Criminals Gotta Crime

And by criminals, I mean the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™, who just got caught surreptitiously installing facial recognition software on their smart glasses.

Seeing as how they did not announce this to their users, it would have been a selling point, it is not unreasonable to assume that this was for Meta to spy on its users.

Hell, everything in Meta is about spying on its users.

One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code.

The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called NameTag. The version published the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them.

Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, told WIRED on Monday that the feature is purely exploratory, adding: “No final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”

On Thursday, WIRED reported that Meta had quietly integrated substantial portions of the NameTag system into the Meta AI app. Though never publicly enabled, the feature was designed to convert faces captured by the glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and compare them against a database of faceprints stored on the user's device. WIRED also found that faces the system failed to recognize were cropped, indexed, and stored locally for future processing.

Well, this seems completely aboveboard and not suspicious at all.

The Mask Slips

If when arguing about a President's ability to create or change public monuments and government buildings your lawyers have to argue that Donald Trump has the unrestricted power to tear down the Statue of Liberty, you have already lost.

A federal appeals court panel expressed skepticism Friday about the Trump administration’s view that courts are powerless to stop the construction of the White House ballroom now that the East Wing had been demolished.

Two members of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit repeatedly pressed administration lawyers about its argument that President Donald Trump’s pet project — now well underway — could not be stopped by the courts even if it was found to be illegal, because it was too far along and involved significant national security interests.

“When did it become a fait accompli?” Judge Patricia Millett asked. “If this were complete lawlessness by the government … it couldn’t be stopped?”

“On these theories, I think that’s right,” replied Yaakov Roth, a Justice Department attorney.

Millett, an Obama appointee, peppered Roth with questions about the extent of the Trump administration’s view of its power to “move fast and break things” without being subject to legal challenge.

“If the government decides, very quickly, to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty — the people whose ancestors that was the first thing they saw coming to this country, but the government moved too fast — nothing can be done?” the judge asked.

“I think that’s right, yes,” Roth responded.

Once again, I am left staring at the fiasco with an expression on my face like that of a cow that has just stepped on its own udder. 

Yes

In response to the question, "Screwworm Is Back In Texas Cattle—Is DOGE To Blame?" the answer is, "Yes."

DOGE killed the programs fighting the flesh eating maggots, because they all are flesh eating maggots.

New World screwworm, a parasitic fly with larvae that burrow in healthy tissue of cattle, deer, horses and other warm-blooded animals, was discovered in La Pryor, Texas.

The case is the only one that has been identified in the country so far, according to the USDA, but a wider outbreak could severely impact already-suffering cattle numbers and put even more of a strain on ranchers as they spend money on treatment and prevention.

In turn, the price of beef—which has gone up roughly 75% since December 2020—could continue to rise.

The U.S. cattle herd is already at its lowest level in 75 years, and a major screwworm outbreak would cause more calves to die, adult cattle to lose weight and limit what animals are suitable for sale, meaning fewer pounds of beef reaching the market.

Even without a major outbreak, containment efforts may cause the government to implement widespread cattle movement restrictions, limit border crossings or impose quarantine on certain herds, all of which would further impact the nation’s cattle numbers.

The return of screwworm comes after the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, launched by the Trump administration, last year cut funding for a project dedicated to monitoring and containing New World screwworm in Central America.

The funding was axed days before the U.S. ended a temporary suspension of cattle imports from Mexico, meaning livestock was allowed to cross the border without any of the monitoring previously funded by the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID).

Agriculture officials and cattle industry leaders raised alarm about the cuts at the time and, for the last several months, pleaded with the government to step in as they monitored screwworm infections moving north through Mexico—but they were ignored, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told NBC News.

If the next Democratic President does not prosecute the sh%$ out of these folks, they will have betrayed their obligations at the most basic level.

Not Enough Bullets

Go old school?DOGE and DHS tried to get the Social Security Administration to declare that 2.7 million people were dead in an attempt to harass immigrants.

Everyone involved in this should never see the sky as a free man.

The Trump administration had plans to classify 2.7 million living people — including some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — as dead as part of its immigration enforcement efforts, according to a former senior Social Security executive. 

The previously unreported plan, which the Social Security Administration said was not carried out, would have used one of the government’s most consequential identity databases to effectively erase people from the financial system, potentially cutting them off from wages, banking, government benefits and other services.

Jeremiah Schofield, who worked at Social Security for 25 years and helped lead the agency’s IT modernization efforts before leaving in October, said he refused to help implement the plan after agency lawyers warned that falsely marking living people as dead could violate federal law. Schofield said he realized the plan’s possible intent — to intimidate and worsen the finances of immigrants — as well as its potential unlawfulness after taking a sample of people from the 2.7 million and discovering they were all alive. Some were U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, teenagers and senior citizens, including one widow who was a legal permanent resident receiving survivor benefits.


Schofield has provided details on the plan in a 49-page whistleblower disclosure to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is on the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the ranking member on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The disclosure was reviewed by The Washington Post, and it offers the most detailed account yet of how officials from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service sought to use Social Security data in service of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

In an interview with The Post, Schofield said he is speaking publicly for the first time because he believes Americans need to understand how government data can be misused and, in some cases, already has been.

………

Schofield’s whistleblower complaint describes a tumultuous period inside Social Security, as career officials questioned the legality of such efforts and watched DOGE officials gain access to some of the government’s most sensitive databases. In one meeting, Schofield said, a DOGE official working with the Department of Homeland Security described the goal of declaring 2.7 million living people dead: making immigrants so miserable that they self-deported or went to Social Security offices for help, where they could be arrested.

I'm beginning to think that if the DOGE boy's parents had decided to drown them all at birth, (I'm looking at YOU, Mae Musk) the world would be a far better place. 

Crap

Slate Auto promises to put out a low cost, bare bones, and spyware free electric pickup truck, which sounds good, but then I discovered that Jeff Bezos is a major backer of the firm.

My eldest had expressed an interest in something like this, so I need to tell them not to buy this.

Ahead of its launch late this year, Jeff Bezos-backed Slate Auto is figuring out how it’s going to sell its all-electric small pickup truck, and it’s reportedly getting on board with online automotive retailer Carvana.

According to TechCrunch, Carvana was given a warrant for shares in Slate Auto last year, based on documents from the State of Delaware Division of Corporations. The move comes as the startup automaker prepares to release details such as official prices later this month, as well as the end of reservations and the beginning of preordering. Since last year, Slate Auto has offered a $50 reservation fee to be among the first in line and reported 100,000 reservations in two weeks.

(emphasis mine)

So both Bezos and Carvana.  That is a truly toxic mixture.

………

The Slate Truck was announced in April 2025 as a back-to-basics EV that won’t come standard with features such as power windows or an infotainment system. Buyers, however, will be able to customize the vehicle with vinyl wraps and even an enclosed SUV body with a rear seat. By doing this, the company targets a sub-$30,000 starting price.

Yeah, pretty bare bones.

Demanding the Right to Murder Black Men

At the state convention Minnesota Republicans held a moment of silence for Derek Chauvan, who murdered George Floyd.

They are offended that white cops are not allowed to murder black men whenever they want.

The Minnesota Republican party’s decision to hold a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin, the former police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, has angered the state’s attorney general – who was the lead prosecutor in the case.

Keith Ellison, a Democrat, said Saturday’s gesture at the state Republicans’ annual convention in Duluth was “an act of profound cruelty” to Floyd’s family and “disrespectful” to Minnesota’s law enforcement personnel.

“This decision dishonors the memory of George Floyd and wounds his loved ones all over again,” Ellison said in a statement.

Alluding to how the murder had happened six years earlier almost exactly, Ellison added: “To honor the man convicted of murdering George Floyd – days after the very anniversary of that terrible day – is an act of profound cruelty to the Floyd family and to every Minnesotan who believes in accountability under law.

These are really truly awful people.

Clarence Thomas Learned Corruption from the Master

In news that should surprise no one, Scalia Cheney engaged in virtually identical corrupt behavior, and engaged in a virtually identical defense of the indefensible.

In recent years, Justice Clarence Thomas’s fondness for taking luxury vacations on billionaire-owned superyachts has made Supreme Court ethics reform perhaps the single easiest campaign promise for Democratic politicians to make. But two decades ago, the real-world particulars of Supreme Court conflict-of-interest scandals were smaller in scale: for example, the physical proximity of Justice Antonin Scalia to Vice President Dick Cheney when the two men were sitting in duck blinds, shotguns in hand, waiting to kill some birds.

The saga began in January 2004, shortly after Cheney and Scalia—good friends since their time working together in the Ford administration—traveled to Louisiana for an annual duck hunt hosted by an acquaintance of Scalia’s. Cheney invited Scalia to join him on a government plane for the flight from Washington; Scalia, along with his son and son-in-law, accepted.

The objectionable part of this story (legally speaking, I mean) was that several weeks earlier, the Court had granted certiorari in a case about whether Cheney had to disclose details about clandestine meetings with fossil fuels executives while he was leading a task force responsible for the Bush administration’s energy policy. The Sierra Club had argued that Scalia, fresh off a vacation with the vice president and a free flight on Air Force Two, should recuse himself from the case, on the grounds that his impartiality “might reasonably be questioned.”

Scalia refused, however, releasing a 21-page memo in which he assured the public that he and Cheney had not discussed the case, and had never even been alone together—in duck blinds or otherwise—during the entirety of the trip. After running through a brief history of social relationships between Supreme Court justices and elected officials, from poker games to dinner parties to Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone’s early-morning medicine-ball workouts with members of the Hoover administration, Scalia asserted that a rule requiring the justices to recuse themselves from cases involving their famous friends would be “utterly disabling.”

Gee, it sounds awfully familiar.

Scalia did, as Thomas, Alito, and Roberts do, found press coverage of corruption to be the real problem.

Colorado's Worst Governor

Jared Polis, once again showing how he is a Republican in drag.

This time, he vetoed the repeal of Colorado's anti-union right-to-work law.

This is in addition to his commuting Tina Peters sentence for election fraud.

For the second time, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis vetoed a bill that would have eliminated a unique second election requirement in the state’s union formation law, after business and labor groups failed to reach a compromise on how to tweak the measure.

“In the wake of (last year’s) veto and the substantial negotiations that preceded it, I would have hoped that both business and labor leaders could have worked to craft a long-term and durable agreement on this matter that would have served Colorado workers and businesses alike,” Polis wrote in his veto letter on Friday. “Unfortunately, because that did not happen, this issue will likely come up again next year and every subsequent year until it is addressed, which creates uncertainty for both workers and businesses.”

House Bill 25-1005 would have repealed the Labor Peace Act in Colorado. Unions can form with a simple majority, per federal law, but in Colorado they must win a second election with 75% of the vote to negotiate so-called union security — whether all workers need to pay into collective bargaining negotiations.

His political career needs to be ended. 

Replacing Low Value Human Capital

Bill Winters, CEO of Standard Chartered Bank, used that phrase to describe the 8,000 people that he plans to replace with AI.

After his odious utterance, he tried to walk it back.

Hopefully, he won't be able to do so, and he will spend the rest of his life living in fear and paying for bodyguards.

AI has emboldened CEOs to make all kinds of smug declarations that betray their contempt for lowly human laborers.

But Bill Winters, the CEO of the British multinational bank Standard Chartered, said something so viscerally off-putting that he’s now gone into full damage control mode to get the heat off his back.

On Wednesday, he wrote an internal memo to employees attempting to explain away his remark that he would be firing thousands of workers and replacing the company’s “lower-value human capital” with AI.

Yes, you heard that right: “lower-value human capital.” And it clearly didn’t go over well.

“Many of you will have seen media coverage following the investor event in Hong Kong, particularly the reporting around automation, AI, and workforce changes,” Winters said in the memo, per The Wall Street Journal. “I know this may be unsettling when reduced to simple headlines or a quote out of context.”

No, it's not a matter of context.  You told your truth and revealed yourself to be a psychopath.

Skeet of the Day

Paxton's win proves the MAGA base will follow Trump to hell. I look forward to making them go there.

[image or embed]

— Lindsay Beyerstein (@beyerstein.bsky.social) May 27, 2026 at 10:18 PM

I believe that this is a just, possibly noble, sentiment.

As my people are wont to say, the MAGAts should, "גיי אין גיהנום מיטן קאָפּ ערשט און באַק בייגל." (Go to hell head first and bake bagels.)

OK, There Are Lizard People

I expect him to eat live guinea pigs in private


Something dead there


See the TV Series "V" for Reference So, the Wall Street Journal just put out an exclusive, saying that The Philippines has aggreed to hand over a few thousand acres to the United States as a part of the US "Pax Silica" initiative.

It turs out that the WSJ is wrong.  There is no agreement, perhaps because the deal proposed is more one-sided than the notorious pre-WWII foreign concessions in China.

The deal is proposed/being negotiated by Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg, a "Senior advisor to Alex Karp Palantir."

The details are: 

• The US will take control of 4,000 acres in the Philippines.
• A lease renewable for 99 years and a rent of $0.00
• The area will have diplomatic immunity.
• The area will operate under us "Common Law". (Whatever the f%$# that is.)

It appears that Helberg misled the authors of the story, because Philippine officials have categorically denied that anything resembling this deal has been agreed to.

This is not a surprise. 

Unlike in the US, the memories of colonialism are still very much remembered in Far East societies. (Somewhere between ¼ and 1½ million civilian deaths as a result of US actions during the Philippine Insurrection)

Philippine officials on May 18 pushed back against reports that a planned United States-backed industrial hub on the main island of Luzon would operate under American laws or grant diplomatic immunity to US personnel.

The clarification came during the visit by US Undersecretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment Jacob Helberg to New Clark City, where he joined Philippine officials in unveiling a marker for the proposed 1,620ha Pax Silica industrial hub under the Luzon Economic Corridor initiative announced in April.

Mr Joshua Bingcang, president and chief executive of the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA), said the Philippines had rejected US proposals that would place the project beyond local jurisdiction.

“That’s their request, but we did not agree to that,” Mr Bingcang told the media when asked about a Wall Street Journal report on April 17 claiming the hub would operate under US laws and enjoy diplomatic protections.

“There will be no special arrangement accorded to the US,” he added.

Mr Bingcang said the project would instead fall under the Special Economic Zone Act, which governs investment incentives and operations in Philippine economic zones, as well as BCDA law that oversees the conversion and development of former US military bases into investment and commercial hubs.

I'm not primarily writing about this.  I'm writing about Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg.

Look at him.  He's a f%$#ing lizard person.  There is no humanity behind those eyes.

This is Actual Bond Villain Sh%$

According to conservative influencer and billionaire f%$#er Ashley St. Clair, Elon Musk bragged to her about 10,000 space lasers onboard Starlink satellites that he could use as an anomaly in the matrix.

First, Elon is f%$#ing nuts.

Second, Elon is f%$#ing nuts.

Third, he constitutes a clear and present danger to society.

………

In a new 18-minute long TikTok video, former conservative influencer and mother of one of Elon Musk’s children Ashley St. Clair shared private conversations she allegedly held with the billionaire about the 2024 US election — and the details are bonkers, even by Musk’s unhinged standards.

According to St. Clair, Musk once told her that he had “10,000 lasers in space, referring to his [Starlink] satellites.” These, per the influencer, were Musk’s “anomaly in the matrix,” seemingly meaning he viewed them as a kind of card up his sleeve to be unleashed at the right moment during the course of the US presidential election.

“He says this is not a piece they’ll see on the chess board,” St. Clair continued. “I straight up tell him, ‘I would ask more but I really don’t want to be deposed,’ to which he says ‘very wise.'”

You may recall that a billionaire with space lasers was actually the plot of a Bond movie.

Headline of the Day

Court To DOGE Bros: Asking ChatGPT ‘Yo, Is This DEI?’ Is Not Proper Legal Process & Also A First Amendment Violation

—Techdirt

We really do live in the stupidest timeline. 

This is the lamest case of letting ChatGPT doing your homework ever. 

Start With, "He Burnt a Cross Next to a Police Station as a Young Adult"

Charles Murray is a racist hypocrite dirt-bag, but for some reason, whenever writes, people thing that he is wise.

Whether it is The Bell Curve, wherein he used fudged data and statistics to "Show" that blacks were genetically inferior, or his latest screed, saying that the Electoral College is a core founding structure of the Republic, he's a complete wanker.

When I came across William Hogeland devastating take-down of Murray's latest, I noticed an omission, he neglected to note that Murray is also a cross burning racist, something that he has never apologized for.  (He claims that he did not know what a cross burning meant.  Bullsh%$.)

I highly recommend that you read the essay, but Murray's past should be the lede on any article about him.

OK, This is Beyond Comically Corrupt

So, Donald Trumps pet lawyer has announced an $1,776,000,000.00 "settlement" in the case of an IRS contractor leaking Trump's tax returns.

That money goes to a slush fund that they are calling an fund to reimburse "victims of weaponization and lawfare."

The Justice Department announced on Monday that it was setting up a new $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who it said were victims of “weaponization and lawfare,” a group that will almost certainly be made up of President Trump’s political allies.

The creation of the fund came in exchange for Mr. Trump’s dropping his lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, as well as two administrative claims he had made against the federal government that he currently controls.

The Justice Department said Mr. Trump would not himself receive money from the fund. But it did not provide many other details about how it would operate or who could be eligible for compensation. That fueled criticism that the money was a “slush fund” that Mr. Trump would use to pay supporters who have faced federal investigations and convictions, including those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

You know, that is pretty f%$#ing corrupt ……… But wait, there's more.

The "settlement" also includes provisions ending all audits of Trump and his Spawn by the IRS.

The Justice Department has granted President Trump, his family and businesses immunity from ongoing inquiries into their taxes, a potentially lucrative arrangement that could shield the president from significant financial liability.

The provision, quietly inserted on Tuesday as a supplement to a remarkable deal that also created a $1.8 billion compensation fund aimed at benefiting Mr. Trump’s allies, protects the president, his relatives and his businesses from pending audits and tax prosecutions.

The one-page document, signed by the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” pending tax claims against Mr. Trump, his family members and businesses.

The provision invited immediate criticism as tax experts raised the possibility that it was illegal. 

POSSIBLY illegal? 

Meanwhile, some House Democrats are working on a discharge petition to force a vote on this fund.

It would be nice if they could, but I'm not expecting much. 

The Cruelty is the Point

Is anyone surprised that adding work rules to SNAP (Food Stamps) does not increase employment?

It's not about getting people to work.  It's political masturbation. 

………

As part of the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act, all “able-bodied adults” 64 or younger who don’t have dependents and don’t work, volunteer, or participate in job training at least 80 hours a month are now restricted to three months of benefits every three years from SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. Previously, the federal requirement applied to those 54 or younger. The new rule, which went into effect in November, also applies to parents of children 14 or older. And it removed exemptions for veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and young adults who’ve aged out of foster care.

Proponents of work requirements argue that they incentivize people who are “work-ready” to seek and keep jobs, reducing dependence on government assistance and upholding the “dignity of work.”

Rhonda Rogombé serves as health and safety net policy analyst for the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. She and her colleagues have studied the effects of SNAP work rules and found that requiring recipients to work does not lower an area’s unemployment rate.

 

How is This Not Dancing on Sailors' Graves?

When Kash Patel went to Hawaii last year, he insisted that it was not a vacation, but rather a working trip where he snorkeled around the wreck of the USS Arizona.

As an FYI, this is generally forbidden, with exceptions being made for surveys of the state of the wreck and for interring survivors of the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, who have requested to be laid to rest there.

I did not think that the Trump Administration could get any more creepy and inhuman.

It appears that I was misinformed.

FBI Director Kash Patel has been caught in yet another eyebrow-raising side quest: a snorkeling excursion to a sunken battleship in Hawaii entombing hundreds of sailors and Marines.

The controversial official’s strange trip was almost a year ago, but leaked now amid mounting scrutiny of his activities in office.

When Patel flew to Hawaii last July, FBI news releases framed the visit as part of his “ongoing commitment to supporting frontline efforts and strengthening interagency partnerships,” noting meetings with local law enforcement and a walking tour of the Honolulu field office. He then went on to Australia and New Zealand.

But the FBI director returned to the island just days later for what government officials described in internal emails as a “VIP snorkel” around the USS Arizona, the Associated Press reports. The battleship was sunk during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and serves as a memorial and a war grave for more than 900 crew members.

Peak Elon

A judge has ruled that the DOGE was stupid and bigoted when it revoked thousands of grants.

Short version: They looked for words which implied non-white, non-mail, and non-Christian using AI, and when this turned up a positive result, they canceled it with no further review. 

The Department of Government Efficiency’s cancellation of over $100 million in grants was unconstitutional, according to a ruling on Thursday. In the 143-page decision, US District Judge Colleen McMahon cites DOGE’s process for eliminating grants, which involved using ChatGPT to determine if something is related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

The ruling, which stems from a 2025 lawsuit filed by humanities groups, says “it could not be more obvious that DOGE used the mere presence of particular, protected characteristics to disqualify grants from continued funding” from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Judge McMahon cites several instances in which DOGE appeared to use ChatGPT to scan and eliminate grants using their relation to characteristics like race, national origin, religion, and sexuality.

Here's a thought:  The statute of limitations for the over-broad and frequently misused RICO statutes is 4 years.

If the 2028 election goes the Dem's way, they would have about 4 mohths to file charges, take them into custody, and ship them to Gitmo. 

Today in the Presumption of Regularity

Once again Federal Judge Judge James Boasberg has ruled against the Trump DoJ.

In this case, he has ruled that the Trump administration's demands for records from pro-trans organizations was retaliation for protected speech.

Basically, he's calling the government lying sacks of sh%$.

Last night, Chief Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted preliminary injunctions in two parallel cases—Endocrine Society v. FTC and World Professional Association for Transgender Health v. FTC—enjoining the Federal Trade Commission from enforcing civil investigative demands against the two leading medical organizations on transgender health. The judge ruled in both cases that the FTC likely violated the organizations' First Amendment rights and engaged in unlawful retaliation against them for their protected speech supporting gender-affirming care. Boasberg further found that the Trump administration and the FTC had pursued the organizations based on "extensive evidence of animus" and "wafer-thin justifications" for their demands. For now, the private communications, internal deliberations, and member information of these two organizations are protected from the Trump administration's escalating campaign of government censorship and retaliation against the medical institutions that support transgender people.

"On this preliminary record, with extensive evidence of animus and wafer-thin justifications lacking evidentiary support, [the Court] finds that WPATH is likely to demonstrate a causal link between its protected speech and the FTC's issuance of the CID,” said the judge in the WPATH ruling. In the parallel Endocrine Society ruling issued the same day, the judge went likewise found similar violations: "The Court finds the same systemic targeting of proponents of medical treatment for gender incongruence at work here. The Society is the latest casualty in some Executive Branch agencies' bid to investigate hospitals, medical providers, and charitable organizations that support transgender health. The CID's focus on academic and medical speech, combined with the FTC's paucity of logic or evidence pointing to a genuine investigation, confirms the conclusion that the CID was likely issued for a retaliatory purpose."

The cases center on Civil Investigative Demands—administrative subpoenas the FTC issued to both organizations in January 2026, demanding sweeping and unprecedented access to their internal operations. The FTC ordered the organizations to turn over decades of internal communications about their clinical guidelines on gender dysphoria, every educational and advocacy material, every financial record, and the names of every member who had ever helped develop claims about gender-affirming care—potentially thousands of people. The CID to WPATH alarmingly reached back to 1979, the year WPATH was founded. The CIDs are part of a sprawling Trump administration campaign to suppress speech about transgender people and crush the institutions that provide it: the Kennedy Declaration, which drove more than 40 hospital systems to shutter their trans youth programs before a federal judge vacated it as unlawful last month; CMS proposed rules that would bar Medicare and Medicaid-receiving hospitals from providing such care entirely; and DOJ subpoenas to hospitals across the country, which federal judges have repeatedly quashed as "smokescreens" for retaliation. The FTC's CIDs were the latest weapon in that campaign.

We really need Nuremberg style tribunals when this is all done. 

Clearly, the Problem is Criticism of the Supreme Court

In writing his opinion emasculating the Voting Rights Act, Samuel Alito used fraudulent data. 

I would argue that this should embarrass the Supreme Court Justice, except that:

• Alito has no shame.
• He doesn't care, and likely know that it was bogus.

The claims Samuel Alito, a supreme court justice, made about voter turnout in Louisiana in a landmark Voting Rights Act case were based on a misleading data analysis, a Guardian review has found.

In his opinion gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last week, Alito said that Black voter turnout had exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. Alito’s claim was copied almost verbatim from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the justice department. It was a critical data point Alito used to make the argument that the kind of discrimination that once made the Voting Rights Act necessary no longer exists.

“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, where many Section 2 suits arise,” Alito wrote in a majority opinion in the case, which concerned Louisiana’s congressional map, joined by the five other conservative justices on the court. “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana.”

But a review of turnout and racial data in Louisiana reveals that assertion relies on an unusual methodology. The justice department brief that Alito cited calculated Black and white voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group over the age of 18. Such an approach is not preferred by experts in calculating statewide turnout because the general over-18 population may include non-citizens, people with felony convictions and others who cannot legally vote. But it does yield Alito’s conclusion that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections in Louisiana.

The widely accepted approach is to consider voter turnout as a proportion of the citizen voting age population or the voter eligible population, the latter of which excludes non-citizens as well as people who cannot vote because of a felony conviction or because they have been deemed mentally incapacitated. When the Guardian analyzed turnout numbers in Louisiana using the citizen voting age population, it found that Black voter turnout in Louisiana only exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election.

This is not the first time that Alito has cited fraudulent data, and it will not be the last.  He is a corrupt hypocrite.