Lawmakers from both parties said Sunday they support congressional reviews of U.S. military strikes against vessels suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, citing a published report that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a verbal order for all crew members to be killed as part of a Sept. 2 attack.

The lawmakers said they did not know whether last week’s Washington Post report was true, and some Republicans were skeptical, but they said attacking survivors of an initial missile strike poses serious legal concerns.

Lawmakers voice bipartisan support for congressional reviews of Trump's boat strikes

Lawmakers from both parties said Sunday they support congressional reviews of U.S. military strikes against vessels suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, citing a published report that Defense Secretary Pete Heg…

^{PBS News}

In less than a year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken a bonesaw to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. While his supporters have touted it as the liberation of public health that will “make America healthy again,” a growing chorus of doctors and medical organizations are sounding the alarm that it will cost the lives of children, older adults and disabled people, mangling our medical system for generations.

Kennedy, 71, has no medical or government background, but since his appointment in February, he has undertaken massive changes to the nation’s many agencies tasked with keeping people alive and healthy. That includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which monitors for disease outbreaks, and the Food and Drug Administration, which approves new medications and treatments.

Kennedy approaches public health with the gravitas of a rabid raccoon.

Last week, at Kennedy’s behest, the CDC removed the statement “vaccines do not cause autism” from its vaccine safety page, tweaking it with “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” Apparently, Kennedy has never heard of the burden of proof or the extreme difficulty in proving a negative. This is no minor revision — it not only broke one of many promises Kennedy made to Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the deciding vote in Kennedy’s confirmation, but it drew widespread outcry from doctors, scientists and other public health experts. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told KFF Health News that Kennedy and his “nihilistic Dark Age compatriots have transformed the CDC into an organ of anti-vaccine propaganda.”

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This is only one of dozens of ways in which Kennedy has crusaded against standards in science and health. Kennedy has fired thousands of employees across the board (including mere weeks after a mass shooting at CDC headquarters), gutted billions in research funds, attacked medications from antidepressants to acetaminophen (Tylenol), and dismantled and recast vaccine advisory bodies with “noted vaccine skeptics and conspiracy theorists,” as PBS reported. Kennedy has long railed against these institutions because, he says, they have been co-opted by industry and are dedicated to extracting profit from public health instead of fortifying it.

There’s no denying Americans’ health is dismal, and a big part of that is major conflicts of interest between pharmaceutical giants, corporate agriculture and the departments that regulate them. Kennedy is absolutely right that this system needs reform — but his prescriptions aren’t well-informed by evidence and seem poised to exacerbate the problem.

Still, Kennedy is beloved by many, and not just on the right. When he suspended his bid for president in 2024 and endorsed then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, many saw it as a perk that the current president would let him “go wild on health,” as Trump put it. And that’s just what he has done.

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Yet so much of the media coverage around Kennedy, especially lately, has focused more on his personality and lurid life history rather than the chaos and destruction he has sown. The Atlantic graced their latest cover with Kennedy, complete with a glamour shoot, fawning at the camera with a rosary in hand like a choir boy. The accompanying headline, “The most powerful man in science,” is more than a little misleading. Saying he’s the “most powerful” is a little like saying the fastest driver in NASCAR is a nuclear bomb. What are we even comparing here? Kennedy isn’t in science in the literal sense and certainly not from any sort of merit. He’s never run a clinical trial, treated a patient or published academic research. He landed his position because the current president returns favors like a Mafia boss and is enamored with the idea of a Kennedy being in his cabinet, not to mention the disdain Trump has for public health, as demonstrated during the botched reponse to COVID-19 in 2020.

To his credit, author Michael Scherer professes good intentions in featuring Kennedy in such an adulatory light: to help bridge some of the political division plaguing our country. Maybe if we can step inside Kennedy’s mind, we can find some middle ground and actually work toward a healthier America.

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It’s a lofty goal, but it might not be very relevant, just like the absurd details of Kennedy’s melodramatic history. Even Scherer finds it hard not to profile the secretary without at least glancing at his many bizarre escapades, from dumping a dead bear in Central Park to allegedly eating barbecued dog, to hand-waving away sexual assault allegations with the explanation “I am not a church boy.” The article paints Kennedy’s long struggles with addiction and infidelity leading to his current position of influence as a sort of Dantesque excursion, “back from hell, still fighting to fulfill his birthright.”

It’s a fascinating profile, but we really don’t need any of these details any more than we need New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi gushing about her inappropriate personal relationship with Kennedy. Again, flush with cosmopolitan snapshots, the recent New York Times profile of Nuzzi glosses over some severe problems.

“Nuzzi did not want to discuss Kennedy’s tenure as secretary of health and human services,” Jacob Bernstein reports in the Times profile, while Nuzzi says, “I don’t have any interest in offering punditry.”

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That might be fine if people’s lives weren’t at stake. There are multiple public health crises stacked on top of each other, from overdose deaths to declines in life expectancy to heart disease and dementia to unnecessary deaths from abortion bans to still circulating COVID and ongoing measles outbreaks. It’s hard to argue Kennedy is doing much to address any of this when he’s busy firing people, dousing scientific research and picking fights over his convictions that mainstream medicine is wrong about nearly everything.

His credibility is worsened by numerous conflicts of interest, including receiving money from anti-vaccine organizations that he has worked for while positioning himself to profit from anti-vaccine lawsuits. Since becoming health secretary, Kennedy has distanced himself from these ventures, but there’s more at stake.

“His entire political project — his campaign, his hiring by Trump, his role at HHS — is entwined with his ability to prove that scientists were deceiving the public about vaccines. He would lose a lot if he changed his mind,” Scherer writes.

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In contrast, conflicts of interest among federal vaccine advisers are at historic lows and have been for years, according to research published in August in JAMA. “Secretary Kennedy is right that conflict of interest is an important issue, but he is wrong that it is present at substantial levels on HHS vaccine advisory committees,” study co-author Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and former FDA associate commissioner, said in a press release.

“‘Trusting the experts’ is not a feature of science,” Kennedy says in The Atlantic story. “It’s not a feature of democracy. It’s a feature of totalitarianism and religion.”

When you wipe away all the chaos and arguments over scientific data, or the lack of it — and do your best to ignore the salacious nature of Kennedy’s persona — the true mission behind Making America Healthy Again becomes apparent.

Rich words given the overt totalitarianism happening under Trump’s watch. Kennedy is conveniently ignoring the real mass surveillance in this country, and it’s not vaccines. Every major social media platform is owned by the richest people in history, who suck up so much data on you that they can weaponize it to sway elections and dull us with doomscrolling. Flock automatic license plate readers are being used to monitor protests and enable ICE raids. American citizens are now regularly detained by homeland security adviser Stephen Miller’s masked police force, while migrants are whisked away to dungeon-like prisons in El Salvador. Yeah, the Department of Homeland Security is threatening anyone who dares film them snatching people, but “trusting the experts” is pure Stalinism. Kennedy is no fool — he knows that his efforts are more antithetical to democracy than he lets on.

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And we knew all of Kennedy’s corruption long before he was appointed. But if we needed any reminder, we only need to look at his family relationships. Last week, Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of former President John F. Kennedy, published a moving essay in The New Yorker detailing her battle with a terminal form of leukemia. It reads almost like an obituary, detailing the suffering and grief she’s experienced as she pushes through treatment she knows will do little to save her life. But she also took space to express the horror she’s felt witnessing her cousin’s ascent to power:

Bobby is a known skeptic of vaccines, and I was especially concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get mine again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly. Bobby has said, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” Bobby probably doesn’t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available. My dad, who grew up in New York City in the nineteen-forties and fifties, does remember. Recently, I asked him what it was like when he got the vaccine. He said that it felt like freedom.

…

I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings. Hundreds of N.I.H. grants and clinical trials were cancelled, affecting thousands of patients.

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You really don’t need to sympathize with Kennedy’s tragic backstory or his apparent charm to certain political correspondents to understand why he approaches public health with the gravitas of a rabid raccoon. The Atlantic story and other accounts of Kennedy make it clear he views himself as the lone hero of a great battle, a Beowulf intending to slay a dragon of dogma and lies. Kennedy has indeed faced a lot of opposition in life, perhaps now more than ever. But he’s more of a Don Quixote tilting at windmills because his solutions amount to the same level of self-delusion.

Take, for example, Kennedy’s staunch rejection of germ theory in favor of “miasma theory.” In his 2021 book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy defines this as “preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses.” He posits that “Miasmists argue that malnutrition and inadequate access to clean water are the ultimate stressors that make infectious diseases lethal in impoverished locales. When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition; germ theory proponents (a.k.a. virologists) blame the virus. The miasmist approach to public health is to boost individual immune response.”

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There’s some truth to this, but the overarching emphasis on miasma theory fundamentally ignores how the immune system works. It’s not a zero-sum game. Katherine Wu explained in a recent Atlantic piece: “The reality is that both environment and pathogens often influence the outcome of disease, and both should be addressed.”

When you wipe away all the chaos and arguments over scientific data, or the lack of it — and do your best to ignore the salacious nature of Kennedy’s persona — the true mission behind Making America Healthy Again becomes apparent. It’s not about whether vaccines really work; it’s whether the government should have any say in an individual’s health at all. What that translates to, intentionally or not, is you’re on your own now, bub. Health insurance, guidance, research — you don’t need that. Instead, there is an overwhelming emphasis on the individual. Eat better, exercise and take some supplements and you won’t even need a shot or a doctor. Anyone who can’t follow this advice is doomed to just die, I guess.

There are sometimes valid reasons to distrust experts. There were numerous institutional failures during the COVID pandemic and the tendrils of capitalism embedded in public health have given people good cause for skepticism. But just because a medicine or vaccine can be profitable does not mean it’s useless. Just because some advice was unhelpful or counterproductive during a global pandemic — school closures being an oft-cited example — does not mean that a novel virus is safe to breathe in.

But instead of strengthening the structures at HHS that work and encouraging the public to trust them, Kennedy has given people even less reason to trust the government on these issues. It’s becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the “public” in public health is erased, ignoring the deeply rooted fact that an individual’s health cannot and never will be isolated from everyone else. That’s exactly why we train people to deeply study these problems and trust their judgment based on data that is transparent and peer-reviewed. We need more of that, not less. The lone warrior battling against insurmountable foes makes for a nice fairy tale, but it does not translate to protecting a nation’s health.

RFK’s individualist rhetoric hides a deeper public health threat

The debate isn’t about “trusting experts.” It’s about who shoulders responsibility for staying healthy.

^{Troy Farah (Salon.com)}

This is his official tweet:

A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our Country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish countries throughout the World, for being “Politically Correct,” and just plain STUPID, when it comes to Immigration. The official United States Foreign population stands at 53 million people (Census), most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels. They and their children are supported through massive payments from Patriotic American Citizens who, because of their beautiful hearts, do not want to openly complain or cause trouble in any way, shape, or form. They put up with what has happened to our Country, but it’s eating them alive to do so! A migrant earning $30,000 with a green card will get roughly $50,000 in yearly benefits for their family. The real migrant population is much higher. This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II (Failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits, etc.). As an example, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for “prey” as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone. The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both, while the worst “Congressman/woman” in our Country, Ilhan Omar, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab, and who probably came into the U.S.A. illegally in that you are not allowed to marry your brother, does nothing but hatefully complain about our Country, its Constitution, and how “badly” she is treated, when her place of origin is a decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation, which is essentially not even a country for lack of Government, Military, Police, schools, etc…

Donald J. Trump: "A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens a...

A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our Country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish coun…

^{Trump's Truth}

The leaked assessment, obtained by the New York Post and prepared for both congressional Senate and House judiciary committees, is based on confidential accounts from 24 FBI sources.

They accuse Patel of lacking the experience to lead the FBI and that managers will not take initiative without explicit direction for fear of being fired. Patel’s first six months have produced a “troubling picture” of an organization described by insiders as a “rudderless ship”, with two sources independently characterizing the director as being “in over his head”. One stated he “lacks the requisite knowledge or deep understanding of all the FBI’s unique and complex investigative and intelligence programs”.

One key accusation is that the FBI has become “internally paralyzed by fear”. Managers are “afraid of losing their jobs”, and “waiting on directions from the FBI director” rather than taking initiative, according to multiple sources.

FBI under Kash Patel has become ‘internally paralyzed by fear’, new report reveals

Leaked assessment based on confidential accounts from 24 FBI sources describes organization as a ‘rudderless ship’

^{Joseph Gedeon (The Guardian)}

The Trump administration's latest campaign for SNAP changes comes as millions of recipients are already poised to lose benefits in the coming years as states begin to implement new work requirements and eligibility rules that Republicans in Congress passed over the summer that are the deepest cuts in history to the program.

In a Fox Business interview last month, Rollins said the further changes she is proposing will "make sure those vulnerable Americans who really need that benefit are going to get it. And for all the rest of the fraudsters and the people who are corrupt and taking advantage of it — we're going to protect the taxpayer, too."

Food policy experts say they are concerned that Rollins' talking points suggest a distorted view of the prevalence of SNAP recipients committing fraud, and seem to conflate fraud with payment errors of any kind.

Researchers at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute have argued this eligibility rule should be ended because states are using it to allow people with incomes above the limit set by the SNAP statute to receive the benefit. Though they also cautioned that eliminating broad-based categorical eligibility must be done in a way that addresses "benefit cliffs" that would disincentivize people from earning slightly more because they would lose benefits and become worse off.

Over the past year, Silicon Valley has gone fully mask off in favor of fascism and oligarchy. Gone are the days of the Valley’s veneer of idealistic futurism, where technology was supposed to level the playing field and make us more connected than ever.

What we have instead is a technological playground catered to the whims of the ultra-wealthy. They throw billions behind designer gene edited babies and cryogenic freezing and consciousness uploading and sycophantic slop machines. They indulge in sci-fi fantasies of space colonization and metaverses and the technological singularity, repurposing dystopian warnings as aspirational goals. Their most “visionary” ambition is that of artificial techno-utopia, in which we merge with computers and become superior post-humans, our digital hands running through digital grass as we inhale the digital simulation of pine forests, scents and sights that have been fully subsumed by the capitalist religion of infinite growth.

Technology is often talked about as an inherent good, and the latest and greatest tech, be it surveillance or AI, are said to be inevitable. You must embrace these technologies or be left behind. If you bring up the real-world harms, you are dismissed as a closed-minded, anti-progress technology-hater.

The inevitability narrative obfuscates the fact that all of these technologies resulted from decisions. Decisions by out-of-touch, overwhelmingly white, male billionaires who refuse any and all ways of seeing the world that challenges their ability to increase their already obscene wealth.

President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Alina Habba, whom the administration has maneuvered to keep in place as New Jersey top federal prosecutor, is disqualified from serving in the role, an appeal court said Monday.

A panel of judges from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sitting in Philadelphia sided with a lower court judge’s ruling after hearing oral arguments at which Habba herself was present on Oct. 20.

The ruling comes amid the push by President Donald Trump’s Republican administration to keep Habba as the acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, a powerful post charged with enforcing federal criminal and civil law. It also comes after the judges questioned the government’s moves to keep Habba in place after her interim appointment expired and without her getting Senate confirmation.

Alina Habba, Trump's former lawyer, disqualified as New Jersey prosecutor

The ruling from a panel of judges from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals comes amid the push by President Donald Trump's Republican administration to keep Habba as the acting U.S.

^{PBS News}

Indiana House Republicans released a proposed map with new congressional district lines Dec. 1 that could lead to the elimination of the two Democrats from the state's congressional delegation if passed.

They got the votes for this by threatening to firebomb the home of any Republican state legislator who wouldn't go along.

Archived copies of the article:
* archive.today
* ghosarchive.org — click 'continue to site'

The breach affected customers’ names, email addresses, phone numbers, shipping addresses and certain order histories, per Coupang.

Korea's Coupang says data breach exposed nearly 34M customers' personal information | TechCrunch

E-commerce company Coupang has confirmed a massive data breach affecting 33.7 million customer accounts in South Korea.

^{Kate Park (TechCrunch)}

Currently debating with filen and proton drive.
Primarily for sharing sensitive info that can't be shared physically. ie family videos, photos, docs

Thoughts?

btw, I'm know computers, but not enough to reverse proxy out of my home router and start self hosting... unless there is an easier option. I just started my journey with local trueNas

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/india-orders-mobile-phones-preloaded-with-government-app-ensure-cyber-safety-2025-12-01/

DeepSeek has released V3.2, replacing the experimental version. There are two main models are open as always and can be downloaded from Hugging Face:

• V3.2: General-purpose, balanced performance (GPT‑5 level)
• V3.2‑Speciale: Specialized for complex reasoning (Gemini‑3.0‑Pro level)

V3.2 can now "think" while using tools (like searching the web, running code, or calling APIs). This makes AI assistants more transparent and better at multi‑step tasks. You can choose thinking mode (slower but more thorough) or non‑thinking mode (faster for simple tasks).

Key improvements are better reasoning transparency with the model explaining the steps when using tools, and stronger performance on benchmarks.

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2 · Hugging Face

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

^{huggingface.co}

Casting support is still available on older Chromecast devices or TVs that support Google Cast natively, according to Netflix’s support page

Netflix kills casting from phones

Netflix has removed the ability to cast shows and movies from phones to TVs, unless subscribers are using older casting devices.

^{Jess Weatherbed (The Verge)}