In covering the science and politics beats these days, there is the collection of normal practices aimed at shining light on abnormal things — speaking with sources, reading reports and studies, filing likely futile FOIA requests, connecting dots between apparently unconnected things, and so on. But then there are the ancillary actions, semi-compulsive tics that have developed over the last few months that, in general, don’t offer much in the way of insight or information, but I do nonetheless. These are mildly unreasonable things formed in the fires of an extremely unreasonable administration, an indicator of declining sanity whose arrow of causation remains hazy — do I do these things because I am losing my mind, or am I losing my mind because I do these things? Who can say. Anyway:
1. Refresh the EPA’s mission page
I have had this tab open in my browser since mid-March. That’s when EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced an orgy of dergulatory actions, effectively reversing his agency’s purpose from protection to destruction. And in doing so, he explicitly said that the purpose of the EPA is now “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business,” rather than, you know, protecting the environment. Ever since I have been curious if he would be bold enough to make this shift literal, and so there I am, sometimes multiple times a day, hitting refresh on a usually-ignored mission page.
As of this writing, the original stands: “The mission of EPA is to protect human health and the environment… To accomplish this mission, we: Develop and enforce regulations.” It makes much more sense, from the perspective of your average deregulatory monster, to simply leave that up while you do the exact opposite; I will keep checking, though, just in case.
2. Examine charts for DJIA, INX, and TSLA
I am not, in general, a business or economics knower (we have one of those!). I don’t tend to pay close attention to stock charts or economic indicators beyond what other, smarter people write about it. But a government apparently hell-bent on causing a massive recession mixed with the richest man in the world oozing, slime mold-like, into every corner of that government… well, it’s hard not to check. And when the Dow, the S&P 500, and yes Tesla’s stock all seem to have somehow found a way to detach themselves from reality, it becomes a strange and largely useless habit to call them up once more.
3. Reload Google Maps
If there isn’t much point to checking market indices multiple times a day, there is definitely no point to zooming Google Maps out to the continent level as often as I do. I do this simply to confirm, over and over, the sheer degree of elite institutions’ and corporate America’s cowardice — because there it is, the big body of water bordering several southeastern states and a big country whose name escapes me to the south. That body of water’s title, long established and uncontroversial, is wrong on the map; it has been wrong for months now and will remain wrong for some undetermined amount of time. And yet I reload just the same.
4. Read Department of Defense press releases
At least I got a post out of this one. It is remarkable, in the wake of the Signal fiasco and probably a couple dozen other things we haven’t yet heard about, that Pete Hegseth remains in his position as Secretary of Defense. His and his underlings’ only accomplishment, at this point, is the mainstreaming of the word “warfighter,” since apparently it is one of maybe a few dozen that he knows. The Pentagon’s press releases continue to act as a source of morbid fascination for me — since I wrote about it, they have managed to up the ante by doing things like mentioning the “warrior ethos” in a press release about sexual assault in the military. Similar to the habits above, returning and reading releases that combine the bland with the casually psychotic from a massive bureaucracy that continues to leak actual information like a sieve isn’t going to produce any breathtaking insights. And yet.
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The Truth Hurts
