Chuck Darwin

Social and economic justice, technology and tennis.  I'll have what @jbf1755 is having. 
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Last Notes

2026-07-19 17:36:20 UTC

Every zipper is manufactured to a specification that balances precision against cost.
A zipper with teeth machined to tolerances of plus or minus 0.02 millimetres will last thousands of cycles without splitting.
A zipper with tolerances of plus or minus 0.08 millimetres will function adequately for hundreds of cycles before wear accumulates to the failure threshold.
The first costs more to produce.
The second costs more to replace.
The decision between them is made not by the zipper manufacturer but by the garment brand’s procurement team,
working to a bill of materials that has been cost-optimised before the designer has finished the sketch.
This is the hidden truth of everyday product engineering:
the point at which a product fails is,
in many cases, the point at which its manufacturer decided to stop spending.
A zipper doesn’t split because zippers are fundamentally unreliable.
It splits because the specific zipper installed in your specific garment was manufactured at a tolerance level selected to minimise cost,
not to maximise lifespan.
Better zippers exist at every price point.
The question is whether the brand selling the garment considered the zipper a feature worth investing in
https://riftlymedia.com/zipper-mechanics-fail-everyday-product-engineering/

2026-06-29 02:44:16 UTC

When Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Kazakhstan’s president at the St. Regis Hotel last September in New York,
Donald Trump jumped in by phone as the men sealed a deal on a top priority for Washington.
During the call, Mr. Trump and his team won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten,
a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods.
Ahead of the deal, the Trump administration approved preliminary applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing for the American company, now called Kaz Resources,
which plans to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan.
It was not only Mr. Trump and Mr. Lutnick who saw an opportunity.
Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating,
continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history
The Kazakh deal was ultimately signed on Nov. 6,
six days after the investment involving the Trump sons and their partners,
which was not publicly disclosed at the time.
The arrangement is hardly an outlier.
One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals,
including the Kazakhstan project,
according to federal filings examined by The New York Times.
All 14 of these companies have either benefited directly from offers of financial assistance from the Trump administration,
or have pending permit applications before the Commerce Department,
which Mr. Lutnick oversees,
The Times found.
The total amount of federal funding that the Trump administration has provided or is considering providing to the companies exceeds
$8.9 billion,
according to public statements by the companies and federal government.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/28/world/europe/trump-lutnick-sons-kazakhstan.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

2026-06-29 01:18:43 UTC

It’s often said that the Supreme Court has no army.
Yet, with little fanfare, the size of the Supreme Court’s police force has begun mushrooming.
For years, the force sat at fewer than 200 officers,
but now officials are aiming to more than double the ranks of the agents
and officers who protect the justices and the Supreme Court’s building.
The push for a rapid security buildout stems from the substantial threats to the justices at a moment of growing political violence in the U.S.
and the sense that the system has just not been up to the task of keeping them safe.
That’s a belief that appears to be shared by at least some of the justices themselves.
“The justices are averse to the intrusion into their personal lives that comes with increased security,
but they are resigned to the need for it both personally and for the court as an institution,”
said one former court staffer,
who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the court’s security practices.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/06/28/supreme-court-justices-security-police-00969784

2026-04-28 01:20:45 UTC

Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds
— backups zapped, after Cursor tool powered by Anthropic's Claude goes rogue
The founder of PocketOS has penned a social media post to warn others about the “systemic failures” of flagship AI and digital services providers.
Jer Crane was inspired to write a public response after an AI coding agent deleted his firm’s entire production database.
The AI agent’s misdemeanors were then hugely amplified by a cloud infrastructure provider’s API wiping all backups after the main database was zapped.
This tag team of digital trouble has wiped out months of consumer data essential to the firm’s, and its customers, businesses.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/claude-powered-ai-coding-agent-deletes-entire-company-database-in-9-seconds-backups-zapped-after-cursor-tool-powered-by-anthropics-claude-goes-rogue

2026-04-26 02:53:34 UTC

Trump said one officer was shot before authorities stopped an unidentified gunman at the White House Correspondents Assn. dinner,
“from very close distance, with a very powerful gun, and the vest did the job.”
“I just spoke to the officer, and he’s doing great,” Trump said at a press conference. “He has very high spirits, and we told him we love him and respect him.”
After thanking the officer Trump, pivoted the conversation to the ballroom,
the planned “East Wing,” would be “much more secure, it’s got drone proof and it’s bullet proof.”
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/live/trump-evacuated-after-reports-of-gunfire-at-white-house-correspondents-dinner#p=trump-says-one-officer-shot-pivots-to-his-ballroom-that-will-have-bulletproof-glass

2026-04-22 18:32:28 UTC

A group of unauthorized users has reportedly gained access to #Mythos, the cybersecurity tool recently announced by #Anthropic.
Much has been made of Mythos and its purported power — an AI product designed for enterprise security that,
in the wrong hands, could become a potent hacking tool, according to the company.
Now Bloomberg has reported that a “private online forum,” the members of which have not been publicly identified, has managed to gain access to the tool through a third-party vendor.
Members of the group are part of a Discord channel that seeks out information about unreleased AI models, the outlet reported.
Bloomberg reports that the group, which supposedly gained access to the tool on the same day it was publicly announced,
“made an educated guess about the model’s online location based on knowledge about the format Anthropic has used for other models.”
The group in question is “interested in playing around with new models,
not wreaking havoc with them,” the source told the outlet.
Mythos was released to a select number of vendors, including big names like Apple,
as part of an initiative called
"Project Glasswing".
The limited release of the model was designed to prevent its use by bad actors.
The tool could be weaponized against corporate security instead of bolstering it, Anthropic said.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/21/unauthorized-group-has-gained-access-to-anthropics-exclusive-cyber-tool-mythos-report-claims/

2026-04-19 22:20:45 UTC

Experts say 2026 will serve as an unprecedented stress test of the integrity of American elections.
“Our election system withstood” Trump’s “attacks following the 2020 election,”
said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who has led the pushback to the administration’s actions on elections,
“but this will be an even tougher test,
with more election deniers having access to federal power than ever before.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-midterm-elections-takeover

2026-04-18 22:48:28 UTC

In a dramatic middle-of-the-night stand off, a bipartisan set of lawmakers pushing for true reform and privacy protections for Americans bought us some more time to fight!
They are holding out for, at a minimum,
the requirement of an actual probable cause warrant for FBI access to information collected under the mass spying program known as 702.
 A reauthorization with virtually no changes was defeated because a core group of lawmakers held strong;
they know that people are hungry for real reform that protects the privacy of our communications. We now have a 10-day extension to continue to push Congress to pass a real reform bill.
 The Lawmakers rallied late Thursday night to reject a proposed amendment that made gestures at privacy protections, but it would not have improved on the status quo and would have reauthorized Section 702 for five more years to boot.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/keep-pushing-we-get-10-more-days-reform-section-702

2026-04-17 18:00:20 UTC

Q: "Now that you've met with [Trump], you've spoken with him multiple times, do you still think he's a fascist?"
Zohran Mamdani: "Yes"
Q: "And do you tell him that?"
Zohran Mamdani: "Yes"
https://s3.c.im/media_attachments/files/116/421/346/570/544/429/original/84b230f7f3188896.mp4

2026-04-17 01:03:52 UTC

Following California implementing a law raising its minimum wage to $20 for more than 500,000 fast-food workers in the state in 2024,
Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of research firm Beacon Economics, offered a warning about the state raising its minimum wage.
“California’s well-intended push to reduce income inequality via wage floors is beginning to have a significant negative impact on some of our most vulnerable workers
—our youth, particularly those from lower-income households,”
he wrote earlier this year.
His concerns echoed those of fast-food franchise owners, one of whom told Fortunein 2024 that higher wages would be unsustainable for smaller chains with slim margins.
But nearly two years after the law’s passage, economists are seeing very different results than what was initially feared.
A working paper from University of California at Berkeley released this month found the policy increased average weekly wages for eligible workers by 11% and did not reduce employment.
Prices increased modestly, about 1.5%, or the equivalent of about six cents for a $4 item.
“The results are nowhere as dire as predicted,”
Michael Reich, the study author and chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at UC Berkeley, told Fortune
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/economists-warned-california-not-raise-110500084.html?guccounter=1

2026-04-16 09:55:10 UTC

I am a proud Jewish American.
My father fled Poland in 1921 to escape poverty and antisemitism.
Those in his family who stayed were murdered by the Nazis.
Since childhood, I have known very well where antisemitism, racism, fanaticism and demagoguery lead.
So let me be clear.
Speaking out against the horrific and inhumane actions of Israel, and its extremist leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, is notantisemitic.
Speaking out about the dangerous and destructive role that Israel plays in shaping US foreign and military policy is notantisemitic.
It is, in fact, what every member of Congress and every American should be doing
-- Bernie Sanders
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/15/no-more-us-military-aid-to-israel?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-04-16 04:55:53 UTC

Mastodon announced it will add five much-needed features and improvements
thanks to funding from the German government’s Sovereign Tech Agency.
The five deliverables include:
🔸Blocklist synchronisation
To improve moderation and safety, Mastodon servers will be able to subscribe to shared blocklists to block offending servers or suggest servers to block automatically.
🔸Remote media storage
Mastodon will add support for the Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider (FASP) specification
— a proposed standard for connecting fediverse servers to external service providers
— to enable cost-saving media processing between servers.
🔸Automated content detection
Using FASP, Mastodon will allow server owners to use external or self-hosted tools to scan for and process spam and illegal content automatically.
🔸End-to-end encryption for private messages
Mastodon will work with the Social Web Foundation
— a nonprofit dedicated to growing the fediverse through ActivityPub
— and its E2EE messaging project to implement support for ActivityPub E2EE extensions for private messages.
🔸Documentation improvements
Mastodon will create a new documentation site, provide more detailed installation and upgrade instructions, and make it easier for server owners to have the correct software dependencies.
https://coywolf.com/news/social-media/mastodon-to-get-end-to-end-encryption-and-other-features-thanks-to-sovereign-tech-agency/

2026-04-16 03:28:37 UTC

The French government is pressing the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to
release the 86-year-old French widow of a military veteran from immigration custody after she was detained earlier this month.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained
Marie-Therese Ross in Alabama on 1 April after she overstayed her 90-day visa, according to DHS.
Ross is now being held at a federal immigration detention facility in Louisiana.
She is among the thousands of people targeted by the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda that has resulted in the spouses of US soldiers and military veterans detained,
who previously received greater leniency under policies since scrapped by Donald Trump in his second term in office.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/15/french-widow-detained-ice-marie-therese-ross?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-04-13 20:05:47 UTC

If no Iranian oil gets through the strait, prices could keep rising over time
— some companies say they are planning for $175 a barrel.
The Iranians understand the potential political effects of continued inflation in the United States less than seven months before midterm elections.
“Soon you’ll be nostalgic for $4 to $5 gas,” Iran’s top negotiator and the speaker of its Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, warned American consumers after the failure of the talks he led with J.D.Vance.
Trump could be overestimating how effective the economic pain of a blockade would be in changing Iran’s position,
said Ahmet Kasim Han,
a professor of international relations at TED University in Ankara, Turkey.
“Iran is already hurting, and they have shown that they are willing to take more than a couple of hits,” he said.
“The Iranian regime is not one that cares for the well-being of its citizens, and there is no civil society that can raise its voice against the regime in the face of economic calamity.”
Mr. Han added that Mr. Trump’s message was undermined by his announcement that other countries would help impose the blockade without saying which ones.
“This habit of saying that people are on board with him while not naming them diminishes his credibility,
and that does not work well for U.S. standing internationally,” he said
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/us/politics/iran-war-strait-of-hormuz-blockade-economy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

2026-04-13 03:01:19 UTC

The former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan has added his name to growing calls for the president to be ousted on grounds that he is unfit for the job,
arguing that the US constitution’s 25th amendment addressing involuntary removal from office was
“written with Donald Trump in mind”.
Brennan, who served as head of the spy agency during Barack Obama’s presidency, told MS Now on Saturday that
Trump’s recent volatile remarks about destroying Iranian civilization
and the danger he posed to so many lives
merited his removal from the Oval Office.
“This person is clearly unhinged,”
he said.
“I think the 25th amendment was written with Donald Trump in mind.”
Brennan added that Trump was too much of a liability to be allowed to continue to be commander-in-chief, with immense firepower at his disposal, including the US nuclear arsenal.
#JohnBrennan #A25
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/12/ex-cia-director-oust-trump-25th-amendment?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-04-12 17:11:03 UTC

EpsteinWiki is a collaborative research archive dedicated to documenting the evidence surrounding the Jeffrey Epsteintrafficking network.
Critical records remain scattered across court filings, depositions,
FOIA releases, investigative reporting, and government archives.
Our goal is to bring this material together in one organized, searchable knowledge base.
Every page is built on verifiable sources such as court records,
law-enforcement documents, and established investigative journalism.
By organizing and cross-referencing this evidence, EpsteinWiki helps researchers, journalists, and the public better understand the people, institutions, and systems connected to one of the most significant unresolved criminal networks in modern history.
https://epsteinwiki.com/

2026-04-12 03:48:26 UTC

Brian Morales, a U.S. citizen,
has been deported to Mexico despite telling arresting officers that he had proof of citizenship at home, according to a new report.
According to Univision’s Lidia Terrazas, 25-year-old Denver-born Brian Morales was threatened with either deportation or prison time following a traffic stop in Texas by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents.
This is the latest in a string of incidents involving U.S. citizens and Department of Homeland Security agents during the first 18 months of Trump’s second term in office.
In addition several American children have been deported alongside their parents, including a child undergoing cancer treatment in the U.S.
Meanwhile, three U.S. citizens have been killed by federal immigration officers this year.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/bryan-morales-us-citizen-deport-mexico-b2955205.html

2026-04-11 23:39:29 UTC

The first US-born pope said:
“Even the holy Name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death.”
Addressing world leaders who decide to go to war, Leo said:
“To them we cry out: stop!
It is time for peace!
Sit at the table of dialogue and mediation
– not at the table where rearmament is planned and deadly actions are decided.”
“Enough of the idolatry of self and money!
Enough of the display of power!
Enough of war!
True strength is shown in serving life,” he added.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/11/pope-leo-us-israel-iran-war?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-04-10 13:41:49 UTC

- reply

DONALD TRUMP
— a man convicted of 34 felony counts, currently in political freefall, his name reportedly appearing thousands of times in the Jeffrey Epstein files
— posted graphic surveillance footage of Easmin’s murder,
amplifying a video package assembled and branded by his own Department of Homeland Security.
The footage shows the suspect, 40-year-old Rolbert Joachin, a Haitian national, striking her in the head with a hammer,
knocking her to the ground, and continuing to beat her as she lay there.
DHS and its conservative media partners have packaged this killing as proof that Biden’s immigration policies are responsible for Easmin’s death.
Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said the suspect “barbarically hit this woman in the head multiple times with a hammer,”
adding that “their reckless immigration policies cost this woman her life.”
Never mind that Easmin herself was an immigrant.
Never mind that the Bangladeshi community in Fort Myers
— the community that employed her, that is laying flowers at the gas station where she died
— is also a community of immigrants,
of mothers and fathers and cashiers and store managers who came to this country and are now watching the president weaponize their grief.
THE TIMING tells you everything about why Trump reached for this video now.
His presidency is in historic collapse. The Iran war
— prosecuted with the hapless Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon
— has become a signature debacle.
The mass deportation campaign, the crown jewel of his coalition’s fever dreams,
has failed so thoroughly that the American public has swung back toward immigrants with a warmth not seen in years, and ICE
— once the cudgel of choice
— has become politically toxic.

2026-04-10 13:38:11 UTC

Her name, according to the Bangladeshi press outlets that bothered to cover her murder, was Nilufar Easmin.
She had come to this country from Gorarbag village, in the Kushakhali Union of Lakshmipur District, in southeastern Bangladesh
— a place most Americans couldn’t find on a map even if the fate of the republic depended on it.
She had two daughters. She had been working the register at the D&D Convenience Store, a Bangladeshi-owned shop bolted to a Chevron station on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Fort Myers, Florida, for roughly three months.
On the morning of April 2, she heard her car being vandalized in the parking lot. She walked outside to find out why.
She was beaten to death with a hammer.
That is the whole of what we know for certain about the last minutes of Nilufar Easmin’s life.
Everything else
— her exact age, conflicting in various accounts as 42, 48, or 51; the full arc of how she came to Florida; what she wanted for those two daughters
— remains unresolved in the public record,
a void that will take time and care and reporting to fill.
What we know with equal certainty is what happened next:
the President of the United States turned her death into content.
https://migrantinsider.com/p/her-name-was-nilufar-yasmin

2026-04-09 06:46:43 UTC

One hundred and ninety-three million acres of your national forests. An area larger than Texas. The largest public land agency in the country. Just handed, on a silver platter, to the people who’ve spent their entire careers trying to destroy it.
And they did it with a press release on a Tuesday
https://www.hatchmag.com/articles/trump-administration-orders-dismantling-us-forest-service/7716263

2026-04-09 01:30:42 UTC

In a rare public criticism of a fellow member of the Supreme Court,
Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized Justice Brett Kavanaugh
for his justification of racial profiling
in immigration-based stops of U.S. citizens.
“I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,”
Sotomayor said at a University of Kansas School of Law event on Tuesday.
She was referring to the case of
"Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo",
in which Kavanaugh wrote an opinion framed as a concurrence to the unsigned majority ruling.
“This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”
“Those hours that they took you away, nobody’s paying that person,”
she added.
“And that makes a difference between a meal for him and his kids that night and maybe just cold supper.”
In his concurrence, Kavanaugh said that race or ethnicity can be a “relevant factor” when combined with other factors
like “day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction”
or speaking Spanish instead of English.
He added that the burden of racial profiling on citizens or legal non-citizens would be minimal.
“If the person is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter,” Kavanaugh wrote.
“Only if the person is illegally in the United States may the stop lead to further immigration proceedings.”
As Sotomayor’s critique shows, these encounters are anything but brief or friendly.
Citizens profiled by immigration agents have been manhandled, hit, zip-tied, kidnapped off the street and held for days in detention,
-- sometimes without access to a lawyer.
Agents also routinely refused to accept documents proving their citizenship.
Citizens who have been detained include at least 20 children.
These encounters have come to be known as
“Kavanaugh Stops,”
after the justice’s concurrence authorizing them.
In her dissent in
"Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo" Sotomayor criticized Kavanaugh’s concurrence as
“all but declared that all Latinos, U. S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time,
taken away from work,
and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.”
Kavanaugh’s insistence that these stops would be just a “brief encounter” for citizens “blinks reality,” Sotomayor wrote.
“Two plaintiffs in this very case tried to explain that they are U. S. citizens;
one was then pushed against a fence with his arms twisted behind his back,
and the other was taken.”
Despite Kavanaugh’s concurrence seemingly authorizing these Kavanaugh Stops,
the Supreme Court has not officially ruled on the use of racial profiling in roving mass deportation operations.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sonia-sotomayor-brett-kavanaugh-racial-profiling-immigration_n_69d6ae34e4b0ccb589eaa377

2026-04-06 11:03:46 UTC

Workers’ pay is increasingly shaped by opaque algorithms and artificial intelligence systems,
shifting compensation decisions away from human managers, clear legal standards, and collective bargaining.
This phenomenon
—known as algorithmic wage discrimination1 or surveillance pay
—was first documented in app-controlled ride-hail and food-delivery work.
Now, it is spreading to a range of other industries and services.
Surveillance wages are being offered in sectors as diverse as "healthcare, customer service, logistics and retail."
Customers for surveillance wage tools include "Intuit, Salesforce,
Colgate-Palmolive, Amwell and Healthcare Services Group":
https://equitablegrowth.org/how-artificial-intelligence-uncouples-hard-work-from-fair-wages-through-surveillance-pay-practices-and-how-to-fix-it/

2026-04-06 10:44:51 UTC

The Trump administration has spent the better part of a year quietly negotiating agreements with poorer nations
as it seeks to scale back and reimagine U.S. foreign assistance for efforts like HIV and tuberculosis prevention through a new “America First” global health strategy.
 To date, 28 deals have been negotiated with foreign governments, mostly throughout Africa.
But in a break with precedent, the administration has refused to disclose their full terms publicly.
 The veil of secrecy has frustrated partner countries and angered transparency advocates,
who worry that billions of dollars in U.S. funding
— money that’s intended to help combat disease
— is being leveraged by the Trump administration as it seeks controversial concessions on unrelated policies in return.  Public Citizen, a government watchdog group, has brought a lawsuit demanding access to some of the administration’s global health agreements,
-- arguing that the State Department’s failure to produce the records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request is unlawful
In Zimbabwe, for instance,
President Emmerson Mnangagwa halted his country’s negotiations with the Trump administration late last year
after the government determined that the “lop-sided” talks risked undermining Zimbabwe’s sovereignty,
according to correspondence reviewed by The Washington Post.
 The U.S. Embassy in Harare confirmed in February that Zimbabwe had withdrawn from negotiations
and that the United States would begin
“winding down our health assistance in Zimbabwe.”
 In neighboring Zambia,
where a deal was expected to be signed in December,
talks have become a political pressure point for the government amid reports that the Trump administration is seeking to leverage the aid money
as it seeks concessions on a separate agreement related to the mining of critical minerals.
The Trump administration is pushing for greater access to critical minerals in Africa,
such as copper in Zambia,
to challenge Chinese dominance of a resource that is vital for building modern technology like electric vehicles and data centers
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/04/06/trump-global-health-deals/

2026-04-05 12:09:34 UTC

"The amount of untaxed wealth hidden offshore by the richest 0.1 percent exceeds the entire wealth of the poorest half of humanity (4.1 billion people), according to a new Oxfam analysis published on April 2, 2026, ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Panama Papers."
The consequences are as predictable as they are devastating:
we see our public hospitals and schools starved of funds,
our social fabric shredded by rising inequality,
and ordinary people forced to shoulder the costs of a system rigged to enrich a tiny few.
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/governance/untaxed-wealth-hidden-offshore-by-richest-01-surpasses-entire-wealth-of-the-poorest-half-of-humanity-oxfam

2026-04-05 05:43:28 UTC

More than 40 million borrowers are saddled with federal student debt,
and a record number
— 7.7 million
— have defaulted on their loans,
For some borrowers, moving abroad and out of reach of debt collectors can be tempting.
In interviews, people who made this decision cited relieving the psychological burden of student debt as a motivator,
as well as having a higher quality of life,
even on a lower salary,
outside the United States.
Many who fled abroad said they had no plans of ever returning.
Figures on the number of borrowers who abandon their loans in this manner are unknown,
but many debtors have shared their experiences on forums like Reddit.
Credit reporting agencies like Experian, aware of the issue,
have advised borrowers who have moved abroad to
“resist the temptation to stop making payments.”
Borrowers in delinquency and default will likely see their credit scores plummet,
raising their borrowing costs and making it difficult for them to access credit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/04/business/student-loans-abroad-default.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

2026-04-01 16:29:31 UTC

At Luigi Mangione's hearing this AM,
the feds indicated they were eager to show their evidence to people who think he's a hero
“Your honor need only look out the window to see the people who follow this defendant and believe that what he did was right,” AUSA Dominic Gentile said
https://bsky.app/profile/mollycranenewman.bsky.social/post/3mih3sobxyc24

2026-04-01 13:32:54 UTC

Ten years ago today, Donald Trump said he would pay off the national debt in the span of just eight years.
That did not happen.
Instead, the gross national debt has doubled since that day
—from about $19 trillion to over $39 trillion.
Much of that additional borrowing has taken place during Trump's five-plus years in the White House.
The gap between Trump's outlandish promise and the brutal fiscal reality of the past decade is not just a political gotcha.
It's also an apt illustration of how far and how fast the debt has spiraled.
And it's a painful reminder of a missed opportunity that Americans will be facing for a long, long time.
The bill for these 10 years of fiscal profligacy will be coming due long after Trump has finally departed from the political scene.
https://reason.com/2026/03/31/10-years-ago-today-trump-promised-to-eliminate-the-national-debt-instead-it-has-doubled/

2026-03-31 23:24:29 UTC

If you studied CS or math at any point,
you’ve probably run into this one.
The Four Color Theorem says: any map (or equivalently, any planar graph)
can be colored with at most four colors such that no two adjacent regions share the same color.
It’s simple to state, maddening to prove,
and has a wild history.
Francis Guthrie noticed the pattern in 1852 while coloring a map of English counties.
Alfred Kempe published a flawed “proof” in 1879.
Percy Heawood found the bug 11 years later. The conjecture then sat open for nearly a century.
In 1976, Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken finally proved it by exhaustive computer verification of 1,476 reducible configurations.
-- It was the first major theorem proved by computer,
and mathematicians spent decades arguing over whether it counted as a real proof.
In 1996, Robertson, Sanders, Seymour, and Thomas simplified the proof (down to 633 configurations)
and produced a quadratic-time coloring algorithm:
-- given a planar graph with n vertices, it finds a valid 4-coloring in O(n²) time.
That algorithm has been the state of the art ever since.
Until last week.
A new paper by Kawarabayashi, Thorup, Mohar, and Thomassen gives an O(n log n) algorithm for 4-coloring planar graphs,
breaking a 30-year quadratic barrier.
https://www.danilchenko.dev/posts/2026-03-30-four-color-theorem-near-linear-time-algorithm/

2026-03-30 04:43:03 UTC

What happens on Tuesday is a matter of life and death.
The Endangered Species Committee
—composed of the heads of the Interior, Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Army, and the Council of Economic Advisors
—can decide that the very presence of an endangered species is an unacceptable obstacle to the oil and gas industry’s balance sheet.
When the "God Squad" grants an exemption, the species in question is put at risk of extinction.
The principal species in question is the Rice’s whale,
a majestic creature that has navigated the Gulf since long before humans named it,
but was only identified as a distinct species in 2021.
As the only baleen whale to live exclusively in American waters, it has earned the nickname “America’s whale”
—and there are only around 50 of them left in our world.
There is a certain irony to the fact that a species so closely identified with America now faces existential risk from policies advanced in the name of putting America first.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208313/trump-god-squad-endangered-rices-whale-extinction-gulf-mexico

2026-03-29 20:01:40 UTC

Anti-war activists in the '60s and early '70s did not just organize headline-grabbing mass marches.
They patiently worked together to build a vast anti-war infrastructure
– legal groups, GI coffeehouses, alternative newspapers and national anti-war coalitions
– that could sustain a wide range of future actions.
In working towards that goal,
anti-war activists benefited from the rich social fabric of associational life in the US
– a fabric that has significantly frayed.
Anti-war initiatives were buoyed up by unions, social clubs, book stores, civic groups, movement organizations, professional societies, immigrant community centers and religious institutions.
They also drew upon a network of informal organization,
whether born of the working-class neighborhood, the intensity of student life, or the collaborative relationships of the workplace.
This ecosystem helped activists fundraise, recruit members, secure meeting spaces, and reach wider communities.
They ensured that when the anti-war call was sounded, there was an audience available to respond.
Since the 70s, however, social life has been dramatically reconfigured:
associational life has steadily declined,
working-class institutions have been hollowed out,
and Americans have become more atomized than ever before.
In the absence of a sturdy associational matrix, Americans have now turned to the internet as a sort of surrogate social community,
replacing the hard work of in-person organizing with consuming news, sharing posts or debating anonymous opponents on platforms owned by the very warmongers they oppose.
Moreover, we live in a different international context.
The anti-war movements of the 60s emerged at a time when emancipatory struggles were erupting everywhere
– not just in Vietnam, but also in Cuba, Algeria, China, Palestine, South Africa, Guinea-Bissau.
These struggles were winning.
In Cuba, a tiny band of guerrillas worked in tandem with militant workers to overthrow Fulgencio Batista,
then resist US invasion.
In Algeria, anticolonial fighters expelled the French settlers.
In Vietnam, revolutionaries held their own against the most powerful military in history.
These miraculous victories, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre explained,
expanded “the field of the possible”.
They convinced millions that it was possible to unite across borders to create a new world.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/mar/29/how-to-end-the-iran-war?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-03-29 15:52:55 UTC

"We’re not just talking about potential spikes in food prices …
but also potentially key shortages in the commodities that are necessary to produce food, like fertilizers,”
says Adam Hanieh, director of the SOAS Middle East Institute at the University of London.
“Many of the countries that are going to be most potentially impacted by this are already in conditions of famine or near famine.”
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3/26/hanieh_iran_hormuz_oil_war

2026-03-29 11:17:50 UTC

Many ICE detention facilities are run by large private companies,
such as CoreCivic and the GEO Group,
that also operate many prisons.
The companies say that they provide round-the-clock medical care and proper diets
and that they are subject to government oversight.
But a federal lawsuit and more than two dozen interviews with lawyers, detainees and their family members and elected officials
depict acute deficiencies that they believe contributed to the deaths.
They describe some of the country’s largest immigrant detention facilities as places where disease and illness are rampant
and detainees are often denied sufficient food, clean drinking water, medications and medical care.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/us/ice-detention-deaths-immigrants.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

2026-03-28 07:09:07 UTC

We call on European governments to:
Stop signing new contracts with Palantir.
Review and phase out existing contracts with the company.
Invest in transparent, publicly accountable European alternatives.
https://action.wemove.eu/sign/2026-03-palantir-petition-EN?akid=s7155930..xIUPA9

2026-03-27 15:56:51 UTC

The U.S. military has fired more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles in four weeks of war with Iran,
burning through the precision weapons at a rate that has alarmed some Pentagon officials
and prompted internal discussions about how to make more available,
said people familiar with the matter.
 The missiles, which can be launched from Navy surface warships and submarines, have been a staple of U.S. military attacks since they were first used in combat in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War.
But only a few hundred are manufactured each year,
meaning the global supply is limited.
The Pentagon does not publicly disclose how many missiles are in its inventory at any one time.
 Tomahawks are prized in part because they can travel more than 1,000 miles,
reducing the need to send American pilots into well-defended airspace.
The heavy reliance on them in the Iran conflict will require urgent discussions about whether to relocate some from other parts of the world,
including the Indo-Pacific,
and a concerted long-term effort to build more, said several U.S. officials,
speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military planning.  The dilemma has laid bare broader concerns in both the Pentagon and Congress about the Trump administration’s war in Iran,
its shifting explanations for why the conflict is necessary,
and the risks a shortage could pose to the United States
as it balances the potential for future conflict in other parts of the world.
It comes as the White House deliberates over a possible major escalation in Iran,
to include the use of ground troops,
while pursuing negotiations to end hostilities.
The most recent versions of the missile can cost as much as $3.6 million a piece
and require up to two years to build,
according to Navy documents.
In recent years, they have been purchased in small batches,
with just 57 included in last year’s defense budget.
 Many of the 850-plus expended Tomahawks were fired in the opening days of Operation Epic Fury,
the Trump administration’s name for the war in Iran,
people familiar with the matter said.
They include at least one that struck in the vicinity of an elementary school in the Iranian city of Minab early in the operation.
U.S. officials have since opened an investigation into the incident, which Iranian officials have said killed scores of children.
The U.S. military also has fired more than 1,000 air-defense interceptor missiles
in response to Iranian counterattacks across the region,
-- including from the Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems,
which are considered the world’s most advanced, two other officials familiar with the issue said.
The inventory of those weapons also is limited and not publicly disclose
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/27/iran-war-tomahawk-missiles/

2026-03-25 14:53:52 UTC

On a hazy afternoon in the Persian Gulf nearly 40 years ago,
the captain of a U.S. Navy frigate summoned Lt. Gordan Van Hook to the bridge and handed him a pair of binoculars.
Through them, Lieutenant Van Hook, the ship’s chief engineer, saw the danger that lay ahead
— three Iranian mines.
The frigate, part of an American force sent to escort oil tankers, came to a stop well ahead of the mines.
But some 10 minutes later, an undetected mine exploded under the ship.
“You could feel it lift,” he said in a recent interview. “It was a huge explosion.”
The mine tore a 21-foot-wide hole in the vessel, which nearly sank it, and seriously injured 10 members of its crew.
The hit on the frigate, the Samuel B. Roberts, on April 14, 1988,
is a reminder of the dangers facing any attempt to provide a naval escort in the gulf today
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/business/iran-mines-gulf-hormuz-strike-naval-escort-history-1988.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

2026-03-19 03:13:35 UTC

Police officers raided the
rapper Afroman's Ohio home,
... then sued him after he ridiculed them on social media
— but a jury just sided with the rapper.
In an unusual lawsuit members of an Ohio county sheriff’s department sued over songs and social media posts by Afroman
(Joseph Foreman)
that criticized the guns-drawn 2022 raid on his property, which yielded no charges.
The case claimed the videos were false and caused the officers "severe emotional distress".
But Afroman,
known for his 2000 hit “Because I Got High,”
testified at trial that he had a First Amendment right to mock the officers,
-- particularly after they smashed down his door for ultimately no reason:
“All of this is their fault, and they have the audacity to sue me"
https://www.billboard.com/pro/afroman-trial-verdict-rapper-wins-lawsuit-cops-music-videos/

2026-03-18 17:54:34 UTC

Donald Trump is dismantling U.S. democracy at an “unprecedented” rate,
downgrading the U.S.’s democratic rating on a global scale
and plunging the country toward autocracy at a faster rate than autocratic leaders of other countries in the 21st century,
the latest report by an international democracy watchdog finds.
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Sweden’s Gothenburg University finds in its annual report that
Trump’s second term has been characterized by a swift concentration of power in the executive branch
that ignores the rule of law,
suppresses dissent,
and targets civil rights.
Many countries are falling further into autocracy, the report finds.
But the U.S. stands out as “an exceptional new autocratizer due to both far-reaching changes in 2025 and their implications for the rest of the world,” the group writes.
“The extensive damage already done to American democracy under the second Trump presidency
— in just one year
— stands out on the world map.”
https://truthout.org/articles/trump-is-destroying-us-democracy-at-unprecedented-rate-global-watchdog-finds/

2026-03-17 02:21:32 UTC

Jared Kushner,
arched with the swagger of the world’s most confident mediocre white man,
walked into the most sensitive nuclear negotiation of the decade on behalf of the United States
— representing governments that had paid him $157 million
— carrying a pager given to him by the intelligence service of the country that wanted war most,
without a single technical expert,
and delivered a conflict so catastrophic and convenient that it is impossible to explain as an accident
https://open.substack.com/pub/thecause/p/jared-kushners-corruption-is-a-national?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

2026-03-17 00:32:59 UTC

RE: https://c.im/@cdarwin/113946648601251220
Here’s what you need to know about the documentary proof of citizenship requirements of the SAVE America Act:
🔸Citizenship is already a requirement to vote, and instances of noncitizen voting are rare.
🔸Many eligible citizens don’t have access to documentary proof of citizenship.
🔸There are better ways to verify citizenship that put the responsibility on government, not voters.
🔸The SAVE America Act could have unintended consequences for election officials and election administration.
🔸The SAVE America Act needs more time and resources to be implemented well
The Senate votes on Tuesday (it has already passed the House)
Call your Senators and urge them to vote NO
#note1tks…cg7j

2026-03-16 01:36:08 UTC

After Russia invaded Ukraine, his school changed almost overnight– teachers ordered to deliver government scripts and students marched through military drills. Talankin was required to film it all as the school videographer, and what he witnessed made him want to walk away from his job entirely. Instead, he connected with documentary director David Borenstein, and together they turned his footage into a feature film.
Borenstein said Talankin “wanted to show how quickly totalitarianism can take over a school, a workplace, a government, and how our complicity becomes fuel in that fire.”
It’s a message Talankin originally hoped to share with fellow Russians. But he now believes the film speaks to a far wider audience than he could ever have anticipated when he began filming.
He points to a joke circulating in Eastern Europe: the Belarusians say they and the Russians are watching the same TV series- only Russia is a few episodes behind.
“I am sorry to tell you,” he says, “that America has begun watching this series, too.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/03/this-oscar-nominated-doc-says-nows-the-time-to-resist/

2026-03-14 21:34:31 UTC

We’ve been saying this for years now, and we’re going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in:
mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached.
Every single time.
And every single time it happens,
the politicians who mandated these systems and the companies that built them act shocked—shocked!
—that collecting enormous databases of government IDs, facial scans, and biometric data from millions of people turns out to be a security nightmare
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/25/hackers-expose-the-massive-surveillance-stack-hiding-inside-your-age-verification-check/

2026-03-14 17:05:33 UTC

The corruption of the Trump Administration remains so massive
while also being so obvious
that people just don’t know what to do.
If Kushner was merely shaking someone down for $5,000 using his government role, there’d be an outcry.
But do it for $5,000,000,000 and mostly there’s 🤷‍♂️
#TrumpCorruptionWatch
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/jared-kushner-affinity-mideast-funds.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

2026-03-14 02:17:55 UTC

The Trump administration ordered the restart of a Santa Barbara oil pipeline shut since the 2015 Refugio spill -- invoking emergency powers under the Defense Production Act.
California officials say the move defies court orders and state oversight.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state will sue.
The order escalates a fight over whether federal authority can override California regulators blocking Sable Offshore’s plan to restart the pipeline.
https://calmatters.org/environment/2026/03/trump-emergency-sable-santa-barbara/

2026-03-12 17:27:19 UTC

The hardest thing for the media to wrap its hands around over the last year is that
⭐️Donald Trump has no plan
— for anything, ever.
Time and again, national pundits and the White House press corps invent a logical Donald Trump who sets, announces, and later “changes” real “policies” or “plans,”
failing to convey what is clear to anyone who is actually following events closely:
⚠️In each public appearance and social media post, the Mad King Donald Trump spouts a string of words,
devoid of meaning or purpose,
that may or may not represent anything at all.
🔥Every single thing he says may, at any given time, be taken as an official hard-line policy of the US government,
the opening gambit to a long flexible negotiation,
-- or a random pronouncement that will be never be mentioned again.
It’s impossible to know in real-time which is which — especially so if you’re actually in the US government and in charge of translating his words into actions and plans
https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/trump-surprised-to-find-he-s-at-war-in-iran

2026-03-11 17:23:07 UTC

Mining the strait would mean a protracted closure of at least a month, because finding and removing mines is a difficult and time-consuming process.
This would create a global economic disturbance well beyond what we are already seeing.
Laying mines is comparatively easy and can be done from both modern fishing boats and dhows.
In the area of the strait, both of these number in the thousands.
Iran used this strategy for conducting the clandestine mining of the Persian Gulf in the 1980s as part of the “tanker wars,”
the name for the series of military attacks by Iran and Iraq against merchant vessels in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz from 1981 to 1988, and later U.S. intervention to protect maritime traffic.
Stopping these boats would require constant surveillance of a large area, a difficult task even with the vast array of forces in the area.
Indeed, during the Persian Gulf War, Iraq managed to lay 1,300 sea mines right “under the noses” of the coalition.
Iran also has the capability to flood the zone with dozens or hundreds of civilian boats at the same time.
It can be difficult or impossible for the U.S. to tell which ones have mines and which don’t.
Exacerbating the problem is that the munitions used to sink these boats would likely be more expensive than the boats themselves.
The mines themselves are potentially very cheap and easy to produce, and can be deployed in large numbers.
Simple contact mines with a design dating back to World War I can cost as little as $1,500 each.
More advanced magnetic influence mines are still remarkably cheap, as low as $25,000 apiece.
The relatively shallow waters of the Persian Gulf are an ideal place for using mines against shipping,
and this creates many of the same cost-imposing problems as the Iranian Shahed-136 drones that have been employed in vast numbers against U.S. and Gulf State air defenses.
Mines, like Shaheds, are cheap, plentiful, relatively easy to produce, and easy to deploy.
They can disable or destroy vessels worth hundreds of millions of dollars, or even a billion dollars (such as an Arleigh-Burke-class guided missile destroyer).
Countering them requires expensive, rare, specialized equipment, highly trained personnel, and a lot of time to carry out the mission.
https://newrepublic.com/article/207631/iran-mining-strait-hormuz-implications?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_source=Bluesky

2026-03-11 17:10:36 UTC

In a sensational turn of events in the fight against Chat Control,
a majority in the European Parliament voted today to end the untargeted mass scanning of private communications.
In doing so, the Parliament firmly rejected the error-prone and unconstitutional surveillance practices of recent years.
Pressure is now mounting on EU governments to respect the MEPs’ vote and bury untargeted mass surveillance in Europe once and for all.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/historic-chat-control-vote-in-the-eu-parliament-meps-vote-to-end-untargeted-mass-scanning-of-private-chats/

2026-03-10 21:01:32 UTC

Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.
The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.
Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.”
“Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees in an email, also seen by the FT.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/03/after-outages-amazon-to-make-senior-engineers-sign-off-on-ai-assisted-changes/

2026-03-09 05:41:21 UTC

James Fallows:
This week I realized that over the past 45 years I’d been preparing for the news of the past nine days.
I’ll list the reporting steps I’ve taken, because they set up the questions and reactions I have now.
-In 1981 I published a book called "National Defense", which was serialized in the Atlantic.
Its purpose was to interview people who’d spent their lives waging war, or studying warfare,
and ask what realities of combat they think the rest of us misunderstand.
One of its messages was that the ability to think many steps ahead of the adversary
—if we do this, they’ll probably do that, and then we’d have to imagine something else
—distinguished the victors from the defeated.
This applied on the battlefield and in other arenas of competition.
So did the related-but-different ability to re-orient and change plans more quickly than the adversary,
when circumstances inevitably changed.
These points may seem obvious,
but you’ll see why I’m returning to them now.
Another message involved “quantity vs quality.”
The historians, combat veterans, and technologists I spoke with also emphasized that in warfare,
having more weapons, could sometimes matter more than having “better” weapons.
One gruesome example from Vietnam was the cheap but reliable AK47 rifle used by the Vietcong, versus the more “advanced” American M16, prone to deadly jams in the arms of US troops.
Drones did not exist in those days.
But since 2022 Ukraine has shown how a $2,000 “first-person-view” drone can destroy a $5 million Russian tank.
Right now, Iran can buy at least 150 of its Shahed “suicide missiles” for the cost of a single US-made Patriot missile to defend against them.
https://fallows.substack.com/p/the-arrogance-of-ignorance

2026-03-07 05:19:23 UTC

- reply

As for the media takeover:
What I didn’t foresee in 2024 was the aggressiveness of Trump patsy David Ellison,
the CEO of Paramount Skydance,
in trying to take over both CBS and CNN.
But he wouldn’t stop.
Netflix bid $83 billion.
Ellison topped that this week with a bid of $111 billion,
and Netflix dropped out.
And somewhere in there,
Ellison attended Trump’s State of the Union address,
and Trump took to social media to “urge” Netflix to remove Obama and Biden administration official Susan Rice from its board.
I once would have written that this is how things go in tinpot dictatorships,
or in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
But today, it’s how things go in the United States of America.
So picture this.
It’s October.
The mystery Trump accuser,
the one about whom those FBI files have strangely gone missing,
has come forward.
Her allegations against the president of the United States are lurid and,
to most of the country,
credible.
Trump is down to 29 percent in the polls.
The economy is still limping.
The polls all indicate that the GOP is in for a historic thrashing.
Democrats are favored to win the House
and, by now, are odds-on to maybe take the Senate too
—their candidates in Alaska and Texas have now pulled slightly ahead.
And Trump declares a state of emergency and postpones the election.
The Supreme Court issues an emergency stay,
saying he can’t do that.
But the court has no army, and Trump does,
along with a handful of lickspittle governors who just might follow him down whatever dark path he plows.
That, not to mince words,
is a coup d’état.
Will he get away with it?
I don’t know,
but having effective control over how it is presented to viewers of CBS and CNN,
and readers of the Bezos-owned Washington Post,
to say nothing of the already vast pro-Trump propaganda empire of Fox News and the rest,
will certainly make it easier.
That’s how fascism descends.
And it’s becoming less and less hypothetical by the week.
https://newrepublic.com/post/207138/trump-coup-detat-midterm-elections

2026-03-07 05:13:51 UTC

- reply

Trump has no power to “decree” that voters must present ID
or to end mail-in balloting.
But that doesn’t mean he can’t at least try both
With respect to those measures, he has no power whatsoever to impose them.
As anti-Trump legal expert Norm Eisen put it on Morning Joe Friday:
“Just as the Supreme Court struck his supposed emergency powers over tariffs,
he has even less here.”
That is true.
But remember:
Between tariff “Liberation Day”
(April 2, 2025)
and the day the Supremes finally ruled against Trump on tariffs
(February 20, 2026),
more than 10 months passed.
Under the Insurrection Act or some other dusty statute,
Trump can declare a state of emergency.
-- Then he can decide that said state permits,
nay requires,
him to take extraordinary measures.
On October 5, say, that might mean outlawing early voting.
By October 13, it might mean no mail-in voting.
By October 29, a reminder that all voters must present ID to vote.
And by Sunday, November 1, two days before the election
—an announcement that all these “reasonable” measures have alas failed,
and he is now forced,
against his will,
to postpone the election.
Have trouble seeing that happen? I didn’t think so.

2026-03-07 04:53:46 UTC

It Can Now Be Plainly Said:
Trump Is Planning a November Coup d’État
During the campaign, it was kind of hard to picture the specifics of how Trump might pull such a thing off.
Alas, it’s getting less hypothetical by the week.
Back in 2024, Kamala Harris and the Democrats struggled to convince voters that a second Donald Trump term would constitute a serious threat to democracy.
We can debate the effectiveness of her, and their, rhetoric.
But on a certain level, it was a hard argument to make
because it was hypothetical.
Voters aren’t very interested in wrapping their heads around hypotheticals,
or at least vague ones.
And Harris’s hypotheticals were mostly vague,
so if she or any Democrat tried to say,
for example,
that there was a very real threat that once in office,
Trump might try to cancel elections,
most people kind of tuned that out.
Well, we’re now beginning to see it.
Let’s start with elections.
The Washington Post
—and yes, there’s still good reporting going on there
—reported Thursday that pro-Trump “activists”
(a rather generous and perverse use of that word, I think)
who say they’re working with the Trump administration
🔥“are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.”
The plan would mandate voter ID and ban mail-in balloting,
and calls on Trump to issue an executive order announcing both measures.
The premise, it almost goes without saying,
is a total lie.
China did not interfere in the 2020 election.
Trump and his people often said so,
the implication being that China interfered on behalf of its old friend Joe Biden and his son Hunter,
whose alleged business dealings in China left his father hopelessly compromised.
None of it was true.
Hunter Biden did have some business interests in China,
but nothing that reached his father.
The U.S. intelligence services studied foreign influence in the 2020 election,
and in March 2021, the government released an intelligence report concluding that China
“considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”
In fact, the report found
—and isn’t this a surprise?
—the biggest foreign actor in 2020 was Russia,
trying to help Trump:
“The primary effort the IC [intelligence community] uncovered revolved around a narrative
—that Russian actors began spreading as early as 2014
—alleging corrupt ties between President Biden,
his family, and other U.S. officials and Ukraine.”
⚠️ But Trump administration officials
—including Attorney General Bill Barr
—pushed the China lie aggressively.
💥So it’s very easy for Trump today to invoke China again
and lie that the threat of even greater Chinese interference in 2026 demands that he take emergency measures.
https://newrepublic.com/post/207138/trump-coup-detat-midterm-elections?utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_medium=social&utm_source=Threads

2026-03-07 01:12:36 UTC

Elon Musk’s new AI data center has turned a formerly quiet Mississippi town into a noisy nightmare.
The $20 billion facility, run by Musk’s AI firm xAI, is powered by ⚠️27 methane gas turbines that run day and night,
belching fumes and emitting a constant noise like jet engines, NBC News reports.
The turbines were trucked in because Southaven, the unsuspecting rural community that Musk chose to build the data center in, can’t provide the electricity the facility needs.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/musks-ai-power-plant-generates-sound-fury-mississippi-rcna258594

2026-03-05 19:09:56 UTC

- reply

We are entering a new era of American imperialism.
Trump Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper,
“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.
These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
As Jonathan Last wrote in The Bulwark,
in both Venezuela and in Minneapolis,
“What we are seeing is a worldview for which the only value is the domination of enemies.
There is a name for that.
It is fascism.”
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/renee-good-ashli-babbitt-fascism

2026-03-05 19:07:03 UTC

- reply

Trump campaigned on the promise that the United States would stop policing the world,
that the era of regime change and open‑ended intervention was over.
Now we have invaded Venezuela, kidnapped their president, and Trump tells us we “are going to run the country for a long time,”
as if Venezuela were a failed subsidiary being placed into receivership.
Next up was Iran, with a New York Times banner headline proclaiming, “Trump Calls for Overthrow of Government.”
The idea that the United States will “run” or administer another sovereign nation,
even “temporarily,”
ought to trigger every alarm that still works in Washington.

2026-03-05 19:03:48 UTC

It was outside the United States that the dissonance struck most deeply.
I remember sitting on high-speed trains that glided so fast and silently they seemed to erase distance itself,
watching wind farms cross the horizon like silent fleets.
In country after country
— places far smaller and, on paper, far poorer than ours
— I kept asking the same question:
how could they manage to build what we could not?
Why did the richest nation on earth feel like it was living off the leftovers of its mid-twentieth century optimism?
Conversations in Europe added another layer.
People spoke casually of health care as a right, not a privilege;
of sending their children to university without dread or debt;
of a shared obligation to slow the warming planet.
It was not utopia
— just an older, steadier faith in the public good.
The idea that freedom and mutual responsibility might coexist had not yet been driven out of their political imagination.
Back home, the contrast was impossible to ignore.
We stumble on crumbling bridges and argue about the price of insulin
yet never question why nearly two-thirds of what Washington calls “discretionary spending” is locked inside the machinery of the National Security State.
In the 2026 budget,
-- 59.6 percent is marked for the Pentagon
(even more if Trump succeeds in getting an additional $600 billion),
-- another 6.4 percent for Homeland Security.
No other democracy has made such choices
— or lived so comfortably with their consequences.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-america-military-industrial-iran-war-1235524970/

2026-03-03 20:07:08 UTC

Tillis to Noem:
"A 14 month old dog is basically a teenager in dog years.
You decided to kill that dog because you hadn't invested the appropriate training,
then you have the audacity to write a book & say it's a leadership lesson! ...
Those are bad decisions not unlike what happened in Minneapolis"
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mg6do2dx3f2a

2026-03-03 16:29:39 UTC

While pursuing regime change in Iran, Trump is desperately attempting to stop regime change through the midterm elections.
He needs a swift victory in Iran to avoid a quagmire, but he needs a long war to attempt the assertion of unconstitutional emergency authority over the electoral process.
Plunging into war followed Trump’s signature style:
he negotiated in bad faith,
turned to bombing when the sides were making “significant progress”, according to Oman’s foreign minister,
was heedless of international law,
and shut out congressional consultation.
He offered as his imperative Iranian “imminent threats”, which the Pentagon briefed congressional staffers after Operation Epic Fury began was simply without basis in fact.
There was no intelligence suggesting an “imminent threat”. Where’s the WMD?
Trump has created a scenario in which he has cornered himself, so he has declared he has a series of supposed “off-ramps”.
“I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians:
see you again in a few years if you start rebuilding [your nuclear and missile programs].
In any case, it will take them several years to recover from this attack.”
His fantasizing, however, reveals the absence of any strategy.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/03/trump-iran-war-emergency-powers?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-03-03 05:10:26 UTC

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that
⚠️ the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was
💥“anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.
From Saturday morning through Monday night,
👉more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).
The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.
The MRFF is keeping the complainants anonymous to prevent retribution by the Defense Department.
https://jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/us-troops-were-told-iran-war-is-for

2026-03-02 20:45:59 UTC

- reply

Submit a public comment to the FCC
DarkSky International is urging the public to weigh in now,
before these projects move forward without the testing, research,
and environmental review such sweeping changes to the night sky and nighttime environment demand.
https://darksky.org/news/two-satellite-proposals-threaten-the-night-sky-the-window-to-act-is-now/

2026-03-02 20:42:55 UTC

How to Submit Comments on Satellite Applications to the FCC
Any member of the public can provide input to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as it considers satellite applications.
The AAS believes that its individual members (in addition to the Society as a whole) should be able to voice concerns about any proposed satellite system that might be harmful to astronomy and the night sky.
This process is also open to those outside the United States who may be impacted by a proposed system.
In this step-by-step guide, we'll walk you through how to submit comments on applications.
https://aas.org/posts/advocacy/2026/02/how-submit-comments-satellite-applications-fcc

2026-03-02 01:50:20 UTC

The Trumpocalypse metastasizes:
Lebanon’s #Hezbollah has claimed responsibility for projectiles launched from Lebanon to Israel.
The militant group said it launched missiles and drones towards Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, news agencies are reporting.
Israel’s military said it had begun striking Hezbollah across Lebanon.
The Israel Defence Forces said on X that it would “respond forcefully” to Hezbollah’s decision “to join the campaign”.
It also said:
IDF forces prepared for this scenario
as part of the orderly combat procedure within
Operation “Roar of the Lion”
and are ready for a "multi-arena scenario" and to confront any threat to the State of Israel
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2026/mar/01/us-israel-war-on-iran-ayatollah-ali-khamenei-i-dead-latest-reports?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-02-27 18:55:26 UTC

The Department of Homeland Security was caught lying Thursday about ⚠️ abandoning a blind refugee who was later found dead on the street.
The Department of Homeland Security claimed that the Tim Hortons in Buffalo
where federal agents left Nurul Amin Shah Alam,
a 56-year-old Burmese refugee who was blind and spoke no English,
was “determined to be a warm, safe location near his last known address.”
Video footage reviewed by The Washington Post, however, showed that the location had already closed, except for the drive-thru.
In video footage released by IP, Shah Alam could be seen walking past the drive-thru window,
then pacing by the locked front doors,
before he eventually wandered across the parking lot toward a Dollar Tree.
The Border Patrol agents drove away after one minute.
Shah Alam was blind and spoke no English.
He was found dead on Tuesday
https://newrepublic.com/post/207151/dhs-caught-lying-blind-refugee-agents-left-die-buffalo

2026-02-27 11:33:24 UTC

Neanderthal DNA is largely missing from the human X chromosome.
“We found a pattern indicating a sex bias: gene flow occurred predominantly between Neanderthal males and anatomically modern human females,”
said Dr Alexander Platt, a senior research scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and first author of the research.
The ancestors of modern humans and the closest related species, the Neanderthals, diverged, forming two distinct groups, about 600,000 years ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/feb/26/male-neanderthals-human-females-mating-research-dna-genetics?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-02-22 22:15:18 UTC

You might think switching to an electric vehicle is the best step.
In fact, for short trips, an electric bike or moped might be better for you, and for the planet.
That’s because these forms of transport – collectively known as electric micromobility – are cheaper to buy and run.
But it’s more than that – they are actually 💥displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present,
due to their staggering uptake in China and other nations where mopeds are a common form of transport.
https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-280-million-electric-bikes-and-mopeds-are-cutting-demand-for-oil-far-more-than-electric-cars-213870

2026-02-19 21:49:26 UTC

Increasing amounts of metal, such as lithium, as a byproduct of the modern-day space race, are beginning to alter the chemical composition of Earth’s atmosphere.
Robin Wing, and his colleagues at the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Rostock in Germany, measured a 10-fold concentration of lithium atoms in the upper atmosphere around 20 hours after the uncontrolled re-entry of a Falcon 9 rocket.
The findings are detailed in a new studypublished Thursday in Nature.
As spacecraft reenter through the atmosphere, they slowly disintegrate into smaller fragments that burn up and release metals into the upper atmosphere.
Lithium, as well as aluminum and other metals used to construct spacecraft, vaporizes during atmospheric re-entry.
The researchers behind the new study chose to measure lithium because it’s an effective tracer of space debris pollution and is commonly used in spacecraft.
“We discussed several materials, and lithium gave a good compromise of expected signal and challenges in the lidar setup,” Wing said.
“We know that lithium is present in the aerospace-grade lithium-aluminum alloys used in spacecraft construction.”
Although the risks of space debris falling onto the ground are well-studied, there is very little known about the effects of falling spacecraft on Earth’s upper atmosphere.
Using lidar—a laser-based remote sensing instrument used to measure atmospheric conditions—the team of scientists behind the new study detected a sudden increase in the concentration of lithium atoms,
around 10 times the baseline value found in the atmosphere, on February 20, 2025.
This lithium plume stretched from around 58 to 60 miles (94 to 97 kilometers) above sea level.
The researchers observed the plume for 27 minutes until data recording stopped.
They then traced the plume of pollution to the Falcon 9 reentry, linking its area of origin to the uncontrolled path taken by the rocket on its way down.
https://gizmodo.com/study-confirms-reentering-spacex-rockets-are-peppering-the-upper-atmosphere-with-metal-pollution-2000723932

2026-02-16 21:59:28 UTC

- reply

⭐️Blocking ICE’s attempts to convert warehouses into jails
As part of the Trump administration’s plan for mass deportations,
ICE has been attempting to buy a slew of warehouses across the US that it can transform into detention centers.
Those warehouses have become the target of intense pushback.
Communities and city officials have protested – and successfully blocked – some of these purchases.
In Ashland, Virginia, more than 100 protesters braved freezing temperatures to successfully lobby the local board of commissioners against an offer from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to buy a warehouse.
Not long after, the warehouse’s billionaire Canadian owner announced he was rejecting the DHS’s offer.
In January, residents of Oklahoma City packed a city council meeting to express their displeasure that the DHS was interested in buying a local warehouse to turn into a detention center.
The Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, David Holt, met with the owners of the facility and later announced that they had decided not to sell to the DHS.
A few hours away in Durant, Oklahoma, the Choctaw Nation issued an ordinance banning the sale of an empty distribution center near tribal lands to the DHS.
And in Kansas City, Missouri, the port authority moved to cut ties with a local company to discourage the city’s plans to sell a warehouse to the DHS.
Joining the efforts to protest against the purchase, the city council passed a years-long moratorium on the creation of any new detention centers.
⭐️Targeting the contracts that provide ICE’s rental cars and parking
One common strategy for organizers over the past year has been to identify local contracts with ICE
– and to push elected officials and institutions to cut them.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car has been a common target for its partnership with ICE.
After the federal immigration enforcement agency swept into Los Angeles last summer,
a local congregation of nuns heard that the agents were renting cars from the company,
then canceled their own reservations for 18 cars
(the nuns have taken a vow of poverty and do not own their own cars).
City and state officials are starting to pay attention to the company’s relationship with ICE as well.
In December, after ICE agents were reported to be illegally swapping license plates on their rental cars to make tracking them more difficult,
the Illinois secretary of state, Alexi Giannoulias,
revoked an Enterprise license plate registered in the state.
Local officials are also targeting contracts for ICE’s office spaces and parking garages.
In January, Josh Siegel, county executive of Lehigh county, Pennsylvania, canceled the county-owned lease on ICE’s office in Allentown, citing over $115,000 in unpaid rent.
“The department’s failure to pay rent, combined with DHS’s national reputation for recklessness, chaos and public disorder, warrants ending any relationship with the county,”
Siegel said in a statement.
“We will not accept their blood money.”
In New York City, elected officials are calling on a local park trust to immediately cancel a contract allowing ICE agents to park their cars in a Manhattan garage,
after the trust stated it would not renew the contract when it expires this summer.
And Philadelphia, city councilors are pushing to end or restrict collaboration with the DHS in what they are calling their “ICE Out” package.
The proposed legislation would prohibit the city from entering into those contracts with the DHS, as well as prohibit agents from entering into city-owned spaces, similar to several cities’ creation of “ICE-free zones”.
“The ICE Out legislation is bold and comprehensive, and that’s exactly the type of action we need in this moment,”
said Aniqa Raihan, an organizer with the local No ICE Philly coalition.
“It’s going to take all of us being brave and thinking creatively to keep ICE out of our city.”
The fight over ICE contracts has even come right to agents’ doors in Minneapolis, where the city council is withholding liquor license renewals to hotels that house ICE agents.

2026-02-16 21:54:23 UTC

From Philadelphia to Oklahoma City and Oakland, California, many cities are developing new
– and creative
– tactics to prepare for and push back against ICE.
Here’s a look at a few.
⭐️Creating ‘ICE-free’ zones
Several cities, counties and states across the country are creating “ICE-free zones” by restricting immigration agents’ access to government-owned and public spaces.
Local officials say this makes it safer for residents to visit hospitals, courthouses, public parks and other critical spaces without fear of ICE.
While these restrictions are unable to completely bar immigration agents from operating on government property, they make it easier for officials to potentially sue agents who do enter.
This strategy harkens back to the 1980s, when some cities designated themselves “sanctuary cities”
to affirm that they would protect newly arrived migrants and refugees
and not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
These sanctuary cities later played a key role during the first Trump administration in the movement against family separation and pushing back against ICE raids.
In October last year, amid the Department of Homeland Security’s “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago,
Brandon Johnson, the city’s mayor, created an “ICE-free zone” through an executive order.
This year, similar actions have been taken in Oakland,
San Jose and Richmond, California;
Los Angeles county;
Washtenaw county, Michigan;
Providence, Rhode Island;
New York City; and New Jersey.
⭐️Making it easier to sue ICE agents over misconduct
After an ICE agent shot and killed the Minneapolis resident Renee Good last month,
JD Vance claimed that ICE agents have “absolute immunity”.
While some legal experts have said this is not true, accountability has remained difficult to achieve.
(Good’s killer has not been arrested, nor have the federal agents who shot and killed Alex Pretti, another Minneapolis resident, last month.)
To make it easier, officials in cities including Chicago and Philadelphia are proposing new ways to facilitate lawsuits against ICE agents.
In January, Chicago’s mayor commanded city police to document federal immigration agents “to set the groundwork to prosecute ICE and border patrol agents for criminal misconduct”.
This kind of evidence could be used in cases when residents are injured or charged with a crime by immigration agents.
The case of Marimar Martinez,
a teacher who was shot five times by ICE agents in Chicago, shows how this evidence could be useful.
While agents claimed she drove into them and the Department of Justice pursued charges against her,
body-camera footage contradicted the administration’s story.
The charges were ultimately dropped, and Martinez successfully sued in federal court to have other evidence released.
Meanwhile in Philadelphia, the district attorney, Larry Krasner, and a group of prosecutors from across the US have formed a coalition called the
"Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach" ( #Fafo ) to “share strategies and best practices” for prosecuting federal agents when they break state laws.
Members of the Fafo coalition include district attorneys from cities such as Minneapolis;
Austin and Dallas, Texas;
Arlington, Virginia;
and Pima county, Arizona.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/16/cities-anti-ice-tactics?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-02-15 17:03:59 UTC

From claims that Jews kill children to make matzo, to accusations that immigrants in Ohio are devouring neighbors’ pets,
the myth of the blood libel is a nightmare that never ends
https://www.openmindmag.org/articles/the-worst-story-ever-told

2026-02-15 04:59:53 UTC

Meta is putting a "Name Tag" feature in Ray-Bans
- facial recognition through the glasses' camera.
You look at someone, AI tells you who they are.
In an internal document, the company wrote that the timing is good
because civil society groups are busy with politics
and won't cause problems.
https://bsky.app/profile/lukaszolejnik.bsky.social/post/3metjqikqps2n

2026-02-15 04:43:14 UTC

In a secret deportation arrangement,
the Trump administration flew nine people, nearly all of whom had been granted U.S. court protections from being sent back to their home countries,
to the African nation of Cameroon in January.
None of them are from Cameroon, according to government documents obtained by The New York Times and lawyers for the deportees,
and the United States has not made any public deal with Cameroon to accept deportees who hail from other nations.
Several of the men and women deported
— whose cases have not been previously reported
— told The Times they did not know they were being sent to Cameroon until they were handcuffed and chained on a Department of Homeland Security flight leaving Alexandria, La., on Jan. 14.
Cameroon’s Ministry of External Affairs declined to comment when reached by phone, and the State Department said it would not comment on its “diplomatic communications with other governments” when asked about the terms of an agreement.
Most of those migrants and their lawyers say they have been detained since then
at a state-owned compound in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital.
They say they’ve been told by local authorities that they cannot leave the facility unless they agree to return to their home countries, from which they fled to escape war or persecution.
As far as is known, the deportations are the first such expulsions to Cameroon.
They highlight the extraordinary secrecy that surrounds Trump’s global deportation effort.
Through murky deals forged with willing governments
— often in exchange for cash
— the U.S. has deported hundreds of people to foreign countries that may not respect the removal protections they have been granted in U.S. courts,
returning them to the dangers they fled.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/world/africa/us-secret-deportation-cameroon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MVA.jHqR.KJcoPMA1-P89&smid=nytcore-ios-share

2026-02-15 00:26:52 UTC

Minnesota is an anathema to the Trump administration.
“He’s attacking Minnesota because of Minnesota’s virtue,” said Keith Ellison, the state’s attorney general
It’s a midwestern state that hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972,
including the three times it voted against Donald Trump.
A strong and growing
Scandinavian-style social safety net
and welcoming culture to immigrants
has attracted populations from around the world over the last few generations, including the largest Somali population outside Somalia.
The state is a refuge for trans people and abortion access.
It has high levels of civic engagement,
regularly ranking at or near the top for voter turnout.
It is a donor state, sending more money to the federal government than it receives.
It has higher organized labor participation rates than the national average.
Minneapolis, its largest city, ignited the nationwide 2020 protests over police brutality and racism after a police officer killed George Floyd.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/14/why-minnesota-ice-crackdown-trump?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-02-14 23:49:12 UTC

Office of Budget and Management Director Russell Vought killed USAID, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths,
and is now using the money he “saved” to bankroll his security detail.
A Reuters report Friday states that the Project 2025 architect who promised to put federal employees “in trauma”
is spending $15 million of former USAID funding
—money that would have gone toward fighting HIV, polio, malaria, and other diseases
—to pay his U.S. Marshal security through the end of the year.
One source told Reuters that Vought has more than a dozen U.S. marshals in his security detail.
While Vought allegedly faced a threat on his life last month,
the irony of the man who ripped disease-fighting funding away from some of the most at-risk people in the world only to use it to beef up his personal bodyguard staff is impossible to ignore.
This is yet another example of Trump officials’ questionable personal spending habits.
On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Homeland Security
is leasing a $70 million jet that Secretary Kristi Noem and her alleged boyfriend Corey Lewandowski use to travel in luxury.
And what’s up with that $400 million White House ballroom?
https://newrepublic.com/post/206559/russ-vought-usaid-funds-security

2026-02-11 16:28:32 UTC

Pam Bondi has accused the Democrats of “theatrics.”
-- But the attorney general has been, by far, the loudest voice in the hearing room.
She has insulted several Democrats and has been repeatedly, if gently,
blocked by Jim Jordan, a Republican and the chairman of the judiciary committee, from shouting over her questioners.
Under pressure from Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat,
Bondi refuses to apologize over her actions in the case to victims of Jeffrey Epstein who are in the hearing room.
Bondi, who appeared caught off guard, pivoted to attack Jayapal for trying to drag her “into the gutter.”
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/11/us/trump-news?smid=nytcore-ios-share

2026-02-11 00:42:07 UTC

Google handed over a trove of personal data
about a student and journalist to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
in response to a subpoena that had not been approved by a judge, according to a report by The Intercept.
The search and advertising tech giant provided ICE with the usernames, physical addresses, and an itemized list of services associated with the Google account of Amandla Thomas-Johnson,
a British student and journalist who briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest in 2024 while attending Cornell University in New York.
Google also turned over Thomas-Johnson’s IP addresses, phone numbers, subscriber numbers and identities, and credit card and bank account numbers linked to his account.
The subpoena, which reportedly included a gag order, did not include a specific justification for why ICE was requesting Thomas-Johnson’s personal data,
but the student previously said that the demand for his data came within two hours of Cornell informing him that the U.S. government had revoked his student visa.
This is the latest example of how the U.S. government is using a controversial type of legal request, called an #administrative #subpoena, to demand that tech companies turn over the private data of individuals who have been critical of the Trump administration.
This has included anonymous Instagram accounts that share information about ICE presence and raids,
as well as people who criticize or protest Trump and his policies.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/google-sent-personal-and-financial-information-of-student-journalist-to-ice/

2026-01-25 17:11:03 UTC

The Department of Homeland Security has ordered immigration officers to gather identifying information about anyone filming them and to “send that information to Intel who will do a ‘work-up’ on them,” a federal law enforcement official directly involved tells me.
“Meaning, trying to identify them via social media, running their license plates if available, and running a criminal history check,” the official explained.
The directive is part of a sweeping, nationwide effort by U.S. immigration authorities to identify anyone and everyone trying to film their conduct. This includes not just ICE but other Department of Homeland Security agencies like Border Patrol as well. The ultimate goal is to create a list of anti-ICE protestors, which the Trump administration believes are part of an organized network of domestic terrorists.
A loose-lipped ICE agent in Portland, Maine publicly hinted at the effort in an exchange on Friday that was captured on video. The video shows the ICE agent taking pictures of a car belonging to a woman who had been recording him, prompting her to ask why. The ICE agent replies: “‘Cause we have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist. So have fun with that.”
The remark wasn’t just bravado or trolling. In addition to what my own sources at DHS are telling me, David Bier, Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute, published a report last month pulling together reams of incidents similar to the one in Portland. The report concludes that DHS has a formal policy of intimidating people trying to film them on the dubious legal grounds that doing so amounts to impeding federal enforcement.
“DHS has a systematic policy of threatening people who follow ICE or DHS agents to record their activities,” the report says.
But the policy goes farther than just deterring people from filming ICE. As my source explained to me, the Department of Homeland Security is moving to collect intelligence on and watchlist protesters.
Asked about the purpose of DHS policy of filming the ICE filmers, Bier told me that the information are being fed into databases for possible future law enforcement action.
“ICE agents film arrests both to feed the DHS social media blitz and to identify them,” Bier told me. “They upload information to their databases and see if they have outstanding warrants or are here illegally.”
The practice can also be seen in the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis earlier this month. Video of the incident shows ICE Agent Jonathan Ross holding up a phone and filming Good in her vehicle shortly before the shooting.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/ice-making-list-of-anyone-who-films

2025-12-24 16:15:48 UTC

Analysts believe widespread GLP-1 adoption could mean long-term changes in demand.
Food companies including Conagra Brands and Nestle are already dealing with shifts in consumer tastes toward higher protein and smaller portions
due to the popularity of weight-loss injections
To cope, businesses are promoting products with more protein,
tweaking labeling to say they are GLP-1 friendly
and working with large retailers to better market products.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/weight-loss-pill-approval-set-accelerate-food-industry-product-overhauls-2025-12-24/?link_source=ta_bluesky_link&taid=694c01233265bb00019ede4d&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=bluesky

2025-12-24 15:40:42 UTC

ICE documents reveal plan to hold 80,000 immigrants in warehouses
The Trump administration is seeking contractors to help it overhaul the United States’ immigrant detention system
in a plan that includes renovating industrial warehouses to hold more than 80,000 immigrant detainees at a time,
according to a draft solicitation reviewed by The Washington Post.
 Rather than shuttling detainees around the country to wherever detention space is available, as happens now,
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement aims to speed up deportations by establishing a deliberate feeder system, the document says.
Newly arrested detainees would be booked into processing sites for a few weeks
before being funneled into one of seven large-scale warehouses holding 5,000 to 10,000 people each,
where they would be staged for deportation.
 The large warehouses would be located close to major logistics hubs in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia and Missouri.
Sixteen smaller warehouses would hold up to 1,500 people each.  The draft solicitation is not final and is subject to changes.
ICE plans to share it with private detention companies this week to gauge interest and refine the plan, according to an internal email reviewed by The Post.
A formal request for bids could follow soon after that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/12/24/ice-immigrants-detention-warehouses-deportation-trump/

2025-12-11 06:15:25 UTC

"The United States condemns the Houthis' ongoing unlawful detention of current and former local staff of the U.S. Mission to Yemen,"
U.S. State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said in a statement.
"The Houthis' arrests of those staff,
and the sham proceedings that have been brought against them,
are further evidence that the Houthis rely on the use of terror against their own people
as a way to stay in power"
Pigott said
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-condemns-houthi-detention-embassy-staff-yemen-2025-12-11/?link_source=ta_bluesky_link&taid=693a6041fbf4d40001aeeea1&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=bluesky

2025-12-07 02:12:24 UTC

Medicare pilot program will allow private companies to use artificial intelligence to review older Americans’ requests for certain medical care — and will reward the companies when they deny it.
In January, the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will launch the
"Wasteful and Inappropriate Services Reduction" (WISeR) Model to test
👉AI-powered prior authorizations on certain health services for Medicare patients in six states:
Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Washington.
The program is scheduled to last through 2031.
❌The program effectively inserts one of private insurance’s most unpopular features
— prior authorization
— into traditional Medicare,
the federal health insurance program for people 65 and older and those with certain disabilities.
Prior authorization is the process by which patients and doctors must ask health insurers to approve medical procedures or drugs before proceeding.
https://stateline.org/2025/12/04/medicares-new-ai-experiment-sparks-alarm-among-doctors-lawmakers/

2025-12-05 19:09:18 UTC

The Department of Justice (DOJ) plans to
👉 dismantle protections for trans and intersex people
in federal, state, and local prisons, jails, and youth detention facilities,
according to a government memo obtained by Prism.
The memo, dated Dec. 2, takes aim at existing standards of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA)
that the department says do not comport with the Trump administration’s first-day executive order that,
among other things, targeted protections for trans people behind bars.
PREA was passed in 2003, and President Barack Obama added new protections for LGBTQIA+ people to the DOJ’s PREA rulebook in 2012.
The proposed changes would affect all facilities that are subject to PREA standards,
including adult prisons and jails,
lockups,
community confinement facilities such as halfway houses,
and juvenile facilities that are operated by the DOJ, state, or local governments
or by corporate or nonprofit organizations.
Facilities operated by other agencies,
such as the Department of Homeland Security,
are subject to their own detention standards.
https://prismreports.org/2025/12/04/prison-rape-elimination-act-trans-intersex-trump-doj/

2025-11-27 22:04:15 UTC

Uruguay did what most nations still call impossible:
it built a power grid that runs almost entirely on renewables
—at half the cost of fossil fuels.
The physicist who led that transformation says the same playbook could work anywhere
—if governments have the courage to change the rules.
For Ramon Méndez Galain,
the energy transition isn’t just about climate
—it’s about economics.
Uruguay’s shift to renewables, he argues,
demonstrated that clean energy can be cheaper, more stable, and create more jobs than fossil fuels.
Once the country adjusted the playing field that had long favored oil and gas,
renewables outperformed on every front:
halving costs,
creating 50,000 jobs,
and protecting the economy from price shocks.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2025/10/19/uruguays-renewable-charge-a-small-nation-a-big-lesson-for-the-world/

2025-11-07 18:15:38 UTC

Flooded disused coalmines could be a significant source of energy and provide cheap heat to thousands of homes, a new report argues.
Mine water geothermal heat (MWGH) systems use the water in flooded coalmines,
which is warmed by natural processes,
to supply low-carbon heat.
Heat exchangers and pumps recover the heat,
which is distributed via district heating networks to homes and buildings,
providing low-cost, long-term, stable energy.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/06/flooded-uk-coalmines-low-carbon-cheap-heat

2025-10-25 18:34:45 UTC

The sanctions regime makes it hard for Russia to charter ships from legitimate shipping companies.
Instead, it has built a ‘shadow fleet’ of almost 1,000 elderly oil tankers
But Denmark has started stopping and boarding them. https://www.hilltimes.com/story/2025/10/22/denmark-versus-the-russias-shadow-fleet/478049/

2025-10-25 15:40:05 UTC

Changpeng Zhao bought himself a presidential pardon
by doing everything he could to boost the fortunes of World Liberty Financial,
the crypto firm in which the Trump family owns a 38 percent stake
https://c.im/@cdarwin/115435534482079649

2025-10-24 05:10:07 UTC

Elon Musk is having a very bad week.
The man who bought Twitter for $44 billion to secure unaccountable power over public discourse
is discovering what unaccountable power actually looks like when wielded by someone who understands dominance even better than he does.
Trump just stripped SpaceX of a government contract and handed it to Jeff Bezos.
Musk’s response?
Rage-tweeting at Trump officials, including the immortal question
“why are you gay”
—the rhetorical sophistication we’ve come to expect from the richest man-child on the planet having a public meltdown
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/10/22/elon-musk-discovers-what-hierarchy-actually-means/

2025-10-05 03:28:10 UTC

Less than a week after copying a Joseph Goebbels speech to mythologize Charlie Kirk,
Stephen Miller is trying to gin up outrage because Gavin Newsom’s trollish Xitter account called him, accurately, a fascist.
Because Stephen Miller’s expression of outrage about the use of inflammatory language
— even the use of the word fascism
— necessarily involved Miller projecting his own actions onto someone else,
it led him to go on Hannity and confess he has been engaged in stochastic terrorism for years.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/10/02/stephen-miller-confesses-he-intended-for-trumps-nutjobs-to-kill-democrats/

2025-09-27 14:49:24 UTC

The Supreme Court upended the constitutional separation of powers on Friday afternoon
with a brief order allowing Donald Trump to unilaterally cancel $4 billion in foreign aid appropriated by Congress.
In an apparent 6–3 decision,
the conservative supermajority greenlit Trump’s so-called “pocket rescission,”
ensuring that the money will expire before its intended beneficiaries receive it.
It offered a single page of vague, threadbare justification,
suggesting that the president’s authority over foreign affairs outweighs Congress’ control over spending.
This view marks a radical rewriting of the Constitution
that shifts a massive amount of power from the legislative branch to the executive.
It essentially awards Trump a line-item veto over any part of the budget that is remotely connected to foreign policy
—and, quite possibly, every dollar appropriated by Congress.
And the court did all this without full briefing, oral argument, or a signed ruling,
abusing the shadow docket yet again to hand Trump one of the biggest power grabs of his second term so far.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/09/trump-supreme-court-pocket-rescission-constitution-congress-impoundment.html

2025-09-20 18:27:57 UTC

For the past three weeks, I’ve been attending protests at the Broadview ICE facility.
There’s been a vigil there for almost two decades at this point, but they started ramping up after three protesters were arrested four weeks ago.
Three weeks ago, we went, and it was very peaceful.
We ended up actually getting a car to turn around.
Last week, when we went, ICE assaulted a lot of us.
We went early because they changed their deportation time to around 6 a.m.
ICE threw me to the ground then and assaulted other protesters, as well.
That was the same day as the Franklin Park murder, and someone else was shot with pepper balls then.
And then today, my friend and I woke up at 3 a.m. and went to the facility.
We got there and were sitting on public property.
ICE agents told us to essentially go away:
“Your First Amendment rights are on the sidewalk.”
Around 6 a.m., they started bringing out a van, and we were in the way,
so an ICE agent once again picked me up and threw me to the ground
—they love throwing me.
The video that people saw was after that.
But during that first altercation, they took one of the protesters inside the facility
—that’s the first time this has ever happened.
We don’t know what happened to that person—we still don’t know where they are.
https://newrepublic.com/article/200715/im-congressional-candidate-assaulted-ice

2025-09-07 05:02:30 UTC

Apocalypse Now is about a man driven insane by war, a movie about how hollow war can make people.
Donald Trump, unintentionally, has invoked just the right image for what is to come.
https://norden.social/@wackJackle/115159522417700451

2025-09-07 04:16:53 UTC

A number of companies, including many of the country's most quintessentially American brands,
have warned that growing anti-Americanism as a result of Donald Trump's tariffs
could end up hurting their success overseas.
Experts believe that the trend,
if it translates into a broad-based shift in consumer behavior,
could prove to be a significant headwind for the companies
while taking a significant toll on the broader U.S. economy.
https://www.newsweek.com/us-bands-warn-anti-american-sentiment-hurting-sales-2125050

2025-09-05 20:43:04 UTC

The date is set for the next big protest.
Saturday, October 18th.
https://NoKings.org
Comment your events.
https://bsky.app/profile/liberalresistance.bsky.social/post/3lxv7ucboyk2r

2025-07-19 17:30:22 UTC

Over the past few months, we have seen the Trump administration engage not only in medical misinformation, but in active censorship of scientific discourse.
Since he took the helm at HHS, Kennedy’s unscientific views on vaccines and some other medical matters
-- coupled with the agency’s widespread research and staff cuts,
-- have prompted protests from scientists inside and outside HHS plus lawsuits.
Medical experts say Kennedy’s policies are helping “sow distrust in vaccines”
as measles cases soar to a more than three decade high,
hurt vital healthcare research with draconian cuts,
and helped foment a Trump administration
“war on science”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/19/rfk-jr-science-research-cuts?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2025-07-13 20:47:14 UTC

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, has filed a criminal complaint against
#Alejandro #Orellana,
a local immigration activist in Los Angeles.
They’ve charged him for distributing face masks to protestors.
They specify that the masks are supposed to protect protestors from “chemical splashes and flying debris,”
-- a goal they claim is self-evidently criminal.
https://www.popehat.com/p/only-criminals-don-t-want-to-be-gassed-by-the-government

2025-07-11 02:02:39 UTC

Congressmember Salud Carbajal showed up to see first hand the ICE raid on the Carpinteria Glasshouse cannabis greenhouse owned by Santa Barbara county grower Graham Farrar.
In an interview afterwards, Carbajal said there were 45-to-50 ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and Homeland Security agents dressed up in military-style scrubs and armed with military-style rifles and weapons.
He saw no members of the National Guard, though it was a chaotic scene.
A former Marine himself, Carbajal scoffed, “They looked like they were having fun dressing up like they were in the military.
I’m guessing less than half of them had ever served.”
“I wanted to find out what was going on,” Carbajal explained to the Independent.
When he told them he was a member of Congress, “No one was interested,” he said.
Then he sought to break through the perimeter established by the ICE agents to “find someone who was in charge,”
but was pushed back.
He recounted how he sought to break through more than once but was repeatedly pushed back.
“No one told me anything,” he said,
and “nobody wanted to talk to me.”
He asked multiple times to speak to whoever was in charge, but no one answered him.
Instead, one man from ICE, Luis Alani, did hand him a business card with the phone number of a “public information strategist” he could call.
Calls placed by the Independent to the number Carbajal was given, have not been returned.
“It was overkill and disproportionate,” Carbajal emphasised repeatedly during this interview.
“They’re militarizing our streets. They’re inciting fear, chaos and trauma.”
When asked how the show of force affected him personally, Carbajal replied,
“It’s outrageous. It angers me. It disappoints me as an American.
And they’re violating the rights of US citizens. If you’re Brown, you’re going to have your civil rights violated.”
https://www.independent.com/2025/07/10/carbajal-denounces-militarization-of-our-streets/

2025-07-01 21:58:40 UTC

Harvard physicist Jacob Barandes returns with a groundbreaking insight that could reshape quantum theory.
By questioning a single hidden assumption, Jacob bridges the gap between classical probability and quantum mechanics.
This ‘mathematical accident’ challenges the foundations of Bell’s Theorem, dissolves the measurement problem, and opens a path to a realist interpretation of quantum physics.
This episode is a rigorous journey through stochastic processes, non-locality, and the future of theoretical physics.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/theories-of-everything-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802?i=1000715343221

2025-04-23 04:30:27 UTC

How does anyone know that these guys in plainclothes
💥and wearing balaclavas are legitimate federal officers, and not kidnappers?
And what happens when a "good guy with a gun" kills a "bad guy with a gun" who turns out to be a Fed?
It will happen
https://dailyprogress.com/news/local/crime-courts/article_9ce921d6-5f61-4546-b0c9-ea2287d8bf16.html

2025-04-22 13:24:38 UTC

- reply

@npub1qas…7dng unroll Hitler's terrible tariffs

2025-04-17 02:43:02 UTC

Far-right Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene stumbled Tuesday night when faced with tough questions about her allegiance to Donald Trump at a chaotic town hall that led to three arrests.
Several individuals were removed for disrupting Greene’s town hall at a community center in Acworth, Georgia.
While Greene railed against undocumented immigrants, one protester started shouting about the Ku Klux Klan, which historically targeted Black Georgians in Greene’s district.
The protester, as she was escorted out by security, shouted,
“You butch body bigot! You butch body bigot!”
“The protest is outside! Bye, have fun out there,” Greene sneered.
The protester’s chide echoed that of Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett, who went so far as to trademark her burn against Greene, “bleach blonde bad-built butch body.”
Another protester with a “Jail 4 Insider Traders” banner was also removed by security.
Greene disclosed Monday that she had bought between $21,000 and $315,000 in stocks last week in 17 companies including Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, and Palantir,
buying into the stock market dip just hours before Trump announced he was partially pausing some of his tariffs.
The stock market shot back up as a result.
In total, three people were arrested, including two who engaged in a physical altercation and were tasered by Acworth police, according to NBC News.
https://newrepublic.com/post/194051/marjorie-taylor-greene-town-hall-voters-shreds-tasered

2025-04-15 22:24:17 UTC

it's Maine Governor Janet Mills.
I wanted you to be the first to know:
I’m officially suing Donald Trump.
When I recently visited the White House, President Trump chose to single me out in a room full of governors from both parties
and threatened to unilaterally withhold federal funding from Maine unless we fall in line with his personal demands.
When I stood my ground, he claimed he was "the law,"
never mind Congress or the states.
I told him I’d see him in court.
His administration has ordered investigations into Maine schools,
tried to cancel millions of dollars worth of federal grants awarded to Maine's education system,
and worked to terminate federal contracts based in Maine
– a decision his own administration says would increase Social Security fraud.
They've even called me a "petulant child."
But I refuse to back down.
⭐️We've officially filed our lawsuit against Donald Trump for overreaching his authority and illegally freezing funds that go to feeding children in Maine.
I – along with my fellow Democratic governors across the country
– will not be intimidated by the President's threats.
We refuse to be bullied. Instead, we're taking action.
We're doing everything we can to fight for democracy and push back against attacks on our freedoms.
But we can't do it without your support.
So I’m asking supporters like you for the 4th time:
can you add your name to stand with me and other Democratic governors as we work to push back against Trump and his Republican trifecta?
https://demgovs.co/4isHSdy
Thank you,
Gov. Janet Mills via DGA