Deep Thought

Tim Curry did Muppet Treasure Island, the Muppets should do Rocky HorrowThe next Muppet movie should be a remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

That is all. 

The Joys of a Cleaver

A few years back, I got a cheap meat cleaver at Target.

I really like it.

I use it a lot, not just for things like breaking up a turkey carcass.

Just tonight, I chopped up come cabbage with it, it was an amazing goodatthat, and then hand washed it immediately.

It has a lot more uses that I had originally thought, even if one does not consider it's obvious application, threatening people who intrude in my kitchen.

FWIW, I have never threatened anyone with my cleaver, though I have joked about the possibility. 

This is Nuts

Donald Trump is claiming that he has pardoned Tina Peters, the former county clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, who was convicted of convicted of three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with the secretary of state, and sentenced to 9 years in prison.

She did all this in an attempt to create false evidence of a "stolen" election in 2020. 

With all of the pardons that Trump is issuing lately, my reader(s) might wonder why this pardon is noteworthy.

It's pretty simple.  All of the above charges are State charges, and the President has no authority to do so.  (Well, at least he lacks the authority until the six corrupt Supreme Court Justices make yet another ruling rivaling the awfulness oif Dred Scott v. Sanford.)

Unfortunately, the so-called journalist out there are selling it as a, "Some experts say," as opposed to it being bat-shit insane, because there has been too much in the way of media mergers:

President Donald Trump said Thursday that he has pardoned Tina Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado who was convicted in state court on felony charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

“Democrats have been relentless in their targeting of TINA PETERS, a Patriot who simply wanted to make sure that our Elections were Fair and Honest,” wrote Trump in a post on Truth Social. “Today I am granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election!”

It was unclear whether Trump was asserting that he has the power to free Peters from state prison. She is serving a nine-year sentence. Presidents have the power to pardon defendants convicted in federal courts, but previous presidents have not claimed that authority in a state case.

Unclear?  Seriously? 

………

The Constitution gives the president the power “to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States.” The Supreme Court has interpreted that language as referring to federal crimes, not those charged by states.

In a lengthy letter to Trump this month, however, Ticktin disputed that traditional understanding.

“The issue which needs to be answered whether our founders understood or intended when they wrote that the President had the Power to Pardon offenses against the United States, if it meant the states or only the federal government. Did they mean the one central authority, or did they mean the plural, meaning the states which were united?” he wrote.

Ticktin conceded that the claim that the president could pardon people for state crimes “has never been raised in any court” but said Trump should assert that authority in Peters’s case.

It's never been raised in court because the argument is complete bullshit.

Anyone who is a serious journalist should be calling that bullshit out.  This Washington Post reporter clearly is not serioius. 

Headline of the Day

Jurors in Sandwich Thrower Case Found Charges ‘Bunch of Baloney’

—Bloomberg

I have only one thing to add, whoever wrote this hed should never have to buy themselves another drink.

Not a Fan of Gerrymandering, But

In response to Texas redistricting and Trump bullying, Virginia Republicans, who will shortly have control of both state houses and the Governor's mansion, have rolled out a redistricting plan of their own, which will take the current 6D — 5R delegation and make it a 10D — 1R.

I'm pretty sure that the 6 Supreme Court corrupt conservative justices will find a way to invalidate this, even though they blessed the Texas redistricting, because ……… The Aristocrats.

Virginia Democrats threatened to go nuclear on the GOP in their retaliatory mid-decade redistricting, potentially deleting as many as four Republican seats to create a map where Democrats win 10 out of 11 districts.

Don Scott, speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, was asked about redistricting at a meeting of the Virginia Property Owners Alliance. In response, he replied, "10-1 is not out of the realm to be able to draw the maps in a succinct and community-based way," according to Punchbowl News' Ally Mutnick.

To quote Sean Connery reading David Mamet's screenplay, "They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way!"

Damn

The lobbyists strike again.

Once again, lobbyists for the military-industrial complex win, and right to repair for the military was cut from the latest military spending bill.

F%$# the  lobbyists and the so-called moderates who did this. 

Congress has released the final version of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and critics have been quick to point out that previously proposed rules giving the US military the right to repair its equipment without having to rely on contractors have gone missing.

The House and Senate versions of the NDAA passed earlier both included provisions that would have extended common right-to-repair rules to US military branches, requiring defense contractors to provide access to technical data, information, and components that enabled military customers to quickly repair essential equipment. Both of those provisions were stripped from the final joint-chamber reconciled version of the bill, published Monday, right-to-repair advocates at the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) pointed out in a press release.

Support for the military's right to repair is so broad, and it's one of the few issues where liberal Democrats in Congress are aligned with President Trump. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tim Sheehy (R-MT) even introduced a bill over the summer that would have legislated "fair and reasonable access" to necessary parts and information that would enable the US military to fix gear faster than farmers with broken John Deere tractors. That bill, referred to the Senate Armed Services Committee in July, hasn't budged since.

The real problem is that the DMCA makes this a favored profit source for too many business.  It needs to be relealed.

A Feature, Not a Bug

In news that should surprise no one, algorithmic pricing can raise prices and short circuit competition.

Well, duh.  That's why they spend the money on things like RealPage.

It's a way for capitalists to collude to raise prices with plausible deniability.

It's also why the same sort of algorithms are used to discriminate against potential renters, etc.

It's turtles all the way down. 

Headline of the Day

Trump’s Primary Problem Isn’t Aging, It’s Narcissism

—Mike the Mad Biologist, on the fact that Trump is Nucking Futz.

He's right, you know.

………

The fundamental issue is that Trump is, and has been, mentally ill: when I use the word narcissist, I do not mean that he is a self-absorbed asshole (though he is). I mean that he is often delusional and does not perceive reality in any way that could be described as accurate. Moreover, he does not recognize that he is ill and takes no steps to control his illness; in fact, he has established significant structures to prevent the intrusion of reality.

Outside of The Guardian and The Huffington Post, which have discussed this in detail with clinical professionals, the only media outlet that has even come remotely close is Politico (?!?), which last week described Trump as a twelve year-old child.

His longstanding mental health problem and the inability to recognize it is far more dangerous than any possible aging.

Yep.  

Gee, Ya Think?

I'm not a big fan of corporate consultants.  

Mostly, they state the3 blatantly obvious, and give permission for companies to behave unethically (I'm looking at you, McKinsey)  and charge millions of dollars for this.

That being said, Gartner just stated the obvious and provided a very real public service when they recommended that companies not use AI browsers because their security is complete pants.

Everyone with half a brain should know this, but everyone is also afraid that they will be blamed for causing the tulip AI mania to collapse, so they remain silent:

Agentic browsers are too risky for most organizations to use, according to analyst firm Gartner.

The firm offered that advice last week in a new advisory titled “Cybersecurity Must Block AI Browsers for Now,” in which research VP Dennis Xu, senior director analyst Evgeny Mirolyubov, and VP analyst John Watts observe “Default AI browser settings prioritize user experience over security.”

The analysts’ definition of an AI browser encompasses tools like Perplexity’s Comet and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas that include two elements:

• An “AI sidebar” that offers users the chance to summarize, search, translate, and interact with web content using AI services provided by the browser’s developer
• An agentic transaction capability that allows the browser to autonomously navigate, interact with, and complete tasks on websites, especially within authenticated web sessions.

………

But if you decide the back-end AI is too risky, Gartner recommends blocking users from downloading or installing AI browsers.

Gartner’s fears about the agentic capabilities of AI browser relate to their susceptibility to “indirect prompt-injection-induced rogue agent actions, inaccurate reasoning-driven erroneous agent actions, and further loss and abuse of credentials if the AI browser is deceived into autonomously navigating to a phishing website.”

Shorter version:  AI browsers are a Petri dish for phishing. 

Maybe, Don't Buy Bloated Death Mobiles?

US consumers are finding cars too expensive. 

For years it has seemed no sticker price was too high for American car buyers. Even as average new car prices approached $50,000 this year, dealers fretted more over depleted inventories than losing customers to sticker shock.

Those days are coming to an end.

Increasingly stretched consumers are starting to draw the line on what they will pay for a new car, according to dealers, analysts and industry data. 

Car buyers are downsizing, buying used vehicles, taking on longer car loans and holding out for deals.

It should be noted that cars are like hamburger, you pay for them by the pound.

A Cadillac Escalade weighs 2½ times as much as my Toyota Corolla.

………

For the U.S. auto industry, 2025 was supposed to be a banner year fueled by tax cuts and a deregulatory wave. Analysts predicted a third-straight annual sales increase as automakers, who had been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic and semiconductor shortages, finally got their factories running full steam. Now forecasts predict muted or no growth for the year and more of the same in 2026.

Also, people remember just how much dealers overcharged in the years immediately following the height of the pandemic.

People still have a chip on their shoulder about that. 

Primary Jeffries

Henry Cuellar, in addition to being a morally corrupt DINO, was indicted in 2004 for taking bribes from a Mexican bank and an Azerbaijani oil company.

In a transparent attempt to get him to switch party, Donald Trump pardoned him, which was not a surprise, but Hakeem Jeffries effusively praised Donald Trump's pardon.

The obvious conclusion is that Jeffries is aware of more corruption in the House Democratic Party Caucus, and doesn't want to turn over those rocks.

Also, it shows his default position is to support the incumbent, no matter how bad they are for the party and the American people.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday backed President Trump’s decision to provide a preemptive pardon for Rep. Henry Cuellar, suggesting the corruption charges against the longtime Texas Democrat were so “thin” that he wouldn’t have been convicted anyway.

“I don’t know why the president decided to do this, [but] I think the outcome was exactly the right outcome,” Jeffries said in an interview with CNN.

………

But in the case of Cuellar, the Democratic leader has taken a softer approach. AndWednesday, following Trump’s pardon, Jeffries questioned the legitimacy of the corruption charges against him. 

“Listen, the reality is [that] this indictment was very thin to begin with, in my view,” Jeffries told CNN. “The charges were eventually going to be dismissed — if not at the trial court level [then] by the Supreme Court, as they’ve repeatedly done in instances just like this.” 

Sorry, no.  Just no.

He should not be the House Democrat's leader, and he should not be in Congress at all.

Also, there is an interesting coda to all of this, in an admission that his pardon was an explicit attempt to bribe Cuellar to switch parties, raged against Cuellar's "Disloyalty" for not switching parties.

Donald Trump is angry that Rep. Henry Cuellar is running again as a Democrat rather than switch parties after the president pardoned the Texas congressman and his wife in a federal bribery and conspiracy case.

Trump blasted Cuellar for “Such a lack of LOYALTY,” suggesting the Republican president might have expected the clemency to bolster the GOP’s narrow House majority heading into the 2026 midterm elections.

Cuellar, in a television interview Sunday after Trump’s social media post, said he was a conservative Democrat willing to work with the administration “to see where we can find common ground.” The congressman said he had prayed for the president and the presidency at church that morning “because if the president succeeds, the country succeeds.”

But in the case of Cuellar, the Democratic leader has taken a softer approach. AndWednesday, following Trump’s pardon, Jeffries questioned the legitimacy of the corruption charges against him. 

………

“Listen, the reality is [that] this indictment was very thin to begin with, in my view,” Jeffries told CNN. “The charges were eventually going to be dismissed — if not at the trial court level [then] by the Supreme Court, as they’ve repeatedly done in instances just like this.” 

………

Federal authorities had charged Cuellar and his wife with accepting thousands of dollars in exchange for the congressman advancing the interests of an Azerbaijan-controlled energy company and a bank in Mexico. Cuellar was accused of agreeing to influence legislation favorable to Azerbaijan and deliver a pro-Azerbaijan speech on the floor of the U.S. House.

Of course, this explicit attempted bribery does not matter, because the Supreme Court made Donald Trump above the law.

Another Reason to Support Platner in Maine

Janet Mills, Chuck Schumer's choice, has a long record as a stooge of predatory business.

At a time when Democratic voters are demanding new, antiestablishment leaders, the Democratic Party’s power brokers are pushing a seventy-seven-year-old candidate for a key 2026 Senate race who’s spent the past six years as governor vetoing collective bargaining rights for workers, tax increases on the wealthy, renter protections, and tribal sovereignty protections, according to a Lever review.

That candidate, Maine’s two-term governor, Janet Mills, entered the 2026 Democratic primary race last month to take on Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) as the hand-picked candidate of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Her opponent is Graham Platner, a forty-one-year-old oyster farmer and populist candidate running on delivering Medicare for All and breaking up monopolies. He’s faced scrutiny for past postings in online forums and a tattoo from his time in the military.

Since entering the race, Mills’s campaign has highlighted her stances on a host of progressive causes, including her labor advocacy and her efforts to protect health care and abortion rights.

But the governor’s veto pen tells a different story, say her critics.

When bills arrive on her desk, “there’s a perception that she’s mostly concerned with business interests,” said Andy O’Brien, a former Maine state representative and the current communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO union federation, speaking in his personal capacity. “She’s very good on social issues like reproductive rights, LGBTQ issues, and the environment, but when it comes to economic issues, she’s very conservative.”

………

Just months before she announced her Senate bid, Mills ended Maine’s 2025 legislative session by striking down a bill supported by labor groups that would have permitted farmworkers to discuss their pay and working conditions with one another without threat of retaliation from their employer, as well as file complaints to a state labor relations board.

Her veto letter explaining the decision cited concerns about “disruptions” to agricultural businesses caused by a “new regulatory burden.”

………

Mills, the granddaughter of potato farmers, has made blocking worker protections for these laborers a hallmark of her time in the governor’s mansion. 

………

In 2024, she killed a bill banning restrictive noncompete agreements that hamstring worker mobility. That same year, she vetoed another piece of legislation that would have strengthened workers’ collective bargaining rights by banning anti-union intimidation tactics used by employers

In previous years, she blocked efforts to stop employers from punishing employees who took state-guaranteed paid time off, killed a permitting reform bill to streamline offshore wind developments because it included a provision mandating union jobs, and vetoed a modest labor bill that would have required the state government to merely study the issue of paper mill workers being forced to work overtime without adequate compensation.

 Other vetoes:

• A bill prohibiting retaliation for using the state mandated leave rights.
• Campaign finance reform bill.
• Increasing taxes on the rich.
•  The creation of a rape kid database.
• Landlord protections.

I think that this is rather more significant than Reddit posts and a profoundly ill-advised tattoo.

•  

Stupid, but Occasionally Entertaining

Yes, I know, this does narrow this down much, so I'll note that this is the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™, aka Elon Musk.

Musk came up with a wicked new feature for Ecch (formerly Twitter) where the country of initial login became available on a user's profile.

To be clear, I mean, "Wicked," in the New England vernacular, which is a positive adjective.

While there are some obvious privacy issues, this level of transparency does provide an ample opportunity for much amusement and even more schadenfreude.

You see, many of the most popular MAGAt posters turned out to be the equivalent of Nigerian 419 scammers.

Elon Musk’s social media site X has rolled out a new feature in an effort to increase transparency—and unwittingly revealed that many of the site’s top MAGA influencers are actually foreign actors.

The new “About This Account” feature, which became available to X users on Friday, allows others to see where an account is based, when they joined the platform, how often they have changed their username, and how they downloaded the X app. 

Upon rollout, rival factions began to inspect just where their online adversaries were really based on the combative social platform—with dozens of major MAGA and right-wing influencer accounts revealed to be based overseas.

“This is easily one of the greatest days on this platform,” wrote Democratic influencer Harry Sisson.

'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

— Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn) October 16, 2015

Sorry, Mr. Sisson, but you are wrong.  Who can forget Leopards eating peoples faces or the, (since deleted) "Just came back from the centrist rally," tweet

………

Dozens of major accounts masquerading as “America First” or “MAGA” proponents have been identified as originating in places such as Russia, India, and Nigeria.

In one example, the account MAGANationX—with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading “Patriot Voice for We The People”—is actually based in Eastern Europe.

In the grand scheme of things, this ain't much, but it's worth a laugh. 

 

Linkage

• It’s Official: The Original Theatrical Cut of ‘Star Wars’ Is Coming Back to Theaters (Gizmodo) Han shoots first, no ring around the Death Star.  Someone finally pried George Lucas' finger from the original.  Sweet.
• Welcoming the Wolf at the Door (Barn Raiser) Wolves are good for the environment, as are all apex predators.
• “Burnt a Hole In Me”: Yarvin’s Nazi Origin Story (Mind War) How the tech bro's favorite philosopher learned to love Nazis.
• Suspect Arrested in Inquiry Into Pipe Bombs in D.C. Ahead of Jan. 6 Riot (New York Times) Surprising bit, he's black, unsurprising bit, he's a MAGAt.
• The trustbuster advising Mamdani who could bring aggressive approach to affordability (Gothamist) Lina Khan.  Hope that she kicks ass in New York.
• Elon Musk's Grok AI Is Doxxing Home Addresses of Everyday People (Futurism) What a surprise, yet another Musk project is complete crap.
• Game Theory Explains How Algorithms Can Drive Up Prices (WIRED) This is a feature, not a bug.  Pricing algorithms are about looting.
• Science journal retracts study on safety of Monsanto’s Roundup: ‘Serious ethical concerns’ (The Guardian) The "Independent Study" was bought and paid for by Monsanto.

Have some Szechuan Dan Dan Noodles: (you can substitute veal for the pork)

Was it Over When the Germans Bombed Pearl Harbor?

85 years ago today the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

John Belushi died way too young.

Well Imagine That

From Reason magazine, we have a report that shows that mRNA COVID vaccines do not have increased mortality, in fact, morbidity, including long COVID, has decreased.

When JFK, Jr. has lost Reason, he's lost everyone.

A few years before he took over the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called COVID-19 shots the "deadliest vaccine ever made." More recently, various anti-vaccination activists have been claiming that the mRNA vaccines are causing a turbo-cancer epidemic.

A huge new French study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network deflates those claims and confirms the safety and efficacy of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. The researchers followed 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals for nearly four years. They found not only that vaccinated people have a 74 percent lower risk of death from severe COVID-19, but also that those individuals have a lower risk of death, period. Specifically, people who received the shots have a 25 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality.

Because COVID-19, is associated with increased cancer rates, blood clots, heart attacks, etc.

As for the turbo-cancer claims, the researchers report that the incidence of tumors among vaccinated adults is 769 per million. For the unvaccinated, the rate is versus 853 per million. In other words, vaccinated adults were about 15 percent less likely to be diagnosed with cancer than those were unvaccinated.

The researchers sought to control for various confounders, such as a healthy-vaccinee effect, where healthier individuals are more likely to opt for vaccination, or a frailty-related bias, where those in poorer health may avoid it. They also note that vaccinated individuals in their study were generally older and tended to have more co-morbidities, such as obesity and chronic illnesses, which would usually be associated with an increased risk of dying. (The different results, they note, might be partially explained by the fact that vaccinated individuals tend to be more socioeconomically advantaged.)

Get your f%$#ing shots (I did, though I got the the adjuvent based Novavax), and wear your f%$#ing masks.

The Hero We Need

As you may be aware, Glassholes are back, but this time, it's the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ that is selling spy spectacles masquerading as a VR headset.

Some influencer wannabee was making funny noises on the New York City Subway and filming reactions for a TikTok, and a woman snatched the Ray-Bans off of his face and broke them in two.

Good on her, and bad on the skeevy cretin who was filming people without their knowledge:

A New York subway rider is going viral after a TikToker accused her of breaking his Meta AI glasses, a moment that instantly made her a folk hero among privacy-conscious internet users.

The eyewear, which can discreetly record video, has been criticized as a creeping surveillance threat. Many online viewers argued that the woman simply did what others have only joked about doing.

While the TikToker insists the incident was unprovoked and filed a police report, the internet has already taken her side, celebrating her as the anti-AI vigilante of their dreams.

………

In the description on another video, he claims he did nothing to provoke this woman.

“She was like 12 feet away from me and I wasn’t addressing her, I was just making sounds that I and others thought was hilarious for a video to post,” he wrote. “There were so many different routes one could take instead of breaking someone else’s $300 glasses such as asking nicely to not post it or blur my face.”

Ummm....No.

It's your job to get affirmative permission before filming people in an attempt to create a funny video.

Alan Funt you ain't.  (Also, he got waivers signed for anything that he showed) 

Well, That Explains His Outrage at the EU

As the reader(s) of my blog are no doubt aware, I am not a fan of the EU, but I am even less of a fan of Elon Musk, who just got fined €120 million for violations of the Digital Services Act.

Short version, the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™'s blue check-mark plan is deceptive and facilitates fraud.

Whoocoodanode that the biggest bunco artist of the 21st century could be facilitating fraud?

Elon Musk’s X became the first large online platform fined under the European Union’s Digital Services Act on Friday.

The European Commission announced that X would be fined nearly $140 million, with the potential to face “periodic penalty payments” if the platform fails to make corrections.

A third of the fine came from one of the first moves Musk made when taking over Twitter. In November 2022, he changed the platform’s historical use of a blue checkmark to verify the identities of notable users. Instead, Musk started selling blue checks for about $8 per month, immediately prompting a wave of imposter accounts pretending to be notable celebrities, officials, and brands.

Today, X still prominently advertises that paying for checks is the only way to “verify” an account on the platform. But the commission, which has been investigating X since 2023, concluded that “X’s use of the ‘blue checkmark’ for ‘verified accounts’ deceives users.”

This violates the DSA as the “deception exposes users to scams, including impersonation frauds, as well as other forms of manipulation by malicious actors,” the commission wrote. 

For Elon, it's just professional courtesy for fellow professionals in his field. 

Interestingly, the commission concluded that X made it harder to identify bots, despite Musk’s professed goal to eliminate bots being a primary reason he bought Twitter. Perhaps validating the EU’s concerns, X recently received backlash after changing a feature that accidentally exposed that some of the platform’s biggest MAGA influencers were based “in Eastern Europe, Thailand, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and other parts of the world, often linked to online scams and schemes,” Futurism reported.

Again, this is a feature, not a bug.

Although the DSA does not mandate the verification of users, “it clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified, when no such verification took place,” the commission said. X now has 60 days to share information on the measures it will take to fix the compliance issue.

Expect no compliance, followed by malicious compliance.

X’s fine also included DSA violations due to the lack of transparency and accessibility of its ad repository. The DSA requires platforms to make certain details about ads public so that researchers and users can “detect scams, hybrid threat campaigns, coordinated information operations, and fake advertisements.”

Rather than making that information accessible, X apparently was guilty of “excessive delays in processing” when researchers sought access. And once the data was shared, X excluded “critical information”—”such as the content and topic of the advertisement, as well as the legal entity paying for it.”

That makes it harder to determine who’s paying for what ads. In the context of election ads, X’s failures risked obscuring the origins of false or misleading claims in ad campaigns, EuroNews reported.

Again, a future, not a bug.  If it weren't for fraud, Ecch would not be selling any ads at all. 

If there is any justice in the world (spoiler, there isn't) Elon would spend the remainder of his life in prison, as would Ellison, Zuckerberg, Andreeson, Trump, etc.

How Can They Both Lose?

In this case, the entities in conflict are Amazon and Perplexity.

The former is a retail and eCommerce giant, and the latter is one of the increasingly ubiquitous AI companies.

Amazon has sent demand letters demanding that Perplexity stop offering its users access to its comparison shopping comparison features on Amazon.

Amazon is claiming that this is insecure, and Perplexity is claiming that Amazon does not want its users to find better deals which make Jeff Bezos' monster less money, including showing them non-Amazon sources for things that they want to buy.

Both accusations are probably true.

Amazon has told Perplexity to get its agentic browser out of its online store, the companies both confirmed publicly on Tuesday. After warning Perplexity multiple times that Comet, its AI-powered shopping assistant, was violating Amazon’s terms of service by not identifying itself as an agent, the e-commerce giant sent the AI search engine startup a sternly worded cease-and-desist letter, Perplexity wrote in a blog post titled “Bullying is not innovation.”

“This week, Perplexity received an aggressive legal threat from Amazon, demanding we prohibit Comet users from using their AI assistants on Amazon. This is Amazon’s first legal salvo against an AI company, and it is a threat to all internet users,” Perplexity lamented in the blog post.

Perplexity’s argument is that, since its agent is acting on behalf of a human user’s direction, the agent automatically has the “same permissions” as the human user. The implication is that it doesn’t have to identify itself as an agent.

………

If Amazon is to be believed, then Perplexity could simply identify its agent and start shopping. Of course, the risk is that Amazon, which has its own shopping bot called Rufus, could also block Comet — or any other third-party agentic shopper — from its site.

Amazon suggests as much as its statement, which also says, “We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions whether or not to participate.”

Perplexity claims that Amazon would block the shopping bot because Amazon wants to sell advertising and product placements. Unlike human shoppers, a bot tasked with buying a new laundry basket presumably wouldn’t find itself buying a more expensive one, or getting lured into buying the latest Brandon Sanderson novel and a new set of earphones (on sale!).

What Perplexity is doing is creating the sort of "lite" version of the adversarial interoperability proposed by Corey Doctorow.

It's pretty likely that the DMCA prevents this, which is all the more reason to abolish the DMCA.

Important Context

For all the furor over what is clearly a war crime, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth's extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean in the name of drug interdiction, it should be noted that these sorts of activities are in fact routine for elements of the US foreign policy and state security apparatuses.

From at least the Bush administration, and including the Obama years, so-called "Double Tap" strikes were routine. (Yes, I know, it's Matt Taibbi, who has gone f%$#ing nuts, but the point still stands)

This was where an attack was launched, and when first responders approached to provide aid, they were targeted as well. 

Taibbi, as is his wont, makes his story (what I can read, I don't subscribe) about Democratic Party hypocrisy, but the bigger point, and one that he misses, is that the entire US polity, regardless of party, has been aggressively engaging and encouraging war crimes.

War crimes at the heart of American empire, regardless of who is office, and there will be payback.

Self Regulation is to Regulation as Self Importance is to Importance

Case in point, the Virginia Bar, which has refused to investigate a complaint against not-interim-US-Attorney for flagrant violations of legal codes of professional conduct.

When you have lawyers policing lawyers, you have no policing nor any legal professional standards.

In case anyone was wondering whether state bars would step up to hold anyone accountable if the Trump administration sends cronies to cosplay as U.S. Attorneys and fire career prosecutors so they can file bad faith criminal cases, the Virginia State Bar has helpfully answered: LOL, no.

Last month, the Campaign for Accountability filed ethics complaints in both Virginia and Florida against Lindsey Halligan, the insurance lawyer serving as the Interim-But-Not-Legally-Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging she’d violated multiple rules supposedly governing members of the bar. In response, Virginia sent a polite letter explaining that it would pass on looking into allegations of a pattern of misconduct and would rather leave it to the courts. “Whether criminal indictments were obtained through material misrepresentations of fact and done for political purposes falls within the authority of the court to determine and not this office.”

………

In fairness to the Virginia State Bar, the most egregious allegations — the ones involving Halligan’s illegal actions as a squatter pretending to be a U.S. Attorney and her shady effort to ramrod through a falsified indictment in a desperate bid to beat the statute of limitations — may well have been properly within the court’s purview. While every adult with a frontal lobe already suspected that the judge would find that Halligan’s misadventures compromised the cases, there’s nothing wrong with the state bar exercising prudence and steering clear of those allegations until the court acted. For the record, the federal judge presiding over these matters has since confirmed that Halligan possessed no more authority than “any private citizen off the street — attorney or not” and kicked the indictments as void.

The problem with the “we have to defer to the courts” excuse from the Virginia Bar is that the ethics complaint raises more issues beyond the status of the indictments. Issues that explicitly fall outside the authority of the court to determine. By shrugging off the whole complaint over the limited issue of the indictments, the Virginia Bar created a troubling zone of unaccountability.

The purpose of a state bar, much like it is for other private professional groups with authority to supervise their members is 2 fold:

1. Protect their members from accountability.
2. Ensure that these professional organizations retain their power and prestige.

 

A Stopped Clock Moment

Images from WikipediaIt looks like Donald Trump finds Kei Cars kawaii, (かわいい, meaning cute) and wants to make them legal in the United States.

These tiny vehicles, limited by Japanese Law to having engines no larger than 660 cc engine displacement, 47 kW, and 3.4 meters long are available in Japan as normal(ish) passenger cars, sports cars, and tiny pickup trucks.

During his Wednesday announcement regarding shifting fuel economy regulations, President Donald Trump dropped a surprise victory for car enthusiasts here in the United States. While outlining how his new plans will improve the affordability of new cars in America, Trump announced that he has tasked U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy with clearing the regulatory deck to allow small cars of the sort sold in Asia, such as Japan's kei cars, to become available in the United States.  

………

Trump explained how he saw these small cars during his recent trip to Asia, which he described as both “cute” and “beautiful,” but was told they could not be sold in the United States due to regulations. The president's remarks suggested he thought that silly, and that these small machines could be sold at a more affordable price point than other traditional models. Trump also touted how smaller cars are more efficient thanks to their smaller engines, and specifically named brands like Honda and Toyota as potential sources for these machines.

For those who are not familiar, kei cars are a segment of vehicles that are quite popular in Japan. They are built to strict dimensional standards, and must feature an engine no larger than 660 cc. The form factor can range from pickup truck to mid-engine sports car and everything between. They’re absolutely tiny however, with many being utterly dwarfed by the likes of the Mazda Miata.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how well they will do in America, the land of 5,500 pound death machines.

Yeah, This is Literally the Worst Thing to Do

In response to high pricing (not high cost, high prices) of pharmaceuticals, the Trump administration is writing higher drug prices into international trade deals.

This isn't lowering prices, it's just hurting other people.

The Trump administration’s position on drug prices is that Americans pay too much while other countries don’t pay nearly enough. A new trade deal with the United Kingdom is addressing that imbalance, raising prices the national health system will pay for new medicines in exchange for tariff exemptions on U.K. pharmaceutical exports valued at about $3.5 billion a year.

The deal announced Monday is an update to a broad trade deal the U.S. struck with the U.K. in May. While the countries describe this new deal as an “agreement in principle,” it sets a precedent that could shape pharmaceutical pacts the Trump administration is still pursuing with other countries.

Before the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) can use a new medicine, it must first be evaluated by the government’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which assesses a drug’s cost effectiveness to the health service. NICE’s current cost effectiveness benchmark is a range of £20,000 to £30,000 (about $26,412 to $39,618) per quality adjusted life year. That means a cost-effective drug should lead to the equivalent of one additional year of health and improved quality of life for no greater than £20,000 to £30,000 more than the cost of the current standard of care. Consequently, a drug shown to be safe and therapeutically effective in clinical trials may end up being turned down by NICE because it is not cost effective, though the agency said it applies a higher threshold for medicines developed for ultra-rare conditions.

 This is ineluctably evil.

Headline of the Day

Elon Musk Could 'Drink Piss Better Than Any Human in History,' Grok Says

—404 Media, noting just dysfuynctional his AI system has been made in service to his ego.

Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ must have a penis the size of a tic-tac.

Elon Musk is a better role model than Jesus, better at conquering Europe than Hitler, the greatest blowjob giver of all time, should have been selected before Peyton Manning in the 1998 NFL draft, is a better pitcher than Randy Johnson, has the “potential to drink piss better than any human in history,” and is a better porn star than Riley Reid, according to Grok, X’s sycophantic AI chatbot that has seemingly been reprogrammed to treat Musk like a god. 

Grok has been tweaked sometime in the last several days and will now choose Musk as being superior to the entire rest of humanity at any given task. The change is somewhat reminiscent of Grok’s MechaHitler debacle. It is, for the moment, something that is pretty funny and which people on various social media platforms are dunking on Musk and Grok for, but it’s also an example of how big tech companies, like X, are regularly putting their thumbs on the scales of their AI chatbots to distort reality and to obtain their desired outcome. 

………

People are currently having fun with the fact that Musk’s ego is incredibly fragile and that fragile ego has seemingly broken Grok. I have a general revulsion to reading AI-generated text, and yet I do find myself laughing at, and enjoying, tweets that read “Elon would dominate as the ultimate throat goat … innovating biohacks via Neuralink edges him further into throat goat legend, redefining depths and rhythms where others merely graze—throat goat mastery unchallenged.”

 

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

I'm thinking I may have some orthopedic issues.

I'm going to cuddle the sh%$ out of my cats. 

Scientific research has confirmed that the vibrations produced by a cat’s purr, ranging between 25 and 150 Hertz, can accelerate bone healing and improve tissue repair.

Cats purr naturally during rest, stress, or pain, and these frequencies stimulate bone density and promote… pic.twitter.com/Ac6aQdmxV3

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) December 3, 2025

I'm Moving Up in this World

After an oft delayed review of my blog comments, I spam flagged 3 posts.

They were all just links to prostitution websites.

Here is a hint to would be hooker spammers:  Wait until I post about prostitueion or sex work.

At least then, you will be on topic. 

The Nakedly Corrupt Supreme Court Needs to be Broken

And it is not just the 6 conservatives.

Doe the past 25 years, the liberals on the court have refused to call the bat-sh%$ insane rulings, particularly in the shadow docket, while refusing to call out the partisanship, corruption, and profoundly bad lawyering of their colleagues/

In yet another unsigned  ruling. the Supreme Court allowed the racially driven Texas mid census redistricting to proceed.

Basically, the Court decided to make up its own facts to justify their decision.

Roberts Court Republicans use shadow docket to refuse to allow its precedents to be applied because it would be an electoral disadvantage for the Republican Party

And in doing so shows its typical unbridled contempt for federal judges who try to apply rules other than “Trump wins”:

Notably, in assessing “irreparable harm” that Texas would face, the court also stated, “The District Court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.”

This is, however, a function of the timing of the Texas legislature’s action — not the challengers or three-judge district court (whose 2-1 opinion was authored by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a Trump appointee and former Texas Supreme Court justice) — and it’s astounding to see an unsigned Supreme Court order accusing a lower court of such a “improper[]” act in this fashion.

[…]

But on Thursday, Kagan continued, “this Court reverses that judgment based on its perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record. We are a higher court than the District Court, but we are not a better one when it comes to making such a fact-based decision.”

Noting that the Supreme Court’s order “disrespects the work of a District Court that did everything one could ask to carry out its charge” and “disserves the millions of Texans whom the District Court found were assigned to their new districts based on their race,” Kagan went on to detail the district court’s actual trial work and legal conclusions regarding the racial gerrymandering claim that is all but ignored by the Supreme Court’s order.

“You would never guess it from the majority’s order, but under this Court’s precedents, a district court’s factfinding about electoral districting—’most notably, as to whether racial considerations predominated in drawing district lines’—is reversible ‘only for clear error,’” Kagan wrote. 

Sorry, but Kagan's dissent is far to mealy-mouthed.

The Supreme Court has become a threat to the Republic. 

It has been such since well before Bush v. Gore.

It is imperative for the citizens of the United States to use all constitutional levers of power to address this. 

Grand Juries are not Buying their Bullsh%$

A federal grand jury no-billed in response to the mortgage fraud accusations against New York Attorney General Letitia James.

I think that enough of the general public has come to understand the nature of the Trump Department of Justice, and they are no longer giving the prosecution the benefit of the doubt. 

The Justice Department failed Thursday to secure a new indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James after a judge dismissed the previous mortgage fraud prosecution encouraged by President Donald Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.

Prosecutors went back to a grand jury in Virginia after a judge's ruling halting the prosecution of James and another longtime Trump foe, former FBI Director James Comey, on the grounds that the U.S. attorney who presented the cases was illegally appointed. But grand jurors rejected prosecutors' request to bring charges.

It's the latest setback for the Justice Department in its bid to prosecute the frequent political target of the Republican president.

Prosecutors are expected to try again for an indictment, according to one person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the case.

This is a good thing now, and it will be a good thing in the future,because it will force prosecutors to work to get azn indictment.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm beginning to have doubts about the accuracy of statistics from a post-DOGE Bureau of Labor Statisticsx.

The fact that their latest numbers have initial unemployment claims falling to the lowest number in 3 years.

I'm going to call bullsh%$ on this, particularly since continuing claims have are trending upward:

Applications for US unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest in more than three years, indicating that employers are still largely holding onto workers despite a wave of recent layoff announcements.

Initial claims decreased by 27,000 to 191,000 in the week ended Nov. 29, a period that included Thanksgiving. The weekly claims data can be particularly choppy around holidays. The figure was below all estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists.

The four-week moving average of new applications, a metric that helps smooth out volatility, fell to 214,750 last week. That’s the lowest since January, according to Labor Department data released Thursday.

………

While continuing claims — a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits — retreated to 1.94 million in the week ended Nov. 22, they remain near the highest since 2021. The low-hire, low-fire job market has kept a lid on initial applications for unemployment benefits, but it has also limited out-of-work Americans’ ability to find a new job.

US companies shed payrolls in November by the most in over two years, driven by small businesses, according to ADP Research data released Wednesday. That report, alongside the weekly claims figures, will help inform Federal Reserve officials as they decide whether to lower interest rates for a third-straight meeting next week.  

 As I've noted before, we are already in a recession, or at l;east 80% of the population is.

The Swedes Are Not Known for Their Senses of Humor

But they should be.

Even Ingmar Bergman, who is better known for his brooding films directed a very good comedy, Smiles of a Summer Night  which I rather liked, even with subtitles.

The humor definitely has been effected by the dark cold winters of Scandanavia, but unlike, for example, Russian humor, which tends to be dark, Swedish humor is more wry and playful. 

This Swedish pilot's walk around of the Saab Gripen is very funny.

Well Deserved Fall

After an entire career of failing up, and  the immiseration of millions of people, it looks like Larry Summers is seeing some incredibly well deserved karma.

First, the American Economic Association has banned Larry Summers for life.

Personally, I hope that this ban continues for its full term, and that the actual length of this sanction will be brief.  (If Mr. Summers could dine on excrement while shortening the ban duration it would be sweet)

The American Economic Association (AEA) has accepted Lawrence H. Summers' voluntary resignation from membership and, pursuant to the AEA's Policies, Procedures, and Code of Professional Conduct, has imposed a lifetime ban on his membership. In addition, effective immediately, the AEA has imposed a lifetime prohibition on Mr. Summers' attending, speaking at, or otherwise participating in AEA-sponsored events or activities, including serving in any editorial or refereeing capacity for AEA journals. The AEA condemns Mr. Summers' conduct, as reflected in publicly reported communications, as fundamentally inconsistent with its standards of professional integrity and with the trust placed in mentors within the economics profession. Consistent with longstanding AEA practices and to protect the integrity and confidentiality of AEA processes, the AEA will not comment further on individual matters or the specific considerations underlying this determination.

The AEA is committed to upholding the highest standards of professional conduct and to fostering a safe, respectful, and inclusive environment for all members of the economics community.  The AEA affirms its expectation that all members adhere to the AEA Code of Professional Conduct and the AEA Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, and Retaliation, and remains dedicated to maintaining professional environments in which economists of all backgrounds can participate fully, and with dignity and respect. 

Meanwhile, writing in The Crimson,  the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Harvard alumnus states the obvious, that the Cambridge, Massachusetts school activelhy and aggressively covered up its eager involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, particularly the involvement of Summers:

In 2019, Jeffrey E. Epstein was charged with the sex trafficking of minors. That charge triggered a wave of recriminations across the nation, including at some of America’s most elite universities. In the decade since his first arrest in 2006 for soliciting prostitution with a child, Epstein had nurtured close connections with some of the most prominent academics in the country.

Those recriminations also reached Harvard. While Harvard President Drew G. Faust had forbidden the University from directly accepting his money after a 2008 child-sex conviction, between 2010 and 2015, Epstein facilitated over $9 million in donations from associates like Leon Black to support work at Harvard — with the knowledge and encouragement of Harvard development staff.

………

Almost a year after that first report, the University concluded its investigation, and took formal action against just one member of the Harvard faculty: Martin A. Nowak. Nowak was “disciplined” for his ongoing professional relationship with Epstein. His Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, funded with the help of Epstein, was shuttered, and he was banned from serving as a principal investigator on any academic research for two years.

………

From 2003 through 2019, Summers had been a central figure in Epstein’s relationship to Harvard. He had attended events hosted by Epstein and planned private meetings. Besides Epstein’s lawyer, and now-professor emeritus, Alan M. Dershowitz, he was by far the most prominent of the Harvard elite at the center of Harvard’s Epstein relationship.

Yet Summers is essentially invisible in the official accounts. A gift to support the work of Summers’s wife was mentioned in a footnote to the 2020 report, though obscurely, since she does not share Summers’s name. And never subsequently has Harvard disclosed anything more about his ongoing relationship with Epstein, which continued, as we’ve now learned through the published Epstein emails, until Epstein’s 2019 arrest.

………

There’s little need to reform Larry Summers. He will, I suspect, pass quickly from Harvard’s orbit. But it is the culture that would have allowed Larry Summers to be protected that must now be called to account. How could Harvard have allowed this production of Hamlet without the Prince? And will it now commit to a practice that will not protect the elite among us, while shaming those not quite elite enough?

No,Mr. Lessig they will not commit to such a practice.

Harvard's entire brand is built on elite privilege.

People want to go to Harvard because it is the closest thing US higher education to being a "Made Man" by the Mafia, only the scope of criminal activity by Harvard alumni is vastly greater than organized crime syndicates could ever dream of.

Bye Felicia Doge

So the White House is shutting down Elon Musk's DOGE initiative.

I'm stunned that they are doing this, after all the success that Elon has had running twitter, creating autonomous driving for the masses, creating a supersonic underrground transit system, his success in creating home solar energy comoany, creating a non-Nazi artificial intelligence bot, his uncanny asbility to play the video game Diablo IV, graduating with a bachelors degree in physics, his accomplishments as a spouse and father………

I'm shocked that he failed at DOGE as well.

Less than a year after Elon Musk took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, brandishing a bedazzled chainsaw to showcase the Department of Government Efficiency’s cost-cutting spree, the most significant cut was the agency itself.

Donald Trump’s DOGE disbanded eight months earlier than scheduled, Reuters first reported on Sunday.

“That doesn’t exist,” Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told the outlet when asked about DOGE. “There is no target around reductions,” he added.

………

Tens of thousands of federal employees fired under Musk’s leadership were offered their jobs back in September after what amounted to monthslong paid vacations. Millions were reportedly lost in interest and fees after government projects were frozen, and some woefully underqualified DOGE staffers were reportedly pocketing six-figure salaries.

I'm shocked that the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ has not been delivering on his promises.

I mean, he's ALWAYS delivered on his promises in the past. 

Think of the Overtime Costs

It turns out that the FBI was so busy covering up Donald Trump's role in the Epstein files that they had to stop fighting crime.

Newly released internal emails show the FBI mounting a costly overtime-fueled sprint to analyze the Epstein files as political pressure grew to release them—in a project dubbed the “Special Redaction Project,” Bloomberg reports.

………

A conspiracy theory still thrives among some in Trump’s base that Epstein knew the names of other rich or powerful pedophiles.

Epstein knew, because he was the US oligarchs pimp.  There's a pretty good chance that Trump was not just a client, but a partner, as he owned the organization that ran the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA pageants from 1996 until 2015.

Correspondence obtained and detailed by Bloomberg’s FOIA Files lays out how FBI Director Kash Patel sent about 1,000 special agents to the bureau’s Central Records Complex in Winchester, Virginia, for crash-course redaction training on the “Epstein Transparency Project,” also called the “Special Redaction Project.”

That's 1,000 special agents for an agency that has, according to its website, about 38,000 total employees with about ⅓ of those being special agents, so we are talking about 8% of the field agents being pulled in to cover Donald Trump's pale flabby ass.

Good to know that this is where out tax dollars are going. 

You Need to Read This

I just read this essay on the shooting of the two National Guardsmen in Washington, DC, and you should do.

The thesis is that the shooting was not about terrorism, nor was it about immigration.

Rather it was about a kid who was recruited by the CIA into a death squad, and that this came over to the United States with him.

………

The shooter was a 29-year-old Afghan national named Rahmanullah Lakanwal. He worked for us. For a decade. He was part of what the CIA calls a “Zero Unit”—paramilitary forces trained and backed by American intelligence. Human rights groups have another name for these units: death squads.

According to the New York Times, a childhood friend of Lakanwal’s said he “suffered from mental health issues and was disturbed by the casualties his unit had caused.” His family told investigators he has PTSD from the fighting he did on our behalf.

We trained him to kill. We pointed him at targets. We made him part of a unit known for brutality. And then when the war ended and the Taliban took over, we brought him here—and apparently did nothing to address what we’d done to his mind. 

………

Lakanwal served in a death squad. American veterans were sent to Iraq to kick down doors, raid homes, and kill people’s families. They were sent to Afghanistan to call in drone strikes on wedding parties. They served at checkpoints where the rules of engagement meant shooting first and asking questions never. We ask human beings to do inhuman things, and then we act surprised when they can’t just switch it off.

The evidence is overwhelming: what we make people do in these wars destroys them. And destroyed people do violence. Doesn’t matter if they were born in Kandahar or Kentucky—the damage is the same. 

This is Manifestly a War Crime

Remember when I said that the obligation of servicemen to refuse illegal orders required that the order be, "Manifestly Illegal?"

The classic example of a war crime, both in US military training materials and in international protocols is machine gunning survivors of a ship sinking, whether floating in the water or on a life boat.

This is manifestly illegal, and Hesketh ordered it, SOCOM commander Admiral Frank Bradley relayed the order to command officers in the area, and everyone in the chain of this command, including whoever pulled the trigger, is guilty of a war crime.

So is anyone who had the opportunity to protest these manifestly illegal orders and did nothing .

This is not up for dispute. 

We executed German U-Boat sailors following WWII for doing this. 

Officials in Congress and the Pentagon said Monday they are increasingly concerned that the Trump administration intends to scapegoat the military officer who directed U.S. forces to kill two survivors of a targeted strike on suspected drug smugglers in Latin America, as lawmakers made initial moves to investigate whether the attack constituted a war crime.

The Washington Post reported exclusively Friday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken order to kill the entire crew of a vessel thought to be ferrying narcotics in the Caribbean Sea, the first of nearly 20 such strikes directed by the administration since early September.

When two survivors were detected, the military commander overseeing the operation, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, directed another strike to comply with Hegseth’s order that no one be left alive, people with direct knowledge of the matter told The Post. The Trump administration has said 11 people were killed as a result of the operation.

In addition to prosecuting everyone even remotely in the decision chain for this, perhaps breaking up SOCOM, which has had a spate of criminality in its ranks in the past few years would be advisable.

Gee, Ya Think?

The Guardian is shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover that Donald Trump and his family is aggressively profiteering over his being President.

He started doing this  in 2016 before he was inaugurated the first time.

This sh%$ ain't rocket science. 

A crusading prosecutor in the Balkans comes under pressure to drop a big case. Vietnamese villagers learn they are to be evicted. A convicted crypto kingpin in the Gulf receives a pardon.

All have one thing in common: they appear to be connected to the Trump family’s campaign to amass riches around the world. Since Donald Trump’s re-election a year ago, warnings that his use of presidential power to advance personal interests is corroding American democracy have grown ever louder. What is less understood – and perhaps even more dangerous – is the damage this is doing everywhere else.

Trump’s eldest sons, Don Jr and Eric, formally the custodians of the family business, are conducting a global dealmaking blitz. They have broken ground on new golf courses, received permission for new skyscrapers, rented out the Trump brand, and in cryptocurrency they have embraced a venture with the capacity to bring in more than everything that has gone before.

They insist, in Eric’s words, that there is a “huge wall” between this moneymaking and their father’s position as the most powerful man alive. “Nothing I do has anything to do with the White House,” Eric told CNN recently.

But Kristofer Harrison, a senior foreign policy official under President George W Bush who now runs an anti-corruption organisation called the Dekleptocracy Project, is among those accusing the Trumps of operating a “pay to play” system that benefits those who do business with the president’s family. Such an approach could be manipulated, he said, especially by rival powers such as China. He said: “Trump has made authoritarians’ wildest dreams come true.”

Despite allegations – denied by the White House – of conflicts of interest, no explicit quid pro quos have been proven. But the Trumps’ business interests are raising questions about convictions that have been quashed, sensitive technologies transferred, tariffs eased, alliances forged. Should any of this give the appearance of abuse of public office for private gain – commonly known as corruption – ethics experts fear it invites other rulers to do the same.

There are no explicit quid pro quos under the pro-corruption rulings of the Supreme Court.

Gee, I wonder why Thomas and Alito and the rest of the corrupt 6 are so dedicated to creating an explicit road map to legal corruption?

It couldn't be that they are corrupt rat-f%$#s too.. 

 

Linkage

• Antarctica’s Fastest Glacier Collapse on Record Alarms Scientists (Sci Tech Daily) Nothing to worry about it's only a glacier about the size of Swansea losing half its volume in only a few months.
• Secret Third-Party Litigation Funding Threatens American Innovation (Techdirt) The patent troll model encompasses the whole legal process.
• Reintroduced carnivores’ impacts on ecosystems are still coming into focus (Ars Technica) Ecological impacts of reintroducing animals like wolves to ecosystems are more complex than previously thought.  Hoocoodanode?
• The collapse of Maya civilization: Drought doesn't explain everything (Phys.org) Some regions were not effected by the drought.  It turns out it was a highly interconnected society, and collapse spread following localized breakdowns.  Luckily, WE don't have this problem in OUR society.
• Premium: The Hater's Guide To NVIDIA (Where's Your Ed At?) Makes a pretty case that we are in the "Bezzle" stage of NVIDIA. (Bezzle is a neologism created by John Kenneth Galbraith describing the interval between embezzlement and when the crime is discovered by its victim)
• Companies Are Trying to Hide Their Ties to Larry Summers (The American Prospect) Overdue by about 30 years, but I'll take it.

It appears that the lack of safety in bicycling in the USA is due in large part to the strenuous, and extremely dishonest, efforts of one hardcore rider who thought that bicycle lanes were for punks:

“Fake It till You Make It,” Huh?

In any other line of work, the driving philosophy of tech startups would be better defined as fraud.

As we saw with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, this is basically fraud premised on the idea with a sprinkling of fairy dust (or VC funding) you can actually make something that resembles an ongoing business.

The thing is, when you are dealing with meat space, things like diagnostic tests (Theranos) or military autonomous drones simply do not work.

When defense procurement wonks say that systems should be developed on the Silly-Con Valley model, they miss this. 

In this case, I am referring to Anduril, a company that is aggressively selling autonomous autonomous vehicles with little success.

The company founder, Palmer Luckey, made his money by creating VR goggles company Oculus (borrowing tech from another company) and then selling out to Facebook, who wanted the technology for their incredibly abortive foray into the, "Metaverse."

How this makes him qualified for anything beyond technology hype is beyond me, as the string of failures of his company projects show.  (Actually, I do know how this makes him qualified, he has been a Donald Trump supporter since at least 2016)

The Navy was attempting to launch and recover more than 30 drone boats from a combat ship off the coast of California in May when more than a dozen of the uncrewed vessels failed to carry out their missions. The boats had rejected their inputs and automatically idled as a fail-safe, making them “dead” in the water. 

The botched experiment quickly became a potential hazard to other vessels in the exercise. Military personnel scrambled overnight to clean up the mess, towing the boats to shore until 9 a.m. the next day. 

The drone boats were relying on autonomy software called Lattice, made by California-based Anduril Industries. The Navy said the exercise was handled safely, but the incident alarmed Navy personnel, who said in a routine follow-up report that company representatives had misguided the military. In comments that were unusual for such a report, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, four sailors warned of “continuous operational security violations, safety violations, and contracting performer misguidances (Anduril Industries).” If the software configuration wasn’t immediately corrected and vetted, they wrote, there would be “extreme risk to force and potential for loss of life.”

(emphasis mine)

BTW, this behavior is classic, "Fake it till you make it." 

Since its founding in 2017, Anduril Industries has become one of the hottest companies in a crowded field of defense-tech startups, promising to deliver hardware and software that will usher in a new era of autonomous warfare and equip the U.S. military with the speed that only a startup can offer. The privately held company was valued at more than $30 billion in its last funding round and has scored an impressive number of military contracts to build prototypes of everything from unmanned jet fighters to mixed-reality headsets to battlefield-management systems.

Yeah, this is gonna end well. 

………

The startup’s fast-moving approach comes with its share of setbacks—during closed military exercises, at private drone ranges and even on the battlefield in Ukraine.

In California, a mechanical issue damaged the engine in Anduril’s unmanned jet fighter Fury in a ground test over the summer ahead of a critical first flight for the Air Force. In August, a test involving its Anvil counterdrone system caused a 22-acre fire in Oregon. And in the exercises with unmanned boats over the summer off the coast of California, Anduril’s Lattice software struggled to command and control vessels. 

Anduril’s only real battlefield experience—in Ukraine—has been marred by problems as well, including vulnerability to enemy jamming, according to former employees and others familiar with the systems in Ukraine. Some front-line soldiers of Ukraine’s SBU security service, for instance, found that their Altius loitering drones crashed and failed to hit their targets. The drones were so problematic that they stopped using them in 2024 and haven’t fielded them since, according to people familiar with the matter.

That the Ukrainians were unwilling to continue to use the drones is telling.  They are grabbing onto any system that works at all, but Andruil's crap was below the level of their desparation. 

To quote Richard Feynmann, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." 

As an FYI, Feynmann's quote comes from the last line of his report on the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.  He was commenting on how NASA (and the rest of the investigation board) was choosing public relations over the reality behind the accident.

Of Course He is Looking for a Pardon

This one does not involve Trump, at least not directly.  Rather I am talking about Benjamin Netanyahu demanding a pardon from Israeli President Isaac Herzog. (It should be noted that the Israeli Presidency is a largely ceremonial position)

Trump is lobbying for Netanyahu's pardon, but I do not think that will have much impact.

More importantly Netanyahu is guilty as hell:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel asked its president on Sunday to pardon him in his long-running corruption trial, a request that the president called “extraordinary” and that critics said would run counter to the rule of law.

Mr. Netanyahu’s unusual pre-emptive appeal to President Isaac Herzog, while his trial is still underway, came about two weeks after President Trump sent a letter to Mr. Herzog urging him to pardon the Israeli prime minister.

A statement by the Israeli president’s office said the request would have “significant implications,” and that he would “responsibly and sincerely consider” it after seeking expert opinions. 

I really hope that this means, "F^%$ No!" from Herzog, but trying to figure out what an Israeli politician will do is well beyond my meager abilities to predict what people will do. 

As to the specifics of the charges, which do not include his having Israeli taxpayers foot a $2,700.00 a year for ice cream, there are 3 basic charges:

• Pressuring ministries and the US government to benefit rich Israelis in exchange for $300,000.00 in personal gifts.
• Discussing a quid pro quo with a media mogul in where he would put forward legislation disfavoring a rival media conglomerate for favorable coverage.
• Executing a quid pro quo with another media mogul to not put forward legislation disfavoring him in exchange for favorable coverage.

Pardoning Netanyahu will have a corrosive effect on Israeli politics, and Israeli politics is not, and has never been, particularly healthy to begin with.

A Great Holiday Gift Choice

Penguin Random House released an Avatar: The Last Airbender picture book, My Cabbages!

It's intended to be for children aged 4 to 8 years old, but if you know an Avatar fan, they would appreciate it as well.

I am stoked about this.

Please, if there is, "My Cabbages guy," slash fic out there, do not not tell me.

I do not want to know.