The fierce intensity of small town politics

Carmel-by-the-Sea is very small upscale town near where I live, where Clint Eastwood and Brad Pitt own homes and rich people own vacation homes. It is a quirky place that has some very strange laws that derive from its early history when it was incorporated in 1916 as a place for artists of various kinds.

One of the many quirks is that the houses have no street numbers, a topic I wrote about a few years ago, looking into the history of that issue. Currently homes are identified by specifying ““Lincoln Street 3 southeast of Fifth Avenue” or other formulations. Any measure to introduce street number arouses fierce opposition from some residents, even though they seem to be in the minority.
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The bizarro world of Trumpian economics

Trump has released his big tariffs plan and most observers are stunned, not just by the size and scope of the tariffs ,but also by the bizarre reasoning that has been given for the numbers

It is clear from the reasoning given for the sizes of the tariffs that Trump sees things in very simplistic terms. He thinks that the US should have a trade surplus with every other country and that if it has a deficit, that must be because those countries are engaging in unfair trade and should be punished accordingly. That is how he arrived at his tariff numbers.
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Wisconsin and Florida elections

There were three major elections yesterday, two for congressional seats in Florida and one for a state supreme court justice in Wisconsin. The Florida seats were vacated by the resignations of Matt Gaetz and Michael Waltz. Gaetz, a controversial figure accused of having sex with underage girls as well as using drugs, did not resign because of that but because, incredibly, Trump had nominated him for the position of attorney general. But when even some Republicans viewed his nomination unfavorably, he withdrew it.

Waltz resigned because Trump appointed him as national security advisor, where he has recently been criticized for allegedly including the editor of The Atlantic magazine in a high-security chat group over the unsecured commercial channel Signal. It turned out that this was not the only unsecured group chat Waltz had created to discuss sensitive information, having created 20 more on Signal. He seems sloppy and incompetent to say the least.
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TV review: The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram

On March 15, 2019, a man walked into two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand during Friday prayers and killed 51 people and injured 89 others. He live-streamed the first attack. The. following month on April 27, another man walked into a synagogue in San Diego during Passover and started shooting, killing one woman and injuring three others. On October 12, 2022, yet another man shot and killed two people and injured another outside a gay bar in Bratislava, Slovakia. In each case the person was caught and the authorities concluded that they were so-called ‘lone wolf’ attacks in that the perpetrator acted alone.
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Top health officials resign over Kennedy’s misinformation and lies

[UPDATE: ProPublica reports that “Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging”. That has all the signs of Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism.]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent years peddling crank theories about vaccines and yet the Republicans in the Senate approved of his nomination to be the head of the department of Health and Human Services, the cabinet office that oversees almost all the agencies that deal with public health, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

During his hearings he claimed that he was not a vaccine skeptic but anyone who has followed his career knows that he was being disingenuous at best, if not outright lying. And sure enough, top career people in those agencies are quitting, with one of them Dr. Peter Marks, pointing to Kennedy’s misinformation and lies as the reason.
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Tesla cybertruck looks like a piece of junk

It is astonishing how shoddy is the construction of Elon Musk’s Tesla Cybertruck, with parts of the body falling off especially at higher speeds, because they had been pasted on with glue and the adhesive failed after some time, especially in colder weather.

@olgag.87 Left my comments, was not translating him, but he says similar things and even more funny things #sybertruck #elonmusk #fypシ #car ♬ original sound – OlgaG

That is not the only part that is falling off. The A-shaped piece of trim along the top at the two sides over the window also has been falling off for the same reason.This is dangerous for other users of the road, since flying metal parts can cause serious injury and damage. How long before Tesla gets sued?

Tesla has stopped all Cybertruck deliveries but isn’t saying it’s because of the glue used on the Cybertruck. Tesla is only saying Cybertrucks are on a “containment hold,” which is a vague designation by design. A containment hold is a proactive stopgap used by auto manufacturers to address quality issues or defects on vehicles before they reach customers. This is a serious measure that indicates significant problems with the vehicle’s construction. Automakers don’t have to explain why a vehicle or vehicles are in a containment hold, and companies aren’t limited to the time they can be in containment holds, either. For now, Tesla is simply keeping Cybertrucks away from dealerships without acknowledging any issues.

Now, the automaker has issued another recall, the eighth one since the truck was released, involving over 46,000 Cybertrucks produced between November 13, 2023, and February 27, 2025. The NHSTA notes that the warning is for the aforementioned cant panel separation and that fixing it will require extra reinforcements and an adhesive that is not susceptible to “environmental embrittlement.”

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Science? We don’t need no stinking science!

The latest global rankings on university research by the journal Nature has been released and China has vaulted into the lead, with US universities sliding rapidly down.

In the last decade, a profound shift has taken place in global academia that has fundamentally altered the hierarchy of scientific research. China, once considered a peripheral player in cutting-edge science, has now ascended to the forefront of academic excellence. The latest Nature Index rankings reveal an astonishing trend: nine of the world’s top 10 research institutions are now Chinese, with Harvard University being the sole Western presence in the upper echelon.

This seismic transformation, while the Trump administration is instituting deep cuts in funding for research and shutting down the Department of Education, underscores not only China’s scientific prowess but also its strategic vision for global leadership in innovation and technology. To fully appreciate China’s meteoric rise, one must look back at the academic landscape a decade ago. When the Nature Index Global rankings were first released in 2014, only eight Chinese universities made it into the top 100. Today, that number has more than quintupled, with 42 Chinese institutions now ranking among the world’s best, surpassing the 36 American and four British universities in the list.
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Israeli snipers targeting Palestinian children?

Israel has started bombing Gaza again and there are horrifying reports that their snipers are deliberately targeting children.

On August 24, four-year-old Mira Al-Darini had just woken up to a hot summer morning in a crowded displacement camp, located between a local prison and the mediterranean sea in Khan Younis, when the sound of Israeli military tanks and gunfire erupted. Panic ensued. Mira was standing outside her family’s tent, clutching a sandwich her mother made for breakfast when a bullet struck her in the head.
…

Suddenly, Mira’s entire face was covered in blood, and we knew our daughter was shot in the head.” Witnesses said Mira was fired at by an Israeli military drone armed with a gun.
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This is what a police state looks like

You are walking along a public street in daylight when suddenly you are surrounded by people dressed in black with masks on their faces who then handcuff you and take you away in unmarked vehicles to an unknown destination and not allowed to contact anyone. This is what happens routinely in authoritarian countries where the rule of law has broken down and death squads operate with impunity.

But this happened on Tuesday on the streets of a Boston suburb to a Fulbright graduate student from Turkey attending Tufts University.

Dramatic footage had emerged on Wednesday evening of the moment US immigration officials, wearing masks and hoodies, detained the Tufts University doctoral student in Massachusetts in the street, handcuffed her and bustled her into an unmarked car.

Ozturk was detained on Tuesday by federal immigration agents, and on Wednesday was being held at the South Louisiana Ice processing center, according to the government’s Ice detainee locator page.

The video, taken from a security camera on a building, shows Ozturk walking along the street when she is approached by several masked figures, who forcibly take her phone and backpack and place her in handcuffs. The officials, some with badges around their neck, all have their faces covered.

After she screams, an unseen onlooker can be heard responding.

“Is this a kidnapping?” asks the bystander, who appeared to be recording the arrest, footage that later circulated on social media.

In separate security-camera footage, the agents can be heard responding: “We’re the police.”

The bystander replies: “You don’t look like it. Why are you hiding your faces?”

Here is video of the event.

What the newly released JFK files reveal

Trump has ordered the release of a whole trove, over 80,000 pages, of formerly classified CIA and FBI documents purportedly dealing with the assassination of president Kennedy in 1963. The killing has been the source of endless conspiracy theories about who was responsible, throwing doubt on the official Warren Commission finding that it was the work of Lee Harvey Oswald working alone.

David Price has done a quick sampling of the documents and estimates that less than 20% of them deal with the actual events leading up to that day and those who are expecting bombshell revelations are going to be disappointed. However, he says that there is a lot on interesting information that is revealed about how the CIA (and FBI) operates because Trump has released information that is usually redacted.
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