State Sponsored Terrorism

 

ICE murdered someone else in Minneapolis, 39 year old ICU nurse Alex Pretti. 

There are multiple videos out there, but I will not be posting them here.  I am writing opinions, and not news, and as such, I don't want to post this sort of media.- 

He was attempting to help someone up who had been knocked to the ground by ICE agents.

He was then tackled, and his (legally carried and never removed from his holster) gun was removed, and while on the ground he was shot 10 times.

Two witnesses to the killing of Alex Pretti have said in sworn testimony that the 37-year-old intensive care nurse was not brandishing a weapon when he approached federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, contradicting a claim made by Trump administration officials as they sought to cast the shooting of a prone man as an act of self-defense.

Their accounts came in sworn affidavits that were filed in federal court in Minnesota late Saturday, just hours after Pretti’s killing, as part of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of Minneapolis protesters against Kristi Noem and other homeland security officials directing the immigration crackdown in the city.

One witness is a woman who filmed the clearest video of the fatal shooting; the other is a physician who lives nearby and said they were initially prevented by federal officers from rendering medical aid to the gunshot victim.

Not allowing medical aid to arrive seems to be a theme for these thugs.

DHS and the Trump administration have stated that the mere fact that he was carrying a weapon, even if it never left its holster, justified his killing.  Various ammosexual groups have taken profound exception to these statements.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) has joined other gun lobbying and advocacy groups that are typically aligned with Donald Trump in calling for the Republican president’s administration to conduct a “full investigation” into the killing of Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old nurse who was shot dead by federal immigration officials in Minneapolis on Saturday.

Pretti was reportedly legally permitted to carry a gun and is a citizen of the US, where it is a constitutional right to bear arms. Widely circulated video of his shooting death does not depict him ever holding a gun. It does show an officer reaching to Pretti’s lower back and stepping away with what appeared to be a pistol – and Pretti being subsequently shot to death.

The NRA waded into the national dialogue over Pretti’s killing after Bill Essayli – who was appointed by Trump to temporarily serve as a US attorney in California in 2025 – posted on social media: “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.”

In response, the NRA posted: “This sentiment … is dangerous and wrong. Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.”

Gun Owners of America, a non-profit lobbying organization, also criticized that claim from Essayli – who is now an acting first assistant US attorney for California’s central federal district court.

“Federal agents are not ‘highly likely’ to be ‘legally justified’ in ‘shooting’ concealed carry licensees who approach while lawfully carrying a firearm,” the group posted. It added that the US constitution’s second amendment “protects Americans’ right to bear arms while protesting – a right the federal government must not infringe upon.”

California governor Gavin Newsom’s press office responded to the NRA’s criticism of Essayli, saying on social media, “Wow. Even the NRA thinks Trump’s [justice department] stooge in California has gone too far for claiming federal agents were ‘legally justified’ to kill Alex Pretti.”

Newsom’s press office added: “Your position is truly horrible when even the NRA calls you out.”

Not only is the White House lying about what is going on, but Attorney General Pam Bondi is saying that she will pull ICE out of Minnesota if the state turns over their voter rolls in their entirety, so that the Trump administration can use this data to suppress votes from areas that they think will go Democratic Party.

Just hours after federal immigration officers shot and killed a man in Minneapolis, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi seized upon the incident to demand access to Minnesota’s voter rolls, directly tying the Trump administration’s quest for voters’ unredacted personal data to its aggressive immigration raids across the state.

In a letter to Gov. Tim Walz (D) Saturday, Bondi blamed state and local leaders for the unrest ignited by the Trump administration’s expansive immigration enforcement operations. She claimed that Walz could “restore the rule of law” by complying with a list of demands, including giving the Department of Justice (DOJ) the state’s voter registration records.

“Allow the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to access voter rolls to confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law as authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1960,” Bondi said in the letter, which was first obtained by Fox News.

The letter adds the state’s unwillingness to share voting data to a litany of grievances the Trump administration has leveled against Minnesota, which range from the local Democratic leaders’ rejection of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) actions to a longstanding welfare fraud scandal.

Bondi’s other demands included sharing Minnesota’s data on Medicaid and supplementary food assistance with the federal government, ending “sanctuary policies” and supporting and collaborating with ICE. This would allow the government to investigate fraud and curb “crime and violence” in the state, the attorney general claimed.

In sum, Bondi’s letter represents a major assault on Minnesota’s sovereignty, demanding that it forfeit its ability to make and enforce its own laws and maintain its voter rolls without oversight from the executive branch, which does not have authority over elections. 

This is blackmail, pure and simple.

Meanwhile, in an update to the Renee Good murder, at least 10 lawyers for the DoJ, 6 in Minnesota and 4 in Washington, DC, resigned over the government's refusal to investigate the shooting, as did the an FBI supervisor in Minneapolis.

Finally, and this may be the most important bit, is that extensive files on ICE incidents and personnel have been leaked.

Sensitive details of around 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol employees—including almost 2,000 agents working in frontline enforcement—have allegedly been released by a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower following last week’s fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good.

The Jan. 7 killing of the mother by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has sparked nationwide protests and worldwide outrage, including among some DHS employees.

The alleged leak to ICE List, a self-styled “accountability initiative,” is believed to be the largest ever breach of DHS staff data. It appears to include names, work emails, telephone numbers, roles, and some resumé data, including previous jobs of federal immigration staff. 

I have not found a full downloadable version of this database.   ICE List is a Wikipedia style database, so the entire 

If any of my reader(s) know how to download the full database, do so, and post in the comments how to do so.

Elon Lie? Say it Ain't So!

Elon said that it had removed safety monitors from its, "Robotaxis."

What he did not say was that these monitors were simply moved to a chase car that closely followed the "autonomous" taxis.

Earlier today, [ed: 2 days ago] Elon Musk announced on X that Tesla had “just started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car.” Tesla’s stock immediately jumped over 4% on the news. Headlines across the financial press celebrated the milestone.

There’s just one problem: it appears to be another game of smoke and mirrors. The Robotaxi cars spotted without “safety monitor” were all being followed by a trailing black Tesla supervising the “driverless” Robotaxi.

It means Tesla didn’t “remove the safety monitor”, it just moved them to a vehicle behind them.

………

When Musk says there’s “no safety monitor in the car,” he’s technically telling the truth, the monitor is in a different car, following right behind. But the implication that Tesla has achieved true unsupervised autonomy is misleading at best.

True unsupervised autonomy means the vehicle can operate safely without any human backup ready to intervene. That’s what Waymo does, their vehicles operate genuinely alone, without chase cars, across multiple cities. They’ve accumulated over 100 million fully driverless miles.

Now, there’s still some remote teleoperation when the vehicle gets into trouble, but it’s clear that Tesla is not even there yet.

This is fraud, period, full stop.

Of Course They Did

It has been revealed that Elon Musk's DOGE was illegally transferring personal data from the Social Security (SSA) database to right wing vote suppression groups. 

After months of denials, the Trump administration has admitted that staffers affiliated with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) misused Social Security Administration (SSA) data. In an extraordinary court filing, “NOTICE OF CORRECTIONS TO THE RECORD,” government lawyers representing the SSA revealed that in March 2025, a DOGE staffer signed an agreement to share the private data of Americans with a “political advocacy group” seeking to “overturn election results in certain States.”

SSA determined in its recent review that in March 2025, a political advocacy group contacted two members of SSA’s DOGE Team with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired. The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States. In connection with these communications, one of the DOGE team members signed a “Voter Data Agreement,” in his capacity as an SSA employee, with the advocacy group. He sent the executed agreement to the advocacy group on March 24, 2025.

The filing says that emails “suggest that DOGE Team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls.”

The use of government data for political purposes is unlawful. The Hatch Act prohibits a federal employee from using “his official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.” In the filing, government lawyers say the DOGE employees involved were referred to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel for possible Hatch Act violations.

………

While the court filing does not name the “political advocacy group” coordinating with DOGE, there is evidence pointing to True the Vote, a right-wing group with a history of pushing false claims of election fraud. True the Vote published “An Appeal to DOGE” in March 2025, the same month that the DOGE staffer signed an agreement with the political group. In the open letter, published on the group’s website on March 5, True the Vote encouraged DOGE to investigate the country’s voter registration system. At the top of the letter, Democracy Docket notes, True the Vote Founder Catherine Engelbrecht wrote, “We’ve received word that this message is being carried forward.”

At the earliest opportunity, Elon and his DOGE thugs need to be arrested put in the dock.

Elon Musk's Lawyer is a Fucking Clown

No, literally, not metaphorically. 

One of Musk;s IP lawyers, Jaymie Parkkinen, has a side gig as a clown.

If Elon Musk’s antics over the past few years have felt like a three-ring circus, there just might be a reason for that.

As it turns out, one of the billionaire’s key legal strategists isn’t just an attorney but a professionally trained — and currently practicing — clown.

We wish we were kidding. But new reporting by Business Insider tells the tale of Jaymie Parkkinen, an intellectual property lawyer representing Musk by day while working as an actual clown by night. Amidst a massive courtroom drama playing out between Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Parkkinen has stood out, occasionally going it alone against esteemed counsel for OpenAI and Microsoft on the multibillionaire’s behalf.

“All of my comedy friends — none of them can believe I’m a lawyer,” Parkkinen told BI. “And none of my lawyer friends can believe I do clown.”

“Clown” is his preferred term for the act of performing onstage in the slapstick tradition, an intransitive verb similar to “improv” or “vogue” dance. For Parkkinsen, clown is less about dressing up in big goofy shoes and throwing pies, and more of an artistic craft, similar to the way silent artists mime as a comedic technique.

A clown representing a clown.

Sign of the Apocalypse

I did not expect to see this, but the New York Times OP/ED page actually has a worthwhile article, "State Terror Has Arrived," by M. Gessen.

They aren't saying anything that you aren't hear everywhere, but the for what Atrios calls, "That Fucking Paper," it is a departure. 

I would also note that given Gessen's experience in Russia, they are in a position to draw parallels.

After the past three weeks of brutality in Minneapolis, it should no longer be possible to say that the Trump administration seeks merely to govern this nation. It seeks to reduce us all to a state of constant fear — a fear of violence from which some people may at a given moment be spared, but from which no one will ever be truly safe. That is our new national reality. State terror has arrived.

………

……… We don’t focus on these details in order to justify the federal agents’ actions, which are plainly brutal and unjustifiable; we do it to force the world to make sense, and to calm our nerves. If we don’t talk back, if we alter our routes to avoid protests, if we are lucky enough to be white, straight, natural-born Americans — or, if we are not, but we lie low, stay quiet — we will be safe. Conversely, we can choose to speak up, to go to protests, to take a risk. Either way, we tell ourselves, if we can predict the consequences, we have agency.

But that’s not how state terror works.

In the 1990s, when I talked to people in the former Soviet Union about their families’ experiences of Stalinist terror, I was repeatedly struck by how much people seemed to know about their circumstances. Time and time again, people would tell me exactly what had led to their family members’ arrests or executions. Jealous neighbors had reported them to the authorities, or colleagues who had been arrested named them under duress. These stories had been passed on from generation to generation. How could they come to know so much, I wondered. They couldn’t. People crafted narratives out of suspicions, rumors and hints, to fill a desperate need for an explanation.

………

For this was the secret about the secret police that became clear when the K.G.B. archives were opened (briefly) in the 1990s: They were ruled by quotas. Local squadrons had to arrest a certain number of citizens so they could be designated enemies of the people. That the officers often swept up groups of colleagues, friends and family members was probably a matter of convenience more than anything else. Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is, in fact, how state terror works.

………

The toolbox isn’t particularly varied. President Trump is using all the instruments: the reported quotas for ICE arrests; the paramilitary force made up of thugs drunk on their own brutality; the spectacle of random violence, particularly in city streets; the postmortem vilification of the victims. It’s only natural that our brains struggle to find logic in what we are seeing. There is a logic, and this logic has a name. It’s called state terror.

To true. 

 

I am Legitimately Surprised

I just came across a study which shows that metal heads are among the most faithful partners among music fans, which surprises me, though the news that jazz fans are the biggest hounds does not.

Jazz fans may want to keep whatever's in their pants in check — according to a recent survey by affair website Victoria Milan, lovers of jazz are almost 10 times more likely to cheat than heavy metal fans.

The study (published by The Sun), which queried more than 6,500 people who admitted to affairs, also found that three-quarters of unfaithful men and women say they can't stop thinking about their lover when hearing their favorite music.

Jazz topped the list of "seductive" genres, followed by salsa and pop, which were most likely to send respondents into sexual fantasy mode. All I'm hearing is "nobody wants to fuck to metal," which is simply not true. Other genres ranked as follows in order of cheaters' preference: 

1. Jazz: 19%
2. Salsa: 14%
3. Pop: 13%
4. Country: 12%
5. Rap: 9%
6. Classical: 8%
7. Blues: 6%
8. Reggae: 5%
9. Rock and Roll: 5%
10. Electronica: 4%
11. Indie: 3%
12. Heavy Metal: 2%

I wish that I had known this when I was single.

Another Loss in Court

Prosecutors in Chicago took a case of shit-posting on Snapchat and made a federal out of it.

It took a jury three hours to call bullshit on this.

Federal authorities slapped all kinds of sinister labels on Chicago’s Juan Espinoza Martinez when they arrested him last fall, and they did it for all the world to hear.

They called him a “high-ranking member of the Latin Kings.” They called him “depraved.” They even called him a “thug” as they accused him of offering $10,000 for the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino.

But Thursday, a federal jury called Espinoza Martinez “not guilty.” In doing so, it put an end to one of the most contentious prosecutions to result from Operation Midway Blitz.

The panel of regular citizens, led by a teacher who served as the foreperson, answered a call from defense attorney Dena Singer. The lawyer urged them in closing arguments to “stand up to the overreaching government.”

………

After deliberating for about three hours, the jury acquitted Espinoza Martinez of one count of murder-for-hire, which carried a maximum of 10 years in prison. They did so after hearing how Bovino last fall became the face of immigration enforcement in Chicago.

 

Headline of the Day

Elon Musk Is So Unlikable That His Feud With Random Airline Is Doing Wonders for Sales, Says CEO

—Futurism, discussing the recent dustup between the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ and the CEO of Ryanair over the latter's choice not to put Starlink™ on its planes.

Ryanair is literally offering Musk discount fares. 

Elon Musk tried to pick a fight with a major airline CEO — who says thanks for all the additional business you’re bringing in with your public tantrum, sucker.

“We love these PR spats that drive bookings on Ryanair,” the budget airline’s chief Michael O’Leary said at a news conference in Dublin on Wednesday, as quoted by CNN. “And we want to thank him sincerely for the additional publicity.”

The trash talking began last week when the Irish airline, the largest in Europe, said it wouldn’t install its fleet with Starlink technology, a satellite-based internet service operated by Musk’s company SpaceX. O’Leary claimed that the Starlink antennas would add drag to the planes and drive up fuel costs.

Musk could barely hide the sting he felt from the snub. He initially responded by calling O’Leary “misinformed” and added that he doubted Ryanair “can even measure the difference in fuel use accurately.”

Smelling controversy, O’Leary went on a interview with the Irish radio station Newstalk to taunt the world’s richest man.

………

Musk even threatened to buy out the airliner and posted a poll asking his fans whether he should “restore Ryan as their rightful ruler” once he does. Clearly, Grok was not consulted before putting up the poll: the “Ryan” Musk is presumably referring to is the Irish billionaire Tony Ryan, who died in 2007.

Elon Musk is a fucking moron. 

 

Headline of the Day

Americans Aren’t Traumatized Enough by Gun Violence

—The Fair Observer online journal, stating the obvious.

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

QED. 

Yeah, It's a Scam

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

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

Well, now you do.

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

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

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

Bodies Do Not Lie

But ICE agents do.

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

 

Project Scoop

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

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

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

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

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

Walking the Talk

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

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

FYI, DWCP = Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.

Mamdani Administration Bans Hotel Hidden Fees and Unexpected Credit Card Holds

What you should know 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

Media Contact

pressoffice@cityhall.nyc.gov

(212) 788-2958

(emphasis original)

Quote of the Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

……… 

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

Headline of the Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

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

Headline of the Day

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

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

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

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

Notice a couple of things:

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

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

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

He is not playing 3-D chess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Larson Was Right

Cows got tools!

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

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

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

………

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

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

………

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

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

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

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

I, for one, welcome our new bovine overlords.

Linkage

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

Yes, I love my little fuzz balls.

Have You Heard the One About the Heckler Autoworker?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sweet.

Look Out Below

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best economy ever, huh?

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

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

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

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) January 18, 2026

I agree.

The New York Times is indistinguishable from parody. 

Yeah, Security Concerns.

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

[image or embed]

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

Yeah, right, "Safety Concerns"

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

I believe the statements of the hotel.

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

Or not. 

Trump Admin Goes to Bat for Pedophile Welfare Queen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China Gets a Couple of Things Right

Th PRC has decided to ban algorithmic price discrimination.

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

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

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

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

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

Also, China is cracking down on high frequency trading.

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

………

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

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

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

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

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

A Cartoon, Context, and a Bit of History

This puts everything in the proper context.

H/t Assigned Male

I'd Like to Neuter the Federal Reserve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

………

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pardon me while I clean my screen. 

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

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

………

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

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

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

That's some sweet, sweet schadenfreude. 

ICE is Not the Gestapo

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

Sound familiar? 

H/T Pharyngula.

How Do You Make Coffee When You Need Coffee?

This morning, I made myself some coffee.

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

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

I made it a little bit strong.

I think that it straightened my pubic hair. 

And Then There is Real Journalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

I approve.

From the "Mind" of Bari Weiss

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

[image or embed]

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

OMFG, it's Real

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

[image or embed]

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

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

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

I was wrong.

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

No, I am not fucking joking.

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

………

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

………

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

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

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

It's called Drunk History. 

Snark of the Day

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

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

This made me laugh out loud. 

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

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

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

And then they go in for the kill:

………

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

This shows us something:  This came from Elon.

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

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

I Needed This So Much, and So Do You

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

Thank you Hank Azaria.

I have been a fan since Herman's Head. 

Because, Of Course They Did

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

Senate Republicans are all Trump's little bitches. 

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

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

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

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

Paging Margaret Atwood

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

They are in the process of extraditing an extradition request.

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

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

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

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

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

I Did Not Think That It Could Get Any More Stupid

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

I was misinformed.

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

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

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

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

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

I favor the latter, particularly for Marc Andreeson. 

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

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

……… 

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

………

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Day

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

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

That is perfect. 

Today In Horrifying Restaurant Reviews - Stellar Parthenon

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

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

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

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

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

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