Week 35
By 
What a week! I am going to have to confine myself to one sentence or less per outrage, there were so many of them. Pedants among you will note that some of these topics actually have more than one sentence. Now you don’t have to say it!
The scariest in terms of what it implies about Donald Trump’s path forward is his willingness to kill people at sea. I’ll probably write a separate post on this. It is wrong in so many ways and dangerous if he widens its application. Seems to me that his personality characteristics are amplifying.
Charlie Kirk is still dead, despite AI replicas and insistence that we all pay homage to this Great American Hero.
Trump’s 80-page encomium to his wonderfulness, with a demand for $15 billion from the New York Times was summarily thrown out by the judge. Trump continues to mostly lose in the lower courts. That means that the lower courts are on our side and might continue to be allies as things proceed.
Ted Cruz (yes, that one!) came out strongly on his podcast against the firing of Jimmy Kimmel. So did a lot of other people, including Republicans. Time to start thinking about how one allies with unpleasant people!
Pete Hegseth wants only the official line printed by news outlets. Others will be excluded. His boss feels that if coverage is “95% negative,” that’s not free speech, amid a lot of other whining. The whine level is really annoying.
Late Friday afternoon, an order came out requirin $100,000 for an H1B visa, and the tech firms scrambled to tell their folks outside the country to get back, posthaste. I do not know much about this order, but it’s supposed to go into effect tonight. I have not seen that anyone has taken this to court, but it’s hard to believe they wouldn’t.
Bobby Kennedy’s anti-vaccine panel showed that they are totally incompetent – didn’t know what statistical confidence intervals are, for only one example – and bollixed up insurance coverage for children under 4. Some of those children will die.
A number of members of Congress, in New York and Chicago that I’m aware of, got arrested or roughed up by ICE.
The world outside the United States continues on its way. One thing that happened there was that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a mutual defense pact. Yesterday Bibi Netanyahu threatened Egypt. No connection between the two.
Last night’s post was intended to be a broad view of the zeitgeist. Some of you got that. Thank you.
I still want to work on a vision of the future, the project I started a few weeks ago. I have the comments. I would like to write scenarios of how life would look if we put all those ideas into action, but that’s not my strength in writing skills. I will do something, maybe even this week.
Follow the court-watchers for the details of the lawsuits. Chris Geidner (LawDork, Bluesky), Roger Parloff (Lawfare, Bluesky), and the Just Security tracker.
As usual, keep it to things that have actually happened, not hypotheticals. What is actually happening is bad enough.
Caring for yourself and loved ones is resistance too. Post your pets. The top photo is of Jose (white and gray) and Luca (orange tabby) listening to and perhaps looking at the owls who live in the adjacent trees, whooo have been very active in the mornings lately. I think the owls are great grays.
174 more weeks to go. What are you doing?
Previous weeks: Week 10, Week 20, Week 30, Week 31, Week 32, Week 33, Week 34