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🐱 A recent study has shown that cats can associate specific human words with images! Researchers found that when exposed to different word-image pairings, cats responded to changes with curiosity—some even had pupil dilation, a sign of focus and confusion. 😮
What are your thoughts? Would you try a word-association test with your cat?
#GoodNews #AnimalScience #FelineFacts #Cats #PetResearch #EarthDotCom #AnimalCognition #ScienceNews
https://www.earth.com/news/cats-can-associate-human-words-with-images/ -
UNIX Fourth Edition on SIMH v3.12-5
UNIX v4 was officially released for the DEC PDP-11/45 computers on November 1973, when those computers were the only computers eligible for this version of UNIX. Since then, it was thought to be lost until November 7th when the tape has been rediscovered. Apparently, this tape was sitting somewhere in one of the storage rooms in the University of Utah.
The Computer History Museum has further handled this by letting bitsavers.org conduct the recovery process, where the tape has been successfully recovered to a raw tape, which has then been uploaded publicly to the Internet Archive for publication, and the installation instructions were then laid out for simh.
So, we have followed the instructions on how to set up a minimal UNIX v4 system on an Arch Linux host using simh version v3.12-5. First, we have downloaded the system tape files.
[aptivi@archapt ~]$ mkdir uv4 [aptivi@archapt ~]$ cd uv4 [aptivi@archapt uv4]$ wget http://squoze.net/UNIX/v4/disk.rk --2026-04-01 13:56:49-- http://squoze.net/UNIX/v4/disk.rk Resolving squoze.net (squoze.net)... 93.128.9.138 Connecting to squoze.net (squoze.net)|93.128.9.138|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 2494464 (2.4M) [application/octet-stream] Saving to: ‘disk.rk’ disk.rk 100%[================================================>] 2.38M 511KB/s in 5.8s 2026-04-01 13:56:55 (423 KB/s) - ‘disk.rk’ saved [2494464/2494464] [aptivi@archapt uv4]$ wget http://squoze.net/UNIX/v4/unix_v4.tap --2026-04-01 13:57:47-- http://squoze.net/UNIX/v4/unix_v4.tap Resolving squoze.net (squoze.net)... 93.128.9.138 Connecting to squoze.net (squoze.net)|93.128.9.138|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 2572452 (2.5M) [application/octet-stream] Saving to: ‘unix_v4.tap’ unix_v4.tap 100%[================================================>] 2.45M 332KB/s in 6.9s 2026-04-01 13:57:54 (365 KB/s) - ‘unix_v4.tap’ saved [2572452/2572452] [aptivi@archapt uv4]$ wget http://squoze.net/UNIX/v4/install.ini --2026-04-01 13:58:00-- http://squoze.net/UNIX/v4/install.ini Resolving squoze.net (squoze.net)... 93.128.9.138 Connecting to squoze.net (squoze.net)|93.128.9.138|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 68 [text/plain] Saving to: ‘install.ini’ install.ini 100%[================================================>] 68 --.-KB/s in 0s 2026-04-01 13:58:00 (10.9 MB/s) - ‘install.ini’ saved [68/68]Afterwards, we have installed UNIX v4 files from the installation tape. The
install.inifile contained the following contents:set cpu 11/45 att rk0 disk.rk att tm0 unix_v4.tap d sr 2 boot -o tmWe had to use the
mcopycommand to install the system to the rk disk, then useuboot, with writingkandunixto boot to the installed kernel. Depending on your host distribution, the executable file for running the PDP11 simulator is eithersimh-pdp11orpdp11.[aptivi@archapt uv4]$ simh-pdp11 install.ini PDP-11 simulator V3.12-5 Disabling XQ =mcopy 'p' for rp; 'k' for rk k disk offset 0 tape offset 75 count 4000 =uboot k unix mem = 64530 login: root # ls bin dev etc lib mnt tmp unix usr # sync # Simulation stopped, PC: 002040 (MOV (SP)+,177776) sim> exit GoodbyeThe Unix files have been successfully written to the rk disk, so we need to boot to Unix from it with
boot.inias the configuration file for simh.Hint: CTRL + D to log out from your user account. CTRL + E to stop the simulation.
set cpu 11/45 set tc en att rk0 disk.rk d sr 2 boot rkAgain, we have to write both
kandunixto boot to the kernel.[aptivi@archapt uv4]$ wget http://squoze.net/UNIX/v4/boot.ini --2026-04-01 13:59:55-- http://squoze.net/UNIX/v4/boot.ini Resolving squoze.net (squoze.net)... 93.128.9.138 Connecting to squoze.net (squoze.net)|93.128.9.138|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 76 [text/plain] Saving to: ‘boot.ini’ boot.ini 100%[================================================>] 76 --.-KB/s in 0s 2026-04-01 13:59:55 (13.3 MB/s) - ‘boot.ini’ saved [76/76] [aptivi@archapt uv4]$ simh-pdp11 boot.ini PDP-11 simulator V3.12-5 Disabling XQ k unix mem = 64530 login: root #Now, we need to make device files for tape disk controllers using
/etc/mknodand create them on/dev. This is needed to be able to read tapes on the installed system. They will be persistent across reboots.# chdir /dev # /etc/mknod mt0 b 2 0 # /etc/mknod tap0 b 1 0 # /etc/mknod tap1 b 1 1 # /etc/mknod tap2 b 1 2 # /etc/mknod tap3 b 1 3 # sync # Simulation stopped, PC: 002040 (MOV (SP)+,177776)Now that we have the tape device files, we can now read from tapes. We will recompile the kernel to integrate the enhanced rk driver. After the recompilation, we’ll reboot the system to the new kernel and create device files for rk.
[aptivi@archapt uv4]$ wget http://squoze.net/UNIX/v4/sys.tp --2026-04-01 14:02:21-- http://squoze.net/UNIX/v4/sys.tp Resolving squoze.net (squoze.net)... 93.128.9.138 Connecting to squoze.net (squoze.net)|93.128.9.138|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 17408 (17K) [application/octet-stream] Saving to: ‘sys.tp’ sys.tp 100%[================================================>] 17.00K 8.45KB/s in 2.0s 2026-04-01 14:02:25 (8.45 KB/s) - ‘sys.tp’ saved [17408/17408] [aptivi@archapt uv4]$ simh-pdp11 boot.ini PDP-11 simulator V3.12-5 Disabling XQ k unix mem = 64530 login: root # Simulation stopped, PC: 002040 (MOV (SP)+,177776) boot.ini> # type k Unknown command boot.ini> # type unix Unknown command sim> att tc1 sys.tp TC1: 16b format, buffering file in memory sim> c # chdir /usr/sys # tp 1t run dmr/run dmr/rk.c ken/run conf/conf.c 5 entries 9 used 544 free 33 last END # chdir /usr/sys/dmr # mv rk.c rk.c.orig # chdir ../ # rm -f conf/conf.c # tp 1x END # sh run alloc.c: clock.c: fio.c: iget.c: main.c: nami.c: prf.c: rdwri.c: sig.c: 60: Warning: assignment understood 61: Warning: assignment understood slp.c: subr.c: sys1.c: sys2.c: sys3.c: sys4.c: sysent.c: text.c: trap.c: bio.c: cat.c: dc.c: dh.c: dhdm.c: dhfdm.c: dn.c: dp.c: dv.c: kl.c: lp.c: malloc.c: mem.c: partab.c: pc.c: pipe.c: rf.c: rk.c: rp.c: tc.c: tm.c: tty.c: vs.c: vt.c: # mv a.out /unix /unix: 0644 mode y # sync # Simulation stopped, PC: 002040 (MOV (SP)+,177776) sim> exit Goodbye TC1: writing buffer to file [aptivi@archapt uv4]$ simh-pdp11 boot.ini PDP-11 simulator V3.12-5 Disabling XQ k unix mem = 64529 login: root # chdir /dev # rm -f null # /etc/mknod mem c 1 0 # /etc/mknod kmem c 1 1 # /etc/mknod null c 1 2 # /etc/mknod rk0 b 0 0 # /etc/mknod rk1 b 0 1 # /etc/mknod rk2 b 0 2 # /etc/mknod rk3 b 0 3 # ls -l total 0 crw-rw-rw- 1 root 1, 1 Jun 12 19:54 kmem crw-rw-rw- 1 root 1, 0 Jun 12 19:54 mem brw-rw-rw- 1 root 2, 0 Jun 12 19:52 mt0 crw-rw-rw- 1 root 1, 2 Jun 12 19:54 null brw-rw-rw- 1 root 0, 0 Jun 12 19:54 rk0 brw-rw-rw- 1 root 0, 1 Jun 12 19:54 rk1 brw-rw-rw- 1 root 0, 2 Jun 12 19:54 rk2 brw-rw-rw- 1 root 0, 3 Jun 12 19:54 rk3 brw-rw-rw- 1 root 1, 0 Jun 12 19:52 tap0 brw-rw-rw- 1 root 1, 1 Jun 12 19:52 tap1 brw-rw-rw- 1 root 1, 2 Jun 12 19:52 tap2 brw-rw-rw- 1 root 1, 3 Jun 12 19:52 tap3 crw--w--w- 1 root 0, 0 Jun 12 19:55 tty8 # ps a 0 0 ???d??H??`?? ak??Z? ????? k? ? 0 1 /etc/init 8 7 - 8 17 ps a 0 6 /etc/update #To verify that the new driver works properly, we’ll copy the UNIX source code to the second rk disk. We’ll then make it as a mount point as
/usr/sourcefor the source code files that will be located there.sim> att tm0 src.tap TM: creating new file sim> att rk1 src.rk RK: creating new file sim> c # /etc/mkfs /dev/rk1 4872 isize = 103 # /etc/mount /dev/rk1 /mnt # chdir /usr/source # tp mr * 256 entries 1194 used 1256 last END # tp mt s1/ac.c s1/ar.s s1/as11.s s1/as12.s s1/as13.s s1/as14.s s1/as15.s s1/as16.s s1/as17.s s1/as18.s s1/as19.s s1/as21.s s1/as22.s s1/as23.s s1/as24.s s1/as25.s s1/as26.s s1/as27.s s1/as28.s s1/as29.s s1/bas0.s s1/bas1.s s1/bas2.s s1/bas3.s s1/bas4.s s1/bas5.s s1/basx.s s1/cal.c s1/cat.s s1/cc.c s1/cdb.c s1/check.c s1/chmod.c s1/chown.s s1/clri.s s1/cmp.s s1/comm.c s1/cp.c s1/date.c s1/db1.s s1/db2.s s1/db3.s s1/db4.s s1/dc1.s s1/dc2.s s1/dc3.s s1/dc4.s s1/dc5.s s1/dd.c s1/df.c s1/diff1.c s1/diff2.s s1/dsw.s s1/du.s s1/dump.c s1/echo.c s1/ed1.s s1/ed2.s s1/ed3.s s1/exit.c s1/fc.c s1/fed1.s s1/fed2.s s1/fed3.s s1/find.c s1/form1.s s1/form2.s s1/form3.s s1/form4.s s1/form5.s s1/form6.s s1/getty.s s1/glob.c s1/goto.c s1/grep.s s1/if.c s1/init.c s1/kill.s s1/ld1.s s1/ld2.s s1/ldx.s s1/ln.c s1/login.c s1/lpd.s s1/lpr.c s1/ls.c s2/mail.c s2/mesg.s s2/mkdir.s s2/mkfs.c s2/mknod.c s2/mount.c s2/msh.s s2/mv.c s2/nice.c s2/nm.c s2/nohup.c s2/od.c s2/passwd.s s2/pfe.s s2/pr.c s2/prof.c s2/ps.c s2/pwd.c s2/restor.c s2/rew.s s2/rm.c s2/rmdir.s s2/sa.c s2/sh.c s2/size.c s2/sleep.c s2/sort.c s2/split.c s2/strip.s s2/stty.c s2/su.c s2/sum.s s2/sync.c s2/tee.c s2/time.s s2/tp1.s s2/tp2.s s2/tp3.s s2/tp4.s s2/tr.c s2/tty.s s2/typo.c s2/umount.c s2/uniq.c s2/update.s s2/wc.c s2/who.c s2/write.s s3/atan.s s3/atof.s s3/atoi.s s3/compar.s s3/crypt.s s3/ctime.c s3/dpadd.s s3/ecvt.s s3/exp.s s3/fakfp.s s3/fp1.s s3/fp2.s s3/fp3.s s3/fpx.s s3/gamma.s s3/get.s s3/hypot.s s3/ldiv.s s3/log.s s3/mesg.s s3/mon.s s3/nlist.s s3/pow.s s3/put.s s3/qsort.s s3/rand.s s3/sin.s s3/sqrt.s s3/switch.s s3/ttyn.s s4/abort.s s4/atan.s s4/atan2.s s4/atof.s s4/chdir.s s4/chmod.s s4/chown.s s4/close.s s4/cos.s s4/crand.s s4/creat.s s4/crt0.s s4/crypt.s s4/dup.s s4/ecvt.s s4/errlst.c s4/execl.s s4/execv.s s4/exit.s s4/exp.s s4/ffltpr.s s4/floor.s s4/fltpr.s s4/fmod.s s4/fork.s s4/fstat.s s4/gamma.s s4/getc.s s4/getchr.s s4/getcsw.s s4/getgid.s s4/getpw.c s4/getuid.s s4/gtty.s s4/hmul.s s4/hsw.s s4/kill.s s4/link.s s4/locv.s s4/log.s s4/ltod.s s4/makdir.s s4/mcrt0.s s4/mdate.s s4/mknod.s s4/mon.c s4/mount.s s4/nargs.s s4/nice.s s4/nlist.s s4/open.s s4/perror.c s4/pipe.s s4/pow.s s4/printf.s s4/prof.s s4/putc.s s4/putchr.s s4/qsort.c s4/read.s s4/reset.s s4/retrn.s s4/rin.c s4/rsave.s s4/sbrk.s s4/seek.s s4/setgid.s s4/setuid.s s4/signal.s s4/sin.s s4/sleep.s s4/sqrt.s s4/ssw.s s4/stat.s s4/stime.s s4/stty.s s4/switch.s s4/sync.s s4/time.s s4/times.s s4/umount.s s4/unlink.s s4/wait.s s4/write.s s7/roff1.s s7/roff2.s s7/roff3.s s7/roff4.s s7/roff5.s s7/roff7.s s7/roff8.s s7/suftab.s 256 entries 1194 used 1256 last END # chdir /mnt # mkdir s1 s2 s3 s4 s7 # chown bin * # chmod 755 * # tp mx END # chdir /usr/source/s1 # rm -f [a-f]* # rm -f * # chdir ../s2 # rm -f * # chdir ../s3 # rm -f * # chdir ../s4 # rm -f [a-f]* # rm -f * # chdir ../s7 # rm -f * # chdir .. # rmdir * # chdir / # /etc/umount /dev/rk1 # /etc/mount /dev/rk1 /usr/source # ed /etc/rc 70 $ /etc/update i /etc/mount /dev/rk1 /usr/source . w 102 q #Adding users to this system isn’t as straightforward as the modern Unix distributions; you’ll need to directly modify the
/etc/passwdfile to add a new entry that contains a new user,aptivi.# ed /etc/passwd 30 $ bin::3:1::/bin: a aptivi::10:1::/usr/aptivi: . w 57 q # mkdir /usr/aptivi # chown aptivi /usr/aptivi # login: aptivi % who aptivi tty8 Jun 12 20:03 % login: root # passwd aptivi test # login: aptivi Password: %As the site that provided us this tutorial claimed that we can install the B programming language compiler, but our tests have failed due to errors in the installation process.
[aptivi@archapt uv4]$ wget http://squoze.net/B/b.tp --2026-04-01 14:15:13-- http://squoze.net/B/b.tp Resolving squoze.net (squoze.net)... 93.128.9.138 Connecting to squoze.net (squoze.net)|93.128.9.138|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 137216 (134K) [application/octet-stream] Saving to: ‘b.tp’ b.tp 100%[================================================>] 134.00K 168KB/s in 0.8s 2026-04-01 14:15:14 (168 KB/s) - ‘b.tp’ saved [137216/137216] [aptivi@archapt uv4]$ simh-pdp11 boot.ini PDP-11 simulator V3.12-5 Disabling XQ k unix mem = 64529 login: root # Simulation stopped, PC: 002040 (MOV (SP)+,177776) boot.ini> # type k Unknown command boot.ini> # type unix Unknown command sim> at tc0 b.tp TC0: 16b format, buffering file in memory sim> c # mkdir /usr/b # chdir /usr/b # mkdir bilib libb # chown bin * # chmod 755 * # tp 0x END # sh install libb.a: non existent chdir chmod chown close creat ctime execl execv exit fork fstat getchr getuid gtty lchar link makdir open printf printn putchr read seek setuid sleep stat stty time unlink wait write char bilib.a: non existent a b1 b10 b102 b103 b11 b112 b113 b114 b115 b116 b117 b12 b120 b13 b14 b15 b16 b17 b2 b20 b3 b4 b5 b6 b7 c f n11 n123 n4 n6 n7 s t u10 u2 u3 u4 u5 u6 u7 va vx x y z brt1 brt2 bc File not found: /usr/lib/bilib.a un: s un: x un: c un: n4 un: b7 un: f un: ix un: n2 un: vx un: t un: n3 un: ivx un: b1 un: u4 un: n1 un: b5 un: n11 un: va un: iva un: u10 un: u7 un: a un: ia un: b4 un: b14 un: b2 un: n6 un: z un: b11 un: b114 un: u3 un: b3 un: b10 un: b15 un: b17 un: u5 un: y un: u2 un: u6 un: b6 un: b116 un: b117 un: n7 un: ic un: b103 un: b13 un: b20 un: b16 ba File not found: /usr/lib/bilib.a un: y un: s un: x un: c un: n4 un: b7 un: f un: ix un: n2 un: vx un: t un: n3 un: ivx un: b1 un: iva un: n1 un: b11 un: ia un: z un: n6 un: a un: b17 un: b14 un: va un: b114 un: u7 un: b5 un: b4 un: b15 un: u6 un: u3 un: n11 un: b3 un: u10 un: b10 un: b2 un: u2 un: n7 un: ic un: b20 un: b16 B i Bus error -- Core dumped Source file non-existent B i Bus error -- Core dumped Source file non-existent #Other than this error when it comes to the B programming language, the Unix system works.
#news #simh #Tech #Technology #Unix #UNIXFourthEdition #UNIXV4 #update -
Lazy Caturday Reads: Slow News Day–Just Kidding.
Good Afternoon!!
By Susan McLaughlin
I wonder if we will ever see another slow news day. Before Trump came on the political scene, I can recall days when I struggled to find interesting stories to post. It has been a decade now since that happened. Even when Biden was president, Trump managed to dominate the news. I’m just so sick and tired of him. But he will continue to be the top story even if Democrats take over the House and Senate next year. If that happens, he’ll be impeached and–I hope–prosecuted. If only he would just go away!
It’s the weekend, and the news is once again overwhelming. I’m going to begin with a couple of immigration stories from my home territory.
Sarah Betancourt at WGBH: Immigrants kept from Faneuil Hall citizenship ceremony as feds crackdown nationwide.
Becoming a U.S. citizen takes years and involves immigrants acquiring a green card, extensive interviews, background checks, classes and a citizenship test. The naturalization ceremony is the final step to the process, where the oath of allegiance and a citizenship certificate are granted.
Immigrants approved to be naturalized went to Faneuil Hall Thursday — known as the country’s cradle of liberty — for that long-awaited moment to pledge allegiance to the United States. But instead, as they lined up, some were told by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin.
The same situation is playing out at naturalization events across the country as USCIS directed its employees to halt adjudicating all immigration pathways for people from 19 countries deemed to be “high risk”.
“One of our clients said that she had gone to her oath ceremony because she hadn’t received the cancellation notice in time,” said Gail Breslow, executive director of Project Citizenship. “She showed up as scheduled, and when she arrived, officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled.”
That client, a Haitian woman in her 50s, has had a green card since the early 2000s and started working with Project Citizenship in January. She declined an interview request through Breslow.
“People are devastated and they’re frightened,” Breslow told GBH News. “People were plucked out of line. They didn’t cancel the whole ceremony.”
She said many clients with upcoming ceremonies and USCIS appointments have received cancellations via an online portal. She shared an example of the notices they’re receiving, which provide no further guidance or instructions.
“One person was, you know, asking … what did I do wrong? Why is this happening to me? And, you know, needed to be reassured that it wasn’t anything she had done. This wasn’t her fault,” Breslow said.
Read more at the link. This is so heartbreaking. Trump is destroying our country’s image around the world. I doubt if we can recover from his destruction in my lifetime.
Man and Cat by Stu Morris 2020
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the arrest of the mother of White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt’s nephew. Her name is Bruna Caroline Ferreira, and she is still in ICE custody in Louisiana.
Here’s an update on this story published at WBUR on Thursday: Brother of White House press secretary Leavitt had contentious custody battle with ex, now in ICE custody.
PLAISTOW, N.H. — In this rural town just across the Massachusetts line, the Leavitt family runs a used-car dealership, with hulking work trucks lined up in the front lot. Inside the lobby, a giant TV blares Fox News, and a framed photo features President Donald Trump, posing with owners Bob and Erin Leavitt.
A New Hampshire family once best known for selling cars and ice cream, the Leavitts were thrust into the national spotlight this year when their 27-year-old daughter, Karoline, was named White House press secretary. Ten months later, the administration’s war on illegal immigration landed in the Leavitts’ backyard.
Bruna Ferreira — a Brazilian immigrant who shares an 11-year-old child with Karoline’s brother Michael Leavitt — was arrested by ICE in mid-November. Ferreira, 33, remains in custody in Louisiana. The boy lives with his father in New Hampshire.
Ferreira’s sister and lawyer had claimed there was no animosity between Ferreira and the Leavitts. But court records, police reports and family text chains reviewed by WBUR tell a vastly different story — one of a bitter custody battle, years-old allegations of a threat to call immigration authorities, and concerns for the well-being of the child when his mother was staying in a vacant mansion in Cohasset.
The arrest, first reported by WBUR, has sparked questions about whether the Leavitts used their inroads to the White House to put ICE onto Ferreira’s trail. Karoline Leavitt has denied any involvement in the arrest. And Michael Leavitt, 35, told WBUR on Thursday that neither he nor anyone else in his family called ICE on the mother of his son: “Absolutely not,” he said in a text response to questions.
ICE accused Ferreira of overstaying a visa that ran out in 1999 and of a battery arrest. Ferreira’s lawyer has said he’s unaware of crimes on her record. He said she’d been unable to renew the legal status she had under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Leavitt’s brother was asked about this.
Asked whether Karoline Leavitt would do anything to help Ferreira get released, Michael Leavitt told WBUR, “I would never ask my sister to abuse her government position to help anyone, including me — nor would I ever assume she would do so.”
Instead, Leavitt said, he and his father urged Ferreira’s sister to get her to self-deport. Leavitt said by agreeing to be deported — rather than being forced to leave through the removal process — she could one day return to the U.S.
The sister, Graziela Dos Santos Rodrigues, said she called Karoline Leavitt after the arrest. She still hasn’t heard back.
There quite a bit of interesting detail in the story about the relationship between Leavitt’s brother and his ex-wife. Among other things, Ferreira claims that Leavitt owes $70,000 in child support. I would not be at all surprised if Ferreira was specifically targeted by the White House.
Prisac Nicholai, Self, Portrait with My Cat
It’s beginning to look like Pete Hegseth may be in trouble following the uproar about the double strike on a “drug” boat in September, reported by The Washington Post and the recent report on “Signalgate,” the scandal about Hegseth using Signal to discuss top secret information.
Joseph Gedeon at The Guardian: Pressure grows on ‘reckless’ Hegseth as twin scandals engulf Pentagon chief.
Pete Hegseth is facing the most serious crisis of his tenure as defense secretary, engulfed by allegations of war crimes in the Caribbean and a blistering inspector general report accusing him of mishandling classified military intelligence. Yet despite the long list of trouble and as lawmakers from both parties call for his resignation, Hegseth shows no signs of stepping down and still holds Donald Trump’s support.
The twin crises have engulfed the former Fox News personality in separate but overlapping allegations that lawmakers, policy experts and former officials say reveal a pattern of dangerous recklessness at the helm of the Pentagon. Democratic legislators have reignited calls for his ouster after revelations that survivors clinging to wreckage from a September boat strike were deliberately killed in a “double-tap” attack, while a defense department investigation released on Thursday concluded he violated Pentagon policies by sharing sensitive details via the Signal messaging app hours before airstrikes in Yemen.
The most recent controversy comes as the Caribbean campaign centers on the Trump administration’s extrajudicial strikes against suspected drug smugglers, which have killed at least 87 people across 22 attacks since September. Trump has justified the operation as essential to combating fentanyl trafficking, claiming each destroyed vessel saves 25,000 American lives, though factcheckers, former officials and drug policy experts have called this figure absurd, noting that fentanyl primarily enters the United States overland from Mexico, not via Caribbean boats from Venezuela.
The legality of the strikes came under intense scrutiny after the public learned that two men who survived the initial 2 September attack could been seen amid the wreckage when a lethal follow-up strike was ordered. While Hegseth initially dismissed the reporting as fabricated, he later confirmed the basic facts during a cabinet meeting this week, saying he acted in the “fog of war” but “didn’t stick around” to observe the rest of the mission.
Senator Patty Murray, the Democratic vice-chair of the Senate appropriations committee, called for Hegseth’s firing following a bipartisan briefing on the incident on Thursday. “Between overseeing this campaign in the Caribbean, risking US servicemembers’ lives by sharing war plans on Signal, and so much else, it could not be more obvious that Secretary Hegseth is unfit for the role, and it is past time for him to go,” Murray said.
Hegseth is an incompetent moron, but so are all of Trump’s other cabinet members.
Garrett Owen at Salon: “It’s bad”: Lawmakers shocked at video of strike on survivors of alleged drug boat.
Video footage of a highly controversial second strike on an alleged drug boat in September was shown to lawmakers in Washington, shocking and disgusting some, while others defended the decision to target survivors.
Members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate and House Armed Services committees viewed the footage in a closed-door meeting with military brass involved in the strikes. The video showed a suspected drug boat operating in the Caribbean, being struck, and then being struck again as two survivors appeared to cling to wreckage.
“This is a big, big problem, and we need a full investigation,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., told The New Republic in an interview. Smith, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, was told that the survivors were “capable of returning to the fight.” He disagrees, though he contends that the boats may have been transporting drugs.
“It looks like two classically shipwrecked people,” Smith said, calling it a “highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight.”
Fellow lawmakers Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., were appalled by the footage. Himes called it “one of the most troubling scenes I’ve ever seen in my time in public service.” Reed said he was “deeply disturbed” by the video.
“The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage of the September 2 strike, as the President has agreed to do,” Reed said.
Some Republican tried to defend the strikes.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. called the second strike “righteous” and “highly lawful and lethal.” Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., said the strikes were carried out in a “highly professional manner.”
I guess we’ll find out, since Trump has said he would release the complete film of the attacks.
Cats Painting, by Fred Bell
If you’re interested in a deep dive about Hegseth’s situation, here’s a gift link to a piece at the Atlantic by Missy Ryan, Nancy A. Youssef, Sarah Fitzpatrick, and Jonathan Lemire: Pete Hegseth Is Seriously Testing Trump’s ‘No Scalps’ Rule.
The suspected drug traffickers, the lone survivors of a U.S. airstrike, were sprawled on a table-size piece of floating wreckage in the Caribbean for more than 40 minutes. They were unarmed, incommunicado, and adrift as they repeatedly attempted to right what remained of their boat. At one point, the men raised their arms and seemed to signal to the U.S. aircraft above, a gesture some who watched a video of the incident interpreted as a sign of surrender. Then a second explosion finished the men off, leaving only a bloody stain on the surface of the sea. Footage of the two men’s desperate final moments made some viewers nauseated, leading one to nearly vomit. “It was worse than we had been led to believe,” one person told us.
The video was part of a briefing that Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, gave lawmakers yesterday about the September 2 attack. Bradley told legislators that, after consulting military lawyers, he authorized the follow-on strike, judging that the men still posed a threat because of what they could have done: radioed for help or been picked up with what remained of their cargo of suspected cocaine. The video suggested they didn’t actually do any of that, but Bradley defended his decisions in the first episode of the Trump administration’s newly militarized counternarcotics campaign.
Republicans and Democrats who watched the grainy footage drew different conclusions about whether Bradley’s actions were justified. But many also sounded exasperated that once again they were dealing with controversy sparked by Bradley’s boss, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. And after 10 months of turbulence under Hegseth’s leadership, the Republican-led Congress is now showing signs of exercising its oversight powers.
Read the whole thing at The Atlantic.
Andrew Solender at Axios: Scoop: Democrats call Trump’s bluff on releasing boat strike video.
Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee are pressing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to release video of U.S. military strikes on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat that have inflamed tensions on Capitol Hill.
Why it matters: The lawmakers are seizing on to President Trump’s own comments this week that he would have “no problem” releasing the footage to the public.
“We look forward to your prompt response and release of this footage to the public, as has already been promised by President Trump,” the lawmakers, led by Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) wrote in a letter to Hegseth that was obtained by Axios.
“The American people deserve transparency on these attacks,” they wrote, “it is your obligation to release the footage.” [….]
What they’re saying: “We write to request that you release all audio and video footage from the kinetic strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean on September 2, 2025, including the follow-on strikes,” the Democrats wrote in their letter.
“Our concern stems from reports that you, as Secretary of Defense, issued an order to ‘kill everybody,’ followed by additional strikes seeking to kill the two remaining unarmed, shipwrecked individuals.”
The letter was signed by 19 of the 27 Democrats on the Armed Services Committee. Ryan’s office told Axios they reached out to Republicans as well, but none signed.
Yesterday, Dakinikat posted an article from The Economist about the Trump administration’s newly announced “security strategy” which denigrates Europe and praises Russia.
Here’s another analysis of the “strategy” by Anton Troianovski at The New York Times (gift link): Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy.
Latin American countries must grant no-bid contracts to U.S. companies. Taiwan’s significance boils down to semiconductors and shipping lanes. Washington’s “hectoring” of the wealthy Gulf monarchies needs to stop.
The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its vast powers to make money.
Михалыч и Васильич», 2023
President Trump has shown all year that his second term would make it a priority to squeeze less powerful countries to benefit American companies. But late Thursday, his administration made that profit-driven approach a core element of its official foreign policy, publishing its long-anticipated update to U.S. national security aims around the world.
The document, known as the National Security Strategy, describes a world in which American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations — even in Mr. Trump’s first term — had portrayed them. Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash.
“We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world,” it says, “without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”
The National Security Strategy of Mr. Trump’s first term, by contrast, cast the world as a contest “between those who favor repressive systems and those who favor free societies.”
The National Security Strategy has no binding force, and some analysts cautioned against reading too much into it as a guide to future actions given Mr. Trump’s mercurial nature.
But the release of the strategy, which recent presidents have generally updated just once in every term, did carry significance as a snapshot in time. Amid the debates swirling among Republicans over American policy toward the Middle East, Russia, China and elsewhere, the document showed how the administration has appeared to coalesce around a commitment to avoid military entanglements and promote commerce.
In an interview, Dan Caldwell, a former senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who argues in favor of American military restraint, hailed the new strategy as a “true break from the failed bipartisan post-Cold War foreign policy consensus.”
Personally, I don’t see that as a good thing. Use the gift link to read more.
I wonder if Donald Trump has ever been in a grocery store. I really doubt it. He doesn’t seem to understand the lives of ordinary Americans at all. He has no concept of what it’s like to worry about having enough money to pay the bills or to put food on the table. Someone else handles all those things for him. And frankly, he couldn’t care less if children are starving and families can’t pay the rent or mortgage. The only reason he has to care at all is because those people can vote. Right now, he’s making it clear he doesn’t give a shit.
Naftali Bendavid at The Washington Post: Trump struggles to persuade Americans to ignore affordability issues.
President Donald Trump has said drug prices are falling by as much as 1,500 percent, a mathematical impossibility. He has declared himself “the affordability president,” while dismissing the affordability issue as “a con job by the Democrats.”
Trump also vows that good times are coming. He has predicted that gas prices, which now hover around $3 a gallon, will plummet to $2. He has promised Americans $2,000 refund checks from the revenue raised by tariffs. He has suggested that “in the not-too-distant future,” no one will have to pay income tax.
This flurry of sometimes extravagant claims comes amid a growing Republican fear, fueled by recent election results, that high prices could set the stage for a Democratic sweep in next year’s midterms. So far, there is little evidence that Trump’s urgent attempt to shift the economic storyline is working.
By Sergey Levin
“Any Republican who refuses to admit we have an affordability problem is not listening to the American people,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) said. “It’s real because the American people think it’s real. I cannot overstate that — in a free country it’s the people who define what is real, not the politicians.” [….]
Trump’s plight is a striking turnabout. In last year’s campaign, Trump scored political points by highlighting Americans’ inflation concerns, and President Joe Biden faced the almost impossible task of convincing voters they were not as bad off as they thought.
Strategists of both parties note that Trump — who has often seemed to defy the laws of politics — is struggling with the affordability issue as he has with few others. The president shrugged off criticism after he accepted a luxury plane from a foreign country, pardoned unsavory figures and demolished a third of the White House, for example — episodes that might be devastating to another politician.
This seems different. Alarm bells have gone off for Republicans since Democrats swept last month’s off-year elections, then performed better than usual in Tuesday’s House race in a bright-red Tennessee district. A Democrat could capture the Miami mayor’s office next Tuesday in heavily Republican Florida.
“He often exists in an alternative reality that many of his followers are happy to follow him into, but the affordability issue is kryptonite for him, because even his most devoted followers know which way is up when it comes to prices,” said Jared Bernstein, who chaired Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers. “He may be able to convince people of his alternative vision in lots of different areas, but not this one.”
Economic issues are going to kill the Republicans in 2026 if Trump continues to live in a fantasy world.
NBC News: ‘People aren’t dumb’: Republicans worry they’re not doing enough on affordability.
Congressional Republicans are starting to publicly and privately sound the alarm about their party’s disjointed strategy to address Americans’ affordability concerns, with some growing increasingly frustrated with President Donald Trump’s sometimes cavalier attitude toward the subject.
While Republicans say the high cost of living is a problem they inherited from President Joe Biden, many GOP lawmakers still think their party needs to sharpen its own message and platform ahead of the midterms — or else it could cost them their tenuous majorities in Congress.
“If we don’t do that, we would be morons, because the economy is very much on people’s minds,” Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican, told NBC News. Democrats “failed to really hammer the economy, and it cost them the election,” he added. “If we as Republicans fail to do the same, it wouldn’t surprise me if we had a similar turnout.”
Nearly two dozen Republican senators, House members, strategists and congressional aides shared their concerns about their party’s handling of affordability in interviews with NBC News. Another six acknowledged the issue but said the party will settle on the right strategy to address it.
Their comments come after Democrats have secured wins in many of this year’s elections, with voters citing economic concerns, and as Trump has dismissed the issue as a Democratic “hoax,” rhetoric that has privately frustrated some Republicans.
Read the rest at NBC News.
Those are the stories that captured my interest today. What’s on your mind?
#affordabilityCrisis #boatStrikes #brunaCarolineFerreira #donaldTrump #immigrants #karolineLeavitt #naturalization #peteHegseth #signalgate #trumpAdministrationSecurityStrategy
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Lazy Caturday Reads: Slow News Day–Just Kidding.
Good Afternoon!!
By Susan McLaughlin
I wonder if we will ever see another slow news day. Before Trump came on the political scene, I can recall days when I struggled to find interesting stories to post. It has been a decade now since that happened. Even when Biden was president, Trump managed to dominate the news. I’m just so sick and tired of him. But he will continue to be the top story even if Democrats take over the House and Senate next year. If that happens, he’ll be impeached and–I hope–prosecuted. If only he would just go away!
It’s the weekend, and the news is once again overwhelming. I’m going to begin with a couple of immigration stories from my home territory.
Sarah Betancourt at WGBH: Immigrants kept from Faneuil Hall citizenship ceremony as feds crackdown nationwide.
Becoming a U.S. citizen takes years and involves immigrants acquiring a green card, extensive interviews, background checks, classes and a citizenship test. The naturalization ceremony is the final step to the process, where the oath of allegiance and a citizenship certificate are granted.
Immigrants approved to be naturalized went to Faneuil Hall Thursday — known as the country’s cradle of liberty — for that long-awaited moment to pledge allegiance to the United States. But instead, as they lined up, some were told by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin.
The same situation is playing out at naturalization events across the country as USCIS directed its employees to halt adjudicating all immigration pathways for people from 19 countries deemed to be “high risk”.
“One of our clients said that she had gone to her oath ceremony because she hadn’t received the cancellation notice in time,” said Gail Breslow, executive director of Project Citizenship. “She showed up as scheduled, and when she arrived, officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled.”
That client, a Haitian woman in her 50s, has had a green card since the early 2000s and started working with Project Citizenship in January. She declined an interview request through Breslow.
“People are devastated and they’re frightened,” Breslow told GBH News. “People were plucked out of line. They didn’t cancel the whole ceremony.”
She said many clients with upcoming ceremonies and USCIS appointments have received cancellations via an online portal. She shared an example of the notices they’re receiving, which provide no further guidance or instructions.
“One person was, you know, asking … what did I do wrong? Why is this happening to me? And, you know, needed to be reassured that it wasn’t anything she had done. This wasn’t her fault,” Breslow said.
Read more at the link. This is so heartbreaking. Trump is destroying our country’s image around the world. I doubt if we can recover from his destruction in my lifetime.
Man and Cat by Stu Morris 2020
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the arrest of the mother of White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt’s nephew. Her name is Bruna Caroline Ferreira, and she is still in ICE custody in Louisiana.
Here’s an update on this story published at WBUR on Thursday: Brother of White House press secretary Leavitt had contentious custody battle with ex, now in ICE custody.
PLAISTOW, N.H. — In this rural town just across the Massachusetts line, the Leavitt family runs a used-car dealership, with hulking work trucks lined up in the front lot. Inside the lobby, a giant TV blares Fox News, and a framed photo features President Donald Trump, posing with owners Bob and Erin Leavitt.
A New Hampshire family once best known for selling cars and ice cream, the Leavitts were thrust into the national spotlight this year when their 27-year-old daughter, Karoline, was named White House press secretary. Ten months later, the administration’s war on illegal immigration landed in the Leavitts’ backyard.
Bruna Ferreira — a Brazilian immigrant who shares an 11-year-old child with Karoline’s brother Michael Leavitt — was arrested by ICE in mid-November. Ferreira, 33, remains in custody in Louisiana. The boy lives with his father in New Hampshire.
Ferreira’s sister and lawyer had claimed there was no animosity between Ferreira and the Leavitts. But court records, police reports and family text chains reviewed by WBUR tell a vastly different story — one of a bitter custody battle, years-old allegations of a threat to call immigration authorities, and concerns for the well-being of the child when his mother was staying in a vacant mansion in Cohasset.
The arrest, first reported by WBUR, has sparked questions about whether the Leavitts used their inroads to the White House to put ICE onto Ferreira’s trail. Karoline Leavitt has denied any involvement in the arrest. And Michael Leavitt, 35, told WBUR on Thursday that neither he nor anyone else in his family called ICE on the mother of his son: “Absolutely not,” he said in a text response to questions.
ICE accused Ferreira of overstaying a visa that ran out in 1999 and of a battery arrest. Ferreira’s lawyer has said he’s unaware of crimes on her record. He said she’d been unable to renew the legal status she had under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Leavitt’s brother was asked about this.
Asked whether Karoline Leavitt would do anything to help Ferreira get released, Michael Leavitt told WBUR, “I would never ask my sister to abuse her government position to help anyone, including me — nor would I ever assume she would do so.”
Instead, Leavitt said, he and his father urged Ferreira’s sister to get her to self-deport. Leavitt said by agreeing to be deported — rather than being forced to leave through the removal process — she could one day return to the U.S.
The sister, Graziela Dos Santos Rodrigues, said she called Karoline Leavitt after the arrest. She still hasn’t heard back.
There quite a bit of interesting detail in the story about the relationship between Leavitt’s brother and his ex-wife. Among other things, Ferreira claims that Leavitt owes $70,000 in child support. I would not be at all surprised if Ferreira was specifically targeted by the White House.
Prisac Nicholai, Self, Portrait with My Cat
It’s beginning to look like Pete Hegseth may be in trouble following the uproar about the double strike on a “drug” boat in September, reported by The Washington Post and the recent report on “Signalgate,” the scandal about Hegseth using Signal to discuss top secret information.
Joseph Gedeon at The Guardian: Pressure grows on ‘reckless’ Hegseth as twin scandals engulf Pentagon chief.
Pete Hegseth is facing the most serious crisis of his tenure as defense secretary, engulfed by allegations of war crimes in the Caribbean and a blistering inspector general report accusing him of mishandling classified military intelligence. Yet despite the long list of trouble and as lawmakers from both parties call for his resignation, Hegseth shows no signs of stepping down and still holds Donald Trump’s support.
The twin crises have engulfed the former Fox News personality in separate but overlapping allegations that lawmakers, policy experts and former officials say reveal a pattern of dangerous recklessness at the helm of the Pentagon. Democratic legislators have reignited calls for his ouster after revelations that survivors clinging to wreckage from a September boat strike were deliberately killed in a “double-tap” attack, while a defense department investigation released on Thursday concluded he violated Pentagon policies by sharing sensitive details via the Signal messaging app hours before airstrikes in Yemen.
The most recent controversy comes as the Caribbean campaign centers on the Trump administration’s extrajudicial strikes against suspected drug smugglers, which have killed at least 87 people across 22 attacks since September. Trump has justified the operation as essential to combating fentanyl trafficking, claiming each destroyed vessel saves 25,000 American lives, though factcheckers, former officials and drug policy experts have called this figure absurd, noting that fentanyl primarily enters the United States overland from Mexico, not via Caribbean boats from Venezuela.
The legality of the strikes came under intense scrutiny after the public learned that two men who survived the initial 2 September attack could been seen amid the wreckage when a lethal follow-up strike was ordered. While Hegseth initially dismissed the reporting as fabricated, he later confirmed the basic facts during a cabinet meeting this week, saying he acted in the “fog of war” but “didn’t stick around” to observe the rest of the mission.
Senator Patty Murray, the Democratic vice-chair of the Senate appropriations committee, called for Hegseth’s firing following a bipartisan briefing on the incident on Thursday. “Between overseeing this campaign in the Caribbean, risking US servicemembers’ lives by sharing war plans on Signal, and so much else, it could not be more obvious that Secretary Hegseth is unfit for the role, and it is past time for him to go,” Murray said.
Hegseth is an incompetent moron, but so are all of Trump’s other cabinet members.
Garrett Owen at Salon: “It’s bad”: Lawmakers shocked at video of strike on survivors of alleged drug boat.
Video footage of a highly controversial second strike on an alleged drug boat in September was shown to lawmakers in Washington, shocking and disgusting some, while others defended the decision to target survivors.
Members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate and House Armed Services committees viewed the footage in a closed-door meeting with military brass involved in the strikes. The video showed a suspected drug boat operating in the Caribbean, being struck, and then being struck again as two survivors appeared to cling to wreckage.
“This is a big, big problem, and we need a full investigation,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., told The New Republic in an interview. Smith, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, was told that the survivors were “capable of returning to the fight.” He disagrees, though he contends that the boats may have been transporting drugs.
“It looks like two classically shipwrecked people,” Smith said, calling it a “highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight.”
Fellow lawmakers Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., were appalled by the footage. Himes called it “one of the most troubling scenes I’ve ever seen in my time in public service.” Reed said he was “deeply disturbed” by the video.
“The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage of the September 2 strike, as the President has agreed to do,” Reed said.
Some Republican tried to defend the strikes.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. called the second strike “righteous” and “highly lawful and lethal.” Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., said the strikes were carried out in a “highly professional manner.”
I guess we’ll find out, since Trump has said he would release the complete film of the attacks.
Cats Painting, by Fred Bell
If you’re interested in a deep dive about Hegseth’s situation, here’s a gift link to a piece at the Atlantic by Missy Ryan, Nancy A. Youssef, Sarah Fitzpatrick, and Jonathan Lemire: Pete Hegseth Is Seriously Testing Trump’s ‘No Scalps’ Rule.
The suspected drug traffickers, the lone survivors of a U.S. airstrike, were sprawled on a table-size piece of floating wreckage in the Caribbean for more than 40 minutes. They were unarmed, incommunicado, and adrift as they repeatedly attempted to right what remained of their boat. At one point, the men raised their arms and seemed to signal to the U.S. aircraft above, a gesture some who watched a video of the incident interpreted as a sign of surrender. Then a second explosion finished the men off, leaving only a bloody stain on the surface of the sea. Footage of the two men’s desperate final moments made some viewers nauseated, leading one to nearly vomit. “It was worse than we had been led to believe,” one person told us.
The video was part of a briefing that Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, gave lawmakers yesterday about the September 2 attack. Bradley told legislators that, after consulting military lawyers, he authorized the follow-on strike, judging that the men still posed a threat because of what they could have done: radioed for help or been picked up with what remained of their cargo of suspected cocaine. The video suggested they didn’t actually do any of that, but Bradley defended his decisions in the first episode of the Trump administration’s newly militarized counternarcotics campaign.
Republicans and Democrats who watched the grainy footage drew different conclusions about whether Bradley’s actions were justified. But many also sounded exasperated that once again they were dealing with controversy sparked by Bradley’s boss, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. And after 10 months of turbulence under Hegseth’s leadership, the Republican-led Congress is now showing signs of exercising its oversight powers.
Read the whole thing at The Atlantic.
Andrew Solender at Axios: Scoop: Democrats call Trump’s bluff on releasing boat strike video.
Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee are pressing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to release video of U.S. military strikes on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat that have inflamed tensions on Capitol Hill.
Why it matters: The lawmakers are seizing on to President Trump’s own comments this week that he would have “no problem” releasing the footage to the public.
“We look forward to your prompt response and release of this footage to the public, as has already been promised by President Trump,” the lawmakers, led by Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) wrote in a letter to Hegseth that was obtained by Axios.
“The American people deserve transparency on these attacks,” they wrote, “it is your obligation to release the footage.” [….]
What they’re saying: “We write to request that you release all audio and video footage from the kinetic strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean on September 2, 2025, including the follow-on strikes,” the Democrats wrote in their letter.
“Our concern stems from reports that you, as Secretary of Defense, issued an order to ‘kill everybody,’ followed by additional strikes seeking to kill the two remaining unarmed, shipwrecked individuals.”
The letter was signed by 19 of the 27 Democrats on the Armed Services Committee. Ryan’s office told Axios they reached out to Republicans as well, but none signed.
Yesterday, Dakinikat posted an article from The Economist about the Trump administration’s newly announced “security strategy” which denigrates Europe and praises Russia.
Here’s another analysis of the “strategy” by Anton Troianovski at The New York Times (gift link): Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy.
Latin American countries must grant no-bid contracts to U.S. companies. Taiwan’s significance boils down to semiconductors and shipping lanes. Washington’s “hectoring” of the wealthy Gulf monarchies needs to stop.
The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its vast powers to make money.
Михалыч и Васильич», 2023
President Trump has shown all year that his second term would make it a priority to squeeze less powerful countries to benefit American companies. But late Thursday, his administration made that profit-driven approach a core element of its official foreign policy, publishing its long-anticipated update to U.S. national security aims around the world.
The document, known as the National Security Strategy, describes a world in which American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations — even in Mr. Trump’s first term — had portrayed them. Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash.
“We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world,” it says, “without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”
The National Security Strategy of Mr. Trump’s first term, by contrast, cast the world as a contest “between those who favor repressive systems and those who favor free societies.”
The National Security Strategy has no binding force, and some analysts cautioned against reading too much into it as a guide to future actions given Mr. Trump’s mercurial nature.
But the release of the strategy, which recent presidents have generally updated just once in every term, did carry significance as a snapshot in time. Amid the debates swirling among Republicans over American policy toward the Middle East, Russia, China and elsewhere, the document showed how the administration has appeared to coalesce around a commitment to avoid military entanglements and promote commerce.
In an interview, Dan Caldwell, a former senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who argues in favor of American military restraint, hailed the new strategy as a “true break from the failed bipartisan post-Cold War foreign policy consensus.”
Personally, I don’t see that as a good thing. Use the gift link to read more.
I wonder if Donald Trump has ever been in a grocery store. I really doubt it. He doesn’t seem to understand the lives of ordinary Americans at all. He has no concept of what it’s like to worry about having enough money to pay the bills or to put food on the table. Someone else handles all those things for him. And frankly, he couldn’t care less if children are starving and families can’t pay the rent or mortgage. The only reason he has to care at all is because those people can vote. Right now, he’s making it clear he doesn’t give a shit.
Naftali Bendavid at The Washington Post: Trump struggles to persuade Americans to ignore affordability issues.
President Donald Trump has said drug prices are falling by as much as 1,500 percent, a mathematical impossibility. He has declared himself “the affordability president,” while dismissing the affordability issue as “a con job by the Democrats.”
Trump also vows that good times are coming. He has predicted that gas prices, which now hover around $3 a gallon, will plummet to $2. He has promised Americans $2,000 refund checks from the revenue raised by tariffs. He has suggested that “in the not-too-distant future,” no one will have to pay income tax.
This flurry of sometimes extravagant claims comes amid a growing Republican fear, fueled by recent election results, that high prices could set the stage for a Democratic sweep in next year’s midterms. So far, there is little evidence that Trump’s urgent attempt to shift the economic storyline is working.
By Sergey Levin
“Any Republican who refuses to admit we have an affordability problem is not listening to the American people,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) said. “It’s real because the American people think it’s real. I cannot overstate that — in a free country it’s the people who define what is real, not the politicians.” [….]
Trump’s plight is a striking turnabout. In last year’s campaign, Trump scored political points by highlighting Americans’ inflation concerns, and President Joe Biden faced the almost impossible task of convincing voters they were not as bad off as they thought.
Strategists of both parties note that Trump — who has often seemed to defy the laws of politics — is struggling with the affordability issue as he has with few others. The president shrugged off criticism after he accepted a luxury plane from a foreign country, pardoned unsavory figures and demolished a third of the White House, for example — episodes that might be devastating to another politician.
This seems different. Alarm bells have gone off for Republicans since Democrats swept last month’s off-year elections, then performed better than usual in Tuesday’s House race in a bright-red Tennessee district. A Democrat could capture the Miami mayor’s office next Tuesday in heavily Republican Florida.
“He often exists in an alternative reality that many of his followers are happy to follow him into, but the affordability issue is kryptonite for him, because even his most devoted followers know which way is up when it comes to prices,” said Jared Bernstein, who chaired Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers. “He may be able to convince people of his alternative vision in lots of different areas, but not this one.”
Economic issues are going to kill the Republicans in 2026 if Trump continues to live in a fantasy world.
NBC News: ‘People aren’t dumb’: Republicans worry they’re not doing enough on affordability.
Congressional Republicans are starting to publicly and privately sound the alarm about their party’s disjointed strategy to address Americans’ affordability concerns, with some growing increasingly frustrated with President Donald Trump’s sometimes cavalier attitude toward the subject.
While Republicans say the high cost of living is a problem they inherited from President Joe Biden, many GOP lawmakers still think their party needs to sharpen its own message and platform ahead of the midterms — or else it could cost them their tenuous majorities in Congress.
“If we don’t do that, we would be morons, because the economy is very much on people’s minds,” Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican, told NBC News. Democrats “failed to really hammer the economy, and it cost them the election,” he added. “If we as Republicans fail to do the same, it wouldn’t surprise me if we had a similar turnout.”
Nearly two dozen Republican senators, House members, strategists and congressional aides shared their concerns about their party’s handling of affordability in interviews with NBC News. Another six acknowledged the issue but said the party will settle on the right strategy to address it.
Their comments come after Democrats have secured wins in many of this year’s elections, with voters citing economic concerns, and as Trump has dismissed the issue as a Democratic “hoax,” rhetoric that has privately frustrated some Republicans.
Read the rest at NBC News.
Those are the stories that captured my interest today. What’s on your mind?
#affordabilityCrisis #boatStrikes #brunaCarolineFerreira #donaldTrump #immigrants #karolineLeavitt #naturalization #peteHegseth #signalgate #trumpAdministrationSecurityStrategy
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Lazy Caturday Reads: Slow News Day–Just Kidding.
Good Afternoon!!
By Susan McLaughlin
I wonder if we will ever see another slow news day. Before Trump came on the political scene, I can recall days when I struggled to find interesting stories to post. It has been a decade now since that happened. Even when Biden was president, Trump managed to dominate the news. I’m just so sick and tired of him. But he will continue to be the top story even if Democrats take over the House and Senate next year. If that happens, he’ll be impeached and–I hope–prosecuted. If only he would just go away!
It’s the weekend, and the news is once again overwhelming. I’m going to begin with a couple of immigration stories from my home territory.
Sarah Betancourt at WGBH: Immigrants kept from Faneuil Hall citizenship ceremony as feds crackdown nationwide.
Becoming a U.S. citizen takes years and involves immigrants acquiring a green card, extensive interviews, background checks, classes and a citizenship test. The naturalization ceremony is the final step to the process, where the oath of allegiance and a citizenship certificate are granted.
Immigrants approved to be naturalized went to Faneuil Hall Thursday — known as the country’s cradle of liberty — for that long-awaited moment to pledge allegiance to the United States. But instead, as they lined up, some were told by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin.
The same situation is playing out at naturalization events across the country as USCIS directed its employees to halt adjudicating all immigration pathways for people from 19 countries deemed to be “high risk”.
“One of our clients said that she had gone to her oath ceremony because she hadn’t received the cancellation notice in time,” said Gail Breslow, executive director of Project Citizenship. “She showed up as scheduled, and when she arrived, officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled.”
That client, a Haitian woman in her 50s, has had a green card since the early 2000s and started working with Project Citizenship in January. She declined an interview request through Breslow.
“People are devastated and they’re frightened,” Breslow told GBH News. “People were plucked out of line. They didn’t cancel the whole ceremony.”
She said many clients with upcoming ceremonies and USCIS appointments have received cancellations via an online portal. She shared an example of the notices they’re receiving, which provide no further guidance or instructions.
“One person was, you know, asking … what did I do wrong? Why is this happening to me? And, you know, needed to be reassured that it wasn’t anything she had done. This wasn’t her fault,” Breslow said.
Read more at the link. This is so heartbreaking. Trump is destroying our country’s image around the world. I doubt if we can recover from his destruction in my lifetime.
Man and Cat by Stu Morris 2020
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the arrest of the mother of White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt’s nephew. Her name is Bruna Caroline Ferreira, and she is still in ICE custody in Louisiana.
Here’s an update on this story published at WBUR on Thursday: Brother of White House press secretary Leavitt had contentious custody battle with ex, now in ICE custody.
PLAISTOW, N.H. — In this rural town just across the Massachusetts line, the Leavitt family runs a used-car dealership, with hulking work trucks lined up in the front lot. Inside the lobby, a giant TV blares Fox News, and a framed photo features President Donald Trump, posing with owners Bob and Erin Leavitt.
A New Hampshire family once best known for selling cars and ice cream, the Leavitts were thrust into the national spotlight this year when their 27-year-old daughter, Karoline, was named White House press secretary. Ten months later, the administration’s war on illegal immigration landed in the Leavitts’ backyard.
Bruna Ferreira — a Brazilian immigrant who shares an 11-year-old child with Karoline’s brother Michael Leavitt — was arrested by ICE in mid-November. Ferreira, 33, remains in custody in Louisiana. The boy lives with his father in New Hampshire.
Ferreira’s sister and lawyer had claimed there was no animosity between Ferreira and the Leavitts. But court records, police reports and family text chains reviewed by WBUR tell a vastly different story — one of a bitter custody battle, years-old allegations of a threat to call immigration authorities, and concerns for the well-being of the child when his mother was staying in a vacant mansion in Cohasset.
The arrest, first reported by WBUR, has sparked questions about whether the Leavitts used their inroads to the White House to put ICE onto Ferreira’s trail. Karoline Leavitt has denied any involvement in the arrest. And Michael Leavitt, 35, told WBUR on Thursday that neither he nor anyone else in his family called ICE on the mother of his son: “Absolutely not,” he said in a text response to questions.
ICE accused Ferreira of overstaying a visa that ran out in 1999 and of a battery arrest. Ferreira’s lawyer has said he’s unaware of crimes on her record. He said she’d been unable to renew the legal status she had under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Leavitt’s brother was asked about this.
Asked whether Karoline Leavitt would do anything to help Ferreira get released, Michael Leavitt told WBUR, “I would never ask my sister to abuse her government position to help anyone, including me — nor would I ever assume she would do so.”
Instead, Leavitt said, he and his father urged Ferreira’s sister to get her to self-deport. Leavitt said by agreeing to be deported — rather than being forced to leave through the removal process — she could one day return to the U.S.
The sister, Graziela Dos Santos Rodrigues, said she called Karoline Leavitt after the arrest. She still hasn’t heard back.
There quite a bit of interesting detail in the story about the relationship between Leavitt’s brother and his ex-wife. Among other things, Ferreira claims that Leavitt owes $70,000 in child support. I would not be at all surprised if Ferreira was specifically targeted by the White House.
Prisac Nicholai, Self, Portrait with My Cat
It’s beginning to look like Pete Hegseth may be in trouble following the uproar about the double strike on a “drug” boat in September, reported by The Washington Post and the recent report on “Signalgate,” the scandal about Hegseth using Signal to discuss top secret information.
Joseph Gedeon at The Guardian: Pressure grows on ‘reckless’ Hegseth as twin scandals engulf Pentagon chief.
Pete Hegseth is facing the most serious crisis of his tenure as defense secretary, engulfed by allegations of war crimes in the Caribbean and a blistering inspector general report accusing him of mishandling classified military intelligence. Yet despite the long list of trouble and as lawmakers from both parties call for his resignation, Hegseth shows no signs of stepping down and still holds Donald Trump’s support.
The twin crises have engulfed the former Fox News personality in separate but overlapping allegations that lawmakers, policy experts and former officials say reveal a pattern of dangerous recklessness at the helm of the Pentagon. Democratic legislators have reignited calls for his ouster after revelations that survivors clinging to wreckage from a September boat strike were deliberately killed in a “double-tap” attack, while a defense department investigation released on Thursday concluded he violated Pentagon policies by sharing sensitive details via the Signal messaging app hours before airstrikes in Yemen.
The most recent controversy comes as the Caribbean campaign centers on the Trump administration’s extrajudicial strikes against suspected drug smugglers, which have killed at least 87 people across 22 attacks since September. Trump has justified the operation as essential to combating fentanyl trafficking, claiming each destroyed vessel saves 25,000 American lives, though factcheckers, former officials and drug policy experts have called this figure absurd, noting that fentanyl primarily enters the United States overland from Mexico, not via Caribbean boats from Venezuela.
The legality of the strikes came under intense scrutiny after the public learned that two men who survived the initial 2 September attack could been seen amid the wreckage when a lethal follow-up strike was ordered. While Hegseth initially dismissed the reporting as fabricated, he later confirmed the basic facts during a cabinet meeting this week, saying he acted in the “fog of war” but “didn’t stick around” to observe the rest of the mission.
Senator Patty Murray, the Democratic vice-chair of the Senate appropriations committee, called for Hegseth’s firing following a bipartisan briefing on the incident on Thursday. “Between overseeing this campaign in the Caribbean, risking US servicemembers’ lives by sharing war plans on Signal, and so much else, it could not be more obvious that Secretary Hegseth is unfit for the role, and it is past time for him to go,” Murray said.
Hegseth is an incompetent moron, but so are all of Trump’s other cabinet members.
Garrett Owen at Salon: “It’s bad”: Lawmakers shocked at video of strike on survivors of alleged drug boat.
Video footage of a highly controversial second strike on an alleged drug boat in September was shown to lawmakers in Washington, shocking and disgusting some, while others defended the decision to target survivors.
Members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate and House Armed Services committees viewed the footage in a closed-door meeting with military brass involved in the strikes. The video showed a suspected drug boat operating in the Caribbean, being struck, and then being struck again as two survivors appeared to cling to wreckage.
“This is a big, big problem, and we need a full investigation,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., told The New Republic in an interview. Smith, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, was told that the survivors were “capable of returning to the fight.” He disagrees, though he contends that the boats may have been transporting drugs.
“It looks like two classically shipwrecked people,” Smith said, calling it a “highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight.”
Fellow lawmakers Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., were appalled by the footage. Himes called it “one of the most troubling scenes I’ve ever seen in my time in public service.” Reed said he was “deeply disturbed” by the video.
“The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage of the September 2 strike, as the President has agreed to do,” Reed said.
Some Republican tried to defend the strikes.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. called the second strike “righteous” and “highly lawful and lethal.” Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., said the strikes were carried out in a “highly professional manner.”
I guess we’ll find out, since Trump has said he would release the complete film of the attacks.
Cats Painting, by Fred Bell
If you’re interested in a deep dive about Hegseth’s situation, here’s a gift link to a piece at the Atlantic by Missy Ryan, Nancy A. Youssef, Sarah Fitzpatrick, and Jonathan Lemire: Pete Hegseth Is Seriously Testing Trump’s ‘No Scalps’ Rule.
The suspected drug traffickers, the lone survivors of a U.S. airstrike, were sprawled on a table-size piece of floating wreckage in the Caribbean for more than 40 minutes. They were unarmed, incommunicado, and adrift as they repeatedly attempted to right what remained of their boat. At one point, the men raised their arms and seemed to signal to the U.S. aircraft above, a gesture some who watched a video of the incident interpreted as a sign of surrender. Then a second explosion finished the men off, leaving only a bloody stain on the surface of the sea. Footage of the two men’s desperate final moments made some viewers nauseated, leading one to nearly vomit. “It was worse than we had been led to believe,” one person told us.
The video was part of a briefing that Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, gave lawmakers yesterday about the September 2 attack. Bradley told legislators that, after consulting military lawyers, he authorized the follow-on strike, judging that the men still posed a threat because of what they could have done: radioed for help or been picked up with what remained of their cargo of suspected cocaine. The video suggested they didn’t actually do any of that, but Bradley defended his decisions in the first episode of the Trump administration’s newly militarized counternarcotics campaign.
Republicans and Democrats who watched the grainy footage drew different conclusions about whether Bradley’s actions were justified. But many also sounded exasperated that once again they were dealing with controversy sparked by Bradley’s boss, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. And after 10 months of turbulence under Hegseth’s leadership, the Republican-led Congress is now showing signs of exercising its oversight powers.
Read the whole thing at The Atlantic.
Andrew Solender at Axios: Scoop: Democrats call Trump’s bluff on releasing boat strike video.
Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee are pressing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to release video of U.S. military strikes on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat that have inflamed tensions on Capitol Hill.
Why it matters: The lawmakers are seizing on to President Trump’s own comments this week that he would have “no problem” releasing the footage to the public.
“We look forward to your prompt response and release of this footage to the public, as has already been promised by President Trump,” the lawmakers, led by Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) wrote in a letter to Hegseth that was obtained by Axios.
“The American people deserve transparency on these attacks,” they wrote, “it is your obligation to release the footage.” [….]
What they’re saying: “We write to request that you release all audio and video footage from the kinetic strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean on September 2, 2025, including the follow-on strikes,” the Democrats wrote in their letter.
“Our concern stems from reports that you, as Secretary of Defense, issued an order to ‘kill everybody,’ followed by additional strikes seeking to kill the two remaining unarmed, shipwrecked individuals.”
The letter was signed by 19 of the 27 Democrats on the Armed Services Committee. Ryan’s office told Axios they reached out to Republicans as well, but none signed.
Yesterday, Dakinikat posted an article from The Economist about the Trump administration’s newly announced “security strategy” which denigrates Europe and praises Russia.
Here’s another analysis of the “strategy” by Anton Troianovski at The New York Times (gift link): Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy.
Latin American countries must grant no-bid contracts to U.S. companies. Taiwan’s significance boils down to semiconductors and shipping lanes. Washington’s “hectoring” of the wealthy Gulf monarchies needs to stop.
The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its vast powers to make money.
Михалыч и Васильич», 2023
President Trump has shown all year that his second term would make it a priority to squeeze less powerful countries to benefit American companies. But late Thursday, his administration made that profit-driven approach a core element of its official foreign policy, publishing its long-anticipated update to U.S. national security aims around the world.
The document, known as the National Security Strategy, describes a world in which American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations — even in Mr. Trump’s first term — had portrayed them. Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash.
“We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world,” it says, “without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”
The National Security Strategy of Mr. Trump’s first term, by contrast, cast the world as a contest “between those who favor repressive systems and those who favor free societies.”
The National Security Strategy has no binding force, and some analysts cautioned against reading too much into it as a guide to future actions given Mr. Trump’s mercurial nature.
But the release of the strategy, which recent presidents have generally updated just once in every term, did carry significance as a snapshot in time. Amid the debates swirling among Republicans over American policy toward the Middle East, Russia, China and elsewhere, the document showed how the administration has appeared to coalesce around a commitment to avoid military entanglements and promote commerce.
In an interview, Dan Caldwell, a former senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who argues in favor of American military restraint, hailed the new strategy as a “true break from the failed bipartisan post-Cold War foreign policy consensus.”
Personally, I don’t see that as a good thing. Use the gift link to read more.
I wonder if Donald Trump has ever been in a grocery store. I really doubt it. He doesn’t seem to understand the lives of ordinary Americans at all. He has no concept of what it’s like to worry about having enough money to pay the bills or to put food on the table. Someone else handles all those things for him. And frankly, he couldn’t care less if children are starving and families can’t pay the rent or mortgage. The only reason he has to care at all is because those people can vote. Right now, he’s making it clear he doesn’t give a shit.
Naftali Bendavid at The Washington Post: Trump struggles to persuade Americans to ignore affordability issues.
President Donald Trump has said drug prices are falling by as much as 1,500 percent, a mathematical impossibility. He has declared himself “the affordability president,” while dismissing the affordability issue as “a con job by the Democrats.”
Trump also vows that good times are coming. He has predicted that gas prices, which now hover around $3 a gallon, will plummet to $2. He has promised Americans $2,000 refund checks from the revenue raised by tariffs. He has suggested that “in the not-too-distant future,” no one will have to pay income tax.
This flurry of sometimes extravagant claims comes amid a growing Republican fear, fueled by recent election results, that high prices could set the stage for a Democratic sweep in next year’s midterms. So far, there is little evidence that Trump’s urgent attempt to shift the economic storyline is working.
By Sergey Levin
“Any Republican who refuses to admit we have an affordability problem is not listening to the American people,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) said. “It’s real because the American people think it’s real. I cannot overstate that — in a free country it’s the people who define what is real, not the politicians.” [….]
Trump’s plight is a striking turnabout. In last year’s campaign, Trump scored political points by highlighting Americans’ inflation concerns, and President Joe Biden faced the almost impossible task of convincing voters they were not as bad off as they thought.
Strategists of both parties note that Trump — who has often seemed to defy the laws of politics — is struggling with the affordability issue as he has with few others. The president shrugged off criticism after he accepted a luxury plane from a foreign country, pardoned unsavory figures and demolished a third of the White House, for example — episodes that might be devastating to another politician.
This seems different. Alarm bells have gone off for Republicans since Democrats swept last month’s off-year elections, then performed better than usual in Tuesday’s House race in a bright-red Tennessee district. A Democrat could capture the Miami mayor’s office next Tuesday in heavily Republican Florida.
“He often exists in an alternative reality that many of his followers are happy to follow him into, but the affordability issue is kryptonite for him, because even his most devoted followers know which way is up when it comes to prices,” said Jared Bernstein, who chaired Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers. “He may be able to convince people of his alternative vision in lots of different areas, but not this one.”
Economic issues are going to kill the Republicans in 2026 if Trump continues to live in a fantasy world.
NBC News: ‘People aren’t dumb’: Republicans worry they’re not doing enough on affordability.
Congressional Republicans are starting to publicly and privately sound the alarm about their party’s disjointed strategy to address Americans’ affordability concerns, with some growing increasingly frustrated with President Donald Trump’s sometimes cavalier attitude toward the subject.
While Republicans say the high cost of living is a problem they inherited from President Joe Biden, many GOP lawmakers still think their party needs to sharpen its own message and platform ahead of the midterms — or else it could cost them their tenuous majorities in Congress.
“If we don’t do that, we would be morons, because the economy is very much on people’s minds,” Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican, told NBC News. Democrats “failed to really hammer the economy, and it cost them the election,” he added. “If we as Republicans fail to do the same, it wouldn’t surprise me if we had a similar turnout.”
Nearly two dozen Republican senators, House members, strategists and congressional aides shared their concerns about their party’s handling of affordability in interviews with NBC News. Another six acknowledged the issue but said the party will settle on the right strategy to address it.
Their comments come after Democrats have secured wins in many of this year’s elections, with voters citing economic concerns, and as Trump has dismissed the issue as a Democratic “hoax,” rhetoric that has privately frustrated some Republicans.
Read the rest at NBC News.
Those are the stories that captured my interest today. What’s on your mind?
#affordabilityCrisis #boatStrikes #brunaCarolineFerreira #donaldTrump #immigrants #karolineLeavitt #naturalization #peteHegseth #signalgate #trumpAdministrationSecurityStrategy
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Lazy Caturday Reads: Slow News Day–Just Kidding.
Good Afternoon!!
By Susan McLaughlin
I wonder if we will ever see another slow news day. Before Trump came on the political scene, I can recall days when I struggled to find interesting stories to post. It has been a decade now since that happened. Even when Biden was president, Trump managed to dominate the news. I’m just so sick and tired of him. But he will continue to be the top story even if Democrats take over the House and Senate next year. If that happens, he’ll be impeached and–I hope–prosecuted. If only he would just go away!
It’s the weekend, and the news is once again overwhelming. I’m going to begin with a couple of immigration stories from my home territory.
Sarah Betancourt at WGBH: Immigrants kept from Faneuil Hall citizenship ceremony as feds crackdown nationwide.
Becoming a U.S. citizen takes years and involves immigrants acquiring a green card, extensive interviews, background checks, classes and a citizenship test. The naturalization ceremony is the final step to the process, where the oath of allegiance and a citizenship certificate are granted.
Immigrants approved to be naturalized went to Faneuil Hall Thursday — known as the country’s cradle of liberty — for that long-awaited moment to pledge allegiance to the United States. But instead, as they lined up, some were told by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin.
The same situation is playing out at naturalization events across the country as USCIS directed its employees to halt adjudicating all immigration pathways for people from 19 countries deemed to be “high risk”.
“One of our clients said that she had gone to her oath ceremony because she hadn’t received the cancellation notice in time,” said Gail Breslow, executive director of Project Citizenship. “She showed up as scheduled, and when she arrived, officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled.”
That client, a Haitian woman in her 50s, has had a green card since the early 2000s and started working with Project Citizenship in January. She declined an interview request through Breslow.
“People are devastated and they’re frightened,” Breslow told GBH News. “People were plucked out of line. They didn’t cancel the whole ceremony.”
She said many clients with upcoming ceremonies and USCIS appointments have received cancellations via an online portal. She shared an example of the notices they’re receiving, which provide no further guidance or instructions.
“One person was, you know, asking … what did I do wrong? Why is this happening to me? And, you know, needed to be reassured that it wasn’t anything she had done. This wasn’t her fault,” Breslow said.
Read more at the link. This is so heartbreaking. Trump is destroying our country’s image around the world. I doubt if we can recover from his destruction in my lifetime.
Man and Cat by Stu Morris 2020
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the arrest of the mother of White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt’s nephew. Her name is Bruna Caroline Ferreira, and she is still in ICE custody in Louisiana.
Here’s an update on this story published at WBUR on Thursday: Brother of White House press secretary Leavitt had contentious custody battle with ex, now in ICE custody.
PLAISTOW, N.H. — In this rural town just across the Massachusetts line, the Leavitt family runs a used-car dealership, with hulking work trucks lined up in the front lot. Inside the lobby, a giant TV blares Fox News, and a framed photo features President Donald Trump, posing with owners Bob and Erin Leavitt.
A New Hampshire family once best known for selling cars and ice cream, the Leavitts were thrust into the national spotlight this year when their 27-year-old daughter, Karoline, was named White House press secretary. Ten months later, the administration’s war on illegal immigration landed in the Leavitts’ backyard.
Bruna Ferreira — a Brazilian immigrant who shares an 11-year-old child with Karoline’s brother Michael Leavitt — was arrested by ICE in mid-November. Ferreira, 33, remains in custody in Louisiana. The boy lives with his father in New Hampshire.
Ferreira’s sister and lawyer had claimed there was no animosity between Ferreira and the Leavitts. But court records, police reports and family text chains reviewed by WBUR tell a vastly different story — one of a bitter custody battle, years-old allegations of a threat to call immigration authorities, and concerns for the well-being of the child when his mother was staying in a vacant mansion in Cohasset.
The arrest, first reported by WBUR, has sparked questions about whether the Leavitts used their inroads to the White House to put ICE onto Ferreira’s trail. Karoline Leavitt has denied any involvement in the arrest. And Michael Leavitt, 35, told WBUR on Thursday that neither he nor anyone else in his family called ICE on the mother of his son: “Absolutely not,” he said in a text response to questions.
ICE accused Ferreira of overstaying a visa that ran out in 1999 and of a battery arrest. Ferreira’s lawyer has said he’s unaware of crimes on her record. He said she’d been unable to renew the legal status she had under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Leavitt’s brother was asked about this.
Asked whether Karoline Leavitt would do anything to help Ferreira get released, Michael Leavitt told WBUR, “I would never ask my sister to abuse her government position to help anyone, including me — nor would I ever assume she would do so.”
Instead, Leavitt said, he and his father urged Ferreira’s sister to get her to self-deport. Leavitt said by agreeing to be deported — rather than being forced to leave through the removal process — she could one day return to the U.S.
The sister, Graziela Dos Santos Rodrigues, said she called Karoline Leavitt after the arrest. She still hasn’t heard back.
There quite a bit of interesting detail in the story about the relationship between Leavitt’s brother and his ex-wife. Among other things, Ferreira claims that Leavitt owes $70,000 in child support. I would not be at all surprised if Ferreira was specifically targeted by the White House.
Prisac Nicholai, Self, Portrait with My Cat
It’s beginning to look like Pete Hegseth may be in trouble following the uproar about the double strike on a “drug” boat in September, reported by The Washington Post and the recent report on “Signalgate,” the scandal about Hegseth using Signal to discuss top secret information.
Joseph Gedeon at The Guardian: Pressure grows on ‘reckless’ Hegseth as twin scandals engulf Pentagon chief.
Pete Hegseth is facing the most serious crisis of his tenure as defense secretary, engulfed by allegations of war crimes in the Caribbean and a blistering inspector general report accusing him of mishandling classified military intelligence. Yet despite the long list of trouble and as lawmakers from both parties call for his resignation, Hegseth shows no signs of stepping down and still holds Donald Trump’s support.
The twin crises have engulfed the former Fox News personality in separate but overlapping allegations that lawmakers, policy experts and former officials say reveal a pattern of dangerous recklessness at the helm of the Pentagon. Democratic legislators have reignited calls for his ouster after revelations that survivors clinging to wreckage from a September boat strike were deliberately killed in a “double-tap” attack, while a defense department investigation released on Thursday concluded he violated Pentagon policies by sharing sensitive details via the Signal messaging app hours before airstrikes in Yemen.
The most recent controversy comes as the Caribbean campaign centers on the Trump administration’s extrajudicial strikes against suspected drug smugglers, which have killed at least 87 people across 22 attacks since September. Trump has justified the operation as essential to combating fentanyl trafficking, claiming each destroyed vessel saves 25,000 American lives, though factcheckers, former officials and drug policy experts have called this figure absurd, noting that fentanyl primarily enters the United States overland from Mexico, not via Caribbean boats from Venezuela.
The legality of the strikes came under intense scrutiny after the public learned that two men who survived the initial 2 September attack could been seen amid the wreckage when a lethal follow-up strike was ordered. While Hegseth initially dismissed the reporting as fabricated, he later confirmed the basic facts during a cabinet meeting this week, saying he acted in the “fog of war” but “didn’t stick around” to observe the rest of the mission.
Senator Patty Murray, the Democratic vice-chair of the Senate appropriations committee, called for Hegseth’s firing following a bipartisan briefing on the incident on Thursday. “Between overseeing this campaign in the Caribbean, risking US servicemembers’ lives by sharing war plans on Signal, and so much else, it could not be more obvious that Secretary Hegseth is unfit for the role, and it is past time for him to go,” Murray said.
Hegseth is an incompetent moron, but so are all of Trump’s other cabinet members.
Garrett Owen at Salon: “It’s bad”: Lawmakers shocked at video of strike on survivors of alleged drug boat.
Video footage of a highly controversial second strike on an alleged drug boat in September was shown to lawmakers in Washington, shocking and disgusting some, while others defended the decision to target survivors.
Members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate and House Armed Services committees viewed the footage in a closed-door meeting with military brass involved in the strikes. The video showed a suspected drug boat operating in the Caribbean, being struck, and then being struck again as two survivors appeared to cling to wreckage.
“This is a big, big problem, and we need a full investigation,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., told The New Republic in an interview. Smith, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, was told that the survivors were “capable of returning to the fight.” He disagrees, though he contends that the boats may have been transporting drugs.
“It looks like two classically shipwrecked people,” Smith said, calling it a “highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight.”
Fellow lawmakers Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., were appalled by the footage. Himes called it “one of the most troubling scenes I’ve ever seen in my time in public service.” Reed said he was “deeply disturbed” by the video.
“The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage of the September 2 strike, as the President has agreed to do,” Reed said.
Some Republican tried to defend the strikes.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. called the second strike “righteous” and “highly lawful and lethal.” Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., said the strikes were carried out in a “highly professional manner.”
I guess we’ll find out, since Trump has said he would release the complete film of the attacks.
Cats Painting, by Fred Bell
If you’re interested in a deep dive about Hegseth’s situation, here’s a gift link to a piece at the Atlantic by Missy Ryan, Nancy A. Youssef, Sarah Fitzpatrick, and Jonathan Lemire: Pete Hegseth Is Seriously Testing Trump’s ‘No Scalps’ Rule.
The suspected drug traffickers, the lone survivors of a U.S. airstrike, were sprawled on a table-size piece of floating wreckage in the Caribbean for more than 40 minutes. They were unarmed, incommunicado, and adrift as they repeatedly attempted to right what remained of their boat. At one point, the men raised their arms and seemed to signal to the U.S. aircraft above, a gesture some who watched a video of the incident interpreted as a sign of surrender. Then a second explosion finished the men off, leaving only a bloody stain on the surface of the sea. Footage of the two men’s desperate final moments made some viewers nauseated, leading one to nearly vomit. “It was worse than we had been led to believe,” one person told us.
The video was part of a briefing that Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, gave lawmakers yesterday about the September 2 attack. Bradley told legislators that, after consulting military lawyers, he authorized the follow-on strike, judging that the men still posed a threat because of what they could have done: radioed for help or been picked up with what remained of their cargo of suspected cocaine. The video suggested they didn’t actually do any of that, but Bradley defended his decisions in the first episode of the Trump administration’s newly militarized counternarcotics campaign.
Republicans and Democrats who watched the grainy footage drew different conclusions about whether Bradley’s actions were justified. But many also sounded exasperated that once again they were dealing with controversy sparked by Bradley’s boss, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. And after 10 months of turbulence under Hegseth’s leadership, the Republican-led Congress is now showing signs of exercising its oversight powers.
Read the whole thing at The Atlantic.
Andrew Solender at Axios: Scoop: Democrats call Trump’s bluff on releasing boat strike video.
Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee are pressing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to release video of U.S. military strikes on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat that have inflamed tensions on Capitol Hill.
Why it matters: The lawmakers are seizing on to President Trump’s own comments this week that he would have “no problem” releasing the footage to the public.
“We look forward to your prompt response and release of this footage to the public, as has already been promised by President Trump,” the lawmakers, led by Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) wrote in a letter to Hegseth that was obtained by Axios.
“The American people deserve transparency on these attacks,” they wrote, “it is your obligation to release the footage.” [….]
What they’re saying: “We write to request that you release all audio and video footage from the kinetic strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean on September 2, 2025, including the follow-on strikes,” the Democrats wrote in their letter.
“Our concern stems from reports that you, as Secretary of Defense, issued an order to ‘kill everybody,’ followed by additional strikes seeking to kill the two remaining unarmed, shipwrecked individuals.”
The letter was signed by 19 of the 27 Democrats on the Armed Services Committee. Ryan’s office told Axios they reached out to Republicans as well, but none signed.
Yesterday, Dakinikat posted an article from The Economist about the Trump administration’s newly announced “security strategy” which denigrates Europe and praises Russia.
Here’s another analysis of the “strategy” by Anton Troianovski at The New York Times (gift link): Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy.
Latin American countries must grant no-bid contracts to U.S. companies. Taiwan’s significance boils down to semiconductors and shipping lanes. Washington’s “hectoring” of the wealthy Gulf monarchies needs to stop.
The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its vast powers to make money.
Михалыч и Васильич», 2023
President Trump has shown all year that his second term would make it a priority to squeeze less powerful countries to benefit American companies. But late Thursday, his administration made that profit-driven approach a core element of its official foreign policy, publishing its long-anticipated update to U.S. national security aims around the world.
The document, known as the National Security Strategy, describes a world in which American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations — even in Mr. Trump’s first term — had portrayed them. Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash.
“We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world,” it says, “without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”
The National Security Strategy of Mr. Trump’s first term, by contrast, cast the world as a contest “between those who favor repressive systems and those who favor free societies.”
The National Security Strategy has no binding force, and some analysts cautioned against reading too much into it as a guide to future actions given Mr. Trump’s mercurial nature.
But the release of the strategy, which recent presidents have generally updated just once in every term, did carry significance as a snapshot in time. Amid the debates swirling among Republicans over American policy toward the Middle East, Russia, China and elsewhere, the document showed how the administration has appeared to coalesce around a commitment to avoid military entanglements and promote commerce.
In an interview, Dan Caldwell, a former senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who argues in favor of American military restraint, hailed the new strategy as a “true break from the failed bipartisan post-Cold War foreign policy consensus.”
Personally, I don’t see that as a good thing. Use the gift link to read more.
I wonder if Donald Trump has ever been in a grocery store. I really doubt it. He doesn’t seem to understand the lives of ordinary Americans at all. He has no concept of what it’s like to worry about having enough money to pay the bills or to put food on the table. Someone else handles all those things for him. And frankly, he couldn’t care less if children are starving and families can’t pay the rent or mortgage. The only reason he has to care at all is because those people can vote. Right now, he’s making it clear he doesn’t give a shit.
Naftali Bendavid at The Washington Post: Trump struggles to persuade Americans to ignore affordability issues.
President Donald Trump has said drug prices are falling by as much as 1,500 percent, a mathematical impossibility. He has declared himself “the affordability president,” while dismissing the affordability issue as “a con job by the Democrats.”
Trump also vows that good times are coming. He has predicted that gas prices, which now hover around $3 a gallon, will plummet to $2. He has promised Americans $2,000 refund checks from the revenue raised by tariffs. He has suggested that “in the not-too-distant future,” no one will have to pay income tax.
This flurry of sometimes extravagant claims comes amid a growing Republican fear, fueled by recent election results, that high prices could set the stage for a Democratic sweep in next year’s midterms. So far, there is little evidence that Trump’s urgent attempt to shift the economic storyline is working.
By Sergey Levin
“Any Republican who refuses to admit we have an affordability problem is not listening to the American people,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) said. “It’s real because the American people think it’s real. I cannot overstate that — in a free country it’s the people who define what is real, not the politicians.” [….]
Trump’s plight is a striking turnabout. In last year’s campaign, Trump scored political points by highlighting Americans’ inflation concerns, and President Joe Biden faced the almost impossible task of convincing voters they were not as bad off as they thought.
Strategists of both parties note that Trump — who has often seemed to defy the laws of politics — is struggling with the affordability issue as he has with few others. The president shrugged off criticism after he accepted a luxury plane from a foreign country, pardoned unsavory figures and demolished a third of the White House, for example — episodes that might be devastating to another politician.
This seems different. Alarm bells have gone off for Republicans since Democrats swept last month’s off-year elections, then performed better than usual in Tuesday’s House race in a bright-red Tennessee district. A Democrat could capture the Miami mayor’s office next Tuesday in heavily Republican Florida.
“He often exists in an alternative reality that many of his followers are happy to follow him into, but the affordability issue is kryptonite for him, because even his most devoted followers know which way is up when it comes to prices,” said Jared Bernstein, who chaired Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers. “He may be able to convince people of his alternative vision in lots of different areas, but not this one.”
Economic issues are going to kill the Republicans in 2026 if Trump continues to live in a fantasy world.
NBC News: ‘People aren’t dumb’: Republicans worry they’re not doing enough on affordability.
Congressional Republicans are starting to publicly and privately sound the alarm about their party’s disjointed strategy to address Americans’ affordability concerns, with some growing increasingly frustrated with President Donald Trump’s sometimes cavalier attitude toward the subject.
While Republicans say the high cost of living is a problem they inherited from President Joe Biden, many GOP lawmakers still think their party needs to sharpen its own message and platform ahead of the midterms — or else it could cost them their tenuous majorities in Congress.
“If we don’t do that, we would be morons, because the economy is very much on people’s minds,” Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican, told NBC News. Democrats “failed to really hammer the economy, and it cost them the election,” he added. “If we as Republicans fail to do the same, it wouldn’t surprise me if we had a similar turnout.”
Nearly two dozen Republican senators, House members, strategists and congressional aides shared their concerns about their party’s handling of affordability in interviews with NBC News. Another six acknowledged the issue but said the party will settle on the right strategy to address it.
Their comments come after Democrats have secured wins in many of this year’s elections, with voters citing economic concerns, and as Trump has dismissed the issue as a Democratic “hoax,” rhetoric that has privately frustrated some Republicans.
Read the rest at NBC News.
Those are the stories that captured my interest today. What’s on your mind?
#affordabilityCrisis #boatStrikes #brunaCarolineFerreira #donaldTrump #immigrants #karolineLeavitt #naturalization #peteHegseth #signalgate #trumpAdministrationSecurityStrategy
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🚨Breaking news: Ruby on Rails is still open-source and still has code! 🎉 After an epic audit saga fueled by acronyms and jargon, we're told Rails is now secure enough to not implode when you blink at it. Thanks, Sovereign Tech Agency and X41Dsec, for ensuring our web frameworks can continue to power cat photo apps without risking world peace. 🐱💻
https://ostif.org/ruby-on-rails-audit-complete/ #RubyOnRails #OpenSource #WebDevelopment #SecurityAudit #CatPhotoApps #HackerNews #ngated -
🚨Breaking news: Ruby on Rails is still open-source and still has code! 🎉 After an epic audit saga fueled by acronyms and jargon, we're told Rails is now secure enough to not implode when you blink at it. Thanks, Sovereign Tech Agency and X41Dsec, for ensuring our web frameworks can continue to power cat photo apps without risking world peace. 🐱💻
https://ostif.org/ruby-on-rails-audit-complete/ #RubyOnRails #OpenSource #WebDevelopment #SecurityAudit #CatPhotoApps #HackerNews #ngated -
The news is out: Cashmere Cat has left his mark on Lil Uzi Vert’s latest album, Eternal Atake 2. Known for his unique production style, Cashmere Cat produced 11 of the 16 tracks, including “We Good,” “Meteor Man,” and “The Rush.”
https://retroworldnews.com/cashmere-cat-brings-fresh-sound-to-lil-uzi-verts-eternal-atake-2/#CashmereCat #LilUziVert #EternalAtake2 #FreshSound #MusicCollaboration #HipHop #NewMusic #InnovativeSound #MusicProduction #ArtistSpotlight #SoundEvolution #TrapMusic #MusicIndustry #CreativeVibes #GenreBlending #MusicInnovation #music
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🌳BREAKING NEWS: Trees don't hibernate! 🌱 A "groundbreaking" study discovered that roots stay awake in the winter...who knew? 🙄 Next up, scientists confirm water is wet! 💦
https://www.creaf.cat/en/articules/deciduous-trees-roots-remain-active-winter #GroundbreakingStudy #WinterRoots #NatureNews #ScienceHumor #HackerNews #ngated -
Week 16-26 – Curiosities
Garden and cat updates. Links to open source, cool art, blog, RA resource, and worldwide free libraries map. #blog #curiousities #weeklynewsletter #weblog #newsletter
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Sacred tomes, curses, and research librarians in “Libra of Nil Admirari”
The library is introduced in the show’s second episodeHappy United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities! When I started watching Libra of Nil Admirari (also known as Nil Admirari no Tenbin), I had a sense that libraries would be a part of the story. Reading that the story was about a group of people who try and track down cursed books reminded me of R.O.D. the TV, and even Library War a bit. This series is a dark fantasy and a reverse harem. While I’m not, necessarily, a fan of the latter genre, the former was much more intriguing. So, let me get started! As a warning, there will be description of attempted suicide in this article.
The first episode hits like a freight train. Protagonist Tsugumi Kuze (voiced by Juri Kimura) watches her brother, Hitaki Kuze (voiced by Ayumu Murase) try to kill himself by self-immolation. Horrified, she blamed herself, but later learns that a cursed book, written in Japanese handwriting, named a maremono is responsible. She joins the Imperial Library Information Assets Management Bureau (also known as Fukurou), willing to use her ability to “see” the tomes, which she gained following a traumatic experience (her brother’s attempted suicide). In the next episode, she becomes more familiar with the bureau, which has a compound similar, in some ways, to the situation of the Library Defense Force in Library War. She does wear a strange uniform with a cut-out for her breasts, an unnecessary form of fan service which could have easily been avoided in this series, as could the fact that her work uniform has a relatively short skirt.
Within this compound is a room with cursed tomes, guided around by Hayato Ozaki (voiced by Yuuki Kaji), a member of Fukurou who tried to recruit her in the first episode. She meets Yutaka Nabari (voiced by Hikaru Midorikawa), who can also see auras of books, like her, and is researching cursed tomes. Later, Shiori Tokimiya (voiced by Rio Natsuki) shows Tsugami around the Fukurou building, walking through a secret passage to the research division, headed by Motofumi Mashiko (voiced by Kazuyuki Okitsu), who is wearing a mask and has a toucan on his shoulder. A small library room is shown at first, but this is only the beginning. Motofumi is said to be well-versed in many fields, like ornithology and folklore. From there, she goes into a huge room described as the only national library in the country, and there are at least ten library assistants, carrying books. [1] It is noted that Fukurou was originally a department for managing “precious books” and they are still diligently performing this goal. He welcomes Tsugami with open arms and she is grateful for that.
The claim that this is the “only” national library in Japan is accurate! The National Diet Library of Japan was not established until 1948, even though Japan had its first public library in 1872, following introduction of Western culture to the island, and the Japan Library Association (JLA) was founded in 1892 to “promote library services and librarianship in Japan,” with a first All Japan Library Conference held in 1906. [2] There’s more context, that should be established. This series is set in an alternative universe in which the Taisho era of Japan is still ongoing, in 1936. This is a period of Japanese history, from 1912 to 1926, in which there was a liberal movement with growth of power among democratic parties and away from elder politicians. It is also the period Japan developed its first aircraft carrier, and emerged from World War I as a “major industrial nation”. [3]
Although the later part of the episode, where Tsugami goes on patrol with Osaki, Kōgami, and Hisui Hoshikawa, going to bookstores and other shops, looking for cursed books, is not directly about libraries, it is related nonetheless. I haven’t played the otome visual novel video game, Nil Admirari no Tenbin: Teito Genwaku Kitan (written by Yuma Katagiri), that this series is based on, or the manga, written by Shō Yuzuki, but I’d imagine it probably has similar themes. The director of this anime, Masahiro Takata, is well-known for many other productions, including as an episode director of My Roommate is a Cat! Despite mixed reviews from Anime News Network writers, apart from Rebecca Silverman (who was more positive), [4] I decided to keep watching, and expected there would be more library scenes.
Tsugami opposes book burning in the third episode, saying what we can/should all agree with.Clearly, Motofumi Mashiko and the other unnamed assistant librarians, are all research librarians, as they are researching these tomes, and storing them in a huge space. While undoubtedly librarians instruct, research, connect people to technology, manage social media, build websites, and digitize archives. Research librarians specifically analyze information requests to “determine which materials will best meet that researcher’s needs”. In some sense, the library in this series is a research library, as it has an in-depth collection, even though it doesn’t have a large volume of peer-reviewed work, and other works. More accurately, it is a special library, in that it is serving a particular population and is dedicated to a certain collection. [5]
By the third episode, Tsugami sees a book burning. In the process, she meets Sagisawa Rui, a doctor-in-training. While she calls herself “Kuze” here, I am calling her Tsugami in this article to distinguish from her brother. Later, they have a debriefing with Shiori Tokimiya, where it is revealed that a group called “Kagutsuchi” is stealing people’s books and burning them, in a number of recent incidents. Other members explain that the public burn cursed tomes because they are afraid of them and see them as dangerous. Tsugami later meets with Sagisawa. A man holding a cursed tome later dies on the train tracks, horrifying them all, and it is guessed that someone is purposely creating cursed tomes. Later, she tells Sagisawa that burning potentially dangerous books is wrong, which is a sentiment we can all agree with. At the end of the episode, she raids a building, with the help of her fellow agents, where the Kagutsuchi are holed up, and trying to burn books.
Tsugami meets the pompous son of the Prime Minister, Ukai, who also attempted society. However, she sympathizes, as he tried to kill himself, but she struggles with this, because he is so arrogant… She later learns that a legislator jumped from a building, and died, with a tome in one hand. She is informed she can’t do anything, even though people are dying, and is told this is why they are investigating every day and getting information from the press. She later tells Ukai that the job gives her freedom and that she enjoys it, says that communal living is fun, and hopes to get along better with him. He agrees to take her to a ball so they can learn about possible individuals involved in the book burning. She reports back what she saw. Later, Ukai realizes he was wrong about her and endeavors to become better friends with her. At the end of the episode, a woman is shown dead, with a tome, a romantic novel, nearby.
While I could go further, I decided to stop watching this series at this point, as it wasn’t to my fancy, and because I’ve already noted the existing library themes here.
© 2023-2025 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.
Notes
[1] Motofumi is the only character who speaks, as the others are only as background characters.
[2] “Brief Information on Libraries in Japan,” Japan Library Association, accessed Jul. 18, 2023; “History,” National Diet Library, Japan, accessed Jul. 18, 2023;
[3] Hoffman, Michael. “The Taisho Era: When modernity ruled Japan’s masses,” Japan Times, Jul. 29, 2012; Hoffman, Michael. “‘Taisho Democracy’ pays the ultimate price,” Japan Times, Jul. 29, 2012; “IJN Imperial Japanese Navy / ( Nihon Kaigun ),” globalsecurity.org, accessed Jul. 18, 2023; Japan: a country study (Washington, D.C., Library of Congress Federal Research Division, ed. Ronald E. Dolan and Ronald L. Warden: 1990), xviii, 46, 49-53. The Library of Congress country study says there were two other periods of history: Showa from 1926 to 1989 and Hensai from 1989 to present. The latter era actually ended in 2019, and replaced by the Reiwa era, which is currently ongoing.
[4] Jensen, Paul; Theron Martin; Nick Creamer; Rebecca Silverman, “The Spring 2018 Anime Preview Guide: Libra of Nil Admirari,” Anime News Network, Apr. 8, 2018; Silverman, Rebecca. “Libra of Nil Admirari Episodes 1-12 streaming Review,” Anime News Network, Jun. 28, 2018.
[5] “Become a Librarian,” American Library Association, accessed Jul. 18, 2023; Matthews, Rose. “Research Librarian Job Description,” Chron.com, accessed Jul. 18, 2023; “What is a Research Library?,” Linda Hall Library, accessed Jul. 18, 2023; “What is Research Library,” IGI Global, accessed Jul. 18, 2023; “research library,” dictionary.com, accessed Jul. 18, 2023; “Special Libraries,” American Library Association, accessed Jul. 18, 2023.
#abandonedSeries #AnimeNewsNetwork #bookBurning #fanService #history #Japan #JapaneseLibrarians #LibraOfNilAdmirari #LibraryWar #MyRoommateIsACat #RODTheTV #rareBooks #referenceLibrarians #research
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Top of the Lake Snowmobile Museum: Naubinway, Michigan
The Top of the Lake Snowmobile Museum is situated in the village of Naubinway, the northernmost community on the Upper Peninsula’s Lake Michigan shoreline. With an active snowmobiling community and close to 200 snowmobiles on display, it’s a great year-round attraction for travelers.
What’s in the Top of the Lake Snowmobile Museum?
The Top of the Lake Snowmobile Museum has a collection of around 200 machines. Time-wise, the collection spans the period from the first car-track conversion snow machines of the early 1900s, through to the early 2000s. But that’s not all!
The museum’s collection also includes lots of memorabilia, gear, signs, owners manuals, and more.
One of the great things about this snowmobile museum attraction is the signage.
Snowmobiles in the Top of the Lake Snowmobile Museum in Naubinway, Michigan. Photo by Linda Aksomitis.There’s lots of information on the history of the brands and the specific sleds on the floor. The volunteers who’ve put this together have shared magazine and newspaper clippings, details on ownership where available, and historical insights.
There are, of course, a number of sleds from the history of today’s brands: Ski-Doo, Arctic Cat, Polaris, and Yamaha, in the collection. However, they’ve also got lots of snow machines manufactured by companies that have long since hung up their skis.
Some of them include:
- Home made snow machines like the 1936 Westendorf built by local machinist, Fred Westendorf, to go ice fishing
- 1969 Snow Ghia first produced by Ghia Industries, Torino, Italy, with a move to US New Jersey Headquarters in 1968, with a low profile for better vision and tracking
- 1969 Wheel Horse from the Wheel Horse, Inc. company in South Bend, Indiana, which offered riders the choice of an electric start or dash mounted recoil
- 1971 Big Boss manufactured in Ovid, MI, for the 1970-71 season, however 20 were built but only 8 sold, and the rest destroyed as part of bankruptcy proceedings
- 1973 Polar Bear, originally produced one machine at a time and only sold in Connecticut
Linda’s Pick of the Displays
Of course, I’ve been snowmobiling for … well not quite since the beginning of the industry, but close, so I have a lot of favorites. However, my pick here was the 1968 Sno-Bunny manufactured by the Jac-Trac Company of Marshfield, WI, for distribution through the midwest and by J.C. Penney.
Sno Bunny snowmobile and accessories. Photo by Linda Aksomitis.I love the name — snobunny or snow bunny. The history of the term goes back to the 1950s as a slang term for a novice skier or snowmobiler (usually female). Also, of course, it’s been a slang word used to describe an attractive woman since the 1700s.
While I don’t know how much weight the manufacturer meant to put into the name it picked, advertisements of the time did describe it as one of the lightest, quickest machines on the market. And that’s exactly what we ladies wanted!
Linda’s Road Trip Tips
Most of this trip we spent on U.S. Route #2, which goes from coast to coast just below the Canadian border. So, we headed to Escanaba, a port city on Lake Michigan around 100 miles away from Naubinway.
We stayed at the Hiawatha Motel, which provided a comfortable night for a good price. Our favorite part of Escanaba, however, was Hudson’s Classic Grill where we went for dinner. I especially enjoyed the pumpkin pie and whipped cream!
Pin me!Who Should Visit the Top of the Lake Snowmobile Museum?
The Top of the Lake Snowmobile Museum is a must see for anyone interested in winter sports, especially its history. Many of the snowmobiles in the museum were mainly used in Michigan’s UP and down the east coast, so for westerners, there are lots of different models to check out.
The museum is open year round, so you can get your “snowmobile fix” in August if you like, as we did!
How Long Does It Take To Visit The Museum?
Going through the museum can take half a day if you’re reading all the information cards! It’s also a fun way to introduce young snowmobilers or non-snowmobilers to the sport, so is great for all ages.
How Do You Visit the Top of the Lake Snowmobile Museum?
Pin me!The Top of the Lake Snowmobile Museum is located at W11660 US-2 Naubinway, Michigan.
Visit the museum at its website for a virtual tour, admission costs, and upcoming snowmobile events:
Follow the Top of the Lake Snowmobile Museum Facebook page to keep up to date on all the happenings.
Take a virtual tour with YouTube and the excellent video, Tour a collection of RARE and Vintage Snowmobiles with an Expert Guide.
Plan your visit with Google Maps!
Discover More Snowmobile Museums
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Vilas Historical Museum: Snowmobiles to Paul Bunyan in a Wisconsin Museum
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World Snowmobile Headquarters Museum: Eagle River, Wisconsin
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Polaris Experience Center: Polaris Snowmobile Museum in Roseau, Minnesota
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Museum of Ingenuity: Ski-Doo Snowmobile Museum in Valcourt, Quebec
#2 #history #Michigan #museums #snowmobiles #travel #US #US2
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OP_CAT Proposal to Bring Smart Contracts to Bitcoin Finally Gets a 'BIP Number' - - https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/04/24/op-cat-proposal-to-bring-smart-contracts-to-bitcoin-finally-gets-a-bip-number/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=rss&utm_campaign=headlines #bitcoinimprovementproposal #satoshinakamoto #smartcontracts #technology #bitcoin #news #bips
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🧵 (13/17)
🏴☠️ Gypsy Taylor
Some of Gypsy's work's being highlighted from The Newsreader Season 3!
(Source: https://www.instagram.com/stories/gypsytaylor)🏴☠️ Andrew DeYoung / Andy Rydzewski
One of our Directors, Andrew, and our cinematographers, Andy are on their way to SXSW (South By South West) Film and TV Festival for their film 'Friendship'! It's an official selection! Congrats you two!
(Source: https://www.instagram.com/stories/filmandy)🏴☠️ Damien Gerard
Our Father Teach, Damien, is blessing us with more and more cat content, Athena is such a work of art <3
(Source: https://bsky.app/profile/damientgerard.bsky.social/post/3lggjzqvtrc2x)#GypsyTaylor #TheNewsreader #AndrewDeYoung #AndyRydzewski #SXSW #DamienGerard #OFMDRecaps
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Playful Math 184: Carnival of Living Math
Welcome to the 184th edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival — a smorgasbord of delectable tidbits of mathy fun. It’s like a free online magazine devoted to learning, teaching, and playing around with math from preschool to high school.
With all the links, a blog carnival can feel overwhelming. Bookmark this article, so you can take your time reading the posts.
“Living math” means bringing our children face-to-face with the big ideas of mathematics to help them develop their reasoning skills. When the ideas of math come to life for our children, their minds delight in seeing how numbers and shapes connect to each other and exploring these relationships.
Scattered between the playful math links below, you’ll find quotations from my new book Charlotte Mason’s Living Math, along with several paintings of children playing and learning which I considered for the book but ran out of room.
“The lesson” by Rafael Frederico, 1895.By tradition, we start the carnival with a puzzle/activity in honor of our 184th edition. But if you’d rather jump straight to our featured blog posts, click here to see the Table of Contents.
Puzzle: Playing with Primes
Prussian mathematician Christian Goldbach, in correspondence with Swiss polymath Leonhard Euler, posed several ideas about number theory (the study of natural numbers) which he couldn’t prove. The version we know now as Goldbach’s Conjecture is:
Every even natural number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers.
Goldbach’s Conjecture is one of the oldest and best-known unsolved problems in math. It has been shown to hold for numbers less than 4 × 10^18, but remains unsettled for larger numbers.
Our carnival number can be written as the sum of primes in eight ways:
184 = 181 + 3
= 179 + 5
= 173 + 11
= 167 + 17
= 137 + 47
= 131 + 53
= 113 + 71
= 101 + 83184 can also be written as the sum of four consecutive prime numbers:
184 = 41 + 43 + 47 + 53
Play around with Goldbach’s Conjecture and prime numbers.
- What do you notice about sums of primes?
- What do you wonder?
- What other questions can you ask?
Did you know the prime numbers come in a pattern? While it can be hard to prove for sure which large numbers are prime, there are infinitely many numbers that we can be confident are not prime.
- List some large numbers that you know are not prime. How do you know?
- Fill in this worksheet and consider the patterns.
- Now can you list more large numbers that are not prime? Can you tell some that might be?
Contents
And now, on to the main attraction: the blog posts. Some articles were submitted by their authors; others were drawn from the immense backlog in my rss reader. If you’d like to skip directly to your area of interest, click one of these links.
- Talking Math with Kids
- Exploring Elementary Arithmetic
- Adventuring into Algebra and Geometry
- Scaling the Slopes of High School Math
- Enjoying Recreational Puzzles and Math Art
- Teaching with Wisdom and Grace
- Giving Credit Where It’s Due
Talking Math with Kids
“From their birth, children have minds just like ours, hungry for knowledge and able to digest solid mental food. They enter life full of wonder, questioning, investigating the world, reasoning, and drawing conclusions.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Dan Finkel invents Trifle — a new, very small game. “I invented a small game off the cuff last night. I needed a super quick game to play with my 6.5-year-old before bedtime.”
- Christopher Danielson shares the conversations that launched his yet-unpublished book: On vehicles and the meanings of words. “These questions are simple yet deep. They can inform our current conversations in which we seek to regain our understanding of truth, meaning, and empathy.”
- Digging through Christopher Danielson’s delightful archives, I find: A circular conversation, and Doll years, and Does the Earth have an end?. “If you are new to talking math with your kids, don’t worry about getting the timing right. Just start to make a habit of asking those questions. The first few times, you may not get much. That’s OK. It can be like introducing new foods — children need multiple exposures to new things before they accept them.”
- Tom Hobson tells how to build A State-of-the-Art Preschool Playground (for under $200) that will prompt all sorts of math (and other) talk. “As educational as these kinds of spaces are for children, these wonderlands of loose parts, dirt, rocks and compost, these bastions of junkyard chic, they are often perceived as eyesores by the uninitiated. Before going too far, you might want to save up to build a fence.”
- Writing is talking on paper. Dylan Kane tries Incorporating more writing in 7th grade math. “Slowing down and writing about a topic is a great way to think deeply about it, to make connections, to consider hypotheticals, to reason about cause and effect.”
- Jenna Laib gets 4th-graders writing math: How Many Nivelsnorts: Assessing Silly Story Problems. “Perhaps this speaks to who I was as a child, but there is a playfulness and a creativity to getting to write about nivelsnorts and flying tomatoes, and I don’t see a need to deny students that.”
- Karrie E. suggests 5 Easy Ways to Add Writing into Your Math Class. “The goal isn’t to create more work for your or your students. It’s to make thinking visible.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Exploring Elementary Arithmetic
“That he should do sums is of comparatively small importance; but the use of those functions which ‘summing’ calls into play is a great part of education.”
—Charlotte Mason
- Patrick Vennebush explores the Mathematical Mysteries of 2026. Meanwhile, Iva Sallay collects 2026 Math Facts and Factors, including a “powerful” math joke. You may also enjoy George Sicherman’s Roman New Year puzzle.
- Sarah Dees explains one of my favorite math games: How to Play Target Number. “This is a fabulous math game that works for third grade all the way up through 6th. You can choose the complexity of the game by choosing how many dice to use.”
- Erick Lee poses A Problem Worth Solving. “I liked this problem because there are so many different ways to approach it and so many interesting patterns to see while solving it.”
- Susan Smith and Kim Montague explore Factor Puzzles: Helping Math Make Sense. “That’s the challenge we pose to students: What do you notice about the puzzle you see? What relationships pop out to you?”
- Pat Ballew plays around with The 3×3 Magic Square, More Magical than You Thought! And Greg Ross shares a magic Venn diagram: Set Piece.
- For my contribution to the carnival, I finish up my series on mental math with Advanced Multiplication, Part 1, followed by Advanced Multiplication, Part 2, and then Advanced Division to wrap things up. “The more time our children spend playing around with numbers and making sense of these relationships, the better they’ll be prepared for algebra and beyond.”
- Jenna Laib shares important information: The 8 Fast Food Chains in the US Most Likely to Get Your Drive-Thru Order Right. And some good news: Extreme Poverty Fell Sharply Worldwide – Even Excluding China. Slow Reveal Graphs “invite learners to examine trends, relationships, and possible interpretations.”
- John Golden teaches Statistics and Probability for K-8 Teachers with some fun resources: Who Wins? “Lots of great discussion about variation, mean, median and their limitations.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Adventuring into Algebra and Geometry
“If students find our lessons boring, that is because we are not engaging their minds. Children learn by thinking, imagining, reflecting, reasoning, arguing, justifying, and communicating, putting their thoughts into words. Learning, like digestion, is active.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Iva Sallay graphs a Cat Rotating Around a Bouncing Ball. “This year, the 9th-graders I work with at school need to know how to rotate a shape around a point that is NOT the origin. This is a topic I had never thought about before. To patch up this hole in my math knowledge, I decided to play with rotations in Desmos.”
- Ramsha Waseem reports on 14-year-old Miles Wu’s origami invention. “I was really shocked by how much [weight] these simple pieces of paper could hold,” says Wu.
- Karen Latham offers suggestions for Making the Most of Probability. “I like to have students work several counting problems by hand, so they have experience simplifying expressions with factorials. Then they can move on and let the calculator do the work.”
- David Butler plays with a geometric puzzle: When perimeter is equal to area. “One answer I discovered to this question is completely surprising and delightful to me. You may want to attempt to prove it yourself before I show you my proof…”
- Andrew Staccy categorizes Catriona Agg’s Puzzles by Topic. “The various techniques are grouped into categories and ordered roughly by complexity. Puzzles may appear more than once as they can have multiple ways of being solved.”
- Pat Ballew takes a look at Heron and his Formula(s). “Heron is also remembered for his invention of a primitive steam engine and many early automatons, and a coin operated vending machine, and one of the earliest forerunners of the thermometer.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Scaling the Slopes of High School Math
“Never are the operations of Reason more delightful and more perfect than in mathematics. There is great joy in standing by, as it were, and watching our own thought work out an intricate problem.”
—Charlotte Mason
- Christopher Burke posts a series of Geometry Problems of the Day from the Regents Exam, with solutions. “This is a silly question because it’s obvious that both Choices (1) and (2) cannot both be true, so one of them must be the answer.”
- Oliver Johnson explores the probability that your shopping receipt ends in .00: Time’s Arrow. “This ‘everything has the same chance’ collection of probabilities is called the uniform distribution, and it’s really important. But what might be surprising is how easily we reach it, and how few items we need to pick up in a supermarket to make it appear.”
- Nicola Rennie discusses How to create a more accessible line chart. “It’s a myth that accessibility means compromising on aesthetics. Instead, accessibility means prioritising communication.”
- Sue VanHattum needs beta-readers for Althea and the Mysteries of Calculus, version 8.2. “I’m still finding places where I need to add a bit to make the math clearer. Adding a touch of color here, removing something out of place there. I feel like a sculptor or painter.”
- Erick Lee shares A Calculus Esti-Mystery. “Instead of using basic number properties for the clues, I leveled it up. To unlock the clues, my students had to evaluate derivatives.”
- And don’t miss the 249th Carnival of Mathematics.
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Enjoying Recreational Puzzles and Math Art
“We take strong ground when we appeal to the beauty and truth of Mathematics. Mathematics are to be studied for their own sake and not as they make for general intelligence and grasp of mind. But then how profoundly worthy are these subjects of study for their own sake!”
—Charlotte Mason
- David Butler (and daughter) explore a math/art puzzle: Jenga Views. “One thing I particularly like about them is that you don’t need an answer key, because you can just look at your construction and tell if it looks right or not. There’s something empowering about being able to check it yourself.”
- John Golden shares a couple of shape puzzles: Five by Five, and his variation on the theme: Seven by Seven. “Easier to solve, but more solutions. Better for free play. If you made something cool, tangram style, I would love to see it!”
- Rick Mohr welcomes us to a world of Tiled Art. “enjoy a gallery of artworks as each emerges from an underlying grid. And try creating your own tessellation, with the tiles staying interlocked automatically.”
- I post two excerpts from my new book, Charlotte Mason’s Living Math: Discover Math in Art, and the math equation journaling prompt True-False-True. “This puzzle pushes students to consider the structure of mathematical expressions. Make it a game by letting your children challenge you, too.”
- Andrew Taylor creates things with math. I’ve been enjoying his puzzle game Celtix. “Celtic knots are a rich tradition, but for the sake of reducing them to a game mechanic you can think of them as ribbons which ‘bounce’ off ‘walls’ which you can add by clicking anywhere that the ribbons cross each other.”
- Paula Beardell Krieg demonstrates how to make a Cube with an Open Pocket. You may also enjoy her Snow Day Octahedrons. “I’ve been at my desk, working on geometric solids, doing art and math together. I find focus and comfort here.”
- Jonathan Halabi plays with a couple of Birthday Puzzles. Greg Ross finds some harder Words and Numbers. And Pat Ballew digs deeper into Some History Notes about Alphametic Puzzles (and some early versions of a Topology Gem).
- Ben Orlin seeks play-testers: Puzzle Planet. “Your collective generosity and wisdom help me to clarify confusing bits, fine-tune difficulty levels, cull inferior puzzles, spotlight superior ones, and sprinkle play-testers’ insight and wit throughout the text.”
- Laura looks at the math of bell ringing: I can hear the bells. “Each bell ringer controls a huge bell, often on the order of a tonne in weight. One by one they ring their bells, then switch to a new permutation (a change) and repeat.”
- James Propp plays around with probability: In Praise of Stupid Questions. “The way to find things out is to ask a lot of questions. Ask enough questions, and you’re likely to find a new answer: new to you, and once in a while, new to others.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Teaching with Wisdom and Grace
“It can be exhausting to shovel information into our child’s head. We put out a lot of effort without much return, and daily lessons become a struggle of wills. But when we treat a child as a person capable of learning for himself and meet him mind-to-mind, with a focus on understanding big ideas, lessons become a delight.”
—Denise Gaskins
- Dan Finkel concludes that Manipulatives in Math Class Are So Worth It. “When it came to mathematizing — linking equations and the rods — the kids who had previous experience building and free playing with the rods made the connections far more readily. Playing with the rods seems to prime the mind to make connections.”
- JoAnne Growney wonders, Can Poems Affect Students’ Math-Attitudes? “One useful viewpoint is that math need not be treated as an isolated subject . . . it is connected to our lives in VERY MANY ways.”
- Growney also links to two contests your students still have time to enter: Creative Writing — Including Mathematics. For inspiration, consider her poem Like Poetry, Mathematics is Beautiful.
- Cathy Yenca details how to prepare The April Fool’s Day Math Activity Students Never Forget. “I decided I wanted to prank my students, but not the kind of prank that derails a lesson. I wanted something that would make students lean into the math instead of checking out.“
- Jenna Laib discusses Measuring Growth in Mathematical Reasoning: What Mia’s Thinking Reveals. “I confess: sometimes I find wrong answers more interesting than right ones. There can be so many ways to get something wrong!”
- Craig Barton creates interactive tools and games for teachers. “End of lesson treat or whiteboard activity for the whole class. Project a game and play together!”
- The Math is FigureOutAble team highlights Leonhard Euler: The Blind Mathematician Who Saw Everything. “Every student can learn to think like a mathematician. They can persist through challenges, adjust their thinking, and experience the satisfaction of figuring something out. They do not need perfect conditions or special talent. They need instruction that invites sense making and builds confidence over time.”
- David Butler shares More wisdom from the Dodecahedron about the humanity of doing math. “I find that maths is full of emotion. Frustration, curiosity, surprise, satisfaction, pride, sadness, companionship, wonder, silliness, joy — they’re all there, sometimes in quick succession.”
[Back to top.]
[Back to Table of Contents.]Giving Credit Where It’s Due
Quotations are from my new book Charlotte Mason’s Living Math. Public domain art is primarily from Wikimedia Commons.
And that rounds up this edition of the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival. I hope you enjoyed the ride.
The next installment of our carnival will open sometime during the 2nd quarter of 2026 at Nature Study Australia. Visit our blog carnival information page for more details.
“The Lesson” by Charles Chaplin, circa 1880. #Activities #AllAges #Games #MTaPPlayfulMathCarnival #Puzzles #Quotations -
This bizarre story reminds me of the time when my cat refused to go into the garden for several days. I couldn't work out why. Then I spotted that a balloon from a kid's birthday party down the street had floated off into my garden and lodged in the branches of a tree. Evidently the cat was scared of it. As soon as I removed the balloon, the cat resumed his visits to the garden.
#ChineseSpyBalloon #ScaredyCat
US shoots down suspected Chinese 'spy balloon'
https://www.rte.ie/news/us/2023/0204/1353736-china-balloon/ -
Dear Friends of the Good Life,
Due to circumstances beyond control:
1) Yesterday, today and tomorrow are all Birthdays. Celebrate.
2) Health cake is a type of brioche advocated by Marie 'The bread eater' Antoinette. Who fought for the right to be useless.
3) Gilty pleasures are not all gold, without glitter.
4) #Nature survives.
In other words.
"Morning has spoken and black birds are unbroken. Raise for the singing, Raise for the mourning. Raise for them springing fresh from the world". ~ Cat (meow meow) Stevens
Strangely enough I only have good news to share:New flutterbies in the garden. #Pathway and birds secured and bathing. Squirrel fed. New #flowerings and #growth. The #morning is now lit and ready to boing break fasted. I can hardly wait for another day. Catch ya later alligator. In a while crocodile.
Never underestimate an Inner Smile. A Happy. A #positive in the face of underwhelming odds.Yes Dear Friends. We are the #future. #Aliens? No. #Silent? No. Here to stray. You can count on it...
:agummyhug: ✅ 🎶
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https://www.europesays.com/ro/169768/ Cât de pregătită este România pentru o nouă criză mondială. „Va fi mult mai periculoasă decât cea din 2008” #AdrianNegrescu #analiza #BreakingNews #BreakingNews #CeleMaiPopulareSubiecte #consumul #CrizaFinanciara #deficit #FeaturedNews #FeaturedNews #Headlines #inflatia #Internațional #LatestNews #LatestNews #News #petrolul #RO #Română #Romania #Romanian #SilviuGresoi #Știri #Titluri #TopStories #TopStories #World #WorldNews #WorldNews
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https://www.europesays.com/ro/126024/ Evaziunea fiscală, nota plătită de contribuabilii onești. Unde sunt vulnerabilitățile și cât contează reducerea gap-ului de TVA #AdrianNegrescu #analiza #BreakingNews #BreakingNews #CeleMaiPopulareSubiecte #contrabanda #DeficitulBugetar #EvaziuneaFiscala #FeaturedNews #FeaturedNews #frames #Headlines #LatestNews #LatestNews #News #RO #Română #Romania #Romanian #SilviuGresoi #Știri #Titluri #TopStories #TopStories #tva
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https://www.europesays.com/ro/96870/ Primii români care „vor fi nevoiți să-și vândă casele” în 2027. Cât de mult ar putea crește impozitele, la anul #AdrianNegrescu #bani #BreakingNews #BreakingNews #CeleMaiPopulareSubiecte #FeaturedNews #FeaturedNews #Headlines #imobiliare #LatestNews #LatestNews #News #RO #Română #Romania #Romanian #Știri #TaxeSiImpozite #Titluri #TopStories #TopStories
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https://www.europesays.com/ro/96180/ Funcţionarii în primărie calculează impozitul auto cu pixul. Cât plătești în funcție de motor • Newsweek România #AdrianNegrescu #BreakingNews #BreakingNews #calcule #CeleMaiPopulareSubiecte #Dig24H #DITL #eveniment #FeaturedNews #FeaturedNews #GabrielBiris #Headlines #LatestNews #LatestNews #News #pix #RO #Română #Romania #Romanian #SistemeInformatice #Știri #TaxaAuto #Titluri #TopStories #TopStories
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https://www.europesays.com/ro/87243/ Impozit cât două salarii medii pentru un apartament minuscul. Explicațiile unui specialist #AdrianNegrescu #apartament #BreakingNews #BreakingNews #CeleMaiPopulareSubiecte #FeaturedNews #FeaturedNews #Headlines #impozit #LatestNews #LatestNews #locuinta #News #RO #Română #Romania #Romanian #Știri #Titluri #TopStories #TopStories
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DNA in the feces of snow leopards shows alpine #cats eat plants https://phys.org/news/2024-06-dna-feces-leopards-alpine-cats.html
Metabarcoding analysis provides insight into the link between prey and plant intake in a large alpine cat carnivore, the snow leopard https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.240132
"#felids do eat #plants despite their classification as #carnivores. In particular, Panthera uncia—or snow #leopards—seem to have a preference for a specific plant... The plant genus #Myricaria appeared the most frequently"
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Australian-born MP at centre of 'palace coup' plot to knife British PM
By Riley StuartUp until the past few days, Catherine West kept a low profile, as far as politicians go. Most Brits would never have come across the Australian-born, London-based MP before, but that all changed at the weekend.
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“The desperation is real. The next fake elector coup is coming.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
It was inevitable that the incredible crowds that the Harris/Walz appearances have been attracting would eventually impact Donald’s psyche. One of the first signs was the amount of disinformation being packaged by right-wing sites and news. The KKKult is falling for it. I even had to fact-check someone myself. I’ve never seen a group of more gullible people in my life. They’re even rehashing some of the crap they tried to pass in 2020. We’ve also seen poorly photoshopped pictures of crowds in Trump’s appearance, where the same obvious guys appear in four different stadium sections. We’ve now advanced to AI conspiracies.
Marcy at emptywheel has a delightful account of this current bout of fake crowds. It’s filled with pictures and videos of the size issue. “In Which Ian Miles Cheong Understands Trump’s Campaign Better than NYT. The second I saw video of Vice President Harris rolling up to a hangar at Detroit’s airport on Air Force Two, then alighting with Tim Walz in front of cheering crowds, I knew it would break Donald Trump’s brain.” Indeed.
This is the kind of spectacle Donald Trump excels at creating.
This is the kind of spectacle on which Trump has built slavering loyalty from millions of MAGAts who see power in such spectacle.
And a Black woman created it.
Or rather, a Black woman and her campaign team, a campaign team which has already demonstrated they know exactly how to trigger Donald Trump, created it.
And sure enough, it did melt his brain.
Yesterday, he adopted the hysterical claims of some of his followers, posting that Vice President Harris was cheating because (he falsely claimed) she had used AI to sub in a crowd of people who weren’t there.
After these many years of dealing with this emotionally disturbed man with his plethora of Personality Disorders, we know his defense is projection. I know you are, but what am I! Donald has crowd-size envy, so it has to be resolved by calling it fake photos, fake videos, and fake reporting! Marcy brings the tape and photos to show how deluded he is. So deluded that even social media right-wing troll Malaysian Ian Miles Cheong. This guy jumps for red meat but can’t even with the entire AI crowd thing. Marcie continues with this. Wait for it. She mercilessly goes straight from the well-known troll to WAPO and NYT.
And Cheong is not the only right wing troll complaining that Trump is hurting the movement, their movement, with his unhinged response to Vice President Harris’ rally. At a time when some prominent right wing trolls are showing RFK-curiosity, they’re also questioning the campaign, in significant part because of Trump’s public meltdown over this arrival.
And that’s where things start to get weird.
Both WaPo and NYT reported overnight on Trump’s unhinged claim.
But they’re both missing a bit of what’s going on, and they’re missing it, in my opinion, because they’re still seeing this race from Trump’s perspective.
In a piece on Saturday, WaPo claimed that Democrats were obsessing over crowd size in their own right, citing Tim Walz’ boast about crowd size in a Friday rally in Phoenix, even while (in the penultimate paragraph) quoting a Harris spox mocking Trump for the meltdowns he has in response.
Read more for details. It’s true. We’ve all had fun with Trump waving his hands to a nonexistent crowd at airports and in front of Trump Tower. Watching Trump meltdown over his dwindling crowd size has been epic fun. This is from Brett Bachman from The Daily Beast. “Dem Rep: Trump’s Latest Conspiracy Is Evidence He’s in ‘Dementia Land.’
Rep. Ted Lieu had some harsh words for Donald Trump Sunday after the former president falsely suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris had somehow digitally altered photos of her rally at a Detroit-area airport over the weekend. “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Lieu attacked the conspiracy theory during an appearance on MSNBC, saying that Trump was “really going bonkers off the edge into dementia land.” Lieu added: “He’s now fantasizing that all these rallies are not real and that somehow, Air Force Two is not real and that the rally she had in Michigan was not real. I think the American people realize that Donald Trump is not suited for office in any way whatsoever.”
So, yeah, they’re going for the paid actor thing yet again. Why not? In fact, it seems they’ve just doctored some of the stuff they used in 2020, as I said. But, here’s world-class troll Ian Miles Cheong at least copping to them not being AI. Michael Tomasky writes this for The New Republic. “Grab the Popcorn. Donald Trump Is Freaked Out in Ways He Never Imagined Were Possible. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are getting under his skin, and it’s a beautiful sight to behold.”
The Harris-Walz campaign proved two important things last week. First, it proved that sometimes all you really have to do is answer attacks—the mere fact of answering them deflates their momentum. Second, it proved that Democrats have finally learned something from brazen Republican presidential campaigns over the years: Convert your perceived weakness into strength and their perceived strength into weakness.
The campaign did both of these things effectively last week. And it drove Donald Trump, and Republicans generally, nuts. Democrats aren’t supposed to do that! It’s like Cinderella saying she’s not doing the dishes. But Democrats are saying it, and it’s effing awesome.
…
Republicans have understood this for years. Seeing a Democratic presidential campaign finally get this is exhilarating to me personally but, more important, potentially game-changing.
And Donald Trump is freaked out in ways he never imagined were possible. He has faced a lot of opponents—from 1980s New York Mayor Ed Koch to all his many creditors to the 16 dwarves he ran against in 2016 to a Clinton campaign that thought the race was over to prosecutors he has known for years how to slow down, especially with corrupt hack judges having his back. But Trump has never had an opponent that made him go: “Oh fuck, these people mean business.”
Now he does. And that it’s a Black woman who means this business makes it so great, so much better. The New York Times reported over the weekend that he is so shell-shocked by the turnabout in this race that he’s doubling down on racism and “stop the steal” delusions. He is in full-blown meltdown mode, in other words.
All the pressure is on Trump now. Can he come back? Can he respond? Can he prove, contra George Conway’s brilliant ads, that he is not a pathetic psychopath? Can he make up these polling gaps, like his sudden four-point deficit in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan?
In 2016, we had a Trump who expected and even wanted to lose, who had no investment in winning. In 2020, we had a Trump with a deep investment in winning, and who expected to win. In 2024, we had a Trump—while he was running against Joe Biden—who fully expected to win.
But now we have a new Trump. He really isn’t sure. We’ve never seen this animal on the loose. Hide the wives and children. The Democrats are hitting him where it hurts. And it’s about damn time.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson believes that “Vice President Kamala Harris’s choice of Minnesota governor Tim Walz to be her running mate seems to cement the emergence of a new Democratic Party.” Her analysis was posted yesterday in her SubStack Letters from an American.
While Biden worked hard to make his administration reflect the demographics of the nation, tapping more women than men as advisors and nominating more Black women and racial minorities to federal judicial positions than any previous president, it was Vice President Kamala Harris who emphasized the right of all Americans to be treated equally before the law.
She was the first member of the administration to travel to Tennessee in support of the Tennessee Three after the Republican-dominated state legislature expelled two Black Democratic lawmakers for protesting in favor of gun safety legislation and failed by a single vote to expel their white colleague. She has highlighted the vital work historically Black colleges and universities have done for their students and for the United States. And she has criss-crossed the country to support women’s rights, especially the right to reproductive healthcare, in the two years since the Supreme Court, packed with religious extremists by Trump, overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
To the forming Democratic coalition, Harris brought an emphasis on equal rights before the law that drew from the civil rights movements that stretched throughout our history and flowered after 1950. Harris has told the story of how her parents, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, who hailed from India, and Donald J. Harris, from Jamaica, met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and bonded over a shared interest in civil rights. “My parents marched and shouted in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s,” Harris wrote in 2020. “It’s because of them and the folks who also took to the streets to fight for justice that I am where I am.”
To these traditionally Democratic mindsets, Governor Walz brings something quite different: midwestern Progressivism. Walz is a leader in the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which formed after World War II, but the reform impulse in the Midwest reaches all the way back to the years immediately after the Civil War and in its origins is associated with the Republican, rather than the Democratic, Party. While Biden’s approach to government focuses on economic justice and Harris’s focuses on individual rights, Walz’s focuses on the government’s responsibility to protect communities from extremists. That stance sweeps in economic fairness and individual rights but extends beyond them to recall an older vision of the nature of government itself.
Philip Bump of the Washington Post believes Donald’s most recent behavior is ominous. “‘AI’ crowds and unskewed polls: Trump prepares to reject another loss. The former president’s recent rejection of obvious realities indicates that he is not planning to treat a negative 2024 outcome as legitimate.” As I mentioned on Friday, shenanigans are afoot.
The first person who I noticed spreading the idea that images of Vice President Kamala Harris’s rally in Michigan had been manipulated was conservative moviemaker Dinesh D’Souza.
On Saturday evening, D’Souza posted a photo on social media of Harris exiting her airplane with a crowd of supporters looking on. Two reflections from the airplane were circled in red, illustrating that, despite the crowd, no one was visible in the reflection.
“Does this look like a real picture to you?” D’Souza asked. Within hours, similar questions were everywhere on social media — and by Sunday had popped up in former president Donald Trump’s feed at Truth Social.
“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Trump wrote. “She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane.”
That D’Souza was at the leading edge of this argument is not surprising. It was D’Souza, you may recall, who produced a feature-length movie arguing without evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen by “mules” who collected and submitted ballots on behalf of Joe Biden. Then, as now, D’Souza’s claims were rooted in a trivial misrepresentation of digital information.
There was a crowd in Michigan to meet Harris, as shown below in a photograph taken by a Washington Post photographer. You can also see why the reflection from the plane didn’t show the crowd; it was angled away from the speaking platform.
No AI. No whistleblowing maintenance worker, ginned up from the ether to make the claim of dishonesty seem more credible. And no “cheating” by Harris.
Why would Trump and his allies spread a false claim about attendance at a rally that was covered on C-SPAN? In part because many elements of Trump’s base have embraced rejections of basic reality (like the existence of “mules”) for years. In part, it’s confirmation bias, with partisans being more likely to accept false information as true when it supports their preexisting beliefs. But in part, it’s because Trump and his allies are already eagerly raising questions about the reliability of measures of Harris’s support — and by extension, the reliability of the results in November.
Bump makes a strong case that the Trump campaign will reject the election results and chaos will follow. The response will be in Biden’s court. Recent Polls show that “Democratic attacks on JD Vance are working.” This is from Semafor and reported by Kadia Goba.
New polling shared exclusively with Semafor shows Democrats’ attacks on JD Vance’s views on abortion, divorce and “childless cat ladies” are sticking with voters.
A pair of surveys by Blueprint, the centrist Democratic pollster backed by Reid Hoffman, one taken July 21 – July 22, two days after Vance was announced as Donald Trump’s running mate, and then again two weeks later on August 4, showed Vance’s net favorability falling from -7 to -11 with fewer voters unsure either way. That’s similar to other public polling, which has also shown Vance making a poor first impression since joining the Republican ticket.
The main shift in how respondents viewed Vance: He’s become more and more identified with his particular brand of conservatism and less with his famed biography as an author, veteran, and politician. Presented with a list of options to describe Vance in August, the most common answers were “conservative,” “anti-woman,” and “weird,” while more positive options like “young,” “smart,” and “businessman” declined from July. The percentage calling him “extreme” shot up 13 points.
So, it appears to be the crazy season, even if it isn’t even Labor Day yet. However, constant craziness just naturally comes with anything DonOld does.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Come to my FaceBook page and play the game of Name this Drag Queen, or do it here! We gotcha Couchy Tomato!
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/08/12/mostly-monday-reads-size-matters/
#groundGame #OnTheGroundPolitics #PresidentialElection2024 #What #WhatSVanceSDragQueenName_
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“The desperation is real. The next fake elector coup is coming.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
It was inevitable that the incredible crowds that the Harris/Walz appearances have been attracting would eventually impact Donald’s psyche. One of the first signs was the amount of disinformation being packaged by right-wing sites and news. The KKKult is falling for it. I even had to fact-check someone myself. I’ve never seen a group of more gullible people in my life. They’re even rehashing some of the crap they tried to pass in 2020. We’ve also seen poorly photoshopped pictures of crowds in Trump’s appearance, where the same obvious guys appear in four different stadium sections. We’ve now advanced to AI conspiracies.
Marcy at emptywheel has a delightful account of this current bout of fake crowds. It’s filled with pictures and videos of the size issue. “In Which Ian Miles Cheong Understands Trump’s Campaign Better than NYT. The second I saw video of Vice President Harris rolling up to a hangar at Detroit’s airport on Air Force Two, then alighting with Tim Walz in front of cheering crowds, I knew it would break Donald Trump’s brain.” Indeed.
This is the kind of spectacle Donald Trump excels at creating.
This is the kind of spectacle on which Trump has built slavering loyalty from millions of MAGAts who see power in such spectacle.
And a Black woman created it.
Or rather, a Black woman and her campaign team, a campaign team which has already demonstrated they know exactly how to trigger Donald Trump, created it.
And sure enough, it did melt his brain.
Yesterday, he adopted the hysterical claims of some of his followers, posting that Vice President Harris was cheating because (he falsely claimed) she had used AI to sub in a crowd of people who weren’t there.
After these many years of dealing with this emotionally disturbed man with his plethora of Personality Disorders, we know his defense is projection. I know you are, but what am I! Donald has crowd-size envy, so it has to be resolved by calling it fake photos, fake videos, and fake reporting! Marcy brings the tape and photos to show how deluded he is. So deluded that even social media right-wing troll Malaysian Ian Miles Cheong. This guy jumps for red meat but can’t even with the entire AI crowd thing. Marcie continues with this. Wait for it. She mercilessly goes straight from the well-known troll to WAPO and NYT.
And Cheong is not the only right wing troll complaining that Trump is hurting the movement, their movement, with his unhinged response to Vice President Harris’ rally. At a time when some prominent right wing trolls are showing RFK-curiosity, they’re also questioning the campaign, in significant part because of Trump’s public meltdown over this arrival.
And that’s where things start to get weird.
Both WaPo and NYT reported overnight on Trump’s unhinged claim.
But they’re both missing a bit of what’s going on, and they’re missing it, in my opinion, because they’re still seeing this race from Trump’s perspective.
In a piece on Saturday, WaPo claimed that Democrats were obsessing over crowd size in their own right, citing Tim Walz’ boast about crowd size in a Friday rally in Phoenix, even while (in the penultimate paragraph) quoting a Harris spox mocking Trump for the meltdowns he has in response.
Read more for details. It’s true. We’ve all had fun with Trump waving his hands to a nonexistent crowd at airports and in front of Trump Tower. Watching Trump meltdown over his dwindling crowd size has been epic fun. This is from Brett Bachman from The Daily Beast. “Dem Rep: Trump’s Latest Conspiracy Is Evidence He’s in ‘Dementia Land.’
Rep. Ted Lieu had some harsh words for Donald Trump Sunday after the former president falsely suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris had somehow digitally altered photos of her rally at a Detroit-area airport over the weekend. “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Lieu attacked the conspiracy theory during an appearance on MSNBC, saying that Trump was “really going bonkers off the edge into dementia land.” Lieu added: “He’s now fantasizing that all these rallies are not real and that somehow, Air Force Two is not real and that the rally she had in Michigan was not real. I think the American people realize that Donald Trump is not suited for office in any way whatsoever.”
So, yeah, they’re going for the paid actor thing yet again. Why not? In fact, it seems they’ve just doctored some of the stuff they used in 2020, as I said. But, here’s world-class troll Ian Miles Cheong at least copping to them not being AI. Michael Tomasky writes this for The New Republic. “Grab the Popcorn. Donald Trump Is Freaked Out in Ways He Never Imagined Were Possible. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are getting under his skin, and it’s a beautiful sight to behold.”
The Harris-Walz campaign proved two important things last week. First, it proved that sometimes all you really have to do is answer attacks—the mere fact of answering them deflates their momentum. Second, it proved that Democrats have finally learned something from brazen Republican presidential campaigns over the years: Convert your perceived weakness into strength and their perceived strength into weakness.
The campaign did both of these things effectively last week. And it drove Donald Trump, and Republicans generally, nuts. Democrats aren’t supposed to do that! It’s like Cinderella saying she’s not doing the dishes. But Democrats are saying it, and it’s effing awesome.
…
Republicans have understood this for years. Seeing a Democratic presidential campaign finally get this is exhilarating to me personally but, more important, potentially game-changing.
And Donald Trump is freaked out in ways he never imagined were possible. He has faced a lot of opponents—from 1980s New York Mayor Ed Koch to all his many creditors to the 16 dwarves he ran against in 2016 to a Clinton campaign that thought the race was over to prosecutors he has known for years how to slow down, especially with corrupt hack judges having his back. But Trump has never had an opponent that made him go: “Oh fuck, these people mean business.”
Now he does. And that it’s a Black woman who means this business makes it so great, so much better. The New York Times reported over the weekend that he is so shell-shocked by the turnabout in this race that he’s doubling down on racism and “stop the steal” delusions. He is in full-blown meltdown mode, in other words.
All the pressure is on Trump now. Can he come back? Can he respond? Can he prove, contra George Conway’s brilliant ads, that he is not a pathetic psychopath? Can he make up these polling gaps, like his sudden four-point deficit in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan?
In 2016, we had a Trump who expected and even wanted to lose, who had no investment in winning. In 2020, we had a Trump with a deep investment in winning, and who expected to win. In 2024, we had a Trump—while he was running against Joe Biden—who fully expected to win.
But now we have a new Trump. He really isn’t sure. We’ve never seen this animal on the loose. Hide the wives and children. The Democrats are hitting him where it hurts. And it’s about damn time.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson believes that “Vice President Kamala Harris’s choice of Minnesota governor Tim Walz to be her running mate seems to cement the emergence of a new Democratic Party.” Her analysis was posted yesterday in her SubStack Letters from an American.
While Biden worked hard to make his administration reflect the demographics of the nation, tapping more women than men as advisors and nominating more Black women and racial minorities to federal judicial positions than any previous president, it was Vice President Kamala Harris who emphasized the right of all Americans to be treated equally before the law.
She was the first member of the administration to travel to Tennessee in support of the Tennessee Three after the Republican-dominated state legislature expelled two Black Democratic lawmakers for protesting in favor of gun safety legislation and failed by a single vote to expel their white colleague. She has highlighted the vital work historically Black colleges and universities have done for their students and for the United States. And she has criss-crossed the country to support women’s rights, especially the right to reproductive healthcare, in the two years since the Supreme Court, packed with religious extremists by Trump, overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
To the forming Democratic coalition, Harris brought an emphasis on equal rights before the law that drew from the civil rights movements that stretched throughout our history and flowered after 1950. Harris has told the story of how her parents, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, who hailed from India, and Donald J. Harris, from Jamaica, met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and bonded over a shared interest in civil rights. “My parents marched and shouted in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s,” Harris wrote in 2020. “It’s because of them and the folks who also took to the streets to fight for justice that I am where I am.”
To these traditionally Democratic mindsets, Governor Walz brings something quite different: midwestern Progressivism. Walz is a leader in the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which formed after World War II, but the reform impulse in the Midwest reaches all the way back to the years immediately after the Civil War and in its origins is associated with the Republican, rather than the Democratic, Party. While Biden’s approach to government focuses on economic justice and Harris’s focuses on individual rights, Walz’s focuses on the government’s responsibility to protect communities from extremists. That stance sweeps in economic fairness and individual rights but extends beyond them to recall an older vision of the nature of government itself.
Philip Bump of the Washington Post believes Donald’s most recent behavior is ominous. “‘AI’ crowds and unskewed polls: Trump prepares to reject another loss. The former president’s recent rejection of obvious realities indicates that he is not planning to treat a negative 2024 outcome as legitimate.” As I mentioned on Friday, shenanigans are afoot.
The first person who I noticed spreading the idea that images of Vice President Kamala Harris’s rally in Michigan had been manipulated was conservative moviemaker Dinesh D’Souza.
On Saturday evening, D’Souza posted a photo on social media of Harris exiting her airplane with a crowd of supporters looking on. Two reflections from the airplane were circled in red, illustrating that, despite the crowd, no one was visible in the reflection.
“Does this look like a real picture to you?” D’Souza asked. Within hours, similar questions were everywhere on social media — and by Sunday had popped up in former president Donald Trump’s feed at Truth Social.
“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Trump wrote. “She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane.”
That D’Souza was at the leading edge of this argument is not surprising. It was D’Souza, you may recall, who produced a feature-length movie arguing without evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen by “mules” who collected and submitted ballots on behalf of Joe Biden. Then, as now, D’Souza’s claims were rooted in a trivial misrepresentation of digital information.
There was a crowd in Michigan to meet Harris, as shown below in a photograph taken by a Washington Post photographer. You can also see why the reflection from the plane didn’t show the crowd; it was angled away from the speaking platform.
No AI. No whistleblowing maintenance worker, ginned up from the ether to make the claim of dishonesty seem more credible. And no “cheating” by Harris.
Why would Trump and his allies spread a false claim about attendance at a rally that was covered on C-SPAN? In part because many elements of Trump’s base have embraced rejections of basic reality (like the existence of “mules”) for years. In part, it’s confirmation bias, with partisans being more likely to accept false information as true when it supports their preexisting beliefs. But in part, it’s because Trump and his allies are already eagerly raising questions about the reliability of measures of Harris’s support — and by extension, the reliability of the results in November.
Bump makes a strong case that the Trump campaign will reject the election results and chaos will follow. The response will be in Biden’s court. Recent Polls show that “Democratic attacks on JD Vance are working.” This is from Semafor and reported by Kadia Goba.
New polling shared exclusively with Semafor shows Democrats’ attacks on JD Vance’s views on abortion, divorce and “childless cat ladies” are sticking with voters.
A pair of surveys by Blueprint, the centrist Democratic pollster backed by Reid Hoffman, one taken July 21 – July 22, two days after Vance was announced as Donald Trump’s running mate, and then again two weeks later on August 4, showed Vance’s net favorability falling from -7 to -11 with fewer voters unsure either way. That’s similar to other public polling, which has also shown Vance making a poor first impression since joining the Republican ticket.
The main shift in how respondents viewed Vance: He’s become more and more identified with his particular brand of conservatism and less with his famed biography as an author, veteran, and politician. Presented with a list of options to describe Vance in August, the most common answers were “conservative,” “anti-woman,” and “weird,” while more positive options like “young,” “smart,” and “businessman” declined from July. The percentage calling him “extreme” shot up 13 points.
So, it appears to be the crazy season, even if it isn’t even Labor Day yet. However, constant craziness just naturally comes with anything DonOld does.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Come to my FaceBook page and play the game of Name this Drag Queen, or do it here! We gotcha Couchy Tomato!
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/08/12/mostly-monday-reads-size-matters/
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