in America, of course, are submitting, but far too many are). As in Russia, our daily lives are flooded by such a rushing river of contradictory lies that we have trouble knowing where we are, let alone what we should do. As in Russia, a president supported by oligarchs and their media power is trying to humiliate the other branches of government. The executive is seeking to marginalize the legislature — forever — by ruling without passing laws. The executive is seeking to marginalize the judiciary — forever — by ignoring court rulings. Those things, of course, have already happened in Russia.
This passage made my stomach drop:
As I close my tablet and go to sleep, I am safer than every single one of you reading this in the United States, and indeed safer than I would be in the United States. My train will stop in five hours. But America will keep hurtling.
It’s a great, provocative piece; read the whole thing.
Jamelle Bouie: Trump’s War on DEI Is Really a War on Civil Rights. “His attack on DEI isn’t about increasing merit or fighting wrongful discrimination; it is about reimposing hierarchies of race & gender (among other categories) onto American society.”
Tressie McMillan Cottom’s latest is not easily summarized, but is well-worth a read: Look Past Elon Musk’s Chaos. There’s Something More Sinister at Work.
The Trump administration barred an AP reporter from an event because the AP won’t refer to the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”. Something something free speech something something protects but does not bind, etc. etc. lolololsob
Security expert Bruce Schneier & digital ethicist Davi Ottenheimer: “The U.S. government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history.” And: “This is beyond politics — this is a matter of national security.”
Josh Marshall: “This new EO signed today appears to create DOGE as a shadow government across the entire federal government.” And: “I genuinely don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Elon Musk is functionally in charge of the US government.”
Law professors are a staid bunch. But: “We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis right now. There have been so many unconstitutional and illegal actions in the first 18 days of the Trump presidency. We never have seen anything like this.”
Pitching a Big Tent in an Emergency
On her newly launched site, Meditations in an Emergency, Rebecca Solnit talks about the importance of coming together with “people who are not exactly like each of us individually” in times of crisis.
In this emergency, I think it likely that we are going to need to pitch a very big tent and invite everyone in who doesn’t want to live in a dictatorship, who wants the rule of law, the checks and balances, the Constitution to still be in effect, everyone’s human and civil rights protected, who wants to protect the vulnerable.
I also appreciated her speaking up about a dynamic I’ve witnessed on social media a lot:
I want to take an unscenic detour to talk about what I’ve noticed on social media lately, and doing so is a reminder that being on social media is forever derided and dismissed, but it’s where a lot of us connect with each other, gather (reliable or corrupt) information, connect, and express ourselves. I’ve often found it useful as a sort of laboratory for opinion. And what I’ve seen lately — and really all along — is a focus on morality and taste rather than strategy and possibility.
She continued:
It was a snarky week on social media. Someone I otherwise respect re-posted a guy proposing that all Tesla vehicles should be vandalized (though obviously many people bought them well before this crisis, even before Musk went so far into right-wing rage, racism, and conspiracy theory, and many bought them out of concern for the climate). People lashed out at those who didn’t vote for Harris, and apparently some people were sneering at those impacted in a measles outbreak in Texas, though this meant kids suffering the consequences for their parents’ anti-vaccination ideology. Going after each other is not going after the Trump Administration; fighting each other produces division when we need unity or at least a broad coalition. I’m not arguing here for having nothing but lofty thoughts; I have plenty of not very nice thoughts, but I try to save them for conversations in private and statements about actual enemies.
In these comments, people weren’t looking for strategy or possibility or the building of coalitions and the reaching out to new potential allies. They were looking for people to scorn.
Like Solnit, I just don’t find it helpful to wage rhetorical war on potential allies — although it may be understandable, give how scared and helpless people feel.
A federal judge has ordered the HHS, CDC, and FDA to restore their websites and datasets to how they were on Jan 30th by 11:59pm tonight. Resistance is not futile, but we’ll see how much Trump wants to push/piss off the judiciary.
The Trump administration is defying federal court orders and maintaining the funding freeze on issuing grant funding at the National Institutes of Health.
I loved Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World so I am looking forward to reading his upcoming Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America.
Civil Servants Are Not America’s Enemies. “Washington created the modern civil service to make the government efficient in the first place, ending a patronage system wracked with graft and incompetence.”
Unsurprising: a recent study of 32M tweets from politicians from 27 countries shows that “far-right populists [are] much more likely than the left to spread fake news” and “amplifying misinformation is now part of radical right strategy”.
Is Social Media Doing You Dirty? Apply the CUE Test.
In a recent episode of the Uncanny Valley podcast about quitting social media, Lauren Goode talked about a framework she applies to see if the time she’s spending on social media is serving her well. From the transcript:
I have been toying with this idea of a framework for a while as I’ve thought about social media and how to manage it and how I actually really would love to get off social media. I came up with this acronym, CUE: community, utility and education. Bear with me here. The C, community, is what you just described, Mike.
Here is what Mike described:
I really feel like the community aspect is the thing that makes it healthy. When I know that I can open an app and find all of my people, that makes me happy and it makes me want to open the app. I think probably the best illustration of that is the experience that we’ve all had where you’re live tweeting something, right? You’re watching a television show, or you’re watching some event happening and you have your phone in your hand and you are posting and you’re replying to other people’s posts, and you’re faving things and you’re reposting re-xing, re-skeeting things, and it adds to the experience. It enhances the experience. It makes it feel like you’re hanging out with your friends while you’re doing this thing together, even if you’re all alone. To me, that’s a good, healthy thing that social media can provide.
Ok, back to CUE:
Utility, it could be something like messaging, which is also a part of community too, but it could be something kind of simple like you’re messaging to get an address or you’re checking the weather, that’s a utility, right? Then there’s education. You’re actually using the apps to learn something real and true and valid that you would not have learned otherwise. I think once you get into the, “I’m not using this as a utility or for education, it’s not serving me in any way, it’s not a tool, it’s not building community, it’s fraying community, and I’m just doom scrolling,” then you’re outside of the CUE. You need to log off.
I like this framework, but I feel like there’s something missing. Another E for entertainment? It’s OK to log on to Instagram to watch skateboard tricks and capybara soaking in citrus-infused baths and people finally succeeding in throwing a CD into a thin slot from across the room. But when it stops being entertaining and starts to feel compulsive, like gambling or pressing a button to get a treat, then it’s time to stop.
Whether it’s CUE or CUEE, the important part is thinking about your social media use, how it makes you feel (both in the moment and afterwards), what needs or desires it’s filling in your life, and what it might be taking away from you (or taking you away from). And then, hopefully, taking steps so that social media sparks joy instead of inciting dread or dispensing numbness.
Personally, I’ve scaled way back on my Instagram usage in the past month (focusing mainly on the community aspect when I do use it) and have stopped using Facebook & Threads. I’ve been using Bluesky a ton for work…it’s been essential in tracking what’s going on and who’s doing the best reporting and contextualization on the coup.
What’s your relationship to social media like these days?
Democracy is Crumbling. Is Anybody Doing Anything? Sherrilyn Ifill has a list of what people are doing to counter the coup and more importantly, what you can do. I’m working on this one: “Make sure you have and can share good information”.
Five Former Treasury Secretaries: Our Democracy Is Under Siege. “[We’re writing] this piece because we are alarmed about the risks of arbitrary & capricious political control of federal payments, which would be unlawful & corrosive to our democracy.”
Voting for the Mayor Who Promised to Blow Up the City Doesn’t Mean I Approve of the Mayor Blowing Up the City. “I just wanted him to fix the old bowling alley like he promised in passing once.”
How People & Institutions in Budding Autocracies Obey in Advance
In a piece called The Chilling Consequences of Going Along With Trump, Russian exile M. Gessen outlines the five different types of arguments used by people & institutions when they engage in “anticipatory obedience” (aka, obeying in advance). For example:
The second argument is the higher-purpose argument, which is a close cousin of collective hostage-taking. In 2012, during the winter when more than 150,000 Russians protested against rigged elections and Putin’s intention to assume the presidency for a third term, a popular actress, Chulpan Khamatova, broke ranks with the liberal intelligentsia and came out in support of Putin. Khamatova had co-founded an organization that helped children with cancer. She faced some criticism but said, “If it meant that another hospital was built, I would do the same thing again.” Her dignity was, after all, a small price to pay for saving children’s lives.
I suspect that some American hospital administrators who are discontinuing trans care for young people are using similar logic: To serve their patients, they must protect their federal funding — even if this means that they stop serving another group of patients.
One of the attributes of the modern condition is an inability to be bored. “In one study, nearly half of participants left alone for 15 minutes with no stimulation chose to have an electric shock.” !!!
From Greg Storey, a list of “ways to take in information without getting pulled under”. Including the Control Test: “Is this within my control? If yes, what’s my next step? If no, how do I adjust to move forward anyway?”
“The private companies in control of social-media networks possess an unprecedented ability to manipulate and control the populace, to keep them in a kind of algorithmic cage divorced from reality.”
It’s a Coup, But It’s Not Just Musk’s Coup
This piece at The Verge from Elizabeth Lopatto is a great recap of Elon Musk’s coordinated attack on the infrastructure of the US federal government. I particularly appreciate the dozens of links throughout the piece that provide context for the text, a demonstration of the powerful utility of hypertext.
But I do have a criticism and I think it’s an important one: this is not solely Elon Musk’s coup. Here’s the lede:
Almost 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, America has gotten herself a new king. His name is Elon Musk.
“Wait a minute,” you may be saying. “What about President Donald Trump?” Trump ran, much like Silvio Berlusconi before him, primarily to avoid prosecutions. He has never liked being president and he has already gotten what he wants. He’s not the power center. Musk is.
Consequently I will not be bothering with whatever statements Katie Miller of DOGE and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt are putting out. We all have eyes; we can see what is going on. Musk has taken over the civilian government. This is a billionaire pulling a heist on the entire nation.
The Verge is not alone in asserting this — Carole Cadwalladr’s latest piece is almost entirely about Musk’s actions. While I agree that Musk is the sharp end of the spear and what he’s doing (and has already done) is of unprecedentedly massive concern, this single villain view of the coup is incomplete, for two main reasons:
- The executive branch is fully participating in the coup. Musk is acting on behalf of Trump and with his public approval. This cover matters, even if Trump isn’t actively directing what Musk is doing (he surely isn’t), even if Trump doesn’t actually know what exactly Musk is up to and why (he probably doesn’t), and whether Musk’s and Trump’s agendas overlap (only partially).
Additionally, through his executive orders, Trump is also attempting to seize governmental power that doesn’t reside in the office of the president. The data & systems that Musk now has access to will be useful to Trump in executing these power seizures. The chaos Musk is creating will also be useful in distracting from Trump’s own authoritarian objectives.
- In standing by and allowing Trump & Musk to seize power that is not constitutionally theirs, the Republican-controlled Congress is fully participating in the coup. Most of the power being grabbed here is that of Congress…and they are just letting it happen.
Let me put it this way: let’s say this afternoon Elon Musk is somehow stopped, fired, thrown out of the country, divested of all his companies. The coup would continue. Perhaps not as vigorously as before, but it would continue because the executive branch and Congress are fully on board. It’s important that we don’t lose sight of this larger picture.
This is a great thread on how an ordinary person stepped up to help her community during a crisis (her kids’ school burned down in the recent LA fires).
The Power of Chaos
The events of the last few weeks reminded me of this succinct summary of Timothy Ryback’s book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power fron Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker:
Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money. Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution. The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader. In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.
Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show. Kendrick said, “The revolution ‘bout to be televised. You picked the right time but the wrong guy.” — with the wrong guy sitting in the audience.
Judith Butler: “Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic, because that means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth, and then what happens?”
Some Wild Ice Skating
When Fairlee, Vermont’s Lake Morey freezes over in the winter, a 4-5 mile loop is cleared by a local resort for wild ice skating. I was able to get out on the ice with my family for a couple hours on Friday; it was great fun, and I’m looking forward to going again soon.
I hope you got out this weekend and did something outside or active or new or comforting…we’re going to need to replenish our reserves in the coming weeks and months.
Extinction Burst Explains MAGA Voters’ Racist Anger
This fantastic two-minute video, from a guy named Rich, neatly explains why the anger and frustration of Trump’s supporters has been growing over time — why the pushback on things like diversity, equity, inclusion, trans rights, and LGBTQ+ issues seems to be increasing and the hate grows more overt. It has to do with an idea called an extinction burst.
Here’s a transcript of the video:
The Trump spike in racism, sexism, and hate — it’s the emotional foundation for the entire Make America Great Again movement, that nostalgia for when life in America was simpler and paler. But as soon as we began addressing it — boom! extinction burst.
This term is why I love science so much. You can take an idea from one field, like psychology for example, and apply it to another field, like political science, and the principles still apply.
Extinction burst is actually really simple. It’s when you have a behavior and a reward, and you withdraw the reward in order to change the behavior. When you do that, usually to change an undesirable behavior, the behavior itself increases in frequency and intensity for a short period of time until ultimately the subject changes the behavior and then that behavior goes extinct.
This is like you’re at the store and you’re swiping your credit card, and it doesn’t work, and so then you swipe your credit card like 15 more times until you’re so angry you’re freaking out, and you’re about to scream an F-bomb in the middle of Toys R Us. And then you say, “I’ll just pay with cash”. Swiping is the behavior and the payment is the reward. So when the swiping doesn’t work and you don’t get the reward you need, you get madder and madder and you try it more and more until you change the behavior, which then results in the extinction of the original behavior.
Now, extinction burst at the national level is much slower, but in this case we actually know very clearly what triggered it: it was Obama’s election in 2008. Sarah Palin, the Tea Party Movement, the birther movement, and ultimately MAGA. It is a 10-year tsunami of rage in the face of inevitable extinction.
This is why Republicans are still so angry. They know they know Trump winning can’t stop it, and they know Trump in office can’t stop it — they can feel the inevitable extinction of their own terrible beliefs.
At this point, the only thing that’ll stop it is if we let up. If you stop interfering with that undesirable behavior, it will go back to normal. So no, you’re not crazy; yes, you are doing the right thing; and yes, if you persevere, the extinction burst will end.
Note that this isn’t an explanation of where the Tea Party & MAGA movements came from; many people have written about how MAGA can be understood as a reaction to Obama’s election — subsequent events like Black Lives Matter, the Me Too movement, the election of a Black woman as vice-president, the legalization of gay marriage, etc. have kept the indignities coming.
Rather, the extinction burst concept explains why the reaction seems to be getting more extreme, from QAnon to an increased number of book bans to anti-trans laws to anti-abortion laws to Elon Musk doing Nazi salutes in public to openly expressed racism by many Republican politicians to January 6th to the 2025 Coup. We are seeing behavior that 15-20 years ago would have been almost unthinkable — now it’s daily. They are swiping the card and getting madder and madder.
You can read more about extinction bursts, including some examples of extinction bursts in children:
Tantrums: A child who has learned that tantrums result in attention from their parents may initially escalate their tantrum behavior when their tantrums are no longer reinforced. This escalation is an extinction burst, as the child is attempting to regain the attention they once received.
Protesting: When a person has been reinforced by being excused from a task or activity, they may initially increase their protest behaviors, such as whining or arguing, when the reinforcement is no longer provided. This increase in protest behavior is an extinction burst.
Persistence: In some cases, individuals may persistently engage in a behavior that previously led to reinforcement, even if the reinforcement is no longer present. For example, a child who used to receive a treat for asking repeatedly may continue to ask repeatedly, hoping for the treat, even when the treat is no longer given. This persistence is an extinction burst.
And in adults:
Cell Phone Addiction: If an individual is accustomed to receiving instant gratification through social media notifications on their cell phone, they may experience an extinction burst when they attempt to reduce their screen time. They may initially intensify their checking behavior, hoping to regain the previous level of reinforcement.
Gambling: In the context of gambling, an individual who has previously experienced wins and rewards may exhibit an extinction burst if they suddenly stop winning. They may increase their gambling behavior, hoping to recreate the past reinforcement.
Smoking Cessation: When someone tries to quit smoking, they may experience an extinction burst in the form of increased cravings and even heightened smoking behavior. This burst occurs because the expected reinforcement (nicotine) is no longer being received, leading to an initial escalation in smoking behavior.
(via @karenattiah.bsky.social)
According to Wired’s reporting, a US Treasury Threat Intelligence Analysis has called the incursion by “DOGE” staff “the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced”. And it recommends suspending their access.
Doechii’s Tiny Desk Concert
Hi, friends. It’s Friday and I don’t know about you, but I think we need to unwind a little bit with this Tiny Desk Concert from Doechii. Aaron posted this back in December but it’s popped up in my feed and inbox a few times in the past few days — must be that shiny new best rap album Grammy — so I thought I’d pop it in here again.
Backed by a full band, horns and two background singers, Doechii’s performance was a masterclass in creativity. Sporting vintage academia looks, complete with matching cornrows and beads, Doechii delivers a freshly rearranged medley of cuts from ALLIGATOR BITES NEVER HEAL, tailored specifically for Tiny Desk. While hip-hop remained at the core, she truly gave us everything: a jazz arrangement of “BOOM BAP,” heavy rock vibes on “CATFISH” and a Southern praise break outro on “NISSAN ALTIMA.”
She closed her set with “Black Girl Memoir” from her debut album, Oh The Places You’ll Go. Before performing, she shared, “I wrote this song specifically for Black women. As a dark-skinned woman, there’s a very unique experience I’m trying to internalize … This is dedicated to all the beautiful Black women in the room.” While her star has been steadily on the rise since her debut, 2024 is shaping up to be the year Doechii cements herself as a household name.
Some Actions That Are Not Protesting or Voting, including donating to a food program, volunteering your skills to local groups, joining or starting a union, and helping with disaster relief.
David Kurtz argues that we should refer to Trump’s mass removal of federal employees as purges, not as “firings” or “layoffs”. “Business terms provide a totally wrong conceptual framework for the purges underway.”
“The Government’s Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified”
Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost from The Atlantic talked to four experienced federal-government IT professionals who have all “built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure” that Elon Musk’s team of young hackers are attacking. They are beyond concerned about the potential consequences.
Based on what has been reported, DOGE representatives have obtained or requested access to certain systems at the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with eyes toward others, including the Federal Aviation Administration. “This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”
What exactly they want is unclear. And much remains unknown about what, exactly, is happening here. The contractor emphasized that nobody yet knows which information DOGE has access to, or what it plans to do with it. Spokespeople for the White House, and Musk himself, did not respond to emailed requests for comment. Some reports have revealed the scope of DOGE’s incursions at individual agencies; still, it has been difficult to see the broader context of DOGE’s ambition.
The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with deep knowledge about the government’s IT operations told us, “I don’t think the public quite understands the level of danger.”
For example:
Many systems and databases in a given agency feed into others, but access to them is restricted. Employees, contractors, civil-service government workers, and political appointees have strict controls on what they can access and limited visibility into the system as a whole. This is by design, as even the most mundane government databases can contain highly sensitive personal information. A security-clearance database such as those used by the Department of Justice or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, one contractor told us, could include information about a person’s mental-health or sexual history, as well as disclosures about any information that a foreign government could use to blackmail them.
Trump tried to illegally fire US Federal Election Commission Chair Ellen Weintraub. She refused to leave: “There’s a legal way to replace FEC commissioners — this isn’t it.” She pledges to continue to “stir up some good trouble”.
A kid named Big Balls (with some shady stuff in his past) hacked into gov’t computer systems for Elon Musk, but “there’s little chance that he could have passed a background check for privileged access to government systems” (that he now has access to).
Wired is reporting that the Treasury Secretary and the White House press secretary lied about “DOGE” staffer Marko Elez (who recently resigned, for being a racist (after being hired for same)) having write-access to the Treasury’s payment system code.
Outrage Fatigue Is Real. These Tips May Help. “Repeated exposure to outrage-inducing news or events can lead to emotional exhaustion. An expert who studies online outrage says there are ways to cope.”
You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism. “When it comes to addressing the problems we face, no amount of posting or passive info consumption is going to substitute the hard, unsexy work of organizing.”
“In 2022, one of Peter Thiel’s favorite thinkers envisioned a second Trump Administration in which the federal government would be run by a “CEO” who was not Trump and laid out a playbook for how it might work. Elon Musk is following it.”
The world has probably passed ‘peak air pollution’. “Global air pollution is now falling, and we can save many lives by accelerating this decline.”
State Attorneys General to Sue Over Musk’s Access to Government Systems. “The president does not have the power to give away our private information to anyone he chooses, and he cannot cut federal payments approved by Congress.”
Mister Rogers on How to Talk to Kids About Distressing News Events
In 2002, Fred Rogers wrote a parenting book as a resource for caregivers of children aged two to six. One of the topics he covered was how to talk to children about tragic events in the news. Rogers begins by noting that even young children can pick up on when adults are feeling distressed:
In times of community or world-wide crisis, it’s easy to assume that young children don’t know what’s going on. But one thing’s for sure — children are very sensitive to how their parents feel. They’re keenly aware of the expressions on their parents’ faces and the tone of their voices. Children can sense when their parents are really worried, whether they’re watching the news or talking about it with others. No matter what children know about a “crisis,” it’s especially scary for children to realize that their parents are scared.
In times of crisis, kids need to feel safe:
In times of crisis, children want to know, “Who will take care of me?” They’re dependent on adults for their survival and security. They’re naturally self-centered. They need to hear very clearly that their parents are doing all they can to take care of them and to keep them safe. They also need to hear that people in the government and other grownups they don’t even know are working hard to keep them safe, too.
Parents need to step away from the news in order to be present for their kids and for their own well-being. The 2025 equivalent of limiting TV viewing would be “put down the phone”:
It’s easy to allow ourselves to get drawn into watching televised news of a crisis for hours and hours; however, exposing ourselves to so many tragedies can make us feel hopeless, insecure, and even depressed. We help our children and ourselves if we’re able to limit our own television viewing. Our children need us to spend time with them – away from the frightening images on the screen.
We need to let kids know that whatever they’re feeling is natural:
If we don’t let children know it’s okay to feel sad and scared, they may think something is wrong with them when they do feel that way. They certainly don’t need to hear all the details of what’s making us sad or scared, but if we can help them accept their own feelings as natural and normal, their feelings will be much more manageable for them.
Angry feelings are part of being human, especially when we feel powerless. One of the most important messages we can give our children is, “It’s okay to be angry, but it’s not okay to hurt ourselves or others.” Besides giving children the right to their anger, we can help them find constructive things to do with their feelings. This way, we’ll be giving them useful tools that will serve them all their life, and help them to become the worlds’ future peacemakers — the world’s future “helpers.”
And of course, we can urge kids to look for the helpers:
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.
Update: On the first anniversary of 9/11, Fred Rogers recorded this brief message about tragic events in the news. Here’s the video followed by a full transcript:
Hello, I’m Fred Rogers. Some parents wonder how to handle world news with their young children. Well, we at Family Communications have discovered that when children bring up something frightening, it’s helpful right away to ask them what they know about it. We often find that their fantasies are very different from the actual truth. What children probably need to hear most from us adults is that they can talk with us about anything and that we will do all we can to keep them safe in any scary time. I’m always glad to be your neighbor.
This was one of Rogers’ last recordings before he died in early 2003.
A list of all the lawsuits related to Trump administration executive orders. “More than thirty lawsuits have been filed and we are trying our best to keep this page updated in real-time.”
The Musk staffer who broke into the Treasury Dept system has quit after the discovery of racist Twitter posts (gift link): advocating repealing the Civil Rights Act, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity”, and “Normalize Indian hate”.
“The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler”
Historian Timothy Ryback, the author of Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power who also wrote the popular article How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days, has a new piece in The Atlantic about Adolf Hitler’s relationship with the rich German industrialists who helped him rise to power, many of whom subsequently “ended up in concentration camps”.
The parallels to the present political situation in the US start right in the first paragraph:
He was among the richest men in the world. He made his first fortune in heavy industry. He made his second as a media mogul. And in January 1933, in exchange for a political favor, Alfred Hugenberg provided the electoral capital that made possible Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Before Hugenberg sealed his pact with Hitler, a close associate had warned Hugenberg that this was a deal he would come to regret: “One night you will find yourself running through the ministry gardens in your underwear trying to escape arrest.”
And from later in the piece, he describes how German businessmen participated in enslavement and murder:
For the industrialists who helped finance and supply the Hitler government, an unexpected return on their investment was slave labor. By the early 1940s, the electronics giant Siemens AG was employing more than 80,000 slave laborers. (An official Siemens history explains that although the head of the firm, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, was “a staunch advocate of democracy” who “detested the Nazi dictatorship,” he was also “responsible for ensuring the company’s well-being and continued existence.”)
These companies did this in service of the bottom line, in keeping with Milton Friedman’s doctrine of shareholder value. Friedman’s idea that the primary social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, along with the Corleone doctrine of “it’s just business”, still holds sway in boardrooms & C-suites across America, nowhere more so than in Silicon Valley. We’ll see how it works out for them.
Business foot traffic is up within the [NYC] congestion pricing zone. “People were concerned that fewer vehicles would mean fewer people visiting the zone, and that seems to not be the case at all.” (It never is!)
Resegregation, Coups, Orwell, and the Importance of Precise Language
Karen Attiah wrote a short opinion piece about how the nationwide assault on diversity, equity and inclusion led by conservatives is actually aimed at resegregation and how being precise in our language about what’s happening is crucial.
These facts, taken together, point to the removal of Black people from academic, corporate and government spaces: resegregation.
People are vowing to push back with their wallets — to shop at Costco and boycott Target, for example. But I believe the fight starts with language. Journalists have a role and an obligation to be precise in naming what we are facing.
Frankly, I wish the media would stop using “DEI” and “diversity hiring” altogether. Any official, including the president, who chooses to blame everything from plane crashes to wildfires on non-White, non-male people should be asked whether they believe that desegregation is to blame. Whether they believe resegregation is the answer. We need to bring back the language that describes what is actually happening.
When I write about difficult or contentious topics where I want to take great care to not be misunderstood and to be as accurate as I can be, I always think about this piece by history professor Michael Todd Landis on the language we use to talk about the Civil War & slavery.
Specifically, let us drop the word “Union” when describing the United States side of the conflagration, as in “Union troops” versus “Confederate troops.” Instead of “Union,” we should say “United States.” By employing “Union” instead of “United States,” we are indirectly supporting the Confederate view of secession wherein the nation of the United States collapsed, having been built on a “sandy foundation” (according to rebel Vice President Alexander Stephens). In reality, however, the United States never ceased to exist. The Constitution continued to operate normally; elections were held; Congress, the presidency, and the courts functioned; diplomacy was conducted; taxes were collected; crimes were punished; etc. Yes, there was a massive, murderous rebellion in at least a dozen states, but that did not mean that the United States disappeared.
Landis notes that scholar Edward Baptist also uses different language:
In his 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books), he rejects “plantations” (a term pregnant with false memory and romantic myths) in favor of “labor camps”; instead of “slave-owners” (which seems to legitimate and rationalize the ownership of human beings), he uses “enslavers.” Small changes with big implications. These far more accurate and appropriate terms serve his argument well, as he re-examines the role of unfree labor in the rise of the United States as an economic powerhouse and its place in the global economy. In order to tear down old myths, he eschews the old language.
German museums and public remembrances of the Holocaust use similarly precise language:
Just as important, the language they used on the displays in these places was clear and direct, at least in the English translations. It was almost never mealy-mouthed language like “this person died at Treblinka”…like they’d succumbed to natural causes or something. Instead it was “this person was murdered at Treblinka”, which is much stronger and explicitly places blame on the Nazis for these deaths.
This is why I’ve been so insistent on describing the events of January 6, 2021 as an attack on Congress and as a coup attempt:
This was not an attack on the Capitol Building. This was an attack on Congress, the United States Government, and elected members of our government. It was a coup attempt. Can you imagine what the mob in those videos would have done had they found Nancy Pelosi? Kidnapping or a hostage situation at the very least, assassination in the worst case. Saying that this was an “attack on the Capitol” is such an anodyne way of describing what happened on January 6th that it’s misleading. Words matter and we should use the correct ones when describing this consequential event.
In writing about the 2025 Coup, I’ve been careful to call it a coup because it is. I’ve been repeating words like “illegal” and “unconstitutional” because these actions attacks by Trump and Musk are just that. Our government’s computing systems have been “seized” or “broken into to” or “hacked” (illegal!) rather than “accessed” (sounds routine). In his piece yesterday, Jamelle Bouie argued for more precision in how we describe the coup:
To describe the current situation in the executive branch as merely a constitutional crisis is to understate the significance of what we’re experiencing. “Constitutional crisis” does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy and of what Congress’s decision not to act may liquidate in terms of constitutional meaning.
One of the reason people get so upset at media like the NY Times and Washington Post is because the language they often use is so watered down that it’s actually not truthful. Take the initial opening paragraph to this NYT piece about Trump’s statement about wanting to ethnically cleanse Gaza:
President Trump declared on Tuesday that he would seek to permanently displace the entire Palestinian population of Gaza and take over the devastated seaside enclave as a U.S. territory, one of the most audacious ideas that any American leader has advanced in years.
(They later changed “audacious” to “brazen”.) Audacious? Brazen? Advanced? Ideas? These words all have meanings! And when you put them together, it makes Trump sound like some genius superhero statesman. And “seaside enclave”? That is technically correct but it sounds like they’re talking about fucking Montauk. This is terrible writing that fails to communicate the truth of the situation.
Here’s why this matters: imprecise and euphemistic language is the language of fascists, authoritarians, and oppressors — power-craving leaders who either don’t want people to know what they are doing or don’t want them to think too hard about the illegality or immorality of their actions. The Nazis had all kinds of euphemisms — the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”, “protective custody”, “work-shy”, “enhanced interrogation” — to mask their mass imprisonment activities and mass murder.
In 1946, Nineteen Eighty-Four author George Orwell published an essay called Politics and the English Language in which he decried the “lack of precision” of political writing:
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
And from his concluding paragraph:
…one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits…
You can read Orwell’s whole essay here.
I don’t always succeed, but I try really hard to use precise, concrete language in my writing. As Attiah urges, we should want and expect our media to do the same — anything less is an abdication of their duty to their readers to tell them the truth.
McSweeney’s: Here at DOGE, We’ve Streamlined Every Aspect of America’s Collapse. “I am proud to say that in just weeks, we have used the Tesla, SpaceX, and X playbook to make America’s collapse much more efficient.”
A huge list of trans Girl Scouts who are selling Girl Scout Cookies. “Please consider choosing a trans girl scout to get your cookies from this year — the kids are under attack this year more than ever, so lets give them some joy.”
Unsurprisingly, it would be bad if Elon Musk breaks into the computer systems of the National Nuclear Security Administration. “It has all manner of sensitive information on hand, including nuclear-weapon designs and the blueprints for reactors…”
Palate cleanser: Cabel Sasser’s review of all of the weird new snacks and cereals he found at the grocery store in 2024. There are some truly unhinged things in here, including IHOP pancake-flavor potato chips and s’mores Cup Noodle.
From Scientific American, Avoiding Outrage Fatigue While Staying Informed. “We can take care of ourselves in an onslaught of overwhelming news.”
Timothy Snyder: Of Course It’s a Coup
Historian Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, is urging people and the media to understand and acknowledge that what’s happening right now is definitely a coup.
Imagine if it had gone like this.
Ten Tesla cybertrucks, painted in camouflage colors with a giant X on each roof, drive noisily through Washington DC. Tires screech. Out jump a couple of dozen young men, dressed in red and black Devil’s Champion armored costumes. After giving Nazi salutes, they grab guns and run to one government departmental after another, calling out slogans like “all power to Supreme Leader Skibidi Hitler.”
Historically, that is what coups looked like. The center of power was a physical place. Occupying it, and driving out the people who held office, was to claim control. So if a cohort of armed men with odd symbols had stormed government buildings, Americans would have recognized that as a coup attempt.
And that sort of coup attempt would have failed.
Now imagine that, instead, the scene goes like this.
A couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives. Using technical jargon and vague references to orders from on high, they gain access to the basic computer systems of the federal government. Having done so, they proceed to grant their Supreme Leader access to information and the power to start and stop all government payments.
That coup is, in fact, happening. And if we do not recognize it for what it is, it could succeed.
Lots of people asking what they can do about the coup. Here’s a start: an updated guide from Indivisible, “a set of strategies and practical first steps” for “anyone who lives in America and is upset, scared, and determined”.
Federal software contractor Dan Hon (who’s worked with HHS, Head Start, Medicaid/Medicare, DOD) has a great & informative thread about Musk’s seizure of the government’s computing systems.
“Musk’s Impossible Power Grab And America’s Crisis”
This long post by Mike Brock at Techdirt does a great job in laying out the many reasons why we should be concerned about Elon Musk’s power grab. Here’s just part of the section about all of the federal laws he is breaking:
When Congress passed 18 U.S.C. § 208, they were imagining scenarios where federal officials might have access to some information that could affect their private interests. But Musk’s situation goes far beyond anything the drafters likely contemplated—he has gained access to the actual machinery of government while simultaneously running multiple companies directly affected by that machinery.
Consider what this means in practice: Through DOGE, he has access to sensitive Treasury data while running public companies whose stock prices could be affected by that information. He can see classified materials while controlling SpaceX, which competes for national security contracts. He has visibility into federal agency operations while owning a social media platform that shapes public discourse about those agencies.
The Ethics in Government Act and STOCK Act were designed to prevent federal officials from using nonpublic information for private gain. But Musk isn’t just getting occasional access to sensitive information — he’s gained unprecedented access to core government systems while maintaining control of companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The potential for using this access to benefit his private interests isn’t incidental — it’s systematic and structural.
Since NYC began congestion pricing, subway ridership is up, subway crime is way down, traffic fatalities are down. Also, trip times for drivers and buses are faster and bus ridership is up.
Members of Musk’s team have tried to gain access to servers at the NOAA. Project 2025 says the agency is “‘harmful to US prosperity’ for its role in climate science”. Their data collection and capabilities would be a massive loss.
The End of the Liberal Consensus
I really appreciate Heather Cox Richardson’s daily newsletter for providing historical context to what’s happening right now. In this morning’s letter, after summarizing the Musk/Trump attacks on our government (most of which I linked to yesterday), Richardson talks about the history of the liberal consensus, the post-WWII agreement about how government should be deployed and how that consensus is coming to an end (gradually, then suddenly).
Musk’s takeover of the U.S. government to override Congress and dictate what programs he considers worthwhile is a logical outcome of forty years of Republican rhetoric. After World War II, members of both political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. The idea was to use tax dollars to create national wealth. The government would hold the economic playing field level by protecting every American’s access to education, healthcare, transportation and communication, employment, and resources so that anyone could work hard and rise to prosperity.
Businessmen who opposed regulation and taxes tried to convince voters to abandon this system but had no luck. The liberal consensus—”liberal” because it used the government to protect individual freedom, and “consensus” because it enjoyed wide support—won the votes of members of both major political parties.
But those opposed to the liberal consensus gained traction after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional. Three years later, in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, sent troops to help desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Those trying to tear apart the liberal consensus used the crisis to warn voters that the programs in place to help all Americans build the nation as they rose to prosperity were really an attempt to redistribute cash from white taxpayers to undeserving racial minorities, especially Black Americans. Such programs were, opponents insisted, a form of socialism, or even communism.
That argument worked to undermine white support for the liberal consensus. Over the years, Republican voters increasingly abandoned the idea of using tax money to help Americans build wealth.
A Programming Note
Hey, everyone. I just wanted to update you on what’s been happening here at KDO HQ. As you might have noticed (and if my inbox is any indication, you have), I have pivoted to posting almost exclusively about the coup happening in the United States right now. My focus will be on this crisis for the foreseeable future. I don’t yet know to what extent other things will make it back into the mix. I still very much believe that we need art and beauty and laughter and distraction and all of that, but I also believe very strongly that this situation is too important and potentially dangerous to ignore. And it is largely being ignored by a mainstream press that has been softened up by years of conservative pushback, financial pressures, and hollowing out by Facebook & Google. But I have an independent website and a platform, and I’m going to use it the way that I have always used it: to inform people about the truth of the world (as best as I understand it) and what I feel is important.
I have pivoted like this a couple of times before: in the aftermath of 9/11 and during the pandemic. This situation feels as urgent now as those events did then. Witnessing the events of this past weekend, I felt very much like I did back in March 2020, before things shut down here in the US — you could see this huge tidal wave coming and everyone was still out on the beach sunbathing because the media and our elected officials weren’t meeting the moment. I believe that if this coup is allowed to continue and succeed, it will completely alter the course of American history — so I feel like I have no choice but to talk about it.
If you need to check out, I totally understand. I’ve heard from many readers over the years that some of you come to the site for a break from the horrible news of the world, and I know this pivot goes against that. I expect I will lose some readers and members over this — the membership page is right here if you’d like to change your status. For those who choose to continue to support the site, no matter what, my deep thanks and appreciation to you.
I’ll end on a personal note. I’ve talked a little about the impact that covering the pandemic for two years had on me, particularly in this post about Ed Yong’s talk at XOXO:
It was hard to hear about how his work “completely broke” him. To say that Yong’s experience mirrored my own is, according to the mild PTSD I’m experiencing as I consider everything he related in that video, an understatement. We covered the pandemic in different ways, but like Yong, I was completely consumed by it. I read hundreds(/thousands?) of stories, papers, and posts a week for more than a year, wrote hundreds of posts, and posted hundreds of links, trying to make sense of what was happening so that, hopefully, I could help others do the same. The sense of purpose and duty I felt to my readers — and to reality — was intense, to the point of overwhelm.
Like Yong, I eventually had to step back, taking a seven-month sabbatical in 2022. I didn’t talk about the pandemic at all in that post, but in retrospect, it was the catalyst for my break. Unlike Yong, I am back at it: hopefully more aware of my limits, running like it’s an ultramarathon rather than a sprint, trying to keep my empathy for others in the right frame so I can share their stories effectively without losing myself.
Covering the pandemic broke me. I spent the weekend and most of Monday wrestling with myself and asking, “Do you really want to put yourself through that again?” I could easily just go on posting like this existential threat to the United States isn’t happening. Like I said before, I believe we need — like they are actually necessary for life — art and beauty and laughter and distraction…and continuing to cover them would be a noble and respectable undertaking. But I eventually realized, thanks in part ot an intense session with my therapist on Tuesday, that in order to be true to myself, I need to do this.
Thankfully, I am in a much better place, mental health-wise, than I was 5 years ago. I know myself better and know how to take care of myself when I am professionally stressed out. There may be times when I need to step away and I thank you for your patience in advance. I hope that you’re doing whatever it is you need to do to take yourselves. 💞
Regarding comments: I haven’t been turning them on for any of the posts about the coup. I am trying to figure out how to turn them back on and not have the discussions mirror the sorts of unhelpful patterns that social media has conditioned us into following when discussing political issues online. I have turned them on for this post, but would encourage you to reflect on kottke.org’s community guidelines if you choose to participate; the short version: “be kind, generous, & constructive, bring facts, and try to leave the place better than you found it”. Thanks.
This Changes Everything
This is a great piece by Jamelle Bouie, which lays out in plain language what Musk and Trump are doing to the federal government, why it matters, and what can be done about it.
To describe the current situation in the executive branch as merely a constitutional crisis is to understate the significance of what we’re experiencing. “Constitutional crisis” does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy and of what Congress’s decision not to act may liquidate in terms of constitutional meaning.
Together, Trump and Musk are trying to rewrite the rules of the American system. They are trying to instantiate an anti-constitutional theory of executive power that would make the president supreme over all other branches of government. They are doing so in service of a plutocratic agenda of austerity and the upward redistribution of wealth. And the longer Congress stands by, the more this is fixed in place.
If Trump, Musk and their allies — like Russell Vought, the president’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget and a vocal advocate of an autocratic “radical constitutionalism” that treats the president is an elected despot — succeed, then the question of American politics won’t be if they’ll win the next election, but whether the Constitution as we know it is still in effect.
Very much worth reading the whole thing — I found his conclusion somewhat unexpected (but IMO correct).
“A self-coup, also called an autocoup…is a form of coup d’état in which a political leader, having come to power through legal means, stays in power illegally through the actions of themselves and/or their supporters.”
FAIR calls out some of the shoddy coverage on the 2025 Coup by the NY Times & Wash. Post. They “largely buried these stories, downplaying their earth-shattering break from democratic norms”. (Wired & Rolling Stone have been courageous in their coverage.)
I’m a Federal Worker. Elon Musk’s Government Data Heist Is the Entire Ballgame. “Those outside the federal government might not understand the gravity of this situation.” And: “Now is the moment to act.”
Mike Masnick: Some Conservatives Admit We’re In A Constitutional Crisis. “It’s about recognizing that the politics of destruction, even when wrapped in the flag of ‘winning,’ leads inevitably to collective loss.”
Personal Discretion Over the Treasury’s Payments System Means the End of Democracy. “Don’t like “woke” research? Turn it off. Hate USAID? Cut off the money. Think payments to Lutheran Family Services are illegal? Shut them down.”
Why It Matters That Musk Has Taken Control of Key Government Operations
It’s a couple of days old by now, but this Bluesky thread by Abe Newman (“someone who spent a decade studying how centralized information systems are used for coercion”) does a great job in laying out some of the stakes and potential consequences of Musk’s & Trump’s illegal seizure of some key operations of the federal government.
These systems seen arcane and technical but are critical to key operations of the federal government — payment, personnel, and operations. In good times they make the trains run on time, but now they may be exploited for control.
Newman links to reporting that detail that these operations are controlled by Musk: payment, personnel, and operations. But seeing them as part of a bigger strategy is important:
The first point is to make the connection. Reporting has seen these as independent ‘lock outs’ or access to specific IT systems. This seems much more a part of a coherent strategy to identify centralized information systems and control them from the top.
Newman continues:
So what are the risks. First, the panopticon. Made popular by Foucault, the idea is that if you let people know that they are being watched from a central position they are more likely to obey. E.g. emails demanding changes or workers will be added to lists…
The second is the chokepoint. If you have access to payments and data, you can shut opponents off from key resources. Sen Wyden sees this coming.
Divert to loyalists. Once you have a 360 view, you can redirect resources to insiders and cut off the opposition. Reports suggest the GSA has a whiteboard with properties being sold. Who are they going to? Watch out for sweetheart deals.
What happens though, when you try to manipulate these systems at the same time that you gut the administrative state? Bad stuff. You get miscalculations, overreactions and unanticipated consequences.
This is a key point: the way in which and the speed at which this is being done, combined with other actions (many of them illegal and unconstitutional) being taken by the administration (Trump’s Executive Orders about freezing funding, etc.) is evidence of an overall strategy:
The overarching takeaway is that the plumbing is political and politicians and the media need to focus on what Musk is doing as a strategy.
A couple things that Newman doesn’t mention specifically are how controlling these operations can be used to restrict people’s speech & actions and the massive potential for theft and grift. If there’s no longer any oversight, they can do whatever they want.
The Verge interviewed federal employees about the chaos they’re seeing. “Many workers still worry that outside the government, people don’t realize how unprecedented this situation is — or how much is at stake.”
‘Fuck That’: Federal Workers Say They’re Scared But ‘Digging In’ Amid Trump’s Chaos. “Ironically for the Trumpies, bringing us back to the office will make us stronger morale-wise.” Signs like this of resistance are good news!
The 2025 Coup (Derogatory)
In her latest installment of Letters From an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson writes about the ongoing coup of the US government by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
I’m going to start tonight by stating the obvious: the Republicans control both chambers of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. They also control the White House and the Supreme Court. If they wanted to get rid of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, they could introduce a bill, debate it, pass it, and send it on to President Trump for his signature. And there would be very little the Democrats could do to stop that change.
But they are not doing that.
Instead, they are permitting unelected billionaire Elon Musk, whose investment of $290 million in Trump and other Republican candidates in the 2024 election apparently has bought him freedom to run the government, to override Congress and enact whatever his own policies are by rooting around in government agencies and cancelling those programs that he, personally, dislikes.
The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup. The U.S. president has no authority to cut programs created and funded by Congress, and a private citizen tapped by a president has even less standing to try anything so radical.
But Republicans are allowing Musk to run amok. This could be because they know that Trump has embraced the idea that the American government is a “Deep State,” but that the extreme cuts the MAGA Republicans say they want are actually quite unpopular with Americans in general, and even with most Republican voters. By letting Musk make the cuts the MAGA base wants, they can both provide those cuts and distance themselves from them.
But permitting a private citizen to override the will of our representatives in Congress destroys the U.S. Constitution. It also makes Congress itself superfluous. And it takes the minority rule Republicans have come to embrace to the logical end of putting government power in the hands of one man.
I am *begging* you to read Richardson’s piece (and all the other stuff I’ve been posting this week) and to take it seriously. There has been remarkably little coverage of this in the national press (compared to, say, tariffs) and IMO this is much more serious because if they have control over the IT and payment functions of the US government, they can do almost whatever they want without having to pass laws or argue in front of judges or tell people what they’re doing at all. I keep hearing people saying this is a five-alarm fire but I feel like it’s a 500-alarm fire…we need metaphorical fire trucks coming from thousands of miles away to fight this blaze. I know this sounds cuckoo bananapants but like Jamelle Bouie said the other day:
honestly think some of the hesitation here is that no one wants to sound like a crank. i was talking at an event last night and even i felt like a crank while i was speaking!
simply repeating the straight reporting of what is happening in the executive branch makes you sound like you have lost your mind.
Here is some good news: the white nationalist terrorist group Proud Boys have lost control of their trademarks. They are now controlled by a Black church in Washington DC that the group attacked in 2020.
Trump & Musk have discussed placing “spies” in gov’t offices to root out anti-MAGA sentiment so gov’t employees can’t inform Americans about the ongoing coup. (And some fed. employees are using Reddit to get news on what’s happening in their depts.)
More on Musk’s alarming unconstitutional seizure of the Treasury Department payments system: they’ve had admin access since Jan 31 and have already made changes to the system’s *live code*. (Good luck getting your tax refund if you voted for Harris?)
VERY VERY BAD: Under the direction of Elon Musk, a 25-year-old engineer has seized admin privileges to the code for “Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government”, incl. Social Security, tax payments, etc.
“Musk’s political project with DOGE is actually quite straightforward: The world’s richest man appears to be indiscriminately dismantling the government with an eye toward consolidating power and punishing his political enemies.”
It Only Tuesday. “Not only do Americans have most of Tuesday morning to contend with, but all of Tuesday afternoon and then Tuesday night.”
Donald Trump’s Executive Orders Aim to Create Jim Crow for Trans People. “The orders also, variously, deny people the ability to exercise control over their own bodies, medical care, and future, while also infringing on rights of free expression.”
Heather Cox Richardson is perhaps too dispassionate in her piece about Trump’s/Musk’s ongoing attempts destroy the US government but these are the facts and her sources list is well-worth making your way through.
Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder on the 2025 coup: “The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government…are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation.”
A complete archive of all CDC datasets uploaded before January 28th, 2025. Under the direction of Trump, the CDC has been removing data related to gender, vaccines, and climate change.
A simple guide to using Signal for government workers (written by a US federal employee). If you need to communicate securely with others (coworkers, journalists, etc.) during this coup attempt, this is the way to do it.
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