Declines to reindict.....

Grand jury declines to reindict Letitia James

By Katelyn Polantz, Kaitlan Collins, Holmes Lybrand

A grand jury declined to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James after being asked to look at the mortgage fraud case against her a second time, 10 days after a federal judge threw out the initial charges against her, according to a person familiar with the development Thursday.

Another source familiar with the situation said there should be no premature celebration, because the Justice Department could try to seek the indictment a third time.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on grand jury matters. The grand jury was in court until noon on Thursday.

The quick move by the Justice Department to present the case again to a grand jury shows the intensity of its efforts to prosecute James, a frequent Trump political target who was one of several enemies he has said on social media should face legal jeopardy.

Late last month, a federal judge said that Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s handpicked prosecutor, was unlawfully appointed as an interim US attorney and therefore the cases against James and another Trump political opponent — former FBI Director James Comey — must be dismissed. Halligan, a former White House adviser, was given the job after the Justice Department pushed out the previous interim US attorney amid increasing pressure to bring cases against Comey and James.

James had pleaded not guilty to one count of making false statements to a financial institution and one count of bank fraud.

“All actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment” including the indictments against Comey and James “were unlawful exercises of executive power and are hereby set aside,” Judge Cameron McGowan Currie ruled.

But Currie tossed out the cases “without prejudice,” leaving open the possibility that both individuals could be re-charged for the same alleged conduct.

Prosecutors, however, face a long road ahead as several efforts to dismiss the charges remain — including claims of a selective and vindictive prosecution that James made before the case was thrown out.

Both James and Casey have pointed to a myriad of comments from Trump calling for them to be prosecuted, and in the case of James, have accused the government of “transforming the Department of Justice into the President’s personal agents of revenge.”

Their attorneys pointed to one of Trump’s Truth Social posts, which was directed at Attorney General Pam Bondi, in September.

“Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,’” Trump wrote, referring to Comey, James, and Sen. Adam Schiff of California.

The Justice Department has argued that the president’s social media posts weren’t directing Bondi to act, but simply saying Trump believed those people should be prosecuted because they’re guilty.

In the cases against Comey and James, defense attorneys argued the 120-day period an interim US attorney is allowed to serve prior to confirmation from the Senate or approval from the district’s judges had already expired when Halligan took the position.

This, they said, meant that Halligan’s appointment was unlawful.

Currie agreed. She wrote that agreeing with the government’s position would give Trump and other officials authority “to evade the Senate confirmation process indefinitely by stacking successive 120-day appointments.”

“The 120-day clock began running with Mr. Siebert’s appointment on January 21, 2025,” she wrote, referring to Erik Siebert, who had been serving as the interim US attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia until he was pushed out in September. (After the 120-day period ended earlier this year, judges in the district voted to keep him in the job.)

“When that clock expired on May 21, 2025, so too did the Attorney General’s appointment authority,” Currie wrote, adding that Bondi’s “attempt to install” Halligan “was invalid and that Ms. Halligan has been unlawfully serving in that role since September 22, 2025.”

Last month’s ruling made Halligan the latest Trump US attorney nominee whose appointment was found to be unlawful. Federal judges found the process that the Trump administration used to name three US attorneys in New Jersey, Nevada and the Central District of California was unlawful.

But unlike with Halligan, judges did not throw out the indictments because they said there were other assistant US attorneys who worked on the case, and the interim US attorneys’ roles were limited, if they were involved at all. Halligan was the only person who signed the indictments for Comey and James.

Most troubling things.......

‘One of the most troubling things I’ve seen’: lawmakers briefed on double-tap strike

By Katie Bo Lillis, Ellis Kim, Morgan Rimmer, Annie Grayer

Top House and Senate lawmakers emerged divided along party lines after a private briefing with the military official who oversaw September’s attack on an alleged drug vessel that included a so-called double-tap strike that killed surviving crew members, with a top Democrat calling video of the incident that was shared as part of the briefing “one of the most troubling things” he has seen as a lawmaker.

“Any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors — bad guys, bad guys, but attacking shipwrecked sailors,” said Connecticut Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. “Yes, they were carrying drugs. They were not in the position to continue their mission in any way.”

But the panel chairman, Republican Rep. Rick Crawford of Arkansas, said that he thought the second strike was justified. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton, also a Republican from Arkansas, called the strike “entirely lawful and needful.”

After reviewing video of the strike, Cotton told reporters, “Just like you would blow up a boat off of the Somali coast or the Yemeni coast, and you’d come back and strike it again if it still had terrorists and it still had explosives or missiles, Admiral Bradley and Secretary Hegseth did exactly what we’d expect them to do.”

In what has been the most significant congressional scrutiny of President Donald Trump’s military campaign in the Caribbean so far, Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley is on Capitol Hill on Thursday for a round robin of private meetings with lawmakers of both parties to defend the secondary strike on the ship.

Most Republicans have signaled support for the overall campaign, which has killed more than 80 people and which a broad range of outside legal experts have argued is likely unlawful. But the September 2 strike has drawn bipartisan scrutiny as a potential war crime — including, most consequentially, a vow from the Senate Armed Services Committee to conduct oversight.

When the initial hit on the vessel did not sink it, CNN and others have previously reported, the military then carried out a second strike that killed survivors.

According to Cotton and Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, the military used a total of four missiles to sink the boat — two missiles in the initial strike, according to Coons, and two in the second strike. According to Cotton and another source with direct knowledge of the briefings, after the initial strike, the boat capsized, leaving the two survivors amid the wreckage. But from there, interpretations differed: Cotton said he “saw two survivors trying to flip a boat, loaded with drugs bound for the United States, back over so they could stay in the fight.” The source with direct knowledge of the briefing said the two men were clinging to the wreckage, helpless, before they were killed.

It is considered a war crime to kill shipwrecked people, which the Pentagon’s law of war manual defines as people “in need of assistance and care” who “must refrain from any hostile act.”

“You have two individuals in clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, were killed by the United States,” Himes said Thursday.

The Defense Department has been making the case for the follow-up strike by arguing that the survivors were still “in the fight” and defense officials have said that they radioed for help. If they had been rescued, they could have theoretically continued trafficking drugs, according to US officials briefed on the strikes.

Bradley was expected to make a similar case to lawmakers Thursday, as CNN has previously reported.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who specializes in law of war issues and is among those who believe the administration is unlawfully treating civilians as enemy combatants without an authorization for war, dismissed the department’s argument.

“Even if you were to assume there was an armed conflict and further assume that these people could be targeted in the first instance, they don’t forfeit their status as ‘shipwrecked’ by calling for help based on the speculation that the rescuers could salvage some of the cargo,” he said. “That would blow a huge hole in the protection for the shipwrecked. … If anytime you called for help, you lost your ‘shipwrecked’ status, there would be no protections there.”

The precise timeline of the twin strikes — as well as who ordered them — have been a shifting point of scrutiny since reports of the second strike first emerged in the press over the weekend.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his spokespeople initially railed against reporting of the second strike, with Hegseth calling it “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting.” Just days later, however, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the second strike occurred and said Bradley was the one who ordered it.

Himes said Thursday that the admiral told lawmakers Hegseth did not issue an order to “kill them all.” CNN previously reported that a source familiar with the strikes said the defense secretary ordered the military to ensure everyone on the boat was killed, but it was not clear if he knew there were survivors before a second strike was carried out.

During a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Hegseth said that he observed the initial strike on the boat but then left to attend other meetings and learned about the second strike hours later.

Asked if he was told that Hegseth ordered the second strike on a suspected drug boat in September after the original strike did not kill everyone on board, Crawford said it was his “understanding” that Bradley had ordered the strike.

“I feel confident and have no further questions of Hegseth,” Crawford told CNN.

But the precise language of Hegseth’s orders surrounding the September 2 strike — or the more than 20 others that the military has carried out — remain unclear, as has the broader legal justification for the campaign.

“The underlying judgment that frames this entire operation is that if there is a boat with narcotics and people that are affiliated with a narcotics trafficking organization, that that’s a legitimate target,” Coons told reporters on Thursday. “I’ve still got questions about that.”

They are not following science

Doctor reacts to ACIP: “They are not following science”

From CNN's Meg Tirrell

The presentations Thursday on hepatitis B vaccination “are not following science,” Dr. Jason Goldman, a liaison to the ACIP for the American College of Physicians, told CNN.

Studies casting doubt on the need for hepatitis B vaccination and its safety were quoted out of context, and the proposed language for voting on vaccine recommendations “is inappropriate,” Goldman added.

The first vote scheduled for Thursday is whether to remove the universal recommendation that newborns receive a hepatitis B vaccine that’s been in place in the US since 1991. Instead, for babies whose mothers haven’t tested positive for the virus, the recommendation would move to “individual-based decision-making.” If parents forgo a birth dose, the vote would recommend babies receive the vaccine no earlier than two months of age.

But, Goldman pointed out, “all decisions are individual-based. Nothing is a mandate.”

He compared the nature of the recommendation that all babies receive a dose at birth with one he might make as a physician for other health decisions, such as whether patients should get a colonoscopy to screen for colorectal cancer.

“I recommend a colonoscopy to a patient. They still have a choice to do it. The evidence shows colonoscopy reduces incidence of cancer,” Goldman told CNN. “Same analogy. I recommend the hepatitis B vaccine. [The] patient can refuse. The evidence shows benefit of [the] vaccine in reducing disease.”

Speaking during the meeting, Goldman said the meeting should be ended now, before a vote.

“You are wasting taxpayer dollars by not having scientific rigorous discussion on issues that truly matter,” he said. “The best thing you can do is adjourn the meeting and discuss vaccine issues that actually need to be taken up.”

Non-experts

Non-experts whose research has been discredited presented on hepatitis B

From CNN's Brenda Goodman

In another departure from past practices, the CDC vaccine committee heard a presentation from Dr. Cynthia Nevison, a research associate at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she is an atmospheric scientist.

One of her research studies, called “Autism Tsunami,” was written with the next ACIP presenter — Dr. Mark Blaxill, who introduced himself as a critic of the CDC who is now working at the agency — was retracted by the journal that published it.

The editors of the journal said the authors misrepresented and selectively cited. or cherrypicked, data and that there were no valid justifications for the mechanisms the authors proposed for prevention.

“This is someone with no hepatitis B expertise and a well documented anti-vaccine bias. They could not find an expert to present on this?” wrote Dr. Dorit Reiss, a law professor at the University of California at San Francisco and a vaccine policy expert who was posting about the meeting on social media.

In her presentation, Nevison, who introduced herself as a contractor to the CDC, suggested that hepatitis B infections had never been a real threat to infants.

Nevison’s presentation sought to cast doubt on the importance of the hepatitis B vaccine and on recent modeling evidence that indicated doing away with the birth dose would increase the number of preventable hepatitis B cases and deaths in kids.

“There’s very little evidence that horizontal transmission has ever been a significant threat to the average American child, and the risk probably has been overstated,” Nevison said.

Nevison noted that the greatest declines in hepatitis B cases had been among younger adults, ages 20 to 39 — exactly the age group born after the universal birth dose was first recommended in 1991.

Instead, she said the decline in cases in this age group “had to be [due to] other measures.” She said other measures that may have been driving down hepatitis B infections, including better screening of blood products used for transfusion, safer dialysis and the adoption of safer sex practices due to the AIDS epidemic.

In reality, the adoption of screening and recommendations to lower the risk of transmission to infants has been stepwise.

In 1984, the CDC first recommended vaccination of infants born to mothers who tested positive for hepatitis B. Four years later, in 1988, the CDC first recommended hepatitis B screening for all pregnant women. In 1991, the CDC recommended universal hepatitis B vaccination for infants, then, in 2005, the CDC updated the recommendation to specify that babies should get a shot before they leave their birth hospital. In 2018, the recommendation was revised to specify that all infants should get the shot within 24 hours of birth. Nevison failed mention this history in her presentation.

Dr. Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth and the only current member of ACIP who has experience on the committee, said he took “strong positions against each of the three presentations.”

“This disease has gone down in the United States thanks to the effectiveness of our current immunization program,” Meissner said.

“The way I look at a neonatal birth dose is that it is a safety net.”

Leave fucker! And take your dry-cleaners with you.....

Prop. 50 changes may send longtime Calif. Republican to Texas

By Anabel Sosa

After Proposition 50 passed, which sliced up GOP congressional districts in California, Rep. Darrell Issa said he wasn’t leaving.

“I’m not going anywhere. I’ll continue to represent the people of California — regardless of their party or where they live,” the 72-year-old Republican said in a statement sent to SFGATE after the Nov. 4 vote. “I’m not quitting on California. And neither should anyone else,” he reiterated at the time.

With the passage of Prop. 50, California’s congressional districts are now completely rearranged — and five heavily Republican seats have been changed to favor incoming Democratic challengers. For Issa, who was first elected to Congress in 2001, his post-passage statement was a reflection of how consequential the redistricting ballot measure would be to the longevity of his job.

Yet despite having insisted he was “not going anywhere” just one month ago, Punchbowl News reported on Monday that Issa is planning to leave California politics –– and is toying with a congressional run in Texas next year instead.

Jonathan Wilcox, a representative for Issa, told SFGATE in an email on Monday evening that he could not confirm Punchbowl’s report, but he left his note on a cliff-hanger.

“We don’t have any news to make tonight — but stay tuned,” he said, adding: “On the record!” 

The speculation comes as Issa, along with his Republican colleagues, confronts the reality that he could lose his seat. Issa’s district, District 48, was one of five that was redrawn under Prop. 50 to favor Democrats. Whereas the district used to span San Diego and Riverside counties, it is now set to add Palm Springs and three other cities in San Diego County, including Escondido, San Marcos and Vista. Those changes will shift District 48 away from its Republican-dominated voter population and to a generous Democratic lead. 

Issa previously did not run for reelection in 2018; that year, the district was becoming increasingly Democratic and was rated a “toss up” by nonpartisan political analysts. He did, however, successfully jump back in the race during the 2020 election and has held his seat representing both San Diego and Riverside counties since then. 

It is not uncommon for a member of Congress to run for a different district in their state — Issa himself has done this before, and his fellow newly endangered Republicans are also considering whether to run in different districts next year — but leaving to run in another state altogether is unprecedented, one Republican strategist told SFGATE.

Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist, told SFGATE it would be “wild” if Issa left California.

“I can’t think of a precedent for that. Especially someone trading flip-flops for cowboy boots,” Stutzman said.

California Rep. Ro Khanna, an outspoken Democrat who represents Silicon Valley, called the potential move “bizarre” in a phone call with SFGATE on Tuesday.

“I think it’s hilarious. To run in two different states?” he said “ … It’s kind of bizarre, I’ll leave it at that.”

U.S. representatives are required to live in the state they represent but are not required to live in the district they serve in. It is unclear, however, whether Issa owns a residence in Texas.

Issa would be leaving the Golden State to run for Texas’ 32nd District, a Dallas-area seat that is currently held by Democratic Rep. Julie Johnson, Punchbowl News reported. Under that state’s new redistricting law, her seat is now vulnerable. 

If he follows through, Issa would be parting ways with his San Diego County district, where he has served on and off for the last 25 years. 

Issa has been a staunch ally of President Donald Trump. He most recently nominated the president for a Nobel Peace Prize, praising him as a leader that “kickstarted” peace throughout the world.

Whether Texas’ new map holds up or not will be decided soon by the U.S. Supreme Court. Last month, a federal panel of judges decided the Texas map was unconstitutional on the grounds that it was “racially gerrymandered,” but the Supreme Court temporarily restored those lines. Issa would likely only make the jump to Texas if the new map is upheld by the high court.

Candidates have until an early March deadline to jump into the 2026 midterms race in time for the June primary. Stutzman, the Republican strategist, said Issa’s departure could make room for a more fresh-faced Republican to step into District 48.

One of those candidates could be Jim Desmond, a current member of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, who announced earlier this year he was running to represent part of San Diego County. He did not respond to SFGATE’s request for comment before the time of publication. 

Rusty Hicks, the chairman of the California Democratic Party, told SFGATE on Tuesday that he was confident that under Prop. 50, Issa would be out of California either way.

“It doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “Darrel Issa can retire now or run off to Texas. Either way, when new membership is sworn in in 2027, Darrell Issa will not be a member of congressional California. That’s all that matters.”

Returned to California tribe

Nearly 1,000 acres near Yosemite National Park returned to California tribe

'It's a sanctuary, and a place where we can go and be, and have our own sovereignty'

By Sam Mauhay-Moore

Nearly two centuries after the Southern Sierra Miwuk people were displaced from present-day Mariposa County, 900 acres of land west of Yosemite National Park have been returned to the tribe. 

Sandwiched between the park and Sierra National Forest, the property is set along Henness Ridge, a crest rich with conifer and oak woodlands that separates two branches of the Merced River. Its forested vistas look out over the Sierra and the mouth of Yosemite Valley to the east and the Central Valley to the west, and it once acted as a key migration route for Miwuk and Mono tribes traveling from low to high elevations between seasons.

Its return marks the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation’s first modern real estate transaction, according to Tara Fouch-Moore, the nation’s secretary. 

“Now we finally have this piece of our land that we can go to. We don’t have to ask permission to be there,” Fouch-Moore said. “We relied on this ecosystem for thousands of years, and now we don’t have to ask permission to gather our foods and medicines there anymore. It’s a sanctuary, and a place where we can go and be, and have our own sovereignty over how we want to exist on the landscape.”

The land was transferred to the tribe from the Pacific Forest Trust using funding from the California Natural Resources Agency’s Tribal Nature-Based Solutions Program, which has facilitated the return of thousands of acres across the state back to Indigenous stewardship. The agencies and the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation also partnered with local groups like the Sierra Foothill Conservancy to facilitate the deal, Fouch-Moore said. 

The ridge sits along a historic deer migration route from the Central Valley and is rich with springs, meadows and wildflower blooms, according to Laurie Wayburn, president of the Pacific Forest Trust. 

“You walk up to the top of the ridge, and the world unfolds in front of you,” Wayburn said. “When you look to the south, you see the river winding like a little shining ribbon, and to the north you see the mouth of the Yosemite Canyon itself. But what’s truly amazing is that on a clear day, to the west, you can actually see the Pacific.”

The land was originally proposed by John Muir — who had an often-buried history of holding deeply derogatory views toward Native Americans — to be part of the park, Wayburn added. But the land was owned by timber companies at the time and used instead for logging. It was then sold off in tracts and was placed under private ownership or absorbed into Sierra National Forest prior to being acquired by Pacific Forest Trust. 

“It’s really wonderful for this to be returned to people who value it as part of their culture and their identity, as opposed to just as a commodity, whether for real estate or for timber,” Wayburn said. 

The Southern Sierra Miwuk people are among several groups whose homelands include present-day Yosemite National Park. When tribes in the area were driven out of the western Sierra by settlers, many sought refuge in Yosemite Valley — only to be displaced once again when the land was declared a national park. 

“As time progressed and as the park developed, it became more of a situation where you could only live in Yosemite if you were an employee of the park or one of the concessionaires. And that’s still true today,” Fouch-Moore said. 

The return of Henness Ridge, she said, marks an opportunity for the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation to once again employ its traditional land management and stewardship practices, including cultural burns and the restoration of pollinator habitats. 

“That’s why it’s so important for us to have land of our own, so that we can implement Indigenous stewardship the way our ancestors have done it, and pass on that traditional ecological knowledge amongst ourselves and to future generations,” Fouch-Moore said. “This can show modern land managers how it could be done, how it used to be done and how it should be done.”

The California Natural Resources Agency program that provided funding for the deal has returned large swaths of land to several California tribes this year, including 17,000 acres to the Tule River Indian Tribe and 1,000 acres to the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel.

Spread heavy metals everywhere............

Calif.'s enormous battery plant ignited. Now scientists say it spread heavy metals everywhere.

The new study uses soil samples from three days after the Moss Landing blaze

By Anna FitzGerald Guth

After a massive blaze at one of the world’s largest battery storage facilities in Monterey County this past January, thick smoke spread over the area, and residents reported ailments such as bloody noses, skin rashes and lung problems.

Now, scientists are revealing what they found in the soil three days after firefighters contained the flames at the Moss Landing Power Plant. 

Researchers from San José State University’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories and their colleagues discovered elevated levels of nickel, manganese and cobalt — the primary components of the plant’s lithium-ion batteries that can be toxic for people and wildlife — in soil samples from the nearby estuary, Elkhorn Slough.

They recently published their findings in the journal Scientific Reports.

“This study is a solid set of evidence showing that indeed the fire spilled these metals,” Ivano Aiello, a marine geologist and the chair of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories who authored the study with his colleagues, told SFGATE. “We were lucky, in a sense, because we had baseline data for the area from a major marsh restoration project, so we could create a before and after. A few days after the fire, we found a multifold increase in the particular three elements used in lithium-ion batteries.” 

The researchers determined that the ratio of nickel to cobalt in the soil mimicked the discharge from the plant’s batteries, confirming the source. The study area alone — an almost 300-acre marsh within the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve — had a some 55,000 pounds of heavy metals, the researchers estimated. Still, their soil samples likely only account for around 2% of the total heavy metals the blaze burned, Aiello said, suggesting the vast majority spread elsewhere in the region.

“The Moss Landing battery facility is located within a complex and vulnerable landscape,” the researchers wrote in their study. “It sits adjacent to Elkhorn Slough, one of California’s largest estuaries, near the town of Moss Landing, and is surrounded by intensively farmed agricultural land. The fallout from the fire’s smoke plume raises serious concerns about contamination of soils, water, and vegetation in this region.”

Nearby residents filed a lawsuit against Vistra Corp., which owns the battery facility, and other defendants soon after the fire. They allege the company did not establish adequate fire safety measures. Vistra did not respond to SFGATE’s request for comment before the time of publication.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency authorized the removal of the damaged batteries, with Vistra picking up the tab. The EPA and California Public Utilities Commission are investigating the cause of the fire. 

Meanwhile, Aiello reports that his team will continue tracking how the metals move through the area and interact with the estuary’s flora and fauna. 

Because AI is garbage

The time has come to declare war on AI

By Drew Magary

A few months ago, my son asked me to buy him a subscription. The product in question was something called Ground News. For $100 a year, Ground News would assign a bias rating to any news link my son came across. He’s an aspiring journalist, and he knows that the journalism industry — which I work in — is rife with misinformation, obfuscation and ulterior political motivations. The kid is only 16. He’s not as media literate as his old man is. In theory, a bias sniffer like Ground News might prove valuable.

So I dug around a bit on Ground News to see if it was worth the subscription. And folks, you’re not gonna believe this, but it’s not. In fact, it buys some of its bias ratings straight from an AI algorithm. Once I discovered that bit of intel, I told the boy that the app was garbage.

Because AI is garbage. It’s an inherently antihuman technology that is doing active harm to the now hundreds of millions of people who consume it. A recent MIT study showed that using AI bots, like ChatGPT, can deaden your cognitive skills. Multiple parents have filed suit against ChatGPT’s parent company, the former nonprofit outfit OpenAI, accusing the product of encouraging their children to (successfully) die by suicide. Elsewhere, AI services are stealing creative content they don’t own, disseminating lifelike child sexual abuse images for pedophiles, jacking up Americans’ electricity bills and boosting fossil fuel emissions to record levels at a time when the planet’s health, humanity’s health, can least afford it. To cap it all off, the tech giants that have profited wildly from the AI boom are now openly laying off thousands of workers, with the expressed goal of using their AI models to do all of that work instead. Andrew Yang warned us the robots were coming for our paychecks, and we didn’t listen.

The problem is only metastasizing. In a very short timeframe, AI has become the high-fructose corn syrup of the digital realm: It’s now in everything, even if you don’t want it there. It’s at the top of every Google search, unless you do a bit of manual tinkering. It’s in your news feed. It’s on your Spotify playlist. It’s in terrible holiday ads for Coca-Cola. And, thanks to our beloved President Narcolepsy, it’s about to be in your government. From NBC News:

“[Trump’s] order opens the door to significantly increased public-private partnerships on AI development: within 90 days, the secretary of energy must identify systems and data available to support the program, including ‘resources available through industry partners.’”

I hardly need to tell you that Donald Trump is mandating AI contracts in order to enrich his Silicon Valley donor base, but it’s especially galling when you consider how much the tech sector has already profited from the AI boom over the past three years. Once OpenAI launched its ChatGPT product to the public in 2022, and once its CEO Sam Altman later did away with the whole nonprofit charade, the company triggered a gold rush that every major tech giant — Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon — rushed to get in on. The downsides to the technology may have spooked them at first; we’ve all seen “The Terminator” movies. But they stopped worrying about all of that doomsday s—t when their market caps went up and up and up.

And yet, they want more. In fact, those same companies are now aggressively portraying the advent of AI as an economic opportunity they have to take full advantage of. They now have allies in Washington. Many of them. Just this summer, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz mounted an effort to ban individual states like California from regulating AI. Ted Cruz is scum. He’s not fighting AI regulation because he cares about you. He’s fighting it because he wants to f—k you. They all do. And they’re succeeding.

This is a crisis, only you may not read about how big of a crisis it is because your Ground News app rated this article as LEFT. These bots are only as honest as the people programming them. And you may not find a more dishonest breed of businessmen right now than the AI evangelists of Silicon Valley. I know because I’ve tested their products, from Elon Musk’s AI-powered Wikipedia clone to ChatGPT and its competitors. None of them provided me with any intellectual stimulation, and virtually all of them have been designed to prey on Americans, especially young ones, whose loneliness was exacerbated by the pandemic. These AI models all bear the marks of their respective creators, because those creators are eternally biased in favor of whatever brings them the heftiest profit. That bias, along with a bit of Nazism, shows in the products they’re forcing down our collective throat.

And you know what? Americans are beginning to get sick of it. They don’t wanna pay higher power bills just so they can get laid off from their assembly line gig by corporate. They don’t want their kids dying by suicide. And they prefer that their pornography feature human genitals rather than digitally rendered ones. Meta may be seeing returns on its AI products, but their customers sure as s—t aren’t. You and I know that staying in a chat room with a virtual customer service agent is only so enjoyable for so long.

The question is if fed-up Americans are willing to fight back against the incredible institutional backing that AI now enjoys. Silicon Valley’s attempt to excise human beings from the world economy is supported both by predatory Democrats and by Republicans who, like Trump and Cruz, perfected the art of crybaby politics long ago. Republicans want nothing more than an electorate that’s been dumbed down into servitude, and these mind-eating AI products are only helping to accelerate that process. None of the aforementioned sockstains I just mentioned will suffer from the AI bubble going POP. Once the sector crashes, these leeches will simply pivot to a new bubble, with taxpayers footing the tab for the transition. From needless wars to needless bailouts, American tax dollars have always been used primarily to keep the markets up. The real money is in the corruption and, with Trump in charge, the corruption sector is enjoying a boom unlike anything that you or I have ever lived through.

That’s how market manipulation has helped AI weasel its way into every digital product you use, and why a chatbot is currently giving your little brother detailed instructions on how to hang himself in the basement. This is an evil technology, and I said as much to my son when he asked for that Ground News sub. You, the discerning reader, must also spread the word. Tell your family, tell your friends and tell your representatives. AI is evil. It’s a bunch of crappy products engineered to wage war on mankind itself, and not in cool sci-fi ways. It’s a banal evil, same as so many of the other evils that you and I have encountered over the years. But it’s a growing one. All reasonable Americans should want it banned, and they should want the likes of Sam Altman dropped into a Supermax. I don’t care if you take anything else away from this essay, so long as you absorb that point.

And if you decided to read an AI summary of this essay, come here for a second so that I can kick you in the face.

NGC 1316

An example of violence on a cosmic scale, enormous elliptical galaxy NGC 1316 lies about 75 million light-years away toward Fornax, the southern constellation of the Furnace. Investigating the startling sight, astronomers suspect the giant galaxy of colliding with smaller neighbor NGC 1317 seen just right of the large galaxy's center, producing far flung star streams in loops and shells. Light from their close encounter would have reached Earth some 100 million years ago. In the sharp telescopic image, the central regions of NGC 1316 and NGC 1317 appear separated by over 100,000 light-years. Complex dust lanes visible within also indicate that NGC 1316 is itself the result of a merger of galaxies in the distant past. Found on the outskirts of the Fornax galaxy cluster, NGC 1316 is known as Fornax A. One of the visually brightest of the Fornax cluster galaxies it is one of the strongest and largest celestial radio sources with radio emission extending well beyond this one degree wide field-of-view.

3 Steps Backward

Trump Is Taking 3 Steps Backward in the AI Race

The administration needs to shift focus away from providing chips and datacenters to the world’s richest companies.

By Arati Prabhakar and Asad Ramzanali

Last week President Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence policy took a fresh twist with his latest executive order, launching a “Genesis Mission” that claims to accelerate scientific research and bolster U.S. competitiveness by using AI. The order came wreathed in grand rhetoric, including comparisons to the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program.

But for all that Trump touts the importance of American leadership in AI, in reality he’s spent much of his presidency hobbling it.

So far, Trump’s AI doctrine has focused on boosting tech companies friendly with the administration, helping them dominate every aspect of people’s lives and the economy. The doctrine is driven by the idea that the United States wins the AI race if these companies control global AI — even at the cost of our kids’ mental health, gutted jobs, polluted skies and higher utility bills.

The recent executive order may seem like a welcome pivot to using AI rather than just building AI infrastructure. But unfortunately for American leadership in AI, it’s just a small step forward after three giant leaps backward. A serious effort to achieve America’s aspirations with AI has to start by reversing Trump’s damage to critical government functions.

The first giant leap backward has been a dangerous weakening of public data, the raw material required to train AI models. The federal government collects troves of data that families and businesses use every day — traffic patterns and census information, nutritional assessments and air quality reports, soil data and economic measures.

The executive order rightly focuses on the importance of data to “unleash a new age of AI-accelerated innovation and discovery.” But this comes after the administration has spent months ordering agency after agency to delete or hide data that’s politically inconvenient, and indiscriminately firing employees including those who manage valuable datasets.

Here’s what that means for AI advances. Initial research shows the eye-popping potential for AI weather forecasts that could be precise down to a city block or accurate as far ahead as a month. But that’s only possible with the sensor data that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) collects and curates from weather stations, ships, balloons, aircraft, satellites and buoys. The Trump administration has reduced weather balloon launches and removed hundreds of agency staff. It plans to cut back on NOAA satellites and shutter more than a dozen facilities that gather and curate data.

Politics, not policy, is guiding these decisions. As this administration tries to blind us to climate risks, it is putting Americans at risk today by undercutting conventional weather and disaster forecasting — and it’s diminishing the prospects for one of the most powerful and globally significant advances that AI could bring us.

The data problem doesn’t stop at weather. The Trump administration has also disrupted the collection of important health data. One example is data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gathered for nearly four decades from a representative sample of volunteers to understand risks in pregnancy. That valuable data now remains scattered and hard to access, because the CDC first shuttered the database to avoid collecting data on race and ethnicity in line with the administration’s executive order against “DEI,” and then placed the staff on administrative leave. That makes it harder to learn why Black maternal mortality is more than twice the national average, or how to protect all mothers and newborns. Data on vaccine safety, farm labor, hunger, greenhouse gas reporting and international development have also been deleted or degraded.

For AI to be effective against these immensely complex challenges, the smarter move would have been to expand data collection and support the agency staff who make sure datasets are robust and accessible.

The second backward move is Trump’s cuts to federally funded research. With steady support from Congress over successive administrations, eight decades of federal research funding made it possible to start new industries, prevent and cure diseases, deter potential adversaries, understand and start to manage environmental risks and expand the boundaries of human knowledge. This research base is where AI itself came from, and to harness AI for the next generation of advances, federal support is essential.

Instead, the Trump administration has frozen grants, attacked leading research universities, curtailed high-talent immigration, ousted thousands of research agency staff and proposed a $44 billion reduction in federally funded research and development — the largest single-year cut in history.

While some take solace in the administration’s cuts sparing specific budget lines for AI research and the new executive order for Energy Department research using AI, that’s like buying more tractors while you kill off your crops. AI is a tool, not the goal itself. The federal government needs to fund not just AI researchers, but researchers in the full range of promising fields that need AI to advance — for example, biologists, materials scientists and meteorologists. It is their knowledge that will help develop AI for more effective medicines, resilient infrastructure and disaster warnings. And that’s how we create new industries that will help America maintain its global economic leadership. Trump’s cuts to publicly funded research mean lost opportunities, delays in breakthroughs and American researchers recruited to other countries hungry for our talent.

The third backward leap is the administration’s opposition to policies that protect people. The foundation for all AI applications, current and future, has to be managing AI’s risks. The obvious reason for this is the real harms that are already materializing: bot-encouraged suicides, deepfakes nudes, worker surveillance and job loss, and new forms of fraud. In addition, AI advances won’t meet their potential if people don’t trust the technology.

Nonetheless, the Trump administration and its allies in Congress are trying to undo or preclude state laws that protect Americans from real harms. While the previous congressional attempt at a moratorium on state AI laws failed 99-1 in the Senate, the White House has been itching to try again, and some in Congress are looking for ways to revive this misguided policy.

The American people have a different view. A recent Pew poll found that 50 percent of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI, while only 10 percent are more excited than concerned. Democratic and Republican voters across dozens of polls strongly support AI regulations. Effective regulation of industrial production reduced pollution. Effective regulation for seat belts saved hundreds of thousands of lives. AI is an even broader technology that will reshape so many facets of our lives. It needs effective regulation that builds trust, so Americans can seize the beneficial advances AI can provide.

To be sure, the Trump administration has done some good on AI. For example, it is expanding a pilot of the National AI Research Resource to support researchers and startups with AI computing resources, and it has embraced open source and open weight AI models that are increasingly important in the global AI race. The recent order on AI for science could make some advancements in accelerating how AI is used in scientific domains, though it remains to be seen how this work is executed.

But these are modest elements compared to the rest of the Trump AI agenda — a series of measures that focus on providing expensive chips and datacenters for the world’s richest companies.

AI is a powerful technology that can help America meet its great ambitions. A different, better AI doctrine would recognize that the work ahead is much more than supercomputers, data centers and chips. It would recognize the expansive possibilities of AI beyond today’s narrow commercial focus, move nimbly to manage risks, and boost our national capacity to develop and deploy AI applications that transform Americans’ lives. It would define larger national objectives that public and private organizations achieve together, rather than ceding our future to a small group of billionaires whose most obvious imperative is the valuations of their companies, not the value they add to our lives.