It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

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

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

………

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

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

………

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

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

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

Headline of the Day

Study Shows Corporate Subsidies Only Create Jobs for Lobbyists

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

Subsidies have always been a sucker bat.

This is Literally Beyond Parody

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

The rest of the article is even worse. 

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

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

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

Where Can I Rent the World's Smallest Violin?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fed Stands Pat

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

Also, the bond vigilantes were unimpressed:

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

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

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

………

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

Googly-Eyed Chud Loses

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

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

OK, There is Some Good AI Slop Out There

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

This is wicked smaht!

History Rhyming

We are seeing the financial merry go ground slowing down.

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

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

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

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

……… 

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

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

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

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

The numbers behind the warning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are in for interesting times. 

Bummer

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

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

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

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

Corruption is as corruption does.

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

 

Some News You Can Use

Removing AI From Your Google Account.

This includes Gmail.

Just do it. 

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud ……… Under Oath

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

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

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

But it wasn’t true.

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

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

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

Wait, Wut?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brazil Tells Trump to F%$# Off

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

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

Clever

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, it ended up working a little too well.

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

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

32 of 35?  That's a 94% cheat rate.

Jackson in Maine

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

………

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

Running against Chuck Schumer is a winner.  

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

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

From the Department of, "But I Repeat Myself"

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

Rapist turned pharma executive?  How can you tell?

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

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

At least there is symmetry. 

He Hates it Because it Works

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

 

This Applies to the US as Well

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're #1!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Am So Going to See This

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

I don't care.

I must see Coyote vs. Acme. 

Will This Get Me Banned from Ecch (Twitter)?

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

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

Original Ecch (Tweet)


Screenshot backup

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

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

We shall see in the next 24 hours. 

How Not to Speak Ill of the Dead

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

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

Good on him.

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

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

The reaction from Republicans was largely the same.

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

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

………

And so, what to say about Mitch?

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

The fall of Nixon was a triumph for our country.

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

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

יִמַּח שְׁמו (May his name be effaced).

Good News Everyone!

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

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

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

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

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

(Emphasis mine)

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

………

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

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

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

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

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

This deal is pretty horrible for the rest of us.

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

Flock Off

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

………

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

Indeed.

We Are F%$#ed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

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

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

Gee, You Think?

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

Gee, you think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You mess with the bull, you get the horns. 

 

 

Partying Like It's 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

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

It's only going to get worse. 

Yeah, War is Bad, But

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

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

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

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

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

Just Leave an Empty Lot

In an attempt to prevent Nazi pilgramages to Hitler's birth house, Austrian authorities have taken the house under eminent domain and turned it into a police station.

This is wrong.

They should have demolished the house and left a hole in the ground. 

Austria has opened a police station in the house where Adolf Hitler was born in the town of Braunau am Inn.

It follows years of controversy about what to do with the 17th-Century former inn, where Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was born in April 1889.

The building has now been substantially refurbished and its facade changed, but it has been a huge headache for Austrian authorities, who want to prevent it from becoming a site of neo-Nazi pilgrimage.

Hitler only lived in Salzburger Vorstadt 15 for a few weeks before his family moved to another address in Braunau. They left the town for good when he was three years old.

………

The opening ceremony for the police station, featuring police musicians playing a tuba and other brass instruments, was attended by Interior Minister Gerhard Karner and other local dignitaries.

Austria was taking "responsibility" for the "terrible legacy" of the past, said Karner. While deciding what to do with the building had not been easy, Karner believed the police station marked "a new chapter" for it.

 If you were not going to turn it into a hole into the ground, then turn it into a museum of the Ramani.

Headline of the Day

Penis Costume Protester Prevails in Court

—Courthouse News Service

Yeah, I know this is from April, I was doing some bloggy house cleaning, and came across it again.

One could call it a, ahem, hard case. But ultimately, an Alabama judge found, not hard enough.

Fairhope Municipal Judge Haymes Snedeker acquitted Renea Gamble Wednesday of all remaining misdemeanor charges stemming from her decision to wear a inflatable 7-foot penis costume at an anti-Trump “No Kings” protest in October 2025.

Gamble walked out of the courtroom after three hours of testimony cleared of any wrongdoing, but her attorney said her arrest was traumatizing and she may consider legal recourse.

Seriously, in a nation of truck nuts, how is this an arrestable offense? 

Speaking of Defamation Lawsuits

The Guardian has just had the defamation suit filed against it by United Healthcare dismissed.

The judge determined that the story that the paper reported, that UHC was bribing nursing homes to decrease transfers to hospitals, was true, and truth is always a defense against defamation. 

A state judge in Delaware has dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought against the Guardian by the UnitedHealth Group.

Delaware superior court judge Calvin Scott’s ruling stemmed from a lawsuit that the US’s largest health insurance conglomerate pursued against the Guardian in May 2025 over an investigation by the outlet which reported that UnitedHealth secretly made payments to nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers for residents.

………

In a ruling issued on Monday, Scott granted the Guardian’s motion to dismiss. And he dismissed all six defamation claims in the lawsuit.

“The article’s reporting of the bonuses as ‘secret’ or made ‘secretly’ or ‘quietly,’ is substantially true,” Scott wrote in one part of the ruling.

In another part, he added that the Guardian “is not required to publish facts just because United would have preferred more favorable facts”.

Yeah, there's a reason that UHC is the most widely loathed health insurance company in America.

Pass the Popcorn

The BBC has secured an order requiring that Donald Trump provide detailed information about his businesses for his defamation lawsuit.

This is a no-brainer from a legal perspective.  In addition to the requirement that the statements be false (absence of malice for public figures), but it also requires a showing of harm.

In this case, in addition demonstrating harm to the delicate feelings of snowflake Trump, this means that Trump has to demonstrate real and measurable financial harms.

Donald Trump must divulge detailed financial information from his many businesses as part of his $10bn defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corporation, a federal judge ruled during a discovery hearing on Tuesday, according to news reports.

The ruling by US magistrate judge Enjoliqué Lett could open a unique window into the hundreds of businesses owned by Trump’s family trust. It also highlights a potential drawback for Trump’s strategy of bludgeoning critical media with multibillion-dollar lawsuits.

Trump filed a defamation lawsuit late last year seeking $10bn in damages over a 2024 documentary called “Trump, A Second Chance,” which features a scene of the speech he made before his supporters attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. The scene splices lines together to make it appear that Trump directly urged his supporters to attack. The BBC apologized to Trump last year for the misleading edit, but has argued the president’s defamation claims have no merit.

………

Trump’s lawyers are also trying to dodge the forced release of his financial records by limiting the scope of the lawsuit. Alejandro Brito, a Trump lawyer, told Lett on Tuesday that he intends to amend the current complaint, according to Politico. The amended complaint will say the documentary only caused reputational damage, rather than undermining his businesses, making the financial disclosures unnecessary.

But for now, the BBC can move forward with requests for Trump’s financial records. The BBC aims to argue that Trump’s wealth skyrocketed since the documentary aired, contradicting the claim that the documentary undermined his businesses.

I am thinking that if the BBC gets this data and looks into it thoroughly, they should find some convincing data of self-dealing and bribery.

If they find such evidence, they should report on it. 

How About Adding a Few Zeros?

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch has been threatened with $1,000.00/day in fines for refusing to comply with an order for him to produce document for Journalist and Lawyer Katie Phang's lawsuit for a more complete release of the Epstein files.

Good.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is begging a federal judge to let him off the hook for a $1,000-a-day fine.

This fine is Blanche’s latest setback in a series of back-and-forths surrounding a lawsuit brought against him by journalist Katie Phang, who has accused the Department of Justice of failing to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Phang sued the DOJ in April for a “brazen, shocking, and ongoing violation” of the law, which President Donald Trump reluctantly signed in November.

Despite the Justice Department’s repeated assertions that the investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and subsequent release of files has been conducted with “an unprecedented commitment to transparency,” millions of files are still either missing or redacted.

In June, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ordered Blanche to produce previously redacted materials from the Epstein files, including FBI notes from interviews with a woman alleging that Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1980s when she was 13 years old, as well as email exchanges with Epstein regarding a “torture video” and the identities of Epstein’s potential co-conspirators.

Sullivan gave Blanche until July 2 to produce the materials. When the acting attorney general failed to do so, Phang suggested a daily $1,000 fine until he complied.

Fine him, and then go in and take the gold from his teeth. 

Mother's Little Helper, Cetacean Edition

An interesting behavior has been seen among Southern Right Whale cows, and it appears to be driven by parental angst.

Mother Right Whales have been seen swimming upside down, and while initially thought to be an indicator of distress, it appears that it is instead an attempt to cool down and get some, "Me time."

The sight of a huge whale floating upside-down might be worrisome. Is it sick or injured? According to a new study, probably not—the whale is likely a mom taking a well-deserved break from raising her calves.

Southern right whales (Eubalaena australis) migrate extremely long distances—about 3,728 miles (6,000 kilometers)—between western Australia and Antarctica. While following this long journey with overhead drones, researchers noticed that some of the whales would lie upside-down at or just above the ocean surface. Upon further investigation, the team concluded that, fortunately, the whales weren’t sick. Rather, this behavior appeared to be a whale mother resting, either to prevent overheating or to get some reprieve from feeding milk to her calves. The team published its results in a recent paper for Mammalian Biology.

………

Southern right whales lead an energy-intensive lifestyle. They’re known as capital breeders, which means the whales have separate locations for feeding and breeding. Earlier in the migration season, the whales swim over to Antarctica to feast on krill. Then they travel back to warmer breeding grounds on Australian coasts while relying on energy stored in their blubber, the team explained in The Conversation.

That calls for smart management of energy, as mothers’ body condition “declines as the season progresses while calf growth rate and energetic demands increase,” according to the paper. In that sense, resting upside-down would prevent calves from reaching their mother’s mammary slits, allowing the mom whale to get some well-deserved “beauty sleep,” as the researchers put it.

Whales seem more and more like us every day. 

Gnarly

So, Trump has resumed airstrikes on Iran, and Iran has retaliated, killing at least 2 American soldiers operating air defense units in Jordan, along with strikes on Kuwaiti desalination and power plant.

From a tactical perspective, it appears that the Iranians have better targeting capabilities, as they are hitting specific military targets for tactical advantage, while the US is blowing up bruidges and drinking water infrastructure.  

Meanwhile, it looks like the international fossil fuel markets are getting skittish, and may be going into full panic mode if the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz continue.

We've lost this war, and the sooner that this is acknowledged by the PTB, the better. 

It's Only 14 Days, But

I am heartened that federal district judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín has issued a 2 week injunction against the Paramont-Warner merger.

The only way this deal makes sense is through the extraction of monopoly rents, and they need those rents sooner rather than later.

With nepo-baby David Ellison's Paramount Skydance Corporation being largely dependent on his dad's Oracle wealth, and given that Oracle bonds are rapidly approaching junk bond status, any delay in the deal could both kill the deal and Paramount Skydance.

A federal judge on Monday ordered Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery to halt their $81bn merger for at least two weeks, allowing states that are challenging the deal more time to see their case through in court.

Twelve states, led by California, sued to block Paramount’s pending buyout of Warner last week – alleging that such a combination would “extinguish competition” in Hollywood and lead to fewer choices for consumers, particularly moviegoers and cable customers across the US.

The states’ top prosecutors called on Warner and Paramount to not close the transaction until after a court had time to “fully evaluate” their claims. And when the companies refused, they filed for a temporary restraining order – which is what district judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granted on Monday. That opens the door to a potential preliminary injunction that the states are also seeking to effectively block the deal.

………

The temporary restraining order granted on Monday halts the deal from progressing for at least 14 days, although the pause could be extended for up to 28 days. The court has set 3 August as a date for a hearing on the states’ preliminary injunction motion, although that schedule could also be pushed back.

This does not appear to be anything more than a delay to allow for evidence to be presented and evaluated, but 14 days is better than no days.

Linkage

• Elon Musk Is Charging Starlink Customers Gigantic Bogus Fees Because Its Network Is Being Crushed by "High Demand" (Futurism) This is probably because bandwidth is falling because of network congestion.  The tech is spectacularly ill suited for the urban areas where uptake is greatest.
• Tidal Says It Won’t Pay Royalties for AI-Generated Music (404 Media) Tidal is a small streamer, and this is lawful, because AI cannot hold copyright.
• Hey Dems! Swing Voters Want You To Tax The Rich And Get Them Medicare For All! Isn't That Nice? (Wonkette) Yep.  The "socialist policies" scare quoted by moderates in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) are wildly popular.
• Solution to Feynman's reverse sprinkler puzzle also applies to "silly sprinklers" (Ars Technica) For all of you physics geeks out there.
• Archaeologists Unearth a 2,400-Year-Old Sanctuary for the Worship of Odysseus (New York Times) It's not clear if this was organic worship or a king declaring themselves a god.
• Lessons from a cat about to outlast yet another prime minister (The Economist) This is an article about Number 10's official mouser, Larry the Cat.  When the lede is about how the cat is a, "Self-serving and territorial little shit," you know that it's a stem winder.

In memoriam, Sam Neill

I Don't Give a F%$# About Soccer or the World Cup

But the news that Donald Trump was ferociously booed when he showed up at the World Cup finals makes me happy.

Spain may be the 2026 World Cup official winner, but the game actually had two losers, thanks to Donald Trump. During a brief appearance on the jumbotrons around New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, the crowd of Argentina and Spain fans booed the U.S. president, who is set to present the World Cup trophy itself to the winning team. The moment happened just after Jennifer Hudson performed the national anthem.

He was shown sitting in a box next to Melania Trump a few more times throughout the game.

This isn’t the first time Trump has been booed at a sporting event, and it certainly won’t be the last. Aside from UFC fights and stops on the PGA tour, most major sporting events have been hostile territory for Trump. 

 They hate him, they really hate him!

They Haz a Sad

It appears that forcing your staff to engage in legally unwinnable and unwinnable prosecutions against protesters results in an unhappy staff.

In Chicago, this means that there has been a rush for the exit at the US Attorney's office.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago is among the most prestigious in the country, known for winning ambitious cases against everyone from Al Capone to the former Illinois governor Rod R. Blagojevich.

But the Trump administration’s immigration sweep in Chicago last fall has left the office in crisis.

The office brought a wave of doomed cases that accused protesters and immigrants of assaulting federal officers. That accelerated an exodus of veteran prosecutors, some of whom felt they’d been wrongly pressured into pursuing the charges, former prosecutors said in interviews.

The heads of all seven sections of the Chicago office’s criminal division have left in the past year, as have many of their successors and deputies.

More than 100 former federal prosecutors from the office recently signed a letter criticizing Andrew S. Boutros, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, saying that “actions taken by leadership in the last year have tarnished the reputation” of the office.

I'm an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit, ⃰ but it seems to me that these lawyers should just quit and file bar complaints against Boutros.

 

Yes, It's That Easy

I'm amused at just how obvious this proposal to limit the misuse of AI in the classroom is.

The short version is:

• Smaller class size.
• A lighter teaching load.
• More in person classes.
• More one to one interactions with instructors.
• Greater focus on in class performance.
• An administration that backs up their instructors.

I would note that that last point is rather unsurprising given that the writer is an instructor, but it does seem to me that more personal engagement of students would reduce cheating.

Everyone agrees it is happening. Below is a handy formula to limit unauthorized AI use in the classroom, for use by faculty, administrators, and legislators alike. Some of the key variables are controlled by the institution, some by the faculty. Everyone needs to work together. 

I use the term “unauthorized,” so “cheating” is whatever the faculty member declares to be unauthorized use, understanding that in the AI era, students are fluent in AI and will seek the most efficient way to fulfill course assignments. (Most of the misconduct data is pre-LLM and is not directly applicable to today’s technology but I am assuming the same patterns hold.) 

The hundreds of conversations I have had in the past year with faculty members across the country make clear that there is almost no agreement about what AI misconduct means. Some faculty members hold that any LLM use at all is cheating; others say “go ahead and use Claude or ChatGPT, but if I can prompt your paper into existence in under 10 minutes, you fail.”

My proposed rule is flexible by focusing on AI use that is “unauthorized” by the faculty member. The institutional role is ensuring that faculty can enforce their own line.

The formula

P = 1 − (S × L × M × C × A × κ)

P is the probability that a student will use AI in a way the instructor did not authorize. P runs from 0 to 1. Zero means it won’t happen. One means it will.

The six variables are the conditions of teaching. Each runs from 0 to 1. Multiply them. Subtract from 1. That’s P.

• S — class size

• L — teaching load

• M — modality

• C — one-to-one contact

• A — assessment design

• κ — institutional culture

A 1 means the condition is fully present. A 0.1 means it’s gone.

The basic concept, that personalized education provided by instructors who are available to observe and provide individual instructions to the students, is likely true.

Reducing it to an equation, particularly one this simple, seems to be a rather silly exercise in faux mathematics.