How ProPublica works to address important local and national issues

In the US, local media has been on a steady decline over decades, with local newspapers either closing or being bought up by giant national chains and their local reporting gutted and replaced with general stories that are written for all their newspapers across the country. This means that important local issues do not get covered and local politicians and institutions do not get the close scrutiny they deserve because local media do not have the resources needed to do investigative reporting.

ProPublica has tried to combat this news vacuum by collaborating with local journalists to cover important stories and then using their national networks to provide these stories with greater publicity by having them appear in major media, thus increasing the impact. ProPublica can provide the local allies with the kind of resources needed for on-depth work. This approach has garnered them various awards, including the prestigious Pulitzer and Polk awards that are shared with the local collaborator, giving them recognition that they would not have otherwise had.

In a recent article, they discussed the various successes they have had, such as the one where they joined forces with The Connecticut Mirror to expose how Connecticut’s unique towing laws enabled towing companies to ripping off low-income people by quickly selling the cars they they towed.
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What is the point of this summit?

Trump, currently in China for a summit meeting with the Chinese president Xi Jinping, is definitely in an inferior position.

Donald Trump has landed in Beijing, the first visit to China by a US president in nearly a decade, as he seeks to mend power and prestige weakened by the war in Iran.
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The war has entered its third month, with Tehran tightening its grip over the strait of Hormuz and Washington struggling to turn a fragile ceasefire into a lasting settlement.

Behind the scenes, US officials have spent weeks urging China – Iran’s biggest oil customer and one of the few powers with leverage in Tehran – to pressure the Islamic Republic into reopening the strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply ordinarily passes, while accepting US terms for peace.

The US recently sanctioned several Chinese firms accused of assisting Iranian oil shipments and supplying satellite imagery allegedly used in Iranian military operations. China condemned the measures as “illegal unilateral sanctions” and invoked a rarely used blocking statute prohibiting Chinese entities from complying with them.
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Is agnosticism a viable stance on the existence of God?

I am busy today and in lieu of an original post, thought that I would post an old article of mine that was published in the UK magazine New Humanist in July 2011. I moved my blog to FtB in 2012 from my earlier platform where it started in 2005, so the article appeared before many current readers would have started reading the blog and they may find it of interest.

The topic was whether being agnostic on the question of the existence of God was a viable position to take. I argue that the answer is no, hence the title of No Doubt that I gave the piece.

That magazine used to have a more playful, irreverent style that you can see just below the header. It later became more staid.

AI is making spam moderation harder

Whenever a new person tries to comment on a post here, the WordPress platform that this blog uses has filters to check if they could be spam. A visit to the spam folder shows that each day tens, if not hundreds, of potential comments are summarily dispatched to the spam folder without my ever seeing them. If a comment passes those checks, then it is sent to me for moderation, to enable me to make sure that it is not spam. Once I approve the first comment from a new person, subsequent comments from that same person go through immediately, so spammers have to make the first comment plausible.

It used to be fairly easy to identify spam comments that make it past the filters and get to me. They were usually poorly written with typos and grammatical errors, they would have links to sites that had nothing to do with the post, they would often have effusive but generic compliments on the content of the post and my writing, and they would usually arrive a long time after the post originally appeared.

But in a recent post of mine about the blame game that has begun over the stagnation in the Iran war, I received the following comment for moderation.
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Evaluating the Democratic candidates for CA governor

In the previous post, I discussed the peculiar features of the so-called ‘jungle primary’ system in California to be held on June 2 that is used to select which two candidates will face off against each other for the governorship in the general election in November. I also discussed the two leading Republican contenders whom I will definitely not be voting for.

Before we get to the Democratic candidates for governor, we have to remember that outgoing governor Gavin Newsom, while good at gaining visibility by trolling Trump on social media is far from progressive and very much a protector of the wealthy. His actions seem to be designed to gain media attention and name recognition to lay the groundwork for a run for president in 2028. John Nichols exposes the hollowness of Newsom

Gavin Newsom made headlines this winter by vowing to defeat a proposal for a one-time 5% tax on billionaires in the state…Last year, a Reuters-Ipsos poll reported that a whopping 86% of Democrats said “changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority.”
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While pandering to business elites, Newsom has slashed budgets to assist the poor and near-poor with healthcare, housing and food – in a state where seven million live under the official poverty line and child poverty rates are the highest in the nation.
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California primary election dilemma

The American election system is pretty convoluted at the best of times and foreigners can be excused for being utterly baffled by it. One general feature of this system is that political parties are weak entities and what membership in them means is informal and largely determined by the individual states and can vary. The party leadership does not get to choose which candidates represent them in a general election. Instead that is decided in a preliminary election called a primary election held several months before the general election in which voters get to decide which of the candidates should represent their party in the general election.

Who gets to vote in their primary election is not controlled by the parties either. In some states, when one registers to vote, one is asked to pick a party preference. Based on that, one is sent a party ballot for the primary election. But it is usually easy to switch from one party registration to another. In some other states, one can just show up on primary day and ask for ballot for one party and vote for a candidate from that party to be the nominee in the general election. Doing so automatically registers you as having that as your party choice. In the next election, one can choose to vote for a member of the other party and your preference gets switched. This sometimes results in devious voting where a Republican (say) votes in the Democratic primary for the candidate that they think the Republican could beat most easily in the general election. It is not clear if this strategy has ever worked but the idea periodically gets promoted.
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Good grief! How can people do this?

Most of us take some steps to look our best selves, especially if we are going out in public. Usually those are limited to how we dress and some minimal efforts at grooming. But as with so many things, there are those who take this to an extreme, leading to a phenomenon known as ‘looksmaxxing’, one of the recent trends that have had the suffix ‘maxxing’ added to it to give the cachet of sounding cool and hip.

Perhaps the most viral example of maxxing is looksmaxxing, a cultural phenomenon that originated in the incel (a.k.a. involuntary celibate) community, encouraging boys and young men to take intense, often dangerous, measures to enhance their physical appearance. That includes undergoing intrusive surgeries, using steroids to bulk up, or using a hammer to smash your facial bones in hopes of accentuating one’s jawline. Looksmaxxing promises one sole goal: that by being exceedingly and unattainably hot, men can achieve the utmost confidence, social clout and sexual success.

The article goes on to describe other forms of maxxing, all involving taking some ordinary activity to the extreme, including food, with things like protein and fiber being targeted for maxxing.

On TikTok and Instagram, the protein hysteria reached a fever pitch. Influencers showed off their high-protein diets filled with protein powders, eggs, egg whites, cottage cheese, poultry and red meat. Some also pushed for eating more high-protein snacks, ranging from meat sticks and cold cuts to homemade chicken chips made from seasoned, ground meat. Everyone was hellbent on maxing out on the macro.
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That’s all to say that our food was never intended to be maxxed. Certain nutrients and so-called superfoods were never meant to be heavily prioritized at the expense of other beneficial ingredients. Regardless of how severe the spectrum is, maxxing implies that more is always better. It’s in the name. But that’s not what healthy eating is all about. Per the World Health Organization, a healthy diet is made up of four basic principles: adequacy, balance, moderation and diversity. Maxxing, for the most part, fails to satisfy three of those principles — adequacy, balance and diversity.

It also raises the question of how much food maxxing is necessary in the future to undo the damage of previous maxxing trends. First, it’s protein. Then, fiber, which many U.S. adults aren’t eating enough of already. What’s next? Carb-maxxing to compensate for the lack of carbohydrates in our diets? Or perhaps, raw greens-maxxing?

As the age-old adage goes, “too much of a good thing is a bad thing.” It feels especially pertinent in a new era of maxx eating.

It seems to me that people are disregarding the health of their future selves by emphasizing short-term gains and ignoring the possibility of serious long-term damage to their bodies. We will not know the real consequences of such actions until these people age and by then it may be too late to repair any damage. We can place some of the blame on so-called influencers who boast that they have become successful by doing all these things and selling products that they claim they used to achieve that look, whether that is true or not.

Kash Patel channels Captain Queeg

Recently The Atlantic magazine ran a lengthy investigative piece detailing the excessive drinking of FBI director Kash Patel. (I wrote about it here.) Patel was enraged and immediately rushed to file a $250 million defamation lawsuit against the magazine and the article author Sarah Fitzpatrick. Legal observers said that Patel’s lawsuit was not well-founded and likely to lose, and thus would be yet another waste of taxpayer funds. But filing lawsuits is what the members of the Trump clown car do for the flimsiest of reasons.


Fitzpatrick and the magazine were defiant and indeed she said that since the lawsuit she had heard from a great many current and former FBI officials who wanted to provide more dirt on Patel. The results of the fresh outpouring have been released in another article by Fitzpatrick that makes Patel look even worse, someone who seems incredibly childish and obsessed with branding his name.

After my story appeared, I heard from people in Patel’s orbit and people he has met at public functions, who told me that it is not unusual for him to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words “kash patel fbi director,” as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: ka$h. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with “#9” there as well. One such bottle popped up on an online auction site shortly after my story appeared, and The Atlantic later purchased it. (The person who sold it to us did not want to be named, but said that the bottle was a gift from Patel at an event in Las Vegas.)
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In March, Patel and his team brought at least one case of bourbon to the FBI’s training facility in Quantico, Virginia, for a “training seminar,” where Ultimate Fighting Championship athletes provided mixed-martial-arts instruction to aspiring FBI agents and senior staff. At one point at least one bottle went missing, which caused the director to “lose his mind,” according to clients of Kurt Siuzdak, a retired agent who has assisted FBI agents, including whistleblowers, with legal issues. Siuzdak told me that multiple agents contacted him for legal guidance after Patel began threatening to polygraph and prosecute his staff over the missing bottle. “It turned into a shitshow,” Siuzdak said. Other attorneys told me they received similar calls from FBI employees regarding concerns about Patel’s bottles.

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Going into debt to visit Disney parks

In an earlier post, I wrote about how the effort to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ had resulted in many young people nowadays going into debt in order to try and match and even exceed the lifestyles that they saw their peers boasting about in social media. It appears that people are also willing to go into deep debt to satisfy their desire to repeatedly visit Disney theme parks which are very expensive, even though they are not children nor have children. Amelia Tait writes about these people who have acquired the label of ‘Disney adults’.

So-called Disney adults have become a subject of online fascination, with many people now questioning how much it costs to be one.
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In June of 2024, the loan-comparison website LendingTree surveyed more than two thousand Americans and found that almost a quarter of Disney visitors had gone into debt for a trip. According to the survey, Gen Z-ers like Ashley were the most likely to take on Disney debt, which corresponds with a boom in young adults visiting the parks—either by themselves, or with friends their age—despite Disney World being a place stereotypically catering to families. Still, a high percentage of Disney debtors are parents: among the seventy-seven per cent of survey respondents who said that their children had visited a Disney park, forty-five per cent reported going into debt for a trip, with parents of young children owing an average of almost two thousand dollars. Anecdotally, the figures shared in forums and on social media can climb much higher; one couple told a YouTuber last year, for instance, that they’d taken out a roughly seventy-thousand-dollar loan partly for Disneyland trips.
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