40 Years In The Desert

Snark of the Day

2026-04-04T19:11:00.004-04:00

We Were Wrong, Years Ago. We Should’ve Rooted for the Jocks to Win, to Stuff Those Nerds in the Locker for All Eternity.

—Atrios, on Mark Andreeson's recent incoherent philosophical statements

Mark Andreeson has been hitting podcasts and social media insisting that self-examination is not a real thing, but rather it is an artifact of a dysfunctional modern world.

He has in fact said that, "The whole idea of self-examination, he explained, is basically a Freudian fad— an invention dating from around 1910 that serious people have no business indulging."

I think that the Delphic Oracle, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Sun Tzu, Cicero, Lucretius, etc. would like to have a word with you.

It really is amazing how aggressively tech bros try to find a moral justification for their own selfishness.

Maybe It's Just a Jewish thing

2026-04-03T19:18:00.001-04:00

But when fascists demand a list of all the Jews in an educational institution, it makes me uneasy.

I know that this could just be dismissed as just another attempt by the anti-Semite in the White House to use antisemitism as a political cudgel against his opponents, but they said exactly the same thing about that unpleasant little man with the funny mustache.

The Trump administration was within its rights to demand that the University of Pennsylvania turn over information about Jews on campus as part of a federal investigation into discrimination at the school, a federal judge decided Tuesday.

The government’s investigation had united Penn leaders with Jewish students and faculty members as they opposed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s subpoena. Many on campus drew parallels between the government’s approach and methods deployed in Nazi Germany.

But the Trump administration has said that its request was typical for discrimination investigations to seek potential victims and witnesses, and Judge Gerald J. Pappert of Philadelphia’s Federal District Court agreed on Tuesday. He gave Penn until May 1 to comply with the administration’s subpoena, though the ruling appeared unlikely to quell the debates around how the administration has pressured top American universities.

So, they are remaking the movie, only they have recast Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich with Stephen Miller.

Lovely.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2026-04-03T02:32:00.000-04:00

And we are still in the low hire low fire economy.

Initial claims fell tp 202,000 and continuing claims rose to 1.84 million.

I have no clue as to what it all means.

Applications for US unemployment benefits fell last week to one of the lowest levels in the last two years, suggesting layoffs remain low.

Initial claims decreased by 9,000 to 202,000 in the week ended March 28, according to Labor Department data released Thursday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 212,000.
Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, rose to 1.84 million in the previous week.
Thursday’s figures, alongside other recent data, illustrate a labor market that is still stuck in a “low-hire, low-fire” phase. Initial claims have hovered at relatively low levels in recent weeks, suggesting employers are holding onto current workers even as hiring has slowed.

Separate data released earlier this week showed hiring in February slowed to the weakest pace in nearly six years. Data earlier Thursday from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. showed in the first quarter of 2026, US employers announced 217,362 job cuts, the lowest total for this period since 2022.

The End of the Beginning?

2026-04-02T19:17:00.002-04:00

Trump just fired Pam Bondi.

I think that this is more significant than Noem's firing for a number of reasons:

It's the second firing from the Trump administration in a fairly short time.
The Senate is likely to be a bit less likely to rubber stamp Trump's next nominee for Attorney General.
Her exit is likely to slow down attempts to use the DoJ for Trump's desired vengeance.

I have no doubt that Trump will attempt to replace here with something even more bizarrely inexplicable

Donald Trump has fired Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, dismissing a loyalist who reshaped the justice department but still failed to please a president fixated on prosecuting political enemies and frustrated with the politically explosive release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social: “Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year. Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900. We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future.”

The president added that Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, would serve as acting attorney general. Lee Zeldin, a former New York congressman who now leads the Environmental Protection Agency, is said to be a top contender to replace Bondi.

Yeah, Zeldin would qualify as something even more bizarrely inexplicable

………

During her 14 months as attorney general, Bondi presided over a major purging of career justice department staff, shifted focus away from criminal prosecutions toward immigration cases, and spearheaded the defense of Trump’s towering stack of executive orders as they faced legal challenges.

But she will be perhaps best remembered for complying with Trump’s public demand last year that federal prosecutors bring criminal charges against his personal enemies. Within three weeks, federal prosecutors had indicted James Comey, a former FBI director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general.

Maybe someone should refer her to the state bar.

Well, This Was Not on My F%$#ing Bingo Card

2026-04-01T18:07:00.002-04:00

Byron Noem, husband, and cuck, of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, has been exposed as a cross dressing "Bimboification" fetishist.

Not that there is anything wrong with that.

I'm just a surprised, even though I have said time and time again that every one of their accusations is a confession.

In the spectrum of creepy GOP sleaze, this one is up there with the Jerry Falwell ally who died in bizarre auto-asphyxia accident involving a closet, wet suits (plural), and a dildo in his anus.

Clearly, fiction writers are going to have a problem writing something weirder than this.

Kristi Noem's husband is today revealed as a secret cross-dresser who dons gigantic fake breasts and pink hotpants to chat with online fetish models.

While his wife has operated at the highest echelons of government, handling matters of national security in her recent role as secretary of homeland security, Bryon Noem, 56, has been dressing up and paying adult entertainers to talk dirty.

The Daily Mail has reviewed hundreds of messages involving three women from the 'bimbofication' scene – where porn performers transform themselves into real-life Barbie dolls by pumping colossal amounts of saline into their breasts.

Bryon has lavished praise on their surgically enhanced bodies, confessed his lust for 'huge, huge ridiculous boobs,' and even made indiscreet remarks about his 34-year marriage to Kristi, our investigation can exclusively disclose.

National Security experts consulted by the Daily Mail said his brazen behavior could have left the 54-year-old MAGA favorite, who oversaw ICE's aggressive crackdown until she was removed from her position on March 5, vulnerable to blackmail.

If you are worried about vulnarability to blackmail, perhaps Kristi Noem's affair with Cory Lewandoski, or her bragging about shooting a puppy.

Those are kind of red flags to a lot of security folks.

As an FYI, there are some pictures at The Mail, but I am not sharing them here.

Also, this is not an April Fools joke.

Running Around Like a Chicken With My Head Cut Off

2026-03-31T21:12:00.001-04:00

Cleaning for Passover.

First Seder is tomorrow.

With Good Reason

2026-03-31T20:23:00.001-04:00

Did you know that the 2nd most blocked account at Bluesky is their AI tool Attie?

Given that it's only been out a few days, I expect it to pass JD Vance shortly.

Bluesky has launched an AI assistant called Attie that allows users to design their own social media algorithms and create custom feeds within the company’s AT Protocol ecosystem. And let’s just say the response has been heated.

Attie debuted this weekend at the ATmosphere conference, which Bluesky sponsors. But Bluesky’s userbase did not embrace the new product. Instead, about 125,000 users have already blocked Attie’s Bluesky account, making it the second most blocked account on the network, according to open source data. Attie only has 1,500 followers, meaning that about 83 times more users have blocked the account than followed it.

The only account with more blocks than Bluesky’s AI agent is Vice President J. D. Vance, with about 180,000 blocks — Attie even surpassed the White House account (122,000 blocks) and the ICE account (112,460 blocks). That’s some seriously detested company for a platform that skews left politically.

"This is not a good look for Bluesky, said Captain Obvious.

Thank You Palantir

2026-03-31T20:18:00.000-04:00

It looks like our AI driven military just bombed another school, only this time it appears to be the combat debut of a new missile system as we.

On the first day of the war with Iran, a weapon bearing the hallmarks of a newly developed U.S.-made ballistic missile was used in an attack that struck a sports hall and adjacent elementary school near a military facility in southern Iran, according to weapons experts and a visual analysis by The New York Times. Local officials cited in Iranian media said this strike and others nearby in the city of Lamerd killed at least 21 people.

The Feb. 28 attack occurred the same day as a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile struck a school in the city of Minab, several hundred miles away, killing 175 people. In the case of Lamerd, though, it involved a weapon that had been untested in combat.

The Times verified videos of two strikes in Lamerd, as well as aftermath footage from the attacks. Times reporters and munitions experts found that the weapon features, explosions and damage are consistent with a short-range ballistic missile called the Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM (pronounced like “prism”), which is designed to detonate just above its target and blast small tungsten pellets outward.

If you want to murder children, Palantir is for you.

The Finest Bit of Politics Theory That I Have Heard in a Long Time

2026-03-31T19:58:00.000-04:00

This is about Canadian politics, which is something that I know little about, beyond the fact that there are two sorts of Canadians, those who hate Donald Trump, and those who are committing treason in an attempt to sell their province to Donald Trump. (Mostly, but not entirely, in Alberta)

In any case, there were recently party elections for the leadership of the New Democratic Party, the most progressive of Canada's 4 major political parties, and had been completely trounced in the last elections, largely because the last permanent leader Jagmeet Singh had decided to walk back party priorities in order to be in the government (as a second party) with the centrist (I would argue center-right, but I am a Pinko) Liberal Party.

(I said that I know little about Canadian politics, not that I could not read about Canadian politics)

So, they had leadership elections, and Avi Lewis, who is associated with the party's left wing won, and many of the party stalwarts (read careerist assholes and fossil fuel stooges) have expressed dismay, and some have moved away from the party, with some NDP MPs crossing the floor to serve with the (not-so) Liberals.

Their electoral blowout was a direct result of their selling their souls for proximity to power.

After that long introduction, let me quote Jason's analysis:

People are calling this a split in the NDP, but it's not.
This is what happens when a party finally decides what it is and what it represents.
For the last decade, the NDP has been drifting to the center by working alongside the Liberals, softening its message and trying to appeal to as many people as possible.
They thought that that was a strategy, but really it created a problem.
If you're offering a softer version of the Liberals, voters are just going to choose the Liberals. And that's what they did in this last election. The party blurred itself, its identity, and its message so much that it collapsed, and that collapse forced a choice.
………
And that's being framed as a split. But it's not dysfunction, it's alignment.
Centrists are being forced to decide where they belong.
Soft Liberals are being pushed back toward the Liberal Party of Canada. And the NDP is stopping its attempt to be a party that only cares about proximity to power and is putting an effort into defining itself.

Watch the whole thing, it's only about 6 minutes.

Judge Calls Bullsh%$ on Elon

2026-03-30T20:51:00.001-04:00

Rather unsurprisingly, when advertisers decide not to buy ads from you because you have created a cesspool of racism, bigotry, and misinformation, it is not a violation of antitrust law.

Being Elon's lawyers must be the worst job on earth.

On Thursday, Elon Musk lost his lawsuit alleging that advertisers violated antitrust law by colluding on an ad boycott after he took over Twitter, gutted content moderation teams, and disbanded the Trust and Safety Council.

In her opinion, US District Judge Jane Boyle wrote that the lawsuit was dismissed because Musk failed to state a claim. His arguments that advertisers acted against their own best interests by avoiding advertising on his platform, now called X, did not plead facts showing that consumers were harmed. Without consumer harm, there can be no antitrust violation, the judge wrote, deeming the ad boycott perfectly legal.

“The very nature of the alleged conspiracy does not state an antitrust claim, and the Court therefore has no qualm dismissing with prejudice,” Boyle said. At one point, she emphasized, “the question underlying antitrust injury is whether consumers—not competitors—have been harmed.”

For Musk, the loss is likely significant. He had argued that advertisers should be “criminally prosecuted” after allies in Congress released a report claiming they were conspiring to tank Twitter’s revenue with the supposed goal of censoring conservative voices.
………
There are many ways that Musk’s antitrust claims could have succeeded, Boyle noted. He could have argued that the boycott prevented X from competing with other social media companies to “corner the supply against users’ interests.” Or that advertisers were somehow motivated to help a rival platform raise ad prices to exclude X from that market. Or possibly show that the World Federation of Advertisers intended to shut X out in order to launch its own social media ad business.

Much like any official statements regarding his businesses, in the final analysis, there is no, "There," there.

There Has Already Been the Bear Movie

2026-03-30T20:15:00.000-04:00

And now we have to deal with cocaine sharks.

I hate remakes.

The expression “coked to the gills” has never been more apt.

Scientists from Brazil have discovered that sharks swimming in the Bahamas are testing positive for a potpourri of substances, ranging from caffeine to cocaine and painkillers — as if they, too, are ready for a party in an island paradise.

The implications of the findings, detailed in a study in the journal Environmental Pollution, make for quite the comedown. That the substances are turning up in detectable quantities in sharks points to an “urgent need to address marine pollution in ecosystems often perceived as pristine,” the authors warned in the study, with divers in the area being the most likely culprit.

The first urgent need is to keep cocaine sharks from completely losing their sh%$.

It will make Sharknado look like a trip to the kiddie pool.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

2026-03-30T20:06:00.004-04:00

This time it comes from France, where the headline, "Murder trial involving Freemasons, French secret agents opens in Paris court," caught my eye.

It seems to me that Masons in Europe are not the guys in Fez hats (Shriners) that we see in the United States.

In Europe, at least on the Continent, you have murders, lodges that have brought down governments, and the occasional terrorist bombing. (See the P2 Lodge)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Twenty-two people went on trial in France on Monday on charges of murder and other serious crimes centred on members of a Masonic lodge accused of running hit squads.

Thirteen of the defendants face life imprisonment.

Those in the dock include four military personnel from France's foreign intelligence service (DGSE), two police officers, a retired domestic intelligence officer, a security guard and two business executives.

They are accused of the murder of a racing driver, the attempted murders of a business coach and a trade unionist, aggravated assault and criminal conspiracy – all on behalf of a mafia network inside the former Athanor Masonic Lodge in the Paris suburb of Puteaux.

………

The alleged ringleaders are Athanor Freemasons Jean-Luc Bagur, Frédéric Vaglio and Daniel Beaulieu. They face life in jail if convicted.

So does Beaulieu's right-hand man Sébastien Leroy, who is accused of carrying out the trio's dirty work himself or through a hit-man network.

The case was triggered by a botched contract killing in July 2020, when two members of France's parachute regiment were arrested in possession of weapons near the home of business coach Marie-Hélène Dini.

Under questioning, they said they thought they had been asked to murder Dini on behalf of the French state on the grounds that she worked for Israeli spy agency Mossad.

Whoever has the tinfoil hat concession for this trial will make out like a reped ape.

Linkage

2026-03-30T04:57:00.000-04:00

Why Falling Cats Always Seem to Land on Their Feet (New York Times) They are wrong. Cats do not land on their feet, they rotate the universe u to meet their feet.

Archaeologists May Have Found the Lost Iron City of the Silk Road in the Remote Highlands of Uzbekistan (Smithsonian Magazine) A major find at an unexpectedly high altitudes.

Lost Rembrandt painting verified by Dutch art experts (UPI) The 1633 painting Vision of Zacharias in the Temple/

Polling shows Ohio public libraries have vast voter support (Ohio Capital Journal) This is not surprising.

Samples From Distant Asteroid Contain All DNA and RNA Building Blocks (FuturismI) They have found all five primary nucleobases, which may point to extraterrestrial origins of life on earth.

This 2-pound dinosaur is rewriting what scientists know about evolution (ScienceDaily) Fossil finds of the smaller dinosaurs are rare, and this find is an almost complete skeleton.

Beavers can convert stream corridors to persistent carbon sinks (Communications Earth) Beavers seem to do an awful lot in an ecosystem. They seem almost busy.

Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here's How to Use It. (Card Catalog) Tips and tricks for disenshittifying Google search.

Patrick Boyle explains how the SpaceX IPO is a con job. (I've made similar points about valuations and IPOs)

Bringing Jobs Back to America

2026-03-30T00:35:00.001-04:00

Or not.

Because of concerns about threats to travelers to the United States by immigration authorities, the Ig Nobel Prize will be moving its awards ceremony to Europe.

Honestly, I understand the need to relocate to a safer place than the United States.

It could have been Europe, it could have been Japan, it could have been Karg Island, or it could have been Chernobyl. They would all be safer for people going through US customs.

The annual Ig Nobels, a satirical award for scientific achievement, are shifting for the first time from the US to Europe due to concerns about attendees getting visas, organizers announced on Monday.
Organized by the Annals of Improbable Research, a digital magazine that highlights research that makes people laugh and then think, the 36th annual ceremony will be held in Zurich. It’s usually held in the US in September, a few weeks before the actual Nobel prizes are announced.
“During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the magazine, told the Associated Press in an email interview. “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA this year.”
The move comes amid Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration, in which he has focused on deporting migrants illegally in the US, as well as holders of student and visitor exchange visas.
………
But four of the 10 winners last year chose not to travel to Boston for the ceremony. In previous years, the ceremony has taken place at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University.

I think that someone should publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal about this. You might even get an Ig Nobel Prize for that.

Artificial Stupidity

2026-03-29T20:42:00.002-04:00

2 years after going all in on Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence, the listicle wankers Buzzfeed are circling the drain.

Gee, hoocoodanode that a pivot to AI would not work out? (Spoiler, everyone knew that a pivot to AI would not work out.)

Why would people go to Buzzfeed when they could generate identical generic bullsh%$ from ChatGPT?

In January 2023, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced in a memo to staff that the company was making a hard pivot to AI — years before the word “slop” was added to the public lexicon.

In the memo, which was published roughly two months after OpenAI unveiled its groundbreaking ChatGPT chatbot, Peretti said BuzzFeed would be using the software to enhance the company’s infamous quizzes by generating personalized responses.

The company’s stock price jumped aggressively, from around $3 per share to north of $15. But longer-term, neither insiders nor the public were particularly compelled by the move. Nonetheless, Peretti doubled down, promising in May 2023 that AI will “replace the majority of static content” on the site, just a month after shutting down its Pulitzer Prize-winning BuzzFeed News division.

The stock price jumped because stock prices always jump after massive layoffs. Wall street is populated by not particularly bright sociopaths.

Reality soon set in. The AI quizzes were underwhelming, and the site was soon caught publishing entire AI-generated articles that were sloppy and repetitive. After the initial spike in enthusiasm, the company’s stock took a massive beating; as of this week, its shares are hovering around 70 cents.

Now, three years after its AI pivot, the writing is on the wall. The company reported a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025 in an earnings report released on Thursday. In an official statement, the company glumly hinted at the possibility of going under sooner rather than later, writing that “there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

I won't miss this sh%$ at all.

Cooking the Books

2026-03-29T20:13:00.000-04:00

It now appears that we have evidence that the Trump administration is manipulating economic data for their own political gain.

Gee, who could have seen that coming?

An obscure methodological change lowered a key measure of inflation in January, prompting questions about how government statistical agencies produce and report economic data.

Deep inside its monthly inflation report on Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said that the cost of legal services rose 1.8 percent in January. That was an unusually large increase, but not nearly as big as the double-digit gain that some forecasters were expecting.

The reason for the divergence: The agency, which is part of the Commerce Department, had changed the source of its data on legal prices, relying on wholesale prices from the Bureau of Labor Statistics rather than the consumer price data it usually uses.

A technical tweak to such a small category — legal services account for less than 1 percent of overall consumer spending — would ordinarily draw little notice.

But in this case, the adjustment was enough to shave roughly a tenth of a percentage point off the monthly change in the core Personal Consumption Expenditures price index. That is a meaningful difference to investors, who track even tiny moves in the index for hints of when and how the Federal Reserve will next adjust interest rates. The central bank officially targets the P.C.E. index, not the better-known Consumer Price Index, when making policy decisions.

The bureau provided no public disclosure of the change. Economists learned about it only when they reached out to the agency to understand why their forecasts had been so far off.

As I have said repeatedly, the economic data from the Trump administration should not have the presumption of regularity. (See here, here, here, and here)

A Jewish Joke

2026-03-29T19:06:00.000-04:00

Many years ago, a Jew was the most trusted minister to a king.

The king said, "Moishe, I would like to make you my prime minister, but the people would not stand for me appointing a Jew, please convert."

Moishe agrees, and converts to Christianity, and becomes prime minister.

After a few months, he cannot deal with this any more, and with much trepidation, he goes to the king and says, "My king, I am a Jew, and I cannot be otherwise. Please forgive me, but I must resign from my position and return to the practices of Judaism."

The king understands, and is not angry, and accepts Moishe's decision.

He then goes home to his wife, and says Shoshana, I am no longer prime minister. I have to be a Jew.

Shoshana smacks him on the head, and says, "Moishe, why couldn't you wait until AFTER Passover?"

My gentile reader(s) may not get this, but all of my Jewish readers do.

I've been thinking about this joke for the past week or so as our hoshold frantically cleans for Pesach.

It's AI Slop, but It's Funny AI Slop

2026-03-29T18:10:00.001-04:00

Also kind of true

There is a genre of AI slop on YouTube, a SCF-FI genre you could call human exceptionalism.

Basically, it consists of a spoken word YouTube video in which aliens encounter Earthers, and said humans blithely do something that confuses and terrifies the host of aliens present.

I generally do not have much use for such stuff, unless, of course, it involves humor and cats.

At that point, I feel the need to share this with the rest of you.

Have fun.

Headline of the Day

2026-03-28T22:55:00.000-04:00

When Pete Hegseth Says “Lethality” He’s Talking About Killing Iranian School Girls
—Dean Baker, stating the obvious about what it means when SecDef Hegseth brags that our military not be constrained by "Woke" rules of engagement.

I’m going to give our “Secretary of War” a little credit. I will assume that even someone as openly bloodthirsty as Hegseth would not deliberately blow up a school building filled with little girls. But this tragic accident, that led to the death of at least 165 Iranian girls between the ages of 7 and 12, was the direct result of Hegseth’s policy.

The main point of the “woke” rules of engagement that Hegseth has constantly derided, and told the military to ignore, is to prevent tragic accidents like the bombing of a girls’ school in the middle of the day. The rules are designed to try to minimize civilian casualties.

You give Hegseth more credit than I would. I think that the Trump administration likes the idea of killing civilian noncombatants.

You Know That Ecuadorian Drug Lab We Bombed?

2026-03-28T21:09:00.000-04:00

It was a dairy farm.

Why am I not surprised?

As President Trump prepared to welcome conservative Latin American leaders to a summit in Florida in early March, U.S. officials released a video of a massive explosion — capturing the destruction of what they said was a drug trafficker’s training camp in rural Ecuador.

The video was meant to show that the U.S. military, which for months has bombed boats it says are carrying drugs from South America, was “now bombing Narco Terrorists on land,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on social media.

But a New York Times investigation raises questions about the operation that both the United States and Ecuador spotlighted as part of a new military alliance targeting drug traffickers.

The military strike appears to have destroyed a cattle and dairy farm, not a drug trafficking compound, according to interviews with the farm’s owner, four of its workers, human rights lawyers and residents and leaders in San Martín, the remote farming village in northern Ecuador where the strike took place.

These little sh%$s cannot do anything right.

Isn't This Supposed to Take 25 Years and Be Over Budget?

2026-03-28T20:51:00.000-04:00

The first production KF-21, South Korea's stealth(ish) fighter jet, has rolled off the assembly line.

Considering that the program officially launched in 2015, this is faster than I would have anticipated.

By way of comparison, it took the US F-22 about 15 years and the US F-35 took about 20 years.

Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) has rolled out the first production KF-21 Boramae fighter jet, less than two years after construction on it began and four years after the first prototype aircraft made it maiden flight.

The aircraft, a two-seat jet carrying the serial number 26-001, rolled out at KAI’s facilities at Sacheon on Wednesday in a ceremony attended by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, where he said the program embodied the country’s aspirations to be reliant in self-defense, according to national news agency Yonhap.

………

The rollout was a significant development for the KF-21 program, which marked another milestone in January with the completion of its flight test program.

South Korea first conceptualized its own indigenous fighter program 25 years ago, although the final go ahead to start development was only made in 2015. Beside KAI, its development also involving stakeholders such as South Korea’s Agency for Defense Development and Korean defense giant Hanwha.

The KF-21 is considered a 4.5 generation fighter jet and will be equipped with a mix of indigenous and Western sensors and weapons in service, including the KGGB precision glide bomb and European MBDA Meteor air-to-air missile, according to South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA).

Maybe the DoD should look at the RoK's defense procurement practices.

Not a Surprise

2026-03-28T19:27:00.002-04:00

Scientists have repeatedly cloned a mouse. Somewhere around generation 30, reproductive success dropped, and by generation 58, all of the mice were born dead.

This is not particularly surprising.

Sexual reproduction evolved as a genetic repair device, some bacteria exchange genetic material to this day.

Cloning does not necessarily cause genetic damage, but it necessarily fails to repair damage as sexual reproduction does.

Here’s the cautionary tale you didn’t know you needed: cloning the same mouse in perpetuity will produce horrific affronts to mammalian biology.

A team of researchers in Japan discovered this firsthand. In a stunning experiment lasting two decades, they cloned a female mouse, and then cloned its clones, for 58 successive generations. But over 1,200 clones later, the experiment stopped, because by that last generation the mice kept dying immediately after being born, despite displaying no outward physical abnormalities.

The findings, published in a new study in the journal Nature Communications, suggest there’s a hard limit to duplicating mammals. And to scientists hoping for “infinite” cloning, this came as a major let down.

“We had believed that we could create an infinite number of clones. That is why these results are so disappointing,” study senior author Teruhiko Wakayama, of the University of Yamanashi, told Reuters.
………
Perfect clones, it turns out, aren’t perfect clones. Sequencing their DNA throughout the generations revealed that they were accruing small mutations over time that snowballed into larger ones, even though the clones were superficially identical. In some cases, the clones even lost an entire copy of their X chromosome.

“It was once believed that clones were identical to the original, but it has become clear through this study that mutations occur at a rate three times higher than in offspring born through natural mating,” Wakayama said.

Justice

2026-03-28T18:38:00.005-04:00

Rapper Afroman, best known as the artist who produced the song, "Because I Got High," just prevailed in a defamation suit filed by Adams County sheriffs for his mockery of them for breaking into his house, disconnecting his security cameras, and stealing his money. (See here for my earlier thoughts on this)

Afroman took the incident, and made lemonade, or possibly lemon pound cake, over, and the sheriff's deputies decided that being help up for mockery for their egregious and unprofessional behavior hurt their delicate feelings, so they sued, and lost.

Before Friday, Grammy-nominated musician Afroman might have been best known for his Y2K hit, “Because I Got High.” But now he has a new claim to fame, as the man who fought the law—and won. The southern Ohio resident, whose legal name is Joseph Edgar Foreman, prevailed in a nearly $4 million lawsuit filed against him by seven police officers in 2023, all of whom claimed that songs and videos he released regarding a raid on his home were defamatory and an invasion of their privacy.

The saga began on August 21, 2022, when a group of Adams County, Ohio, Sheriff's Office deputies raided Foreman's Winchester, Ohio home, which is about 55 miles east of Cincinnati. According to a Fox 19 report from the time, police had obtained a warrant to search the residence based on “probable cause that drugs and drug paraphernalia were located on the property and that trafficking and kidnapping had taken place there.”

Foreman, who was not home at the time, posted security footage of the raid to Instagram, including a door-busting breach into the kitchen, followed by a police pause at a dessert stand populated by what we'd later learn was a lemon pound cake. An additional video showed police rifling through his closet, as one law enforcement agent asks “is he a Raiders fan? Still?”

According to Foreman, police confiscated a joint, a vape pen, and $5,031 in cash. (The latter was returned.) He was never charged. A spokesperson for the Adams County Prosecutor’s Office later admitted that the raid “failed to turn up probative criminal evidence.”

Well, it was about $400.00 short, the cops, "Misplaced," the cash. Yeah, sure.

………

In the wake of the event, Foreman says he thought about suing the police, but decided against it. "I asked myself, as a powerless Black man in America, what can I do to the cops that kicked my door in?" he asked NPR. “And the only thing I could come up with was make a funny rap song about them and make some money, use the money to pay for the damages they did and move on.”

The result was Lemon Pound Cake, an album released by Afroman in 2022. Tracks such as “The Police Raid,” “Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera,” and the title song retold details of the breach in an exaggerated, hyperbolic, and oft-comedic fashion. Another song, “Will You Help Me Repair My Door," was accompanied by a video that included footage from the breach, set to lines like “Did you find what you were looking for/ Would you like a slice of lemon pound cake/ You can take as much as you want to take/ There must be a big mistake.”

………

It wasn't until this week that the trial began, with Foreman in attendance in a suit patterned with the American flag. He took the stand on Tuesday, WCPO reports. “All of this is their fault,” Foreman said. "If they hadn't wrongly raided my house, there would be no lawsuit, I would not know their names, they wouldn't be on my home surveillance system, and there would be no songs ... my money would still be intact."

“After they run around my house with guns and kick down my door,” he said. “I got the right to kick a can in my backyard, use my freedom of speech, turn my bad times into a good time.”

The next day, the jury reached its verdict after six hours of deliberation. "It's been an emotional case, it's been a well-tried case," the judge said. “In all circumstances, the jury finds in favor of the defendant. No plaintiff verdict prevailed. So the matter will be concluded with defense verdicts.”

I'm not sure what he can do legally in response to what was obviously a SLAPP suit, but there is clearly material for another album in this.

Mixed Emotions in Action

2026-03-28T13:26:00.001-04:00

PZ Meyers, in addition to being an academic is a prominent Atheist.

As such he exhibits a bunch of chagrin when he felt the need to praise Pope Pope Leo XIV for his advocacy of universal healthcare.

I feel your pain.

How to Govern

2026-03-27T21:00:00.000-04:00

Step one is to look for signs of corrupt exploitative rat-f%$#s, and then investigate them.

Case in point, Zohran Mamdani has instructed city agencies to investigate organizations which have abnormally low sick leave numbers, which would indicate that they are using subterfuge to evade the city's paid time off laws.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection will roll out Friday a new compliance check to make sure that employers are following the city’s revamped paid time off law.

Going forward, if an employer’s payroll records show that fewer than 50% of employees have used any paid time off in the past year, the agency will flag that business as possibly engaging in “systemic” violations of the law, said DCWP policy director Elizabeth Wagoner. The exact benchmark varies by industry and company size, she added.

The 50% benchmark is based on the agency’s analysis of national data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that half of all private sector employees with paid sick leave miss at least one work day per year due to their own illness, injury or disability.

The agency will also continue to investigate possible violations of the law based on complaints from workers, she said.

This is precisely the sort of action that the New Dem/Blue Dog Democrats would never do, because it might offend donors if they investigated their law-breaking.

It's Bank Failure Friday!!!

2026-03-27T20:10:00.002-04:00

My bad, I have not checked the announcements from the FDIC and NCUA for a while.

Here are the commercial bank failures

Metropolitan Capital Bank & Trust, Chicago. IL, on January 20.

Here is the Full FDIC list.

Here are the credit union failures

People Trust Community Federal Credit Union, North Little Rock, AR, on January 16.
Beverly Hills City Employees Federal Credit Union, Beverly Hills, CA, on January 22

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

My bad for not looking at the lists.

Not enough to see a trend.

At least this time I did it on a Friday.

Headline of the Day

2026-03-27T19:41:00.001-04:00

America’s Self-Proclaimed Free Speech Warrior, Brendan Carr, Gets a Letter Documenting His First Amendment Violations

—Techdirt, noting that a group of actual 1st Amendment scholars are calling bullsh%$ on his actions.

Carr has been actively threatening media outlets with retribution for free speech that he disagrees with, and that is wrong.

It's probably a crime.

Send him to Gitmo.

………

Well, congratulations to everyone who wanted to reanimate that corpse. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is doing something remarkably similar — except he’s only using it in one direction (the other problem with the Fairness Doctrine, it depends entirely on the enforcers), to punish outlets that report things the Trump administration doesn’t like, while conveniently leaving alone outlets that parrot the administration’s preferred narratives.

We’ve been covering Carr’s censorial ambitions for a while now. When Trump picked Carr to chair the FCC, we noted that despite all the “free speech warrior” branding from the administration and the credulous political press that repeated it, Carr had made it abundantly clear he wanted to be America’s top censor. And he’s delivered on that promise with remarkable enthusiasm — going after CBS over “60 Minutes”, threatening ABC over Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes, and most recently threatening to revoke broadcast licenses of outlets that accurately report on the disastrous war in Iran.

Now, a broad coalition of more than 80 legal scholars, former FCC officials, and civil society organizations — organized by TechFreedom and signed by groups ranging from the ACLU to EFF to the Knight First Amendment Institute to the Institute for Free Speech — has sent a formal letter to Carr laying out, in meticulous legal detail, exactly how his threats violate the First Amendment. I’m proud to note that our think tank, the Copia Institute, is among the signatories, and this was a very easy decision.

Yes, it's a crime, because he has clearly conspired with staff to violate the 1st Amendment rights of the organizations that he is targeting, and while the former is largely just a civil matter (What do I know, I'm an engneer, not a doctor, dammit!*) the conspiracy to do so is a criminal act, a felony.

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

Subhed of the Day

2026-03-27T19:20:00.000-04:00

None of This Would Have Been Legal If They’d Sent Competent Adults. But the Fact That They Sent Smirking Little Sh%$s Makes It So Much Worse.
—Liz Dye at Law and Chaos, describing how the DOGE bros comported themselves when forced into sworn depositions. (%$ mine)

Yeah, these smirking assholes make it much worse. (BTW, the hed is, "DOGE Bros Had More Fun Burning Down Government Than Testifying About It."

In the spring of 2025, the Elon Musk’s DOGE slashed and burned through various congressionally-created and -funded federal agencies, systematically destroying them as part of an effort to … well, who the hell knows. Something-something deficit. Blahblahblah waste, fraud, and abuse. Eradicate DEI!

………

On March 12, the code monkeys descended on the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent agency established by Congress in 1965 to “foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.”

Which is a little on the nose, to be honest.

………

None of that interested Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, the 20-something tech bros dispatched to raze the agency. They’d never worked in government or the humanities, and they didn’t know didn’t know the First Amendment from the Administrative Procedure Act.

………

Fox and Cavanaugh instructed NEH staff to rate the agency’s active grants for the presence of DEI, “gender ideology,” and “environmental justice.” When this failed to yield enough cuts, Fox and Cavanaugh turned to ChatGPT, feeding it the database of grants and instructing it to flag anything that relates to DEI.

A $349,000 grant to replace the HVAC system at the High Point Museum in North Carolina was DEI because, according to ChatGPT, it “enhances preservation conditions for collections, aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences.” A documentary about the Colfax Massacre — the 1873 slaughter of Black Louisiana freedmen, one of the bloodiest atrocities of Reconstruction — was canceled “because it focuses on exclusively anti-Black violence, which is a race.” A project to digitize local newspaper archives was nixed because digital accessibility “aligns with DEI goals of inclusivity and representation.” A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust was flagged as DEI because it focused on gender and religious oppression.

In short, every bit scholarship or art involving anyone who wasn’t white, male, and able was cut.

………

If all this sounds wildly illegal, that’s because it is.

I really hope that the DOGE Bros get prosecuted to the fullest extant of the law, and that they then get sent to a Federal PMITA prison.

We Are F%$#ed

2026-03-26T19:01:00.001-04:00

It turns out that the emissions creating anthropogenic climate change may not just broil us, it mayd strangle us directly as well.

Short version of this study: They collected blood test results over the past roughly 20 years, and there are increasing signs of CO2 toxicity, and the trend indicates that there may be acute health impacts from this by 2075 or so.

On the bright side, I'll be dead then.

Abstract

Anthropogenic activities are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere. There is mounting experimental evidence that lifetime exposure to these increasing atmospheric CO₂ levels can negatively impact the normal physiology of organisms. However, directly assessing this in humans is very difficult. We analysed serum bicarbonate (HCO₃⁻), calcium (Ca) and phosphorus (P) levels from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 1999 to 2020 as indirect proxies for atmospheric CO₂ exposure. Over this period, average bicarbonate levels in this population show an increasing trend which parallels rising atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. Both Ca and P have decreased steadily over the same period. If these trends continue, blood bicarbonate values could be at the limit of the accepted healthy range in half a century, and Ca and P will be at the limit of their healthy ranges by the end of this century. Studies indicate that, after this time, elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide, leading to CO₂ accumulation in the body, has the potential to cause a range of adverse health effects. These findings highlight the urgent need for significant reductions in anthropogenic CO₂ emissions to safeguard public health.

Headline of the Day

2026-03-25T18:55:00.002-04:00

Activist Who Pushed 2020 Election Fraud Claims Convicted of Election Fraud
—NBC News

Every accusation is a confession.

Pshaw!

2026-03-24T19:27:00.015-04:00

Researchers at Boston University have combed through the death certificates, and Covid deaths were severely undercounted during the height of the pandemic.

Thank-you Captain Obvious.

This was clear from the most cursory examination of excess death data.

The covid-19 pandemic was perhaps the greatest natural disaster to befall America and the world in modern times. Research out today, however, indicates that we’re still underselling just how deadly it truly was.

Researchers at Boston University and others examined national death certificate data collected in the first two years of the pandemic. They estimated that the official tally missed nearly 20% of covid-related fatalities between 2020 and 2021, amounting to 155,536 uncounted deaths. These missing cases were more common among minority and disadvantaged communities, likely reflecting longstanding disparities in how deaths are investigated in the country, the researchers say.

This sh$# ain't rocket science.

Both the death toll and the bad statistics are a natural consequence of having a public health establishment opposed to the idea of public health.

We Are So Screwed

2026-03-23T22:44:00.004-04:00

One of the side effects of the increasing commerce in liquefied natural gas is the production of uelium.

When you cool down the gas, the helium remains a gas, and you can collect it and use it for things like MRI machines and silicon chip manufacture.

Among the strikes made by Iran in retaliation for attacks on its South Pars natural gas facilities, Iran struck the major helium production at Ras Laffan in Qatar, which looks to have the effect of taking 30% of world helium supplies offline.

Days after the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared the Strait of Hormuz—the narrow waterway through which roughly one fifth of the world’s oil passes—closed. While oil has dominated headlines, a third of the world’s commercial helium comes from Qatar and has also been cut off.

Often associated with party balloons, helium is indispensable to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, aerospace and the manufacture of microchips for artificial intelligence. With the strait closed, the disruption of the global helium supply chain could have ripple effects that might last for months and affect the most advanced technologies on Earth.

While there is a decent supply and stockpile out there, it is almost certain that helium providers will shortly announce a "Force majeur," and raise prices on existing contracts immediately.

Thanks, Donnie.

H/t PZ Meyers.

Interesting Analysis

2026-03-23T20:45:00.003-04:00

So,I came across this video about 80s SF movies that were considered duds when they came out and are now considered classics, or prophetic, or are at least cult classics.

They are Blade Runner, The Thing, Tron, Dune, Brazil, Big Trouble in Little China, RoboCop, They Live, Buckaroo Banzai, Videodrome, and Miracle Mile.

Notice anything interesting about this list?

I'll give you a hint, one director put out 3 of these 11 films, John Carpenter. (The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live.)

The Thing, which was largely panned upon its release, is now considered a masterpiece of the genre, and They Live is not viewed as prescient social commentary.

Big Trouble in Little China, would probably make no one's list of great movies, but it's fun as hell and has a great following.

There a number of John Carpenter films that do nothing for me, Prince of Darkness and Christine come to mind, but his oeuvre figures predominantly in my top films list.

BTW, I'm pretty sure that the vid is AI slop, but the point stands.

………Which Would Be Replaced by Something Even More Bizarrely Inexplicable

2026-03-23T20:33:00.001-04:00

I am referring, of course, to the fact that Markwayne Mullin has been confirmed as the new Secretary of Homeland Security, replacing Kristi "Ice Barbi" Noem.

I did not think that it would possible to find someone worse than Noem.

I was misinformed.

The Senate confirmed Sen. Markwayne Mullin on Monday to serve as the next secretary of Homeland Security, putting the Oklahoma Republican in charge of immigration enforcement, one of President Trump's biggest priorities in his second term.

Mullin won the confirmation in a 54-45 vote. He will be the second secretary to lead the department during this Trump administration, replacing Kristi Noem. He comes to the helm in the midst of a shutdown that has left 100,000 of the department's more than a quarter-million employees working without pay.

Reality exceeds my capability for cynicism yet again.

TACO for Profit

2026-03-23T19:42:00.007-04:00

Is this the best timed trade of 2026?

At 6:50 AM ET today, $1.5 BILLION in notional value worth of S&P 500 futures contracts were bought.

This trade was so large it sent the entire index +0.3% higher that minute.

Then, 14 minutes later at 7:04 AM ET, President Trump announced… pic.twitter.com/zFdZ1sQxeq
— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) March 23, 2026

Roll Tape!

So, Donald Trump announced a unilateral suspension of some strikes on Iran, because Trump Always Chickens Out.

I do not expect Iran to reciprocate, because they (IMHO correctly) believe that this is merely a ploy by the Americans to time for the next round of attacks.

I think that Trump's announcement on social media that there have been, "Very good and productive conversations," probably has another motivation, personal profit.

You see, minutes before he posted it, someone made billions of dollars in futures trades, on the S&P 500 going up and oil prices falling.

It seems that someone was trading on this information, and my guess is that their name rhymes with Ronald Lon Rump.

Unusually large futures trades placed minutes before a major geopolitical announcement have sparked allegations of potential insider trading, after market participants pointed to timing and scale that appeared closely aligned with U.S. policy developments.

According to data shared by the market-tracking account unusual_whales, approximately $1.5 billion in S&P 500 futures contracts were purchased while roughly $192 million in oil futures were sold just five minutes before President Donald Trump announced a halt to attacks on Iran.

The trades were reportedly four to six times larger than typical order sizes observed at that time.

The sequence of events has raised questions over whether the trades were informed by non-public information, given the immediate market reaction that followed.

What will the SEC do about these suspicious trades?

I think that they will take a cue from Inspector Renault.

One of these days, I need to watch Casablanca in one sitting.

I've seen all of it, but not all at once.

I Was Today Years Old When I Learned This

2026-03-23T19:08:00.001-04:00

With both my late (and not particularly lamented) 2025 Toyota Prius and my current 2026 Corolla, I have noticed a pronounced whine at low speed and in reverse.

I had assumed that the whine was caused by using higher speed electric motors in the drive train which would allow for smaller and lighter motors.

I was wrong. Both of these cars have speakers to generate noise to warn pedestrians.

It appears that this was regulation put in place by the NHTSA.

Now, how about making SUVs safer to pedestrians, particularly the cheese grater on wheels that is the Tesla Cybertruck?

Linkage

2026-03-23T01:34:00.001-04:00

Companies Report Raging Inflation, Except in Wages (Wolf Street) This is a feature, not a bug.
Ultraprocessed Food Consumption and Behavioral Outcomes in Canadian Children (Pediatrics | JAMA Network Open) Spoiler, our agricultural industrial complex is making us less well.
There are key differences in long-term impacts of COVID and flu (Futurity) Covid is much worse.
Pixar's Sexism Under John Lasseter Ruined My Dream Job (Guest Column) (Variety) Not sure if this should be filing under Tech Bro, Studio Bro, or just Douche Bro.
We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI (Techdirt) but Sam Altman will be rich, so it's all good.
Political storm in Wyoming as far-right activist caught handing checks to lawmakers (The Guardian) Cue inspector Renault.
Nearly blind refugee abandoned by US border patrol found dead in Buffalo (The Guardian) There need to be trials and incarcerations after all this is done.
“AIPAC Is Toxic”: Illinois Races Expose a Shifting Democratic Landscape (Sheer Post) AIPAC has always been toxic, people are just recognizing it now.
Pete Hegseth Trolled Over 'Unflattering' Photos Ban (Comic Sands) They really are just a bunch of delicate snowflakes.

The only submarine to be a ship, for a few days:

Today in Schadenfraude

2026-03-22T21:21:00.000-04:00

A jury has ruled that Elon Musk engaged in stock fraud in the run-up to his Twitter purchase.

He lied about his early stock purchases, he lied about his intentions, and these lies were material to the transaction.

It's fraud.

A California jury found Elon Musk liable for misleading Twitter investors by making public statements casting doubt on his eventual $44 billion acquisition of the social media giant, contributing to a huge drop in the company's stock price.

A class-action lawsuit was filed in federal court against the world's richest man in 2022, just before he fully took control of Twitter.

The plaintiffs argued that they, along with countless other investors, were duped into selling their shares primarily because Musk tweeted that the Twitter deal was 'temporarily on hold' on May 13, 2022.

Musk was concerned there were many more spam or fake accounts on the platform than Twitter had publicly disclosed. He believed about five percent of all accounts were bots.

The plaintiffs argued that Musk made these statements to intentionally drive down the value of the shares so he could negotiate a lower purchase price.

On May 16, 2022, Musk publicly suggested that the deal price could change, saying during a Miami tech conference that it wouldn't be 'out of the question' to buy Twitter for less than the $44 billion that had already been agreed upon.

After nearly four days of deliberation, a nine-person jury in San Francisco found that Musk misled investors with his tweet saying the deal was 'temporarily on hold'.

Like Robert Hooke on Acid

2026-03-22T21:18:00.000-04:00

This apparatus is a profound mind-f%$#.

It is fascinating, though I'm not sure of its strength or its physical robustness.

^*Robert Hooke was a 17^th century physicist, astronomer, etc. who is credited with inventing the univerals joint.

Headline of the Day

2026-03-22T20:31:00.000-04:00

Palantir Is Nazi Cancer
—Jim Stewartson, describing how Peter Thiel's monstrous enterprise is successfully inserting itself in the very highest levels of power.

If evil has a face, it is the face of Peter Andreas Thiel, who, when not being a literal vampire, is working to eliminate democracy, strip civil rights from women, and make himself god king.

Peter Thiel founded Palantir.

Palantir is Nazi cancer. It is metastasizing beyond the point of saving the patient.

This is a metaphor I’m prepared to explain and defend because it’s barely a metaphor at all. We have reached a very bad place; America is dying; and I need to be direct about how serious its condition is.

There are several reports that the former Department of Defense has established Peter Thiel’s surveillance software company Palantir as the “program of record” for all branches of military service. The man who announced it is the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Steve Feinberg, an investment banker worth $5 billion. Feinberg’s company Cerberus has a 5% stake in Bank Leumi, one of Israel’s largest financial institutions. Feinberg is also reportedly close to Peter Thiel.

Palantir was heavily involved in the early stages of the Iran attack, “assisting in identifying and engaging 1,000 targets within the first few hours.” Presumably those targets included the girls’ school in Minab where 168 children were massacred by an American Tomahawk missile based on bad intelligence. Nevertheless, despite the slaughter, Peter Thiel’s long-held dream of being able to kill people at scale has been permanently granted.

Thiel’s Naziphilia has been clear for a very long time. And there is a reason for that. Thiel was raised in the most Nazi town on Earth in the 1970s: Swakopmund, in apartheid-controlled SW Africa (now Namibia). Thiel’s apartheid Christian school—and the town itself—used “Heil Hitler!” as a normal greeting, just as they did in Nazi Germany. Thiel’s father Klaus moved his family to Swakopmund when Peter was a baby to develop a secret uranium mine outside of town—which fed apartheid South Africa’s illegal nuclear weapons program.

Imagine what it was like to be a young gay boy growing up in a Nazi-soaked apartheid town in southern Africa, and being brought back to the U.S. at ten years old. Peter Thiel has reportedly described the early part of his childhood as being formative in his thinking—about who should have power and who should not.

………

When Thiel blamed women’s suffrage for the fact that he “no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible” 17 years ago, it should have set off alarms across the Defense Department and the intelligence community. When Palantir planned to target Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald with a psychological operation in 2011—and got caught—the government’s should have ended the relationship.
But despite Thiel’s many years of broadcasting his fascist beliefs—and his plans to overthrow the federal government—America kept feeding the beast.
………
Palantir itself is a remarkable story of unremarkable software. Thiel has invested heavily in making the product look cool, but it’s really just standard business intelligence software with AI chatbots bolted on. The main thing that distinguishes Palantir from its competition is its willingness to be totally evil. The IDF, just as one example, used Palantir extensively in its destruction of Gaza, and its genocide of civilians.
………

Thiel’s salesmen for his death-creating product are people like his co-founders, fascist dudebro Joe Lonsdale and nerdish psychopath Alex Karp—and baby-faced Louis Mosley, head of Palantir UK.

Lonsdale is openly fascist, pro-Russian, and pro-violence. In 2015, he was accused of raping a Stanford intern. In 2023, he started a failing “anti-woke university” in Austin with Thiel mouthpiece and now-editor of CBS News, Bari Weiss.

Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, has completely absorbed Thiel’s Nazi goals and sees “liberal white women” as the enemy of America:

“This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters…”

Finally, out of everyone in the United Kingdom, Peter Thiel chose Louis Mosley to run Palantir UK, which has taken over the National Health Service, and is getting into business with the British military. Mosley is the only grandson of Oswald Mosley, the most infamous fascist in British history, who was so enamored with the Nazis that he had his wedding at Joseph Goebbels’ house so Hitler could attend.
………
Palantir is just one tooth in the jaws of Peter Thiel—a man obsessed with not just overturning democracy in America but determined to repeal the Enlightenment. He says the last 200 years of history were a huge mistake. Like Epstein, Thiel is obsessed with “young blood,” genetics, eugenics, and transhumanism. He sees dealing with humans as a messy requirement of running a business. But to him, America is just a pile of resources, with a population which needs to be purified, segregated, and purged of undesirables.
………
When Trump leaves office by death or disability—I will be shocked if Trump makes it three more years—there will be nothing in between Peter Thiel and total control of the country. JD Vance was plucked out of Yale by Peter Thiel. Vance has done nothing with his life but live off Thiel’s largesse, including adopting Catholicism after Thiel gave him $15 million. JD Vance is just Thiel’s personal robot.
………
It must be the highest priority of any politician that wishes to save America to remove this metastasis from the body politic. It must be burned out of every corner of the government before the tumor replaces the brain entirely. Peter Thiel is not just cosplaying the Antichrist. As an atheist, I assure you he’s the real thing.

Mr. Stewartson, tell us how you really feel.

Please Make it So

2026-03-21T19:58:00.001-04:00

It appears that a group of Senate Democrats are looking at replacing Chuck Schumer with someone who has a modicum of guts and integrity.

About f%$#ing time:

Sen. Chris Murphy was dining with progressive activists at a French restaurant in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood when the conversation about how to advance their legislative priorities turned to a thorny question: what to do about Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

To the surprise of some attendees, the Connecticut Democrat—a rising star in the party’s left flank—responded that some lawmakers had been doing informal counts to see whether enough votes existed to remove the New York Democrat from his leadership position, according to people familiar with the mid-February dinner. Murphy explained that Schumer had enough backing to remain as leader. But the disclosure stood out nonetheless, because it revealed that frustration inside the Senate had reached a high enough level that some Democrats were actively contemplating how to oust Schumer.
………

In more than four dozen interviews with Democratic senators, candidates, current and former congressional aides, activists and advisers, many said the concern about Schumer’s leadership was widespread. Meetings between Democratic chiefs of staff on Senate business often veer into airing discontent with Schumer and how to pressure him to step aside as leader after November’s elections, according to attendees and others familiar with the discussions.

Your mouth to God's ear, Mr. Murphy.

Stay Classy, My Friend

2026-03-21T19:26:00.003-04:00

Robert Mueller died, and Trump gloated about it on Truth Social.

I have mixed emotions about both of these events.

I was never a fan of Mueller, and I have on occasion been somewhat less than charitable when hearing of some people's deaths. (And that's only going back to late 2022)

So, Trump exulting over Mueller's death is not a particularly extraordinary thing to my mind, though putting it out as a social media post while President of the United States of America does seem to be extreme, stupid, and self-destructive.

My sharing negative aspects of the recently dead to my reader(s), while not laudable, seems to be me Trump's post, which was just a happy dance, is a whole different level of cringe.

Donald Trump has been condemned as a “vile, disgusting man” and a “sick human being” after gloating over the death of Robert Mueller, a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Mueller, a decorated Vietnam war veteran who led a politically explosive investigation into Trump, died on Friday aged 81, triggering a callous reaction from the US president.

“Robert Mueller just died,” Trump responded quickly on his Truth Social platform. “Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”

Even by the president’s own norm-shredding standards, the comment was unusually harsh. There was a chorus of opprobrium from the “Never Trump” movement in his own Republican party.

Good

2026-03-20T19:55:00.001-04:00

The Mamdani administration, has moved to end the city's defense of Eric Adams against sexual assault allegations.

These allegations date back decades from Adams' term as mayor, and as such, the city should never have been involved in his defense.

It's yet another example of Adams' corruption and cronyism.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s law department on Tuesday sought a judge’s approval to stop representing former Mayor Eric Adams in a sexual assault lawsuit brought against him in 2024.

In a filing in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, [Supreme Court in New York State is the trial court, the court of last appeal is the Court of Appeals] New York City’s corporation counsel argued that Mr. Adams should not be represented by the city because, contrary to the law department’s earlier determination, he was not acting within the scope of his city employment when the alleged assault occurred.

“Based on my review of new evidence since the original decision to represent him was made, I have determined that he is not entitled to representation by the City in this matter,” the corporation counsel, Steve Banks, said in a statement. “Accordingly, the Law Department has asked the court to permit our office to withdraw from representing the former Mayor.”

The lawsuit against Mr. Adams was filed in March 2024 by Lorna Beach-Mathura, a former employee of the transit bureau of the New York Police Department. She accused Mr. Adams of sexually assaulting her in 1993 when she went to him seeking career advice; at the time, he was a police officer and she also worked for the department.

This lawsuit has nothing to do with his official duties as mayor, and as such, the city should not be paying big bucks to defend him.

………
Megan Goddard, the lawyer who brought the suit on behalf of Ms. Beach-Mathura, said her client had informed others of her experience with Mr. Adams before it was possible for her to sue him. It was only later, in 2022, that New York’s Adult Survivors Act opened a window for people to bring lawsuits over past sexual assaults, regardless of the statute of limitations.
Ms. Beach-Mathura noted on Tuesday that she had first spoken out about her experience during Mr. Adams’s first mayoral campaign.
“I came forward with the fact that Eric Adams sexually assaulted me in 1993 because I was highly disturbed by his portrayal of himself as ‘the law-and-order candidate,’” Ms. Beach-Mathura said in a statement provided by Ms. Goddard.
………
The Mamdani administration’s decision to stop representing Mr. Adams comes just days after it announced similar actions regarding two other former city officials, both Adams allies.
They are Timothy Pearson, one of Mr. Adams’s closest aides and a defendant in at least four sexual harassment suits, and Jeffrey Maddrey, a former top police official accused of demanding sex from a subordinate in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime.

I really hope that they all end up both bankrupted and incarcerated as a result of this.

They are Beyond Redemption

2026-03-20T18:34:00.006-04:00

The Trump administration has decided to validate conversion "therapy" by forcing transgender inmates in federal prisons to participate.

First, the science shows that it does not work, and second, and more importantly, they are conducting involuntary medical experiments on prisoners.

Paging Dr. Mengele.

It's enough to make me rethink my position on capital punishment.

Last Thursday, the Trump administration released its new policy outlining how it will treat transgender people in Bureau of Prisons (BOP) custody. Under it, the approximately 2,200 trans people held in federal prisons will be denied access to medically necessary healthcare, subjected to constant misgendering by staff, and have all of their gender-affirming items—including binders, bras, and makeup—confiscated.

Instead, the policy will impose a treatment that targets “psychological distress/dysphoria” through “psychotherapy” (talk therapy) and “psychotropic medication” (like antidepressants) until the gender dysphoria diagnosis can be marked as “resolved.” Additionally, the new policy designates gender dysphoria as a “mental illness” that requires “routine mental health care.”

In other words, the Trump administration won’t just medically and socially detransition trans people en masse; it will actively try to ‘cure’ them of their gender dysphoria. And if this is beginning to sound like conversion therapy, that’s because it is. The BOP is giving trans people no other choice but to conform to their sex assigned at birth by forcing them into a societal role that they reject and ignoring clinical guidelines—all hallmarks of harmful and dangerous conversion practices recognized by the United Nations to be a form of torture.

This is quite literally lifted straight from the Nazi playbook in the 1930s. (Also lifted from Florida policy today under Ron DeSantis, but I am repeating my self.)

These people need to be broken like the Nazis were, and the willing executioners among the bureaucracy need to be rooted out of government and public life completely.

No Blogging Tonight

2026-03-19T22:12:00.007-04:00

I got back from Dayton late this evening and I'm completely wiped

I did get the opportunity to spend a little bit over 2 hours at the US Air Force museum in Dayton, and that was quite nice.

I will show pictures later.

Classy

2026-03-18T21:07:00.001-04:00

Neal Dunn (R-FL) is retiring from the House of Representatives.

It's generally been assumed that he had health issues. This was confirmed when made a snarky revelation about him having a terminal illness.

Trump should have been drowned at birth.

President Donald Trump on Monday revealed that retiring Rep. Neal Dunn (R-Florida) is fighting a terminal illness and said that doctors previously told Dunn he could be “dead by June.”

In January, Dunn announced that he would not seek reelection to the House after five terms representing Florida’s 2nd District. Dunn, 73, did not offer details about the reasons behind his retirement, but it has been widely reported that he has been dealing with health issues.

On Monday, Trump divulged details about Dunn’s diagnosis while speaking to reporters at the Kennedy Center, where he attended a board meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), among others.

With Johnson seated beside him, Trump riffed on how difficult it is for the speaker to operate with a very slim majority, particularly given recent resignations and the January death of Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-California).

Trump said that another Republican lawmaker “was very ill and looked like he wasn’t going to make it.” At first, Trump did not share the congressman’s name but then encouraged Johnson to divulge details.

Johnson identified Dunn and said he “had a pretty grim diagnosis.” After some prodding from Trump, Johnson added that it was a “terminal diagnosis.”

“He would be dead by June,” Trump added, interrupting a stunned Johnson.

He then went on to brag about he personally got Dunn into Walter Reed for treatment.

What a miserable excuse for a human being.

Today in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

2026-03-18T20:50:00.001-04:00

One of our employees, Jared Rackley, caught this morning's meteor on camera from the Pittsburgh area. pic.twitter.com/2LdqOpChti
— NWS Pittsburgh (@NWSPittsburgh) March 17, 2026

The meteor thing is real

So I'm googling a news story about a defamation trial, and in the side bar I see the headline, "What Did The Migrating Bigfoot Family Know About This Ohio Meteor Explosion?" (Alternate link here)

As God as my witness, I am not making this up.

It appears that someone at Defector found the juxtaposition of a report from the Bigfoot Society (yes, they really exist) of a mass Bigfoot migration observed in Ohio, with the actual large meteor observed over northeastern Ohio.

My guess is that a third item was juxtaposed to create this article, an EPIC amount of weed or some other intoxicant.

Just as an FYI

2026-03-18T15:14:00.003-04:00

I opted out of facial recognition at the TSA check in.

The entire exchange took perhaps 5 seconds.

Just to be clear, this has nothing to do with the Libyan hush money allegations.

On the Road Tomorrow and Thursday

2026-03-17T22:58:00.000-04:00

Heading to a customer meeting in Dayton, Ohio, which means light posting.

That being said, I do think that I will have time to hit the US Air Force Museum there, and hopefully, I will generate some kick-ass photographs.

Dead Man Walking

2026-03-17T20:40:00.000-04:00

While I enjoyed the original film with Donald Sutherland and Kristy Swanson, I have never seen a full episode of the TV spinoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It never appealed to me.

That being said, I understand and appreciate the sincere intensity of the fans of the series.

That being said, when I heard the news that a Buffy reboot with (most) of the original cast was canceled, I could imagine heads exploding through the "Sklayerverse." (Is that what it is called, I honestly do not know)

In a recent interview, Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played the eponymous said that there was one executive at Hulu who hated the show who killed the new series.

If this report is accurate, the executive mentioned below is in for a world of (hopefully just social) hurt.

This past weekend’s shock news about the death of Buffy: New Sunnydale felt like it came out of nowhere for fans hopeful for a return of the Slayer. That shock similarly applies to returning star Sarah Michelle Gellar and director Chloé Zhao, who have spent the past days since reflecting on the show’s sudden staking. But while Zhao has erred on the side of mystery about what went on with the show, Gellar herself has been much more open—putting the show’s axing in the hands of a single man.

In a new interview with People, Gellar reflected on the way the news rolled out—suddenly over a weekend, with the actress herself breaking the news to the public on Instagram this past Saturday. She especially questioned the timing of that news, with Gellar claiming that the call to confirm the series wouldn’t be moving forward at Hulu came as she was attending the SXSW premiere of her return to horror cinema in Ready or Not 2: Here I Come for Searchlight, one of the studios involved in making New Sunnydale for Hulu, and while Zhao was preparing to attend events tied to Sunday’s Academy Awards, where she was nominated for Best Director for Hamnet.
………
But while Zhao took to the Oscars red carpet and described the cancellation as unsurprising, saying that she would “welcome the mystery” of whatever came next, Gellar wasn’t willing to be so vague.

“We had an executive on our show who was not only not a fan of the original, but was proud to constantly remind us that he had never seen the entirety of the series and how it wasn’t for him,” Gellar told People. “That’s very hard when you’re taking a property that is as beloved as Buffy, not just to the world, but to me and Chloé. So that tells you the uphill battle that we had been fighting since day one, when your executive is literally proud to tell you that he didn’t watch it.”
While Gellar did not go as far as to name the executive she believes is responsible for delivering the killing blow to New Sunnydale, a new report from Deadline alleges that Gellar was talking about Disney Television Group President Craig Erwich. According to the trade, New Sunnydale‘s pilot, written by Nora and Lilla Zuckerman, had already undergone a significant round of changes after an initial version was described as playing to too young an audience and aiming its scope too small, putting more focus on the new Slayer, played by Star Wars: Skeleton Crew‘s Ryan Kiera Armstrong. A rework of the pilot’s script to make the tone more adult, and to incorporate more of Gellar as Buffy Summers, was much more strongly received, sparking talks that a pickup for new Sunnydale would be imminent.

This is like f%$#ing with Corvidae (Ravens, Crows, etc.).