Powderhorn

The fired Noaa employees were among the roughly 16,000 people terminated across the federal workforce in a sweeping move by the Trump administration that targeted workers in “probationary” status. Some were categorized that way because they were new in their careers, but others had recently received promotions or been added full-time to agencies after years of contract or temporary work.

“The majority of probationary employees in my office have been with the agency for 10+ years and just got new positions,” said one worker who still had their job, and who spoke to the Guardian under the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal in February, when the firings first happened.

“If we lose them, we’re losing not just the world-class work they do day-to-day, but also decades of expertise and institutional knowledge.”

Looks like we're going to need more Sharpies.

Does Trump really believe that all NOAA does is prattle on about climate change? Or is this the more obvious first step toward privatizing weather forecasts?

Earlier this week, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — which oversees ICE — announced that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will begin monitoring the social media of non-citizens for “antisemitic activity.”

“USCIS will consider social media content that indicates an alien endorsing, espousing, promoting, or supporting antisemitic terrorism, antisemitic terrorist organizations, or other antisemitic activity as a negative factor in any USCIS discretionary analysis when adjudicating immigration benefit requests. This guidance is effective immediately,” the announcement from DHS read.

Given the recent actions by the Trump administration, activities that evidently qualify for detention and removal include protests against human rights abuses by the Israeli military.

For now, it seems as if the president’s economy-nuking bad math was somehow too stupid to implement, even for this uniquely depraved administration.

“I can breathe now… But everything could change tomorrow,” one big Trump and GOP donor says, days after telling Rolling Stone: “I don’t know if I would be this worried about what will happen to the economy if Bernie fucking Sanders were president. That’s how bad this is.”

In fact, mere hours before the president cried “PAUSE,” an array of Trump advisers and close associates were watching through splayed fingers, unsure if catastrophe and collapse were waiting around the next news cycle.

“I am cautiously optimistic about the future. But I’m scared to death right now,” Art Laffer, a well-known Reaganite economist who remains an informal adviser to Trump, said in a phone interview Wednesday morning. “I am a wuss. I really don’t like taking things to the brink,” he said, explaining that Trump was “doing something I never would do, because I’m a chicken, and he’s not. It frightens me, but can I say he’s wrong? I don’t know.”

Some political observers hope that Trump single-handedly inflicting deep financial pain on the world might break the spell among his most ardent supporters. In this way, the tariffs are a reality test. But if the recent past is any guide, what many dismiss as bad-faith rhetoric can quickly harden into a core ideology for a set of true believers; the anti-vax movement and the subsequent measles outbreaks are a sobering analog. This is how breaks with reality occur now, aided, in part, by the internet’s justification machine, which is an efficient mechanism for dispelling any trace of cognitive dissonance. In some cases, falling down the conspiratorial rabbit hole is motivated by grievance—my enemies hate this, therefore it must be good. And any market bounce-back after Trump’s announcement of a 90-day pause will be taken by true believers as evidence of the president’s genius (see: Bill Ackman).

Some Trump supporters are also worried about their reputations. For many outspoken VCs, backing Trump was a bet, much like investing in a portfolio company—one that came with substantial risk. Should Trump’s tariff scheme backfire completely by causing a recession or worse, their reputations as risk managers and complex-systems thinkers would naturally be tarnished (see: Bill Ackman). Unless, of course, they chose to double down and create a fictional narrative in which they cannot be wrong. The truthers are, in essence, talking up their reputational investment —as if the Trump administration was a stock they were holding. As Trump himself has proved throughout his political career, it is often easier to double down and build a fantasy world around your mistake than to admit you were wrong.

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In my experiments I’ve found that the most rigid thinkers have genetic dispositions related to how dopamine is distributed in their brains.

Rigid thinkers tend to have lower levels of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex and higher levels of dopamine in their striatum, a key midbrain structure in our reward system that controls our rapid instincts. So our psychological vulnerabilities to rigid ideologies may be grounded in biological differences.

In fact, we find that people with different ideologies have differences in the physical structure and function of their brains. This is especially pronounced in brain networks responsible for reward, emotion processing, and monitoring when we make errors.

For instance, the size of our amygdala — the almond-shaped structure that governs the processing of emotions, especially negatively tinged emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, danger and threat — is linked to whether we hold more conservative ideologies that justify traditions and the status quo.

Forty-one new anti-protest bills across 22 states have been introduced since the start of the year – compared with a full-year total of 52 in 2024 and 26 in 2023, according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) tracker.

This year’s tally includes 32 bills across 16 states since Trump returned to the White House, with five federal bills targeting college students, anti-war protesters and climate activists with harsh prison sentences and hefty fines – a crackdown that experts warn threaten to erode first amendment rights to freedom of speech, assembly and petition.

🎶 O'er the land of the free ... 🎶

I fell into the field. Had my roommate not wanted to watch a particular channel at a particular time, y'all would have a rather different U.S. News community.

This was spring 1998, so at least we were past Braveheart running on some HBO channel 24/7 such that walking down the hallway to pee meant hearing it yet again.

Early on in my time as a columnist, I took aim at the administration, as I already saw what was happening. We were sold an amazing undergrad, but as things went on, it became increasingly clear we were just this pesky thing stopping UW from being able to fully focus on important things like research.

By underpaying grad students, of course.

As opinion editor a year after actually steeping myself in the newsroom (and production room), I stepped up my assaults on the administration; by this point, I was calling out individual administrators for their actions.

A year later, I was managing editor and at this point had no fucks left to give. I raked the university president over the coals over, and over, and over. Not weekly via my column, as that would have been tedious, but I was running the editorial board, so I could certainly do it anonymously with some frequency.

We had those times where College Republicans would steal and burn issues of The Daily just outside the Communications building. Thing is, they didn't do enough research to figure out which side of the building the newsroom was on, so they were burning shit outside of professors' offices with all of us blissfully unaware until someone needed to take an unusual path (usually via the health center) to grab lunch.

There was a vice-provost who had to endlessly come to my defense throughout my time there, from contributing writer, to designer and columnist, to opinion ed, to managing ed. It wasn't that he agreed with me; he thought the purpose of the university was to foster an environment where ideas could be exchanged.

When we remove this from campus, it is questionable what universities are doing. At that point, it's an unapologetic trade school, shitting out good little bitches for corporate America.

I never intended to go into journalism, everything my parents did to the contrary, from getting me a rubber movable-type setup -- which I loved -- around 4 to a copy of The Newsroom, software for the Apple ][+ that allowed one to take copy and art and design a page crudely.

Right, this is normal for being 8. But I'm named after a WWII journalist, so despite their protestations when I went off the reservation in college and starting prioritizing my time in the newsroom over being fucked to go to class, surprised Pikachu.

There is no purpose in a college newsroom where the opinion page is Dear Leader approved.

Hatsushima is not a particularly busy station, relative to Japanese rail commuting as a whole. It serves a town (Arida) of about 25,000, known for mandarin oranges and scabbardfish, that is shrinking in population, like most of Japan. Its station sees between one to three trains per hour at its stop, helping about 530 riders find their way. Its wooden station was due for replacement, and the replacement could be smaller.

The replacement, it turned out, could also be a trial for industrial-scale 3D-printing of custom rail shelters. Serendix, a construction firm that previously 3D-printed 538-square-foot homes for about $38,000, built a shelter for Hatsushima in about seven days, as shown at The New York Times. The fabricated shelter was shipped in four parts by rail, then pieced together in a span that the site Futurism says is "just under three hours," but which the Times, seemingly present at the scene, pegs at six. It was in place by the first train's arrival at 5:45 am.

Love the kicker of "Concrete Examples." chef's kiss

The harm required for an injunction "is not present here," according to Richardson. He wrote that each "plaintiff's information is one row in various databases that are millions upon millions of rows long. The harm that might come from granting database access to an additional handful of government employees—prone as they may be to hacks or leaks, as the plaintiffs have alleged—strikes me as different in kind, not just in degree, from the harm inflicted by reporters, detectives, and paparazzi."

Judge Nicole Berner, a Biden appointee who dissented from the 8-7 vote against an en banc hearing, said the court "majority effectively denies the plaintiffs the relief they seek without adjudication of their case on the merits. Permitting DOGE unfettered access to the plaintiffs' personally identifiable information lets the proverbial genie out of the bottle. Even if they ultimately prevail, the plaintiffs will already have suffered irreparable harm."

Just two months into Donald Trump’s second term, Wall Street is unnerved. Julia Coronado, the president and co-founder of the economic consulting firm MacroPolicy Perspectives, said that’s because investors and executives had convinced themselves that Trump wouldn’t do anything significant to disrupt the market’s upward trajectory.

“We had a pretty great setup for Trump,” Coronado said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine, paraphrasing the thinking on the Street. “Why would he mess with that?”

Coronado, a former Federal Reserve economist who’s held top roles at BNP Paribas and the hedge fund Graham Capital Management, is a widely sought after economic consultant whose clients include asset managers, hedge funds and banks. I spoke with Coronado as she drove to the University of Texas at Austin, where she’s a clinical associate professor of finance at the McCombs School of Business.

Wall Street craves predictability, but Trump’s early priorities — including off-and-on tariffs, government cutbacks and immigration crackdowns — signal that this time around, the president has a much stronger appetite for disruption. He has refused to rule out a possible recession even after markets convulsed following a series of major tariff announcements.

As countries debate how to respond, the pain threshold that might matter most is not Trump’s but that of his fellow Republicans, especially those in Congress who have the ability to stop and reverse these tariffs. At what point will they feel enough pressure from their voters, with their dwindling savings, to move against the president?

Even if that day comes sooner than expected, one thing is for certain: One of the biggest costs of Trump’s trade war is the trust of other countries in America as a stable, reliable pillar of global trade.

The office’s closure strips Homeland Security of a key internal check and balance, analysts and former staff say, as the Trump administration morphs the agency into a mass-deportation machine. The civil rights team served as a deterrent to border patrol and immigration agents who didn’t want the hassle and paperwork of an investigation, staff said, and its closure signals that rights violations, including those against U.S. citizens, could go unchecked.

The office processed more than 3,000 complaints in fiscal year 2023 — on everything from disabled detainees being unable to access medical care to abuses of power at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and reports of rape at its detention centers. For instance, following reports that ICE had performed facial recognition searches on millions of Maryland drivers, [an Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties] investigation led the agency to agree to new oversight; case details have been removed from the DHS website but are available in the internet archive. The office also reported to Congress that it had investigated and confirmed allegations that a child, a U.S. citizen traveling without her parents between Mexico and California, had been sexually abused by Customs and Border Protection agents during a strip search.

Those cases would have gone nowhere without CRCL, its former staffers said.

“Nobody knows where to go without CRCL, and that’s the point,” a senior official said. Speaking of the administration, the official went on, “They don’t want oversight. They don’t care about civil rights and civil liberties.”