librarydenizenk

Trump is moving the headquarters of the U.S. Forest Service, one of the United State's largest federal public land management agencies, to Utah; a state that is suing the government to take control of federal public lands away from the American people. thehill.com/policy/energy-…

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

Border Patrol chief Michael Banks engaged in the sex trafficking of Mexican, Cambodian and Thai women. He was being investigated but Kristi Noem stopped the investigation while she was head of DHS.

I hate Grammarly, I hate Smart Compose, they’re flattening language by removing all the things that make it personal & distinctive. Your voice, your style, your idiosyncratic perspective are being molded into a blancmange of conformity. Don’t let them steal what makes you unique

.@ChefJoseAndres: I am a cook and I know there is no America without immigrants. There is no food at our table without immigrants. There is no farm without immigrants. There are no kitchens without immigrants.

Montana — yes, deep red Montana — has a plan to effectively neuter Citizens United. No Supreme Court ruling or constitutional amendment needed. Here's how it works.

In the 1990s, Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard made a groundbreaking discovery that challenged everything we thought we knew about how forests work. While studying managed forests in British Columbia, she noticed something puzzling: when birch trees were removed to promote the growth of valuable Douglas firs, the firs did not flourish as expected — they actually struggled and grew more slowly. Determined to understand why, Simard traced the movement of nutrients using radioactive carbon isotopes. What she found was astonishing. Trees were actively sharing resources through vast underground fungal networks known as mycorrhizae. These delicate, thread-like fungi connect the roots of different trees across the forest floor, forming a complex web that allows the exchange of carbon, water, nutrients, and even chemical signals — sometimes between entirely different species. She discovered that older, larger trees often serve as central "hubs" or "mother trees," supporting younger saplings by redistributing vital resources and helping the entire ecosystem remain resilient. When these key trees are removed, the underground network weakens, and the health of the remaining forest declines. Simard’s research overturned the traditional Darwinian view of forests as battlegrounds of ruthless competition. Instead, she revealed a far more sophisticated reality: forests operate as highly cooperative systems where trees communicate, support one another, and even warn neighboring trees about threats like drought, disease, or insect attacks. What appears to the human eye as a silent, still forest is, in truth, a vibrant, interconnected living network — built not on isolation and rivalry, but on deep connection and mutual aid.

The Pentagon is denying a report by The Financial Times that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s stockbroker was seeking to make large investments in major defense companies in the days before the U.S. and Israel struck Iran. That report is raising more concerns about the people in and around the Trump administration who seem to be profiting in unusual ways. @ElizLanders reports.

The rice plant does not negotiate. It does not wait for the grand bargain in Beijing. It does not care about the April 6 deadline. It grows on a biological clock that requires nitrogen at specific stages of development, and if the nitrogen does not arrive during the vegetative window in April and May, the crop fails. No ceasefire can reset the clock. No diplomatic breakthrough can un-miss the planting season. The strait can reopen tomorrow and the fertiliser still will not reach the field in time. Eighty-five to 95 percent of fertiliser traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has stopped. The combined cost of IRGC toll and war-risk insurance, $3 to $7.5 million per voyage, exceeds the profit margin on a 50,000-tonne urea shipment. The insurance market that made Hormuz an oil-only lane did not intend to create a nitrogen crisis. But the actuarial sorting that prices crude tankers through and container ships out also prices fertiliser vessels out. Oil molecules transit. Nitrogen molecules do not. The market is choosing energy over food, and nobody voted on it. India imports 65 to 70 percent of its nitrogen fertiliser, 40 percent from the Gulf. Pakistan imports 80 percent. Bangladesh 75 percent. Urea prices have surged 25 to 50 percent since the war began, reaching $420 to $720 per tonne. India has lost 800,000 tonnes per month of domestic urea production because the natural gas feedstock itself transits the same disrupted routes. The fertiliser is not just blocked at the chokepoint. The raw material to make it domestically is blocked at the same chokepoint. April is when Indian farmers plant kharif rice. May is when Pakistani wheat gets its critical nitrogen dose. These are not flexible schedules. They are dictated by monsoon onset, soil temperature, and photoperiod. A delay of seven to ten days in nitrogen application during grain filling reduces yields by 8 to 15 percent. The quadratic response curve between nitrogen input and grain output is one of the most studied relationships in agricultural science. Late nitrogen produces less food. The projections are severe. If current disruptions persist through May, rice and maize yields across South and Southeast Asia face 8 to 15 percent reductions. Food inflation in vulnerable countries could rise 10 to 20 percent by the third quarter. For nations where households spend 40 to 60 percent of income on food, a 15 percent price increase is not an economic statistic. It is a hunger crisis measured in calories per child per day. Russia and China are offering subsidised alternatives through bilateral deals. India secured 8.6 million tonnes through emergency pacts. Morocco is supplying 2.5 million tonnes of phosphate. Global urea stocks are 12 percent higher than last year. These buffers matter. But buffers do not change the clock. A shipment that arrives in June cannot feed a crop that needed nitrogen in April. The molecule must meet the plant at the right moment or the moment passes. Three elements transit the same 39-kilometre strait. Carbon in crude oil. Helium cooling lithography machines. Nitrogen feeding a billion people. The war disrupted all three. The market sorted them by price. Oil gets through. Helium evaporates. Nitrogen waits. The rice plant has no lobby. It has no insurance policy. It has a biological clock. And the clock is running. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

🚨 BREAKING: OpenAI and Google are about to have a massive legal problem. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have repeatedly sworn to courts that their models do not store exact copies of copyrighted books. They claim their "safety training" prevents regurgitation. Researchers just dropped a paper called "Alignment Whack-a-Mole" that proves otherwise. They didn't use complex jailbreaks or malicious prompts. They just took GPT-4o, Gemini, and DeepSeek, and fine-tuned them on a normal, benign task: expanding plot summaries into full text. The safety guardrails instantly collapsed. Without ever seeing the actual book text in the prompt, the models started spitting out exact, verbatim copies of copyrighted books. Up to 90% of entire novels, word-for-word. Continuous passages exceeding 460 words at a time. But here is the part that changes everything. They fine-tuned a model exclusively on Haruki Murakami novels. It didn't just learn Murakami. It unlocked the verbatim text of over 30 completely unrelated authors across different genres. The AI wasn't learning the text during fine-tuning. The text was already permanently trapped inside its weights from pre-training. The fine-tuning just turned off the filter. It gets worse. They tested models from three completely different tech giants. All three had memorized the exact same books, in the exact same spots. A 90% overlap. It's a fundamental, industry-wide vulnerability. For years, AI companies have argued in court that their models are just "learning patterns," not storing raw data. This paper provides the smoking gun.

This is awful. I hope @Apple will rethink this decision.

Trump's corporate tax breaks have officially cost us $65 BILLION. Amazon, Eli Lilly, Verizon, AT&T, Meta, Palantir, Walmart—they all got massive tax breaks. We gave THEM $65 billion that could have gone to healthcare, education, childcare, housing, and a million other things.

Thomas Massie is sounding the alarm. Congress is about to pass a liability shield for Bayer — a foreign corporation — that would strip Americans of the right to sue when glyphosate gives them cancer. Massie: “This is not to grant farmers immunity. This is to grant corporations immunity. If you contract non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma from this chemical — you won’t be able to sue.” Bayer has already paid billions settling cancer lawsuits. This bill ends future lawsuits permanently. RFK Jr. built his brand on MAHA. Trump is urging Republicans to pass it anyway.

Health and environmental groups are suing the EPA under Trump for rolling back pollution limits for coal plants. Mercury and other pollutants from coal plants cause brain damage, especially in children. The executive branch is weakening public health protections in favor of private profits. We need to protect our air, water, and food supply from these dangerous criminals.

Let me get this straight… Palantir now controls: – 30+ federal agencies – DHS-wide data fusion – Health surveillance infrastructure – Master list database of all Americans – Law‑enforcement “precrime” intelligence And now the Pentagon is making Palantir AI its core military system. One company... Running government. Running the military. Running surveillance on all of us. What could possibly go wrong?

The White House said it was "over prosecution." Schwartz's own guilty plea says otherwise — he admitted responsibility for $39 million in payroll taxes withheld from his employees and never paid. The pardon wiped the conviction, the fine, and the $5 million restitution order. Prior to signing, Schwartz had paid $960,000 to two right-wing lobbyists to secure it. The pitch to the White House included a claim that the sentencing judge was antisemitic — no evidence offered, some version of it made it into the official pardon rationale anyway. The Coulson family won a $19 million wrongful-death judgment. Never collected a dollar. Prosecutors believed Schwartz controlled $50M+ in assets. Republican AG Tim Griffin of Arkansas called it out plainly: Schwartz preyed on nursing home residents and on the workers in his facilities. Griffin forced state time anyway. $960K buys a pardon. $5M in restitution disappears. Families with court judgments get nothing. DOGE is cutting benefits for working people to eliminate fraud. This is what the fraud looks like when it wears a different suit.

This isn’t a small deal. Restaurant Depot is where most mom & pop restaurants go to buy inventory because Sysco is so expensive. Restaurant Depot was privately owned. Sysco is owned by… you guessed it, BlackRock & Vanguard. Now private equity can control pricing for food costs with zero competition. Just like they did with housing. This should be an anti-trust violation, but we have politicians that work for Big Corp, not us.

While Trump has railed against drugs coming into the U.S., his DOJ has declined to prosecute nearly 5,000 federal drug cases, including trafficking and money laundering — 45% higher than the average of the prior three new administrations. propublica.org/article/trump-…

#BREAKING: Legendary #Maddow: “The military calls them AWACS…they can detect anything airborne within 200 miles from the surface of the earth all the way up to the stratosphere…they are very very very expensive, but AWACS are just key to American air dominance in far away war zones…over the weekend, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky told NBC News that it wasn’t #Iran that figured out where that vital U.S. aircraft was, sitting there unprotected, it was Russia…”🤦‍♀️

We've LOST 89,000 manufacturing jobs since the administration announced its tariff agenda. That's like if you closed over 2,800 factories nationwide. The same corporations that already get massive tax breaks pass the cost of tariffs on to us—or just fire us. Rigged economy.