Having the right to take maternity leave does not necessarily mean you will have an income while you are away from work. One of the most important sources of financial support during maternity leave is Maternity Allowance (出産手当金), which is available through employees’ health insurance for workers who meet the requirements. Workers enrolled only in National Health Insurance generally do not receive the same benefit.
That means two workers with very similar jobs can find themselves in very different financial situations when they become pregnant, depending on their insurance coverage.
Shakai hoken eligibility can also be complicated. Working hours, wages, the size and status of the employer, and other factors may affect whether enrollment is required. And even when an employer is technically complying with the law, gaps in the system can still leave workers without the support they expected when they need it most.
That’s why it’s worth checking your insurance coverage before you need maternity or childcare leave. Don’t wait until your leave is about to begin to find out what benefits you will—or won’t—receive.
韓国 (からくに) — China 日韓 (にっかん) — Japan and South Korea 韓国人 (かんこくじん) — South Korean person 米韓 (べいかん) — United States and South Korea 韓国語 (かんこくご) — Korean (language) 日中韓 (にっちゅうかん) — China, Japan and Korea 韓流 (かんりゅう) — hallyu 中韓 (ちゅうかん) — China and Korea 訪韓 (ほうかん) — visit to South Korea 在韓米軍 (ざいかんべいぐん) — US troops stationed in South Korea
The big Meta multi-state settlement got most of the headlines, and there’s been plenty of discussion about how it’s a bad deal for kids and pretty clearly anti-competitive. That’s thanks to a very strange clause that encourages Meta to make its own required feature changes the “industry standard” by convincing other platforms to cut similar deals with state AGs. So far, YouTube has said it won’t accept Meta’s terms, because they don’t make sense for its very different platform. TikTok hasn’t publicly commented on the Meta deal, though it did reject Meta’s attempt to run ads on TikTok itself urging TikTok to join the settlement.
It didn’t get nearly as much attention, but TikTok did somewhat quietly settle with one state: Alabama. They came to a $100 million settlement in a case that Alabama brought last year, claiming that the features of TikTok were “addictive.” The settlement came out on a Friday, just before the first such trial was set to begin against TikTok the following Monday. Given how we’ve seen juries more than willing to blame social media platforms for anything bad that happens to kids using the platform, it’s clear that TikTok was under the gun to work out a settlement that avoided an expensive trial and possibly more expensive verdict.
On Friday, Alabama announced that TikTok had agreed to safety measures including a two-hour daily limit for underage users and additional parental controls to further limit time on the site. The settlement also restricts unlimited scrolling and overnight access, as well as the use of beauty filters and other features that social media experts have said are harmful to teenagers’ mental health.
Most of those sound pretty similar to Meta’s settlement. But there are some key differences in the full settlement agreement. And the biggest, as first pointed out by Stanford’s Daphne Keller, is that whereas the Meta settlement encouraged Meta to convince TikTok and YouTube (and possibly Snap) to sign similar deals and to pay similar amounts, the TikTok settlement… appears to encourage Alabama to convince other Attorneys General to go after TikTok.
It’s… weird.
The agreement sets up multiple “funds” that are wholly dependent on other state AGs coming to similar settlements. The headline $100 million number is “fund 1.” The $100 million is supposed to go towards compensating people “harmed” by TikTok, but it appears that the Alabama Attorney General gets to decide how that works, and based on past settlements in other cases, I’m going to assume there won’t be much transparency there. Then there’s another $16.2 million going to outside lawyers and litigation costs:
Fund 1 is paid to resolve the State’s claims under the Alabama Deceptive Trade Practices Act (Ala. Code § 8-19-1 et seq.). $14,200,000.00 is allocated to attorneys’ fees and $2,000,000.00 is allocated to litigation expenses associated with this action (to be paid to outside counsel directly). The remaining $100,000,000.00 of Fund 1 is designated as compensatory restitution and remediation for the benefit of Alabama consumers within the meaning of Section 162(f)(2) of the Internal Revenue Code andshall be paid to the Office of the Alabama Attorney General to be used in the Attorney General’s sole discretion for any lawful purpose, including compensatory restitution and remediation for the benefit of Alabama consumers.
“Sole discretion for any lawful purpose.” In other words, the AG’s office can spend it however it wants, and there’s no requirement that a dime reach anyone “harmed” by TikTok. Indeed, the chief counsel in the case has more or less admitted that the Alabama has no intention of actually using the money to help kids at all:
Chief Counsel Katherine Robertson, who oversees the case for the Attorney General’s Office, said the money will likely land in the state’s general fund, though her office wants lawmakers to steer it toward Alabama youth.
“It will probably go to the general fund, but we hope to have discussions with our legislative leadership about using this to really remediate the harm that’s been done to our youth here in Alabama,” Robertson said.
But then it gets really bizarre. There’s a second fund, Fund 2, that TikTok agrees to pay, up to an additional $183.8 million, depending on if and when certain “tiers” of other AGs convince TikTok to settle:
Fund 2 Contingent Payment Pool & Sequential Tiered Vesting
(a)Total Contingent Amount:In addition to Fund 1, Defendants shall establish a contingent payment allocation pool of$183,800,000.00(“Fund 2” or “Contingent Amount”).
(b)Vesting Tiers and Sequential Timeframes:Fund 2 shall vest incrementally across four (4) distinct tiers based upon state participation in qualifying agreements (including any consent judgment and settlement agreements) or Assurances of Voluntary Compliance (“AVCs”)
(i)Tier 1 (30% / $55,140,000.00): Vests when ten (10) State Attorneys General execute qualifying agreements, provided the tenth (10th) agreement is executed within twenty-four (24) months following the Effective Date (“Tier 1 Window”).
(ii)Tier 2 (30%/$55,140,000.00): Vests when twenty (20) State Attorneys General execute qualifying agreements, provided the twentieth (20th) agreement is executed within twenty-four (24) months following the Tier 1 Vesting Date (“Tier 2 Window”).
(iii)Tier 3 (20%/$36,760,000.00): Vests when thirty (30) State Attorneys General execute qualifying agreements, provided the thirtieth (30th) agreement is executed within twenty-four (24) months following the Tier 2 Vesting Date (“Tier 3 Window”).
(iv)Tier 4 (20%/$36,760,000.00): Vests when forty (40) State Attorneys General execute qualifying agreements, provided the fortieth (40th) agreement is executed within twenty-four (24) months following the Tier 3 Vesting Date (“Tier 4 Window”).
I can’t recall ever seeing anything even remotely like this. As regular Techdirt commenter John Roddy noted, TikTok and the Alabama AG here basically created an affiliate program for settlement enforcement. I honestly can’t even wrap my head around the logic here. “Here, we’ve agreed to pay you a ton of money to settle this case… and if we agree to pay more money to other states, you also get a cut for being first in line.”
Think about the incentive structure here: Alabama’s AG now has a direct financial stake in recruiting 39 other states to pressure TikTok into the same deal, on a deadline. I can’t see how anything good comes of that.
And, just as with the Meta settlement, this appears to be painfully unconstitutional. The settlement requires the suppression of clearly constitutionally protected speech at gunpoint. “Agree to suppress this content we don’t like or we will make you suffer through a painful trial, and possibly an even more painful verdict.”
The Meta settlement was concerning enough on its own, but now this model of AGs extracting speech restrictions through settlements is becoming a template, and it’s picking up weird gamified bounty structures along the way. The state AGs may get their headlines and their billions, but the real losers are everyone who uses social media and the First Amendment.
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There is plenty of coverage everywhere you look about how Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon have announced plans to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the Army officer who shot up Fort Hood, killing 13 people and wounding dozens more. There is plenty of debate about the moral atrocity that is a firing squad execution and plenty of comparison to the botched lethal injection execution in Tennessee last week. This is not the place for such discussions, other than to make it clear that the entire concept here — no matter how terrible Hasan is or no matter how terrible his crime — of the state putting people to death is a barbaric practice that should be ended.
But there is one angle here that we can talk about that most other places won’t: whether hosting the livestream would violate the platforms’ own rules — and whether they’ll simply ignore (or rewrite) those rules to do it anyway. While it’s probably perfectly legal in the US to stream the execution, it still might violate the various platform rules that most sites have set up for themselves. (Hosting it globally may also create legal headaches in countries with stricter rules on violent, extremist, and terrorist content, but that’s a separate question.)
But let’s look more closely at the possible platforms Hegseth might use, since the Pentagon hasn’t yet said where this “livestream” is supposed to occur.
X
Elon Musk’s X is (duh) a likely choice. In theory, X has a “violent content policy,” but it leaves a lot of wiggle room for Elon to claim the barbarous execution doesn’t violate its policies:
You may share graphic media if it is properly labeled, not prominently displayed and is not excessively gory or depicting sexual violence, but explicitly threatening, inciting, glorifying, or expressing desire for violence is not allowed.
X is a place where people can express themselves, show and learn about what’s happening, and debate global issues, often sharing images and videos as part of the conversation. However, healthy conversations can’t thrive when Violent Speech is used to deliver a message, and not every participant wishes to be exposed to Violent Media. As a result, we may remove or reduce the visibility of Violent Content to ensure the safety of our users and prevent the normalization or glorification of violent actions. We also do not allow sharing Violent Content in highly visible places such as profile photos, banners or bio.
I would argue that livestreaming a government firing squad is “excessively gory” and, depending on how it’s packaged, “glorifying” violence, though there’s clearly room to argue otherwise. And I’m sure Elon will claim it’s not. The policy does do a little more of an explanation of what it considers “glorification” as well:
Glorification of Violence: Glorifying, praising, or celebrating acts of violence where harm occurred, including expressing gratitude or praising that someone experienced physical harm by Violent Entities. This also includes glorifying animal abuse or cruelty.
Again, I would argue the execution counts, because it is clearly celebrating an act of violence. The policy also says that it prohibits violent content “in live video” but again, I expect that to be ignored by Elon’s team.
There is one concrete area of X’s policy that is interesting:
Moment of Death: We may request the removal of images or videos that were taken at the point of, immediately before, or after an identifiable individual’s death, if we receive a request from their family or an authorized representative.
In theory, Hasan’s family could ask X to remove the video, and then the question is whether Elon would honor that request. And since the policy only says X “may” remove such content, it leaves plenty of wiggle room to say no.
In short, the video will likely be shared on X, and whether or not it violates the company’s policies really depends on a very subjective set of decisions.
YouTube
YouTube is the other most likely choice for streaming the execution. Here, it seems pretty clear that the execution video, on its own, would violate YouTube’s stated policy.
Violent or gory content intended to shock or disgust viewers, or content encouraging others to commit violent acts, are not allowed on YouTube.
That said, YouTube leaves itself an out in saying there’s an exception for “content that is in the public interest.”
Looking through that linked exceptions page, the obvious hook is that YouTube lists “government proceedings” as public-interest material that may get an exception, and you can bet that’s what it would point to. But the same page lists content that’s barred from exceptions no matter the context, including “the act of decapitation.” While this isn’t quite decapitation, it’s still a pretty gruesome public execution.
Meta (Instagram / Facebook)
Zuck has spent the past couple years sucking up to Donald Trump after Trump threatened to put Zuck in jail for life. But Meta’s “Violent and Graphic Content” policy is the clearest of the bunch in ruling out hosting a livestream of the execution. In the list of things that it says “Do not post” is literally:
Live-streams of capital punishments.
The policy does allow still imagery of such content behind a warning screen and limited to adults, but livestreams of capital punishment are banned outright.
I don’t see any exceptions or language that Meta can wiggle out of for this, meaning that if it does allow such a livestream, it would only be either by ignoring its current policies or changing them.
TikTok
TikTok has less detail than the others in its policy, but does say they don’t allow “glorification of violence” among other things.
Violent and Criminal Behavior:We don’t allow threats, encouragement or glorification of violence, promotion of crime, or instructions on how to commit harmful acts.
Again, the company (now backed by Trump’s investor friends) can probably wriggle around that language and try to claim that the execution isn’t a “glorification” of violence, though it would be wrong.
Truth Social
I guess we need to consider that the Pentagon might try to post it on the president’s personal social media and propaganda site, Truth Social. Truth Social has very unhelpful terms of service and community guidelines, that do say that when you upload content you “represent and warrant” that your content isn’t violent:
your Contributions are not obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, violent, harassing, libelous, slanderous, or otherwise objectionable.
your Contributions do not depict violence, threats of violence or criminal activity.
But that is only the agreement with the user. It says nothing about whether or not the site will take such content down. In the community guidelines, it only notes that you can “report” “content that depicts violence or threat of violence,” but says nothing about whether or not that’s actually allowed.
In short, depending on how much these services want to bend over backwards (or should I say, bow down?) to appease Donald Trump and the bloodthirsty Pete Hegseth, all of them except Meta can make unfortunately credible claims that livestreaming an execution by firing squad doesn’t technically violate their policies. Meta cannot say that. I’d argue that the videos likely do violate YouTube, X, and TikTok’s policies as well, but it very much depends on subjective calls for all three.
Again, as a reminder, in the US, all of these platforms are free to set their own editorial policies, including both what to allow and what not to allow.
Remember, some of the earliest moral panic over how “bad” social media is came from US elected officials losing their minds about terrorist execution videos on YouTube. It’s kind of incredible how far we’ve come: Now the US government itself is planning to stream a gruesome execution of its own, and any platform that pushes back will likely be attacked by the president and his supporters for not being patriotic enough.
Recent concerns about a political donation by a Mullvad co-founder have raised questions about the Tor Project's funding relationship with the company. We are not terminating the relationship but are setting clear boundaries on our relationship with Mullvad.
Members of the Tor community have asked us to explain how continued collaboration with Mullvad fits with the Tor Project's human rights mission. We have heard both calls to end the relationship and concerns about what that would mean for Tor's work and the communities affected. We want to explain our decision to continue our technical collaboration with Mullvad and acknowledge the difficult trade-offs behind it. Our decision followed a thorough due diligence process that involved extensive discussions with community members, staff, and the board, a staff survey, and detailed financial analysis and scenario planning.
The Tor Project’s mission is to advance human rights and freedoms. We build privacy and anti-censorship tools that people use to protect themselves from repression and surveillance, and express themselves freely. We will continue this work alongside communities whose rights are under threat.
While Tor defends free speech, not all speech is equally compatible with our mission. We strongly oppose rhetoric that threatens other human rights and freedoms.
The work to promote and preserve the human right to privacy, free speech, and free access to information online is severely under-resourced. This work requires and benefits from collaboration across organizations. Sometimes that work requires making difficult compromises to advance specific goals we know will benefit our communities in the long run.
We are continuing our technical collaboration with Mullvad to sustain work that Tor users and contributors depend on. This collaboration has helped improve the structure, maintainability, and auditability of Tor Browser’s codebase, expanded feedback from users beyond Tor Browser’s core audience, and created a lower-risk environment to test features that may later benefit Tor Browser users. It also gives more people access to online privacy through an additional free, open-source tool that serves different user needs. We recognize that the potential benefits to Mullvad of such a collaboration are difficult for some in our community to accept. Our responsibility is to ensure that this collaboration does not compromise our mission or the Tor Project's independence.
Tor Project has paused proactive co-branding with Mullvad. That pause applies to joint promotional activity while the technical collaboration continues in alignment with our narrowly scoped agreement. We have also reviewed how Mullvad Browser is described and endorsed on our owned channels, and clarified language suggesting broader alignment between our values. These changes are intended to describe the relationship more accurately and avoid notions of implied endorsement.
We know this decision will not satisfy everyone. Continuing the collaboration carries a cost to trust for some in our community, and we take that seriously. We are grateful to the members of our community who have raised concerns, asked hard questions, and reminded us what is at stake. Those concerns are shaping our path forward. Tor’s mission has always required both principle and pragmatism. We will continue to defend privacy, anonymity, freedom of expression, and access to information while making clear that our collaborations must serve, and never obscure, our human rights commitments.
Civilized culture is based on a thin sort of friction. You don’t yell at the library, act boorish at a restaurant or hassle a minor celebrity at the supermarket. It’s just not done.
The result of these human layers and inferences are cues and norms that add up to a connected, generative society.
Add selfish hustle, AI agents and cheap bots, and the thin friction is insufficient. They can multiply exponentially, care little about being shunned and have no interest in their reputation.
Fake sincerity is now cheap. Interchangeable identities subvert a generations-long tradition of owning your words and your actions.
You’ll miss the thin friction when it’s gone, replaced by taller, thicker walls. You might already be noticing it.
Interactivity and permeability to those we don’t know well were largely overlooked foundations in the creation of learning, science and culture. We figured out a scalable approach to “knock knock, who’s there” but now it’s going away.
You won’t be able to knock unless you’re invited first. Of course, the invitation will probably be filtered out.
Series.ly was once one of Spain’s best-known pirate link sites. The original operation dropped its piracy links in late 2014.
In 2021, the domain was bought at auction by a new team, which says it isn’t part of the original one.
The new Series.ly, which requires a login to access, became pretty popular on its own, with nearly two million monthly visits, and nearly 90% of its traffic coming from Spain.
That popularity didn’t go unnoticed by rightsholders, which haven’t given up on shutting it down yet. In May, film and TV producers’ group EGEDA filed a complaint with the Second Section of Spain’s Intellectual Property Commission, which falls under the Ministry of Culture, aiming to shut the site down.
The Commission’s investigator checked a sample of 42 of the 110 titles that were listed in the complaint. Of these, 35 could be streamed or downloaded from Series.ly at the time. The Commission also ordered the site to remove the infringing content in July, but it says Series.ly never responded.
From Google to a Libyan Registrar
At the end of July, the Commission sanctioned a series of anti-piracy measures against the site, targeting third-party intermediaries. For example, the resolution requires Google and Bing to remove the site from their search results, while ISPs with a market share of more than 1% must block the domain name.
The ISPs are also urged to redirect visitors to a government page. This informs users that the Commission blocked the domain “for having illegally facilitated access to content protected by intellectual property rights” (translated).
The order also lists Cloudflare and Ukrainian hosting company Virtual Systems, whose Kyiv data centers were hit by Russian missile strikes last month, as well as Series.ly’s domain registrar, Libyan Spider Network. These measures apply to the current domain name, as well as new ones that the operator may use for the same purpose.
The Commission’s order
The Commission’s resolution needs court approval before it can be enforced. This came on September 28, when a judge at the Central Court of First Instance in Madrid concluded that the measures were proportionate, approving them as requested.
The Libyan Registrar Acts
Little more than a week later, at least one intermediary appears to have taken action. Earlier this week, Series.ly unexpectedly lost its domain name after the domain registrar, Libyan Spider, stepped in.
WHOIS records show that series.ly was placed on ‘clientHold’, a status set by the registrar to take a domain offline. This pulls the domain from the .ly zone, which means that Series.ly no longer resolves.
clientHold
Libyan Spider hasn’t commented publicly, but the Series.ly operator says the notice cited the Spanish order. It reached them through the auction house that sold them the domain, which acts as a reseller for the registrar.
“The reason they gave us was a Spanish copyright resolution and a court order authorizing suspension measures against the domain,” the operator tells TorrentFreak (translated).
It is not clear whether the other intermediaries have taken action yet, but the court order remains valid.
Interestingly, soon after the Series.ly domain was suspended, a similar site with the Cinubo brand appeared online. The Series.ly Telegram and Discord were also renamed to Cinubo.
Cinubo.com
No Plans to Appeal
Regarding the suspension, the operator says it didn’t see the warnings before the domain was suspended. An EGEDA email it later found was sent to support@series.ly, while the address listed on the site is soporte@series.ly.
According to the operator, Series.ly is a non-profit that hasn’t generated any revenue since it launched. The site doesn’t host any video files, and the links to other services are added by the community, he explains.
“Our position is that complaints about those video files should be directed at the services that host or distribute them,” the operator says (translated).
“We think it’s disproportionate that a complaint about content hosted by third parties ends up getting our entire domain suspended, including email and the personal library features.”
For now, the operator doesn’t plan to appeal the Spanish order. The company behind the project is based in Nevis, which raises questions about the reach of the Spanish order, the operator argues.
“We question whether a procedure handled in Spain justifies suspending our domain worldwide, which also affects email and services that have nothing to do with the works in question,” the operator notes (translated).
This may not be the end of it though. The Spanish order also covers new domain names that are used for the same purpose, which could include the new Cinubo one. In addition, other intermediaries may take action as well.
—
Update October 9, 2026: A few days after it was suspended, the series.ly domain appears to be back under the control of its owner. The operator informs us that the registrar lifted the suspension, but stressed that the domain can no longer be used to link to copyright-infringing content.
Update 2: Series.ly now shows a page documenting the history of the domain. It no longer links to a streaming portal.
The new Series.ly (translated)
—
A copy of the Commission’s resolution is available here (pdf). The court’s authorization can be found here (pdf). The Series.ly operator’s answers were provided in Spanish. The quotes in this article were translated by TorrentFreak.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
I’ve explored how Trump FCC Boss Brendan Carr has been working tirelessly to illegally destroy what’s left of already shaky U.S. media consolidation limits. He’s particularly interested in helping Trump-friendly local broadcasters like Sinclair, Tegna, and Nexstar merge and dominate what’s left of broadcast TV “news,” as a very obvious reward for their loyalty to the president.
Consumer groups, media reformers, and activists have obviously been disgusted by the efforts. But the efforts have also repeatedly pissed off other Trump-friendly companies. Right wing propaganda “news” outlet Newsmax, for example, recently complained to Carr because they feel the elimination of media consolidation rules will make their local broadcast competitors in the right wing propaganda space too powerful.
Carr’s moves have also ironically pissed of bigger cable companies, which are now saying Carr’s attempt to greenlight a monopoly over local TV broadcast news will result in the bigger, combined broadcasters extracting significantly more money from them. As such, a lobbying org representing cable giants like Comcast and Charter say they’ll soon be filing suit against the agency over the changes:
“The TV ownership rule prohibits any single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. Congress directed the FCC to set the cap at 39 percent in 2004. On Friday, cable lobby groups submitted a petition asking the FCC to keep the TV ownership cap in place until litigation over the FCC’s authority to repeal the rule is over.”
There’s no shortage of irony that this is what passes as media policy in the U.S.
Cable giants like Comcast and Charter, which have actively (and successfully) lobbied for reduced scrutiny of their own monopolization and consolidation across broadband and TV, are now complaining that other illegal efforts at consolidation will be bad for them personally. They like it when Carr obliterates oversight of their own monopolization, but don’t much like it when the shoe is on the other foot.
This is all the embarrassing gesticulations of obvious regulatory capture and corruption.
Trump’s first FCC boss, Ajit Pai, was basically just a revolving door regulator whose interests fully lined up with industry. Brendan Carr is most certainly that — but he’s also a radical authoritarian zealot keen on censoring voices critical of his autocratic boss, and helping right wing propagandists dominate U.S. media — much to the chagrin of some other, equally terrible companies.
The cable lobby won’t be alone in suing Carr and the FCC over its attack on media consolidation limits. Media reform group Free Press is also planning to sue the agency over its effort:
“Changing this limit requires congressional action, but Carr doesn’t care,” Free Press General Counsel Matt Wood said at the time. “He’ll do whatever it takes to clear the way for Trump-aligned billionaires to swallow up stations wherever and whenever they please. The result would be just one or two dominant broadcasters in every market, deep job cuts for journalists, and an influx of bargain-basement content disguised as local news.”
Several of these bigger cable giants (like Comcast NBC Universal) have been lobbying the FCC to also eliminate rules preventing the big four major networks from merging as well. The plus side is that Comcast and Charter taking a stand against Carr policies is another indicator that big companies are starting to gain in confidence as Trump’s health and political power wanes.
In no time at all we’ll be back to ordinary corruption and regulatory capture, slightly less tainted by the unpleasant, lingering odor of autocratic extremism.
There’s a certain segment of the American population that likes to really bang on about the importance of the First Amendment to our rights to free speech and the freedom of religion… right up until that includes speech and religion they don’t like. This same segment also tends to make a lot of noise about how America is the freest and bestest country in the world, full of liberty and apple pie and Ford F150s, or whatever the hell else gives them a jingoistic flutter.
The reality is different, of course. Human rights in America in the modern era were never blazing any new trails, and religious liberty specifically has been on the decline for decades, particularly since the 9/11 attacks. Certain populations and sects of Christianity have enjoyed general freedom, no matter the gnashing of teeth you might hear over a fucking wedding cake or website on occasion, while many other faiths have faced all kinds of headwinds. Including, I might add, those with no faith whatsoever, who find their contributions to federal coffers routinely misused for religious purposes of which they want no part.
Such as the faith-based offices that have sprung up within federal government departments ever since George W. Bush decided that faith had a place in the American government after all. It was inevitable that charlatans like Donald Trump would use that sort of thing to his advantage, of course, but the practice was also continued under Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And now we have Pete Hegseth injecting a religious office directly into the Pentagon.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is launching an office of religious affairs, the latest of his faith-related reforms at the Pentagon. He announced in a speech Wednesday that the office will help offer “first-class religious support” and will report directly to him.
“Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God, because while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual,” he said.
If a chill didn’t just run down your spine, you’re not paying attention to history. There is nothing more dangerous, as Christopher Hitchens used to say, than a man with a powerful army who believes he has god on his side. To cloak the Pentagon in religiosity is a dangerous mistake so obvious that it barely needs arguing. So much so, in fact, that the Pentagon’s PR department attempted to clean this up and make it all sound more benign.
The Office of Religious Affairs, or ORA, will advocate for military chaplains and religious support “at the highest level of the Department,” according to a Pentagon statement. It will not “compel religious participation, favor one faith, or diminish the rights of personnel of any faith or lack thereof.”
Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and call bullshit on that one. Go read Hegseth’s remarks again and tell me if that doesn’t sound like someone who is going to compel participation. As for the favoring of one religion over another, or of the faithless, that’s already happened. And this office, bound by the arbitrary determinations made under Hegseth’s DoD, will be compelled to follow suit.
The Defense Department also slashed the number of religious affiliations it officially recognizes, down to 31 from more than 200 previously recognized traditions. The list no longer includes atheists, Unitarian Universalists, pagans and Wiccans.
And then add to it all that the military is currently in a bit of a crisis over mental health and suicides. Chaplains have been tasked in recent years to help guide soldiers in a therapeutic way for those suffering, but Hegseth is tired of that namby-pamby bullshit.
The memo mentions “faith-based initiatives supporting Department-wide suicide reduction.” In recent years, the military has become increasingly dependent on chaplains to help address the growing numbers of troops in mental health distress. Hegseth has said he wants chaplains to focus more on God and less on therapeutic “self-help and self-care.”
This is what happens when you let religion creep its way into secular organizations. Religion is evangelical and expansionist by its very nature. That isn’t meant to be a criticism; it just is, definitionally. The original sin, as it were, was allowing Bush to open the door just enough to get a more benign version of this established. Perhaps it was even earlier, when the Continental Congress approved the very first military chaplains, even as they fought the Revolutionary War.
The fascistic takeover of that religious infrastructure is, and always was, inevitable.
Hero of the Republic Marc Elias, photo courtesy of Democracy Docket
On Monday, the first day California opened its ballot drop boxes for the midterms, masked ICE officers detained the parent of a student in a parking lot at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria—even though ICE claims it has “no record of activity” there. As Democracy Docket’s Yunior Rivas reported, that lot adjoins a second lot serving as a county ballot drop-off site, and voters had to pass through the area where agents were operating in order to deposit their ballots.
That story capped a week of Democracy Docket reporting on how far federal agencies have already gone to mess with the midterm vote. Jacob Knutson reported that ICE has investigated hundreds of voter registration groups. Knutson and Rivas further reported that ICE has obtained two voter datasets totaling 99 million records. And Matt Cohen reported that election deniers Tina Peters and Cleta Mitchell are pressing the Commerce Department to put voting machines under federal regulation.
Their reporting draws significantly from the legal work of Democracy Forward. The nonprofit has forced the ICE records into public view through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, and it also represents voting rights groups and local governments suing to keep armed federal agents away from the polls.
Democracy Docket’s founder, Marc Elias, chairs Democracy Forward’s board. In his newsletter this morning, Elias wrote, “For months, I have been sounding the alarm that ICE will be used to suppress voters and block people from casting their ballots. These records show that, behind the scenes, it is already carrying out Trump’s orders.”
Each story is alarming on its own. Together they describe a unified effort aimed at every stage of the vote: who gets registered, whose names sit on the rolls, who can walk into a polling place and even how the ballots will get counted.
In 1865, with the Civil War nearly won, Congress made it a federal crime for any U.S. officer to bring “troops or armed men” to a place where an election is held, unless needed “to repel the armed enemies of the United States.” The original law also allowed federal forces “to keep the peace at the polls.” Congress repealed that exception in 1909, leaving peacekeeping at polling places to state and local authorities.
For decades, the Justice Department’s election-crimes manual warned that the statute makes it a felony to send armed agents to the vicinity of open polls. By June, as Democracy Docket notes, the department had taken the manual off its website.
For most of this year, the regime and its allies have been threatening to violate this law. In February, Steve Bannon said on his War Room podcast that ICE would “surround the polls” in November. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she “can’t guarantee” an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location. Heather Honey, then DHS’s deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, assured top state election officials on a Feb. 25 call, “There will be no ICE presence at polling locations,” but in March then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, now the attorney general, suggested otherwise, asking the audience at CPAC, “Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?”
The mixed signals continued. In May, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons wrote to Colorado’s secretary of state that “there is no reason for ICE officers and special agents to be deployed to polling places.” But on Sept. 1, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said ICE could be at polling places if “we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down.” Two weeks later, FBI Director Kash Patel told the Senate Judiciary Committee the bureau has election crimes coordinators in all 56 field offices, “so you bet we’re gonna have them there.” When Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) asked whether Patel had earlier ruled that out, Patel answered, “When did you hear that? It’s just another lie.”
On Sept. 13, White House border czar Tom Homan told Fox News there had been “not one instance” of ICE operating at a sensitive location, “to include polling places.” This, to use the legal term, is total B.S.
According to the Democracy Forward lawsuit and local reporting, as early as May, ICE agents swarmed a vehicle during a traffic stop in the parking lot of an active San Antonio polling site. ICE also showed up at a vote center in Simi Valley, California, during a June rush of voters and confronted a poll worker in Syracuse, New York, mid-shift.
Elias notes that ICE is staffed with agents who are primed to intimidate voters. “They lack the discipline and training of other federal law enforcement officers,” he wrote. “They have proven themselves willing to do anything Trump asks.”
Hennepin County, Minnesota, which joined the suit Wednesday, says DHS investigators have entered its election spaces three times in the past five months. In response, the county has drafted no fewer than eight contingency plans for federal agents at election sites, which make up 38 percent of its risk-mitigation planning for November. The amended complaint, brought by Democracy Forward, now also names the Justice Department, the FBI, Patel and Attorney General Todd Blanche. It adds a claim under the Voting Rights Act’s ban on voter intimidation, and it asks the court to act before Election Day.
Ninety-nine million records and dozens of arrests
Over the past year, ICE’s investigative arm went looking for the people who help others register to vote. The result has been a full-fledged attack on the civic infrastructure that supports voter participation.
Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) reviewed at least 82 nonprofits in Pennsylvania, according to internal ICE records Democracy Forward obtained through its FOIA lawsuit. It flagged the state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations for “further investigation.” It even went after Zumiez, a clothing chain popular with young skaters that has partnered with voter registration groups at youth events.
Its efforts have turned up zip in nearly all cases. In New Jersey, for example, HSI reviewed at least 41 organizations and found “no derogatory information” on any of them. One document even contemplated sending undercover agents to “initiate prosecutions and dismantle illicit facilitation networks,” but the records, at least so far, do not show that any such operation took place.
In Ohio, HSI identified Black Fork Strategies, a voter-engagement firm, as “associated with several aliens registered to vote in Cuyahoga County.” It is not clear what “associated with” even means here. But that “association” was apparently enough to go hog wild with search warrants. A June 8 email to ICE leadership announced joint HSI and FBI warrants, along with interviews of more than 100 current and former employees of an organization whose name was redacted from the document. That same week, federal agents searched the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a voter registration group founded by Black Fork’s founder, Kirk Noden. Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, called the raid “an outrageous fishing expedition.”
And that was of course the main point of these investigations and searches: to intimidate and silence groups that are lawfully helping people register and get to the polls. Elias underscored the stakes: “To be clear, it is not illegal to register voters. It is not illegal to encourage voting.”
Investigators were also amassing voter data. An HSI status report dated May 25 lists 50.6 million voter records from the Justice Department, plus another 48.4 million obtained by “DAS Heather Honey” through “independent sources of information.” (Note that last bit; I’ll come back to it.)
Keep a close eye on Honey, the “DAS” in that line who joined DHS in August 2025 as deputy assistant secretary for election integrity. She now serves as a senior adviser to the ICE director and senior counselor to Mullin.
After the 2020 election, Honey’s investigations firm worked as a subcontractor to Cyber Ninjas, the company Arizona Senate Republicans hired to review Maricopa County’s ballots.The review had its moments. Chasing a QAnon theory about secretly marked ballots, reviewers scanned ballots under UV light “to see if there were watermarks,” the Senate Republicans’ audit liaison, Ken Bennett, told PolitiFact. They also checked the paper for bamboo fibers to test a claim that 40,000 ballots had been flown in from Asia. Ironically, and rather awkwardly, Honey helped draft the final report, which ended up confirming Biden’s win.
Given her background in conspiracies and election denialism, we should be on our guard. Elias zeroed in on the 48.4 million records Honey allegedly obtained that were being used by HSI investigators, particularly the identity of her “independent sources”:
“The documents do not identify these independent sources. We do not know whether some are records she brought with her from her work outside of government. We do not know if they were given to her by outside election-denier groups.”
Both datasets, the report says, “are currently with iLab for secondary enrichment and identification of high-value targets,” whatever that means. Elias also flagged a July report in the records showing voter roll data from six states awaiting entry into Palantir’s ELITE system (yes, Peter Thiel’s Palantir, God help us), which ICE uses to find people for deportation. He noted it is unclear whether the data was entered.
Lawyers are still trying to make sense of the HSI status report, and they have flagged other disturbing passages. The polling-place suit cites one in which ICE describes “ingesting processed voter roll data into the ELITE enforcement system.” That raises the possibility that voter roll data now sits in a platform built by a private surveillance company, although a source familiar with the matter told Democracy Docket that the data was not integrated into ELITE.
This isn’t just a Homeland Security matter anymore. According to the complaint, by July a weekly HSI fraud report that tracked voter-fraud arrests was being routed to White House staff.
The DOJ is also involved. ICE claims 36 criminal arrests and 56 administrative arrests related to voter fraud “so far this year.” Across 2025, HSI’s voter-fraud initiatives generated more than 2,000 leads and 68 cases presented for prosecution. As early as December 2025, the agency stated it had begun working with Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Justice Department to identify noncitizens who registered or voted unlawfully, for prosecution or deportation. As Popular Information reported, the agency noted that deportation for unlawful voting generally requires neither a conviction nor proof that the person knew the vote was illegal. And in August, the New York Times reported that green card holders applying for citizenship had been placed in deportation proceedings for registering to vote.
They want the voting machines
With less than a month until Election Day, election deniers are pushing Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to assert “regulatory authority” over the machines states use to cast and count ballots, Democracy Docket’s Matt Cohen reported. The request relies on a 2019 Trump executive order on foreign threats to the technology supply chain. The plan’s proponents contend that, under it, a Commerce finding that voting machines pose a national security risk would allow the department to “impose mitigation or prohibition.” Cohen noted that such a finding “could open the door for the federal government to take control of electronic voting.”
The plan’s leading champion is Tina Peters, the former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk convicted in 2024 over a plot to breach her county’s voting machines in search of “proof” that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Gov. Jared Polis infuriatingly commuted her nine-year sentence this year, and now she’s predictably at it again. Trump, who had pressured Colorado for months, welcomed her to the Oval Office on June 30.
Peters’s written plan is measured in tone, but her public statements are not. In August, she said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (meaning, the U.S. military) “needs to go in and demand to have these machines in their custody.”
Election denier Cleta Mitchell has tried this before. On Jan. 2, 2021, she was on the line when Trump pressed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to reverse his loss there, and she pushed state officials for voting records during the call. Days later, after her firm said it was “concerned” by her role, she resigned from Foley & Lardner. She went on to run the so-called Election Integrity Network, which held summits for right-wing activists in swing states, under the Conservative Partnership Institute, a group backed by money from Trump’s political operation. Unfun fact: The network’s Pennsylvania chapter, Pennsylvania Fair Elections, was founded by Honey, whom ProPublica described as “a protege of Cleta Mitchell.”
On Tuesday, Mitchell posted online that Lutnick should act “TODAY” to ensure voting systems in the 2026 elections are not “compromised or manipulated by enemies, foreign or domestic.”
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told Democracy Docket, “I can’t say this any more clearly: The commerce secretary has no authority.” The Constitution leaves the times, places and manner of congressional elections to the states, subject to changes Congress makes by law.
ICE also appears to want control over the voting machines. The agenda for a May 27 HSI voter-fraud call included the headings “Counties with 2020 Results” and “Voter Machines.” Their contents are redacted.
It’s suppressing registration efforts, but not the early vote
The effects of these efforts are already showing up in voter outreach. A nonprofit that works with African immigrant communities in Hennepin County reported that its door-knock response rate fell to between 5 and 10 percent this year, down from 40 to 45 percent in past cycles. It has recorded one voter registration this year, compared with hundreds before.
The League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, which works to register Latino voters, says it has scaled back get-out-the-vote work in 10 communities and canceled registration drives in five states.
Common Cause says members have dropped out of election-protection training for fear of encountering ICE.
UnidosUS has reserved $121,000 to respond to immigration enforcement at polling places. It says that money would otherwise have reached about 19,200 more voters.
The response from voting rights groups has been to urge voters to vote early, either in person or by mail-in ballot returned to an official drop box. That appears to have produced tangible results. It’s too soon for firm predictions, but Democrats’ early-vote margin is running well ahead of where it stood at the same point in 2022 and 2024. As Simon Rosenberg noted in his Hopium Chronicles newsletter on Wednesday, citing TargetEarly data:
The early vote is picking up. Here’s the current national early vote via TargetEarly (10/6/26 758pm update). This comparison is 27 days before Election Day in each of the last three cycles:
2022 D+22
2024 D+23
2026 D+29
Elias warns that the voter data the federal government is amassing can be turned against eligible voters. “A name change, a new address, a missing piece of information — the administration can turn almost anything into an excuse to remove voters from the rolls.”
But voters can fight purges at the polling place. In most states, a registered voter whose name is missing from the rolls can cast a provisional ballot, which is counted if officials confirm the voter is eligible under state law. Voters should ask what steps they must take to have it counted and how to check its status. In tight House races, provisional or cured ballots can often decide the outcome.
The Trump regime’s efforts to intimidate voters and suppress the vote will continue, and they will likely grow more desperate. It has even declined to invite observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which has monitored every federal election since 2002.
In a literal sense, then, we are on our own, and it is up to us. But take heart. In the coming weeks, tens of millions of voters will defy the regime’s scare tactics and thwart its elaborate electoral schemes with a massive, undeniable blue wave. Together, we can, and will, vote the spineless GOP out of power and finally check the would-be king.
The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.
The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.
Part VI: The Illusion of Knowing Us Part V explored what is lost when an open system becomes a finished one. Part VI returns to the question at the heart of the series: what happens when the ability to measure human behavior creates the illusion that human beings themselves have become fully understood?
There is an old temptation that accompanies every period of technological progress: the belief that a sufficiently complete collection of facts will eventually become indistinguishable from understanding. It is an idea that predates computers by centuries. Enlightenment thinkers imagined that careful observation might reveal the laws governing society just as Newton had revealed the laws governing motion. Nineteenth-century bureaucracies believed that censuses, maps and statistics would render increasingly complex populations legible to governments. Twentieth-century corporations discovered that markets could be segmented, modelled and predicted through ever more sophisticated forms of consumer research. Every era has entertained, in one form or another, the hope that enough information might finally dissolve uncertainty.
The digital age inherited that ambition and expanded it beyond anything previous generations could have imagined. Never before have private organizations possessed such detailed knowledge of everyday human behavior. The major technology platforms know what captures our attention, how long we hesitate before making a decision, which conversations draw us back repeatedly, what time we wake, when we travel, where we shop, what we read, which videos we abandon after twenty seconds and which ones persuade us to remain for twenty minutes. Individually, these fragments appear almost trivial. Collectively, they amount to one of the most ambitious efforts in history to observe human behavior at planetary scale.
The achievement is extraordinary. It is also deeply misleading. Observation and understanding are not the same thing. The distinction is easy to overlook because the predictive power of these systems has become genuinely remarkable. Recommendation algorithms often anticipate our preferences before we consciously recognize them ourselves. Navigation applications predict our journeys with astonishing accuracy. Streaming platforms learn our habits so quickly that their suggestions can feel almost uncanny. The practical success of these systems encourages a subtle but important assumption: if behavior can be predicted with sufficient precision, perhaps behavior itself has been understood.
And this may be the most consequential consequence of the platform age. The more of human behavior platforms learned to measure, the easier it became to believe that human beings themselves had become legible. Clicks became preferences. Networks became communities. Attention became interest. Prediction became understanding. Metrics became meaning. The platforms could see more of us than any institution in history and gradually became less capable of seeing what their measurements left out.
Yet this conclusion rests upon a philosophical confusion that extends far beyond technology. More than half a century ago, the economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek argued that modern societies possess a form of knowledge that can never be fully centralized. Much of what people know is contextual, local and often impossible to articulate explicitly. A shopkeeper understands the rhythms of a neighborhood without reducing them to data points. A teacher recognizes the confidence of a struggling student before it becomes measurable through examination results. A parent notices subtle changes in a child’s mood that no questionnaire could adequately capture. This knowledge is not irrational. It is simply embedded within lived experience rather than abstract information.
Around the same time, the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi expressed the idea even more succinctly. “We know more than we can tell,” he wrote. Human understanding depends not only upon explicit facts but upon intuition, memory, culture, relationships and forms of judgement that resist codification. Much of what makes societies function exists precisely because it cannot be reduced to a formal rule.
Technology has always struggled with this distinction because computation requires representation. Before an algorithm can optimize anything, the world must first be translated into variables that can be measured. Human beings become profiles. Relationships become networks. Interests become categories. Attention becomes duration. Influence becomes engagement. These abstractions are indispensable because without them computation would be impossible. Yet every abstraction also excludes dimensions of reality that prove difficult to quantify.
The political scientist James C. Scott devoted an entire book to this problem. Modern states, he argued, simplify the societies they govern in order to make them administratively manageable. Forests become inventories of timber rather than ecosystems. Cities become grids. Citizens become statistics. These simplifications are not inherently malicious; they are necessary for governing large populations. Problems arise when institutions begin mistaking their simplified representations for reality itself. The map becomes more authoritative than the territory it was intended to describe.
Digital platforms confront a remarkably similar dilemma. Their models of human behavior are necessarily simplified because every computational system requires simplification. The question is not whether these models are imperfect; they are. The more consequential question is what happens when organizations become so successful within their own representations of the world that they gradually lose contact with the world those representations were created to explain.
One sees hints of this throughout the contemporary digital landscape. Platforms confidently predict what will retain our attention while appearing increasingly uncertain about what earns our trust. They identify emerging trends with astonishing speed while repeatedly struggling to distinguish civic participation from performative outrage. They optimize conversations according to measurable interactions while overlooking qualities such as reflection, empathy, restraint or wisdom because none of these can easily be incorporated into engagement metrics.
This should not surprise given that trust is not merely repeated interaction. Community is not simply network density and friendship is not the frequency of communication. Curiosity is not equivalent to clicking.
These distinctions may sound obvious when expressed in ordinary language. They become far less obvious once organizations begin making billions of decisions each day through computational systems that necessarily privilege what can be counted over what can only be experienced.
There is another irony here that deserves attention. For decades, Silicon Valley celebrated itself as uniquely capable of understanding people because it possessed unprecedented quantities of behavioral data. Traditional institutions, like governments, universities or newspapers, were often portrayed as slow, hierarchical and detached from ordinary life. Technology companies, by contrast, claimed to learn directly from users. Every click became feedback, every interaction generated insight and every product update reflected continuous adaptation to human behavior. For many years, this confidence appeared justified.
These developments often appear puzzling only because they are interpreted through behavioral models that assume more engagement necessarily reflects greater satisfaction. Yet anyone familiar with modern cities knows that constant traffic does not indicate affection for the road network. Congestion may simply reveal that people have few practical alternatives. Likewise, continued use of social media reveals remarkably little about whether users believe these platforms enrich their lives. Behavior alone cannot answer that question because behavior is shaped not only by preference but also by dependency, habit, professional necessity and the absence of viable substitutes.
This may be the deepest misunderstanding at the heart of Big Tech’s current predicament. The companies continue to believe that they understand society because they observe so much of its behavior. Increasingly, society appears unconvinced. People do not feel recognized merely because they have been accurately profiled. They do not experience prediction as understanding. If anything, the extraordinary precision with which platforms anticipate our habits has heightened our awareness of everything they fail to perceive: our uncertainty, our changing aspirations, our moral dilemmas, our search for meaning, and our persistent desire to belong to communities that are valued for something more enduring than their ability to generate engagement.
History suggests that this moment arrives sooner or later for every dominant institution. Power often produces the illusion of comprehension. Success encourages organizations to believe that because they have mastered the mechanics of a system, they have also grasped its purpose. Yet societies are not machines, and human beings have an inconvenient habit of changing the questions they ask long before institutions notice that the answers they continue providing have ceased to satisfy.
Perhaps that is the quiet reckoning confronting Big Tech today. Not that it has forgotten how to build extraordinary technology. Rather, it has become so accomplished at modelling human behavior that it has begun to overlook the one thing behavior can never fully reveal: what it actually means to be human.
Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.
The Democratic party has announced they’re suing Donald Trump for his recent attempt to flood the midterm airwaves with propaganda he’s falsely claiming are “public service announcements.”
The DNC complaint was filed in federal court in Washington, and names the White House, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as defendants in what the party calls “a blatant violation of the statutory ban on the use of appropriations for ‘publicity or propaganda purposes.”
As we recently noted, Donald Trump decided to flood the midterm airwaves with agitprop, including a recycled black and white advertisement from the 2024 election cycle featuring the president walking down a hallway promising to smite his perceived enemies. Given Trump’s abysmal polling it’s more likely to hurt than help midterm Republicans, but Trump’s gargantuan ego couldn’t help itself.
There are a few different ads in the campaign. The catch: the $20 million advertisement campaign was funded by taxpayers. That violated not only Federal Appropriations Laws restricting taxpayer-funded propaganda, but also other potential laws like the Hatch Act and the The Anti-Deficiency Act.
From the Democrats’ lawsuit:
“The use of public funds also places the DNC and Democratic candidates at an electoral disadvantage, even though the publicly funded propaganda advertisements are deeply unpopular with American voters, by preserving funds held by campaign committees and PACs—including MAGA Inc.—for other political expenditures.”
To try and pretend they weren’t violating multiple laws, dutiful Trumplings like FCC boss Brendan Carr repeatedly lied and claimed these were just public-service announcements — despite the fact that PSA legal exemptions require some actual government service or program to be advertised. Vice President JD Vance also lied about this when interviewed by the press this week, going so far as to falsely claim the Trump propaganda spots “were not partisan:”
Trump subsequently made a post to his personal propaganda website, Truth Social, claiming (for whatever that’s worth) that he’ll stop using taxpayer dollars and instead fund the ads “himself” (leverage his existing SuperPAC cash trove):
Republicans enjoy a massive financial advantage over Democrats, and are throwing half-a-billion dollars at midterm ad spending with the help of top donor and white supremacist Elon Musk.
The great irony remains that Trump is increasingly so unpopular due to his empty promises, pointless wars, blatant corruption, and constant bumbling, that all the money in the world doesn’t seem to be providing any real tactical advantage. If anything, slathering the airwaves with Trump’s face seems more inclined to undermine Republicans in key House and Senate midterm races.
It’s never been easier to create unique or personalized gifts online. People have always loved gifting books, but today it’s incredibly easy to make a custom, personalized book as a gift that recipients will cherish.
Because Lulu offers individual, book-of-one printing on demand, you can create a unique file, upload it, and order that exact book. There is so much demand for personalized books that an entire new industry built around using AI and print-on-demand has emerged over the last two years.
We call it generative print commerce, and it’s built on the idea that LLMs can easily ingest a user’s inputs, lean on templates the business develops, and quickly generate a unique, completely personalized book for the buyer. Then the book is printed through Lulu’s API, which enables a distinct file for each book.
But today, we’re going to focus on five options you can easily make yourself to give as a gift.
Create a Book for a Gift
To create a book on Lulu, you’ll need two files:
An interior PDF with all of the pages for your book
A cover PDF including the front, back, and spine
Note that you can use our Cover Creator to make your cover file while you’re uploading your interior files.
I recommend watching this short video that shows how uploading your files works.
When you make your own book, you’ll need to gather all the content together to create the PDF. That means creating the pages, editing images, and laying them all out. Check out some of our guides and templates to help you create your book files.
5 Customizable Book Ideas
These five book ideas all make great personalized gifts. And they’re all pretty easy to make on your own and have printed by Lulu.
#1: Make a Personalized Calendar
Custom calendars make amazing gifts. Trust me. I give them all the time. I don’t think I’ll ever buy another generic wall calendar at Target; not when I can turn 14 images into a personalized calendar so easily.
Watch this 3-minute video to see how easy it is to make a custom calendar:
All you need are the images! Maybe you took a vacation this year; let your friends and family relive those memories. Kids and pets make great subjects for calendars too! Or you might show off some of your original art.
Our calendars can include a range of months—from 2 to 18. And you’ll have the option to add custom holidays.
Another popular and common book that is great to personalize is a journals and notebooks.
We have premade templates for all kinds of common notebook designs, like lined, dot grid, or blank. And we have some simple planner, habit tracker, or task tracker templates too. All are free to download and ready to use.
You can always create a custom interior file too, personalized based on the recipient’s own habits or the way they like to journal.
If you’re in need of a simple, inexpensive way to make your cover, I suggest Canva or Adobe Express.
Or, of course, you can use the built-in Cover Creator. But for a notebook or journal, the cover really needs to stand out, so you may need a more sophisticated tool.
#3: Create a Memory Book
There are some really cool businesses out there that make creating a memory book—like a memoir, biography, or similar—incredibly easy. One example is My Forever Books, a business that takes old text messages and arranges them into a personalized gift book.
You can always build the book yourself too. It’s a longer process, but memory books aren’t novels. You don’t need to aim for a specific word count or follow a detailed plot. Simply recount the events or history that you want to share and type it up!
Gather family stories, detail an adventure you’ve had, or trace the history of your ancestors: memoirs are the perfect book to create lasting family memories.
Create Your Book
Learn how to prepare your print files, upload, create a cover, and publish on Lulu.
With cameras in all of our pockets, we’ve never had more material for creating photo books.
With high-quality paper and ink, as well as hardcover binding, a printed photo book is the perfect unique gift to show off your pictures and bring joy to friends and family.
Photo books are one of my favorite kinds of books to give, but they can be tough to create. Luckily, there are lots of great ways to design a photo book without spending a penny. So while Instagram is good for sharing photos today, a photo book is the perfect gift to capture those pictures for a lifetime.
#5: Cook Up a Cookbook
Finally, we have cookbooks. If you like to cook or you’ve got a family member who loves to cook, giving a recipe book is a wonderful gift. Want to gather your mom’s apple pie recipe and your uncle’s hand-pulled noodles and whatever else your family loves to cook? Create a unique recipe book!
Creating a cookbook means designing the pages just like a memoir or photo book. You’ll want to check out our Book Creation Guide for specs, but our templates (for InDesign or Affinity Publisher) help make it easier to lay out those pages.
You can also find templates for Microsoft Word on their site, but I find Word to be a poor choice for cookbooks—it’s difficult to keep spacing and page layout consistent.
Regardless of how you choose to design your cookbook, you know your family will cherish those recipes for years to come. The perfect (and most delicious) gift you can give, though you might want to consider making one of the recipes to go along with the book!
Making This a Memorable Holiday
Showcase your creative side to your friends and family when you create something for them this year. It’s never been easier to make unique gifts, and even though the shopping season is fast approaching, you still have time! Get started today and make this holiday season one to remember.
Your Free Lulu Account
Create a free Lulu account today to self-publish your book and have your book printed for you, a friend, or readers all over the world.
Hey, this guy is a judge now! Let that seep in for a bit.
Emil Bove used to work for the DOJ. Then he went to work for Trump, acting as his personal lawyer starting in 2023. Upon Trump’s return to office, he was brought back to the DOJ to serve as an “associate deputy attorney general” — a position that didn’t actually require Bove to be subjected to the Senate confirmation process.
Bove was fine with this. And being one of Trump’s guys, he decided to use this new position to aid and abet illegal activities engaged in by ICE and the DHS. It was Bove who first instructed DOJ lawyers to tell courts to “fuck themselves” when faced with rulings that demanded the administration respect the law.
It was also Emil Bove who pushed hard for the “murder people in boats” program the Trump administration has been engaged in ever since it first decided people from Central and South America needed to be killed to prevent them from eventually reaching the US border.
This show of absolute loyalty was rewarded. Emil Bove is no longer just a guy who thinks ignoring court orders and murdering people in international waters is a fine way to run a government. He’s now capable of turning an entire circuit against Americans and their rights, thanks to his installation as a Third Circuit Appeals Court judge.
There’s no reason he should be given this position. He’s entirely untrustworthy and has, at best, only a cursory relationship to the rule of law so often claimed as the high ground by Trump and his bootlickers.
There was plenty of evidence already on the record that should have blocked this nomination, but all it took to install him in a position to do serious damage to an entire nation was a unified MAGA front that could override any opposition from the Democratic Party minority in the Senate.
It doesn’t take much to get a judge installed, as Trump has repeatedly proven. It takes far, far more to remove one who is so compromised they can’t possibly be trusted. The wheels are greased and the trolley car has been directed to engage in maximum cruelty. And that’s not going to change even if more dirt on Bove emerges.
Jill Fields, a former supervisory intelligence analyst in the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, made a formal whistleblower complaint to Senate Judiciary Committee leaders over the federal response to anti-ICE protest activity around federal buildings, as well as in a residential area, early last year.
[…]
Fields says Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, told the head of the field office to open an investigation into activities outside the federal building even though, she says, the activities were protected free speech. Separately, she says the White House gave a directive to FBI Director Kash Patel to investigate a group of protesters using megaphones during immigration enforcement operations after FBI agents had conducted a check into the conduct and declined to open an investigation.
There’s no pretending this doesn’t sound exactly like something Bove would have directed and approved. After all, he was already giving his blessing to boat strikes and courtroom “fuck you’s” at this point. The whistleblower report [PDF] goes into more detail about Bove’s actions, demands, and general disregard for constitutional rights.
First, it details how FBI agents and officers were taken off task to help Trump fight his War on Los Angeles that was a vindictive offshoot of his general War on Migrants. It also details the administration’s desire to do these things while adding as little as possible to the public record.
From the very start of the second Trump administration, Ms. Fields and her colleagues at the Los Angeles Field Office were instructed by Field Office leadership, including the Assistant Director in Charge (ADIC), the Special Agents in Charge (SACs), the Assistant Special Agents in Charge (ASACs), and the Senior Supervisory Intelligence Analysts (SSIAs), through emails and directives in meetings, to support what they called a nationwide “big immigration push” to take place across multiple “weeks of action” that would begin in February and continue throughout the year.
The initiative included assigning agents Title 8 authorities, directing intelligence analysts to conduct checks on lists of immigrants, and supporting immigration-related arrests across FBI Field Offices nationwide. During meetings on this initiative, Ms. Fields experienced supervisors encouraging her and others to not put things in writing and noticed many directives and subsequent discussions were conducted in face-to-face meetings rather than over email.
Not only were agents redirected to support the “big immigration push,” they were told not to create any written documentation of their actions in support of Trump’s bigotry.
The FBI no longer served the public or the ideal of public safety. What FBI agents in the Los Angeles area were instructed to do was make their superiors look good in front of the boss.
[A]gents were pulled off active cartel cases to satisfy what her supervisor, , described as “optics” designed to “make a show for the president.”
Meanwhile, ICE and DHS were busy making themselves look worse. Whatever wasn’t an obvious lie about the situation in Los Angeles was a series of “boots on the ground” debacles that failed to produces the thousands of migrant arrests the administration had already told its voting base were all but inevitable.
Either Bove sensed some impending displeasure or was just a hideous human being who should never have been allowed to become a judge. Whatever the case, Bove — while still holding a position as a top DOJ prosecutor — directed the FBI to start investigating peaceful protesters simply because they were protesting the government that now employed him.
In late January or early February 2025, shortly before a standing 4:00 pm Pacific Timemeeting including SACs, ASACs, SSIAs, and the Los Angeles Criminal Program’s Mission Support Analyst regarding the immigration push, [redacted] came to Ms. Fields’s office, shut the door, and informed her that Department of Justice (DOJ) former Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove had instructed Akil Davis, the ADIC of the Los Angeles FBI Field Office, to open an investigation into any anti-ICE and CBP protesters demonstrating at federal buildings in Los Angeles.
The FBI knows constitutionally protected activity can never form the basis for an investigation. And it ignores this knowledge with alarming regularity. But this is Trump’s DOJ, which not only spends most of its time satisfying his bigotry and revenge fantasies, but also hasn’t met a right it doesn’t feel comfortable violating (Second Amendment excluded).
That Bove would be the lapdog Trump wants to see in the world is unsurprising. What is surprising is that an agent would actually file a whistleblower report while overseen by an administration that has been rooting out dissent since day one, and would gladly hang any dissenter if it didn’t have to hammer out a contract with Dana White first. Anyone who isn’t a loyalist will soon be unemployed. And those who dare to peep above the parapet will be the first against the wall.
This report is essential. But it’s being handed to people who can’t do anything about it and raises issues the current administration views as features, rather than bugs. And it certainly won’t get Bove booted back to where he should be: just another Trump lawyer wondering when he’s going to get paid for protecting Mr. MAGA from the consequences of his own actions.
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谷川 (たにがわ) — mountain stream 渓谷 (けいこく) — valley (with a river running through it) 谷町 (たにまち) — sponsors of rikishi or their stables 谷地 (やち) — marsh land 谷間 (たにあい) — valley 谷垣派 (たにがきは) — Tanigaki Faction (of the LDP) 峡谷 (きょうこく) — gorge 九谷焼 (くたにやき) — Kutani ware (style of Japanese porcelain) 谷水 (たにみず) — rill 谷風 (たにかぜ) — valley wind
On February 10, 2027, all Let’s Encrypt subscribers will move to certificates with 64 day lifetimes by default unless they select an even shorter lifetime (45 or 6 days, as previously announced). This means that any certificate we issue or renew on and after that date will have a 64 day validity period, and we expect the last 90-day certificate to expire on May 11, 2027. We will not revoke valid certificates as a part of this process.
We will switch to issuing 64 day certificates in our staging environment on October 14, 2026 to enable testing. We recommend testing in staging before the change takes effect in production.
If your renewals are automated and your client supports ACME Renewal Info (ARI), you should be all set since ARI allows Let’s Encrypt to tell your client when to renew (you can review your ACME client’s documentation to determine if ARI is implemented).
If your renewals are hard-coded to a date from expiration you should update them to renew at approximately ⅔ of the lifetime instead. Taking this step in preparation for 64 day lifetimes will lay the groundwork for default lifetimes of 45 days in 2028. Grep for common hardcoded numbers like 83, 80 or 60 in cron jobs, wrapper scripts and runbooks if you’re not sure.
We will also be reducing the authorization reuse period from 30 days to 10 days. In 2028, the reuse period will shrink to seven hours. We are making this change to comply with a 2029 reduction in maximum validation reuse periods, and to remove the need for “CAA rechecking”, where we have to repeat part of the validation process if the validation data is more than 7 hours old. Unless you have specifically designed your ACME client to rely on validation reuse, you will not need to make any changes.
This is also an opportunity to automate certificate management processes like reload and deployment and to add alerting for renewal failures.
Rate limits will not be impacted by this change; you can learn more in our previous blog post.
This change will not affect ACME endpoints or our issuance chains.
We are moving to shorter certificate lifetimes because this reduces the risk of key compromise and mis-issuance. As a nonprofit we see it as part of our mission to make this change to advance security for everyone using the Web globally. We anticipate a smooth transition, but if you experience issues, our community forum and documentation are good resources.
Over the past two years, French courts have ordered a growing list of intermediaries to block access to pirate sports streams.
In addition to regular ISPs, the orders now target public DNS resolvers, VPN services, search engines and CDN providers, all of which can help people bypass existing blockades.
Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare has received several of these orders. In April, the Paris Judicial Court ordered the company to block 21 domains linked to pirate Formula 1 streams and 16 linked to MotoGP.
The orders covered Cloudflare’s DNS resolver as well as its CDN. However, they didn’t prescribe how the sites should be blocked, only that access from France had to be prevented “by any effective means.”
French pay-TV provider Canal+, which requested the blockades, concluded that Cloudflare’s efforts fell short. The broadcaster went back to court and, as first reported by L’Informé, it didn’t get what it wanted.
Canal+ Requested €50,000 a Day
In May, Canal+ asked the Paris court to add daily penalties to the April orders. It requested €50,000 per day for every site that remained accessible, and the same amount for every new site that media regulator Arcom reports to Cloudflare.
From the order (translated)
According to Canal+, Cloudflare had deliberately failed to comply with the site blocking orders.
“[Cloudflare] allegedly circumvented the measures by only implementing the decision through its CDN service, which meant that only three of the 21 domain names listed by the court were blocked,” Canal+ argued, according to the court’s summary (translated).
In the MotoGP case, Canal+ counted three blocked domains out of 16. In both cases, it added that two of the three blocked sites were back online a week later; one switched to a different CDN, while the other used a mirror site.
Court Sides With Cloudflare
On September 17, a panel of three judges ruled on both penalty requests. Cloudflare had pointed to technical constraints that only allowed it to comply through its CDN. It also stressed that the court had expressly left it free to choose which of its services to use, as long as it contributed meaningfully to the fight against sports piracy.
The court first noted that the way Cloudflare implements the blocking orders is not in dispute.
“It is undisputed that Cloudflare only implements the ordered measures by blocking through its CDN service, when the site uses that service,” the court writes (translated).
CDN only
Cloudflare told the court that this is incomparably more effective than DNS blocking. It added that the architecture of its public DNS resolver doesn’t allow for blocking, making such measures unreasonable.
Canal+ had argued that Cloudflare only blocked 72.6% of the domain names the court ordered it to block. The court, however, saw the figure as evidence of a genuine willingness to help stop the infringements.
The ruling doesn’t explain how this percentage relates to the three out of 21 blocked domains that Canal+ cited earlier.
The court also concluded that Cloudflare can’t be blamed for the sites that switched to another CDN or moved to a mirror.
“Cloudflare cannot be held responsible when the owners of the sites in question switch to another CDN or set up a redirect to a mirror site,” the court writes (translated).
Not Cloudflare’s responsibility
Instead, it is up to Canal+ to ask the new intermediary to block these sites and to report mirror sites to Arcom, the court notes.
Canal+ also argued that, under the EU Court of Justice’s UPC Telekabel Wien ruling, intermediaries must block effectively. The Paris court disagreed. In its view of the same ruling, intermediaries only have to take reasonable measures, which Cloudflare did with its CDN blocks.
The court therefore rejected the requested penalties as neither necessary nor proportionate. In addition, Canal+’s request for €20,000 in legal costs was also denied.
1.1.1.1 Stays Block-Free
As a result, Cloudflare will not be penalized under these orders, even though its public DNS resolver is not blocking the sites in question. That is in line with the company’s long-standing claim that it doesn’t interfere with its DNS.
In its recent transparency reports, Cloudflare repeatedly stated that it hasn’t blocked any content through 1.1.1.1, despite orders from French and Italian courts.
“To date, Cloudflare has not blocked content through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver,” the company’s latest report reads.
From Cloudflare’s transparency report
Blocking through the CDN is another matter. According to the same report, Cloudflare geoblocked 1,238 domains in France in the second half of 2025, all under a single court order. In the first half of the year, it geoblocked 662 domains under seven orders.
Cloudflare recently explained its position to the European Commission, in a submission to its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation, stressing that global public DNS resolvers should not be used to block or restrict access.
Instead, it highlights its real-time pirate stream blocking program, which allows vetted rightsholders to flag pirate streams that run through its network. These streams are disrupted “within seconds,” Cloudflare says, without any DNS or IP address blocking.
“For live content, where speed is crucial, Cloudflare has built real-time mitigation mechanisms that allow vetted rightsholder partners to flag infringing streams. When those streams are running through our network, we act on them in seconds,” Cloudflare informed the Commission.
Stream mitigation
For now, Cloudflare can continue to block pirate sites through its CDN only, while its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver remains untouched. Canal+ can still appeal the rulings, so it may not be the last we hear of it.
Non-profit DNS resolver Quad9 faces a similar, potentially bankrupting penalty request from beIN Sports for not blocking pirate content on its DNS resolver. How the Paris court will view this will become apparent later this month.
—
Copies of the Paris Judicial Court’s rulings in the Formula 1 (RG 26/08243) and MotoGP (RG 26/08228) cases are available here (pdf) and here (pdf). Cloudflare’s submission to the EU Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation can be found here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
One of the most bizarre things over the last few years is how two guys, Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, bumbling around cosplaying as “free speech” experts, have done tremendous damage to free speech. After Elon Musk brought them in to report on the so-called “Twitter Files,” the two of them spun up nonsense tales of conspiracy theories that didn’t exist, either because they were too clueless to understand what they were looking at, or because they knew there was a grift in screaming “censorship” where it didn’t actually exist. The whole premise of this made up theory of a “censorship industrial complex” is the idea that anyone who does any kind of research on “disinformation” is secretly a government censor. These two bumbling doofuses can’t comprehend that there could possibly be any reason ever to study “disinformation” and propaganda, except to censor. And, because of them running around screaming “censorship” at thoughtful research on how propaganda spreads, they’ve been able to lean on their government connections… to create actual censorship, silencing researchers across the globe.
Shellenberger was at it again this week. There’s a conference happening right now in Vilnius, Lithuania, called #Disinfo2026, hosted by the EU Disinfo Lab, which (as the name implies) does a ton of work studying disinformation, including how it’s created, how to respond to it, how it spreads, and its potential impact on democracy. Unlike Shellenberger, I’ve spent plenty of time with actual disinformation researchers and recognize that there is a wide variety of (often conflicting) beliefs about how to deal with disinformation, the most common of which is figuring out how to use counter speech to respond to disinformation campaigns. While there absolutely are exceptions — people who believe that suppression is the right approach — it is far from the most common view within the disinformation ecosystem. If anything, a lot of disinformation research is explicitly about finding alternatives to censorship, because most disinfo experts know that actual censorship tends to backfire (hold that thought).
But, because Shellenberger — who has a job at Bari Weiss’s flailing fake university as the “Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech” — thinks that the only purpose of disinformation research is censorship, he spent the last few days on a campaign to demonize the entire conference as yet another gathering in the “Censorship Industrial Complex” focused on how to censor speech. That, of course, is not what the conference is about at all. But Shellenberger, posing as a “journalist,” sent a bunch of participants emails in the last few days asking fairly silly questions about the conference.
For example, he sent an email with a bunch of questions to someone who runs an independent spam labeling service on Bluesky (because, you know, on Bluesky anyone can build their own moderation tools). A bunch of other researchers reported receiving similar emails. Indeed, in every email Shellenberger seemed especially focused on one particular issue: how the attendees of the conference felt about whether or not the US government is “a source of foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) in Europe.”
Then, the day of the conference, attendees noticed that signs at the conference appeared to have had the logos of sponsoring countries and orgs — namely Canada, Lithuania (where the event was being held!), and the European External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic arm — hastily covered up as they apparently pulled out of having their sponsorship listed either the day before or the morning of the conference.
A running theme of #Disinfo2026h this year is about the US as FIMI actor.In a completely unrelated turn of events, a few sponsors pulled out at the last moment, including the @eudiplomacy.bsky.social (yet another case of our institutions making me ashamed to be European).
A few hours later, The Guardian found out that the US State Department was actually responsible, leaning on the governments sponsoring the conference until they pulled their support — and then thanking them for it.
Three persons familiar with the matter, including European officials, confirmed that the US state department had been in touch with multiple governments over their support for the conference.
Internal state department documents seen by the Guardian also show US officials thanking Lithuania for “taking US concerns seriously”.
The main issue? One panel, out of many at the conference, asked whether the United States itself should be viewed as a “foreign information manipulation and interference” (FIMI) threat… the very same issue that Shellenberger seemed so focused on.
The document says Washington was “grateful” Lithuania supposedly found a panel framing the US as a foreign information threat “reprehensible and surprising” and welcomed its decision to limit involvement in the conference.
That panel – called “USA as a FIMI threat: adapt, acknowledge, push back”, with the acronym FIMI referring to “foreign information manipulation and interference” – took place Wednesday. It explored how Europe’s disinformation community could rebuild resilience without Washington, and is the first time the conference appears to have entertained the idea that the US could be a disinformation actor in Europe. Sources and the internal document indicate the state department was explicitly focused on this panel…
Indeed, soon after the sponsorships were pulled and before anyone had publicly reported it, Shellenberger emailed at least some attendees yet again, pointing out that the sponsorships had been pulled, and asking them more questions about their participation in light of the dropped sponsors.
Yeah, let me repeat that so we’re abundantly clear: we had a guy who cosplays as a “free speech” supporter trying to drum up propaganda attacking a disinformation conference because one panel of many asks the question of whether or not the US engages in foreign information manipulation. Around the same time, the State Department reaches out to sponsors of the event to literally engage in foreign information manipulation and interference because the US government is upset that anyone wants to discuss how the United States might engage in foreign information manipulation and interference.
It’s a hypocrite turducken.
After this started getting some attention, the State Department tried to defend its censorial “lobbying” efforts:
The U.S. State Department criticized the conference for proposing that the United States is a source of foreign interference and manipulated information.
“The organizers appear to put the United States in the same bucket as foreign adversaries,” the department said in an e-mailed statement. “This false equivalence is antithetical to the goals these individuals claim to promote and obscures the scale and nature of adversarial interference.”
Knowing how these conferences work, it’s not “the organizers” who did this, but whoever proposed this panel. And, more to the point, by threatening sponsors of this event for their participation in a foreign conference about speech, the US is kind of confirming that it absolutely is “a foreign adversary” when it comes to interference and manipulating information.
Not surprisingly, at least some of the communications appear to have come from the office of the State Department’s top censor, Sarah Rogers, who literally a few days ago (I was there) spoke at the “Future of Free Speech Summit” about how important free speech was to her, as an American. Apparently, that support for free speech does not extend to anyone talking about the US’s propaganda efforts.
According to one person familiar with the deliberations, other communications appeared to originate from the office of Sarah B Rogers, the US undersecretary of state for public diplomacy.
Also, this is absolute bullshit:
In statements, Lithuania,Canada and the EU said the program of the conference did not align with their official views on the US role in disinformation – although that program had been in place for months before they withdrew their support, since June.
“Lithuania has cancelled its participation in ‘Disinfo 2026’ as several parts of the conference programme differ from the official position of the Government,” Lithuania’s foreign ministry wrote in a statement.
Global Affairs Canada “carefully assesses participation in, and sponsorship of, external events on a case-by-case basis,” GAC spokesperson Samantha Lafleur said. “Following changes to the framing of several panel discussions, GAC decided to revise its participation in those sessions at the EU DisinfoLab 2026 conference.”
….
An EU spokesperson confirmed that the European External Action Service had decided to withdraw its support from the conference because “the organisers chose to frame some of the discussions in a way which does not align with the official positions held by the EU.”
Canada, at least, tries to defend its position by saying the framing “changed,” but the Guardian points out that the program has been public since June. The other statements are just weird. Do they mean that other conferences sponsored by Canada, the EU, or Lithuania only take place after those three have carefully vetted and approved all speakers and topics? Because that would seem like more of a free speech problem than… having a single panel discussing how the US engages in foreign propaganda campaigns.
The only supporter of this conference who comes out of this with any principles is, surprisingly, France:
A diplomatic source at France’s foreign ministry said “there’s absolutely no reason for us to change our commitments” when it came to supporting the conference.
“We stick to supporting civil society. It’s not just principled, it’s operational,” she said, adding that the conference was a “laboratory” that helped Europe develop key policy around disinformation.
There’s no way to get around this: this is the same US State Department that has exiled critics in the name of free speech, with a censorial guy who pretends to be a supporter of free speech as their warm-up act, making sure that there can be no discussion about how the US itself engages in foreign propaganda campaigns.
Except, of course, as both Rogers and Shellenberger should know by now, the Streisand Effect remains undefeated. And now tons of people who had never heard of a conference panel on America as a foreign propaganda threat know all about it.
The main takeaway from this year’s #Disinfo2026 conference will be about Streisand effect.
The djinn go back millennia, powerful and elusive creatures of the supernatural. They show up across time and culture.
Three hundred years ago, Charles Perrault retold a short story about a headstrong woodcutter and his wife. On being granted three wishes from Jupiter (archetype for the genie of legend), he accidentally blurts out that he’d like sausage for dinner. One wish, gone. His wife calls him a fool, and he responds by turning her nose into a sausage. Now, with just one wish left, he’s torn between being rich (but having a wife with a sausage attached to her nose) or using the third wish to end up right where he started.
Marital harmony and common sense prevail, and he ends up where he started, but filled with regret for what could have been. Ever since, we’ve been telling stories about people who screw up their wishes.
The persistence of genie morality in our culture is bigger than a Disney marketing ploy. It’s an important reminder about responsibility, long-term thinking and how often we fail to recognize how much agency we actually have. The three are woven into a narrative that often leaves us with a sausage attached to our noses.
In this moment, the biggest technology revolution humans have ever lived through, we’re all at risk of getting our wishes wrong. Careful what you wish for. But don’t forget to wish.
Major media companies insist they simply have to merge to create all manner of amazing new “consolidative synergies.” The debt from the acquisitions then result in brand and company cannibalization as labor and consumers are forced to carry the load. The net result is mass layoffs, higher prices, and shittier products from corner cutting. Typical enshittification.
It used to be that after a major acquisition, executives would spend six months to a year at least pretending there were no labor downsides to consolidation. Now they don’t even bother.
“Integrating two companies will bring change, including difficult decisions that affect our workforce,” the execs wrote in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by Variety. “We are committed to handling this process thoughtfully and respectfully.”
The mass firings are, employees are told, part of “building a culture” where people feel “supported” and “empowered:”
“We must never lose sight of what matters most: our people. We will build a culture where people feel respected, empowered, supported and proud of the work they do.”
It’s important to recall that Skydance was first created years ago by Larry Ellison as an avenue that would allow his son David to pretend he was an actor. Like most extraction-class brunchlords, David has just failed upward ever since, to the point where he’s now in charge of most of Hollywood’s biggest studios.
Paramount execs say they’re aiming to create more than $6 billion in annualized cost savings over three years, most of which will come from layoffs (despite claims to the contrary by deal architect and RedBird Capital Partners boss Gerry Cardinale). Recall that when AT&T bungled its dual, doomed acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner, more than 50,000 employees ultimately lost their jobs.
This comes after numerous rounds of layoffs caused by the previous merger between Paramount and Skydance. Further layoffs will come next year as bumbling Paramount execs struggle to adapt to shifting demand across traditional film and television. We know this because this is literally what happens every single time major media companies (especially Warner Brothers) pursue “growth for growth’s sake” consolidation.
The risks here are so bad, even normally pro-consolidation and pseudo-growth obsessed Wall Street is getting cold feet about how this all ends:
“TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz wrote in a note Wednesday that investors should hold their shares of Skydance as the firm remained “quite cautious on the ability of the company and its management to avoid integration and execution problems that have bedeviled other major media mergers.”
“The risks (leverage, integration) of the combination with WBD are high; we remain skeptical that SKYD management will be able to create value from this deal when so many other major media deals have failed,” the note read.”
And again, this could have been potentially prevented if California Democrats like Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and gubernatorial nominee Xavier Becerra hadn’t pressured state AGs to settle their antitrust lawsuit against the company. What’s worse is they couldn’t even be bothered to affix meaningful conditions to the deal; most were simply empty gestures Paramount suggested itself.
It’s becoming very apparent that we failed to learn a key lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic: infectious diseases aren’t partisan; they will come for us all. While Donald Trump and RFK Jr. play their little partisan games over the measles outbreak, the disease is spreading. Spinning conspiracy theories, falsely claiming that the government has it all under control, or trying to hide the data that says otherwise doesn’t stop measles. Vaccinations stop the measles.
That’s why, while the focus recently has been on the outbreak in Pennsylvania that has resulted in 5 deaths, a disease like measles was never going to be bound by state borders. It’s disappointing, but unsurprising, to see that New York has declared a statewide emergency due to measles infections as a result.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a statewide emergency on Monday over a measles outbreak spreading from Pennsylvania. It is the first time an emergency declaration has been issued since measles began surging in the U.S. in 2025.
“No one should get seriously ill or die from a vaccine-preventable disease,” Hochul said in a statement.
Indeed, but this is what Kennedy and the Trump administration hath wrought. Hochul paired the declaration with an executive order that expands what types of medical professionals can administer the MMR vaccine, and to whom. Now, pharmacists can inoculate the public, so long as they are at least 2 years old. The EO also requires that any administration of the vaccine must be reported to the state within three days, regardless of whether patients opt into that reporting or not.
I fully expect the MAHA goons to go kazoo over that last bit, but it’s important for the state to have this data when they’re trying to combat a disease as infectious and problematic as measles.
It’s unlikely that New York will be the last state to have to do this sort of thing. For now, I guess we hold our breath until November to see if the government is reconfigured in a way that can finally put an end to Kennedy’s profane reign at HHS.
President Donald Trump has seemed both desperate and filterless lately. In the first week of a 32-day rally blitz before the midterms, he has said plenty that no other politician could get away with. And yet the press lets him do just that, sane-washing and second-guessing his vile words.
Most notably, on Monday night in Grand Island, Nebraska, Trump told the crowd Iran could “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego. They lapped it up, cheering the idea of millions of fellow Americans perishing.
Yet the New York Times somehow reported that his meaning was unclear—even though the crowd seemed to understand him perfectly.
The same day on Truth Social, Trump hurled an anti-trans slur at South Carolina’s Democratic Senate nominee, calling her “Annie ‘Trannie’ Andrews.” In another post, he attacked the Times for reporting that his “PACKED” Ohio rally had empty upper sections. But the line he quoted came from a story about a different rally in a different state. At that Ohio rally on Saturday, he called Democrats “dumb son of a bitches [sic].” And he told the crowd Republicans would win the midterms “big,” adding, “And we’re going to shove it up their ass.”
None of these remarks was ambiguous. But the major press covered them unevenly or not at all.
Facing rising disapproval, Trump has had to defend his war of choice with Iran and the high fuel prices that have come with it. His attempt in Nebraska produced a monstrous hypothetical. As transcribed by the New York Times, Trump said:
“It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe.
They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego. That’s — this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon.”
High gas prices are already hurting working families. The destruction of two major American cities was thrown in as red meat to a frothing crowd.
Journalist Jim Acosta, who left CNN in January 2025 and now runs his own news show, flagged the moment as the clip spread. “The crowd starts to applaud as Trump fantasizes about LA and San Diego being wiped out by a nuclear attack. WTF,” he posted. “This is not normal.”
You can hear the crowd’s reaction for yourself. Hillary was right: deplorable.
But let’s be clear. Despite the legacy media’s chin-stroking, this was not some verbal gaffe or an off-the-cuff aside. Trump has been workshopping a version of this line about a nuclear weapon hitting an American city, something I haven’t seen discussed anywhere.
Three days earlier, at a rally in Mobile, Alabama, Trump tried out a similar line. (Yes, I sat through much of Trump’s speech to find it. Please support your beleaguered writer.) He told the crowd that high oil prices were a small price next to what would happen if Iran got a nuclear weapon “and used it on Mobile, Alabama.” That crowd stayed quiet, as C-SPAN’s recording shows at the 22:12 mark.
By contrast, the riled-up Nebraska crowd was hearing about the destruction of two major California cities more than 1,000 miles away, with Trump inviting them to relish the thought.
California officials heard it for what it was. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria posted, “San Diego is not collateral damage. We are not expendable.” Even California Republicans were appalled. San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, a Trump-endorsed Republican running for an open San Diego-area House seat, said he “vehemently” disagreed and that “no American city is expendable.”
The White House predictably called the reaction a “media freakout” that was “not rooted in reality.”
The problem is that the media didn’t freak out at all. Instead, the major press somehow found the remarks hard to parse. The Times’ first story, by Laura Chung, quoted Trump through “Let them take out San Diego” but stopped before he weighed the two cities against gas prices. Her piece omitted the cheering, and four paragraphs in, she wrote, “It was not immediately clear what Mr. Trump meant.”
The Times’ follow-up, by Shawn McCreesh, also sane-washed the remarks, calling them “confusing comments” and attributing them to Trump’s “rambling style of off-the-cuff speaking”—even though Trump had said something similar three days earlier.
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale, who usually does the public a great service by fact-checking Trump, posted that Trump had delivered a familiar talking point but did so “in especially rambling and incomplete fashion,” and that “you kinda have to be steeped in TrumpRallySpeak to know what he was saying.” As Mediaite’s headline noted, this was an unusual defense of Trump.
NBC’s San Diego station opened its video report with a hedge suggesting the president was trying to be funny. “Even if the president was joking, the comments have drawn condemnation from California officials like San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria and Gov. Gavin Newsom.” The Associated Press story on the rally led with Trump signing an executive order on red-dyed diesel and did not mention Los Angeles or San Diego.
The media ought to be warning that the unhinged president has moved from declaring that there is a dangerous enemy within to whipping up his base to cheer the imagined destruction of entire U.S. cities, simply because lots of Democrats live there. This is Trump conditioning his base, to paraphrase Voltaire, first to accept absurdities so they can accept atrocities.
It is not rambling. It is not a joke. It is how we slide perilously into civil conflict and violence.
The T-word
Listening to Trump’s Mobile speech, I was struck by how much vitriol and hate he reserves for trans people. Trump knows he can’t use the N-word publicly, but he is testing the waters now with the T-word, after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threw open that door earlier this summer.
Trump took to Truth Social to attack Annie Andrews, a pediatrician and the Democratic nominee against Republican Sen. Darline Graham, who was appointed to finish her late brother Lindsey Graham’s term and has since won the GOP nomination.
“Darline is a High Quality person, maybe the Highest, and Annie Tr**nie is not,” Trump wrote. He closed: “Tr**nie is not for South Carolina, and South Carolina must show, in the upcoming Election, that it is not for her.”
All told, Trump used the slur three times.
Andrews is not transgender. She has even broken with trans advocates on two issues, opposing gender-affirming surgery for minors and transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. Trump hurled the slur at her anyway, proof that it doesn’t matter what your position is; the White House and the GOP will attack you.
Asked why the president had used the slur, the White House referred NBC News to the post, which of course provides no explanation.
The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization where I serve as incoming board chair, blasted Trump’s remarks. Spokesperson Ramiro Sarmiento called them “the sad, disgusting, pathetic diatribes of a lame duck president with record-low approvals. So low, in fact, he’s having to campaign in deep red territory in a desperate attempt to shore up support ahead of the midterms.”
Condemnation crossed party lines. David Beasley, a former Republican governor of South Carolina, posted that “South Carolina deserves better.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the attack “despicable.” Andrews largely ignored the insult, saying she would “work with anyone to put South Carolina first.”
At least this time the press called out the moment for what it was. NBC’s headline read, “Trump uses anti-trans slur against Democratic Senate candidate in South Carolina.” Charleston’s ABC affiliate, WCIV, ran the headline, “President Trump attacks Democrat Annie Andrews using anti-trans slur.”
Given the media’s record on giving Trump a pass, though, it may not be long before such slurs become so commonplace from Trump that they are no longer considered newsworthy.
“Shove it up their ass”
At a high school gym in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday, Trump urged the crowd to vote for Sen. Jon Husted and gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy. NBC News reported:
I think we’re going to have a big surprise, because they don’t know what’s happening. … Just get out and vote. If you do that, we’re going to win, and we’re going to win big. And we’re going to shove it up their ass.
NBC’s headline highlighted the “big surprise” but reported the vulgarity only in the body of the story. Reuters called the speech “crude,” reporting that Trump called Democrats “dumb son of a bitches” and that he said of Democratic gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton, “I’m not going to help her.” The Times’ Katie Rogers noted that rallygoers cheered his profanity, “as they did in Ohio when the president called Democrats an expletive.”
The pass Trump got on the “shove it up their ass” remark stands in stark contrast to the press’s pearl-clutching over President Biden in 2022, when he called a reporter a son of a bitch on a still-hot mic. At a White House event that January, Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy shouted a question about whether inflation was a political liability. Biden, thinking his microphone was turned off, replied, “No, that’s a great asset. More inflation.” He added, “What a stupid son of a bitch.”
No argument there. But within hours, the phrase was in headlines.
CNBC: “Biden calls Fox News reporter Peter Doocy ‘a stupid son of a bitch.’”
The Hill: “Hot mic catches Biden calling Fox News reporter ‘stupid son of a b—-.’”
Variety: “Joe Biden Calls Fox News Reporter a ‘Stupid Son of a Bitch’ After Inflation Question.”
Biden muttered his remark about a single reporter on a hot mic. Trump delivered his vulgar line from a rally stage and aimed it at the entire opposing party. Only one got headline treatment.
Trump’s public language has grown coarser over time. In July, after Iran targeted U.S. forces in Jordan, he said American troops would “beat the fucking shit” out of Iranian forces. Medical experts who have raised concerns about Trump’s cognitive health have pointed to the same pattern. A 2024 open letter from geriatric, neurological and forensic psychiatric experts listed “disinhibition in speech, such as the frequent use of vulgar, profane language or hate speech” among signs “aligned with common signs of an early dementia,” while acknowledging they could not make a formal diagnosis without examining him.
In April, three dozen medical professionals, including neurologists and psychiatrists, issued a statement that Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed entered into the Congressional Record. Without examining him, the medical professionals cited “severely impaired judgment and impulse control.”
When Trump throws out coarse and vile language, it’s not just Trump being Trump. It’s his brain turning to mush and the filters disappearing. That should be the story.
“Should be arrested”
Trump’s rallies this fall also carry a recurring plea. “When I run, we win,” he told the Ohio crowd. “But for some reason, when I don’t run, they draw 44% less people. So what I’m going to do is ask you to just pretend that I’m running.”
That’s a terrible plan, given his historically high disapproval numbers, which are reflected in turnout at Trump’s pre-midterm rallies. Rogers reported that the crowds “are, in fact, more modest — and at times more sedate — than they used to be.”
That touched a nerve, and Trump has spent the week insisting otherwise. Tuesday morning, he posted, “MY RALLIES ARE SAVING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, AGAIN!!!”
The empty seats tell a different story. The Ohio rally was held in a high school student activity center with a capacity of 4,500. Rogers reported that several areas of the upper deck were empty by the time Trump finished speaking.
On Monday, Trump fired back on Truth Social. “The Fake News New York Times ‘reported’ on my Great, PACKED Rally in Ohio that, ‘the place was not full. Some upper sections were almost completely empty,’” he wrote. “In actuality, thousands of people were unable to get in. The Arena was totally MAXED OUT, including all upper sections.” But the line he quoted came from a Times story about his rally the day before in Mobile, Alabama.
Trump also offered an explanation for the empty seats. “What does happen at all of my SOLD OUT Rallies, is that the people in the upper sections tend to migrate down to the Main Floor — The ‘migration’ process always happens!” he wrote. “I never have empty seats — Never have, and never will!” (That is false.) He added that he now has cinematographers filming his rallies to counter the press.
Then he upped the ante, calling for the arrest of journalists. “The New York Times, and many other Artificial Media Outlets, should be arrested for their dishonesty and disservice to our Country,” Trump wrote.
It’s hard not to draw a connection between the sane-washing of Trump, the consolidation of major media by Trump allies and these threats against journalists. Those covering Trump honestly have to be willing to accept verbal abuse, threats to their freedom and safety, and the possibility that honest reporting could cost them their jobs if they work for major networks like CNN and CBS, which are now under the thumb of the Ellisons.
Increasingly, independent journalists who answer to nothing but the truth, and who are willing to speak it plainly, must pick up the slack.
Series.ly 
Over the past two years, French courts have ordered a growing list of intermediaries to block access to pirate sports streams.
