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April 05, 2025 12:05 AM UTC

Weekend Open Thread

  • 25 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.”

–James Baldwin

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25 thoughts on “Weekend Open Thread”

  2. Federal judge issued a permanent injunction on Thursday against Denver Water's Gross Reservoir expansion. Front page news on the Denver Post today. The judge cited potential irreparable harm to the environment in her decision. No timeline yet for how long it will take the Army Corps of Engineers to redo the permitting process.

    1. [Insert This Morning’s Commercial Comments Here About How Overregulation is Destroying America’s Future, and Our Immediate Pressing Need to Begin Now Building New Nuclear Power Plants.]

      1. It is ridiculous how some government agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers can't do an adequate permitting review before committing to lots of environmental destruction. If you read the article in the Denver Post today David you would read that the Corp failed among other things to consider alternatives to the reservoir expansion and there were several. They didn't consider the impact of climate change on snow met runoff and they accepted Denver Water estimates of demand that were not offset by conservation initiatives and overstated.

        Denver Water jumped the gun before all legal issues had been resolved and don't get the benefit of having already started.

        The big point in the ruling is that it is a permanent injunction until the Corp can do an honest assessment of the environmental risks of this project. Judge Aguello specifically noted that environmental damage can not be easily reversed if ever. It's like one of those sandstone arches in Utah that collapses. You can never restore it to a pre-collapsed condition. The judge's injunction prevents Denver Water from cutting down a half million trees prematurely. It was a good ruling and puts the onus on the Corp to determine if there will be enough water in the future to justify the cost of construction.

        1. There is always more environmental review that can be done. There are always alternatives that exist. That shouldn't be used to delay building stuff forever. Denver continues to grow. Denver will need more water. This is a good solution.

          There's a great book about this issue, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress. It discusses at book length this very issue and how we went from a government that could create the TVA bringing economic development to an underdeveloped part of the country to a government that struggles to increase its water supply and can't run transmission lines from wind or solar farms to the grid.

          And what do we get for all this? They held up the Tellico Dam because of the snail darter. They finally built the dam and the snail darter? It's doing so well it's no longer on the endangered species list.

          I'm all in favor of a single step in the process where people can raise concerns. But delaying builds forever with lawsuit after lawsuit – I prefer to be a country that buils things and understands that there is trade-offs in everything and that building will inflict some environmental damage.

          1. Thanks for the perceptions David. I prefer to be a nation that genuinely recognizes that our planet is composed of finite resources and we need to protect critical resources like water by not doing foolish things with it.

            I don’t know if fraud in the inducement is the correct term but when the permitting agency uses findings like projected demand that is skewed towards the petitioners position then it is a dangerous situation that isn’t being judged fairly or impartially. It’s like Musk bidding on government contracts that involve SpaceX and the government agency always picks SpaceX. Sometimes the process is flawed and the injured parties have a right to redress those wrongs in a court of law. The animals and wildlife can’t represent themselves so these environmental groups do and their arguements were heard loud and clear.

            You shouldn’t bulid a dam if there isn’t going to be any water to put in it. Whether the Trump Administration recognizes it or not, someone needs to inject some reality into this magical thinking that the earth is this cornucopia of unlimited resources and we can squander our earthly assets because someone wants to make more money building more subdivisions where there is no water.

    3. You assume there will be a permit process left to do.  All the USACE has to do under this new regime is to sign off on the application it and it should be good to go.

      1. But the project is something wanted in a Blue state, led by the chief "Not Our Type of Guy" Polis.  So the diminished ACE may not have resources to do the work … meaning it sits in limbo.

      2. The status quo is an injunction and halt in construction so if USACE punts on their responsibilities and fails to remedy the problems with the first permits then the judge can issue a permanent injunction. The Trump Administration might try to find a way around this ruling but right now Denver Water can only hope that their appeal is successful otherwise it is going to be a big delay to repermit the project.

    1. Ask yourself; would he have been selected if he wasn’t?

      Hegseth, Noem, Kennedy the least, Waltz, Gabbard, Bongino, Patel, etc., etc., — the real question for our times, it seems, is: Which came first, the idiots or the choice?

    2. I think he’s scared. He’s been kept out of planning feels set up and is relying on the limitations prior Secretaries have set. As a result his information is limited

      Also I think he looks like Actor Barry Bostwick from Spin City or the first episode of the Canadian series Lexx. 

  4. All I really needed to know I learned by reading group texts on Signal from the Ministry of Orange Truth?

    President Trump issued an executive order in January that banned D.E.I. materials in kindergarten through 12th grade education, but the office of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth informed the Naval Academy on March 28 that he intended the order to apply to the school as well, even though it is a college.

    The list also includes “Memorializing the Holocaust,” Janet Jacobs’s examination of depictions of women in the Holocaust, and “How to Be Anti-Racist” by Ibram X. Kendi. Also listed are “The Making of Black Lives Matter,” by Christopher J. Lebron; “How Racism Takes Place,” by George Lipsitz; “The Fire This Time,” edited by Jesmyn Ward; “The Myth of Equality,” by Ken Wytsma; studies of the Ku Klux Klan, and the history of lynching in America.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/us/politics/naval-academy-dei-books-removed.html

     

    The full list:

    https://media.defense.gov/2025/Apr/04/2003683009/-1/-1/0/250404-LIST OF REMOVED BOOKS FROM NIMITZ LIBRARY.PDF

     

    1. It appears the term "Slavery" is now banned when recounting the history of, um, slavery:

      Amid anti-DEI push, National Park Service rewrites history of Underground Railroad

      For years, a National Park Service webpage introduced the Underground Railroad with a large photograph of its most famous “conductor,” Harriet Tubman. “The Underground Railroad — the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War — refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage,” the page began.

      Tubman’s photograph is now gone. In its place are images of Postal Service stamps that highlight “Black/White cooperation” in the secret network and that feature Tubman among abolitionists of both races.

      The introductory sentence is gone, too. It has been replaced by a line that makes no mention of slavery and that describes the Underground Railroad as “one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement.” The effort “bridged the divides of race,” the page now says.

      War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, and 2 + 2 = 5

    1. There are the constant attacks from krasnov, who only knows cruelty as enjoyment.  He must have had a large store of wing less flies hidden away.

      I expect him to take his etchasketch EO scribble to an EO declaring Trans people illegal and to be jailed/concentration camp.

  6. Uhhh….the VA has been using AI for years (via contractors that may or may not have been terminated by the NaziTechBro)

    But I guess it wasn't "developed by an itty-bitty startup company that does invoices for hustle culture" AI, so I guess this is somehow better.  

    On March 25, tech staffers and contractors at the VA noticed an unfamiliar name trying to push changes that could impact VA.gov code. It was Sahil Lavingia, a newcomer to the agency listed in the VA’s internal directory as an adviser to the chief of staff, Christopher Syrek.

    Lavingia's presence in the VA's GitHub instance—a publicly viewable platform that houses projects and code for VA.gov—set off immediate alarm bells. It bore all the hallmarks of DOGE’s incursion into the federal government: Lavingia, a startup CEO and engineer with no government experience, all of a sudden had power—and was in their systems.

    These DOGE operatives appear to have no work experience that’s remotely close to the VA in terms of its scale or complexity. The VA administers all the government benefits afforded to veterans and their families for roughly 10 million people, including education, loans, disability payments, and health care. Lavingia is the CEO of Gumroad, a platform that helps creatives sell their work and takes a cut of each sale. More recently, according to his blog, Lavingia launched Flexile, a tool to manage and pay contractors. According to his LinkedIn profile, Lavingia was the second employee at Pinterest, which he left in 2011 to found Gumroad. Lavingia is also an angel investor in other startups via SHL Capital, which backed Clubhouse and Lambda School, among others.

    https://www.wired.com/story/doge-department-of-veterans-affairs-ai/

    I'm sure this will all go smoothly…. 

    1. An trrteresiting recent article on the roots of the technology-is-the-answer Musketeers and their tech-bro fanboys’ hero:

      The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk

      Four years ago, I made a series for the BBC in which I located the origins of Mr. Musk’s strange sense of destiny in science fiction, some of it a century old. This year, revising the series, I was again struck by how little of what Mr. Musk proposes is new and by how many of his ideas about politics, governance and economics resemble those championed by his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a cowboy, chiropractor, conspiracy theorist and amateur aviator known as the Flying Haldeman. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was also a flamboyant leader of the political movement known as technocracy.

      . . . 

      Leading technocrats proposed replacing democratically elected officials and civil servants — indeed, all of government — with an army of scientists and engineers under what they called a technate. Some also wanted to annex Canada and Mexico. At technocracy’s height, one branch of the movement had more than a quarter of a million members.

      . . . 

      Technocrats argued that liberal democracy had failed. One Technocracy Incorporated pamphlet explained how the movement “does not subscribe to the basic tenet of the democratic ideal, namely that all men are created free and equal.” In the modern world, only scientists and engineers have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of the economy. Mr. Scott’s army of technocrats would eliminate most government services: “Even our postal system, our highways, our Coast Guard could be made much more efficient.” Overlapping agencies could be shuttered, and “90 percent of the courts could be abolished.”

      Decades ago, in the desperate, darkest moment of the Depression, technocracy seemed, briefly, poised to prevail against democracy. “For a moment in time, it was possible for thoughtful people to believe that America would consciously choose to become a technocracy,” writes William E. Akin, the author of the definitive historical study of the movement, “Technocracy and the American Dream.” In the four months from November 1932 to March 1933, The New York Times published more than 100 stories about the movement. And then the bubble appeared to burst. By summer, Technocrats Magazine and The Technocracy Review had gone out of print.

      . . .

      Nevertheless, technocracy endured. Its spectacles grew alarming: Technocrats wore identical gray suits and drove identical gray cars in parades that evoked for concerned observers nothing so much as Italian Fascists. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was a technocracy stalwart. In 1940, when Canada banned Technocracy Incorporated — out of fear that its members were plotting to undermine the government or the war effort — Mr. Haldeman took out an ad in a newspaper, proclaiming technocracy a “national patriotic movement.”

      Weeks later, when he tried to enter the United States for a technocracy speaking tour, he was denied entry at the border, possibly because of a new passport regulation that barred travel into the United States to “an alien whose entry would be contrary to the public safety” (something of an irony, given the current administration’s border policies). In Vancouver, British Columbia, he was arrested, convicted and sentenced to a fine or two months in jail. He later joined the antisemitic Social Credit Party, becoming its national chairman.

      https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/opinion/elon-musk-doge-technocracy.html

      As the posters now appearing in England read:  “Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds, Tesla. The Swasticar.”; “Now With White Power Steering.”; and ‘The Fast and the Führer,’ with a picture of Mr. Musk saluting beside a Tesla with a DOGE license plate, 

       

       

       

      1. I read this today and found it interesting as well. It seems to explain a lot about the muskrat. Speaking only for myself, I grew up immersed in school and discourse on more or less the mainstream American political structure – system of checks and balances, small-d democratic elections, representatives in theory responsive to input from constituents, etc. Elon doesn't seem bound by any of that, and we're the lucky guinea pigs who get to see where it all leads.

  8. Is this the answer for the Dems in 2028?

    They Pushed for Cuomo to Resign. Now They’re Clearing His Comeback Path. – The New York Times

    Let's face it, nice doesn't cut it. Kamala Harris was nice and where did it get her.

    Cuomo is a ruthless, vengeful, nasty and offensive New Yorker with a history of preying on women.

    Sounds a lot like the guy who won two of the last three presidential elections.

    Maybe we need a Trump from the left…..

    1. Fuck that. You can be tough and mean and ruthless without being a sexual predator. We don't need to disappear sexual crimes to find good strong candidates.

      Also, if the New York Times told me the sun would rise in the east tomorrow, I'd be sure to check for myself.

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