Garry Hayes

Here's some blue skies over Yosemite last week. Speaking of blue skies, I'm now there as Geotripper too. I have almost 4,000 mostly non-bot followers here who I'm not quite ready to abandon, despite the dumpster fire X has become. If you are over there, please give me a follow.

200 helium containers are stranded in the Persian Gulf right now. Each one holds 41,000 liters cooled to -269°C. The containers have no refrigeration. No compressor, no cooling loop. Insulation is all that stands between the cargo and ambient heat, and it buys 35 to 48 days. After that, the liquid boils, the pressure valve opens, and the helium vents to atmosphere. Re-liquefying it requires a specialized plant. Most ports do not have one. Qatar's North Field supplied 33% of the world's helium as a byproduct of cryogenic separation at its LNG plants. On March 2, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. Spot prices surged 70 to 100 percent. EUV lithography requires 99.9999% purity helium for wafer cooling and no current substitute exists. The fifth helium shortage since 2006 has just begun.

Modesto proud! No kings, no forever wars

The official vote is in from W Pacific Fishery Council. Every single Pacific National Monument will be opened to commercial fishing. Longlines in Papahānaumokuākea. All fishing gear in Rose Atoll. The entire Marianas Trench reserve gone. ~80% of US protected waters abolished.

This week: The Director of the FBI got hacked. Iranians now have 23,000 pictures of him chugging beers. The newly confirmed Secretary of the DHS, formerly a plumber with 3 MMA fights, has no experience with matters of national security except for a highly classified mission he made up. The Vice President thinks nuclear suicide vests are a thing. The Secretary of Defense remains a raging alcoholic with anger management issues. The President is still a pedophile. It’s only Friday.

Nobody in the Trump administration planned for Iran to shut the Strait of Hormuz. Nobody planned for sustained missile strikes on American bases across the Gulf. Nobody planned for an energy crisis. Nobody planned for Europe to look at Washington, shrug, and walk the other way. Nobody, it turns out, planned for very much at all. Read the accounts of how this war was decided and you are left with one deeply uncomfortable realisation: the people who launched it appear to have been genuinely surprised by almost everything that followed. The Iranians shot back. The allies didn’t show up. The oil price went vertical. All of it, apparently, news to them. Which leaves two questions so obvious they’re almost embarrassing to ask. What exactly did they think was going to happen? And did anyone, in any room, at any point, think further ahead than the applause? Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

With all the disturbing things going on, I want to think of something more positive. Here are some (locally) rare birds I've seen this week; a Hudsonian Whimbrel, and a Hooded Oriole. Both arrived in the region a bit early.

geotripper.blogspot.com/2026/03/one-of… We were out at the Red Hills last weekend, and the flowers were putting on a show, although conditions are drying out quickly. I wrote about the strange geology of the area a few years ago and reposted today, for anyone who wants to see this unique area.

Seems like the elites in UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi, etc had it pretty good heading into 2025. Economies and tourism booming, construction and infrastructure projects everywhere, economic diversification. Then they went all in with Trump and are finding out what that’s like.

For my entire life it has been true that every time Republicans are in power, they increase deficit spending, and whenever they aren't in power, they complain about deficit spending and pinky swear they will reduce deficit spending if only you vote them back into power. And what do they use that spending for? Tax cuts for the rich, subsidies for big corporate donors, and wars in the Middle East. If you voted Republicans into power again in the belief they would reduce the deficit and not go to war, sorry, but you were lied to and you fell for it, despite being able to learn from the past to avoid that. Yes, you voted for all of this. You may not understand that you did, but you did. This is all just the newest variation of what we see every time the GOP gets handed the reigns of the economy. Democrats need to stop playing this game and instead use deficit spending to make our lives better by focusing on our basic needs and our costs of living. Spend less on the military and more on healthcare and a basic income floor. Also, to hell with the two party system. We need more choices. We need other parties to win via proportional representation.

THE TRUMP EFFECT: Gas when Joe Biden left office: $3.13/gallon Gas today: $3.94/gallon Electricity when Biden left office: 17.5c per kWh Electricity today: 19.9c per kWh Oil when Biden left office: $70/barrel Oil today: $112/barrel Heating Oil when Biden left office: $2.50 Heating Oil today: $4.60 Coal when Biden left office: $116.35/T Coal today: $146.50/T Beef when Biden left office: $5.50/lb Beef today: $7.50/lb Bread when Biden left office: $2.00 Bread today: $2.10

🚨 Epstein’s accountant just testified under oath: The Epstein estate settled with Jane Doe 4 — for both Epstein and Trump. Jane Doe 4 alleged to the FBI that Epstein abused her at 13. And that Trump abused her at 15. The Jane Doe 4 files were missing. Discovered only through the Maxwell discovery when lawyers noticed Bates stamp numbers were gone. Those files surfaced after Trump bombed Iran. The lawyer tried to walk back the settlement testimony. The accountant refused to confirm or deny. Trump started a war the same week the Epstein names were supposed to drop. Never stop connecting the dots.

California's snowpack has collapsed at a pace never seen before in late winter, the fastest late February–March melt on record. Spring snowpack is now on track to be the second smallest since records began in 1950, trailing only 2015, the lowest snowpack year in the Sierra Nevada in at least the last 500 years. Phillips Station, the state's most iconic snowpack measurement site, is expected to show bare ground on April 1, the date that has historically marked peak snowpack.

Trump and Robert Mueller were born two years apart, both into wealthy families and both with private school upbringings. Trump received five draft deferments during Vietnam and became a parasitic real estate baron. Mueller volunteered for service, graduated from Officer Candidate School and Ranger School, was wounded in combat, and received a Bronze Star w/ Valor for rescuing one of his wounded soldiers under intense enemy fire. And that pretty much crystallizes both the difference between the two and Trump's toxic jealousy toward Mueller.

Hawaii is facing its worst flooding in 20 years—5,500 evacuations, a 120-year-old dam at risk, homes and roads destroyed. In Nebraska, historic wildfires have burned over 800,000 acres, killed one, and are still threatening ranches. Trump hasn’t said a word about either.

I still remember when presidents had to be dignified, show some decorum, especially in the wake of a human being's death. Now there is no bottom, no leadership or humanity at the top.

Robert Mueller died last night. He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving. He had integrity. And tonight the President of the United States said good! I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good. I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word. Good. This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened. The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming. America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner. And the church said nothing. Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary. Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart. JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again. Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing. Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him. And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it. When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming. Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say. He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true. He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad. The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be. A man died. His family is broken open with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good. And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸 Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

The entire planet is counting down to the single most satisfying obituary ever written.
Because he is, was, and forever will be an irredeemable piece of shit.

Every day I watch the chaos in this country and think about how many people got it completely wrong on Joe Biden, especially Democrats and the media. Democrats turned on him and bought into a manufactured narrative, while the press trashed stability, mocked experience, and helped normalize a convicted felon… and now act like none of it happened. A lot of people owe him an apology. Anyone else feel this anger? 🤷

Pete Hegseth: The problem with Iran is it spends money on weapons and missiles instead of improving life for their people. Self awareness of a potato