Slovakia sought to modernize its traffic control systems with the acquisition of a batch of 279 new NERO R-ONE speed cameras, reports the Risky Bulletin Newsletter. Unfortunately, the country’s national security service, the NBU, has discovered that the cameras have multiple security issues. Firstly, they have SMS-activated Russian backdoors. Secondly, live camera feeds can be accessed by anyone with the device IP, no password necessary. Slovakia splurged a chunk of its €30 million EU-fund modernization budget on this now deactivated system…
he nearly 300 freshly installed NERO R-ONE cameras are thought to be rebranded Russian CORDON PRO.M traffic cameras, produced by a St. Petersburg-based firm called Semicon. Their path to acquisition sounds rather serpentine, with the big batch reportedly bought via a Cyprus-based shell company with fake certifications. Reports also suggest that pressure from the opposition political party in Slovakia led to the NBU investigations. The current government of the country, led by populist Robert Fico, initially denied reports that the cameras were of Russian origin and rebuffed any security concerns. Fico has what some would describe as a pro-Russia tilt, but you can read more about that elsewhere, if you are interested.
…
Probably most seriously, in terms of national security, these cameras contain a hardcoded list of Russian phone numbers, which can be used to open a backdoor. An SMS from one of these numbers can open shell and network access…
Navy leadership is discussing renaming a Navy aircraft carrier after President Donald Trump, according to two U.S. officials.
The ship, which is still under construction, has been set to be named the USS Doris Miller in honor of an enlisted sailor who famously staffed an anti-aircraft gun during the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, during World War II despite not having been trained on the weapon. Miller, a mess attendant, grabbed the gun during the attack and is credited with shooting down at least one Japanese plane and dragging wounded U.S. sailors to safety.
Miller was the first Black service member to receive the Navy Cross — the Navy’s second-highest honor.
…
The decision and the announcement to name the carrier after Miller were made during Trump’s first term….
A Swiss tourist has been sentenced to one year in prison for insulting a sacred religious event on Indonesia’s holiday island of Bali.
In a now-removed video, Luzian Andrin Zgraggen, 26, had filmed himself walking to an empty beach during the Hindu holiday of Nyepi, describing the scene as “crazy”.
He was arrested in March after the video sparked widespread anger among Balinese on social media.
Nyepi, also known as the Day of Silence, is an annual holiday during which the usually bustling tourist island goes quiet, as people stay home and refrain from making loud noises. The restrictions apply to everyone on the island regardless of religion, including tourists.
…
A rare collection of handwritten notes by Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi has been sold for $1.69m (£1.24m) at an auction in Mumbai city.
The notes, owned and preserved by the family of close associate and freedom fighter Anand T Hingorani, include 688 of Gandhi’s handwritten messages on truth, non-violence and self-restraint written between 1944 and 1946.
…
Pierce R. Butlersays
Reginald Selkirk @ # 223 (“Older Comments”): … climate change threatens its cheese banks that hold Parmigiano wheels as loan collateral
… wheels of the beloved cheese are neatly tucked away in cool storage and aging nicely while the rest of Italy sweats. MGT, which stores 500,000 cheese wheels valued at 300 million euros ($350 million) in two storage facilities, confirmed all is well.
Giancarlo Ravanetti, MGT’s general manager, said the extreme heat had pushed energy consumption to keep the facilities cool up by 30%.
But he said neither the cheese wheels nor MGT’s operations were at risk due to the extreme temperatures,
AP attributes the initial claims to “social media”; no reference to the Fortune source @ # 223. They cite only people with a stake in the cheese and related financial concerns – no on-site visits to the repositories, no local fact-checkers.
I had previously considered both Fortune and the AP fact-checkers as generally reliable sources, and must now brace myself for the shock of losing trust in at least one.
Anybody here planning a trip to northern Italy soon?
California state Sen. Aisha Wahab will serve out the rest of former Rep. Eric Swalwell’s term after securing victory Thursday in a special election.
Swalwell, a Democrat who was running for California governor, ended his campaign and resigned from Congress in April after he was accused of sexual assault and harassment, which he denies. Wahab will represent the state’s 14th Congressional District, which covers parts of Alameda County on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay, through Swalwell’s term ending in January.
She will be the first Afghan American to serve in Congress. The progressive Democrat defeated Bay Area Rapid Transit Director Melissa Hernandez even after a swell of spending by outside groups opposing Wahab in the race’s final stretch. She said her victory shows her district “cannot be bought.” …
President Donald Trump’s allies are being accused of a “new and breathtaking act of defiance” for voting to return his name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts even after a judge ordered it removed.
“This time, Trump’s name will appear on the building’s front portico not once, but twice. Underneath President Kennedy’s name, it will say: ‘Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump’ and ‘Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund,’” Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, said in an emergency motion to halt that defiance.
This is formally being done by the board of directors of the Kennedy Center but the board has been largely packed with Trump’s puppets, anything of significance they are doing is at Trump’s direction.
Trump is trying to get his name on the Kennedy Center again. Unable to change the name directly the new plan is add text under the formal name proclaiming Trump’s importance in maintaining the Kennedy Center. This new text will be larger then the title of building and will be carved into the building, both of which I expect will be important. If Trump had been willing to settle for a plaque under the name that was significantly smaller then the court probably lets him get away with it. Carving it into the building makes it hard and expensive to change later and making it bigger then the building title makes it clearly an attempt to get around the original order.
JMsays
ISW: Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 20, 2026
The biggest point is that the report is more about drone and missile strikes then ground movement. Both sides are making bigger strikes that way and both sides are having trouble coping with it. The Russian air defense is failing because the Ukrainians are destroying the air defense units. On the Ukrainian side it’s more the limited supply of air defense and air defense missiles can’t hold up to saturation attacks, particularly when Russians strike civilian areas away from targets of military significance.
On the ground there is not a lot of movement. Both sides are making small moves and trading land near important points. The ISW report doesn’t note this but the Russians have also made some advances by attacking away from anything of importance, apparently some combination of trying to force Ukraine to spread out and wanting to have some wins they can report.
Moscow is ready to listen to new ideas for ending the war in Ukraine, provided they align with President Vladimir Putin’s position, a senior Russian diplomat has said.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said in an interview published by News.ru on Friday that Russia is open to proposals that are in line with “realities on the ground”.
Ryabkov’s words suggest that Moscow may be seeking to revive the Trump administration’s support for its agenda. Moscow previously welcomed the United States’ demonstrating “an understanding of Russia’s position”, but Washington has been distracted from mediation efforts amid its war on Iran.
“Realities on the ground” probably means that Russia is now willing to consider freezing the front line where it is. When Russia was negotiating soon after the start of the war it was mostly not serious proposals, either demanding Ukraine hand over territory or was just a short term truce. The situation has gotten much worse for Russia then it was only a few years ago. The army has made no real progress despite the great cost. Russia is now being hit far behind the front line and the Russian economy is in really bad shape.
Pierce R. Butlersays
JM @ # 9: … Russia says ready for ‘new ideas’ …
IOW, they’ve gotten so desperate they’ll try Hegseth’s gambit of crowd-sourcing tactics & strategy?
This week, Romania accused Russia of sending a drone boat loaded with explosives to a vital European natural gas platform in the Black Sea. A Romanian F-16 fighter jet used its cannons to disable the surface drone so that explosive ordnance experts could blow it up safely.
On August 20, the Romanian Coast Guard first spotted the maritime drone a few hundred meters away from the Neptun Deep project’s main drilling platform, where several hundred workers were busy with the platform’s ongoing installation, Defense Minister Radu Miruță said in a Facebook post. The offshore gas project would make Romania the largest gas producer in the European Union once it starts full production in 2027.
To protect the lives of the workers and the offshore gas infrastructure, the Romanian military scrambled two F-16 fighter jets to stop the drone with cannon fire, Miruță said. Army specialists later carried out a controlled detonation, as seen in a Facebook video shared by the defense minister.
The drone boat itself supposedly carried explosives, according to Miruță’s comments, as reported by Reuters. Romania’s president blamed Russia directly for the incident…
re shermanj@12: I have recently played through Watch Dogs 2 again. It came out ten years ago. It has some similarities to the Flock shit, and the surveillance state in general, we are dealing with now. Resistance is NOT futile.
Thanks, @13 Johnson catman for the positive thought. I was researching the possibility of reducing of obliterating the effectiveness of flock and other spy surveillance systems and found an artist that had created a shirt or coat with simulacrums of dozens of car license plates and it seemed to load a lot of obfuscatory info into the flock cameras he stood in front of. Sounds like an idea that might dilute the abusive spying if a lot of us did that. That’s just being creative in design.
Dayton, Ohio has covered its Flock automated license plate reader cameras with black trash bags in part because police there are unsure whether the cameras are still active and the city also doesn’t seem to know whether it is allowed to take the cameras down. […] Cities are not sure […] how to extricate themselves from those contracts
[…]
In August, Evanston [Illinois] terminated its contract with Flock, and the Flock cameras were removed. The city then claimed Flock “reinstalled the cameras without the city’s permission,” and sent the company a cease-and-desist. […] a spokesperson for the city of Evanston told 404 Media. “The cameras are owned by Flock and had to be removed by Flock. While we awaited the removal, we covered them.”
Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both […]
Drawing on a network of cameras that logs the movements of drivers in more than 6,000 communities, the tool can pick out potential witnesses by how often their cars pass through a neighborhood, or surface a driver’s “associates” from the cameras they pass together [in successive vehicles]. Because the system also reaches police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, those plates can be turned into names, home addresses, and relatives. It can search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description.
[…]
Flock says it is testing the product with a small group of law enforcement partners […] Flock built its business on a simple transaction: A camera photographs a passing car, converts the plate to text, and checks it against a list of vehicles police are looking for. (Cars that are not on the list are recorded and otherwise ignored.) OS Investigate’s preloaded prompts describe an inversion of that arrangement. An officer no longer needs a plate, a name, or a crime to begin: They supply a place, a stretch of time, and a pattern of behavior, and the system is designed to hand back the people who fit.
[…]
Because the prompt menu is a convenience rather than a constraint, an officer can also type whatever they want. Selecting a prompt drops its sentence into an ordinary chat box, where it can be edited, rewritten, or replaced outright. […] “It’s going to develop not a legal standard of criminal suspicion, but whatever that AI standard is.” Flock’s software chains vehicle searches to queries against police records that sort people by sex, race, ethnicity, height, weight, build, scars, marks, and tattoos. One prompt searches by description alone, asking for records matching “male, ~6ft, black hoodie, forearm tattoo” near a location.
[…]
that closely resembles what the US Supreme Court took up in June, when it held that people keep a privacy interest in records of where they have been, and that the Fourth Amendment applies when police demand those records from a company. Here, police departments buy that capability outright, opening space for fishing expeditions
Plus their queries and results will be filtered through the LLM bs engine instead of a deterministic interface with buttons or command line arguments.
The US Supreme Court has temporarily allowed construction of the White House ballroom to move forward.
The decision on Friday by Chief Justice John Roberts, issued as a stay, will allow US President Donald Trump’s $400m (£297m) project to continue as the high court mulls over a case aiming to halt it entirely.
The stay will remain in place pending further action from the court…
Mike Caruso, the Palm Beach County clerk of courts and a staunch ally of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, was arrested Tuesday morning on charges linked to the child sexual abuse of a family member, state officials announced.
Attorney General James Uthmeier announced the arrest in a statement on X.
…
An expert witness testifying in a lawsuit about liability for a Houston explosion that killed three people and destroyed roughly 200 homes used ChatGPT to write significant portions of his “expert report.” The man, who was hired by the industrial product conglomerate 3M, exposed his AI prompts publicly. They showed that he asked ChatGPT to help him “create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M,” and that the report should “show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion at Watson Grinding.”
…
an imaginary color that can only be seen using specialized tools that exclusively activate the M cone cells on the retina without activating the L and S cone cells at the same time. It is impossible to view olo under normal viewing conditions, due to the overlapping sensitivities of M cone cells and S and L cone cells in all wavelengths of visible light
[…]
the closest color to olo in the sRGB gamut is hexadecimal code #00FFCC. […] Only the five subjects of the [April 2025] Berkeley experiment have officially seen olo. […] the five subjects of the experiment similarly described the color as a “blue-green of unprecedented saturation”.
He talked about how newborns cannot perceive shapes or colors well, and how they have trouble recognizing faces. “The optics are fine when they’re born, but the brain is not ready to make sense of the input,” he said. “My belief is that, although in the early olo experiments I was comfortable describing olo as a teal-like color, if I was exposed to it enough I would probably start saying that the word ‘teal’ is not doing it for me anymore.”
Reporter on Bond Market: The yields have come back up since then. Have you talked to Bessent about another type of intervention?
Trump: The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will. [Video clip]
Commentary
Is he threatening to bomb our allies who sell off their bonds?
Is he… going to try to bomb… the bond market?
Well, he wanted to nuke a hurricane…
the universal American solution to a problem is shooting at it.
So he thinks once the military intervenes, the bond market will say: “Yield!”
I bet Wall Street would be pretty nervous right about now if we had any bombs left.
I was willing to consider that everything was loud on a runway so he only heard “intervention” and thought it was an Iran question, but the text is actually doing him favors here. He talks about Bessent and the Military in the same sentence. What a mess.
Telling people you will use the military when they come for their money probably isn’t beneficial for their willingness to lend you more money.
Tank the economy.
If he’s suggesting taking military action against Bessent, I might be ok with that.
OCCUPY WALL STREET
Alan G. Humphreysays
Some random security: “What do you expect to happen with that intervention?”
Trump: “I expect you to Die, Mr. Bond!”
held for years in a feed lot in Idaho while the government tried to find them what it called “loving homes.” […] Whether it was loving didn’t seem to matter.
[…]
Bureau of Land Management, the agency in charge of protecting wild horses, is quietly selling thousands of horses to buyers [who disappear them]. Slaughtering wild horses is illegal, but the bureau’s actions create a loophole that enables people to get mustangs on the cheap and then quickly resell them to be exported alive, processed into cuts of meat and sold abroad.
[…]
The U.S. government’s sales of wild horses were once rare, but started to rise after President Trump took office. In 2025, they more than doubled to 3,700 horses […] The government can spend more than $3,000 to capture a mustang and bring it to market, but sells each for as little as $25. A horse can fetch up to $750 at a slaughter plant. The potential for profit keeps buyers coming. By selling mustangs at a huge loss, […] the agency [is] subsidizing their destruction.
[…]
About 73,000 wild horses roam federal public lands in the West, where they are protected from hunting or capture. For decades, in an attempt to keep the population sustainable, the bureau has rounded up 9,500 on average each year and offered them for adoption. But it finds adopters for only about half. The rest go into a labyrinth of feedlots and pastures that the bureau calls “the holding system.” The system now stores 58,000 wild horses at an annual cost of $100 million. Caring for them eats up most of the bureau’s $142 million wild horse budget. […] Congress—aware that the public wants mustangs protected—has barred the bureau from spending any money to kill healthy wild horses.
[…]
There are alternatives to the roundups […] For 20 years, the bureau has had access to inexpensive fertility-control drugs delivered by dart gun. They have been used effectively to control a few wild herds, and the government’s own experts have repeatedly urged the bureau to use them more widely. But because the bureau is spending so much on storage, it has little left to make the changes that would save it from storing more.
Rando: “there was an A-Team episode about stopping this sort of thing.”
One week out from the world-renowned Sydney Marathon, organisers face questions about whether designers etched the wrong city’s stadium on the participation medal.
The medal appears to feature a stadium carved in the likeness of Allianz Arena in the German city of Munich, rather than Allianz Stadium in Sydney – which the 42.2km (26.2 mile) course runs past…
… We covered the miserable conditions that sailors and Marines on the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) have been enduring for a record-setting 250 days at sea last week, and now we know what’s causing those conditions: Iran bombed the main U.S. resupply base in the Gulf of Oman.
MS NOW’s senior national security reporter David Rhode said that the Lincoln wasn’t able to be resupplied because the base was destroyed by Iranian strikes, and that U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth chose not to make the news public despite having several opportunities to do so…
StevoRsays
For thsoe in Adelaide or SA or near enough and wanting to attend there’sa big STOP THE CHOP! rally & march tomorrow starting in Victoria Square, Adelaide city centre at 12 noon.
Apparently they want folsk to wear yellow and bring banners and your voices to tryand save our Parklands from Premier Possum-killer Malisantosés needless, obscene environmental vandalism
This is but one of many such articles which disclose a disaster which is important to any literate person (this is not hyperbole or hysterics, we’ve experienced some of this before):
“Hoard and Destroy – AI companies are engineering a future where only the wealthiest incumbents can build high-quality AI models and operate as the sole holders of humanity’s written works.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/artificial-intelligence-book-burning
The coalition, led by the Demand Progress Education Fund, pointed to an internal Anthropic memohttps://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/554/21/bartz-v-anthropic-pbc/ that was made public as part of a copyright lawsuit against the company. The memo is headlined “Project Panama,” which is described as “our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”
Our organization is an internationally recognized publisher. These huge criminal corporations have joined tRUMP’s war on education and intellectualism by again scanning and destroying rare important books. We have pulled all connection to our works, once again, to protect them from these corporate criminal acts.
A federal judge threw out a Justice Department lawsuit against a Michigan county after one of its lawyers admitted no case supported his argument.
In a Friday decision, U.S. District Judge F. Kay Behm dismissed all six counts of the DOJ’s suit against Washtenaw County, which had ended its cooperation with federal immigration authorities and restricted Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s access to county property and jail cells. Behm cast the case as the latest in a string of attempts to force local governments to do Washington’s bidding under President Donald Trump.
It’s a simple case really and the DOJ has lost nearly identical cases in multiple states. The law precludes the Federal Government from forcing states to implement Federal policy. In many areas there is wiggle room but ICE is clear cut. It’s federal only. If states want to help the feds they can but the feds can’t force them to do enforcement for ICE.
“At oral argument, Plaintiff’s counsel admitted that he was not aware of any case that supports his argument,” Behm noted, without naming the DOJ lawyer in question.
That is an amazing admission. I would assume the DOJ lawyer who said that will soon be out of a job but I expect he knew that when he said it.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Qasim Rashid (Human rights lawyer):
This is Michael Caruso—a former GOP lawmaker in Florida who championed the death penalty for pedophiles. Caruso was just arrested on 5 felony counts of kidnapping, child molestation, lewd exhibition, luring or enticing a child, & child abuse causing mental injury—AGAINST HIS OWN GRANDSON.
Not an immigrant. Not a Black or brown person. Not a drag queen. Not trans. A 67-year-old white male MAGA Republican married father of seven & appointed by Ron DeSantis.
* The Guardian: “removed as clerk of court and comptroller for Palm Beach county”
A company linked to an E. coli and salmonella outbreak by federal health officials is recalling its alfalfa sprouts products after at least 55 people have been sickened in 15 states.
Everything Sprouts, LLC, based in Minneapolis, said in a notice Friday it is issuing a voluntary recall of its 5-ounce containers of alfalfa sprouts that were distributed since May 27 due to potential E. coli and salmonella contamination…
birgerjohanssonsays
Seventeen-year-old girl killed in sword attack at school in Sweden .https://share.google/aKLgNDHwaUisFJRlr
We have gun control. It cuts down the number of victims. This is the second sword attack in a school.
Solar Roof is no longer available to order, and that only conventional solar panels will be supplied going forward.
[…]
A product built to sell the SolarCity merger […] Elon Musk unveiled it in October 2016 on a Hollywood back lot, using homes from the set of Desperate Housewives fitted with the tiles. Weeks later, Tesla shareholders voted to approve the company’s roughly $2.6 billion acquisition of SolarCity—a debt-laden solar installer where Musk was the largest shareholder and chairman, and which was run by his cousins. The Solar Roof demo was central to selling that deal to investors […] Years later, during shareholder litigation over the acquisition, it emerged that the tiles shown at the 2016 event were not yet functioning solar products.
[…]
Tesla marketed the Solar Roof as costing less than a new conventional roof plus traditional solar panels […] Tesla drastically increased Solar Roof prices, in some cases after customers had already signed contracts. That triggered a class-action lawsuit
[…]
Tesla installed only about 3,000 Solar Roof systems in the US across roughly seven years. […] Between the manufacturing complexity, the labor-intensive install, and the shading limitations of the tiles, the Solar Roof only ever penciled out on very expensive homes where the buyer wasn’t especially price-sensitive.
Rando: “Remember when Tesla had to pay to remove its solar [panels] from 240 Walmarts after it burned down 7 stores? Good times.”
Florida’s Sarasota County Schools Board will flip to a Democratic majority following recent election wins […] She did not run for re-election.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Reginald Selkirk @35. Sarah Taber (Crop scientist): “Ah I see Satan’s pubes have finally shown up to the party. Sprouts are INFAMOUS for being very prone to outbreaks. Why? They grow in a lil container that’s kept warm, moist, & rotated to keep all the seeds wet & growing in random directions. AKA, a microbial incubator that guarantees every stray cell of Salmonella or E. coli gets its BEST start in life.”
Sarah Taber:
Rando 1: Should I consider myself lucky because I have had a lot of mung bean sprouts just like most chinese ppl and never once suffered for that?
Mung beans are big, chunky, & can be disinfected w hot water or a strong chlorine solution w/o damage.
Alfalfa, radish, & other popular sprouting seeds are tiny. They get cooked through if you try to heat treat them, and don’t take chlorine as well either.
Sarah Taber:
Rando 2: I thought the seed sprouts were no longer sold in grocery stores
Yeah stores take them off the shelves after an outbreak. Then a year or two later, everyone forgets why they stopped selling them & they stock them again. It’s the circle of life (for diarrhea).
this comes as Trump warns about the dangers of socialism and communism. [Screenshot]
Trump: the American beef herd fell to its smallest size in modern history. As we work to rebuild this herd and help our ranchers, for the next 90 days, the United States will allow up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef to be imported with no out of quota tariff. We have a committment that this beef will be sold at 25 percent below market prices. This deal will reduce prices for Americans
Joey Politano (Economist): “Every 6 months the Trump administration realizes lowering tariffs will lower prices, applies this insight to one specific good, and then proceeds to never introspect beyond that. It’s honestly beautiful in its stupidity.”
Q: On the beef deal, which countries did you make the deal with?
Trump: I don’t want to say. [Video clip]
Commentary
90 days eh? So, say, through November?
I’m not much of a rancher, but I’m skeptical 90 days is sufficient to build up a herd.
no awareness that the herd culls were because of climate-driven droughts.
dumping cheap/subsidized meat en masse into our economy will only further hurt farmers in this country. … Well that didn’t take long for a statement from the national farmers group. [Screenshot]
I’m pretty sure you don’t invest in growing your business in response to the government flooding your market. I’m also pretty sure the point is to show off the power to lower the price of a commodity your voters like (beef) since you fucked up the other one (gas).
661 million pounds—or about 2 pounds of beef per American, and Trump won’t tell anyone where it’s coming from.
So is this a “the deal is so bad they won’t tell us the details” thing or a “the president hallucinated an agreement and now everybody has to play make-believe” kind of thing?
Yum… price-fixed foreign mystery meat. That should put an end to the diarrhea outbreak.
It’s gonna be horse.
They’re eating the cats; they’re eating the dogs!!
let’s just say the unemployment rate is about to drop.
Reginald Selkirksays
@40
90 days eh? So, say, through November?
I’m not much of a rancher, but I’m skeptical 90 days is sufficient to build up a herd.
Maybe not, but it’s long enough to hold an election.
The Justice Department’s own public documents, some of which were quietly removed from its website, suggest that the use of election monitors departs from prior practice and could even be improper.
Earlier this week, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harmeet Dhillon, told Bloomberg that she would deploy 1,000 monitors to watch the November midterm elections, calling it “something that DOJ does.”
The numbers themselves suggest as much: As CBS News reported earlier this week, fewer than 300 DOJ staff were sent to polling places in the last midterm election in 2022, and just over 700 were sent in the last presidential election.
So way more polling place monitors but not an absurd number. The real question is likely to be where they monitors are and what they do. This may also be setting the stage for more monitors in 2028.
the postal service would require states to give [DHS] and other agencies access to lists of voters and to adopt new balloting procedures before the mail agency would make deliveries. If states did not comply, the USPS would refuse to deliver the ballots. […] According to the text posted online Friday, the USPS is ready to implement the new restrictions on mail-in voting if the court injunctions are lifted. […] Nearly one in three Americans voted by mail in 2024
This was some context to international relations I’d been missing.
The Infinite Thread, I think, overlooked stories where Germany had its own police crackdowns on Palestine solidarity protests throughout 2024 and 2025. such that the UN urged them to stop the brutaliity and criminalization. And the whole existence of unsubtle AfD was odd for a place that REALLY ought to know better. Of course lots of countries merely learned that the Nazi brand was bad without absorbing why. But Germany screwed up the lesson in its own way.
Even though Staatsräson is neither constitutionally nor legally binding, it is widely understood as a non-negotiable guiding principle of the German government, rooted in the memory of the Holocaust and moral responsibility. Political scientists describe Israel as an integral part of Germany’s “ontological security”, since the relationship with Israel was closely linked to the Federal Republic’s self-image as a liberal, democratic state and its break with its Nazi past.
The performativity of remembering in Germany is deployed to forget: to forget the root causes of the Holocaust and to favour instead a translocation of White supremacist Nazism unto the racialised Other today. There has been no room in the mainstream, for example, for understanding the resurgence of the far-right AfD […] No one made it clearer than the German chancellor Friedrich Merz himself who, in a 2025 interview […] blamed rising antisemitism in Germany on “imported antisemitism with the big numbers of migrants we have within the last 10 years.” This is despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of antisemitic attacks in Germany today are committed by the local Far Right.
[…]
German memory culture […] came about especially in the 1980s […] a newly reunited Germany’s desire to […] “show itself fit to enter the community of Western European nations.” […] the German state decided to support the state of Israel at all costs
[…]
Under this logic, there is only one way to be a Good Jew, and that is one who supports the state of Israel’s right to kill as many Palestinians as it wants. […] the brutal German response to pro-Palestine protests, including those organised by German and non-German Jews, was apparent for all to see. The state that spent decades telling the world that it has moved on from its violent past was producing a police force that now looks for any signs of Palestinian-ness […] to label all participants in a given protest, including Jews, as antisemitic. […] Those Jews who have declared “Not in Our Name” and “Never Again” are painted as either naive or traitors or both.
[…]
The German state is vindicated of its historical crimes because it unconditionally supports Israel. The unconditional support of Israel has become a core part of postwar German identity, and the Palestinian—or Arab, or Muslim, or inconvenient Jew—is a threat to that identity. […] This is why the notion that Germany is complicit in yet another genocide is blasphemous in German political culture today, and anyone who dares to suggest otherwise is treated with hostility or worse.
[…]
To put it differently, German redemption requires the genocide of Palestinians. […] [Felix Klein] is on record supporting Trump’s Gaza plan which includes the ethnic cleansing of large parts of the Palestinian population of Gaza. Despite this, he remains Germany’s commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the fight against Antisemitism […] “none of the antisemitism commissioners for either the German Federal Government or its Bundesländer, or states, is ethnically Jewish,” which Klein himself [said] is by design. […] this is understandable within the logic of German Catechism and Redemption Theology. […] Klein even argued that Israeli Jewish leftists in Berlin who oppose the Israeli state’s actions should “be sensitive to Germany’s special historical responsibility.” They must fall in line to make way for the purification of the “white German soul,” to use Delalić’s framing again.
Germany has approved almost 800 million euros ($913m) in arms export licences to Israel in the first five months of 2026, more than in the previous 20 months combined […] The approvals portend a dramatic surge in weapons exports to Israel from one of the country’s most steadfast allies in Europe despite the German government’s insistence that it is concerned about the devastation wrought by Israel’s military in Gaza.
[…]
The government said more than 60 percent of the value of the arms licences is earmarked for a single, unnamed “major maritime project”. […] The INS Drakon, a nuclear-capable Dolphin II-class submarine […] was officially handed over to the Israeli Navy last week […] The order dates back to 2012. While [the German manufacturer] indicated approval, the German government denied it at the time.
The hesitation might have stemmed from legal concerns surrounding proceedings against Germany at the International Court of Justice in The Hague as well as shifting public opinion in Germany, which has largely turned against arms exports to Israel. According to media reports, Germany is helping finance about 30 percent of the costs for the Drakon and roughly one-third of those for the future Dakar class [subs].
* Dolphin II’s will replace Israel’s existing 5 Dolphin subs, which are also nuclear-capable.
* Germany is Israel’s second biggest arms dealer after the US.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
* @48: Correction, Dakar class subs will replace Dolphins, and Dolphin-IIs are just a larger upgraded Dolphin in the meantime.
Content creator and golf brand Good Good has apologised and removed an advertisement for a new golf driver which showed a woman being pushed to the ground after reaching for the club.
American company Good Good, which has 2.13m subscribers to its golf channel on YouTube and sponsors a PGA Tour tournament, had created and published the advert for golf club manufacturer Callaway.
The advert drew a backlash and was accused of making light of violence against women.
“We posted a video to our channels that ultimately depicted actions that are not aligned with our values as a brand,” read the Good Good apology on X, external.
“We have since taken that content down, and sincerely apologise.
“Good Good has always stood for making the game of golf more inclusive to all, and we will continue to ensure that is our mission moving forward”.
The advert showed Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark rushing over to Alexis Miestowski – a professional golfer and regular content creator for Good Good – and pushing her to the ground before shouting: “Do not touch my new driver.” …
The animated series “Masha and the Bear” promotes pro-Russian narratives disguised as children’s content, according to Andrii Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) at the National Security and Defense Council.
Kovalenko made the statement on Telegram while commenting on Ukraine’s latest sanctions against Russia, Ukrinform reports…
A tourist visiting from France died in Death Valley on Monday while attempting to walk across one of the hottest places on Earth.
On Monday, Pierre Michel Formosa, 68, and a travel partner were driving near the Queen of Sheba Mine when their vehicle became trapped in the mud, National Park officials said. The two men left their vehicle and began walking across the salt flats toward Badwater Road in an attempt to get help. Death Valley National Park is one of the hottest places on the planet in summer, with temperatures hitting 130 degrees. On Monday, the high was 113, officials said.
A little over a mile into the walk, Formosa could no longer continue. His companion left him there and continued walking, making it close enough to Badwater Road to flag down a passing driver. The man was taken to the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, where authorities were alerted that Formosa was missing.
A California Highway Patrol helicopter dispatched to help with the search located Formosa about 1.5 miles from Badwater Road. He was declared deceased at the scene…
The world’s wealthiest man is already personally responsible for death through his tenure at DOGE, which he continues to deny. There’s no reason to doubt his foul intentions. Today, Musk celebrated a post on X that highlighted the idea of Greece shooting migrants, sinking refugee boats, and denying food and water to those who survive, calling it “based.”
@51 Reginald Selkirk 23 August 2026 at 4:40 pm capped his comment with “Shithole country” regarding:
Thousands in northwest Indiana still without power nearly two weeks after storm
I agree. the magat plutocratic government has truly made this country a “Shithole country”
Here is a HUGE reason why
It is long but IMPORTANT https://mockpaperscissors.com/2026/08/23/more-on-the-failed-canadian-trade-deal/
Restrictions on Canada’s right to pursue independent global trade deals (veto power).
• Changes to French-language rules in Quebec.
• Demands to eliminate Canadian cultural content quotas (Online Streaming Act).
• Exclusion of heavy vehicles (Ford/GM plants) from tariff relief.
• Opening up procurement for public projects to American companies.
• Dismantling Canadian dairy supply management entirely.
• Demands for Canada to align domestic tariffs automatically with US trade policy.
• Full elimination of provincial liquor board restrictions on US alcohol imports.
• Forced synchronization of pesticide and agricultural chemical regulations.
• New US intellectual property rules extending drug patent protections.
• Demands for shared management or full US control over critical mineral extraction and export.
• Direct pressure to increase defense spending to meet strict US targets.
• Reductions to the ‘de minimis’ threshold for tax-free US cross-border purchases.
My first thought was that some billionaires had started a chat thread along the lines of, “Yo, what do you want from Canada, Bezos?” and they all piped up.
Anyway, I was especially flummoxed by the French stuff, and here it is –
Canadian culture, language rules
The third factor Carney said had derailed trade talks was disagreements over French language rules.
The prime minister offered few details of exactly where the two sides had disagreed but suggested it related, in particular, to French and said those rules would have amounted to a broader attack on Canada.
“[There were] efforts to restrict our protections of our language, our culture, and in effect, our sovereignty,” he said
Later, speaking in French, he said there were “threats” from the United States in the deal over French language and Quebec culture.
Republicans have previously taken aim at Canada’s Online Streaming Act, calling it “discriminatory” and suggesting it should result in additional tariffs.
The Online Streaming Act was passed in 2023 and would empower the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to force large foreign platforms like Netflix and Amazon to pay a portion of their annual Canadian revenues into funds devoted to producing Canadian content.
The summit eruption of Kīlauea in Halemaʻumaʻu is paused. Data from summit tiltmeters shows deflation continues this morning, following the pattern of deflationary steps observed before previous episodes. Glow was observed on webcams from the north and west vents overnight. Inflation models suggest that another episode is likely between Monday August 24 and Friday August 28.
WARNING: NWS forecasts the nearby tropical storm system may cause potential torrential rains today and tomorrow. Overlap with an eruption may create extreme conditions not suitable for viewing.
CLOSURES: Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park is CURRENTLY CLOSED.
A research team at Kyoto University has built a silicon carbide (SiC) transistor that operates at 600°C (873 K) using ion implantation, the doping step used across commercial chip fabs, and cut the gap between its designed and measured threshold voltage to under 0.1V at 400°C, down from more than 2V in the conventional layout. The work, announced earlier this month by Mitsuaki Kaneko, Shunya Shibata, and Tsunenobu Kimoto and published in APL Electronic Devices, pairs a bottom-gate transistor with a double-well isolation structure to keep an ion-implanted SiC junction field-effect transistor stable at temperatures where silicon stops working above roughly 250°C…
… western Spain’s Cova de les Dones (the “Cave of the Women”)…
But, last year, a team co-led by archaeologists Aitor Ruiz-Redondo and Virginia Barciela found a chamber hidden deep within the cave that has forever changed how scholars now think of the site and its role in the ancient world.
Their team called it a “Roman sanctuary,” initially identified by about 15 Latin inscriptions along its cave walls and a first century CE Roman coin from the reign of the Emperor Claudius. Now, according to the team’s latest announcement, this remote cave holds the record for the highest known number of confirmed Latin inscriptions of any place of its kind across the entire reach of what was once the Roman Empire.
The site’s 120 inscriptions, as Ruiz-Redondo and his colleagues explain, appear to be a clear indication that the cave-sanctuary had once been a place of worship for an obscure Roman goddess, reverentially known as Domina, Latin for “the Lady.”
“The fact that the texts are concentrated in a specific and delimited area of the cave, away from the entrance, confirms that it is an organized cult,” Sergio García-Dils, one of Ruiz-Redondo’s archaeologist and speleologist collaborators, said in a Spanish-language statement (via Google Translate).
At least three inscriptions now identified in the cave reference the Lady and also bear the name “MALACI,” which the researchers believe is not a previously known name for any known goddess, Roman or otherwise. Given the cave’s structure, however, and the sanctuary’s naturally occurring small pools known as rimstone dams or gours, Ruiz-Redondo’s team suspects that the Lady was worshipped for this site’s reliable water resources.
…
Archaeologist and project co-lead Virginia Barciela of the University of Alicante noted that its first century visitors appear to have deposited offerings within the sanctuary’s gours. These “numerous spindle whorls,” as she described them, “likely indicates the offering of spindles, a textile-working tool that, in antiquity, was associated with the female sphere.”
…
The Roman sanctuary’s inscribed Latin texts reside in a chamber over 656 feet (200 meters) deep, discovered over half a century after the first Iron Age artifacts emerged from archaeological work at the cave around 1960. Ruiz-Redondo, Barciela, and their team suspect that the site might have maintained its local cultural significance all the way from the old Stone Age into the Roman era—an impressive feat given the site’s still elusive significance…
A fiber-optic cable strung across the Drake Passage could pull Antarctica’s research bases off satellite links and hard-drive shipments and onto the global network after Chile’s finalized feasibility study concluded last week that the crossing is technically viable…
President Donald Trump has cast his $600 million White House ballroom as more than a place to dance — it’s a matter of national security. But a hidden bunker capable of withstanding a nuclear blast reportedly already lies more than 60 feet (18 meters) beneath the White House, according to the Washington Post on Sunday.
Built into the bedrock beneath Washington, the facility was designed to withstand a nuclear blast and can accommodate dozens of people for weeks, according to the report that cited three former U.S. government officials.
The bunker has enough food to last several months as well as an independent air circulation system. Its exact location and layout remain classified for security reasons.
Construction of the bunker reportedly began after 9/11 terrorist attacks and was completed in secret during the Barack Obama administration.
An older facility, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), had already existed beneath the White House East Wing since World War II. Secret Service agents evacuated then-Vice President Dick Cheney and first lady Laura Bush to the PEOC during 9/11.
…
But the Trump administration has also invoked national security as a justification for the project.
A massive military facility is planned beneath the ballroom to replace the existing PEOC. Reuters reported that the six-story underground complex would include research facilities, bomb shelters and secure communications facilities –even a drone base on the roof.
“The ballroom is so much a military component with the drones and the bomb shelters,” Trump told the reporters on Wednesday…
Are you sick and tired of maintaining a password manager? Struggling with choosing the right one for you? Well, readers who live Down Under can get themselves down to their local AusPost branch where they can pick up an old-school alternative for just AU$4.90 (US$3.51).
Password books are something of a historical relic, phased out largely because of the scrutiny associated with using one and the now-gray-haired elders who once scoffed at the mere notion of such an opsec crime.
They might not be able to suggest a strong password for each of your many online accounts, and they won’t do you much good if your house is burgled, but you could argue that there is still value to be found in a pen-and-paper password vault.
That’s exactly the conclusion drawn by the thousands of social media users who flocked to a post this week from one Australian who found stacks of password books for sale in their local post office. ..
for [Twyla Lowry], a retired social worker and special education teacher […] all that matters is that [Democrat Gina Hinojosa] wants to impose a moratorium on data center projects and Abbott doesn’t. “He’s pushing for them. Everything’s so shady,” said Lowry, 56, who had voted for Abbott all three times. […] she’s not switching parties. In fact, she plans to vote for Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in his race for U.S. Senate. But her willingness to split her ticket for even one race is a sign the Texas political landscape—at least this cycle—is scrambling in unprecedented ways that could result in surprising statewide wins for the Democratic Party.
[…]
some conservatives and right-leaning independents say they plan to vote Democrat in protest, dissatisfied with how the GOP is handling issues such as data centers, water, electricity, schools and the economy. Even more unusual is how vocal some of these conservatives are about their dissatisfaction. They’ve adopted a slogan “Break Rank,”
[…]
A volunteer asked Hinojosa […] how to persuade Latino Trump voters to return to the Democratic Party. “A lot of them have buyers’ remorse,” Hinojosa said, noting she’d spoken with some upset by recent fatal ICE shootings. […] They’re not saying ‘Yay, Democrats!’ But they are saying ‘We don’t want this.'”
[…]
Abbott’s campaign, so far, has largely focused on Democrats broadly rather than singling out Hinojosa. […] Mark Jones, a political science professor […] predicted Abbott will hammer Hinojosa in the coming weeks with attack ads highlighting her liberal legislative record. As a state lawmaker for the past nine years, Hinojosa fought the state school voucher program, helped lead a legislative walkout in 2025 that delayed passage of a new congressional redistricting map, and voted against restricting transgender medical care for minors and limiting abortion access in the state. “That might give pause to those voters who say they’re going to vote for Hinojosa as a protest against Abbott,”
Millions of Tesla vehicles are being recalled in China over the brand’s hidden door handles, which regulators worry could present a danger in crashes.
Minimalist door handles have long been a feature of Elon Musk’s electric vehicles. However, Chinese regulators are less than impressed with the tech and demanded that Tesla, alongside other brands, update the vehicles to mitigate a perceived safety risk, in which occupants might not be able to escape a vehicle or rescuers be unable to gain access during an emergency…
birgerjohanssonsays
Eli and Michael provides a fun summary of skeptic news from USA and UK:
some conservatives and right-leaning independents say they plan to vote Democrat in protest, dissatisfied with how the GOP is handling issues such as data centers, water, electricity, schools and the economy. Even more unusual is how vocal some of these conservatives are about their dissatisfaction. They’ve adopted a slogan “Break Rank,”
It has always been my worry that eventually there will arise a political movement that is “progressive” on econoimic issues, but reactionary on scoial issues. They’ll vote against data centers and more funding for education–maybe even national health care–but will ban abortion and continue to rollback civil rights. This might be the start of that.
Reginald Selkirksays
@66
I’ve seen a couple other articles on “some Republicans will be voting for Democrats or independents this year.” I can never seem to find a list of what Democratic positions they disagree with.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Republican social worker and special ed teacher. *shudder*
The Trump administration on Monday announced a plan to isolate Iran’s economy by threatening to impose secondary sanctions on the “enablers” keeping the Islamic Republic afloat.
The secondary sanctions is the important part, there isn’t really anything left that the US can directly sanction on Iran. However, there are countries that trade with Iran despite the sanctions and putting pressure on those countries to stop dealing with Iran matters.
The plan, which Trump had hyped as Iran’s “Economic D-Day,” quickly drew questions about whether the U.S. would also go after China, Tehran’s top trading partner.
Washington and Beijing have maintained a fragile trade truce for months, following an escalatory trade war last year. Trump and President Xi Jinping met for a pageantry-laden summit in Beijing in May, and Xi is scheduled to meet with Trump in Washington in late September.
Bessent suggested at Monday’s event that China would not be exempt.
China and UAE are the partner that matter. Getting it to stick will be a challenge. Particularly China, which buys oil and sells military supplies.
The U.S. military has helped tankers transport more than 660 million barrels of crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz since early May, Central Command told CNBC this week.
The military has assisted about 1,300 commercial vessels sail through Hormuz over the same period, said U.S. Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, a Central Command spokesperson, in a statement Thursday.
The shipments are still far below the fuel exports before the war, when about 20 million bpd of crude oil and products passed through Hormuz. But the U.S. military’s figures indicate that a substantial amount of oil is passing through the strait despite Iranian threats and attacks.
Exactly how much oil is coming out of Hormuz daily is unclear as the U.S. government has provided different estimates that are usually higher than data from independent ship tracking firms.
The US says they are getting oil through the Strait, something around 1/3 of pre-war figures. Independent oil and ship tracking firms don’t see that much making it’s way through but there is some and the rate is rising. At least one firm puts the rate at 5 million, would be 1/4 of pre-war rates. The US Navy’s determined effort to escort ships is working even if they are not talking about it as much.
As I understand it, negotiations appeared to be going well and productively. They began as an attempt to find an agreement to forestall Trump’s original threat of a new round of draconian and illegal tariffs. Indeed, they appeared to be so near completion that an article I saw mid-week referred to Mexico eyeing and looking to negotiate a deal with comparable contours. […] Then Carney abruptly ended them in response to new demands.
[…]
We know from Trump’s business history that mafia-style squeezes are one of his trademarks. Specifically, he was known for introducing last minute demands that were so over-the-top and shocking that the counterparty would simply be bewildered and thrown off balance and start negotiating against themselves.
[…]
My best guess is […] what Trump wants—particularly in the psychic space he’s been in since last fall—isn’t any particular trade deal but a burst of domination over and humiliation of the guy on the other side of the table. […] a kind of executive self-soothing, because of the pressure he feels over diminished power on so many other fronts.
[…]
Late Update: Carney now says that “in the last hours” the US introduced demands to restrict Canada’s ability to make trade deals with other countries.
Reginald Selkirksays
I hope Trump can keep up his anti-ris losing streak for another 10 weeks, to maximize the electoral potential.
A highly effective vaccine for the human papillomavirus is looking even better than we hoped, thanks to new research that suggest HPV vaccination can prevent a variety of cancers, not just cervical cancer.
Researchers in Taiwan examined the medical records of over 1.4 million Americans, half of whom were vaccinated against HPV. Compared to unvaccinated people, HPV-vaccinated people were significantly less likely to develop cancers of the neck and head, they found.
The findings provide “real-world evidence supporting the potential broader benefits of HPV vaccination,” the authors wrote in their paper, published this month in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases…
Sounds great, although I wonder how Taiwanese researchers got a hold of the medical records of 1.4 million Americans…
johnson catmansays
re CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain@74:
Late Update: Carney now says that “in the last hours” the US introduced demands to restrict Canada’s ability to make trade deals with other countries.
The Orange Turd seems to think he is the king of the world. In reality, he is a pitiful bully who would rather fellate Putin, Xi, and Kim than help the people of his own country (rich people excepted).
The Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration Monday in a case over President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting, though it remains unclear how much can be implemented before the fast-approaching midterm elections.
The decision leaves room for additional court challenges that could further slow Trump’s order, and other similar cases have already been filed. The U.S. Postal Service laid out how it would implement the order last week, but time is running short to impose major changes with some states beginning to send mail ballots to voters in just a few weeks.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority didn’t decide the legality of Trump’s order, instead ruling that the states did not have the legal right to challenge it…
BASH: One of the things that’s happening is there’s a push to start students down a trade school track as early as elementary school. Is that too early?
LINDA McMAHON: I don’t think so.
BASH: But elementary school?
McMAHON: I think you can have some introduction of skilled trades in elementary. [Video clip]
Asawin Suebsaeng (Zeteo): “If you want to go to a trade school, great? Think college isn’t for you? Ok. But that’s not what this is. This is the government trying to do culture war social engineering while also staring down their noses at poor kids and preemptively deciding things like: I don’t want you as my doctor.”
Adam Rogers (Journalist): “At least in the Omelas story they had nice lives otherwise. Now it’s all we-torture-babies, *plus* clear dystopia.”
CW: Child abuse, death Don Moynihan (Public policy prof):
An employe at McMahon’s company, WWE was accused of systematically sexually assaulting vulnerable boys who worked at the company. McMahon persuaded them not to sue, and told one she would support his education. When his grades dropped, she stopped paying tuition support. He later killed himself.
McMahon is one of Trump’s most competent Cabinet officials, but she has run two federal agencies without articulating why she wants governmental power. Her motivation seems similar to why she led the WWE: to serve a dominant, charismatic and abusive man. […] She has gutted the Dept of Education because Trump wants her to. She has no meaningful vision about the purpose of govt to help others.
Trump wanted her to run Ed. “I said, ‘Mr. President, I don’t have any background in education.’ He said, ‘I’m not looking for an education expert.'” What he wanted was to kill the department. McMahon recounted, “He said, ‘The goal is that you’ll be successful when you fire yourself.'”
Eric Columbus (Lawfare): “depressingly accurate phrase: ‘McMahon is one of Trump’s most competent Cabinet officials.'”
Bessent wavered when asked about the details behind his aggressive claims, acknowledging that the “economic D-Day” was more of a warning than anything else.
[…]
When asked twice if his sanctions would target China or oft-mentioned Chinese banks accused of facilitating transactions for Iran, he had no direct answer, saying that the sanction recipients “know who they are.”
He avoided specifics entirely for the rest of the questioning period. “You said the president is calling world leaders with specific asks, and that there is a defined timeline,” a reporter from CBS asked. “Who is he calling, and what are the asks?”
“We’re not gonna name names. […] and we are following his calls up with calls from the State Department and from the U.S. Treasury … telling the leaders, and the countries, and the entities exactly what we expect. And the timelines,” he equivocated. “And I would expect that very quickly, if they do not respond, then you will see the ramifications of their actions.”
“You described this as an economic D-Day, but D-Day wasn’t a threat of an invasion, and the U.S. didn’t give a timeline to Germany,” another reporter followed up. “So why not impose the sanctions today?”
[…]
It seems like the Trump administration rolled out Bessent for tough talk and unspecified threats because they are running out of options. […] Iran has already dealt with U.S. sanctions for 47 years. Why would this empty show of economic force change anything?
SCOTUS has *granted* the Trump administration’s request to freeze a district court injunction that had blocked the mail-in ballots executive order. But Trump’s EO remains blocked by a different injunction in a different case—at least for now. And as soon as tomorrow, Judge Talwani may also issue a TRO against the new rule the USPS issued Friday night to implement the EO.
In other words, this is a small win for the Trump administration, but *not* a ruling that fully clears the way for Trump to mess with mail-in ballots come November.
it’s the still-to-come litigation over the USPS Final Rule that’s going to be critical here. […] the shadow looming over all of this is the “Purcell principle,” the idea that, as election day draws nigh, federal courts should stay their hand rather than issue coercive orders changing the rules for when and how people vote. […] the justices are ruthlessly inconsistent […] an injunction against the USPS Final Rule might be deemed “too close to the election,” […] That’s a genuine concern
Andy Craig (Cato institute): There’s no standing for states to sue over that EO yet because it’s just the president of the United States officially proclaiming his order to illegally interference in state elections, and you have to wait and see how and if agencies actually follow what he said first, is pants-on-head lunacy.
[Screenshot of SCOTUS decision] To paraphrase: “It’s cool, the President said in the executive order telling the Post Office to do something illegal that they can’t do anything illegal, so who knows, maybe it’ll be legal. We can’t say. It’s just too early.”
Aviles’ arrest comes as the Trump administration rolls back immigration protections for military families to pursue its mass deportation agenda, detaining at least dozens of parents and spouses of active-duty U.S. troops. At least six family members have been deported and one self-deported
[…]
One of the military’s most highly advertised immigration benefits is “military parole-in-place,” which allows the spouses, children and parents of active-duty service members and veterans to obtain legal immigration status from within the country.
[…]
he will remain in ICE custody while the government seeks to deport him. […]
Joshua Aviles wrote in his post on Saturday that he was still on the USS Lincoln […] “This is heartbreaking for me. I don’t know how I can mentally continue working 12+ hour days knowing that my dad is somewhere, possibly treated like a criminal,” […] Joshua joined the military in part because he thought it would improve his father’s chances of getting citizenship and so that he would “no longer be living in fear of being arrested.”
Republican House candidate in NY-19 posted a photo of his grandfather in a full Nazi uniform, swastika and all, on Veterans Day with the caption, “I salute all who served.” Peter Oberacker sat on the state Senate GOP’s antisemitism working group and already had to fire his campaign manager over the “I love Hitler” Young Republicans group chat.
* Politico Article Rando 1: “Come on guys. This [photo post] was 11 years ago! He was the young and immature age of… Jesus Christ, he was 52 years old. [Screenshot]”
Rando 2: “Doing the ‘my grandfather fell off a watchtower joke’ but quite literally.”
Rando 3: “Not your fault if your grandfather fought for Nazi Germany. […] EXTREMELY your fault if you post a photo of your grandfather in Nazi uniform saluting his service.”
StevoRsays
Cleland near where I am up in the hills.
About 100 captive native birds at Cleland Wildlife Park will be vaccinated against H5N1 bird flu.
They include critically endangered orange-bellied parrots and, regent honeyeaters, endangered red-tailed black cockatoos and vulnerable regent parrots, in addition to 26 other bird species at the park.
Primary Industries and Regional Development Clare Scriven said Cleland would be the first South Australian wildlife park to gain approval to administer the H5N1 vaccine to its captive birds.
It recently received federal funding to upgrade several aviaries in anticipation of the arrival of bird flu in Australia.
Cleland Wildlife Park general manager Kelly Bramhill said biosecurity measures have restricted public access to three other aviaries not subject to the upgrades.
“Vaccination for us really is that last line of defence,”
Last Friday, a teenager attacked a Swedish school, killing a 17-year old girl and injuring three others. We have gun control, so he used a sword (which probably kept the death toll to a fraction of what it could have been).
The school attacker is a teenager who grew up in a violent, negligent home. When he was placed in a foster home he seemed to become alright, but then he linked uo with an internet group glorifying school shooters and people like Breivik. He is almost a stereotypical example of a school shooter (even if he used a different weapon).
Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) says the country has brought into service its first home-grown jet-powered drone interceptor, intended to take out Russian attack drones.
The weapon, known as the Alexa Spatium, is a v-tail unmanned plane developed by Ukrainian engineers to destroy small airborne and surface targets. It was designed primarily to engage Russian kamikaze drones such as the Geran-3, Geran-4, and Geran-5, plus the infamous Shahed-131.
Measuring 1.5 by 1.7 meters, it is launched from a mobile catapult and can also return to the launch site for re-use if it does not complete its mission, according to Ukraine’s MoD.
The aircraft can be fitted with high-explosive, fragmentation, shaped-charge, or thermobaric (fuel-air) warheads. It can fly to a target using pre-programmed coordinates or use direct guidance. It features both TV and infrared search and targeting systems.
Ukraine is being somewhat vague about the Alexa Spatium’s exact capabilities, which is understandable for a country at war. Thus the MoD says only that the aircraft has a high operational ceiling, a substantial combat radius and a powerful turbojet engine, but does not detail what speed it is capable of…
Scientists have warned deadly H5 bird flu could cause “carnage” for Australia’s seal and sea lion populations after detection of the virus in long-nosed fur seals in South Australia. SA confirmed Australia’s first case in a mainland mammal on Saturday after a dead long-nosed fur seal found at Beachport on the Limestone Coast tested positive for H5N1.
… (Snip)..
“The carnage may be substantial and represent a serious conservation impact,” he (John Woinarski, leading mammal scientist Charles Darwin University -ed) said. “I fear for Australian sea lions in particular because of their small population size.“It’s likely in the next few weeks it will spread more quickly into the sea lion population in South Australia generally because of the proximity of the sea lion colonies to breeding seabird colonies or affected seabirds.”
H5 bird flu has already affected pinnipeds in South America and sub-Antarctica, where it has caused catastrophic losses in populations of some species, particularly among pups.
In 2023, H5N1 killed more than 17,000 southern elephant seal pups in Argentina and drone surveys detected more than 13,000 dead southern elephant seal pups on Australia’s Heard Island in 2025 and 2026.
Then there’s an individual Elephant Seal and a worry here :
For seven years, Scott Kempton has taken boats out of the waters of Portland, Victoria for maintenance, but for the past three weeks, he has used a long-handled shovel to clear the same slipway of dozens of dead birds.
“There was one day last week where there was 22,” the slipway operator said.
..(snip)..
..While the removal efforts were partly to prevent “stinking the joint out”, Mr Kempton’s mission is further fuelled by the presence of “Sammy”, a celebrity seal.
Locals have seen the multi-tonne elephant seal resting near birds that have died close to one of his frequent hang-out spots.
“The first one was a [crested] tern,” said Mr Kempton, a resident of the coastal city in the state’s south west.
“He was laying with it for probably five or six hours. “[The locals] are worried that he’ll get bird flu and he’ll tip over.”
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, has raised eyebrows after asking Fox News’ Jesse Watters if he is circumcised during a combative prime-time interview.
…
“Sex change for minors. Do you support that?” Watters asked El-Sayed, to which the former public health official said, “I just think the government shouldn’t tell you what kind of healthcare you should have.”
“So you think it’s okay for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off?” Watters asked.
El-Sayed retorted: “Do you really want to have this conversation? Are you circumcised?”
The shocked Fox News host said, “Yeah, but I mean that’s a personal question, doctor.” …
StevoRsays
A right wing Israeli politician has recorded himself taking a sledgehammer to a Palestinian memorial in the occupied West Bank, after being escorted into the village by Israeli soldiers. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) accused Zvi Sukkot of having “acted deceptively and manipulatively” in requesting its protection at the site, confirming it diverted resources to accompany Mr Sukkot only for him to carry out the vandalism. The 35-year-old member of the Knesset posted video of his attempt to destroy the stone memorial in the town of Madama, south of the city of Nablus, arguing it was a “terror monument”.
“It also lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges,” Jackson wrote.
Jackson said her colleagues lacked “situational awareness” in ruling that blue states needed to wait for the U.S. Postal Service to at least begin implementing Trump’s policy before challenging it. She called it a “catch-me-if-you-can” approach.
She grasps what the majority either don’t grasp or are intentionally ignoring. For sensible reasons the court doesn’t normally address theoretical questions, doing that could easily tie up the court’s time with cases that don’t happen in reality and there are a lot of “what if” questions that go away when a theoretical issue becomes a concrete case. The court shouldn’t let people abuse that principle and that is what people (mostly Republicans) are doing on these voting issues. Don’t do anything concrete until it’s too close to the election to change the procedure, districts, rules, etc. That way a court case can’t fix things and the changes will apply for at least one election cycle.
On what happened to the Herero and Nama peoples of what is now Namibia – an informative but WARNING confronting material and images 7 mins long yt doco here – Gaza & Germany’s Forgotten African Genocide by the Palestine Deep Dive channel.
A US federal judge has rejected a bid by Ghislaine Maxwell, a key accomplice of notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, to throw out her conviction on sex trafficking charges.
Maxwell, 64, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison and is the only person convicted of a crime in connection with Epstein, who died in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting his own trial.
In his ruling on Tuesday, local time, Judge Paul Engelmayer said that Maxwell’s claims that her constitutional rights at trial and sentencing were violated “are all meritless and all or almost all are frivolous.”
Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of supplying underage girls to Epstein, whose ties to powerful business executives, politicians, celebrities and academics have fuelled years of scrutiny and conspiracy theories.
Two people who were not vaccinated against measles have died of the virus in Pennsylvania, health officials said.
The state has seen 393 cases of the highly contagious virus this year, as infections across the US have hit the highest point in 35 years.
…
Eighty-five percent of kindergarten-age students in Lancaster County, where the recent deaths occurred, are vaccinated against measles – well below the 95% rate needed for herd immunity to limit the spread and protect immunocompromised people.
…
If you read this, and identify as a caring ‘truth seeker’ type, you will become more enlightened and I respect you. If you don’t, I have no sympathy for your willful, destructive ignorance. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/669
@92 Reginald Selkirk posted about Abdul El-Sayed asks Jesse Watters if he is circumcised during combative Fox News interview
I must suspect that the person performing watters’ procedure confused circumcision with lobotomy!
Doctor El-Sayed is so sharp, candid and decent!
After more than a quarter-century of drought in the Colorado River Basin, water levels in America’s largest reservoirs recently plummeted to historic lows. As this crisis reaches a boiling point, new research shows that just 122 companies are responsible for about half of the West’s climate change-driven water losses over the past decade.
Between 2014 and 2024, global warming reduced the American West’s snowpack by more than a third, choked the region’s warm-season streamflow by roughly 13%, and increased irrigation demand by 4.3%, according to a study published today in Nature’s Communications Earth & Environment journal. The authors traced about half (40% to 64%) of these impacts to emissions from 122 “carbon majors” since 1950.
“Due to their outsize contributions of carbon to the atmosphere and their decades-long deception concerning climate change, fossil fuel companies should face accountability for their climate harms,” several of the authors associated with the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in a statement…
…
In this first-of-its-kind study, the researchers used observational data and climate modeling to quantify how emissions from 122 carbon majors since 1950 have contributed to water cycle disruptions across the western United States. They found that the impact these companies have had on the West’s April snowpack alone has drained more than 9 trillion gallons of water from the region over the past decade. That’s roughly equivalent to the maximum capacity of Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States…
@102 Reginald Selkirk warned us: 122 Companies Are Quietly Sucking the West Dry, Study Finds
I reply: Reginald, thanks, you do provide a lot of important comments.
As residents of scarizona, we see the insanity here increasing and being ignored.
The water level in the two major reservoirs will soon drop to the point where they will have to shut down all power generating water turbines, depriving the state of major sources of electric power.
With water supplies already disappearing, phoenix has more huge apartment complexes under construction than any other large city, they want more water wasting data centers and large industrial centers to come to the state. Thus, tens of thousands more thirsty, energy gulping people.
One of their frequent answers is ‘toilet to tap’: use massive amounts of money and electricity to process all the sewer outflow into drinking water even though it WILL NOT ELIMINATE many of the drugs, microplastics and potentially viruses already in the sewer water, etc.
More symptoms of the Death Spiral. The world around me is so depressing. I have to go and do something constructive and positive.
Attorney General Todd Blanche abandoned his months-long claim of compliance with an order regarding the Epstein files one day before a frustrated judge’s deadline and appealed the order instead.
The notice of appeal, filed Sunday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, acknowledged that the order requiring Epstein files to be handed over to the court may not even be appealable. Senior U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan had given Blanche until August 25 to hand over Epstein-related documents.
This goes beyond just stalling to trying to abuse the court system to work around a judge. It isn’t clear if the DOJ can legally appeal at this point in the process.
This is confusing legal arcana but my understanding is this. The DOJ can obey the original order or raise an issue with the judge. To take it back to the judge they have to provide a reason why they are not complying with his order. When the judge then responds the DOJ could appeal if they don’t like his response. The DOJ wants to avoid the problem of coming up with some sensible grounds and is trying to skip several steps and go straight to the appeal court without answering the judge.
One of our members compiled this list and it angers us all.
Some reasons why hack-eem jeffries sucks and should be defeated at every opportunity:
» he opposes Medicare for All
» says he will oppose bid to cut off aid to genocidal Israel
» he voted for resolution honoring Charlie Kirk
» he had a secret meeting to brown-nose jerkoff kushner
» he opposes legitimately chosen Dem. Socialist candidates
A polygamous sect leader already serving a 50-year federal prison sentence for orchestrating sex involving children is scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday on separate state convictions for hauling girls through a community in northern Arizona in an unventilated trailer.
Samuel Bateman, 50, was convicted of three child abuse counts stemming from an August 2022 traffic stop in Flagstaff that led to the discovery of three girls, ages 11 to 14, in the trailer. It had a makeshift toilet, sofa and camping chairs and lacked air conditioning and seat belts. Someone tipped off authorities about the trailer after seeing small fingers reaching through gaps in the doors.
Each count carries a mandatory sentence between four and eight years. A judge will have discretion to run the counts consecutively or concurrently…
Former Miss North Carolina USA Brittany Boltinhouse filed a defamation lawsuit against pageant organizers after the Miss USA organization stripped her of her title earlier this month, alleging they tried to portray her as a racist and targeted her because she is a “conservative Christian.” …
This came up on a previous page. She was found to be the author of many offensive social media comments, many of which used the ‘N’ word.
A 12-year-old girl stole the show at the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania Monday, helping advance the Southeast Region team to game two in the U.S. division.
Kinley Rasmus, a two-way player with the Phenix City Youth Baseball Little League team in Alabama, allowed only two hits and struck out six batters against the East Side Little League team of West Chester, Pennsylvania, leading her team to a 6-5 victory.
Kinley’s play on the field while wearing her signature bow sparked “fear the bow” chants from fans as excitement rippled through the crowd…
Kinley is the 25th girl to ever play in the Little League World Series. She tied Mo’ne Davis’ record for most strikeouts by a girl in the Little League World Series after Monday’s performance, according to the Little League World Series…
In 2024, construction workers in Austria had an unlikely encounter with a mass grave. Expert analysis dated the grave back to the Roman era, finding around 150 young men who likely perished in combat. The team now has more details on how exactly these soldiers were hurt. And let me just say: ouch.
Most of the sharp force was observed on the skull—fairly standard. But 40% of the 128 individuals studied displayed “trauma seen on and around the pelvis,” according to a presentation overview of the findings, announced at a recent meeting of the 25th European Paleopathology Association.
…
But now, after fully cataloguing the remains, the researchers were able to define patterns across the skeletons, including the strange prevalence of groin injuries. To Live Science, Sheridan Strang, a bioarchaeologist with the archaeology firm Novetus, explained that the most likely scenario is that horseback attackers used lances to target a gap in the enemy’s armor…
A developer found AliExpress using silent browser audio signals to fingerprint devices after the site disrupted their Bluetooth headphones.
The scripts also collect graphics, hardware, network, and interaction data, then send fingerprints to Alibaba telemetry servers.
AliExpress may use fingerprinting to fight fraud and abuse, but users receive no clear notice or consent.
Alibaba has an interesting way to fingerprint users that nobody else has been caught using yet. It plays 0 volume sounds and tracks how the computer responds. Small differences in how fast the computer does that and how it reports that are unique enough to identify computers.
Fingerprinting can be used in fighting fraud but it’s primary use is in tracking users that are not logged in. Really obnoxious behavior.
County Attorney Mary Moriarty will not press felony riot charges against white supremacist provocateur Edward Jacob “Jake” Lang for his latest hate rally in Minneapolis […] Lang may face misdemeanor charges from the City of Minneapolis if the city’s attorney chooses to prosecute […] The protester dressed as Spider-Man, however, is currently facing charges. [See PZ’s post for the GoFundMe.]
“Mr. Lang had been in prison for four years for violent crimes committed against law enforcement at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, before being released from prison after being pardoned[“]
[…] Despite lacking a permit for the hate rally, the MPD coordinated with Lang to see the “march” carried out. […] it was the MPD’s Lt. Deitan Dubuc who communicated with Lang, even replying with fist bump emojis. […] Dubuc’s had at least 17 complaints filed against him and has been suspended without pay and given written reprimands […] In January, Dubuc was a lone officer preventing hundreds of anti-ICE protesters from entering the Home2 Suites […]
Because of the communication between Dubuc and Lang, Moriarty’s office stated “we simply cannot prove the requisite intent in light of the evidence of communication and logistical coordination.” Additionally, they are unable to pursue felony assault charges in the case of Lang’s truck hitting a police officer, because, according to the officer’s own report of the incident, “he did not believe the driver saw what was happening.”
No mention was made in the report of Lang’s private security immediately pepper spraying counter-protesters and members of the media despite a heavy police presence. [That’s a felony up to 5 years.]
Lang’s security, armed with handguns […] would go on to work with police in pushing back counter-protesters […]
Lang is currently being held in the Hennepin County Jail awaiting extradition to Texas. His arrest in the Twin Cities violated the conditions of his bail in the Lone Star State, where he is currently facing charges of terroristic threats. All six people arrested alongside Lang have been released
Rando 1: “Wait, so as long as there’s a MAGA cop leaking info to MAGA rioters, they can’t be held responsible?”
Rando 2: “Let me recap: the MPD is 30 million over budget, helped Lang plan his riot, set up barricades for him, let him drive multiple vehicles into a crowded area, one of the cops had their foot run over, and now we can’t press charges because the cops are in on it in the first place.”
Rando 3: “but ICE keeps using ‘fear’ of weaponized vehicles to shoot people.”
JMsays
Adam Mockler: They faked EVERYTHING!!!
Tristian Tate filed a personal deposition taking the “lying influencer” defense. They are actually poor and everything they do that shows wealth in their videos is a lie, nothing they say can be taken seriously. I would take it that most of their claims about wealth are a lie. Their claims to own super yachts and many valuable sports cars are common lies for that sort. They are also likely trying to hide what money they do have to avoid it being seized.
The brothers also filed evidence in support of release from custody that makes a terrible case. Romainian authorities are quoted as saying the brothers show constant disregard for judicial measures and legal obligations and that Tristan was involved in 11 attempts to influence witnesses. This is the evidence their lawyers are submitting to suggest they don’t need confined.
StevoRsays
PBS Newshour has “Live Results: South Carolina’s special Senate GOP primary runoff here :
Wealth inequality is becoming extreme. Political corruption is rampant in the United States. Billionaires are building fortified bunkers to protect themselves from the inevitable social upheaval that lies in our future (they fear).
“What do I see in our future now? I see pitchforks,” US tech entrepreneur Nick Hanauer famously warned in 2014. “There is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. “You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counter-examples.” Some tech leaders say it is inevitable that people will revolt against automation.
Environmental DNA shows the endangered waterfall frog (Litoria nannotis) and the endangered Australian lace-lid frog (L. dayi) had expanded to new territories after being badly hit by chytrid fungus.
The armoured mistfrog (Litoria lorica), however, remains restricted to one area.
What’s next?
Researchers say more needs to be done to investigate the genetic diversity of the populations impacted by chytrid fungus, as mass deaths can mean a loss of genetic variation, leaving the populations vulnerable.
President Donald Trump’s upcoming Republican midterm convention has been described as a trainwreck by political insiders, with concerns ranging from the exorbitant ticket prices to poor optics, according to a new report.
The convention, the first of its kind, is set to be held at the American Airlines Center in Dallas on September 9 and 10 — just months before the November midterm elections, which are historically viewed as a referendum on the president’s performance in office.
The timing sets it up for lots of 9/11 fear mongering but putting at the very start of the NFL season is bad. The timing in general is odd, normally part of the reason for these events is fund raising so the national party has money to spend on the elections but this will be too close to the election to do much. There doesn’t seem to be much interest in attending, one of the primary reasons to go would be to get a picture or video with Trump for campaign advertising. Right now a lot of Republicans would consider that a liability.
The ticket prices are one source of discontent. The National Republican Campaign Committee is asking House members to pay $25,000 for themselves and a plus one to attend, according to three sources who spoke to the outlet. The top price is even steeper, with some lawmakers being asked to contribute $100,000 — and few appear eager to attend.
Those prices are a shakedown. Actual prices for a normal convention are hard to track down because there are so many special invitations, different tickets at different prices and last minute discounts. It appears that is significantly higher, for an event on a non-presidential year. Those prices are likely to drop as they get closer to the event, it will be embarrassing for the entire party if the event isn’t largely filled.
birgerjohanssonsays
Scientists Discover Process for Tissue Regeneration (not quite on the level of Deadpool- it takes a month to heal wounds)
.https://youtube.com/shorts/Vecx0CRwKKk
Voters in South Carolina have chosen Darline Graham, the sister of late Senator Lindsey Graham, as the Republican candidate to contest his US Senate seat in November.
Graham’s bid received strong backing from President Donald Trump, who travelled to the state to campaign for her. Graham’s victory is being seen as evidence of Trump’s continuing influence over the Republican Party.
Graham is currently serving in the Senate as a temporary replacement for her brother, who died suddenly in July. She had never previously run for elected office.
…
Political experts expect that Graham will now go on to succeed in the November election. South Carolina has not elected a Democrat to the Senate for decades…
Antibodies play a central role in your body’s immune defense. But they’re also nearly ubiquitous in biological research, being essential for several widely used lab techniques. While some researchers need to go through the process of producing their own antibodies, antibodies to many key proteins are commercially available and can be ordered for overnight delivery.
In May, however, Reese Richardson, a post-doc at Northwestern University, discovered that some of the images used to demonstrate how these antibodies performed in lab experiments had been subject to image manipulation—the sorts of changes that would get a paper retracted if they had appeared in the academic literature. The manipulations ranged from removing background noise to copying and pasting data to fabricate results. Now, he has done a more exhaustive search and found problematic manipulations in images used to market over 17,000 commercial antibodies.
At the very least this means wasted time for researches, retracting papers and redoing them. At worst this could have led to bad medicine and dead people. None of those checked so far are entirely faked, so it will lean heavily towards the wasted time end of the spectrum.
birgerjohanssonsays
Tim Curry 1946 – 2026.
Actor in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and many other, more serious films.
A bad week for celebrities born that year.
whheydtsays
Re: birgerjohansson @ #127…
PZ noted in his post the meme of deaths coming in threes. Personally, I don’t want the third to be That Felon in the White House as that would clear the way for JD to get elected twice in his own right (much as I don’t want him the get elected at all). Best that that third one survive past 21 Jan 2027.
Lux Claridge, the teacher who was arrested in Emporia, Kansas, during an AI data center meeting for clapping, said that the city has dropped the charges against them. According to 404 Media, the Emporia assistant city attorney told Claridge’s lawyer that the case has been dismissed without prejudice in municipal court because of conflicts on the matter. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that they’re in the clear yet, as the case has been bumped to the County Attorney’s office for further review…
A pro-Israel messaging website badged with the name of a thinktank that does not exist has published more than half a million words in nine days, built on a commercial platform that promises to optimize content so that AI chatbots will cite it.
The site gives Israel’s position on subjects including the torture of Palestinian prisoners, Israeli war crimes and whether Israel has deliberately starved Palestinians in Gaza, all presented as neutral research.
The New York media production company Piro Inc filed the site with the US justice department this month under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara), a 1938 law that requires anyone working for a foreign government to formally disclose it, as material it distributes for the Israeli government.
The site publishes in the name of the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, which apparently does not exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no physical address, and carries no named staff and no bylines on any of its reports. Its own terms of use are governed by the laws of “the state in which the Institute is established”, which they decline to name.
…
Florida’s attorney general got a fiery rebuke and some ecclesiastical schooling from the state’s Catholic bishops after he boldly threatened to block funding to Catholic schools unless the church bends to the state’s anti-vaccine policies—policies allegedly intended to uphold religious freedom.
On July 31, Attorney General James Uthmeier sent a questionable letter to the bishops regarding exemptions to school vaccination requirements. Florida law requires public and private schools to allow vaccination exemptions based on religious grounds. But Catholic schools in the state do not accept religious exemptions; Florida’s Catholic dioceses support vaccination and recognize no theological argument against it. The schools only accept exemptions based on medical conditions that are verified by a healthcare provider.
Uthmeier, himself a Catholic, wrote to the bishops in an open letter that, based on his own understanding of Catholicism, he saw “no legitimate religious reason to refuse granting religious exemptions.” He reviewed select theological positions regarding the use of “abortion-derived vaccines,” and suggested to the bishops that it was “morally reprehensible” that they not grant religious exemptions.
Beyond sharing his personal interpretations with the bishops, Uthmeier threatened to withhold state scholarships and vouchers from Catholic school if they don’t change their position.
The bishops responded with their own letter, which they made public last week. With a firm crack, they smack down Uthmeier’s legal and theological arguments, while also noting that they’re being unnecessarily nice in explaining to him why he’s wrong. “[T]he Catholic bishops in Florida do not have to justify to your office their position on Catholic teaching and their reasons for the current vaccine policies,” the write.
But “out of respect,” they go on to demolish Uthmeier’s points, citing the hierarchical nature of the Catholic church, the Religion clauses of the First Amendment, state laws, and previous court rulings. In all, “It is beyond cavil that the bishops, not the state, decide how to interpret and apply Catholic principles and theology.”
…
As Donald Trump’s trade war against Canada heats up, an Ottawa city councillor says it’s finally time to rename a street that bears the U.S. president’s name.
A 2021 effort to rename Trump Avenue in the Central Park neighbourhood off Merivale Road fell through after a consultation found residents were split on the idea.
But the area’s councillor, Riley Brockington, said it’s now time to put an end to what he called an embarrassment in light of Trump’s repeated threats to Canada’s sovereignty and economy.
“I’m embarrassed that there is a street in River Ward called Trump Avenue, and I’m embarrassed that in the nation’s capital we have Donald Trump honoured in this respect,” he said.
Brockington said he will work with Trump Avenue residents to launch the renaming process after the next election, but he said he’s set on seeing it done…
Alaskans this November will have two individuals named Dan Sullivan on their ballot for U.S. Senate, in one of the races that both parties see as critical for determining the balance of power in the chamber.
The Associated Press projected overnight that retired teacher Dan J. Sullivan, a Republican, will advance in Alaska’s top-four primary for U.S. Senate. Last week, the Associated Press projected that Democratic candidate Mary Peltola and Republican candidate and incumbent Dan S. Sullivan would advance.
Alaska holds top-four nonpartisan primary elections, meaning the top four vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of their political party. The Associated Press has not yet projected the fourth candidate who will advance to the general election for Senate. The primary was held Aug. 18…
Operation Bluebird, the Virginia-based startup trying to revive the allegedly abandoned “Twitter” name and logo, announced Monday that it has launched its new social media network: Twitter.now.
“We are a small company, we have investors, and we have a product,” Stephen Coates, one of Operation Bluebird’s cofounders, told Ars. “And we have waited months and months to launch, and we are not going to wait anymore.”
As Ars reported in December 2025, Coates and his coterie believe that when Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and quickly changed the company’s name to X, the Twitter identity and intellectual property were abandoned.
Musk’s decision, they claim, created the opening for Operation Bluebird to claim Twitter’s trademarks.
But Musk’s X Corporation quickly sued Operation Bluebird late last year and asked a federal judge in Delaware to issue a preliminary injunction to prevent a new version of Twitter from launching.
However, in an April 2026 hearing, US District Court Judge Colm Connolly gave a tentative ruling from the bench that X seemed to have given up intellectual property claims over the word “tweet” and the Twitter bird logo—and possibly even on the word “Twitter” as well. The judge has yet to issue a written order.
For Coates, who serves as Twitter’s new general counsel and previously worked in the same role during the pre-Musk era, the judge’s words were enough to serve as a green light…
coffeepottsays
@136 new twitter:
“A new and notable feature is the automated fact-checking tool, a Gemini-based “veracity engine for real-time analysis” (“Vera” for short), which runs on every tweet.”
yeah, nope. woulda considered signing up to show support
johnson catmansays
re whheydt@128:
PZ noted in his post the meme of deaths coming in threes. Personally, I don’t want the third to be That Felon in the White House as that would clear the way for JD to get elected twice in his own right (much as I don’t want him the get elected at all). Best that that third one survive past 21 Jan 2027.
Your math is slightly off.
The Twenty-Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution sets a strict two-term limit for elected presidents.Ratified in 1951, the rule states that no person can be elected to the office of the president more than twice.The absolute maximum time a person can serve as president is 10 years. This happens if a person takes over the presidency midway through someone else’s term (serving two years or less) and is then elected to two full terms of their own. If they take over with more than two years left in that term, they can only be elected one more time.
So it would be BETTER to have The Orange Turd keel over BEFORE January 21, 2027 because then, Junior Drumph Vancehole only has the possibility of being elected once.
whheydtsays
Re: johnson catman @ #138…
You’re right. I inverted the condition. So… With any kind of luck, That Felon in the White House will soon be #3 in the current run.
I don’t think teaching should be left to people incapable of learning.
birgerjohanssonsays
“How the sun’s galactic journey and superflare-filled youth shaped Earth’s climate.”
Nitrous oxide kept the young Earth just warm enough to avoid freezing. Another indication that the ‘Rare Earth’ hypothesis may be right.
When a science gets proper funding! This telescope will be launched 30th August.
“Roman telescope aims to directly image exoplanets 1,000 times fainter than current limits”
Just watched a really good movie on SBS World Movies channel. This one :
How To Blow Up A Pipeline
Thursday, 27 Aug
7:35 PM – 9:30 PM [115 mins] ctc
A crew of young environmental activists execute a daring mission to sabotage an oil pipeline, in director Daniel Goldhaber’s taut and timely thriller that is part high-stakes heist, part radical exploration of the climate crisis. Based on the controversial book by Andreas Malm.
A federal judge on Wednesday refused to order Texas to extradite an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer charged with shooting a man and lying about it during the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.
U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. wrote in an order that he couldn’t prevent a county sheriff from releasing Christian Castro or order Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to sign his extradition warrant.
The Cameron County sheriff said he would release Castro on Thursday morning.
Castro is charged in Minnesota with assault and falsely reporting a crime in the Jan. 14 shooting of 24-year-old Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis.
Castro is accused of firing a gun through the front door of a Minneapolis home, shooting Sosa-Celis in the leg. Prosecutors say Castro also falsely accused Sosa-Celis and another man of attacking an ICE officer with a broom handle and a snow shovel.
After a Minnesota judge issued a nationwide warrant for Castro’s arrest in May, authorities, including Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, arrested Castro in Cameron County on May 29. Minnesota authorities have sought his extradition since his arrest, but he remains in custody in Brownsville, Texas, a city bordering Mexico.
Under Texas law and barring extradition, Castro must be released after 90 days of detention, which is Thursday.
A win for the bad guys.
davetheresurrectorsays
The judge says the issue isn’t ripe because Gov. Abbott hasn’t denied the extradition request yet.
One thousand Swiss citizens voluntarily buried their cotton underpants for two months—not to keep the Underpants Gnomes from stealing them, but as part of a citizen science project to map out soil health across Switzerland. The results of this unique experiment were reported in a new paper published in the journal Plants People Planet.
…
Commercially available teabags are a common material used to measure decomposition rates, known as the “teabag index” (TBI).
…
an der Heijden et al. recruited 1,000 Swiss citizens across the country—240 of whom are listed as co-authors on the paper—and sent them an activity pack: two pairs of organic cotton men’s underpants, 12 teabags, and a sampling bag for soil collection, along with detailed instructions. Each volunteer selected a site, dug a hole, and collected a soil sample. Then they inserted the two pairs of underpants vertically, side by side, with the synthetic waistband visible on the surface.
They also placed six teabags in front of each of the garments to compare how the underpants performed vs. the TBI in terms of decomposition assessment, and then refilled the hole. Participants dug up the first pair of underpants and associated tea bags after 30 days and the second after 60 days, documenting the condition of the items and mailing all the materials to the scientists for analysis.
…
Overall, the authors found that their “underpants index” provided equally meaningful information about soil conditions as the TBI, including chemical and physical properties, elevation, and moisture. And unlike TBI, the underpants “provide a direct visual and haptic measure of decomposition that is easier to interpret,” they wrote. This makes it “an ideal tool to be used in citizen science projects and to raise awareness for soil-related issues.” …
In the wake of news on Tuesday that two people in Pennsylvania died from measles, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been posting a slew of anti-vaccine rhetoric and misinformation on social media—marking a resurgence of his old ways as a fervent opponent of lifesaving immunizations.
The deaths are the first measles-linked fatalities in Pennsylvania in 35 years and are the first US measles deaths reported in 2026. They occurred amid an explosive outbreak in the state that has reached nearly 400 confirmed cases, as well as an ongoing nationwide surge for the vaccine-preventable disease. The US has tallied nearly 2,800 cases so far this year, the highest total since 1991.
Pennsylvania health officials initially declined to provide details about the deaths, only reporting that they were in unvaccinated people from Lancaster County. However, news broke Wednesday that one of the deaths occurred in a newborn baby. That heart-wrenching news was swiftly entangled in the anti-vaccine misinformation Kennedy was spewing online.
On Tuesday, as news of the two deaths was breaking, Kennedy took to his personal X account to rail against the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and posted a link to The HighWire, a hardline anti-vaccine and conspiracy site run by Del Bigtree, a prominent anti-vaccine propagandist and Kennedy ally.
Kennedy’s post also assailed Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who has criticized Kennedy’s anti-vaccine rhetoric and activism. Kennedy went on to blame national declines in vaccination rates on the Biden administration.
On Wednesday, as news broke that one of the deaths in Pennsylvania was in a newborn, Kennedy turned to his official X account as US health secretary to allege that “the deaths may even have been altogether fabricated by one of the Governor’s hopeful staffers.” He cited a tweet from Josh Parsons, a Republican commissioner of Lancaster County, who claimed there had been “zero measles deaths” reported in the county. The claims appear to be another old play from the anti-vaccine handbook.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported later on Wednesday that the Lancaster County Coroner publicly stated that a newborn who had tested positive for measles had died shortly after birth of a ruptured spleen. The coroner, Stephen Diamantoni, said that a pathologist “did not feel it was related to measles.” He noted that he did not know when the baby died or whether the baby’s mother was infected with measles, and had not been in touch with state health officials.
Paul Offit, a vaccine and pediatric infectious disease expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, clarified that the measles virus can be passed on in the womb or shortly after birth. The virus can cause the spleen to enlarge and rupture at birth. Offit urged that if measles wasn’t the cause of the baby’s ruptured spleen, the coroner should provide an alternative explanation.
…
James Dale
On Feb. 27, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth posted a video announcing that he had forced Scouting America (formerly the Boy Scouts of America) to bend the knee regarding its inclusive policies. Hegseth said the organization would purge what he called “an insidious, radical, woke ideology” and membership would be based on birth certificates. Hegseth gave the organization’s leaders six months to prove themselves, and he closed with a threat: “We’re watching, and we’re watching closely.”
I know that rhetoric. I heard it in 1990 at 19 years old, when the Boy Scouts of America expelled me for being openly gay. I was an Eagle Scout and an assistant scoutmaster in Matawan, New Jersey, and a one-page form letter told me I no longer met the standards for leadership.
I spent the next decade fighting that decision all the way to the Supreme Court, and in 2000 I lost 5-4. The conservative court held that the scouts had a First Amendment right to decide their own membership, free from government interference, overturning a unanimous decision of New Jersey’s highest court.
Beneath the bluster in Hegseth’s video, he kept referencing an agreement or memorandum but never shared it.
Scouting America’s news release described a “renewed, strengthened partnership with the Department of War” but didn’t mention a memorandum. The Scouting CEO told the media that transgender members would remain in the program.
Hegseth and the organization he claimed to have broken were describing two different agreements.
Not comfortable with the gap between what was being publicly said, I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to see the memorandum. When the Pentagon stonewalled, I appealed. When officials stonewalled again, I sued them in federal court.
…
Just weeks after I sued, the Department of Defense handed over all six pages of the memorandum, with nothing redacted but a few phone numbers and email addresses.
…
The document is worth reading. Hegseth told the public there would be a single six-month review. The memorandum he signed requires compliance reviews every 90 days. He framed the restrictions as being about membership. The document extends birth-sex requirements to adult leaders, volunteers, staff and partner organizations.
He hid the agreement because it’s worse than his speech and because secrecy was the point.
…
Now for a healthy dose of irony. The Supreme Court case I lost, Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, established that the government cannot dictate the membership of a private expressive organization. The precedent built on my expulsion is now the strongest legal shield Scouting America has against the Pentagon’s coercion. The weapon that scouts leaders used on me is sitting there, waiting for them to pick it up.
In 2000, Scouting told the Supreme Court it was a values-based organization. It is time to live those values and fight the Pentagon….
Conspiracism means never having to say you’re sorry. It’s always somebody else’s fault. […]
I’m writing today about MAHA’s roots in the moral panic over brainwashing in the Korean War. A lot has been written about its roots in evangelical religion, patent medicine, and eugenics but people don’t talk enough about how the search for scapegoats for stalemate in Korea broke American brains.
Conservatives were casting about for excuses for why the US didn’t have a resounding victory in Korea like they had in WW2. There was plenty of blame to go around. [*snip*] the real constraint was that China was backing North Korea, and China was under Russia’s nuclear umbrella, and Harry Truman realized that this was going to have to be a limited war. The right didn’t want to hear that.
[…]
many Americans were taken prisoner and subjected to communist indoctrination. A handful even chose to defect […] This idea that Russian communists were teaching American communists mind control techniques to shape the American population became the backbone of a whole suite of conspiracy theories about the US Public Health Service, fluoride, vaccines, and the Alaska Mental Health Act.
A holocaust denier, Identity minister, and general purpose agitator named Kenneth Goff […] repurposed a forged text pseudonymously written by L. Ron Hubbard called Psychopolitics. It was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for psychiatry.
“Psychopolitics” purported to be a lecture that KGB head Lavrenti Beria gave to American psychologists training in Moscow in the 1930s. Beria is supposedly giving them marching orders to go back to America and take over the country with Marxism disguised as psychiatry.
[…]
the Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act was legislation to build the first-ever psychiatric hospital in the Alaska territory so that patients wouldn’t have to be shipped to Oregon far from their friends and family.
“The crackpot right at that time decided that this was some kind of plot to create a vast concentration camp in Alaska—or “Siberia, U.S.A.,” as they called it—and to send all the conservatives up there,” Rep Edith Green, the sponsor of the bill, later recalled in a speech on the House floor.
[…] the Alaska Mental Health Act was trying to remedy an oppressive use of psychiatry, not perpetrate one. Today, the 3500 patients who were shipped to the Morningside sanitarium in Portland, OR are remembered as the Lost Alaskans because so many of their families never saw them again. These people were sent to Oregon not because they wanted to go but because a jury voted them insane. What much of what constituted insanity in the first half of the 20th century was not what we’d consider insane today: epilepsy, alcoholism, post partum depression.
But the right wing didn’t care about the rights of Native Alaskans, epileptics, or alcoholics. For them, it was all a morality play with conservatives cast as the lead martyrs.
* Wikipedia – Limited war, Korean War
* Wikipedia – Korean War
* Yes, the same war in which I mentioned the US carpet bombed North Korea. I found inconsistent definitions of ‘limited war’. Peninsula-only, limited ground troops, no nukes, proxy war. There was a research paper I couldn’t access with the pithy title: “Limited War, Unlimited Targets”.
US President Donald Trump has issued an emergency executive order banning the import of power equipment, including inverters, transformers, and battery energy storage systems, that could threaten the security of the US grid. The order, announced yesterday, declares a national emergency over the risks posed by foreign-made equipment, citing vulnerabilities created and exploited by certain foreign actors.
According to the source, the ban applies to equipment that interacts with transmission lines of 69kV or higher, excluding distributed energy sources and local distribution grids. It covers 24 countries on US arms embargo and sanctions lists, with China being the most notable. The restrictions target equipment originating from these countries or from entities owned, controlled, or directed by them, similar to existing rules on Foreign Entities of Concern.
The order is not yet in effect and will apply to deals initiated after 26 August 2026. The Department of Energy (DOE) has 120 days to publish implementation rules. Transactions will not be barred until the DOE determines that specific equipment poses an unacceptable risk to US security, considering cybersecurity, sabotage, and remote access concerns…
Sahan Journal staffers Katrina Pross, Cynthia Tu, Gabriel Kwan and Dymanh Chhoun are at the Minnesota State Fair on opening day to review new foods from immigrant and BIPOC vendors.
There are nine official new vendors at the fair this year, including Saturday Dumpling Co. and Jive Turkey BBQ. There are 36 official new foods, including Union Hmong Kitchen’s Hmong corndog and El Burrito Mercado’s Tacos de Mole.
Follow along throughout the day for Sahan’s reviews of the dishes.
…
The Hmong corndog is a pork sausage flavored with ginger, garlic, fish sauce, chili and lemongrass, dipped in a cornmeal batter and fried. It comes with a citrus Kua Txob sauce.
…
A $150,000 reward is being offered in the search for a brazen crew of thieves caught on security video displaying teamwork while stealing carts full of mail from a Northern California post office…
This is especially interesting because the guidance for some time has been to mail letters at the the [post office itself, rather than to mail drop boxes, which were being ripped off.
xAI has now been accused of training Grok on child sex abuse materials (CSAM), as regulators and courts continue to probe how far the problem goes, and some Grok users have been arrested.
In a complaint filed on Wednesday, a plaintiff known as Jane Doe explained that she was preschool-age in the early 2000s when adult men repeatedly raped her to create CSAM to sell to pedophiles online. Since then, Doe’s images have been hashed by groups like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (CCCP).
For her safety, Doe has opted to receive alerts from the US Department of Justice Victim Notification System any time she may be a victim in a new criminal investigation. Although she has received countless alerts, she was shocked when the CCCP notified her that it had identified AI-generated CSAM on xAI that depicted her. This re-traumatized Doe, whose complaint alleged that messages were found on online forums “between offenders chatting about creating AI generated CSAM of Plaintiff and other similarly situated known, legacy, victims of CSAM.” …
A former staffer for Georgia Rep. Mike Collins, a Republican, allegedly posted images on social media depicting a swastika and photos of himself in Ku Klux Klan-style robes, according to a report.
The Washington Post on Thursday reported that 24-year-old Preston Parra interned in Collins’ congressional office in 2024 and later worked as a contractor for the congressman’s political action committee (PAC). His work with the PAC ended in 2025, which was before Collins launched his U.S. Senate campaign.
The media outlet said the images were “found in a search by The Washington Post” and are among “other controversial actions and rhetoric” from Collins’ former staffers and associates.
“A number of people in Collins’s orbit have been accused of having ties to white nationalists or of making racist or antisemitic comments, and the congressman’s own social media presence has also drawn scrutiny,” per the outlet…
All but one of the 23 detention campsites abandoned or paused indefinitely as a result of swift, visceral opposition from local residents. […] a 64,000-square-foot industrial warehouse in San Antonio, Texas, that officials expect to open in Spring 2027.
StevoRsays
This weekend, NASA plans to launch its next flagship mission into deep space.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which started life as a spy satellite, will help find alien planets, map the universe, and possibly contribute to the collapse of a major theory in modern physics. Ami Choi, a research astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, says the telescope will help make discoveries in dark energy and dark matter. But, as previous space telescopes have done, it may find things that astronomers can’t even imagine yet.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Moderna, Novavax-Sanofi and Pfizer-BioNTech’s updated COVID vaccines, the companies said on Thursday, after an advisory panel recommended that the shots should target the dominant XFG variant…
Reginald Selkirk @150.
Kevin Beaumont (Cybersecurity journalist):
A bunch of companies who stand to directly financially benefit from AI hype are hyping AI cyber attacks—which aren’t based on operational reality. Every organisation in this list is irresponsible, and clueless.
Banks and other financial institutions are largely clueless about the operational reality of cybersecurity as they exist in a bubble of near limitless budgets compared to other sectors—they don’t deal with real incidents at the same scale as elsewhere as they’re in control ivory towers. They’re the least intelligent voice to be inputting about cyber future.
such assessments start from a false premise about what drives the behaviour of cybercriminals. […] the supply of potential addressable victims is effectively unlimited […] cybercriminals generally use what works and stick with it. […] a ‘Minimum Viable Product’ philosophy; if phishing emails work, send phishing emails; if existing malware continues to compromise organisations, there is little incentive to redesign it. […] there is little financial benefit in taking the time and risk of innovating when you already have something that works. In the case of ransomware, it is also instructive that when innovation has occurred, it is largely through new business strategies rather than technical capabilities.
[…]
there is little evidence that AI has changed the operating models of cyber extortionists or will in the short- to medium-term future. […] AI’s impact on ransomware may be felt first in helping cybercriminals better [mine] stolen data in their attacks, and then monetising the huge backlog of stolen data as opposed to acquiring more of it.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Kevin Beaumont: “Both Xcancel and Nitter have had cease and desist letter from Twitter. [Screenshots]”
Both have paused operations and are seeking legal advice.
A couple alternatives are suggested in the replies.
StevoRsays
@ ^ Notably Doug Wilson – Kegsbreath’s pastor. There’s more here :
But you can’t see the full interview unless you’re a Zeteo subscriber. Grrr..
StevoRsays
Also there’s this which is also infuriatingly paywalled on Zeteo bt you can see the start of it :
Here Are 19 – Yes, 19! – Ways Trump and Republicans Are Plotting to Rig and Steal the Midterm Elections
Attacking immigrants and Black voting power. Gutting election security. Voter purges. Threats of arrests and raids. And so much more. Trump’s assault on elections is truly unprecedented.
Justin Glawe and Asawin Suebsaeng
Note from our Editor-in-Chief:
This week, we are running our ‘Start The Steal’ series, with three months left in the 2026 midterm elections. The president and his allies are conducting a scorched-earth campaign to rig the coming elections, and we believe it’s the biggest story in America right now.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has approved the sale of the Hobart Private Hospital to Calvary Healthcare, ending fears about its future.
But there are concerns services including gender-affirming care, surgical terminations, vasectomies or fertility treatments won’t be offered anymore.
Hired in 2024, […] Deputy of the Year in 2025. The day of the ceremony Fultz’s ex-girlfriend sent a letter of complaint […] enough to prompt the sheriffs to investigate […] Fultz had posed for pictures as Adolf Hitler [with the mustache], freely used racial slurs in texts, masturbated on camera in his police vehicle, took pictures of his ex-girlfriend with his service weapon in her mouth during sex, […] and used Flock to stalk his ex-girlfriend.
[…]
Fultz had been pulled over for speeding on his motorcycle and covering up his license tag at least four times, including one incident where he was going 111 MPH. He walked away from every interaction after identifying himself as a member of law enforcement. Investigators told him he had to keep his motorcycle’s license tags visible. “Inexplicably, within 30 minutes of the direct order you were provided, you drove your motorcycle out of the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office parking lot with no license tag attached.[“] Fultz explained he was speeding and covering his tag for online clout [Instagram and TikTok].
[…]
they allowed him to resign rather than be fired.
Rando: “Let me guess… Not a single criminal charge has been made against the deputy’s actions. So he can just ‘resign’ and then go work for another district having learned to keep his behavior more low key.”
StevoRsays
The Australian Antarctic Division will launch a mission to extract personnel from Macquarie Island in the Southern Ocean due to the psychological risk posed by a potential outbreak of bird flu.
The sub-Antarctic island, 1,500 kilometres south-east of Hobart, is a World Heritage-listed wildlife sanctuary with up to 4 million seabirds and 100,000 seals.
The island is currently free of the deadly H5 strain of bird flu.
But once it arrives, up to 90 per cent of baby elephant seals could perish, as happened on Heard Island over summer, when 13,000 pups died from bird flu.
The Australian government says exposing expeditioners to such harrowing scenes is untenable.
Nepal latest and being updated regularl;y news via Aussie ABC here
Here is a summary of today’s events:
At least 469 people have been killed and more than 1,400 are missing after deadly flash floods struck villages in the border region between Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday.
The floods were likely triggered by a large chunk of ice breaking off a Himalayan glacier, according to satellite imagery, sending tonnes of ice and rock tumbling into a river below.
… (Snip)..
The Red Cross’s local representative in Nepal said “entire villages and market areas” were wiped out by the flooding.
If you want to help support the thousands affected by the crisis, the ABC is supporting the Emergency Action Alliance member charities and their local partners. You can find more information here, and make a donation here.
The controversial tactic was pioneered by Elon Musk’s datacenters along the Tennessee and Mississippi border and has since gone mainstream: nationwide, nearly 60 datacenters are planning to build their own gas plants […] The “bring your own power” strategy has resulted in years-long backlogs for gas-powered turbines, with facilities increasingly turning to even less conventional energy sources, such as modified jet engines and portable generators.
Canada is recruiting 64 researchers to universities across the country (source paywalled; alternative source), including 48 from U.S. institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT. The hires are backed by more than $364 million in government funding and are part of a broader effort to attract researchers in fields such as AI, climate science, and medicine. The New York Times reports:
While scientists often shy away from political discourse, some are saying the Trump administration’s assault on science is behind their departure. “I used to live in the country that I thought was the most enthusiastic about the prospects for science improving the human condition, of any country in the world,” said Phillip Zamore, the chair of RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts. “And I woke up one day and that wasn’t true anymore.” He has been recruited to McGill University in Montreal, which has also hired five other researchers, and will join the medical faculty. “If scientists don’t stand up for truth, no one will,” Dr. Zamore said.
…
X’s Global Government Affairs team posted on its account that it identified a 200,000-strong bot farm operating on the platform, with 200 of them posting information designed to influence public perception. According to the team, the accounts are suspected to have been created by Chinese operators, and that they’re using the accounts to amplify the negative impacts of AI data centers, especially on electricity prices.
“We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy,” the team said in its post on the platform. “These posts contained claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid. Others included AI-generated cartoons that depicted data-center operators enriching themselves at the public’s expense.” …
I bolded one word for emphasis. And my electricity bills have definitely gone up.
A United States federal judge has for a second time blocked the Trump administration’s overhaul of election rules aimed at limiting voting by mail.
District Judge Indira Talwani late on Thursday blocked the US Postal Service’s new ballot rules for 14 days, hours after the agency said they had taken effect…
KGsays
Reginald Selkirk@178.,
Well, telling the truth is surely a violation of X’s Terms of Service!
KGsays
Sorry: 178->173@175.
KGsays
Sky Captain@170,
Next step: rendering down dissidents and the underclass into biodiesel (a “joke” made by Curtis Yarvin – a friend of Peter Thiel, and associated through him to J.D. Vance – while suggesting San Francisco become a corporate dictatorship).
We wrote that in civilized countries in Europe and Japan, the pay ratio of CEOs to their lowest paid workers was 20:1 and 12:1 respectively. Workers in this country are now being pushed down the death spiral even faster by plutocrats.
And, as another kick workers when they are down, the article states that between 2019 and 2025 inflation outpaced wage increase by 25.9%
Thanks, @159 Reginald Selkirk for the news about the new covid vaccines. Those of us that are aged and vulnerable need the protection and certainly we won’t hear it from the Mainslime News.
KGsays
Wiped out: US faces surging toilet paper prices amid trade war with Canada – Reginald Selkirk@122
Nicely complements the epidemic of explosive diarrhea. This is truly a Golden Age for the US of A!
Donald Trump’s war on Iran has driven the US military into a severe financial crisis, with the US navy forced to transfer money from its payroll and other sources to cover the costs of combat, according to documents seen by the Guardian, and interviews with navy officials, contractors and defense analysts.
The US-Israeli operation, which has depleted US munitions stockpiles and prompted retaliatory Iranian strikes that have wrecked strategic bases across the Middle East, is piling pressure on budgets across the military.
On the one hand the war against Iran ending because the Navy runs out of money will be amusing, on the other it’s the worst possible solution for the US. Trump will wreck the Navy before giving up this way. And there is a distinct possiblity he will cheat and start shifting money from other parts of the DOD budget, if not the entire US budget.
President Donald Trump is reportedly planning to skip the 25th anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero after seeking to deliver remarks at the event, with the logistics surrounding an upcoming golf trip also factoring into the decision.
Trump’s team had previously indicated that he intended to attend the Sept. 11 commemoration in Manhattan and even conducted advance visits to the site, according to a Thursday report from The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Dana Rubinstein, and Sally Goldenberg.
But Trump also wanted to speak at the ceremony, an idea that was relayed to organizers in recent weeks, according to the Times. That presented a problem, though, as the National September 11 Memorial and Museum has prohibited politicians from delivering speeches at the annual commemoration since 2012 in an effort to keep the event nonpartisan and centered on victims and their families.
The Memorial management has a rule against speeches at the annual event. Trump wanted an exception so he could give a speech, the management wouldn’t give him one. So he decided not to go, he will instead hold his own little event at the Pentagon just so he can give a speech.
Reginald Selkirksays
The Guardian: Trump’s war on Iran is rapidly draining US navy budget, documents and interviews reveal
Bold prediction: Trump will promise to resume the bombing, and he’s going to make Iran pay for it!
Anthropic just scored a major win in its fight against President Donald Trump’s administration over efforts to blacklist the AI company.
U.S. District Judge Rita Lin ruled Thursday in Anthropic’s lawsuit against the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and several other federal agencies over the administration’s decision to designate the company a national security supply-chain risk. This followed a dispute between the company and the government over how Anthropic’s AI technology could be used in classified military settings.
Lin wrote in her 59-page ruling that the government’s actions “constituted unlawful retaliation” in violation of Anthropic’s First Amendment rights and denied the company due process required under the Fifth Amendment.
The judge acknowledged that the government has the right to weigh in on national security concerns. But she said its actions showed the move was “based on a desire to make a public example out of Anthropic for its ‘arrogance’ in criticizing the government, not based on any articulable basis to believe that Anthropic would actually sabotage its model.” …
The controversial political personality is currently being held at an ICE detention center, per inmate records. The circumstances surrounding his detention are not yet clear but our sources tell us Milo was detained at an airport…
A traditional Ugandan ruler named as the world’s youngest monarch has died aged 34, his prime minster announced.
Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV became king of Tooro in western Uganda at just three years old in 1995 after the death of his father.
The Tooro kingdom did not disclose the cause of King Oyo’s death, but a Ugandan government minister was quoted in local media saying that he had been critically ill and was seeking treatment in the US.
Though Uganda is governed by an elected president and parliament, it has several traditional kingdoms which continue to have significant cultural influence despite not having political power.
Oyo, who Guinness World Records listed as the world’s youngest reigning monarch, ruled over more than two million people. He was the 13th monarch of a kingdom that was founded in the early 19th Century…
For a second time, a federal judge on Friday rejected President Trump’s attempt to move his criminal hush money case to federal court, where his conviction could be vacated.
“The grounds for a second removal cited by Defendant, Donald J. Trump, are neither new nor legally sufficient. He has failed to show good cause and diligence,” Judge Alvin Hellerstein decided.
Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 hush payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford. He is appealing his conviction.
A federal appeals court ordered Hellerstein to take a second look at Trump’s attempt to move the case from state to federal court after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark immunity opinion.
“I reaffirm my former decision. The president’s motion is denied,” Hellerstein said.
Trump’s attorneys said they plan to appeal the decision…
Senators are renewing calls for anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy to step down or be ousted—and at least one is calling for a criminal investigation—amid the release of documents they say prove Kennedy lied to them during his confirmation hearings last year.
…
During Kennedy’s reality-bending confirmation hearings in January 2025, multiple senators raised concern about a trip Kennedy took to Samoa in 2019. At the time, Kennedy was a prominent anti-vaccine activist leading the rabidly anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense (CHD). Just months after he visited the island nation, Samoa suffered a massive measles outbreak in which 83 people died, mostly children under the age of 5. The outbreak was largely fueled by a swell of vaccine hesitancy, drummed up by anti-vaccine activists. Vaccination rates had cratered to as low as 31 percent.
While the senators linked Kennedy’s anti-vaccine work to that deadly measles outbreak, Kennedy denied any connection during the confirmation hearings. In an exchange with Wyden, Kennedy claimed: “I went there, [it had] nothing to do with vaccines. I went there to introduce a medical informatics system that would digitalize records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient.”
In an exchange with Markey, he said: “My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines.”
On Thursday, the Associated Press and The Guardian jointly released newly obtained documents that directly contradict Kennedy’s statements. One of the documents is a letter Kennedy sent to Samoa’s prime minister in January 2019, in which Kennedy falsely suggested “deaths associated recently with MMR [measles, mumps, and rubella] vaccines” were due to a bad lot of vaccinations from the manufacturer. Kennedy proposed letting him and his “team” from CHD investigate the country’s MMR vaccines. In all, Kennedy used the words ‘vaccination’ and ‘vaccine’ eight times in the letter proposing his visit.
The prime minister responded with a letter in February saying he welcomed Kennedy and his “team’s independent health assessment of our MMR vaccines.” He requested Kennedy coordinate a visit with him…
Kalshi today lost a major ruling over whether it can evade state gambling laws, as a federal appeals court found that Nevada can stop the prediction market from allowing sports bets. While the Trump administration is trying to help prediction markets avoid state regulation, a panel of three Trump-appointed judges unanimously ruled against Kalshi in today’s decision from the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board today said the 9th Circuit “emphatically reject[ed] the view that the federal Commodity Exchange Act preempts application of Nevada’s gaming laws to sports-event contracts offered by Kalshi, Crypto.com, and Robinhood.” Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, a Republican, said that “prediction markets offering sports-event contracts constitute gambling and must comply with Nevada’s gaming laws and regulatory framework.”
The judges affirmed a district court order that let Nevada enforce state laws against Kalshi’s sports-related event contracts…
Event on tomorrow in Adelaide citycentre – starting by meteting at Hindmarsh square 11.30 am.
Flyer on this handed out to me Friday night.
its small text reads :
“The racists of March for (their version of -ed) Australia are marching again on 30th August this time claiming (falsely -ed) their march is about free speech. (Read hate speech – ed.)
While free speech is increasingly under attack, it is movemets like Palestinian liberation that are bearing the brunt of these restrictions.
March for Australia has openly targeted migrantand refugee communites, LGBTIQ+ people, First Nations People and abortion rights.
With Pauline Hanson’s One Nation growing in the polls, we can’t sit back while racists mobilise.”
Dunno if many others here are from Adelaide (Lofty stillaround & reading?) or close enough to attend but thought I’d let folks know.
Huh. Hoped they’d have live coverage fo this but FWIW :
Vote counting is underway in a by-election in Secret Harbour, an electorate in Perth’s southern suburbs.
The seat, long held by Labor, is also being hotly contested by One Nation, which has seen its popularity surge recently.
The by-election is seen as one of the biggest tests for Pauline Hanson’s (racist far reichwing formerly utterly fringe – ed) party which has been gaining ground due to frustration with the major parties.
…Roman is NASA’s next-generation observatory designed to explore some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, including dark energy.
NASA and SpaceX are targeting Roman’s liftoff for no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday, Aug. 30, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Launch coverage begins at 6:20 a.m.
Live coverage of these events will stream through a variety of platforms. Learn where to watch online:
It’s easy to think of mountains like the Himalayas as solid masses of rock, but much of what makes up the landscape is permafrost, ground that always remains below zero.
Permafrost isn’t just soil or rock, it’s also moisture that remains frozen solid year-round, while the snow layer changes with the seasons. Warming temperatures can melt the snow and threaten the stability of the ground that was previously held together.
As cracks open in the thawing permafrost, water from rain and ice melt can penetrate deeper inside the mountain.
StevoRsays
@198 Er, sorry & should’ve noted there but belated WARNING Some confronting language and crude sexual references made by Kyle there so probly NSFW.
The FBI previously refused to hire job applicants if they admitted to hiring sex workers or stealing from an employer — or engaging in acts of bestiality.
Today, those acts, which are mostly illegal across the country, are no longer automatic deal breakers for applicants to the nation’s top law enforcement agency.
In June, the FBI quietly lowered some of the standards it uses when it conducts background checks on would-be federal agents and other personnel. According to multiple sources briefed on the matter, the FBI did so to facilitate hiring in some cases, even if candidates acknowledged they engaged in sexually deviant activities or stole from an employer.
The move comes as the FBI has lost scores of employees through firings, retirements and resignations since the start of the Trump administration…
Tom Begich, the Democratic former state lawmaker who finished second in Alaska’s crowded gubernatorial primary, said Friday that he is dropping out of the governor’s race and endorsing Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins.
Begich was the first Democrat to enter the race and secured 20.8% of the primary vote, finishing second to Kreiss-Tomkins, his former colleague in the Legislature, who received 22.5% of the vote.
With Begich’s withdrawal, only one Democrat will appear on the November ballot, paving the way for Kreiss-Tomkins, the 37-year-old from Sitka, to consolidate Democratic support.
In an interview Friday evening, Begich said he made the decision to withdraw based on data showing that a Democrat was likely to win the governor’s race if only one such candidate appears on the November ballot…
Caitlin Clark and Kelsey Mitchell each scored 34 points as the Indiana Fever defeated the Connecticut Sun 111-91 on Friday.
The Fever’s dynamic duo scored 30 or more for the fourth game this season, extending their WNBA single-season record for a duo. It’s also the first time in WNBA history the same teammates have scored at least 30 in consecutive games.
…
Clark added 12 assists, marking the fifth time this year she has had a double-double with at least 30 points and 10 assists…
A federal judge on Friday declared that the Trump administration’s efforts to deport noncitizens for political speech run counter to the Constitution’s First and Fifth Amendments, the latest legal rebuke of the White House’s expansive immigration agenda.
Northern District of California Judge Noël Wise, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, sided with the Stanford Daily, which sued Secretary of State Marco Rubio, arguing that his use of the Immigration and Nationality Act to deport noncitizen students had foreign students refraining from writing opinion pieces critical of the administration.
”In the United States, freedom of speech belongs to the people,” Wise wrote in her opinion. “It is not the government’s to take.”
…
birgerjohanssonsays
Trump will use his ad budget to praise himself, not help GOP candidates
“Trump’s Ad Budget Just Told the GOP: ‘Drop Dead’
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=7zR2x4AA6z4
This is the problem with picking a narcissist as your boss. He will screw you over.
JMsays
@205 shermanj: A good case can be made for breaking up the big meat processing companies. Only a handful of companies process the vast majority of meat, putting them in a good position to manipulate markets and prices at both ends.
Trump’s idea for doing it is bad and will be badly implemented. It’s like Trump pulling out of Afghanistan. It was really the right thing to do but Trump negotiated a bad treaty, then didn’t setup to actually implement the treaty he had negotiated, leaving Biden to rush the US out at the last minute.
With meat processing Trump is trying to go from a monopoly to hundreds of little individual processors in one step. Many of the individual farms are not setup to do this, they will need new building, new roads and new staff. No consideration how this changes the way the meat will move around, be packaged or be inspected. There is no planning for in between markets. There is no thought to keep one set of companies being replaced by another.
Trump can, by accident, have good idea. Even then you can be sure he will implement it badly because managing all of the bits of an organization as big as the US is it’s own skill and that skill isn’t much related to finance.
In a sense what the US needs is really a super skilled Jira project manager. The president’s job is not setting overall priorities, picking projects or designing them, that is Congress. His job is not implementing the projects, that is the work for the individuals, teams and departments under him. His job is coordinating across departments, managing negotiating with outside groups, balancing between multiple priorities and reporting on how things are going.
Before the ink had even dried on U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order to rename Lake Ontario, a Canadian company was already selling hats with the Great Lake’s true name emblazoned on it.
The baseball caps from Ottawa company Jackpine went up for sale online just hours after Trump signed the order to call the body of water that borders Canada and New York “Lake America.”
Jackpine founder Liam Mooney says he came up with the idea for the design the night before.
“It was just clear that he was going to do this to us, and so we jumped on it,” Mooney told As It Happens guest host Paul Hunter. “The timing was certainly fortuitous.” …
… A team in the UK has published the first trial in people of a vaccine reformulated to survive without refrigeration. Writing in eClinicalMedicine, part of the Lancet group of journals, they describe drying a licensed tetanus-diphtheria vaccine into a powder with trehalose, storing it at room temperature for a year, then reconstituting it with water and injecting it….
JM @ 181
More comments from ‘A Different Bias’ (Youtube):
.
“The Man Who Bankrupt Casinos Has Now Bankrupted the Navy”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=NXGyMsOaOlQ
“Raiding the payroll budget” indeed…
birgerjohanssonsays
Neo Ranga 11 hour TV anime from the 90s
(Despite the scanty clothes in the opening credits below this is not a fan service show. It’s about orphan sisters inheriting a god and discovering their tribal heritage.) The beginning has the vibes of a Godzilla film.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=TvjS_s9huV4
.
“Neo Ranga Opening Credits”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=mvwuUgdiBzU
Last week, investor Lawrence McDonald flagged a series of “red flashing signals” on Fox Business, warning that climbing global bond yields were dragging prices lower, a pattern he likened to the run-up to 1987’s Black Monday crash.
In an effort to calm the market, Bessent revealed that he planned to double Treasury’s buybacks of long-term bonds to calm a selloff that had pushed 30-year yields to an 18-year high amid Iran war fears and fiscal worries, just as U.S. debt topped $40 trillion.
“The long bond buyback was perceived as somewhat farcical by the financial community, and when he went on to opine that we could grow our way out of the debt, I’m sure he knows better than that,” Galston said, per The Guardian.
We will grow out of it is the last resort of somebody without a plan. Bessent is squeezed here in a way, no one problem the US faces economically is terrible but everything is going wrong at the same time with no end in sight. Military expenses are not going down, the economy is not turning around, Trump is still in love with tariffs, other countries are reducing their US bond holdings. Trump isn’t going to produce a sensible plan to deal with the situation, Congress won’t pass anything substantial that will help.
Bessent doesn’t really have a lot of options, everything is bad and may get worse. He isn’t good at convincing Trump to do anything useful. The Federal Reserve is looking at possibly pushing interest rates back up, which will make Trump angry and could lead to further financial stupidity.
In his first term Trump suggested that the US should just default and get it over with. His much better team at the time had trouble convincing him that national finance didn’t work like corporate finance and that was a bad idea.
President Trump on Friday, August 28, envisioned a “massive American Starfleet” of nuclear-powered spacecraft traveling toward Mars while tying space exploration directly to military power.
The president said NASA is working on a nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft that will launch in 2028 on a Mars mission.
Trump made the remarks during a speech at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston while honoring the Artemis II crew.
Nuclear powered interplanetary spacecraft launched by 2028? If he means small probes with little thermal generators that are technically nuclear then OK. If means manned craft he is out of his mind.
When Trump had the Space Force created in his first term in office he was over eager but it was going to happen eventually. Not about manned military space flight but about control of the orbital satellite networks. This talk of a manned fleet is Musk level delusions about Star Fleet forming in our lives.
His speech at Nasa was massively delayed and they didn’t want to hear his delusional speech at best, the room was entirely silent. Unlike a proper military organization NASA is under no obligation to clap just because the president spoke.
The FBI previously refused to hire job applicants if they admitted to hiring sex workers or stealing from an employer—or engaging in acts of bestiality. Today, those acts, which are mostly illegal across the country, are no longer automatic deal breakers for applicants
Commentary
Oddly specific.
Well… it isn’t a barrier for employment as president.
[Former FBI agent]: When I had my background check, it was held up because I had a speeding ticket from when I went home sophomore year in college that I forgot to put on my SF-86. I got grilled about why I didn’t disclose it (they eventually believed it was mistake).
In an institution under extreme pressure to preference loyalty and skirt the law when inconvenient for “the President’s agenda”, everyone who puts duty & rule of law first either leaves, is fired, or otherwise sidelined. Then staffing shortfalls ‘justify’ lower standards that favor more loyalists.
Imagine having enough cases of bestiality in your recruits that you have to loosen hiring rules to get enough of them in.
The FBI can now contextualize past misconduct when it needs employees. If only the criminal justice system extended defendants the same imagination.
“‘I don’t think anybody who has been involved with prostitution is trustworthy. You could be compromised,’ said one retired agent”
Solution: Decriminalize sex work.
StevoRsays
Australia has again reached a moment where the safety of women is dominating the national conversation.
A horrific period of violence and sexual assault allegations has governments promising to accelerate action.
Their commitment to the cause is not in doubt, but after hundreds of recommendations and billions of dollars, it is time to ask if Australia’s problem is now less about what to do, and more about getting it done.
At the same time, new forms of harm are clearly emerging faster than governments and laws can respond.
This week, national cabinet acknowledged rates of intimate-partner homicide and sexual violence remained “unacceptably high” and it agreed to priorities for the next five-year plan to tackle the issues.
States and territories will give progress reports later this year on work related to sexual violence and judicial responses, respectful relationships education, men’s behaviour-change standards, emergency accommodation and alcohol reforms.
They have also signed off on a new national family and domestic violence risk-assessment framework.
The idea there is that whether someone presents to police, a GP or hospital, they should have any warning signs recognised consistently across jurisdictions.
But states will get two years to align their systems, which is frankly a peculiar interpretation of acceleration.
A mutiny by Russian sailors aboard the battleship Potemkin initiated the 1905 Revolution.
A mutiny by sailors of the German High Seas Fleet led to Germany’s surrender in 1918.
PRECEDENTS…
Author unknown.
Ellipsis original. Backdrop image of an aircraft carrier presumably the USS Abraham Lincoln where appalling conditions have driven crew to attempt suicide and near revolt. See :
Of course, the big question is would all the USoA military stand by and allow it if a military coup against Trump took place or would that trigger a Civil War with the USoA’s military fighting breaking up and fighting itself?
Horrendous options & scenarios really but then I fear that a successful military coup is the best chance the USoA still has. I have nearly zero belief that the mid-terms will be genuine democratic elections if they go ahead at all.
IF/b> they do, VOTE BLUE no matter who please everyone who can. Support and unite behind the Blue 100% too. Last, best hope if, indeed, there is any now.
Otherwise, we get a Nazi USoA Trump variety (already there actually) or a Civil War.
Iceland appears to have rejected the government’s proposal to hold accession talks with the EU, the public broadcaster RUV has reported, with only a small number of votes left to count.
The no camp had 52.5% of votes and the yes camp 47.5%, with only a few ballots left to be counted in one of Iceland’s six voting districts, which was already leaning towards no, online ballot counting on RUV showed on Sunday…
Reginald Selkirksays
I watched a movie on tubitv.com yesterday. I saw a lot of ads about how data centers are paying taxes, providing jobs, etc. in North Carolina. A bit odd as I am not in North Carolina. But it seems they are now taking their case to the public, instead of just bribing top officials.
Rescuers evacuated around 50 people by air on Saturday after flash flooding in the Grand Canyon, according to officials with the National Park Service.
The flash flooding started in Bright Angel Canyon at around 2:30 p.m., officials said. No injuries have been reported.
The visitors were rescued from the Phantom Ranch area, according to park officials. Phantom Ranch and the entirety of the North Kaibab Trail are closed until further notice.
Park officials ask that visitors not try to access closed areas and said more information will be shared when it is available.
Roman Space Telescope was launched as planned an hour ago and is now in a parking orbit. After the final burn it will need three months to reach L2 (the same position as JWST). Data should beigin to arrive by the end of the year or early next year.
StevoRsays
^ So far so good. It is up and flying!
StevoRsays
@227. birgerjohansson : An hour ago already?!
Time flies.. Almost as well as those rockets do.. Perhaps quicker!
Doesn’t seem that long yet. They said 23 mins ago just afew minutes ago on my “live” feed. (NASA yt.)
Perhaps my feed / computer is slow? (Quite likely.)
Just heard payload deployment – Nancy Grace Roman telescope deployment – in about 5 mins time..
Press conference on the Nacy Grace Roman Space Telescope to take place at 9 am US time presumably eastern USA time – was mentioned on the NASA launch live feed.
Assuming my computer is in synch and accurate time~wise.
StevoRsays
Space Mog pleads for help esp from Brits Save UK Astronomy YT short.
birgerjohanssonsays
Ha! I used Google to dig up dirt on Dubya but I had forgotten the details. The wanker protected Japan from a lawsuit over the systematic r*apes of Korean “comfort women”.
.
“…Earlier in his presidency, the Bush administration also intervened from a legal standpoint by siding with Japan in U.S. federal courts. In 2001, when fifteen former comfort women filed a class-action lawsuit against the government of Japan in Washington D.C., the Bush administration’s Justice Department filed briefs urging the court to dismiss the case. They argued that the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty had already legally settled all wartime claims and that U.S. courts lacked jurisdiction—leading to the lawsuit’s eventual dismissal.”
@208 JM said: good case can be made for breaking up the big meat processing companies. Only a handful of companies process the vast majority of meat,
I reply: I Agree. Not only do they have a stranglehold on the market, they have degraded the quality everywhere. My friend has noted that they have sped up the chicken processing to the point that they don’t drain the blood from the chickens and they are full of blood in the package in the market and taste terrible and the ground beef is full of gristle chunks and the still contains ‘pink slime’. UUUGGGHHH!
@18 JM reported: MSN: A massive American starfleet: Trump lays out his futuristic vision for US in space. President Trump on Friday, August 28, envisioned a “massive American Starfleet” of nuclear-powered spacecraft traveling toward Mars while tying space exploration directly to military power.
I reply: in 2024 we created a video titled ‘Spaced Farce’ that envisioned just such a disaster as this. We had to pull it from our site because of the massive theft of all intellectual property to feed the thieving corporations’ AI training.
A headteacher has told how he saved 900 pupils’ lives from the Nepal floods – by quickly evacuating them just 10 minutes before the waters hit.
Rajendra Dawadi, who is in charge of Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School in Nuwakot, told the BBC he had received four calls at 09:10 local time (03:25 GMT) warning about the disaster, which has now claimed at least 794 lives.
He quickly decided to evacuate, telling the children to run to higher ground and ordering buses full of students to turn around to flee the area…
Russia has said its forces helped to repel Saturday’s attempted coup in Niger.
Explosions and gunfire rang out across capital, Niamey, early in the morning, including at a key military airbase and the presidential palace.
Hours later, Niger’s authorities said the rebellion had been contained.
Nigerien forces had repelled the attack “with the assistance of servicemen of the African Corps of the Russian Ministry of Defence”, the foreign ministry in Moscow said on Sunday…
Turkish and Somali forces have freed a cargo ship held captive by pirates off the coast of Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland state, according to authorities.
In a statement on X on Saturday, the Somali Ministry of Defence said that “14 pirates” died in the operation to free the Cameroon-flagged MV Latuf.
Four of their boats were also destroyed, it said.
The Defence Ministry said that “sustained pressure from the forces ultimately compelled the remaining pirates to abandon the vessel”, allowing the forces to take control of the ship.
The rescue operation was conducted under a defence cooperation agreement between Somalia and Turkiye, aimed at strengthening maritime security, protecting Somalia’s coastline and combating piracy, it said…
Zambia’s main opposition leader Brian Mundubile, who was runner-up in this month’s disputed presidential election, is being questioned by police over alleged treason.
Mundubile and his running mate, Makebi Zulu, are in police custody after being questioned “in connection with an alleged offence of treason”, the Zambia Police Service said on Thursday…
A Dutch drug addiction and mental health institute warned users on Friday about potentially lethal ecstasy pills shaped to look like the head of President Trump.
The respected Trimbos Institute said that several of the pills have been handed in recently at a network of centers that test drugs for users before they take them.
The institute warned in a “Red Alert” published on its website and social media that they contain a high concentration of a chemical called PMMA, or para-methoxymethamfetamine. The chemical is similar to MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy pills.
The institute says if PMMA is found in an ecstasy pill, then the pill is contaminated and could be lethal. Users don’t feel the effect of the drug right away, the institute said, and could take a higher dosage, which could lead to overheating, epileptic seizures, loss of consciousness or heart problems…
The Shin Bet security agency confirmed on Saturday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son, Yair, was returned to Israel from Miami after a threat to his life.
The agency’s comments came after a report earlier this week that the younger Netanyahu was the target of an Iranian assassination plot in December 2025, while he was living in Florida. The reports surfaced after Netanyahu told the pro-government Channel 14 in a phone interview that “Iran targeted one of my sons. Iran tried to kill, to murder one of my sons.”
In a statement carried on Saturday evening, the Shin Bet confirmed that “there was a significant threat to harm Yair Netanyahu, and in light of this and after an assessment, a decision was made to urgently extract him along with his security team and return him to Israel.”
In order to carry out the snap operation, Channel 12 reported that the Shin Bet moved some of its agents to Miami from New York, where they were attached to President Isaac Herzog, who was visiting at the time…
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 238
Gee, I wonder which neo-Nazi tech bro gave him THAT idea.
President Donald Trump said “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker will be reported to the Federal Communications Commission over her coverage of his endorsements ahead of the midterm elections.
“Kristen Welker, the Unpopular ‘Hostess’ of the once great Meet the Press, now considered Meet the Fake Press, just stated that Donald Trump has ‘mixed results’ on his Endorsements of Candidates, when the recent WINS of Darline Graham and Mike Mazzei, stand at 100% for the U.S. Senate, and 98% for the U.S. House,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Aug. 30.
Trump added: “Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment. Unfortunately, she is not the only one.” …
O Noez, reported to the FCC! She should put that on her resume.
birgerjohanssonsays
Brandon Herrera is a conservative gun enthusiast, but he knows gun safety. He has collected video clips of what NOT to do.
Iran and the United States traded attacks for the first time in over a month overnight into Monday, in an exchange that risks reigniting the damaging conflict after weeks of relative military calm.
Iran fired missiles toward US military targets in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates in retaliation for a strike on Iranian rocket launchers that the US said were trying to launch sea mines into the Strait of Hormuz –– the key shipping route that’s become the center of regional tensions and diplomatic efforts.
The first time it’s been publicly admitted that attacks have occurred. Occasional attacks have been happening on and off as the US has been escorting ships through the strait.
CENTCOM completed clearing sea mines from the waterway’s international shipping routes last week, the Trump administration has said. “Iran has been notified that any ship or boat placing new mines will be immediately and systematically destroyed,” Trump said last Tuesday.
It’s possible that is true, more likely they have most of the mines. This is one of the reasons non-military ships will need escorts for some time. The big cargo ships have such poor maneuvering that they need somebody well in front of the ship to warn them so they have time to turn.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s top military brass has now privately warned him directly: His war in Iran is unsustainable and is draining America’s ability to defend itself from threats elsewhere—and at home.
On Sunday morning, the Washington Post published a scoop describing a classified assessment by the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, as well as top commanders from across three continents, contained in a twice-monthly report called the Secretary of Defense Orders Book.
This is a big deal. Both in the leaking of the military classified assessments and that they are so negative. These are not judgements if something is a good idea, it’s a view of of how good the current shape of the military is and how ready they are for missions. The combined report is highly classified , highly sensitive information and only available to a small group of people. Somebody leaking this probably means they think the US forces are in danger of collapse if they continue course.
The issue in this report is that Trump has ordered the military to keep large forces at high readiness in case Trump want to launch an invasion, or air strikes or navel strikes, etc. Trump wants every option open continuously. This is expensive and difficult for operations half way around the planet and has reached the point it is getting in the way of the ability to do anything else.
THE RIGHT-WING SOCIAL MEDIA DOGE BOOSTER known as “DataRepublican” has, over the last two months, waded deeper and deeper into hot-button political issues. From Candace Owens to the six Democratic lawmakers who encouraged troops not to follow unlawful orders, DataRepublican, the nom de web of Utah mom Jennica Pounds, has been active on X, venturing far beyond the number-crunching work she did as an early Elon Musk booster.
What Pounds didn’t reveal as she grew her social media presence was that she was secretly working at the Department of Defense. Since July, Pounds has been a temporary “special government employee” for the Pentagon.
Pounds’s secret job spilled out into the open this week, after she erroneously accused Sarah B. Rogers, the State Department undersecretary for public diplomacy, of trying to entrap her for treason. Amid that flap, an X user critical of Pounds revealed that she worked for the Defense Department. The Pentagon later confirmed to me and other reporters that Pounds does work as a special government employee, but refused to explain exactly what job Pounds has or in which departmental office she works.
Other reporters have shown it’s more then just Pounds but how many is still unclear. This is a major issue and grounds for removing Hegseth immediately. It doesn’t matter exactly what orders Pounds was given or the terms of her being paid. Hegseth’s attempts to control the press reporting on the military overstep what he can legally do but it is a matter for the DOD. Secret partisan meddling in American politics is well outside the range of a acceptable behavior for the DOD. It’s also another great example of “every accusation is an admission”. After years of accusing left leaning online figures of being paid to manipulate politics it turns out that it’s right wing influencers that are being paid.
Following the successful launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Sunday, the agency held a news conference to discuss the observatory’s upcoming science operations. The standard post-launch briefing took a weird turn, however, when the U.S. president unexpectedly chimed in to congratulate NASA on the mission he repeatedly tried to scrap.
About halfway through Sunday’s news conference, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman received a call from President Donald Trump. Isaacman briefly left the room and returned with the president on the line, speaking at the press briefing through speakerphone.
“I just want to thank everybody, and congratulate you. Boy, it looked beautiful on television,” Trump said of the Roman space telescope’s launch, according to Space.com. “Jared is doing a fantastic job, you are doing a fantastic job, and I’m supplying you all that money.”
…
But Roman almost didn’t make it to the launch pad. In fact, the telescope survived several termination attempts by the president. In April 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced a plan to cut NASA’s science program in half, cancelling at least 41 missions. Leaked budget cuts suggested that no telescope besides the Hubble and Webb space telescopes would have received funding.
…
When the president’s official skinny budget was released, the administration didn’t outright call off the telescope, but its prospects were still not all that much better. The White House allocated $156.6 million to Roman’s continued development in 2026, less than half of what the mission received in 2025. Luckily, the proposed cuts to NASA’s budget were averted in Congress.
Trump’s determination to cancel the Roman mission even preceded last year’s proposed budget cuts. During the president’s first term, the Trump administration tried to cancel the mission on three separate occasions between 2019 and 2021…
Berlin is being blackmailed by hackers who were able to compromise city systems and steal data earlier this month, its mayor has said.
Kai Wegner said officials would not cave in to the ransom demand, which came on Thursday evening. He did not say how much was being sought, though Der Spiegel reports the hackers are demanding 30 bitcoin, worth around €2m (£1.7m).
Some of the German capital’s online systems were forced to close down as a result of the attack, while investigators were working to understand what data had been taken…
The leader of the controversial Unification Church has been sentenced to two years in prison for bribing South Korea’s former first lady and other political funding offences.
A court found that Han Hak-ja’s church gave Kim Keon Hee, the wife of ousted President Yoon Suk Yeol, two Chanel bags and a diamond necklace, together worth 80 million won ($57,900; £42,500).
Earlier this year, Kim was sentenced to 20 months in jail for accepting bribes from the church.
Han, the 83-year-old widow of the Unification Church’s founder Sun Myung Moon, had repeatedly denied the allegations, calling them “false”….
MapQuest’s refusal to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America” has sent its app surging up the charts, making it the No. 1 navigation app in the U.S. and driving “hundreds of thousands” of new downloads. In contrast, Google Maps announced on Saturday that it was complying with the Trump administration’s name change. TechCrunch reports:…
Kalshi has banned former Republican Rep. George Santos from its platform for life, the first time the prediction market company has taken such an action.
Kalshi also penalized and suspended several political candidates accused of betting on their own races, including Ben Midgely, who ran and lost in the Republican primary for Maine’s gubernatorial race; Laurie Buckhout, a Republican congressional nominee; and former California gubernatorial candidate Stephen Cloobeck.
The Santos ban follows allegations that he bet on whether he would attend President Trump’s State of the Union address, allegedly making $17,839 on the wager. Kalshi’s compliance department said it “established reasonable cause” to believe that Santos had placed bets connected to his own attendance at the event. Kalshi also fined Santos $71,356 over the activity.
“As a person capable of influencing the outcome of the underlying event, Santos was prohibited from trading in this market,” Kalshi wrote, accusing him of making public statements about his attendance to impact the odds…
… Scientists with the Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy Vermont spent the summer injecting 6,000 young elm trees with Dutch elm disease spores to test their resistance to the disease.
The survivors will be sent to a breeding program with a goal of growing the genetic diversity of disease-tolerant elm trees. They will one day be used for restoration in forests, riverbanks and backyards.
“We will put those newly propagated trees into a seed orchard, basically just a big fenced area, will grow and love those trees for about 15 or so years, at which point they should produce seeds, and that seed can be used for restoration,” Wilson said.
The young elms were bred from a group of a few dozen trees in the Northeast that have survived Dutch elm disease, which is a fungus that arrived in the U.S. a little less than a century ago…
The phrase “hidden supervolcano” sounds a bit like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? Supervolcanoes are notoriously conspicuous, what with their enormous size and penchant for spewing massive amounts of lava, ash, and rock into the sky. This one, however, has quietly been buried off the east coast of England for millennia.
Its discovery, detailed in a recent study published by the GSA Bulletin, answers a question that has puzzled geologists for decades. The authors believe that some 454 million years ago, this long-extinct supervolcano produced one of the largest eruptions known to scientists, creating the Kinnekulle tephra. The origin of this expansive volcanic ash layer—spread across Norway, Sweden, the Baltic region, Belarus, and Poland—was a mystery until now…
The US Supreme Court has ruled that construction of a $400m (£297m) ballroom at the White House can go ahead, handing a win to President Donald Trump.
In a 5-4 ruling, the justices granted the Trump administration’s emergency request, blocking lower court rulings that would have halted construction of an above-ground portion of the project.
But Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, sided with the three liberal justices to dissent, writing that “construction is likely unlawful” because Congress has not approved the project…
In Monday’s unsigned order, the five justices who cleared the way for construction said lower court judges had “likely exceeded” their authority in blocking the ballroom.
While the majority did not decide on the legality of the East Wing project, they said the preservation group “lacks standing” to sue the government.
They ruled that the Trump administration had established it was likely to succeed in arguing that it would “suffer irreparable harm without a stay”…
The United States plans to cut its health funding to 18 countries by 59% of pre-2025 levels by 2030, according to a Public Citizen analysis of the bilateral agreements the US has signed with these countries.
The bilateral Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) were signed as part of the ‘America First Global Health Strategy’ adopted by the Trump administration in 2025, and are intended to rapidly wean countries off US aid by 2030…
EU forces intercepted and boarded a suspected Russian shadow fleet oil tanker in the Mediterranean on Sunday, according to the bloc’s top diplomat.
In a post on X, Kaja Kallas said troops from the EU’s Operation Irini boarded the MV Sun tanker for “flag verification,” following suspicions that the vessel was sailing under a false flag in breach of international maritime law.
“Illegal oil sales from shadow fleet ships are a critical lifeline for Russia’s war in Ukraine, and we’ll continue to cut them off,” she wrote, adding that it was the sixth suspected shadow fleet ship boarded by EU operations in recent months…
JMsays
@265 Reginald Selkirk:
While the majority did not decide on the legality of the East Wing project, they said the preservation group “lacks standing” to sue the government.
The courts are way to narrow on the issue of standing when it comes to the federal government. The government violating the law harms all Americans, it doesn’t have to be a slap to a persons face or take money from their personal pocketbook.
I am still recovering from surgery. I have completed two weeks of physical therapy and have a lot more to do.
I will contribute to The Infinite Thread now, but my ability/time to do so is limited. Many thanks to those of you who have carried on in my absence. Please continue to cover for me. Thank you.
whheydtsays
Re: Lynna, OM @ #269…
Been there (though not your specific operation), done that. Take care of yourself first. We’ll cope.
“Trump signed an order to import 300,000 metric tons of beef from other countries, to be sold here at a discount. Beef that comes from…well, we don’t really know,” says Chris Hayes.
I also wanted to add this: Thank you wheydt and others who have wished me well. It means lot.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In what was called “an experiment gone horribly awry,” on Thursday White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller tested a pair of ICE “shock gloves” on himself and inadvertently sent 380 volts of electricity coursing through his body.
Moments after Miller made the questionable decision to grasp his own neck with the electrified gloves, White House staffers found him writhing on the floor spasmodically and foaming at the mouth.
After he was rushed to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, a hospital spokesman said that Miller was “rambling and incoherent, so we expect a full recovery.”
At the White House, Donald Trump had no comment about the incident until Natalie Harp reminded him who Stephen Miller was.
The Trump administration is halting vital federal research on the foodborne parasite Cyclospora, despite the record-breaking, nationwide outbreak of the diarrheal pathogen, according to Politico.
Of the three research programs that represent nearly all of the Cyclospora work at the US Department of Agriculture, two have been defunded, and the third is about to lose every scientist working on it. The Trump administration is shuttering the USDA’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center near Washington, DC, and moving its work to a location in Iowa. That includes relocating the remaining Cyclospora research.
Although the research is still funded, insiders told Politico that not one of the scientists working on the project plans to relocate from Maryland to Iowa. Instead, they are either retiring, being reassigned to a different project, or leaving the USDA’s research services…
United States Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll has submitted his resignation following months of tension with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to media reports…
StevoRsays
With soft woolly (and sometimes feathery) star-shaped flowers and grey-green foliage, the flannel flower is a well-known wildflower.
But this beautiful flower has a few superpowers up its floral sleeve.
Out of a group of 10 incredible native flowering plants, the flannel flower has been crowned Australia’s most amazing wildflower for National Science Week 2026.
The flannel flower might look a daisy but it’s actually in the Apiaceae family, which includes carrots, celery, parsley, fennel, coriander and cumin. It even has a carroty smell when it is cut.
While most of us are familiar with the beautiful east coast flannel flower Actinotus helianthi — you’ll find it in florists and nurseries — there are actually 14 species found in Australia, and one in New Zealand.
@275. Reginald Selkirk : Wish such generals would do something much stronger than just resign.
At worst they need to stay and do what they can to oppose to restrain Trump & Kegsbreath and shadow POTUS Miller from within. At best, well, time for them to take the pigeons advice I reckon..
Now he’ll be replaced by a Trump loyalist and the grip of the tyranny the USoA now has will be strengthened and the chances of the least bad alternative for y’all and the rest of our planet – an anti-Trump Military coup diminished.
I fear the current path is taking the USoA in a 1930’s Germany-like direction or, slightly better but not much, an 1861 USoA Slaver vs Free states one.
Wsh I could see better options here, really do, and no, I don’t put any store in the Mid-terms actually working as planned or being fair if they are even held at all.
StevoRsays
@273. Lynna, OM : Yikes! Didn’t know about that! Hope you make as smooth and speedy a recovery as possible and wishing you all the best and, as always, my respect and thanks for all you do here making this Infinite thread work.
Please let us know if there’s anything I & others here can do to help.
Also in more seriously sad news seems it will soon be over for the SWIFT telescope. But its now returning to work whilst it can before its fiery demise :
NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is back to studying the universe after spending months in a low-drag configuration while awaiting an orbital rescue mission that ultimately fell short.
Mission controllers restarted two of Swift’s three science instruments — its X-ray Telescope (XRT) and Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) — on Aug. 26. Both instruments had been shut down in February as part of an effort to minimize atmospheric drag and keep the aging spacecraft in orbit long enough for another spacecraft to reach and boost it to a higher altitude, according to an Aug. 28 statement from NASA.
Swift’s third instrument, the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT), remains offline. Operations of the BAT were halted in April to conserve power, allowing controllers to position Swift’s solar panels in a way that further reduced drag from its interaction with Earth’s atmosphere. NASA says the mission team hopes to resume data collection with the instrument within the next few weeks.
… (snip).. The return to science follows NASA’s decision to abandon plans to boost Swift’s orbit using LINK, a robotic servicing spacecraft built by the Arizona company Katalyst Space.
a successful military coup is the best chance the USoA still has. — @221 StevoR
Authoritarian toadies always seem to believe they can use a military coup for their own purposes…
I have nearly zero belief that the mid-terms will be genuine democratic elections if they go ahead at all.
Are you willing to bet money on that eventuality? Everyone running for office seems to think otherwise.
IF they do, VOTE BLUE no matter who please everyone who can. Support and unite behind the Blue 100% too.
No.
They want my vote, they had better god damn earn it.
StevoRsays
Via PBS Newshour ‘What the latest U.S.-Iran strikes mean for oil supplies and maritime safety’ article headline :
For perspective on the latest developments in the war with Iran, Amna Nawaz spoke with retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery and Michelle Wiese Bockmann, an analyst at Windward, a London-based maritime intelligence company.
NASA launched its newest space telescope, undertaking its biggest mission yet to study the universe on a much larger scale. A roughly $4 billion project, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will allow scientists to get panoramic views of space and better understand the nature of powerful forces known as dark energy and dark matter. Miles O’Brien joined Amna Nawaz to discuss more.
Revealing yet again if there were still any doubt what that commenter truly is.
StevoRsays
TV ALERT _ Starting in under 30 mins here on c 2 ABC 8.30 pm
Tampa: The Turning Point
Tuesday, 1 Sep
Series 1 | Episode 1
8:32 PM – 9:19 PM [47 mins]
pgCCAudio Described (AD)
When Afghan refugee Abbas Nazari boards a dilapidated Indonesian fishing vessel with over 400 others in 2001, he has no idea he’s about to be at the centre of one of the most dramatic chapters in Australian history.
Trailer for a doco here – Tampa: The Turning Point on the Tampa affair wherea cargo ship carrying refugees was taken over by Australian military forces to prevent those innocent refugees from landing here. See wikipage :
Turkmenistan has started plugging the mega-leaks of methane that spew from its ageing oil and gas facilities, the latest UN data shows, in a move hailed as a breakthrough.
…
The Guardian revealed in 2023 that Turkmenistan was the worst country for methane mega-leaks. Sources in Turkmenistan said this scrutiny was the “critical step” in leading the secretive and authoritarian government to engage with foreign partners.
A “super-emitter” leak, the escape of tonnes of methane per hour from a single valve or pipeline, heats the planet more than the emissions from a million SUVs or an entire coal-fired power station.
Turkmenistan had now stopped eight leaks by repairing corroded pipes, faulty wells and failing flares. The work was an “incredible first step”, said the UN, but much remained to be done.
…
The UN Methane Alert and Response System (Mars) sent 192 alerts of methane plumes to Turkmenistan in the last year. The country had three of the six worst leaks detected in the world by Mars in last six months, and nine of the top 50.
Turkmenistan responded to about 20% of the alerts with on-the-ground information about the leaks and potential plans to fix them. In contrast, the US was sent the second highest number of alerts – 138 – but responded to none and had fixed no leaks in the last year. Other nations that failed to respond to any alerts were Iran, Russia and China.
…
Mark Carney’s Liberal Party won all three parliamentary special elections that were held in Canada on Monday, indicating ongoing public support for the prime minister well into his second year in office and after recent trade tensions with the US.
The votes were triggered by the resignations of three MPs. The most notable result saw Carney’s party claim a Québec seat previously held by an opposition Conservative.
In the other two votes, in Ontario and British Columbia, the Liberals held onto their seats as pollsters expected.
Carney has received a bump in the polls following his decision to end trade talks with the US, accusing Canada’s southern neighbour of proposing terms that were “unfair”.
…
The results mean Carney will keep his slim majority in the House of Commons…
The government is to create more cells in existing prisons in England and Wales as part of its plans to tackle overcrowding.
An investment of £110m, which will come from existing budgets, will be used to convert unused office space, laundry rooms and storage space into cells, the Ministry of Justice said…
Rob Grigjanissays
Welcome back, Lynna! If it’s anything like my knee replacement surgery, the worst should be over soon. The physio was rough at times, but it really paid off.
Thank you, Rob @291. Yes, physical therapy can be tough, but I’ve been working hard at it. I’ll continue to do so. There’s no getting around the need for the daily work.
JM @284, “hope you feel better.” Thank you. Yes, I am feeling better. It helps to be home. It helps to be past the worst of the pain.
StevoR @278:
Lynna, OM : Yikes! Didn’t know about that! Hope you make as smooth and speedy a recovery as possible and wishing you all the best and, as always, my respect and thanks for all you do here making this Infinite thread work.
Please let us know if there’s anything I & others here can do to help.
Thank you. :-)
The people who regularly post here have already been very helpful. It’s good to see that others have picked up the slack.
Hey everybody — it’s Rachel and Steve here. As old as it makes us feel to admit it, as of this year, MaddowBlog has been going for 16 years. It’s old enough to drive! And we love it today as much as we ever did — and are looking forward to it growing old enough to vote, drink, rent a car, run for office, and get its AARP card someday. Steve promises to keep bringing you the news until the letters wear off his keyboard. And then we’ll get him a new one! That is how we imagine the future of this long conversation we have been having together about the news all these years – MaddowBlog and youse guys, our favorite people in the world.
That said, the MaddowBlog universe is about to have some changes. Good ones! Over time, there have been a few features of the blog that we liked a lot, but that were cast aside for one reason or another — we’re going to bring some of those things back now. For example, you used to be able to comment on the blog — we’re going to bring that back. We used to post more stuff about me (Rachel) behind the scenes, which we’ll start doing again, too. Letters and contributions from you guys alerted us to a ton of great stories we wouldn’t have otherwise known about and even helped us tell them — we’re going to add in more ways to do that again.
The big change that’s happening for us, company-wide, is that MS NOW is launching a new Membership program, and our new app and website for MS NOW Members has a whole bunch of new stuff. There will be new ways for you to connect directly with me every week. You can watch The Rachel Maddow Show and other MS shows both live and recorded. You can comment on MaddowBlog posts or on stories and discussions throughout MS NOW. There is a lot to this. It’s going to be good!
But! And! There are bigger changes afoot, too. If you are used to reading MaddowBlog on the MS NOW app, you can still read all you want for free. If you read MaddowBlog on a browser, there will be a limit to how many articles you can read without becoming a Member. [Details regarding cost are available at the link. I think it is $40 per year. Best blog for news in my opinion. I often turn to the Maddow Blog for info to post on The Infinite Thread.]
We also want to be clear and honest with you about the reason we’re doing the membership program — it’s because we intend to be here for the long haul. The new MS NOW — with the app and the membership program and everything else — will help us stay resilient and stay independent, so we can keep reporting the news and telling the truth without fear or favor, and without giving anyone a way to push us around. It gives us the financial and editorial freedom and foundation we need so we can be here for you and with you, for good. We hope you’ll join us!
With gratitude and respect…
Rachel and Steve
Links to the membership page, FAQ page, etc. are available at the main link.
Rachel Maddow looks at how Donald Trump’s shameful dedication to deporting immigrants has led him to betray Afghans who helped the U.S. military in Afghanistan and were promised protection in the U.S., leaving it to individual service members to push back against his disgrace. Trump is also betraying the Iranians he continues to claim he is helping with his war on Iran, shaming the United States with his dishonor.
In the basement of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just across from the West Wing on the White House complex, there’s a small bowling alley that has been around for several decades. During the Obama administration, officials decided it needed some meaningful repairs.
In fact, around this time 12 years ago, the General Services Administration concluded it had been several years since the lanes in the small bowling alley had had “any professional, industry standard maintenance, modifications, repairs or attention.” The GSA agreed it was time for an overhaul.
Republicans vociferously disagreed, characterizing the project as wasteful government spending, and the Democratic administration quickly reversed course, canceling the renovations.
You can probably guess where this story is going. Politico reported:
On July 28, the General Services Administration, under the auspices of the Executive Office of the President, awarded a nearly $253,000 contract for lighting work on the two-lane Harry S. Truman Bowling Alley, according to public contract awards reviewed by West Wing Playbook. And on Aug. 18, GSA awarded another contract to the same contractor, Charles Mann Enterprises, for $8,800 in escort services — essentially accompanying outside workers through secure areas — tied to the bowling alley project. […]
In isolation, this might seem an easy story to overlook, Republicans’ Obama-era hypocrisy notwithstanding. But there’s a larger context to this.
President Donald Trump has spent much of his second term obsessing over a laundry list of pet projects, including (but by no means limited to) the ballroom, the Reflecting Pool, the “triumphal arch,” the fountains, the horse statues, the “Trump Promenade,” the helipad, the “statue garden” and the dozen or so additional renovation projects he’s prioritized in and around the White House complex.
Focusing exclusively on White House projects, The Washington Post reported a few weeks ago that the Republican administration plans to spend “at least $900 million for construction projects” in and around the presidential mansion. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the president’s 2016 rival, noted via Bluesky, “While Americans struggle to afford groceries, Trump is spending taxpayer money on the worst HGTV show ever.” [LOL. Hillary is correct.]
This and related mockery, however, apparently hasn’t deterred the incumbent president. On the heels of Trump investing quite a bit of time and effort into the granite walkway outside the Oval Office, he recently shifted focus to the renovation of the columns outside the White House’s North Portico.
This set the stage for the president hosting an impromptu tour of the White House complex two weeks ago, talking to reporters about the state of his various renovations.
This included the public’s first look at the White House’s new stone helipad, when Trump took the opportunity to assure the public, “I’m very good at flagpoles.”
With just nine weeks remaining before the midterm elections, Team Trump decided to add renovations to the White House bowling alley to his already long list.
s countries develop new export pipelines, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Tuesday said the Strait of Hormuz will soon have no value as an oil conduit.
He is being terribly optimistic. If the war looks to permanently destabilize the Strait then countries will look for other routes but it won’t be cheap and not all can. It won’t be done in two years. Most of the countries would have to send their oil across Saudi Arabia and sell out of Saudi ports. Which would be handing price control over to the Saudis.
According to The National report, speaking at the G20 finance ministers meeting in North Carolina, Bessent also said the US in the next two weeks is likely going to announce actions on banks with links to the Iranian regime, as the Trump administration seeks to “asphyxiate” the regime’s economy.
This falls into the same problem that the US had with the previous attempt. There is nothing significant that the US can do directly at this point, this will be targeting banks in other countries that deal with Iran. Unless the government of the countries involved back it up this won’t do much. The Iranian side will be channeled through one bank and the US side through another.
Long-term use of melatonin, a widely used sleep supplement, was linked to a higher risk of heart failure, hospitalization for heart failure, and death from any cause among people with chronic insomnia, according to preliminary research presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2025.
The findings do not prove that melatonin itself caused the increased risks. However, they raise new questions about the long-term safety of a supplement that many people view as a harmless or “natural” way to improve sleep…
U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” last week, but not all Americans are happy with the change — including some in the House of Representatives.
On Monday, Democratic representatives Tim Kennedy and Joe Morelle, both of New York, and Debbie Dingell, of Michigan, introduced the Hands Off Our Great Lakes Act. The legislation aims not only to reverse Lake Ontario’s name change, but also to block future renaming of any Great Lake…
The Pentagon is standing behind a controversial social media post by U.S. War Secretary Pete Hegseth about a Canadian cadet program.
Hegseth on Monday posted an image from the Cadet Training Centre in Vernon, B.C., depicting two young women in uniform with the caption “this is real” alongside a Canadian flag.
The online response to Hegseth’s post was filled with remarks belittling the physical appearance of the cadets, but it also triggered massive backlash from Canadians.
Some people posted that it was unfair for Hegseth to target the youth program in an attempt to disparage the Canadian Armed Forces and others criticized him for body-shaming women serving in the cadet program.
Asked about the backlash today, Pentagon deputy press secretary Jacob Bliss said “the X post speaks for itself.”
…
When asked by reporters in Ottawa today about the post from Hegseth, Prime Minister Mark Carney said the message was “beneath their office.”
“When the Americans stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough and start being serious about having the discussions, we can have those discussions,” he said. “But it’s not constructive, but that’s their democracy.”
…
Everything Sprouts, the company linked to a salmonella and E. coli outbreak from alfalfa sprouts, has voluntarily expanded its recall to include radish sprout mix due to contamination concerns.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) shared in an update on Monday that the radish sprout mix had the potential for “cross-contamination” with bacteria from the alfalfa sprouts.
No illnesses have been traced back to the radish mix, and no new illnesses have been reported in the outbreak overall…
More than 113,000 Russian citizens crossed into Georgia through the Verkhny Lars checkpoint over the past week following rumors of a new military draft, Politico reported
On Aug. 20 alone, over 20,000 people crossed the border. Russia’s Federal Customs Service confirmed the figures significantly exceed crossing levels from previous years.
The Russian government is still saying no draft is planned but the rumors are spreading among the civilians. I don’t know what a typical number is so I can’t really put a perspective on this other then say it’s high.
“To a Russian person, I can say only one thing: ‘Welcome to Armenia,’” Simonyan said, as cited by The Moscow Times. “Here they will find everything they were looking for… And they will return to Russia whenever it is convenient for them.”
The other countries that Russians can still easily go to are also expecting an influx of people, at least on the west side. On the east side options are more limited for countries to visit but going on a really extended hunting and fishing trip is easier.
The states of Florida and Texas are moving to end their relationship with surveillance giant Flock, as the company faces increasing backlash over privacy concerns and misuse of its tracking technology.
Florida’s Department of Transportation said in a memo on Monday that it will cease using license plate readers across the state’s highways, such as Flock’s cameras, citing “concerning reports of misuse, data privacy concerns, and surveillance schemes.” The state now has 30 days to remove the cameras.
The decision comes days after Florida governor Ron DeSantis called the license plate reading technology “out of control” in remarks during a press conference last Wednesday.
Florida follows similar action by Texas, which last week ordered state agencies to stop funding Flock cameras. Texas governor Greg Abbott’s office cited abuse of the surveillance system, including the recent indictment of a Lufkin, Texas police officer with 100 felony counts related to allegedly searching Flock’s database to track people without authorization…
Intersting. There has been widespread and growing anti-Flock sentiment, but these are two very Republican states.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Demonstrating his seriousness about declaring war on Canada, on Wednesday Donald J. Trump obtained a medical note from his new podiatrist exempting him from military service.
The podiatrist, Dr. Mehmet Oz, indicated in the note that a “Vietnam War-era issue involving bone spurs” would prevent Trump from participating in an invasion of America’s northern neighbor.
“President Trump’s bone spurs would become dangerously inflamed if exposed to Canada’s frozen tundra,” Oz wrote. “If he decides to put boots on the ground, his feet should not be in those boots.”
Former Border Patrol commander at large Gregory Bovino, who led the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis and other major cities, was under internal investigation due to concerns over his testimony in federal court and for past alleged antisemitic comments when he retired, according to records released last week that were reviewed by CBS News.
Customs and Border Protection informed Bovino in an email on March 2 that the agency was “conducting an official Inquiry into allegations of misconduct reported to CBP.” Just 16 days later, Bovino…
Throughout Donald Trump’s rise in Republican politics, the president and his party have repeatedly clung to the idea that their organized critics deserve to be dismissed as inauthentic. It has fueled the “paid protesters” myth that still has currency in GOP politics, and the party has applied the rhetoric to everything from No Kings events to critics of mass deportations.
The claims have long been rooted in an absurdity: Since Americans who disagree with Republicans are effectively an impossibility, protests can only be explained through corrupt schemes and illicit payments. Those on the right deserve to be seen as real, while Americans who dare to disagree must necessarily be seen as corrupt. [All too true. A good summary.]
As data centers generate public backlash of their own, it seems inevitable that Republicans would apply the same logic — which is precisely what’s happening.
In July, for example, former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley, his party’s U.S. Senate nominee in North Carolina, told Fox News, “This opposition to data centers is not organic. … This is being ginned up the same way that we saw opposition to energy projects around the country.”
He didn’t say who, exactly, was responsible for “ginning up” opposition, but the underlying argument has gained traction. Just last week, Republican Rep. Michael Rulli of Ohio, where the backlash to data centers has been especially intense, told Fox Business that the Chinese Communist Party has “infiltrated” his home state with “propaganda against this.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise is apparently thinking along the same lines. [video]
“This is a competition with China,” the Louisiana Republican told Fox Business. “Let’s be clear about this. And we are investigating whether China is behind a lot of this misinformation, false information against data centers. Who is funding this campaign, I think, is a good question to ask against data centers, because if it’s literally a war between America and China, China is the only one that benefits. And so we’ve been investigating it.”
The GOP leader said his party is already “finding some things,” including social media bots controlled by Beijing that Scalise claimed “are spewing out a lot of this stuff” related to data centers.
In other words, with nine weeks until Election Day 2026, one of the nation’s most powerful Republican officials wants Americans to know one thing: The GOP doesn’t just think Americans are wrong about data centers — the party also wants to investigate why Americans have been fooled into opposing data centers.
To hear Scalise tell it, data center critics may be sincere, but they are really just the victims of a conspiracy hatched by the Chinese. [Yep. That is what I conclude from listening to Scalise and to Trump.]
Scalise’s comments came just one day after Trump, displaying a degree of condescension rarely seen or heard in national politics, wrote to his social media platform, “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor.” [Oh FFS.]
On one of the year’s hot-button issues, Republican leaders haven’t merely positioned themselves on the unpopular side. they are doing so in way that’s as insulting as possible to Americans’ intelligence. [True]
“Following sweeping cuts, the tax agency brought in 35% less last year [!] than the year before, and there’s no great mystery as to why.”
Donald Trump’s second term has been a difficult one for the IRS. The tax agency has struggled with resignations, DOGE-imposed disruptions and the abandonment of a much-needed modernization initiative.
Complicating matters, there’s been a revolving door at the IRS administrator’s office. In the first seven months of Trump’s second term, seven different people led the agency. The eighth was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who already had another important full-time job. Since March, no one has served as IRS commissioner, although the White House tapped Frank Bisignano to serve as the agency’s chief executive officer (an office that’s never existed before), despite the fact that he also has a full-time job running the Social Security Administration.
With all of this tumult, it’s tempting to ask how the IRS can be expected to fulfill its core functions. The answer to that question is that it’s not completing some of its core functions. The New York Times reported:
The amount of money the Internal Revenue Service collected from audits dropped dramatically last year after the Trump administration pushed out many of the agency’s employees, according to a watchdog report released on Monday.
The report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, called TIGTA, showed that I.R.S. audits brought in $6.5 billion in fiscal year 2025, a 35 percent decrease from the $10 billion that audits elicited the previous year.
This isn’t altogether surprising. On the contrary, it was effectively inevitable: The president slashed the IRS workforce, and nearly a third of its staff dedicated to audits is now gone.
During Joe Biden’s presidency, Democratic officials advanced a straightforward proposition: When it comes to domestic priorities such as investments in infrastructure, it’s not entirely necessary to raise taxes, they said. As an alternative, the IRS can simply better enforce the tax laws that already exist to ensure that people are paying their fair share, which would mean more revenue to be invested on behalf of the public. [Yes!!]
Trump and his party have not only rejected that approach — they’ve taken steps to ensure the opposite outcome.
Following almost a week of relentless Russian attacks on Kyiv and non-stop air raid alerts, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy issued a stark warning to international airlines and insurers: “Russian airspace will effectively be closing.”
In his evening address on 1 September, Zelenskyy said the consequences of the war Moscow launched more than four years ago could no longer be confined to Ukrainian territory and that Kyiv’s ever-growing drone operations would soon render Russian airspace unsafe.
“It was from Russia that the first missiles and the first drones came, and they crossed our country’s border from Russian airspace,” Zelenskyy said. “This escalation cannot and will not remain confined to Ukrainian territory.”
Ukraine isn’t saying they will be targeting planes. Rather as Ukraine launches more drones and Russia launches more anti-air defense missiles the air space over Russia will become unsafe. If Ukraine can make this the case it will be a problem for Russia.
Ukraine is mostly talking about Moscow and Saint Petersburg and the area between those cities and Ukraine. This is as much embarrassing as it is a problem. Air traffic is way off it’s peak anyway, the remaining traffic can be routed further east and make the rest of the trip by train. Still, it will mean longer trips, make supply lines more complex and put more load on Russian trains. There will also be a problem is civilian air traffic that just happens to be flying over western Russia, which will have to go way out of it’s way.
johnson catmansays
re Lynna@307:The Orange Turd (TOT)
The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor.
Okay then, I think the perfect placement for a huge datacenter should be right next to Mar a Lago. Nobody there wants to be backwards or poor.
whheydtsays
Re: johnson catman @ #310…
I’ve thought for a while that announcing the construction of an AI data center adjacent to Mar-a-Lago would be a good idea, if only to watch the ensuing fireworks.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
@Lynna: I’m glad you’re caring for yourself, active, and feeling better. Missed you.
Milo Yiannopoulos, the British far-right commentator who was arrested last week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Louisiana and deported to the United Kingdom, has broken his silence about the experience, saying that “for the first time I know what it feels like to be really, really terrified”.
Yiannopoulos on Tuesday appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, a YouTube show presented by Piers Morgan, the British broadcaster and media personality. Yiannopoulos, 41, described the experience in the US as “humiliating and disorientating”, “physically degrading” and “frightening”.
It sounds like a start and some degree of awareness of just how terrible the current deportation process is.
“I didn’t really understand the physical reality of how institutionalized the brutality is in America” he said, adding: “It’s like everybody that’s arrested is an MS-13 gang member, and it hurts a lot more than it looks like on television.”
Then he goes and says he is upset that he was treated like a MS-13 gang member. Saying he would be fine with criminals being treated like that even though ICE can’t really know the difference when picking up people.
In the Piers Morgan interview, Yiannopoulos disputed the government’s account and denied previously overstaying a visa. He said he is married to an American, and claimed he held a green card that he was “renewing on a two-year basis”.
This may or may not be true. ICE doesn’t really care nor would they have the awareness or planning to avoid a known right wing figure like Yiannopoulos. One of the key features of the current ICE is the utter incompetence at even the basic procedures.
Yiannopoulos also said that while he was detained, “no one would tell me anything” – a common complaint from people held in ICE custody.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been frightened like that before” he told Morgan. “I think maybe in the past I’ve been a little bit blasé when people talked about their trauma, a little bit cavalier when people talked about stuff kind of lingering with them, but I get it now … I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”
Well at least that shows a bit of understanding and empathy. He misses that ICE doesn’t say anything because they don’t want you to have any information but that would require some knowledge about ICE and how it functions, something that most Americans don’t know. Anything they tell you about where you are, why you are being processed and such might come back to hurt ICE. They want you ignorant and unable to defend yourself.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
JM @313: “Well at least that shows a bit of understanding and empathy.”
California needs ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections, and government buildings, with on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally. [Screenshot of “Papers, Please” videogame]
Rando: “[Wikipedia]: ‘Papers, Please depicts the life of an immigration inspector at a border checkpoint for the fictional country of Arstotzka in the year 1982.’ And anyone who played it knows that the most likely ending is to get arrested yourself.”
There is one concrete thing we must insist on this administration delivering. It matters a lot more than debts measured in imaginary money. We have got to deport millions and millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters.
Milo Yiannopoulos (2025-07-13): “[Fantasizing about wanking in public if he witnessed an ICE raid.]”
Betty Bowers:
You supported ICE when it was kidnapping people & sending them to concentration camps in countries they’d never seen—WHEN IT WASN’T AFFECTING YOU! You spent 1 night in a detention facility—not a jail—before being flown to live free in your own country.
Rando: “Lots of people responding to this by accepting the frame, that he’s surprised to find himself in this position and genuinely remorseful about trump. In reality he’s a serial media manipulator and the whole Come To Jesus act and eating crow on TV is his way into a career here now he’s been deported.”
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Philosopher):
Seems like a good time to remind people that Niemöller (the author of the confession memorialized in the “First they came for the Communists” poem) was a Hitler supporter, and made that confession after spending time in the Dachau concentration camp.
While in the concentration camp, he “wrote to a military commander […] asking to be released from Sachsenhausen so he could serve in the German Wehrmacht.” He volunteered in September 1939 to become a U-boat commander; his offer was rejected.
Rando: “Bro specifically tried to be put in a position where he would definitely be involved in murdering civilians?! […] killing civilian sailors is like the whole point of a U-boat.”
beholdersays
Intersting. There has been widespread and growing anti-Flock sentiment, but these [Florida and Texas] are two very Republican states. — @304 Reginald Selkirk
They’re also two states with a large population of Libertarians, who have been the most consistent and principled liberal opposition to this particular form of nanny state encroachment.
birgerjohanssonsays
Ron DeSantis is in trouble after it was revealed that he misappropriated ten million dollars for political activities in September 2024.
This reminds me, Carl Hiaasen has written a lot of novels about crime in corruption in Florida. One of his books will be serialised for cable TV.
.
Nobel laureate explains why ‘trickle-down economy’ aka neoliberalism is not working.
.https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1DSnX8HYGj/
The world’s largest EV aircraft takes off.
.
Heart Aerospace was founded in Gothenburg 2018 by Anders Forslund and Klara Forslund. The company moved to USA 2025 and has now produced the world’s largest electric-powered aircraft, at 25 000 lb (11 tons). It can either fly 125 miles (200 km) on batteries alone, or 500 miles (800 km) as a hybrid, with a generator producing power. The service costs will be significantly lower than for conventional aircraft.
Massachusetts progressive Sen. Ed Markey, a sharp critic of Israel, on Tuesday beat the more moderate Rep. Seth Moulton by a wide margin, securing the Democratic nomination for the upcoming US Senate race.
The Associated Press called the race just a half hour after polls closed, at 8:31 p.m., when Markey had secured 75.9% of votes to Moulton’s 24.1%, with 3% of ballots tallied.
“Tonight is a testament to the power of the progressive movement,” Markey said on Tuesday night. “It is a progressive movement fueled by young people demanding more from their leaders.”
…
Markey, 80 …
NASA has awarded Blue Origin a contract worth up to $700 million to build and operate a dedicated Mars telecommunications network for current and future missions to the Red Planet. Blue Origin is expected to deliver the spacecraft by the end of 2028, with the network targeted to become operational by 2030. From a press release: …
The Oklahoma Office of the Attorney General commanded the City of Claremore to release body cam footage requested by farmer Darren Blanchard and his legal team without charging them $17,125.44. According to 404 Media, the city is asking for that amount so that it will release information on Blanchard’s arrest in April 2026 for speaking 30 seconds longer than the allowed time during a public consultation for a proposed data center in the area, as well as city records of previous disturbances in other public meetings. This led Kate Griffin, one of the farmer’s lawyers, to complain to the Oklahoma Attorney General, which looked at
Claremore justified the fees by saying that it would need to spend $16,540.44 for a legal review of requested records “to ensure that all information which must be withheld relating to members of the public and the City’s personnel is redacted in order to protect their privacy.” It’s also asking for $585 — equal to the 15-hour pay of a city clerk — to conduct the search of the documents.
…
Russia’s attempt to replicate SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network seems to be moving as slowly as the front lines in eastern Ukraine.
The Rassvet program, often billed as Russia’s answer to Starlink, started launching its first operational satellites earlier this year. Two launches, one in March and a second in July, have delivered 32 Rassvet satellites to low-Earth orbit, some 10 percent of the roughly 300 Rassvet spacecraft Russia aims to put into orbit by the end of next year to provide connectivity for military and civilian users. The company in charge of Rassvet, Bureau 1440, wants to deploy 924 satellites by 2035.
But none of the 32 satellites launched so far have reached the 500-mile (800-kilometer) orbit they were designed to operate in. The rockets that launched the first two batches of Rassvets released the satellites much closer to Earth, and the satellites were expected to use their own plasma engines to raise their orbits over the next few months.
The highest altitude achieved by the Rassvet satellites so far is a little more than 300 miles (500 kilometers). Twelve of the 16 Rassvet satellites from the first launch in March have settled into orbits at this altitude, according to an assessment released Monday by the Institute for the Study of War. A chart published by Jonathan McDowell, an independent tracker of global launch and satellite activity, indicates one more Rassvet satellite may soon climb above 300 miles.
One Rassvet satellite from the March launch never made any significant maneuvers and reentered the atmosphere in June. The remaining two satellites have not raised their altitude in the last two months, an indication that they, too, may be experiencing problems.
Some satellites in the second batch of Rassvets also show signs of trouble. Two of them never maneuvered after launch in July and appear to be heading for reentry, according to Anatoly Zak, a journalist and editor of RussianSpaceWeb.com. Eleven of the 16 satellites launched in July were “noticeably climbing” by early August, Zak reported. Three more appeared to stop maneuvering after initial attempts to raise their orbits.
…
JMsays
@320 Reginald Selkirk: The article is about Narendra Modi, Prime Minster of India. He is a friend in the sense of “somebody that I have to deal with and put on a good face in public”. India is too good a trade partner and has too much leverage over Russia for Putin to play hard with Modi. India has maintained a pro-peace policy on paper but they are still directly importing oil from Russia.
They are a key supporter because they are internationally accepted and can import Russian crude, process it into refined oil and export that to other countries. Which is probably why India wants Putin to survive. Putin surviving the war and in control of Russia, desperate to sell oil but still sanctioned and deeply unpopular in the west is best for India. India and China will be able to control the price they pay for oil better. Russia getting wrecked further could reduce exports, if Putin is replaced the new leader could be more interested in being friendly with the west.
A whistleblower complaint alleges USPS’s rollout of Trump’s mail-in ballot order could trigger a “catastrophic failure” that derails the midterms. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who is contact with the whistleblower, and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser join to discuss.
UPDATE: We have changed the headline on this based on a bunch of goddamn whiners on Bluesky picking nits about “the ballots aren’t invalidated, this is stopping them from being MAILED,” like it is a big huge difference of some kind, whatever.
An anonymous federal official warns in a formal whistleblower complaint that Donald Trump’s executive order to restrict voting by mail is likely to result in a “foreseeable catastrophic disruption” to November’s midterm elections, because the USPS has attempted to slap together complex new computer systems on a rushed timeline, without adequate planning or testing. Also known as “yeah, that’s the point.”
The whistleblower’s statement, released Tuesday by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), says the system is designed to fail, because if barcode scanners fail to read just one ballot envelope in a batch of tens of thousands, the entire batch would be rejected and sent back to the state to fix. (And then there might be another fuckup.)
The whistleblower says that where similarly complex IT projects for handling mail or packages normally take a year or more to develop, with multiple rounds of testing to make sure its parts work together, the Postal Service has attempted to cobble together its election mail system in just 90 days so it can be online in time for the fall elections, whether it works or not. The point? Yeah! That’s it!
The development process for the new election ballot IT systems has been so haphazard and rushed that in the days before its planned rollout, “multiple USPS officials” have called it “a shit show,” according to the whistleblower complaint.
In slightly more measured language, the disclosure explains,
USPS leadership, it appears, has discarded all best practices as they speed the project to be ready for a September 1 implementation – raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug.
Thanks to a judge’s order, the buggy system won’t actually come online today, so woohoo, democracy saved for the moment, again.
Back in March, Trump issued an executive order directing the US Postal Service to only mail out ballots to people on lists of voters that states would be required to compile, making absolutely sure that everyone on the lists is a US citizen. This was supposedly to prevent “fraud,” although voting by noncitizens has always been vanishingly rare. A federal judge in Massachusetts has issued orders in two separate cases blocking the administration and the Postal Service from implementing the scheme. The administration has appealed both cases to the Supreme Court in hopes that Trump’s buds there will let him rig the election with all deliberate haste.
Eight states currently run almost all their elections by mail, and have done so for years without any significant problems. They’re mostly blue, though deep-red Utah also uses vote-by mail and manages to elect rightwing loons without any problems. All the other states allow voters to request absentee ballots, most without having to provide an excuse. […]
Today’s release of the whistleblower complaint makes clear that if the Court is stupid enough to let Trump’s plan go into effect, the Postal Service’s new IT systems won’t be up to the job. USPS is in the business of delivering mail, not deciding who’s eligible to vote, and up until now, it’s done a pretty good job of getting ballots to the voters, then delivering the votes back to county elections officials for counting. Until now, election mail has been handled pretty much like any other bulk mail, and the technology was about properly getting the mail delivered, and charging the states the correct postage. [True.]
In late August, USPS issued new rules to get in the way of that fairly simple process: It won’t deliver mail ballots until states get approval for the envelopes and submit new lists of eligible voters, using a “portal” designed to handle all that information from the states.
Have we mentioned that the Constitution reserves the running of elections to the states? Ah, a mere bagatelle. […]
Per the disclosure letter, submitted to Blumenthal by the nonprofit group Whistleblower Aid:
The Whistleblower paints a dire picture of a slapdash software development process as the USPS attempted to create this complex IT system, with multiple points of ballot review, in a matter of weeks. The very manner in which the project is being developed deviates dangerously from even the most basic software development best practices.
Individual parts of the system were “siloed” from each other during development, with little testing of how they’d work together, and the final version was only thrown together during the week of August 24, 2026, the complaint says.
Oh yes, and when Judge Talwani ordered the Postal Service to stop working on the portal system on June 25, USPS complied, but then started working on it again on July 29 [!], the day the administration appealed the case to the Supreme Court. The Court didn’t actually overturn Talwani’s order until August 24.
As the AP reports, “Talwani last week found the Postal Service violated her order by continuing to work on the final rule, but she imposed no sanctions on the government,” which we think is entirely too nice of her. Monday, Talwani also ruled that the restraining order against implementing the portal remains in place, but she also said USPS can keep working on it, as long as it doesn’t require states to use the thing. We are not a lawyer, but we guess that means red states can “voluntarily” submit whatever raggedy-ass voter lists they want ahead of the election and then wait to be sued if voters in blue cities never get their absentee ballots. […]
Johnson Catman @310, and whheydt @311: LOL, I agree.
Sky Captain @312: “@Lynna: I’m glad you’re caring for yourself, active, and feeling better. Missed you.”
I’m glad too! I missed The Infinite Thread and the kind of discourse it provides. I’m not yet back to 100% functional, but I’m getting closer day by day.
More than 153 million US and Canadian driver’s licenses, as well as other identity documents, have reportedly become available for purchase on the dark web for a limited time. According to cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs, the service was called Nexus, and although it’s no longer available at the time of writing, it claimed to have possessed 153 million driver’s licenses, 10 million ID cards, 1.9 million travel documents, 1.3 million international driver’s licenses, 579k medical cards, 429k common access cards, 91k residence cards, 77k employment authorization records, and 5 million other documents, allegedly sourced from an ID-authentication service based in Louisiana.
The service was advertised on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, where whoever was promoting it posted the driver’s license of Krebs as a free sample, which caught the journalist’s attention. He was also able to see a preview of U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s information on the database — a concerning breach of security for someone with such a sensitive position in the government. After further investigation, they concluded that the service seemed to have possessed legitimate data, especially after searching for the data of several of his friends and family members with their consent. One thing that all the people he found in the database had in common was that they all used Hertz to rent a vehicle.
Krebs also talked with security and privacy researcher Zach Edwards, who said that their information was also found on Nexus. Edwards said that they did not rent a car recently but used their ID at a Planet13 marijuana dispensary. The time stamps found on the scanned images of the driver’s licenses and other identity documents coincide with the time that the victims used their IDs at the said companies, confirming that they were the sources of the leaks. However, Planet13 and Hertz do not do their own authentication; instead, they contract a service provider for the service. Now, it turns out that both Planet13 and Hertz used the company for identity verification and ID-authentication — IDScan…
A federal grand jury in California has indicted Russian citizen Searzhudin Tamirlanovich Aktulaev for allegedly conducting phishing attacks that stole data from over 80,000 computers between June 2016 and November 2017, using TVRAT and DarkVNC remote-control malware. Detailed in a Department of Justice press release on September 1st, the indictment — filed in June 2021 and released September 2026 — lists charges of “Conspiracy, Transmission of a Program, Information, Code, and Command to Cause Damage to a Protected Computer, and Aggravated Identity Theft, among other offenses.”
Aktulaev was extradited to the U.S. in August 2026, five years after his arrest in Cyprus in May 2021…
There’s a lot going on right now, as usual, but something just hit my radar (get it?!), which is a tropical storm they’re calling Marie forming out in the Pacific Ocean, way down south of the Baja California peninsula. […]
For those of you in other parts of the country who might have been going around blissfully unaware, we have all been struggling through sweltering temperatures and some of the highest humidity ever experienced in Southern California — for the last several weeks. It’s been awful, borderline unbearable. I guess that the very warm seawaters that caused all that humidity have now birthed this potential hurricane.
So what does that mean for California? Maybe nothing, this time around. But if there’s a worst-case scenario, we’re going to see a lot of flooding and it’s going to be riiiiight around Labor Day. […]
The good news is that by the time it hits shore, even as a worst-case scenario, it probably won’t be a hurricane. The bad news is, you don’t need a ton of winds to flood the absolute shit out of a place without much of an infrastructure in place for rain!
Once upon a time, not so long ago, this was completely aberrant and abnormal but now it seems to happen every year so I guess the climate has changed, baby, no matter what the GOP says!
Climate change denial is a form of particularly potent disinformation — not misinformation, which implies that people might have made some honest mistakes — but disinformation with a “D,” as in “deliberate.” It’s been documented time and again how insidious those lies have been, and yet those liars get to go walking around free with their heads still on their shoulders and moneys still in their bank accounts while those of us with lower incomes are still bailing out our living rooms with plastic buckets.
I think a lot of people are familiar with one kind of disinformation about climate change, which is when bad actors look at the facts arrayed neatly out in front of them and then just simply issue blanket denials, but there are other kinds to be aware of as well. In fact, the climate disinformation machine is highly organized, global, and extremely well-funded.
Here are some real-world, recent examples of climate disinformation, brought to you by the same shitheels who hate books, women in the workplace, our trans siblings, and so many more of the exact things that once made this country a place people actually wanted to live!
“Heat waves have always been this way! You’re just getting older and less heat-tolerant.” This oldie is a fun one because it manages to wrap up an insult within the lie, casting you — yes, you — as a fuckwitted, feeble-minded dipshit who can’t remember what summers used to be like […]
Heat waves have been unprecedented everywhere, and I do mean everywhere! I recommend just walking away from people like that and shunning them, because we don’t need people like that in our lives! […]
“A warming planet is good, actually!” I first heard that one years and years ago from a Russian diplomat who was visiting Alaska at the time, back when I was a wee reporter. This diplomat, who was probably drunk and whose name I can’t remember because I was drunk too, went on for some time about how northern latitudes would become arable and green, which would take all that extra CO2 and create more oxygen in the atmosphere. Cattle and grass could replace the permafrost, he said. Trees and birds would flourish where today there was only ice. […]
This time, though, all I saw was a big lake [at the previous site of “Portage Glacier”, no ice chunks, a new-to-me sign, and friends, I’m not going to lie, I cried. You know what else I didn’t see? Any fucking farmland! Turns out that was all bullshit, too. So remember that the next time you get drunk with Russian diplomats in Alaska circa 2003 and find out what they think about climate change.
“What about the people in more southern latitudes?” I remember asking this gentleman. “What about the birds that are already in the north? What about the fish?” I don’t remember whether he answered, but I’m not sure his answer would have made a difference. I hope he had a terrible hangover the next morning.
I would offer a suggested rejoinder here, but I’m not sure you can talk to people like that for any reason, ever. I recommend flinging poo into their faces, but you would have to sort of come prepared for that one. I personally deal with it by issuing a long, hollow laugh and walking away. The trick is to start walking away before you start crying!
The final, extremely common climate disinformation line is the one that makes me the angriest and gives me the most angst.
“Yes, climate change is real, but it’s too late to do anything about it now.” Are you fucking kidding me? Since when is it too late to do anything about anything? This lifetime is filled to the brim with do-overs and second chances! There are only sixteen novel plots! If anybody ever says that to your face, tell them that perhaps they want to be lazy and hopeless, and they are welcome to curl up and die. But the rest of us are going to do something about this. We owe it to our huge beautiful complicated planet to do something nice for it for a change, don’t you think?
The problem with that one is that we are living through a very despairing time. It might be the strongest piece of disinformation being circulated of all, because disinfo always, always plays on emotion. And there is a lot of emotion in watching the world around you get destroyed, reshaped, drowned in rains. It’s tough to not feel despair. After I lived in Alaska, I eventually made my way to Altadena, a beautiful place in Los Angeles County, and fell in love with its incredible people and history. I lived in a gorgeous old home at the top of a hill in a neighborhood that no longer exists because it got destroyed in the Eaton Fire — burned straight to the ground.
And that’s not even the first time this has happened to a place I lived in! It’s like the fifth one! I swear I am not doing it, I just love living near open spaces, which apparently now means you have to prepare yourself for heartbreak down the line at the very least.
But I am digressing! I’m just trying to say that this is an easy time to be despairing, and climate deniers know this and are using it against you in order to get their way and amass all sorts of resources while we are still reeling. So don’t let them do it. Don’t let them tell you it’s too late. They just want all our water and to do creepy surveillance shit and sniff our underwear or whatever it is climate deniers do with their spare time.
How do you handle despair? Well, I can’t speak for you, of course, but the way I do it is through spite. I will clean up this goddamn planet myself just to fuck these assholes off. I will live forever simply for the joy of outliving them. I will breathe clean air and eat good food and drink clean water just so techbro billionaires and their allies can’t. I will fucking do this! And most of all, I will do what we must do in order to survive this time, which is to build climate and social resilience and work together so that we can survive together. (More on that in future articles.)
But don’t forget the spite. Some days it’s all that gets me out of bed in the mornings to fight another day!
Stay dry out there, friends.
And don’t forget: Climate denial is a far-right project, so if we all miss out on tasty BBQ that’s on them — and it’s never, ever too late to fight those fuckers.
Iran’s foreign ministry said strikes which resulted in four deaths, including two children, at a wedding ceremony in Sirik county were a “war crime”.
A further 67 people were injured, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, after shrapnel from a US missile hit a house in southern Iran.
US Central Command told the BBC it’s “looking into” Iranian media reports about the strikes, but added “the US military never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC”.
A weapons expert consulted by BBC Verify said images shared online following the attack show fragments of a cruise missile used by US forces…
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Facing a Republican wipeout in November, on Tuesday House Speaker Mike Johnson begged God to “rapture him up” before the midterm elections.
Witnesses in the US Capitol reportedly saw the Louisiana lawmaker on his knees in the House cloakroom, beseeching the Almighty to “put me out of my misery.”
“I don’t want to be in the minority,” he prayed, chocking back tears. “I’m a Republican. We hate minorities.”
“You’ve seen the polls, and O Lord, are we screwed,” he added. “Please call me up to Heaven like you did to Lindsey Graham.”
According to onlookers, the normally taciturn deity thundered, “What makes you think that asshat’s in Heaven?”
“The president’s effort to rename Lake Ontario was not popular. He’s nevertheless already eyeing a rebrand for yet another waterway.”
It’s hardly a secret that Donald Trump likes to rename things, but during the president’s second term, he’s placed a special emphasis on, of all things, bodies of water.
As much of the world knows, Trump invested an enormous amount of time and energy trying to rename the Gulf of Mexico, for example, which was soon followed by a fleeting effort to start referring to the Persian Gulf as “the Gulf of Arabia.” Last week, he added to the list, signing an executive order declaring his unilateral belief that Lake Ontario should forevermore be known as “Lake America.”
[…] The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 63% of Americans are against renaming Lake Ontario, while just 14% endorsed the idea.
Confronted with this public reaction, Trump decided to keep adding to his ridiculous list. On Wednesday, apropos of nothing, the president wrote to his social media platform:
Now that we have it under U.S.A. control, should we change the name Hormuz Strait to TRUMP STRAIT??? Like America itself, it would be “hotter” than ever before! Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Right off the bat, it’s worth emphasizing that Trump’s repeated insistence that the United States now “controls” the Strait of Hormuz is absurd. [yep]
[…] there was no implied humor in his missive about the waterway, which he’s also begun referring to in recent weeks as a U.S. territory. (It’s not.)
But reading Trump’s latest nonsense, I found myself thinking about Republican Rep. Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma.
The Bulwark obtained an audio recording of comments the congresswoman made at Oklahoma State University last week, where she reflected on the electoral landscape to a Republican audience and on the degree to which the party is burdened by the president’s antics.
“The challenge that we have is that we have to get over the narrative that ‘I don’t like this guy, so I’m going to vote for the Democrat,’” Bice said. “Because I’m telling you right now, I’m hearing it already.”
In reference to the president’s executive order, signed hours earlier, she added, “We’re not helping ourselves when we decide to rename Lake Ontario ‘Lake America.’ This does not help the case.”
Bice’s team later suggested that the broader context of her comments were more forgiving, but the quote was nevertheless striking: A conservative Republican, in one of the nation’s most reliably red states, speaking to a Republican audience, conceded that Trump isn’t doing the party any favors.
Less than a week later, Trump’s talk about renaming the Strait of Hormuz after himself (to borrow Bice’s phrasing) also “does not help the case.”
When NASA’s Voyager spacecraft flew past Saturn in 1980, it spotted something unlike anything scientists had seen before: a colossal, six-sided storm swirling around the planet’s north pole. The strange hexagon has persisted for decades, becoming one of Saturn’s most mysterious features. But now, astronomers may have found something even more surprising—a similar pattern emerging on the opposite side of the planet.
Images captured by the Hubble space telescope revealed a growing decagon-shaped wave around Saturn’s south pole. The 10-sided storm appears to have developed between 2023 and 2025 and may be evolving to this today, unlike its counterpart that has remained stable for more than 40 years. The new discovery is detailed in a paper published Wednesday in Science Advances…
“Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Juneteenth, a newly designated federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged during a Thursday briefing with reporters that it was a federal holiday and thanked reporters for showing up, but declined to answer whether Trump was doing anything to mark it.
“The workers don’t want it either!” Trump said of federal holidays in his post. “Soon we’ll end up having a holiday for every once working day of the year. It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
The actual math is too complex to easily describe because short term, long term and overall impact on the economy are not the same. Even that is not the entire picture though, the good of Americans is not the same as the total output of the economy. Trump doesn’t understand any of them, he has just been talking to corporate CEOs too much. CEOs ignore that what is best for the company this quarter might not be best for the US in the long run.
Vying to become House speaker in a few months, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries outlined four items on the agenda that he said would enjoy “uniform Democratic support” and advance the party’s goal of “making life more affordable.”
The first two were about healthcare, and all four set a direct contrast with President Donald Trump.
The big issues are affordability, health care, pulling control of tariffs back to Congress and ending war with Iran.
They have some ideas but no plan for affordability yet. Health care is easy in a sense because their immediate goal is just reversing the cuts that Trump has made. Taking control of tariffs back and setting them at some reasonable level is both good for the US and will infuriate Trump. Ending the war with Iran will be more complex, it isn’t something that Congress should just cut off there needs to be some exit. However, if Trump gives them no alternative then just blocking any further spending on military operations in the area will force a pull back.
The list is indecisive for this late in the campaign. The Democrats should have a more organized plan while recognizing that they will have to modify it later depending on how the election goes.
He added that Democrats would also conduct aggressive oversight of the Trump administration and “certainly will fight to hold the crooks accountable.”
This is Jeffries saying that. Easy to say, what will matter is how hard they actually go at it. With Blanche as the head of the DOJ they are not going to get prosecutions but they can make the crimes public.
Still, many Democrats say reversing Trump on Medicaid and the ACA would be the bare minimum — and want the party to do much more on healthcare.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said it would “absolutely not” be enough to simply restore Medicaid and ACA funds.
This is very true. The Democrats have to get away from the trend of 2 steps backwards under Republicans and then celebrating the 1 step forward they achieve. The Democrats will have trouble doing anything under Trump but hopefully they try. The Democrats are going to need to be willing to do some windmill tilting over the next two years. With Blanche and Trump in power they are not going to outright win much but they need to show that they are willing to try.
whheydtsays
Re: JM @ #335….
…says the man who spends his days golfing, watching TV, ranting on social media, and never spent a day of his life actually working.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Adam Parkhomenko (Dem political strategist): “The iconic weeping willow trees outside the Kennedy Center have been cut down by Trump. [Photos]”
Update from a reader: “I was told that the garden beds the willows are in are very shallow so every few years they start to die off. One was really sick and not looking great and another fell over in one of the recent storms so they went ahead and cut them all down. The were replanted a couple of years ago when one of the theater houses had finished its latest remodel. No word on if they will be replanted or if something else will be replanted in its place.”
“Blue,” a towering cobalt figure that has watched over the grounds of the Reach since 2019. […] earmarked for elimination not long after President Trump’s takeover of the institution. There had been no public announcement or consultation. […] Whether “Blue” finds a new home elsewhere or disappears into storage remains unclear.
I spent 10 months working at the institution […] I was the staffer in charge of the artworks […] Shortly after Trump’s shutdown announcement, the center’s president, Richard Grenell, told me to “get rid of everything” […] A current Kennedy Center staffer told The Atlantic that [the removed artworks] are now in the building’s archives.
[…]
With an absentee leadership, a growing list of artist cancellations, declining ticket sales, and a lack of financial resources […] The institution’s spending priorities seemed dubious. The roof has been leaking for years, and the willow trees in the River Plaza outside the Grand Foyer were visibly rotting, and yet the high-priority renovations made to the building involved adding gold gilding to the chandelier of the presidential box in the Opera House.
[…]
When Grenell instructed me to “get rid of” the center’s permanent art collection because we needed new art to adorn the building’s walls after its renovation, I was taken aback by his cavalier attitude. If the donors of the works didn’t want to pay for their removal, he said, we could put them up for auction or give them away.
A paragraph in the article accepts framing Oct 7th as a pogram. The author organized a commemorative exhibit, and Grenell threatened the Jewish audience with removing it if they didn’t sponsor the room. Room sponsoring was new. One was sponsored by a pardoned fraud who paid millions to name it. One room got a plaque in tribute to the intelligence community, named for a a guy who allegedly lied about being in the CIA.
The Dutch central bank (DNB) has confirmed that billions of dollars in gold has been taken out of north America and relocated to London, citing “increasing geopolitical unrest”.
DNB said on Wednesday that 86 tonnes of gold had been removed from the US and Canada in a complex operation that took several months. It is now being held by the Bank of England, where the precious metal can be traded more easily “in a crisis situation”…
One of India’s most shocking incidents of anti-Christian violence is back in the news more than a quarter of a century after it drew condemnation from around the world.
The Supreme Court is hearing a petition seeking release from prison by a man who is convicted of killing Australian Christian missionary Graham Staines and his two young sons in 1999…
U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday implied the Bank of Canada was a commercial bank with locations south of the border, not a Crown corporation that exists solely up north.
The president made the claim at an Oval Office event with travel executives, repeating his longstanding belief that Canada takes economic advantage of the U.S.
“They basically don’t allow banks of America to be in Canada. That’s sort of emblematic of the way they treat us,” Trump told reporters, having been asked a question about the decline in Canadian tourism.
“They have their banks here, Bank of Canada, all of their big banks, big beautiful banks. I think they have six or seven major banks here. We don’t have our banks there. You know why? They don’t allow it.”
The Bank of Canada is not a commercial bank for everyday citizens looking to open accounts or make transactions and does not operate in the U.S. It is a Crown corporation that oversees banking services on behalf of the federal government…
Alanis Morissette is suing her former tour manager for what she calls a “calculated blackmail campaign” to frame her for drug trafficking unless the Canadian singer-songwriter agreed to sign her to a lengthy contract.
Morissette filed a lawsuit in California on Tuesday, obtained by CBC News, alleging that Keren Urinov is threatening to report her to British authorities for drug trafficking unless Morissette agreed to employ her as a tour director for 15 years and pay her “massive compensation.”
Morissette is suing Urinov for civil extortion, fraud and negligent misrepresentation, writing in the lawsuit that she “will not be coerced into delivering her blackmailer an extraordinary payday” and that she pursued legal action “to expose Urinov’s scheme and hold her accountable.” …
A new fundraising campaign builds off Prime Minister Mark Carney’s use of the word “hydronym” to raise awareness and environmental protections for Lake Ontario.
London, Ont., apparel company Branded By Collins has created T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase, “My hydronyms are Lake & Ontario.” A portion of the sales proceeds go to Swim Drink Fish Canada, a Toronto-based, national charity that connects people with the lake, and works to keep it safe and clean…
A Coast Guard plane carrying Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin had to make an emergency landing Wednesday afternoon at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, multiple sources told ABC News.
Mullin said on X that there was “no panic” during the incident, which sources said occurred after the aircraft lost its right engine…
President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he is formally nominating acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao to the permanent position.
The announcement comes one day after Trump accepted the resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, and four months after former Navy Secretary John C. Phelan was ousted…
I don’t know anything about him, but if he was nominated by Trump I assume he is incompetent and corrupt.
On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed a stopgap measure that would continue funding the US government through early December. While the measure still requires the signature of President Trump, it’s widely expected that he will act to avoid a government shutdown immediately before the midterm elections.
This is a normal part of how the US government has operated in recent years, as it’s often difficult to build the political support needed to pass a full year’s budget in advance. In fact, dissent within the House’s Republican caucus prevented them from agreeing on their own measure to keep the government open; instead, the House simply adopted a version of the spending bill that had previously passed the Senate.
From the perspective of scientists and their supporters, that adoption turned out to be a very good thing. Because the Senate’s budget bill, passed in early August, contains a provision that blocks the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from implementing new rules that would give political appointees full control over what science is funded and allow them to cancel any grant at any time. The proposed rule has been widely decried as catastrophic for science, and it faced widespread opposition from scientific and health-focused organizations.
That opposition likely contributed to two senators, Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), inserting language into the budget deal that prevents the OMB from implementing it prior to the expiration of the stopgap measure on December 11…
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a former member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is calling on President Trump to fire Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth over what he called Hegseth’s “inept management” of the military.
…
Tillis, who cast a pivotal vote to confirm Hegseth last year, is now calling on Trump to fire him…
Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy on Tuesday said President Trump tapped her husband, Sean Duffy, to be Transportation secretary “because that was all that’s left.”
The two were interviewed on “The Katie Miller Podcast,” hosted by the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. The host asked about their conversation after Trump nominated Duffy.
“He said he wanted to serve the president in any way,” Campos-Duffy said. “He ended up in Transportation because that was all that’s left.”
Duffy, himself a former Fox News host, interjected and said he believed Trump when he told him, “If I wasn’t the president, I would pick the Department of Transportation over any department. It’s the best department, and I’m going to give it to you.” …
An obvious lie. Whether Trump was lying to Duffy, o Duffy was lying to the audience, I don’t know.
Not a great cause for concern, amending the constitution is hard. Article V
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
whheydtsays
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #349…
Minor historical note…
Ratification by state conventions has only been used ONCE. Due to rural (conservative) domination of state legislatures at the time, ratification by state conventions was used to repeal prohibition.
Researchers with the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization are baffled, according to one of their own, Matthew Moneymaker. He posted on Facebook last week images of what they’ve dubbed the “Syracuse Figure.”
What is it? That’s what they’d love to know. While they admit it looks like an old man wading into a pond, they’re not convinced that’s the case.
“The Syracuse Figure does not look like a classic bigfoot, but it does not look like a normal human either. The location and behavior (wading in a swamp) are more consistent with bigfoots than humans. What appears to be skin may actually be thinning wet fur that is laying flat,” Moneymaker wrote…
@347 Reginald Selkirk
Longer quote from the article.
“I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country. He is intimidated by competence and retreats to ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and well-being of our fighting force,” Tillis posted on social platform X.
Tillis, who cast a pivotal vote to confirm Hegseth last year, is now calling on Trump to fire him.
That is true but Tillis dances around the obvious and unmentionable for a Republican. Hegseth has taken a hatchet to all female and non-white officers also.
I wouldn’t mind Tillis turing around if it turned out to be a surprise that Hegseth was incompetent. The only surprise is how bad he is at the job. The DOD has gone through a lot of bad heads that acted as messengers between the White House and the DOD. Hegseth is not content with this, he is working hard to implement every bad idea he has and replace the command structure with incompetent yes men.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
A follow-up of sorts on Palestine context. Previously Germany. https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/06/28/infinite-thread-xxxx/comment-page-5/#comment-2309873
Ben Gvir posted this video on twitter today which shows fat and happy Palestinians on a conveyer built going through the Israeli “prison” (torture camp) system and coming out emaciated and maudlin. This is textbook genocidal content. [Video clip]
Nathan Tankus: “He is the minister of national security, which means he runs Israel’s police and prisons. In other words, he is actually in charge of the prisons this AI slop video is representing.”
A lot of people responding with some variation of shock that people who the “Holocaust” happened to would act like this. But as [Eyshe Beirich] and [my] forthcoming [book We Traitors: Bundist writings on Zionism, Palestine, & socialism] illustrates (not to mention a large academic literature), the Nazi Holocaust is not the basis of Zionism or Israel.
Further, Ben Gvir (whose parents are from Iraq, not Europe) comes from an intellectual lineage that follows Ze’ev Jabotinsky who was regularly referred to in the Jewish press as a “fascist” in the 1930s. Here are some samples of what our translated writers say about Jabotinsky. [*snip*]
Whether the Zionism was “revisionist”, “general” or “labor”, they all participated in violently evicting Palestinians and taking their place. And they began this process well before the Holocaust, or even Hitler taking power. There is nothing contradictory with Ben Gvir’s behavior.
Only a small percentage of Jewish Israelis descend directly from victims of the Holocaust, and those that do have been socialized into a dominant Zionist culture which was defined well before the Nazi Holocaust ever happened. A culture that referred to Nazi Holocaust survivors as “soap” when they arrived. [In the sense of soft weaklings, not the camp saponification rumor.]
This [paywalled] paper about the integration (or lack thereof) of Polish Jews into Israel after the Nazi Holocaust is good. One of the points it develops well is that the children of Polish and Yiddish speaking Jews were isolated from their parents by [switching to] Hebrew.
Their parents’ cultures were “old”, “stale” and of the “weak-willed” jews of the Diaspora. Their children aspired to be “hip” and “cool” “new jews” who would be strong, not weak like their parents.
I actually emailed Pew and got the Jewish Israeli numbers at the time. “They told me 47% of Israeli Jews asked between March 3rd and April 4th [2024] said Israel’s military response in Gaza had been ‘about right’ while 42% said it had ‘not gone far enough’.” [Email screenshot: “4% of Israeli jews and 74% of Israeli Arabs said ‘gone too far'”]
To contextualize this, in March/April 2024 the invasion of Gaza was more popular among Jewish Israelis (89% [=47+42]) than Italian food is among Americans (88%). Chocolate chip cookies are liked by 90% of Americans. [YouGov polls]
In September 2025, 60.4% of Jewish Israelis wanted the war on Gaza to end, but only 1.4% of Jewish Israelis wanted it to end because “In order to cease harming the residents of Gaza and begin reconstruction of the Strip”. [Survey by Israel Democracy Institute, a leftist think tank]
^ I’d known the Palestinian displacement began at the turn of the 20th century. But I hadn’t heard the hostile assimilation of survivors spelled out before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba#Ottoman_and_British_Mandate_periods_(prior_to_1948)
My question: will it be easier to inject carbon monoxide in exhausted oil and gas wells than carbon dioxide? Will it react with the sedimentary rock easier than co2?
Residents say ICE agents arrested parents at school bus stops in Danbury, Connecticut as its immigration crackdown continues across the state. Sen. Chris Murphy joins to discuss.
CO is a very useful chemical (as well as being highly poisonous!). Among other things, it can be combined with hydrogen to make liquid hydrocarbons (which have a much higher energy density than hydrogen, or I think any chemical batteries yet invented, and being liquid, are much easier to handle than hydrogen). So if you generate hydrogen by electrolysis of water using electricity from non-fossil-fuel sources, you get near-carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuels.
johnson catmansays
re Reginald Selkirk@363:
Military personnel told last month to stop calling Iran conflict “Operation Epic Fury”
It should now be called “Operation Epic Failure”.
KGsays
Researchers with the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization are baffled, according to one of their own, Matthew Moneymaker. He posted on Facebook last week images of what they’ve dubbed the “Syracuse Figure.”
What is it? That’s what they’d love to know. While they admit it looks like an old man wading into a pond, they’re not convinced that’s the case. Reginald Selkirk@351 quoting WFMD
I’ve just seen this bright yellow disc in the sky, which seems to be radiating heat as well as light! I admit it looks like the sun, but I’m not convinced that’s the case.
“A day later, Team Trump has come up with a talking point to explain the commerce secretary’s latest mistake. It’s literally unbelievable.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s latest appearance on CNBC did not go well. The White House Cabinet secretary has struggled throughout his tenure, routinely blurting out comments that have gotten him into trouble, but his Wednesday morning “Squawk Box” interview was especially cringeworthy, at times.
During the segment, Lutnick claimed, for example, that data centers “don’t use water,” adding that the very suggestion should be seen as “propaganda by our adversaries.” In reality, data centers rely heavily on water — as the commerce secretary himself has previously acknowledged.
As the interview went on, Lutnick talked up the idea of fracturing Canada, blamed Donald Trump’s latest trade war on Canada for having hurt the president’s feelings, and struggled with a question about corruption allegations.
And while each of these examples was notable in its own right, there was another quote of even greater importance. [video]
As part of an exchange about the bond market, the commerce secretary assured the public that the administration is confident about imminent stabilization.
To justify this position, Lutnick said, “I think the way the president is playing Iran, right? There’s not, there haven’t been American deaths; it’s really just an economic choke-out, which the administration is now executing more broadly, and I think it’ll be very effective. So I’m very optimistic that the bond market will treat us very well.”
Putting aside Lutnick’s predictions for the bond market, there was one dramatic problem with his comments: 18 American service members have been killed as part of the ongoing war with Iran. When the secretary said “there haven’t been American deaths,” he turned a blind eye to these 18 service members who made the ultimate sacrifice. […]
Nearly 24 hours after the CNBC appearance, Trump declared by way of his social media platform that Lutnick “had Venezuela on his mind when he said nobody was killed.” Nearly an hour later, the commerce secretary embraced the same talking point.
“While speaking yesterday at the G20 innovation summit about AI, I answered a question about the military actions in Iran, I misspoke,” Lutnick said by way of a written online statement. “18 members of our military have died, and to those families my heart breaks and I am so very sorry for their loss. I was thinking about the Venezuelan military operation where no service members died.”
Maybe. I obviously can’t read the secretary’s mind, and I’m not in a position to say definitively whether or not he was thinking about the operation in Venezuela.
But look again at the context: While discussing concerns about the bond market, which have literally nothing to do with the operation in Venezuela that ended eight months ago, Lutnick said, “I think the way the president is playing Iran, right? There’s not, there haven’t been American deaths; it’s really just an economic choke-out, which the administration is now executing.”
I understand why the Republican administration is trying to clean up Lutnick’s comments, but the explanation is literally unbelievable.
In the news article linked above, these are presented as a synthetic video, serially zooming in on each photo. This made it hard to do side by side comparison. The BFRO report has the two original photos, full-sized and zoomed in.
The lens is totally inadequate, so that when you zoom in enough to make anything of the figure, it is blurry. The alleged distance from photographer to figure is ~ 72 meters.
“As I looked to the left I realized there was someone like wading in the pond. I was instantly unnerved and wondering what the heck was going on . I snapped a couple photo’s and it seemed to snap its head around and look right at me in such a strange way that I got creeped out even more.”
When I look at the photos, I cannot even see eyeballs. just a shadowy cleft under the brow. My first guess is a chainsaw carving. The subject claims the figure moved and looked at her. Judging from the only two available photos, it could have been rotation of a static figure.
The photos in question were taken with an iPhone 17 with an automatic focus.
It’s a pretty crappy photo, technically. There are reeds in the foreground which might have misled the autofocus.
Independence City Council member John Perkins lost his position after 68.05% of voters opted to oust him in a special election because he supported data centers. According to NBC News, Perkins was one of the five councilors who said yes to the tax breaks amounting to more than $6 billion for the Nebius data center being built in the area…
One week after her death, repair work was underway Tuesday at Dolly Parton’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star, which was apparently vandalized by someone who scratched over the singer’s name.
Ana Martinez of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce said the star, which became the site of a large memorial of flowers, cards and other tributes following Parton’s death at age 80, had been cleared in anticipation of repair work that had been previously planned by the Hollywood Historic Trust, which maintains the stars.
According to Martinez, Parton’s star was already on a list of those set to undergo repair work due to prior cracks. But after the star was cleared to make way for the work, somebody vandalized it, she said…
Recent remarks by US Vice-President JD Vance about the Antichrist and “the end times” are a “very, very common belief”, one of his friends says.
Vance recently mused on his religious views while responding to a question on a Christian podcast. He said he would “not [be] shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us” and speculated on whether the end of the world was nigh.
His friend Rod Dreher, a conservative writer, rejected any suggestion that the comments would harm the vice-president. He told the BBC’s Today programme: “Most Americans who are inclined to vote Republican already believe this stuff.” …
KGsays
Massachusetts progressive Sen. Ed Markey, a sharp critic of Israel, on Tuesday beat the more moderate Rep. Seth Moulton – Reginald Selkirk@319 quoting Times of Israel
Hmm: m-o-r-e m-o-d-e-r-a-t-e is a strange way of spelling “pro-genocide”.
KGsays
JM@313, Sky Captain@314,
I doubt even the sketchiest of the multiple far-right outfits sprouting like poisonous fungi on the decaying body of the UK is going to want anything to do with Milo Yiannopoulos; publicly okaying adult sexual exploitation of 13-year-old boys is difficult to live down. He might have to get a proper job.
KGsays
Lynna, OM@307,
The prospectus the techbros have been putting out in support of data centres is, more-or-less:
We want to steal your land and water, and jack up your energy prices, so we can work on creating artificial superintelligence which will then put all you proles out of work if it doesn’t actually decide to exterminate you.
For some weird luddite reason, this does not seem to be gaining general public support.
The GOP-led chamber was supposed to work three more weeks before Election Day. It’s now down to one four-day week.
Most members of the Republican-led House did show up for work this week, tackling weighty tasks such as denouncing socialism and launching a failed effort to amend the Constitution to keep the number of Supreme Court justices at nine.
That said, there’s still some time for the chamber’s GOP majority to at least try to get real work done ahead of the midterm elections, theoretically giving members something to brag about before voters cast their ballots. According to the official schedule released as 2026 got underway, the House will be out the week of Labor Day, but it was scheduled to be in session for the three weeks that followed.
At least, that was the plan. Roll Call reported:
House Republicans are scrapping the last two weeks the chamber was scheduled to be in session before the midterm elections.
Under the revised schedule announced Thursday, the House will return for votes the evening of Monday, Sept. 14, a week after Labor Day, for what is now expected to be only a one-week session before members return to their home districts.
In other words, between now and Election Day, the House was supposed to be in session for three more weeks. That has now been reduced to just one four-day week […]
At a Capitol Hill press conference this week, House Republican Conference Chair Lisa McClain boasted, “This has been the most aggressive and productive Congress since Speaker Joseph Martin’s 80th Congress in 1949.” At the same event, House Speaker Mike Johnson similarly added, “This has literally been the most productive, successful and aggressive Congress since 1949 — and I think it’s in the top five of all time.” [Whoa. Blatant propaganda and lies.]
The references to the 80th Congress in the late 1940s were curious: This was the same Congress that was famously condemned by Harry Truman as the “Do-Nothing Congress.”
[…] the GOP leaders’ use of the word “aggressive” this week also stood out because it suggests the Republican-led chamber has been hard at work for the past 20 or so months, tackling the public’s business and delivering real results.
But that doesn’t describe the recent past at all. Punchbowl News noted earlier this week that 244 days into 2026, the House has held votes on just 65 days, a track record that’s now poised to look worse as GOP leaders give members even more time off.
As for Republicans’ increasingly absurd claims about congressional productivity, NOTUS’ Dana Milbank noted in his latest column that the official congressional data shows that the current Congress “is indeed on pace to set a record — as the least productive Congress in modern history. With just 104 pieces of legislation enacted into law so far, it is poised to take the crown from … well, from the last Congress, which Johnson also led, when just 274 pieces of legislation became law.”
GOP leaders could roll up their sleeves and try to deliver some results in the run-up to the midterms, but as they made clear on Thursday morning, they no longer intend to try.
blockquote>A shootout between two of Ukraine’s top intelligence agencies has wounded at least three security officials, highlighting internal divisions within Kyiv’s security establishment.
On Wednesday morning, a gunfight broke out between Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR), a military arm which handles foreign intelligence, and the State Security Service (SBU), which focuses on domestic intelligence and counterterrorism activities. …
… the SBU took Stepan Kaplunov, deputy commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) that fights for Ukraine, into custody. RVC is a subordinate of HUR.
… Kaplunov is a Russian native who moved to Ukraine after Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014, according to Ukrainian media reports.
While Kaplunov is still a Russian citizen, Moscow added him to its list of “terrorists and extremists” because of his support for Ukraine. …
<
blockquote>
Al Jazeera gives more details and background, but not enough for me to feel I understand what’s going on. I can at least agree with Pres. Zelenskyy (as AJ spells his name) that this is “an absolutely disgraceful situation”.
A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent has been charged with lying about the non-fatal shooting of a Venezuelan migrant in the state of Minnesota.
Christian Castro, who is not yet in custody, faces a six-count federal indictment relating to shooting on 14 January, according to the BBC’s US media partner CBS.
The Department of Homeland Security initially said he fired in self-defence after being attacked by three Venezuelan illegal migrants with a shovel and broom handle. Minnesota investigators allege Castro fired through a closed door, shooting the man in the leg.
It is rare for the current justice department to accuse a federal agent of breaking the law on the job…
Billionaire investor Leon Black has failed to appear before a US congressional committee investigating the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – instead filing a lawsuit challenging the committee’s efforts to summon him.
The lawsuit calls the subpoenas issued by the House Oversight Committee “invalid” and says they hold “no legitimate connection” to the committee’s legislative aim.
Black walked out of the committee in June while giving voluntary testimony after he was asked about nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) he may have signed, lawmakers said at the time…
Republican House candidate Te Mayonna Brown is fighting an uphill battle. Florida’s 24th Congressional District, where she took the Republican nomination after running unopposed last month, is one of the bluest in the state.
But that’s not the only hurdle she appears to be facing. Before getting involved in the FL-24 race, Brown lost a different Republican House primary this year—not in Florida, but in Illinois. Oh, and there’s this: Back in Illinois, she appears to be under indictment for felony wire fraud. Per publicly available court documents, her trial is set to begin just weeks after Election Day.
I am saying “appears” here a lot, because Brown denied it. Not just that she did the things she’s been accused of, but that she’s been accused of them at all. When I reached her by phone yesterday, she flatly insisted—despite clear photographic, social-media, and campaign-records evidence to the contrary—that she, Te Mayonna Brown, wasn’t the Tedora M. Brown who ran for Congress in Illinois or the Te Dora Brown named in a federal indictment. She then asked if I was with law enforcement before hustling off the phone…
The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to lift a block on the U.S. Postal Service plan for President Trump’s attempt to restrict mail-in voting for the midterm election.
For now, key parts of that plan are blocked by a temporary restraining order from a federal judge in Boston.
As the legal fight over Trump’s mail-in voting order continues, here’s what to know about the state of voting by mail for the midterms:…
The Missouri Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the state’s redrawn congressional map cannot be used in this year’s midterm elections, dealing a blow to Republicans.
The court ruled that a referendum on whether the state can use the map going forward must be included on the November ballot, meaning Missouri’s fall elections will take place under its previous district lines.
The new map was designed to draw one of the two Missouri Democrats in Congress, longtime Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, out of his seat…
KENNESAW, Ga. — A former Kennesaw State University student was found dead in his off-campus student housing unit after his mother called in a welfare check.
She had not heard from him in about 10 days.
Police said in a preliminary report Saturday that none of Larry Green’s three roommates at the apartment on Hidden Forest Court had noticed the smell of a decomposing body…
Pierce R. Butlersays
Akira MacKenzie @ # 386: Isn’t Dreher the one who constantly claims he’s under attack by literal demons?
Gloria Steinem, the pioneering journalist and activist who became one of the most recognizable voices of the modern women’s movement, has died at the age of 92. For more than half a century, Steinem challenged entrenched ideas about gender and power, helping bring the fight for women’s equality from the margins of American life into the mainstream. Jeffrey Brown has this remembrance.
Physicists at the LUX-ZEPLIN detector in the US have uncovered a single event which they say could be evidence of dark matter or a new type of particle interaction.
The team are cautious, but the results suggest there is just a 0.5 per cent chance the event could be explained by something else.
What’s next?
The results have been released for other scientists to pore over, with the researchers hoping other detectors will be able to find similar events in their data.
What do burying undies, stealing from babies and vicious friends all have in common?
It’s all part of research celebrated today with an opera about mushrooms and paper planes thrown at winning researchers as part of the Ig Nobel Prizes. The annual awards, which play on the coveted Nobel Prizes, are given for research that “first makes people laugh, and then make them think”. In the past, very important research such as Dr Karl’s citizen science investigation into belly button lint has won awards.
This year, 10 prizes were awarded at a ceremony in Zurich, the first time in 36 years the Ig Nobels have been hosted outside of the US. Despite the silly nature of the prizes, the winners, including Australia/US dual citizen Keelah Williams, are typically delighted to win.
I have nearly zero belief that the mid-terms will be genuine democratic elections if they go ahead at all. — @221 StevoR
Are you willing to bet money on that eventuality? Everyone running for office seems to think otherwise. — @281 beholder
What a non-surprise that StevoR has, again, run away from answering the question above.
State your loss conditions concisely and verifiably (I fully expect you to move the goalposts all over the place otherwise), and make an offer. I will respond with (probably) a smaller amount, because I’m perpetually broke, so you may choose to readjust to that.
birgerjohanssonsays
“Why doesn’t Venus have a moon? A new study may have the answer”
Denver Water, which supplies the city and its surrounding areas, has imposed Stage 1 drought restrictions in its service area starting August 2026 as water supplies continue to drop. According to Gadget Review, commercial properties like data centers can only water grass twice a week — on Tuesdays and Fridays — until September 30. Starting October 1, lawn sprinklers will be banned for use until the Board of Water Commissioners declares otherwise. However, one resident who was out walking their dog saw that the new AI data center built close to their home was watering its lawn and using so much water that some areas have started to puddle…
Romanian prosecutors officially indicted social media influencer Andrew Tate on Friday for trafficking minors, money laundering, sex with a minor and witness tampering and his brother Tristan for complicity, years after they began investigating them.
…
The Tate brothers remain in jail in the U.S. while a judge decides on the request for their extradition to Britain, where they are wanted on rape charges.
The spokesperson for the Romanian anti-organized crime prosecuting unit DIICOT — which is investigating the Tates — said it was not immediately clear whether the unit will seek their extradition from the United States.
The Tates can be tried in absentia in Romania, but the trial will not start immediately. Under Romanian law, the indictment gets sent to a preliminary court chamber, where a judge will inspect the case files to ensure legality…
Chris Hayes and Rebecca Traister discuss the enduring hope of feminist trailblazer Gloria Steinem. “We’re constantly in the fight, and the only end is, in fact, when you say, “Oh, we’ve lost.” And that was her point. There’s no loss. There’s no end. There’s hope because there’s always a fight to continue to be had moving forward,” says Rebecca Traister.
Video is 12:52 minutes. Includes a 2013 interview, and another interview, in which Chris Hayes questioned Steinem. Amazing
… Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer Christian Castro was in custody in Texas on Thursday evening after a federal grand jury indicted Castro on six counts making materially false statements to investigators.
…
Castro also faces state assault charges in Minnesota for shooting and wounding Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg during the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis earlier this year.
The state charges also include falsely reporting a crime after Castro allegedly told his superiors at DHS that Sosa-Celis and other people attacked him with a snow shovel and a broom — claims disproven by video evidence.
The federal charges follow the officer’s release last week after spending 90 days in a Texas county jail. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) refused to sign extradition papers requested by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) so he could face charges there.
Mary Moriarty, county attorney for Minnesota’s Hennepin County, said in a statement shared with The Hill that Castro had been arrested again in Texas and said she expected the officer would “appear in federal court” there and eventually in Minnesota.
“Despite Gov. Abbott’s best efforts to shield Mr. Castro, we will see him soon,” she added…
A Southern California man is being hailed as a hero after he confronted a violent customer who was threatening employees at an In-N-Out in Lake Elsinore.
Luca Opperman, 20, said he was waiting in the drive-thru line when he suddenly heard loud yelling from inside the fast-food restaurant.
“I just hear banging, super loud banging coming from the inside of the lobby,” he told KTLA’s Sandra Mitchell. “I look up and I see this lady smashing what looked like a baseball bat.”
Opperman, who is a former gymnast and freestyle trampoline athlete, said he didn’t think twice before jumping into action.
With his agility, he quickly left his car and jumped through the drive-thru window, feet-first. He grabbed a metal spatula and went over to confront the angry woman who was yelling and swinging around a large wooden stick with a sharpened end.
“I’m holding the spatula, wielding my spatula and yelling at her, ‘Get out of here! Get out of here!’”
The woman did not surrender and continued swinging the large stick at Opperman. Seeing that the woman remained combative, he decided to lunge at her to remove the stick from her hands.
“That’s when you see me go in with the shoulder drop,” he said. “I checked her. I grabbed the stick. This was a stick the size of a baseball bat, and the other end was snapped off, so it had a thick sharp end and edges.”
Fearing for their safety, witnesses said most employees had already made their way to a back room.
One witness said the woman was reportedly upset that her burger was not being made fast enough.
Opperman said that after he seized the large stick, the tense confrontation was over and no one was injured. The woman was eventually taken into custody by police. ..
Remember, the only counter to a bad guy with a baseball bat is a good guy with a spatula. ‽
The Burning Man event welcomes all attendees from all walks of life to the Black Rock Desert for 10 days of festivities with a philosphy of radical inclusion; however, one group is alleging that it was unfairly excluded from the event.
On Tuesday, the Christian missionary camp Shift the Atmosphere was asked to pack up its belongings and leave the playa. According to videos posted on Instagram by camp member John Hinerman, the complaint stemmed from the camp engaging in nonconsensual activity, including filming Burning Man attendees and encouraging them to “receive a blessing.” Burning Man has strict rules regarding privacy, and no photos or videos that show attendees faces’ are allowed to be taken without permission…
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., is showing growing apathy for the duties of his job outside of the public spotlight, often cancelling or refusing meetings with fellow lawmakers and constituents, while prioritizing interviews with Fox News and meetings with Israel advocates, according to a new Wall Street Journal report…
President Donald Trump issued a menacing threat Friday to blow up the United States’ global trade in an attempt to coerce the Federal Reserve to cave to his demands
“LOWER THE RATE OR I’LL STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT, which the U.S. Supreme Court, in its ridiculous and very costly Tariff decision, strongly acknowledged ‘the President’ has an absolute right to do. ITS BETTER THAN TARIFFS! The Fed Board, with its great new leader, must get smart – BE PATRIOTS for a change.”
Normally headlines like that are exaggerations but this time it’s real. Trump has directly said he will block trade with certain countries unless the Federal Reserve does what he wants.
The Federal Reserve is setting their policy based on inflation, not what Trump wants. Sometimes the Fed is slow to reduce the rate when inflation goes down and the economy is good but not right now, right now they need to put pressure on to keep inflation from getting even worse.
Donald Trump’s administration has funneled another $2.65 million of taxpayer funds into renovating the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, bringing total costs for the project to nearly $20 million.
In July, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the Trump administration would not seek any new contracts after costs exploded to more than $17 million.
But federal spending records show that the National Park Service awarded a nearly $2.7 million contract last week to American Ag Energy Inc., for the maintenance, repair and rebuilding of water purification and sewage treatment equipment.
This was originally estimated at < $2 million so this pushes the price to more then 10x the original estimate. This is something like half a dozen contract going to 3-4 different companies, none of which has gone through a public competitive contracting process.
The UN general assembly will vote on Friday on a resolution for the world to formally phase out the traditional Mercator map of the globe in favour of one that more accurately displays Africa’s size.
Robert Dussey, Togo’s foreign affairs minister, said the resolution was sponsored by Togo and backed by countries including the African Union’s 54 other member states. He did not specify the total number.
“This discussion is not a political discussion [but] a scientific discussion, because there is scientific proof so we all have to accept the reality,” he said.
It’s a political argument. The Mercator map is accurate just designed for a different purpose. Maps have sometimes been selected to justify particular political goals but the talk of “cartographic colonialism” is taking it too far.
The classic Mercator map was designed for easy sailing, altering country sizes to keep sailing routes simple and straight. The suggested alternatives are designed to make country areas accurate. There are a bunch of different alternatives depending on how accurate you want the areas and what other compromises your willing to make. No projection of a sphere to a flat map can be perfect in every regards.
I agree with the suggestion as long as we don’t spend a lot of money replacing existing maps, it isn’t a big enough issues to justify that. Swap them out when they need replaced. Pick a preferred map for government documents and encourage schools and universities to use that one. Unless some other map actually suits the issue being looked at.
More than six months after President Donald Trump announced the start of a war against Iran that has claimed the lives of 18 service members, injured at last 750 more, and cost between $71 billion and $118 billion, Vice President JD Vance now says the war is not a war at all.
Vance replied that he “wouldn’t call it a war” and claimed there was “no active shooting” between American and Iranian forces happening while downplaying the exchanges of fire that have taken place as points where hostilities have merely “flared up.”
Goof by Vance. For legal reasons he probably shouldn’t call it a war but it would be better not to talk about that bit at all. Saying it doesn’t qualify as a war because it hasn’t been violent enough is not a good look.
“You would have to ask the Iranians when will the Iranians shooting at ships [and] stop having an effect on world energy markets,” he said.
That is a much better line for Vance. The White House should be pushing that for all public interviews.
“What I would say is it would be irresponsible for us to write out our strategy and our timeline for an Iranian nation that simply cannot honor its commitments and cannot stop shooting at commercial ships,” he added.
Iran was honoring it’s commitments up until the US tore up the deal and started shooting at Iran, after which it can’t really be blamed for fighting back.
A Republican candidate for a Missouri State House seat was hit with a federal charge after he allegedly tried to plant drugs on his primary opponent, federal prosecutors alleged.
Thomas Christopher Ross, who won the Republican primary last month for Missouri House District 161 in Joplin, was charged Wednesday with conspiring to distribute a controlled substance after authorities discovered the alleged plot to plant cocaine and Adderall in the car of Louise Secker, who faced Ross in the Republican primary.
Ross’s campaign manager contacted the police in July after the candidate allegedly gave him the drugs and instructed him to plant them on Secker, the criminal complaint released Thursday said.
…
The campaign manager showed law enforcement alleged text messages between himself and Ross, 37, where the candidate allegedly discussed the plot, with references going as far back as May, according to the complaint.
The police called in the FBI to help with the investigation and the bureau provided the campaign manager with a covert recorder that was used on July 31 to document a meeting between him and Ross, the complaint said…
Ross defeated Secker in the primary four days later by only 33 votes, and was set to face off against Democratic candidate Aaron Metzger in the general election…
Following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s startling announcement in July that the US military would begin mandatory testosterone screening for personnel, the Pentagon released a clinical guidance document on September 2 outlining the new medically questionable policy.
The next day, though, the clinical guidance document disappeared, as did an accompanying statement by spokesperson Sean Parnell. The withdrawal was first reported by Reuters.
In a statement sent to Ars Technica, the Pentagon said that the document, titled “Clinical Guidance for Health and Human Performance Optimization,” had been temporarily rescinded on September 3 to allow for updates…
I read these articles and appreciate the commenters here. But, I must limit my consumption, for is it all too distressing since it is obvious:
There no power on this planet that can stop the slide of society into another dark ages.
And, importantly, I hope Lynna’s recovery is going well.
FBI Director Kash Patel is not known as the most competent guy around. And a video he posted to X on Thursday isn’t going to help that reputation.
Patel posted a new video about all the supposedly “cutting-edge technology” the FBI is using to solve crimes. Most of the video is clearly AI-generated, with several shots of disturbing, alien-like people who are supposed to be FBI agents. It has that unnerving plastic sheen that people can immediately recognize as AI slop.
But there’s one shot that may rank as the funniest when you remember that this is supposed to be a video boasting about how the FBI is using advanced AI. Take a look at the screenshot below and see if you can spot it.
(see link for image)
Yep. That’s right. The FBI seal that appears on screen at the 18-second mark says Federal “Bureal” of Investigation rather than Bureau…
Sheeppox is a highly contagious, often fatal viral disease that was largely eradicated from much of European livestock in the 20th century. But there is still the occasional regional outbreak, such as the one that afflicted many flocks of sheep in Greece last year. In order to reconstruct how the virus has evolved over the last 3,500 years, scientists extracted and sequenced sheeppox DNA preserved in the animal skins used for the parchment of numerous medieval manuscripts. They reported their findings in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances.
…
The team also extracted DNA from Bronze Age sheep teeth collected at settlement sites in Russia and Central Kazakhstan, since teeth can preserve DNA evidence of infection over thousands of years. After comparing those ancient sequences with the medieval ones, the authors concluded that the sheeppox virus diverged from the goatpox and lumpy skin disease viruses (all members of the Capripoxvirus family) between 11,500 and 3,700 years ago. That coincides roughly with the domestication of animals in Europe. All told, the team recovered 21 ancient genomes from 1700 BCE to early modern Europe.
…
@415 Reginald Selkirk wrote about: Medieval manuscripts are “biological time capsules” for deadly sheeppox virus
I reply: It is a very well done, but grim movie I suggest you watch ‘The Name of the Rose”
OR, just as deadly, take any of Roadkill Fracking Kennedy, jr’s advice.
Reginald Selkirksays
@416 “The Name of the Rose”
I think I saw that; I am certain that I read the book.
A proposed ballot question that could set new standards for the way congressional maps are drawn in Maryland will go to voters in November, the Supreme Court of Maryland ruled Thursday evening.
The order from a divided high court overturned two lower courts that had sided with state Republicans who challenged the proposed amendment to the Maryland Constitution. The Thursday evening order came as an end-of-the-day deadline to finalize the ballot for printing approached.
The decision was anything but a full-throated victory for legislative Democrats who muscled the bill and a legally faulty question through a two-day special session. Even so, the end result is voters will be asked to weigh in on the proposed change this fall.
In an eight-page order written for the majority, Chief Justice Matthew J. Fader agreed with judges in Anne Arundel and Dorchester counties who ruled that the ballot question as written by the Maryland General Assembly “is misleading and therefore violates due process requirements.”
In particular, Fader said the majority found fault with the question’s reference to “applicable federal laws” as the criteria for determining congressional boundaries.
Despite that, Fader wrote that judges in both cases were wrong to have issued injunctions last week blocking the question.
“An available remedy in this case that is appropriately respectful of the General Assembly’s constitutional authority to propose constitutional amendments to the voters of this State is to substitute the purpose paragraph … for the text of the question,” the majority opinion states…
An aggressive mystery animal is on the loose in New Hampshire, and authorities said it’s gone after multiple people in recent days.
The Lebanon Police Department said it’s still unsure exactly what the animal is, but it has reportedly displayed “unusually aggressive behavior towards people,” and at least three unprovoked attacks have been reported since August 30.
Lebanon police released video of the animal attacking two people as they got out of a U-Haul.
Investigators said they believe it may be a gray fox or a fisher cat, but no confirmation has been made, as officers have not personally observed or encountered the animal.
The police department said it has notified the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department and is coordinating with them regarding these incidents.
Residents in the Centerra Park area are being urged to use caution and be aware of their surroundings, especially when walking near wooded, brush-covered, or other areas where wildlife could be present.
Officials said the animal could pose a rabies risk and they’re asking anyone who has been attacked, bitten or scratched to seek medical treatment and report it to the Lebanon Police Department.
The Supreme Court on Friday handed a win to Republicans by ensuring that party committees paying for TV advertisements in the upcoming midterm elections can take advantage of the same discounts that candidates get.
The justices blocked a ruling by the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that had invalidated a recently announced Federal Communications Commission policy.
Only one member of the court, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, objected to the majority’s decision.
The decision means that the often sharply discounted rates will apply to committees and candidates alike as litigation continues…
A New York Times video analysis identified parts of a U.S. bomb at the site of a strike on an Iranian wedding party that killed at least five people, including a 6-year-old boy, and wounded at least 67 others.
When the U.S. launched its campaign against Iran six months ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised a quick, decisive blow that would avoid a long entanglement. Now, he is quietly extending troop deployments in a sign that the conflict could drag well into next year, according to people familiar with the matter. It is part of an open-ended military strategy designed to give President Trump options in the war, the people said.
Washington Post:
The Pentagon has pulled decades of classified documents from a secret computer system commonly used by defense officials and U.S. troops, after The Washington Post published a story detailing senior military officers’ concerns about the Iran war.
Documents associated with the Secretary of Defense Orders Book (SDOB) were removed from an internal web portal on the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), three people familiar with the matter said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified system.
It was not immediately clear if the documents remain otherwise available to U.S. personnel or how the reduction in access could complicate military planning. SIPRNet holds information that is labeled “secret,” while top-secret information is held on more highly classified networks, where fewer people have access.
[…] The SDOB details the location and availability of U.S. warships, military units, weapons systems and other resources, and provides top generals and admirals a forum in which they can disagree with President Donald Trump and Hegseth while still carrying out their orders. They do so by “non-concurring,” a process by which they explain reservations they may have or the detrimental effects of orders on other military plans.
The SDOB, published twice per month, became the focus of intense discussion after The Post reported Sunday that several top generals and admirals cautioned Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere. They did so by non-concurring in the SDOB, people familiar with the document said.
Among those who raised reservations with a “non-concur” were Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the head of European Command; Gen. Francis Donovan, the head of Southern Command; Adm. Samuel Paparo, the head of Pacific Command; and Adm. Daryl Caudle, the chief of naval operations, the people familiar with the discussion said.
[…] Purging the SDOB or moving it to systems with higher levels of classification will “dramatically reduce the number of people who have direct access to it,” which can constrain urgent planning, said a former defense official who routinely reviewed those documents and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive planning.
Commanders and their staffers rely on access to the SDOB to make time-sensitive decisions and notifications, the former official said. […]
EBILD, Denmark (WKRC/CNN Newsource) – A man was digging in his backyard to prepare it for renovations when he discovered a buried silver hoard from the age of Vikings.
According to information obtained by CNN, the man was digging in his backyard to ready the land for a new terrace when he suddenly came upon a cache of sorts. He discovered 41 pounds of silver bars, jewelry, coins, and even a small figure of Thor’s hammer.
Historians said it was the largest single hoard of Viking-age silver ever discovered in Denmark, being three times larger than the runner-up.
The artifacts are being examined by Denmark’s National Museum, who determined that the relics were from the ninth and tenth century and will likely end up in a permanent museum display.
Ukrainian drones attacked targets across Russia overnight, hitting residential buildings near Moscow and a seaport in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi, Russian officials and monitoring channels reported.
In Kubinka, about 60 kilometers west of Moscow, a drone attack caused a fire on the eighth and ninth floors of an apartment building, Moscow Region Governor Andrei Vorobyov said. Ten people were evacuated. He said there were no casualties.
Kubinka is home to a major Russian military airfield used by the country’s Russian Knights and Swifts military aerobatic teams. The town is also located near Patriot Park, a large Russian military-themed complex.
…
Farther south, Ukrainian drones reportedly attacked the seaport in Sochi, a major Russian resort city on the Black Sea.
Monitoring channels published footage appearing to show a fire at the port. No further details about damage or casualties were immediately available…
While the White House works through the process of choosing a new press secretary, Vice President JD Vance filled in at the podium on Thursday afternoon for a Q&A with reporters that could have gone better.
At one point, for example, the Ohio Republican acknowledged the fact that next week is the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and he will attend a memorial service in New York City. “As you guys can probably guess, I’m really looking forward to hanging out with Joe Biden,” Vance said in apparent jest. “I’m sure we’ll have many, many intense intellectual conversations. And, you know, it’ll be great; we’ll have a great time.”
Because nothing’s funnier than joking about the 25th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in American history and an ailing former president who has cancer.
While at the podium, the vice president also insisted that people follow Trump’s lead in support of data centers, brought up Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed unprompted multiple times, refused to accept any responsibility for the ongoing affordability crisis, falsely insisted that the White House is committed to “transparency” and at one point even claimed that gas prices would be higher were it not for administration “efforts” that he failed to identify.
But of particular interest were Vance’s comments about the war with Iran.
“America has fought a lot of wars since I’ve been alive, 42 years,” the vice president told reporters. “And we have won almost none of them — until Donald J. Trump became the president of the United States.” [JFC, and Oh, FFS]
I’m mindful of the fact that there’s often a gap between what Vance says and what’s true, but this was absurd even by his standards. At the root of the claim is the idea that Trump launched a war in Iran and succeeded, which is tragically at odds with reality, as the administration’s failed four-week war extends past the six-month mark.
Roughly 15 minutes later, however, during the same briefing, a reporter asked whether the war with Iran will be over by the midterm elections. [social media post, with video]
“I wouldn’t call it a war,” the vice president replied. “Right now there is no active shooting.”
Hours earlier, The Associated Press reported, “Iran fired at Kuwait Thursday, continuing its retaliation for U.S. bombardments earlier in the week. … [This] came after U.S. allies Bahrain and Jordan said their air defense systems intercepted several Iranian air attacks Wednesday. Fighting between the U.S. and Iran has increased this week after the U.S. hit Iranian rocket launchers on an island in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday, saying Iran was planning to use them to shoot mines into the waterway.”
I don’t mean to sound picky, but this sounds a lot like “active shooting.”
Vance didn’t need to do fresh damage to his elusive credibility, but he did it anyway.
“If Hung Cao is expecting his Navy secretary nomination to advance effortlessly, he’s likely to be disappointed.”
One of the oddities of Donald Trump’s personnel choices in his second term is how often he has chosen failed GOP candidates for important positions. Indeed, the White House seems to be a jobs program for Republicans who have been rejected by voters, hiring so many failed candidates that Roll Call last year said the president had created a “stable of losers.”
The list is still growing. Hung Cao, for example, is known to campaign watchers as a Virginia Republican who ran a failed congressional campaign in 2022, losing to then-Democratic Rep. Jennifer Wexton by nearly 7 points, followed by a failed Senate campaign in 2024, losing to Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine by nearly 9 points.
Just months after Cao’s defeat, Trump tapped him to serve as under secretary of the Navy, and he was narrowly confirmed last fall. In April the president named him acting Navy secretary after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired John Phelan, becoming the 10th person to serve in the position across both of Trump’s terms.
This week, the White House decided to try to remove the word “acting” from his title. MS NOW reported:
President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he is nominating Hung Cao to serve as secretary of the Navy.
“I am pleased to nominate a true WARRIOR, Hung Cao, to become the next Secretary of the Navy,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, urging the Senate to confirm Cao “ASAP.”
There’s no great mystery as to why the White House thinks highly of Cao: He’s not just a failed Republican congressional candidate, he’s also an enthusiastic proponent of “alpha” troops who has publicly condemned “cross-dressers” and “leaf eaters” in the armed forces. [OMFG]
[…] During his 2024 candidacy, USA Today reported that Chao, a decorated Navy veteran, “made repeated references to becoming disabled after he was ‘blown up’ in combat,” although his military record did not support those claims.
The article added that Cao’s Navy service record “does not show a Purple Heart award, the commendation given to troops who have suffered wounds from ‘direct or indirect result of enemy action’ that required medical attention. Nor does his record indicate that he received the Navy’s Combat Action Ribbon, which requires that a sailor ‘must have rendered satisfactory performance under enemy fire while actively participating in ground or surface combat engagement.’”
Pressed at the time for an explanation, Cao declined to answer specific questions about his military service.
Complicating matters, shortly after launching his Senate campaign, Cao also expressed concerns about, of all things, witchcraft. [Red Flag alert]
During one 2023 interview, Cao said witches had “taken over” a California city, and he wanted to prevent similar problems in Virginia.
“We can’t let it turn like this,” he said during an interview with a Christian pastor. “There’s a place in Monterey, California, called Lovers Point. The original name was Lovers of Christ Point, but now it’s become — they took out the ‘Christ,’ it’s Lovers Point, and it’s really — Monterey is a very dark place now, a lot of witchcraft and the Wiccan community has really taken over. We can’t let that happen to Virginia.”
As for his tenure as acting secretary, Cao has overseen the Navy during the controversy surrounding conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which included a combative face-to-face confrontation with sailors’ families in early August.
The nomination will require Senate confirmation, and Cao’s hearings are bound to be interesting. […]
Sept. 4, 2026, 6:11 PM EDT / Updated Sept. 4, 2026, 6:45 PM EDT
A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked a bid by President Donald Trump for the U.S. Postal Service to exert control over mail-in voting ahead of the midterm elections as one state begins mailing out ballots.
Boston-based U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, who previously blocked a related effort on mail voting, found the new Postal Service rule dictating how mail-in ballots can be sent is likely unlawful and unconstitutional, prompting her to issue a preliminary injunction.
The rushed time frame being pushed by the administration will make voter disenfranchisement “practically inevitable” if the rule is allowed to stay in place, the judge found.
The “court finds, on one side, that immediate implementation of the Final Rule issued less than seventy days before the November 2026 election threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail,” while “on the other side, that the record includes no evidence relating to fraudulent mail voting to support the rushed implementation of the Final Rule,” Talwani wrote.
She rejected the Justice Department’s request that she pause her order while the administration appeals, and noted that her ruling does not bar states that want to follow the new rules from doing do…
The former U.S. Department of Labor secretary drank on the job, created a toxic work environment, charged the government for personal travel, and accepted gifts without properly reporting them, according to a federal watchdog investigation released Sept. 3.
At one point, Lori Chavez-DeRemer and an unnamed special agent pressured a member of her security detail to enter a strip club and “drop bills one-by-one” onto a performer’s body, the report said.
Chavez-DeRemer, who started the role in 2025, resigned from her post on April 20, 2026, one day before the Office of the Inspector General was scheduled to interview her as part of the investigation, the report said…
The indefatigable Heather Cox Richardson keeps doing cool and surprising new things.
Many of you have subscribed to her newsletter, Letters from an American, or have read her books, like Democracy Awakening, which was a TBR Book Club pick earlier this year. I was honored when she appeared on my podcast to answer TBR readers’ questions about it.
Now, to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Richardson has launched 250 to 250, a series of short videos celebrating icons of American history.
Heather asked me to contribute a video, and I immediately knew who I wanted to commemorate: the great American humorist Molly Ivins.
Here’s my (very short) tribute to Molly. It’s impossible to sum up her genius in a minute, but I hope this video will inspire you to seek out her work: [Video]
PHOENIX — Former U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema can be sued under North Carolina’s homewrecker law over her relationship with a member of her security detail, a judge ruled Friday.
Sinema has acknowledged having a romantic relationship with Matthew Ammel but argued that she can’t be sued in North Carolina because she has no connection to the state.
U.S. District Judge David A. Bragdon rejected that argument, saying nine text messages she sent Ammel while he was in the state give North Carolina jurisdiction over her. He found it implausible that she was unaware of Ammel’s whereabouts when she texted him.
Sinema’s lawyer, Steven Epstein, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
The lawsuit, filed by Ammel’s ex-wife, seeks financial damages from Sinema, who represented Arizona in the U.S. House and later the Senate for one term that ended early last year. North Carolina is one of a handful of states that allow jilted spouses to sue for “alienation of affection” to seek compensation from a third party responsible for the breakup of their marriage.
I guess Sinema’s 15 minutes of fame aren’t quite over yet….
The announcement comes three days after the Supreme Court allowed Trump to keep building his planned White House ballroom […] Justice Department lawyers invoked it Thursday as they sought to dismiss a legal challenge to the arch.
[…]
The administration plans to build the arch in Memorial Circle, a traffic roundabout tucked inside Washington’s boundaries near Arlington National Cemetery. Trump […] vowing that it will be the largest triumphal arch in the world—about 86 feet taller than France’s famed Arc de Triomphe.
[…]
Administration officials have laid out an aggressive timeline to potentially complete the arch within two to three years, saying that crews would work 20 hours per day, year-round. Trump and his deputies also contend that they do not need approval from Congress because lawmakers authorized a somewhat similar project a century ago that was never built.
Kel McClanahan: “I for one can’t wait to learn how stopping construction on the Arch will jeopardize national security.”
Rando 1: “I encourage everyone to read the history of the MLK Memorial, to appreciate how many decades, how much fundraising, and how many proposals it took before could construction begin. Who knew the President could have just said ‘Make it so’ and cut to the chase.”
Rando 2: “To be fair, Trump makes a lot of promises about things starting in 2 weeks.”
Sanho Tree:
Nobody tell him there’s another reflecting pool at the other end of the mall!
Patricia Zengerle (Reuters): So… a few years ago, the architect of the Capitol built a few plastic ramps at the [other] reflecting Pool, so ducks could get out. Some Republicans objected to the “use of taxpayer dollars” (which was maybe $20). [NYT – https://archive.is/M7L0y]
Rando 3: “I think about this all the time because a representative responded, ‘DUCKS CAN FLY!!’ to this, and somebody simply replied, ‘BABY DUCKS CAN’T.’ And I think that sums Republicans’ maximum level of analysis perfectly.”
“Arguably Adolf Hitler’s greatest passion and pastime outside of his quest for world domination was his obsession with architecture and urban design.”
Here he is with a model of the 330-foot high triumphal arch he wanted. [Photo] Hitler’s triumphal arch was to have been so much larger than the Arc de Triomphe that the Paris one would have fit in the Berlin version’s opening.
Rando 4: “there’s a great scene in Downfall where Hitler and Speer are examining a scale model of his plans to remake Berlin as ‘Germania’—while the Russians are closing in on the city. [Video clip]”
Rando 5: “Another fun fact: Speer built a huge concrete cylinder equivalent to the weight of one leg of the planned arch to test the ground. It soon started sinking. It still exists in Tempelhof, Berlin.” [The Schwerbelastungskörper]
All of the funds came from the Office of Minority Health, which the administration tried to shutter last year. Administration officials wrote to grantees that going forward, awards should directly advance “reducing overmedicalization in health care by addressing the root causes of infertility” including hormonal imbalances, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, low sperm count, low testosterone levels and erectile dysfunction as root causes.
Marisa Kabas:
One of the programs HHS defunded in Colorado “sends nurses to the homes of minority women in the days after they give birth, checking to make sure they’re able to care for themselves and their newborns.” Instead they’ll fund programs that “promote regular physical activity and exercise.”
Rando 1: “Letting newborns die so they can make a boner pill two months before election is a brilliant strategy.”
Rando 2: “It is a brilliant strategy if you’re a eugenicist.”
Rando 3: “Yeah, the root cause of infant mortality is definitely guys who can’t get boners.”
Rando 4: “And they’re doing this in the midst of probably one of the most infamous cases of postpartum psychosis [Lindsay Clancy].”
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
A Fox clip from April was circulating this week on Bluesky without the air date.
Marc Siegel: “The problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15-19 the fertility rate is down 7% and it’s down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies.” [Video clip]
He even goes on to fearmonger about complications at older ages.
Commentary:
FIFTEEN?!?
Teen pregnancies and single mothers were literally sold as the root of all societal ills by this same cohort through the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
I don’t think the hand-wringing about teen pregnancy was specifically racist (there were plenty of racist angles taken with it, though). The natalist movement on the right is explicitly white supremacist.
And then these teens go on welfare and snap because that is what happens to teen pregnancies, and they become bad people in the eyes of Fox and their viewers.
Not THEIR teenagers, though! Their teenagers will get secret abortions and be allowed the freedom to choose their own futures.
This makes more sense when you realize it’s not teen boys they want to be getting teen girls pregnant.
If I was a network founded by a serial sexual harasser, who had to pay out millions in settlements for sexual harassment by our lead prime time host [Bill O’Reilly], I might shut the fuck up about the reproductive organs of young women.
This is depraved GOP fearmongering.
[Chart: 2006-2023 change in raw births by age of mother]
Teen pregnancy is down, but births to mothers in this age group accounted for just 10% of births in 2006. The real cause of birthrate collapse in the US is a crash in the 20-24 and 25-29 age groups. In raw numbers, 20-24 fell by almost double the teen decline
* Unknown citation for their chart, but USAFacts corroborated. https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-us-fertility-and-birth-rates-changed-over-time/
/Previously in the Infinite Thread: In 2024, Republican AGs sued over mifepristone, complaining about declining teen pregnancies. And that was worse.
It’s all happening. Next week, the hollow moral rot of the Trump II era will be on full display in a string of convergent events: the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and the RNC’s first-ever midterms convention in Texas, headlined by President Trump.
On Sept. 10, the Turning Points USA crew will descend on Utah Valley University’s campus for “Freedom Built to Last,” a memorial event honoring Kirk. Then they’ll embark on their “America: Love It or Leave It” tour of college campuses, in which students will be challenged to “discuss why America remains the greatest country on Earth,” and, if they disagree with this premise, explain why they don’t move elsewhere. In a testament to the thrumming xenophobia undergirding this tour, one of the speakers will be anti-immigrant YouTuber Nick Shirley, whose racist videos about Somali immigrants spurred the deadly ICE crackdown on Minneapolis.
These themes will carry over to the RNC’s first-of-its-kind midterms convention, too. Vice President JD Vance is slated to give a speech on Thursday, Sept. 9, while Trump himself will speak on Sept. 10. Anonymous Republicans have grumbled that the “Trump-a-palooza” is perhaps ill-advised at a moment when the president’s approval ratings are underwater. But Trump himself seems to have no qualms about pulling candidates off the campaign trail and forcing House members to shell out $25,000 to attend this event in the final weeks before the election. Some 45 congressional Republicans and candidates told Politico they’re not bothering to show up. The convention is slated to take place in Texas because of the must-win Senate race there, but the location is fitting since the Lone Star State was the launching pad for the GOP’s Islamophobia-centric midterms strategy. The party can’t run on affordability since Trump’s trade war in Canada and bombing war in Iran have driven up prices, so they’ve opted to fall back on classic fearmongering about creeping Sharia.
Anti-Muslim hysteria has been similarly unavoidable in coverage leading up to the 9/11 anniversary, which will take place next Friday. The New York Post has spent months pumping out stories about 9/11 families supposedly pushing for New York City’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, not to attend the memorial events because of his “anti-American agenda” and association with “terrorist sympathizers.” CBS New York soon joined in. (Popular Information has reported that the number of families cited in the Post and CBS’ coverage is wildly inflated, and that another group of 9/11 families is publicly pushing for Mamdani’s attendance.) These same outlets are also going after Abdul El-Sayed, with CBS publishing a bizarre article claiming that Michigan’s Muslim Democratic Senate nominee is “facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack” in light of the anniversary. (We’re all trying to find the guy doing this scrutinizing and attacking!) At issue are two old tweets in which El-Sayed compares the loss of life on Sept. 11 to that from the pandemic, and laments that more was not done to address the catastrophe of COVID. Meanwhile, Trump opted to skip the Ground Zero memorial that Mamdani is attending because organizers are maintaining their existing policy prohibiting political speeches at these events; instead, he’ll go to the Pentagon service, where he’ll be able to make an address.
So expect to return from Labor Day to a week-long, flag-draped orgy of casual racism and chest-thumping nationalism, with Trump at the very center.
When longtime Indiana politician Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) lobbed a powerful allegation against the Census Bureau last October, what had been a low-profile, fringe GOP conspiracy theory burst to the fore. Banks said he believed the Census Bureau had injected errors in the decennial population count and survey which were so severe, they netted Democrats more representation in Congress at the expense of Republican seats. [Not true.]
[…] Banks [added] that the 2020 census “scrambled the data and miscounted 14 states. It included illegal immigrants and handed Democrats extra seats.”
In a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik that Banks posted on X, the senator repeatedly asserted that the use of a privacy technique called noise infusion, rolled out to help the Census Bureau better protect the individual identities of respondents, resulted in population count errors that interfered with the process of allocating political representation in Congress, known as apportionment. Those errors overwhelmingly supported blue states and hurt red ones, said Banks, who also conflated the use of the technique with myths about noncitizen voting. [sheesh, that is some potent misinformation]
His post has more than 9,000 reposts and has, according to X, been viewed more than 8.5 million times. [!]
[…] The editorial board at the right-leaning Washington Times wrote in October that the Census’ use of noise infusion, a type of differential privacy, “formalized the publication of fraudulent information.”
The problem is, Banks’ viral post wasn’t true. It was part of a disinformation campaign using categorically false information about census administration that has reduced a highly advanced statistical technique to just another arm of the disproven, right-wing delusion that immigrants are somehow enabling Democrats to rig federal elections and claim undeserved political power.
[…] The Census Bureau is legally required to protect the identities of people who respond to its surveys. In 2020, Bureau employees accomplished this by using noise infusion, which added and subtracted information from individual respondents’ data at granular geographic levels to fuzzy the figures and keep bad actors from re-identifying people who filled out the census.
Differential privacy isn’t applied at all to the state population totals that are used to determine congressional representation by state, [important note] experts told TPM. And the amount of “noise” eventually added to fuzzy individual demographic data is too small to impact redistricting, as Republicans claim.
[…] Trump’s reactionary movement uses its crusade against the Census Bureau [to] help cement Republican legislative power. It is likely to play a crucial role as it works to fulfill the president’s demand for a whole “new” census in time for 2030.
[…] Our interest in this conversation was piqued because Trump’s Census Bureau appears to be acting on these unfounded beliefs.
[…] In June, it banned a set of policies for protecting Americans’ privacy, including differential privacy — policies that had been carefully fine-tuned over the last several years — seemingly without any expert input.
Then, TPM uncovered a draft Census Bureau rule circulating within the administration that sought, among other things, to exclude many immigrants from the population count used for apportionment, an attempt to redistribute that violates the 14th Amendment requirement for the census to count all whole persons in the country. It also sought to end the collection of most demographic information, citing concerns about privacy.
[…] On Aug. 7, 2025, Trump, in a post on the social media platform he owns, Truth Social, directed the “Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS.” That census, Trump wrote, should exclude undocumented immigrants. [social media post]
The same day, the Center for Renewing America — a think tank founded by now-Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought — published a 6,000 word report called “The 2020 Census Fraud: How Differential Privacy Skewed Representation.” […]
At the nucleus of this effort to demonize differential privacy, TPM found, is Vought’s thinktank, the Center for Renewing America, and Wade Miller, the organization’s current director.
[…] Miller, from the Center for Renewing America, joined the Charlie Kirk Show last August when, in responding to a question from Kirk, Miller said differential privacy allowed the Census Bureau to “make up fake numbers.”
[…] The idea that the Commerce Department would ban a slate of statistical techniques based on “crazy, insane, right-wing conspiracy theories that somehow differential privacy and disclosure control more broadly is somehow biased towards Democrats or something — I mean, that’s just dumb,” said Ruggles.
Dumb or not, the idea that “Obama-era bureaucrats” commandeered the census for their own political gain continues to thrive among right-wing influencers.
[…] “I sometimes get a feeling they use it as a scapegoat exactly because nobody really understands it,” Jan Vink, a demographer at Cornell University who represents New York State in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Federal-State Cooperatives for Population Estimates and Projections, told TPM.
“They are confusing differential privacy with under and overcounts and apportionment,” Vink said of conspiracy theorists. “It has nothing to do with over-under count, it has nothing to do with apportionment — but they use those arguments anyhow.”
One day before the Commerce Department banned noise infusion via a June 4 memo, the Center for Renewing America’s Miller appeared on Lindell TV, a streaming channel helmed by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and 2020 election denier who recently lost the Minnesota GOP gubernatorial primary. Miller continued to make false claims about differential privacy.
“We think that the weaponized Census Bureau used this algorithm… to move population around,” Miller said. [FFS]
[…] “States were intentionally over- and undercounted, costing citizens seats in Congress and Electoral College votes,” he wrote, falsely, each time.
StevoRsays
Whoah! Pierre Gasly has pole position for Monza! Wow.
Driving the Alpine car which for those who don’t know is a rubbish car & team. Wow.
Remarkably enough he also won here back in 2020 for Alpha Tauri (or Aldebaran as astronomers call it.. ;-) )
Sometimes sport can surpise in simply joyous ways..
I mean it’d be like Bangladesh beating Australia at Test cricket.. Oh wait..
whheydtsays
Re: Lynna, OM @ #436…
Back in the day, the answer to “America, Love it or leave it,” was “America, Change it or lose it.” Seems applicable under current circumstances.
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Nearly 2,000 people, most of them students, fell ill in suspected food poisoning outbreaks linked to President Prabowo Subianto ’s flagship Free Nutritious Meals program this week, raising fresh concerns about food safety as the government rapidly expands the multibillion-dollar initiative nationwide, officials said Saturday.
The incidents, reported between Tuesday and Thursday in East Java, Central Java, West Sumatra, Aceh and South Sulawesi, affected about 1,950 students, teachers and Islamic boarding school pupils who became sick after consuming meals distributed under the government program, known by its Indonesian acronym MBG…
Former U.S. Olympian David Hearn and his attorneys returned to court to urge the judge who previously oversaw his Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool vandalism case to formally bar federal prosecutors from seeking new charges against him.
…
But the motion from U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro asked the judge overseeing Hearn’s case, Todd Edelman, to dismiss the indictment “without prejudice,” which would leave the door open for prosecutors to potentially seek to re-charge Hearn.
Hearn’s attorneys have argued a series of statements from Trump and other officials in the weeks after Pirro’s motion that falsely accused him and others of vandalizing the pool warrants dismissal of the case “with prejudice” — effectively shutting the door for prosecutors to charge him again.
…
“How do I conclude these statements as anything other than statement by the chief executive urging your office to pursue a prosecution that you have told me is meritless?” Edelman pressed. “Isn’t this a pretty unique threat of not just re-prosecution but meritless re-prosecution?”
“I think, Your Honor, it’s premature to even get there because there has not — this case has been dropped. It has not been submitted to a new grand jury for an indictment,” Spence replied.
Spence argued that even if the government did at some point move to re-charge him, the grand jury process would serve as a kind of protection ensuring he wouldn’t be charged based on no evidence.
“How could Mr. Hearn look at this case and make that conclusion?” Edelman asked with clear skepticism, noting Hearn was previously indicted in a case the government now concedes was baseless…
Election experts are examining the new U.S. Postal Service rules for mailed ballots, and finding that under them, getting ballots in the mail could take weeks — or even years — rendering the program unworkable for an actual election.
“If it took one minute to verify each piece in the mailing, it would take about 4.9 years of continuous scanning to verify the whole mailing,” wrote Tammy Patrick, Chief Programs Officer of the National Association of Election Officials and a former elections official for Maricopa County, in a declaration as part of one of the legal challenges to the rule.
“If it only took only a second to scan each mailpiece, it would take 30 days,” she continued. “Even if it took only one tenth of a second to scan each mailpiece, it would take a little over 72 hours.”
Maricopa County, Patrick said, will send out 2.6 million ballots on the first day of early voting. Patrick wrote that under the new USPS rules, a single error could lead to the entire batch being rejected.
[…] a single error — which, the whistleblower underscored, could be human or technical — could lead to the entire batch of 10,000 ballots being sent back to election officials to be resubmitted.
Ann Jacobs, a former chair of the Wisconsin Election Commission, wrote on X that getting Milwaukee’s 33,567 primary election mailed ballots out could take more than two months. “At a minute each, that’s 559.45 hours or 69.94 work days,” she wrote. “At 30 seconds each, that’s 279.73 hours or 34.97 work days. A month of days of someone standing at a post office, watching a scanner. Heck, at 10 seconds each, it’s 93.25 hrs.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but ballots go out 9/17/26 in Wisconsin – we don’t have 35 work days,” she continued. “This is true across the nation.” [!!]
Indeed. In fact, North Carolina — a state with some 7 million registered voters and some important races in November — begins sending out absentee ballots today.
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court yesterday to immediately allow it to implement the USPS rule, despite a lower court injunction on it that is still working its way up to the Supreme Court.
Hat tip to NOTUS for flagging some of these former election officials’ comments.
[…] The states that saw the largest increases in utility-scale electricity generation were, in order: Texas, Washington, Tennessee, Ohio and New Mexico. Each has its own story, with solar surging in Texas and different technologies rising in the other states, from hydropower in Washington and nuclear in Tennessee to natural gas in Ohio and a coal-solar combo in New Mexico.
[…] It’s not surprising that Texas had the largest increase in utility-scale generation. The state is a hotbed of data-center development and other large electricity users, while its population continues to grow.
What surprised me is how much renewables contributed to growth.
The state’s power plants generated 293,151 gigawatt-hours in the first half of the year, the most of any state, and 9,086 gigawatt-hours more than in the same period last year.
While the state is on the cusp of a boom in natural gas plant construction, few new plants have gone online this year. This helps to explain why output from natural gas power plants was flat.
Coal-fired power was down, to the point that it got passed by utility-scale solar in five of the first six months of the year. Solar is on pace to exceed coal for the year as a whole, which would be the first time that’s happened in Texas, the country’s leading producer of coal power. [Good news]
“Five years ago, coal still generated more than seven times as much electricity as solar in Texas,” said Nicolas Fulghum, senior energy and climate data analyst for Ember, the research and advocacy nonprofit. “That gap closing so fast tells you this isn’t all about policy. Solar is winning on cost and deployment speed.” [Good news]
Utility-scale solar in Texas generated 35,992 gigawatt-hours, an increase of 9,373 or 35 percent.
Let’s step back to appreciate those numbers, which I double-checked several times because they seemed almost unreal. Solar grew enough to offset the decrease in other resources. [More good news]
For perspective, an average U.S. household consumes about 10,800 kilowatt-hours per year (0.0108 gigawatt-hours). So, the increase in utility-scale solar in Texas in the first half of the year was enough to meet the needs of about 870,000 houses for a year. […]
More details are available at the link, including analysis of electricity generation in Washington State, Tennessee, Ohio, New Mexico, California, China, and New Jersey.
In a development that was basically inevitable once the Supreme Court blessed President Donald Trump’s continuing construction of his big dumb White House ballroom, the developer in chief is flexing his fascist muscles by building the big dumb arch.
No, he doesn’t have approval to break ground, but it’s increasingly clear he doesn’t need any. The Supreme Court was really the last, the tiniest, of guardrails here. And since the conservative wing—minus Chief Justice John Roberts, in one of his patented bids to be remembered as evenhanded instead of a core part of dismantling democracy as we know it—let Trump crash straight through, there’s really no stopping him now.
This isn’t some sort of secret. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced Thursday that excavation work would begin in the next two weeks, and he’s pretty sure everyone is excited and has been waiting on this for … over a century?
On X, Burgum posted
[A]fter a very long wait (over 125 years!), we are preparing to start, over the next two-week period, the excavation work necessary for the Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck, at Memorial Circle on Columbia Island between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. This will be one of the Great Pieces of American Architecture, honoring the history and significance of Arlington Cemetery and befitting the most powerful Capital in the World.
This is beside the point, but the fact that all administration officials now have to ape Trump’s posting style, complete with random capitalization, is one of the most depressing and stupid signs of our creeping fascism. [I agree.]
[…] Now, sure, the federal commission that is required to approve the final design for the arch hasn’t done so yet, and sure, there is a lawsuit pending that points out that this requires approval under the Commemorative Works Act, but so what?
Just like the ballroom, this arch is set to dwarf everything around it, functioning as an ugly, enormous monument to Trump’s ego and terrible taste.
It’s expected to be more than twice as tall as the Lincoln Memorial […]
Much like how the oversized ballroom is deforming everything around it, the arch also mangles the layout of Washington, D.C., which was carefully mapped out after the Civil War. It was designed with sightlines from the Lincoln Memorial to the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial and to Arlington Cemetery, where the Civil War dead were buried.
Just as the symbolism of dwarfing Lincoln is so on point that it makes the writers’ room look lazy, so too is the destruction of the version of D.C. that sought to heal the nation after the Civil War. Trump is a Confederate, let’s be honest […]
Honestly, given how Trump simultaneously wastes millions of tax dollars and does things on the cheap—looking at you, Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool—this thing will probably end up looking like the full-scale version of the Temu arch replica Trump erected at the Great America Celebration of Trump Jamboree—whoops, sorry, it was apparently called the Great American State Fair. There, the plywood model started oozing globs of foam, which seems about right.
We’ll just put this in the books as another thing the next Democratic president should tear down.
Sudan’s authoritarian government built a secret stockpile of chemical weapons that senior military officials sought to conceal after chlorine bombs were used against rebel forces, according to internal videos, documents, text messages and other materials reviewed by The Washington Post.
The materials indicate that Sudan’s chemical weapons effort involved diverting shipments of chlorine meant to provide safe drinking water, hiding warhead production sites on military bases, testing bombs in remote desert locations and drawing up lists of targets where toxic gas could penetrate enemy defenses.
[…] The images and documents, which have not been previously reported, go well beyond the limited information made available by the U.S. government when it imposed economic sanctions on Sudan following a pair of suspected chlorine gas attacks in September 2024.
Any stockpiling and use of chemical weapons would violate long-standing international bans aimed at eradicating a notoriously inhumane form of warfare, and put Sudan in the company of Syria and Iraq as states that have been condemned in recent decades for deploying chemical agents against their own people.
Sudanese officials, including the country’s ruler, Gen. Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan, have denied that the government has developed or used chemical weapons.
The trove was provided to The Post by Middle Eastern security officials who said the material had been obtained through sources in Sudan. The officials spoke on the condition that neither they nor their government be identified.
The files include documents allegedly prepared by Sudanese military officials that refer to “dual-effect” munitions filled with “choking gas,” videos that show weapons tests producing plumes of green-yellow vapor, and messages between Sudanese military officials indicating that the country’s security forces had stockpiled as many as 290 chemical munitions. It is not clear from the materials what Sudan has done with that alleged stockpile.
In vetting the files, The Post consulted more than two dozen Western intelligence officials, chemical weapons inspectors and experts at human rights organizations. All described the material as credible evidence of a chemical weapons program but emphasized that a conclusive assessment would require access to suspected weapons sites and witnesses, which has not been provided since the start of the civil war.
[…] The stockpiling of chlorine munitions “cannot be definitively verified from visual evidence alone,” Williams [Gareth Williams, a former senior official at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, now a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute] said. “But the indicators are strongly consistent with a chemical weapons program.”
Developing or using chemical weapons would violate the Chemical Weapons Convention, a treaty among 193 nations, which Sudan signed in 1999. The treaty prohibits developing, stockpiling or using chemical weapons and requires signatories to allow inspections by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
[…] The development of a chemical weapons arsenal would add a dangerous element to a civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) led by al-Burhan — which controls Khartoum, the capital, as well as much of the eastern side of the country — and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, which occupies much of Darfur in the west and is led by al-Burhan’s former deputy, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
Both sides have been accused of atrocities including rape, the killing of children and ethnic violence targeting non-Arab communities. More than 13 million people have been displaced by the war, according to the United Nations, which said that an RSF campaign in Darfur last year had “the defining characteristics of genocide.”
[…] Sudan also has served as a proxy battleground for Middle Eastern states, pitting U.S. allies against one another. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are key supporters of the SAF, while the RSF is backed by the United Arab Emirates, according to Western security officials and human rights organizations.
[…] Digital forensics experts contacted by The Post to review the audio and key visual materials found no evidence of manipulation. […]
Democrats are seeking to seize on the Republican National Committee’s first-of-its-kind midterm convention with plans for counterprogramming around the two-day Dallas bash as the party eyes a Senate flip in the red state.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen organizations are planning to rally in downtown Dallas to pull focus as top Republicans address the convention crowd. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also announced on Friday that a four-member House delegation would be headed to Dallas to underscore the contrast between the two parties.
Looks reasonable. The Democrats are going to do something as a counter to the Republican event because there isn’t a Democratic event. It isn’t going to be big though, they are mostly banking on the many protests being held at the same time.
And while Republicans have said the convention will be a great opportunity to rev up their voters in the Lone Star State, where Paxton and Talarico are neck-and-neck for the Senate and several House seats are in play after GOP-friendly redistricting reshaped the state’s congressional maps last year, Democrats and other organizers are also hoping that the focus on those must-win contests actually fuels their own supporters.
The Republican event is in Dallas and is likely to become a rally for the Paxton/Talarico contest. The contest is close enough that Republicans are getting worried. Plus a small quiet group of Republicans that hope Paxton loses because he is likely guilty of multiple crimes and bad at his job.
birgerjohanssonsays
Norway has a rocket launch pad!
The German company Isar successfully launched a rocket with multiple satellites from the Norwegian island Andöya (a sutitable location for orbits covering the poles). Scotland will try launching a rocket later this year.
Some spectacular videos with Norwegian mountains and a fjord as a backdrop.
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesia’s Anak Krakatau volcano erupted early Sunday, prompting the cancellation of all flights at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport as volcanic ash drifted across parts of western Indonesia.
Indonesia’s Geological Agency said the volcanic island located in Indonesia’s Sunda Strait between the main Java and Sumatra islands showed signs of activity Saturday and erupted for 30 seconds at 3:53 a.m. Sunday.
There were no casualties reported and no evacuation order issued. The nearest settlement is more than 16 kilometers (10 miles). But the agency warned residents and visitors to stay at least 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) from the volcano’s active crater.
Volcanic ash spread across parts of the capital Jakarta and Lampung province on the southern tip of Sumatra island, Indonesia’s Center for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation said.
“Due to increased activity from the Mount Anak Krakatau eruption, Soekarno-Hatta International Airport has temporarily suspended flight operations from 5:30 a.m. to 9.30 a.m.,” the airport said in a travel advisory early Sunday.
Passengers at the country’s busiest airport sought refunds and reclaimed checked baggage as departure boards displayed a growing list of canceled flights.
Indonesia’s volcanology agency and the Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre in Australia identified two ash clouds using satellite imagery.
One plume rose to an altitude of 20,000 feet (6,100 meters) while drifting northeast, affecting parts of Jakarta, Banten, West Java and surrounding waters.
A second cloud reached 50,000 feet (15,200 meters) and was moving westward and northwestward, covering parts of Banten, Lampung and Bengkulu provinces, the southern Sunda Strait and sections of the Indian Ocean west of Sumatra.
The explosive collapse of Anak Krakatau caused a tsunami in 2018 that killed at least 430 people in Sumatra and Java.
That volcano is what has rebuilt itself from the 1883 eruption of what most people would call Krakatoa. “Anak Krakatau” means “Son of Krakatau.”
birgerjohanssonsays
Whheydt beat me to it.
The successor volcano of Krakatoa has been erupting since September 4th. When Mt. Pinatubo erupted forty years ago it injected enough particles in the stratosphere to reduce global temperatures for a year. I would not mind if that happens again.
A relentless series of fast-moving wildfires tore through northern Algeria last week, leaving many people dead, dozens injured, thousands displaced, and laying waste to vast tracts of forest and farmland.
The catastrophic blazes erupted amid an intense, persistent heatwave gripping the Maghreb region, pushing temperatures to dangerous extremes and creating prime conditions for rapid fire spread.
..(Snip).. in a pure Stalinist tradition, private and public media outlets, operating under strict state control, have continued to report only a dozen deaths while highlighting the presence of government ministers on the ground, as well as the efforts of state institutions to help the victims.
However, the death toll is believed to be higher.
The Associated Press, for example, reported that twelve members of the same family were killed, and three others remain missing in the mountain village of Ouled Riyah. Lieutenant Djabri Said told AP: “I have worked in Civil Protection for 40 years. We have dealt with fires, but this is the first time we have faced such a human, environmental, and material catastrophe. There are hundreds of dead.”
Independent news outlets estimate that the wildfires, described as unprecedented in their intensity, have killed more than 200 people.
A municipal database has recorded more than 70 fire victims, offering a rare glimpse of the disaster’s scale amid the absence of an accurate official death toll. Clearly, local registries are filling gaps in government data as recovery efforts continue.
Even Republicans seem to think Democrats are poised to capture control of at least one chamber of Congress during the midterm elections. Consequently, Will Scharf, who took over as White House counsel this week, is reportedly leading other White House lawyers in battening down the hatches against an expected onslaught of congressional investigations.
Scharf, like so many of the administration’s top-ranking lawyers, formerly worked as one of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyers. That’s a problem, because there is a line between serving the presidency and serving the man who holds the office. There are times when that line can be fuzzy, but Trump has encouraged his administration to act as if there isn’t one at all.
According to a recent New York Times profile of Scharf, “friends and colleagues who know him well say that he does not see standing up to Mr. Trump as part of his job.” That’s arguably true for his former role as White House staff secretary, but it doesn’t bode well for him encouraging cooperation with investigations that target Trump or his family. […]
Many of the individuals in Trump’s orbit are reportedly looking to lawyer up and are hoping that Justice Department efforts to extend the scope of executive privilege to communication with private advisers will shield them from congressional subpoenas. […] According to the Post, staffers were also “encouraged … to be careful about what they put in writing and provided guidance for how to respond to congressional inquiries in a timely manner.”
During the first Trump administration, the White House legal team was initially focused on blunting the effects of the Russia probe and accordingly was slow to react to Democrats winning the House in 2018. That is, the attorneys were unprepared for the wave of requests for documents and testimony from staffers. Pat Cipollone, then Trump’s White House counsel, took a hard-line approach against cooperating with the inquiry, which culminated in Trump’s first impeachment. House Democrats eventually charged Trump with abusing his power in a scheme to influence the 2020 election and obstructing their investigation.
That said, Cipollone’s efforts to stonewall and stymie those probes were largely successful. Most of the evidence provided in the impeachment inquiry came from career staffers who testified over the administration’s objections. The executive branch turned over almost no evidence willingly. But even Cipollone and his top deputy refused to go along with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and they cooperated with the House Jan. 6 Committee’s probe.
[…] Before he was tapped as counsel, Scharf served as White House staff secretary, essentially managing the flow of documents that reached Trump’s desk. He showed a glimpse of willingness to push back against his most extreme colleagues in that role. He wrote memos for chief of staff Susie Wiles laying out the problems with proposals to suspend habeas corpus for immigrant detainees and invoke the Insurrection Act against protesters. But there’s a difference between disagreeing with someone else in the White House and saying no to the president.
[…] Scharf formerly wore a second hat in the administration as chair of the National Capital Planning Commission. He happily rubber-stamped approval for Trump’s multitude of construction projects, seemingly with little regard for laws or norms. His new role as White House counsel mandates that Scharf be less of a yes-man and strictly adhere to the law, but given his past history in Trump’s employ, the odds don’t seem great.
[…] Democrats would do well to review the tactics people on Team Trump, including Scharf himself, have previously used to avoid exposure or accountability. The success of those tactics helped Trump reach the White House again.
Democrats must employ speed and aggression and dole out real consequences to counteract the delays and drawn-out legal proceedings that Trump can be expected to use as he again tries to avoid accountability for his assault on democracy.
“Nearly all Americans say government corruption is ‘widespread.’ Blame Trump.”
[…] Three days before he took office, Trump created a meme coin for people to invest in. As of July, he made $636 million in fees; buyers lost $3.81 billion. […]
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Explaining his opposition to birth control, Senator Tommy Tuberville said on Tuesday that he opposes contraception and all other words with more than one syllable.
“I see the word ‘contraception’ and that’s a quick ‘no’ for me,” the Alabama lawmaker said. “Don’t know what that means. Won’t look it up.”
Proud of his consistent opposition to polysyllabic words, Tuberville said, “Immigration. Education. Vaccination. No, no, no.”
The senator said, however, that he would continue supporting one-syllable words such as guns and oil, adding, “Short words good. Long words bad.”
Fassbinder anticipated The Matrix by more than twenty years!
The director of Ghost In The Shell made a Polish live action film. Two films based on stories by Stanislaw Lem, one based on the Strugatskys. And plenty of other famous names.
“13 Vastly Underrated European Sci-Fi Movies!”
The Trump administration came to the Supreme Court on Sunday morning, asking the justices to pause a ruling by a federal judge in Massachusetts that bars the government from implementing parts of a U.S. Postal Service rule on mail-in ballots. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court that Friday’s order by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani “nullif[ies] the Postal Service’s efforts to address the risk that the federal mails will be used to perpetrate voter fraud—a particularly pernicious species of fraud that dilutes the votes of lawful voters, prevents election results from reflecting the will of the American people, and undermines ‘public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process.’”
Sunday’s filing was the third time in less than six weeks, and the second time since Thursday, that the Trump administration came to the Supreme Court seeking to clear the way to implement restrictions on mail-in voting.
…
If Talwani’s order is not put on hold, Sauer said, the government will – as the Supreme Court has already recognized in earlier proceedings involving the rule – suffer permanent harm (a key factor in determining whether to award temporary relief) because the election is so soon.
…
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has initial responsibility for emergency appeals from Massachusetts, directed the challengers to file their response by 4 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, Sept. 9.
birgerjohanssonsays
Why Are American And European Snipers So Different?”
“Gen. Christopher T. Donahue’s vision for fighting future wars won him powerful supporters around the world.”
This excellent and detailed account shows that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth can turn almost any operation into a shit show.
My conclusion is that Hegseth and Trump are consistent in one way: they always throw out the best people and ideas; and they always replace the best with the worst.
“The Alternative for Germany party was projected to finish first in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. But it was not clear whether it would win a majority — which would propel a far-right party into power for the first time since World War II.”
[…] We’ve passed 90 percent of the votes counted. The AfD still looks likely to fall short of an absolute majority. The prospects for a rival coalition coming together remain unclear.
Here’s one quick scenario being tossed around in Berlin political circles: The BSW, a populist party with policies associated with both the left and the right, could at some point abstain from voting for a state leader. In that case, the other parties — the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Greens and Die Linke — would have one more seat than the AfD, and just enough to elect a leader of their choice. […]
whheydtsays
Minor note…
Since Anak Krakatau is in the news (Indonesia has closed nearby airports, due to ash in the air), there are probably people here old enough to remember a movie called “Krakatoa, East of Java”. Note that Krakatoa (Krakatau) happens to be WEST of Java. It’s east of the southern tip of Sumatra, in the straight (Sunda Straight) between those two islands.
An “armed individual” allegedly lunged at Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton while she was attending a local fair on Sunday, according to a spokesperson for her campaign.
“While attending the Canfield Fair, an armed individual lunged at Dr. Acton, injuring multiple people. Dr. Acton and Eric are grateful for the swift and decisive action of law enforcement and are praying for the recovery of those injured,” Addie Bullock, the campaign spokesperson, said in a statement, referring to Acton’s husband. “This kind of violence has no place in Ohio. Dr. Acton will always stand up to the chaos, hate and vitriol that pits us against one another.”
Frequent Martin Scorsese collaborator and the screenwriter behind Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, and The Last Temptation of Christ, Paul Schrader, is turning to AI to make the crime noir Three Guns At Dawn. He’s been trying to make the movie about three criminal brothers for a long time, but nobody wanted to star in it. When asked why, he gave The Playlist a… let’s say, revealing answer.
“We sent it out to actors, and no Black actors wanted to play in a movie where there are no good Black people,” he said. “And it sort of died. But then AI came along, and I didn’t need Black actors.”
So they ripped off the symbol from Star Trek and the uniforms from the Empire in Star Wars?
Temu Tarkin.
Ah, hobnailed jackboots, for all the marching they’ll be doing in space.
[From Trump’s image]: Inspired by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform modernized for the guardians of the space domain.
I presume this is slop that Natalie found for Trump and not the official plan, because if so, woof. The Starship Troopers uniform was […] based on SS uniforms. Paul Verhoeven had a comment about how they put Neil Patrick Harris in that uniform to drive home the satire.
The person who created this 100% knows this. This is the whole cultural significance of Starship Troopers to the modern right. It’s a way to advocate fascism in a plausibly deniable way.
I knew I saw that eagle patch near his left shoulder somewhere before. [Image]
the rank insignia, […] one star, normally indicating a brigadier general, as the insignia for second lieutenant.
United States Spaceballs Force.
We’re surrounded by assholes.
Aaron Rupar: “A string of absolutely bonkers Truth Social posts from Trump in the span of about 10 minutes. [Video clip scrolling through them]”
* One post redrew Iran’s borders on a map to resemble his head.
* One post was a state map labelled “New Mexico America”.
Rando 1: “Did he… did he just discover that New Mexico exists?”
Rando 2: “I wondered why he’s so mad at New Mexico and well…” [“New Mexico sues DOJ for blocking access to unredacted Epstein investigative files in Zorro Ranch criminal probe” (Aug 5)]
* One post was an image claiming “The moon is ours.”
Marco Langbroek: “The US has signed the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which states the Moon cannot be claimed by anybody.”
* One post was of Trump on horseback beside George Washington.
Rando 3: “the horses’ legs are the same distance from the viewer yet Trump—sitting—is a head taller than Washington, who was 6’2″.”
Donald Trump is having a mental health episode online, posting nonstop AI photos and videos. [Text summary of 26 posts from 11:54AM to 3:43PM]
This man is unwell. 25th Amendment NOW.
Rando 4: “The idea that making a sitting president answer for criminal charges would distract him from important official duties has never looked more ridiculous.”
Powerful Hurricane Lowell is barreling toward Hawaii and is expected to make a dangerously close pass by the state’s western islands as heavy rain associated with the Category 3 hurricane has already triggered flash flooding on Oahu and damaging surf is pounding Hawaii’s southern shores.
A Hurricane Warning was issued for Kauaʻi County late Sunday, Hawaii time. Meanwhile, a Tropical Storm Warning is now in effect for Oahu…
Justice Department lawyers told a federal court the Kennedy Center’s board would let the building “deteriorate into an unsafe, decrepit structure” and be torn down if a renovation adding Trump’s name is blocked. Congress chartered it as a memorial to President Kennedy and controls its funding.
Donald Trump is 80 yrs old
Kennedy Center is 54 yrs old. [social media post]
[…] In May, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that Trump’s name be removed from the outside of the venue, noting that only Congress could approve a change to the Kennedy Center’s name.
On Aug. 13, the MAGA-aligned board of the venue voted to add “Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump” beneath the center’s name. [Scoff] Additionally, a second inscription, “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund,” would also be added if it could raise $100 million.
Rep. Joyce Beatty, the lone Kennedy Center board member fighting Trump’s changes, filed an emergency motion accusing her colleagues of undertaking a “breathtaking assault on the rule of law.” The Democrat is an ex officio member representing Congress on the board, which is made up of members appointed by the president and ex officio members who are designated federal and local government officials to provide public oversight.
An emergency court hearing last Thursday saw the Trump administration argue to get Trump’s name back on the D.C. icon.
Judge Cooper, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2014, presided over the two-hour hearing, where he heard arguments for both sides but did not make a ruling, according to the Washington Post. The report added that the judge “pressed” Kennedy Center lawyers to explain the trustees’ reasons for restoring Trump’s name to the building.
In a Sunday evening Truth Social post, Trump insulted the building’s age and condition while sending a message to Judge Cooper.
“Kennedy Center is an old and decrepit building that is badly in need of a major construction and public relations fix before it can attain greatness and prestige, perhaps far greater than ever before,” Trump wrote, before taking aim at Cooper. [social media post]
Trump added, “It has been losing a fortune for many years, and will continue to do so if the highly conflicted judge on the case doesn’t allow us to do what has to be done!”
[…] In filings ahead of last week’s court appearance, Trump administration lawyers suggested the building could be bulldozed and replaced with an outdoor amphitheater unless they could shut the place down for two years to carry out the renovations the president has deemed necessary.
They argued that the venue was “structurally unsound, fundamentally unsafe, and embarrassing to the Nation’s Capital.”
Beatty’s legal team last week shut down the Trump administration’s argument that the center would be in a “financial and structural death spiral” unless the president’s name was attached.
“This is not true,” Beatty’s lawyers claimed, referencing documents obtained by the Washington Post that show ticket revenue and fundraising actually plunged when Trump’s name was added to the facade of the building in December.
Speaking on MS NOW’s The Weekend on Saturday, Beatty said that Trump’s threat to demolish the Kennedy Center should be taken seriously. [video]
[…] Speaking to reporters after Thursday’s legal battle, Lutnick said Trump wanted to remake the iconic building because “it’s fun for him.”
“The president works all day every day, and there are two things that he does for enjoyment: he plays golf on the weekend, and he builds,” Lutnick [Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick], whose wife sits on the Kennedy Center’s Trump-stacked board, added.
“He loves to build. So why are we talking about this? This is what he enjoys.”
submoronsays
I’ve just found another odd, but meaningless, coincidence. In Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama Northern Italy is destroyed by a bolide strike in 2077 on September the 11th at 9:46 AM GMT. That would be 10:46 CET but the minutes and the day of the year coincide. I suppose that was spotted years ago by somebody else.
[…] Trump has been entirely silent on the subject [a steely response to deter Putin from stepping up his attacks on Europe], but everything he says and does sends the wrong signal to the Kremlin. He just said that Canada is harder to deal with than China or Russia, and he invited the Russian finance minister to attend the Group of 20 summit last week for the first time since 2022.
On Saturday, Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, had a chummy meeting with Putin in the Kremlin before going to Kyiv for the first time. Witkoff told the Butcher of Bucha that “when we retire we’ll have all these incredible stories and incredible memories and yours will be right at the top of it all.”
This comes after Trump created a transatlantic crisis earlier this year by threatening to attack Greenland. He later blamed the Europeans for his failure to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Throughout his second term, Trump has sharply scaled back U.S. support for Ukraine. He appeared to pivot at the NATO summit in July when he promised to allow Kyiv to manufacture its own Patriot air-defense missiles, but he has since backtracked. CIA Director John Ratcliffe went to Moscow last month to warn Putin away from escalating in the war with Ukraine, but Trump’s mixed messages undermine any such warning.
Despite Trump’s claims that Europe is taking advantage of U.S. generosity, the Europeans have already provided more total aid to Ukraine and continue to promise even more. Britain and France have recently agreed to give Ukraine a license to build its own SCALP cruise missiles.
Yet both Europe and America remain curiously reticent to provide Ukraine with $300 billion in frozen Russian funds. Sending that money to Kyiv would be the strongest signal from the West that Russia’s terrorist assault on Europe is unacceptable.
The top priority for Ukraine now is to improve its air defenses against a growing threat from Russian ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones.
Unfortunately, Trump has wasted precious Patriots in a needless war with Iran, and even if Ukraine receives a license to manufacture them, that will take years. An impending Italian delivery of SAMP/T New Generation air-defense systems should help. It would also help, as noted by my Post colleague Marc Thiessen, if South Korea were to agree to sell its M-SAM II missile-defense batteries to Ukraine. Both Europe and America need to pressure Seoul into providing this lifesaving aid before more Ukrainian civilians die in Russian missile attacks.
Meanwhile, on offense, the Trump administration needs to pressure Elon Musk to allow Ukraine to use his Starlink internet-satellite system to better target its drones against ballistic missile launchers in Russian territory.
In sum, the West needs to raise the cost of Putin’s aggression. If the response remains mushy, there is good cause to worry about Russia expanding its attacks — for example, by targeting the Baltic republics — and thereby provoking a full-blown war with NATO.
“For Trump’s Former Fixer, a Tortured Path From ‘Rat’ to Reconciliation”
“The president has made peace with Michael D. Cohen, his onetime lawyer who turned against him. But contrary to Mr. Trump’s claims, Mr. Cohen has not recanted the testimony that helped convict his former boss.”
On a radio show last month, President Trump welcomed Michael D. Cohen, the former fixer he once denounced as a “rat” for testifying against him, back into the fold. “I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said,” Mr. Trump said. He went on to use the word “recant” three more times.
In case anyone missed it, the president posted a message on social media on Friday claiming that Mr. Cohen, a key witness against Mr. Trump in criminal and civil trials, “has just fully RECANTED his testimony.” Mr. Trump demanded “that any remnant of those Politically Weaponized Cases against me be immediately terminated and dismissed.”
Except that Mr. Cohen has not, in fact, recanted his testimony. He has not taken any of it back.
In his eagerness to return to the president’s good graces, Mr. Cohen now says that he “felt pressured and coerced” by prosecutors to testify. But he has not actually disavowed anything that he swore to under oath about Mr. Trump’s hush money scheme to cover up an affair with an adult film actress or about his former boss’s efforts to defraud his lenders.
And so this unlikeliest of rapprochements between two men who helped get each other convicted of crimes is built not on an emotional outpouring of forgiveness but on what looks like a pretty straightforward bargain, spoken or unspoken, according to people close to both. Mr. Trump is trying to use his former lawyer’s desire for absolution to rewrite history as he presses his effort to overturn his conviction. Mr. Cohen gets to position himself as an insider once again and possibly obtain a presidential pardon to wipe out his own felony record.
[…] Mr. Cohen is not someone who just trash-talked the president; he actually testified in court against him. Mr. Cohen went to prison because, he said, he committed crimes at the instructions of the man he now again calls “Boss.” And in a trial in which his onetime fixer provided evidence for the prosecution, Mr. Trump was convicted of 34 felonies that, had it not been for the intervening 2024 election, might have put him behind bars as well.
[…] “Michael was left by the side of the road as roadkill,” [Donny Deutsch, a New York advertising executive and television commentator who has been close with Mr. Cohen for years said]. “Beyond going to prison, he couldn’t practice law, he couldn’t get a job, he couldn’t get insurance. He’s doing what he needs to do to survive.”
As for Mr. Trump, accepting Mr. Cohen back into his orbit, even an outer orbit somewhere past Pluto, allows him to claim vindication. “If you go grovel to him and suck up to him, he loves that because it’s validation of his power,” said George T. Conway III, the former conservative lawyer who became one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal foes. “He has brought someone to heel. And part of what he does is try to intimidate people into doing that. He has a reptilian ability to sense who he can intimidate.”
[…] Mr. Cohen secretly sought on Mr. Trump’s behalf to seal a deal with the Russians to build a Trump tower in Moscow even while his boss was running for president in 2016. He was the middle man who paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels, the porn star, to buy her silence about her alleged tryst with Mr. Trump before the election. (Mr. Trump denies the affair.)
That eventually led to criminal charges, a guilty plea and prison. When Mr. Cohen was released, the Trump administration revoked his home confinement and locked him up again because he planned to publish a book, a move that a judge overruled because it was “retaliatory.”
Mr. Cohen later turned witness for Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, in the case that convicted Mr. Trump for falsifying business records to cover up the payments to Ms. Daniels. He also testified for Letitia James, the New York attorney general, in her civil case that found Mr. Trump liable for business fraud. […]
In addition to testifying in court, he also went after the president publicly with both barrels, writing books titled “Disloyal” and “Revenge” and characterizing his former employer as “a racist,” “con man” and “cheat” during a congressional committee hearing.
Outside the halls of Congress, Mr. Cohen went even further, calling Mr. Trump “a mob boss,” “the slime of humanity,” a “scumbag,” a “petty tyrant,” a “deranged president,” a “narcissistic sociopath,” a “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain,” “Dictator D-Bag,” “this Frankenstein’s monster” and “the poster boy for fascism” who was trying “to screw over the country.” And those were the lines printable in a family newspaper. […]
when they finally had their bury-the-hatchet talk on the radio last month, Mr. Cohen sounded needy, anxious to reminisce about the old times with the Boss, but the Boss wasn’t having any of it. Distant and hardly warm, Mr. Trump focused on promoting the fiction that Mr. Cohen had recanted his testimony, making clear that their reconciliation was dependent entirely on that. “You took it back,” Mr. Trump said falsely. “I wouldn’t even be talking to you right now if you didn’t, to be honest.” […]
Twenty-five years after Sept. 11, a trove of newly obtained records is offering what families of the victims characterize in court as compelling evidence of deep Saudi complicity in the attacks. Now, as their decade-old lawsuit against the Saudi kingdom marches toward trial, the families are pressing the Trump administration to declassify more government records they believe could finally deliver justice.
The newly revealed records, from a lawsuit involving an alleged Saudi agent, include a video purportedly casing the Capitol two years before the attacks and a sketch that purportedly shows calculations for navigating a plane toward a target on the ground, which one family member called “smoking gun evidence.”
…
Eagleson has enlisted the support of members of the New York congressional delegation to press the administration to release key records that include phone logs purportedly belonging to Omar al-Bayoumi, who the families allege is a Saudi intelligence asset, as well as two of the hijackers.
…
Police in the tiny mid-coast Maine community of Damariscotta said they received about a half dozen calls Tuesday reporting a Bigfoot or Sasquatch-like figure seen walking around town.
But it was really just a man dressed in a “very convincing costume” resembling Bigfoot. He was seen walking along Main Street and also appeared at the local school during morning drop-off on the first day of school…
JMsays
@472 Lynna, OM
Trump has been entirely silent on the subject [a steely response to deter Putin from stepping up his attacks on Europe], but everything he says and does sends the wrong signal to the Kremlin. He just said that Canada is harder to deal with than China or Russia, and he invited the Russian finance minister to attend the Group of 20 summit last week for the first time since 2022.
It’s likely that Trump does find Russia and China easier to deal with. The negotiators for those countries are used to dealing with dictators and trained to manipulate people. When Trump makes stupid demands during negotiations they say positive things, feed his ego, drag out the negotiations and change the topic but never just say no. Canada just said no directly to Trump’s face when presented with demands they would never agree too and went public with the demands to show how stupid they are. That is the sort of thing a petty boss like Trump finds infuriating.
President Donald Trump’s administration on Sunday again asked the Supreme Court to allow the US Postal Service plan for mail ballots to take effect immediately, a mostly procedural move that nonetheless underscores the president’s desire to restrict mail voting during the critical midterm elections.
In its emergency appeal, the Postal Service noted that mail ballots for the November midterms are already being sent in one state, North Carolina, and that other states will soon follow. The USPS asked the high court to quickly allow it to implement its rule, setting up one of the most significant election cases on the court’s quick-turn docket in years.
The DOJ has withdraw it’s appeal for the first case. It’s almost entirely meaningless at this point as the court has issued a second stay that covers the same territory. The DOJ wants to keep only one case going because it means fewer matters to deal with before the post office can move forward on the plan.
My answer would be it’s too late, ignoring the question if the executive branch has the authority to do this it should have been done months earlier and likely last year. This is exactly the sort of thing the judicial branch has an unwritten rule about changing things too close to the election for.
“Once those ballot envelopes enter the mailstream, there is no retrieving them,” the Justice Department told the Supreme Court in its filing on Sunday. “And while the injunction allows the Postal Service and the states to continue taking steps to ensure that their envelopes satisfy the rule’s requirements, each day the injunction is in place risks sowing confusion and chaos because the injunction makes those preparatory steps voluntary, rather than mandatory.”
The minor rules about mail in ballot envelope shape are not what matters here. It is what the DOJ wants to argue about because the executive branch can make some claim to authority due to it’s control of the post office.
The USPS rule would require state and local election officials to upload lists of their mail voters to a portal. It would also require election officials to use special barcodes on the envelopes to ease tracking of that mail. Many election officials have argued that it’s already too late to implement those requirements.
It’s the list of voters, barcodes and validation that matter. Nothing there is impossible but it will be complex and there will be issues getting everything into matching address formats and validating them. It will take time to build and implement such a system. This is also the part that is probably illegal. The executive branch doesn’t have the authority to decide on the security for the voting system, it’s a matter for congress and the states.
whheydtsays
Re: CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @ #471…
Everyone who has read E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen series knows that space force uniforms are black with silver trim. Except for Unattached Lensmen. They wear gray leather.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—JD Vance stirred controversy on Monday by suggesting that Labor Day be a celebration of “women who go through labor.”
“The woke mob has distorted the true meaning of Labor Day,” Vance said. “Honoring workers might please people who work for a living, but it doesn’t delight me and Donald Trump.”
The vice president urged that Labor Day be “a time to pay tribute to the one thing that gives women’s lives meaning: reproducing.”
“Only women who have given birth should be allowed at Labor Day picnics,” he declared. “No baby, no hot dog.”
Labor Day is a time to celebrate the labor movement in the United States, which Donald Trump has always disliked.
Before bankrupting his businesses numerous times, Trump was known for complaining about the cost of labor and shortchanging the people he hired to build his Trump-emblazoned monstrosities.
Since returning to office, the president, with help from billionaire megalomaniac Elon Musk, has illegally gutted the federal workforce, while driving up the cost of … everything.
Trump team’s trucking policy exposed as racist nonsense
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy boasted about shutting down 110 driving schools for lack of “English proficiency” at a press conference, but was met with a sobering fact-check of the racist fearmongering driving the Trump administration’s attack on immigrant truck drivers. [video]
Trump goon: Latest job losses don’t count—they’re just teachers
Another abysmal jobs report was released in August, which meant it was time for National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett to make the rounds on right-wing media […] [video]
‘Anyone should panic’: Agriculture chief admits farmers are screwed
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins appeared on Fox Business to defend the Trump administration’s track record of bankrupting farms with bad policies, blaming rising costs on former President Joe Biden. [video]
Who knew mass government firings would create a mess?
Right around this time last year, Trump, Musk, Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Russ Vought, and the racist tweens at the pretend Department of Government Efficiency were having a barnburner of a time firing thousands of federal workers based on some combination of vibes and malice. Of course, even a year ago, it was obvious they had no idea what they were doing when they ended up begging the newly fired to return.
Trump economic adviser’s spin on jobs report will give you whiplash
Kevin Hassett appeared on Fox News a year ago to try to spin a disappointing jobs report, which was bleak enough that President Donald Trump tried to shift attention by posting a screed on Truth Social about his former buddy, Jeffrey Epstein. [video]
Critical weather service scrambles for staff after DOGE cuts
Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency left National Weather Service teams desperately scrambling to staff depleted operations ahead of the hurricane season.
Musk is now begging air traffic controllers to come back to work
Trump gave his co-President Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency carte blanche to go on a federal employee firing spree—and then Musk had to beg for workers to come back.
Trump plays mob boss and vows to ‘take care of’ federal workers
While speaking with reporters, Trump threatened to target certain federal workers who “really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.” [video]
Trump’s record offers a very transparent reminder this Labor Day: he continues to find ways to make working people pay for his corruption.
With an insulted and angry nation solidly behind him, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada is charging ahead in a bitter trade war with the United States, risking a further fraying of what once was one of the world’s closest friendships.
Retaliatory tariffs, set to take effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, demonstrate Mr. Carney’s defiance toward increasing bombast by President Trump, who has been trying to humiliate Canada economically after more than two weeks of finger pointing and threats.
Mr. Carney’s response has distinguished him as one of the few world leaders standing up to Mr. Trump as he lashes out at American allies on a range of issues.
The new measures will double the rate of existing tariffs that Canadian businesses pay on imported American steel and aluminum products and affect about 700 products, including aluminum foil, railway locomotives and steel bridges.
[…] Mr. Carney made clear last week that he was in no hurry to return to negotiations and was focused instead on diversifying Canada’s trade and expanding its domestic economy. […]
Many of the American items that will soon face Canadian tariffs of 15, 25 or 50 percent mirror the Canadian exports that now face 50 percent American tariffs, particularly clothing and wood products.
Mr. Trump has not imposed tariffs on some of Canada’s largest exports, including oil and gas and many minerals, and has exempted many products with enough North American content to move duty free under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Auto parts, for example, are subject to a 25 percent tariff but generally cross the border without incurring it.
As a result, Canada’s overall average tariff rate remains low compared with what most other countries face and the majority of its trade, by dollar value, is still duty free. […]
[…] President Trump signed a proclamation last week that will allow the duty-free importation of about 660 million pounds of inexpensive beef.
If American consumers knew where that beef was coming from, they might not want to eat it.
The cuts of meat covered by Trump’s proclamation aren’t fresh sirloins, rib eyes and filets. They’re lean beef trimmings that will be added to fattier American cuts to make ground beef. They’re small chunks of frozen meat that could have been kept in cold storage overseas for years. They are the quintessence of generic industrial meat, imported here to be subsequently processed in massive grinders that combine pieces of tens of thousands of cattle from multiple countries, mainly into fast food hamburgers.
[…] some of the practices in the 16 countries currently authorized to export raw beef to the United States are worse than any on these shores. During the past year, China rejected two shipping containers of beef from Uruguay after finding residue of an anti-parasitic drug in the meat, and rejected beef from Argentina reportedly because it tested positive for a banned antibiotic that can cause serious blood disorders.
One of the worst food-safety scandals occurred in Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of beef. In 2017, the Brazilian federal police raided nearly 200 meatpacking plants after allegations that government inspectors and politicians were being bribed to allow the sale of contaminated beef. Rotten meat treated with ascorbic acid and other chemicals to mask the contamination had been sold to hospitals and schools in Brazil and also been exported. Executives at the Brazilian company JBS, the largest beef producer in the world, later admitted to bribing inspectors.
American cattle industry leaders say that Mr. Trump’s move will hurt domestic ranchers and do little to reduce the price of ground beef. They say the real cost savings will be enjoyed by meatpacking companies, fast food chains and supermarkets.
Why did Mr. Trump come up with this scheme to import hundreds of millions of pounds of beef?
“Regime Change,” the recent book by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, contains an interesting clue: a White House meeting last November between President Trump and Joesley Batista, whose family controls JBS.
Mr. Batista had long been considered persona non grata in Washington, having been jailed in Brazil as a result of, among other things, paying $186 million in bribes to almost 2,000 politicians, including three Brazilian presidents, to obtain state financing for his family’s company. In 2019, after JBS bought several American meatpacking companies, Senator Marco Rubio and his colleague Robert Menendez deplored JBS’s “admitted criminal conduct,” its “business relationships with Venezuela’s Maduro regime, as well as its growing reliance on financing from entities aligned with the Chinese government.” The senators argued that allowing JBS to own U.S. companies could endanger America’s food supply and national security.
Mr. Batista gained the White House meeting last November, Ms. Haberman and Mr. Swan wrote, because of his friendship with Melania Trump. In addition, a JBS subsidiary had donated $5 million to Mr. Trump’s second inauguration, the largest gift from any individual or corporation. Not long afterward, JBS got approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, a privilege the company had sought for almost a decade. […]
The European Union suspended imports of beef from Brazil this past Thursday because of concerns about antibiotic misuse. […] According to the The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Trump announced his intention to allow duty-free foreign beef just a day after another meeting with Mr. Batista at the White House. […]
the livelihood of American ranchers is being shaped in private meetings between the president of the United States and a representative of Brazil’s largest exporter of beef.
Country-of-origin labeling on beef used to be mandatory in the United States. That changed in 2015, when a Republican-controlled Congress, led by Speaker of the House John Boehner, ended the requirement. Just over a year later, Mr. Boehner was appointed to the board of JBS Foods International.
[…] Last year the Senate majority leader, John Thune, and Senator Cory Booker introduced bipartisan legislation that would once again require that meat be labeled according to its country of origin. In March, the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, introduced separate legislation that would require tougher antitrust enforcement in the meatpacking industry, break up the big four beef companies, strengthen protections for independent ranchers and place limits on foreign ownership of American meat companies.
[…] When that market was truly competitive, Americans ate more beef than they do today, the nation had more than twice as many cattle ranchers — and foreign corporations didn’t control the most valuable sector of American agriculture.
Until a new labeling act gets passed, if you want to eat a hamburger, I suggest going to your local butcher shop, rather than the supermarket, ordering cuts of American beef, and asking for them to be ground on the premises. Or grind it at home. Otherwise, there’s really no way of knowing what’s in your meat, or how many international borders it crossed to reach your plate.
[Photo: Milo sitting in a mosque]
Is it happening?
Lmao I knew it.
[Screenshot: He tweeted a hadith quote in English and Arabic alongside a selfie wearing a taqiyah skullcap and beard.]
Rando 1: “Didn’t he JUST convert to Christianity?”
Eiynah: “Lol yeah it certainly wasn’t that long ago.”
Rando 2: “Reminds me of when Sinead O’Connor became a priest.”
Eiynah: “She wasn’t a horrible person like Milo tho. But yeah quite the twist from ripping up a pic of the pope. And… Didn’t she also convert to Islam?”
Rando 2: “Yep.”
Trump likes to play the part of the generous host to his Secret Service at the Trump National Golf Club outside Washington, D.C. […] “He has this weird, very odd pride about how good the hot dogs are,” […] “So obsessed that he orders one for everyone around him, including his Secret Service detail. Then, according to a former employee, the club bills the Secret Service for the hot dogs.”
johnson catmansays
re CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain@484:
Then, according to a former employee, the club bills the Secret Service for the hot dogs.
And I would bet any amount that the bill would be at very highly inflated prices that would make hot dogs at baseball stadiums seem cheap.
whheydtsays
Re: johnson catman @ #485…
I agree with your assessment of the practice. On the other hand, here’s an anecdote of when things go better…
The convention I’m involved with running used a particular hotel once. They were reluctant to set up a snack bar for us, but did under pressure. Initially, the prices were pretty high. Once they saw how much business was going through the snack bar, they started lowering prices, making up the profit on volume. This repeated for a few cycles. The hotel ran out of hotdogs. They bought supplies from other hotels in the area. They ran out of hotdogs. They sent a truck to the nearest Costco and cleaned them out of hotdogs. They ran out of hotdogs. The stripped the Costco of polish sausage (back then, Costco sold Hebrew National polish) and by the end of the con, they were selling polish sausage as hotdogs at prices significantly lower than the hotdogs they were selling at the beginning of the con.
It’s really hard for a gaming of SF convention to convince a hotel about what sort of food service the con-goers are looking for. Gaming and SF convention attendees are not on expense accounts…
The warning is included in a 69-page “first responder interaction plan” that Tesla has posted on its website and submitted in July to the Texas Department of Public Safety. “In situations where there is minimal risk of fire or high voltage exposure and low voltage power is present, Cybercab can be quickly pushed in order to clear the roadway,” the guide says.
[…]
The finding adds another layer to an already chaotic rollout of the Cybercab onto the streets of Austin, Texas, where the robotaxi is being deployed after a launch event Thursday evening. Tesla has not gotten clearance from safety regulators to deploy vehicles without features such as brake pedals, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Friday it had opened an investigation into whether the Cybercab meets vehicle safety standards.
The Cybercab’s first-responder plan includes numerous other warnings for emergency personnel. It says the Cybercab “moves quietly, so never assume it is powered off. Never assume that Cybercab will not move.” It instructs first responders to “cage the vehicle first before attempting to interact directly with the vehicle.”
It also says that “not every high voltage component is labeled,” so emergency personnel should always wear protective gear. And it says that the doors may not unlock as intended “if there is insufficient low voltage power.”
From the document: “If necessary, manually turn the front tires by hand to help position the vehicle.”
I wonder who is supplying Robotaxi cages to first responders…
“there’s no prop rod for the hood” and the power cutoff is “situated behind two steel panels” and is difficult to access. Good luck if the thing is on fire and you can’t open the doors, folks.
When the doors […] are damaged, the preloaded springs for the doors can pop out when the door opens. […] Wear appropriate PPE.
[…] What the heck is “appropriate PPE” for not being decapitated by a door spring, I wonder. I suppose maybe it will only remove your kneecap or break your arm if it hits you?
[…]
Hmm, no mechanical trunk safety release… or interior trunk release. In case you feel like kidnapping someone with a Cybercab. PS. would not recommend getting in the trunk of one of these, even as a joke.
Their Instagram account was banned for a sign reading “He can’t handle a lake and now he want’s our lake” in reference to renaming Lake Ontario. They got banned from X for Hate Speech when they posted a picture of their sign reading “Forever Neighbours Never Neighbors”* In response to the 51st state nonsense.
*If you dont get it not the different spellings of Neighbours.
Tesla is now asking businesses whether they’d like to buy and operate their own fleets of Cybercab robotaxis on its network. It’s the same pitch Elon Musk has been making since 2019: buy the cars, put them to work, and earn money while you sleep.
[…]
it never happened […] Owners paid up to $15,000 for FSD on the promise of taxi income, and years later, not one of them can run their car as a robotaxi. […] used Teslas started depreciating at roughly three times the rate of the broader used-car market. The robotaxi income never came. MisterGreen went bankrupt in December 2025 and wiped out its bondholders. $40 million was lost.
[…]
Companies don’t outsource money machines. They outsource risk. Selling you the Cybercab means you eat the capital cost and the depreciation, while Tesla keeps the software margin and its cut of every fare.
And you’d be competing directly against the company that controls the platform. Tesla can undercut your prices, prioritize its own cars in the app, change the revenue split, or geofence you out entirely. You don’t own a business in that arrangement. You own the downside.
[…]
Sell the promise of future income, collect the money up front, and let the buyer hold the bag when the economics don’t materialize. […] the question worth asking is simple: if this is such easy money, why is Tesla so eager to let you have it?
StevoRsays
A Palestinian Australian man who alleges he was punched in the face when trying to stop police from harassing Muslim men praying during an anti–Isaac Herzog protest is suing New South Wales over “a series of false accusations”.
Eyad Shadid has launched a civil case in the NSW district court, alleging he was assaulted, battered and falsely imprisoned by police near Sydney’s town hall.
The Palestine Action Group member, in his statement of claim, says NSW police committed misfeasance in public office and subjected him to a malicious prosecution.
Build the Wall: Zombie Border Siege, a Tetris knock-off where you’ll “protect the border from the coming horde.” […] One notable thing about this one is that unlike actual Tetris, the lines don’t disappear when they’re completed. Instead, they just stack up until they reach the top, at which point it’s inevitably game over no matter how neatly you’ve arranged things.
A slow-moving line of “zombies” moves across the bottom of the screen, and they are capable of getting past your wall if you haven’t built it high enough—but “high enough” is literally two stacked tetrominoes, after which nothing can get past. So I’m not sure what the point is there, except to be really racist
[…] Rio Run, a recreation of a “border patrol along the Rio Grande” based on the ancient classic Snake. As a balding white guy in a suit, you pick up brown-skinned people one at a time, each of whom joins a train behind you wearing shackles and an orange jumpsuit. Once the game ends, when you run into a wall or your train of prisoners, they’re all deported and you’re encouraged to try again.
[…] Supply Line, as it’s called, charges you to “sort the school line to make America healthy again” by letting ‘good’ food ride a conveyor belt to the school lunch box, while chucking ‘bad’ food—anything with coloring, additives, sealed packages, or seed oils—into the “reject” box. […] what’s really bizarre is the muscular Black man in boxing gloves standing in the background. Every time I let a bad bit of food slip past, he punched the back of my monitor. […] although oddly enough he’s the one who took the actual damage. Also, reading labels is apparently bad, according to a sign with a red strike through it.
[…]
these things are universally bad, both conceptually and in execution […] I can’t shake the feeling that all of these games were vibe-coded […] why? Who are these games for? […] they’re for no one in particular, but are instead just another wave in the flood of sewage pumped out every day by the US president […] It is transgressive in a way that delights the administration’s supporters and infuriates its rivals. And it feels all the more edgy because the formerly stuffy White House social channels have been turned into a place where this kind of stuff circulates freely.
Having watched a video of Supply Line, bad food that makes it across the conveyor is ejected from the lunch box at the boxer causing his injury, and then he punches the screen in retaliation. If he weren’t standing back there to get hit, a bin in that spot would sort everything automatically.
birgerjohanssonsays
Clever ancient Chinese engineering!
This 2,200-Year-Old Waterworks Tamed a Killer River. There’s No Dam. Three Jobs [detailed explanation]
Saudi Arabia has accused Yemen’s Houthi rebels of launching attacks on civilian and economic sites in the kingdom, wounding at least 73 civilians, including women and children.
The accusation came on Tuesday as fighting intensified in Yemen, where the Saudi-backed, internationally recognised government has launched a counteroffensive to retake territory from the Iran-backed Houthis…
The average price of gas going into this Labor Day weekend reached a record holiday high compared with past years at $4.14 a gallon, according to a national tracking average from AAA. The previous record for Labor Day was $3.82 in 2012.
The high price for fuel comes as diesel hit its highest price ever on Friday, at an average of $5.85 a gallon. Both are surging because the war in Iran has reduced the supply of oil and gasoline around the world as the Strait of Hormuz, a key thoroughfare for tankers, remains closed.
[…] It should have been obvious before Trump launched the war with Iran that this was likely, and more than six months into the conflict, it’s easy to draw a straight line connecting the president’s misguided decision and the pain consumers are feeling at the pump.
But it’s also worth appreciating just how badly the Republican administration has managed public expectations. [social media post, with video]
As recently as July, for example, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent boasted about the inevitable decline in fuel prices. When CBS News asked when consumers should expect to see some relief while filling up, he replied, “Maybe by Labor Day.”
Oops.
In March, CNN asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright a similar question, and the Cabinet secretary said at the time, “In the worst-case, this is a weeks, not a months, thing.”
Sixth months later, Wright returned to CNN and was asked whether prices might get even worse. “Look, I don’t want to have an opinion on that,” he replied.
[…] Nearly four weeks ago, JD Vance appeared on Fox News, where he falsely claimed that oil prices are “way down from the highs in the early days” of the war. The vice president quickly added, “That’s goal No. 1 — keep oil and gas cheap for Americans all over our country.” […]
“I’ve never seen polygraphs employed this broadly or at this seniority level,” a retired Navy JAG [Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter] said. “In my experience, it’s unprecedented.”
In recent decades, federal agencies have sometimes utilized polygraph tests as part of a background check process for applicants seeking sensitive positions, but the idea of using them more broadly to crack down on media leaks is unprecedented.
At least, it was.
In the spring, MS NOW reported that FBI Director Kash Patel ordered the polygraphing of more than two dozen former and current members of his security detail, as well as other staff, as part of an apparent panic about alleged leakers among his team. There was a similar controversy late last year about the use of polygraphs at the Department of Homeland Security.
But to fully appreciate the scope of these efforts, look no further than the Pentagon. The New York Times reported:
U.S. government investigators have taken the extraordinary step of subjecting roughly 50 members of the U.S. military’s Joint Staff to polygraph tests over leaks to journalists, including about how the Iran war has created a shortage of crucial munitions, according to officials briefed on the move.
The investigators asked military officers and civilian employees on the Joint Staff if they disclosed classified information to members of the press, and about whether they provided information about diminished U.S. munitions stocks.
[…] the polygraph tests were conducted last month in the wake of multiple reports about “diminished stocks of crucial munitions” as a result of the war with Iran. (The White House has repeatedly suggested those reports were false, though the search for leakers suggests it was the denials that were actually untrue.)
To be sure, there have been reports for months about the Defense Department utilizing polygraphs more broadly, but it’s worth appreciating just how unusual these circumstances are. Indeed, the Times explained, “The scope of the investigation is without parallel. Mass polygraph tests have never been administered to the top ranks of the U.S. military in modern history.”
[…] Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had already earned a reputation for creating a culture of fear at the Pentagon. There’s fresh evidence that the hapless Cabinet secretary is making matters worse.
cloudflare is abusively discriminatory in how it ‘tests if you are an ai bot’ by not letting legitimate alternate or older browsers access sites. The people who run all these sites that use it, in trying to prevent ‘ai plague scraping’ of their sites and stealing all their works, have used a tool that locks out thousands of legitimate viewers.
Paraphrasing the term Cory Doctorow created; the internet is being ‘enshitified’ by crapitallists and ai slop.
ai is artificial. It is NOT intelligence. And, it is like a huge plague of locusts destroying everything in its path.
My entire organization posits this after hundreds of hours of research and analysis by Karen Hou, Cory Doctorow and countless other tech experts. Thus, we will avoid ai like the destructive plague it is.
@488 Militant Agnostic wrote about a Vancouver strip club . . .They got banned from X. .
I reply: I cheer that strip club for being 1) honest and 2) Canadian. We need to make it clear: that site used to be called twitter, now its xhitter (pronounced like one who defecates everywhere like its current owner)
Slovakia discovers Russian backdoors in 279 new traffic cameras — SMS-triggered shell access and passwordless live feeds found in EU-funded rollout
Navy discusses renaming aircraft carrier after Trump instead of heroic Black sailor
Bali jails Swiss tourist for insulting sacred Day of Silence
Gandhi’s handwritten notes on life sold for $1.69m at Indian auction
Reginald Selkirk @ # 223 (“Older Comments”): … climate change threatens its cheese banks that hold Parmigiano wheels as loan collateral
AP now says Social media falsely claims heat wave threatens Parmigiano Reggiano cheese and bank:
AP attributes the initial claims to “social media”; no reference to the Fortune source @ # 223. They cite only people with a stake in the cheese and related financial concerns – no on-site visits to the repositories, no local fact-checkers.
I had previously considered both Fortune and the AP fact-checkers as generally reliable sources, and must now brace myself for the shock of losing trust in at least one.
Anybody here planning a trip to northern Italy soon?
California lawmaker Aisha Wahab wins special election to succeed Eric Swalwell in Congress
MS Nows: Emergency motion in Kennedy Center case seeks to halt ‘breathtaking act of defiance’
This is formally being done by the board of directors of the Kennedy Center but the board has been largely packed with Trump’s puppets, anything of significance they are doing is at Trump’s direction.
Trump is trying to get his name on the Kennedy Center again. Unable to change the name directly the new plan is add text under the formal name proclaiming Trump’s importance in maintaining the Kennedy Center. This new text will be larger then the title of building and will be carved into the building, both of which I expect will be important. If Trump had been willing to settle for a plaque under the name that was significantly smaller then the court probably lets him get away with it. Carving it into the building makes it hard and expensive to change later and making it bigger then the building title makes it clearly an attempt to get around the original order.
ISW: Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 20, 2026
The biggest point is that the report is more about drone and missile strikes then ground movement. Both sides are making bigger strikes that way and both sides are having trouble coping with it. The Russian air defense is failing because the Ukrainians are destroying the air defense units. On the Ukrainian side it’s more the limited supply of air defense and air defense missiles can’t hold up to saturation attacks, particularly when Russians strike civilian areas away from targets of military significance.
On the ground there is not a lot of movement. Both sides are making small moves and trading land near important points. The ISW report doesn’t note this but the Russians have also made some advances by attacking away from anything of importance, apparently some combination of trying to force Ukraine to spread out and wanting to have some wins they can report.
Aljazeera: Russia says ready for ‘new ideas’ on Ukraine war that match Putin’s goals
“Realities on the ground” probably means that Russia is now willing to consider freezing the front line where it is. When Russia was negotiating soon after the start of the war it was mostly not serious proposals, either demanding Ukraine hand over territory or was just a short term truce. The situation has gotten much worse for Russia then it was only a few years ago. The army has made no real progress despite the great cost. Russia is now being hit far behind the front line and the Russian economy is in really bad shape.
JM @ # 9: … Russia says ready for ‘new ideas’ …
IOW, they’ve gotten so desperate they’ll try Hegseth’s gambit of crowd-sourcing tactics & strategy?
Explosive Russian drone boat destroyed near European offshore gas site
YES, be afraid, be very afraid . . . This is the fascist police surveillance state IRL! NOW!
https://www.rsn.org/001/flock-has-a-powerful-new-ai-tool-for-police-we-got-its-code.html
https://www.rsn.org/001/their-cities-dropped-flock-surveillance-cameras-theyre-still-being-watched.html
re shermanj@12: I have recently played through Watch Dogs 2 again. It came out ten years ago. It has some similarities to the Flock shit, and the surveillance state in general, we are dealing with now. Resistance is NOT futile.
Thanks, @13 Johnson catman for the positive thought. I was researching the possibility of reducing of obliterating the effectiveness of flock and other spy surveillance systems and found an artist that had created a shirt or coat with simulacrums of dozens of car license plates and it seemed to load a lot of obfuscatory info into the flock cameras he stood in front of. Sounds like an idea that might dilute the abusive spying if a lot of us did that. That’s just being creative in design.
Cannabis addiction climbs fast while alcohol use disorder slowly declines across the USA
.https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-08-cannabis-addiction-climbs-fast-alcohol.html
404Media – Cities are covering Flock cameras with trash bags
Wired – Flock has a powerful new AI tool for police. We got its code.
Plus their queries and results will be filtered through the LLM bs engine instead of a deterministic interface with buttons or command line arguments.
Supreme Court temporarily unfreezes Trump ballroom construction
DeSantis appointee for Clerk of Courts arrested on child sexual abuse charges
‘Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:’ Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit
Wikipedia – Olo
NewYorker – What would it mean to see a new color?
Acyn (MeidasTouch):
Commentary
Some random security: “What do you expect to happen with that intervention?”
Trump: “I expect you to Die, Mr. Bond!”
“Why America Won’t Copy Sweden’s Cheap Highway Fix”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=jyNEnYaBszk
NYT – Under Trump, protected wild horses are going to slaughter
Rando: “there was an A-Team episode about stopping this sort of thing.”
Sydney Marathon medal mistakenly depicts Munich stadium
Trump Administration Covers Up Real Reason USS Abraham Lincoln Hasn’t Been Resupplied: Because Iran Blew Up The Resupply Base
For thsoe in Adelaide or SA or near enough and wanting to attend there’sa big STOP THE CHOP! rally & march tomorrow starting in Victoria Square, Adelaide city centre at 12 noon.
Apparently they want folsk to wear yellow and bring banners and your voices to tryand save our Parklands from Premier Possum-killer Malisantosés needless, obscene environmental vandalism
Kyle Kulinski on some stuff Kushner recently said about Gaza & more in this 11 mins long yt viddy – Jared Kushner’s PURE EVIL Comment Will Blow You Away.
Redgum singer and great human bing sings the
Ragtag Extremist Blues – John Schumann and the Vagabond Crew under 5 mins long.
Oh and via an fb and also know in physical life friend another song here also under 5 mins. :
https://gwynashton.bandcamp.com/track/stop-the-chop
‘Stop The Chop’ by Gwyn Ashton.
Fusion / Mash up of The Strangers Case speech by the Bard and The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus spoken by those who have earnt the right to be heard on this Warriors For Peace PSA: Sir Thomas More Monologue about tolerance. Under 5 mins long.
This is but one of many such articles which disclose a disaster which is important to any literate person (this is not hyperbole or hysterics, we’ve experienced some of this before):
“Hoard and Destroy – AI companies are engineering a future where only the wealthiest incumbents can build high-quality AI models and operate as the sole holders of humanity’s written works.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/artificial-intelligence-book-burning
The coalition, led by the Demand Progress Education Fund, pointed to an internal Anthropic memo https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/554/21/bartz-v-anthropic-pbc/ that was made public as part of a copyright lawsuit against the company. The memo is headlined “Project Panama,” which is described as “our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”
Our organization is an internationally recognized publisher. These huge criminal corporations have joined tRUMP’s war on education and intellectualism by again scanning and destroying rare important books. We have pulled all connection to our works, once again, to protect them from these corporate criminal acts.
Raw Story: ‘Flummoxed’ Trump DOJ humiliated in court after lawyer admits he has no case
It’s a simple case really and the DOJ has lost nearly identical cases in multiple states. The law precludes the Federal Government from forcing states to implement Federal policy. In many areas there is wiggle room but ICE is clear cut. It’s federal only. If states want to help the feds they can but the feds can’t force them to do enforcement for ICE.
That is an amazing admission. I would assume the DOJ lawyer who said that will soon be out of a job but I expect he knew that when he said it.
Qasim Rashid (Human rights lawyer):
* The Guardian: “removed as clerk of court and comptroller for Palm Beach county”
Company recalls alfalfa sprouts after CDC says 55 sickened in salmonella, E. coli outbreak
Seventeen-year-old girl killed in sword attack at school in Sweden .https://share.google/aKLgNDHwaUisFJRlr
We have gun control. It cuts down the number of victims. This is the second sword attack in a school.
Electrek – Tesla discontinues its Solar Roof tiles, not economically viable
Rando: “Remember when Tesla had to pay to remove its solar [panels] from 240 Walmarts after it burned down 7 stores? Good times.”
Anti-LGBTQ Moms for Liberty co-founder, who had bi threesome rape scandal (with husband, the then state Republican party chairman), to lose school board seat
Reginald Selkirk @35.
Sarah Taber (Crop scientist): “Ah I see Satan’s pubes have finally shown up to the party. Sprouts are INFAMOUS for being very prone to outbreaks. Why? They grow in a lil container that’s kept warm, moist, & rotated to keep all the seeds wet & growing in random directions. AKA, a microbial incubator that guarantees every stray cell of Salmonella or E. coli gets its BEST start in life.”
Sarah Taber:
Sarah Taber:
Eric Garcia (MSNOW):
Joey Politano (Economist): “Every 6 months the Trump administration realizes lowering tariffs will lower prices, applies this insight to one specific good, and then proceeds to never introspect beyond that. It’s honestly beautiful in its stupidity.”
Acyn (MeidasTouch):
Commentary
@40
Maybe not, but it’s long enough to hold an election.
MS Nows: The DOJ plans to send out 1,000 election monitors in November. Is that normal?
So way more polling place monitors but not an absurd number. The real question is likely to be where they monitors are and what they do. This may also be setting the stage for more monitors in 2028.
The Guardian – US Postal Service rule tightens mail-in voting despite court orders blocking changes
Reporter tricks Trump into exposing Kim Jong lie
.https://youtube.com/shorts/RCAsAmTCZ0w
From DC.
MOM, Grandpa got out again!
.https://youtube.com/shorts/A0qAWB8jd9Y
In light of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney tell Trump to fuck off with his tariff threats.
Every time the USA has started a trade war with Canada the USA ends up regretting it.
This was some context to international relations I’d been missing.
The Infinite Thread, I think, overlooked stories where Germany had its own police crackdowns on Palestine solidarity protests throughout 2024 and 2025. such that the UN urged them to stop the brutaliity and criminalization. And the whole existence of unsubtle AfD was odd for a place that REALLY ought to know better. Of course lots of countries merely learned that the Nazi brand was bad without absorbing why. But Germany screwed up the lesson in its own way.
Wikipedia – Israel in the Federal German Reason of State
German catechism versus memory culture (2026-08-21)
By Elia Ayoub (Journalist, Lebanese diasporan)
* Adnan Delalić’s “German Redemption Theology” analysis of state mythmaking.
Al Jazeera – German arms export licences for Israel surge with focus on sub project (2026-07-27)
* Dolphin II’s will replace Israel’s existing 5 Dolphin subs, which are also nuclear-capable.
* Germany is Israel’s second biggest arms dealer after the US.
* @48: Correction, Dakar class subs will replace Dolphins, and Dolphin-IIs are just a larger upgraded Dolphin in the meantime.
I wa sone of these thousands and thousands of protesters today
Massive ‘Stop the chop’ rally turnout to protect hundred of trees | 9 News Australia
Thousands in northwest Indiana still without power nearly two weeks after storm
“Shithole country”
Golf brand apologises for advert that shows woman being pushed over
WTF?
‘Masha and the Bear’ promotes pro-Russian narratives disguised as children’s content – CCD chief
French tourist dies in Death Valley after car breaks down
Elon Musk endorses murder and starvation.
@51 Reginald Selkirk 23 August 2026 at 4:40 pm capped his comment with “Shithole country” regarding:
Thousands in northwest Indiana still without power nearly two weeks after storm
I agree. the magat plutocratic government has truly made this country a “Shithole country”
Here is a HUGE reason why
It is long but IMPORTANT
https://mockpaperscissors.com/2026/08/23/more-on-the-failed-canadian-trade-deal/
Restrictions on Canada’s right to pursue independent global trade deals (veto power).
• Changes to French-language rules in Quebec.
• Demands to eliminate Canadian cultural content quotas (Online Streaming Act).
• Exclusion of heavy vehicles (Ford/GM plants) from tariff relief.
• Opening up procurement for public projects to American companies.
• Dismantling Canadian dairy supply management entirely.
• Demands for Canada to align domestic tariffs automatically with US trade policy.
• Full elimination of provincial liquor board restrictions on US alcohol imports.
• Forced synchronization of pesticide and agricultural chemical regulations.
• New US intellectual property rules extending drug patent protections.
• Demands for shared management or full US control over critical mineral extraction and export.
• Direct pressure to increase defense spending to meet strict US targets.
• Reductions to the ‘de minimis’ threshold for tax-free US cross-border purchases.
My first thought was that some billionaires had started a chat thread along the lines of, “Yo, what do you want from Canada, Bezos?” and they all piped up.
Anyway, I was especially flummoxed by the French stuff, and here it is –
Canadian culture, language rules
The third factor Carney said had derailed trade talks was disagreements over French language rules.
The prime minister offered few details of exactly where the two sides had disagreed but suggested it related, in particular, to French and said those rules would have amounted to a broader attack on Canada.
“[There were] efforts to restrict our protections of our language, our culture, and in effect, our sovereignty,” he said
Later, speaking in French, he said there were “threats” from the United States in the deal over French language and Quebec culture.
Republicans have previously taken aim at Canada’s Online Streaming Act, calling it “discriminatory” and suggesting it should result in additional tariffs.
The Online Streaming Act was passed in 2023 and would empower the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to force large foreign platforms like Netflix and Amazon to pay a portion of their annual Canadian revenues into funds devoted to producing Canadian content.
Innteresting warning from the Hawaii Volcano Observatory (daily updates here: https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/kilauea/volcano-updates )
shermanj @56
Leaked video of American trade negotiators reacting to Canada rejecting Trump’s demands
MS Now:”Breaking Point ? USS Lincoln returns home as panic grows over state of US Navy” .https://youtube.com/watch?v=8jwuyVwO7LE
Texas conservatives are ‘breaking rank’ and pldeging to vote Democrat
paywalled, so I haven’t read it. The sub-head mentions data centers.
Kyoto University builds transistor that survives 600C temperatures, compatible with standard fabs — Standard ion implantation and bottom-gate design fix leakage and voltage drift
120 Roman-Era Inscriptions Found Deep in a Spanish Cave Point to a Mysterious Goddess Named ‘Domina’
Undersea cable to Antarctica through Drake Passage is viable, researchers find — 1,600km route to Chile could spell an end to research data leaving in ‘suitcases full of hard drives’
Trump’s $600 million ballroom has a bunker problem: One already exists
Security vets rally around $4 paper password books for sale in Australia
Reginald Selkirk @60.
WaPo – Texas conservatives are ‘breaking rank’ and pledging to vote Democrat
Tesla to recall almost three million vehicles over hidden door handles
Eli and Michael provides a fun summary of skeptic news from USA and UK:
The Skepticrat 277 — “Lego My Legos Edition”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=XE5Iq9x2ndQ
@ 66
It has always been my worry that eventually there will arise a political movement that is “progressive” on econoimic issues, but reactionary on scoial issues. They’ll vote against data centers and more funding for education–maybe even national health care–but will ban abortion and continue to rollback civil rights. This might be the start of that.
@66
I’ve seen a couple other articles on “some Republicans will be voting for Democrats or independents this year.” I can never seem to find a list of what Democratic positions they disagree with.
Republican social worker and special ed teacher. *shudder*
CNBC: Trump admin unveils anti-Iran global sanctions plan, signals China not exempt
The secondary sanctions is the important part, there isn’t really anything left that the US can directly sanction on Iran. However, there are countries that trade with Iran despite the sanctions and putting pressure on those countries to stop dealing with Iran matters.
China and UAE are the partner that matter. Getting it to stick will be a challenge. Particularly China, which buys oil and sells military supplies.
CNBC: U.S. military says it aided passage of 660 million barrels of oil through Strait of Hormuz since May
The US says they are getting oil through the Strait, something around 1/3 of pre-war figures. Independent oil and ship tracking firms don’t see that much making it’s way through but there is some and the rate is rising. At least one firm puts the rate at 5 million, would be 1/4 of pre-war rates. The US Navy’s determined effort to escort ships is working even if they are not talking about it as much.
TPM – What did Trump do that made Carney walk away?
I hope Trump can keep up his anti-ris losing streak for another 10 weeks, to maximize the electoral potential.
The HPV Vaccine Isn’t Just Preventing Cervical Cancer, New Research Reveals
Sounds great, although I wonder how Taiwanese researchers got a hold of the medical records of 1.4 million Americans…
re CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain@74:
The Orange Turd seems to think he is the king of the world. In reality, he is a pitiful bully who would rather fellate Putin, Xi, and Kim than help the people of his own country (rich people excepted).
Ford doubles down on ‘kiss my ass’ comment to Trump amid Canada-U.S. trade war
Supreme Court sides with Trump administration on mail voting restrictions ahead of midterms
They are not only malevolent, they are cowardly.
Aaron Rupar:
KnowYourMeme – The children yearn for the mines
Asawin Suebsaeng (Zeteo): “If you want to go to a trade school, great? Think college isn’t for you? Ok. But that’s not what this is. This is the government trying to do culture war social engineering while also staring down their noses at poor kids and preemptively deciding things like: I don’t want you as my doctor.”
Adam Rogers (Journalist): “At least in the Omelas story they had nice lives otherwise. Now it’s all we-torture-babies, *plus* clear dystopia.”
CW: Child abuse, death
Don Moynihan (Public policy prof):
Eric Columbus (Lawfare): “depressingly accurate phrase: ‘McMahon is one of Trump’s most competent Cabinet officials.'”
JM @72: A different take.
TheNewRepublic – Bessent flails as Trump’s pathetic “economic D-Day” on Iran is exposed
Reginald Selkirk @79.
Steve Vladeck (Law prof):
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick:
APNews – He was waiting for his son to return from the USS Lincoln. Then Border Patrol arrested him.
Mike Nellis (Democratic strategist):
* Politico Article
Rando 1: “Come on guys. This [photo post] was 11 years ago! He was the young and immature age of… Jesus Christ, he was 52 years old. [Screenshot]”
Rando 2: “Doing the ‘my grandfather fell off a watchtower joke’ but quite literally.”
Rando 3: “Not your fault if your grandfather fought for Nazi Germany. […] EXTREMELY your fault if you post a photo of your grandfather in Nazi uniform saluting his service.”
Cleland near where I am up in the hills.
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/cleland-to-begin-vaccinating-birds-against-deadly-h5-bird-flu/107076064
Last Friday, a teenager attacked a Swedish school, killing a 17-year old girl and injuring three others. We have gun control, so he used a sword (which probably kept the death toll to a fraction of what it could have been).
The school attacker is a teenager who grew up in a violent, negligent home. When he was placed in a foster home he seemed to become alright, but then he linked uo with an internet group glorifying school shooters and people like Breivik. He is almost a stereotypical example of a school shooter (even if he used a different weapon).
Ukraine unveils native jet-powered drone interceptor
Extraordinarily beautiful footage and very informative and powerful 20 mins long mini-doco here – The Decline of the Australian Sea Lion – A Film by Brad Leue. Now the Australian Sea lions have bird flu to worry about too.
@ ^ As discussed here :
Source : https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/25/australia-has-just-12000-sea-lions-left-and-carnage-may-await-them-as-bird-flu-takes-hold-scientists-warn
Then there’s an individual Elephant Seal and a worry here :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/sammy-the-elephant-seal-bird-flu-concerns/107072310
Abdul El-Sayed asks Jesse Watters if he is circumcised during combative Fox News interview
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/israeli-politician-sledgehammers-palestinian-memorial/107077828
@79 Reginald Selkirk & @ 83 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain:
The Hill: Jackson calls Supreme Court’s mail-in voting ruling a ‘Kafkaesque nightmare’
She grasps what the majority either don’t grasp or are intentionally ignoring. For sensible reasons the court doesn’t normally address theoretical questions, doing that could easily tie up the court’s time with cases that don’t happen in reality and there are a lot of “what if” questions that go away when a theoretical issue becomes a concrete case. The court shouldn’t let people abuse that principle and that is what people (mostly Republicans) are doing on these voting issues. Don’t do anything concrete until it’s too close to the election to change the procedure, districts, rules, etc. That way a court case can’t fix things and the changes will apply for at least one election cycle.
God Awful Movies 571: Young Washington
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=h_-vcoxiLBw
On what happened to the Herero and Nama peoples of what is now Namibia – an informative but WARNING confronting material and images 7 mins long yt doco here – Gaza & Germany’s Forgotten African Genocide by the Palestine Deep Dive channel.
Latest episode of Planet America here – How a series of scandals is shaping the 2026 US midterm election campaigns runs for just over half an hour. From yesterday Aussie time.
Good!
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-26/maxwell-appeal-thrown-out/107078020
Two unvaccinated people die of measles in Pennsylvania
If you read this, and identify as a caring ‘truth seeker’ type, you will become more enlightened and I respect you. If you don’t, I have no sympathy for your willful, destructive ignorance.
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/669
@92 Reginald Selkirk posted about Abdul El-Sayed asks Jesse Watters if he is circumcised during combative Fox News interview
I must suspect that the person performing watters’ procedure confused circumcision with lobotomy!
Doctor El-Sayed is so sharp, candid and decent!
122 Companies Are Quietly Sucking the West Dry, Study Finds
Dolly Parton has died. She was 80.
@102 Reginald Selkirk warned us: 122 Companies Are Quietly Sucking the West Dry, Study Finds
I reply: Reginald, thanks, you do provide a lot of important comments.
As residents of scarizona, we see the insanity here increasing and being ignored.
The water level in the two major reservoirs will soon drop to the point where they will have to shut down all power generating water turbines, depriving the state of major sources of electric power.
With water supplies already disappearing, phoenix has more huge apartment complexes under construction than any other large city, they want more water wasting data centers and large industrial centers to come to the state. Thus, tens of thousands more thirsty, energy gulping people.
One of their frequent answers is ‘toilet to tap’: use massive amounts of money and electricity to process all the sewer outflow into drinking water even though it WILL NOT ELIMINATE many of the drugs, microplastics and potentially viruses already in the sewer water, etc.
More symptoms of the Death Spiral. The world around me is so depressing. I have to go and do something constructive and positive.
Raw Story: Todd Blanche abruptly retreats on Epstein as latest hoodwink ends in judge’s threat
This goes beyond just stalling to trying to abuse the court system to work around a judge. It isn’t clear if the DOJ can legally appeal at this point in the process.
This is confusing legal arcana but my understanding is this. The DOJ can obey the original order or raise an issue with the judge. To take it back to the judge they have to provide a reason why they are not complying with his order. When the judge then responds the DOJ could appeal if they don’t like his response. The DOJ wants to avoid the problem of coming up with some sensible grounds and is trying to skip several steps and go straight to the appeal court without answering the judge.
One of our members compiled this list and it angers us all.
Some reasons why hack-eem jeffries sucks and should be defeated at every opportunity:
» he opposes Medicare for All
» says he will oppose bid to cut off aid to genocidal Israel
» he voted for resolution honoring Charlie Kirk
» he had a secret meeting to brown-nose jerkoff kushner
» he opposes legitimately chosen Dem. Socialist candidates
Now, I’ve gotta go before I scream.
@103
Dolly Parton was a true American hero.
From ‘Jolene’ To Vaccine: Dolly Parton Gets COVID-19 Shot She Helped Fund
(2021)
re Reginald Selkirk@92:
Wow, he was SO close to actually getting the point.
Polygamous sect leader Samuel Bateman to be sentenced in Arizona for girls found in trailer
Trump floats renaming Lake Ontario to ‘Lake America,’ denies claim he’d interfere with Canadians speaking French
Trump administration suggests Kennedy Center could be demolished if court blocks planned renovations
What an asshole.
Dethroned Miss North Carolina USA files defamation lawsuit against pageant organizers
This came up on a previous page. She was found to be the author of many offensive social media comments, many of which used the ‘N’ word.
12-year-old girl steals the show at Little League World Series
At Least 50 Men in This Roman Mass Grave Were Hit in the Same Sensitive Spot
Cybernews: Alibaba’s AliExpress caught tracking user audio systems
Alibaba has an interesting way to fingerprint users that nobody else has been caught using yet. It plays 0 volume sounds and tracks how the computer responds. Small differences in how fast the computer does that and how it reports that are unique enough to identify computers.
Fingerprinting can be used in fighting fraud but it’s primary use is in tracking users that are not logged in. Really obnoxious behavior.
UnicornRiot – Hennepin County drops charges against Jake Lang
Rando 1: “Wait, so as long as there’s a MAGA cop leaking info to MAGA rioters, they can’t be held responsible?”
Rando 2: “Let me recap: the MPD is 30 million over budget, helped Lang plan his riot, set up barricades for him, let him drive multiple vehicles into a crowded area, one of the cops had their foot run over, and now we can’t press charges because the cops are in on it in the first place.”
Rando 3: “but ICE keeps using ‘fear’ of weaponized vehicles to shoot people.”
Adam Mockler: They faked EVERYTHING!!!
Tristian Tate filed a personal deposition taking the “lying influencer” defense. They are actually poor and everything they do that shows wealth in their videos is a lie, nothing they say can be taken seriously. I would take it that most of their claims about wealth are a lie. Their claims to own super yachts and many valuable sports cars are common lies for that sort. They are also likely trying to hide what money they do have to avoid it being seized.
The brothers also filed evidence in support of release from custody that makes a terrible case. Romainian authorities are quoted as saying the brothers show constant disregard for judicial measures and legal obligations and that Tristan was involved in 11 attempts to influence witnesses. This is the evidence their lawyers are submitting to suggest they don’t need confined.
PBS Newshour has “Live Results: South Carolina’s special Senate GOP primary runoff here :
Sourec : https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/live-results-south-carolinas-special-senate-gop-primary-runoff
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-26/automation-and-repression-the-two-go-hand-in-hand-daron-acemoglu/107063582
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-26/edna-frog-fungus-wet-tropics-research/107079218
Independent: Trump’s midterm convention deemed a ‘s*** show’ with high ticket prices, low attendance and NFL competition
The timing sets it up for lots of 9/11 fear mongering but putting at the very start of the NFL season is bad. The timing in general is odd, normally part of the reason for these events is fund raising so the national party has money to spend on the elections but this will be too close to the election to do much. There doesn’t seem to be much interest in attending, one of the primary reasons to go would be to get a picture or video with Trump for campaign advertising. Right now a lot of Republicans would consider that a liability.
Those prices are a shakedown. Actual prices for a normal convention are hard to track down because there are so many special invitations, different tickets at different prices and last minute discounts. It appears that is significantly higher, for an event on a non-presidential year. Those prices are likely to drop as they get closer to the event, it will be embarrassing for the entire party if the event isn’t largely filled.
Scientists Discover Process for Tissue Regeneration (not quite on the level of Deadpool- it takes a month to heal wounds)
.https://youtube.com/shorts/Vecx0CRwKKk
Wiped out: US faces surging toilet paper prices amid trade war with Canada
At least 22 killed and hundreds missing after avalanche triggers deadly flash floods in Nepal
Darline Graham wins primary to contest late brother’s US Senate seat
German airport worker dies of malaria after ‘mosquito arrives on plane’
Arstechnica: Lab supply companies have been selling antibodies using manipulated images
At the very least this means wasted time for researches, retracting papers and redoing them. At worst this could have led to bad medicine and dead people. None of those checked so far are entirely faked, so it will lean heavily towards the wasted time end of the spectrum.
Tim Curry 1946 – 2026.
Actor in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and many other, more serious films.
A bad week for celebrities born that year.
Re: birgerjohansson @ #127…
PZ noted in his post the meme of deaths coming in threes. Personally, I don’t want the third to be That Felon in the White House as that would clear the way for JD to get elected twice in his own right (much as I don’t want him the get elected at all). Best that that third one survive past 21 Jan 2027.
@ 127
In tribute: https://youtu.be/1NeWEs4qQG8?si=7GK1ujKwadvkZtSz
Kansas town drops charges against teacher arrested for clapping during public hearings on data centers — says that ‘case has been dismissed without prejudice’
Fake US thinktank set up and funded by Israel sought to game AI for propaganda
Florida Catholics slap down state AG by rejecting religious vaccine exemptions
@125
Two German airport workers die of malaria after ‘mosquito arrives on plane’
The body count doubles!
It’s finally time to rename Ottawa’s Trump Avenue, councillor says
2nd Dan Sullivan makes the cut for Alaska Senate general election
New Twitter launches, says Musk’s X gave up the name
@136 new twitter:
yeah, nope. woulda considered signing up to show support
re whheydt@128:
Your math is slightly off.
So it would be BETTER to have The Orange Turd keel over BEFORE January 21, 2027 because then, Junior Drumph Vancehole only has the possibility of being elected once.
Re: johnson catman @ #138…
You’re right. I inverted the condition. So… With any kind of luck, That Felon in the White House will soon be #3 in the current run.
Trump: ‘Time to teach Canada you can’t do this anymore’
I don’t think teaching should be left to people incapable of learning.
“How the sun’s galactic journey and superflare-filled youth shaped Earth’s climate.”
Nitrous oxide kept the young Earth just warm enough to avoid freezing. Another indication that the ‘Rare Earth’ hypothesis may be right.
.https://phys.org/news/2026-08-sun-galactic-journey-superflare-youth.html
When a science gets proper funding! This telescope will be launched 30th August.
“Roman telescope aims to directly image exoplanets 1,000 times fainter than current limits”
.https://phys.org/news/2026-08-roman-telescope-aims-image-exoplanets.html
Just watched a really good movie on SBS World Movies channel. This one :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/tv/epg/#/
Highly recommend it. The movie that is.
Judge denies Minnesota’s bid to compel the extradition of an ICE officer from Texas
A win for the bad guys.
The judge says the issue isn’t ripe because Gov. Abbott hasn’t denied the extradition request yet.
Scientists introduce “underpants index” for monitoring soil health
RFK Jr. goes full anti-vaccine bananas over two measles deaths—one was a newborn
Hegseth bullied Scouting America. One lawsuit made him fold.
Lindsay Beyerstein (Journalist):
* Wikipedia – Limited war, Korean War
* Wikipedia – Korean War
* Yes, the same war in which I mentioned the US carpet bombed North Korea. I found inconsistent definitions of ‘limited war’. Peninsula-only, limited ground troops, no nukes, proxy war. There was a research paper I couldn’t access with the pithy title: “Limited War, Unlimited Targets”.
OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google say companies need to combat AI cyberattacks with AI.
Sounds vaguely familiar. “The only way to stop a bad guy with AI is a good guy with AI.” ‽
Pass the word: Someone has already decreed the First Annual Dolly Parton Day next month, 9/25 (Nine Two-Five).
Trump Issues Emergency Order Banning Foreign Power Equipment Imports to Protect US Grid
Minnesota State Fair food review: From Hmong corndogs to cheese curd lumpia
And many others.
Thieves display teamwork in brazen heist at California post office
This is especially interesting because the guidance for some time has been to mail letters at the the [post office itself, rather than to mail drop boxes, which were being ripped off.
Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says
Former staffer for Georgia Rep. Mike Collins accused of posting antisemitic images: report
Only one warehouse remains from Trump admin’s mass detention camp plan
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2026-08-28/nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope-is-about-to-launch/107080044
US FDA approves updated COVID vaccines for 2026-27 season
Mehdi Hasan forces Christianist into proving his misogyny here YT short.
Reginald Selkirk @150.
Kevin Beaumont (Cybersecurity journalist):
Beyond the Hype: AI, Ransomware and Business Models
Kevin Beaumont: “Both Xcancel and Nitter have had cease and desist letter from Twitter. [Screenshots]”
Both have paused operations and are seeking legal advice.
A couple alternatives are suggested in the replies.
@ ^ Notably Doug Wilson – Kegsbreath’s pastor. There’s more here :
https://zeteo.com/p/christian-nationalism-doug-wilson-hegseth
But you can’t see the full interview unless you’re a Zeteo subscriber. Grrr..
Also there’s this which is also infuriatingly paywalled on Zeteo bt you can see the start of it :
Source : https://zeteo.com/p/19-ways-trump-and-republicans-are
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-28/hobart-private-hospital-sale-to-calvary-approved-accc/107088602
404media – Florida ‘deputy of the year’ used Flock to stalk ex, held gun in her mouth, did a nazi salute
Rando: “Let me guess… Not a single criminal charge has been made against the deputy’s actions. So he can just ‘resign’ and then go work for another district having learned to keep his behavior more low key.”
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-28/macquarie-island-scientists-to-be-evacuated-over-bird-flu-fears/107088108
Nepal latest and being updated regularl;y news via Aussie ABC here
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-28/nepal-tibet-floods-live-updates/107086974
Canada responds to Trump.
.https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1JxNuMrQXM/
The Guardian – Thermal drone footage shows a Microsoft-backed AI datacenter powering its operations with dozens of unpermitted generators
King Harald V of Norway 1937-2026.
Canada Hires 48 Scholars Away From Top US Universities
X busts 200,000-strong Chinese bot farm, including accounts making claims about AI data centers and electricity — suspect accounts posted claims about pricing and grid strain to ‘manipulate’ debate
I bolded one word for emphasis. And my electricity bills have definitely gone up.
US judge repeats block on Trump’s bid to limit voting by mail
Reginald Selkirk@178.,
Well, telling the truth is surely a violation of X’s Terms of Service!
Sorry: 178->173@175.
Sky Captain@170,
Next step: rendering down dissidents and the underclass into biodiesel (a “joke” made by Curtis Yarvin – a friend of Peter Thiel, and associated through him to J.D. Vance – while suggesting San Francisco become a corporate dictatorship).
It’s much worse than what we put in our book in 2016:
https://www.rsn.org/001/ceos-earn-614-times-more-than-workers-at-uss-100-lowestpaying-corporations.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/27/ceo-worker-pay-ratio-us-analysis
We wrote that in civilized countries in Europe and Japan, the pay ratio of CEOs to their lowest paid workers was 20:1 and 12:1 respectively. Workers in this country are now being pushed down the death spiral even faster by plutocrats.
And, as another kick workers when they are down, the article states that between 2019 and 2025 inflation outpaced wage increase by 25.9%
Thanks, @159 Reginald Selkirk for the news about the new covid vaccines. Those of us that are aged and vulnerable need the protection and certainly we won’t hear it from the Mainslime News.
Nicely complements the epidemic of explosive diarrhea. This is truly a Golden Age for the US of A!
The Guardian: Trump’s war on Iran is rapidly draining US navy budget, documents and interviews reveal
On the one hand the war against Iran ending because the Navy runs out of money will be amusing, on the other it’s the worst possible solution for the US. Trump will wreck the Navy before giving up this way. And there is a distinct possiblity he will cheat and start shifting money from other parts of the DOD budget, if not the entire US budget.
Mediaite: Trump to Skip Ground Zero Ceremony Over No-Speech Rule and Golf Trip Logistics: NYT
The Memorial management has a rule against speeches at the annual event. Trump wanted an exception so he could give a speech, the management wouldn’t give him one. So he decided not to go, he will instead hold his own little event at the Pentagon just so he can give a speech.
Bold prediction: Trump will promise to resume the bombing, and he’s going to make Iran pay for it!
Judge Says the Pentagon’s Blacklisting of Anthropic Is Illegal
@110
JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, tweeted his own joke renaming Trump Tower in Chicago to “Natalie,” a reference to his creepy right-hand woman Natalie Harp.
The 17 billion settlement benefits the suckerberg media more than it protects youth!
https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/
https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/3284.png
Also, in reference to tRUMP’S new anal appendage, I think we should refer to her as ‘nastilie harpy’
Milo Yiannopoulos has been apprehended by ICE in Louisiana … TMZ has learned.
World’s youngest reigning traditional monarch dies aged 34
Judge rejects President Trump’s attempt to move his criminal hush money case to federal court
Laura Loomer is claiming she reported Yappynopolus to ICE.
https://newrepublic.com/post/214907/ice-arrests-far-right-milo-yiannapoulos
“RFK Jr. has lied to the Senate”: Lawmakers call for criminal probe, ouster
Smoking Gun
Kalshi can’t evade Nevada gambling laws by calling bets “swaps,” court rules
Latest episode of If You’re Listening – Will Trump’s weird obsession break the US Navy? here. Good 27 mins long ep.
Event on tomorrow in Adelaide citycentre – starting by meteting at Hindmarsh square 11.30 am.
Flyer on this handed out to me Friday night.
its small text reads :
Dunno if many others here are from Adelaide (Lofty stillaround & reading?) or close enough to attend but thought I’d let folks know.
@ ^ Meeting not “meteting” a smy typso had it.
HIndmarsh square wikipage : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindmarsh_Square
Huh. Hoped they’d have live coverage fo this but FWIW :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-29/secret-harbour-by-election-one-nation-labor-explained/107086850
Source : https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-sets-coverage-for-roman-space-telescope-launch-from-florida/
Soem intresting stuff discussed by Kyle Kulinski
BREAKING: TRUMP NUCLEAR STRIKE FEARS ESCALATE w/ Secret NATO Meeting; State GOP Brings Back Slavery 53 minutes long.
Some really dramatic images & illustrations here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-28/nepal-flash-flood-buries-villages-after-glacier-breaks/107085892
@198 Er, sorry & should’ve noted there but belated WARNING Some confronting language and crude sexual references made by Kyle there so probly NSFW.
At the FBI, a history of hiring prostitutes or stealing from employer may no longer be a barrier to being hired
Tom Begich says he will withdraw from Alaska governor’s race
Clark, Mitchell combine for 68 in Fever’s blowout win over Sun
Finally – a renaming I can support.
Tennessee moves to rename Nashville International Airport in Dolly Parton’s honor
Not only is tRUMP screwing struggling cattle ranchers by making them drop their prices to compete with the contaminated argentine beef sold at 25 percent below market prices*, now he wants them to put out millions of dollars to create their own slaughtering and procssing plants.
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/trump-pledges-legal-documents-to-let-ranchers-and-farmers-process-their-own-food/
*as @45 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain pointed out
Judge declares Rubio’s speech-based student deportations violate the Constitution
Trump will use his ad budget to praise himself, not help GOP candidates
“Trump’s Ad Budget Just Told the GOP: ‘Drop Dead’
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=7zR2x4AA6z4
This is the problem with picking a narcissist as your boss. He will screw you over.
@205 shermanj: A good case can be made for breaking up the big meat processing companies. Only a handful of companies process the vast majority of meat, putting them in a good position to manipulate markets and prices at both ends.
Trump’s idea for doing it is bad and will be badly implemented. It’s like Trump pulling out of Afghanistan. It was really the right thing to do but Trump negotiated a bad treaty, then didn’t setup to actually implement the treaty he had negotiated, leaving Biden to rush the US out at the last minute.
With meat processing Trump is trying to go from a monopoly to hundreds of little individual processors in one step. Many of the individual farms are not setup to do this, they will need new building, new roads and new staff. No consideration how this changes the way the meat will move around, be packaged or be inspected. There is no planning for in between markets. There is no thought to keep one set of companies being replaced by another.
Trump can, by accident, have good idea. Even then you can be sure he will implement it badly because managing all of the bits of an organization as big as the US is it’s own skill and that skill isn’t much related to finance.
In a sense what the US needs is really a super skilled Jira project manager. The president’s job is not setting overall priorities, picking projects or designing them, that is Congress. His job is not implementing the projects, that is the work for the individuals, teams and departments under him. His job is coordinating across departments, managing negotiating with outside groups, balancing between multiple priorities and reporting on how things are going.
California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law — software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses are exempt
JM@181:
And the U.S. Navy is essential to the world’s economy—see this ACOUP post by military historian Bret Deveraux for why.
Former Ecuadorian president imprisoned for corruption
envy
Ottawa couple’s ‘Lake Ontario’ hats selling like hotcakes after Trump’s executive order
Fridge-free vaccine passes first human trial, raising hopes for the hardest-to-reach
Sign in
‘Weird Al’ Yankovic: Tiny Desk Concert
JM @ 181
More comments from ‘A Different Bias’ (Youtube):
.
“The Man Who Bankrupt Casinos Has Now Bankrupted the Navy”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=NXGyMsOaOlQ
“Raiding the payroll budget” indeed…
Neo Ranga 11 hour TV anime from the 90s
(Despite the scanty clothes in the opening credits below this is not a fan service show. It’s about orphan sisters inheriting a god and discovering their tribal heritage.) The beginning has the vibes of a Godzilla film.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=TvjS_s9huV4
.
“Neo Ranga Opening Credits”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=mvwuUgdiBzU
Raw Story: Scott Bessent called ‘worst treasury secretary in history’ after baffling move: report
We will grow out of it is the last resort of somebody without a plan. Bessent is squeezed here in a way, no one problem the US faces economically is terrible but everything is going wrong at the same time with no end in sight. Military expenses are not going down, the economy is not turning around, Trump is still in love with tariffs, other countries are reducing their US bond holdings. Trump isn’t going to produce a sensible plan to deal with the situation, Congress won’t pass anything substantial that will help.
Bessent doesn’t really have a lot of options, everything is bad and may get worse. He isn’t good at convincing Trump to do anything useful. The Federal Reserve is looking at possibly pushing interest rates back up, which will make Trump angry and could lead to further financial stupidity.
In his first term Trump suggested that the US should just default and get it over with. His much better team at the time had trouble convincing him that national finance didn’t work like corporate finance and that was a bad idea.
MSN: A massive American starfleet: Trump lays out his futuristic vision for US in space
Nuclear powered interplanetary spacecraft launched by 2028? If he means small probes with little thermal generators that are technically nuclear then OK. If means manned craft he is out of his mind.
When Trump had the Space Force created in his first term in office he was over eager but it was going to happen eventually. Not about manned military space flight but about control of the orbital satellite networks. This talk of a manned fleet is Musk level delusions about Star Fleet forming in our lives.
His speech at Nasa was massively delayed and they didn’t want to hear his delusional speech at best, the room was entirely silent. Unlike a proper military organization NASA is under no obligation to clap just because the president spoke.
CBS – The FBI quietly lowered some of the standards it uses when it conducts background checks on would-be federal agents
Commentary
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-30/domestic-family-gendered-violence-plan-faces-changing-problem/107076220
As a meme seen today on fb noted :
Author unknown.
Ellipsis original. Backdrop image of an aircraft carrier presumably the USS Abraham Lincoln where appalling conditions have driven crew to attempt suicide and near revolt. See :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Abraham_Lincoln_(CVN-72)#Mental_health_on_the_Lincoln_during_Iran_War
Of course, the big question is would all the USoA military stand by and allow it if a military coup against Trump took place or would that trigger a Civil War with the USoA’s military fighting breaking up and fighting itself?
Horrendous options & scenarios really but then I fear that a successful military coup is the best chance the USoA still has. I have nearly zero belief that the mid-terms will be genuine democratic elections if they go ahead at all.
IF/b> they do, VOTE BLUE no matter who please everyone who can. Support and unite behind the Blue 100% too. Last, best hope if, indeed, there is any now.
Otherwise, we get a Nazi USoA Trump variety (already there actually) or a Civil War.
LIFT OFF! Live coverage Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Launch here NASA channel yt.
Iceland appears to have rejected EU accession talks in referendum, reports say
I watched a movie on tubitv.com yesterday. I saw a lot of ads about how data centers are paying taxes, providing jobs, etc. in North Carolina. A bit odd as I am not in North Carolina. But it seems they are now taking their case to the public, instead of just bribing top officials.
Dozens of people rescued from Grand Canyon trails after flash flooding
Church leads tributes for man killed at festival
An act of God.
Roman Space Telescope was launched as planned an hour ago and is now in a parking orbit. After the final burn it will need three months to reach L2 (the same position as JWST). Data should beigin to arrive by the end of the year or early next year.
^ So far so good. It is up and flying!
@227. birgerjohansson : An hour ago already?!
Time flies.. Almost as well as those rockets do.. Perhaps quicker!
Doesn’t seem that long yet. They said 23 mins ago just afew minutes ago on my “live” feed. (NASA yt.)
Perhaps my feed / computer is slow? (Quite likely.)
Just heard payload deployment – Nancy Grace Roman telescope deployment – in about 5 mins time..
Telescope deployed now.. Yes! Success. So far.
Space Mog on yt has a great 9 mins long discussion of the The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope here –
NASA’s New Space Telescope Was Originally a Spy Satellite.
(“Swords into ploughshares” metaphor / adage applies.)
@ ^ Huh. Link not working? Let’s try again here – will this now work?
Press conference on the Nacy Grace Roman Space Telescope to take place at 9 am US time presumably eastern USA time – was mentioned on the NASA launch live feed.
That press conference to be here – Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Postlaunch News Conference (Aug. 30, 2026) in approx 10 mins time as of now.
Assuming my computer is in synch and accurate time~wise.
Space Mog pleads for help esp from Brits Save UK Astronomy YT short.
Ha! I used Google to dig up dirt on Dubya but I had forgotten the details. The wanker protected Japan from a lawsuit over the systematic r*apes of Korean “comfort women”.
.
“…Earlier in his presidency, the Bush administration also intervened from a legal standpoint by siding with Japan in U.S. federal courts. In 2001, when fifteen former comfort women filed a class-action lawsuit against the government of Japan in Washington D.C., the Bush administration’s Justice Department filed briefs urging the court to dismiss the case. They argued that the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty had already legally settled all wartime claims and that U.S. courts lacked jurisdiction—leading to the lawsuit’s eventual dismissal.”
@208 JM said: good case can be made for breaking up the big meat processing companies. Only a handful of companies process the vast majority of meat,
I reply: I Agree. Not only do they have a stranglehold on the market, they have degraded the quality everywhere. My friend has noted that they have sped up the chicken processing to the point that they don’t drain the blood from the chickens and they are full of blood in the package in the market and taste terrible and the ground beef is full of gristle chunks and the still contains ‘pink slime’. UUUGGGHHH!
@18 JM reported: MSN: A massive American starfleet: Trump lays out his futuristic vision for US in space. President Trump on Friday, August 28, envisioned a “massive American Starfleet” of nuclear-powered spacecraft traveling toward Mars while tying space exploration directly to military power.
I reply: in 2024 we created a video titled ‘Spaced Farce’ that envisioned just such a disaster as this. We had to pull it from our site because of the massive theft of all intellectual property to feed the thieving corporations’ AI training.
Head teacher evacuated 900 children minutes before Nepal floods hit school
Let’s Remember Some Publications That Said We Would Get To Mars By 2026
NO, don’t give up! There’s four months left…
AMV – Ghost in the Shell (1995) – “Inner Universe”
Origa, the vocalist, left us much too early.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bd2LThO0PcQ
.
The Sounds – Painted By Numbers
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=3xk8UUdlhFw
Russia says it helped to repel Niger attempted coup
Turkiye, Somalia forces free cargo vessel hijacked by pirates
Zambia opposition leader questioned over ‘treason’ amid election fallout
Trump-shaped ecstasy pills contain dangerous chemical and could be deadly, Dutch group says
Shin Bet confirms spiriting Yair Netanyahu back from Miami due to ‘significant threat’
@ 238
Gee, I wonder which neo-Nazi tech bro gave him THAT idea.
Rhetorical question! We all know it’s Musk.
Trump says Kristen Welker of ‘Meet the Press’ will be reported to FCC
O Noez, reported to the FCC! She should put that on her resume.
Brandon Herrera is a conservative gun enthusiast, but he knows gun safety. He has collected video clips of what NOT to do.
“The Worst Internet Gun Fails #22 – The Darwin Awards”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=l6cJxE1idX4
Donald Trump is now officially a r*pist
.http://youtube.com/post/Ugkx6khu4R7ItnMJhfAF9gFU_JBtq61oWrl-
Man uses robot vacuum to covertly record his wife’s affair, wins divorce settlement but gets sentenced to prison for making an illegal recording — Husband lands behind bars after counter-suit over privacy rights
re Reginald Selkirk@251: Link is broken for me. Changes color when hovering over it, but doesn’t give a link.
CNN: US and Iran trade attacks, marking first major military escalation in a month
The first time it’s been publicly admitted that attacks have occurred. Occasional attacks have been happening on and off as the US has been escorting ships through the strait.
It’s possible that is true, more likely they have most of the mines. This is one of the reasons non-military ships will need escorts for some time. The big cargo ships have such poor maneuvering that they need somebody well in front of the ship to warn them so they have time to turn.
Mother Jones: New Report: Hegseth’s Own Military Brass Warn the Iran War Is Unsustainable
This is a big deal. Both in the leaking of the military classified assessments and that they are so negative. These are not judgements if something is a good idea, it’s a view of of how good the current shape of the military is and how ready they are for missions. The combined report is highly classified , highly sensitive information and only available to a small group of people. Somebody leaking this probably means they think the US forces are in danger of collapse if they continue course.
The issue in this report is that Trump has ordered the military to keep large forces at high readiness in case Trump want to launch an invasion, or air strikes or navel strikes, etc. Trump wants every option open continuously. This is expensive and difficult for operations half way around the planet and has reached the point it is getting in the way of the ability to do anything else.
“30,000 Cycles, 25-Year Lifespan — The Sodium Battery Hitting America This Year ”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=V0Ijuuuz9ww
The Bulwark: Pete Hegseth Is Building a Pentagon Troll Army
Other reporters have shown it’s more then just Pounds but how many is still unclear. This is a major issue and grounds for removing Hegseth immediately. It doesn’t matter exactly what orders Pounds was given or the terms of her being paid. Hegseth’s attempts to control the press reporting on the military overstep what he can legally do but it is a matter for the DOD. Secret partisan meddling in American politics is well outside the range of a acceptable behavior for the DOD. It’s also another great example of “every accusation is an admission”. After years of accusing left leaning online figures of being paid to manipulate politics it turns out that it’s right wing influencers that are being paid.
@251, 252 Another attempt
Man uses robot vacuum to covertly record his wife’s affair, wins divorce settlement but gets sentenced to prison for making an illegal recording — Husband lands behind bars after counter-suit over privacy rights
Trump Crashed NASA’s Press Conference to Praise the Space Telescope He Repeatedly Tried to Kill
Berlin is being blackmailed by hackers, mayor says
‘Moonies’ church leader jailed for two years over bribery offences
MapQuest’s App Surges to No. 1 In Navigation After Refusing to Rename Lake Ontario
Kalshi bans George Santos for life over State of the Union bets
New generation of elm trees could be equipped to beat disease that killed parents
Scientists Discover a Hidden Supervolcano Buried Beneath England
Supreme Court clears way for Trump to keep building White House ballroom
United States to Cut Health Funding to 18 Countries 59% by 2030
Suspected Russian shadow fleet oil tanker boarded by EU forces in the Mediterranean
@265 Reginald Selkirk:
The courts are way to narrow on the issue of standing when it comes to the federal government. The government violating the law harms all Americans, it doesn’t have to be a slap to a persons face or take money from their personal pocketbook.
Hello, Infinite Thread denizens,
Just wanted to let you know that I am alive.
I am still recovering from surgery. I have completed two weeks of physical therapy and have a lot more to do.
I will contribute to The Infinite Thread now, but my ability/time to do so is limited. Many thanks to those of you who have carried on in my absence. Please continue to cover for me. Thank you.
Re: Lynna, OM @ #269…
Been there (though not your specific operation), done that. Take care of yourself first. We’ll cope.
Folliowup to Sky Captain @40, shermanj @295 and 237.
Trump’s plan to import mystery beef from overseas
All In with Chris Hayes • August 28, 2026
“Trump signed an order to import 300,000 metric tons of beef from other countries, to be sold here at a discount. Beef that comes from…well, we don’t really know,” says Chris Hayes.
I also wanted to add this: Thank you wheydt and others who have wished me well. It means lot.
‘Governing from a land of make believe’: Chris Hayes on Trump’s belief he can control reality
“Chris Hayes discusses Trump’s belief that he can control reality as he renames Lake Ontario and claims the Strait of Hormuz is a U.S. territory.”
Link
Trump admin shelves Cyclospora research despite record-breaking outbreak
US Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll submits resignation, media reports say
@275. Reginald Selkirk : Wish such generals would do something much stronger than just resign.
At worst they need to stay and do what they can to oppose to restrain Trump & Kegsbreath and shadow POTUS Miller from within. At best, well, time for them to take the pigeons advice I reckon..
Now he’ll be replaced by a Trump loyalist and the grip of the tyranny the USoA now has will be strengthened and the chances of the least bad alternative for y’all and the rest of our planet – an anti-Trump Military coup diminished.
I fear the current path is taking the USoA in a 1930’s Germany-like direction or, slightly better but not much, an 1861 USoA Slaver vs Free states one.
Wsh I could see better options here, really do, and no, I don’t put any store in the Mid-terms actually working as planned or being fair if they are even held at all.
@273. Lynna, OM : Yikes! Didn’t know about that! Hope you make as smooth and speedy a recovery as possible and wishing you all the best and, as always, my respect and thanks for all you do here making this Infinite thread work.
Please let us know if there’s anything I & others here can do to help.
& Days of Science latest here – Jurassic Forest (insects -ed) Sounds Reconstructed & The Evolution of Pet-Keeping in Primates as well as discussing a new Japanese Ankylosaur fossil, giant whales moving to Greenland waters, rocky planets in the early universe, a solar eclipse captured on Mars plus more. A dozen mins long.
@ ^ Er, that’s ‘7’ Not ‘&’ intended obvs! Dóh!
Also in more seriously sad news seems it will soon be over for the SWIFT telescope. But its now returning to work whilst it can before its fiery demise :
Source : https://www.space.com/space-exploration/missions/nasas-doomed-swift-space-telescope-restarts-science-work-after-rescue-mission-fails
Authoritarian toadies always seem to believe they can use a military coup for their own purposes…
Are you willing to bet money on that eventuality? Everyone running for office seems to think otherwise.
No.
They want my vote, they had better god damn earn it.
Via PBS Newshour ‘What the latest U.S.-Iran strikes mean for oil supplies and maritime safety’ article headline :
Source : https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-the-latest-u-s-iran-strikes-mean-for-oil-supplies-and-maritime-safety
Source : https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-nasas-new-space-telescope-could-help-solve-mysteries-of-dark-energy-and-dark-matter
@269 Lynna, OM: Sounds miserable, hope you feel better.
HAPPY WATTTLE DAY everyone!
Start of Spring as reckoned by many Aussies here (Sept, Oct, Nov = Spring..) too.
https://wattleday.asn.au/
BTW. comment #281 above has now been addressed here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/08/28/its-another-incitatus-moment/comment-page-1/#comment-2310702
Revealing yet again if there were still any doubt what that commenter truly is.
TV ALERT _ Starting in under 30 mins here on c 2 ABC 8.30 pm
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/tv/epg/#/
Trailer for a doco here – Tampa: The Turning Point on the Tampa affair wherea cargo ship carrying refugees was taken over by Australian military forces to prevent those innocent refugees from landing here. See wikipage :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampa_affair
‘Breakthrough’ as Turkmenistan starts fixing ‘mindboggling’ methane mega-leaks
Liberals sweep three seats in boost for Carney after trade tensions with US
Laundry rooms to be turned into cells to tackle prison overcrowding
Welcome back, Lynna! If it’s anything like my knee replacement surgery, the worst should be over soon. The physio was rough at times, but it really paid off.
WNBA player rankings: The top 50 players in the league
PPG = points per game
R = rebounds
A = assists
Thank you, Rob @291. Yes, physical therapy can be tough, but I’ve been working hard at it. I’ll continue to do so. There’s no getting around the need for the daily work.
JM @284, “hope you feel better.” Thank you. Yes, I am feeling better. It helps to be home. It helps to be past the worst of the pain.
StevoR @278:
Thank you. :-)
The people who regularly post here have already been very helpful. It’s good to see that others have picked up the slack.
An Update! From Rachel [Maddow] and Steve [Benen]
Links to the membership page, FAQ page, etc. are available at the main link.
Maddow: Trump shamed by dishonor in betraying U.S. promises to Afghans, Iranians
Video is 9:50 minutes
Renovations for White House bowling alley add to Team Trump’s growing list
First Post: ‘Worthless piece of water’: US Treasury chief Bessent says Strait of Hormuz will be bypassed in two years
He is being terribly optimistic. If the war looks to permanently destabilize the Strait then countries will look for other routes but it won’t be cheap and not all can. It won’t be done in two years. Most of the countries would have to send their oil across Saudi Arabia and sell out of Saudi ports. Which would be handing price control over to the Saudis.
This falls into the same problem that the US had with the previous attempt. There is nothing significant that the US can do directly at this point, this will be targeting banks in other countries that deal with Iran. Unless the government of the countries involved back it up this won’t do much. The Iranian side will be channeled through one bank and the US side through another.
Long-term melatonin use linked to 90% higher heart failure risk
Experts from Genocide Watch say we are in the early stages of an “Anti-Trans Genocide” in America
Do you think that’s extreme? I want to think so, but it’s looking worse and worse every day.
Why this U.S. congressman is fighting back on Donald Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario
U.S. Pentagon defends Pete Hegseth’s post about Canada’s cadet program
Radish sprout mix added to ongoing recall of sprouts linked to salmonella, E. coli outbreak
Kyiv Post: Over 113,000 Russians Flee to Georgia Amid Draft Rumors
The Russian government is still saying no draft is planned but the rumors are spreading among the civilians. I don’t know what a typical number is so I can’t really put a perspective on this other then say it’s high.
The other countries that Russians can still easily go to are also expecting an influx of people, at least on the west side. On the east side options are more limited for countries to visit but going on a really extended hunting and fishing trip is easier.
@ 12, 13, 14, 16, 166
Florida and Texas move to block Flock cameras over privacy concerns
Intersting. There has been widespread and growing anti-Flock sentiment, but these are two very Republican states.
Link
Gregory Bovino, former Border Patrol commander, was under internal investigation when he retired, records show
Republicans push weird conspiracy theory to dismiss data center backlash
Under Trump, the IRS’ audit revenue falls in predictable and damaging ways
“Following sweeping cuts, the tax agency brought in 35% less last year [!] than the year before, and there’s no great mystery as to why.”
EuroNews: Zelenskyy warns ‘Russian airspace will effectively be closing’
Ukraine isn’t saying they will be targeting planes. Rather as Ukraine launches more drones and Russia launches more anti-air defense missiles the air space over Russia will become unsafe. If Ukraine can make this the case it will be a problem for Russia.
Ukraine is mostly talking about Moscow and Saint Petersburg and the area between those cities and Ukraine. This is as much embarrassing as it is a problem. Air traffic is way off it’s peak anyway, the remaining traffic can be routed further east and make the rest of the trip by train. Still, it will mean longer trips, make supply lines more complex and put more load on Russian trains. There will also be a problem is civilian air traffic that just happens to be flying over western Russia, which will have to go way out of it’s way.
re Lynna@307:The Orange Turd (TOT)
Okay then, I think the perfect placement for a huge datacenter should be right next to Mar a Lago. Nobody there wants to be backwards or poor.
Re: johnson catman @ #310…
I’ve thought for a while that announcing the construction of an AI data center adjacent to Mar-a-Lago would be a good idea, if only to watch the ensuing fireworks.
@Lynna: I’m glad you’re caring for yourself, active, and feeling better. Missed you.
The Guardian: Deported Milo Yiannopoulos says he is ‘ashamed’ of support for Trump
It sounds like a start and some degree of awareness of just how terrible the current deportation process is.
Then he goes and says he is upset that he was treated like a MS-13 gang member. Saying he would be fine with criminals being treated like that even though ICE can’t really know the difference when picking up people.
This may or may not be true. ICE doesn’t really care nor would they have the awareness or planning to avoid a known right wing figure like Yiannopoulos. One of the key features of the current ICE is the utter incompetence at even the basic procedures.
Well at least that shows a bit of understanding and empathy. He misses that ICE doesn’t say anything because they don’t want you to have any information but that would require some knowledge about ICE and how it functions, something that most Americans don’t know. Anything they tell you about where you are, why you are being processed and such might come back to hurt ICE. They want you ignorant and unable to defend yourself.
JM @313: “Well at least that shows a bit of understanding and empathy.”
Milo Yiannopoulos (2025-06-08)
Rando: “[Wikipedia]: ‘Papers, Please depicts the life of an immigration inspector at a border checkpoint for the fictional country of Arstotzka in the year 1982.’ And anyone who played it knows that the most likely ending is to get arrested yourself.”
Milo Yiannopoulos (2025-06-05):
Milo Yiannopoulos (2025-07-13): “[Fantasizing about wanking in public if he witnessed an ICE raid.]”
Betty Bowers:
Rando: “Lots of people responding to this by accepting the frame, that he’s surprised to find himself in this position and genuinely remorseful about trump. In reality he’s a serial media manipulator and the whole Come To Jesus act and eating crow on TV is his way into a career here now he’s been deported.”
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Philosopher):
Wikipedia – Martin Niemöller, Imprisonment and liberation
Rando: “Bro specifically tried to be put in a position where he would definitely be involved in murdering civilians?! […] killing civilian sailors is like the whole point of a U-boat.”
They’re also two states with a large population of Libertarians, who have been the most consistent and principled liberal opposition to this particular form of nanny state encroachment.
Ron DeSantis is in trouble after it was revealed that he misappropriated ten million dollars for political activities in September 2024.
This reminds me, Carl Hiaasen has written a lot of novels about crime in corruption in Florida. One of his books will be serialised for cable TV.
.
Nobel laureate explains why ‘trickle-down economy’ aka neoliberalism is not working.
.https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1DSnX8HYGj/
He is such a bad liar.
“Goku Recruits Android 18!”
.https://youtube.com/shorts/_HIHp7MSeLk
The world’s largest EV aircraft takes off.
.
Heart Aerospace was founded in Gothenburg 2018 by Anders Forslund and Klara Forslund. The company moved to USA 2025 and has now produced the world’s largest electric-powered aircraft, at 25 000 lb (11 tons). It can either fly 125 miles (200 km) on batteries alone, or 500 miles (800 km) as a hybrid, with a generator producing power. The service costs will be significantly lower than for conventional aircraft.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=nM86DBOqgPM
Israel critic Ed Markey trounces Seth Moulton in Massachusetts Democratic Senate primary
Putin’s friends finally tell him the truth: Get out of Ukraine to save yourself
I don’t believe it. Putin doesn’t have friends. He just has people who are useful to him.
NASA Selects Blue Origin As Mars Telecommunications Network Provider
Oklahoma City tries to charge farmer arrested at data center debate $17,000 for body cam footage of the incident — accused faces trespassing charge for going over allotted speaking time by 30 seconds at a public debate
Is Russia’s rival to Starlink failing? Here’s what we know.
@320 Reginald Selkirk: The article is about Narendra Modi, Prime Minster of India. He is a friend in the sense of “somebody that I have to deal with and put on a good face in public”. India is too good a trade partner and has too much leverage over Russia for Putin to play hard with Modi. India has maintained a pro-peace policy on paper but they are still directly importing oil from Russia.
They are a key supporter because they are internationally accepted and can import Russian crude, process it into refined oil and export that to other countries. Which is probably why India wants Putin to survive. Putin surviving the war and in control of Russia, desperate to sell oil but still sanctioned and deeply unpopular in the west is best for India. India and China will be able to control the price they pay for oil better. Russia getting wrecked further could reduce exports, if Putin is replaced the new leader could be more interested in being friendly with the west.
‘Catastrophic’: Whistleblower warns Trump’s USPS plot could toss millions of ballots
Yikes!
Followup to comment 325. Also a followup to Sky Captain @83.
Whistleblower: Single Barcode Error Will Stop Mailing 1000s Of Ballots For Trump’s Vote-By-Mail ‘Sh*t Show, AKA ‘Yeah, That’s The Point’
Johnson Catman @310, and whheydt @311: LOL, I agree.
Sky Captain @312: “@Lynna: I’m glad you’re caring for yourself, active, and feeling better. Missed you.”
I’m glad too! I missed The Infinite Thread and the kind of discourse it provides. I’m not yet back to 100% functional, but I’m getting closer day by day.
FBI investigating 153 million US and Canadian driver’s licenses leaked on Russian cybercrime forum, including that of US SecDef Pete Hegseth — data is suspected to have come from an ID-authentication service provider
Russian hacker faces up to 20 years in prison, following extradition and indictment over US phishing campaign that allegedly infected 80,000 PCs — hacker stole victims’ data via remote access
https://www.wonkette.com/p/how-to-fight-climate-disinformation
Iran calls deaths at wedding celebration a ‘war crime’ as US denies targeting civilians
Link
Trump suggests renaming the Strait of Hormuz after himself, causing fresh trouble for the GOP
“The president’s effort to rename Lake Ontario was not popular. He’s nevertheless already eyeing a rebrand for yet another waterway.”
A Giant Hexagon Has Been Spinning at Saturn’s North Pole for Decades. Now, Scientists Found Its Twin
CNN: holidays and they’re hurting the economy. Is he right?
The actual math is too complex to easily describe because short term, long term and overall impact on the economy are not the same. Even that is not the entire picture though, the good of Americans is not the same as the total output of the economy. Trump doesn’t understand any of them, he has just been talking to corporate CEOs too much. CEOs ignore that what is best for the company this quarter might not be best for the US in the long run.
NBC: Healthcare tops the Democrats’ to-do list if they win control of the House in 2026
The big issues are affordability, health care, pulling control of tariffs back to Congress and ending war with Iran.
They have some ideas but no plan for affordability yet. Health care is easy in a sense because their immediate goal is just reversing the cuts that Trump has made. Taking control of tariffs back and setting them at some reasonable level is both good for the US and will infuriate Trump. Ending the war with Iran will be more complex, it isn’t something that Congress should just cut off there needs to be some exit. However, if Trump gives them no alternative then just blocking any further spending on military operations in the area will force a pull back.
The list is indecisive for this late in the campaign. The Democrats should have a more organized plan while recognizing that they will have to modify it later depending on how the election goes.
This is Jeffries saying that. Easy to say, what will matter is how hard they actually go at it. With Blanche as the head of the DOJ they are not going to get prosecutions but they can make the crimes public.
This is very true. The Democrats have to get away from the trend of 2 steps backwards under Republicans and then celebrating the 1 step forward they achieve. The Democrats will have trouble doing anything under Trump but hopefully they try. The Democrats are going to need to be willing to do some windmill tilting over the next two years. With Blanche and Trump in power they are not going to outright win much but they need to show that they are willing to try.
Re: JM @ #335….
…says the man who spends his days golfing, watching TV, ranting on social media, and never spent a day of his life actually working.
Adam Parkhomenko (Dem political strategist): “The iconic weeping willow trees outside the Kennedy Center have been cut down by Trump. [Photos]”
What the Helen of Troy happened to the trees at the Kennedy Center!?!
Joel Shapiro sculpture to be removed from Kennedy Centre amid Trump art purge
Atlantic – What I saw inside the Kennedy Center (2026-04-16)
A paragraph in the article accepts framing Oct 7th as a pogram. The author organized a commemorative exhibit, and Grenell threatened the Jewish audience with removing it if they didn’t sponsor the room. Room sponsoring was new. One was sponsored by a pardoned fraud who paid millions to name it. One room got a plaque in tribute to the intelligence community, named for a a guy who allegedly lied about being in the CIA.
Netherlands moves billions in gold to London in ‘crisis preparedness’ move
Could the man who murdered a Christian missionary and his sons walk free in India?
Donald Trump mistakes Bank of Canada for retail bank
Alanis Morissette sues former tour manager over alleged ‘calculated blackmail campaign’
Carney’s ‘hydronym’ moment is behind a cheeky campaign to raise awareness about Lake Ontario
Coast Guard plane carrying DHS Secretary Mullin makes emergency landing
Trump says he is nominating Hung Cao to be Navy secretary
I don’t know anything about him, but if he was nominated by Trump I assume he is incompetent and corrupt.
Spending deal comes with a bonus: Blocking political control of grants
Tillis urges Trump to fire Hegseth over ‘inept management’ of military
Fox News host says Trump made her husband Transportation secretary ‘because that was all that’s left’
An obvious lie. Whether Trump was lying to Duffy, o Duffy was lying to the audience, I don’t know.
House Democrats block constitutional amendment to lock Supreme Court at 9 justices
Not a great cause for concern, amending the constitution is hard.
Article V
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #349…
Minor historical note…
Ratification by state conventions has only been used ONCE. Due to rural (conservative) domination of state legislatures at the time, ratification by state conventions was used to repeal prohibition.
Creature dubbed ‘Syracuse Figure’ spotted in New York: Is it Bigfoot or an elderly skinny-dipper?
@351
Here’s the actual photograph.
Bigfoot or a human skinny-dipping? Photos of a mysterious creature dubbed the ‘Syracuse Figure’ spark debate
@347 Reginald Selkirk
Longer quote from the article.
That is true but Tillis dances around the obvious and unmentionable for a Republican. Hegseth has taken a hatchet to all female and non-white officers also.
I wouldn’t mind Tillis turing around if it turned out to be a surprise that Hegseth was incompetent. The only surprise is how bad he is at the job. The DOD has gone through a lot of bad heads that acted as messengers between the White House and the DOD. Hegseth is not content with this, he is working hard to implement every bad idea he has and replace the command structure with incompetent yes men.
A follow-up of sorts on Palestine context. Previously Germany.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/06/28/infinite-thread-xxxx/comment-page-5/#comment-2309873Nathan Tankus (US Fed Reserve wonk, Jewish grandchild of holocaust survivors):
Nathan Tankus: “He is the minister of national security, which means he runs Israel’s police and prisons. In other words, he is actually in charge of the prisons this AI slop video is representing.”
Nathan Tankus:
Nathan Tankus:
^ I’d known the Palestinian displacement began at the turn of the 20th century. But I hadn’t heard the hostile assimilation of survivors spelled out before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba#Ottoman_and_British_Mandate_periods_(prior_to_1948)* Citation for 354: Pew – Israeli views of the Israel-Hamas War, Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis see the war very differently (pdf, 2024-05-30)
Clever engineering (in the socialist hellhole that is Sweden 🙂 ). Keeping cooling costs down in summer.
.https://youtube.com/shorts/A7gnRGkdBgk
“Five-metal 2D catalysts could convert CO₂ to CO without needing an extra electrical boost”
.https://phys.org/news/2026-09-metal-2d-catalysts-extra-electrical.html
My question: will it be easier to inject carbon monoxide in exhausted oil and gas wells than carbon dioxide? Will it react with the sedimentary rock easier than co2?
Gloria Steinem, a potent voice of U.S. feminism and co-founder of Ms. Magazine, has died
Live now on yt here – ESA pressconference & / on
BepiColombo’s Mercury arrival begins (Official ESA broadcast) albiet entering the Mercurian orbit is still months away
Live now on yt here – ESA pressconference & / on
BepiColombo’s Mercury arrival begins (Official ESA broadcast) albiet entering the Mercurian orbit is still months away
Cannabis edibles can impair driving, even with blood THC below legal limits
.https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-09-cannabis-edibles-impair-blood-thc.html
ICE accused of arresting parents at school bus stops in Connecticut
Video is 9:51 minutes
Military personnel told last month to stop calling Iran conflict “Operation Epic Fury”
Rusty state of USS Abraham Lincoln after marathon deployment shocks observers
birgerjohansson@357,
CO is a very useful chemical (as well as being highly poisonous!). Among other things, it can be combined with hydrogen to make liquid hydrocarbons (which have a much higher energy density than hydrogen, or I think any chemical batteries yet invented, and being liquid, are much easier to handle than hydrogen). So if you generate hydrogen by electrolysis of water using electricity from non-fossil-fuel sources, you get near-carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuels.
re Reginald Selkirk@363:
It should now be called “Operation Epic Failure”.
I’ve just seen this bright yellow disc in the sky, which seems to be radiating heat as well as light! I admit it looks like the sun, but I’m not convinced that’s the case.
Update~ish 9 mins long approx BepiColombo Is Mercury-Bound! Separation Should Have Happened — ESA Awaiting Confirmation
Lutnick scrambles after falsely saying ‘there haven’t been American deaths’ in Iran war
“A day later, Team Trump has come up with a talking point to explain the commerce secretary’s latest mistake. It’s literally unbelievable.”
@ 351, 352, 366 “Syracuse Figure”
The BFRO report, with two still photographs.
In the news article linked above, these are presented as a synthetic video, serially zooming in on each photo. This made it hard to do side by side comparison. The BFRO report has the two original photos, full-sized and zoomed in.
The lens is totally inadequate, so that when you zoom in enough to make anything of the figure, it is blurry. The alleged distance from photographer to figure is ~ 72 meters.
When I look at the photos, I cannot even see eyeballs. just a shadowy cleft under the brow. My first guess is a chainsaw carving. The subject claims the figure moved and looked at her. Judging from the only two available photos, it could have been rotation of a static figure.
It’s a pretty crappy photo, technically. There are reeds in the foreground which might have misled the autofocus.
Almost 70% of voters in Missouri city vote to recall council member who said yes to AI data center tax breaks — councilor said disagreement over an issue shouldn’t be enough to unseat him
Trump administration pushes to remove tax exemption for private colleges with DEI policies
Dolly Parton’s Walk of Fame star vandalized; repairs underway
Vance’s Antichrist comments are a ‘common belief’, his friend tells BBC
Hmm: m-o-r-e m-o-d-e-r-a-t-e is a strange way of spelling “pro-genocide”.
JM@313, Sky Captain@314,
I doubt even the sketchiest of the multiple far-right outfits sprouting like poisonous fungi on the decaying body of the UK is going to want anything to do with Milo Yiannopoulos; publicly okaying adult sexual exploitation of 13-year-old boys is difficult to live down. He might have to get a proper job.
Lynna, OM@307,
The prospectus the techbros have been putting out in support of data centres is, more-or-less:
For some weird luddite reason, this does not seem to be gaining general public support.
House Republicans decide to do even less work ahead of the midterm elections
Ukrainian intel agencies in Kyiv firefight
<
blockquote>A shootout between two of Ukraine’s top intelligence agencies has wounded at least three security officials, highlighting internal divisions within Kyiv’s security establishment.
On Wednesday morning, a gunfight broke out between Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR), a military arm which handles foreign intelligence, and the State Security Service (SBU), which focuses on domestic intelligence and counterterrorism activities. …
… the SBU took Stepan Kaplunov, deputy commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) that fights for Ukraine, into custody. RVC is a subordinate of HUR.
… Kaplunov is a Russian native who moved to Ukraine after Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014, according to Ukrainian media reports.
While Kaplunov is still a Russian citizen, Moscow added him to its list of “terrorists and extremists” because of his support for Ukraine. …
<
blockquote>
Al Jazeera gives more details and background, but not enough for me to feel I understand what’s going on. I can at least agree with Pres. Zelenskyy (as AJ spells his name) that this is “an absolutely disgraceful situation”.
ICE agent charged with lying about shooting Venezuelan man during crackdown
For why he is not in custody, see @ 144, 145.
Watch: JD Vance ‘extremely sceptical’ over alleged strike on Iranian wedding
He seems more skeptical of this than he does of the antichrist (@373)
US billionaire Leon Black defies summons and sues Epstein panel
Good luck with that, buck-o.
Trump wants Europe to retroactively pay U.S. for past Ukraine aid
Christ, what an asshole.
We Found Her: The Most Absurd General-Election Candidate in America
Trump asks Supreme Court to lift block on USPS plan to restrict mail voting
Tesla’s robotaxi promises are clashing with reality
@ 373
Isn’t Dreher the one who constantly claims he’s under attack by literal demons?
@ 386
I am not familiar with him.
Missouri Supreme Court rules new GOP-drawn map can’t be used for November elections
Ex-KSU student had been dead for days; roommates didn’t notice
Akira MacKenzie @ # 386: Isn’t Dreher the one who constantly claims he’s under attack by literal demons?
Yup.
Reports: RFK Jr. ordered measles deaths deletion; CDC still secretly counts them
PBS Newshour onGloria Steinem’s passing :
Source : https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/remembering-gloria-steinem-and-her-trailblazing-fight-for-womens-rights
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2026-09-02/dark-matter-lux-zeplin-discovery-cautious-results/107097774
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2026-09-04/ig-nobel-prize-2026-zurich-kissing-animals-vicious-friends/107101748
What a non-surprise that StevoR has, again, run away from answering the question above.
State your loss conditions concisely and verifiably (I fully expect you to move the goalposts all over the place otherwise), and make an offer. I will respond with (probably) a smaller amount, because I’m perpetually broke, so you may choose to readjust to that.
“Why doesn’t Venus have a moon? A new study may have the answer”
.https://phys.org/news/2026-09-doesnt-venus-moon.html
.
“Diabetes drug metformin could be repurposed to help slow aging mechanisms”
.https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-09-diabetes-drug-metformin-repurposed-aging.html
FIBA women’s world cup basketball
Team USA leading China 40-27 with 3 minutes to go in the first half.
@397
Final score:
USA 94 – 61 China
Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers, Rhyne Howard all had 14 points
Jackie Young had 13 points
Caitlin Clark had 10 assists
Denver data center continuously waters its lawn even after city announced drought restrictions, enraging residents — it’s unclear if site is breaking the law or using its own recycled water
Romanian prosecutors indict Andrew Tate for trafficking minors, money laundering
Mexico’s military kills avocado-extortion ringleader ‘R5’, one other in surprise shootout
‘Young women are mad as hell’: Why Gloria Steinem ‘knew the fight would continue’
Video is 12:52 minutes. Includes a 2013 interview, and another interview, in which Chris Hayes questioned Steinem. Amazing
@144, 379
ICE officer charged with lying about shooting turns himself in
Man uses spatula to fend off woman threatening workers at SoCal In-N-Out
Remember, the only counter to a bad guy with a baseball bat is a good guy with a spatula. ‽
Christian missionaries at Burning Man evicted in the middle of the night
‘I Truly Don’t Care’: Report Says Fetterman Has Become Apathetic About His Duties—While Advocating For Israel
Raw Story: Trump hurls unhinged threat to blow up global trade: ‘The president has an absolute right’
Normally headlines like that are exaggerations but this time it’s real. Trump has directly said he will block trade with certain countries unless the Federal Reserve does what he wants.
The Federal Reserve is setting their policy based on inflation, not what Trump wants. Sometimes the Fed is slow to reduce the rate when inflation goes down and the economy is good but not right now, right now they need to put pressure on to keep inflation from getting even worse.
The Independent: Trump is pouring more money into Reflecting Pool repairs, with costs surging to nearly $20m
This was originally estimated at < $2 million so this pushes the price to more then 10x the original estimate. This is something like half a dozen contract going to 3-4 different companies, none of which has gone through a public competitive contracting process.
The Guardian: UN to vote on adopting new world map that shows Africa’s true scale
It’s a political argument. The Mercator map is accurate just designed for a different purpose. Maps have sometimes been selected to justify particular political goals but the talk of “cartographic colonialism” is taking it too far.
The classic Mercator map was designed for easy sailing, altering country sizes to keep sailing routes simple and straight. The suggested alternatives are designed to make country areas accurate. There are a bunch of different alternatives depending on how accurate you want the areas and what other compromises your willing to make. No projection of a sphere to a flat map can be perfect in every regards.
I agree with the suggestion as long as we don’t spend a lot of money replacing existing maps, it isn’t a big enough issues to justify that. Swap them out when they need replaced. Pick a preferred map for government documents and encourage schools and universities to use that one. Unless some other map actually suits the issue being looked at.
The Independent: ‘I wouldn’t call it a war’: JD Vance’s jaw-dropper after reporter asks about Iran timeline
Goof by Vance. For legal reasons he probably shouldn’t call it a war but it would be better not to talk about that bit at all. Saying it doesn’t qualify as a war because it hasn’t been violent enough is not a good look.
That is a much better line for Vance. The White House should be pushing that for all public interviews.
Iran was honoring it’s commitments up until the US tore up the deal and started shooting at Iran, after which it can’t really be blamed for fighting back.
Missouri Republican candidate allegedly tried to plant drugs on primary opponent: Investigators
Pentagon rescinds new testosterone screening policy without explanation
I read these articles and appreciate the commenters here. But, I must limit my consumption, for is it all too distressing since it is obvious:
There no power on this planet that can stop the slide of society into another dark ages.
And, importantly, I hope Lynna’s recovery is going well.
Federal ‘Bureal’ of Investigation: Kash Patel Posts Embarrassing Slop Video About How Much the FBI Loves AI
Medieval manuscripts are “biological time capsules” for deadly sheeppox virus
@415 Reginald Selkirk wrote about: Medieval manuscripts are “biological time capsules” for deadly sheeppox virus
I reply: It is a very well done, but grim movie I suggest you watch ‘The Name of the Rose”
OR, just as deadly, take any of Roadkill Fracking Kennedy, jr’s advice.
@416 “The Name of the Rose”
I think I saw that; I am certain that I read the book.
Trump accidentally tells a truth:
Trump says ‘nobody will’ build monuments for him once he’s gone
And hope we tear down everything he touched while he’s here.
Maryland Supreme Court says redistricting ballot question can go to voters
An aggressive mystery animal is attacking people in New Hampshire
It’s certainly not a Bigfoot.
Supreme Court backs Republicans in election ad rate dispute
NYT analysis links U.S. bomb to Iran wedding strike
Video is 7:54 minutes. Excellent analysis.
Wall Street Journal:
Washington Post:
Man digging in backyard during renovations discovers Viking-age silver hoard
Ukraine’s Drones Reach Moscow’s Doorstep, Hit Homes and Sochi Port
Followup to JM @410.
Followup to Reginald @345
Why Trump’s new choice for Navy secretary shouldn’t expect a smooth confirmation process
“If Hung Cao is expecting his Navy secretary nomination to advance effortlessly, he’s likely to be disappointed.”
Judge again blocks Trump’s effort to restrict mail voting as ballots start going out
Ex-Labor secretary drank at work, brought staff to strip club, watchdog says
Link
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/judge-lawsuit-kyrsten-sinema-north-carolina-homewrecker-law-rcna596205
I guess Sinema’s 15 minutes of fame aren’t quite over yet….
WaPo – Trump officials say work will start on triumphal arch within two weeks
Kel McClanahan: “I for one can’t wait to learn how stopping construction on the Arch will jeopardize national security.”
Rando 1: “I encourage everyone to read the history of the MLK Memorial, to appreciate how many decades, how much fundraising, and how many proposals it took before could construction begin. Who knew the President could have just said ‘Make it so’ and cut to the chase.”
Rando 2: “To be fair, Trump makes a lot of promises about things starting in 2 weeks.”
Sanho Tree:
Rando 3: “I think about this all the time because a representative responded, ‘DUCKS CAN FLY!!’ to this, and somebody simply replied, ‘BABY DUCKS CAN’T.’ And I think that sums Republicans’ maximum level of analysis perfectly.”
Helen Kennedy
Rando 4: “there’s a great scene in Downfall where Hitler and Speer are examining a scale model of his plans to remake Berlin as ‘Germania’—while the Russians are closing in on the city. [Video clip]”
Rando 5: “Another fun fact: Speer built a huge concrete cylinder equivalent to the weight of one leg of the planned arch to test the ground. It soon started sinking. It still exists in Tempelhof, Berlin.” [The Schwerbelastungskörper]
NOTUS – HHS cancels infant mortality, postpartum grants to focus on sperm counts and erectile dysfunction
Marisa Kabas:
Rando 1: “Letting newborns die so they can make a boner pill two months before election is a brilliant strategy.”
Rando 2: “It is a brilliant strategy if you’re a eugenicist.”
Rando 3: “Yeah, the root cause of infant mortality is definitely guys who can’t get boners.”
Rando 4: “And they’re doing this in the midst of probably one of the most infamous cases of postpartum psychosis [Lindsay Clancy].”
A Fox clip from April was circulating this week on Bluesky without the air date.
MediaMatters – Fox senior medical analyst says that part of the fertility rate “problem” in the country is fewer teen pregnancies
He even goes on to fearmonger about complications at older ages.
Commentary:
Rando:
* Unknown citation for their chart, but USAFacts corroborated.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-us-fertility-and-birth-rates-changed-over-time//Previously in the Infinite Thread: In 2024, Republican AGs sued over mifepristone, complaining about declining teen pregnancies. And that was worse.
Latest and a very good in my view 30 mins long episode of Planet America here – US-Canada trade war escalates as Trump’s distraction game steps up.
Get Ready for Peak Trump II
Taking a look at some particularly bad misinformation/disinformation …
How a Baseless, Right-Wing Social Media Panic Led to Dramatic Changes at the Census Bureau
Whoah! Pierre Gasly has pole position for Monza! Wow.
Driving the Alpine car which for those who don’t know is a rubbish car & team. Wow.
Remarkably enough he also won here back in 2020 for Alpha Tauri (or Aldebaran as astronomers call it.. ;-) )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Italian_Grand_Prix
F1 underdog breaking~ish news.
@ ^ Qually highlights – official F1 channel Qualifying Highlights | 2026 Italian Grand Prix (Just over 7 mins long.) Unexpected would be an understatement.
Sometimes sport can surpise in simply joyous ways..
I mean it’d be like Bangladesh beating Australia at Test cricket.. Oh wait..
Re: Lynna, OM @ #436…
Back in the day, the answer to “America, Love it or leave it,” was “America, Change it or lose it.” Seems applicable under current circumstances.
Trump accidentaly speaks another truth
Trump says ‘stupidity causes inflation’…
Nearly 2,000 people fall ill in suspected food poisoning in Indonesia
Judge indicates Trump’s pressure campaign could permanently sink Reflecting Pool vandalism case
Link
Link
More details are available at the link, including analysis of electricity generation in Washington State, Tennessee, Ohio, New Mexico, California, China, and New Jersey.
Link
Washington Post EXCLUSIVE: Trove of documents reveals alleged chemical weapons stockpile in Sudan
More details are available at the link.
The Hill: Democrats seek to counter RNC’s ‘Trump-a-palooza’ convention in Dallas
Looks reasonable. The Democrats are going to do something as a counter to the Republican event because there isn’t a Democratic event. It isn’t going to be big though, they are mostly banking on the many protests being held at the same time.
The Republican event is in Dallas and is likely to become a rally for the Paxton/Talarico contest. The contest is close enough that Republicans are getting worried. Plus a small quiet group of Republicans that hope Paxton loses because he is likely guilty of multiple crimes and bad at his job.
Norway has a rocket launch pad!
The German company Isar successfully launched a rocket with multiple satellites from the Norwegian island Andöya (a sutitable location for orbits covering the poles). Scotland will try launching a rocket later this year.
Some spectacular videos with Norwegian mountains and a fjord as a backdrop.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=IlJXLtHvIPM
https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/indonesia-cancels-flights-jakarta-airport-anak-krakatau-volcano-136233965
That volcano is what has rebuilt itself from the 1883 eruption of what most people would call Krakatoa. “Anak Krakatau” means “Son of Krakatau.”
Whheydt beat me to it.
The successor volcano of Krakatoa has been erupting since September 4th. When Mt. Pinatubo erupted forty years ago it injected enough particles in the stratosphere to reduce global temperatures for a year. I would not mind if that happens again.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Reg_TypDDRQ
^ ^ ^ ^
Maybe it is a portent that some world leader is about to die? 🙂
Heather Cox Richardson sums up the strategy of the Right since Reagan, and what has changed during Trump.
“A Sledgehammer to the Republican Party”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=JVSqEa0-oMU
Source : https://www.newarab.com/opinion/algerias-wildfires-show-state-unprepared-climate-chaos
Protecting Trump seems to be the main emphasis:
Link</>
Link for text quoted in comment 455
“Nearly all Americans say government corruption is ‘widespread.’ Blame Trump.”
https://www.ms.now/opinion/trump-government-corruption-poll
Much more at the link.
One week to go to the election. Jonas Blaursen: “The Swedish Election: A Simple Guide”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=u_f2qkYfkww
https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/tommy-tuberville-opposes-contraception-8b3
Satire
Fassbinder anticipated The Matrix by more than twenty years!
The director of Ghost In The Shell made a Polish live action film. Two films based on stories by Stanislaw Lem, one based on the Strugatskys. And plenty of other famous names.
“13 Vastly Underrated European Sci-Fi Movies!”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=a4A1TzMODWg
Trump administration again appeals mail-in ballot dispute to the Supreme Court
Why Are American And European Snipers So Different?”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=T65DpXzwFMc
BTW, drones are beginning to both supplant and threaten snipers, as can be seen in Ukraine.
Inside the Battle to Save One Pioneering General From Hegseth’s Purge. That is a New York Times link.
“Gen. Christopher T. Donahue’s vision for fighting future wars won him powerful supporters around the world.”
This excellent and detailed account shows that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth can turn almost any operation into a shit show.
My conclusion is that Hegseth and Trump are consistent in one way: they always throw out the best people and ideas; and they always replace the best with the worst.
Live Updates: Germany’s Far Right Has Big Lead in Key Election, Exit Polls Show, as reported by The New York Times.
“The Alternative for Germany party was projected to finish first in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. But it was not clear whether it would win a majority — which would propel a far-right party into power for the first time since World War II.”
Minor note…
Since Anak Krakatau is in the news (Indonesia has closed nearby airports, due to ash in the air), there are probably people here old enough to remember a movie called “Krakatoa, East of Java”. Note that Krakatoa (Krakatau) happens to be WEST of Java. It’s east of the southern tip of Sumatra, in the straight (Sunda Straight) between those two islands.
Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nominee lunged at by ‘armed individual,’ campaign says
Behold a man who has never asked himself, “Am I the asshole?”
Trump posted an image of a “next generation” Space Force service dress uniform.
Commentary
Aaron Rupar: “A string of absolutely bonkers Truth Social posts from Trump in the span of about 10 minutes. [Video clip scrolling through them]”
* One post redrew Iran’s borders on a map to resemble his head.
* One post was a state map labelled “New
MexicoAmerica”.Rando 1: “Did he… did he just discover that New Mexico exists?”
Rando 2: “I wondered why he’s so mad at New Mexico and well…” [“New Mexico sues DOJ for blocking access to unredacted Epstein investigative files in Zorro Ranch criminal probe” (Aug 5)]
* One post was an image claiming “The moon is ours.”
Marco Langbroek: “The US has signed the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which states the Moon cannot be claimed by anybody.”
* One post was of Trump on horseback beside George Washington.
Rando 3: “the horses’ legs are the same distance from the viewer yet Trump—sitting—is a head taller than Washington, who was 6’2″.”
Harry Sisson (Political TikTok influencer):
Rando 4: “The idea that making a sitting president answer for criminal charges would distract him from important official duties has never looked more ridiculous.”
The Great Renaming, a cartoon by Tom Tomorrow.
Powerful Category 3 Hurricane Lowell barrels toward Hawaii, prompting Hurricane Warning for Kauaʻi
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/9/7/800092267/community/nu/“>Projection
See also Trump Loses It at Judge in Unhinged Kennedy Center Meltdown
I’ve just found another odd, but meaningless, coincidence. In Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama Northern Italy is destroyed by a bolide strike in 2077 on September the 11th at 9:46 AM GMT. That would be 10:46 CET but the minutes and the day of the year coincide. I suppose that was spotted years ago by somebody else.
Washington Post link
New York Times link
“For Trump’s Former Fixer, a Tortured Path From ‘Rat’ to Reconciliation”
“The president has made peace with Michael D. Cohen, his onetime lawyer who turned against him. But contrary to Mr. Trump’s claims, Mr. Cohen has not recanted the testimony that helped convict his former boss.”
25 years later, 9/11 victims hope newly uncovered records will help illuminate Saudis’ alleged role
‘Case closed’: Police say Bigfoot sightings in Maine were just a man in a costume
@472 Lynna, OM
It’s likely that Trump does find Russia and China easier to deal with. The negotiators for those countries are used to dealing with dictators and trained to manipulate people. When Trump makes stupid demands during negotiations they say positive things, feed his ego, drag out the negotiations and change the topic but never just say no. Canada just said no directly to Trump’s face when presented with demands they would never agree too and went public with the demands to show how stupid they are. That is the sort of thing a petty boss like Trump finds infuriating.
CNN: Trump admin renews Supreme Court ask to let mail ballot rule to take effect ahead of midterms
The DOJ has withdraw it’s appeal for the first case. It’s almost entirely meaningless at this point as the court has issued a second stay that covers the same territory. The DOJ wants to keep only one case going because it means fewer matters to deal with before the post office can move forward on the plan.
My answer would be it’s too late, ignoring the question if the executive branch has the authority to do this it should have been done months earlier and likely last year. This is exactly the sort of thing the judicial branch has an unwritten rule about changing things too close to the election for.
The minor rules about mail in ballot envelope shape are not what matters here. It is what the DOJ wants to argue about because the executive branch can make some claim to authority due to it’s control of the post office.
It’s the list of voters, barcodes and validation that matter. Nothing there is impossible but it will be complex and there will be issues getting everything into matching address formats and validating them. It will take time to build and implement such a system. This is also the part that is probably illegal. The executive branch doesn’t have the authority to decide on the security for the voting system, it’s a matter for congress and the states.
Re: CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @ #471…
Everyone who has read E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen series knows that space force uniforms are black with silver trim. Except for Unattached Lensmen. They wear gray leather.
Link
JM @476, I agree. Good points.
In other news: Taking a look at the Trump administration’s terrible labor record
New York Times link
New York Times link
Follow-up on Milo Yiannopoulos.
Eiynah Mohammed-Smith (Polite Conversations):
Rando 1: “Didn’t he JUST convert to Christianity?”
Eiynah: “Lol yeah it certainly wasn’t that long ago.”
Rando 2: “Reminds me of when Sinead O’Connor became a priest.”
Eiynah: “She wasn’t a horrible person like Milo tho. But yeah quite the twist from ripping up a pic of the pope. And… Didn’t she also convert to Islam?”
Rando 2: “Yep.”
Forbes via RawStory – Hot dog-obsessed Trump
re CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain@484:
And I would bet any amount that the bill would be at very highly inflated prices that would make hot dogs at baseball stadiums seem cheap.
Re: johnson catman @ #485…
I agree with your assessment of the practice. On the other hand, here’s an anecdote of when things go better…
The convention I’m involved with running used a particular hotel once. They were reluctant to set up a snack bar for us, but did under pressure. Initially, the prices were pretty high. Once they saw how much business was going through the snack bar, they started lowering prices, making up the profit on volume. This repeated for a few cycles. The hotel ran out of hotdogs. They bought supplies from other hotels in the area. They ran out of hotdogs. They sent a truck to the nearest Costco and cleaned them out of hotdogs. They ran out of hotdogs. The stripped the Costco of polish sausage (back then, Costco sold Hebrew National polish) and by the end of the con, they were selling polish sausage as hotdogs at prices significantly lower than the hotdogs they were selling at the beginning of the con.
It’s really hard for a gaming of SF convention to convince a hotel about what sort of food service the con-goers are looking for. Gaming and SF convention attendees are not on expense accounts…
NBC – Tesla says first responders may need to push new Cybercab with no steering wheel
From the document: “If necessary, manually turn the front tires by hand to help position the vehicle.”
Rando:
Vancouver strip club slapped with social media ban for sign mocking Trump
Their Instagram account was banned for a sign reading “He can’t handle a lake and now he want’s our lake” in reference to renaming Lake Ontario. They got banned from X for Hate Speech when they posted a picture of their sign reading “Forever Neighbours Never Neighbors”* In response to the 51st state nonsense.
*If you dont get it not the different spellings of Neighbours.
Electrek – If a Tesla Cybercab fleet were profitable, Tesla wouldn’t sell you one
Source : https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/sep/03/palestinian-australian-eyad-shadid-sues-nsw-police-punched-at-herzog-rally-ntwnfb
PC Gamer – 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
Having watched a video of Supply Line, bad food that makes it across the conveyor is ejected from the lunch box at the boxer causing his injury, and then he punches the screen in retaliation. If he weren’t standing back there to get hit, a bin in that spot would sort everything automatically.
Clever ancient Chinese engineering!
This 2,200-Year-Old Waterworks Tamed a Killer River. There’s No Dam. Three Jobs [detailed explanation]
.https://youtube.com/shorts/GPXph3CRRj0
Owen Jones Nigel Farage Is SO Screwed 30 mins long.
32 mins long latest ep of Planet America – Military purges prompt calls for Pete Hegseth to be sacked.
Aussie ABC’s half hour long Foreign Correspondent program here –
Who will save Lebanon?
Saudi Arabia says 73 wounded as Houthis attack civilian and energy sites
Link
Pentagon imposes polygraph tests on military officers as Hegseth’s culture of fear grows
“I’ve never seen polygraphs employed this broadly or at this seniority level,” a retired Navy JAG [Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter] said. “In my experience, it’s unprecedented.”
cloudflare is abusively discriminatory in how it ‘tests if you are an ai bot’ by not letting legitimate alternate or older browsers access sites. The people who run all these sites that use it, in trying to prevent ‘ai plague scraping’ of their sites and stealing all their works, have used a tool that locks out thousands of legitimate viewers.
Paraphrasing the term Cory Doctorow created; the internet is being ‘enshitified’ by crapitallists and ai slop.
ai is artificial. It is NOT intelligence. And, it is like a huge plague of locusts destroying everything in its path.
My entire organization posits this after hundreds of hours of research and analysis by Karen Hou, Cory Doctorow and countless other tech experts. Thus, we will avoid ai like the destructive plague it is.
@488 Militant Agnostic wrote about a Vancouver strip club . . .They got banned from X. .
I reply: I cheer that strip club for being 1) honest and 2) Canadian. We need to make it clear: that site used to be called twitter, now its xhitter (pronounced like one who defecates everywhere like its current owner)