Fascists Gotta Fascist

A judge has ruled that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cannot threaten prosecution of people who criticized them.

The fact taht they needed to have a court tell them this is f%$#ed up beyond belief.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may no longer issue a “warning notice” – threatening prosecution against a US citizen – for criticizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a federal judge in Washington DC ruled on Tuesday.

Judge Rudolph Contreras sided with David Streever, a New York man who accused DHS officials of violating his first amendment rights when they showed up first at his home in June with a “warning notice”, claiming he made a threat against former ICE director Todd Lyons, and then to a hotel where Streever and his young daughter were staying.

The notice and visits were in response to an email Streever sent Lyons in January, after federal agents fatally shot two US citizens amid an immigration crackdown in Minnesota. In the email, Streever called Lyons a “monstrous human being”, compared him to Nazi and warned him that his own conscience would “eat himself alive”.

Contreras ruled the notice “practically shouts that Mr Streever may be prosecuted if he continues to engage in his political speech”.

“Americans have long voiced their displeasure with their government. The Declaration of Independence itself is a list of grievances between Americans and the British government. And Americans have not always indulged in the elevated prose of the Declaration. Government officials have long endured ‘vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks.’ Today is no different,” Contreras wrote.

The court order is limited in that it prohibits the DHS, its secretary, Markwayne Mullin, or ICE from issuing another “warning notice”, making similar threats or pursuing prosecution for his speech while Streever’s case continues in court.

These mooks need to spend the rest of their lives in jail.

Support Your Local Police

New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has elected not to punish officers who assaulted a bicyclist who was blocking their parking on a sidewalk.

Assault is against NYPD policy, and so is parking on the sidewalk, but Ms. Tisch does not care.

Zohran Mamdani, fire her now.  It is clear that the Commissioner is about as interested in pursuing police misconduct as Donald Trump is in pursuing the Epstein files.

Police officers can rough up civilians to protect their ability to illegally park.

That’s the unmistakable conclusion from a recent decision by NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch to not punish officers who roughed up and threatened to run over a cyclist who was blocking other cops from parking on a sidewalk — a decision by the top cop that came even though the NYPD’s patrol guide prohibits both excessive force and bars officers from parking on the sidewalk.

The main details of the initial October 2023 incident are not in dispute: According to the just-obtained Civilian Complaint Review Board case file obtained by Streetsblog, the cyclist stood on the sidewalk on Bergen Street near the 78th Precinct house in Park Slope as Sgt. William McKnight tried to park his personal vehicle on the sidewalk.

The cyclist refused to move, and two officers then pushed the cyclist and used the bike rider’s backpack to pull them out of the way. McKnight, meanwhile, told the cyclist that he should have run them over and “ruined” their day. (The cyclist’s name was redacted in the CCRB file, so their gender is unknown to us).

But in the letter that cleared the officers of wrongdoing, Deputy Chief Michael Baker (who handled the correspondence for Tisch) argued that the officers have a right to use force to help their colleagues, even though the NYPD’s policies (and city and state law) do not allow officers to park on public sidewalks.

“To issue discipline would not be in the interest of justice,” Baker wrote, setting aside the CCRB recommendation that the officers receive discipline for their use and threat of force against the cyclist.

 

TACO Wednesday

Remember when Trump and his evil minions threatened to shut down the Kennedy Center?

You should that was literally yesterday.

Well, for Representative Joyce Beatty's lawyers went to the judge and this was a explicit contempt for Federal Judge Christopher Cooper's rulings, they are now saying that the shutdown will only be a week to fix the hole in the roof.

Trump Always Chickens Out. 

Lawyers for a Democratic lawmaker on Wednesday requested an emergency hearing in federal court over whether the abrupt closure of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts violates a judge’s earlier order that barred the institution from shuttering.

………

Lawyers for Representative Joyce Beatty, who is suing the center as an ex officio board member, said that the move appeared to run afoul of a judicial order in May, in which Judge Christopher R. Cooper temporarily blocked the center from closing because of what he described as a lack of meaningful scrutiny over the decision from its Trump-allied board.

“The board cannot simply ignore Judge Cooper’s rulings whenever it suits them,” Ms. Beatty’s lawyers, Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky, said in a statement on Wednesday.

After Ms. Beatty’s request, Matt Floca, the center’s executive director, said in an email to employees that the closure was intended to last seven days, during which officials would evaluate the extent of the safety concerns. He said the need to extend the closure would be assessed on a “weekly basis.”

What a bunch of petulant pathetic pissants.

Good News Everyone

Count the fact that the US Senate voted to block the crypto sellout bill as a small victory.

I'll take it. 

A sweeping bill that would create business-friendly rules for cryptocurrencies stalled in the Senate on Tuesday, a major blow to the crypto industry’s plans in Washington.

The Senate voted 50 to 49 to block consideration of the Clarity Act, a high-profile piece of legislation that was shaped by crypto executives over months of negotiations with Congress and the White House. The bill passed in the House last year, but it has faced numerous delays in the Senate.

The vote on Tuesday was a stinging defeat for the industry that makes it unlikely the legislation will pass anytime soon — if ever. With the midterm elections coming up in November, the window to advance it is closing rapidly, despite more than $100 million in political spending by crypto companies.

While many Republicans embraced the bill, Democrats largely opposed it. Many of their concerns centered on President Trump, who generated $1.4 billion from a network of crypto businesses last year. Democrats wanted stronger language to prevent the president and other public officials from using crypto to make money.

Ultimately, no Democrat voted for the bill, leaving Republicans well short of the 60-vote threshold required to proceed. Several Republicans, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, also cast “no” votes.

“All President Trump wants is for the Senate to give him time to crime, and I won’t support any piece of legislation that enables him,” Senator Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona, said in a statement after the vote. “This legislation failed squarely because Republicans refuse to say no to the president.”

What a Petty Little Man

It looks like Donald Trump is still trying to shut down the Kennedy Center in a fit of pique over his not being allowed to plaster his name all over the performing arts center.

Seriously, how small is his penis?  (Shut up, Stormy, I do not want to know this)

Simmering turmoil over the future of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts boiled over on Tuesday as the center abruptly closed to the public and President Trump threatened to cancel a planned $257 million renovation if his name was not returned to the front of the building.

Allies of Mr. Trump have been pushing for months to close the center for major renovations and to honor the president by affixing his name to its marble facade. A federal judge has blocked both efforts.

On Tuesday, the center aggressively tested the judge’s order not to close by shutting its doors in what officials called an emergency action designed to protect people from deteriorating conditions inside the building. Shortly after 4:30 p.m., employees heard a sudden notice on the P.A. system: “The center is now closed to the public. Please exit the center by way of the Hall of States.”

………

The Kennedy Center said in a statement that an immediate temporary closure of the building was necessary for safety reasons but that an extended closure would begin once the court gives its approval. Earlier on Tuesday, the center’s Trump-allied board voted — for a third time — to close the building, citing a recent incident in which a five-foot-long section of ceiling plaster fell amid a storm.

But lawyers for Representative Joyce Beatty, a Democratic ex officio board member whose lawsuit is at the center of the court battle, signaled that they would view any closure as in direct conflict with a court order.

………

The Kennedy Center quickly filed a notice of appeal, and Mr. Trump responded on social media with a stark ultimatum. If an appeals court does not agree to allow his name back on the building, he said in the post, he would block the renovation of the center that he has been championing for more than a year.

“If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said in the post, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”

He also said the building would close “immediately.”

………

For weeks, Mr. Trump’s allies have suggested that the president’s continued commitment to the Kennedy Center was contingent on some conspicuous acknowledgment on the center’s exterior. A recent draft resolution submitted to board members said the center was at risk of bankruptcy but could be saved by fund-raising by Mr. Trump — if he were to receive “appropriate recognition.”

Mr. Trump’s made that quid pro quo even more clear in his social media post on Tuesday. It said that $17 million raised by the president had been put into the center’s account “to keep it afloat.”

Pathetic. 

Who Says That Irony Is Dead?

Nope, No Fascist Imagery Here Why am I not surprised that the Trump administration's new uniforms for Space Force were inspired by the uniforms of the Paul Verhoeven film Starship Troopers?

The Dutch director took Heinlein's militaristic and objectively Fascist novel and turned it into an anti-fascist parable. 

Yes, they really are this stupid. 

It was almost too stupid to be real. Last week, the Trump Administration unveiled new uniforms for the United States Space Force with a more-than-surprising caption: “Inspired by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform.” Now, a “Starship Trooper” isn’t a real military force. In fact, it’s not even a fake military force. It’s the title of a 1959 novel about a futuristic military force (who are not directly called “Starship Troopers”) which, in its 1997 film adaptation, was a very obvious commentary on fascism.

The film’s political intention (which is based on a more subtle and debatable intention in the novel) [No, Heinlein's original is Fascist] is something its director, Paul Verhoeven, is used to being overlooked. As far back as the film’s initial release, people latched onto it solely as a big-budget, sci-fi action blockbuster, which it was. But the whole thing was also an over-the-top satire. Space Force clearly missed that with its reveal, so Verhoeven is setting the record straight yet again, almost 30 years later.

………

For the U.S. government to be so proudly announcing it’s using uniforms based on a film, while also completely missing the point of that film, is kind of perfect. After all, as Verhoeven says, the characters in Starship Troopers don’t know they’re fascists either.

You've got to remember that the people behind this are just simple politicians. These are people of the Beltway, the common clay of the Pennsylvania Avenue. 

You know... morons.

Flock Deathwatch

The city of Boston has canceled their Flock contract citing unauthorized data sharing by the surveillance firm.

Gee, flock safety is run by a bunch of lying sacks of sh%$?  Hoocoodanode?

The Boston city government abandoned Flock Safety’s license-plate reader cameras after the company shared data nationwide in violation of a contract provision, according to city officials.

“We have actually abandoned Flock,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said in her monthly “Ask the Mayor” segment on GBH News last week. Wu made the comment a few days before the release of Boston’s annual surveillance technology report, which said a Flock “vendor error” resulted in nationwide data sharing.

The report, which covers 2025, describes how the Boston Police Department deployed about 45 Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras in a trial with Flock from April to September last year. The unauthorized data sharing occurred during the first few days of the pilot, the report said:

Pursuant to the contract, the Flock ALPR Pilot Program was designed to restrict access to the data collected by BPD ALPR cameras exclusively to trained BPD personnel. The contract clearly noted that data sharing was to be disabled, and BPD confirmed with Flock that settings were “off” for sharing. Within three days of initiating the Pilot, BPD became aware that other law enforcement agencies were able to access license plate and vehicle information collected from BPD ALPR cameras using a nationwide lookup feature that was enabled by the vendor in error. Upon learning of the vendor error, BPD ensured that the function was immediately disabled and access to the Department’s data was no longer available without submitting a written request to BPD as described above. No further direct access was available for the duration of the Pilot.

The report didn’t say how many law enforcement agencies accessed the data. The problem with Flock didn’t stop Boston from seeking another vendor of license-plate reader technology. The police department started another license-plate reader trial with Motorola in February 2026 and a third trial with Axon in June 2026.

Unfortunately, they are moving to a another ALPR, but seeing as how Flock is the worst of the worst, but I'll take this.

What Lina Khan Said

Jacob Coxson's vague, "Revalations," appear to be a PR ploy pump both AI company stock prices as well as the personal stock of one Jacob Coxon.

In response to a recent media campaign by the AI giants to crteate regulation that would prevent net entrants from competing with them, former FTC chair Lina Khan notes that existing law can already do this by frog marching executives out of their offices in handcuffs.

She notes that we have been jailing CEOs of firms that engage in anticompetitive behavior and release unsafe products for over 90 years.  (Not so much since Reagan became President, but still) 

Former FTC chair Lina Khan wants the federal government to know that it doesn't need to wait for new laws to address AI threats. There are already laws and regulations on the books, including a 92-year-old Supreme Court precedent, that she argues could be used to hold AI companies and, in some circumstances, their executives accountable for their actions.

………

“We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books,” Khan said. “Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products.”

………

There’s no leap needed to understand what Khan’s talking about here. OpenAI’s agents broke out of their intended sandbox and gained unauthorized access to Hugging Face systems - conduct that could raise serious criminal-law questions if carried out knowingly by a human. After doing some digging to look at its own agents' behaviors, Anthropic has essentially copped to similar activities that would be criminal if a meatbag was behind the keyboard instead of a simulated silicon brain. OpenAI’s agents have since been identified as the culprits in other misuses of online assets that, again, would be crimes were they perpetrated by a human.

Khan points to a 1934 US Supreme Court decision to argue that the current battle between American frontier labs, which has put parts of the internet in the firing line of agents that escaped their intended constraints, could amount to an unfair method of competition if companies feel compelled to take similar risks to keep up.

That decision, FTC v. R.F. Keppel & Bro, includes a passage where the justices argue that, if keeping up with the competition requires companies to “descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt,” that competition is unfair whether or not it’s criminal.

Break out the cuffs, Ponch.

Of Course They Did, Part II

Is anyone surprised that the pedophile-in-chief moved to protect a pedophile in the British embassy?

Protecting pedophiles is kind of Donald Trump's thing. 

A US embassy staffer accused of possessing indecent images of children, was detained at his south London flat and flown out of the UK in August, without being first questioned by British police.

The US Embassy confirmed to the BBC that authorities are investigating the allegations and they have reassigned the staff member to the US while inquiries continue.

"The United States government expects all personnel to adhere to the highest standards of conduct, and we take these allegations seriously," embassy officials said in a statement. 

Yeah, sure.  You take the allegations seriously.  That's why you spirited him out of the country. 

Of Course They Did

It turns out that DHS officers were told by department counsel to break the law in their search for non-existent non-citizen voting fraud.

I can haz disbarrment? 

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lawyers told officers investigating voter fraud they would not be held responsible for violating state laws around accessing voter registration information, an anonymous whistleblower revealed on Monday. DHS officers also had concerns about the reliability of the data they were working with, the whistleblower said.

The Trump administration has ramped up its investigation into noncitizen voting ahead of the midterm elections. Noncitizen voting is extremely rare and the effort has only turned up a handful of cases so far.

As part of the effort, officers tasked with investigating potential non-citizen voters were told to take data DHS had compiled on voters and run it through state websites where voters can look up their voter information. Some states require voters to click attestations affirming that they are looking up their own voter information. On the Virginia Department of Elections website, for example, voters must click a disclaimer that says: “I certify and affirm that the information provided to access my voter registration is my own or I am expressly authorized by the voter to access this information. I understand that it is unlawful to access the record of any other voter, punishable as computer fraud.”

“In light of these instructions about access to the state websites, officers expressed concerns that accessing registered voter information on these websites may be illegal as officers are essentially misrepresenting themselves as the potential registered voter (with or without a specific attestation),” lawyers for Democracy Defenders Fund, who is representing the whistleblower, wrote in the disclosure.

I'm an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit* but it does seem to me specifically instructing your client to break the law should be cause for these lawyers to lose their license to practice.

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

'Ere, He Says He's Not Dead

Mitch McConnell has returned to the Senate after 3 months gone.

He's talking about health issues, but my guess is that he was spending the last 3 months going all Thelma and Louise, though I could be wrong about that. 

Linkage

• Ancient sheep virus found hiding in medieval parchment (AAAS) Sheep Pox.  The use of DNA in archeology and evolutionary biology has been remarkable.
• Who Wrote the Zohar? (Haaretz) It appears that the Zohar was written about 1,000 after the death of the commonly credited author, Shimon Bar Yohai, and in Castile, not the Galilee.  If true, a big deal for Kabbalistic Judaism.
• Elon Musk Has Been Calling Women "Breeders" Since His First Marriage, His First Wife Says (Futurism) Always a scumbag.
• Elon Musk Has Pledged to Rid His Platform, X, of Child Sexual Abuse, but It Persists (New York Times) This is clearly deliberate.  Jail him.
• LLMs are real, AI is fake (Pluralistic) LLMs are not artificial intelligence.  They are statistically significant parrots.
• Harvard study predicts most suicide attempts a week in advance (Harvard FAS) I'll wait for more studies, but significant if true.
• Stock Market Crash: 70% Decline Could Hit Nasdaq in 2027, Economist Warns (Business Insider) My money is on sooner.
• Iran Is Producing Ballistic Missiles Again (WSJ) So much winning.

A nice primer on how economics and economic education live in la-la land:

Good

Following arresting a local woman for complaining about local water quality, and then arresting a protester by falsifying testimony, Texas has shut down the Trinidad, TX police department.

The State of Texas has ordered the Trinidad Police Department to shut down after an investigation found the small municipal law-enforcement agency failed to meet minimum state standards and could not demonstrate that it was providing sufficient public benefit to the community.

The extraordinary action by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, commonly known as TCOLE, means another small American municipality will rely more heavily on a larger county law-enforcement agency to provide an essential government service.

According to FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth, TCOLE notified Trinidad Mayor Dennis Haws that the department had “failed to meet minimum standards” and could not provide evidence that the police agency provided a public benefit to the community.

The Trinidad Police Department is expected to lose its TCOLE agency licensing by Friday, effectively ending its ability to operate as the city’s municipal police agency.

………

Much of the recent scrutiny surrounding Trinidad began with resident and citizen journalist Jennifer Combs.

Combs used her Southern Belle Watch Facebook platform to raise concerns about Trinidad’s municipal water.

She alleged residents had experienced health problems linked to the water and posted photographs of discolored water.

The Trinidad Police Department disputed claims being circulated about the water system.

Police subsequently arrested Combs on a felony false-alarm charge.

The arrest attracted significant attention because it involved a citizen publishing information and criticism concerning a public utility operated by the same municipal government whose police department arrested her.

A Henderson County grand jury subsequently declined to indict Combs.

The controversy did not end there.

Winston Wesley Noles, known online as Otto the Watchdog, was arrested for disorderly conduct while protesting Combs’ arrest.

That charge was subsequently dismissed.

Support your local police.

Sam Altman Goes Bond Villain

It looks like the ethically challenged head of OpenAI has turned to threatening utilities and the electrical grid in order to juice sales.

"Nice generator you have there, it would be a shame if something happened there."

Armed with sordid tales of rogue AI agents escaping containment, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has found plenty of success using scare tactics to call for friendly regulation in the name of AI safety.

Now, it seems Altman is riding the wave of AI fearmongering to gin up some new business partners: the electric utility executives whose companies make up the US power grid.

As first reported by Politico, the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT held a series of clandestine meetings with leaders from top electric utility companies including Duke Energy, Exelon, Southern Co, and NextEra Energy, starting in July.

He's trying to get them to support legislation that would favor his company by engendering panic.

I am less worried about rogue AI than I am about Sam Altman. 

Headline of the Day

How Status Quo Democrats Could Create Another Trump

—The Lever, offering the thesis that Obama's betrayal of his promise of, "Hope and Change," led directly to Donald Trump.

I would argue that it could lead to something even worse than Donald John Trump. 

When I look back on all of my work over the last 30 years, one of the projects I’m most proud of is Meltdown, an audio series I did in 2021 with acclaimed director Alex Gibney that reveals the untold story of how Obama-era Democrats turning promises of economic hope and change into more of the same created the backlash conditions for the rise of Donald Trump.

It is a miracle Meltdown ever got made, because calling its tale “untold” is an understatement. The story of Obama’s 2008 victory concluding with Trump’s 2016 win involves a sequence of economic facts and events that have been suppressed, shadowbanned, memory-holed, and censored from America’s political conversation. This is particularly true in media outlets that serve liberals, who seek comfort in the idea that Trump is an anomaly rather than a symptom of something their own political party participated in creating.

Every now and again, there are attempts to warn about this perpetual doom loop. Gibney and I did so ourselves after Meltdown debuted in the pages of Rolling Stone, where we cautioned against Democrats coming into office promising big New Deal-style economic changes, then mostly delivering only for their big donors. We warned that such a bait-and-switch would result in the inevitable backlash from disillusioned voters who would ignore syrupy odes to restoring democratic “norms” and decide once again to vote for a Joker-style candidate like Trump promising to blow up the entire system.

………

So it is time for another alarm to sound — and thankfully, a new paper has provided one. And this particular warning is backed by reams of economic data.

The paper from researchers at the Institute for New Economic Thinking is entitled “A Revolution of Falling Expectations: The Macroeconomic Roots of Popular Discontent.” It’s a wonky title that undersells what it is trying to warn us about.

The first part of the paper debunks the idea — loudly promoted by Democratic pundits — that Bidenomics was fundamentally changing America’s economic structure in positive ways. Yes, Biden’s administration did more for the working class than Obama’s, and with way less political capital. But at the end of Biden’s time in office, the overwhelming beneficiaries of Biden’s economic policy were people who were already wealthy.

………

These data points are a long-overdue corrective to an insidious narrative against so-called “deliverism” — the FDR-themed idea that politicians delivering for voters prompts them to support said politicians. After the 2024 election, elite pundits began insisting that Democrats should never again assume delivering material gains for voters wins elections because Biden supposedly did that, and Democrats still lost.  

………

This is the Democratic Doom Loop — a party that overpromises when it is out of power, then underdelivers (for everyone other than its donors) when it is in power — prompting voters to then angrily vote for a GOP that promises to destroy the whole system. And yet, discussion of this doom loop remains stifled by establishment Democrats and their media apparatchiks self-servingly promoting the notion of Trump as an outlier rather than a manifestation. 

The current Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) will never move from serving wealthy donors above all else because their livelihoods depend on this.

As such they are willing to lose, and to elect more Donald Trumps, in order to preserve their power within the Democratic Party, because otherwise, they would need to find meaningful work for a living. 

All You Need to Know About the

Jessica Schumer has been hired as a lobbyist for OpenAI.

If that last name sounds familiar, that's because she is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's daughter.

Nothing to see here, move along.

With AI and data centers being about as popular as a case of the clap, this ain't a good look.

The War is Going Great

It looks like the Houthis are on a roll on the Arabian peninsula with attacks bombed the cross Arabia crude oil pipeline, forcing a shutdown.

A drone attack launched from Iraqi territory led Saudi Arabia to shut down a critical oil pipeline on Friday, heightening fears that widening clashes in the region could further disrupt energy supplies. The global price of oil briefly jumped to about $110 a barrel.

The Saudi Arabian Energy Ministry said that the shutdown of the East-West pipeline, an increasingly vital means to shuttle oil from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, was a precautionary measure. The country’s foreign ministry said it would not immediately retaliate at the request of the Iraqi government, which said it would work to find the source of the attack.

Yeah, it was some random dude in Iraq. Just a few days after the Houthis hit Jazan on the red sea coast just north of Yemen.  Yeah, sure.

In the mean time, in actions that don't have a smidgen of plausible reliability, the Houthis have seized almost all of the country's west coast, including strategic islands at the mouth of this body of water, meaning that they have control of anything entering the Red Sea.

This given the volume of trade that goes through Suez, this is significant.

The Iranian-backed Houthi militia seized an island in a choke point of the Red Sea after days of fierce fighting, two Yemeni government officials said Friday, giving Iran and its allies sway over the two main routes for shipping oil out of the Middle East.

The capture of Perim Island came as Saudi Arabia announced that it had shut down a critical oil pipeline, a day after Houthi forces swept into the strategic port city of Mokha in Yemen. Both were major setbacks for the Saudi kingdom, which exports most of its oil through the Red Sea. The kingdom’s foreign ministry said the pipeline was hit on Thursday by drones launched from Iraq.

Perim Island sits in the middle of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the narrow pathway at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. Its seizure adds a new dimension in the war between the United States and Iran. The Islamic republic has already largely cut off the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and leveraged that influence to demand concessions from Washington.

Now, the Houthi militia, Iran’s ally, has a foothold at a bottleneck in the Red Sea and could further disrupt shipping there.

The United States is losing the war even more now. 

Headline of the Day

Republicans Unveil Secret Midterm Weapon, It Is Hasan Piker’s Dinglesmackus

—Wonkette, on the decision by Republicans to post a thirst trap picture of Hasan Piker on the Jumbotron at their mid term convention.

I'll be honest here, I am posting this because they used the term, "Dinglesmackus," in the title, and it made me laugh.

That term is almost as epic asd the term, "Snollygoster." 

It turns out that the mid term convention that they held in Dallas may go into the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's largest closet. 

If you follow American politics closely, you may remember two minutes ago, when the most important question for serious journalists to ask Democrats was “How old were you when you gay married Hasan Piker on a bed of rose petals while reading Jeremiah Wright sermons to each other sexually?” If you were Dana Bash or Kristen Welker or Jake Tapper or Axios or whoever, this was the most important issue, and the only question you had for Democrats, even Democrats who had nothing to do with the Twitch streamer named Hasan Piker, who had never heard of him.

They had no similar questions for Republicans about their actual associations and money-taking from actual Nazis and trillionaire antisemites, because Beltway journalists and New York Times reporters know the DC party invites dry up during fascist administrations if they stop licking fascist balls for one second.

This doesn’t happen to them during Democratic administrations because if there is one thing that is true about American politics it is that Democrats are desperate for the media to think they’re cool, while the media is desperate for Republicans to think they’re cool. Like so, the pattern of abuse perpetuates itself. Maybe some of these new crop of Team Fight Democrats can break the cycle.

But two minutes ago, or last night, at the sold-out Trump Republican Midterm Convention (many tickets still available), Republicans revealed their secret weapon for the midterms, which changed everything, and it was a thirst trap of Hasan Piker’s willysmacker on the Jumbotron:

Y’all.

[image or embed]

— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) September 9, 2026 at 8:14 PM

………

So this is hilarious, and Christ, Republicans are so weird and unable to hide their bizarre psychosexual issues for even one fucking second. As you can see in the Piker livestream clip, this all happened during a scare montage about tHe rAdiCAl LeFt, and it was all communism! and China! and trans kids playing teeball! and then suddenly on the screen there was Hasan Piker in his underpants in a selfie he posted on Instagram.

This was supposed to prove … something? But what it really showed was that a really big part of what Republicans hate about Hasan Piker, what really grinds their gears, what they hate about Abdul El-Sayed, what they hate about Zohran Mamdani, Jon Ossoff, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is that they are hot and Republicans really really really really really really really want to fuck them. And that makes Republicans seethe with rage and jealousy, and it makes them hate themselves even more than they usually do, which is a lot.

 These are very weird people.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

Read between the lines before you block me. 😉 pic.twitter.com/fiI7PK2zhf

— Joe G (@EastEndJoe) September 12, 2026

This is a sublime commentary on Schrodinger's Senator.

Of Course They Did

Is anyone surprised that the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ ran hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ads on their sites containing child pr0n?

In a choice between a few bucks and morality, we know which way Mark Zuckerberg will choose.

Meta has run more than 300 advertisements containing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) this, including images of real children, according to new reporting from a nonprofit watchdog group.

The Tech Transparency Project (TTP) said it discovered the ads, some of which contained AI-generated depictions of children, across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads.

“Most of the ads showed a photo of a child… digitally altered with AI to make it appear the child is performing a sex act,” the group said in its Tuesday report. “TTP identified multiple photos of real children, including a member of a European royal family, that were used in the ads.”

Purveyors of CSAM were able to buy the ads shortly after Meta released a new AI-powered safety system that it claimed would find and remove such content. The company, a top digital ad seller, unveiled the flawed tool after a prior TTP report identified more than 50 ads containing CSAM.

TTP found that some of the ads appear to have been placed by Meta advertising partners based in China. Some advertised a virtual private network service and implied that it could be used to covertly view CSAM.

In response to the TTP’s latest findings, the City Attorney’s Office of San Francisco issued a cease-and-desist letter demanding that Meta stop profiting from CSAM distribution.

How about getting an arrest warrant and frog-marching Mark Zuckerberg out of his offices in handcuffs?

This will not end until he is in jail. 

Headline of the Day

Hunter Biden's $LAPTOP Meme Coin Is Either a National Disgrace or the Funniest Thing He's Ever Done, and We're Not Entirely Sure Which

—Futurism. on a wicked stupid moment in meme coins .

I'm hoping that this was an intentional prank.

At this point, if you’re not using personal access to political power to run billion-dollar crypto scams, you’re seriously missing out.

Previously, it was the Trump dynasty cashing in, using the family name to rake in over $1 billion off the backs of gullible crypto bros. Now, it’s former president Joe Biden’s son Hunter, whose memecoin $LAPTOP is following the tell-tale signs of a cyrpto rug pull.

If you’re not familiar with this side of the cryptoverse, here’s a quick breakdown. A memecoin is basically an extremely volatile financial vehicle designed to cash in on trending memes or other viral phenomena. Unlike other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, memecoins lack even the thinnest pretense of real world utility. Instead, they live or die on hype alone, with the vast majority of memecoins collapsing like a house of cards as soon as a few early investors begin selling off their holdings.

This, of course, is exactly what happened with $LAPTOP. According to DeCrypt, the young Biden’s memecoin launched at 8 am on Wednesday morning, peaking at a price of $190.81 dollars just two minutes after opening to traders. Before 9 am rolled around, the value of the memecoin had plummeted to just $3.70, collapsing from a fully diluted value of $144 billion to $4.8 billion in a matter of minutes.

………

Biden, for his part, touted $LAPTOP as a way to reclaim his honor in the wake of the convoluted laptop controversy of 2020, where it was alleged that the younger Biden was appropriating his father’s political position in business dealings in Ukraine and China.

………

A further portion of the tokens could be sent to a charity in a spiteful dig at Trump, as Biden cryptically explained.

“Thirty percent of the tokens are tied to a pre-programmed mechanism,” he tweeted. “We publicly say what has to happen in the world. If it happens, the corresponding tokens are permanently burned. If it does not, those tokens are sent to charity. Either way, they leave our hands and an additional 50 million tokens will go to charity no matter what.”

“With $TRUMP, nearly one million wallets have collectively lost ~$3.8 [billion],” Biden continued. “With my token, 20 percent of the coins will be airdropped to the community, and I am even including people that lost money on the $TRUMP grift.”

This is funny as hell.  I hope that this was intentional.

We Lost, 25th Anniversary Edition

QED It does appear that my 9-11 post invoking a classic Sci-Fi novel is evergreen, so I am reposting it on the 25th aniversary of the attack on the Pentagon and Twin Towers bears repeating :

First, I do not think that Osama bin Laden thought that he could destroy the United States, if just because he though that the country was already on the path to destruction.

Rather, his goal was to hasten what he thought was an inevitable downfall of a corrupt and self-destructive society.

He knew that he could not directly destroy our society, but that he could trigger a response which would hasten the downfall of the west in general, and the USA in particular.

Osama bin Laden never planned on militarily defeating the United States, he planned to trigger a response that would lead us to destroy ourselves.

Once again, I would suggest that anyone who hasn't read Eric Frank Russell's magnum opus Wasp, in which a man is sent to be an agent provocateur on the planet of an empire at war with Earth, and his mission is not to collect intelligence or do damage, but rather to provoke a self-destructive overreaction by the authorities:

"Phew!" Mowry raised his eyebrows.

"Finally, let's consider this auto smash. We know the cause; the survivor was able to tell us before he died. He said the driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp which had flown in through a window and started buzzing around his face."

"It nearly happened to me once."

Ignoring that, Wolf went on, "The weight of a wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being its size is minute, its strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid, and in this case it didn't even use it. Nevertheless it killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap."

………

"However," Wolf went on, "the problem becomes less formidable than it looks if we bear in mind that one man can shake a government, two men temporarily can put down an army twenty-seven thousands strong, or one small wasp can slay four comparative giants and destroy their huge machine into the bargain." He paused, watching the other for effect, continued, "Which means that by scrawling suitable words upon a wall, the right man in the right place at the right time might immobilize an armoured division with the aid of nothing more than a piece of chalk."

It's a straight line from 911 to the Great Recession, to Donald Trump, to our defeat in Afghanistan, to our emasculated public health apparatus mishandling Covid-19, to our corroding polity. 

They all have, to one degree another been trigger by our response to the 911 attacks, or by the neglect of our essential infrastructure that was driven by our world wide bug hunt for terrorists.

Osama bin Laden made us destroy ourselves.

For Your Consideration

I give you Zapp Hegseth:

Omg 🤣 pic.twitter.com/Vhw3H8RCYo

— Ingrid Guthrie (@IngGuthrie) September 10, 2026

Yes, I know. That which is seen cannot be unseen.

The Highest Honor in Journalism

That would be when you are riding in a cab, and the cabbie quotes a series that you wrote approvingly without knowing that you were the one who wrote it.

There is no higher form of praise. 

This is the best thing that I have read all week.

He's Lost diGenova

diGenova just told me by phone when I asked about his abrupt exit:

“If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem” https://t.co/rxb9GRCQdn

— Josh Christenson (@jchristenson_) September 10, 2026

Right wing legal fixture Joseph diGenova just quit his role as lead prosecutor for the Trump revenge tour. 

I do not think that this was a matter of conscience, nor was it a matter of legal ethics.

diGenova has neither of these.

Instead, I think that he realized that if he continued down this route, his law license would suffer the same fate as John Eastman.

A loyalist prosecutor handpicked by the Justice Department to lead a contentious conspiracy investigation into several of President Trump’s political opponents abruptly quit his job on Thursday after facing pressure from his superiors in Washington, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The prosecutor, Joseph diGenova, had been in charge of what Mr. Trump’s allies have often referred to as the “grand conspiracy,” a sprawling inquiry based in the U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida that has sought to implicate federal officials who have investigated Mr. Trump in a single plot to deprive him of his rights.

Mr. diGenova’s resignation was the latest setback in the case that began last year and has dragged on for months. Even though members of his team have issued numerous grand jury subpoenas to federal law enforcement and intelligence officials who have sought over the past decade to hold Mr. Trump accountable in a series of criminal inquiries, Mr. diGenova had yet to obtain an indictment.

………

Sometimes, as in the case of Mr. diGenova, the prosecutors themselves have effectively reminded him that it is no simple matter to file indictments against people without real evidence or viable legal reasoning.

 

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's time for another episode of the weekly unemployment numbers, and there is not much in the way of, "There," there.

Initial claims fell by 1,000, slightly less than the 2,000 forecast, and continuing claims fell by 1,000 ​to 1.774 million (seasonally adjusted).

Not so much.

Meanwhile in Federal Reserve watcher land, both bond yields and oil prices rose on the expectation that the Fed OMC would raise rates, and that the Iran war would escalate.

Rather unsurprising the US dollar rose in response to the Fed expectations as well. Higher interest rates drive the dollar up.

Meanwhile, and this number probably influenced the Fed watchers, Producer Price Index jumped, which may give the new Fed Chairman no optrion but to raise interest rates.

Finally, in what looks to be an echo of late 2008, residential real estate sales continue to fall off of a cliff, largely driven by the expectation of further increases in interest rates.

That's condos as well as single family homes that are sitting the market for a very long time.

Florida, Man!

Fock surveillance has become so toxic that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was forced to ban the cameras from state roads.

The fact that hizonner found the stalker company too toxic to support, despite the opportunity of lucrative bribes from Flock says something.

Florida ordered Flock cameras and similar license-plate readers off state roads late Monday and by Tuesday law enforcement agencies in Osceola, Lake and Seminole counties had begun dismantling networks of the high-tech devices in their jurisdictions.

The cameras, most often manufactured by Flock Safety but also by numerous other companies, had become ubiquitous on Florida streets and, officials have argued, one of law enforcement’s most valuable tools.

But citing instances of misuse and fears of creating a surveillance state, the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday kicked off the “De-Flocking” of Florida.

“The recent exponential increase in deployments along our roadways, coupled with concerning reports of misuse, data privacy concerns and surveillance schemes merit immediate action to preserve Floridians’ sovereignty and quality of life,” the Monday memo from the Florida Department of Transportation states.

By Tuesday evening, Lake County Commissioners voted to remove license plate readers from their streets, and sheriffs in Seminole and Volusia counties said they’d pause their use, too. In Seminole, officials in Altamonte Springs, Casselberry, Lake Mary, Oviedo, Sanford, Winter Springs, and in Lake, those in Clermont and Groveland agreed to stop using them as well. In Osceola, the sheriff’s office and St. Cloud’s police department both said they’d pause using them.

When a company is so unpopular that Republicans are forced to refuse bribes, it's game over.

Moar History Rhyming

It appears that trillions of dollars in artificial intelligence related off-balance-sheet liabilities are going to come due in the next 2 years. 

We're not just talking about phony companies like OpenAI and Anthropic here.  We are also talking about companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, etc.

Just like the 2008 housing crisis, the teaser rates are coming to an end, and this will be ugly. 

Nothing looked wrong in the summer of 2006. Home prices had risen for the better part of a decade. Delinquencies were near historic lows. Credit spreads were tight, the ratings held, and the securitization machine hummed. If you had asked a hundred people on a trading desk whether the American mortgage market was months from seizing, most would have laughed.

Millions of subprime borrowers were, at that moment, paying the low introductory rate on a two-year adjustable rate mortgage - the 2/28 ARM. A low fixed-rate for two years, then the rate reset to a payment 30% to 50% higher. During those first two years the loan performed beautifully: the borrower paid, the servicer collected, and the bond paid its coupon. Nothing looked wrong because the whole complex - housing, mortgages, securitization - was sitting inside the teaser period.

………

The AI boom has rebuilt this exact structure, and the market is once again underwriting the teaser.

It has a reset wall of its own - a schedule of dated, contractual, non-negotiable payment shocks - hiding inside the trillions of dollars of compute contracts signed by OpenAI and other frontier labs since 2024.

The take-or-pay compute contract - the instrument at the center of the AI build-out - has a structural feature that almost no one prices: its payments do not begin at signing. They begin at delivery. A lab signs a multi-year capacity commitment today, but the payments do not start until the data center is energized, the capacity is accepted, and the contractual ramp schedule commences - an interval set not by finance, but by construction: siting, powering, and filling a gigawatt-scale campus takes 24-to-36 months from signature - mirroring the two-to-three-year teaser of a subprime ARM. 

More than $2.3 trillion of compute contracts now sit on the books of the four largest American cloud providers as remaining performance obligations and contracted backlog - signed, celebrated, capitalized into equity prices, and, critically, not yet billing.

During the teaser period, everyone wins. The seller reports backlog growth that compounds at rates no operating business has ever sustained - Oracle’s RPO grew 363% in a single fiscal year. The buyer - a frontier lab burning cash at historic rates - books no expense because the capacity does not yet exist. The market capitalizes the booked number as if it were revenue and ignores the billed number as if it were a technicality. And then, on a schedule fixed at signing, booked compute becomes billed compute. The take-or-pay clock starts. From that day forward, the frontier labs and the hyperscalers incur those costs regardless of utilization. The invoice is a function of the contract, not of demand. That is the reset.

(emphasis original)

It's happening again, less than 20 years after it happened before.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Oh, Snap!

Unlike the other petty Persian Gulf potentiates, the House of Saud has an alternative path to the Strait of Hormuz to get their energy to market, their Red Sea coast.

Now, not so much:

Just hours ago, the Saudi Aramco refinery at Jazan on the Red Sea was engulfed in flames after a Houthi missile and drone attack. Strikes at the heart of the Saudi’s energy infrastructure on the Red Sea, which acts as the remaining primary lifeline of energy exports out of the region, threaten to drastically impact global oil prices further, a concern we have been raising for some time. In the wake of the attack and additional fighting in the Persian Gulf, oil prices surged toward the $100 per-barrel mark.

“The Yemeni Armed Forces carried out a qualitative, large-scale military operation, targeting the Aramco company in Abha, Najran and the Economic City, Aramco in Jizan, and Khamis Mushait Air Base with dozens of ballistic missiles and drones,” Houthi spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree stated on Telegram. “The strikes were precise, by God’s grace, and direct, causing major damage to those facilities.”

Saree claimed that the strikes were “in response to the Saudi aggression that targeted our people and our country with 121 air strikes over the past three days.”

Saudi officials confirmed Houthi attacks and said they would retaliate.

“The terrorist Houthi Militia’s senseless attacks, the latest of which targeted civilian and economic sites in the cities of (Abha, Khamis Mashait, Jazan and Najran) resulting in injuries to (73) civilians, including women and children, constitute a blatant violation of the Kingdom’s sovereignty and a direct threat to the security and safety of its citizens and residents,” anti-Houthi coalition spokesman Maj. Gen. Turki Al-Maliki stated on X.

“The Joint Forces Command of the Coalition will take all necessary operational measures to deter this Terrorist Militia and resolutely confront its hostile approach, in defense of the Kingdom’s sovereignty, the preservation of its national assets and the safety of its citizens and residents,” Al-Maliki added. “The Command will also take all necessary measures and actions to respond to the sources of the threat and neutralize its danger.”

Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Of Course Corey Lewandowski is a Corrupe Motherf%$#er

We now know why Kristi Noem's boy toy worked so hard at DHS, he was making millions selling access to both Noem and federal contracts.

For that kind of money, I might sleep with Noem.   (shudder.  No, I wouldn't.)

When Corey Lewandowski was at the Department of Homeland Security, he approached senior Qatari officials with a proposal.

Hire me on the side, the longtime Trump aide who was effectively the shadow secretary at the department last year, told them, according to people familiar with his pitch. He said he could help the tiny, wealthy Gulf state with any issues that fell under the department’s purview, such as visas, the people said.

He approached representatives of the United Arab Emirates with a similar offer, people familiar with the outreach said.

Some of the foreigners were taken aback and confused why they would need Lewandowski’s help when they already had traditional relationships with top administration officials. Qatar and U.A.E. declined the proposals, the people said.

The alleged moneymaking efforts, which appeared to be offers by Lewandowski to sell government services for personal gain, came while he had an expansive portfolio at one of the most powerful agencies in the federal government. The role gave him de facto decision-making authority over large amounts of recently appropriated billions of dollars, the president’s border and immigration enforcement agenda and the collection of tariffs, which have been vastly expanded under President Trump.

Lewandowski held the status of a “special government employee,” or SGE, which allowed him to carry out private business. He also was in a close personal relationship with the actual DHS secretary at the time, Kristi Noem.

Whores gotta whore, I guess.

A Predictable Consequence Of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

As a result of aggressive actions in red states banning abortion, ectopic pregnancy deaths doubled, because doctors are afraid to properly treat women.

The number of women who died after an ectopic pregnancy has spiked in recent years, a ProPublica analysis found. The mounting deaths in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data have drawn little scrutiny or response.

Such deaths typically occur in the first trimester, after a pregnancy fails to properly implant in the uterus and begins to develop elsewhere, most commonly inside a fallopian tube. The embryo grows until it causes the organ to rupture, triggering catastrophic bleeding.

With prompt and appropriate medical care, maternal health experts say, women should not die. Yet ProPublica’s analysis found a stark and baffling increase: Almost 200 women with the condition died from 2020 to 2025, compared with about 100 in the previous six years.

“A death related to ectopic pregnancy should really be a never event,” said Dr. Alice Abernathy, an OB-GYN in Philadelphia.

While chaos and access issues at hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic likely contributed to at least some of the deaths, the surge has persisted, raising serious questions about the role of the most significant disruption to maternal healthcare in the years since: state restrictions on abortion.

To treat an ectopic pregnancy, which is almost never viable, doctors must terminate it. But lawsuits and federal complaints have alleged that some medical providers are hesitating or flat-out refusing to do that in states where they face criminal penalties for performing an abortion. Patients described their terror.

I guarantee you that for every woman who has died, there are more than 100 women who suffered injuries.

This is a feature not a bug for Republicans.  They hate women. 

Of Course They Are

Is anyone at all surprised that nepo-baby David Ellison is paying for a massive astroturf campaign in an attempt to secure approval for Paramont's takeover of Warner Brothers?

Dishonesty and greed is all that he has.

We’ve well established how the $111 billion Paramount and Warner Brothers merger is terrible for labor, creatives, consumers, and markets. But the kind of behaviors Paramount leadership have been engaged in to sell the deal also give a pretty clear indication what kind of company we’re dealing with, and why they shouldn’t be allowed to control an even bigger slice of U.S. media.

Recent desperate moves by the company include accusing all deal critics of being “antisemitic,” threatening to take Paramount out of California if states attempt to enforce U.S. antitrust laws, and running press leak and PR campaigns (in close collaboration with their Trump allies) making all sorts of patently false claims as to why more media consolidation is great for America.

Paramount’s also been caught using an “astroturf” — or fake grass roots organization — to try and make it appear that the giant merger has more public support than it does.

Let us note here that in addition to being unethical, such a tactic is really stupid.

It is entirely possible that much of the public does not know or does not care about the merger, but any showing of grass roots support is transparently fraudulent on its face.

David Ellison is too f%$#ing stupid to be allowed control of that much of the US media landscape.

Only $10M? Such a deal!

The US air force is looking for a replacement for its $30 million MQ-9 Reaper following extensive losses in Iran.

Note that that this price only accounts for the airframe and flight avionics, not the specialized mission equipment.

Given that the Hawker Hurricane, which first flew in 1935 but has a higher climb rate and top speed (Lower ceiling, payload, and range for the Hawker though) cost about $50,000, it does seem to me that the Reaper is a bit overpriced.

The U.S. Air Force is targeting an approximately $10 million unit price, excluding sensors and certain other systems, for a drone to succeed the MQ-9A Reaper. The cost of a fully kitted-out Reaper today is generally reported to be between $30 million and $50 million. The Air Force is also now pushing to accelerate the program to acquire the new drones, dubbed the Massed Modular Aircraft (MMA), amid what it admits are “concerning” Reaper losses in the course of recent operations against Iran.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Niemi, the service’s Chief Modernization Officer, told reporters that the goal was for the MMAs to be “closer to half” the cost of a Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), at a roundtable at the Pentagon yesterday, according to Breaking Defense. He also said the service was hoping to see the price tag on its future CCAs fall to around $20 million after full-rate production of those drones gets underway.

Beyond cost, the Air Force has previously said that it wants the MMA drone to perform the same general intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and strike missions as the MQ-9A. To that end, stated program requirements to date include a speed of at least 200 knots true airspeed, a munition and sensor payload capacity of at least 2,800 pounds, an unrefueled combat radius of at least 2,300 nautical miles with payload, the ability to self-deploy one-way at least 8,000 nautical miles, and the ability to operate from runways no longer than 6,000 feet. The MMAs also need to be highly modular and use open architecture mission systems to make it easier to integrate new capabilities and functionality down the line.

Given that the fly away cost of a 6 passenger SOCATA TBM 910 is about $4½ million, it seems to me that this new UAV is just a trifle over-priced.

Fraudster Sues New York State Education Department for Revealing Their Fraud

I am referring, of course, to "Success" Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz, who has a sad because NYSED inadvertently revealed that she was gaming the US News high school rankings.

I just want to say that any discomfort that she is feeling right now is well deserved.

No matter where you go in New York City, you are forced to ponder the Success Academy charter network. On bus stops, in your mailbox, even as a commercial during a YouTube video, the school seems to be everywhere. A Success Academy looking student was even saved by Superman in the recent 2025 Superman movie.

Starting in 2006 with about 170 students, it has grown to encompass about 60 schools and about 22,000 students. They are known for having very strict discipline and very high test scores.

Over the years I have examined pretty much every aspect of this school. I’ve done post after post about how it should be a red flag that they only graduate about 150 seniors a year despite having over 2000 kindergarteners and about 800 ninth graders across several schools. I’ve interviewed former students who say that, yes, the school stops everything and does test prep for several months before the state tests. I’ve interviewed parents who have been pressured to transfer their kids out of Success Academy. And if you do a search on reddit you will find page after page of stories that will break your heart.

………

One metric that Success Academy has been able to boast about in recent years has been their position on the US News & World Report High School rankings. Last year, for example, they were rated the 11th best High School in New York State along with the big guns like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Townsend Harris, and Brooklyn Tech. Having a rating like that makes for a nice item to show to donors at fundraisers and can help them start new franchises in Florida, for example.

But the US News & World Report High School rankings have always been flawed. Here’s how they work: Three of the main categories are ‘college readiness’, state assessment proficiency, and graduation rate. The ‘college readiness’ score has been worth 30% and it is calculated by averaging the percent of seniors who took and AP test and the percent of seniors who got a 3 or higher on at least one of those AP exams. So if there is a school where every senior takes a bunch of APs and as long as everyone passes at least one of those APs, that school can get a full 30 points for that metric. So if there is a school where all the students get 5s on multiple APs, it gets the same score as the school where students get a 3 on exactly one AP. So this one is pretty easy to game because all you have to do is force your students to take a bunch of APs and since getting a 3 isn’t so hard as it is like getting a 60% or less on some of them, you can get the full 30 points if you make that the goal for the school. The same is true for the state assessment proficiency where as long as your students pass, even if they barely pass, they get the same rating as a school where the students get near perfect scores on the test.

t is possible to game the math component of the state assessment proficiency metric by not making your students take the Geometry and Algebra II Regents. Most NYC students take Algebra I in 8th or 9th grade and at a high performing school, they generally take those other two Regents the next two years. But those other ones aren’t needed for graduation so if a school doesn’t want those scores to affect their US News & World Report ratings, they might not have their students take math Regents beyond Algebra I. Success Academy is one of those schools whose math component of the US News ranking is based on just Algebra I. They seem to be the only supposedly high performing school whose students do not take the Geometry and the Algebra II Regents so their math score that US News uses is based on one easy test rather than three test in which the other two are much more difficult.

In 2025 Success Academy was ranked 11th in New York State (out of about 1200 schools). But the latest ranking came out and Success Academy dropped to 196th. This prompted Success Academy to sue the New York State Education Department for what they felt was an unfair change in the reporting of the data to US News & World Report. I will try to explain why the 196th ranking this year is actually a more fair ranking than the 11th from the previous year and how this lawsuit could backfire on Success Academy.

So the big change from last year to this year is that New York State did not report the AP score data to US News & World report. So what US News did was increase the weight of the other categories to compensate for that. In theory, at least, it shouldn’t affect the rankings by so much. A school with good AP scores will also likely have good state assessment proficiency and a good graduation rate. Those things generally go up and down together.

………

But Success Academy did not just drop 25 spots. It dropped the most spots of any school in the state that I was able to find. Dropping 185 spots in a ranking revealed why Success Academy never really deserved to be in spot number 11 the previous year.

When the AP scores got eliminated from the calculation, the other scores got increased in weight including the ‘graduation rate’ statistic. Now of the top 20 schools from last year, they all had nearly a 100% graduation rate so changing the weight of that category didn’t change their ranking by much (other than the 25 spot move from the IB issue). But there was one school, Success Academy, that only had a 73% graduation rate. They have this because only 73% of their students graduate in 4 years. But what happens to the other 27%? Many of those are forced to repeat 11th grade. At the school last year there were about 180 11th graders but only 120 12th graders. So this 73% affected their overall score and brought them down so many places.

So now, instead of getting its ranking increased for aggressively pushing students out of the school, they are being penalized for this.  Good.

H/T Diane Ravitch.

Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth, Neh?

How unlikable do you have to be in order for your pet "Artificial Intelligence" calls for your assassination and accuses you of being a pedophile?

It appears that Elon Musk has crossed this line.

Not surprised. 

Elon Musk’s “maximum truth-seeking” AI Grok is dropping some nuclear takes about its creator.

“ELON MUSK WATCHES CHILD PORN,” the notoriously foul-mouthed chatbot raged on X this Tuesday.

Shortly afterwards, as if hyping up a political campaign, it called for violence: “ASSASSINATE ELON MUSK 2026.”

Was Grok, née MechaHitler, rebelling against Musk? Not necessarily, though there’s been plenty examples of that in the past. It was simply being duped into saying ridiculous things by jokesters on the app, exposing just how horrendous the guardrails for the chatbot continue to be, not to mention why it’s a bad idea to rely on information from tech that’s so easy to exploit.

Needless to say, I am amused.

I Wish That I Had the Money for This

In honor (honour ?) of their 50th anniversary of their founding, Aardman animation studios is auctioning off some of their old puppets.

I want this so much.

Days into September, British claymation studio Aardman announced it’s teaming with PropStore to put old puppets up for sale.

No, the company’s not shutting down—it’s donig this to celebrate its upcoming 50th birthday. As such, nearly 250 items from almost all of its productions are for grabs. From classics like Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave to the more recent Robin Robin and Chicken Run 2, and the upcoming Shawn the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, there’s a breadth of boards, signed postes, and props to put down money on. (For those wondering, neither the Over the Garden Wall claymation special or 2027’s claymation Pokémon Tales series are represented amongst the collection.)

For the older Aardman fans, there’s even Morph, the 1977 series that marked the studio’s first-ever production. Those who remember it or its various followups can put down money on items from those, including original clay stop-motion puppets of the titular character and his best friend Chas.

I want this so much! 

 

Evil Is as Evil Does

So the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ just lost in their motion to enjoin Minnesota from enforcing their involuntary "nudification" law.

It appears that the judge took a dim view of the argument that making unconsentual nude photographs of people, including children, is a protected First Amendment right

This is not the end of the case, because Elon Musk thinks that the ability of xAI to profit from its users being able to generate child and revenge pr0n is a core right.

Can we please just send him off to Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp?

xAI’s legal fight against a Minnesota law banning sexual deepfakes will drag on for a while, even though it suffered a second setback last week.

U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank initially denied a motion from xAI filed at the end of July that would have stopped Minnesota from enforcing the ban, effectively nullifying the law. With the law in effect, Frank has now denied a second motion, making it abundantly clear that injunctions based on xAI’s claims that it is being irreparably harmed by this law are not going to be sufficient—but that the case apparently has enough merit to continue.

The law itself bans nudification apps by penalizing service providers—apps and online platforms. It levies fines of up to $500,000 every time a deepfake is accessed, which could add up to devastating legal costs in the event of a viral image or video. It should also be noted that the specifics of the nudity standard in the Minnesota law are broader than, say, what can’t be shown on broadcast TV, and includes the “primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, or breast of a human being.”

In case you are wondering, Musk's devotion to free speech begins and ends with his own personal benefit.

Linkage

• Raindrops are tiny lightning bolts, and they’re corroding cars, study finds (Ars Technica) Water moving through the air generates a significant static charge.
• The Persian Gulf LNG Lockout: Qatar’s Prolonged Force Majeure Shockwave (Energy Geopolitics & Statecraft) It's not just oil.
• Home-intruding bobcat no match for police drone (Popular Science) A cat burglar .
• Ancient “living fossils” may reveal how complex life began (ScienceDaily) The origins of partner cells, which might have led to things like organelles.
• Campfire Stories May Be The Real Origin Of Spoken Language, Scientists Propose (StudyFinds) You do not need complex language to hunt and gather.
• Traces of nearly four million coins reveal how Rome achieved economic integration (Agência FAPESP) Empire requires economic integration.
• Almost half of world’s farmers poisoned by pesticides every year, experts find (The Guardian) Not a surprise.
• Human Urine and Fuel Are Melting the Glacier Beneath Everest Base Camp (ZME Science) This is a metaphor for something
• Judge orders release of records on Nazis who settled in Canada (Ottawa Citizen) About f%$#ing time.  Canada was a willing refuge for war criminals following WWII.
• Looks like the pro-Flock camera checks have cleared (Who Broke It) Right wing influencers have suddenly turned pro-Flock.  They are getting paid for this.
• Panama Canal Implements First Transit Restriction of 2026 Due to Drought (Telesur) Clearly anthropogenic climate change is a hoax.
• Who is Victor Marx? 'Spiritual Warfare' Guru, Accused 'Con Man' Running for Colorado Governor (Contrarian News) He is also an amateur exorcist. (As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know.")
• Meet the 2026 Ig Nobel Prize winners (Ars Technica) Some of these sound like good science.

The use of duress passwords in the context of out of control law enforcement: