As we’ve previously noted, Brendan Carr recently launched a series of phony inquiries into ABC because Jimmy Kimmel made fun of the president’s wife. Carr can’t just come out and say that, so he’s launched a series of fake (and legally laughable) “investigations” into the company. They’re all designed to scare ABC, and other big media companies, away from platforming critics of the unpopular president.

“If you platform voices critical of the president you’ll face an endless barrage of costly and annoying legal headaches and bad press in the right wing media,” is the unsubtle threat.

So Carr has falsely claimed ABC is violating the Communications Act by embracing diversity practices. He’s also falsely claimed that ABC violated the dated FCC “equal time” rule by not platforming more right wing Trump supporters. And he’s repeatedly lied and stated ABC is violating the FCC’s antiquated and never used “news distortion” rule because Kimmel made fun of Charlie Kirk.

It’s all a very big pile of racism, ignorance, zealotry, and censorship pretending to be serious adult policy. And you’ll notice the inquiries only go one way: Carr has nothing to say about Fox News (or countless local right wing broadcast new affiliates and AM radio stations) routinely airing right wing propaganda. Right wing outlets can do whatever they’d like without criticism or repercussion. Funny, that.

As part of the proceedings, Carr has repeatedly threatened to pull one of ABC’s eight broadcast licenses if they refuse to roll over to the administration (they haven’t… so far).

Last week, Carr pretended he was open to receiving public input about the whole ignorant mess. The FCC Media bureau issued a public notice seeking opinions on whether The View qualifies for the bona fide news exemption to the FCC’s equal-time rule, which requires equal time for opposing political candidates on non-news programming. From the notice:

“Does The View qualify as a bona fide news interview program? Does the federal equal opportunities statute pass relevant constitutional scrutiny, either as a general matter or as applied here? Are the relevant decisions on The View, including on format and participants, based on newsworthiness or on an attempt to oppose or support particular candidates within the meaning of FCC precedent? We welcome comment on these and any other relevant points.”

The last page of this document has details on how you can formally comment. Of course, Brendan Carr doesn’t really welcome public input; they’re looking to make this appear like a meaningful public policy initiative, and not the censorial witch hunt it actually is. I suspect the call for comments, as is usually the case, will be flooded with all sorts of bots and fake people.

As we’ve mentioned previously, ABC’s daytime talk show The View hosted Texas Democrat James Talerico last February. The Trump administration is apparently unhappy with the inroads Talerico has been making with Texas Christians and independents. So Carr has falsely claimed that platforming Talerico violated the FCC’s equal time rule, requiring ABC file appropriate paperwork and platform a Republican voice in opposition.

But as ABC’s recent notice to the FCC makes clear, The View was clearly granted an FCC Bona Fide Exemption to the rule back in 2002. Most talk shows have broadly been viewed as exempt since 1984 or so (and increasingly so, as the Internet challenged TV’s supremacy). So there’s nothing to really debate.

Carr knows that, so instead he manufactured a controversy. But it’s worse than that: as ABC’s filing made clear, Carr appears to have worked collaboratively with right wing local broadcasters to make it seem like ABC-owned Houston affiliate KTRK had done something wrong. They collaborated on a big performance to make it seem like KTRK broke the law.

This is all so profoundly stupid it would be laughed immediately out of court in a functional country. But a corporate media, worried they won’t get mergers approved (or could face costly legal headaches for having a spine), has generally chosen to roll over both in their official capacity, and as reflected by their journalism.

As a result, most of the reporting on Carr’s censorship has generally either failed to call out Carr’s behaviors as radical or extreme, or they’ve taken a “both sides” approach to the story where they frame everything as a matter of two equally valid opinions, in turn normalizing authoritarian censorship.

But make no mistake: Carr’s a censorial authoritarian zealot engaged in a laughable and racist government harassment campaign because the U.S. President is a giant baby with a historically fragile ego. And Brendan Carr should never be allowed to live it down.

I’m starting to wonder if RFK Jr. can do anything right at all. After the courts put an injunction on Kennedy’s overhaul of the CDC’s ACIP panel on vaccines, as well as pretty much all of their recommendations since it was rebuilt on a foundation of anti-vaxxers, the government sprung into action to try to let Kennedy keep fucking with vaccines in America. The reasoning by the court for the injunction was a process oriented one: Kennedy’s overhaul of ACIP violated the American Procedures Act. By simply hand-picking unqualified sycophants to ACIP, he didn’t follow procedural law. The Trump administration eventually appealed the ruling, which is still pending hearings. On his end, Kennedy decided to amend the ACIP charter to try to route around some of the procedural violations of the APA that got him in trouble the first time.

But it turns out he fucked that up, too. His amended ACIP charter has now been withdrawn for once again not following proper procedure.

A revised charter document for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s influential vaccine advisory committee has been withdrawn by the Health Department over an administrative error, according to a notice published in the Federal Register Tuesday.

While the Health Department is working to appeal the injunction, Kennedy attempted to circumvent the judge’s ruling on the ACIP members by altering the committee’s charter to, among other things, allow for people without expertise in immunizations and public health to be members.

But, for now, that effort, too, has been thwarted. According to the notice on Tuesday, the new charter has been withdrawn for not following a federal requirement on public notification.

The law on the matter is remarkably clear. In order to reestablish a discretionary advisory committee, for which ACIP qualifies, the Secretary of the agency must provide a written statement that the committee is being formed in the public interest, establish what that public interest actually is, and then publish a public notice to the Federal Register so that the people can understand the action that is being taken.

Kennedy didn’t do any of that. He rewrote the governing charter for his remade version of ACIP and just tried to make it a thing without following any of those rules. He just plain fucked it up.

Which isn’t to suggest that Kennedy definitely won’t try to do this all again with an actual attempt to follow procedural law. I am having trouble imagining a world in which he doesn’t do that, actually. But given his apparent desire to step on every last rake he can find, it’s a wonder to me that the Trump administration doesn’t simply want to put someone more capable in charge of HHS.

I’ve spoken to enough teachers and professors to know that LLM tools are absolutely a challenge for many of them in the classroom. Many struggle with making sure they’re actually teaching students how to learn, worrying that the tools are doing the work for them, and skipping over the actual learning. Many are (understandably) resorting to outright bans on students using the tools (which they often know they can’t enforce). Others say that students can use these tools but are fully responsible for any work they turn in, hoping that this will encourage students to be wary of relying too much on the tech. Still others are trying clever workarounds (I appreciate the assignment in which students are asked to have an LLM generate an essay and then the student has to review/grade the essay themselves, which is engaging and also teaches some of the limitations of the tools).

But I’ve also heard from both teachers/professors and students that there are concerns that as students go out into the job market, having some skills with these tools is often a requirement in whatever fields they pursue, leading them to wonder how to best teach the subject in a world where LLM tech isn’t likely to go away, and is seen as part of the toolbox that many employers will expect their employees to use.

I don’t necessarily have good answers to that, but I did recently have an experience in my own home that struck me as potentially relevant as an example of how the tech can actually be useful as a learning tool. I’ve been meaning to write about this for a few months now, but there always seemed to be something more urgent to cover. With the school year almost over, I figure I should get this out. For all the talk of how kids are cheating using AI, it might be worth showing at least one example where the tool is genuinely useful — in this case, one of my kids and their friends.

At the beginning of this year I had actually set up my kids with some (very sandboxed) agentic coding tools, after walking them through how I used such tools for a fairly simple project so they could see both how it worked, but also some of the limitations with the tools.

Soon after that, my 12-year-old had asked about my opinion on AI in schools. We talked through how using them to avoid doing the work is genuinely damaging to learning, but there are cases where they can be legitimately helpful. I used the calculator analogy: you first have to learn basic arithmetic by hand, but once you genuinely understand it, a calculator is a perfectly legitimate tool for tackling harder problems — it stops being a crutch and starts being a multiplier.

Apparently that analogy stuck, because what happened later was that analogy made real.

Once I had set my kids up with the tools, they did what most people do with them: created some fun games. A couple of months went by and they hadn’t used them much more. In early March, however, the 12-year-old came home and told me there was a math test that Friday and some classmates were doing an online study group. They worked through some problems together in a live voice chat, but afterward my kid stayed at the computer for a while longer before calling me over to take a look.

“I vibe coded a system to help study.”

I was… surprised. Even more interesting, the app had been packaged up (as an HTML file) and shared with the study group. My kid then explained that because AI can’t be trusted to always get things right, they’d gone through and checked the AI’s math themselves — making some (minor) corrections along the way — and that the process had given them a stronger grasp of the material than just passively studying would have.

I never got a full explanation on the “errors” that they found, though the sense I get is that it wasn’t anything major (outright incorrect math or explanations or anything) but more minor mistakes that they used the tools to fix directly within the app.

After acing the test that week, the next obvious thing to do over the weekend was plan out a study tool for the rest of the semester:

Among other things, this version of the app includes an onscreen pop-up calculator — but only for the topics where a calculator is allowed on exams. I have no idea if this was a more literal implementation of the calculator analogy we’d discussed earlier! It also (for fun) lets you adjust the color scheme.

And it has a changelog as updates were made to the app.

There are plenty of reasonable concerns about kids using AI to cheat, and those concerns aren’t wrong. It’s a real issue. But the framing of “AI as cheating tool” has crowded out a more interesting question: what does it actually look like when a kid uses these tools well?

The calculator analogy holds: the LLM tool generated a first draft — a study tool, a set of practice problems, a scaffolded explanation of the material. My kid then had to engage critically with that output: checking the math, finding the gaps, making corrections. That process of verification was part of the studying. The tool actually created the conditions for more active, more engaged learning than just reviewing problems in a book. And it certainly didn’t substitute in for the learning, like most people worry about with these tools in classroom settings. Quite the opposite.

That’s a meaningfully different frame than “AI does your homework.” The homework here was, in part, checking the tool’s work — and it turns out that’s not a bad way to learn math.

It’s one thing to accuse the government of engaging in vindictive prosecutions. It’s quite another thing to prove it.

The deck is stacked against those making these claims. These allegations rarely succeed. The government gets the benefit of the doubt and has the ability to make evidence against its position simply disappear.

It didn’t work here, though. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was among the initial wave of deportations in which the US government sent hundreds of people to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT maximum security prison — one overseen (almost directly) by a man who had declared himself the world’s “coolest dictator.”

Abrego Garcia, however, didn’t go silently. He fought back, first against the fact-free allegations that he was a dangerous MS-13 gang member before fighting the government’s insistence on punishing him for daring to speak up. That retaliation took many forms, including multiple attempts to send Garcia to countries like Liberia and Uganda, rather than allow him to reside in Costa Rica, which had already offered to take Garcia off the government’s hands. It also took the form of gag orders the government hoped would silence Garcia while it continued to make unproven claims about Garcia’s allegedly violent gang-related history.

The more Abrego Garcia pushed back, the angrier the government got. But anger is hardly useful when you’re supposed to be in the business of seeking justice and enforcing the law. It’s even more useless when the only people left manning the DOJ and DHS are people long on sycophancy and short on experience.

The end result is a legal unicorn: a sustained allegation of vindictive prosecution that has resulted in the dismissal of criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The ruling [PDF] — issued by federal judge Waverly Crenshaw (and brought to us by Liz Dye on Bluesky) — opens with a quote of a former federal prosecutor (and Supreme Court justice) that makes it clear where this order is headed.

Then-Attorney General Robert H. Jackson warned his fellow prosecutors long ago of the danger of picking the person first and the crime second. “Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.” Robert H. Jackson, The Federal Prosecutor, 31 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 3, 5 (1940). That is the situation here.

That’s the leadoff. The payoff involves running down everything the administration did in hopes of bullying Abrego Garcia into silence/compliance. Those steps involved everything from resurrecting a traffic stop of a car driven by someone else that never resulted in criminal charges to a government attorney resigning, rather than help the administration pursue its petty revenge. Lots of DOJ/DHS attorneys/officials are name-checked on the way to the court’s ruling in favor of Abrego Garcia.

In short, the timing of [HSI] Agent VanWie’s decision to reopen the closed HSI investigation of the November 2022 traffic stop and [acting US Attorney General Todd] Blanche’s now unrebutted public statements tying the reopened investigation to Abrego’s successful lawsuit taints the investigation with a vindictive motive. That vindictive taint continued with [Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash] Singh’s close substantive oversight of McGuire’s and his prosecution team’s work leading to the indictment. Finally, after the indictment was presented, the Executive Branch found a way to return Abrego to the United States to comply with the District of Maryland’s order to facilitate his return. While the Court finds insufficient evidence of actual vindictiveness, the Court concludes that the Government has failed to rebut the presumption of vindictiveness. The evidence it labels as newly discovered was available to be obtained with due diligence long before April 2025. Even more, it does not explain the Government’s change in position to remove Abrego and not prosecute him to then prosecute and not remove him. McGuire’s subjective explanations also do not cure the retaliatory taint that set the investigation and resulting indictment in motion. Because the presumption of vindictiveness remains unrebutted, the indictment must be dismissed.

Listed above this paragraph is a comprehensive recounting of the government’s actions in this case, which includes several failed appeals (after it was ordered to return Garcia to the US), including a rare loss in the US Supreme Court. It also details the social media postings and press releases issued by the administration, which again stated (without providing evidence) that Garcia was a MS-13 gang member involved in human trafficking.

Because Garcia refused to go quickly and quietly, the administration (begrudgingly, following several appeals) returned him to the United States only to hit him with criminal charges meant to keep him locked up until the government could toss him into the next available hellhole devoid of human rights (Liberia, Uganda, etc.).

None of this worked, and now the government has been fully exposed as the bullying thug it is. Garcia is free to go, mainly because it’s impossible for the Trump administration to provide anything that credibly counters the apparent truth of the matter: Garcia was punished solely because he chose to fight back.

The Court does not reach its conclusion lightly. The objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution. The Executive Branch closed its investigation on the November 2022 traffic stop. Only after Abrego succeeded in vindicating his rights did the Executive Branch reopen that investigation. What the Government labels as “new evidence” was not new as a matter of law. The prosecutor’s subjective good faith does not cure the retaliatory taint.

This is a massive loss for the Trump administration. While it only affects one of hundreds of victims of its anti-migrant purge efforts, it was a case this administration threw all of its power at and still got shut out by the court. Bullies only win when no one fights back. And a single El Salvadoran has managed to expose the inherent weaknesses of the administration’s institutional bigotry — something that operates outside of the law as frequently as possible. That the government chose to appeal repeatedly just means it has secured multiple levels of adverse precedent. It has been beaten by the person the administration accidentally turned into the poster boy for racist immigration efforts.

The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was one of the few genuinely good things Donald Trump was talked into doing during his first term. It was an agency within the Department of Homeland Security that was focused on coordination between the government and industry when there were larger cybersecurity threats that needed coordination to deal with in a manner that protected Americans.

It was staffed with genuinely competent people who understood cybersecurity risks, and who did serious work keeping critical systems safe and secure. Everything started to go south in late 2020 when its then-director, Chris Krebs, made the factually accurate statement that the 2020 election had been incredibly secure. That MAGA narrative violation made it so Trump had to fire Krebs and for MAGA to decide that this factual statement was the equivalent of treason.

From about that point onwards, CISA has been basically seen by the MAGA world as suspect, and that was helped along by some bad reporting and conspiracy theory nonsense pretending that CISA was involved in “censoring social media,” something that was not even remotely true. The real story was that, given CISA’s involvement in sharing cybersecurity threat information across industries, there were some efforts to see if they could also coordinate information sharing for things like election disinformation: not as a tool of censorship, but if an election official in some random area saw someone posting information telling people to (for example) “vote by phone” or whatever, there would be a way to route that issue to the relevant internet company to review against its own guidelines.

But because of the false reporting, the MAGA world took it on faith that CISA was commanding a vast censorship empire which simply never actually existed. Either way that made it ripe for the chopping block. Rand Paul, in particular, wanted to destroy the whole thing, falsely believing it was engaged in censorship.

However, he barely needed to do anything because the Donald Trump / Kristi Noem DHS moved many CISA officials away from actually worrying about cybersecurity to… processing deportation paperwork for ICE. And then, of course, came the firings, gutting the agency.

But, you know, having people who actually understand the basics of cybersecurity is probably useful for the [checks notes] cybersecurity agency of the United States. And as a recent Brian Krebs (unrelated to Chris Krebs) report details, whoever was left at CISA apparently was so bad at cybersecurity that they leaked the government’s AWS GovCloud keys by… putting them in a public Github repo.

On May 15, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Guillaume Valadon, a researcher with the security firm GitGuardian. Valadon’s company constantly scans public code repositories at GitHub and elsewhere for exposed secrets, automatically alerting the offending accounts of any apparent sensitive data exposures. Valadon said he reached out because the owner in this case wasn’t responding and the information exposed was highly sensitive.

The GitHub repository that Valadon flagged was named “Private-CISA,” and it harbored a vast number of internal CISA/DHS credentials and files, including cloud keys, tokens, plaintext passwords, logs and other sensitive CISA assets.

Valadon said the exposed CISA credentials represent a textbook example of poor security hygiene, noting that the commit logs in the offending GitHub account show that the CISA administrator disabled the default setting in GitHub that blocks users from publishing SSH keys or other secrets in public code repositories.

This is really bad in so many ways. First, as already mentioned, GitHub has literal protections against just this thing which you have to actively go and disable, which whoever is left at CISA clearly did.

On top of that, any developer with even the slightest knowledge of how this works knows you put credentials and tokens in a .gitignore file — which, as the name implies, makes sure they never end up in an accessible repository.

Here it was even worse — this wasn’t just tokens buried in the code, but a CSV file with plaintext passwords. What are they even doing?

“Passwords stored in plain text in a csv, backups in git, explicit commands to disable GitHub secrets detection feature,” Valadon wrote in an email. “I honestly believed that it was all fake before analyzing the content deeper. This is indeed the worst leak that I’ve witnessed in my career. It is obviously an individual’s mistake, but I believe that it might reveal internal practices.”

One of the exposed files, titled “importantAWStokens,” included the administrative credentials to three Amazon AWS GovCloud servers. Another file exposed in their public GitHub repository — “AWS-Workspace-Firefox-Passwords.csv” — listed plaintext usernames and passwords for dozens of internal CISA systems. According to Caturegli, those systems included one called “LZ-DSO,” which appears short for “Landing Zone DevSecOps,” the agency’s secure code development environment.

It is difficult to explain how incredibly insecure and, well, amateurish all this is. And these don’t appear to be dummy data or old and obsolete data either. Again from Krebs:

Caturegli said he validated that the exposed credentials could authenticate to three AWS GovCloud accounts at a high privilege level. He said the archive also includes plain text credentials to CISA’s internal “artifactory” — essentially a repository of all the code packages they are using to build software — and that this would represent a juicy target for malicious attackers looking for ways to maintain a persistent foothold in CISA systems.

“That would be a prime place to move laterally,” he said. “Backdoor in some software packages, and every time they build something new they deploy your backdoor left and right.”

This kind of security blunder would be embarrassing for anyone. But for the US government’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency to have a fuckup this bad is unforgivable.

Hell, even when Krebs reached out to CISA about this they did a poor job reacting. While they, thankfully, pulled the repo right after being alerted, it appears it took them over two days to actually rotate the keys to make the exposed ones inactive:

The GitHub account that included the Private CISA repo was taken offline shortly after both KrebsOnSecurity and Seralys notified CISA about the exposure. But Caturegli said the exposed AWS keys inexplicably continued to remain valid for another 48 hours.

Krebs points out that CISA has lost a third of its workforce to Trumpian purges, but the bigger story is how the agency was so thoroughly demonized — made the villain in so many MAGA conspiracy theories about censorship — that it drove away the people who actually know how to run a secure operation.

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Our war on drugs began with a simple man with a simple plan. That plan was this: give the government more powers at the expense of civil rights, all under the “leadership” of soon-to-be-deposed president Richard Nixon and known drug enthusiast, Elvis Presley.

While that summary is long on pithiness and short on detail, it’s not that far from the truth. The government wanted more ways to lock people up and take their stuff, and a “war” on drugs was the best way to sidestep constitutional protections that might otherwise prevent the government from locking up as many minorities as possible.

The “War on Drugs” has always been racist. Pretty much the only reason marijuana and opium were originally determined to be illegal was because Black and Chinese people became the convenient scapegoats, even when it was clear whites were far more likely to abuse these drugs, especially the opiates.

Racism and the Drug War have gone hand in hand since the early 1900s. It gained even more traction following the passage of laws protecting the civil rights of minorities, which saw Richard Nixon trying to undo the good Lyndon Johnson had done as perhaps the only redneck-with-a-conscience this nation has ever elected as president.

Since the usual racist shit doesn’t play quite as well as it used to 50 years ago (well, except for at the federal level), cops are now pretending drugs currently on the market are more powerful and dangerous than ever. This should be an indictment of the War on Drugs, but drug warriors are incapable of recognizing their contribution to the purity and easy availability of the same drugs they claim they’re fighting on behalf of America.

Cops like to pretend that the mere presence of fentanyl during busts and arrests is enough to kill officers, even though it’s impossible to overdose on any drug without actually ingesting it. Meth used to be the drug scourge of choice when the government felt like getting its racism on, but that fell out of favor when it was discovered to be the substance of choice of white people residing in the Midwest and southern Bible Belt.

Efforts were made to tie drug use to non-whites, which has resulted in the Trump administration declaring it’s legally in the right to drone strike any boats cruising through international waters south of the US border.

Panic artists continue to pretend every drug is the mass murderer, including former reality TV stars hoping to contain control of one this nation’s largest cities, as Miles Klee reports for Wired.

Spencer Pratt, once the villain of the 2000s MTV reality show The Hills and now an insurgent candidate in this year’s Los Angeles mayoral race, had a breakthrough moment in his first debate performance last Wednesday.

Turning to his signature issue of public safety, Pratt berated his opponents—Mayor Karen Bass and city councilmember Nithya Raman—for not doing enough about unhoused people dealing with drug addiction.

“The reality is, no matter how many beds you give these people, they are on super meth,” Pratt said, criticizing Raman’s plan to expand addiction treatment. “I will go below the Harbor Freeway tomorrow with her, and we can find some of the people she’s gonna offer treatment for. She’s gonna get stabbed in the neck. These people do not want a bed. They want fentanyl or super meth.”

SUPER METH. Dang.

Hopefully, it’s as cheap and easy to obtain as regular meth. I mean, it should be.

What is “super” meth, you might ask? Well, if it actually exists at all, it’s a direct result of this nation’s Drug War efforts to prevent regular non-drug users from obtaining stuff like Sudafed without having to get pharmacy staff involved.

Super Meth Is More Potent Than Traditional Meth: After U.S. restrictions on meth precursors in 2006, cartels developed a purer form—often at least 93% pure—that can produce a high lasting up to 24 hours, significantly increasing addiction and overdose risk.

That’s from “rehab” super group Aliya, which helpfully has a “brands” page on its website, along with this statement (no citations included) about the existence and origin of “super meth.”

It would seem the most rational response to US efforts to curtail local efforts to brew up acceptable meth would be to offer a cheap knockoff that undercut US restrictions by giving users what they wanted without generating more expenses on the supply side. I’ll tap the screen again to remind readers that this claim by a for-profit rehab center that — at the end of April 2026 — laid off 80 employees and closed at least two California rehab facilities. This may or may not be related to Aliya’s legal troubles with the federal government:

Not long after Johnson’s appointment, the company found itself the target of a U.S. Federal Trade Commission lawsuit in June 2025. The FTC accused that a former owner of an addiction treatment center that Aliya acquired, consultant groups and others of engaging in deceptive marketing practices. 

A lot of this is neither here nor there. But it’s hardly encouraging that the first few so-called expert sources on “super meth” have been generated by entities in the for-profit rehab business. And so it is for opportunists/political hopefuls like Spencer Pratt. It doesn’t matter whether or not any of this adds up. It doesn’t matter than it doesn’t make sense for international drug cartels to make a stronger product to compete with tepid domestic US meth and then apparently sell it at the same price point.

These are words of opportunists who want regular people to believe a new drug scourge is worth throwing money at. Whether that money is harvested by a corporation that offers for-profit rehab services or a politician who thinks adding the word “super” to something makes them a better candidate doesn’t matter. Both entities are exploiting a knowledge gap to enrich themselves.

Pratt can be forgiven for just being a mayoral hopeful willing to traffic in lies to get elected. Aliya (and others like it) have no excuse. They’re leveraging ignorance to increase profits. They’re both entirely wrong about this supposed new drug plague.

“Thankfully, super meth isn’t real,” says Claire Zagorski, a paramedic, harm reductionist, and PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin College of Pharmacy. “If there really was a new type of meth, it’d have its own chemical name and we’d be hearing about it from much more reputable sources than Mr. Pratt.”

The reality of the situation is far more mundane than these people are willing to admit. Meth production relied on phenyl-2-propanone (P2P) for decades before it was placed on the DEA’s drug schedule in 1980. The next closest thing was pseudoephedrine (Sudafed, etc.), which meth producers used until the government cracked down on that by treating regular people like drug dealers by limiting their purchases and requiring they turn over their identifying info to obtain what used to be an over-the-counter medication.

Now that pseudoephedrine is about as difficult to obtain as P2P, the drug has undergone iterations depending on what’s more easily available. It didn’t suddenly make meth “super.” All it did was change (depending on what’s available) the end product. And yet, we’re getting another wave of panic led by aspiring politicians and rehab centers who want potential clients to feel that the meth they’re currently using is far more potent than the meth they’ve always been using.

Color me cynical. Everyone knows meth will fuck you up on multiple levels. Meth users aren’t going to be dissuaded just because someone is saying weird stuff about “super meth.” Everything about this is performative and does a disservice to everyone — including the people these entities (public and private) claim to be helping — by pretending whatever meth is currently available is an insta-killer that can only be stopped by (1) oppressive government action and/or (2) paying a whole lot of money to people who would have charged less for services if “super meth” wasn’t currently making national headlines.

In the end, it’s the same old bullshit. People in government want more power, so they’ll use the most convenient excuse to obtain it. People in the business of milking every last dollar out of the victims of the US’s failed Drug War will do the same thing. Meanwhile, no one gets better and the flow of drugs to users doesn’t decrease. But these middlemen will continue to see steady profits, all while they pretend to care about the people they’re using as pawns.

NPR is imposing a new round of buyouts and layoffs as it tries to survive the brutal Trump GOP attacks on public broadcasting. According to NPR, it’s being forced to trim $8 million of its $300-million annual budget because of the illegal (for whatever that word is worth any more) Trump administration attacks on NPR, PBS and their member station funding earlier this year.

The original executive order resulted in Congress obliterating the entire Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) budget of $1.1 billion for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. With no money left to function, the CPB voted to dissolve itself last January. A judge subsequently ruled that the defunding was illegal and violated the First Amendment, but the ruling came too late to save the CPB.

According to NPR, it received $113 million in private donations ($80 million of it coming from Connie and Steve Ballmer) to offset the losses, but that money won’t be used to save the jobs of human beings doing actual reporting. Instead, it can only be spent on “technological innovation” (read: likely given to Microsoft for enterprise services):

“Paradoxically, just prior to the announcement of these cost-cutting measures, NPR received a pair of private gifts totaling $113 million — representing the network’s second- and third-largest in its 56-year history. Most of that money, however, is dedicated to technological innovation.”

While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributed over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations. Much of them providing popular and useful educational programming.

As we’ve noted previously, right wingers, corporations, and authoritarians loathe public broadcasting because, in its ideal form, it can untether public interest journalism from the often perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement-based corporate media.

A media, if you hadn’t noticed, that is easily bullied, cowed, and manipulated by bad actors looking to normalize, downplay, or validate no limit of terrible and illegal bullshit (see: CBS, Washington Post, the New York Times, and countless others). In functional countries, taxpayer-funded journalism functions as a public interest firewall from corporatism and authoritarianism.

In the United States, decades of attacks and defunding have left us with outlets like NPR that barely even qualify as a “public broadcaster.” And as NPR became a more traditional, corporate ad-driven outlet you could watch in real time how it became friendlier and friendlier to right wing narratives for fear of being accused of a “liberal bias” (for all the good it wound up doing them).

But after decades of under-funding and attacks, what passes for U.S. public media is a distant shadow of the idea’s full potential. And now even that’s been left reeling. Should we survive authoritarianism, maybe there will be a few useful lessons buried in the rubble.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad pushing back on some of our criticism about John Oliver’s AI chatbot segment and his call for regulation:

Isn’t the logical conclusion of this argument that we shouldn’t have government regulations on vaccines or antidepressants?

Like, you’re arguing that we shouldn’t put this particular thing under the control of HHS because it’s currently run by a lunatic, but…couldn’t you apply that argument to literally everything?

Hell, why stop at HHS? RFK is hardly the only corrupt moron in Trump’s cabinet. Carr’s corrupt; I guess we shouldn’t have any regulations on the broadcast spectrum. Chavez-DeRemer resigned due to misconduct; I guess we should get rid of OSHA. Kristi Noem —

…okay, actually we should abolish DHS; I’ll give you that one.

In second place, it’s Nimrod with a comment about Border Patrol chief Michael Banks:

Anyone who brags about their sexual exploits clearly lacks the maturity to be put in charge of anything more serious that a lemonade stand. Even then, they should probably be supervised.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments about the latest example of a judge smacking down the DOJ. First it’s Ninja asking the all-important question of whether it will matter at all:

So what exactly is preventing the DOJ and the people they represent from doing this again trying different paths? Any meaningful punishment? Threat of disbarring if it continues? Fines to the DOJ itself and those repeatedly doing this kind of persecution against trans people? Perhaps jail time? No?

It will keep happening.

Next, it’s Nathan F with thoughts about the future:

In two and a half years the DOJ is going to have an almost insurmountable hill to climb in redeeming themselves in the eyes of the court. I have no doubt the the current administration is going to continue to lie to the court and abuse their power.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Asst DA BA Baracus with a reply to a commenter complaining about “activist judges”:

Neat how 10,000 decisions are wrong on the law because they’re not YOUR preferred interpretation of the law. And amazing how, without further reasoning from you, you’re able to come to the obvious implication that these are 10,000 decisions by the “lots” of activist judges. How do we know they’re not fair jurists? Because you disagree with them.

The view from your own navel must be glorious.

In second place, it’s Bloof with another comment on the same subject:

Every judge is an activist judge, unless they were handpicked by the federalist society or have worked for Trump in some capacity, then they’re non partisan champions of justice.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Stephen T. Stone, deploying a movie quote in response to Bill Cassidy’s primary loss:

Of all the movies I could quote, Ocean’s Thirteen has the most appropriate two lines I could think of for this:

You think this is funny?

Well … it sure as shit ain’t sad.

Finally, it’s one more comment from Nathan F, this time about Trump’s absurdly corrupt IRS shenanigans:

Soooo… Now that Trump is no longer and can no longer be audited by the IRS.. he is going to release his tax returns right? Right??

That’s all for this week, folks!