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…
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