Putin's Pawn Who Would Be King

Today is the day that I've finally begun to acknowledge that Trump and his allies and collaborators plan to give up Europe to Russian domination. That's probably been clear to other people for some time, but I've been in denial.

It happened to coincide with the day Trump declared himself king, which is something American presidents do not joke about (obviously!). 

This image is from the official White House account:

And this one is from the account of a deputy chief of staff for communication and personnel:

As some on BlueSky have pointed out, Tea Partiers back in 2009 were full of outrage that Obama was acting like a king, as they perceived it. He or his staff never called him a king, of course, and the executive orders he signed were nothing compared to what Trump has done. 

And this takes place while Trump and Vance sell us and Ukraine out to Vladimir Putin.

Imagine going into the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, which will last throughout his term in office, thinking that it's *good* to portray yourself as a king.
Robert Cruickshank

Publicly abandoning American and Ukranian democracy on the same day.
Don Moynihan

Dear Republicans,
Are you all really ok with Trump unilaterally surrendering to Russia? Your silence says you are.
Peter Gleick

Trump calls Zelensky “a dictator without elections” having lauded Putin, a man who hasn’t had a free or fair election in years and who has prevented elections in Ukraine because he invaded... A key aim of Putin has to been to delegitimise the democratically elected Zelensky and the Ukrainian government. He now has the active assistance and connivance of the President of the United States in that effort.
Lewis Goodall

Trump has never met a dictator that he didn't admire. That's how you know he's self-consciously lying about Zelenskyy being a dictator.
Atheopagan Gab

We are living through a genuinely seismic shift in American foreign policy; the end of the established world order.
@bencoates1.bsky.social

 A king, a dictator, a vassal of Putin... he contains multitudes.

Clockwork Elon

More on Elon Musk. These graphics are from the Rachel Maddow Show about a week ago:

So that gives an idea how little of a "mandate" there is for Musk's actions.

This illustration is by Barry Blitt, who frequently graces the cover of the New Yorker:

I've been trying to get details on how "probationary" is defined in federal employment, and as I suspected it's not what one might assume (like a newly hired employee who's been with an agency for less than six months). No... it includes people promoted into a more senior role, so those could be people who've been at an agency for decades. 

I also saw mention of an attorney at one agency who had passed his year-long probation period about a month earlier, who recently got notice that the probation period was changing to two years and that he was therefore being fired. 

A one-year probation period seems pretty extreme, and two years (with no notice) is obviously absurd, and I imagine violates an applicable bargaining agreement.

People are also being fired ostensibly because they have had under-performed at their jobs, when there is no documentation in their personnel files to support that claim, and in fact their files show the exact opposite. That sounds like a raft of lawsuits for illegal firing, which we the taxpayers will have to pay for. How much money will that save?

He Is Stealing from Us

Since yesterday we've heard that Elon Musk is either about to get or has already gotten access to all of our individual tax filing information, stored within the IRS's systems. Of course, he had earlier gotten access to the Treasury Department's payment system.

A few days ago there was news of $400 million to be spent by the State Department for "armored electric vehicles" (original specifically labeled as Teslas). 

Now today Space X has somehow been awarded a contract to overhaul the FAA's air traffic control system, as if that company knows anything about air traffic control, especially compared to the federal employees who have just been fired.

One of the things that keeps running through my head is how little Musk had to pay to get Trump elected, compared to how much he paid for Twitter. It was cheap to buy the election, and it's paying off handsomely so far. 

Make America Polluted Again

People on BlueSky are reminding each other why the Environmental Protection Agency was created (by the Nixon Administration, no less). 

In its first six years, the agency sent out photographers to document the smog and water pollution that existed. Popular Science compiled some of the photos in 2017. The whole archive exists on Flickr.

People commenting on BlueSky gave other examples from the 1970s, including the burning Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, and two images of the Nashua River, added by Minnesota blogger Bob Collins. He wrote a few words about them.

The paper mills in my town dumped untreated chemicals 24/7. Dioxins and dye. Most of the time the river was a bright orange. The Nashua River ran to the Merrimack, and then to the Atlantic, right where the fish we ate were:



The river today:

One commenter described the right-wing push to dismantle the EPA this way:

It reminds me of schizophrenics who stop taking their meds because they feel better mentally but have minor side effects. The environment is clean now, surely we don’t need the EPA any more…but the economic side effects are much less than the real pollution effects.

 

Little Boy Who Cried Chicken Little

It's increasingly hard to pay attention to current climate change news in the midst of the burning trash heap of the U.S. Constitution as administered by Donald Trump and Elon Musk. And the co-presidents will make it harder to get news and analysis as they gut programs at NOAA, NASA, and other agencies, and make the very words "climate change" verboten. 

However, information from many other sources is still out there. The recent, rapid upturn in global temperature is one topic that scientists have been trying to figure out. El Niño, changes in cloud cover decreasing reflectivity, decreases in pollution from intercontinental shipping doing the same…

But for whatever reason, there is new analysis about whether that increase in temperature may result in other rapid changes from reaching a tipping point. Dave Roberts, as usual writing what I am thinking, said,

...do we *know* we'll hit those tipping points, or a cascade of them, at a particular temperature level? No! There's tons of uncertainty in all this, in either direction.

But uncertainty is not our friend here. Do we really want to gamble with such existential stakes?

It's very difficult to discuss the current climate change situation without sounding like a lunatic. We're gambling with the *entire future of our species* and we are doing so with such callow thoughtlessness. It is crazy-making if you dwell on it too much.

That's the thing — and it's similar to the current Trump/Musk situation. Humans (or maybe just those of us in the West?) have such a status quo bias: we hate to sound like Chicken Little or the Little Boy Who Cried Wolf.

But the idea that betting the future of human civilization even if it's a 5% chance... seems off-the-wall to me.

Frederick Douglass

Today I learned two things about Frederick Douglass I didn't know before.

First, that he picked February 14 for his birthday, which was otherwise not known, given his enslaved birth.

Second, that he was the most photographed American in the 19th century. There are more than 160 photos of Douglass, and this was not a fluke. Douglass knew, early on, the power of photography and used his image to fight the stereotypical image of Black people. 

This is one of the earlier images, taken in 1847:

This a good time to learn more about Douglass, who never stopped working to change what seemed like immovable forces in society.

Saving the Vaccine Schedule

To mark the day the cowardly Republicans in the U.S. Senate approved RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, here is the CDC's recommended timing of vaccines for children by age 6:

(Click to enlarge.)

Keep it handy since it will probably be hard to find through any official source, if it isn't already.

I wonder where that QR code goes these days.

Infrastructure, We Love You

Many of us live in the age of human luxury, relative to any of our ancestors. The millionaires aboard the Titanic would have envied most aspects of how a middle class American lives today: our diet, warmth in the winter and coolness in the summer, range of clothing options, health care (despite its many issues)...

I've known this for quite some time, though I can't remember how I came to realize it. Much of our comfort is due to the infrastructure we've built up over generations: some government-run, some public utilities, some privately owned. As John Oliver showed in one of his best pieces almost 10 years ago, infrastructure is not sexy, but it's very necessary. Deb Chachra's book How Infrastructure Works — which awaits me on my to-be-read pile — is another great look at the subject.

Charles Mann, author of 1491, 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet, just published a short essay called We Live Like Royalty and Don't Know It along the same lines. "Every American stands at the end of a continuing, decades-long effort to build and maintain the systems that support our lives," he says.

It's a fraught time to publish such a piece, given the current Musk/Trump demolition derby, which will undermine significant parts of the under-recognized infrastructure Mann refers to. But it's good to know what you're losing, even if you lose it. And motivation to keep it, if it can be kept.

Refusing the Gulf of Obeisance

Yes, we all should know by now, Don't obey in advance. Too many people, businesses, and organizations are failing to follow that directive, however.

Google Maps is one of them, in its decision to relabel the Gulf of Mexico (for U.S. viewers) as the Gulf of America or whatever the heck ridiculous thing Trump decided it should be called.

And now there's news that the Associated Press, which refuses to call the Gulf of Mexico anything but its internationally recognized name, was informed by the White House that its reporter would be barred from an executive order signing because of the naming divergence.

Here's the AP's statement on the subject.

This follows earlier decisions by the Trump administration to replace reporters from legitimate news sources at Pentagon briefings with people from right-wing puppets (Breitbart, OANN, Newsmax, among others). 

Here's one person's version of what we can expect in the future for the name of the gulf:

By Dennis Detwiller.

Warming Stripes

Do you know about warming stripes? This is the image that's usually shown:

It's a visual representation of the increase in global average temperature. And here's the image mapped onto a German bus:

I thought the stripes were pretty well-known, especially among people who are aware of the climate crisis and are doing any kind of climate activism. But lately I've talked to a few different people at climate-related events who didn't know what the stripes mean, or had never even seen them.

So I'm doing my part here to further awareness. 

Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading created the stripes, and then he create a website (linked above) that has versions based on data for various locations around the world. Each stripe represents a year, starting on the left side (as early as 1850, depending on location) and so far ending on the right in 2024. 

The colors represent the annual variation from 0 to 0.9 degrees Celsius above (red) or below (blue) the 1961–2010 average temperature in each year. (In other words... the colors are already weighted toward the higher average baseline of the recent past.)

Hawkins' site doesn't have data for Minneapolis/Saint Paul. The closest city was Milwaukee, so here's that:

Check out your own location, or look at other places around the world. It's enlightening.

Where Federal Employees Work

From Pew Research Center, as of March 2024:

Click to enlarge for better viewing.

So it's easy to see that more than half of federal employees are in the VA (doctors, nurses, support staff) or the military. Note: These numbers shown for the various branches of the military are the civilian employees, not the active duty members of the Army, Navy, and so on.

Homeland Security (a department that's only existed as such since 9/11, and which I would argue could use some downsizing) is the next largest.

After that, Agriculture — one third of which is made up Forest Service employees — is one of the larger remaining departments. 

This chart does not include the U.S. Postal Service, which is an independent federal agency employing an additional 600,000 people. 

The chart comes from this page on the Pew Research Center site, where there is lots of other great information, such as where employees are located and salary ranges. 

Federal employment, excluding the Postal Service, "accounts for 1.5% of total civilian employment, a share that – except for a temporary bump in mid-2020 for the decennial census – has been largely constant for more than a decade." 

The Postal Service's employment numbers have declined by half since their high at the end of the 1990s. I don't  know about you, but I felt better served by the Postal Service back then.

Living in the Clampdown

Yesterday was International Clash Day, which began in 2013 when a radio host at Washington-based station KEXP played their music all day on February 7. Band member Joe Strummer once said the Clash was “…anti-fascist, we’re anti-violence, we’re anti-racist, and we’re pro-creative. We’re against ignorance.”

When I saw mention of the day come through my BlueSky feed yesterday, it included a link to a video of the song "Clampdown" (lyrics here), and a local response from Chris Steller, who noted:

FACT: The Clash debuted "Clampdown" in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Sept. 12, 1979. Photo taken from the front row that day by Mike Reiter:

Thanks to all of these people for improving my knowledge of the Clash in this moment.