This morning, a headline in the Guardian read: “RFK Jr lied in Senate confirmation hearings, newly revealed documents indicate.” The story by Michelle R. Smith reports that letters, newly obtained by members of the press, contradict Kennedy’s repeated assertions to members of Congress in early 2025 during his confirmation process to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that his 2019 visit to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines.” In fact, in a letter to the Samoan prime minister before the trip, Kennedy said explicitly that he wanted to investigate the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine used there.
Observers claim that Kennedy’s visit empowered anti-vaccine activists in Samoa. After he left, a measles epidemic killed 83 people. Smith notes that knowingly lying to Congress is a crime, although it is rarely prosecuted. Still, Smith points out, the apparent proof that Kennedy lied to Congress is a clear opening for hearings into Kennedy’s testimony, history, and conduct in office—including changing the vaccine schedule after promising not to—that would illuminate what has been happening to the U.S. government, information that would likely prove embarrassing to the Trump administration.
The U.S. is now in the midst of its own measles outbreak, which has killed two unvaccinated people in Pennsylvania. One of them was a newborn, too young for the vaccine and thus dependent on herd immunity. Yesterday, Kennedy suggested that Democratic governor Josh Shapiro’s announcement of the deaths might “have been altogether fabricated by one of the Governor’s hopeful staffers.”
Smith reports that a spokesperson for HHS said: “Secretary Kennedy’s visit to Samoa in 2019 was unrelated to vaccines. Any claim or insinuation based on these letters that Secretary Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress is not only false but outright defamatory.” Kennedy was not under oath in the hearings.
This afternoon, Aram Roston of the Guardian reported that Trump’s war on Iran has “driven the US military into a severe financial crisis.” Roston reports that the U.S. Navy, which is bearing the brunt of the operation, is transferring money from payroll to combat operations, creating shortfalls. Officials are covering that shortfall by raiding other accounts.
This issue has already come up in a July hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, when Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), the top-ranking Democrat on the committee, noted that Defense Secretary Hegseth was using a funding mechanism that “does not make a lot of sense.” Hegseth responded by blaming the “gross negligence” of the Biden administration and its “woke” policies. The ways in which he has spent the department’s budget were not closely examined.
Defense analyst Todd Harrison of the conservative American Enterprise Institute told Roston that the shortages are no secret, but speculated that “that is a deliberate decision of the civilian leaders in the Pentagon, starting at secretary, that this is for political reasons, that they don’t want to look like they’re damaging future military readiness over a war that is becoming increasingly a political liability.”
A former military officer who now works for a company that contracts with the navy told Roston: “They’re f*cked. They shot all their weapons; they trashed all their ships; they ran out of their money.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Navy denied that funds for maintenance and operations have been run down. “The Department of the Navy,” the statement said, “is actively managing its resources to meet current pay obligations on time. We continue to work closely with Congress to address ongoing operational demands and sustain our personnel and readiness throughout the fiscal year.”
In the Washington Post, Evan Halper reported that the administration’s latest move to cancel an offshore wind project and nurture the fossil fuel industry will funnel a fortune to Australian billionaire Michael Dorrell, who donated about a million dollars to Trump’s inaugural committee. The way it works is this: the German company RWE will get $1.2 billion from the U.S. government to give up its wind leases for projects off of New York, California, and Louisiana if it invests instead in “conventional energy” projects. RWE will spend $900 million of that $1.2 billion for a stake in a giant liquefied natural gas project in Louisiana.
Halper reports that that stake is currently owned by a private equity fund run by Dorrell, meaning that the $900 million RWE invests in the “conventional energy” project after abandoning its wind projects will go to Dorrell’s private equity fund.
Administration officials told Halper they had nothing to do with RWE’s decision. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said: “This story is a brazen attempt to insinuate a conflict-of-interest that does not exist.”
Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, had already called for investigations of the more than $4 billion the administration has spent buying the abandonment of offshore wind development. After the new story dropped, he told Halper “These fake ‘settlements’ were already an insane waste of taxpayer funds and a ridiculous charade that seems to be blatantly illegal. This now adds the stench of corruption.”
Huffman said of the buyouts of offshore wind projects: “The deals are deeply corrupt and illegal. When the accountability comes, and I promise you accountability is coming, everyone involved in them will answer for it.”
Last week, Kenneth P. Vogel and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that three days after Trump administration officials awarded a 5-year federal contract worth $85 million a year to the private prison company GEO Group to house people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a subsidiary of GEO Group donated $1 million to MAGA Inc., a political super PAC run by Trump’s allies. Two days after announcing another ICE contract worth $80 million annually, the company donated another $413,000.
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement: “Any allegation that political donations play a role in agencies awarding government contracts are [sic] false. It is not shocking that ICE is announcing more contracts to detain illegal aliens as President Trump carries out the largest deportation operation in American history.”
In a major story for Public Citizen, Zach Everson examined the Trump family’s cryptocurrency products, reporting that Trump appears to have made at least $1.4 billion off crypto in 2025, although he put none of his own money into the ventures. The money, Everson says, comes from foreign governments, pardon seekers, corporate interests, and targets of government investigations.
It also comes from retirement accounts and MAGA supporters who believe Trump when he tells them his coins are a good investment. Everson reports that “Trump’s crypto schemes have left investors at least an estimated $4.7 billion underwater.” The losses reflect “wealth transferred to a small group of early buyers rather than money that simply vanished.
The White House claims: “Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”
This afternoon, Rebecca Ballhous, Sam Kessler, and Angus Berwick of the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family’s new crypto bank is backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, the national security advisor of the United Arab Emirates who is also the brother of the country’s president. Last year, the Abu Dhabi royal invested $500 million in the Trumps’ World Liberty Financial.
Such an investment in a president’s company by a foreign government official is unprecedented. Even more alarming is that Trump is currently negotiating with the UAE over whether it can have access to U.S. artificial intelligence chips that experts fear will make their way from the UAE to China. “How many red flags do we need?” ethics lawyer Kathleen Clark told the reporters. “Trump is selling out our national security in exchange for his own wealth maximization.”
If voters put Democrats in control of either or both chambers of Congress this fall, investigations and hearings into the machinations of administration officials will be epic. It is no wonder Trump appears frantic at the idea of midterm losses.
And the ranks of his supporters appear to be thinning. G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers reported yesterday that Trump approval among American adults is underwater on every single issue, including border security. And there is a strong intensity gap: 49% strongly disapprove of his job as president, while only 17% strongly approve. Morris notes that the “movement against the president is now primarily in his own coalition, with significant softening in the share who say they ‘strongly support’ the job he’s doing.”
As his popularity falls, Trump appears to be adopting the belief that people don’t like him because they don’t understand all he’s done for them. Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Michael Scherer, and Ashley Parker of The Atlantic reported Tuesday that Trump intends to buy a blitz of midterm ads that focus on him, rather than the candidates on the ballot, making the election all about him.
He is already trying to sell that story. Yesterday morning, he tried to recast his disastrous Iran war as a success, posting an AI image of himself in front of a giant American flag, an aircraft carrier, and military aircraft. In the image, he leans over dirt as if it were a desk, with President George W. Bush in the lower left corner of the image surrounded by flames and a pair of empty soldier’s boots. In front of Bush is a sign that reads: “MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED 2001–2021.” In the lower right corner of the image is a picture of the former leader of Iran, killed in Trump’s strikes, with a sign that reads: “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED 2026.”
Journalist Jim Acosta noted, “This is delusional for Trump to post this and it should be covered as such. It was a massive story when Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ during the Iraq War. The image dogged Bush throughout much of his presidency. Should be the same for Trump.”
After the “mission accomplished” post, Trump reposted someone else’s social media post warning that voters are mad at the Republicans not because of Trump but because Republicans in Congress have not gone far enough in implementing Trump’s will.
“I don’t think the [Republicans] fully grasp how badly they are f*cking up right now,” the post read. “I’m talking to people who normally have ZERO interest in politics who are legitimately pissed off. They are not seeing the major reform they thought would happen and are REALLY MAD about it. No true accountability. No true mass deportations. No meaningful decrease in the deficit. Lots of very long vacations and no work. No bills being passed that REDUCE the government involvement in their lives.”
The poster continued: “I’m very worried the [Republican Party] is sleepwalking toward a midterm reckoning they don’t see coming. People are pissed off that they voted Trump into office and then the [Republican Party] continues to slow-walk every reform people want.”
Later this afternoon, in what seemed to be an attempt to bully Canada—although Canadians and Americans both have made it very clear that strategy is backfiring—Trump signed an executive order directing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” in official U.S. government documents and communications, as well as the Geographic Names Information System.
As Marianne LeVine, Natalie Andrews, and Amanda Coletta of the Wall Street Journal reported, in Trump’s discussion of his executive order, he harked back to his change of the name of the Gulf of Mexico in official U.S. documents.
“We took something called the Gulf of Mexico, we changed it,” the president of the United States said. “So if you think about it, we have a gulf and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean. So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific.”
—
Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/27/trump-iran-war-navy-budget
https://www.citizen.org/article/donald-trump-crypto-investors-4-7-billion-underwater/
https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/trump-canada-lake-ontario-executive-order-e66b7512
https://www.inquirer.com/health/measles-deaths-pennsylvania-rfk-shapiro-dispute-20260826.html
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/25/health/measles-deaths-pennsylvania
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/trump-midterms-ads-maga/688409/
https://www.military.com/hegseth-says-not-giving-dod-15-trillion-funding-greatest-threat-us-faces
https://www.dw.com/en/lake-ontario-lake-america-trump-renames/a-78537838
X:
SecKennedy/status/2092723195228909676?s=46
Acosta/status/2092948785055838428
Trump’s Truth:
There was a man named Doug Sharp.
I knew him from research for my Tupac book. We spoke a few times about his different ties to the late rapper. Doug was a former actor who was trying to make ends meet, but failing. He had little money. His career flattened out. His car broke down. I usually don’t give interview subjects dough (you don’t pay people for talking), but, oh, a year after our last talk I sent him some bucks to help with car repairs. He sounded like life had him drowning and he needed … someone. Something. A moment.
Earlier this week, he sent me a suicide e-mail.
There were four of us on the chain—I didn’t know the others. The letter was seven paragraphs long, and read—in part …
The life ending act has already be ‘executed.’ A Single shot 9mm hollow point bullet to the right temple. A DO NOT RESESSICATE ORDER IS IN PLACE WITH MY PRIMARY CARE PHYSICIAN AND IN CALIFORNIA SUICIDE FALLS UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE RIGHTS OF A DNR; ADDITIONALLY I AM WEARING A DNR BRACELET AND NECKLACE.
I have journals, VHS tapes from when I did standup and a myriad of photos. I would llike to ask you and Jeff Pearlemen to share this inofration and workout the boundaries of what is wanted and what is not worth your time. Feel free to compose a story or do nothing; it’s not like I am going to find out and I understand that what I am asking steps over the bouandaries of acquaintances.
I think back to the days and years when I had a wealth of friends; howevver I was never able to feel the love. I felt unworthy and always believed the love would end; and it did.
I called 9-1-1 to report, and hope—maybe—nothing had yet happened, or Doug backed out. I was on hold for 10 minutes. Ten minutes. I ultimately hung up and forwarded LAPD the letter. Nothing happened.
Doug Sharp is gone.
This is the second time in my life someone has sent me a suicide letter. The first happened about 12 years ago; a former classmate named David Clingerman. He had a wife who loved him; a daughter who loved him. But he could no longer withstand the pain.
Life is hard. Even when people seem chipper and OK, life is hard. We all need help, positivity, reassurances, kindness, empathy.
We need one another.
Life is hard.
In this episode, SpaceNews’ Mike Gruss interviews Jeff Janicik, founder and chairman of Innoflight. They discuss Golden Dome, Artemis and working with big numbers for the Space Development Agency. Sponsored […]
The post The electronics ‘under the hood’ of space networking appeared first on SpaceNews.
While the only good week is one without any homicides, homicides declined this week. As of Friday 9am, D.C. has reported has only one new homicide this week, bringing the total for the year to 68*. Last year, during the same time period, we had 102 homicides, and in the surge year of 2023, there were 176 homicides during that time.
Unfortunately, non-violent crime categories trended upwards, while violent crimes pretty much leveled off. It’s still unclear if we will achieve another 33 percent drop in homicides for the third straight year–a trend that began pre-occupation, in the Biden era. Right now, we’re on pace to do so, but we will need slightly less than one homicide per week for that to happen. It’s worth noting that the first three months of the year had only twelve homicides (versus 34 in the first three months of 2025), and since then, we have had 54 homicides (versus 59 in the same time period in 2025)**.
Hoping next week gets us back to a zero homicide week.
*Three of the 71 murders reported this year actually occurred in other years (e.g., a missing persons case from 2023 turned into a homicide case this year with new evidence). Also, occasionally homicides get reclassified so the annual total can increase or decrease by one, with or without any homicides.
**As best as I can tell, this seems to be a general pattern in much of the Northeast, making me wonder if the crappy winter weather played a role. Could be wrong about the pattern or the explanation though.
Dubai Airports, the entity that runs Dubai International (DXB), have come up with a logo, which you can see above.
DXB is the world’s biggest international transit hub, which explains the arrowed “X” in the center. The overall concept here is solid.
What we don’t like is how the two halves are offset vertically. What’s the point of this? It causes whole thing to drop and stumble. The first time I saw it, I thought it was a mistake. It also makes the “X” look more like a “K.”
Here, let me fix this…
Much better. The Dubai Airports people can thank me later.
Meanwhile, something I’ve always wondered: why is it “DXB” and not “DBX?”
The post August 28, 2026. DXB. appeared first on AskThePilot.com.
Links for you. Science:
In a 2023 interview, Trump’s new FDA pick laid out a vision for ‘conservative-based’ science
Scientists left this farm field alone. Thousands of orchids appeared
FDA approves first Alzheimer’s blood test for Americans as young as 40
NIH Reportedly Flagging, Freezing Policy-Focused Grant Applications
Florida continues push to repeal four required vaccines for public, private schools: “Your body is a gift from God”
2 people die from measles in Pennsylvania, marking state’s first deaths in 35 years
Mutations in filamentous bacteriophages spark eco-evolutionary feedbacks in Pseudomonas aeruginosa
Other:
Why Getting High Has Only Gotten Cheaper
Smaugs
To lower energy costs for DC renters and homeowners, pass the GRID Act
Dolly Parton, Queen of Country Music, Dies at 80
Actually Smart
Donald Trump’s Summer of Screwing Our Allies
ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS
States Are Quietly War-Gaming Trump Interference in the Midterm Elections
Democrats don’t agree on how to talk about trans athletes. Just look at Ohio.
The Supreme Court Is Helping Trump Rig the Midterms
Castles Made of Sand. Why I Did Not Return to the Government Job I Loved
Comments on OMB research rule mysteriously removed from federal website
It’s time for some game theory
Dolly Parton, Superstar Whose Songs Spoke to Millions, Dies at 80
Stop Talking To Me, Google Search
Vivek Ramaswamy Tells Voter He Supports Max Miller To Preserve GOP Power
Is This Social Media’s Big Tobacco Moment?
D.C. Groups Hit the Road to Flip Congress — And Gain Statehood
Leading Sephardic & Mizrahi Organizations Challenge New York Magazine’s “Habibi City” Over Erasure of Middle Eastern Jews
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Faces Resignation Calls as Measles Outbreak Worsens
The AI Slop Backlash Is Actually Having an Impact
Judge strikes down Texas ban on drag shows, tells people offended by them ‘just don’t go’
Karen Attiah Is Ready to Go Back to the Washington Post
‘132F’: meet the man calling out NYC’s infernally hot subway stations
The Rich Own the Media They Want to Take Your Social Security
Dolly Parton seemed like she’d live forever, but she poignantly reminded us that nothing lasts
Trump-Aligned Board Threatens to Demolish the Kennedy Center
A Republic of Excuses
America is lawless. Are Dems ready to get tough on crime?
I Was a Child Actor. No One Deserves That Fate.
Hadn’t been there in a while. Enjoy.
Entrance to the art of state fairs exhibit
Butter Carton Dress Worn by Princess Kay of the Milky Way–Mary Ann Titrud
Horseshoes from County Fairs
And this is a bench:
Fun (but depressing?) data analysis project from Louis Abraham, showing how repetitive Claude is in the words it chooses when submitting GitHub pull requests. Abraham, in the project’s readme:
GitHub pull request descriptions, grouped by the words they are written with rather than by anything they were told to look for: eight ways of writing, and every description belongs to one of them. One of the eight was 1.0% of the corpus at the start of 2025 and is 45% of it by the middle of 2026.
If you want to get a little more depressed, I’ve been doing deeper reading into AI watermarking research, and one of the admissions in Google’s white paper on SynthID-Text — the watermarking scheme Anthropic says Claude is going to start using — is that the technique incurs “some reduction to inter-response diversity”. That means different answers to the same prompt become more similar to each other — there’s less variety to watermarked text responses. That’s a load-bearing problem given that Claude clearly already struggles in this regard before watermarking its output.
Speaking of tariff refunds, here’s an official statement from Senator Elizabeth Warren from a few weeks ago:
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote to Target, Apple, Amazon, Nike, Motorola, Walmart, and Energizer pushing these companies — each of which have or are expected to receive massive rebates from the Trump Administration for tariffs paid last year — to provide refunds to customers.
“I urge you to pass along any refund you may receive to the consumers who paid higher prices for your products while the tariffs were in place,” wrote Senator Warren.
NEW: Apple reportedly got $2.2 BILLION back in tariff refunds. Amazon got $600 MILLION.
What’s their plan to give YOU your money back?
Warren published the letters she sent to the CEOs, including Tim Cook:
Reports indicate that Apple has applied for a refund of the roughly $3.3 billion in tariffs you paid in 2025, and as of July 30th, that you have received nearly $2.2 billion in refunds. This amounts to a multi-billion dollar windfall, which could still grow if more of your refund petitions are granted. You have claimed that you “plan to reinvest any amount we receive back into U.S. innovation and advanced manufacturing,” but this vague statement offers no clarity as to where this money will go: indeed, it implies that you will not be returning it to the millions of consumers who purchased Apple products last year and paid higher prices. [...]
You have received an astronomical cash infusion in the form of a tariff refund, and Apple customers who paid increased prices for your products, ostensibly due to tariffs, deserve to know how that money will be spent. Your vague statements about “reinvesting” the refund leave hardworking Americans who paid hundreds of dollars more to buy Apple products in the dark about why they paid those increased prices and where their money will go. To better understand the disposition of any tariff refund you might receive, I request that you respond to the following questions by August 21, 2026.
Amongst the 11 questions she asks, the only one that seems pertinent is #5:
(5) How much did Apple increase prices on products in 2025?
(a) For what products did Apple increase prices, and how many of these products were directly impacted by tariffs?
Unless I’m missing something, the answers are “$0” and “none”. Apple increased none of its prices on any of its products in response to tariffs in 2025. The iPhone 17 lineup, in fact, surprised many observers and made news by holding prices steady.
In May 2025, Warren co-signed a letter to the FTC encouraging them to discourage large profitable companies from raising prices due to tariffs. Apple — a large profitable company — didn’t raise prices at all, which seemingly was what Warren thought they should do. But now she’s expressing outrage that Apple got a refund for the tariffs whose costs the company covered, and her followers are left to believe that Apple did raise prices and is keeping the money.
Nicole Carpenter and Diego Argüello, reporting for Game Developer:
“There was a specific window of time this year where we charged tariffs to customers,” Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser explained in an e-mail to Game Developer confirming the news. “We tried absorbing the cost for a while, but that was financially difficult for a small company like ours. We made the tariff a very obvious and clearly labeled line item on checkout for any customer affected.”
Panic also set up a website to explain the 19% tariff surcharge. [...] The refund amount a customer will get back depends on how much they purchased.
“It’s just not our money to keep, and it felt really good to give it back,” Sasser said. “That’s an easy way to know you made the right decision.”
He continued: “Still, it took a lot of work for us to file all the paperwork to get the refund from the government, and it took work to build a little system to process the refund, and sometimes it felt like, wait, why are we seemingly doing more work than even gigantic companies are on this issue? That felt weird. But I guess it makes sense in a way, because our small size means we’re far more directly affected by something like a tariff.”
Sasser said he hopes Panic never has to talk about tariffs again.
Cool story from a cool company, and amen to the day we never hear about tariffs again.
Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:
Apple confirmed to 9to5Mac that the ads rollout in Maps began in the last few days. And it will continue ramping in the weeks ahead to all users.
There are two places you’ll find ads in the Maps app:
- Before searching: Suggested Places in the search screen will feature an ad.
- After searching: Ads will appear in search results when relevant.
Before searching, I saw an ad for an HVAC contractor 12 miles away in “Suggested Places”. Knock on wood but I currently have no HVAC problems, and even if I did, I’d just call someone and have them come here. Then I waited a few minutes and looked again. This time I saw an ad for Tommy’s Express Car Wash (“Get your first month free”), 23 miles away in the middle of a suburban shopping mall. Apple Maps estimates it would take me 1 hour 8 minutes to drive there right now. I’ll get right on that.
The first organic (non-ad) suggested place is a coffee shop 300 feet away.
This is a touch meta. But indulge me because I think it could have real world effects. When real world players start acting on new perceptions, beliefs, prognostications, those beliefs become meaningful and consequential even if they’re absurd or unsupported in themselves. Because they are driving actions.
What’s going on? In short, over the last couple of weeks Republicans and Donald Trump have decided they’re losing this election. It’s not clear to me that anything has actually changed — except to the extent that for the party on the ropes “nothing changing” becomes a bigger problem the closer you get to Election Day. What’s focused people’s attention is Donald Trump yesterday reposting a fan’s tweet (on Truth Social) basically arguing that Republicans are heading toward an electoral tsunami and don’t seem to realize it. He’s also reportedly gearing up to have all the GOP’s election ads focus on him — which has Democrats basically ecstatic.
You’ll notice the key detail that tells us where we’re going: Republicans. Donald Trump has decided they’re losing the election and he knows whose fault it is: Republicans. There are many layers of comedy and poetic justice at work here. Trump appears to be rewinding about ten years, certainly way before 2021, to a point where there was a Republican Party as anything other than a manifestation of the will of Donald Trump. There’s no need to even argue this point. The Republican Party is Donald Trump now. Everything it does is what he demanded and ordered. The identity between the two things is total. He calls the shots.
The GOP joins that long list of people and things, most recently Benjamin Netanyahu, who thought that unlike all the others, they were the ones Trump really loved deep down in his heart.
In any case, this clicked with another thing I’ve been wondering about. A few days ago TPM Reader PT wrote me an email the upshot of which was this: ‘You and everyone else keeps saying that Trump is worried about the midterms and the prospect of hearings and all the rest — but is he? Are you sure? Because he’s not really acting like that at all.’
This was, as I told PT, a really good question and one I’ve actually been struggling to get my head around for a while. I actually think it’s eating him up. He seems to be worrying about it a lot — though you can certainly argue that he’ll just stonewall Capitol Hill for two years, so who cares? But he’s not acting like it at all. His election subversion plans have been going nowhere and that mostly still applies even after his incremental win on his mail in ballot executive order earlier this week. And on the conventional politics front, he’s not doing any of the things you’d expect a president in his position to do. He really has no good options on Iran. But he’s not ramping back any of the unpopular policies where he has room to maneuver. He’s very conspicuously broadcasting the message that his real focus is things like his ballroom, the reflecting pool and a bunch other vanity projects and grievances. Those are things many people may not care that much about in themselves but they send a clear message that the things people actually care about are nowhere on his list of concerns. The Canada trade war pulls the whole litany together and tops it with a bow. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to just punt this to the winter or the spring. And yet he didn’t.
So does he actually care? My best stab at this, and what I told PT, is that I think it’s both. And we’re thinking about it too linearly. Yes, he’s really worried, upset, mad. But at the second term’s mix of intense cocooning, several additional years of age and the absence of anyone around him but the most abject yes-men has simply made it impossible for him to do anything but stay in the mode of self-assertion, grandiosity and impulse — some mix of the Mad King and “Anthony” the little boy in the classic Twilight Zone episode who mind-zaps people to the cornfield. As much as you may hate Trump, the 2016 version of him was cannier. He was more dextrous. He can pivot in unpredictable and often advantageous ways. Even the 2024 Trump was meaningfully different from this one. Maybe that’s because he was, in meaningful ways, fighting for his life, or at least his freedom. He was also fighting for the ability to wreak vengeance on his foes.
Whatever it is, I don’t think he’s capable anymore of getting out of the mode he’s been in since January 2025. So yes, he really is worried about the midterms. But he’s unable to do the things that could at least lessen the velocity of impact. Sure, maybe he’ll lose terribly but the fix is in and they’ll say all the Republicans won, or refuse to seat the Democrats. But I doubt it. If anything Trump’s sudden rediscovery of a separate entity called the Republican Party is him telling us he doubts it, too. I don’t take anything for granted. And Democrats need to remain vigilant. But deciding that it’s Republicans who screwed up makes perfect sense. It heals all the ego wounds he may feel he is about to suffer.
Jeff Halter has done it again: after bringing back the single greatest After Dark module (Ben Haller’s Lunatic Fringe game, via a modern runtime named Lunacy), he’s now released Afterglow:
Running After Dark modules in the present day has involved fussy configuration of Mac OS emulators or vintage hardware. Even then, no single emulator or vintage computer can faithfully run every module: some animate too fast, some too slow.
Afterglow is an emulator built specifically for running After Dark modules — the original 68k module code, not a remake or port — with no dependencies on ROMs or classic Mac OS. Created in the spirit of software preservation, it makes After Dark easy to enjoy today and for years to come.
All this in the same summer during which Halter released Stacks, his beautiful native modern HyperCard player.
Last night, at exactly 9:25—9 to 5—the top of the Empire State Building in New York City lit up pink. The antennas of Chicago’s Willis Tower—formerly the Sears Tower—lit up pink, too. So did the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier, which also sported a giant pink heart. The Hoan Bridge in Milwaukee; Reunion Tower and other buildings in the Dallas skyline; and the Longfellow, Burns, Fore River, Braga, and Zakim bridges of Boston; Caesar’s Superdome in New Orleans; and, of course, Nashville’s KVB Bridge and historic Metro Courthouse were all lit up in pink last night.
The Arthur Ashe Stadium played “Jolene” during the U.S. Open. Jack White played Jolene in London. Elsewhere in London, the Buckingham Palace band played “9 to 5.”
All this and more for a woman born on January 19, 1946, in Sevier County, Tennessee, in a cabin in the Smoky Mountains without electricity or running water.
Dolly Rebecca Parton was the fourth of twelve children born to illiterate sharecropper Robert Lee Parton Sr. and Avie Lee Caroline Owens. A musical prodigy encouraged by her mother, Dolly was singing on local radio and television shows in Nashville by the time she was 10 and debuted at the Grand Ole Opry when she was 13. In 1964 she moved to Nashville, where other musicians quickly recognized her talent as a songwriter. Over her career, she would write songs made famous by Kenny Rogers, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, and others.
In 1965, Parton made her first record, and the following year she married asphalt paver Carl Dean, who stayed out of the limelight during their 59-year marriage. Following the success of Parton’s first record, country music star Porter Wagoner invited her to become part of his show in 1967.
There she blossomed, joining Wagoner to record a dozen studio albums that produced a number of top 10 hit singles. Playing off Wagoner’s famous rhinestone-studded suits made by Ukrainian-American designer Nudie Cohn, the petite Parton adopted huge hairstyles and emphasized her figure, and soon began wearing rhinestones herself.
She once told a journalist that she modeled her public image after a woman others called the “town tramp” but whom she saw as a glamorous contrast to the women in Parton’s own life. “She had bright red lipstick, long red fingernails. She had high-heeled shoes, little floating plastic goldfish in the heels of them, short skirts, low-cut tops, and I just thought she was beautiful. When people would say, ‘She ain’t nothing but trash,’ I would always say, ‘Well, that’s what I’m gonna be when I grow up.’” But, in an industry dominated by men, Parton also noted her style was a way for a small woman to “fill my space.”
By the 1970s, Parton was coming into her own, taking on the music industry on her own terms.
“Find out who you are and do it on purpose. And do it with purpose,” Parton was famous for saying. “Don’t ever sacrifice who you are, your principles and your morals and your values to just try to get ahead in business. It ain’t worth it.”
Rather than running from her upbringing in rural poverty, Parton embraced the values that upbringing had inspired in her. In 1971 she hit #1 on the country charts with her song “Joshua,” inspired by the Appalachian men around whom she had grown up whose rough looks covered their quality. In the same year, her “Coat of Many Colors” reached #4, telling the story of how her mother had made her a coat of rags, rich with love. Those who valued possessions over love, she sang, were the ones truly impoverished. In 1972 she wrote “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” about the peace and humanity of rural life, “walking home from church on Sunday with the one you love, just laughing, talking, making future plans.”
She parted ways with Wagoner in 1974, and her farewell song to him, “I Will Always Love You,” became a global sensation that reached #1 on the country charts in 1974, 1982, and again in 1992, when it spent 14 weeks at #1 after Whitney Houston covered it. In 1974, Parton also delivered “Jolene,” the desperate plea of a woman to a beautiful rival not to “take my man.” “Jolene,” too, hit #1 on the country charts.
In 1975 and 1976 the Country Music Association named Parton Female Vocalist of the Year, and in 1978 it honored her as Entertainer of the Year, just three of the many awards she would win as her musical career took off not just at home but also internationally.
In 1976, Parton began working with manager Sandy Gallin, and in 1980 she launched her film career, starring with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in 9 to 5, a comedy with a subversive subtext about discrimination against women. In the film, for which Parton wrote the theme song, three working women replace their sexist, domineering boss and implement programs their colleagues like, including equal pay, flexible hours, and an on-site daycare center, all of which result in dramatically improved office productivity.
A massive success at the box office, 9 to 5 opened doors for Parton in the movie industry, leading to parts in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Steel Magnolias, and other films. She and Gallin created a production company, Sandollar, which produced her television specials and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
For almost sixty years, Parton was a member of the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada, a labor union that represents about 70,000 singers and players and is affiliated with the AFL-CIO. She joined the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) in 1969.
AFM International president Tino Gagliardi told John Nichols of The Nation: “Before she was an icon, Dolly was a working musician. Dolly never forgot the musicians who helped bring her music to life. By standing firm for solidarity and treating every player with dignity, she elevated our entire profession.”
In 1989, Sandollar helped to bring awareness and empathy to the AIDS crisis with the documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt. The film explored the lives of five of the individuals memorialized in panels on the AIDS Memorial Quilt and called attention to the Reagan administration’s lack of response to the epidemic.
In 1990, Common Threads won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and in the 1991 song “Family” that she wrote with Carl Perkins, Parton sang: “Some are preachers, some are gay, some are addicts, drunks, and strays, but not a one is turned away when it’s family. Some are lucky, others ain’t, some are fighters, others faint. Winners, losers, sinners, saints, it’s all family.”
In a conversation with host Larry King in 2016, Parton noted that she had taken heat for her support for the LGBTQ community, but that she did “not believe that we should criticize and judge other people. I think we should be accepting and loving. We are all God’s children. We are who we are, and we should be allowed to be who we are…. I just think that we should be more loving, more caring. We are who we are. If you’re gay, you’re gay. If you’re straight, you’re straight, and you should be allowed to be, you know, how you are, and who you are.”
In 1986, Parton bought an interest in a theme park owned by Jack and Pete Herschend in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Renamed “Dollywood,” the park became the biggest ticketed attraction in the state, now visited by about 4 million people a year and employing about 4,000. “I always thought that if I made it big or got successful at what I had started out to do, that I wanted to come back to my part of the country and do something great, something that would bring a lot of jobs into this area,” she told a reporter.
Two years later, she established the Dollywood Foundation to support education in Sevier County. In 1990, her “buddy” program decreased the high school dropout rate in classes that participated from 35% to 6%. In 2016, the Dollywood Foundation created the My People Fund—as in, these are my people—providing immediate financial assistance to families who lost their homes in wildfires in Sevier County that November. It donated more than $12 million.
In 2020, Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center to fund the research that allowed researchers to prove that mRNA vaccine technology worked. That research led to grants that enabled development of the Moderna mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 that saved millions of lives. She also helped encourage others to get vaccinated, taking her own shot on camera in a dress she had cut the shoulders out of so the doctor would have easier access.
Beginning in February 2022, under the Grow U program, Parton provided 100% free tuition, fees, and books to any of the 11,000 employees at any of the 25 amusement parks and attractions under Herschend Enterprises. The president of Dollywood told reporters that one of the key tenets of the Dollywood Foundation is to “learn more.” He said that Parton is “very supportive of the employees learning and continuing to grow themselves.”
That drive for growth and opportunity was behind Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which Parton founded in 1995 to put books into the hands of every young child in Sevier County. Her inspiration, she said, was her father, who was “the smartest man I have ever known but I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all his dreams.” The program has grown until it now serves children across the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.
In February 2018, Parton donated the 100 millionth book from her Imagination Library to the Library of Congress. It was a copy of her book Coat of Many Colors, dedicated to her father.
By the time Dolly Parton died on Tuesday, August 25, at the age of 80, her Imagination Library had delivered more than 332 million books to more than 3 million children.
“When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true,” the Imagination Library website reads. “I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer. The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.”
When children age out of Dolly’s Imagination Library, they receive a final letter from her hoping they would “have a great time” in school and urging them to keep reading.
The letter ends: “You and all of your friends are very special. There is no limit to what you can do or how far you can go. Just remember the lessons my family taught me—dream big dreams; learn everything you can learn; and care for all those who care for you. You do all of these things and you can be anyone you want to be.
“You are terrific, and remember…
“I Will Always Love You,
“Dolly.”
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/02/09/dolly-parton-dollywood-tuition-education/
https://abc7chicago.com/archive/7386332/
https://dollywoodfoundation.org/history/
https://www.today.com/parents/moms/dolly-parton-mom-phrase-rcna208813
https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/dolly-parton-obituary-unions-9-to-5/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/aug/26/dolly-parton-style-fashion
https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-sand-gallin-20170421-story.html
https://screenrant.com/dolly-parton-buffy-the-vampire-slayer-executive-producer-role/
https://www.dollyparton.com/
https://imaginationlibrary.com/
https://imaginationlibrary.com/letter-from-dolly/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/arts/music/dolly-parton-dead.html
https://shouldntneedtobealawyer.com/posts/dolly-parton-at-167673821?pr=true
https://people.com/all-about-dollywood-theme-park-12067846
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/music/music-features/dolly-parton-dies-lgbt-advocacy-1236682086/
YouTube:
X:
dariacott/status/2092449109911445561
HQNewsNow/status/2092322219162575350
boston25/status/2092418666302201970
Bluesky:
thedarkpages.bsky.social/post/3mtxiu6clq22a
cwebbonline.com/post/3mtxf2edp4s2h
john-in-chicago.bsky.social/post/3mtx32i5krk2l
reneepatrice.bsky.social/post/3mtxmt6jbq222
itsjoels.bsky.social/post/3mtwh44kwzk2u
mikewildspeaker.bsky.social/post/3mtxelpakok2i
wutangforchildren.bsky.social/post/3mtx5s3qrik2x
wutangforchildren.bsky.social/post/3mtybgvvpas2m
massgovernor.bsky.social/post/3mtx7ktcfjc2o
nashville.gov/post/3mtxieawo322y
Of late, U.S. airlines have embarked on a flurry of international expansion. United, in particular, has been throwing darts at the map, moving into markets (Split, Kaohsiung, Ulaanbataar) many Americans have never heard of.
Yet one destination continues to remain conspicuously absent: Poland.
No U.S. carrier flies to Poland. Nor has any American carrier served Poland since Delta flew to Warsaw in the early 1990s, after its takeover of Pan Am’s European network. The city was dropped shortly thereafter.
Why? This isn’t a trick question. I don’t know the answer. Surely it’s odd. Not only are there millions of Polish-Americans, but the largest community of them lives in and around Chicago, a major hub for both American Airlines and United. Polish carrier LOT, meanwhile, has flown to both O’Hare and JFK for decades. We compete with foreign carriers on hundreds of routes; why not this one?
Is it a political thing? Is there not enough premium fare traffic to warrant such a flight?
A LOT Boeing 787 at New York’s JFK Airport.
The latter would seem a likely reason, but many of the recently unveiled routes are to lower-yield leisure markets. Surely Warsaw, or a summer route to Krakow, could bring in as much revenue as Sardinia or Tenerife or Dubrovnik, one would think.
American Airlines did announce a Chicago-Warsaw flight just before COVID hit. The launch was put on hold, then the whole idea was scrapped.
The Israeli carrier El Al sometimes operates charters from JFK to the Polish city of Katowice. My guess is that these are remembrance tours of some kind, as the Auschwitz-Birkenau site is nearby to there.
While were at it, what other “missing routes” are you there? Can you name another city-pair that seemingly should have regular service, but for whatever reasons doesn’t?
The post Dlaczego nie Polska? appeared first on AskThePilot.com.
Nature-based projects are generating more environmental data than ever before. Satellites observe landscapes from orbit, while field teams capture what is happening on the ground. Yet these data sources often […]
The post LatConnect 60 and Phi Earth Partner to Connect Space and Soil appeared first on SpaceNews.
LAFAYETTE, Colo. (August 26, 2026) — Small satellite manufacturer and mission services provider Blue Canyon Technologies, part of RTX’s (NYSE: RTX) Raytheon business, has unveiled its latest spacecraft subsystem, the […]
The post RTX’s Blue Canyon Technologies introduces new spacecraft mission enabler appeared first on SpaceNews.
In this episode, SpaceNews’ Mike Gruss interviews FrontGrade CTO Lorne Graves. They discuss how processing power on spacecraft is adapting to the rise of megaconstellations, what benefits satellite processing power […]
The post The threat environment and processing at the edge appeared first on SpaceNews.
I still remember the first time I set foot on Market Street. I was a freshman in college, and big cities were still a very new thing to me. It felt like I was swimming through an ocean of foot traffic; the towering shops and hotels seemed like they were built by giants.
That Market Street is gone now. In its place is a giant empty field of asphalt in the center of San Francisco — a desolate gray waste baking in the sun, empty except for the occasional bus and a tiny smattering of bicycles.
On either side of this yawning wasteland are giant sidewalks with only a few pedestrians, boarded-up stores, and the occasional small, sad retail chain. At midday on a Monday, what was once the bustling commercial heart of San Francisco feels abandoned.
What happened? In fact, Market Street was destroyed by several things:
The city’s decision to close the street to cars (but not buses), enacted in 2019
The crime wave of the early 2020s
The pandemic, and the shift to remote work
The second and third of these, together, are known as the “Doom Loop”. It’s been talked about a lot, so let’s just cover it briefly.
The pandemic, and the economic and social changes it brought, came out of the blue. But San Francisco was particularly vulnerable to the shock. As in many American cities, 20th century urban planning and zoning rules concentrated office buildings in the downtown area and put housing farther out. This meant that once people stopped going downtown for work, the neighborhood was just a lot more empty, because almost no one lives there. This is in contrast to big cities in Europe and Asia, where downtown neighborhoods are typically mixed-use. (SF also had a stronger shift to remote work, because of the heavy presence of the tech industry.)
The crime wave was another shock. Although SF escaped the destructive rioting that hit other West Coast cities like Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles in 2020, it had plenty of looting in downtown areas — especially around Union Square and the San Francisco Centre mall on Market Street. Even after the pandemic ended, San Francisco suffered especially hard from the statewide wave of “smash-and-grab” store thefts. It got so bad that American Eagle actually sued the San Francisco Centre for being negligent toward crime, reporting over 100 serious incidents of violence and harassment in its downtown store.
Crime and emptiness fed on each other. Less foot traffic meant fewer “eyes on the street” to discourage property crime. Property crime and reduced foot traffic forced stores to close. Fewer stores meant less foot traffic, and so on. The collapse of downtown culminated in January 2026 with the closure of the San Francisco Centre, the iconic mall that had formed the commercial heart of Market Street, but which had been gutted by the Doom Loop. It now stands as a looming, empty, boarded-up structure dominating the area around the Powell Street train station:
The intersection of Powell Street and Market Street, once bustling and alive with tourists, shoppers, and street vendors, is now virtually empty, except for a forlorn line of people waiting to get on the iconic streetcar:
But recent years have seen the first glints of recovery from the Doom Loop. For one thing, crime has begun to fall. 2025 alone saw a 27% decrease in property crime, including a 29% decrease in burglaries, a 22% decrease in larceny (including retail theft), and a 24% decrease in robbery. 2026 has seen further drops. The reasons for this are interesting, but I’ll go into them another time. Suffice it to say that this has made downtown SF feel much safer and more orderly. The stereotype of SF as being overrun by drug addicts and dangerous vagrants still holds true of a few areas of the city, but from Powell Street to the bay, the city no longer feels like a post-apocalyptic movie.
Meanwhile, the business district is showing a few sluggish signs of life. The AI boom is causing a (modest) rebound in the demand for office space. Some office buildings are being converted to housing, raising hopes that SF’s downtown can finally become a mixed-use neighborhood. A concerted effort to revive Union Square after the devastation of 2020 is beginning to bear fruit. And both companies and the SF city government are mandating return-to-office policies.
And yet Market Street remains a dead zone. Weekday foot traffic is still down by half compared to 2019:
The wounds inflicted by the Doom Loop will take lots more time and effort to heal. Retail businesses have to be encouraged to open. Defunct buildings have to be torn down and rebuilt. Crime has to be reduced even further, and so on. This will all take years.
But there’s one other factor contributing to the death of San Francisco’s most important street, and it began before the pandemic: The ban on cars.
In recent years, a number of cities around the world have experimented with car-free zones and traffic reduction policies in their downtown areas. The most famous of these is Paris, with its Limited Traffic Zone, its expansion of pedestrian malls, and its road closures during Sundays and holidays. Shortly before the pandemic, San Francisco decided to enact a plan its leaders thought was in the same spirit: closing downtown Market Street to all car traffic:
But although Market Street was closed to cars, it wasn’t closed to buses, delivery trucks, and licensed taxis. This was in keeping with the general “transit good, cars bad” thinking of modern progressive urbanism. But a bus will kill a pedestrian just as easily as a car will, which is why Market Street remains empty of pedestrian traffic. This mathematically guaranteed that Market Street would become a more empty place: Cars were subtracted, but pedestrians weren’t added.
The direct cost of this policy is pretty obvious. When people can’t park in a parking garage on Market, and when Uber and Lyft can’t pick people up and drop people off on the street, it makes businesses on the street less attractive to visit. Sure, people could bike or take the train, but not everyone wants to do that; instead, they’ll just go to restaurants or stores in other areas. In addition, restaurants on Market Street now can’t deliver food, cutting them off from an important source of revenue. That probably helps explain why Market has suffered more from the Doom Loop than other areas.
But what did SF gain by deleting cars from Market Street and adding nothing at all in their place? Cars create a little bit of pollution (though modern cars are very clean), so that was removed. Pedestrians who run off the sidewalk and into the street are somewhat less in danger of being killed (though still in danger). These are meager benefits indeed.
What about bike traffic? Presumably, reduced danger of being hit by a car would allow more cyclists to ride down Market Street. But in fact, bike traffic on the street is considerably lower than it was pre-pandemic:
A lot of that is the Doom Loop — there are simply fewer stores for cyclists to visit on Market Street, so there’s less reason for them to go there. But much of downtown hasn’t collapsed the way Market Street has, and presumably cyclists could use the street as a way to get to places like the Embarcadero, Chinatown, etc. They’re not doing it. Cyclists are a relatively rare sight on Market these days.
One reason might be that although the city planned to make the car-free stretch of Market more bike-friendly, it never really followed up on those plans. So it’s still pretty dangerous to ride a bike or scooter down the street — you can get caught in the train tracks, and you can get hit by a bus or truck.
In fact, this sloppy implementation is a general pattern with the Market Street closure. Josh Koehn had a great article in 2023 about how the plan degenerated from its initial form:
A $600 million capital project called Better Market Street promised to create a futuristic boulevard that would safely buffer bicycles and scooters on elevated sidewalk lanes, separating the little wheels from rapid bus lines, vintage streetcars and pedestrians…The new vision for Market Street, advocates said, would create a safer, more vibrant multimodal avenue…More than a decade of planning went into alterations of Market Street…
But funds for anything beyond modest improvements along a three-block stretch of Market Street between Fifth and Eighth streets…have evaporated…The cost of Better Market Street, which soared above a billion dollars before being reined in to a still-staggering $604 million, is almost double the amount spent on the tormented Van Ness Avenue redesign…
City officials enraged safe streets advocates when they announced in late 2020 that the elevated bike lanes on sidewalks would be scrapped.
SF’s lack of state capacity had a lot to do with this; constant cost overruns inevitably require ambitious projects to be scaled back. The pandemic also obviously got in the way. But part of what killed the vision for Market Street is simply that the vision itself was never very good.
If you look at Paris, it’s immediately clear how that city’s car-limitation measures were designed to create spaces for pedestrians. In certain areas like the banks of the Seine, Paris didn’t just ban cars; it also banned buses and trucks, so that people could walk safely. Paris also reserved much larger areas for pedestrians on certain days.
But Market Street has no more pedestrian areas than it did in 2019. You can still only walk on the sidewalk. If the entire street were reserved for foot traffic during certain times — like SF does with Valencia Street, for example — then these periodic temporary pedestrianizations could become an event that regularly draws lots of people to the area. This could include farmers’ markets, street concerts, and other fun events. Those would give people a reason to walk around Market Street even before new businesses opened.
Alternatively, if SF permanently closed off some portion of the street to buses and trucks, that stretch of road could become a pedestrian public square, similar to the center of Times Square:
Instead of thinking about how to create spaces that people would actually want to walk around in, the SF government — and the many activist groups and nonprofits that influence its policy — appear to have adhered to the simple rule of “bikes and buses good, cars bad”.
This is a way of thinking centered around modes of transit rather than public space. It implicitly conceives of areas like Market Street as thoroughfares to take people from one place to another, rather than as actual destinations. Market Street’s car closure is all about forcing people to go down Market Street in a different way, rather than about encouraging people to go to Market Street.
There’s something inescapably and depressingly suburban about this way of thinking. In the suburbs, life is lived point-to-point — you go from house to strip-mall to restaurant to office without thinking much about the places you traverse in between. In a suburb, the mode of transportation — how you get from Point A to Point B — is the important question.
Americans are a suburban people; even many of our urban areas look like suburbs in other countries. So perhaps it’s inevitable that the urbanists who closed Market Street off to car traffic would think entirely about modes of transportation and ignore the vibrant city center whose destruction they exacerbated. Instead of Jane Jacobs, they ended up just being the Robert Moses of buses.
Again, careful attention to car limitations in cities like Paris, where people are used to occupying urban places instead of simply whizzing through them, would have proven enlightening. Paris’s Limited Traffic Zone doesn’t ban cars in downtown areas; it merely bans cars from transiting through those areas. People who stay within the area can still drive. The point is to make downtown spaces into places people occupy rather than places people simply go through. What San Francisco did to Market Street was, in many ways, the exact opposite.
In lieu of turning Market Street into a pedestrian paradise, SF’s best move is probably just to allow private cars again. It’s not the optimal way to create more foot traffic to nourish retail businesses, but it’s the quickest and easiest. In fact, Mayor Daniel Lurie has made moves in this direction, allowing certain Uber, Lyft, and Waymo cars to operate on the street. But they might as well simply go all the way. Best to simply bury the era when Market Street was a large empty scar commemorating the decline of San Francisco; if San Francisco can’t be Paris, at least it can return to what it used to be.
Links for you. Science:
Staggering 90% of biomedical papers now show signs of AI help. The figure, which is much higher than previous estimates of Large Language Model use, is for papers published in December and archived in PubMed
The Case Against Splitting Up the MMR Vaccine
Outputs of generative diffusion models are often unattributable
What really happened on Easter Island? For decades, an influential theory blamed the Rapanui for their own downfall—a story made famous by Jared Diamond’s book Collapse. New evidence tells a different tale
Emergence Biases in Molecular Evolution
‘They Want Us All To Leave’: Interior Reassigns Dozens of Senior Staff
“I’m Not Talking About 2020. I’m Talking About 2026.”
Other:
Eyeing the midterm elections, D.C. is taking the fight for statehood to the states
Dolly Parton, Public Health Hero, Dies at 80
The Man Behind the Anti-Flock Darth Vader Mask Wants to Know: ‘When Will This End?’
Canada’s Resistance Benefits the US. Trump is our oppressor; those who fight him help us.
No matter what, we have to tear down Trump’s corrupt ballroom (Damnatio memoriae must be an essential part of detrumpification)
Calif. colleges bought everyone ChatGPT. No one knows what to do with it.
Trump Officials Propose Sale of ‘Woke’ Painting by Kehinde Wiley. The State Department recently removed the painting of Dominicans from a U.S. embassy, noting it was by the artist who made Barack Obama’s presidential portrait.
Trump’s Obsession With Dominance Has Made Him a Huge Loser
Police departments weren’t looking for officers abusing Flock. We did it for them.
Oyez, Oyez and Ahoy! Paddlers Protest John Roberts’ Private Island
Trump Administration Has a Different Way to Drain Harvard Funding
So the most powerful person in the world is insane. Now what?
We Asked the Women of the SEC About “Shrekking”
Main Character Syndrome
KING CARNEY ACTIVATES KONG MODE WITH ZERO FUCKS
Two weeks. No power. Gary, Indiana, failed Black citizens. Like many others, Indiana has entered the data center race and is particularly attractive due to the availability of cheap land. NIPSCO, a monopoly utility that serves Gary, is leading the effort.
What’s more punk than … a sewing machine?
Trump takeover has been a financial disaster for the Kennedy Center
Raze Application Filed For Howard’s Wonder Plaza, Clearing Path For New Fusion Building
Losing the Iran War: The Economic Front
Anacostia River water quality improves, but it’s still not safe for swimming
First deaths from measles in Pennsylvania in 35 years
The AI Hater’s Manifesto
Trump administration says it might demolish the Kennedy Center if court blocks renovations
Kennedy Center finances deteriorated sharply after Trump name change
It Should Be Harder to Apply for a Job. No, Really. Thanks to a dwindling supply of open roles, “one-click” applications, and the rise of artificial intelligence, it’s easier than ever to apply for a job. We’re all paying the price.
How Trump’s Crazed Fury at Canada Is Already Backfiring Badly for Him
Farmers Struggle to Get Basic Services From Depleted Agriculture Dept. After the departure of thousands of federal workers, rural communities report problems obtaining loans, grants, technical assistance and support for infrastructure and other services.
Trump’s border wall construction threatens rock art as old as the pyramids: ‘The ancestors are still here’
DHS acknowledges the noncitizen numbers it touted on voter rolls were inflated
As part of its nuclear fusion processes, the Sun produces a particularly interesting isotope of helium, known as helium-3. Some of this helium-3 escapes the Sun's gravitational pull as part of the solar wind, a stream of charged particles that emanates out across the Solar System.
Over billions of years, this wind has bombarded every body in the vicinity of the Sun, including Earth's Moon. Lacking a magnetic field or atmosphere, the Moon's surface has no barrier to prevent the constant flow of this wind.
This means that helium-3 has been striking the lunar soil, or regolith, for a long time. These helium ions penetrate only a little way into the individual grains of this soil, but periodically meteorites have struck the lunar surface to churn the soil, mixing some of this helium-3 a little below the surface.
Chance Miller:
Not to be overshadowed by the new Mac mini and Mac Studio, Apple today has also released an updated version of its Polishing Cloth. In an age of everything getting more expensive, the new Polishing Cloth is cheaper than before at $9 (down from $19). [...]
Apple released the Polishing Cloth in October 2021 and sold out almost instantly. While it has become a meme, it is genuinely a good polishing cloth for your Apple gear.
Moore’s Law comes for everything eventually.
Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:
Apple has officially announced its next product event, where it will unveil the iPhone 18 Pro lineup and its first foldable iPhone. The event will take place on September 9 at 10 am, PT. The tagline reads “Surprise and shine,” and the invitation features a glowing Apple logo with a sun shining through.
Apple generally prefers Tuesdays, but on years when Labor Day falls in the second week of September, they move it to Wednesday.
As a general matter, people who write about or strategize about politics greatly overestimate our collective ability to shape how an election will play out, the extent to which clever ideas can pivot the course of an election in any new direction. We’re more small sailboats on a big ocean than some kind of latter-day Neptune actually changing the waves or the wind. But, all that said, Trump may have handed a unique card for Democrats to play against Republican candidates, especially those bordering Canada, which include key states like Michigan, Alaska, and Maine, as well as states with strong trade dependencies like Iowa and Ohio. This part requires little explanation. Heading into an ugly midterm cycle with one damaging and needless war underway, it boggles the mind that he thinks it’s a good idea to start a trade war with America’s second-largest trading partner. Trade wars raise prices; and the cost of living is the largest single issue in the election.
But there’s an additional dimension to the politics.
One of the Trump opposition’s consistent challenges through both his presidential terms has been making the case that Trump’s selfishness, corruption, incompetence and malevolence affects voters’ individual lives. One blindspot for the opposition during Trump’s first term, at least through February 2020, was that for many people, as crazy and terrible as Trump acted, if you just went about your life and didn’t pay attention to the news, none of it really mattered. Trump inherited a strong economy and then juiced it with free spending and tax cuts. Many people could just ignore it and go about their business. And of course that’s what a big cross-section of the population is always doing, especially those loosely committed voters who are most up for grabs in any election.
The dynamics are different here. Not unlike the case with the Iran War, most people not only oppose this trade war, they’re baffled by it — like why is this even happening? It’s all Trump’s erratic impulsive and grandiosity and aggression bundled together. And unlike the Reflecting Pool or the ballroom or corrupt prosecutions of people you may not know, this is actually going to affect you, and not in a good way. Trump’s pathetic threat to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America plays nicely into this. It drives home that this isn’t some arcane trade dispute that maybe you don’t understand. It’s clearly another of his ego-trip, dick-swinging gyres, only this time really clearly at your expense.
A lot of Canadians think we, as Americans, have turned against them or are attacking them. And they are totally justified in assuming that and being super angry about it since our country could stop this at any moment. And we’re not. But Trump has actually had pretty little success convincing Americans that Canada is some aggressive power harming or taking advantage of America.
As you can see in this poll, Trump has had a fair amount of success changing Republicans’ views of Canada. But even among self-identified Republicans, most of whom are off-limits even in a wave election, a fairly big majority still has a favorable opinion of Canada. Unsurprisingly, Democrats’ views are unchanged and couldn’t be much higher. Independents’ views are still upwards of North Korea levels of support. But even that 80% number is a little deceptive. Substantial slices of “independent voters” are actually firmly aligned with one party or another. In voting terms, they’re Republicans or Democrats. They are independents as a matter of political identity rather than voting behavior. Put this all together and what it amounts to is that outside consistent Republican voters, nobody buys any of this.
The political line of attack is pretty clear. Unlike so many other examples of chaotic and degenerate bullshit or egregious damage that shows up over time in indirect ways, this one is crystal clear: it’s all on Trump and something almost everyone feels in the here and now. You’re already struggling to make ends meet. Trump doesn’t care and isn’t doing anything about it. And all Trump will do is go create more chaos, do some stupid thing no one was asking for for his own kicks, making your situation worse.
As I said at the top, most voters will come to these conclusions on their own. And an incumbent party usually takes the hit for whatever goes wrong, whoever’s fault it was. But it’s important for the opposition party to help it along. And more specifically, Democrats need to frame these attacks not just around Trump but around Republican candidates who need to answer for it and for him since they support him 100% on anything and everything.
When some stars or legends die, they spur outpourings and commemorations that appear to transcend the mere mechanics and scaffolding of their fame. Dolly Parton was clearly one of those stars. For many reasons, with her this isn’t surprising. It was predictable and for very good and understandable reasons. But it still hits a certain way when you watch it unfold. It’s certainly not her greatest or hundredth greatest accolade. But I saw someone point out that in the hours after her death she was lauded on the social media feeds of the Democratic Socialists of America and Donald Trump’s — an emblem of her ability to transcend some of the most acidic divides in contemporary American society.
Music has always played a central role in my life. And I have an uncannily strong aural memory, despite having until quite recently virtually no technical knowledge about music theory at all — which tones are associated with which alphabet letters, chord progressions, etc. What I’ve studied pretty closely through my life is popular music history. And if you study the history of the production, composition and performance of music starting around the beginning of the 20th century, you know that one of the biggest throughlines separating the happy stories from the sad and tragic ones is rights and royalties and songwriting credits. Which will bring us back to Parton in a moment.
I’m always amazed at just how much money rights and royalties throw off over time. You can be a huge, huge pop star and if you don’t write the songs, you can end up with little or nothing a few years after the peak of your stardom. But writing the song is just the start of it. There’s a complex bundle of rights and powers associated with a composition. First there’s the moral right involved, the ability to say, ‘I wrote this song and you didn’t.’ Then there’s control over who gets to do what with the song. Then there are money streams which are traditionally and typically divided 50/50 into songwriting royalties and publishing royalties. Again, if you write songs and you hold onto most or all of these rights and, critically, if you write songs other people want to sing or record, it’s hard to overstate just how much money this can bring in over time. This is why Bob Dylan, within just a few years of his fame, was already a millionaire a few times over (a much bigger deal in the mid-’60s than now). So many other acts were covering his songs.
Parton, early in her career but really throughout, often indulged or leaned into the caricature of herself as a loud-looking, big-boobed, hillbilly girl. But she was a shrewd self-advocate and businesswoman from the very start. In 1966, at the age of 20, she set up her own music publishing company, something highly unusual for a country artist at the time, especially a female one. She didn’t have full ownership of the music publishing company at the start, though she gathered the remainder back over the next few years. That decision set the stage for roughly doubling the income she drew from her own songbook by holding both the 50% that went to the songwriter (Dolly Parton) and the 50% that went to music publisher (Dolly Parton).
Parton guarded those royalties consistently and aggressively. In one oft-told story, Elvis Presley, during his mid-’70s comeback, wanted to record “I Will Always Love You,” what turned out to be one of Parton’s signature songs and a #1 country hit for her in 1974. That was a big deal for Parton, still relatively early in her career. But at the last minute — apparently literally the night before the studio session — Presley’s notorious manager, Colonel Tom Parker, called Parton with a catch. It was their standard practice, according to Parker, that when Elvis recorded a song he got half the publishing rights. Not just half those rights and revenues on his recording, but half the publishing rights to the song itself in perpetuity. An anguished Parton refused, and that was the end of it. When Whitney Houston had a global mega-hit with the song in 1992 (many people, especially outside the U.S., have no idea it’s even Parton’s song), she had a massive windfall because of this close management of that bundle of rights. Published reports put her royalties on that recording, just during the ’90s, at over $10 million. That would be over $20 million today.
One of the consistent themes of all the obituaries and remembrances of Parton we’re reading today isn’t just her multifaceted talent but her bounteous and fairly low-profile philanthropy over many decades. This meticulous and far-sighted management of her songbook, which runs into thousands of songs, was the cornerstone of the fortune that made it possible.
Wikipedia:
The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a heuristic in systems thinking coined by the British management consultant Stafford Beer, who stated that there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”. It is used in systems theory, and is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system can or should be read from the intentions of those who design, operate, or promote it. When a system’s side effects or unintended consequences reveal that its behaviour is poorly understood, then the POSIWID perspective can balance political understandings of system behaviour with a more straightforwardly descriptive view.
I don’t recall seeing POSIWID before, but I love the concept. A friend sent this to me, with the quip that I forgot to include a link to it in my “What Is the Point of the DMA?” piece this week. Indeed, it encapsulates my arguments about the DMA specifically and the European Commission generally. The purpose of the DMA is what it does, not what you imagine it is intended to do.
In the same vein, I have been thinking too about the famous anecdote reported by Adam Lashinsky for Fortune back in 2011:
Steve Jobs doesn’t tolerate duds. Shortly after the launch event, he summoned the MobileMe team, gathering them in the Town Hall auditorium in Building 4 of Apple’s campus, the venue the company uses for intimate product unveilings for journalists. According to a participant in the meeting, Jobs walked in, clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, clasped his hands together, and asked a simple question:
“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”
You can argue all you want that the DMA is intended to give developers and users choice and freedom. My retort is “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” The DMA is what it does — and it isn’t that.
(Also, if you follow the link quoted above to Stafford Beer’s Wikipedia entry — man, put a hat on that guy and damned if he doesn’t look like Jim Dalrymple. It would be even more uncanny if his name had been Stafford Heineken.)
Trump started the morning on social media saying: “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to [be] doing much business with Ontario any longer.” On X, the account of the Republicans pushed the idea of renaming the lake.
In contrast to MAGA’s performative nonsense, Canadian officials announced today that on September 8 they will begin to impose tariffs of up to 50% on about 700 products worth about $20 billion in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs on Canada. Those products include U.S. steel, aluminum, chain saws, appliances, processed cheese, and clams. Paul Vieira of the Wall Street Journal noted that the tariffs appear targeted toward plants in Republican-held congressional districts.
Canada will also invest about 7.5 billion in Canadian dollars ($5.4 billion U.S.) in Canadian firms and workers hit by the trade war.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s threat of yesterday that the U.S. intends to strangle Iran’s economy isn’t faring much better than Trump’s attempt to rename Lake Ontario.
As economist Paul Krugman pointed out in his newsletter today, China can supply much of what Iran needs and has incentive to do so as Trump’s “self-inflicted quagmire in Iran” saps U.S. strength and respect. Krugman warned that Bessent’s threat “reeks of desperation,” a scent China would surely smell.
Krugman concluded with a prediction: “I can safely predict that the Chinese will make sure that the Iranian regime survives, and that they will thoroughly enjoy watching Trump slowly twist in the wind over the Strait of Hormuz.”
Indeed, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian today rejected the administration’s call for isolating Iran economically. “Cooperation between China and Iran has always been conducted within the framework of international law and should not be interfered with or disrupted,” Lin said. “China has already stated many times that it firmly opposes illegal unilateral sanctions.… China will take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard its own rights and interests.”
As Krugman pointed out, the Iran war has forced the U.S. to abandon many of its Middle East bases—that’s why the USS Lincoln couldn’t be resupplied—and it has little prospect of reclaiming them now that Iran has been emboldened to attack the troops there. MS NOW national security analyst Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired Army general, posted Saturday: “In my judgement, the US Armed Forces have probably permanently lost access to 15 Persian Gulf bases. Iran now poised to control access [to] the Gulf States. US will have to negotiate new access in western Saudi Arabia, Israel, southern Europe.”
On Sunday, in The Atlantic, Robert Kagan noted that the Iran war has reconfigured the Middle East. For years, Iran was on the ropes, with the U.S. dominating the region alongside countries aligned with the U.S., including Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Now Iran has withstood six months of attacks from the U.S. and Israel. Its survival has reconfigured the power structure of the region, with Iran emerging as the area’s dominant power as it has demonstrated its ability to damage the oil and gas infrastructure of its neighbors.
It is plain, Kagan wrote, that “Washington fears escalation more than Iran does,” limiting what the U.S. can do as Iran not only exercises the right to collect tolls on vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz but also decides who can use the strait. That control, Kagan notes, gives Iran “leverage every day, over dozens of countries.” It can “reward friends, punish enemies, extract revenue, force the loosening of sanctions, and make governments think twice before opposing Iranian policies…without firing a shot.”
The policy of Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to bring a “warrior” ethos to the Pentagon by putting it “on offense, not just on defense” using “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” and having “violent effect, not politically correct,” has given the U.S. a tremendous loss in Iran.
And a report today from Megan Rose and Hannah Allam of ProPublica suggests that officers in U.S. Central Command recognized the dangers of Hegseth’s approach to warfare. Rose and Allam report that when Hegseth polled top commanders about cutting the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program instituted after civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan hardened opposition to the U.S., they universally objected.
Current and former defense officials told the journalists that Hegseth apparently thought senior officers would agree with him that focusing on civilian security was “woke” and would hamper “maximum lethality.” Instead, they uniformly disagreed, warning that scaling back the effort to protect civilians would “result in decreased efficiency of U.S. lethal operations due to an increased risk of target misidentification and reduced battlespace awareness.” Hegseth gutted the program anyway, and U.S. strikes have killed hundreds of civilians. Now it appears the administration is considering rebuilding the program.
Social media this morning picked up that a U.S. Air Force transport aircraft that had taken off from Joint Base Andrews near Washington, D.C., landed in Moscow. Later reports said the U.S. official traveling to Moscow was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John Ratcliffe. There’s been lots of speculation about the purpose of his trip to Moscow, but so far it’s all guesses.
Journalist Greg Sargent notes that Trump’s trade war with Canada will hit the Midwest right before the midterms. Josh Turek, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Iowa and a leading voice for a new prairie populism that works for farmers, told Sargent, “It’s a really dangerous time to be a farmer in the Midwest.” “You talk to farmers, and they’ll tell you it’s one gut punch after another,” Turek said. Iowans tell him they feel betrayed.
Michigan’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, said that “Trump is escalating a trade war with Canada for his own vanity” and that his Republican opponent, former representative Mike Rogers, is a “rubber stamp” for Trump’s plans.
Maine, too, will be hit by the trade war with Canada. Yesterday, Vice President J.D. Vance was in Maine campaigning for Senator Susan Collins, but while he praised her, she did not show up for the rally. Vance made it a point to call Collins “independent,” a descriptor that many former MAGA candidates in Maine are using in this election cycle.
Collin’s Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, was a logger on the Canada border before pursuing a career in politics, giving him an authentic voice as he explains the cost of a fight with Canada for Mainers.
NBC News national political reporter Sahil Kapur noted today that Ralph Alvarado, who is running for the U.S. House from Kentucky’s sixth District, which Trump won in 2024 by 15 points, has scrubbed his website of references to Trump and has changed his slogan from “America First Fighter” to “Independent Leadership.”
Still, Trump appears to think his power is unchallenged and, in the midst of the fires all around him, continues to be focused on his renovations to Washington, D.C. A report today from Jonathan Edwards in the Washington Post showed that ticket sales and fundraising for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts plummeted after Trump’s name was added to it, even though the board insisted his takeover was a financial rescue.
Today Trump’s lawyers suggested that the administration might have to demolish the Kennedy Center if the courts don’t allow the board to renovate it over the next two years and add Trump’s name to the facade. After the renovations, it would read: “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.”
As Gary Grumbach and Dareh Gregorian of NBC News reported, Justice Department attorney Brantley T. Mayers wrote: “Without those efforts, the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down, with a determination to follow on what to build on the site, such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years.”
Trump’s threat to destroy the Kennedy Center unless he gets to do what he wants to it seems to be a metaphor for the United States: “Nice country you got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it.”
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/25/business/canada-us-tariffs-american-consumers
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/08/iran-middle-east-power/688374/
https://newrepublic.com/article/214669/trump-canada-trade-war-backfiring
https://www.ms.now/news/vance-susan-collins-trump-maine-senate
Trump’s Truth:
X:
Republicans/status/2092241418609713392
mccaffreyr3/status/2091313067200266407
sahilkapur/status/2092281557213925691
Bluesky:
Alain Pannetrat, founder of Lectronz:
Lectronz is a marketplace for open-source hardware makers and DIY electronics. Most of our sellers are not factories or well-funded start-ups. They are engineers, independent designers, and hardware enthusiasts working from spare rooms, garages, and tiny workshops.
Some earn a living from their products. Some sell only a handful of boards each year. Others build ten units simply because they created something useful and want to share it with the community. Occasionally, one of those experiments grows into a real business. Every Arduino begins somewhere.
But the European Union’s new packaging rules now threaten to kill the world of makers and micro-entrepreneurs, putting jobs, livelihoods and an entire ecosystem of innovation at risk.
Pannetrat says these new regulations will require even one-person hobbyists to spend hundreds of euros per year (and file paperwork) for each country they ship to. The costs will far outstrip the money they make from selling a few dozen gadgets or circuit boards, and the hassles are probably worse than the costs. But these regulations are no big deal at all to big companies like Amazon — they only hurt smaller companies, and they’re effectively crushing to hobbyists.
A couple of years ago Philadelphia banned retailers from using plastic bags. It’s worked out great. More people bring reusable shopping bags with them, and if you need a bag from the store, you get paper bags that they charge you a nickel each for. A small price to encourage bag reuse, and the end result is no more plastic bags. Regulations can be very effective without adding any complexity or annoyance to daily life.
