Subheadline: "The American Prairie Foundation has had its license to graze conservation herds of bison on federal pastures revoked by the Department of the Interior."
From the text: "The Department of the Interior, which has a bison as its logo, has revoked the licence of a rewilding charity trying to restore the natural splendour of the 'American Serengeti,' the eco-diverse range of grasslands home to wolves, pronghorns, grizzly bears and mountain lions.... Doug Burgum, the secretary of the interior, who owns a ranch in neighbouring North Dakota, has favoured the arguments of cattle farmers eager to graze their cow herds on cheap federal lands instead...."
"'We are officially terminating the so-called "endangerment finding," a disastrous Obama-era policy,' he said. Mr. Trump called it a 'radical rule' that became 'the basis for the Green New Scam,' a label the president gives to any effort to curb emissions or develop renewable energy. Mr. Zeldin called it 'the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.' He accused Democrats of having launched an 'ideological crusade' on climate change that 'strangled entire sectors of the United States economy,' particularly the auto industry...."
"... for tens of millions of new cars and light trucks. The administration claimed the changes would save Americans $109 billion over five years and shave $1,000 off the average cost of a new car. The Biden administration’s stricter efficiency standards were designed to get more Americans to go electric. But Mr. Trump said they 'forced automakers to build cars using expensive technologies that drove up costs, drove up prices, and made the car much worse. This is a green new scam, and people were paying too much for a car that didn’t work as well.'"
"It's the greatest scam in history. The most expensive energy you can buy. They are ugly. A friend of mine comes from Minnesota... He said it's unbelievable what happened.... The most beautiful fields.... I was so looking forward to seeing them again... and they had windmills all over them. These horrible structures.... these ugly horrible things.... I looked at this field that was one of the most beautiful places in my own mind and imagination. It's littered with this garbage. It looked like a junkyard, he said. Then you get different manufacturers, and [the windmills] don't look alike. And they're not painted alike. Different colors. Even if they're white, one's a beige-y white, one's a darker white, one's a lighter white. And they start to rust after four or five years. And then they start to wear out. And nobody takes them because you're not allowed to bury the props... There's a certain type of fiber, and if it goes the ground, we are all going to die. What bullshit this is! Okay?... What they do is leave them up.... Windmills all over the place. Tall ones, short ones, dead ones, they're all dead. Some are hanging over by a thread...."
Said Trump today.
You may not like Trump's aesthetics all the time. We were just talking about all the gold leaf in the Oval Office. But he is attentive to the details of the visual world. He's an aesthete. What kind of man cares that the windmills are not painted alike even if they are all white because one's a beige-y white, one's a darker white, one's a lighter white? He not only cares, he will calmly detail the problem of shades of white as if you are expected to notice the variations and become unsettled by them as he is.
You are expected to see it as part of what should concern the President of the United States, this discontinuity of the whiteness of windmills.
I like this about him. I think it matters how things look. These places that are beautiful in our "mind and imagination" need to be kept beautiful. Anyone who modifies the landscape owes us all a duty to take care of this beauty. I don't think this comes naturally to most politicians, but it's something that Trump slowed down to contemplate out loud.
"I don’t think he’s going to be able to get away with that,' he said. 'I think we’re more resilient as a constitutional, representative democracy than a lot of people of fear.'"
When Biden was President, "democracy" meant gracefully accepting the result of the election and working on winning the next election. But with Trump as President, "democracy" means stopping the duly elected President from doing what voters heard him promise he'd do.
I'm just asking for a stable definition of "democracy" to go along with the demand for our devotion to it. I agree with Gore that the courts have role to play. But it's a counter-majoritarian role. And we can argue about the scope of their role and whether they are doing too much or too little. We'll see how they do.
"It is my utmost priority to get a handle on every dollar that went out the door in this scheme and once again restore oversight and accountability over these funds. This rush job operation is riddled with conflicts of interest and corruption."
Weiss writes: "The Department of Justice is investigating the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was part of Joe Biden’s $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act. Created in the spring of 2023, and managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the fund was supposed to be a 'first-of-its-kind' program to address the climate crisis while revitalizing communities that it considered 'historically left behind.'
But it appears little of the $27 billion revitalized anything—except the coffers of a range of environmental nonprofits associated with former Obama and Biden administration officials.."
Donald Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, said... [t]here will be widespread panic, Kettl said, as state and local governments as well as the people most reliant on federal-funded grants scramble to figure out if and when their cash flow will stop.
Re "people most reliant on federal-funded grants" — the memo is explicit that it does not apply to Medicare or Social Security and "does not include assistance provided directly to individuals." But clearly there are "people" who have reason to panic. These would be "people" overseeing matters entangled with left-wing ideology who must "complete a comprehensive analysis" of whether their activities align with Trump's "executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal."
Trump has gone big. It's the shock-and-awe approach. But do you remember "Obama's Big Bang" ("rapid, once-in-a-generation overhauls of energy, financial regulation and health care")?
I like getting a chance to use my "Trump is like Obama" tag. That's where the cruel neutrality really hurts.
"Donald Trump was mocked for sounding the alarm on the California water/fire crisis during his interview with Joe Rogan. Turns out, he was right. Trump spent nearly 7 minutes ranting about the issue, blasting Newsom for doing nothing to fix the problem."
An excerpt from Trump's rant about the water: "Millions and millions of gallons of water gets poured [into the Pacific].... I got it all done. Nobody could believe it. It was all done. I said, I got it. You got so much water. All you have to do is sign, and [Newsom] didn't wanna sign.... Every time I go to California, I say you have so much water. They don't know it... I'm telling you, people living in Beverly Hills, they turn off the water...."
Donald Trump was mocked for sounding the alarm on the California water/fire crisis during his interview with Joe Rogan.
Turns out, he was right.
Trump spent nearly 7 minutes ranting about the issue, blasting Newsom for doing nothing to fix the problem.
ADDED: The Trump episode of Joe Rogan went up on October 25, 2024, and if you go here, at Podscribe, you'll be at the beginning of Trump's L.A. water rant, with both audio and transcript. I'll do my own edit of the text:
Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place, and these are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump. The causes were free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the war on our children....
The military-industrial complex has provided us with a familiar comic book justification, as they do in every war, claiming this one is a noble effort to stop Vladimir Putin. Tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of U.S. neocons for American global hegemony.
I'm not excusing Putin for invading Ukraine; he had other options. The war is Russia's principal response to the reckless neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia, a hostile act....
The Ukraine war began in 2014 when U.S. agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installed a hand-picked pro-Western government that launched a deadly civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine. In 2019, America walked away from a peace treaty.... In April 2022, we escalated the war....
President Biden stated that month that his objective in the war was regime change in Russia. His defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, simultaneously explained that America’s purpose in the war was to exhaust the Russian army and degrade its capacity to fight anywhere else in the world. These objectives had nothing to do with what they were telling Americans about protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty. Ukraine is a victim in this war; it is a victim of the West....
Judging by her bellicose and belligerent speech last night in Chicago, we can assume President Harris will be an enthusiastic advocate for this and other neocon military adventures. President Trump says he will reopen negotiations with President Putin and end the war overnight as soon as he becomes president. This alone would justify my support for his campaign....
Less than two hours after President Trump narrowly escaped assassination, Calley Means called me on my cell phone.... I was delighted when Calley told me that day that he had been advising President Trump. He told me President Trump had been anxious to talk to me about chronic disease and other subjects, and to explore avenues of cooperation.... In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues.
In those meetings, he suggested we join forces as a unity party. We talked about Abraham Lincoln’s "team of rivals." That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately, even fiercely if need be, on issues over which we differ while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance.... [W]e are aligned with each other on... ending the Forever Wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting freedom of speech, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, and getting the U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing, censoring, and surveilling Americans, as well as interfering in our elections....
In case some of you don’t realize how dire the condition is regarding chronic disease, I would urge you to view Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Calley Means and his sister, who was the top graduate of her class at Stanford Medical School.... This is the most important issue. It has the potential to bring us together, so let me share a little bit about why I believe it is so urgent....
Two-thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues. Fifty years ago, that number was less than 1%. We have gone from 1% to 66%.... When my uncle was president, juvenile diabetes was effectively nonexistent. Today, one out of every three kids who walk through a doctor’s office door is diabetic or prediabetic.... There has been an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never saw as a kid: ADD, ADHD, language delay, Tourette’s syndrome, narcolepsy, Asperger’s, autism. In the year 2000, the autism rate was one in 1,500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36 according to the CDC nationally....
Why are we allowing this to happen to our children?... So, what is causing this suffering? I will name two culprits. First, and the worst, is ultra-processed food.... The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, medicine, and environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. The impact on our children's hormones is relentless.... The good news is we can change all this, and we can change it quickly....
I got involved with chronic disease 20 years ago, not because I chose to or wanted to, but because it was thrust upon me. It was an issue that should have been central to the environmental movement....
For 19 years, I prayed every morning that God would put me in a position to end this calamity. The chronic disease crisis was one of the primary reasons for my running for president, along with ending censorship and the Ukraine war. It is the reason I made the heart-wrenching decision to suspend my campaign and support President Trump....
If I am given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis, I promise that within two years, we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically. We will make Americans healthy again....
MAHA.
This is a spiritual journey for me. I reached my decision through deep prayer and hard-nosed logic.... I am 70 years old. I might have a decade to be effective. I cannot imagine a President Harris allowing me or anyone to solve these dire problems. After eight years of President Harris, any opportunity for me to fix the problem will be out of my reach forever.
President Trump told me this is what he wants to be his legacy. I am choosing to believe that he will follow through....
My dad and uncle made such an enduring mark on the character of our nation.... They were able to put their love into the hearts of ordinary Americans and to unify a national populist movement of Americans—blacks, whites, Hispanics, urban and rural Americans—with love, high hopes and a culture of kindness.... That is the spirit with which I ran my campaign and I intend to bring into the campaign of President Trump, instead of vitriol and polarization.... The most unifying theme for all Americans is that we all love our children....
With a final rule published Tuesday in the Federal Register, the Trump administration is ending a five-year-old ban on the practices, which also include shooting swimming caribou from a boat and targeting animals from airplanes and snowmobiles. It will take effect in 30 days. State officials primarily composed of hunters in Alaska argued that the October 2015 regulations ordered by the Obama administration infringed on traditional native hunting practices and were more restrictive than what is permitted on state land....
A massive 200 Billion Dollar Sea Wall, built around New York to protect it from rare storms, is a costly, foolish & environmentally unfriendly idea that, when needed, probably won’t work anyway. It will also look terrible. Sorry, you’ll just have to get your mops & buckets ready!
"Based upon data and reports, the agency is concerned that California’s implementation of federal environmental laws is failing to meet its obligations required under delegated federal programs."
San Francisco officials reject the idea that they have failed to capture objects such as needles because they send sewage and street runoff to the same pipes. This combined discharge is treated at one of the city’s sewage treatment plants, where pollutants are captured or treated before being released to the San Francisco Bay or the Pacific Ocean.
“We have our challenges in San Francisco around homelessness,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s communications director, Jeff Cretan, said in response to Trump’s comments aboard Air Force One. “But in terms of needles flowing into the bay, it’s absolutely ridiculous.”
In terms of excrement flowing into the bay, it’s not absolutely ridiculous.
San Francisco is one of the few major cities with sewers that combine stormwater and sewage flows that is not operating under a federal consent decree.
Drawing on public databases and press reports — including a NPR report in August that “piles of human feces” are now visible on sidewalks and streets in San Francisco — Wheeler noted that even California’s own government has posted studies noting that human waste can increase bacteria levels in water off its beaches.
What happens when our greatest living scientists disagree with our greatest living authority on what bullshit looks like? I guess we'll find out. https://t.co/aoS6KSiL4c
I spent 5 minutes looking at the details of that photograph — which is by Damon Winter — and thinking and talking about it with Meade. I still haven't read anything more than the words you see there, the caption — "Erik Hagerman heads out for his morning ritual, a thirty minute drive into town for coffee and a scone, at his favorite coffee shop in Athens" — and the byline — "Glouster, Ohio" (so the Athens is Athens, Ohio not Athens, Georgia). I really haven't read anything more, even now, as I write this. I just love the image. I feel like saying — creative-writing-ishly — there, now, you make up the story.
I can't get over how much I love that image. I love the way the curve of the ground makes the house look like it's on its own little planet. I think of:
Searching for that image, which I knew I'd put up on the blog before, I found the 2010 post, "Obama plan to land on asteroid may be unrealistic for 2025." I had totally forgotten about that going-to-an-asteroid business, hadn't you? I was skeptical at the time. I wrote the sentence: "Go 5 million miles to paddle your gloved hands across the surface of a rock and stir up a cloud of razor-sharp dust particles that will — once you leave — hang there endlessly."
Searching the blog for the Little Prince, I also came up with this November 2017 post (which has a "Little Prince" image): "Trump and the elephants — what just happened?" ("So you've probably heard that Trump made an announcement that had to do with killing elephants, people got upset — because people love elephants — and then Trump took it back — kind of.") Coincidentally, Trump and the elephants is back in the news this week. "Trump’s cave to elephant and lion hunters" is deplored by the editors of the Chicago Tribune:
Some African governments allow [elephants] to be taken by trophy hunters.... Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tried to discourage this macabre pastime by outlawing imports of elephant trophies from specified countries. African elephants are listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, and the law says their body parts may be brought in only if “the killing of the trophy animal will enhance the survival of the species.”
I think those words "Under President Barack Obama" bring tears to some eyes. There was a time! Once our quills were made to temporarily lie flat, but that time is gone.
But speaking of temps perdu, we left Erik Hagerman, walking down his ranch-house asteroid, nearing the bottom of the paved drive, which ends abruptly, like the end of a dreamlike Obama presidency. He must continue onto the rougher way of the gravel road. Where is he going? To the endless coffee cup and the scone.... Dare I step off the image I've said I love and walk onto the gravel path of the article?
Mr. Hagerman begins every day with a 30-minute drive to Athens, the closest city of note, to get a cup of coffee — a triple-shot latte with whole milk. He goes early, before most customers have settled into the oversize chairs to scroll through their phones. To make sure he doesn’t overhear idle chatter, he often listens to white noise through his headphones. (He used to listen to music, “but stray conversation can creep in between songs.”)
Why? Why drive 30 minutes to get coffee if you don't want the company of other human beings? Surely, the whole point is to "overhear idle chatter"! But he plays "white noise" — nothingness. Not even music, because with music, there are spaces of silence, and "stray conversation can creep in between the songs." Why come down from your asteroid? It can't be the triple-shot latte with whole milk. Is it to truly experience loneliness, to see and need to defend against the others? To really feel your distance, you must approach.
At Donkey Coffee, everyone knows his order, and they know about The Blockade. “Our baristas know where he’s at so they don’t engage him on topics that would make him uncomfortable,” said Angie Pyle, the coffee shop’s co-owner.
I'd skipped to the middle of the article, looking for coffee, and now I need to puzzle out Hagerman's problem:
Mr. Hagerman has also trained his friends. A close friend from his Nike days, Parinaz Vahabzadeh, didn’t think he was quite serious at first and, in the early days of The Blockade, kept dropping little hints about politics.
The new administration compelled her to engage more deeply in politics, not less. She had only recently become a United States citizen, and she was passionate about the immigration debate. She did not let Mr. Hagerman opt out easily. “I was needling him,” she said.
Ah! He built a wall — The Blockade. I will build a great wall — and nobody builds walls better than me... I will build a great, great wall...
How to write about articles you've never read.... makes me think about how to make art about the stray chatter you overheard in the coffee shop...
I see that even Scott Adams — who revels in explaining why whatever Trump does is some genius "master persuader" move — thought Trump blundered ridiculously. Even though (if?) Trump's plan made good sense at the real-world factual level, it was horrible messaging at the emotional level, which is what matters in politics, and he shouldn't have done it. In that view, Trump's quick turnaround was a correction, abandoning rational policy to realign with emotional politics.
But let's undertake the thought experiment: What if it was a good idea to temporarily waft the idea of ending the ban on importing elephant trophies? I've been toying with a few thoughts on the subject.
No elephants actually died. The idea was out there and then squelched, just something to think about. What most people seemed to think about was how great elephants are. We love elephants. They're just about the favorite animal on earth. I mean, what's the competition? Dogs? Giraffes? Human beings? Pandas? We just got all balled up in our warm, enthusiastic love for the gigantic beasts with the big ears and the long trunks.
It's an almost childlike response. Didn't you draw elephants when you were a child? Every drawing of Noah's Ark has an elephant. We've been trying to draw elephants for a long time:
An elephant is the first thing the author tries to draw in "The Little Prince":
We have many soft buttons about elephants. The first thing I saw this morning on Facebook was an old photograph of a little girl sitting on a stool next to an elephant. The elephant is also seated (I guess because getting elephants to sit down was a standard circus trick imposed on captive elephants), and the girl has her arm as far as she can get it around the elephant. The elephant doesn't have its arm around the little girl because elephants don't have arms, and it's unlikely that the elephant loves the little girl. But we see love, because the love is in our heart.
But did you know that just in India, 100 to 300 human beings are killed by elephants every year? I'm reading that at the World Wildlife Fund website:
Elephant-human conflict poses a grave threat to their [that is, the elephants'] continued existence.... When elephants and humans interact, there is conflict from crop raiding, injuries and deaths to humans caused by elephants, and elephants being killed by humans for reasons other than ivory and habitat degradation. Elephants cause damage amounting from a few thousand dollars to millions of dollars. Every year, 100 humans (in some years it may be 300 people) and 40-50 elephants are killed during crop raiding in India....
We have no wild elephants in America, and I notice the "Pleistocene re-wilding" plan (blogged here in 2005) didn't get too far. We don't have elephants trampling cropland and little girls in Nebraska. For us, elephants are like unicorns. They live in Imaginationland. If Trump kills them, he kills out dreams.
Do you think he didn't know that? I'm going to suggest that he knew he could make elephants fill our brain. They are huge, not just in real life, but in our mind. You won't be able to ignore the elephant in the room that is your head space, and Trump put him there. The question is what were you not thinking about when you were thinking about the elephant? It's the most perfect distraction ever. It was so distracting that you didn't even notice what was that thing about Trump that we'd have been harping on if it weren't for the SAVE THE ELEPHANT!!! I think it was Roy Moore molested children, therefore Trump should be impeached.
Yes, we were thinking about big unruly penises, but a human penis looks like nothing compared to the elephant's trunk. Look at that thing! It's huge! It's prehensile!
By the way, "trunk" sounds like "Trump." And elephants "trumpet." Don't you hear them in your head now? Trump and elephants begin to merge in that deep part of your psyche that makes no sense. Suddenly, you love Trump. You were loving elephants, and Trump is saving the elephants now. All is good, the arc of elephant-saving bends toward justice.
... an elephant that in real life might like to trample you to death, but an elephant that exists in your mind as the lovable creature that Trump saved.
When confronted by Jake Tapper over his hypocrisy, today on "State of the Union":
A carbon-free lifestyle?! It's an oxymoron. I love when a guy who has been scolding us for almost 2 decades about our ignorance of science says something so blatantly absurd. If he were "carbon-free," he would not exist as a living physical entity.
I know the claim is something like "carbon neutral." All his carbon emissions are, he claims, "offset." You'll just have to take his word for that and back off, climate deniers.
"... weakening global efforts to combat climate change and siding with conservatives who argued that the landmark 2015 agreement was harming the economy, officials briefed on Capitol Hill said," the NYT reports.
Is Meade right? I see in the article (at Mashable) it says:
By putting up a coal photo, the BLM is simply showcasing another aspect of its wide-ranging mission, Paul Ross, a spokesman for the Interior Department, said in an email. He clarified that Interior Department bureaus and agencies manage their content separately from the main department's accounts.
"We applaud their creativity in getting their message out," Ross said. He added that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke "has made it clear that he will manage our public lands in accordance with President Teddy Roosevelt's mixed use philosophy, where development of our natural resources is done in a way that balances conservation and public access."
ADDED: Something similar came up on March 31st, blogged here, and I made a very similar poll. The overwhelming vote was sabotage. The EPA had put up a "media alert" titled "What They Are Saying About President Trump's Executive Order on Energy Independence" and the first thing on the list was a quote from Sen. Shelley Moore saying "With this Executive Order, President Trump has chosen to recklessly bury his head in the sand...."
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