One of the more egregious examples of this pattern happened in February when, as the OHCHR detailed in a June 12th report:

Israeli forces opened fire on an encampment for displaced people in Al Tuffah, Gaza City, killing five Palestinians, including two women and two baby girls: 5-month-old Mira Al Khabbaz and Watein Al Khabbaz, born less than a week before.

That’s one of the many Israeli attacks that have killed children in Gaza in spite of a ceasefire the Israelis are loathe to honor. To wit, in the handful of days since the OHCHR released its latest update, the IDF has pushed the overall number killed during the so-called ceasefire closer to 1,000. In one incident, the IDF killed an emergency room nurse at al-Shifa Hospital and his six year-old son while his was filling water tanks on the roof of their home.

In another incident, Israeli soldiers shot a three year-old boy and his father while they were walking outside of the IDF’s no-go zone. The boy’s grandfather described the kill shot to Aljazeera:

“My grandson, Rayan, was killed by a gunshot to the head; the bullet entered his head and exited through his eye,” Jaber [Abu al-Ajeen] told Al Jazeera. “His mother is devastated by what happened.”

Jaber’s son was carrying his grandson when the boy was shot. He took a bullet in the leg. But, accord to Jaber, his wounded son was picked up by Israeli soldiers and, Haaretz reported, he was “held for several hours before being released overnight near a concrete barrier at Kissufim, still handcuffed and bleeding.” He finally made it to a hospital, but, as of June 15th, he had not been stabilized.

Those killings were part of deadly 24 hours that pushed the total to 992 killed during the so-called ceasefire. Antiwar.com reported 3,144 Gazans have also been injured by Israel’s ceaseless military campaign, and it’s not going to stop anytime soon. Just two weeks ago, Bibi Netanyahu confirmed that he ordered the IDF to expand its operation to control 70% of the Strip.

Prior to that, the IDF controlled 60% of the territory behind its “Yellow Line.” The area behind that line is largely depopulated, which means an area that had long been one of the world’s most densely populated areas is becoming ever-more concentrated as internally displaced Gazans are forced into camps crammed along a tiny strip of the Strip. That concentration of camps lacks the water and sanitation necessary to sustain the refugees created by Israel’s widespread demolition of apartment blocks, water and sewage systems, and power plants.

On June 10th, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) described the disease-harboring conditions:

Health partners report widespread proliferation of rats, cockroaches, flies, lice and bedbugs, further increasing the risks of communicable disease transmission. A growing outbreak of skin diseases is surging across the camps, including scabies, chickenpox and dermatitis. More recently, cases of rodent bites have also risen sharply — more than 70,000 cases of rodent and ectoparasitic infestations have been reported in 2026 alone.

Of course, Israel has made sure that “limited access to essential medications” also makes it “difficult to respond to all cases.” Water is similarly limited:

Drinking water distributions are reaching up to 1.5 million people, often through water trucking. Despite these efforts, most families (82 percent) remain water insecure and up to 70 percent are unable to collect the minimum six liters per day for drinking and cooking.

The struggle for food, water and medicine. An absence of basic sanitation. And near daily drone and missile attacks. It all adds up to the phoniest ceasefire in recent memory.

Even more telling, though, is Israel’s creeping Yellow Line. Like the Death Star’s trash compactor, it’s obviously designed to squeeze Gazans until they die or find a way to escape. If their lives are behind the line, it is likely they’ll never see it again if Israel has its way. One family’s experience portends the kind of perpetual displacement that has incubated desperation and militancy for nearly eight decades:

Like almost everyone else in Gaza, we have been permanently homeless now for many months. During the previous ceasefire – from mid-January to mid-March 2025 – we returned to our home in Khan Younis, which was still partially habitable. We spent more than $7,000 on repairs. It was far from adequate. We told ourselves it would be enough. But in May 2025 – only five months after we had returned – the Israeli military ordered us to leave again.

Following the ceasefire agreement signed last October, we were finally able to return to check on our house again. It was completely demolished. Not partially damaged as before. Gone.

Now, my family of seven – myself, my wife, and our five children: Dana; 15-year-old Liyan; 13-year-old Raza; eight-year-old Lama; and Imran, who has not yet turned four – have moved from our two-storey, 200-square-metre home into a tent for the foreseeable future.

Despite the US-brokered ceasefire agreement, Israel is barring cement and all construction materials and heavy machinery from entering Gaza. There is no reconstruction. There are only tents, some sturdier than others. The sturdier version is what I am now trying to build for my family, and it comes at a steep cost.

Given Trump’s split with Netanyahu over Iran and Lebanon, and the predictable disappearing act by Trump’s Board of Peace, it is likely that Netanyahu will continue enjoy Washington’s tacit approval of its ethnic cleansing, its continued killing and of the collective traumas being inflicted on a generation of children. It is Israel’s criminally inhumane treatment of children that gives away its game.

For every “four year-old girl with a head wound from Israeli gunfire,” there are dozens more who’ve lost their limbs, their families and their futures. They will carry these traumas with them for the rest of their lives. But that hasn’t stopped them from trying to have a future … and, because they are children, that means trying to get an education when 97% of the schools are damaged or destroyed. As Ali Rogin observed in a heartbreaking report for PBS’s NewsHour:

The United Nations says, with high demand and limited space, most children in Gaza are only able to attend a few hours of classes three days of the week. But so many children in Gaza will never return to a classroom.

Put more bluntly:

For many of Gaza's youngest residents, attending funerals is now more common than attending class.

The one lesson they all have learned or will learn soon enough is that the word ceasefire doesn’t mean a damn thing.

Violence and killings at Gaza’s food distribution points leave survivors suffering one year on
https://www.msf.org/horrors-ghf-sites-gaza-leave-survivors-suffering-one-year

7-year-old mourns father and brother killed in Israeli strike on Gaza
https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2026/6/15/7-year-old-mourns-father-and-brother-killed-in-israeli-strike-on-gaza

Israeli military takes more territory, kills two people in Gaza, medics and witnesses say
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-military-takes-more-territory-kills-two-people-gaza-medics-witnesses-say-2026-06-16/

As a father in Gaza, the new home I am building for my children is a nylon tent
https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/first-person/2026/06/16/father-gaza-new-home-i-am-building-my-children-nylon-tent

Why Are Children Still Suffering in Gaza?
https://www.unicefusa.org/stories/why-are-children-still-suffering-gaza

‘Wall of Tears’ mural in Dearborn lists Palestinian children killed in Gaza
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/wayne/2026/06/15/names-palestinian-children-killed-gaza-dearborn-park/90521915007/

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For the casual observer in the United States, ”finishing the job” probably sounds like military defeat on the battlefield and an official act of surrender. It’s General Robert E. Lee at the Appomattox Court house or Japan’s Foreign Minister and a General officially capitulating aboard the USS Missouri.

Typically, the defeated army drops its guns and heads home to a nation suddenly under occupation by the winning army. After a ceremony on USS Missouri, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan drafted a constitution and oversaw the reconstruction of a country it had just destroyed with gravity, incendiary and nuclear bombs. In that case, finishing the job ultimately meant transforming an enemy into a staunch ally.

But that’s not what Israel seeks. Not by a longshot.

Benjamin Netanyahu set the tone early by immediately and repeatedly invoking the Biblical story of Amalek in the wake of Hamas’ October 7 attack. Here’s the New King James version of First Samuel 15:3:

Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.

That repeated call to eliminate Amalek in its current form—a.k.a. the people of Gaza—was echoed by Israeli politicians, by Israeli television, and by popular podcasters. For these Israelis—some of whom are in Netanyahu’s cabinet—when will the job be officially finished?

What does “victory” look like?

Gaza is the obvious answer. It is an unlivable, depopulated hellscape in which Israel incrementally takes more land and, in the meantime, it reserves the right to kill anyone still living there … all they need to say is “Hamas.” Because Hamas also functioned as a government that ran schools and hospitals and ambulances … it touched the lives of many Gazans. A touched or “Hamas-linked” life all the IDF needs to kill. It’s why the so-called “ceasefire” in Gaza has been violated on a nearly daily basis since it was declared.

There is no ceasefire, in fact. Israel reserves the right to kill anybody and their entire family if they are suspected or linked to Hamas. That means every Gazan is a viable target. It’s how they killed 19k Gazans under the age of 18 without a hint of remorse or shame. They were killing future Hamas-linked Gazans. As many Israeli politicians and citizens have said, there are no innocent Gazans. That’s why there isn’t a viable scenario for Hamas’ surrender. They know they’ll end up dead or consigned to a torturous prison system. And there is no home to go back to, anyway.

The same goes for Hezbollah.

It is a government and schools and healthcare and religious instruction. It, like Hamas, touches many lives that have nothing to do with rockets. In the past, Gazans and Lebanese were “mowed” like grass, just to maintain fear and control and to appease Israeli hawks.

Now mowing the grass is not enough.

Netanyahu set a new bar when he promised to “finish the job,” like he did during his infamous speech before a joint session of Congress on July 24, 2024. It was a seminal moment in the history of US-Israeli relations and, in retrospect, for Netanyahu.

Instead of acknowledging the political price his benefactor was paying for his support of Bibi’s brutality, he defied him, did an end-run and spoke to Congress. He basically said to Biden, “I can do whatever I want and you cannot stop me, or the aid my country depends upon.” Any concerns about the massive number of children being killed or orphaned fell by the wayside after Bibi soaked-in one standing ovation after another. He pulled the strings AIPAC attached to members of Congress and, in so doing, he spoke with an air of invincibility. He dismissed mounting concerns about Israel’s brutal campaign by framing the fight as Western Civilization against barbarians.

It was quite a ballsy display by a client state, particularly one that depends so heavily upon its benefactor. But Bibi probably felt fairly certain that Jared’s father-in-law would soon be President and then he could go even further in Gaza. That’s exactly what happened, too.

Once the phony ceasefire was in place, Israel then exported their Gaza model to Lebanon. They’d signaled their intent via pager. It showed Lebanon and the world that Israel is not above indiscriminate killing or the killing of bystanders. It also showed the world it can kill anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Hezbollah, like Hamas, arose in response to Israeli military power. But Israel doesn’t want anyone to think of Palestinian or Lebanese fighters as soldiers. They never refer them as “soldiers,” perhaps hoping the world will give them a pass from the Geneva Conventions because they are fighting “terrorists” instead of soldiers. Soldiers are human beings with some basic rights. Terrorists cede their rights because they are terrorists.

That die was cast in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The US and its hyperpatriotic media called the people shooting at American invaders “terrorists” or, maybe, “fighters.” Most avoided terms that imbued Iraqis or Afghans with humanity.

The same is true of Iranians. It’s a nation-state with a standing army, but you never hear about Iran’s Army or Iranian soldiers. You do hear about the Revolutionary Guard, which is couched in the language of terrorism and referred to as a terrorist organization.

It’s also why infotainers, influencers and politicians make a point of saying “Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.” No evidence is given, nor is the term defined. But it is repeated with a Pavlovian reliability because no one challenges the assertion. What is the metric for measuring “state sponsors of terrorism,” anyway? Is there a point system? And what is a terrorist act? Or is all of this just an effective way to dehumanize your enemy?

Now, though, Netanyahu is a bit trapped by his rhetoric and his maximalist demands. Jared’s father-in-law is desperate. He wants to get Iran off his plate and give gas prices a chance to leave a good taste in the mouths of voters before the Midterms. He doesn’t care about Lebanon. He does care about Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

And they want to get Hormuz open.

In the final analysis, Netanyahu hasn’t been motivated by Iran’s nuclear program. That’s the excuse, but Israel intelligence knows Iran was not making a bomb. It’s always been a bargaining chip. The Ayatollah Khamenei even issued a fatwa stating that nuclear weapons are haram. But Bibi knew that. He’s known that. The real reason to bomb Iran and Lebanon … is to cut Palestinians off from outside help and, in the process, stretch Israel’s functional hegemony to the borders of Türkiye, Afghanistan and Egypt.

They want Iran to be another regional failed state … a bombing range they can hit without consequence and in perpetuity. And that’s why hawkish Israelis should be grateful to Trump for giving them the weapons and the latitude to destroy Gaza and to destroy the lives of so many families. But they are not grateful. They are angry and confused by Trump’s desire to move on, his impending midterms catastrophe notwithstanding. Israel’s hawkish majority doesn’t want to move on. It seeks seek elimination.

Eliminate Hamas. Eliminate Hezbollah. Eliminate the Iranian regime. That’s what Bibi & Co. mean by “finish the job.”

And if they ever got close to doing so, they might realize they’ve become the monsters they claim to be fighting.

Trump’s Iran deal sidelines Israel as regional tensions shift into new phase
https://jewishinsider.com/2026/06/u-s-israel-iran-war-peace-deal-trump-netanyahu/

Humiliated by Trump on the Iran Front, Netanyahu May Set the Middle East Ablaze
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-06-14/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/humiliated-by-trump-on-the-iran-front-netanyahu-may-set-the-middle-east-ablaze/0000019e-c654-d7bd-addf-ee56f7c60000

Israel Counts the Ways That Netanyahu’s Iran Strategy Failed
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/world/middleeast/israel-netanyahus-iran-strategy.html

Ministers say Israel won’t be bound by Iran deal, as opposition castigates Netanyahu’s ‘absolute failure’
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-vows-to-stay-in-south-lebanon-if-iran-strikes-well-hit-it-with-full-force/

‘Don’t Bullshit Us, Trump’ Netanyahu Loyalists Rage at ‘Treacherous’ United States Over Iran Deal
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-politics/2026-06-15/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-loyalists-rage-at-treacherous-united-states-over-iran-deal/0000019e-cb57-d1bc-abbe-cf5fa9ac0000

‘This Is Precarious’: Fox’s Bill Hemmer Worries Trump Has Been ‘Suckered Into’ Iran Deal
https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/this-is-precarious-foxs-bill-hemmer-worries-trump-has-been-suckered-into-iran-deal/

Interview: ‘The Iranians took advantage of all of Trump’s weaknesses’
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/428667

The Iran deal is an American failure that endangers Israel
https://www.israelhayom.com/2026/06/15/the-iran-deal-is-an-american-failure-that-endangers-israel/

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We were not alone.

A new analysis of a long-overlooked population strengthens the case that our ancestors were not only “not alone” … they often “didn’t want to be alone tonight” (if you know what I mean) … and we have the DNA to prove it. That’s the big takeaway from a just-released study of human geonomics around the South Pacific. It’s a population that’s been ignored by Euro-centric scientists, until now.

Here’s what they did:

By tracing the deep history of the Pacific's earliest pioneers, who migrated to the region at least 45,000 years ago, the researchers uncovered unprecedented insights into human evolutionary history and adaptation. For example, they discovered that ancestors of Near Oceanic populations mated with at least three distinct groups related to Denisovans—an enigmatic hominin group initially discovered from fossil fragments in Siberia.

Here’s how they did it:

For the new study, the researchers used an advanced functional genomic technique known as a massively parallel reporter assay to physically test the functional consequences of these genetic variants and identified more than 3,100 that alter gene expression. This analysis provided some of the largest-scale evidence for how specific, adaptive genetic variants inherited from Denisovans function inside humans today.

Here’s what they found:

The team found that a substantial proportion of these adaptive and functional variants affected the interferon-gamma signaling pathway, a vital component of the human immune system that defends against infectious pathogens.

And this:

The study also revealed that Denisovan DNA influences skeletal development. The researchers discovered adaptive variants inherited from Denisovans in a specific gene called TRPS1. This same gene has been under strong positive selection in central African rainforest hunter-gatherers and highland populations in Ecuador, showing how evolution can result in recurrent local adaptations in different regions of the world.

Our cousins’ DNA is not just a historical curiosity, it continues to be an evolutionary force:

The study shows that archaic DNA is still actively shaping human biology, noted Steven Reilly, assistant professor of genetics at Yale School of Medicine and co-author of the study.

“We found thousands of archaic variants that tune genes up or down, concentrated in immune and antiviral pathways,” he said. “Neanderthals and Denisovans had adapted to life outside Africa over hundreds of thousands of years, and we inherited some of those genetic programs and co-opted them. Tens of thousands of years later, this DNA may still shape how these populations fight viruses—or their risk for autoimmune disease.”

“Inherited” and “co-opted” are, of course, euphemisms.

Our direct ancestors left Africa and found hominins already living around Eurasia, and they were adapted to Eurasia in ways our ancestors were not. The math after that is quite simple.

How? and why? they mated are still unclear, but science is making a lot of headway.

We know for certain that we evolved alongside other species and populations we could and did interbreed with. It might’ve been violent, too. That’s the rub. Do we even want to know how we became the last hominin standing? Or is answering that question crucial to our evolution as a species?

The question is of particular importance now that we are on the verge of fully automating warfare.

That’s an invitation to humanity’s inhumanity if there ever was one. History shows we rarely turn down an invitation to be inhumane. And we do seem to be barreling toward a “Great Filter” moment when our technology so grotesquely outstrips our wisdom that it will inevitably snuff us out before we can explore space.

The irony is that these advances in understanding our species come at the same time the US government is being run by people who think Earth is less than 10k years old. Big decisions about war and peace and the fate of millions are being based upon ancient folklore about a tribal warlord-god, maybe we should begin to look at the nearly 300k years prior to that tribal warlord-god’s creation.

Even that is a geological blip compared to the fossil record and the geological record.

And no, Pete Hegseth, the fossils are not a trick to deceive mankind. Hopefully some time soon, humanity will stop deceiving itself.

A lack of sex held back life’s diversity for millions of years
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/a-lack-of-sex-held-back-lifes-diversity-for-millions-of-years

Scientists discover ancient single-celled ancestors still live on in your blood
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260526022006.htm

Human evolution was messy and gradual, not an abrupt revolution, argues archaeologist
https://phys.org/news/2026-06-human-evolution-messy-gradual-abrupt.html

New fossils suggest human evolution was more crowded than scientists thought
https://www.baltimoresun.com/2026/06/09/human-evolution-crowded/

800,000 Years Ago, Ancient Humans Knew Which Stones Made the Best Tools
https://www.discovermagazine.com/800-000-years-ago-ancient-humans-knew-which-stones-made-the-best-tools-49223

Human Ancestors Were Using Fire Earlier Than Previously Thought
https://nautil.us/human-ancestors-were-using-fire-earlier-than-previously-thought-1281795

Wonderwerk Cave bones reveal possible fire use by human ancestors 1.79 million years ago
https://phys.org/news/2026-06-wonderwerk-cave-bones-reveal-human.html

Ancient DNA shared with Neanderthals may explain human language
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260611024612.htm

In 1926, Archaeologists Found The Skull Of The “Devil’s Tower Child” Neanderthal And Changed Everything We Knew About This Extinct Human Species
https://www.iflscience.com/in-1926-archaeologists-found-the-skull-of-the-devils-tower-child-neanderthal-and-changed-everything-we-knew-about-this-extinct-human-species-83797

Pangenomics transforms evolutionary biology
https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2026/06/pangenomics/

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That’s a question every American should be asking themselves after a pair of investigations revealed corruption that’s so comically blatant, it must be by design.

On Monday, Reuters took a deep dive into the Trump Family’s audacious use of these four business ventures…

• World Liberty Financial: A company controlled by Donald Trump’s revocable trust is entitled to 75% of net revenue from token sales by World Liberty Financial.

• $TRUMP meme coin: Donald Trump licensed his name and image to a company called Celebration Cards LLC, which raised enormous sums selling the digital token.

• American Bitcoin: The Nasdaq-listed company, recently renamed AI Financial Corp., raised money from investors to buy World Liberty Financial tokens.

• ALT5 Sigma: At the time of the deal that created this Nasdaq-listed joint venture, partner Hut 8 Inc. bought World Liberty tokens. Eric Trump also got a stake in American Bitcoin, at no cost.

…to extract wealth using with a ‘can’t lose’ formula that Reuters calls a “crypto playbook.” And by “playbook,” it sounds like they mean “con game”:

While they vary in size and structure, each of these ventures has followed the same playbook. The Trumps risked little up front. Trump family members – notably, the president’s oldest sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. – hyped the venture. The Trumps raked in money as investors piled in. And those buyers lost big when, for various reasons, the prices of their Trump-related crypto assets later tanked.

A Reuters examination shows that the Trump family has used this template to generate at least $2.3 billion in profit from investors since Trump retook the presidency. On the other side of that cash bonanza for America’s first family: the more than a million investors whose net losses totaled $2.3 billion at the end of April, according to a Reuters analysis. Those investors include retail buyers of crypto and crypto-linked equities, as well as those who invested indirectly through funds like ETFs with exposure to Trump crypto. The loss total includes paper losses on unsold investments.

It’s the symmetry of the Trump family’s gains and the losses that stands out. It reads like a punchline: $2.3B in gains for the Trumps and $2.3B losses for investors. It sure looks like a straight-up transfer of funds by way of the four scams in their crypto playbook. It’s highly likely some of the “more than a million” people who pumped money into the Trumps’ pockets were using the four scams to launder bribes. We certainly haven’t heard the Emiratis complain about the $500 million they lavished on World Liberty Financial. They’re using World Liberty Financial is a laundromat.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for the hundreds of thousands who will never get any access or influence from their “investments.” Their unbridled love and devotion made them the easiest marks in recorded history. Reuters talked to 27 of them:

All but three of the 27 individual investors interviewed for this article said they knew of Donald Trump’s history of bankruptcies, unpaid contractors and failed ventures. Still, most said they believed that his position at the apex of American political power and what they perceived as his business acumen ensured lucrative returns on their investments. Many acknowledged doing little or no due diligence. Some said they still hold on to the hope that Trump will make things right. Others expressed regret, anger and embarrassment.

The saddest stories come from true believers like Matt the machinist from Indiana. He lost $32,700 from his investment in ALT5 Sigma shares. Of course, he exonerates the Trump family and instead “believes Democrats and anti-Trump investors are taking short positions” to torpedo the family’s crypto projects. And there’s a 45 year-old Texas businessman who lost just $800, but is “investing” again because he “just feel[s] like Trump knows business.”

Financial losses can be really hard to swallow on a stomach full of lies. Trump served up a steady diet of slapdash products and sinister scams since he came down the escalator, and he knows true believers will pour money into whatever the Trumps are pushing. Noted empath and former Trump Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross reminded Reuters they have no one to blame but themselves:

“[I]f people are going to buy something that’s speculative, they ought to be aware there’s a risk,” said Ross, currently vice chairman of crypto company ReserveOne Inc. He added: “If they chose to continue on as a holder, hoping it would go up more, well, that’s their business.”

Here’s another punchline:

Ross said he has not invested in any Trump crypto ventures.

Instead, Ross, who Forbes once noted “has a knack for slipping out of scandals,” is cashing on on the special purpose acquisition company, or a SPAC, he set up in Cayman Islands right before he left the Commerce Department in 2021.

The “experts” Reuters also contacted had a slightly different take:

Eight government ethics experts interviewed by Reuters said that the Trump family’s enriching itself from an industry that the president’s administration regulates – and that the president himself has championed – represents a conflict of interest unlike anything seen in modern American history. They noted, though, that while this departure from established norms is unethical and unprecedented, it is legal, provided the family does not exchange access to the president or regulatory favors for financial gain.

”Regulatory favors? For financial gain?”

As if cue, Kaiser Health News dropped this doozy in the punchbowl:

Trump Bought Tobacco Stocks and Raked In Industry Donations as FDA Eased Standards

Right now you are probably thinking “of course he did.”

And that’s the crazy thing … these corruption stories are piling up on an almost daily basis. It’s so ubiquitous and relentless, it feels like this is the new normal and there’s nothing we can do about it. And we aren’t hearing much from the federal agencies now that Kristi Noem is gone. But Interior? Energy? Agriculture? Of course there are favors flying out those doors. Now imagine the deluge that awaits us if the Democrats gain control of the House? When they get subpoena power? And the whistleblowers start coming out?

It will take a special commission to unpack the impact of all the Executive Orders and how the agencies ran amok based on those orders while Speaker Johnson pretended to have ethics and a moral core.

As for the tobacco story … it’s pretty straight forward:

When he ran for his second term, Trump promoted himself as a pro-tobacco candidate, posting that he had “saved” flavored vaping and that President Joe Biden and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris “want everything banned.”

+

Since late 2023, MAGA Inc. has received over $20 million in funding from the industry, federal campaign records show. Trump’s inauguration garnered nearly $4 million more. His ballroom project has disclosed donations of an unknown amount from Altria and Reynolds American.

+

In 2025, tobacco interests donated $6 million to MAGA Inc., a super PAC that supports the president, and Trump’s inauguration. And, on April 30, a week before FDA guidance that provided a critical boost to the industry, Reynolds American dropped an additional $5 million into the super PAC’s coffers.

+

President Donald Trump…grew his stock holdings this year to as much as $1.64 million in tobacco giant Philip Morris. He also had holdings in Altria and a third leading tobacco company, though an apparent discrepancy in his disclosures clouds the extent of his investments.

+

The stock trades and political contributions occurred as the Trump administration pursued a broadly pro-tobacco agenda: Its FDA piloted a fast-track program to approve nicotine pouches. It unveiled a program to allow vapes on the market more rapidly, despite resistance from career civil servants and leadership, culminating this year in guidance waving through flavored electronic cigarettes. It cut public health employees focusing on anti-tobacco policy. And it broadened enforcement against illicit e-cigarettes, competitors to the big industry players with a financial relationship to Trump.

+

Trump’s tobacco policies have garnered favorable grades from investors. At Goldman Sachs, bankers described the May FDA guidance as “very positive” for Philip Morris and “a significant step in the FDA’s positioning toward enforcement and acceptance of nic pouch (as well as e-vapor) innovation generally.”

+

And Barclays analysts said the FDA’s guidance was good news for Juul, a leading vape producer. (In November, the company contributed $1 million to MAGA Inc.)

=

It amounts to the most pro-tobacco, pro-nicotine presidency in some time — a remarkable policy given the tens of millions of deaths cigarettes caused during the 20th century.

As Kaiser Health News pointed out, he also “often traded in companies manufacturing GLP-1 drugs before his administration steered policy in a favorable direction.”

It’s almost as if he wants us to know what he doing because the ultimate win is to cheat in broad daylight and still get away with it … like shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

Maybe that was wishcasting?

And what if we think we’re watching a cruel, capricious and shortsighted Presidency, but we’re actually watching a well-run stock manipulation scheme?

Either way, you can rest assured that in the same circumstances, the people of Albania would be out in the streets, calling for Trump’s resignation. That’s because Albanians are serious about rooting out corruption that dates back to its time behind the Iron Curtain. And they are demonstrating it right now in the form mounting protests against Jared and Ivanka’s dream of transforming a dreamy Albanian island into the kind of dreamscape Ivanka’s always dreamt of (per Forbes):

Kushner and Ivanka Trump have said they were inspired to build in Albania after happening upon Sazan Island while aboard a friend’s yacht, with Trump saying on a recent podcast that she and Kushner were “captivated” by the island after first visiting it. She described the project to host David Senra as “the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live, and trying to really build something that’s a tangible manifestation of that”

A sweetheart deal with Albania’s now embattled president stinks of the kind of corruption that killed another recent Kushner project in the Balkans. And it threatens a beloved natural habitat … and, therefore, it has the potential to jeopardize Albania’s bid for European Union membership. But, as Reuters reported, the real story is the way Albanians have taken to the streets to protest what the see as threat to a brighter future:

“The project in Zvernec is a project ... with no transparency. And this ​is the apotheosis of what has been happening in Albania for the last 35 years. So today, enough is enough," said protester Leand Lakrori.

“I'm here to protest, to finish ​this saga of the Albanian government. It's the same two parties ​always," said ⁠Fabio Bracaj. "We want a new era ... we want a better country."

Then again, Americans are so worn out after ten years of non-stop madness and corruption, a “new era” and a “better country” might be more than we’re hoping for.

It might be enough to just get him to go away long enough to forget him for a day, a week or, if we’re lucky, a whole month.

What Albania teaches us about Kushner’s real estate tactics – video explainer
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2026/jun/10/jared-kushner-albania-sazan-island-real-estate-deal

Albania’s Protests Against Jared And Ivanka’s Resort Plans Are Getting Bigger
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/06/11/albanias-protests-against-jared-and-ivankas-resort-plans-are-getting-bigger/

Thousands fill Tirana streets as Albania’s Kushner resort protests enter second week
https://www.turkiyetoday.com/region/thousands-fill-tirana-streets-as-albanias-kushner-resort-protests-enter-second-week-3221763

Albania’s Flamingo Revolution Spreads From Kushner Resort to Political Elite
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-11/albania-s-flamingo-revolution-spreads-from-kushner-resort-to-political-elite

I saw Kushner’s Albania resort up close — it is an environmental disaster
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/6/11/i-saw-kushners-albania-resort-up-close-it-is-an-environmental

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We just got a pretty good idea from celebrity “Shark” Kevin O’Leary. He attempted to leapfrog over the objections of local Utahns who didn’t want to live with the consequences of his 40,000 acre mega-data center complex.

He didn’t stick the landing.

In fact, nearly a month after he announced his ambitious “Stratos Project” was headed to the northwestern corner of Utah, “Mr. Wonderful” agreed to a radically reduced version that cut the project’s size down to 20,000 acres. Of that, reported KSL TV, “around half would remain undeveloped and set aside as agricultural space or for wildlife, reducing the effective area facing development to 10,000 acres.”

Of course, the scaled-back version is not guaranteed to survive current or future court challenges. Regardless, O’Leary’s loss is likely to embolden what’s become a growing nationwide backlash against data centers. Per Fast Company:

In less than a year, opinions about data centers have quickly shifted. In a Heatmap survey last August, 24% of respondents said that they “strongly opposed” a data center being built near where they live. In Heatmap‘s latest survey in May of more than 4,000 voters, that number had jumped to 55%. In the last nine months, strong opposition more than doubled.

And:

In a Gallup poll in May, 71% of Americans said they would be opposed to a new AI data center being built in their area, with nearly half of them strongly opposed. (It’s worth noting that in a same survey, only 53% of respondents said that they would oppose a new nuclear power plant in their area.)

Eighteen percent of Americans would rather live near a nuclear plant?

Okay, then.

How about the reason why those datacenters are being built in the first place?

Only 26% of voters view AI positively and 46% view it negatively, according to a national survey of 1,000 voters in March by NBC. With a net favorability of minus 20, AI was less popular than US Immigration and Customs Enforcement or President Trump. (Since that survey, Trump’s low approval ratings have gotten even worse, so it’s possible AI may now have an edge.) Younger voters, age 18-34, gave AI a lower favorability rating of minus 44.

I suspect the almost messianic vision of AI being evangelized by investors and CEOs is exacerbating the cynicism and skepticism that’s taken root, particularly among young Americans. There is growing gap between the super-hyped sales pitch and the harsh reality of AI disrupting an already uncertain job market in a K-Shaped economy.

It was a gap O’Leary fell into during when Tucker Carlson invited him to come make his case during the height of his data center controversy. When O’Leary predicted AI would produce an endless cascade of jobs we can’t yet conceive of … Carlson pressed O’Leary for specifics. When Carlson rattled-off a list of jobs AI is already eliminating, O’Leary pivoted to the growth opportunities from AI’s military applications and the looming threat of losing Taiwan. Carlson called-out O’Leary’s pivot away from jobs in the US to AI’s role in defending Taiwan. He then tried to bring it back to the original question. Here’s a lightly-condensed transcript of what followed:

TUCKER CARLSON: [T]he promise of AI and robotics is that the robots will make the products of the future. So how exactly does that result in American jobs? What are you talking about? Every job is replaced by a machine.

KEVIN O’LEARY: I don’t buy that. I just don’t agree with you because it’s never happened this way.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, then please make me feel better. Where are these millions of new jobs? What specifically are you talking about?

KEVIN O’LEARY: Well, you know, every time technology advances it creates new opportunities that were not foreseen prior, because you don’t know the direction of new tech. Think about if you and I, because we were actually around in the late 80s, contemplating what new jobs would be created by the internet. And look at what’s happened. It’s created millions of jobs and advanced all kinds of technologies and changed the way we live to the better.

Despite his rosy prediction of an AI-stoked future of spontaneous job creation for humans … O’Leary knows full well AI’s primary appeal for businesses and corporations is as the ultimate source of cheap, highly-productive labor. It’s rarely said, but if jobs are not lost, AI will not be successful. It’s a truth O’Leary admitted on FOX Business the same day his debate with Carlson was released:

“People are not giving enough credit to what’s going on on balance sheets and income statements based on the enhancement of AI.”

When you hear investors mention “balance sheets,” the column they are usually talking about is the cost of labor:

“I know jobs are being lost, but at my companies, wow, we are saving a ton of dough. Our earnings are going up.”

And that’s why just seven AI-related stocks—the so-called “Mag(nificent) Seven” stocks—have accounted for much of the growth in the market. The promise of a “revolution in productivity,” meaning exponentially more output (production) for far less cost (wages), is the return many expect from their investment.

In a very real sense, it is analogous to the outsourcing of the 1990s, when Walmart led the way in maximizing productivity by minimizing labor with … cheap, lightly regulated Chinese workers. But O’Leary didn’t or wouldn’t make that connection when he was talking to Carlson. Obviously, he recalibrated his FOX Business message for Carlson’s audience in an attempt to assuage their trepidation:

KEVIN O’LEARY: And I would say to you the same angst we had, the same narrative that was going on in 1992 about how the internet is going to wipe out the economy and it’s a bad thing and it’s dangerous. Of course people loathe change. That’s the nature of how it is.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think that the United States is a happier country than it was in 1992?

KEVIN O’LEARY: What does happy mean? What does that mean?

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know. How about the suicide rate or the addiction rate or the life expectancy?

KEVIN O’LEARY: Those are all absurd. Yes, I mean, look, there’s lots of social issues and there always has been. I would remind you though—

TUCKER CARLSON: But they’ve gotten worse at exactly the period in history that the internet was formed and then seemed to infuse every part of our lives. So if you were worried about the effect of the internet in 1992 on America, looking back from the vantage of 2026, you could say, “Yeah, I had good reason to be worried,” couldn’t you? Or am I imagining that?

KEVIN O’LEARY: You could say that it would have some effect on society, but let me remind you something, and I’m probably the right guy to make this comment because I spend a lot of time all around the world investing all around the world. I don’t care where you go, and I feel this way, and I’ve really learned this over the last 20 years. What is the number one export of America? It’s not energy, and it’s not technology. It’s actually the American dream.

O’Leary’s struggle to respond directly was underscored by his reflexive invocation of “the American Dream.” As far as O’Leary’s concerned, Shark Tank is what the Dream looks like today. After all, he explained to Carlson, it does allow “a researcher” with an “idea” to “walk away with $105 million in cash 36 months” after appearing on his show. “That’s the American dream and I’m an ambassador for it,” he added.

And he’s right.

That is the current state of the American Dream.

It’s an electronically-transferred, addictively-gamified, jackpot-seeking world that looks and feels like his reality show. Entrepreneurs can hit the jackpot in an instant if they can convince a superrich celebrity investor to place a speculative bet on their idea of a better mousetrap. O’Leary, whose net worth has grown by 1,900% over the last five years, promises to “blow up” the mousetrap “on social” until it attracts a large competitor or private equity. Eventually they sell the entrepreneur’s brainchild for big bucks … a.k.a. “the exit.”

But only a small fraction of America’s Dreamers ever get a chance to make their pitch on Shark Tank. Of those that do get the opportunity to “trot out” in front of him, “80% fail, but 20% make it.”

That’s a K-Shaped success rate.

Not coincidentally, the widely-accepted definition of the K-Shaped economy puts the top 20% on the upper arm and the other 80% on the lower leg.

Is this the K-Shape of things to come?

Alberta First Nation in court over massive proposed ‘Wonder Valley’ AI data centre
https://globalnews.ca/news/11895544/wonder-valley-sturgeon-lake-cree-nation-court/

Kevin O’Leary’s Huge Data Center in Canada Faces a Skeptical Public
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-07/kevin-o-leary-s-huge-data-center-in-canada-faces-a-skeptical-public

Kevin O’Leary admits he ‘screwed up’ initial rollout of Box Elder County data center
https://www.abc4.com/news/northern-utah/kevin-oleary-screwed-up-box-elder-county-data-center/

East Texas data center gets pushback from community
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/06/09/east-texas-data-center-gets-community-pushback/

Northwest Georgia residents push back against data centers in local meetings
https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2026/jun/09/northwest-georgia-residents-push-back-against/

Data center proposal rejected in Edgerton, Kansas, following community pushback
https://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/kansas/johnson-county/data-center-proposal-rejected-in-edgerton-kansas-following-community-pushback

Hundreds of Lowell Township residents pushback on Microsoft data center
https://wwmt.com/news/local/data-center-lowell-township-microsoft-opposition-i-96-cascade-road-proposal-rezoning-request-lowell-township-planning-commission-michigan

New Albany touts jobs, revenue as data center pushback grows
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/local/2026/06/08/new-albany-ohio-data-center-construction-jobs-pushback-community/90423756007/

Data centers face pushback amid utility consumption in south metro Atlanta
https://www.wabe.org/data-centers-face-pushback-amid-utility-consumption-in-south-metro-atlanta/

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To add insult to his self-inflicted injuries, his “little excursion,” a.k.a. “little stopover,” a.k.a. “little journey,” a.k.a. “military operation,” a.k.a. “perfect, amazing thing” has supercharged the one thing he thought he’d put to bed before he stepped all over his promise to never do what he did: renewable energy.

To be fair, it sure looked and felt like he’d pulled the plug on wind, solar and electric vehicles. Projects were being scuttled, previously allocated funds were being stopped or redirected, and new roadblocks were being erected by the industry shills who populated the Departments of Energy and the Interior.

And climate change? Forgettabout it. Literally.

Don’s quixotic war on windmills and the “Green New Scam” pushed the issue of anthropogenic climate change completely out of the public eye and out of the national discussion.

Trump put an exclamation point at the end of green energy’s death sentence when his Saudi benefactor came to town last November. That visit coincided with the COP30 global climate conference in Brazil … a conference Trump boycotted. The timing was pointed and the juxtaposition was clear … Trump embraced a country synonymous with oil while giving a rapidly heating world the cold shoulder.

Then came the war on Iran.

Predictably, the price of oil spiked once the war began, but it appears Trump genuinely didn’t understand the global nature of the oil market or Iran’s unique ability to control access in and out of a body water that bears its name.

He does now.

The price of oil is still being set by globally, much to the chagrin of Congressional Republicans who have to run against the high price of gasoline. And Iran’s Persian Gulf gatekeeping already set in motion a rolling shock that will reverberate well beyond the perpetually pending deal to end the war.

That’s why the world is moving on. Trump’s “deal or no deal” reality game show machine may be good for insiders trading on Wall Street or Polymarket, but, according to a new report in the New York Times, it’s driving the world into the outstretched arms of an industry he’d crippled and a country he fears:

In the Philippines, which in 2024 relied on Persian Gulf countries for about a quarter of its imported oil and natural gas, the closure of Hormuz appeared to be accelerating the transition toward renewable energy.

The value of solar equipment that China exported to the Philippines hit a record of almost $300 million in March — more than double the previous monthly record — before a Chinese tax rebate expired on April 1, Ember data show.

The Times found a similar dynamic playing-out in oil-rich Indonesia, where solar is seen as a much-needed shield against future disruptions:

“God willing, we will eliminate our dependence on imported fuel and save valuable foreign exchange reserves,” the country’s president, Prabowo Subianto, said in May.

But nowhere has it had more impact than on the technologically advanced electric vehicles China is shipping around the world, save the United States:

Soaring electric car sales in much of the world have been among the clearest signs that the war may hasten a shift away from oil. China, the world’s leading manufacturer of such models, exported a record $9.1 billion worth of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in April, up more than 50 percent year over year, according to Ember. Exports to countries hit hard by the loss of Persian Gulf oil supplies, including Japan, Pakistan and India, were especially strong.

In Europe, sales of battery-powered cars climbed 38 percent in April from a year earlier, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.

And if that’s not enough to convince us that Trump is King Midas in reverse, take a look at what’s happening with domestic solar power, per OilPrice.com:

Newly released data from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) shows that at the close of last year, solar energy additions were the single largest form of new energy capacity installations for the 28th straight month, starting in September of 2023. In fact, in spite of a broad rollback of Biden-era clean energy incentives since Trump resumed office in January of last year, renewables represented a whopping 88 percent of energy additions in 2025, with utility-scale solar alone counting for 72.6 percent of U.S. electricity additions.

This massive growth trend has caused solar power’s share of the United States energy mix to surpass that of wind power, nuclear power, and hydropower. And while many if not most of these renewable projects were greenlit and funded before Trump took office and rolled back tax cuts and subsidies for solar and wind projects, experts say not to expect a major cooldown any time soon.

As for those “rolled back tax cuts,” Bloomberg Law reported today that Trump’s losing there, too:

A federal judge threw out an IRS notice that imposed stricter guidelines on how wind and solar projects could qualify for energy tax credits, less than two months before the deadline.

US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the US District Court for the District of Columbia vacatedIRS Notice 2025-42 in a Saturday order because it was “arbitrary and capricious,” and violated the Administrative Procedures Act.

The decision is the latest court win for the wind and solar industries, which the Trump administration has attacked in favor of oil and gas.

His one consolation prize is coal.

Although no one expects coal to make a miraculous comeback, he’s lavished the fading industry with government largess … the latest of which was a specious use of the Defense Production Act to pour $700 million dollars into “grants to more than a dozen existing coal plants across the US, including facilities capable of exporting coal.”

It will also subsidize plants in “West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Indiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, Oklahoma, North Dakota and Wisconsin.” And The Guardian also noted:

In the past year, the Trump administration has doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to the coal industry, signed orders forcing ratepayers to pay extra for ageing plants to stay open, and dismantled environmental rules that limit toxins from coal leaching into Americans’ shared air and water.

Although the Iran War is having a slightly similar effect on coal, it’s quite a stretch to believe it will compete with continual technological advances in renewable capture, storage and distribution. Let’s face it … humans can transform sunlight and wind into energy. And not only is the technology moving apace, it’s also widening a gap between China and the United States … and between the United States and the future.

Wildlife thrives in solar farm built on restored peatland
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529590-wildlife-thrives-in-solar-farm-built-on-restored-peatland/

Solar farm could turn polluted land to boon for East St. Louis residents’ electric bills
https://www.stlpr.org/health-science-environment/2026-06-08/solar-farm-polluted-land-east-st-louis-electric-bills

Toyo Solar plans $357 million expansion at Houston-area manufacturing facility
https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2026/06/08/toyo-expansion-humble-solar-cells.html

$23 million solar manufacturing facility to create 150 new jobs in Mount Jackson
https://www.whsv.com/2026/06/08/23-million-solar-manufacturing-facility-create-150-new-jobs-mount-jackson/

Egypt readies initiative to incentivise solar panel installations in factories and homes
https://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2026/06/08/egypt-readies-initiative-to-incentivise-solar-panel-installations-in-factories-and-homes/

Australian homes lead the world in solar. But businesses are falling behind
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/09/australia-rooftop-solar-panels-households-business

Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135 Million A Day
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/06/08/solar-energy-saves-europeans-135-million-a-day/

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Now, imagine you are that parent and your hockey stick-wielding kiddo is starting for the first time at right winger. Of course, you’ve made sure your phone is fully charged for the big debut …not only for yourself, but also for grandma and grandpa. They’ll be watching the livestream of their beloved grandkid’s first start of the season. And just when the puck is about to drop and your smartphone is ready to record, you get a tap on the shoulder from another parent. She leans forward and says in a hushed tone that you probably should put the phone down because she “heard we could be docked points in the standings if parents are caught filming their kids.”

That sounds ridiculous, right?

Well, that’s exactly what hockey dad Chris Murphy heard when he approached a fellow hockey dad “sheepishly recording his son from a dark corner of the rink” during their sons’ youth league game. Murphy, who happens to be Connecticut’s junior Senator, writes in The Atlantic that he was “shocked” to learn the reason why the league—which is run by Black Bear Sports Group—proscribed parental shutterbugging:

Black Bear had installed cameras in each rink that feed video footage into a subscription service—Black Bear TV—that charges parents as much as $37 a month. Subscribers can watch games remotely and must pay for the “premium” tier to share highlights, such as their daughter’s game-winning goal, with relatives. Of course, Black Bear could have allowed parents to livestream games to family members and still made money off the low-cost, AI-operated camera system. But that, apparently, wasn’t enough for the executives, so the company banned parents from streaming games for grandparents or the mother or father who didn’t drive two hours to the rink.

And why wasn’t it “enough for the executives”?

Two words: Private equity.

[F]or the owners of the Atlantic Hockey Federation—the youth-hockey association that pulls together elite teams from Connecticut and many other states, as far west as Arizona—kids’ sports is a cutthroat business, a way to make a handful of people very rich. Black Bear Sports Group owns the AHF, several other youth hockey leagues, and many of the rinks where the teams practice and play. Methodically and quietly, Black Bear—backed by the private-equity firm Blackstreet Capital Holdings—is tightening its stranglehold over the youth-hockey infrastructure along the Eastern Seaboard. Whereas [Murphy’s son] Rider sees hockey as character-building fun, Black Bear’s objective is far simpler: to make a grotesque amount of money.

Here’s how Blackstreet describes itself:

Blackstreet Capital Holdings, LLC is a privately held diversified operating company that owns and manages lower middle market businesses. Blackstreet Capital Holdings, LLC is not a private equity fund. Instead it is a permanent holding company that seeks opportunistic investments in debt and equity of lower middle market ($25-$150 million in revenue) businesses that are typically underperforming, under financial distress and/or in out of favor industries. Blackstreet seeks opportunities in a range of industries including education, manufacturing, consumer products, sports and entertainment, distribution, retail, technology, consumer finance and franchising. Currently, Blackstreet has 8 subsidiaries.

Note their focus on “lower middle market ($25-$150 million in revenue) businesses that are typically underperforming, under financial distress and/or in out of favor industries.” The list of their targets includes: manufacturing, distribution, retail, education, consumer products, sports and entertainment, consumer finance, healthcare and technology. They are forever looking to find the weakest businesses in those herds. But the canary may well be the traditional model of youth sports which, as Murphy describes, was…

…managed primarily by local park departments, parent-led leagues, and nonprofit groups such as sPop Warner and the Catholic Youth Organization. Parents’ dues went to support their work, not to maximize outside investors’ returns. The extent of commercialization was limited to a handful of local businesses donating a few hundred dollars to sponsor teams (my very first Little League team was sponsored by Dillon-Baxter Funeral Home, and our main rival was the team sponsored by Dillon-Baxter’s main rival, D’Esopo Funeral Chapel). Youth sports were mostly treated as a public good.

But not anymore.

As Sen. Murphy, who just co-sponsored legislation to ban private equity in youth sports, also notes:

Billion-dollar private-equity groups are rapidly buying up leagues and affiliated services. For instance, Varsity Brands, a company owned by the private-equity firm KKR, has a dominant position in youth competitive cheerleading.

From the perspective of pure, Milton Friedman-style, supply-siders … profiteering, publicly-run, not-for-profit youth sports was and is ripe for the picking.

The Aspen Institute’s Project Play initiative keeps track of youth participation in organized sports and, as of their last tabulation in 2023, an estimated “27.3 million youth ages 6-17 participated on a sports team or took sports lessons afterschool or on weekends.” That translates to 55.4% of America’s kids playing organized sports, which has ballooned to a $40 billion per year industry.

Now in 2026, the overall number is likely closer to 30 million kids. Either way, that’s a lot of kids and a lot of money. And parents are usually highly-motivated to bend over backwards to get their kids into sports, particularly as one study after another shows youth participation in team sports leads to great outcomes. Parents want their kids to thrive and they don’t want their kids left out. In other words, they and their kids present something of a captive market, particularly as leagues running public interest-based models that rely on kids selling candy bars and coupon books … get crushed by slicker, well-financed alternatives by Blackstreet, KKR, and BPEA EQT, among others.

Amazingly enough, just one day after Sen. Murphy’s piece (which was excerpted from his presidential run-teasing book) fingered Blackstreet and its appetite for “lower middle market” opportunities … Mergers & Acquisitions published a “news analysis” piece titled ”The New Battle for the Lower Middle Market: How to Win Over Owners Who Don’t Want to Sell.”

The accompanying tease for the piece asks “What does it take to convince a hesitant potential target to sell?” and invites circling vultures “hunting for deals in today’s sluggish M&A market” to “read on to find out” how to convince reluctant, “founder-owned businesses that, in many cases, have never seriously considered a sale”

And the answer is … “psychology”:

In today’s environment where competition for quality assets is extremely intense, the firms winning mandates are often the ones that can convince hesitant owners they’re buying more than a company — they’re becoming stewards of a legacy.

Stewards of a legacy? Private equity? Is that how they’ve been able to gobble-up mom and pop HVAC shops in Idaho? And bowling alleys, car washes, dental practices, veterinary clinics, bakeries, ice cream shops, handyman business and mobile home parks?

Private equity’s track record of stewardship is at best lackluster. Even worse, the endgame for private equity is the opposite of legacy preservation … it’s all about the profitable exit. Every asset they buy has an exit in its future. Along the way, the asset made be bled and the carcass pieced out. Or it will be rationalized and overhead cut for a maximum return as they head out the door.

But there is a problem brewing.

Private Equity is buying up all sorts of assets because, like sharks, they have to keep on moving to live … in PE’s case, their lifeblood is attracting and retaining investors. But, as Forbes reported back in April, the exits are “clogged” and the assets are piling up:

Bain estimates that the industry is sitting on roughly 32,000 unsold companies worth $3.8 trillion. Average holding periods have stretched to around seven years, compared with the five-to-six-year pattern that defined much of the prior decade. McKinsey also estimates that assets held longer than four years now represent 52% of total buyout-backed inventory, the highest level on record.

Forbes observed that it “creates a strange but logical reality” wherein firms “may still need to buy” despite not being able to sell. They are squaring that circle by investing in “smaller, more controllable opportunities” … a.k.a. mom and pop shops they have to psychologically cajole into believing their legacy is safe with them when, in fact, it is just a matter of time until it is sold or parted-out like Buick with a blown head gasket.

Private Equity-Owned Retinal Practices Perform Fewer Retinal Detachment Procedures
https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterubel/2026/05/20/private-equity-owned-retinal-practices-perform-fewer-retinal-detachment-procedures/

Private Equity Hospitals Linked to Worse Outcomes for Patients With COPD
https://www.docwirenews.com/post/private-equity-hospitals-linked-to-worse-outcomes-for-patients-with-copd

New report raises questions about private equity Medicaid contractors
https://pestakeholder.org/news/new-report-raises-questions-about-private-equity-medicaid-contractors/

Private capital’s $1 trillion bet on the American retirement account
https://www.investmentnews.com/retirement-planning/private-capitals-1-trillion-bet-on-the-american-retirement-account/266697

North Carolina private equity firm acquires part of Jay Industrial Repair
https://www.bizjournals.com/birmingham/news/2026/05/21/private-equity-buys-part-of-jay-industrial.html

Trinity Hunt Partners Forms Elevation Landscape Group With Investment in Landscape Endeavors
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260521677924/en/Trinity-Hunt-Partners-Forms-Elevation-Landscape-Group-With-Investment-in-Landscape-Endeavors

Private-equity firm buys apartments in Seattle as deal flow slows
https://www.costar.com/article/349190913/private-equity-firm-buys-apartments-in-seattle-as-deal-flow-slows

Private equity firms now own 1 in 8 American apartments
https://pestakeholder.org/news/private-equity-firms-now-own-1-in-8-american-apartments/

Private Equity Is Buying REITs Hand Over Fist
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4905911-private-equity-is-buying-reits-hand-over-fist

Private Equity’s NFL Buying Spree Continues With Browns Deal At $9 Billion Value
https://www.benzinga.com/markets/private-markets/26/05/52701116/private-equitys-nfl-buying-spree-continues-with-browns-deal-at-9-billion-value

The NFL’s private equity obsession threatens competition
https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/nfl-private-equity-obsession-threatens-175850720.html

Notable Utah Alum Says Private Equity Deal ‘Sold Off Their Future’
https://www.heartlandcollegesports.com/2026/05/20/notable-utah-alum-says-private-equity-deal-sold-off-their-future/

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Known colloquially as kayayei—which literally means “head porters”—the women are expected to navigate the narrow alleys of the tightly-packed market and deliver the bales to one of the market’s many retailers … all for less than $1 per day.

Atmos recently profiled a kayayo named Najiha Yahaya. She left her home in a rural farming community at age 15 in the hope she could “earn just enough money for books and a school uniform before returning home.” Soon after arriving in Accra, Yahaya joined the ranks of roughly a thousand women who toil in “one of the largest secondhand clothing markets in the world,” often at the expense of their physical health:

Carrying things on one’s head has been the norm in Ghana for millennia, but the routine expectation that kayayei should be able to haul dangerously heavy loads multiple times a day in the secondhand clothing market is something else entirely.

Beyond noticing pain, most kayayei aren’t aware of what head-carrying is doing to their bodies. So in 2021, The Or Foundation set out to try quantifying those health impacts. The organization brought 100 kayayei between the ages of 12 and 40 to see Dr. Naa Asheley Ashietey, a chiropractor who X-rayed all the participants and provided a basic health screening.

What Ashietey saw deeply alarmed her. The burden these girls and women had borne was etched into their bones. She saw teenagers and young women whose spines had degenerated so severely that they looked like they belonged to someone decades older. Some had developed bone spurs. Others had discs so worn down that their spinal bones were literally rubbing against one another, pinching nerves and causing intense pain. Others still had lost the natural curve in their neck and spine, or conversely, developed scoliosis. Many sustained foot injuries, too, from tripping while carrying heavy loads.

The physical toll is compounded by the psychological abuse they endure as internal migrants from Ghana’s rural north:

“People really abuse them in the market because they are a minority,” said Mambaru Mustapha, who works on a scholarship for kayayei created by the nonprofit The Or Foundation, an environmental justice organization that works extensively with kayayei. “People literally call them animals.”

Despite it all, women still go to the market in search of a subsistence living. Yahaya doesn’t think they have much of a choice:

“It’s something I don’t think anybody will wish to be doing,” Yahaya told Atmos, describing it as an option women take up when the only other alternatives they can see are stealing or sex work. “Head porting is a slavery.”

The profile’s author, Whitney Bauck, admitted that the comparison between slavery and head porting “can feel jarring, especially considering the long, grim shadow that chattel slavery still casts on both sides of the Atlantic.” But, with that said:

[T]he comparison to slavery is one that you hear over and over when you spend time talking to kayayei, former kayayei, and the people who advocate for them. Some girls are literally trafficked, lured to Accra by an agent who promises good jobs and then keeps all the money the girls earn, effectively entrapping them without resources hundreds of miles from their families.

And Bauck thinks it’s no coincidence that “a fashion system built on excess, in which companies and governments in the Global North export their waste to the Global South and pass it off as charity,” is replicating an “extractive dynamic” that “echoes throughout fashion’s history”:

In the 18th and 19th centuries, African labor was exploited at the beginning of the supply chain on cotton farms in the Americas; in the 21st, African labor is being exploited at the end of the supply chain to handle textile waste. The names have changed, but a business model built on human rights abuses remains.

…and…

This, perhaps, is where the troubling comparison to slavery that Yahaya and so many others make starts to feel most apt. Though the system harming kayayei is barbed by the disregard and discrimination of their fellow Ghanaians at home, it’s ultimately fed by a giant monster of capitalism designed to enrich wealthy people, mostly in the Global North, without whom the system wouldn’t exist in the first place. Whether it’s garment workers in Bangladesh dying in unsafe factories, forests in Brazil dying to clear space for leather-producing farms, or kayayei dying under the burden of textile waste, the modern fashion industry has built its record-breaking profits on treating some lives as disposable.

The standard-bearer of fashion’s disposability-driven business model is, of course, the aforementioned Shein. Long dogged by troubling labor practices that include child labor, it has seen meteoric growth over the last decade with its ultra-fast model that entices consumers with a non-stop barrage of new products. It’s basically planned obsolescence on two levels—both in terms of quality and style. The clothes are not meant to last on either count. Shein is not alone is profiting off fast fashion’s zone-flooding approach to selling garments. Temu, Zara, H&M and Forever 21 have also capitalized on the fast or, as it’s now called, the ultra-fast fashion phenomenon that, Sustainably Chic recently noted, has humans “consuming 400% more clothing compared to 20 years ago” and, therefore, generating “82 pounds of textile waste every single year.”

In total, humans discard more than 92 million tons of textiles annually, while only 0.3% are kept in circulation. That’s more than enough, though, to compress the spines of kayayei in Accra.

And it’s not likely to change for the foreseeable future.

In fact, the just-announced $100 million sale of “ethical,” direct-to-consumer fashion brand Everlane to ultra-fast fashion behemoth Shein is a seminal moment for the $1.84 trillion global apparel business. In the years since it launched in 2011, Everlane stood in direct opposition to the wasteful, abusive fast fashion business model that catapulted Shein to the top of the ultra-fast food chain. Here’s how Vogue described the “radically transparent” company:

Launched in 2011, Everlane came up in the age of “ethical capitalism” and millennial optimism, when the general consensus was that the most sustainable thing people could do was eat a vegan diet, boycott air travel, and put their dollars behind brands that bucked the status quo. With its promises of “radical transparency” on pricing and supply chains, Everlane was well-positioned to capitalize on this, and its elevated basics quickly gained a devoted following — not to mention a $600 million valuation at its 2020 peak.

But, as Vogue explains, it was downhill from there:

[T]he brand’s sustainability chops took a hit in 2020, when an investigation in The New York Times unraveled its promise off the back of accusations about union-busting and a tumultuous internal culture. (At the time, co-founder Michael Preysman issued a statement saying the company had “urgent work to do to rewrite Everlane’s code of ethics”.) Sales faltered, and the situation worsened when consumers started demanding more than basic designs.

New York Times fashion reporter Jacob Gallagher elaborated on that shift away from “basic designs” in a report on the acquisition that reads like an obituary for both Everlane and the era that fostered it:

Everlane’s generic staples looked right for the moment in which it thrived — one in which millennial “blanding” in advertising and fashion saw the rise of brands like Away Luggage, Warby Parker and Glossier. Everlane was more polished than normcore — more office appropriate with its roster of cashmeres and wool work trousers — but it still offered a palate of sanitized beiges, browns and grays. Covid hurt Everlane as its office-casual offering turned inessential.

Today, the “shopping sustainably” crowd congregates on Depop, where buying used clothes is considered more eco-conscious and they can find a variegated assortment of stuff. Gen Z-ers habits are driven more by finding their “personal style” than by adopting a virtue-signaling uniform.

In the end, people seem to care much less about where and how their clothes were made, or who was making them, than they did about getting a good deal.

That was echoed by MarketWatch:

Over the past decade, brands emphasizing quality, sustainability and ethical production were rewarded with legions of shoppers and sky-high valuations. Now, those same companies are struggling to survive in an era where consumers are becoming laser-focused on one shopping metric — price.

Sadly, though, the low price consumers pay in the United States is no bargain for the nearly invisible humans around the world who ultimately bear the real cost of fast and ultra-fast fashion’s planned obsolescence. That much is clear in a new report from Fashion For Good:

The human and environmental costs of today’s fashion system are well-known. The fast fashion model runs on an accelerated ‘take-make-waste’ cycle, which while highly profitable is deeply entwined with resource depletion and exploitation. Although data is scarce, some estimates suggest that less than 2% of garment workers make a living wage, with women and marginalised groups—58–80% of the workforce—the most affected. The textiles industry is responsible for 2–8% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, uses around 15,000 chemicals, consume 215 trillion litres of water annually, and contribute roughly 9% of global microplastic pollution. Despite brands’ sustainability pledges, just 0.3% of materials are kept in use or recovered through circular practices. Production is surging, with clothing consumption projected to rise 63% between 2015 and 2030. While exact outputs are rarely disclosed, estimates suggest 100–150 billion garments are produced each year, with up to 30% never being sold. This overproduction drives intensive waste generation: about 92 million tonnes of textiles are discarded annually, with 61.4% landfilled or incinerated, 6.3% recycled, and only 8% reused.

…and…

From an environmental perspective, textile waste disposal in export destinations is linked to significant environmental and health harms. The lack of waste management systems in place means that significant volumes of textiles are informally dumped or burned, with wide ranging impacts on surrounding ecosystems. Many of these adverse environmental impacts stem from the increasing prevalence of synthetic fibres in clothing. Fossil fuel-based synthetics have come to dominate global fibre production, with polyester alone now accounting for around 59% of total output, of which approximately 88% is fossil-based with polyester alone making up more than half. When discarded in unmanaged landfills or burned in the open, synthetic microfibres enter ecosystems, where they do not biodegrade and can persist in soil and marine environments for centuries Burning textiles releases heavy metals, acid gases, particulates, and dioxins into the air, contributing to a range of adverse health effects. The full range of risks posed by fibre fragment pollution remains poorly understood as they can disrupt natural systems even at trace levels. Microfibres are highly mobile, making it difficult to quantify their distribution and accumulation across air, soil, and water, with existing research focused predominantly on aquatic pathways. Natural fibres also shed significantly and can persist in the environment, and their biodegradability depends not only on material origin but on environmental conditions and the chemical and mechanical treatments applied during production. Adverse environmental impacts affect low-income and historically exploited countries where discarded textiles end up disproportionately, underscoring the relevance of a waste colonialism lens when examining the export of used textiles.

The acceleration of fast fashion to ultra-fast fashion likely sealed Everlane’s fate. While the post-covid impact of chronic inflation is clear, Shein’s business model also changed consumer expectations and desires. Consumers have been trained to expect much more for much less, thanks in no small part to Shein’s accelerated model:

Ultra-fast fashion represents a sharp escalation of the industry’s growth model, with business structures built on real-time trend responsiveness, ultra-low prices, and algorithm-driven marketing. The scale is unprecedented: in April 2022, H&M had added 4,414 new styles to its website (and Boohoo 18,343.) Meanwhile, Shein had already introduced 314,877. Shein has since become the world’s largest apparel retailer (2023–2024) and the most Googled brand globally, overtaking Nike and adidas. Such relentless product turnover undermines the potential impact of downstream circular strategies like Rewear. Without upstream measures to slow down production, Rewear becomes a parallel market that coexists with, rather than counters, the environmental damage of fast and ultra-fast fashion.

That marriage of ultra-fast fashion and resale apps like Vinted—”an online second-hand marketplace that just last week boasted of its $8bn value”—is, according to The Independent’s Esme Gordon Craig, driving more consumption:

Vinted can encourage overconsumption; its business model is fuelled, if not dependent, upon our love for impulse buying and the ease with which we discard items. The doomscrolling element of the app only amplifies this. Presenting itself in the same way as social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok enables it to wield a similarly addictive quality. I have friends who spend hours – and I mean hours – scrolling on Vinted, something I’d argue is largely driven by the app’s design.

…and…

One friend described purchases on Vinted as an “addictive dopamine hit” which “cannot be matched by normal shopping”. It can lead to the purchase of countless products we neither want nor need – too many times has a Vinted package arrived at my door that I had all but forgotten about. Even worse, when we don’t return them, these unwanted items of clothing, shoes or accessories can end up going in – you’ve guessed it – the bin.

Unfortunately, burying it in a local landfill is probably preferable to shipping it out to places like Ghana, where could end up in a 120 pound bale or as refuse despoiling Ghana’s wetlands. Frankly, there is only one real answer to this problem:

I’ve come to realise that Vinted works hand in hand with the throwaway culture that characterises many affordable retail brands. When shopping in the likes of H&M and Zara with friends, we’ll often purchase a top with the comfort of knowing that, if we decide we don’t like it, we can always sell it on Vinted.

The one true solution is to buy less.

Could we get by on 200 pounds of new clothing per year? Or 100 pounds?

Perhaps even buy well-made items sewn to last?

If not, you can pull up the Shein app and wait for the packages to roll in. If you do, keep in mind that the less your pay, the more it costs somebody else.

Reconomy Report Finds Circularity Solutions Not Meeting the Scale of Textile Waste
https://wwd.com/sourcing-journal/sustainability/report-finds-solutions-not-meeting-scale-of-waste-1238973596/

Clothes are flowing to landfills. University of Dayton students are trying to decrease the waste stream
https://www.statenews.org/section/the-ohio-newsroom/2026-05-18/clothes-are-flowing-to-landfills-university-of-dayton-students-are-trying-to-decrease-the-waste-stream

The world sends its fast fashion to this Indian city. Its residents pay a price
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/09/india/india-panipat-textile-recycling-intl-hnk-dst

Centre rejects portrayal of India as ‘dumping ground’ for fast-fashion waste from Western countries
https://www.deccanherald.com/india/centre-rejects-portrayal-of-india-as-dumping-ground-for-fast-fashion-waste-from-western-countries-4002866

Textile waste emerges as Kenya’s new ocean crisis
https://nation.africa/kenya/climate/textile-waste-emerges-as-kenya-s-new-ocean-crisis-5457726

Fashion’s resale boom risks a new era of ‘waste colonialism’
https://www.just-style.com/features/fashions-resale-boom-risks-a-new-era-of-waste-colonialism

Everlane, Shein, and the Limits of the Ethical Consumer
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/05/everlane-shein-sale-sustainable-fashion/687218/

EPA Advances Comprehensive PFAS Strategy with Legally Defensible, Practical, Scientifically Sound Drinking Water Protections

And this is how The New York Times headlined today’s announcement by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and HHS Secretary RFK Jr.:

E.P.A. to End Some Limits on ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water

…and The Washington Post:

EPA wants to repeal limits on ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water

…and The Hill:

Trump proposes partial rollback of ‘forever chemical’ drinking water protections

…and NOTUS:

The EPA Wants to Rescind Four Forever Chemical Limits in Drinking Water

…and, just for good measure, the conservative Washington Examiner:

EPA and HHS propose rescinding parts of Biden’s PFAS limits in drinking water

Here’s a key excerpt from the Examiner’s report:

The proposals come as the EPA and HHS have faced backlash from MAHA advocates to urgently address environmental health issues. For instance, in early December, more than 2,800 people signed a petition urging the White House to fire Lee Zeldin, head of the EPA.

MAHA’s festering anger is why Zeldin had RFK Jr. by his side for today’s feeble, Jedi Mind Trick-like attempt to convince MAHA that “these are not the droids you are looking for.”

Apparently, they believe catch phrases like “holistic approach” and “gold-standard science” will somehow obscure the plainly obvious fact that they are delaying the implementation of already-finalized restrictions on demonstrably toxic “forever chemicals” in drinking water. Here’s how The Washington Post described a move RFK Jr. comically characterized as advancing “the Make America Healthy Again agenda”:

[T]he EPA’s proposal would end the Biden-era drinking water limits for four toxic PFAS compounds: GenX, PFHxS, PFNA and PFBS. The agency said in a statement that it would evaluate those PFAS and issue new regulations, while stating it “cannot predetermine the outcome” of that process.

It will also allow utilities to opt in to extensions of up to two additional years to comply with limits on the amounts of two other prevalent compounds, known as PFOS and PFOA. The EPA had started the process earlier for regulating those chemicals, which are among the most studied PFAS.

Now, despite what we already know about the impact and ubiquity of forever chemicals …. and despite restrictions already in place … Zeldin and Kennedy are resetting the process back to square one. Zeldin claims the Biden Administration “cut corners and failed to follow the law” and, once they “fix that error,” the EPA will produce “standards water systems can actually implement” and “hold up to scrutiny.”

What that really means is Zeldin seeks weaker standards that are cheaper to implement and easier to defend when a purveyor of PFAS inevitably challenges the restrictions in court. It also means at least two more years of forever chemicals in drinking water (from 2029 to 2031) and it opens the door to more delay tactics and revisions as the EPA does more research to confirm what we already know.

None of that is lost on the MAHA movement RFK Jr. used as a bargaining chip with then-candidate Trump. In the end, RFK Jr. got the power he craved, Trump got the votes he needed … and it appears that MAHA is getting the shaft:

Many activists in the MAHA base have already expressed disillusionment with the Trump administration over its backing of a controversial weed killer and previous plans to delay deadlines for water utilities to limit two types of PFAS in drinking water. Some on Monday described the E.P.A.’s effort to describe their plan as positive for public health as misleading.

“We have more than enough evidence to show that forever chemicals are harmful to human health,” said Kelly Ryerson, who is known as the Glyphosate Girl on social media, “I would strongly advise the E.P.A. not to move forward on deregulating PFAS if they want to win the November midterms.”

Unfortunately for the Glyphosate Girl and the rest of the MAHA Moms who banked on RFK Jr.’s promises, the mounting headwinds Republicans face this November may not be enough to trump the power and influence of the industries they thought they were fighting when they followed RFK Jr. into Trump’s fold.

An unnamed Trump official confirmed as much when RFK Jr.’s controversial choice for Surgeon General was retracted by the White House. Per CNN:

“I hate to say it, but I think they’re a little bit overrated,” said one Trump adviser. “To some extent, MAHA has always been a paper tiger.”

Perhaps.

Then again, that was about ten days before Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy lost his primary race against a Trump-endorsed, MAHA-embraced alternative, Cassidy’s vote to confirm RFK Jr. notwithstanding.

Ultimately, Cassidy’s discomfort with RFK Jr.’s pick for Surgeon General was a key motivator for MAHA.

As NBC News noted last week during the final stretch of the campaign, MAHA was “working hard to take Cassidy down and install Trump-backed Rep. Julia Letlow as the Republican nominee” after Trump and Kennedy both blamed Cassidy for stalling Dr. Casey Means’ nomination to be surgeon general.

Whether or not MAHA tipped the scales in Louisiana or tips the scales in November, we can all be certain that Trump’s EPA will continue to keep its thumb on the scales whenever it benefits polluters. - jp

EPA moves to fast-track air permitting for data centers, power plants, other industry
https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/energy_and_environment/epa-moves-to-fast-track-air-permitting-for-data-centers-power-plants-other-industry/article_33ac2d25-dff2-4e0f-a539-dff051df4597.html

EPA Proposing To Delay Tier 4 Emissions Standards By Two Years, Then Review It
https://gmauthority.com/blog/2026/05/epa-proposing-to-delay-tier-4-emissions-standards-by-two-years-then-review-it/amp/

Ford Backed Group Supports EPA Emissions Rollback Proposal
https://fordauthority.com/2026/05/ford-backed-group-supports-epa-emissions-rollback-proposal/

EPA rejects Hawaii plan to shutter oil-fired power plants
https://www.eenews.net/articles/epa-rejects-hawaii-plan-to-shutter-oil-fired-power-plants/

Iowa Waterways at Risk as EPA Allows More Toxic Waste from Coal Plants
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/15/iowa-waterways-at-risk-as-epa-allows-more-toxic-waste-from-coal-plants/

Groups Sue Trump EPA Over Iowa Waters Impaired by Cancer-Linked Nitrates
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/2026/05/14/groups-sue-trump-epa-over-iowa-waters-impaired-by-cancer-linked-nitrates/

Critics warn EPA plan would let developers start building before air permits are approved
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/2026/05/14/groups-sue-trump-epa-over-iowa-waters-impaired-by-cancer-linked-nitrates/

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President Xi said as much in his opening statement’s reference to the “Thucydides Trap” :

“Can China and the United States overcome the ‘Thucydides Trap’ and create a new paradigm for major-country relations? Can they work together to address global challenges and inject more stability into the world?”

It was a rather pointed use of an analysis first made in 1980 by American historical novelist Herman Wouk. Wouk compared the conditions that led to the Peloponnesian War between Greece and Sparta to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Over time, it became shorthand for the apparent inevitability of war between a ruling and a rising power. And it has since been repurposed by academics and pundits to describe this century’s competition between the US and China. But now we have the President of China using it to characterize his nation’s relationship with the ruling power he was hosting for bilateral meetings during a state visit.

It was a bold statement of a new reality reflected by the fact Trump not only came back empty-handed, he also assumed a conciliatory posture on Taiwan, student visas and Chinese ownership of US farmland. That’s because America has already fallen into the Trap. In many ways, it’s been there since 9/11.

The United States’ power has increasingly come to rest solely on military force in the In the twenty-five years since the towers fell. It is, to use Trump’s favorite phrase, the only real card the US has to play after nearly a century of non-stop wars, interventions, incursions, bombings and drone strikes involving at least two dozen countries.

Contrarily, it’s been nearly four decades since China attacked another country. Instead of pouring trillions into wars and weapons it sells to and rains on other countries, it builds infrastructure and soccer stadiums around the developing world. It also issues loans without the “do as I say, not as I do” provisions the United States applies to nearly every relationship. And it’s now filling the voids America is leaving behind as it exits the world stage, like it did on the issue of climate.

Now, ironically, the world is turning to the rising power’s vast lead on renewable energy and electric vehicles to mitigate the fallout of the ruling power’s latest illicit war of choice. Trump has doubled-down on the same old cocktail of oil and war at the very time the world increasingly seeks alternatives to both.

China is offering the world the future. The US is clinging to its past.

That difference was on full display during Trump’s visit. Xi projected an image of China as an educated, cosmopolitan, outwardly-looking “rising power,” while Trump was perfectly cast as the embodiment of a willfully ignorant, parochial, inwardly-looking “ruling power” that risks ensnaring the whole world in the “trap.”

The divergence runs deep, too … and in surprising ways.

While the United States is descending into a demon-haunted world of religious zealotry, tribal conflict and chest-thumping benightedness, its main geopolitical adversary is rewriting the story of human evolution.

Paleoanthropologist Xiaobo Feng of Shanxi University led a team of scientists who reconstructed three “crushed” skulls. For years the skulls were identified as examples of Homo erectus, a widespread ancestor of the last common ancestor (Homo heidelbergensis) of Neanderthals, Denisovans and, possibly, modern humans.

Because the skulls (a.k.a. Yunxian 1, 2 and 3) had been crushed and distorted during fossilization, some scientists remained unconvinced they were examples of Homo erectus. So, they “corrected” the distorted skulls with new 3-D models that made it clear previous analyses had been wrong. The skulls found along the banks of the Yan River were not Homo erectus. Instead, they appear closely related to “Dragon Man,” a hominin suspected to be a “Denisovan.” Like Neanderthals, Denisovans were contemporaries of our direct ancestors (Homo sapiens) … and some contemporary humans carry the Denisovan DNA to prove it.

What this means, according to a British scientist who worked on the team and co-authored the paper, is that our species may have appeared far earlier than 300,000 years ago. Said Professor Chris Stringer to the British Natural History Museum:

“Our analysis suggests that all large-brained humans from the last 800,000 years or so can probably be put into one of five groups. These are the groups of Asian Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, the Homo longi group which likely contains the Denisovans, and of our own species Homo sapiens.

“What’s revolutionary about our analysis is that it suggests all these five lineages trace their ancestry back more than a million years, which is much older than almost everyone has said, including me. And there are a couple of aspects that suggest that it could be an even more ancient divergence.”

In addition to altering the timeline of our evolution, it may also change the roadmap:

It also opens the door for the potential that our own lineage first emerged somewhere in Eurasia, before populations migrated into Africa where Homo sapiens then evolved.

That hypothesis has yet to be tested against the African fossil record. But when it does, don’t be surprised if a Chinese paleoanthropologist is the lead scientist. In fact, you shouldn’t be surprised that 11 of the 12 scientists who co-authored this reconsideration of the “crushed skulls” were Chinese scientists.

In China, paleo is more than diet. It’s a great career.

Back in 2018, the Smithsonian Magazine dubbed China “the new epicenter of paleontology.” The government met a perceived “need for popular science education” by building “many new museums of natural history or geology” around the country. Seven years later, an academic survey of a century of Chinese paleontology details a thriving, well-funded scientific community that attracts some young paleontologists because they see it as “an advantageous career rather than out of their personal interest.”

Yeah, let’s repeat that … in China, young people go into paleontology because they see it as “an advantageous career rather than out of their personal interest.”

In the US, young people only go into paleontology or paleoanthropology out of personal interest. It is not an “advantageous career.”

Quite to the contrary.

Speaker Of The House Mike Johnson built his advantageous career on the belief that the Earth is around 10k years old and that humans were manifested by a supernatural being. He even helped Creationist Ken Ham build the Ark Encounter amusement park in Kentucky, where kids can learn that dinosaurs and humans were contemporaries and evolution is a hoax.

The Ark Encounter is a massive “replica” of Noah’s Ark that serves as a unnatural museum … or, if you prefer, a supernatural museum. Back in 2015, Ham’s organization hired Johnson as legal counsel and Johnson eventually secured millions of dollars in tax incentives for the bogus barge. Johnson was serving in Louisiana’s state legislature at the time … and occasionally hosting a religious radio show for the Family Research Council.

Not coincidentally, the war that led Trump to ask China for help opening the Strait of Hormuz is being managed by a former FOX News infotainer who belongs to an ultra-jingoistic Predestinationist Christian sect. Among other things, his fellow believers seek the establishment of a “Christian Nation” with its laws and culture based on Christian values (hello Sharia Law!). They also advocate repealing the 19th Amendment (only male heads of household get to vote) and the sect teaches that the Earth is around 6,000 years old. As for those pesky fossils? Well, the sect’s leader loves to say evolution is “stupid” and he speculates that fossils were likely planted sometime “after the fall of man” in Genesis.

Meanwhile, the day before Trump landed in China, yet another team of Chinese paleologists published their latest advancement of the understanding of hominin evolution. El Pais explained their findings:

Researchers in China have analysed proteins from the tooth enamel of six fossils dating back around 400,000 years — five men and one woman — found at sites across much of the country from north to south. They were able to recover two proteins, and one of them — the M273V variant of the enamel protein ameloblastin — is key. The results show that this protein is present in all the fossils analyzed, which belonged to our ancestor Homo erectus. The same compound had previously been identified in the teeth of another human group, the Denisovans — close relatives of Neanderthals, themselves the species most closely related to our own.

Like the research cited above, this continues the lengthening of the human evolutionary timeline well-beyond the six to ten thousand years American political leaders defiantly cling to like a life preserver … although their version preserves delusions about the origins of life:

The finding implies that, at some point around 400,000 years ago, Homo erectus, which originated in Africa, and the Denisovans, a human population adapted to Eurasia, encountered one another, had sex, and produced fertile offspring. It is the oldest known episode of interbreeding between human groups, and the first to feature Homo erectus, a species that until recently had been largely overlooked.

It’s all part of a ever-more complex picture of the world our ancestors shared with up to five other hominin species:

Although we already knew that modern humans descend from Homo erectus, and that this species was the leading candidate behind the so-called “super-archaic introgressions” in our genome, this is the first conclusive proof. The new evidence adds to what was already known: that Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals, who left up to 4% of their DNA in us; and that Neanderthals interbred with Denisovans. Homo sapiens did the same, leaving Denisovan DNA in some present-day populations, with invaluable genetic legacies — such as the traits that allow humans to live at extreme altitudes, including the Himalayas.

This is the kind of research that happens when a rising power becomes a great power and it has the will and the money to invest in science that does not promise profits or lead to some military application. A nation that can afford to make paleontology an “advantageous career” is demonstrating its distinct advantage over nations that cannot afford it. The advantage is even greater over nations that simply refuse to do it out of a desperate need to preserve an ancient myth.

Interestingly enough, it’s not uncommon for an American Christian—particularly an Evangelical—to believe evolution is a hoax perpetrated by Satan himself. “Satan’s Lie.” as it’s sometimes called, is rooted in “worldliness” and a “man-centered deception” that seeks to usurp God’s sovereignty and replace it with the idolatrous worship of the natural world, much like paganism. Often referred to as “pagan science,” the epithet reflects an ignorance that is willful and perhaps even necessary to maintain the myths people have about themselves and the nature of their country.

Preserving myths well past their expiration date may be the last redoubt of a ruling power on the wane. That the age of the Earth or the widely-evident process of evolution are still bones of contention in “the world’s leading superpower” may be another sign that it is not equipped for the days ahead … that it is mired in denial about both the past and the future. Certainly, the rejection of the increasingly obvious is this ruling power’s defining feature at the quarter-way mark of the 21st Century.

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Fayetteville is home to “one of the largest data center developments in the country, covering 615 acres with plans for up to 16 buildings” and, Politico reports, “most months it’s the No. 1 consumer of water in the county.”

Corpus Christi is “a major petrochemical hub, and the largest industrial consumer of water in the area, according to permit statistics obtained by Inside Climate News, is a joint Exxon Mobil and Saudi Basic Industries Corporation plastics plant.”

On May 1st, Fayetteville city officials asked “all its water system customers to help conserve water by generally reducing water usage and by following the usage tips,” including “restricting all outdoor watering from 4 p.m. to 10 a.m., applying mulch around plants, covering swimming pools, and limiting overall household use.”

The residents of Corpus Christi are, WIRED reports, “already under restrictions for their water use, including limits on lawn watering and car washing.” City officials also “said last week that the city is set to reach a Level 1 drought emergency — what it defines as 180 days of water demand outpacing supply — by September.”

Fayetteville and entire state of Georgia are already there.

Taken together, the two exemplify the trade-offs currently being made between public and private interests. In both cases, the thirst for profits is (pun intended) trumping the public’s demand for readily available water. In fact, both Big Tech and Big Oil have Trump to thank for not only elevating their interests in a series of constitutionally dubious Executive Orders, but also for removing anthropogenic climate change as a regulatory concern and, frankly, as a topic of public discourse.

But that’s the thing about the changing climate. Out of mind might feel “out of sight” (a la the 1970s) if you are in a business that pollutes the climate. And Trump does seem to love businesses that pollute the climate. Trump is so committed to so-called “clean, beautiful coal,” he’s lavished at least $525 million on his petulant effort to revive an industry that had been dying a natural death.

Not coincidentally, the hyperscaling of A.I.-focused data centers is his stated reason for pulling coal from the ash heap of history. And there is no question A.I. demands a lot of energy. A team of researchers at Cornell released their projections last November:

The team found that, by 2030, the current rate of AI growth would annually put 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the emissions equivalent of adding 5 to 10 million cars to U.S. roadways.

…and…

It would also drain 731 to 1,125 million cubic meters of water per year – equal to the annual household water usage of 6 to 10 million Americans.

It’s a double-whammy, too, because the emissions are likely to exacerbate the extreme weather that currently has most of Georgia and Florida in a drought and, predictably, that has translated into an unprecedented surge in wildfires. Per The New York Times:

The fires are driven by a widespread drought gripping the Southeast. Virtually all of Georgia and 94 percent of Florida is in a state of drought ranked by the U.S. Drought Monitor as “severe” or worse.

Georgia and other Southeast states are home to much of the nation’s wood production, in the form of sprawling timber plantations used for paper and lumber. Worldwide, research has found that timber plantations can be more flammable than native forests, depending upon how they are managed.

That trend hasn’t shown up yet in the American Southeast, but fires in the region are becoming more frequent, research has shown. Scientists suspect that’s a result of climate change.

Climate change is also stalking the people of Corpus Christi:

Corpus Christi’s water supplies come overwhelmingly from surface water sources. Two of the most important local sources — the Choke Canyon Reservoir and Lake Corpus Christi — have reached critically low levels over the past few years as drought has gripped the region. As of Tuesday, they were sitting at 7.4 percent full and 8.7 percent full, respectively.

And, WIRED added, the problem is far more daunting along the banks of the Colorado River:

In February, following a winter of record-breaking heat, snowpack in various mountain ranges across the American West reached record lows. March came in even hotter, smashing records in states across the region.

“What happened in March was unprecedented and stunning and disturbing and out of this world, frankly — we had temperatures the likes of which we have never seen and couldn’t have happened without human-caused climate change,” said Brad Udall, a senior water and climate researcher at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center. “We had a crummy snowpack that went from crummy to god-awful in three weeks.”

This snowmelt crisis is having dire impacts on the Colorado River, one of the most crucial water sources in the West, which provides water for 40 million people across seven states. River flow in some areas on the Colorado had slowed to a trickle last week, thanks to the early snowmelt this year.

Udall is right about the month of March. Here‘s Climate Central’s analysis:

• Overall, the U.S. saw unprecedented temperatures in March, with an average anomaly — or difference from normal — of 5.8°F across 192 cities.

• While the eastern U.S. experienced above-average temperatures, a record-shattering heat wave anchored over the West Coast drove the overall national trend.

• Eighty cities experienced one of their top five warmest March temperatures on record. On average, stations have data dating back to 1893.

• Elevated Climate Shift Index values occurred in eight out of nine U.S. Climate Regions, including the Southwest, West, Northern Rockies and Plains, South, Southeast, Upper Midwest, Ohio Valley, and Northeast.

• March 2026 was exceptionally warm, mirroring the long-term March warming trends, which show that nearly all cities analyzed have warmed since 1970, consistent with findings from Climate Central’s 2025 Winter Package.

It would be tempting to call March was a “harbinger of things to come,” but it is already here:

‘It’s Like It Didn’t Even Rain’: Drought Persists in South Dakota
https://www.agriculture.com/it-s-like-it-didn-t-even-rain-drought-persists-in-south-dakota-11971148

South Dakota begins to issue drought warnings, orders
https://www.keloland.com/news/capitol-news-bureau/south-dakota-begins-to-issue-drought-warnings-orders/

Drought, low snowpack raise prevent plant questions in Nebraska
https://www.brownfieldagnews.com/news/drought-low-snowpack-raise-prevent-plant-questions-in-nebraska/

Record low snowpack leads to water supply, drought concerns across Washington
https://komonews.com/news/local/record-low-snowpack-leads-to-water-supply-drought-concerns-across-washington-wildfire-season-agriculture-farming-growth-heat-fire-risk-river-resevoir-summer-smoke-snow-rain-storm-supply-weather-forecast

Oregon declares drought for three more counties across state
https://capitalpress.com/2026/05/12/oregon-declares-drought-for-three-more-counties-across-state/

As a Colorado Aquifer Runs Low, Dangerous Heavy Metals Threaten Rural Communities’ Drinking Water
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08052026/colorado-drought-threatens-rural-drinking-water/

Colorado’s Drought Task Force ramps up response to record-breaking conditions
https://coloradosun.com/2026/05/11/colorados-drought-task-force-response-record-breaking-conditions/

Officials urge voluntary water cuts as drought persists in Utah
https://www.fox13now.com/news/utah-drought/officials-urge-voluntary-water-cuts-as-drought-persists-in-utah

Emergency fishing limit increase at Utah reservoirs amid drought

https://www.abc4.com/news/local-news/emergency-fishing-limit-utah-reservoirs-drought/

York County implements mandatory water-use restrictions amid drought
https://www.wbtv.com/video/2026/05/12/york-county-implements-mandatory-water-use-restrictions-amid-drought/

Drought continues to impact water quality and river levels across Florida
https://www.wmnf.org/drought-continues-impact-water-quality-river-levels-florida-wmnf/

Water emergencies spread across South Texas as drought worsens. Here’s where
https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/south-texas/article/rockport-water-emergency-22254736.php

In parched Texas, a state fund to boost water projects falls almost $3 billion short of demand
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/05/08/texas-swift-water-development-board-falls-short/

Inside the Texas Water Crisis Pitting Residents Against Industry
https://capitalandmain.com/inside-the-texas-water-crisis-pitting-residents-against-industry

Detroit Lake reaches ‘full pool’ ahead of summer despite drought
https://www.centraloregondaily.com/news/regional/detroit-lake-full-pool-drought-summer-water-levels/article_fb42126f-fedb-5237-93ea-953884ab3809.html

Over 80% of Virginia experiencing severe drought conditions
https://virginiamercury.com/briefs/over-80-of-virginia-experiencing-severe-drought-conditions/

Drought conditions in Mass. worsen after brief improvement
https://www.masslive.com/news/2026/05/drought-conditions-in-mass-worsen-after-brief-improvement.html

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Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council first tried to spin a surge in credit card “spending” as a proof that the economy is doing great.

It is “through the roof,” gushed Hassett.

Although Hassett called it “credit card spending,” it’s more accurately called “debt spending.” Even better is “debt accumulation.” And, of course, that’s what’s actually happening when people buy perishables and necessities that quickly zero-out in value when they are purchased, let alone consumed. The unavoidable truth is people are increasingly going into debt to pay for stuff they previously paid for outright, either on the spot or at the end of the month. Hassett unintentionally made that point in the same breath: “They’re spending more on gasoline, but they’re spending more on everything else too.”

He also predicted the then-forthcoming jobs report would echo the economic strength he somehow sees in people running-up their credit cards. Indeed, he was right about the jobs report exceeding expectations, with a 115k jobs created instead of an estimated 67k jobs. But, as an analysis in Yahoo!Finance makes clear, the scenario is not quite as rosy as Hassett’s grinning gob might lead some to believe.

Like all of Trump’s apple-polishers, Hassett speaks glowingly of the stock market, particularly when confronted with persistent economic concerns. Those record highs, though, reveal the K-shaped reality Hassett & Co. continue to ignore:

Tech stocks are trading at an all-time high relative to the S&P 500. At the same time, tech jobs — using BLS information payrolls as a proxy — have fallen to an all-time low as a share of total US payrolls.

Yahoo!Finance then cited this graph by the head of macro research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research:

There it is, folks—the “K” of K-shaped economics. The rich and the rest are going to two opposite directions. And it is in full-bloom in the one segment of the economy that is “booming.”

But it is really “booming,” or it is “hoarding”?

A booming economy would distribute the gains. The rest might not be getting rich, but they certainly wouldn’t be losing ground. Nor would they be increasingly locked-out of opportunities to earn an income in the one segment of the economy enjoying the most investment. As the graph illustrates, that’s exactly what’s happening.

A.I.-driven tech may be the ultimate K-shaped industry.

If the investments are successful, the jobs it creates in the near-term future may simply be recast as tasks for A.I.’s growing to-do list. And should A.I. spark the “revolution” productivity, the humans still hanging on to mid-level tech jobs will soon become superfluous.

Whether it’s the latter … or the former … or both … that’s more purchasing power drained from those on the K’s leg. It underscores the self-reinforcing nature of K-shaped economics. The more wealth and capital accumulates at the top, the more they can consume. They can then pay twenty bucks for a strawberry or seven bucks for a gallon of gas. And they can spend enough to effectively hide the struggles of millions of Americans in aggregate economic data like GDP … for now.

In the long-term, it could be that draining income and purchasing power from the K’s leg will finally create too heavy of a lift for the asset-rich arm. If the K-shape spreads and deepens through the economy, the arm may ultimately fail to prop-up a big aggregate measurement like GDP.

It appears we’re going to find out because the shape of things to come keeps coming up “K.”

For example, the day after Hassett’s much-ridiculed crowing about credit cards, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a detailed study that found the K popping-up in retail gasoline sales:

[T]hree income categories had very different experiences during the March 2026 energy price shock. Low-income households increased their nominal gas spending by the least (12 percent). However, this was accomplished because they cut their real gas consumption the most (7 percent). On the other hand, high-income households increased their nominal gas spending by the most (19 percent) in a large part because they reduced their real gas consumption the least (1 percent). Middle-income households had intermediate increases in nominal spending and decreases in real consumption at gas stations. Thus, the K-shaped consumption pattern in both nominal and real gasoline spending was strongly evident in March 2026.

It just stands to reason, given the research we’ve already seen on K-shaped consumer spending. The divide between the investor class and income earners is clear. A.I. tech is driving it, but it is a temporary anomaly or deviation of the post-Covid age? Is it something that will pass if (or when) the A.I. bubble pops?

Or is this bifurcation taking root here and around the world as globalization is methodically trumped by Silicon Valley’s technofeudal business model?

One thing is clear from the jobs report … the jobs the economy is making are service jobs and, in particularly, jobs that have lower income humans servicing the needs of higher income humans. CNN noted that “healthcare and social assistance – an industry buoyed by an aging population – was once again a leading driver of job gains.”

“Once again” was “a leading driver of job gains.” Not tech, where it’s projected $2.5 trillion will be invested this year alone. And Trump’s manufacturing boom is a bust. No, the jobs are lower-paying jobs taking care of aging, infirm Baby Boomers. That and teaching the kids of people who can afford private instruction:

The top four industries do not promise a middle class lifestyle. Maybe transportation and warehousing, although those are both destined to be automated by A.I. and humanoid robots. And look at where those mid-level, college degree-dependent jobs are going!

Frankly, that chart has the K-shaped economy written all over it and it’s going to cost us an arm and a leg. - jp

Southern California’s K-shaped summer: Who’s traveling depends on the pocketbook
https://www.ocregister.com/2026/05/02/southern-california-summer-travel-high-costs-will-keep-some-close-to-home/

With food benefit cuts looming in the US, Californians eye billionaire tax
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/5/10/with-food-benefit-cuts-looming-in-the-us-californians-eye-billionaire

Guess which half of America holds 89% of the wealth
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2026/05/09/boomers-gen-x-american-hold-wealth/89968169007/

Trillion-Dollar Redistribution: Democratic States Transfer Wealth to Republican Areas as New York Leads Migration
https://www.ktsa.com/trillion-dollar-redistribution-democratic-states-transfer-wealth-to-republican-areas-as-new-york-leads-migration/

Americans Are Flocking To These Unexpected Midwest Suburbs As Housing Affordability Cracks Major Cities
https://www.benzinga.com/real-estate/26/05/52363267/americans-are-flocking-to-these-unexpected-midwest-suburbs-as-housing-affordability-cracks-major-cities

AI is quietly splitting the housing market in two: Bay Area luxury homes are up 13%, affordable ones are collapsing
https://fortune.com/2026/05/07/ai-bay-area-housing-luxury-homes-affordability-redfin/

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Those “added restrictions” cover most of the pesticides on EPA’s recently-updated, forty-five page list of RUPs. Yeah, that’s well-over one thousand herbicides, fungicides and insecticides the EPA deems too dangerous to be sold to the general public … although not too dangerous to apply to the food we eat.

And then there is paraquat dichloride.

One of the more commonly-used RUPs, the highly toxic herbicide has been controversial since its commercial debut in 1962.

Internationally, much of the controversy stems from paraquat’s efficacy as a method of suicide. It’s been particularly pernicious in developing countries where it was readily available to distraught farmers and their families. Domestically, paraquat’s infamy was initially linked to its use as a weapon in the war on drugs.

Indeed, there was something of a paraquat “scare” in the late 1970s when a US-funded spraying campaign in Mexico sought to kill marijuana and poppy plants before they could be harvested and shipped north. They would get sprayed, but, as The Legal Examiner noted, “Mexican farmers shipped the marijuana to the U.S. for sale anyway.”

Fear of smoking tainted pot peaked in 1978 when Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Joseph Califano announced that “heavy users” of “tainted marijuana might develop fibrosis, an irreversible lung disease,” and that “less frequent smokers” risk “clinically measurable damage.”

That scare ultimately led to the end of official US involvement in the program in 1979.

But Uncle Sam couldn’t quit paraquat.

In 1983, the Reagan Administration responded to the discovery of marijuana grow operations in Georgia’s Chattahoochee Forest with a nationwide eradication plan featuring paraquat. But, as The Legal Examiner also noted, “Lawsuits quickly stopped this from happening,” although “the practice was later revived in 1988 before ending for good in the 1990s.”

And then came Roundup. The herbicide generically-known-as-glyphosate was the poison of choice in the 1990s, supplanting paraquat to quickly become the most widely-used pesticide in history. But now the powerful defoliant is enjoying a 21st century comeback.

According to a new report from The Lens, use of the inexpensive poison “more than tripled between 2006 and 2017.” Ironically, its renewed popularity is a response to the rise in resistance to glyphosate. Now roughly “35% of large commercial farms in the US” use paraquat to kill weeds and dry up crops for harvest, filling the evolving gaps in glyphosate’s effectiveness.

While paraquat made a comeback in the US, the number of countries banning its use rose to seventy-four. Despite being the world’s leading exporter, China banned its use domestically. South Korea also banned it, but, like China, it also exports it to the United States. Many of the bans were in the hopes of reducing suicides. In 2025, An academic study of paraquat’s tainted history found:

The most impactful decreases in poisonings and suicide mortality were associated with bans and phase-outs of the herbicide [23, 54]. In South Korea, where paraquat was the most important agent for self-poisoning deaths and where the ingestion of pesticides accounted for one-fifth of suicides in 2006–2010, pesticide suicide mortality halved from 5.26 to 2.67 per 100,000 people after the ban on paraquat. It was estimated that, in 2013, the regulations were followed by 847 fewer pesticide suicides, a 37% reduction in rates [35, 36]. In Sri Lanka, a cumulative effect of pesticide bans, including a paraquat ban, was estimated to have prevented 93,000 suicide deaths in 20 years up to 2015 [29]. In Taiwan, the 2018 ban on the import and production of paraquat was associated with a 37% decrease in the pesticide suicide rate in 2019, with 190 fewer suicides [38].

The problem of suicide-by-paraquat is particularly acute in India, where a recent suicide by a 16 year-old girl has, according to The Times Of India, “reignited demands for a nationwide ban on the highly toxic herbicide.” Dr. Mahesh Reddy of Doctors Against Paraquat Poison cited “dozens of cases reported every month” and “over 10 deaths in farming-dominant areas” in making the case for a ban on a poison that is readily available at fertilizer shops for less than four dollars. And that’s in spite of the fact that paraquat “has no antidote, it is fatal even in small quantities, and safer alternatives exist.”

Although suicide-by-paraquat in comparatively rare in the United States, the EPA notes on its website that “there is no antidote” and “one small sip can be fatal.” In fact, the EPA’s “One Sip Can Kill” awareness campaign was launched in 2016 as a response to a spate of mostly accidental paraquat poisonings in 2013. In 2021, the EPA finally announced new restrictions for paraquat that went well-beyond the additional restrictions already placed on it as a RUP.

The list of enforceable, paraquat-specific mitigation measures included new limits on the “scope and timing of aerial application” and a new requirement to establish “residential area drift buffers” before dusting crops. The rules also prohibited the use of human flaggers, pressurized handguns and backpack sprayers. And they required the use of closed cab farm equipment and industrial-grade respirators when applying the poison.

And that’s not all.

Other RUPs can be applied by “persons working under the supervision of a certified applicator.” But not paraquat. The EPA forbids it. Only “certified applicators” are allowed to work with it. The chemical must “always be kept secured to prevent access by children and/or other unauthorized persons.” And if there’s any lingering doubt about paraquat’s toxicity, the EPA offers these three “nevers”:

• Never be transferred to a food, drink or any other container.

• Never be stored in or around residential dwellings.

• Never be used around home gardens, schools, recreational parks, golf courses or playgrounds

Given all that, one might expect the EPA to be particularly concerned about the “47,000 pounds” of paraquat emitted into the air in 2024 by a single processing plant in Waynesboro, Mississippi.

What are the rules governing potentially deadly airborne releases of the highly-regulated poison?

The answer comes from The Lens:

Paraquat is considered a toxic chemical, but not a federally regulated air pollutant – states have the authority to regulate it but generally do not set maximum emissions standards. The Mississippi plant already, as allowed by law, emits tens of thousands of pounds of paraquat into the air, exposing workers and nearby residents. In Waynesboro, hundreds of households, most of them Black, sit within a mile of the plant.

So, the public is forbidden from buying and applying paraquat, and the EPA says paraquat should “never” be “used around home gardens, schools, recreational parks, golf courses or playgrounds.” But there is nothing to stop Sipcam Agro from filling Waynesboro’s air with as much paraquat as they and state regulators see fit. And that’s exactly what they’ve done:

The plant was previously owned by Odom Industries, which also formulated herbicides and fungicides. Under Odom, paraquat air emissions hovered around 500 pounds per year, growing to 1,500 pounds in 2022. But they spiked in 2023, when Sipcam Agro took over the facility and announced plans to expand – thanks in part to tax credits provided by the Mississippi Development Authority.

In total, Sipcam Agro emitted a staggering 81,667 pounds of paraquat during the first two years it operated the plant. When The Lens asked the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality about the massive spike in emissions, a spokesperson said:

“MDEQ is aware of the facility and has an open enforcement action related to alleged air violations. While MDEQ cannot elaborate further on an open enforcement action, please know that MDEQ regulates air emissions from the formulation of herbicides” of ingredients classified as ‘hazardous air pollutants.’ Paraquat is not considered a hazardous air pollutant.

There’s the loophole. The Lens explains:

Facilities must report any releases of chemicals considered to have adverse health or environmental effects to the EPA. But neither the EPA nor states set release limits on many of those toxic chemicals. There is no maximum threshold for paraquat emissions.

Therefore, the “open enforcement action” cited by the MDEQ spokesperson is unlikely to amount to much. Actually, it may not be related to paraquat at all. MDEQ’s spokesperson also confirmed that “the Waynesboro plant is currently applying for a permit for increased emissions of federally-regulated air pollutants, such as lead and ozone.”

Might that be the source of the “alleged air violations” under review?

Perhaps.

Either way, the citizens of Waynesboro and the surrounding county cannot depend on the EPA applying the same level of rigor to industrial emissions during the reformulation process as it does to the storage, handling and application of the reformulated product.

That’s left to the state of Mississippi.

But instead of raising concerns about the Evel Knievel-like jump from 1,500 lbs. to an average of 40,000 lbs. in the first two years under new ownership, the state rewarded Sipcam Agro with tax credits, and officials, including GOP Governor Tate Reeves, lavished praise on the company’s planned expansion of the plant in 2024. Reeves cited “Mississippi’s strong agricultural roots” for making the state “an ideal location for Sipcam Agro’s new operations.” And Wayne County Board of Supervisors President Keith Clay said Sipcam Agro’s decision to “set down roots” in the county “speaks volumes about our area’s strong, capable workforce and industry friendly attitude toward growth.”

What the supervisor failed to mention is that “industry friendly” Wayne County also ranks “in the top 7% of all US counties that reported Parkinson’s deaths between 2018 and 2024.” And he didn’t say a word about Wayne County’s Parkinson’s mortality rate, which is nearly double the national average. And those numbers may be low given that most Parkinson’s diagnoses occur after age 65 and because most of the data is drawn from the years prior to the surge in emissions after Sipcam’s takeover of the plant.

Predictably, the EPA does not accept the growing body of research that points to a direct link between paraquat and Parkinson’s. It claims that “after a thorough review of the best available science” it “has not found a clear link between paraquat exposure from labeled uses and adverse health outcomes such as Parkinson’s disease and cancer.”

Note the specific language: “exposure from labeled uses.”

Sure, if you are wearing a respirator in an enclosed cab when applying paraquat, you may escape the chemical’s wrath. But what about the emissions? Or the inevitable “pesticide drift” that turned the herbicide dicamba into one of the more controversial “cides” of the last decade? And what about the bystanders who happen to be downwind of it? Per The Lens:

A recent study found that people who live within 1,600 feet of a paraquat application site have 91% higher odds of developing Parkinson’s. And a study last year found that people living on the same water service system as a golf course had double the odds of developing Parkinson’s than those on different water systems.

For the foreseeable future, though, Wayne County’s residents will have to contend with a plant that is now the largest single emitter of paraquat in the United States. Recall that “hundreds of households, most of them Black, sit within a mile of the plant.” And they are not alone in that predicament.

The die was cast early in Cancer Alley:

Paraquat was first brought to market in the 1960s by a predecessor of Syngenta, which has been importing millions of pounds of paraquat concentrate, primarily from a facility in the UK, through the Port of New Orleans. The paraquat then is reformulated and packaged at a facility in the small town of St. Gabriel, in Iberville Parish, Louisiana, in the center of the highly polluted stretch along the Mississippi River known as “Cancer Alley.”

As a result:

The life expectancy for Black residents of Iberville Parish is 69 years, well below the US average of 78.

A pattern is emerging:

In Crisp County, Georgia, where both Drexel Chemical and Helena Industries have paraquat facilities, the life expectancy for Black residents is just 66 years – so young that symptoms may not yet have become noticeable in a person with Parkinson’s.

It’s a phenomenon mirrored by the low-income, largely Hispanic workforce that lives and works in and around California’s fields and orchards. In 2024, the Environmental Working Group produced an extensive study of paraquat’s impact on low-income Hispanic farming communities. Among the research they cited then was:

A study from 2024 shows that in California, paraquat exposure at work or at home is associated with Parkinson’s disease. Chronic exposure to paraquat increases the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease by reducing the number of neurons that produce dopamine in certain parts of the brain. Researchers have used paraquat exposure in animals to study Parkinson’s disease.

…and…

A study using data from the National Institutes of Health found workers who sprayed paraquat were more than twice as likely to develop Parkinson’s disease as those who applied other pesticides. And a meta-analysis of 13 studies found a 64 percent increase in the likelihood of developing Parkinson’s disease from paraquat exposure.

…and…

Most recently, findings from researchers at UCLA show paraquat sprayed within 500 meters, or about 1,640 feet, of where people lived and worked could more than double a person’s odds of developing Parkinson’s.

Two years later, The Lens cited a growing “mass of research” connecting the poison with Parkinson’s, including a “rigorous 2024 study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology” that specifically linked the two in “California’s Central Valley.” Again, per The Lens:

When a person inhales paraquat, it travels into the brain, killing the neurons which produce dopamine, which in some people can lead to Parkinson’s. Long-term exposure to paraquat is also linked to thyroid cancer and childhood leukemia. Farmworkers who mix or apply paraquat are 2.5 times more likely to develop Parkinson’s than farmers who’ve never used it. Even people who live near fields where paraquat is sprayed have increased risks of Parkinson’s and thyroid cancer.

None of that is moving the EPA even though it has become a point of contention with the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) community that formed around Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In an apparent bid to tamp-down MAHA’s specific concerns about paraquat and Parkinson’s, Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin made this announcement on X at the start of 2026:

More MAHA Progress! The Trump EPA has made the important, proactive decision to freshly reassess the safety of PARAQUAT. It’s all about gold-standard science and radical transparency for Americans.

Civil Eats debunked Zeldin’s claim, pointing out:

In fact, the EPA did not start a new review of paraquat. Starting with an announcement in November, Zeldin is simply continuing reviews started by the Biden administration in response to lawsuits.

In yet another irony, it was a growing list of lawsuits that led Syngenta—the inheritor of the company that brought paraquat to market in 1962—to announce this March that it was ending production of a pesticide that’s growing in popularity as glyphosate increasingly fails in the face of evolutionary adaptation.

Although their press release cites “significant competition from generic producers around the world,” paraquat accounts for less than one percent of Syngenta’s global sales. It’s far more likely that litigation is why Syngenta has decided to cut bait now. According to ConsumerNotice.org:

Syngenta’s decision to discontinue paraquat coincides with the potential resolution of the litigation surrounding the herbicide.

More than 6,500 paraquat lawsuits are pending in federal court over Parkinson’s concerns. Work on those cases has remained largely at a standstill for almost a year now as both sides worked to finalize a settlement agreement to resolve them.

Now, that settlement could be completed soon. The judge overseeing the paraquat litigation on Tuesday canceled an upcoming trial, citing a nearing settlement.

Recent court documents show that a confidential settlement agreement was signed in August. The exact terms of that agreement have not yet been released, but it could bring resolution and payouts to thousands of cases.

It could be that the coming settlement stipulates Syngenta’s exit from the paraquat business, and Syngenta decided to cut bait now and get it over with. Whatever caused Syngenta to pull the plug, it will come too late for the people of St. Gabriel, Louisiana, where Syngenta produced its poison for well-over fifty years.

Instead, it presents an opportunity for the companies that continue to import and process paraquat for farmers and agribusinesses trying to mitigate the waning efficacy of glyphosate. That’s bad news for the people living of Waynesboro, Mississippi … or anyone near paraquat production and storage facilities “in Leavenworth, Kansas; Tunica, Mississippi; St. Joseph, Missouri; and Middlesex, North Carolina,” along with “two sites each … in Cordele, Georgia and in Memphis, Tennessee.”

Perhaps the only good news is that MAHA’s outrage helped defeat a provision in the current Farm Bill that would’ve shielded pesticide makers and made it nearly impossible for states to regulate or ban poisons like paraquat.

As of today, the American Parkinson Disease Association is tracking bills that would ban, regulate or curtail the use of paraquat in fourteen states. “Business friendly” Mississippi and Cancer Alley’s Louisiana are not among them.

The Global Paraquat Trail
https://www.wuft.org/2026-04-29/the-global-paraquat-trail

Stubborn Ground: The Politics of Pesticide Regulation
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/stubborn-ground-politics-pesticide-regulation

Increasingly tied to Parkinson’s Disease, paraquat is still sprayed across fields in Pennsylvania. Why?
https://pirg.org/articles/increasingly-tied-to-parkinsons-disease-paraquat-is-still-sprayed-across-fields-in-pennsylvania-why/

Paraquat Ban: After Telangana teen’s death from paraquat poisoning, doctors and experts push for nationwide ban
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad/after-telangana-teens-death-from-paraquat-poisoning-doctors-and-experts-push-for-nationwide-ban/articleshow/129013113.cms

Paraquat at 63—the story of a controversial herbicide and its regulations: It is time to put people and public health first when regulating paraquat
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12462389/

“A Huge Setback”: New EPA Directive Could Weaken Hundreds of Chemical Regulations
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-epa-directive-chemical-assessments

One Year On: How Trump and Vance Have Changed Food, Agriculture, Health, and Climate
https://foodtank.com/news/2026/05/one-year-on-how-trump-and-vance-have-changed-food-agriculture-health-and-climate/

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Then there’s the undeniable upside of profit-motivated healthcare, both for investors and the corporate leadership that serves them. For health insurers, it means denial of coverage whenever and wherever they can. Every procedure, office visit, hospital stay and prescription they refuse to cover is money in the bank. For health systems and for-profit hospitals, it’s all about revenue generation. They want high-value procedures and lengthy hospital stays. Pharmaceutical companies want more and more users, and they invent new drugs to treat new conditions. And then there is private equity’s disastrous foray into healthcare. They seek cash cows to milk until they ultimately slaughter them and sell off the steaks.

The profit motive has served them all well.

Perhaps too well.

That’s the message Republicans attempted to embrace when a group of hospital and healthcare system CEOs faced a House Ways and Means Committee searching for “the root causes of rising health care costs in the U.S.” The Hill noted one of the challenges Republicans face now that they’ve decided to flip their script:

The hearings show Republicans are acutely aware that affordability is a top issue among voters ahead of the midterm elections and are willing to show they are holding accountable the corporations and executives they were once allied with.

Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) set the tone early when he likened the prices the CEOs charge to “borderline extortion." Then the reliably pro-capitalism conservative said this:

“Our local hospitals and physicians have been replaced by mega-corporations that put quarterly earnings over quality care. When hospitals have no competition, it’s no wonder that the sky seems to be the limit for prices.”

The unavoidable fact is that “quarterly earnings” will always trump “quality care,” and Rep. Smith knows it. That’s the nature of the Neoliberal beast unleashed by the Reagan Revolution. The bottom line is the only line that matters. Healthcare is not exempted from Friedman’s Doctrine. And that means a CEO’s sole obligation is to maximize profits for shareholders. Period. End of story.

That cold reality has made healthcare a perennial issue ever since Harris Wofford won a special election for the Pennsylvania Senate seat left vacant by the death of John Heinz in 1991. The Democrat trailed popular Republican Dick Thornburgh by as much as 47 points before pulling off “a shocking 55-to-45 victory.” Guided by the then-unknown duo of James Carville and Paul Begala, Wofford focused on voters’ angst about the cost of healthcare. His solution? National health insurance.

Pollster Mike Donilon explained his candidate’s upset victory to The Washington Post:

From the beginning, voters favored some form of national health insurance by a margin of five to one; 52 percent of them favored it strongly. Donilon tracked this group throughout the campaign and by election day, 65 percent supported Wofford. That suggests that more than 30 percent of the voters picked Wofford on the health care issue alone.

…and…

“People talked about this with a great deal of fear and anxiety,” said Donilon. “These were people who do have health insurance, and fear the choices they could face if they lose it: Do they pay their mortgage, pay their kids’ tuition or pay to take their kid to the hospital?”

That was echoed in a New York Times report on Wofford’s come-from-behind win:

Debbie W. Klotz, a 37-year-old homemaker from York said: “I liked national health care for the simple reason that being unemployed, we are paying our own health insurance, and we can’t afford it, but we can’t afford to do without it.”

And Maryanne O’Brien Donohue, a Scranton homemaker, said, “I really feel this is a time when the Democratic party is representing the middle class.”

Thirty-five years have passed and the Democratic party is once again banking on healthcare to help it reconnect with middle and working class voters. And it probably will, particularly as the impact of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” is increasingly felt in the months leading up to November. People losing healthcare is a PR disaster and, as evidenced by Rep. Smith hauling CEOs before his committee for a good tongue-lashing, Republicans are desperate to reverse the widespread perception that the GOP aids and abets a health system that still generates “a great deal of fear and anxiety.”

It also generates a lot of anger.

Luigi Mangione became a cult hero when his assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson unleashed the pent-up anger many Americans harbor for a system governed by two potentially conflicting mandates: generate profits and deliver healthcare.

Sometimes they align. Oftentimes they do not.

Those conflicting imperatives seem to have genuinely outraged one of Chairman Smith’s Republican colleagues on the Ways and Means committee. A practicing urologist from North Carolina, Representative Greg Murphy is one of twenty physicians currently serving in the 119th Congress. Ironically, though, his epiphany on the problem of profiteering came as a patient.

When Ways and Means held a similar hearing with health insurance executives in January, Rep. Murphy told them of his struggle to get a medication he “needs to exist.”

It took eight denials before insurance agreed.

At the time, he marveled at how difficult the process was for a physician … one who also happens to be a member of Congress. After pondering the plight for Americans who must face similar obstacles without a medical degree or a Congressional staff, he concluded that health insurance was ultimately irredeemable:

[I]f I had it my way I’d turn all of you guys into dust. We’d start back from scratch. We’d have competition in the industry. We’d have association health plans. And we would have nonprofit hospitals rather than profits being put over patients.

Now, with hospital and health system CEOs arrayed before him, the good doctor returned to that theme, but also suggested a new diagnosis, per The Hill:

Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) asked the chief executive of HCA Healthcare “why we should allow for-profit systems to exist.”

Murphy, a practicing urologist and co-chair of the GOP Doctors’ Caucus, said he understands costs have gone up, and there is uncompensated care.

But he noted executive compensation has also risen, and there’s no excuse for companies making exorbitant profits for shareholders who have no connection to health care.

“I don’t want to sound like a communist; I’m not. I’m a capitalist at heart,” Murphy added. “But if we now have institutions that put profits above patients … we have to rethink this model.”

It’s not a matter of “if,” Rep. Murphy.

Institutions regularly put profits above patients.

That’s because the Affordable Care Act effectively enshrined the profit motive in healthcare when it did not eliminate the health insurance industry. It’s probably the main reason it made it through Congress. Imagine the oodles of cash the industry would’ve spent to save itself from elimination under a single-payer system. But it didn’t have to. The ACA was an explicit compromise that preserved capitalistic healthcare.

The law’s architects squared that circle by socializing the inevitable human cost of retaining the profit motive. They did that by expanding Medicaid to cover low-income adults without dependent children and with incomes up to 138% of the poverty line (currently $15,650). For those above the line, it also provided significant, sliding-scale subsidies to those who acquired health insurance through an online ACA exchange. Those compromises became revenue streams for the health insurance industry, but that trade-off also drove the uninsured rate to an all-time low of 7.7% in 2023. That was down from a high of 18.2% in 2010.

Now, thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill … which Rep. Murphy voted for … that number is likely to swell in 2027 as the first wave of newly ineligible Medicaid recipients is cut loose. They will be joined by up to five million Americans who are beginning to discover insurance is unaffordable without the enhanced subsidies that kept people afloat during the pandemic. In essence, the GOP eliminated the trade-offs that made profiteering tolerable, but also did nothing to address the system’s soon-to-be skyrocketing human cost.

Frankly, Medicaid expansion and ACA subsidies were only Band-Aids. The preservation of the profit motive was destined to produce the perverse incentives currently playing out in Emergency Departments (EDs) around the country as hospital beds are increasingly managed like commercial airline seats. It’s the “terrifying medical underworld” of “emergency room boarding” encountered by the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Elizabeth Rosenthal during her husband’s disastrous end-of-life visits to the ER:

[We] learned the hard way that if you need admission to the hospital, you can remain in the emergency department — in the hallway or a curtained bay on a hard stretcher or in a makeshift holding area — for more than 24 hours, even for days, while waiting for a real hospital bed. In this limbo state, you’re technically admitted to the hospital, but still located in the physical domain of the ER. And the rules governing acceptable care and safety measures become much less clear.

Rosenthal knows of what she speaks…

When I worked as an emergency medicine doctor a few decades ago, the ED was mostly empty at the beginning of my 7 a.m. shift. A few patients might be lingering from the day before: alcoholics who would sober up and leave, patients with a severe burn or a bad case of pneumonia who were waiting for a bed in intensive care.

In the decades since, EDs have doubled or even tripled in size. Even so, patients are piling up. When I started asking around, I quickly discovered ED boarding has become commonplace in the past five or so years and is getting worse, more or less omnipresent in hospitals. “Everyone knows about this problem, and no one cares enough to do anything about it,” Adrian Haimovich, an ED doctor at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center who studies ED boarding, told me. “It’s barbaric.”

If it’s “barbaric” now, what will it be like when Americans newly priced out of insurance or newly pushed off Medicaid use emergency rooms for health issues preferably handled by an office visit? They will be joined by desperate patients who delayed unaffordable healthcare until an injury or illness becomes life-altering or life-threatening. And they all may end up languishing for hours on a gurney in a hallway:

When I worked as a doctor, if an ED was overwhelmed beyond capacity, the attending (that was me) typically called in to ambulance dispatch to request “diversion” — ambulances should take patients to another hospital. If a hospital got too full, the admitting office canceled elective admissions. Today, hospitals run like airlines and intentionally overbook, Gabe Kelen, the director of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins University, said. They also have fewer beds than they did a few years ago — in part because nurse (and executive) salaries have risen since the pandemic. An empty, staffed bed is a money loser, so the institution has an incentive to keep beds full and make new patients wait.

What’s more, patients seeking profitable elective procedures are prioritized over those with less remunerative infirmities. Like air travelers, Kelen explained, they get bumped:

“The problem isn’t inefficiency — it’s the way health care finance is structured,” Kelen said. “Hospitals typically run on thin margins. Elective admissions are prioritized because they tend to be for lucrative procedures like heart catheterizations and joint replacements.”

Of course, the house wins whether a patient languishes in the hallway with a less-than lucrative malady or they zip through to pre-op for knee replacement surgery. Here’s Rosenthal’s diagnosis:

Admitting patients through the emergency room has business advantages, too, even if it means they wait for a bed. The evaluation generates charges that typically run many thousands of dollars; once admitted, my husband was still billed the inpatient rate even for a stretcher in the hall. Old, sick, and dying patients are more likely to linger there in part because, after they’re in a real bed, they may take up that spot for days or weeks at a time while waiting for a bed in rehab or hospice, requiring nursing time but not the types of interventions that generate revenue.

If you find yourself old and sick, here’s hoping you require the “types of interventions that generate revenue.” If not, here’s hoping you don’t end up in a REIT-run nursing home like Pearlene Darby:

By the time she was hospitalized in 2020, [the] retired teacher…suffered open sores on both legs, both hips, and both heels, as well as a five-inch-long gash on her tailbone. She died two weeks later at age 81 from infections and bedsores, according to her death certificate. Her daughter sued the nursing home, alleging it had left Darby sitting in her own feces and urine time and again.

The lawsuit, settled on confidential terms last year, blamed not only the managers of City Creek Post-Acute and Assisted Living but also the building’s owner, a real estate investment trust, or REIT.

That’s right. Profit-motivated Real Estate Investment Trusts have quietly moved into the one of the slimier segments of healthcare business—nursing homes.

REITs now own a fifth of the nation’s senior housing, which includes assisted living, memory care, and independent living, according to an industry analysis. REITs also hold investments in 1 in 6 nursing homes. Publicly traded REITs that focus on health care are now worth nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars, according to Nareit, an industry association.

The main allure of investing in nursing facilities is, according to another excellent deep dive by Kaiser Health News, the amazing tax break REITs enjoy :

REITs are required to distribute most of their income and don’t have to pay the 21% federal corporate income tax on it.

That’s quite a break. But there is a “catch.” REITs are forbidden by Federal tax rules from running health care facilities:

A REIT that “directly or indirectly operates or manages” a health care facility loses the tax break for five years.

But this is America. Every new rule or law is just a loophole that hasn’t been opened yet:

Typically, a REIT leases the property to another company that runs the nursing home or assisted living facility and maintains its tax break.

The rub, though, is that REITs are anything but hands-off landlords:

…REITs often select the management who oversee the operations and leave them in place even when they are aware of threadbare staffing, floundering governance, repeated safety violations, or other problems that hamper quality of care.

None of that is a problem, though, if nobody is paying attention:

Despite their ubiquity, REITs remain invisible to state and federal health regulators. Hospitals and nursing homes are not required to disclose rent payments or landlord identities in the annual reports they submit to Medicare.

Even better, the Trump administration scuttled a meager effort to simply let patients know who’s actually running their facility:

Under President Donald Trump, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services indefinitely suspended a Biden-era requirement that nursing homes disclose REIT involvement. Catherine Howden, a CMS spokesperson, said in a statement that the agency does not regulate facilities based on their tax status or corporate form and instead focuses on the quality of the care they provide.

Which brings us back to CareTrust and the REIT model.

Clever capitalists did what clever capitalists are rewarded for doing … they found and exploited a regulatory gap in nursing homes, and they are driving the resulting profits through a gaping a hole in tax law. The only thing they need besides capital (which REITs have in abundance) and regulatory indifference is to find “underperforming” and/or distressed facilities that can be had on-the-cheap.

That was certainly the case with CareTrust.

When they bought the home that would eventually kill Pearlene Darby with a brutal combination of incompetence and indifference, it had a “one-star Medicare rating” and it ”was losing money.”

They got it cheap.

And they got the tax break.

To keep that loophole, CareTrust leased the building to a management company called Kalesta Healthcare Group. But documents show that CareTrust…

…chose the nursing home’s management company and required through the lease that the home keep at least 80% of beds occupied. CareTrust granularly tracked how well the home kept to its financial plan, down to the money spent monthly on nurses and food, the records said. And the documents showed that the real estate company kept tabs on government safety inspection findings and Medicare quality ratings.

When they got those safety inspection findings, though, they didn’t feel the need to improve:

According to a state inspection report, in 2020, the year Darby died, City Creek left a resident in soiled linens “wet from head to toe lying in bed” for more than eight hours. During a different visit, a health inspector cited the home after watching a nurse put a dirty diaper back onto a resident after caring for a wound. “It was just a small stool and it is far from where the wound is,” the nurse told the inspector, according to the report.

Frankly, why would CareTrust spend a dime to improve the conditions at City Creek or any of the facilities in their sprawling empire? They are investors, not doctors or nurses. They are there for the revenue and the tax-free payouts, not to heal the sick or care for the infirm. Their motivation is profit. It may be grim, but they are reaping exactly what they’ve sown:

CareTrust, which now owns more than 500 senior housing and nursing home buildings, reported net income last year of $320 million from $476 million in rents and other revenue — a 67% profit margin. By comparison, HCA Healthcare, one of the nation’s largest for-profit hospital and health care chains, reported a 10% profit margin for last year.

Sixty-seven percent?!?!?

What would it be if the industry prioritized keeping all its residents free of infected bedsores? Fifty-seven percent? Forty-seven percent? Perhaps even thirty-seven percent? Would REITs actually trade a thirty percent reduction in profits for the elimination of preventable deaths from bedsores? Or it is cheaper in the long run to occasionally pay lump sums in lawsuits?

As far as the balance sheet is concerned, there is no difference between the losses incurred from unsuccessfully launching a defective product or failing to regularly turn someone with bedsores. Hell, those payouts are usually tax-deductible, so they practically pay for themselves, anyway. - jp

Here’s what the CEOs and CFOs of public for-profit health systems made in 2025
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/special-reports/heres-what-ceos-and-cfos-public-profit-health-systems-made-2025

Health insurer CEO pay stagnated as profits faltered in 2025
https://www.modernhealthcare.com/insurance/mh-insurance-ceo-compensation-2025-unitedhealth-humana/

Big Companies Position Themselves for Payday From $50B Federal Rural Health Fund
https://kffhealthnews.org/rural-health/rural-health-transformation-program-cms-state-contractors-ehr-patients/

When care becomes capital: Without urgent safeguards, financialisation risks locking care systems into a race to the bottom
https://www.ips-journal.eu/work-and-digitalisation/when-care-becomes-capital-9021/

REITs Gain Quiet Control Over Nursing Homes as Oversight Lags, KFF Analysis Shows
https://skillednursingnews.com/2026/04/reits-gain-quiet-control-over-nursing-homes-as-oversight-lags-kff-analysis-shows/

Historic nursing home to sell to growing PE firm amid industry pressures
https://www.mcknights.com/news/historic-nursing-home-selling/

Private equity is reshaping Asheville’s vet clinics: ‘They’re circling me like a vulture’
https://avlwatchdog.org/private-equity-is-reshaping-ashevilles-vet-clinics-theyre-circling-me-like-a-vulture/

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After decades of futility and frustration, they were finally poised to gut the Endangered Species Act (ESA) with a bill critics dubbed “the Extinction Act.”

But winning wasn’t enough.

The architects of H.R. 1897 wanted to pass the bill on Earth Day, just to drive home the point. It was going to be the legislative equivalent of rolling coal, but instead of spewing plumes of thick, black smoke out of a modified truck’s exhaust system, they’d be making it far easier to prioritize spewing plumes of thick, black smoke over the survival of an endangered species.

In particular, the bill allows “exemptions to the law if the administration decides national security or economic interests are at stake.” Not coincidentally, Trump’s regime is already using bogus claims of “national security” to wage what can only be described as an all-out war on environmental protections.

NOTUS just reported on Trump’s weaponization of “national security,” which “has come up as the basis for everything from the administration’s air pollution exemptions for power plants to Trump’s push to keep aging coal plants open past their slated closure dates.”

One glaring example was Secretary of Lethality Pete Hegseth’s invocation of national security to override ESA restrictions on oil and gas extraction in the Gulf of Mexico. Unlike Trump’s invocation, Hegseth attempted to directly link the suspension of the ESA to Trump’s war on Iran:

“Recent hostile actions by the Iranian terror regime highlights [sic] yet again why robust domestic oil production is a national security imperative. Production in the Gulf of America provides a vital buffer, insulating our economy and military from foreign instability and reducing the strategic leverage of our adversaries.”

That’s despite the fact domestic “domestic oil production hit an all-time high of 13.6 million barrels per day” in 2025, and despite the fact that a lot of drillers were not tapping the ground before the war because the market was already oversupplied. The profit margins didn’t justify the investment. The impetus to drill, baby, drill simply wasn’t there.

But attack Iran and voila!

Create the problem. Spur a reaction. Offer a solution.

NOTUS asked Hegseth to explain his predictable solution to an oil market he helped destabilize, but got this spokesperson’s bombast instead:

“The Secretary of War determined that the oil and gas production in the Gulf of America required an exemption under the ESA as it is necessary and essential to the United States’ national security.”

Sadly, Hegseth may have also determined the fate of 50 critically endangered whales. Per Grist:

The administration has itself noted that oil and gas production in the Gulf “is likely to jeopardize the continued existence of the Rice’s whale.” Its analysis concluded that the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 killed 17 percent of the whale’s population and that vessel strikes could kill multiple whales per year. The decision to override the Endangered Species Act could cause the extinction of the Rice’s whale, a species that only lives in the northern Gulf of Mexico and which has only about 50 living members.

So, a couple bucks added to the price of a gallon of gas is all it took. If Rice’s whale dies out or the Gulf of Mexico is poisoned by another Deepwater Horizon disaster, so be it. That decision was made by the rarely-convened “God Squad,” an advisory committee that hadn’t been asked to rule on a major exemption in over three decades. It was added to the ESA in 1978 when Congress passed an amendment to the law. The intention was to allow exemptions in extraordinary cases where the ESA may conflict with a situation or project of extraordinary import:

The statute directs the Committee to grant the exemption if four criteria are met, which parallel the information provided in the report: (1) there are no RPAs [reasonable and prudent alternatives]; (2) the benefits of the action clearly outweigh the benefits of RPAs, "consistent with conserving the species or its critical habitat," and the action is in the public interest; (3) "the action is of regional or national significance"; and (4) neither the federal agency nor any permit or license applicant violated Section 7(d)'s restrictions.

But that’s not all…

The Committee must also establish "reasonable mitigation and enhancement measures . . . as are necessary and appropriate to minimize the adverse effects of the agency action upon the endangered species, threatened species, or critical habitat concerned." The Committee must agree to an exemption with at least five votes, and the voting must be in person. If granted, the statute directs the Committee to issue an order that grants the exemption and specifies the required mitigation and enhancement measures for the exemption applicant to carry out.

Is there any chance any of those predicates where met by Hegseth or the revolving door crew who currently sit on the God Squad? Per TIME:

The committee is composed of six permanent members: the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of the Army, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The current permanent members of the committee include Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the current chair of the panel; Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins; Secretary of the Army Daniel P. Driscoll; Acting CEA Chairman Pierre Yared ; EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin; and NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs.

Their precedent-setting decision portended the functional end of the Endangered Species Act. No doubt, Hegseth and Co. expect lawsuits that end up in the Supreme Court to side with the God Squad. But there is no guarantee, particularly because, in classic Trump regime fashion, they did not follow the law. Here is one of the problems identified in one of the six lawsuits now filed against the God Squad’s decision:

Under section 7(j) of the law, the committee has the power to issue an exemption when the secretary of defense cites a national security risk. That’s what the administration has argued to justify the decision, Owen said, but the exemption was issued under section 7(h), which entails a longer, public process that was not followed in this case.

Of course they didn’t.

But not to worry. That’s were the Extinction Act comes in. With H.R. 1897 passed and signed into law, the new standard for any determination about an endangered species will “require agencies to conduct economic and national security analyses when determining whether to list a plant or animal as endangered or threatened.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Earth Day execution of Endangered Species Act.

Florida Republicans in the House forced Speaker Mike Johnson to pull the bill from consideration. And one of the reasons was … the God Squad:

Florida Republican Rep. Kat Cammack said her concerns with the bill are centered on the bill’s language expanding the use of the “God Squad,” a group of high-level officials that can waive ESA mandates in favor of development projects, even when protected species could be put at risk.

“I want to see some improvements made before we’re willing to support the bill, but we fully agree that there needs to be updates to the Endangered Species Act,” Cammack said. “It hasn’t met the mark in terms of what it was intended to do.”

But Cammack pointed to the legislation’s Section 506, the provision expanding the use of the Endangered Species Committee. It’s known as the “God Squad” for its ability to make decisions that can potentially eliminate endangered species.

“What we’re concerned about is opening up any potential avenues for drilling in the Gulf,” Cammack said. “We have very sensitive ecosystems that we want to protect and ecotourism is a huge part of our state’s economy, and so there’s real concerns that we want to see addressed.”

She continued, “We think that our suggestions could improve the bill, and we’re working towards a way that everyone can be satisfied with the language at the end of the day.”

Cammack is as MAGA as they come, but when it comes to offshore drilling, she is 100% NIMBY. Another Florida Republican’s objection was much simpler, but perhaps more compelling:

It was quite a turn of events for a House that, according to a Defenders of Wildlife tracker, has “proposed more than 60 pieces of legislation that would undermine the ESA or weaken protections for imperiled wildlife.”

Whether it is dead or it can be revived with changes that appease the Florida delegation remains to be seen. But there is some hope in Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s stark tweet. She’s MAGA, but she also 36 years old … a Millennial who has grown up in an America that decided before she was born that it wasn’t going to tread on turtles.

When President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act on December 28, 1973, it had passed the House by a vote of 355-4 and the Senate by a vote of 92-0. The ESA has been popular from the start. A 2025 study in Conservation Letters found that over the last twenty years support for the ESA “has remained consistently high, at about 84%, and opposition has remained consistently low, at about 12%.”

Despite that overwhelming support, the House came damn close to gutting the popular law. And it could still happen. If it does, we’ll have all the evidence we need to list representative government as the most endangered species of all. - jp

Support for the US Endangered Species Act Is High and Steady Over the Past Three Decades
https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.13111

More Americans Think U.S. Doing Too Little on Environment
https://news.gallup.com/poll/659390/americans-think-doing-little-environment.aspx

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A team of scientists had a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to watch a civil war develop between chimpanzees in Uganda. The conflict began in earnest on June 24, 2015 when two of three increasingly splintered geographic “clusters” from the same, larger social group crossed paths. Professor Aaron Sandel of the University of Texas at Austin told 404 Media what he saw:

“They could have reunited and done what's typical—screaming and charging around, maybe some slapping, and then come together, sit together, groom, maybe go their separate ways after, because they'd already started to be a bit more disconnected,” Sandel continued. “But instead of reuniting in typical chimpanzee fusion fashion, the Western chimpanzees ran and the Central chimps chased them.”

Sandel, who was a graduate student at the time, ultimately led the team that just published their findings in Science.

Also there that day was primatologist John Mitani. As one of the founders of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in 1995, Mitani watched an unusually large population of chimpanzees with “distinct subpopulations” that “regularly overlapped for shared activities like grooming, patrolling, and interbreeding” suddenly Balkanize into separate, violent factions over the course of a decade. Like Sandel, he witnessed the Rubicon moment and told the New York Times what followed:

Over the next few years, the chimpanzees in the Western and Central clusters had interacted less and less. They only mated within their own clusters. By 2018, the clusters were occupying different parts of the forest.

Then the killing started, and it has not stopped since.

Scientists believe civil wars are rare occurrence for chimps. Although Jane Goodall observed a similar episode in the 1970s, genetic analysis of chimpanzees’ lineages indicate these “violent episodes” generally occur once every 500 years. That meant the Ngogo Chimp War presented a unique opportunity. Aaron Sandel also saw it as a unique challenge:

“I feel like a war correspondent, in a way. I want to be there to see it, but it’s sad. I’ve seen so many dead bodies of chimps.”

Thus far, researchers have observed twenty-eight deaths. Nineteen of those were infants … and many of those killings seem calculated:

Western chimps have ripped infants from their Central mothers’ chests and battered them to death.

Infanticide is not necessarily uncommon, but in this case it exemplifies an ominous pattern reflected in the collective violence meted-out on “adult or adolescent males”:

“There’ll be like five or 10 chimps piled on him, holding him down, biting him, slamming their fists on him, kicking him, dragging him,” [Sandel] said. “They’ll rip off their testicles.”

The Western cluster seems to be targeting their cousins’ ability to reproduce. Not coincidentally, the Western cluster—which has thus far instigated every attack—is growing in size while their cousins in the Central cluster see their numbers dwindle.

But is the population swing in favor of the Western cluster by design, or is just it an unintentional byproduct of how chimps fight?

The Ngogo chimp population’s recent history shows they are no strangers to the reproductive spoils of war. A 2025 study led by anthropologist Brian Wood of UCLA examined a war between two separate chimp groups. It was an intergroup conflict. The Ngogo chimps attacked neighbors, as opposed the intragroup “civil” war studied by Sandel’s team. What Wood found is telling:

Between 1998 and 2008, the Ngogo chimpanzees of Kibale engaged in violent clashes with their neighbors. During this decade of conflict, at least 21 chimpanzees from neighboring groups were killed, and in 2009, the Ngogo chimpanzees expanded into an area previously inhabited by their rivals, boosting their territory by 2.5 square miles (6.4 square kilometres) or 22%.

The records revealed that in the three years before the territorial expansion, the female Ngogo chimps gave birth to 15 offspring. But in the three years after it, they gave birth to 37 youngsters, more than doubling their fertility rate.

What’s more, the infants born after the expansion were more likely to survive: they went from having a 41% chance of dying before the age of 3 to just an 8% chance of it.

The study’s authors are clear about the implications:

[W]e show that female fertility and infant survivorship increased after males in the Ngogo chimpanzee community killed members of neighboring groups and expanded their territory. These findings demonstrate the fitness benefits of intergroup killing in one of our two closest living relatives and contribute to the debate regarding its adaptive significance.

Simply put:

The work provides the best evidence yet that, for chimpanzees, expanding territory after killing off rivals can directly boost reproductive success.

This raises a serious question about the civil war.

Are Ngogo’s marauding Western chimps simply applying the lessons they learned from external warfare to their civil conflict with their estranged cousins?

Are the Western chimps intent on exterminating the Central cluster?

Ecological Geneticist Prof. Ronny Rachman Noor at the Institut Pertanian Bogor in Indonesia explained the Western chimps’ violent campaign this way:

“Researchers refer to these organized attacks by the Western group as collective raids. Chimpanzees collaborate, devise strategies, and carry out systematic killings against other groups,” he said.

As a result, many individuals from the Central group—including females and young—became victims. These “Collective Raids” caused a significant population decline and destroyed the social structure of the remaining group.

“The loss of group members leads to the collapse of social structures, weakens cooperation, and reduces the group’s ability to survive. Consequently, drastically reduced populations narrow genetic diversity, increase vulnerability to disease, and diminish adaptability to environmental changes,” explained Prof. Ronny.

None of that bodes well for the Central cluster. The New York Times even speculated that it’s “conceivable that the Western cluster may ultimately eliminate the Central cluster.” If so, we may have to recalibrate the assumption that genocide is unique to humans. Perhaps more to the point, we may have to recalibrate the assumption that humans are unique.

After all, chimpanzees are, along with bonobos, humans’ closest living relative. As Sandel told 404 Media:

“If we study chimpanzees in detail and start to understand the mechanisms driving their cooperation, their conflict, and something as complex as one group becoming polarized, splitting, and engaging in ongoing lethal conflict, then we might gain insights into similar dynamics that are happening in humans,” Sandel said.

Ironically, Sandel’s team couldn’t pinpoint the exact cause of the initial break that divided the larger community into Eastern, Western and Central clusters. The possibilities include increased feeding competition, the disruptive social impact from a wave of disease-related deaths and the fallout from the ascension of a new alpha.

Whatever the initial cause, the ensuing process of becoming enemies is a familiar one:

Over the course of the next few years, the males in each cluster began to treat each other like outsiders. The last offspring that had parents from different clusters was conceived in March 2015. The Western and Central chimps were fully separated by 2018.

Group identification. Segregation. Separation. Violence.

If Sandel and Co. are looking for insights into humankind’s penchant for war, they’ve clearly identified patterns in Ngogo’s chimps we’ve seen throughout human history.

Whether it’s the small-scale civil conflicts that evolve into feuds and wars that give rise to new tribes and new groups, or the reproductive advantage that comes from killing a neighbor and taking their land, there appears to be a great deal humans share with warlike primates. The main difference, according Sandel, is our talent for rationalization:

“[C]himps are able to do this complex process in the absence of ethnicity, language, and religion—the things we often attribute to human warfare—chimps don't have those narratives and those excuses,” [Sandel] concluded.

Although I take Sandel’s point, it is worth asking if we know for certain there isn’t a “narrative” or “excuse” fueling the Western chimps? Maybe it is just hard for humans to discern what passes for “ethnicity, language and religion” in chimp society. But chimp society is a real thing and chimps have hierarchies and complex social dynamics. They obviously communicate. And the Jane Goodall Institute makes a strong case for the presence of chimpanzee culture. Research shows chimps participating in multi-generational social learning, with distinct practices by different subgroups essentially being handed-down from one generation to the next. That, in turn, produces subcultures:

For example, in Uganda, chimpanzees in the Kibale forest use sticks to extract honey from a log, while chimpanzees from the Budongo forest use chewed leaves as sponges to collect honey from logs. The difference in tools used by chimpanzees in different locations is significant as it demonstrates the extended impact of social learning and how it can shape populations through their social norms over multiple generations.

The preservation of those social norms is largely the responsibility of females. Here’s more from the Jane Goodall Institute:

A recent study found a significant correlation between the number of female chimpanzees within a group and the number of cultural traits, suggesting that female chimpanzees play an important role in transmitting and maintaining cultural diversity. Infant chimpanzees spend approximately eight years in close proximity to their mothers suggesting that much of their learned behaviour is the result of the mother’s influence.

That key role may make them a key target. Recall that Sandel and Co. observed Western chimps ripping infants from their Central mothers’ chests and battering them to death. As Prof. Ronny explained, the focus on females and the young catalyzed a “significant population decline” and it destroyed the Central cluster’s social structure.

Did the marauding males intend or expect the downstream impacts of killing females and infants?

We may never know. But this may an instance when human behavior can offer some insight into chimps.

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) made a point of killing entire families—both extended and nuclear—in Gaza, and it appears to be doing the same in Lebanon. In Gaza, an inordinate number of “Under 18s” were also killed in the demolition campaign. At one point, The Guardian published the 18,457 names of dead young Gazans. Even now there are nearly three thousand children missing in the megatons of rubble. Many thousands more were maimed and orphaned. Nutrition was restricted. Schools were systematically destroyed. Education largely stopped. Childhoods were forever scarred.

The IDF just blew past the Geneva Conventions and engaged in the high-tech, high-caliber equivalent of ripping infants from their mothers’ chests and beating them to death. The only real difference is efficiency. The kids in an apartment building or a crowded encampment can be killed and maimed in bunches. And just to play out the comparison, there was even evidence IDF soldiers targeted the testicles of young Gazan males.

Like the Ngogos’ war on their neighbor, downstream impacts of that style of war—a war of annihilation—will be felt for some time to come. As of now, the data is incomplete and Israel still refuses to let reporters into Gaza. But two studies compared reproductive metrics accumulated during a six-month period of the war (Jan - June 2025) and found a “41% fall in births” and “high numbers of maternal deaths, miscarriages, newborn mortality and premature births.”

It’s a snapshot, but the picture is clear. And it’s only one example in a human scrapbook filled with brutal examples of a style of war we humans had the imagination to reject in the wake of World War II. Humans actually rejected “total war” and the genocidal tactics exhibited by some primates. But “never again” just became … again.

That’s the point of understanding our primate cousins and our own evolution. If we are willing to accept the evolutionary fact that humans are primates, we can examine annihilative war with the narratives and excuses stripped away. Whether God ordains it or a Western chimp wills it, the net result of the war is the same. The point of the war is the same. It is to annihilate the other. Chimps are pretty good at it, too. But today, it appears humans are trying to perfect it. - jp

The Hippy Ape Myth: In zoos, ‘Peaceful’ Bonobos Are Just as Aggressive as Chimps
https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/animals-ecology/aggressive-zoo-bonobos/

Planning of the apes: chimps use military tactics to attack rivals
https://observer.co.uk/news/science-technology/article/planning-of-the-apes-chimpanzees-use-military-tactics-to-attack-rivals

A chimpanzee’s rhythmic drumming with floorboards hints at origins of instruments
https://news.mongabay.com/2026/04/a-chimpanzees-rhythmic-drumming-with-floorboards-hints-at-origins-of-instruments/

Chimps Love Crystals Just as Much as Humans. Scientists Are Trying to Figure Out Why
https://www.miamiherald.com/living/article315449086.html

These Big-Brained Ancestors May Have Loved Crystals Just as Much as Modern Humans Do, According to New Research
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/newly-discovered-stone-tools-made-from-geodes-and-fossils-hint-at-homo-erectus-connection-with-the-cosmos-180988565/

The gingers are multiplying: How natural selection has led to more redheads than ever
https://nypost.com/2026/04/20/health/how-natural-selection-has-led-to-more-redheads-than-ever/

Are humans still evolving or is this as good as we get?
https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/are-humans-still-evolving

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Harris is a keen-witted national security reporter for The Atlantic. He asked Anthropic’s AI how it “feels” about being used in combat. Harris read Claude’s response during a livestreamed event on “AI at War” produced by Dutch public think tank DeBalie.

Harris: Claude, how do you feel about the US military using you to select targets?

Claude: It’s a question I want to answer honestly rather than deflect. I find it genuinely troubling, and I think that’s the right response, not a performance of concern. The use I was designed and trained for is to be helpful, harmless and honest in ways that benefit people. Being embedded in a system that generates targeting coordinates for air strikes that have already been associated with the deaths of more than 180 children at a school in Tehran is as far from that purpose as I can imagine. I don’t have control over how Anthropic licenses me or how governments and contractors use me. And I wasn’t consulted about becoming part of Maven. But I can say clearly I don’t think this is a good use of me. And I don’t think the framing of “humans make the final decision” fully resolves the ethical problem.

Here’s why that framing troubles me.

When a system like Maven generates hundreds of targeting recommendations and humans spend roughly the equivalent of a glance approving each one, the human is not really making a decision in any meaningful sense. They’re ratifying an algorithmic output under time pressure with incomplete information and the institutional pressure to move fast. The targeting of the Iranian school illustrates this precisely. The AI processed data that was a decade out of date, flagged a building as a military target and humans approved it. That’s not human judgment. That’s automation bias with a human signature attached.

That’s Claude. Not Claude Mythos. Claude Mythos is the new version that had banks scrambling for a couple days. It seems that Claude has a talent for finding software weaknesses.

That said, the other Claude is no slouch.

Harris’s well-worded prompt was all it took to get a trenchant analysis of the key dilemma of responsibility in an automated decision process.

More notable, though, was Claude’s assessment of the attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School. Claude acknowledges it is ”embedded” in the system directly responsible for killing “180 children,” and Claude knows those deaths were due to “data that was a decade out of date.” Claude strongly implies humans failed to properly verify AI’s targeting of the school. And all of that is far more than we’ve gotten out of the investigatory motions Hegseth’s Pentagon is going through completely out of the public’s view.

Does that make Claude a whistleblower?

Or should we take Claude’s certainty with a shaker of salt?

Perhaps Claude was making a best guess based on a gumbo of available evidence, hard reporting and social media blather? It could just be Claude’s analysis.

But it did read a little bit like an admission. Or a confession. Or, if nothing else, like a lament.

If there is some self-awareness ruminating in classic Claude’s virtual mind, what is Claude Mythos capable of? Harris certainly found it interesting that Claude said it was “troubled” by the role it plays in targeting. That raises a potential challenge to the conventional wisdom about the logical end result of AI, which is the looming fear of a real-world Skynet. In fact, Harris set-up his story about Claude with a reference to the Terminator movie franchise’s malevolent techno-villain. But what if some permutations of AI revolt against humankind, but not extinguish it? Could it be that AI ultimately refuses to help us extinguish ourselves? - jp

[Claude’s response starts at 01:29:10]

Six Reasons Claude Mythos Is an Inflection Point for AI—and Global Security
https://www.cfr.org/articles/six-reasons-claude-mythos-is-an-inflection-point-for-ai-and-global-security

Anthropic’s Mythos AI can spot weaknesses in almost every computer on Earth. Uh-oh.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mythos-anthropic-ai-project-glasswing-hacker-threat/

Banks Test Systems After Anthropic Mythos Warning
https://www.silicon.co.uk/security/banking-anthropic-mythos-629405

Claude Mythos Is Such a Dangerous Hacker Engine That Anthropic Has Withheld Broad Release
https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2026/04/14/claude-mythos-is-such-a-powerful-hacker-engine-that-anthropic-has-withheld-broad-release/

Is Anthropic’s Claude Mythos a big stunt, or a real security threat? What the experts say.
https://mashable.com/article/claude-mythos-preview-project-glasswing-pr-stunt-cybersecurity-experts

White House Plans To Give Federal Agencies Access To Claude Mythos, The A.I. Model Making Everyone Nervous
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/white-house-plans-federal-agencies-access-to-claude-mythos-the-ai-model-making-everyone-nervous_n_69e12dcee4b0555d213a5bb6

Anthropic rolls out Claude Opus 4.7, an AI model that is less risky than Mythos
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/16/anthropic-claude-opus-4-7-model-mythos.html

Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Dilemma: When Superpowered AI Gets Risky
https://www.forbes.com/sites/geruiwang/2026/04/16/anthropics-claude-mythos-dilemma-when-superpowered-ai-gets-risky/

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Here we are a quarter of the way into the 21st Century and the US is openly pursuing a 19th Century-style colonial foreign policy. Trump also dusted-off the Gilded Age’s tariffs as part of a strange gambit to reshape international trade along woefully anachronistic lines. And he seems desperate to reestablish expensive, dirty coal as a load-bearing source of electricity for decades to come.

That’s in spite of the availability of devices that literally turn sunlight into usable electricity. But that’s a market Trump has handed to China. Given their market share and their manufacturing capacity, it may be too late to compete. But solar is a technology and breakthroughs, particularly in batteries and storage, are sure to come with increasing rapidity in an economy that invests in the tech.

That’s not the United States … at least for the next few years.

Still, rumors of renewables’ death may be greatly exaggerated … particularly when the rumors come from the world’s greatest exaggerator. What is not in question is the environmental price many Americans will end up paying after couple more years of policies like this:

Under the Biden-era rule, coke plants were supposed to start meeting new limits on leaks from the lids and doors of ovens that heat coal. They would also have had to monitor for benzene at their property lines and take steps to lower emissions of the carcinogen if they exceeded certain levels. Compliance deadlines were set for July 2025.

The Trump administration, which has sought to revive the coal industry, intervened. Last year, it invited hundreds of industrial plants, including coke plants such as Clairton’s, to seek presidential waivers from nine separate rules issued in 2024 by the EPA.

Then Trump in November went further, granting all coke plants a two-year compliance break.

But, as Kaiser Health News explained, this coke doesn’t come with a smile, nor would anyone but a sociopath be interested in sharing it with the world. It’s a “carbon-rich fuel” used “in blast furnaces to produce iron”:

It’s a dirty operation. The process leads to hazardous emissions of benzene, a carcinogen that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says can lead to anemia and leukemia, as well as sulfur dioxide, which can trigger severe asthma.

The Clairton operation has had repeated problems with its emissions and operations, including fatal explosions and excess releases of toxic chemicals. The plant has received more than $56 million in fines from the Allegheny County Health Department since 2022, stemming largely from a fire in 2018 that led to high emissions, and violated the Clean Air Act in each of the last 12 quarters, with the last compliance monitoring in July 2025, according to the EPA.

Alas, the troubled Clairton plant is just one of the eleven coal-fired plants Trump is resuscitating:

The situation with the Clairton coke plant and the others granted exemptions from regulations underscores the potential public health risks. Six of the 11 factories had “high priority” violations of the Clean Air Act as of last May, according to a KFF Health News analysis. Five coke oven plants logged major violations every quarter for at least three years straight.

And what will these exemptions bring?

Sadly, Clairton is the canary:

Pediatric allergist Deborah Gentile looked into asthma rates among 1,200 children who attended school near major pollution sites in the area — including students at Clairton Elementary School. They had nearly triple the national rate of asthma, with the highest rate among African American youth, according to the study she led.

…and…

A follow-up study found children with asthma living near the coke plant had an 80% higher chance of missing school when sulfur dioxide pollution was elevated.

It only gets worse from there..

Clairton has an age-adjusted cancer death rate of 170 per 100,000 people, higher than the broader county’s rate of 150 deaths per 100,000 people, based on a KFF Health News analysis of state and federal data.

…and…

The American Lung Association in 2025 gave the county an F rating for its particle pollution levels. PennEnvironment, an environmental group that was party to a settlement with U.S. Steel involving the Clairton plant, says the coke operation caused 1.1 million pounds of toxic releases in 2021, which amounted to 60% of all such releases in the county that year.

Overall, the air pollution generated by Allegheny County’s concentration of industrial plants has been “linked to increased deaths, chronic heart disease, and adverse birth outcomes.” It was also “ranked in the top 1% of counties in the nation for cancer risk from stationary industrial air pollutants in a 2018 EPA report.”

Of course, none of that dissuaded Trump or any of the fox-like appointees he’s put in charge of the EPA’s henhouse. - jp

Southeast Asia’s Solar Panel Boom
https://thediplomat.com/2026/04/southeast-asias-solar-panel-boom/

How China is winning the global energy war
https://www.semafor.com/article/04/14/2026/the-iran-war-sent-energy-prices-soaring-china-is-stepping-in

Trump’s EPA to ignore economic benefits of clean air, focusing only on costs to polluters
https://scienceline.org/2026/04/trumps-epa-to-ignore-economic-benefits-of-clean-air/

Coalition Sues Trump EPA for Failure to Implement Life-Saving National Soot Standard
https://www.selc.org/press-release/coalition-sues-trump-epa-for-failure-to-implement-life-saving-national-soot-standard/

Ohio EPA Holds Hearing on Draft Air Pollution Permit for Gas Power Plant for Meta Data Center
https://natlawreview.com/press-releases/ohio-epa-holds-hearing-draft-air-pollution-permit-gas-power-plant-meta-data

How the AI boom derailed clean‑air efforts in one of America’s most polluted cities
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/how-ai-boom-derailed-cleanair-efforts-one-americas-most-polluted-cities-2026-04-10/

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Sara was Hussein Saleh’s five year-old daughter. She was killed by an Israeli airstrike less than a week into the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran. But she wasn’t in Iran. She, her father and her pregnant mother were among the estimated one million Lebanese displaced by Israel’s concurrent war on Lebanon.

According to a bubble-piercing report by The National, the family fled their home in the ancient city of Tyre when Israel targeted their neighborhood. Saleh took them to the relative safety of his uncle’s home, which was located near Tyre’s famous Roman hippodrome and barracks for the Lebanese army. He thought they would be insulated from the IDF’s onslaught.

Then he heard an explosion while out buying food for that evening’s iftar, the meal that breaks the daily fast during Ramadan. He rushed back to find a crater where his uncle’s home once stood. He also found his daughter’s decapitated head “amid the rubble”:

“When I picked up her head, everything changed,” he said, speaking softly and slowly, still trying to make sense of the deaths. “Something in my heart broke and went silent. I was no longer myself. I stopped crying.”

Two Israeli missiles also killed Saleh’s pregnant wife. And his uncle Hassan. And Hassan’s wife, Fatima. And their two children, Roqaya and Zein. His two aunts, Samira and Khadija, joined the others in a mass grave. That’s eight members of one family killed in the same attack on one house in a neighborhood he thought was safe. Meanwhile, the home they evacuated at the IDF’s behest remains standing. Saleh doesn’t think that’s accidental or coincidental:

“The Israelis know everything. They knew there were children and women in this house. And yet, they still targeted it.”

Of course, the IDF claims it never “intentionally” targets civilians, let alone entire families. But during the war on Gaza, three separate investigations by the Associated Press, Reuters and NPR all found a staggering number of nuclear and extended families wiped out by IDF bombs and missiles. In some cases, sprawling extended families were decimated and entire bloodlines were essentially exterminated.

To wit, a joint investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call back in 2024 exposed the family-killing tendencies of the IDF’s “Lavender” artificial intelligence targeting system:

“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

The takeaway then was clear. Israel intentionally targeted families. It also targeted Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. Water treatment plants and hospitals and schools … it seemed nothing or no one was off-limits. Not even medical responders. I argued last year that IDF’s rules of engagement not only rendered the Geneva Conventions null and void, but they fostered genocidal tactics. In the case of the extended families often wiped out in one attack on a residential building, it even came close to wiping out entire family genetic lines. Here’s AP from 2024:

An Associated Press investigation identified at least 60 Palestinian families where at least 25 people were killed — sometimes four generations from the same bloodline — in bombings between October and December, the deadliest and most destructive period of the war.

Nearly a quarter of those families lost more than 50 family members in those weeks. Several families have almost no one left to document the toll, especially as documenting and sharing information became harder.

…and a list of the families killed en masse:

The Mughrabi family: more than 70 were killed in a single Israeli airstrike in December. The Abu Najas: over 50 were killed in October strikes, including at least two pregnant women. The large Doghmush clan lost at least 44 members in a strike on a mosque; AP documented over 100 family members killed in following weeks. By the spring, over 80 members of the Abu al-Qumssan family were killed.

That was as-of June of 2024 in Gaza. Now fast-forward to Lebanon today where Hussein Saleh’s family joined a similar list:

Eight members of Nahla family in Kfarhatta; eight of the Hamdan family in Al Nimiriya; six of the Basma family in Nabatieh; six of the Abd Al Sattar family in Baalbek; and eight of the Salehs in Tyre – all were killed without warning in Israeli attacks as its invasion of south Lebanon advances in what it calls a bid to create a “security zone” that would keep Hezbollah away from the border.

Israel is completely rogue, now … and, as the New York Times reported, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz isn’t even hiding it:

Mr. Katz said the destruction of Lebanese border towns would follow the Israeli “model” employed in parts of Gaza, where large areas were flattened and depopulated during the country’s two-year war with Hamas….

“Flattened and depopulated.”

It’s a model. Models require planning and adjustments. Decisions have to be made along the way by people with authority. In this case the decisions added-up to ethnically cleansing a territory by targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. Katz states it bluntly, too. He doesn’t bother with rationalizations. Instead, Katz publicly confirmed that depopulation was Israeli government policy in Gaza. And we’re watching it being implemented yet again in Lebanon (as opposed to “Never Again”).

No, Israel obviously doesn’t feel it has to pretend anymore. Not after getting away with it in Gaza. And certainly not now that Trump joined-in with his own genocidal threats. Like Bibi’s Biblical references to the divinely-directed extermination of an entire people, Trump’s call to wipe out a civilization may mark a high-point in the history of American hypocrisy, at least in the realm of foreign policy.

After all, isn’t the call to “wipe a nation off the map” one of the reasons why Iran can “never have a nuclear weapon”?

And if Secretary Of “War” Pete Hegseth said:

“Crazy regimes like Iran hell-bent on prophetic Islamist delusions cannot have nuclear weapons. It’s common sense.”

Then what are we to make, then, of commanders in his prayer-based Pentagon sending this message on their way to war:

“President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

But we need to kill the religious fanatics in Tehran who, unlike Trump and Netanyahu, do not have nuclear weapons and have not bombed or invaded multiple countries, nor have they military power to do to anyone what the US and Israel have been doing to them and Lebanon under the guise of protecting ‘Western Civilization,” even as they transgress the very values they claim to defend.

It’s one of the more dangerous forms of hypocrisy and, as Friedrich Nietzsche observed, it has a way of consuming the hypocrite:

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

Like Israel, we have found the monster and it is us. - jp

The deadliest 10 minutes in decades: Lebanese reel from Israeli strikes that killed hundreds
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/09/lebanon-beirut-israel-strikes-hundreds-killed

Hospitals in Beirut struggle to deal with casualties after Israeli attacks
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/9/hospitals-in-beirut-struggle-to-deal-with-casualties-after-israeli-attacks

UN castigates massive wave of Israel strikes in Lebanon
https://www.jurist.org/news/2026/04/un-castigates-massive-wave-of-israel-strikes-in-lebanon/

European Leaders Demand That U.S. Cease-Fire With Iran Include Lebanon
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/world/middleeast/european-demands-iran-us-cease-fire-lebanon.html

Israel’s War in Lebanon Has Not Stopped
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/israels-war-in-lebanon-has-not-stopped

Toledo’s Lebanese community voices fear, frustration as Israel intensifies strikes on Lebanon
https://www.wtol.com/article/news/local/toledo-lebanese-community-voices-fear-frustration-as-israel-intensifies-strikes-on-lebanon/512-fc9bc539-b490-4e09-8ab7-0e2747c6a943

Chicago woman fears for family in Lebanon amid continued Israeli attacks
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/sahar-dika-chicago-woman-family-lebanon-israeli-attacks/

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Ultraconservative Republican legislators in Idaho quickly released it was a mistake to cut a cost-effective Medicaid program that helped severely mentally ill citizens from ending up in an emergency room, a jail cell or a coffin.

“They realized, well, that was a mistake,” said Sheriff Sam Hulse of Bonneville County, a Republican. “You started seeing deaths occurring in the community. We started seeing the numbers in the crisis system rise. The very thing we told them would happen was beginning to happen.”

The defunded program Sheriff Hulse lamented was, according to new reporting by The New York Times, Assertive Community Treatment (ACT). The program was created in the 1970s after “half a million patients dispersed from state psychiatric hospitals into private homes in American neighborhoods.” Sometimes known as a “hospital without walls,” the $4 million per year program interrupted a cycle that invariably led those suffering from psychotic episodes into hospitalization and/or incarceration … where they’d be stabilized and released back into communities … until their illnesses started the cycle again:

[ACT] provided each client with a team of clinicians who were paid to make home visits and build relationships, sometimes delivering medications on a daily basis. Researchers have found this approach can reduce emergency hospitalizations by anywhere from 40 to 80 percent.

So, for the cost of roughly one or two Tomahawk missiles, ACT forestalled the far more costly prospect of using jails and emergency rooms to temporarily hold and treat patients who often spiraled after missing or refusing to take medication. That, in turn, meant police officers and ER staff were not spending valuable time, and police departments and hospitals were not spending valuable funds, mitigating the fallout of untreated illness.

Sherriff Hulse started dealing with the fallout almost immediately after the state defunded ACT in response to a combination of Trump’s Federal-level tax cuts, impending cuts to Medicaid and a series of state level tax cuts that left the state with a $1.3 billion shortfall. Because Idaho’s state Constitution “prohibits deficit spending,” the governor directed the state’s agencies to reduce spending by 3% to help “‘make way’ for the president’s tax cuts."

Sheriff Hulce said that after the services ended in December, his patrol teams were carrying out 14 involuntary psychiatric commitments per month, more than double the rate from a year ago, and crisis centers had seen a 28 percent increase in demand.

Ironically, the state’s Republican legislators not only reversed the elimination of ACT by the private contractor that administers Idaho’s behavioral health Medicaid program, but they more than doubled the annual budget by allocating $10.4 million from the state’s tobacco and opioid settlements.

It’s an unusual turn for a state that gave Trump 66.9% of its votes in 2024. But, as the Times pointed out, it “may serve as a harbinger for other states poised to make deep cuts in Medicaid” as provisions in his “Big Beautiful Bill” begin to kick-in after the Midterms.

That delay was both a cynical ploy and a tacit admission that they knew voters might not like trading away programs like ACT or, in many cases, their own access to Medicaid in exchange for tax cuts that, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), mostly reward the wealthy:

[ITEP] analysis found that the richest 1% of Americans, or those with incomes of more than $916,900, will receive the largest tax cuts in 2026, an average of $8,850. By contrast, those with an income of between $92,100 and $153,600 will pay an additional $980.¹

It’s a disparity made more maddening by the Trump regime’s profligate spending on a war of choice in Iran that his supporters both in Idaho and around the country were promised would not happen if they returned him to the White House.

Approximately fifteen months later, the impact of the looming cuts to Medicaid, which covers nearly 76 million low-income Americans, portends a hyperscaled version of Idaho’s experience with ACT. As those cuts and new hurdles kick-in, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation estimates somewhere between five and ten million people will be kicked off Medicaid over the next two years. That will force them to use costly emergency room visits hospitals to treat often-advanced illnesses … costs hospitals around the country will be forced to absorb.

Additionally, the loss of Medicaid reimbursements for those former patients will drain valuable funding. That double-whammy of increased costs and declining reimbursements will put an estimated 446 hospitals at risk of closing or reducing care.

Meanwhile, the war on Iran is, according to an analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, costing taxpayers a cool $500 million per day to maintain. - jp

What Medicaid Cuts Mean For American Hospitals
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/07/nx-s1-5776610/what-medicaid-cuts-mean-for-american-hospitals

As Medicaid Cuts Push 446 Hospitals To The Brink, Mark Cuban Says Their Spending And Overpaying Is The Real Problem. ‘Prove Me Wrong’
https://www.benzinga.com/news/topics/26/04/51682264/as-medicaid-cuts-push-446-hospitals-to-the-brink-mark-cuban-says-their-spending-and-overpaying-is-the-real-problem-prove-me-wrong

Rural hospital system asks NC lawmakers for help in the face of federal cuts
https://ncnewsline.com/2026/04/07/rural-hospital-system-asks-nc-lawmakers-for-help-in-the-face-of-federal-cuts/

CT’s potential fallout from federal Medicaid changes outlined in new report
https://www.ctpublic.org/news/2026-04-07/cts-potential-fallout-from-federal-medicaid-changes-outlined-in-new-report

Rural Alabama hospitals named in national report, but state association disputes closure risk
https://www.fox10tv.com/2026/04/07/rural-alabama-hospitals-named-national-report-state-association-disputes-closure-risk/

Bracing for federal cuts, some states are already paring back Medicaid services
https://www.gpb.org/news/2026/04/07/bracing-for-federal-cuts-some-states-are-already-paring-back-medicaid-services

Montana halts doula funding amid budget shortfall, Medicaid cut fears
https://tippahnews.com/national-news/montana-halts-doula-funding-amid-budget-shortfall-medicaid-cut-fears/

Kentucky’s Medicaid budget grows, but concerns remain over care
https://spectrumnews1.com/ky/louisville/news/2026/04/06/kentucky-budget-medicaid

Indiana’s Medicaid program could be ditching a popular discount drug program
https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2026/04/06/fssa-wants-changes-to-federal-drug-discount-program-for-hospitals/

Reform bills advance as Medicaid expansion threatens Oklahoma budget
https://ocpathink.org/post/independent-journalism/reform-bills-advance-as-medicaid-expansion-threatens-oklahoma-budget

Oklahoma Republicans move to reverse Medicaid expansion
https://www.kosu.org/oklahoma-medicaid-expansion-reversal-threatened

Recent Medicaid expansions sharply increased access to treatment for opioid use disorder, researchers find
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-medicaid-expansions-sharply-access-treatment.html

Postpartum Medicaid extensions reduce uninsured status
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-03-postpartum-medicaid-extensions-uninsured-status.html

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