The Untold Saga of What Happened When DOGE Stormed Social Security
In the streets of suburban Sydney lies the headquarters of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church — a secretive, ultra-wealthy organisation whose $22 billion business empire stretches around the globe.
Mapped: How 6 Billionaire Family Fortunes Fund Project 2025
DeSmog –
“As scrutiny of Project 2025continues to grow, defenders of the Heritage Foundation-led initiative, which would reshape federal governance and give the next Republican president unprecedented new powers, say it’s the criticism — not the 922-page plan itself — that’s too extreme. In a piece published last month, Fox News cited prominent conservatives who feel there’s “nothing radical” about the endeavor.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has accused detractors of “panic-mongering” and tried to reframe Project 2025’s sprawling “Mandate for Leadership” blueprint as more boring than scary — a milquetoast white paper that simply “melds the work of some 400 scholars and analysts from an eclectic mix of center-right groups.” This echoes Heritage’s insistence that Project 2025, while conservative, is anything but fringe.
…The six family dynasties providing significant support to Project 2025 — Bradley, Coors, Koch, Scaife, Seid, and Uihlein — all have long histories of fighting for financial and environmental deregulation. Three of the six families have promoted climate denial consistently enough to appear in DeSmog’s Climate Disinformation Database, which tracks the people and organizations doing the most to undermine decarbonization efforts. They include oil and gas magnate Charles G. Koch and his Koch Family Foundations; the Scaife Family Foundations, which tap vast wealth from the Mellon aluminum, oil, and banking fortune; and chemicals-and-electronics industrialist Barre Seid, whose recent, record-setting $1.6 billion gift to a nonprofit controlled by Federalist Society co-chair Leonard A. Leo has been a major source of Project 2025 money.
Related: See DeSmog’s coverage of Trump Megadonor Tim Dunn’s Plan That’s More Extreme Than Project 2025
Mother Jones – “From nationalizing voter suppression to flooding the streets with federal agents, the president and his allies are using all the tricks in the authoritarian playbook to tilt the midterms in their favor. The scale of Trump’s interference in the midterms has become crystal clear in recent weeks.
The president pressured Texas to pass a mid-decade redistricting plan last month that would add five more Republican seats in the US House. Shortly thereafter, he vowed to “get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and “Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES,” through an executive order.
“If we do these TWO things,” he wrote on Truth Social, “we will pick up 100 more seats.” The stakes for the midterms are incredibly high. It’s the last chance for Democrats to hold Trump accountable at the national level before he leaves office (unless he attempts to follow through on his musings to seek an unconstitutional third term).
At the same time, nearly 100 state-level races for offices like governor, secretary of state, and attorney general are on the ballot, which will determine who’s in charge of supervising elections in 2028. But unlike 2018, when Trump was still a political novice, or 2022, when Democrats controlled the presidency and Congress, the 2026 midterms will take place under a radicalized Trump administration that appears hellbent on crushing its opposition.
“Our elections have faced an elevated level of risk for some time and now there’s one additional factor that’s going to exacerbate all the other risks, which is a weaponized federal government that might be deployed in ways that can disrupt or interfere in free and fair elections,” says Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice. “That’s a dramatic new factor this year.” Here are 10 ways Trump and his allies are tilting the midterms in their favor before anyone has cast a vote…
See also Greg Olear – The Real Epstein List – A survey of the rich & powerful individuals who elevated Jeffrey Epstein, hired him, funded him, enabled him, befriended him, and/or partook of his services. Includes name and bios and information about each person’s relationship with Epstein.
Dean Blundell – “The House Oversight just published Epstein estate records—including the 2003 “birthday book.” Trump/MAGA cried “fake,” “forgery,” and “hoax.” The receipts say otherwise. I spent the last 9 hours scouring documents handed over to the House Oversight Committee via the Lawyers for Jeffrey Epstein’s Estate. Not a news story from MSM. Not social media posts. Hard evidence that has been sealed by the DOJ and kept hidden by the Epstein Estate until now. For transparency, we’re including the following links so you can do your own research:
I’ll summarize the worst of the worst here for anyone who doesn’t have the stomach for it:
Put simply: you don’t need a single silver-bullet “list” when you have time series, cross-references, and money trails. Prosecutors and congressional investigators build cases from exactly this kind of mosaic…”
153 tons – that’s how big the garbage pile at Tesla became after the blockade Dagensarbette via machine translation.
“How Tesla-employees turned into garbage men.”
The great Ray Hudson is retiring from broadcasting. “His commentary was a gift from the gods, a shooting star from the furthest reaches of the brightest galaxy, that was only meant to rest on planet earth for a short period of time…”
Defector is celebrating its fifth anniversary. “This is a website run by people who want to speak — plainly, honestly, passionately — to an audience that we acknowledge as people rather than metrics.”
Radical Neighbouring. “The food from this place has been offered as a gift to the neighbours and strangers who find their way here. Welcome to the farm where nothing is for sale.”
Revealed: the huge growth of Myanmar scam centres that may hold 100,000 trafficked people Guardian
Former health minister Greg Hunt an adviser to Exclusive Brethren-linked firm
Former minister Greg Hunt works for Brethren company whose owners made millions on COVID contracts
The Treasury Department is rolling back efforts to shut down aggressive strategies used by America’s biggest multinational companies and wealthiest people.
Trump administration loosens corporate taxes after pulling out of global deal
Why I blog: Hundreds of pages could be filled or just a sentence might capture some of the depth behind blogging. Blogging is interactive and in many ways inclusive. Anyone anywhere can shed a light on this strange cosmos of ours.
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
- Dorothy Parker
Why - we Royal Malski - blog
Why do we collect things? Cazadora
The Other Mark Zuckerberg Has Had Enough: Bankruptcy Lawyer Sues Meta Over Identity Mix-Upstechnobez
Sweeteners can harm cognitive health equivalent to 1.6 years of ageing, study finds The Guardian
Great Lakes have entered era of extreme temps, study finds Bridge Michigan
Why Blue Eyes Aren’t Really Blue (And What Makes Green So Rare) ScienceAlert
Do Indian authors need to be social media influencers to sell books? Vogue India
A monster seaweed bloom is taking over the Atlantic Science Daily
Do Indian authors need to be social media influencers to sell books? Vogue India
49 Literary Movies and TV Shows to Watch This Fall. That seems like a lot! Includes Frankenstein, The Twits (Roald Dahl), various Seuss stories, The Running Man, Train Dreams, Hamnet, etc.
Sophisticated nations support literary culture
“And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.”
— B.B. King
The Good Soldier Švejk manuscript
ahrefsblog: “AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude can hallucinate URLs and direct visitors to non-existent pages on your website. But how often does it happen? To find out, we looked at the http status of 16 million unique URLs cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, and Mistral. 
We found that AI assistants send visitors to 404 pages 2.87x more often than Google Search. ChatGPT is the greatest offender, with 1.01% of clicked URLs and 2.38% of all cited URLs returning a 404 status (compared to baseline 404 rates of 0.15% and 0.84% respectively). Here’s what we found:
Liberty Street Economics, Federal Reserve Bank of New York: “The swift advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has sparked significant concern that this new technology will replace jobs and stifle hiring
Japan sets record of nearly 100,000 people aged over 100 - via Little Bay
The Island Where People Forget to Die
Remembering Stamatis Moraitis: The Man Who (Almost) Forgot to Die
Prior to his death, he had become an international media darling. The New York Times featured him in a story called “The Island Where People Forget to Die.“
Moraitis also featured in other interviews including one with BBC reporter Andrew Bomford.
Renowned celebrity chef and Diane Kochilas’ wrote a cookbook which dives into the Ikarian “food-as-life” philosophy and includes dozens of recipes, photographs and stories from locals.
.Ikigai (Japanese, 生き甲斐) originates from the words iki meaning “life” and kai meaning “reason; worth; use”. “Ikigai can be something small or something big. Ikigai is a spectrum. The complexity of ikigai actually reflects the complexity of life itself.”
The internationally best-selling book Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life highlights one of the key principles called “hara hachi bu” that almost every Japanese person follows. This principle means eating until you're 80% full.
Ikigai (pronounced "eye-ka-guy") is a Japanese concept that means having a reason to live or "a reason to jump out of bed in the morning". It represents the convergence of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for, leading to a life of purpose, joy, and balance. Finding your ikigai is a personal journey to discover your own unique reason for being, often linked to long-term happiness and well-being.
