Lessening Heart Hums, 49th Day of Childwinter, 525 M.E. (Atlas): The incompetence has been truly breathtaking. 

I really, really, really do not want this blog to devolve into daily anti-Trump screeds. But a person whose house is on fire may not want to talk only about "call the Fire Department," and "how did the flames spread so fast?" and "let's get the fuck out of here." In a crisis, conversations about the crisis are all but inevitable.

This is the time and this is the record of the time. Writing about the weather, my daily walks, some movie I watched on television last night, my dipshit "new, revised" calendar,  or video games seems pretty pointless when the house is burning down. Let's put the fire out first and then we can talk about anything else that rises in our minds.

Trump and his pet DOGGIE (actually, DOGGIE and his pet Trump) are dismantling the government and laying off its employees en masse with little or no idea of what those agencies or people actually do and the harm of their layoff actions. Sadly, even if the effort were to stop right now, this very instant, it may take a long time, maybe as long as a generation, to repair the damage already done. The damage to global climate will probably never be fixed. "Trump Cuts Target Next Generation of Scientists and Public Health Leaders," according to a New York Times headline, which further notes that a core group of so-called disease detectives, who track outbreaks, was apparently spared, but other young researchers are out of jobs. The workers in charge of nuclear weapon safety were fired, and after it was realized that they were actually kind of important, the administration discovered they didn't know how to call them back, as they had already terminated their email accounts and didn't know how to access other records on their whereabouts.

Meanwhile, we are blundering our way into a financial crisis, as an op-ed in today's Times claims.

The Vice President, DOD Secretary, and Secretary of State made royal asses of themselves in Europe. The Veep delivered a blistering attack on the leaders of European countries to their faces, a move calculated to win street cred on Fox News and with the MAGA base, but which infuriated and alienated our allies. Among the charges leveled were that Germany was unfairly excluding far-right neo-Nazi groups from public discourse, but the move backfired, at least in Germany, where the fringe support of fascism actually decreased following his statements. The alcoholic, black-out drunk Defense Secretary told NATO that they should consider Ukraine's admission to NATO and keeping of their pre-2014 borders "off the table" in any truce negotiations with Russia. In other words, our opening position on negotiations with Putin should be unconditional surrender. And then, the Secretary of State began formal negotiations with Russia without any Ukrainian presence, but with Saudi Arabia instead for some reason. Meanwhile, Trump floated the idea that Ukraine should consider giving the U.S. half of its mineral rights in exchange for American support. 

There have been four fatal plane crashes since Trump took office and sacked the FAA, eventually (but only after the first crash) replacing the director with one of his own loyal stooges. Trump blamed the first one on DEI (i.e., women and persons of color), but everyone know the fault was on him, and he hopes we quickly forget the rest of the crashes. 

Trump tried to engineer a deal with the disgraced and criminally indicted mayor of New York City to conditionally pardon his crimes in exchange for cooperation on mass deportation of immigrants, but the deal was so obvious and stupid that a number of Department of Justice officials involved have resigned in protest, the Governor is considering using her executive powers to remove the compromised mayor from office, and the city is in administrative chaos.

Trump has proposed renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Denali, blamed the L.A. wildfire crises on some imaginary "giant faucet" in northern California and then ordered 2.2 billion gallons of water dumped from the state's reservoir onto Central Valley farmland that didn't need it and where it won't benefit firefighters at all (but will cause problems this summer when droughts begin), replaced a four-star general at DOD with the inexperienced, alcoholic, black-out drunk Fox & Friends weekend host, imposed tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, and then lifted the tariffs on our North American neighbors after they repeated pledges they had already made, pardoned or commuted the sentences of all of the convicted January 6 rioters, including the most violent, withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate-change treaty and the World Health Organization, said the U.S. will take over the Gaza strip and "own it," including displacing all of the native Palestinians, and tried to end the constitutional birthright citizenship of those born on American soil. Stable genius, my ass!    

This is what happens when stupid people elect a stupid man for president. Yes, I know that I just called half the American population stupid, but as Steven Wright once noted, "Half the people you know are below average." The below-average half are the ones that voted for Trump and brought on this wave of administrative incompetence.