Given what has happened in just since the inverted traffic cone was inaugurated, I need to say fuck, shit, motherfucker, and the like more and more often, but I am going back to expurgating the words.
At least as long as I can f%$#ing stand it.
I will, however, use the word felch in unexpurgated form.
The career civil servant who was acting Secretary of the Treasury, David Lebryk has quit after Elon Musk and his stooges took control of the federal payments system.
So Musk will be in control the check writing capability of the United States while having total access to all of the all the personal information of the recipients.
It is not reassuring that a man whose wealth is largely a product of what John Kenneth Galbraith called, "The Bezzle,"* has this power.
The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department left the agency after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.
David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues that was obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.
Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration. Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley executive who has now been detailed to Treasury, is among those involved, the people said. Krause did not respond to requests for comment.………
When Scott Bessent was confirmed as treasury secretary on Monday, Lebryk ceased to be the acting agency head. Trump administration officials placed Lebryk on administrative leave before he announced he would step down, two of the people said.
………
Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.
………
The executive order Trump signed creating DOGE also instructed all agencies to ensure it has “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” which would appear to include the Treasury payment systems.
It is unclear precisely why Musk’s team sought access to those systems. But both Musk and the Trump administration more broadly have sought to control spending in ways that far exceed efforts by their predecessors and have alarmed legal experts.………
Still, the possibility that government officials might try to use the federal payments system — which essentially functions as the nation’s checkbook — to enact a political agenda is unprecedented, said Mark Mazur, who served in senior Treasury Department roles during the Obama and Biden administrations.
“This is a mechanical job — they pay Social Security benefits, they pay vendors, whatever. It’s not one where there’s a role for nonmechanical things, at least from the career standpoint. Your whole job is to pay the bills as they’re due,” Mazur said. “It’s never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda. … You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case.”
Bad intentions are a given for this bunch.
There is no easier way to prove that the government does not work than to stop cutting checks.
Then, Trump and President Musk will privatize the system, which will take months, if not years to come to fruition, and one of Elon's friends will be taking a cut of every payment.
These failures will be used to justify draconian cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
We are fucked.
Donald Trump's response to the mid air collision over the Potomac was to blame it on too many minorities working as air traffic controllers.
This is ludicrous, of course, but that doesn't matter for Trump and his Evil Minions™.
Trump's FAA has called bullshit on the anti-DEI narrative.
A preliminary report on Wednesday night’s plane and helicopter collision near Washington, D.C. contradicts Donald Trump’s favorite DEI scapegoat.
An internal report from the Federal Aviation Administration found that in reality, the tower’s staffing at Ronald Reagan National Airport (DCA) was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” according to The New York Times. There was only one air traffic controller to handle both helicopters and planes in the airport’s vicinity, a job usually assigned to two people.
Having to handle both types of air traffic can be complicated, the Times report states, because air traffic controllers can use different radio frequencies for helicopter and airplane pilots. In such cases, while the controller is communicating with pilots of both kinds of aircraft, the pilots may not be able to talk to one another.
Also, it appear that the helicopter was out of position.
There were two pilots flying the helo, and one of them, Andrew Eaves, was a white man.
The other pilot, a woman, has not had her name released at the request of her family, probably because we know that Trump would blame her, and his acolytes would then doxx the family.
Significant layoffs at my place of work, including my immediate supervisor and me.
This sucks wet farts from wet pigeons.
Posted via mobile.
The Anglican Catholic Church, a conservative sect that split off from the Anglican/Episcopal Church (Catholic in this case is an adjective meaning universal) has defrocked one of their priests for giving a Nazi Salute during a speech.
Given said cleric's close ties to UKIP, I'm not surprised that he went all, "Seig Heil," though I am surprised that the church acted quickly and decisively:
The Anglican Catholic Church said it had revoked the license of one of its priests Wednesday after he delivered “a gesture that many have interpreted as a pro-Nazi salute” at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington days earlier.
Calvin Robinson, who had recently started work at St. Paul’s Anglican Catholic Church in Michigan, said his action was intended to imitate Elon Musk’s inauguration hand gesture that critics contended was a Nazi salute, which Musk has denied.
“I gave a talk at a pro-life event that seemed to go down well,” Robinson said on X. “The joke at the end was a mockery of the hysterical ‘liberals’ who called Elon Musk a Nazi for quite clearly showing the audience his heart was with them.”
Robinson, who maintains a large social media presence and was billed at the summit as a conservative commentator, declined to comment Thursday. The Anglican Catholic Church said in a statement that Robinson previously “had been warned that online trolling and other such actions (whether in service of the left or right) are incompatible with a priestly vocation and was told to desist.”
“Clearly, he has not, and as such, his license in this Church has been revoked,” the statement reads. “And we believe that those who mimic the Nazi salute, even as a joke or an attempt to troll their opponents, trivialize the horror of the Holocaust and diminish the sacrifice of those who fought against its perpetrators.”
When the fucking ACC has a better, more honest, and braver response to this than does the media or the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), we are in a world of hurt.
The lede here has to be that the Federal Reserve did not lower interest rates yesterday
for the first time in about 5 months. (Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump has
completely lost his shit over this.)
The Federal Reserve hit the pause button on recent interest rate cuts, entering a new wait-and-see phase as it tries to determine whether and how much more to lower rates from a recent two-decade high.
The decision on Wednesday to leave the benchmark federal-funds rate at its current range around 4.3% followed three consecutive rate cuts beginning in September, when the rate stood around 5.3%.
Officials made only minor changes to the policy statement they released at the conclusion of their two-day meeting. The statement indicated comfort with their interest-rate stance for an economy where inflation remains somewhat above their goal and where labor market conditions have been solid.
………
A widely watched gauge of so-called core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose 2.8% in November from a year earlier and is likely to sit at the same level for the 12 months ended December.
Because inflation was unusually strong during the first quarter of 2024, mild readings of inflation over the coming months could lead 12-month measures to drop significantly as the high readings of one year ago are replaced with lower ones. For example, if core prices in January, February and March rise at a 0.19% month-over-month rate (their monthly average since April), then year-over-year inflation would slow to 2.3% in March.
That last bit is math 101.
My guess is that one of the big reasons for the pause is because the Federal
Reserve has no fucking where the Trump administration is going on the budget
and the economy.
In more general economic terms, and likely one reason that the Fed forbore
rate cuts is because,
4th quarter GDP was quite strong, with the economy growing at a 2.3% annual rate, largely because of large
increases in consumer spending.
This is down from the 3rd quarter's
3.1% rate, and it's lower than the forecast of 2.6%, but it is still fairly
strong.
Further reinforcing this is the fact that today's unemployment report was pretty strong, with initial claims falling by 16,000 to 207,000, and continuing claims falling by 39, 000 to 1.89 million.
I think that everyone is waiting to see how fucking insane Trump's economic and fiscal plans are.
President Xi please save us from Adobe's ridiculous monthly subscription charges and shitty policies! https://t.co/XAaIuRu7qd
— Brad Sigal (@BradSigal) January 29, 2025
Yeah, if Chinese company does to Adobe what DeepSeek did to OpenAI, I will fucking buy, and fucking read, Mao Zedong's Little Red Book, and post a video of me doing a chapter by chapter interpretive dance of its contents.
Suggestions as to costumes for the dance can be posted below, but please consider that I am a fat hairy motherfucker.
Story still breaking, but it appears that a regional jet flying helicopter after taking off from Washington National Airport.
Update:
The collision was caught on video: (at about 2 minutes)
Further update:
Plane was inbound from Wichita, KS, and the helicopter was an army UH-60 Blackhawk.
Bodies have been recovered but no survivors yet.
Oh I'm sorry, are you crying? Are you crying because your plagiarism machine that made stuff by copying everybody's stuff was used to train another machine that made stuff by copying stuff? Are you going to cry? Cowards, losers, pathetic pic.twitter.com/Xl4JwWXBaW
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) January 29, 2025
OK, it's not an actual parent murderer, it's Sam Altman and OpenAI accusing DeepSeek of using its model to train their AI program.
I don't ascribe to the extreme view of IP that has people like Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, George R.R. Martin, and John Grisham that learning from copyrighted works is a violation of copyright, and I do not believe that LLM models are actually learning, (a pox on both their houses) but OpenAI is accusing DeepSeek of doing exactly what they have been doing since their founding.
Goose, gander, sauce:
OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property.Yeah, that is exactly what Altman/OpenAI has been accused of doing.
The San Francisco-based ChatGPT maker told the Financial Times it had seen some evidence of “distillation”, which it suspects to be from DeepSeek.
………
Distillation is a common practice in the industry but the concern was that DeepSeek may be doing it to build its own rival model, which is a breach of OpenAI’s terms of service.
Go fuck yourself, SAM.
………
OpenAI declined to comment further or provide details of its evidence. Its terms of service state users cannot “copy” any of its services or “use output to develop models that compete with OpenAI”.
Yeah, well they aren't competing. They are opensourcing their stuff.
DeepSeek’s release of its R1 reasoning model has surprised markets, as well as investors and technology companies in Silicon Valley. Its built-on-a-shoestring models have attained high rankings and comparable results to leading US models.By, "Protect their technical edge," OpenAI and its ilk mean, "Extract monopoly rents."
………
The practice highlights the difficulty for companies keen to protect their technical edge. “We know [China]-based companies — and others — are constantly trying to distil the models of leading US AI companies,” OpenAI said in its latest statement.
Many reported on Nancy Pelosi dumping millions worth of Nvidia ahead of the DeepSeek fallout.
— James Li (@5149jamesli) January 28, 2025
But very few noticed she bought into Tempus AI, a healthcare AI stock that’s nearly doubled in price since her investment.
Why? Because she is betting on Americans getting sicker. 🤨 pic.twitter.com/AvoLnz4s3Q
I know that I might be stating the obvious, and it is something studiously ignored by the Very Serious People™, but Nancy Pelosi is incredibly corrupt, even if she is not technically breaking any laws.
The cynic in me would suggest that the reason that the Democratic gerontocracy in Congress is so loathe to relinquish power is because it allows them to make large amounts money for themselves and their families.
Just trying to follow all of the Trump administration's outrages, is exhausting.
Actually coming up with cogent commentary (for me, admittedly a pretty low bar) is a challenge.
I am working on this.
It appears that the Royal Navy went on high alert in response to whale farts.
Burritos need to be kept far away from the Royal Navy:
The Royal Navy of the United Kingdom started a frenzied hunt for phantom Russians off the coast after hearing two weird sounds in the water, only to discover that the noises were caused by a gassy whale, an official told The Sun.Not to toot my own horn (no apologies for that turn of phrase), but I like to think of myself as the go to source for flatulence related news.
Naval authorities were concerned that one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s drone submarines had placed a listening device on the ocean floor between two Scottish islands, launching an inquiry.
The two toots were discovered around 100 miles from where the UK’s doomsday submarines are located.
“We have been analyzing the sounds and now believe it was a marine mammal. A whale” the officer informed the British tabloid.
The sound, initially identified by analysts as a man-made noise, had never before been detected by the sensors, causing the navy to misinterpret Das Boof for Das Boot, according to the article.
Order now, demand is spiking.
In a surprise to my reader(s) I am not talking about the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™, I'm referring to Mark Andreeson, who is arguing that must make everyone (but him) completely destitute to achieve utopia.
He has explicitly stated that his goal for the world is to reduce wages of everyone (but him) to basically nothing:
Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the massive venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz — which has its fingers in pretty much every pie in tech — has revealed an eyebrow-raising detail in his "techno-optimist" vision of the future.
In a recent tweet, the American billionaire investor casually proclaimed that AI must "crash" everyone's wages before it can deliver us an economic utopia — one that'll definitely happen, and certainly not create a permanent underclass of have-nots.
"A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero," Andreessen wrote. "Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies."
So fret not, lowly laborer: you may be destined for financial ruin, but paradise is right around the corner. Pinky promise.………
………
Andreessen's tweet is a revealing example of the ruthless economic logic that underlies tech moguls' utopic visions of the future, in which progress is a foregone conclusion, rendering everyone's economic suffering in the interim merely a means to an end. Like overzealous fitness instructors, they always choose to emphasize the need for pain to achieve anything.
Above all, many of these ultra-rich tech types like Andreessen can't help publicly fantasizing about punishing the poor.
Larry Ellison for instance, cofounder of the software outfit Oracle, drooled about how AI would supercharge the surveillance state, ensuring that "citizens will be on their best behavior."
These folks are the problem, not the solution.
The only good news is that rat-fucks like Mark Andreeson went all in on AI, and they are taking a bath now that Deepseek's incredibly inexpensive artificial intelligence has eaten Big AI's lunch.
The fact that, following the DeepSeek ascendancy, uranium stocks fell 11% (on the 'fears' that the vast expansion of data centres may be unnecessary, rendering nuclear power less attractive), reveals how deeply in the void of madness the stock market had fallen...
— Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) January 28, 2025
2 police officers in St. Louis have been fired, and have had their peace officers licenses revoked after they did nothing to aid a gunshot victim because they found it inconvenient.
It should be noted here that the Supreme Court has ruled that there is no duty for police officers to protect you, (Castle Rock v. Gonzales) but officials in St. Louis and in Missouri have (IMHO correctly) decided that the officers behavior was beyond the pale:
Urayoan Alejandro Rodriguez-Rivera called St. Louis police at 6:13 p.m. on Sept. 10, 2023, to tell them he was going to kill himself. By the time two officers found him in Forest Park 13 minutes later, he had shot himself in the head and was clinging to life.
At first, the officers thought the 29-year-old was dead, body-camera footage shows. Then they discovered he was still breathing — barely.
“We need to take this [guy], then,” said Ty Warren, who according to authorities was referring to the need to take responsibility for the call and write reports about what happened.
“We ain’t taking this [mess],” his partner, Austin Fraser, replied, according to the Missouri Attorney General’s Office. “Let’s cruise around and come back.”
Fraser and Warren didn’t try to give Rodriguez-Rivera any medical help, Assistant Attorney General David Hansen alleged in a disciplinary complaint. They didn’t tell dispatch that they had found him or that he needed an ambulance. They didn’t try to find the gun he had been shot with.
Instead, one minute after finding Rodriguez-Rivera, the officers left him, exiting the park and returning to their patrol vehicle as they laughed and joked around with each other, Warren’s body-cam footage shows. They returned minutes later, pretending to stumble upon Rodriguez-Rivera’s body for the first time as another officer called for an ambulance and took the lead on the call.
Within days, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department fired Fraser, and within weeks, Warren had also left the department. Fraser’s peace officer license was revoked earlier this month, after Warren’s had already been — meaning they can no longer work as law enforcement officers anywhere in the state, said Mike O’Connell, spokesman for the Missouri Department of Public Safety.The Missouri attorney general’s office accused the former officers of violating two statutes: gross misconduct and committing an act of “reckless disregard.”
Pre-George Floyd, I do not think that much would have happened to these officers.
Progress, I guess, but these guys should be in jail.
In this case, Reddit management is not disciplining the moderators of the SubReddits, they are just litting it slide.
What are these mods have done is to ban links from Ecch (Twitter) on their discussions.
This is big deal, because it has the effect of shutting down a lot of the distribution of links on Ecch (Twitter).
Scores of Reddit’s online communities have banned the posting of links from the social media platform X in protest of owner Elon Musk’s inauguration hand gesture that critics contend was a Nazi salute.I believe that this is a, "Fuck Around and Find Out," (FAFO) moment.
Among the most notable subreddits to ban X links are the sports discussion hubs r/NFL and r/NBA, which have 12 million and 15 million subscribers respectively, along with the women’s issues and news subreddit r/TwoXChromosomes, which has 14 million members.
………
Reddit is a social media platform that has more than 97 million daily active users. It’s made up of individual communities, called subreddits, which are typically centered on specific interests. Users can subscribe to their preferred subreddits, which have their own volunteer moderators that establish and enforce their own rules beyond Reddit’s sitewide regulations. Subreddits related to properties (such as sports teams or TV shows) are nearly always run by fans and not affiliated with the property itself.
A Reddit spokeswoman confirmed Thursday that the website itself has no ban on links from X and restated the company’s commitment to freedom of speech.
Among the first subreddits to ban X links after Musk’s Monday speech was r/NewJersey. Its users have been taking a victory lap, sharing posts crediting the community with starting the trend.
Other state subreddits, including r/Georgia and r/Massachusetts, have followed suit. Topic subreddits including r/antiwork, which has nearly 3 million members, and r/Christianity and r/Military, which each have around a half-million members, also banned X links.
I am referring to the, "Peach State," and not the former Soviet Republic on the Black Sea.
Their PUC just issued a rule allowing Georgia Power to charge data centers higher rates for electricity.
Considering the negative externalities of data centers, this is a very good idea:
Metro Atlanta is one of the hottest destinations in the country for tech companies to build data centers, hulking warehouses filled with servers that power web services, cryptocurrency transactions and increasingly, artificial intelligence.
But the facilities themselves use huge amounts of electricity, and concern has been growing that their demands could strain the grid and drive up costs for residential customers and other businesses.
On Thursday, the Georgia Public Service Commission approved changes to Georgia Power’s rules and contract provisions commissioners say will make sure data centers pay their fair share and keep other customers from being saddled with their costs.………
The changes were proposed by Georgia Power in December and apply to new customers that use more than 100 megawatts of electricity.………
Already, Georgia Power has been approved to build new oil- and gas-burning units, add massive battery storage systems and buy power from coal and gas plants in other states, largely to meet a wave of data-center demand the company contends is coming.
Those projects, along with building new transmission lines to deliver the power, carry enormous costs, which some fear could be passed on to the company’s other customers, whose rates have shot up dramatically in recent years. Since late 2022, the PSC has approved a series of rate increases that have pushed the average Georgia Power customer’s bill up by about $43, according to data from the company.
Nice to see the big players being made to paid some of the costs that they inflict on the rest of us. (That's the definition of, "Negative Externalities.)
Remember how I said that the ADL was letting Elon Musk's Nazi salute slide?
Well, they have finally made a statement, well, just a strongly worded Ecch (Tweet) condemning the Nazi jokes he wrote as a followup to his Nazi salute.
Weak tea, Kapos, very week tea.
Is anyone surprised that the US Air Force stopped showing videos about the Tuskegee Airmen and the WASPs because it's DEI. (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)
The Air Force has pulled and is reviewing a basic military training course that includes videos on the history of pioneering Black and female pilots during World War II, following President Donald Trump’s order to halt diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
An Air Force official told Air Force Times the videos themselves were not targeted for removal, but BMT classes that include diversity materials were pulled and are now under review to make sure they are in compliance with this week’s executive orders.
The unofficial Facebook page Air Force amn/nco/snco on Friday night posted an excerpt of an internal Air Force message, which said videos on the Tuskegee Airmen and Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, had been removed from the service’s BMT course.
“In accordance with NEW DEIA [diversity, equity, inclusion and acceptance] Guidance the lesson plans listed below have been changed/alternated to meet the guidance,” the leaked internal message said, adding that the revised lessons should be used “immediately,” with the final word underlined and in bold.
One of those classes, a one-day program titled “Airmindedness,” included videos on the Tuskegee Airmen and WASPs, as well as an inspirational-style recruiting video called “Breaking Barriers.”
This decision was reversed once it starting getting savage press reporting, but if it hadn't blown up, this policy would still be in place.
Effacing any record of minorities in American history is an explicit goals of this rat-fuck.
A federal court has ruled that the abuse of section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is unconstitutional.
The court actually ruled in December, but it's only now being made public:
It's official: The FBI's warrantless searches of communications seized to protect US national security have at last been ruled unconstitutional and in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
In a major December ruling made public this week, US District Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall settled one of the biggest debates about feared government overreach that has prompted calls to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for more than a decade.
Critics' primary concern was whether the FBI needed a warrant to search and query Americans' communications that are often incidentally, inadvertently, or mistakenly seized during investigations of suspected foreign terrorists.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights group that has long said a warrant is needed to conduct such invasive searches, celebrated the ruling as "better late than never." The EFF noted that the FBI conducted 3.4 million warrantless searches of US persons' 702 data in 2021, describing it as a "routine practice" and calling out Section 702 as a "finders keepers" rule that for years has seemingly given feds' unfettered access to many Americans' private and sensitive communication data.
DeArcy Hall agreed with an appeals court that ruled that "the government cannot circumvent application of the warrant requirement simply because queried information is already collected and held by the government," as the US unsuccessfully tried to argue.
I expect this to go all the way to the US Supreme Court, and I have no fucking clue as to how they would rule.
It is clear that the FBI has been abusing the process, which is not a surprise.
It's what cops do.
'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.
— Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn) October 16, 2015
Seriously, there are a leopard supporters getting their faces eaten, and given that the next 4 years will be hell, have some schadenfreude.
You see things like this:
Also, in response to denying military deportation flights to ColOmbia, their issue was with the military part, Trump declared retaliatory tariffs on ColUmbia.
I'm not sure if he meant the sportswear company, or the town in Ohio, or the nation's capitol, or the planned community in central Maryland, or the University, or the 20 odd other places with that name.
We are so fucked.
Elon Musk: "race mixing is bad. Italy for Italians!" *woman next to him moves as far away as possible*
— The Serfs (@theserfstv.bsky.social) January 26, 2025 at 5:38 PM
[image or embed]
Elon Musk, the child of Apartheid, and (as I have noted earlier) the grandchild of literal Nazis, just gave a speech to an Alternative für Deutschland rally stating that Germans should not be ashamed of the Holocaust.
From the ADL? **crickets**
Greeted with loud cheers, Elon Musk virtually delivered a short speech Saturday at a rally for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, where he urged the crowd to not be ashamed of their country’s history.
Musk’s appearance comes amid debate over whether a gesture he made twice during an inauguration rally was a Nazi-style salute, which he denies. He was introduced by Alice Weidel, the AfD’s candidate for chancellor. At the rally in Halle, Musk encouraged the roughly 4,500 attendees to be proud of their German heritage.
“There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” Musk said, seeming to reference the country’s history when the Nazis rose to power.
AfD's goal, and Elon's, goal is to rehabilitate Hitler and Nazis, at least it is if you believe your own eyes.
Musk has always been a con-man. He is now a clear and present danger to the world.
I would file this under, "Did Nazi this coming," but I am not at all surprised that The Tennessee Federation of Republican Women cited Adolph Hitler when recommending a reading list for children.Of course once it got noticed, it was withdrawn.
Go figure.
To quote Woody Allen: (Yes, I know, I'm quoting Woody Allen, but this says it all)The Tennessee Federation of Republican Women is coming under fire for providing parents a reading list for children that cites Adolf Hitler as an example of leadership.
"Hitler and all intelligent leaders throughout history have understood that the way to change a country was through the training of its youth, to get them while they are young," the group's reading list says.
The list, dated March 2024, is titled "Growing American Patriots Through Literacy" and posted on the group's website..........
A parents group in Indiana faced a similar controversy in June 2023, citing the German dictator in a newsletter. The newsletter cited Hitler, with the quote, "He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future."
The Indiana group, a chapter of Moms for Liberty, apologized for including the quote in the newsletter.
We should go down there and get some guys together, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them..........Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.
Tennessee Nazis. I have Tennessee Nazis.
Drunken wife beater Hegseth for Secretary of Defense, and the corrupt dog shooter for head of DHS.
This is what passes for normal these days.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Posted via mobile.
I was at an SCA (Medieval recreation group) event today, and at feast, they were serving various east Asian dishes.
Included in one course was Mongolian salted butter tea.
As an acknowledgement of the western palates at the feast, there was not much salt in the tea, I barely noticed it, but the butter had a rather odd mouth feel.
Posted via mobile.
I'm not a huge fan of Paul Krugman. (I dropped him from my blog roll years ago) I've always felt that he was far too supportive of economics, and politics of the Clintons and Barack Obama.
That being said, I still believe that he is honest and that he tells the truth, so his his interview with the Columbia Journalism Review is quite informative.
Basically, he left because the editorial editors were constantly trying to water down his stuff, and were trying to cut down on the articles/newsletters that he put out.
The Opinion Editopr, Kathleen Kingsbury, and the Deputy Opinion Editor, Patrick Healy, deny that any such thing was taking place, for reasons noted above, I am disinclined to believe them.
Krugman spent years as a tenured professor at MIT and Princeton for 30 years, so he knows rat-fucking better than any journalistic rat-fucker could possibly imagine.*
For two and a half decades, Paul Krugman’s columns in the New York Times were beacons of intelligence and common sense. Particularly for progressives inured to the work of many of his colleagues, Krugman offered a liberal gospel that was also a reliable refuge from mediocrity.
He was a reliable refuge from the mediocrity of the New York Times OP/ED page, which, given the continued employment of Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Brett "Bedbug" Stephens, David French, etc.
………Kingsbury, her deputy, Patrick Healy, and publisher A.G. Sulzberger all told CJR that they wished that Krugman had stayed at the paper—a desire none of them expressed last week, when an internal memo announced that Pamela Paul and Charles M. Blow would soon stop writing their columns.
It is mendacious to suggest that they wish that he had stayed at the paper when they made it clear that they wanted a lot less of him at the paper.
………
Krugman agreed that he could have stayed at the paper. But in an interview, he said the circumstances of his job changed so sharply in 2024 that he decided he had to quit. He had been writing two columns and a newsletter every week, until September, when, Krugman said, Healy told him the newsletter was being killed.
“That was my Network moment,” Krugman said. “‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore’”—a quote from the Howard Beale character in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film.
Kingsbury said it was “patently untrue” that Krugman’s newsletter had been killed, although it stopped appearing last October. She emailed him on September 30 to urge him to stay at the paper, and offered to let him keep the newsletter, but without guaranteeing its weekly frequency. She told him he could “use it to weigh in when you and your editor agree that it’s necessary.” And there was a condition: if he wanted to keep the newsletter, the frequency of his column would have to be cut in half, to once a week.
And then there is this:
………
The offer to reinstate the newsletter did nothing to placate Krugman, who had another serious complaint. “I’ve always been very, very lightly edited on the column,” he said. “And that stopped being the case. The editing became extremely intrusive. It was very much toning down of my voice, toning down of the feel, and a lot of pressure for what I considered false equivalence.” And, increasingly, attempts “to dictate the subject.”
“I approached Mondays and Thursdays with dread,” Krugman continued, “and often spent the afternoon in a rage. Patrick often—not always—rewrote crucial passages; I would then do a rewrite of his rewrite to restore the original sense, and felt that I was putting more work—certainly more emotional energy—into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft. It’s true that nothing was published without my approval; but the back-and-forth, to my eye, both made my life hell and left the columns flat and colorless.”
"Flat and colorless," huh? That should be the new motto for what Atrios calls, "That fucking newspaper."
Healy denied he had done anything to muffle Krugman’s voice. “He never called or emailed me saying I was changing his meaning or censoring his views, and he never lodged an objection to me that I overrode,” Healy wrote in his email to CJR.This is an admission that Healy was trying to, "Muffle Krugman's voice."
This is what happens when you have too many nepobaby failsons running an institution. (It ain't just "Dash" Sulzberger)
*To quote Henry Kissinger, "The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small."
I know that I have been married to Sharon* for 30 years, but this is freaky weird.
I complained to her that I had another ear worm, but at least it wasn't completely horrible.
She guessed the ear worm and started singing it.
To be fair, I named the group and asked her to guess, and the group was Styx.
And the song was:
Still,there is something profoundly unsettling when someone knows you so well that they can guess your ear-worms.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
Just went to the Oreo website and hit “accept all cookies” … and now we wait
— Cooper Lawrence (@CooperLawrence) January 23, 2025
The Republicans in Congress want to investigate the January 6 Committee.
The basic goal is to harass people who told the truth.
There is a speed bump in the path though, it turns out that a number of members of Congress were sexting former Trump Aide and January 6 Committee witness Cassidy Hutchinson.
What a sleazy group of hypocrites:
An aide to House Speaker Mike Johnson advised Republican colleagues against subpoenaing former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson as part of their investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack in an effort to prevent the release of sexually explicit texts that lawmakers sent her, according to written correspondence reviewed by The Washington Post and a person familiar with the effort.
The aide intervened last June, citing concerns that a subpoena could expose the texts, according to the correspondence and the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about private conversations. Johnson revived the investigation this week as part of an effort by President Donald Trump and his allies to seek retribution against perceived political enemies, including those who investigated his role in the Capitol attack.………
The Post reviewed documentation reflecting the speaker’s office’s concern ahead of the June meeting between him and Loudermilk that corroborated the account of the person familiar with the effort to prevent the texts’ release, but has not seen the purported sexually explicit messages. Nor has The Post identified who sent them or determined whether Hutchinson responded.
In a statement provided in response to an inquiry from The Post, Hutchinson’s lawyer, Bill Jordan, did not address the existence of texts and said his client has cooperated voluntarily with the investigation. He also criticized the interim report Loudermilk issued in December, which accused Cheney of “secretly communicating with Hutchinson without Hutchinson’s attorney’s knowledge.”
I'm completely unsurprised by this revelation.
Now that the Supreme Court has made their indemnification ploy unlawful, the worst drug pushers in world history have come up with a new settlement, and it's even more venal and corrupt than the last one.
Basically, they are demanding that the states put nearly a billion dollars into a Sackler defense funds.
Seven months after the Supreme Court struck down a deal that would have resolved thousands of opioid cases against Purdue Pharma, the company’s owners, members of the Sackler family, have increased their cash offer to settle the litigation — but with a novel catch.The states need to stop the negotiations and sue the Sacklers into oblivion.
Under the framework for a new deal, the Sacklers would not receive immunity from future opioid lawsuits, a condition that they had long insisted upon but that the court ruled was impermissible.
Instead, they would pay up to $6.5 billion — $500 million more than the previous agreement — but with a new condition: Claimants, including states, municipalities and individuals, would have to set aside as much as $800 million in an account akin to a legal-defense fund for the billionaires to fight such cases, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
Some details of the framework — but not the legal-defense fund — were announced on Thursday by the New York attorney general, Letitia James. She said the overall settlement totaled $7.4 billion, which would include $897 million from Purdue.
This would be a better option for the former owners of Purdue Pharma as well, because crap like this leads to people playing Super Mario Brothers oligarchs.
The Supreme Court has reinstated the Corporate Transparency Act of 2021, for now, at least.
The law requires that corporations report their actual owners to the government.
Unfortunately, it does not make this information public, but it's a good start at reducing the rat-fuckery created by opacity in places like Delaware, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Nevada.Mazzant is a right wing judge, but in a twist, Obama appointed.
The Supreme Court on Thursday revived a federal law requiring companies to report information about their owners in an effort to combat money laundering, the drug trade and terrorism.
The court’s brief order gave no reasons, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. The ruling was provisional, reinstating the law while a challenge to it moves forward.
Critics say that the law, the Corporate Transparency Act of 2021, is needlessly burdensome, a threat to privacy and an unconstitutional federal intrusion on matters that have been historically regulated by states.
………
Judge Amos L. Mazzant of the Federal District Court in Sherman, Texas, blocked the law nationwide, saying that Congress had overstepped its constitutional authority.
………
A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit temporarily lifted the injunction, observing that the “ownership and operation of a business” are economic activities and that “a reporting requirement for entities engaged in these economic activities falls within ‘more than a century of the Supreme Court’s commerce clause jurisprudence.’”
A different three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit later reversed course, blocking the law while an appeal moved forward. Arguments before the Fifth Circuit are scheduled for late March.
This appears to be some weird shit going down. I'm not sure why the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit got two bites at this apple.
One of the core arguments it's too expensive, but this is free. The money is being spent on concealing ownership. Revealing this is free.
And initial claims rose slightly and continuing claims rose more:
The number of Americans on benefit rolls climbed to a more than three-year high, while first-time applications for US unemployment insurance edged slightly higher.
Continuing claims, a proxy for people who are already receiving benefits and still can’t find a job, jumped to 1.9 million in the week ended Jan. 11, the highest since November 2021, according to Labor Department data released Thursday. Initial claims increased by 6,000 to 223,000 last week.
The continuing claims were 1.86M last week, and 4-week moving average rose slightly to 213,500.
As an aside because of the California fires, it appears that we are not getting accurate data from the Golden State in addition to the disaster causing significant dislocations.
Most people probably don't realize how bad news China's Deepseek is for OpenAI.
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) January 21, 2025
They've come up with a model that matches and even exceeds OpenAI's latest model o1 on various benchmarks, and they're charging just 3% of the price.
It's essentially as if someone had released a… pic.twitter.com/aGSS5woawF
It turns out that the basic programming required to generated shitty overgrown Eliza programs is not a uniquely American skill.
Over in China, Deepseek has released an "AI" that is largely open source, and the paid part of it costs 3% of what OpenAI charges.
Look out below:
On Monday, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released its new R1 model family under an open MIT license, with its largest version containing 671 billion parameters. The company claims the model performs at levels comparable to OpenAI's o1 simulated reasoning (SR) model on several math and coding benchmarks.
Alongside the release of the main DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1 models, DeepSeek published six smaller "DeepSeek-R1-Distill" versions ranging from 1.5 billion to 70 billion parameters. These distilled models are based on existing open source architectures like Qwen and Llama, trained using data generated from the full R1 model. The smallest version can run on a laptop, while the full model requires far more substantial computing resources.
The releases immediately caught the attention of the AI community because most existing open-weights models—which can often be run and fine-tuned on local hardware—have lagged behind proprietary models like OpenAI's o1 in so-called reasoning benchmarks. Having these capabilities available in an MIT-licensed model that anyone can study, modify, or use commercially potentially marks a shift in what's possible with publicly available AI models.
The US AI industry, and Sam Altman in particular, have been selling the idea that AI is hard and expensive.
That's why Altman has been saying that OpenAI needs a TRILLION dollars in capital.
It looks to me like the Chinese have come up with something better, faster, and cheaper.
It looks like the VCs won't have time to sell their stakes to the rubes before it all comes crashing down.
Heh.
So, Number 10 has forced out the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority because we was too diligent in protecting competition.
Bad politics and worse policy:
Ministers have forced out the chair of the UK Competition and Markets Authority, as the government seeks to dial back regulation as part of Labour’s growth agenda.
The government confirmed the departure of Marcus Bokkerink as chair of the CMA on Tuesday evening, after the Financial Times reported that business secretary Jonathan Reynolds had intervened at the agency.
The Department for Business and Trade made clear to Bokkerink on Monday that it felt the regulator was not sufficiently focused on growth, according to one government figure.
Bokkerink, a former managing director at Boston Consulting Group, was appointed in 2022. CMA chairs can serve up to a five-year term.
The government has appointed Doug Gurr as new interim chair of the CMA.
Gurr ran Amazon’s UK business during the company’s tussle with the CMA over its minority investment in Deliveroo, which the regulator ultimately approved in 2020. He is currently director of the Natural History Museum in London.
Reynolds said in a statement that the government had a “plan for change” that would boost growth for businesses and communities across the UK.
“We want to see regulators including the CMA supercharging the economy with pro-business decisions that will drive prosperity and growth, putting more money in people’s pockets,” he added.
No it won't.
One need only look at Amazon, which has used its monopoly power to extract rents from small businesses and their customers..
They have appointed a fox to guard the hen house in the hope that they will get more eggs.
Not gonna happen.
It appears that what used to be called the "Tiffany Network" is looking at capitulating to a bogus Trump lawsuit in order to bribe him to approve a merger with a company owned by one of Larry Ellison's kids.
Paramount Global executives have held internal discussions about settling a lawsuit filed by Donald Trump over a CBS News interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, according to people familiar with the situation, a sign of larger efforts to dial down tensions with the incoming president.
Paramount, owner of CBS, its namesake studio and several cable channels, has a major piece of business in front of the new administration: its planned merger with Skydance Media. It’s become clear to executives at both companies that Trump’s dissatisfaction with CBS News will make the review tougher than they anticipated, and that they’ll likely need to offer concessions to win approval, people familiar with the situation said.
………Trump’s lawsuit against CBS, which seeks $10 billion in damages, alleges that the network committed election interference by editing portions of an interview with Harris, favoring her campaign for president. Trump claimed CBS aired one version of the interview on “60 Minutes” and another version on its show “Face the Nation,” each containing different answers about Israel. CBS has said it aired a more succinct version of Harris’s interview on “60 Minutes.”
This is a bribe, and CBS executives know that it is a bribe, and they don't give a fuck.
………
Skydance is run by David Ellison, the son of billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who has a good relationship with Trump. Under the terms of the deal, Skydance and its investors agreed to spend more than $8 billion to acquire control of Paramount from media heiress Shari Redstone and merge it with Skydance. A person close to Skydance said David Ellison would support measures to promote unbiased journalism.
If you believe that, I have some swampland in Florida for you.
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/17/24346279/cbs-paramount-trump-merger-lawsuit
So after months of accusations, the various European and American intelligence agencies are saying that the damage to communications cables in the Baltic are the result of accidents.
Gee, who could have seen that coming!
Ruptures of undersea cables that have rattled European security officials in recent months were likely the result of maritime accidents rather than Russian sabotage, according to several U.S. and European intelligence officials.
The determination reflects an emerging consensus among U.S. and European security services, according to senior officials from three countries involved in ongoing investigations of a string of incidents in which critical seabed energy and communications lines have been severed.
The cases raised suspicion that Russia was targeting undersea infrastructure as part of a broader campaign of hybrid attacks across Europe, and prompted stepped-up security measures including an announcement last week that NATO would launch new patrol and surveillance operations in the Baltic Sea.
But so far, officials said, investigations involving the United States and a half-dozen European security services have turned up no indication that commercial ships suspected of dragging anchors across seabed systems did so intentionally or at the direction of Moscow.
So, the problem seems to be the greedy and negligent ship owners, like the ones who knocked over a bridge in my town, aren't Russian moles?
They are just corrupt capitalists?
The problem is deeper than Russian rat-fuckery. It's that shipping is dedicated to socializing the negative consequences of their ineptitude and malice while privatizing the profits that result.
Maybe if we started arrested shipping executives whose chronically under maintained ships and chronically under trained crews do this, we would see a change in behavior.
I did Nazi that coming.Do not give to them.
We've know that their CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, is a complete prat, after all, he unironically compared Elon Musk to notorious antisemite Henry Ford as a compliment, and decided that the ADL would resume advertising on Ecch (Twitter).
And now, he and his organization are making excuses for Elon Musk's Nazi salute at the inauguration yesterday.
Some things that you need to know:
The fact that the ADL is still trying to suck suck up to His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Doctor Elon Musk, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Texas in Particular.
He knew what he was doing:
Of all the dark moments during Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday, the darkest may have been the moment Trump acolyte and world’s richest man Elon Musk threw up not one but two Roman salutes—the gesture most strongly associated with Nazis and the phrase “Heil Hitler,” but also used as a symbol of support in other fascist regimes. The gesture was shocking, and observers from the left to the racist right alike agreed on what they saw. Neo-Nazis cheered. (“Holy crap … did Elon Musk just Heil Hitler at the Trump Inauguration Rally in Washington DC … This is incredible,” one prominent Holocaust denier wrote, later adding, “We are so back.”) Moderates and liberals were shaken.
All good people should have been shaken, regardless of political bent.
Again, I note: the Romans NEVER used this salute.
One group, though, was unbothered: The Anti-Defamation League, which has as its mission fighting antisemitism and bigotry more broadly.
“It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge,” the ADL posted on the Musk-owned X. “In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath. This is a new beginning. Let’s hope for healing and work toward unity in the months and years ahead.”
………
Perhaps Musk wasn’t throwing up a deliberate sieg heil; he is notoriously physically awkward, throwing his limbs around in ways that are often outside of the normal range of human movement. But Musk has made a series of public posts and comments that make it awfully hard to conclude he doesn’t actually harbor racist and antisemitic views, and that should at the very least make groups like the ADL think twice before extending the benefit of the doubt. He is loudly supporting a German far-right party with connections to neo-Nazis. He changed his X avatar to Pepe the Frog, a symbol of far-right racism and antisemitism. After violent anti-immigrant riots rocked the U.K. last summer, Musk sided with the rioters: He has been a vocal supporter of the British far-right hatemonger Tommy Robinson, and was incensed by the seven-year jail sentence handed down to a man who posted an image of a map with a mosque circled in red and the caption “TIME FOR WAR”—a post found to have incited some of the riots. (The mosque was indeed attacked; “we started the southport and liverpool riots, all it took was a telegram and a tiktok account,” the man wrote.) In 2023, after Musk allowed white supremacists to run rampant on his newly acquired social media platform, one X user posted: “Jewish communties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much. You want truth said to your face, there it is.” Musk responded, “You have said the actual truth.”
Elon Musk is a bigot, and more specifically, he is an antisemite. He has already shown us this, and the ADL is still sucking up to him.
Do not make donations to the ADL. Refuse to talk to their fund raisers.
At a minimum Jonathan Greenblatt and the rest of his cronies should be fired ……… out of a cannon ……… and into the sun.
You had one job, motherfuckers.
1,500 traitors pardoned, an executive order attempting to overturn the 14th amendment, etc.
So, no blogging tonight. I cannot muster up the energy
Posted via mobile.
The Federal Trade Commission has sued John Deere for monopolizing repair of their tractors.
I wish that this had happened 3 years ago:
America's top consumer watchdog has sued tractor maker John Deere for monopolizing tech repair services for its machinery, though whether the lawsuit will survive the pending presidential transition remains to be seen.
With just days until Biden leaves office, and the Democrat-led FTC cedes control to Republicans under President-elect Trump, the federal regulator has decided to file suit against Deere over what it said is decades of unlawful practices that have driven up repair costs and caused losses for farmers left without the ability to repair equipment in a timely manner. The FTC was joined in filing the complaint by the states of Minnesota and Illinois; the suit was filed in the latter.
"Deere's unlawful practices have limited the ability of farmers and independent repair providers to repair Deere equipment, forcing farmers to instead rely on Deere's network of authorized dealers for necessary repairs," the FTC said in a statement. "This unfair steering practice has boosted Deere's multi-billion-dollar profits on agricultural equipment and parts."
The specifics of the complaint [PDF] will look familiar to anyone who has followed the years-long saga of repairability groups, farmers, and the federal government to force Deere to open its tractors, combines, and other farm equipment to repair by third parties and device owners.
Right move, but too late.
Filed under, "When did The New Republic stop being lame right wing faux Democrats?"*
They are suggesting that they should make Trump actually do the hard work that is a part of the job of the Presidency.
It's an interesting idea:
………This would easy for Democrats as well, because incompetence in the execution of governance is a core value of the Republican Party.
A second Trump era offers the opportunity for a change of course—a second reckoning of sorts. I think that Last is on to something when he suggests that Trump’s opposition should force him to “own every bad outcome that happens, anywhere in the world.” I’d actually take this a step further. Rather than exert so much energy trying to thrust Trump out of the presidency, liberals would be well served to spend their time thrusting the presidency upon Donald Trump. Instead of searching for illusory quick fixes for the existence of the Trump administration, start demanding the Trump administration fix everything quickly.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the sample size of one Trump presidency and his four years out of power, it’s that Trump is a bog-standard rich white guy whom the justice system is largely incapable of bringing to heel. He has powerful friends (oligarchs, Supreme Court justices), deep pockets, and a well-tempered ability to joust in the media. By now we’ve watched ol’ Donny “wriggle out of this one” on multiple occasions; he seems to thrive if you put him at the center of something he can deem to be a witch hunt—even when those hunters bag their quarry, as prosecutors did in his hush-money case.
But Trump has historically faltered when he’s been forced to contend with the actual pressure of the presidency and its myriad responsibilities (see also: the Covid-19 pandemic) because his ideas are bad and he doesn’t have a deep and abiding interest in public service to really make a sustained effort to confront, let alone solve, the biggest problems we face.
………
To get there, liberals need to get into the business of identifying the problems that real Americans face (which honestly, is something they could stand to relearn how to do) and more forcefully blame Trump for those problems’ continued existence. They need to raise a hue and cry over everything under the sun that’s broken, dysfunctional, or trending in the wrong direction; pile line items on Trump’s to-do list, wake him up early and keep him up late. Every day, get in front of cable news cameras and reporters’ notepads with a new problem for Trump to solve and fresh complaints about the work not done.
It's a tactic that is straightforward, low risk, and high reward, and is likely to succeed.
These are the reasons why Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) will never do this.
It appears that serial fraudster Vivek Ramaswamy will not be running DOGE with Elon Musk.
My guess is that Musk, as he has in literally every other project that he has ever worked on, was unwilling to share authority:
Vivek Ramaswamy plans to bail on President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to focus on his ambitions to become Governor of Ohio, according to reports.
Sources close to the situation told CBS News that his counterpart at the newly-formed panel, billionaire Elon Musk, has undercut Ramaswamy for much of the last few weeks.
“Vivek has worn out his welcome,” a Trumpworld source told the network.
Musk does not play well with others.
By, "Old School," I mean bloodletting, the technique likely responsible for the death of George Washington.
To be fair, there are therapeutic uses for the procedure, such as the treatment of excessive levels of iron in the body, and, in this case, excessive levels of the PFAS family of chemicals in their systems.
These chemicals, popularly called, "Forever Chemicals," accumulate in the body for a very long time, and so the treatment is to repeatedly remove blood until the levels are low enough.
Rather unsurprisingly, the victims in this case are in New Jersey:
Residents of Jersey have been recommended bloodletting to reduce high concentrations of “forever chemicals” in their blood after tests showed some islanders have levels that can lead to health problems.
Private drinking water supplies in Jersey were polluted by the use of firefighting foams containing PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) at the island’s airport, which were manufactured by the US multinational 3M.
PFAS, a family of more than 10,000 chemicals, can build up in the body and are linked to conditions such as kidney and bladder cancer, thyroid disease and immune deficiency.
Bloodletting draws blood from a vein in measured amounts. It is safe and the body replenishes the blood naturally, but it must be repeated until clean.
“I just want this out of my body. I don’t want to end up with bladder cancer,” said Sarah Simon, one of 88 residents of the polluted area in whose blood tests found high levels of PFAS.………
Worried about their health as a result of the mains water findings, more than 100 residents outside the plume area had their blood independently tested. The unverified results showed that 57% had levels of PFHxS above US safety thresholds and 15% exceeded levels for PFOS. Many reported health problems they thought could be linked to PFAS exposure.
Everything old is new again, I guess.
In completely unsurprising news, Chrystia Freeland has announced her cnadadicy to replace Justin Trudeau as the leader of Canada's Liberal Party.
I am not suggesting that Ms. Freeland is a Nazi, but I am saying that she has been a Nazi apologists, particularly with regard to her grandfather, and NeoNazis in the Ukraine.
Her finger prints are all over the placing of Nazi collaborators names on the "Victims of Communism" Memorial, the ongoing coverup of the specifics of admitting Nazi collaborators to Canada following WWII, and the public plaudits given a Ukrainian Nazi SS member in Parliament on live TV.
She is not the front-runner, that would be former Mark Carney, the former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.
If someone from the Great White North can explain what this all means, please do so in the comments:
A former journalist turned senior government minister – who was dubbed a “nasty woman” by Donald Trump after bruising trade negotiations with the US – has announced that she will run for leadership of Canada’s ailing Liberal party.
Chrystia Freeland declared her intention to become the next Liberal leader – and the country’s next prime minister – on Friday with a post on social media, with plans for a formal campaign launch in Toronto on Sunday.
“I’m running to fight for Canada,” she wrote.
Freeland triggered the current leadership race by resigning as the country’s finance minister last month after clashing with the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, over how to handle the looming threat of US tariffs. Her stern rebuke of the prime minister came amid mounting calls for him to step aside. Weeks later, he resigned.
I am not sure how this will all shake out, and what the policy differences are between Freeland and Carney.
It is likely that whoever wins the leadership fight will not be Prime Minister for long. The polls indicate that the Conservative Party, and it's Neanderthal leader Pierre Poilievre will win the election that follows by a large margin.
In what must be the most unsurprising news since the MAGAts blamed everything
on diversity,
people are dumping their streaming services
after many rounds of price increases and massive reductions in their
libraries.
Streaming has been enshittifying as aggressively as any industry that have
ever seen.
Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we’ve noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV.
That has involved chasing pointless “growth of growth’s sake” megamergers and imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions — all while simultaneously cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.
Customers are reacting. According to Review’s annual State of Consumer Media Spending Report, the average American spent 23 percent less on streaming subscriptions in 2024 than in 2023. Not because streaming was cheaper, but because customers are being more particular about which streaming service they subscribe to in a bid to do something about soaring costs:
“A total 27.8% of Americans report experiencing “streaming fatigue,” defined as that exact feeling of being overwhelmed with the increasing number of streaming apps.”Here’s where Cory Doctorow’s enshittification truly steps in.
………
At which point the customer annoyance accelerates, free services like piracy become even more attractive, and the disruption/evolution cycle begins all over again.
Same as it ever was ………
Same as it ever was ………
Same as it ever was ………
Same as it ever was ………
In Germany, the home of sado-monetarism, small and medium company bankruptcies have hit the highest level since 2009.
Not good.
Germany recorded the highest number of company insolvencies since 2009 in the last quarter of last year, a study from the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) showed on Thursday, reflecting high interest rates and increased prices.
The fourth quarter of 2024 saw 4,215 company insolvencies with almost 38,000 jobs affected, according to the study, a level unseen since the financial crisis in mid-2009.
Compared with the fourth quarter of 2023, the number of insolvencies at the end of last year rose by 36%, as calculated by IWH.
The institute attributes the negative development only partly to the current economic crisis and increases in the cost of energy and wages."Years of extremely low interest rates have prevented insolvencies, and during the pandemic, insolvencies have failed to materialize due to subsidies such as short-time work benefits," said Steffen Mueller, head of insolvencies research at IWH.
Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night.
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A member of the Democratic wing of the Democratic party, and a fan of Bernie who thinks Neoliberal (DLC/New Dem) trickle down conomics sucks.Mechanical Engineer with a background in defense, electronics packaging, medical & food equipment, transportation, and manufacturing.
In my spare time (Hah!), I am the developer of the Firefox addon, bbCode for Web Extensions (bbCodeWebEx).
I have two cats, a black cat, and a gray and white long hair cat, who keep me on my toes. (Because he keeps attacking my feet)
I am a Jew and a Zionist, who is married to a woman with exquisitely bad taste in men, and I have two remarkable children with her.
