The “tell” in Donald Trump’s lie about the results of the U.S. bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites was “completely and totally.” It is one thing to claim (falsely) that we “obliterated” the Iranian program, but “completely and totally obliterate”? After all, “obliterate” means “to remove utterly.” Did we truly “completely and totally remove utterly” Iran’s nuclear threat? Well, no. We did not.

For one thing, approximately 880 pounds of 60% enriched uranium is “missing.” The Iranians had apparently moved the stockpile stored underground at the Isfahan facility. Moreover, even the most optimistic talk from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggests the program was set back only a couple of years. The U.S. assessment suggested we bought only a few months. The Trump team spent days frantically trying to deny that, even attempting to divert attention from its misrepresentation by attacking Fox News Pentagon reporter Jennifer Griffin, perhaps the only real reporter left there.

Moreover, we did not even try to hit all underground facilities. “The US military did not use bunker-buster bombs on one of Iran’s largest nuclear sites [Isfahan] last weekend because the site is so deep that the bombs likely would not have been effective, the US’ top general told senators during a briefing on Thursday,” CNN reported. You cannot “obliterate” what you never try to hit. Worse, the Iranians have now learned that the way to protect their sites is to go as far underground as Isfahan.

To add insult to Trump’s bruised ego, the Washington Post reported, “The United States obtained intercepted communication between senior Iranian officials discussing this month’s military strikes on Iran’s nuclear program and remarking that the attack was less devastating than they had expected, said four people familiar with the classified intelligence circulating within the U.S. government.” Ouch.

The Iranians are not the only ones underwhelmed. “I just don’t think the president was telling the truth when he said the program was obliterated,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said after a belated briefing. If Iran, as he said, retains “significant remaining capability,” then we didn’t “obliterate” (let alone “completely and totally obliterate”) Iran’s nuclear program.

. . .

So, let’s stop using “obliterate” (and exercise extreme skepticism when Trump dresses up lies with adjectives such as “completely and totally”) when the truth is: “The military successfully completed its specified mission, setting back Iran’s program some undermined amount of time but not destroying Iran’s capacity or will to rebuild it. In fact, in dressing up limited action as unalloyed success, Trump might have incentivized Iran to sprint to manufacture a nuclear weapon.”

You can see why Trump and his flunkies prefer to lie.

"This is the most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my entire time in Congress,” said Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT).

“[W]e're debating a bill that’s going to cut healthcare for 16 million people. It's going to give a tax break to…massively wealthy people who don't need any more money. There are going to be kids who go hungry because of this bill. This is the biggest reduction in…nutrition benefits for kids in the history of the country.” Murphy continued: “We're obviously gonna continue to offer these amendments to try to make it better. So far not a single one of our amendments…has passed, but we'll be here all day, probably all night, giving Republicans the chance over and over and over again to slim down the tax cuts for the corporations or to make life a little bit…less miserable for hungry kids or maybe don't throw as many people off of healthcare. Maybe don't close so many rural hospitals. It's gonna be a long day and a long night.”

“This bill is a farce,” said Senator Angus King (I-ME). “Imagine a bunch of guys sitting around a table, saying, ‘I've got a great idea. Let's give $32,000 worth of tax breaks to a millionaire and we’ll pay for it by taking health insurance away from lower-income and middle-income people. And to top it off, how about we cut food stamps, we cut SNAP, we cut food aid to people?’... I've been in this business of public policy now for 20 years, eight years as governor, 12 years in the United States Senate. I have never seen a bill this bad. I have never seen a bill that is this irresponsible, regressive, and downright cruel.”

. . .

The Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill takes wealth from the American people to give it to the very wealthy and corporations, and Democrats are calling their colleagues out.

“This place feels to me, today, like a crime scene,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said on the floor of the Senate. “Get some of that yellow tape and put it around this chamber. This piece of legislation is corrupt. This piece of legislation is crooked. This piece of legislation is a rotten racket. This bill cooked up in back rooms, dropped at midnight, cloaked in fake numbers with huge handouts to big Republican donors. It loots our country for some of the least deserving people you could imagine. When I first got here, this chamber filled me with awe and wonderment. Today, I feel disgust.”

We’ve already seen the grotesque “re-decorating” of the oval office and the razing of the rose garden to put in “patio” like the one he has a Mar-a-Lago. His portrait is hanging all over the White House now, even in the First Ladies gallery replacing HIllary Clinton’s:



According to the NY Times, his grandest dream (other than the Nobel Peace Prize) is to be carved into Mt. Rushmore. You may recall that he told then Gov. Kristi Noem that he dreamed of it and she had a model with his face on it made for him.

. . .

You can’t help but wonder what these guys would do if they really were taking back Falluja instead of abducting unarmed men and women trying to make a meager living. This has all the hallmarks of a Call of Duty cos-play convention.

In today’s NY Times:

Some carry passports to travel to the corner store. Others do not venture out at all, too afraid of the consequences. Bus ridership has dropped. So has business at taco trucks and fruit stands.

Fear and anxiety have gripped Latinos in Los Angeles to an extraordinary degree, upending the lives of thousands of residents. Increased immigration raids and patrols by masked officers have stifled one of the largest and most established Latino communities in America, causing what residents and officials describe as a Covid-style shutdown of public events, street life and commerce.

It has affected not only undocumented immigrants and mixed-status families but also many U.S. citizens who have lived in California for decades and who say that they are fearful of being swept up in the raids. Interviews with more than two dozen Latino residents, elected officials and community leaders in the Los Angeles area revealed the cultural, financial and psychological toll the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is having on a county where nearly half of the population traces their ancestry to Mexico and other parts of Latin America.

This is what we’re living with in Los Angeles these days. It’s what’s about to explode in cities and towns all over the country as soon as DHS gets all its money. I hope everyone is prepared.

Would you pay $169 for an introductory ebook on machine learning with citations that appear to be made up?

If not, you might want to pass on purchasing Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Advanced, published by Springer Nature in April.


Based on a tip from a reader, we checked 18 of the 46 citations in the book. Two-thirds of them either did not exist or had substantial errors. And three researchers cited in the book confirmed the works they supposedly authored were fake or the citation contained substantial errors.

“We wrote this paper and it was not formally published,” said Yehuda Dar, a computer scientist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, whose work was cited in the book. “It is an arXiv preprint.” The citation incorrectly states the paper appeared in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

Aaron Courville, a professor of computer science at Université de Montréal and coauthor on the book Deep Learning, was correctly cited for the text itself, but for a section that “doesn’t seem to exist,” he said. “Certainly not at pages 194-201.” And Dimitris Kalles of Hellenic Open University in Greece also confirmed he did not write a cited work listing him as the author.

The researcher who emailed us, and asked to remain anonymous, had received an alert from Google Scholar about the book, which cited him. While his name appeared on multiple citations, the cited works do not exist.

Nonexistent and error-prone citations are a hallmark of text generated by large language models like ChatGPT. These models don’t search literature databases for published papers like a human author would. Instead, they generate content based on training data and prompts. So LLM-generated citations might look legitimate, but the content of the citations might be fabricated.

. . .

The same day Behrendt replied to our query, Springer Nature published a post on its blog titled, “Research integrity in books: Prevention by balancing human oversight and AI tools.”

“All book manuscripts are initially assessed by an in-house editor who decides whether to forward the submission to further review,” Deidre Hudson Reuss, senior content marketing manager at the company, wrote. “The reviewers – subject matter experts – evaluate the manuscript’s quality and originality, to ensure its validity and that it meets the highest integrity and ethics standards.”

The year is 1936. German citizens that the Nazi Party arbitrarily deems criminals or undesirables are being disappeared to Dachau concentration camp, where they are imprisoned in the most inhumane conditions. They do not know how long they will be there, and they have no legal recourse to contest their detention.

Back home, the prisoners’ loved ones have no idea where they are. Or if they know, they cannot visit or get in touch in any way. They are terrified of the unknown suffering their loved one is enduring, sure that he will get sick and die, and the Nazis won't even bother to tell them.

Meanwhile, the Nazi Party is so proud of itself that it’s selling fucking T-shirts with slogans like “Dachau ain’t just an animal you milk!”

Now imagine it is 2025 and the Republicans are building a concentration camp in the middle of the Florida Everglades where they plan to imprison thousands of migrants and foreigners being scooped up by the ICEstapo. And they are so fucking proud of it that the Florida GOP is selling T-shirts and beer koozies with the prison’s cutesy appellation “Alligator Alcatraz” stamped on them. Sure, it’s an inhumane prison camp, but that is no reason to skip making a little profit off the merchandising!

You can buy these allegedly made in the USA products in the Florida GOP’s online store. Maybe pick up a “Gulf of America” coffee mug while you’re at it, in case you still owe Dad a Father’s Day gift.

The Department of Homeland Security, which is contributing funding for the camp, is also proud of the incredible effort by the state of Florida to dump thousands of people in a remote stretch of the Big Cypress National Preserve in the middle of the Everglades, on the theory that the government can let the alligators in the surrounding swampland do most of the security work, much like San Francisco Bay was supposed to deter escape attempts from Alcatraz. Which, so far as we know, has not yet been reopened as a migrant detention facility.

. . .

A widely-used agricultural chemical sprayed on fruits and vegetables to prevent fungal disease is also killing beneficial insects that play a critical role in pollination and wider ecosystems.

New Macquarie University-led research published in Royal Society Open Science, shows chlorothalonil, one of the world's most widely used agricultural fungicides, deeply impacts the reproduction and survival of insects, even at the lowest levels routinely found on food from cranberries to wine grapes.

"Even the very lowest concentration has a huge impact on the reproduction of the flies that we tested," says lead author, Ph.D. candidate Darshika Dissawa, from Macquarie's School of Natural Sciences.

"This can have a big knock-on population impact over time because it affects both male and female fertility."

The insect species Drosophila melanogaster, commonly called fruit fly or vinegar fly, was used as a laboratory model representing countless non-target insects found in agricultural environments.

"D. melanogaster is also at the bottom of the food chain, becoming food for a whole lot of other species," says Dissawa.

. . .

The Supreme Court ruled last week that Trump can continue to break the law — both US and international law — by having his secret police agents snatch people off American streets and “disappear” them into immigration prisons and then deport them to foreign concentration camps.

Lacking national injunctions, this cruel and inhumane process can now only be stopped one person at a time, one court at a time, at least until the six Republicans on the Court get around to deciding a person’s fate. And they’re now on vacation until October.

Students of history like Jim Stewartson have seen this movie before.

When the Enabling Acts gave the Hitler regime the power to arrest people and disappear them into concentration camps or worse without judicial oversight, Heinrich Himmler came up with what he thought was a neat way to deal with political dissidents: “Night and Fog.”

Nacht und Nebel was designed to instill such terror among the occupied population that it would cause people who might otherwise protest the Nazis violations of law and human rights to self-censor and remain quiet. As Himmler himself wrote:

“The Führer is of the opinion that in such cases penal servitude or even a hard labor sentence for life will be regarded as a sign of weakness. An effective and lasting deterrent can be achieved only by the death penalty or by taking measures which will leave the family and the population uncertain as to the fate of the offender. Deportation … serves this purpose.”

Field Marshall Keitel was equally enthusiastic, writing:

“Efficient and enduring intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminals do not know the fate of the criminal. The prisoners are, in future, to be transported … secretly, and further treatment of the offenders will take place here; these measures will have a deterrent effect because: A. The prisoners will vanish without a trace. B. No information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate.”

Pee Wee German may well have studied this history, as it appears the US deportation schemes to foreign hellholes like El Salvador and South Sudan are explicitly designed to produce terror among brown-skinned immigrants.

The group Human Rights First documented how “disappearances” are one of the main weapons being used by ICE to spread terror in immigrant communities:

“The Trump administration has used a pattern of disappearances to detain, remove, and expel people to countries which are not their countries of origin, and for which no removal proceedings have been conducted nor the required fear screenings. These actions are part of a broader effort to subvert due process and the checks and balances that are central to the U.S. Constitution.

“Among those impacted in these first few months of the administration have been countless asylum seekers, including people fleeing persecution by repressive governments, religious-based persecution, anti-LGBTQI attacks, and other harms.”

. . .

Senate Republicans over the weekend decided to move forward on the big, ugly bill to rip healthcare coverage from 17 million people, deprive millions of food assistance, and use that money to pay (only partially!) for gigantic tax cuts for the super-rich. Their version is far worse than the House’s handiwork; Senate Republicans want to cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid. Apparently, they concluded the House’s $700 billion cut did not throw a sufficient number of people off their healthcare coverage. An estimated 17 million (including those priced out of the Affordable Care Act exchanges) would lose healthcare coverage

Even those who mouthed concerns about the draconian cuts, including Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) fell into line, voting to move the bill forward. They are daring voters not to hold them accountable for their monstrous hypocrisy.

Lawmakers are not in the dark. Their constituents, rural hospitals, state and local officials, the Congressional Budget Office, conservative think tanks, the Wall Street Journal, and their Democratic colleagues have explained the bill’s horrid consequences. Republicans might parrot MAGA talking points, but when Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) distributes materials to fellow Republicans highlighting the devastation the bill will cause, only the truly deluded can imagine this is anything but horrid policy. (The Hill quoted a source familiar with the scene at Tuesday’s Senate Republican lunch: “Thom Tillis got up and he had a chart on what the Senate’s provider tax structure will cost different states, including his. His will lose almost $40 billion. He walked through that and said, ‘this will be devastating to my state.’”

. . .

The Democratic base, rightfully underwhelmed by elected Democrats’ efforts earlier this year, should acknowledge Senate Democrats left nothing on the field in their battle to delay and upset the worst piece of legislation in history. The task for organizers, activists, and ordinary Democratic voters between now and 2026 is to make sure every voter knows who is responsible for this shambolic legislation and which party fought tooth and nail to stop it.

Elections have consequences, and the passage of a bill as damaging as this following Democrats’ 2024 defeat should remind every Democratic, independent, and disgusted Republican voter that the only way to halt and reverse the assault on America is to start defeating MAGA’s assault on average Americans.