Linkage

• Courage Before Greatness: The Albert Camus Story (Classic Literature) He was a serious badass.
• Sculptor Spends $100K on Charlie Kirk Statue, Struggles to Find Buyer (Art News) My heart bleeds for him.
• The earth has stopped being as shiny. Insurers are worried (Insurance Business) Anthropogenic climate change is now driving further climate change.
• Long COVID Brain Scans Reveal Damage to Dopamine Neurons (Sci Tech Daily) Wear your f%$#ing mask.
• Incredible Video Shows Chinese Rocket Get Hit by Lightning Mid-Launch  (Futurism) It survived, but why launch in such weather?
• The myth of medieval childhood (Works in Progress) Medieval parents loved their children too.
• The Math Behind The U.S. Defeat in Iran  (Forever Wars) Proof of the old adagage from Josef Stalin, "Quantity has a quality of its own."
• Rahm Emanuel’s Losing Record (The Nation) Making the obvious point, that Emanuel's history is one of failure.
• A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attack (MIT Technology Review) Short version:  LLMs are broken in ways that are ineluctably tied to the basic model.
• AI slop pollutes the CVE pipeline with fake vulns (The Register) AI slop is just that, slop.

Cthulhu in the manner of Theodore Seuss Geisel:

Sub Hed of the Day

In an article noting that Iran seems to be spending a significant amount of resources attempting to blast Amazon warehouses and data centers off the map in the Middle East, we have the sub hed, the line between the headline and the byline saying, "That's one way to deal with data centers."

I like that framing.

There’s data center activism, fought with Facebook groups and petitions, and then there’s data center annihilation, fought with guided missile and suicide drones.

Recently, the Iranian military announced it had hit and damaged two Amazon data centers in the island country of Bahrain with a volley of cruise missiles.

After the attack, the Iranian state media outlet Tasnim published a partial statement from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, saying that the “IRGC Aerospace warriors… in response to the aggression and assault… by the child-killing American army on the under-construction and civilian facilities of DarKhoveyn, attacked and destroyed the central data infrastructure of the American company Amazon in Bahrain with several cruise missiles.”

Using images from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellites, Bloomberg confirmed an attack on the data center campus had taken place, though noted it’s difficult to say how bad the damage is (Amazon refused to comment on Bloomberg‘s reporting.)

I do not approve of this war, nor do I approve of Iran's theocratic regime, but if they expanded their target list to include Flock Cameras, I would be more receptive to their ideas.

Just saying. 

I'm Calling Bullsh%$

So, Todd Blanche has announced that he will be canceling the Trump slush fund in order to get Republican votes for his nomination as US Attorney General, he also issued a related memo saying that the IRS amnesty will only apply to Trump, his businesses, and his immediate family.

Unsurprisingly, the Republicans have declared that this is enough.

Equally unsurprisingly, even though the one of the memos is signed by Todd Blanche. they mean nothing, because the "settlement" requires signatures from all parties to modify.

It's all bad legal theater. 

Texas Senator John Cornyn and North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis just caved to Donald Trump’s demands, paving the way for acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to move toward a full Senate confirmation.

The two Republican holdouts announced Monday that they had reached a deal with the Justice Department that they claimed satisfied their aims to end Trump’s $1.8 “anti-weaponization” fund.

“We are pleased that the Department of Justice has issued a formal order terminating the anti-weaponization fund,” the outgoing lawmakers said in a joint statement. “Additionally, the Department has acknowledged in a binding written order that the audit settlement is limited to the plaintiffs and the scope does not extend beyond the defendants in the lawsuit, the IRS and the Treasury, addressing concerns that multiple of our Republican colleagues share.”

………

On its face, Blanche’s note appeared to terminate the fund, specifying that the order was “rescinded and shall have no force or effect.” However, journalists were quick to comment that the language employed in the rest of Blanche’s memo not only suggested that the honey pot fund would be preserved in some form, but also failed to terminate Trump’s underlying IRS immunity arrangement.

This makes Neville Chamberlain waving a piece of paper after selling out Czechoslovakia look like a profile in courage.

The War Crimes Were the Purpose

I am not surprised that the Trump administration's program of targeted assassination in the Caribbean and the South Spear have not slowed drug shipments to the United States.

This is not a surprise.  The goal of this program was never to interdict drug shipments.  It's goal was to murder innocent fisherman for in order to generate the illusion of toughness.

The Trump administration’s deadly military strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats have not reduced the amount of cocaine entering the United States, but they’re prompting criminal organizations to develop new strategies and tactics and undermining traditional investigative methods, according to a previously unreported assessment by the Drug Enforcement Administration, a closed-door congressional briefing and interviews with current and former U.S. and foreign officials.

It's all posturing and politics and corrupt murder. 

Should Be Permanent

Professionally obnoxious Evangelelist Whitney Lynn has an signature bit of theological masturbation, she stands up and preaches onboard airline flights, which prevents people from walking away.

Well, Alaska Airlines just booted her from a flight, and her self-involved butt-hurt is a site to see.

Florida evangelist Whitney Lynn uses most of her flights as an opportunity to share her faith, a trend that was featured in a recent Washington Post article.

On Thursday, she said, her sermon got her kicked off a San Diego-bound jet before it even took off from Orlando International Airport. She documented the removal in a series of videos she posted on social media, one of which had racked up 3 million views on Instagram by Friday afternoon.

………

In another video, an airline employee can be seen telling Lynn to gather her things and follow him off the plane because the “crews don’t feel safe with you.”

………

In an emailed statement responding to questions about Lynn’s videos, Alaska Airlines said that the flight crew “became increasingly concerned” about a passenger’s behavior.

“The passenger was asked to deplane the aircraft for safety reasons,” the airline said in a statement. “For the foreseeable future, the guest will not be permitted to travel on our flights.”

Lynn, who said she had planned to attend a follower’s funeral in California, said she was able to rebook her flight but later got an email from the airline saying she was not allowed to travel on Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines or Horizon Air while reports about her recent travels were under investigation. She received a flight credit but said there is no way for her to use it now.

Nice to see someone who hypocritically uses religion as an excuse to express rudeness and passive aggression get what is coming to them.

You mess with the bull, you get the horns. 

Headline of the Day

Tesla Cybertruck Risks Becoming the Ford Edsel of the EV Era

—Bloomberg on the piss poor sales numbers for Musk's folly.

Elon's Swasticar is not selling well

Ford Motor Co. introduced a car almost 70 years ago widely viewed as the greatest automotive flop of all time. Tesla Inc.’s Cybertruck may well be on its way to claiming that title.

Ford’s Edsel, unveiled in 1957, was pitched as an entirely new kind of car, with an oval-shaped front grille likened to a horse collar. The company predicted it would sell 200,000 units in the model’s first year on the market. Ford ended up selling less than one-third of that target, and the Edsel’s design became the butt of jokes.

Tesla started delivering its unusually angular Cybertruck in 2023. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk called it the company’s best product ever and estimated the carmaker might build more than 250,000 annually, depending on demand. Tesla sold less than one-sixth of that number in its first year, and the truck’s blocky looks became a punchline.

Edsel sales dropped each year the model was on the market, and Ford discontinued the car in 1959. Cybertruck sales are off to an even worse start. Only 7,133 have been registered in the US this year through May, according to S&P Global Mobility data provided to Bloomberg News. That count is buoyed by Musk’s other companies, with SpaceX building out a fleet of Cybertrucks.

 Even with the self-dealing and fraud, the tiny penis truck is not selling well.

Fraudy McFraud Face is a Fraud

And by, "Fraudy McFraud Face," I mean Flock Group Inc.

It turns out that the eponymous private surveillance firm provides little evidence that it reduces crime.

Gee, It's all a corrupt fraud?  Who do they think that they are, the Trump Org?

Since the launch of Flock Safety in 2017, the ACLU estimates the company installed some 100,000 automatic license plate readers throughout the United States. The dragnet comes with plenty of downsides to privacy and civil liberties: it’s ripe for abuse by crooked cops, powered by sweatshop labor, and nearly impossible to escape once it designates you a target.

But police officials insist it’s worth the trade off — because at it least it helps them catch the bad guys, right? Unfortunately, the reality isn’t quite that peachy.

Atlanta, Georgia has experienced far and away the largest influx of ALRPs in the country, with over 5,000 various Flock cameras now blanketing the city. Yet as bombshell data released by the FBI shows, the city’s massive web of surveillance has had virtually zero impact on the Atlanta Police Department’s ability to solve crime, with some clearance rates for offenses like homicide even experiencing a decline over the past few years as the cameras have proliferated.

First reported by the Atlanta Community Press Collective, the FBI data is a damning refutation of Flock’s primary claim: that ALPRs are necessary to help officers keep the public safe.

According to the ACPC, the rates at which the APD resolves crimes like homicide, robbery, miscellaneous larceny, and shoplifting have actually decreased between 2021 and 2025, when the city’s ALPR build-out hit its full stride.

For homicide, the numbers are especially embarrassing, with the FBI reporting case closures at just 48 percent in 2025, down from 53.4 percent in 2021. Meanwhile, rape remained flat year over year, holding steady at a pitiful 37.7 percent closure rate from 2021 to 2025, and dipping down to just 21.2 percent at its lowest point in that four-year span.

(emphasis original)

This might explain why Flock shrouds its marketing in secrecy and non-disclosure agreements.

It also explains why so many public officials involved in approving the camera deals end up getting payoff of various sorts from the company. 

Common Sense in the UK

Given the large number of applications for power connections for data centers that are either never built or delayed, the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem) is proposing a substantial fee for grid connection requests from data centers.

Given that these requests result in significant costs which are largely borne by the rate-payers, this makes a lot of sense.

Ofgem is seeking feedback on proposals to levy a fee on datacenter development projects at the time they apply for a grid connection.

The move aims to discourage companies from seeking approval for speculative applications that clog up the pipeline and cause connection delays, without ever resulting in finished datacenters.

The UK regulator for electricity and gas says connection applications for electrical supply have surged from 41 gigawatts (GW) to 125 GW in under a year, with datacenters accounting for at least 80 GW of the new demand.

………

Ofgem is proposing a Datacenter Commitment Fee paid by the developers of large server farm projects when accepting a grid connection offer. The fee would be refunded once the facility is drawing power, or forfeited if the project exits the queue early instead.

That refund bit I do not approve of.  Data center power provisioning levies large external costs on the grid, and the AI grifters should be made to pay for that.

To Know It Is to Hate It

In profoundly unsurprising news, a poll is showing that as people learn more about LLM artificial intelligence, the more they hate it.

This is not a surprise.  Except for some very limited edge cases (The Odysseus Google Maps video), there is little real benefit shown, and little benefit promised, by the technology.

For a time, it appeared as if AI would find broad acceptance among the American masses.

The peanut gallery on social media happily embraced early image generation models as researchers appeared to make significant breakthroughs with the aid of their newfound tools. On paper, surveys found public attitudes toward the tech continued to improve into 2025 — before sharply reversing.

In 2026, America’s honeymoon phase with AI seems to be quickly wearing off. According to a joint poll conducted by Bentley University and Gallup, the percentage of US adults who think AI does “more harm than good” is rising, from 31 percent in 2025 to 39 percent this year, while a piddling 9 percent still think the tech does “more good than harm.”

As outlooks sour, the Bentley-Gallup poll found that Americans’ familiarity with AI continues to grow. In 2026, 70 percent of those polled said they’re “somewhat or extremely knowledgeable” about AI, up 6 percent compared to 2024. The implication probably gives OpenAI Sam Altman a migraine: the more people learn about AI, the less they seem to want it in their lives.

The American public is smarter than most of our oligarchs think. 

It just takes them a while to examine complex issues like this, because they have bills to pay and lives to live. 

Well, It's a Start

Capital One has announced that it has closed Trump Organization accounts due to patterns showing money laundering.

What?  You mean that a mobbed up real estate developer from New York City might be laundering money?

Pshaw! 

Capital One Financial hit back on Friday against a lawsuit over its ⁠decision to close the Trump ⁠Organization’s bank accounts ​years ago, stating that it did so after a review by anti-money-laundering experts.

The disclosure marks the first time a bank has formally tied money-laundering concerns to Donald Trump’s family business. Capital One is seeking to dismiss the case by casting doubt on claims of illegally debanking – or denying services on religious or political grounds – the Trump Organization.

………

Capital One has never accused the Trump Organization of money laundering. ​But Friday’s filing argues that “documents and Plaintiffs’ own ‌allegations make clear that Capital One closed ‌Plaintiffs’ accounts for anti-money laundering (‘AML’) reasons.

“The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by ‌Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance.”

Capital One gave notice of its plans to close more than 300 Trump-affiliated bank accounts in March 2021.

300 accounts?!?!!?  

Nope, no money laundering there.

………

“The transaction patterns identified by Capital One are among the types of activity flagged by federal banking guidance,” the filing said.

Gee, ya think?

DoJ F%$#s Up Again

Their felony charge against David Hearn for touching the Washington, DC Reflecting Pool has been dropped, because it is obvious that the failure of the pool renovation, algae blooms and the coating peeling off, was as a result of piss poor execution by the by the Trump aligned contractor selected for the job.

Federal prosecutors on Friday said that contractors hired by the Trump administration had botched the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, leaving behind “widespread damage” in the pool’s new blue lining, and that the Interior Department had then falsely blamed that damage on vandals.

In an extraordinary motion filed Friday evening, the U.S. attorney in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, said she was seeking to dismiss a felony charge against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was accused of pulling up a piece of the pool’s lining two feet square.

In doing so, Ms. Pirro — a longtime ally of President Trump’s — directly contradicted the president’s repeated claim that the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner was caused by people slashing its coating with knives. Instead, she said, “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.” 

Imagine that? 

Stupid Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) Tricks

Amy Acton is the Democratic Party nominee for Governor in Ohio.

She is also an anti-LGBTQ bigot, having referred to trans girls as boys and making a ban on TG athletes central to her campaign. 

In an attempt at damage control, her campaign scheduled a meeting with LGBTQ advocates.

Sounds like a good move, only Acton did not attend the meeting and excluded trans people from the meeting.

She sounds like a perfect candidate for the consultants busy sucking the marrow out of the Democratic Party. 

Amy Acton, Ohio Democratic Candidate for Governor, has seen her relationship with the state’s LGBTQ+ community go from bad to catastrophic. Weeks after Acton endorsed a transgender sports ban and called transgender girls “boys,” the fallout has been intense: the Ohio Democratic Party forced its own Progressive and Pride caucuses to delete their criticism and a meeting the campaign promised would begin repairing the damage instead further inflamed tensions. Inside sources who have gone public now say the “listening session” was a debacle. Acton did not show up, her campaign manager barred Arienne Childrey—Vice Chair of the party’s Pride Caucus, a transgender candidate for the Ohio House, and Ohio’s first openly trans city council member—from even entering the Zoom call. When another advocate demanded to know why Childrey was barred, she was ejected. The Chair of the Progressive Caucus, Kim McCarthy, was locked in the waiting room during the entire “listening session.” And in the end, the campaign ultimately refused to apologize for calling trans girls “boys,” refused to retract Acton’s support for a transgender sports ban, and ended the meeting with no plans for what come next.

………

According to notes obtained from a source who attended the meeting, the session opened with a blow: Dwayne Steward of Equality Ohio, reading what appeared to be a prepared statement, announced the organization was rescinding Acton’s “A” rating on its LGBTQ+ candidate scorecard. “This is not about punishment, but partnership,” Steward said. “Harm has been done. Attacking trans people isn’t just wrong, it is a losing strategy.” From there, the meeting devolved. Multiple attendees demanded to know why Childrey had been barred from an event about the LGBTQ+ community. Campaign manager Philip Stein responded only that the meeting was “mostly a space we want to listen to the folks that we picked here.” When pressed on why the event had been titled a “conversation” rather than a one-way listening session, Stein conceded that running this kind of meeting was “not his area of expertise” and that he could “only apologize for the way that the event was titled.” 

………

The political math of Acton's position doesn't add up. Republicans aren't going to reward her for baseline levels of transphobia—Ramaswamy will run ads against her on any number of transgender issues regardless. What Acton’s anti-trans turn does is depress turnout among Ohio’s LGBTQ+ voters and allies in a race separated by less than a single percentage point. And the campaign's response to that reality has been, at every turn, to punish the people telling her so. The demand of LGBTQ+ Ohioans still stands unanswered. Until it is met, Acton has given Ohio's LGBTQ+ community every reason to believe she would govern exactly the way her campaign has conducted itself—with the people she claims to represent locked in the waiting room. 

To quote (not) Tallyrand, this is worse than a crime, it is a mistake. 

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's Thursday, and so time for the weekly unemployment report.  We have initial claims rising slightly and continuing claims falling slightly, along with a side dish of increased inflation and higher gas prices.

The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits rose last week but layoffs remain in the historically healthy range of the past few years.

U.S. filings for jobless aid in the week ending July 25 rose by 9,000 to 197,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. The previous week’s figure was revised up by 1,000 to 188,000 but remains the lowest in more than 50 years.

………

Following a 6.6% rise a day earlier, the price for a barrel of U.S. crude fell slightly more than 1% Thursday to $83.36 a barrel. Gas prices in the U.S. are also back up above $4 a gallon on average. Besides squeezing consumers’ budgets, it also hits businesses hard, especially those which are heavily dependent on fuel.

Also Thursday, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation metric, PCE, came in at 3.7%, still well above its 2% target. On top of that, the government reported Thursday that the U.S. economy grew at an unexpectedly sluggish 1.5% pace in the April-June quarter.

………

The Labor Department’s report Thursday also showed that the four-week moving average of weekly jobless claims, which softens some of the weekly volatility, fell by 5,000 to 202,750.

The total number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits for the previous week ending July 18 was 1.78 million, a decline of 7,000 from the previous week.

Not a clue as to what the f%$# is going on here.

Headline of the Day

Study Shows Corporate Subsidies Only Create Jobs for Lobbyists

—Boondoggle on a study showing that massive subsidies to business generate jobs in only one industry.

Yeah, this is kind of a, "Well, duh!" moment.

The promise of corporate “economic development” subsidies is that they will create new jobs. Indeed, elected officials, government agencies, and the corporate executives that receive them all defend these public dollars flowing to private interests in the same way: As investments in local job creation and economic growth.

Research shows that this promise routinely isn’t kept. But a new study suggests that one industry does, in fact, see meaningful job creation from such subsidies: The lobbying industry.

Researchers Russell Sobel, Gary Wagner, and Peter Calcagno tracked data from more than 40,000 lobbying firms, covering all 50 states from 1997 to 2019. They examined what happened in a state before and after it handed out an “extraordinarily large” incentive — defined as a subsidy thousands of times bigger than that state had ever given before — and compared that to states that never awarded such an extraordinarily large incentive.

The study found that in the years after a state hands out its first extraordinarily large incentive, lobbyist employment in that state rises 3.6 percent on average. The effect is sharper in the state capital: In the five years following the incentive, lobbying firms in the capital county see employment gains of 4.5 percent relative to capital counties in comparison states. Additionally, lobbying’s share of the capital county’s private-sector workforce grew by 5.8 percent.

………

Separate research has found that firms that put more resources into the political process are more likely to land these incentives in the first place, suggesting the lobbying isn’t just a side effect of winning a deal, but a key part of obtaining it in the first place.

All of this sits on top of decades of research showing that these incentive programs generally fail to produce the job growth, income gains, or tax revenue they promise. Yet, that has not stopped states from handing out more of them: State governments now spend more than $40 billion a year on these incentives — three times what they spent in 1990.

Subsidies have always been a sucker bat.

This is Literally Beyond Parody

So, the paper run by the Amazon sociopath just published an OP/ED titled, "Will Maine uproot Susan Collins? I went to a potato festival to find out."

The rest of the article is even worse. 

That's the hed printed at the top.  The title you would see on a news search would be, "Susan Collins faces a populist test in Maine Senate race," which is what the title tag is set to.probably to avoid widespread mockery.

No link, they don't deserve even the meager traffic that my sh%$#y little blog would send them.

Yeah, the author is a MAGAt, and yes, the Washington Post OP/ED page has gotten even worse than the travesty it was under the mismanagement of the late (and unlamented) Fred Hiatt. 

Where Can I Rent the World's Smallest Violin?

Because it looks like Todd Blanch's nomination to be US Attorney General likely not going to make it through the Judiciary Committee.

You have two Republican Senators demanding a written promise not to use the, "Weaponization fund,"
 nor preemptively pardon Trump and his family for Tax fraud.

As one of them is John Cornyn, and he lost the primary to Ken Paxton in large part because Trump endorsed the latter, and so has nothing to lose, I rather think that the nomination is as dead as the parrot in Monty Python's sketch. 

The Senate committee weighing Todd Blanche’s bid to become the next attorney general postponed a key vote on his nomination Wednesday, amid a standoff between the Trump administration and two Republican senators who have threatened to withhold their support.

The postponement was a high-profile setback for President Donald Trump, and a further indication that congressional Republicans are becoming more willing to stand up to him on key matters. It also leaves the fate of Blanche’s nomination uncertain after Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced the vote’s deferral just hours before it was set to take place at a 9 a.m. Thursday hearing.

Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) had insisted that the Trump administration limit — in writing — central provisions of a controversial deal struck this spring between the Justice Department and the president to resolve a lawsuit he filed against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. DOJ was not able to provide the senators sufficient assurances to win their agreement to support Blanche.

The senators have said their votes for Blanche’s nomination hinge on their requested changes to the deal. A “no” vote from either one of them would be enough to sink Blanche’s nomination at the committee stage, given the expectation that all Judiciary Committee Democrats will oppose Blanche’s confirmation.

Hopefully, soon I will be able to say, "This nomination is no more, it has ceased to be." 

Fed Stands Pat

The Federal Reserve held its benchmark interest steady today, but in a sign of growing concerns about inflation three members of the Board of Governors voted to hike rates, which is the most public split on the board in about a decade.

Also, the bond vigilantes were unimpressed:

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday kept interest rates unchanged despite growing divisions among policymakers to more directly tackle inflation after five years of overshooting the central bank’s 2 percent target.

The Fed voted 9-3 to maintain rates at 3.5 to 3.75 percent, a level that has been in place since January. Beth M. Hammack of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Neel Kashkari of the Minneapolis Fed and Lorie K. Logan of the Dallas Fed dissented, voting instead for a quarter-point increase.

The divisions underscore the tough spot the Fed and its chairman, Kevin M. Warsh find themselves in as they grapple with new sources of price pressures that are threatening to compound an already complicated and longstanding inflation problem.

………

As Mr. Warsh spoke, longer dated Treasury yields rose sharply, with the 30-year bond closing in on its May peak of 5.2 percent. That was the highest level since 2007. The rise in the 30-year Treasury yield suggests some worry about Mr. Warsh’s ability to tackle inflation in the long run.

Googly-Eyed Chud Loses

In what is extremely unsurprising news, Kash Patel defamation lawsuit against Jim Stewartson for the latter calling him a "Googly Eyed Chud" has been thrown out of court.

And yes, the judge who issued the ruling used the phrase in the footnotes.

A federal judge Tuesday tossed FBI Director Kash Patel’s $10 million lawsuit against a blogger who called him a “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch.”

In his final order, Nevada Chief District Judge Andrew Gordon dismissed Patel’s lawsuit against Jim Stewartson, finding that he did not have “personal jurisdiction” over the internet commentator.

………

In June 2023, Patel filed a complaint that Stewartson was smearing him online by calling him a “blatantly incompetent chud” and a “Kremlin asset” who plotted to “overthrow the government” on January 6, 2021.

Initially, Stewartson didn’t respond to the lawsuit, which led to Patel winning a $250,000 default judgment in August 2025. Stewartson challenged the default judgment on the grounds that he had no meaningful ties to Nevada, where the case was filed, and declared that Patel was a “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch” and, again, a “chud.”

Stewartson celebrated the final order, which referenced his comment in a footnote. “I’d like to commend the judge for including ‘googly-eyed Kremlin bitch’ in his ruling,” Stewartson wrote on X Tuesday.

 No sanctions against Patel or his legal team, which is a bit of a bummer though.

OK, There is Some Good AI Slop Out There

This is fan-f%$#ing-tastic.

This is wicked smaht!

History Rhyming

We are seeing the financial merry go ground slowing down.

First, we have banks starting to call in loans from hedge funds as a result of concerns about the possible collapse of the AI bubble.

Wall Street banks have demanded more collateral from hedge funds in recent weeks as a rout in AI stocks accelerates and triggers heavy losses across several popular strategies.

Banks asked funds whose holdings are heavily concentrated in certain industries to provide additional collateral to keep their existing levels of leverage, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The collateral demands highlight the mounting fears on Wall Street about the scale and speed of the sell-off in AI stocks over the past fortnight, which has upended a rally in a sector favoured by many funds.

……… 

Banks build in protections when lending to hedge funds to make sure they do not incur losses in case the market turns negative. 

Meanwhile, on a slightly more personal scale, we are seeing a spike in the level of margin debt on the New York Stock Exchange.

When people start buying stocks with borrowed money at rates not seen since the dot-com bubble, someone usually gets hurt. Deutsche Bank is now waving the yellow flag.

The bank’s credit strategists, led by Steve Caprio, published a warning on July 24 that US margin debt has crossed the $1 trillion mark as of June 2025. That’s not just a round number for headlines. As a share of GDP, margin debt has now surpassed levels seen during the late-1990s tech mania and is closing in on the 2021 all-time high. 

The numbers behind the warning

Here’s what caught Deutsche Bank’s attention: NYSE margin debt jumped 18.5% from April to June 2025. That two-month sprint ranks as the fifth-fastest increase since 1998, a period that includes some of the most memorable market blowups in modern history.

Finally, and I'm going to quote the hed, "The bond market hasn’t been this calm since the dot-com bust and the financial crisis. History warns of a rude awakening." 

The spreads between high and low quality debt is shrinking, which tends to happen before a crash.

For all the current economic and geopolitical turmoil, the U.S. bond market is remarkably sanguine about the risks of a U.S. economic recession, even after oil’s big price jump.

To appreciate the bond market’s seemingly unconcerned behavior, consider the high-yield bond spread, which represents the additional compensation bond investors demand for incurring the extra risk that high-yield (“junk”) bonds represent relative to U.S. Treasurys.

The junk spread rises along with the risk of recession, when issuers of high-yield bonds become less likely to be able to repay, and it falls when the risk of an economic downturn is lower.

At the end of June, when a barrel of Brent crude was selling for $73, the junk spread stood at 2.75 percentage points. Currently, with Brent crude near $100 per barrel, the spread stands at 2.68 points. While a 7-basis-point decline is not in itself particularly meaningful, it is highly significant in light of the increased likelihood of economic distress to which the higher oil price leads.

In addition, we shouldn’t forget that oil’s recent spike comes on top of a private-credit market that has already been struggling. In its recent report on the state of private markets in 2026, MSCI writes that this market is facing problems even deeper than previously known: “Among loans in private-credit funds, 15.7% have been marked below 80% of principal — a rough threshold for distress — and more than 10% are now marked below 50% — a level typically associated with deep distress or risk of restructuring.”

MSCI’s report reflected the state of private markets at the end of 2025’s third quarter, the latest period for which data were available. Since then, conditions in the private-credit market have deteriorated even more, but the junk spread has narrowed rather than widened — to 2.68 percentage points from 2.80. 

Moreover, as you can see from the chart above, the junk spread is now lower than at any time since immediately prior to the 2008 global financial crisis. The only other time since 1997 that the spread was lower than today came near the top of the dot-com bubble. We don’t need to be reminded what happened after that. 

We are in for interesting times. 

Bummer

A federal judge has stayed the Minnesota law banning predictions markets.

This is temporary, so Minnesoto might still prevail, but the injunction is disappointing.

The bookies Kalshi and Polymarket, along with the Trump DoJ claimed that these were swaps, not betting.

It's not a surprise that Trump is a big supporter of this sort of gambling.  He and his family are deep into the so-called "Prediction Markets",  Also, there is compelling evidence that members of his administration are using the markets to insider trade.

Corruption is as corruption does.

As I have noted for well over a decade, swaps are basically just betting, not insurance, which should have been banned via a legal framework dating back to the Marine Insurance Act of 1746, which prevented people from doing the equivalent of getting paid for burning down their neighbors house.

A federal judge on Monday blocked a Minnesota state law that would ban prediction markets days before it was set to go into effect, siding with a federal financial regulator and two companies that had sued to stop it.

In May, Minnesota became the first state to pass a law making it a felony for most prediction markets to locally operate and advertise. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency that oversees prediction markets, and the markets Kalshi and Polymarket sued, arguing that the platforms can be regulated only at the federal level.

On Monday, Judge Kate M. Menendez of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota granted a preliminary injunction to halt the law from going into effect on Saturday, finding that the companies faced a threat of irreparable harm. The law will remain on hold until a final ruling is made in the case.

………

The agency has faced criticism for making what appear to be favorable decisions for prediction markets with ties to the Trump family. Donald Trump Jr. advises Kalshi and Polymarket, and he backs Polymarket financially.

President Trump has posted on Truth Social that the agency, not states, must have “exclusive authority” over prediction markets.

 

Some News You Can Use

Removing AI From Your Google Account.

This includes Gmail.

Just do it. 

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud ……… Under Oath

In news that is surprising only because they admitted guilt, Trump and his Evil Minions™ have admitted that they cancelled grants because they came from states that did not vote for him.

Impeach Trump, Impeach Vance, jail the lot of them. 

When the Trump administration canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste.

But it wasn’t true.

In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.

The admission showed how President Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid in his second term. Far from rooting out the sort of misspending that Mr. Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to leverage the budget as a tool to assist its allies — or as a cudgel to hurt the president’s foes.

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

Wait, Wut?

New on the list of things we really don't need is a digital cassette tape simulator.

Because I guess some people's lives are so empty that they have to relive the era of using a pencil eraser to rewind tapes. (F%$#, I'm old)

If you have wistful longings for the days when your songs carried the subtle hiss of the cassettes you listened to, we have some reel good news. A new project takes modern music back to the analog era.

The project, available on GitHub, is called "Audio Cassette Simulation" and uses FFmpeg to transcode audio files to get that "wish I'd bought some decent tapes instead of the superstore's own-brand" sound.

The repository includes simulations of BASF LH Extra C90, Maxell UD C90, Sony CHF60 Type I Normal, Sony CHF90, TDK D90, and even Soviet MK-60 tape. Navigate to the appropriate cassette folder using bash, then run the conversion code (or use it to convert a live stream).

The output is dumped into a ./out folder for a bit of retro enjoyment.

According to the README, "This project simulates cassette tape audio profiles using ffmpeg.

"It applies tape noise, wow and flutter pitch modulation, bandwidth limits, and equalizer adjustments."

I know that I am lame, just ask my kids, but I take comfort in the fact that I am not THIS lame. 

Brazil Tells Trump to F%$# Off

There has been no small amount of tension between Brazil's Lula da Silva and Trump, but I never imagined that Brazil would simply refuse entry to US officials.

In this case, said officials were sent to create a false narrative about the upcoming Brazilian elections, so the denial is justified, but still this is unprecedented, at least as directed toward the US.

Brazil has denied visas to two senior State Department officials whom the Trump administration planned to dispatch on a mission to cast doubt on the fairness and integrity of the country’s electoral system before millions of Brazilians vote in a presidential election on Oct. 4, the Foreign Ministry said Saturday.

A U.S. State Department delegation, including Trump political appointees Riley M. Barnes, an assistant secretary, and Samuel Samson, a deputy assistant secretary, had planned to depart for Brasília, the capital, in coming days, according to a senior State Department official and three Brazilian officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

But Brazilian officials, apprised of the plans, denied the Americans permission to travel, the Foreign Ministry said. The U.S. officials applied for visas through the Brazilian consulate in Washington, saying they planned to hold “meetings with authorities involved in the electoral process,” Brazilian officials said.

………

Two senior Brazilian officials told The Washington Post on Thursday that they had recently learned of what they described as the American “ploy” and had vowed to block the U.S. officials from entering the country.

“It is a ploy that is completely incompatible with Brazilian democracy,” said one of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. This official said the Brazilian government would move to “protect our voting system.”

The Brazilian officials said they suspected that the Americans’ goal was to meet with electoral skeptics and produce a report that could be used to delegitimize the nation’s electronic voting system. Samson in the past has produced department reports that critics say brought a partisan lens to human rights issues.

Trump was attempting a ret-f%$#ing, and Brazil was having none of this.

Clever

Alcorn State University professor Jason Gibson was concerned about students cheating on take-home exams by using ChatGPT.

His solution was elegant. He embedded a prompt about Madagascar in a white font in his midterm exam.

Given that the midterm exam was about the industrial revolution, responses invoking the African island would be a clear sign of major shenanigans.

Who could’ve guessed that students who use AI to cheat on their assignments are incredibly lazy?

Jason Gibson, a history professor at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, says that he used white font to hide a prompt telling an AI model to spew nonsense in the instructions for his mid-term.

Unfortunately, it ended up working a little too well.

“Thirty-two of my 35 students between two classes failed a portion of their midterm because they all used AI to generate their entire response,” he explained in a viral TikTok, sounding incredulous. “And apparently they didn’t proofread it.”

The hidden prompt told the AI to sneak in random digressions about Madagascar. The midterm, by the way, was about the Industrial Revolution. And apparently none of the indolent cheats put in the bare modicum of effort required to at least check if what the AI wrote made any sense at all. All they did was copy-paste the midterm instructions into a chatbot, then copy-paste the chatbot’s spiel back into the answer window.

32 of 35?  That's a 94% cheat rate.

Jackson in Maine

I do not know the specifics of his platform in detail, but the selection of Troy Jackson as the new Democratic Party nominee for US Senate appears to be a continuation of the Platner narrative.

I'm not sure how this all will shake out. 

Maine Democrats chose Troy Jackson, a progressive former state legislator, to replace Graham Platner as their Senate candidate at a convention on Saturday that followed weeks of internal turmoil in a key battleground state.

Mr. Jackson’s victory, a vote of 566 to 5, came on the first ballot of a pop-up state convention the Maine Democratic Party organized in the 17 days since Mr. Platner, who faced a rape accusation he denies, dropped out of the race.

………

Mr. Jackson, 58, carries much of the progressive politics that powered the movement that lifted Mr. Platner from political obscurity. A former logger who entered politics in the late 1990s organizing against Canadian workers crossing the border to work for lower wages than Americans, Mr. Jackson now faces perhaps the biggest challenge of his political career.

He is up against Ms. Collins, a moderate Republican seeking a sixth term in office. The race, seen as a central battleground in the fight for control of the Senate, features two longtime politicians who grew up in the same county in northern Maine.

Trust the New York Times to bury the lede, because in the very last paragraph, after extensive coverage of Collins talking points, they note this: 

………

Mr. Jackson said in that interview that he would not support Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, to remain in his post. Mr. Jackson also expressed reservations about receiving financial or other assistance from Mr. Schumer, whose allies oversee the super PAC devoted to electing Senate Democrats.

Running against Chuck Schumer is a winner.  

If he beats Collins, I hope that he sticks to this promise.

From a purely pragmatic perspective, disrupting things in the Senate would make Jackson's tenure in the Senate much more difficult. 

From the Department of, "But I Repeat Myself"

That is what I thought when I saw the headline, "Man Accused of Horrific Crimes Caught Hiding as Pharma Executive."

Rapist turned pharma executive?  How can you tell?

For over two decades, a notorious fugitive accused of horrible crimes in Rhode Island hid out in one of the places you’d most expect — the corner office of a Big Pharma company.

Reported by Stat News, a 70-year old chief medical officer at the California-based firm Immix Biopharma was found to be afugitive sex predator who disappeared during his 2005 trial. Though he went by Richard Graydon in the more than twenty years since, his real name turns out to be Ronald Fischer — an anesthesiologist accused of raping numerous women on his various yachts (yes, plural).

At least there is symmetry. 

He Hates it Because it Works

Paul Krugman (Yeah, I know) has a very interesting look at the Trump administration's hostility toward the Brazilian digital payments system PIX.

It's cheaper, more reliable, and more secure than anything that US payment providers offer, and so the White House is threatening sanctions.

Brazil introduced Pix, a digital payment system, almost 6 years ago. The system — which allows people to make payments on their phones, not very differently from Apple Pay or Google Pay, except that Pix payments are official currency rather than transfers from private companies — has been highly successful. The vast majority of Brazilians use it regularly, and by all accounts Pix — which is free for individuals, and cheap for businesses — is hugely popular.

On Wednesday — as it happens, on the first anniversary of an article I posted praising Pix and suggesting that it may represent the future of money — the Trump administration will try to punish Brazil for this success. It will do so by imposing tariffs on Brazilian exports under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which permits such tariffs to counter “unfair trade practices.”

………

Trump’s hostility towards Brazil’s Pix system is also an illustration of the same phenomenon we see in his energy policy: this administration is hostile to progress whenever that progress works against the interests and ideology of the oligarchs who have poured money into Trump’s campaigns and his pockets.

Krugman is wrong here when he characterizes this behavior as being unique to the Trump administration though, the Biden USTR was expressing "concerns" about PIX in 2022. (PDF).

This knee jerk support of predatory US financial institutions is something that widely supported by the US Polity, whether conservative or liberal.

 

This Applies to the US as Well

One possible reason for the EU underperforming is that the European Union and its member nations have structured their economies and societies to favor rent seeking over productive activity.

In addition to increasing inequality, rent seeking uses the power of the state to favor the already wealthy, it also crowds out productive activity, because the former is more lucrative.

To be fair, there is also the energy increases resulting from the cut off of cheap Russian natural gas as well.

Why is Europe falling behind in investment and growth compared with the US, let alone China and India?  In a new report, Labour Squeezed, Investment Stalled – the renowned economist Mariana Mazzucato and a team at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, financed by the European Trade Union Federation (SETU), reckon that the EU’s declining competitiveness is not the result of too much regulation or the lack of cheap credit as mainstream economists and Mario Draghi is his report for the EU Commission argued. 

Instead it is due to “falling investment and productivity caused by the hoarding of profits and higher payments to shareholders and CEOs rather than reinvested in production, innovation and good jobs”. The decline is the result of an emergence of a “capitalism of rent” in Europe, where income is increasingly captured not by producing anything, but by owning assets, financial positions and market power, and charging for access to them. Mazzucato concludes that Europe must switch from “an economy based on value extraction to one based on value creation”.

Mazzucato and and the IIPP show that headline profits have stayed healthy even as profitability in production have declined since 2000.  They claim that’s because profits have been captured through ‘financialisation’ ie non-financial corporations are increasingly make more money through financial investment rather than in production. In study of over 300 EU corporations, they find that around one in six firms surveyed now draw more than 10 percent of earnings from financial rather than productive activity. 

I think that the framing in the last paragraph is particularly important.

Stating that financial activity is not a productive activity is true, even if financial activity can aid in productive activity by allocating capital to business that need it.

Finance, as well as IP driven activity are profitable because they are fundamentally parasitic in nature when taken to extremes. 

It's why they are so hard to fight, they have excess profits that can be redirected to bribery in various forms to support their businesses. 

We're #1!!!

As The Register notes in an an article titles, "Google breaks Alibaba’s record for Europe’s largest DMA fine." Google has beaten the Chinese at something.

Alibaba’s reign as the worst offender under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) lasted just four days, after the European Commission yesterday fined Google €890 million for breaches of the law –€340 million more than the Chinese e-commerce company will pay.

Europe even fined Google twice – once for treating its own services more favorably in search rankings and the second time for failing to properly inform users of its “Play” app store.

The search infractions attracted a fine of €460 million ($523.5m/£393m) and the Play offenses will cost the Chocolate Factory €430 million ($490m/£367.5m).

In US dollars, the fines total $1.013 billion – or one quarter of one percent of the $402 billion in revenue that Google’s parent company Alphabet won in its last full financial year. The Big G’s net income was $132 billion in the same year, making these fines less than one percent of its profits.

It's literally just a cost of doing business to them, so I expect them to repeat this. 

I Am So Going to See This

I know that I will probably be disappointed, because there is no way that this movie will meet my expectations.

I don't care.

I must see Coyote vs. Acme. 

Will This Get Me Banned from Ecch (Twitter)?

When I want the opinion of a drug addled bigot, I will beat it out of you, thank you very much.

— Not the Apartheid Emerald Heir Pedo Guy/MG Saroff (@40_Years) July 26, 2026

Original Ecch (Tweet)


Screenshot backup

I have made the decision that I will stay on Ecch (Twitter) until the motherf%$#ers ban me, because I'm childish and immature.

I guess that the question is if I am being childish and immature enough.

We shall see in the next 24 hours. 

How Not to Speak Ill of the Dead

There is, of course, self restraint, but I prefer the tactic of opening up a can of whup ass on a malefactor why they are still (barely) living.(Is that a prebituary?)

This is what Joseph Gerth of the Louisville Courier Journal has decided to do with regard to Mitch McConnell.

Good on him.

Following the unexpected death of U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham on July 11, it seemed that any criticism of the South Carolinian online garnered the same response — “How dare you say that about a guy who just died?”

It didn’t seem like it mattered if the criticism was legitimate or not, whether it was questioning his sexuality while voting against gay and lesbian rights issues, or whether it was his flip-flopping on Donald Trump and becoming one of his biggest supporters.

The reaction from Republicans was largely the same.

That got me thinking about Sen. Mitch McConnell, who was rumored to be dead or on life support or in a coma or whatever and was the odds-on favorite to beat Graham to the gates of hell in the days before Graham’s death.

And, so with McConnell allegedly on the mend, I figured I’d go ahead and tell you what I think about McConnell now — when no one can complain, “How dare you write that about a dead guy?”

………

And so, what to say about Mitch?

I wish the late Louisvillian, Hunter S. Thompson, were still around to tell the story of McConnell, the former Senate majority leader when he passes from the scene.

Thompson’s obituary upon the death of Richard Nixon was a master class in truth-telling. It painted Nixon as the detestable person he was, who nearly broke the government with his lies and his efforts to hold onto power at any cost.

Read Thompson's obit of Nixon.  It is a thing of beauty.

………

And McConnell is every bit the detestable figure that Nixon was.

But unlike Nixon, McConnell never paid for his sins that have damaged our nation’s trust in government, destroyed the country’s ability to have meaningful dialogue and cemented our nation’s politics as an arena in which winning is the only thing that matters.

In fact, for all of Nixon’s flaws and crimes, he proved that the system worked as he was held accountable for what he had done. It took real leadership to do that though — Republican Sens. Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott and Rep. John Rhodes essentially forced him to resign.

The fall of Nixon was a triumph for our country.

It’s hard to imagine McConnell ever having the guts or the desire to protect the nation like Goldwater, Scott and Rhodes did that day in 1974 when they went to the White House and told Nixon it was over.

McConnell is someone who has done significant damage to our government and our society.

יִמַּח שְׁמו (May his name be effaced).

Good News Everyone!

It looks like the Ellison nepo-baby will have to delay the takeover of Warner Brothers, because it was clear that if they were not to do so voluntarily, then the judge would have made it mandatory.

I'm not sure whether the State Attorneys General suing to stop the deal will prevail, it would have been a long shot a decade ago, but antitrust law has shifted a lot in the past 10 years,

Paramount said on Friday that it had agreed to halt its merger with Warner Bros. Discovery until next June at the latest while a judge considers a lawsuit from state attorneys general who sued to block the deal. The delay is the latest curveball in a deal that would remake Hollywood.

In a legal filing, Paramount and the state attorneys general said that they had reached an agreement to freeze the $111 billion merger while the case works its way through court, extending a shorter pause imposed this week by a federal judge in California. The merger agreement expires on June 4, 2027, if the deal has not closed by that date.

The delay could be costly for Paramount. The company, run by the tech scion David Ellison, has agreed to pay Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders a fee of $650 million for every quarter that the deal does not close, beginning in October.

(Emphasis mine)

Given that Oracle corporation, the source of his family's wealth via his father is now approaching junk bond status, this may end up being more than just a delay.

………

The coalition of 12 states led by California includes New York, Connecticut, Oregon and Arizona. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who led the states, said in a statement that the delay was “great news for audiences.” Letitia James, the New York attorney general, called the freeze “a crucial victory” in a statement.

The deal would unite under one roof two major movie studios, the streaming services HBO Max and Paramount+ and networks including CBS and CNN. Mr. Ellison has aggressively pushed to acquire Warner Bros., ultimately outbidding Netflix after proposing a handful of escalating offers.

The deal was already a big bet for David Ellison, his partners at RedBird Capital and his father, Larry Ellison, who personally guaranteed the acquisition. The combined company is expected to carry about $80 billion in debt, a daunting burden for the younger Mr. Ellison. Now, with the delay potentially triggering hundreds of millions of dollars in additional fees, the deal could become even less attractive.

I dunno, the deal is pretty f%$#ing ugly right now.

The merits of the deal are monopoly rents and currying political favor with Trump and his Evil Minions™.

This deal is pretty horrible for the rest of us.

Here is hoping that Oracle ends up in receivership before the deal goes through. 

Flock Off

Even if one approves of Flock's digital surveillance as a service as a business model, the specific business way that the conduct business, with thinly veiled bribes to public officials and attempts to cover their operations on public streets under layers of secrecy, are duplicitous.

Now, we learn that when a government decides to terminate a contract, Flock drags its feet on removing cameras as well as refuses to turn the cameras off, which is why we are now seeing municipalities covering the cameras with trash bags.

As a bonus for my reader(s) I will give you this marvelous quote from the subhed, which describes Flock as, "The herpes of the surveillance state."

Flock and other automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras continue to give AI data centers a run for their money as the least welcome presence in American communities.

Things are getting so bad that Flock Safety’s CEO, Garrett Langley, came out of the woodwork last week to apologize for his 2025 comments to Forbes where he likened anti-Flock activists and deflock.org, the site that tracks where ALPRs are placed, to “terrorists.” Calling his past remark “a mistake” and throwing some stock we see you, we hear you-type platitudes to his critics, Langley went on to insist he still believes in a world that can be filled with his probing digital eyes—”a world where we can have safety and privacy.”

………

As reported by 404 Media, the city of Verona, Wisconsin, could not get Flock to come remove the three cameras it had installed after the city council voted to not renew a contract with the surveillance company. Verona officials were instructed by Flock not to remove the cameras themselves. More concerning, after Verona officials asked for the cameras to at least be remotely disabled while they waited for the company to come collect them, a Flock employee said they were unsure if such a thing was even possible—a claim that, if true, would indicate Flock technology is outdated by a factor of decades. It wasn’t true, of course. Flock later made clear that they “can remotely deactivate [the cameras] at any time.”

But while things were still fuzzy about whether those feeds were live and when Flock actually planned to come collect their gear, Verona took matters into their own hands. The decision was made to cover the cameras with black trash bags while waiting for them to be retrieved on some indeterminate date in the future, an analog privacy hack that is catching on nationwide.

………

As Verona, Wisconsin’s council president Mara Helmke so eloquently put it in the meeting where they voted to deFlock their city, “Flock is not trustworthy, no matter what kind of guarantees they have given you… Flock has assured us that our data is ours, right? But we can’t trust that. We simply can’t.” 

Indeed.

We Are F%$#ed

The numbers are in, and 2025 and 2026 were catastrophic years in terms of arctic sea ice.

Things are going from bad to worse in terms of climate change.

A previously recorded slowdown in Arctic sea ice decline has ended, according to a new study, with the largest year-to-year wintertime reduction ever recorded.

In a study published last summer, researchers found that melting sea ice in the Arctic had slowed down over the past 20 years, with no statistically significant decline in its extent recorded between 2005 and 2024.

Given the increase in global temperatures during this period, the finding was surprising.

However, the researchers said natural variations in ocean currents that limit ice melting probably balanced the rise in global temperatures. They said this was only a temporary reprieve and melting was highly likely to start again at about double the long-term rate at some point in the next five to 10 years.

Just two years later, the new study has found the slowdown in sea ice decline is now over.

………

Sea ice area in September, when it reaches its annual minimum, has halved since 1979, when satellite measurements began.

The researchers found that between 2024 and 2025 Arctic sea ice declined by 5.8%. This is the largest year-to-year wintertime drop ever recorded.

Dr Alessandro Silvano, co-author of the paper at the University of Southampton, said this sharp drop in 2025 was unusual, but physically plausible under current Arctic warming.

Because the winter sea ice acts as an insulator between the relatively warm Arctic ocean and the much colder atmosphere, a reduction in ice will mean more ocean heat and moisture will enter the atmosphere.

To quote the character Andrei Bonovia from the movie The Hunt for Red October, "You arrogant ass. You've killed us!"

Gee, You Think?

Iran has struck a number of clandestine CIA sites in the Persian Gulf area recently, leading some to wonder if Russia is providing targeting information to Tehran. 

Gee, you think?

The US has been providing extensive real-time intelligence and extensive mission planning assistance to the Ukraine since the war there began.

Why would anyone think that Russia would not do the same themselves for their ally?

When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Russian Foreign Secretary Sergey Lavrov on Thursday in Manila, on the margins of a summit of Southeast Asian nations, Moscow’s war on Ukraine was officially the top agenda item.

But the meeting between Rubio and Lavrov was held under the shadow of fresh reports suggesting that Russia might be playing a more active role than it has publicly acknowledged in Iran’s attacks on United States military sites in the Middle East.

Reports of Iran targeting sites belonging to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) first emerged in the early days of the US and Israel’s war on Iran. Three days into the war, on March 3, The Washington Post reported that a CIA station in the US embassy in Riyadh had been targeted, according to two people familiar with the matter. On March 6, CNN reported, citing US intelligence sources, that Moscow had been helping Tehran locate US personnel and aircraft in the Gulf.

Now, more recently, the Reuters news agency on Wednesday reported that Iranian drone attacks on CIA facilities, specifically on the embassy in Saudi Arabia, had prompted US intelligence to investigate possible Russian involvement, suggesting that the strikes’ effectiveness and precision could suggest possible evidence of support.

I would make a number of points here, first I'm pretty sure that Iran's organic intelligence capabilities in the region are pretty good, and locating covert CIA facilities is probably well within their capabilities, and second, this is a foreseeable and measured response to similar American actions in the Ukraine.

You mess with the bull, you get the horns. 

 

 

Partying Like It's 2008

The Wisconsin PSC just through a major monkey-wrench into Oracle's plans to build a data center there when it announced that because of its recent downgrade by S&P to BBB-, the roach motel of software companies will have to post a $7,000,000,000.00 bond in order to be hooked into the grid.

It is refreshing to see that a billionaire cannot buy his way into regulatory forbearance somewhere. 

Oracle says that it could face more than $100 million a year in financing costs to guarantee the power commitments behind a nearly 1 GW datacenter campus it is developing in Wisconsin with Vantage and OpenAI.

Local regulators have refused to revisit a decision that they say protects existing customers and improves public transparency around the energy-related needs of datacenters.

Oracle's plans to build the Lighthouse Campus datacenter in Port Washington are supported by local utility We Energies. The campus is expected to require nearly a gigawatt of power.

The Public Service Commission (PSC) of Wisconsin, an energy regulator, told the Financial Times it had "declined to take action" on a petition seeking to reopen or overturn its earlier decision.

In April, the PSC considered We Energies' application for Very Large Customer (VLC) and Bespoke Resources Tariff status around the datacenter. Among the modifications to improve the tariff was a revision "to address the risk of transmission cost shifting from dataCenter customers to existing customers."

In an affidavit supporting the joint petition to reopen or rehear the decision, Oracle explained that if the decision was not modified, it would have to post security in a cash deposit or a letter of credit.

"Based on our current projections, we anticipate that, under the current mandated requirements, we will ultimately be required to post financial security, likely in the form of a letter of credit in an amount exceeding $7 billion, at an annual cost that could exceed $100 million," the document said.

To qualify for an exemption, Oracle would have to meet several tests, including maintaining ratings of at least A- from S&P and A3 from Moody's. At the time of the PSC decision, S&P rated Oracle BBB, but downgraded it to BBB- earlier this month.

"We estimate that OpenAI makes up roughly half of the $638 billion in (Oracle's) remaining performance obligations (RPO)," S&P said. "OpenAI's ability to meet its contractual obligations and raise external financing will be contingent upon AI tailwinds continuing and its models being market leaders. If OpenAI were unable to pay Oracle, we believe Oracle could be left with massive datacenter leases that it might be unable to exit or have to re-lease to new tenants under less-favorable terms."

………

In September last year, Oracle's valuation rocketed after it boasted $455 billion in RPOs, $300 billion of which turned out to be for OpenAI.

In the period since, Oracle has raised debt to fund its datacenter building program and has negative free cash flow.

S&P said Oracle's capex guidance had risen to between $90 billion and $95 billion for fiscal 2027, which started in June, up from an earlier forecast of $60 billion. For the same period, S&P forecasts negative free operating cash flow of $42 billion, worse than its previous estimate of negative $24 billion.

Yes, this does remind me of early 2008.  We are seeing signs of the credit markets slowly freezing up.

It's only going to get worse. 

Yeah, War is Bad, But

Sometimes it's tough to feel that way, particularly when things like an Iranian drone strike did significant damage to an Amazon Central Data Bahrain.

Not a fan or theocracies, but I am even less of a fan of kleptocratic monopolists like Amazon.

Iranian forces destroyed Amazon’s central data infrastructure in Bahrain, according to state-aligned media reports.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claims to have targeted and destroyed the American tech giant’s infrastructure with cruise missiles in response to an American attack that allegedly destroyed an under-construction nuclear site in Southern Iran on Monday, according to reports from Iran’s Fars News Agency. Amazon has not yet confirmed damage to its infrastructure in the region, though Bahraini authorities have acknowledged that air raid sirens were activated on Tuesday and said they intercepted a wave of Iranian strikes, though officials have not reported what, if any, material damage was sustained at this time.

You know, Bezos also has a yacht. According to this website, it was just north of Vanatu 5 days ago.