Kilowatts or connections? Trump’s favored nuclear start-ups soar to riches.: Founders of politically connected nuclear companies that have never built commercial reactors are becoming billionaires. - "Valar declares on a company webpage that 'holding the spent fuel from [its] system for five minutes gives the equivalent radiation exposure to receiving a CAT scan.' Nuclear engineers were appalled by his claims."
Climate change, aging farmers endanger Japan's 'Rolls-Royce of pearls'
Trump Cabinet secretaries conspired to violate Constitution, judge says: “The Cabinet secretaries and ostensibly, the president of the United States, are not honoring the First Amendment,” U.S. District Judge William Young declared. - "The 2025 trial revealed the machinery behind the Trump administration’s campus crackdown. Senior administration officials directed personnel at DHS who normally analyze transnational criminal networks to instead produce reports on students involved in pro-Palestinian protests, one official testified."
Congressional Republicans might finally jump off the hamster wheel: Maybe Trump has at last gone too far for GOP legislators tired of going nowhere. - "Hassett predicted that Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cuts would produce a $4,000-$9,000 increase in average household incomes. That has not happened. Early in the pandemic, he predicted it would soon wane. It did not. Writer Steve Chapman, who calls Hassett 'a master of opportunistic amnesia,' notes that no states had gas prices averaging as low as $2 when Hassett said prices are 'below $2 a gallon in a lot of places.'"
An injured NFL team, a power substation and a theory that won’t fade: A viral online theory for the San Francisco 49ers’ injuries is disputed by scientists but has some players’ attention. - "But tracing it to the opening of Levi’s is dubious because the 49ers started practicing next to the substation in 1988, three decades before Levi’s Stadium opened. From 2001 to 2014, the 49ers ranked below average in injuries, according to Aaron Schatz, a veteran NFL analyst who tracks injury reports."
Elizabeth Warren’s Abundant Mistakes: Her critique of moderate Democrats is a mischaracterization of her opponents within the party. - "At one point in her speech, for instance, Warren claimed that Donald Trump 'is trying to push out the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and complete his corrupt takeover of America's central bank-so that it serves his interests, along with his billionaire friends'.' Is it true that Trump's billionaire friends would benefit from undermining central-bank independence? The billionaires don't seem especially excited about this aspect of Trump's power grab." [ed. note: in fact, rich people hate inflation, because it makes their money worth less]
America Has Entered Late-Stage Protein: This has gone too far.
Rubio Won; Liberty Lost: Is it really a win when the regime you detest stays in place?
Suspect in Mississippi synagogue fire laughed as he confessed to his dad, authorities say - "Pittman appeared in federal court on Monday afternoon via video conference, accompanied by a public defender. He affirmed to the judge, Andrew Harris, that he was competent and sober. Pittman appeared to be leaning back in his chair, gazing away from the camera. When the judge asked him if he understood his rights to an attorney, Pittman responded, 'Yes sir, Jesus Christ is Lord.'"
New NASA head appears to slow controversial Discovery shuttle move: Jared Isaacman, the new NASA administrator, signaled he was open to offering other spacecraft to Texas instead of the one housed at the Smithsonian. Opponents of the transfer welcomed his comments. - "The Smithsonian said in September that it had been approached by the Office of Management and Budget to work with NASA to prepare for the relocation of Discovery within 18 months. The Institution cautioned the transfer would require 'significant disassembly' of the shuttle that they feared 'will destroy its historical value.' Along with NASA, the institution estimated the move would cost from $120 million to $150 million. Sen. Cornyn’s office has called the estimate 'purposefully overblown' and accused the Smithsonian of going outside of its purview in raising concerns."
California is adding a supplement to tortillas. RFK Jr. calls it ‘insanity.’: California now requires corn masa flour to contain folic acid to reduce birth defects among Latinos. Some conservatives oppose it, citing government overreach. - "The new requirement is part of national effort to add folic acid, already required in other types of flour, to corn masa. Alabama’s version of the law takes effect in June, and lawmakers in Florida, Georgia and Oklahoma are considering similar legislation.
...
"Since the start of those efforts, the rates of neural tube birth defects for White women and other groups dropped 40 percent, but remained high for Latinas, studies have found."
Exxon CEO calls Venezuela ‘uninvestable’ without ‘significant changes’: At Trump meeting with oil executives, he vows they will spend $100 billion. The companies worry the numbers don’t add up. - "'It would be like going to Brazil, taking them over for their cattle, and then flooding the American beef market with it,' he said. 'That’s the analogy we see in the oil and gas business.'"
Ukraine’s ex-commander in chief, envoy to Britain and maybe next president: Gen. Valery Zaluzhny’s distance from Kyiv, possibly an attempt to sideline his political ambitions, has left him at a safe remove from tensions back home. - "Ukrainian law prohibits presidential elections under martial law, and democracy experts have noted the seeming absurdity of Putin complaining that Zelensky has stayed in office beyond the normal length of a term because of a war that Russia started, while Putin rewrote Russia’s constitution to eliminate term limits and has long won elections widely derided as neither free nor fair."
Trump Isn’t Interested in Competing With China: To see how the president is losing ground to Beijing, consider his disastrous relationship with India. - "India is not the only Asian partner the Trump administration has alienated. ICE agents arrested more than 300 South Koreans who had entered the United States legally and were building a Hyundai battery plant in Georgia. The move generated outrage in Seoul. On the same day, Trump imposed a punitive investment deal on Japan that drew the ire of Japanese officials and business leaders."
It’s Fun to Be a Board-Game Sociopath: What can I say? I love to betray my friends. - "For example, if I were to offer aspiring Werewolf champions one piece of advice: When caught in a lie, do not admit to it. Rather, you must double down and commit to your lie even harder, so that the other players are forced to choose sides between you and your accuser."
The 4th Amendment will no longer protect you - "Earlier this month, the Supreme Court rendered obsolete the 4th Amendment’s prohibition on suspicionless seizures by the police. When the court stayed the district court’s decision in Noem vs. Vasquez Perdomo, it green-lighted an era of policing in which people can be stopped and seized for little more than how they look, the job they work or the language they speak."
Charlie Kirk, Ezra Klein, and the Cost of Civility-Theater Liberalism: “Talking across divides” is laudable—until it becomes a license to launder antidemocratic and dehumanizing ideas. - "This outrage-packaged-for-attention market that incentivizes mockery and monetizes contempt is the roadshow that made Charlie Kirk famous—an old playbook Dinesh D’Souza and David Horowitz ran before him, now optimized for an algorithmic age: a ritualized antagonism, audience participation as culture-war cosplay, the triumphant edit pushed out to millions before the house lights are up. Strip away the self-flattery of a university crowd congratulating itself on its open-mindedness, and the illusion that a staged confrontation with a celebrity provocateur constitutes pedagogy, and what remains is a reel factory masquerading as a public forum."
Why do women outlive men? A study of 1,176 species points to an answer.: Let’s talk about sex chromosomes, baby. - "The 'heterogametic sex hypothesis' holds that if something goes haywire with a gene on one of a woman’s X chromosomes, her cells have a spare to rely on. But men, with only a single X chromosome, have no such reinforcements. The same sort of problem may happen with a male’s unpaired Y chromosome."
Doing Nothing About Biden Is the Riskiest Plan of All
This Isn’t All Joe Biden’s Fault - "But rather than act as a check on Biden’s decisions and ambitions, the party has become an enabler of them. An enforcer of them. It is giving the American people an option they do not want and then threatening them with the end of democracy if they do not take it." [ed. note: the party is right, but voters are morons]
Joe Biden should drop out: Denying Joe Biden's decline has put Democrats in a terrible position.
The short answer on office shorts: No: Ask yourself these questions before you free your knees.
Brett Favre's involvement in Mississippi welfare scandal draws outrage and indifference
The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse - "What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where 'winning' means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust."
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In U.S., ruinous cotton boll weevils are exiled to a ‘last frontier’
Opinion A longtime conservative insider warns: The GOP can’t be saved
