In the middle of an unprecedented government shutdown, in the middle of an unprecedented drought, after a year of unprecedented federal funding freezes, after two years of unprecedented flooding, while the government seeks to label my law-abiding friends as terrorists and wage war on its own people.

Spending a lot of time thinking about Ulysses S. Grant these days.

"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty." Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Climate change is only "controversial" if your livelihood doesn't depend on the land or the weather. I don't know a single farmer, wildland firefighter, or emergency manager who doubts climate change or our need to adapt. Only people who don't have to get their hands dirty think this is political.

Re: Grok and literally all AI tools: "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." -- Frank Herbert

Oh noooo, did you realize what the USDA does? 🙄 After forcing resignations, USDA tries to walk back staff cuts and calls frontline workers ‘vital’ investigatemidwest.org/2025/04/24/a...

I might be accidentally writing for McSweeney's in a sleep-deprived haze. Fisher-Price Recalls the Deluxe Kick 'n Play Piano Gym for Having Too Many Bops www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/fis...

I'm thinking of starting a running series called "Favorite New Ban" where I list my favorite banned words and phrases under federal grants. New favorite? "Safe Drinking Water." Because apparently, water that you can drink without dying is an ideological issue.

Popping in to report that the administration still has funds illegally frozen in spite of multiple court orders. My bills have not been paid. $500,000 and counting for staffing alone, not including project costs to contractors.

Monday we furlough half our staff. In spite of multiple court orders, we're still not getting paid.

Just had a meeting where I got to tell most of our staff that we have to furlough them because the federal government won't pay its bills.

You know how DOGE ordered federal employees back to in-office work? They're now selling those office buildings and terminating those office leases WITH NO PLAN FOR WHERE EMPLOYEES SHOULD GO. Leases have ALREADY BEEN TERMINATED without informing agency leadership or the employees that work there.

So I'm all for resilient local food systems, but the reason backyard chickens went by the wayside is because they are disease vectors. The problem is bird flu. Adding more disease vectors in response to a disease outbreak is like responding to a fire by throwing gasoline on it.

Just to explain how stupid and wasteful the administration's censorship is, they've censored terms that agencies use to comply with federal law.

The vice president is skiing this weekend. All this security, you'd think he was driving through Ukraine.

Cosign all this. It's bad.

Keeping track of my "favorite" random federal firings. New favorite? APHIS airport staff. Who are they? They're the folks who keep geese and other migratory birds from hitting airplanes. Because what this country needs right now is more random plane crashes.

Fritz Lang's 1920s anti-capitalist sci fi is giving life right now. "For the human mind, there is no never, only a NOT YET." -- Thea von Harbou, Woman in the Moon

The feeling when you realize your country is being run by people who read a bunch of cyberpunk without realizing it's dystopian.

Mom Achievement Unlocked: timing an entire day of daycare closure baby activities so naps perfectly align with my schedule of testimony in the legislature. HAVE IT ALL.

Trump's Ship of State is basically one of those libertarian sea nations that flame out spectacularly every so often: incompetent, an obvious grift, full of a surprising number of engineers, and probably smells terrible.

Funny thing about tradition: my cultural tradition is progressivism. When your ancestors tried to kill Hitler, were executed by the English in the fight for Irish independence, were executed as witches, and published abolitionist newspapers, the least I can do is tell MAGA to go fuck itself.

Invoices under existing federal contracts for ALREADY INCURRED EXPENSES are not being paid under the funding freezes, meaning Trump has figured out how to screw over not only HIS contractors, but ALL contractors everywhere. Really appreciate his consistency on the "Fuck People Who Do Work" front.

Trying to have Very Serious meetings while Femininomenon is playing on loop in my brain.

When having the worst idea isn't the worst idea.

The Civil Rights Act is federal law. Nevertheless, federal agencies are "pausing" Civil Rights work until the "DEI situation" can get figured out. Never downplay or dismiss the impact of these executive orders. They are absolutely using them to undermine law.

I believe in meritocracy. That's why I believe in DEI. Competence doesn't favor a race or gender, but hiring practices do.

Wow, this is bad. Bad from a firefighting perspective, from a natural resources management perspective, from an emergency management perspective, from a farming perspective... California needs that water for the summer. www.latimes.com/environment/...

The "Party of Free Speech" just dropped a hot new list of words to purge! Pick your favorite. (Mine's "empathy.")

Just Say No to Re-Nazification.

Don't Re-Nazify Shit: De-Nazify Shit.

In spite of the administration's promise that "payments to individuals" would not be frozen, we just got word that payments to farmers under existing federal grants are indeed being frozen with the threat of future funding retraction. Don't trust them as far as you can yeet them. (But DO yeet them)

Good thing history never repeats itself. I feel we're in good hands with an administration intent on waging ideological warfare against FAA and ASAC.

I'm thinking of starting a "You Know Things Are Bad When..." series. For instance, you know things are bad when professional HR consultants are passing around the CIA's "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" for how to fight Nazis. www.cia.gov/static/5c875...

Hard to view this as anything other than terrorism. If you want to destroy a country, this is how you do it. www.npr.org/2025/01/28/n...

Holy shit. YOU CAN'T JUST "PAUSE" HIV TREATMENT. "Any prolonged pause in funding could disrupt HIV treatment programs, leading to treatment interruptions, rise of drug-resistant HIV. That’s playing with fire, risking progress that we’ve made over decades to control the HIV epidemic”

Yeah, they're not just targeting "wasteful DEI." They're targeting legitimate nonprofits who act as official resettlement agencies on behalf of the government. They're targeting people doing legal work to support legal admittance to the United States.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the "leader of the free world" should never say the words "we just clean out that whole thing" in discussing people.

The federal government now has an internal snitch-on-your-coworkers infrastructure, as all good guys throughout history have always had.

Pretty sure my grandpa could have beaten up Elon Musk. Which grandpa? Doesn't matter. Both were WWII vets.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do learn from history are doomed to watch in horror as those who don't learn from history repeat history.

Names I call my dog: Pip Pipper Pipper Pepper Pip Pip Pipperoo Pupper Pipper Pupper Buddy Budder ("Butter") Butter Boy Butter Bear Big, Big Buttery Bear Dogge Nüdge My Little Fancy Lad Friend-o Fuzzy Butt Stonk

36 pages of meticulous documentation of Elon Musk engaging in racist and antisemitic content on Twitter. Mind you, this is just a sampling pulled together for the purposes of a lawsuit. An amuse bouche of right-wing extremism, if you will.

Not even the most cynical of 20th century dystopian sci fi writers would have predicted making AI versions of Anne Frank to sugarcoat the Holocaust. Our world is currently teetering at the very edge of what was previously unthinkable. And not in a good way. My soul wants to puke.

I'm glad we got our solar panels put up under the current administration. The current tax incentive seems to be one of the few ways we're actually supporting infrastructure upgrades, rather than just slowly letting everything rot. We need more incentives like this, not fewer.

Lol, no, a white man could not have stopped these fires. Unless he's a sorcerer. Are our hiring practices unfairly disadvantaging sorcerers? If so, something to look into.

This is really interesting, but it's worth noting that (1) it doesn't include flooding, and (2) the models on future wildfire risk are probably off, particularly since we're primed for areas to go from zero fire risk to moderate fire risk. That green zone might not be as habitable as you think.