…federal immigration officials attempted to use the tariff statute to unmask the president’s critics before, during the first Trump administration, and were reprimanded for doing so by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General in a 2017 report.

In its summons, ICE indicated the basis for its request was a provision of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 . John Doe informed the court that they had nothing to do with the kind of activities at issue in the near-century-old statute, which governs boat show sales, wild animal imports, forfeited wines and spirits, and cross-border trade in other goods.

deleted by creator

Everything he does makes sense, if you can accept that he sees the United States itself as an rival for the attention and praise that is rightly his. Commanding other people’s attention, redirecting it to himself, has been the only trick behind his falling-up success, his whole life. This is what they mean when they say “all publicity is good publicity.”

Now we’re not talking about Iran, we’re not talking about America’s future, we’re talking about him.

Are… are the ceasefire talks in the room with us now, Donnie?

Edit: Trump Was Watching a U.F.C. Fight in Miami While Iran Talks Collapsed

deleted by creator

One of the criticisms of the Artemis program is that NASA’s SLS rocket is Titantically, catastrophically expensive compared to SpaceX rockets. Or compared to the Saturn IV rocket. Compared to just about everything.

Artemis III is supposed to involve a commercially-made moon lander, probably from SpaceX. Artemis IV is supposed to build a space station in lunar orbit, on the back of about a zillion SpaceX rocket launches.

I don’t know everything, but I don’t think NASA’s in any position to tell Elon Musk off.

Grain of salt: Most of what I think I know about Artemis is from a very long, very detailed, very critical and persuasive blog post by someone who isn’t even an engineer as far as I know.

Even in pre-history, men were somehow convinced that what women really wanted was: bigger dicks. Bigger dicks than human men could possibly offer.

It’s such a weird preoccupation, and it seems like it’s got to be deeper than just a cultural thing.

It’s gotten the point where one must dig into every accusation of “antisemitism” to see if there’s really bigotry or if someone just pissed off the Zionists.

If one must find out more every time one hears a word, that word’s utility is gone.

Painesville is a real place

So on one end of the bridge, you’d have the Lincoln Memorial. And at the other, you’d have gilded Temu Arc de Triomphe knockoff.

It wouldn’t be possible to visit Arlington National Cemetery without thinking of our Dear Leader.

Maybe we deserve it.

I feel like this is ripe for an “Autotune The News” treatment. I’m thinking Eminem’s “Without Me:”

🎵

I have two Microsoft Outlooks, Outlooks
Neither of 'em works
Neither of 'em works

🎵

I don’t think the suggestion is that she’s a victim. Just that what we’re seeing is the fallout of a power struggle from behind the curtain.

This Threads post tells a theory / story that’s worthy of a soap opera. Spoiler: Everything comes back to Epstein, as it always seems to.

Robert Reich had some theories, including:

3. Melania is pissed off at Trump for any number of things, and today’s news conference was a way of letting him know she’s capable of making his life miserable.

An unnamed source told the Post it was like “hearing a voice in a stadium, except the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert.”

What the hell is this analogy? “It’s like [thing], except if [thing] were totally different.” This is like a bad movie script.

To find a heartbeat, a quantum Ghost Murmur tool would have to contend not just with Earth’s magnetic field and magnetic noise from natural and human-made electric currents but also with “the heartbeats of the sheep and dogs and jackrabbits—whatever else is running around out there,” says Chad Orzel, a professor of physics…

I’m glad someone brought this up, it was the first thing that came to my mind.

Gosh maybe ICE and the DOJ should read some executive orders, eh?

By the authority vested in me … it is hereby ordered … no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen…

I have a Uni Kuru Toga mechanical pencil that I bought perhaps 20 years ago. For about $7. And it still works great.

Somehow, it’s still $7? How?

Sumatra PDF Reader is no-frills and distraction free. Even on my ancient PC, it’s fast as heck. I have rather rudely installed it on other people’s PCs, because their slow all-singing all-dancing PDF readers drove me up the wall.

RawTherapee converts “RAW” files from digital cameras to friendlier image formats, and pretty often RawTherapee’s edit is all I need. It’s feature packed, it can do film simulations, image de-noising, tone-mapping, and now it has the ability to do some local adjustments, too. I have several “RAW” converters, including a commercial one, but I keep coming back to RawTherapee as the mainstay, the most productive for me.

I’ve got foobar2000 set up as a pretty plain-looking, non-distracting music player. It’s got great library features, it has a wildly customizable interface, it’s got a plugin architecture to extend its abilities in many ways. It has stayed on my PC for years because of its quiet competence, always serving without demanding my time or attention.

I used to keep my password file and other confidential stuff inside a TrueCrypt virtual volume. Now I use the successor, VeraCrypt. Both have always worked flawlessly; in fact, TrueCrypt is way smaller and I’m not aware of any security issues with it, it’s just not actively developed anymore.

These are actually blog posts that list such things:

A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites (Updated 2026)

No Logins Required: Alternative Interfaces To YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram

There are a lot of problems with this, but a pretty telling one, I think, is: That’s not even what “vindication” means. The global-warming-denial position would be vindicated – proven, justified, confirmed – by years or decades worth of data showing that the environment isn’t heating up.

Demonstrating that you have the political power to change the rules in spite of the data is not vindication, it’s just gloating.

Any dictionary could straighten this out for him, if he were interested in expert opinions, in being correct. But they’re not. Flouting the definitions is part of the bully strategy: “My will is your reality, peasant.”