Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Friday that the Trump administration had granted permission to West Virginia to ban the use of federal food assistance dollars to buy soft drinks. At an event in Martinsburg, WV, RFK Jr. gave West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrissey a first-of-its-kind waiver to permit the ban and had a message for the rest of the country: “Apply for a waiver to my agency, and we’re going to give it to you.” //

This marks a turning point in the battle between nutritional advocates and beverage manufacturers and sellers over whether SNAP dollars should be used to buy soft drinks.

Soft drinks are the top item purchased with SNAP benefits.

Soft Drinks
Fluid Milk
Ground Beef
Bag Snacks
Cheese
Baked Breads
Cold Cereal
Fresh Chicken
Frozen Handhelds and Snacks
Lunchmeat
Candy
Infant Formula
Frozen Pizza
Refrigerated Juices/Drinks
Ice Cream
Coffee and Creamers. //

Personally, I think the framing of this issue as a "government overreach" or "rights" argument is the height of dishonesty. SNAP benefits, as the name indicates, are "supplemental" to the normal food budget. The money is a government benefit and it has the right to decide what that benefit can be used for. If you want to buy candy and soft drinks, go right ahead, but use your own money. The other major nutritional program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, also known as WIC, already prohibits soft drink purchases, and the sky didn't fall in.

Senator Kennedy -- challenging the status quo, like Noah.

"All the fact checkers died" is savage 🤣

On Thursday, two Republican Senators, Mike Lee (R-UT) and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), revealed a bill that would abolish the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in favor of private security at the nation's airports and other secure venues. //

The measure would officially abolish the TSA three years after being enacted into law, which the senators believe would provide time for security needs to be privatized. //

The TSA should be eliminated and replaced with privatized solutions that are more targeted, streamlined, and where appropriate accountable to limited government oversight," he added.

The senators specifically denote in the legislation that the reorganization plan can't require private security companies to do warrantless searches or extend the TSA in any way. //

Private security firms, arranged by the local airports' management, have the advantage of being accountable. Screw-ups can lead to a company losing a lucrative contract, so there is a strong incentive to be effective. TSA, as with any bureaucracy paid for by taxpayer dollars, has no such incentive.

Kernen: “Did you call for Lloyd Austin’s resignation? Not only did we lose 13 service members, we left $70 billion worth of equipment that fell into the hands of the Taliban.”

“Couple of years later, he was out of pocket for two weeks and didn’t tell the White House. Did you ask for him to resign at this point?”

Coons: “The fact the Secretary of Defense was getting healthcare is fundamentally different from the Secretary of Defense sharing on an unsecured platform attack plans.”

Kernen: “The point is you’re going to complain about a splinter in one eye and ignore a 2x4 in the other eye.”

In signing the EO, President Trump used the authority granted him by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA), which empowered presidents to shape and oversee the federal workforce. We'll see what the judicial branch has to say about that and whether or not they held previous presidents to the same standards. //

Eric Blanc (also at ericblanc. b s k y ) @_ericblanc
Trump's executive order tonight has illegally cancelled union contracts for 67% of the federal workforce & 75% of unionized federal employees — roughly 700,000 union workers

This may be the single biggest attack on the labor movement in American history
10:45 AM · Mar 28, 2025. //

G3
an hour ago
Labor unions came about to protect employees from predatory employers...is the federal government in the habit of mistreating its employees? No? then why should federal employees be unionized...other than to line the pockets of a select few at the top.

Frankly, most unions are worthless - especially the teachers' union. //

NorCalGC SH-2F SCPO
22 minutes ago
My grandfather was a member of the carpenters union. During WW2 he moved to the SF Bay Area to work as a welder in the shipyards. It was a nonunion job. When the war ended he went back to work for the union. After he’d put in his 30 years he went to the union office to get his pension. They told him he wasn’t eligible because his 30 years weren’t consecutive. They screwed him out of his pension. No one in his family has had any use for a union ever since. //

Az-Mt
an hour ago
Congress allocates money for wages and benefits so administration should not negotiate on anything except working conditions. Very little use of unions. Also stop deducting their dues. Make the Union collect them.

And the media was running anonymous stories claiming that Hegseth's colleagues thought he should resign; for instance, Trump allies are starting to notice Hegseth's growing pile of mistakes - POLITICO and Concerns about Hegseth’s judgment come roaring back after group chat scandal | CNN Politics.

Pete Hegseth has been targeted for destruction, but he was merely a participant in the chat group. This isn't new. It comes after another failed attempt to claim that Hegseth had briefed Elon Musk on top-secret war plans targeting China.... The question is: Why?

The answer to that, I think, lies in what Hegseth has done since taking the reins at the Pentagon. He has swiftly removed the most problematic military leaders and replaced them with people who support his agenda. He has largely uprooted the massive DEI infrastructure transplanted into the Pentagon during the Obama years and nurtured to maturity under Biden. He has made great strides in focusing the Pentagon on fighting and winning wars. I think the team he is building will begin to repair much of the damage done to the services, particularly the Navy. His willingness to work with DOGE ensures he is making enemies in the right places. As we've noted before, Hegseth is facing a lot of pushback from the status quo in the Department of Defense, and he's not backing down. //

There is no logical reason why Pete Hegseth should resign or be fired over the Signal fiasco, but there is a very logical reason why that blunder is being used to discredit him and try to have him removed. Hegseth is an existential challenge to the left's "long march" through the military. He's taking back ground the left fought hard to gain in turning the military into a giant petrie dish for social experimentation. The team he is putting together holds the promise of being transformative. That is why Pete Hegseth has become the target.

Immediately completing tasks that only take 60 seconds to do is the key to productivity and decluttering, according to experts.

While household tasks can seem insurmountable — heaps of laundry to wash and fold, a mountain of dirty dishes in the sink, dust collecting on shelves — a simple 60-second rule can help mitigate how overwhelming it may seem. //

In short, the rule is that if a chore can take less than a minute to do, such as picking up dirty clothes off the floor or wiping down countertops, it should be completed immediately. //

The 60-second rule could be a game-changer for seasoned procrastinators or people who have mental health struggles or ADHD, according to Hallmark.

This is because doing one small task at a time is less anxiety-inducing than an onslaught of chores to complete all at once.

Crawford | March 26, 2025 at 11:46 am
“No matter where you are and what you’re accused of, you deserve due process if you are a citizen of America.”

Simply not true. US citizens who had gone to Germany and volunteered for the Wehrmacht were not given due process during WWII, and no one expected them to receive it. They were enemy combatants, no more.

TargaGTS in reply to Crawford. | March 26, 2025 at 12:47 pm
That’s true. They were not afforded due process on the battlefield…in Europe. However, some were captured in the US. For instance, the US citizens involved in Operation Pastorious (three total), were granted due process (as were the other German nationals captured with them) and that would eventually produce the case SCOTUS decided, Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942). Those men were eventually sentenced to death. Their convictions upheld by the Court but two of the three US citizens were granted clemency by FDR and I think later deported to Germany after the war. One was executed weeks after the sentences were upheld.

Three weeks ago, NASA revealed that a shipping container protecting a Cygnus spacecraft sustained "damage" while traveling to the launch site in Florida.

Built by Northrop Grumman, Cygnus is one of two Western spacecraft currently capable of delivering food, water, experiments, and other supplies to the International Space Station. This particular Cygnus mission, NG-22, had been scheduled for June. As part of its statement in early March, the space agency said it was evaluating the NG-22 Cygnus cargo supply mission along with Northrop.

On Wednesday, after a query from Ars Technica, the space agency acknowledged that the Cygnus spacecraft designated for NG-22 is too damaged to fly, at least in the nearterm.

Fox News Senior Correspondent and host of "Special Report" Bret Baier sat down with Elon Musk and the entire DOGE team on Thursday. This is a step up from the individual interviews done with Musk and one or two of the members. While their work overlaps all of the government agencies, each DOGE member spoke to the findings at particular agencies like the Social Security Administration, the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute of Health, the Department of the Treasury, and the Department of the Interior.

Baier kicked off his questioning with Musk, asking what are the DOGE budgetary savings goals and what he thinks he's achieved thus far?

During the continuing resolution fight, the drum the Democrats kept beating was that Republicans wanted to gut Medicare - despite the fact that Joe Biden's administration oversaw years of cuts to Medicare Advantage, the plan increasingly chosen by the nation's seniors. Dems won't characterize cuts to Medicare Advantage as Medicare cuts, though, because what they're really trying to do is eliminate Medicare Advantage as a way to push "Medicare for All."

We all know that Dad is the IT infrastructure manager at home, so when it became clear that we needed a VPN for everyone to enjoy that infrastructure (aka access to streaming services) on their phones and laptops when they were away- it became Dad's job to make it happen.

This is the kind of information that all the sites you visit, as well as their advertisers and any embedded widget, can see and collect about you.

rsync -rin --ignore-existing "$LEFT_DIR"/ "$RIGHT_DIR"/|sed -e 's/^[^ ]* /L             /'
rsync -rin --ignore-existing "$RIGHT_DIR"/ "$LEFT_DIR"/|sed -e 's/^[^ ]* /R             /'
rsync -rin --existing "$LEFT_DIR"/ "$RIGHT_DIR"/|sed -e 's/^/X /'

One of the distinctives of Christianity is the call to behave otherworldly.

Revenge is a human instinct and something most people would say is a natural right. Christ tells Christians to turn the other cheek and let God take care of vengeance for them. Humanity has no natural impulse to love their neighbor if their neighbor is from a different tribe. Christ says to love your neighbor with no exception—yes, love even that neighbor. The natural order does not call for sacrificial love. Christ does. //

A Christian leader should be able to say, “I screwed up.”

We do not live in Christian times.

We live in pagan times where we behave like Romans. Lawsuits are all the rage. Doubling down on behaviors and attacking the other side, no matter the merit of their argument, is what we do. Our politicians in a post-Christian America, even many of the Christian ones, cannot admit a mistake. It is a sign of worldly weakness. It is likewise a sign of worldly weakness when too many Christians are willing to go along for the ride with the lie because it is easier than accepting that the leader made a mistake.

Christian theology is about mercy and grace. The early Church Fathers embraced the apology, and Christians have long been urged to behave contrary to the spirit of the age—show grace and apologize when you mess up. Ask for forgiveness. Be quick to forgive. And move on.

The pagans will always try to hold the mistake over your head. The pagans will always try to shame you with past sins. The pagans will never show grace. And the pagan does not apologize because paganism sees confession as weakness.

However, Christianity shows that grace and confession make us stronger, and a simple apology from the powerful to the people goes a long way to restoring trust when trust in institutions is needed. Instead, our politicians gaslight us, hoping the faithful repeat their spin. We’ve gone from demands for and respect of others’ pronouns, to demands for a restatement of and acceptance of each other’s lies.

If only we had in leadership on display today the humility to admit a mistake. It is harder to find in politics and the church as the West leaves Christianity behind, not for something new, but for the things that existed before Christ. The old gods are creeping back in from the shadows. And yes, just like turning your cheek, saying “sorry” helps keep them at bay.

Russia does not provide medical assistance at the front to its own soldiers. So, if you get seriously wounded, too bad for you and your family.

I've seen drone videos of such Russian men writhing on the ground in filthy trenches littered with dead bodies. And they end up killing themselves with a rifle or grenade rather than die slowly alone in agony.

The thinking in news media is often that graphically detailed news coverage of such conflicts is too gruesome for viewers or readers back home. Often, they don't even show or describe dead bodies.

We should have provocative discussions about such unofficial censorship that sanitizes the horrors of war. Because that reduces the awful ongoing events basically to an imaginary game far away. Who's going to oppose war — or support it, for that matter — if they never see how bad it really is? I ran into some of this editorial opposition at the end of the Vietnam War. //

While Russian forces are killing Ukrainian men in combat at the front lines (and thousands of civilians in indiscriminate artillery, bombing, and missile attacks on cities), other Russians are kidnapping children from Ukrainian homes behind the front lines. They are simply seizing them from their families — I call that kidnapping — and shipping them off to Russia, never to be seen again.

There, they are punished if they don't speak Russian. The goal is to erase from the minds of these Ukrainian youngsters the national identity that Putin maintains does not exist. Hundreds of thousands of children stolen from their families.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited ruling in Bondi v. Vanderstok, upholding the Biden administration’s 2022 rule that allows the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to regulate so-called “ghost guns.” But while headlines may frame this as a Second Amendment loss, that’s not the real story here.

The real story is this: the administrative state just scored another narrow, but important, win—and once again, it did so not through an act of Congress, but through bureaucratic interpretation.

Let’s walk through what actually happened. //

This case was a challenge to the ATF’s rule under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)—a law meant to prevent executive agencies from exceeding their statutory authority. //

This may sound reasonable on paper—especially given concerns over untraceable firearms—but it opens the door to something much more troubling: the broadening of executive power through regulation rather than legislation.

Congress never passed a law banning or regulating ghost guns. Instead, the ATF reinterpreted existing law to give itself that authority. And the Supreme Court just signed off on that approach.

That’s the real concern here. Not the regulation itself, but the process. //

In a blistering dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas warned that the Court was effectively rewriting the statute to allow the executive branch to regulate products Congress never intended to regulate. He pointed out that the Gun Control Act only allows the ATF to regulate certain gun parts, not any part or unfinished frame that might one day become part of a gun.

He also noted that the logic behind the majority’s ruling could eventually be used to justify classifying AR-15 receivers as “machineguns” under the National Firearms Act—an outcome that would have massive legal implications for millions of gun owners nationwide.

he Democracy Fund lawyers champion Amish clients in the legal battle over ArriveCan tickets.

WELLAND, ONTARIO: The Democracy Fund (TDF) has successfully reopened a number of ArriveCan tickets for five Amish clients. These individuals received tickets in 2021 and 2022 for allegedly failing to complete the ArriveCan app but had not received any notification of court dates or convictions, leading to outstanding fines being sent to collections and, in some cases, liens placed against their family farms. These individuals, due to their faith, avoid modern technology. They do not use any form of electricity and have little to no experience using a telephone, much less navigating an app on a modern smartphone.

TDF recently filed documents with the court seeking to have these tickets reopened. The court has now granted this request, which will allow the clients to receive a Notice of Trial and, eventually, set a trial date.

The New York Times, ever ready to preach the faith of “climate responsibility,” recently published a piece titled “What Shopping Bags Should I Use?” It’s a fascinating read, not because it provides clarity, but because it demonstrates just how convoluted eco-virtue has become. Spoiler alert: you can’t win. But you can feel like you’re winning, and maybe that’s the point. //

Plastic bags, we are told, are the spawn of fossil fuels, and as such, must be banished. Their recycling rate is a dismal 10%, and their afterlife often involves floating past a turtle’s nose or breaking into confetti-sized microplastics that haunt us for centuries. But here’s the twist—according to not one but two studies cited by the article (from Britain’s Environment Agency and Denmark’s Environmental Protection Agency), those unholy plastic bags actually have the smallest environmental footprint of the lot when judged by greenhouse gas emissions.

So how did they become public enemy number one? Simple. They look bad. They’re flimsy, crinkly, and associated with other people who don’t bring their own bags to Trader Joe’s. //

Then there’s paper—renewable, biodegradable, and about as sturdy as wet tissue paper and prone to tearing dramatically halfway across the parking lot, right as your oat milk makes a break for it. Surely this is the sanctified option? Not quite. Paper bags, according to the same British study, need to be reused three times to match the global warming impact of a single plastic bag. Which, for anyone who’s ever had a soggy-bottomed paper bag explode in the rain, is optimistic bordering on delusional.

Still, paper has better PR. Its recycling rate is 43%—respectable, though still meaning most paper bags end up decomposing into methane and carbon dioxide in landfills. Methane, for those keeping theological score, is one of the top demons in the pantheon of greenhouse gases. That’s right: while plastic might just sit there, paper actively farts its way through the afterlife.

We've noticed that some of our automatic tests fail when they run at 00:30 but work fine the rest of the day. They fail with the message

gimme gimme gimme

in stderr, which wasn't expected. Why are we getting this output?

Answer:

Dear @colmmacuait, I think that if you type "man" at 0001 hours it should print "gimme gimme gimme". #abba
@marnanel - 3 November 2011

er, that was my fault, I suggested it. Sorry.

Pretty much the whole story is in the commit. The maintainer of man is a good friend of mine, and one day six years ago I jokingly said to him that if you invoke man after midnight it should print "gimme gimme gimme", because of the Abba song called "Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight":

Well, he did actually put it in. A few people were amused to discover it, and we mostly forgot about it until today.

I can't speak for Col, obviously, but I didn't expect this to ever cause any problems: what sort of test would break on parsing the output of man with no page specified? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that one turned up eventually, but it did take six years.

(The commit message calls me Thomas, which is my legal first name though I don't use it online much.)

This issue has been fixed with commit 84bde8: Running man with man -w will no longer trigger this easter egg.