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.

Headline of the Day

We Should, in Fact, Politicize the Tragedy

—Olga Khazan at The Atlantic, discussing the Camp Mystic flood tragedy in Texas.

The subjead is, "Holding people and policies accountable for disasters is essential," really says it all.

When people f%$# up like this, they should be held accountable, whether they are represent Kerr County, whose government refused money to upgrade their warning systems, the state Texas for their slow response, and Kristi Noem for refusing to approve money for FEMA to act until she came back for her weekend.

These are failures who should be held accountable.

As much as it pains me to quote The Atlantic, which has made its brand mindless contrarianism and unintelligible pseudo-intellectual arguments in service of the status quo, I am doing so because it gives me the opportunity to slam the magazine yet again.

You see, if you look at what is shown at the top of the web page, it's not the headline above, it's, "Who's to blame for the Camp Mystic Disaster?"

That means that if you look this up on any of the search engines, you will see it called by the latter, which pretends to be an both sides headline, when in fact the article (which you should read at this link, it makes good points, which will not generate any money for the magazine) is condemning the calls made by self-serving politicians for people to ignore their own misfeasance.

The wanking at The Atlantic continues. 

The New York Shooting Gets Weirder and Gets a Bit Surreal

It appears that the shooter was targeting the National Football League over some grievance about the disgraceful actions of the league regarding chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is odd, since the gunman never played in the NFL

He got into the wrong elevator, and ended up on the wrong floor, and started shooting.

The gunman who killed four people and himself at a Midtown Manhattan tower on Monday was targeting the National Football League’s office, but ended up on the floor of another company by mistake, according to two senior law enforcement officers.

Instead of going to the NFL’s fifth-story office at 345 Park Avenue, he picked the elevator bank that took him to building owner Rudin Management’s office on the 33rd floor, the officers said. That’s where the body of the shooter, believed to be Shane Tamura, a 27-year-old who last resided in Las Vegas, was found with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Here comes the surreal bit, one of the victims was the chief executive of the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust Wesley LePatner, who has been instrumental in hiking rents around the nation. (I mean her personally, not just Blackstone in general)

This appears to be the f%$#ing universe going Luigi Mangione on a corrupt business executive:

Four people have been killed at 345 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan after a gunman entered the tower, which houses private equity manager Blackstone, as well as the NFL, real estate firm Rudin Management and KPMG, among others.

Among those killed by a lone gunman who was reportedly targeting the NFL, was Blackstone executive Wesley LePatner, 43, who was recently named chief executive of the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust (BREIT).

………

LePatner joined Blackstone in 2014, having previously worked at Goldman Sachs. She was global head of its core plus real estate business and CEO of BREIT, the firm’s $53bn non-traded real estate investment trust. She was appointed to the role in August of last year, ahead of the retirement of Frank Cohen, who she replaced in the position at the start of 2025.

I have on a number of occasions said semi-humerously that if you are going to engage in a workplace shooting, start with upper management.

It appears that the universe has listened. 

A few more of these, and we might start to see meaningful gun control legislation.

Lock Them Up Too

In news that should surprise no one, Jeffrey Epstein’s Birthday Book include a wide range of luminaries on all sides of the political and cultural divide.

Not a surprise.

Law enforcement should go Pokemon on them: 

The biggest name in Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book back in 2003 was a past president rather than a future one.

Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell was keen for Bill Clinton and other boldface names to submit letters for the special gift, according to people involved in putting it together.

In the end, she was successful. The leather-bound album—assembled before Epstein was first arrested in 2006—included a page with a single paragraph in Clinton’s distinctive scrawl:

……… 

The former president was among around five dozen people, including Donald Trump, Wall Street billionaire Leon Black, fashion designer Vera Wang and media owner Mort Zuckerman, who ended up with letters in the 2003 book, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. 

………

Clinton and Trump were listed under the “Friends” group, along with about 20 other associates such as Black, Zuckerman, former Victoria’s Secret leader Leslie Wexner, attorney Alan Dershowitz, U.K. politician Peter Mandelson and the late Jean-Luc Brunel, who ran a modeling agency. 

Brunel later committed suicide after being arrested for raping minors.

I see a pattern.  Not raping kids, but the pattern of elite impunity.

I came across this yesterday, and it was too juicy to wait for Epstein Monday to write about it. 

This Couldn't Happen Soon Enough

It looks like he DeBeers diamond cartel is on its last legs.

Between the increased output of gem quality manufactured diamonds, and the increasing demands by African nations to control their own diamond output, and get the money derived from the diamond trade, it looks like its death grip on the diamond market may be coming to an end.

To the degree that their neocolonial economic reign of terror ends, everyone, except of course for DeBeers, will be the better for it:

For over a hundred years, DeBeers has dominated and controlled the global diamond trade.

But today, Chinese factories are mass-producing lab-grown diamonds, which are chemically identical to natural stones, and prices are collapsing worldwide for both man-made and natural diamonds.

DeBeers sources most of their rough diamonds from mines in Botswana, and the new government there is determined to move DeBeers' value chains to Botswana itself, thereby retaining billions of dollars in industry revenues in-country.

Anglo-American is DeBeers' parent company, and they are trying to divest their holdings. But even after writing off $4.5 billion in book value in two years, no buyers can be found.  

The diamond industry has been a racket for over a century, with monopolists, primarily DeBeers, creating artificial scarcities to drive up the price.

For me, I'm not that concerned much about diamonds as gems, but I am interested the potential lab-grown diamonds as a heat sink material.  (Diamonds are the world's most thermally conductive substance as well as being an electrical insulator, which makes their engineering applications very interesting)

The real issue here is that DeBeers stole the wealth of (largely) African nations and kept it for themselves for many decases, and not this looks to end. 

Good

As the reader(s) of the blog know, I think that IP protections are far too expansive, and now are little more than an exercise in corrupt rent seeking.

As the reader(s) of the blog also know, I think that LLM AI's are complete hokum, and will never be more than an overgrown Eliza program. (It may make our lives when we phone in to tech support more miserable, but that's not going to change the world.)

Also, I have profoundly mixed emotions regarding the claims by copyright holders that training Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence on copyrighted works is an infringement of their exclusive licenses.

On one hand, it seems to me that learning from a copyrighted work is allowed, on the other hand, calling what AI does, "Learning," seems to be to be a bit of a stretch.

That being said, it appears that Anthropic, which claims to be the "Ethical" AI, appears to have been training its system on pirated books.

The judge has ruled that this IS copyright infringement, as it would be for a human being, and as such, Anthropic could be liable for billions of dollars in damages because of the extremely high (IMNSHO excessively high) statutory damages.

I am amused:

Anthropic, the AI startup that’s long presented itself as the industry’s safe and ethical choice, is now facing legal penalties that could bankrupt the company. Damages resulting from its mass use of pirated books would likely exceed a billion dollars, with the statutory maximum stretching into the hundreds of billions.

Last week, William Alsup, a federal judge in San Francisco, certified a class action lawsuit against Anthropic on behalf of nearly every US book author whose works were copied to build the company’s AI models. This is the first time a US court has allowed a class action of this kind to proceed in the context of generative AI training, putting Anthropic on a path toward paying damages that could ruin the company.

The judge ruled last month, in essence, that Anthropic's use of pirated books had violated copyright law, leaving it to a jury to decide how much the company owes for these violations. That number increases dramatically if the case proceeds as a class action, putting Anthropic on the hook for a vast number of books beyond those produced by the plaintiffs.

………

Just a month ago, Anthropic and the rest of the industry were celebrating what looked like a landmark victory. Alsup had ruled that using copyrighted books to train an AI model — so long as the books were lawfully acquired — was protected as “fair use.” This was the legal shield the AI industry has been banking on, and it would have let Anthropic, OpenAI, and others off the hook for the core act of model training.

But Alsup split a very fine hair. In the same ruling, he found that Anthropic’s wholesale downloading and storage of millions of pirated books — via infamous “pirate libraries” like LibGen and PiLiMi — was not covered by fair use at all. In other words: training on lawfully acquired books is one thing, but stockpiling a central library of stolen copies is classic copyright infringement.

Statutory damages are $150,000.00 per book.  While I find this level excessive, see my comments above on , "Rent seeking," this would add up to over $750,000,000,000.00 in damages, which would likely bankrupt the company.

Well, that's going to put a kink in their $100,000,000,000.00+ valuation. 

Personally, I would prefer that the jury seize their entire training set in lieu of such a fine, but I am unclear on the law on this matter.

Quote of the Day

Well We’re Now in the Sandpaper Condom Period of “Ride Sharing”, Where Investors Earn Back Their Investment by Hurting Everyone Else.

—Ian Welsh, discussing the predatory, monopolistic, and outright criminal business model of Uper and Lyft

Their model always was to use huge amounts of money to subsidize the service, drive cab companies out of business, and then jack up prices.

Now these services cost more than taxis, pay their drivers less, and are finally making a profit. 

Uber started in 2009. It incurred losses every year until 2023 except for a profit in 2019 which was due to selling subsidiaries in various countries. Numbers before the IPO are difficult to obtain, but it lost 31.5 billion from 2016 to 2022. Let’s assume a loss of equal to funding during the pre-IPO period, so 24.7 billion. This seems reasonable, since Uber never made a profit during the period.

So we’ll estimate Uber’s total losses at 86.2 billion from 2009-2022.

In 2023 Uber made a profit of 1.9 billion and in 2024 it made a profit of a little under ten billion. Prices for rides on Uber are between ten to twenty percent higher than taxi rides, rising to as much as 50% higher during surge pricing periods (when there’s the most demand.) Driver’s on average, get paid less than taxi drivers used to.

So–the workers get less, the customers pay more.

………

Everyone knew this was the play, and that people were getting subsidized rides now (Uber was much cheaper than taxis in the early years) in exchange for getting fucked over later. Well we’re now in the sandpaper condom period of “ride sharing”, where investors earn back their investment by hurting everyone else.

This should never have been allowed. Uber and Lyft violated massive numbers of laws and were just allowed to do so thru non-enforcement. The end result was obvious and it’s here now: worse wages, higher prices and less ability to regulate the industry.

This is one of the prominent models in Silly-Con Valley, which is why I have always advocated for prosecutions against both the founders and the funders of these sorts of companies.  They are engaging in securities fraud, and violations of anti-trust law.  (That's to say nothing of the Taxicab regulations violated by the Gypsy cab companies)

We need to start arresting these folks. 

The World Has Become a Slightly Better Place

Because Terry Bollea has died at the age of 81.

He is probably better known by his stage name, Hulk Hogan.

A face (hero) inside the ring, and a heel outside of the ring, who colluded with literal vampire Peter Thiel to destroy Gawker, narked on unionization efforts in pro wrestling to Vince McMahon, and was caught spewing racist rants on video

………

Reports of Bollea's poor health were first circulated by the radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge Clem. Followers of Bollea's post-wrestling career will recall that Clem and Bollea were once good friends and sometimes appeared together on Clem's Tampa-area radio show. In 2012, the two made headlines when Gawker reported that Clem had recorded a clandestine video of his wife, Heather, having sex with Bollea. A separate recording that became public years later captured Bollea making vile and racist remarks while in conversation with Heather.

Can I say here that any scandal involving, "Bubba the Love Sponge Clem," is going to appeal to me

Gawker published short edited clips from the video, and Bollea, backed financially by vampiric futurist freak Peter Thiel, sued Gawker's parent company for $100 million. A hometown Florida jury ruled in Bollea's favor. The fallout of this lawsuit led inexorably to the destruction of Gawker Media, the eventual rise of Jim Spanfeller as a cut-rate villain of the final chapter of the blog era, and, well, the establishment of this very website.

Bollea eventually seated himself, unsurprisingly, as a champion of Donald Trump's MAGA movement. He also managed the neat trick of retaining enough general public goodwill from his early wrestling days that it has rarely been considered particularly controversial or damaging to one's reputation to express ongoing affection for his Hulk Hogan character, despite all that has been learned about the performer. That is not to say that his shtick worked on everyone: At his final WWE appearance, at a Monday Night Raw event back in January, Bollea, in his Hogan character, was booed relentlessly by a Los Angeles crowd. But in a sign of his cultural resilience, and the broad mainstream acceptance of ideas and behaviors that a saner society might otherwise consider grounds for literal exile, he was then invited onto ESPN's most popular show to talk about the experience with the network's most prominent media personality.

Fundamentally, if Hulk Hogan had never existed, someone else would have been the face, and maybe they wouldn't have been Thiel's stooge and wouldn't have betrayed unionization efforts. 

Privilege Much?

One of the secrets of Harvard is that within the academic community, the undergraduate program is considered rather mediocre.

I heard this from my step-mom (Radcliffe, 1956, and former college president), economist Brad Delong, and a number of my step-mom's acquaintances.

What Harvard sells, as are the connections created.  You graduate from Harvard, and you are something akin to a Mafia, :Made Man."

What the school is selling is entry into a social set. 

So it comes as no surprise that the university's admissions data indicate a tremendous amount of "White Boy Affirmative Action" for alums, donors, and the like.

Harvard University is a notoriously tough school to get into, with an acceptance rate of just 4.5% in the most recent admissions cycle for the class of 2023. But it’s significantly easier to land a spot at the esteemed Ivy League institution if you’re a legacy student or an athlete—a fact that disproportionately benefits white applicants.

A new study notes that in the six admissions cycles between 2014 and 2019, 43% of white students admitted to Harvard were either legacies, recruited athletes, children of faculty and staff, or students on the Dean’s Interest List—a list of applicants whose relatives have donated to Harvard, the existence of which only became public knowledge in 2018. By contrast, no more than 16% of admitted students who were African-American, Asian-American, or Hispanic fell into one of those favored categories.………

It’s not news that elite institutions like Harvard give special dispensation to athletic recruits and to applicants whose relatives have a relationship with the schools, whether as alumni or donors. The Wall Street Journal reports that over the past five years, Princeton University admitted 30% of its legacy applicants, compared to 7% of the general applicant pool, while the acceptance rate for legacies at the University of Notre Dame, Georgetown University, and the University of Virginia is roughly double the rate for the overall applicant pool. 

………

The newly revealed statistics on legacies and athletes are a reminder that inequality in the Ivy League isn’t an accident; it’s by design.

 Indeed.

Headline of the Day

The US Makes Most Compelling Case for Nuclear Proliferation

—The Left Chapter on why US foreign policy makes the development of nuclear weapons by non-nuclear power more likely.

Hell, overthrowing Qaddafi about 2 years after he gave up his WMD programs (Thanks, Hillary and Barack) was an abject lesson to the DPRK and Iran that security comes from developing nuclear weapons, not eschewing them.

The atomic bomb has been humanity’s most dangerous creation; that the United States government used the atom bomb twice against Japan’s civilians in August 1945 can neither be forgiven nor forgotten. It is fitting that one of the first acts of the United Nations in January 1946 was establishing a commission to deal with the ‘Problems Raised by the Discovery of Atomic Energy’. Yet, the resolution did not ban atomic weapons but simply sought to study its ‘problems’. Even after the grotesque demonstration in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States government was reluctant to permit the abolition of nuclear bombs. Having opened the doorway to Hell, there was no real desire to close it.

Creating the first major United Nations treaty to tackle atomic weapons took two decades. More importantly, the treaty did not ban nuclear weapons. While preventing further proliferation, it, nonetheless, allowed the then-nuclear powers—the United States (1945), the Soviet Union (1949), the United Kingdom (1952), France (1960), and China (1964)—to keep their nuclear arsenal. When the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) came into force in 1968, Israel likely had nuclear weapons (1967). Thereafter, despite the NPT, India (1974), Pakistan (1998), and North Korea (2006) developed and tested nuclear weapons. Of all these countries, only North Korea has been pressured to de-nuclearize by the United States and its allies. If it has refused, it is because denuclearising would lead to its annihilation.

………

For a rational person, the example of Libya and North Korea sends out a very clear message: developing nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them are the most effective deterrent. In fact, each stage in the development of North Korea’s nuclear program was precipitated by the US stalling in the peace process or failing to carry out its promises for peace and security made to North Korea. In effect, North Korea’s two-track process allowed it to pursue its security through the diplomatic path when possible and through nuclear deterrence when necessary.

Take a look at US regime change actions over the last century, it's on the Wiki, and it's horrifying.

Destroying countries and freedom for the benefit of Chiquita and big oil. 

Gee, Corruption Much?

It appears that Texas Attorney General, and indicted fraudster, Ken Paxton claimed 3 different houses as is primary residence in mortgage documents.

I would note that Baltimore City States Attorney Carolyn Mosby was convicted of similar fraud.

Is anything going to happen?  Probably not.

After all, we know that Paxton has used his position as Texas AG to avoid trial on his fraud charges:

Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas and his now-estranged wife, Angela, declared three separate Texas homes as their primary residence in mortgage documents, according to records obtained by The New York Times.

The possible misrepresentation could have allowed the couple to secure more favorable loan terms and save hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The issue, first reported by The Associated Press, emerged on Thursday, two weeks after his wife, a state senator, filed for divorce, accusing him of adultery, and a little more than three months after Mr. Paxton announced that he would challenge Senator John Cornyn in what could be the Republican primary season’s toughest, most expensive race in 2026.

………

The Paxtons reside in a home worth more than $1 million in McKinney, a suburb of Dallas, according to their voter registration records. That house is in the State Senate district that Ms. Paxton represents and the one Mr. Paxton represented as a state senator before he was elected attorney general in 2014.

The couple also holds mortgages on two houses in Austin, each of which they also called their primary address. Those houses appear to be rental properties, based on online listings. Mr. Paxton has disclosed rental income from two Austin sources on his financial disclosure documents.

Yeah, this seems to be straight up fraud.

Nothing to see here, move along. 

Once again, I feel compelled to ask if we could give Texas back to Mexico. 

If Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day, Let's Have Monday be Jeffrey Epstein Day

I'm consuming a whole bunch of stuff about L'Affaire Epstein, I've saved about 20 links, and I have decided that I need to have a regular day to update this, and today is as good a day as any.

First, I want to lead with Trump's bizarre explanation as to why he and Epstein ended their friendship, he is saying that Epstein poached his employees.  

Bullsh%$.  It was a dispute over a real estate deal, which reported extensively at the time.

Note that this is from 2016

BTW, things have to be seriously insane if Luke "Uncle Luke" of 2 Live Crew says that he bailed on a Trump party because there there were underage girls and too many drugs at the at said bash. 

That is a serious Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment. 

BTW, the WSJ,  which has been all over this story, is reporting that Pam Bondi told Donald Trump that his name was all over the Epstein files,

I've already mentioned that Mike "Tiny Johnson" Johnson adjourned the House of Representatives in an attempt to prevent a vote on releasing the Epstein Files, but he was not fast enough, because subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has voted to subpoena Ghisland Maxwell and question her about the Epstein matter.

Oh, snap! 

Meanwhile, Michael Wolff continues to supply us with salacious revelations about Trump, such as Epstein's testimony about Trump's proclivity to f%$# his friends' wives, but this IMHO is not really important.

What is important though are the calls for the Department of Justice to follow Epstein's money.  In particular, Senator Ron Widen (D-OR) has been pressuring the DoJ to investigate this.

To this day, the public does not know how Epstein made his money. 

Meanwhile, in furtherance of a Trump coverup, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was also Donald Trump's boutique defense attorney until his appointment, is interviewing Ghislane Maxwell and has granted her use immunity for whatever she says.

This means that she cannot be directly prosecuted for what she says, though she could be prosecuted if crimes are determined by another avenue.

It seems to me likely that Blanche will attempt to pressure to lie about Trump and Epstein.

Busy week. 

(On Edit)

Forgot to add, it looks like the FBI put somewhere around 1,000 agents on going through Epstein court documents looking for references to Donald Trump. likely with an eye to suppressing or redacting these these documents.

Gee, corruption much? 

Linkage

• Reviving Europe's historical scents—including 'the smell of hell' (Phys.org) There is a library of scents called, "ODEUROPA," it's fascinating.
• A knockout blow for LLMs? (Marcus on AI) AI model collapse.  It's the rule, not the exception.
• The Water Cooler Giant Primo Brands: When Customer Service Signs Off as 'Joseph Stalin' (Big by Matt Stoller) They are a monopoly and they don't give a sh%$.
• In 1979, A Deep-Sea Mining Experiment Carved Up The Seabed. 44 Years On, We're Finding Out Its Impacts (IFLScience) Spoiler, it's still messed up.  Not a surprise.  Roman mines in Spain are still leaching toxins into the surrounding environment.
• Elon Musk Has Somehow Created a Bad Diner (Discourse Blog) Of course he did.  He does this with everything.
• ICE Prosecutor in Dallas Runs White Supremacist X Account (Texas Observer) Of course he is.
• Ryan Walters' TV displayed "nude women" during a meeting. Now he's blaming the media. (The Friendly Atheist) Mr. Walters is the Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction, and he wants to put as bible in every classroom.  Christo-Fascist family values, neh?
• Trump Is Trying to Hide the Cost of Renovating His New Air Force One  (Rolling Stone) Remember, this Emerati airliner is going back with Trump when he leaves office.
• Echelon kills smart home gym equipment offline capabilities with update (Ars Technica) You'll own nothing and be happy.  They pushed an "Update" removing functionality and requiring connection to their servers to function.  How this is not a malicious hack is beyond me.

How Venezuela, the Weimar Republic and Zimbabwe prove MMT is true:

Competition Helps Consumers

Hence the decision by Comcast to drop data caps in areas where community fiber and 5G wireless.

Gee who could have imagined that?

I dunno, every single student taking Economics 101 everywhere in the world?

Techdirt has always made it very clear that broadband usage caps on fixed-line broadband are bullsh%$t. [%$# mine]

The costly and confusing restrictions serve no legitimate technical function. They don’t help your ISP “manage congestion.” They exist simply as a way for giant companies like Comcast to nickel-and-dime captive customers in uncompetitive broadband markets. Market failure created by their own tireless efforts to kill competition and government oversight.

But there’s been a small wrinkle over the last few years. Trying to gain market share, wireless giants have been offering home 5G wireless connection for lower prices. We’ve also been seeing a rise in community-owned broadband networks and cooperatives offering cheaper gigabit fiber. The combination has resulted in Comcast losing a growing number of broadband subscribers in some markets.

So Comcast is trying something new. They’re retreating from broadband caps on the new service tiers being offered new customers. According to a press release, they’re offering to eliminate usage caps for new users who sign up for four new tiers of service: 

“Following the successful launch and positive consumer reaction to Xfinity’s new 5-year guarantee, the nation’s largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) has launched its everyday pricing (EDP) structure with four simple national Internet tiers that include unlimited data and the advanced Xfinity WiFi Gateway for one low monthly price.”

There are caveats that make this walk-back less than it seems of course, because if they weren't f%$#ing with their customers, the would not be Comcast.

Petty and Evil

As you are no doubt aware, the Trump administration has cut off billions in foreign aid.

One of the particular cases is particularly egregious, they are going to pay taxpayer funds to destroy a warehouse full of contraception despite the fact that other countries and private organization offered to deliver this aid to the people need this.

They just hate women:

The Trump administration is set to destroy a large stockpile of U.S.-funded contraceptives stored at a warehouse in Belgium, which says it has “explored all possible options to prevent the destruction.”

The family-planning supplies, which include more than 50,000 intrauterine devices, nearly 2 million doses of injectable contraceptives, nearly 900,000 implantable contraceptive devices and more than 2 million packets of oral birth control, are worth about $9.7 million, according to an internal accounting in April, The Washington Post reported.

“The State Department confirms that a preliminary decision was made to destroy certain abortifacient birth control commodities from terminated Biden-era USAID contracts,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

“Only a limited number of commodities have been approved for disposal,” said the spokesperson, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the department. “No HIV medications or condoms are being destroyed.”

 

This is Why You Don't Do Bailouts

Gavin Newsom's bailout of PG&E following the Camp Fire in 2018, which created the California Wildfire Fund.

The alternative would have been bankruptcy and the likely public takeover of what is arguably one of the worst utilities in the nation.

Now, it looks like the damage from the Los Angeles fires could exhaust this fund.

This is what happens when you bail out a bad actor because they are, "Too big to fail." 

Insurance claims from the Eaton wildfire could “fully exhaust” a state fund that was set up to protect customers when a wildfire is caused by a utility company.

The devastating wildfire in Los Angeles killed 17 people and destroyed more than 9,000 structures in January. One leading theory is that ageing equipment belonging to Southern California Edison, the primary electricity provider in the region, ignited the fire.

If the utility company is found to have been responsible for igniting the devastating January blaze, then the “financial health of the fund could be strained”, according to documents published by California’s Catastrophe Response Council, a group of lawmakers and members of the public who oversee the state’s wildfire fund.

California lawmakers established the state’s $21bn wildfire fund in 2019 in an effort to prevent the state’s largest utility companies from declaring bankruptcy if their equipment caused a fire. The fund is made up of money the utility companies contribute and a surcharge on customers’ utility bills.

Power lines and other utility equipment are a top cause of wildfires in drought-ridden California – and have sparked some of the state’s most devastating blazes, including the 2018 Camp fire that killed more than 80 people. Although investigators are still determining the cause of the Eaton fire, the utility company has been under scrutiny since the blaze broke out.

(emphasis mine)

PG&E should have been liquidated, and its assets taken over by the state of California, or it should have been reconstituted as a customer owned utility.

It was bad politics and bad policy. 

Republican Family Values

Republican Texas State Representative Giovanni Capriglione has admitted that he had an affair with a stripper, but denied her allegations that he paid for an an abortion for her.

The kicker?  He wrote the Texas "Trigger Act" which made abortion a crime as soon as the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Hypocrisy much?

Three days after state Rep. Giovanni Capriglione announced he was dropping his reelection bid, the conservative news site Current Revolt published an interview with a former exotic dancer who alleges she had a 17-year affair with the Southlake Republican.

The woman, Alex Grace, alleges that Capriglione paid her for “meetups” and “funded several abortions for his own personal gain.” She declined to provide additional details on the alleged abortions in the interview, saying, “you’re just going to have to go with my word.”

Her interview with Current Revolt was captured in a 25-minute video published Friday.

In a statement, Capriglione admitted he’d had an affair “years ago”, but said the other allegations are “categorically false and easily disproven.” He added that he had “never, nor would I ever, pay for an abortion.”

………

In 2021, Capriglione carried the “trigger ban” that allowed Texas to ban nearly all abortions after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. As a result of that bill, performing an abortion in Texas is punishable by up to life in prison. Other laws supported by Capriglione made it a civil offense to “aid and abet” in a prohibited abortion, including paying for someone to terminate their pregnancy in Texas.

Bummer

 Tom Lehrer has died at age 97.

A Small Data-Set, But

The Tesla Cybertruck is statistically more dangerous than the 4-wheeled Ronson lighter known as the Ford Pinto.

It should be noted that this is a small sample size, only 5 incidents for the WankPanzer because it has not been on the road that long, and there are not too many on the road, so this could just be an outlier, but the numbers show that the Deplorean is about 15 times less safe than the Pinto: 

In its first year on the road, the Cybertruck ended up being tied to five fire fatalities through Jan. 1, a concerning trend that makes the rate of such fatalities higher than that of the notorious Ford Pinto, which was in production from 1970–80.

According to an analysis by auto news website Fuel Arc comparing the rate of fire fatalities in the Cybertruck's first year to that of the Ford Pinto during its life, the Cybertruck has a fatality rate 17 times of the problematic Pinto. Fuel Arc carried out its analysis by calculating the fire fatalities per 100,000 units, which was 14.5 for the Cybertruck compared to 0.85 for the Ford Pinto.

Of course, the number should be per mile driven, but that would make the numbers even more lopsided, since the Pinto was made for 10 years, and many remained on the roads for decades after production ended.

Elon Musk is to car design what Homer Simpson is to car design. 

Not a Fan, but

When Gavin Newsom's office calls Trump deportation Czar Steven Miller a "Fascist Cuck", I have to give credit where credit is due.

Well done. 

A "Criminal Enterprise", Huh?

Former New York City Police Commissioner Thomas Donlon has sued Mayor Eric Adams ran the NYPD as a corrupt criminal enterprise.

Yes, it's a RICO lawsuit.

Looking at the allegations, I'm not sure about the specifics, but it has been obvious to the casual observer that Adams' NYPD has been permeated by pervasive cronyism, and as such, corruption would be a logical consequence.

Certainly one of the allegations, that his wife was arrested and taken to the precinct for expired insurance, is true.  (As to whether it was retaliatory, that's for the jury to decide)

That Adams is a crook is also pretty obvious, which is why Trump was trying to blackmail him over his corruption trial:

Former NYPD Commissioner Thomas Donlon on Monday filed notice of his intention to file a $10 million lawsuit against Mayor Eric Adams and former Deputy Commissioner Tarik Sheppard after they suggested in recent days that he suffered from cognitive issues while running the department.

Since Wednesday, Sheppard, who served as Deputy Commissioner for Public Information under Donlon but has since left the department, told a number of media outlets that Donlon suffered from “cognitive issues” as commissioner.

………

The 251-page lawsuit detailed a host of alleged misconduct by the department’s leaders — who were close to Adams and, in Donlon’s words, woefully unqualified — including the promotion of NYPD members based on loyalty rather than merit, without Donlon’s required approval.

The lawsuit singles out Sheppard for allegedly promoting himself to a 3-star ranking without permission and threatening to kill Donlon at the New York City Marathon after they bumped one another during a photo op. 

………

Donlon’s notice of claim, which is a required filing ahead of a lawsuit, says the unsupported claims by Adams and Sheppard are further retaliation against a whistleblower.

“If the Mayor truly believed Mr. Donlon lacked the capacity to lead, appointing him as Senior Advisor for Public Safety would have been reckless and indefensible. Instead, these statements had a clear purpose — but not a lawful or legitimate one,” the notice of claim says. “They were made to discredit and silence a whistleblower.”

 But wait, there's more:

………

Donlon’s lawsuit comes a week after four former NYPD chiefs sued the city alleging they were retaliated against for reporting misconduct by top department officials.

Two of the chiefs said they were punished simply for investigating or identifying misconduct, while the others claim they were sidelined for complaining about the promotion or transfer of unqualified personnel to vital roles.

It seems to me that there is a pattern, so it's tough to dismiss this all as simply the ravings of a disgruntled former employee.

Headline of the Day

This Silicon Valley Stuff'll Get You Killed

—Edward Ongweso Jr on The Tech Bubble noting that Silly-Con Valley business plans actually kill people.

I've always felt that the Silly-Con Valley entrepreneurs would have been charged with fraud rather than presented as icons of capitalism if they did what they do during the 1960s and early 1970s.

He observes, IMNSHO honestly, that they do more than defraud people, they are responsible for a not inconsiderable number of deaths.

Feet of clay:

Most of my thinking on Silicon Valley—on its firms, its products, its financiers, its ideologues, its boosters, and its projects—rests on a relatively simple understanding: these people will sacrifice us.

My first experience witnessing this came when helping organize ride-hail drivers working for Uber and Lyft as well as talking with taxi drivers struggling to survive the ascent of these firms. These companies, in a desperate scramble for their first profits, brazenly ignored the law, misclassified and immiserated countless workers, pushed drivers into predatory leasing agreements, paid out starvation wages while dodging taxes and ensuring drivers were blocked from dignified working conditions, and countless more abhorrent practices.

Who cared if a few taxi drivers committed suicide because UberLyft’s predations degraded pay and labor conditions across the entire ride-hail sector, or if drivers were forced to sleep in their cars to meet aggressive quotas crafted to effectively lockout and fire workers (minimizing labor costs), or if they were attacked or robbed or killed on the job. So what? Were you going to complain on behalf of people who couldn’t adapt to the future, who made a bad choice in betting their livelihood on a line of work that should be Flexible and Temporary, who are lucky enough to get in early on “the operating system for your everyday life.”

Have things improved? Uber’s global lobbying and law breaking campaign was a resounding success—they’ve successfully degraded working conditions worldwide, convinced regulators that their specific model and structure is inevitable, integrated themselves into policy planning visions and decisions, and burned enough capital to create their desired markets and consumers and behaviors where they did not exist before.

………

Things have only gotten worse as Silicon Valley’s business model has metastasized, with oligarch-intellectuals poised to reorganize wider and wider swaths of our economy, culture, social relations, and politics. To maximize profits and efficiency and productivity, to purge capitalism of its last vestiges of democracy and liberalism, to transform speculative gains into real wealth then into political power that makes this alchemy easier, to discipline consumers and workers and regulators, to foster paranoia (whether by states or communities) and preserve order, to pursue geo-strategic primacy, to summon some artificial superintelligence that will either end history or realize historic profits, anything and everything will be offered up. Something has to give—the situation demands a blood sacrifice.

If it really demands a blood sacrifice, better that it is Musk, Andreeson, Zuckerberg, and the like rather than my children, or their (eventual) children.

Something to Confirm with My Computer Programmer Reader(s)

I was doing some programming/database work today, relatively simple stuff, basically a not very procedural report generator and cleaning up a database.

When I was done, I realized that I do not feel like myself when I have done this.

This is distinct from engineering problems, where, even if it is percolating through my head in the background for days, I still feel like me.

It takes about 2 hours before I feel like me again.

Anyone else have this experience. 

Not a Surprise

AI generated code quality
byu/lastwarriorpl inProgrammerHumor

Seems About Right

I am not at all surprised that a study has shown that AI tools made software development significantly slower.

Gee, hoocoodanode? 

When it comes to concrete use cases for large language models, AI companies love to point out the ways coders and software developers can use these models to increase their productivity and overall efficiency in creating computer code. However, a new randomized controlled trial has found that experienced open source coders became less efficient at coding-related tasks when they used current AI tools.

For their study, researchers at METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research) recruited 16 software developers, each with multiple years of experience working on specific open source repositories. The study followed these developers across 246 individual "tasks" involved with maintaining those repos, such as "bug fixes, features, and refactors that would normally be part of their regular work." For half of those tasks, the developers used AI tools like Cursor Pro or Anthropic's Claude; for the others, the programmers were instructed not to use AI assistance. Expected time forecasts for each task (made before the groupings were assigned) were used as a proxy to balance out the overall difficulty of the tasks in each experimental group, and the time needed to fix pull requests based on reviewer feedback was included in the overall assessment.

………

These factors lead the researchers to conclude that current AI coding tools may be particularly ill-suited to "settings with very high quality standards, or with many implicit requirements (e.g., relating to documentation, testing coverage, or linting/formatting) that take humans substantial time to learn." While those factors may not apply in "many realistic, economically relevant settings" involving simpler code bases, they could limit the impact of AI tools in this study and similar real-world situations.

Headline of the Day

“Crypto” Is Silicon Valley Speak for Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

—Dean Baker discussing the cryptocurrency bill going through Congress.

He's right.

I particularly like his analogy between trucking and finance here.  It describes the problem:

The Republicans in Congress, along with many Democrats, are rushing ahead with legislation to promote crypto currencies in various ways. Their motivation is not hard to understand; they got hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the industry. In terms of economic policy, the effort to promote crypto is taking the country 180 degrees in the wrong direction. The only real question is how bad the results will be.

When we think of finance, we need to think of trucking. Just as we need the trucking industry to transport items to factories and stores, we need the financial sector to make payments and allocate capital. But both finance and trucking are intermediate goods; they don’t directly make us better off, like healthcare or housing.

The fewer resources (labor and capital) we devote to these sectors, the better. If we have fewer people working in these industries, it means that we have more people available to work in sectors that provide the items we value.

Everyone can understand this with trucking. If the size of the trucking sector had quintupled relative to the size of the economy in the last half century, we would probably all be talking about how incredibly inefficient our trucking industry is.

But almost no one complains about the inefficiency of our financial system, even though the share of some components (the securities and commodities trading sector) has quintupled over the last half century. Maybe this is because people in the financial industry teach at elite institutions, have columns in elite media outlets, and hold top positions in administrations of both parties.

But political power does not change reality. An efficient financial sector is a small financial sector, and our financial sector is clearly not small.

This is all essential background for any discussion of crypto. The crypto industry obviously intends to make money by pushing the stuff. The question is what will the rest of us get out of the increased use of crypto?

The answer is at best, not much. The best story from the crypto bros is that it will reduce transactions costs. They focus largely on the high swipe fees charged to retailers by credit cards.

Spoilers: Swipe fees in the EU are almost an order of magnitude less, because they regulate these fees, and transaction costs of cryptocurrency are huge compared to cards or Western Union wire transfers. 

Preach it, Brother. 

 

And the First Group of People to Start Ignoring Supreme Court Rulings Are………

The lower federal courts, who are doing a pretty good job of imitating Andrew Jackson (Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.)

We now have a 3rd ruling basically ignoring Trump v. CASA, where the Supreme Court ruled that Trump's executive order revoking birthright citizenship would stand until appeals are exhausted.

In the past two years, we have had two rulings that rival Dredd ScotT v. Sanford in their corruption, partizanship and lawlessness.  (The other one was Trump v. United States)

A third court ruled Friday that President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order cannot go into effect across the country, following the Supreme Court’s decision last month clawing back nationwide injunctions.

U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin, an appointee of former President Obama, found that the nationwide injunction he granted to more than a dozen states remains in effect because “no workable, narrower alternative” would provide the plaintiffs full relief — an exception laid out in the Supreme Court’s ruling.

“Despite the defendants’ chosen path, the Court — aided substantially by the plaintiffs’ meticulous factual and legal submissions — undertook the review required of it by CASA and considered anew whether its original order swept too broadly,” Sorokin wrote in a 23-page opinion, referencing the high court decision.

“After careful consideration of the law and the facts, the Court answers that question in the negative,” he said.

Sorokin’s decision follows rulings by another district court and an appellate panel of judges that also allowed blocks on Trump’s order to remain in place for states.

The Supreme Court's credibility and power are on a knife edge, and most of its members are not even aware of this.

Hubris Ate Nemesis 

I Did Not Know That Eric Adams Had a Red Line for Police Brutality

It's a complete mind-f%$#, but hizonner is demanding a federal investigation of the conditions at the ICE lockup in Manhattan.

Considering Adams' long history of defying court orders so that Rikers Island can remain a hell-hole, this was NOT on my bingo card:

Mayor Eric Adams yielded to mounting political pressure and called on the federal government Wednesday to immediately inspect conditions inside the shadowy ICE lock up on the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan. He did so even as City Hall continues to contest the idea it has any authority over conditions in the Manhattan building.

In a letter first reported by the New York Times, Adams asked the U.S. General Services Administration, which owns 26 Federal Plaza, to conduct an immediate inspection of conditions there.

“As of mid-June, publicly available information indicates that individuals have been held at the facility for an average of 103 hours — more than four days,” the letter reads, citing reporting in THE CITY earlier this week. 

The letter goes on to reference a video published on Tuesday by THE CITY that offered the first public glimpse inside the holding areas at Federal Plaza, which have seen a surge of detainees as ICE dramatically ramped up arrests in New York City in mid-May.

The brutality and inhumanity is not a consequence of ramped up enforcement.  It is a deliberate policy promulgated by the naked sadism of these so-called law enforcement officers.

Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols

I guess I have time to post a musical interlude. 

I was thinking, maybe something to sooth the troubles souls out there.

Then I listened to this album for the first time in years, and said, F%$# that. 

Stay angry, my friends.

No Blogging Tonight

Working on streamlining my job search.

You will have to find your sh%$ty writing somewhere else tonight. 

Support Your Local Police

The New York Police Department is forbidden by city law from using facial recognition technology.

Their solution when they wanted to go after student protesters was to have a member of the New York Fire Department to do the search for them.

A city fire marshal used FDNY’s access to a facial recognition software to help NYPD detectives identify a pro-Palestinian protester at Columbia University, circumventing policies that tightly restrict the Police Department’s use of the technology.

Details of the arrangement emerged in a recent decision by a Manhattan criminal court judge and in a lawsuit seeking information from the FDNY filed this month by the Legal Aid Society, which represented the protester, Zuhdi Ahmed, now a 21-year-old pre-med CUNY student going into his senior year of college.

Police identified Ahmed after searching for a young man accused of hurling what they said was a rock at a pro-Israeli protester during an April 2024 skirmish at Columbia. Thanks to the FDNY’s assistance and its use of Clearview AI software, the police were able to identify Ahmed.

The FDNY began using Clearview AI in December 2022 and has an annual contract with the company, according to a spokesperson.

The fire marshal also accessed documents from the Department of Motor Vehicles that are typically unavailable to the police, court records show.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Ahmed with a felony, assault in the third degree as a hate crime, which was later reduced to a misdemeanor of second degree aggravated harassment. A criminal court judge in June dismissed the case against Ahmed and in a lengthy ruling raised red flags about government surveillance and practices that ran afoul of law enforcement’s own policies.

Cops gotta cop, I guess. 

ACAB. 

What a Pathetic Excuse of a Human Being

Rather unsurprisingly, we are talking about Rahm Emanuel who just, denied that transgender people even exist in an interview with Megyn Kelly on Fox News.

Apparently, Rahm has decided that it is politically expedient to make a whole class of human beings unpeople because he thinks that he will derive political benefit by hurting people already under attack.

Rahm Emanuel, who is publicly mulling a presidential run, told conservative media host Megyn Kelly in a new interview that a man can’t become a woman, breaking with most Democrats on the divisive issue of transgender rights.

“Can a man become a woman?” Kelly asked Emanuel, former President Biden’s ambassador to Japan, on her SiriusXM show.

“Can a man become a woman? Not — no,” the former Chicago mayor and Obama chief of staff replied.

I'm not surprised by this, Emanuel is the scum of the earth.  This has been evident for decades.

The fact that he has been aggressively supported by luminaries in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama is a sign of the moral rot at the center of the party.

The Epitome of Chutzpah

SpaceX, which has been blighting the night sky and interfering with both visual and radio astronomy, is freaking out about the impact of the AST SpaceMobile BlueBird LEO satellites, which are far less numerous and intrusive than Musk's system.

Despite owning more than half of the satellites currently in low Earth orbit, SpaceX is complaining about AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird constellation and how it’ll introduce added risks.

In a letter sent to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), SpaceX raised concerns that AST SpaceMobile poses a threat to the sustainability of low Earth orbit. Elon Musk’s space venture accused the Texas startup of underestimating collision risks in space and whether its satellites pose a threat to people on the ground during reentry. To be fair, these are valid concerns, but the accusations are laughably ironic coming from SpaceX. The company operates more than 7,800 satellites—currently around 60% of all satellites in orbit—and they’ve had more than a few close calls with other objects.

In a case of the pot calling the kettle black, SpaceX calls on the FCC to “carefully scrutinize” AST’s plan of launching its BlueBird satellite constellation to ensure it doesn’t “present untenable risks to space sustainability.” SpaceX claims that AST’s orbital debris mitigation plan “uses inconsistent and unrealistic assumptions to significantly downplay the risk of its satellites.”

………

But there’s more to the hypocrisy and the accusations that SpaceX is levying at its rival. Similar to AST, SpaceX’s satellites have also been a visual orbital nuisance. Astronomers have raised concern that Starlinks are interfering with their observations of the universe, appearing as bright streaks in telescopic images. SpaceX was also involved in multiple disputes over the use of spectrum bands that interfere with other networks; the company has been accused of using its position in the industry as a main provider of rocket launches to coerce other companies, like OneWeb, to share their wireless spectrum rights.

Cry me a river, Elon.

Gee, What a Shame 🤣

Not generally a fan of the Trump administration's actions with regard to anthropogenic climate change, but as I have noted before, I am not a fan of carbon credits, which I see as an inherently corrupt system.

Frequently, as is most the egregiously the case with The Nature Conservancy  these credits involve the sale of, "Credits," derived from activities that already would have happened.  (The Nature Conservancy sells carbon credit for properties that they had already declared will never be logged)

Another case is credits to EV manufacturers, who would have tried to sell the same cars with or without carbon credits.

So we have a case where bad politics, their being pro-pollution, results in good policy, 

That is a bit of brightness in the dark, but this is not what I find amusing.

What I find amusing is that the 2nd most egregious abuser of this program is Tesla, whose profits would be nearly non-existent without those credits and now the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ is having major butt-hurt over the loss of revenue: 

Despite the occasional stock market rally, Tesla is clearly struggling. The EV company, once the crown jewel of its industry, has seen steep declines over the past year, as its CEO, Elon Musk, continues to draw criticism over his political activities. Sales for the company are down all over the world, despite its recent introduction to new markets, like India. Now, as Tesla struggles to keep its head above water, another significant revenue stream is about to run dry, thanks largely to Musk’s former “buddy,” President Trump.

On September 30th, the EV regulatory credit is set to expire. The program, which has allowed gas-powered vehicles to sidestep federal fines linked to the pollution they create, has served to enrich a small number of electric vehicle producers, most notably Tesla. To avoid getting dinged over their emissions (the government has incentivized EV production by fining firms that fail to produce a certain threshold of zero-emission cars), traditional car companies can purchase “credits” from EV makers like Tesla, which allows them to stay within compliance.

For years, the EV regulatory credit has provided Musk’s company with a financial lifeline. Indeed, according to an E&E News analysis of Tesla’s securities filings, the company has earned over $10 billion from the scheme, a third of the company’s total profits over the last decade. Reuters reports that such credits are currently “crucial for Tesla’s finances” and that they have represented the “main driver” of the company’s profits during the first quarter of 2025. In that sense, despite its supposed mission of making the world a healthier place, Tesla has ironically helped to incentivize the continued production of gas-guzzling, emissions-producing cars, as the EV credits scheme has allowed many of the big-name automakers to continue on with business-as-usual.

 I've had my schadenfreude for the month.

Headline of the Day

With His Bribe Paid, Trump’s FCC Will Now Help CBS Pretend Its Shitty Merger Is Good For Journalism And The Public

—Techdirt

Yes, I know, it's not, "Say f%$# January," but the quote loses something if i Bowlderize the "S-Bomb."