FirstCircle

joined 2 years ago
 

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I had the Covid shots too. They all had powerful side-effects. My whole life, I've never been able to catch measles. I didn't get sick from Covid. I probably won't die from measles now either. That's right, they took away muh Freedumb!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Yep, had my 1st measles shot in the mid-60s, a booster in '74, and now this year found (via a blood test) that my immunity had waned to a point that another shot was needed. Got it. Five stars, no pain, highly recommended.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

How well would US Xian nationalists (Christofascists) get along with the CoE? Is the latter, like the former, actively attempting to acquire absolute power over social matters in their country? Would the two be of like minds w/respect to doctrine?

 

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Slightly related perhaps, at least if you're an HBS grad.

Portion of job-seeking Harvard Business School students who were unemployed three months after graduation

  • in 2022 : 1/10
  • In 2024 : 1/4

From Harper's Index 4/2025

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I wonder how long it will be before the Amateur Radio (ham) spectrum allocations are deleted? After all, that allotment is a set-aside for the good of the public, and we can't give handouts like that to the commoners any more. Loafers and degenerates, make them PAY for their bandwidth, make them earn it.

With enforcement deleted and existing public-use bands sold off to the highest-paying (or best-politically-connected) grifter, I hope high-power, not-exactly-legal mesh networks can get a foothold.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

legal residents are abducted from their houses for saying genocide is a bad thing

And tortured, with impunity, by government agents.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

All right out of Stalin's playbook. First you arrest them, then you hold them indefinitely in jail without contact with the outside world. During this time you torture them until they confess to whatever made-up "crime" you accuse them of, and preferably falsely rat out others who the torturers want to give the same treatment to. Then you sentence them to decades of "hard labor" in a remote camp, and to more torture. Sentencing done by a non-judicial, non-accountable administrative tribunal whose primary job is producing "guilty" verdicts in order to meet their quotas.

Apply this method to the weakest first, and then to the working classes (including veterans) and then to the middle- and upper-classes (administrators and engineers and military leaders and especially "intellectuals"), rinse and repeat, until you've got yourself a society composed of individuals who live in utter terror of Uncle Elon and Tusk, and of being arrested themselves. Members of that society will never step out of line, will never be a threat to the regime.

Here's a first-hand description of how it works : https://archive.org/details/TheGulagArchipelago-Threevolumes/The-Gulag-Archipelago__vol1__I-II__Solzhenitsyn/

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The memo also proposed IRS detail a dedicated group of several dozen senior IRS auditors to launch investigations into companies suspected of hiring undocumented immigrants.

I guess I better step on the gas and get work done on my house right now, before the (mostly-MAGA-voting) contractors can no longer get any workers. Probably a good time to stockpile food too, before crops are rotting in the fields because of a lack of workers.

I guess I'd better put a halt to getting old too, before long-term care facilities run out of staff and shut their doors.

Within minutes of showing up, a twenty-something software engineer dispatched from DOGE began demanding access

I'm in software and I can guarantee you these punks are absolutely reveling in the feeling that they're the "elite" because Leon likes them and picked them to do all this world-shattering demolition work. He wouldn't have tapped them if they weren't elite, if they weren't 1% hackers, right? Oh and they'll surely be in charge of the design and implementation of the Leon-approved Government 2.0 systems, work that only they, the best of the best, could possibly do! Incel no more!

The new IT stuff, assuming it's ever implemented, will all collapse. I can't wait for MAGA/Leon to kick them to the curb once he's done using them for wrecking and intimidation and they get to go back to unemployment and incel-hood.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

Streisand effect time. I would never known about the book if not for this bit of news, but now I see that my library has it in their catalog though it's not yet available. Hold placed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

I'm looking forward to seeing Indian tech companies outsourcing their tech work to formerly Elon-employed punks in the US, for pennies on the rupee. The punks are auditioning for it right now, and clearly their work will be shit but at least it'll be cheap.

 

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.”

[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

5'9" and 68 lbs, that's just mind-blowing. He's got to be just a skeleton, no fat at all, no muscle left anywhere. I weighed more than that in grade school. I wonder if he can even walk? Holodomor vibes.

Well, she's decided to prominently display that she's a Christian with that cross there. So I guess we're supposed to understand that she's by definition a Good Person. Give her a slap on the wrist, admonish her to not be naughty, and let her go. Whatever she did is God's Will after all.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

FWIW the term was in common use in Vermont when I was growing up, and was used to refer to Vermonters who wintered anywhere in the U.S. south. It was kind of a generic term though and could have referred to Canadians too, and to people with other southern nesting sites outside of the U.S.

 

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.

 

“Super pigs” wreaked havoc on the U.S.–Canada border; after a second deadly attack, pigs in Piedmont, Alabama, were put down; and a grand jury recommended the abolition of the Hanceville, Alabama, police force after determining that the department, of which every officer is currently on administrative leave, represents “an ongoing threat to public safety.”

view more: next ›