Nostr notes by Chuck Darwin

The government agency that administers Medicaid has created a new ...

2026-07-26T23:00:53Z

The government agency that administers Medicaid has created a new criterion,
‘medically frail,’
which must be met to qualify for the program without working
— even if you only have weeks to live.
It didn’t exist prior to the passage of the "Big Beautiful Bill".
Before that landmark legislation was signed into law, Medicaid was primarily a means-tested program,
accessible to those with low enough incomes to qualify.
But the new rule means even if you have pancreatic cancer, HIV, or Parkinson’s, you will have to meet work requirements to maintain eligibility, or prove you are too sick to comply.
Your doctor’s opinion won’t matter. It will be up to the bureaucrats.
Essentially, this amounts to navigating a process fashioned explicitly to kick people off the program.

That means filling out forms and filing papers and hoping someone sitting at a desk determines you comply with a definition critics say is vaguely written and open to interpretation.
This is all part of a scheme hatched during the passage of the massively destructive "Big Beautiful Bill" last year.
Trump and his MAGA cohorts wanted to give a trillion-dollar tax break to the top one percent.
But the cuts were projected to add trillions to an already historically high federal debt.
So, to conjure a so-called “pay for,” Republicans turned to Medicaid, the critical program that provides healthcare to the poorest Americans.
Simply slashing funding was politically unpalatable, even for the party best known for trying to dismantle Obamacare multiple times without providing a viable alternative.
So Republicans came up with a workaround -- make it more difficult to qualify.
In practice, that translated into the aforementioned new work requirements
https://therealnews.com/trump-wants-to-deny-healthcare-to-impoverished-cancer-patients-welcome-to-the-great-american-cruelty-regime

DHS surveilled peaceful protesters and then yanked their Global ...

2026-07-25T12:58:13Z

DHS surveilled peaceful protesters and then yanked their Global Entry, federal lawsuit alleges

April Walker, a San Diego resident, was observing federal immigration agents in a Target parking lot in April
when she said they boxed her in and pointed a camera at her face and license plate.

👉 She said she never provided her driver’s license
and the agents only moved their vehicles and allowed her to leave after she called 911.

❌ Five days later, she learned that her Global Entry, which provides expedited TSA screening, had been revoked.

⚠️ It was only reinstated, she said, after she contacted a reporter who then reached out to the Department of Homeland Security to inquire about the revocation.

Walker laid out her story in a federal lawsuit, filed Friday in the Southern District of California,
alleging that agents working for Homeland Security deployed facial recognition technology and license plate information
to surveil people observing and documenting federal immigration enforcement.

Homeland Security then used that information to revoke Global Entry privileges in retaliation, the lawsuit alleges.

“Now more than ever, those of us who have the privilege to speak out have a responsibility to defend the rights of everyone in our communities,”
Walker said in a statement.

🔥“When people are punished for exercising their First Amendment rights,
we begin losing the democratic principles that protect all of us.

Every American should be alarmed by retaliatory action against one’s free speech

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-07-24/federal-lawsuit-alleges-dhs-unlawfully-surveilled

The U.S. Justice Department is prosecuting an American for ...

2026-07-25T07:11:39Z

The U.S. Justice Department is prosecuting an American
for allegedly providing U.S. border authorities with a passcode that wiped the contents of his phone,
according to an indictment and media reports.

This is thought to be the first known case in the United States where federal prosecutors have charged someone for the alleged destruction of data using a “duress” password built into a phone’s software.

According to The Guardian, which covered the story earlier this week following the court’s first hearing on Monday,
Atlanta resident Samuel Tunick is fighting the charges.

Tunick’s attorneys said that it was unlawful for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to seize his phone as he arrived back in the U.S. last year
and that any evidence
— including the alleged wiping of his phone
— should be thrown out.

The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system that runs in place of the software on most modern Google Pixel devices.

Tunick’s attorneys confirmed GrapheneOS was running on his phone.

The software feature allows the device owner to set a passcode that deliberately wipes the contents of that device if entered instead of the user’s unlock passcode.

Tunick’s case also raises ongoing questions about what constitutional rights can be invoked at the border,
which the U.S. government has long asserted is not U.S. soil until a person is authorized to enter.

The government’s indictment, which contains a typo (“Untied States Code”),
accuses Tunick of allegedly providing a passcode to border agents that caused the phone
to “delete the digital contents,”
prior to the device being seized.

Tunick’s attorneys filed a motion to suppress the evidence, claiming that the detention and the seizure were unlawful.

The motion said U.S. border authorities took Tunick into a secondary inspection at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport as he returned from overseas on January 24, 2025,
but that he was repeatedly denied access to an attorney and was not informed of his legal rights.

Tunick’s attorneys accused the government of demanding access to his phone under the pretext of searching for child exploitation imagery,
but without providing evidence to justify its suspicion.

His motion to suppress argued that the government was instead investigating him over his association with a
long-running environmental movement called "Defend the Atlanta Forest", which opposes the development of a sprawling training campus for law enforcement in Atlanta dubbed “Cop City.”

#duresspasscode #grapheneos
#copcity #atlanta #samueltunik

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/24/us-accuses-american-of-allegedly-wiping-his-phone-using-a-duress-password-during-border-search/

Staying in a job for the health insurance? About 1 in 4 Americans ...

2026-07-22T16:40:43Z

Staying in a job for the health insurance?

About 1 in 4 Americans do,
a survey says

The survey from West Health-Gallup Center on Healthcare in America
finds that approximately
23 million adults are in what the report authors call "job lock."

In 2021, 16% of those surveyed were in job lock.

"Anybody having to stay in a job just to keep their health insurance,
knowing that they want to leave, is crazy,"
says Ellyn Maese, a research director for the center,
a partnership between Gallup and West Health.

"That is a concerning figure,
even if it's 10%.

But when we're seeing it rise to 1 in 4 employees,
that's pretty serious."

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/22/nx-s1-5902333/health-insurance-jobs-gallup

Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar introduced a resolution on ...

2026-07-15T15:15:16Z

Democratic congresswoman
Ilhan Omar introduced a resolution on Wednesday
urging the United States to join the international criminal court (ICC),
marking the first congressional pushback against the Trump administration’s pledge to
“systematically disable” the war crimes tribunal through sanctions and diplomatic pressure.

Omar’s bill came two days after Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, vowed to dismantle the court.

“The ICC is a crucial tool for justice in places where victims have nowhere else to turn,” Omar said.
“If we truly believe in human rights and the rule of law, we should strengthen international justice
– not undermine it.
The United States should lead by example and show that no one is above the law.”

European lawmakers have also rallied in defense of the war crimes tribunal
and rejected the Trump administration’s assertion that the ICC poses a threat to US sovereignty.

“We stand firm in our support for the international criminal court.
Attacks or threats against the court, elected officials, personnel or those cooperating with the court are simply not acceptable,”
an EU spokesperson, Anouar El Anouni, said on Tuesday.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/15/ilhan-omar-icc-membership-resolution?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Sony recently informed its PlayStation customers in the United ...

2026-07-01T00:33:09Z

Sony recently informed its PlayStation customers in the United Kingdom that
they will no longer be able to watch previously purchased movies
and shows from production and distribution company StudioCanal.
As of September 1, affected customers will no longer be able to stream 551 titles from the PlayStation Store.

In a legal notice first spotted by gaming news outlet PlayStation LifeStyle,
Sony said that affected customers will lose the ability to stream titles including
Outrage: Way of the Yakuza, Paddington, Paddington 2, Pan’s Labyrinth,Rambo 3, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
“due to our content licensing agreements.”

As of September, Sony will remove any affected titles that UK users bought from their PlayStation library, per the notice.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/sony-erases-digital-content-from-libraries-were-reminded-we-dont-own-what-we-buy/

We’re having a pizza party with 100 guests! Let’s divvy up ...

2026-05-27T23:37:22Z

We’re having a pizza party with 100 guests!
Let’s divvy up the slices the way wealth is divided among American households:
• 1 person gets 30 slices • 9 people get 3.7 slices each • 40 people get 0.75 slices each • 50 people get 0.05 slices each
Dig in! But watch out for “those people” trying to steal your 0.05.
https://kottke.org/26/05/american-wealth-sliced-up

US defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempt to put a positive ...

2026-04-30T21:39:39Z

US defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempt to put a positive spin on the ongoing US war on Iran was immediately challenged,

first by the ranking Democrat on the armed services committee, senator Jack Reed, who lambasted his “dangerously exaggerated” claims,

and then by a protester who shouted, “you’re a war criminal!”

A Reuters photograph of the protester from the activist group Code Pink showed that he stood up in the audience behind Hegseth and held a sign reading
“No War on Iran”,
as a colleague recorded and Capitol Police officers quickly converged on him.

That video, recorded and posted online by fellow activists from the group Code Pink, showed that the protester shouted at Hegseth, as he being bundled away by Capitol Police officers:

“You should be arrested. What you’re doing is despicable.
The American people do not want to go into this war.
We don’t want to fight a war for Israel!”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2026/apr/30/donald-trump-pete-hegseth-iran-war-oil-king-charles-latest-news-updates?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Following California implementing a law raising its minimum wage ...

2026-04-17T01:03:52Z

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

I am a proud Jewish American. My father fled Poland in 1921 to ...

2026-04-16T09:55:10Z

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

The French government is pressing the US Department of Homeland ...

2026-04-16T03:28:37Z

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

In a rare public criticism of a fellow member of the Supreme ...

2026-04-09T01:30:42Z

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
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sonia-sotomayor-brett-kavanaugh-racial-profiling-immigration_n_69d6ae34e4b0ccb589eaa377

The United States and Iran reached an 11th-hour ceasefire deal on ...

2026-04-08T06:11:40Z

The United States and Iran reached an 11th-hour ceasefire deal on Tuesday night,
pausing for two weeks the threat of military strikes that Trump had warned would wipe out a “whole civilization” unless Tehran agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Accepting ceasefire, Trump agreed to negotiate on Iran’s terms

-- He did so stating that diplomacy would revolve around a 10-point proposal from Tehran,
a framework he described as a
“workable basis on which to negotiate"

White House: No final decision yet on direct Iran-U.S. peace talks

Iran agrees to ceasefire, talks set for Friday

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/live/iran-war-updates-trump-deadline-news

Trump has threatened to commit war crimes against Iran, going so ...

2026-04-08T02:36:04Z

Trump has threatened to commit war crimes against Iran, going so far as to threaten to destroy Iranian civilization.

https://mastoreader.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fc.im%2F%40cdarwin%2F116366572666355647

NYT reporting that under this ceasefire each ship will pay $2M to ...

2026-04-08T02:03:33Z

NYT reporting that under this ceasefire each ship will pay $2M to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
It was $0 before Trump launched this illegal war.

100-130 ships pass the Strait daily.

Trump just gave Iran an extra $100M-$130M per day.
Masterful gambit, sir.
Impeach and remove this fascist—NOW.

https://bsky.app/profile/qasimrashid.com/post/3miwzcvkabs2k

Trump's gerrymandering push wasn't subtle. He wanted ...

2026-04-07T22:04:04Z

Trump's gerrymandering push wasn't subtle.

He wanted Republican House control. Virginia can counter with a voter approved measure.

Don't let authoritarianism win.
Vote YES on April 21st. #VirginiaVoteYes

https://bsky.app/profile/aaronblack.bsky.social/post/3miwqrh2dik2b

Rep. Mike Lawler: "I don't support making a whole ...

2026-04-07T17:54:52Z

Rep. Mike Lawler: "I don't support making a whole civilization die, but ... "

⭐️You Don't Get To Add 'but' To That Sentence

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mivvez7g5z2u

A weaker, angrier, more suspicious regime with a less cautious ...

2026-04-07T15:58:25Z

A weaker, angrier, more suspicious regime with a less cautious supreme leader and leverage over Hormuz

Preventing an Iranian Bomb Is Only Getting Harder
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/07/iran-bomb-nuclear-trump-war-ayatollah-khamenei/

The Trump administration’s attack on diversity, equity and ...

2026-04-07T00:50:45Z

The Trump administration’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion has rolled back decades of progress for women,
who now face a widening gender pay gap and narrowing employment protections.

In the process, discussions about women have become a third rail,
a toxic topic that is too politically charged to touch.

Companies, universities, law firms and cultural institutions are all expunging references to “women” and “gender,” even under the most benign circumstances.

The Trump administration has defined “illegal D.E.I.” as “programs, initiatives or policies that discriminate, exclude or divide individuals based on race or sex.”

But in practice, President Trump’s allies have questioned whether women deserve a place in the work force at all.
They have blamed women for last year’s California wildfires and slammed the conservative Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett as a “D.E.I. hire” for a ruling they didn’t like.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is purging the military of senior female officers after complaining that the armed forces had become “effeminate.”
Women’s names have disappeared from museums, parks, monuments and even the Arlington National Cemetery.

Terrified of being the administration’s next target, organizations are descending into the realm of the absurd.

A researcher focused on maternal health removed referencesto gender-based discrimination in order to receive federal funding.

A medical trade publication warnedscientists to avoid words such as “female” and “women” in grant applications.

After Senator Ted Cruz of Texas released a list of supposedly “woke” National Science Foundation grants last year,
ProPublica foundthat some were included merely because their project descriptions included words like “female,” as in a female research scientist,
or “diversify,” as in the biodiversity of plants.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/opinion/women-workplace-dei-feminism.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Nostr event nevent1qqsv5ssdqfvualuxrdp3lj75sjpu2pt244a2dmaz3647qc6x7xytv0czyqk0zvvpjjtuw9un8q0vfgqajm5fr7lfr8vcuzr0phc777s9kpwvjmj7zzs

2026-04-06T23:34:35Z

A federal judge has DENIED Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan’s ...

2026-04-06T22:39:36Z

A federal judge has DENIED Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan’s motion for a new trial or an acquittal
following her conviction late last year for obstructing an ICE arrest in her courthouse

https://www.allrisenews.com/p/judge-hannah-dugan-verdict

Utah has made it nearly impossible for residents to hold fossil ...

2026-04-06T20:22:21Z

Utah has made it nearly impossible for residents to hold fossil fuel companies legally accountable for climate damages
in a move one advocacy group described as putting
“profits for the biggest polluters over communities”, with other states expected to follow suit.

The new state legislation comes as part of a push from big oil and its political allies
– including groups tied to rightwing impresario Leonard Leo
– for legal immunity in red statehouses and Congress,
with a goal of winning state and federal legal immunity similar to the liability waiver granted to the firearms industry in 2005.

Such policies would shield major fossil fuel companies from a wave of litigation they are facing from states,
subnational governments,
and individuals who claim the firms knew their products would cause climate damages,
but sold them to the public anyway.

Four other red states are considering laws similar to Utah’s
– with two close to passage
– and federal legislation is seemingly in the works.

Signed into law by the state’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, late last month,
Utah’s new legislation shields any person or entity from civil or criminal liabilities related to planet-warming emissions,
unless a court finds that the defendant violated the specific “enforceable limitation” on a greenhouse gas
or the “express terms of a valid permit”.

Challengers would also have to provide
“clear and convincing evidence that unavoidable and identifiable damage or injury has resulted or will result as a direct cause of the” violation.

The language will make it virtually impossible to successfully sue polluters for climate damages, critics say.
“This is a surrender to wealthy special interests and an affront to the public good,”
said Delta Merner, lead scientist at the science hub for climate litigation at the science advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists.
“Utah’s new law prioritizes profits for the biggest polluters over communities already suffering from climate impacts and constituents should be outraged.”

Set to be enacted next month,
Utah’s HB 222 was sponsored by the Republican representative Carl Albrecht,
who has received some funding from oil and gas interests.
He was also formerly the CEO of a rural electric cooperative

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/06/utah-fossil-fuels-legal-shield?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Workers’ pay is increasingly shaped by opaque algorithms and ...

2026-04-06T11:03:46Z

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/

The Trump administration has spent the better part of a year ...

2026-04-06T10:44:51Z

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/

Peter Thiel’s Antichrist lectures have been rejected by ...

2026-04-06T04:45:32Z

Peter Thiel’s Antichrist lectures have been rejected by theologians and mocked by comedians,
but he still cannot stop talking about the Antichrist.

This week, the billionaire delivered his trademark four-part Antichrist lecture at a private venue within sight of the Vatican.

At the height of his power
—with his companies and allies embedded in Trump’s fascist regime and his protégé, JD Vance, a heartbeat from the presidency
—Thiel has launched a campaign to herald the Antichrist.

He is on an Antichrist world tour, having given his talks in Austin, San Francisco, England, Austria and, now, Rome.

The Vatican was in no mood to play games with the would-be prophet from Palantir.

Paolo Benanti, a priest who has advised Pope Francis and Pope Leo on AI and tech ethics, called out Thiel as a “political theologian operating at the very heart of the Silicon Valley ecosystem” and delivered a scathing rebuke of Thiel’s religious delusions:

"Thiel’s entire action can thus be read as a prolonged act of heresy against the liberal consensus:
a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence, which he now considers outdated."

Benanti hit Thiel where it hurts, zooming in on his persistent efforts to pervert religious ideas into justifications for greed, monopoly, and authoritarianism.

He exposes Thiel’s obsessive focus on achieving
“the pathological radicalization” of “competition, technology, the individual”
to argue against democratic society itself.

It’s clear that Benanti has done a deep study of Thiel and knows exactly what the billionaire is up to with all of this Antichrist talk.

The priest hits Thiel for weaponizing René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire
—the theory that people learn desire by imitating other people
—in a demented search for
the “perfect algorithmic implementation” of its destructive force.

Benanti points to Thiel’s early investment in Facebook as an effort to create “a device designed to amplify and monetize mimetic desire on a planetary scale.”   He also calls out Thiel’s love for The Sovereign Individual,
a 1997 book that taught Thiel
“to view technology not only as an instrument of profit, but as a tool for managing the decline of liberal democratic institutions.”

Benanti further connects Thiel’s ideas to the TESCREAL movement
—“philosophies, championed notably by Elon Musk,
see technology as the instrument for transcending the biological and social limitations of humanity.”

TESCREAL ideologies like transhumanism and longtermism are Silicon Valley’s true religion.

Thiel’s Antichrist meditations attempt to put a Christian mask on these ideas, but Benanti argues that Thiel’s vision is structurally pagan

https://www.thenerdreich.com/peter-thiels-antichrist-circus-smacked-down-in-rome/

Federal prosecutors in California lost their central witness in a ...

2026-04-05T18:49:41Z

Federal prosecutors in California lost their central witness in a high-stakes meth trafficking case

after Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported him to Mexico months before trial,

leading to the acquittal of two defendants.

Javier Hernandez had agreed to testify against alleged cartel-linked associates despite receiving a death threat,

but ICE acted without consulting prosecutors.

The incident has intensified concerns that immigration enforcement priorities are undermining major criminal prosecutions
and could weaken broader efforts against organized crime.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/he-was-willing-to-testify-against-the-cartel-but-ice-got-to-him-first/ar-AA20bC6a?cvid=69d2aed67cf14fbc92623b5dddb5435e&ei=15

"The amount of untaxed wealth hidden offshore by the richest ...

2026-04-05T12:09:34Z

"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

Unabashed viciousness is part of the appeal of the Maga ...

2026-04-05T06:20:28Z

Unabashed viciousness
is part of the appeal of the Maga administration for its fans,
and might seem like a refreshing return to plain speaking.

But you can, of course, speak plainly while lying.
Trump and Hegseth’s vivid wallowings in industrial ultraviolence are in reality no more honest than regular political dissembling.

But while this maniacal, no-bullshit posturing,
this chest-beating fiesta of blood and guts, takes centre stage,
the real bullshit
– of geopolitical miscalculation and cynical profiteering
– seems to be simply swept under the carpet.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/04/trump-using-dysphemism-language-against-iran?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

A judge forced ICE to open the doors. On Holy Thursday, four ...

2026-04-04T17:02:51Z

A judge forced ICE to open the doors.

On Holy Thursday, four priests washed the feet of fourteen detained migrants.

The next morning, the Pentagon excluded Catholics from Good Friday services.

https://www.thelettersfromleo.com/p/trump-vance-white-house-escalates

Last September, the Trump administration imposed a $100,000 fee ...

2026-04-04T00:26:19Z

Last September, the Trump administration imposed a $100,000 fee on new H-1B applicants,
stirring confusion around the program.
Then in late February, another hurdle was introduced:
The Department of Homeland Security turned this game of chance into one that prioritizes higher salaries.

Now, if there are more H-1B applicants than spots available, U.S.C.I.S. will conduct a weighted lottery system based on new criteria:
wage levels that are calculated with government employment and wage data, which include factors like job title and location.

This new process gives applications tied to higher wages an advantage in the lottery system.

The D.H.S. says the new rule is meant to better protect job opportunities for Americans and to deter companies from filing H-1B petitions for low-skilled, low-paid positions, a practice the Trump administration says has led to the abuse of the program.

“There’s definitely a panic level that we hadn’t seen in the past with clients,” said Matthew Maiona, a Boston-based immigration lawyer who has over 30 years of experience representing both employers and employees in sectors like I.T. and engineering.

These changes have impelled some foreign workers to rethink their careers in the United States.

Those we spoke to said that it felt nearly impossible to find U.S. employers over the last year that would sponsor their H-1B visas for roles in biotechnology and marketing analytics.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/video/h-1b-visa-skilled-workers-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Trump administration no longer has enough lawyers left to do its ...

2026-04-03T15:03:24Z

Trump administration no longer has enough lawyers left to do its dirty work.

Whoever hasn’t been purged for not being loyal enough or exited ahead of the purges has been asked to clean up a mess with extremely limited amounts of resources and manpower.

To make things worse, Trump’s handpicked prosecutors keep being kicked out of court because Trump bypassed the appointment process essential to them remaining employed.

Then there’s the self-inflicted reputational damage Trump’s DOJ has done.
The government, for the most part, is no longer granted the presumption of good faith.

Courts across the land are not only aware this government isn’t acting in good faith, but they’rerefusing to pretend it is,
no matter how much copy-pasted boilerplate appears in DOJ filings.

Hundreds of adverse rulings have already been handed down.
Hundreds more are on the horizon,
especially now that the DOJ has admitted pretty much every arrest that took place in an immigration court was illegal.

It all adds up to the long tail of “flooding the zone.”
If you can’t bail water fast enough, you’re going to drown.
Here’s how this is working out for the DOJ now
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/20/ice-detention-cases-doj-judges-00837850

Iran shot down a US fighter jet A search is under way for the ...

2026-04-03T14:37:02Z

Iran shot down a US fighter jet
A search is under way for the crew of a US fighter jet that was shot down by Iran, a person familiar with the matter has confirmed.

Iran claimed that it had shot down a US fighter jet, with state media reporting it was an F-35 warplane.

The fate of the crew remains unclear.
It follows reports by Iranian state media that the US military is searching for an American pilot of a downed aircraft in Iran, following earlier reports that Tehran had shot down a US F-35 fighter jet.

Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency claimed that the US military is searching for a pilot “of a fighter jet that was attacked by the Iranian armed forces this morning”.

In an earlier report, it published photos purporting to show the wreckage of a downed US aircraft, although it appears to be an F-15E Strike Eagle based out of RAF Lakenheath.

Peter Layton, a visiting fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Australia, told NBC News:
“I think the structure looks like an F-15 and from the tail flash stripe markings from the 48th Fighter Wing, based at RAF Lakenheath in the United Kingdom.”

US officials have not publicly commented on the claims.
The Associated Press news agency reported that a channel affiliated with Iranian state television broadcast news of the pilot.
The channel is in Kohkilouyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, a rural and mountainous region that spans over 15,500 sq km (5,900 sq miles).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/apr/03/middle-east-crisis-live-trump-urges-iran-to-make-deal-after-bridge-strike?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

German bargain grocer Aldi plans to open more than 180 U.S. ...

2026-04-03T14:25:32Z

German bargain grocer Aldi plans to open more than 180 U.S. stores this year.
The chain, which has been rapidly expanding since inflation surged in 2021, has set a goal of 3,200 stores globally by the end of 2028.

Trader Joe’s has been on an expansion spree.
Many Dollar General stores have begun selling fresh produce.

“Discounters are in this really tricky spot, where price is paramount, but they’re up against the likes of Walmart,” Moran said.
Walmart and Amazon have expanded grocery offerings and are scooping up wealthier consumers.
Their massive size and efficient supply chains allow them to have lower prices than competitors.

Lower-income consumers, facing tough economic pressure, are increasingly turning to food banks, Moran said.
A November Pew Research Center study estimated that more than 40 million people in 22 million households receive monthly Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits.

Grocery Outlet will be scaling back in California

In the latest earnings announcement, Potter said Grocery Outlet left its shoppers disappointed
— and their baskets mostly empty
— because stores didn’t offer enough “wow” deals on name-brand products.
The company has since expanded its distribution capacity and is reducing slow-selling stock to make more room for “opportunistic products” from name brands.
https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=95a40f0d-11f8-4d00-b54a-a6885fe141f3&v=sdk

Trump’s VA killed a home loan program. Vets are now losing ...

2026-04-03T03:15:34Z

Trump’s VA killed a home loan program.

Vets are now losing their homes because of it.
- NPR

https://stocks.apple.com/AhpCFwAUSRcy-9nE1KUxPZg?highlight=Trump%E2%80%99s%20VA%20killed%20a%20home%20loan%20program.%20Vets%20are%20now%20losing%20their%20homes%20because%20of%20it%0AForeclosures%20on%20VA%20loans%20are%20at%20their%20highest%20level%20in%20a%20decade.%20VA%20has%20a%20fix%20but%20it%20is%20months%20away%20and%20could%20still%20leave%20vets%20worse%20off%20than%20most%20other%20homeowners

Hegseth's purge of Black and women officers larger than ...

2026-04-03T02:05:02Z

Hegseth's purge of Black and women officers larger than previously reported

"Hegseth has taken steps to block or delay promotions for MORE THAN A DOZEN Black and female senior officers across all four branches of the military."

“There is not a single service that has been immune to this level of involvement by Hegseth,” one of the U.S. officials said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/hegseth-intervened-military-promotions-dozen-senior-officers-rcna266062

I’ll be talking about the very serious helium shortage that is ...

2026-04-02T00:04:19Z

I’ll be talking about the very serious helium shortage that is looming

(actually, it’s already upon us)

and risks crippling semiconductor chip production and diagnostic instruments like MRI scanners,
not to mention low temperature science..

It’s maddening because we’ve known that helium is very limited but it’s cheap
so no one recovers it.

It’ll be on BBC World Service Newshour around 13:45 BST.
#elements #chemistry #economics #profligacy

https://mastodon.social/@sellathechemist/116312371974222785

CNBC Correspondent, Megan Cassella landed a one-two verbal punch ...

2026-04-01T12:32:00Z

CNBC Correspondent,
Megan Cassella
landed a one-two verbal punch on a stunned Trump during a press briefing.

Her responses to two of his rude outbursts:

"Sir, you are the president, not God."

Then, in response to him demanding she never say that again
she replied:

"Mr. President I ask questions,
not permission.

#MeganCassella #Trump

Governments across Asia are ramping up their use of coal, the ...

2026-04-01T12:19:44Z

Governments across Asia are ramping up their use of coal,
the dirtiest fossil fuel,
as they try to cover huge energy shortfalls triggered by the US-Israel war on Iran.

The move has triggered warnings from climate experts
who point to coal’s devastating environmental impact,
and say the energy crisis should be a wake up call
for governments to invest in renewables,
which can offer a more stable supply that is not exposed to price shocks.

Across the region, from Bangladesh to South Korea,
governments are trying to compensate for a drop off in imported energy,
much of which comes from the Middle East.

South Korea said it will delay the shutdown of coal-fired power plants
and has lifted caps on electricity from coal,
while in Thailand, the government has increased output at the country’s largest coal-fired plant.

The Philippines, which has declared a “national energy emergency” as a result of the war,
also plans to boost operations of its coal-fired power plants.

In South Asia, India, which relies on coal for nearly 75% of its power generation,
has asked its coal plants to run at maximum capacity and avoid planned outages,
while Bangladesh increased coal-fired power generation and coal-fired power imports in March.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/01/iran-energy-crisis-asia-dirty-fuels-coal?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

A US government panel on Tuesday exempted oil and gas drilling in ...

2026-04-01T03:46:01Z

A US government panel on Tuesday exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act (ESA),
-- a move which critics say could doom a rare whale species and harm other marine life.

The Endangered Species Committee
– which had not convened in more than three decades
– voted to approve the request for the ESA exemption at the request of the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth has said environmentalists’ lawsuits against the industry threatened to hobble the nation’s energy supply,
-- while environmentalists fear drilling could kill off protected species including Rice’s whales, whooping cranes and sea turtles.

Only about 51 Rice’s whales remain,
and they and other wildlife are largely on the brink of extinction
because of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig spill, which devastated the gulf when it leaked about 210m gallons.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/31/gulf-of-mexico-drilling-endangered-species?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The gap between what artificial intelligence promised and what ...

2026-04-01T03:07:22Z

The gap between what artificial intelligence promised and what the battlefield delivered has become the defining scandal of the Iran war.

AI-powered targeting systems generated over 1,000 strike coordinates in the first 24 hours.

AI simulations projected rapid regime collapse.

AI logistics models forecast a 12-hour securing of the Strait of Hormuz.

None of it happened as predicted.

Thirteen American service members are dead,
over 200 wounded,
oil has breached $120 a barrel,
and the regime in Tehran
— far from collapsing
— has installed a new supreme leader and triggered nationalist rallies
rather than the pro-US uprising planners had expected.

A growing body of evidence, drawn from leaked planning documents, academic research, and the testimony of intelligence professionals,
suggests that the most consequential military operation of the twenty-first century
may have been shaped less by strategic necessity than by a phenomenon researchers now call
AI sycophancy
— the tendency of large language models to tell their users exactly what they want to hear

https://houseofsaud.com/iran-war-ai-psychosis-sycophancy-rlhf/

What happens on Tuesday is a matter of life and death. The ...

2026-03-30T04:43:03Z

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

The Donald Trump - JD Vance administration has sentenced ...

2026-03-29T23:50:16Z

The Donald Trump - JD Vance administration has sentenced Middletown, Ohio
— Vance's hometown
— to decades of environmental devastation
by canceling a $500 million federal grant that would have transformed a major steel plant into the world's cleanest industrial facility.

Instead, Cleveland-Cliffs is now planning to reline its aging blast furnace with coal and coke,
locking the region into at least 15 to 18 more years of toxic pollution and the health consequences that come with it.

The facility is already the 11th worst carbon monoxide emitter in the United States, according to EPA data from 2020.

The Biden administration had attempted to modernize the facility.

The $500 million grant would have replaced the coke-burning infrastructure with a hydrogen-powered furnace that,
according to some analyses,
would have made Middletown the lowest greenhouse gas-emitting steel plant in the world.

Instead, Trump and Vance have prioritized fossil fuels over clean energy and human health in the vice president's own backyard.

Local residents are already suffering.

Vivian Adams, who moved to Middletown from Louisville just four years ago, has watched her six-year-old daughter's health collapse.

"My daughter was born prematurely so she already had lung issues, but it's gotten worse.

She stays sick and coughing and can't breathe.

She's had to go on everyday medication for her asthma, plus she has a rescue inhaler," Adams said.

The environmental contamination is inescapable.

"The smell some days is absolutely awful,"
Adams said.

"We sit on our chairs and there's a bunch of black stuff on them, on our vehicle, it's soot.

It's on their toys, so you can't leave them outside."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/voters-in-vances-hometown-furious-at-trump-admin-siding-with-horrible-polluter/ar-AA1ZEMan

I feel like—from all sides—this case is The Big Moment for ...

2026-03-29T23:06:53Z

I feel like—from all sides—this case is The Big Moment for SCOTUS.

Have they completely abdicated or is there any semblance of separation of powers and rule of law?

If they side with Trump it feels like a death knell of sorts.
... If we aren’t there already.

-- Kendyl Hanks

https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3mia6yhbgws22

The 1898 Supreme Court case of "United States v. Wong Kim ...

2026-03-29T17:51:58Z

The 1898 Supreme Court case of "United States v. Wong Kim Ark" established an important precedent in its interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment

-- in that it cemented birthright citizenship for children of all immigrants.

For over a century, anyone born on U.S. soil has automatically been conferred citizenship at birth regardless of their parents’ immigration or citizenship status.

While most legal scholars across the political spectrum have maintained that the Fourteenth Amendment interpreted through Wong Kim Ark unequivocally extends birthright citizenship to anyone born in the United States,

anti-immigrant political factions have pushed to restrict birthright citizenship
—primarily, attempting to deny it to children born in the United States to undocumented immigrant parents.

In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced to reporters that he was looking “very seriously” at ending birthright citizenship,
a warning that lacked details and did not come to fruition.

On January 20, 2025, one of the first actions President Trump took after being inaugurated was to issue an executive order purporting to deny birthright citizenship to children born of undocumented parents
or whose parents are in the country on temporary status.

Litigation ensued shortly after the administration issued the order, and its implementation has been blocked by the courts as of January 23.

The 1844 New York court case of "Lynch v. Clarke" was one of the first cases to address the concept of birthplace-based citizenship in the United States,
even though it did so in the context of deciding an inheritance in New York.

Julia Lynch was born in New York to two Irish parents who were temporary visitors in the United States.

Soon after her birth, Lynch and her family returned to Ireland without declaring an intent to be naturalized.

Although she remained in Ireland for twenty years after her birth,
a U.S. court later used the principle of "jus soli", or birthplace-based citizenship,
to decide that she was an American citizen at the time of her birth.

The Court ruled that her prolonged residence in Ireland succeeding her birth did not affect her birthright citizenship in the United States.

Judge Lewis Sandford wrote in 1844,
“I can entertain no doubt, but that by the law of the United States,
every person born within the dominions and allegiance of the United States,
whatever were the situation of his parents,
is a natural born citizen."

The Lynch case is one of the few examples of how courts at the time applied the basic principle of citizenship based on some people’s birth in the United States.

But Thirteen years after Lynch, the Supreme Court’s infamous
"Dred Scott" decision addressed the question of whether the descendants of people who were enslaved and brought to the United States were citizens entitled to the relevant rights and privileges granted to citizens under the Constitution.

The Court enshrined the principle that enslaved people and people of African descent were not citizens of the United States,
and in doing so rejected birthright citizenship for people of color
and abrogated the concept that Black Americans were citizens of the United States by virtue of being born in the country.

The Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed certain rights for African Americans in all the states,
was enacted following the end of the Civil War
and sought to rectify the Dred Scott decision.

Among other things, the Fourteenth Amendment sought to ensure birthright citizenship for everyone born on U.S. territory regardless of race.

The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment states the following:
👉 “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

While the fight for citizenship recognition continued well after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment,
the aim of the Amendment was to eliminate the existence of a class of people who were subjected to American law,
but excluded from American legal rights.

In essence, the use of
"jus soli" to confer citizenship to those born on U.S. soil was to ensure that all those born within the country’s territory,
regardless of race,
would be citizens.

Nevertheless, some groups continued to be excluded from recognition as citizens on the basis of race.

The Fourteenth Amendment became the basis for landmark Supreme Court rulings over the years addressing birthright citizenship.

Most notably, the 1898 ruling in
"United States v. Wong Kim Ark" established the explicit precedent that any person born in the United States is a citizen by birth.

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/birthright-citizenship-united-states/

Many ICE detention facilities are run by large private companies, ...

2026-03-29T11:17:50Z

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

Trump's war on Iran is the perfect embodiment of all that is ...

2026-03-29T01:42:49Z

Trump's war on Iran is the perfect embodiment of all that is wrong with our ongoing fossil fuel dependence.

And it puts an exclamation mark on the case for a clean energy transition.

Renewable energy promises a more secure, domestically sustainable and inexhaustible energy source
— via wind, solar, geothermal and energy storage technology.

It doesn't lead to the further warming of our planet and the destabilization of our climate.

And it doesn't lead to us fighting dangerous, often misguided, wars in far-flung lands.

https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/fossil-fuels/our-fossil-fuel-economy-is-a-house-of-cards-and-trumps-war-in-iran-is-about-to-topple-it-the-need-for-a-clean-energy-transition-has-never-been-clearer-opinion

A Palestinian middle school student in Michigan who was publicly ...

2026-03-28T22:46:37Z

A Palestinian middle school student in Michigan
who was publicly admonished for refusing to stand for the pledge of allegiance as part of a personal protest against the war on Gaza
has settled with her school district following a lawsuit around her first amendment free speech rights.

The teenager, identified as DK in court documents, said she faced racism from a teacher at the West Middle school in Canton, Michigan,
after she did not participate in the pledge.
The teacher reportedly told DK to “go back to her country”, Fox 2 Detroit reported.
In a statement following the settlement, DK called the ordeal “terrifying” and “overwhelming” at times.

“But it taught me the importance of speaking up for what I believe is right,” said DK.
“I feel proud of the outcome and of being part of something that reinforces how important free speech is.
I’ve learned that even when it feels uncomfortable or risky, speaking out can make a difference,
not just for me, but for others as well.”

DK, who is 14, chose not to participate in the pledge on 10 January 2025 given the continuing war on Gaza.
“I decided I wanted to sit down because I didn’t feel comfortable standing because of what’s happening in Palestine,” said DK at a February press conference.

After the pledge, DK said that a teacher told the class that “anyone that was sitting down was being very disrespectful to soldiers, to America”.
DK said she tried to explain her view to the instructor but was told that if she did not like the US, she should go back to her own country. DK later left the room in tears.
The Arab American Civil Rights League and the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan later filed a lawsuit in June 2025 against the Plymouth-Canton community schools district on behalf of DK.
As a part of the recent settlement,
the Plymouth-Canton community schools district has pledged to provide diversity, sensitivity, and first amendment training for staff.
The district has also agreed not to punish DK, remove any indication from school files that suggest her protest was inappropriate and provide needed counseling.

Jacob Khalaf, DK’s father, applauded his daughter for her bravery in advocating for her freedom of speech.
“My daughter has shown her strong moral fiber throughout all of this,”
he said in a statement to Fox 2 Detroit.

“She had the courage to resist when a person in authority tried to make her relinquish her right to free speech,
and then, with the help of the ACLU and ACRL, brought a lawsuit to make sure her first amendment rights, as well as those of others, were protected.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/28/michigan-student-protesting-gaza-war-school-settlement?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Since Trump took office, his administration has mounted an ...

2026-03-28T16:54:41Z

Since Trump took office, his administration has mounted an aggressive campaign to use federal law enforcement agencies to pursue his political adversaries.  The Justice Department filed criminal cases against former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, for example.

A judge threw out both indictments in November, ruling that Lindsey Halligan, the prosecutor overseeing both cases, had been unlawfully appointed.

 Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte — a staunch Trump ally — referred Swalwell to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution over mortgage fraud allegations,
but the department never indicted Swalwell.

Swalwell sued Pulte, saying he unlawfully looked used his position to look through private mortgage fraud documents, but he ultimately dropped the lawsuit.
 The department is also investigating Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell over the cost of the Fed’s recent building renovations.

A federal prosecutor acknowledged in a closed-door hearing this month that the department did not have evidence of wrongdoing, The Post has reported. 
Even against this backdrop, a proposal to release extensive files, send agents to China to interview a suspected intelligence operative and offer her a U.S. visa in exchange for revelations about a U.S. congressman would be extraordinary.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/28/fbi-patel-eric-swalwell/

G-7 foreign ministers agreed to adopt a declaration on Friday ...

2026-03-28T03:22:25Z

G-7 foreign ministers agreed to adopt a declaration on Friday
calling for the “immediate cessation” of attacks on civilian population centers and infrastructure.
“Nothing justifies deliberately targeting civilians during armed conflicts,
nor carrying out attacks against diplomatic facilities,”
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said, adding that the declaration
“also reaffirms the absolute necessity of permanently restoring free and safe navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Meanwhile, it remains unclear just how close (if at all) the Iran war is to reaching a diplomatic solution.
Rubio reportedly told the conference’s attendees on Friday that Washington is still communicating with Tehran via mediators -- but is close to holding serious negotiations.
On Thursday, Trump gave Tehran another 10 daysto reopen Hormuz or else face attacks on its energy infrastructure.

Rubio’s comments come amid reports that the U.S. Defense Department is considering deploying
at least 10,000 additional combat troops to the Middle East in the coming days.
Rubio said on Friday that the United States can achieve its aims in Iran without ground troops
but that it was deploying some to the region “to give the president maximum optionality and maximum opportunity to adjust the contingencies, should they emerge.”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/27/rubio-g7-us-iran-war-two-four-weeks-nato-negotiations/

Judge blocks Pentagon order branding Anthropic a national ...

2026-03-28T02:10:27Z

Judge blocks Pentagon order branding Anthropic a national security risk

A federal judge in San Francisco blocked a Pentagon order Thursday labeling the artificial intelligence company Anthropic a national security risk,
saying officials had likely violated the law and retaliated against the firm for speaking publicly about how it wanted its technology to be used.
 “Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government,”
District Court Judge Rita F. Lin wrote.
 The immediate practical implications of the ruling are unclear,
but it represents a clear victory for the AI lab, which has been involved in a bitter power struggle with the Defense Department over the use of its Claude system by the military.

Defense officials pushed the company to allow for the technology to be used for any lawful purpose,
but Anthropic wanted a bar on it being used in mass domestic surveillance and to power fully autonomous weapons.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/26/pentagon-anthropic-national-security-risk-order-blocked/

As Trump feels pressure to end war, allies fear what Iran may do ...

2026-03-28T02:07:52Z

As Trump feels pressure to end war, allies fear what Iran may do next

The attack Trump launched Feb. 28 has transformed the risks in the region.

The Strait of Hormuz
— which was open and secure before the fighting began
— is now a danger zone.

And many U.S. allies among the Arab states lining the Persian Gulf,
who were skeptical about the war in the first place,
now fear that a wounded Iran run by hard-line leaders imperils their populations.
 That leaves the United States with a dilemma,
part of which Trump summed up in a Cabinet meeting on Thursday in which he talked about shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
 “The problem with the straits is this,” Trump said. “
Let’s say we do a great job. We say we got 99 percent.
One percent is unacceptable, because one percent is a missile going into the hull of a ship that cost $1 billion.”
 “If we do a 99 percent decimation, that’s no good,” he said.
 What Trump didn’t say explicitly,
but what Iranian officials appear to be counting on, is that the 99-1 asymmetry gives Tehran significant leverage despite being badly outgunned by the combined U.S. and Israeli bombardment.  
On Friday, the price of Brent crude rose above $113 a barrel.
Asian markets closed slightly lower and European markets were mostly flat,
suggesting that Trump’s move to delay attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure for 10 days had failed to reassure investors.
 Also on Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio attended a meeting of Group of Seven foreign ministers in France,
where he warned allies that Iran may seek to impose a toll on the strait,
which he said would be “unacceptable” and “illegal.”

He did not say the U.S. would lead a response to this challenge despite Washington’s role in initiating hostilities.

“It’s important that the world have a plan,” Rubio told reporters in France.  “Iran wants to fight this war of attrition,” said Nate Swanson,
a former diplomat who was on Trump’s Iran negotiations team last year
and is now at the Atlantic Council,
a think tank.

“Once the war got underway, they had two objectives.
One was to survive,
but the second was to outlast Trump.

Make the U.S. feel so much pain through the economy,
strikes on the energy infrastructure,
that they don’t do it again.

What they’re trying to ensure is that Israel doesn’t go in and do a war like they do in Lebanon every six months.”  Having demonstrated that they can inflict damage on the world’s economy by closing down the Strait even while under major bombardment from Israel and the U.S.,
Iranian leaders have publicly stuck to maximal demands.

They have insisted the U.S. compensate them for damage and pledge not to resume attacks in the future.
 Whether there is room for a deal remains unclear, though Trump said Thursday that the talks were going well.
 “I read a story today that I’m desperate to make a deal. I’m not,” Trump said.

“I’m the opposite of desperate. I don’t care. …
In fact, we have other targets we want to hit before we leave.”
 Later Thursday, he extended the deadline to reach a deal, saying that he was “pausing the period of Energy Plant destruction by 10 Days” to allow talks to continue.
 So far, the gap between the two sides remains vast, said Ilan Goldenberg,
who advised the Biden White House on Middle East policy.
 “The American position was essentially Iranian surrender,
and the Iranian response was essentially American surrender,” he said.

“The American position was, ‘Get rid of your nuclear program, missiles and proxies,’
and the Iranian position was, ‘Compensate us for our losses, and get out of the Middle East.’”  Arab nations around the Persian Gulf that are now concerned about strikes from Iran are “getting totally screwed,” Goldenberg said.

“They didn’t want this. They advised against it. They tried to stop it.

But it’s one thing to say now you have to finish the job.
It’s another thing to have a definition of what that means"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/27/trump-iran-negotiations-dilemma/

Mathematicians are threatening to boycott the field’s largest, ...

2026-03-27T12:44:29Z

Mathematicians are threatening to boycott the field’s largest, most prestigious gathering this summer
if it takes place in the U.S., as currently planned.

Every four years since the turn of the twentieth century,
the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) has brought together mathematicians from all over the world to share the latest breakthroughs and plot the field’s future.

Famous speeches delivered at the congress have gone on to redefine entire subfields of math.

The ICM is also where math’s most hallowed prize, the Fields Medal, is awarded.

This July, the ICM is slated to take place in Philadelphia
—the first time in 40 years that it’s been held in the U.S.

Now a petition to move the event elsewhere is circulating among mathematicians.

It cites the recent American military actions in Venezuela and Iran,
the suspension of visas from 75 countries
and the continued presence of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents across major U.S. cities
as contrary to the ICM’s goal of fostering “a sense of international unity amongst mathematicians.”

As of this writing, more than 1,500 mathematicians have signed the petition,
which states that they plan to boycott the event if it isn’t moved outside the U.S.

The list of signatories includes many of the field’s most prominent names,
more than 50 of whom have spoken at previous congresses.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-mathematicians-are-boycotting-their-biggest-conference/

Donald Trump extended his deadline for Iran to open the strait of ...

2026-03-27T02:09:22Z

Donald Trump extended his deadline for Iran to open the strait of Hormuz by 10 days to 6 April
after saying talks are “going very well”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/26/donald-trump-urges-iran-end-war-or-face-assassinations?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called ...

2026-03-26T15:40:02Z

The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven.
Nobody was arguing about Maven.
Eight years ago, Maven was the most contested project in Silicon Valley.
In 2018, more than 4,000 Google employees signed a letter opposing the company’s contract to build artificial intelligence for the Pentagon’s targeting systems.
Workers organised a walk out.
Engineers quit.
And Google ultimately abandoned the contract.
Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company and defence contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, took it over
and spent the next six years building Maven into a targeting infrastructure that pulls together satellite imagery, signals intelligence and sensor data to identify targets and carry them through every step from first detection to the order to strike.

The building in Minab had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that, according to CNN, had not been updated to reflect that the building had been separated from the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound and converted into a school, -- a change that satellite imagery shows had occurred by 2016 at the latest.
A chatbot did not kill those children.
People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal.
By the start of the Iran war, Maven
– the system that had enabled that speed
– had sunk into the plumbing,
it had become part of the military’s infrastructure,
-- and the argument was all about Claude.
This obsession with Claude is a kind of AI psychosis, though not of the kind we normally talk about, and it afflicts critics and opponents of the technology as fiercely as it does its boosters.
You do not have to use a language model to let it organise your attention or distort your thinking.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The United Nations General Assembly has voted to recognise the ...

2026-03-26T14:35:41Z

The United Nations General Assembly has voted to recognise the enslavement of Africans during the transatlantic slave trade as
"the gravest crime against humanity",
a move advocates hope will pave the way for healing and justice.

The resolution - proposed by Ghana - called for this designation, while also urging UN member states to consider apologising for the slave trade and contributing to a reparations fund.

It does not mention a specific amount of money.

The proposal was adopted with 123 votes in favour and three against
- the United States, Israel and Argentina

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg06q36052o?xtor=AL-71-%5Bpartner%5D-%5Bbbc.news.twitter%5D-%5Bheadline%5D-%5Bnews%5D-%5Bbizdev%5D-%5Bisapi%5D&at_medium=social&at_campaign=Social_Flow&at_format=link&at_campaign_type=owned&at_ptr_name=twitter&at_bbc_team=editorial&at_link_id=27703418-2874-11F1-8FB7-D66EDAB0C0E6&at_link_type=web_link&at_link_origin=BBCNews

Not long after Donald Trump said the US was engaged in “strong ...

2026-03-26T14:02:19Z

Not long after Donald Trump said the US was engaged in “strong talks” to bring the war with Iran to an end this week,
Qatar took the unusual step of distancing itself from the alleged diplomatic negotiations.

Qatar was not involved in any mediation efforts, said government spokesperson Majed al-Ansari at a briefing on Tuesday night,
before adding as a telling aside:
“If they exist.”

It signalled a notable break from Qatar’s historic and recurring position as chief mediator in Middle East and wider regional conflicts

“They’ve been burned by their previous experience,”
said Bilal Saab, senior managing director of advisory group Trends US and former Pentagon official in the first Trump administration.

He added: “They previously thought they played a useful mediating role
– until they realised that it was all for naught.

Not to mention that they have been directly implicated in the war and are still being attacked by the Iranians.

So there’s a lot of pent-up frustration and disappointment that is affecting their willingness, and perhaps even ability,
to mediate anything.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/26/gulf-states-scepticism-over-alleged-us-iran-talks-signals-a-distrust-of-trump?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Iran said it is done dealing with the two emissaries Donald Trump ...

2026-03-26T04:05:34Z

Iran said it is done dealing with the two emissaries Donald Trump has tasked with leading negotiations in the Middle East.
The country, which Trump began striking over three weeks ago, is not keen on any more attempts at negotiations with Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East,
Steve Witkoff, or Trump’s son-in-law,
Jared Kushner, both of whom were leading the nuclear negotiations with Iran before the war.

Iran now says it will only engage in negotiations with Vice President
JD Vance, according to a report in The Guardian
https://www.thedailybeast.com/iran-gives-trump-a-negotiation-ultimatum-on-jd-vance-sidelining-steve-witkoff-and-jared-kushner/

Over two days in October 2025, up to 10,000 people are believed ...

2026-03-25T14:44:20Z

Over two days in October 2025, up to 10,000 people are believed to have been massacred;
a further 40,000 civilians from the Sudanese city are still unaccounted for.

Heroism, horror and the ‘pits of hell’: inside the last days of El Fasher

This is the story of what happened

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/mar/25/heroism-horror-and-the-pits-of-hell-inside-the-last-days-of-el-fasher?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Organizers across the U.S. are planning more than 3,000 local ...

2026-03-25T06:25:44Z

Organizers across the U.S. are planning more than 3,000 local events Saturday for
No Kings Day of Nonviolent Action.

https://www.axios.com/2025/10/17/trump-no-kings-protest-safety-tips

Upcoming state- or territory-wide primary election registration ...

2026-03-23T12:34:38Z

Upcoming state- or territory-wide primary election registration deadlines
Some states or territories have multiple deadlines, depending on voter registration method.
Click on an individual state/territory for all its deadlines.
Military and overseas citizen voters may have different registration deadlines.

https://apps.npr.org/voter-registration-2026-mail/?utm_id=3746350&orgid=305&uniquet=6K15GwT-2awgWEMBzjXH3Q&utm_att1=

‘Sunlight travels 93 million miles to reach the earth, not one ...

2026-03-22T22:59:37Z

‘Sunlight travels 93 million miles to reach the earth, not one of them through the Strait of Hormuz,”

said Bill McKibben, American environmentalist

https://www.thenational.scot/business/25957356.dependency-oil-ludicrous-scotlands-green-jackpot/

As media scrutiny intensifies on Trump’s Iran war blunders, an ...

2026-03-22T21:55:29Z

As media scrutiny intensifies on Trump’s Iran war blunders,
an international relations expert explains the extraordinary depths of failure here
—and why he may now attempt a domestic information crackdown:

The president’s tone and his supposition that media is not telling his story
—not telling the truth
—is extremely problematic.

The use of government resources to now pursue these claims as if they are reality is something that should concern us all,
in the same way they’ve pushed the line on defining what is a domestic terrorist or not.

The pursuit of people not telling the truth,
using sanctions from the U.S. government,
could be extremely significant.

We’ve already seen people self-editing and sort of suppressing their views
—in universities, in the media and other places
—for fear of the kind of things Trump lashes out at.

Part of the problem is he has already decided whatever he thinks is reality is reality
—that’s a challenge for anyone in charge of anything.

We know for sure that the people around him don’t give him the information.

They give him the three bullet points written in crayon, or whatever, that he wants to see.

The intelligence being presented to him has been extra-edited in the context of this administration.

It’s been presented—in a range of other stories we know from the past—to suit his views,
to suit his needs.

They’re not talking about what Russia is doing.

He doesn’t believe the story about how they’re helping Iran with intelligence, et cetera.

Everything he’s presented with is whatever is meant to prop up his view of the moment.

No one can make valid decisions living in the soup of lies.

They know they’re losing their own base, especially the manosphere podcaster base, with this war.

Nobody signed up for let’s-invade-Iran.

There are plenty of people who are now on the bandwagon, who are transmitting the message that victory is near,
that our huge military success of the first days proves we are the greatest and whatever.

I understand that there are people who support this. It’s not like anybody is in love with the mullahs and wants them to return to power—the same way we don’t want Maduro to be back in power.

This is not the choice that anyone is making.

But it is not popular.

It is clear there’s a lot of dissent in the influencer space that Trump pays a lot of credence to,
in order to access younger, especially younger male, voters.

They’re not happy.
They don’t like this.

The attacks on the press still resonate a lot with his base,
and it will be a boost to him in the context of not winning on any other message.

They all just mirror Trump’s behavior now.

There’s no normal press secretaries.
There’s no normal communications.
It’s all just the same
'we’re-going-to-punch-you-in-the-face' stuff.

If it was a vaguely normal administration, we would have done what we did all the times we hit a school in Afghanistan or whatever
-- which is you just say, It’s under investigation,
it is a likely targeting error, we’re sorry

—you don’t even have to say sorry!

Just admit it.
Then everybody forgets, and we’ll never discuss it again,
-- because that’s how we are as a population.

We don’t really think about the human cost of war too much.

But they just cannot
—in any instance
—present what they view as weakness.

I don’t think the instincts that they have been able to coast by on for the last year are going to serve them particularly well in the context where reality is suddenly going to be biting us all a lot.

They all just mirror Trump’s behavior now.

There’s no normal press secretaries.
There’s no normal communications.

It’s all just the same
'we’re-going-to-punch-you-in-the-face' stuff.

But they just cannot
—in any instance
—present what they view as weakness.

https://newrepublic.com/article/207842/transcript-trump-erupts-damning-leaks-war-blunders-hit-hard?utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_source=Bluesky&utm_medium=social

Uranus smells like farts, scientists confirm ...

2026-03-22T20:46:17Z

Uranus smells like farts,
scientists confirm
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-tuesday-full-episode-1.4633051/uranus-smells-like-farts-scientists-confirm-1.4633058

Kelly Loeffler, the new administrator of the Small Business ...

2026-03-22T14:45:43Z

Kelly Loeffler, the new administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA),
announced recently that the agency charged with supporting the businesses that are the backbone of the US economy
would no longer be approving loans to small business owners unless they are US citizens.

If you’re a legal, tax-paying immigrant with a green card and full residency? No loans for you.
This is a big mistake.

It’s one thing to go after and deport undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes.
But it’s difficult to watch undocumented immigrants who have committed no crime other than trying to make a better life for their families in this country suffer a similar consequence
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/22/small-business-administration-immigrants-political?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Jeff Webb, a conservative political activist considered to be ...

2026-03-22T06:59:52Z

Jeff Webb,
a conservative political activist considered to be Charlie Kirk’s “mentor”
has died after he fell while playing pickleball

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/charlie-kirks-mentor-dies-after-36904048

Western car manufacturers are making what one former boss calls a ...

2026-03-22T01:33:22Z

Western car manufacturers are making what one former boss calls a
“profound strategic mistake”
as they pull back from electric vehicles (EVs) and refocus on the combustion engine -- just as oil prices are soaring once again.

Experts say the industry’s future
– and that of tens of millions of jobs
– could be on the line.

This time, however, the threat is from China.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/21/west-carmakers-retreat-electric-vehicle-risks-irrelevance-iran-war-evs-china?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Sources familiar with the discussions reveal that the Pentagon ...

2026-03-21T22:08:37Z

Sources familiar with the discussions reveal that the Pentagon has mapped out scenarios involving boots on the ground in Iran.

Among the units reportedly considered is the 82nd Airborne Division, one of the military’s most elite rapid-response forces, known for its ability to deploy quickly into high-risk combat zones.

The reported planning includes not only troop deployment but also operational logistics
—such as how to detain enemy combatants and manage potential engagements within Iranian territory.

These details suggest a level of preparation typically associated with imminent or high-probability scenarios, rather than distant contingencies.
Further fueling speculation, reports indicate that training exercises involving the 82nd Airborne Division were recently canceled without clear explanation
—an unusual move that some analysts interpret as a possible sign of redeployment readiness.

The reported plans come amid a broader military buildup in the region. Amphibious warships carrying thousands of U.S. service members
—including Marines—have already departed from the United States.
Additional naval groups are reportedly en route, potentially bringing the total number of deployed personnel to as many as 8,000.

These forces are said to be equipped with advanced military assets, including F-35 fighter jets and amphibious assault vehicles capable of supporting a full-scale ground operation.

Such a buildup significantly increases the potential for rapid escalation, particularly in an already volatile region.
https://allchronology.com/2026/03/21/he-said-no-troops-but-secret-war-plans-were-already-in-motion-whats-really-happening-behind-the-scenes/

If the "SAVE act" passes most people registering to vote ...

2026-03-21T15:32:38Z

If the "SAVE act" passes most people registering to vote would have to present documents in person at an elections office, including people who vote by mail.
Advocacy groups that oppose the legislation say that the bill would crush voter registration efforts ahead of this year’s elections.
The bill would create new penalties for election officials who register applicants who have not presented documentary proof of citizenship.
Opponents say that provision could potentially scare workers into turning away valid applicants while also discouraging people from working or volunteering at polling locations.
It would also allow private individuals to sue election officials in some circumstances.

The legislation would require states to share voters’ information with the Department of Homeland Security as a way to verify the citizenship of the names on the voter rolls
—giving the federal government unprecedented access to state voter data.

Many states are already embroiled in legal fights with the Trump administration over demands that they provide voter information
https://www.mississippifreepress.org/whats-in-the-voting-bill-that-republicans-are-pushing-to-the-senate-floor/?utm_content=buffer87e89&utm_medium=social&utm_source=bufferapp.com&utm_campaign=bufferbsky

With the International Energy Agency calling the war “the ...

2026-03-21T15:26:29Z

With the International Energy Agency calling the war
“the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,”
most experts don’t expect prices to come down soon.  Regular gas averaging $4 per gallon seems certain in the coming weeks, experts say.
 “It’s more like a ‘when’ than an ‘if,’”
said Patrick De Haan, petroleum analyst at GasBuddy.
 A $4 national average would mean $5.79 a gallon in California,
a state with among the highest prices

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/03/21/gas-prices-miles-per-gallon-iran-war/

NO KINGS 3 RALLY AND MARCH SAT. MARCH 28 ALAMEDA PARK SANTA ...

2026-03-20T23:37:45Z

NO KINGS 3

RALLY AND MARCH

SAT. MARCH 28
ALAMEDA PARK
SANTA BARBARA

11 AM: MEET OUR COMMUNITY PARTNERS
12:30 PM: RALLY AND SPEECHES
1:30 PM: MARCH TO DE LA GUERRA PLAZA

https://bsky.app/profile/indivisiblesb.bsky.social/post/3mhjio5jmxc22

The US is reportedly considering plans to occupy or blockade ...

2026-03-20T15:12:45Z

The US is reportedly considering plans to occupy or blockade Iran’s Kharg Island
to pressure Tehran to reopen the strait of Hormuz,
despite earlier suggestions by Donald Trump that he was not leaning towards putting “boots on the ground”.

Any attempt to physically occupy Kharg Island would entail high risks,
exposing American forces there to Iranian drone and rocket fire in a geographically confined space.

The report emerged as Iran’s military threatened it would
“hunt down” officials and military commanders from the United States and Israel
wherever it could find them in the world.

“We are watching your cowardly officials and commanders, pilots and wicked soldiers,”
the armed forces spokesperson Abolfazl Shekarchi said,
quoted by state TV.
“From now on, based on the information we have on you,
the promenades, resorts and tourist and entertainment centres in the world will not be safe.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/20/us-considering-occupying-iran-kharg-island-hormuz-strait-trump?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

After the Iran war, the Gulf will never be the same again Most ...

2026-03-19T15:10:22Z

After the Iran war, the Gulf will never be the same again

Most observers are rightly focusing on the near-term effects of the war in Iran.

In addition to the mounting human cost,
the war has caused the largest supply shock in oil market history by volume and percentage of global supply affected.
 But equally important, if less visible, are the long-term impacts that war will have on the global economy.

Iran will very likely have a government that is hostile to the United States after the war is over.

As a result, political risk surrounding the Gulf will cause structurally higher prices in many sectors,
boosting inflation rates and degrading the appeal of further investment in the Middle East.  Iran’s government will remain hard line.

New Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is, by reputation,
an authoritarian figure with close connections to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,
the elite and ideological branch of Iran’s armed forces.

He will have to share power with other conservatives including
Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, speaker of the parliament,
and Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, who heads the IRGC.

Moreover, Iran’s decentralized strategy for the war included mapping layers of succession for all key posts,
ensuring that even if the U.S. or Israel kills the current crop of leaders,
other hard liners will easily replace them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/19/iran-gulf-economy-risk/

Drones over base where Rubio, Hegseth live raise security ...

2026-03-19T15:05:31Z

Drones over base where Rubio, Hegseth live raise security concerns

 U.S. officials detected unidentified drones above the Washington Army base where Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth live,
according to three people briefed on the situation.

Officials have not determined where they came from, two of the people said. 
The military is monitoring potential threats more closely because of the heightened alert level as the United States and Israel strike Iran

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/18/hegseth-rubio-drone-targeting-iran/

Police officers raided the rapper Afroman's Ohio home, ... ...

2026-03-19T03:13:35Z

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/

COVID may have killed significantly more people in the U.S. in ...

2026-03-19T02:25:47Z

COVID may have killed significantly more people in the U.S. in the first two years of the pandemic than official records indicate, with as many as one overlooked death for every five recorded ones. That brings the total to nearly one million deaths just in 2020 and 2021.

That calculation comes from research published today in Science Advances that seeks to understand how many COVID deaths fell through the cracks of official reporting systems. The untallied cases show the burden of the pandemic in the U.S. fell most heavily on marginalized people.
“These vulnerable groups are just taking a higher risk at every step, and the accumulation of all of that is this disparity in COVID mortality at the end,” says Mathew Kiang, an epidemiologist at Stanford University and a co-author of the study.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-killed-150-000-more-people-in-its-first-two-years-than-official-toll/

A recent spate of espionage and cybercriminal campaigns has ...

2026-03-19T01:45:02Z

A recent spate of espionage and cybercriminal campaigns has deployed phone-takeover tools,
embedded in infected websites,
to indiscriminately hack phones by the thousands.
And one new technique in particular
—capable of taking over any of hundreds of millions of iOS devices
—has appeared on the web in an easily reusable form, putting a significant fraction of the world's iPhone users at risk.
https://www.wired.com/story/coruna-iphone-hacking-toolkit-us-government/

The United States was not ready for this war. Secretary of State ...

2026-03-19T00:42:05Z

The United States was not ready for this war.

Secretary of State Rubio publicly acknowledged the structural mismatch before the operation began:

Iran produces more than 100 ballistic missiles per month,
against six or seven interceptors that the United States can manufacture in the same period.

The Shahed-136 drone costs between twenty and fifty thousand dollars to produce.
-- The PAC-3 interceptor that destroys it costs four million.

The THAAD interceptor costs twelve point seven million.

The twelve-day war in June 2025 had already consumed approximately 150 THAAD interceptors
— roughly a quarter of the entire global supply.

The first nine days of Epic Fury burned through an additional 40 THAAD,
90 Patriot, and over 180 carrier-based interceptors.

Current THAAD production runs at approximately eight missiles per month.

The January 2026 contract with Lockheed Martin to quadruple production to 400 per year requires seven years to reach full capacity.

New interceptors will not arrive in meaningful volumes before 2028.

The Stimson Center’s analysts put the timeline to critical arsenal depletion at four to five weeks.

At that point, the United States faces a choice that no American strategic planner has been willing to articulate publicly
— who to defend: Israel, Taiwan, or tankers in the Gulf.

Because defending all three simultaneously has proven beyond American capacity.

https://medium.com/@cheslavsky/the-hormuz-trap-how-beijing-won-a-war-without-firing-a-single-missile-f68522fe7888

If you need a cathartic release from the news that Amazon laid ...

2026-03-18T23:26:01Z

If you need a cathartic release from the news that
Amazon laid off 16,000 workers,
Block chopped nearly half its workforce,
Atlassian pared back 10% of staffers,
and Meta is reportedly considering another massive round of layoffs
-- all in the name of AI,

then we invite you to browse the responses to a recent
Sam Altman post on X.

Altman, the CEO of OpenAI,
shared this on Tuesday:

“I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took. Thank you for getting us to this point.”
Altman shared on Tuesday.

The problem with that sweet sentiment is that Altman’s company ushered in the AI now being used as an excuse for developer layoffs and fewer junior developer jobs.

And it did so by training on massive volumes of code written the
old-fashioned way — by the very people he’s now thanking.

His post implies that developers’ genuinely difficult-to-master craft is now like a rotary telephone:
outdated and unnecessary.

Naturally, Altman’s comments attracted memes and responses richer than his post.

While some were straight-up angry, (“You’re welcome. Nice to know that our reward is our jobs being taken away”),

much of the internet did what it always does: cracked jokes.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/18/sam-altmans-thank-you-to-coders-draws-the-memes/

Donald Trump is teaching the world a lesson - but not the one he ...

2026-03-18T22:54:51Z

Donald Trump is teaching the world a lesson
- but not the one he thinks.

The attack on Iran was meant to be a dazzling display of military supremacy.

It has instead illuminated chinks in the US’s armour.

The US president’s formidable arsenal cannot summon up an insurrection from Iran’s tyrannised and leaderless opposition.
It cannot force merchant ships to run a gauntlet of missile and drone attacks in the strait of Hormuz.
The government in Tehran and the facts of geography that give it leverage over global trade are unchanged.
Trump’s exasperation is showing.
-- He urges tanker crews to “show some guts” by sailing into harm’s way.
He calls on Nato members to provide naval chaperones and accuses them of cowardice and ingratitude for refusing.
He comes across as peevish and flustered.
Impotence is not a good look in a potentate.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/18/donald-trump-limits-us-power-slow-learner-china-iran-war?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Sergey Brin, a Google founder, has more than doubled his ...

2026-03-18T22:16:35Z

Sergey Brin, a Google founder,
has more than doubled his financial contribution to the fight against a proposed wealth tax in California.

New filings with the state show that former Alphabet president Sergey Brin donated $25m to a Super Pac dedicated to blocking the tax
-- on top of $20m he had already given.

Brin is not alone among Google’s top brass in upping his financial stake in the campaign against the ballot proposal.
The company’s former CEO
Eric Schmidt donated $1.02m,
-- adding to a previous $2m contribution.

The tech titans are battling the “California Billionaire Tax Act”,
often referred to simply as the "billionaire tax".
It’s a proposed ballot measure that would require any California resident worth more than $1bn to pay a one-off, 5% tax on their assets
to help cover education, food assistance and healthcare programs in the state.
It’s sponsored by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, and is still in the signature-gathering phase.

If the measure reaches the ballot and gains voters’ approval, the tax would apply to billionaires based on their residency as of 1 January 2026.
For Brin, worth about $247bn, the bill would likely be upwards of $12bn.
That stipulation appears to have caused him and several other billionaires to leave California at the end of last year.
Brin relocated to a $42m estate on the north-eastern shore of Lake Tahoe in Nevada,
and his Pac donations show Reno as his address.
Schmidt’s filings show his address as West Hollywood.

The Super Pac that Brin and Schmidt most recently donated to is called "Building a Better California".

It’s dedicated to sponsoring a separate ballot measure that would kneecap the billionaire tax
by banning retroactive taxes, according to the New York Times.
The Pac’s motto is “California’s best days are ahead"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/18/google-sergey-brin-california-billionaire-tax?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Curtis Yarvin has befriended Alexander Soros, son of George Soros ...

2026-03-17T00:46:04Z

Curtis Yarvin has befriended Alexander Soros, son of George Soros and chair of the Open Society Foundation, at a fancy conference in southern Bavaria.

It’s a strange sight—the son of the man long credited as liberalism’s greatest patron, arm in arm with one of today’s leading architects of neofascism.

But Yarvin has always had a talent for cultivating men with more money than sense. More on that in a moment

A new profile of Yarvin in the German publication Die Zeit captures Yarvin guzzling wine (and weeping, as he has a habit of doing lately) at an intellectual confab for “distinguished political thinkers” at a five-star Schloss Elmau spa and hotel in February.

Yarvin described Soros as “actually smart,” while Soros described Yarvin as “very nice.”

On Saturday, Yarvin posted pictures of himself with Soros, embracing and smiling like the best of friends.

During an appearance on the Anglofuturist podcast last year,
Yarvin swilled beer and laid out a dehumanizing and dystopian vision for Africa:

"Imagine a futurist Africa, Africa in 2100 and there’s a computer...
that knows how many Africans there are,
down to a single digit, where they are in terms of position—just the way, you know, if you’re, like, a rancher in Wyoming, you know where all your cattle are thanks to modern whatever
—you know where all these people are, you know what they’re doing and your goal is for them to thrive as human beings without breeding too much.
Like, you know, what a vision right?
You know, like, imagine restoring order to South Africa.
You don’t need to make South Africa all white to restore order to South Africa. You just need governance."

He suggested another target for the same treatment:
West Oakland.

His “neocolonialism” solution for the historically Black neighborhood entails allowing the Chinese government to impose an authoritarian surveillance regime

“And that’s the first step, and if there’s no compliance with these orders in Chinese—which maybe the guy doesn’t understand—I think he’ll learn to understand them,”
Yarvin said,
calling the situation a “win win” and a model for future governance.

Yarvin says in public what others can only say in private,
and he has a talent for introducing disturbing scenarios that later become reality.

Long before DOGE, Yarvin imagined a presidential administration that would install a CEO to gut the federal bureaucracy and dismantle USAID.

Many shocking aspects of our current situation can be traced back to his blogs.

So when Yarvin speaks of colonizing Africa with surveillance and eugenics, we should pay attention,
because Yarvin—clown, court jester, guru, svengali—has a talent for cultivating billionaires.

People like Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and Marc Andreessen consider him a genius.

Now, he’s cozied up with Alexander Soros.
https://www.thenerdreich.com/curtis-yarvin-compares-africans-to-cattle-cuddles-a-soros/?ref=the-nerd-reich-newsletter

Jenny O’Connell-Nowain was ready to go to jail. She had been ...

2026-03-09T14:36:08Z

Jenny O’Connell-Nowain was ready to go to jail.

She had been prepared to spend six months in the custody of the Shasta county sheriff’s office.

One of the top prosecutors in this part of far northern California had presented the evidence against her in a weeklong trial,
and a jury had delivered a guilty verdict.

A judge offered probation, but O’Connell-Nowain did not agree to the terms.

Her crime?

Sitting on the floor in front of the dais of the board of supervisors with a sign, silently protesting an official who had criticized the county elections office.

The case of a former preschool teacher with no criminal history
tried and convicted for a peaceful demonstration was shocking even for Shasta county,
which has drawn international attention for its rowdy and radical brand of conservative politics.

But what happened to O’Connell-Nowain is not just the story of one county’s crackdown on free speech
and the forces that have sown division in the community;

it is emblematic of the political turmoil that has become commonplace in this part of California
and the US more broadly.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/mar/09/fighting-extremism-redding-california?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has said that DHS ...

2026-03-09T14:31:18Z

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has said that DHS leadership change is not enough to reopen the government
and starting to fund the Department of Homeland Security again.

It comes as Republican Senator Thom Tillis said he believes White House adviser Stephen Miller “should go”
and that his role in the Trump administration has been a “big problem”.

The senior senator representing North Carolina, when asked on CNN’s State of the Union if he thinks Miller should go, during a conversation about the administration’s immigration crackdown, responded to host Jake Tapper stating “Oh, of course I do.”

“He is not worried about substance.
He’s more worried about form, but I also think that he has an outsized influence over the operations of the cabinet.
And I believe we’ve got qualified cabinet members there that sometimes are doing less than what they want to,
-- because of his direction and his outsized influence.
He’s a big problem in this administration.
He has been from the beginning,” said Tillis.

Tillis affirmed support for Department of Homeland Security Secretary pick Markwayne Mullin to replace Kristi Noem,
claiming he believes Mullin will be independent from Miller’s influence,
even though Mullin repeated similar falsehoods about the killings by federal agents of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Tillis, who is not seeking re-election this year, was the first Republican to call for the resignation or firing of DHS secretary Noem.

But Jeffries said on NBC’s Meet the Press with Kristen Welker that leadership change alone is not enough.

“What we want is a situation where ICE is actually conducting itself like every other law enforcement agency in the country
as opposed to using taxpayer dollars to brutalize or in some cases kill American citizens,” Jeffries said.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2026/mar/09/white-house-dhs-donald-trump-us-politics-latest-updates?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

RFK Jr. wanted parents to question the science. A study of 12 ...

2026-03-09T14:22:04Z

RFK Jr. wanted parents to question the science.

A study of 12 million newborns shows they listened

America’s vaccine skepticism is starting to show up in health data

https://www.memeorandum.com/260309/p36

“It’s become just too easy to go to war.” A panel about ...

2026-03-09T05:58:40Z

In reply to nevent1q…g87t
_________________________

“It’s become just too easy to go to war.”

A panel about managing combat was commissioned by
then-president Barack Obama

One of the points from its report is haunting now:

💥Clarify the decision-making process for use of force.

Such critical decisions,
currently ad hoc,
should instead be made in a systematic way
by the appropriate authority or authorities
based on the most dependable and persuasive information available
and an understanding of our national interests based on 21st-century realities.

🔥That is, something other than a serving president having a “feeling” that it was time to attack

https://fallows.substack.com/p/the-arrogance-of-ignorance

James Fallows: This week I realized that over the past 45 years ...

2026-03-09T05:41:21Z

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

Pete Hegseth, 45, a former Fox News TV host who now commands the ...

2026-03-08T14:59:21Z

Pete Hegseth, 45, a former Fox News TV host who now commands the world’s most powerful military, has this week become the face of Donald Trump’s war in Iran.

That has set off for alarm bells for critics who warn that the Secretary of Defense – pointedly rebranded “Secretary of War” – has rapidly transformed the Pentagon into the staging ground for an ideological and religious crusade.

With machismo, Christian nationalism and callousness toward the lives of US troops, they say,
Hegseth’s puerile displays on TV are aimed at sating Trump’s desire for a warmonger worthy of the manosphere.
This was reinforced by a lurid social media video that intersperses clips from Hollywood blockbusters such as Braveheart, Gladiator, Superman and Top Gun with Hegseth and real kill-shot footage of the attacks in Iran.

Janessa Goldbeck, chief executive of Vet Voice Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy organisation, said:
“Pete Hegseth is a very dangerous person.
He’s a white Christian nationalist
and has the arsenal of the United States government at his disposal
and a permission slip from President Trump to deploy carnage wherever he wishes against whomever he wishes.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/08/pete-hegseth-pentagon-trump-iran?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

There are now just three days until the special election in ...

2026-03-07T23:02:27Z

There are now just three days until the special election in Georgia to fill the seat vacated by Marjorie Taylor Greene.

20 Republicans are running.
One Democrat is running.
I'm that Democrat.

This is how we win.

This is how we take back the House and put a check on Trump's rampage against our Democracy.

I'm Shawn Harris. I'm a Democrat, Husband, Father, Retired Brigadier General, Farmer, and I'm running to represent Northwest Georgia with the seriousness, steadiness, and leadership it's been missing for years.

If you're in a position to support this campaign, I need you now more than ever.
I'm asking because it's critically important.
With three days left, please consider pitching in now to help me restore honor, integrity, and dignity to the U.S. Congress:
https://shawn-4ga.com/actblue_secure_2026-02_V-G4_S-A1

Reports emerged this week of the ⛔️death of two more ...

2026-03-07T21:00:04Z

Reports emerged this week of the
⛔️death of two more immigrants in the custody of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Emmanuel #Damas, 56, a Haitian asylum seeker, reportedly died from an infection linked to a toothache that his family said went untreated for two weeks while Damas was incarcerated at the Florence Correctional Center in Arizona.
Damas appears to be the
👉tenth person to die while in ICE custody in 2026,
which would bring the total number of people to die while incarcerated by the agency under Donald Trump to 💥at least 39.
Damas’s death was first reported by the Arizona Daily Star on March 4.
That day, ICE announced that 48-year-old Alberto #Gutierrez-#Reyes had died in a California hospital on February 27 after falling ill at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center,
where the population has skyrocketed in recent months.

“Nobody should die from a toothache,”
Chandler City Councilwoman Christine Ellis, a Haitian American and registered nurse representing the Arizona community near the prison where Damas was incarcerated told the Arizona Daily Star.
“Something has to be done."
https://truthout.org/articles/kristi-noem-is-leaving-a-trail-of-death-behind-her-in-ice-jails/

Kristi Noem repeatedly declined to deny her widely-reported ...

2026-03-05T16:05:41Z

Kristi Noem repeatedly declined to deny her widely-reported sexual relationship with her shadow chief of staff Corey Lewandowski,
twisting into all sorts of remarkable rhetorical shapes to avoid uttering the word “no” while under oath.
“I am shocked that we’re going down and peddling tabloid garbage in this committee today,”
Noem told Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.),

who pushed back: “You should be able to answer if someone asks if you or any federal official is sleeping with their subordinate. It’s the easiest—you should be wanting to answer that question.”

“I think the ridiculousness of this and the tabloids that you are quoting and referencing are insane,” Noem said later.
“You say conservative women are stupid or sluts. I am neither"

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/what-trump-really-thinks-about-his-iran-war-mission-accomplished-victory-vance-hegseth-middle-east

Escalation rarely stays confined to one place. The wider region ...

2026-03-04T18:02:35Z

Escalation rarely stays confined to one place.
The wider region is watching.

Gulf states are quietly recalibrating, strengthening defences and updating contingency plans.

Traders and markets are alert, and governments around the world are preparing for potential spillovers.

For ordinary people – in Tehran, in Beirut, in Gaza, in Tel Aviv, and increasingly across the Gulf – the cost is paid in uncertainty,
disrupted lives and a constant recalibration of what “normal” now means.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/04/us-israel-iran-attacks-uae-consequences?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Tillis to Noem: "A 14 month old dog is basically a teenager ...

2026-03-03T20:07:08Z

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

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a ...

2026-03-03T05:10:26Z

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

U.S. app uninstalls of ChatGPT’s mobile app jumped 295% ...

2026-03-03T02:22:09Z

U.S. app uninstalls of ChatGPT’s mobile app jumped 295% day-over-day on Saturday, February 28, as consumers responded to the news of OpenAI’s deal with the Department of Defense(DoD)

Meanwhile, U.S. downloads for OpenAI competitor Anthropic’s Claude jumped up by 37% day-over-day on Friday, February 27, and 51% as of Saturday, February 28,
after the company announced that it would not partner with the U.S. defense department.

Anthropic said it was not able to agree on the deal terms over concerns that AI would be used to surveil Americans and be used in fully autonomous weaponry, which AI is not yet ready to do safely.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/02/chatgpt-uninstalls-surged-by-295-after-dod-deal/

Sharing content to Mastodon is getting easier with the addition ...

2026-03-03T00:26:49Z

Sharing content to Mastodon is getting easier with the addition of a universal “Share to Mastodon” button for the decentralized social media platform.

Announced on Monday, the widget allows users to share content on any Mastodon server by connecting your Mastodon account and redirecting you to the server that account is on.

The blog post announcing the feature also explains that the tool “works entirely in your browser: there is no tracking data, and it does not store any information on the server.”

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/03/a-new-share-button/

Katherine Abughazaleh —pronounced /ah-buu-gə-ZAH-lay/ —is a ...

2026-03-02T20:55:36Z

Katherine Abughazaleh
—pronounced /ah-buu-gə-ZAH-lay/
—is a progressive Democratic candidate for Illinois' 9th congressional district, located to the northwest of Chicago.

The seat had been held by retiring Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky since 1999.

Abughazaleh, known as Kat Abu online, is turning a familiar campaign tactic on its head by launching an attack ad against herself.

The ad uses popular voice actor Matt Mercer, known for his roles in animation, video games

With the appropriate level of alarm for an attack ad, Mercer says:

"Kat Abughazaleh is the kind of radical Democrat Fox News warned you about."

"Kat believes you deserve universal health care, groceries, and housing. Where does she think we are? The richest country on Earth?"

In a nod to the Citizens United SCOTUS ruling that declared corporations "people," the ad continues:

"Kat isn't a millionaire. She doesn't take PAC money. She can't even afford health insurance herself. How can she possibly relate to normal, hardworking corporations like you and me?"

"And it gets worse. As a journalist, Kat's reporting helped lead to Tucker Carlson's departure from Fox News. Is that who you want fighting extremists in Washington?"

As a senior video producer for Media Matters for America, Abughazaleh used to cover Fox News content with the tagline,
"I watch Tucker Carlson so you don't have to."

The unique campaign ad goes on to state:

"Kat claims the Democratic Party should not bow down to Trump or his billionaire friends. Does she think strongly worded letters count as bowing?"

Abughazaleh has been critical of Democratic veterans in Congress for playing too nicely with MAGA Republican President Donald Trump instead of taking decisive action
https://www.comicsands.com/abughazaleh-viral-campaign-ad

A cancer diagnosis can push people to crime Even generous welfare ...

2026-03-02T19:44:20Z

A cancer diagnosis can push people to crime

Even generous welfare states are not immune to a “Breaking Bad” effect

The television show’s plot is less outlandish than it seems.

Researchers in Denmark and the Netherlands find that the likelihood of a cancer patient committing a crime is 14% higher in the decade following their diagnosis than the baseline rate among people yet to develop the disease.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2026/03/01/a-cancer-diagnosis-can-push-people-to-crime

Trump’s War on Iran Violates International Law & U.S. ...

2026-03-02T18:04:47Z

Trump’s War on Iran
Violates International Law
& U.S. Constitution

-- War Crimes Prosecutor Reed Brody

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3/2/iran_reed_brody

The median home buyer is 59 years old. That may sound like a ...

2026-03-02T15:33:11Z

The median home buyer is 59 years old.

That may sound like a shocking statistic, but it’s part of a trend.

In 2020, the median home buyer was 47 years old, which at the time was also an all-time high.
 Here’s another shocking statistic:

The median down payment on a house in 2025 for first time homebuyers surpassed $40,000
— exceeding the median net worth of Americans under 35.

Americans once went in search of their starter homes in their 20s,
but today’s first-time home buyers are 40 years old on average.

That is the affordability and the fertility crisis in a nutshell.

The median age of home buyers is an affront to the American Dream

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/02/home-affordability-savings-accounts-hsa/

I can’t stop thinking about Nurul Shah Alam, the disabled ...

2026-03-02T00:52:13Z

I can’t stop thinking about
Nurul Shah Alam,
the disabled refugee who died after Border Patrol left him outside in the cold with no way to contact friends or family.

It took five days for him to die.

He was blind and didn’t speak English.

They took the pole he was using as a cane.

This man survived an actual genocide only to be killed by the incompetence and cruelty of the Trump regime.

Five days of wandering around lost, sick and disoriented.

It was all preventable.

They could have taken him home.

They could have called his family.

They could have refused to leave him for dead.

Say his name. Don’t ever forget what they did.

https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2026/02/shah-alam-buffalo-rohingya-blind-man-border-patrol/

https://zeroes.ca/@broadwaybabyto/116144619166553375