Chris Adams

“But the blatant intimidation tactic is the first of its kind ever made by American officials to the Catholic Church. There are no public records of any previous meetings between Vatican and U.S. officials at the Pentagon, let alone an instance in which the world power suggested that it could force the Bishop of Rome into captivity.

The Vatican was so alarmed by the Pentagon’s warning that Pope Leo cancelled his plans to visit the U.S. later in the year”
https://newrepublic.com/post/208820/pentagon-threatened-pope-criticized-donald-trump

“For the first time, the United States now has the capacity to supply 100% of domestic energy storage project demand with American-built systems,” said Noah Roberts, executive director of the U.S. Energy Storage Coalition, on a Wednesday press call. ​“That is a fundamental shift from where we were just a year and a half ago, when the majority of battery storage systems were imported.”
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy-manufacturing/us-capacity-storage-cell-factories

Today in #CarsRuinCities: use a HEPA filter to reduce the mental impact of pollution.

https://theconversation.com/hepa-air-purifiers-may-boost-brain-power-in-adults-over-40-new-research-280885

Ah, Takoma porchfest!
#takomaporch #Takoma

“At this point, you’re probably thinking, Uh, isn’t gathering to praise a giant golden statue textbook idolatry? I’m glad you (hypothetically) asked because this was actually one of the very first things Burns addressed in the captions to his Instagram posts on the event.

“Let me be clear: this is not a golden calf. We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone,” he wrote.”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/gold-trump-statue-doral-false-idol.html

The climate and microplastics crises are the same crisis:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-026-02620-1

That’s basically synthetic textiles and car tires going most of the damage, so “cars ruin cities” and “polyester ruins planets”?

Really glad my grandfather sold his house before the chemical tank became the thing his old neighborhood in Garden Grove is known for…

“The federal government had access to that video within hours of the shooting on Jan. 14, the Minneapolis police chief said. Yet prosecutors did not watch the footage, an official said, until nearly three weeks after they filed charges against the two men.

“Bare due diligence would have shown that the agents were lying,” Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis said in a recent interview, shortly after he watched the video for the first time.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/us/minnesota-ice-shooting-video.html

“She was, after all, an unpaid U.N. expert, whose only real weapon (aside from the symbolic authority of her office) was her voice. That’s a point her family will take up in a court in the District of Columbia on Wednesday as they challenge the sanctions on free-speech grounds.

Now she is under constraints normally reserved for narco-barons and terrorists. What had she done that was so threatening to the U.S.?”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/03/30/gaza-israel-un-criticize-us-sanction-00850477

Who among us hasn’t held all of the cards and hoped to end up where we started?

https://xcancel.com/HQNewsNow/status/2051752576127750324

“There is no way to watch the new Harry Potter show subversively; whether or not you believe you're being responsible, if you're watching, you are buying in. Harry Potter is now a byword for the industrial-scale erosion of the limited rights trans people had managed to win or squat in, and the equally galling mass indifference to that erosion. She has ruined it utterly.”
https://defector.com/its-time-to-grow-up-hbo-harry-potter

“Edward Fishman, the author of ‘Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare,’ said the rest of the world had seen how the mineral controls had gotten Mr. Trump to back off China last year. Since Mr. Trump threatened in January to take over Greenland, even European officials had been searching for potential choke points…

‘The lesson is that the way to deal with American economic coercion is to fight back,’ he said. ‘Iran now is proving that again.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/business/economy/trump-iran-china-choke-points.html

Orbán realized that if he won, he’d have to spend more time with Trump and Vance:

https://apnews.com/article/hungary-election-orban-magyar-trump-1a4eb0ba6b94e0c80c3cd18bd36254ab

"We're a country full of sitting ducks, unfortunately," Rumbach says. "They're vulnerable to hazards like floods and wildfires, and the climate is changing and making these events more common and more costly."
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/30/nx-s1-5753765/fema-trump-extreme-weather-rural-pennsylvania

It’s quite possible for both sides of a war to lose while victory goes to a non-combatant:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/business/war-energy-china-iran.html

“Chinese solar panel exports more than doubled in March compared with the previous month, while electric vehicle exports also rose despite tariffs aimed at keeping them out of many markets.”

"This is the second home I've lost," he says. "In the last war [in 2024] I lost a home. And in this war I lost another.
"I wish it was just my home that I lost, and that my son survived. This brick can be rebuilt. But nothing will bring back my son."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c202652vvnjo

Headways on the Maryland purple line look brutal:

You don’t say: “The error, which the administration admitted first to The Associated Press, prompted health analysts to question how many of the Republican administration’s sweeping anti-fraud efforts around the country were based on faulty findings.”
https://apnews.com/article/new-york-medicaid-fraud-dr-oz-trump-342285a3c5d5b71f36ce3f3c77ec72c5

“Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that media reports that the Strait of Hormuz has been closed are ‘false,’ but then called for the strait to be reopened ‘immediately.’”

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04/08/world/iran-war-trump-news/b41d69b4-6c7b-586f-b217-fc2da9a02081

“The Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air has estimated that the solar boom will help Pakistan avoid $7 billion in fossil fuel imports this year. That’s shielding Pakistanis from real pain.

With solar, “you can make a major dent on your fossil fuel reliance in a matter of a couple of years,” Lauri Myllyvirta, the research center’s lead analyst, told me.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/opinion/oil-crisis-iran-electric-solar.html

“This is a thing the right does. It’s a formula I’ve been tracking for years, one I wrote about repeatedly when I was at Media Matters for America: take something a Democrat said, detach it from context, assign it the most absurd possible meaning, and then attack the meaning you invented. It works because it’s simple, because it’s fast, and because the people doing it understand that the correction never catches up to the lie.”
https://www.readtpa.com/p/they-know-what-wrong-place-wrong

“The immigrants said they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between assailants posing as ICE agents and real agents, “because now they all come hooded,” one of them said”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ice-impersonators-immigrants-raids-violence-trump-administration-rcna265653

Just a few types of plastic waste account for most ocean pollution:

https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/news/food-and-drink-related-litter-dominates-global-plastic-pollution

“The writings, obtained by The Associated Press, include hateful rhetoric toward Jewish people, Muslims and Islam, as well as the LGBTQ+ community, Black people, women, and both the political left and right. Both express beliefs that white people are being eliminated, and one writes about mental health struggles and being rejected by women.”

https://apnews.com/article/islamic-center-san-diego-shooting-mosque-hate-d81d87793aa3eea836d45a9d5b1f297b

The contrast in priorities is stunning:

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/trump-drives-across-reflecting-pool-to-inspect-blue-coating-he-ordered/4101737/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/world/asia/trump-xi-china-us-iran-munitions.html?unlocked_article_code=1.g1A.Urcw.ctNRBuFG7CEz&smid=url-share

This is impressively scathing from someone who defends some earlier SCOTUS decisions:

https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/05/the-supreme-courts-indefensible-evisceration-of-the-voting-rights-act/

Remember all of those people who used to constantly talk about the risks of “cancel culture”?

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/05/trump-admin-censors-more-studies-conflicting-with-rfk-jr-s-anti-vaccine-views/

“Two months ago the global news story was Tehran massacring its own people,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Today the global news story is Tehran successfully resisting America and Israel.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/world/middleeast/iran-war-leadership.html

“Breaking from past precedent, the Department of Defense did not give any kind of warning or hint to the vessels, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy or the Department of Transportation that the U.S. was going to strike the region, three sources close to the situation told NOTUS.”
https://www.notus.org/defense/us-cadets-vessels-stuck-persian-gulf-trump-bombing-iran-war

“It doesn’t make any sense — they’re going to get arrested for following the law? That’s stupid,” Stock said. “It’s bad for morale, it disrupts the soldiers’ readiness.”
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/07/us/immigration-military-bases

“There is no legitimate basis for such an emergency. That is not the point. The point is that the Trump administration could manufacture an impression of an emergency, creating a pretext for intervention.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/opinion/midterm-elections-trump-interference.html

“Leon, who was nominated to the bench by Republican President George W. Bush, concluded that the National Trust for Historic Preservation is likely to succeed on the merits of its claims because ‘no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have.’”
https://apnews.com/article/trump-white-house-ballroom-construction-halted-9cafc70569a3a05fcbaa6cafddbeace4

Happy Easter: “Don’t send any money for day care, because the United States can’t take care of day care. That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of day care. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-not-possible-us-pay-medicaid-medicare-daycare-re-fighting-w-rcna266381

The only thing more shameful than the people who spent all of 2024 lying about the competent black woman supporting genocide is their silence now:

https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-israel-trump-lebanon-april-7-2026-421ee64fdc9a5c26460df8119c7d1b3f

Mental health treatment should be more accessible than guns:

https://www.thebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/who-is-nasire-best-alleged-white-house-shooter-killed-secret-service-DJ2CR6XFCREWHBEAUA2WBHAK4Y/

“It feels frighteningly appropriate for a 1950s television western to seem more important to Trump right now than the real world of April 2026 does. Davy Crockett was only one of the many westerns on television in the 1950s and 1960s as those eager to dismantle the New Deal government championed the idea of the western hero as the true American.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-2-2026?publication_id=20533&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=38p5ov&utm_medium=email

“In no way could you call this war “worth it,” from a climate or any other perspective. Far better that it ends today. But if it must go on, then we have to hope that it will at least hasten a new global energy system that makes future wars over oil and other resources less likely.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-31/trump-s-iran-war-is-accelerating-the-global-energy-transition

“Rights groups, however, have said these mass remote detonations could amount to wanton destruction: a war crime. The laws of war prohibit the deliberate destruction of civilian homes, except when necessary for lawful military reasons.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/12/how-israeli-offensive-destroyed-entire-villages-in-lebanon

“Trump likes to move on women. He also apparently likes to fire them. A month ago, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was the first cabinet official of Trump’s second term to be removed. She had tried dutifully to implement the mass-deportation agenda under the direction of Trump’s top aide, Stephen Miller. But it was Noem, not Miller, who was dumped when Trump needed a scapegoat for its unpopularity.”
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/all-the-presidents-women-scapegoats-noem-bondi-hegseth-promotions-iran-hormuz-oil-energy-trump?r=38p5ov&utm_medium=email

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-war-takeaways.html - beyond the Netanyahu details, I have to wonder whether the details about Vance are going to feature in a 25th amendment play. I think a lot of people would accept a “mental illness exploited by trusted advisors” narrative if it came with an off-ramp…

“The U.S. Department of Labor has proposed a rule designed to make it harder to sue retirement plan fiduciaries that invest in risky, more volatile assets. The rule is also President Donald Trump’s administration’s latest giveaway to the Trump family’s favorite industry: Cryptocurrency.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/new-labor-department-rule-trump-crypto-retirement-401k

“In total, the DOJ quietly closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of President Donald Trump’s administration, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases”
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-doj-immigration-bondi-declinations-criminal-investigations