Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass. Most people are good.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Sunday, March 8, 2026

Wearing down the defenders of the environment

Context

Most Americans don't know it but MAGA elite and bigoted, Christian nationalist theocrat Russell Vought is arguably the 2nd most powerful American today. He likes to fly under the radar. He once promised this to federal employees if Trump won the 2024 election: “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work… We want their funding to be shut down… We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected… We want to put them in trauma”. 

It isn't just federal employees that authoritarian MAGA ideology needs to break. America's authoritarian MAGA wealth and power movement needs to neutralize the same kinds of pro-democracy and pro-rule of law opposition that all corrupt tyranny movements need to subdue. A prime target for MAGA's transfer of wealth and power from the public interest to allied special interests is the environment and its defenders. 

Some recent reporting indicates that active environmentalists are wearing down and weakening. MAGA is winning its pro-pollution war. The defenders start from a position of weakness, unlike (1) the huge, powerful corporations like Exxon-Mobil that profit from pollution, and (2) intense government hater ideology that falsely argues that unregulated free markets will solve our problems, while government regulation can only make them worse. Wealth and power are, as usual, at the heart of this political and social war. 

The WD4C program (working dogs for 
conservation) provides support dogs to try to
reduce mental distress among conservationists


From eco-grief to eco-depression

The defender's weaknesses: One source reports that the environmentalism movement never considered the mental well-being of working conservationists. Those jobs are characterized by low wages, exploitative practices such as endless volunteering or unpaid internships, job insecurity, low benefits and high expectations for work that are sometimes unrealistic. Not surprisingly in view of the intense hostility that Trump and powerful MAGA elites hold for environmentalism (and democracy generally), mental problems among environmental workers are becoming more common. 

A 2023 research paper found that about 28% of conservationists were experiencing moderate to severe distress. The distress includes paranoia, panic attacks, depression, and suicide. Ecologic anxiety and climate distress foment adverse psychological and emotional responses to the dark future that climate change can lead to. 

Reasons for mental breakdown are obvious in the data. A World Wildlife Federation study found that global wildlife populations fell by 73% from 1970 to 2020. That is a staggering, shocking loss. Other research found that ~90% of global fisheries are either maxed out or overfished. Fisheries failure is one facet of ocean health decline. And there is the always denied, distorted or otherwise MAGA-spun reality that the world has heated up almost 1.5 C (2.7 F) in less than 200 years. The MAGA-denied impacts are pile up and there is no end in sight.

Being human, a growing belief among conservationists is that current evidence of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss is at a point where many activists no longer believe that we can recover anymore. Conservationists are feeling grief and loss very acutely not only because they directly experience it constantly. 

MAGA's intense hostility 

Conservationists are also aware of the ferocious hostility and hate of them and environmentalism that flows every day from Trump, MAGA elites and the pro-pollution sector of the US economy. For example, on Jan. 22, 2026 at a White House event, Trump mocked climate advocates as "environmental insurrectionists", accusing them of using bad weather to push a climate scam and job‑killing regulations. In Sept. of 2025, at Trump’s UN General Assembly address, he blamed radicalized environmentalists for trying to shut down factories and hurting the economy. MAGA makes it crystal clear where MAGA stands on the issue of environmentalism -- it is just a hoax.

Idaho Fish and Wildlife Office biologists hike at sunrise 
surveying greater sage-grouse in Owyhee County Idaho

People who aren't conservationists relate to the natural world and its beauty many different ways. A non-paywalled NYT opinion, The Badlands Hold Me as I Grieve, links one woman's grief with nature's beauty: "I have a kind of game I play with grief, imagining the birds I see are the people I’ve lost." She took this night picture of a hoot owl in her back yard in South Dakota:


 Personally, I mourn the avoidable loss of species and natural beauty that global warming caused. I see it here in the mountains in San Diego county. I feel some of the grief and mental distress. I know that Trump and MAGA are going to cause a lot more damage and continue to tell us it's just a hoax or something else ludicrous. Much of MAGA's damage will be either irreversible or very hard to reverse.  

Saturday, March 7, 2026

Pardons for Sale: Trump’s Vision of Justice for the Right Kind of Criminals

Trump has turned his presidential pardon power into a sleazy, cash‑drenched patronage machine. This shows cynical indifference to law and harm done to ordinary people. His pardon of nursing‑home magnate Joseph Schwartz, who defrauded the government of nearly $39 million in payroll taxes and helped collapse a multistate nursing‑home chain, wiped out prison time, fines, and $5 million in restitution after Schwartz had served only a few months. This contempt for victims and for the sentencing judge, who had rejected leniency because of the scale of the fraud, signals a president who treats justice as an opportunity to harvest cash by selling access to his presidential pardon power. Link 1, link 2

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Trump has built a lucrative “pardon industry” that now sells access and influence to rich felons. To buy a pardon, each criminal launders about $1 million to Trump through operatives and lobbyists with personal connections to the president and his inner circle. The official clemency list is a roll call of tax cheats, securities fraudsters, murderers, corrupt politicians, foreign influence peddlers, and January 6 and 2020‑election traitors. Trump rewards loyalty, ideological alignment, or personal usefulness in his calculation of who gets pardoned. He operates a pay‑to‑play get out of fines and jail (not for free) for criminals. Trump's moral rot openly mocks the rule‑of‑law ideal that justice cannot be bought. Link 3, link 4

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Estimates are that Trump’s pardons and clemency grants have eliminated almost $2 billion in court‑ordered financial penalties, including restitution, fines, and forfeitures. Of that, more than $1.3 billion was owed directly to crime victims in restitution. In other words, Trump shafted the victims of pardoned criminals' crimes in return for payment from the criminals themselves. So far, his pardons have taken about $1.3 billion from innocent crime victims. Link 5, link 6

Criminals buying pardons for cash is MAGA law and order in action, right? /s

Q: Is Trump's pardons for cash evidence that he really is on the little guy's side, as he always claims, or is it evidence he is on the big guy's side and, more or less, could not care less about shafting little regular people who have been harmed by criminals?

Link to the DoJ's list of Trump pardons since Jan. 2025: https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-grants-president-donald-j-trump-2025-present

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Thursday, March 5, 2026

Montana Wyoming Colorado Nebraska South Dakota North Dakota Iowa Minnesota

 If you live in or near those states you better have your fall-out shelters updated and well stocked.

The most dangerous US states if WW3 breaks out



Looking at Scientific American’s fallout maps of nuclear attacks on missile silos in the US to identify which states would be the most affected, the publication found that these eight locations would be the most affected by radiation exposure risk:

  • Montana
  • Wyoming
  • Colorado
  • Nebraska
  • South Dakota
  • North Dakota
  • Iowa
  • Minnesota


DAMN, way too close to Canada, time for me to move to Nunavut. 

Wednesday, March 4, 2026

An interesting commentary about retirement

Comments by a retired woman are quoted in a NYT opinion (not paywalled). The retired woman says it all for millions of average Americans.
“I’m 65 years old. I’m legally blind. I’m on disability. I went to my doc, and I lost 28 pounds in the last year. I did not need to lose 28 pounds. I did not try to lose 28 pounds. I lost the 28 pounds because I cannot afford to eat anymore.”
She can afford no more than $65/month for food.

Millions of Americans her age and younger are facing the similar dismal retirements and retirement prospects. Too many younger people can afford to save much or anything for their retirement. Millions of retired people are in bad situations. 

Elite MAGA's response: Get a job, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and stop whining.

Another MAGA policy goal is to offload risk onto individuals and let them sink or swim on their own.  MAGA elites have no empathy. But they're in power and calling the shots. If they get their way, they will stay in power and keep calling the shots, whether its legal or lethal or not.