We Were Wrong, Years Ago. We Should’ve Rooted for the Jocks to Win, to Stuff Those Nerds in the Locker for All Eternity.
—Atrios, on Mark Andreeson's recent incoherent philosophical statements
Mark Andreeson has been hitting podcasts and social media insisting that self-examination is not a real thing, but rather it is an artifact of a dysfunctional modern world.
I know that this could just be dismissed as just another attempt by the anti-Semite in the White House to use antisemitism as a political cudgel against his opponents, but they said exactly the same thing about that unpleasant little man with the funny mustache.
The Trump administration was within its rights to demand that the University of Pennsylvania turn over information about Jews on campus as part of a federal investigation into discrimination at the school, a federal judge decided Tuesday.
The government’s investigation had united Penn leaders with Jewish students and faculty members as they opposed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s subpoena. Many on campus drew parallels between the government’s approach and methods deployed in Nazi Germany.
But the Trump administration has said that its request was typical for discrimination investigations to seek potential victims and witnesses, and Judge Gerald J. Pappert of Philadelphia’s Federal District Court agreed on Tuesday. He gave Penn until May 1 to comply with the administration’s subpoena, though the ruling appeared unlikely to quell the debates around how the administration has pressured top American universities.
So, they are remaking the movie, only they have recast Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich with Stephen Miller.
Applications for US unemployment benefits fell last week to one of the lowest levels in the last two years, suggesting layoffs remain low.
Initial claims decreased by 9,000 to 202,000 in the week ended March 28, according to Labor Department data released Thursday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 212,000.
Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, rose to 1.84 million in the previous week.
Thursday’s figures, alongside other recent data, illustrate a labor market that is still stuck in a “low-hire, low-fire” phase. Initial claims have hovered at relatively low levels in recent weeks, suggesting employers are holding onto current workers even as hiring has slowed.
Separate data released earlier this week showed hiring in February slowed to the weakest pace in nearly six years. Data earlier Thursday from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. showed in the first quarter of 2026, US employers announced 217,362 job cuts, the lowest total for this period since 2022.
I think that this is more significant than Noem's firing for a number of reasons:
It's the second firing from the Trump administration in a fairly short time.
The Senate is likely to be a bit less likely to rubber stamp Trump's next nominee for Attorney General.
Her exit is likely to slow down attempts to use the DoJ for Trump's desired vengeance.
I have no doubt that Trump will attempt to replace here with something even more bizarrely inexplicable
Donald Trump has fired Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, dismissing a loyalist who reshaped the justice department but still failed to please a president fixated on prosecuting political enemies and frustrated with the politically explosive release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social: “Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year. Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900. We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future.”
The president added that Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, would serve as acting attorney general. Lee Zeldin, a former New York congressman who now leads the Environmental Protection Agency, is said to be a top contender to replace Bondi.
Yeah, Zeldin would qualify as something even more bizarrely inexplicable
………
During her 14 months as attorney general, Bondi presided over a major purging of career justice department staff, shifted focus away from criminal prosecutions toward immigration cases, and spearheaded the defense of Trump’s towering stack of executive orders as they faced legal challenges.
But she will be perhaps best remembered for complying with Trump’s public demand last year that federal prosecutors bring criminal charges against his personal enemies. Within three weeks, federal prosecutors had indicted James Comey, a former FBI director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general.
Clearly, fiction writers are going to have a problem writing something weirder than this.
Kristi Noem's husband is today revealed as a secret cross-dresser who dons gigantic fake breasts and pink hotpants to chat with online fetish models.
While his wife has operated at the highest echelons of government, handling matters of national security in her recent role as secretary of homeland security, Bryon Noem, 56, has been dressing up and paying adult entertainers to talk dirty.
The Daily Mail has reviewed hundreds of messages involving three women from the 'bimbofication' scene – where porn performers transform themselves into real-life Barbie dolls by pumping colossal amounts of saline into their breasts.
Bryon has lavished praise on their surgically enhanced bodies, confessed his lust for 'huge, huge ridiculous boobs,' and even made indiscreet remarks about his 34-year marriage to Kristi, our investigation can exclusively disclose.
National Security experts consulted by the Daily Mail said his brazen behavior could have left the 54-year-old MAGA favorite, who oversaw ICE's aggressive crackdown until she was removed from her position on March 5, vulnerable to blackmail.
If you are worried about vulnarability to blackmail, perhaps Kristi Noem's affair with Cory Lewandoski, or her bragging about shooting a puppy.
Those are kind of red flags to a lot of security folks.
As an FYI, there are some pictures at The Mail, but I am not sharing them here.
Given that it's only been out a few days, I expect it to pass JD Vance shortly.
Bluesky has launched an AI assistant called Attie that allows users to design their own social media algorithms and create custom feeds within the company’s AT Protocol ecosystem. And let’s just say the response has been heated.
Attie debuted this weekend at the ATmosphere conference, which Bluesky sponsors. But Bluesky’s userbase did not embrace the new product. Instead, about 125,000 users have already blocked Attie’s Bluesky account, making it the second most blocked account on the network, according to open source data. Attie only has 1,500 followers, meaning that about 83 times more users have blocked the account than followed it.
The only account with more blocks than Bluesky’s AI agent is Vice President J. D. Vance, with about 180,000 blocks — Attie even surpassed the White House account (122,000 blocks) and the ICE account (112,460 blocks). That’s some seriously detested company for a platform that skews left politically.
"This is not a good look for Bluesky, said Captain Obvious.
It looks like our AI driven military just bombed another school, only this time it appears to be the combat debut of a new missile system as we.
On the first day of the war with Iran, a weapon bearing the hallmarks of a newly developed U.S.-made ballistic missile was used in an attack that struck a sports hall and adjacent elementary school near a military facility in southern Iran, according to weapons experts and a visual analysis by The New York Times. Local officials cited in Iranian media said this strike and others nearby in the city of Lamerd killed at least 21 people.
The Feb. 28 attack occurred the same day as a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile struck a school in the city of Minab, several hundred miles away, killing 175 people. In the case of Lamerd, though, it involved a weapon that had been untested in combat.
The Times verified videos of two strikes in Lamerd, as well as aftermath footage from the attacks. Times reporters and munitions experts found that the weapon features, explosions and damage are consistent with a short-range ballistic missile called the Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM (pronounced like “prism”), which is designed to detonate just above its target and blast small tungsten pellets outward.
If you want to murder children, Palantir is for you.
This is about Canadian politics, which is something that I know little about, beyond the fact that there are two sorts of Canadians, those who hate Donald Trump, and those who are committing treason in an attempt to sell their province to Donald Trump. (Mostly, but not entirely, in Alberta)
In any case, there were recently party elections for the leadership of the New Democratic Party, the most progressive of Canada's 4 major political parties, and had been completely trounced in the last elections, largely because the last permanent leader Jagmeet Singh had decided to walk back party priorities in order to be in the government (as a second party) with the centrist (I would argue center-right, but I am a Pinko) Liberal Party.
(I said that I know little about Canadian politics, not that I could not read about Canadian politics)
So, they had leadership elections, and Avi Lewis, who is associated with the party's left wing won, and many of the party stalwarts (read careerist assholes and fossil fuel stooges) have expressed dismay, and some have moved away from the party, with some NDP MPs crossing the floor to serve with the (not-so) Liberals.
Their electoral blowout was a direct result of their selling their souls for proximity to power.
After that long introduction, let me quote Jason's analysis:
People are calling this a split in the NDP, but it's not.
This is what happens when a party finally decides what it is and what it represents.
For the last decade, the NDP has been drifting to the center by working alongside the Liberals, softening its message and trying to appeal to as many people as possible.
They thought that that was a strategy, but really it created a problem.
If you're offering a softer version of the Liberals, voters are just going to choose the Liberals. And that's what they did in this last election. The party blurred itself, its identity, and its message so much that it collapsed, and that collapse forced a choice.
………
And that's being framed as a split. But it's not dysfunction, it's alignment.
Centrists are being forced to decide where they belong.
Soft Liberals are being pushed back toward the Liberal Party of Canada. And the NDP is stopping its attempt to be a party that only cares about proximity to power and is putting an effort into defining itself.
Rather unsurprisingly, when advertisers decide not to buy ads from you because you have created a cesspool of racism, bigotry, and misinformation, it is not a violation of antitrust law.
Being Elon's lawyers must be the worst job on earth.
On Thursday, Elon Musk lost his lawsuit alleging that advertisers violated antitrust law by colluding on an ad boycott after he took over Twitter, gutted content moderation teams, and disbanded the Trust and Safety Council.
In her opinion, US District Judge Jane Boyle wrote that the lawsuit was dismissed because Musk failed to state a claim. His arguments that advertisers acted against their own best interests by avoiding advertising on his platform, now called X, did not plead facts showing that consumers were harmed. Without consumer harm, there can be no antitrust violation, the judge wrote, deeming the ad boycott perfectly legal.
“The very nature of the alleged conspiracy does not state an antitrust claim, and the Court therefore has no qualm dismissing with prejudice,” Boyle said. At one point, she emphasized, “the question underlying antitrust injury is whether consumers—not competitors—have been harmed.”
For Musk, the loss is likely significant. He had argued that advertisers should be “criminally prosecuted” after allies in Congress released a report claiming they were conspiring to tank Twitter’s revenue with the supposed goal of censoring conservative voices.
………
There are many ways that Musk’s antitrust claims could have succeeded,
Boyle noted. He could have argued that the boycott prevented X from
competing with other social media companies to “corner the supply
against users’ interests.” Or that advertisers were somehow motivated to
help a rival platform raise ad prices to exclude X from that market. Or
possibly show that the World Federation of Advertisers intended to shut
X out in order to launch its own social media ad business.
Much like any official statements regarding his businesses, in the final analysis, there is no, "There," there.
The expression “coked to the gills” has never been more apt.
Scientists from Brazil have discovered that sharks
swimming in the Bahamas are testing positive for a potpourri of
substances, ranging from caffeine to cocaine and painkillers — as if
they, too, are ready for a party in an island paradise.
The implications of the findings, detailed in a study in the journal Environmental Pollution,
make for quite the comedown. That the substances are turning up in
detectable quantities in sharks points to an “urgent need to address
marine pollution in ecosystems often perceived as pristine,” the authors
warned in the study, with divers in the area being the most likely
culprit.
The first urgent need is to keep cocaine sharks from completely losing their sh%$.
It will make Sharknado look like a trip to the kiddie pool.
It seems to me that Masons in Europe are not the guys in Fez hats (Shriners) that we see in the United States.
In Europe, at least on the Continent, you have murders, lodges that have brought down governments, and the occasional terrorist bombing. (See the P2 Lodge)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Twenty-two people went on trial in France on Monday on charges of murder and other serious crimes centred on members of a Masonic lodge accused of running hit squads.
Thirteen of the defendants face life imprisonment.
Those in the dock include four military personnel from France's foreign intelligence service (DGSE), two police officers, a retired domestic intelligence officer, a security guard and two business executives.
They are accused of the murder of a racing driver, the attempted murders of a business coach and a trade unionist, aggravated assault and criminal conspiracy – all on behalf of a mafia network inside the former Athanor Masonic Lodge in the Paris suburb of Puteaux.
Under questioning, they said they thought they had been asked to murder Dini on behalf of the French state on the grounds that she worked for Israeli spy agency Mossad.
Whoever has the tinfoil hat concession for this trial will make out like a reped ape.
Honestly, I understand the need to relocate to a safer place than the United States.
It could have been Europe, it could have been Japan, it could have been Karg Island, or it could have been Chernobyl. They would all be safer for people going through US customs.
The annual Ig Nobels, a satirical award for
scientific achievement, are shifting for the first time from the US to
Europe due to concerns about attendees getting visas, organizers
announced on Monday.
Organized by the Annals
of Improbable Research, a digital magazine that highlights research that
makes people laugh and then think, the 36th annual ceremony will be
held in Zurich. It’s usually held in the US in September, a few weeks
before the actual Nobel prizes are announced.
“During
the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the
country,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the
magazine, told the Associated Press in an email interview. “We cannot in
good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists
who cover the event, to travel to the USA this year.”
The
move comes amid Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration, in
which he has focused on deporting migrants illegally in the US, as well
as holders of student and visitor exchange visas.
………
But
four of the 10 winners last year chose not to travel to Boston for the
ceremony. In previous years, the ceremony has taken place at Harvard
University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University.
I think that someone should publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal about this. You might even get an Ig Nobel Prize for that.
2 years after going all in on Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence, the listicle wankers Buzzfeedare circling the drain.
Gee, hoocoodanode that a pivot to AI would not work out? (Spoiler, everyone knew that a pivot to AI would not work out.)
Why would people go to Buzzfeed when they could generate identical generic bullsh%$ from ChatGPT?
In January 2023, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced in a memo to staff that the company was making a hard pivot to AI — years before the word “slop” was added to the public lexicon.
In the memo, which was published roughly two months after OpenAI unveiled its groundbreaking ChatGPT chatbot, Peretti said BuzzFeed would be using the software to enhance the company’s infamous quizzes by generating personalized responses.
The company’s stock price jumped aggressively, from around $3 per share to north of $15. But longer-term, neither insiders nor the public were particularly compelled by the move. Nonetheless, Peretti doubled down, promising in May 2023 that AI will “replace the majority of static content” on the site, just a month after shutting down its Pulitzer Prize-winning BuzzFeed News division.
The stock price jumped because stock prices always jump after massive layoffs. Wall street is populated by not particularly bright sociopaths.
Now, three years after its AI pivot, the writing is on the wall. The company reported a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025 in an earnings report released on Thursday. In an official statement, the company glumly hinted at the possibility of going under sooner rather than later, writing that “there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”
An obscure methodological change lowered a key measure of inflation in January, prompting questions about how government statistical agencies produce and report economic data.
Deep inside its monthly inflation report on Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said that the cost of legal services rose 1.8 percent in January. That was an unusually large increase, but not nearly as big as the double-digit gain that some forecasters were expecting.
The reason for the divergence: The agency, which is part of the Commerce Department, had changed the source of its data on legal prices, relying on wholesale prices from the Bureau of Labor Statistics rather than the consumer price data it usually uses.
A technical tweak to such a small category — legal services account for less than 1 percent of overall consumer spending — would ordinarily draw little notice. But in this case, the adjustment was enough to shave roughly a tenth of a percentage point off the monthly change in the core Personal Consumption Expenditures price index. That is a meaningful difference to investors, who track even tiny moves in the index for hints of when and how the Federal Reserve will next adjust interest rates. The central bank officially targets the P.C.E. index, not the better-known Consumer Price Index, when making policy decisions.
The bureau provided no public disclosure of the change. Economists learned about it only when they reached out to the agency to understand why their forecasts had been so far off.
As I have said repeatedly, the economic data from the Trump administration should not have the presumption of regularity. (See here, here, here, and here)
Many years ago, a Jew was the most trusted minister to a king.
The king said, "Moishe, I would like to make you my prime minister, but the people would not stand for me appointing a Jew, please convert."
Moishe agrees, and converts to Christianity, and becomes prime minister.
After a few months, he cannot deal with this any more, and with much trepidation, he goes to the king and says, "My king, I am a Jew, and I cannot be otherwise. Please forgive me, but I must resign from my position and return to the practices of Judaism."
The king understands, and is not angry, and accepts Moishe's decision.
He then goes home to his wife, and says Shoshana, I am no longer prime minister. I have to be a Jew.
Shoshana smacks him on the head, and says, "Moishe, why couldn't you wait until AFTER Passover?"
My gentile reader(s) may not get this, but all of my Jewish readers do.
I've been thinking about this joke for the past week or so as our hoshold frantically cleans for Pesach.
There is a genre of AI slop on YouTube, a SCF-FI genre you could call human exceptionalism.
Basically, it consists of a spoken word YouTube video in which aliens encounter Earthers, and said humans blithely do something that confuses and terrifies the host of aliens present.
I generally do not have much use for such stuff, unless, of course, it involves humor and cats.
At that point, I feel the need to share this with the rest of you.
When Pete Hegseth Says “Lethality” He’s Talking About Killing Iranian School Girls
—Dean Baker, stating the obvious about what it means when SecDef Hegseth brags that our military not be constrained by "Woke" rules of engagement.
I’m going to give our “Secretary of War” a little credit. I will assume that even someone as openly bloodthirsty as Hegseth would not deliberately blow up a school building filled with little girls. But this tragic accident, that led to the death of at least 165 Iranian girls between the ages of 7 and 12, was the direct result of Hegseth’s policy.
The main point of the “woke” rules of engagement that Hegseth has constantly derided, and told the military to ignore, is to prevent tragic accidents like the bombing of a girls’ school in the middle of the day. The rules are designed to try to minimize civilian casualties.
You give Hegseth more credit than I would. I think that the Trump administration likes the idea of killing civilian noncombatants.
As President Trump prepared to welcome conservative Latin American leaders to a summit in Florida in early March, U.S. officials released a video of a massive explosion — capturing the destruction of what they said was a drug trafficker’s training camp in rural Ecuador.
The video was meant to show that the U.S. military, which for months has bombed boats it says are carrying drugs from South America, was “now bombing Narco Terrorists on land,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on social media.
The military strike appears to have destroyed a cattle and dairy farm, not a drug trafficking compound, according to interviews with the farm’s owner, four of its workers, human rights lawyers and residents and leaders in San MartÃn, the remote farming village in northern Ecuador where the strike took place.
Considering that the program officially launched in 2015, this is faster than I would have anticipated.
By way of comparison, it took the US F-22 about 15 years and the US F-35 took about 20 years.
Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) has rolled out the first production KF-21 Boramae fighter jet, less than two years after construction on it began and four years after the first prototype aircraft made it maiden flight.
The aircraft, a two-seat jet carrying the serial number 26-001, rolled out at KAI’s facilities at Sacheon on Wednesday in a ceremony attended by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, where he said the program embodied the country’s aspirations to be reliant in self-defense, according to national news agency Yonhap.
………
The rollout was a significant development for the KF-21 program, which marked another milestone in January with the completion of its flight test program.
South Korea first conceptualized its own indigenous fighter program 25 years ago, although the final go ahead to start development was only made in 2015. Beside KAI, its development also involving stakeholders such as South Korea’s Agency for Defense Development and Korean defense giant Hanwha.
The KF-21 is considered a 4.5 generation fighter jet and will be equipped with a mix of indigenous and Western sensors and weapons in service, including the KGGB precision glide bomb and European MBDA Meteor air-to-air missile, according to South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA).
Maybe the DoD should look at the RoK's defense procurement practices.
Scientists have repeatedly cloned a mouse. Somewhere around generation 30, reproductive success dropped, and by generation 58, all of the mice were born dead.
This is not particularly surprising.
Sexual reproduction evolved as a genetic repair device, some bacteria exchange genetic material to this day.
Cloning does not necessarily cause genetic damage, but it necessarily fails to repair damage as sexual reproduction does.
Here’s the
cautionary tale you didn’t know you needed: cloning the same mouse in
perpetuity will produce horrific affronts to mammalian biology.
A team of researchers in Japan
discovered this firsthand. In a stunning experiment lasting two decades,
they cloned a female mouse, and then cloned its clones, for 58
successive generations. But over 1,200 clones later, the experiment
stopped, because by that last generation the mice kept dying immediately
after being born, despite displaying no outward physical abnormalities.
The findings, published in a new study in the journal Nature Communications,
suggest there’s a hard limit to duplicating mammals. And to scientists
hoping for “infinite” cloning, this came as a major let down.
“We had believed that we could create
an infinite number of clones. That is why these results are so
disappointing,” study senior author Teruhiko Wakayama, of the University
of Yamanashi, told Reuters.
………
Perfect clones, it turns out, aren’t
perfect clones. Sequencing their DNA throughout the generations revealed
that they were accruing small mutations over time that snowballed into
larger ones, even though the clones were superficially identical. In
some cases, the clones even lost an entire copy of their X chromosome.
“It was once believed that clones were
identical to the original, but it has become clear through this study
that mutations occur at a rate three times higher than in offspring
born through natural mating,” Wakayama said.
Afroman took the incident, and made lemonade, or possibly lemon pound cake, over, and the sheriff's deputies decided that being help up for mockery for their egregious and unprofessional behavior hurt their delicate feelings, so they sued, and lost.
Before Friday, Grammy-nominated musician Afroman might have been best known for his Y2K hit, “Because I Got High.” But now he has a new claim to fame, as the man who fought the law—and won. The southern Ohio resident, whose legal name is Joseph Edgar Foreman, prevailed in a nearly $4 million lawsuit filed against him by seven police officers in 2023, all of whom claimed that songs and videos he released regarding a raid on his home were defamatory and an invasion of their privacy.
The saga began on August 21, 2022, when a group of Adams County, Ohio, Sheriff's Office deputies raided Foreman's Winchester, Ohio home, which is about 55 miles east of Cincinnati. According to a Fox 19 report from the time, police had obtained a warrant to search the residence based on “probable cause that drugs and drug paraphernalia were located on the property and that trafficking and kidnapping had taken place there.”
Foreman, who was not home at the time, posted security footage of the raid to Instagram, including a door-bustingbreach into the kitchen, followed by a police pause at a dessert stand populated by what we'd later learn was a lemon pound cake. An additional video showed police rifling through his closet, as one law enforcement agent asks “is he a Raiders fan? Still?”
According to Foreman, police confiscated a joint, a vape pen, and $5,031 in cash. (The latter was returned.) He was never charged. A spokesperson for the Adams County Prosecutor’s Office later admitted that the raid “failed to turn up probative criminal evidence.”
Well, it was about $400.00 short, the cops, "Misplaced," the cash. Yeah, sure.
………
In the wake of the event, Foreman says he thought about suing the police, but decided against it. "I asked myself, as a powerless Black man in America, what can I do to the cops that kicked my door in?" he asked NPR. “And the only thing I could come up with was make a funny rap song about them and make some money, use the money to pay for the damages they did and move on.”
The result was Lemon Pound Cake, an album released by Afroman in 2022. Tracks such as “The Police Raid,” “Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera,” and the title song retold details of the breach in an exaggerated, hyperbolic, and oft-comedic fashion. Another song, “Will You Help Me Repair My Door," was accompanied by a video that included footage from the breach, set to lines like “Did you find what you were looking for/ Would you like a slice of lemon pound cake/ You can take as much as you want to take/ There must be a big mistake.”
………
It wasn't until this week that the trial began, with Foreman in attendance in a suit patterned with the American flag. He took the stand on Tuesday, WCPO reports. “All of this is their fault,” Foreman said. "If they hadn't wrongly raided my house, there would be no lawsuit, I would not know their names, they wouldn't be on my home surveillance system, and there would be no songs ... my money would still be intact."
“After they run around my house with guns and kick down my door,” he said. “I got the right to kick a can in my backyard, use my freedom of speech, turn my bad times into a good time.”
The next day, the jury reached its verdict after six hours of deliberation. "It's been an emotional case, it's been a well-tried case," the judge said. “In all circumstances, the jury finds in favor of the defendant. No plaintiff verdict prevailed. So the matter will be concluded with defense verdicts.”
I'm not sure what he can do legally in response to what was obviously a SLAPP suit, but there is clearly material for another album in this.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection will roll out Friday a new compliance check to make sure that employers are following the city’s revamped paid time off law.
Going forward, if an employer’s payroll records show that fewer than 50% of employees have used any paid time off in the past year, the agency will flag that business as possibly engaging in “systemic” violations of the law, said DCWP policy director Elizabeth Wagoner. The exact benchmark varies by industry and company size, she added.
The 50% benchmark is based on the agency’s analysis of national data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that half of all private sector employees with paid sick leave miss at least one work day per year due to their own illness, injury or disability. The agency will also continue to investigate possible violations of the law based on complaints from workers, she said.
This is precisely the sort of action that the New Dem/Blue Dog Democrats would never do, because it might offend donors if they investigated their law-breaking.
America’s Self-Proclaimed Free Speech Warrior, Brendan Carr, Gets a
Letter Documenting His First Amendment Violations
—Techdirt, noting that a group of actual 1st
Amendment scholars are calling bullsh%$ on his actions.
Carr has been actively threatening media outlets with retribution for free
speech that he disagrees with, and that is wrong.
It's probably a crime.
Send him to Gitmo.
………
Well, congratulations to everyone who wanted to reanimate
that corpse. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is doing something remarkably similar
— except he’s only using it in one direction (the other problem with the
Fairness Doctrine, it depends entirely on the enforcers), to punish outlets
that report things the Trump administration doesn’t like, while conveniently
leaving alone outlets that parrot the administration’s preferred narratives.
We’ve been
covering Carr’s censorial ambitions for a while now. When Trump picked Carr to chair the FCC, we noted that despite all the
“free speech warrior” branding from the administration and the credulous
political press that repeated it, Carr had made it abundantly clear he
wanted to be America’s top censor. And he’s delivered on that promise with
remarkable enthusiasm — going after
CBS over “60 Minutes”, threatening
ABC over Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes, and most recently
threatening to revoke broadcast licenses
of outlets that accurately report on the disastrous war in Iran.
Now, a
broad coalition of more than 80 legal scholars, former FCC officials, and
civil society organizations
— organized by TechFreedom and signed by groups ranging from the ACLU to EFF
to the Knight First Amendment Institute to the Institute for Free Speech —
has sent a formal letter to Carr laying out, in meticulous legal detail,
exactly how his threats violate the First Amendment. I’m proud to note that
our think tank, the Copia Institute, is among the signatories, and this was
a very easy decision.
Yes, it's a crime, because he has clearly conspired with staff to violate
the 1st
Amendment rights of the organizations that he is targeting, and while the
former is largely just a civil matter (What do I know, I'm an engneer, not a
doctor, dammit!*) the conspiracy to do so is a criminal act, a felony.
None of This Would Have Been Legal If They’d Sent Competent Adults. But the Fact That They Sent Smirking Little Sh%$s Makes It So Much Worse.
—Liz Dye at Law and Chaos, describing how the DOGE bros comported themselves when forced into sworn depositions. (%$ mine)
Yeah, these smirking assholes make it much worse. (BTW, the hed is, "DOGE Bros Had More Fun Burning Down Government Than Testifying About It."
In the spring of 2025, the Elon Musk’s DOGE slashed and burned through various congressionally-created and -funded federal agencies, systematically destroying them as part of an effort to … well, who the hell knows. Something-something deficit. Blahblahblah waste, fraud, and abuse. Eradicate DEI!
………
On March 12, the code monkeys descended on the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent agency established by Congress in 1965 to “foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.”
Which is a little on the nose, to be honest.
………
None of that interested Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, the 20-something tech bros dispatched to raze the agency. They’d never worked in government or the humanities, and they didn’t know didn’t know the First Amendment from the Administrative Procedure Act.
………
Fox and Cavanaugh instructed NEH staff to rate the agency’s active grants for the presence of DEI, “gender ideology,” and “environmental justice.” When this failed to yield enough cuts, Fox and Cavanaugh turned to ChatGPT, feeding it the database of grants and instructing it to flag anything that relates to DEI.
A $349,000 grant to replace the HVAC system at the High Point Museum in North Carolina was DEI because, according to ChatGPT, it “enhances preservation conditions for collections, aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences.” A documentary about the Colfax Massacre — the 1873 slaughter of Black Louisiana freedmen, one of the bloodiest atrocities of Reconstruction — was canceled “because it focuses on exclusively anti-Black violence, which is a race.” A project to digitize local newspaper archives was nixed because digital accessibility “aligns with DEI goals of inclusivity and representation.” A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust was flagged as DEI because it focused on gender and religious oppression.
In short, every bit scholarship or art involving anyone who wasn’t white, male, and able was cut.
………
If all this sounds wildly illegal, that’s because it is.
I really hope that the DOGE Bros get prosecuted to the fullest extant of the law, and that they then get sent to a Federal PMITA prison.
Short version of this study: They collected blood test results over the past roughly 20 years, and there are increasing signs of CO2 toxicity, and the trend indicates that there may be acute health impacts from this by 2075 or so.
On the bright side, I'll be dead then.
Abstract
Anthropogenic activities are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. There is mounting experimental evidence that lifetime exposure to these increasing atmospheric CO2
levels can negatively impact the normal physiology of organisms.
However, directly assessing this in humans is very difficult. We
analysed serum bicarbonate (HCO3−), calcium (Ca)
and phosphorus (P) levels from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition
Examination Survey (NHANES) from 1999 to 2020 as indirect proxies for
atmospheric CO2 exposure. Over this period, average
bicarbonate levels in this population show an increasing trend which
parallels rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Both Ca and P
have decreased steadily over the same period. If these trends continue,
blood bicarbonate values could be at the limit of the accepted healthy
range in half a century, and Ca and P will be at the limit of their
healthy ranges by the end of this century. Studies indicate that, after
this time, elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide, leading to CO2
accumulation in the body, has the potential to cause a range of adverse
health effects. These findings highlight the urgent need for
significant reductions in anthropogenic CO2 emissions to safeguard public health.
This was clear from the most cursory examination of excess death data.
The covid-19 pandemic was perhaps the greatest natural disaster to befall America and the world in modern times. Research out today, however, indicates that we’re still underselling just how deadly it truly was.
Researchers at Boston University and others examined national death certificate data collected in the first two years of the pandemic. They estimated that the official tally missed nearly 20% of covid-related fatalities between 2020 and 2021, amounting to 155,536 uncounted deaths. These missing cases were more common among minority and disadvantaged communities, likely reflecting longstanding disparities in how deaths are investigated in the country, the researchers say.
This sh$# ain't rocket science.
Both the death toll and the bad statistics are a natural consequence of having a public health establishment opposed to the idea of public health.
One of the side effects of the increasing commerce in liquefied natural gas is the production of uelium.
When you cool down the gas, the helium remains a gas, and you can collect it and use it for things like MRI machines and silicon chip manufacture.
Among the strikes made by Iran in retaliation for attacks on its South Pars natural gas facilities, Iran struck the major helium production at Ras Laffan in Qatar, which looks to have the effect of taking 30% of world helium supplies offline.
Days after the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared the Strait of Hormuz—the narrow waterway through which roughly one fifth of the world’s oil passes—closed. While oil has dominated headlines, a third of the world’s commercial helium comes from Qatar and has also been cut off.
Often associated with party balloons, helium is indispensable to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, aerospace and the manufacture of microchips for artificial intelligence. With the strait closed, the disruption of the global helium supply chain could have ripple effects that might last for months and affect the most advanced technologies on Earth.
While there is a decent supply and stockpile out there, it is almost certain that helium providers will shortly announce a "Force majeur," and raise prices on existing contracts immediately.
So,I came across this video about 80s SF movies that were considered duds when they came out and are now considered classics, or prophetic, or are at least cult classics.
They are Blade Runner, The Thing, Tron, Dune, Brazil, Big Trouble in Little China, RoboCop, They Live, Buckaroo Banzai, Videodrome, and Miracle Mile.
Notice anything interesting about this list?
I'll give you a hint, one director put out 3 of these 11 films, John Carpenter. (The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live.)
The Thing, which was largely panned upon its release, is now considered a masterpiece of the genre, and They Live is not viewed as prescient social commentary.
Big Trouble in Little China, would probably make no one's list of great movies, but it's fun as hell and has a great following.
There a number of John Carpenter films that do nothing for me, Prince of Darkness and Christine come to mind, but his oeuvre figures predominantly in my top films list.
BTW, I'm pretty sure that the vid is AI slop, but the point stands.
I did not think that it would possible to find someone worse than Noem.
I was misinformed.
The Senate confirmed Sen. Markwayne Mullin on Monday to serve as the next secretary of Homeland Security, putting the Oklahoma Republican in charge of immigration enforcement, one of President Trump's biggest priorities in his second term.
Mullin won the confirmation in a 54-45 vote. He will be the second secretary to lead the department during this Trump administration, replacing Kristi Noem. He comes to the helm in the midst of a shutdown that has left 100,000 of the department's more than a quarter-million employees working without pay.
Reality exceeds my capability for cynicism yet again.
I do not expect Iran to reciprocate, because they (IMHO correctly) believe
that this is merely a ploy by the Americans to time for the next round of
attacks.
I think that Trump's announcement on social media that there have been, "Very
good and productive conversations," probably has another motivation, personal
profit.
It seems that someone was trading on this information, and my guess is that
their name rhymes with Ronald Lon Rump.
Unusually large futures trades placed minutes before a major geopolitical
announcement have sparked allegations of potential insider trading, after
market participants pointed to timing and scale that appeared closely
aligned with U.S. policy developments.
According to
data
shared by the market-tracking account unusual_whales, approximately $1.5
billion in S&P 500 futures contracts were purchased while roughly $192
million in oil futures were sold just five minutes before President Donald
Trump announced a halt to attacks on Iran.
The trades were
reportedly four to six times larger than typical order sizes observed at
that time.
The sequence of events has raised questions over
whether the trades were informed by non-public information, given the
immediate market reaction that followed.
What will the SEC do about these suspicious trades?
I think that they will take a cue from Inspector Renault.
One of these days, I need to watch Casablanca in one sitting.
With both my late (and not particularly lamented) 2025 Toyota Prius and my current 2026 Corolla, I have noticed a pronounced whine at low speed and in reverse.
I had assumed that the whine was caused by using higher speed electric motors in the drive train which would allow for smaller and lighter motors.
He lied about his early stock purchases, he lied about his intentions, and these lies were material to the transaction.
It's fraud.
A California jury found Elon Musk liable for misleading Twitter investors by making public statements casting doubt on his eventual $44 billion acquisition of the social media giant, contributing to a huge drop in the company's stock price.
A class-action lawsuit was filed in federal court against the world's richest man in 2022, just before he fully took control of Twitter.
The plaintiffs argued that they, along with countless other investors, were duped into selling their shares primarily because Musk tweeted that the Twitter deal was 'temporarily on hold' on May 13, 2022.
Musk was concerned there were many more spam or fake accounts on the platform than Twitter had publicly disclosed. He believed about five percent of all accounts were bots.
The plaintiffs argued that Musk made these statements to intentionally drive down the value of the shares so he could negotiate a lower purchase price.
On May 16, 2022, Musk publicly suggested that the deal price could change, saying during a Miami tech conference that it wouldn't be 'out of the question' to buy Twitter for less than the $44 billion that had already been agreed upon.
After nearly four days of deliberation, a nine-person jury in San Francisco found that Musk misled investors with his tweet saying the deal was 'temporarily on hold'.
—Jim Stewartson, describing how Peter Thiel's monstrous enterprise is successfully
inserting itself in the very highest levels of power.
If evil has a face, it is the face of Peter Andreas Thiel, who, when not
being a literal vampire, is working to eliminate democracy, strip civil rights from women, and make
himself god king.
Peter Thiel founded Palantir.
Palantir is Nazi cancer. It is metastasizing beyond the point of saving the
patient.
This is a metaphor I’m prepared to explain and defend
because it’s barely a metaphor at all. We have reached a very bad place;
America is dying; and I need to be direct about how serious its condition
is.
There are
several reports
that the former Department of Defense has established Peter Thiel’s
surveillance software company Palantir as the “program of record” for all
branches of military service. The man who announced it is the Deputy Secretary
of Defense,
Steve Feinberg, an
investment banker worth $5 billion. Feinberg’s company Cerberus has a 5% stake
in Bank Leumi, one of Israel’s largest financial institutions. Feinberg is
also
reportedly close
to Peter Thiel.
Palantir was heavily involved in the early stages
of the Iran attack, “assisting in identifying and engaging 1,000 targets
within the first few hours.” Presumably those targets included the girls’
school
in Minab
where 168 children were massacred by an American Tomahawk missile based on bad
intelligence. Nevertheless, despite the slaughter, Peter Thiel’s long-held
dream of being able to kill people at scale has been permanently granted.
Thiel’s
Naziphilia has been clear for a very long time. And there is a reason for
that. Thiel
was raised
in the most Nazi town on Earth in the 1970s: Swakopmund, in
apartheid-controlled SW Africa (now Namibia). Thiel’s apartheid Christian
school—and the town itself—used “Heil Hitler!” as a normal greeting, just as
they did in Nazi Germany. Thiel’s father Klaus moved his family to Swakopmund
when Peter was a baby to develop a secret uranium mine outside of town—which
fed apartheid South Africa’s illegal nuclear weapons program.
Imagine what it was like to be a young gay boy growing up in a Nazi-soaked
apartheid town in southern Africa, and being brought back to the U.S. at ten
years old. Peter Thiel has reportedly described the early part of his
childhood as being formative in his thinking—about who should have power and who should not.
………
When Thiel blamed women’s suffrage for the fact that he “no longer
believes freedom and democracy are compatible” 17 years ago, it should
have set off alarms across the Defense Department and the intelligence
community. When Palantir planned to target Julian Assange and Glenn
Greenwald with a psychological operation in 2011—and got caught—the
government’s should have ended the relationship.
But despite
Thiel’s many years of broadcasting his fascist beliefs—and his plans to
overthrow the federal government—America kept feeding the beast.
………
Palantir itself is a remarkable story of unremarkable software.
Thiel has invested heavily in making the product look cool, but it’s
really just standard business intelligence software with AI chatbots
bolted on. The main thing that distinguishes Palantir from its
competition is its willingness to be totally evil. The IDF, just as one example, used Palantir extensively in its destruction of Gaza, and its genocide of civilians.
………
Thiel’s salesmen for his death-creating product are people like his co-founders, fascist dudebro Joe Lonsdale and nerdish psychopath Alex Karp—and baby-faced Louis Mosley, head of Palantir UK. Lonsdale is openly fascist, pro-Russian, and pro-violence. In 2015, he was accused of raping a Stanford intern. In 2023, he started a failing “anti-woke university” in Austin with Thiel mouthpiece and now-editor of CBS News, Bari Weiss.
Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, has completely absorbed Thiel’s Nazi goals and sees “liberal white women” as the enemy of America:
“This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters…”
Finally, out of everyone in the United Kingdom, Peter Thiel chose Louis Mosley to run Palantir UK, which has taken over the National Health Service, and is getting into business with the British military. Mosley is the only grandson of Oswald Mosley, the most infamous fascist in British history, who was so enamored with the Nazis that he had his wedding at Joseph Goebbels’ house so Hitler could attend.
………
Palantir is just one tooth in the jaws of Peter Thiel—a man obsessed with not just overturning democracy in America but determined to repeal the Enlightenment. He says the last 200 years of history were a huge mistake. Like Epstein, Thiel is obsessed with “young blood,” genetics, eugenics, and transhumanism. He sees dealing with humans as a messy requirement of running a business. But to him, America is just a pile of resources, with a population which needs to be purified, segregated, and purged of undesirables.
………
When Trump leaves office by death or disability—I will be shocked
if Trump makes it three more years—there will be nothing in between
Peter Thiel and total control of the country. JD Vance was plucked out
of Yale by Peter Thiel. Vance has done nothing with his life but live
off Thiel’s largesse, including adopting Catholicism after Thiel gave him $15 million. JD Vance is just Thiel’s personal robot.
………
It must be the highest priority of any politician that wishes to save
America to remove this metastasis from the body politic. It must be
burned out of every corner of the government before the tumor replaces
the brain entirely. Peter Thiel is not just cosplaying the Antichrist.
As an atheist, I assure you he’s the real thing.
This blog is a place to put my stream of consciousness thoughts about life, politics, technology, and cats.
It's a posting ground for my more-or-less annual personal newsletter, 40 Years in the Desert.(PDF's available at link)
I find that if I wait until year's end I miss stuff from earlier in the year.
40 Years is put out the old fashioned way, it's printed out on ledger sized paper with 4 pages and mailed to people, total circulation of about 100.
I'm just not the holiday card kind of guy.
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