The Guy Schumer Hand Picked to Succeed Him

It's Brian Schatz ("D"-HI) who has gone to extremes to suck up to big money lobbyists.

Yeah, that's gonna win elections. 

As my colleague Bob Kuttner explains, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tim Scott (R-SC) have moved through a bipartisan housing bill supported by President Trump that if signed would represent the most (only?) progress of the second Trump term. The bill passed 89-10, reflecting awareness that housing affordability is a critical subject to loosen public anger over an economy that doesn’t work for most of them. The bill mostly adds funding to build housing, tackles land use rules, and lifts restrictions on manufactured housing that could lower costs of construction.

But on Wednesday, there was apparently only one provision worth talking about on the shambling mound that used to be Twitter: a requirement that investment companies that build single-family homes in order to rent them out (a strategy that has advanced over the past decade known as “build-to-rent”) and have over 350 properties sell them after seven years of rent collection. This was the subject of forceful objection by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), the heir apparent to Chuck Schumer in the Senate Democratic leadership.

Schatz called this particular measure “positively Soviet,” described it as “an effort to demonize people who want to build rental housing for folks,” and claimed it was a “drafting error,” presumably to embarrass its authors into a fix. “There is literally no reason to do it this way, and it would take like a two-line fix. But what we were told last week was, I’m sorry, the bill is closed,” he said.

………

That’s because this wasn’t about a policy change, but a signal to the people who actually do build-to-rent for mass amounts of properties, who aren’t families or pension funds as Schatz intimated, but private equity firms. They have been the ones loudly objecting to this measure. He was effectively telling the industry that he was on their side, and in opposition to their most hated opponent, Sen. Warren.

His vote did not matter.  It was not needed.  He could have told Private Equity that there was no point in his voting no with this much support.

He didn't because he wants to demonstrate his slavish fealty to them. 

Pay Enough to Live

It appears that someone at a Kimberly Clark warehouse is feeling very underappreciated by his employer.

They burnt down a 1,2 million square foot (111,000 m2) warehouse and shared the whole thing on social media.

I'm not sure that I'm particularly upset by his behavior.

Many workers’ pay is effectively frozen in an unforgiving labor market that hasn’t seen any meaningful increases in wages in decades. Meanwhile, the cost of living — not to mention the price of gas — continues to rise, making it difficult for low-income households to squeeze by.

One strategy we wouldn’t recommend is to set a 1.2-million-square-foot warehouse filled to the brim with toilet paper and other highly flammable paper products on fire — which is exactly what a disgruntled employee at a paper products facility in Ontario, California did earlier this week, as the LA Times reports.

The resulting fire, which started just after midnight local time on Tuesday, was enormous, requiring 175 firefighters and 15 fire trucks to put it out.

And if you really, really can’t keep yourself from watching the world burn, we do not, under any circumstances, advise you to film yourself while doing it — which is also what 29-year-old Highland resident Chamel Abdulkarim has now been accused of doing.

The NFI Industries employee was promptly arrested in connection with the blaze after a video showing a man lighting tall stacks of toilet paper on fire went viral online.

“All you had to do was pay us enough to live,” the man could be heard saying in the video. 

We now have a corollary to that old adage, "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."

People who own warehouses full of highly flammable paper products should pay their employees enough to live.

So Much for Judicial Independence

The Trump administration just fired a number of immigration judges after they followed the law when making their decisions.

That seems just a little bit ……… Fascist.

It's certainly an explicit attempt to intimidate judges into breaking the law. 

The Trump administration has fired two immigration judges who dismissed high-profile deportation cases against international students who had advocated for Palestinians.

The firings of the judges, Roopal Patel and Nina Froes, marked the latest efforts by the Trump administration to reshape the country’s immigration courts.

The administration has dismissed dozens of immigration judges and, according to those on the bench, has put judges under pressure to deny asylum claims and order deportations. Unlike federal judges in the independent judicial branch, immigration judges work for the Justice Department and are hired and fired by the attorney general.

The two judges, who were terminated alongside four colleagues on Friday, oversaw two high-profile cases filed by the government against the students, Rumeysa Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi.

 If there is an election in 2028, and if the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) doesn't shoot itself in the foot again, every one of these bastards, from Trump, to Miller, to Bondi, to Blanche, to Rubio need to spend the rest of their lives in jail.

From the Department of, "About F%$#ing Time"

This picture should refresh your memoryThe Ramsey County Minnesota District Attorney and Sheriff are investigating the detention of ChongLy “Scott” Thao by ICE as a possible kidnapping.

Thao, a US citizen, was dragged out of his house wearing a pair of shorts and Crocs by ICE agents after they broke down his door.

It was all without a warrant.

Ramsey County is investigating the January arrest of a St. Paul Hmong American man by federal immigration officers as a potential case of kidnapping, burglary and false imprisonment, officials announced Monday. 

Ramsey County Attorney John Choi and Sheriff Bob Fletcher said at a news conference they will pursue information from the Department of Homeland Security that they need for their investigation into the arrest of ChongLy “Scott” Thao on Jan. 18, calling it a violation of the U.S. Constitution to forcibly remove Thao without probable cause.

………

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers bashed open the front door of Thao’s East Side home at gunpoint without a warrant, then led him outside half-dressed in freezing conditions.

………

Thao later told the Associated Press that his daughter-in-law alerted him that ICE agents were banging at the door. He told her not to open it. Masked agents then forced their way in and pointed guns at the family, yelling at them, Thao recalled.

“I was shaking,” he said. “They didn’t show any warrant; they just broke down the door.”

Thao, a naturalized U.S. citizen and Hmong elder, was quickly handcuffed and was seen on video being led outside bare-chested in freezing temperatures, wearing nothing but Crocs, boxer shorts and a children’s blanket. A photo of the incident drew immediate attention on social media.

 Throw the book at them.

Amazon Delenda Est

You are supporting a company that tells everyone to keep working when another employee dies on the job.

Management at Amazon is by design a bunch of, "Little Eichmanns," to quote Ward Churchill. 

Amazon does not just need to be broken up, it needs to be razed to the ground, and salt needs to be sowed in its ruins.

This is what your Amazon Prime membership funds

Sam was helping unload trucks when a heavy thud against concrete echoed across the Amazon warehouse. An employee’s lifeless body lay on the floor.

Work halted in the loading docks on the south side of Amazon’s distribution center in Troutdale, Oregon. Sam and other employees stared at the person who’d collapsed just 20 feet away. Conveyor belts of packages continued to roll.

“I didn’t have a direct line of sight of the person’s face, but I saw a body form laying lifeless,” Sam told The Western Edge. Employees who spoke for this story requested anonymity to protect their jobs and their names have been changed.

………

The man who collapsed on the floor died Monday, April 6 on the second level of the Amazon warehouse as machinery filled the cavernous loading dock with a dull hum.

In 911 calls, obtained through a public records request, one employee called for an ambulance at 1:55 pm. The dispatcher coached a confused employee over speakerphone on how to use a defibrillator.

………

For more than an hour, several employees said, workers in the facility were instructed to continue fetching totes, picking items off shelves and loading them onto trucks for delivery as the man lay dead, and management figured out their next steps. News of the fatality quickly spread through the building, but workers say top managers did not call operations to an immediate halt. A week later, several workers said they still do not know what caused the man to die. Records indicate he was 46 years old.

Rather unsurprisingly:

………

A 2019 investigation by Reveal found the Portland area facility had the worst injury rate out of 23 major distribution centers analyzed using data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). In 2018, more than a quarter of all workers at the building - known as PDX9 - had some type of injury on the job.

If you work at Amazon, I suggest thinking about the humble wooden shoe,  known as the sabot in French.

In the past, workers found alternate uses for said shoes, throwing it into the machines. 

Unsurprising

After working with AI content, the management at Wikipedia came to the conclusion that AI was total pants, and so they have banned it from the crowd sourced encyclopedia.

Gee, I could have told you that. 

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales once described his creation as a “temple of the mind.”

Now, a decade on, it’s taken on another role: a refuge against AI slop.

Late this month, the English version of the online encyclopedia officially banned the use of AI to generate or rewrite articles, after years of piecemeal experimentation and heated internal debate among its volunteer editors, 404 Media reports.

That debate finally came to a vote on March 20, which ended in an overwhelming 40-to-2 decision to place heavy restrictions on how large language models are used to maintain the site.

“Text generated by large language models (LLMs) often violates several of Wikipedia’s core content policies,” the new policy states. “For this reason, the use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited, save for the exceptions given below.”

As the exceptions stipulate, it’s not a wholesale ban on AI: “Editors are permitted to use LLMs to suggest basic copyedits to their own writing, and to incorporate some of them after human review, provided the LLM does not introduce content of its own,” the policy continues. “Caution is required, because LLMs can go beyond what you ask of them and change the meaning of the text such that it is not supported by the sources cited.”

This has happened almost everywhere that AI has been applied.

Kind of Like Captain America Winning an Election

Peter Magyar has defeated Victor Orban in parliamentary elections, which is arguably the first major defeat for right-wing populism in years, if not decades.

This is good news, since a descent into Fascism does not end well, particularly in Europe.

It's also interesting linguistically, as my son observed.

Magyar is the preferred term for ethnic Hungarians, so Peter Magyar is the equivalent of, "Peter Hungarian," so, yeah, a bit like Captain America being elected President.

On a rather more prosaic level, in terms of bread and butter issues for the average Hungarian, I would not expect much change.  Magyar is firmly right of center, and so things like years of under-investment in the social safety net and healthcare are likely to continue.

I Was Wrong

While shaky, it appears that the US — Iran cease fire has not collapsed in 3 days, as I had predicted.

It's lasted twice that so far, and I now think that it might last almost as long as Liz Truss's tenure as UK Prime Minister.

Or not. 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Some Times, the Economy Lands on You

 As an FYI, my position at Bascom Hunter is ending this Friday, April 17.

My conversion from contract to direct was dashed on the rocks of corporate reorganization. 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

What can you do? 

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write to a famous author & ask for advice.

KURT VONNEGUT (who left us 19yrs ago today) was the only one to respond.

His reply was a doozy. pic.twitter.com/r9vE8uNEk6

— Michael Warburton (@For_Film_Fans) April 11, 2026

This is remarkable.

I'm not a fan of Kurt Vonnegut's writing, it's never done much for me, but I love his attitude.

I've confirmed this story, and here is his letter as text, which I find more convenient than an image. 

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!" 

~Kurt Vonnegut 

Color me impressed. 

Quote of the Day

There’s a huge argument among Democrats about whether they need to run more centrist candidates. I am not ready to weigh in on that debate. But if you’re going to take that side, find better centrists. I mean, are Cuomo and Eric Adams the best you can do?

—Paul Krugman, on the low quality of Democratic Party centrist candidates.

Dr. Krugman, you are an economist, you should understand economic incentives.

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is not interested in good policy, nor is it interested in winning elections.

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) makes its money from candidates whose only skill is fund raising, and the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) gets a cut of their ad buy.

Good candidates can generate their own press and motivate voters without massive media purchases, and this costs the consultants who effectively run the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) money.

Cleaning Up Archived Drafts

Nothing major, but I have a backlog of stuff in draft that I have not cleaned up in a while.

If you are wondering why some older news or quotes are being blogged about, it's Spring cleaning.

It's Bank Failure Friday!!!

No commercial bank failures this week, but I did miss a credit union failure from last week:

3. Copper & Glass Federal Credit Union,  Glassport, PA

I'm not sure of the specifics, but it has been liquidated after being placed under conservatorship in November of last year.

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

Pizza Tastes So Good When Pesach Ends

 There is a reason that matzoh is called, "Bread of Affliction."

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So this week, initial claims rose more than expected, and continuing claims fell more than expected.

I have no f%$#ing clue what this all means, but inflation appears to spiking as well, which strongly implies that we won't see any more rate cuts from the Fed. 

New applications for U.S. unemployment benefits increased moderately last week, showing no signs of labor market deterioration and potentially giving the Federal Reserve room to keep interest rates unchanged as it monitors the economic fallout from the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.

Monthly inflation rose by the most in 12 ​months in February and economic growth almost braked in the fourth quarter, other data showed on Thursday. Economists expect that price pressures increased further in March as the war drove up the cost of energy and other products.

………

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 16,000 to a seasonally adjusted 219,000 for the week ended April 4, the Labor Department said. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 210,000 claims ​for the latest week. Low layoffs are anchoring the labor market. A surge in global oil prices has sent the national average gasoline retail price soaring above $4 per gallon for the first time in ⁠more than three years and wiped $3.2 trillion from the stock market in March. 

Economists are bracing for a jump in inflation in March, with the Consumer Price Index expected to increase about 1.0% on a monthly basis, translating to a year-on-year rise of about 3.3%. The government ​will release the CPI report for March on Friday. Inflation already was elevated before the war, largely because of Trump's broad import duties.

A separate report from the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis showed the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index increased 0.4% in February, the largest increase since February 2025, after gaining 0.3% in the prior month. The increase, which was in line with economists' expectations, reflected strong rises in the prices of recreational goods and vehicles as well as clothing and footwear.

………

Excluding the volatile ​food and energy components, the PCE Price Index increased 0.4% in February for a second straight month. In the 12 months through February, so-called core PCE inflation advanced 3.0% following a 3.1% increase in January. The slowdown in year-on-year core PCE inflation reflected last year's high ​readings dropping out of the calculation.
The U.S. central bank tracks the PCE price measures for its 2% inflation target.

Economists say monthly PCE inflation needs to increase 0.2% for a sustained period to bring inflation back to target. The release on Wednesday of the minutes of the Fed's March 17-18 policy ‌meeting showed a ⁠growing group of policymakers felt last month that rate hikes might be needed to counter inflation.

The central bank left its benchmark overnight interest rate in the 3.50%-3.75% range. The odds of a rate cut this year have greatly diminished.

I am not sure what is going on, but it ain't good.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

It comes as no secret that Pope Leo is not a fan of  Trump and Netanyahu's war against Iran.

After Leo XIV gave an anti-war "State of the World" speech, Apostolic Nuncio Cardinal Christophe Pierre was summoned to the Pentagon and the Pope and the Church were threatened.

If we are looking for signs of the apocalypse, I think that they found one.

Relations between the U.S. and the Catholic Church have not been the same since January, when senior U.S. defense officials shared an abrasive message with a Vatican official.

Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his State of the World speech, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door Pentagon meeting for a bitter lecture.

“The United States,” Colby said, according to a blistering new report by The Free Press, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

An important note here, the Free Press, formerly Common Sense, is a propaganda rag founded by Bari Weiss, and as such I would not take anything that they write at face value, but I am quoting the New Republic, which has been a reliable source of news ever since Marty Peretz got dumped.

One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the 14th century in which the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent death and forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon, a region inside France.

Credit where credit is due, someone knows their European history.

It appears that the threats were so blatant that the Pope canceled his planned visit to the United States,

………

But the blatant intimidation tactic is the first of its kind ever made by American officials to the Catholic Church. There are no public records of any previous meetings between Vatican and U.S. officials at the Pentagon, let alone an instance in which the world power suggested that it could force the Bishop of Rome into captivity.

The Vatican was so alarmed by the Pentagon’s warning that Pope Leo cancelled his plans to visit the U.S. later in the year, reported Hale, who noted that “many in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.”

This is f%$#ed up and sh%$.

A Public Service Warning About the Danger of the Beatles

I have been listening to a lot of Beatles songs lately, as well as some of the Fab 4's later solo work.

I highly recommend this, but I have had nearly constant ear worms.

For the past few days, it has been George Harrison's What is Life.

This is a posthumous video, part of a contest approved by Harrison's widow and son

Official video created by Brandon Moore for George Harrison - What Is Life. The video was created for the Genero.tv competition and was chosen as the overall winner from all entries by Olivia & Dhani Harrison.

“We were totally surprised and delighted by this video and it was a clear favourite for both of us. The dancer really expressed unbounded joy, and managed to capture the spirit of “What is Life” through movement, which the director captured beautifully. Thank you to each and every filmmaker for all of their time, effort and care, and above all their love for George and his music which is evident in all of these videos – it has been a real pleasure to watch them!”

Olivia & Dhani Harrison

Now you can have the ear worm. 

I Give it 3 Days

So, Trump has announced a 2 week cease fire with Iran.

That and $31.87 will get you a trenta vanilla sweet cream cold brew with two pumps of vanilla, three pumps of caramel syrup, two pumps of cinnamon dolce syrup, two pumps of hazelnut, two pumps of toffee nut syrup, two pumps of mocha, two pumps of white mocha, two pumps of pumpkin sauce, three pumps of maple pecan syrup, and five shots of espresso at Starbucks.

Otherwise, I see it as worthless.

Over the period of less than a year, the US and Israel have launched strikes while negotiations were ongoing.

It's telling that Iran's 10 point plan in response increases their demands.

While a part of this may be gamesmanship, the Iranian's clearly feel that they have the upper hand.

Just 90 minutes before President Donald Trump’s 8 p.m. deadline to “wipe out a whole civilization” with massive strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure and bridges, he granted a two-week extension for diplomacy to continue.

"Granted"?  That's an interesting way of describing TACO Trump chickening out once again.

………

Trump said his ceasefire decision was in response to an appeal from Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and military chief Gen. Asim Munir, whose government has been serving as mediator between the United States and Iran.

………

After Trump’s announcement, a statement posted by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, which he attributed to the Supreme National Security Council, said it too was responding to Pakistan’s request and Trump’s “acceptance of the general Framework of Iran’s 10-point proposal for negotiations.”

………

In the 10-point proposal Trump said was a basis for negotiations, Iran demanded a permanent end to the war as well as an end to any attacks against the “Axis of Resistance,” as it calls its proxy groups in the region, including Hezbollah. According to a government statement reported by Iranian media late Tuesday, demands also included establishment of a formal protocol for passage through the Strait of Hormuz “that ensures an oversight role for Iran.”

 And Iran's counter proposal?

1. The U.S. must fundamentally commit to guaranteeing non-aggression.
2. Continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz.
3. Acceptance that Iran can enrich uranium for its nuclear program.
4. Removal of all primary sanctions on Iran.
5. Removal of all secondary sanctions against foreign entities that do business with Iranian institutions.
6. End of all United Security Council resolutions targeting Iran.
7. End of all International Atomic Energy Agency resolutions on Iran’s nuclear program.
8. Compensation payment to Iran for war damage.
9. Withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from the region.
10. Cease-fire on all fronts, including Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon. 

This does not sound to me like a country that has been cowed into submission. 

The biggest problem with any negotiations is that the US in general, and Trump in particular, have shown themselves to be untrustworthy negotiating partners.

I rather expect the United States to violate the cease fire in the next few days.  It's kind of our thing. 

Now Start Kicking Down Doors and Hauling Them Off to Prison

You may not have heard the story of Nurul Amin Shah Alam.

He was a refugee from from Myanmar, a Rohinga.  He is also blind and spoke very little English.

He was arrested in what was clearly a case of over aggressive policing, and spent much of the next year in jail.

His family would not bail him out because they believed that he would be seized by immigration officers and deported.

He was released following a plea deal which included no deportable offenses, but CBP seized him in response to a no longer in force detainer, and then they promptly dumped him in the parking lot of a closed coffee sErie County Medical Examiner has now ruled his death a homicide.

On Wednesday, the Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office announced that it ruled the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a Blind Rohingya refugee who was left on the freezing streets of Buffalo by Border Patrol officers, a homicide. Neither Shah Alam’s family, who had waited to meet him outside the facility where he was being held, nor his lawyers, who had been attempting to contact him, were notified of his location. Shah Alam spoke very little English.

The Associated Press reported that the medical examiner’s office did not “reach any conclusions about responsibility” for the homicide and that Shah Alam’s death was “caused by complications of a perforated duodenal ulcer, precipitated by hypothermia and dehydration. “

“The designation of homicide does not imply intent to cause harm or death,” Erie County official Mark Poloncarz said at a press conference on Wednesday. “Manner-of-death determinations are neutral, non-legal, and exist for vital statistical purposes only. They do not indicate criminality, which is the purview of the justice system.”………

The Department of Homeland Security claimed on X that Shah Alam “showed no signs of distress, mobility issues, or disabilities requiring special assistance,” despite being blind and experiencing other health issues. “DHS is lying,” New York Democrat and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer responded in a quote post.

Poloncarz said that he has spoken to Erie County District Attorney Michael Keane and New York Attorney General Letitia James about the case, and he encouraged questions about criminal investigations to be directed to them.

The CBP officers involved with this, including supervisors who knew, or should have known, about this should be in custody right now.

I want to see COPS style footage of them being frog marched out of their homes in their underwear. 

Ignoring Article 1 of the Constitution

After the House refused to pass the Senate bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, Donald Trump has issued an executive order to pay them anyway.

The exclusive role of the Congress in funding the government is Constitution 101, but Trump ignored this, and the New York Times buried the lede on this, it's mentioned in passing in the 9th paragraph out of 13.

President Trump on Friday signed a directive calling on his administration to pay all Department of Homeland Security employees, an effort to circumvent congressional gridlock and end the record-long shutdown of an agency tasked with protecting the country.

………

The Friday order came after House Republicans refused to clear a Senate plan that would have restored funding to the agency, prolonging the shutdown. Mr. Trump earlier this week had hinted that he would sign a directive calling for all Department of Homeland Security employees to be paid, as he criticized Democrats for their role in the impasse. The president signed a similar memo last week ordering the department to pay Transportation Security Administration officials after about 60,000 employees from the agency had to report for work without pay for weeks. 

………

The workaround could face legal scrutiny, since it is the role of Congress to be the arbiter of federal spending. Mr. Trump’s directive could be seen as an attempt to unilaterally circumvent that responsibility, weakening the legislative branch’s ability to hold the executive branch accountable.

………

The impasse began in February when Senate Democrats refused to support funding for immigration agencies without new constraints on immigration officers.

Weeks later, the Senate sent a plan to the House that funded the Department of Homeland Security, except the immigration agencies. It omitted the restrictions Democrats had sought on federal agents.

Hard-right Republicans declined to support a Senate agreement to fund the department because it excluded money for immigration enforcement agencies.

(emphasis mine) 

Trump's actions are clearly unlawful, and all we get in this story is equivocation ¾ of the way down.

Bad news, and bad journalism. 

While on the Topic of Charities Betraying Their Missions

We have to talk about the Southern Poverty Law Center, which aggressively retaliated against union employees and gutted its investigations of white supremacists following Donald Trump's election.

For five years, I wrote about far-right extremism for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and served as one of its spokespeople. Then, one day, I wasn’t there anymore. I never publicly explained why I was no longer with the SPLC, and I took a year off from social media after I left. On Posting Through It, the podcast I co-host with Jared Holt, I’ve occasionally hinted that something went wrong at the SPLC without getting into specifics. With my book Strange People on the Hill publishing on Tuesday, I’m going to explain what happened here—clearly and in full. 

Some of what follows reflects poorly on the SPLC as an institution. It should be said, though, that many union members there are people I respect and care about. They’re still fighting for a better organization and doing important work in a difficult, often repressive environment. After the right-wing authoritarian shift the SPLC had warned about for years arrived, the organization chose to reduce its public profile. That isn’t on these workers. They deserve better, and so does the broader civil rights community.

………

Donors to the SPLC may not realize that the organization purposefully discarded not only me but also the entire editorial team operating within the Intelligence Project—the division focused on far-right extremism—before Trump took power again in January 2025. That’s why you’ve seen fewer investigative pieces from them, even as open displays of hate have become increasingly common in American life. 

………

That’s why I agreed to become a union steward at the end of 2022. I had seen enough of that type of dysfunction. There were other, related issues. Extremists threatened my friend Hannah Gais’s physical safety during a reporting trip, and the Huang-picked Intelligence Project director didn’t even seem to know what was happening. But my primary goal in becoming a steward was to help us do our jobs without interference from leadership. We wanted to publish the investigative work on the radical right that we believed our donors expected of us.

The SPLC’s unionization effort began before I arrived—a response to underpaid staff working in palpably toxic conditions. (When you’re done reading here, check out the comments on the SPLC’s Glassdoor page for some dark comedy.) Before I became a steward, I had a spotless employment record, and leadership treated me as one of their own. I was once pulled into a Zoom call Huang held with CBS News to feed her talking points in real time. I also participated in ongoing chats with leadership and communications teams, advising them on how best to respond to breaking news. All that changed overnight when I became a steward. 

For those who have never experienced actual union-busting tactics firsthand, consider yourselves lucky. It really, really sucks. Throughout 2023, the SPLC’s leadership team called me into Kafkaesque disciplinary meetings, issuing verbal warnings over incidents that never occurred. In one case, leadership put in writing quotes of mine that they had fabricated wholesale. 

……… 

You hear a lot of liberal and Democratic rhetoric about how dire this moment is. I agree. The only thing I have ever wanted, for the SPLC and for everyone living through this extraordinarily challenging moment, is for us to act like it.

Cowardice and union busting.  Now there is a toxic mix.

A Charity Not to Donate To

The Holocaust Memorial Museum.

It turns out that they shut down all their online and offline programs detailing the linkages between Jim Crow in the United States and the Nazis in Germany without being asked by the Trump administration..

This is not a minor thing.  This is them betraying their whole mission because they are concerned that Trump will throw a hissy fit.

In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington quietly removed from its website educational resources about American racism and canceled a workshop about the “fragility of democracy.”

The changes, which have not been previously reported, came as Trump cracked down on what he called “corrosive ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution, demanding a slew of alterations at the world’s largest museum network to more closely align its content with his worldview. They also coincided with the administration’s efforts to remove content related to diversity, equity and inclusion from federal websites.

Unlike his posture toward the Smithsonian, Trump has not publicly commented on the USHMM’s content or publicly called for any modifications. But two former museum employees who left amid the changes told POLITICO they believed the museum was altering its content preemptively, so as to not draw unwanted negative attention from the Trump administration. Both were granted anonymity due to fear of professional retaliation.

“It seems like they were trying to proactively fall in line as to not then be forced to change,” one of the people said.

The museum pulled from its website a page called “Teaching Materials on Nazism and Jim Crow” at some point after Aug. 29, 2025, the last time the page was captured on the Internet Archive. That page provided lesson plans and resources about the connections between American de jure racism and the Nazi regime, including links to sites about “African American Soldiers during World War II” and “Afro-Germans during the Holocaust,” among other topics.

………

Since taking office, Trump has tightened his grip on the USHMM, an independent museum that relies on both private donations and federal appropriations and is not affiliated with the Smithsonian. In an unprecedented move last year, the president purged from its board several of President Joe Biden’s appointees before the end of their terms. And in the months since, he has installed his own loyalists on the board — most notably replacing Stuart Eizenstat, who helped found the museum, with GOP megalobbyist Jeffrey Miller as chair last month.

………

In emails reviewed by POLITICO sent from a museum employee to two professors who had planned on hosting the workshops, the employee attributed the cancellation to “a set of cuts that are due to limited federal funds and a difficult fundraising environment.” But the employee — who has since left USHMM — said museum leadership had privately told them the cancellation was also about “shifting priorities.”

It's really simple, when push came to shove, the the USHMM showed who they were, because this is what they did.

As such, they do not deserve our support. 

Drawing to an Inside Strait

The Bab Al-Mandeb Strait It appears that Iran is now openly coordinating with the Houthis in Yemen in closing off the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait, which is the path to and from the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.

This was also foreseeable before the shooting started.

An Iranian official threatened the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a narrow waterway dividing Yemen from Africa and providing a critical trading route from the Red Sea, if the U.S. “dares to repeat its foolish mistakes,” threatening further disruptions to global trade. 

Key Facts

• In an English language post on X, Ali Akbar Velayati, an advisor to Iran’s new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, said the U.S. opposition “views Bab al-Mandeb as it does Hormuz”—the key oil-transport route Iran has effectively closed to maritime traffic as the war with the U.S. and Israel drags on.
• Although Iran does not border the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, Yemen does, and Iran is closely allied with the Houthis, the Yemeni militant group that previously conducted dozens of strikes against Israel-linked vessels in the Red Sea in 2023 and 2024 in response to the war in Gaza.
• The Houthis began launching missiles at military targets in Israel in late March.
• The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused global oil prices to skyrocket and has pushed average gasoline prices in the U.S. above $4 per gallon, according to GasBuddy data.
• The statement came hours after President Donald Trump again threatened Iran’s power plants and bridges over Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

The willingness of the Houthis to support Iran in this war is not a surprise.  They have been close allies for decades, and Iran has shown repeatedly that they can be trusted by them.

In contrast, the United States has not been a trustworthy ally for decades, which is why our Nato allies are profoundly disinterested in forcing the Strait of Hormuz.

Snark of the Day

We Were Wrong, Years Ago. We Should’ve Rooted for the Jocks to Win, to Stuff Those Nerds in the Locker for All Eternity.

—Atrios, on Mark Andreeson's recent incoherent philosophical statements

Mark Andreeson has been hitting podcasts and social media insisting that self-examination is not a real thing, but rather it is an artifact of a dysfunctional modern world.

He has in fact said that, "The whole idea of self-examination, he explained, is basically a Freudian fad— an invention dating from around 1910 that serious people have no business indulging."

I think that the Delphic Oracle, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Sun Tzu, Cicero, Lucretius, etc. would like to have a word with you.

It really is amazing how aggressively tech bros try to find a moral justification for their own selfishness.  

Maybe It's Just a Jewish thing

But when fascists demand a list of all the Jews in an educational institution, it makes me uneasy.

I know that this could just be dismissed as just another attempt by the anti-Semite in the White House to use antisemitism as a political cudgel against his opponents, but they said exactly the same thing about that unpleasant little man with the funny mustache.

The Trump administration was within its rights to demand that the University of Pennsylvania turn over information about Jews on campus as part of a federal investigation into discrimination at the school, a federal judge decided Tuesday.

The government’s investigation had united Penn leaders with Jewish students and faculty members as they opposed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s subpoena. Many on campus drew parallels between the government’s approach and methods deployed in Nazi Germany.

But the Trump administration has said that its request was typical for discrimination investigations to seek potential victims and witnesses, and Judge Gerald J. Pappert of Philadelphia’s Federal District Court agreed on Tuesday. He gave Penn until May 1 to comply with the administration’s subpoena, though the ruling appeared unlikely to quell the debates around how the administration has pressured top American universities. 

So, they are remaking the movie, only they have recast Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich with Stephen Miller. 

Lovely. 

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And we are still in the low hire low fire economy.

Initial claims fell tp 202,000 and continuing claims rose to 1.84 million.

I have no clue as to what it all means.

Applications for US unemployment benefits fell last week to one of the lowest levels in the last two years, suggesting layoffs remain low.

Initial claims decreased by 9,000 to 202,000 in the week ended March 28, according to Labor Department data released Thursday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 212,000.

Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, rose to 1.84 million in the previous week.

Thursday’s figures, alongside other recent data, illustrate a labor market that is still stuck in a “low-hire, low-fire” phase. Initial claims have hovered at relatively low levels in recent weeks, suggesting employers are holding onto current workers even as hiring has slowed.

Separate data released earlier this week showed hiring in February slowed to the weakest pace in nearly six years. Data earlier Thursday from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. showed in the first quarter of 2026, US employers announced 217,362 job cuts, the lowest total for this period since 2022.

The End of the Beginning?

Trump just fired Pam Bondi.

I think that this is more significant than Noem's firing for a number of reasons:

• It's the second firing from the Trump administration in a fairly short time.
• The Senate is likely to be a bit less likely to rubber stamp Trump's next nominee for Attorney General.
• Her exit is likely to slow down attempts to use the DoJ for Trump's desired vengeance.

I have no doubt that Trump will attempt to replace here with something even more bizarrely inexplicable 

Donald Trump has fired Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, dismissing a loyalist who reshaped the justice department but still failed to please a president fixated on prosecuting political enemies and frustrated with the politically explosive release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social: “Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year. Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900. We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future.”

The president added that Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, would serve as acting attorney general. Lee Zeldin, a former New York congressman who now leads the Environmental Protection Agency, is said to be a top contender to replace Bondi.

Yeah, Zeldin would qualify as something even more bizarrely inexplicable

………

During her 14 months as attorney general, Bondi presided over a major purging of career justice department staff, shifted focus away from criminal prosecutions toward immigration cases, and spearheaded the defense of Trump’s towering stack of executive orders as they faced legal challenges.

But she will be perhaps best remembered for complying with Trump’s public demand last year that federal prosecutors bring criminal charges against his personal enemies. Within three weeks, federal prosecutors had indicted James Comey, a former FBI director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general.

Maybe someone should refer her to the state bar. 

 

Well, This Was Not on My F%$#ing Bingo Card

Byron Noem, husband, and cuck, of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, has been exposed as a cross dressing "Bimboification" fetishist.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. 

I'm just a surprised, even though I have said time and time again that every one of their accusations is a confession.

In the spectrum of creepy GOP sleaze, this one is up there with the Jerry Falwell ally who  died in bizarre auto-asphyxia accident involving a closet, wet suits (plural),  and a dildo in his anus. 

Clearly, fiction writers are going to have a problem writing something weirder than this. 

Kristi Noem's husband is today revealed as a secret cross-dresser who dons gigantic fake breasts and pink hotpants to chat with online fetish models.

While his wife has operated at the highest echelons of government, handling matters of national security in her recent role as secretary of homeland security, Bryon Noem, 56, has been dressing up and paying adult entertainers to talk dirty.

The Daily Mail has reviewed hundreds of messages involving three women from the 'bimbofication' scene – where porn performers transform themselves into real-life Barbie dolls by pumping colossal amounts of saline into their breasts.

Bryon has lavished praise on their surgically enhanced bodies, confessed his lust for 'huge, huge ridiculous boobs,' and even made indiscreet remarks about his 34-year marriage to Kristi, our investigation can exclusively disclose.

National Security experts consulted by the Daily Mail said his brazen behavior could have left the 54-year-old MAGA favorite, who oversaw ICE's aggressive crackdown until she was removed from her position on March 5, vulnerable to blackmail.

If you are worried about vulnarability to blackmail, perhaps Kristi Noem's affair with Cory Lewandoski, or her bragging about shooting a puppy.

Those are kind of red flags to a lot of security folks. 

As an FYI, there are some pictures at The Mail, but I am not sharing them here.

Also, this is not an April Fools joke. 

Running Around Like a Chicken With My Head Cut Off

Cleaning for Passover.

First Seder is tomorrow. 

With Good Reason

Did you know that the 2nd most blocked account at Bluesky is their AI tool Attie?

Given that it's only been out a few days, I expect it to pass JD Vance shortly. 

Bluesky has launched an AI assistant called Attie that allows users to design their own social media algorithms and create custom feeds within the company’s AT Protocol ecosystem. And let’s just say the response has been heated.

Attie debuted this weekend at the ATmosphere conference, which Bluesky sponsors. But Bluesky’s userbase did not embrace the new product. Instead, about 125,000 users have already blocked Attie’s Bluesky account, making it the second most blocked account on the network, according to open source data. Attie only has 1,500 followers, meaning that about 83 times more users have blocked the account than followed it.

The only account with more blocks than Bluesky’s AI agent is Vice President J. D. Vance, with about 180,000 blocks — Attie even surpassed the White House account (122,000 blocks) and the ICE account (112,460 blocks). That’s some seriously detested company for a platform that skews left politically.

 "This is not a good look for Bluesky, said Captain Obvious.

Thank You Palantir

It looks like our AI driven military just bombed another school, only this time it appears to be the combat debut of a new missile system as we.

On the first day of the war with Iran, a weapon bearing the hallmarks of a newly developed U.S.-made ballistic missile was used in an attack that struck a sports hall and adjacent elementary school near a military facility in southern Iran, according to weapons experts and a visual analysis by The New York Times. Local officials cited in Iranian media said this strike and others nearby in the city of Lamerd killed at least 21 people.

The Feb. 28 attack occurred the same day as a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile struck a school in the city of Minab, several hundred miles away, killing 175 people. In the case of Lamerd, though, it involved a weapon that had been untested in combat.

The Times verified videos of two strikes in Lamerd, as well as aftermath footage from the attacks. Times reporters and munitions experts found that the weapon features, explosions and damage are consistent with a short-range ballistic missile called the Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM (pronounced like “prism”), which is designed to detonate just above its target and blast small tungsten pellets outward.

If you want to murder children, Palantir is for you.

The Finest Bit of Politics Theory That I Have Heard in a Long Time

This is about Canadian politics, which is something that I know little about, beyond the fact that there are two sorts of Canadians, those who hate Donald Trump, and those who are committing treason in an attempt to sell their province to Donald Trump. (Mostly, but not entirely, in Alberta)

In any case, there were recently party elections for the leadership of the New Democratic Party, the most progressive of Canada's 4 major political parties, and had been completely trounced in the last elections, largely because the last permanent leader Jagmeet Singh had decided to walk back party priorities in order to be in the government (as a second party) with the centrist (I would argue center-right, but I am a Pinko) Liberal Party.

(I said that I know little about Canadian politics, not that I could not read about Canadian politics)

So, they had leadership elections, and Avi Lewis, who is associated with the party's left wing won, and many of the party stalwarts (read careerist assholes and fossil fuel stooges) have expressed dismay, and some have moved away from the party, with some NDP MPs crossing the floor to serve with the (not-so) Liberals. 

Their electoral blowout was a direct result of their selling their souls for proximity to power.

After that long introduction, let me quote Jason's analysis:

People are calling this a split in the NDP, but it's not.

This is what happens when a party finally decides what it is and what it represents.

For the last decade, the NDP has been drifting to the center by working alongside the Liberals, softening its message and trying to appeal to as many people as possible.

They thought that that was a strategy, but really it created a problem.

If you're offering a softer version of the Liberals, voters are just going to choose the Liberals. And that's what they did in this last election. The party blurred itself, its identity, and its message so much that it collapsed, and that collapse forced a choice.

………

And that's being framed as a split. But it's not dysfunction, it's alignment.

Centrists are being forced to decide where they belong.

Soft Liberals are being pushed back toward the Liberal Party of Canada. And the NDP is stopping its attempt to be a party that only cares about proximity to power and is putting an effort into defining itself. 

 Watch the whole thing, it's only about 6 minutes.

Judge Calls Bullsh%$ on Elon

Rather unsurprisingly, when advertisers decide not to buy ads from you because you have created a cesspool of racism, bigotry, and misinformation, it is not a violation of antitrust law.

Being Elon's lawyers must be the worst job on earth. 

On Thursday, Elon Musk lost his lawsuit alleging that advertisers violated antitrust law by colluding on an ad boycott after he took over Twitter, gutted content moderation teams, and disbanded the Trust and Safety Council.

In her opinion, US District Judge Jane Boyle wrote that the lawsuit was dismissed because Musk failed to state a claim. His arguments that advertisers acted against their own best interests by avoiding advertising on his platform, now called X, did not plead facts showing that consumers were harmed. Without consumer harm, there can be no antitrust violation, the judge wrote, deeming the ad boycott perfectly legal.

“The very nature of the alleged conspiracy does not state an antitrust claim, and the Court therefore has no qualm dismissing with prejudice,” Boyle said. At one point, she emphasized, “the question underlying antitrust injury is whether consumers—not competitors—have been harmed.”

For Musk, the loss is likely significant. He had argued that advertisers should be “criminally prosecuted” after allies in Congress released a report claiming they were conspiring to tank Twitter’s revenue with the supposed goal of censoring conservative voices.

………

There are many ways that Musk’s antitrust claims could have succeeded, Boyle noted. He could have argued that the boycott prevented X from competing with other social media companies to “corner the supply against users’ interests.” Or that advertisers were somehow motivated to help a rival platform raise ad prices to exclude X from that market. Or possibly show that the World Federation of Advertisers intended to shut X out in order to launch its own social media ad business. 

Much like any official statements regarding his businesses, in the final analysis, there is no, "There," there. 

There Has Already Been the Bear Movie

And now we have to deal with cocaine sharks.

I hate remakes.

The expression “coked to the gills” has never been more apt.

Scientists from Brazil have discovered that sharks swimming in the Bahamas are testing positive for a potpourri of substances, ranging from caffeine to cocaine and painkillers — as if they, too, are ready for a party in an island paradise.

The implications of the findings, detailed in a study in the journal Environmental Pollution, make for quite the comedown. That the substances are turning up in detectable quantities in sharks points to an “urgent need to address marine pollution in ecosystems often perceived as pristine,” the authors warned in the study, with divers in the area being the most likely culprit.

The first urgent need is to keep cocaine sharks from completely losing their sh%$.

It will make Sharknado look like a trip to the kiddie pool. 

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

This time it comes from France, where the headline, "Murder trial involving Freemasons, French secret agents opens in Paris court," caught my eye.

It seems to me that  Masons in Europe are not the guys in Fez hats (Shriners) that we see in the United States. 

In Europe, at least on the Continent, you have murders, lodges that have brought down governments, and the occasional terrorist bombing.  (See the P2 Lodge)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Twenty-two people went on trial in France on Monday on charges of murder and other serious crimes centred on members of a Masonic lodge accused of running hit squads.

Thirteen of the defendants face life imprisonment.

Those in the dock include four military personnel from France's foreign intelligence service (DGSE), two police officers, a retired domestic intelligence officer, a security guard and two business executives.

They are accused of the murder of a racing driver, the attempted murders of a business coach and a trade unionist, aggravated assault and criminal conspiracy – all on behalf of a mafia network inside the former Athanor Masonic Lodge in the Paris suburb of Puteaux.

………

The alleged ringleaders are Athanor Freemasons Jean-Luc Bagur, Frédéric Vaglio and Daniel Beaulieu. They face life in jail if convicted.

So does Beaulieu's right-hand man Sébastien Leroy, who is accused of carrying out the trio's dirty work himself or through a hit-man network.

The case was triggered by a botched contract killing in July 2020, when two members of France's parachute regiment were arrested in possession of weapons near the home of business coach Marie-Hélène Dini.

Under questioning, they said they thought they had been asked to murder Dini on behalf of the French state on the grounds that she worked for Israeli spy agency Mossad.

Whoever has the tinfoil hat concession for this trial will make out like a reped ape.

 

Linkage

Why Falling Cats Always Seem to Land on Their Feet (New York Times) They are wrong.  Cats do not land on their feet, they rotate the universe u to meet their feet.

Archaeologists May Have Found the Lost Iron City of the Silk Road in the Remote Highlands of Uzbekistan (Smithsonian Magazine) A major find at an unexpectedly high altitudes.

Lost Rembrandt painting verified by Dutch art experts (UPI) The 1633 painting Vision of Zacharias in the Temple/

Polling shows Ohio public libraries have vast voter support (Ohio Capital Journal) This is not surprising.

Samples From Distant Asteroid Contain All DNA and RNA Building Blocks (FuturismI) They have found all five primary nucleobases, which may point to extraterrestrial origins of life on earth.

This 2-pound dinosaur is rewriting what scientists know about evolution (ScienceDaily) Fossil finds of the smaller dinosaurs are rare, and this find is an almost complete skeleton.

Beavers can convert stream corridors to persistent carbon sinks (Communications Earth) Beavers seem to do an awful lot in an ecosystem.  They seem almost busy.

Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here's How to Use It. (Card Catalog) Tips and tricks for disenshittifying Google search.

Patrick Boyle explains how the SpaceX IPO is a con job. (I've made similar points about valuations and IPOs)

Bringing Jobs Back to America

Or not.

Because of concerns about threats to travelers to the United States by immigration authorities, the Ig Nobel Prize will be moving its awards ceremony to Europe.

Honestly, I understand the need to relocate to a safer place than the United States.

It could have been Europe, it could have been Japan, it could have been Karg Island, or it could have been Chernobyl. They would all be safer for people going through US customs.

The annual Ig Nobels, a satirical award for scientific achievement, are shifting for the first time from the US to Europe due to concerns about attendees getting visas, organizers announced on Monday.

Organized by the Annals of Improbable Research, a digital magazine that highlights research that makes people laugh and then think, the 36th annual ceremony will be held in Zurich. It’s usually held in the US in September, a few weeks before the actual Nobel prizes are announced.

“During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the magazine, told the Associated Press in an email interview. “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA this year.”

The move comes amid Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration, in which he has focused on deporting migrants illegally in the US, as well as holders of student and visitor exchange visas.

………

But four of the 10 winners last year chose not to travel to Boston for the ceremony. In previous years, the ceremony has taken place at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University.

I think that someone should publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal about this.  You might even get an Ig Nobel Prize for that.

 

Artificial Stupidity

2 years after going all in on Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence, the listicle wankers Buzzfeed are circling the drain.

Gee, hoocoodanode that a pivot to AI would not work out?  (Spoiler, everyone knew that a pivot to AI would not work out.)

Why would people go to Buzzfeed when they could generate identical generic bullsh%$ from ChatGPT?

In January 2023, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced in a memo to staff that the company was making a hard pivot to AI — years before the word “slop” was added to the public lexicon.

In the memo, which was published roughly two months after OpenAI unveiled its groundbreaking ChatGPT chatbot, Peretti said BuzzFeed would be using the software to enhance the company’s infamous quizzes by generating personalized responses.

The company’s stock price jumped aggressively, from around $3 per share to north of $15. But longer-term, neither insiders nor the public were particularly compelled by the move. Nonetheless, Peretti doubled down, promising in May 2023 that AI will “replace the majority of static content” on the site, just a month after shutting down its Pulitzer Prize-winning BuzzFeed News division.

The stock price jumped because stock prices always jump after massive layoffs.  Wall street is populated by not particularly bright sociopaths. 

Reality soon set in. The AI quizzes were underwhelming, and the site was soon caught publishing entire AI-generated articles that were sloppy and repetitive. After the initial spike in enthusiasm, the company’s stock took a massive beating; as of this week, its shares are hovering around 70 cents.

Now, three years after its AI pivot, the writing is on the wall. The company reported a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025 in an earnings report released on Thursday. In an official statement, the company glumly hinted at the possibility of going under sooner rather than later, writing that “there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

I won't miss this sh%$ at all. 

Cooking the Books

It now appears that we have evidence that the Trump administration is manipulating economic data for their own political gain.

Gee, who could have seen that coming?

An obscure methodological change lowered a key measure of inflation in January, prompting questions about how government statistical agencies produce and report economic data.

Deep inside its monthly inflation report on Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said that the cost of legal services rose 1.8 percent in January. That was an unusually large increase, but not nearly as big as the double-digit gain that some forecasters were expecting.

The reason for the divergence: The agency, which is part of the Commerce Department, had changed the source of its data on legal prices, relying on wholesale prices from the Bureau of Labor Statistics rather than the consumer price data it usually uses.

A technical tweak to such a small category — legal services account for less than 1 percent of overall consumer spending — would ordinarily draw little notice.

But in this case, the adjustment was enough to shave roughly a tenth of a percentage point off the monthly change in the core Personal Consumption Expenditures price index. That is a meaningful difference to investors, who track even tiny moves in the index for hints of when and how the Federal Reserve will next adjust interest rates. The central bank officially targets the P.C.E. index, not the better-known Consumer Price Index, when making policy decisions.

The bureau provided no public disclosure of the change. Economists learned about it only when they reached out to the agency to understand why their forecasts had been so far off.

As I have said repeatedly, the economic data from the Trump administration should not have the presumption of regularity. (See here, here, here, and here)

A Jewish Joke

Many years ago, a Jew was the most trusted minister to a king.

The king said, "Moishe, I would like to make you my prime minister, but the people would not stand for me appointing a Jew, please convert."

Moishe agrees, and converts to Christianity, and becomes prime minister.

After a few months, he cannot deal with this any more, and with much trepidation, he goes to the king and says, "My king, I am a Jew, and I cannot be otherwise.  Please forgive me, but I must resign from my position and return to the practices of Judaism."

The king understands, and is not angry, and accepts Moishe's decision.

He then goes home to his wife, and says Shoshana, I am no longer prime minister.  I have to be a Jew.

Shoshana smacks him on the head, and says, "Moishe, why couldn't you wait until AFTER Passover?"

My gentile reader(s) may not get this, but all of my Jewish readers do.

I've been thinking about this joke for the past week or so as our hoshold frantically cleans for Pesach. 

 

It's AI Slop, but It's Funny AI Slop

Also kind of true

There is a genre of AI slop on YouTube, a SCF-FI genre you could call human exceptionalism.

Basically, it consists of a spoken word YouTube video in which aliens encounter Earthers, and said humans blithely do something that confuses and terrifies the host of aliens present.

I generally do not have much use for such stuff, unless, of course, it involves humor and cats. 

At that point, I feel the need to share this with the rest of you. 

Have fun. 

Headline of the Day

When Pete Hegseth Says “Lethality” He’s Talking About Killing Iranian School Girls

—Dean Baker, stating the obvious about what it means when SecDef Hegseth brags that our military not be constrained by "Woke" rules of engagement.

I’m going to give our “Secretary of War” a little credit. I will assume that even someone as openly bloodthirsty as Hegseth would not deliberately blow up a school building filled with little girls. But this tragic accident, that led to the death of at least 165 Iranian girls between the ages of 7 and 12, was the direct result of Hegseth’s policy.

The main point of the “woke” rules of engagement that Hegseth has constantly derided, and told the military to ignore, is to prevent tragic accidents like the bombing of a girls’ school in the middle of the day. The rules are designed to try to minimize civilian casualties. 

You give Hegseth more credit than I would.  I think that the Trump administration likes the idea of killing civilian noncombatants. 

You Know That Ecuadorian Drug Lab We Bombed?

It was a dairy farm.

Why am I not surprised? 

As President Trump prepared to welcome conservative Latin American leaders to a summit in Florida in early March, U.S. officials released a video of a massive explosion — capturing the destruction of what they said was a drug trafficker’s training camp in rural Ecuador.

The video was meant to show that the U.S. military, which for months has bombed boats it says are carrying drugs from South America, was “now bombing Narco Terrorists on land,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on social media.

But a New York Times investigation raises questions about the operation that both the United States and Ecuador spotlighted as part of a new military alliance targeting drug traffickers.

The military strike appears to have destroyed a cattle and dairy farm, not a drug trafficking compound, according to interviews with the farm’s owner, four of its workers, human rights lawyers and residents and leaders in San Martín, the remote farming village in northern Ecuador where the strike took place.

 These little sh%$s cannot do anything right.

Isn't This Supposed to Take 25 Years and Be Over Budget?

The first production KF-21, South Korea's stealth(ish) fighter jet, has rolled off the assembly line.

Considering that the program officially launched in 2015, this is faster than I would have anticipated.

 By way of comparison, it took the US F-22 about 15 years and the US F-35 took about 20 years.
 

Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) has rolled out the first production KF-21 Boramae fighter jet, less than two years after construction on it began and four years after the first prototype aircraft made it maiden flight.

The aircraft, a two-seat jet carrying the serial number 26-001, rolled out at KAI’s facilities at Sacheon on Wednesday in a ceremony attended by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, where he said the program embodied the country’s aspirations to be reliant in self-defense, according to national news agency Yonhap.

………

The rollout was a significant development for the KF-21 program, which marked another milestone in January with the completion of its flight test program.

South Korea first conceptualized its own indigenous fighter program 25 years ago, although the final go ahead to start development was only made in 2015. Beside KAI, its development also involving stakeholders such as South Korea’s Agency for Defense Development and Korean defense giant Hanwha.

The KF-21 is considered a 4.5 generation fighter jet and will be equipped with a mix of indigenous and Western sensors and weapons in service, including the KGGB precision glide bomb and European MBDA Meteor air-to-air missile, according to South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA).

Maybe the DoD should look at the RoK's defense procurement practices.
 

Not a Surprise

Scientists have repeatedly cloned a mouse.  Somewhere around generation 30, reproductive success dropped, and by generation 58, all of the mice were born dead.

This is not particularly surprising.

Sexual reproduction evolved as a genetic repair device, some bacteria exchange genetic material to this day.

Cloning does not necessarily cause genetic damage, but it necessarily fails to repair damage as sexual reproduction does. 

Here’s the cautionary tale you didn’t know you needed: cloning the same mouse in perpetuity will produce horrific affronts to mammalian biology.

A team of researchers in Japan discovered this firsthand. In a stunning experiment lasting two decades, they cloned a female mouse, and then cloned its clones, for 58 successive generations. But over 1,200 clones later, the experiment stopped, because by that last generation the mice kept dying immediately after being born, despite displaying no outward physical abnormalities.

The findings, published in a new study in the journal Nature Communications, suggest there’s a hard limit to duplicating mammals. And to scientists hoping for “infinite” cloning, this came as a major let down.

“We had believed that we could create an infinite number of clones. That is why these results are so disappointing,” study senior author Teruhiko Wakayama, of the University of Yamanashi, told Reuters.  

………

Perfect clones, it turns out, aren’t perfect clones. Sequencing their DNA throughout the generations revealed that they were accruing small mutations over time that snowballed into larger ones, even though the clones were superficially identical. In some cases, the clones even lost an entire copy of their X chromosome.

“It was once believed that clones were identical to the original, but it has become clear through this study that mutations occur at a rate three times higher than in ​offspring born through natural mating,” Wakayama said. 

Justice

Rapper Afroman, best known as the artist who produced the song, "Because I Got High," just prevailed in a defamation suit filed by Adams County sheriffs for his mockery of them for breaking into his house, disconnecting his security cameras, and stealing his money. (See here for my earlier thoughts on this)

Afroman took the incident, and made lemonade, or possibly lemon pound cake, over, and the sheriff's deputies decided that being help up for mockery for their egregious and unprofessional behavior hurt their delicate feelings, so they sued, and lost.

Before Friday, Grammy-nominated musician Afroman might have been best known for his Y2K hit, “Because I Got High.” But now he has a new claim to fame, as the man who fought the law—and won. The southern Ohio resident, whose legal name is Joseph Edgar Foreman, prevailed in a nearly $4 million lawsuit filed against him by seven police officers in 2023, all of whom claimed that songs and videos he released regarding a raid on his home were defamatory and an invasion of their privacy.

The saga began on August 21, 2022, when a group of Adams County, Ohio, Sheriff's Office deputies raided Foreman's Winchester, Ohio home, which is about 55 miles east of Cincinnati. According to a Fox 19 report from the time, police had obtained a warrant to search the residence based on “probable cause that drugs and drug paraphernalia were located on the property and that trafficking and kidnapping had taken place there.”

Foreman, who was not home at the time, posted security footage of the raid to Instagram, including a door-busting breach into the kitchen, followed by a police pause at a dessert stand populated by what we'd later learn was a lemon pound cake. An additional video showed police rifling through his closet, as one law enforcement agent asks “is he a Raiders fan? Still?”

According to Foreman, police confiscated a joint, a vape pen, and $5,031 in cash. (The latter was returned.) He was never charged. A spokesperson for the Adams County Prosecutor’s Office later admitted that the raid “failed to turn up probative criminal evidence.”

Well, it was about $400.00 short, the cops, "Misplaced," the cash.  Yeah, sure. 

………

In the wake of the event, Foreman says he thought about suing the police, but decided against it. "I asked myself, as a powerless Black man in America, what can I do to the cops that kicked my door in?" he asked NPR. “And the only thing I could come up with was make a funny rap song about them and make some money, use the money to pay for the damages they did and move on.”

The result was Lemon Pound Cake, an album released by Afroman in 2022. Tracks such as “The Police Raid,” “Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera,” and the title song retold details of the breach in an exaggerated, hyperbolic, and oft-comedic fashion. Another song, “Will You Help Me Repair My Door," was accompanied by a video that included footage from the breach, set to lines like “Did you find what you were looking for/ Would you like a slice of lemon pound cake/ You can take as much as you want to take/ There must be a big mistake.”

………

It wasn't until this week that the trial began, with Foreman in attendance in a suit patterned with the American flag. He took the stand on Tuesday, WCPO reports. “All of this is their fault,” Foreman said. "If they hadn't wrongly raided my house, there would be no lawsuit, I would not know their names, they wouldn't be on my home surveillance system, and there would be no songs ... my money would still be intact."

“After they run around my house with guns and kick down my door,” he said. “I got the right to kick a can in my backyard, use my freedom of speech, turn my bad times into a good time.”

The next day, the jury reached its verdict after six hours of deliberation. "It's been an emotional case, it's been a well-tried case," the judge said. “In all circumstances, the jury finds in favor of the defendant. No plaintiff verdict prevailed. So the matter will be concluded with defense verdicts.”

I'm not sure what he can do legally in response to what was obviously a SLAPP suit, but there is clearly material for another album in this.