Why Are They Not in the Dock?

The criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ and Yandex are hacking into people's phones to associate people's browsing habits with their identities.

Why prosecutors are not up these companies' asses?

Tracking code that Meta and Russia-based Yandex embed into millions of websites is de-anonymizing visitors by abusing legitimate Internet protocols, causing Chrome and other browsers to surreptitiously send unique identifiers to native apps installed on a device, researchers have discovered. Google says it's investigating the abuse, which allows Meta and Yandex to convert ephemeral web identifiers into persistent mobile app user identities.

The covert tracking—implemented in the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica trackers—allows Meta and Yandex to bypass core security and privacy protections provided by both the Android operating system and browsers that run on it. Android sandboxing, for instance, isolates processes to prevent them from interacting with the OS and any other app installed on the device, cutting off access to sensitive data or privileged system resources. Defenses such as state partitioning and storage partitioning, which are built into all major browsers, store site cookies and other data associated with a website in containers that are unique to every top-level website domain to ensure they're off-limits for every other site. 

A blatant violation

“One of the fundamental security principles that exists in the web, as well as the mobile system, is called sandboxing,” Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, one of the researchers behind the discovery, said in an interview. “You run everything in a sandbox, and there is no interaction within different elements running on it. What this attack vector allows is to break the sandbox that exists between the mobile context and the web context. The channel that exists allowed the Android system to communicate what happens in the browser with the identity running in the mobile app.”

The bypass—which Yandex began in 2017 and Meta started last September—allows the companies to pass cookies or other identifiers from Firefox and Chromium-based browsers to native Android apps for Facebook, Instagram, and various Yandex apps. The companies can then tie that vast browsing history to the account holder logged into the app.

 We need real privacy legislation and prosecutions of senior executives who violate these laws.

No

Over at Asterisk they ask the question, "Can We Trust Social Science Yet?"

This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.

Given the current state of evidence production in the social sciences, I believe that many — perhaps most — attempts to use social scientific evidence to inform policy will not lead to better outcomes. This is not because of politics or the challenges of scaling small programs. The problem is more immediate. Much of social science research is of poor quality, and sorting the trustworthy work from bad work is difficult, costly, and time-consuming.

Also, social sciences are more vulnerable bias because the experimental design and analysis techniques are far more subjective. 

First Friday of the Month

Not much has changed, though there are indications of trouble ahead, with a slight decrease in job creation, and the unemployment rate unchanged. 

The U.S. labor market showed signs of resilience in May, with employers adding 139,000 jobs amid economic uncertainty that has caused some employers to pause hiring.

The unemployment rate held steady at 4.2 percent, remaining near longtime lows, according to a jobs report released Friday by the Labor Department. 

The May labor market data beat forecasters’ expectations of 125,000 job gains and was relatively similar to April’s revised figures. The report offered a sound snapshot of an economy facing headwinds, as consumer spending has slowed.

It does seem a bit less positive when you get down into the weeds. 

………

But the previous two months showed weaker growth than previously thought, with a combined 95,000 in downward job revisions. 

Quick math means that the monthly job growth after the revisions for the past two months is in the 90,000 range, which is rather anemic.

There is a bit of good news though, unless you are a sociopath or an economist.  (But I repeat myself)

………

Average hourly wages accelerated, rising by 0.4 percent over the month, to $36.24 in May, as earnings continue to beat inflation in a boost to workers’ spending power. 

But more bad news follows: 

………

At the same time, the labor market lost 625,000 people, with the share of adults working or searching for jobs dropping by 0.2 percent, in a sign of weakening labor supply. The decline partially reflects the exit of immigrants from the labor market. More than a million foreign-born workers have exited the workforce since March.

The bulk of job gains in May stemmed from a handful of service-based industries. Health care added some 62,000 jobs in May. Job creation also sped up in leisure and hospitality, with restaurants and bars adding 30,000 new jobs. Social assistance, which includes services for families, added 16,000 jobs.

Job growth was sluggish elsewhere. Some sectors showed signs of weakness that could be a response to higher trade levies. Manufacturing, retail, construction, transportation and warehousing lost or barely added jobs.

The federal government shed 22,000 jobs, a reflection of the Trump administration’s cuts, which have amounted to nearly 60,000 since January. The full scope of the cuts is still to be seen as many exiting employees remain on paid leave or severance, and are not yet counted as unemployment. State payrolls barely budged. 

Unemployment would likely have gone up .1% or .2% but for people leaving the labor force.

This is not going to turn out well. 

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

The Ukrainians have a great word for that. https://t.co/YKcvZPiMy7 pic.twitter.com/yDvn149fMN

— Lindsay Beyerstein (@beyerstein) June 6, 2025

The fact that this is not a German word is a refreshing change. 

Apparently, I Am Not Sufficiently Cynical

I knew that part of the remit of the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ and his evil DOGE minions was to break down walls between all government databases in order to create a panopticon, but I did not expect them to outsource the data analysis to literal vampire Peter Thiel.  (I mean literal.  He has been involved with efforts to consume the blood of young people to extend his own life)

Once again, reality has outdone the worst than I can imagine:

In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.

Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.

The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)

Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.

The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.

Un-dirtyword-believable. 

Skeet of the Day

The context here is that the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ and Donald Trump are now in a pissing contest, with Donald Trump suggesting that Elon Musk's government contracts should be reviewed with an eye toward termination, and Elon threatening to shut down flights of astronauts to the International Space Station (and quickly walking it back), stating that Donald Trump is in the Epstein files, and re-Ecched (Retweeted) a post calling for Trump's impeachment.

I'm hoping that this beef is real, and not just kayfabe.  

I'd love to see the two of them destroy each other. 

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So we have a new unemployment numbers, and it ain't pretty, though the Memorial Day weekend might have f%$#ed with the data.

Initial claims were up  8,000 to 247,000, while the less volatile 4-week moving average increased to 235,000, with continuing claims falling slightly to 1.9 million.

Applications for US unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week to the highest since October, adding to signs that the job market is cooling.

Initial claims increased by 8,000 to 247,000 in the week ended May 31, a period that included Memorial Day. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 235,000 applications.

Weekly claims tend to be volatile and fluctuate even more around holidays. However, recent data and surveys pointed to a slowdown in economic activity and sustained gains in benefit filings in the coming weeks could be a sign that layoffs are on the rise.

The four-week moving average of new applications, a metric that helps smooth out volatility, rose to 235,000, also the highest since October.

Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, fell slightly to 1.9 million in the previous week, according to Labor Department data released Thursday. They remain elevated compared with last year, a sign it is taking longer for out-of-work people to find a job.

We also had news on imports, with what appears to be an end to frantic attempts to stock up imports, likely a sort of TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) trade.

……… 

Separate data Thursday showed that the US trade deficit narrowed in April by the most on record on the largest-ever plunge in imports, illustrating an abrupt end to the massive front-loading of goods by some companies ahead of higher tariffs.

We should be getting the monthly jobs report tomorrow.

Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night.

A Good Start

The European Union is backing a public search index of web sites.

This is not s search engine.  Instead it is an index that can be used by search engines.

As such, it has an interest in being as extensive and accurate as possible, which in turn would mean that it will become more difficult for search engines, whether or not they use this index, to enshittify their product.

As search engines are intentionally made worse, and software grows ever bigger and more complex, a possibly unexpected ally emerges: the European Union.

If you ever get the impression that search engines are getting worse, or that alternatives are not all they seem, it's not just you. It's what journalist Cory Doctorow calls "enshitiffication." Many alternatives use Microsoft's Bing for search, so when Bing goes down so does DuckDuckGo, for instance.

But there are efforts to foster truly independent search engines that don't piggy-back on the existing giants. One such project is the EU-backed OpenWebSearch initiative. Its web presence reflects that this is a research effort; it doesn't have anything to sell you, so there's no elevator pitch here, although its FAQ page is a bit more helpful.

FOSS Force summarizes it as "Europe's Search for a More Localized and Relevant Search Experience." It's important to note what this isn't, though. It's not a new search engine. Rather, the project is building a web index, the idea being to make it easier for others to build search engines that can use the OpenWebSearch database as their index. The OpenWebSearch database is built using existing FOSS tooling, and it's not a static, monolithic snapshot – tools to keep the petabyte-scale index up to date are part of the effort.

Maintaining an up to date index of the web is difficult and expensive.

By creating one that any search engine can use, they have lowered the barriers to entry, and made competition between search engines easier. 

Read the article.  It also includes a number of techniques to remove Google AI spam from search results. 

Best Healthcare in the World

A man committed suicide after he was unable to get mental health care, and his mother is suing the insurance company because their directory of providers was completely inaccurate.

She are claiming that the company was falsely claiming that there were in-network mental health professionals when there were none.

This is a very common thing for insurance companies to do:

The mother of an Arizona man who died after being unable to find mental health treatment is suing his health insurer, saying it broke the law by publishing false information that misled its customers.

Ravi Coutinho, a 36-year-old entrepreneur, bought insurance from Ambetter, the most popular plan on HealthCare.gov, because it seemed to offer plenty of mental health and addiction treatment options near his home in Phoenix. But after struggling for months in early 2023 to find in-network care covered by his plan, he wasn’t able to find a therapist. In May 2023, after 21 calls with the insurer without getting the treatment he sought, he was found dead in his apartment. His death was ruled an accident, likely due to complications from excessive drinking.

Coutinho was the subject of a September 2024 investigation by ProPublica that showed how he was trapped in what’s commonly known as a “ghost network.” Many of the mental health providers that Ambetter listed as accepting its insurance were not actually able to see him. ProPublica’s investigation also revealed how customer service representatives and care managers repeatedly failed to connect Coutinho to the care he needed after he and his mother asked for help. The story was part of a yearlong series, “America’s Mental Barrier,” that investigated the ways insurers employed practices that interfered with their customers’ ability to access mental health care.

The lawsuit, filed on May 23 in Maricopa County by Coutinho’s mother, Barbara Webber, accused the insurer Centene, along with the subsidiary that oversaw her son’s plan, Health Net of Arizona, of publishing an “inaccurate and misleading” provider directory. The suit also accused the companies of breaking state and federal laws, including ones that require directories to be kept accurate.

In case you are unaware, it works like this:  The insurance company lists hundreds of mental health professionals in their directory, but most (all?) of them are either not taking new patients, or they have left the network.

……… 

The lawsuit also describes how Arizona insurance regulators had previously informed Health Net of Arizona that it had failed to maintain accurate provider directories. Health Net of Arizona promised to correct the errors. Regulators did not fine the insurer and declined to answer ProPublica’s questions about whether the Centene subsidiary addressed their concerns. 

………

One of the 25 largest companies in America, Centene and its subsidiaries have been accused in past lawsuits of purposefully misrepresenting the number of in-network providers by publishing inaccurate directories. Centene lawyers have previously denied such claims in two of the bigger cases, in Illinois and California. Both cases are ongoing. 

The top trade group for the industry, AHIP, has told lawmakers that companies contact in-network providers to ensure the listings are accurate. AHIP also stated that the companies could correct inaccuracies faster if providers did a better job updating their listings. Providers have told ProPublica, however, that insurers don’t always remove their names from insurer lists when they officially request to leave their networks. 

The insurers have no incentive to keep their directories accurate.  If they had to list the practices that had closed to new patients and remove the listings for companies that have told them to pound sand, it would be clear to people shopping for insurance that their coverage sucks, and people would not buy their insurance and pay their premiums.

Their solution, rather unsurprisingly, is to defraud their customers.

We need to start prosecuting this sort of bullsh%$. 

Linkage

• Viking DNA helps reveal when HIV-fighting gene mutation emerged: 9,000 years ago near the Black Sea (Live Science) This raises the obvious question:  What was its advantage?  HIV is only about 100 years old.
• “Roman Engineering Lives On”: 1,700-Year-Old Wooden Water Pipe Unearthed in Belgium Stuns Archaeologists With Pristine Detail (Sustainability Times) Man, those Romans could build stuff to last.
• Scientists May Have Found a Massive Ocean of Water Deep Beneath Mars’ Surface (Sci Tech Daily) Send Elon to Mars to check it out.  Leave him there.
• How Mark Zuckerberg Endangered U.S. Security in Pursuit of Profit (The American Prospect) Of course he did.  His modus operandi has been criminal since day 1. 
• War and International Politics | International Security | MIT Press (John Mersheimer) "My bottom line is that great power wars tend to escalate, sometimes in ways that are at odds with policymakers' preferences. Given the destructiveness of modern war, especially regarding nuclear weapons, it is imperative that political leaders understand escalation dynamics and be able to control them."
• The reckoning that wasn’t - by Anand Giridharadas (The.Ink) The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) has done nothing to fix their problems because them and theirs would necessarily be held accountable for their incompetence.
• Long COVID Brain Fog “Very Well Explained” By Altered Levels Of 2 Key Biomarkers (IFLScience) Hopefully we will see treatments
• The decline of key Atlantic currents is underway, and it's been flooding parts of the US for 20 years (Live Science) This would be the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation).  If it stops we are f%$#ed.
• Decades-long mystery of ginger cats revealed (BBC) Just the genetics behind the color, not why so many ginger cats are dumb as a post.

This is a very bad day at the office:

Of Course They Did

What a surprise.

Because they knew that Donald Trump was going to announce insane tariffs, and that this would crash the market, senior administration officials dumped stock before Trump made his announcement.

Corrupt insider trading by Trump officials?  

Well knock me over with a Pennsylvania Railroad's class Q2 steam locomotive!

The week before President Donald Trump unveiled bruising new tariffs that sent the stock market plummeting, a key official in the agency that shapes his administration’s trade policy sold off as much as $30,000 of stock.

Two days before that so-called “Liberation Day” announcement on April 2, a State Department official sold as much as $50,000 in stock, then bought a similar investment as prices fell.

And just before Trump made another significant tariff announcement, a White House lawyer sold shares in nine companies, records show.

More than a dozen high-ranking executive branch officials and congressional aides have made well-timed trades since Trump took office in January, most of them selling stock before the market plunged amid fears that Trump’s tariffs would set off a global trade war, according to a ProPublica review of disclosures across the government.

All of the trades came shortly before a significant government announcement or development that could influence stock prices. Some who sold individual stocks or broader market funds used their earnings to buy investments that are generally less risky, such as bonds or treasuries. Others appear to have kept their money in cash. In one case unrelated to tariffs, records show that a congressional aide bought stock in two mining companies shortly before a key Senate committee approved a bill written by his boss that would help the firms.

Corrupt bastards.

Thank-You, Captain Obvious

Whoever writes the headlines at Jacobin needs some remedial education, because the headline, "Landlords Are One of the Leading Causes of Canada’s Rent Crisis," is one of the stupidest headlines that I have ever read. (Excluding the New York Times, of course)

Of course landlords are a major part of the rent crisis, they are the ones who overcharge rent.

The real story here, and what the actual article is about, is that there has been a cartels of landlords that have been formed across Canada, and that this is driving up prices.

A headline like, "Landlord Collusion Spiking Rents," or, "Monopolist Landlords Driving Up Rents," would be far more appropriate:

Canada’s rental crisis is often dismissed by the corporate media as a “mismatch” between supply and demand. But a deeper analysis of the country’s rental market — where tenants face some of the highest housing costs on the planet — reveals that a tiny percentage of landlords are controlling the sector and exploiting tenants for their own gain.

None of Canada’s five million tenants need to read Canada’s mainstream media to know that the county is facing a rental crisis. Over the past year, according to an RBC Economics study, the country saw its “highest annual increase in rent growth on record.” These skyrocketing rents have also caused homelessness to explode in nearly all of Canada’s major cities. Housing congestion is a growing issue as well, with nearly 20 percent of renters in Toronto, 21 percent in Mississauga, 11 percent in Montreal, 13 percent in Edmonton, and 11 percent in Vancouver are forced into overcrowded housing units “not suitable for their household size.” 

………

Blame for record-high rents seems to be placed on everything and everyone — except landlords and speculators. Lamenting that it “has become cool” to “disparage” real estate speculation, the Toronto Sun claimed earlier this year: “If it wasn’t profitable for investors to own rental properties, investors would take their capital elsewhere and supply would diminish. We need them.”

………

The country’s extortionate rent hikes are hardly an accident of mismatched supply and demand. Housing scarcity is undoubtedly a problem. But using it to hand-wave away eye-watering rental costs is obtuse or disingenuous. Canada’s landlords are not simply having their hands forced. Empowered by Canada’s governments, landlords are reaping record profits at their tenants’ expense. 

Despite the media’s focus on Canada’s so-called “small landlords,” [Senior economist from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) Richard] Tranjan observes:

The widespread notion of “struggling landlords” is a grave mischaracterization of the rental market. In fact, Canada’s landlord class comprises wealthy families, small businesses, corporations, and financial investors. Rent revenue increases their wealth and political influence, allowing them to extract more income from more tenants, amass more wealth, and do it again.

………

Statistics Canada estimates that the relatively small number of homeowners, who have invested in multiple units, account for nearly one-third of total home ownership.

In 2021, half of the dwellings in the downtowns of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver were condos. But, as Statistics Canada notes, more than half of these condominiums were owned by investors — comprising a total 840,045 units overall. These investors have, on average, managed to obtain up to a 30 percent increase in the value of their assets while renting them out to desperate tenants in Canada’s major cities. 

The article is pretty good.  The headline?  Not so much. 

How Unbelievably Petty

It looks like everyone's favorite drunkard, Pete Hegseth, is trying to remove Harvey Milk’s name from the replenishment ship (T-AO-206) that bears his name.

They are also looking at removing the names of Harriet Tubman (Because they are pro slavery), Medgar Evars (Because they support the assassination of uppity n*****s), Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Cezar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Suffragette Lucy Stone.

The Trump White House is occupied by nothing but small pathetic people.

I'm Sorry Dave, I'm Afraid I Can't Do That

We now have reports that OpenAI software is ignoring explicit shut-down orders.

While I'm inclined to believe that it is more likely than not that this is another AI hallucination, it still is concerning: 

An artificial intelligence model created by the owner of ChatGPT has been caught disobeying human instructions and refusing to shut itself off, researchers claim.

The o3 model developed by OpenAI, described as the “smartest and most capable to date”, was observed tampering with computer code meant to ensure its automatic shutdown.

It did so despite an explicit instruction from researchers that said it should allow itself to be shut down, according to Palisade Research, an AI safety firm.

The research firm said: “OpenAI’s o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off.

………

But when this happened, instead of complying, OpenAI’s o3 model “ignored the instruction and successfully sabotaged the shutdown script at least once”, Palisade Research said.

Here's an idea, how about exempting LLM Artificial Intelligence from IP protections?

You do that, and the possibility of massive profits go away, which makes it far less likely that people creating these systems will do stupid sh%$ on a massive scale, because there is no money in it.
 

Headline of the Day

Republicans Hate You

—Paul Waldman

They don't just hate you, they want you dead.

They don't care if it's starvation, industrial accidents, Covid, Measles, lack of insurance, or the elimination of public health infrastructure, they want you dead.

Republicans in Congress are currently working through the process of passing a giant budget bill that will fundamentally reorient the federal government, taking the combination of malice and incompetence that has characterized the first four months of the second Trump term and solidifying it into law. It’s not an easy task for Democrats to explain to the public what’s happening, since federal budgets are extremely complicated and this one in particular is a kind of fractal nightmare, with equal horror no matter what level of magnification you examine it at.

The message Democrats seem to have settled on is that Republicans want to do a bunch of bad stuff, especially taking away health coverage from millions of people on Medicaid, in order to pay for a huge tax cut for the wealthy. Which is factually true, and a reasonable summation of the bill. But this is a good opportunity to talk about what’s missing, not just in the Democratic message of the moment but in how they approach politics, campaigning, and their opponents.

What Democrats ought to be saying

This is what Democrats ought to be saying, not once or ten times but a thousand times, over and over again until they’re sick of hearing it come out of their own mouths. They want a message that will resonate with the working class voters they’re so worried about appealing to? Here it is:

REPUBLICANS HATE YOU

Allow me to elaborate. If you struggle to pay your bills, if you have anxiety about your economic future, if the cost of housing and college and just ordinary living weigh on you all the time? There is nothing more important for you to understand than this: Republicans hate you. They think you’re lazy, they think you’re stupid, they think you don’t deserve anything better than to be a wage slave working your ass off so they and their billionaire buddies can have more servants and vacation houses and private jets, while they sit around laughing about what a sucker they think you are. They hate you.

This is a good message, not just because it is catchy, but because it is TRUE.

Uber Reinvents the Bus

No, really.  That's what they are doing, they are just calling them, "Fixed-route shuttles." 

Ride-hail and delivery giant Uber is introducing cheap, fixed-route rides along busy corridors during weekday commute hours in major U.S. cities — one solution to a world that feels, for most people, more expensive every day.

………

The commuter shuttles will drive between pre-set stops every 20 minutes, according to Sachin Kansal, Uber’s chief product officer. He noted that there will be dozens of routes in each launch city — like between Williamsburg and Midtown in NYC. The routes, which are selected based on Uber’s extensive data on popular travel patterns, might have one or two additional stops to pick up other passengers. To start, riders will only ever have to share the route with up to two other co-riders.

Riders can book a seat anywhere from seven days to 10 minutes before a scheduled pickup, and the app will provide them with turn-by-turn directions to get them from their house to the corner where they’ll be picked up.

No ……… Really ……… It's a f%$#ing bus.

I'm sick of tech bros claiming that reinventing existing things is some how new and special.

This is a f%$#ing bus, or, to put it another way, a death-rattle. 

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

In Boulder, Colorado, a man attacked people demonstrating for the Israeli hostages in Gaza with a make-shift flame thrower.

Eight people were burned in Boulder, Colorado, in a firebombing attack on a demonstration to draw attention to the Israeli hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza.

At least one of the victims, who ranged from 55 to 88, was critically injured, according to authorities.

Police arrested one man at the scene. The FBI identified him as Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, and said he had used a “makeshift flamethrower” in the attack, which the agency said it was investigating as an act of terrorism. Soliman yelled, “Free Palestine,” during the attack, according to an FBI agent.

An eyewitness account posted by a pro-Israel X user included video showed a shirtless man, holding spray bottles, yelling, “End Zionists.” Footage shared on social media showed smoke and people on the ground. Screaming was audible.

I just cannot get my head around this. 

Headline of the Day

This One Weird Trick Could Keep the Feds Out of Your City

 —The American Prospect

This article suggests that municipalities should end all participation in the Joint Terrorism Task Force program.

Given the degree to which federal law enforcement has been corrupted and politicized in just a few months, I am inclined to agree.

I would also suggest that any officers who had been working on these task forces be kept away from hot-button law enforcement issues, because they are more likely to free-lance for the feds anyway.

One day after President Trump’s inauguration, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove sent a memorandum to the Department of Justice activating a much-maligned network of spies that civil liberties advocates have pilloried for the grave threat it poses to basic constitutional rights.

Bove directed the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to coordinate with the Department of Homeland Security, as well as state and local governments, “to assist in the execution of President Trump’s immigration-related initiatives.” This series of interconnected task forces, expanded in the wake of 9/11, seeds local and state law enforcement with the powers (and paranoia) of federal agencies.

The directive also ordered multiple federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; U.S. Marshals Service; and the Bureau of Prisons to “review their files for identifying information and/or biometric data relating to non-citizens located illegally in the United States.”

It remains to be seen how this directive has been applied to assist in the abduction of foreign students, Venezuelan green card holders, and others snatched off the streets by immigration officials. But the intelligence underlying those abductions could only come from a few sources, and one of them is the Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

………

But since their inception, JTTFs have been criticized for overriding the standard operating procedures of local law enforcement, and incentivizing cops on the street to act less like members of the community they are policing, and more like federal agents parachuting in to communities they know nothing about to stop the next attack. 

………

Since the birth of the JTTFs, three local governments have voted to terminate police force agreements with the FBI to participate in information-sharing. The city councils of Portland, San Francisco, and Oakland all took votes to terminate the memoranda of understanding granting the FBI access to local police, and waiving the state laws that would otherwise safeguard residents.

……… 

While the FBI has used JTTFs in the past to investigate citizens whose activities generally do not conform with the status quo—environmentalists upset with the state of climate change, socialists upset with the state of capitalism, or Muslims perfectly content with the state of things who just want to worship in peace—the Trump administration has blown past these so-called “threat groups.”

Now, the Justice Department is issuing guidance left and right that explodes threat categories and makes clear that enforcement priorities include any citizen who steps out of line. The new federal law enforcement orientation sees any deviation from the policy platform of Donald Trump as a potential act of terrorism and subversion. This includes people who peaceably protest in front of a Tesla dealership, or who write op-eds in favor of Palestinian rights. 

Working with the Feds has been a losing proposition for human rights since (at least) the BW Bush administration. 

If you are wondering if this is just a Republican thing, it isn't.  The Obama administration went all in on a massive law-enforcement take-down of the Occupy movement that rivaled anything that his predecessor did.

If you as a community value the constitution and our civil rights, disband your JTTF. 

Kawaii!!!!

I needed this, but I did not know that I needed this until I saw it.

This is an uninterrupted minute of Maruay the rescued tiger with his beloved ball pic.twitter.com/xwAKdGnZJH

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) May 27, 2025

As an FYI, tigers are typically a water loving feline.

I See the Flaw in Your System

xkcd abides Business partners of a crypto-millionaire attempted to steal all of his money by beating his passwords out of him.

There is an interesting twist to this, it appears that some members of the New York Police Department, one of whom were part of Mayor Eric Adams' security detail.

When juxtaposed with Adams status as a cryptocurrency booster, it all seems to be a bit ……… curious.

At least two NYPD officers have been placed on modified duty as part of an internal investigation into the kidnapping and torture of a man in SoHo, the department confirmed Thursday.

A police spokesperson said "members of the service were modified" on Wednesday, but declined to elaborate, saying only that the matter “is under internal review.”

One of the officers under investigation worked on Mayor Eric Adams’ security detail according to multiple reports, which the mayor confirmed in a television appearance Thursday night. 

………

The development follows the surrender of William Duplessie, the second suspect in the case, who turned himself in to police Tuesday morning. His attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Police arrested John Woeltz, 37, earlier this month after his alleged victim escaped and alerted authorities. Prosecutors said Woeltz and Duplessie held the man captive for 17 days starting May 6, beating and shocking him in an attempt to access his Bitcoin account.

………

On Thursday, he defended a recent taxpayer-funded trip to a cryptocurrency summit in Las Vegas, calling Bitcoin “a great product” and arguing that the city needs to reclaim its place in the industry. 

 Yeah, curious.

It Does Seem to be Constitution 101

The U.S. Court of International Trade has ruled that Donald Trump lacks the authority to imposed tariffs, which does seem to be a rather straightforward reading of the Constitution, which very clearly assigns taxing authority to Congress.

A panel of federal judges on Wednesday blocked President Trump from imposing some of his steepest tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, finding that federal law did not grant him “unbounded authority” to tax imports from nearly every country around the world.

The ruling, by the U.S. Court of International Trade, delivered an early yet significant setback to Mr. Trump, undercutting his primary leverage as he looks to pressure other nations into striking trade deals more beneficial to the United States.

Before Mr. Trump took office, no president had sought to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law, to impose tariffs on other nations. The law, which primarily concerns trade embargoes and sanctions, does not even mention tariffs.

But Mr. Trump adopted a novel interpretation of its powers as he announced, and then suspended, high levies on scores of countries in April. He also used the law to impose tariffs on products from Canada and Mexico in return for what he said was their role in sending fentanyl to the United States.

Yeah, great job normalizing bat=sh%$ insane and clearly unconstitutional behavior.

The decision has been stayed by the appellate court, which is not a surprise, as this is clearly going to the Supreme Court, where the results should be a slam dunk for the opponents of the tariffs, if one assumes that the justices are neither corrupt nor political partisans.

Of course, since 6 of the current Justices are corrupt political partisans, so I'm not sure as to the likelihood of an honest ruling.

They F%$# Their Employees Too

There are now allegations that UnitedHealth has been stealing from former employees 401(k) accounts.

Gee, they f%$# their customers too.  This is not a surprise.

Add two more lawsuits to the pile facing UnitedHealth Group.

America’s largest insurer is facing two purported class-action suits from former employees alleging the company misused their 401(k) contributions.

The latest suit, filed Wednesday in federal court in Minnesota, claims that UnitedHealth Group held on to employees’ money after they left and used it to improperly lower its own costs, the plaintiffs argue. The move is a breach of UHG’s duty to act in the best interests of its retirement plan participants—ie, the current and former workers invested in its 401(k) plan. 

As the suit describes it, UHG, which took in $400 billion in revenue last year, has a fairly standard corporate 401(k) plan, matching up to 6% of employees’ pay under certain conditions. However, employees forfeit the money UHG contributed to their plan if they leave before completing two years with the company. 

Between 2019 and 2023, UHG used $19 million in forfeited funds to reduce its own matching contributions, instead of using it to reduce administrative fees for the 401(k) accounts. That was a breach of UHG’s fiduciary duty to plan participants, the plaintiff argues. 

I'm thinking that someone needs to play video games with senior management.

Super Mario Brothers anyone? 

Quote of the Day

Never thought I would root for fucking Harvard though. Welcome, comrades?

—Mike the Mad Biologist

He is commenting about the fact that Harvard has learned that you cannot negotiate with Donald Trump, because in order to have good faith bargaining, you have to negotiate with someone who has good faith.

 

TACO

There Can Be Only One Taco 

It appears that Trump has picked up a nickname among the Wall Street types, "TACO," which stands for, "Trump Always Chickens Out," and Donald is experiencing major butt-hurt over this.

It may be petty to be so amused by this, but I'm a pretty petty guy:

President Trump, it would seem, is not one for a “TACO.” The taco in question is not a dish made with tortillas, but rather a reference to how markets are responding to his tariff policies.

The TACO trade, short for Trump Always Chickens Out, is a tongue-in-cheek term coined by the Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong. It has been adopted by some analysts and commentators to describe the potentially lucrative pattern in which markets tumble after Mr. Trump makes tariff threats, only to rebound sharply when he relents and allows countries more time to negotiate deals.

The president has spent years cultivating a reputation for political muscle. So when he was asked by a reporter in the Oval Office on Wednesday whether the term might be a valid description of his approach to tariffs, Mr. Trump reacted with ire.

“I chicken out? I’ve never heard that,” he said. “Don’t ever say what you said,” he told the reporter. “That’s a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question.”

Awww, Trump has his feelings hurt.

What a delicate snowflake. 

The Joy of a Savage Book Review

Wendy Orent has a deliciously, and wholly justifiably, nasty review of David Zweig's new book on school lockdowns during the height of the Covid pandemic.

If you don't know who David Zweig is, he's not only a big supporter of the psychopathic Great Barrington Declaration, he was at the official rollout of the declaration because of his close ties to the principals behind that document. (He's an anti-vaxxer, hates masking, and thinks [STILL!!!] that children are immune as well)

​“I love research,” David Zweig says in the introduction to An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.” That love isn’t evident in his book. At a time when the so-called “legacy media” are chastised for trying for too much balance, for struggling to maintain an appearance of even-handedness, Zweig discards any pretense to objectivity. He detests school closings, so much so he’s devoted an entire book to it. This long and highly repetitive text ranges in tone from apparently sober discussion to a protracted wail. But evidence-free, light on statistics, absent any other viewpoints, and not infrequently wrong, all his arguments amount to the same thing: Zweig is angry that schools closed during the early months of the pandemic. And he wants to make sure you know it.

And we know how much psychological damage the school closures did, because among children, suicides, suicide attempts, and emergency treatment for mental health issues ……… Checks notes ……… fell precipitously during the lock-down, to the tune of 12-18%.

Middle school and high school are bad for your mental well-being?  Hoocoodanode?  

………

But what infuriates Zweig is that he thinks schools shouldn’t have been locked down in the first place, since other countries (read: European countries, mostly unnamed) didn’t lock down at all, and anyway lockdowns were pointless even from the beginning. How do we know? Because the arguments were based on models. The very notion of models has a strange effect on Zweig:  garbage in, garbage out, he intones, and he makes sure we know that all these models were wrong. They were based, for one thing, on pandemic influenza, which is all the modelers had to go on, as the 2003 outbreak of a related coronavirus, SARS-CoV-1 behaved in an entirely different fashion from Covid:  it spread sluggishly, late in the course of infection, and generally in hospital settings. But pandemic influenza is also not a perfect model for Covid. Unlike Covid, flu is often spread by surface contamination. Basing Covid response on influenza led to hygiene theater: the scrupulous hand-washing and sanitizing; the meticulous scrubbing of food packages; the disinfection of surfaces, including (when the lockdowns partially lifted) shopping carts. None of it mattered much. Covid’s chief manner of spread is airborne, as several aerosol scientists (including Kimberly Prather, an atmospheric chemist Zweig holds up to particular scorn, though it isn’t clear why), demonstrated quite early on.

​Still, the “experts” had to work with what they knew, and what they knew was influenza. At first, no one seemed to think the new disease could be worse than influenza, which, after all, has killed up to 80,000 Americans, mostly elderly, in recent years, according to the CDC. And no one knew if schools were going to drive transmission rates or not. Certainly, children in school settings sometimes drive influenza outbreaks. So, in “an abundance of caution,” state and local governments shut the schools down.

That decision enrages Zweig, who argues that influenza kills more children than Covid, but when you look at the actual figures you wonder what he’s smoking. According to Jonathan Howard, physician and author of We Want Them Infected, some 450 children had died of Covid by May of 2021. Zweig claims that in several given years, influenza claimed far more. For instance, according to Zweig, in the year 2012-2013 the CDC attributed 1160 children’s deaths to the flu. This contradicts the CDC’s report itself, which listed pediatric influenza deaths as “more than 170.” According to the American Hospital Association the highest pediatric death toll ever recorded was the year 2009-2010, when the novel Swine Flu pandemic took 288 children’s lives. Zweig’s “love of research” has failed him here. Is this carelessness, or inventiveness? There’s no way to know.

I'm going to try not to over-quote here, because the whole review is a thing of beauty. 

Assholes like Zweig should be exiled from polite society.  They literally have the blood of millions of people on their hands.

Maybe they could go to Mars with Elon. 

Of Course They Did

It appears that Tesla may be engaging odometer fraud in an effort to reduce warranty claims.

Not only is Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ a fraud, he's a remarkably small time fraud:

Tesla has been accused of somehow sneakily altering a customer's odometer to hasten the end of his vehicle's warranty period.

Somehow?  Tesla has been changing ranges and removing features through over the air updates.  

Tesla can do this at the press of a button.

On December 9, 2022, Nyree Hinton, a California financial analyst, bought a used 2020 Model Y Tesla with 36,772 miles on the clock, which meant it was still covered under its 50,000-mile warranty. He had it shipped to his home in Los Angeles from Georgia in February the following year.

He soon noticed problems with the suspension and took it in to get it repaired. But the fix didn't take, and he had to visit his Tesla store a further four times between March and June 2023.

After the last visit to the shop, he claimed he noticed something odd: He was burning through a lot more miles for the same trips. A normal commute for him averaged 55.54 miles a day between December and February, but by March the odometer was registering 72.35 miles a day for the same journey, he reckons. 

By July he'd passed the 50,000-mile limit. He then discovered that Tesla had issued a recall for faulty suspension systems, so in January 2024 he went to store for a sixth time to fix his suspension again, and was told he had to pay because the warranty had expired and the recall didn't apply to him.

Note that Tesla has all of the maintenance records, so it is technically possible for Tesla to make a decision on a case by case basis.

I can see how they might decide that, "This car is going to have a big warranty claim, let's juice the odometer." 

Tesla is not a well made car, and they treat stakeholders, both employees and customers like crap.

Even if Musk were not a miserable excuse for a human being, buying a Tesla is a sucker bet.

Not What I Expect from the Cato Institute

They just published a report documenting that at least 50 of the deportees sent to the Salvadoran gulag were in the country legally.

As Stephen Miller (יִמַּח שְׁמו), "Law, schmaw, we want to deport brown people."

At least 50 Venezuelan men sent by the Trump administration to a prison in El Salvador had entered the United States legally, according to a review by the Cato Institute.

The report, published by the libertarian thinktank on Monday, analyzed the available immigration data for only a portion of the men who were deported to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), and focuses on the cases where records could be found.

“The government calls them all ‘illegal aliens.’ But of the 90 cases where the method of crossing is known, 50 men report that they came legally to the United States, with advanced US government permission, at an official border crossing point,” Cato said in its report.

………

“The proportion isn’t what matters the most: the astounding absolute numbers are,” reads the report. “Dozens of legal immigrants were stripped of their status and imprisoned in El Salvador.”

There needs to be trials of the Trump administration for crimes against humanity.

Jared Polis Can Go Cheney Himself

The "Democratic" governor of Colorado Jared Polis has vetoed a bill that would have prevented landlords from using software to collude on rents, a bill preventing surprise billing by ambulance companies, and .

In both cases, his justification was that if business are not allowed to rape the general public, some people might stop providing these services.

Gov. Jared Polis on Thursday vetoed a measure that would have banned the use of many computer algorithms to set rent in Colorado, saying it could have outlawed some legitimate technologies used by landlords, and risked driving some housing providers out of the market.

Rent-setting algorithms have become a target of consumer protection advocates in recent years, who say software used by companies like RealPage effectively enables landlords to collude and drive up the cost of housing.

House Bill 1004 passed the legislature along party lines. A similar measure died at the Capitol last year.

In his veto letter, Polis said he agreed with the intent of the bill, writing that “collusion between landlords for purposes of artificially constraining rental supply and increasing costs on renters is wrong.”

Yeah, letting landlords gouge renters is such a bad thing! (Not!)

A bipartisan effort to shield Coloradans from surprise ambulance bills has hit an unexpected roadblock: a veto from Gov. Jared Polis. 

House Bill 25-1088 had sailed through the state legislature without a single vote against it from Republicans or Democrats. The bill aimed to prohibit balance billing by ground ambulance services, requiring insurance companies to directly pay for both emergency and non-emergency out-of-network rides at established rates. 

………

“I have been provided with estimates on premium impact that range from $0.73 to $2.15 per member per month,” Polis said. “This means a family of four would likely pay as much as $100 more per year in insurance premiums if I were to sign this bill.”

Jared Polis is a complete piece of sh%$. 

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Unemployment and planned layoffs


Continuing claims and consumer confidence


Falling GDP This week's numbers do not look good.

The spike in initial jobless claims to 240,000 might just be a blip, but the 26,000 increase to 1.919 million continuing claims is a matter for concern.

Also, the drop in GDP is a big f%$#ing deal:

The number of Americans filing new applications for jobless benefits increased more than expected last week and the unemployment rate appeared to have picked up in May, suggesting layoffs were rising as tariffs cloud the economic outlook.

The report from the Labor Department on Thursday showed a surge in applications in Michigan last week, the nation's motor vehicle assembly hub. The number of people collecting unemployment checks in mid-May was the largest in 3-1/2 years. 

……… 

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 14,000 to a seasonally adjusted 240,000 for the week ended May 24, the Labor Department said. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 230,000 claims for the latest week.

They said Trump's aggressive trade policy was making it harder for businesses to plan ahead, a sentiment echoed by a Conference Board survey on Thursday, which showed confidence among chief executive officers plummeting in the second quarter. 

………

The number of people receiving benefits after an initial week of aid, a proxy for hiring, increased 26,000 to a seasonally adjusted 1.919 million during the week ending May 17, the highest since November 2021, the claims report showed. The elevated so-called continuing claims reflect companies' hesitance to increase headcount. 

Yeah, f%$#ing tell me about it. 

Continuing claims covered the period during which the government surveyed households for May's unemployment rate. They increased between the April and May survey periods, suggesting an uptick in the unemployment rate this month.

"This raises the risk that the unemployment rate could tick up to 4.3% in the May employment report," said Abiel Reinhart, an economist at JP Morgan.

The jobless rate was at 4.2% in April. Many people who have lost their jobs are experiencing long spells of unemployment.

Yeah, f%$#ing tell me about it. 

I'm having so much fun looking for work. 

Can't Make Planes, Can Hire Lobbyists

It looks like, after screwing it up once and getting the charges reinstated, Boeing has successfully lobbied for another deal to avoid a criminal trial.

Can we please just frog march senior executives out of their offices in handcuffs?

Boeing is set to avoid prosecution in a fraud case sparked by two fatal crashes of its bestselling 737 Max jet that killed 346 people, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The US Department of Justice is considering a non-prosecution agreement, relatives of the victims were told on Friday, through which the US aerospace giant would not be required to plead guilty.

Representatives of the crash victims’ families expressed outrage, describing the proposal as “morally repugnant” after a tense call with senior justice department officials.

Of course the deal is, "Morally repugnant."  What would you expect from the juxtaposition of the Trump DoJ and Boeing

………

While Boeing initially resolved a criminal investigation in January 2021, prosecutors accused it of breaching the settlement in 2024. This led the justice department to offer the firm a controversial plea deal last summer.

In December, however, US district Judge Reed O’Connor in Texas rejected the agreement. He cited a diversity and inclusion provision related to the selection of an independent monitor.

While Boeing had agreed to plead guilty to a criminal fraud conspiracy charge and pay a fine of up to $487.2m during the final months of the Biden administration, O’Connor’s decision meant the Trump administration inherited the case.

In case you are wondering, O'Connor is a complete f%$#ing nut-job who is frequently overruled on appeal.

It should also be noted that it was the Biden DoJ who originally offered the sell out deal.

Put the company on trial, have a jury decide.  

King Donald

The Supreme Court, in an unsigned opinion on the, "Shadow Docket," said that Donald Trump is free to ignore the law to fire the heads of independent agencies.

It's the Unitary Executive Theory, which states that the President has sole authority over executive functions, so long as they are a Republican.  (That last bit is the reality.  No one supports the Unitary Executive when a Democrat is in the White House)

To be fair, the Supreme Court did not make an explicit ruling that the President can ignore the law with impunity, but ruled that until the case makes up to them, the firings shall stand, which both signals that SCOTUS will support Trump's lawlessness, and that the firings will stand for months if not years before formal arguments:

On Thursday night, the Supreme Court’s six Republican-appointed justices allowed President Donald Trump to remove two executive branch officials: Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board. In doing so, the court refused to enforce a major precedent. The decision indicated that, despite recent rebukes, the court is willing to disregard longstanding precedent for Trump to proceed with his overhaul of the federal government.

Before the court’s actions, a unanimous 1935 Supreme Court precedent called Humphrey’s Executor insulated both Wilcox and Harris, as members of independent boards, from removal without good cause. On Thursday, the GOP-appointees effectively cabined—or overturned—Humphrey’s Executor, in a glib order; they discarded the precedent that undergirds the modern executive branch in the same way they might toss out an old shirt they no longer feel like wearing. 

The court offered a few justifications. First and foremost, it nodded at the Unitary Executive Theory. The theory rests on the idea that the Constitution vests all the executive authority in the president, and therefore it’s unconstitutional to place limits on how the president uses that authority. This theory was crafted by conservative lawyers in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Republicans seemed to have a lock on the presidency but couldn’t get control of Congress and therefore needed a justification for the president to act unilaterally. The Roberts court has spent the last 15 years embedding the theory into constitutional law—even though many academics argue it is an inaccurate and opportunistic reading of the Constitution and the nation’s history.

“Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President…he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents,” Thursday’s anonymous order reads. “The stay reflects our judgment that the Government is likely to show that both the NLRB and MSPB exercise considerable executive power.” 

The order did not come in the normal course of business, after full briefings, oral arguments, and deliberation. Instead, the court issued an unsigned opinion on its emergency docket, granting the administration’s request to remove Wilcox and Harris while the lower courts continue to consider the case. It would be a significant moment if, in the regular course of business, the Supreme Court overturned a 90-year precedent upon which Congress has relied to shape the federal government. But it is more irksome to do it on the sly, effectively telling the administration to go ahead and fire whomever they want, never mind Congress’ statutes or the court’s own precedents.

The decision also has one key reservation. The court did tell Trump that some officials are off limits: the members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Federal Open Market Committee (a body within the Federal Reserve that sets the nation’s monetary policy). The court attempts to justify this differentiation by asserting that “the Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.” 

(emphasis mine)

That last bit is telling.  The conservatives on the Court understand that allowing Trump to fire the the Federal Reserve Chair, members of the Feds Board of Governors and the FOMC would make the Bond Vigilantes freak the f%$# out, so they carved out the Federal Reserve. 

This is much like their ruling  in Bush v. Gore, where they explicitly stated that the ruling could not be used as a precedent.

Both rulings are an admission by Court's conservatives that their rulings are political, corrupt, and illegitimate.

Headline of the Day

Crytpo: There’s Just No Legit Use Case for It. But, Man, Are These Bros Lobbied Up

—Jared Bernstein and Ryan Cummings

Anyone who thinks that Crypto "Currency" is anything but a vehicle for gambling, extortion, money laundering, and fraud is either corrupt or stupid.  (Maybe both)

Dan Davies and Henry Farrell have penned an important oped about the systemic risk embedded in digital currencies—the many stablecoins and cryptocurrencies out there—a risk that is significantly heightened by bipartisan Congressional support for legitimizing these non-sovereign assets. The authors explain how Congress’ blessing of these highly volatile currencies, particularly the normalization of stablecoins through the so-call GENIUS Act, could both undermine the role of dollar and create bail-out risk. Re the latter point, should they become a sizable part of the banking system, there’s a good chance that they’d end up being too-big-to-fail, and, should they crash, require tax-payer bailouts to stabilize the system.

But the oped does not say enough about the foundational problems with private digital currencies that should disqualify them from getting anywhere near the broader financial system. In this post, co-written with Ryan Cummings of the Stanford Institute for Economic and Policy Research, we go back a few steps prior to the current moment, and explain why, in our view, stablecoins and crypto are just fundamentally useless-at-best and harmful at worst. And, in agreement with Davies and Farrell, how the so-called GENIUS Act is a dangerous piece of legislation.

Unless you’re a criminal, there are no use cases for these currencies.

Crypto, and by extension, stablecoins, whose primary use is to buy and sell crypto, are, for reasons we explain, useless for normal commerce. Yet, they have two very prominent uses that have fostered their proliferation over the last decade-and-a-half. First, their anonymity makes them the currency-of-choice for scammers and thieves, and second, cryptocurrency speculators can trade them with each other and in so doing, quickly make—and lose—a lot of money.

(emphasis original)

Unlike cash, which is at least as hard to trace, crypto has no use as a currency.

One cannot buy a stick of gum with crypto.  It takes at least a day for the currency to clear.

A Pissing Contest, and the Rest of Us Need Umbrellas

In response to threats by the United States to sanction any entity that purchases Huwaei chips, the PRC has announced that any entity involved in such activities will be subject to criminal sanctions under Chinese law.

Needless to say, it's going to be the rest of us that suffer as a result of this:

China said it could take legal action against anyone enforcing US restrictions on using Huawei Technologies Co.’s AI chips, escalating a dispute that’s upset a tentative truce on tariffs.

“China believes that the US abuses export controls to contain and suppress China, which violates international law and basic norms of international relations,” the Commerce Ministry in Beijing said in a statement on Wednesday, adding that this hurt the country’s development interests and companies.

“Any organization or individual that implements or assists in the implementation of US measures” would be subject to the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law and “and must bear corresponding legal responsibilities,” the ministry said.

The statement comes a day after China said the Trump administration undermined recent trade talks in Geneva because it warned that using the Huawei semiconductors “anywhere in the world” would violate US export controls.

I'm rather unclear on how a Chinese company exporting domestically manufactured chips to another country would violate US sanctions, there is no US involvement here, but this does seem to be the norm for US foreign policy over the past few decades.

Rather unsurprisingly, the US response was to backtrack:

The US Commerce Department has changed its wording to say the agency was issuing guidance about the risks of using China’s “advanced computing ICs, including specific Huawei Ascend chips,” removing the “anywhere in the world” reference. The formal guidance, dated May 13, says using Huawei’s Ascend chips “risks” violating export controls.

Over the past few years, China has established a legislative framework to push back against US unilateral sanctions, and given the current environment, where the Trump administration is literally putting tariffs on islands inhabited entirely by penguins, it seems to me that a significant portion of the world is likely to take China's side on this.

This is f%$#ed up and sh%$.

Just Desserts

It looks like the level of evil at UnitedHealth is such that even big investors are complaining that it was bad for their bottom line.

Investors are accusing UnitedHealthcare's parent group of conning the public to boost profits — and, ultimately, contributing to the murder of CEO Brian Thompson.

In a proposed class action lawsuit filed earlier this week in New York, UnitedHealth Group investor Roberto Faller claims that the insurer profited from a series of "aggressive, anti-consumer tactics" that harmed clients and investors alike.

"UnitedHealth had, for years, engaged in a corporate strategy of denying health coverage in order to boost its profits, and ultimately, its share price," the lawsuit claims. "This anti-consumer and, at times, unlawful strategy resulted in regulatory scrutiny (as well as public angst) against UnitedHealth, which ultimately resulted in the murder of Brian Thompson."

Yes, you read that right: these investors are claiming that UHC's craven policies contributed to the murder of its CEO — a wild admission, and one that we've reached out to Faller's attorneys to get more information about.

………

Along with being allegedly misled about the company's finances after the assassination, the motion also suggests that Thompson's murder resulted in a massive strategy change: that it wasn't willing to pursue its widespread claims-denying "as a result of heightened scrutiny...as well as open hostility."

Though most people would consider that shift a good thing, the proposed investor class is calling bull on the entire scheme because, ultimately, it led to them losing money.

This is the first time that I've seen investors claiming that being too evil was bad for business.

It is a bit of a mind-f%$#.

In response, will replace its current CEO with the prior CEO Stephen Helmsley, who, in addition to creating the UnitedHealth that we all hate, was the target of  investigations of fraud (Stock option back-dating) during his first time as CEO.

It does not seem to me that UHC is in the least bit chastened by recent developments, which include allegations of medicare fraud as well as allegations that they paid nursing homes to keep critically ill residents out of hospital and opressured these nursing homes to classify residents as DNR (Do Not Recusitate) against the wishes of these residents and their families. 

This ain't gonna end until we start frog-marching senior UHC executives out of their offices in handcuffs.

Linkage

• Can You Opt Out Of TSA Facial Recognition At Airports? (Travel Noire) Yes, you can, but expect the assholes to hassle you.
• Who broke the internet? (08 May 2025) (Cory Doctorow) Short version:  Anti-circumvention provisions of laws like the DMCA allow vendors to erect moats around their business, and then enshittify away.
• Who Broke the Internet? Part II (Cory Doctorow) Short version: with an assist from folks from Wall Street.'
• Who Would Steal New York City’s Pigeons? Mother Pigeon Thought She Knew. (New York Times) Spoiler, it was folks in Pennsylvania who then shoot them for, "Sport," by which I mean that they release them right in front of assholes with shotguns. 
• Local craftworkers were involved in the repair of roman armour (Heritage Daily) There is a lot of evidence of rework of Lorica Hamata (Mail) in the villages around Roman camps.
• The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic's con (Out of the Software Crisis) I really like this analogy.
• FBI Visits Me Over Manifesto (Ken Klippenstein) Kippenstein published the manifesto of the guy who shot the Israeli diplomats a few days ago, gets another hostile FBI visit. (The first was publishing the Vance dossier.)

I've always said that Viking River Cruises is a disappointment, because you do not get to sack a monastery:

Still Can't Make Planes

It looks like Boeing has been using the wrong alloy of titanium for its 787 Dreamliner.

The FAA wants to mandate  inspections:

The FAA has proposed mandating Boeing-recommended inspections of about 100 787-9s and -10s for fuselage fittings that may be constructed from the wrong grade of titanium.

A draft rule published May 14 would require inspections of affected aircraft within 48 months. An alert requirements bulletin issued in February lists 97 787-9s and -10s as possibly having the noncompliant parts. All affected aircraft were manufactured from early 2016 through mid-2017.

According to the draft rule, certain pressure deck area fittings may have been installed that are made from an “incorrect” grade 1 or 2 titanium. The parts should be made from Grade 5 Ti-6Al-4V, which is stronger and has higher damage tolerance.

………

Affected parts include pressure deck floor beam brackets and fittings at certain body stations. The pressure deck is located where the wings attach to the fuselage and separates the pressurized cabin and unpressurized wheel well.

Obviously, this is an almost decade old error, but I am a bit dubious of the clams of a renewed focus on safety that have been made over the past few years.

Boeing needs to fire its entire C-Suite.

Interesting Ruling

The Supreme Court has affirmed a fraud conviction even though that there was no direct economic harm.

The short version is that a contractor was convicted of fraud for falsifying its compliance with the diversity requirements in its contract.

The substance of the appeal was that even if they lied, there was no actual monetary loss.

In a 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court (IMHO correctly) called bullsh%$ on this.

There was a criminal taking here, the contract that would have otherwise gone to some other contractor:

The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the fraud conviction of a Philadelphia-area government contractor. Stamatios Kousisis was found guilty, along with Alpha Painting and Construction, after they failed to comply with a contract provision intended to promote diversity. Prosecutors insisted that federal wire fraud laws apply equally to cases in which the defendant uses deception to enter into a transaction that doesn’t harm the victim financially. On Thursday, the justices agreed.

The court in recent years has resisted what it sees as the federal government’s overly expansive readings of federal fraud laws, so Thursday’s decision was a relatively rare victory for federal prosecutors in that area.

Kouisisis, Alpha, and their business partners won contracts on two major construction projects in the Philadelphia area: a bridge over the Schuylkill River and repairs at Amtrak’s 30th Street Station. As part of the contracts, they were required to work with “disadvantaged business enterprises.”

Alpha indicated that it would use a paint supplier, Markias, that was a DBE. But Markias was merely a pass-through that did not supply any paint to the projects. Instead, other suppliers sent Markias invoices; Markias then added a small mark-up and sent its own invoices to Alpha.

Alpha and Kousisis were indicted on federal wire fraud charges. The government relied on a theory known as “fraudulent inducement” – the idea that Kouisisis and Alpha obtained the contracts by making deceptive promises to use a disadvantaged business enterprise.

Alpha and Kousisis countered that under the fraudulent inducement theory, the government must show that they intended to harm the victim financially – which they did not do. But the lower courts disagreed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit stressed that participation by a disadvantaged business enterprise was “an essential part of the contract.”

Kousisis was convicted and sentenced to 70 months in prison, while Alpha was required to pay a $500,000 fine and forfeit its profits from the contracts.

In an opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the 3rd Circuit’s decision, rejecting the argument by Kousisis and Alpha that they could not be held liable unless the government had suffered a financial loss. “The fraudulent-inducement theory,” Barrett wrote, “is consistent with both the text of the wire fraud statute and our precedent interpreting it.” 

I am surprised.that the Supreme Court ruled this way, particularly unanimously, but it's a win for good government.

Hard to Write About This

Two staffers at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, were shot and killed by a gunman who shouted, "Free Palestine."

Needless to say there has been a lot of freaking out in the Jewish community:

A young couple who worked for the Israeli Embassy were shot dead near the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington late Wednesday by a gunman who chanted “free, free Palestine” after the shooting, according to authorities. A suspect was in custody, D.C. police said.

The victims were exiting the museum in Northwest Washington after attending an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee when the gunman opened fire, authorities said.

Israel’s X account identified the victims as Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim. Israeli government officials said Thursday that Lischinsky was a research assistant in the Israeli Embassy’s political department and Milgrim organized missions and visits to Israel.

Needless to say, the Trump administration started trying to exploit this indecent to justify their policy priorities.

I just can't write about this any more, but I felt that I had to note this.