There are still a few good guys.

When the Supremes decided that the Orange Toddler's tariffs from last spring were illegal, the question arose whether what or who might get a refund. Many companies had raised prices hoping to make up for the hit to their bottom line from paying the duties on imported goods. Many others held tight on prices, hoping a court would free them from the levies, as it did, while nonetheless paying up in the interim. That is, as usual, Trump had left American businesses with a mess.

So now what happens to the money the Trump regime has been ordered to pay to the importers?

Popular Information looked into this:  

The federal government could now be responsible for issuing “refunds worth $175 billion,” according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

... While it seems likely that companies will eventually get refunds from Trump’s tariffs, much of the cost was borne by consumers. Many companies publicly stated that they were raising prices due to the tariffs. But now that the tariffs are being refunded, only a few companies have pledged to refund customers or offer discounts.

Costco is one of the few companies that has promised to pass some of the refunded tariff money back to customers.

“As we’ve done in the past, when legal challenges have recovered charges passed on in some form to our members, our commitment will be to find the best way to return this value to our members,” Costco CEO Ron Vachris said during an earnings call last week. Vachris said that the company would return recovered tariff money to customers “through lower prices and better values,” but noted that “it is not yet clear what the process will be, what refunds, if any, will be received, and when this will happen.” Costco executives also said during the call that the company took steps to absorb some of the increased cost caused by tariffs instead of passing it on to customers.

In November, Costco sued the Trump administration over its tariff policies and sought refunds.

FedEx has also pledged to refund a portion of any tariff money it receives to customers. “Our intent is straightforward: if refunds are issued to FedEx, we will issue refunds to the shippers and consumers who originally bore those charges,” FedEx said in a statement on its website. “When that will happen and the exact process for requesting and issuing refunds will depend in part on future guidance from the government and the court.”

It seems worth remembering who treated their customers right ...

Listen to the old timers ...

According the Johns Hopkins Measles Tracker the US has seen 1513 measles cases this year as of March 13. (Yes, I looked on a university site; dare I trust whatever stats the federal government is offering any longer? Don't know.)

I am old enough to have vivid memories of a time when measles and chickenpox were simply considered hazards of childhood. In the 1950s, most of us got the diseases; most of us came through fine. But not everyone. 

There was a little kid who lived down the street. She was several years younger, had a sister my age who was someone I played with. The family was not exactly close to mine, but a pack of us kids rioted around in each other's houses. I can still remember that family's entrance hall and front room. And then, the younger sister got sick and we were kept out of that house. Several weeks went by and we were told that the little one had died. Her illness had begun with measles; she suffered complications which I now think probably included encephalitis. And then she was gone.

The kid pack never went back to that house and I don't remember the older sister ever playing with us again.

Naturally I have no trouble believing that vaccines which prevent measles, mumps and rubella (chickenpox) and later polio (that scourge too crippled several girls in my school) are among 20th century America's best inventions.

So I was heartened to read Jonathan Cohn's shout-out to a creative intervention. 

Grandparents for Vaccines recruits elders who lived the pre-vaccine era to tell their stories.

The goal of Grandparents for Vaccines is to push back against [the anti-vaccine] movement, while getting Americans thinking about what’s at stake if the trends continue. And while that’s an awful lot to ask from a group of seniors, most of them political novices still learning the finer points of social media, they have two powerful weapons for making their case: the unique moral authority of grandparents, and insights that can come only from people who have seen these scourges up close. ...

[Founder Arthur] Lavin likens the effort to what Mothers Against Drunk Driving did in the 1980s and ’90s. ...

Judging by the offerings on YouTube, the project needs more new immigrants and people of color. But if we have to do public health for ourselves without federal authorities we can trust, who better to testify than grandparents?

A psychotic war made by two psychopaths

Uri Misgav is an Israeli journalist, publicist, lecturer, teacher and director, formerly with Haaretz, the closest thing Israel has to a mainstream opposition newspaper. 

Haaretz gave him oped ed space to denounce Prime Minister Netanyahu's current war. 

I wish to write my opinion about the war. No filters. It's important to do this because, heaven forbid, a missile will hit our rented apartment in Jaffa or the shelter in the assisted living facility next door where we run to during the incessant sirens. I'm using the free platform provided me by Haaretz, which has been under frontal assault by the government in recent years. It is also my right to make my civic voice heard in a democratic country (still, ostensibly).

I think that this is a psychotic war. One that Israel and the United States entered led by two psychopaths. Vainglorious, narcissistic, disconnected. They're up to their necks in political and legal trouble. They head the two most fundamentalist and anti-democratic governments in the history of their countries. And they have the chutzpah to preach democracy elsewhere.

It gets worse.

At the moment, it's a deluxe war, based on bombing from an open air corridor high above, with almost no enemy antiaircraft or jets. Or bombing by American cruise missiles, which sometimes hit desalination plants or a girls school. The cannon fodder are Israelis and people in the Gulf states. 

Also the Iranian people, whom U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are encouraging to replace the ayatollahs' regime even as they are being savagely bombed and hit by black rain after oil depots were attacked. 

And one million Lebanese who were again ordered to evacuate their homes, or were simply unfortunate enough to live in Beirut. Everything is supposed to give rise to "changing the face of the Middle East for generations."

... I have a name for this war: the roaring psychos.

 

Mishav, for all his desperation at finding himself huddling in shelters as a consequence of the vicious stupidity of a government he despises, writes obliviously, ignoring the two million Israeli Arab citizens and the additional two and a half million residents of the occupied Palestinian West Bank. These people largely do not enjoy the same high class bomb shelters.

In the Israeli/Palestinian +972 Magazine the journalist Meron Rappaport puts the psychopaths' war in a  perspective that is both closer to home and wider at the same moment. 

Questioner: ... Where do you see the Palestinians in Israel, in the West Bank, in Gaza, and the Palestinian refugees fitting in Israel’s or Netanyahu’s plan for the region and for Iran? 

Rappaport: In two words: not here. I think the genocide and the partial ethnic cleansing in Gaza set a model that this is possible. Or at least I think Netanyahu and his allies think it’s possible, even if we, Israel, failed to do the total ethnic cleansing. 

There are still two million Palestinians in Gaza. Yes, they live in tents and in broken houses, but they are there. But I think it opened up the appetite to do this, that this is possible, that the world will not oppose, that there will be no internal opposition to that. 

Of course we see that in the West Bank, it’s still the semi-official policy in the West Bank. It’s not the official policy — the ethnic cleansing. In Italian there is ufficiale and there is ufficioso. Ufficiale is official and ufficioso is half-official. There is this policy in the West Bank of half-official policy of ethnic cleansing. Still, you have to see the big picture, it does not still succeed fully or even partially. You know, for the communities hit in the Jordan Valley or Masafer Yatta, it’s terrible for every community, but there are still two and a half million Palestinians in the West Bank.

But I think this is the idea. The idea is put on the table. It was more or less agreed upon by the army, which was previously a little bit opposed to this kind of move. So I think that there is a semi-official policy of ethnic cleansing and really wiping out any opponent like Israel did in Gaza. We see it in Lebanon now really leveling out. 

The opposition leader, Yair Lapid, said yesterday that Israel should have no alternative but to go into South Lebanon and bring down a few villages, level down a few villages. This really went into the bloodstream of Israeli society, not only Netanyahu and his allies, the army, the institutions. 

Of course, it will be hard to do the same thing in Iran, 2,000 miles away and with 80 million people but what we are seeing, the bombing, the pressing now in Tehran, other cities are leveling down. The idea is the same. 

This is, I think, really here Israel’s biggest contradiction maybe or problem. Because if this is the thinking — that taking down the Iranian regime — if someone really believes, and of course we put a lot of question marks on this, but let’s say that people do believe that taking down the Iranian regime will make it possible for Israel to live in peace in the Middle East without giving Palestinians their rights. 

If someone really believes in this I think quite soon he will realize this is not the case. I think Israel will learn quite quickly that it did not solve anything, that the Palestinians are here. ...

The vocation of a genuine objector within Israeli society is lonely. +972 Magazine and Standing Together attempt the near impossible: a joint Israeli/Palestinian peace movement from within.

Much as the two psychopaths wish, Palestinians cannot be just erased from the reality of the lands of their ancestors.

So far, they haven't figured out how to turn off the sun

NPR reports:

Easy-to-install solar panels that plug into a regular outlet are getting attention just as Americans are worried about rising energy costs. That's because these plug-in or balcony solar panels start shaving off part of a homeowner's or renter's utility bill right away.

"A year ago, nobody was talking about this," says Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver, a California nonprofit group that advocates for plug-in solar. The panels are already popular in Germany, where more than 1.2 million of the small plug-in systems are registered with the German government.

For the panels to become more widely available in the U.S., state lawmakers are proposing bills that eliminate complicated utility connection agreements, which are required for larger rooftop solar installations and, most utilities say, should apply to plug-in solar too. Those agreements, along with permitting and other installation costs, can double the price of solar panels. ...

The utility companies which make a business of selling electricity don't like the promise of plug-in panels ...

"They don't want anyone messing with their business model," Stryker says. "Kicking up dust regarding safety concerns is definitely a strategy that is being used by people who don't want this for their own self-interested reasons." 

Utilities also raise potential safety issues. But they ignore that Germans have been conducting the experiment for a decade.

... with more than a million systems installed, no safety incidents have been reported for customers who used the panels as instructed, according to a research paper funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. 

... Stryker says plug-in solar took off in Germany once renters were allowed to install the systems, and she sees the potential for a similar trajectory in the United States. 

State legislation which would overcome utility company opposition is under consideration in Utah and Virginia.

Where's California in this? 

Friday cat blogging

Actually this should probably be titled something like "domesticity at a quiet moment."  The beasts are often not so settled. Erudite Partner can even read without interruption, not always the case.

We knew he was a crook. The latest Trump heist comes for us all.

The United States is not only failing to "win" but also actively losing Donald Trump's glorious new iteration of a Middle East war. 

Journalist and historian Garrett Graff explains:

... The Pentagon is telling Congress today an initial, partial tally of the monetary cost of the war (the cost in human lives, instability, and reputation is of course much higher): The first week of the war cost about $11.3 billion — an enormous number that is hard to even tally. To put that in context: It’s a number larger than the annual state budget of some 16 states, including Iowa or New Mexico and represents roughly the entire annual state budget of Nebraska, Oklahoma, or Alabama.

More than that, though, is how we as a nation spend money on war and “immigration enforcement” as if it’s endless, while skimping on all the expenses that actually help our fellow humans. We have already added this past year $150 billion to the defense budget — while destroying and dismantling the $35 billion we spent on the US Agency for International Development. 

As I wrote and investigated a couple weeks ago, the $52 billion construction and procurement budget for Customs and Border Protection is so large that it represents more than the defense budgets of Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Finland, Greece, Belgium, Romania, Denmark, and Norway combined.

The remaining money to spend this year that CBP has to spend equals the entire GDP of Estonia. 

I think a lot in moments like this of the 1953 speech by Dwight Eisenhower about the cost of war versus peace. 

 “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” [President Dwight] Eisenhower told a group of newspaper editors. “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.” 

What could $11.3 billion have bought us if we spent it here at home? A few data points: We spent in the 2020-2021 school year a total of about $21 billion to feed near universal school lunches and breakfast across the country during the pandemic — a life-changing educational investment for children. Or today: $11.3 billion would cover putting 1.4 million on Medicaid or into affordable housing — that’s the entire population of New Hampshire or Maine. 

Remember all of this the next time you hear a politician tell you there’s not enough money for this social safety program or that one. ...

I am confident we the people didn't make this grifting moron the president in the hope he'd crash our economic well-being. But here we are.

What does it know? What do we know?

Somebody asked the AI chatbot Claude Opus 4.6 what it is like to be a Large Language Model. 

 Seems to be busy -- and importantly, is emphatically not a human. 

Via Micah Sifry.  

Excrement compounded

There's a tongue-in-cheek joke that our wars are how Americans learn what little we know about global geography. Apparently the Orange Toddler's latest Middle East atrocity is going to teach us about fertilizer.

From the NY Times [gift]: 

... War has a way of exposing vulnerabilities that arise from interconnection. Four years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the world gained a wrenching lesson in the geography of agriculture. Both countries were substantial sources of wheat and other grains. Shortages of bread soon emerged from West Africa to South Asia.

... “It’s bad — there’s no other way of putting it,” said Chris Lawson, vice president of market intelligence and prices at CRU Group, a London-based research and data firm focused on commodities. “The world is highly reliant on fertilizer and associated raw materials supplied out of that region.”

... The latest upheaval in the Middle East does not affect the harvesting of grain, but its impacts for fertilizer may be even more profound.

... Some view the evolving crisis confronting agriculture as a warning sign about excessive reliance on a handful of fertilizer producers to satisfy humanity’s need for calories.

... The situation is acute for American agriculture. President Trump’s tariffs had already raised the costs of imported fertilizer, forcing many farmers to hold off stocking up. The White House exempted fertilizers from its latest tariffs last month. But millions of tons of urea cannot quickly be summoned from points around the globe.

India is uniquely vulnerable, given that it traditionally buys some 40 percent of its urea and phosphate-based fertilizers from suppliers in the Middle East.

As the world seeks other sources, the most obvious alternative is China. But the Chinese government, seeking to cushion its own farmers from the very sort of geopolitical turmoil now at play, last year imposed restrictions on the export of fertilizers.

... A sustained rise in the cost of fertilizer could force governments in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to subsidize the cost of growing crops or otherwise watch food prices climb. That could add to debt burdens afflicting many lower-income countries.

The ignorance of the Trump clowns is no excuse.

• • •

Nor is ignorance an excuse for what US and Israeli bombing of Iranian oil depots has wrought. Bill McKibben tells the story of in pictures.

... here’s the Guardian reporting on what that feels like to the people living there

Speaking to the Guardian via voice notes, Negin – not her real name – an activist and former political prisoner based in the central-east side of the city, said the situation was “apocalyptic”.

“The situation is so frightening it’s hard to describe. Smoke has covered the entire city. I have severe shortness of breath and burning in my eyes and throat, and many others feel the same. But people still have to go outside because they have no choice. Many places reopened today, but closed again because it’s impossible to stay outdoors.”

They also heard from a woman, Mehnaz, who wanted to flee after the initial strikes Saturday night.

Tehran is burning. And smoke has filled the streets. It’s impossible to drive out of the city right now and even with the windows closed, heavy smoke is making its way inside … [I am] clueless whether to stay in or brave the flames and drive out while it’s still on fire. I don’t even have a mask.”

Fire and fury indeed -- to distract from probable child rape in the Epstein files?

Liz Specht –1929-2026

There was a lot of life in those long years: wife and partner to Eddie Specht for over 70 of them, mother to three children in the 1950s, doting on many grandchildren and a great grandchild, faithfully seeking to encounter a living God through an Episcopal path, and abiding as a "deacon of the earth" always.

Emerging from Grosse Pointe, Michigan and Wellesley College, she gave so much in that life: founding a tutoring program for San Francisco Mission District kids that grew up to be Mission Graduates and also an international aid nonprofit, El Porvenir, which works with Nicaraguans to bring clean water to rural Nicaragua. To the last, she was engaged in civic activism with her Mill Valley community.

For many years, Liz and Ed lived on a boat in Alameda, California. You might notice that water was a theme in this life.

Working a winch on a catamaran off Belize in 2004

  

Riding a pony across a Nicaraguan stream in 2018

Pensive alongside the Mill Valley Cascade in 2025

Out for a short walk at the beginning of March 2026

She was gentle, curious, thoughtful, determined and sometimes fierce. Many loved her; she gave love to many.

We must not become numb ...

A Pew Research Center survey in twenty-five countries asked respondents "to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country." According to the report, only people in the USofA thought a majority (by 53%) of their peer citizens were immoral and/or unethical.

There were other countries which came close to that judgement: Turkey (49%) and Brazil (48%) stand out. But people in most of the surveyed countries thought far fewer were off the ethical rails; the most trusting included Canada (7%), Indonesia (8%), and India (9%). 

We sure don't trust each other these days; I'd hazard the U.S. findings are just about Civil War numbers. We believe, earnestly, that those other guys must be despicable and dangerous. I certainly do think that what MAGA has wrought, through attacks on immigrants and people they see as queer, is quite simply evil. Not all Republicans, but hey ...

John Della Volpe of Harvard reports a finding from a focus group with young adults with mixed political leanings in Charlotte, NC. 

ICE Didn’t Just Target Immigrants

I’ve written before about how ICE has become a feeling for Gen Z, not just a policy. Charlotte made that visceral. Nearly every hand went up when I asked if ICE operations were affecting them personally — across race, gender, and political identity.

A 22-year-old Black behavioral therapist described what happened at her autism center: “The families were scared. They didn’t send their kiddos to therapy. Staff were losing out on hours, the kiddos were losing out on hours — nobody felt safe.”

A Hispanic caseworker and new mother described days away from her baby because parents were being detained and children had nowhere to go.

A refugee resettlement worker said even legally documented families stopped attending appointments out of fear.

When legal status doesn’t eliminate fear, enforcement has created something beyond policy.

It has created a climate.

Friday was the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday, of the 1965 civil rights march in Selma, AL, which segregationist cops broke up with clubs and horses. 

Selma is nearby and feels live to Alabama-based legal commentator Joyce Vance:

... On the anniversary of Selma, a moment that reminds us that Americans are capable of coming together and doing great things, MAGA remains enthusiastic about where Trump is taking the country while many Americans seem to have become numb from the constant barrage of truly horrible things this administration does and is perfectly fine with. ...

... We need the kind of national courage that took us from Selma to the Voting Rights Act in the space of five months. It’s difficult in a sense because there are so many different outrages that it’s hard for people who love democracy to pick one to coalesce around. They all deserve our attention.

... There is great danger in moments like this, and that is precisely why we need to make sure we don’t let this go.

She's right. Wherever we fit in our kaleidoscopic patterns of mutual incomprehension and resistance to ignorance and cruelty, we cannot let go. 

History is complicated

This thoughtful young man, Mik Barnes, mulls over the discovery that his ancestors include white men who fought for the Confederate States to preserve Black slavery in the U.S. Civil War. 

The Cado "Parish" he refers to is Louisiana-speak for what most states would call Cado "County."

Video by way of  Civil War Memory.

Does anyone else think that is a Fred Hampton t-shirt that he's wearing?