they just keep on looking to the east

I had a decent, slightly chaotic day - I was at the first event that I had to help out with a little before 7 am, and I did events stuff straight until 5. They all went well and I got a v nice free sweatshirt from one of them, but it meant I didn't get much other stuff done.

So I holed up in my hotel room and was going to work/relax, but I was too upset by the latest wrecking balls to national security and global democracy - Trump berated Zelensky in a press conference and made it clear that he's going to support Russia and abandon helping Ukraine and Europe in the defense against Russia's ambitions. This was in the same week that the US voted against a resolution condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine - joining only Russia, Belarus, North Korea (an illustrious set of allies!), and a dozen other small countries in pretending that Russia wasn't the aggressor. Europe and Canada can see very clearly now that they shouldn't trust us, and it seems the only countries this might actually help are Russia and China, because it certainly doesn't help us.

And then the President of the United States tweeted tonight about how he's going to pardon Pete Rose posthumously (for tax evasion - he can't pardon him for the betting that got him banned from baseball) and said baseball needs to get off their "fat, lazy asses" and induct Rose into the Hall of Fame. Nice to see we're pardoning tax evasion while supposedly cracking down on fraud.

But if you prefer not to get upset about global politics or stupid tweets, maybe you can instead get upset that DOGE fired an estimated 1300 NOAA employees yesterday, including a bunch of forecasters at NWS local offices, just as we head into tornado season. The National Weather Service was already considered understaffed, and cutting thousands more isn't going to help. Taking a sledgehammer to the most basic and important functions of the government can be done in a day, but will take years to recover from - if we're able to recover, which I have some doubts about.

My bet is that they'll screw up every agency with indiscriminate cuts, use the resulting chaos to claim those agencies are incompetent, privatize them, and the taxpayer will either pay vastly more for less (see: increasing postage costs with decreasing service) or not have service at all. This is the classic private equity playbook playing out with critical government functions, and we're all going to suffer for it.

And on that note, I'm going to bed.