Strongman's Accomplices

On this day:

350
Roman usurper Nepotianus, of the Constantinian dynasty, proclaims himself Roman Emperor, entering Rome at the head of a group of gladiators.
1140
French scholar Peter Abelard is found guilty of heresy.
1839
In Humen, China, Lin Tse-hsü destroys 1.2 million kg of opium confiscated from British merchants, providing Britain with a casus belli to open hostilities, resulting in the First Opium War.
1932
Lou Gehrig and teammate Tony Lazzeri hit four home runs in one game, and hit for the natural cycle, respectively. These two feats are both less common than a perfect game, which has occurred twenty-one times in one hundred and twenty years.
1937
The Duke of Windsor marries Wallis Simpson.
1940
World War II: The Battle of Dunkirk ends with a German victory and with Allied forces in full retreat.
1940
World War II: The Luftwaffe bombs Paris.
1969
Melbourne-Evans collision: Off the coast of South Vietnam, the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne cuts the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Frank E. Evans in half.
1982
The Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom, Shlomo Argov, is shot on a London street. He survives but is permanently paralysed.
1989
The government of China sends troops to force protesters out of Tiananmen Square after seven weeks of occupation.

***

"[classics] teaches you 'to read difficult things. ... In a global environment of fact-dodging, misreporting, conspiracy theories, fake news, and outright lies, skills in reading difficult things are those that the world most needs."--Mary Beard

***

Bass secured a spot on the November ballot and Pratt was running in second place as of early Wednesday morning, ahead of progressive city councilwoman Nithya Raman. These are the best candidates for mayor in LA's drifting hulk.
The electoral talent search for Maine senator seems to settle between a 120-year-old career politician and a Nazi.

***

Apparently, accusations of being a Nazi are true unless you have Nazi tattoos.

***

Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist congressional candidate endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, deleted a previous Twitter account that included thousands of posts and reposts expressing support for abolishing police, prisons and borders, as well as seizing private property and nationalizing major industries and calling into question Israel’s right to exist.

***

The metaphor of “running different software” that fathers sometimes use turns out to be a reasonable approximation of what the neuroimaging shows in new fathers.

***

Tom Steyer, running for California governor, spent over $200 of his own money on the race. Is that reasonable?

***

Strongman's Accomplices

The American president has threatened military action against Denmark, a NATO ally, if it doesn’t surrender Greenland to the United States. He moved to punish a US senator — a retired Navy captain and combat veteran — for reminding service members they must not obey illegal orders. He posted a grotesquely cruel message on social media, jeering the deaths of director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. He sent his press secretary to warn CBS News that unless it broadcast a presidential interview in its entirety and unedited, "we’ll sue your ass off.” He deposed Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, then announced that the United States was now “in charge” of that country, and “we’re going to be taking oil.” He summoned Justice Department attorneys to berate them for not moving fast enough to prosecute his critics and opponents. And when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, an unarmed American citizen, the White House instantly pronounced her a “domestic terrorist” and refused to open an investigation into the shooting.

This is not normal political combat. It isn’t just more of the partisan roughness that Mr. Dooley had in mind when he remarked that “politics ain’t beanbag.” This is unabashed White House thuggishness, a vengeful aggressiveness that makes no effort to disguise itself by pretending to care about constitutional norms or democratic values. And all of it is cheered by tens of millions of Americans who cannot seem to get enough of President Trump’s cascade of gratuitous cruelty, insults, and threats.

When the president was asked in a recent interview whether he recognizes any check on his powers, he didn’t bother with euphemisms. “Yeah, there is one thing,” he said. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

For anyone who takes the American constitutional system seriously, that statement is genuinely terrifying. Not because Trump is wrong but because — let’s face it — he’s right.

The British statesman William Gladstone praised the US Constitution as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” For more than two centuries, the self-correcting durability of the constitutional framework the Framers devised has rightly been regarded as a masterpiece of statesmanship.

But now the checks and balances on which that system depends are failing. Built into the constitutional architecture was an assumption of public virtue. It was not designed to contain a president who would openly declare himself restrained only by his own (nonexistent) morality and whose outrages would be endorsed by a major political party.

…..

The Trump phenomenon isn’t an aberration our constitutional machinery can correct. It is the failure the Founders anticipated when they warned of what happens after virtue collapses and applause replaces judgment. The Constitution still exists on paper. What is disappearing is the public will to enforce its meaning. A republic does not fall when a strongman declares himself unchecked. It falls when millions hear him say it — and approve.--from Jacoby

Jacoby's pretty rough on Trump because he's implying this dangerous phase of our republic is somehow limited to him, or characterized by him. Rather, the country has struggled with its ideals since its inception.  It is the basis of the Civil War, the battles between amoral political parties, the essence of those politicians who claim they plan on "fundamentally transforming the United States of America." These people are not ignoring America's principles; they don't like them.

Politicians eager to seize the wealth of citizens or gerrymander a state are not redirecting the nation; they are changing its nature. Politicians who would pack the court are trying to bypass the very checks and balances that have allowed the country to succeed. Trump is philosophy-free, but he is no aberration. You don't fight repeated, pointless wars, allow erosion of fundamental American rights, and amass $38 trillion in debt without true incompetence and a deep disregard for the citizenry. Trump is a problem, but he is only the current iteration of a long line of them. And, as the results of incompetence, greed, ambition, and cynicism circle the landing strip,  there will be more to come.

 

The Inadequacy of Truth

On this day:

455
Sack of Rome: Vandals enter Rome and plunder the city for two weeks
1692
Bridget Bishop is the first person to go to trial in the Salem witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts. Found guilty, she is hanged on June 10.
1763
Pontiac’s Rebellion: At what is now Mackinaw City, Michigan, Chippewas capture Fort Michilimackinac by diverting the garrison’s attention with a game of lacrosse, then chasing a ball into the fort.
1774
Intolerable Acts: The Quartering Act is enacted, allowing a governor in colonial America to house British soldiers in uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns, or other buildings if suitable quarters are not provided.
1793
French Revolution: François Hanriot, leader of the Parisian National Guard, arrests 22 Girondists selected by Jean-Paul Marat, setting the stage for the Reign of Terror.
1919
Anarchists simultaneously set off bombs in eight separate U.S. cities.
1962
During the 1962 FIFA World Cup, police had to intervene multiple times in fights between Chilean and Italian players in one of the most violent games in football history.
1966
Surveyor program: Surveyor 1 lands in Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon, becoming the first U.S. spacecraft to soft land on another world.
1967
Protests in West Berlin against the arrival of the Shah of Iran turn into riots, during which Benno Ohnesorg is killed by a police officer. His death results in the founding of the terrorist group Movement 2 June.
1995
United States Air Force Captain Scott O'Grady’s F-16 is shot down over Bosnia while patrolling the NATO no-fly zone.
1997
In Denver, Colorado, Timothy McVeigh is convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

***

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”--Mamdani

***

Every member of the cat family Felidae, from the smallest domestic tabby to the largest Siberian tiger, shares the same broken gene. They cannot taste sweetness.

***

On Monday, Los Angeles traded for future Hall of Fame edge rusher Myles Garrett in exchange for draft picks and young edge rusher Jared Verse, completing a defense that had already added veteran defensive backs Trent McDuffie and Jaylen Watson this spring. Everybody is comparing this to the sea-changing Boston-Moss trade in 2007.

***

FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend has sued MS NOW, accusing the news organization of using “sham” anonymous sources to “push knowingly or recklessly false allegations” that she abused bureau resources.


***

These Delaney Hall riots over the quality of prison food are a wonderful metaphor for our society of innuendo.

***

The Inadequacy of Truth

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
This is not political or economic or historical; this is daycare talk.
By collectivism, political theorists and their own champions have meant a social order in which the claims of the group—often defined and enforced by the state—override individual choice, property rights, and voluntary exchange. Production and distribution are guided not by prices and consent but by political priorities, and individual autonomy is tolerated only insofar as it serves collective ends. That is not a caricature; it is the standard definition of what’s espoused in fascist, socialist, and communist literature.

The word’s lineage matters. Zohran Mamdani is consciously drawing on a tradition that stretches from Karl Marx, who rejected “bourgeois individualism” in favor of collective ownership, through Vladimir Lenin, who implemented it via one-party rule, to Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, who enforced it at colossal human cost. Even outside the communist tradition, collectivism was proudly embraced by Benito Mussolini, who defined fascism as the negation of individualism in favor of the state as an ethical whole, and by strongmen such as Idi Amin, who expelled ethnic minorities and appropriated their land in the name of the national good.

The historical record is not ambiguous. Where collectivism has moved from rhetoric to reality, the results have been grim. The Soviet Union’s collectivized agriculture led to chronic shortages and mass famine through both disastrous economic policies and by design to suppress dissent. China’s Great Leap Forward killed tens of millions. Cambodia’s agrarian collectivism under Pol Pot destroyed a quarter of the population, resulting in the “killing fields” and perhaps the most brutal regime in modern history. In each case, politics replaced price signals, error correction was treated as dissent, and individuals weren’t free to exit the collective.--from Bourne

This reasonable summary is nonetheless a curious approach to this strange problem, which has recurrent outbreaks in the West, like malaria or Ebola, rising, killing, then receding. The basic notion is that if it worked, a martial-law approach to the economy would be acceptable. There is rarely a consideration of abstract value. Doesn't freedom have some value, too? Isn't a free economy indirectly an expression of us?

Certainly, collectiveism has a basic appeal to the species: our tribalness, our envy, our romantic and unreasonable optimism and magic, our deep, cold savagery. But these are the basics of the savannah, rooms in our much more glorious house. What we are is not any of these elements; we have transcended them. We are no longer wanderers looking for an Alpha.

The real question, at its heart, is: where does the struggle to justify an inhuman, oppressive, unsuccessful system come from? Infection? Aliens?

Unit 731.5

On this day:

1215
Zhongdu (now Beijing), then under the control of the Jurchen ruler Emperor Xuanzong of Jin, is captured by the Mongols under Genghis Khan, ending the Battle of Zhongdu.
1533
Anne Boleyn is crowned Queen of England.
1648
The Roundheads defeat the Cavaliers at the Battle of Maidstone in the Second English Civil War.
1660
Mary Dyer is hanged for defying a law banning Quakers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1943
British Overseas Airways Corporation Flight 777 is shot down over the Bay of Biscay by German Junkers Ju 88s, killing actor Leslie Howard and leading to speculation the downing was an attempt to kill British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

***

Tyranny can demand production but not innovation.

***

A meteor exploded off the coast of Massachusetts, causing a loud boom that could be heard throughout the state Saturday afternoon.

***

Bombs, drones, and missiles were exchanged over the weekend between the U.S. and Iran as they continue to redefine what a 'ceasefire' is.

***

Unit 731.5

Change within a free culture will always create new interfaces between the past and the future. Citizen interference with law enforcement, historically a recognized crime, is now apparently at least debatable. The vigilante now has an admired subtype, the vigilangione. Drone warfare has reshaped the requirements of the foot soldier. Technology — and a perceptible ethical slide — has changed our environment and us.

A biotech startup called Bexorg is extracting human brains just hours after death and then hooking them up to specialized life support machines, Science reports. While the tissue no longer has electrical activity, most of its key functions remain intact, allowing scientists to test experimental drugs, such as potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, like never before.

According to the reporting, an extracted brain hooked up to one of Bexorg’s proprietary life support machines, BrainEX, “hovers between life and death.” There’s no spark of consciousness, and yet the brains are kept running on an artificial lung, kidney oxygenate, blood, and other fluids.

Bexorg CEO Zvonimir Vrselja said that the brains come with decades of environmental exposures, histories of drug treatments, and other factors that make them a more realistic testing medium for drugs. “You get cells that have been there for 60 to 80 years,” Vrselja told Science.

Bruna Bellaver, who studies neurodegeneration at the University of Pittsburgh, was also effusive.

“It’s a huge step up from mouse models,” she told Science.

Sunday/Trinity

On this day:

1279 BC
Rameses II (The Great) (19th dynasty) becomes pharaoh of Ancient Egypt.
526
A devastating earthquake strikes Antioch, Turkey, killing 250,000.

1162 

Happy Birthday, Genghis Khan, Khagan of the Mongol Empire
1678
The Godiva procession through Coventry begins.
1889
Johnstown Flood: Over 2,200 people die after a dam break sends a 60-foot (18-meter) wall of water over the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
1921
Tulsa Race Riot: A civil unrest in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, the official death toll is 39, but recent investigations suggest the actual toll may be much higher.
1935
A 7.7 Mw earthquake destroys Quetta in modern-day Pakistan: 40,000 dead.
1941
A Luftwaffe air raid in Dublin, Ireland, claims 38 lives.

1962

Adolf Eichmann is hanged in Israel.
1970
The Ancash earthquake causes a landslide that buries the town of Yungay, Peru; more than 47,000 people are killed.

***

The Flat Earth Facebook group has more than 100,000 members. They vote.

***

Biblioclasm: the destruction of books, especially the Bible. — biblioclast.

***

Sunday/Trinity

Today is Trinity Sunday, and its gospel is the gospel of John 3:16--18, made famous by baseball caps and signs held up in endzones by strange, bearded men with rainbow hair. It is also famous in the seminary. No one wants to give a sermon on this gospel; it always risks heresy.

John's lines summarize the two great difficulties in Christianity: the Trinity and Christ's motive. Muhammad was so bewildered by the Trinity that he solved it with polytheism. The Old Testament scholars expected a leader in the messiah. Conflict and victory.

But the New Testament offers neither. Rather, it creates an incomprehensible spiritual circular genealogy and the Christ who promises no justice, no judgment.

Mystery. And a mercy.

Stats

On this day:
70
Siege of Jerusalem: Titus and his Roman legions breach the Second Wall of Jerusalem. The Jewish defenders retreat to the First Wall. The Romans build a circumvallation, cutting down all trees within fifteen kilometers.
1431
Hundred Years’ War: in Rouen, France, 19-year-old Joan of Arc is burned at the stake by an English-dominated tribunal. Because of this the Catholic Church remembers this day as the celebration of Saint Joan of Arc.
1806
Andrew Jackson kills Charles Dickinson in a duel after Dickinson had accused Jackson’s wife of bigamy.
1814
Napoleonic Wars: War of the Sixth Coalition – the Treaty of Paris (1814) is signed returning French borders to their 1792 extent. Napoleon Bonaparte is exiled to Elba.
1854
The Kansas-Nebraska Act becomes law, establishing the US territories of Nebraska and Kansas.

1871
The Paris Commune falls.

***

Grownups report: President Trump's name must be removed from the Kennedy Center, according to an order signed Friday by a D.C. district judge.

***

Claude Lemieux, who became a successful agent after his 21-season NHL career, in which he won four Stanley Cups, died by suicide on Thursday, according to authorities. He was 60.

***

Astonishing:

Peter Thiel appears to have found a new spot. He isn't alone in looking beyond America's shores.

The PayPal and Palantir cofounder and prominent libertarian has been spending more time in Argentina, The New York Times reported, where he has enrolled his children in school and bought a home in one of Buenos Aires' wealthiest neighborhoods.

Among the ultrawealthy, that fits a larger pattern. The rich are treating their lives in America like part of an investment portfolio: still worth betting on, but increasingly in need of a hedge.--BI


***

Stats

In the days before the Memorial Day weekend, rates on 30 year Treasury bonds hit their highest level in 19 years at 5.2%, and the benchmark 10-year reached 4.7%, the top reading since mid-2007. If those kinds of yields take hold, the scenario for federal interest expense posited in the CBO’s “Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036,” released in February, descends from dire to near-disastrous. Takeaway: America’s track to fiscal safety has lost all margin for error, and nothing demonstrates that better than the long-term impact of loftier-than-expected rates. --Fortune

*

Early results provide no clear evidence that a school's smartphone ban policy reduced screen time or improved psychological well-being.

*

Estimates of data center impact show positive effects on total employment, data-processing employment, construction employment, establishments, house prices, and electricity prices at different horizons after data center growth. We also find positive effects on tax returns, adjusted gross income, and wages, while annual payroll responds less robustly. The results suggest that data centers create measurable local activity, increase house prices, and affect local electricity markets through higher prices.

*

Outside of Sloan and the EECS MEng program, still in the midst of admissions, compared with 2024, our departments’ new enrollments for next year are down close to 20%.

That means that, in total, outside of Sloan, we could have about 500 fewer graduate students. Which means we’ll have many fewer students advancing the work of MIT, and undergraduates will have fewer grad students as mentors in their research.- The president of MIT

*

U.S. natural gas consumers have saved $4.5-$5.3 trillion between 2007 and 2025, equivalent to $237-$276 billion annually.

*

Healthcare and Social Assistance have added nearly 1.8 million private-sector jobs in the US since the end of 2023 while all of other industries combined have lost 127,800 jobs.

*

Chinese battery manufacturer Calb has broken ground on a €2 Billion gigafactory in southern Portugal which is expected to represent more than 4% of the country’s GDP when in full swing.”

*

Latin America is the new frontier for Old Colony Mennonites. They are spread across 200 colonies with 200,000 people in a combined area almost equal to that of the Netherlands and twice that of Israel.

*

Quality-adjusted AI production in the United States grew at over 2,000 percent per year in 2024 and 2025, driven by three compounding forces: expanding data-center capacity, hardware efficiency gains, and—the largest of the three—algorithmic progress.
Treating the AI sector as a coherent economic entity yields preliminary estimates of nominal AI GDP at approximately $250 billion in 2025, growing at roughly 2,600 percent per year in quality-adjusted real terms.
National economic statistics accounts were not designed to track this kind of activity. Statistics agencies should begin developing AI-focused satellite accounts now, before the measurement gap becomes a policy gap.

*

“For the first time in decades, new and recent graduates with at least a bachelor’s degree have consistently higher unemployment rates than the overall American workforce, according to data on 22-to-27-year-olds compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.”

*

Households expecting children report shorter financial planning horizons, which may explain their lower risk-taking. These results suggest declining fertility can increase young adults’ stock market participation through childbearing expectations.

*

In Tajikistan, remittances — the money sent or brought back by migrants — amounted to 48% of GDP in 2024.
According to a report from the International Organization for Migration, about 1.2 million Tajiks were in Russia in mid-2024, which is more than a tenth of Tajikistan’s total population.

*

Exposure increases interclass (high- and low-parent-income) marriage but has no detectable effect on interracial (White and Black) marriage. A spatial marriage market model predicts that residential segregation—one of many forms of exposure—accounts for more than one-third of marital sorting by class but less than 5% by race.

*

Economic relocation to the US vs Europe:

Drones, People, and the Miniaturization of Violence

On this day:

1453
Fall of Constantinople: Ottoman armies under Sultan Mehmed II Fatih capture Constantinople after a 53-day siege, ending the Byzantine Empire. Although the date of May 29, 1453, is that of the Julian Calendar, the event is commemorated in Istanbul on this day of the present Gregorian calendar.
1660
English Restoration: Charles II is restored to the throne of Great Britain.
1780
American Revolutionary War: At the Battle of Waxhaws, Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton massacres Colonel Abraham Buford’s Continentals, allegedly after the Continentals' surrender. 113 Americans are killed.
1903
May coup d'etat: Alexander Obrenovich, King of Serbia, and Queen Draga, are assassinated in Belgrade by the Black Hand (Crna Ruka) organization.
1919
Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity is tested (later confirmed) by Arthur Eddington’s observation of a total solar eclipse in Principe and by Andrew Crommelin in Sobral, Ceará, Brazil.
1953
Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay become the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, on Tenzing Norgay’s (adopted) 39th birthday.

***

The Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, has said the alliance is “ready to defend every inch” of its territory after a Russian drone hit an apartment building in Romania, a member state, during an overnight attack on neighbouring Ukraine.


***

Robinhood launched agentic trading and an agentic credit card today, allowing AI agents to trade equities and make credit card purchases on customers' behalf.

***

Russia has passed a law authorizing its central bank and other financial institutions to repel drone attacks with their own defense systems, as the country struggles to defend against Ukrainian strikes.

The law, passed by Russia’s lower house of parliament on Tuesday, will allow staff at Russia’s central bank to be armed and to operate the systems used to down unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV, or drone) attacks without the involvement of special forces.

***

In Rome, actors could not vote, hold office, or be trusted to give an oath in legal proceedings.

***

A Blue Origin rocket exploded on the launch tower in a fiery blast during a test of its engines on Thursday night, the company said.


***

Boston’s Mayor Michelle Wu is fund­ing a new pro­gram that gives “queer and trans” migrants up to $500 for mas­sages, yoga classes, and 'cre­at­ive heal­ing.'


***

Drones, People, and the Miniaturization of Violence

The Uyghurs are a Turkic and predominantly Muslim ethnic minority spread across Central Asia but concentrated in China's far-western Xinjiang region. It is they who are always referenced as examples of Chinese oppression, in the U.S., called phonetically, wiː.ɡʊr.

Through circumstance and demographics, they have become the largest contingent of foreign fighters in Syria. They were responsible for the fall of Aleppo, indirectly responsible for the overthrow of Assad, and were gratefully integrated into the new Syrian military.

They have demonstrated serious military ability and hostility.

These are the same Uyghurs that the Chinese authorities have been suppressing at home, in the Xinjiang region, for years. Starting in 2017, authorities began sending hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs to "reeducation camps," where they were taught Mandarin and forced to memorize Chinese leader Xi Jinping's speeches, according to human rights organizations. Others were placed under house arrest, harassed, or subjected to extensive surveillance, or had their passports confiscated, according to prior NPR reporting and the findings of the United Nations and rights groups. In 2021, the U.S. labeled China's campaign a "genocide" aimed at eradicating Uyghur identity. (With the West's current infatuation with 'identity,' one would think they would care more.) Beijing slammed that decision and has defended the detention camps as a necessary facet of a wide-ranging de-radicalization effort in the region.

There is speculation that China is very unhappy that these people, an increasingly well-organized and disruptive group, have been welcomed in the Middle East. They also appear to hold a grudge. The belief is that China sees them as a potential destabilizing force within its own borders.

So it is in this new world where size doesn't matter, and no one is safe.

Not Caesar's Wife

On this day:
585 BC
A solar eclipse occurs, as predicted by Greek philosopher and scientist Thales, while Alyattes is battling Cyaxares in the Battle of the Eclipse, leading to a truce. This is one of the cardinal dates from which other dates can be calculated.
1533
The Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer declares the marriage of King Henry VIII of England to Anne Boleyn valid.
1754
French and Indian War: in the first engagement of the war, Virginia militia under 22-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Washington defeat a French reconnaissance party in the Battle of Jumonville Glen in what is now Fayette County in southwestern Pennsylvania.
1830
President Andrew Jackson signs the Indian Removal Act which relocates Native Americans.
1940
World War II: Norwegian, French, Polish and British forces recapture Narvik in Norway. This is the first allied infantry victory of the War.
1942
World War II: in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Nazis in Czechoslovakia kill over 1,800 people.
2002
NATO declares Russia a limited partner in the Western alliance.
2002
The Mars Odyssey finds signs of large ice deposits on the planet Mars.

***

Republicans and Democrats alike recently enacted a bill that allows taxpayer funds to help pay name, image, and likeness (NIL) funds to athletes at the University of Wisconsin.

***

The government is opening its interests, expanding from promising what is in unlimited supply to that which is in unlimited supply, but inconvenient.

The proposed “For the Fans Act” would mandate that professional leagues provide every local fan a way to watch every game played by every team in their state — no streaming blackouts, no platform exclusivity — or face legal consequences. The bill covers baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and soccer.

***

Mamdani is the mayor/artist formerly known as Young Cardamom


***

An interesting little experiment comparing AIs:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYzu9ZZljj2/

***



Not Caesar's Wife

The Wall Street Journal published an immensely troubling dispatch on Thursday exposing how cryptocurrency networks — specifically, the formerly China-based crypto exchange Binance — have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Based on how terrorism-financing experts assess the purpose of trading accounts like Zanjani’s, the $850 million in Zanjani transactions, which included both deposits and withdrawals, likely means about $425 million moved through Binance to finance Iran’s military, according to foreign law-enforcement officials and other people familiar with the activity. Binance’s own investigators assessed the accounts were a money-laundering network to finance the regime, according to the compliance reports.


In 2023, Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty to charges relating to the violation of U.S. money-laundering statutes — a scheme that enriched child sex traffickers, international scamming operations, and terrorist groups, including “Al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).”

Like a bolt from the blue, however, President Trump gave Zhao a pardon last October

Representatives of the Trump family have held talks to take a financial stake in the U.S. arm of Binance.

The promise of cryptocurrency notwithstanding, if it serves merely as a vehicle for criminals and corrupt interests to strip the United States down and sell it off, piece by piece, to its enemies, you might expect the stewards of American interests to take a firmer line against it. And they might have if they hadn’t already gotten theirs.

If your gut response is to write this off as the usual innuendo and Trump hatred, be aware that this is from an article in The National Review.