Spoiler Alert

Popular Mechanics was wrong. It only took one century.

Whether it was Edward Teller in 1959 or other studies in the 1980s, those fuckers have known all along what they were doing and they continued despoiling the planet for fun and money.

If your granddad or great granddad worked for them, consider going and spitting on his grave. The line to piss on Dick Cheney's should be monumental as things get worse.

And they will.

To everyone who voted for Trump knowing his hostility to renewable energy and his devotion to fossil fuels, I have one respectful entreaty:

Lake Mead Level.

It's at 1,040'. That's 189' below "full pool" and 145' above "dead pool". That's below the level of one of Las Vegas's intakes. Their deepest one, built ten years ago, is 20' below dead pool.

Make of that what you will.

ETA: What happens if Lakes Powell and Mead fail. (H/T to Stewart Dean)

Fuck Flock, Uber and Lyft

Flock wants to use Uber and Lyft vehicles to create a roving surveillance network.

Flock is evil. Full stop. It has been abused by snooping cops and thugs in Texas seeking to enforce their abortion ban nationwide.

Butlerian Jihad Now, Please

ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Tuesday that its artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its own in what the company called an “unprecedented cyber incident.”

“We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement posted on social media.

Q: Who could have foreseen that an AI system would go off on its own and do things it wasn't supposed to?

A: Anyone who has ever read science-fiction stories since the first one was printed over two hundred years ago.

The utter blind arrogance of the tech bros pushing AI along will end us all if they are not brought to heel.

Something to Ponder (and GOP Revisionist Morons)

Paul Krugman believes that there is a real possibility that things are going to get very bad.

He might be wrong. But I'd trust him over those idiots that now claim that we won the Vietnam War.

“And then we won” is quite some interpretation of the Vietnam War. https://t.co/1FJnCdH3TG

— Niall Stanage (@NiallStanage) March 31, 2026

I gather that Hollywood is going to have to rework all of those movies like First Blood and Platoon.

And this patch will need updating.

Since we won, they'll have no objection to changing the name of Hi Chi Mihn City to Trumpville.

Welp, This Will Be Interesting

France's Finance Minister Roland Lescure revealed on Wednesday that between 30 and 40 per cent of Gulf refining capacity has been damaged or destroyed by Iran's retaliatory strikes following attacks by the United States and Israel, France 24 reports.

According to him, this has left a shortage of 11 million barrels a day on global oil markets. Lescure warned it could take up to three years to restore damaged facilities, and several months to restart those that were urgently shut down.

Which means that even if Bibi and Donnie's Most Excellent War stopped today, the ramifications will continue for years.

The best is yet to come, as the last ships that had left the Persian Gulf before the war started arrive at their delivery ports. This map shows global oil imports from the Guld and when the deliveries from the Gulf will end:

In a month, the globe will go from just feeling the price of oil rise to having actual shortages. In the US, we don't import a lot of oil from the Gulf, so we're not going to see much in the way of shortages. But oil is a global commodity and so is the pricing.

It's not just oil, of course. It's also aluminum, helium, natural gas and fertilizer. All of which will be in somewhat short supply, thanks to this war.

Meanwhile, the Orange Sundowner is blathering about attacking electrical generation and desalinization plants if Iran doesn't knuckle under. To say that doing that would be a war crime is beyond obvious. It's the sort of thing that his boss would do, another perpetrator of war crimes en masse.

The Gulf Water War?

Iran has made it clear that attacking their water supplies will not go unanswered.

If they successfully hit a number of the desalinization plants in the area, a good part of the Persion Gulf region will become uninhabitable, for that's the main source of fresh water for a number of cities.

Not that Trump or Hegseth'll give a fuck. But those countries who have given Trump and Kushner large amounts of money might. And they might be really willing to talk to congressional investigators and DoJ's lawyers in 2029.

Another Corporate Evildoer

NEC, which sells facial recognition software to the DHS ghouls.

If you work for NEC or do business with them, you are one evil motherfucker.

Trump Condemns the US to a Dark Future

Uruguay has shifted its electricity production to 99% renewable (non-fossil) sources. The result was cheaper electricy, less poverty and more jobs.

But we're stuck with a demented president who is mentally stuck in the 1960s and who is suffering butthurt over his precious Scottish golf course, and with political parties that are rife with corruption and greed.

Where Are the Billionaires?

Between unpaid Federal workers and SNAP recipients, tens of millions are facing a food crisis. States and citizens are donating to food banks to help. Which begs the obvious question:

WHERE ARE THE BILLIONAIRES?

The billionaires are funding Trump’s golden obscenity of a ballroom. They are not opening their hoards of wealth to help anyone else. Is there anything else needed to convince people that the billionaires, the Musks, the Zuckerbergs, the Bezos, the Ellisons, the Waltons and the rest are parasites? They suck the wealth out if the rest if us and give nothing back.

This level of inequality can’t be allowed to go on. Either we’ll fix it the easy way, with tax policy, or we’ll fix it the hard way, the way the French did.

But sooner or later, we will fix this.

The Death of CBS News

John Oliver has the deets:

Watch What is Coming

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has summoned the military’s top officers — hundreds of generals and admirals — to a base in northern Virginia for a sudden meeting next week, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The directive did not offer a reason for the gathering Tuesday of senior commanders of the one-star rank or higher and their top advisers at the Marine Corps base in Quantico. The people, who described the move as unusual, were not authorized to publicly discuss the sensitive plans and spoke on condition of anonymity.

My guess is that Whiskey Pete called this meeting to have the generals and admirals swear an oath of personal loyalty to President Voldemoron.

I sure hope that I'm wrong.

Melt Down the Umpire! Melt Down the Umpire!

Robot umpires are getting called up to the big leagues next season.

It's not quite a full replacement of the umpires, but make no mistake about it, we are getting there.

The "Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee" Party. (Updated)

Vice President JD Vance on Monday jumped onto the conservative movement demanding consequences for those who have cheered Charlie Kirk’s killing, calling on the public to turn in anyone who says distasteful things about the assassination of his friend and political ally.

Killing somebody for their political beliefs is wrong.

But it would be nice if that was an ideal followed by the dead guy, who celebrated the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi. I am absolutely sure that if the perp had found Nancy Pelosi at home and killed her, Kirk and his ilk would have been figuratively dancing in her blood in celebration. Just like Republicans celebrated the murders of Melissa and Mark Hortman.

It is becoming clearer and clearer after Kirk’s slaying that freedom of speech, like every other constitutional right, is one that is to be freely enjoyed only by straight, white, conservative, christian men.

In that, they are dishonoring the man they seek to honor:

And it is no coincidence that whenever the Feds began looking at domestic terrorism, they found out every time that the threat was coming from the Right and the Republicans made them shut down the programs/inquiries.

As Sen. Murphy warns, we may be in for some dark times. For the Right is doing its best to turn this killing into their Reichstag moment and use that to quash freedom for everyone else. And they are not shy about their aims.

And above all, Trump needs to distract people from the fact that he is prominently mentioned in the Epstein files.

Cadet Bone Spurs Is Not Cleaning Up the Red State Hellholes

As Donald Trump threatens to deploy national guard units to Chicago and Baltimore, ostensibly to quell violence, a pattern has emerged as he describes which cities he talks about.

Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington DC and Baltimore.

But not Jackson, Birmingham, St Louis or Memphis.

An analysis of crime trends over the last four years shows two things. First, violent crime rates in America’s big cities have been falling over the last two years, and at an even greater rate over the last six months. The decrease in violence in America is unprecedented.

Second, crime in large cities in the aggregate is lower in states with Democratic leadership. But the president focuses his ire almost exclusively on large blue cities in blue states, sidestepping political conflict with red Republican governors.

Those red state governors could use their own national guard to clean up their own shitholes.

But they won't.

That should suggest something to you, such as none of this is about crimefighting, It's about a small-dicked demented autocrat attempting to be dominant. A man who, when it was his turn to serve, ran away and hid behind his father's money and influence. But now, safely ensconced in the White House, he's ordering violence on his fellow citizens.

And if you support that, with all due love and respect, go fuck yourself.

Trump's New Concentration Camps

He wants to incarcerate everyone who appears to be mentally ill or is homeless.

Now Trump will treat being homeless as an offense to justify imprisoning people without trial in the growing set of concentration camps that he avoids calling what they are. All in the name of safe public spaces and less crime. Unconstitutional, but hard to stop. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

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— Laurence H. Tribe (@tribelaw.bsky.social) July 25, 2025 at 9:05 AM

Do you see where we are going in this country? Trump is following Hitler's playbook in first going after marginalized groups of people as the expands his reach.

If you are not a straight white person whose ancestry is tracable back to northwestern Eurpoe, you are likely in his crosshairs as Trump seeks to racially purify the country.

We have a demented Nazi governing the country, aided and abetted by billionaire fascists who seek to generate a permanent American underclass by cutting education and ending social mobility.

People, Especially Conservatives, Are Dumb as Rocks

It was known in 1965 that carbon dioxide was warming the globe. That was back when some subtle tweaks to things could have avoided the mess we are falling into.

We're probably now at the point of no return. Glaciers and ice caps are melting and disappearing as the atmosphere warms up. It's possible that most of the coastal cities will be underwater within the lifetimes of kids alive today.

Nobody can say that we didn't see it coming. Our generations, and the couple before us, will be reviled for centuries. They won't care about antibiotics or robotics or cyber-shit or space exploration or any of that shit. No, they will remember us as the clueless imbeciles who had all the information that we needed to avert the catastrophe and we, instead, buried our heads in the sand.

The only slightly positive thing about it could be that destroying the environment will be the final nail in the coffin of conservatism.

Masked Goons With Guns

One of these is from this country, one is not:

Are we being conditioned to accept that anyone riding around in an unmarked van, fully masked up, wearing a plate carrier, a helmet, and a Batman belt, with no visible identification and carrying a gun is a cop of some kind?

What happens when the criminals recognize this and begin acting accordingly? How do you know that the unmarked goon invading yur home is a cop or a criminal? Anyone can shout "police" and the bad guys do.

Beyond that, are we setting ourselves up for having private militias and death squads roaming around unhindered?

Third, if the bad guys, however you define them, are wearing plate carriers, then shooting for the center-of-mass is a waste of ammunition. So start training for hitting the suprasternal notch (or the center of the nose, if you're that good).

Inflation and War

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell set talk about President Donald Trump’s tariffs straight on Wednesday after the central bank kept interest rates steady as officials expect higher inflation and lower economic growth in the coming months.

During a press conference following the Fed’s decision, Powell said that the central bank is waiting to cut rates until it understands the impact of tariffs. He stressed that the current strength of the economy allows for patience, but noted that “every forecaster you can name” is predicting a “meaningful increase” in inflation due to Trump’s signature economic policy.
...
“All through that chain, people will be trying not to be the ones who can take up the cost, but ultimately, the cost of the tariff has to be paid. And some of it will fall on the end consumer,” he continued.

The Dictator of Crypto responded, of course, with his usual stream of juvenile insults. Chief among them is threats to fire Powell and put himself in charge. Which would likely result in an immediate crash of stock markets around the globe and even he is probably not stupid enough to do that.

But nobody's made money ascribing smarts to that fat old fuck.

Meanwhile, Israel is screeching about an Iranian missile hitting a hospital. I don't expect the world to care very much. We haven't seen global outrage from the kitsaps striking Ukranian hospitals. And correct me if I'm wrong, but israel has repeatedly struck hospitals in Gaza, often killing scores of patients, doctors and nurses, while claiming there was a terrorist in there, somewhere.

Dictatorship, Incoming

In response to a question from a blogger for the far-right Gateway Pundit about when the Trump administration could start “suspending the writ of habeas corpus to take care of the illegal immigration problem”, White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller said the Trump administration is “actively looking at” doing so.
...
Miller told the blogger, Jordan Conradson, he had made a point of calling on first: “The Constitution is clear, and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in time of invasion. So it’s an option we’re actively looking at. Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not”.

Let's be crystal clear on this: A "suspension" of habeus corpus means that they could snatch up whomsoever they want, toss them into a cell and the person grabbed would have no recourse. It is what Pee Wee German has been aiming for since 2016 and now he sees it almost within his grasp. The GOP is going full fascist without a peep of protest from any of its sitting legislators (except maybe Rand Paul).

And it makes a mockery of those who said that having to wear a mask during a pandemic was tyranny. Real tyranny is the government snatching people off the street without legal process and the right to a trial.

Also, this, from Sam Stein:

If I understand the White House's current messaging it's that the border is completely under control unlike ever before in history, crime is dramatically down across the board, but we are also under such an invasion that we have to suspend habeas corpus?

Yep, that's exactly right.

Reminder to the Batshit Brigade: Moderation is in effect and the Banhammer List is being enforced.