America needs another New Deal

An excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson's April 13 "Letters from an American" -

Just as there is a blueprint for destroying democracy, there is also one for rebuilding it. “Let us now and here highly resolve to resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality for all of our citizens, great and small,” New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 1932 as American democracy struggled to resist fascism.

“Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose,” FDR said. “Today we shall have come through a period of loose thinking, descending morals, an era of selfishness, among individual men and women and among Nations…. Let us be frank in acknowledgment of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon, that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old barricades. To return to higher standards we must abandon the false prophets and seek new leaders of our own choosing.”

“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” FDR concluded. “Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”

(boldface added), More at the link.

The world's oldest gorilla

Details from Deutsche Welle:

At 69 years old, Lady Fatou on Monday became not only the Berlin Zoo's longest-residing tenant but also maintained her title as the oldest gorilla in the world.

Born somewhere in West Africa in 1957, she arrived in Europe at the port of Marseilles in 1959 amongst the luggage of a French sailor. According to the Berlin Zoo, the sailor found himself unable to pay his bill at a tavern and gave Fatou to the landlady as payment. From there, she soon ended up in the German capital.

Fatou is a western lowland gorilla. In the wild they usually don't live past their 40s, and even in captivity 50 is considered advanced old age.

In 1974 she gave birth to Dufte, the first gorilla born at the Berlin Zoo. Although her daughter passed away in 2001, Fatou's granddaugther M'penzi still keeps her company in Berlin. She has at least three great-great-great grandchildren as of 2026.

I had no idea they could live that long.  You learn something every day.

Breaking news

Screencap this afternoon from the France 24 site.  Putin's ally Orban loses despite Trump's support:

“My Administration stands ready to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian People ever need it,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social ahead of Sunday’s vote.

“We are excited to invest in the future Prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s continued Leadership!” said Trump, who has endorsed Orbán multiple times during the campaign.

The U.S. has always influenced foreign elections - but usually not so overtly.  Or so ineffectually.

And "Magyar" is such a wonderful patronym for a Hungarian leader.  Apparently it is a common surname as well as the ethnonym for the people.

Daddy, what is a "late night rage tweet"?

Here you go, sweetheart.  Read this and weep.  This is a spontaneous public rant by a person who is supposed to represent the dignity of the United States to the rest of the world.  This is what happens when a man becomes mentally unstable and discovers that after a lifetime of having people do whatever he wants them to do, his "base" of loyal supporters begin to desert him.

Some of the backstory triggering this rage is expressed in the I Fucking Love Australia substack: 

"The story is this: Trump’s own people are ratting him out faster than a Boa constrictor with an eating disorder. Staff leaking. Pentagon leaking. State Department leaking. Every single person in that building with access to a phone and a journalist’s number is apparently queuing up to unload everything they know about the most powerful man on earth, and what they know is not flattering.

This is not a leak. This is Niagara Falls wearing a suit.

Carville’s referencing a New York Times story that reads like a guided tour through the West Wing’s collective contempt for the man running it. These aren’t anonymous sources with a grudge. These are the people who sit in meetings with him. The people who hand him his briefing notes and watch him ignore them. The people who stand there with a straight face while he explains how he could’ve been a general if he hadn’t had that thing with his foot.

Those people. Talking. Constantly.

That is not the behaviour of people who fear their boss.

That is the behaviour of people who have already quietly packed their desk drawers and are just waiting for the right moment to walk...

And then there’s the book.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. June. Carville calls them the pizza man. Because they’re going to deliver.

Every leaked conversation. Every panicked staffer confession. Every moment where the people closest to the most powerful man on earth looked at each other across a conference table and thought Jesus Christ we are so completely fucked. All of it. Bound. Published. On shelves in June.

The structural collapse of the whole operation is what Carville is pointing at underneath all the profanity. MAGA loyalty looks airtight until it doesn’t. Then it goes like a tradie’s knees on a cold morning. Fast and all at once. He’s watching the Indiana state Senate Republican primary as an early indicator. Republican voters. In Trump’s own party. Peeling away...

Carville’s flat prediction: Trump will not be president a year from now. Too weak. Too exposed. Too hated by the people closest to him. And when Democrats get back in January they go straight for the corruption and they claw every dodgy dollar back...

But here’s what we do know.

The leaks are real. Vance sharpening his knife is real. The book is real. The polling is real. The fact that the most feared political operator in living memory is now being openly mocked by his own Pentagon is very, very real..."

(boldface added)  More at the link.

American negotiators arrive in Pakistan for peace talks

I can't imagine anyone had serious hopes that peace could be negotiated during the recent summit in Pakistan, when the U.S. positions include "complete surrender" and the Iranians insist on control of Hormuz plus compensation for damages from the bombing campaign.  American media reported hopfully that "talks were underway" while in fact both sides were using the pause to reload their weaponry.

The AI image and the text below come from an April 11 Substack entitled "I Fucking Love Australia."

The Surrender Summit: Trump Sends His Son-in-Law to Lose a War

JD Vance flew to Pakistan to negotiate with a civilisation that’s been doing geopolitics 

since before white people invented trousers.

"Vance brought his wife.

Not a deputy secretary. Not a general. Not even a halfway competent mid-level State Department lifer who at least knows what the Strait of Hormuz is on a map. He brought Usha. His wife. To a war negotiation. The most consequential diplomatic moment since the end of the Cold War and JD thought, yeah, I’ll make a long weekend of it, bring the missus, see Pakistan...

And then there’s Jared Kushner. Jared fucking Kushner. A man whose entire qualification for any of this is that he married into the right family, which, by the way, is also his business model, his foreign policy experience, and apparently now his military strategy. Jared has the energy of a guy who’s never been told no in his life because everyone around him was either paid not to or too scared to. He walked into the Middle East peace process last time and achieved absolutely nothing except making himself several hundred million dollars richer. So naturally Donald called him again...

And somewhere in a Mar-a-Lago dining room, the aluminium siding salesman with the IQ of a concussed house brick is posting about tankers on Truth Social, absolutely convinced he’s winning, because no one in his orbit is allowed to tell him otherwise, and the two blokes he sent to Pakistan to save his legacy couldn’t find the Strait of Hormuz with both hands and a geopolitical GPS..."

More at the link. 

"Relapsing into individuality"

I came across an interesting quote from one of my favorite authors:

“As life goes on it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself everyday.”

The citation comes from her 1976 autobiography.  It reflects an astute perception by a woman whose literary craftsmanship focused on the deceptions of her fictional characters.  I particularly like the three words I've placed in the title of this post, and I have no doubt that I am more "myself" now than I was during the earlier phases of my social and professional life.

Via the Indian Times Entertainment.  Embedded image via Goalcast, where there are additional quotes and aphorisms.

Reinstituting U.S. military draft registration

A very interesting headline in The Hill this morning.  Details re the implementation at the link.

I came of age during the 1960s, when the Vietnam War was at its peak, and I can assure younger readers that a wartime draft was a very big deal back then.  I have read in unreliable sources (Facebook) that with the onset of the Gulf War, soldiers have been implementing misdemeanors (smoking weed on base etc) in order to be dismissed from active duty.  And it's possible that the onset of active conflict and some combat-related deaths has diminished the applications for military service.

But then I saw this in the article at the link:

"In addition, immigrants who don’t register may lose their U.S. citizenship."

Is this automatic registration being implemented as a strategic way to justify the mandatory deportation of legal immigrants?

Worldwide toilet paper consumption

I'm not particularly surprised that the U.S. leads the world in this metric, but the numbers are unexpected.  Per capita usage of 141 rolls per year would mean 2-3 rolls every week.  How many squares are people using???

Zweeeeëg explained

If I'm going to blog words tonight (in order to avoid you-know-what/you-know-who), we might as well look at this wonderful word meaning "dizygotic."  This discussion thread at the etymology subReddit has a lot of interesting and relevant content, including how in Danish one word can mean either dizygotic or double-edged.  Followed by a allusion to the two very different meanings of "unionized" (union-ized vs un-ionized) and the two meanings of logistics (vs. logistic).

Words are always fun.

Word for the day: deranged

It's a word most people recognize and vaguely understand, but I was curious about the etymology.

From French déranger, from Old French desrengier (“throw into disorder”), from des- + rengier (“to put into line”), from reng (“line, row”), from a Germanic source. See rank (noun).

Coming from the French is what left it out of my wheelhouse.  But it makes sense - disrupting a rank, creating disorder.

The Google Ngram viewer for usage in books shows several generations of quietude followed by a rise in recent decades.  I suspect once the 2025-26 data is entered that there will be an upward spike.  If there is an equivalent tool for monitoring usage in blogs and social media, I should think the numbers will have gone parabolic this year.

The synonyms are pretty familiar -

- and the idioms are perhaps more fun to peruse:

Kinetic art

TYWKWDBI doesn't do any product promotions or have sponsored posts, but I'm going to post this video because the technology behind this Kickstarter project is so cool.  I grew up with Etch-A-Sketch, and now it seems toys have evolved to the point where you don't do any of the art yourself - you just watch the gadget do it for you.  The video shows people using the table for playing cards, which looks ridiculous.  Our cats would love to have one of these.

Lusitano stallion

One of the winning photos in the 2026 Sony World Photography Awards open competition.

Celestial Dance. Shortlist, Motion. This young Lusitano stallion was allowed to move freely during a photography session, enabling the photographer to capture its powerful and graceful movements.

Credit Lorea Hausheer, via The Atlantic.  Posted so I don't end the blogging day with a damn war story at the top of the column.

NASA team during the Artemis launch

These are the scientists in the Science Evaluation Room, built by NASA specifically for Artemis missions, designed to support lunar science and planetary observations alongside mission operations.  Via Newsweek, where the discussion focuses on the composition of the team.

An existential threat to Pacific island micronations

Yesterday TYWKIWDBI received a comment from reader Jim, who was addressing points relevant to the recent post about international mail disruptions.   His focus was on the island nation of Niue, and his point was that mail disruption is only one aspect of a huge threat to Pacific island nations resulting from large increases in the costs of fuel oil.

Amongst the pacific islands, there are big ones with multiple options (standouts are Fiji/Nadi, Tonga/Nuku’alofa, Solomon Islands/Honiara, Samoa/Faleolo, New Caledonia/Noumea, and of course Hawaii being of least concern), then there are the littler ones with maybe one or two airline choices like the Marianas, Marshall Islands, Cook Islands, Palau, Kiribati (which isn’t tiny by population, but was never well-covered logistically), Micronesia, etc…. 

 

Then you have the tiny ones that were almost always “too hard basket” jobs. Some were harder than others, occasionally I could get a rate to/from one of these, but I would sometimes have to offer to get a client service to/from a location nearish their target, then advise them to contact charter services to meet up with where I could get them. Examples were Pitcairn (sea only), Nauru, Rapanui/Easter Island, Niue, Tokelau and Tuvalu, and possibly some others I’m forgetting. 

 

If the Middle East nonsense is to continue for a long time, I fear for the food security of many of the inhabitants of the islands, especially those of Kiribati and Nauru, which IIRC, have absolutely nowhere near the ability to feed their local populations without regular food imports. Niue may be in less immediate danger of food insecurity simply by virtue of having much lower population density. If things deteriorate, I foresee humanitarian relief missions to the islands being undertaken by AU+NZ (and perhaps Chile for Rapanui), and (the cynic in me compels me to add) almost certainly China, who for some time have been trying to curry favour amongst the pacific nations, most notably the Solomons of late.

 

This is perhaps pessimistic of me, but if the situation continues to deteriorate, we may see large scale de-population of some of the less food-secure and economically vulnerable pacific islands, especially those more vulnerable to sea level rises, for whom the writing is somewhat on the wall already. A geopolitical shove added to the already keenly-felt climate-change push might be enough to convince many to head for higher ground, both literally and figuratively.

(boldface added by me for those who speed-read TYWKIWDBI).  I totally agree that China is likely to step in.  As the U.S. loses its credibility around the world, China is able and willing to step in to be the new world leader.

Here's that link from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, if the one in the embed isn't clickable.

Potential effects of the Trump/Netanyahu war on Iran on world economics

An extended (8-minute) discussion of current economic and market conditions by Mohamed El-Erian.  He makes note of the little-appreciated "side effect" of inflation, which is demand destruction.

The interview was conducted by and posted by Faux News, so I have no control over the freeze-frame image in the embed - but this was the most extended and most current interview I have seen with El-Erian, so I didn't want to pass it up.