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.

It doesn't take long

From the time I left my house until I got back it was 11 minutes on my phone's stopwatch.  A simple ballot and an efficient crew at our neighborhood church polling location.

Addendum:  

In Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election, the Democratic-backed candidate sailed to a nearly 20-point landslide victory Tuesday in a battleground Trump carried less than two years ago. Meanwhile, a Georgia Democrat slashed Trump’s margin of victory by two thirds in the state’s reddest district despite losing the election — the most significant overperformance the party has seen across all seven House special elections so far this cycle.

The results in the battleground states — home to key Senate, gubernatorial and House races — are the latest repudiation from voters of Trump and his agenda and flashing warning signs for the GOP heading into November.

Wisconsin in last presidential election:

Results from yesterday's state Supreme Court election: 

Res ipsa loquitur.

Childhood punishments become adult goals

I didn't want to end the bloggin day with all that war crap at the top of the column, so I'll shift gears to this aphorism.  Perhaps later I can find a nice photo or such, but right now I need to watch the end of the NCAAW championship game.

Screencaps from Al Jazeera

Not emphasized on American media are the antiwar protests going on in Israel.  There apparently is a lot of opposition to Netanyahu, either because of his principles or out of fear of retaliation, but the people there may have as little control over their leader as we do.

Yemen is situated quite a distance from the Persian Gulf, but in close proximity to the Red Sea and the access to the Suez Canal.  This image from last week when the Houthis joined Iran and Hezbollah in sending missiles against Israel, with mixed success.

Also not featured much on American media is the Israeli push into Lebanon in their efforts to lay waste to the southern part of the country to create a "buffer zone" from hostile forces there.  This image posted after an Israeli "double-tap" attack - a rocket to a residential neighborhood followed by a second one schedule to arrive when rescuers and journalists were present at the scene.

I think I mentioned in the Facebook excerpts that Iran is responding to destruction of its own universities by counterattacking American-related universities in the Gulf region.

A screencap from April 1 in response to Trump's claim that negotiations were underway.  The Iranian counterproposals are diametrically opposite to Trump's 15-point "plan" that any intelligent observer would see they are not compatible.

From April 5 (today), part of the message the Iranian parliament sent to Trump.  The phrase in the screencap "because you insist on following Netanyahu's commands" shows how they think the dynamics of the war are set.  More of the message to Trump was posted in The Times of Israel: he said "“Your reckless moves are dragging the United States into a living HELL for every single family..." in response to Trump's claim that Iran will be living in Hell.

If any readers here do decide to intermittently monitor Al Jazeera's broadcasts (note they come not from Iran but from the Gulf state of Qatar), you can do so via a link at the World Monitor app, or via their You Tube channel (both are in English).  If you do so and happen to view at a time when this young woman is providing analysis -

- I would encourage you to pay special attention to her commentary.  I only picked up the closing moments of an interview, and her perception of the power play between Trump and the Iranians is superb.  I believe that she is Negar Mortazavi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy based in Washington DC.  She has ten years experience covering US/Iran relationships.  She is also the host of The Iran Podcast.

Gleanings from Facebook

I'm sure it's reasonable to assume that the "one million" number is exaggerated, but it's worth remembering that this is a country of 93 million people, whose lives are being systematically ruined by Trump and Netanyahu.  

This is "old" war news from more than a week ago, covering the destruction of one very advanced aircraft.  I don't remember whether it was the Telegraph coverage or commentary elsewhere that made special note of the position of the damage, which indicated specific targeting of the radar bubble where the hi tech was stored, suggesting (but not proving) that the attack was achieved using "smart" drones or drones guided by precise navigation coordinates, as perhaps could be provided by Russian satellites.

A good map of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, from a different perspective.  Kharg Islad would be the little brown dot above the word "force."  Note the distance from the actual Strait of Hormuz at the bend.  There is a lot of real estate in between.  I think the distance is about the same as from Boston, Mass to South Carolina.  Found in the New York Times, as part of an informative article (not from Facebook, but it seemed to fit in here on a topical basis).

The image is probably AI-generated, but the sentiment expressed is accurate.  Several spokespersons for Iran have expressed on Al Jazeera that Iran's response to American/Israeli aggression would be "proportionate."  In other words, now that Israel and America have attacked non-military targets in Iran, Iran feels justified in targeting non-military targets in Gulf States that are supporting the war effort.  This includes American university branches in the region, which I understand have been evacuated.  And as I write this I think there is a report of a desalination plant having been hit last night.

(BTW, I'm not enjoying posting wartime coverage.  I have an interesting article about head lice, and one about the U.S. leading the world in toilet paper consumption and a great Agatha Christie quote and other stuff I'd rather blog, but this war material is important, and I can't just stick my head in the sand and ignore it.)

Grim forecasts for the U.S. economy

The embed is a screencap from Facebook several days ago, but I've seen a similar forecast during a live discussion on Bloomberg TV.  The next Consumer Price Index report is scheduled for this coming Friday, April 10, before the markets open.  This will cover the month of March and thus will be the first one to reflect rising oil prices from the U.S./Israel war on Iran.

The second embed is also from before this weekend.  The Federal Reserve is in an impossibly terrible position if the anticipated "stagflation" occurs.  The investment community has been counting on a decrease in federal funds rates, arguing over one vs. two cuts in the year ahead.  More recently they have expected no rate cuts.  Now the possibility of a rate increase looms.  

Before we started this war, nobody would have imagined the Fed increasing rates.  It's probably not priced into the market now, but even the possibility of a rise in the future will have major reverberations on equity prices and bond yields.

"Pentagon Pizza Index" explained

In the wee hours of the night while doomsurfing for world geopolitical news, I noticed while looking at Euronews a reddish icon near the top that said "DEFCON 2 44%", and when I clicked on it, the pulldown showed a "Pentagon Pizza Index" as the index for the DEFCON rating.

Wikipedia has this to offer:

"The Pentagon pizza theory is the informal observation that spikes in fast food orders, particularly pizza delivery orders, near US government buildings such as The Pentagon, CIA headquarters, and the White House often occur right before a major international crisis...

In 1990, Frank Meeks, a Domino's franchisee in Washington, told the Los Angeles Times about an extraordinary observation of some unusual late-night deliveries to the Pentagon, CIA and the White House. Meeks had noted that on August 1, the CIA had ordered a one-night record of 21 pizzas, and the following day Iraq invaded Kuwait, starting the Gulf War. At first, Meeks thought it was just a coincidence, but he observed a similar surge in deliveries in December 1998 during the impeachment hearings of Bill Clinton...

In a statement to Newsweek in 2025, the Department of Defense denied the theory, claiming that the Pentagon has numerous internal food vendors that are available to late-night workers. It criticized the accuracy of the timeline provided by the Pentagon Pizza Report.

I found the Pentagon Pizza Index homepage.  It seems to monitor the number of pizza ordered from various places near the Pentagon, but has no evidence for where they are being delivered.  I think the page is run mostly for humor, as evidenced by this graphic:

International mail disruptions

From the USPS website.  None of these are surprising, but it's interesting to note that they are advising people not even to try sending mail now.  Imagine how this is rippling through the business communities involved.

(test)

I'm having trouble trying to tranfer a video from my Facebook page to my blog here on Blogspot.  Not sure how to tweak the code - but I can't fix it now because I have plans for midday today.

Also don't know anything about the source for this, but the claims being made do tend to echo what I've heard intermittently on Al Jazeera. There is a war of disinformation going on, and I don't know how this fits in.  The video uses the face of George Will, but I'm sure this is generated by AI from a written text because of various glitches in pronunciation.  I may erase this by tonight if I don't find other confirmatory evidence.

Years ago, probably during the first Trump presidency, I remember speculating (silently to myself, not here on the blog) whether if Trump were to order a nuclear strike or some other catastrophic order, whether the Joint Chiefs of Staff would tell him "Sir, we need to move you to a secure facility first," and then would take him to a bunker in Washington, lock him in, and announce to the Congress and the American people that they have effected a bloodless coup and ask the country to select a new leader.  Trump has removed most of the military brass who disagree with him, but I still wonder whether such a turn of events would be possible.  It would result in a total political clusterfuck, but might be better than the alternative.

Chuckleworthy

Found on Facebook.

"Make a fortune" may be the"truth" after all...

That from Trump.  This from the American public (via Facebook):

Trump really said this. Out loud. In public.

I found confirmation at The New Republic:

Donald Trump doesn’t think the federal government should fund child care, Medicare, or Medicaid.

At an Easter Lunch reception at the White House Wednesday, the president told guests what exactly he thought about what the U.S. should be prioritizing, and it doesn’t bode well for the government’s most widely used and popular social programs.

“I said to [Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought], ‘Don’t send any money for daycare because the United States can’t take care of daycare.’ That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people,” Trump said. “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You got to let a state take care of daycare and they should pay for it, too. They should pay. They’ll have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. And we could lower our taxes a little bit to them to make up.”

“It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country. But all these little things, all these little scams that have taken place, all you have to you have to let states take care of them,” Trump continued.

Newspaper clippings

Gleanings from recent entries at Bad Newspaper - a reliable refuge in a world of geopolitical turmoil.\

Beavers as landscape architects

There's nothing fundamentally "new" in this video about beavers being reintroduced into Scotland, but the results are impressive.

Related:  

A "rescue beaver" starts building dams inside a house (3-minute video)

Trailcam video compilation of one year activity on a beaver dam in northern Minnesota (6-minute video)

More than you would ever need to know about beaver testicles (re medieval bestiaries)

"Lunar Grazing Model" - a celestial bovine containment system

Posted at NASA's APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) website.   

Related:  Historic footage from the BBC of the Swiss spaghetti harvest (1957):

Whom do you believe?

While the world jumps with joy and the financial markets soar upward on an announcement from Donald Trump that productive peace talks are underway, this screencap is from Al Jazeera this morning.

Could be empty rhetoric from their side... or perhaps both sides are just reloading their weapons.  Commodity traders must be having conniption fits.  And people with inside information are making immense profits from this volatility.