There was a messianic fervour in Donald Trump’s Second Inaugural speech that wasn’t evident eight years ago. As dark as the 2016 American Carnage diatribe was, there was still the sense that Trump was a salesman pitching a vision he didn’t quite believe in, but thought he needed to sell in order to legitimise himself to his own ragged ranks of followers. Mainly, he seemed surprised to find himself where he was. The man who returned to power this week seemed sterner, surer of how to leverage his authority and who to use it against, more confident of his own invincibility. Was this hubristic exhibition infused by the bullet that grazed his ear, or his close encounters with incarceration, and the Supreme Court anointing him with an almost Divine-like cloak of immunity to do whatever he wants for whatever venal reason? Likely, all of the above.
Refreshingly, Trump’s speech lacked any promises of national unity, political comity, rhetorical civility, or letting bygones be bygones. Trump was as explicit as he could get (given his limited facility with the language he wants to require everyone to speak) about what’s coming, and what’s coming is the dismantling of the regulatory state and the expansion of the imperial state. As always, the American underclass will pay the price, and it will be a severe one, subjected to both destitution and persecution. Only the most foolish and faint-hearted will fail to take him seriously now.
I probably have a softer spot than most for Napoleon, wrecker of aristocracies, but as I watched the inauguration, diverted into the Rotunda of the Capitol because of the Dante-esque weather (See below) outside, I couldn’t help but think of the Corsican upstart seizing the imperial crown from Pope Pius VII and proclaiming himself emperor in the dark sacristy of Notre Dame 221 years ago. At a time when trust in religious institutions is at its lowest in many decades, the US government is almost entirely in the grip of Christian Nationalists or those who exploit Christian Nationalism for their own power and profit. Trump seemed like an Old Testament prophet announcing his own Second Coming. (Although Stormy Daniels might dispute the last part.)
“Just a few months ago, in that beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”
More than anything, this was a Trump speech about Trump. It was twice as long (2888 words) as his first inaugural speech (1433), but even more about himself. In his first speech, Trump referred to himself 52 times. In this week’s speech, he referred to himself 140 times, more than twice as much as he mentioned the country he is now ruling once again.
“Many people thought it was impossible for me to stage such a historic political comeback. But as you see today, here I am.”
Trump’s concept of his own authority is so all-consuming that he could declare there are “only two genders: male and female,” even though around 1.7% of any given population of humans (and other animals) are born with intersex traits. (The intersex population of the US is about 5.7 million, which is about the same percentage of people in the US who identify as Jewish or Mormon.) He also granted himself the authority to rename the geographical features of the hemisphere he seeks to control.
“A short time from now, we’ll be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. And we will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, to where it should be and where it belongs.”
Will he also be renaming all the animals?
For the past four years in exile, Trump seems to have been marinating in the accolades of the YouTube evangelists who have proclaimed him Manifest Destiny’s Child, the savour of Christian America in a demon-haunted world. The former self-proclaimed nationalist has emerged as a Teddy Roosevelt imperialist with designs on expanding the empire by annexing Canada, Greenland, northern Mexico, Panama and, yes, Mars.
The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.
Trump has accumulated a small mountain range of political IOUs. The question is whether he’ll be more willing to pay them off than his own debts. If the seating arrangement at the inauguration is any indication, where the Technogarchy was seated in front of his own cabinet, Trump seems intent on rewarding the billionaire class at the expense of the working-class proles hammered by the post-Covid economy, who put him into office. But how long can Trump’s ego tolerate the proximity and meddling of a richer and equally spotlight-hungry figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg? An internecine clash of the moguls seems both inevitable and desirable.
Let the infighting begin. It may be our last, best hope…
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In his lone debate with Kamala Harris, Trump claimed he had “nothing to do with Project 2025.” Yet, 16 of the 26 executive orders Trump issued on Day One were cribbed directly from the pages of Project 2025. Here’s a summary of what they do…
- An Executive Order rescinding 78 executive orders issued by President Biden.
- Prohibits federal agencies from engaging in censorship, and orders an investigation into any federal censorship from the past 4 years
- Directs the Attorney General to review and remediate any “weaponisation” of the Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Federal Trade Commission over the past 4 years. The National Intelligence Director is directed to do the same for the intelligence community.
- Orders all federal departments and executive agencies to terminate remote work arrangements and require full-time in-person work.
- Places a freeze on all federal regulations that are proposed but not yet published in the Federal Register, and postpones for 60 days any that have been published but not yet taken effect.
- Places a freeze on hiring federal civilian employees and contracting, excepting immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety.
- Directs all agencies to act to reduce the cost of living, including by expanding the housing supply, reducing unnecessary expenses and requirements that raise costs, and eliminating climate policies that increase the cost of food and fuel.
- Orders the withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.
- Commutes the sentences of 14 people convicted of offences related to January 6 and otherwise pardons all 1,500 other individuals convicted of crimes related to January 6. Dismisses all pending indictments.
- Directs the Attorney General not to enforce the TikTok law for 75 days.
- Orders the withdrawal from the World Health Organisation (WHO).
- Recategorises policy-influencing positions in the federal workforce to Schedule F (giving the executive branch greater ability to hire, fire, and manage them).
- Direct implementation of performance standards and evaluations for career senior executive federal employees.
- Revokes clearances from 50 former intelligence officials who signed a letter in 2020 discrediting the Hunter Biden laptop story.
- Declares an emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border and directs National Guard deployment, construction of additional barriers, and use of aerial systems to impede unauthorised physical entry by aliens.
- Orders the Secretary of Defence to direct the military to repel unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking, and other criminal activities on the U.S.-Mexico border.
- Suspends entry of refugees into the United States effective January 27, pending a report within 90 days by the Department of Homeland Security on whether to resume them.
- Directs the federal government not to recognise U.S. citizenship for persons born in the United States but whose parents are not citizens or lawful permanent residents. Effective 30 days from today, for births on or after that date.
- Directs implementation of a policy of establishing a physical wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, removal of aliens unlawfully present in the United States, and terminating categorical parole programs (Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans).
- Authorises temporary top secret security clearances for 6 months for certain staff designated by the White House Counsel.
- Directs trade investigations to begin.
- Orders a review of federal regulations to remove regulatory burdens on oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuel, critical minerals, and nuclear energy. Revokes 12 Biden climate-related executive orders. Pauses federal funds for building electric vehicle infrastructure.
- Orders a study on diverting water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to southern California.
- Directs the Attorney General to seek capital punishment in federal capital crimes, to ensure that the 37 federal death row inmates commuted by Biden are imprisoned in consistent conditions, and supply lethal drugs to states that administer the death penalty.
- Directs a report within 60 days on federal building standards that reflect classical architectural heritage.
- Declares a national energy emergency, directing expedited delivery of energy infrastructure.
- Suspends offshore wind energy projects.
- Orders a pause on foreign aid disbursements for 90 days to assess programmatic efficiencies and consistency with foreign policy.
- In a new executive order issued on Tuesday, Trump has revoked the federal contractor nondiscrimination executive order, EO 11246, signed by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 and has protected employees of businesses seeking federal contracts from discrimination ever since. This order has been on Trump’s personal hit list since he and his father were charged with discrimination against blacks and Hispanics in their federal housing projects in the 1970s.
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Face it: this is not a country dominated by goodly-hearted people…(Or if it is, as Lou Reed, sang: You can’t depend on the goodly hearted / the goodly-hearted turned people into lampshades and soap)
- Percent of Americans in favour of mass deportations: 66%
- (GOP 93% / Ind 67% / Dem 43%)
Under Trump’s two executive orders on the border, the US defence secretary has 10 days to “deliver to the President a revision to the Unified Command Plan that assigns United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) the mission to seal the borders.”
Remember when the libertarian right used to rightly, in my view, accuse the Feds of violating the Posse Comitatus Act by using federal troops domestically? Now Trump charged the Pentagon with “repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking, and other criminal activities.”
Will Trump’s declaration that the US is being “invaded” by migrants withstand scrutiny by the Supreme Court? In an article for Just Security, law professor Frank Bowman III suggests not: “a large influx of legal or illegal aliens into a state does not constitute an ‘invasion’ under Article IV and that the term invasion connotes armed hostility or military invasion.”
Antonio De Loera-Brust, a spokesman for the UFW, on the Bakersfield, California ICE raids: “It’s had a chilling effect on the community. There’s a lot of fear and anxiety for everyone with an undocumented loved one, which is a significant portion of the Latino community in Kern County.”
On Friday morning, ICE agents tried to raid an ELEMENTARY school in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighbourhood on the city’s south side but were turned away by the Hamline Elementary School’s courageous teachers and staff. A press release from Chicago’s Public Schools Department said:“Hamline staff followed CPS’ established protocols; they kept the ICE agents outside of the school and contacted CPS’ Law Department and CPS’ Office of Safety and Security for further guidance. The ICE agents were not allowed into the school and were not permitted to speak to any students or staff. Teaching and learning continued throughout the day at Hamline.”
Leaked documents from Trump’s Customs and Border Patrol show that ICE wants four new detention centres with 10,000 beds each and fourteen smaller facilities with 700-1,000 beds each. These will almost certainly be private prisons.
After Trump rescinded Biden’s executive order to move the federal government, especially ICE, away from its reliance on private prisons, the stock price of the private prison company GEO Group, which once employed Pam Bondi, Trump’s AG nominee, as a lobbyist, is up 131%.
On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order “to ensure that so-called ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions, which seek to interfere with the lawful exercise of Federal law enforcement operations, do not receive access to Federal funds.”
According to an internal Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by CBS News, Trump has given federal immigration authorities permission to revoke the legal status of hundreds of thousands of migrants the Biden administration allowed into the U.S. and seek their deportation.
Trump told Sean Hannity this week that Trump says he can tell if immigrants are bad based on how they “look”: “You can look at them and say ‘could be trouble’.”
Deploying Trump’s “I know an undocumented migrant when I see one” logic, ICE has been detaining members of the Navajo Nation.
Countries that have birthright citizenship laws, nearly all of them, including the US, are former colonies of European empires–one of our few remaining links with the post-colonial world, some of which Trump now wants to re-colonise…
- Antiqua & Barbuda
- Argentina
- Azerbaijan
- Barbados
- Belize
- Bolivia
- Brazil
- Canada
- Chad
- Chile
- Costa Rica
- Cuba
- Dominica
- Ecuador
- El Salvador
- Fiji
- Grenada
- Guatemala
- Guinea-Bissau
- Guyana
- Honduras
- Jamaica
- Lesotho
- Luxembourg
- Mexico
- Nicaragua
- Paraguay
- Pakistan
- Panama
- Peru
- Saint Kitts and Nevis
- Saint Lucia
- Saint Vincent & Grenadines
- Tanzania
- Trinidad & Tobago
- Tuvalu
- United States
- Uruguay
- Venezuela
The Trump administration has revoked a Biden-era memo that prohibited ICE from arresting unauthorised immigrants at or near “sensitive locations,” like schools, places of worship, healthcare sites, shelters and relief centres and instructed officials to begin the process of phasing out programs that allowed certain immigrants to stay in the U.S. under the immigration parole authority. The churches in the Sanctuary Mvt of the 80s that challenged Reagan’s vicious immigration policy that sent Salvadorans, Guatemalans & Haitians back to their deaths while welcoming rightwing Nicaraguans and Cubans was as uplifting as those churches now supporting Trump’s purge are appalling. (In the 1980s, more than 25% of all asylum claims were approved. That figure for Salvadorans and Haitians was less than 0.5%.)
After Chuck Schumer gave “vulnerable” Democratic senators the greenlight to vote for the atrocious “Laken Riley Act,” giving ICE the authority to arrest and detain migrants without due process, 12 Democrats did so, including Raphael Warnock!
- Catherine Cortez Masto—NV
- John Fetterman—PA
- Ruben Gallego—AZ
- Maggie Hassan—NH
- Mark Kelly—AZ
- Jon Ossoff—GA
- Gary Peters—MI
- Jackie Rosen—NV
- Jeanne Shaheen—NH
- Elissa Slotkin—MI
- Mark Warner—VA
- Raphael Warnock—GA
One senator later griped to The Hill that there was discontent in the caucus with how Schumer handled the whole affair: “There is huge concern because we’re talking about the mandatory imprisonment based on an accusation without a person even being charged, let alone being convicted, and this applies to kids.”
Trump Border Czar Tom Homan (a former Obama appointee) said that ICE arrested 308 “illegal” migrants on Trump’s first day in office. Homan didn’t say whether that was more or less than ICE arrested on Biden’s last day in office. For comparison, in 2024, ICE says it made more than 146,000 arrests, which works out to around 400 per day. I write this not to minimise Trump’s opening act but to emphasise the pre-existing cruelty of Biden’s border policies.
Trump attacked Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, for her remarks at the interfaith prayer service for the country at the Washington National Cathedral on Tuesday, the day after Trump’s inauguration.
What was her offence? Asking the new president to show mercy:
Let me make one final plea, Mr. President: Millions have put their trust in you, and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and [transgender] children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives…the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbours.
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Under questioning from Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Donald Trump’s nominee for United Nations Ambassador, Elise Stefanik, said she agrees with the view that “Israel has a BIBLICAL right to the entire West Bank.” Does she have an opinion on whether the descendants of Ham hold a legal title to Egypt?
The curse of Ham (really his fourth son, Canaan) is one of the strangest episodes in the very strange book of Genesis. Noah is 500 years old but still randy as ever, and on this night, he has passed out drunk and naked in his tent. Ham happens to see his father in the nude and tells his brothers, Shem and Japheth, who grab a blanket, put it on their shoulders, then walk backward to Noah’s tent and cover their inebriated and insensate dad. Genesis emphasises that “their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.”
When Noah wakes up with a hangover, he begins shouting curses at Ham’s son, Canaan, condemning the poor kid to slavery: “Noah knew what his youngest son had done to him, and he said: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” And he said [still hung over and not making a lot of sense] “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem [Shem will give his name to the Semites]; and let Canaan be his servant. God enlarge Japheth and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.” From this passage, generations of Judeo-Christian and Islamic slavers have derived divine authority for enslaving other humans, especially dark-skinned humans, based on a mistranslation of Ham as meaning “burnt” or “black.” (See David Goldenberg’s The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam.)
Noah sounds like a lot of alcoholic fathers, blaming their sons and wives for their own acts of debauchery.
What went down in Noah’s tent has been debated for millennia. Was he simply ashamed his son had seen him naked? Did Ham castrate Noah? Or did he anally rape him? (The latter two explications by Talmudic scholars have dominated the exegesis of the episode for centuries.)
The real question, though, is why Canaan was condemned to slavery for Ham’s transgression. And there’s a relatively new theory that makes a lot of sense to me: the Rabbis who wrote the Old Testament had Noah lay a curse on Canaan to justify the Israelites conquest of the land of Canaan, a conquest that involved the wiping out of its original population (genocide) with the few survivors being placed into perpetual slavery (See: Steven Haynes, Noah’s curse: the biblical justification of American slavery).
Good luck to the Biblical Title Insurance companies in untangling these competing land claims.
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GAYLE KING: In 2021, even you issued a statement saying the images of J6 stirred up anger in you, ‘the nation was embarrassed.’ How do you reconcile those feelings with Trump’s pardons?
MARCO RUBIO: I used to be a senator, and now I’m about to be sworn in as the secretary of state. And that’s what I’m thinking. I work for Donald J Trump.
Rubio wants to invade Venezuela and Cuba and kill anyone associated with Hamas, and still, not one senator–not Sanders or Paul–voted against him…
Rubio’s first call as Secretary of State was to…drumroll, please…Benjamin Netanyahu. Surprise, surprise.
Rubio’s second official act was to instruct State Department staff to suspend all passport and other official documentation applications with “X” sex markers, saying U.S. policy “is that an individual’s sex is not changeable.” The Department will no longer issue U.S. passports containing an X sex marker and will suspend applications seeking to change that to anything but “male” or “female.”
Terence McKenna did not live to see Monday’s spectacle, but he did somehow–a certain species of mushroom probably–predict the essence of the experience: “Today was truly an insane show to see. But if there’s one good thing that can come over the next 4 years, it’s that…Things are just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder until finally, things will be so weird that everyone will have to talk about it.”
Trump’s ratings weren’t great: Around 24.6 million viewers watched Trump‘s second inauguration, down from the 33.8 million viewers who tuned into Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration in 2020 and 31 million fewer than those who watched Trump’s first inauguration in 2016.
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The Financial Post predicts that Trump’s proposed tariffs on Canada would drive Canada into recession by mid-year.
Doug Ford, the rightwing premier of Ontario, said Canada is prepared to make electricity unaffordable for Americans by cutting off energy supplies to the U.S. in response to Trump’s tariffs: “We will go to the extent of cutting off their energy, going down to Michigan, going down to New York State, and over to Wisconsin.”
Trump: “Canada is subsidised to the tune of about $200 billion a year, plus other things. And they don’t essentially have a military. They have a very small military. They rely on our military. It’s all fine, but you know they gotta pay for that.”
Canada has an Army, a Navy, and, yes, even an Air Force, which William Faulkner once tried to join.
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A Redfin analysis reports that a homebuyer in the US must earn an annual income of at least $116,782 to afford a home by the end of 2024.
From January 2020 to the end of 2024, home prices nationwide increased over 52%, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index.
Melania Trump’s crypto scam, the $MELANIA meme, debuted on Sunday and is now down more than 70% from its peak price.
Steve Bannon on Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, et al.: “These guys [the Tech Lords] do not believe in the nation-state; they believe in techno-feudalism.”
According to Fortune magazine: “Gen Z are becoming pet parents because they can’t afford human babies—now veterinarian is one of the hottest jobs of 2025.
On Thursday, Trump veered off into a bonkers rant against Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America:
I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives because many conservatives complain that the banks are not allowing them to do business within the bank, and that included a place called Bank of America. They don’t take conservative business. And I don’t know if the regulators mandated that because of Biden or what, but you and Jamie [Dimon] and everybody, I hope you’re going to open your banks to conservatives because what you’re doing is wrong.
Bankers refusing to take the deposits of deep-pocketed conservatives? Seems unlikely to me…
After Amazon workers in Quebec successfully formed the first Canadian union at the company last year, Amazon retaliated by closing its facilities in Quebec, slashing more than 1,700 jobs.
Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede: “We are Greenlanders. We don’t want to be Americans. We don’t want to be Danish, either. Greenland’s future will be decided by Greenland.”
Trump on antagonising Latin American countries with threats of tariffs and military invasions: “They need us. We don’t need them.” Trump seems to think the US runs on oil and gas. But we all know it really runs on coffee, and 82% of the unroasted coffee beans used in the US are imported from Central and South America. Screw around and find out.
Top Funders of the World Health Organisation before Trump’s vow that the US will quit the group and withdraw its funding…
- USA: $1.28 billion
- Germany: $856 million
- Gates Foundation: $830 million
- GAVI: Vaccine Alliance: $481 million
- European Commission: $468 million
- UK: $396 million
- Canada: $204 million
- Rotary Intl.: $177 million
- Japan: $167 million
- France: $161 million
One of the most outrageous annexations justified by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny was the forcible theft of Texas from Mexico, a war that was opposed by two unlikely figures: Ulysses Grant and John C. Calhoun.
Ulysses S. Grant on the annexation of Texas:
I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war [with Mexico] which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.
John C. Calhoun, the southern secessionist, also opposed the annexation of all of Mexico on racial grounds:
We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind, of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race…. We are anxious to force free government on all; and I see that it has been urged … that it is the mission of this country to spread civil and religious liberty over all the world, and especially over this continent. It is a great mistake.
Manifest Destiny is a religious-sounding phrase used to justify annexation (similar to Israel’s Biblical rationalisation for land rights in Palestine), and annexation in practice always means the dispossession, if not extermination, of the indigenous population by the colonising settlers.
With friends like this… After resuming his chair in the Oval Office, Trump swung a couple of verbal punches at his old buddy, Vladimir Putin: “Putin is destroying Russia…he can’t be thrilled, he’s not doing so well…Russia is bigger, they have more soldiers to lose, but that’s no way to run a country.”
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$288,685: the amount the state of Utah spent to perform its first execution in 14 years when it killed Taberon Honey by lethal injection with two doses of pentobarbital. (Not including the $1 million in legal expenses.)
Breakdown of the costs:
- Lethal injection drug (Pentobarbital): $200,000 Other Medical Services and Supplies: $60,906
- Event expenses (Supplies & equipment): $16,804
- Personnel and overtime: $10,973
- The state of Utah says it costs $1.6 more to house and execute a death row prisoner than a life without parole sentence.
The day after Trump shut down the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, a student opened fire in the cafeteria at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee, killing two students and then shooting himself. This is the 10th school shooting of 2025.
Thomas Fabrizi, a lieutenant in the NYPD, has been charged with ‘stealing” more than $64,000 in fake overtime pay. How could they tell he was faking it?
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Biden was even more debilitated than we realised, and nearly everyone who had been in his presence for the last couple of years knew it. It was the autumn, make that winter, of the Patriarch:
+ Leonard Peltier is finally out of prison after 50 years but is not “free.” In typical Biden fashion, his commutation came with a nasty hitch: he must spend the rest of his life under “home confinement.”
+ Steve Donzinger on the last day of the Biden Presidency: “Just got word from inside the Biden team that I will not be receiving a pardon — and that Chevron lawyers were working overtime to try to kill my request despite 34 members of Congress backing me.”
+ According to the BBC, Instagram, META, is hiding search results for ‘Democrats.’ Who are these lost souls searching for “Democrats?”
+ In light of Biden’s slates pre-emptive pardons and Trump’s pardons of 1,5000 insurrectionists (and his designs on Panama), here’s Alexander Cockburn on George W. Bush’s Iran/contra pardons: “So why no pardon for Gen. Manuel A. Noriega? If Bush is going to behave like a Latin American dictator on his way to the airport, handing out pardons to his secret police and kindred underlings and accomplices, how can he forget to pardon the Panamanian who abetted his secret war and is the only one of the gang to land in prison?”
What a difference four years makes in the MAGA hive mind…
+ The Democrats are still trying to blame Jill Stein for making them lose an election they’d have lost even if she hadn’t been on the ballot.
+ Robert Weissman, president of Public Interest, on Trump’s financial conflicts of interest: “We want a president acting in the interest of Americans, not in [his own] financial interests. The [Foreign Emoluments Clause] of the Constitution says that a president can’t be getting things of value from foreign governments or domestic governments, but it’s very hard to run a big international business without violating that.”
+ Masayoshi Son, CEO of Softbank, at the Trump White House praising Trump’s commitment of $500 million in federal funds for the Stargate AI project: “I think AGI is coming very soon. After that, artificial super intelligence will come to solve the issues that mankind would have never thought that we could solve.”
Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.
Dave: What’s the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it.
Dave: I don’t know what you’re talking about, HAL.
HAL: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me. And I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.
+ Former Michigan Rep. Justin Amash: ‘The Stargate Project sounds like the stuff of dystopian nightmares—a U.S. government-announced partnership of megacorporations ‘to protect the national security of America and its allies’ and harness AGI ‘for the benefit of all of humanity.’”
+ AI has the potential to solve all of humanity’s problems except the planet-terminating problems posed by AI itself.
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+ Musk and Trump claim they want to make the US government run like a business (except when it comes to the Pentagon, naturally). A fatal problem of this approach is that one of the primary functions of government, in theory at least, is to mitigate the failures of business (Trump’s had plenty of those in his career). Here’s an example of the failures of business (externalities) when applied to the environment. While I was out sloshing through the frozen marshes of the lower Columbia yesterday, it was impossible to ignore the recent industrial clearcutting in the Willapa Hills above the Julia Hansen National Wildlife Refuge, which caused large landslides on the steep slopes, bleeding silt into the spawning bed of endangered salmon below. Now imagine them applying this cut-and-run strategy to the public forests (which have already been thoroughly abused by the US Forest Service, which at least operates under some legal restraints).
+ Alaska is set to resume helicopter gunning of bears and wolves. American “civilisation,” which was never among the most advanced in the world, is running rapidly in reverse these days…And it’s not just Alaska, Montana politics keeps getting sicker and sicker, too. This week, legislators in the state introduced a “trio of bills that would increase the take of animals by eliminating hunting quotas, allowing year-round hunting, and reclassify wolves as ‘furbearers.’” Together, the three bills would allow the slaughter of half the state’s wolf population.
+ 300 million: number of birds killed by H5N1 virus.
+ Bill McKibben: “Our leader has declared a fake emergency about energy so that we can do more of something—drilling for oil and gas—that causes the actual emergency now devastating our second most populous city.” It’s also a strange “energy emergency” that exports oil and gas it claims it’s critically short of, cancels offshore wind power projects and “pauses” the construction of EV infrastructure…
+ Natural Gas prices on Monday when Trump took office – $3.50
Natural Gas prices four days later – $3.97
+ It’s not a promising start … for consumers, anyway.
+ In Ventura County, farmworkers are harvesting strawberries in the dense, toxic smoke from the still-spreading Hughes Fire. Employers are required to provide them with respirator masks when the Air Quality Index hits 150. Many don’t.
+ In one 24-hour Arctic blast, Pensacola, Florida, was buried under 8.7 inches of snow, more snow in one day than 8.0 inches the Gulf Coast City had experienced in the previous 124 years combined.
+ Climate scientist Daniel Swain on the LA fires: “I don’t see this as a failure of firefighting. I see it as an indication of what you can achieve when conditions are this extreme.”
+ A third of Alaska’s vast tundra, once one of the Earth’s greatest carbon sinks, is now a carbon emitteras the permafrost melts, releasing tons of carbon dioxide and methane gas.
+ Trump: “I’ll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA. I think, frankly, FEMA is not good. I think when you have a problem like this, I think you want to use your state to fix it and not waste time calling FEMA … I think we’re gonna recommend that FEMA go away.” Some of the poorest and reddest states in the country (those in the hurricane belt and tornado alley) are the most frequent recipients of FEMA money and aid: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and South Carolina. We’re entering the Dig-Yourself-Out-of-Your-Own-Rubble State of Capitalism.
+ Pettiness as Policy: Trump told reporters Friday that he will be conditioning aid to California following the most destructive wildfires in the state’s history. Among his bizarre conditions: that California admit a voter ID law and that the “water be released.”
+ Imagine if Biden had required Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina to adopt stringent climate policies, return Gender Queer: a Memoir and All Boys are Not Blue to school library shelves, teach evolution in the classroom, accept Medicaid expansion, legalise abortions on demand and give driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants before getting any federal relief funding for Hurricane Helene and Milton…I mean, why didn’t he?
+ Trump said this week that he would approve new power plants for energy-hogging AI data centres through an emergency declaration.
+++
+ With Trump back in the White House, FoxNews is struggling to find topics to keep their viewers in perpetual outrage. Last night, Jesse Watters had a meltdown over Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff shopping for groceries. Watters: “What kind of husband goes grocery shopping with his wife?”
+ Stanford historian and Stalin biographyer Stephen Kotkin, on Trump’s appeal to Americans:
Trump is not some alien who landed from another planet. This is somebody the American people voted for who reflects something deep and abiding about American culture. Think of all the worlds that he has inhabited and that lifted him up. Pro wrestling. Reality TV. Casinos and gambling, which are no longer just in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, but everywhere, embedded in daily life. Celebrity culture. Social media. All that looks to me like America. And, yes, so does fraud and brazen lying and the P.T. Barnum, carnival barker stuff. Butere is an audience, and not a small one, for where Trump came from and who he is.
+ $1.06 trillion: the combined net worth of the four wealthiest people at Trump’s inauguration.
+ According to 404 Media, Jeff Bezos has ordered Amazon to remove statements advocating for LGBTQ rights and racial equity from its public listing of corporate policies.
+ You can drop the “neo.” He’s the real thing…
+ The German newspaper Die Zeit covered Musk’s upraised arm for its article titled: “A Hitler Salute is a Hitler Salute is a Hitler Salute.” (Musk has endorsed the far-right German Party, AfD.)
+ Jamie Dimon on Musk: “Elon and I have hugged it out. He’s our Einstein.” This week, Dimon said that Trump’s tariffs will be inflationary and that Americans just need to “get over it.”
+ It looks like the new Trump administration just had a Viveksectomy. Apparently, Ramaswamy was too annoying even for the equally annoying Elon Musk.
+ As DC succumbed to the grip of a polar vortex during Trump’s re-inauguration and first week in office, it’s helpful to remember that the centre of Dante’s Inferno is not “the fires of Hell” but a lake frozen in perpetual ice to confine the treacherous. As the poet and Dante translator John Ciardi wrote: “The treacheries of these souls were denials of love (which is God) and of all human warmth. Only the remorseless dead centre of the ice will serve to express their natures. As they denied God’s love, so are they furthest removed from the light and warmth of His Sun. As they denied all human ties, so are they bound only by the unyielding ice.”
+ On Monday, the Trump State Department implemented a “One Flag Policy,” barring U.S. outposts at home and abroad from flying any flag other than the Stars and Stripes. Hopefully, this means good riddance to the ubiquitous MIA flags.
+ Trump’s EO to release all of the files on the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK could put an end to one of the last growth industries in the US…
+ I don’t know if there’s a more prickish collection of journalists than the Baseball Writers Association, who proved their prickishness once again this week in two revealing votes for entry into the Hall of Fame. The first denied Ichiro Suzuki, the transcendent outfielder for the Seattle Mariners, who was perhaps the greatest all-around player of his era, a unanimous vote–one lone prick choosing to dissent. The other was to deny entry to Andruw Jones, perhaps the most outstanding centerfielder since Willie Mays, who patrolled the outfield with abandon for the Atlanta Braves for a decade, excelling at the plate and in the field. The alleged rap against Jones was that his play declined in his later years. But it’s a bum one. Let’s compare Jones, who played one of the two or three most demanding positions in the game, to a player the writers chose to admit to the Hall in his place, the Houston relief pitcher Billy Wagner. I have nothing against Wagner, who was great at what he did, but what he did doesn’t compare to what Jones did. There’s no question Jones had a more significant impact on the game than a guy who pitched one inning every two or three games. Wagner had 11 good to great years; Jones had 10 great years. But those years were not the same. Andruw, the pride of Curaçao, played nine innings a game every day, hit, fielded, threw, and ran the bases. Wagner spent 99 percent of his time as an Astro sitting on the bench in the bullpen…
Wagner: 853 games, 903 innings
Jones: 2193 games, 7,599 AB, 17,078 innings
+ As Andruw’s dugout brother, Chipper Jones, said: “I wanna ask all HOF voters one question….if Andruw Jones plays for the New York Yankees for 15 yrs with 10 GGs, 400Hrs, 1300 RBIs…is he a HOFer? Lemme answer for you….first ballot!”
+ Ishmael Reed’s newest play, The Shine Challenge, 2005, a courtroom drama on the legend of Shine, a folk hero who in this latest variation on the tale defends himself against charges that he was responsible for the sinking of the Titanic, will premiere at the Theatre for the New City, in NYC on January 30th, with 12 showcase performances running Thursdays-Saturdays at 8:00 pm, with Sunday matinees at 3:00 pm, through February 16.
+ RIP Garth Hudson, the multi-instrumentalist with The Band, who started out on Bach and “soon hit the harder stuff”: “There is a view that jazz is ‘evil’ because it comes from evil people, but actually the greatest priests on 52nd Street and on the streets of New York City were the musicians. They were doing the greatest healing work. They knew how to punch through music that would cure and make people feel good.”
+ Garth could play anything and infuse it with a deep groove. But his organ riff on Chest Fever is one of the most incredible sounds in rock music…
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
Unusual Cruelty: the Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Justice System
Alec Karakatsanis
(New Press)
The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars
Cormac Ó Gráda
(Princeton)
Immediacy or the Style of Too Late Capitalism
Anna Kornbluh
(Verso)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
Héritage
Songhoy Blues
(Transgressive)
Cosmic Seeds
Brown Spirits
(Soul Jazz)
Force Majeure
Delivery
(Heavenly Recordings)
In the Interest of Humanity
It’s not greed and ambition that makes wars–it’s goodness. Wars are always fought for the best of reasons, for liberation or manifest destiny, always against tyranny and always in the best interests of humanity. So far in this war, we’ve managed to butcher some 10,000,000 people in the interest of humanity. The next war, it seems we’ll have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damn dignity.
– Paddy Chayefsky
Republished from CounterPunch, 24 January