April 4, 2026: Crabapple buds in my Racine, Wisconsin backyard.
Another Week: Number 171
This was a fairly nasty little week. We had thunderstorms on Monday night that dropped .44 inches of rain. Winter winds blew as April arrived on Wednesday. The rabbits doing their foreplay frolicking in my backyard were brown-gray blurs. It rained again most of Thursday, triggering a tornado watch and 2.4 more inches, with another .71 and thunderstorms Friday night.
Also Friday night, March Madness crashed to a halt. UConn’s 54-game winning streak ended in a stunning 62-48 loss to South Carolina and a jumble of acrimony.
Donald J. Trump’s war against Iran has officially become a quagmire. As everyone in the world but Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth expected, Iran has halted traffic through the Straight of Hormuz. Now, bored by the complexities, Trump is trying to declare victory and move on — but reality is thwarting him.
On Wednesday, Hegseth prayed during a Pentagon Christian service for “overwhelming violence of action,” and Trump visited the Supreme Court to intimidate the justices during his guy’s flimsy argument on birthright citizenship.
On Wednesday night, in his first nationally-televised address about the war, Trump disappointed and confused the world. His horseshit very poorly-received, but on Thursday, he stopped the media from talking about it by firing Attorney General Pam Bondi, which may also keep her from testifying to Congress about the Epstein Files. Hours later, for good measure, Hegseth fired his Army Chief of Staff — during a war.
A weird nonchalance counterbalances our gathering disaster. The news media tiptoe around our addled president and his lunatic Defense Secretary, and the stock market presumes silver linings.
But some are sensing deep shit ahead. On Tuesday at Semafor, Liz Hoffman wrote “The crisis will arrive slowly, then all at once.” Two days later, Katherine Tai talking to the BCC, likened our current predicament to the onset of COVID.
And remember what Nancy Pelosi observed about Trump six years ago?
Thursday on CNN, after Trump’s address, David Sanger of the New York Times marveled, “It’s almost as if you had designed a system to boost Putin’s agenda here.” Meanwhile, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote in a post on X: “The threat of NATO’s break-up, easing sanctions on Russia, a massive energy crisis in Europe, halting aid for Ukraine and blocking the loan for Kyiv by Orbán — it all looks like Putin’s dream plan.”
On Good Friday morning, news broke that a US fighter jet was down in Iran, with one of two airmen rescued and the other missing.
I walked 3.32 miles this week — and built a website for an upscale European-style steakhouse in Georgetown, Texas.
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Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Saturday evening, I finished reading Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, the controversial book from last year by former Facebook public policy director Sarah Wynn-Williams that makes a number of accusations against Facebook’s top brass, ranging from sexual harassment to complicity with China’s mass surveillance regime.
The harrowing tale begins with Wynn-Williams barely surviving a shark attack as a teenager in New Zealand, then goes on to describe her attempts to make Facebook aware of its global implications while it morphs from a tech novelty to a media monster.
We read about typical corporate inefficiency and clueless executives. There’s creepiness involving bedrooms aboard company jets, inappropriate probing about personal matters, and performance review weaponization.
Gradually, though, we also see the implications of Facebook’s reach into the hearts of people worldwide. Girls can be targeted with cosmetics ads at moments of crushing insecurity. Whole populations can be incited with lies as easily as flipping a switch. Politics can be tilted in Myanmar, the Philippines, and — oh, hi Mark! — the United States.
As these entanglements become increasingly fraught, and Mark Zuckerberg approaches world domination with the comprehension of an entitled ten-year-old, the reader starts screaming “Get out!” like the viewer of a slasher movie.
But Wynn-Williams stays and stays, trapped partly by thorny circumstances and partly by hopes of remediation.
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