New Year, New Laws -- Lots Of 'em

“I was like, Oh, my God, look at her. She’s like me; she speaks Spanish, and she has an accent like my mom.” That’s how Mathia Vargas describes the first time she remembers seeing a Latina in an American movie: Salma Hayek in the 1997 romantic comedy Fools Rush In.

A few hours after taking the Oath of Office on Monday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order purporting to redefine “male” and “female” by fiat. The order, with the cumbersome title “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” instructs all executive agencies—including those governing education, health, housing, and employment—to use new definitions of “male” and “female” in every aspect of their work: (d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. (e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell. The order is scant on details about how the new definitions will be applied, nor does it explain how sex will be measured for the policy purposes it does outline, such as determining which gender marker appears on a person’s passport or separating incarcerated people by sex.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. To the extent that X ever was the “public square” of the internet, it is clearly no longer such a place. The platform—known as Twitter until it was rechristened in 2023 by Elon Musk—has become an echo chamber for extremist conspiracy theories and hate speech—or, depending on what you’re looking for, a porn site. Even before this transformation, however, years of research suggested that Twitter and other social media apps were vectors of misinformation and propaganda, including from fossil fuel interests.

Heaven forbid that Trump would change things in D. C. since things have been going so well for the last forty or fifty years.

When it comes to war at sea, we get few opportunities to see what works, what does not work.