Headline of the Day

Americans Aren’t Traumatized Enough by Gun Violence

—The Fair Observer online journal, stating the obvious.

If Americans had been sufficiently traumatized by gun violence, they would have done something about it.

QED. 

Yeah, It's a Scam

Get Out Now!Are you aware that 53% of all cryptocurrency offerings since 2021 have failed?

Are you aware that 45% of all cryptocurrency offerings since 2021 failed in just the past year?

Well, now you do.

More than half of all cryptocurrencies ever launched are now defunct, with most failures occurring in 2025, according to a new analysis by CoinGecko.

The study looked at token listings on GeckoTerminal between mid-2021 and the end of 2025. Of the nearly 20.2 million tokens that entered the market during that period, 53.2% are no longer actively traded. A staggering 11.6 million of those failures happened in 2025 alone — accounting for 86.3% of all token deaths over the past five years.

One key driver behind the surge in dead tokens was the rise of low-effort memecoins and experimental projects launched via crypto launchpads like pump.fun, CoinGecko analyst Shaun Paul Lee said. These platforms lowered the barrier to entry for token creation, leading to a wave of speculative assets with little or no development backing. Many of these tokens never made it past a handful of trades before disappearing. 

Bodies Do Not Lie

But ICE agents do.

Case in point, (It's not Renee Nicole Good) is Geraldo Lunas Campos, where what ICE claimed as suicide was definitively ruled homicide by the local medical examiner.

This is not law enforcement. This is not immigration enforcement.  This is terrorism. 

A Cuban immigrant’s death in an El Paso detention center this month was ruled a homicide, according to an autopsy report released Wednesday by the county medical examiner’s office.

The detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, became unresponsive while he was physically restrained by law enforcement on Jan. 3 at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility called Camp East Montana, the report said. Emergency medical workers tried to resuscitate him, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.

The autopsy listed the cause of death as “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.” The report also described injuries Mr. Lunas Campos had sustained to his head and neck, including burst blood vessels in the front and side of the neck, as well as on his eyelids.

………

Mr. Lunas Campos’s death has brought renewed scrutiny to the detention center this month after The Washington Post reported the episode last week. His family has asserted that he was killed by the facility’s guards, citing a witness who said he saw guards choking Mr. Lunas Campos to death. The family is preparing a wrongful-death lawsuit, according to their lawyer, Will Horowitz.

“He was being abused and beaten and choked to death,” Jeanette Pagan Lopez, the mother of two of Mr. Lunas Campos’s children, told The New York Times last week. On Wednesday, Ms. Pagan Lopez said she had not yet seen the autopsy report.

Federal officials have offered a different account of how Mr. Lunas Campos died. In a Jan. 9 news release, they said he died on Jan. 3 after experiencing medical distress, but after the Washington Post article published, they described his death as a suicide.

 

Project Scoop

This is a reference to a Michael Crichton novel The Andromeda Strain, of course, involving a lethal pathogen brought back to earth by a satellite operated as a part of a government program called Project Scoop..

Project Scoop was a program to bring back potential candidates for germ warfare from the upper atmosphere.

Well, I just read an article about an experiment where viruses were sent into space, and while no one was harmed as a result, some profoundly weird shit happened.  (Take off the tinfoil hat.  The emergency evacuation of some crew from the ISS is entirely unrelated., the E. coli and the bacteria phage viruses used are completely harmless)

When scientists sent bacteria-infecting viruses to the International Space Station, the microbes did not behave the same way they do on Earth. In microgravity, infections still occurred, but both viruses and bacteria evolved differently over time. Genetic changes emerged that altered how viruses attach to bacteria and how bacteria defend themselves. The findings could help improve phage therapies against drug-resistant infections. 

It gave me a big of a literary flashback to the Crichton book. 

Walking the Talk

What follows is the full text of the new rules banning hotel junk fees, as Zohran Mamdani promised during his campaign for Mayor 

3 weeks from swearing in to a rule. Not too shabby 

FYI, DWCP = Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.

Mamdani Administration Bans Hotel Hidden Fees and Unexpected Credit Card Holds

What you should know 

• Mayor Zohran Mamdani joined Commissioner Sam Levine and business, consumer and labor leaders to announce DCWP’s final rule banning hidden junk fees and unexpected credit card holds on hotel stays, ensuring transparency for consumers and saving millions of dollars overall.
• In 2025, the City’s DCWP received hundreds of complaints from consumers related to hidden hotel fees or unexpected holds

NEW YORK, NY – TODAY, the Mamdani administration issued a final rule banning hotels across the city and country from charging consumers hidden junk fees—often mislabeled as “destination fees,” “resort fees,” or “hospitality service fees”—as well as unexpected credit card holds or deposits, that cheat consumers and hurt honest small businesses.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani joined Commissioner Sam Levine and business, consumer and labor leaders to announce DCWP’s final rule banning junk fees on hotel stays. This rule will protect both consumers coming to New York City, and New Yorkers traveling elsewhere around the country. Some economists estimate that banning hotel junk fees will save consumers more than $46 million in 2026. The junk fee prohibitions of the final rule go into effect in New York City on February 21, 2026.

When you book a room, the price you see is often not the price you pay. Many hotels utilize “junk fees,” advertising a base room rate and only later revealing additional mandatory charges that make it harder for consumers to understand the true overall cost. Many hotels also issue unexpected credit card holds or deposits with misleading terms. In 2025, DCWP received over 300 complaints from consumers related to hidden hotel fees or unexpected holds.

To address this problem, DCWP proposed a rule modeled on a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rule that makes it a deceptive trade practice under the City’s Consumer Protection Law to offer, display or advertise a price for a hotel without clearly and conspicuously disclosing the total price of the stay, including all mandatory fees. The new rule goes a step further than the FTC's rule requiring transparency on mandatory credit card holds or deposits taken as well.

Today’s announcement builds on the work the Mamdani Administration is doing to hold companies accountable and protect New Yorkers from deceptive practices, including issuing two Executive Orders that crack down on citywide junk fees and subscription traps, and creating a Citywide Junk Fee Task Force to target predatory companies.

Hotels in New York City are also required to comply with other key consumer and worker protections, including the Hotel Service Disruption Act, which requires that consumers be notified of changes to service during their stay, and the Safe Hotels Act, which prohibits illegal subcontracting at hotels. Together these laws ensure that the city’s hotel industry is transparent with its consumers and compliant with nation-leading workers’ rights requirements.

“Whether you’re visiting the five boroughs for the World Cup or leaving our city for a well-deserved vacation, you deserve to know how much a hotel costs up front. This new rule will ensure that New Yorkers and visitors alike are not stuck paying hidden hotel fees, and will instead save millions of dollars each year,” said Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani. “In just three weeks, our administration has made it clear that deceptive business practices do not have a home here—and that City Hall will always fight for New Yorkers to know exactly what they’re paying for.”

“This final rule delivers on affordability—for New Yorkers traveling across the country to see the World Cup, and visitors who want to experience our incredible city,” said DCWP Commissioner Sam Levine. “DCWP will use its full enforcement authority to ensure hotels comply with the laws and rules of our city and we will be vigilant to ensure consumers have transparency in their transactions and that workers’ rights are respected.”

###

Media Contact

pressoffice@cityhall.nyc.gov

(212) 788-2958

(emphasis original)

Quote of the Day

A Psychotherapist Who Uses AI to Transcribe Sessions So They Can Refresh Their Memory About an Exact Phrase While They’re Making Notes Is a Centaur. A Psychotherapist Who Monitors 20 Chat Sessions with LLM “Therapists” in Order to Intervene If the LLM Starts Telling Patients to Kill Themselves Is a “Reverse Centaur.” This Situation Makes It Impossible for Them to Truly Help “Their” Patients; They Are an “Accountability Sink,” Installed to Absorb the Blame When a Patient Is Harmed by the AI.

—Cory Doctorow describing how the real goal of AI is to eliminate the possibility of independence and professional standards among what should be professional employees.

As I have noted before, the way to deal with this is to suspend IP protections on AI data sets and models.

Once you eliminate the profit motive, the people remaining in the field will not spend their time figuring what sort of reckless shit that they can do to get their cut of the next funding funding round. 

Growing up, I assumed that being a "professional" meant that you were getting paid to do something. That's a perfectly valid definition (I still remember feeling like a "pro" the first time I got paid for my writing), but "professional" has another, far more important definition.

In this other sense of the word, a "professional" is someone bound to a code of conduct that supersedes both the demands of their employer and the demands of the state. Think of a doctor's Hippocratic Oath: having sworn to "first do no harm," a doctor is (literally) duty-bound to refuse orders to harm their patients. If a hospital administrator, a police officer or a judge orders a doctor to harm their patient, they are supposed to refuse. Indeed, depending on how you feel about oaths, they are required to refuse.

There are many "professions" bound to codes of conduct, policed to a greater or lesser extent by "colleges" or other professional associations, many of which have the power to bar a member from the profession for "professional misconduct." Think of lawyers, accountants, medical professionals, librarians, teachers, some engineers, etc.

While all of these fields are very different in terms of the work they do, they share one important trait: they are all fields that AI bros swear will be replaced by chatbots in the near future.

………

I hold a bedrock view that even though an AI can't do your job, an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:

But why are bosses such easy marks for these gabby AI hustlers? Partly, it's because an AI can probably do your boss's job – if 90% of your job is answering email and delegating tasks, and if you are richly rewarded for success but get to blame failure on your underlings, then, yeah, an AI can totally do that job. 

……… 

That certainly explains why bosses are so thrilled by the prospect of swapping professionals for chatbots. What a relief it would be to fire everyone who is professionally required to tell you to fuck off when you want them to do stupid and/or dangerous things; so you could replace them with servile, groveling LLMs that punctuate their sentences with hymns to your vision and brilliance! 

Headline of the Day

Wall Street And Crypto Are At War Over Who Gets To Rob You

—The Lever, describing how banks and crypto bros are are in a lobbying war over legislation regulating cryptocurrencies in Congress.

Both sides are contemptible ganefs, and this is a dispute over the spoils.

The short version is that banks lowball their customers interest rates, and particularly among the larger banks, this has gotten progressively worse.

The new legislation allows the crypto bros to have unregulated deposits that function in much the same way, eliminating a profit center.

Wall Street and Silicon Valley are embroiled in a legislative slugfest over which business interests will get to fleece more of their customers’ money.

A loophole under current law allows stablecoins — crypto tokens pegged to the U.S. dollar — to essentially pay interest on their investors’ holdings, similar to a bank account except without the same regulatory guardrails.

This carveout could lure depositors away from banks’ savings accounts — a move that would threaten a multitrillion-dollar scheme by the banking industry in recent years, in which they’ve paid minuscule interest on customers’ financial deposits while enjoying far higher interest rates from the country’s central bank and pocketing the difference.

Now, banks have launched a last-minute lobbying offensive to protect their margins and avoid competition by preventing crypto from copying their business model. They’re trying to insert new language related to the loophole into a piece of stablecoin legislation, known as the Clarity Act, which the crypto industry had been backing for months.

………

This difference between interest paid to depositors and interest collected from loans — called net interest income — has always been central to banks’ business model. But in a Senate letter sent to executives at Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and other major financial institutions last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote that banks’ refusal to pass down any of their mounting profits to consumers over the last three years has allowed this net interest income to reach historic levels, creating a massive upward transfer of wealth from account holders to banks.

If savers moved their money to higher-yielding accounts — or to smaller regional and local banks, which have historically passed down more money to depositors than megabanks when interest rates increase — they could recoup tens of billions of dollars, as the Wall Street Journal has reported. But the cartel-like grip that megabanks have on the economy has helped quell competition and kept savers collecting paltry interest rates on their nest eggs.

From this vantage point, stablecoins that pay interest to investors — which the crypto exchanges call “rewards” — could pose a competitive threat to banks’ interest-rate arrangements.

I cannot believe that I am saying this, but I am on the side do the banks, because they are regulated and slightly less likely to just steal folks' money. 

Headline of the Day

Now Is the Time to Admit It, America: Donald Trump Is a Dangerous, Lunatic Moron 

—The Daily Beast, on Donald Trump's completely deranged missive to the Prime Minister of Norway about Greenland

I was going to write about it, but DB writer David Rothkopf has kind of nailed this.

Short version:  Trump wrote to the Norwegian PM Jonas Gahr Støre explaining that because he did not get a Nobel Peace Prize, he was going to have to invade Greenland.

Notice a couple of things:

• The Nobel Prize committee is a private entity and the government in Oslo has no authority over it.
• It is Denmark, not Norway that has sovereignty over Greenland. 
• Threatening invasion to get the Nobel Peace Prize is fucking insane.

He is not just joking. He is not just trolling.

He is not owning the libs. He is not simply toying with the mainstream media. 

He is not playing 3-D chess.

He is not a master of the art of the deal. He is not a business genius. He is not a political savant.

He is not a peacemaker. He does not believe in “America first” or even know what it means. And he has no intention of making America “great again.”

No matter who you are, no matter how close you are to him, he does not represent you or even care about your interests.

No. He’s none of the good or great things the slavering fluffers in his Cabinet or on his White House staff make him out to be. And none of the defenses his enablers on Capitol Hill and in the press and across the country have used in the past work any longer.

He is just a dangerous lunatic moron who has become the most powerful man in the world.

And if you do not recognize that, you are part of the problem.

This is serious 25th Amendment shit.  (Letter below) 

Gary Larson Was Right

Cows got tools!

More specifically, a cow in Switzerland (because, of course, Switzerland) has been documented using tools.

Scientists have been forced to rethink the intelligence of cattle after an Austrian cow named Veronika displayed an impressive – and until now undocumented – knack for tool use.

Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker from a small town in Carinthia near the Italian border, keeps Veronika as a pet and noticed that she occasionally played with sticks and used them to scratch her body.

………

Word soon got around and before long a video clip of the cow’s behaviour reached biologists in Vienna who specialise in animal intelligence. They immediately grasped the importance of the footage. “It was a cow using an actual tool,” said Dr Antonio Osuna Mascaró at the city’s University of Veterinary Medicine. “We got everything ready and jumped in the car to visit.” 

I have this image of one of the lab coated biologists running into the room shouting, "Road Trip!!!" 

………

Armed with a deck brush, Osuna Mascaró and his colleague Alice Auersperg set about testing Veronika’s skills. Through a series of field trials, the brown Swiss proved she could not only pick up the broom, but wield it according to the job at hand. If the broom was at an awkward angle, Veronika used her tongue to reposition it before clamping it in place with her teeth.

Veronika favoured the bristled end of the broom to scratch the tough skin on her back. But she switched to the smooth handle and scratched more gently when the itch was on more delicate, lower body areas such as her udders and belly, according to the study in Current Biology.

“At the beginning I thought this was the result of a mistake. Perhaps Veronika was not careful enough when selecting her tool for self-scratching,” Osuna Mascaró said. “But after a while we started to observe a pattern: Veronika indeed had a preference for using the broom end, but when she used the handle end she was doing so in a meaningful way.”

Tool use is well known in chimps, crows, dolphins and even octopuses. The latter have been filmed throwing shells at one another. But livestock have never been considered the sharpest of animals. Gary Larson’s 1982 Far Side cartoon, Cow Tools, shows a cow standing behind a table of oddly shaped objects. It confused scores of readers, including Larson’s mother, prompting him to explain: “While I have never met a cow who could make tools, I felt sure that if I did, they (the tools) would lack something in sophistication and resemble the sorry specimens shown.”

I, for one, welcome our new bovine overlords.

Linkage

• SecureDrop: Looking back at 2025 (Freedom of the Press Foundation)
• The Permian Is Drowning in Its Own Wastewater (OilPrice.com) Yeah, fracking, the gift that keeps on giving.
• Google brings back digital fingerprinting to track users for advertising (Mashable) Being evil.
• Anti-Aging Injection Regrows Knee Cartilage and Prevents Arthritis (Sci Tech Daily) I'd wait at least a decade before even trying to evaluate this.  There always seems to be a, "Yes, but,"moment with this sort of stuff.
• Code is a liability (not an asset) (Pluralistic) Cory Doctorow makes what should be the obvious point, computer code is not a desirable thing, computer code is twitchy, requires constant maintenance, and frequently breaks.  Code exists to create capabilities, and otherwise has negative value.
• The Psychology of People Who Love Cats (Laughing Squid) Think of dog people as King Arthur, and cat people as Denis.  (We are an anarchy-syndaclist commune) Video below.
• Washington National Opera to move out of Kennedy Center after Trump ‘takeover’ (The Guardian) They destroy everything.
• ‘Kill Switch’—Iran Shuts Down Starlink Internet For First Time (Forbes) But Elon promised that it was unjammable? Was he lying?

Yes, I love my little fuzz balls.

Have You Heard the One About the Heckler Autoworker?

Donald Trump was touring a Ford plant, and one of the workers called him a, Pedophile protector."

Trump responded with, "Fuck you," and flipping him the bird. 

He was suspended from his job, and the UAW local set up a GoFundMe for him, and it has raised around $½ million, well in excess of the goal of $150 thousand.

He will be donating the remainder to charity.  (I'd suggest various anti-ICE organizations)

A GoFundMe campaign for a Detroit autoworker who called Donald Trump a “pedophile protector” was suspended from the Ford plant where he worked on Tuesday. But it looks like he’s going to be alright financially. A GoFundMe campaign set up for the Michigan man has already raised over $450,000 and counting.

TJ Sabula, a 40-year-old line worker, told the Washington Post he was suspended from his job for shouting “pedophile protector” at Trump during the president’s visit to the Ford F-150 plant. Trump responded, either by audibly saying or just mouthing the words, “fuck you” twice. The president then extended his middle finger as he kept walking.

Two different videos posted to social media captured the exchange, including the first published by TMZ. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung defended Trump’s actions, telling the Washington Post: “A lunatic was wildly screaming expletives in a complete fit of rage, and the President gave an appropriate and unambiguous response.”

There’s no evidence that Sabula was shouting expletives, though he did call Trump a “pedophile protector,” according to the video. Trump, who was reportedly best friends with notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, has received criticism in recent months because his Department of Justice has failed to release millions of documents related to Epstein’s crimes. Refusal to release the files violates the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which passed last year.

Sweet.

Look Out Below

The 4th largest intermodal trucking company in the United States has just declared bankruptcy.

I guess they couldn't squeeze any more blood from their drivers. 

After nearly half a century in the business, a trucking company has filed for bankruptcy.

This news signals the latest of what’s being called the “Great Freight Recession,” during which a demand for shipping services has dropped while capacity has stayed high.

According to industry publication FreightWaves, STG Logistics — a Dublin, Ohio-based institution that also happens to be the country’s fourth-largest asset-based intermodal marketing company — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey on Monday.

This pre-negotiated plan, FreightWaves explains, wipes out 91 percent of STG’s almost $1 billion debt. It also gives it $1140 [sic should be $140 million] in new capital in order to support its core business operations, and to compensate its employees and vendors.  

Best economy ever, huh?

We are already in a full recession, not just a, "Freight recession." 

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

The New York Times actually became the Internet parody of itself pic.twitter.com/oiPtEbgPCJ

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) January 18, 2026

I agree.

The New York Times is indistinguishable from parody. 

Yeah, Security Concerns.

It's worth noting that the St. Paul Doubletree and Intercontinental are both owned by the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe's hospitality group. ICE has been harassing Native people in the region and tribal governments have taken notice.

[image or embed]

— taber (@kvetch.gay) January 18, 2026 at 8:53 PM

Yeah, right, "Safety Concerns"

It seems that 2 hotels in St. Paul are shutting down, and hence evicting the ICE agents staying there, citing safety concerns.

I believe the statements of the hotel.

Given the cordial relations between ICE officers and aboriginal Americans, I am sure that the owners of these businesses spared no effort to stay open in order to accommodate their guests.

Or not. 

Trump Admin Goes to Bat for Pedophile Welfare Queen

Now that Elon Musk has turned Ecch (Twitter) into a Pedo Porn generator, the UK is seriously considering blocking the social media site as well as the Grok AI tools that are used to generate this material.

In response, the Trump administration is demanding that Great Britain take no sanctions against the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™. 

The State Department is issuing a blunt warning to the United Kingdom: Ban Elon Musk’s X, and the United States could retaliate.

The threat follows increased concern in Britain over a flood of AI-generated sexualized deepfakes circulating on X, including non-consensual images and material that could violate child-safety laws.

U.K. regulators are now considering whether the platform ran afoul of the country’s Online Safety Act, a decision that could trigger a transatlantic standoff—with arguments for free speech on one side and growing pressure to curb AI-fueled sexual abuse on the other.

In an interview with GB News on Tuesday, the State Department’s Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, Sarah B. Rogers, suggested that the Trump administration is prepared to push back aggressively if Britain takes action against Musk’s platform.

“With respect to a potential ban of X, [U.K. Prime Minister] Keir Starmer has said that nothing is off the table. I would say from America’s perspective, nothing is off the table when it comes to free speech,” she said. “Let’s wait and see what Ofcom does, and we’ll see what America does in response. This is an issue dear to us, and I think we would certainly want to respond.”

Gee, hypocrisy much?  (Ask the owners or TikTok)

China Gets a Couple of Things Right

Th PRC has decided to ban algorithmic price discrimination.

Chinese regulators have issued new rules to curb e-commerce platforms’ use of consumer data to charge different prices for the same goods or services, targeting a long-criticized practice in which loyal or high-spending users were often quoted higher prices than others.

The measures, announced Jan. 7 by multiple government agencies, tighten oversight of algorithmic pricing and data profiling, marking the clearest move yet to draw a regulatory line between “big data” price discrimination and lawful promotions after years of consumer complaints and court cases.

Under the new rules, platforms are prohibited from using data profiling to offer different prices to different users, and barred from practices that restrict consumer rights or shift liability without notice.

For years, loyal or high-spending users of platforms ranging from travel apps to social media shops have complained that they are often quoted higher prices than others, prompting some to experiment with ways to “game” opaque pricing algorithms — from switching devices to masking browsing behavior.

This shit, which includes things like Uber's surge pricing, should be illegal everywhere.

Also, China is cracking down on high frequency trading.

Chinese stock markets have come under renewed pressure in recent days as Beijing intensifies its clampdown on high-frequency trading, a move that has rattled sentiment but reflects a deeper regulatory shift toward control and stability amid a US$1.2 trillion rally.

………

Commodities futures exchanges in Shanghai and Guangzhou have instructed brokers to relocate client servers away from exchange-operated data centers, a step that removes the ultra-low-latency access on which high-frequency trading strategies depend, Bloomberg reported.

While the changes apply to all market participants, high-frequency traders are expected to bear the brunt of the impact. The Shanghai Futures Exchange has set staggered deadlines for server relocation, requiring equipment used by high-speed trading clients to be removed by the end of February, with other clients given until April 30, according to the report, which cited people familiar with the matter.

In addition, some futures exchanges have drawn up preliminary plans to impose an extra two milliseconds of latency on connections routed through third-party data centers, the people said. Any such delay would be layered on top of the additional lag firms already face from relocating servers away from exchanges, further diluting the speed advantages enjoyed by high-frequency traders.

China is looking at making sure that businesses provide useful goods and services, and that investment is more important than various forms of exotic trading that turn markets into casinos.

Maybe we should address this shit in the USA as well? 

A Cartoon, Context, and a Bit of History

This puts everything in the proper context.

H/t Assigned Male

I'd Like to Neuter the Federal Reserve

I believe that it is a thoroughly anti-worker and pro bank institution, and that it uses its extraordinary powers to suppress worker wages and worker power.

That being said, I am on the side of the Federal Reserve, and its Chairman Jerome Powell in his fight against the bogus politically motivated charges filed by the Tump DoJ.

They are clearly about his refusal to lower rates as the orange caudillo demanded.

As to Powell, IMHO, he sucks, but he sucks less than any Fed Chair in my memory, probably because he does not have a background as an economist. 

I also appreciate the fact that he is pushing back publicly against this bullshit. 

There are often few surprises with Jerome Powell. At his handful of public appearances each month, the US Federal Reserve chair always sports the same softly stern expression. His voice, typically dispassionate and near-monotone, never wavers.

As one of the most powerful officials in the world, commanding a platform that has the ability to move global markets with a few words, Powell is often reserved in a way that fails to yield soundbites in this social media era: boring, even.

That changed on Sunday night. In a video statement released by the Fed, Powell looked like his usual self. Calm and composed, though without his usual black glasses frame, Powell announced the Trump administration had instigated a criminal investigation against him – and that he would not back down.

“I have served at the Federal Reserve under four administrations, Republicans and Democrats alike. In every case, I have carried out my duties without political fear or favor, focused solely on our mandate of price stability and maximum employment,” Powell said. “Public service sometimes requires standing firm in the face of threats.”

………

In his statement on Sunday, Powell for the first time outlined the extraordinary campaign that the White House has undertaken to push the Fed to lower rates – an incredible violation of the central bank’s independence.

This criminal investigation is simply “pretext”, Powell said, noting that threat of the criminal charges comes after the Fed refused to follow “the preferences of the president”.

Powell’s term as chair is due to conclude in May. Trump, who has claimed he did not personally know about the justice department’s investigation, says he has already picked a successor.

Trump's claims that he did not know, and merely said something like, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest," do not ring true to my ears.

The Greatest Trick That Obama Ever Pulled Was Convincing the World He Was Powerless

I am, of course rephrasing Charles Baudelaire in the hed, though most people know it from the movie The Usual Susopects.

With all the talk of the Green Lantern theory of politics and the like, the centrists have maintained for decades that they simply lack to power to follow through on their promises.

The reality is that they are fine with the way things are, because they personally do very well under the current regime of inequality. 

That's also why the centrists want to keep the filibuster, it gives them another excuse not to do anything.

Of course, when the reactionary right takes the White House, whether it be Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, or Trump, they seem to have no problem making the United States a crueler and worse place.

Well, over at The Lever, David Sirota shines a light on what might be the only bright side to Trump being elected in 2024, he has shown that the centrist bleats about being powerless are a lie, and they always have been.

There are a few of us who are old enough to remember everyone in the Obama White House and in liberal media defending former President Barack Obama’s failures by insisting that he never had the power to do any of the big things he promised.

Those who pushed Obama to at least try to do what he promised were ridiculed by Ezra Klein as deranged believers in a so-called “Green Lantern Theory” of the presidency. When Obama’s own grassroots supporters tried to help round up congressional votes for his promised populist policies like a public health insurance option, Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly lambasted those supporters with epithets:

The friction was laid bare in August when Mr. Emanuel showed up at a weekly strategy session featuring liberal groups and White House aides. Some attendees said they were planning to air ads attacking conservative Democrats who were balking at Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul.

“F—ing retarded,” Mr. Emanuel scolded the group, according to several participants.

………

To be fair, former President Joe Biden rammed through Congress a much bigger stimulus package than Obama ever tried, and pockets of the Biden administration at the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Justice Department’s antitrust division did laudably exercise much more power to deliver than their Obama predecessors ever did. And yet, in his rhetoric and deference to norms, Biden himself did his own part to enshrine the overall idea of the powerless president as Democratic dogma.

………

I bring this all up not because I live eternally in the past, and not just because I’m still mad about what happened in the Obama years, and not because I still believe that was the entirely preventable meltdown that explains this whole godforsaken era. I bring it up with an eye on the future: I want to remind everyone in the horrible here and now that President Donald Trump’s ongoing second-term rampage of unilateral executive power shows what a complete lie all of that pretend Democratic powerlessness really was. And that reminder is important so that nobody accepts that horseshit excuse ever again. 

This is why the Democratic Party rank and file know this, which is why they want Chuck Schumer's and Hakeem Jefferies' heads on a pike.

They have seen what the, "Better things aren't possible," policies leads to, and that is Donald Trump.

Since the mid-1970s, the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) has positioned itself as a ratchet, so while they were in charge, nothing would get much worse, but they would not reverse the evil done by the reactionaries when they had power.

This is unsustainable for us as a society, and that which cannot continue will not continue. 

Maybe I Can Buy the World's Smallest Violin on Amazon

Saks, the failing retailer once known as Saks 5th avenue, is filing for bankruptcy, and Amazon is fighting this, because it will make its $457,000,000.00 investment worthless. (Wiping out stockholders is a feature, and not a bug of corporate bankruptcy.

It seems that Amazon bought into the less than successful acquisition of Neiman Marcus,  with the hope of selling overpriced crap with a high end name.

Pardon me while I clean my screen. 

Amazon wants a federal judge to reject Saks Global's bankruptcy financing plan, writing in court papers the beleaguered department store "burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in less than a year" and failed to hold up their agreement.

When Saks acquired Neiman Marcus for $2.7 billion in December 2024, Amazon invested $475 million into the venture on the grounds the retailer would start selling its products on Amazon's website and the tech company would offer technology and logistics expertise.

………

As part of the deal, Saks launched a branded "Saks at Amazon" storefront on the e-commerce company's website featuring a range of luxury fashion and beauty items. It also agreed to pay a referral fee for Saks-branded goods sold on the platform, guaranteeing at least $900 million in payments to Amazon over eight years.

In its filing, Amazon argued that Saks' bankruptcy financing plan harms the company, and other creditors, because it saddles parts of the Saks corporation with new debt that it previously didn't have. It also pushes Amazon further down the pecking order in terms of repayment, which reduces the amount it could potentially be repaid during the proceedings, the e-commerce company said in the filings.

Amazon's argument is basically, "How dare they go bankrupt without us having the opportunity to suck them dry for a decade first."

That's some sweet, sweet schadenfreude. 

ICE is Not the Gestapo

YouTube personality Ashley the Baroness, notes that the behavior of ICE is far more analogous to something sits firmly within American culture and history, the antebellum fugitive slave patrols, which kidnapped black people off the street, demanded paperwork, harassed local law enforcement, were incredibly corrupt, etc.  

Sound familiar? 

H/T Pharyngula.

How Do You Make Coffee When You Need Coffee?

This morning, I made myself some coffee.

I really needed it, which meant that I was measuring beans, grinding beans, and pouring water from an electric kettle over it while impaired.

Yes, with coffee, it the lack of your addictive substance impairs you.

I made it a little bit strong.

I think that it straightened my pubic hair. 

And Then There is Real Journalism

An, "old-school anarchist researcher," infiltrated the white supremacist dating site WhiteDate and released thousands of user records.

I know what some of my reader(s) are thinking, "But she hacked them, that's a violation of journalistic efforts."

Just ask Woodward and Bernstein, who used personal credit card data covering Watergate.

An “old-school anarchist researcher,” who goes by the online pseudonym Martha Root, claims to have breached a racist dating site and two similar platforms.

The leak affects WhiteDate, a white supremacist dating site for “Europids seeking tribal love,” WhiteChild, a white supremacist site focused on family and ancestry, and WhiteDeal, a networking and professional development site for people with a racist worldview.

All three platforms were operated by a right-wing extremist from Germany.

“I infiltrated a racist dating site and made nazis fall in love with robots,” Root claims.

The journalist found that websites’ cybersecurity hygiene was so poor that it “would make even your grandma’s AOL account blush.”

………

The researcher created a website okstupid.lol, where 8,000 leaked profiles are placed on the map, exposing users from very different regions of the world.

The data includes highly sensitive and detailed self-reported information, such as usernames, gender, age, location, activity history, lifestyle, height, eye color, hair color, and other physical appearance traits, income range, education, marital status, religion, and even self-assessed IQ, among many other fields. 

I approve.

From the "Mind" of Bari Weiss

Update — Here is another clearer view of the "Whiskey Fridays with Tony Dokoupil" staging at CBS News:

[image or embed]

— Prem Thakker ツ (@premthakker.bsky.social) January 14, 2026 at 11:52 AM

OMFG, it's Real

UPDATE: Jack Daniel’s parent co. Brown-Forman tells me it has nothing to do with CBS’ “Whiskey Friday” concept. “Jack Daniel’s is not involved in any such segment, nor do we have any awareness of the segment and any potential partnerships or sponsorships.”

[image or embed]

— Dave Infante (@dinfontay.com) January 14, 2026 at 9:44 AM

Also, Jack Daniels had no knowledge of this, and wants nothing to do with it.

After the continuous stream of disasters coming from CBS News since Bari "Shanda far de Goyim" Weiss took over, I thought it could not get any more awful.

I was wrong.

The latest idea to spring from the "Very Special brain," aka the Editor in Chief of the Tiffany Network's news division is to have her disastrous choice for CBS Evening News anchor drink on the air once a week.

No, I am not fucking joking.

The new era of CBS Evening News, under the editorial direction of Bari Weiss and featuring new anchor Tony Dokoupil, is off to a rough start. Weiss is meddling and pouting, Dokoupil is not ready for primetime, and the ratings are already slumping compared to last year's numbers. These guys need a win, badly. On Tuesday, they tried to get one by securing an exclusive interview with President Donald Trump at a Ford factory in Dearborn, Mich. 

………

Dokoupil isn't equipped to be an effective nightly news anchor, and he's not the best option to interview a deranged president who can rightly point out that his current career trajectory is entirely owed to the rise of reactionary forces in the country. Surely, this former morning show host has something else to offer. Perhaps we can't judge him until we've seen him fully unleashed on Whiskey Fridays, as reported by Zeteo's Prem Thakker:

………

Is this the exact sort of idea that I've personally seen cooked up by a beleaguered sales team at a struggling digital media company? No comment, but that doesn't make it any less awesome. The CBS News ratings are going to go through the roof as soon as Dokoupil is allowed to get behind this desk and say, "Welcome to Whiskey Fridays, presented by Jack Daniel's, where we drink like we mean it and report like we give a damn."

So we have a political poseur pseudo intellectual hired by Larry Ellison's useless nepo-baby, and we get a, "Sponsored by Jack Daniels, we'll tell the good old boys from Lynchburg Tennessee next week," drunk news.

Bari?  You do know that Comedy Central already has this basic show, don't you?

It's called Drunk History. 

Snark of the Day

Also, in This Universe, Elon Musk Found His Highest Personal Calling as Dinner for a Family of Hogs Some 20 Years Ago

—Defector, describing a non-broken universe in which Elon Musk's child pr0n creation machine did not exist.

This made me laugh out loud. 

Twitter, also called X, the social media network owned and constantly used by the world's richest man as well as virtually every powerful person in the American tech industry, and on which the vast preponderance of national political figures also maintain active accounts, has a sexual harassment and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) problem.

I disagree a bit.  I do not think that this is a problem, I think that this was a deliberate choice.

This has been true more or less since Elon Musk took it over, but this problem's latest and most repellent efflorescence is the result of one of Musk's signature additions as owner. Grok, the network's embedded AI chatbot, will—or would, as recently as yesterday, and certainly did many, many times—generate graphically sexualized images of real people, including minors and non-consenting third parties, in response to any user's request. Another Twitter feature bearing Elon Musk's fingerprints is that the site filled with the kind of people who, when a photograph of a 14-year-old TV actress appears on their timeline, will ask Grok to generate an image of her without clothes on. As a result, for much of this week Twitter has been rife with AI-generated revenge porn, deepfake celebrity porn, and CSAM.

And then they go in for the kill:

………

Surely, however, to the extent that many laws prohibit the creation and proliferation of CSAM and revenge porn, someone is responsible for Twitter's embedded chatbot having spent much of the past week visibly and flagrantly breaking those laws. Yes? If a cineplex spends a week showing CSAM in one of its theaters, a posted apology purportedly in the voice of the screen seems unlikely to get that cineplex's owners and operators off the hook, legally speaking. If the owner of a roadside billboard lets strangers use the thing, and one of them tacks a huge sexualized image of a child—or an unconsenting celebrity, or an ex-girlfriend he's mad at for dumping him—on there, no one would accept a legal consequence which stopped at the assurance that the billboard's fucking support stanchions sincerely feel real bad about it.

So. Who's standing trial for this one? Who's going to jail?

I think it's important for a person to hold an imaginary sane and just society in their mind, against which to measure the actual society that exists instead. In a sane and just society ... well, Grok probably doesn't exist in the first place in a society like that. (Also, in this universe, Elon Musk found his highest personal calling as dinner for a family of hogs some 20 years ago.) But somewhere along the wide spectrum of social operability in between that sane and just place and the shambling, clattering junk heap where I wrote this blog and you're reading it, there is a theoretical place in which OK, yes, Grok exists, but maybe not absolutely everything has yet been motherfucked all the way out of function.

(emphasis mine)

I would note that the response of Ecch/Twitter/Grok has been to GEO FENCE the feature, not shut it down, which means that people in countries where fake revenge porn is legal, and those with sufficiently sophisticated VPNs, can continue to generate this slash-fic bullshit.

This shows us something:  This came from Elon.

If Musk were not actively supporting this, no one would suggest this to him, because of fear that they would be perceived as setting him up for an Epstein style take-down.

The creation of this feature, and its continued availability in limited areas had to come from the top. 

I Needed This So Much, and So Do You

I did not know that I needed this, but I really, really did;

Thank you Hank Azaria.

I have been a fan since Herman's Head. 

Because, Of Course They Did

As I had predicted, the Senate has killed the war powers act resolution to limit Trump's actions in Venezuela.

Senate Republicans are all Trump's little bitches. 

The US Senate has voted against a war powers resolution that would have prevented Donald Trump from taking further military action against Venezuela without giving Congress advance notice.

Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Todd Young of Indiana, who had joined three other Republicans to advance the resolution alongside Democrats last week, flipped after they said they received assurances from the Trump administration.

With Hawley and Young’s votes, the Senate was split 50-50 on the resolution. JD Vance cast the tie-breaking vote. Republican senators Rand Paul, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins cast their votes for the war powers resolution alongside Democrats.

As a note, if neither Hawley or Young had flipped, Collins would have flipped, as she always does when her vote is the deciding one.

Paging Margaret Atwood

Louisiana has  indicted a doctor in California for prescribing abortion medication.

They are in the process of extraditing an extradition request.

Louisiana law enforcement officials are seeking to extradite a California doctor who, officials say, sent abortion pills to a woman living in the southern state.

The extradition order for the doctor, Remy Coeytaux, marks the latest salvo in the escalating battle between states that protect abortion rights and those that ban the procedure. While Louisiana is one of more than a dozen states that have banned almost all abortions, California and a handful of other blue states have enacted so-called “shield laws”, which aim to protect abortion providers from out-of-state extradition or prosecution.

“We are going to continue to fight the illegal sending of abortion pills into Louisiana,” Liz Murrill, Louisiana’s Republican attorney general, said in a video posted to X. “It’s illegal drug trafficking and we will continue to prosecute those doctors and we will also continue to pursue actions against the states that are shielding those doctors.”

Coeytaux has been charged with violating a Louisiana statute that bans “criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs”. If convicted, he could face fines and up to 50 years of “hard labor”. He did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

We need to rip this out of our body politic branch and root.

I Did Not Think That It Could Get Any More Stupid

If it's good enough for Bogie, it's good enough for me

I was misinformed.

It appears that Trump's lust for Greenland can get even stupider, or at least the cadre of those supporting the policy can get even dumber. 

It appears that the the prospect of establishing "Freedom Cities" in Greenland is giving the tech bros a stiffie.

I would note to these folks, that a similar attempt in a far more accommodating and less dangerous local, rural New Hampshire, because some people insisted that it was their business and no one else's if they wanted to feed bears, with predictable results.

Living in Greenland is far more difficult than living in New Hampshire, and polar bears are far larger, and far more aggressive, than are the black bears that are the only member of the family Ursidae in the Granite State.

Doubtless, any such attempt will result in a collapse through technical issues, fraud, or bear maulings.

I favor the latter, particularly for Marc Andreeson. 

This past week, President Trump removed any remaining ambiguity about his intentions toward Greenland. During a White House event, he declared he would take the Arctic territory “whether they like it or not.” Then he laid down what sounded like a mobster’s threat to Denmark: “If we don’t do it the easy way we’re going to do it the hard way.”

Trump also reportedly ordered special forces commanders to come up with an invasion plan, even though senior military officials warned him it would violate international law and NATO treaties. In an interview with the New York Times, Trump said, “I don’t need international law.

……… 

Given the massing opposition to Trump’s quest for Greenland, and questionable security benefits from annexing the island, what’s really going on here?

………

But they stop short of examining the forces that may be actually driving the minerals agenda: tech billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who see Greenland not just as a source of rare earths, but as a laboratory for their libertarian economic and social experiments. These tech-billionaires envision unregulated “freedom cities” in Greenland, free from democratic oversight, environmental laws, and labor protections.

Ken Howery, Trump’s ambassador to Denmark and a PayPal co-founder with Thiel and Musk, has reportedly been in talks to set up these low-regulation zones.

There’s an ironic clash of interests here: the national security establishment wants strong state control over strategic territory. The tech-billionaire funding Trump want the opposite: a deregulated playground for their anarcho-capitalist experiments. Both share a common blindness to Greenlandic sovereignty and Indigenous rights.

I'm hoping for bear maulings, lots, and lots of bear maulings. 

Quote of the Day

I Understand That Vice President Vance Believes That Shooting a Young Mother of Three in the Face Three Times Is an Acceptable America That He Wants to Live In, and I Do Not.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when asked what the differenence was between her and JD Vance.

That is perfect. 

Today In Horrifying Restaurant Reviews - Stellar Parthenon

I went to Luby's, and had the worst drive through experience ever. 

This is my joke, I a came up with it on my own.

It is the 2nd worst joke* that I have ever heard in my life. 

If you want to get the joke, the context is here, but if you don't get the joke, count yourself lucky.

I had to share this because I am a very bad person. 

^*I heard the most awful joke ever in 1981, and I have never repeated it, nor will I.

Partying Like It's 2009

In both Finland and Canada investors, many of them small investors are suddenly discovering that the real estate investment funds that they had their savings in will not let them withdraw money.

It ain't exactly a money market breaking the buck, as happened at the start of the Great Recession, but it seems to me that it might be the tide going out as the tsunami comes in.

Real estate funds have long been sold as low-risk investments, but that has not turned out to be the case as Finland's housing market started dropping.

Today, ten real estate funds in Finland have restricted investors' ability to withdraw their money.

Two years ago, many small-time investors had a rude awakening when they realised that they could not redeem their holdings in almost a dozen real estate funds.

As the housing market slowed, many investors began wanting to sell their fund shares. But with few buyers for the underlying properties, the funds lacked the cash to honour redemptions.

The lockup began in September 2023, when Ålandsbanken's housing fund — with over 6,000 owners and assets exceeding 700 million euros — became the first to postpone redemptions.

………

Ålandsbanken told Yle it is protecting the fund's value by not selling properties at a loss. 

Let me translate, "Protecting the fund's value by not selling properties at a loss," from the original Finnish.  It translates to, "We are insolvent, but we hope to keep the game of musical chairs going until things work out."

And, oh! Canada:

Andre El-Baba never imagined an investment fund could trap him.

A lifelong property manager from Vancouver, he’d spent decades navigating real estate markets and thought he understood risk. So when he put money into Romspen Mortgage Investment Fund in 2022, it felt like a safe, sensible choice. Such private real estate funds had become a popular way for Canadians to invest in developing new houses and condominiums, riding a construction boom that had lasted two decades. They offered solid returns, regular payments and the ability to cash out at will.

Then the gate slammed shut.

Not long after he and his father invested a combined C$2 million ($1.5 million), Romspen announced it was blocking withdrawals — a last-resort tactic that lets funds avoid selling assets when too many clients want to pull out their money. The principal Andre assumed would always be within reach was suddenly sealed off, with no timeline for release. He’s getting only a thin, 2% stream of monthly income in return — far less than expected. Every month, Andre’s account statements tell the same story: The cash is still there, but he can’t move it.

………

To be sure, this is not Canada’s Lehman Brothers moment. The development industry has other sources of capital, including C$13 billion of government money Carney plans to inject into a new agency to build affordable homes. But the gating crisis is a harsh reckoning for everyday Canadian investors, who for decades treated real estate as a safe bet.

Let me translate THIS from the original Canadian, "This is not Canada’s Lehman Brothers moment," translates to, "This is not Canada’s Lehman Brothers moment……… SO FAR." (Ce n'est pas encore le moment Lehman Brothers pour le Canada... JUSQU'À PRÉSENT. for the Quebecois out there)

This is going to get ugly fast.   

I Was Today Years Old When I Learned This

I have been aware for some time of the term, "Perfidy," which is used as a synonym for disloyal or treacherous, what I did not know was that it was a specific term used in the context of the international laws of war, and that when the Trump administration fired missiles at fishermen to distract from Jeffrey Epstein from a plane in civilian markings, they had violated this law.

Even if one accepts Trump's claims that this is a real war, which makes you a blithering idiot, they are still required to follow the laws of war, so in addition to the double-tap strike on men clinging to the remains of a boat, the whole attack constitutes a war crime.

If there is another Presidential election, and there is a Democrat elected, not prosecuting the rat-fucks would be a betrayal of the Republic.

The Pentagon used a secret aircraft painted to look like a civilian plane in its first attack on a boat that the Trump administration said was smuggling drugs, killing 11 people last September, according to officials briefed on the matter. The aircraft also carried its munitions inside the fuselage, rather than visibly under its wings, they said.

The nonmilitary appearance is significant, according to legal specialists, because the administration has argued its lethal boat attacks are lawful — not murders — because President Trump “determined” the United States is in an armed conflict with drug cartels.

But the laws of armed conflict prohibit combatants from feigning civilian status to fool adversaries into dropping their guard, then attacking and killing them. That is a war crime called “perfidy.”

Retired Maj. Gen. Steven J. Lepper, a former deputy judge advocate general for the United States Air Force, said that if the aircraft had been painted in a way that disguised its military nature and got close enough for the people on the boat to see it — tricking them into failing to realize they should take evasive action or surrender to survive — that was a war crime under armed-conflict standards.

There should be trials, but I do not think that there will be trials, because our elites are terrified that accountability applied to the most perfidious of them will eventually be applied to them as well.

Nixon gets his pardon, Obama says that we have to look forward, not back, and our country continues to circle the moral drain. 

As Anna Russel Would Say, “I’m Not Making This Up, You Know.”

It appears that the "War on Woke" in Texas has led Texas A&M to ban Plato in philosophy class.

I'm not a fan of Plato.  In high school, I came to that he was the direct ancestor to western Fascism, and I find his dialogues to be contrived and self serving.

That being said, banning Plato from philosophy class?  What the fuck? 

I guess that it's time to start making Aggie jokes again.

A professor at Texas A&M University was forced to remove Plato readings from his syllabus after a crackdown on academic freedom in the university system and Texas at large. Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor at the university, fell victim to a proposal adopted in November that limits teaching “advocat[ing] race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Campus presidents, in accordance with the new measure, are required to sign off on courses that fit this description as well as those related to sexual orientation or gender identity. According to a report from The Texas Tribune, the university “had identified roughly 200 courses as potentially affected by policy restrictions.”

For Peterson, his story has garnered national attention after his syllabus was reviewed and his department head, Kristi Sweet, gave him two choices — either remove “the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these,” according to a New York Times report, or teach another course.

In an interview with the Times, Peterson expressed, “A philosophy professor who is not allowed to teach Plato, what kind of university is that? Is that really what they want?”

………

The president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Todd Wolfson, issued a statement on Jan. 12 regarding Peterson’s situation, stating,

“Silencing 2,500-year-old ideas from one of the world’s most influential thinkers betrays the mission of higher education and denies students the opportunity to engage critically with the foundations of Western thought… A university that censors Plato — as well as other significant texts — abandons its obligation to truth, free inquiry, and the public trust… A college or university of this sort harms its students, faculty, and traditions, and consequently can no longer be regarded as a serious institution of higher learning.”

After all that effort to have a physics department that their football team would be proud of, it's come to this.

So sad. 

 

And the Smear Campaign Begins

It looks like the J. Edgar Hoover's bastard child is doing its best to slander murder victim Renee Good.

Why am I not surprised?

Federal investigators assigned to the fatal shooting of a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman are looking into her possible connections to activist groups protesting the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement, in addition to the actions of the federal agent who killed her, people familiar with the situation said.

It seems increasingly unlikely that the agent who fired three times at the unarmed woman, Renee Nicole Good, will face criminal charges, although that could change as investigators collect new evidence, the people added.

On Sunday, President Trump described Ms. Good and her wife, Becca Good, as being “professional agitators,” adding that the authorities would “find out who’s paying for it.” He offered no evidence to support his claims.

The decision by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department to scrutinize Ms. Good’s activities and her potential connections to local activists is in line with the White House’s strategy of deflecting blame for the shooting away from federal law enforcement and toward opponents they have described as domestic terrorists, often without providing evidence.

I'm not surprised that the FBI is doing this, Kash Patel is director of the FBI, but to do so so openly and blatantly is a bit of a surprise.

As I noted earlier, I would not be surprised if Donald Trump gives Jonathan Ross a Medal of Freedom for shooting a middle aged mother in the face. 

Donald Trump and I Agree

We both hate Maine Senator Susan Collins.

We do so for different reasons.  I see her as a hypocrite and a liar who pretends to be moderate, but always tows the line when her vote matters, while Trump hates her for not beint 100% in lockstep with dear leader.

Republicans are increasingly concerned about maintaining Senate control in the upcoming midterm election, expressing frustration that Donald Trump is undermining their efforts.

The party faces challenging circumstances. While poor approval ratings—partly attributable to the president's inability to address cost-of-living concerns—make House losses likely, Republicans have remained confident about retaining the Senate.

That confidence has wavered following Trump's attacks on five Republican senators who voted with Democrats to limit his military authority regarding Venezuela. His criticism of Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) has particularly alarmed GOP leadership.


According to The Hill reporter Al Weaver, "While Republicans were miffed at the attack on the handful of members, it's Collins they are most concerned with as she potentially holds the key to them retaining the majority next year."

One anonymous GOP senator expressed frustration: "You probably ought not take on the chair of Appropriations, who's a little bit pissed off about not getting regular order appropriations done. And now you're s——g on her on this sort of stuff?"

………

Senate leadership has long protected Collins, a Maine centrist and frequent Trump target. Both parties acknowledge she represents the only Republican candidate likely to win her seat in 2024. Without her, the seat would likely be lost permanently, similar to recent Democratic losses in Montana and West Virginia. 

I would note here that it's not just the Republican leadership, but the Democratic leadership as well, because they are spineless morons.

The interesting thing here is that the vote is meaningless, because it will never make it through the House. 

This is posturing directed at the upcoming election, and if the vote had meant anything, she would have voted the other way. 

As an aside here, should Collins announce her resignation, it eliminates the argument that the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) have made for nominating the geriatric Janet Mills instead of Graham Platner.  (I think that this argument is false, FWIW.  Mills is a Schumer Democrat, and Schumer Democrats lose.)

Unbelievably Fucking Lame

In an attempt to have Donald Trump install her as President of Venezuala, María Corina Machado offered to transfer her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump.

The Nobel committee, deciding that this was a bridge too far, told her that this was not allowed.

Even if the committee allowed this, it would not have her installed in Caracas.

Even a cursory examination of her support in country shows that she is about as popular as a case of the  clap, and her stint as a US puppet would last about as long as a neutrino detection.

The organisers of the Nobel peace prize have said it “cannot be revoked, shared or transferred” after Venezuela’s opposition leader, María Corina Machado, said she wanted to give her award to Donald Trump.

When Machado was named Nobel laureate in October, it was seen as a snub by the White House, despite Machado rushing to dedicate the prize to the US president and his “decisive support of our cause”.

Trump has made no secret of his strongly held desire to be awarded the Nobel peace prize, the winner of which is selected by an independent five-person committee in Oslo.

She thinks that Trump is a delicate snowflake whose feelings were hurt because he did not get an award, which is true, but she also thinks that Trump would be grateful enough to put her in charge if she gave him the prize.

Trump does not do grateful.

Also, I'm pretty sure that the Nobel Committee is beginning to regret giving the award to her inb the first place. 

 

Portlander of the Year Arrested

 I am, of course referring to Seth :Toad" Todd, better known as the Portland Frog, recipient of Wilammette Week's Portlander of the year.

Todd was at another protest following the shootings of 2 people in Portland and arrested.

Police arrested six people during protests outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in South Portland on Thursday night, officials said.

………

Protesters gathered after news spread of a Border Patrol shooting Thursday afternoon that wounded two people in Southeast Portland. Hundreds of people went to the site of the shooting, blocking streets. Another crowd came together outside the ICE building, yelling “Shame” and hurling insults at the building’s occupants.

Ezekiel Mclain, 28, of Portland, and Benjamin J. Davis, 24, also of Portland, were booked on charges of riot, disorderly conduct in the second degree and interfering with a peace officer, police said. Ashley Daugherty, 48, and Seth Todd, 24, of Clackamas, face charges of second-degree disorderly conduct and interfering with a peace officer. Jordan Brokaw, 28, of Portland, was charged with second-degree disorderly conduct.

………

But the night’s relatively high-profile arrest was Todd. Last year, Todd began showing up outside the ICE building in an inflatable frog costume and quickly became known as the “Portland Freedom Frog.” When he was pepper-sprayed by federal agents on Oct. 2, he told The Oregonian/OregonLive it was no big deal.

It was a big deal 

The World Has Become Marginally More Fact Based

The headline says it all, "Erich von Däniken, Who Claimed Aliens Visited Earth, Dies at 90. 

One less snollygoster peddling pablum to the world. 

Gee, Ya Think?

In admitting the obvious, Dell Computer has announced changes to its PC lineup because said customers hate AI features with a white-hot burning passion.

Reading this room did not require much of a stretch. 

The tech industry’s insistence on cramming AI into virtually every aspect of their consumer-facing offerings, from AI apps you can’t uninstall to hallucinating assistants that nobody asked for, has been nothing short of insufferable.

Tech enthusiasts and average consumers alike have watched helplessly as software and hardware they rely on to research, work, game, and keep in touch have turned into testing grounds for unproven AI tech — often without their consent.

………

Thankfully, vendors are finally starting to pay attention. As PCGamer reports, Windows PC maker Dell admitted at this year’s CES that things have really gotten out of hand.

Their executives are willing to say the quiet part out loud — that nobody is scrambling to buy an “AI PC.”

“One thing you’ll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first,” Dell’s head of product, Kevin Terwilliger, said during a pre-CES briefing, as quoted by the publication. “So, a bit of a shift from a year ago where we were all about the AI PC.”

………

The fact that Dell is worried its AI-first approach may be hindering it from reaching new customers and making new sales, though, is telling.

Beyond Terwilliger’s eureka moment, Dell also admitted at CES that killing off its much-beloved line of XPS laptops was a mistake, officially reviving it for 2026 — and judging by the elated reactions the move has garnered, it was likely the right move.

If you war wondering if regular consumers are sick and tired of bogus hallucinating "Artificial Intelligence" features in their every day work, the answer is not just, :ye," but the answer is, "Fuck yes."