FirstCircle

The head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told Americans it was their “patriotic duty” to save on medical costs by not getting sick

the U.S. Naval Academy canceled a philosopher’s lecture about wisdom after he refused to refrain from discussing the 381 books the school banned from their library

in Mississippi, the Commission on School Accreditation voted to remove a requirement that graduating students pass a United States history test

A man driving in Indonesia followed Google Maps directions off an unfinished bridge

It will soon be illegal in Spokane for an employer to ask a prospective employee if they’re homeless or reject their application solely because they do not have a permanent address.

The Spokane City Council voted 6-1 Monday in favor of the law, titled “Ban the Address” as a riff on “Ban the box” laws that prohibit inquiries about an applicant’s prior convictions. Councilman Jonathan Bingle was the sole vote against.

City officials believe Spokane is the first in the nation to pass such a law.

“Housing status should never define someone’s potential,” Councilman Paul Dillon said. “Employment really is a critical way we have to reduce homelessness and help people get back on their feet.”

“They can assume that everybody is armed,” Seth Stoke, chairman of the St. Maries School Board said in an interview Monday night after the board voted 4-0 to finalize a policy that will allow permitted staff to carry concealed firearms inside the district’s public schools.

The board developed the policy during the last school year in response to decades of school shootings across the nation, Stoke said.

Parents also won’t be allowed to appeal if they have specific concerns about a specific staff member’s decision to arm themselves in the classroom.

“The whole idea is not knowing who is carrying,” Stoke said, adding that parents always have the right to remove their child from the school.

Staff members who are approved to bring a gun to their school job must have an Idaho concealed carry license, which requires a national background check. Employees must use their personal firearms; guns will not be provided by the school district.

As fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of ready-to-eat meals they buy). But there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.

It’s also a self-reinforcing downward spiral: Trump’s furious attacks on every structure designed to protect the public from diseases, dangerous foods and disasters – even to tell the public when disasters are headed their way – strengthen the case for prepperism at both the high and low ends, all while creating myriad new opportunities for privatization and profiteering by the oligarchs powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state.

Oyer has since told various media outlets that her firing came shortly after she declined to recommend restoring gun rights to actor Mel Gibson, a supporter of President Donald Trump. She is one of several Justice Department officials slated to testify on Monday afternoon before a hearing organized by Democrats in the House of Representatives and Senate about the Trump administration's treatment of the Justice Department and law firms who act in cases disliked by the Republican president.

Democratic U.S. Senator Adam Schiff of California called the mobilization of the Marshals to deliver a letter an effort to "intimidate and silence" Oyer, while U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland compared it to a move "ripped straight from the gangster playbook."

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.

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.