All of us must do our part and subject world leaders to extreme and relentless public pressure. The challenge of stranding potentially trillions of dollars in fossil capital and rebuilding the world is enormous. Of course, global leaders and officials will take the easier, cowardly road if they can get away with it. As we cross the 1.5C threshold into uncharted climatic territory, …

And why am I only just now learning about Andrei Gromyko's three rules for negotiating with the West? 1) demand the maximum – do not meekly ask, but demand that which has never been yours; 2) present ultimatums – do not hold back on threats, since you will always find people in the West who are willing to negotiate; and…

Like many of the boat strike videos posted to social media by Trump, Hegseth, and the White House, the video of the attack conducted in the Caribbean on November 1st was edited and heavily redacted before its release. Like the other videos, it masquerades as "unclassified" public disclosure, but it discloses almost nothing at all. We are being asked to rely on the stories Hegseth and other administration figures tell when they post these videos on social media.

In my last couple of posts (here and here), I've been trying to look closely at some of the latest boat strike videos, call out some of their features, and discuss the information they offer as well as the information they withhold. It might also be helpful to look at all the boat strike videos in a single chronological sequence.

The latest boat strike video shows US military attacks on four boats in the Eastern Pacific. The strikes killed 14 people and left one survivor, who is, according to Pete Hegseth, now in the hands of Mexican authorities. Edited together to show three strikes in different locations, these videos have many of the features called out in my first post on this topic…

This morning, I downloaded the latest of the boat strike videos that the Secretary of Defense is posting on Twitter. (That sentence alone is kind of mind blowing, but let’s leave that discussion for another day.) After watching it a few times, I am starting to put together some notes and seeing if I can have some conversations about the boat strike videos the administration has put out.

The Bernhardt Group, the lobbying shop set up just down the street from the White House by Trump's former Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, is now the sole firm lobbying for Antofagasta's Twin Metals project on the edge of the Boundary Waters (as I noted back in July). The Group's third quarter disclosure reports income of $110,000 for lobbying on "mine leasing issues" on behalf of Twin Metals.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas published this chart of AI Scenarios back in June. I came across it for the first time today.

I’ve been receiving mailings (surface mail, emails) about the upcoming vote on Invesco QQQ Trust for a few months now, urging and imploring me to vote Yes on converting the QQQ fund from a Unit Investment Trust or UIT to a so-called Open-End Fund ETF.  So has everyone else invested in the fund. The Future is Bright with QQQ Your Vote, Your Growth!

I've been traveling for the past week or so, and haven't had a chance until this morning to publish these latest filings in Twin Metals v. US. (For background, see this, this, this, and this, among many other posts.) As those who have been following the case are aware, in March of 2025, just a month after he was sworn in, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum did an about-face and joined the plaintiffs (a foreign mining company with plans to mine nickel and copper and on the edge of the Boundary Waters).

This is from today's House Natural Resources hearing, where Representative Jared Huffman offered an amendment to Stauber's HR 4090. As both Huffman and Teresa Leger Fernandez suggest in the discussion that follows, this is not just a one-off. It's an example of a much larger problem of bad faith in public discourse.

Well, that was fast. Only a few hours after I published my post about BacTech Environmental this morning, CEO Ross Orr sent this reply -- drafted, he notes, by BacTech's lawyer. The requirement is that an application be made to the court of competent jurisdiction in order to have a waiver/extension of the meeting prior to the deadline. BacTech did not have the means to hold a meeting and neither of the means to pay for legal counsel to ask for an extension.

I've just written to the investor relations people at BacTech Environmental Corporation to get some background information on two extraordinary resolutions included on this year's proxy form. Both resolutions have to do with the Board's failure to hold an annual general meeting for several years in a row. As a result of insufficient financial resources for the years ended 2021, 2022 and 2023, the Corporation has not held…

I embarrassed myself when, back in January, I asked whether wind energy investors had standing to sue the Trump administration over a presidential memorandum pausing all federal approvals for wind power development. I was suffering at the time from the delusion -- common to most writers, I suppose -- that readers would respond or at least consider the point. Instead, crickets.

2025-07-17-memo-reinstating-m-37049Download On the very same day that the DC District Court of Appeals issued its per curiam opinion putting the Boundary Waters litigation on hold for 90 days, Deputy Secretary of the Interior Kate MacGregor issued this memo, re-instating the Jorjani M-Opinion. That legal opinion misconstrues history, suppresses evidence, and twists logic to say that Twin Metals has a "non-discretionary" right to renewal of its mining leases on the edge of the Boundary Waters: put crudely, it says that a foreign mining company has more discretion over the disposition of federal lands than the United States government.

I missed this June Politico story about David Bernhardt breaking with Brownstein Hyatt and setting up his own lobbying shop at 1455 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, just a block away from the White House. The former Secretary of the Interior, who oversaw Trump's first assault on the Boundary Waters, will now run the Twin Metals lobbying game. The most recent Senate lobbying disclosures show Brownstein Hyatt filing…

Back in 2019, I made a Freedom of Information Act request for the work calendar of Michael Nedd, a long time Bureau of Land Management official, for the months following the 2016 election through the inaugural period. The documents were released just the other day, six years and four months after I submitted the FOIA request. Nedd had been promoted in March of 2017 from Executive Director, Energy Minerals and Management to Deputy Director at the Bureau of Land Management in March of 2017, just a couple of months after Trump took office.

For background, see this post. This per curiam order dropped yesterday. The case before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals is held in abeyance until mid-October. The Court deferred to the Agency. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum now has 90 days to act on the findings of an "agency review" of the Twin Metals matter. According to Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, the review was already "complete" by June 13th, which just happened to be one day after the Senate struck Stauber's Boundary Waters giveaway from the budget bill (see the 13 June update to…

I have a lot of afterthoughts, and it's always hard for me to decide how to present them: should I write postscripts as amendments to an existing post or are they best presented as new short posts? On the one hand, I am hoping that a reader will make her way to the end of my post and wonder what more I might have to add -- most likely a vain hope, and vain definitely strikes me as the right word here -- or should I consider postscripts to be more than staircase thoughts, posts in their own right, deserving of separate attention and an email to my subscribers?

I was going to write about the specious reasoning behind the copper tariffs announced earlier this week, but now, having read a little more about it, I hesitate even to call it reasoning. I am tempted to say that the story Howard Lutnick is telling about "the idea" of " copper production home" by imposing tariffs on imports is an example of magical thinking, but that would imply that the idea is a serious idea, that it involved actual planning or something that can actually be called thinking, and also that that thinking carries some charm.

I felt a little sheepish suggesting that the writing in the Media Lab paper about "cognitive debt" and ChatGPT needed some work. Ashley Juavinett, Professor of Neurobiology at UC San Diego, and psychologist Cat Hicks have no such qualms. Their podcast, "You Deserve Better Brain Research," addresses some serious problems with this "weird document," from the writing to methods and research design. I'm putting it up here because I enjoyed and learned from it, and I hope others will, too.

No, that's not a typo in my title. I've just had my first look at the MIT Media Lab paper that is making the rounds: “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.”  This paper is disturbing, to say the least. What the authors call “friction” is what we used to call thinking, or it's at least an essential element of thinking, the effort of it.