The bus stopped, the door opened, and David Crosby stepped aboard. He paid his fare with three one-dollar bills, the driver handed him a transfer, and I think the driver recognized him, too.
It was David Crosby, no doubt about it. He was wearing David Crosby’s mustache, long white hair, pink shorts, baby blue sandals, and a tropical sorta psychedelic shirt that revealed more than a hint of his belly.
It must be rough being famous, though, so the driver didn’t say anything, and none of the other passengers said anything.
He sat in a sideways seat right in front of me, and I said nothing too, for a few blocks, but — this was David Crosby, man, one of the greats of 1960s rock’n’roll. Holding a stanchion as the bus turned, his hair flopped onto my hand, and I could be silent no longer.
“Thank you for ‘Teach Your Children’, man. Beautiful song.” He looked at me, held my eyes for too long, then allowed himself a hint of a smile and turned looked out the window again. We said nothing more, and he rang the bell and stepped off at Juneau Street.
My brushes with celebrities have been few: I held the door for Winona Ryder at Macy’s in downtown San Francisco, a few weeks before she was busted for shoplifting. Peed in a trough-style urinal next to Demond Wilson at a bar in Kansas City. Salman Rushdie walked past me on Telegraph Avenue, in Berkeley. And now I’ve shared a bus with David Crosby, three years after he died.
♦ ♦ ♦
Waiting for a #560 westbound, the bus that was coming was a #560 eastbound. And that can’t be — an eastbound bus would be on the other side of the street.
The lady getting on before me was confused, and asked the driver, “Is this bus going to Westwood Village?”
“Yes,” he said. The lady is a regular on this route, so she usually doesn’t have to ask, and the question made the driver suspicious. “Doesn’t it say Westwood Village on the sign?” The driver, being inside the bus, couldn’t see the sign on the bus’s outside.
“No,” the lady answered. “It says Bellevue.”
“Damn,” said the driver.
When the bus reaches the end of the line, any bus, any line, the destination sign is supposed to be changed before starting the return trip. The driver must’ve forgotten, I thought. That’s why it still said “Bellevue” when we’re going away* from Bellevue.
But that’s the old way, and these are new times. “We can’t change the signs any more,” the driver said. “The computer does that now.”
I’ve been taking transit for sixty years, and in all that time I’ve seen perhaps half a dozen buses with the wrong destination sign, and that includes today. Having “the computer” take over this task is a solution for a problem that wasn’t a problem, but by golly, the problem has been solved: sign-switching has been automated, and it’s probably AI so it’s wrong.
At every stop for the rest of the way, as the driver opened the door, he announced for new passengers, “Ignore the sign, we’re going to Westwood Village.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Another day, another route, the bus pulled into a stop and a well-weathered black bum clamored aboard. He was lugging everything he owned in a subcompact-car-sized-wagon, overstuffed with bundles, plastic bags, paper bags, a pillow, and his tightly-rolled sleeping bag, everything bundled together with twine.
He passed the fare box without paying, and said to the driver, “I’m OK,” which meant he’d secure his load, and keep it out of the aisle. We have very polite homeless people in Seattle.
He pulled a roll of twine from his pocket, and used it to quickly and expertly tie his wagon to an armrest and a stanchion, and then he sat in a sideways seat in front of me.
I wasn’t going to say anything, but the bum spoke first. He’d noticed me noticing his knotwork, and said to me, “I used to be a Boy Scout.”
“You learned your knots well,” I said.
“And I carry the twine to ‘Be prepared’.”
I nodded and smiled, said nothing more. Something about the man’s chipper demeanor warned me that if I said more, he’d pour a conversation all over me.
But I seriously respected his knotwork. This was the RapidRide #F, which makes dozens of sharp turns and myriad smaller twists as it winds anything-but-rapidly toward Renton, and every twist and turn is capable of toppling passengers who aren’t holding something for stability. But through it all and all the way to Renton, that man’s wagon never moved an inch.
Excerpt: The uproar roiling international football in the wake of FIFA’s plans to sell a stake in its new media division got its start in secret talks last year, when the chief of the sport’s international body met with Joshua Kushner, the venture capitalist with family ties to President Donald Trump.
Excerpt: The settlement given to Paul Vaughn, who was convicted by a Tennessee jury in 2024 of conspiring to prevent access to an abortion clinic, shows how the goal of a $1.8 billion fund announced in May can continue, despite a public retreat by Mr. Blanche. An already existing avenue for disbursing taxpayer money could allow him to assuage skeptical Republicans while fulfilling President Trump’s desire to pay people he believes were wronged by the Justice Department.
Excerpt: The FBI office in charge of maintaining the terrorist watch list is seeking an artificial intelligence system for pre-crime policing, according to procurement documents obtained by Reason. The request for information for vendors, posted by the FBI’s procurement division in March, solicits potential bidders for a project that would supercharge the Threat Screening Center (TSC) with new predictive AI capabilities—just as its focus moves from Islamist terrorism to domestic dissent.
Excerpt: It’s one thing to criticize federal judges. We do it here all the time, and it can be a healthy to hold unelected, life-tenured officials to scrutiny. But none of us at Above the Law is presently a federal government official and none of us are comparing federal judges to murderers and kidnappers for an audience of thugs who already stormed the Capitol and tried to hang the vice president.
Like so many Trump regime prosecutions, this was plainly bogus from the git-go. Everyone involved in his arrest and prosecution, absolutely including the President, should be sued, impeached, disbarred, algae bloomed, etc.
Excerpt: Epstein also sat at the center of a web of fixers and scouts that approached young women and lured them into his orbit with promises of work. A Bloomberg News analysis of Skype messages, flight records and other documents released by the US Department of Justice show that from the time of his release from jail in 2009, through to his arrest in July 2019, this shadow network spanned Europe, recruiting dozens, potentially more than a hundred women, who were transported to his properties in France, the UK, the US and the US Virgin Islands. Some involved now say they didn’t know the true nature of Epstein’s activities, and would not have assisted him had they known the truth.
Excerpt: Initially I couldn’t believe Google could be so dumb to kill the thing it makes literally all its money from, but lately I’ve arrived at another conclusion: Google knows it’s killing the open web and is doing it on purpose. There’s no way no one at Google realizes what’s happening. There’s no way this hasn’t been brought up internally in meetings. Anyone can see what the impact will be long term. What Google thinks they’ll have for a core business if they succeed in capturing all outbound traffic for themselves, I have no idea. They probably think they’ll be an AI company doing AI stuff making AI revenue, but in my opinion that’s a goal with no clear path, not a plan.
Much more likely it was Iran. As the US daily bombs that country’s civilian infrastructure and Trump reduces American cyberdefense, attacks like this are increasingly likely.
Excerpt: But on some level, these fact-checks miss the point. We don’t think Musk intends claims like these to be debated on an empirical level. Rather, Musk is communicating in subterranean tropes that his far-right global audience will instantly find intelligible: He’s advancing the generalized sentiment that due to DOGE cuts, nobody died for whom we need to feel any passing responsibility. Nobody died who’s worthy of our concern.
Excerpt: In a recent interview with The Economist, Musk denied that he was a racist, even as he defended his far-right views of immigration. “If you have a large and growing, rapidly growing group of people whose beliefs are antithetical to Western beliefs, at some point, there will be a reckoning,” he said.
But those views, as we see, are indistinguishable from what you would find in The Turner Diaries. With hundreds of millions of followers on a platform he personally controls, Musk stands as the most prominent purveyor of far-right and ultranationalistic rhetoric in the world. This is the same Musk who is also busy leveraging his vast wealth to shape that same world in his own image.
Excerpt: Ms. Moreno, the daughter of Senator Bernie Moreno, also an Ohio Republican, has said that Mr. Miller scalded her chest and stomach by throwing hot water from a skillet at her body; held a gun to her head; pushed her against a wall and hit her head; and fractured their daughter’s collarbone and bruised her shoulder.
According to court documents, their daughter at one point told Ms. Moreno, “Daddy kill you.”
Mr. Miller has not only denied it all, he has gone on offense against Ms. Moreno, making damaging accusations of his own in a series of media interviews, court filings and countersuits that have kept the family’s personal trauma in the headlines. He has called his ex-wife mentally ill, a liar, a stalker and a dangerous individual who has made him and their daughter unsafe.
Excerpt: Mr. Raymond’s predecessor, Anthony Miranda, an appointee of Mayor Eric Adams, was fired in May. He is now under criminal investigation related to possible corruption.
Mr. Mamdani immediately appointed Mr. Raymond, a former New York City police lieutenant, to replace Mr. Miranda. Mr. Raymond was picked largely for his anti-corruption stance, having played his own role as a whistle-blower in the Police Department before retiring as a lieutenant in 2023.
A decade ago, Mr. Raymond, who grew up in Brooklyn the child of Haitian immigrants, sued the Police Department along with a group of fellow officers, claiming that officials pushed unofficial arrest quotas that Mr. Raymond said were targeting Black and Latino men.
Around this time, Mr. Raymond also met Mr. Serpico, another son of Brooklyn who became known for fighting corrupt police culture.
That’s cool and all, but in 2025, eBay’s revenue totaled $11.1-billion. This is a pittance as punishment, and zero executives have been prosecuted.
Excerpt: The Steiners were bombarded with anonymous material including deliveries of live cockroaches and a bloody pig mask. They were threatened online. Much of the material they were sent, including a funeral wreath and a book on surviving the loss of a spouse, suggested imminent death. The security team was on the verge of breaking into the Steiners’ garage to put a tracker on their car when the plot was derailed.
Excerpt: As Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei Asia found in a recent investigation, just five US tech giants — Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle — are hiding an estimated $1.65 trillion in debt that doesn’t appear on balance sheets. That’s even more than the $1.35 trillion in debt the five companies officially reported in their financial data for the most recent quarter.
Meta alone has amassed around $420 billion in off-balance-sheet debt, according to Nikkei, highlighting how precarious the AI industry’s steep investment in AI has become, and inspiring comparisons to energy company Enron, which collapsed in spectacular fashion in 2001 because of similar debts hidden behind shell companies.
Excerpt: The Trump administration has begun arresting foreign citizens with expired US visas as they travel through airports, including spouses of Americans, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with immigration lawyers — a tactic that opens up a vast new pool of people for deportation.
Me again: This will include people whose visa expires while they’re working through the legal labyrinth of renewing it, even folks with a valid green card and/or work permit — people playing by the rules. Trump & the Republicans will have them deported to third-world countries the immigrants have never before been to.
And if you’re thinking, tough shit, they’re not Americans, please tell yourself “Fuck you,” click away from this page and site, and never click back. Your kind ain’t welcome here.
What a very strange article: The author’s head is in the right place, attached at the neck and all, but he’s hemming and hawing and doing the whole Hamlet shtick over calling ICE gulags “camps” instead of detention centers.
Get real: ICE facilities are not detention centers, certainly, but they’re also not “camps” — there are no weenie roasts or woodsy hikes. They’re concentration camps, by every metric of the definition.
Excerpt: “The US used to be a beacon of human rights. Not anymore. Today, it stands alongside North Korea, Nicaragua, Mali & Russia, isolated. And the world no longer listens to it.”
25-million seniors on fixed incomes will pay higher premiums or die.
My dad used to say Social Security and Medicare were forever, because the American Association of Retired Persons would raise a ruckus you could hear from outer space. But from AARP today, silence and crickets.
Excerpt: Hoping to avoid an expensive lift off the mountain via helicopter, he walked around and found he wasn’t lightheaded and told his friends, “I think we can get out of here.”
Me again: I don’t want to read too much into a happy, heroic story like this, and maybe David Cifaldi is rich and he’s just joking here, but … It sure sounds like he calculated the numbers, and decided that hiking ten miles with a stick stuck through him wasn’t as terrifying as the bill for an air ambulance.
Excerpt: The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands.
That’s it. That’s the story. They are naturally not putting it in those words, but instead talking about “gold standard science” and the “reproducibility crisis” and funding “bold inquiry” for “transformational breakthroughs”. This is all bullshit, and it’s important to realize that. Shameless hand-waving bullshit, delivered in a how-dare-you-think-otherwise manner is the defining style of the entire Trump administration. You can see it in every appointee, in every part of the executive branch, and in the pronouncements of all of Trump’s supporters. I realize that this is a simple heuristic to apply, and a very unambiguous and unflattering one, but I find it to be all too useful and all too accurate. Give it a try.
Excerpt: For years, [hundreds of millions of gallons of radioactive fracking wastewater] has arrived in a caravan of tanker trucks that come night and day to deposit the toxic brine in injection wells that pump it thousands of feet underground, where it is supposed to stay forever.
But the brine is spurting to the surface, and locals fear it could soon contaminate the drinking water source for 32,000 people. “It would destroy the city,” said Susan Vessels, president of the Marietta City Council. “Once the damage is done, it cannot be undone.”
Giving a damn about good movies, I must mention that this video’s relentless and unnecessary bubble-music is Auschwitz for the ear.
Other than that, though, it’s a hella good video, jammed with information I hadn’t known, about preventable traffic deaths and one American city that’s prevented them.
Excerpt: Darren Eichler and Daniel Greer were working on the cemetery grounds when they noticed immigration agents trying to arrest a man standing in the Des Plaines River, which runs alongside the cemetery. From behind the cemetery’s fence, Eichler, Greer and two other co-workers told the agents to leave the area and stop harassing people, according to their complaints.
Instead, agents approached them and demanded to be let into the cemetery. When they refused, agents took out bolt cutters and cut the gate’s lock, according to the complaints. The agent sprayed them with mace and arrested them. Eichler started experiencing intense chest pains and struggled to breathe. He repeatedly asked to go to the hospital, but it took agents over an hour to take him to Rush Oak Park Hospital, where he was kept handcuffed. He was eventually released from the hospital without charges, according to his complaint.
Meanwhile, Greer was sprayed, shoved to the ground and his hands were zip-tied behind his back, according to his complaint. He was taken to a Department of Homeland Security facility but was never told why he was detained or offered medical help for the chemical burns on his face. He was also released without charges, but he was handed paperwork claiming he was arrested for “assaulting or resisting an officer,” according to the complaint.
Excerpt: Many of the materials appear to have been made public when Claude users opted to distribute a given chat or project to colleagues or associates using the chatbot’s “share” feature. After hitting the “share” button in the top right corner, Claude notes that sharing will create a “public” link, which “anyone with the link can view.” The warning, though, doesn’t alert users that shared content could wind up being indexed by a search engine — meaning that a user could effectively be sharing their Claude-generated document with the entire internet.
Excerpt: Meta will be able to draw upon Newsmax‘s significant current reporting as well as archived content to support AI queries across Meta’s apps and devices.
Excerpt: Current AI tools are being used mainly as assistants, backed up by human checks, much as with other medical devices. For instance, when AI models trigger an alert that a patient is at risk of sepsis, a clinician must review and confirm the physiological rationale before any treatment.
But in the next few years, AI-driven clinical tools are expected to advance from synthesizing data to acting on it, with less and less human input. They will make diagnoses, devise treatment plans and make patient-management decisions that clinicians play little or no part in. Whereas the outputs of many existing tools are understandable — sepsis models, for instance, work by combining defined physiological variables according to a transparent formula1 — more-advanced tools can involve black-box deep-learning processes. Clinicians will no longer be able to fully follow the tools’ reasoning, even for algorithms that provide some explanations for their judgements2.
Excerpt: Morales’ father said he believes law enforcement bears responsibility for the events leading up to the crash.
“They told me they stopped chasing, but the videos online show something else. They show lots of police cars behind them. I think there are other ways they could have stopped the car,” he said in Spanish.
Excerpt: The extreme weather has forced the country in and out of a state of paralysis. Near Bordeaux, a wildfire has burned some 160 square miles; more than 220,000 people have been evacuated. Several nuclear power plants were temporarily shut down; trains were canceled because their route brought them too close to a fire. Paris landmarks like the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower have had to close early because of the heat, leaving tourists and the businesses that cater to them grumbling. As one crisis follows the next, the government has offered only an incoherent response.
Some commenters have suggested that the problem, at least when it comes to heat, lies in France’s supposed aversion to air-conditioning and that the fix must be a cultural one. The far-right leader Marine Le Pen, whose party has a long history of opposing climate-friendly policies, announced a plan to roll out air-conditioning nationwide. On X, right-wing foreigners like Elon Musk mocked Europeans for their lack of air-conditioning and implied that if residents simply learned to love it then all would be well. But it will not be easy to bring cooling to the masses, and it won’t be enough to solve the country’s problems. France needs to take climate adaptation far more seriously as this summer’s blazing heat and wildfires become a deadly, recurring reality.
Until recently, France had rather clement weather. But climate change has hit France and the rest of Europe very quickly. The continent is warming more than twice as fast as the global average, and scientists believe that there will be 10 times as many extremely hot days by the end of the century as there are now. Drought, too, has become a continual problem, leading to failed harvests and water restrictions.
This is a charming human interest story, I guess? This human (me) doesn’t have much interest, but to recap:
Rich idiot takes friends boating in dangerous conditions, gets rescued by the Coast Guard, but his boat blows away and gets stuck. It’s this rich idiot’s fifth boat, but it’s not insured, so he turns to eager volunteers to help get the boat out of the mud, so far to no avail. And the rich idiot says in hindsight, “The stupid Coast Guard made me cut my anchor and leave the boat behind. …”
Excerpt: Knowing that the federal government under President Lyndon B. Johnson had in 1968 allocated funds to encourage publishers to create more books for students like hers, Ms. Walter eventually challenged an executive at a local publishing company, Ward Ritchie Press, to fill that need.
“‘Well, write them,’ he responded,” she wrote in her autobiography, Something Inside So Strong: Life in Pursuit of Choice, Courage and Change (2019). “I felt he was passing the buck and told him so. But he insisted. I reluctantly agreed.”
Nothing will meaningfully improve until billionaires fear for their lives.
7/31/2026
News always and only from reliable sources, and I decide what’s reliable — no right-wing bullshit, no Substack because fuck Nazis, no RawStory, Newsweek, or other clickbait sites, and no Glenn Greenwald, Ezra Klein, Matt Taibbi, Matthew Yglesias, or other famous writers with nothing left to say. Written news is preferred; video links will be rare, and damned near never to videos where the reporter sits, stands, or strolls in front of a camera — that’s show biz, not news.
If you’re blocked from reading anything linked above, please send an email, and I’ll reply with the article’s complete text, via my vast array of fine ad-blockers and paywall-vaulters.
Special thanks to Linden Arden, Becky Jo, Joey Jo Jo & John the Basketemeritus, the aforementioned Mr Meyer, Dave S, Name Withheld, and always extra special thanks to my lovely late Stephanie, who gave me 21 years and proved that the world isn’t always shitty.
