Laughing at Kristi Noemore. That is all I am doing right now. But then — I Read the Bondi impeachment filing at 6 a.m. — three articles, obstruction, dereliction, DOJ weaponized as a personal shield — and the coffee went cold while I stared at the wall. Wrote this instead of screaming. The margin was thin.

Atlanta: 68°, cloudy — warm enough to forget the rot, but that gray lid says something is still coming.

Detroit: 38°, cloudy — Rust Belt cold pressing down like it already knows what's being dismantled.

Kansas City: 63°, light rain — the kind of drizzle that sounds like a slow leak in a system nobody repaired.

New York: 38°, cloudy — stone-cold and overcast, same temperature as the answers on the Epstein files.

San Francisco: 51°, sunny — clean blue sky over a city that keeps resisting and a courtroom that didn't.

Miami: 76°, partly sunny — bright and warm and just comfortable enough to make the coming heat feel like someone else's problem.

The cabinet is burning from the inside and they're calling it a restructuring. A subpoena doesn't scare a woman who already called a murdered American a terrorist. The machine is eating its own this Friday and we are watching every bite.

First time here? Pull up a chair — thistleandmoss.com

Editor's note: March is cracking something loose — visible rot is halfway to accountable, and we are not looking away.

She called Alex Pretti a domestic terrorist before the body was cold.

She spent $220 million of your money on ads starring herself — running mostly in English to warn Spanish-speaking migrants — then lied to Congress about who approved the campaign. That is the Kristi Noem legacy: the first Cabinet secretary ousted in Trump's second term, kicked sideways into something called Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas, a title so meaningless even the White House was still spelling it on the drive to the podium.

What Trump's own people said: "She burnt up a ton of goodwill. It was everywhere. It was everything."

The damage:

As of March 5, 190 co-sponsors backed her impeachment. Half of Americans now support abolishing ICE entirely. That happened on her watch.

Action: Demand Mullin's confirmation hearings include sworn testimony on Minneapolis. axios.com

At the peak of the Standing Rock camps, 10,000 people held the land — the largest gathering of Native Americans in over a century. Energy Transfer just billed Greenpeace $667 million for the memory of it.

Evidence:

Energy Transfer CEO Kelcy Warren — a $70 billion Trump mega-donor who once said activists should be "removed from the gene pool" — funded this SLAPP suit for nine years. Greenpeace USA's entire 2023 revenue was $40 million. The verdict is more than sixteen times that. This isn't a legal ruling. It's a corporate execution dressed in jury instructions.

Action: Greenpeace is appealing. Donziger says the case has "a good chance" of reversal. Support directly. earth.org

Trump briefly posted that gender-affirming surgery for trans youth was acceptable "with parental consent" — and Marjorie Taylor Greene, former congresswoman and full-time cock-gobbling turd-sprinkle, absolutely detonated. She posted: "NOW THE PRESIDENT SAYS ITS OK AS LONG AS THESE SICK PARENTS AGREE!!!" Trump deleted the post and republished it without the consent language. He blinked first. The MAGA coalition is eating itself alive over trans children's bodies.

Stakes:

What the fuck is happening when a president accidentally sounds humane for twelve hours and the howling from his own base is louder than any Democrat? Trans kids are not a negotiating position. They are alive. Their doctors know what they're doing — and 73% of battleground voters oppose jailing those doctors.

Support: Trevor Project — 1-866-488-7386. Call your senator. Kill this bill in committee. lgbtqnation.com

Survival wisdom — how you carry this: The cabinet burns. The pipeline verdict landed like a sealed door. Trans kids are being argued over like line items. You showed up this morning anyway. That is not small. Danez Smith writes from the body that has been targeted, politicized, grieved — and still refuses to go quiet. Hold your own body like it matters, because it does, regardless of what they pass or bury or burn. That refusal is the whole damn fight.

Shia LaBeouf's Defense: After beating two queer men at a New Orleans bar during Mardi Gras and hurling homophobic slurs, the Transformers actor told a YouTube interviewer that "big gay people are scary to me" — and if that's homophobic, "then I'm that." A judge ordered rehab. He respectfully disagreed. Court date March 19. The gay panic defense is still legal in Louisiana, which is the actual horror here. lgbtqnation.com

TikTok Lawsuit: The new Public Integrity Project sued Trump and Bondi, arguing ByteDance still controls TikTok's recommendation algorithm and the sale rewards Trump campaign donors. This is exactly the case DOJ's gutted public integrity unit would have brought. npr.org

Protein and Liver Cancer: A Rutgers study found mice with damaged livers eating low-protein diets showed dramatically slower tumor growth — because impaired livers can't clear ammonia, and ammonia feeds cancer cells directly. For the 1 in 4 Americans with fatty liver disease, worth discussing with your doctor. sciencedaily.com

Ancient Brain: 550-million-year-old comb jellies had a sensory organ with 17 distinct cell types functioning as a primitive brain — suggesting centralized nervous systems evolved independently, more than once. Evolution keeps inventing the same solutions from completely different starting points. sciencedaily.com

Pre-cut produce markup ($3–6 per item) → Buy whole: a full broccoli head at $1.29 versus florets at $6.49. Twenty minutes Sunday saves $60–100 per month. Feeling: The quiet satisfaction of not paying a convenience tax on your own groceries.

Mail pile dread → A small tray at the door. Sort every piece the moment it enters: recycle, action, file. Never touches a flat surface. Never becomes a monument. Feeling: The background noise in your brain just went silent.

Radishes → Slice thin, toss in olive oil and flaky salt, roast at 425° for 12–15 minutes until caramelized. They shed their bitterness and go silky-sweet. March is peak radish. They grow in 25 days from seed. Plant some. They don't care about the news.

Microgreens on a windowsill → Shallow tray, potting soil, sunflower or pea shoots ($3–4). Ready in 10–14 days, three to four harvests per tray. No yard. No supply chain. Sovereignty starts where you grow something with your own two hands.

Pasta aglio e olio for four → 1 lb spaghetti, 6 sliced garlic cloves, ½ cup olive oil, red pepper flakes, ½ cup pasta water, parsley, parmesan. Warm garlic in oil until golden — don't burn it — toss with pasta and starchy water until silky. Under 15 minutes. Under $8 total. The meal you make when the world is loud and you need something true and hot.

Moving forward — your armor for today: Allison's whole life was an argument against contraction — against the idea that people from the margins don't get to take up full space or tell the full truth. Today will try to make your world smaller. The bills, the verdicts, the buried files — they all say contract. Don't. Make the pasta good. Let the radishes grow. Stay furious and specific. That is the whole fucking resistance — the refusal to shrink.

Here are the ones who held the room and made it bigger just by walking through the door.

Ethel Smyth | Queer Composer, Prison Conductor (Queer / Cultural) Born 1858 in London, she wrote six operas — her Der Wald was the first and only opera by a woman staged at the Metropolitan Opera in New York — then surrendered music for two years to throw rocks at politicians' windows for women's suffrage. She was found in Holloway Prison conducting her own anthem "The March of the Women" through the bars with a toothbrush. Openly lesbian. Received the first damehood ever given a female composer. Imprisoned, brilliant, conducting the revolution.

Cecilia Chung | The First of Every First (Trans / Cultural-Political) First trans woman and first Asian American to chair the SF Pride Board; first openly HIV-positive trans woman to chair the San Francisco Human Rights Commission; 2013 Obama appointment to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. She co-founded the Trans March in 2004 — now replicated in cities across the country — and launched Positively Trans in 2015, a national network for trans women of color living with HIV, because she understood that visibility without power is just a spotlight on a target.

Roxane Gay | The Bad Feminist Who Won Everything (Liberal / Progressive / Cultural) Her 2014 Bad Feminist cracked open cultural criticism for a generation of Black women and queer readers who had never seen their actual complexity reflected back at them — not as footnote, not as asterisk. 7 books, PhD, New York Times, The Guardian, Harper's — all of it while being exactly, unapologetically herself. That turned out to be the most radical move in the room.

Trump Deletes Trans Surgery Post After MTG Meltdown — PinkNews | Staff. Trump implied parental consent could permit gender-affirming surgery, MTG publicly detonated, the post was deleted within hours. Read it. The administration tried to thread an impossible needle; the far right slapped it out of their hands immediately.

Jazz Sabbath: War Pigs as Ethereal Jazz Meditation — Sweaty's Corner | Geoff Anderson. Our Gathering partner Geoff discovered a jazz trio doing Black Sabbath as airy, expansive piano compositions — and bought their entire Bandcamp discography for fifty bucks before 7 a.m. That is the correct response. sweatyspice.com Three musicians. Infinite permission. Find it.