Maui

And another diversion. I can sympathize with whoever wrote this piece. Our last trip to Maui was about 15 years ago and it was packed with people then. Now? 

MAUI, HAWAIʻI: WARNING!

In regards to all the people wanting to move here from California, Texas, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Canada, Australia, and every influencer with a drone and a ukulele soundtrack…

Before you come to MAUI, you should be aware of what is happening here. There’s a severe housing shortage, locals are being priced out, and tourism numbers keep breaking records. Traffic is getting worse every year and half the island seems to be permanently under construction.

So if you plan on moving here, or just vacationing on our beaches this summer, I think you should know:

The sun here is not the same sun you’re used to. Tourists arrive pale and confident, then leave looking like microwaved hot dogs after “just 20 minutes” at the beach.

The Road to Hana is now approximately 94% rental Jeeps crossing the center line while somebody hangs out the window filming waterfalls for Instagram.

Locals can immediately detect when someone stops in the middle of the road because they saw a rainbow, whale, chicken, surfer, or “really pretty tree.”

Our oceans are full of tiger sharks, Portuguese man o’ war, shorebreak waves that snap boogie boards in half, and sea turtles that will absolutely get you fined if you try riding one for TikTok.

The beaches are covered in tourists who underestimated Hawaiian shorebreak and are now limping back to the parking lot carrying one sandal.

The centipedes here are enormous. Nobody from the mainland believes this until one sprints across the ceiling at 2am moving approximately 40 mph.

Wild chickens and roosters have completely taken over the island. They roam parking lots in gangs and scream outside your condo window before sunrise every single day.

The mosquitoes are thriving, especially after rain, and somehow always know exactly which tourist forgot bug spray.

Parking at beach parks now requires timing, strategy, luck, and occasionally divine intervention.

Our hiking trails are full of flash flood warnings, slippery mud, loose rocks, mosquitoes, and visitors wearing flip flops carrying one tiny bottle of Dasani.

The trade winds are strong enough to relocate beach umbrellas, towels, rental car doors, and emotionally fragile tourists.

Coconuts fall out of trees with alarming force and absolutely zero concern for human life.

Mongoose run around everywhere looking like they’re late for an important meeting.

The humidity guarantees that nothing in your condo, hotel room, or rental car will ever fully dry again. Ever.

Every Costco trip feels like the island population has increased by 600,000 people overnight.

Tourists continue attempting to stand on coral reefs, touch monk seals, climb over safety barriers near blowholes, and swim at beaches locals specifically told them not to swim at. Nature usually handles the situation from there.

The locals are friendly until you block traffic, disrespect the land, complain that things are expensive, ask where the “hidden locals-only beaches” are, or announce you’re “thinking about moving here” after visiting for four days.

And don’t even get me started on the cane spiders. They’re harmless, technically. But emotionally? Spiritually? Absolutely not.

What I’m saying is if you are thinking of coming here… don’t.

Honestly, I hear California is beautiful this time of year though.

Edit: This pile of comments is packed with disgusting racist entitlement and straight-up colonial superiority.

You outsiders flood in with your cash, treat Maui like your personal playground, then throw tantrums when locals finally speak truth about being priced out after fires wrecked homes, cultural destruction, and an economy stacked to enrich outside investors over the actual families rooted there for generations.

The nonstop “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” narrative is pure colonial rot. Locals are not your obedient servants or smiling, grateful natives who must stay quiet while foreign money jacks up costs, turns their ancestral home into a cheap theme park, and leaves them scraping by. That twisted thinking assumes Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders only exist to cater to tourists and property flippers, and any resistance gets labeled lazy, entitled, or anti-white. That right there is the ugly racism on full display.

Dismissing the original post as lies or exaggeration while brushing off the brutal housing shortage, mass displacement, and crushing over-tourism damage is outright gaslighting.

So many of you brag you “just visit,” yet still demand the island contort itself for your comfort, then brand locals grouchy or unwelcoming for naming the problems your presence worsens.

The stereotypes about “bad locals” and “ungrateful natives” come straight from repeated entitled outsiders who trash the ʻāina, ignore every warning, and treat sacred ground like their own Instagram backdrop.

Framing all locals as angry ingrates for daring to defend their home is the same tired dehumanizing language that has been aimed at Native Hawaiians and island peoples for far too long.

Tourism brings money, yes, but that does not erase locals’ right to call out unsustainable traffic, endless construction, environmental damage, and ongoing cultural disrespect. Dismissing those concerns as “hate” or “bad leadership” while benefiting from visits or rental income is peak arrogance and hypocrisy.

You do not get to enter a place, reshape it for your own gain, and then smear the people dealing with the consequences as ungrateful parasites.

If this post makes people uncomfortable, that discomfort is revealing. The racism is obvious in how quickly people jump to “these people are ruining paradise” while still expecting gratitude for showing up.

Locals owe no performance of gratitude for their own displacement, and they do not have to soften their reality to make visitors feel more comfortable.

Show the respect you claim to have, or accept that pushback is part of being a guest in someone else’s home.

Maui belongs to its people.

climate change

And here is another open-and-shut case. Trump promised oil industry fat cats awhile ago that if they gave him a shit ton of money, he would do whatever they wanted. He got the money. One item on their wish list was to deemphasize climate change. How to do that? How about pulling up all the ocean-based equipment that sends massive amounts of data to climate researchers? No info on wave action; no info on warming oceans; no data on how much CO2 is escaping from the ocean floor. And the fossil fuel industry can go along its merry way knowing that scientists will be less able to argue that the climate is changing if they have little to no data. Win, win, especially for Trump, who doesn't give a fuck about much of anything except his own pocket. 

EarthJustice

They said no. Twice. It didn’t matter.

Congress said no to gutting ocean monitoring in 2025. They restored the funding. The Trump administration tried again in 2026. Congress restored it again.

So the Trump administration didn’t go through Congress. They went around it. They control who runs the National Science Foundation. So they simply directed the NSF to start pulling the equipment out of the water anyway — no vote, no approval, no debate.

This week, ships are physically removing a $368 million deep-ocean monitoring network that took decades to build. 900 buoys and instruments — tracking fisheries, weather, tsunami warnings, and ocean currents — pulled from the Pacific Northwest, the Atlantic, Greenland, the Southern Ocean. The system was expected to keep collecting data for another 15 years. Gone.

By the time any lawsuit works through the courts, the buoys will already be gone. Instruments that took decades to build and place, retrieved in a matter of weeks. That’s not an accident. That’s the strategy. Move fast enough that the law can’t catch you.

The official reason? Saving $48 million a year.

But here’s what the Trump administration won’t tell you: what does it cost to remove it?

They are deploying ships globally for 15 months to physically retrieve equipment from the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, North Carolina, Greenland, and the Southern Ocean. Each buoy alone is worth $1.5 million. They’ll tell you what they’re saving. They won’t tell you what the removal costs.

And here’s the part that I believe they really don’t want you to know: this was written into Project 2025 before Trump even took office.

The architects of this administration explicitly named NOAA’s ocean and climate research office as “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and called for its research to be “disbanded.” This isn’t budget math. This is a hit list.

No monitors means no data. No data means no accountability. No accountability means the Trump administration and its fossil fuel donors can drill, dump, and extract — and there’s no paper trail.

And it’s not just the oceans.

The Trump administration’s proposed 2027 budget zeroes out Forest Service research entirely — all $309 million, gone. At least 57 of the agency’s 77 research stations are on the chopping block across 31 states. Scientists in Baltimore have spent years planting white oak saplings that take three decades to mature. You can’t FedEx a forest to Colorado. You can’t manage a Hawaiian ecosystem from a cubicle in Utah. Researchers have told NPR they’ll quit before they relocate — which may be exactly the point.

The “fiscal responsibility” pitch falls apart the moment you look at the numbers. The research station in Hilo, Hawaii sits on 30,000 acres locked in until 2067 — for a one-time fee of one dollar. The Fort Collins office where the Trump administration wants to move everyone? One million dollars a year in rent.

They’re closing dollar leases to expand a million-dollar one. (That seems fiscally wasteful.)

Meanwhile Trump has pledged to ramp up logging on federal land. Gut the scientists who document the damage, and there’s no one left to sound the alarm when ancient forests get clear-cut for profit.

The forests. The oceans. The scientists. The Trump administration is methodically dismantling every system that could document what it’s doing to this planet.

That is not incompetence. That is strategy.

The forests don’t belong to Trump. The oceans don’t belong to his donors. They belong to every American who has ever stood quiet under a hundred-year-old tree, or watched the sun go down over open water, and understood that some things are not for sale.

Congress said no. It didn’t matter — yet. It could matter if enough of us are loud enough.

And to wrap this up:

“Trump said he has nothing to do with Project 2025,” said by someone very close to me a couple years ago. But here we are. It is playing out in rapid time before our eyes (in hundreds of ways beyond the topic of this article) — it can’t be denied if we are paying attention. These actions are not to benefit the whole or the planet that support life. Follow the money trail and those who will massively benefit at the expense of all of us.

Don’t take my word for it. Read it yourself. Share it. Then act.

• Ocean monitoring: http://cnn.com/.../ocean-monitoring-system-amoc-trump...

• Forest Service: search “Forest Service closing offices costs” at npr.org

• Sign Earthjustice’s forest petition: http://earthjustice.org/.../protect-forests-from-massive...

• Call Congress — works for every American: 202-224-3121 — give them your zip code, they’ll connect you. Sixty seconds. They tally every call.

screwworm

Oh boy, another possible screwworm infestation? This is what happens when you mindlessly cut government. According to the GOP, government must be reduced in size, apparently no matter how many may die or how many disease outbreaks may occur. After all, the U.S. health apparatus kept pushing Covid-19, contradicting Trump and making Trump look bad, so all health agencies must be destroyed. It's as simple as that.

Josh Helfgott

BREAKING A flesh‑eating parasite just showed up in Texas cattle for the first time since the 1960s — and thanks to Trump’s budget cuts, it could drive beef prices even higher.

Federal officials have confirmed a case of New World screwworm in a calf in South Texas, near La Pryor, Zavala County. This isn’t a normal fly. Its larvae burrow into open wounds and literally eat living tissue; untreated, an animal can die in a couple of weeks.

Screwworm was once so destructive that the U.S. and Mexico spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars eradicating it using a sterile‑fly program that released millions of lab‑raised, non‑breeding males along the southern border to keep the pest out of U.S. herds. It worked — until now.

Under Trump, that prevention wall has been quietly dismantled. His administration slashed money for screwworm surveillance and sterile‑fly production, even as scientists warned that climate change and cross‑border livestock trade were pushing the pest north again.

A key USDA program that funded sterile‑fly releases and inspections on the U.S.–Mexico border was downsized and delayed. The White House also pushed for cuts to international cooperation with Mexico and Central America, where the flies are still endemic, bragging about “wasteful foreign programs” being axed. Ranchers and public‑health experts said at the time that this was exactly how you invite screwworm back into Texas cattle country.

Now it’s here — and the economic stakes are huge. USDA modeling suggests a serious outbreak in Texas alone could cost more than $2 billion a year in livestock losses, vet bills, and trade disruptions. Before eradication, screwworm outbreaks forced ranchers to shoot or amputate infected animals; now, with today’s smaller cattle herd and already record‑high beef prices, losing calves to a preventable parasite will tighten supply even more.

One analysis estimated that if screwworm spreads, national beef production could drop enough to push prices up for consumers on top of inflation and drought‑driven herd reductions. Border cattle imports from Mexico have already been restricted over screwworm concerns, shrinking the supply of feeder cattle that feedlots rely on.

And here’s the part the right won’t say out loud: this is what “cutting the deep state” actually looks like in real life. The people Trump smeared as faceless bureaucrats were the ones running the sterile‑fly plants, inspecting cattle trucks, and catching this parasite before it got into a Texas pasture.

When you gut long‑term prevention to score budget talking points, you don’t just hurt agencies. You hurt ranchers, workers at packing plants, and every family standing in front of a meat case at the grocery store.

We’re about to hear a lot of spin that blames “Biden inflation” or “migrant cattle” for every jump in beef prices. But remember: scientists and ranchers warned years ago that slashing screwworm defenses was a time bomb. Trump cut the wires anyway.

The bill is coming due — not for him, but for the people who raise our food and the families already struggling to afford it.

SpaceX IPO

I don't trust Elon Musk at all.  He's still a drug-addled Nazi who helped Donald Trump become president in 2024, and his DOGE bullshit helped to cripple our government. My money would be on the 2024 election being stolen, but as far as I know, there is no hard proof. Musk is systematically destroying a large area in deep south Texas with his Starbase bullshit. His launches from Boca Chica are gradually destroying homes on South Padre Island, and he doesn't give a flying fuck about it. I do not believe he really cares about getting to Mars. I do believe he wants to be the richest person on Earth, and god help us if he gets there. 

The Most Manipulative IPO in History

by Daniel Pinchbeck

I have been reviewing the SpaceX IPO and various analyses of their plan, and the findings are deeply unsettling. The SpaceX offering bears little resemblance to a normal company seeking funding to build meaningful, long-term revenue streams. It appears closer to a final extinction burst of post-industrial capitalist machismo, contorting into a reprehensible, inhumane form of techno-fascism with cosmological pretensions. Even The Economist finds a strain of paranoid eschatology embedded in the offering:

"Apocalyptic thinking is the strongest impulse in American capitalism today. Elon Musk… will soon float SpaceX, a rocket company whose professed mission is to avert existential threats to humanity by establishing a colony on Mars. Mr Musk is America’s richest capitalist in part because he is its loudest Cassandra."

The SpaceX IPO is deeply weird, brutally manipulative, and ponderously speculative. I am not a professional business person so what follows is just my opinion, informed by other perspectives I have explored.

One astonishing feature is that Musk has actually induced the NASDAQ exchange to rewrite its own rules to guarantee the SpaceX IPO extracts billions of dollars from millions of retirees and small-scale retail investors and gives it to elite financiers, particularly Musk’s super-wealthy cronies. This has been orchestrated in such a way that there is nothing small investors can do about it. The SpaceX IPO is grift on a Trumpian scale—perhaps even beyond.

As is widely understood, the SpaceX IPO will be the largest public offering in history, seeking up to $80 billion in fresh capital. The company—which partners closely with Musk’s other ventures, such as Tesla—is targeting a valuation of nearly two trillion dollars, despite running at a multi-billion-dollar loss across most divisions and offering highly fantastical projections of future revenue. Where standard IPOs are typically dry recitations of lease agreements and tax liabilities, the SpaceX prospectus reads less like a standard financial disclosure and more like speculative fiction entirely unmoored from material constraints, penned by Isaac Asimov on five hits of acid and a chug of nitrous. It opens with fourteen pages of photographs of rockets and satellites.

SpaceX’s true purpose, according to the filing, has nothing to do with short-term revenue or making Musk the first trillionaire. Instead, the company’s objective is now of galactic generosity:

"Our mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars. To do this, we have formed the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth with unmatched capabilities to rapidly manufacture and launch space-based communications that connect the world, to harness the Sun to power a truth-seeking artificial intelligence [Grok, which distorts data according to Musk’s racist and authoritarian biases] that advances scientific discovery, and ultimately to build a base on the Moon and cities on other planets."

One thing I have been learning, as I watch the United States’ pathetic collapse and self-willed immolation, is that fascism is more like an art project or a dramatic spectacle than any sensible or functional form of government. Elon Musk, of course, was one of the main architects of our country’s rapid race to the bottom, showing off his Roman/Nazi salute soon after Trump’s victory. The tech oligarchs still want us (the suckers) to believe they are embarked on a great mission for humanity that is somehow in the public good.

The opacity and scale of Musk's initiative have inevitably fostered an atmosphere of paranoia, sometimes emanating from within his own orbit. For example, Ashley St. Clair—the mother of one of his children—recently circulated the claim that Musk may have utilized his satellite infrastructure to interfere with the 2024 voting systems. While this remains an unverified theory, its resonance is telling (amplified by Musk’s own ominous pre-election posts asserting that "anything can be hacked"). The fact that such claims can gain traction underscores the lack of accountability surrounding his aerospace and communications empire. Yet we do not need to rely on satellite conspiracy theories to recognize his interference. His documented efforts to secure Trump's re-election were blatant and unprecedented, encompassing hundreds of millions in PAC spending, algorithmic manipulation of X, and legally dubious cash giveaways to swing-state voters. The threat he poses to democratic structures is not merely hypothetical; during an interview, he laughed nervously while admitting he would likely end up in prison if Trump lost.

One concept that has gained traction recently is “hyperstition,” a framework particularly useful for understanding neo-fascist movements. Hyperstition proposes that mimetics and mythic narratives can be used to manifest a desired future simply by acting as if it is inevitable. The SpaceX IPO functions as a massive, albeit blatantly unconvincing, exercise in hyperstition. As financial analyst Patrick Boyle observed upon reviewing the filing, “What we’re looking at is quite possibly the most extraordinary document in the history of American securities regulation.”

To justify its staggering valuation, the SpaceX prospectus does not focus on existing businesses, but rather projects enterprises that might eventually emerge. SpaceX claims a potential total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, a figure larger than the entire annual economic output of the United States. To defend this valuation, the company provides a long list of highly speculative business opportunities. One proposal is long-haul point-to-point travel, which involves catapulting passengers across the Earth in rockets instead of airplanes. Eight years ago, the company’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, stood on a TED stage and promised that within a decade, people would take thirty-minute rocket trips from New York to Shanghai, withstanding three times the force of gravity at takeoff in the process.

Today, no commercial commuter rocket exists. Yet the product continues to be pitched to investors as a realistic revenue stream. The SpaceX prospectus also envisions a luminous future of in-orbit manufacturing, building factories in zero gravity—a feat never attempted at scale. It describes passenger and cargo transport to the Moon and Mars, manufacturing and energy production on the Martian surface, and asteroid mining. None of these technologies exists in a commercially viable form, and no market exists to price them.

Every one of these hyperstitious constructs depends on a single machine: the Starship rocket. The rocket forms the basis of Musk’s entire argument. It is expected to launch the next generation of Starlink satellites, carry the cargo for a future Mars colony, and reach a launch frequency the company itself accurately terms “insane.” So far, the Starship rocket remains prone to “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” the aerospace industry’s euphemism for exploding. The two-trillion-dollar valuation assumes this vehicle will work exactly as advertised, on schedule, with zero setbacks.

Remarkably, according to the IPO, SpaceX does not conceive of itself primarily as a rocket or satellite internet company. In terms of future revenue, it presents itself as an artificial intelligence company. The filing attributes 93 percent of its total addressable market to AI, and roughly 60 percent of the company’s spending now goes toward AI infrastructure. This includes massive data centers in Tennessee and Mississippi powered by temporary gas turbines that unleash huge pollution, alongside the ceaseless noise of a fleet of jumbo jets.

Musk’s AI product is Grok, which currently holds a marginal 3.4 percent of the AI market. The filing concedes that the enterprise AI space is dominated by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. As Boyle notes, the main documented uses of Grok have been fact-checking posts on X and generating non-consensual nude images. Furthermore, Grok’s explicit rejection of ethical safeguards has drawn regulatory investigations in Spain, France, and the United Kingdom. Alarmingly, Grok is also being integrated into the Pentagon—currently overseen by Pete Hegseth—which struggles to manage escalating conflicts in Iran while blowing up fishing boats.

SpaceX’s own engineers have been slow to adopt Grok because it underperforms rival tools. Musk himself recently admitted the code needs to be rebuilt from scratch, a statement made shortly after he sold xAI to SpaceX for $250 billion in an all-stock transaction. His proposed fix was to spend $60 billion attempting to buy Cursor, the coding tool his engineers actually prefer, with a $10 billion penalty if the deal collapsed. There is a palpable sense that SpaceX is functioning as a vehicle to patch up Musk’s past failures—Solar City, the Tesla Cybertruck, the chaotic acquisition of Twitter—by bundling them into one monumental initiative that the public must buy into to avoid planetary extinction (the “fate of the dinosaurs”)...

However, SpaceX’s near-term AI revenue does not stem from selling Grok as a business-to-business or consumer product. It comes from renting AI computing power to one of its main competitors. SpaceX has a deal to rent compute capacity to Anthropic for $1.25 billion a month through 2029, equating to roughly $15 billion a year. Bloomberg reports this amounts to approximately 40 percent of the company's near-term projected revenue. As Boyle points out: if Volkswagen rented out all of its car factories to another manufacturer, would anyone still consider Volkswagen a car company?

If 93 percent of a $28.5 trillion market is AI, then by SpaceX’s own logic, the companies actually winning that market must be worth far more than SpaceX. Anthropic’s quarterly revenue is already roughly double the revenue of SpaceX’s entire AI segment, and both Anthropic and OpenAI are reportedly preparing public offerings at around a trillion dollars each. SpaceX is asking the public for nearly two trillion dollars based on the strength of a market already dominated by its direct competitors.

Only one business inside SpaceX currently makes money. In the first quarter of 2026, the space division—the part that builds and launches rockets—lost $662 million. The AI division lost $2.5 billion in the same three months. The connectivity division, Starlink, earned $1.1 billion.

Founded in 2019, Starlink has launched approximately 6,800 satellites into space for personal, commercial, and military use. While Starlink produced $4.4 billion in operating profit across 2025, the overarching enterprise still lost $4.94 billion overall. That means the rest of the company consumed more than nine billion dollars in a single year. Even Starlink’s success reveals underlying vulnerabilities: its average revenue per user has fallen about 18 percent since 2023, largely because the company has relied on steep discounts to artificially inflate subscriber numbers ahead of the public offering.

Starlink also carries a profound ecological risk regarding the Kessler Effect, a threat the IPO filing carefully skirts. The prospectus treats orbital debris merely as a hazard to SpaceX’s own hardware, noting that space is “inherently hostile” and that satellites may fail. It does not reckon with the deeper, systemic flaw in its plan to eventually launch up to a million satellites into low orbit.

The Kessler Effect, named by astrophysicist and former NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler, outlines the atmospheric threshold where the density of objects in orbit becomes so high that a single collision spews debris, triggering a cascading chain reaction of further collisions. This uncontrollable cascade would render whole orbital bands—and potentially our entire stratosphere—unusable for satellites, knocking out global communication infrastructures within months or years. According to Kessler, once this chain reaction reaches a critical tipping point, it is irreversible based on current technology, and the resulting debris field could persist for decades, centuries, or even a millennium.

The SpaceX IPO also inadvertently reveals who has been purchasing the Tesla Cybertruck: SpaceX itself. According to the filing, SpaceX bought $131 million worth of Cybertrucks from Tesla at full retail price, amounting to roughly 1,500 vehicles... (read the rest on Substack)

I stopped the article here because, to read the rest of it, you have to agree to a 7-day free trial, but have to input credit card data to start the free trial. I refuse to be jerked around like that. I considered deleting the entire article, but I feel that many of the points Pinchbeck makes are valid, and I cannot stand Elon Musk, so I want to read the rest of this, but will not sign up as requested. You can subscribe to the free version on Substack, but the free trial is the only way to read the res of this post. I frankly resent this type of coercion and it makes me suspicious of Pinchbeck. Reading some of this guy's bio makes me even more suspicious. Still, I am going to be selfish and leave this here. We'll see what becomes of the rest of this. If you want to read the rest, you can go to Daniel Pinchbeck at Substack.