Carrying the war on diversity too far
In mid February Elon Musk’s DOGE (pronounced “douche”) attacked the USDA’s team of scientists that maintain a diverse collection of seeds as a strategic hedge against catastrophic famine brought on by any number of potential threats. The DOGE team fired some of the scientists that carry out this important work.
Since its establishment in 1898, the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Plant Germplasm System and the scientists who support it have systematically gathered and maintained the agricultural plant species that undergird our food system in vast collections such as the one in Aberdeen. The collections represent a towering achievement of foresight that food security depends on the availability of diverse plant genetic resources. NY Times, March 22, 2025
One can imagine that Elon and Trump heard that the USDA was protecting diverse plant genetics and wanted to rid the agency of this DEI program.
Posted 22 March 2025 by Mark ·
Oh lord, he's such a putz
This is what happens when you are a corrupt weakling cosplaying as a strongman. You take credit for things that competent people do.
The Starliner saga is finally coming to an end with the return of NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore on Tuesday after a prolonged nine month stay in space. The story is largely over, but that didn’t prevent President Donald Trump from taking one final stab at the former administration—a stab packed with disinformation, exaggerations, and outright falsehoods.
Trump took to his social media platform Truth Social on Monday to once again take credit for the plan to bring the Starliner astronauts back home. The NASA duo, Wilmore and Williams, launched to the International Space Station on board Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner on June 5, 2024. The mission was supposed to last for eight days but NASA declared Starliner unsafe in the wake of alarming technical issues. The spacecraft returned home empty, with Wilmore and Williams assigned a pair of seats aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which finally undocked from the ISS on Tuesday, March 18 at 1:05 a.m. ET.
Trump is disingenuously claiming to have facilitated a rescue mission to bring the astronauts home, accusing the Biden administration of having “abandoned” them. The president’s latest social media diatribe on the return of Crew-9, posted to Truth Social on Monday, is a doozy, filled with nonsensical claims and glaring inaccuracies.
Posted 18 March 2025 by Mark ·
Our corrupt Republican congressman
Cliff Bentz, the only Republican congressman from Oregon, is a supporter of the most corrupt administration ever elected in the United States. His unwavering sycophancy to the corrupt patrimonialism of Trump and his henchman, Elon Musk, should be an obvious incentive for a reasonable Republican to challenge Bentz in 2026. It remains to be seen if there’s a reasonable Republican in Oregon’s district 2, but we can dream.
By failing to challenge Trump and Musk, Bentz is throwing his weight behind a kind of incompetent corruption that could lead to an economic meltdown unmatched since the Great Depression of last century. The problem with Trump’s lack of ethics is that it leads to the kind of corruption that removes all of the safeguards that were put in place to protect our society and economy from the kind of calamity caused by that economic collapse nearly a century ago. By handing Elon Musk the weapons needed to destroy the institutional foundations of our nation, Trump is able to capitalize on his corruption and steal directly from American citizens the riches of our one-time great society while ignoring the potential for just such a collapse. (The actual theft may be carried out by Musk, but like the system that operates in all crime families, Trump benefits by the tribute kicked up from his goons.)
Cliff Bentz may be ignorant of the real risks of Trump’s corruption. Or he may be corrupt, too, and hope to get a piece of the ill-gotten pie himself — it’s difficult to know since he’s afraid to hold meetings with constituents in Ashland where he would face serious questioning.
We need a congressional representative in Oregon District 2 who has the courage and character to stand up for the constitution and the American people, and to fight against the corruption of an administration that refuses to adhere to the law.
Posted 18 March 2025 by Mark ·
