This is F%$#ing Insane

Former Biden National Security Council staffer Jacob Stokes is calling for military strikes on Chinese data centers to prevent the PRC from eclipsing the United States on AI.

This guy has drunk so many flavors of Kool Aid, possibly some laced with LSD, that it buggers the mind.

While American tech billionaires fret over the capabilities of Chinese AI, one national security advisor has a brilliant idea to flatten the competition: simply bomb their data centers to smithereens.

In a new report titled “Superpowers and AGI,” former Obama-era national security official Jacob Stokes calls for United States to begin preparing readiness drills in response to Chinese AI development — up to and including military strikes on the nation’s data centers, the South China Morning Post reported.

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to the theoretical point at which an AI model achieves human, or superhuman, levels of reasoning and intelligence. Though the science is still out on whether such a system is even possible, Stokes’ report begins from the assumption that AGI is inevitable, and that if the US can’t get to it first, its military needs to prepare to take drastic action.

Referring to the US as a hypothetical “laggard state” behind China’s achievement of AGI, Stokes — now the deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, a prominent DC think tank — writes that the country could “try to sabotage the leading state’s AGI systems, either through physical infiltration or offensive cyber operations; that is, cyberattack.”

 How do idiots like this secure comfortable sinecures at think tanks?

Of Course They Did

The Federal Trade Commission has accused Amazon of defrauding advertisers to the tune of $20 billion by manipulating ad auctions.

I am so not shocked. 

The Federal Trade Commission and 22 states sued Amazon yesterday, alleging that it has conducted a secret scheme to overcharge advertisers for seven years.

“Since 2019, Amazon.com, Inc. has secretly and systematically overcharged its approximately 1.2 million advertising customers by manipulating the ‘auctions’ that it uses to set the price of ads on its platform,” the lawsuit said. “Amazon represents, and advertisers believe, that competitive auctions set the prices for advertising on its leading e-commerce website. But, in reality, Amazon overrides and replaces the actual auction results with higher prices set by Amazon to increase its profits.”

The FTC said it obtained internal documents and messages that reveal how Amazon secretly inflated auction prices for Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display advertisements that appear alongside results seen by consumers when they search for a product. The FTC investigation began in 2024.

“Based on numerous internal documents describing its ‘hidden’ ‘surcharges,’ Amazon’s scheme has likely illegally extracted over $20 billion from its unwitting advertising customers,” according to the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Western District of Washington.

It's fraud all the way down. 

 

First Friday

NFP Numbers


Unemployment rateAnd the numbers are numbers are better than expected, which, when combined with stubbornly inflation numbers, makes it likely that the Fed will raise rates at its next meeting.

What can you do? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The U.S. added 162,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department reported Friday, a much-stronger-than-expected result that suggested the labor market shook off its early-summer doldrums. 

The numbers

The unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.1%. That leaves it at a historically low level that indicates the labor market remains generally healthy.

Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had forecast the report would show the economy gained just 53,000 jobs. The unemployment rate was in line with their expectations.

What this means for jobs

The jump in jobs came in part from rebounds in restaurant and in local-education employment that many economists viewed as one-off factors. But the U.S. has added an average of 80,000 jobs a month so far this year, which compares with monthly growth of 10,000 jobs in 2025.

“We don’t have a problem in the labor market,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM.

Hiring had weakened considerably in June and July, and so the August job gains helped dispel concerns that the labor market had re-entered a period of cooling.


Still, workers’ pay has been lagging behind inflation, raising concerns that consumer spending could be challenged in the months ahead.

………

Average hourly earnings rose 3.1% from a year earlier, indicating that pay continues to struggle to keep up with inflation. Consumer prices were up 3.4% from a year earlier in July. Because people’s inflation-adjusted, or real, wages are close to zero, their ability to spend is getting challenged, said EY-Parthenon chief economist Gregory Daco.

In the middle of all this, it looks like private equity is heading for a major crackup, as they cannot unload the properties that they have looted.

Retail stalwarts Saks and Eddie Bauer filed for bankruptcy. Kmart and JoAnn Fabrics are gone for good, a trail of layoffs and disappointed customers in their wake. Hospital giant Steward Health Care collapsed, costing thousands of jobs and leaving several communities without a local hospital.

These once-trusted US companies have one thing in common: they were owned by private equity investors, who load companies with debt when they buy them and squeeze out profits as they restructure.

The business model is now facing an existential crisis that may have profound ramifications across the US.

………

But this wave of buyouts is running smack into a wall of persistently high interest rates, rising buyout prices and pressure over moribund returns.

Private equity funds are sitting on a “record number of unsold companies, many of which they’ve been unable to sell … or at least unable to sell at the prices that they’re looking for”, said Jim Baker, the executive director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, an industry watchdog.

The end of low interest rates are hitting them hard.

Good, though there will be some short term gain. 

Not a Good Look

Click to embiggen







I am referring, of course, to CVN-72, the USS Abraham Lincoln, which has arrived in Laem Chabang, Thailand looking like an extra from the zombie film 28 Days Later.

No wonder crewmen were literately throwing themselves into the ocean. 

The U.S. Navy’s supercarrier USS Abraham Lincoln is now in Thailand for a much-deserved and highly publicized liberty port call. The carrier had gone 286 days without making such a stop, with much of that time spent executing grueling combat operations against Iran. The ship has been run very hard, relying on at times a rickety conveyor of sea replenishments to continue operating for months on end, and it has the scars to show for it. The Lincoln looks very much worse for wear, with so-called “running rust” and algae caked all along the sides of the hull, as well as around the edges of the flight deck and sponsons on either side. It’s something of a startling appearance for one of the most powerful ships on the planet and a major symbol of U.S. power projection, but it is also a reminder of what the vessel and its crew have endured for months on end.

The Lincoln arrived in the Thai port of Laem Chabang earlier today. The carrier did make a stop in Guam in December 2025 and reportedly made another one somewhere in the Middle East in July. However, in both cases, these have been characterized as brief logistical stopovers that did not offer any real opportunity for personnel onboard to disembark. Thai media reports say the carrier is expected to remain in Laem Chabang through the end of the weekend.

Great Googly Moogly!

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Seeing as how the full report will be coming out tomorrow, I'll keep this post on the weekly unemployment report brief.

• Initial claims up 2,000 to 206,000.
• Continuing claims up  8,000 to 1.779 million.
• All signs point to continued inflation above the Fed target. 
• Trade deficit is up.

Friday should be interesting. 

Headline of the Day

This Is the Worst Possible Time for OpenAI to BfЖ7!م#2猫$9&क

Gizmodo, on OpenAI's plans to roll out an even less responsible version of artificial intelligence.

Yea, this is gonna go so f%$#ing well, innit.

AI models are notoriously likened to black boxes, meaning the humans who build them can’t look inside to see how they transform mountains of training data into lines of code, sonnets, or whatever else they’re asked to generate. Not completely, anyway. A subfield called interpretability research has blossomed in recent years, aimed at shining various lights on how AI models “think.” One of the brightest lights is called chain-of-thought reasoning, or CoT. Think of it like a recorded transcript of the steps models take while working through problems—like a student showing their work on a test. It’s widely regarded as a critical safety mechanism as models become more capable and less predictable.

OpenAI is now experimenting with a technique that could make it harder for researchers to interpret models’ CoT reasoning process, according to a Tuesday report from The Information.

The latest versions of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini—all based on an architecture called a transformer—process data via a series of steps, recording their reasoning process in natural language the whole way through (albeit not always totally accurately).

The new technique, on the other hand—known as recurrent depth—turns that linear reasoning process into a cyclical one: the model iteratively refines its internal representations by repeatedly passing them through the same set of layers. The takeaway is that the relatively clear CoT transcripts generated by traditional transformers can be replaced with a much more opaque reasoning process. In other words, we can’t be sure what it’s thinking when it isn’t thinking in words.

For Sam Altman and the rest of the Silly-Con Valley fraudsters, the solution to AI hallucinations is to make sure that diagnosis becomes more difficult.

Wonderful. 

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Too Corrupt for Texas?

It appears that even Texas Republicans are realizing that Elon Musk's attempts to secure state subsidies for broadband are too corrupt for them.

I did not know that it was possible to be too corrupt for Texas.

Back in June I wrote a feature for The Verge about how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos had convinced Republicans to redirect billions in taxpayer money away from future-proof fiber optic upgrades, and toward their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband networks they’d already planned to deploy. Curious behavior for two extremely-rich gentlemen who both repeatedly claim to loathe subsidies and corporate welfare.

But wait! It gets dumber and more corrupt!

Originally, Congress set aside $42.5 billion in taxpayer money in the infrastructure bill to spend on broadband upgrades. But after shoveling a large chunk of that money to two billionaires for slower satellite networks they already planned to build without subsidization, Trump Republicans claimed they’d “saved” taxpayers $21.5 billion dollars in “non-deployment funds” that appear to have mysteriously fallen into a deep hole in the federal government.

Obviously states are pissed off, and have been waiting for much of the last year for the Trump administration to green light that money for the purpose Congress earmarked it for. But wary of upsetting the Trump administration, many haven’t been willing to publicly comment on how stupid this all is for fear of losing out on their promised money. But they’re getting increasingly pissed all the same.

That includes Texas, which was slated to get the most “BEAD” (Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment) funds ($3.3 billion) of any state in the country.

Over the last month or two there’s been a growing, bipartisan annoyance in the Lone Star state at the fact that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos appeared to have hijacked billions of dollars originally slated for fiber optics for their satellite ventures. That’s forced the Texas Broadband Deployment Office (BDO) to put all grant awards on hold while the state investigates questions of cronyism and favoritism at the agency:

The fact that both Musk and Bezos are also building large AI data centers, which are politically toxic, even in the corporate whoring Lone Star State, may have something to do with this.

I would expect that Musk and Bezos will get their Baksheesh following the November elections.

Forget it Jake, it's Texas. 

That Which Can Be Destroyed by the Truth, Should Be

A local activist in Arkansas filed an FOI request to the state PUC about a what Entergy was doing with regard to Google's efforts to secure power for their planned data center in West Memphis, Arkansas.

It appears that she got more than what the utility company intended. 

The short version:

Google appears to be paying only a third of the cost for new electric infrastructure, not the full amount, as Entergy has said.

Yes, these documents appear to undermine Entergy’s claims that customers won’t pay higher bills to support data centers

Details of Google’s West Memphis site’s massive power draw are revealed. [Google would be using all of the energy from a solar installation that it was touting.]

In response to this data being released, Entergy filed suit asking for a restraining order preventing the news media from writing about this information, something which a Federal Judge promptly denied.

Entergy claimed that the documents revealed trade secrets, but the fact that Entergy plans to screw its rate-payers is simply not a secret.  It never has been. 

Holy F%$#ing Sh%$

We have a report that a a grad student synthesized dimethylmercury and possibly exposed themselves.

Dimethylmercury makes the Minimata Disease look like a trip to a pre-Amazon Whole Foods.

We had a weird story develop over the weekend here in the Cambridge area (and among organic chemists in general). I’m glad that I wasn’t trying to blog it as it happened, because it’s taken some turns!

This all started last Wednesday night, but most of us only heard something on Thursday when word came of an MIT chemistry building that was being closed off because of a report of someone who had been exposed to hazardous material. It became clear that said material was possibly dimethylmercury, which a graduate student had claimed to have synthesized, and who subsequently reported themselves to a local emergency room. And you can see why that caused a stir (but read on!)

Dimethylmercury is very, very bad news. It is obviously something I will not work with, but it’s never been the subject of a blog post here in that category because unfortunately there’s nothing lighthearted about the subject. Not after the death of Karen Wetterhahn in 1997. That story should be well known to chemists everywhere, but the short version is that Prof. Wetterhahn (at Dartmouth) was accidentally exposed in August of 1996 to a few drops of liquid dimethylmercury on her latex-gloved hand. What she didn’t know (and what none of us really knew) was that this compound rapidly penetrates such gloves, which meant that Wetterhahn was exposed to skin contact within seconds. Toxicologically, it is probably the worst of the organomercurys, which are of course a dangerously toxic group of compounds overall. Her precautions for handling the compound were the standard at the time, it should be noted.

Prof. Wetterhahn began to notice general symptoms within weeks. Early in 1997 she began to show neurological problems, and within weeks she had collapsed into a vegetative state. She was removed from life support in June. She had very high levels of mercury in her blood, and all attempts at chelation therapy to remove it were ineffective. That’s surely because it had spread throughout her body by the time the problem was recognized, but frankly no one can be sure if there were any measures that could have been effective enough after the initial exposure. This horrifying incident led to a complete re-evaluation of the use of dimethylmercury in synthetic and analytical chemistry, where among other things it had been the reference peak standard in mercury NMR experiments.

It appears that there was no exposure to anyone, and possibly that there was no actual synthesis of the ferociously toxic material, but someone was trying to make some.

Whoever they are should be blackballed from chemistry for the rest of their natural life. 

I don't just mean that they should be banned working in ans academic or industrial programs related to chemistry.  I mean that they should be banned from any work with chemicals at all, up to and including working as a pastry chef.

Coyote vs. ACME Review (No Spoilers Except Revealing a Cameo)

A brief and explosive cameo



A promotional poster

---

Director	Dave Green
Writers	Samy Burch James Gunn Jeremy Slater
From a New Yorker article by	Ian Frazier
Cast
Will Forte	Kevin Avery
Lana Condor	Paige Avery
John Cena	Buddy Crane
Tone Bell	Sal Maltese
Martha Kelly	Dottie Jones
Luis Guzmán	Judge Troppogrosso
P.J. Byrne	Bill Pelicanos
John Early	Henry Heslop
Nancy Linehan Charles	Cherry
Kenneth Choi	Oscar Jeon
Ernie Vigil	Talon
Eric Bauza	Bugs Bunny Charlie Dog Daffy Duck Dr. Lorre Elmer Fudd Foghorn Leghorn Gossamer Porky Pig Road Runner Tweety
Candi Milo	Granny Miss Prissy Witch Hazel
Jim Cummings	Tasmanian Devil

First, the cameo.  It came from a 70 year old USAF veteran, the AIM-4 Falcon.

The round nose, triangular wings, and the tiny fins on the front are kind of a dead give-away.

I will not reveal the role that the missile took, except to say that it was sell acted and, "Energetic," pairing very nicely with their fellow actor in the scene.

A further note: my guess is that there are perhaps 100 other people in the united states who identified the missile.

I cannot speak to these other mil-pr0n geeks, but this makes me the least cool man in the world.

Of course, this is not a surprise.  My kids have been saying this for years.  

As to my movie review, I will take the approach that Michael Caine took with the Muppets, in a Muppet Christmas Carol,  and review all characters, both live action and animated as if they are all live actors.

First, let me state that this is a really good movie, funny, poignant, and at times laugh out loud. 

I think that it is better than Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and it is better while having to carry the enormous burden of Warner Brothers canon, which Roger Rabbit did not.

The technical production values are very high, but truth be told, this does not matter.  We are here for the dialogue, characters, and story.

There is a lot that I wanted to see that I did not see, not just more of some of the non Coyote and Roadrunner characters, but also, for example, a deeper dive into the law office staff, who seemed to have been worked through far more deeply than the there was addressed in the film.

I understand why this happened.

If we had seen more of Bugs Bunny as the classic trickster, and more of Daffy Duck duck being ……… well ……… daffy, along with a deeper dive into the law offices, the movie would likely have been about 4½ hours long, which would have been too long.

It was good at 1h 39m

Still, I'd like to see what ended up on the cutting room floor.

The basic plot was obvious to anyone who read the original New Yorker essay or saw the coming attractions, but it was executed quite well.

It was also laugh out loud funny, and quite touching, being an examination of friendships and obsessions. (Wile E. Coyote and obsession, now there is a surprise)

It was a bit less subversive than the original Looney Tunes, which did a job of communicating very different humor to the adults and the children in the audience.

I also think that it is kind of absurd that it got a PG rating.  It's Looney Tunes for f%$#'s sake!  Those anvils have a context!

As to the performances:  They were all good, and it was apparent that everyone involved was enjoying themselves, which is just plain fun to watch.

John Cena as evil lawyer Buddy Crane is clearly the best performance in the film.  He chews the scenery with reckless abandon, and does extremely well both as a source of jokes and as a straight man without completely dominating the movie.  (Thing about Alan Rickman in Robin Hood, who made Kevin Costner look like Jerry Lewis)

Wile E. is great, true to form. His portrait as a person whose obsession is being opposed by the universe itself is as pure and focused as it was when he fell off that cliff ………and that cliff ……… and that cliff ………and that cliff in the original Warner Brothers shorts.

The Road Runner is good, but a little softer than in the original.  He is not taunting the Coyote (and everyone else in this movie) quite so much as he does in the original.  Good, but only an A, not an A+.

Will Forte gives a good solid performance as Kevin Avery, (I assume that the name is an homage to Tex Avery) but he's a little bit too earnest, particularly in the beginning.  As the character who changes the most, going from disillusioned cynic to crusader almost as obsessed as the coyote, he's just too nice and too engaged in the needs of his clients at the start.

The weakest performance was from Foghorn Leghorn.  He was OK, but given his role as a villain, arguably the boss villain, he lacked the menace and arrogance required for the role.

While his earlier performances never presented much in the way of menace, his arrogance is normally a bit more prominent.  

Also, Tweety's performance was a disappointment.  His character was in a bad place, but we don't see any of the ingenuity and brutality that has made Sylvester's life a living hell.

As to the legal machinations in the plot, it was well done, but I would have liked it to a bit more Perry Mason than it was. 

Of course, one does have to talk about the real villain in this movie, former Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zazlav, who canceled the release of the film in order to secure a tax write-off.

I won't go into detail on that whole matter, but Zazlav should be strapped into a chair and made to watch this movie on repeat for a full week without being allowed to close his eyes. 

You know the drill: 

 

I call it Kubricking.

"Convenience Fees," My Flabby White Hairy Ass!

I booked tickets to Coyote vs. Acme this afternoon, and it came with a 20% "Convenience Fee".

F%$# that, and f%$# AMC Theaters, without lube.

It's late, so I will do a full review the movie tomorrow.   

Short version:  See it.  It is Who Framed Roger Rabbit good.

Elemental Geography

I’m wondering if the Trump regime thought through pissing off Canada, including renaming a lake that honors not just the province of Ontario but also the First Nations people who lived there and named it. But there’s the little matter of navigation on the Great Lakes, including the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Welland Canal, which is the only way ships can travel between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. The canal is in Ontario and wholly operated by Canada, and no ship can pass through it and the eight locks without permission of Canada. In other words, Canada has their own Strait of Hormuz.

—Bark Bark Woof Woof

Oh Snap! 

The Welland Canal, because you cannot sail a ship over Niagara Falls.

The phrase, "Own Goal," comes to mind here. 

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

I get that recruiting at the FBI is not what it once was, but recruiting people who frequent prostitutes and f%$# animals seems to be desparation.

Worst timeline ever, 

Kash Patel's FBI is being pilloried online after a new report revealed the bureau quietly loosened the vetting standards that once automatically disqualified applicants who had hired sex workers, stolen from an employer or engaged in bestiality.

According to CBS News, the FBI in June eased some background check rules so that those acts, most of them illegal, are no longer instant disqualifiers for would-be agents. A candidate may now get a pass on prostitution as long as they did not hire sex workers three or more times and not within the past decade, and someone who committed bestiality as a minor could still make the cut, sources told the outlet.

The change comes as the FBI lost more than 1,000 special agents in 2025, part of an exodus of firings, forced retirements and polygraphs since Trump returned to power. Critics say the loosened rules point to a recruiting crisis.

"How can this not be reflective of a recruiting problem at the FBI if you are lowering your standards on issues like bestiality and prostitution?" attorney Mark Zaid told CBS.

Only the very best people?

Linkage

• It’s 90 degrees in the Arctic right now (Scientific American) We are at f%$#ed.
• Florida Republican could face death penalty under child abuse law he championed (Raw Story) It's all projection, isn't it.
• 2,200-year-old Roman shipwreck reveals ancient waterproofing secrets (ScienceDaily) Getting your historical engineering freak on.
• There Are Carrier Pigeon Apps Now Because Pigeon Technology Is Actually Superior (Gizmodo) There's an app for what?
• Tesla to recall almost three million vehicles over hidden door handles (The Register) It turns out that China takes exception to the stupid and unsafe door handles that Elon Musk is such a fan of.
• Scientists find evidence for two origins of life on Earth (ScienceDaily) 2 separate events in 2 separate locations.  Cool.
• Scientists Studied 338 NFL Players' Brains After Death. Nearly All Had the Same Disease (Gizmodo) CTE,  I do not think that there is a way to fix football.
• Trump Isn’t Caligula, He’s Commodus (Martin Longman) It gets down into the historical weeds, but I agree.
• Did Google Glass Wearers Actually Get Punched in the Face? (Gizmodo) There is no evidence that "Glassholes" were actually punched in the face, though they deserved it.

The history of coffee, as only OTR can cover it:

Guck Foogle

We're not changing the name of Lake Ontario. Name it whatever you want at your leisure: https://gulfof.mapquest.com/lakeontario (tag us so we can see your work 🙂)

[image or embed]

— MapQuest (@mapquest.com) August 27, 2026 at 4:14 PM

MapQuest is having none of it 

Once again Google has offered conclusive evidence that it's old motto of, "Don't be evil," is inoperative.

In this case, Google Maps renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America before the ink was dry on Trump's executive order.

Time to switch to MapQuest, I guess.  (Waze is owned by Google)

Google Maps has changed the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America following Donald Trump’s executive order mandating the change amid his trade war with Canada.

On Saturday, two days after the president cited Executive Order 14172 (Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness) to authorize the Great Lake’s renaming, Google Maps was updated to reflect the change for U.S. users.

Google’s sudden name change — the executive order stated the change must occur within 30 days, not 48 hours — was met with anger by Canadians, Lake Ontario-defending Americans, and HOMES mnemonic rememberers, all of whom accused the company of too quickly complying with Trump’s Lake America demand spurred by a trade war over tariffs.

To the degree that a future Democratic administration can dismantle all of the Silly-Con Valley monopolies, they should. 

Pakistan Said This?

While there have been recent movement toward China over the past few years, Pakistan has been in the pocket of the United States.

Not any more, it seems, because Pakistan has stated that it is not bound by unilateral US sanctions against Iran.

Pakistan said it is not “obliged to” comply with unilateral sanctions on Iran unless they are imposed by the United Nations, signaling a willingness to continue trade after the US warned of economic penalties against countries doing business with Tehran.

Islamabad is following bilateral agreements with Iran and while trade between the two neighbors remains robust, “there is a desire to expand,” Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Tahir Andrabi said at a weekly briefing Thursday.

Pakistan relied on its ties with Iran to negotiate the release of oil tankers early on during the conflict. The two countries have also agreed to Pakistan, Iran Agree on Completing Free Trade Agreement Soon a Pakistan, Iran Businessmen Aim to Boost Trade to $10 Billion to increase bilateral commerce by more than threefold to $10 billion. 

Pakistan has been trying to balance its relations with the US and Iran during the war. The country has strengthened its ties with the US during President Donald Trump’s second term, particularly after emerging as a key mediator between Tehran and Washington.

Last week, Pakistan’s army chief was in Iran as part of negotiations to end the Middle East conflict after tensions flared up again.

Iran won the war, and there are consequences of this. 

Cats, Huh?

Yes, this is our cat Mousetrap/Meatball.

Yes, this is our clothes dryer.  (Gas)

Yes, we took her out before Sharon* loaded her wet clothes.

Catz are weird.

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Not a Surprise

A grand jury in Florida has determined that Ron DeSantis stole money from a Medicaid fraud settlement and gave it to two of his PACs.

I'm surprised, but not by the corruption. I'm surprised that anyone was willing to confront the little man on his blatant corruption.

Unfortunately, there will be no charges forthcoming.

A Florida grand jury has found that the administration of the governor, Ron DeSantis, “misappropriated” $10m in taxpayer money from a Medicaid settlement into the Hope Florida Foundation, a charity with ties to DeSantis’s wife, before the money was reportedly “funneled” into “two political action committees”.

In the grand jury report, which remains sealed but was obtained and published by CBS News Miami on Wednesday, the grand jurors wrote that “we conclude that these funds were misappropriated as part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities” but said that they found “insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally”.

The grand jury report, dated 28 January 2026, states that in 2024, the Hope Florida Foundation received $10m from a Medicaid settlement between the state and Centene, a contractor for the government health insurance program for low-income Americans and children.

The report goes on to say that after the money was transferred to Hope Florida, it was “quickly funneled” from there into two political action committees, and that the money was then reportedly used to lobby against a ballot measure that would have legalized marijuana in Florida, and was sent to the Republican party of Florida.

 In a just world, DeSantis would already in custody.

I've Been Saying this for How Long?

David Sirota on the Real News Network (RNN) describing how the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) consultant class have systematically sabotaged the party for their own personal gain.

As an aside, the woefully pathetic post-mortem that was finally released by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had a chapter removed that called out the consultants before its release.

Go figure. 

Grand Jury No-Bills

For once, this is not the Trump DoJ that f%$#ed this up.

In this case, the grand jury was in Ohio, and they refused to indict a man who sawed down a Flock camera.

Good.

A grand jury in Ohio has declined to indict a man charged with felony vandalism for allegedly destroying a Flock automatic license plate reader camera.

Police in Union Township, a Cincinnati suburb, accused Cody Morelock of disassembling the camera, its support pole and solar panel on June 13.

Investigators, according to WKRC-TV in Cincinnati, identified Morelock after obtaining surveillance footage from other cameras near the scene as well as information linked to a credit card and a customer rewards account.

Police estimated the damage at more than $1,000. Morelock posted a $10,000 bond and was released from custody shortly after his arrest.

A Clermont County grand jury, however, opted not to indict Morelock, and the charges were dismissed.

It is said that a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.

It appears that a ham sandwich with a side order of flock vandalism is a different kettle of fish. 

Today in Very Bad Fashion for a Very Good Cause

If you wondering what could motivate such an ugly sartorial statement, the answer is pretty simple: The pattern f%$#s up the ability of AI to recognize the target as a human being.

Hopefully, this isn't just someone blowing smoke up our collective asses.

Designer Simon Weckert has created a colourful camouflage shirt that cannot be detected using AI video systems.

Developed in response to a pilot project to use artificial intelligence (AI) video surveillance at Berlin's Kottbusser Tor, which starts this month, the shirt was designed to stop the user being recognised as a person.

Named Digital Camouflage, the shirt aims to confuse the AI-powered object-detection system by subverting what the system recognises as a person.

………

The shirt uses a combination of bright colours and patterns to confuse the AI systems so that it doesn't recognise what it is seeing as a person. 

 Make it so.

 

Yeah, They are a Bookie

The Appeals Court for the 9th Circuit just ruled that Kalshi sports "prediction market" is just sport betting and so subject to state regulations.

The court rejected claims that Kalshi's sports book operation is a. "Swap," which are exclusively covered under federal law.

Kalshi today lost a major ruling over whether it can evade state gambling laws, as a federal appeals court found that Nevada can stop the prediction market from allowing sports bets. While the Trump administration is trying to help prediction markets avoid state regulation, a panel of three Trump-appointed judges unanimously ruled against Kalshi in today’s decision from the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

The Nevada Gaming Control Board today said the 9th Circuit “emphatically reject[ed] the view that the federal Commodity Exchange Act preempts application of Nevada’s gaming laws to sports-event contracts offered by Kalshi, Crypto.com, and Robinhood.” Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, a Republican, said that “prediction markets offering sports-event contracts constitute gambling and must comply with Nevada’s gaming laws and regulatory framework.”

The judges affirmed a district court order that let Nevada enforce state laws against Kalshi’s sports-related event contracts.

“KalshiEX, LLC advertises itself as ‘the first app for legal sports betting in all 50 states,’” wrote Judge Ryan Nelson. “As the volume of activity on Kalshi’s ‘sports betting’ platform ballooned, the Nevada Gaming Control Board sent a cease-and-desist letter notifying Kalshi that it was violating Nevada statutes and gaming regulations. Kalshi sought injunctive relief, arguing that it is not a legal sports betting platform but a designated contract market under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) offering legal sports event contracts. Kalshi argues that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has exclusive regulatory authority over its sports event contracts and, therefore, Nevada’s gaming regulations do not apply.”

Good.

It's Bank Failure Friday!!!

And I missed a few recent ones over the past few weeks.

First, the commercial bank failures number 4, Tioga-Franklin Savings Bank of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on August 21.

Here is the  Full FDIC list. 

Then there is the credit union failure number 7, African Diaspora Federal Credit Union of Saint Ann, Missouri on August 6.

Here is the Full NCUA list, and the direct link for this year. 

Twice as many bank failures this year as occurred in all of 2025, and one fewer credit union failure than in all of 2025.

Cue Alanis Morissette

When I heard the news that Milo Yiannopoulos had been detained by ICE, and that he has received a final deportation order, I could not help but smile.

It turns out that there ARE some people that I would wish ICE detention on.

I’m torn. I think the government has gone way overboard on deportations — let the people pursue happiness! — but yeesh, it’s Milo Yiannopoulos.

Far-right political commentator and deportation advocate Milo Yiannopoulos is currently in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody facing a final order of removal, according to U.S. officials and agency records.

Yiannopoulos, who is British, was apprehended in the New Orleans area and is being held in a Louisiana ICE holding facility, the U.S. officials said. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Yiannopoulos came to the U.S. legally in 2019 but “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws.”

I was feeling a twinge of sympathy, both because I hate ICE and because he sure looks down in the dumps in his mugshot, but then, I was served with some quotes…

California needs ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings, with on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally, he posted on social media in June 2025.

Total legal immunity for ICE agents when they’re on duty, he wrote in September 2025.

There is one concrete thing we must insist on this administration delivering, he wrote in June 2025. It matters a lot more than debts measured in imaginary money. We have got to deport millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters.

Yeah, throw his ass out of the country.

Schadenfreude, sweet schadenfreude.

Can We Arrest Him Now?

It appears that the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ was using child pr0n to train his Grok artificial intelligence system.

We are not talking hashes here, where the a digital signature is generated and used to compare to images and the like.

We are talking about actual CSAM.

Put the Elon Musk in jail. 

xAI has now been accused of training Grok on child sex abuse materials (CSAM), as regulators and courts continue to probe how far the problem goes, and some Grok users have been arrested.

In a complaint filed on Wednesday, a plaintiff known as Jane Doe explained that she was preschool-age in the early 2000s when adult men repeatedly raped her to create CSAM to sell to pedophiles online. Since then, Doe’s images have been hashed by groups like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (CCCP).

For her safety, Doe has opted to receive alerts from the US Department of Justice Victim Notification System any time she may be a victim in a new criminal investigation. Although she has received countless alerts, she was shocked when the CCCP notified her that it had identified AI-generated CSAM on xAI that depicted her. This re-traumatized Doe, whose complaint alleged that messages were found on online forums “between offenders chatting about creating AI generated CSAM of Plaintiff and other similarly situated known, legacy, victims of CSAM.”

Now, Doe fears that xAI has not only made it easier to make more violative images of the most distressing time in her life, but also that xAI allegedly has stored the images that Grok generates and uses those outputs to further train Grok. Because of this, she believes that Grok has been trained on both the initial set of images that have haunted her for more than 20 years and the more recent AI-generated ones.

………

The lawsuit further noted that while xAI filters out violent content in Grok outputs to exclude it from training data, xAI’s terms notably do not specify if CSAM, non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), or NSFW material are “excluded categories.”

It seems to follow then that “because full removal of a training example’s influence from an already-trained model is technically difficult and not something that xAI has publicly claimed to have done, any CSAM ingested into training before takedown likely continued to shape the model’s outputs even after the original images were removed from public view,” Doe’s complaint said.

If you cannot get Musk arrested, I would suggest that perhaps Ms. Doe and her lawyers could ask for all of xAI be deleted, because the nature of Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence means that the entire data set has been polluted.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And initial and continuing claims are both down, while the trade deficit rose to a 16 month high and inflation remained in, "The Fed Hikes Rates," territory.

The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits for the first time fell for a second week while the overall number of people on jobless relief rolls slid to the ​lowest level in a month, signaling a stable labor market that should give the Federal Reserve leeway to focus on containing inflation.

Meanwhile, the U.S. trade deficit in goods, which President Donald ‌Trump is trying to reduce through his aggressive use of tariffs on imported goods, was the widest in 16 months in July as exports fell for a third straight month and capital goods imports surged on the back of the artificial intelligence build-out. The wider goods trade gap last month puts trade on track to be a net drag on U.S. gross domestic product growth for a fourth straight quarter.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell 4,000 to a seasonally adjusted 203,000 for the week ended August ​22, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 208,000 claims for the latest week.

Claims are hovering in the lower end of their 189,000-230,000 range for this year, indicating ​that layoffs remain low even if hiring is soft. Despite a surprise drop in employment in July, the U.S. jobless rate ticked down again to 4.1%, a historically low ⁠level.

The number of people receiving unemployment benefits after an initial week of aid, a proxy for hiring, fell 18,000 to a seasonally adjusted 1.778 million during the week ended August 15, the claims report showed. The ​continued claims data covered the survey week for the monthly nonfarm payrolls report for August.

………

Labor market stability, ​if sustained, gives the Fed headroom to keep its focus on containing inflation that has run above its 2% target for 65 straight months.

Thursday's data came as Fed policymakers and other global economic officials were gathering in ​Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for the Kansas City Fed's annual economic symposium, where U.S. central bank Chairman Kevin Warsh will deliver a keynote address on Friday morning. Warsh, who so far in his young term has shied away from commenting specifically ‌on the state ⁠of the economy and direction of Fed policy, is under pressure to address a central issue: Is current inflation a problem or not, and what should be done about it?

A growing minority of his Fed colleagues are increasingly anxious about inflation, and three voting members of the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee dissented last month with the decision to leave interest rates unchanged at 3.50% to 3.75%. The inflation measure the Fed uses to set its target held steady unexpectedly last month at 3.7%.

Not a clue as to what this all means.

Headline of the Day

Ex-Barclays boss denies having sex with woman dressed as Snow White after Epstein emails

—The Guardian

There are a lot of ,b.REALLY,/b. sick f%$#s out there.

The former Barclays boss Jes Staley has denied having sex with a woman dressed as Snow White, after being questioned about an infamous email exchange about Disney princesses with Jeffrey Epstein.

The comments were detailed in newly released transcripts from a closed-door interview last month with US lawmakers as part of their investigation into Epstein, who died in prison in August 2019 while awaiting trial on child sex-trafficking charges.

In the email exchange on 9 and 10 July 2010 Staley and Epstein referred to Disney princesses. In those messages, the details of which have been circulating in the media since 2021, Staley tells Epstein: “That was fun. Say hi to Snow White.”

Epstein then asks: “What character would you like next?” to which Staley replied: “Beauty and the Beast.” Epstein responded: “Well one side is availble [sic].”

During his congressional testimony, Staley, who spent more than three decades at JPMorgan Chase before joining Barclays in 2015, was asked: “Did you ever have sex with a young woman in a Snow White costume?

“No, I did not,” Staley said.

Mandy Rice-Davies Applies.  (Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?)

I expect Disney to file a lawsuit against Mr. Staley in the next few days. 

 

Sick Burn

So, Lindsay Ellis had a post on YouTube about Kid Rock being a dick. (Not really, a dick has a head, but I digress)

In any case, a commenter said the following:

You really gotta separate the art from the artist, that way you get to hate Kid Rock twice. 

That's gonna leave a mark.

Pocket Change

It appears that the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ will be pay somewhere between $12 and $17.1 billion to settle the lawsuit accusing it of deliberately making an addictive product.

That is by my calculation less than 1 month's revenue.  

They can find it in their couch cushions. 

Meta on Wednesday reached a landmark settlement with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, agreeing to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties and make major changes to its products over claims it endangered children with addictive social media platforms.

In a dramatic capitulation, the owner of Facebook and Instagram agreed to the financial penalties for violating federal child privacy and states’ consumer protection laws, the states announced. Meta also agreed to limit how long teenagers can spend on its platforms and to bans on features that stoke mental health issues, striking at the heart of the company’s business of engagement for advertising.

………

The settlement effectively ends a bellwether federal trial in the U.S. Northern District of California in Oakland, where California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey were seeking roughly $200 billion over accusations that Meta harmed children. The states filed their agreement with Meta on Wednesday morning in that court, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers approved it.

Separately, Meta said on Wednesday that it settled with Texas for about $1 billion over similar allegations. The company still faces numerous other lawsuits from school districts and individuals, some of which are scheduled for trial in the coming months.

Meta’s stock rose on the news, closing up just over 1 percent. The company is valued at $1.47 trillion and most recently generated $60.8 billion in quarterly revenue.

 Like I said, pocket change.

Also, there is a condition to this settlement that will likely mean that they won't even be paying that.

………

The full value of Meta’s payout depends on whether other social media companies also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes. Meta will initially pay about $12 billion. It will pay an additional $5 billion if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes. 

I would be very surprised if a significant amount of this payout will occur this decade.

Facebook is, and always has been, a bad actor, and this settlement will not change that.

What would change this is frog-marching Mark Zuckerberg out of his offices in handcuffs. 

Private Island? How Does a Justice Afford a F%$#ing Private Island?

No, it's not Clarence Thomas, it's John Roberts, who was confronted by protestors at his private island.

Also, the whole private island thing is a bad look.  Just ask Jeffrey Epstein. 

Chief Justice John Roberts’ island escape was interrupted by protesters who arrived by kayak to stage a demonstration.

The 71-year-old Supreme Court justice, who has pleaded with critics of his ultra-conservative court to back off, learned earlier this month that even his private island retreat off Port Clyde, Maine, wasn’t beyond the reach of protesters.

Arriving by kayak, canoe, and rowboat, the protesters staged a one-hour “floating vigil” in the waters between Port Clyde and Hupper Island, where Roberts has a home, the Midcoast Villager reported.

he protesters’ signs declared “The Roberts Court: Rubber Stamp for Fascism” and “Roberts Benched the Constitution,” according to photos published in the Midcoast Villager. More than 20 people paddled out for the protest, while another 20 demonstrated on land, according to the Midcoast Villager.

Roberts and his wife, Jane Roberts, bought a 1,344-square-foot home on Hupper Island, a private island accessible only by water, in 2006. They bought a second 1,560-square-foot home sitting on two waterfront acres in 2016, according to the Bangor Daily News.

Last month, the couple—whose wealth is estimated at roughly $25 million—sold their longtime home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, for $3.44 million, Realtor.com reported. They had bought the seven-bedroom house for $1.23 million in 2003.

$25,000,000.00? I'd love to see a deep dive on his finances. 

Now Tim Curry

The actor known for Frankenfurter, Pennywise, Long John Silver, Wadsworth,Nigel Thornberry, Dr. Petrov, and many other roles has died at age 80.

Seriously, when is death coming for Trump? 

Hitting Us Where We Sit

It appears that one consequence of our trade war with Canada is a jump in the price of toilet paper.

Thanks Donnie. 

Using the bathroom or having a cry is about to become more expensive for North Americans as the US and Canada enter a full-fledged trade war that threatens to flush away decades of peaceful trading between the two nations.

After trade negotiations broke down between the two countries last weekend, Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, vowed to match US tariffs “dollar for dollar” and unveiled a list of nearly 900 American goods that will face 25% to 50% tariffs starting on 8 September.

Paper products are among the hardest-hit sectors, with Canada threatening to put tariffs of between 25% and 50% on “toilet paper or face tissue stock” from 8 September in retaliation for a 50% hike from Washington DC.

Though American toilet paper and tissues are often made domestically, they heavily rely on lumber-rich Canada for raw materials. Procter & Gamble, the owner of Charmin toilet paper, said last year that it would have to increase prices amid tariffs that were in place at the time.

Maybe it's time to switch to 1-ply.

Because, Of Course They Are

In the latest filing with the court regarding the Kennedy Center, the Trump DoJ has stated that if they do not get to shut down the center for 2 years (In order to conceal how much attaching Trump's name to the building has cratered support), and do not get to add Trumps name to the building, that Donald Trump might have the building torn down.

You know, I'm beginning to think that Adolph might be looking up from his pit of lava and saying, "Damn, Donald Trump is such a delicate snowflake."

Lawyers for the Trump administration told a federal judge that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts desperately needs the major renovation ordered by President Trump and raised the specter that it would need to be “taken down” if those plans are blocked.

In a court filing late on Monday, Justice Department lawyers defended plans for the $250 million renovation project and described how, as recognition for the president’s role, an inscription of his name on the center’s marble facade would be appropriate.

“Without those efforts, the center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down,” the filing said, “with a determination to follow on what to build on the site, such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years.”

………

It was unclear how seriously any thought to knock down the building has been considered, but it was the most extreme measure cited to support Mr. Trump’s contention that the Washington arts center needs a major overhaul that would force it to close for two years. Mr. Trump ordered the demolition of the White House’s East Wing last fall to make way for a luxury ballroom.

………

This month, the board approved two new inscriptions below the main Kennedy Center signage. The first would read “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump.” The second, which would be added below the first once the endowment reaches $100 million, would say “endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”

Someone please make it stop.

Damn

Dolly Parton has died at age 80.

While I cannot comment on her artistic accomplishments, I do not like and do not listen to Country Music, she was good people.

Worse than Useless

Just the thing for caving I am referring, of course, to the dead eyed leader of the Democratic Party Caucus in the House of Representatives, and exemplar of everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), Hakeem Jeffries, who was just caught meeting with Trump son in law Jared Kushner.

Nice job of pre-capitulation.  Showing your belly to these guys is going to work out just great.

Democrats and other Donald Trump critics reacted incredulously to a New York Times report on Sunday that House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries met with Jared Kushner, the president’s influential son-in-law, to discuss possible areas of collaboration.

The reported meeting comes months ahead of the November midterm elections in which Democrats are favored to retake the US House, a development that would make Jeffries speaker. If they are in the majority, Democrats are expected to use their oversight power to aggressively investigate the Trump administration, including self-enrichment by the president and his family.

There are longstanding conflict-of-interest concerns about the way Kushner has continued to make money from foreign nations as he works on foreign affairs, including conflicts in Ukraine, Iran and Gaza.

There is no excuse for this.  Kushner holds no government position, and he is arguably the most aggressive grifter among the Trump Crime Family except (perhaps) for Donnie "Small Hands".  

………

Nonetheless, among some who lamented the reported gathering was Tommy Vietor, previously an aide to former president Barack Obama and now a co-host of the left-leaning podcast Pod Save America.

“Jared Kushner has no actual government job he just uses his family connections to get money from gulf autocrats and fund corrupt deals. The only way [Jeffries] should work with him is with demands for documents and subpoenas,” Vietor posted.

In April, Democrats on the House judiciary committee opened an investigation into Kushner’s financial conflict of interest. The investigation is focused on the way Kushner’s private business has raised money from Gulf nations while Kushner served as a special envoy for peace for the government.

“You cannot both be a diplomat and a financial pawn of the Saudi monarchy at the same time; you cannot faithfully represent the United States with billions of dollars in Saudi and Emirati cash burning a hole in every pocket of every suit you own,” Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House judiciary committee, wrote in an April letter to Kushner.

What a useless excuse for a leader.

Impeach Them All

I am not referring to anyone in the White House.  I am referring to the 6 corrupt and partisan Supreme Court Justices who just authorized Donald Trump's plan to meddle in mail-in voting in the upcoming election.

The US supreme court sided with Donald Trump on Monday in his effort to crack down on mail-in voting, though it remains unclear if his administration can take action ahead of the midterm elections in November.

Justices on the court voted 6-3 along ideological lines to lift an injunction from June that a judge in Massachusetts placed on an executive order issued by the president. But a second injunction remains in place and the ruling leaves room for legal challenges.

“The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful,” the majority wrote in an unsigned order. “On that score, time will tell.”

The three liberal justices dissented. In a blistering dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the decision “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections”.

Justice Brown Jackson, injecting, "Chaos and ncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections," is a feature, not a bug.

To be fair the conservatives on the court did take a principled stance, it's just that the principle was, "N%$#@!*s should not vote." 

 

This Has Got To Mean Something

The fact that Texas scumbags Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott have both come out against further data centers in Texas, with Texas AG Paxton releasing a 4 point plan which would (among other things) make it easier to sue AI companies, and Texas Governor Abbot declaring that AI companies, "Basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them, and that’s why they got the backlash they deserve," on the ABC program This Week.

Let's be clear:  Neither politician is sincere. 

You know it, I know it, and I'm sure that the various AI data center firms have quietly been told it's just politics.

Still, it is significant that they feel compelled to lie about this. 

Another Reason to Hate Donald Trump

Because in response to his bullying tactics, he he makes Ontario Premier Doug Ford sound like a hero, rather than the right wing bowling ball in a jacket that he is.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is slamming Donald Trump as a “loser” and the “king of bankruptcies” after the U.S. president criticized him on social media on Monday afternoon.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump referred to Ford by name as “the less charismatic, intelligent, and overall unimpressive brother of the late, great, Rob Ford.”

The post came hours after an interview with The Morning Rush with Bill Carroll in Ottawa, in which Ford said that Trump could “kiss my ass.”

At a news conference in Hamilton on Monday afternoon, Ford initially said that he wouldn’t respond to a “dictator” and “bully” like Trump before going on a prolonged rant about the U.S. president.

Ford also doubled down on his earlier remarks, saying “I have a lot of real estate on my ass, so he has a lot of room to kiss my ass.”

“I am not going to take any advice off a guy that is the king of bankruptcies and he is actually tariffing his own people, taxing his own people,” Ford said of Trump. “I am going to be reaching out to every single governor, every single senator, every single congressperson and when it comes to the (U.S.) midterms I have a message to the Americans: don’t vote in a person that is going to kill your jobs.”

………

Ford’s news conference in Hamilton was held to announce an expansion of an existing program to support workers and businesses impacted by the trade war.

However, it unfolded just moments after Trump’s Truth Social post.

At one point during the news conference Ford addressed the U.S. president directly: “Your own people, President Trump, don’t even like you,” he said.

He then predicted that Americans would “speak loud and clear” during the upcoming midterm elections and offered that he would be “door-knocking” himself if he could.

When asked about the personal nature of Trump’s criticism, Ford said “bring it on.”

………

Ford’s comments on Monday come after Trump threatened to impose a 50 per cent tariff on Canadian vehicles by 2027.

Speaking with reporters, Ford said he believes “everything should be on the table” amid the renewed trade war with the U.S., including a surcharge on electricity exports that Ontario introduced and then scrapped earlier in the trade war.

………

“I cannot speak for other premiers but a couple premiers have a lot of power to protect Canada, massive power,” Ford said. “Everyone needs to be on team Canada and throw everything and the kitchen sink at them (the U.S.) no matter if it is electricity, if it is fuel, potash or uranium. We need to have everything on the table. But we need a buy-in from cost to coast.”

Note that the threat to end /surcharge cheap hydro-electricity exports to the US is a big deal, and given this year's record El Niño, it's likely that this won't result in potential sales being literally flushed down river.  

I'm nodding in approval, and I don't want to be nodding in approval. 

I File This Under, "This and $17.47 Will Get You a Starbucks Venti Pumpkin Spice Latte with Eight Shots of Espresso, Seven Pumps of Pumpkin Sauce, and One Pump of Maple Pecan Sauce."

Still, a man portable high power laser is kind of cool. 

My guess as to the power?  To my not particularly trained eye, I would guess about 1kW.

„Laser weapons“ powered by a backpack energy source have appeared in the Russian Armed Forces pic.twitter.com/Z5aE2JnYIg

— Drone Wars (@Drone_Wars_) August 23, 2026

As to the tech? It could just be batteries, or maybe a fuel cell and a capacitor.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Predicting 15 of the Past 4 Stock Market Crashes

I am referring, of course, to the current hand wringing over the price/equity (PE) ratio.

While the number is concerning, using this statistic as a a hard limit is on its face financially absurd.

Usually when numbers shoot higher on Wall Street, it is a reason for celebration.

That is not how Jonas Goltermann, the chief markets economist at Capital Economics, feels when he looks at one of the most feared charts on the stock market: the Shiller price-to-earnings (PE) ratio.

“That’s obviously a bit worrying,” he says after seeing the metric on track to end the month at its highest level since August 2000.

The Shiller PE ratio, a closely watched fear gauge on Wall Street, may sound esoteric, but it has become one of the most important numbers in the world – and one you should care about.

For all intents and purposes, it is the canary in the coal mine for global financial crashes.

To be clear, I do believe that we are headed to a crash, and that this crash is coming because the entire facade of our current financial market is a fraud. (The AI bubble)

What I do not believe is that this obsession with PE ratios is a useful diagnostic tool.