In February 2025, Robert F Kennedy Jr began his tenure as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with an unusual message for the federal department responsible for protecting public health.
America’s greatest challenge, he said, was not just chronic disease but a “spiritual malaise”, a kind of soul-sickness derived from America’s moral decline.
“Spiritual and physical maladies thrive on one another,” Kennedy told HHS employees in his first address. The solution, he said, “must begin with a spiritual question”, of personal responsibility and inward vigilance against the dark forces that would keep Americans “sedated” and “compliant”.
Weeks later, the White House moved to cut 20,500 jobs across the very agency tasked with protecting public health.
They keep telling us to believe in the system. And just to wait for the coming election(s).
I remember Bill Maher predicting that Donald Trump wasn’t going to leave the White House if he lost in 2020. One after another Democratic bigwig smiled and laughed and then schooled Maher that the system would hold. OH YEAH?
What we’ve got is Democratic elected officials and TV talking heads going on about the horse race(s)… It’s endless, it’s the underlying theme of all their speech. But what if someone changes the rules of the game?
That is what the Republicans have done with redistricting. Normally executed every ten years after the census, Donald Trump pushed for a redrawing now, ergo the changes in Texas.
And yes, California fought back.
And ultimately Virginia. But Virginia’s new maps were just thrown out by the courts. https://lefsetz.com/
Donald Trump wins, Republicans lose. The Indiana primaries on 5 May, in which five of seven Trump-backed candidates ousted stalwart conservative Republican state legislators who had refused his command to redraw congressional districts, has been the only victory Trump can claim recently. Indiana, happily for him, is not Iran. His appeal still prevails at least over the increasingly narrow band of Maga voters. But the persistence of Trump’s domination is a sign of mounting haplessness. His victory is an augury of repudiation. Maga devotion is hardening in response to his dwindling popularity, a telltale reaction of true believers to a failed prophesy. The cult survives, the party withers.
On the same day the Indiana Republicans went down to defeat to sate Trump’s vengefulness, a Democrat won a bellwether Michigan state senate seat by 20 points in a district that Kamala Harris carried by less than a point. The bell tolls for thee.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/11/ republicans-trump-popularity
One of my guilty hathos pleasures during the elite mass psychosis known as the Great Awokening was to read each year’s New York Times’ Diversity and Inclusion Report(which they first released in 2017 — Trump’s first year in office — but stopped last year). As documents of the time go, it’s hard to get a sharper insight into the worldview still held by much of our educated elites. ttps://andrewsullivan.
The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately, as the city has reached a “point of no return” that will see it surrounded by the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a stark new study has concluded.
Ongoing sea-level rise and the rampant erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up the New Orleans area within a few generations, with the new paper estimating the city “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century”.
A climate monster is growing right now in the Pacific Ocean, perhaps the most fearsome El Niño since before scientists even began modeling them. They now know the pattern quite well: A marine heat wave in the Pacific Ocean scrambles global weather and produces in some places more intense droughts and in others more intense rainfall and flooding; disruptions to hurricane patterns and monsoon seasons, which can cause widespread crop failures; and much more punishing heat.
The El Niño building right now, and expected to crest around the end of next year, arrives on top of all our global warming. And it appears stupendously intense — almost certainly stronger than the “Super” El Niño of 2015-16, and perhaps the most intense since the epochal El Niño of 1877. The global consequences of that climatic event were so devastating that the environmental historian Mike Davis called them “Late Victorian Holocausts. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/
Alex, as we’ll call him, works for a global manufacturing company — a successful one with far-flung clients Alex visits weekly, sometimes aboard a private jet. His wife, who often joins him on the road, prefers a different mode of travel, and Alex generally lets her decide which one they use when they visit places together. That mode of travel is Delta 360°, the somewhat mythical elite-service tier offered by invitation only by America’s most successful airline.
My rant is occasioned by the news that the administration has stopped all approvals on wind farms across the country. As Katherine Krawczyk explains, for 15 years wind farms have applied to the Defense Department where
they’re supposed to undergo a “timely, transparent, and repeatable process to evaluate potential impacts” to national security and military operations. It’s a routine that has spanned presidencies, including the first Trump administration, and that typically revolves around making sure turbines don’t interfere with radars or federal airspace. https://billmckibben.
substack.com/p/everyone-knows- its-windy?utm_source=post- email-title&publication_id= 438146&post_id=197349504&utm_ campaign=email-post-title& isFreemail=true&r=2cwgv& triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=
He asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not. So,the rival florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, a thug in town to "persuade"them to close.
puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did!
Last week, we took some friends to a new restaurant, 'Steve's Place,' and noticed that the waiter who took our order carried a spoon in his shirt pocket. It seemed a little strange.
When the busboy brought our water and utensils, I observed that he also had a spoon in his shirt pocket. Then I looked around and saw that all the staff had spoons in their pockets. When the waiter came back to serve our soup I inquired, 'Why the spoon?'
'Well,' he explained, 'the restaurant's owner hired Andersen Consulting to revamp all of our processes. After several months of analysis, they concluded that the spoon was the most frequently dropped utensil. It represents a drop frequency of approximately 3 spoons per table per hour.
'If our personnel are better prepared, we can reduce the number of trips back to the kitchen and save 15 man-hours per shift.'
As luck would have it, I dropped my spoon and he replaced it with his spare. 'I'll get another spoon next time I go to the kitchen instead of making an extra trip to get it right now.' I was impressed.
I also noticed that there was a string hanging out of the waiter's fly.
Looking around, I saw that all of the waiters had the same string hanging from their flies. So, before he walked off, I asked the waiter, 'Excuse me, but can you tell me why you have that string right there?'
'Oh, certainly!' Then he lowered his voice. 'Not everyone is so observant. That consulting firm I mentioned also learned that we can save time in the restroom. By tying this string to the tip of our you-know-what, we can pull it out without touching it and eliminate the need to wash our hands, shortening the time spent in the restroom by 76.39%.
I asked quietly, 'After you get it out, how do you put it back?'
'Well,' he whispered, 'I don't know about the others, but I use the spoon.
