Speaking of the Ongoing War

Trump has announced that the cease fire has ended and that the United States will resume its blockade on Iran and charge a 20% fee on all ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

I'm not sure what the legal justification is for charging such a fee, and in announcing the blockade he is announcing a resumption of war against Iran.  (It's why Kennedy called the blockade of Cuba during the Missile Crisis an, "Embargo.")

The fee that President Trump wants to charge ships going through the Strait of Hormuz would significantly increase the cost of transporting oil and other products through the crucial waterway, shipping operators and logistics experts said.

On Monday, Mr. Trump said the United States would charge a 20 percent fee on all cargo shipped through the strait, as a way to recover the cost of providing military protection to vessels using the waterway.

……… 

Mr. Trump did not explain exactly how the 20 percent fee would be calculated.

But if it were charged on the value of the cargo, it could more than double the cost of shipping oil through the strait.

Scores of ships have gone through the strait with Iran’s permission, taking routes close to the Iranian coast. On Monday, Mr. Trump said he was reinstating a U.S. naval blockade of ships that use Iranian ports.

……… 

In late June, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “No country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway. That’s existing international law.” 

He forgets the most important internal law, "We don't care, we don't have to, we are the United States of America mother f%$#ers."

Bummer of a Birthmark, Donnie

A Federal Reserve Governor has publicly stated that they are seriously looking at a rate hike.

I kind of think that the collapse of the cease fire with Iran, and the oil price spikes that have resulted, make this even more likely.

Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said policymakers may need to raise rates in the near term if underlying inflation continues to signal broad price pressures.

“If we get another hot reading on core inflation this week, then the FOMC will need to consider tightening monetary policy in the near term,” Waller said Monday, referring to the central bank’s rate-setting committee, in remarks prepared for an event in New York.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is due to release fresh data on consumer prices on Tuesday.

Waller emphasized the economy was in good shape, with the labor market appearing stable and consumer demand resilient. Still, he said, monetary policy was at a “crossroads” because of inflationary pressures driven by tariffs, energy prices and the build-out of artificial intelligence infrastructure.

“No matter how you cut it, or what measure you want to use, inflation is up this year,” Waller said. “At this point, I am concerned about the elevated pace of core inflation.”

I'm a dove on inflation, not that counts for anything, but the fact that this probably has Donald Trump's head exploding amuses me.

The French Freddy Krueger Returns

I am referring, of course to Marine Le Pen who was cleared by a French appellate court to run for President of France in the next election.

It appears that French voters will have the opportunity to see the front-runner of the Presidential race wearing an ankle monitor.

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."

For a long time, Marine Le Pen believed she was untouchable. So certain was she of her political immortality that she had turned it into a worn-out joke: Nothing would ever stop her from running for office, "unless a truck runs over me." But since March 31, 2025, she was no longer laughing.

On that day, a court had set in motion the inexorable countdown of her political career. Convicted of embezzlement, heavily sentenced, and left disqualified from standing in elections, Le Pen caught a glimpse, for the first time, of her political "death." And while the "miracle" she was hoping for from the Paris Court of Appeal did not quite materialize on Tuesday, July 7, she decided to take her resurrection into her own hands. 

Convicted again for misappropriation of public funds, Le Pen benefited from greater leniency from the appellate judges – with her election ban reduced to the bare minimum – and confirmed that evening she would be running in the 2027 presidential election. No matter if her new appeal to the highest court is uncertain. Now, any potential setbacks will only serve to reinforce her narrative of a political "sacrifice." On her first campaign poster, celebrating a "renaissance," she poses with her arms outstretched, Christ-like.

More details on the electronic monitoring here.

It's fairly clear that she will make it to the runoff.  The only question is how many of Frances polity will support her if her opponent is someone like the left wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

I expect that there are quite a lot of potential Franz von Papen's out there., 

Cover Them Up With Trash Bags

After years of misuse by the police, a 30%+ error rate, and rising public protests, the Los Angeles Police Department has elected not to renew their contract with Flock cameras.

Good.  Now address the remaining problem, that Flock will not remove the cameras and will continue to spy on innocent citizens while they lobby for a new contract. 

The Los Angeles Police Department on Saturday stopped working with a surveillance technology company over concerns about the data’s use, according to an LAPD official.

Flock Safety operates 138 pole-mounted cameras in Los Angeles, allowing authorities to track vehicles that have been reported stolen or are registered to known fugitives. It is one of a handful of vendors used by the city for automated license plate readers.

Flock has been criticized for sharing its data with state and federal officials. Advocacy groups worry that information could help President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

………

Dean Gialamas, LAPD’s chief information officer, told several news outlets that the LAPD is seeking more protections around the information collected by the agency.

“The sticking point is around having very clear terms about who owns the data, what happens with the data once they collect it,” said Gialamas.

He said the LAPD would stop using Flock “until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out through a contractual relationship.”

The LAPD signed a three-year agreement with Flock in July 2023 that was already set to expire Saturday.

………

Reports that Flock has shared license plate data with federal authorities, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has led smaller cities across the country to end their relationships with the company.


In Northern California, the city of Mountain View turned off its 30 Flock cameras in February after officials announced that federal and state law enforcement agencies had accessed city data in violation of the city’s policies.

………

Inspector General Matthew Barragan recommended in the audit that the department suspend the deployment of any new automatic license plate readers, known as ALPRs, and the execution of new contracts.

Any new contracts should go through the Board of Police Commissioners, regardless of whether the agreement includes an exchange of funds, according to the report.


“Contracts or agreements shall establish enforceable requirements governing data security, privacy, access controls, retention and auditing to protect Department ALPR data and ensure accountability for its collection, use and disclosure,” the report said.

Even if one supports the indiscriminate use of ALPRs in US cities (I do not) Flock is a toxic bad actor whose business model is secrecy and back loaded bribery to public officials.

Linkage

• The Poop Emoji Got Gravity Right, Physicists Find (Gizmodo) From the department of too much free time.
• ‘No one believed it’: how a YouTube video accidentally proved Libya’s sand cat really does exist  (The Guardian) First evidence of its presence in Libya.
• Masochistic YouTuber Punishes Himself by Writing a First Person Shooter Entirely in COBOL (Gizmodo) I can't even.
• Detectorist finds 2,700-year-old Bronze Age sword in Poland (Notes from Poland) Metal detector guy hits the jackpot.
• Oldest Wine in the World Is Still Liquid Inside 2,000-Year-Old Roman Funeral Urn (ZME Science) I wonder how it would taste.
• Once Again, Trump Poisons Everything He Touches (The Cross Section) Trump's interference in the referee ruling at the World Cup.
• EU Funding Huge Project on the Origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls - Archaeology (Haaretz) Some of the scrolls are papyrus, and they are going to track down the provenance of those reeds.
• Something Weird Is Going on With the 66 Billion Trees China Planted in a Huge Wall (Futurism) The trees are working to prevent desert expansion, which was expected, and the trees are growing faster than anticipated, which was unexpected.

A pretty good summary of the cesspool known as Palantir.

A New Fusion Complication

One of the outputs from a fusion reaction is a f%$# tonne of neutrons, and as such, one could generate relatively large quantities of Pu239 and U233, which raises significant proliferation issues.

Billions of dollars in venture capital and state investments have recently been poured into efforts to finally make nuclear fusion a viable energy source—big bets that a futuristic leap is coming soon, despite decades of premature prognostications.

Plenty of hurdles remain, of course, from engineering a system that can safely contain the literal power of a burning Sun to ensuring that such a system would be stable enough, consistently enough, for 24/7 use as an energy utility. Now, a particle physicist at Virginia Tech and physicists at Princeton have added a new hurdle to this race to crack fusion: How do we prevent rogue actors from secretly using their fusion plant to stockpile a nuclear arsenal?

Patrick Huber at VT’s Center for Neutrino Physics and Robert Goldston at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory zeroed in on this unintended consequence specifically for the case of deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion reactors. DT methods have shown great promise in U.S. government tests recently, tapping into a flow of energetic neutron particles created as its supply of hydrogen isotopes fuses into helium atoms. But those substantial neutron fluxes, Huber and Goldston noted, “could be used for covert production of fissile materials.”

“When operated in such a mode, a gigawatt scale fusion reactor could in principle produce tens of kilograms of plutonium or uranium-233 per week,” the researchers calculated in their new study, published Tuesday in the journal Physical Review Applied.

This is not a surprise actually, the neutron output of fusion reactions are generally used to generate Tritium for future use of the reactor.

Actually, non-break-even room temperature fusion reactions have been used as a neutron generator for years.  

You can buy them buy them from Fischer Scientific.

So, Lindsey Graham has Died Unexpectedly

It appears that it was an aortic dissection.

I could make a comment on the odd juxtaposition of this event and a significant anniversary in my life, but I won't, at least not outside my immediate family. 

What can you say about a man whose guiding star was the infliction of the horrors of war on brown and black people?

I guess one could say, "Bye Felicia!"

Shut Up and Take My Money!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Laser Bites (@laserbites)

What can I say, this is an epic bit of pseudo-Mexican cuisine.

Also, considering how often I put my foot in my mouth, this is particularly apropos. 

An Anniversary to Make You Feel Old

The Rolling Stones played their first ever gig the Marquee Club in London, England 64 years ago today.\

They are still touring.

Musing on Life, Courtesy of John, Paul, George and Ringo

F%$# I'm old.

Not Surprised

Nope, no cheating here A professor at Brown University moved to take-home exams, and suddenly his class tripled in popularity and the scores for the mid-terms climbed into the 95%+ range.

He announced that the final would be in person, and a significant portion his students dropped the class or did not show up for the final, and now he suspects cheating.

Gee, ya think?

For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so “it was appropriate,” he said, to allow students to take their exams at home.

But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it. Administrators’ response to the widespread cheating event has been “meek,” he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can—and should—respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale.

His welfare economics class typically attracted up to 30 students, but this spring he taught 86—an increase he attributes to the promised take-home exams. When the midterm came along, the average score was 96 percent.

Gee, nothing suspicious here.

“Historically the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 [percent], and this exam was harder than the exams I wrote in the past, because … take-home is an opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more, given that you’re giving the students unlimited time,” Serrano said.

………

In a message to students after the midterm that he shared with Inside Higher Ed, he told them he suspected many of them of using AI to cheat and, with the blessing of his dean, changed the final exam to an in-person test.

………

Serrano heard crickets from his students, but 18 of them subsequently dropped the class. Nine students remained enrolled but did not take the final exam. And Serrano said the results proved him right; three students earned a zero, and the average score on the final was 48.6 percent—by far a historic low, he said. Previously, the average final exam score had never dropped below 65 percent. Only a few students scored similarly to how they did on the midterm. 

Generation Alpha is going to make Idiocracy a reality. 

My Latest Attempt to Get Banned from Twitter

The use of the term, "Murdered," here is 100% accurate.
His shutdown of USAID was part of a felony conspiracy to conceal his corruption, and the deaths were foreseeable, which makes it first degree murder.https://t.co/c7Pl2u4ges

— Not the Apartheid Emerald Heir Pedo Guy/MG Saroff (@40_Years) July 12, 2026

Roll Tape!


A Backup Screen Shot

It appears that Elon Musk finds it highly offensive when people blame him for the deaths of thousands of children as a result of his Jihad against USAID.

I made the obvious point he did not kill thousands of children, he murdered them with premeditation.

It's felony murder.  He corruptly shut down USAID because they were investigating his ties to fraud and human trafficking in the Ukraine.

The underlying felony (felonies) are things like obstruction of justice, think about how Martha Stewart went to jail for altering her appointment calendar.

It was foreseeable that this had a high likelihood of causing deaths in exactly the same way that robbing a bank with a firearm had a high likelihood of causing a death.

Let's look at the relevant statute, 18 U.S. Code § 1111 (a):

Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. Every murder perpetrated by poison, lying in wait, or any other kind of willful, deliberate, malicious, and premeditated killing; or committed in the perpetration of, or attempt to perpetrate, any arson, escape, murder, kidnapping, treason, espionage, sabotage, aggravated sexual abuse or sexual abuse, child abuse, burglary, or robbery; or perpetrated as part of a pattern or practice of assault or torture against a child or children; or perpetrated from a premeditated design unlawfully and maliciously to effect the death of any human being other than him who is killed, is murder in the first degree.

Any other murder is murder in the second degree.

  

I know that my quest to get banned from Twitter is a bit quixotic and a little bit silly, but I gotta be me.

I Love This

It's an all too common story, Nigel Farage conceals a multi-million Pound payoff gift from a crypto billionaire friend, and when Parliament starts looking into it, he resigns and announces that he will run for again in the by-election to replace himself.

The established political parties see this as a transparent political stunt, and so will not be putting forward a candidate to stand for election.

There is a candidate running against him, Count Binface, a perennial parody candidate whose platform includes, among other things, "Moving the hand dryer in the men's toilet at Uxbridge's Crown and Treaty pub to a more sensible position."

While it is almost certain that, for the first time ever, Count Binface will get his deposit back. the UK requires a £500.00 deposit to be refunded if the candidate gets more than 5% of the vote, to stand for election.

It also makes a mockery of the racist charlatan Farage. 

What had been an opportunity for self-aggrandizement is now a battle that he can only lose, because there is no way that he cannot underperform in the elction. 

Count Binface had been looking forward to a relaxing journey back to his home planet of Sigma IX when Nigel Farage dropped a political bombshell on Tuesday.

Instead, Britain’s hottest new political property said he was left with no choice but to perform a swift intergalactic handbrake turn when news broke that Farage had resigned as MP for Clacton, triggering the possibility of a byelection in the English coastal constituency he has represented since 2024.

Farage, the leader of the rightwing populist Reform UK party, has been accused of using the poll to shake off a deepening scandal over financial gifts he has received. But the plan appears to have backfired after his main rivals announced they would boycott the byelection. The Clacton byelection is now likely to be a two-man race between the Reform leader and Binface.

“I didn’t know old Farage was going to self detonate … did I?” said Binface, a veteran of British elections, where the parody candidate is something of a mainstay.The 5,900-year-old leader of the Recyclons is the creation of Jon Harvey, a comedian from Lewisham in south-east London, who has run against former prime ministers including Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson, as well as Theresa May in his previous incarnation as Lord Buckethead.

………

He said that he had been inundated over the past 48 hours with emails and messages from Binface activists offering to knock on doors and deliver leaflets on his behalf in what could yet emerge as an electoral shock on a par with when Hartlepool United’s mascot, H’Angus the Monkey, was elected as mayor of the northern English town. 

It's Bank Failure Friday!!!

Today was kind of busy, with the 3rd commercial bank failure of the year, Kentland Federal Savings and Loan Association of Kentland, IN, and the 6th credit union failure of the year, WeDevelopment Federal Credit Union of Kansas City, Missouri.

I'm not sure if this is the start of something, or just a blip.

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

Quote of the Day

The Matter Continues and Appears Likely to Do So Until either the Heat Death of the Universe or the Year of Linux on the Desktop – Whichever Comes Sooner.

—The Register on the seemingly never ending Unix (Eunuchs?) lawsuit between IBM and the remnants of SCO.

The ancient dispute over ownership of UNIX, and perhaps Linux too, has returned to court. Again.

………

SCO and its successors struggled to survive, but interested parties kept the lawsuit alive because the chance to emerge as owner of parts of the Linux codebase, and IBM’s code, had the potential to turn into a colossal payday.

………

The matter continues and appears likely to do so until either the heat death of the universe or the year of Linux on the desktop – whichever comes sooner.

Please just make it stop. 

At Least These Goniffs Have Been Stopped for a Decade

I am referring, of course, to John Deere, who have been forced into a settlement that requires them to allow farmers to fix their own tractors.

The Right to Repair movement is generally associated with electronics, but its latest battle has been fought—and won—on an entirely different front: the ranches of America’s heartland. The issue at hand was a dispute between the Federal Trade Commission and tractor/farm equipment manufacturing company John Deere, and, specifically, a suit filed jointly by the FTC and five states against the company back in 2025. That suit was settled this week, and the settlement represents a resounding victory for the plaintiffs.

The FTC’s statement about the case accused the company of “illegally restrict[ing] the ability of farmers and independent technicians to repair Deere equipment, including tractors and combine [harvesters].” That statement was issued by then-FTC chair Lina Khan, who has since been removed from the position by the Trump administration and replaced by the more “deal-friendly,” in the words of the New York Times, Andrew Ferguson. (She has since served as part of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s transition team.)

………

Nevertheless, John Deere’s eagerness to reap the amber waves of gain that could be had by redefining the concept of ownership has meant that they’ve spent the last decade doing their very best to make it difficult for anyone but authorized dealers to repair their machinery. In particular, as per the FTC’s statement on this week’s settlement, the company “makes the only software repair tools capable of performing all electronic repairs on Deere equipment…[but] has previously made such tools available only to its authorized dealers, forcing farmers to rely on authorized dealers for many necessary repairs.” And as Wien explained in 2025, those software tools are copyrighted, so “not only [were] [John Deere] being anti-competitive, it [was] literally illegal to compete with them.”

That’s all set to change with the settlement reached between the company and the FTC this week. The FTC’s statement on the matter explains that the terms of the settlement require John Deere to “provide farmers and independent repair providers with the same equipment repair resources, including applicable software capabilities, that it currently provides to authorized Deere dealers”—and to do so “for the next 10 years and under the supervision of the FTC and plaintiff states.” 

This is good.  What would have been better would have been to send some Deere senior executives to jail. 

We Are Unbelievably Screwed

A pre-peer review study has concluded that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) may already be in the early stages of an irreversible collapse.

If this happens, we could see temperature drops of 5-15° C in parts of Europe and devastating temperature increases in the south east United States, along with sea level rises well in excess of a meter.  (Probably enough to submerge Mar-a-Lago, but I'm looking on the bright side here.)

As Earth rapidly warms, fears over the collapse of a critical ocean current system are mounting. This event would wreak havoc on the global climate, and the latest research suggests this catastrophe may already be inevitable.

In a study that has yet to undergo peer review, researchers used a climate model to estimate how likely it is that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, is “locked in” to collapse. Under conservative assumptions of Greenland ice sheet melt—a key driver of AMOC slowdown—they estimate a 10% chance that collapse is certain, rising to 80% by 2100 under the worst-case emissions scenario. The findings are currently available on the preprint server Earth ArXiv.

Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany who was not involved in the research, noted in an X post that the study is based on a single model. However, he said its conclusions are plausible based on overall knowledge of how fragile the AMOC currently is. Rahmstorf has studied this current system for more than 35 years.

………

If the AMOC shut down, it would trigger global climatic changes with catastrophic regional impacts. Sea levels would rise dramatically along the U.S. East Coast and other densely populated shorelines. There would also be major temperature shifts—in northern Europe, for example, the average temperature could drop by 9 to 27 degrees Fahrenheit (5 to 15 degrees Celsius). The world would see changes in extreme weather too, including more severe storms and a shift in the tropical rain belt, causing widespread drought in some areas and excessive rainfall and flooding in others.

And all of this can happen WITHOUT the collapse of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. 

I Hate Reruns

So, Trump has declared that the cease fire has ended, and the US is launching strikes on Iran while Iran has responded in kind.  (Also, the US has revoked its waiver of sanctions on Iranian oil, which counts for little giving that the shooting war has started up again.)

I expect to see gas price increases returning shortly. 

 

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 Rather than leading with the unemployment numbers, I think that we need to look at the news about home sales, where the soft pedal the the obvious conclusion.

The short version is that sales are falling largely in relatively inexpensive properties, so sales fall, and the average, and the median, home prices rise, because the bottom half has shut down.

It's arithmetic 101, and it mirrors what happened in 2008-9

U.S. existing home sales unexpectedly fell in June as tight inventory boosted house prices to a record high and the Middle East conflict kept mortgage rates elevated, pushing potential buyers to the sidelines.

The report from the ​National Association of Realtors on Thursday underscored the growing affordability hurdle faced by many young people pursuing the so-called American dream of homeownership. Still, economists expected the housing market to make a small contribution to economic ‌growth in the second quarter for the first time in more than a year.

………

Home sales dropped 2.4% last month to a ​seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.09 million units. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast home resales would climb to a rate of 4.20 million units. Home sales have been bouncing around a 4 million unit pace for years now, ​with NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun noting a similar trend happened during the 2008 Great Recession.

That being said, this week's unemployment report was not great either, with initial claims being basically flat, and continuing claims rose 8K to 1.814M.

Initial claims decreased by 2,000 to 215,000 in the week ended July 4, a period that included the Independence Day holiday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 217,000 applications.

Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, edged up to 1.81 million in the previous week, according to Labor Department Data released Thursday.

With oil prices spiking again and little prospect for rate cuts from the Federal Reserve, this ain't good.

Some Good News Out of Madrid

Spain has excluded Palantir from public contracts.

What a surprise.  It's in the pocket of the US State Security Apparatus, its founder is a literal vampire, its CEO is increasingly unhinged, and it's f%$#ing evil.

Spain just told Palantir to pack its bags. Or at least, to stop unpacking new ones.

On July 1, the Spanish government issued a directive through SEPI, the state holding company that oversees the country’s publicly owned enterprises, instructing its portfolio companies to avoid entering new contracts with Palantir Technologies. The reason: concerns over classified national security information and what officials see as risks to national sovereignty.

The directive targets firms operating in defense, communications, and infrastructure. We’re talking about heavyweights like Telefónica, defense contractor Indra, and naval shipbuilder Navantia

………

Spain isn’t acting in isolation. France announced similar restrictions on June 10, specifically linked to Palantir’s operations. Germany has been having its own version of this conversation.

The concept driving all of this is “digital sovereignty.” The basic idea is that nations should control their own critical data infrastructure rather than outsourcing it to foreign companies, particularly ones whose other clients include the CIA and the Pentagon.

Toxic assholes should not handle sensitive data.  Musk and DOGE demonstrated this quite clearly.

Meanwhile, in Air Force One Failures

For some unspecified security reason, Donald Trump decided to switch to one of the older 747s to fly back to the United States.

I am wondering just how many listening devices were planted in the plane. 

Nobody is buying President Donald Trump’s shady excuse for leaving Air Force One behind in Europe.

While taking questions from the press at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, on Wednesday, Trump was asked to respond to speculation that security concerns had forced him to ditch the newly renovated, Qatar-gifted plane after the president scrapped his own ceasefire deal with Iran.

You know, maybe it is a good idea to look a gift horse in the mouth.

 

Meanwhile, In Better Sexual Assault Related News

The judge overseeing the E. Jean Carroll case has told Donald Trump, "Dear Orcface, pay up or else!"

Judge Lewis Kaplan has said that Trump must pay the $5 million judgement immediately.

Call me a cynic, but given his reputation for paying his debts, I'm pretty sure that this will not be resolved for many months, if not years.

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered that the writer E. Jean Carroll should promptly receive a $5 million jury award, days after the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by President Trump and despite his last-minute attempt to get the justices to reconsider.

In a two-page ruling, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Manhattan federal court cited the Supreme Court’s June 29 order denying Mr. Trump’s request that the justices review the matter. That cleared the way for the funds, which Mr. Trump had deposited with the court, to be released to Ms. Carroll.

A Manhattan jury awarded the multimillion-dollar judgment to Ms. Carroll in May 2023 after finding him liable for sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. The jury also found that Mr. Trump defamed Ms. Carroll by calling her allegations against him “a Hoax and a lie” on social media. He has continued to deny assaulting Ms. Carroll.

Even Trump's pet judges at the Supreme Court found no reason do deal with his sh%$.

………

After the court’s rejection last week, Ms. Carroll had immediately asked a federal judge to order the president to pay her, asserting that Mr. Trump had “consistently sought to obstruct and delay payment” of the jury’s award.

“In the last analysis, defendant has been stalling this case for years,” Judge Kaplan wrote in a six-page opinion issued Wednesday evening explaining the ruling. The judge cited the jury’s verdict, the fact that it was upheld on appeal and the Supreme Court’s decision not to review the matter, adding that it was time for Mr. Trump to “pay the judgment.”

The Supreme Court wrapped up its term last week and is now in summer recess. Although the justices continue to hear emergency applications, they are not scheduled to meet to consider other cases until September. That is when the justices will convene as they prepare to begin a new term, which officially starts on the first Monday in October. As a result, they may not consider Mr. Trump’s new request for months.

By then, the court may also need to decide whether to review a second case related to Ms. Carroll and Mr. Trump. Lawyers for Mr. Trump said in their petition on Wednesday that the president “will imminently file” to ask the justices to step in and overturn the verdict of a separate jury, which in 2024 had ordered him to pay Ms. Carroll $83.3 million after concluding Mr. Trump had defamed her in 2019.

 Here's an idea, seize the golf course at Mar a Lago, and erect a toll booth on it.

And He is Out

Graham Platner has officially suspended his Senate campaign.

The, "Suspended," rather than, "Ended," is an artifact of campaign finance law.

He ain't coming back.

It appears that the DSCC types are already flocking to Maine in an attempt to ensure that whoever replaces him will be a focus group tested non-entity.

U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner, the political upstart who overwhelmingly secured the Democratic nomination just one month ago, has ended his candidacy. His withdrawal from the race now sets up a frantic scramble to replace him on the November ballot. 

Platner announced Wednesday that he's quitting the race in a defiant video statement that blamed the political establishment for his downfall, saying that it conspired against him.

"We believe that for the movement to continue, it can't be me," he said. "And for that reason we are suspending campaign operations."

He also framed his plight as one shared with his base of supporters.

"We live in a political system that is not built for normal people. It is built structurally so that movements like ours cannot flourish, that if they begin to succeed they can be crushed," he said. "What we have accomplished here you made possible ... and I have all the faith in the world that we could win if we continue to harness that. But the brutal political reality is that they're going to take everything away from us."

The moves followed a report by POLITICO that detailed allegations that he sexually assaulted a former girlfriend five years ago. The oysterman and combat veteran strongly denied the report, but it quickly led to a cratering of support from national and local Democrats who had endorsed him. That included leaders in the Maine Democratic Party who will now decide who will replace him on the November ballot to run against Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

They need to select a replacement before July 27, so less than 3 weeks. They are planning a state Party convention.

I expect extensive rat-f%$#ery in the process.  Hopefully this will be both sides, and not just exclusively from the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment).

The progressives need to play the same hardball that the Schumer wing of the party does. 

Platner

This appears to be catastrophic.

Whether he stays in or drops out it's a clusterf%$#.

If he stays in, he's a crippled candidate, and if he is replaced by one of the usual suspects by the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) it will demoralize a significant portion of potential Democratic voters.

One of the biggest challenges in the November elections is that voters will choose the couch (aka JD Vance's girlfriend) over the voting booth, and I do not see how this won't make this more likely regardless of final outcome. 

If he drops out, and he is replaced with Janet Mills or someone of her ilk, that would just make a bad situation much worse, but this won't stop the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) from doing just that.

It's the Iron Law of Institutions, "The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution." (Not my idea or term, this term was coined by Jon Schwarz) 

Finally

 The power is back on.

STILL Waiting for BGE

 Being without power is no fun at all.

That's Gonna Leave a Mark

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams just issued a ruling stating that Donald Trump, the Department of Justice, and the IRS committed a fraud on the court with their lawsuit, and subsequent "Settlement" creating a 1.7 billion slush fund.

A federal judge just nixed the settlement underlying Donald Trump’s nearly $1.8 billion slush fund.

The fund was the result of an unprecedented deal that Trump made with himself after he dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for the unlawful leak of his tax returns in 2019. The honey pot payments were pitched as reparations, paid for by U.S. taxpayers through the Department of Justice, to virtually any right-winger that felt targeted by the previous presidential administration.

“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” wrote U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in a 56-page order Monday.

Williams ruled that any entities affiliated with the slush fund settlement—including the president, the Treasury Department, and the IRS—were “prohibited” from using the details of the arrangement in any official capacity. She also referred Trump’s attorney, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida bar for possible professional discipline. 

………

“These officials then negotiated on behalf of the United States, with his current lawyers, including his former White House Counsel, to reach a ‘settlement,’” Williams assessed. “It is risible to suggest that there was ever adverseness between the Parties.”

………

But as Williams observed, the jaw-dropping components of the case—such as the billions of dollars in taxpayer funds proposed for undefined grievances, or the blanket immunities offered to Trump—were not put before the court. Instead, the question underlying the legality of the president’s slush fund centered around whether the entities engaged in the settlement arrangement, from government representatives to Trump’s personal attorneys, ever represented different parties while they pretended to engage in a legitimate court proceeding.

“The answer is a resounding ‘no’: the Lead Plaintiff and the Government are one, a fully realized unitary interest,” Williams wrote. 

I find it rather unlikely that the Florida Bar will take any action against Brito, they have been loath to involve themselves in closely related matters, and I believe that there is a good possibility that at least 4 Supreme Court members would be supportive of what is a naked fraud upon the court.

I am not entirely sure where it goes from here. 

Still No Power

 It appears that we have been collateral damage to God smiting Donald Trump's July 4th celebrations.

No Blogging Tonight

Power has been out since about 7pm, and as yet, a crew had not been scheduled. 

As to what I did today, I was down in Cheverly for a sewing circle and terrorist society meeting, and I caught the July 4 flyover. 

I just saw some F-18s, some F-22s, a VC-25, a KC 135, and a KC 46.

Posted via mobile.

Today in Experimental Archeology

Specifically, archeologists at the University of Tokyo demonstrated long distance canoe travel across the Pacific Ocean, which demonstrates how the Austronesian people could have spread throughout the region.

Long-standing questions about the migration of early modern humans in East Asia may finally be answered, thanks to a rare and remarkable journey made in a dugout canoe.

The timing and destinations of the earliest modern human migrations into East Asia are fairly well established. What remains unclear is how these early populations managed to travel between islands separated by dangerous ocean passages.

To address this gap, a research team from Japan and Taiwan, led by Professor Yousuke Kaifu of the University of Tokyo, explored the types of methods ancient people might have used. They also recreated the journey themselves, building canoes with replicas of the tools available at the time.

Archaeological and environmental evidence indicates that roughly 30,000 years ago, humans completed a sea voyage from what is now Taiwan to islands in southern Japan, such as Okinawa—without the aid of maps, metal tools or modern seafaring vessels. To better understand how this journey could have taken place, Kaifu’s team conducted both experimental reconstructions and computer-based simulations.

One of their two recent studies used digital modeling to test how a vessel could cross the powerful Kuroshio Current, one of the world’s most forceful ocean flows. The results demonstrated that a craft built with Paleolithic-era tools and navigational knowledge could indeed manage the crossing. The second study focused on building and trialing an actual canoe, which the team used to paddle more than 100 kilometers between islands, successfully replicating the hypothesized ancient route.

Once again, we see that our ancestors were far more capable than was previously thought.

There Is No Way That You Can Improve a Banksy Artwork………

Banksy original


After censorship by the Royal Courts of Justice OK, I was wrong. 

When the Royal Courts of Justice attempted to efface one of his works, one that protests the prosecutions of pro- Palestinian they made the work more striking and effective.

British judges have been harsh in their actions against pro-Palestinian protesters.

Banksy the artist pointed to this with a mural at a wall of the Royal Courts of Justice.

The mural in more detail.

As Banksy's art accused the British government to censor too much, said government responded by censoring Banksy.

Attempts were made to remove the mural.

But what is left now is still sufficient, if not stronger, in making the point. 

Authoritarians don't get art.

Finally, Some Good News from the UK

Unfortunately fro British subjects, the https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c30yrqem5l6o, and not one of the myriad of problems in the island nation.

A yellow eel spotted for the second time in Coventry is "rare and exciting", says an expert, who is appealing for help from the public to track further local sightings.

Alexander Jones, ecology and biodiversity officer at Coventry City Council, saw one in the River Sherbourne in 2024 but was shocked to see a second this year, since the fish used to be one of the most common species locally, but is now one of the rarest.

The second sighting in the river suggests it is making a slow comeback, Jones said.

"We've lost over 90% of our eels in the last few decades, so they are critically endangered," he explained. "The fact we're starting to see them in Coventry is really... positive."

The European eel is a critically endangered species of fish, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

 The British are not yet ready to start serving jellied eel again, but that is a good thing too.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Because tomorrow is when the July 4 holiday is observed, in addition to the unemployment claims report, we also have the monthly jobs report a day early.

The short version if all of this, initial unemployment claims fell from slightly to 215K with continuing claims rose slightly to 1.814M.

More significantly was the monthly jobs report, where only 57K jobs were created, well under what is needed to account for workforce growth.

Additionally, while the unemployment rate fell from 4.3% to 4.2% this was because workforce participation fell to a 5 year low. 

Neither of these are good economic news. 

Will Wonders Never Cease

Both the The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have deigned to notice that Trump's self-dealing and corruption are without precedent in the United States.

This is an obvious state of affairs, but the fact that two of the bastions of self-important hack journalism are acknowledging reality is a a  pleasant surprise. 

Today in Stopped Clocks

The Supreme Court has ruled that geofence demands from law enforcement are a 4th Amendment search which requires a judge issued search warrant, and not just an administrative warrant.

Good.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Monday that geofence warrants count as a “search” under the Fourth Amendment, a decision that will likely impact how police departments around the country seek cellphone location data in the future.

Geofence warrants compel tech companies like Google to provide information about electronic devices that are present in a given area on a particular date during a specific window of time. The case, Chatrie v. United States, involved a man who was convicted of robbing a credit union outside Richmond, Virginia, in 2019.

………

The question at hand was whether these geofencing techniques are considered a “search” under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Supreme Court found on Monday that police had conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired Chatrie’s location data from Google “because an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information.” But it didn’t ban the practice completely. Police will now need to show probable cause.

………

“In recent years, police around the country have relied on geofence warrants like the one in this case tens of thousands of times to cast dragnets that violate the privacy of innocent bystanders, all without even targeting a known suspect or device. Although the Court stopped short of striking down these warrants as inherently unconstitutional, we look forward to pressing lower courts to eliminate these warrants once and for all.” 

Here's hoping that these digital dragnet will eventually be made unlawful.

Good News Everyone!

For the first time ever, solar energy has generated more electricity than coal in the United States.

This is not a surprise.  Solar energy is now cheaper than coal power, the capital investment is lower, and the time from concept from rollout to service entry is lower.

For the first time on record, solar power has generated more electricity than coal in the United States, marking a structural shift in the country’s electricity mix and the accelerating role of renewables in the grid. In May 2026, solar accounted for approximately 12.8% of U.S. electricity generation, while coal accounted for about 12.2%. This marks the first monthly period in which solar surpassed coal in electricity output.

Solar’s record output during the month is is due in part to the seasonal conditions that increase daytime generation. Growth in solar also comes from both utility-scale installations and distributed systems across multiple states. At the same time, coal generation continued its long-term downward trend due to plant retirements, reduced utilization, and competition from lower-cost energy sources. Coal plants also increasingly operate below full capacity, which reduces their overall share of total electricity generation even when facilities remain active. This moment does not signal the end of coal, but it confirms a shift in the structure of electricity production in the U.S. The result is a grid that now relies more heavily on variable renewable energy, with solar playing a growing role in meeting daytime demand and offsetting fossil fuel generation.

………

Across regions, solar growth is being driven by declining technology costs, faster deployment timelines compared to fossil fuel infrastructure, and policy frameworks that prioritize renewable energy expansion. The solar-over-coal crossover reflects more than a statistical milestone. It signals a broader reconfiguration of electricity systems toward modular, rapidly deployable energy sources that can scale faster than traditional fossil fuel infrastructure.

This is a good thing.  The faster that we get off coal, the better.

Quote of the Day

Regardless, I Have a Larger Point: It’s Time to Start Mocking These People and Tearing Down Their Legends as Geniuses of Industry. They Are Not Better than Us, nor Are They Responsible for Anything That Their Companies Build Other than the Share Price (Which Is a Meaningless Figure) and the Accumulation of Power and Resources. These Men Are neither Smart nor Intellectually Superior, and It’s Time to Start Treating Them as Such.

—Ed Zitron on the broligarchs.

They are lucky incompetents, beneficiaries of privilege, and con men. 

True as Turnips is

True as taxes is, and nothing is truer than them.

I Knew That They Were Somewhere

I've been looking for my toolbox, and I am not sure how it ended up in southern Greece.

Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece — the earliest wooden tools on record.

The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence.

Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred.

The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years.

Kewl.

Of Course They Are

It appears that some of Elon Musk's DOGE Bros are redesigning government websites to spy on US citizens.

Tech bros gotta tech bro.

An opaque White House office staffed largely by veterans of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has quietly rebuilt some of the federal government’s most sensitive websites – for passport applications, voter registration, prescription-drug pricing and children’s savings – in ways critics say appear to violate federal law.

The National Design Studio (NDS) was established by a Donald Trump executive order last August, and is led by Trump-aligned Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and staffed by Doge veterans.

A Guardian investigation has found the office has apparently been developing or redeveloping sensitive federal websites, including those connecting Americans with prescription drugs, children’s savings accounts, passports and voter registration. The investigation corroborates and advances earlier reporting by the Drey Dossier, a YouTube and Substack investigative outlet.

The NDS built and now operates four public federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov and trumpaccounts.gov. All four ran commercial visitor-tracking software, configured to evade the privacy tools many web users install, and none carry the public filings federal privacy law requires under laws including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the E-Government Act of 2002.

They all need to spend the next decade or two in jail. 

6 — 3 (More like 5½ — 3½)

The Supreme Court just came frighteningly close to invalidating a Constitutional amendment because Donald Trump wanted them to.

I am, of course referring to their ruling on the birthright citizenship case, where 5 justices said that the black letter text of the US Constitution said what it said, 1 justice said that federal law would have to be changed, and 3 justices wanted to give Trump a blank check. (How I get to 5½ — 3½)

The Supreme Court on Tuesday affirmed the principle that almost everyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen, a major decision that rejects a push by President Donald Trump to fundamentally redefine who is American in ways not seen for more than 150 years.

The justices struck down an executive order by the president that said citizenship would not be granted to children born to parents who are in the country illegally or those on temporary visas for work, travel, school or humanitarian reasons.

Trump’s order would have had sweeping political, economic and social ramifications, changing the definition of citizenship in the most significant way since the 14th Amendment guaranteeing citizenship to formerly enslaved people was ratified shortly after the Civil War. 

The ruling reaffirms the long-settled understanding that the 14th Amendment automatically confers citizenship on any child born in the United States, with limited exceptions for children of diplomats and other rare cases. The principle was established in a landmark 1898 high court decision that found that Wong Kim Ark, a man born to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, was a citizen. ………

Conservative Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh dissented from the 5-4 majority in ruling the executive order violated the 14th Amendment, but he joined the 6-3 majority in finding the order violated federal law.

………

The opinion came over the objections of conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Alito wrote a dissent, while Thomas wrote another that Gorsuch joined.

Alito said birthright citizenship acts as a magnet drawing migrants to the United States to give birth so their children could be citizens, echoing an argument the Trump administration has made.

………

Thomas said the court “adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”

So, Alito just let his bigot flag fly, and Thomas just showed himself to be a worse historian than he is a jurist, which is a pretty heavy lift.

Primary in Colorado Tonight

While I am a bit bummed about pro-business stooge and current Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper winning the Senate primary, I am heartened that centrist empty suit Michael Bennett lost to Colorado AG Phil Weisner in the Gubernatorial primary, and that DSA candidate Melat Kiros defeated 15-term Congresswoman Diana DeGette.

DeGette is problematic for a number of reasons:

• 30 years is enough.
• She is deeply enmeshed in the Democratic Party Congressional leadership, having being Chief Deputy Whip for 6 years. The out of touch Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) gerontocracy in the US Congress needs to be removed.
• AIPAC was stealth funding a number of anti-Kiros PACs. 

That last point does not mean that I am no longer a Zionist.  It means that I consider AIPAC to the the 2nd greatest threat to the State of Israel in the world today after Benjamin Netanyahu. 

The Last Refuge of Scoundrels

So, the Pentagon has been refusing to review new wind power projects, and now a group of renewable energy organizations have filed a lawsuit to end this mishugas.

About f%^$#ing time.

A coalition of renewable energy groups asked a federal court on Friday to order the Pentagon to resume reviews of onshore wind projects, in an attempt to end delays by the Trump administration that have brought the U.S. wind power industry to a standstill.

Since April, the Pentagon has stopped all military reviews of proposed wind farms, which are meant to ensure that turbines don’t interfere with local radar or flight paths. Virtually every new wind project in the country needs to undergo these reviews, which until recently were considered routine and often completed within months.

………

The delays have led to a “total halt of all wind development in the United States,” the groups told the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon in a lawsuit filed against the Defense Department last week. At least 106 planned wind projects in 21 states have been stalled indefinitely, representing an estimated $47 billion in potential investment.

The delayed reviews are the latest in a series of extraordinary actions by the Trump administration to halt the expansion of wind power in the United States. On his first day in office, President Trump issued a moratorium on all approvals for wind farms on federal lands, and the Interior Department last year issued stop-work orders for five wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean that were already under construction. More recently, the administration agreed to pay several companies $1.8 billion to abandon their offshore wind plans.

Mr. Trump has called wind turbines ugly and expensive, and has instead pushed to meet rising power demand with fossil fuels like coal and natural gas.

“My goal,” he said in January, “is to not let any windmill be built.”

One does hope that whatever judge gets assigned to the case makes it clear to the government that there is no presumption of regularity, and so they will have to provide evidence supporting every "and" and "the".

I Have One Comment About the Bricks and Minifigs Thing

Do not enter into a franchise agreement without consulting a lawyer. Don't attempts to make changes to any deal without consulting a lawyer.

The whole lawyer thing more generally applies to running a business.

Basically, listen to Mike Monteiro.

He said this 15 years ago.

I will post no more on this subject, even though I will continue to follow it, because it holds a perverse fascination for me.

Flock You!

Denver removed Flock cameras, and car thefts fell:

Given Flock's history of ethically questionable business practices, I am not surprised that their services fail to deliver on the promised crime reduction.

It is likely that the reduction in car thefts came from a change in the law, it used to be that only stealing rich people's cars was taken seriously, but it does show that the surveillance state favored by Flock and law enforcement does not meaningfully contribute to public safety. 

Not a Surprise

This is my Shocked Face

The news that used fraudulent data to get approval for its self-driving systems.

Gee, who saw that coming?

As if things couldn’t get any worse for Tesla in Europe, traffic safety researchers now say they’ve caught the company cooking numbers they gave to regulators in order to get its “Full Self-Driving” system approved.

The discrepancy was spotted by Reuters, which claims that data Tesla gave to authorities in Sweden and the Netherlands grossly exaggerated the safety record of FSD in the United States.

Reuters reports that in a presentation meant for Swedish regulators, Tesla’s policy manager Ivan Komusanac claimed that Tesla’s FSD can travel over seven times farther between crashes than human drivers in the US. Using that claim as a jumping-off point, the presentation continued by claiming that Tesla’s FSD could have saved 32,000 lives and prevented 1.9 million injuries over an indeterminate period of time, the publication reports.

In the old days, Elon Musk would be in jail for fraud.

Epstein Island 2

I cannot understand why the Albanian people are so upset about Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump stealing the largest Albanian island on the Aegean.

Actually, I can understand why there are massive protests in Tirana.

The plan to gift the Sazan Island to the Trump Crime Family is infuriating to me, and I am 7 time zones behind the Balkan nation.

There is a nonzero chance that Jared Kushner will play a pivotal and entirely accidental role in bringing down the government of Albania. Over the last several weeks, the Balkan nation has been roiled by protests stretching from the capital, Tirana, to rural coastlines and cities around the world. The demonstrations were sparked by the government’s giving the green light to firms linked with Kushner to develop a 10,000-bed luxury resort near the city of Vlorë on the Narta Lagoon and protected wildlands in Zvërnec. Kushner and Ivanka Trump also have plans to turn Sazan Island, which belongs to a national park, into a smaller coastal enclave for the wealthy. On Saturday, some 200,000 people turned out as anger spread from the Kushner project to other luxury developments. Roughly 200 protesters in northwestern Albania tore down barbed-wire fencing around the construction site of a non-Kushner-linked five-star resort on the Adriatic Coast. As one participant told Reuters, they were demanding “compensation” for 200 local families whose “land has been seized.”

International coverage of the protests in Albania—a country relatively unfamiliar to many in the United States—has focused largely on the environmental concerns being raised by demonstrators, and the projects’ ties to the Trump family. The fledgling Kushner resorts threaten pristine wilderness and critical ecosystems that sustain a rare colony of the world’s largest freshwater birds, endangered Albanian water frogs, and loggerhead turtles. Among the species that stand to be affected are flamingos, whose last remaining habitat in Albania could be threatened by the developments. But the “Flamingo Revolution,” as the wide-ranging, horizontalist movement has become known, is about much more than flora, fauna, or Donald Trump. As Albania vies to become a top tourist destination and a member of the European Union, the ongoing protests aim to do nothing less than upend its political system. “At the core of this protest is not just environmental issues,” said Gresa Hasa, a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law and the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz. “This is a fight for freedom and democracy, and a future where the resources and the state works for all of us and not just for some of us, and where we are not excluded from our own beaches and public spaces.”

………

It’s no secret that the Trump family has been eager to make itself richer while the patriarch occupies the White House. Here in the U.S., awareness of these activities hasn’t yet made much of a dent in Trump’s grasp on power. Abroad, however, it may help bring down politicians who thought they could use that grift to their advantage. Let’s hope Americans take note.

The Trumps are a cancer on the entire world.

It's Called "Rods from God"

Call me paranoid, but I think that Elon Musk's plan to set up a rocket based cargo delivery system sounds more like a ploy to provide a cover for developing an orbital mass driver with which he can hold the world hostage.

I'm pretty sure that this has been covered in any number of James Bond novels and movies over the past 80 years.

Elon Musk is officially a Bond villain.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on Tuesday to test a new reentry vehicle designed to deliver cargo anywhere in the world from low-Earth orbit.

The company developed the new saucer-shaped reentry pod, called Starfall, under a veil of secrecy. Its purpose is to support the “transport and delivery of goods through space,” according to an environmental assessment published by the Federal Aviation Administration last month.

The first demonstration of the Starfall vehicle began at 6:53 am EDT (10:53 UTC) with liftoff aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. At least one Starfall reentry pod rode to orbit on the Falcon 9, perhaps alongside another undisclosed payload. After circling the planet two times, the Falcon 9’s upper stage was expected to release Starfall for atmospheric reentry, targeting a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean around 800 miles west of California.

On the brighter side, Elon Musk's history of actually executing on this sort of crap is profoundly bad.

 

Headline of the Day

CEOs Who Think AI Replaces Their Employees Are Just Bad CEOs

—Techdirt, stating the obvious about American business management.

I have come to the conclusion that any business management fad is inherently wrong.

This time, it is AI. 

F$#@, I'm Old!

I just got back from upstate New York, a 6-hour drive.

In my younger days, I'd follow this up by 3 hours of blogging. 

These days? Not so much.

The Term for this is Inflation

So, the Wall Street Journal is lauding the end of the 4 year trucking slump, trumpeting the increasing freight rates in recent weeks.

This is inflation marker, not an essential turn around in industry. 

Truckers who held on through almost four years of slumping freight rates finally have something to celebrate. 

“It feels like a breath of air for an industry that maybe felt like they were running out of air,” said Webb Estes, president and chief operating officer of Estes Express Lines, a Richmond, Va.-based carrier with revenue of about $6 billion. 

Trucking executives are calling an end to one of the longest freight downturns in carriers’ memory. They say rates have risen to more sustainable levels after a period of low earnings coupled with Trump administration crackdowns on immigrant drivers pushed many carriers out of the market. 

The Logistics Managers’ Index, a monthly survey of supply-chain managers, showed transportation prices increased in May at the fastest rate for any metric in the report’s 10-year history.

This is not a good thing

It's Not About Global Insecurity

The fact that many central banks are repatriating their gold reserves from the UK and US stems from the belief that if their government falls afoul of Washington, DC, they will lose access to their gold stores at a critical point.

Maintaining one's own gold reserves is a PITA compared to allowing the gnomes in The City of London and Wall Street keep them in their vaults, unless you stop believing that they can be relied on.

Global central banks are removing gold from vaults in London and New York as they become more skittish about storing bullion outside their own borders, according to a new survey.

The central banks of India and France are among those that have relocated huge volumes of gold out of the US and UK in the past year to store more domestically — part of a trend of the institutions bringing bullion home and also diversifying the storage location of their reserves.

For years, central banks have been increasing their holdings of gold, which recently surpassed US Treasuries to become the world’s top reserve asset, as many seek alternatives to the US dollar, the world’s de facto reserve currency.

However, increasing geopolitical conflict, sanctions regimes and a decline in trust have put strains on a gold trading system that relies heavily on London — where huge vaults at the Bank of England store more than $700bn of the yellow metal — and on New York, the world’s largest gold futures market.

………

The news comes as Singapore and Hong Kong have been working to offer vaulting services to central banks that are looking to diversify their storage. Singapore’s deputy prime minister on Monday said the city-state would launch an over-the-counter clearing system for gold this year, along with a vaulting service for central banks.

One of the biggest recent repatriation programmes has been in France, which removed 129 tonnes of gold from the New York Federal Reserve between July 2025 and January 2026 and now stores all its gold domestically.

………

Over the past three years, India’s central bank has also repatriated most of the gold it held overseas with the Bank of England and the Bank for International Settlements.

The share of its gold held overseas by the Reserve Bank of India dropped to 22 per cent in March 2026 from 55 per cent in March 2023, according to the central bank’s data. The RBI did not respond to a request for comment.

Let me be clear here, I do not believe that gold reserves are that significant in the modern financial system, but the movement of these assets is an indication of reduction of trust in the US and UK, and that is significant.