When Is a Commitment Not Really a Commitment?

From a news story about Amazon's "natural" gas power plant planned for Texas, which will generate more greenhouse gas emissions than any other single source in the U.S. It's "needed" because of AI, of course.

The Seattle-based tech giant has acknowledged that rising emissions from AI data centers could get in the way of its climate goals.

"The world looks different now than when we cofounded the climate pledge," said [the spokesperson]. Still, "our commitment hasn't changed"...

Oh, right. Keep saying you have the commitment, while your actions show otherwise. We live in the age of saying one thing and doing another, and no one being held accountable. It definitely helps when the people who own the worst offenders also own the largest media companies. 

The plant's permit allows 33 million tons of C02 into the atmosphere per year. That's more than twice as much as the current worst, a coal-burning power plant in Alabama. 

And of course, that doesn't account for water use, or any other impacts of the data center itself.

Can't Wait to Smell the GLOVE

I heard on NPR on the way home this afternoon that ICE plans to spend our tax dollars to buy millions of dollars worth of shock gloves to put on its storm troopers, so they can shock people into compliance without warning. 

Get this: the company that makes the devices is called Compliant Technology, and the things are an acronym called G.L.O.V.E. (Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter). Bureaucrats and fascists all love a good euphemistic acronym.

This AP story has the details. Quoting that story: 

The manufacturer warns the device should not be used as punishment, against people merely exhibiting “verbal defiance or belligerence” or on high-risk populations such as children, pregnant women or elderly or disabled people.

Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy project director on policing at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the public should have no confidence that ICE officers will use the devices appropriately. She questioned why the devices would be necessary for civil immigration enforcement and noted those getting shocked might have no advance warning.

“ICE spent the last year showing this country they are too quick to use force. Now they will be able to deploy electric shocks with the slight push of a button that maybe nobody else can see them do,” she said. “Introducing gloves that can so easily be used to deliver terrible pain in encounters is a recipe for harm to the public.”

Supporters say the devices are generally used in specific jail and transport situations, rather than broadly to patrol on the streets. They have been used to subdue violent suspects who are refusing to get into squad cars and inmates who are harming themselves and threatening officers, according to Compliant Technologies.

The NPR story, however, said the gloves have been on the market for 10 years — 10 years! — and that while they have been bought by prisons and police departments, they have also been bought by schools. Schools. And even in the supposed intended use locations, does anyone believe that cops and prison guards only use them to get compliance in extreme situations?

The technology should not exist, the company should not exist, and ICE (and DHS) should not exist.
 

Light It Up

Sometimes the stupid from the Trump regime is so extreme it just burns.

I was trying to ignore the fact that his FCC has approved the application of a company that plans to put up a satellite that wants to use a giant mirror to reflect the sun back to Earth, lighting the night sky for reasons I was not going to look into. All I knew was that astronomers and the Dark Skies folks were opposed to it (duh). 

I've been hoping they will get an injunction and stop this sheer idiocy. Maybe they will, but I keep seeing coverage of it so now I know more about it, unfortunately.

Jen Sorensen made a cartoon, and wrote about it in her weekly newsletter:

The company wants to put up 50,000 of these things by 2035. Jen wrote:

For a few years now, the company has been touting the illumination of solar farms at night as the primary reason for the mirrors. Setting aside whether this is feasible or even a priority in a country that is doing its best to undermine solar power, the company is openly promoting other, less noble uses: extending working hours at industrial sites, replacing streetlights in urban areas, and (as I mentioned in the comic) "unforgettable nighttime experiences." Here, have a screenshot from their website:



Is that supposed to be a European city square lit up with a night sun? What part of "light pollution" do these messianic tech bros not understand? What about the people who live in the cities and are trying to sleep there? And we're seriously talking about disrupting the life-sustaining rhythms of the natural world so people can have Instagrammable experiences? 

She recommended this November 2025 Scientific American article, which includes this stunning fact: 

Each [mirror] would be capable of casting a 5 km-wide beam about four times brighter than the full moon down to Earth. 

Imagine how much light a full moon gives. Then think of it being four times brighter, and there being thousands of them in the night sky. Maybe tens of thousands of them, all around the planet.

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Subscribe to Jen's newsletter! 

How Much Is Being Spent on Data Centers?

Christopher Schmidt, who works for Google and is a founding member of the Alphabet Workers Union, posted this thread today on BlueSky:

In 2026, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle plan to spend $725 billion on data center buildout.

I wonder what other things in the economy are happening at that scale. Like, how does this compare to, I dunno, all road-widening projects? Or global solar installations?

It's hard for me to picture what $725B looks like in terms of capital expenditures.

Like, Massacusetts has a $16B 5-year capital plan; expanding that per-capita to the US means something like $260B/year for the combination of all states in the US, so AI capex is 3x larger than all state-level capex spend.

It looks like the 2024 estimate of CapEx for solar installed in the US was $1.61/W, and US solar added 43GW in 2025, so total solar installed at that rate in the US in 2025 was around $69B (nice), so it's around 10 times as much as all US solar installations in 2025.

Total construction on US highway projects in 2025 is estimated at $188B, with ~$50B for expansion projects, so it's 4 times as much as all US highway spending, and 15 times as much as all highway expansion spending. 

He continues with numbers on urban rail, private home construction, and some numbers from other parts of the world. 

Then:

Total outlays for physical capital by the US government in 2025 were expected to be $463B as of March 2025. So the data center investment by hyperscalars is expected to be 50% higher than all US federal government physical capital investments combined.

So in 2026, the $725B capex to be spent on data centers:
 - 40% more than new housing construction.
 - 50% more spending than the US federal government.
 - ~3x US state capital spend.
 - 8x all of Africa infrastructure.
 - 5x all global rail.
 - 4x all US highway spend.
 - 10x US solar spend.

He ends by comparing with the boom and bust of U.S. railroad expansion, 1867–1873, which led to the devastating Panic of 1873.

Hallucinated Citations and the Matthew Effect

A month or so ago, I heard about a study that found 85% of LLM-hallucinated citations in scientific article preprints were also in the later journal versions. That means they were not caught by peer review. Bad, right?

It gets worse. The fake citations also disproportionately gave credit to male scholars, who already have many citations. In the BlueSky post where I saw the study mentioned, this was called "a fake-citation Matthew effect."

I had never heard of the Matthew effect, so looked it up. The term goes back to 1968. Robert Merton and Harriet Zuckerman named it (ironically, Merton is the one usually credited with it). 

The name comes from the Parable of the Talents from the Gospel of Matthew in the Bible. In general, it's the tendency for the rich to get richer, but in academia, it's the way "eminent scientists will often get more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher, even if their work is similar; it also means that credit will usually be given to researchers who are already famous."

So the fact that LLM-generated fake citations credit more-established, male scholars is just one more thing to hate about them. They can't even hallucinate fairly.

Sickening Incompetence, Denialism

Two adjacent posts in my BlueSky feed just now:

Five cases of New World screwworm have now been confirmed in the U.S., Texas has declared an emergency, and Canada immediately restricted livestock imports. Most people had never heard of screwworm until last week (or maybe just now). That's because we eradicated it from the U.S. in 1966.
Your Local Epidemiologist

Camp East Montana in El Paso is currently under quarantine following a measles outbreak and cases of tuberculosis.  
Jeff Abbott @palabrasdeabajo.bsky.social

Combine that with the ebola news from Congo as part of the ongoing public health crisis caused by stopping USAID funding for HIV and other chronic illnesses, and reports of RFK Jr.'s total disengagement and the vacancies and acting figures in top roles within our U.S. health infrastructure, and we have a perfect set of circumstances to sicken and kill many people, all while wreaking lots of economic damage along the way.

Oh and then there's the recent raw milk news. As Adam Serwer said today on BlueSky, 

The raw milk thing is proof that you can trick conservatives into literally eating shit and liking it.

But how different is from vaccine denialism, really? They're both just different forms of the naturalistic fallacy. 

Taking a Stand Against a Giant Data Center... in Utah

Thanks to Bill Lindeke for pointing me to this Guardian article on a giant Stratos data center that was recently approved by commissioners in a Utah county. It would be larger than Manhattan Island and will use 9GW of electricity. That's more than all of the electricity Utah currently uses. Its Shark Tank celebrity backer says they'll build their own clean energy to add to the grid, but he somehow doesn't seem to know that fossil gas is not "clean."

The data center will also, of course, use a large amount of water in a state that is not known as a water paradise, and has specifically been in a drought recently.

And get this: 

The network of industrial-scale fans needed to cool the datacenter’s hot pipes will result in so much waste heat that it could raise daytime temperatures in the surrounding Hansel valley by 2F to 5F (1.1C to 2.7C) and night-time temperatures by 8F to 12F (4.4C to 6.6C), according to an analysis by Rob Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University.

Not surprisingly, there has been huge push back from residents against the build. They have filed for

a referendum to reverse the commissioners’ approval of Stratos. If the group is able to collect 5,422 signatures from registered voters in the county in the next 45 days, the project approval will go to a vote in November.

Utah's governor, Spencer Cox, is quoted as saying, "Industry* is our state’s motto," but also that he will make sure to "require that the Stratos project doesn’t harm the Great Salt Lake or raise power bills."

His waffling sounds a lot like Minnesota Republicans promising that mining in or near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area won't affect the water there or in nearby communities, as they work to please corporate interests and billionaire owners. 

How will they guarantee that? The answer is, they won't. They'll let the project go forward and then hope people forget, once it's in place.

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* Industry, as in the Utah motto, did not mean modern-day corporate industry. When it became the motto, it would have meant something closer to the original meanings of the word: habitual diligence or effort, which came from the Latin industria, which meant diligence, activity, or zeal. 

Kind of the opposite of how people use AI. 

Line Goes Straight Up

George Pearkes, a finance guy who makes a lot of interesting graphs, posted this to BlueSky yesterday:

Absolutely insane numbers on data center buildout. I haven’t vetted these but they’re about right based on memory/back of the envelope:

Be sure to click to enlarge and read the labels on those variously colored lines.*

Sure, the 2026 dotted line is planned data centers, but even the 2025 line — which represents stuff that is already built — is bananas. And that's just about money spent, not about who the AI run through the data centers will benefit. 

In response in Pearkes's thread, a guy named Marc Maxmeister spoke for me with this: 

Interesting to recognize the Marshall Plan as being so big, so fast, and so effective. US rebuilt Western Europe in half a decade and we haven't seen any regional wars there since then. The prosperity influx demilitarized a region. That's success.

Here are a couple of other related pieces:

An article I've been saving for way too long in an open tab: We suspected data centers were creating an energy crisis for Virginia. Now it’s official. If you haven't been to Northern Virginia, particularly the part west of Dulles Airport, in the past 10 years or so… it's dominated by huge data centers. They know whereof they speak.

From MinnPost just this week: Minnesota Democrats (and a few Republicans) are fighting to ban non-disclosure agreements between local officials and big corporations that want to build data centers. Yes, that's right, elected county and city officials — who are subject to open-meeting laws and the Freedom of Information Act — have been signing non-disclosure agreements with big "anonymous" companies developing mystery projects that somehow always turn out to be data centers. Which none of the residents of the counties and cities want. Go figure!

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* The point of this post is to talk about the travesty of data center construction compared to infrastructure investments like the Marshall Plan, the railroads, or the interstate system — much as I might have problems with some of those. But I can't help noting I find myself pretty shocked that the F-35 fighter jet program cost substantially more than the Apollo program. 

Big Boats Gotta Spew, See?

There's so much bad news, I was ignoring this story I kept seeing in my BlueSky feed: "Did U.S. bully tactics kill climate measure?" It was a gift-linked story, which sometimes are wonky when viewed on my phone, and I thought, What's one more climate bad news story from the Trump regime? They're all bad, I know enough, so I didn't click on it.

But then it showed up as a reprint in today's Star Tribune so I read it. (Here's a gift link to the New York Times.)

The climate measure in question was, in effect, the first global carbon tax, and it was all agreed upon except the final vote. It would have fined the worst-polluting cargo ships, heading off the increases anticipated in their output by 2050.

The Trump regime, of course, wants more pollution. None of us are surprised by that at this point, but it's the tactics they used in this case that are notable. 

They threatened primarily poorer and smaller countries — all of which had previously planned to vote for the fines — with revocation of port access for their ships and sailors, financial penalties, blacklisting of diplomats, and revocation of personal visas. Marco Rubio personally called people in several of the countries.

And now, of course, the regime denies the strong-arm tactics they used. Lying cat says...



Here are a couple of choice quotes from the article:

• The regime opposed the fines because "activist-driven climate policies ... would burden American consumers." Unlike, of course, Trump's tariffs. Those don't burden American consumers at all.
• "Chris Wright, the energy secretary, said he and other Trump administration officials were told the approval of the maritime fee was a foregone conclusion, and took it as a challenge. Early on, State Department officials recognized the shipping fee as a winnable battle that would excite Mr. Trump." Exciting Trump — that's the goal of people in our government. Since he is a toddler, as we know.
• The regime dared to release a statement calling the fines a "European-led neocolonial export of global climate regulations." When everyone knows, many of the most important leaders of global climate efforts have been people from previously colonized countries — the ones most in peril from global warming. And the neocolonial United States calling anyone else neocolonial is rich, indeed.
• The Energy Department spat out the phrase "climate alarmists" in one of its victory statements, made after the fine was voted down. I try to wrap my head around those words. How does the word "alarm" which is neutral or maybe even a good word for it get turned into a negative when you put the suffix "ist" onto it?

Separately... but possibly of use in this fight, a group called Oilfield Witness has developed cameras that can see emissions that are invisible to the human eye. Their optical gas imaging (OGI) camera is calibrated to detect hydrocarbons:

I wonder if such a camera, trained on these cargo ships, would help in the future fight to reinvigorate this carbon tax. As well as in fighting the natural gas fracking fields Oilfield Witness intends them for.

Steve Jobs, Memento Mori

In my early 20s, my two brothers-in-law who now haven't spoken for 30 years were still on good terms. The three of us stayed up late one night for a college-like bull session, talking about the meaning of life. We got onto the subject of mortality and I remember one of them saying something like, "I can't imagine not being here. How can it all just end for me?"

That came to mind this morning when I was thinking about our current set of Silicon Valley tech villains pushing us to supposed "artificial intelligence" and its required building of giant data centers everywhere.

There's increasing evidence that AI is a boondoggle, and the billions of dollars they have all been throwing at it will be money down the drain.

I think they could have figured this out long ago — since they are supposedly super-duper smart — so why are they all so fervently motivated?

We have heard from some who think Elon Musk is working toward a day when he (and his #1 son) will be translated into the cloud. I don't think he's the only tech lord who wants to do that.

This kind of plan fits with the tech lords' utter disregard for climate change, and their active contributions to it through their lifestyles and current push to build data centers that suck reservoirs of water and outcompete small cities for electricity. Who needs a livable planet if you've translated to the cloud, and all the peons are dead?

I'm not sure who will be left to tend the machines that house their embodiments. What will those  data center machine-tenders eat? But these tech guys don't seem like they're planners for things like that, especially in the long term.

They weren't the first ones to think of this acceleration to the singularity. Ray Kurzweil, curse his name, published an influential book on it in 2005. But I think the death of Steve Jobs in 2011 is what pushed them all over the edge.

It was a memento mori to all of them.

Google hired Kurzweil the next year to start working on AI/LLMs, according to Kurzweil's Wikipedia page. And we've been paying the price ever since through enshittification and slop.

But they will die, as we all do. It can all "just end," as my brother-in-law has come to realize, now that he's in his late 60s and has buried both of his parents and a brother. And if you can't face that fact, feel free to believe in heaven if that helps. 

Just don't destroy the time we all have on earth to make up for your mental weakness — as the tech lords are.

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I've never appreciated the intended use of the phrase "memento mori." Rather than just the bare bones of what the words say, according to this site, in Roman times it was a reminder to "great men that regardless of their exploits and glories, the epilogue would be the same for everyone.... when a victorious general was celebrated in procession through the streets of the city, he was also reminded of his death to prevent him from incurring excessive pride."

What's a Hundred Feet, Anyway?

I've flown in and out of Washington National Airport (DCA) a number of times, mostly in the 1980s when I lived in D.C. It always felt a bit hairy, since the planes access the runways very low over the Potomac, but I had faith in the systems and people that controlled the space and machines. 

That used to be true, I think. But maybe not.

It's now known that the January 29 mid-air crash that killed 67 people was the result of a military helicopter flying higher than it was supposed to, so that it was in the airspace allocated to commercial planes. 

And why was that? At an National Transportation Safety Board hearing yesterday, a military expert testified that the types of altimeters used in their helicopters are only accurate within plus or minus 100 feet. And the helicopters in that airspace are not supposed to exceed 200 feet.

So.

That seems like a rather wide margin of error for such a low clearance. 

The collision occurred at 278 feet, within the margin of error but also within the airplane's designated space.

Has no one ever realized this before? Has it been only luck that has prevented this from happening before?

Shrug emoji, I guess. Whatever.

Cars! Cars! Cars!

Another negative effect of the Republican Murder Bill that got no attention:

Car buyers will now be allowed write off up to $10,000 per year in interest they've paid on auto loans. Because subsidizing car- (or SUV-, or light truck-) driving is what we really need to be doing, right now! Right!

Bike commuters, on the other hand, had their $240-per-year benefit cut.

The new deduction for car loans is estimated to cost $57 billion over 10 years (2025–2034), which is about three times as much spent on bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure by the federal government in the last 35 years.

This, of course, is heaped on top of the cuts to clean energy and increased subsidies to oil and coal. COAL!

Cars Are Weapons

A Hennepin County jury found Derrick Thompson guilty on Friday not just of criminal vehicular homicide, but also of third degree murder. Thompson killed five young women two years ago with his rented SUV, after exceeding 110 mph on Interstate 35W in South Minneapolis, then leaving the highway at about 95 mph, running a red light off the ramp, and smashing into the car carrying the young women, who had been preparing for the wedding of a friend the next day.

At the trial, Thompson's attorney argued in his closing statement that if Thompson had been driving the car (which the lawyer did not concede), the driver's actions were merely reckless and did not indicate the required depraved indifference to human life required for a murder conviction.

This seems obviously absurd to me, since traveling over 100 mph on an urban highway and almost 100 on a ramp and then running a red light on a city street on a summer evening clearly requires depraved indifference to any human life, including your own. However, the attorney was not far wrong in his estimation of what a jury might think of his argument.

According to today's coverage of the trial outcome in the Star Tribune,

...data from the Fourth Judicial District [shows] there have only been three convictions for third-degree murder involving a car crash in Hennepin County in the last decade, and only once did the conviction come from a jury.

And I'll bet alcohol or drugs were used by the driver in all three of those cases... neither was involved in Thompson's case. Juries (and even judges) just don't want to convict unimpaired drivers of heinous behavior. They don't see it as heinous.

The Hennepin County prosecutor's office had offered Thompson a plea deal late last year: five counts of criminal vehicular manslaughter with a sentence of 32 to 38 years, which would have meant he got out in 21 to 25 years with good behavior. Now he's been convicted of 10 counts of manslaughter and five of third-degree murder.

Seems like Thompson made a bad bet on going to trial. The assumption of motornormativity on his part or his lawyer's part didn't pay off for once.

Running a red light at almost any speed, but definitely if above the speed limit, should automatically equal depraved indifference to human life. The burden should be on the driver/offender to show it isn’t.

Cars are weapons, and society should start treating them as such.

We Don't Consent

I don't know when I first said it, but it was a long time ago: the user agreements and terms of service that we all have to agree to use programs, apps, and social media platforms are all based on the concept of contract law, and contract law, in turn, is based on the idea that contracts are made between equal parties. However, it's completely obvious that the parties in this case are not comparable: you have to agree if you want to use the program.

Anil Dash just published an essay called The Internet of Consent that addresses this problem, and discusses how it has developed over the past 20 years or so. AI (LLM) hoovering up everything makes it all even worse.

Enshittification comes into it, too.

A Way to Undermine Vaccines

I can't keep up with all of the b.s. coming out of RFK's Department of "Health" and Human Services. He said yesterday that the Biden administration was responsible for child trafficking, blabbed about the MMR vaccine containing aborted fetus debris, and now there's a new report lying about transgender treatments. I'm sure there have been seven other things in the past week I'm not mentioning.

But the thing I wanted to call attention to was the news from a few days ago that his FDA plans to require new clinical trials for the Novavax covid vaccine with each update. Novavax is the one covid vaccine that is not based on mRNA technology, which the vaccine fear-mongers supposedly had no problem with, and updates are the equivalent of an annual flu vaccine change. Such vaccines have not required new trials in the past.

The former vaccine chief for FDA said there's no reason to do this, and if it became a requirement, "you'd always be doing clinical trials and you'd never have a vaccine that was up to date."

Which, one assumes, is likely the point of the requirement from RFK and the Trump administration: to undermine vaccine efficacy and faith in vaccines. 

Over on Science-Based Medicine, Dr. Jonathan Howard wrote a scathing post about the same topic, pointing out that the new head of FDA, Dr. Martin Makary, was a fan of Novavax, but now that he's in the Trump administration, he no longer is. And that while he and his compatriots working with RFK claim to want the "gold standard of science" (random, controlled trials), they really just want to support their predetermined results... which sounds a lot like RFK's announcement about autism. 

Big shock.

Screaming Defensiveness

As I've stood along a state highway demonstrating in front of a Tesla showroom for most of the Saturdays since mid-February, I've noticed that the drivers of a particular type of vehicle are by far the most likely to give us the finger or yell at us.

If you need to guess what general category that type of vehicle falls into, this is a hint:

Some of my fellow demonstrators were just commenting on their assessment of this fact two days ago. I didn't bring it up, I swear.

Tonight, Dave Roberts posted this on BlueSky, and it lines up with these drivers' need to

The bloated pickup truck really does perfectly represent the US right now. It's "powerful," in a blundering, thoughtless way that hurts innocent bystanders, but it's antiquated, fits poorly in modern cities, and above all *screams* defensiveness and overcompensation. 

I just smile and wave at the angry drivers and hope they don't run us down.

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Oh, and all this reminds me of one of my past posts.

Naming the Companies

Today I learned, via Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social, that

these are the companies that we must force governments to dismantle if our kids are going to have a mostly habitable planet:

I hear all the time, here in the West, about four of the five in the bottom chart. (I've never heard of TotalEnergies, but Wikipedia tells me it's the French equivalent of the others on the orange chart.)

But I never hear about any of the five in the red chart and their much more significant output. The closest one hears is reference to "the Saudis" as oil producers, which I suppose is the same thing as Saudi Aramco.

Interesting how invisible they are in American media.

Disordered Discourse

Elliot Higgins, founder and creative director of Bellingcat, posted a thread on BlueSky yesterday that summed up our current communication dysfunction in a way I hadn't thought of it before, with more explanatory power:

What we’re witnessing in America is what happens when disordered discourse captures a political party, then the state itself. The Republican Party was the first to fall - abandoning truth for conspiracy, ideology for grievance, and policy for performative outrage.

Now, with its grip on institutions, disordered discourse isn’t just shaping politics - it has overtaken those in power, who now govern as if manufactured narratives were reality, eroding the state and democracy itself from within.

Disordered discourse doesn’t just govern through those who believe its manufactured narratives - it forces even those who don’t to submit. To stay in power, they must either bend the knee to the lies or become the next target of the machine they helped create.

America is not unique. Any democracy can fall to state capture by disordered discourse if there’s no systematic response. This isn’t something we can fact-check our way out of - it’s deeper than misinformation. It’s about power, identity, and the narratives that shape reality itself.

We’re living through a fundamental shift in how discourse is created. Institutions once shaped a shared reality through discourse - imperfectly, but with structure. Now, that reality has splintered. In its place, engagement-driven ecosystems amplify whatever resonates, truth optional.

The result? A fragmented public consciousness where competing realities coexist, each self-reinforcing and resistant to correction. When truth is no longer a shared foundation, power shifts to those who control the most compelling narrative - no matter how detached from reality it is.

Democracies weren’t built around this. They depend on a shared reality, however contested, to function. When governance becomes a battle between competing fictions rather than policy and truth, institutions designed for debate and compromise become tools for enforcing narratives.

The end result is what we’re seeing in the U.S. - a democracy struggling to function because its institutions are trapped in disordered discourse. Governance isn’t about solving problems; it’s about demonstrating loyalty to manufactured narratives.

If you think this can’t happen outside the U.S., consider that we’re all subject to the same forces - social media-driven discourse, collapsing institutional trust, and the rise of narratives untethered from reality. It’s a systemic vulnerability in every democracy.

We need to consider what this means for our democracies at the most fundamental level. If governance is shaped by engagement-driven narratives over reality, how do institutions survive? If truth is irrelevant to power, what stops disordered discourse from capturing the state everywhere?

Disordered discourse thrives on systemic drivers: engagement-driven algorithms, collapsing trust in institutions, news influencers shaping reality through identity, and the erosion of shared discourse. These forces don’t just distort politics - they reshape democracy itself.

Higgins followed up with a thread on solutions, including examples that exist in other countries. While those types of solutions are clearly what's needed, they sound like pie-in-the-sky, given the situation the U.S. is in currently, with the Right undermining the basic idea of public education as liberal indoctrination.

A bit later in the day, Dave Roberts from the Volts podcast posted a thread that seemed to be in response, but wasn't:

Hi, broken record here. The same degraded information environment that led to Trump being elected is still in place. Most people still aren't being told what's happening, who's at fault, or what the effects will be. And there's zero reason to think traumatic events will "wake people up."

People want to think that trauma -- being fired from their job, losing medicaid, whatever -- will "force people to face reality," but that's not how people work. When people face trauma they turn to voices they trust to tell them who's doing it, and why, and what it means.

Trauma does not tell its own story. Yes, people will get angry, they'll be unhappy, but they will not just automatically know who's to blame or why it happened or how to fix it. They won't magically "wake up" to that knowledge unless *someone tells them*. Events will not do dems' communications for them.

Start solving the info problem -- figure out how to get good information and pro-social narratives in front of ordinary people, repeatedly -- or all else is lost. No deus ex machina is coming. Dems solve this or America keeps going down the road it's on.

There's no sign that the Democratic leadership has gotten that message, I hate to say.

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.

 

Clearing the Northern Forests

While preparing the January BlueSky summaries, I omitted this post from Vince Mpls because I wanted to say more about it:

January 1899: Minneapolis becomes the nation's largest sawmilling center, as northern Minnesota lumber production reaches a frenzied peak, with the average annual cut of pine 2.3 billion board feet. By 1930, less than 1/3rd of the state's trees remain, very little of that virgin growth.

He included these two photos:

Saint Paul had its share of sawmilling and wood-processing industry at the time as well. Wisconsin was hard at the same kind of work.

Of course, the photos Vince shared were what grabbed me first — the idea that all that lumber was hauled out with horses, especially. 

But then the last sentence hit: "By 1930, less than 1/3rd of the state's trees remain, very little of that virgin growth." And I thought of how we in the global north criticize people in the Amazon and other rain forest areas for cutting down trees today, when we cleared a vast forest from the entire eastern half of the U.S. in just decades. 

It brought me back to one of my earliest posts, Cutting Down the Last Tree, Selling the Last Drop of Water.

It also reminded me that there was an alternative, as demonstrated by the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin. Since 1908 they've been practicing sustainable forestry on their land, and operating a sawmill to process the wood.

There could have been another way, one that wouldn't have been so voracious, sure, and wouldn't have fed the profits of speculators and nascent corporations. We would have had a different history.

I think we can all see that it would have been better for the ecosystem, both human and beyond.