Click by Pimm Fox

The FAA clears lasers for civilian airspace, and suddenly turbulence isn’t the worst thing overhead

There it is, tucked between a coffee cup and the polite typography of institutional calm: the Federal Aviation Administration has cleared the use of high-energy lasers in civilian airspace.

Read that again slowly, like a man checking the label on a bottle he swore was bourbon but now glows faintly in the dark.

Lasers.

In.

Civilian.

Airspace.

Sam Kinison would already be screaming—“THE SKY?! YOU PUT IT IN THE SKY?!”—because there used to be rules, or at least the illusion of them, that the heavens above your head were for clouds, birds, and the occasional piece of lost luggage.

Now it’s an arena.

Now it’s a firing range with frequent flyer miles.

The air itself has been deputized.

The sky is no longer a sanctuary but a jurisdiction.

You used to worry about turbulence; now you’re wondering whether your connecting flight to Chicago is passing through a silent light show of classified intent.

The state that invented “Virginia is for Lovers” has decided it is no longer in love with paying for your favorite insurrection

There is something uniquely, magnificently, almost acrobatically American about a government financially underwriting an organization whose entire purpose is the loving maintenance of a rebellion against that same government.

It has the gymnastic elegance of a man hiring a skywriter to commemorate the time he burned his own house down — the nostalgia-industrial complex in full, flag-draped, tax-exempt flower.

For decades, Virginia — once the Confederacy’s capital, now the capital of belated self-awareness — extended tax exemptions to groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894 with the serene audacity of people who lost a war and decided the solution was better marketing.

How a traffic circle became the site of the most expensive self-portrait in American history

There are moments in the history of public art when vulgarity achieves such spectacular velocity that it briefly resembles vision. 

Donald Trump's proposed triumphal arch for Washington — a 250-foot aureate confection of gilded eagles, splayed lions, and a winged figure Trump has described, with the art-historical confidence of a man who once franchised steak, as "Lady Liberty" — is one of those moments. 

It does not merely cross the line of taste.

It pole-vaults over it, lands in the gift shop, and demands a commemorative coin.

Let us be precise about what we are looking at. 

The design, rendered by Harrison Design with the earnest competence of people who have been asked to gild something and are determined to gild it thoroughly, presents a structure that would rise more than twice the height of the Lincoln Memorial. 

Lincoln himself, of course, had the decency to be assassinated before anyone could ask him how tall his monument should be. 

Trump has suffered no such editorial intervention.

The arch would overtop the Arc de Triomphe — that 164-foot limestone elegy Napoleon ordered after Austerlitz.

It would eclipse Pyongyang’s Arch of Triumph, that concrete hymn to self-regard commissioned by Kim Il-sung.

It would outgrow Mexico City’s Monumento a la Revolución, a building that at least had the decency to begin as something else before becoming a monument to thwarted ambitions.

This one begins and ends as ambition uninterruptible.

It arrives whole, self-generated, immaculate in its grandiosity, like a pharaoh who skips the dynasty and goes straight to the pyramid.

The inscriptions — "One Nation Under God," "Liberty and Justice for All" — are the lettering of a man who has discovered that patriotism, like marinara sauce, improves everything it is poured over. 

Four lions crouch at the base. 

Eagles flank the barrel. 

A winged figure blazes at the summit, holding a torch that will presumably illuminate the traffic circle connecting Washington to northern Virginia, or possibly a signal to passing aircraft.

 The cost is estimated at $15 million, a number that achieves real comedy only when compared to the monument’s aesthetic ambitions, which hover somewhere around Versailles-on-Red-Bull with a side of commemorative hubris. 

This is not architecture. 

It is gold-plated self-regard with load-bearing columns.

History's genuinely great triumphal arches were built by men who had, at minimum, triumphed over something external. 

Titus had Jerusalem. 

Constantine had Maxentius. 

Napoleon, at the moment of commissioning, had most of continental Europe. 

What Trump has triumphed over is less clear — democracy, perhaps, or zoning restrictions.

The veterans suing to block construction argue it would destroy the sightline between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. 

This is correct, and almost poignant. 

Lincoln looked toward the graves of the fallen. 

The new arch looks toward itself.

Lincoln looked outward, toward sacrifice, toward the irreversible cost of the republic's survival. The new arch, blazing and lion-bookended and torch-crowned in its traffic circle, looks inward, upward, and most persistently — in every gilded, wing-encrusted, self-regarding inch — directly at itself.

Now offering unlimited immunity with every qualifying interaction. No receipt required.

There comes a point in the life of every republic when the machinery stops pretending it isn’t a slot machine. When the levers are exposed, the lights start blinking, and the house announcer politely reminds you that the odds are terrible but the drinks are free.

We have reached that point. Please keep your hands inside the vehicle. The pardons are automatic.

Donald Trump has discovered that the constitutional pardon power—originally intended as a narrow instrument of mercy—can be reimagined as something far more modern: a fully scalable, on-demand immunity platform.

Apparently, standing still and not turning a profit was provocation enough

On a Tuesday in March, with the quiet confidence of a man dismantling a smoke alarm because it keeps going off, the administration of Donald Trump set about hollowing out the United States Forest Service—an agency older than most of the buildings in Washington, created when conservation was still considered a virtue and not an inconvenience.

They did it, naturally, with a press release.

No vote. No hearings. No moment where someone might stand up and ask, in plain English, what exactly is being done to 193 million acres of public land. Just a document—sterile, jargon-soaked, written in the linguistic equivalent of chloroform. “Mission delivery.” “Operational realignment.” Words designed not to inform, but to sedate.

Most fathers teach their daughters to parallel park. Kim Jong-un has upgraded to armored vehicles.

There comes a moment in every parent’s life when they hand over responsibility and hope for the best. 

Usually, it’s car keys. 

Occasionally, it’s a debit card. 

In extreme cases, it’s the Wi-Fi password.

Kim Jong-un has chosen to begin with a tank.

We broke winter and fixed it with the same stuff that broke it

Congratulations, humanity.

We have finally achieved a perfect loop of self-sabotage so elegant it deserves framing. We warmed the planet, melted the ice, and then — without pausing for even a single moment of shame — decided to replace it with plastic made from the exact same fossil fuels that caused the problem.

A nation that tortures animals for fun has thoughts about American foreign policy. How delightful.

Last Friday evening in Málaga, a bull named nobody-bothered-to-ask gored retired matador Ricardo Ortiz to death while he was preparing the annual Corrida Picassiana — a bullfight themed around Pablo Picasso, because nothing honors a great artist quite like watching terrified animals bleed out in the afternoon sun.

This is Spain, where the killing of bulls is not merely tolerated but curated — wrapped in pageantry, dipped in art history, and occasionally accessorized with Picasso references for that extra cultural sheen.

A tenure so empty it may qualify as a legal vacuum — where accountability went to disappear and Jeffrey Epstein's victims went to be ignored

There are failures, and then there are absences. 

Pam Bondi's tenure as Attorney General of the United States was not a failure in the traditional sense. 

Failures require effort, friction, the visible wreckage of things attempted and botched. 

This was something purer, rarer, and, in its own way, more damning: a sustained, laboratory-grade absence of consequence, dressed in a business suit and coached on how to run out the clock.

Future historians will not need to speculate. 

They will point here.

Some governments build shelters. Others build press offices. The difference is what they think you're worth.

Some governments have decided, quietly and without theatrics, that their citizens should survive what is coming. 

Not metaphorically. 

Not aspirationally. 

Physically. 

Breathing, intact, accounted for.

Others have decided — just as quietly, just as deliberately — that survival is someone else's problem. 

Yours, specifically.

Consider three countries that made a different choice.