We got all the Chomeytz (leavened food stuffs) cleaned up tonight.
We will do be doing bedikat chametz (בְּדִיקַת חָמֵץ) in the morning.
So once again, no meaningful blogging tonight.
*Yiddish, it translates to, "It's hard to be a Jew." (Shver tsu zayn a yid) It's a Yiddish aphorism as well as the title of a comedic play written by Sholem Aleichem (Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich).
So it appears that Trump has backed down on tariffs, probably because the US Treasury markets were freaking out.
Or because it was all a scam to allow Trump and his Evil Minions™ to trade with the knowledge that the aforementioned import taxes would not actually go into effect. (Why not both?)
I am not sure if this is a humiliating back-down, but if anyone in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) have any political acumen (they don't), they should be calling it such.
It does not matter if it is true or false, they should be calling Trump a wuss who caved to China.
President Trump finally blinked.
It took a week for the plunge in the stock and bond markets—along with a sustained campaign by executives, lawmakers, lobbyists and foreign leaders—to prompt Trump to roll back for 90 days a major element of his sweeping tariff plan.
The president said that the reaction to the tariffs was getting a bit “yippy”—like a nervous athlete unable to perform—and he relied on his instincts to change course as he watched the bond market tank and listened to business leaders including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon express fears of a recession. The episode was classic Trump: He took a drastic action, closely tracked the reaction, kept advisers and allies guessing and then changed course.
In this case, the extraordinary reversal was announced via Trump’s social-media platform just hours after so-called reciprocal tariffs officially went into effect. He tapped out the post in the Oval Office as he sat with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Trump also significantly raised tariffs on China.
Shortly after Trump published his post, as markets rose, Bessent stood outside the entrance to the West Wing and explained that the move to pause some of the tariffs was discussed Sunday when the two men met. “He and I had a long talk,” Bessent said before a crowd of reporters. “This was his strategy all along.”
Yeah, sure. He was always planning to do this.
Also, I have this bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Elon Musk Rage Quits Livestream After Being Cyberbullied by Gamers in The Chat—The Daily Beast
1h44m of a lame-ass gamer getting roasted in a live stream. Sweet.
So, Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ wanted to demonstrate the performance
of Starlink™ based wifi by live streaming his playing Path of Exile 2 at
the hardest level.
First, he wasn't any good at it, and second, he got roasted by the live stream participants.
Elon Musk rage quit a livestream of the video game Path of Exile 2 on Saturday night after repeatedly dying while also being ruthlessly cyberbullied in the chat.
Path of Exile 2 is one of Musk’s favorite games—so much so that he once claimed to be one of the world’s top players in an attempt to boost his gamer cred, before later backtracking and admitting that he had been secretly paying people to level up his account to make him appear more talented at it than he was.
Nevertheless, while attempting to show off Starlink’s in-flight WiFi capabilities while onboard his private jet over the weekend, Musk streamed himself playing some PoE2 on the hardest difficulty, which was broadcast live on X.
The DOGE chief was, predictably, terrible at the game, but that was the least of his problems—Less than five minutes into the stream, a player logged on and asked Musk if he could “please jerk off mr trump so he dies of a heart attack.” It only got worse from there.
For the next hour and a half, Musk sat in stony-faced silence and blasted techno music while dozens of users with names such as ELON_IS_A_PEEDOPHILE and ELON_MUSK_IS_PATHETIC repeatedly spammed the chat to tell him “YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS AND YOU WILL DIE ALONE” and “YOU WILL ALWAYS FEEL INSECURE AND IT WILL NEVER GO AWAY.”
………
Eventually, he vanished when his WiFi connection abruptly cut out and ended the stream, which he later deleted from X but was swiftly reuploaded onto YouTube.
Needless to say, massive levels of schadenfreude here.
Elon Musk is now a subject of (very well deserved) derision.
To quote Ben Franklin Abraham Lincoln Mark Twain Maurice Switzer, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt."
Colossal Biosciences, a genetic engineering firm has claimed that they have recreated the dire wolf species, which has been extinct for more than 10,000 years.
They haven't. This is marketing to Game of Thrones fanbois.
For over 2 million years, dire wolves roamed present-day North America until their extinction around 10,000 B.C.
On Monday, a Dallas-based bioscience firm said it had brought the species back to life in the form of three pups, claiming to have “successfully restored a once-eradicated species through the science of de-extinction” in a remarkable statement on its website.
Notice that there is no mention of any peer reviewed or pre-peer reviewed paper?
Red flag.
The team at Colossal said the pups — named Khaleesi, [More GoT Wankery] Romulus and Remus, and ranging in age from 3 to 6 months old — were created using a combination of gene-editing techniques and ancient DNA found in fossils from between 11,500 and 72,000 years ago.
Other scientists, however, say that while Colossal’s technological feats are impressive, the animals are not truly dire wolves — and that the process raises ethical questions.
“The reality is we can’t de-extinct extinct creatures because we can’t use cloning — the DNA is just not well enough preserved,” said Nic Rawlence, an associate professor and director of the Palaeogenetics Laboratory at New Zealand’s University of Otago.
………
Pontus Skoglund, leader of the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at Britain’s Francis Crick Institute, said in a post on Bluesky about the dire wolf project that he was “not necessarily against the initiative, but would a chimpanzee with 20 gene edits be human? … These individuals seem optimistically 1/100,000th dire wolf.”
………
In the wolves’ case, scientists edited the gray wolf genome to approximate the size, color and coat of a dire wolf, Rawlence said. “There are about 19,000 genes in that genome. They looked at all the differences and said there are 20 key differences in 14 key genes that they could change to make a gray wolf look like a dire wolf,” he said. “Their technology is amazing, but my personal view is it needs to be used to conserve the animals we’ve got left,” he said. This could include using money the company has raised to manage existing endangered species or reintroduce genetic diversity among existing species to help them adapt to climate change or diseases.
This sounds a lot like Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons levels of humbug.
When Your Threat Model Is Being a Moron—404 Media
This is, of course, about the leak of Yemen war plans to a journalist on the Signal app.
The subhead says it all:
No phone, no app, no encryption can protect you from yourself if you send the information you’re trying to hide directly to someone you don’t want to have it.The Japanese aphorism, "バカにつける薬はない," there is no medicine for stupidity, applies here.
Musical Interlude
In desperation, New York Mayor Eric Adams
has declared that he will run for reelection as an independent, because he is so f%$#ing toxic that f%$#ing Andrew "Rat Faced Andy" is
f%$#ing out-polling him in the primary race.
Mayor Eric Adams declared Thursday he will be skipping the Democratic primary in June and running for reelection as an independent candidate in November.
The announcement came just hours after the federal corruption case against the mayor was permanently dismissed . In a brief video announcing the decision, the mayor said the case made it impossible to mount a run in the June primary.
Adams realizes that his electoral goose is cooked, so he will be running as an independent.
Not a surprise, he is corrupt, self-important to the point of being delusional, and just f%$#ing embarrassing.
FWIW, the New York City primary elections use ranked choice voting, (RCV) so I don't see Cuomo winning the primary, because of the way that RCV works: People rank their candidates from 1st to 5th choice, and on the first round, everyone's 1st choice is counted, and the low vote getter is removed, and that voter's 2nd choice votes are counted.
This procedure continues until a candidate has an absolute majority of the vote, typically when there are only 2 or three candidates remaining.
I don't see Rat Faced Andy Cuomo ever reaching 50%, no matter how much money he raises. In no particular order:
There are about 9 candidates competing in the Democratic primary, it's complicated, and I imagine that one of the other 8 will get the party nod.
If this were first past the post, my money would be on Cuomo, but not now.
BTW, as we are talking about the now dismissed corruption charges against Mayor Adams, here are the details.
Adams was guilty as hell, and the Trump administration tried to have the charges dismissed without prejudice, meaning that they could refile at any time, and so use this as a way to coerce the Mayor to do their bidding. The judge was having none of this, and dismissed the charges with prejudice, meaning that double jeopardy applies, and so the prosecutors cannot refile charges:
………I feel compelled to invoke Anatole France, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
This is one of the small victories, even if it — at first glance — it appears to be a win for the Trump Administration. The indictment against NYC Mayor Eric Adams — stemming from a corruption case that managed to ensnare pretty much all of his closest government confidants — has been dismissed by Judge Dale Ho.
This dismissal event was highly controversial. Once Trump took office, he directed the DOJ to dismiss the case against the mayor. This immediately prompted the resignation of the DOJ prosecutors who had brought the criminal charges. Trump’s preferred DOJ officials publicly pilloried the prosecutors that chose to walk, rather than undermine their ethics. Then Trump’s careerist prosecutors took over, raising a litany of bad faith arguments as to why Eric Adams should be allowed to walk.
Trump wanted Adams to walk, but only while being manipulated by puppet strings. Trump wanted to ensure the mayor would go all in on his anti-immigrant efforts and figured being given a free pass on criminal charges might purchase enough loyalty to get him through the next four years.
So, it might seem that dismissing the charges with prejudice would just be another example of a court failing to act as a check on executive power. But Judge Dale Ho’s dismissal [PDF] makes it clear he’s unhappy with Trump’s DOJ. More than that, this dismissal ensures Adams can’t be prosecuted for these charges, even if the mayor decides he’s not going to be Trump’s puppet.
Trump’s DOJ wants to have both the carrot and the stick. Judge Ho says the court will allow the carrot, but will be confiscating the stick. Here’s how that’s explained in the opening of Ho’s comprehensive, 78-page dismissal:A critical feature of DOJ’s Motion is that it seeks dismissal without prejudice—that is, DOJ seeks to abandon its prosecution of Mayor Adams at this time, while reserving the right to reinitiate the case in the future. DOJ does not seek to end this case once and for all. Rather, its request, if granted, would leave Mayor Adams under the specter of reindictment at essentially any time, and for essentially any reason.Now, the DOJ is stuck with its politically opportunistic dismissal. If Mayor Adams decides to push back against Trump (however unlikely that is), he has nothing to fear from Trump’s DOJ. At best, they’d have to start over from scratch and find some other set of criminal charges to levy against Adams for his disobedience.
The Court declines, in its limited discretion under Rule 48(a), to endorse that outcome. Instead, it dismisses this case with prejudice—meaning that the Government may not bring the charges in the Indictment against Mayor Adams in the future. In light of DOJ’s rationales, dismissing the case without prejudice would create the unavoidable perception that the Mayor’s freedom depends on his ability to carry out the immigration enforcement priorities of the administration, and that he might be more beholden to the demands of the federal government than to the wishes of his own constituents. That appearance is inevitable, and it counsels in favor of dismissal with prejudice.
The dismissal is an unequivocal win for Mayor Adams, but it is a loss for Trump and his Evil Minions™.
Needless to say, June 24 in New York City, primary day, is going to be very interesting.
"A top Goldman Sachs executive summed up the frustration with Mr. Trump succinctly: Someone has to stop him." https://t.co/GgjFNUjy8n pic.twitter.com/oblJLZR8cN
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) April 6, 2025
To quote Colin Powell, and Pottery Barn, "You broke it, you bought it."
Lina Khan going after your flabby white asses for anticompetitive behavior does not seem so bad now, does it?
Not tax season, though that is a rather fakakta time.
I am referring to our week of hell as we scramble to remove chametz (leavened bread products) from our home in preparation for Pesach. (Passover)
It's the one time of the year I really want to be Sephardic, and eat legumes and rice.
It appears that the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™'s merry band of idiot vandals are, "Planning a Hackathon at the IRS, so that they can have complete control of and access to the data, including personal data of hundreds of millions of taxpayers.
They believe that they might need some help, so they are looking to bring in Peter Thiel's Palantir for technical support. (Also, because it is a convenient way to divert taxpayer money to a Musk buddy, but I digress.)
Expect to see a complete collapse of the income tax collection shortly:
Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has plans to stage a “hackathon” next week in Washington, DC. The goal is to create a single “mega API”—a bridge that lets software systems talk to one another—for accessing IRS data, sources tell WIRED. The agency is expected to partner with a third-party vendor to manage certain aspects of the data project. Palantir, a software company cofounded by billionaire and Musk associate Peter Thiel, has been brought up consistently by DOGE representatives as a possible candidate, sources tell WIRED.This is a recipe for insecure data being used to attack and blackmail regime opponents. That is probably a feature, not a bug.
Two top DOGE operatives at the IRS, Sam Corcos and Gavin Kliger, are helping to orchestrate the hackathon, sources tell WIRED. Corcos is a health-tech CEO with ties to Musk’s SpaceX. Kliger attended UC Berkeley until 2020 and worked at the AI company Databricks before joining DOGE as a special adviser to the director at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Corcos is also a special adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Since joining Musk’s DOGE, Corcos has told IRS workers that he wants to pause all engineering work and cancel current attempts to modernize the agency’s systems, according to sources with direct knowledge who spoke with WIRED. He has also spoken about some aspects of these cuts publicly: "We've so far stopped work and cut about $1.5 billion from the modernization budget. Mostly projects that were going to continue to put us down the death spiral of complexity in our code base," Corcos told Laura Ingraham on Fox News in March.
Corcos has discussed plans for DOGE to build “one new API to rule them all,” making IRS data more easily accessible for cloud platforms, sources say. APIs, or application programming interfaces, enable different applications to exchange data, and could be used to move IRS data into the cloud. The cloud platform could become the “read center of all IRS systems,” a source with direct knowledge tells WIRED, meaning anyone with access could view and possibly manipulate all IRS data in one place.
Over the last few weeks, DOGE has requested the names of the IRS’s best engineers from agency staffers. Next week, DOGE and IRS leadership are expected to host dozens of engineers in DC so they can begin “ripping up the old systems” and building the API, an IRS engineering source tells WIRED. The goal is to have this task completed within 30 days. Sources say there have been multiple discussions about involving third-party cloud and software providers like Palantir in the implementation.
Another kickback to Peter Thiel, imagine that.
………
“Schematizing this data and understanding it would take years,” an IRS source tells WIRED. “Just even thinking through the data would take a long time, because these people have no experience, not only in government, but in the IRS or with taxes or anything else.” (“There is a lot of stuff that I don't know that I am learning now,” Corcos tells Ingraham in the Fox interview. “I know a lot about software systems, that's why I was brought in.")
Knows, "A lot about software," and thinks that this is enough? He needs to know about accounting standards, privacy regulations, and database schema. Software is the least important thing here.
………
"It's basically an open door controlled by Musk for all American's most sensitive information with none of the rules that normally secure that data," an IRS worker alleges to WIRED.
Again, a feature, not a bug.
This is going to fail, and it will fail spectacularly.
It appears that in the midst of a rapidly spreading measles outbreak, The Trump administration has pulled Dave Weldon to be head of the Center for Disease Control because they lack the votes, which means that at least 4 Republicans are not willing to support this moron.
The White House abruptly abandoned the nomination of Dave Weldon, the former Florida congressman who questioned vaccine safety, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday amid concerns he could not be confirmed by the Senate.
The move leaves the Trump administration in search of a leader for the agency — which formulates vaccine policy recommendations — as a growing measles outbreak highlights criticism of the administration’s public health response.
The Senate health committee announced Weldon’s nomination had been pulled shortly before he was scheduled to testify at a hearing Thursday morning.
The withdrawal of Weldon’s nomination marks a rare setback for a Trump administration pick. The Senate has confirmed every controversial choice brought to a full vote on the floor to date.
Weldon, a 71-year-old doctor who left Congress in 2009, drew scrutiny for his longtime promotion of the false claim that vaccines can cause autism.
Yeah, but they still voted for JFK, Jr.
A federal judge has ruled that Alabama cannot prosecute anyone who helps someone travel out of state for an abortion.
While there have yet to be any such charges filed, the state AG has announced that he is looking into this, so there is already a chilling effect on healthcare providers:
Alabama’s attorney general cannot prosecute individuals and groups that help Alabama women travel to other states to obtain abortions, a federal judge ruled on Monday.
The US district judge Myron Thompson sided with an abortion fund and medical providers who sued Alabama’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, after he suggested they could face prosecution under anti-conspiracy laws. Thompson’s ruling declared that such prosecutions would violate both the first amendment and a person’s right to travel.
Marshall has not pursued any such prosecutions. However, he said he would “look at closely” whether facilitating out-of-state abortions is a violation of Alabama’s criminal conspiracy laws. The ruling was a victory for the Yellowhammer Fund, an abortion assistance fund that had paused providing financial assistance to low-income people in the state because of the possibility of prosecution.………
“It is one thing for Alabama to outlaw by statute what happens in its own backyard. It is another thing for the state to enforce its values and laws, as chosen by the attorney general, outside its boundaries by punishing its citizens and others who help individuals travel to another state to engage in conduct that is lawful there but the attorney general finds to be contrary to Alabama’s values and laws,” Thompson wrote in the 131-page opinion.
It's like prosecuting people for organizing a trip to Los Vegas, and it i9 clearly unconstitutional.
Or at least it is until the Supreme Court issues yet another corrupt ruling.
With concerns growing among European nations that the United States might no longer be a reliable supplier of weapons systems, they are attempting to move their defense procurement from the US to European suppliers, and the Trump administration is having major butt hurt over this.
Personally, I'm Ike's (Eisenhower) side on all of this, and I think that the excessive presence of the military industrial complex in our economy is a bad thing, so this change in policy will ultimately be good for both America and Europe:
U.S. officials have told European allies they want them to keep buying American-made arms, amid recent moves by the European Union to limit U.S. manufacturers' participation in weapons tenders, five sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The messages delivered by Washington in recent weeks come as the EU takes steps to boost Europe's weapons industry, while potentially limiting purchases of certain types of U.S. arms.
………
Some of the proposed measures could mean a smaller role for non-EU companies, including those based in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, experts say.
In a March 25 meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the foreign ministers of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia that the United States wants to continue participating in EU countries' defense procurements, the sources told Reuters.
According to two of the sources, Rubio said any exclusion of U.S. companies from European tenders would be seen negatively by Washington, which those two sources interpreted as a reference to the proposed EU rules.
I'm not surprised that the Europeans are considering this, both the current economic situation and the erratic nature of Trump foreign policy would tend to encourage such moves.
This is particularly true for some of the more sophisticated US weapons systems, (the F-35) require near real time support from US controlled entities to operate for more than about a week.
You may have read that Elon Musk has announced that he has sold Ecch (Twitter) to his artificial intelligence company XAI.
The thing to understand here is that was an all stock transaction, that xAI is privately held, so there is no market price for its stock, and as such, he's basically using magic beans.
This is an attempt to confuse his lenders to delay when they make a margin call and Hoover up the bulk of his stake in Tesla. (Don't worry, he'll still be worth billions after that)
This is securities fraud, or it would be if we were still enforcing those laws: (How quaint of me)
Elon Musk announced on Friday that xAI, his artificial intelligence company, had purchased his social media platform X. “xAI and X’s futures are intertwined,” he wrote on X. “Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution, and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced A.I. capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.” The all-stock transaction between the two private companies valued xAI at $80 billion [this is a fraud] and X at $33 billion in equity, [this is a fraud] plus $12 billion in debt. [this is a fraud]
The numbers behind Musk’s valuation of X add up to a convenient enterprise value of $45 billion, or $1 billion more than what he paid in 2022 to acquire the company formerly known as Twitter. [this is a fraud]
That Musk would seek to close this chapter of X up $1 billion — notionally, at least — could be a response to critics who say he ran the company aground by decimating its core revenue stream: ad buys from blue-chip companies. Over the past few months, Musk has made a concerted effort to puff up X’s value by claiming a return of the top advertisers who fled the platform after his leveraged buyout. [this is a fraud]
With some top companies resuming advertising on the platform, Musk declared a new $44 billion valuation for X last month, [this is a fraud] even though some X investors valued the company at $12 billion as recently as last December. Musk went on to claim that X had doubled its annual profits since he bought it. [this is a fraud]
The advertisers on Ecch (Twitter), with the exceptions of Chinese firms Temu and Shein (who would advertise on my ass if they knew that there were space available), are small advertisers, and various scammers. (Particularly crypto scammers)
Ecch (Twitter) has become a haven for scammers, because the Hellsite has refused to investigate them because they need the advertising revenue.
This "Sale" is little more than an attempt to obfuscate the precarious financial position of Musk's Tesla and Ecch (Twitter) holdings from his lenders, and that is pretty clearly fraud.
It appears that Donald Trump has has imposed tariffs on uninhabited islands around Antarctica, because penguins are masters of the art of deception.
As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."
A group of barren, uninhabited volcanic islands near Antarctica, covered in glaciers and home to penguins, has been swept up in Donald Trump’s trade war, as the US president hit them with a 10% tariff on goods.
Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which form an external territory of Australia, are among the remotest places on Earth, accessible only via a two-week boat voyage from Perth on Australia’s west coast. They are completely uninhabited, with the last visit from people believed to be nearly 10 years ago.
Nevertheless, Heard and McDonald islands featured in a list released by the White House of “countries” that would have new trade tariffs imposed.
I'm beginning to think that the morphine addled Hermann Goering could do a better job governing than this sorry lot.
And initial unemployment claims fell slightly, but continuing claims rose to a 41 month high. (Full disclosure, I am a part of the latters statistic)
U.S. initial jobless claims moved lower last week, according to the Department of Labor, underscoring that there has been no big increase in newly employed workers through the end of March.Of more note, at least for this week, is the stock market.
The week through March 29 brought 219,000 initial jobless claims, compared with 225,000 a week earlier. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had been forecasting 228,000 initial claims.
The number of continuing claims, a gauge of the size of the unemployed population, rose to 1.9 million in the week through March 22, the highest level since November 2021. A week earlier, continuing claims held at 1.85 million. The continuing-claims data lag the data on new filings by a week.
The figures are a final weekly labor-market snapshot before the Labor Department’s full jobs report for March lands on Friday. Economists believe the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1% last month, per the Journal’s survey, and that the economy added 140,000 jobs, a slight slowing from February.
I generally do not consider the stock market as reflective of the economy, but today we saw an absolute bloodbath in the stock market today over trade war concerns.
U.S. markets suffered their steepest declines since 2020 on fears President Trump’s new tariff plans will trigger a global trade war and drag the U.S. economy into recession.That selloff was triggered by the Covid shut-down. This is a big f%$#ing deal.
Major stock indexes dropped as much as 6% on Thursday. Stocks lost roughly $3.1 trillion in market value, their largest one-day decline since March 2020. Stock-index futures drifted lower Thursday evening, and stocks in Japan were hit for a second day as Friday trading began.Not good, and it gets worse:
In Thursday's market plunge, the Dow industrials dropped 1679 points, or 4%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq, which powered the market higher for years, was down 6%, pulled lower by big declines in Nvidia, Apple and Amazon.com. The S&P 500, which fell 4.8%, and the other benchmarks suffered their sharpest declines since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The dollar meanwhile tumbled, with the WSJ Dollar Index suffering its sharpest decline since 2023. The 1.3% fall brought the greenback to its lowest level since October, a sign of unease over the growth outlook and fears that the flow of funds into the country will be sharply curtailed.
………Trump took the selloff in stride. “I think it’s going very well,” Trump said in response to a question about his tariffs Thursday afternoon. “The markets are going to boom.” He left the door open to making deals to lower tariffs, while also promising new ones on pharmaceuticals and semiconductors.
Dozens of household-name stocks posted double-digit declines, including HP, Nike and Target. Stellantis also fell sharply. The Jeep maker said it is temporarily halting production at its auto assembly factories in Mexico and Canada.
The turmoil spread beyond stocks, with oil prices dropping more than 6% and investors selling gold after its sharp run over the past year to fresh records.
So Trump is cool with this. I guess that this makes it all better.
We are f%$#ed.
I Won’t Connect My Dishwasher to Your Stupid Cloud—Jeff Geerling
Here's a hint for Consumer Reports, which top-rated the Bosch 500 series of dishwashers: If the feature requires an app, it's not a feature, because either the manufacturer will start charging for it, or they will eventually shut down the web service disabling the feature.
The features that are missing without the app? Minor things like delayed start and rinse.
No one ever used those before the internet of sh%$.
He has convinced most of the Québécois in Canada that they are Canadians:
This is profoundly odd.
………
For the first time in my life, I noticed a very strong nationalistic--even patriotic--feeling arise from coast to coast here in Canada. I was speaking with a good friend of mine yesterday, he's a bit older, he's been around like almost 20 years, longer than me, and we were talking about how generally Canadians are not the most patriotic people.
They're not as much keen to flag-waving or public displaying of their national pride, never as much as our southern neighbor anyway.
And that is especially true here in Quebec, where, as I mentioned before, the French-speaking Quebecers are most likely to identify as Quebecer before Canadian, if at all.
But even here, since those declarations, shocking declarations from Donald Trump, we've been noticing that patriotic Canadian pride take over people.
It's really unbelievable. Suddenly, like you're in a grocery store and you see that elderly lady wondering in French, reading the label on the mustard pot, like, "Was this made in Canada? If not, I'm not even buying it."
Personally, I first came to realize that there was something going on when I randomly came across some posts.
You know it's getting serious when Quebecers start feeling patriotic towards Canada.
………
Montreal guy here, born and bred, he made Quebecers patriotic. Do you know to what degree you need to piss off a Quebecer to make them stand up for Canada?
I can't even imagine to what degree you need to piss off a Quebecer to make them stand up for Canada.
Whatever number this is, I believe that it is so big that any tolerance would be on the exponent if you wrote it in scientific notation. (Something like 3.113 × 10187±4.4. Astronomers frequently put tolerances in exponents. It's a big f%$#ing number.)
We had 2 special elections for US Representatives in Florida, and Republicans won both races, which was not unexpected, but it was far closer than the demographics of this districts would indicate.
Two Trump-backed Republicans won special congressional elections in Florida on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, shoring up their party’s slim majority in the House at a crucial moment for President Trump’s domestic agenda.
Jimmy Patronis, the state’s chief financial officer, won the race to replace Matt Gaetz in the First Congressional District, on the western end of the Panhandle. With most of the vote counted late Tuesday, Mr. Patronis had won 57 percent.
As Gaetz getting 66.0% in the last election.
And State Senator Randy Fine captured the Sixth District seat that had been held by Michael Waltz, now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser. That district is rooted in Daytona Beach and parts of the northeast coast. Mr. Fine had 56.7 percent of the vote as of 9 p.m.
That's as against Waltz winning the district with 66.5%
This is more than a 10% swing toward the Democratic Party in both cases.
Heartening, but it's about 18 months until the 2026 elections.
More importantly to my mind is that Susan Crawford won the race for Wisconsin Supreme Court justicee against Elon Musk supported right-wing knuckle-dragger Brad Schimel.
This is important for a number of reasons:
The latter is important because it is a significant loss for Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ who spent millions on an ad blitz and paid hundreds of people for their votes.
The fact that his candidate lost by 11% is a mark of his complete toxicity as both a human being and a political figure.
That is my take-away of Corry Booker's 25 hour long record breaking speech from the floor of the Senate.
Credit though for the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey's kidneys of steel.
He spent 25 hours lambasting Donald Trump without a bathroom break, breaking Strom Thurmond's record by 1 hour.
I'm not sure that this had much meaning in a greater strategic sense, but at least he is doing something, unlike, for example, Chuck Schumer.
Former, "30 Under 20," business star Charlie Javice has been found guilty of fraud while selling her company to JP Morgan to the tune of about $175,000,000.00.
She faked her customer numbers during the sale.
If this had not come out before JP Morgan had flipped it to retail investors. (aka "suckers")
Am I the only one who thinks that a this is more the rule than the exception, and we only see prosecutions when the big fish lose money?
Charlie Javice, who made big headlines in 2023 when JPMorgan Chase accused her of faking her start-up’s customer list, was found guilty in federal court Friday of three counts of fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit fraud.
She now faces the possibility of decades in prison.
The bank has its own civil lawsuit on standby as it attempts to claw back some of the $175 million it paid for her company, Frank. It sued her three years ago, and Ms. Javice was arrested at Newark Liberty International Airport not long after that.
Frank, which was founded in 2016, aimed to help customers fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid at a time when the FAFSA was notoriously complicated. Ms. Javice, 32, quickly became a go-to quote for journalists writing about paying for college and turned up on lists of under-30 and under-40 up-and-comers.
Gee, we are going to make millions of dollars helping people filling out financial aid forms, and you are going to dominate the market because ………?
Bueller? Bueller?
This isn't even a business model? It's sillier than WeWork's plans for world domination, because colleges already have financial aid offices that help students for free, because the Colleges want their f%$#ing money?
Not long after Ms. Javice sold Frank to JPMorgan, there was trouble. The bank ran a test of Frank’s customer list, hoping to persuade its young customers to open Chase accounts. Of 400,000 outbound emails, just 28 percent arrived successfully in an inbox.
………
An internal investigation ensued, and the bank claimed to have found evidence that Ms. Javice and Olivier Amar, Frank’s chief growth and acquisition officer, had faked much of its customer list. JPMorgan sued her, and the federal government followed with its own charges, which resulted in the verdict Friday.
But we do find why they wanted to buy her sh%$ idea:
Sweet.
………
During the trial, JPMorgan bank executives said that one appeal of Frank was its promise of over four million customers, with detailed contact information, whom the bank could pitch. The bank could hook young adults with a checking account and potentially keep them and their business through decades of mortgages and retirement savings.
So Frank and JP Morgan were co-conspirators with a goal of raping the privacy of their customers, only Frank faked its customer base, hue?
You know, if we prosecuted everyone on both sides of the case who broke the law, the world would be a much better place.
I guess that it is just business as usual in the United States of Fraud.
I think that I have heard this song more often than any other song that I had ever heard:
This song does not give me pleasant memories.
I don't think that this song gives anyone warm fuzzies.
Yes, it IS that f%$#ing hold music.
1977 is the year that composer and professor R. Douglas Helvering was born, and 2024 was the year that he first heard the iconic Mason Williams song Classical Gas.
It boggles my mind that he manged to make it through 47 years of life without ever hearing the song.
How the F%$# does this happen?
His analysis is very interesting.
I would note that my favorite version is the Mason Williams version, but it is the guitar only rendition on his album Handmade.
In the latest DOGE insanity, the Trump administration is planning to release a spreadsheet listing recipients of foreign aid has been accidentally released, and some of the recipients are likely to be targeted for this, putting them in very real danger.
First, yes, this is a major breach, and the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ and his merry band of young boys are completely incompetent.
That being said, we are not talking about funding from the CIA, or the DoD, etc.
These are basic foreign aid programs, and unless this is just a front for regime change activities by the United States state security apparatus, these folks should not be at risk.
This is, of course a rhetorical question. Many of these activities are ust a front for regime change activities by the United States state security apparatus.
It's something that we blithely accept, and have blithely accepted since some point in the 1950s.
Reports that Donald Trump’s top national security officials accidentally shared their Yemen attack plans with The Atlantic in real-time drove the news in official Washington in recent days. But it wasn’t the only damaging leak of information held by the administration this week.
………
Two Trump administration spreadsheets — which each include what numerous advocates and government officials say is highly sensitive information on programs funded by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — were sent to Congress and also leaked online.
The leak, which sent a variety of international groups and nonprofits scrambling to assess the damage and protect workers operating under repressive regimes, came after the organizations had pressed the Trump administration to keep the sensitive information private and received some assurances it would remain secret.
The State Department, led by Marco Rubio, informed a variety of international nonprofits and longtime implementing partner organizations last week that upcoming payments of their congressionally approved grant funds came with some conditions that the Trump administration wanted to clarify.
As part of their campaign to eliminate what they’re calling “waste, fraud, and abuse,” Team Trump and DOGE had demanded comprehensive grant recipient information — and State Department officials let the organizations know that Musk’s lieutenants were likely planning on turning this information into a public spreadsheet or database.
Needless to say, this is profoundly f%$#ed up, both from an operational perspective, but also from the window that it gives into the ordinary operation of the surveillance state/non-governmental organizational complex.
Both sides know what they are being paid for, and for the rest of us, it's just more of the merry band of regime change mousketeers creating worse problems in the future. (See Iran, Afghanistan, much of Latin America, Vietnam, Congo, etc.)
Full disclosure here, I did not take the picture, I was driving.
I spotted it, and asked Sharon* to take the picture, so no traffic rules or basic safety protocols were broken.
I hate to tell this guy, but this sort of half-assed camouflage just ain't gonna cut it.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
It's a Liberal Party campaign ad, and it is, at least according to our stereotypes of Canada, very in your face.
I know what you are all thinking, "When did Mike Myers go gray?"
Well it happens to a lot of us, and at least he still has hair.
Loved the bit of Canadian Trivial Pursuit in the middle.
Hire Clowns, Get a Circus
—Dan Rather and Team Steady on Donald Trump misadministration
What is remarkable here is that their lede isn't the accidentally revealed war plans, it's the economy going sideways faster than anyone could imagine.
They get to that in the latter half of the essay.
I do differ though on one thing, circuses are very well planned and organized, otherwise people die and tents catch fire, and elephants go on rampages, etc.
I'd rather have President Pennywise.
JD Vance's wife Usha wanted to go to Greenland and see the sights, catch a dog sled race, etc.
One small fly in the ointment, she wanted to have a meet and greet with a Greenlander household, and no one wanted to talk to her.
Not a single person.
Though there are not many people in Greenland, about 56,000, it is stunning just how uninterested anyone was to hang out with her:
It’s a good thing that the second lady’s trip to Greenland was canceled, because apparently nobody wanted her there.
U.S. representatives were reportedly seen knocking door-to-door in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, to ascertain just how Vance’s visit to the Nordic island would be received. The answer? Not well.
“The Americans’ charm offensive mission has failed,” reported TV 2 correspondent Jesper Steinmetz, adding that locals have completely cold-shouldered the Vance family’s prospective visit.
American representatives were seen walking around the city, canvassing residents to see if people would be interested in a visit from the vice president’s wife.
“They’ve gotten no, no, no, no, no, every single time,” Steinmetz said.
………
The Vance family’s travel plans to Greenland were, however, dropped. Instead, they will visit a U.S. space base on the island’s northwest coast later this week.
………
Greenland’s government said in a statement posted on Facebook Monday that it had “not extended any invitations for any visits, neither private nor official.”
They do not take kindly to Donald Trump's threats to annex (or perhaps invade) them.
All this because Trump doesn't understand how a Mercator Map works. (A Mercator projection grossly enlarges areas near the poles)
We don't have another commercial bank failure, not have another credit union failure of the year, we have a credit union, Valwood Park Federal Credit Union of Carrollton, TX (Full NCUA list, and the direct link for this year) removed from conservatorship.
Basically, that means that the NCUA has decided that they got their sh%$ in order, and so can go back to business as usual:
Valwood Park Federal Credit Union of Carrollton, Texas, is once again under the control and direction of its members, the National Credit Union Administration announced today.
“The recovery of Valwood Park reflects the extraordinary efforts of its leadership team, staff, and members,” NCUA Chairman Kyle S. Hauptman said. “Working in collaboration with the NCUA, the new management team saved the credit union from failure by enhancing controls and mitigating risks. Valwood Park is now in a stronger position to provide vital financial services and enhance the financial well-being of residents in Dallas’s Metrocrest communities.”
The NCUA placed Valwood Park Federal Credit Union into conservatorship on January 20, 2023, because of unsafe and unsound practices at the credit union.
Not a clue as to what this means.
There has been an explosion of American citizens taking dual citizenship.
I understand the desire for a metaphorical, "Go Bag," but spending the time and effort on this is not spending the time and effort on stopping Trump and his Evil Minions™.
Tim Hennigan and Peter Atlas are tired of the political divisiveness, unstable international relations, and Teslas parked in front of the White House. Most of all, they are fed up with President Trump. The Charlestown couple is in the final stages of obtaining Irish citizenship and recently moved to their new home in Ireland, where they will wait out the current administration.
“This is not just four years of a president that we don’t happen to like,” Hennigan said. “This is a different regime, and it’s time to leave. For years, I saw progress with race equality, women’s equality, and gay equality. Now, I think maybe we’ve already lived through the pinnacle of equality, at least in this country.”
Atlas, a retired school teacher, and Hennigan, a travel adviser who can work remotely, are concerned about their rights as a gay married couple. Despite recently completing a 20-month renovation of their Boston home, they have decided to uproot.
The couple are among the growing number of Americans seeking dual citizenship through ancestry or golden visa programs. Rules vary by country, but a golden visa allows individuals to qualify for residency or citizenship in exchange for an investment in real estate. They obtained ancestry through Hennigan’s Irish roots. Google searches in the United States for dual citizenship hit a five-year high the week of the November presidential election and grew again the week of the inauguration. However, the number of those taking the next step has been more telling than quick Google searches.
………
Hennigan and Atlas began looking into Irish citizenship during the first Trump administration. Rich Welch, a biotech executive in Somerville, started working on his Italian citizenship three years ago with plans to retire to Europe when he’s ready. His college-age sons will also become Italian citizens, allowing them to study and work in Europe. For Welch, dual citizenship wasn’t about escaping political turmoil, but he said he’s thankful he has a Plan B.
………
Not everyone is on board with fleeing the United States until Trump is out of office. Even TV host Bill Maher, a moderate Democrat, has been critical of the movement, saying, “We don’t need quitters. We need people to stay and fix it.
F%$# me, I agree with Bill f%$#ing Maher.
We are living in a dystopian young adult novel.
President Elon Musk taking a wrecking ball to the IRS will likely reduce tax collections by 10%.
This is a feature, not a bug.
They want to destroy the IRS because they want to destroy the income tax, so that they can tax poor people using alternate taxes:
Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.
Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.
This is a feature, not a bug.
They want to burn it all down.
I'm brewing something unpleasant.
My eldest tested positive for Covid, but I did not yesterday.
I will check again tomorrow.
I feel like crap.
You may recall that Trump has nominated Elise Stafanik to be the UN Ambassador.
He has now withdrawn the nomination over concerns that the Democrats would take her seat in a special election.
Note that the 2024 PVI was R+10, which is pretty much in territory of the Evan Edwards quote, "The only way I can lose is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.
But the Republicans are afraid that they will lose the district in a special election.
President Trump on Thursday said he had asked Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, to stay in Congress rather than serve as ambassador to the United Nations, amid concern about the minuscule voting margin that Republicans hold in the House.
“There are others that can do a good job at the United Nations,” Mr. Trump wrote on his website, Truth Social, where he said it was critical for Republicans to hold onto every House seat they have. “Therefore, Elise will stay in Congress, rejoin the House Leadership Team, and continue to fight for our amazing American People.”
Mr. Trump hinted that he might make it up to Ms. Stefanik in the future with another position in his administration. But for now, he said, Speaker Mike Johnson was “thrilled” with the development.
Trilled? More like relieved.
If there is an election in 2026, and this is not certain, it is likely that control of Congress will be lost by a margin that will be impervious to Republican rat-f%$#ery.
So now the good folks at The Atlantic, after having been assured that the discussions on Signal were totally non classified, have released the messages that were inadvertently sent to Jeffrey Goldberg.
Can you say sh%$ show?
Good, I knew you could. (Yeah, I know invoking Mr. Rogers and the Muppets. PBS is way more powerful than I had previously thought)
So, about that Signal chat.
On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”
At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”
President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”
Well, that's a relief for Mr. Goldberg. It means that his story did not reveal any secrets, and it also means that further releases will not reveal any secrets.
So Goldberg and his posse are releasing the whole megillah.
Much hilarity ensues:
………
Experts have repeatedly told us that use of a Signal chat for such sensitive discussions poses a threat to national security. As a case in point, Goldberg received information on the attacks two hours before the scheduled start of the bombing of Houthi positions. If this information—particularly the exact times American aircraft were taking off for Yemen—had fallen into the wrong hands in that crucial two-hour period, American pilots and other American personnel could have been exposed to even greater danger than they ordinarily would face. The Trump administration is arguing that the military information contained in these texts was not classified—as it typically would be—although the president has not explained how he reached this conclusion.
Yesterday, we asked officials across the Trump administration if they objected to us publishing the full texts. In emails to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and the White House, we wrote, in part: “In light of statements today from multiple administration officials, including before the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the information in the Signal chain about the Houthi strike is not classified, and that it does not contain ‘war plans,’ The Atlantic is considering publishing the entirety of the Signal chain.”
………
As we wrote on Monday, much of the conversation in the “Houthi PC small group” concerned the timing and rationale of attacks on the Houthis, and contained remarks by Trump-administration officials about the alleged shortcomings of America’s European allies. But on the day of the attack—Saturday, March 15—the discussion veered toward the operational.
At 11:44 a.m. eastern time, Hegseth posted in the chat, in all caps, “TEAM UPDATE:”
The text beneath this began, “TIME NOW (1144et): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch.” Centcom, or Central Command, is the military’s combatant command for the Middle East. The Hegseth text continues:Let us pause here for a moment to underscore a point. This Signal message shows that the U.S. secretary of defense texted a group that included a phone number unknown to him—Goldberg’s cellphone—at 11:44 a.m. This was 31 minutes before the first U.S. warplanes launched, and two hours and one minute before the beginning of a period in which a primary target, the Houthi “Target Terrorist,” was expected to be killed by these American aircraft. If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds. The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.
- “1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”
- “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”
Yeah, nothing in the least sensitive here.
You can read the rest. at the link. It's pretty clear that these folks have no f%$#ing clue.
Jasmine Crockett Scorching governor Abbott.
— Winter’s Politics 🖤 (@WintersPolitics) March 25, 2025
"You know, we got Governor hot wheels down there. Come on now. And, and the only thing hot about him is that he is hot ass mess, honey.
I'm gonna move on. I'm gonna move on because I got other people to diss."
🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/ccWKMR6tSL
In a way, this is actually good. It shows that the disabled, Abbot is wheelchair bound, can be as much of an affront to human cedently as the temporarily able bodied.
To the degree that Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) causes anguish for the Texas Governor and his Evil Minions™, this is a good thing.
For all of the MAGAts who have a problem with this, it must suck to be such delicate snowflakes.
The backstory here is that I saw the normal web site about 15 minutes before it was taken down, and so I did not have a chance to see if someone assembled this from public data, or if there was a data breach at Tesla.
After looking at the dark web version of the web site, I’m still not sure. My neighborhood is accurate though, at least in terms of the dealers and superchargers. (Not gonna confirm the private owners, that is creepy beyond belief)
So, on to the instructions: (click images to embiggen)
| First, download the version of the Tor Browser from torproject.org appropriate to your computer operating system. In MS Windows, this is a portable installation, so you just run the file and choose a directory, and everything will load on or below that directory. Once installed, set to , "Always connect," then click, "Connect" | 
|
| You will get a search prompt. Turn on, "Onionize," and then enter "Dogequest.st," and hit return. | 
|
| You will get a Duck Duck Go page, click on the link. | 
|
| A partial map with limited information and sucky icons will come up. In the upper left hand corner, you will see a purple button. Click it. | 
|
| You will get the interstitial image and fact box. There will be a .onion address immediately after the Tor hyperlink. (Not posting this publicly) Copy and paste this into the address bar. | 
|
| You now see a more complete map, but you still have crappy icons, so click on the picture icon next to the url bar, select, "Allow," and reload the page. | 
|
| You get this, with locations of Tesla dealers, Tesla owners, and Doge ratf%$#ers. See the Molotov cocktail cursor? Took me an hour to get it in there, thank you very much. | 
|
It's not between left and right, it's between the careerist cowards and those who want to fight.
Given the tumultuous reception of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez resistance tour it's clear who is on the right side of this issue:
For months, Democratic leaders have been struggling to develop a strategic response to the problems that Donald Trump has laid at their doorstep: his demographically expanded electoral coalition, his flood-the-zone dismantling of the federal government, and his turbocharged push for authoritarian control. While Democratic electeds have found some collective will on occasion—like their House caucus forcing the GOP to pass their own budget bill—the party establishment has, in the main, failed to coalesce around a clear plan to fight this multifront war. Worse, their overall approach has generally lined up with James Carville’s recent call for Democrats to “roll over and play dead” and “allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight.”
This was a bad strategy when Biden made it the cornerstone of his 2024 campaign. It was a bad strategy for Germany’s opposition parties in the early 1930s. And it is a bad strategy today, especially at a time when Trump’s plans are advancing and the American people are increasingly agitated by the administration’s encroachments—and growing more angry with Democrats in Congress for their perceived inaction. Voters, in fact, have already rendered a judgment about Carville’s strategy, with a recent poll finding that 40 percent of voters don’t think the Democratic Party has any strategy at all for responding to Trump and 24 percent think they have a strategy that isn’t working. By contrast, just 10 percent think they have a good strategy.
Arriving to head off this trend is Bernie Sanders, who has formulated a very different vision. With his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Bernie has begun holding a series of rallies in GOP-represented swing districts to bring attention to Trump’s billionaire-boosting, middle class–busting agenda. As he’s swung through heartland states such as Nebraska and Iowa, the grassroots response has been electric. Last Friday, 4,000 people came out to hear him in Kenosha, Wisconsin; the next morning he was joined by 2,600 in Altoona, Wisconsin, a town of less than 10,000; and then in a suburb outside Detroit he spoke to a crowd of 9,000 that filled a packed gym, two overflow rooms, and the parking lot outside.
………
By rejecting passivity, Sanders is also doing more to actually put Republicans—who’ve recently been ordered to abandon town halls in the wake of mounting anger from their own voters—under pressure, demonstrating how Democrats locked out of power in Washington can go on offense. What if, rather than simply praying that some swing-district Republican legislators will grow a spine and help Democrats hold the line against irreversible cuts to life-or-death social programs, we instead rallied their constituents to directly demonstrate to them that going along with Trump might cost them their next election?
Finally, Bernie’s approach is proving to be a far more effective mechanism for delivering new information to targeted communities, and not just through the mega-blast of social media discourse that actions like these produce. Just take a look at a few examples of local coverage from Bernie’s rallies this weekend.
It's not just Bernie Sanders and AOC though, it's also Representative Al Green, and Chris Murphy.
It is most assuredly NOT Chuck Schumer.
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
—Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic
It really is remarkable how completely incompetent these folks are.
If they were any stupider or more incompetent, they could have run Hillary Clinton's or Kamala Harris' Presidential campaigns.
The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.
I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.
This is going to require some explaining.
Indeed it will require, "Some explaining."
Unfortunately, except for some snark about the emojis(!) used, Mr. Goldberg declines to go into as much detail as this incident really demands.
It is notable that JD Vance participated, and was primarily concerned with the optics of the situation, and not the real world consequences. (What an oleaginous sh%$ stain)
This is the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) in a nutshell.
I'd call the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) worthless bags of sh%$, but that is unfair to fertilizer containers.
Generic NGAD Rendering Donald Trump has announced that Boeing has won the Next Generation Air Defense (NGAD) fighter contract
The F-47, as it will be designated, is a new heavy fighter to replace the F-22 and (at least some) F-35s.
As near as I can tell from publicly available data, it will have a MTOW in the 40 ton range, similar to that of the F-22.
I would expect the range to be better, because of propulsion and material improvements, though the F-15, which does not have to carry a significant amount of fuel for cooling, might still out range it.
Obviously the stealth features should require less maintenance, and much like its F-22 and F-35 predecessors, it will carry all munitions internally, limiting flexibility.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that the effectiveness of stealth will decrease in future years, given that the underlying physics is publicly available, having been initially published in a Soviet academic journal, and advances in processing power and radar systems should increasingly be able to extend detection ranges.
Also, I am very dubious of Boeing being able to execute on time or on budget, since the company is still a clusterf%$#:
Boeing won a contract March 21 to develop a next-generation combat aircraft for the U.S. Air Force that will spearhead future air wars and throw a lifeline to the company’s struggling military aviation business.
The White House announcement came after a tumultuous competition between Boeing and Lockheed Martin for the prized rights to build the aircraft that is meant to anchor the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) family of systems.
“It will be known as the F-47, the generals picked a title,” President Donald Trump said. “It’s something the likes that no one has seen before.”
Yeah, sure. The "Generals picked," the title, which corresponds to Trump being President 47.
Following years of losses and missteps by Boeing Defense, this contract was a, "MUst win," for them, and one has to wonder if much of the reason for this choice is for industrial base preservation as anything else.
………
The Air Force wants a new aircraft with the range, speed and stealth to operate effectively over the vast Indo-Pacific region and against some of China’s most advanced weapons systems, including current and future stealth fighters and surface-to-air missile systems. The requirements dictate an aircraft with performance that defies familiar categories for combat aircraft, such as a fighter or bomber. But Boeing’s future aircraft is expected to feature supersonic speed and perhaps a lack of vertical control surfaces, along with a large structure to carry all fuel, sensors and weapons internally.
The cost-plus contract award for NGAD also offers a reprieve for a defense and space business within Boeing that has reported over $18 billion in reach-forward losses on fixed-price military and NASA programs since 2014, including $5 billion in new charges from 2024 alone. Despite the losses, Boeing invested heavily to win the NGAD contract, including starting construction nearly two years ago on a new factory in St. Louis to produce the aircraft.
This appears to be, unlike the F-35, a single service program, as all the current renderings show a tailless design, which mitigates against carrier versions or STOVL versions.
They are promising that it will be cheaper than the F-22, but I sincerely doubt this.
Other sources have stated that they expect the aircraft to first take to the air some time in 2028, of which I am dubious. In any case, I would expect service entry to follow any first flight by around a decade.
Trump has a plan to eliminate Social Security.
It's simple, they believe that if they gut the Social Security Administration, the resulting poor performance will undermine support for the program.
They put it in a memo, and the memo got leaked:
An internal Social Security Administration (SSA) memo, sent on March 13 and obtained by Popular Information, details proposed changes to the claims process that would debilitate the agency, cause significant processing delays, and prevent many Americans from applying for or receiving benefits.
The memo, authored by Acting Deputy SSA Commissioner Doris Diaz, purports to be motivated by a desire to mitigate "fraud risks."Elon Musk has pushed several false claims about the nature and scope of Social Security fraud. In a recent interview on Fox Business, Musk suggested that 10% of federal expenditures were related to Social Security fraud. This is false. Social Security fraud does exist, but "improper" Social Security payments amounts to about $9 billion annually — less than 1% of total Social Security benefits paid and 0.1% of the federal budget. Most improper payments are not criminal fraud but the result of beneficiaries or the SSA failing to update records.
The biggest change contemplated by Diaz's memo is to require "internet identity proofing" for "benefit claims… made over the phone." When an SSA customer is "unable to utilize the internet ID proofing, customers will be required to visit a field office to provide in-person identity documentation."
When this is juxtaposed with thousands of layoffs at field offices, and dozens of field office closures, it means that people will not be able to get their benefits.
With wait times for face to face appointments exceeding a month before the cuts, it is no stretch of the imagination to see wait times of 6 months to a year to address even the most basic issues.
When people don't get their benefits, or they are forced to jump through ridiculous hoops to get them, the popularity of the program will tank, and at that point, Trump and his Evil Minions™ can gift wrap social security and give it to Wall Street.
I reserve the right to reprint any email correspondence on my blog.
If you want to keep your correspondence private, please tell me.
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.
