Excerpt: The nation’s top scientific body has removed a chapter on climate science from a reference manual for judges after an outcry from critics on the right, including President Trump.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said Friday that it had “determined that questions about the processes used to develop the chapter warrant an independent review, and the chapter will not appear on our website while that review is underway.”

Me again: Pre-Trump, I thought I grokked how rotten everything was, but watching the one-by-one asskissing collapse of the few institutions I’d sorta respected — like the NAS — is srsly depressing.

This is one of the great moments of cruelty by Trump & the Republicans: Haiti remains a dangerous place, with minimal rule of law, repressive authorities, and armed, violent groups killing and kidnapping people for their political activity, but some lucky thousands of Haitians have made it to America. Here they’ve built peaceful, productive lives, found safety, until America’s leadership decided to end that safety and begin doing whatever can be done to ruin their new lives here. This is a fucking crime against humanity, one of many underway amid more crimes against humanity being planned by Trump and Trumpians who live only to hate.

DOGE cuts caused a work slowdown in immigration offices, extending the backlog of applications for citizenship, green cards & work permits to millions more people, and that delay makes these people subject to arrest and warehousing in the new American concentration camps.

Whatever reassurance and accountability bodycams are alleged to provide, this is the opposite. We’ll only see bodycam imagery that ‘proves’ ICE is the good guys.

Americans who support cruelties like this need to be shunned from polite society, and kicked in the genitals whenever possible.

The Gestapo is rude — who knew?

Excerpt: “When I joined the United States Navy, I swore an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States of America from enemies foreign and domestic, and when people try to take away our right to vote in America, they start looking like enemies domestic. I’m talking to you, comrades.”

Fucking obviously, no.

Nicole Ozer has a pertinent resumé, but she’s an outside hire. She’d never worked for EFF until she was hired as the boss, in June. This gives me a scary flashback to my long and illustrious career as a nobody at dozens of different companies, where an outside hire as the boss was damned near always a disaster.

Worse, though, is the talking part of the talk show — Ozer is a filibuster. Ask her anything, and she talks and talks and reiterates and talks and goes on a tangent and reiterates, and the talking doesn’t illuminate anything about EFF’s work. It’s more like an endless speech, and I do mean endless — for most of the few questions the host asked in 45 minutes or so, he had to interrupt.

This is not the right leader for one of the most important good guys groups, and I’m worried about the EFF under her leadership.

“Supreme Court, my ass” (which gets quotes cuz it might as well be verbatim from Trump’s weirdly-shaped mouth). Trump lives so far above the law, it’s like there’s no law at all, no Constitution…

Oh, “errors”? Like, honest oopsies? I don’t think so.

Musk and his monsters set out to monkeywrench anything that helped people, largely succeeded, and none of it was an “error” in their minds. They have no regrets, and never will unless they’re prosecuted. Which won’t happen but ought to, equally of course, since everything that was done was illegal.

Excerpt: A lawyer for the nonprofit said, “This latest attempt by Trump’s Justice Department to target SPLC through one of its former employees is as legally and factually flawed as their previous attacks.”

Excerpt: Some of the words or expressions in this article may at first blush seem hyperbolic. One of them is “fascism.” That’s how Kirschstein characterized the process when we met in Lawrence in July: “It was soft fascism.” It was.

Fascism usually begins with redefining the nation by excluding certain groups, which are branded threats to national health and unity. The Trump administration has fixated on two groups most of all — immigrants and trans people — in just this way, smearing us (I am a member of both groups) as predatory, sick, at once subhuman and terrifyingly powerful.

Miller is a Republican Congressman credibly accused of spousal and child abuse, so this is exactly what you’d expect — Trump & the Republicans are pro-abuse.

The US military is no longer an equal opportunity employer.

This is your ordinary American wingnut cruelty, but I’m wondering why NBC News repeatedly refers to this 18-year-old woman as a “girl.”

The article isn’t worth reading, but I’m impressed at the Washington Post‘s headline, which subtly implies that Trump is steadfast, insistent, unyielding, instead of that Trump is criminally overruling the rule of law.

Excerpt: Utah-based Our Rescue, previously known as Operation Underground Railroad, says it helps law enforcement perform sting operations to catch human traffickers and rescue survivors. It’s unclear if it has immigration lawyers on its staff, although its website says it offers “legal support to help prosecute offenders.” Our Rescue did not immediately return NPR’s request for comment.

The group was founded by activist Tim Ballard, who was the subject of the 2023 film Sound of Freedom. The movie starring Jim Caviezel was heavily promoted in conservative media as QAnon conspiracies flourished.

The world’s enKushnerfication continues.

FIFA, Infantino, and Trump are all best known for flagrant and fragrant corruption.

Excerpt: On the day the Oxferd Comma investigation was opened, the acting F.B.I. director, Andrew G. McCabe, briefed the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, on the bureau’s decision.

The following day, Mr. Rosenstein undertook his own extraordinary decision: He appointed the former F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, to be a special counsel to investigate Mr. Trump and his campaign.

But what was not known at the time was that Mr. Rosenstein, in appointing Mr. Mueller, had in effect killed the counterintelligence investigation.

Excerpt: The National Firearms Act of 1934 had instituted a tax-and-registration requirement for rifles and shotguns with short barrels, as well as for suppressors — weapons that Congress sought to curb because they were deemed particularly suited for violent crime. The law was written as lawmakers warned of a “serious national emergency” driven by gun crime as the country reeled from Prohibition-era gang shootings and an attempted assassination of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The law also regulated the sale and ownership of machine guns through the permitting process, but that part of the law remains intact.

Excerpt: Many of the details of the saga are reported in this article for the first time. They show that the pool, which was supposed to reflect the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, became a striking reflection instead of the second Trump administration’s willingness to skirt laws, expend millions of dollars, ignore facts and punish truth tellers in service of the president’s demands to put his mark on the capital.

Me again: You’re perhaps 2/3 as weary as I, of reading about the Reflecting Pool. Well, fuck your weariness; this is the article worth reading about it (the article above, that is; you have my permission to skip the article below).

Trump picks Project 2025 co-author for role that would oversee any Reflecting Pool review

Excerpt: Thanks to Trump, misogyny and extremism among Republicans has become what journalists sometimes call a dog-bites-man story, something so ordinary and predictable that it breaks through only when it reaches an absurdly high threshold.

Yes, he did.

Kaine was the milquetoast Vice Presidential running mate of milquetoast Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, and vanished into anonymity after the election.

Taylor Diarrhea Farms recalls salsa, guacamole on salmonella outbreak, intensifying food-safety fears

Well, this should make it easier to scam you. There’s this law, see, the Corporate Transparency Act. Trump vetoed it. Congress overrode his veto (the only time that’s happened, I think), so Trump announces that the law simply won’t be enforced.

$567-million sounds like a lot of money, and it is if you’re you. If you’re Meta, though, it’s the equivalent of a parking ticket, nothing but a cost of doing business, certainly not a deterrent or punishment in any meaningful sense.

Excerpt: Two leading specialist military papers, the Navy Times and Stars and Stripes, are reporting that there have been multiple attempts by sailors to jump overboard as poor conditions and mental stresses on the Lincoln reach the breaking point. The crew is in its ninth month at sea, and has spent 250 days consecutively without making land – a record for an aircraft carrier in modern times.

Me again: The comfort of American soldiers and sailors in the Middle East isn’t in my top 10,000 worries, but treating troops crappy reeks of the Trump regime’s incompetence and dislike of enlisted men and women, and might motivate some people to give a damn.

Between early June and early July, as many as 5 people who worked in or closely with US Cyber Command took their own lives

Excerpt: Flock showed The New York Times how its technology works. After logging into the system, users must acknowledge they cannot search for license plates related to “reproductive care” offenses in 17 states and Washington, D.C. (Those places have expressly prohibited those searches, though a Flock spokeswoman said officers could do searches related to abortions in states only where abortion is illegal.) There is a similar warning about nine states that prohibit searching their cameras for “immigration enforcement.”

Me again: That’s the safeguard for preventing abuse? A reminder?

Excerpt: Tuberculosis, a bacterial disease that spreads through the air, is considered such a serious public health risk that there are laws in state statute specifically related to controlling it. As Weidenbach said Friday, the law makes clear that “investigation is not optional.”

Excerpt: The United States spends more than $5 trillion a year on health care. It funds the most productive biomedical discovery engine in the world. But the most effective treatment in the world does nothing for the patient who doesn’t receive it.

Excerpt: Two blood biomarker tests for Alzheimer’s were approved by the Food and Drug Administration last year to help diagnose people who are experiencing cognitive impairment.

More and more, people without memory problems are taking the tests, as well, to try to determine whether they will develop Alzheimer’s in the future. Some purchase them through direct-to-consumer lab testing sites, others are referred by a doctor. However, dementia experts almost universally say the tests aren’t ready to be used in this way and recommend against doing so.

I’ll be curious to see how many clinics or practitioners follow a Trump edict instead of medical best practices. How many families will want three separate pediatrician appointments, three separate co-pays, three separate wrangling of kids in the car?

Trump: “I’ve seen proof of where they have a vaccination thing that looks like the size of a bottle of soda and pour it into a little child’s body.”

New York Times politely lists some of the exaggerations, outright falsehoods, and wingnuttery in Trump’s vaccine orders

I read the book and saw the movie. The book was better, but I either way, things don’t turn out well.

Excerpt: The school board’s decision to rename the schools after Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Turner Ashby “cannot be divorced from racial discrimination,” Judge Michael F. Urbanski wrote in his ruling.

Me again: Limitless white-hot white stupidity — naming schools after treasonous slaveowners … in 2026.

Cool idea. And then, whatever tax rate is proposed, quintuple it.

Public transit should be free, everywhere.

Excerpt: “How is it possible … to have the rest of the world watching that and not doing anything about it?” asks Paula. “The organizations that are supposed to [help] are just not doing anything about it. … There are people that are actually starving to death right now. People that are in jail because they protest against a dictatorship that we did not choose. … There must be something that [people] can do from the outside in order for us to change the government here.”

Excerpt: The union’s lawsuit asserted that the tax provision, which was signed by Mr. Blanche, violated a federal law prohibiting the president from interfering with tax audits. That law creates potential criminal penalties for any I.R.S. employees who are found to have obeyed such a political direction, a risk to members of the agency’s union. At the same time, the suit notes that any I.R.S. employee who refuses to drop audits of Mr. Trump could face retaliation.

Excerpt: Councilmember Kim-Khánh Văn noted that Renton Police reactivated the cameras in April without issuing a community notice — not even to city council, added Rivera — which eroded public trust in the agency.

Apocalypse soon…

Excerpt: AI webpage crawlers are now being served their very own ads that ordinary visitors never see, with one firm’s boss openly describing a strategy to influence what chatbots say about brands. The next time you ask Claude about where to bank, its answer may have been influenced by this bot-targeted content.

Excerpt: Body camera footage shows Poole pulling out his taser “as a show of force,” Prummell said. When Burch did not retreat, Poole deployed the taser twice but it did not affect Burch, who lunged at the deputy several times.

Me again: Well, that’s untrue. Watch the bodycam.

No stolen car is worth anyone’s life, so no stolen car is worth a police chase. We do not live in The Dukes of Hazzard.

No stolen car is worth anyone’s life, and anyway…

Family of Abington teen killed in crash during police chase says car was not stolen

Excerpt: “I begged for an Amber alert, but law enforcement mislabelled her as a runaway. They don’t look for runaways,” Cory said. Cory also requested that investigators ping Kristen’s phone to try to determine its location in the days following her disappearance. She said that request was also denied.

Montgomery county sheriff’s office, which led the missing-person investigation, did not respond to requests for comment about its efforts to locate Kristen after she went missing.

Excerpt: Since 2022, when a gunman killed 21 people at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas has spent billions of dollars installing police officers at public schools. Under state law, officers are supposed to stay out of “routine student discipline.” But over the past few years, they have used physical force in thousands of cases, including to stop seemingly minor misbehavior.

And I certainly hope they shared some high-quality doobie.

Excerpt: The sheriff’s deputy chatted breezily over the phone about his three young daughters as Kimberly Fudge drove through gritty streets and lush Florida byways on a grim errand: gathering thousands of dollars in bail to avoid arrest for missing jury duty.

When Fudge, 38, a manager in the finance department of a government contractor, reached the drop-off point, she balked. It was a convenience store with abandoned gas pumps and a cryptocurrency machine inside. She was told to scan a QR code and feed the machine $4,000 in cash.

She walked back to her car and began to voice doubts that had been building: “Are you sure this is where I’m supposed to post the bail?”

The officer’s friendly demeanor vanished. His voice rose. He reminded her that he was tracking her location—and that deputies were two blocks away, ready to bring her in.

She went back inside and made the deposit.

Me again: For saying this, fate will require that I’m scammed myself, and soon, but… How can an adult human be so gullible?

I’ve heard John Lennon’s “Imagine” a lot of times, but Lennon was kind of a douchebag, which gets in the way of the song. It works better with Neil Young singing it.