40 Years In The Desert

What Lina Khan Said

2026-09-14T21:22:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

………

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

………

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

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

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

Break out the cuffs, Ponch.

Of Course They Did, Part II

2026-09-14T21:01:00.000-04:00

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

Protecting pedophiles is kind of Donald Trump's thing.

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

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

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

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

Of Course They Did

2026-09-14T20:28:00.000-04:00

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

I can haz disbarrment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Ere, He Says He's Not Dead

2026-09-14T20:10:00.000-04:00

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

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

Linkage

2026-09-14T05:35:00.000-04:00

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

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

Good

2026-09-13T19:24:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Henderson County grand jury subsequently declined to indict Combs.

The controversy did not end there.

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

That charge was subsequently dismissed.

Support your local police.

Sam Altman Goes Bond Villain

2026-09-13T19:09:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Headline of the Day

2026-09-13T18:54:00.000-04:00

How Status Quo Democrats Could Create Another Trump
—The Lever, offering the thesis that Obama's betrayal of his promise of, "Hope and Change," led directly to Donald Trump.

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

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

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

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

………

So it is time for another alarm to sound — and thankfully, a new paper has provided one. And this particular warning is backed by reams of economic data.
The paper from researchers at the Institute for New Economic Thinking is entitled “A Revolution of Falling Expectations: The Macroeconomic Roots of Popular Discontent.” It’s a wonky title that undersells what it is trying to warn us about.
The first part of the paper debunks the idea — loudly promoted by Democratic pundits — that Bidenomics was fundamentally changing America’s economic structure in positive ways. Yes, Biden’s administration did more for the working class than Obama’s, and with way less political capital. But at the end of Biden’s time in office, the overwhelming beneficiaries of Biden’s economic policy were people who were already wealthy.
………
These data points are a long-overdue corrective to an insidious narrative against so-called “deliverism” — the FDR-themed idea that politicians delivering for voters prompts them to support said politicians. After the 2024 election, elite pundits began insisting that Democrats should never again assume delivering material gains for voters wins elections because Biden supposedly did that, and Democrats still lost.
………
This is the Democratic Doom Loop — a party that overpromises when it is out of power, then underdelivers (for everyone other than its donors) when it is in power — prompting voters to then angrily vote for a GOP that promises to destroy the whole system. And yet, discussion of this doom loop remains stifled by establishment Democrats and their media apparatchiks self-servingly promoting the notion of Trump as an outlier rather than a manifestation.

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

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

All You Need to Know About the

2026-09-12T21:05:00.000-04:00

Jessica Schumer has been hired as a lobbyist for OpenAI.

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

Nothing to see here, move along.

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

The War is Going Great

2026-09-12T20:22:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The United States is losing the war even more now.

Headline of the Day

2026-09-12T19:00:00.000-04:00

Republicans Unveil Secret Midterm Weapon, It Is Hasan Piker’s Dinglesmackus
—Wonkette, on the decision by Republicans to post a thirst trap picture of Hasan Piker on the Jumbotron at their mid term convention.

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

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

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

If you follow American politics closely, you may remember two minutes ago, when the most important question for serious journalists to ask Democrats was “How old were you when you gay married Hasan Piker on a bed of rose petals while reading Jeremiah Wright sermons to each other sexually?” If you were Dana Bash or Kristen Welker or Jake Tapper or Axios or whoever, this was the most important issue, and the only question you had for Democrats, even Democrats who had nothing to do with the Twitch streamer named Hasan Piker, who had never heard of him.
They had no similar questions for Republicans about their actual associations and money-taking from actual Nazis and trillionaire antisemites, because Beltway journalists and New York Times reporters know the DC party invites dry up during fascist administrations if they stop licking fascist balls for one second.
This doesn’t happen to them during Democratic administrations because if there is one thing that is true about American politics it is that Democrats are desperate for the media to think they’re cool, while the media is desperate for Republicans to think they’re cool. Like so, the pattern of abuse perpetuates itself. Maybe some of these new crop of Team Fight Democrats can break the cycle.
But two minutes ago, or last night, at the sold-out Trump Republican Midterm Convention (many tickets still available), Republicans revealed their secret weapon for the midterms, which changed everything, and it was a thirst trap of Hasan Piker’s willysmacker on the Jumbotron:
Y’all.

[image or embed]
— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) September 9, 2026 at 8:14 PM
………
So this is hilarious, and Christ, Republicans are so weird and unable to hide their bizarre psychosexual issues for even one fucking second. As you can see in the Piker livestream clip, this all happened during a scare montage about tHe rAdiCAl LeFt, and it was all communism! and China! and trans kids playing teeball! and then suddenly on the screen there was Hasan Piker in his underpants in a selfie he posted on Instagram.
This was supposed to prove … something? But what it really showed was that a really big part of what Republicans hate about Hasan Piker, what really grinds their gears, what they hate about Abdul El-Sayed, what they hate about Zohran Mamdani, Jon Ossoff, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is that they are hot and Republicans really really really really really really really want to fuck them. And that makes Republicans seethe with rage and jealousy, and it makes them hate themselves even more than they usually do, which is a lot.

These are very weird people.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

2026-09-12T18:50:00.000-04:00

Read between the lines before you block me. 😉 pic.twitter.com/fiI7PK2zhf
— Joe G (@EastEndJoe) September 12, 2026

This is a sublime commentary on Schrodinger's Senator.

Of Course They Did

2026-09-11T20:59:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This will not end until he is in jail.

Headline of the Day

2026-09-11T19:01:00.000-04:00

Hunter Biden's $LAPTOP Meme Coin Is Either a National Disgrace or the Funniest Thing He's Ever Done, and We're Not Entirely Sure Which
—Futurism. on a wicked stupid moment in meme coins .

I'm hoping that this was an intentional prank.

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

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

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

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

………

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

………

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

“Thirty percent of the tokens are tied to a pre-programmed mechanism,” he tweeted. “We publicly say what has to happen in the world. If it happens, the corresponding tokens are permanently burned. If it does not, those tokens are sent to charity. Either way, they leave our hands and an additional 50 million tokens will go to charity no matter what.”
“With $TRUMP, nearly one million wallets have collectively lost ~$3.8 [billion],” Biden continued. “With my token, 20 percent of the coins will be airdropped to the community, and I am even including people that lost money on the $TRUMP grift.”

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

We Lost, 25th Anniversary Edition

2026-09-11T18:39:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Phew!" Mowry raised his eyebrows.

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

"It nearly happened to me once."

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

………

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

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

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

Osama bin Laden made us destroy ourselves.

For Your Consideration

2026-09-10T20:50:00.000-04:00

I give you Zapp Hegseth:

Omg 🤣 pic.twitter.com/Vhw3H8RCYo
— Ingrid Guthrie (@IngGuthrie) September 10, 2026

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

The Highest Honor in Journalism

2026-09-10T20:14:00.000-04:00

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

There is no higher form of praise.

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

He's Lost diGenova

2026-09-10T20:00:00.000-04:00

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

“If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem” https://t.co/rxb9GRCQdn
— Josh Christenson (@jchristenson_) September 10, 2026

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

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

diGenova has neither of these.

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

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

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

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

………

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

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2026-09-10T19:18:00.000-04:00

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

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

Not so much.

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

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

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

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

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

Florida, Man!

2026-09-09T20:49:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moar History Rhyming

2026-09-09T20:31:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

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

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

(emphasis original)

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

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Oh, Snap!

2026-09-09T20:06:00.000-04:00

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

Now, not so much:

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

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

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

Saudi officials confirmed Houthi attacks and said they would retaliate.

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

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

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

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

2026-09-09T19:12:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whores gotta whore, I guess.

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

2026-09-09T19:00:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of Course They Are

2026-09-08T22:45:00.000-04:00

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

Dishonesty and greed is all that he has.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only $10M? Such a deal!

2026-09-08T21:37:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Niemi, the service’s Chief Modernization Officer, told reporters that the goal was for the MMAs to be “closer to half” the cost of a Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), at a roundtable at the Pentagon yesterday, according to Breaking Defense. He also said the service was hoping to see the price tag on its future CCAs fall to around $20 million after full-rate production of those drones gets underway.
Beyond cost, the Air Force has previously said that it wants the MMA drone to perform the same general intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and strike missions as the MQ-9A. To that end, stated program requirements to date include a speed of at least 200 knots true airspeed, a munition and sensor payload capacity of at least 2,800 pounds, an unrefueled combat radius of at least 2,300 nautical miles with payload, the ability to self-deploy one-way at least 8,000 nautical miles, and the ability to operate from runways no longer than 6,000 feet. The MMAs also need to be highly modular and use open architecture mission systems to make it easier to integrate new capabilities and functionality down the line.

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

Fraudster Sues New York State Education Department for Revealing Their Fraud

2026-09-08T20:12:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

H/T Diane Ravitch.

Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth, Neh?

2026-09-08T19:50:00.000-04:00

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

It appears that Elon Musk has crossed this line.

Not surprised.

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

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

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

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

Needless to say, I am amused.

I Wish That I Had the Money for This

2026-09-07T20:10:00.000-04:00

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

I want this so much.

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

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

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

I want this so much!

Evil Is as Evil Does

2026-09-07T19:59:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linkage

2026-09-07T02:28:00.000-04:00

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

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

History Rhyming

2026-09-06T22:36:00.000-04:00

German Fascist Party AfD just won the election in Saxony-Anhalt tonight, though it appears that they did not get an absolute majority.

Rather unsurprisingly, they thanked Elon Musk for his support.

I did Nazi that coming.

The candidate who led the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party to a historic state election victory in Germany has thanked Elon Musk for his support, as one French minister warned that this was a “serious moment” for Europe.

The AfD more than doubled its support in the Saxony-Anhalt region and appears to be on the brink of becoming the first far-right party to gain power in Germany at state level since the second world war.

On Sunday night, Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s lead candidate, thanked Musk on X “for your support and for your clear and highly important perspective on the political developments of our time”, adding: “I would very much welcome the opportunity for strong and constructive cooperation”.

Siegmund wrote his comments after Musk said “Well done!” in German to AfD co-founder Alice Weidel, when she posted about the projected win.

So Nu?

2026-09-06T20:31:00.000-04:00

Except for clueless C-Suite Auto executives (but I repeat myself) no one wants the f%$#ing touchscreens in their f%$#ing cars.

Hoocoodanode?

Automakers are having an increasingly difficult time convincing their customers that more in-car screens — and the often dodgy software that accompanies them — are a compelling reason to pay a major premium.

Virtually every major car company is now installing increasingly enormous screens into the dashboards of its cars, frequently stretching far beyond the driver’s seat and into the passenger area as well.

But what’s becoming more and more clear is that practically nobody actually wants any of those purported luxuries in their ride. As a new survey by consumer research firm JD Power goes to show, owners of 2026 model-year vehicles are being actively put off by the enormous displays.………

“The technology customers value most is often the technology they barely notice because it simply works,” said JD Power director of customer success Doron Hikry in an accompanying press release. “Smart ignition and smart climate control make everyday driving easier without demanding the driver’s attention, while more automation and additional screens don’t necessarily translate into a better experience.”

Deep Thought

2026-09-06T19:24:00.000-04:00

I hate Ikea

That is all.

Today in Defense Procurement

2026-09-05T20:42:00.000-04:00

While the Pentagon has been claiming that cost of the F-35 Lightning II is under control, we are seeing continuing rounds of double digit annual price increases.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

The cost of all three variants of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter are increasing by as much as roughly 11 percent, according to the Pentagon.

A spokesperson for the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) confirmed to Breaking Defense that the average flyaway cost — a metric that measures when a jet has all the equipment it needs for delivery — of the conventional takeoff and landing F-35A rose to $92 million in the aircraft’s 18th and 19th production lots, which will deliver over the next two years. That’s up from the $82.5 million price tag of the jet’s most recent group of production contracts spanning 2023 to 2026, a growth of 11.5 percent.

Similarly, the price of a jump jet F-35B rose to $121.4 million across lots 18 and 19, while the carrier-capable F-35C climbed to $110.8 million. For the F-35B, that’s an increase of 11.4 percent compared to a previous price tag of $109 million; the F-35C had the smallest increase of 8.5 percent set against a prior cost of $102.1 million.

Can you say, "Death spiral?" Good, I knew you could.

The cost of purchasing the aircraft are spiking.

The operating costs are horrendous, being slightly more than the 2 decade old F-15E.

A Foreseeable Consequence

2026-09-05T20:27:00.000-04:00

As a result of the US attack on them, Iran is charting a more aggressive and active path in foreign relations, because they have concluded that the US is spent.

The Iran war hawks got their war, and they lost.

Iran has grown more confident in its ability to attack targets in the Middle East and appears determined to continue the conflict for months to frustrate the United States, according to U.S. intelligence reports in recent weeks.

In many respects, the assessments reflect what has been observable on the ground as fighting erupted again after a period of relative calm. In the past week, Iran targeted ships in the Strait of Hormuz and American troops in the region, and U.S. forces struck inside Iran, killing military personnel and civilians.

The new exchanges have been limited so far. But the intelligence reports, according to people who have read them, suggest that Iran’s hard-line government might be contemplating a significant escalation.

Iran has emerged from months of the on-again, off-again war with a far better understanding of its military strengths and is more sure of its capabilities, according to officials briefed on the intelligence.

………

In the coming weeks, Iran could take actions akin to what it did in July, according to U.S. officials. At that time, Iran attacked American military bases in the Middle East, killing three Americans in Jordan; struck shipping in the Strait of Hormuz; and struck infrastructure in Kuwait and elsewhere.

………

There are signs that Iran-linked hackers may have regrouped in recent months after sustaining some losses at the start of the war, according to current and former U.S. officials.

………

Iran’s leadership also appears to have a more precise understanding of how to exert control over the Strait of Hormuz, which carried one-fifth of the world’s oil before the war.

………

Others briefed on the reports said Iran probably believes that the U.S. military will be hard pressed to mount major new strikes as its munitions stockpiles dwindle.

Every other nation on earth concerned about being on the United States' "Naughty List" is taking notes right now.

Needs to Be in Jail

2026-09-05T19:18:00.000-04:00

RFK, Jr. is conspiring to conceal measles deaths in Pennsylvania, because antivaxx is his personal brand.

Whenever the wheels of justice turn on him, he should never see the outside of a prison again,

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked his new CDC director to remove a reference to two Pennsylvania deaths from the agency’s online measles tally after he questioned whether the disease contributed to the fatalities, three sources familiar with the situation said.
Kennedy’s request came after CDC staffers had already accepted the state’s characterization of the deaths as linked to measles, a Pennsylvania official ‌said.

Despite that, Erica Schwartz, the recently appointed director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agreed with Kennedy’s directive and implemented it without objection, said the three sources familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The move followed a heated exchange on social media between Kennedy, a long-time anti-vaccine activist appointed by President Donald Trump, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat. The two officials accused each other of politicizing the outbreak in Pennsylvania, the latest state to grapple with a resurgence of measles since the Trump administration took office.

Erica Schwartz should be prosecuted as well.

Ken Paxton Corrupt?

2026-09-05T19:12:00.000-04:00

Also, the sky is blue, Trump is a moron, and housecats are sometimes uncooperative.

It turns out that in an attempt to conceal his extensive real estate holdings, the Texas Attorney General omitted his real estate empire from required reports.

It should be noted that he did this because his property holdings constitute supporting evidence of his corruption.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appears to have violated federal ethics law in significant ways when filing recent disclosures of his assets and liabilities, creating confusion about his net worth and holdings, a review by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.

Among them: Paxton, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, reported owning seven homes but said he earned no income from any. Yet all but one was listed for rent during the reporting periods, and some current residents and neighbors at those addresses confirmed that the properties were rented, the news organizations found. Receiving income and not reporting it is a violation of federal disclosure law, three ethics experts said.

Additionally, Paxton did not disclose mortgages for three condos at a Utah golf resort that federal law requires him to list as liabilities if they are not personal residences.

He also valued his stake in a vacant plot of Texas land at up to $50,000 on last year’s filing, but his business partner told the newsrooms Paxton’s share for years has been worth about $1 million. Federal financial disclosure law requires property to be listed at fair market value.

The apparent errors and omissions the newsrooms found obscure the extent of Paxton’s income streams, assets and debt, making it difficult for voters to make sense of his finances as they mull whether to support him in November’s election, the ethics experts said.

“It reflects either pure sloppiness on Paxton’s part or a deliberate effort to conceal some of his investments and property holdings,” said Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for the nonpartisan good-government group Public Citizen.

There is no, "Or," here. It's a deliberate event at a coverup.

Headline of the Day

2026-09-05T19:04:00.000-04:00

Burning Man Has Become a Wrinkled Sausage Fest of Aging Millennial Men, Data Shows
—New York Post once again demonstrating that while their journalism may be complete pants, but the headline writers are top rate

The story is about how the Burning Man crowds are aging out.

The man will burn…and he’s also getting on in years.

Burning Man — the nine-day celebration of art, music, and anarchist hijinks in the Nevada desert — has been steadily shrinking since its 2019 peak, but the share of people in their 40s and 50s is on the rise, data shows.

The number of free-loving revelers flocking to “the playa” — where each year a city is built on bare sand and razed after a week of drug-fueled, clothing-optional partying — dipped to about 70,000 last year after peaking close to 80,000, according to last year’s census of Black Rock City, the ad hoc municipality that hosts the burn.
But the oldies are proving they have more stamina than the kids. In 2014, burners under 30 made up 30% of the playa. That number plunged by more than half to 14% by 2025.

Yeah, the Economy is Great

2026-09-04T20:22:00.000-04:00

The new inflation numbers are in, and it is f%$#ing ugly.

I think that Trump's pet Federal Reserve Chairman won't be able to hold rates steady at their next meeting later this month.

With inflation rising faster than predicted, according to new data from the Trump administration, a rate hike at the Federal Reserve’s next meeting is beginning to seem like a fait accompli in some quarters.

Futures showed investors priced in a rate hike next week as a near certainty following the release by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and put a high likelihood on a second increase before the end of the year.

………

Now attention turns to Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, who was asked during confirmation hearings whether he would be a “sock puppet” of the man who gave him his job. President Donald Trump ordered up a criminal investigation into Warsh’s predecessor, a shocking move that was widely seen as more about Jerome Powell’s reluctance to cut interest rates then a Fed building revamp. Now, Powell’s successor faces intense pressure to vote to raise rates at next week’s policy meeting.

In terms of the actual inflation numbers, it's not good.

The month-to-month all-items CPI bounced back, jumping by 0.40% in August seasonally adjusted (+4.9% annualized, blue line in the chart), after a low positive reading in July and the steep negative reading in June when energy prices had plunged.

Only part of it was driven by the jump in gasoline prices, which mostly occurred in late August and September, so some of it will show up in the September CPI. A big driver was the “core services” CPI, which jumped by 0.33% (+4.0% annualized). Core services account for nearly two-thirds of the all-items CPI and include housing, healthcare, insurance, etc.

On a year-over-year basis, the all-items CPI rose by 3.4% in August, roughly the same pace as in July. Since the beginning of 2020, it has surged by nearly 30%.

How's that Iran war going, Donnie?

This is F%$#ing Insane

2026-09-04T19:52:00.000-04:00

Former Biden National Security Council staffer Jacob Stokes is calling for military strikes on Chinese data centers to prevent the PRC from eclipsing the United States on AI.

This guy has drunk so many flavors of Kool Aid, possibly some laced with LSD, that it buggers the mind.

While American tech billionaires fret over the capabilities of Chinese AI, one national security advisor has a brilliant idea to flatten the competition: simply bomb their data centers to smithereens.

In a new report titled “Superpowers and AGI,” former Obama-era national security official Jacob Stokes calls for United States to begin preparing readiness drills in response to Chinese AI development — up to and including military strikes on the nation’s data centers, the South China Morning Post reported.

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to the theoretical point at which an AI model achieves human, or superhuman, levels of reasoning and intelligence. Though the science is still out on whether such a system is even possible, Stokes’ report begins from the assumption that AGI is inevitable, and that if the US can’t get to it first, its military needs to prepare to take drastic action.

Referring to the US as a hypothetical “laggard state” behind China’s achievement of AGI, Stokes — now the deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, a prominent DC think tank — writes that the country could “try to sabotage the leading state’s AGI systems, either through physical infiltration or offensive cyber operations; that is, cyberattack.”

How do idiots like this secure comfortable sinecures at think tanks?

Of Course They Did

2026-09-04T19:02:00.000-04:00

The Federal Trade Commission has accused Amazon of defrauding advertisers to the tune of $20 billion by manipulating ad auctions.

I am so not shocked.

The Federal Trade Commission and 22 states sued Amazon yesterday, alleging that it has conducted a secret scheme to overcharge advertisers for seven years.

“Since 2019, Amazon.com, Inc. has secretly and systematically overcharged its approximately 1.2 million advertising customers by manipulating the ‘auctions’ that it uses to set the price of ads on its platform,” the lawsuit said. “Amazon represents, and advertisers believe, that competitive auctions set the prices for advertising on its leading e-commerce website. But, in reality, Amazon overrides and replaces the actual auction results with higher prices set by Amazon to increase its profits.”

The FTC said it obtained internal documents and messages that reveal how Amazon secretly inflated auction prices for Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display advertisements that appear alongside results seen by consumers when they search for a product. The FTC investigation began in 2024.

“Based on numerous internal documents describing its ‘hidden’ ‘surcharges,’ Amazon’s scheme has likely illegally extracted over $20 billion from its unwitting advertising customers,” according to the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Western District of Washington.

It's fraud all the way down.

First Friday

2026-09-04T18:57:00.000-04:00

NFP Numbers

Unemployment rateAnd the numbers are numbers are better than expected, which, when combined with stubbornly inflation numbers, makes it likely that the Fed will raise rates at its next meeting.

What can you do? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The U.S. added 162,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department reported Friday, a much-stronger-than-expected result that suggested the labor market shook off its early-summer doldrums.

The numbers

The unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.1%. That leaves it at a historically low level that indicates the labor market remains generally healthy.

Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had forecast the report would show the economy gained just 53,000 jobs. The unemployment rate was in line with their expectations.

What this means for jobs

The jump in jobs came in part from rebounds in restaurant and in local-education employment that many economists viewed as one-off factors. But the U.S. has added an average of 80,000 jobs a month so far this year, which compares with monthly growth of 10,000 jobs in 2025.

“We don’t have a problem in the labor market,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM.

Hiring had weakened considerably in June and July, and so the August job gains helped dispel concerns that the labor market had re-entered a period of cooling.

Still, workers’ pay has been lagging behind inflation, raising concerns that consumer spending could be challenged in the months ahead.

………

Average hourly earnings rose 3.1% from a year earlier, indicating that pay continues to struggle to keep up with inflation. Consumer prices were up 3.4% from a year earlier in July. Because people’s inflation-adjusted, or real, wages are close to zero, their ability to spend is getting challenged, said EY-Parthenon chief economist Gregory Daco.

In the middle of all this, it looks like private equity is heading for a major crackup, as they cannot unload the properties that they have looted.

Retail stalwarts Saks and Eddie Bauer filed for bankruptcy. Kmart and JoAnn Fabrics are gone for good, a trail of layoffs and disappointed customers in their wake. Hospital giant Steward Health Care collapsed, costing thousands of jobs and leaving several communities without a local hospital.

These once-trusted US companies have one thing in common: they were owned by private equity investors, who load companies with debt when they buy them and squeeze out profits as they restructure.

The business model is now facing an existential crisis that may have profound ramifications across the US.

………

But this wave of buyouts is running smack into a wall of persistently high interest rates, rising buyout prices and pressure over moribund returns.

Private equity funds are sitting on a “record number of unsold companies, many of which they’ve been unable to sell … or at least unable to sell at the prices that they’re looking for”, said Jim Baker, the executive director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, an industry watchdog.

The end of low interest rates are hitting them hard.

Good, though there will be some short term gain.

Not a Good Look

2026-09-04T18:20:00.000-04:00

Click to embiggen

I am referring, of course, to CVN-72, the USS Abraham Lincoln, which has arrived in Laem Chabang, Thailand looking like an extra from the zombie film 28 Days Later.

No wonder crewmen were literately throwing themselves into the ocean.

The U.S. Navy’s supercarrier USS Abraham Lincoln is now in Thailand for a much-deserved and highly publicized liberty port call. The carrier had gone 286 days without making such a stop, with much of that time spent executing grueling combat operations against Iran. The ship has been run very hard, relying on at times a rickety conveyor of sea replenishments to continue operating for months on end, and it has the scars to show for it. The Lincoln looks very much worse for wear, with so-called “running rust” and algae caked all along the sides of the hull, as well as around the edges of the flight deck and sponsons on either side. It’s something of a startling appearance for one of the most powerful ships on the planet and a major symbol of U.S. power projection, but it is also a reminder of what the vessel and its crew have endured for months on end.

The Lincoln arrived in the Thai port of Laem Chabang earlier today. The carrier did make a stop in Guam in December 2025 and reportedly made another one somewhere in the Middle East in July. However, in both cases, these have been characterized as brief logistical stopovers that did not offer any real opportunity for personnel onboard to disembark. Thai media reports say the carrier is expected to remain in Laem Chabang through the end of the weekend.

Great Googly Moogly!

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

Seeing as how the full report will be coming out tomorrow, I'll keep this post on the weekly unemployment report brief.

Initial claims up 2,000 to 206,000.
Continuing claims up 8,000 to 1.779 million.
All signs point to continued inflation above the Fed target.
Trade deficit is up.

Friday should be interesting.

Headline of the Day

2026-09-03T20:43:00.000-04:00

This Is the Worst Possible Time for OpenAI to BfЖ7!م#2猫$9&क
Gizmodo, on OpenAI's plans to roll out an even less responsible version of artificial intelligence.

Yea, this is gonna go so f%$#ing well, innit.

AI models are notoriously likened to black boxes, meaning the humans who build them can’t look inside to see how they transform mountains of training data into lines of code, sonnets, or whatever else they’re asked to generate. Not completely, anyway. A subfield called interpretability research has blossomed in recent years, aimed at shining various lights on how AI models “think.” One of the brightest lights is called chain-of-thought reasoning, or CoT. Think of it like a recorded transcript of the steps models take while working through problems—like a student showing their work on a test. It’s widely regarded as a critical safety mechanism as models become more capable and less predictable.

OpenAI is now experimenting with a technique that could make it harder for researchers to interpret models’ CoT reasoning process, according to a Tuesday report from The Information.

The latest versions of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini—all based on an architecture called a transformer—process data via a series of steps, recording their reasoning process in natural language the whole way through (albeit not always totally accurately).

The new technique, on the other hand—known as recurrent depth—turns that linear reasoning process into a cyclical one: the model iteratively refines its internal representations by repeatedly passing them through the same set of layers. The takeaway is that the relatively clear CoT transcripts generated by traditional transformers can be replaced with a much more opaque reasoning process. In other words, we can’t be sure what it’s thinking when it isn’t thinking in words.

For Sam Altman and the rest of the Silly-Con Valley fraudsters, the solution to AI hallucinations is to make sure that diagnosis becomes more difficult.

Wonderful.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Too Corrupt for Texas?

2026-09-03T20:33:00.000-04:00

It appears that even Texas Republicans are realizing that Elon Musk's attempts to secure state subsidies for broadband are too corrupt for them.

I did not know that it was possible to be too corrupt for Texas.

Back in June I wrote a feature for The Verge about how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos had convinced Republicans to redirect billions in taxpayer money away from future-proof fiber optic upgrades, and toward their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband networks they’d already planned to deploy. Curious behavior for two extremely-rich gentlemen who both repeatedly claim to loathe subsidies and corporate welfare.

But wait! It gets dumber and more corrupt!

Originally, Congress set aside $42.5 billion in taxpayer money in the infrastructure bill to spend on broadband upgrades. But after shoveling a large chunk of that money to two billionaires for slower satellite networks they already planned to build without subsidization, Trump Republicans claimed they’d “saved” taxpayers $21.5 billion dollars in “non-deployment funds” that appear to have mysteriously fallen into a deep hole in the federal government.

Obviously states are pissed off, and have been waiting for much of the last year for the Trump administration to green light that money for the purpose Congress earmarked it for. But wary of upsetting the Trump administration, many haven’t been willing to publicly comment on how stupid this all is for fear of losing out on their promised money. But they’re getting increasingly pissed all the same.

That includes Texas, which was slated to get the most “BEAD” (Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment) funds ($3.3 billion) of any state in the country.

Over the last month or two there’s been a growing, bipartisan annoyance in the Lone Star state at the fact that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos appeared to have hijacked billions of dollars originally slated for fiber optics for their satellite ventures. That’s forced the Texas Broadband Deployment Office (BDO) to put all grant awards on hold while the state investigates questions of cronyism and favoritism at the agency:

The fact that both Musk and Bezos are also building large AI data centers, which are politically toxic, even in the corporate whoring Lone Star State, may have something to do with this.

I would expect that Musk and Bezos will get their Baksheesh following the November elections.

Forget it Jake, it's Texas.

That Which Can Be Destroyed by the Truth, Should Be

2026-09-03T20:05:00.000-04:00

A local activist in Arkansas filed an FOI request to the state PUC about a what Entergy was doing with regard to Google's efforts to secure power for their planned data center in West Memphis, Arkansas.

It appears that she got more than what the utility company intended.

The short version:

Google appears to be paying only a third of the cost for new electric infrastructure, not the full amount, as Entergy has said.

Yes, these documents appear to undermine Entergy’s claims that customers won’t pay higher bills to support data centers

Details of Google’s West Memphis site’s massive power draw are revealed. [Google would be using all of the energy from a solar installation that it was touting.]

In response to this data being released, Entergy filed suit asking for a restraining order preventing the news media from writing about this information, something which a Federal Judge promptly denied.

Entergy claimed that the documents revealed trade secrets, but the fact that Entergy plans to screw its rate-payers is simply not a secret. It never has been.

Holy F%$#ing Sh%$

2026-09-03T19:47:00.000-04:00

We have a report that a a grad student synthesized dimethylmercury and possibly exposed themselves.

Dimethylmercury makes the Minimata Disease look like a trip to a pre-Amazon Whole Foods.

We had a weird story develop over the weekend here in the Cambridge area (and among organic chemists in general). I’m glad that I wasn’t trying to blog it as it happened, because it’s taken some turns!

This all started last Wednesday night, but most of us only heard something on Thursday when word came of an MIT chemistry building that was being closed off because of a report of someone who had been exposed to hazardous material. It became clear that said material was possibly dimethylmercury, which a graduate student had claimed to have synthesized, and who subsequently reported themselves to a local emergency room. And you can see why that caused a stir (but read on!)

Dimethylmercury is very, very bad news. It is obviously something I will not work with, but it’s never been the subject of a blog post here in that category because unfortunately there’s nothing lighthearted about the subject. Not after the death of Karen Wetterhahn in 1997. That story should be well known to chemists everywhere, but the short version is that Prof. Wetterhahn (at Dartmouth) was accidentally exposed in August of 1996 to a few drops of liquid dimethylmercury on her latex-gloved hand. What she didn’t know (and what none of us really knew) was that this compound rapidly penetrates such gloves, which meant that Wetterhahn was exposed to skin contact within seconds. Toxicologically, it is probably the worst of the organomercurys, which are of course a dangerously toxic group of compounds overall. Her precautions for handling the compound were the standard at the time, it should be noted.

Prof. Wetterhahn began to notice general symptoms within weeks. Early in 1997 she began to show neurological problems, and within weeks she had collapsed into a vegetative state. She was removed from life support in June. She had very high levels of mercury in her blood, and all attempts at chelation therapy to remove it were ineffective. That’s surely because it had spread throughout her body by the time the problem was recognized, but frankly no one can be sure if there were any measures that could have been effective enough after the initial exposure. This horrifying incident led to a complete re-evaluation of the use of dimethylmercury in synthetic and analytical chemistry, where among other things it had been the reference peak standard in mercury NMR experiments.

It appears that there was no exposure to anyone, and possibly that there was no actual synthesis of the ferociously toxic material, but someone was trying to make some.

Whoever they are should be blackballed from chemistry for the rest of their natural life.

I don't just mean that they should be banned working in ans academic or industrial programs related to chemistry. I mean that they should be banned from any work with chemicals at all, up to and including working as a pastry chef.

Coyote vs. ACME Review (No Spoilers Except Revealing a Cameo)

2026-09-02T20:37:00.000-04:00

A brief and explosive cameo

A promotional poster

Director	Dave Green
Writers	Samy Burch James Gunn Jeremy Slater
From a New Yorker article by	Ian Frazier
Cast
Will Forte	Kevin Avery
Lana Condor	Paige Avery
John Cena	Buddy Crane
Tone Bell	Sal Maltese
Martha Kelly	Dottie Jones
Luis Guzmán	Judge Troppogrosso
P.J. Byrne	Bill Pelicanos
John Early	Henry Heslop
Nancy Linehan Charles	Cherry
Kenneth Choi	Oscar Jeon
Ernie Vigil	Talon
Eric Bauza	Bugs Bunny Charlie Dog Daffy Duck Dr. Lorre Elmer Fudd Foghorn Leghorn Gossamer Porky Pig Road Runner Tweety
Candi Milo	Granny Miss Prissy Witch Hazel
Jim Cummings	Tasmanian Devil

First, the cameo. It came from a 70 year old USAF veteran, the AIM-4 Falcon.

The round nose, triangular wings, and the tiny fins on the front are kind of a dead give-away.

I will not reveal the role that the missile took, except to say that it was sell acted and, "Energetic," pairing very nicely with their fellow actor in the scene.

A further note: my guess is that there are perhaps 100 other people in the united states who identified the missile.

I cannot speak to these other mil-pr0n geeks, but this makes me the least cool man in the world.

Of course, this is not a surprise. My kids have been saying this for years.

As to my movie review, I will take the approach that Michael Caine took with the Muppets, in a Muppet Christmas Carol, and review all characters, both live action and animated as if they are all live actors.

First, let me state that this is a really good movie, funny, poignant, and at times laugh out loud.

I think that it is better than Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and it is better while having to carry the enormous burden of Warner Brothers canon, which Roger Rabbit did not.

The technical production values are very high, but truth be told, this does not matter. We are here for the dialogue, characters, and story.

There is a lot that I wanted to see that I did not see, not just more of some of the non Coyote and Roadrunner characters, but also, for example, a deeper dive into the law office staff, who seemed to have been worked through far more deeply than the there was addressed in the film.

I understand why this happened.

If we had seen more of Bugs Bunny as the classic trickster, and more of Daffy Duck duck being ……… well ……… daffy, along with a deeper dive into the law offices, the movie would likely have been about 4½ hours long, which would have been too long.

It was good at 1h 39m

Still, I'd like to see what ended up on the cutting room floor.

The basic plot was obvious to anyone who read the original New Yorker essay or saw the coming attractions, but it was executed quite well.

It was also laugh out loud funny, and quite touching, being an examination of friendships and obsessions. (Wile E. Coyote and obsession, now there is a surprise)

It was a bit less subversive than the original Looney Tunes, which did a job of communicating very different humor to the adults and the children in the audience.

I also think that it is kind of absurd that it got a PG rating. It's Looney Tunes for f%$#'s sake! Those anvils have a context!

As to the performances: They were all good, and it was apparent that everyone involved was enjoying themselves, which is just plain fun to watch.

John Cena as evil lawyer Buddy Crane is clearly the best performance in the film. He chews the scenery with reckless abandon, and does extremely well both as a source of jokes and as a straight man without completely dominating the movie. (Thing about Alan Rickman in Robin Hood, who made Kevin Costner look like Jerry Lewis)

Wile E. is great, true to form. His portrait as a person whose obsession is being opposed by the universe itself is as pure and focused as it was when he fell off that cliff ………and that cliff ……… and that cliff ………and that cliff in the original Warner Brothers shorts.

The Road Runner is good, but a little softer than in the original. He is not taunting the Coyote (and everyone else in this movie) quite so much as he does in the original. Good, but only an A, not an A+.

Will Forte gives a good solid performance as Kevin Avery, (I assume that the name is an homage to Tex Avery) but he's a little bit too earnest, particularly in the beginning. As the character who changes the most, going from disillusioned cynic to crusader almost as obsessed as the coyote, he's just too nice and too engaged in the needs of his clients at the start.

The weakest performance was from Foghorn Leghorn. He was OK, but given his role as a villain, arguably the boss villain, he lacked the menace and arrogance required for the role.

While his earlier performances never presented much in the way of menace, his arrogance is normally a bit more prominent.

Also, Tweety's performance was a disappointment. His character was in a bad place, but we don't see any of the ingenuity and brutality that has made Sylvester's life a living hell.

As to the legal machinations in the plot, it was well done, but I would have liked it to a bit more Perry Mason than it was.

Of course, one does have to talk about the real villain in this movie, former Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zazlav, who canceled the release of the film in order to secure a tax write-off.

I won't go into detail on that whole matter, but Zazlav should be strapped into a chair and made to watch this movie on repeat for a full week without being allowed to close his eyes.

You know the drill:

I call it Kubricking.