The right has been skeptical of the State Department since the McCarthy era when they claimed it was crawling with commies. So it surprised me that we haven’t seen this until now:
A draft of a Trump administration executive order proposes a drastic restructuring of the State Department, including eliminating almost all of its Africa operations and shutting down embassies and consulates across the continent.
The draft also calls for cutting offices at State Department headquarters that address climate change and refugee issues, as well as democracy and human rights concerns.
The purpose of the executive order, which could be signed soon by President Trump, is to impose “a disciplined reorganization” of the State Department and “streamline mission delivery” while cutting “waste, fraud and abuse,” according to a copy of the 16-page draft order obtained by The New York Times. The department is supposed to make the changes by Oct. 1.
Shutting down embassies across Africa seems particularly stupid. Do they think Africa is going away ? Or are they just planning to wage war against the whole continent? I can’t imagine why anyone thinks this is a good idea.
And yeah, why should we concern ourselves with climate change and refugee issues? Those are totally irrelevant issues to the United States Of America. Great idea.
We’ve learned in the last few days that the TV host pete Hegseth is having a difficult time handling the job over at the Pentagon. And now we’ve learned that the Deputy FBI Director, which used to be a serious job for a long term professional FBI employee since he is the one tasked with the day to day management of the bureau, is spending his time “being a man” with the boys at Quantico rather than learning how to do the job for which he’s totally unqualified. It seems like a pattern.
Uhm… no. It’s clear. He’s a young MAGA cultist, gun nut known for his extremist views. Considering the history of young, MAGA cultist gun nuts who commit violence I don’t think it’s a stretch to eschew going the extra mile to make sure you don’t make any assumptions about motive. They could have written the article without saying the motive is “a mystery.”
Ikner had just transferred to Florida State University from Tallahassee State College and enrolled this semester as a political science major. He remains hospitalized with serious but non-life-threatening injuries after he was shot by law enforcement, police said.
As the investigation widened Friday into what led to the gunfire, students who knew the accused gunman described him as a troubled young man who openly talked about having a weapon.
“He would joke about mass violence,” said Lucas Luzietti, who shared a national government class with Ikner when he was at Tallahassee State College. “And he did talk about how he used guns and had access to them.”
“He espoused the election denialism belief that Joe Biden was not the legitimate president, he said that Rosa Parks was in the wrong, he also talked about how Black people are ruining his neighborhood and Stonewell was bad for society,” Luzietti said. “He would also talk about how multiculturalism is dangerous.”
Reid Seybold, a senior at FSU who said he first met Ikner at Tallahassee State, recalled Ikner being asked not to return to a political discussion club at his former college because of “white supremacist rhetoric and far-right rhetoric.”
He had a tumultuous childhood in which his parents fought over custody. He ended up changing his name (but unlike JD Vance, only once.) I suppose it’s possible that he was just mad about his grades or something but his extremism indicates that his motive is very likely not “a mystery.”
JD Vance is such a phony shape-shifter that I don’t believe that he’s sincere about being a Catholic convert any more than anything else. His visit to the pope, ostentatiously carrying his kid around to prove his natalist bonafides, was ludicrous. It was widely reported that the Church dispatched the pope’s second in command to meet with him and they had an “exchange of opinions.”
Pope Francis was absent from Vance’s conversation with Cardinal Pietro Parolin. However, the statement said there was “an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners.”
It called for “serene collaboration” between the White House and the Catholic Church in the United States—a seeming hint to the tensions that have brewed between the two since President Donald Trump took office.
A statement from Vance’s office about the meeting, however, did not include migration among the topics of conversation.
After the encounter, Francis was wheeled out to the Loggia of Blessings overlooking St. Peter’s Square to cheers from a crowd of 35,000. He offered a silent blessings and a short, breathless greeting before Archbishop Diego Ravelli, master of apostolic ceremonies, read aloud Francis’s Easter speech — known as an Urbi et Orbi, from Rome to the World — which presented a worldview in stark contrast with the Trump administration’s.
“How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized and migrants,” Ravelli read, without mentioning a country or person. In a later passage, he said, “I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear which only leads to isolation from others, but rather to use the resources available to help the needy, to fight hunger and to encourage initiatives that promote development. These are the ‘weapons’ of peace: weapons that build the future, instead of sowing seeds of death.”
Basically, the Catholic Church told Vance to fuck off. Not that Vance cares one way or the other. This was all performative “traditionalism” for the rubes. But it should say something to the Catholic faithful who might believe that Trump and Vance are doing God’s work.
TPM’s Josh Marshall issued a series of whatever-they’re-calleds on Bluesky last night that merit a closer look and more validation. There doesn’t seem to be anything new on this at TPM this morning, so….
2/ Keep those caveats in mind. I relay these takeaways essentially as heads ups of things to look out for. In the retribution dept the reorg permanently downsizes the US Embassy in Canada to a sub-skeleton crew. “no more than 10 consular officers” etc. Similarly drastic cuts to all other personnel.
3/ It appears to essentially abolish what we now know as the foreign service. Immediately ends the foreign service exam. Institutes new system based on things like “demonstrated charisma”, “verbal authenticity”, “alignment with President’s foreign policy vision”, et al.
4/ Embeds DOGE-centric scrutiny of all spending; ends generalist global rotation in favor of four regional corps for the world – says new statute will be needed for that but start now anyway; dramatically reduces staff of Dept at home and abroad; shuts down several pages worth of offices at State.
5/ Bureau of Humanitarian Affairs inherits whatever is left of USAID. There’s a lot more there but those are some toplines.
I’ve got a couple of retired FSOs nearby who will be interested to hear that there is talk (likely from Project 2025 mastermind Russ Vought) of zeroing out their beloved diplomatic corps and friends still in its employ.
Scarecrow: I haven’t got a brain… only straw. Dorothy: How can you talk if you haven’t got a brain? Scarecrow: I don’t know… But some people without brains do an awful lot of talking… don’t they?
A commenter notes that Trump lacks the authority to kill off the Foreign Service. But then Trump does an awful lot of things he doesn’t have the authority to do, doesn’t he?
Marshall replies:
There has already been an awful lot of coloring outside the guardrails by the Trump 2.0 administration. So much so that a 7-2 U.S. Supreme Court majority felt the need to put the ol’ quaheedus on Trump-Miller-Bondi efforts to spirit away yet another batch of non-citizen(?) detainees to Nayib Bukele’s “CECOT holiday resort” without so much as a “But Judge, they’ve got the wrong man.”
Suddenly, Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Clarence Thomas) is concerned that his colleagues on SCOTUS are not following established procedures in ordering Donald Trump to stop violating established procedures.
Alito complains that “issuing an order at midnight” to stop Trump 2.0 from jetting its Venezuelan prisoners out of reach of constitutional “due process” protections was both unnecessary and inappropriate. It sure as hell would have been appropriate if the prisoner in question was Thomas billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow, don’t you think?
It seems our would-be monarch was peeved at the “UnSupreme Court” majority. A showdown is surely coming.
As OldDudeFella observes, “Our country is already being run by criminals.”
Photo by author from April 19 “No KIngs” rally in Asheville, NC.
A few of us were out in the streets on Saturday at hundreds of anti-Donald Trump rallies across the U.S. and abroad. There were many discouraging words about our would-be monarch. (Not enough is made of the fact that as much as Trump loves to cosplay as a gilded nobleman, there is nothing of nobility in him.)
Social media lit up, of course, but the press this morning took little notice that from coast to coast opposition to the return of a king was visible and boisterous. “Nationwide protests” are nowhere on The New York Times front page. Look closely and you might spot 11 words about them at the bottom left of The Washington Post’s. (I’ll throw in a few more photos from Asheville’s rally below.)
It is of course a busy news and cultural weekend. Today is Easter Sunday, celebrated by Christians around the world. The U.S. Supreme Court issued an order early Saturday for the Trump administration to stand down plans to fly more ICE prisoners to a concentration camp in El Salvador.
Major outlets are still watching to see if Trump 2.0 will heed the court’s injunction or launch another round of Calvinball noncompliance-as compliance. And Saturday was the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution with those shots fired at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. Somehow, seeing living Americans revolt against a man crazier and meaner (in several adjectival senses) than King George III did not attract as much media attention.
Previewing Ken Burns’s new series on the American Revolution, Slate’s Henry Grabar begins with a quote from Thomas Paine: “The strength and powers of despotism consist wholly in the fear of resisting it.” (Review Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s comments on fear of speaking out.)
Grabar considers how the American Revolution, once considered “a conservative inheritance” now faces pushback from the left. Toby Sackton, a Lexington celebration organizer, hopes to avoid “a commemoration that doesn’t recognize the parallels between what was happening in 1775 and some of the things we’ve seen in the first hundred days of Trump.”
I met a former Republican at our local rally who sees clearly the parallels. John Tandler, a.k.a. The Soapbox Patriot, has begun traveling the U.S. and delivering a short speech in colonial garb that draws out those parallels.
In a speech in nearby Concord on Saturday morning, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey planned to make the parallel to current events explicit: “We see things that would be familiar to our revolutionary predecessors: the silencing of critics, the disappearing of people from our streets, demands for unquestioning fealty… Together, we will protect the freedoms that were won here. We will defend the rule of law. We will claim our freedom of speech. And we will not be intimidated by the words or actions of a would-be king.”
But sometimes the source material is so strong that it doesn’t need any editorializing. As the journalist Josh Marshall put it on this week about a different 200-year-old document: “Anyone who has read the Federalist Papers in their totality knows that somewhere between a third and a half of the essays are very specifically talking about Donald Trump.”
One group of people who wouldn’t? Immigrants seeking citizenship, who are required to study the document for their citizenship test. Some will be in Lexington on Tuesday, when the 250thbirthday of that first skirmish concludes with a new tradition: a naturalization ceremony.
Lost in the current focus on the American Revolution is the fact that it is the history of only part of this continent-spanning nation. A friend raised out West reminds me that by the time the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, far to the west, Santa Fe, New Mexico was already the colonial seat of New Spain. Spanish, French, British and Russian colonizers of the west coast and Pacific Northwest were already writing their own history, one that’s not taught to school children. As if the only important American stories happened in the original colonies.
It is why when people complain to me about “the Democratic Party,” I might remind them that there is no The Democrats. There are 57 diverse party organizations (50 states, the territories, the District of Columbia and Democrats Abroad). The western states trickled into the union over nearly two centuries, each with their own charters and bylaws, local histories, and local languages and customs (not all of them European). The Democratic National Committee may organize the quadrennial convention and administer the national voter file, but it is not the One Ring that rules them all.
What unifies us, when it does, is a set of governing principles, equality under law, and faith in a more perfect union that is now under greater threat than since the Civil War (another Ken Burns subject). Some of us, it seems, are less committed to this country than they profess. They want a king again.
When he created his online “fish doorbell” to aid fish migration in the Dutch city of Utrecht, never in his wildest dreams did ecologist Mark van Heukelum imagine that one day his project would end up being featured on an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
That’s exactly what happened this past Sunday, when Oliver dedicated a full ten-minutes of his show to van Heukelum’s creation, even enlisting R&B artist Mario to perform a love song aimed at helping the fish population of Utrecht get into the mood.
“I was laughing my head off,” van Heukelum told Dutch broadcaster NOS the day after Oliver’s piece aired. “It was bizarre and above all a very positive story.”
The piece also had an immediate effect on traffic to the fish doorbell website, where visitors can press a button if they see fish in live webcam video outside the Weerdsluis lock in Utrecht, which in turn alerts a lock keeper to open the lock to let the fish through.
According to Anna Nijs, an ecologist with Utrecht municipality, visitors to the site nearly quadrupled overnight, with the site logging between 600,000 and 700,000 visits in the 24 hours following Oliver’s broadcast.
“Of course, you don’t need that many people to actually let the fish through,” Nijs told NU.nl. “But we like to make as many people as possible aware of fish migration and the importance of fewer barriers that we as humans have erected.”
Here’s a short news capsule with a nice overview of the project:
In the grand scheme, ringing that bell may feel like a mere drop in the ocean, but as Jacques Cousteau observed: “We forget that the life cycle and the water cycle are one.”
Speaking of water cycles, life cycles, and Mother Nature…this Tuesday (April 22) is Earth Day. You don’t seem to hear much hype about Earth Day anymore; I suppose the media has had other shiny things to chase after; important and impactful stories to be sure, but from a planetary perspective…will all of this fussing and fighting really matter in 50 years? As Grace Slick once sang, doesn’t mean shit to a tree. Believe me, over the millenniums Mother Nature has seen worse; and from her perspective, Earth is only mostly dead.
So there is still hope.
The photo at the top of this post was taken December 24, 1968 by Apollo 8 crew member Major William A. Anders. The story behind that now iconic photo is on NASA’s website:
Anders said their job was not to look at the Earth, but to simulate a lunar mission. It was not until things had calmed down and they were on their way to the moon that they actually got to look back and take a picture of the Earth as they had left it.
“That’s when I was thinking ‘that’s a pretty place down there,'” Anders said. “It hadn’t quite sunk in like the Earthrise picture did, because the Earthrise had the Earth contrasted with this ugly lunar surface.”
Anders described the view of Earth before Earthrise “kind of like the classroom globe sitting on a teacher’s desk, but no country divisions. It was about 25,000 miles away where you could still recognize continents.”
An international group of scientists who work with satellite data say the acceleration in the melting of Earth’s ice sheets is now unmistakable.
They calculate the planet’s frozen poles lost 7,560 billion tonnes in mass between 1992 and 2022.
Seven of the worst melting years have occurred in the past decade.
Mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica is now responsible for a quarter of all sea-level rise.
This contribution is five times what it was 30 years ago.
The latest assessment comes from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise, or Imbie. […]
The 7,560 billion tonnes of ice lost from Greenland and Antarctica during the study period pushed up sea-levels by 21mm.
Almost two-thirds (13.5mm) of this was due to melting in Greenland; one-third (7.4mm) was the result of melting in Antarctica.
“All this has profound implications for coastal communities around the world and their risk of being exposed to flooding and erosion,” said Dr Inès Otosaka from the UK’s Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM), who led the latest assessment.
“It’s really important that we have robust estimates for the future contribution to sea-level rise from the ice sheets so that we can go to these communities and say, ‘Yes, we understand what is happening and we can now start to plan mitigations’,” she told BBC News.
So hope does remain…provided that proactive steps are taken. Meanwhile:
[from June 2024]
We just lived through the hottest year since record-keeping began more than a century ago, but before too long, 2023 might not stand out as the pinnacle of extreme heat.
That’s because it’s unlikely to be the only hottest year that we experience. Our climate is changing, growing warmer due to the emissions from burning fossil fuels, and our weather is changing with it. It’s possible that this year may turn out to be hotter still.
In March, scientists from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said February 2024 was the hottest February according to records that stretch back to 1940. The news came on the heels of their report in early January that, as expected, 2023 was indeed the hottest year on record. Temperatures closed in on the critical 1.5-degree Celsius rise above pre-industrial levels, after which we will see irreversible damage to the planet. These aren’t freak outliers: The extreme heat we’re experiencing is something we’ll need to be prepared to deal with on a much more regular basis, along with storms, floods and drought. […]
A key trend highlighted by the US government’s Fifth National Climate Assessment, published in November, was that climate change is provoking extreme weather events across the country that are both more frequent and more severe. It pointed to an increase in heatwaves and wildfires in the West over the past few decades, the increased drought risk in the Southwest over the past century and more extreme rainfall east of the Rockies. Hurricanes have also been intensifying, as those who have found themselves in the path of a storm know all too well. […]
Even if you live in a region that hasn’t yet directly been impacted by a climate-linked weather event, you’re not off the hook.
“As the climate continues to warm, most areas will be at an increased risk of some types of climate-linked extreme weather,” says Russell Vose, chief of the Monitoring and Assessment Branch at NOAA’ National Centers for Environmental Information and one of the NCA’s authors. “Perhaps the best example is extreme heat – it can occur anywhere.”
He points to the scorching heat dome that descended on the Pacific Northwest in June and July 2021, which was unprecedented in the historical record. The unpredictable nature of such extreme heat means no regions are marked as safe.
At first glance, the image above may appear to be a still from a post-apocalyptic film-but it’s a photo I snapped outside my Seattle office in September of 2020. You’re looking due East across Lake Washington at around 10am…directly into the sun and toward the Bellevue skyline. I was not using any filters, nor was there any retouching of the photo. Normally, the view across the lake appears as it does in this photo I took:
We not only had a freakish late summer “heat dome” in the Pacific Northwest, but much of the West Coast was aflame. For over a month, resulting smoke made air quality so dangerous that local health officials recommended staying indoors and sealing up windows (good times for those of us with no A/C). It was also recommended to wear masks outdoors…which we were already doing for COVID indoors. Oy.
Was this a sneak preview ? How’s the air today? According to The American Lung Association’s “State of the Air” report for 2024 (their 2025 report isn’t out yet)…let’s just say, I wouldn’t toss those N95s away yet:
The “State of the Air” 2024 report finds that despite decades of progress cleaning up air pollution, 39% of people living in America—131.2 million people—still live in places with failing grades for unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution. This is 11.7 million more people breathing unhealthy air compared to last year’s report.
The significant rise in the number of individuals whose health is at risk is the result of a combination of factors. Extreme heat, drought and wildfires are contributing to a steady increase in deadly particle pollution, especially in the western U.S. Also, this year’s “State of the Air” report is using EPA’s new, more protective national air quality standard for year-round levels of fine particle pollution, which allows for the recognition that many more people are breathing unhealthy air than was acknowledged under the previous weak standard. […]
“State of the Air” 2024 is the 25th edition of this annual report, which was first published in 2000. From the beginning, the findings in “State of the Air” have reflected the successes of the Clean Air Act, as emissions from transportation, power plants and manufacturing have been reduced. In recent years, however, the findings of the report continue adding to the evidence that a changing climate is making it harder to protect human health. High ozone days and spikes in particle pollution related to extreme heat, drought and wildfires are putting millions of people at risk and adding challenges to the work that states and cities are doing across the nation to clean up air pollution.
I’m just here to bring you good cheer.
Anyway, here are my picks for the Top 10 eco-flicks.
Chasing Ice– Jeff Orlowski’s film is glacially paced. That is, “glacial pacing” ain’t what it used to be. Glaciers are moving along (“retreating”, technically) at a pretty good clip. This does not portend well. To be less flowery: we’re fucked. According to nature photographer (and subject of Orlowski’s film) James Balog, “The story…is in the ice.”
Balog’s journey began in 2005, while on assignment in the Arctic for National Geographic to document the effect of climate change. Up until that trip, he candidly admits he “…didn’t think humans were capable” of influencing weather patterns so profoundly. His epiphany gave birth to a multi-year project utilizing modified time-lapse cameras to capture alarming empirical evidence of the effects of global warming.
The images are beautiful, yet troubling. Orlowski’s film mirrors the dichotomy, equal parts cautionary eco-doc and art installation. The images trump the montage of inane squawking by climate deniers in the opening, proving that a picture is worth 1,000 words.
The Emerald Forest– Although it may initially seem a heavy-handed (if well-meaning) “save the rain forest” polemic, John Boorman’s underrated 1985 adventure (a cross between The Searchers and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan) goes much deeper.
Powers Boothe plays an American construction engineer working on a dam project in Brazil. One day, while his wife and young son are visiting the job site on the edge of the rain forest, the boy is abducted and adopted by an indigenous tribe who call themselves “The Invisible People”, touching off an obsessive decade-long search by the father. By the time he is finally reunited with his now-teenage son (Charley Boorman), the challenge becomes a matter of how he and his wife (Meg Foster) are going to coax the young man back into “civilization”.
Tautly directed, lushly photographed (by Philippe Rousselot) and well-acted. Rosco Pallenberg scripted (he also adapted the screenplay for Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur).
Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster– I know what you’re thinking: there’s no accounting for some people’s tastes. But who ever said an environmental “message” movie couldn’t also provide mindless, guilty fun? Let’s have a little action. Knock over a few buildings. Wreak havoc. Crash a wild party on the rim of a volcano with some Japanese flower children. Besides, Godzilla is on our side for a change. Watch him valiantly battle Hedora, a sludge-oozing toxic avenger out to make mankind collectively suck on his grody tailpipe. And you haven’t lived until you’ve heard “Save the Earth”-my vote for “best worst” song ever from a film (much less a monster movie).
An Inconvenient Truth– I re-watched this recently; I hadn’t seen it since it opened in 2006, and it struck me how it now plays less like a warning bell and more like the nightly news. It’s the end of the world as we know it. Apocalyptic sci-fi is now scientific fact. Former VP/Nobel winner Al Gore is a Power Point-packing Rod Serling, submitting a gallery of nightmare nature scenarios for our disapproval. I’m tempted to say that Gore and director Davis Guggenheim’s chilling look at the results of unchecked global warming only reveals the tip of the iceberg…but it’s melting too fast.
Koyannisqatsi– In 1982 this genre-defying film quietly made its way around the art houses; it’s now a cult favorite. Directed by activist/ex-Christian monk Godfrey Reggio, with beautiful cinematography by Ron Fricke (who later directed Chronos, Baraka, and Samsara) and music by Philip Glass (who also scored Reggio’s sequels), it was considered a transcendent experience by some; New Age hokum by others (count me as a fan).
The title (from ancient Hopi) translates as “life out of balance” The narrative-free imagery, running the gamut from natural vistas to scenes of First World urban decay, is open for interpretation. Reggio followed up in 1988 with Powaqqatsi (“parasitic way of life”), focusing on the First World’s drain on Third World resources, then book-ended his trilogy with Naqoyqatsi (“life as war”).
Manufactured Landscapes– A unique eco-documentary from Jennifer Baichwal about photographer Edward Burtynsky, who is an “earth diarist” of sorts. While his photographs are striking, they don’t paint a pretty picture of our fragile planet. Burtynsky’s eye discerns a terrible beauty in the wake of the profound and irreversible human imprint incurred by accelerated modernization. As captured by Burtynsky’s camera, strip-mined vistas recall the stark desolation of NASA photos sent from the Martian surface; mountains of “e-waste” dumped in a vast Chinese landfill take on an almost gothic, cyber-punk dreamscape. The photographs play like a scroll through Google Earth images, as reinterpreted by Jackson Pollock. An eye-opener.
Princess Mononoke– Anime master Hayao Miyazaki and his cohorts at Studio Ghibli have raised the bar on the art form over the past several decades. This 1997 Ghibli production is one of their most visually resplendent. Perhaps not as “kid-friendly” as per usual, but many of the usual Miyazaki themes are present: humanism, white magic, beneficent forest gods, female empowerment, and pacifist angst in a violent world. The lovely score is by frequent Miyazaki collaborator Joe Hisaishi. For another great Miyazaki film with an environmental message, check out Nausicaa Valley of the Wind.
Queen of the Sun- I never thought that a documentary about honeybees would make me laugh and cry-but Taggart Siegel’s 2010 film did just that. Appearing at first to be a distressing examination of Colony Collapse Syndrome, a phenomenon that has puzzled and dismayed beekeepers and scientists alike with its increasing frequency over the past few decades, the film becomes a sometimes joyous, sometimes humbling meditation on how essential these tiny yet complex social creatures are to the planet’s life cycle. Humans may harbor a pretty high opinion of our own place on the evolutionary ladder, but Siegel lays out a convincing case which proves that these busy little creatures are, in fact, the boss of us.
Silent Running– In space, no one can hear you trimming the verge! Bruce Dern is an agrarian antihero in this 1972 sci-fi adventure, directed by legendary special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull. Produced around the time “ecology” was a buzzword, its message may seem a little heavy-handed today, but the film remains a cult favorite.
Dern plays the gardener on a commercial space freighter that houses several bio-domes, each dedicated to preserving a species of vegetation (in this bleak future, the Earth is barren of organic growth).
While it’s a 9 to 5 drudge gig to his blue-collar shipmates, Dern sees his cultivating duties as a sacred mission. When the interests of commerce demand the crew jettison the domes to make room for more lucrative cargo, Dern goes off his nut, eventually ending up alone with two salvaged bio-domes and a trio of droids (Huey, Dewey and Louie) who play Man Friday to his Robinson Crusoe. Joan Baez contributes two songs on the soundtrack.
Soylent Green– Based on a Harry Harrison novel, Richard Fleischer’s 1973 film is set in 2022, when traditional culinary fare is but a dim memory, due to overpopulation and environmental depletion. Only the wealthy can afford the odd tomato or stalk of celery; most of the U.S. population lives on processed “Soylent Corporation” product. The government encourages the sick and the elderly to politely move out of the way by providing handy suicide assistance centers (considering ongoing threats to our Social Security system, that doesn’t seem much of a stretch anymore).
Oh-there is some ham served up onscreen, courtesy of Charlton Heston’s scenery-chewing turn as a NYC cop who is investigating the murder of a Soylent Corporation executive. Edward G. Robinson’s moving death scene has added poignancy; as it preceded his passing by less than two weeks after the production wrapped.
# # #
Bonus Tracks!
Here’s an environmentally-sound mixtape for Earth Day:
Environmental groups are bracing for the Trump administration to potentially target their tax-exempt status, a move that could come down on Earth Day, this coming Tuesday, according to reporting from multiple outlets published Wednesday.
Rumors about such a move are swirling as the Trump administration is also reportedly considering plans to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, a major escalation against the elite institution that critics said marks just the start of a broader assault on nonprofits that refuse to acquiesce to the administration’s demands.
Fears that President Donald Trump will try to revoke environmental groups’ tax-exempt status is the “rumor of the day that is flying around D.C.,” Brett Hartl, the government affairs director at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, toldE&E News. “There’s lots of rumors about what terrible thing [Trump] wants to do on Earth Day, to just give everybody the middle finger.”
Sources who spoke to Bloomberg Law on the condition of anonymity told the outlet that multiple conservation and environmental groups are preparing and assembling legal teams in response to the rumors. Per Bloomberg Law, a potential order from Trump could also seize groups’ funding and designate them as domestic terrorists.
“We are trying to not panic, because we don’t know what it is,” Hartl told E&E News, though he added that environmentalists would “rally together and support each other.”
Kieran Suckling, executive director for the Center for Biological Diversity, told Bloomberg Law that his organization is preparing for a potential order, and said the group would take legal action if it comes to pass.
501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations, such as the Center for Biological Diversity and Earthjustice, are exempt from federal income tax and can collect tax-deductible donations.
The environmentalist and author Bill McKibben reacted to the reporting by remarking that the threat comes amid the “ongoing decimation of federally funded climate science.”
“I know a great many of these people, and I admire their work endlessly; it’s an honor to be counted among them, even if I’m only a volunteer,” he said of those who work for green groups. “It was perhaps inevitable that Trump and his team would target us; together we’ve been making life harder for his clients in the fossil fuel industry. And in the new America, if you don’t knuckle under you get a knuckle sandwich. Figuratively speaking. One hopes.”
Let us all hope. In the meantime-think globally, act locally.
Stop trying to predict and appraise President Trump’s tariffs policies based on economic theories or market realities. Tariffs are pure psychology for the president, fused into his brain like no other topic.
Why it matters: Trump’s tariff brain is unpredictable to the outside (and to market analysts) but wholly knowable to those who know how his mind works.
“There’ll be trial and error. There’ll be pushing the envelope. There’ll be all of that Trumpian stuff,” said a top adviser involved in trade discussions.
Trump approaches tariffs, the remaking of the U.S. economy and the reshaping of global trade as a continuation of his presidential campaign.
He ignored experts and assembled a team dedicated to executing his will and shrugging off the consequences of his unpredictability. He’s not changing now — rocky rollout and chaotic financial markets be damned.
“Donald Trump works at his own tempo, and he doesn’t change the subject until he’s sure he’s clubbed people into seeing it as he does,” the adviser said.
Between the lines: In Trump’s first term, free traders such as then-National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn controlled Trump’s impulses to impose tariffs the way he has now. Trump’s current NEC chief, Kevin Hassett, is pro-tariff.
So is the rest of the economic team: Vice President Vance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, Council of Economic Advisers chair Steven Miran, and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
The intrigue: Trump keeps such a huge team of advisers because he invariably solicits conflicting opinions. He often suffers from analysis paralysis and can be particularly influenced by whomever he talks with last.
Trump also can be unclear on specifics, resulting in contradictory messages from his advisers, each of whom serves as a TV avatar of his tariff brain. Bessent and Lutnick have been criticized for giving mixed messages.
“We saw it in business with Trump,” one adviser said. “He would have these meetings and everyone would agree, and then we would just pray that when he left the office and got on the elevator that the doorman wouldn’t share his opinion, because there would be a 50/50 chance [Trump] would suddenly side with the doorman.”
“There are too many people in his ear,” the adviser said. “You didn’t see this with other presidents. Nixon didn’t act as the maître d’ of his own supper club, where every millionaire and billionaire who could get to him at dinner could chime in and affect policy.”
On political issues, Trump is often more directionally consistent than his critics give him credit for. He’s liable to switch up on policy specifics. But the direction is clear: tariffs. The specifics: wide-ranging.
“It’s about several things,” his adviser said. “It’s about isolating China. It’s about making money for the United States Treasury. It’s about settling what Donald Trump believes is a score where, as he says, stupid people allowed countries to take advantage of us and ripping us off.”
Apparently the past 40 years have been pure hell for all the billionaires in Trump’s cabinet:
Animating Trump and his team is the belief, his adviser said, that “in its very most basic form, the patient, which is the United States economy, has been very sick. It’s been sick for 40 years, and nobody would say so.”
I actually think this is giving Trump too much credit. There is no rhyme or reason for Trump’s economic policies. It’s just that he can’t admit that he’s ever been wrong about anything and is incredibly stupid. He got obsessed with tariffs back in the 1980s and just kept repeating it like it was a brilliant insight.
Someone asked me once if the men who hung the lanterns in the tower knew what they were doing. She meant, did they know that by that act they would begin the steps to a war that would create a new nation and change the world.
The answer is no. None of us knows what the future will deliver.
Paul Revere and Robert Newman and John Pulling and William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, and all the other riders from Charlestown who set out for Lexington after they saw the signal lanterns in the steeple of Old North Church, were men from all walks of life who had families to support, businesses to manage. Some had been orphaned young, some lived with their parents. Some were wealthy, others would scrabble through life. Some, like Paul Revere, had recently buried one wife and married another. Samuel Prescott was looking to find just one.
But despite their differences and the hectic routine of their lives, they recognized the vital importance of the right to consent to the government under which they lived. They took time out of their daily lives to resist the new policies of the British government that would establish the right of a king to act without check by the people. They recognized that giving that sort of power to any man would open the way for a tyrant.
Paul Revere didn’t wake up on the morning of April 18, 1775, and decide to change the world. That morning began like many of the other tense days of the past year, and there was little reason to think the next two days would end as they did. Like his neighbors, Revere simply offered what he could to the cause: engraving skills, information, knowledge of a church steeple, longstanding friendships that helped to create a network. And on April 18, he and his friends set out to protect the men who were leading the fight to establish a representative government.
The work of Newman and Pulling to light the lanterns exactly 250 years ago tonight sounds even less heroic. They agreed to cross through town to light two lanterns in a church steeple. It sounds like such a very little thing to do, and yet by doing it, they risked imprisonment or even death. It was such a little thing…but it was everything. And what they did, as with so many of the little steps that lead to profound change, was largely forgotten until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used their story to inspire a later generation to work to stop tyranny in his own time.
What Newman and Pulling did was simply to honor their friendships and their principles and to do the next right thing, even if it risked their lives, even if no one ever knew. And that is all anyone can do as we work to preserve the concept of human self-determination. In that heroic struggle, most of us will be lost to history, but we will, nonetheless, move the story forward, even if just a little bit.
And once in a great while, someone will light a lantern—or even two—that will shine forth for democratic principles that are under siege, and set the world ablaze.
(@JoshEakle) 