Fitting...

 

If you have been there, you know....

For 40 years, Dolly Parton was a regular at the Madonna Inn

'Incredibly kind, gracious, and sweet to everyone she encountered'

By Julie Tremaine

If there’s a place in California where it made the most sense for Dolly Parton to be a regular, it’s the Madonna Inn. The sprawling hotel in San Luis Obispo is a tribute to opulence and maximalism in the same way the country icon was before her death on Aug. 25. 

Parton spent nearly her whole life in the spotlight, but when she was able to get some time for herself, she often chose to spend it in California’s charming small towns. She had homes in Hemet and Solvang, and in Idyllwild as recently as 2024. And as often as she could, she’d make it back to the Madonna Inn, the singular 68-year-old hotel on the Central Coast with its bright pink exterior and its highly themed 110 rooms. 

“Dolly first visited the Madonna Inn in the mid-1980s and continued to return annually for many years,” Lyndsey Goldwyn, marketing manager for the hotel, told SFGATE. 

“Dolly often expressed how much she ‘loved the Madonna Inn’ and especially appreciated the warm, family atmosphere,” Goldwyn added. “Our longtime staff remember her as being incredibly kind, gracious, and sweet to everyone she encountered.”

During visits, Parton would always make it a point to stay in a different one of the themed rooms, which range from an Austrian suite that looks straight out of “The Sound of Music” to a “love nest” with a pink-carpeted spiral staircase that leads up to a private viewing tower overlooking the grounds.

But when it came to dinner, Parton had a regular spot in the hotel’s Alex Madonna’s Gold Rush Steak House, bedecked in the hotel’s signature rose-patterned pink carpet and glittering chandeliers. It was, of course, the fanciest corner of the restaurant.

“She would always request to sit in the gold booth,” Goldwyn said, a table in a secluded enclave decorated with mirrors and pink-on-pink baroque-inspired wallpaper. It’s the restaurant’s one gold booth among the overstuffed bright pink circular booths, Goldwyn said. Her meal of choice was regularly the steakhouse’s oak-grilled filet mignon.

“Dolly was also a dear friend of the Madonna family,” Goldwyn said. The Madonna Inn was founded in 1958 by Alex and Phyllis Madonna. “Whenever she dined in the Steak House, Alex would make a point to stop by the gold booth to visit with her.”

After Parton’s death, the hotel named the booth in her honor. “Her visits throughout the years created memories we will always hold close, and our gold booth in the Alex Madonna Steakhouse will forever be known as ‘Dolly’s Booth,’” the inn posted on Instagram on Aug. 25.

Fuck you orange turd!

'We're not changing it': SoCal-based Mapquest takes stand against Trump's 'Lake America'

By Corinne Purtill

Within days of President Trump's executive order renaming Lake Ontario to "Lake America," Google Maps quietly fell in line. Searches for the international boundary water in Google Maps now direct U.S. users to a renamed "Lake America."

While the president's preferred name for the smallest Great Lake isn't yet reflected on Apple Maps, it may be just a matter of time - searches for the "Gulf of Mexico" on that app lead to the "Gulf of America," which Trump renamed on his first day in office.

But there is one holdout against Trump's efforts to rechristen boundary waters, a voice of dissent straight out of 2005: Mapquest.

"We're not changing it," Mapquest said Friday in a Facebook post that featured a screenshot of the lake. It also unveiled a tool that allows users to download maps featuring their own custom names for the lake.

For many, Mapquest's political stance was less surprising than the news that Mapquest still exists. The company was acquired in 2019 by System1, a Marina del Rey-based advertising platform.

In the years before smartphones and ubiquitous GPS, Mapquest.com was the vanguard of online wayfinding. Launched in 1996, the site would generate directions between two points, which users would have to jot down or print out before their journey.

It was the internet's leading mapping site when America Online acquired it in December 1999 for $1.1 billion, or roughly $2.2 billion in today's dollars.

The site lost ground to competitors over the following decade, and its ownership transferred to Verizon after that company's 2015 purchase of AOL. Four years later, Verizon sold Mapquest to System1 for a sum so reportedly tiny that Verizon did not file any public paperwork to record it, Business Insider reported.

The company's approach to the second Trump administration's renaming spree has earned it name recognition among a new generation of users, with "hundreds of thousands" of new downloads since the Lake America announcement, general manager Doug Berger told The Times on Sunday.

Cartography enthusiasts have pointed out that Trump does not have authority to rename the Great Lakes, which for more than a century have been governed by a joint U.S.-Canada commission. The U.S. president's naming authority extends only to federal maps and agencies; other nations - and private map providers - are not obligated to adopt the change.

New opportunity....

Dam removal launches white water rafting revival near California border

SFGATE contributor Brian E. Clark rafts the recovering Upper Klamath River on the Oregon-California border

By Brian E. Clark

As my raft plowed into a frothy hole on the Wild Horse rapid in the Upper Klamath River’s Kikaceki Canyon, it swung sideways, shuddered and then charged on through a series of churning, boat-eating holes near the California border. 

The excitement turned to thrill when raft guide Alyssa Winkelmann — of Momentum River Expeditions — plowed into a reversal slightly off center. This flung me into the drink and left me swimming in the rushing river.

“Maybe I’d hit it more straight on next time,” chuckled Winkelmann, who grew up in the town of Shasta and has been a raft guide for more than a decade. On this newly restored section of the Klamath, she’s learning about the river like everyone else. 

For over a century, a wild ride through the Class IV cascade was impossible. That’s because this nearly 3-mile section of the Upper Klamath was dewatered, literally dried up, by a penstock diversion for the Copco No. 2 dam and its powerhouse built in the 1920s.

However, in 2024, four aging hydroelectric dams (including Copco No. 2) on the California-Oregon border were demolished in the largest dam removal project in the U.S. Since then, water has started tumbling over rocks and boulders again, opening the canyon for white water rafting and more. 

Bordered by dramatic, 300-foot columnar basalt cliffs, the trip offers intense rapids for advanced rafters and kayakers. It’s also a tour embodying an unprecedented revival of nature and human history. 

The Shasta people and other tribes — including the Yurok, Karuk, Hoopa Valley and Klamath — lived along the river for millennia. The dam removal allows for lost traditions like dancing the salmon home while also spawning new adventures for the outdoorsy set.

When I floated the Upper Klamath with Momentum River Expeditions earlier this summer, I encountered not only Class IV rapids with names like Caldera, Ambush and Dragon’s Tooth in a deep canyon but also gentle, soul-soothing sections of slowly moving water where merganser ducks swam with their chicks.

Otters poked around eddies dotted with yellow-flowered water lilies, possibly looking for a salmon meal. And speckling the riverbanks, we saw scarlet poppies, sticky purple geraniums and yellow lupines. Soaring overhead were bald eagles, another species that thrives on salmon. 

Even better, I got to share this trip with a decades-old friend, Mark Lorenzen, with whom I’d kayaked white water streams up and down the West Coast, Central America, Chile and Ecuador. These days, though, we live more than 1,500 miles apart. He’s in San Francisco, and I live in Madison, Wisconsin, so reunions on the water are rare.

The first evening, we pulled into our safari camp under towering ponderosa pines — with their distinctive, puzzle-like bark — sharing stories over garlic- and thyme-marinated shrimp prepared by the guides. We were later served nightcaps from the wooden “UK Bar” before heading off to our walk-in tents with decks that were spaced out along a path lit by solar-powered lamps in a scene best described as riparian magic.

A positive achievement, an unexpected problem

The Upper Klamath River’s revival is merely the latest chapter in a long and sometimes bloody dispute over who claims the water. Sami Jo Difuntorum, cultural preservation officer for the Shasta tribe, said that in the 19th century, many Shasta were pushed out of the area or killed by gold miners and the U.S. military. 

“But our ancestors struggled to stay there, and we fought to return,” Difuntorum said. “That flowing water and those lands carry their memories. They have a profound cultural meaning to us.”

Difuntorum said the Texas-headquartered company Resource Environmental Solutions worked with the tribes to lead the restoration. They are now reintroducing some 200 native plants that the Shasta harvested for food, basketry, medicine and ceremonies. That includes wild pumpkin, which is placed in fish traps to lure in and capture salmon. 

“It’s all a work in process because you don’t just take out the dams and everything is fine again,” Difuntorum said. “There is more to be done, including on the Klamath’s tributaries.”

Dave Meurer, community affairs director for Resource Environmental Solutions, added that salmon have returned to the reopened river and its tributaries much sooner than anticipated. 

“We got in there fast, and were re-seeding the reservoir footprints as the water receded,” he said. “Planting in muck, planting in 98 percent dead algae that had been accumulating for decades.”

Meurer added that so far, the “plant response has been fantastic, with fields of poppies and 100 other species growing there the first year, including shrubs and bare-root trees.”

Even more remarkable has been the return of salmon to streams that were “buried under warm slack-water and algae-filled toxic reservoirs,” Meurer said. “We were trying to do in a short time what nature would have taken decades.” 

Meurer said that a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration biologist predicted the salmon return might take a dozen years. “He was stunned by how remarkably fast it happened,” Meurer said.

White water where there was none

As the body of the Upper Klamath River welcomes the salmon’s return, the top of the river is calling to river enthusiasts. White water outfits were among the stakeholders supporting the effort to remove the dams. 

Pete Wallstrom started the rafting company Momentum River Expeditions more than 20 years ago on the Rogue River and the Hells Corner stretch of the Upper Klamath. He worked with the American Whitewater environmental group, public agencies and tribes to develop public access points on the river after the dams were removed. There are other outfitters — including Noah’s River Adventures and Indigo Creek Outfitters — and the cost for one- and two-day trips on the Upper Klamath ranges from $200 to $850.

“It’s been crazy — especially after years of uncertainty — to watch salmon swimming upstream soon after the dams’ removal and see how quickly the river is healing itself,” Wallstrom said. 

Recreation on a river with cultural significance may not always seem complementary, but Difuntorum said she supports it as long as people aren’t jumping out of their rafts in places that are sacred or could be a burial site.

Wallstrom said Momentum’s mission is to protect wild places by connecting with guests on an emotional level. “And to show and connect them in a way that they understand, appreciate, enjoy and feel comfortable with,” he said.

Part of that effort includes getting more people — including those who might be averse to roughing it — on the river by making camping more comfortable at its glamping-style overnight, he said. 

“I believe that rivers and public lands are best protected when a wide range of people know and love them — a mix of more ‘outdoorsy’ people and those who are not as lucky and only get to spend [a few] nights under the stars,” Wallstrom said. 

“That includes people that have never really thought about camping — or that camping is so far away from their life experience that they have a hard time considering it. And there are a lot of people like that now.”

M74

If not the most grand, then this spiral galaxy is at least one of the most photogenic. An island universe of about 100 billion stars, 32 million light-years away toward the constellation Pisces, M74 presents a gorgeous face-on view. Classified as an Sc galaxy, the grand design of M74's graceful spiral arms are traced by bright blue star clusters and dark cosmic dust lanes. Constructed from archival images, this sharp composite is from the Hubble Space Telescope. Spanning about 30,000 light-years across the face of M74, it includes exposures recording emission from hydrogen atoms, highlighting the reddish glow of the galaxy's large star-forming regions.

A big deal...

NASA launches ‘discovery machine’ to unravel the invisible universe

By Ashley Strickland

A massive observatory that scientists have called a “discovery machine” has launched toward the cosmos, beginning a journey that could mark a significant shift in our understanding of the universe.

Designed to seek out otherwise invisible and faint space objects, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off aboard a rocket at 7:26 a.m. ET Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The observatory reached orbit about 10 minutes later.

Over the next five years, the bus-size telescope’s observations could reveal answers to enduring mysteries such as dark energy, which fuels the inexplicable accelerating expansion of the universe, and dark matter, which provides the cosmos with structure but remains unseen. It could allow astronomers to spot previously unseen galaxies and exoplanets, worlds around stars beyond our solar system, as well rogue planets that don’t orbit stars at all.

Dr. Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, reflected on the bittersweet feeling of watching the telescope launch Sunday morning.

“You see it growing up, and then it literally feels like it’s part of your team,” Fox said at a post-launch news conference. “It’s actually the member of the team that’s going to go on this grand expedition and send all that incredible treasure back to us here on Earth. But there is that moment where you think, ‘I’m never going to see that spacecraft again.’ I liken it to sending your kids to college.”

“Roman will give the Earth a new atlas of the universe,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said as the space agency unveiled the completed telescope on April 21 at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

With surveying capabilities more than 1,000 times faster than the Hubble Space Telescope, Roman will capture fundamentally different scientific observations that can’t be done with either Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope.

“Together, the three missions will complement each other, giving us a more complete picture of the cosmos and advancing our understanding of the universe,” Fox said. The mission team also said Sunday that Roman’s mission has the possibility of being extended up to 10 years.

President Donald Trump called in during the Sunday news conference to congratulate the Roman team on their “great success,” calling the US the “hottest in space.”

Roman will take around three months to reach its ultimate orbital position of about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away from Earth, known as Lagrange Point 2, or L2. The James Webb Space Telescope is also parked in this orbit, where spacecraft are balanced by the gravitational pull of Earth and the sun. L2 is about four times farther from Earth than the moon, according to NASA.

In the meantime, the observatory will go through commissioning — testing out its instruments in space and deploying the antenna that will relay Roman’s massive imagery back to Earth.

The telescope is expected to transmit one terabyte of data per day — like streaming 1 million songs from 1 million miles away down to Earth, said Jeremy Perkins, Roman telescope integration and test scientist at Goddard.

The estimated $4.3 billion telescope has been in development for about a decade and became a priority for the scientific community about 16 years ago. Scientists around the world are anticipating the unprecedented insights Roman could deliver.

“When you develop a tool that is radically different from anything you’ve had before, you will discover things that you didn’t know were out there,” said Dominic Benford, Roman program scientist at NASA who has been involved with projects related to the concept for more than 20 years.

“Part of what Roman is for as a discovery machine is to give people a way to ask the universe questions that we have yet to conceive.”

What makes Roman different

NASA’s space telescopes have long explored life-altering questions, and in many ways, those capabilities are thanks to the observatory’s namesake, the “brilliant astronomer” Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, said Dr. Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA.

Roman was NASA’s first chief of astronomy in the 1960s and pioneered the idea of space-based astronomy observations, recognizing the power of lofting telescopes above Earth’s obscuring atmosphere. She became known as the “mother of the Hubble Space Telescope.”

“Although she’s often most associated with those first space telescopes, it’s really our full fleet that she deserves credit for,” Domagal-Goldman said. “Every time we build a new space telescope, we add capabilities we didn’t have before and that adds to her legacy. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is no exception.”

The Roman telescope’s first images are expected in January before it kicks off unprecedented surveys of the universe, powered by a field of view more than 100 times that of Hubble thanks to its wide field instrument.

Domagal-Goldman compared Roman’s capabilities to capturing an all-encompassing view of a forest as well as seeing sharp details of its trees, like leaves and birds, all at the same time.

“Of course, this isn’t a forest we’re talking about; it’s the known universe, and those birds and trees are supernova galaxies, planets and stars,” he said during an August 5 briefing.

Dr. Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist, calls the new telescope’s observations the largest census that scientists have ever been able to take of planets across the Milky Way galaxy. It could find tens of thousands of previously unknown worlds and reveal just how common solar systems such as ours are across the cosmos.

“We’re going to be surveying patches of the sky going back over and over and over again to find new things that go bump in the night,” McEnery said. “Roman’s vast reach will allow us to find the weird, the rare and the unusual. We’ll redefine what it means to find a needle in a haystack.”

Some of those needles may include incredibly dim free-floating objects such as rogue planets or even small, wandering black holes, Benford said. Roman could also provide the first definitive proof of exomoons, or moons orbiting exoplanets.

Probing cosmic mysteries

During its five-year mission, the telescope will enable the discovery of billions of galaxies, thousands of exploding stars called supernovas and tens of billions of stars, according to Fox.

Stellar explosions occur so quickly that they often elude the gaze of telescopes. But Roman has the panoramic vision to see several at once, McEnery said, and the supernovas could act as cosmic candles to help astronomers track a mysterious force — dark energy — and unlock the role it may play in accelerating the expansion rate of the universe.

In the 1920s, astronomers Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe has been expanding since its birth 13.8 billion years ago. But research that began in the 1990s has shown that something sparked an acceleration of the universe’s expansion about 6 billion years ago, and the cause remains unknown.

To study dark energy, Roman will measure how gravity bends light across large cosmic distances — creating a 3D map of dark matter in the process.

Dark matter has never been detected, but it is believed to make up 85% of the total matter in the universe and help hold stars and galaxies in stable orbits. Roman will map the distribution of galaxies and galaxy clusters across the cosmos, looking for the signature gravitational effects of dark matter.

Unlocking the true nature of dark energy and dark matter could help astronomers understand what the universe is made of, how its expansion has changed over time, and if there is more to understanding gravity than meets the eye. Both dark matter and dark energy also play a role in the distribution and movement of objects, such as galaxies and stars, across the cosmos.

“Roman is designed to make the measurements that will determine whether there’s some sort of fundamental difference in the way the universe works compared to the way we think it works,” Benford said.

All of Roman’s data will be made publicly available as soon as it is processed on Earth, providing a treasure trove for scientists to mine for answers to a multitude of cosmic queries.

“Instead of having a telescope that astronomers have to choose to point at a certain object, we just map lots and lots of sky,” Benford said. “Anybody who’s interested in star-forming regions, dying stars or distant galaxies, they’re already there in the data somewhere.”

Enabling a search for life

Apart from its wide field instrument, Roman also carries a technology demonstration called a coronagraph, a proof of concept that’s like “doing magic with physics,” McEnery said.

Astronomers use coronagraphs to block blinding starlight to see finer details, such as planets that may be in orbit around stars other than our sun.

If we were able to see Earth and the sun from a great distance in space, the two objects would appear incredibly close together — and the sun’s blazingly bright light would overshadow Earth’s, Benford said.

Roman will be able to use its coronagraph like a shield against harsh starlight to spot planets that are otherwise difficult to see around other stars and identify them. The observatory will see the glow of a Jupiter-size or possibly a Saturn-size planet near another star, he added. The telescope may even be able to glimpse light reflecting off the tops of clouds on these planets.

Hubble and Webb both have coronagraphs, but Roman’s experimental instrument is 100 to 1,000 times better than any built before, said Bertrand Mennesson, Roman deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Mennesson’s area of focus is on the coronagraph, and he has worked on the mission for 14 years.

“You send the coronagraph into space, and it’s set it and forget it,” Mennesson told CNN. “That’s what I call a passive system, and that’s the case with JWST and Hubble. Conversely, for Roman, it’s an active system.”

To correct for vibrations, fluctuations, thermal radiation or any other errors, Roman’s coronagraph has mirrors that change shape in real time to maintain absolute precision.

If the coronagraph performs as expected, it could pave the way for future observatories.

Think of Roman as being able to take a picture of a firefly next to a floodlight from the other side of the country, Domagal-Goldman said.

What’s even harder is taking the same picture, but without the firefly’s glow, and only the floodlight reflected off the firefly’s dark body.

“If we can do that second one, which Roman is a major stepping stone towards doing, we’ll be able to build our next flagship observatory, the Habitable Worlds Observatory,” he said.

Right now, that mission is just a concept. The Habitable Worlds Observatory would be the first designed to photograph Earth-like planets — and even search for chemical signs of life within the atmospheres of those planets.

“We’re not going to get there with Roman, but we’re going to get there because of Roman,” Benford said.

I am sure she would say "Fuck you".......

Tennessee’s Governor Loves Dolly—But Not the LGBTQ People She Stood Up For

Bill Lee wants to rename Nashville’s airport after Dolly Parton. Repealing the state’s drag ban would be a better tribute.

Sophie Hurwitz

Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee has declared his support for renaming Nashville’s airport for Dolly Parton, days after the beloved singer’s death.

“It is fitting that Nashville International Airport would bear the name of our state’s favorite daughter and greet travelers with the enduring legacy of Dolly’s music, generosity, faith, and kindness,” Lee wrote in a press release.

It’s a nice gesture. But it is also bitterly ironic coming from the man who signed America’s first ban on public drag shows in 2023. Lee’s record on LGBTQ rights is abysmal. He defended the right of faith-based adoption agencies to refuse adoption to same-sex parents, renamed Pride month “Nuclear Family Pride Month,” and has outlawed gender-affirming medical care for minors. Parton expressed a deep fondness for drag performers, and for LGBTQ people, while Lee called drag “sexualized entertainment in front of children” and tried to ban it from public spaces—thereby attempting to put his state’s hardworking Dolly Parton impersonators out of business.

Lee’s record of anti-trans rhetoric and action—signing a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, prohibiting colleges and homeless shelters from recognizing a person’s gender identity, and forcing doctors to hand information about their trans patients over to the state—stands in sharp contrast to that of Parton herself, a staunch advocate for LGBTQ people.

“She reminded us of who had our back,” Brian Sullivan, a leader of the Tennessee Equality Project, recently told the New York Times. “She wasn’t a pushover, and she certainly wasn’t when it came to us.”

With her hyperfeminine makeup, and penchant for dressing, as she put it, as a “cartoon character that I created” when she performed, Parton was, arguably, America’s most well-known drag performer: “It’s a good thing that I was born a woman or I’d have been a drag queen,” she once quipped. (On another famous occasion, Parton entered a Dolly Parton drag contest and was thoroughly amused to lose.)

Tennessee’s “drag ban,” the Adult Entertainment Act, prohibits “adult-oriented performances lacking serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for a reasonable 17-year-old.” It’s a definition that weaponizes vagueness, rather than disallowing the practice of drag as such.

Instead, the law classifies drag as an innately “adult-oriented” or sexual act, and according to the ACLU of Tennessee, creates “an environment of fear and confusion, which too often results in self-censorship.” As Tennessee drag king Jordan Allen, a trans man, said in 2023, the law could theoretically be used to classify trans people existing in public as “adult-oriented” or inappropriate for children, too.

“I know trans men and women who are servers at restaurants and they go up to a table to serve,” Allen told PBS at the time. “If they go up to a table to serve a table and there’s a child there—there’s a possibility that they can literally be charged with a crime for doing their job and serving the table.” The bill, Governor Lee said, “protects children from obscene, sexualized entertainment.”

In 2023, Parton mailed a glittery, rhinestoned guitar to Texas drag queen Brigitte Bandit—while Bandit was suing Texas over a drag show ban in that state. “I wanted Brigitte to know that she is not screaming into the void and that we see her work,” Parton said through her company Parton Productions at the time.

The day Parton died, a Reagan-appointed Texas judge struck down that state’s drag ban for the second time, finding it unconstitutional. Brigitte Bandit was victorious. And US District Judge David Hittner referenced Parton several times in his ruling, as he argued that the ban was overly broad.

“A Dolly Parton impersonator who uses a breast plate while dancing and making gestures or an Elvis impersonator who uses a packer while shaking and shimmying their hips” could be subject to criminal penalties under the law “while still being constitutionally protected performances,” Hittner wrote.

In Parton’s home state of Tennessee, people like Lee who remember Parton with affection are still pushing the LGBTQ community she loved out of public life. Lee’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The governor’s proposal to rename the airport after Parton will be discussed by the Nashville Airport Authority in September—but lifting the state’s drag ban would be a better way to honor Parton’s memory.

Like a puddle of vomit, orangutan names a pile of shit after himself...

Google’s Obedience to Trump’s “Lake America” Order Follows a Depressing Pattern

Alex Nguyen

If you’re a Google Map user in the United States, you’ll now see the name “Lake America” instead of “Lake Ontario,” just days after President Trump’s executive order renaming the body of water amid his ongoing trade war with Canada.

In an announcement published late on Saturday, Google explained that it “reflect[s] name changes in official government sources,” in this case citing the US Geographic Names Information System. 

According to Google, Maps users in Canada still see “Lake Ontario” while those outside the US and Canada will see both names: “Lake Ontario (Lake America).” “These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country,” the announcement in part reads. 

On Saturday night, Trump posted an AI-generated video on Truth Social depicting himself kicking over a “Welcome to Lake Ontario” sign and placing a “Welcome to Lake America” sign in its place. His AI avatar then dances robotically to the tune of the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” Earlier on Saturday, he shared an AI video of ducks sporting Trump’s haircut firing assault rifles to celebrate “Lake America.”

Online reactions of outrage are widespread, but Google has long demonstrated little interest in opposing the Trump administration. The corporation followed a similar pattern to what it did when Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in a day-one executive order last January. The following month, the company announced the same split—”Gulf of America” in the US, “Gulf of Mexico” in Mexico, and the bet-hedging “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” in the rest of the world.

Google has also previously carried out the Trump administration’s bidding in other ways, including eliminating DEI hiring goals last February while reviewing Trump executive orders unwinding DEI in the federal government, and—along with other tech giants like Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft—donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund last year.

So maybe we all go back to using MapQuest again? 

Warned the Iran War Is Unsustainable

Hegseth’s Own Military Brass Warn the Iran War Is Unsustainable

James West

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s top military brass has now privately warned him directly: His war in Iran is unsustainable and is draining America’s ability to defend itself from threats elsewhere—and at home.

On Sunday morning, the Washington Post published a scoop describing a classified assessment by the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, as well as top commanders from across three continents, contained in a twice-monthly report called the Secretary of Defense Orders Book.

The pain point, according to the reporting, is that President Trump wants to keep all his options open, including the ability to attack Iran again—extending a large deployment of troops kept at the ready and limiting the ability to train and run missions elsewhere. That prompted the concern, formally known as a “non-concur,” from Hegseth’s commanders, according to the Post:

As President Donald Trump has pressured Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and accept several U.S. provisions for ending the stalemated conflict, he has been adamant that all options remain available to him — including further military action. Consequently, U.S. Central Command, the headquarters responsible for prosecuting the Iran war, has kept a force of more than 50,000 troops on alert for months in case the president orders additional attacks.

It was the chief of naval operations who provided the bleakest assessment, as deployments of personnel and vessels have been extended for months—warning that just a quarter of the Navy’s destroyer fleet is ready to deploy, representing a big decline from prewar levels, according to the Post.

The Pentagon told the Post it does not discuss these sorts of private assessments.

On Day 10 of the Iran conflict, Trump declared the war “very complete, pretty much.” It’s now many months later, with no deal, no end date, and a $37.5 billion price tag, according to Hegseth’s July testimony to Congress. Last week we documented the ongoing whiplash in our video below—from demands for unconditional surrender, to negotiations, to this week’s “Operation Economic Outcast,” a sanctions campaign that amounts to a tacit admission that six months of bombing didn’t get the job done.

Great, just what we need... Diarrhea Beef now...

Trump looks to ease beef processing regulations

The sweeping changes to meat processing will likely require a longer-term regulatory process or congressional action.

By Grace Yarrow

President Donald Trump said Friday that his administration will seek changes to allow farmers and ranchers to slaughter and process their own products in response to calls to loosen the grip of the big companies that dominate U.S. meat processing.

“I am authorizing legal documents to be drawn in order to allow Farmers and Ranchers to be given the right to PROCESS THEIR OWN FOOD,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “This should move quickly.”

The president’s announcement follows his proclamation earlier this week allowing an increase in beef imports over the next three months as part of a broader effort to bring down food prices ahead of the midterms. Trump also signaled his interest in addressing ranchers’ concerns about the so-called Big Four meat processors during an interview Wednesday with conservative commentator Glenn Beck.

The Trump administration had already been weighing industry-friendly policies to quell ranchers’ backlash against the beef import plans after a previous proposal was shelved earlier this year amid similar complaints.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Friday in a post on X that “big announcements” are coming starting next week, including “expanding truth in labeling,” prioritizing “real support for small processors (funding and deregulation)” and fighting consolidation.

The administration has already rolled out $60 million to bolster small meat processors and initiated an investigation into allegations that the Big Four meatpackers engaged in anti-competitive practices. It’s not yet clear to what extent the new Agriculture Department announcements will differ from existing efforts.

The White House and USDA did not immediately respond to questions about the timeline for the changes or the process for rolling them out.

Beck, who owns a ranch, highlighted concerns about slaughter regulations during the interview with Trump, telling the president that the Big Four meatpackers and regulations are “just killing us.”

“You’re saying, with less regulation, you think that the ranchers and farmers would do a very good job of processing the beef?” Trump asked.

“This is a very big thing you just told me, though, because you just gave me a very good idea,” the president added.

But federal agencies are limited in how much they can unilaterally change without congressional action.

Lawmakers have attempted for years to pass language that would allow small ranches and local slaughterhouses to sell meat directly to consumers without USDA inspections.

The bill, known as the PRIME Act, has bipartisan support led by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) in the House and Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Angus King (I-Maine) in the Senate. The legislation has failed to gain traction in the face of lobbying efforts from powerful agriculture groups that argue the change would create a food safety threat.

Massie posted on X on Friday that Trump’s post “is great, but it should be a law, not just an executive order.”

“Pass the PRIME Act so consumers can get affordable U.S. beef and farmers can flourish!” Massie wrote.

And any mandatory change to country-of-origin labeling for beef would also require congressional approval as lawmakers repealed previous beef labeling rules in 2015. The Senate Agriculture Committee voted to include mandatory country-of-origin labels for beef in their farm bill package, which stalled in committee earlier this month.