Fifteen minutes before the President announced he was pausing strikes on Iran, somebody moved $500 million in oil futures. Somebody knew. Somebody told them. Or somebody is them.
New piece ↓
open.substack.com/pub/adamkinz...
US data centers consume 5-8% of US electricity generation (!) and generates $25 billion in external environmental costs
www.nber.org/papers/w35100
Some historians credit England's better management of scurvy for their defeat of the Spanish Armada
Figure showing number of competitive grants mentioning women from 2015-2025. The number was rising until recently, with a precipitous drop in the last year.
At the end of 2024, the National Academies put out a report concluding the NIH has woefully underfunded women’s health research, and they suggested $15 B should be invested over the next 5 years.
Here’s what’s happened instead. Hard to study women’s health if you can’t say “women.”
wapo.st/4euUt1c
We asked people who lived in homeless encampments that were cleared out in city “sweeps” to write about what object was the hardest for them to lose.
“They took my baby pictures and my moms obituaries,” a man in California wrote.
(Published Dec. 2024)
RFK Jr & Linda McMahon told my university’s medical school to stop creating a diverse medical workforce or else they would cut all federal funding (ie, NIH, NSF, Medicaid, VA hospital)
Here’s a piece I wrote with @michaeldgreen.phd on why that will shorten lives
www.bmj.com/content/391/...
While the Constitution says that the President can be impeached for various "high crimes and misdemeanors", it did explicitly state two specific crimes that are grounds for impeachment, and one of them is "Bribery." The remedy for this scenario was anticipated and does exist. So that being said...
"Every program that carries the president’s name sends a message that the benefits of government flow from him personally. Not from Congress, or the Constitution, or our collective project of self-governance."
In light of Trump’s increasingly cruel and bonkers behavior, many of you want to know: “What can I do now?” Here are 10 recommendations. https://robertreich.substack.com/p/what-you-can-do-f4a
For lawyers, this is the day's essential reading. Steve Vladeck: "In the first major case in which the Court granted emergency relief as a means of shaping nationwide policy, it turns out that the justice who led the charge was the one who was doing quite a bit more than calling balls and strikes."
For the first time, the World Meteorological Organization has highlighted Earth’s dangerous, unsustainable energy imbalance.
"From Endless Frontier to Enemy of the People: The Assault on Public Science" | A very nice, thoughtful review of #ScienceUnderSiege (by @peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social & yours truly) by Wendy Wagner for @lawfaremedia.org: www.lawfaremedia.org/article/from...
"Government-backed marriage programs don't have a stellar success rate." All undaunted, a Heritage Foundation report "is advocating a reorientation of the entire federal government toward favoring married parents above everyone else." [@enbrown.bsky.social]
A picture of Bruce, a green parrot, missing his upper beak. Photo by Alex Grabham
Bruce is a New Zealand parrot missing his top beak. It’s a serious disability, but he has managed to become the alpha of his group, through creativity. Here’s my story about Bruce and the mostly mysterious natural history of disability. Gift link: nyti.ms/4cwVGT5
New, from me: Take the Palantir manifesto seriously, if not literally.
It reveals that our tech philosopher kings want public money, but without public accountability. This creates a dilemma for governments unaligned with its techno-fascist vision. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/palantir-w...
We pay taxes. They steal our money and they use the government we pay for to make their rich friends richer. My latest on how Donald Trump is using the federal government as his private ATM Machine.
open.substack.com/pub/edwineis...
“Koch brother groups have tried to derail public transit plans in other cities around the country, from Little Rock, Arkansas and central Utah, to Nashville and Michigan. They have frequently called such projects ‘wasteful spending’. The Koch organization is also heavily invested in fossil fuels.”
The author of this article refused to sign an NDA, giving up severance and healthcare benefits to tell this story.
If you didn't read it already, read it.
Because he refused, we may be able to stop the Kennedy Center from being sold for parts and turned into a gaudy MAGA fundraising warehouse.
Trump is reported close to a "deal" with himself under which US taxpayers would pay him $10 billion.
I served in multiple communist and authoritarian dictatorships, but I never witnessed corruption on this scale or this blatant.
Right out in the open, Donald Trump is suing his own IRS to try to steal $10 BILLION taxpayer dollars.
I just introduced a bill that would make this theft ILLEGAL.
This is a must-read account of shadow docket deliberations. Note Roberts' push to halt an Obama-era policy b/c it would generate "substantial and irreversible reordering of the domestic power sector." Yet SCOTUS has greenlit far more disruptive Trump-era policies. /1 www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...
This is what happens at concentration camps
that beep beep beep sound you hear is the president and his family backing a truck up to the US treasury...
www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...
"The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet a lifetime is often not enough to rebuild. They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing and devastation, yet the resources needed for healing, education and restoration are nowhere to be found." -Pope Leo XIV
The United States can continue to have free and fair elections — but it will take organization, preparedness, and collaboration. bit.ly/4vuVfBn
Disney's new CEO, whose pay package is worth nearly $45M, just announced 1,000 layoffs.
Reminder that Disney paid an effective federal income tax rate of ZERO in 2025 and aims to buy back $7B of its own stock in 2026.
This is what corporate greed looks like.
Is this The Onion?
Happy Tax Day folks. As I pointed out here, the technical arguments about having free tax filing is over. Direct File proved it. What we are seeing now is just rent-seekers bribing policymakers to be allowed to keep extracting money from you.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/what-the-d...
