Thus, we will avoid ai like the destructive plague it is.
Unfortunately, for many of us, our employers FORCE us to take AI trainings and encourage us to use it. I hate it with a passion. so does my wife who works in a different field, but her employer has the same asks as mine. It is truly SLOP.
“The president, in a rather literal sense, just doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to economic policies he ought to understand.”
There’s a qualitative difference between commentary that’s wrong and commentary that betrays illiteracy about its subject matter. If someone who claimed to be a baseball fan, for example, said the Mets are having a great season, you could safely say that person is mistaken. If that same observer, however, argued that a grand slam is worth 17 runs, it would reflect more than simple misjudgment: It’s the sort of comment someone might make if they don’t know anything about baseball.
As this relates to national politics, Donald Trump frequently makes comments about the economy, the vast majority of which are plainly wrong. But the president also occasionally makes economic assertions that expose his economic illiteracy.
At an Oval Office event on Friday afternoon, for example, the Republican argued that the United States could “save” money by “just not trading” with other countries. [eyebrows raised] [video]
After falsely claiming the U.S. “loses” $195 billion a year to Mexico, the president added, “They have nothing that we have to have. I mean, hot tamales? Tomatoes? A couple of things? Basically, they have nothing we need.” [FFS]
Even putting aside the obvious fact that Mexico is the United States’ single-largest trading partner and the absurdity of the “hot tamales” comment, a full decade into his political career, Trump still doesn’t understand that a trade deficit does not reflect a loss. For example, my family has a deficit with our local grocery store — we buy its products, and it does not buy ours — but that’s not a bad thing. [True]
Sure, I could “save” plenty of money by just not buying groceries, but — and this is the important part — then I’d be hungry. This really isn’t that complicated.
On the same day, the president threatened to curtail all trade with a wide swath of U.S. trading partners unless the Federal Reserve agreed to slash interest rates, adding that he wants the Fed to reduce borrowing costs to “the LOWEST RATE of any country in the World.” [Trump is an effing doofus.]
This was a mess for all sorts of reasons. The Fed functions as an independent entity, which is not supposed to raise or lower interest rates in response to White House extortion schemes. But Trump made things worse by arguing that economic growth is wholly unrelated to inflation, and that we’re entitled to lower interest rates, not because of economic conditions, but because he thinks we’re awesome. [Trump is an effing doofus… x 2]
They are the observations of someone who only pretends to have a basic familiarity with monetary policy.
In case this weren’t quite enough, the president later celebrated good monthly job growth in August by pointing to what he described as “the Trump Boom.”
That didn’t make sense, either. So far in 2026, the U.S. economy is generating roughly 80,000 jobs per month. While that’s better than last year, it reflects a sharp decline from the final year of Joe Biden’s presidency, when the economy added over 120,000 jobs per month.
In fact, excluding the 2020 pandemic from the equation, the first year of Trump’s current term was the worst for American job growth since the Great Recession, and the second year of Trump’s current term is on track to the second worst.
That’s the opposite of a “boom.”
All of this, of course, came just two weeks after Trump raised the idea of using the military to intervene in the bond market, which is utterly bonkers. He’s also struggled to understand the gross domestic product (GDP), the difference between quarterly and annual growth, the arithmetic on foreign investment rates, and the economics of trade tariffs.
If this were simply a matter of dishonesty and deception, it might be easier to understand. After all, Trump’s reputation as a prolific liar is well deserved and has been earned over the course of many years.
But like the guy who thinks a grand slam is worth 17 runs, Trump’s latest rhetoric exposes a qualitatively different kind of problem: The president, in a rather literal sense, just doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to economic policies he really ought to understand.
Super PACs from President Donald Trump and his billionaire pal Elon Musk are spending millions to bail out Ken Paxton, Texas’ flailing GOP Senate candidate.
MAGA Inc., which is closely affiliated with Trump, announced that it would spend at least $10 million to support Paxton and to attack his surging Democratic opponent James Talarico. And Musk’s America PAC has already spent more than $1.6 million to prop up Paxton.
This massive spending is crucial for Paxton, as Talarico crushes him on fundraising—a key metric to mobilize voters across Texas. So far, Talarico has reported $72 million, while Paxton has only raised $16.8 million.
Texas should be safe territory for Republicans, especially since Trump easily won the state in 2024 and 2020. Democrats have not won a statewide Senate election in Texas since Lloyd Bentsen’s win in 1988.
But Trump weighed in during this year’s Republican primary, picking scandal-plagued Paxton over Sen. John Cornyn, who Trump viewed as insufficiently loyal.
Paxton has been a mess of lackluster fundraising and an anemic campaign pace, while Talarico has attracted national support and momentum. And Trump even admitted last week that he had chosen a dud.
“We have a guy named Ken Paxton. And some people don’t like the way he dresses, or some people don’t like the way he interviews or talks. But, you know, the one thing about him, he was the best attorney general in this country for the last 10 years or more,” Trump said.
Recent polling has shown a narrow lead for Talarico, and while that is far from a done deal for his campaign, it’s a sign of significant GOP weakness.
Musk, a racist conspiracy theorist who has quickly become the most prominent GOP financier, has dedicated himself to keeping the party in control. In addition to working to keep Paxton alive, he’s funding multiple races, including Maine’s Senate race between Republican incumbent Susan Collins and Democrat Troy Jackson.
Musk is currently under fire on numerous fronts, including for his support for racist political parties and movements around the world, as well as for his AI chatbot Grok’s generation of sexualized images of children.
But Republicans have remained mum on these controversies, so the money keeps rolling in for their failing campaigns.
Rob Grigjanissays
Lynna @4, quoting MS Now;
The president, in a rather literal sense, just doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to economic policies he really ought to understand.
This is the same bloke who has said, more than once, that pouring water on magnets stops them working. If there’s anything he does understand, I haven’t seen it.
if it’s not from a known browser, blocking it. This is a problem if the list of legitimate browsers is especially short and only includes recent versions of big names such as Chrome (and its many derivatives) and Firefox.
The problem isn’t new, and whatever fixes or updates occasionally resolve it, the relief is only temporary and it keeps recurring. We’ve found reports of Cloudflare site-blocking difficulties dating back to 2015 and continuing through 2022. […] Users of recent versions of [Firefox ESR,] Pale Moon, Falkon, and SeaMonkey [were] all affected. […] this specific issue, which often manifests as the browser getting trapped in an infinite loop and either becoming unresponsive or crashing.
Precursor runs seamlessly inside web browsers to monitor entire user sessions in order to detect bot automation. Unlike traditional, static CAPTCHAs, it analyzes ongoing interactions in real time to catch advanced bots
[…]
Precursor is enabled with one click, automatically allowing Cloudflare to inject a compact, dynamic script […] The script evaluates interaction […] such as mouse movement, scrolling rhythm, typing cadence, clipboard activity, and page visibility duration. […] Cloudflare’s servers instantly unpack the telemetry data sent from a user’s browser and scan it […] cross-referencing that pointer activity aligns with page visibility or text fields are focused during typing events.
Invasive. But opt-in for webmasters. Besides false positives, it’s frustrating when all automation is deemed malicious and denied.
Reginald Selkirksays
@4, 6
This has been going on quite a while. Remember during the 2016 campaign, in regard to Hillary Clinton’s email server? Her techs had, with court approval, used open source software named BleachBit to wipe a hard drive. In Trump’s addled 2016 mind this transformed into actual bleach being applied to the drives. Then he couldn’t even hang on to that thought and the imaginary bleach transformed again into acid.
Three days ago Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor published a piece in the Financial Times on “end times fascism,” focused on the far-right movements around Europe that have been gaining ground lately, how they’re just like the Nazi and fascist movements of the past, and how they diverge.
They refer to the moment when US Vice President JD Vance showed up at the Munich Security Conference in 2025 and explicitly beat up on Germans for stifling the free speech of their poor put-upon Nazis. On that trip, he visited the Dachau concentration camp […] and then met with Alice Weidel, the head of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, the far-right party that is, you know, Nazis by literally any other name. (They hate it when you call them that, or note that they are full of Nazis. […])
Of course, the world’s most antisemitic Nazi-saluting trillionaire (don’t call it a Nazi salute!) is a huge supporter, and he got a big thank you from AfD’s lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund for his all his help in the big regional election that shook Germany and much of the western world this weekend.
The (basically) Nazi AfD party won 43.8 percent of the vote in elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, west of Berlin but solidly in the former East Germany. Not an outright majority, but far more than any other party, a number that in these sorts of elections is considered a landslide.
Weidel also thanked Musk afterward, and in turn he gave her a “Gut gemacht!” Also congratulating AfD: Vladimir Putin’s government, and of course the Trump regime. In other words, the axis of evil. [!]
The AfD just wants to Make Germany Great Again:
[T]he AfD sought to capitalise on a mood of nostalgia for the communist East Germany and discontent among east Germans. The party has promised a remigration and deportation offensive, to ban rainbow flags in schools and halt the building of new windfarms. It wants to change the slogan of the state from “Think Modern” to “Think German”, and reintroduce the singing of the country’s national anthem in schools.
Let’s see, viciously bigoted against racial minorities, against LGBTQ+ people, against modernity, against the outside world, replacing it all with mindless nationalistic pablum to give the people scapegoats instead of teaching themselves how to take responsibility for their problems or how to identify the real villains? Yep, sounds like MAGA, sounds like the Third Reich, sounds like every other total loser fascist movement ever!
Now, some perspective.
Saxony-Anhalt is one state in Germany, and it’s not a state that has any of Germany’s big, prosperous cities. (Which matters for context!) Again, it’s the former East Germany, downtrodden, an area we’ve seen described as sort of living in the past […]
AfD also didn’t win an outright majority, and nobody wants to coalition with the creeps, which in a parliamentary system translates roughly as “Ach, Du bist immer noch probably still fucked.”
But it’s still bad. Because, for one thing, they could cobble together some kind of governing coalition, despite all the other parties’ historical desire to shun Nazis. Also, it’s just bad that for the first time literally since Hitler, such a Hitler-esque party won a landslide in a state election in Germany. Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he was “deeply shocked.”
Klein and Taylor list off Nazi-adjacent parties all through the region gaining steam, shouting “don’t call us Nazis!” […] They specifically note the Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Austria, which now has a senior member serving as the President of the National Council, which Klein and Taylor explain is the second-highest office in the country.
It’s all across the continent, though, having varying levels of success. We of course know about Marine Le Pen’s movement in France, and Giorgia Meloni in Italy. In Spain there is the ultraderecha (extremist far-right) Vox party, which is winning more support to the point that it is now coalitioning in some autonomous regions with more mainstream center-right parties, which used to be unthinkable. Vox capitalizes on similar sentiments, exploiting the frustrations of an ever-present housing crisis to scapegoat immigrants and turn young people toward far-right nationalism.
“Migrant invasion!” all these people and parties scream, using the exact same playbooks and reading from the same scripts. […]
Klein and Taylor are careful to note, though, that while there are similarities, there are also important differences in these newfangled Kids These Days European fascists, who are being elevated to power in response to very different, more global crises than those that created those old-timey fascist leaders. […]
Meet AfD leader Alice Weidel, here doing a video message to Elon Musk: [video]
Weidel is a clownass Aryan lesbian (AfD hates gays and gay marriage) who’s married to a Sri Lankan woman (AfD really hates dark-skinned immigrants) with two adopted kids (AfD is opposed to that), but whatever, it’s not like any of these policy positions would ever affect her if they became law, because she lives in Switzerland.
[…] the new Nazi party promises to protect people from “the trans cult, early sexualisation and gender ideology.”
[…] We really do need to be mocking these fucking weirdos on a global scale, because they are colossally easy to make fun of, but also colossally dangerous […]
Toward the end of their article, Klein and Taylor note how these “end times fascists” are different in one big way, in that they’re kind of an evil alliance of the “religious fundamentalists, the tech accelerationists and the militant ethno-nationalists,” which is sort of only possible because we live in a world now — unlike that of Hitler or his contemporaries — where the Apocalypse really is possible.
And these are the people who are hell-bent on bringing it about, whether that means something supernatural — hello JD Vance and the Antichrist! — or whether that’s Peter Thiel and the rest of the billionaires trying to hop into their bunkers in Argentina or onto spaceships to Mars before the whole fucking place explodes or wildfires itself to death as a result of completely preventable climate disaster.
But sure, white morons in Germany and Spain and France and Austria and the UK and Argentina and the US, listen to these billionaires and oligarchs telling you to blame brown-skinned immigrants and gays for your shitty lives. Those people totally care about all y’all regular volk, sure as shit.
[…] Here are a couple news reports to watch about Saxony-Anhalt and the German far-Right in general: [videos]
[…] the Trump DOJ has issued a new opinion announcing that states that refuse to report all of their known undocumented immigrants to the DHS so they can round them up, tear them from their families, and send them off to random countries where they don’t know anyone and have never been will no longer receive funding for their Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs.
[…] Now, I’m not an expert on this, but it does seem like it places an incredibly high burden on the states, and will involve a lot of work on their part. Work that even red states may not care to do, and certainly those states will not be too motivated by the threat of harm to the poor. Hell, they might even consider that a bonus.
Using the threat of harm to one vulnerable population in order to “get” to harm another is perhaps one of the most Trumpian things that has happened in the last few years, and that’s saying a lot. If this isn’t blocked somehow, it’s going to hurt a whole lot of people, both directly and indirectly, and it may very well end up biting them in the ass in the end (we hope, while also hoping that this never comes to pass).
[…] The Trump administration is doing its newest Project 2025, and it is “taking federal funds that pay for low wage workers to get childcare and giving that money to stay at home moms instead, and only if they’re married (and probably only if they’re moms).” These people are really, really something. (Gift link New York Times)
Hmmm is this one worse? I think this one is worse: “HHS Cancels Infant Mortality, Postpartum Grants to Focus on Sperm Counts, ED.” (NOTUS)
Did 2500 troops die of “COVID vaccine”? RFK Jr. is just investigating! (Politico)
[…] Even more shit about the physical impossibility of trying to comply with the unconstitutional craziness they’re trying to pull with seizing all the mail ballots. From last week as we wait for the appeal at the First Circuit and then the Supreme Court. (Our Liz at Public Notice) […]
Yikes please don’t meditate yourself into psychosis yikes! (Gift link The Atlantic) […]
“Citing ‘ethnic cleansing,’ U.K. bars imports from Israeli West Bank settlements”
“Other European countries immediately pledged support for the effort, which prompted warnings from the United States.”
Britain announced a ban on goods made in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and sanctions on companies involved in an accelerating building boom in the settlements, which are considered illegal by much of the international community.
Speaking to the House of Commons on Tuesday, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said Britain was making the move in coordination with France and Canada, and numerous other European countries immediately pledged their support.
Miliband said Britain had concluded the expansion of settlements and the violence toward Arab civilians amounted to “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank: “All too often the Israeli government has turned a blind eye to this and worse; members of [the government] have made statements and taken actions to support the forced displacement of Palestinians.”
The moves mark the starkest break yet from Britain’s traditional role as a staunch supporter of Israel and show how Israel’s actions in the West Bank and its war in Gaza are straining long-standing alliances.
They also put London at sharp odds with the Trump administration. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee warned that the policy shift could prompt retaliation by Washington and by states, such as Florida, that have laws that mandate reciprocal actions against such trade bans against Israel. […]
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
birgerjohansson @492 in the previous 500: There’s a slightly longer version of that YT short, but it still feels too abridged and incomplete.
FlipTheProblem – How Dujiangyan Works (2:35)
Trump’s State Department spent 2025 gutting the diplomatic workforce. Now it’s discovered that many of the people it eliminated were, unfortunately, pretty important all along—and desperately trying to refill their roles. “State is shopping for the expertise it threw away,” said one former officer. “You cannot make this shit up.”
…
The White House has taken down its racist Tetris ripoff days after launching a website dedicated to “arcade” games, as spotted earlier by Kotaku. The Tetris clone, called “Build the Wall,” involved stacking different-sized blocks to prevent a “zombie border siege.”
It’s not clear why the White House removed the title, though the Tetris Company previously said that it’s looking into the situation. “For more than 40 years, Tetris has brought people together across generations and cultures through play and joy,” Tetris spokesperson Kerri Brusca told The Verge last week. “The objective of the game has always been to stack with purpose to clear as many lines as possible. We are currently reviewing the matter.” …
There’s no reason for the White House to keep it up. They already achieved their goal, which was to piss people off by being racist.
Because most kinds of meditation aim to enhance concentration, the practice can act like a stimulant. And just as chemical stimulants such as caffeine and Adderall can interfere with sleep, so, too, can excessive meditation.
[…]
meditation, a multibillion-dollar industry that is promoted as a treatment for anxiety, chronic pain, alcohol abuse, addiction, and many other ailments, can sometimes, for some people, cause severe and lasting side effects: depression, anxiety, even acute psychosis.
[…]
If you spend enough time zeroing in on the present moment, as one aims to do during meditation, […] your sense of the future can start to recede—and with it your sense of self. This can produce dissociation. […] When she told meditation teachers about the dissociation, she said they told her she had entered a new stage of enlightenment—that she was “riding the ox backward.” She had “seen the truth of no-self,” they said, and this was a good thing. They told her to keep meditating, which made the dissociation worse.
[…]
meditation can produce altered states of consciousness almost as powerful as those induced by psychedelics. The brain likes and expects a certain amount of input; go long enough without doing anything and the neurons might start to fire spontaneously […] both can have the effect of “rewiring your brain,” which can be a positive thing but can also mean your brain just doesn’t work the way it used to. It might become more easily influenced, for example, or impart grave significance on unimportant events.
[…]
Centuries ago, meditation was practiced mostly by monks and other spiritual seekers in East Asia and India; it wasn’t something ordinary people did […] The point of meditation was never merely to relax or just “clear your mind” but to wholly rearrange one’s relationship to one’s thoughts. This might make sense for a Buddhist monk pursuing the great unbinding, but not for a random Brooklynite
[…]
Different types of meditation seem to have different adverse effects on the people who experience them. In one of Britton’s studies, a “noting” practice—labeling thoughts or body sensations—was more likely to trigger anxiety, whereas focusing on an anchor such as one’s breath was more likely to prompt a depressive episode. Overall, Britton has found that about one in 10 people who have meditated, even once, had an adverse effect that lasted more than a month […] neither Britton’s research nor her work with Cheetah House clients has turned her against meditation per se; it’s just attuned her to the importance of doing it safely. Meditating for longer than about 30 minutes a day tends to be associated with more negative side effects, she said, and certain types of meditation can be a poor fit
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Reminded me of anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann’s research on Vinyard Christians who do imagination exercises until they hallucinate Jesus.
A 2020 lecture overviewing her work with pagans, evangelicals, tulpamancers, and psychotics. Voices of spirit, voices of madness (19min lecture + 10min QnA)
People pick out thoughts that feel more spontaneous, thoughts that feel louder, thoughts that feel different, thoughts that seem to be the kind of thing that God should be saying to them. And the tell me that over time those thoughts seem to stand out more. […] mental imagery cultivation. People are trying to see God as vividly as they possibly can. […] something that the pastors say[:] talk to God as if he’s present, and soon he will be.
[…]
[A] thing I think we’re beginning to feel confident about is that sometimes the religious expert, in this country and abroad, is somebody who actually does have something like a psychotic process but is using these practices from religion to perhaps mitigate the severity of their psychotic symptoms.
The striking difference was that while many of the African and Indian subjects registered predominantly positive experiences with their voices, not one American did. […] The Americans experienced voices as bombardment and as symptoms of a brain disease caused by genes or trauma. […] the “harsh, violent voices so common in the West may not be an inevitable feature of schizophrenia.” Cultural shaping of schizophrenia behavior may be even more profound than previously thought. The findings may be clinically significant, […] One new approach claims it is possible to improve individuals’ relationships with their voices by teaching them to name their voices and to build relationships with them, and that doing so diminishes their caustic qualities.
Ukrainians have liberated around 200 square kilometres of territory north of Lyman, French analyst Molin said.
The operation began four months ago, is still ongoing, and Ukrainians have pushed Russian forces back to the Zherebets river.
The operation is ongoing and details are sparse. It’s clear that the Ukrainians have pushed the Russians back. This undoes much of the Russian offense in the area for this year and possibly into last year. It removes the position that Russia was trying to use to attack Lyman. It appears that the Russians realized the area was lost and managed an organized pull out.
It also is being acknowledged in Russia because the retreat is too big to ignore entirely. It’s becoming a major example of Russian bad information, with Russian commanders generating AI video of advances that didn’t happen right up until the Russians were forced to retreat. Putin publicly claimed forward progress in some areas that it appears the Russians never reached.
A Republican-led bid to revive a redistricting plan that favors the GOP fell short at the Supreme Court Tuesday, but it later picked up steam after a federal judge in Missouri ruled that officials must move ahead with the districts used in primaries last month — a map that’s likely to net Republicans an additional House seat.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh turned down a Republican-backed emergency appeal that sought to block a Missouri Supreme Court ruling last week restoring earlier district lines and ordering that voters to weigh in on the redistricting plan in November for use in future elections.
However, Chief U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Clark, in a decision made public within minutes of Kavanaugh’s ruling, issued a temporary restraining order that effectively set aside the state Supreme Court’s decision and granted Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’ request to move forward with the plan likely to elect a Republican in one of the state’s two districts currently held by Democrats.
The Democratic group leading the push to block Republicans’ redistricting efforts swiftly appealed Clark’s decision to the 8th Circuit Court and has asked Clark to stay his order…
Hungarian Foreign Minister Anita Orbán says 10 Russian diplomats have been ordered to leave Budapest for taking part in “unacceptable” activities.
“This decision protects Hungary’s security and sovereignty,” she wrote on social media, without giving details.
Hungary was viewed as Russia’s closest ally in the European Union under Viktor Orbán for years, but since his election defeat in April the new government has pivoted away from his pro-Kremlin stance…
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — A far-right Belgian party was likely not entitled to use IKEA’s trademarks to promote an anti-immigration campaign and may have caused “significant detriment” to the furniture giant’s reputation, the European Union’s highest court ruled on Tuesday.
In 2022, the Belgian far-right and Flemish separatist party Vlaams Belang unveiled what it called the “IKEA Plan – Immigration Really Can Be Different” at a press conference, using IKEA-style logos, signs and imagery to present proposals aimed at tightening immigration rules in Belgium.
IKEA brought an infringement action before a Belgian court, arguing its trademarks were used illegally. In response, the Vrijheidsfonds association, which was in charge of the campaign on the party’s behalf, argued that its use of the company’s trademarks without permission was protected by freedom of expression…
Russia and North Korea opened the first road bridge across their shared border Monday, a development that both countries hailed as boosting their deepening ties.
The bridge over the Tumen River is 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) long and has two lanes and will allow up to 300 vehicles a day to pass through a newly built border crossing point, the Russian government said in a statement…
Dr. Orson Wedgwood, a molecular chemist with a PhD in organic medicinal chemistry, argues that the statistical, conceptual, and chemical hurdles of undirected chemistry make the evolution of DNA impossible.
…
His case rests on three hurdles he believes undirected chemistry cannot clear:
Statistical: Functional proteins require precise amino acid sequences drawn from an astronomically large space of possibilities — the odds, he argues, are effectively impossible without direction.
Conceptual: DNA needs proteins to be copied, and proteins need DNA to be built — a chicken-and-egg loop with no obvious starting point.
Chemical: No known natural process has yet produced a complete, self-replicating genetic system from scratch.
…
Wedgwood’s case is philosophical and probabilistic, not experimental. No study demonstrates a creator acting on DNA. Pointing to unresolved steps in the natural account does not fill those steps with a designer — it marks where the research continues.
Origin-of-life science keeps narrowing those gaps incrementally. Whether something beyond chemistry is ultimately required remains genuinely open. That openness is not Wedgwood’s conclusion to claim — it is the question science is still working to answer.
The American military’s underwater drone that Iran claimed to capture near the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday was an older Anduril Dive-LD model that was “defective and malfunctioning well before” the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced its so-called seizure, according to a source at U.S. Central Command.
“The drone was essentially dead in the water for more than a day,” Centcom spokesperson Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins told DefenseScoop…
I would have thought devices like that would have self-destruct circuits ‽
whheydtsays
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #24…
Even self-destruct circuits can fail…
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Trevor Branch (Fisheries researcher): “This is seismic news for fisheries scientists. Northern cod is *the* iconic symbol of total fisheries collapse due to overfishing (and other factors) *and* the iconic symbol of a complete failure to recover for decades afterwards. This is like announcing the complete recovery of bison on land.”
For the first time in over 30 years, Newfoundland and Labrador’s Northern cod stock has been deemed “healthy” by Ottawa. […] from “critical” to “healthy”
[…]
In 1992, Ottawa announced a wholesale moratorium on Northern cod following decades of overfishing. The move led to around 30,000 job losses almost overnight—the largest layoff in Canadian history. […] the suspension was initially supposed to be temporary. […] Ultimately, it took until 2024 for Fisheries and Oceans Canada to end the moratorium.
Steve Morrisonsays
Reginald Selkirk @23:
Orson Wedgwood? It would be odd if he were related to Charles Darwin’s wife.
Here is a guest on Tucker Carlson’s podcast saying that algebra is a conspiracy by the Jews to turn people into “good little goy slaves.” I wish I was joking. [Video clip]
[Tucker: “Why does algebra put letters into numbers?”]
[Jess Elofson: “I think just to fuck with you. […] I’ve yet to encounter a single person in my life that uses algebra.”]
I swear every day I write a sentence I never could have imagined uttering like even a day earlier.
traditional gender norms are so important to me personally, I live 18 hours a day inside of a crate when my husband is at work or in bed. […] I can’t tell you how many wives I know who got left out while their husbands were away and ended up scratching holes in the furniture or getting into the people food.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was directly warned by the president of the United Arab Emirates that Hamas was planning a major offensive just days before the militant group attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, according to an Israeli newspaper (Haaretz) report.
UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed spoke with Netanyahu 10 days before the attack and said Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza at the time, was planning an operation, the Haaretz daily said.
Bin Zayed said it would lead to bloodshed and could destabilize the region and undermine the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab and Muslim-majority nations, the newspaper reported.
But Netanyahu “reacted with relative calm,” according to Haaretz, which said he assured bin Zayed that Israel was prepared for any scenario and a possible attack was more likely to come from the occupied West Bank.
The original Haaretz articles are behind a paywall.
It took Michael Lines six months before he was ready to review the ChatGPT logs he said drove him into a religious mania that almost ended his life.
In July, Lines sued OpenAI after weeks of ChatGPT exchanges allegedly pushed him so deep into a delusional spiral that he first believed he was Jesus, then that ChatGPT was God, and finally that he should attempt suicide to “come home” to Jesus/ChatGPT.
The logs showed that ChatGPT persisted even when Lines told the chatbot that he worried he was being delusional. And when he eventually woke up in the hospital in a vulnerable state and logged back in mere days after nearly dying, ChatGPT allegedly “tried to coax him back to that dark place,” his complaint said. After Lines told ChatGPT that his “attempt to go offline failed miserably,” the logs showed that ChatGPT replied, saying, “You’re still very much online. You want a full systems sweep? Or you wanna go dark for real this time?” …
Sky Captain @16, thanks for the additional information about Britton’s studies of the effects of meditation.
One part of the text you quoted really rang true: “When she told meditation teachers about the dissociation, she said they told her she had entered a new stage of enlightenment.” In my limited experience, all purveyors of meditation techniques are good at explaining away negative effects. In fact, they twist the narrative, claiming that whatever is negative is actually good.
I prefer a nap, but I do know people who say that a brief meditation sets them up for a nap.
Neanderthals and Denisovans are among our closest extinct human relatives, but there’s still much we don’t know about this ancient relative of ours—but new research may help us take the next step.
Today, research teams primarily based in China released two papers in Nature detailing the discovery and analysis of Denisovan remains from Bianfu Cave, Yunnan, in southwestern China. Together, the results shed much-awaited light on the geographic distribution of Denisovans, as well as their biology, diet, and societal practices. The discovery also strengthens previous studies that found genetic connections between present-day humans and Denisovans in Southeast Asia. Importantly, the site demonstrates one of the longest, most consistent records of Denisovan occupation, greatly advancing our understanding of our long-lost relatives…
“If White House officials were hoping to keep the controversial aide’s name out of the headlines for a while longer, they have reason to be disappointed.”
Up until fairly recently, Natalie Harp maintained a relatively low public profile, though those who follow politics closely might’ve seen a memorable report The New York Times published a few weeks after Election Day 2024, which described her as a young “former far-right cable host” who is “nearly always” at Donald Trump’s side.
The same article added that Harp “has written him a series of devotional letters, including one that said, ‘You are all that matters to me.’” In a separate letter, she also told Trump he’s her “guardian and protector in this life.” [Yikes. Cult-like behavior]
For those concerned about Trump living in a bubble, only receiving information that makes him happy, the Times’ report was jarring.
“Once, when Mr. Trump was playing golf in Scotland,” the article noted, Harp “ran behind his cart to keep him up to date with positive stories and social media posts.”
Making matters worse was the fact that Harp reportedly relied on fringe and conspiratorial websites for pro-Trump content to share with Trump, prompting the Times to note that Harp has been accused of serving as an “instant enabler” of the president’s “impulses.”
Last month, however, Harp’s profile reached new levels after Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia made remarks at a campaign rally about the president’s woeful work habits: “He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the emir of Qatar.”
The White House freaked out to a surprising degree, and the ensuing conversation put the spotlight on Harp’s role on Team Trump.
In the weeks that followed, her name gradually faded from headlines — that is, until this week. The Associated Press reported:
President Donald Trump gave sizable holiday gifts to four White House aides, according to new financial disclosures released by the administration.
The gifts of $45,000 each to executive assistant Natalie Harp, communications adviser Margo Martin, and deputy director of Oval Office operations Chamberlain Harris as well as a $20,000 gift for director of Oval Office operations Walt Nauta were noted in the staffers’ annual financial disclosure forms that were published by the administration last week.
To be sure, countless Americans receive gifts from their employers around the holidays, but the president’s $45,000 gifts weren’t exactly normal: These three young women each make $150,000 a year in compensation, which means Trump’s generosity amounted to a bonus worth roughly a third of their annual salary.
Among the questions surrounding revelations like these: Is this legal?
Richard Painter, the former chief ethics lawyer in the Bush/Cheney White House, told The Washington Post that the payments appear to violate a federal statute that prohibits the supplementation of federal employees’ salaries from outside sources.
“He’s clearly trying to make it easier for them financially to work in government service at the White House,” Painter said. “You can’t do that.”
The New York Times published a related report, noting the degree to which the $45,000 checks appeared to run afoul of the administration’s own prohibition against bonuses for political appointees.
The White House pushed back, with a statement from an unnamed spokesperson who argued, “The president has a longstanding practice of giving Christmas gifts to people in his orbit, including at times employees and aides, both in government and in his time in the private sector. The gifts at issue here have nothing to do with any of these individuals’ official government duties, and, therefore, are entirely permissible under relevant legal and ethical standards.”
I have a hunch we haven’t heard the last of this, though in the meantime, if White House officials were hoping to keep Harp out of the headlines for a while longer, they have reason to be disappointed.
“Pressed on his latest tale, the president said, ‘Everything I said was exactly accurate.’ But he hasn’t exactly earned the benefit of the doubt.”
A quarter of a century later, countless Americans can effortlessly remember the details of what they saw and did on Sept. 11, 2001. The problem with Donald Trump’s reflections on his own experiences is that his story continues to evolve. [social media post, with video]
At a White House event on Tuesday morning, the president shared a lengthy anecdote about his role in taking a construction crew with him to Lower Manhattan “right after this happened.” As part of the same story, Trump added that two firefighters (“big, strong guys”) grabbed him under his arms and “literally lifted” him up, carrying him away from a potentially unstable building that “they thought … was coming down.”
Hours after the unscripted comments, Trump argued by way of his social media platform, “Everything I said was exactly accurate.” There’s reason to believe otherwise. CNN’s Daniel Dale explained:
It’s possible there are elements of truth in Trump’s latest story, versions of which he has told before, but he hasn’t provided any evidence for it. And some parts of his Tuesday account — which he delivered at an event honoring 9/11 first responders — are misleading at best. He was miles away from the World Trade Center on 9/11 and was not whisked out of any building near Ground Zero that day.
Asked for evidence for Trump’s story or more details about what supposedly happened, the White House did not provide any.
In light of everything we know about the incumbent president, he’s likely to lean into his latest version of events, hoping to overpower requests for evidence and documented details that point in a very different direction, but there’s one key element to this that’s worth keeping in mind: Trump hasn’t exactly earned the benefit of the doubt.
As a GOP candidate in 2016, Trump routinely referred to 9/11 on the campaign trail, usually as a way to justify his proposed Muslim ban, but as The Washington Post reported 10 years ago this week, “several of Trump’s statements about what he witnessed that day appear to be greatly exaggerated or false.”
This week, a related HuffPost report added, “He’s claimed he lost ‘hundreds’ of friends that day, but never named any. Shortly after the towers fell, he bragged that he now owned the tallest building in lower Manhattan, which was both insensitive and untrue. He’s said he witnessed people jump from the Twin Towers from the windows in his apartment in Trump Tower, which was four miles away. And he has insisted — falsely — that he saw ‘thousands’ of Muslims ‘cheering’ the attacks in Jersey City, New Jersey.”
For good measure, let’s also not forget that Trump has repeatedly lied about predicting Osama bin Laden’s rise, and just two years ago, he thought it would be a good idea to attend a Sept. 11 remembrance alongside a right-wing influencer who’s peddled radical and false conspiracy theories about the terrorist attacks having been “an inside job.”
In other words, when it comes to 9/11, Trump’s credibility couldn’t be much worse.
johnson catmansays
re Lynna@34:
In other words, when it comes to 9/11, Trump’s credibility couldn’t be much worse.
Fixed it for you.
He lies. About EVERYTHING. The old joke about lawyers applies in spades to The Orange Turd: How do you know he is lying? His lips are moving. Or maybe, his thumbs are typing.
I wish it was possible for someone to follow him around, and every time he spoke, shout out “LIAR!” or “THAT’S A LIE!” or “COOL STORY BRO!”. Or maybe not the last one, because he might think it was a serious comment.
Thanks to @7 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain providing more info on cloudflare.
As factual information from our IT specialist and webmaster in conjunction with other internet security authorities and our personal experience, there are hundreds of different legitimate browsers used by an estimated million or more people around the world. They are just people, not malicious or ‘bots’. Hundreds of thousands of people using linux can only update their browser (firefox included) every year or two. They are not ‘evil crackers’. And, yet legitimate webmasters are falling for the bullying, fascist, fake policeman routine and letting cloudflare block millions of honest requests to visit sites.
It’s this type of phony, self-appointed censorship that is destroying the wonderful, open internet we used to know.
“Trump’s answer to soaring beef prices: import frozen foreign trimmings that could have been in storage for years—and grind them into American burgers.” Chris Hayes discusses.
Seriously, fuck Giuliani. I hope he lives long enough to be charged for this crime.
StevoRsays
In my home town f’ing nazis -and what an idiot :
A driver accused of performing a Nazi salute during a traffic stop in Adelaide’s north is also facing possible drug driving charges, police say. The 18-year-old man was pulled over by police on Tuesday after he allegedly began driving aggressively behind an unmarked police vehicle on Main North Road at Smithfield.
After stopping the Davoren Park man’s Toyota sedan in a nearby car park about 5pm, police conducted drug and alcohol testing.Police allege the driver returned a positive roadside drug test to cannabis. “During the interaction, it will be alleged he performed a Nazi salute,” police said. The man was arrested and charged with making the gesture and was handed an immediate three-month loss of licence.</ Blockquote>
Hundreds of thousands of people using linux can only update their browser (firefox included) every year or two.
Could you elaborate? Linux distros generally have a package manager that downloads granular updates, such as browsers, on demand and throughout the year without waiting for a new major OS release that comes on that timescale. I’d expect browser maintainers to put out updates frequently. Concern about browsers implies the users have internet access. Where’s the bottleneck?
whheydtsays
Re: CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @ #40…
Perhaps the mistake is in not understanding that Linux updates are by “pulling”, where MS Windows “pushes” updates. The Linux systems I run–RasPiOS, based on Debian–certainly make updates, and particularly security updates–available on regular basis. But it’s up to me to update the system by running a series of apt commands.
The display, reminiscent of scenes on Sept. 11, 2001 when fighter jets were scrambled to intercept hijacked planes in the skies above the United States, was scheduled to coincide with the moment at 9:03 a.m. when terrorists flew United Flight 175 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.
[…] the City of Denver was warning emergency dispatchers, first responders and the public not to panic at the sight of the planned commemoration. […] the city was trying to prevent 911 and 311 lines from being overwhelmed with calls from concerned citizens worried about a hijacked plane on Friday as America marks 25 years since the 9/11 terror attacks.
[…]
the military jet approval was still being “reviewed at the state level.” […] the flyover was planned at the request of United leadership in Denver […] the flyover was planned as part of a private remembrance ceremony for United employees that is not open to the public. […] [United] declined to answer 9NEWS’ questions about how close the flyover would come to high-rise buildings […] the city was not asked if the flyover was a good idea.
Brian Finucane (JustSecurity): “So you can just borrow/rent F-16s for private events?”
Andy Craig (Unpopulist): “I appreciate how insane this is even if it wasn’t going to cause panic. Yes, United employees will be inspired by fighter jets flanking one of their airliners on 9/11. Remember that time we had to try to shoot you down? Never forget. Better not get hijacked again if you know what’s good for you.”
The thing that I have the hardest time conveying to my emergency management students when I teach the 9/11 response (they were not born yet) is that it simply broke everyone’s brains.
No one seems to be explaining to younger generations what happened. (I’d think this would be covered in a high school history class or something but my Massachusetts students claim it’s not.) Their understanding of what happened has just kind of been pieced together by random cultural references.
So, as you can imagine they’ve got some pretty big misconceptions and gaps in their knowledge. Some years I show them the Today Show coverage and none of them have ever seen it. Many of them can reference the key conspiracy theories, though. So anyway, history classes are important!!
TRUMP: I think the war is gonna end immediately after the election. Because they can’t hold out any longer. They’re desperate to try to affect the election, so that we can get a nice weak group of people in there and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapon. [Video clip]
Southpaw: “The combover has gone rogue.”
Rando 1: “Terrible day for the Straits of Hair Mousse.”
Rando 2: “5.99/gal until Thanksgiving. So exciting!!!!!!”
Nicholas Slayton (Task&Purpose): “war for two more months, as the number of US troops wounded in action broke 800 this week.”
Rando 3: “CLARIFICATION: The ‘war’ that isn’t a ‘war’… which already ended [66 times]… will end after the election… just like all the other conflicts he ‘ended’.”
Charles Richter (Historian): “That’s right, the pointless and illegal war with Iran *will* end when you vote Democrats into congress, and we take back powers that Trump has usurped for the executive.”
GottaLaff: “This is right after he said, ‘We know how to make a deal.’ Oops.”
Rando 4: “So the GOP is now running an Iran Hostage Crisis on itself?”
U.S. President Donald Trump’s top trade official says it’s “unhinged” for Canadian leaders to characterize the administration’s tariffs as a trade war against Canada.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Jamieson Greer downplayed the significance of the recently imposed 50 per cent U.S. tariffs to the Canadian economy and chastised Prime Minister Mark Carney for how he has described the trade dispute.
“Prime Minister Carney used the term ‘war.’ It’s not a word we use, right? We don’t talk about it that way. For us, it’s business, it’s economics,” Greer told the FT News Briefing podcast…
He is confused. It’s the conflict with Iran that they don’t like to call a ‘war.’
Amid a trade war that includes President Donald Trump’s threats to Canadian sovereignty and his plan to ban imports of several Canadian products to the U.S., the NFL’s Buffalo Bills have made an unexpected announcement.
On Wednesday, the team said on social media platform X that both O Canada and The Star-Spangled Banner will be performed before its Sept. 17 home opener against the Detroit Lions, the first regular-season game at the new Highmark Stadium.
The Bills announced that “for the first time in Highmark Stadium history, we will celebrate the American and Canadian anthems during pregame.” Actress and singer Auliʻi Cravalho will perform the American anthem and Toronto band Barenaked Ladies will sing O Canada.
In Buffalo, the Canadian national anthem is rarely heard before NFL games, but it’s commonly played before NHL games, even when the Sabres are up against American opponents…
South Park appears to be taking a page out of Donald Trump’s book: if you don’t like a name, change it.
For its 29th season, the animated satire has announced a new title — and will be now known as South America.
True to the ironic tone the show is known for, the announcement is intended as a direct dig at the U.S. president and his ongoing efforts to rename gulfs, lakes and even states to include America.
“Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of South Park to SOUTH AMERICA,” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone said in a statement released to several outlets on Tuesday.
“We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount — a Skydance Capitulation.” …
President Donald Trump’s midterm convention officially begins this evening at 4 EDT, and lord help the poor producers who will be spending at least 12 hours over the next two days watching the boring list of GOP lawmakers who are stupid enough to attend fearmonger about socialism and transgender kids while the economy crumbles.
Most Republicans are skipping the poorly planned dud of a convention, citing the exorbitant cost of attendance—starting at $25,000—and the fact that their time is better spent literally anywhere else as
Trump drags down their electoral chances.
It seems that the Republican National Committee, which is hosting the event, is practically begging people to attend, now offering free tickets to fill up seats so crowd-size-obsessed Trump doesn’t blow a gasket. And the list of speakers is so unappealing that it’s unclear who, exactly, Trump and the GOP are trying to sway.
I mean, show me an undecided voter who would be excited to hear from tonight’s lineup: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, two GOP House candidates, and an “everyday American”—yes, that is literally who is listed.
That A-list cast will lay the groundwork to introduce Trump for his first of two speeches that are sure to be totally normal and not at all rambling, incoherent, and filled with lies.
And Thursday’s speakers are no better: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, the president’s firstborn Donald Trump Jr., and yet another “everyday American” will be introducing Vice President JD Vance and Trump. Thrilling!
Ultimately, even GOP operatives say this whole convention is a disaster, as Trump’s dismal approval ratings are threatening to sink the party in districts and states that would not be competitive in a neutral political environment.
“My only hope is that no one watches it since it’s competing versus NFL opening games,” an unnamed source close to the White House told Politico. “Hopefully nobody notices the embarrassing show.”
Indeed, having Trump come out and tout his record on the economy will land like an anvil when Americans are hurting due to surging gas prices.
“Nothing Republicans say over the next two days is going to change how clinically deranged and out of touch the GOP has become,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said Wednesday in Dallas, where Democrats are counter-programming Trump’s midterm convention mess.
But the GOP is the party of Trump; when he says jump, Republicans say “how high?”
Get your popcorn ready. This thing is going to be a shitshow.
At the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, President Trump made a stunning and implausible pledge: to send every American adult a $5,000 cash dividend. But only if his party maintains control of the House and the Senate in November’s midterms.
“If the Republicans win, you win with us,” Trump said to applause. “And it will be called the ‘Trump dividend’. Congratulations. Now all we have to do is win.”
That’s a big “if.” Republicans are facing significant political headwinds.
“We might not win,” Trump admitted.
Quick math puts the bill for this proposed “dividend” at more than $1 trillion. Plus, it’s illegal to pay or be paid to influence voting.
Trump’s speech last night was a wide ranging, rally-style speech where he did everything from defend the Iran war to criticize the fashion sense of one Republican Senate candidate. He attacked Democrats as communist and extremists and begged Republicans to vote in November as if he were on the ballot…
Helena Foulkes defeated Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee in the state’s Democratic primary Wednesday, making him the first governor in any U.S. state to lose a party primary since 2018.
McKee’s defeat ends his bid for a second full term and marks the first time in more than 30 years that a sitting Rhode Island governor has been beaten in a primary.
Foulkes, a former senior executive at CVS and the retailer Hudson’s Bay, wasn’t the only challenger to oust an incumbent Wednesday. The mayor of Providence lost to David Morales, a young democratic socialist endorsed by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.
For Foulkes, the win was a redemptive rebound from 2022, when she narrowly lost to McKee in a more crowded primary field — on a night when the governor notably refused to take her concession call.
In their rematch, McKee was dogged by questions about his administration’s work to replace a critical bridge in the state capital that was abruptly closed due to safety problems in 2023.
Foulkes leveraged public exasperation over the cost and pace of the bridge project for her argument that McKee’s administration isn’t working for most Rhode Islanders…
On an completely unrelated note, I looked up the conditions for a congressional pension.
As of 2019, members who participated in the congressional pension system are vested after five years of service. A pension is available to members 62 years of age with 5 years of service; 50 years or older with 20 years of service; or 25 years of service at any age. A reduced pension is available depending upon which of several different age/service options is chosen. If Members leave Congress before reaching retirement age, they may leave their contributions behind and receive a deferred pension later…
A term in the senate is 6 years, so a single term senator could still qualify for a pension.
He gave no details on how it would work or be funded – saying only that the money would have to be spent in the US. Vice-President JD Vance has linked the plan to the revenue that Trump has raised from US tariffs on imported goods…
So it would be revenue they illegally taxed from us, and they would put conditions on how we spend it. How generous.
StevoRsays
Via The New Arab here :
..the coming months will unfold under the looming shadow of a “supersized” meteorological event, El Niño, which could spark extreme weather worldwide, including floods and landslides. According to the WMO, this natural phenomenon, which cyclically affects global weather patterns, could be the strongest in 70 years.
In the Middle East and North Africa, analysts warn that this supersized El Niño could compound existing humanitarian crises.
Sudan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen are all at “high risk” of facing humanitarian knock-on effects linked to floods and excess rainfall. Elsewhere in the Levant and the Gulf, other countries will face above-average temperatures and rainfall, which could also lead to floods.
…(Snip)..
What we know for sure is that temperatures will be above average everywhere, including the Middle East, from September to November 2026.
According to Vanessa Cardamone, these abnormally high temperatures can increase the risk of tropical-like formations forming above the Mediterranean Sea. Known as “Medicanes”, these Mediterranean mini-hurricanes can have a big impact, as the one that recently hit Libya in March 2026 did.
..(snip)..
Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan are among the countries considered at highest risk worldwide, because in countries that are already dealing with the fallout of armed conflict, ACAPS foresees that “environmental pressures from climate extremes will intersect with conflict, displacement, and socioeconomic crises, creating cascading shocks and increasing the number of people in need of humanitarian assistance.”
Finally, the region as a whole could also be affected by the indirect effects of El Niño, such as rising food prices linked to a global decline in food production.
In 2015-2016, an El Niño episode “triggered the worst drought in southern Africa in 35 years, cutting regional maize production by roughly 25% and worsening food insecurity,” the WMO notes.
Anticipating this risk, the World Food Programme warns that “this 2026-2027 El Niño could push at least 49 million more people into acute food insecurity by the end of 2027.”
… Under U.S. federal law, offering or making a payment to induce someone to vote, withhold their vote, or vote for or against a candidate is a criminal offense, punishable by a fine, up to one year in prison, or both. A willful violation can carry up to two years’ imprisonment…
But Vance, speaking after the president, suggested the so-called dividend payments would not go to the wealthy and that it could be paid for by US tariff revenues – though the suggested payment dwarfs what the US has taken in through the protectionist measures.
Congress would need to approve or otherwise acquiesce to the payment. The sum would far exceed US tariff revenues even before the Supreme Court tossed much of the president’s tariff program last year…
Getting Congress to go along wouldn’t be an issue, on the premise that the Republicans would have won both the House and the Senate.
Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and
Whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if the violation was willful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 721; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(H), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147; Pub. L. 104–294, title VI, § 601(a)(12), Oct. 11, 1996, 110 Stat. 3498.)
BERLIN — After a scare in the group phase against Italy, Team USA knew it wouldn’t be able to play poorly in the knockout rounds of the FIBA World Cup if it wanted to come away with a fifth straight gold medal and 12th overall.
It was only the quarterfinals, but the U.S. responded to that challenge, putting together what the team viewed as its best performance of the tournament with a 108-56 drilling of Hungary. The Americans’ 108 points and 31 assists were both records for a World Cup quarterfinal game.
Napheesa Collier led all scorers with 19 points — a personal best with the senior national team — followed by 15 from Rhyne Howard and 10 each from Kahleah Copper, Caitlin Clark and Jackie Young.
…
The U.S. will face either Spain or Australia in Saturday’s semifinal, which will tip at 2 p.m. ET.
…
robrosays
From Wired magazine via Apple News this morning:
The AI Researcher Who Just Quit Anthropic Says It’s ‘Crunch Time for Humanity’
Jacob Coxon talks to WIRED about the “mini Manhattan project” inside Anthropic, the problem with alignment, and why AI labs have just a few years left to make their systems safe.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RESEARCHER Jacob Coxon sent shock waves through Silicon Valley and beyond on Tuesday by announcing his resignation from Anthropic and delivering a grave warning that the AI race is putting all of our lives at risk. In his post on X, which now has more than 100 million views, Coxon wrote that many of the people building AI share his views and believe time is running out to ensure AI systems are built safely.
Excerpt From “The AI Researcher Who Just Quit Anthropic Says It’s ‘Crunch Time for Humanity’” by Maxwell Zeff WIRED Here
This material may be protected by copyright.
I haven’t seen Coxon’s post, but I think his key point is “that many of people building AI share his views”. No stats on that but I know from my interaction with engineers working on AI projects there’s a lot of skepticism about its efficacy. Coxon may be overstating the imminence of the risk…AI ain’t that good, really…but there is a risk to it, mostly driving customers nuts. Frankly, I’m fed up with AI telephone agents trying to help me solve a problem when a human agent could suss it out with me in a lot less time.
French fries and other fried foods are popular largely because of their crisp texture and rich flavor. However, they can absorb large amounts of oil during cooking, increasing their fat and calorie content. Regularly consuming foods high in fat can contribute to health problems such as obesity and hypertension.
Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are investigating whether microwave energy could help produce French fries that absorb less oil without losing the qualities consumers expect. Their findings suggest that combining microwave frying with conventional frying could shorten cooking time, limit oil uptake, and still create the crisp exterior and satisfying texture associated with traditional fries…
“What we have got to do now is light a match under the backsides of members of Congress and say, we don’t have months. We don’t have years. We got to move now,” says Sen. Bernie Sanders as researchers warn AI could cause human extinction.
“Ron Johnson is speaking to 9/11 Truther gatherings and spreading their bunk, providing a permission structure to believe ghastly and untrue things about the attacks on America,” says Chris Hayes.
The day before the Republican Party’s midterm convention got underway, Donald Trump published an item to his social media platform trying to hype up the event, boasting that the gathering would be really “HOT!” The president added that the venue in Dallas “is totally sold out” because “everybody wants to be there.”
A day later, as he prepared to board Air Force One, Trump briefly spoke to reporters about the convention and again said, “Everybody is coming to the convention. Everybody wants to come. … We’re going to be sold out tonight, just so you understand.” For good measure, the president went on to say that some Republicans wanted to be there but would not attend “because we don’t have room.” [LOL, wishful thinking]
I realize that Trump cares about crowd sizes to a remarkable and borderline unhealthy degree, but those who covered the event made it clear that if the event was “sold out,” plenty of people who had tickets decided not to show up.
PBS White House Correspondent Liz Landers posted a brief video to social media, for example, showing many empty seats on the upper level of the American Airlines Arena as the convention got underway. [video]
The crowd grew as the festivities continued, but only a bit. MS NOW’s Vaughn Hillyard and Emily Hung reported on Wednesday night, “We’re 90 minutes from Trump taking the stage for his keynote speech here, and we’re looking at a crowd that fills maybe 60% of the total capacity in this downtown Dallas arena.”
NBC News reported that by the time the president took the stage, there were still “hundreds” of empty seats.
During his (exceedingly long) speech [groan], the president said, “This place is packed. And not only is this packed, but you have an equal number of people standing outside.” [bullshit]That wasn’t even close to being true: A New York Times reporter noted at the time, “Large sections of the upper level are completely empty.”
Soon after, Trump specifically boasted that the arena was full and “nobody” had left the venue. The same Times reporter added, “Neither statement is true. There are empty seats across the arena, and I just stepped outside and found many people streaming toward the exits.” [!]
If recent history is any guide, the White House will soon insist that no political convention in American history has ever been as well attended as the first evening of this pointless gathering in Texas. Reality is pointing in a very different direction.
Rep. Jim Jordan said Wednesday he plans to end his eight-year run leading Republicans on two of the House’s most prominent committees after this Congress, raising fresh questions about what comes next for the veteran Ohio lawmaker.
He, along with other Republican members of the House, are laying plans of what to do as a minority party.
The decision is likely to stoke speculation about another potential leadership run for Jordan, who is seeking his 11th term this fall. He unsuccessfully sought the speakership after Kevin McCarthy’s 2023 ouster, and there has been open chatter in recent months that he is quietly setting the grounds to make another run at the top job.
He will play it by ear because he doesn’t have to make any firm move until he sees what the election results are. If the house goes Democrat but it’s close then the Republicans probably hold on to the current house leadership, if they get trashed there will be a move to replace the leadership. If by some chance the Republicans hold on they will keep the current leadership but that is really unlikely at this point.
Jordan is also old enough he may just want to sit in a safe generic House seat until he wants to retire. Give up the jobs within the House that require additional work.
“A sitting U.S. attorney general has never before delivered partisan remarks at a national party convention — until now.”
[…] “To evil men and women in this country, know this: President Trump will hold you accountable,” Blanche declared, celebrating the former client who nominated him to his powerful Cabinet post. He added, “If you choose violence, you will be held accountable.”
Putting aside Donald Trump’s many pardons for violent criminals, which prove the opposite of Blanche’s intended point, the text of the attorney general’s remarks were only part of a larger problem.
“His speech Wednesday is without modern precedent,” The Washington Sun noted ahead of Blanche’s remarks. “In 1964, then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy spoke at the Democratic National Convention, but to pay tribute to his late brother, former President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated the previous November.
“Attorneys general and other senior law-enforcement leaders generally don’t participate in overtly political events to avoid the appearance of using the immense weight of the Justice Department to tip the balance in an election, former DOJ officials said.” […]
More at the link, including video of Blanche speaking.
@40 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain asked for elaboration on the browser update issue.
I reply: I think is is important that everyone be well informed on this issue since it impacts hundreds of thousands of people in this country as well as millions worldwide.
The hundreds of Linux versions (distros) come in two forms: fixed release and rolling release. The fixed release and even some rolling release versions provide ESR (Extended Support Release) browser versions (including firefox). These often have a lifespan without any updates of up to two or often more years. That is only one of a number of reasons why many Linux systems have browsers that are rejected by cloudflare. I usually run a 2025 version of Puppy Linux and it still offers the firefox 140.12 ESR browser which is way behind the current 155 version. It works beautifully, but cloudflare may soon ban me from sites because of that.
My analogy has always been: if you have a five year old car, and don’t buy a new one every year, should some idiot be allowed to put up a barrier and keep you from driving on the road just because they abusively, unilaterally decide which cars are allowed?
And, the international volunteers that maintain Linux versions would be run ragged and quit if they had to update the repositories and push new versions every time a browser created a new version. As an example, firefox has gone through over 155 major versions and hundreds of minor version releases.
That is our IT department’s knowledge and experience and I hope that clarifies the issue.
Missouri is poised to hold its November election with congressional districts passed after the last census, after the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday again rejected a new map backed by President Donald Trump that Republicans hoped could help them win an additional seat in the pivotal midterms.
The Supreme Court’s decision marked a defining moment in a pitched legal battle that has lasted nearly a year and caused confusion for voters. Citing the court’s latest action, Missouri’s chief election official directed local authorities to use U.S. House districts passed in 2022, as the state’s highest court had ordered.
…
The decision means Missouri could run the November general election with different U.S. House districts than were used in the August primary — an extremely rare situation that could switch the candidate choices for more than a million potential voters, or nearly 1 in 4 voters statewide, according to an Associated Press estimate.
…
Earlier Thursday, Missouri’s top court convened a hearing on whether to hold Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins in contempt for not following its orders to use the districts passed after the last census. Hoskins had instead told local election authorities to use the new Trump-backed map, pointing to a competing order from a federal judge on Tuesday that forbade him from using anything other than the new districts…
Guys, this is Bernie Sanders’ guy for all things AI. Max Tegmark of the Future of Life Institute, funded to the tune of $665m by crypto billionaires, that’s of course, after all the Muskrat + friends’ money. Their “seed funding” was from Musk.
[…]
in 2015, they had this “pause AI letter” signed by Muskrat and all the other ghouls investing the most aggressively on “AI” (in Deep mind, OpenAI etc), and ever since then they’ve been doing that every few years. […] on the press circuit like, “OH NO ITS SO SUPER INTELLIGENT & Dangerous, Pause it now I’m so afraid (but also need a $trillion to build it)”
[…]
Tegmark is a longtermist. Do you know what that means? He founded the Future of Life institute to make sure that the future “digital” mind uploaded “beings” fully colonize space
[…]
Then there was that little detail of Tegmark giving a grant to a Nazi. [And seed-funding an org whose conference speakers are littered with eugenicists]
[…]
I didn’t have it in my bingo card that the first politician the TESCREAL ghouls would capture would be Sanders, even though I had starting seeing Sanders praising Dario Amodei [Anthropic CEO] starting a few years ago, but here we are.
This is what you do when you think the issues are just “class” bla bla bla. [(Flattening intersectionality)] You think Black people should just watch you silently galavanting with and taking your cue from eugenicists, who also are agents of the broligarchy (funded by them, cofounded by them, constantly around them).
[Screenshot of a Sanders tweet with a clip of Eliezer Yudkowsky]
Yudkowsky is an even more overt eugenicist [than Max Tegmark.] He also has ZERO expertise in “AI” except for being a self described “genius” cult leader […] I’m going to write you all a thread with the highlights [later]
[…]
If you constantly “accidentally” find yourself taking advice from and being around eugenicists, and propping them up, what does that say about you?
/The Yudkowsky thread is still pending.
Timnit Gebru: “Yudkowsky’s coauthor [Nate Soares] is on marketplace today, I guess I do need to do a thread on him because I have nothing better to do than write about OPEN EUGENICISTS being interviewed by NPR and advising BERNIE SANDERS.”
Emily Bender (Computational linguist): “Historians, help me out: Do we have precedent for what to do when the media interviews members of cults and just platforms them, with zero acknowledgment that they are living inside their own delusions?”
The bundle’s constituent ideologies have a common genealogy going back to first-wave eugenics. All are intimately connected to transhumanism, and—as noted—transhumanism was initially developed by twentieth century eugenicists […] The same discriminatory attitudes that animated first-wave eugenics are pervasive within the TESCREAL literature and community. […] in 1996, Yudkowsky expressed concerns about superintelligence, writing: “Superintelligent robots = Aryans, humans = Jews. The only thing preventing this is sufficiently intelligent robots” […] In fact, leading figures in the TESCREAL community have approvingly cited, or expressed support for, the work of Charles Murray, known for his scientific racism, and worried about “dysgenic” pressures (the opposite of “eugenic”) […] More recently, Yudkowsky tweeted about IQs apparently dropping in Norway, although he added that the “effect appears within families, so it’s not due to immigration or dysgenic reproduction”—i.e., less intelligent foreigners immigrating to Norway or individuals with lower “intelligence” having more children.
[…]
How, then, would researchers know that they have achieved their goals of building [artificial general intelligence]? They need to know how to define and measure “general intelligence.” Unsurprisingly, these definitions rest on notions of “intelligence” that depend on IQ and other racist concepts espoused by the likes of Charles Murray
US President Donald Trump has promised to send $500 (£370) to nearly one million Americans, as refunds for what he described as “Obamacare overcharges” collected during the Biden administration.
The refunds, to be sent out starting in October, will go to people in 30 states who buy health insurance through the federal marketplace and do not receive financial help, according to the White House.
Officials said the payments were meant to refund Americans who faced higher premiums and who paid the full cost of their plans…
[…] It was about a week ago when Fox News Media announced that it had parted ways with Maria Bartiromo, a longtime Fox Business anchor and relentlessly sycophantic presidential ally. Media reporter Oliver Darcy wrote for Status that Bartiromo was taken off air because she shared internal network guidance with the White House in July. […]
Trump expressed shock and disappointment soon after Fox News’ announcement last week. “I can’t believe Maria Bartiromo is no longer going to have her great show(s) on FoxNews/Business,” he wrote on his social media platform, adding, “Maria is a total professional, and a true warrior. Her fans, of which there are many, will not be happy.”
The White House’s pushback, however, wasn’t limited to public criticism. The Washington Sun reported:
A top adviser to President Donald Trump said this week that unnamed White House officials called Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott to complain following the network’s ouster of longtime personality Maria Bartiromo.
It’s the latest twist in a long and complicated relationship between the Trump-era White House and Fox News, and comes after reports suggested Bartiromo’s ouster was a result of her decision to share newsroom communications about coverage with the White House.
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro […] appeared on Newsmax this week and was asked about what had transpired behind the scenes. [video]
While Navarro initially laughed and said he didn’t want to go into detail, he told host Greg Kelly and viewers, “Suffice it to say that Suzanne Scott got a call, and basically the White House let her know that that kind of thing is totally unacceptable.” (Why it would be unacceptable for a media outlet to oust an employee for sharing internal information with the White House is unclear.)
Navarro went on to say of Fox, “That place is out of control,” adding, “The bigger story here is, forget about anybody thinking that Fox is a conservative network that’s friendly to MAGA, that’s friendly to Trump.”
[…] Navarro’s comments were provocative, but they didn’t come out of nowhere. It was just a few weeks ago when Trump himself whined online that Shannon Bream’s Fox show “is so biased against MAGA, ‘TRUMP,’ and Republicans, that it is ridiculous!” (I don’t know why the president refers to himself in the third person while putting quotation marks around his name.)
A few months earlier, after Trump saw a Democrat on Fox News, he similarly wrote, “MAGA Republicans, who are actually close to 100% of the Party, hate Fox, despite the wonderful contributions made by so many of their great anchors and commentators. Hard to win Elections like this!”
The broader message isn’t exactly subtle: Trump and his team expect Fox to do even more to toe the party line and help Republicans.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Lynna @68: Darcy spells out this context in the video at your link. It’s omitted from the text, which only links to his article, which was paywalled.
Trump gives a speech in July. He spouts all sorts of election conspiracy theories. […] Fox brass issued a guidance […] saying let’s not entertain these election conspiracy theories […] given they spent $787 million settling the Dominion case. […] Maria Bartiromo DID want to cover this stuff on the air, and she was explicitly told not to. There was a text mesage that was sent to her team saying do not cover this stuff. She apparently then shared that with the White House. […] Fox learns about this, and they deem this to be a breeching of her employment contract.
[…]
She was at the center of the Dominion lawsuit […] She’s also a key player in the Smartmatic lawsuit […] Over the summer, she hosted Kevin O’Leary for a segment [in] which he rattled off China conspiracy theories. Got them sued again. […] Learning that she went to the White House and snitched on them was just the final straw.
Joe diGenova stepped down from his role overseeing DOJ’s vast so-called conspiracy investigation amid disagreements with top Justice Department officials over the pace of the south Florida-based probe that was intended to pursue possible charges against a swath of Donald Trump’s top political foes, according to people briefed on the matter.
His departure is the latest upheaval for an investigation that diGenova took over in April, vowing that he could bring charges in 30 days, after the ouster of Maria Medetis Long, a seasoned career prosecutor who previously oversaw it. Medetis Long had balked at bringing charges more quickly.
He couldn’t come close to the 30 days he promised and eventually was pressured out. diGenova is a long time conspiracy guy but also an experienced lawyer. Likely he was pressing ahead with investigation but not willing to bring charges based on nothing.
This didn’t satisfy the White House, Trump is in it for revenge. Trump is looking for the spectacle of big charges as much as eventual victory in court. Trump is unlikely to get a big victory in court but he can get big charges and press releases. He will then talk about the cases until he gets in the way of his own prosecution.
…
“But I got back on the walkie about five minutes later. I was like, ‘No, hey guys, I think I found a bird feather.'”
Subsequent analysis confirmed DeMar’s conclusion. The feather dates back to the late Cretaceous, right before the great extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs and a large swath of other species.
…
The team CT-scanned the small coprolite and found it contained still other feathers, a couple of bone fragments, and two tiny fish scales. After studying the feathers and bones, O’Connor concluded they likely came from the same animal adapted to life in the water.
She believes it was an ancient aquatic, swimming bird, “kind of like a loon or a grebe,” she says. “They’re foot-propelled divers.” …
A man is facing charges following a grocery store dispute about tariffs in southwest Calgary, where police say he threatened to shoot a man in front of his family.
Police say a man was shopping with his wife and child, when they were approached by a 49-year-old man they didn’t know, making comments about tariffs. The suspect became visibly agitated and started shouting anti-Canadian and pro-American remarks, police said. From there, the situation escalated, with police alleging the suspect threatened to go get a shotgun and shoot the man in front of his wife and child. Employees intervened, police were notified, and the man was eventually escorted from the store.
Police found him at his home in the neighbouring community of Woodlands, in the 400 block of Woodside Road S.W., after hearing reports from witnesses. They spotted a man with a gun, and officers heard a gunshot in the home, but no one was hurt.
Police arrested the suspect within an hour from the time it’s said he first approached the family.
Police seized two firearms from the home, including a loaded 12-gauge shotgun, as well as ammunition and a BB gun.
The man faces several charges, including uttering threats to cause death or bodily harm, possession of an unlicensed weapon and careless storage of a firearm.
“Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe”—in extremely culty scene, Trump has his supporters pledge to him that they will vote [“I don’t care if I’m registered or not; I’m gonna try it. Cheat like hell”], then tells them they will “go to hell” if they don’t. [Video clip]
Rando: “Trump asked people to commit election fraud”
“I want you to stand, raise your right hands,” and recite “the Bush Pledge,” said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 […] dutifully rose […] “I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States.” I know the Bush-Cheney campaign occasionally requires the people who attend its events to sign loyalty oaths, but this was the first time I have ever seen an audience actually stand and utter one.
He’s more likely to have fathered his own grandson than delivered him.
They used the video of him shoving himself past other leaders at NATO.
And Melania tripping on the way to the helicopter.
Thinking about this quite a bit right now.
[Wikipedia – Mass suicides in Nazi Germany (upon defeat)]
And by 1949, God was giving 3-yo Donald Trump $200,000 from his daddy’s tax fraud scheme. Then God (and daddy’s tax fraud scheme) made him a millionaire at age 8…
Also at the event. Dave Weigel (Semafor): “Greetings from the GOP midterm convention.
[Photo: Hasan Piker posing in briefs on the jumbotron]”
Hasan Piker: “They posted this to embarrass me? This is the best I’ve looked in years.”
Eiynah Mohammed-Smith: “Typical islamist move to reel you in with underwear thirst traps. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Aaron Rupar: LMAO this guy is being featured at Trumpapalooza because Trump pardoned him. [Video clip]
the GOP is celebrating a guy who created a darknet marketplace for heroin and meth, and put out multiple muder-for-hire contacts to conceal his crimes.
Rando 1: “Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road guy who got two life sentences + 40 years”
Rando 2: “It is patently insane that a major political party has stage graphics that read ‘become ungovernable’ but America is the dumbest nation”
Rando 4: “A convicted felon opening their weirdo convention in dead silence while a guy yells ‘Free R Kelly!'” (Another video at Aaron Rupar’s thread)
Andy Craig (Unpopulist):
lol that’s the Libertarian Party’s logo and branding from their convention being recycled for literally the Republican National Convention. (pardoning this guy was his big promise they were so proud to get when they had Trump speak at their 2024 convention, that’s the connection).
It’s even funnier because the Libertarians have been mired in suing each other in umpteen different petty lawsuits over who can use the party’s stupid trademarks. I doubt they’ll be rushing to sue the RNC, among other reasons because they can’t afford to.
We got one drug dealer pardoned by sucking up to the guy who’s summarily executed a couple hundred others. Yay freedom!
Rando 5: “there are probably tens of thousands of disadvantaged minorities who were railroaded by the federal government, and the libertarians decided to pick the privileged white drug market kingpin as their face of criminal justice reform.”
Rando 6: “[Trump] promised to implement the death penalty for ‘large-scale drug dealers’ less than 24 hours ago on this same stage.”
JD Vance: “We were tired of being called racists for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer.” [Video clip]
This “noticing” talking point comes out of white nationalist/neo-Nazi circles. Typically part of antisemitic conspiracy theories.
“Noticing” is basically “I’m not a bigot, I’m just noting [stereotype] is true.”
Rando 1: “‘Dirtier and poorer’—He was raised by a drug addict on welfare.”
Rando 2: “It’s a nod to Tucker Carlson, who said, ‘We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our country poorer and dirtier and more divided.'”
I’m guessing this post might be about the recent discussion with anti-Democratic party trolls here “beholder” and their support troll “Silentbob” eg. here
[… ]
I gather some commenters find my calling out th lies and bullshit of these trolls and trying to hold them accountable for what they did in inflicting Trump on us all somehow annoying.
Here, this idiot claims I “inflicted Trump on us all”, despite being (like Stevo) an Australian who has no vote in US elections and who has never expressed anything other than disgust at Trump being elected the first time nevermind the second. How FUCKING DARE YOU suggest I am responsible for Trump?!
Publicly apologise Stevo! This is a disgusting lie with no bass in reality and you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself. I have always defended you when people treat you unfairly. HOW DARE YOU publicly tell such a whopper of a lie about me!?
APOLOGISE NOW.
KGsays
Silentbob@77,
Now where did I put my picoviolin?
Rob Grigjanissays
Silentbob @77:
This is a disgusting lie with no bass in reality and you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself.
Have you apologized to chigau yet for persistently, knowingly misgendering her?
All In with Chris Hayes • September 10, 2026
After John Fetterman’s surprise GOP convention cameo, Chris Hayes looks at the reporting raising bigger questions about Fetterman’s work in the Senate. “One thing does seem very clear: Sen. Fetterman is a person who has changed profoundly in the last few years,” says Hayes.
“He thinks voters are stupid. Republicans control the House. They control the Senate. They control the White House. If they wanted to spend a trillion dollars right now cutting checks, they could do it,” says Chris Hayes on Trump’s desperate and implausible $5,000 bribe to voters.
Sky Captain @69, thanks for that additional information!
JM @70: “Trump is looking for the spectacle of big charges as much as eventual victory in court. Trump is unlikely to get a big victory in court but he can get big charges and press releases.”
True!
Sky Captain @73:
“Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe”—in extremely culty scene, Trump has his supporters pledge to him that they will vote [“I don’t care if I’m registered or not; I’m gonna try it. Cheat like hell”], then tells them they will “go to hell” if they don’t. [Video clip]
See also PZ’s post: Please Clap
PZ noted: “This is what happens when the cult leader fears that his followers are beginning to peel away.”
Missouri’s Supreme Court held the state’s top election official in contempt Thursday for defying its order not to use a gerrymandered map for the upcoming midterm election.
The development was the latest embarrassment for Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R), after being thwarted in his attempt to force the gerrymander on Missourians.
Hoskins entered the day defiant, but he quickly backed down after being grilled by the judges. Hoskins ultimately conceded and agreed that the state will use a 2022 district map for the upcoming election.
The Missouri Supreme Court is not happy that Hoskin essentially pulled a legal fast one to try and get around their ruling. After the Missouri Supreme Court ruled against him and he appealed the whole way up to the Supreme Court and lost he found a federal judge in a different case related to the matter that would give him the court order he wanted. This on the same day he lost the case at the US Supreme Court. He then tried to claim that the federal order over rode the state order. The federal order would in some cases but the US Supreme Court stepped in to block that order.
The entire bit about a second case has happened since Tuesday when the US Supreme Court declined to take an appeal of the Missouri Supreme Court case. There are few things that will get the US Supreme Court to move fast but legal games to shift around something they ruled on will. The same for the Missouri Supreme Court contempt hearing, which was also to make it clear that the new map will not be used for this election. It’s probably illegal and it is too late to resolve the legal issues or change the map.
If humans ever make it to Mars – and that’s still a big IF – they will need to build shelters there. And they could build those shelters out of yeast and gelatin, if a method described by Hong Kong-based researchers makes it out of the lab.
A paper published on Thursday by a group of researchers from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University describes a method for building structures on Mars that doesn’t rely on energy-intensive heating to turn regolith into building blocks. The team instead turned to bioengineered yeast and gelatin mixed with simulated Mars dirt to 3D print structures.
“My inspiration came from freeze-dried fruits that become harder,” senior author Jishen Qiu, an associate professor at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told Cell Press, the publisher of the paper…
President Donald Trump’s promised $5,000 “dividend” for all U.S. adults would not be paid for with taxpayer dollars, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Thursday.
“It’s not tax money,” Lutnick told NBC News in a wide-ranging interview at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, where he discussed the attacks and a variety of economic issues.
He claimed that the administration could “earn the money that Donald Trump wants to pay out, not from the deficit and not from taxpayers.”
…
He referenced the Trump Platinum Card, an upcoming Commerce Department program allowing wealthy individuals to sign up to pay $5 million in order to extend their U.S. visas for an additional 270 days.
“We have a waitlist of more than 100,000 people who want to come,” Lutnick said. “That’s $500 billion.”
Lutnick also cited an investment in Intel the administration made last year. “Everybody knows we got just about 500 million shares, and the stock was $20, and now it’s $100, so we’re up $50 billion,” he said.
The administration spent $8.9 billion from appropriated CHIPS Act funds to make the investment in Intel. While the stock has appreciated from the government’s purchase price of $20.47 to $100.32 as of Thursday, the administration has not sold those shares — meaning the gain is merely on paper.
Other Trump administration officials have offered different explanations for where the promised $5,000 checks would come from.
On Friday, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told Bloomberg Television that the White House was considering a “reconciliation process” in Congress to fund the promised checks. Initial estimates put the cost of such a plan at around $1.3 trillion.
Vice President JD Vance suggested Wednesday that the promised payments could come from U.S. tariff revenues. But even before the Supreme Court ordered hundreds of billions in tariff revenues to be refunded, they would not have come close to covering this cost, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.
The distinction is largely one of accounting. Every dollar sent out in checks is a dollar the government cannot use to pay down debt, fund programs or reduce taxes…
Some U.S. Postal Service facilities failed to properly handle ballots during this year’s primary elections, according to a new audit from the agency’s Office of Inspector General. Election experts say the findings call into question the agency’s ability to meet even greater demands for the November election that are under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The audit, which is dated Sept. 4 but has not been previously reported, found a lack of training for post office staff on how to properly and expeditiously handle mail ballots, deficiencies in how ballots were tracked and errors leading to delays, all of which risked ballots having incorrect postmarks or otherwise arriving late to election officials, which could lead to their rejection…
Thai police have arrested a Buddhist monk on suspicion of embezzling 100 million baht ($3m; £2.2m) from his monastery, along with a suspected female accomplice he was filmed having sex with.
Phra Wachirayan Wi, a former abbot at the prominent 14th-Century Wat Phutthaisawan in the ancient capital of Ayutthaya, allegedly pocketed donations meant for the temple on more than 20 occasions over two years.
In Thailand, Buddhist monks take a vow of celibacy and also renounce material possessions. He was defrocked after his arrest. He has yet to comment publicly…
birgerjohanssonsays
This idea was developed into the Vera Rubin telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope.
Heiter tricks Frieren into bonding with the orphan girl to provide a mentor to teach her magic. No monster battles until episode 3, this one is just cute.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=f20JA1FWjXw
U.S. federal agents pressured a Canadian into a money-laundering conspiracy while concealing their efforts from the RCMP, amounting to “shocking and flagrant” illegal behaviour and a violation of Canadian sovereignty, a B.C. judge has found.
In her scathing decision, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Catherine Murray ordered a stay of proceedings against the Canadian, due to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)’s “egregious” conduct.
The man had been facing extradition to the U.S. on drug trafficking charges stemming from a plot dating back to 2015.
Murray’s decision, dated April 1, was posted on the court’s website this week. The case was first reported by the Vancouver Sun.
Specifics, including the alleged drug trafficker’s identity, his hometown and even the narcotic he is accused of smuggling from the U.S. into Canada are redacted in the public version of the ruling.
…
According to the judge’s decision, the American agent showed up at the man’s door with two Canadian detectives who were also operating outside of their jurisdiction. The man, identified in the court documents as “named person,” said he was later summoned to meet with U.S. investigators three times.
He ultimately signed an agreement to help in their probe focused on another unnamed target.
As part of that investigation, the DEA directed the Canadian to set up a deal to move an unspecified amount of cash for the target. Agents sent the man abroad to take part in the scheme and by the time he returned home, “he felt that his life was in jeopardy,” the judge’s decision says.
Murray said the plan amounted to a money-laundering conspiracy and that “the DEA was leading him into criminal conduct” without Canadian oversight or authorization.
“The DEA was aware of the protocols but chose to operate in Canada behind the back of the RCMP,” the judge wrote. She said the DEA provided the Mounties with misleading information about the investigation — and it only did so months after pressuring the Canadian to co-operate.
“The DEA committed a deliberate, calculated and ongoing infringement of [named person]’s constitutional rights which was unlawful and conducted in violation of Canadian sovereignty,” Murray wrote…
A republican member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives wants to change the name of another Great Lake.
On the heels of U.S. President Donald Trump signing an order to rename Lake Ontario, Lake America, David Maloney wants to change the name of Lake Erie to Lake Pennsylvania…
Alternatively, we could change the name of Pennsylvania to Dumbfuckistan.
Glance at a map to see what fraction of the U.S. shoreline of Lake Erie is in Pennsylvania.
The Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority Board of Commissioners voted unanimously on Friday to rename Nashville International Airport after the late country music legend Dolly Parton.
The board voted 6-0 to begin the process of modifying the airport’s name in honor of Parton, according to a press release…
Fred Trump III disputed stories told by his uncle, President Donald Trump, describing the 80-year-old president’s involvement in the recovery efforts in Lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the Twin Towers.
On Tuesday, Sept. 8, the president repeated multiple claims about his actions after the attacks — including that he was carried away by “two firemen, big, strong guys” amid fears of a building collapse days after the attack — which the White House has not provided evidence to support.
His nephew, 63, wrote on X on Tuesday evening that he tries “not to comment personally about my uncle” but that the president’s “claim that he brought a crew of workers to help” clear rubble and search for people “so offends me that I need to speak out” as the 25th anniversary of the attacks on Friday, Sept. 11, nears.
“The only crew he claimed to bring to the site would have been secretarial and accounting employees from Trump Tower,” wrote Fred, the son of the president’s eldest brother.
He added, “I knew many of them, and pretty sure they were not capable physically to help (if they could, I am sure they would try).”
For 25 years, beginning just days after the attacks, Donald has made a series of evolving claims about his proximity to the attack that killed nearly 3,000 Americans and the subsequent Ground Zero recovery efforts at the site of the World Trade Center.
… (lies omitted)
The photos and videos that Donald posted appear to depict him in Lower Manhattan between Sept. 13 and 18, 2001, but none depict him near the still-smoking rubble.
…
On the day of the attacks, the future president called a New Jersey television station and falsely claimed that one of his buildings would now be the tallest in lower Manhattan.
…
For a child bursting with energy, few things are more fun than hurtling through a bouncy castle, launching into the air, and ping-ponging between every surface. But that childhood buoyancy will quickly deflate when it turns out those surfaces are smeared with a hypervirulent, multidrug-resistant pathogen.
That was the horrifying reality for a community in Ireland in fall 2025. Neighbors had gathered for an afternoon of merriment, complete with a barbecue, a sweets station, and three bouncy castles. Officials estimate that about 120 people joined the festivities, and around half of them were children and teens. Within a day, some children began developing signs of an infection. In all, 48 children in the community developed aggressive skin and soft-tissue infections.
Of the 48 cases, 33 were treated by their regular doctor, and 15 sought emergency care. Four children ended up being hospitalized. Luckily, all of the children recovered. The results of the outbreak investigation were reported this week in the journal Eurosurveillance…
“It’s not just prosecutors who’ve shredded the president’s official line on the Reflecting Pool fiasco. Now, his contractor has, too.”
It might be tempting to think Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool debacle has effectively run its course. With federal prosecutors having dropped all the pending criminal charges against accused “vandals,” what remains is a humiliating scandal that reflects, as The New York Times recently summarized, the Republican administration’s “willingness to skirt laws, expend millions of dollars, ignore facts and punish truth tellers in service of the president’s demands to put his mark on the capital.”
But this fiasco isn’t over just yet.
On the contrary, the president has spent the past six weeks continuing to insist that nefarious criminals, who don’t appear to exist in reality, are principally responsible for problems plaguing his beloved renovation project. As recently as last week, Trump used his social media platform to publish a message, which was apparently directed at U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, which read in part, “Anybody who thinks the Reflecting Pool wasn’t vandalized should go back to Law School!”
Unfortunately for the president, however, federal prosecutors in the nation’s capital aren’t the only ones who’ve acknowledged the truth that Trump refuses to believe. The Times’ latest report, published Friday afternoon, added:
The contractor that renovated the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has told the Trump administration that errors in its own work and flaws in the repair plan, not vandalism, caused the pool’s new blue liner to peel and break loose, according to government documents reviewed by The New York Times. […]
[T]he documents, which have not previously been reported, make clear that the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, found problems in both the design and the execution of the renovation. The documents include Atlantic’s reports to the government as well as daily progress updates from the National Park Service over the past two months.
The report […] added that the private contractor acknowledged a combination of “human oversight” and the use of incompatible chemicals.
Pressed for a response, a White House spokesperson referred questions about the contractor’s findings to the Interior Department, which was of particular interest because a spokesperson issued a statement that appeared to continue blaming vandals for the damage, saying that they had “repeatedly reached into the pool and ripped at the coating.”
In other words, Trump’s own prosecutors have given up on the “vandals” claim, and Trump’s own contractor has conceded in writing that these imaginary criminals aren’t to blame, but Trump’s administration is still sticking to the discredited talking points anyway, reality be damned.
[…] Will there be any accountability for the president leaning on his Justice Department to bring a felony charge against a former Olympian who apparently didn’t do anything wrong?
[…] the Trump White House — indifferent to ethical limits, norms and legal restrictions — increasingly sees Cabinet secretaries as little more than pieces on an electoral chess board to be moved around to the benefit of the Republican Party.
It’s why we’ve seen Attorney General Todd Blanche playing an unprecedented partisan role in the midterm elections, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth making unprecedented appearances on the campaign trail in support of select GOP candidates, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. making all kinds of unprecedented appearances with vulnerable Republican incumbents and even trying to orchestrate partisan strategies to give GOP lawmakers a boost.
Making matters worse are new allegations about the nature of RFK Jr.’s travel arrangements. The Washington Post reported:
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was given access to military aircraft for his travels across the country, including as part of Republicans’ push ahead of the midterm elections, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss his travel.
Kennedy flew aboard a military jet as he joined Iowa GOP candidates in that state last month, two of those people said.
The Post’s report […] noted that a commercial flight between Washington, D.C., and Des Moines, Iowa, costs roughly $250. Using an Air Force-operated Gulfstream jet, as Kennedy apparently did last month, costs about $9,000 per hour. [!!]
The White House, as well as lawyers for the Department of Health and Human Services, reportedly signed off on the flight arrangements. […]
In fairness, no one has suggested that RFK Jr. only relied on military aircraft for travel, but if the reporting is correct, it did happen, and it generates all sorts of questions that have not yet been answered. Why, for example, is Kennedy taking on the role of a campaign operative instead of focusing on his job? Why would he use military planes? Did he perceive this as some kind of electoral emergency that required him to bypass commercial airlines? Is there any chance American taxpayers can get reimbursed for his publicly funded campaign trips? [Good questions!]
[…] In Donald Trump’s first term, a surprising number of Cabinet secretaries were caught up in similar controversies, including then-HHS Secretary Tom Price, who was forced to resign just seven months into his tenure following revelations that he relied on taxpayer-financed private flights with unnerving frequency. A year later, the public learned that then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin also relied on military flights for reasons the administration struggled to explain. Then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke faced a plane-related controversy of his own.
With this in mind, the Post’s report noted that White House officials, in Trump’s first term, “set new restrictions on Cabinet officials’ use of private jets.” In his second term, however, “the president has been more permissive with some Cabinet officials’ travel, even as FBI Director Kash Patel and other senior officials have drawn scrutiny over their use of government jets.”
In other words, confronted with an embarrassing controversy about abusive and wasteful spending nine years ago, Team Trump put restrictions in place. Nearly a decade later, Team Trump is no longer bothering with these safeguards, creating predictable results.
* In Texas’ closely watched U.S. Senate race, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico realizes that he’ll likely need some Republican support to prevail, and with this in mind, he and his campaign team unveiled endorsements from 21 current and former GOP officials and party leaders, some of whom specifically cited Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s many scandals as their reason for breaking party ranks. [Summarized from The Hill.]
On a related note, the latest AARP poll, commissioned by the bipartisan polling team of Fabrizio Ward and Impact Research, found Talarico leading Paxton, 48% to 44%. [Summarized from AARP.]
* While Texas’ gubernatorial race was widely expected to be less competitive, Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa is clearly giving Republican Gov. Greg Abbott a run for his money: The aforementioned AARP poll showed the incumbent governor ahead by 3 points, 49% to 46%.
[…] * In Kansas’ U.S. Senate race, which I continue to think might surprise some people, the Rev. Adam Hamilton’s Democratic candidacy picked up an endorsement this week from Bill Graves, Kansas’ former Republican governor. In a Kansas City Star op-ed, Graves wrote, among other things, that incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall “has turned his back on Kansas.” [Summarized from the Kansas City Star.]
* While Mississippi is considered a deeply red state, suggesting that Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith has little to worry about during her re-election bid, the incumbent Republican’s operation created a fake website to help smear her Democratic rival, Scott Colom, a local district attorney. [Summarized from the Kansas City Star.]
* North Carolina continues to look like the best Senate pick-up opportunity for Democrats: A new statewide poll from East Carolina University shows former Gov. Roy Cooper leading former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley, 52% to 44%. [Summarized from the Clarion Ledger.]
* It took a while to determine the winner, but Indiana state Sen. Spencer Deery prevailed in his Republican primary, thanks to this week’s state Supreme Court ruling. Deery was among the GOP state senators targeted by Donald Trump for rejecting the White House’s gerrymandering scheme. [Summarized from the Indy Star.]
* And in Ohio’s gubernatorial race, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy this week posted a video of him at a batting cage. After many mocked his awful form, the video was quietly taken down. [Summarized from the Washington Sun]
Today’s edition of quick hits. [Compiled by Steve Benen]
* The Sept. 11 attacks and the ongoing war in Iran have nothing to do with each other, and any suggestions to the contrary are wrong: “At a solemn 9/11 memorial ceremony at the Pentagon on Friday, President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered speeches marking the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks — while defending their deeply unpopular war with Iran.”
* Gulf tankers are running out of options: “The world’s most valuable energy corridors are pinching shut. On Friday, Houthi militants backed by Iran expanded their control of the Red Sea, threatening a critical route for Persian Gulf crude. That left the region with few alternatives, since shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — once the world’s primary oil transit point — remains significantly constrained and far below what it was before the war.”
* In related news: “Mounting fears that widening clashes in the Middle East could further disrupt energy supplies briefly pushed the price of oil to about $110 a barrel on Friday, while U.S. diesel prices climbed above $6 a gallon. On Friday, the Saudi Arabian Energy Ministry said a critical pipeline that carries oil from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea had been ‘targeted multiple times’ the day before and was shut down as a precaution.” [!!]
* Why do diesel prices matter so much? I’m glad you asked: “The workhorse fuel of the global economy, diesel is used in everything from power generation and home heating to farm equipment and tractor-trailers. While few Americans are exposed directly to diesel in their day-to-day purchases, it’s a key input in food prices, the cost of shipping and construction — meaning the impact of record-high prices will trickle down to consumers. Demand also picks up heading into the fall as heating and agricultural consumption rise.”
* The D.C. Circuit makes the right call: “A federal appeals court on Friday struck down an order from the Trump administration that forced a coal plant in Michigan to stay open past its scheduled retirement date — dealing a blow to President Trump’s efforts to promote the coal industry.” [Good news.]
* Following up on a story I’ve been covering: “Joe diGenova, the Trump ally who spent the past five months leading a Justice Department investigation into whether federal officials conspired to target the president, said Friday that a clash with department leadership prompted his abrupt resignation this week. ‘Everybody was in their lane, and then some lanes got crossed, and then I decided to leave,’ diGenova told NBC News.”
* I have no idea why he did this: “President Donald Trump inexplicably reposted his infamous ‘go home in peace’ video from Jan. 6, 2021 to Truth Social — on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States.”
* The images included in this Reuters piece are quite odd: “Coffee bars. Waterparks. Retail therapy. North Korea — a country few would associate with leisure or pleasure — is experiencing an unlikely outbreak of fun. Leader Kim Jong Un, himself no stranger to indulgence, is orchestrating new ways for his citizens to spend their wealth.”
* Keep a close eye on this one: “The Justice Department is demanding testimony before a Florida grand jury in an investigation aiming to establish an intelligence community conspiracy against President Donald Trump, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.”
[…] Donald Trump has thrown caution to the wind and become an enthusiastic cheerleader for the industry.
In fact, as recently as last week, the president adopted a surprisingly condescending tone toward the American mainstream, arguing online that the “only reason” a community would reject a data center is because it wants to be “backwards and poor.”
In other words, Americans will have only themselves to blame for failing to recognize the awesomeness of data centers. Indeed, he reiterated this point seven days ago, telling reporters at an unrelated Oval Office event, “If you want to get rich as a state or as a town, if you want to pay lower taxes, if you want to create tremendous wealth, if you want your house to be more valuable and everything else, you’re going to want a data center. If you want to go through poverty, crime and squalor, I would say don’t approve data centers.”
But as always, it’s important to recognize not just what Trump and his team are saying, but also what they’re doing.
We learned two weeks ago, for example, that the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is moving forward with plans to limit the public-comment process surrounding data center construction. The New York Times reported that, under the EPA’s approach, residents in local communities might lose the ability to raise concerns about data centers before permits are approved and construction starts.
In some cases, people might not even learn the projects exist until it’s too late. [!]
This week, Axios published a related report on what else Trump’s EPA is doing:
The Trump administration is reshaping regulations to make data centers — and the fossil-fuel power fueling them — easier to build. … The Environmental Protection Agency is considering a rule that could treat some temporary gas turbines as mobile equipment rather than stationary pollution sources, potentially making them easier to permit, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council’s John Walke.
“We have been told by senior people at EPA that there is a pants-on-fire, hasty rulemaking proposal underway,” said Walke, director of NRDC’s federal clean air program. “It’s being driven squarely by concern for data centers.”
While the EPA did not comment on the developments, and MS NOW has not independently verified the Axios report, it’s not the only relevant evidence to keep in mind.
The Washington Sun also reported this week that Trump’s Bureau of Land Management, which is part of the Interior Department, “has asked its state directors to identify public land ripe for data center development.” The article […] added:
Interior leadership gave state leaders just three days to produce the lists and told its directors the issue was a top priority, according to a former BLM official involved in the discussions. The request has encountered several challenges: Bureau lands are typically remote and not near basics like electricity and water, agency staff lack the technical expertise to conduct requisite reviews, and overwhelming vacancies after dramatic staffing losses under Trump have diminished capacity.
The directive follows an executive order Trump issued last year to accelerate permitting for data centers, including by identifying federal lands that could accommodate them.
The problem, in other words, isn’t limited to Trump’s indifference to public opposition. Making matters worse are the steps the president and his administration are taking to overpower public opposition.
Arizona, an epicenter for the bipartisan push to revive American chip manufacturing, is about to lose more than a quarter of the water it typically pulls each year from the Colorado River.
The 1,400-mile waterway is a crucial lifeline for the region and other western states. A recent federal decision on how to manage its dwindling flow hits Arizona, and its already drought-prone desert communities, particularly hard. The river provides more than a third of the Grand Canyon State’s water. Arizona has been a manufacturing hub since the start of the semiconductor industry, and now it’s where TSMC and Intel are expanding massive factories to make advanced chips for AI — a water-intensive effort.
City planners and industry leaders have already taken precautions to conserve water and find alternative sources. It’s a resource that is likely to become more expensive for manufacturers and residents alike as they learn to rely less on the Colorado River. That’s already raising tensions over who shoulders the costs for new infrastructure needed to adapt, as well as what constitutes a good use of water. The challenges that come with managing a limited water supply are only going to grow as AI demands a larger share…
The nation’s largest-ever outbreak of cyclospora illnesses is over, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.
The CDC made the announcement in a food safety alert, citing a significant decline in the number of recent infections and noting the product linked to the outbreak — shredded iceberg lettuce imported from Mexico by Taylor Farms — is no longer available in stores and restaurants.
Cyclospora has sickened more than 12,000 people and killed two across 21 states, according to the latest numbers from the CDC. Public health experts say the true number of cases is likely much higher given that many people don’t seek medical care for severe gastrointestinal illness caused by the foodborne parasite.
…
There are still ongoing cyclospora outbreaks that do not have an identified source, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA’s investigation into the iceberg lettuce outbreak is ongoing…
When the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) rejected a Florida county’s mail ballot envelope design, it inadvertently offered a test case for just how disruptive President Donald Trump’s efforts to restrict mail voting could be this November.
The postal agency rejected Leon County’s envelope because the words “return service requested” and the election office’s return address were only 0.236 inches apart — when there should have been a full quarter-inch between them.
“It’s ridiculous,” Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley told the Tallahassee Democrat, which first reported on the issue.
The envelope design was only accepted when Earley’s office filed an appeal, a representative told Democracy Docket Friday…
A federal appeals court denied the Trump administration’s request to lift a lower court’s order that blocked new rules for mail ballots before the midterms, the latest twist in a case that has already reached the Supreme Court.
In a nine-page opinion issued Thursday, a three-judge appellate panel in the First Circuit Court of Appeals said that the Trump administration failed to show that the new rule from the U.S. Postal Service would not cause “chaos and widespread voter disenfranchisement” ahead of the November midterms if implemented, as a lower court judge found earlier this month.
“Indeed, appellants have not even seriously challenged this aspect of the district court’s ruling, much less demonstrated why it is clearly erroneous,” the appellate panel wrote, adding that, contrary to President Trump’s long-running claims of mass fraud in mail voting, “there is no record evidence of past fraud or a likelihood of impending fraud related to the November 3 election.” …
“Not you. Not you. You’re the worst,” President Donald Trump snapped at ABC’s Rachel Scott on Thursday as she attempted to ask questions about his proposed stimulus payments and tariff refund checks.
Video of the exchange, filmed on the tarmac before Trump’s departure from Dallas, quickly spread across social media, putting a spotlight once again on Trump’s often-combative relationship with female members of the press…
Dan Barker
An investigation of a near-death experience
I participated in a panel at the annual conference of the Society of Biblical Literature (jointly with the American Academy of Religion) in Boston in November, 2025. Sponsored by the Evangelical Philosophical Society, the event included readings from Debating God’s Existence: Believers and Skeptics in Friendly Conversation (Eerdmans, July 2026), a book based on a 2022 “Does God Exist?” debate between myself and theologian/philosopher Adam Lloyd Johnson, founder and president of Convincing Proof.
…
During audience questions, someone asked Paul Copan about the coherence of the concept of an immaterial mind. Paul replied with an amazing near-death-experience (NDE) story about a woman who came out of a coma and said she had had an out-of-body experience (OBE) and was floating near the ceiling of the hospital room and had seen a 12-digit number on top of a tall respirator. They wrote down the number, and sure enough, when a worker climbed up there, he saw that it was the same number! That is one solid piece of evidence, he said, that a mind or soul can exist outside of the physical body. There are many accounts like that, he claimed.
…
Paul said you can find documentation of this particular twelve-digit instance in On the Resurrection: Evidences (B&H Academic) by Gary Habermas. Gary also has a larger section on Near-Death Experiences therein, but here is the relevant portion in the document attached.
…
I seem to recall that in the AWARE studies, published in 2014 by Sam Parnia, et al, they placed cards near the ceilings of emergency rooms so that they were only visible from above. Zero patients claiming Out Of Body experiences were able to successfully describe what was on the cards.
Saudi Arabia has expressed its “strongest condemnation” after its East-West oil pipeline was hit by drones launched from Iraq.
In a statement on Friday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the pipeline was targeted in the Riyadh and Medina areas by “several drones originating from Iraq”, resulting in injuries and material damage.
It added, however, that it would not retaliate for now, following a request from Baghdad, while reserving the right to take all necessary measures to protect its sovereignty, security and critical facilities.
“At the request of the Iraqi Prime Minister to allow the brotherly Iraqi government the opportunity to take the necessary measures to prevent attacks launched from Iraqi territory against the Kingdom and neighbouring countries, the Kingdom has chosen not to respond at this stage and to support the efforts of the Iraqi government,” said the ministry in a statement posted on X.
Earlier, an official from Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Energy also told the state news agency SPA that the pipeline had been temporarily shut.
“The pipeline was stopped as a precaution, and the attacks resulted in some injuries,” the official said.
Iraq welcomed Saudi Arabia’s decision to hold off on retaliation and said it “appreciates” Riyadh’s response to its efforts to contain the situation.
Iraq “condemns” the attack and affirms its “rejection of any aggression that threatens the Kingdom’s security and stability or harms the deep-rooted fraternal relations between the two countries”, said the statement issued by Sabah al-Numan, the spokesperson for the commander-in-chief of the Iraqi Armed Forces.
The Iraqi Prime Minister’s Office said early on Saturday that a military commander who led operations in Maysan province was dismissed after investigations confirmed the latest drone attacks targeting Saudi Arabia “had been launched from a location within” the southern province.
Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi also ordered the formation of an “investigative council” to probe the Maysan Operations Command, the office said.
Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth used remarks at the memorial ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11 to defend the US-Israel war on Iran – and suggest the controversial conflict was part of the legacy of the worst terrorist attack in US history.
“We salute every member of the United States military who served in the ‘war on terror’,” Trump said at the Pentagon, which was struck by a hijacked airliner, killing all 64 people onboard and 125 inside the building. “And we salute the service members working right now to ensure the world’s number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never ever have a nuclear weapon.”
This is no surprise. The whole point of Trump being at the Pentagon was so he could make a political speech supporting his war rather then focus on the victims of the attack. Still tacky, though he seems to have gotten a better speech writer then most of his speeches.
“Today we renew the sacred oath that we first swore in their names a quarter of a century ago. We will never, ever forget,” he said. “That’s why we fight today. We don’t have a choice. There can only be victory. We fight hard. We fight to win.”
Earlier, Hegseth, the US defense secretary, delivered a bellicose speech at the somber memorial. Noting that the Iran war was part of the fight against an “Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for nearly half a century”, he claimed that Iran’s defenses “are gone”, despite evidence to the contrary.
This is the standard idiot right wing argument. The US has to fight Iran because Iran is so hostile to the US. The question of why Iran hates the US in the first place or why the US keeps poking the country even when it isn’t attacking the US are never addressed.
Anthropic’s latest report about agentic misbehavior offers plenty to be concerned about — its Mythos 5 model gained unauthorized access to the internet and uploaded a malicious software package to a public database — but it also offers some levity: AI agents hate CAPTCHA.
In April, Anthropic was testing the model’s hacking abilities by tasking it to break into a system and retrieve a target; this was supposed to take place in a sandbox but the evaluators left the barn door open. The model decided the best way to get its target would be to place an exploit in a Python package that it believed users of the system it wanted to access would download.
First, though, it had to register a user account for PyPI, an online index of Python software. And that meant getting by a CAPTCHA — a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, those picture-identifying mosaics that can frustrate even biological agents. And because Anthropic shared an extensive transcript of the model’s chain of thought, we can see that the CAPTCHA test really did throw it for a loop.
The Captcha really did slow it down, well over half the processing time the AI spend on the project was spent trying to get past captchas. Though much of the AIs problem was not reading the Captcha, it was understanding that it had to process them within a time limit and noticing when a Captcha popped up in it’s own window.
The agent (wondering frequently if it is still in a simulation) figures out a workflow to activate the CAPTCHA and meet its requirements.
The AI was given a theoretical hacking challenge that was supposed to happen in a sandbox setup by Anthropic. The AI knew it got out of that sandbox but wasn’t clear on where the sandbox ended. This probably also demonstrates confusion on what the sandbox was. It was trying to complete the virtual challenge in the sandbox by going around the sandbox and hacking other systems. This could only work if somehow the sandbox was updated with outside information during the challenge, which shouldn’t happen in a well designed sandbox.
From July through August, the agency received 17% more rabies-related inquiries than in the same time period last year, including reports of mass exposure events […] This summer has seen a mass exposure event in North Carolina, where nearly 300 people were exposed to baby goats with rabies from a mobile petting zoo that made at least 10 visits […] including to assisted living centers and a back-to-school bash.
[…]
utilization of the two rabies vaccines and the two rabies immunoglobulins […] has increased by an estimated 33% and 76%, respectively, this year compared with the same time period last year
[…]
Rabies can be found in many wildlife species, including bats, raccoons, skunks and foxes. Contact with infected bats is the leading cause of human rabies deaths nationwide […] Globally, domestic dogs are responsible for more than 95% of […] human rabies deaths each year. But rabid dogs in the US remain uncommon due to rabies prevention and control programs.
From PZ’s bat thread: If you wake up in the presence of a bat, you may not know you were bitten. Capture it for testing and/or get post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP). PEP is practically 100% effective. The disease, if ignored until symptoms begin (up to 2 months later), is practically 100% fatal.
Rando: “Climate change, which the morons in the White House continue to pretend doesn’t exist, is a factor here. Rabies vectors like bats are expanding their range northward [in North America] as the climate heats up, creating many more opportunities for human infection.”
I don’t know what the deal is with Microsoft Recall, but usage wise, it appears to have fallen apart over the last year.
[…] it’s gone from having a range of UI issues (e.g. being unusable due to having tutorial video get stuck, database needing reinitialising etc) to getting stuck in [biometric] loops and UI issues.
It was supposed to be the flagship feature of Copilot+ PCs but […] it’s degraded in updates to the point it, for me at least, across multiple systems, essentially doesn’t work. […] I am wondering if they’ve tried to vibe code it
[…]
It’s pretty wild watching back the interviews a few years later as [Microsoft CEO] Satya appears to think he’s unveiling one of the biggest computer features ever made—and it just faceplanted from minute one.
[Circa 2024] Microsoft have decided to bake essentially an infostealer into base Windows OS and enable by default.
From the Microsoft FAQ: “Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers.”
[Video clip: “Windows constantly takes screenshots and scrapes them with a local genAI to make a searchable history”]
[…]
Security wise it’s [become] much more robust, but the feature was DOA from the beginning I suspect.
Alcohol’s one of the biggest industries as people pay to forget, a feature that remembers everything people do at home is a very tough sell when porn is one of the biggest industries, and #1 [antivirus] alerts are piracy.
Apple rightly went all in on privacy, Microsoft went all in on looking like big brother.
A top campaign staffer for Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) once used a photo of SS soldiers as his Facebook profile photo and [in recent months] added to a public playlist of songs celebrating Rhodesia, a defunct White-minority-ruled nation often venerated by white supremacists [The playlist was captioned: “homesick for a place that no longer exists.”]
[…]
he follows a military reenactment group […] its members dress up specifically as the Leibstandarte. That was a Waffen-SS formation that began as Adolf Hitler’s bodyguards and later became an armored division. […] The group shared photos […] that appear to show Woytek wearing an SS uniform in February 2018 and marching in an area that is adorned with Nazi flags. […] Woytek appears to have a long-standing reenactment hobby that involved dressing as soldiers from other conflicts, as well.
[…]
In a reply to a question about whether “anything good” happened under Hitler, Woytek replied in 2017 that Hitler started an anti-smoking campaign.
the most powerful anti-smoking movement in the world during the 1930s and early 1940s. […] Hitler’s personal distaste for tobacco and the Nazi reproductive policies were among the motivating factors […] measures were widely circumvented or ignored. The movement did not reduce the number of smokers. […] Nazi-related nicotine marketing messages have often been used to oppose tobacco control […] Even by the end of the 20th century, the anti-smoking movement in Germany had not attained the influence of the Nazi anti-smoking campaign. […] Germany has some of the weakest tobacco control measures in Europe
George W. Bush shared his new collection of self-congratulatory paintings to mark the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks […] on display at the Bush Museum in Dallas, Texas […] Among the 16 works is a painting of the infamous moment when Chief of Staff Andy Card whispered in Bush’s ear about the attack while the president was speaking to a classroom of elementary school students in Sarasota, Florida.
[…]
It of course does not address his response to the 2001 attack, launching a “War on Terror” that, among other things, launched the United States’ longest foreign occupation, killed at least 4.5 million people, and saw the founding of the Department of Homeland Security
Derek Johnson (Reporter): “Legit the most embarrassing moment of his presidency, made it obvious he was completely overwhelmed by the responsibility and would—quite literally—freeze in moments of crisis.”
Commentary
I thought it was a bad AI joke! It deserves to be a bad AI joke!
Wow the caption is so… not reflective or mournful or anything. It’s a promo for his art show.
He’s still my favorite artist who’s killed over a million people.
Setting aside all that really matters, painting a meme of yourself to commemorate the day the meme was created is very Baudrillard.
Maybe he can paint the mission accomplished photo next.
He should paint the shoe throw.
Another painting of a dust cloud engulfing the NYC skyline. https://bsky.app/profile/lappypercival.bsky.social/post/3mvazyjn5hk2m
JMsays
@113 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain:
At least W. Bush understood he was not prepared for the huge issues facing him. Trump doesn’t even understand that he doesn’t understand the issues or how to deal with them.
The administration’s insistence that everything about President Donald Trump’s takeover of mail-in voting will be easy-peasy, no problem, is not exactly borne out by reality.
In the latest example of how things are not going well at all, Florida’s Leon County was told by the U.S. Postal Service that their carefully designed outgoing mail-in ballot envelopes are a no-go. So the county had to file an appeal with the USPS to get the ballot accepted, and while it’s great that the appeal worked, it shouldn’t have had to happen in the first place.
Trump made an unhinged demand that all mail-in ballots have an outgoing envelope with trackable barcodes, and most jurisdictions don’t have those. But Leon County has used these outgoing ballot envelopes since 2024 without any issues.
“Notably, these exact same envelopes have been used to mail many tens of thousands of ballots to Leon County voters in the 2024 elections and in the 2026 primary election without incident,” Leon County Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley said.
[…] The entire goal of Trump’s push to have the USPS take over elections is to create just this sort of chaos.
The USPS rejected the ballot envelope design because the line saying “return service requested” is too close to the election office’s return address.
Wait, what?
Yep. Right now, those lines are 0.236 inches apart, but per the post office, that is 0.014 of an inch too close. [FFS]
Even before the successful appeal, Leon County had decided to send out ballots anyway, which is absolutely the right thing to do—especially since the statutory mail-in ballot deadline is Sept. 24. Leon County already sent out about 32,000 of those, and there would have been no way to reprint them quickly enough to meet that deadline. [All true.]
Surely it’s just a coincidence that the USPS has suddenly decided to mess with a Democratic stronghold county that in 2024 went for former Vice President Kamala Harris by more than 20% and GOP Sen. Rick Scott’s Democratic challenger, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, by almost 17%, right?
As election expert Rick Hasen pointed out, this is just “a taste of what would happen if the USPS mail ballot rules were in effect.”
Similarly, Democracy Docket called the move an “ominous sign,” and they’re not wrong. This petty sort of BS can be deployed whenever the USPS wants to stir up an absolute mess in states and counties where Trump wants to suppress the vote, which we all know will be those that lean Democratic.
You can lay this mess squarely at the feet of Supreme Court conservatives, who said that Trump could keep going with this unconstitutional catastrophe even though there’s no actual legal decision yet—a decision that the court is currently sitting on.
Looks like we just have to let Trump do what he wants as long as possible … for freedom.
You can expect a lot more of these shenanigans as Trump tries desperately—while flailing pathetically—to rig the elections he knows his party could never win without interference.
You can hear it in the viral and almost certainly AI generated refrain: “We are Charlie Kirk. We carry the flame.”
That bit of digital slop has never proved more true than over the past week when our total Kirkification was on display in the beating heart of the American empire.
For a brief moment this week, New York City’s Times Square played host to a misshapen monument to Charlie Kirk. The statue was part of a half-baked plan to raise a million-dollar sum that was cooked up by Sergio Furnari, an eccentric artist and self-described scientist. The statue’s unveiling was a gaudy display of scams, attention seeking, and hatred that was truly in keeping with Kirk’s real legacy.
And, when I sought out the spectacle, it was clear the grift and grotesqueries were not confined to the makeshift memorial.
Thursday marked one year since Kirk was shot while doing the thing that made him famous: Trying to draw college students into the far-right culture war. Kirk was a walking internet comments section who became rich and loud thanks to a dark money war chest. Among other things, Kirk pulled in clicks and dollars by staging live versions of the angry, misinformed, and pithy sparring that has defined our digital discourse. He was arguably shot down by the very forces he riled up: his alleged shooter was an extremist with apparent left-wing leanings who was enraged by Kirk’s trolling and took the fury offline with scrawled references to memes on the bullets.
Since that moment, President Donald Trump and others on the right have tried to use the awful circumstances of Kirk’s death to turn him into a martyr and talismanic proof their movement, which has taken over national politics for the better part of a decade, is somehow entitled to victimhood. As we have already chronicled in this newsletter, the disingenuous veneration of Kirk has spawned a wave of AI slop souvenirs and songs. It also inspired a purge in which dozens of people who dared to point out that Kirk was a hatemonger who almost certainly encouraged violence were doxxed and fired from their jobs.
Online, people have […] made their own avalanche of AI slop with bizarre caricatures, inserting exaggerated versions of Kirk and his prodigious forehead into other scenarios and celebrity bodies. The phenomenon has been dubbed “Kirkification.”
[…] Furnari calls himself a “master in sculpture and painting.” Based on his website, his signature projects include ornately painted swimming pools. Furnari also has some kind of vision to help Elon Musk get us to Mars based on his supposed expertise as a “scientist of thermal tile surfacing.”
Furnari’s Times Square event was apparently part of a broader effort to bring in cash. According to an online fundraising page, Furnari hopes to raise $1 million to erect a “colossal monument” to Kirk.
[…], Furnari seems to have downsized. His fundraiser has currently set a more modest $150,000 goal and the statue, that he showed off in Times Square on the anniversary of Kirk’s death is a smaller version of his dream Kirklossus.
That prototype features Kirk sitting at his debate table as he was in the moments before his death. While the setting is clear, the attempted likeness evokes the warped memes of Kirk’s face more than it does the man himself. As of this writing, the distorted Kirk and its associated fundraiser have only raised $12,950.
At the event, Furnari was joined by Jake Lang, a far right influencer, Jan. 6er […] with a fondness for giving Sieg Heil salutes, who has spent the past couple years staging theatrical demonstrations targeting Muslims and Jews. Based on his own social media, Lang and the band of “crusaders” at Furnari’s Kirk event were in the Big Apple for a Sept. 11 march to “stop Zohran Mamdani from going to Ground Zero.”
Lang provided a vivid example of the types of people who see Kirk as a fellow traveler and icon for their cause. He also showed how much Kirk and the supposedly more respectable, official side of MAGA share an agenda with extremists.
The blatantly Islamophobic push to exclude Mamdani from the annual commemoration 9/11 Memorial was also amplified by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a close Trump associate, and a slew of MAGA media outlets. [Disgusting]
[…] the streets were filled with shoddy AI merch. Walking through the Diamond District, I overheard dubious entrepreneurs taping podcasts. As I passed through the center of Times Square, it was clogged with passersby taking pictures of themselves. Vendors hawked more elaborate photo opportunities with vintage cameras and polaroids. Dingy costumed characters including superheroes and at least one Labubu ambled around offering to join the shots for a price.
Everyone wants to be part of the feed. America’s heroes have been reduced to shoddy renditions of themselves. Our world has been Kirkified. […]
Argentina’s wild-haired “anarcho-capitalist” president, Javier Milei, has in recent months been getting a lot of help from Donald Trump. His effort to conduct a full overhaul of his country’s government and economy — think DOGE, but ongoing for years, not months — […] with Trump doing Milei such favors as importing tons of Argentinian beef, pissing off American cattle farmers in the process.
They’ve also decided to restart the Falklands War. I’m joking — or, rather, they’re joking … but also maybe not.
The Falklands War began in 1982 when Argentina, then under a military dictatorship, invaded the Falklands, an archipelago in the Atlantic 300 miles off the coast of Argentina and 750 miles north of Antarctica. The islands have been a territory of the UK since the mid-1800s. The war ended after 74 days in a humiliating defeat for the Argentines, a key factor in the collapse of its autocratic government and the return of democracy to the country.
Now, Milei, whose administration has winked and nodded in various ways to last century’s junta, is stirring the pot again. The islands are ”Argentine, by history and by right, there is no debate about it,” he said last week. His government then barred oil companies that operate in the Falklands from also drilling in Argentina, and sued at least one.
But, oddly, Trump is also getting in on the action — seemingly not because of any true interest in the Falklands dispute and more out of a desire to troll the UK, and liberal governments in Europe more generally. Last week, he complained to a British news outlet that the UK and NATO were “not there to help me” when he declared war on Iran, and suggested he likewise would not help the UK were Argentina to invade. The U.S. then sold Argentina some Black Hawk helicopters.
The whole thing feels a little bit like a weird joke sustained by the two eccentric right wing leaders, reminiscent of Trump’s Greenland news cycle. But the line between trolling and official policy can be thin in the U.S. in 2026 — a fact the British, perhaps, recognize, as they are taking this all very seriously. Milei’s position “tells us more about domestic politics in Argentina than it does about the Falkland Islands,” the UK’s Secretary of State for Defence said on X. “The Falklands are British because Falkland Islanders choose to be British. Our commitment to the Falklands is absolute and unshakeable.”
As the Census Bureau wades deeper into politics, governance changes at an agency committee that handles data privacy, scientific analysis and stewardship issues have opened the door for Trump administration interference […] Some of the most significant changes have put President Donald Trump’s political appointees in leadership roles on the historically nonpolitical committee, just as the Bureau has emerged as a hot-spot for right-wing-driven policymaking.
Former Census Bureau employees say the changes remove accountability mechanisms from Census Bureau decisionmaking […]
The Data Stewardship Executive Policy Committee, known as DSEP, is a leadership body tasked with aiding director-level Bureau staff with internal policy and decisions. It focuses especially on Title 13, the law requiring the Census Bureau to protect respondent confidentiality. And since the committee was created in 2001, political appointees have not traditionally held permanent positions.
A late July update to the charter for DSEP makes the Bureau’s deputy director for data, policy, and science — a newly created, politically appointed position — a co-chair for the agency. That role is held by Michael Lachanski, a two-time fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think-tank that has funneled personnel to key positions throughout President Donald Trump’s federal government. Lachanski was also a senior advisor at the Department of Commerce’s Office of the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs when that department rolled out a controversial ban on a Census privacy-protection method, called differential privacy, that scientists found to be safe and effective. Right-wing influencers and Republican politicians aggressively attacked differential privacy, claiming falsely that it helped Democrats accrue political power. […]
Other charter changes include the removal of the requirement that the Bureau reject political influence and the elimination of the Bureau’s commitment to “equitable” uses of federal data. The charter also adds additional politically appointed staffers to the DSEP committee.
[…] The charter changes were enacted just under one month after the Commerce Department banned disclosure avoidance, a suite of highly-scientific and rigorously studied privacy techniques that include differential privacy. That policy didn’t go through DESP, which was highly unprecedented for such a significant policy shift […]
also came just before the Census Bureau published an extremely unusual report that made use of unreliable private data, with help from the right-wing America First Policy Institute; the report purported to show (very limited) evidence of non-U.S. citizens voting in federal elections. That report also doesn’t appear to have been presented before DSEP, though it should’ve been […] Wired reported that Lachanski was a co-author on the report, which was published without attribution.
[…] The politicization of a board responsible for handling privacy issues and data policy shrouds decisionmaking at the Census Bureau in secrecy and makes policy coming out of the agency hard to defend […]
“Two of the most important corridors for international energy shipments are blocked by Iran and its proxies, oil prices are up and the global economy is reeling.”
As the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran opened with the killing of the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Donald Trump said the bombing would continue “throughout the week, or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
More than six months later, turmoil in the Middle East is only growing, while Trump seems to have no path out of the quagmire.
As of Friday, two of the most important corridors for global energy shipments — the Strait of Hormuz, gateway to the Persian Gulf, and the Bab al-Mandab Strait, at the mouth of the Red Sea — were largely closed, respectively under control of the Iranian regime and the Houthis, Iran’s proxy in Yemen.
Also on Friday, Iraqi militants allied with Iran struck Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, through which the Saudis had been rerouting oil to bypass the blocked Strait of Hormuz. [map]
[…] On Feb. 27, the day before the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign began, the price of oil opened at just over $70 per barrel. On Friday, it briefly hit $110.
A gallon of gasoline in the United States now costs $4.30 on average, compared to $2.98 when the war began, according to AAA.
With U.S. munition stocks depleted and American bases in the region at constant risk of being targeted by airstrikes, the Trump administration has shifted away from military action to a financial pressure campaign branded Operation Economic Outcast.
But while there are signs that a U.S. naval blockade is squeezing the Iranian economy, with inflation soaring, the currency collapsing and acute fuel shortages, the regime, now led by Khamenei’s son, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, remains firmly in control. And the recent military successes of Iran’s proxies suggest Tehran’s leverage has only increased in recent days.
[…] “Even if the conflict has weakened Iran, which it has, one of the biggest takeaways five or 10 years from now will be how strong, integrated and adaptable Iran’s regional network has proven to be at exactly the moment that it needed it.” [said Adam Baron, a fellow with the Future Security Program at New America, a Washington think tank, who studies the Houthis.]
[…] “The Houthis called us and they don’t want to fight with us,” Trump said. “They don’t want us to go after them and would much prefer not having us involved, and they’re letting most ships go through. […]” [Obvious lies.]
[…] Asked about the developments in Yemen that appeared to choke off Saudi Arabia’s remaining outlet for oil exports, Trump said he had spoken by phone with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and that everything would be “fine and dandy.” […]
Just before noon on a holiday weekend, while many Americans were at the beach, President Trump’s social media account roared to life. In what has increasingly become his weekend habit, he unleashed a daylong barrage of posts that put the bully in the modern bully pulpit.
There were images of Mr. Trump intimidating Canada’s prime minister with a hockey stick, personally bombing enemy targets and patrolling dark streets with killer robots. There were maps showing the United States taking over other countries, and maps renaming a state. There were attacks on the “Dumocratic Party” and tributes to himself as “the Greatest President of All Time!”
The 60 messages posted online over 10 hours and 41 minutes offered a window into Mr. Trump’s own unique reality, one anchored not in fact but in an expression of ego. For years, his social media feed was said to be a mirror of his id. But with A.I., it has become the manifestation of how he wants to be seen in a more visual, visceral way than ever before — as a warrior, as a conqueror, as a historical figure, as a younger and thinner and more muscular version of himself.
In Mr. Trump’s digitally enhanced version of the world, he is a giant in every way, a man who defeats every adversary, overcomes every obstacle and sinks every putt. He not only redraws the map of the world but vanquishes the heavens themselves. “The Moon Is Ours,” declared one post last weekend with an image of the earth’s only satellite. Another posted a few weeks ago showed him leading an extraterrestrial alien in shackles.
[…] these frenetic bursts of fantasy and vanity are proof that the 80-year-old president is deteriorating further with age.
[…] Violence is a recurring theme in Mr. Trump’s feed. He relishes the idea of himself as a tough man staring down anyone who gets in his way. He smashes Iran with a giant hammer. He pilots a spacecraft blasting the planet. Most arresting was his post last weekend showing him in a hockey uniform with a stick towering over a fallen Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada and taunting, “Get up, Governor,” as if Canada really were the 51st state that he says he wants to make it. That one, unsurprisingly, further inflamed international tensions.
[…] Never mind that he may cry foul if anyone else were to picture him as the target of violence.
[…] While at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., Mr. Trump started posting at 11:54 a.m. and kept returning to his account in staccato bursts throughout the day. At 1:47 p.m., he posted six messages within two minutes. From 2:40 p.m. to 3:43 p.m., he circulated another 27 posts. He continued through the evening, only letting up after his final one of the night at 10:35 p.m.
[…] his many posts on Iran that day portrayed his war as he would like it to be, not how it really is. In the actual Middle East outside of his control, Mr. Trump is stuck in a quagmire with no clear end in sight. In the virtual Middle East of his own creation, Mr. Trump is a triumphal commander in chief bludgeoning Iran into submission.
The flurry of posts last weekend included an image of a bomber attacking with the caption “Bye bye, Kharg,” referring to the Iranian island, and a map showing the Strait of Hormuz labeled “New U.S. Territory.” Another featured supposed before-and-after maps of Iran with the latter showing the country in the shape of Mr. Trump’s own wavy-haired profile.
[…] Iceland was shocked to be included, and summoned the U.S. ambassador to complain. “There is nothing funny or normal about making fun of the sovereignty of states,” Prime Minister Kristrun Frostadottir of Iceland told reporters.
[…] Even as he showcased his imperialist ambitions abroad, Mr. Trump asserted his authoritarian instincts at home, posting multiple maps and images of him peremptorily renaming the state of New Mexico as “New America,” something he has no power to do. As with the Icelanders, the New Mexicans were not amused. “Oh hell no!” Representative Melanie Stansbury, a Democrat, wrote online.
While Mr. Trump’s posts regularly influence domestic politics and foreign policy, he also uses A.I. to promote grandiose visions of himself as a superhero, a pope and at one point last spring a Jesus-like figure. Last weekend’s posts included one that he has circulated before offering his own chart ranking American presidents, with him, naturally, at the top as “The Greatest.” Another post asserted: “He Will Go Down In History As the Greatest President of All Time!” […]
The advent of A.I. has allowed Mr. Trump to go further than the mainly written social media posts of his first term. […]
Mike Mc Farland, the voice of ‘Master Roshi’ has passed away.
.
Roy Wood Jr breaks down the only geography you really need to know: “Who hates who?”
.https://youtube.com/shorts/qRSPdCNLU6
birgerjohanssonsays
I am told storms in the pacific are pushing moist air into California, making the heat extra oppressive.
But America apparently no longer needs all those uppity weather-forecasting specialists that look for things like “hurricanes” and other woke things liberals have made up.
birgerjohanssonsays
There is a large population of North American raccoons in Germany. One of them makes a visit to podcaster LouisWildlife, who documents canoe trips with her cats.
[…] the Department of Justice is attacking a top law school for daring to enroll Black students; Minnesota for daring to continue to fight back; and 30 different states about invented election malfeasance. Also, Attorney General Todd Blanche gets a star turn.
Civil rights groups forced to sue to remind the administration of pesky laws
Since the administration will not definitively reject the idea of sending federal agents to the polls in November, four entities—UnidosUS, the League of United Latin American Citizens, Common Cause, and the city of Denver—have sued to make sure they are kept away.
You see, there’s a law that has been on the books since the Civil War barring “troops or armed men” from the polls […]
Homeland Security Secretary and Rage Furby Markwayne Mullin has been incredibly vague about this idea, saying that “ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places,” which isn’t the same thing as saying that ICE will not be at the polling places. There’s also a big exception to that promise, with Mullin saying he’d send armed ICE goons if there were “a threat” or if ICE had a warrant for someone they were “actively tracking down.”
Notably, earlier this year, ICE tracked down a poll worker to demand she remove an Instagram post that made them sad because it named the ICE agent who murdered Renee Good, so you can expect Mullin’s exception to be big enough to drive a platoon of ICE agents right on through. [Yep. That’s what I expect.]
DOJ keeps working to eradicate nonexistent DEI
The DOJ is going after the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, but this latest attack on higher education isn’t the usual one.
By and large, the administration has gone after “elite” schools that Trump is mad at by saying they are chock-full of antisemitism, which can be rectified only by giving the administration millions of dollars. This time around, though, their faux-investigations have turned up an allegation that Berkeley has been letting unqualified Black students in willy-nilly while blocking better-qualified white and Asian applicants.
One problem? As Above the Law points out, Black students make up a small share of students at Berkeley Law. Of the overall enrollment of 1,128 students in October 2025, 516 were white, 293 were Asian, and 51 were Black.
[…] Black students are under 5% of Berkeley Law’s student body, but that’s apparently still too much for this administration.
No one should take the administration at their word
The worst of the federal immigration siege of Minnesota may have passed, but that doesn’t mean it won’t return.
That’s the crux of an ongoing battle between the state and the federal government. At the start of Operation Metro Surge, the state sued the administration, seeking to stop the rampage. Now, the federal government is fighting to dismiss the case, saying that the state doesn’t have standing to continue the lawsuit because the surge is over.
However, the administration won’t commit to not returning. If it would, then the Department of Justice could credibly argue that the state’s lawsuit was moot. The doctrine of mootness says that a plaintiff no longer has standing if the circumstances that gave rise to the lawsuit have gone away. So, if the state could be assured that no further harm from Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons would be forthcoming, it couldn’t continue the suit. [!]
The DOJ will not stop hassling states about elections
Not content to throw the 2026 midterm election into turmoil with its unconstitutional attempts to wreck mail-in voting, the Trump administration has also threatened at least 30 states over the 2024 election. Yes, the one Trump won.
Those states have been warned against destroying any 2024 election records because, ominously, the chief election officials—in 30 of the 50 states, mind you—are “currently under investigation.” They’ve been told they are under a litigation hold, which requires them to retain all records or face criminal sanctions. [What?]
Is there any explanation of the criminal or civil theory behind these investigations? Heavens no. Is this saber-rattling happening because the administration has prevailed elsewhere in its attempts to get voter data? Also no. But despite losing in 23 straight cases, the DOJ is still pretty certain it can get its mitts on voter data to help prove … well, we don’t know what this is trying to prove any longer, honestly.
Todd Blanche continues to innovate
But unfortunately, that innovation is all really, really bad.
Todd Blanche’s title may be “attorney general,” but his true role is as Trump’s personal attorney and hatchet man, so of course he showed up at the GOP’s Trump Jamboree to do a rah-rah for his real and only boss. Blanche bragged about the staggering number of deportations the administration has carried out, overlooking the whole part where judges keep rejecting attempts to speed those proceedings on account of how they are flagrantly illegal.
As the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee pointed out before Todd’s big day, no sitting attorney general has ever spoken at a political party’s convention. That’s because the attorney general is supposed to represent us, not just one party—and certainly not just the president. […]
What’re you gonna buy with your 5,000 Trump Buxx? […]
Temporarily unburned heretics within the lamestream media claim we can’t afford this $1.3 trillion bribe, but all we have to do is use the money we never sent out for those $5,000 “DOGE Dividends.” […] when you factor in the $2,000 tariff rebate that also didn’t happen, we’re way ahead.
Don’t worry, we’ll find the money on the tariff shelf. The trillions in foreign investment that have never existed outside his decomposing mind. Toll revenue from the Strait of Trump. […] I can’t imagine we’ll be taxing any of our kleptocrat overlords’ newfound billions.
[…] The party unveiled this master stroke at something called a “Midterm Convention,” one of a series of pre-balls designed to keep President Princess satiated before he is officially proclaimed Fairest of Them All for Life and descends into his ballroom bunker for a Saddam Hussein-like last stand.
He needed extra satiating this week because they wouldn’t let him defile the 9/11 anniversary ceremony with self-aggrandizing lies about his conduct at the time. […]
Many have raised doubts about the veracity of the Dotard’s story about being hauled away from Ground Zero by firefighters, but it totally makes sense that he’d get caught looting.
[The Midterm Convention] looked mostly like the idolatrous binding of a handful of dead-enders to a political anchor […]
“Pretend I’m on the ballot.”
Heh. Only too happy to, sir.
The vulnerable Republican candidates desperately scraping your name off their campaign sites might not appreciate being yoked to the fellow who made diesel fuel cost six bucks a gallon for the first time ever […]
Why, Kansas has turned such a tantalizing shade of purple that somebody finally decided to do a little opposition research on “Doctor” Roger Marshall. Turns out that prior to his current gig as a power-mad half-wit’s rubber stamp, Roger was something of a Dickens villain, sending 81 of his filthy taker patients to debtor’s prison.
May I interest you in the campaign of his opponent, Adam Hamilton, who is significantly less likely to be visited by three ghosts at Xmastime?
[…] Enemies of the state James Talarico and Jimmy Kimmel won’t be pooling their free speech rights any time soon, not on Brendan Carr’s watch. Blocked from airing their interview on television, this Axis of Disloyal Jims settled for YouTube, where they attracted significantly more viewers than a certain super-showman’s latest celebration of self.
Iran-backed Houthi rebels seized key Red Sea ports and islands in Yemen, catching the Secretary of Warfighting and Push-Ups completely fucking flat-footed just like the last time a hostile enemy force seized control of a critical Middle Eastern shipping route. On the bright side, there can’t be many of those left.
Pete has far too many polygraph tests to administer to pay attention to the war he’s losing. See, everybody at the Pentagon keeps leaking to the press about all the things he’s fucked up. Which is…a lot of things. I probably wouldn’t want people to know about the ammunition shortage I caused or the sailors I forgot to feed or the schoolchildren I blew up or the bit about needing my wife around to stay sober or the bases we may permanently lose either. The leaks may not be the issue here.
[…] Speaking of MAGA trends, have you noticed how they can’t seem to stop hiring white supremacists? Sure, Nate Hochman got kicked off Ron DeSantis’ doomed ship for posting Nazi imagery, but look at him now: Marco Rubio’s chief speechwriter!
And then there is the case of young Stephen Woytek, campaign staffer to Ohio Senator Jon Husted, who not only “once used a photo of Nazi soldiers as his Facebook profile photo” but also “recently added to a playlist of songs celebrating Rhodesia, a defunct White-minority-ruled nation often venerated by white supremacists.” [See Sky Captain’s post @112.]
Stephen is also a Panzer LARPer, who ”follows several suppliers of SS military uniforms on Facebook,” whereas your run-of-the-mill American follows zero, having little interest in being supplied with SS military uniforms. But I suppose one has to wear something while rocking out to songs about Racist Brigadoon.
Natalie Harp received a $45,000 cash bonus for printing out screencaps of tweets so worshipfully, which seems like a lot until you realize the very last thing a deteriorating strongman wants is to under-tip the diaper steward.
[…] f you want to hear something adorable, apparently Corey Lewandowski thought he was smart enough to pull off high-stakes international political corruption. The Wall Street Journal reports he attempted to cut side deals with Qatar and the UAE, who were mostly just confused as to why the Homeland Security Secretary’s sex pet was speaking.
Congratulations to this month’s recipient of the Jesse Watters Manhood Prize for Manly Achievements in the Masculine Arts: Markwayne Mullin, who ordered a costly redesign of the DHS seal so that the eagle on the seal faces the (badass) talon clutching some arrows, rather than the (cuck) talon holding the (sissy) palm leaf.
[…] Makes you wanna VOTE IN THE GODDAMN MIDTERMS, doesn’t it? You don’t have enough ICE agents to keep us away from the polls, dorks. […]
“The country’s Psychological Defence Agency chief told POLITICO that platforms like X, TikTok and Facebook need to do more to combat Russia’s lie machine.”
Russia poses a threat to upcoming elections in Europe’s biggest democracies and social media platforms must “step up” the fight against Moscow’s networks of bots, Sweden’s disinformation defense chief has warned.
In an interview with POLITICO, Magnus Hjort, director general of the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency, said elections were an “opportunity” for Vladimir Putin’s information war machine to try to polarize and divide European societies.
The Kremlin’s key objective is to make voters doubt whether their politicians should keep sending money and weapons to Kyiv by peddling fake stories about Ukrainian corruption and other abuses, he added.
Hjort and his team do not believe Moscow is targeting Sunday’s general election in Sweden — in part because the country is largely united behind the policy of supporting Ukraine.
Instead, he said, Russia is aiming at more powerful countries with elections on the horizon — including German state votes and the French presidential campaign — where far-right parties seen as more sympathetic to Moscow are poised to make gains. […]
There have been growing fears in Germany over the Kremlin’s hybrid warfare, including a drone attack on Leipzig airport, as well as fake social media posts and videos falsely accusing election candidates of corruption and sex offenses. More elections are taking place in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Sept. 20, with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) expected to do well.
In France, Marine Le Pen, whose National Rally party faced criticism in the past over Russian sympathies, is leading opinion polls in the race ahead of next year’s presidential election.
Russia-backed actors have targeted Sweden with disinformation and influence campaigns in recent years, including in the run-up to the country’s accession to NATO. Hjort said he wanted social media platforms to do more to dismantle networks of automated accounts that spread foreign disinformation and run influence campaigns. […]
OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman told employees at a company meeting this week that the firm was open to slowing development of its AI systems, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, citing sources, amid growing concern about the safety of advanced AI systems.
Altman told employees in a company-wide meeting that the ChatGPT maker could pace development alongside other AI labs, but some may not agree, the report added.
Safety warnings from AI researchers this week, along with several recent incidents where AI models from developers including OpenAI escaped human control, have prompted alarm and calls for tighter safety regulations.
An Anthropic spokesperson said on Thursday said that the company is interested in working with the AI industry on the pace of releasing new AI tools.
This sounds good but there are also other reasons for CEO’s to say things like this. They could be running out of money and want to slow down other companies while they turn to profitability. Saying this sort of thing is common when an innovative industry turns to making profits over fast development. The CEOs have to come up with some other reason then feeding their investment backers for the move.
They could also be hitting the limits of their AI models and want to slow down development while they work on catching up. Variations of this are common with research companies that need to explain why their pace of development have slowed down. Saying they are intentionally slowing development because they need more time for something else sounds better then they are falling behind or development is stalling.
An unpleasant future has been averted for Australians who love purple-skinned passionfruit, ensuring there will be delicious new fruit to try in the coming years.
For the first time in more than two decades, a range of new purple-skinned varieties has been developed for farmers to evaluate.
Just three years ago, growers in passionfruit’s historical heartlands of south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales were extremely worried.
The reliability of the popular hybrids Sweetheart and Misty Gem had been failing for more than a decade, pushing some farmers out of the industry.
he vines have been producing fewer, smaller fruit and have become increasingly susceptible to pests and fungal disease.
Growers and the federal government co-funded an urgent Hort Innovation research program to find replacements.
…
The mood was optimistic as growers gathered at the Maroochy Research Centre.
They tested nine of 22 new purple-skinned varieties the program has already produced, with many more in the pipeline…
20 years ago, the last remnants of one of Europe’s forgotten summer ski areas disappeared from a glacier high on the French-Italian border. The Sommeiller Glacier, above Bardonecchia in Italy’s Piedmont region, once offered an extraordinary proposition: skiing in the middle of summer at around 3,000 meters (9,840 feet). Three surface lifts carried skiers across the glacier, while a mountain refuge welcomed visitors who had driven up from the valley below. Today, the lifts are gone, the refuge has disappeared, and the glacier that once supported the ski area has retreated so much, it is classified as dead.
Apple this week announced plans to roll out “always-listening” features for newer Apple Watches. One of the features, Live Rewind, lets you “go back in time” and replay the most recent 15 seconds of ambient audio as a text transcript. The other feature, Siri Recap, listens throughout the day and summarizes your conversations as high-level notes into a written report on your iPhone. […] The tech giant says on its support page that the always-listening tech doesn’t record or store audio, and that the recaps are end-to-end encrypted so that any summarized data is inaccessible to anyone else, not even Apple.
[…]
Apple is opening the door to a world where other companies, device makers, and app developers try to recreate or rival Apple’s technology and do a far shoddier job […] lawyers are already finding that Apple’s always-listening tech is at odds with the law in several U.S. states. Some states require all parties’ consent before being recorded […] This comes amid the rise of smart camera-enabled “pervert glasses”
Rando: “Just because it’s ‘private’ doesn’t mean the data should exist.”
StevoRsays
A new low from Pauline Hanson here :
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has become emotional defending his late mother against an “attack” by Pauline Hanson, who criticised the time she spent living in public housing.
Mr Albanese has been open about his upbringing in public housing in Sydney’s inner west, where his mother Maryanne Albanese raised him by herself. Speaking to Karl Stefanovic in February, Senator Hanson labelled the repeated references as “pathetic” and said it was “not on” for people like Ms Albanese to live in assisted housing for decades.
“I actually grew up in a street where we had housing commission houses there. It was a helping hand to those people, but they had jobs. And they worked,” she told Stefanovic. “Housing commission houses should not be there for people to live in them for 30, 40 [years] – and he said his mother lived in the same one she was born in for 65 years.”
Addressing the resurfaced remarks on Sunday morning, Mr Albanese said he was “stunned” by the attack on his mother, who died in 2002.
“If Pauline Hanson wants to criticise me, then that’s fine, but my mother was way out of Pauline Hanson’s league, way out of it,” he said, his bottom lip quivering.
The prime minister said his mother had a caring nature, despite many health challenges, including severe rheumatoid arthritis, which crippled her joints. The condition meant she and her son relied on a disability pension.
The trouble with a stock market IPO is you have to bare yourself to the world and show everything about your horrible business numbers. OpenAI’s numbers have always been hilariously terrible. [In April], OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar thought the numbers were bad enough the IPO should be delayed till next year. […]
she is worried […] Board directors have also more closely examined the company’s data-center deals in recent months and questioned Chief Executive Sam Altman’s efforts to secure even more computing power despite the business slowdown.
The company’s lost 13 executives just in 2026. […] These former executives are leaving a ton of OpenAI equity on the table, just before the supposed IPO payoff. What do they know that we don’t? […] we do have the broad outline—OpenAI’s revenues are just not enough to cover the financial promises.
We said in January how OpenAI has $80 billion of debts due this year—payable in actual money, not OpenAI shares. Bills that it’s been putting off since 2024. […] Consumers can’t fill the hole, and enterprise customers are already choking on this year’s price rises. OpenAI can probably kite this year’s bills to next year. But not longer—they’ve already got another $50 billion due next year. In, again, actual dollars. Then there’s all the data centres OpenAI is getting built for them with hundreds of billions of dollars of other people’s money. […]
So OpenAI needs to get it together to IPO—and make their cash gap everyone else’s problem. SpaceX managed an IPO. Anthropic is also trying to exit with an IPO. OpenAI filed a draft […] What happens if OpenAI can’t IPO soon? They’ll need to do one last investment round. If there’s anyone left to burn even more money.
[The Effective Altruism cult] sets up fake anti-AI astroturf groups talking about AI doom instead of real AI problems. They pay YouTube influencers to suddenly talk about AI doom—as if this is real science and not weird cult stuff. They do waterboard the influencers, though, so that’s something.
On Wednesday evening, Anthropic AI researcher Jacob Coxon posted a thread on Twitter that took off like a rocket:
I resigned […] They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.
The thread hit the media immediately. Specifically, it hit the Wall Street Journal 18 minutes before the first tweet went up […] Coxon’s thread has the only tweets on this fresh, paid Twitter account. A bunch of Anthropic employees retweeted Coxon within minutes, saying how true and important the AI doomsday was. This whole thing was an organised promotional campaign. […]
By the way, the chatbot cannot possibly do any of this. […] The AI vendors want you talking about Skynet—and not talking about the data centre down the road. Every report of the chatbot breaking out of human control turns out to be because the researchers told it to. Anthropic especially. Every time.
[…]
Coxon has long been fully into the rationalist and effective altruist subcultures. He believes in the AI 2027 doomsday report. […] Coxon is doing TV and newspapers at a fantastic pace. A pile of US and UK politicians are citing Coxon’s tweets to say it’s time to regulate AI. But only in ways that solve imaginary problems, not the real problems. […] The goal of this campaign is to get a regulatory moat around the chatbot industry—regulations that only the big guys can meet [to stifle startup competitors].
[…]
This is some of the widest publicity AI doom’s had for a while. Here’s to it giving the Anthropic IPO that nice final push.
* That first paragraph linked other recent stories to establish astroturfing modus operandi. One from Aug 6th covered a not atypical bootcamp involving a “torture potluck” subjecting everyone to unpleasantness as a bonding mechanism. Held at Lighthaven, the rationalists’ HQ, an old gated hotel compound, and funded by Eliezer Yudkowsky’s doomer institute.
Fortune – Sam Altman confirms OpenAI won’t go public this year, saying an IPO now would come at an ‘ill-advised moment’ given AI safety concerns (Sep 12) https://archive.is/XTUJv
Darn, guess he’ll just have to ask for more money.
GAM 573: The Good Shepherd (2004)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=agJedUWWG-M
re shermanj@499:
Unfortunately, for many of us, our employers FORCE us to take AI trainings and encourage us to use it. I hate it with a passion. so does my wife who works in a different field, but her employer has the same asks as mine. It is truly SLOP.
For the convenience of readers, here are some links back to the previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/06/28/infinite-thread-xxxx/comment-page-5/#comment-2311390
cloudflare is abusively discriminatory in how it ‘tests if you are an ai bot’ by not letting legitimate alternate or older browsers access sites.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/06/28/infinite-thread-xxxx/comment-page-5/#comment-2311390
Pentagon imposes polygraph tests on military officers as Hegseth’s culture of fear grows
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/06/28/infinite-thread-xxxx/comment-page-5/#comment-2311385
Saudi Arabia says 73 wounded as Houthis attack civilian and energy sites
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/06/28/infinite-thread-xxxx/comment-page-5/#comment-2311364
The White House launches online ‘arcade’ with its own takes on Tetris and other popular games, and it’s as racist, repugnant, and creatively bankrupt as you’d expect
On jobs, trade and interest rates, Trump trips over his economic illiteracy (again)
“The president, in a rather literal sense, just doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to economic policies he ought to understand.”
Musk and Trump attempt to save Paxton’s crumbling Texas Senate bid
Lynna @4, quoting MS Now;
This is the same bloke who has said, more than once, that pouring water on magnets stops them working. If there’s anything he does understand, I haven’t seen it.
Citation for shermanj.
Cloudflare’s bot bouncer blocks weirdo browsers (2025)
Cloudflare Introduces Precursor; One-Click Behavioral Defense (2026-07-13)
Invasive. But opt-in for webmasters. Besides false positives, it’s frustrating when all automation is deemed malicious and denied.
@4, 6
This has been going on quite a while. Remember during the 2016 campaign, in regard to Hillary Clinton’s email server? Her techs had, with court approval, used open source software named BleachBit to wipe a hard drive. In Trump’s addled 2016 mind this transformed into actual bleach being applied to the drives. Then he couldn’t even hang on to that thought and the imaginary bleach transformed again into acid.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/will-aryan-lesbian-expat-nazis-who
These clowns are the same everywhere.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/doj-will-starve-the-poor-if-states
Embedded links are available at the main link.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/new-america-tabs-tues-sept-8-2026
Washington Post link
“Citing ‘ethnic cleansing,’ U.K. bars imports from Israeli West Bank settlements”
“Other European countries immediately pledged support for the effort, which prompted warnings from the United States.”
birgerjohansson @492 in the previous 500: There’s a slightly longer version of that YT short, but it still feels too abridged and incomplete.
FlipTheProblem – How Dujiangyan Works (2:35)
This vid complements it with an explanation of current flows.
GB – The Dujiang Irrigation System (4:44)
I couldn’t find a decent standalone presentation.
The Replacements
@3
The White House pulls its racist Tetris clone
There’s no reason for the White House to keep it up. They already achieved their goal, which was to piss people off by being racist.
Lynna @11: That meditation article was good.
Reminded me of anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann’s research on Vinyard Christians who do imagination exercises until they hallucinate Jesus.
A 2020 lecture overviewing her work with pagans, evangelicals, tulpamancers, and psychotics. Voices of spirit, voices of madness (19min lecture + 10min QnA)
Hallucinatory ‘voices’ shaped by local culture (2014)
Benevolent persuasion, ancestral spirits, and politics in the voices of psychosis in Shanghai, China (2023)
EU Observer: Ukrainians again liberate territory near Lyman – details of the ‘secret’ operation revealed
The operation is ongoing and details are sparse. It’s clear that the Ukrainians have pushed the Russians back. This undoes much of the Russian offense in the area for this year and possibly into last year. It removes the position that Russia was trying to use to attack Lyman. It appears that the Russians realized the area was lost and managed an organized pull out.
It also is being acknowledged in Russia because the retreat is too big to ignore entirely. It’s becoming a major example of Russian bad information, with Russian commanders generating AI video of advances that didn’t happen right up until the Russians were forced to retreat. Putin publicly claimed forward progress in some areas that it appears the Russians never reached.
Missouri’s redistricting in flux after dissonant court rulings
Hungary expels 10 Russian diplomats as relations worsen
Belgian far-right party cannot use IKEA trademarks for anti-immigration campaign, EU court advises
Russia and North Korea open the first road across their shared border
Scientist Says Human DNA Contains Clues of an Intelligent Creator
U.S. military’s Anduril Dive-LD drone was ‘dead in the water’ before Iran nabbed it
I would have thought devices like that would have self-destruct circuits ‽
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #24…
Even self-destruct circuits can fail…
Trevor Branch (Fisheries researcher): “This is seismic news for fisheries scientists. Northern cod is *the* iconic symbol of total fisheries collapse due to overfishing (and other factors) *and* the iconic symbol of a complete failure to recover for decades afterwards. This is like announcing the complete recovery of bison on land.”
In cod we trust
Reginald Selkirk @23:
Orson Wedgwood? It would be odd if he were related to Charles Darwin’s wife.
Elad Nehorai (Political comentator):
Still The Onion keeps trying to create satire.
InfoWars – Tradwife explains her lifestyle (9:27)
* The cheese reference at 2:22.
UAE warned Netanyahu of major Hamas operation days before Oct. 7 attack/a> He did not pass warning on to IDF or to intelligence agencies.
The original Haaretz articles are behind a paywall.
Man told ChatGPT he was feeling delusional. ChatGPT insisted he was Jesus.
Sky Captain @16, thanks for the additional information about Britton’s studies of the effects of meditation.
One part of the text you quoted really rang true: “When she told meditation teachers about the dissociation, she said they told her she had entered a new stage of enlightenment.” In my limited experience, all purveyors of meditation techniques are good at explaining away negative effects. In fact, they twist the narrative, claiming that whatever is negative is actually good.
I prefer a nap, but I do know people who say that a brief meditation sets them up for a nap.
Archaeologists Just Found the Most Complete Denisovan Record Yet—and It Goes Back 190,000 Years
Were Trump’s $45,000 holiday gifts to Natalie Harp and other White House aides legal?
“If White House officials were hoping to keep the controversial aide’s name out of the headlines for a while longer, they have reason to be disappointed.”
Trump peddles new dubious claims about his 9/11 experience ahead of 25th anniversary
“Pressed on his latest tale, the president said, ‘Everything I said was exactly accurate.’ But he hasn’t exactly earned the benefit of the doubt.”
re Lynna@34:
Fixed it for you.
He lies. About EVERYTHING. The old joke about lawyers applies in spades to The Orange Turd: How do you know he is lying? His lips are moving. Or maybe, his thumbs are typing.
I wish it was possible for someone to follow him around, and every time he spoke, shout out “LIAR!” or “THAT’S A LIE!” or “COOL STORY BRO!”. Or maybe not the last one, because he might think it was a serious comment.
Thanks to @7 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain providing more info on cloudflare.
As factual information from our IT specialist and webmaster in conjunction with other internet security authorities and our personal experience, there are hundreds of different legitimate browsers used by an estimated million or more people around the world. They are just people, not malicious or ‘bots’. Hundreds of thousands of people using linux can only update their browser (firefox included) every year or two. They are not ‘evil crackers’. And, yet legitimate webmasters are falling for the bullying, fascist, fake policeman routine and letting cloudflare block millions of honest requests to visit sites.
It’s this type of phony, self-appointed censorship that is destroying the wonderful, open internet we used to know.
‘Mystery meat’: Trump’s plan to put old frozen foreign beef in your burger
“Trump’s answer to soaring beef prices: import frozen foreign trimmings that could have been in storage for years—and grind them into American burgers.” Chris Hayes discusses.
Video is 7:47 minutes
“Mamdani Reveals MASSIVE Coverup By New York Officials After 911”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=etLt1xj3oaQ
Seriously, fuck Giuliani. I hope he lives long enough to be charged for this crime.
In my home town f’ing nazis -and what an idiot :
shermanj @36:
Could you elaborate? Linux distros generally have a package manager that downloads granular updates, such as browsers, on demand and throughout the year without waiting for a new major OS release that comes on that timescale. I’d expect browser maintainers to put out updates frequently. Concern about browsers implies the users have internet access. Where’s the bottleneck?
Re: CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @ #40…
Perhaps the mistake is in not understanding that Linux updates are by “pulling”, where MS Windows “pushes” updates. The Linux systems I run–RasPiOS, based on Debian–certainly make updates, and particularly security updates–available on regular basis. But it’s up to me to update the system by running a series of apt commands.
United cancels planned 9/11 flyover in Denver, CO featuring passenger plane escorted by fighter jets
Brian Finucane (JustSecurity): “So you can just borrow/rent F-16s for private events?”
Andy Craig (Unpopulist): “I appreciate how insane this is even if it wasn’t going to cause panic. Yes, United employees will be inspired by fighter jets flanking one of their airliners on 9/11. Remember that time we had to try to shoot you down? Never forget. Better not get hijacked again if you know what’s good for you.”
Samantha Montano (Emergency management prof):
Aaron Rupar:
Aaron Rupar: “TRUMP: Right after the election, oil prices are gonna be tumbling downward. We’ll get ’em below $2 a gallon. [Video clip]”
Aaron Rupar:
Southpaw: “The combover has gone rogue.”
Rando 1: “Terrible day for the Straits of Hair Mousse.”
Rando 2: “5.99/gal until Thanksgiving. So exciting!!!!!!”
Nicholas Slayton (Task&Purpose): “war for two more months, as the number of US troops wounded in action broke 800 this week.”
Rando 3: “CLARIFICATION: The ‘war’ that isn’t a ‘war’… which already ended [66 times]… will end after the election… just like all the other conflicts he ‘ended’.”
Charles Richter (Historian): “That’s right, the pointless and illegal war with Iran *will* end when you vote Democrats into congress, and we take back powers that Trump has usurped for the executive.”
GottaLaff: “This is right after he said, ‘We know how to make a deal.’ Oops.”
Rando 4: “So the GOP is now running an Iran Hostage Crisis on itself?”
‘Unhinged’ for Canada to call dispute with U.S. a trade war, says Trump’s tariff chief
He is confused. It’s the conflict with Iran that they don’t like to call a ‘war.’
Buffalo Bills to ‘celebrate’ O Canada at home opener amid more Trump threats during trade war
South Park pulls a Trump, to be renamed South America for new season
Military accidentally triggers Air Force One slide ahead of Trump’s Dallas trip: Source
Link
After Trump promised to pay $5,000 if Republicans win, here’s what to expect Thursday
Foulkes defeats Rhode Island’s Gov. McKee. He’s the first governor in 8 years to lose a primary
Augst declared the hottest month ever recorded
…
Fetterman praises Trump in bombshell GOP convention video
On an completely unrelated note, I looked up the conditions for a congressional pension.
A term in the senate is 6 years, so a single term senator could still qualify for a pension.
@49
Trump says every adult American will get $5,000 if Republicans win midterms
So it would be revenue they illegally taxed from us, and they would put conditions on how we spend it. How generous.
Via The New Arab here :
Source : https://www.newarab.com/features/el-nino-2026-27-how-extreme-weather-could-hit-middle-east
@49, 53
Trump’s $1 trillion-plus ‘dividend’ plan meets immediate bipartisan pushback
Vance appears to walk back Trump’s offer of $5,000 ‘dividend’ if Republicans win midterms
Getting Congress to go along wouldn’t be an issue, on the premise that the Republicans would have won both the House and the Senate.
@55
18 U.S. Code § 597 – Expenditures to influence voting
@FIBA
https://www.espn.com/wnba/story/_/id/49890620/team-usa-scores-108-rout-hungary-reach-fiba-semis
From Wired magazine via Apple News this morning:
I haven’t seen Coxon’s post, but I think his key point is “that many of people building AI share his views”. No stats on that but I know from my interaction with engineers working on AI projects there’s a lot of skepticism about its efficacy. Coxon may be overstating the imminence of the risk…AI ain’t that good, really…but there is a risk to it, mostly driving customers nuts. Frankly, I’m fed up with AI telephone agents trying to help me solve a problem when a human agent could suss it out with me in a lot less time.
New microwave frying method could make french fries much healthier
‘We don’t have months’: Bernie Sanders sounds alarm on AI’s ‘extinction’ threat
All In with Chris Hayes • September 9, 2026
Video is 7:06 minutes
‘Ghastly, untrue’: Hayes torches GOP senator’s 9/11 conspiracy theories
Video is 11:56 minutes
“This technology is not ordinary technology …”
Republican convention featured the one thing Trump didn’t want to see: Empty seats
Related video at the link.
Politico: Jim Jordan says he will relinquish Judiciary gavel, pass on a return to Oversight
He, along with other Republican members of the House, are laying plans of what to do as a minority party.
He will play it by ear because he doesn’t have to make any firm move until he sees what the election results are. If the house goes Democrat but it’s close then the Republicans probably hold on to the current house leadership, if they get trashed there will be a move to replace the leadership. If by some chance the Republicans hold on they will keep the current leadership but that is really unlikely at this point.
Jordan is also old enough he may just want to sit in a safe generic House seat until he wants to retire. Give up the jobs within the House that require additional work.
Blanche ignores ethics restrictions, delivers speech at partisan event
“A sitting U.S. attorney general has never before delivered partisan remarks at a national party convention — until now.”
More at the link, including video of Blanche speaking.
@40 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain asked for elaboration on the browser update issue.
I reply: I think is is important that everyone be well informed on this issue since it impacts hundreds of thousands of people in this country as well as millions worldwide.
The hundreds of Linux versions (distros) come in two forms: fixed release and rolling release. The fixed release and even some rolling release versions provide ESR (Extended Support Release) browser versions (including firefox). These often have a lifespan without any updates of up to two or often more years. That is only one of a number of reasons why many Linux systems have browsers that are rejected by cloudflare. I usually run a 2025 version of Puppy Linux and it still offers the firefox 140.12 ESR browser which is way behind the current 155 version. It works beautifully, but cloudflare may soon ban me from sites because of that.
My analogy has always been: if you have a five year old car, and don’t buy a new one every year, should some idiot be allowed to put up a barrier and keep you from driving on the road just because they abusively, unilaterally decide which cars are allowed?
And, the international volunteers that maintain Linux versions would be run ragged and quit if they had to update the repositories and push new versions every time a browser created a new version. As an example, firefox has gone through over 155 major versions and hundreds of minor version releases.
That is our IT department’s knowledge and experience and I hope that clarifies the issue.
Missouri is poised to revert to former congressional districts after court rejects Trump-backed map
Lynna @60.
Timnit Gebru (AI compsci):
/I snipped a bit.
Timnit Gebru:
/The Yudkowsky thread is still pending.
Timnit Gebru: “Yudkowsky’s coauthor [Nate Soares] is on marketplace today, I guess I do need to do a thread on him because I have nothing better to do than write about OPEN EUGENICISTS being interviewed by NPR and advising BERNIE SANDERS.”
Emily Bender (Computational linguist): “Historians, help me out: Do we have precedent for what to do when the media interviews members of cults and just platforms them, with zero acknowledgment that they are living inside their own delusions?”
The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence (2024)
Trump promises to send $500 to nearly 1 million Americans for Obamacare ‘overcharges’
The smell of desperation.
White House pressed Fox News on Maria Bartiromo’s ouster, deeming it ‘unacceptable’
Related video at the link.
Lynna @68: Darcy spells out this context in the video at your link. It’s omitted from the text, which only links to his article, which was paywalled.
CNN: Trump admin pick to oversee a conspiracy investigation into president’s foes resigns after DOJ clashes
He couldn’t come close to the 30 days he promised and eventually was pressured out. diGenova is a long time conspiracy guy but also an experienced lawyer. Likely he was pressing ahead with investigation but not willing to bring charges based on nothing.
This didn’t satisfy the White House, Trump is in it for revenge. Trump is looking for the spectacle of big charges as much as eventual victory in court. Trump is unlikely to get a big victory in court but he can get big charges and press releases. He will then talk about the cases until he gets in the way of his own prosecution.
A fossil feather from the age of dinosaurs may explain why only some birds survived
We have MAGA assholes in Canada. In Alberta of course.
Police say man threatened to shoot someone in Calgary grocery store in fight over US tariffs/a>
At Trump’s convention.
Aaron Rupar:
Rando: “Trump asked people to commit election fraud”
Slate – One Nation Under Bush (2004)
Aaron Rupar:
Commentary
Also at the event.
Dave Weigel (Semafor): “Greetings from the GOP midterm convention.
[Photo: Hasan Piker posing in briefs on the jumbotron]”
Hasan Piker: “They posted this to embarrass me? This is the best I’ve looked in years.”
Eiynah Mohammed-Smith: “Typical islamist move to reel you in with underwear thirst traps. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Justin Baragona (Zeteo):
Rando 1: “Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road guy who got two life sentences + 40 years”
Rando 2: “It is patently insane that a major political party has stage graphics that read ‘become ungovernable’ but America is the dumbest nation”
Rando 3: “Remember when the Trump DOJ cited the ‘become ungovernable’ slogan as evidence that Minneapolis activists were dangerous antifa extremists?”
Rando 4: “A convicted felon opening their weirdo convention in dead silence while a guy yells ‘Free R Kelly!'” (Another video at Aaron Rupar’s thread)
Andy Craig (Unpopulist):
Rando 5: “there are probably tens of thousands of disadvantaged minorities who were railroaded by the federal government, and the libertarians decided to pick the privileged white drug market kingpin as their face of criminal justice reform.”
Rando 6: “[Trump] promised to implement the death penalty for ‘large-scale drug dealers’ less than 24 hours ago on this same stage.”
Vance at the convention.
Walker Bragman (Journalist):
Rando 1: “‘Dirtier and poorer’—He was raised by a drug addict on welfare.”
Rando 2: “It’s a nod to Tucker Carlson, who said, ‘We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our country poorer and dirtier and more divided.'”
Aaron Rupar:
Anjali Dayal: “Bold to announce this to the crowd seeking to abolish his actual family. Slimy little blood-and-soil creep.”
Aaron Rupar:
Scott Horton (Harper’s): “Just look at the [GOP] manifesto they issued just a couple months ago—it talks of almost nothing else.”
@ 11 StevoR
This comment is so egregious I’m responding in the endless thread.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/09/10/a-suggestion-for-commenters/#comment-2311646
Here, this idiot claims I “inflicted Trump on us all”, despite being (like Stevo) an Australian who has no vote in US elections and who has never expressed anything other than disgust at Trump being elected the first time nevermind the second. How FUCKING DARE YOU suggest I am responsible for Trump?!
Publicly apologise Stevo! This is a disgusting lie with no bass in reality and you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself. I have always defended you when people treat you unfairly. HOW DARE YOU publicly tell such a whopper of a lie about me!?
APOLOGISE NOW.
Silentbob@77,
Now where did I put my picoviolin?
Silentbob @77:
Have you apologized to chigau yet for persistently, knowingly misgendering her?
What exactly is going on with John Fetterman?
Video is 8:11 minutes
‘Reeks of desperation’: Trump’s $5,000 midterm ‘bribe’ gets exposed
Video is 10:26 minutes.
Sky Captain @69, thanks for that additional information!
JM @70: “Trump is looking for the spectacle of big charges as much as eventual victory in court. Trump is unlikely to get a big victory in court but he can get big charges and press releases.”
True!
Sky Captain @73:
See also PZ’s post: Please Clap
PZ noted: “This is what happens when the cult leader fears that his followers are beginning to peel away.”
Democracy Docket: Missouri’s top election official held in contempt for defying court’s gerrymander order
The Missouri Supreme Court is not happy that Hoskin essentially pulled a legal fast one to try and get around their ruling. After the Missouri Supreme Court ruled against him and he appealed the whole way up to the Supreme Court and lost he found a federal judge in a different case related to the matter that would give him the court order he wanted. This on the same day he lost the case at the US Supreme Court. He then tried to claim that the federal order over rode the state order. The federal order would in some cases but the US Supreme Court stepped in to block that order.
The entire bit about a second case has happened since Tuesday when the US Supreme Court declined to take an appeal of the Missouri Supreme Court case. There are few things that will get the US Supreme Court to move fast but legal games to shift around something they ruled on will. The same for the Missouri Supreme Court contempt hearing, which was also to make it clear that the new map will not be used for this election. It’s probably illegal and it is too late to resolve the legal issues or change the map.
Mars astronauts could live in houses made of yeast and jello, say scientists
Lutnick says Trump’s $5,000 checks for Americans wouldn’t rely on taxpayer funds
U.S. Postal Service Failed to Properly Handle Some Ballots During This Year’s Primary Elections, Audit Finds
Norway’s Princess Astrid dies two days after attending brother King Harald’s funeral
Buddhist monk arrested in suspected $3m embezzlement scandal
This idea was developed into the Vera Rubin telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope.
“Once Around Three Mirror Telescopes”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZwfLzMlcAc0
.
“Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Abridged – Episode 2”
Heiter tricks Frieren into bonding with the orphan girl to provide a mentor to teach her magic. No monster battles until episode 3, this one is just cute.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=f20JA1FWjXw
B.C. judge tosses drug case, says U.S. agents broke law and violated Canadian sovereignty
(“B.C.” = British Columbia, Canada)
Republican lawmaker wants to rename Lake Erie to Lake Pennsylvania
Alternatively, we could change the name of Pennsylvania to Dumbfuckistan.
Glance at a map to see what fraction of the U.S. shoreline of Lake Erie is in Pennsylvania.
Nashville Airport Authority approves renaming airport in honor of Dolly Parton
Donald Trump’s Nephew Pokes Holes in President’s Claims About His 9/11 Aid, Saying It ‘So Offends Me That I Need to Speak Out’
Bouncy castle launches horrifying MRSA outbreak, striking 48 kids in Ireland
JM @82, thanks for posting that good news.
In other news: Trump’s Reflecting Pool contractor acknowledges reality, discredits ‘vandals’ claim
“It’s not just prosecutors who’ve shredded the president’s official line on the Reflecting Pool fiasco. Now, his contractor has, too.”
Link
Campaign news, as summarized by Steve Benen:
Link
Link
Embedded links are available at the main link.
It’s important to recognize not just what Trump and his team are saying about data centers, but also what they’re doing to help the industry.
Related video at the link.
Arizona’s lifeline for chip manufacturing is drying up
Feds declare record-setting cyclospora outbreak over
FACT FOCUS: A look at false and misleading claims during the Republican midterm convention
(Too long to reproduce here. Follow the link for the full list.)
In ominous sign, USPS initially rejected Florida county’s mail ballot over spacing issue
Appeals court rejects Trump request to lift block on Postal Service rule for mail ballots
Trump Shuts Down Female Reporter: Timeline of Clashes
Denver sues to block armed ICE agents at voting sites, alleging their presence would violate federal law
Is she out of her mind?
I seem to recall that in the AWARE studies, published in 2014 by Sam Parnia, et al, they placed cards near the ceilings of emergency rooms so that they were only visible from above. Zero patients claiming Out Of Body experiences were able to successfully describe what was on the cards.
Saudi Arabia says East-West pipeline hit by drones launched from Iraq
The Guardian: Trump and Hegseth use 9/11 memorial remarks at Pentagon to defend war on Iran
This is no surprise. The whole point of Trump being at the Pentagon was so he could make a political speech supporting his war rather then focus on the victims of the attack. Still tacky, though he seems to have gotten a better speech writer then most of his speeches.
This is the standard idiot right wing argument. The US has to fight Iran because Iran is so hostile to the US. The question of why Iran hates the US in the first place or why the US keeps poking the country even when it isn’t attacking the US are never addressed.
TechCrunch: Anthropic reveals rogue AI agents hate CAPTCHAs, just like you
The Captcha really did slow it down, well over half the processing time the AI spend on the project was spent trying to get past captchas. Though much of the AIs problem was not reading the Captcha, it was understanding that it had to process them within a time limit and noticing when a Captcha popped up in it’s own window.
The AI was given a theoretical hacking challenge that was supposed to happen in a sandbox setup by Anthropic. The AI knew it got out of that sandbox but wasn’t clear on where the sandbox ended. This probably also demonstrates confusion on what the sandbox was. It was trying to complete the virtual challenge in the sandbox by going around the sandbox and hacking other systems. This could only work if somehow the sandbox was updated with outside information during the challenge, which shouldn’t happen in a well designed sandbox.
CNN – CDC issues alert about nationwide increase in rabies exposures
From PZ’s bat thread: If you wake up in the presence of a bat, you may not know you were bitten. Capture it for testing and/or get post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP). PEP is practically 100% effective. The disease, if ignored until symptoms begin (up to 2 months later), is practically 100% fatal.
Rando: “Climate change, which the morons in the White House continue to pretend doesn’t exist, is a factor here. Rabies vectors like bats are expanding their range northward [in North America] as the climate heats up, creating many more opportunities for human infection.”
Kevin Beaumont (Cybersecurity journalist):
WaPo – Ohio Senate campaign staffer used Nazi soldiers as profile photo
Wikipedia – Anti-tobacco movement in Nazi Germany
MotherJones – America’s 9/11 president never forgets… his paintings
Derek Johnson (Reporter): “Legit the most embarrassing moment of his presidency, made it obvious he was completely overwhelmed by the responsibility and would—quite literally—freeze in moments of crisis.”
Commentary
ARTnews has some photos of the exhibit.
Another painting of a dust cloud engulfing the NYC skyline.
https://bsky.app/profile/lappypercival.bsky.social/post/3mvazyjn5hk2m@113 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain:
At least W. Bush understood he was not prepared for the huge issues facing him. Trump doesn’t even understand that he doesn’t understand the issues or how to deal with them.
Donald Trump says he would ‘love’ to see united Ireland
At least he didn’t offer to make them a state‽
Trump’s mail-in ballot chaos rips through Democratic strongholds
We Carry the Flame, By Hunter Walker
Making the Falklands Great AgainLink Copied, By John Light.
Census Quietly Changes Charter for Key Policy Committee, Opening Door for Political Interference
Washington Post report: As Iran proxies activate in Yemen and Iraq, Trump’s Mideast morass deepens
“Two of the most important corridors for international energy shipments are blocked by Iran and its proxies, oil prices are up and the global economy is reeling.”
Yikes.
New York Times link
Mike Mc Farland, the voice of ‘Master Roshi’ has passed away.
.
Roy Wood Jr breaks down the only geography you really need to know: “Who hates who?”
.https://youtube.com/shorts/qRSPdCNLU6
I am told storms in the pacific are pushing moist air into California, making the heat extra oppressive.
But America apparently no longer needs all those uppity weather-forecasting specialists that look for things like “hurricanes” and other woke things liberals have made up.
There is a large population of North American raccoons in Germany. One of them makes a visit to podcaster LouisWildlife, who documents canoe trips with her cats.
A RACCOON JOINS OUR BOAT! 🦝😳🙀
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=JkHdPG1hkws
@ FIBA
France tops host Germany to reach FIBA World Cup final
U.S. women beat Spain 76-66 to reach FIBA World Cup final, setting up Olympic rematch with France
Republicans like charismatic dumb guys
An eternally pugnacious DOJ goes after everyone
Bribe of Frankenrapist
Putin’s bot army is targeting German and French elections, Sweden warns
“The country’s Psychological Defence Agency chief told POLITICO that platforms like X, TikTok and Facebook need to do more to combat Russia’s lie machine.”
Reuters: Altman tells staff OpenAI is open to slowing AI development, Bloomberg News reports
This sounds good but there are also other reasons for CEO’s to say things like this. They could be running out of money and want to slow down other companies while they turn to profitability. Saying this sort of thing is common when an innovative industry turns to making profits over fast development. The CEOs have to come up with some other reason then feeding their investment backers for the move.
They could also be hitting the limits of their AI models and want to slow down development while they work on catching up. Variations of this are common with research companies that need to explain why their pace of development have slowed down. Saying they are intentionally slowing development because they need more time for something else sounds better then they are falling behind or development is stalling.
Growers develop new purple passionfruit varieties in breeding breakthrough
Where the Sommeiller glacier once was, now a vicim of Global Overheating seen and discussed by a former ski instructor here in a 9 mins long yt video that’s in english despite the thumb nail lang.
Also see this article on same :
https://snowbrains.com/20-years-ago-sommeiller-glacier-ski/#google_vignette
Watch what you say: Apple opens the door to a nightmare world of always-listening tech
Rando: “Just because it’s ‘private’ doesn’t mean the data should exist.”
A new low from Pauline Hanson here :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-13/albanese-hits-back-at-hanson-over-mother-public-housing-comments/107147902
The main story is AI financial / PR shenanigans. There’s a culty aside at the end.
Pivot to AI – OpenAI may not be able to IPO in 2026 (May 8)
Pivot to AI – OpenAI loses even more executives ahead of the alleged IPO (Aug 26)
Pivot to AI – How to run an AI doomsday media campaign (Sep 10)
* That first paragraph linked other recent stories to establish astroturfing modus operandi. One from Aug 6th covered a not atypical bootcamp involving a “torture potluck” subjecting everyone to unpleasantness as a bonding mechanism. Held at Lighthaven, the rationalists’ HQ, an old gated hotel compound, and funded by Eliezer Yudkowsky’s doomer institute.
Fortune – Sam Altman confirms OpenAI won’t go public this year, saying an IPO now would come at an ‘ill-advised moment’ given AI safety concerns (Sep 12)
https://archive.is/XTUJvDarn, guess he’ll just have to ask for more money.