A dozen states have filed an antitrust lawsuit to block Paramount/CBS’ $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers. The states argue the deal will undermine market competition, cause untold layoffs, result in higher prices and lower quality for consumers, and significantly harm a Hollywood entertainment industry that still hasn’t fully recovered from Covid, the streaming revolution, or previous shitty mergers.
The state lawsuit, led by California AG Rob Bonta and filed in the U.S. District for the Northern District of California, alleges that the merger violates Section 7 of the Clayton Act, which holds that mergers that lessen competition or endeavor to ultimately create monopoly are illegal.
Larry Ellison’s efforts to gift his nepobaby son with two Hollywood studios in a year might be fun for David and other aspiring if unqualified moguls, but it’s likely to result in more problems than ever given the deal’s significant debt load and the steady hints of incompetence among Ellisons’ chosen leadership.
“Consolidation here not only leads to higher prices — it also leads to fewer opportunities for important stories to come to life, and fewer ways for audiences to encounter stories, ideas, and perspectives beyond their own experiences. In this country, no one is above the law. With this lawsuit, California and our sister states are fighting for free and fair markets, not rigged markets. America has no kings in government or our economy.”
California’s AG notes the deal combines two of the nation’s five major film distributors, leaving four major film distributors controlling over 85 percent of all wide-release theatrical films in the United States. The deal also combines two of the five major owners of basic cable channels (three of which are technically Disney), leaving just two companies in control of 59 percent of all basic cable in the United States.
Other states that signed off on the lawsuit include Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington. You’ll notice a broad lack of Republican AGs, despite a lot of pretense last election season that the GOP really cared a lot about antitrust now. Apparently a top Trump donor clumsily trying to dominate American media (with Saudi, Qatari and Chinese help) doesn’t qualify.
We’ve discussed at great length how these sorts of major media deals almost uniformly result in mass layoffs and price hikes in order to pay off the massive new debt load. Every deal involving Warner Brothers in particular, which now goes back a quarter century to AOL, have always resulted in mass layoffs, higher prices, lower-quality, corner cutting, and a lot of shuttered creative projects.
Such deals generally only benefit the extraction class, who, every time they’re out of fresh ideas, look to mindless consolidation to shuffle the deck, obtain tax breaks, and nab a brief stock boost. Execs then inevitably cannibalize brand quality, cash out (see: AT&T), then float off to the next effort with “savvy dealmaker” emblazoned across their resumes, outsized executive compensation in hand.
The state lawsuit doesn’t really touch on the foreign influence peddling concerns created by the deal’s Saudi and Chinese funding. That would normally be a job for the FCC, were we to have one that functioned in the public interest. The state also lacks any authority to challenge Larry Ellison’s efforts to dominate what’s left of U.S. corporate media, supplanting already shaky journalism with lazy right wing agitprop.
Paramount issued a statement insisting that antitrust law somehow doesn’t apply to it, while arguing any delay in the deal would harm consumers:
“The lawsuit filed by the state attorneys general, in the most generous light, reflects a fundamentally flawed application of the antitrust laws and is wrong on both the facts and the law. Delaying this transaction will only harm entertainment workers who have already suffered over recent years as technology has disrupted their livelihood and cost California tens of thousands of entertainment jobs.”
As hints of a looming state lawsuit loomed, Paramount executives seemed to get more and more desperate, jumping between falsely claiming opposition to the deal was “antisemitic,” to empty threats leaked to news outlets this week that the company could leave California if state regulators interfered.
A delay caused by the new state lawsuit isn’t likely to hurt consumers or workers. It is, however, potentially harmful for a very debt-heavy acquisition backed by Ellison, who is extremely over-leveraged on the AI hype bubble. Should the AI bubble pop during regulatory review, Ellison could be looking at a far less forgiving financial reality that makes his aggressive media ambitions less tenable.
Object permanence: MSFT v MP3; UK industry v schoolkids; Gary Larson v comics sharing; Planned LED obsolescence; PoGo v Black neighborhoods; Gnarlier trolley problems; Royal Society v cryptographic backdoors; Theresa May v climate change; Google v search; Facebook v facts.
Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
The "designated survivor" is one of the weirder aspects of America's (very, very weird) political system.
Each year, during the State of the Union address, when both houses of Congress and the President are all under one roof, a single political figure, in the line of succession for the presidency, is spirited away to a hidden bunker, just in case the US legislative and administrative branches are decapitated in a single, spectacular terrorist strike:
Initiated during the 1950s, designated survivors are a paranoid relic of the Cold War, but they're also a relic of an era when America was a less chud-dominated, more technocratic land. It's a longtermist sort of procedure, in stark opposition to vibes-based MAGA chaos in which the Mad King makes daily announcements of new wars, tariffs, monuments, and existential threats to the nation.
America's ruling class have always sought an equilibrium between its pure Id of hatred for labor, autocratic yearnings and apocalyptic fantasies, and its patient, scheming Ego, the author of endless FedSoc judicial nominee listings, Projects 2025, and decades-long schemes to overturn Dobbs and reverse the New Deal.
(Democrats have their own version of this, of course – the endless contest between the McKinsey wing of the party's right and its infinitely embroidered Machin-Synematic Universe.)
The problem is that once the atavistic, impulsive elements of your project escape containment, the resultant turbulence sucks everyone else into their chaotic vortex. How can you plan for anything when you're buffeted by endless stunts, feints, and distractions?
Nowhere is this failure to plan more vivid than in the age distribution of both chambers of the US legislature, its presidential candidates, and its judicial appointments. What's more, this is equally true of the Democrats and the Republicans.
The equilibrium of all of America's key institutions is brittle: legislative majorities are often just one or two seats wide. Key federal circuits and the Supreme Court are knife-edge balances. We keep getting presidential races between septuagenarians and octogenarians.
The question here isn't whether old people can be good at those jobs. They obviously can be. The problem is actuarial: old people are far more likely to die, or suffer severe medical episodes, than younger people. This is a fact of life that every person understands, and the older you get, the better you understand it.
I'm 55. 20 years ago, it was unusual for just one of my peers to die in a given year; now I lose a couple every year. It could be me next (my doctor just informed me that I am cancer free, following excision, radiotherapy and immunotherapy). Anyone who pretends this isn't true is setting themselves and the people around them up for terrible things.
If you're a writer, this means making plans for the smooth management of your literary estate. For the past couple decades, John Scalzi has been my anointed literary executor. He's a great choice: a fabulous writer with a good head for business and a strong handle on my politics and artistic sensibility, whose personal ethics are above reproach. The only problem is that John is a couple of years older than me, which means that he'd be a great executor if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, but not if I keel over with a heart attack in 20 years.
So this year, I added a second executor, Molly White, who is also a fantastic writer, also extremely ethical and also very attuned to my politics and literary sensibilities. Molly is 20 years younger than me, and she has relevant experience: she's also the executor of the literary estate of her great-grandfather (EB White).
In the unlikely event of my untimely death, Molly and John will do a great job running the estate (which mostly will consist of reviewing my agents' recommendations). And if John keels over right after me, Molly will be fine on her own.
Of course, the only reason I need a literary executor is that my kid is only 18. At 18, she's a remarkable, level-headed, ethical young person, but she's not yet fully formed. Literary history is filled with descendants who take over a literary estate and run it in terrible ways. The most notorious example here is Stephen Joyce, grandson of James Joyce and a colossal asshole:
The most likely destiny for my literary estate is that I will grow older alongside my daughter, who will mature in ways that make her a perfectly suitable literary executor (in addition to being the beneficiary of my literary estate) and in a few years I'll send a note of thanks to John and Molly and change the paperwork. But in the unlikely, awful event that my kid runs into serious challenges that make me question her judgment and probity, I'll be covered.
That's what planning is all about: thinking through various scenarios, including low-likelihood, high-salience ones that have easy mitigations, and taking appropriate and proportionate steps to avoid disaster.
You know: like squirreling away a designated survivor in a bunker far from DC during the State of the Union.
This is what makes America's political gerontocracy so weird. In their true hearts, the nonagenarian (1), octogenarians (5), septuagenarians (27) and late sexagenarians (7) in the US Senate know that they could keel over at any moment, and that in a 53:47 Senate, this could spell doom for their political project.
Sure, Mitch McConnell might be secretly dead and that's bad and weird. But it wouldn't be exceptional. We're talking about a legislature whose members sometimes disappear for months, only to be discovered in care homes with advanced dementia, while still somehow holding office:
It's a legislature whose most prominent grandees cling to power at the very brink of death's door, long after they can be effective leaders, just so they can anoint their successor during the next election:
Elections have consequences, but special elections, called after the sudden death of an elderly lawmaker, have wild consequences.
Of course, anyone can die suddenly. 15 years ago, one of my dearest friends, a contemporary, went to bed in seeming perfect health and never woke up. He was only 44. I still miss him, every day:
But the likelihood this happening goes up the older you get, and once you cross a certain age threshold, odds rise sharply. If you're part of a political project that's laying and executing long-term plans whose outcomes turn on hair-fine majorities, this should factor into your thinking. The failure to do so can throw everything you've worked for into disarray:
It's not limited to the legislature, of course. The Supreme Court's slide into its role as handmaiden to totalitarianism began when the dying Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to step down, because she wanted her successor to be picked by the first woman president:
The amazing thing here is that RBG made her name as a master strategist, but when it came to this incredibly consequential matter, she set strategy aside for hubris:
Security practitioners know that anyone can be hacked or scammed, and that the biggest vulnerability of all is to be so confident in your own procedures and discernment that you assume it could never happen to you. If you think you can't get scammed, you are a danger to yourself and others:
By the same token, any politician in their 70s or 80s who thinks that they can't suffer a stroke or heart attack or the kind of lapse that makes you freeze up during a presidential debate is a danger to their party, their politics and their nation:
This isn't about how healthy or robust any given politician is or feels; this is about the cold reality of actuarial tables. The older I get, the more those actuarial tables factor into my own decision-making. The fact that our political classes seem to think that they can choose the time and manner of their passing is baffling.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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Founded in 2010, AnimeFLV has been a dominant player in the anime piracy ecosystem for years.
The Spanish-language site is particularly popular in Latin America and served more than a billion annual visits at its height.
This popularity didn’t go unnoticed with rightsholders. The site has been on the anti-piracy radar for years and the Motion Picture Association (MPA) flagged the site in its most recent report to the U.S. Trade Representative.
According to the MPA, AnimeFLV’s operators are believed to be located in Peru, Chile, and Mexico. In the latter two countries, the anime portal is also among the 100 most-visited websites. However, due to recent changes this traffic rank will likely drop.
“There are currently no videos”
AnimeFLV ran without significant issues for years, but that changed in mid-June. While the site remained online with the content listings intact, the video player categorically returns the message “Actualmente no hay videos,” informing visitors that ‘there are currently no videos.’
In other words, the popular anime site has effectively become a ghost directory of series and movies.
Actualmente no hay vídeos (there are currently no videos)
Initial hiccups were reported in April already but the site recovered from those. By late June, however, bug reports on GitHub from the Aniyomi anime app’s extension tracker confirmed that AnimeFLV’s player returned no video sources at all.
The site’s operators have not issued any statement to this day. No anti-piracy organization has taken credit either, but the video disappearance comes at a time when several major anime and manga operations were dismantled.
A Wave of Pirate Site Shutdowns
In April, we reported that TuMangaOnline, also known as ZonaTMO, was shut down following an enforcement action from Korean rightsholders.
Also in April, the backend infrastructure of many prominent pirate sites was knocked offline. These sites were linked to the popular “Piracy-as-a-Service” operations such as MegaCloud and VidCloud, that also acted as a hosting platform.
A few weeks earlier, the massive anime pirate site HiAnime had already closed its doors. While this action long remained unexplained, earlier this month Vietnamese authorities eventually launched a criminal prosecution against seven people associated with the piracy ring.
While AnimeFLV’s issues fit in this bigger picture, we can’t independently link it directly to these earlier crackdowns. The mid-June date doesn’t directly link to any other known enforcement actions either.
A Valuable Ghost Directory
What makes AnimeFLV’s situation unusual is that the site hasn’t disappeared. The front end remains fully functional, and the ‘ghost’ directory is still being updated.
Why the operators remain silent on the video issues is food for speculation. However, the fact that they keep the site online suggests that it may not permanently close its doors. Whether it will continue as a directory-only site or something more has yet to be seen.
While AnimeFLV still gets plenty of residual traffic, Leiinad World notes that potential successors were quick to enter the scene too. This includes a newer site called AnimeAV1, which references the more modern AV1 codec, instead of the outdated and largely obsolete FLV (Flash) container format.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
I’m not sure who out there is in RFK Jr.’s corner anymore, beyond some unfortunately powerful people in seats of federal power at the moment. That Kennedy’s tenure at HHS has lasted even this long is as absurd as it is dangerous, given the mountains of chaos he’s created in a mere year and change thus far. All of this anti-vaxxer nonsense, the seemingly random attacks on Tylenol of all things, an ongoing measles outbreak he’s mismanaging, and an inability to follow proper governmental procedure has produced a sample size of sucking that really should have been enough to get him booted from office at this point. Whatever you might think of Kennedy’s conspiracy theories and policies, there is simply no arguing that he doesn’t completely suck at his job.
Dr. Debra Houry, the former chief medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), decried the direction of the agency under Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“I think the secretary has caused a lot of irreparable harm, and when you look at many of the polls out there, the trust in public health, specifically CDC, has decreased dramatically, over 20 points in many polls,” Houry told host Margaret Brennan in an interview that aired Sunday on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
“That’s really difficult to recover from, and when states are removing links to the CDC website and following other medical organizations, I don’t know how you build back that trust overnight,” she added.
You absolutely don’t and this is a point I’ve been making for many months. It doesn’t take much skill or time to destroy the trust the public has in federal health officials. That part is very fast and very easy, as Kennedy is demonstrating. But to rebuild that trust, to win back the faith of the public, is going to take years, or decades, or perhaps may never really happen at all. The consequences of the idiotic placement and confirmation of RFK Jr. to lead HHS is going to span decades. The nihilists who managed to put this current cadre of clowns into federal office may not understand that, or may simply not care. But that is the reality.
A poll conducted by Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation’s Public Health Listening Lab from March 19 through April 1 found that 50 percent of 2,205 U.S. adults said they trust health recommendations from the CDC.
In spring 2025, 77 percent of respondents to a similar survey conducted by the joint pollsters said they trust recommendations from the agency.
Whenever this country moves past the MAGA era, it’s going to have what might be the Sisyphean task of repairing all of this damage. And not just in terms of reestablishing good, sane health policies. That’s just part of the task. The other will be the public messaging that must go along with it. That is equally, if not more important to repairing all of the damage Kennedy has and is doing. It’s not enough to have good policy built on science. Someone has to actually get the public to buy into and trust in those policies.
And the public is going to be in a very reasonable place when they ask why they should trust the next government to not be anymore idiotic than this one.
Recently, politicians in the UK pushed forward with plans to eviscerate privacy and free speech on the internet by announcing a ban on social media for users under 16 that is set to take effect in Spring 2027.
The UK government continues to falsely characterize this policy as a necessary response to growing concerns about online harms for young people. In reality, much like the Online Safety Act, it will cause more harm than it will prevent.
Users of all ages are burdened with proving their age before accessing content, with social media platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X included in the ban. There remains no reliable, privacy-preserving method of verifying the age of every internet user and methods vary from one platform to the next.
Young people will not simply be protected from being contacted by adults or endlessly scrolling—they’ll also lose access to educational videos on YouTube, local events on Facebook, and potentially cut off from distant friends and family.
Public policy must be effective, proportionate and respectful of fundamental rights. Young people deserve better than a policy built on panic, and all internet users deserve a safe and free internet. A social media ban generates headlines, but it will not solve the problem.
A Brief History of Age-Gating in the UK
Age restriction proposals in the UK date back to a decade ago, when the proposed Digital Economy Bill was put forth to (among other things) restrict young people from accessing pornographic websites. While the Digital Economy Act of 2017 passed without age-based restrictions, it laid the groundwork for later age verification measures.
Over the next few years, age checks for porn websites were announced then delayed several times. But it wasn’t until a consultation under the 2016-2019 May government and the 2020 publication of the Online Harms Whitepaper that age verification became a broader idea.
In 2023, the UK passed the controversial Online Safety Act, establishing powers that could weaken privacy protections and freedom of expression for internet users worldwide. In July 2025, the government implemented age assurance measures on sites hosting “harmful” content.
And despite politicians affirming repeatedly that the Online Safety Act would solve all of the problems with online safety, this year they decided it in fact did not go far enough. American social psychologist and The Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt—who has called for age-related social media bans around the world, despite significantscientific doubt about his research—met with the UK Health Secretary in February to push for the ban.
In March, politicians introduced plans for a social media ban into the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to “prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users” of “all regulated user-to-user services,” to be implemented by “highly-effective age assurance measures”—effectively banning under-16s from social media.
When this proposal came before the House of Commons, MPs defeated and proposed their own amendment: enabling the Secretary of State to introduce provisions “requiring providers of specified internet services” to prevent access by children, under age 18 rather than 16, to specified internet services or to specified features; and to restrict access by children to specified internet services which ministers provide.
But the social media ban does not stop there. The provision also requires internet service providers to limit the time kids spend online, and has rules about who can contact them online. These extreme rules will take decisions about using technology away from families and put them in the hands of government regulators.
The history of this proposal shows that the UK government has repeatedly returned to the same flawed idea: restricting access to online services by requiring age checks for everyone. But the fundamental problems have not changed. There is still no widely available way to verify age online without compromising privacy—but even if there were, broad restrictions on social media will inevitably limit access to lawful speech, and valuable online communities, and arts and culture.
I think I’ve extensively explained at this point why the $111 billion merger between Paramount/CBS and Warner Brothers is a gargantuan pile of shit that will indisputably harm labor, consumers, markets, creatives, and potentially even national security. It doesn’t matter the company names; every single major media merger of this type ends badly for everyone but the trust fund brunchlords at the top.
Not only that, every single merger involving this particular company (Time Warner, Warner Brothers) in the last quarter century has resulted in nothing but layoffs, price hikes, shittier product, and a lot of whimpering. And there are ample signs that the Paramount folks are even less competent than past suitors, including the AT&T executives, who quickly got too far out over their skis.
While the Trump DOJ has unsurprisingly rubber stamped Larry Ellison’s clumsy effort to dominate what’s left of U.S. corporate media, states keep hinting at the fact they’ll file a collective antitrust lawsuit.
That’s certainly the case in Oregon, where Attorney General Dan Rayfield is asking for a 60 day pause in deal finalization while his office investigates both the deal — and apparently the Trump cronyism that has helped enable it. Rayfield, for one, accuses Paramount of refusing to adequately respond to state AG requests for information about the deal’s impact:
“We’re not going to let Paramount Skydance play hide the ball so they can rush through their massive merger. Oregonians have a real stake in this deal – in our film industry, in our economy, in the choices they’ll have as consumers. Paramount had every opportunity to hand over records and answer a few basic questions. Instead, it is trying to run out the clock and evade scrutiny. We’re asking the court to make sure Oregonians get the answers they’re owed before this deal closes, not after.”
Rayfield says that Paramount has been particularly cagey when asked for data on its interactions with the Trump administration and Trump DOJ. Including details on a federal government influence campaign Paramount internally calls “project warrior”:
“Paramount has not complied. According to court papers, the company declined to accept service of the request, waited weeks to respond, and ultimately sent objections on the day its documents were due – objections the state dismisses as a baseless tactic to avoid turning over the records. Paramount has told Oregon it does not intend to close the deal before July 16 but has not agreed to hold off any longer while the state’s investigation continues.”
So while the $111 billion deal is abjectly terrible, it’s not quite yet a done deal yet. I’d suspect that a joint antitrust lawsuit featuring the handful of states that still care about such a thing will arrive sometime in the next month or two. While it might not succeed in scuttling the deal, it could extend the timeline in a way that could prove costly for Larry Ellison, David Ellison, and their debt-riddled proposal.
Less than a month ago, Trump secured himself a $400 million plane for free — something he certainly couldn’t have accomplished if he weren’t the president of the United States. It’s no longer a mere appearance of corruption: it’s a 250-foot long luxury plane with 2,500 square feet of tangible corruption. Here are some details on the gift/graft, along with a few choice quotes from its recipient:
“This plane was transformed into a flying White House at a level of luxury that nobody’s ever seen before, probably even almost outside of an airplane,” Trump said.
[…]
“It was time for a change. … Everything was designed good. It was my taste,” Trump said saying that he approved the new color scheme, which reflects the American flag.
Obviously, Trump is a fan. But the problem with this particular “free” Qatari-made Air Force One — well, one of several problems — is that is isn’t as secure as the original Air Force One, which was acquired a bit more honestly using only US tax dollars and perhaps a handful of no-bid contracts. The New York Times noted this in its report, after Trump flew the Qatar version to Turkey, but had to exit the country aboard the old Air Force One.
The new Air Force One, which President Trump flew on earlier this week to Turkey, lacks the same defensive countermeasures that were security features of the old model, including its advanced antimissile capabilities, according to multiple officials who have been briefed on how the jet was retrofitted.
Experts say the absence of those capabilities on the Boeing 747-8 aircraft, which was donated by Qatar, creates potential risk in using the jet abroad, a dynamic underscored by the abrupt decision on Wednesday for Mr. Trump to leave Turkey on the old Air Force One at the urging of the Secret Service.
There’s a metaphor in here somewhere, one that might point out that the corruption-adjacent Air Force One is as unfit for its job as the man who took possession of it on behalf of a nation that never asked for it.
While that reporting was definitely going to generate some Truth Social rants and official statements containing phrases like “fake news” or “failing New York Times,” pretty much no one expected it to generate subpoenas. But that’s the reality we now live in as the Trump administration lurches through the second year of its second term.
The Trump administration issued subpoenas on Friday to several journalists for The New York Times, after the news outlet reported this week on security concerns involving President Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One.
The subpoenas — which seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday — were an extraordinary escalation in President Trump’s efforts to threaten and intimidate independent news organizations.
In some cases, the subpoenas were delivered by federal agents who showed up at reporters’ homes.
This isn’t America, I hear you say. But it kind of is, isn’t it? This is Trump’s version of America and the only thing that separates it from actions taken by other autocracies is that these reporters were only accosted by armed officers, rather than directly disappeared. Baby steps. Give Trump another year or so and maybe we can eliminate the relative niceties of merely threatening and intimidating journalists who publish articles the administration doesn’t like.
This follows other actions taken by this administration, like the search of Washington Post reporter’s house earlier this year as the FBI (allegedly) engaged in what what presumably an internal leak investigation. This looks like more of the same — the administration trying to force journalists to give up their sources so they can punish whistleblowers and leakers.
The White House directed Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, to oversee a leak investigation into reporting by The New York Times about security issues with the new Air Force One, leading to a flurry of subpoenas to several Times reporters Friday night, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
Mr. Patel scuttled a planned trip to Chicago and spent roughly eight hours at the White House on Friday, running the investigation from there rather than F.B.I. headquarters — a major departure from historical practice.
This is also extremely unusual. As it appears everyone in the White House has forgotten, the FBI and DOJ are not weapons to be used for politically motivated revenge. They are not foot-soldiers that serve the president. Both are supposed to maintain a certain level of independence, which makes it easy to avoid any appearances of impropriety. But those firewalls have been deliberately destroyed by an administration that not only doesn’t care if this looks shady as shit, but wants to make sure everyone in America — especially the administration’s many enemies — knows this is exactly as shady as it appears.
Things are only going to get worse from here. I can say that with confidence because nothing at all has gotten any better since Trump retook the White House. This administration won’t be happy until it has destroyed all the ideals the United States once stood for. The millions of MAGA faithful who spent Biden’s four years complaining they were being censored are now watching actual censorship being put into action. And, of course, they’re unwilling to speak up because… well, you know: “they came for the fake news and I said nothing, because I was an election denier, etc. etc.”
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When we upgrade something in our lives, the thing we used to be satisfied with is no longer satisfying.
That’s the nature of an upgrade.
After a certain point, the only thing we’re buying is the way the upgrade makes us feel in the moment, not our satisfaction going forward.
Stereos, salt, art on the wall. It’s easy to get hooked on the climb, not the altitude.
Luxury goods are a special set of upgrades. These are purchases that aren’t actually an upgrade, they simply feel that way because of their cost (and the status that goes with it).
At some point, the best upgrade is the realization that we have enough.
Lindsey Graham is dead. That news was a bit surprising, but it prompted many reviews of his record and revived an important question: Why’d he give it all up for a guy like Donald Trump?
Graham served four terms in the Senate, chaired the Judiciary and Budget committees, and was one of the most prominent voices in American foreign policy for two decades. He died Saturday night at his Washington home, hours after returning from Kyiv.
Graham had shown no public signs of illness. A top staffer told NBC News there was no indication he had been feeling unwell. Graham was scheduled to appear on “Meet the Press” the following morning. Trump said he had spoken with Graham by phone that evening and described him as tired but otherwise fine.
Graham’s relationship with Trump will define his legacy, and not in a positive way. Once upon a time, Graham had called Trump out publicly, warning that nominating him as president would destroy the party. But within a year, Graham discarded his principles, along with old friendships, to become one of Trump’s most reliable defenders. It was disquieting to witness.
What causes a person to abandon every stated principle, all for one rotten figure? Was it blackmail? Cowardice? I concur with those who say it was something more banal yet tragic. The last 11 years reveal a pattern quite common among fascist collaborators and hangers-on addicted to their proximity to power.
Graham ran for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination and dropped out that December, never rising above the low single digits in the polls. But what his campaign lacked in traction, it made up for in memorable anti-Trump critiques.
On CNN on Dec. 8, 2015, Graham called Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” who did not represent his party or “the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.” He added, “You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”
Friction between the two candidates ran deep at the time. Months earlier, after Trump read Graham’s personal cell phone number aloud (an early form of doxxing) at a campaign rally, Graham called Trump a “jackass” and destroyed his phone on camera. By January 2016, Graham said: “Donald Trump is the most unelectable Republican I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
The following month, on Fox News, he went further. “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy.”
On May 3, 2016, the day before Trump clinched the nomination, Graham wrote on Twitter: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed… and we will deserve it.” He did not vote for Trump that November.
The tweet remained live on his account for years afterward. Asked about it during a 2024 presidential debate broadcast, Graham claimed he simply hadn’t realized it was still there.
From kook to bestie
Graham’s pivot toward Trump began with a single fateful meeting. In March 2017, the newly inaugurated Trump invited Graham to the White House. By Graham’s own later account, a round of golf followed.
By late 2017, Graham was telling CNN he was troubled by “this endless, endless attempt to label the guy some kind of kook not fit to be president.” Remember, in February of 2016, he had used that very word to describe Trump. He was now redirecting it against others.
Asked what had changed his mind about the man he’d called unfit for office, Graham said: “I got to know him. I’ve played golf with him... He’s funny as hell. He’s got a great sense of humor. There’s a method to the madness.”
By April 2018, with the leaders of North and South Korea pledging to work toward denuclearization, Graham said on Fox News that if it held, Trump “deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and then some.”
Graham’s sycophancy even led him to betray those closest to him. Asked by Bloomberg that same year about Trump’s ongoing public attacks on the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Graham's closest friend in the Senate, including disparaging comments about McCain’s captivity as a prisoner of war, Graham said: “I don’t like what he says about John McCain. But when we play golf, it’s fun.”
“Count me out.”
For a brief moment, on Jan. 6, 2021, Graham appeared ready to do the right thing. Hours after a mob stormed the Capitol to disrupt certification of Joe Biden’s electoral win, Graham took to the Senate floor. While several Republican colleagues continued to object to the certification, Graham broke from them, saying: “Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way… All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.” He then affirmed Biden’s legitimate election.
But five weeks later, on Feb. 13, at Trump’s second impeachment trial, Graham voted not to convict. The Senate voted 57-43 to convict, 10 votes short of the two-thirds majority required.
About six weeks later, Graham traveled to Mar-a-Lago to golf with Trump, framing the trip as an attempt to broker peace between Trump and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
In a March 7, 2021 interview with Axios, Graham said: “Donald Trump was my friend before the riot. And I’m trying to keep a relationship with him after the riot. I still consider him a friend.” From declaring “I’m out” to full reconciliation took him just two months.
The warmonger: Israel and Iran
Graham was consistently one of the most hawkish members of the Senate, especially on Israel and Iran. His statements about the Middle East often seemed designed to shock and dehumanize. That record helps explain at least some of why the White House valued him beyond the golf course.
After Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, Graham became one of the most forceful defenders of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, even if it meant slaughtering civilians. In a February 2026 podcast interview, asked about Israel “flattening Gaza,” Graham said: “Just flatten it. We flattened Berlin. We flattened Tokyo. Were we wrong to drop an atomic bomb to end the Japanese reign of terror? In my view, if I were Israel, I would have probably done it the same way.”
On Iran, Graham had called for military pressure on the regime for years before the Trump administration went to war. According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, Graham made multiple trips to Israel in the weeks before the U.S. joined Israel’s military campaign against Iran in February 2026, meeting with Israeli intelligence officials and, by his own account, coaching Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on how to present the case for action to Trump. Graham told the Journal that Netanyahu subsequently presented Trump with intelligence that “persuaded” him to proceed. Graham therefore bears some responsibility for the mess Trump now finds himself in.
Asked in March 2026 about the war’s cost, reported at roughly $1 billion a day, Graham dug in. He told Fox News: “Best money ever spent.”
Months later, on June 21, 2026, during a discussion on CBS’s “Face the Nation” about negotiations with Iran, Graham said that if diplomacy failed, “President Trump is going to take the Strait of Hormuz,” adding that if Iran contested American control of the waterway, “we will obliterate them.”
A Russia hawk until it wasn’t cool
Graham’s position on Russia followed its own arc. For most of two decades, it looked nothing like his relationship with Trump. McCain, after meeting Vladimir Putin, once said: “I looked into Mr. Putin’s eyes, and I saw three letters, a ‘K,’ a ‘G,’ and a ‘B’” — a rebuke to George W. Bush’s 2001 comment that he’d looked in Putin’s eyes and gotten “a sense of his soul.” Graham, McCain’s closest ally on foreign policy, took a harder line than most.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Graham became one of the Senate’s most consistent voices for Ukrainian aid, eventually making ten wartime trips to Kyiv. Weeks into the invasion, he even called publicly for Putin’s assassination by his own citizens, invoking Julius Caesar’s killers and the German officer who tried to kill Hitler, telling reporters: “I just want him to go… I wish somebody had taken Hitler out in the ‘30s.”
A year later, when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin over the abduction of Ukrainian children, Graham’s office called it “more than justified by the evidence” and warned that “to forgive and forget Putin’s war crimes…would irrevocably damage the Rule of Law-based world order established at the end of World War II.”
Graham’s anti-Russia stance, it turned out, was subject to presidential override. On Feb. 28, 2025, President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met in the Oval Office to sign an agreement giving the U.S. access to Ukrainian mineral resources. The meeting infamously devolved into a public confrontation, with Trump and Vice President JD Vance accusing Zelenskyy of insufficient gratitude for American support and Trump declaring that Zelenskyy had no cards. Trump ended the meeting before the deal could be signed or the planned joint press conference could begin.
Graham had met with Zelenskyy that same morning alongside Democratic Sens. Chris Coons and Amy Klobuchar, in what the senators described as an encouraging bipartisan conversation. But hours later, Graham stood outside the White House and told reporters: “What I saw in the Oval Office was disrespectful, and I don’t know if we could ever do business with Zelenskyy again. I have never been more proud of the president.” He said Zelenskyy should “resign and send somebody over that we can do business with, or he needs to change.”
History and the Complicit
Anne Applebaum singled out Graham as a modern-day fascist collaborator in a 2020 essay for The Atlantic, “History Will Judge the Complicit.” Applebaum is a historian of Soviet and Eastern European authoritarianism. She drew on 20th-century collaborators—Vichy officials who served the Nazi occupation of France, Communist Party functionaries in East Germany and Stalinist true believers in the Soviet Union—and found their motives were never singular. Some collaborated out of fear, some out of genuine ideological belief and some out of simple careerism, dressed up afterward as principle.
And some, she noted, collaborated for a reason having nothing ideological at all: the sheer, addictive pleasure of being close to power. She named Graham as an example. A friend of his, she wrote, told her that every time the senator ran into Trump, he came away boasting about it. Applebaum compared Graham’s excitement to that of a debate-club kid whom the popular quarterback had finally noticed.
Other astute political observers agreed. Steve Schmidt, a former Republican strategist who ran John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, delivered a devastating assessment in Rolling Stone that’s worth reading in its entirety:
People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now,” Schmidt says. “The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.”
In high school terms, Graham was the desperate kid determined to be part of the in crowd, not the out crowd. Like other collaborators throughout history, he would do almost anything to stay there.
It cannot be overstated how important your book cover is. It’s the first impression, the spark that drives a reader to learn more about your book.
A great cover doesn't stop at the front. Your book's spine is just as important—it's what readers see first on a bookshelf, and even small design mistakes can make an otherwise polished cover look unprofessional.
The good news? A few simple guidelines will help ensure your spine prints correctly. This includes designing for bleed and correctly placing your spine, as well as the critical task of planning for variance.
What Is a Book Spine?
A book’s spine is the center of the cover, the narrow (or wide) edge where the pages are bound. There are many ways to bind a book. For our purposes, we’re going to focus on Paperback books (also called perfect-bound books) because they’re one of the most commonly used binding methods.
Perfect binding involves milling the spine edge of the pages to create a series of notches. Then the printer rolls glue over the spine edge, and the book block is pressed into the cover until the glue sets. This glued edge becomes the book’s spine.
Design Your Cover as One Complete File
Your cover should always be created as a single file that includes the:
Back cover
Spine
Front cover
Spine width is determined by your page count, so every book needs a custom cover template. For the best results, generate your template by uploading your final interior PDF file on Lulu. If you're designing your cover first, you can download a preliminary template from our pricing calculator and replace it with an updated version once your page count is finalized.
Leave Room for Print Variance
During printing and trimming, tiny variations can occur. While they're usually only fractions of an inch, they can cause spine artwork or text to shift slightly.
To avoid noticeable issues:
Don't place important design elements directly against the spine edges.
Leave at least 0.125 in (3 mm) of clear space on either side of the spine text.
Avoid creating a spine that's a dramatically different color than the front and back cover unless that color intentionally extends onto both covers.
Center Your Spine Text
If your book is thick enough to include spine text, keep it centered and leave adequate padding on both sides.
A typical spine includes:
Book title
Author name
Publisher logo (optional)
If your spine is very narrow, it's often better to omit text entirely than risk it printing off-center.
Don't Calculate Spine Width Yourself
While there are formulas for estimating spine width, you don't need to do the math.
If you or a professional are designing your cover before your interior is finalized, you can use Lulu's pricing calculator to generate a preliminary cover template using your planned book specifications and estimated page count. Once your interior is complete, download a new template based on the final page count and make any necessary adjustments before publishing.
You can also generate a custom cover template with the correct dimensions after creating a new project and uploading your interior file.
Review Before You Publish
Lulu provides a preview tool to review your cover after you upload it. Before approving your book:
Verify that all spine text is centered.
Check that important artwork stays outside the trim area.
Preview your full wraparound cover to ensure the front, spine, and back align as expected.
A few extra minutes reviewing your cover can help prevent costly reprints and ensure your book looks polished from every angle.
Book Spine Best Practices
Your spine may be the narrowest part of your cover, but it has a big impact on how professional your book looks. By designing with print variance in mind, using a custom cover template, and leaving enough space around text and graphics, you'll create a cover that's ready to print with confidence.
Your Free Lulu Account
Create a Lulu Account today to print and publish your book for readers all around the world
One thing that we’ve heard for many years in covering a variety of ridiculous civil and criminal court cases is the belief that when a crazy case is filed, the person accused of wrongdoing should “just walk into court and tell the judge what really happened.” While that might feel right, it’s really not how these things work. There is a procedure, and having an actual lawyer who understands how things work is incredibly valuable.
When we first wrote about “Reckless” Ben Schneider and his valiant attempt to help Bryan Mansell get back the Lego sets (and/or money) he was owed from the company Bricks & Minifigs, we mentioned that almost everyone in the dispute should have talked to lawyers earlier in the process than they did. We had a lot of people get mad at us for making that claim, but I stand by it. Especially after Schneider has dropped Part 3 (after a federal court fixed the extremely problematic injunction from a state court that had blocked him from releasing it originally), and it again shows why Schneider really needs to hire a lawyer.
As lots of people are rightly noting, the video itself shows a ton of pretty sketchy behavior by Bricks & Minifigs and the cops — police walking a witness through how to invent charges while mocking Schneider, and Bricks & Minifigs caught telling wildly different stories depending on who was listening. And then, right on schedule, after the video came out Bricks & Minifigs followed it up with a new blog post on Friday that somehow makes things worse.
Schneider certainly knows how to make pretty viral video content, but representing himself in court seems particularly stupid, especially as he’s doing it here in a criminal case. He is right that the deck is stacked against him and that the prosecutors and the judge don’t seem to be listening to him or taking his claims seriously, but that’s in large part because he’s bumbling into court without a lawyer, and when he’s being asked fundamental procedural questions is telling the judge “have you looked at the evidence we submitted?”
Again, this might feel like the right way to handle a case where you feel you’re being railroaded, but procedurally, the court isn’t supposed to be looking at the evidence at this stage of the case, so Schneider making out like the court is treating him unfairly just misses the point that basically any lawyer could have told him regarding how cases like this proceed.
That’s not to defend the prosecutors, the police, or Bricks & Minifigs. While the video is (again) only showing Schneider’s side of the story, there are a whole bunch of things in the video that are incredibly damning to all three.
Let’s go through a few key points: First up: what the cops told Schneider about the charges against him, and what they were actually hiding.
Schneider plays some audio from one of the criminal cases against him (it’s a little unclear which one, since he suggests it’s the case in American Fork, but a screenshot he shows briefly suggests it may be the other case in Provo), where he says that the prosecutor and the court won’t even share what he’s being charged with, though the video clips don’t show that. Rather they show prosecutors trying to get out of providing body cam footage in discovery to Schneider, claiming that they’re upset he’ll make video commentary out of it. Discovery of evidence is not the same as knowing what the charges are, even if the evidence is related to the charges.
Even so, the claim is bullshit. The fact that Schneider might create public commentary with the videos is no excuse for not providing discovery. If that’s the concern, prosecutors can seek to have a protective order put over how the discovery materials are used, and if Schneider violates that order, then he could face contempt charges. Simply denying discovery is ridiculous.
But it’s the second case, out of Provo, where the bodycam footage stops looking like sloppy policing and starts looking like something much more problematic. Schneider was able to obtain bodycam footage from the police who were handling the charges against him based on statements from Bricks & Minifigs’ CEO Ammon McNeff. Again, we’re only seeing the evidence as selected and edited by Schneider, but it’s difficult to see how there’s anything else that would exonerate how the Provo police acted here.
They literally have one police officer talking to McNeff (repeatedly), talking about how McNeff’s original claim of extortion isn’t supported by the evidence but offering to help him find some other charges, and then asking McNeff to confirm specific elements to turn it into commercial obstruction. The police officer’s quote here is deeply problematic:
“We agree that there really was no extortion code that would fit your situation, however, you know, at the end of the day, we do want to help you guys so you’re not having to deal with this fool… [sigh]… all his issues. We did find that there was another code that fit and it’s called aggravated commercial obstruction….”
Having the police call Schneider a “fool” and saying they want to help find charges that will stick is not great. They then walk McNeff through what they need him to say/do to get such charges, including claiming that he asked Schneider to leave the Bricks & Minifigs premises multiple times and Schneider refused. Schneider shows his own video recordings (and security footage) that appears to directly contradict this — specifically showing that when asked to leave they did so.
There is one point where McNeff asks them to leave but then keeps talking to them anyway, so that almost certainly doesn’t count as a legitimate request to leave. And none of the footage Schneider shares matches even remotely what McNeff told the police. There is footage of Schneider (stupidly) saying “we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” which is not fatal to Schneider’s argument, but can certainly be read as a threat. In all these videos, that’s the one point that isn’t great for Schneider, though in the full context it’s pretty clearly a threat to release more videos and publicly shame Bricks & Minifigs. Still, that line hurts Schneider’s argument a bit.
McNeff also tells the police that Schneider threatened to burn the offices down, even though in their own civil lawsuit against him they admit that various threats have not come from Schneider directly but from some of his fans online. If Schneider had directly threatened them, you’d think they would have included that in the civil complaint. While most of the video evidence has only been selectively released, at this point not a single bit of evidence shows Schneider actually threatening any sort of violence towards Bricks & Minifigs (indeed, it seems that his whole schtick is to sort of do the dopey, hapless, inquisitor thing).
Based on the current evidence, it sure looks like McNeff just lied to the cops, and the cops not only took his side, but helped nudge McNeff about what he should say or do to give them enough to charge Schneider.
Not great!
Even worse, when the same cop figures out what they can charge them with, the body cam footage shows her laughing with glee. You kinda have to watch the clip directly (starting at 16:15) where the cop gets kinda gleeful that McNeff told her enough to charge Schneider with a second degree felony (Schneider falsely calls it a “secondary” felony). This is actually two separate clips from Schneider’s video, though it sounds like they’re directly connected to one another:
Cop: However, the tricky thing is is that we have to prove that this individual either entered or remains unlawfully on the premise. When he came to the property, did you have to ask him more than once to leave?
McNeff: Yes.
Cop: Okay.
McNeff: You know, ‘we’re not leaving until we we get it.’ …
[other video interspersed before cutting back to this exchange]
McNeff (trying to reconstruct the scene for the cop): ‘Guys, at this point, I’ve asked you to leave. Please leave.’ ‘Well, we we you know, like you have to listen to us. You have to pay us this money.’ ‘No, guys, you need to leave and you’re not leaving.’ Like, but I asked multiple times. They did not leave.
Cop: Looks like that might be a second degree felony. [laughs joyfully] He’s facing felony charges. It is a felony…
That is all… pretty damning. Later the same cop mocks Schneider’s first video: “I’m really curious if this fool makes any money doing this YouTube stuff?” Even later, she says to McNeff “well, I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you. Hopefully no more issues” and “there’s so many other things that this guy could be talking about, right?” Just completely supporting McNeff and dismissing Schneider’s side entirely.
Though I will note that Schneider also has a misunderstanding that “reporting a crime” (as he tries to do with McNeff) is “opening a case.” While police can investigate claims of a crime, until a prosecutor charges it, there is no actual “case.”
But it does seem overwhelmingly clear, from what’s presented in this video at least, that the police immediately believed and sided with McNeff and dismissed/ignored everything Schneider presents in response… to the point that they sent a subpoena to Google seeking a bunch of Schneider’s emails, communications, and other documents. There’s a suggestion in the video that McNeff got Schneider to email him just to get his email for the sake of the subpoena, though it seems clear that McNeff had other means of getting Schneider’s email address. Schneider points out that he emailed via the website contact form and had received a reply from someone at Bricks & Minifigs. And while McNeff acts like he’s never heard of that email address and it has nothing to do with him, that’s clearly bullshit, and he could easily talk to whatever employee manages that account to get Schneider’s email address.
Set the criminal case aside for a second, because there’s a parallel thread here that’s just as bad for the company: McNeff’s own claims about the inventory list don’t survive contact with reality. McNeff tells Schneider that he’ll happily share the inventory they did of the store they took over if he sends an email to the one specific address, and says he told Mansell the same thing. However, when Schneider emails that address and follows up, he receives this reply:
If you can’t read that, it says:
Mr. Schneider,
BAM Franchising, Inc. will not participate in any form of communication that appears designed for public provocation, harassment, or manipulation of facts for the purpose of media content.
Attempts to obtain privileged or confidential information through misrepresentation or the creation of fraudulent documents may constitute criminal misconduct, and we reserve all rights to refer such behavior to appropriate legal authorities.
Should you believe you are entitled to any specific information under applicable law, we suggest that you pursue such requests through formal and lawful legal procedures.
This will serve as our final response to your inquiry unless we are contacted by duly retained legal counsel representing a party of standing.
That shows pretty clearly that McNeff was full of shit when he said he’d be happy to email Schneider a copy of the inventory. And, sure, you can say that between Schneider visiting them and the time this email was sent they decided that they didn’t like how they were going to be portrayed, but there’s a pattern here. In the video Schneider releases, he shows McNeff saying “I think we have sent it to Bryan” in reference to the inventory list, and later says that if Schneider and Mansell get on an email thread together he’ll send it to both of them.
They also show McNeff going on TV news interviews claiming that they had told Mansell and Mansell’s lawyer that they were happy to work on going through the inventory list, but that Mansell’s lawyer stopped responding. McNeff said: “we’ve tried to share those with Mr. Mansell in hopes that he can see that we were not attempting — in any shape or form — to withhold anything. Those were then offered to him, and the initial offer was rejected.”
Except that Mansell has the receipts in the form of the email thread between his lawyer and Bricks & Minifigs, which seems to show pretty clearly a very different story. Even as we only see snippets of the emails, it’s hard to square this with what McNeff keeps claiming. The emails show Mansell’s lawyer asking multiple times how to get the money owed or the sets back and finally getting a stiff arm email saying that the two guys who Bricks & Minifigs handed the store to, “Brandon Best and Joshua Johnson, have no legal obligation to return any of the LEGO product.”
And then, even more damning is the closing of the email, saying “We consider this matter closed and will not be returning any LEGO products to you.”
That, uh, does not seem like a company that claims that it has no problem trying to work with Mansell to resolve this issue. Last week we mocked Bricks & Minifigs for having their crisis comms person send us an email about how the company was so eager to help make Mansell whole. That already seemed ridiculous since they’re suing Mansell for $1.3 million claiming RICO. But also, that was before we’d seen this email where the company basically says “shove it.”
Anyway, even as this is just coming from Schneider’s side, it’s hard to see how there’s any additional info that would acceptably square the claims made by McNeff with what’s been presented. There’s now plenty of discussion about how Schneider likely has civil claims he could bring against McNeff. Arguably he could also claim that the police in both American Fork and Provo violated his rights, but that’s likely an extreme longshot (not because the cops are in the right, but because it’s next to impossible to sue the cops for violating your rights).
Either way, we now know that Schneider has legal representation for the civil case, and hopefully that means he can also secure legal representation for the criminal case as well, because that would clearly be helpful. Yes, all of this is tremendous content, but your strategy in court when facing felony charges and your strategy for making viral content can (and should) be somewhat different.
Honestly, given how much attention this has gotten, and the legal help that has started to step up, there’s a decent chance that the criminal cases will go away, but that’s very much not the norm. Planning to go viral is not a strategy any lawyer would recommend for fighting criminal charges.
Anyway, while Schneider’s legal troubles play out, it’s worth remembering that Bricks & Minifigs certainly was not blindsided by Schneider’s Part III. They knew it was coming and that it was blocked by the broader injunction they had obtained in court. They knew that they had negotiated a pared back injunction, which meant Part III would be released soon. They basically had weeks to prepare a PR response to all the damning stuff that video was going to show.
And this is what they came up with.
The company released yet another tone deaf blog post on Friday, which talks about all the “changes” they’re making to respond to some of the criticism they’re getting. Half of them basically read as admissions of how badly run the company is. They admit that they’re going to work more closely with franchises (apparently they’ve recently jacked up franchise fees) and have put in place a “standardized inventory and trade system” effectively admitting that they had nothing before.
There are also some comments on the lawsuit that look written by the world’s worst crisis comms team. I mean, this is embarrassing:
Some have asked why Bricks & Minifigs hasn’t simply dropped the pending litigation connected to this matter. The answer is that accountability and integrity must run both ways. We remain open to a mediated, amicable resolution, and we don’t view litigation as the preferred path. We’re also not willing to submit to manipulation, threats and unsupported accusations.
That… doesn’t answer the question. And sure, fine, accountability and integrity should run both ways, but you’re the one out there claiming that you’re trying to make Mansell whole… while telling him you won’t give him any of his stuff back and then suing him for $1.3 million.
The blog post also suggests they have to keep the lawsuit going because Schneider’s conduct “has crossed the line from fair criticism into harassment, misrepresentation, and targeted harm.” But that’s Schneider, not Mansell. It’s also laughable given the footage that’s been shown so far.
And of course they try to avoid the fact that all the presented evidence makes them look terrible with this favorite line:
We will not try this matter on social media, and we will not use this statement to relitigate every disputed detail. Those issues belong in mediation and, if necessary, the legal process.
Again, that makes sense in certain contexts, but here where you’ve been running your mouth off constantly on TV show after TV show with claims that directly contradict what corporate actions and emails have said, it does the opposite of building credibility.
At basically every turn where Bricks & Minifigs could have made the situation better, they’ve dug in and made it worse. It seems like a bad strategy. So bad it’s even worse than going to court and trying to defend yourself from criminal charges without a lawyer.
For years I’ve noted that while Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband system can be very useful for people with no other options (warzones, RVs, boats, rural Americans), the network has struggled to maintain performance as it grows into more mainstream markets, resulting in not only widespread slowdowns, but also the company socking users with massive “congestion surcharges.”
These surcharges are actively designed to deter use because the network is struggling to handle the load. They started at around $100 a few years ago, then jumped to $750. And last week, Reddit users began complaining that they were automatically hit with a $1500 demand surcharge. And because Musk’s companies historically don’t invest in customer service, calling up to complain doesn’t really help:
“I have been charged 1500 dollars demand surcharge for simply verifying my address that I have subscribe to 3 years ago. I have contacted starlink customer support but it’s pretty worthless. I have been getting tossed from one agent to another agent for the past 5 days.”
Last year, a study from researchers at X-Lab quietly showed that Starlink struggles to manage the load as the network grows, making it ill-suited as serious game changer for U.S. access. So as the network scales up, Starlink will be forced to impose more and more limits and restrictions on usage to ensure that most people have an acceptable experience. The laws of physics are kind of annoying like that.
Ideally, sensible U.S. broadband policy involves pushing fiber optic cable as deeply into American communities as possible, then covering a lot of the remainder with either fixed wireless or cellular tech. Only then can low-Earth orbit satellite broadband options like Starlink (or Amazon’s Leo) act as niche options that fill in the gaps.
These technologies were never really designed to be the primary avenue for broadband delivery across the bandwidth-hungry country. They’re simply not useful in many more densely populated areas. But the Trump extended infotainment universe is convinced that Starlink is akin to some kind of magic simply because Musk’s name is involved.
So they’re redirecting billions of taxpayer dollars away from better, higher-capacity fiber options and toward Musk’s Starlink, which is only going to result in greater congestion as the network begins to strain under the heavily subsidized load. People will only start to figure this out long after Musk has pocketed billions of dollars in subsidies in exchange for Starlink service SpaceX already planned to deploy.
I’ll repeat that because it gets missed: Musk is getting billions in subsidies, which he professes to hate, in exchange for doing nothing differently. Extremely innovative.
There’s been an additional layer of stupidity created by the SpaceX IPO and its utterly bogus proclaimed valuations. The prospectus pretends that Starlink will somehow magically scale from 10 million current subscribers to more than 300 million in very short order with no headaches, but reality and the laws of physics are going to have something very different in mind.
And again (just like Tesla Solar), because Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent, folks shoveled toward Starlink by the Trump administration aren’t going to have a good time. This is all before you get to the fact that Starlink has also been criticized for harming astronomical research and the ozone layer, and is generally too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access.
That’s not to say that services like Starlink don’t have very real uses, but the company and its tech (like everything Musk touches) is being wildly misrepresented in a way that’s going to become increasingly and problematically apparent in the next few years.
Object permanence: Pro-logging Lorax; Anti-DRM picture book; Whose cops did America train? Day on a Device; Theresa May x Fresh Prince; Ratfucking Corbyn supporters; Infosec v W3C DRM; Remix Public Enemy; Hungary's Cold War cartoons; America is unpaving its roads; Olympic overruns are world champions; Vivendi lobbyist is now UN copyright boss; Boris's racism; Facebook's insider stalkers; Semantic drift, ethical drift.
Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
Why aren't AI companies competing directly with their customers? (permalink)
"I often wonder what the Vintners buy/One half so precious as the Goods they sell" -The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
I first encountered that quote from someone extolling the virtues of bookstores, and it stuck with me, because for most of my childhood, every bookstore visit ended with me broke and wishing I'd had three times as much to spend.
As a larval hyperlexic, I just didn't understand what a bookseller could possibly buy with my money that was better than the books they already had? Of course, then I became a bookseller and discovered that Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is shit") applies to a bookstore's wares as much as it does to anything else. I also acquired a monthly rent obligation and discovered just how important money could be.
Nevertheless, Omar Khayyám's question stuck with me, especially when I fell down a years-long rabbit-hole of learning about scams and the finance sector (but I repeat myself). Every get-rich-quick schemer will tell you that they've found the infinite money hack, which they will sell to you for a remarkably reasonable sum. Likewise, every stock picker claims they can outperform a simple low-load index fund, and all they ask of you is a few hundred basis points in exchange for multiplying your wealth beyond the dreams of Creosote. Neither one has a good answer to Khayyám's question: if you can make all the money with your amazing system, why do you need my money?
This is a question that needs to be forcefully put to AI hucksters. In their more expansive moments, the Altmans and Amodeis of the world will tell you that they're planning to teach the word-guessing program so many words that it will wake up and become god. DOGE's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in the faces of the NIH lifers who begged them not to vaporize their long-running cancer research projects: "General AI is around the corner and it's going to cure cancer. Cancer research is a waste of money!"
Which all raises the question: if you've truly incubated a foetal demiurge in your "AI lab," why are you offering to sell it to me? What do the AI hucksters buy/One half so precious as the Gods they sell?"
Of course, they might answer, "We need your money now so we can make god later." That's why they want your boss to fire you and replace you with their chatbots and split your wages with your former employer. But this just raises the same question: if you have a chatbot that can do a doctor's job, why sell it to a hospital? Why not just open your own hospital? If you've got a chatbot that can do a tax accountant's job, why sell it to a tax-prep service? Why not just open a tax-prep service? If you've got a chatbot that can teach my kids, why sell it to my local school district? Why not just open a school?
If the chatbot can do the job, and if the chatbot costs less than the worker who does the job today, then the chatbot company can profitably sell services more cheaply than anyone who presently employs that worker, because the chatbot company already owns the chatbot. If you were really on a glide path to creating an all-powerful deity and just needed cash to keep the venture going until the cancer-curing word-guesser awoke from its long slumber, then wouldn't you want as much cash as possible? Why would you voluntarily split the take with some sucky, washed, non-god-generating business from before 2022?
I think the only reason this question doesn't come up more frequently is that we're stewing in what Douglas Rushkoff calls the "go meta" economy, in which the most respectable and smartest business to operate must be as many abstraction layers away from real work as possible. Don't drive a taxi, own a medallion that you rent to the cab driver. Don't own a medallion, start a "rideshare" company. Don't start a rideshare company, invest in a rideshare company. Don't invest in a rideshare company, buy options to invest in a rideshare company:
The inverse relationship between doing something useful and making money is deeply ingrained in our economic wisdom. Take the world of online grifters, who don't just peddle get-rich-quick PDFs, they also peddle tools to generate get-rich-quick PDFs, as well as tools to steal other "wealth influencers'" insta videos and deepfake yourself into their pretend private jets:
The scam economy boasts a bewildering array of ancillary services, like a $150/month service that lets you produce fake screenshots showing vast monthly income on other scam services (November Kelly calls this "The world's most expensive 'inspect element'"):
It's an old truism that in a gold rush, the only people who come out ahead are the people selling the picks and shovels. But that's not true – there's even more money to be made wholesaling picks and shovels to the retailers who operate the frontier mercantiles. Go meta!
So it's not surprising that we don't ask why these AI god-botherers need our stupid money while they're immanentizing the eschaton. Why would they operate a hospital if they could go meta and sell the doctorbots to the MBAs running the hospital?
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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With the FIFA World Cup nearing its conclusion this week, the crackdown on sports streaming sites continued this weekend.
As part of the “Operation Offsides” enforcement action, led by U.S. authorities, more than 100 domain names were seized over the past days.
These new seizures came more than two weeks after the U.S. Department of Justice officially announced the action. While no new announcement was released, the recent seizures in part target fallback domains that pirate sites switched to following the initial crackdown.
For example, when the buffstreams.plus domain name was seized, ibuffstreams.app took its place, pointing to the same server infrastructure. This backup domain did not go unnoticed and was subsequently seized, pointing to the now-familiar banner.
The seizure banner
These secondary domain seizures also targeted many other domains and brands, including sportsurge.ws, footybite.app, totalsportekz.app, and istreameast.app. A longer list with more examples is available below.
Iranian Fallback
As long as the people running these sites are not caught, they will often launch new domain names. This is not new, but a recent series of domains caught our eye, as it is using seemingly more resilient fallback: Iran’s .ir country-code top-level domain.
OSINT data gathered by TorrentFreak found that buffstreams.ir, sportsurge.ir, and footybite.ir are all active and operational. These domains resolve to the same Ukrainian IP-address, which was previously used by the now seized buffstreams.plus, ibuffstreams.app, and sportsurge.ws domains.
The Iranian domains are paired with Iranian nameservers, ns1.pars.cloud and ns2.pars.cloud, which are also new as the earlier domains relied on Cloudflare nameservers. This suggests that the operators are intentionally moving away from American infrastructure.
Three Years in the Making
Iranian WHOIS data doesn’t reveal when the domains were registered, but SSL certificate logs tell us these .ir domains are not recent emergency registrations.
Both buffstreams.ir and sportsurge.ir received their first SSL certificates on September 22, 2023, within six minutes of each other. Their certificate chains have been renewed without interruption every 90 days since.
In other words, the .ir domains were set up nearly three years before Operation Offsides was announced. All this time they were presumably kept in reserve as a fallback and following the recent seizure actions they were brought to the fore.
The same certificate information also shows that, a few days ago, these .ir domains moved away from the Google SSL certificates they have been using for years. Instead, they switched to certificates from Let’s Encrypt.
More Iranian Links
The three domains on pars.cloud are not the only pirate streaming brands using .ir. Our investigation identified at least 20 additional streaming-related .ir domains spread across several operator clusters.
This includes Totalsportek, nflbite, and nflstreams branded sites with .ir domains, which are all share the same Cloudflare nameserver pair, indicating that they are run from the same account. There is also a separate .ir-linked mlb66 and nhl66 operation, which has been in use for a while.
These .ir domains are not necessarily a response to the recent U.S. domain seizures, as they’ve been around for much longer, but they show that more operators have discovered the .ir ccTLD.
In fact, we have also seen a cluster of Iranian sports streaming domains that are registered, but are not serving any content. These include nbabite.ir, nbastreams.ir, nhlbite.ir, mmastreams.ir, nflstream.ir, stream2watch.ir, and streameastt.ir. These may be waiting to be deployed at a later moment.
Political Tensions
Iran’s .ir country-code TLD is managed by IRNIC, which is part of the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences, an academic institution based in Tehran. This makes it essentially unreachable for U.S. law enforcement.
Because of American sanctions, U.S. domain registrars are not allowed to resell .ir domain names. At the same time, given the current state of U.S.-Iran relations it is unlikely that IRNIC will voluntarily cooperate with U.S. authorities to target these domain names.
For pirate sites operators, .ir domains are also appealing due to a revision of IRNIC’s WHOIS policy in 2023. As a result, public queries no longer return registration dates, registrant names, or other contact information. For outsiders, these domains are essentially anonymous.
Notably, Iran’s copyright laws do not cover works from outside Iran, as the country is not a signatory to the Berne Convention, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, or a member of the WTO. This further complicates enforcement actions.
Of course, there are plenty of downsides to using .ir domain names. The international sanctions will make it challenging to monetize these domains, while Iranian domains are more complicated to register, and may also seem less trustworthy to the broader public.
Also, if an Iranian domain name gets millions of monthly visits, including a large American audience, the U.S. authorities may try to target these operations from alternative angles.
—
Below is a list pirate sports streaming domains that were seized this past weekend. This is addition to the domain names that were seized earlier.
This Thursday, I’m heading to D.C. for a Human Rights Campaign board meeting. We’re kicking off with a push to elect two new openly LGBTQ+ candidates to the U.S. Senate: Reps. Chris Pappas of New Hampshire and Angie Craig of Minnesota.
I ask for your support at this critical time for my community. Every direction we look, our progress toward equal rights and equal dignity is being rolled back. From the bigoted ban on transgender people serving in the military, which erased decades of honorable service, to efforts at every level of government to strip away our right to marry and even our right to exist as part of the fabric of this country, the LGBTQ+ community is under attack as never before.
We need champions from our community at the highest levels of government to lead us through these dark times. Chris Pappas and Angie Craig are two such leaders.
Angie and Chris made history as the first openly LGBTQ+ people from their states to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. If elected to the Senate, they would make history again and triple LGBTQ+ representation in that body. (No, Lindsey Graham didn’t count.)
Raised by a single mom in a mobile home park, Angie became a reporter, a business leader and a champion for Minnesota families. A local volunteer for the Human Rights Campaign, Angie has worked hard since entering Congress to lower health care costs and strengthen rural communities.
Before Congress, Chris helped run his family’s 108-year-old Manchester restaurant, which has served generations of Granite Staters. A descendant of Greek immigrants and a Harvard graduate, he entered politics to fix a system that was failing everyday people. In Congress, he has earned a reputation for bridging divides.
At a time when people are being fired just for who they are or who they love, we must seize every chance to turn the tide. Here is the larger picture: Both Minnesota and New Hampshire are must-hold states for the Dems. We need to keep each state blue, or the chances of flipping the Senate dwindle to nothing. Your donation helps keep that chance alive!
Please give any amount to one or both their campaigns using the box below, where you can choose how to split your gift. If you aren’t part of the LGBTQ+ community but choose to support greater representation, I thank you especially for putting your hard-earned money behind your principles.
Guy was one of many people involved in the start of Wikipedia, left in a snit to start rival project after rival project more in line with his personal vision, each dying a death because his vision doesn’t make for a useful website with a thriving community. After these sites rotted on the vine, he decided to do return, contribute nothing worthwhile for years and right wing media tours to help signal boost right wing attempts to attack the site because they won’t let them hijack the site the way they have everything else.
He’s the intellectual equivalent of a J6er, he openly tried to do a coup, got punished because the rules should be applied equally regardless of political beliefs, and expects sympathy, only there’s no Trump to wave the get out of consequences free card for him.
In the UK, the wealthy and powerful are able to get “Superinjunctions” to prevent speech, and, significantly, even the existence of the injunction cannot be disclosed.
Combined with strict libel laws (even truth is not an absolute case in the UK — the case of George Galloway against the Daily Telegraph showed this), the powerful in the UK can be used to restrict speech that criticizes them.
Porn is, was, and always will be the canary in the censorship coal mine. Censors count on people being too embarassed about defending porn to stop censorship. If they take even the most innocuous pornography away from you—I’m talking Playboy pinups here—and you do nothing about it because “who wants to defend smut”, every other kind of speech is on the table. This really is a “first they came for” situation, so if you’re not willing to openly defend porn as protected speech, the least you can do is not openly support the censors when they use your triggers against you.
“Remember, pornographers have always been on our side. Brave, ready to fight for our rights. Smut is our friend.” — John Waters
If he’s mad about the Olympian, wait until he hears about that idiot who drove a motorcade of heavy, armoured vehicles across it before they filled it back up. That guy will be in sooo much trouble.
You don’t reseaerch time travel: you just make a decision to research time travel and if your future self doesn’t promptly show up to say hi then you know that your research would have failed.
This is a useful term. It helps us understand a topic or theory that can be considered from multiple points of view by people engaging with good intent.
“Pluto is a planet” was a controversial statement among some people who study the solar system.
On the other hand, it’s not controversial that Pluto actually exists.
Choosing to engage in a conversation about something that’s controversial gives us a chance to share our insights and engage in dialogue. And it also comes with the knowledge that we’ll need to devote time and care to having that conversation.
On the other hand, inventing false controversy is simply a tool to keep people away.
If you insist that the world is flat, and that talking about its spherical nature is controversial, then you’ve made it hard to be a travel agent, a geologist or a sailor. You’ve scared people away from a productive conversation because you’re claiming something without good intent.
The key element of ‘controversial’ is possibility. If that’s not there, it’s simply an empty argument.
On 12 July 2026, three years after the initial release, the regular
support for Debian 12, alias bookworm, has come to an end. The
Debian Long Term Support (LTS) Team
is taking over security support from the Security and Release Teams.
Last year, the recording session I did with Mel Robbins was going so well that her producers asked me to stick around–four hours later, we had recorded enough for two episodes.
One never knows how these things will feel until after the fact, but part 2 is live now. I hope you get as much out of it as I did…
My day with Mel inspired my new book, which ships in 9 weeks. And the limited-edition multi-pack is well on its way to being fully subscribed. I just added a new spiral-bound booklet for the first 700 orders. Photos to come when it comes back from the printer.
The moment you start treating your customers as captives, they begin to make other plans.
It might take a while, but they always end up leaving. The first step is warning away their friends.
On the other hand, when we treat our customers like the free agents they are, they often choose to stick around (and bring the others).
Before you reward an analyst for jacking up the price and making some money this week, it might be worth focusing on what that short-term move is going to cost you.
The week began with a crash. At the Great American State Fair, that is. This patriotic hang glider’s landing captured the whole event. (Thankfully, he and the MAGA onlookers were uninjured.)
Note: Some browsers, such as Firefox, aren’t opening Xcancel links. Others, such as Chrome and Safari, appear to open these links just fine. If a link won't open, cut and paste the URL, remove the word “cancel” then view the original X link.
Following musical act cancellations, poor attendance and crushing heat waves, the weak sauce celebration ended with authorities ordering another evacuation as dangerous thunderstorms approached. That went over well.
My favorite part of the finale was where much of the MAGA crowd had to take shelter.
A bunch of losers marched through the streets of D.C. in masks.
With the algae-filled Reflecting Pool still closed, this became a common theme of the Fourth of July festivities.
If you haven’t seen Larry David’s new mockumentary, here’s a taste:
Even this woman on the street had it out for us and, well, we deserved it.
A gentle reminder:
Politics and sports weren’t limited to the U.S. game.
Besides the World Cup scandal, there was the “Is he actually dead?” scandal back home surrounding Sen. Mitch McConnell. But maybe it’s been a while already?
Read the caption, then the headline out loud.
With so many GOP figures claiming they’d each talked to him for 20 minutes, Rep. Thomas Massie couldn't resist dunking on the absurdity.
The Sick Sense?
Who ya’ gonna call?
Along the same lines:
The humor soon went morbid.
But let’s not weep too much for Mitch.
Leave it to Borowitz…
Few will forget what this man did.
On our side, we had our own scandal that rocked our politics.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) had the nerve to lecture Dems about Platner.
Back in Oz, incredible things are happening.
And this is rather uncanny when you think about it.
And The Onion seizing InfoWars from Alex Jones may be the best thing ever.
How much is laughter worth in these rough times? How about sound, independent political and legal analysis? Enough to support yours truly by buying me coffee once a month? If you think that’s fair and reasonable, upgrade your account to a paid subscription today. And if you’ve already signed up as a paid supporter, thank you! You’re my hero!
A few doggo entries this week. Here’s RxCKSTxR with a voiceover only he can deliver.
Always remember to leave at least one toy out of the wash!
My cat keeps trying to get out of the house, but when he succeeds, he just sits on the porch. Probably because he knows what’s really out there. Unlike this little guy. Sound up!
Founded in 2010, AnimeFLV has been a dominant player in the anime piracy ecosystem for years. 
With the FIFA World Cup nearing its conclusion this week, the crackdown on sports streaming sites continued this weekend. 
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