No More Posting Tonight

 I am busy reconstructing/moving furniture.

Fascism Confirmed

The Nazi Bar Story 
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you.

So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”

And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, I’m a paying customer.”nd the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”

And I was like, oh, ok and he continues. “you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.”

And I was like, “oh damn.”

And he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.

This thread took off unexpectedly. Support your local antifa and black lives matter people. You know who they are.  

Taken from a since deleted twitter thread by Michael B. Tager

It's official, Substack is a Nazi Bar.

If you don't get the metaphor, look at Mr. Tager's Twitter thread.  It makes everything clear. 

Substack is not feeding its users Nazi content: 

Back in April 2023, when Substack CEO Chris Best refused to answer basic questions about whether his platform would allow racist content, I noted that his evasiveness was essentially hanging out a “Nazis Welcome” sign. By December, when the company doubled down and explicitly said they’d continue hosting and monetizing Nazi newsletters, they’d fully embraced their reputation as the Nazi bar.

Last week, we got a perfect demonstration of what happens when you build your platform’s reputation around welcoming Nazis: your recommendation algorithms start treating Nazi content as more than worth tolerating, to content worth promoting.

As Taylor Lorenz reported on User Mag’s Patreon account, Substack sent push notifications to users encouraging them to subscribe to “NatSocToday,” a newsletter that “describes itself as ‘a weekly newsletter featuring opinions and news important to the National Socialist and White Nationalist Community.'”

At this point in the article, there is a screen shot of what was sent.

Yep, a Swastika, and I ain't putting it on my blog. 

………

But here’s the thing about algorithmic “errors”—they reveal the underlying patterns your system has learned. Recommendation algorithms don’t randomly select content to promote. They surface content based on engagement metrics: subscribers, likes, comments, and growth patterns. When Nazi content consistently hits those metrics, the algorithm learns to treat it as successful content worth promoting to similar users.

There may be some randomness involved, and algorithms aren’t perfectly instructive of how a system has been trained, but it at least raises some serious questions about what Substack thinks people will like based on its existing data.

As Lorenz notes, the Nazi newsletter that got promoted has “746 subscribers and hundreds of collective likes on Substack Notes.” More troubling, users who clicked through were recommended “related content from another Nazi newsletter called White Rabbit,” which has over 8,600 subscribers and “is also being recommended on the Substack app through its ‘rising’ leaderboard.”

This isn’t a bug.It’s a feature working exactly as designed. Substack’s recommendation systems are doing precisely what they’re built to do: identify content that performs well within the platform’s ecosystem and surface it to potentially interested users. The “error” isn’t that the algorithm malfunctioned—it’s that Substack created conditions where Nazi content could thrive well enough to trigger promotional systems in the first place.

(emphasis mine)

If you have a blog/newsletter, don't use Substack.

If you are subscribed to a Substack blog/newsletter, write management and tell that they are at a site that promotes Nazis.

If you see ads on Substack, write the advertisers.

Be like Spocko. 

And the Spanish Armada Gets Boned Again

According to reports from El Pais, (translation here) the Spanish government is ending its plans to buy the F-35 from the United States.

Instead, it will buy some European fighter aircraft instead, most likely the Eurofighter Typhoon or the in-development Future Combat Air System.

This is a problem for Spain's aircraft carrier, the Juan Carlos, since it is a STOVL carrier, with a ramp in the front and no arresting gear, and as it stands now, it will not be able to maintain its AV-8B Harriers much longer.

In order to accommodate something like the Rafale-M, they would need to add an arrester gear and angled flight deck, which is a significant rebuild.

The purchase of F-35 Lightning II aircraft, the fifth-generation American stealth fighter, for the Spanish Armed Forces has been definitively shelved, according to a report published by the Spanish newspaper El País, citing government sources.

Preliminary contacts that had already begun have been suspended indefinitely. Although the government approved a 10.471 billion Euro plan last April and has committed to spending 2% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on security and defense, the decision to invest 85% of these funds in Europe is considered incompatible with acquiring an American aircraft.

………

Spain’s defense ministry never moved beyond a non-binding RFI (Request For Information) for the Lightning II. The 2023 budget even penciled in 6.25 billion Euro for “replacement aircraft for the AV-8B and C-15M, phase 2” (in other words, the Navy’s Harriers and the Air Force’s remaining F-18 Hornets). Looks like those plans are now scrapped.

That leaves the Armada (Navy) in a corner. The AV-8Bs are expected to be retired by 2030, and extending their service is no longer realistic: the aircraft are aging, and with both the USMC and Italian Navy phasing theirs out (and replacing them with the F-35B), Spain would be left as the only operator, facing a vanishing spares market. The only viable STOVL replacement is the F-35B. Passing on it would mean the Juan Carlos I loses its fixed-wing fast jet capability and reverts to helicopters only.

Spanish Armada has a problem.

Maybe they could license the Yak 141 from Russia.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

Twitter Publish

"In Russia, you would be arrested", von der Leyen tells a protestor as he's being arrested. pic.twitter.com/kPxEyrrUI3

— Erik Dale ⚡ (@EuroDale) August 7, 2025

I am not a big fan of von der Leyen, and her latest ass-hattery has her in the running for, "Worst Person in the World." (Apologies to Keith Olbermann)

Did you know that von der Leyen has attempted to end protections on wolves in Europe because her improperly penned pony got killed by wolves?

If the EU is to survive, it needs to protect itself from people like Ursula von der Leyen, whose narcissism, incompetence, and entitlement boggle the mind.

Grace Under Pressure

Apollo 13 Commander James A. Lovell, Jr. has died at the age of 97.

He, along with John L. Swigert Jr. and Fred W. Haise Jr. had what could justifiably called the mother of all bad days at the office in 1970.

You might have seen the Tom Hanks movie. 

I Do Not Recall South Park Being This Good During the Clinton Impeachment

I don't watch South Park often, my wife objects strongly, and many of her knives are quite dull, but I did catch a few episodes when it first came out.

I do not recall Parker and Stone doing anything at all about the Clinton impeachment, even though that centered around a blow job. 

It seemed to me to be a news event well suited to their talents.

Almost as well suited as Kristi Noem's shooting of her family's puppy: 

Sweet!

Busy Day

Updated the BBS that I admin, which went remarkably smoothly, and there appear to be some (hopefully) positive developments on the job front.

Quote of the Day

The Sheep/Sheepdog Allegory Completely Misses How Growling Sheepdogs Can Motivate and Escalate Resistance 

—Charles "Chip" Huth, a former police officer and now law enforcement consultant, on how clueless the police are about the dynamics of their authority

The sheepdog analogy is popular with police and the law enforcement industrial complex, but as Mr. Huth notes, the behavior of a sheepdog is indistinguishable from that of a predator from the perspective of the sheep:

A sheepdog’s job is to ensure the integrity of a herd. When the herd gets out of line, the sheepdog drives them by growling and nipping at their heels. The sheepdog adopts a posture characteristic of a predator—like a wolf, for example. This transformation puts the sheep in a perpetual state of fear of being singled out and attacked, thus providing an extrinsic motivation for them to fall in line. Sheep are afraid of sheepdogs just as they are afraid of wolves. They don't trust them and only comply because they are motivated by fear of consequence. Sheep aren’t equipped to fight their antagonists, so a growling sheepdog may not invite escalated dangers amongst the sheep. Not so with people, however. Among those being growled at are people who are capable of resisting. The sheep/sheepdog allegory completely misses how growling sheepdogs can motivate and escalate resistance.  

He also notes that the police mentality leads to disengaged neighbors who do nothing but call 911, or not call 911, diminishing the internal strength of the community.

It's why I think that the entire institution of law enforcement needs to be recreated from scratch. 

Headline of the Day

Tesla Withheld Data, Lied, and Misdirected Police and Plaintiffs to Avoid Blame in Autopilot Crash

—Electrek a brief description of how Tesla attempted to suppress and despoil evidence in the autopilot crash that they recently lost.

Why the f%$# are these guys not being frog-marched out of their offices in handcuffs? 

Tesla was caught withholding data, lying about it, and misdirecting authorities in the wrongful death case involving Autopilot that it lost this week. 

The automaker was undeniably covering up for Autopilot.

Last week, a jury found Tesla partially liable for a wrongful death involving a crash on Autopilot. I explained the case in the verdict in this article and video.

But we now have access to the trial transcripts, which confirm that Tesla was extremely misleading in its attempt to place all the blame on the driver. 

The company went as far as to actively withhold critical evidence that explained Autopilot’s performance around the crash.

What happened:

• The airbag deployed.
• Tesla collected all the camera, CAN Bus, autopilot, and performance data, put it in an archive file, and sent it back to the mothership.
• The car then automatically deleted the data archive.
• Their lawyer, under the guise of "helping" police investigators, gave them instructions in writing a request that, "Specifically crafted the letter to omit sharing the collision snapshot, which includes bundled video, EDR, CAN bus, and Autopilot data." (If there is a lawyer or paralegal among my reader(s) can you confirm to me just how f%$#ing unethical this is?)
• Lied to the police that the data on the onboard computers was corrupted. (Definitely illegal)
• Lied about the existence of this archive on their servers. 

I really hope that the judge refers Tesla counsel to the bar for disciplinary action, and I REALLY hope that the judge refers Tesla to the authorities for wire fraud.

This is RICO sh%$. 

I Would Work on My French Accent and Start Taunting People

I was talking to Sharon* while driving to Costco today, pricing hearing aids. (F%$# I'm old) 

She mentioned that she had an ear-worm, the  Malvina Reynolds/Seeger song Little Boxes.

I mentioned Levittown, and said that it was still better than McMansion Hell, where you have futuristic houses joined to Medieval turrets.

Sharon noted that she liked houses with turrets, and I said, "F%$# that, I want a real castle."

When she asked me what I would do if I owned a real castle, I replied with, "I would work on my French accent and start taunting people."

Seriously, what would you do if you had a castle. 

I thought that my bon mot should be preserved for posterity. 

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

Jobs too Unpleasant for Americans to Do

We can add ICE agents to that list.

The Department of Homeland Security is telling probationary employees to move to the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or they are fired.

In related news, Kristi "ICE Barbie" Noem has announced that ICE is dropping its maximum age requirement to join, so all of you nonagenarian fascists can get a job there.  

A number of employees with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) were informed via email late on Tuesday that they have been reassigned, effective immediately, to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The workers had seven days to accept the reassignment, under threat of being removed from the civil service.

According to sources familiar with the matter, those reassigned were probationary employees with less than one year at FEMA, who because of presumed weaker civil service protections were fired early in the Trump administration but reinstated after a court order. Like at many federal agencies, these employees had been on paid administrative leave for months, among the over 100,000 men and women across the federal government who have been collecting a salary yet doing no work.

But now, these probationary FEMA employees on leave are apparently being shifted as a stopgap maneuver to bolster the ranks of ICE, which received tens of billions of dollars in the GOP mega-bill but faces the daunting task of hiring thousands of new agents to an unpopular agency with plummeting morale.

I actually find this news heartening.

When Stephen Miller began his sadistic reign of terror, I assumed that bullies would be lining up around the block to get in on the mayhem.

It appears that it's too much even for them. 

Who Cares About What the Polls Say, They are Bullsh………

Clearly Bibi has to pick up his game So the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ is the most hated man in America?

OK, maybe I will make an exception, just this once. 

Elon Musk’s image has tanked so badly that he is now the public figure that Americans dislike the most, according to a new poll.

Gallup asked Americans between July 7 and July 21 what they thought of 14 well-known U.S. and global figures, with 61 percent of respondents having an unfavorable opinion of the Tesla billionaire. Six percent said they had no opinion of Musk, while just 33 percent reported a positive view.

………

This has been reflected in several polls, most recently the damning Gallup survey that shows his popularity below even that of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Compared to January’s findings, Musk’s reputation has plummeted faster than Tesla’s sales. His net favorability rating of -4 at the start of the year has worsened to -28 now.

As Abraham Lincoln once said, "You can't fool all the people all the time."

Nice to see the worm turning.

BTW, to the members of the Tesla board, the best thing that you could do for Tesla is fire Elon.

He is an albatross around the neck of that car company. (Apologies to Albatrosses, who are magnificent birds) 

Had a Frank Drebin Refrigerator Moment Today

You know, Frank Drebin from The Naked Gun, the scene in his apartment.

I had a freezer avalanche about 2 weeks ago.

I thought that I had gotten everything back in, but it appears that I missed a fish head. (Asian market, we had them fillet it, and kept the bones for a fish chowder)

Not good.  Not good at all. 

It does explain why the cats were hanging around in the kitchen ……… For the first week anyway.

80 Years Ago Today

The bombing of Hiroshima.

I went there with my dad when I was 17, a rather somber moment in an otherwise delightful, and delicious, graduation trip.

That was a long time ago, and I still have not worked out my feelings about the whole matter. 

Linkage

• Elon Musk Is So Unpopular, He May Be Hurting the Entire EV Industry (Gizmodo) 
• How Did Elon Musk Turn Grok Into MechaHitler? - The American Prospect Money quote, "In other words, LLMs become “woke” because they are trained to be pro-social—to be helpful, kindly, truthful, and not to say bigoted or cruel things. Training it to do the opposite—to be anti-woke—is to activate every antisocial association in the English language, including racism, sexism, cruelty, dishonesty, and Nazism." My take, "Training humans to be anti-woke is to activate every antisocial behavior in human existence, including racism, sexism, cruelty, dishonesty, and Nazism."
• Peacock feathers can emit laser beams - Ars Technica given that the feathers iridescence comes from structure and light diffraction, this is not as surprising as it sounds
• 90 Billion Liters of Water Punched Through Greenland's Ice Sheet – And Nobody Noticed (Science Alert) This is about 0.09 cubic kilometers, which is still a f%$#tonne of water.
• A Eulogy for Vinay Prasad's FDA Career (Pandemic Accountability Index) Dancing on his grave after he was fired from the FDA for not being enough of a charlatan and a fraud.  But he is still a charlatan and a fraud.
• Google loses app store antitrust appeal, must make sweeping changes to Play Store (Ars Technica) Unlike Apple, Google got caught scheming in their internal communications.
• Google Home Is So Bad That a Lawsuit Could Be on Its Way (Gizmodo)  I guess that Google only shuts down products that work.
• India to penalize universities with too many retractions (Nature) By, "Too many retractions," they mean, "Too much fraud."  This is a problem all over the world, but India seems to be its epicenter.
• Days after $5 million donation to MAGA Inc., Trump freezes Medicare waste crackdown (Popular.info) We are talking about a company that sells bandages that cost more than $10,000.00 per square inch, but have done no studies on their efficacy.  Corruption much?

Why Yes, Studio Ghibli Villains are More Realistic than Disney Villains:

You Don't Need More Cops, Hon

Baltimore City has just shown that there are better ways to fight crime than to hire more cops.

Gee, hoocoodanode?  (Spoiler, everyone whose agenda was not an excuse to have armed men abuse people of color)

So many pro-police lawmakers and city officials have always insisted the only way to bring down crime rates is to add more cops to the mix. This may work if you’re mainly interested in racking up meaningless arrests or handing out “broken windows” citations, but it doesn’t address why certain areas have higher crime rates. (And it doesn’t even work then, as Baltimore itself has already demonstrated.)

………

Baltimore has long held a top-level position on lists of annual homicides or per capita crime rates — aspects that have been converted to canon by series like “The Wire,” along with cops’ predilection for corruption and routine rights violations.

………

But homicide isn’t a problem you can solve with irrational hate and being bigoted on main. The Baltimore PD has already tried that and it hasn’t worked, no matter how often it plants evidence, brutalizes residents, or otherwise ignores constitutional rights.

The murder rate continues to drop in Baltimore. And while that does track with post-pandemic trends around the nation, something different is going on in this city, which suggests the current downturn may well develop into an ongoing trend.

What’s different in Baltimore is that it’s addressing underlying causes of crime, rather than just reacting to crime’s often-violent outcomes with more cops and rights violations. Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims have dug into the stats, as well as the circumstances behind them, to explain why Baltimore’s murder rate is more sustainable than just throwing more cops at the problem. 

This April, Baltimore saw five homicides. That is the fewest of any month since 1970, when the city began tracking monthly homicide numbers. In the first six months of the year, homicides were down 22% compared to 2024, and non-fatal shootings were down 19%. This is the latest in a string of historic declines in violent crime. In 2024, homicides dropped 23% from 2023 numbers, and non-fatal shootings dropped 34%. In 2023, the city also saw record-breaking decreases.

[…]

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D), who was first elected in 2020, has brought the city’s homicide rate down by treating violent crime as a public health crisis. That means treating violent crime as a symptom of multiple factors, including racism, poverty, and past violence.

………

In January 2022, MONSE [Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement] launched the Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS). The strategy, launched in partnership with the Baltimore Police Department and the State’s Attorney’s Office, utilizes a collaboration between law enforcement, community members, and social services to “engag[e] directly with those most intimately involved in and affected by violence.” The GVRS aims to target the root causes of gun violence, such as poverty, mental health, and housing issues, by matching participants with a life coach. Participants are also provided with financial support while they seek employment.

The GVRS has delivered results. As of February 2024, the program had a recidivism rate of only 4.3%. An evaluation by the University of Pennsylvania’s Crime and Justice Policy Lab found that the GVRS significantly reduced violence in the city’s Western District, where the program was initially implemented. “[D]uring the first 18 months of implementation,” there was “a 33% approximate gun violence reduction, 60 fewer victims, and a 33% approximate carjacking reduction,” according to the study.

The task force and its implementation program never decided the problem wasn’t enough cops flooding these areas. Instead, it addressed a lot of underlying causes of violence and worked towards fixing those, rather than assuming this was something that just could be forced into submission via the application of even more violence.

Mindlessly punitive policies do not work.  They make the problems worse and cost more money, but too many people want to play the "Hit the n****er" game.

BTW, that game is real, and used human beings as targets. 

Cash in Advance, Baby

It appears that Elon Musk has something in common with the Trump organization, simply refuses to pay its bills.

This happened with Tesla, Ecch (former Twitter), SpaceX, etc.

Toxic narcissism is as toxic narcissism does, I guess?

 

Only ⅓?

Someone has run the numbers and determined that the Trump administration has defied about a third of all court orders since January.

In related news, on a clear day the sky is blue:

President Donald Trump and his appointees have been accused of flouting courts in a third of the more than 160 lawsuits against the administration in which a judge has issued a substantive ruling, a Washington Post analysis has found, suggesting widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system.

Plaintiffs say Justice Department lawyers and the agencies they represent are snubbing rulings, providing false information, failing to turn over evidence, quietly working around court orders and inventing pretexts to carry out actions that have been blocked.

Assuming that he have free and fair elections in 2024, the whole lot of them need to be prosecuted. 

Quote of the Day

The hover text was, "Achilles was a mighty warrior, but his Achilles’ heel was his heel."
Link to xkcd comic

Comic Book Nerds and Theologians Are the Same Animal

—JR on  the Stellar Parthenon BBS,

We were discussing this xkcd cartoon, and JR made this observation.

Mind officially blown, because it is Charles Dickens (Turnips and Taxes) true, and I never realized it before. 

How did I miss this for so many decades? 

Interesting Tech

A South African has initiated a program to make rhinoceros horns radioactive in an attempt to thwart poachers.

This is extremely low levels or radiation, but it's enough that it can be detected in a shipping container using already in place equipment designed to prevent nuclear weapon proliferation. 

A South African university has launched an anti-poaching campaign to inject the horns of rhinoceroses with radioactive isotopes that it says are harmless for the animals but can be detected by customs agents.

Under the collaborative project involving the University of the Witwatersrand, nuclear energy officials and conservationists, five rhinos were injected in what the university hopes will be the start of a mass injection of the declining rhino population, which they are calling the Rhisotope Project.

Last year, about 20 rhinos at a sanctuary were injected with isotopes in trials that paved the way for Thursday’s launch. The radioactive isotopes even at low levels can be recognised by radiation detectors at airports and borders, leading to the arrest of poachers and traffickers.

Researchers at Witwatersrand’s Radiation and Health Physics Unit said tests conducted in the pilot study confirmed that the radioactive material was not harmful to the rhinos.

 Kewl.

Finally

After stonewalling, buying off plaintiffs, and silencing them with non-disclosure agreements, and engaging in character assassination against whistle-blowers, Tesla has finally been taken to court and a jury verdict has been delivered over the claims and the capabilities of its autonomous driving features.

Tesla was found ⅓ at fault, which the jury determined was worth  $329 million dollars.

I am certain that this amount will be reduced on appeal, but much like asbestos litigation, this is a first, and will lead to more. 

True Dat

When a centrist tells you, "Vote blue, no matter who," understand that they do not practice what they preach, as is so clearly the case with Democratic Mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. 

When their guys don't win, the will be inside the proverbial tent pissing in.

I'm not happy with the title, which throws around the term, "Traitors," which, as I have repeatedly is specifically circumscribed by the US Constitution, but I am pleasantly surprised that this came from The New Republic.

It looks like they have finally left their racist Marty Peretz era behind them: 

Andrew Cuomo’s back—or rather, he’s refusing to go away. This week, the former Democratic governor and onetime presidential aspirant announced he will continue contesting the race for New York City mayor, despite having decisively lost the Democratic primary earlier this month to Zohran Mamdani. And Cuomo announced his general-election campaign in perhaps the cringiest way imaginable: with a video that tried to ape Mamdani’s youthful social-media strategy and streetcorner appeal, but instead resembled a elderly hostage’s proof-of-life. No wonder it got ratioed; as of this writing, Cuomo’s post had around 5,000 likes on Twitter, while Mamdani’s comment below the video—he simply shared a link for donations—sits at 180,000.

Cuomo’s decision to run a third-party campaign against the Democratic nominee, after Democratic voters decisively rejected him in favor of that nominee, does not exist in a vacuum. It comes as a number of centrist Democratic leaders—including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul—have refused to endorse Mamdani. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes challenged Jeffries on Tuesday, asking why he wasn’t backing a Democratic nominee in Jeffries’s own city: “What do you say to people who say, ‘What gives? Why are you not endorsing the guy who won the Democratic primary in a contested election in your backyard?’” Jeffries’s response was the same gobbledygook we’ve come to expect from him, which is to say it’s not even worth quoting here.

………

These skeptics and naysayers will likely have little effect on the actual general election results come November. Mamdani, who earned more votes than any candidate has ever earned in the history of New York City Democratic primaries, has significantly higher favorability ratings among voters than any of his critics. But the failure of so many centrist Democrats to rally around the Democratic nominee in a race to lead the biggest and most culturally dominant city in America does effectively illustrate an underrecognized and often misrepresented dynamic in Democratic politics: that it is actually the party’s centrist establishment, not its progressive wing, that’s most likely to violate the maxim of “Vote Blue No Matter Who.”

This is worth noting, because for years it’s been centrists who have used “Vote Blue No Matter Who” as a cudgel to discipline progressives by equating criticism of the party establishment with a refusal to back Democrats in general elections. Those who have tried to push the party to change course—to embrace universal healthcare, support a ban on stock trading, elevate younger leaders—have probably at some point been scolded to “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” as if pushing Democrats to be better is partisan treachery. But this charge has never been based in reality. In fact, the go-to examples used by these centrist scolds to support their claims against progressives militate in the opposite direction.

These guys do not deserve your respect, your vote, or your money.

Until they make at least a pro forma effort to consider your positions and needs, don't give it to them.

If Someone Claims that Sweden was a Covid Success Story

They are an idiot, or a liar, or both.

Further conversation is unwarranted.

In truth the Swedish experience was catastrophic:

Over the past several months, a conventional wisdom has been solidifying in certain centrist and liberal quarters that the controls imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic Went Too Far. This idea has crystallized in a book by two Princeton political scientists, Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo—notably not epidemiologists, or virologists, or public-health experts—called In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. The authors have gotten a respectable hearing from PBS, Jake Tapper, and, of course, The Daily podcast from The New York Times.

The podcast If Books Could Kill recently did a deep-dive debunking of this book, but I want to focus on its treatment of Sweden because of how it’s become a synecdoche for the whole argument. In the Financial Times, the normally level-headed Ed Luce recently cited the Swedish example: “Everyone could agree back then that otherwise liberal Sweden was foolish to take the herd immunity route. That Sweden ended up with one of the lowest mortality rates in Europe has not been similarly highlighted.” The book “should be compulsory reading across the spectrum. That it has not been reviewed by most major newspapers is troubling,” he added. 

………

What’s more, the U.K. figures are provisional, and actual studies have very different numbers. A study in The Lancet by Pizzato et al. found that Sweden’s excess mortality rate was 7.2 percent in 2020—worse than Germany or Greece—and only -0.2 percent in 2021.

Whatever the correct figure is, a lot of Sweden’s mortality drop in 2021 almost certainly was just moving deaths around. For instance, dementia deaths dropped by a lot in 2021-2022, and as a study in the European Journal of Epidemiology notes, “This might reflect that many frail individuals with dementia died prematurely in 2020, hence reducing the population of individuals with dementia who would be at risk of dying in 2021 and 2022.” Seeing a drop in dementia deaths because those individuals were already dead from the government letting COVID run wild in nursing homes is not anything to celebrate.

The lockdown-focused story about mortality is also misleading when it comes to 2022. Prior to that year, the other Nordics were doing far better than Sweden—but they got hammered by the omicron variant, while Sweden did not, which is why it ended up with the best overall mortality rate through 2023, per the Lancet study. Why? It wasn’t immunity from prior infections, as a study in Frontiers in Immunology argues persuasively, but rather that Sweden did its rollout of booster shots far faster than the other Nordics. Ironically, it was swift action by the Swedish public-health bureaucracy, not failing to lock down two years previously, that saved lives. It is simply not true that “interventions seemed to do little if any good beyond delaying the inevitable” or that “the stringency of pandemic restrictions made little evident difference for countries’ overall Covid mortality,” as the authors argue. If Sweden had locked down in the critical early months of the pandemic as its neighbors did, a great many of those 2020 deaths could have been avoided through vaccination and not crushing the hospitals.

While the Danny DeVito — Billy Crystal movie was a good movie, and surprisingly sweet, Throw Momma from the Train is not a good strategy for public health professionals.

Monday is Jeffrey Epstein Day

First, are a couple of commentaries on L'Affaire Epstein, the first from Amanda Marcotte, who explains in a rather succinct way why this is so important to MAGAts.

Quoting the sub-hed, "His base needs a story where they're the heroes, not the villains ."

This is the core of their fixation.  In order to feel like heroes, rather than zeros, MAGATs need to believe that the other side is f%$#ing children and are about to be arrested for it. 

Trump can be caught on tape joking about abusing women, or be found liable for sexual assault, but his followers believe that their support for him makes them protectors of innocent children, and instead they are chumps.

………

But you can’t be a warrior for rape culture day in and day out without starting to ask yourself, “Am I the baddie?” That’s where Epstein and his imaginary client list come in. By hating on Epstein and fantasizing about political enemies being on the “list,” MAGA gets to play at being the heroes for once. Better yet, they can do so without the risk of bringing actual predators to justice, a precedent they don’t want to establish lest it come for their leaders. After all, Epstein is dead, and his “list” only existed in their fevered imaginations.

Or least, that felt true until Trump started visibly panicking about the Epstein files. But giving up on the Epstein case now that Trump is drenched in flop sweat would amount to MAGA admitting they never cared about pedophiles or justice for victims — that it was always just a fairy tale they told to conceal the ugly truth about themselves, even to themselves. 

I recommend reading the whole article.

On the more humorous side, the invaluable Charlie Pierce observes that,  "If you want Epstein out of the news, maybe don’t fire the person who prosecuted him," which is a good indicator just how much Trump and his Evil Minions™ are melting down over all of this.

In more "newsey" news, following her talk with Trump's former defense attorney, now Deputy Attorney General Deputy Todd Blanche, she was moved to a "Club Fed" prison in Texas, where no doubt she will be playing tennis with Elizabeth Holmes.

People convicted of sex-trafficking minors are not supposed to be in that sort of facility.

BTW, remember when Wired found irregularities in the surveillance tapes at the jail where Epstein was held when he commited suicide?  Well, CBS News has found yet more irregularities in the video.

BTW, before declaring that there were, "No Epstein files," the FBI was planning to release the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, and it appears that Kash Patel directed the Bureau's FOIA team to redact all references to Trump.

That's all I have right now, sh%$-for-brains was consolidating the Epstein post, and deleted everything.

 

More Like Us Every Day

Once again I am talking about Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, more commonly known as Neanderthals, have increasingly been found to have sophisticated capabilities that rivaled those of modern humans.  (H. Sapiens Sapiens)

Case in point, anthropologists have found a fat processing factory that was patronized by Neanderthals from hundreds of miles around.

This is not just a sophisticated process, this is a specialized and sophisticated facility by the standards of the time:

The Neanderthals are our closest extinct relatives, and they continue to fascinate as we peer back through tens of thousands of years of history.

In a new discovery about this mysterious yet often familiar species, researchers have found ancient evidence of a Neanderthal "fat factory" in what is now Germany.

Operational around 125,000 years ago, the factory would've been a place where Neanderthals broke and crushed the bones of large mammals to extract valuable bone marrow and grease, used as a valuable extra food source.

According to scientists, this is the earliest evidence yet for this type of sophisticated, large-scale bone processing, including both bone marrow and grease: the first confirmation Neanderthals were also doing this some 100,000 years before our species made it to Europe.

"This was intensive, organised, and strategic," says archaeologist Lutz Kindler from the MONREPOS Archaeological Research Center in Germany.

………

We can add this to the long list of studies that have revealed Neanderthals were much smarter than they're often made out to be. Thanks to recent research we know they were adept swimmers, capable brewers, and abstract thinkers – who raised their kids and used speech patterns in a similar way to humans.

 It does make one wonder why modern humans survived and Neanderthals did now.  

My completely uninformed opinion is that it might have been differences in fecundity, which led to modern humans out-breeding Neanderthals, and eventually lead to modern humans being forced to adopt pastoralism and eventually agriculture because the hunter-gatherer lifestyle cannot accommodate too many people in one area.

Looks like He’s Running His Campaign as Well as He Ran the City

It there are reports that there are large number of forged signatures found on the petitions that Eric Adams' campaign submitted to run as independent in the New York City Mayor race.

Well imagine that. 

When hizzonner was asked about this, he said that it was just, "Part of the business."

This is, strangely enough true, for Eric Adams at least, because fraud has always been a part of his business.

One does have to wonder if this can get him kicked off the ballot:

Mayor Eric Adams’ re-election campaign submitted faked and fraudulently obtained petition signatures in his effort to secure a spot on the November ballot as an independent candidate, a Gothamist investigation has found.

Gothamist reviewed signatures submitted from across New York City and found people who said their names were forged, as well as people who said they were deceived into signing the petitions. In at least three instances, the campaign turned in signatures from dead people. 

It should be noted that it is highly unlikely that this will effect his ballot access though, he submitted about 50 thousand signatures, but it does seem to be emblematic of his entire political career.

Word From J-Street

Or at least from its founder and President Jeremy Ben-Ami.

He is writing about Gaza, and his thoughts strongly echo mine.

As a Jew and a life long Zionist and a supporter of the 2-State solution, I have not been a support of Benjamin Netanyahu (יִמַּח שְׁמו) or his policies.

At the same time, I find the language and terminology used by some people in good faith has made me profoundly uncomfortable.

What Ben-Ami says, and I agree with boils down to this:

The personal pain of my own family from a crime that I believe has no parallel – and my association of the word genocide exclusively with that event - means I am unlikely to use the term myself.  

But I cannot and will not argue any more against those using the term. I simply won’t defend the indefensible."

None of this in any way justifies the actions of Hamas, either on October 7 or since, but the actions of Netanyahu, his government, and members of the state military and intelligence apparatus are not justified by the actions of Hamas.

This is even more incoherent than my normal hog-swallop on this blog.

My apologies to my reader(s).

Headline of the Day

Bitter Fight over 2020 Microsoft Quantum Paper Both Resolved and Unresolved

— The Register

Short version is that the editors split the baby.  The longer version is available at the link and is incredibly boring, but the hed is marvelous. 

The Best Recipe for Tasty Instant Ramen

 Just add a 25 hour fast immediately before consumption.

That is all. 

About F%$#ing Time

Finally, DoJ lawyers who have been lying to judges and disobeying judicial orders have been reported to the bar by other lawyers.

Let these guys flip burgers for a living:

A legal watchdog group accused three Justice Department lawyers of professional misconduct on Thursday, saying they had made false statements to a federal judge in a high-profile case challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The accusations by the group, the Legal Accountability Center, were formally filed with the grievance committees of bar associations in Washington and other cities where the lawyers lived or practiced. The move represented a rare attempt to seek professional sanctions against rank-and-file department lawyers who have appeared in court on behalf of the federal government.

“The rule of law is under direct assault right now, and its greatest threat comes when those within the legal system fail to do their duties and stand up against the attack,” said Michael Teter, the executive director of the group. “The message that needs to be heard by all attorneys representing the government is that even though the Trump administration isn’t interested in following the rules, we are watching.”

The bar complaints against the three lawyers — Eric J. Hamilton, Brad P. Rosenberg and Liam C. Holland — came at an extraordinary moment of tension between the Justice Department and many of the federal judges who have been hearing challenges to President Trump’s policies.

I do not expect anything to come from this, but it is a start. 

 

You Mean that the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ Overpromised Again

In news that surprises no one, Elon Musk’s Starlink is incapable of providing broadband connections to the mass market.

Sounds like solar shingles all over again:

A new study from researchers at X-Lab shows that Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband service lacks the capacity to put a serious dent in U.S. broadband. Despite recent efforts by the Trump administration to rewrite a $42 billion subsidy program with an eye on giving Musk billions in taxpayer dollars.

The researchers found that given the limited nature of satellite physics, the more people that use Starlink, the slower the network is going to get. That’s not a surprise to users who have increasingly seen slowdowns on the network over the last four years, resulting in speeds that often don’t even meet the FCC’s fairly weak definition for broadband (100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up).

The researchers estimated that pushing the network past any more than 6.7 Starlink customers per square mile results in significant slowdowns that will get worse. That’s why, they note, it’s a terrible idea for the Trump administration to redirect infrastructure bill grant money from more reliable (often fiber-based and locally owned) ISPs and instead give it to Elon Musk:

“Many State Offices are concerned that Starlink proposals may be the lowest bid and alternative proposals may not be within the 15% window for consideration. What this analysis presents is that across many geographic areas Starlink may not be a qualified bidder as it may be unable to attain the required 100/20 Mbps service level (and, in deploying Starlink services, may actually degrade pre-existing users’ services to the point that they no longer receive minimal broadband speeds).”

Saturation of the spectrum.  It's physics 101.

It is a consistent problem with wireless broadband. 

I Missed the Inflation Numbers

Sorry.

Rather unsurprisingly, what with the tariffs and all, inflation was higher than forecast.

Given that the Federal Reserve gets these numbers ahead of the rest of us, this might explain why they did not cut their baseline interest rate:

U.S. inflation increased in June as tariffs boosted prices for imported goods like household furniture and recreation products, supporting views that price pressures would pick up in the second half of the year and delay the Federal Reserve from resuming cutting interest rates until at least October.

The report from the Commerce Department on Thursday showed goods prices last month posting their biggest gain since January, with also solid rises in the costs of clothing and footwear. The U.S. central bank on Wednesday left its benchmark interest rate in the 4.25%-4.50% range and Fed Chair Jerome Powell's comments after the decision undercut confidence the central bank would resume policy easing in September as had been widely anticipated by financial markets and some economists.

………

The personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index rose 0.3% last month after an upwardly revised 0.2% gain in May, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis said. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the PCE price index climbing 0.3% following a previously reported 0.1% rise in May.

Prices for furnishings and durable household equipment jumped 1.3%, the biggest gain since March 2022, after increasing 0.6% in May. Recreational goods and vehicles prices shot up 0.9%, the most since February 2024, after being unchanged in May. Prices for clothing and footwear rose 0.4%.

Outside the tariff-sensitive goods, prices for gasoline and other energy products rebounded 0.9% after falling for four consecutive months. Services prices rose 0.2% for a fourth straight month, restrained by cheaper airline fares and steady prices for dining out and hotel stays.

In the 12 months through June, the PCE price index advanced 2.6% after increasing 2.4% in May.

Given that there is a distinct possibility that economic statistics from this point will not be accurate, Trump fired the head of the BLS because he did not like the numbers, so we are likely in for a bumpy ride.

Bad Day Starts at Sundown

At least if you are Jewish.

It will Tisha B'Av, the 9^th day of the Hebrew month Av, and a small subset of the nasty bits of Jewish history follows:

1. The report of the spies from Canaan, resulting in the people of Israel spending 40 Years in the Desert.
2. The destruction of the 1^st Temple.
3. The destruction of the 2nd Temple.
4. The Romans razed Betar, killing 100,000 Jews.
5. The Romans plowed the temple mount.
6. The start of the 1^st Crusade.  (You see it as a coming together of Christendom.  I see it as a pogrom with years of murder and rape.)
7. The expulsion of Jews from England.
8. The expulsion of Jews from France.
9. The expulsion of Jews from Spain.
10. Germany entered the WW I. (Can be legitimately claimed to have directly led to the Shoah)
11. Formal approval of the "Final Solution" by the Nazis in 1941.
12. Deportations to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto begin in 1942.

Excuse me while I find something sturdy to cover my head with. 

It's not a day for this Yid to do anything, and for the first time, I'm fasting, or at least trying to.

Between Donald Trump and my job search, I'm feeling a bit superstitious. 

 

Wear Your F%$#ing Mask

You know all those reports of an unprecedented surge in lung cancer among young non-smokers? (See here and here where I called noted this)

Well, we now have an explanation, and it's what I, as well as professional health experts who actually know what the f%$# that they are talking about, suggested that this was tied to the Covid pandemic.

A study is not saying that dormant cancer in lung cells can be activated by COVID and flu.

Gee, you think:

Hidden in the lungs of some breast cancer survivors are tumour cells that can remain dormant for decades — until they one day trigger a relapse. Now, experiments in mice show that these rogue cells can be roused from their slumber by common respiratory illnesses such as COVID-19 or the flu.

The findings, published in Nature on 30 July1, seem to extend to humans too: data from thousands of people show that infection with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is linked with a nearly twofold increase in cancer-related death, possibly helping to explain why cancer death rates increased early during the COVID-19 pandemic.

………

DeGregori and his colleagues wondered whether acute inflammation caused by a respiratory infection could also reactivate dormant cancer cells. To test this, the researchers genetically engineered mice to develop breast tumours similar to those in humans and to seed dormant tumour cells into other tissues including the lungs. Then, they infected the animals with either SARS-CoV-2 or influenza.

Within days of infection, dormant cancer cells in the lungs of the mice kicked into high gear, proliferated and formed metastatic lesions. But it wasn’t the pathogens directly that caused this to happen, the researchers learnt: it was a key immune molecule called interleukin-6 (IL-6), which helps to rev up the body’s response to foreign threats. They confirmed this by engineering mice to lack IL-6. In these animals, the dormant cancer cells did not multiply nearly as quickly.

Obviously, this applies to a very specific lung cancer case, but it does appear that this mechanism might be at least part of the explanation for the Covid cancer surge.

Linkage

• Court Kicks Lawyers Off Case After Finding Fake AI Cases In Filings (Above the Law)  the judge also referred these folks to the state bar, who hopefully will sanction them.
• Neanderthals Ate Maggots, Scientists Say (Gizmodo) Humans do this too.  Google "Casu Marzu" if you dare. 
• The Return of Corbyn (Splinter) Corbyn has formed a 3rd party.  It is yet to choose a name, but it is already polling as well as Labour, which, after almost a year of the feckless centrism of Kier Starmer, is having people long for the days of Boris Johnson.
• U.S. Building Container Vaults To Deploy U.S. Nuclear Bombs To Remote Bases (The War Zone) This is bad news, because this makes it easier to forward deploy nukes, which destabilizes the situation.
• Ancient Voice Box Finally Reveals How Dinosaurs May Have Sounded (ScienceAlert) Spoiler:  They sounded like the current dinosaurs. (Birds)
• Return of wolves to Yellowstone has led to a surge in aspen trees unseen for 80 years (Live Science) Deer were decimating the aspen seedlings.  We need wolves in our neighborhood for the same reason.
• Marc Andreessen Is a Traitor (Liberal Currents) I don't like the word traitor, there is a very specific definition of the crime in the US Constitution, but it is clear that Andreeson has come out against the very system that made him wealthy.
• Robo-Bunnies Are the Latest Weapon Against Florida's Invasive Pythons (Gizmodo) Wait ……… wut? 

Feeding the Papal Conclave From Max Miller:
 

 

About Those Jobs Numbers

Donald Trump has fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, because he does not like the numbers that he is getting.

It seems that pretty soon, we will be flying blind, deaf, and dumb on the economy:

President Trump unleashed his fury about weakness in the labor market on Friday, saying without evidence that the data were “rigged” and that he was firing the Senate-confirmed Department of Labor official responsible for pulling together the numbers each month.

In a long post on social media, Mr. Trump said he had directed his team to fire Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who was confirmed on a bipartisan basis in 2024.

Emily Liddel, an associate commissioner for the bureau, confirmed late Friday that Dr. McEntarfer had been fired and that William Wiatrowski, the deputy commissioner, would serve as acting commissioner.

The president fired Dr. McEntarfer after the bureau released monthly jobs data showing surprisingly weak hiring in July and large downward revisions to job growth in the previous two months. Economists widely interpreted the report as evidence that Mr. Trump’s policies were beginning to take a toll on the economy, though the president insisted in a subsequent post that the country was “doing GREAT!”

 We are completely f%$#ed.

It's the First Friday of the Month, and It's Ugly

Not good at all


But flat unemployment By ugly, I mean that only 73,000 jobs were added to the non farm payrolls, and the total job growth for May and June was revised down by 250,000.

As I have noted before, you need around 125,000 new jobs to account for the natural growth of the workforce, so we have had 3 straight months of what amounts to a contracting job market.

Nonfarm payroll growth was slower than expected in July and the unemployment rate ticked higher, raising potential trouble signs for the U.S. labor market as President Donald Trump ramps up tariffs.

Job growth totaled a seasonally adjusted 73,000 for the month, above the June total of 14,000 but below even the meager Dow Jones estimate for a gain of 100,000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. June and May totals were revised sharply lower, down by a combined 258,000 from previously announced levels.

At the same time, the unemployment rate rose to 4.2%, in line with the forecast.

The June total came down from the previously stated 147,000, while the May count fell to just 19,000, revised down by 125,000. 

Part of this could be reductions in the federal workforce:

………

However, federal government employment continued to decline, down 12,000 for the month and 84,000 since its January peak, before Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency began paring down the jobs rolls. Professional and business services lost 14,000. 

Unemployment rose by 0.1% to 4.2%, which is basically just statistical noise.

Why the NFP growth has diverged from unemployment implies that something keeping people off of the market.

My completely uneducated guess is that two things are doing ths:

• Covid related disability.
• Large numbers of immigrants of various statuses leaving the counttry.

Generally though, I is confuzzled. 

It's Bank Failure Friday!!

Damn!  I was not paying attention, and missed some bank failures: 

Here are the commercial bank failures

2. The Santa Anna National Bank, Santa Anna, TX on June 27.

This is rather unusual, as it was a Sunday closure, but it appears that the the closing might have been rushed due to, "Suspected Fraud."  It was a tiny bank, with just under $54 million in deposits, and about $2.8 million of that was in deposits of more than the $250 thousand insurance limit, so there were 5 or 6 "Whale" accounts among their depositors at most. (I leave my reader(s) to draw a conclusion)  

Here is the  Full FDIC list. 

Meanwhile, in credit union land, I missed 4 failures: 

Here are the credit union failures

2. Unilever Federal Credit Union, Engelwood Cliffs, NJ on March 30
3. Soul Community Federal Credit Union, Austell, GA on June 20
4. Aldersgate Federal Credit Union, Marion, IL on June 18
5. Butler Heritage Federal Credit Union, Middletown, OH on June 30 

These all seem to be ordinary failures of small credit unions, except for the 6 month old Soul Community Federal Credit Union, which appears to have been chartered 6 months before its closure, and then it did nothing.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

Wolf Calls for Better Shepherds

I came across this headline today:

Tech giant Palantir helps the US government monitor its citizens. Its CEO wants Silicon Valley to find its moral compass

I can't even.

F%$# Me

I agree with Pete Hegseth about something, his order to prevent military personnel from participation in think tank events.

I guess a stopped calendar is right once a month. 

Think-tanks are a cesspool and an affirmative action program for stupid Ivy League graduates.

At their very best, they are lobbying organizations that use the promise of future employment to influence Congressional staffers.

If they went away, or at the very list left the immediate proximity of Washington, DC, the world would be a better place.

A wide swath of Defense Department officials fear that new rules banning employees from participating at think tank and research events — a key way the Pentagon delivers its message and solicits feedback — will leave the military muzzled and further isolated from allies.

The move, according to more than a dozen officials and think tank leaders, hampers the department’s ability to make its case both in Washington policy circles and to allies struggling to understand how they fit into President Donald Trump’s worldview. That’s particularly important now as the Pentagon assesses whether to end decades of U.S. policy and remove thousands of troops stationed abroad.

“The DOD can’t tell its message,” said Becca Wasser, a former Army official, now a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a national security think tank. “They can’t tell the critical points they want the general public to know. This is essentially shooting themselves in the foot.”

To translate this from inside-the-beltway speak, they are saying, is, "We use these to lobby politicians and journalists, and we really like the free champagne at their soirees."

If someone in the DoD has making presentations to think tanks as a significant portion of their job, then they are extremely over-employec. 

Quote of the Day

No. The core of your support for the war was a moral failure. A guy who murders his wife doesn’t get to hide behind a claim about bad analysis after he discovers that she wasn’t in fact screwing the mailman. Oh, you invented an imaginary war to support? That isn’t bad analysis. It’s a crime. 

—Jacob Bacharach on Ezra Klein's excuse for supporting the Iraq War

Ezra Klein claims that he has imagined some sort of benevolent occupation that would have made Iraq a better place.

That still makes him criminally wrong.

Mr. Bacharach argues that this admission of error is a humbug, and instead was a choice made in the interest of furthering his career.

I would argue that Klein's whole Abundance agenda, which is to f%$# minorities, let monopolists run wild, and roll back zoning regulations, is another similar exercise in careerism.

Support Your Federal Schutzstaffel

Guess what? Almost all the cases against LA anti-ICE protesters have been dropped because the ICE agents lied in their arrest reports and testimony.

You know when ordinary people commit perjury, they go to jail, or go on probation, and they lose their right to carry firearms forever.

How about doing this with Trump's immigration Brownshirts? (Yes, I know, the Brownshirts are the SA, not the SS, and I am using a mangled metaphor)

US immigration officers made false and misleading statements in their reports about several Los Angeles protesters they arrested during the massive demonstrations that rocked the city in June, according to federal law enforcement files obtained by the Guardian.

The officers’ testimony was cited in at least five cases filed by the US Department of Justice amid the unrest. The justice department has charged at least 26 people with “assaulting” and “impeding” federal officers and other crimes during the protests over immigration raids. Prosecutors, however, have since been forced to dismiss at least eight of those felonies, many of them which relied on officers’ inaccurate reports, court records show.

………

The Guardian’s review of records found:

Out of nine “assault” and “impeding” felony cases the justice department filed immediately after the start of the protests and promoted by the attorney general, Pam Bondi, prosecutors dismissed seven of them soon after filing the charges.

• In reports that led to the detention and prosecution of at least five demonstrators, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents made false statements about the sequence of events and misrepresented incidents captured on video.
• One DHS agent accused a protester of shoving an officer, when footage appeared to show the opposite: the officer forcefully pushed the protester.
• One indictment named the wrong defendant, a stunning error that has jeopardized one of the government’s most high-profile cases.

“When I see felonies dismissed, that tells me either the federal officers have filed affidavits that are not truthful and that has been uncovered, or US attorneys reviewing the cases realize the evidence does not support the charges,” said Cristine Soto DeBerry, a former California state prosecutor who is now director of Prosecutors Alliance Action, a criminal justice reform group.

When cops lie, they should be prosecuted.  This goes double for the ICE thugs.

I Agree with the Human Bowling Jacket

Ontario mayor Rob Ford has terminated the deal with Starlink to provide remote communications systems.

Rob is the Ford brother who wasn't caught smoking crack.

Ontario has officially cancelled its $100-million contract with Starlink, but the province refuses to say how much it cost taxpayers to get out of the deal.

Energy and Mines Minister Stephen Lecce did not answer numerous questions Wednesday about the kill fee the province will have to pay Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

It should not cost anything.  Just refuse to pay, like Elon Musk and Donald Trump do.

“I can confirm we’ve cancelled the contract at this point, and we look forward to bringing forth alternatives to the people of Ontario so we can get people connected,” Lecce said at an unrelated press conference.

………

Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatened to kill the deal in February if U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods were imposed, and he ultimately pulled the deal in March when U.S. President Donald Trump implemented those tariffs.

“It’s done, it’s gone,” Ford said at the time. “We won’t award contracts to people who enable and encourage economic attacks on our province … and our country.”

This is the, "And find out," part of the whole, "F%$# around and find out," process.

It should be noted that the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ at one point said that Canada was not a, "Real Country."

Well, I guess that they are not a real former customer. 

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, both the initial unemployment claims and the continuing unemployment claims numbers were flat this week.

The former is at an OK level, and the latter is at a very much not OK leve.l 

Meanwhile, the Fed's Open Market Committee kept interest rates unchanged, as predicted, unleashing a storm of whining from Donald Trump, and rose at a robust 3% annual rate in the 2nd quarter, but this number, much like the contraction seen in the 1st quarter fall in GDP are likely more a response to the incoherence of Trump's tariff policy than anything else.

I have no clue what this all means. 

Zeus, Still Catting Around and Making Bastards

That;s the only explanation I have for what happened in Bankatwa village in India.

A cobra wrapped itself around a 2-year old toddler's hand, and the aforementioned toddler bit the snake to death.

This is the sort of thing that makes a honey badger look and go, "Gnarly, dude!" 

A two-year-old boy in India has stunned his community after he bit a three-feet-long cobra to death.

Infant Govinda Kumar bravely fought back against the venomous snake when it coiled itself around his arm while he was playing outside his home in Bankatwa village, in the Majhaulia block of Bihar's West Champaran district on Friday afternoon.

The toddler spotted the snake and threw a piece of brick at it, relatives said. 

The cobra then lunged at him and wrapped itself tightly around his hand.

In a shocking turn of events, the boy responded by sinking his teeth into the reptile's head, killing it. 

There are two lessons to be learned from this whole series of events:

• Don't throw a brick at a cobra. 
• Do not f%$# with Govinda Kumar.

There can only be one musical accompaniment to this story: 

Support Your Local Police

It may be illegal for law enforcement to destroy potentially exculpatory evidence, but it seems that they think that it is all OK if an algorithm does it for you.

ACAB.

On Thursday, a digital rights group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, published an expansive investigation into AI-generated police reports that the group alleged are, by design, nearly impossible to audit and could make it easier for cops to lie under oath.

Axon's Draft One debuted last summer at a police department in Colorado, instantly raising questions about the feared negative impacts of AI-written police reports on the criminal justice system. The tool relies on a ChatGPT variant to generate police reports based on body camera audio, which cops are then supposed to edit to correct any mistakes, assess the AI outputs for biases, or add key context.

But the EFF found that the tech "seems designed to stymie any attempts at auditing, transparency, and accountability." Cops don't have to disclose when AI is used in every department, and Draft One does not save drafts or retain a record showing which parts of reports are AI-generated. Departments also don't retain different versions of drafts, making it difficult to assess how one version of an AI report might compare to another to help the public determine if the technology is "junk," the EFF said. That raises the question, the EFF suggested, "Why wouldn't an agency want to maintain a record that can establish the technology’s accuracy?"

It's currently hard to know if cops are editing the reports or "reflexively rubber-stamping the drafts to move on as quickly as possible," the EFF said. That's particularly troubling, the EFF noted, since Axon disclosed to at least one police department that "there has already been an occasion when engineers discovered a bug that allowed officers on at least three occasions to circumvent the 'guardrails' that supposedly deter officers from submitting AI-generated reports without reading them first."

Call me a cynic, but I think that law enforcement in general, and police in particular, will take every opportunity to abuse the rights of the general public if they think that it makes their job easier.

Someone Noticed

Lawmakerssaying that Delta Airlines' use of AI to price gouge should be made illegal. 

How about you do this for Uber and Lyft, whose apps got caught raising prices on riders when their cell phone batteries were low, because they knew that they were desperate. 

One week after Delta announced it is expanding a test using artificial intelligence to charge different prices based on customers' personal data—which critics fear could end cheap flights forever—Democratic lawmakers have moved to ban what they consider predatory surveillance pricing.

In a press release, Reps. Greg Casar (D-Texas) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) announced the Stop AI Price Gouging and Wage Fixing Act. The law directly bans companies from using "surveillance-based" price or wage setting to increase their profit margins.

If passed, the law would allow anyone to sue companies found unfairly using AI, lawmakers explained in what's called a "one-sheet." That could mean charging customers higher prices—based on "how desperate a customer is for a product and the maximum amount a customer is willing to pay"—or paying employees lower wages—based on "their financial status, personal associations, and demographics."

It's more than that.  They can determine who has to get to a funeral of a family member, and jack up the prices using online information.

Sound creepy enough for you yet.

Tlaib called companies using AI to "exploit" workers in "desperate" situations "appalling," with the one-sheet specifically shaming delivery services that lower drivers' wages based on their "pattern of taking orders" and health care companies that base nurses' pay on "an algorithmically-manipulated-bidding war, not the tasks they perform." 

Delta's counter argument is that this is a well established business practice, by which they mean, "Uber has been doing this sh%$ for years."

As I noted just yesterday, this is why the Gypsy cab companies are busy enshittifying themselves into oblivion right now.

I am not surprised that Delta did this first, for as John Mulaney obsurved:

I'll book a ticket on some garbage airline---
You know, I don't wanna name an actual airline so let's just make one up; let's call it "Delta Airlines." 

We really need to make jailing senior corporate executives great again.