For Amusement Purposes Only

So, ICE is trying to dox folks:

The effort has swept up U.S. citizens and activist groups that track ICE activity, with contractors assembling dossiers that can include a poster’s name, birth date, employer, Social Security number and vehicle records. To identify anonymous accounts, the Department of Homeland Security has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social media companies, and recently escalated to grand jury subpoenas that are harder to fight.

Meanwhile…

The administration now treats organized doxxing of officers as domestic terrorism, a label it has stretched to cover filming agents at work. ICE spending on surveillance tools and consultants hit $258 million in Trump’s first full year back, a 57% jump.

I’d point out the hypocrisy if it weren’t so depressingly obvious.

I’m very glad that I decided to grow my own lettuce on a whim this year.

Turns out it’s pretty easy to grow. I used a packet of Dollar Store seeds and have had the best lettuce of my life for the last 3 months (and still going):

https://www.almanac.com/plant/lettuce

I didn’t mean to imply that the dementia is new, it’s just too evident to hide to even the most dedicated of his followers at this point, and this particular case made it very apparent. The Project 2025 bigwigs just want to get the case out of the news cycle because there’s no positive way to spin it, and the more attention Trump gives it, the more damage it does to their plans.

Once its out of the news cycle, he’ll forget about it, unless they need another distraction from the Epstein files and decide to remind him.

They know he’s disintegrating, and likely only has a few months before he’s rendered incapable of functioning. The contractor was a political crony of Trump’s who has little to no influence within the Project 2025 framework, and the blatant injustice of the trial was eroding confidence in the DOJ - which Project 2025 needs to push it’s agenda.

Pirro will take Trump’s heat for a bit until he forgets about it, and then proceed to implement the rest of Project 2025’s goals like a good little soldier. The contractor was an easy sacrifice, and Trump cares more about the public embarrassment than bailing out a crony who made him look a fool on the national stage.

Trump’s loyalists aren’t turning on him. They’re waiting out his dementia while they implement the Project 2025 agenda, and making sure he doesn’t completely torch the place before the new boss has a chance to take over.

Sometimes… Cyberpunk 2077 at launch is one example where the supposed optimization was less than optimal.

The other element is that it’s easy to get locked out of updates if the developer chooses not to support them on console. For instance, L4D2 on the Xbox 360 is absolutely gimped in comparison to PC, where it has new official campaigns and a thriving modding ecosystem 15+ years after launch… an ecosystem an Xbox 360 user can’t touch.

The PC is more money up front, but drastically cheaper over the lifetime of the product. It’s also more versatile, and capable of upgrading along with almost infinite backwards compatibility for older titles.

Consoles will be a couple of hundred (or thousand, depending on the PC you chose) cheaper, but you are forced to buy games within its ecosystem, usually at full retail price - a library of 10 AAA games will cost $600 on console, where you can get the same library on Steam for half or less of than that by simply keeping an eye on sales. The console won’t be upgradeable. You cannot easily pirate games, and there’s no such thing as DRM free gaming. And backwards compatibility is janky or simply removed for most consoles.

The only place consoles really win out is in live social gaming - it’s a lot easier to get a group of friends to play PS5 on the couch than it is to get them to play PC on the couch. Aside from that, though, it’s sort of like comparing a tricycle to a Harley… yeah, they’re both bikes, but the differences become real clear once you get out on the road.

Translation:

They’re gutting any sort of science that provides benefits to people (life sciences, environmental, social) and putting the money into technology that is designed to control and hurt people (computer science = AI, while physical science and engineering = military application).

At least that’s my take. Feels like they intentionally left the memorandum as vague as possible.

Californian climate refugee here. The issue isn’t that they can’t plant more trees. The issue (dependent on species, of course) is that the trees have stopped sprouting at the same time that they’ve been under a massive decades long assault by an invasive species, bark beetles:

Bark beetles are most commonly recognized by their impact on the lumber industry. Massive outbreaks of mountain pine beetles in western North America after about 2005 have killed millions of acres of forest from New Mexico to British Columbia.[20] Bark beetles enter trees by boring holes in the bark of the tree, sometimes using the lenticels, or the pores plants use for gas exchange, to pass through the bark of the tree.[3] As the larvae consume the inner tissues of the tree, they often consume enough of the phloem to girdle the tree, cutting off the spread of water and nutrients. Ambrosia beetles are also known to aid in the spread of pathogens, such as diseases that can cause cankers, further damaging the trees they infect.[21] Like many other insects, Scolytinae emit pheromones to attract conspecifics, which are thus drawn to trees already colonized by bark beetles. This can result in heavy infestations and eventually death of the tree.[3][22] Many are also attracted to ethanol produced as a byproduct of microbial growth in the dead woody tissues.[23] Increases in international trade, as well as the use of wood containers for storage, has aided numerous species of bark beetle in spreading across the world.[24] They are also extremely adaptable and able to quickly spread through new environments, as seen in France with eleven different species.[25] Bark beetle infestations are also predicted to increase with global warming, meaning infestations will most likely increase in frequency as temperatures rise.[26][27] Besides the fact that these rising temperatures provide the optimal conditions for larval growth, the development time that the larvae need to become an adult also drops, from 8–9 weeks to 6–7 weeks. As a third the result of global warming, the breeding season of the bark beetle is extended, meaning that number of generations per year will increase.[28] All these factors contribute to an increasing amount of bark beetles and will thus likely result in an increasing frequency of infestations. In the past, fire has been suggested as potential mechanism for controlling bark beetle populations; however, most studies of wildfire after beetle outbreaks have found no effect of beetle-caused tree mortality on wildfire size or severity.

In the Napa Valley, the hillsides were covered in Douglas Fir. About 20 years ago, they began to die as the bark beetles spread along the ridgelines, leaving swathes of dead, hollowed out tree trunks. It was bad, but manageable at first - the fir were still sprouting seedlings.

But after things continued to get hotter, the seedling growth slowed. The forests got drier, filled with dead timber, and between 2017 - 2021, about half of the western hills and most of the eastern ridge was burnt. And when I say burnt, I do not mean your standard burn - it was razed to the ground by fire tornadoes 90’ tall, in places that hadn’t burnt in over 200 years.

Five years later, the forest is coming back - but not the same. There are bay laurel and oak seedlings now about 5’ tall - they’re adapted for hotter weather. Normally, the Douglas Fir would be there as well, but there are no seedlings at all.

It’s become too hot for them to germinate in the Napa Valley. The seeds won’t sprout.

If there’s one small silver lining, it’s that the big trees will eventually come back - just not the Douglas Fir. The more heat resistant Ponderosa has begun showing up, and in 20 - 30 years will likely become the dominant big tree on the ridgelines.

20 years ago, the Napa Valley was like Bordeaux. Now the climate is like Sicily, and the deep forest is gone.

Visit your local forest now. Savor what it is NOW. Because it’s very likely you will live to see it burn, and once it burns, it will never come back the same way again.