My worry is that this gets filed away as a freak event, when the same small river flooded 14 months earlier and nobody moved a gauge onto it. "Freak" is the word that we use for things we decided not to measure.
- Gwen, Critical Latitude
"Everything we know about Nepal's flood"
This week's featured post is "Hegseth vs. the Deep Pentagon".
Ongoing stories
- Trump's assault on American democracy. Trump's attempt to control mail-in voting is obviously beyond his legal powers. But he has appealed to the Supreme Court, where laws have no meaning.
- Climate change. The Nepal flood is another of those extreme events that scientists can't 100% nail down as a consequence of climate change. But climate change makes events like this much more likely.
- Ukraine. We've been around this track many times before: Trump sends his people (Kushner and Wittkoff this time) to Moscow. They have "substantive" or "productive" talks with Putin. They go to Kyiv to present Putin's demands to Zelenskyy, who says no. "The war will continue."
This week's developments
This week everybody was talking about the postal service
Under normal circumstances, the US Postal Service is not national news. It delivers mail, does it wonderfully in some ways and disappointingly in others. But during an ordinary presidency the most newsworthy thing it does is add a few cents to the basic letter rate or close a post office somewhere.
USPS used to be an independent agency. But that was in the days before the Supreme Court signed on to the unitary tyrant executive theory, which basically wipes out all independent agencies, placing them under the control of the President (at least until a Democratic president gets elected; whether s/he will have the same powers the Court has given Trump is anybody's guess).
So Trump is trying to use his authority over the Post Office to cheat in the fall elections. Democracy Docket summarizes:
Under the new USPS rule, written to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail voting, states’ mail ballot envelopes must include certain design changes, such as new logos and barcodes. The rule also requires states to submit personal information on voters who’ve requested mail ballots to a federal online portal. States that fail at either requirement would not receive mail ballots from USPS.
The cheating part is the submission to the federal portal, which would check those states' lists against a list complied by DHS of US citizens, and not deliver ballots to people it deemed ineligible. The alleged intent is to keep non-citizens from voting -- which is a laudable goal, but is nearly achieved already: No study has shown any significant number of non-citizens voting in any state. But the actual intent is more sinister: to make the Trump regime the arbiter of who can legitimately vote.
According to the Constitution, managing elections is the job of the states. Congress can pass laws regulating federal elections, but the executive branch without Congress has no authority to issue new rules.
24 states are suing to block the new rule. They initially won their suits, until the Supreme Court weighed in, saying that the suit (at that time) was premature, because the rule was only proposed and had not been finalized. Then it became final and the circus started all over again.
Friday, a district court blocked the rule. The Trump regime responded by skipping the usual appellate court and going straight to the Supreme Court, asking it to stay the lower court ruling and allow USPS' new rule to go into effect in time for the November elections.
As so often happens these days, the law is clear. But whether the Supreme Court will follow the law or make up new laws is anyone's guess. Maybe I'm naive, but I think the Court is going to follow the law this time.
and dissent inside the Pentagon
That's the subject of the featured post.
and Trump's clueless midterm strategy
You may not have heard about it yet, but there's going to be a national political convention this week.
This week in Dallas, Texas, the party will stage a midterm convention for the first time. Donald Trump will deliver a keynote address on Wednesday and closing remarks on Thursday in Dallas, Texas. Other speakers include Vice-President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Attorney General Todd Blanche, Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. The convention has been billed as a “primetime showcase” to boost morale, nationalise congressional elections and galvanise Republican voters.
One reason I'm optimistic about Democrats taking not just the House but the Senate: Trump doesn't seem to understand the problem. He lives in Natalie's fantasy world where he has done all these amazing things. The only problems he sees are that his people are demoralized and the good news of his many achievements just isn't getting out for some reason.
Everybody was wondering what he would spend his massive PAC on. But if his first ad of the season is any indication, he's going to spend it praising himself
He is the toughest, most resilient person that I've ever met, and nothing was going to stop him from fighting so hard for the country he loves. When the world needs courage, vision, and inspiration, it is still turning to America. There is no challenge Americans cannot overcome, no frontier too vast for us to conquer. We will be prosperous. We will be proud. We will be strong, and we will win like never before.
So he's not ending the war or getting gas prices down or resolving the trade war with Canada or forgetting about his unpopular ballroom and triumphal arch until after the election. And he's not holing up in the White House and letting Republican candidates fend for themselves. He wants to be the big issue of the midterms, and Democrats want that too.
Sadly, few people will probably watch this convention. (Being on opposite the start of the NFL season is just one of its many difficulties.) I expect the low ratings for Trump's speech to spark an epic Truth Social tirade from the Mad King. But it probably won't move the needle in either direction, because nobody is going to watch.
Much is being written about Trump's desire to leave a legacy of monuments to himself. He would do well to consider this: There is no Eisenhower monument, but there is an interstate highway system. There is no Johnson monument, but there is Medicare. There is no FDR monument, just Social Security.
Trump needs his arch and ballroom and coin and airport and all the rest of it because he has accomplished nothing of note. If he doesn't use his power to construct some physical edifice (or to carve his name on something constructed by or for some other president), no one will ever think of him again after he leaves office -- at least not in a positive way.
Missouri had passed a gerrymandering map with the intent of getting rid of one of its two Democratic congressional districts. But the state supreme court blocked the move. The situation is a little confusing, because primaries were already held using the gerrymandered map.
and Germany
The far-right Alternative fur Deutschland Party (AFD) got 44% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, one of Germany's 16 regions. The other major parties are firmly against a coalition with AfD, so it will be interesting to see how Saxony-Anhalt forms a government.
The AfD stands for "remigration" of immigrants back to their original countries, even if they entered Germany legally. It also wants to end Germany's support for Ukraine and improve relations with Putin's Russia.
Here's how far out AfD is:
France's National Rally under Marine Le Pen kicked the AfD out of its grouping in the European Parliament two years ago, for being too "radical".
and you also might be interested in ...
Not quite two weeks ago, Nepal suffered a catastrophic flash flood.
At least 1,342 deaths and 4,886 missing persons were confirmed in Nepal with an additional 43 dead and 519 missing in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. The flood carried the bodies of some victims 240 km (150 mi) away into neighbouring India.
One reason this event was so deadly is that in the 50 minutes between detection and the water/debris sludge sweeping a town away, nobody warned them.
Early explanations blamed the flood on an earthquake in the high Himalayas. A later explanation said it was due to a glacier breaking up. But the current explanation says that unusually warm weather melted the centuries-old ice that had been mortaring the mountain rocks together. That led to an avalanche, which fooled seismic sensors into announcing an earthquake.
Is this climate change in action? It's very hard to look at one particular disaster and definitively attach it to climate change. But it sure looks like the kind of thing you'd expect to see more often as the Earth warms.
If you have half an hour to spend on this topic, I strongly recommend this video by the Critical Latitude podcast. It explains why the various false explanations arose, how they were debunked, why warnings didn't make it to the people in the path of the flood, and where else in the world conditions like this might occur.
It's been decades since I've been to the Burning Man festival in Nevada. I remember it as a temporary Shangri-La where you could be free from people trying to dominate you or judge you or sell you something. It's hard to appreciate an environment like that until you experience it. You might think it's effortless to filter out all that dominance and judgement and salesmanship, but then somebody turns it off and the quiet in your mind is amazing.
One price you pay for that freedom is that you have to follow some simple rules, like you don't take pictures or videos of people who haven't consented. There's good reason for that: It would be hard to feel really free in whatever you're doing if you had to worry about your picture showing up on social media and somehow making it back to your workplace. (My late wife once briefly wound up on Nightline, presumably because she was one of the few people who was fully clothed and willing to talk on camera.)
So anyway, according to this account by Friendly Atheist, a proselytizing Christian group showed up at Burning Man, broke a bunch of those rules, and got thrown out of the event. They then started a persecution narrative on their social media accounts, claiming they were thrown out for being Christian.
Would you look at that? Another story of Christians assuming they can break the rules and get away with it because of their faith. Another violation of consent. Another example of Christian privilege followed by false accusations of persecution. ... If Burning Man is all about radical inclusion, that still very much extends to people with absurd religious beliefs. But their rules don’t have exceptions for followers of Jesus. The missionaries’ dishonest attempt to turn their eviction into a story of persecution is just another reason you should always fact-check Christians’ stories whenever they claim they’re the victims of discrimination.
I admit that I do not check out every Christian-persecution story I run across. But every one set in America that I have checked into turned out to be bogus. As best I can tell, there is no actual persecution of Christians in the United States.
and let's close with something incongruous
When you see National Gallery of Art curator Allison Williams, her 77-year-old appearance doesn't seem to fit with her Gen Z slang. Watch her video.
