Trump's sweeping termination of U.S. foreign aid programs last year has largely fallen off of most of our news feeds—leaving a lot of conservative influencers to declare that it was all no big deal; a nothingburger.
But Nick Kristof today in the New York Times does the math and brings the receipts. He marshals convincing evidence that the number of people—mostly children under five—who have died so far as a result of Trump's aid withdrawals is at least in the hundreds of thousands.
I read a very annoying article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday and now I'm wishing I hadn't.
It was about the cottage industry of people online who claim to be able to spot when other writers are using AI.
They have identified a number of tells, they say, which amount to a "house style" for AI.
Yesterday's obituary for Ted Turner in the New York Times quoted a number of appalling anecdotes about his reactionary youth, which made me think this guy does not register as a worthy person. But it also included a single story of personal loss from Turner's biography that was profoundly humanizing.
The article talks about the fact that Turner lost his younger sister to lupus and encephalitis when he was in his twenties. Obviously, with my dad's situation in the hospital, I'm emotionally keyed in to anything I read or see that touches on death—so it's perhaps not surprising that this got to me. Turner "described her death as the reason he lost his religious faith," according to the Times write-up.
"Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing," Orwell wrote in the first sentence of his classic essay on the English novelist.
And Orwell himself, it would seem, is considered by many to be worth stealing as well.
By Ken Griffin, for instance.
Trump's penchant for slaughter and mass-death seems to be concentrated right now in his ongoing boat strikes in the Caribbean and his war in the Middle East. But recent events also prove that his desire to destroy is not limited to human kind—but extends as well to the animal kingdom.
He has also sought to circumvent endangered species protections for the Rice's whale in the Gulf of Mexico, in order to promote more oil and gas drilling, for instance. And now he is reportedly even trying to evict bison herds from federal land in the West—per a recent New York Times article.
My dad has been having a lot of mental confusion lately due to his brain cancer. Yesterday it was particularly bad. But there was one fleeting and precious moment when the fog lifted a bit and he was suddenly completely lucid.
We were walking over to a restaurant a block from our house. As my dad often does in his current condition, he would walk a few feet, then have an idea and pause to explain it to me.
At least if prosecutors are to be believed (never a certain proposition), it looks increasingly likely that last year's apocalyptic Palisades Fire in Los Angeles was deliberately set. Indeed, prosecutors allege that a specific individual went out to commit arson as an act of deliberate revolutionary terrorism against the rich.
He did it, they say, because he was obsessed with another suspected populist terrorist—Luigi Mangione—and saw the fire as a form of vengeance against the indifferent rich. "We’re basically being enslaved by them," he allegedly said; and "Reddit let's kill all the billionaires," was reportedly one of his Google searches.
