Roaming Charges: Catch US Now We’re Falling

On Wednesday in the Oval Office, Trump was allegedly told by X Æ A-Xii, one of Elon Musk’s 12 (known) kids, to “Shut up” and “You’re not the president!” Perhaps as compensation for being dissed by a four-year-old (who also wiped streams of snot on the Resolute Desk), Trump proclaimed himself the head of the Kennedy Center, whose annual awards he’d boycotted during his prior term, and called Putin to let him know he could take as much of Ukraine as he could carry back to Moscow, as long as he left the rare earth minerals behind for Trump. More

When Musk Invades the Pentagon

In an oped in the Washington Post this week, former secretary of the navy Richard Danzig recommended deploying Elon Musk and his team from the Department of Government Efficiency to the Pentagon “not with a view to cutting costs,” but to “increase effectiveness” of our weapons systems.  Danzig believes that “our first national security priority should not be to cut costs.”  I believe that we can do both.
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Trump’s Manifest Destiny

Puerto Rico. Guam. The U.S. Virgin Islands. American Samoa. The Northern Mariana Islands. Today these unincorporated territories are inhabited by U.S. citizens who cannot vote in presidential elections, have limited representation in Congress and circumscribed self-governance, and are excluded from important federal programs and tax provisions. They can only benefit from selective constitutional protections. To this list of colonies one can add the U.S. government’s military bases and operations around the world, resource and labor management, economic control, political interventions, and cultural influence. More

The Intricate Connection of Birdsongs to Human Language

In 1799, during his explorations along the Orinoco River, German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt “stayed with a local Indigenous Carib tribe near the isolated village of Maypures,” located deep in the Venezuelan jungle. The Indigenous inhabitants kept tame parrots in cages and taught them how to speak. But among them was one bird that “sounded unusual.” When Humboldt asked why, he learned that the parrot had belonged to a nearby enemy tribe who were driven from their home village and land. The few surviving members fled to a tiny islet perched between the river rapids. It was there where their culture and their lingo endured for a few more years until the last tribesman died. The only creature “who spoke their language” was the talking parrot. More