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Wed Apr 1 10:00:01 UTC 2026
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Slept from eleven to eight.
Woke briefly around five.
Cloudy.
A slight chance of rain early in the afternoon.
Highs in the lower 40s.
Northeast winds 10 to 15 mph.
Chance of rain 20 percent.
# Work
* 10:00 AM GrowHub Paul + Lindsay
* 11:00 AM GrowHub Scrum
* 12:00 PM GrowHub data migration call
* 02:00 PM GrowHub design and dev sync
# Home
* [x] work on OD&D reference in Markdown
* [ ] go to bed by ten-ish
* [x] taxes
* [ ] confirm that Dr. Lipson takes my new health insurance (Priority Health). If so, schedule appointment?
Read more of Queen Demon.
Might give up on this one.
It doesn't provide any recap of the first book, which I remember only well enough to not be interested in re-reading it.
Shit.
https://morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/breaking-trump-administration-orders
> BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service
> The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.
> What this actually is, stripped of the Orwellian window dressing, is the largest forced purge of a federal land management agency in American history. It dwarfs anything that’s come before. The BLM headquarters move in Trump’s first term — widely understood, even then, as a deliberate gutting of the agency — involved a few hundred positions. This involves thousands. That one closed zero regional offices. This one closes all ten. That one touched one agency’s headquarters. This one dismantles the headquarters, collapses the regional structure, and wipes out the scientific backbone of the largest forestry organization on Earth.
>
> Of 328 BLM positions ordered to relocate, 287 employees left the agency. Only 41 moved at all — scattered across various western offices. And only three — three human beings — actually relocated to the new “headquarters” in Grand Junction. The agency lost 87% of its Washington-based workforce. Decades of institutional knowledge, scientific expertise, and legal acumen walked out the door and never came back.
>
> Because once they’re gone, you replace them. With loyalists. With industry allies. With people who have never set foot in a national forest but know exactly whose phone calls to return. You don’t need to fire anyone. You just announce a “move” and let attrition do the killing for you. Then you fill the vacancies with your own people and pretend the agency still exists.
> Utah. The state whose governor, Spencer Cox, just weeks ago signed a deal with this same Forest Service Chief — the former logging executive — giving Utah de facto control over Forest Service operations on eight million acres of national forest. A “partnership” we called out at the time for exactly what it was: a dry run for transfer. Control without ownership. The first step in a playbook designed to embed the state in federal decision-making so deeply that the line between federal and state management disappears, and when the inevitable push for full transfer comes, the argument writes itself: “We’re already managing it. Why shouldn’t we own it?”
>
> Utah. The state that has been ground zero for the anti-public-lands movement for as long as the movement has existed. A hotbed of Sagebrush Rebellion ideology, where the political class has spent decades trying every conceivable legal, legislative, and administrative maneuver to wrest federal land out of public hands and into the grip of state politicians and their industry patrons.
>
> And now the United States government is handing them the headquarters of the agency that manages 193 million acres of national forest.
>
> Theodore Roosevelt created the national forests to protect them from exactly the kind of industrial plunder this administration is enabling. Gifford Pinchot built the Forest Service from scratch, brick by brick, to ensure that America’s forests would be managed by trained professionals in the public interest — not by political appointees serving the timber industry from a satellite office in the state that wants to own those forests.
>
> Roosevelt fought the robber barons. Pinchot fought the timber trusts. They built this agency as a shield for the American public against the exact forces that are now being handed the keys.
>
> And Tom Schultz — a man who made his career cutting trees for profit before being plucked from the industry to run the agency that’s supposed to regulate it — invokes their names while dismantling their life’s work.
> This is the most respected forestry research program on the planet. It’s the reason we understand wildfire behavior, forest disease, watershed health, carbon storage, old-growth ecology, and climate adaptation. It’s the scientific backbone that every responsible land management decision depends on. It’s the envy of land managers across the world.
>
> And they’re destroying it. Not because it’s expensive — the entire research budget is a rounding error. Not because it’s inefficient — decentralized, place-based research is the only kind of forest science that works. They’re destroying it because science is an obstacle.
>
> Because a scientist who says “you can’t log that watershed without destroying it” is inconvenient. A researcher who publishes data showing that a timber sale will wipe out a salmon run is a problem. A lab that documents the damage from mining runoff or road-building or clear-cutting is an enemy.
> Because once you’ve moved the headquarters to the state that wants to own the forests, installed state-aligned political appointees as managers, destroyed the independent science, eliminated the institutional capacity to resist, and created a structure where state governments are functionally running federal forests already — the argument for formal transfer becomes very, very easy.
>
> “We’re already managing it. Why should Washington own it?”
And, presumably, even selling the land to private interests, take it out of the public domain forever.
Filed my taxes.
☹️
It kept bugging me that the Globe (fn) key (and Ctrl-Cmd-Space) on my MacBook stopped triggering the Emoji & Symbols picker.
Finally found the answer.
Terminal, under the "Termina" menu, has a "Secure Keyboard Entry" item.
When enabled, the globe key stops triggering the emoji picker.
Sigh.
Servings: grains 3/4, vegetables+fruit 5/5, dairy+meat 1/4, nuts+beans 2/0.5
Breakfast: toast, egg, tomato, coffee
Lunch: potato chips
Afternoon snack: banana
Dinner: falafel wrap, roast vegetables, salad, hummus
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