Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon Is Becoming a Bubble | Five Misconceptions Blocking National Security Reform | Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End, and more

On Tuesday, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a proposal to undo the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which allows the agency to limit planet-heating pollution from cars and trucks, power plants and other industrial sources. Hours later, the US Department of Energy published a 150-page report defending the proposal, claiming scientific concern about the climate crisis is overblown.
“Climate change is a challenge—not a catastrophe,” wrote the energy secretary, Chris Wright, in the report’s introduction.
Esteemed climate scientist Michael Mann said the report was akin to the result he would expect “if you took a chat bot and you trained it on the top 10 fossil fuel industry-funded climate denier websites.”
The Energy Department published the report hours after the EPA announced a plan to roll back the “endangerment finding,” a seminal ruling that provided the legal basis for the agency to regulate climate-heating pollution under the Clean Air Act. If finalized, the move would topple virtually all US climate regulation.
In a Fox News interview, Wright claimed the report pushes back on the “cancel culture Orwellian squelching of science.” But Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University and expert in climate misinformation, said its true purpose is to “justify what is a scientifically unjustifiable failure to regulate fossil fuels.”
“Science is the basis for climate regulation, so now they are trying to replace legitimate science with pseudoscience,” she said.

Argonne’s Emergency Management Report is One Step Forward – Who’s Next?  (Dan Stoneking, HSToday)
The Emergency Management Community is all abuzz about Argonne National Laboratory’s “Emergency Management Organizational Structure, Staffing, And Capacity Study.”  That’s a mouthful.  And it even includes a subtitle, “State, Local, and Territorial Findings Report.”  The breadth of the description is mouth-watering.  It has earned the attention it is getting. 
It is 274 pages long.  In my experience, the vast majority of people with competing interests will not likely read the entire document.  I did.  So I want to take a few minutes to condense and address what this study is, what it is not, what it means, and what’s next. 

Five Misconceptions Blocking National Security Reform  (Holden Triplett, National Interest)
American intelligence agencies are too fragmented to face the multifaceted and dispersed nature of Russian and Chinese threats.

How Kash Patel Was Duped  (Cathy Young, The Bulwark)
Trump’s lickspittle FBI director fell for obviously fake Russian documents. So much for Wizard Kashs’s “smoking gun.”
Last week brought a doozy of a Trump administration scandal, one that deserves a special place in the record books for its perfect combination of lying and gullibility, desperation and conspiracy theorizing. It’s at once so brazen and so dumb that future generations looking back on it will have trouble believing it could have happened at all.
The background here is Donald Trump’s obsession with proving that the accusations of collusion between his 2016 campaign and Russia were a “hoax” and a “witch-hunt” concocted by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the “Deep State.” Last week, the staggeringly unqualified toady serving as Trump’s director of the FBI, Kash Patel, breathlessly announced that his team had “uncovered” long-ignored proof “buried in a back room at the FBI.” It is a smoking gun: “evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.”
Hot damn! It’s like a real-life re-enactment of Patel’s children’s book, The Plot Against the King, in which Wizard Kash thwarts a plot by the evil Hillary Queenton to unseat good King Donald by accusing him of “working with the Russionians” to steal the throne. (I am not making that up.)
But wait: As Patel notes, this evidence had already been included as a classified “annex” to the 2023 report by special counsel John Durham, who had been hired as a special prosecutor in 2020 by Trump and his then-attorney general, Bill Barr. If this evidence is as potent as Patel says, then why would Durham—who was hired to blow the lid off the supposed “Russiagate hoax”—have relegated it to a mere annex?
Because, it turns out, Wizard Kash’s “smoking gun” is not only ridiculously fake (as Durham concluded), it actually blows a massive hole in the Trump/Patel “Russia hoax” theory.
Kash Patel, a man so passionately devoted to this theory that he literally wrote a kids’ book about it, unveils the document that should supply the final proof—but instead, it provides a definitive debunking. It’s like a mystery novel where the murderer almost succeeds in implicating someone else, only to plant a clue so obviously fake it gives him away.
Of course, in a mystery novel, the truth comes out and the story is over. In our reality, pro-Trump media (and their left-wing useful idiots like Matt Taibbi) will continue to insist that the fake clue is real, and Wizard Kash will say he’s got even more magic up his sleeve—that is, more “explosive” evidence from that FBI backroom. No doubt it will be enough to keep the base distracted for a little while longer.