FirstCircle

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, although battered by Trump administration attempts to impose massive staff and budget cuts on the agency, nevertheless continues to publish critical climate information, including some dire drought warnings in the spring outlook published March 20 by NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

About 40% of the contiguous 48 states are currently in some stage of drought or abnormally dry conditions, and those are expected to persist in the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest and Southern Plains, according to the March 20 bulletin.

In the past two weeks, water officials in the West warned that, despite near-average snowpack in some parts of the Colorado River’s mountain watershed, the river’s flows are expected to drop below normal, exacerbating tensions between water users in the region. In New Mexico, water experts said the Rio Grande is likely to dry up completely in Albuquerque as early as June. A 2024 study explained how global warming drives a cycle that leads to measured flows in Western rivers and streams being consistently lower than predictions based solely on snowpack measurements.

Other recent research suggests drought risks in North America have been widely underestimated by major climate reports, as rising global temperatures bake the moisture out of plants and out of the soil itself. Annual cycles of decreasing winter snow followed by extreme heat are pushing “a global transition to flash droughts under climate change,” a 2023 study concluded.

The continuing budget resolution passed by Congress March 14 reduces NOAA’s operations, research and facilities budget by 11% from the previous year, and according to congressional sources, it stripped away some of Congress’s budgetary oversight privileges. That could enable the Trump administration to zero out budgets for programs and offices within NOAA and use its ocean and climate budgets as a slush fund.

In addition to supporting jobs that address oil patch pollution, these federal dollars are used on wells that lack any owner to pay for reclamation. Left unplugged, such orphaned oil and gas wells leak huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere and can contaminate local water sources with salty water and benzene.

The Interior Department estimates that there are about 157,000 documented orphaned oil and gas wells nationwide. This figure is likely a dramatic undercount: The Environmental Protection Agency stated in an April 2021 report that there could be as many as 3.4 million abandoned wells nationally.

“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere,” according to a November 2024 report, “the equivalent of over 3.6 million gasoline-powered passenger cars driven per year.”

Orphaned wells represent the final stage in what ProPublica recently described as the oil industry’s “playbook”: When oil wells are no longer productive, large companies sell them off to smaller companies and thereby shed their obligation to plug those wells.

The increasingly marginal wells change hands, eventually landing with operators who lack the financial means to plug them. And when these companies go bankrupt, the wells become orphaned, meaning that the plugging costs then fall on American taxpayers.

Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica detailed cases documented in internal reports and police and court records where staff had beaten, choked, whipped, sexually assaulted and humiliated residents. Those cases included the 2014 beating by staff of a man with intellectual disabilities for failing to pull up his pants. They also included the verbal abuse of a resident with developmental disabilities in 2020, including a threat by staff to break one of his fingers, captured on a recorded 911 line, according to court records, police reports and IDHS watchdog findings.

The reporting also documented a culture of covering up abuse and neglect at the facility, findings later echoed by IDHS’ Office of Inspector General — the watchdog arm that investigates abuse and neglect allegations at state-run facilities and provides agency oversight.

Assuming 128 grams a day and a lifetime in the vicinity of seventy-five years, you’ll leave behind around three and a half metric tons of feces when you die. The volume of your urine will be closer to thirty-eight thousand liters, a bit larger than a standard twenty-foot shipping container and about double the accumulated volume of your flatulence. You’ll have made hundreds of liters of tears, though even for the most emotive of individuals, the portion derived from feelings will represent a minuscule fraction of that number. For all the hullabaloo surrounding ejaculation, the total semen production of even the most alacritous masturbator could be contained handily by a shelf of two-liter soda bottles, and though a period sometimes seems as though it will never end, you could only barely paint a closet with the three or so liters of menses produced during a lifetime. You’ll have made a great deal of mucus, though, close to a hundred thousand liters. And when Atropos snips the thread of your life, the hair from your head, measured as a single strand, will stretch more than three and a half million feet. This is what you will leave behind.

It is an astonishing thing to watch a single man hamstring the United States economy. It is also astonishing to watch Republican senators try to convince the American people that a falling stock market and contracting economy is a good thing. “Our economy has been on a sugar high for a long time. It’s been distorted by excess government spending,” Montana Senator Tim Sheehy told Fox News Channel host Larry Kudlow today. “What we're seeing here from this administration and what you're gonna see from this Congress is re-disciplining to ensure that our economy is based on private investment and free-market growth, not public sector spending.”

In fact, until a brief spike in spending during the coronavirus crisis, government expenditure in the United States as a percentage of gross domestic product has held relatively steady around 20% since the 1950s.

Today, Trump met with Secretary-General Mark Rutte of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) who was eager to get Trump to reiterate U.S. support for NATO. Trump told Rutte that the United States needs control of Denmark’s autonomous territory of Greenland “for international security, not just security—international—we have a lot of our favorite players cruising around the coast, and we have to be careful.” Asked about whether the U.S. would annex Greenland, he answered: “I think that will happen.”

a man in St. Louis, Missouri, was found guilty of shooting his son’s recreational football coach for not giving him enough playing time.

man in Missouri was arrested for the second time for sexual misconduct while trying to have sex with a train seat.

a California assemblyman introduced a bill to make Bigfoot the state’s official cryptid, a man in Detroit accidentally shot himself in the foot while attempting to kill a cockroach, a man in Xianyang, China, ruptured a facial artery while picking his nose, and in Tennessee, a dog climbed into a man’s bed and shot him in the leg.

Christian fascists distort Christianity to sacralize white supremacy, the U.S. empire and capitalism, as well as demonizing those who oppose them as satanic. These heretics — I speak as a dvinity school graduate — deform the Gospels in the same way Jewish fascists deform the Torah. In fact, according to the eschatology of the Christian fascists, Jews in Israel in the “End Times” will be converted to Christianity or exterminated, which exposes their deep antisemitic roots and open embrace of Nazi theorists such as Carl Schmidt and sympathizers such as Rousas John Rushdoony.

Jewish supremacy, like the supremacy of the Christian fascists, is, these fanatics claim, sanctified by God. The slaughter of the Palestinians, who Benjamin Netanyahu compared to the biblical Amalekites, are the incarnate of evil and deserve to be massacred. Euro-Americans in the American colonies used the same biblical passage to justify the genocide of Native Americans. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those inside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism or Christian nationalism speak.

The decision to add the US to the first 2025 watchlist was made in response to what the group described as the “Trump administration’s assault on democratic norms and global cooperation”.

In the news release announcing the US’s addition, the organization cited recent actions taken by the Trump administration that they argue will likely “severely impact constitutional freedoms of peaceful assembly, expression, and association”.

The group cited several of the administration’s actions such as the mass termination of federal employees, the appointment of Trump loyalists in key government positions, the withdrawal from international efforts such as the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, the freezing of federal and foreign aid and the attempted dismantling of USAid.

The organization warned that these decisions “will likely impact civic freedoms and reverse hard-won human rights gains around the world”.

The group also pointed to the administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters, and the Trump administration’s unprecedented decision to control media access to presidential briefings, among others.

Even those who expected the worst from his reelection (I among them) expected more rationality. Today, it is clear that what has happened since January 20 is not just a change of administration but a change of regime—a change, that is, in our system of government. But a change to what?

There is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism—nor is it autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism. Understanding patrimonialism is essential to defeating it. In particular, it has a fatal weakness that Democrats and Trump’s other opponents should make their primary and relentless line of attack.

All the talk now is of how we might defend ourselves without the US. But almost everyone with a voice in public life appears to be avoiding a much bigger and more troubling question: how we might defend ourselves against the US.

The Tesla, the ad promises, "goes from zero to 1939 in three seconds."

The image has been displayed on at least one bus stop in Bethnal Green, London, by a group called Everyone Hates Elon.

Thomas Preston, C. O. Johnson distinguished professor of political science at Washington State University, said in an interview Friday that Baumgartner’s position was “shameful” and the administration’s actions that morning were “disturbing.”

“It’s just an utterly disgraceful comment, and it seems that very few Republicans have any sort of courage or fortitude to actually stand up to what is clearly just a vile and disgraceful performance that we saw today in the White House,” Preston said.

Preston characterized the mineral rights proposal as grossly transactional – pay to use Trump’s fire hose or he’ll let Ukraine burn down – and ultimately a “smokescreen” meant to give Trump an excuse to pull out of Ukraine altogether. He argued acquiring the minerals is significantly more uncertain than Trump has claimed and that there appear to be few guarantees for the security for Ukrainians if they sign a deal.