A quick fact check:

a) Kennedy center: "Following the hearing, the Justice Department informed the judge that no physical changes or name additions will happen before October 8, 2026, leaving the issue in a temporary holding pattern while the legal battle continues."

b) Google: "As of August 2026, the administration is not currently held in active criminal or civil contempt of court in these specific cases, though it has come incredibly close."

(Of Note: The New Jersey item was a threat, not a finding of contempt.)

While google may "work" as you suggest, a random article in "The New Jersey Monitor" from half a year ago is not evidence.

There's a lot of FUD surrounding this claim, but when you drill down to facts, the US does not ignore court orders.

Post verified evidence if you disagree.

So your thesis is that injunctions against the government are simply ignored?

That's a strong position, I think I would have heard about it. Can you cite some examples, Mr. Anonymous Coward?

(Overturn on appeal or vacated after final decision doesn't count.)

Probably not.

As you may have noticed, there are 3 levels of criminal in this country.

If the government is doing something illegal, they just stop.
If a company is doing something illegal, they stop and pay a fee without admitting guilt.
If a person is doing something illegal, they go to jail.

This is the "government doing something illegal" category, which means they simply stop doing it. Justice is served, the system works, yadda yadda.

I've often wondered if remote screening would put an end to this.

Imagine a paid service where the company serves as your window into the internet and composes your HTML and sends it to you as an image displayed by their app. You could magnify or smallify the image as needed, and the app would send mouse and keyboard events back to the company to be forwarded on your behalf.

It's not a fully formed idea, you would also need to package and send audio, deal with credit card payments, and so on, but for people with fast internet access this might be a doable solution.

(Of note: it's like a VPN, but the HTML compositing on the remote computer is an additional layer. A VPN service could randomize the output portal per session, but that's already a feature of VPNs.)

An advantage of this is that almost all the system configuration fingerprinting would be inaccessible to the wider world, if a breech happens none of your private files are available on the remote computer to be stolen, and a number of security guardrails could be implemented, such as ensuring that mouse events are short, keypress events contain only keypress information, only image information is displayed, and so on

A sophisticated client system might even incorporate multiple user identities per client user, keyed to a specific website. Your internet facing information could be different when visiting Amazon.com, as compared to WalMart.com.

VPNs aren't that expensive, and they're used by people who want the value of an extra level of security.

For most web browsing, this might be an extra level of anonymity for people who would value that extra level.

No, their argument is "because Democrat bias".

I don't want my tax money going to politicized institutions, period. I don't want my tax money supporting one side *or* the other, government support should be politically neutral.

The airwaves are a public resource, the government is supposed to manage that resource for the public good.

"One sided" is not the public good. About half the country is conservative, there used to be rules about political bias, it was abolished in 1987, and this has led to the sorry state of affairs we have now.

MSM is unending, incessant propaganda. Rage bait intended to persuade rather than inform.

If it's not going to use the public resource for the public good, then the MSM shouldn't be using that public resource.

(Of note: Fox news is an internet/cable channel, and does not require a broadcast license.)

There are several breakthroughs on the near horizon that will help.

First up is Commonwealth Fusion, based on a technology breakthrough in 2011 is planning to have net gain sometime in 2027 (delayed from "latter part of 2026"), and is so certain of the results that they are building a commercial fusion plant in Virginia... and have already purchased (IIRC) the land and are in the permitting stage. (More info.

Second up is Tesla Robotics, which is putting the transformer model into a physical robot, so that it can do physically what the LLM chatbot can do with words. For all the discussion about AI and whether it's intelligent or any good or whatnot, it's obvious that AI systems are *useful* at glueing words together. Robots will give us access to lots of cheap labor, and part of that will be robots that to cleanup work for humans. Picking up garbage on roadways, going through landfills and sorting, grabbing bits of rope and plastic from shorelines comes to mind(*).

And finally, Verdox, has figured out a way to capture CO2 from the atmosphere electrochemically. Their system works in the manner of an oxygen concentrator that you may have seen people wheeling around (except it's electrochemical and not physical). They claim their system is efficient at extracting CO2 at atmospheric pressure, which is wildly more efficient than distillation, which is our current method.

I figure in about 50 years we should be well on our way to fixing these civilizational problems. Robots powered by AI and cheap energy, running around doing all the cleanup work that humans don't want to do.

(Cue the climate alarmists who run around and screech about "it's not enough!" and "it'll be too late by then".)

(Note that Tesla has designed its own AI processor chip and is building a semiconductor fab plant that will be able to make them in bulk. Their combination of robotics and AI processing chip will be wildly valuable in the future.)

What he (Dolgov) is saying is a belief that stems from rationalization. It *seems* like it's a proof because that's how he's phrasing it, but in the final analysis he's a biased observer expressing an opinion and bolstering it with a rationalization.

It's what we get every time we ask an expert for advice about something they don't directly know. Ask a physicist about dark energy, or a doctor about your unusual symptom, or a nutritionist about what you eat, or an economist about whether the Fed should lower rates... you'll get a reasonable sounding answer backed by rationalization.

We don't have proof that a computer can self-drive using only cameras (and not "computer can do what a brain does", which is a much wider problem set), but we have abundant statistical evidence that it can.

Tesla claims claims (mid 2026) that self driving has about 1/7 of the collisions of human driving. Fully deployed FSD would reduce driving fatalities by 90%.

While not a proof in the inductive-logic sense, it's probably good enough to become general consensus. Given the enormous amount of data they train on (10 billion miles driven?), I suspect the p-value is astronomically small.

And of note, I recently purchased a Tesla with self driving. The system requires you to be attentive while it's active, but I can say with complete honesty that full self driving is here now.

And it works. It'll go into a crowded parking lot and back itself into a parking space, it'll correctly navigate lane closures and safety cone situations, and just yesterday it correctly stopped for a road worker holding a stop sign, waited, and then proceeded when he turned the sign to "slow".

The reason I got the car is because a friend kept badgering me about... of all things... getting old. Our population is aging, and old people driving is a constant source of problems. Having a way for them to get around without being a danger to others seems like a good thing.

Oh, and coming off a day hike or a day of physical labor or something and being really tired it's nice to be able to hit the "start self driving" and have the thing take me completely home because I'm really beat and not very attentive.

This would be a good time to point out that every political argument has two sides and two points of view.

I've seen the arguments for both sides of this issue, and have come to the conclusion that there is merit for both. People should really look at the specific charges being made, with examples, before coming to any conclusion.

Every time someone tries to rein in the news media, it's received by shouts of first amendment, freedom of speech, chilling effects, and so on; and yet, this leads to insane situations. Google most egregious US media failures in the last 10 years for a list of incidents, and note how many of these affected major political events such as a presidential election or national policy.

Should a journalist be able to walk into a church during service and interrupt the proceedings, and not be held accountable because he's a journalist? Should a major news outlet be able to report something without at least a cursory check to see if it's accurate? Should an interview answer be swapped with the answer from a different question?

I've come to the conclusion that knee-jerk framing is on purpose, everyone wants to get "ahead" of an issue, and if an erroneous/misleading/false statement is made they will simply say "oops... I made a mistake" and there's no repurcussions... except that the lie went out to the audience and a small percentage got outraged in the right direction, regardless of whether the statement is true or not.

A "straw-man" argument is where you put your opponent's viewpoint in the most absurd terms and then attack the absurdity. A "strong-man" argument is where you put your opponent's viewpoint in the strongest possible terms and then try to attack it.

Choose the "strong-man" argument here. Find out what the administration is complaining about, and see if you can fault their logic.

Had a look at the criminal complaint just to find out where the perpetrators had gone wrong.

Sending anonymous tweets and E-mails, they purchased pre-paid debit cards to send packages to their home, various harassment techniques such as ordering a pizza "pay on delivery" at 4:30 AM, and so on and so on... how on Earth did the NPD ever figure this out?

Turns out the perpetrators flew from California to Boston area (Natick) to put a GPS on the Steiners' car, which they couldn't do because it was kept in a locked garage, so they rented vehicles to surveil the Steiners, their license plates were noted and given to Natick Police Department (NPD), and the rental agency was contacted.

Once the eBay operatives were identified, they tried various misdirects and obfustication techniques, but NPD a) verified their statements, and so figured out they were lying, and b) contacted eBay directly, which had a security team respond in good faith, and the whole plan unravelled.

One, single mistake is all that stood between a long campaign of harassment and getting found out. One good local police department who took the trouble to look deeply into the problem and figure out the truth despite a torrent of misdirection and obfustication.

I wonder how many more campaigns of harassment are ongoing, led by people who know how to conduct vehicle-based surveillance, or encouraged by ineffective or lazy policing.

I have the "New Tab Override" extension installed, it allows me to load my own local .html file for the new tab page.

My personal page has a 4x3 grid of links to my most often needed pages, and I like this a lot.

I hope they haven't removed this functionality, it might be the last straw that pushes me away from Firefox. I'm really starting to hate their "do it our way and no other" mentality.

In the hopes of clarifying some concepts and descriptive words:

The US army runs under fascism. Management is top-down, everyone has to do what their superior says to do, and if you don't do it there are grave consequences.

All militaries across the globe run under fascism. All militaries throughout history have run under fascism.

Almost all businesses are run under a similar system: there is one person at the top, usually with a vision of what he wants to happen, and everyone from there down what their immediate superior says to do. There is some leeway in the case of business: you can disagree with your superior and perhaps have a discussion, doing the right thing against orders is OK if it works out, and the penalties for disobeying aren't as severe (getting fired versus getting sent to Leavenworth, or being shot).

The fascist model of governance is one of a handful of governing types we know about, and is useful in situations where decisions need to be made quickly based on experience (military planning) or based on vision (business planning). Military actions fall squarely within those situations. It's not the best model for an economic system, where divergent opinions and "try it and see" is more efficient, or a political system where individual corruption can lead to violations in human rights or reasonable policy.

The US military is not capitalistic, but it is not "anti-capitalism" system in the sense that it works against capitalism in any way.

The US military isn't socialist, except that it tries to provide for it's members in compensation for the risks they take. It's similar to businesses providing health insurance or stock options or reimbursement for college courses - we don't normally think of employment perks as "socialism", and in the same manner we shouldn't think of military benefits as socialism either. Socialism is a foundational principle, not a system of perks.

I don't know that using AI is a weakness of the system. The military is famous for actually studying the effects that certain decisions have. You can look up the government's studies on whether and how much coffee improves performance, whether sleep learning is of any use, and the minimum IQ to allow before it takes more resources to manage an individual than the resources the individual brings by enlisting.

Looking into new technologies and their application to warfare is something the US military does very well.

And apropos of nothing, it's completely obvious that drones are a tectonic shift in military technology, this came as a complete surprise from the Ukraine war, and we totally should be pivoting away from expensive missiles and more towards swarms of cheap drones.

I don't know why you're characterizing drones as trendy and popular, either.

A simpler explanation is that this is a biased news report intended to stir up outrage. ... and you and the grandparent post fell for it, and are adding to the overall outrage level.

Take a moment to look at the arguments against.

It looks a whole lot like manufacturers are *not* trying to lie about packaging or content, it's the complete opposite of that. The manufacturers want the labels on based on the product material, and not based on whether there are recycling program within the state. The stamp should describe the product, not the availability of recycling to the end consumer.

If the bag your product came in has a polypropylene triangle on it (a "5"), it means the bag *can* be recycled. If California doesn't have facilities for doing that, it doesn't make the bag non-recyclable. California only manages to recycle 2% of this type, manufacturers want to put the stamp there to inform the consumer, the language of the bill would force them to remove the stamp because California doesn't recycle this type of plastic, and of course the manufacturers wouldn't do that for just California they would do it for everyone.

That's what this is about, not lying.

Furthermore, the plaintiffs the Pack act, which would install one standard country-wide, eliminating the maze of state-wide regulations.

Stop adding to the outrage, look at both sides of an issue before commenting.

Try this: go outside away from the city during a full moon.

I think you'll be surprised.

In the middle ages, when it was too hot during the day, farmers used to till and plant fields at night under the full moon. It allowed them to get more work done during the planting season.

Also try this: go outside between the hours of 2:00 PM and 7:00 PM in Spain right now (July).

I think you'll be surprised.

For senator, most states allow the governor to appoint a replacement until a special election is held. In 5 states, there is no appointment and a special election will be held immediately.

For representative there is no appointment, the US constitution requires a special election.

I believe that the appointment can be anyone, traditionally it's someone from the same party. I seem to remember in one case the wife of the senator was appointed, his term was almost up and she knew what his position would be so it made sense at the time.

Is that the only reason?

A simpler explanation is that they predicted in good faith but the evidence doesn't bear out the prediction.