President-elect Donald Trump announced Wednesday his intent to nominate entrepreneur and commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman as the next administrator of NASA.
For those unfamiliar with Isaacman, who at just 16 years old founded a payment processing company in his parents' basement that ultimately became a major player in online payments, it may seem an odd choice. However, those inside the space community welcomed the news, with figures across the political spectrum hailing Isaacman's nomination variously as "terrific," "ideal," and "inspiring."
This statement from Isaac Arthur, president of the National Space Society, is characteristic of the response: "Jared is a remarkable individual and a perfect pick for NASA Administrator. He brings a wealth of experience in entrepreneurial enterprise as well as unique knowledge in working with both NASA and SpaceX, a perfect combination as we enter a new era of increased cooperation between NASA and commercial spaceflight."
Former Richard Nixon aide and Fox News personality Monica Crowley has been tapped by Donald Trump to be the United States’ next ambassador, assistant secretary of state, and chief of protocol.
During Trump's first time in office, Crowley was tapped to be his senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council, but passed on the post after reports surfaced that her 2012 book "What the (Bleep) Just Happened" and her 2000 dissertation were filled with dozens of instances of plagiarism.
Crowley’s right-wing Fox News bonafides come in the form of old-school racist birtherism. During President Barack Obama’s tenure in office, Crowley promoted various conspiracy theories connected to the legitimacy of the president’s birth certificate, his religious affiliations, and a belief that Obama was working to create “Sharia Law,” in the United States. Still waiting for that to happen.
On Wednesday, Donald Trump nominated former Rep. Billy Long to chair the Internal Revenue Service, a Missouri Republican who tried to abolish the tax-collecting agency while serving in Congress.
Long was a cosponsor of the Fair Tax Act, a bill that would abolish income taxes and instead implement a whopping 23% sales tax—a regressive tax that the Tax Policy Center said would lead to a tax increase on the middle class and a massive cut for the wealthiest Americans. The bill Long co-sponsored also sought to repeal the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to create and collect income taxes, and ultimately would abolish the IRS entirely.
The bill Long cosponsored tracks with the goals of Project 2025, the right-wing roadmap for Trump’s second term. Like the Fair Tax Act, Project 2025 calls for replacing individual and corporate income taxes with a consumption tax, which the Center for American Progress said would lead to a “$5,900 tax increase for the middle 20% of households and an average $2 million tax cut for the top 0.1%.”
Long also was the cosponsor of a bill that would repeal the estate tax, which only kicks in for people who inherit more than $13.6 million—amounting to yet another giveaway to the mega rich.
Since leaving Congress in 2023, Long has been serving as a tax adviser to businesses, and has encouraged them to use a pandemic-era Employee Retention Tax Credit that's cost the government billions more than anticipated due to it being rife with fraud.
Trump touted this work as a reason why he chose Long to lead the IRS.
“Since leaving Congress, Billy has worked as a Business and Tax advisor, helping Small Businesses navigate the complexities of complying with the IRS Rules and Regulations,” Trump said in a Truth Social post. “I have known Billy since 2011 - He is an extremely hard worker, and respected by all, especially by those who know him in Congress. Taxpayers and the wonderful employees of the IRS will love having Billy at the helm. He is the consummate ‘people person,’ well respected on both sides of the aisle.”
Democratic senators are already concerned about Long’s work helping businesses scam the government.
“There are a lot of reasons why former Congressman Billy Long is a bizarre choice for this role,” Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, told Roll Call. “What’s most concerning is that Mr. Long left office and jumped into the scam-plagued industry involving the Employee Retention Tax Credit.”
In order to get Long confirmed, he has to fire current IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, whose term expires in November 2027.
The New York Times reported that Werfel has no intention of leaving his post, saying that he told a podcast in November: “I have a vision of my last day on the job being Nov. 12, 2027. My frame of mind on the IRS is that it’s nonpartisan, is that our priorities can and should shift with new Treasury leadership.”
It wouldn’t be the first person Trump intends to fire in order to install his own corrupt cronies.
Trump also wants to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray, whom he appointed during his first term, and replace him with Kash Patel, a right-wing conspiracy theorist and Trump loyalist who wants to help Trump seek revenge on his perceived enemies.
He'll dismantle NASA and hand it to Trump's other billionaire cronies. Oligarchy in full swing.
Donald Trump added yet another billionaire to his administration on Wednesday with his announcement that Jared Isaacman will become the next NASA administrator.
“Jared will drive NASA’s mission of discovery and inspiration, paving the way for groundbreaking achievements in Space science, technology, and exploration,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Isaacman made headlines in September after becoming the first private citizen to accomplish a spacewalk while in orbit around the Earth in a SpaceX chartered flight. This was Isaacman’s second chartered flight with Elon Musk’s privatized space exploration program; His first was a three-day orbit around the Earth, financed by Isaacman, which included three other private citizens and boasted no professional astronaut in its crew.
Not unlike Musk, Isaacman made his money setting up a payment processing company, named Shift4, when he was 16. The company went public in 2020, making Isaacman a billionaire. Aviation began as a hobby for him, and turned into a business after he founded Draken International, which has had hundreds of millions in dollars in defense contracts with the U.S. Air Force, providing pilot training. Draken also boasts one of the largest private fleets of fighter jets.
Isaacman sold his majority stake in Draken International to the Blackstone Group in 2019. In 2022, the Air Force announced it would not be renewing its $280 million "red air" adversary training services contract with the private defense firm saying its services were “inadequate” for training “high end.”
In 2021, the then 37-year-old Isaacman linked up with Musk and announced he was chartering a SpaceX flight for his first trip into orbit. “We want to work towards a Jetsons-like world,” Isaacman said in an interview at the time.
In a statement on Musk’s social media cesspool X, Isaacman wrote “I am passionate about America leading the most incredible adventure in human history,” promising to work toward “usher[ing] in an era where humanity becomes a true spacefaring civilization.”
I am honored to receive President Trump’s @realDonaldTrump nomination to serve as the next Administrator of NASA. Having been fortunate to see our amazing planet from space, I am passionate about America leading the most incredible adventure in human history. On my last mission…
Like many of Trump’s picks, Isaacman has no specific science or government background. John Grunsfeld, a former NASA associate administrator and an astronaut, told The Washington Post that Isaacson is “an out-of-the-box candidate.”
“He doesn’t have government experience, he doesn’t have previous NASA experience, he doesn’t come from the NASA contractor or the science side,” Grunsfeld said. ”
Gee, it's like putting transphobic religious bigots in positions of authority has bad consequences. Get the fuck out of Tennessee and the other shithole red states.
Lawyer and transgender rights activist Chase Strangio (right) leaves the US Supreme Court after arguing a transgender rights case before the high court on December 4, 2024, in Washington, DC. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in United States v. Skrmetti, arguably the most important transgender rights case the Court has ever heard. The case asks whether discrimination against transgender people can violate the Constitution — and it appears most of the justices feel it does not. The likely result is that the Court will allow states to ban health procedures that enable gender-affirming care, both for minors and, potentially, adults.
The argument went terribly for transgender Americans, as many of the justices suggested creating a carveout from the ordinary constitutional rule restricting sex-based discrimination of all kinds. Chief Justice John Roberts, for example, suggested giving the government broad authority to engage in such discrimination in the medical context — a ruling that could also have severe implications for women generally, including cisgender women.
As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said at one point in the argument, “I’m getting kind of nervous” that the Court is going to chip away at one of the “bedrock” principles in US anti-discrimination laws.
Skrmetti involves a 2023 Tennessee law that prohibits trans youth from receiving medical treatments, such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy, if those treatments are prescribed to help them transition. Notably, the law is quite explicit that its purpose is to “encourag[e] minors to appreciate their sex” and to prevent young people from becoming “disdainful of their sex.”
Although this particular law involves a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, Tennessee’s arguments in favor of the law could also permit the government to prohibit adults from receiving the same treatments.
At least four justices — Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh — appeared all but certain to vote to uphold Tennessee’s law. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, meanwhile, was a bit less direct in her questioning, but she largely seemed sympathetic to Tennessee’s position. Most notably, Barrett signaled midway through the argument that she was open to Roberts’s call for a medical carveout from the Constitution’s restrictions on sex discrimination.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Republican who authored a landmark opinion protecting trans rights in 2020, was silent throughout the argument. That left only the Court’s three Democrats to defend the orthodox approach to laws that discriminate on the basis of sex, which casts a skeptical eye on any law that treats people differently because of their sex assigned at birth.
The biggest question in Skrmetti, in other words, is likely to be how the Court finds a way to uphold Tennessee’s law, rather than whether the Court does so. And it seems fairly likely that the Court’s opinion could fundamentally alter the rules governing sex discrimination by the government.
How the Court’s current precedents approach laws that draw lines based on sex
The most important thing to understand about Tennessee’s law is that it explicitly draws lines based on a patient’s sex assigned at birth. If a child who is assigned male at birthis prescribed testosterone by their doctor, Tennessee permits that child to receive that treatment. But a child who is assigned female at birth may not.
Indeed, while Matthew Rice, the Tennessee solicitor general defending his state’s law, tried many times to deny that this law classifies based on sex, he eventually admitted that it did after being pressed by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Jackson.
Jackson, for example, asked Rice whether this law would permit a boy who seeks testosterone because he wants to deepen his voice and otherwise enhance his masculinity to receive that treatment, and Rice eventually conceded that, under the specific law at issue in this case, the boy could. Rice then eventually admitted that, if a girl sought the same treatment for the same purpose — to deepen her voice and to make her body appear more masculine — Tennessee’s law would prohibit her from receiving the treatment.
This matters because, in United States v. Virginia (1996), the Supreme Court held that “all gender-based classifications” are subject to “heightened scrutiny,” meaning that the law is treated as presumptively unconstitutional and the state has to prove that its law was not enacted for impermissibly sexist reasons. Some laws survive this heightened scrutiny, if those laws are grounded in real differences between the sexes and not in prejudice or stereotypes. But, under Virginia, any law that draws lines based on sex in any way whatsoever receives this higher level of review from the federal courts.
Significantly, neither the Biden administration, which argued against Tennessee’s law in the Supreme Court, nor the ACLU, which represents families that want their transgender children to have access to care, asked the Supreme Court to definitively strike down Tennessee’s law right now. Rather, the sole issue before the Court is whether to send the case back down to a federal appeals court that previously refused to apply the heightened scrutiny required by Virginia.
But many of the justices appeared determined not to apply Virginia to this case. Roberts, for example, warned that there are “medical nuances” in this case that weren’t present in Virginia or some of the Court’s other previous gender discrimination cases. And he suggested that the courts should take a more deferential approach to state lawmakers in cases involving medicine because judges are not good at making medical judgments.
Kavanaugh echoed Roberts’s thinking, suggesting at one point that the Constitution does not take sides on a “medical and policy debate.”
Barrett also appeared sympathetic to Roberts’s approach, asking Chase Strangio, the ACLU lawyer, whether the courts have ever applied heightened scrutiny in a case involving medical judgments.
Strangio had an excellent answer to this question: During the pandemic, several churches and other religious institutions claimed that they had a constitutional right to defy state rules prohibiting too many people from gathering in one place in order to prevent the spread of Covid. The Court eventually split 5-4 in these cases, with five of the Republican justices concluding that the right to freely practice religion overcomes a state’s medical determination that large public gatherings are too dangerous.
Barrett, however, did not appear persuaded, claiming that the Covid cases, in which she ruled with the majority, did not involve “diving deep into the medical evidence.” (Roberts dissented in the Covid cases, so his position in the Covid cases is consistent with the position he seemed to lay out in Skrmetti.)
Thomas and Alito’s questions, meanwhile, were consistently hostile to the two lawyers arguing in favor of trans rights. When you add their votes to Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, that’s a majority likely in favor of Tennessee’s law.
If the Court adopts Roberts’s approach, which seems likely, that’s not just a devastating blow to transgender youth and their families. It’s also a sea change in the Court’s approach to sex discrimination of all kinds. Again, Virginia held that “all” laws that draw lines based on sex must survive heightened scrutiny, even though some laws ultimately clear this hurdle. “All” means all. But now many of the justices seem eager to hold that only some laws that classify people based on sex are presumptively unconstitutional.
This case arrives at the Court at the worst possible moment
It’s hard to divorce this case from its political context. During his recently victorious presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump went all in on anti-trans rhetoric — spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars on ads that, in the Washington Post’s words, “paint trans people as a menace to society.” Republicans control six of the nine seats on the Supreme Court, so it’s not surprising that a majority of the Republican justices seemed to align with their party’s position on trans rights (the Court’s three Democrats, for that matter, also appear aligned with their own party).
But, in their apparent eagerness to uphold this Tennessee law, the Court’s Republican majority appears likely not just to strike a blow against trans rights. They also appear poised to do considerable damage to the legal standard governing sex discrimination generally. Perhaps Tennessee could, if this case were sent back down to the lower court, offer a justification for its law that survives heightened scrutiny. But most of the justices appear ready to overrule Virginia’s statement that all sex-based classifications must undergo such scrutiny.
This is why, near the end of Strangio’s time at the podium, Jackson said she is “suddenly quite worried” about the implications of the Court’s questions.
If the Court can create a medical carveout to the general rule that all sex discrimination is presumptively unconstitutional, what other carveouts might they create in the future? For that matter, will the Court also create similar carveouts for other forms of discrimination, such as race discrimination? Jackson even went so far as to compare Tennessee’s arguments to Virginia’s unsuccessful defense of its ban on interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia (1967).
All of that said, the Court most likely will not hand down an opinion in Skrmetti until June 2025, when the Court normally decides the biggest cases of its term. There may be time for voices like Jackson’s to convince some of her colleagues to compromise. But based on Wednesday’s argument, Skrmetti appears likely to not just be a historic blow to transgender Americans, but potentially a similar blow against all people who might experience unconstitutional discrimination.
Because they're really good vehicles and getting great reviews. You can't find those vehicles anywhere in Seattle right now. They're sold out for months.
Hyundai "just had its best sales month ever in the U.S.," reports Electrek
Hyundai's impressive EV lineup is charging up demand, with its best-selling Hyundai IONIQ 5 SUV also setting a new U.S. record after sales more than doubled in November. With 76,008 vehicles sold in November, Hyundai's record-breaking U.S. sales streak is not slowing down. Hyundai Motor America CEO Randy Parker credited the growing demand for EVs and hybrid vehicles to the growth.
Hyundai's EV sales rose 77% from last year, while hybrid sales surged 104%. Electrified retail sales (EV, PHEV, and hybrid models) climbed 92% in total last month. Several vehicles, including the Santa Fe HEV, Tucson PHEV, Tucson HEV, and IONIQ 5, had their best-ever sales month.
The article also notes increasing sales for Hyundai's electric SUV, the IONIQ 5. Starting at $43,975 — and recently upgraded to a range of 245 miles (or 318 miles for the $46,550 extended-range model) — it features an NACS port for accessing Tesla's Supercharger network.
Look, we know what Twitter is at this point. Staying is a choice, but don't complain about it.
Women are facing some extreme harassment on X. | Roni Bintang/Getty Images
In late November, a woman posted a photo of herself proudly holding her PhD thesis along with the announcement that she had successfully defended her dissertation. “Thrilled to say I passed my viva with no corrections and am officially PhDone,” she wrote. What followed was a case study in how the online right targets and harasses those who don’t fit into the narrow — and often conflicting — standards they’ve formulated for women.
“This woman is why everything is falling apart,” began one viral post by the YouTuber hoe_math, who makes videos about “the degradation of Western Civilization.” “She got a PhD for this, and from the looks of her, she probably believes that this entitles her to an extremely high-status lifestyle. Remember this when they tell you that women are ‘beating’ men at getting an ‘education.’”
“Crows feet and no children,” began another. “You literally have lived in the most advantaged time in all of human history for women and after 40 years have literally nothing of any real value to show for it and your bloodline will end with you due to your need to ‘stick it to the evil man’ by getting an ‘education.’”
Thrilled to say I passed my viva with no corrections and am officially PhDone. pic.twitter.com/4qwCyFYocX
Suffice to say that these are extreme, outlandish reactions to an otherwise anodyne post about completing a PhD. But they’re all too predictable considering the types of content that regularly go viral now on X, where conservative trads, anti-woke crypto bros, and mask-off white supremacists enjoy a platform increasingly friendly to their extremism, especially in the wake of an exodus by users looking for less toxic pastures.
Dr. Ally Louks is the perfect target for these types: She’s a young woman with the highest degree in the humanities, a field frequently ridiculed by certain men in online right spaces who view it as a waste of resources and a sure ticket to a “useless” or low-paying job. Her thesis, titled “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose,” is an exploration of how descriptions of smell in literature structure our social world and, like all PhD theses, is meant to be a niche and novel contribution to the field of English Literature. But it enraged right-wingers who saw it as too woke, irrelevant, or frivolous (using much nastier terms, of course).
The mere existence of an educated woman presumably triggered so many of the right-wing men of X that they have hounded her with rape threats for being “vegan, feminist and queer.” “It sure has been fun to become a scapegoat for the far right’s qualms with academia for a couple of days,” Louks posted.
Like the women in games media who were the targets of 2014’s Gamergate harassment campaign, Louks is only the latest in a long history of misogynist abuse on X, formerly known as Twitter. Through the years, there have been boycotts by women on the platform and studies dedicated to exposing the extent of the harassment they face there.
But since Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022, it’s gotten far worse. In the two years since he’s been its owner, the company rid itself of verification badges that confirmed the authenticity of official accounts, notable figures, and journalists and instead granted the blue checks to anyone willing to pay $8 per month. The change made it so that the top reply on almost any viral post is a scammer, a spammer, or someone engaging in bad faith or harassment for clout. Musk, as a self-described free speech absolutist, brought back previously banned users and cut down the team overseeing content moderation; white supremacist speech is now so common that normal, presumably not-white nationalist celebrities are following accounts that spout extremist ideology.
In the past two years, X also removed its policy banning the deadnaming of transgender people, while Musk threatened to sue researchers studying the increase in hate speech on the platform. X also recently changed its blocking function so that blocked users can still see the posts of the person who blocked them, making it easier for stalkers and harassers to continue to surveil their targets. In March, X was found to be the platform where women were most likely to experience abuse and threats based on the time spent there, according to research from the Open University, a public research institute in the UK.
The ISD found a 4,600 percent increase in phrases like “get back in the kitchen” on X in the 24 hours following the election, while “dumb cunt” had more than 64,000 mentions on November 5.
Donald Trump’s election worsened this problem, with men spamming replies with attack lines like “Your body, my choice,” flipping a longtime pro-abortion rights slogan into a rape threat. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found a 4,600 percent increase in phrases like “get back in the kitchen” on X in the 24 hours following the election, while “dumb cunt” had more than 64,000 mentions on November 5. Considering that Musk has heavily aligned himself with Trump over the past year, it’s not surprising that both men’s fans have coalesced on Musk’s platform, where they dogpile on their perceived opponents.
When content creator Angela Belcamino posted on X about feeling lucky to be at a bar on Thanksgiving without having to pay a babysitter because she doesn’t have children (and that the right would hate this), she was immediately proven correct and excoriated by conservative men who called her a “thot” and “brainwashed” by an “extinctionist apocalypse cult.” The conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg quote-posted it and wrote, “Nothing more awesome than drinking alone at an empty bar when everyone else is hanging out eating well with friends and family. Congrats.”
This landscape is perhaps unsurprising following a campaign year in which progressive values were pitted against a mounting backlash to Me Too and trans rights. Gender policing is now a blood sport online, where women who seem to defy traditional expectations of staying hot, quiet, chaste, and weak are humiliated and attacked en masse.
Women who don’t fit in the mold of wives wearing cottagecore maxi dresses while baking snacks from scratch for their herd of children are being told that they’re responsible for the downfall of civilization by armies of disaffected men with classical art as their profile pictures. What goes unsaid is the knowledge that these women, the trad wives they so revere, are often the breadwinners of their families by monetizing their lifestyles online. Their standards, then, are often conflicting: They want women to be visible online, but only in a way that serves men’s desires. But if women succeed too much at this — like, say, when OnlyFans model Sophie Rain recently shared a screenshot that showed she made more than $43 million on the platform in the past year — men were furious, again blaming her for the collapse of society.
It’s always been somewhat harrowing to be a woman in certain online spaces, but it does seem like a uniquely infuriating moment. More than 100,000 people, women or otherwise, have already left X (the platform and also the company), while millions have signed up for alternatives like Bluesky, and that’s a completely understandable response to a clearly deteriorating experience.
It’s always been somewhat harrowing to be a woman in certain online spaces, but it does seem like a uniquely infuriating moment.
But it’s still debatable whether ceding an enormous and still significant site like X to the white supremacists and the misogynist trolls is the move. Because I’ve spent so much time there, my “For You” algorithm is pretty tailored to my preferences, and unlike many other users say, I rarely see pro-Musk, white supremacist, or otherwise reprehensible posts. Rather, it’s just people making jokes and weird memes about current events, which I’d argue is the only way to use the platform.
As for Louks, she wrote that she’s remaining on X for the time being. But at a certain point, you have to wonder: If you can’t even post about your greatest accomplishments without enduring heaps of harassment, what’s the point of a social network at all?
Anyone buying an intel card right now with all their turmoil needs their head examined. There's no reason to believe there will be any real support over time
Turnover at the top of the company isn't stopping Intel from launching new products: Today the company is announcing the first of its next-generation B-series Intel Arc GPUs, the Arc B580 and Arc B570.
Both are decidedly midrange graphics cards that will compete with the likes of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD's RX 7600 series, but Intel is pricing them competitively: $249 for a B580 with 12GB of RAM and $219 for a B570 with 10GB of RAM. The B580 launches on December 13, while the B570 won't be available until January 16.
The two cards are Intel's first dedicated GPUs based on its next-generation "Battlemage" architecture, a successor to the "Alchemist" architecture used in the A-series cards. Intel's Core Ultra 200 laptop processors were its first products to ship with Battlemage, though they used an integrated version with fewer of Intel's Xe cores and no dedicated memory. Both B-series GPUs use silicon manufactured on a 5 nm TSMC process, an upgrade from the 6 nm process used for the A-series; as of this writing, no integrated or dedicated Arc GPUs have been manufactured by one of Intel's factories.
Donald Trump is most likely not trying to intentionally assemble a Cabinet chock-full of people accused either of sexual assault or of enabling it, but if he were, he’d be killing it.
Former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who has been accused of “sexual encounters” with a minor and paying women for sex, withdrew his nomination for attorney general last month. Gaetz, who has denied the allegations, was in no way qualified for the position, but he met Trump’s main criterion of being likely to comply with the president-elect’s every decree. (In Gaetz’s stead, Trump has nominated former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who faces claims of more pedestrian political corruption.)
Trump’s nominee to lead the Pentagon, the former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, has a military background, but he holds extreme views and beyond being another Trump toady is similarly unqualified to lead America’s large, complicated military bureaucracy. A 22-page police report describes an alleged sexual assault in California seven years ago—Hegseth has insisted that the encounter was consensual, and later entered into a financial settlement with the accuser; no charges were ultimately filed. Beyond the accusation, Hegseth’s statements about sexual assault and women reveal someone who appears to not take either rape or women’s contributions to the military seriously; he has, for example, suggested reversing the rule allowing women in combat roles, because they might be raped by their comrades. If Hegseth is innocent of the sexual-assault allegations, he would nevertheless remain unfit for the role.
Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a staunch ally of preventable childhood diseases who belongs nowhere near a public-health position in the federal government, given his views on vaccinations alone. He also stands accused of sexually assaulting his former live-in nanny. (As The Guardian reported, when asked about the incident publicly, Kennedy acknowledged having “skeletons in his closet,” and later sent the nanny a text saying he had no memory of the incident but apologizing for making her uncomfortable.)
Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick to ruin the Department of Education, is being sued alongside her husband, the wrestling magnate Vince McMahon, over allegedly having enabled the sexual abuse of underage “ring boys” who worked for what was then known as the World Wrestling Federation, now World Wrestling Entertainment. (The McMahons have also denied any wrongdoing.) McMahon’s husband reportedly remains under federal investigation for sex trafficking related to their business, and she has no background in education, other than a brief stint on the Connecticut Board of Education that ended shortly before the revelation that she had falsely claimed to have an education degree.
Then there is Trump himself, who in a 2023 civil suit was held liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll. As Quinta Jurecic writes, “The choice to begin a new administration with this particular slate of picks represents a remarkable commitment to moral ugliness.” The message seems to be that allegations should be taken seriously only if they involve a certain class of persons.
These allegations are credible because they are backed up by official documents, witness accounts, and in Trump’s case, a verdict. That gives them more weight than a mere accusation. Notably, no standard of evidence would make these accusations credible to many conservatives, because the individuals are Republicans, whereas unfounded claims of sexual misconduct against entire categories of people have been a basis for right-wing policy making over the past four years.
Republicans spent much of the Biden years baselessly accusing LGBTQ people of being “groomers” seeking to sexually assault children, and then passing discriminatory laws using those same unfounded accusations as justification. They then nominated Trump, who had admitted on the infamous Access Hollywood tape that he believed his celebrity status allowed him to “grab” women “by the pussy,” and sent him back to the White House. Trump spent his campaign smearing immigrants as sexual predators as well. The contradiction here can be understood as a key element of Trump-era conservative ideology, which is that such categories as “sexual predator” can apply only to groups that conservatives are targeting, and never to conservatives themselves. An immigrant or LGBTQ person is therefore a “groomer” until proved otherwise, whereas a conservative by definition cannot be one, no matter what they’ve allegedly done.
For example, prior to Gaetz’s withdrawal, as reported by HuffPost’s Arthur Delaney, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told a reporter, “We’re not going to try Pete Hegseth or Matt Gaetz based on press statements.” When the reporter pointed out that the allegations against Hegseth had been outlined in a police report, Graham responded, “I don’t care.”
Again, after several years of passing laws and demanding mass deportations on the pretext that sexual crimes are abhorrent and must be prevented without regard for the individual rights of entire groups of people, the response to such allegations made against a prominent Republican is “I don’t care.” Which at least has the virtue of being honest.
Contrast this indifferent response with the treatment of Representative-Elect Sarah McBride of Delaware, the first transgender person elected to federal office. House Speaker Mike Johnson and the publicity-hungry Representative Nancy Mace—who just four years ago attempted to present herself as someone who “strongly” supports “LGBT equality” when that seemed politically advantageous—have spent recent weeks publicly trying to humiliate and bully McBride. Johnson set a House rule banning her as well as any other trans-women staffers or visitors from women’s bathrooms on Capitol Hill, and Mace proposed a federal law that would do the same for “members, officers and employees” of the House. Mace has presented her bill as an attempt to protect women from sexual assault.
McBride, for her part, has said, “I’m not here to fight about bathrooms, I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families. Like all members, I will follow the rules as outlined by Speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them.” Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that such “bathroom bills” ultimately have the perverse effect of making any woman deemed insufficiently feminine subject to suspicion, as well as forcing men to use the women’s room.
As the writer Parker Molloy notes, the Republican fixation on McBride illustrates the folly of the punditocracy’s constant advice to Democrats to lay off “identity politics,” beyond the obvious fact that Trumpism is itself identity politics. Republicans get a say in which issues become salient, and if they want to make every news cycle about trans people or immigrants or whichever group they want to demonize, then they can do that. If Democrats then defend the rights of that group, prominent voices in the media will inevitably accuse the Democrats of being obsessed with identity politics, as though it was their choice to bring up the issue in the first place.
The contrast between how Republicans react to conservatives actually accused of sexual assault and a trans person who simply exists is instructive. If you are a conservative, then you cannot be a sexual predator no matter what you have done. If you are a member of a community that conservatives despise and wish to justify discrimination against, then you are a sexual predator, even if you have never preyed on anyone. This is not principled opposition to sexual abuse; it is a commitment to disparaging entire groups of people in order to legitimize intolerance against them. These divergent reactions offer a grim shorthand for Trumpist politics, which seeks not to solve problems but provide scapegoats for those problems, and then hope that people are too distracted by hatred to notice.
Mirnotoriety writes: Amid the growing warmth and increasingly volatile weather of an approaching summer, Australia passed a remarkable milestone this week. The number of homes and businesses with a solar installation clicked past 4 million -- barely 20 years since there was practically none anywhere in the country. It is a love affair that shows few signs of stopping.
And it's a technology that is having ever greater effects, not just on the bills of its household users but on the very energy system itself. At no time of the year is that effect more obvious than spring, when solar output soars as the days grow longer and sunnier but demand remains subdued as mild temperatures mean people leave their air conditioners switched off.
Such has been the extraordinary production of solar in Australia this spring, the entire state of South Australia has -- at various times -- met all of its electricity needs from the technology.
[...] [T]here is, at times, too much solar power in Australia's electricity systems to handle.
Right-wing pundit and author Dinesh D’Souza has now admitted that the central premise of his election conspiracy film and accompanying book, “2,000 Mules,” is false.
In the 2022 film, D’Souza cited the right-wing activist group True the Vote to claim cell phone geolocation data proved that volunteers for nonprofits were stuffing ballot boxes with votes in favor of President Joe Biden, helping him to defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
“We recently learned that surveillance videos used in the film may not have actually been correlated with the geolocation data,” said a statement quietly posted to D’Souza’s website on Monday.
“I now understand that the surveillance videos used in the film were characterized on the basis of inaccurate information provided to me and my team. If I had known then that the videos were not linked to geolocation data, I would have clarified this and produced and edited the film differently,” he added.
D’Souza’s note apologized to Mark Andrews, a Georgia man recorded on video footage that was used in the movie with his face blurred. In the original version of the film, D’Souza narrated the scene with Andrews and said, “What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes.”
Despite D’Souza’s attempt to lay all the blame at the feet of True the Vote, this claim was the central premise of his movie and accompanying book.
Salem Media Group, which published the book and distributed the film version, previously apologized to Andrews and said the company would no longer distribute the book or film.
Georgia law enforcement agencies previously debunked the film’s allegations but the right-wing provocateurs—led by prominent figures like Trump—have touted the allegations and similar conspiracies for years.
D’Souza is a longtime conservative commentator and activist who made the transition to conspiracy theorist several years ago. He has written and directed eight movies since 2012 attacking Democrats and liberals. Among the films are “2016: Obama’s America,” supposedly depicting the dystopia that would occur if President Barack Obama won reelection in 2012; “Death of a Nation,” which compared Trump to Abraham Lincoln; and the debunked tract “2000 Mules.”
There was a gap in D’Souza’s filmmaking because in 2014 he pleaded guilty to federal charges of making illegal contributions to the Senate campaign for Wendy Long, the Republican nominee in New York’s 2012 Senate race. Despite D’Souza’s attempt to help, Long lost to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand by 46 percentage points.
D’Souza was later pardoned by Trump in 2018, reflecting Trump’s habit of delivering politically for figures who have lavished him with praise—similar to the FBI director nomination he recently offered to Trump fanfic writer Kash Patel.
The D’Souza saga is a microcosm of the right-wing media world and conservative culture in general, where utterly false and easily debunked claims are promoted for years on end, only to quietly be cast off when people are no longer paying attention.
"consequences" but still paid several hundred million to fail spectacularly
In a surprise move, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has stepped down as head of the company after less than four years, as reported by Reuters and other outlets. The change caps a chaotic year for Intel, which is poised to report its first annual financial loss since 1986 and announced layoffs of at least 15,000 employees this year as it attempted to cut costs.
Intel CFO David Zinsner and Client Computing Group head Michelle Johnston Holthaus will be sharing the title of interim CEO while the company's board of directors searches for a new CEO. Gelsinger has also stepped down from his seat on the board.
Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for Defense secretary, is already under fire for several notable controversies, including ties to right-wing extremism, anti-Muslim bigotry, and his defense of mercenaries that killed civilians. But new reporting has revealed more allegations of abuse toward women and public drunkenness that are likely to come up at future Senate confirmation hearings—if the former Fox News pundit makes it that far.
The New York Times reported on Friday that in a 2018 email Hegseth’s mother, Penelope Hegseth, described her son as an abuser of women.
“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” she wrote. “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”
Penelope Hegseth later told the Times she regretted sending the email. The behavior described in the letter echoes other reporting on Hegseth’s past behavior.
That includes a recent report by the New Yorker that detailed alleged behavior from Hegseth that led to him stepping down from leading conservative veterans groups, Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America.
A whistleblower report alleges that Hegseth was so drunk while doing public events for Concerned Veterans of America that he had to be carried out. The report also alleges that Hegseth sexually pursued staffers at the group and he and other men in the organization divided the women staffers into groups labeled “party girls” and “not party girls.”
The report also notes that an allegation of sexual assault by Hegseth was made, involving an employee while the two were at a strip club in Louisiana.
Hegseth is also accused in the document of chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!” while drunk at a bar in 2015, while on an official tour.
An email reportedly sent by whistleblowers also accused Hegseth of treating the organization’s funds “like they were a personal expense account” and said he used money donated to advocate for veterans “for partying, drinking.”
The new revelations about Hegseth come on the heels of the release of a police report in which a woman accused Hegseth of raping her at a Republican women’s event in 2017. Hegseth was not charged following a police investigation.
Disclosures about Matt Gaetz, Trump’s former pick to be U.S. attorney general, led to Trump giving up on the nomination when it became clear even Republicans would oppose him. Those allegations included sex with a minor and accusations of sex trafficking. The disclosures about Hegseth seem even more severe, but so far there has been no indication that Trump will back away from the pick.
Seriously. This model has to be fully compensated, not just paid at the last aggregation step.
Getty Images CEO has criticized AI companies' stance on copyright, particularly pushing back against claims that all web content is fair use for AI training. The statement comes amid Getty's ongoing litigation against Stability AI for allegedly using millions of Getty-owned images without permission to train its Stable Diffusion model, launched in August 2022.
Acknowledging AI's potential benefits in areas like healthcare and climate change, Getty's chief executive argued against the industry's "all-or-nothing" approach to copyright. He specifically challenged Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's assertion that web content has been "freeware" since the 1990s. The Getty chief advocated for applying fair use principles case-by-case, distinguishing between AI models for scientific advancement and commercial content generation. He also drew parallels to music streaming's evolution from Napster to licensed platforms like Spotify, suggesting AI companies could develop similar permission-based models.
He adds: As litigation slowly advances, AI companies advance an argument that there will be no AI absent the ability to freely scrape content for training, resulting in our inability to leverage the promise of AI to solve cancer, mitigate global climate change, and eradicate global hunger. Note that the companies investing in and building AI spend billions of dollars on talent, GPUs, and the required power to train and run these models -- but remarkably claim compensation for content owners is an unsurmountable challenge.
My focus is to achieve a world where creativity is celebrated and rewarded AND a world that is without cancer, climate change, and global hunger. I want the cake and to eat it. I suspect most of us want the same.
"unexpected" and "black hole" are not phrases that one likes to see in the same sentence
What happens when a gargantuan cloud of gas swallows a pair of monster black holes with their own appetites? Feasting on the gas can cause some weird (heavenly) bodily functions.
AT 2021hdr is a binary supermassive black hole (BSMBH) system in the center of a galaxy 1 billion light-years away, in the Cygnus constellation. In 2021, researchers observing it using NASA’s Zwicky Transient Facility saw strange outbursts that were flagged by the ALerCE (Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events) team.
This active galactic nucleus (AGN) flared so brightly that AT 2021hdr was almost mistaken for a supernova. Repeating flares soon ruled that out. When the researchers questioned whether they might be looking at a tidal disruption event—a star being torn to shreds by the black holes—something was still not making sense. They then compared observations they made in 2022 using NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to simulations of something else they suspected: a tidal disruption of a gas cloud by binary supermassive black holes. It seemed they had found the most likely answer.
To help replace power plants, Japan's northernmost island, Hokkaido, "is turning to a new generation of batteries designed to stockpile massive amounts of energy," reports the Washington Post.
"The Hokkaido Electric Power Network (HEPCO Network) is deploying flow batteries, an emerging kind of battery that stores energy in hulking tanks of metallic liquid."
[F]low batteries are making their debut in big real-world projects. Sumitomo Electric, the company that built the Hokkaido plant, has also built flow batteries in Taiwan, Belgium, Australia, Morocco and California. Hokkaido's flow battery farm was the biggest in the world when it opened in April 2022 — a record that lasted just a month before China built one that is eight times bigger and can deliver as much energy as an average U.S. natural gas plant. "It looks like flow batteries are finally about to take off with interest from China," said Michael Taylor, an energy analyst at the International Renewable Energy Agency, an international group that studies and promotes green energy. "When China starts to get comfortable with a technology and sees it working, then they will very quickly scale their manufacturing base if they think they can drive down the costs, which they usually can...."
Lithium-ion batteries are perfect for smartphones because they're lightweight and fit in small spaces, even if they don't last long and have to be replaced frequently. Utilities have a different set of priorities: They need to store millions of times more energy, and they have much more room to work with. "If you think about utility-scale stationary applications, maybe you don't need lithium-ion batteries. You can use another one that is cheaper and can provide the services that you want like, for example, vanadium flow batteries," said Francisco Boshell, a researcher at the International Renewable Energy Agency...
Flow batteries are designed to tap giant tanks that can store a lot of energy for a long time. To boost their storage capacity, all you have to do is build a bigger tank and add more vanadium. That's a big advantage: By contrast, there's no easy way to adjust the storage capacity of a lithium-ion battery — if you want more storage, you have to build a whole new battery... One major barrier to building more of these battery farms is finding enough vanadium. Three-quarters of the world's supply comes as a by-product from 10 steel mills in China and Russia, according to Kara Rodby [a battery analyst at the investment firm Volta Energy Technologies] who got her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying the design and market for flow batteries. Australia, South Africa and the United States also produce vanadium, but in much smaller quantities. Mines that have been proposed could boost supply. And some flow battery start-ups are trying to sidestep the vanadium problem entirely by using different materials that are easier to buy.
The other hurdle is their up-front cost. Vanadium flow batteries are at least twice as expensive to build as lithium-ion batteries, Rodby said, and banks are hesitant to lend money to fund an unfamiliar technology. But experts say flow batteries can be cheaper in the long run because they're easier to maintain and last longer. A lithium-ion battery might have to be replaced after 10 years, but Rodby says flow batteries can last much longer. "There really is no finite lifetime for a flow battery in the way there is for lithium-ion," Rodby said.
Here's an interesting statistic from the article. "Over the next six years, utilities will have to build 35 times as many batteries as there are today to soak up all extra renewable energy that will come online, according to the International Energy Agency."
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A Louisiana law that reclassified abortion-inducing drugs as controlled substances has made it more difficult for doctors to treat a wide range of gynecological conditions, doctors say.
Now, a similar proposal has been filed in Texas.
Texas Rep. Pat Curry, a freshman Republican from Waco, said the intent of House Bill 1339 is to make it harder for people, especially teenagers, to order mifepristone and misoprostol online to terminate their pregnancies. Doctors in Louisiana say the measure has done little to strengthen the state’s near-total abortion ban, but has increased fear and confusion among doctors, pharmacists and patients.
“There’s no sense in it,” said Dr. Nicole Freehill, an OB/GYN in New Orleans. “Even though we kept trying to tell them how often [these medications] are used for other things and how safe they are, it didn’t matter. It’s just a backdoor way of restricting abortion more.”
These medications are often used to empty the uterus after a patient has a miscarriage, and are commonly prescribed ahead of inserting an intrauterine device. Misoprostol is also often the best treatment for obstetric hemorrhages, a potentially life-threatening condition in which women can bleed to death in minutes. Since the Louisiana law went into effect, hospitals have taken the medication off their obstetrics carts and put them in locked, password-protected central storage.
One hospital has been running drills to practice getting the medications to patients in time, and reported, on average, a two-minute delay from before the law went into effect, the Louisiana Illuminator reported.
“In obstetrics and gynecology, minutes or even seconds can be the difference between life and death,” Dr. Stella Dantas, president of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, said in a statement after the Louisiana law passed. “Forcing a clinician to jump through administrative hurdles in order to access a safe, effective medicine is not medically justified and is, quite simply, dangerous.”
Curry said these restrictions won’t stop doctors from prescribing these medications when necessary, but will stop the “wide misuse” of the drugs to circumvent the state’s near-total abortion ban.
Curry said he consulted with the author of the Louisiana law, as well as OB/GYNs in Texas to draft the bill. He said the doctors who have criticized the legislation are raising these concerns as a “smokescreen” because they don’t want more restrictions.
“I understand that. We don’t need or want all kinds of regulations,” he said. “Especially as Republicans, regulations should not be high on our list, but in this case it’s a necessary evil given the situation.”
Texas roots for a Louisiana law
In March 2022, Mason Herring, a Houston attorney, spiked his wife’s water with misoprostol to force her to have an abortion. Catherine Herring was pregnant with the couple’s third child, a daughter who was born 10 weeks premature. She survived, but has significant developmental delays, according to the Associated Press.
Mason Herring was charged with felony assault to induce abortion, and pled guilty to injury to a child and assault to a pregnant person. He was sentenced to 180 days in jail and 10 years of probation.
Catherine Herring’s experience led her brother, Louisiana state Rep. Thomas Pressly, to file a bill that would have made it a crime to coerce someone into having an abortion.
But at the last minute, the bill was amended to also reclassify abortion-inducing drugs as controlled substances, according to the Louisiana Illuminator, leaving hospitals and doctors scrambling to comply with the new restrictions. The state health department advised storing the medication in a locked area on the crash cart, which at least some hospitals have said is not feasible.
“We had to rework how we utilize misoprostol across our hospital systems,” Freehill said. “Labor and delivery, pharmacy, nursing staff, you name it, they were all involved with figuring out how to stay within the law but still use these medications that we need access to.”
It’s rare for a state to decide on its own to classify a drug as a controlled substance. Most commonly, the federal government decides which medications should be “scheduled,” based on their medical usefulness and the potential for abuse. Schedule I drugs, like heroin, have no medical use and are often used recreationally; Schedule IV and V are medications that are useful but have a potential for abuse, like Xanax or Valium.
Boxes of the drug mifepristone sit on a shelf at the West Alabama Women's Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on March 16, 2022.
There are enhanced penalties for having a controlled substance without a prescription, and increased restrictions on how doctors can dispense them. Pharmacists must report any prescriptions for controlled substances to the state Prescription Monitoring Program, and doctors are required to check the database before prescribing certain controlled substances. Law enforcement also has access to that database.
Prescription monitoring has been key to combating the opioid epidemic by identifying doctors who were overprescribing and patients who were getting prescriptions from multiple providers. But with so much political attention on mifepristone and misoprostol as abortion-inducing drugs, doctors are worried about scrutiny for frequently prescribing these common medications.
“We had to fix a problem that wasn’t broken,” said Freehill. “There’s no reason for it to be Schedule IV. It’s not something people abuse. It’s not something people can become addicted to. It’s extremely safe.”
A group of Louisiana health care providers recently filed a lawsuit arguing the law discriminates against people who need mifepristone and misoprostol for other conditions, and challenging whether the last minute amendments to the bill were proper. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill has said the new restrictions are clear and should not delay care. Those who “have attempted to sow confusion and doubt,” she said in a statement, “profit from misinformation.”
When the law first went into effect, Anna Legreid Dopp, senior director of government relations for the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, told CNN that the group expected other states to consider similar measures.
“Almost immediately, our members raised concern that if this is being done in one state, it can easily be a template for other states to use it,” Dopp said.
Restrictions on medication
Curry, who recently won a special election to fill the seat long held by Republican Rep. Doc Anderson, said Pressly and Herring have offered to come testify in support of his bill this session. He anticipates it getting wide support from his fellow lawmakers.
Since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, conservative groups have turned their attention to restricting access to abortion-inducing medications. A group of anti-abortion doctors filed a lawsuit to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, which the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately rejected.
Curry said there are reasons to keep these medications on the market beyond abortion, but they need tighter restrictions.
“You can lie about your age, you can lie about your name, you can lie about your address, there's no verification whatsoever,” he said, referring to online prescribers. “And it gets shipped to a 15-year-old girl, a 13-year-old girl.”
It is already a crime to mail abortion-inducing medications in Texas, and many of the online pharmacies operate in a legal gray area outside U.S jurisdiction. Others are working in states that have “shield laws” that protect doctors’ ability to prescribe and mail pills into states that have banned abortion. None of these interstate and international legal questions have been tested in court with regards to abortion.
Freehill said she would encourage Texas doctors to learn from what has happened in Louisiana as they prepare to advocate against this bill this session.
“There's a lot of education that needs to be done surrounding what this means and what these drugs are really used for,” she said. “I don’t know that we would have been able to sway people, even with more time, but we can at least educate on why this is completely inappropriate and really governmental overreach.”
The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
Well that seems useful. Now if only the Dems can actually stick together.
Democrats got some great news on Tuesday night, when their candidate took the lead in California’s 13th District, a seat Republicans currently hold.
As of Wednesday morning, Democrat Adam Gray now leads Republican incumbent John Duarte by 182 votes.
If the lead holds—and if they pick up the other uncalled seat where they currently lead—it would give Democrats 215 House seats, a net gain from the previous Congress. And it would make House Speaker Mike Johnson's life even more miserable than it already was slated to be, since he'd have one fewer vote to try to pass Donald Trump's destructive agenda.
For at least the first few months of the new Congress, Republicans would have just a 217-215 majority if they win the uncalled seat where they currently lead. That’s because Trump nominated Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York and Mike Waltz of Florida to his administration. Now-former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz—who resigned to try to bury what is believed to be a damning House Ethics Committee investigation into whether he sex-trafficked a minor in order to try to save his now-defunct quest to be attorney general—will also not be taking his seat in the 119th Congress.
That means Johnson would need to have every single Republican vote to pass bills, with just one defection or absence causing a vote to fail. That will be an extremely difficult task for Johnson, who presides over a fractious conference filled with right-wing lunatics who vote “no” on even must-pass government funding legislation over their demand for ideological purity.
“My goodness gracious: the GOP's House Majority looks to be the smallest after any election since 1930 with current results,” CNN’s Harry Enten wrote in a Wednesday post on X. “With resignations (e.g. Gaetz), it may be the smallest majority during a House session in 100+ yrs. Just 1 GOP defection + All Dems could sink a bill.”
Of course, the race hasn’t been called yet. There are still a few votes to count in the district—a sprawling seat located in the San Joaquin Valley.
But it looks like the ballots from the Republican strongholds in the district are exhausted, which would make it difficult for Duarte to win. Election expertssay Gray is now favored to win here. The seat was a major pickup opportunity for Democrats given that Joe Biden won in the district by 11 percentage points in 2020.
Republicans are so incensed that Duarte may lose his seat after just one term that they are baselessly claiming fraud—their go-to excuse when Republicans lose.
“Congressman John Duarte was winning but after 22 days of counting ballots he is now losing by 105 votes. Democrats are stealing another House seat!” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia wrote in a post on X. “Elections nationwide should be one day, paper ballots, and require proof of citizenship with ID!!”
There is obviously zero evidence that Democrats stole Duarte’s House seats.
Sure, it’s absurd how long it’s taking for California to count ballots. But just because it’s taking forever does not mean there is something untoward going on.
It’s also interesting that Greene thinks Democrats would steal a random House seat but not rig it for Vice President Kamala Harris. But common sense is obviously too difficult for Greene to process in her cobweb-filled skull.
The Macquarie Dictionary, the national dictionary of Australia, has picked "enshittification" as its word of the year. Gizmodo reports: The Australians define the word as "the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking." We've all felt this. Google search is filled with garbage. The internet is clogged with SEO-farming websites that clog up results. Facebook is an endless stream of AI-generated slop. Zoom wants you to test out its new AI features while you're trying to go into a meeting. Twitter has become X, and its owner thinks sharing links is a waste of time. Last night I reinstalled Windows 11 on a desktop machine and got pissed as it was finalized and Microsoft kept trying to get me to install OneDrive, Office 360, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and a bunch of other shit I didn't want. Writer and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification in 2022, and recently offered potential solutions to the age-old phenomenon in an interview with The Register.
"We need to have prohibition and regulation that prohibits the capital markets from funding predatory pricing," he explained. "It's very hard to enter the market when people are selling things below cost. We need to prohibit predatory acquisitions. Look at Facebook: buying Instagram, and Mark Zuckerberg sending an email saying we're buying Instagram because people don't like Facebook and they're moving to Instagram, and we just don't want them to have anywhere else to go."
Those are some amazing amounts of drugs to be on...
Lobby groups for Internet service providers claim that ISPs' customer service is so good already that the government shouldn't consider any new regulations to mandate improvements. They also claim ISPs face so much competition that market forces require providers to treat their customers well or lose them to competitors.
Cable lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association told the Federal Communications Commission in a filing that "providing high-quality products and services and a positive customer experience is a competitive necessity in today's robust communications marketplace. To attract and retain customers, NCTA's cable operator members continuously strive to ensure that the customer support they provide is effective and user-friendly. Given these strong marketplace imperatives, new regulations that would micromanage providers’ customer service operations are unnecessary."
Lobby groups filed comments in response to an FCC review of customer service that was announced last month, before the presidential election. While the FCC's current Democratic leadership is interested in regulating customer service practices, the Republicans who will soon take over opposed the inquiry.
9to5Google's Ben Schoon reports: Google has introduced a new feature on iOS that injects links on third-party websites that take users back to Google Search. Recently, Google announced new "Page Annotations" within the Google app on iOS. This feature, as Google explains, "extracts interesting entities from the webpage and highlights them in line." Effectively, it creates links on a website that you've opened through Google's browser that the website's owner did not put there. The links, when clicked, then perform a search on Google for that subject and open the search in a pop-up window on top of the third-party website.
The feature, Google says, will offer an opt-out for website owners through a form. It's pointed out by SERoundTable that opting out can take up to 30 days, while the feature is live now. Further reading: US Says Google Is an Ad Tech Monopolist, in Closing Arguments
Fine, fuck 'em. Rural voters wanted this, so now they can get it good and hard. Fleeced for the GOP's billionaire backers. Good riddance.
Emboldened by Donald Trump's election win, Republicans are seeking big changes to a $42.45 billion broadband deployment program. Their plan could delay distribution of government funding and remove or relax a requirement that ISPs accepting subsidies must offer low-cost Internet plans.
US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) today issued a press release titled, "Sen. Cruz Warns Biden-Harris NTIA: Big Changes Ahead for Multi-Billion-Dollar Broadband Boondoggle." Cruz, who will soon be chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, is angry about how the National Telecommunications and Information Administration has implemented the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program that was created by Congress in November 2021.
The NTIA announced this week that it has approved the funding plans submitted by all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and five US territories, which are slated to receive federal money and dole it out to broadband providers for network expansions. Texas was the last state to gain approval in what the NTIA called "a major milestone on the road to connecting everyone in America to affordable, reliable high-speed Internet service."
oh boy. My lender clients use Finastra quite a bit
An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The financial technology firm Finastra is investigating the alleged large-scale theft of information from its internal file transfer platform, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Finastra, which provides software and services to 45 of the world's top 50 banks, notified customers of the security incident after a cybercriminal began selling more than 400 gigabytes of data purportedly stolen from the company. London-based Finastra has offices in 42 countries and reported $1.9 billion in revenues last year. The company employs more than 7,000 people and serves approximately 8,100 financial institutions around the world. A major part of Finastra's day-to-day business involves processing huge volumes of digital files containing instructions for wire and bank transfers on behalf of its clients.
On November 8, 2024, Finastra notified financial institution customers that on Nov. 7 its security team detected suspicious activity on Finastra's internally hosted file transfer platform. Finastra also told customers that someone had begun selling large volumes of files allegedly stolen from its systems. "On November 8, a threat actor communicated on the dark web claiming to have data exfiltrated from this platform," reads Finastra's disclosure, a copy of which was shared by a source at one of the customer firms. "There is no direct impact on customer operations, our customers' systems, or Finastra's ability to serve our customers currently," the notice continued. "We have implemented an alternative secure file sharing platform to ensure continuity, and investigations are ongoing." But its notice to customers does indicate the intruder managed to extract or "exfiltrate" an unspecified volume of customer data.
A federal court yesterday ruled against parents who sued a Massachusetts school district for punishing their son who used an artificial intelligence tool to complete an assignment.
Dale and Jennifer Harris sued Hingham High School officials and the School Committee and sought a preliminary injunction requiring the school to change their son's grade and expunge the incident from his disciplinary record before he needs to submit college applications. The parents argued that there was no rule against using AI in the student handbook, but school officials said the student violated multiple policies.
The Harris' motion for an injunction was rejected in an order issued yesterday from US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. US Magistrate Judge Paul Levenson found that school officials "have the better of the argument on both the facts and the law."
Donald Trump has chosen to nominate former Florida Attorney General and Fox News guest host Pam Bondi to serve as his attorney general. Trump made the decision after his first choice, sex trafficking investigation subject Matt Gaetz, decided to drop out.
Bondi fits right in with Trump ideologically. During her time serving in Florida, Bondi focused on attacking the Affordable Care Act, which Trump has long pushed to repeal.
In 2012, she worked with other Republican attorneys general on a lawsuit meant to undo the law, which has extended health care coverage to millions of Americans. Bondi clearly relished her role as the public face of the suit and a 2012 Tampa Bay Times story quoted Bondi asking her team to take photos of her in front of the Supreme Court following a news conference there.
The case failed and the law has remained in place—with coverage expanded by the Biden/Harris administration.
Bondi was also part of a 2018 lawsuit that sought to strike down provisions in the law that require insurance companies to cover people with preexisting conditions. That effort also ultimately failed.
Like so many others in the Trump orbit, Bondi is a frequent part of the rotation of guests and guest hosts on Fox News.
In her appearances on the network the lawyer distinguished herself by referring to Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse as merely a “little boy out there trying to protect his community,” and by calling for schools to follow the post-9/11 airport security model in response to school shootings, as opposed to gun regulation.
Trump enlisted Bondi to argue his case on the Senate floor when he was impeached for using the presidency to solicit political favors from Ukraine, and she was one of the public faces of Trump’s efforts to promote election lies following his loss to President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
“We’ve won Pennsylvania,” Bondi claimed at the time—and in a Fox News appearance came up with a story about “fake ballots” purportedly being counted in the state. Trump lost Pennsylvania to Biden by over 80,000 votes.
Trump has frequently said that loyalty is extremely important to him, and Bondi has been an advocate for him for years.
Those ties have also led to the appearance of corruption. In 2016, Trump was forced to pay a penalty to the IRS after it was determined that he had broken tax laws by giving a political contribution to a Bondi-connected nonprofit.
Following that 2013 donation of $25,000 from Trump, Bondi decided not to investigate fraud claims against Trump University in her role as Florida attorney general. Years later, Trump paid out $25 million in settlements to students who said the organization had duped them with promises to impart the “secrets of success” in real estate.
Unlike Gaetz, Bondi may not have any ongoing sex trafficking investigations (that are publicly known at least) but she has proven herself a Trump diehard, which is his top qualification for the most important positions.
During a markup session of the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania slammed the racist Republican attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. (A markup session is used to determine whether a bill or draft bill should be recommended to the full House and in what form.)
“Republicans are trying to bastardize the term ‘DEI’ to be a slur,” Lee said, referring to the kinds of programs and initiatives that have been a culture war target of Trump and the GOP for the last few years. With Trump's election victory, those programs are under very real threat of being extinguished.
“When Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was up for confirmation, and when Vice President Harris was added to the ticket, they called them DEI hires,” Lee said, referring to the outrageously racist performance Republican members of the Senate put on during Brown’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing.
“They want you to believe that a Harvard graduate with over 20 years of experience, who happens to be a Black woman, is not qualified, but a Fox News personality is qualified to run the Department of Defense, and a WWE executive is qualified to run the Department of Education.“
Racism is simply the Republican Party’s most fundamental hypocrisy.
Is our country not greater when all of us have opportunities to succeed and contribute and survive our success and our survival as a nation? It’s bound together. Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs only exist to band-aid over decades, hell, centuries of discrimination against people over skin color, their religion, disabilities, gender, or sexual orientations, you name it. Contrary to Republican conjecture, remedying past discrimination is not, in turn, a discrimination.
And we're not going to sit here and pretend racism is over just because one Black person on the Supreme Court agreed that it should be. What it does not do is give some kind of magical pass to better jobs, like some of our colleagues are implying that middle-world equity does not mean more than or better than, it means treating people fairly and impartially.
It means working to fix generational and systemic discrimination to the betterment of all of us in all of our institutions. But instead, Republicans are trying to bastardize the term “DEI” to be a slur. When Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was up for confirmation, and when Vice President Harris was added to the ticket, they called them DEI hires. They want you to believe that a Harvard graduate with over 20 years of experience, who happens to be a Black woman, is not qualified, but a Fox News personality is qualified to run the Department of Defense, and the WWE executive is qualified to run the Department of Education.
Let's be real. There is an attempt to create a direct correlation between our race being a Black person and our qualifications. So much as to say that there is no way to be a Black woman. There is no resume that a Black person could have that would qualify them. Unless that Black person is a Republican and there is a quota there.
