I think the point @DukeTrout was making is that at the time learning to program in Pascal (long since superseded by so many other programming languages) seemed to be the basis of the future and something that would be of daily use, as opposed to understanding the history of Nazism.
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Oh yeah; my tongue was firmly in my cheek, having taken Pascal myself. 
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Even if I did, it’s less immediately important right now than understanding fascism. 
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April 19, 2025 (Saturday)
Buddy and I are home together for the first time in a month. There is nothing in the world like that last quarter mile of the road to the house, which we hit tonight just as the sky turned pink with the sunset.
Going to take the night off.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
[Photo “Firmament” by Peter Ralston]
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April 20, 2025 (Sunday)
Yesterday, on the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, Americans across the country protested against President Donald J. Trump, his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk, and the administration in general. The decentralized 50501 movement, which stands for “50 protests in 50 states on 1 day,” was one of the organizers of the protests, planning more than 700 events. Spokesperson Hunter Dunn described 50501 as a “pro-democracy, pro-Constitution, anti-executive-overreach, nonviolent grassroots movement.” Notably, protests have spread to small towns all around the country, including towns in Republican-dominated areas.
One of the signs in Miami read, “I’m here fighting for your due process,” a right the Trump administration has abandoned with its rendition of men to CECOT, a notorious terrorist prison in El Salvador. Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) appeared on a number of news programs explaining that his trip to El Salvador to make contact with his constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the administration said it sent to CECOT through “administrative error,” was about defending the rule of law.
“I am not defending the man. I’m defending the rights of this man to due process,” Van Hollen told Jonathan Karl of ABC News. “And the Trump administration has admitted in court that he was wrongfully detained and wrongfully deported. My mission and my purpose is to make sure that we uphold the rule of law, because if we take it away from him, we…jeopardize it for everybody else.”
The right to due process is central to the rule of law in the United States, and the Trump administration has ignored it since at least March 15, when it spirited more than 250 men from the U.S. to CECOT. It claimed the men were all dangerous gang members who had committed crimes, but did not provide their names. Once news outlets got a list of the men, their investigations found the administration had lied about the men’s criminal status. Bloomberg reported that 90% of the men sent to CECOT had no U.S. criminal record.
Judge James Boasberg ordered the government not to deport the men and, if they were already in the air, to turn the planes around. But the administration went forward nonetheless and has appeared to taunt the courts ever since. After the men were landed and in CECOT, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador posted on X, “Oopsie… Too late” with a laughing emoji, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted his post.
Last Wednesday, April 16, Boasberg issued an opinion saying that the court concluded “that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt.” On April 4, Judge Paula Xinis ordered the administration to “facilitate and effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Six days later, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld Xinis’s order.
Last Monday, April 14, in a staged meeting between Trump and Bukele in the Oval Office, Trump made it clear he would ignore the Supreme Court. The administration has maintained that the U.S. has no power to order Bukele to release Abrego Garcia, and in the meeting, Bukele said he would not release the Maryland man.
The administration appears to have tried to create a fiction whereby the U.S. can spirit anyone out of the U.S. without due process, render them to prison in another country, and then declare it doesn’t have the power to get the person back. Vice President J.D. Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller were all present at the meeting. Miller mischaracterized the Supreme Court decision to say it had ruled unanimously in favor of the administration, the exact opposite of reality.
On Wednesday, Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to try to meet with Abrego Garcia, finally securing a visit on Thursday. This appeared to infuriate the White House, which posted on social media an image of a New York Times headline “Senator Meets With Wrongly Deported Maryland Man in El Salvador” edited with red pen to read: “Senator Meets With Deported MS-13 ILLEGAL ALIEN in El Salvador WHO’S NEVER COMING BACK.” Over the image, it posted: “Fixed it for you, [New York Times]. Oh, and by the way [Chris Van Hollen]—he’s NOT coming back.”
There is no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13; indeed, he has never been charged with a crime, and a court had ordered that he must not be deported to El Salvador out of concern for his life. But as control over the narrative of their renditions is slipping out of their hands—influential podcaster Joe Rogan has been defending due process on his show—administration officials appear determined to paint Abrego Garcia as a dangerous criminal.
Yesterday the White House posted on social media an image of a hand that has been very obviously altered by adding “M-S-1-3” over the knuckles. A social media post by Trump is superimposed on the image. It says: “This is the hand of the man that the Democrats feel should be brought back to the United States, because he is such ‘a fine and innocent person.’ They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles, and two Highly Respected Courts found that he was a member of MS-13, beat up his wife, etc. I was elected to take bad people out of the United States, among other things. I must be allowed to do my job. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.” The White House account added: “If he tattoos like MS-13, beats women like MS-13, and tramples the law like MS-13—THEN HE’S PROBABLY MS-13.”
Except the image is clearly false, no courts found he was a member of MS-13, and scholar of MS-13 Óscar Martínez commented: “I covered MS-13 for over a decade: its history, crimes, symbolism, cruelty, pacts with Salvadoran governments. I wrote a book about it. Never, ever, did any of the hundreds of sources I spoke to say anything that would allow us to believe Trump’s strange interpretation of tattoos.”
Although Abrego Garcia’s wife did file a temporary civil protective order against him in 2021, she has said she did it out of an abundance of caution after a previous relationship that had been violent. She did not pursue the order, and says the two worked out their issues with counseling.
Perhaps more to the point was Chris Kluwe’s point that “a sitting US President is using falsified evidence to try and deny due process to a man who has committed no crime.” Also to the point is that the administration’s insistence that Abrego Garcia will never come back to the U.S. flies in the face of the Supreme Court’s 9–0 decision that it must work to get him back to the U.S.
Early Saturday morning, the Supreme Court ordered the administration not to deport another group of undocumented Venezuelans under the authority of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, but the court was in such a hurry to prevent the rendition of the men—who had already been loaded onto buses to head to an airplane—that it issued its decision without waiting for them to finish writing.
In his One First newsletter, legal analyst Steve Vladeck noted that the court appears not to trust the government’s lawyers anymore. Vladeck saw the order as “a sign that a majority of the justices have lost their patience with the procedural games being played by the Trump administration.”
Trump did not take the order well. On Saturday night he posted: “TRUMP’S BEST POLL NUMBERS, EVER. THANK YOU!” After a religiously themed post this morning, he launched another attack on those he sees as his enemies—including judges—and blamed the country’s troubles on his predecessor, President Joe Biden. Then he posted: “We are, together, going to make America bigger, better, stronger, wealthier, healthier, and more religious, than it has ever been before!!! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!!!”
Trump went on to post about the economy, including a post that said: “THE BUSINESSMEN WHO CRITICIZE TARIFFS ARE BAD AT BUSINESS, BUT REALLY BAD AT POLITICS. THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND OR REALIZE THAT I AM THE GREATEST FRIEND THAT AMERICAN CAPITALISM HAS EVER HAD!” About an hour later, he posted that “many World Leaders and Business Executives have come to me asking for relief from Tariffs. It’s good to see that the World knows we are serious, because WE ARE!”
It’s hard not to read desperation in the last days of Trump’s posts as Americans seem increasingly concerned about the loss of the rule of law, as Trump’s tariffs upset the economy, and as Russia’s president Vladimir Putin seemed to taunt the president— who badly wants to end Russia’s war against Ukraine, as he promised to do with a single phone call— by declaring a truce over Easter and then promptly violating it.
That the administration seems to be reeling showed also in the news on Friday that the State Department has been torn apart by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s firing of Peter Marocco, the official who was dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. Dasha Burns and Nahal Toosi of Politico report that Marocco is MAGA and was destroying the agency without advice from career officials. MAGA sees his firing as a sign Rubio is part of the establishment they want to destroy.
Also on Friday, Michael S. Schmidt and Michael C. Bender of the New York Times reported that the administration was suddenly claiming that the letter it sent to Harvard University on April 11 withholding federal grants until the university handed administration officials power over the school’s students and programs was “unauthorized.” Nonetheless, the White House was standing by the letter, which prompted Harvard to take a strong stand against the administration. Officials blamed Harvard for the standoff because, they said, university lawyers should have called when they got such a dramatic letter.
In a response, Harvard pointed out that the letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised. Recipients of such correspondence from the U.S. government—even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach—do not question its authenticity or seriousness.” It noted that it didn’t know which statements the government was claiming were “mistakes,” but in any case, the government’s actions had “real-life consequences.”
Today, Greg Jaffe, Eric Schmitt, and Maggie Haberman reported in the New York Times that on March 15, the same day he shared classified plans of a military strike against the Houthis in Yemen on an unsecure Signal chat on which journalist Jeffrey Goldberg had been included, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared similar detailed information on a different Signal chat. This one he began himself in January on his personal phone for strategizing with his closest allies, and it brought together about a dozen people, including his wife, his brother, and his personal lawyer.
Four people with knowledge of the second chat group spoke with Jaffe, Schmitt, and Haberman, suggesting that dissatisfaction with Hegseth in the department runs deep. Former Pentagon chief spokesperson John Ullyot resigned last week, and today he began an op-ed in Politico with the sentence, “It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon.” On Friday, Hegseth fired three of his senior staffers, and an official announced that his chief of staff was leaving. Ullyot wrote it was “very likely” that “even bigger bombshell stories” would come this week.
Finally, today was the deadline by which Hegseth and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem were ordered to report to the president whether they recommended invoking the Insurrection Act to deal with conditions at the southern border. That law enables the president to use military troops as law enforcement officers inside the United States.
While the two did not file their report today, Natasha Bertrand, Haley Britzky, Jake Tapper, and Priscilla Alvarez of CNN reported Friday that when they do, they will not recommend the president invoke the act.
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What? No he doesn’t. Painfully obviously so.
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He wants an end to the war in the same way that Putin does, for the Ukrainians to stop fighting back.
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Well, I think he does from the standpoint that it was a campaign promise. What he thought would happen is that he thought he could convince Zelensky to give up. I have no idea why he thought that, but he did. He knows damn well Putin wasn’t going to end it on a phone call from him.
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Well, I think he would complete the assignment he’s been given if the war ends with Ukraine under Russian control. And I’m pretty sure that’s what he meant (as @danimagoo and @chenille wrote) in his campaign promise.
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April 21, 2025 (Monday)
Yesterday, on Easter Sunday, Pope Francis performed his final public act when he waved to worshippers in St. Peter’s Square. He died today at 88. Born in Argentina, he was the first Pope to come from the Americas. He was also the first Jesuit to serve as Pope, bringing new perspectives to the Catholic Church and hoping to focus the church on the poor.
The stock market plunged again today after President Donald J. Trump continued to harass Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. The threat of instability if Trump tries to fire Powell, added to the instability already created by Trump’s tariff policies, saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average fall 971.82 points, or 2.48%; the S&P 500 dropped 2.36%, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.55%. The dollar hit a three-year low, while the value of gold soared. Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen noted that since Trump took office, the Dow has fallen 13.8%, the S&P 500 is down 15.5%, and the Nasdaq is down 20.5%.
Hannah Erin Lang of the Wall Street Journal reported that “[t]he Trump rout is taking on historic dimensions.” She noted that the Dow Jones Industrial Average “is headed for its worst April performance since 1932,” when the country was in the midst of the Great Depression. Scott Ladner, chief investment officer at Horizon Investments, told Lang: “It’s impossible to commit capital to an economy that is unstable and unknowable because of policy structure.”
The Trump administration announced on April 11 that it would withhold from Harvard University $2.2 billion in grants already awarded and a $60 million contract unless Harvard permitted the federal government to control the university’s admissions and intellectual content. Today, Harvard sued the government for violating the First Amendment and overstepping its legal authority under the guise of addressing antisemitism.
The complaint notes the “arbitrary and capricious nature” of the government’s demands, and says, “The government has not—and cannot—identify any rational connection between antisemitism concerns and the medical, scientific, technological, and other research it has frozen that aims to save American lives, foster American success, preserve American security, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”
University president Alan Garber explained that the freeze would jeopardize research on “how cancer spreads throughout the body, to predict the spread of infectious disease outbreaks, and to ease the pain of soldiers wounded on the battlefield.” He continued: “As opportunities to reduce the risk of multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease are on the horizon, the government is slamming on the brakes. The victims will be future patients and their loved ones who will suffer the heartbreak of illnesses that might have been prevented or treated more effectively. Indiscriminately slashing medical, scientific, and technological research undermines the nation’s ability to save American lives, foster American success, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”
Harvard is suing the departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, Education, Energy, and Defense, the General Services Administration (GSA), the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, NASA, and the leaders of those agencies.
After news broke yesterday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had disclosed classified information on a second unsecure Signal chat—this one on on his unsecure personal cell phone—and his former spokesperson told Politico the Pentagon was in “total chaos,” and he fired three of his top aides, media articles today wrote that officials were looking for a new Secretary of Defense.
But Hegseth blamed the media for the exposure of his Signal chats, and Trump stood by Hegseth. According to Dasha Burns, Eli Stokols, and Jake Traylor of Politico, the president doesn’t want to validate the stories about disarray at the Pentagon by firing Hegseth. “He’s doing a great job,” the president told reporters. “It’s just fake news.”
While the visible side of the administration appears to be floundering, new stories suggest that the less visible side—the “Department of Government Efficiency”—has dug into U.S. data in alarming ways.
On April 15, Jenna McLaughlin of NPR reported on an official whistleblower disclosure that as soon as members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) arrived at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), they appeared to be hacking into secure data. While they claimed to be looking for places to cut costs, the behavior of the DOGE team suggested something else was going on. They demanded the highest level of access, tried to hide their activities in the system, turned off monitoring tools, and then manually deleted the record of their tracks, all behaviors that cybersecurity experts told McLaughlin sounded like “what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.”
Staffers noticed that an IP address in Russia was trying to log in to the system using a newly created DOGE account with correct username and password, and later saw that a large amount of sensitive data was leaving the agency. Cybersecurity experts identified that spike as a sign of a breach in the system, creating the potential for that data to be sold, stolen, or used to hurt companies, while the head of DOGE himself could use the information for his own businesses. “All of this is alarming," Russ Handorf, who worked in cybersecurity for the FBI, told McLaughlin. "If this was a publicly traded company, I would have to report this [breach] to the Securities and Exchange Commission.” When the whistleblower brought his concerns to someone at NLRB, he received threats.
“If he didn’t know the backstory, any [chief information security officer] worth his salt would look at network activity like this and assume it’s a nation-state attack from China or Russia,” Jake Braun, former acting principal deputy national cyber director at the White House, told McLaughlin.
McLaughlin noted that the story of what happened at the NLRB is not uncommon. When challenged by judges, DOGE has offered conflicting and vague answers to the question of why it needs access to sensitive information, and has dismissed concerns about cybersecurity and privacy. The administration has slashed through the agencies that protect systems from attack and Trump has signed an executive order urging government departments to “eliminate…information silos” and to share their information.
Sharon Block, the executive director of Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy and a former NLRB board member, told McLaughlin: “There is nothing that I can see about what DOGE is doing that follows any of the standard procedures for how you do an audit that has integrity and that’s meaningful and will actually produce results that serve the normal auditing function, which is to look for fraud, waste and abuse…. The mismatch between what they’re doing and the established, professional way to do what they say they’re doing…that just kind of gives away the store, that they are not actually about finding more efficient ways for the government to operate.”
On April 18, Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott of Wired reported that DOGE is building a master database that knits together information from U.S. Customs and Immigration Services, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Social Security Administration, and voting data from Pennsylvania and Florida. This appears to be designed to find and pressure undocumented immigrants, Kelly and Elliott reported, but the effects of the consolidation of data are not limited to them.
On April 15 the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Gerald Connolly of Virginia, asked the acting inspector general at the Department of Labor and the inspector general at the NLRB to investigate “any and all attempts to exfiltrate data and any attempts to cover up their activities.” Two days later, he made a similar request to the acting inspector general for the Social Security Administration.
Connolly wrote: “I am concerned that DOGE is moving personal information across agencies without the notification required under the Privacy Act or related laws, such that the American people are wholly unaware their data is being manipulated in this way.”
On April 17, Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro of ProPublica reported that the administration is looking to replace the federal government’s $700 billion internal expense card program, known as SmartPay, with a contract awarded to the private company Ramp. Ramp is backed by investment firms tied to Trump and Musk.
While administration officials insist that SmartPay is wasteful, both Republican and Democratic budget experts say that’s wrong, according to Bing and Asher-Schapiro. “SmartPay is the lifeblood of the government,” former General Services Administration commissioner Sonny Hashmi told the reporters. “It’s a well-run program that solves real world problems…with exceptional levels of oversight and fraud prevention already baked in.”
“There’s a lot of money to be made by a new company coming in here,” said Hashmi. “But you have to ask: What is the problem that’s being solved?”
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April 22, 2025 (Tuesday)
Today is Earth Day, celebrated for the first time in 1970. The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. A marine biologist and best-selling author, Carson showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. She focused on the popular pesticide DDT, which had been developed in 1939 and used to clear islands in the South Pacific of malaria-carrying mosquitoes during World War II. Deployed as an insect killer in the U.S. after the war, DDT was poisoning the natural food chain in American waters.
DDT sprayed on vegetation washed into the oceans. It concentrated in fish, which were then eaten by birds of prey, especially ospreys. The DDT caused the birds to lay eggs with abnormally thin eggshells, so thin the eggs cracked in the nest when the parent birds tried to incubate them. And so the birds began to die off.
Carson was unable to interest any publishing company in the story of DDT. Finally, frustrated at the popular lack of interest in the story behind the devastation of birds, she decided to write the story anyway, turning out a highly readable book with 55 pages of footnotes to make her case.
When The New Yorker began to serialize Carson’s book in June 1962, chemical company leaders were scathing. “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson," an executive of the American Cyanamid Company said, “we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.” Officers of Monsanto questioned Carson’s sanity.
But her portrait of the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms caught readers’ attention. They were willing to listen. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.
Democratic president John F. Kennedy asked the President’s Science Advisory Committee to look into Carson’s argument, and the committee vindicated her. Before she died of breast cancer in 1964, Carson noted: “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”
Meanwhile, a number of scientists followed up on Carson’s argument and in 1967 organized the Environmental Defense Fund to protect the environment by lobbying for a ban on DDT. As they worked, Americans began to pay closer attention to human effects on the environment, especially after three crucial moments: First, on December 24, 1968, astronaut William Anders took a color picture of the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon from outer space during the Apollo 8 mission, powerfully illustrating the beauty and isolation of the globe on which we all live.
Then, over 10 days in January–February 1969, a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Public outrage ran so high that President Nixon himself, a Republican, went to Santa Barbara in March to see the cleanup efforts, telling the American public that “the Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.”
And then, in June 1969, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. A dumping ground for local heavy industry, the river had actually burned more than ten times in the previous century, but with increased focus on environmental damage, this time the burning river garnered national attention.
In February 1970, President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”
“The tasks that need doing require money, resolve and ingenuity,” Nixon said, “and they are too big to be done by government alone. They call for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”
Meanwhile, Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, visited the Santa Barbara oil spill and hoped to turn the same sort of enthusiasm people were bringing to protests against the Vietnam War to efforts to protect the environment. He announced a teach-in on college campuses, which soon grew into a wider movement across the country. Their “Earth Day,” held on April 22, 1970, brought more than 20 million Americans—10% of the total population of the country at the time—to call for the nation to address the damage caused by 150 years of unregulated industrial development. The movement included members of all political parties, rich Americans and their poorer neighbors, people who lived in the city and those in the country, labor leaders and their employers. Fifty-five years later, it is still one of the largest protests in American history.
Today the White House under President Donald J. Trump celebrated Earth Day by announcing that “we finally have a president who follows science,” with policies “rooted in the belief that Americans are the best stewards of our vast natural resources—no ‘Green New Scam’ required.” One of the policies the White House champions is “opening more federal lands and waters for oil, gas, and critical mineral extraction.”
Four days ago, on April 18, journalist Wes Siler noted in his Wes Siler’s Newsletter that the day before, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum had signed an extraordinary order. The order assigned to the assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget, or AS-PMB, control over the Department of the Interior, including its personnel and its budget.
Siler explains that “[t]he person currently serving as AS-PMB (which in normal times would require Senate confirmation) is DOGE operative Tyler Hassen, the CEO of a Houston-based energy company.” Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement: “Elon Musk is now effectively in charge of America’s public lands.”
Siler notes that Burgum has handed power over the Department of the Interior to “a hitherto unknown political operative” who is holding his position in violation of the appointments clause of the Constitution.
He also notes that the Department of the Interior “manages the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Education, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, Bureau of Trust Funds Administration, Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey,” in addition to the National Park Service. “As such,” Siler writes, “Hassen is now responsible for 70,000 employees, the administration of numerous international treaties, the welfare of 574 Native American Tribes, 433 national park sites, over 500 million acres of public lands, 700 million acres of subsurface minerals, and 3.2 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf.”
Burgum’s order says that his order is designed “to effectuate the consolidation, unification and optimization of administrative functions within the Department of the Interior…in order to achieve effectiveness, accountability and cost savings for the American taxpayer.” In other words, he is falling back on the idea of further cuts to the U.S. government in order to save money.
In fact, the public lands already make billions of dollars a year for the United States through tourism, but since the 1970s, the right wing has come to see the public ownership of lands as an affront to the idea that individuals should be able to use the resources they believe God has put there for them to use. Developers have encouraged that ideology, for privatization of America’s western lands has always meant that they ended up in the hands of a few wealthy individuals.
That impulse shows in Project 2025. As Melinda Taylor, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, told Bloomberg Law in November: “Project 2025 is a ‘wish list’ for the oil and gas and mining industries and private developers. It promotes opening up more of our federal land to energy development, rolling back protections on federal lands, and selling off more land to private developers.”
Burgum appears to be on board with that plan. On January 16, in his confirmation hearings, Burgum made it clear that he sees selling the public lands as a source of revenue, referring to them as “America’s balance sheet.” “[W]e’ve got $36 trillion in debt,” he said, but “[w]e never talk about the assets, and the assets are the land and minerals.” The Interior Department, he said, “has got close to 500 million acres of surface. It’s 700 million acres of subsurface and over 2 billion acres of offshore…. That’s the balance sheet of America…. I believe we ought to have a deep inventory of all the assets in America. We ought to understand…what is our assets, 100 trillion, 200 trillion? We could be in great shape as a country.”
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“We’re saving the environment by destroying it!” 
I believe we ought to have a deep inventory of all the assets in America. We ought to understand…what is our assets, 100 trillion, 200 trillion?
Let’s turn America into a fire sale! Brilliant!
It promotes opening up more of our federal land to energy development, rolling back protections on federal lands, and selling off more land to private developers.
It’s happening here already. What they can’t/won’t sell, they will try to destroy.
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April 23, 2025 (Wednesday)
After previously suggesting that the U.S. would not involve European representatives in negotiations to end Russia’s war against Ukraine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and presidential envoy Steve Witkoff met in Paris last week for talks with Ukrainian and European officials. The U.S. presented what it called “the outlines of a durable and lasting peace,” even as Russia continued to attack Ukrainian civilian areas.
A senior European official told Illia Novikov, Aamer Madhani, and Jill Lawless of the Associated Press that the Americans presented their plan as “just ideas” that could be changed. But Barak Ravid of Axios reported on Friday that Trump was frustrated that the negotiations weren’t productive and said he wanted a quick solution.
Talks were scheduled to resume today, in London, but yesterday Rubio pulled out of them. The U.S. plan is now “a final offer,” Ravid reported, and if the Ukrainians don’t accept it, the U.S. will “walk away.”
On a bipartisan basis, since 2014 the United States has supported Ukraine’s fight to push back Russia’s invasions. But Trump and his administration have rejected this position in favor of supporting Russia. This shift has been clear in the negotiations for a solution: Trump required repeated concessions from Ukraine even as Russia continued bombing Ukraine. Axios’s Ravid saw the proposed “final offer,” and it fits this pattern.
The plan would recognize Russia’s occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea and its occupation of almost all of Luhansk oblast and the portions of Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts Russia has occupied. This would essentially freeze the boundary of Ukraine at the battlefront.
Ukraine would promise not to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the post–World War II defensive alliance that first stood against the aggression of the Soviet Union and now stands against the aggression of Russia.
Sanctions imposed against Russia after its 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine would be lifted, and the United States, in particular its energy and industrial sectors, will cooperate with Russia.
In essence, this gives Russian president Vladimir Putin everything he wanted.
What the Ukrainians get out of this deal is significantly weaker. They get “a robust security guarantee,” but Ravid notes the document is vague and does not say the U.S. will participate. We have been here before. After the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up those weapons, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia agreed to secure Ukraine’s borders. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, they agreed they would not use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine.
Russia violated that agreement with its 2014 and 2022 invasions, making it unlikely that Ukraine will trust any new promises of security.
Under the new plan, Ukraine would also get back a small part of Kharkiv oblast Russia has occupied. It would be able to use the Dnieper River. And it would get help and funds for rebuilding, although as Ravid notes, the document doesn’t say where the money will come from.
There is something else in the plan. The largest nuclear power plant in Europe is Ukrainian: the Zaporizhzhia plant. It will be considered Ukrainian territory, but the United States will operate it and supply the electricity it produces to both Ukraine and Russia, although the agreement apparently doesn’t say anything about how payments would work. The plan also refers to a deal between the U.S. and Ukraine for minerals, with Ukraine essentially repaying the U.S. for its past support.
Ravid notes that the U.S. drafted the plan after envoy Steve Witkoff met for more than four hours last week with Putin. But the plan has deeper roots.
This U.S.-backed plan echoes almost entirely the plan Russian operatives presented to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort in exchange for helping Trump win the White House. Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2014 and was looking for a way to grab the land it wanted without continuing to fight.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Manafort in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Russian-backed Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.”
The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that carved off much of Ukraine and made it subservient to him. This was the dead opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if Trump were elected, the equation changed.
According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Manafort’s partner and Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik wrote: “[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.” Following that, Kilimnik suggested that Manafort ‘could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ([Yanukovych] guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals.’ The email also suggested that once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.’”
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018.
After Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022, Jim Rutenberg published a terrific and thorough review of this history in the New York Times Magazine. Once his troops were in Ukraine, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.
On June 14, 2024, as he was wrongly imprisoning American journalist Evan Gershkovich, Putin made a “peace proposal” to Ukraine that sounded much like the Mariupol Plan. He offered a ceasefire if Ukraine would give up Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, including far more territory than Putin’s troops occupy, and abandon plans to join NATO. “If Kyiv and the Western capitals refuse it, as before,” Putin said, “then in the end, that’s their…political and moral responsibility for the continuation of bloodshed.”
On June 27, 2024, in a debate during which he insisted that he and he alone could get Gershkovich released, and then talked about Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Trump seemed to indicate he knew about the Mariupol Plan: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”
Now that plan is back on the table as official U.S. policy.
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has said that his country will not recognize the Russian occupation of Crimea. In this determination, he speaks for the global rules-based order the U.S. helped to create after World War II. Recognition of the right of a country to invade another and seize its territory undermines a key article of the United Nations, which says that members won’t threaten or attack any country’s “territorial integrity or political independence.” French president Emmanuel Macron and other European leaders are standing behind those principles, saying today in a statement from Macron’s office that they reject Russian territorial gains under the U.S. plan. “Ukraine’s territorial integrity and European aspirations are very strong requirements for Europeans,” the statement said.
But Trump himself seems eager to rewrite the world order. In addition to his own threats against Greenland, Canada, and Panama, in a post today on his social media site he echoed Putin’s 2024 statement blaming Ukraine for Russia’s bloody war because it would not agree to Putin’s terms. Today, Trump said Zelensky’s refusal to recognize the Russian occupation of Crimea was “inflammatory,” and he pressured Zelensky to accept the deal.
Curiously, he felt obliged to write that “I have nothing to do with Russia…”.
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April 24, 2025 (Thursday)
“Vladimir, STOP!” wrote President Donald Trump on his social media site this morning. Yesterday Trump berated Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky for rejecting a peace deal that heavily favored Russia; hours later, Russia launched its deadliest assault on Kyiv since last July, killing at least eight people and wounding more than 70 others. “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing,” Trump posted. “5000 soldiers a week are dying. Lets get the Peace Deal DONE!”
Trump won the presidency by assuring his base that he was a strong leader who could impose his will on the country and the world. Now he is bleating weakly at Putin.
Trump was the logical outcome of the myth of cowboy individualism embraced by the Republicans since President Ronald Reagan rose to the White House by celebrating it. In that myth, a true American is a man who operates on his own, outside the community. He needs nothing from the government, works hard to support himself, protects his wife and children, and asserts his will by dominating others. Government is his enemy, according to the myth, because it takes his money to help undeserving freeloaders and because it regulates how he can run his business. A society dominated by a cowboy individual is a strong one.
Leaders who pushed this ideology knew it attracted voters. Once they were in power, they could slash government programs and cut taxes and regulations that kept wealth and opportunity accessible to poorer Americans. They argued that a society works best if wealth and power are concentrated among a few elites, who can direct capital more efficiently than government bureaucrats can. Their rhetoric worked: from 1981 to 2021, $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. But those same people talking about individualism to secure votes also knew that the world has never worked this way. In the twenty-first century, U.S. security and the economy depended more than ever on coalitions and government investment.
As the middle class hollowed out, Republicans hammered on the idea that government action was socialism and the government was a swamp of waste and corruption. Donald Trump rode that rhetoric to the White House in 2016 but was still restrained by establishment Republicans who understood that the modern state underpinned America’s strength. President Joe Biden’s rejection of the Republicans’ economic vision and reorientation of the economy around ordinary Americans made Republicans rally against another Democratic president. They turned back to Trump, backed as he was by the MAGA base marinated in the rhetoric that government is bad, even though their counties are more dependent than Democratic counties on government aid.
Now the dog has caught the car. In 2024, Americans reelected Donald Trump, but he is no longer restrained by those who understood the importance of alliances and government programs. Instead, he is surrounded by those who appear convinced that displays of dominance will make the U.S. even stronger than it was when Trump took office and that destroying the government will free up great men to reorder society.
This impulse showed as soon as Trump took office in the takeover of the U.S. government by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a group of individuals without government experience or security clearances working in a group whose legal status is doubtful. They were overseen by billionaire Elon Musk, who was neither elected nor confirmed by the Senate. Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget.
In the early days of the administration, Musk dominated Trump’s press opportunities and at least one Cabinet meeting. He appeared to be in charge. But his support soured quickly. From the start, Musk and the DOGE staff slashed willy-nilly, firing vital employees that the government then had to rehire, creating mayhem.
Then, in February, Musk tried to muscle in on the prerogatives of actual Cabinet members by demanding all government employees send a weekly email listing five things they had accomplished that week. Then, earlier this month, Musk publicly disagreed with Trump and his trade advisor Peter Navarro over both tariffs and immigration. He has also fought with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
According to Hannah Natanson, Faiz Siddiqui, and Emily Davies of the Washington Post, it is not clear the emails Musk demanded were ever used for anything, and that initiative is quietly dying. But Musk’s fights with other members of the administration have escalated until, as Dan Diamond, Faiz Siddiqui, Trisha Thadani, and Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reported today, Musk and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent got into a yelling match in the West Wing of the White House.
And Musk’s vow of $2 trillion in cuts has dwindled down to $150 billion, although that number is not yet verifiable. Elizabeth Williamson of the New York Times reported today that the cost of firing workers will be more than $135 billion this year, while cuts to the IRS will cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone. And then there is the cost of lawsuits over DOGE’s actions.
Rather than working with those government officials already in place to save government money, Musk appears to be trying to display his power over government employees. At the same time, he is scooping up data from various government agencies about individuals in the U.S., a treasure trove that he could use for shaping society, garnering government contracts, or raising money either by selling it or by blackmailing people with it. After today’s news that Tesla’s earnings plunged 71% in the first quarter of the year, Musk tried to reassure investors by saying he would focus more on the company.
Trump ally Steve Bannon warned about Musk’s true interests: “We have to have a full accounting that makes sure any government data—classified or not—and any personal financial data, people’s tax returns, and their health records, have not gone to any entity not controlled by the Trump administration or the U.S. government.”
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also promised to sweep through the government bureaucracy he hates and come up with a new, better plan for making Americans healthier. Kennedy has a history of opposition to vaccines and has refused to urge people to get vaccinated to stop the spread of measles. That outbreak is already the largest since the disease ceased to be consistently present in the U.S. population 25 years ago. Today scientists reported that, at current rates of vaccination, measles could become commonplace again.
Kennedy has also pledged to find the causes of autism by September, pushing aside the deep research already done on the subject and instead announcing that the cause is “environmental toxins.” Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told reporters on Tuesday that in order to conduct the study, the NIH is collecting Americans’ private medical records from federal and commercial databases, including from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Indian Health Service, medication records from pharmacies, and data from smartwatches and fitness trackers. It is in talks with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to see if it can get access to that database, too.
The idea that the right sort of men can do a better job than the government officers who have spent decades learning how to do their jobs is on view as well in the appointment of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who previously worked as a Fox News Channel weekend host. Hegseth vowed to champion strong “warfighters” at the Pentagon, but he has had no experience running an entity as large and complicated as the Defense Department, with its annual budget of $850 billion and its almost 3.5 million employees.
The results of his appointment have been disastrous. Under Hegseth, department officials are openly feuding. Paul McLeary and Jack Detsch reported today in Politico that Hegseth is using just his wife, his lawyer, and two lower-level officials as advisors, meaning he is operating without anyone who has significant expertise in the department.
Tuesday, we learned that in the unsecure second Signal chat—the one with his wife and brother and other personal friends—Hegseth posted from his personal phone information he had just received from Army General Michael Erik Kurilla, who leads U.S. Central Command, the command responsible for operations in the Middle East.
That got even worse today when Tara Copp of the Associated Press reported that Hegseth directed staffers to install Signal on his desktop computer so he could use Signal in a secure area where his own cell phone was not allowed. The computer was connected to the internet on an unsecured commercial line, making it highly susceptible to hacking.
Trump’s own belief that he could—and should—force the world to bow to his tariff levies revealed his conviction that he could tear up mutual agreements and impose his will. He predicted that other countries would come begging to him to lift the tariffs. Instead, the reality is that he has maimed the country’s thriving economy. On Tuesday, with the stock market lurching wildly and investors dumping U.S. investments, Trump suggested that he was negotiating with China and the 145% tariff rates he imposed would soon come down “substantially.” Yesterday he said “everything’s active” in negotiations with China.
Today, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry said “China and the U.S. are not having any consultation or negotiation on tariffs, still less reaching a deal.” China’s commerce spokesperson agreed that “Any claims about the progress of China-U.S. trade negotiations are groundless as trying to catch the wind and have no factual basis.” He said that China was willing to talk, but only “on the basis of mutual respect and in an equal manner.”
When a reporter asked Trump about China’s denial, he said: “Well, they had a meeting this morning.” The reporter answered: “Who’s they?” Trump replied: “I can’t tell you. It doesn’t matter who ‘they’ is. We may reveal it later.”
Journalist Chris Hayes wrote: “It’s incredible that now the best case scenario is basically Trump engaging in a humiliating climb-down, but having already inflicted permanent damage and uncertainty that [can] never be undone.”
The rate at which America’s government, health, defense, and economy is degrading shows that reality will not conform to the myth of the American cowboy. The cover of The Economist today shows a battered and heavily bandaged eagle under the caption: “Only 1,361 Days To Go.”
The American people seem to be realizing that the rhetoric of cowboy individualism is a very different thing than its reality. Trump’s poll numbers are dropping sharply. A Reuters poll found that just 37% of Americans approve of his handling of the economy, which was supposed to be his strong suit. An Economist/YouGov poll found Trump’s approval rating was –13, with 54% of Americans disapproving of the way he is handling the presidency and only 41% approving.
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He forgot his safe word, didn’t he?
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How could he forget hamburder?
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Not enough cofveve.
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THIS (emphasis mine)
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