It's been more than a year since I gave up on Google Search (I switched to Kagi.com and never looked back). I don't miss it. It had gotten terrible. It's gotten worse since, thanks to AI (of course):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google's a very bad company, of course. I mean, the company has lost three federal antitrust trials in the past 18 months. But that's not why I quit Google Search: I stopped searching with Google because Google Search suuuucked.

In the spring of 2024, it was clear that Google had lost the spam wars. Its search results were full of spammy garbage content whose creators' SEO was a million times better than their content. Every kind of Google Search result was bad, and results that contained the names of products were the worst, an endless cesspit of affiliate link-strewn puffery and scam sites.

It's not that the internet lacks for high-quality, reliable reviews. There are plenty of experts out there who subject a wide range of products to careful assessment, laboratory tests, and extensive comparisons. The sites where these reviews appear are instantly recognizable, and it's a great relief to find them.

One such site is Housefresh.com, whose proprietor, Giselle Navarro, runs a team that produces extremely detailed, objective, high-quality reviews of air purifiers. This is an important product category: if you're someone with bad allergies or an immunocompromising condition, finding the right air purifier can exert enormous influence on your health outcomes.

This month, Housefresh released its latest report on Google's enshittification, this time with an emphasis on the "AI Overviews" that now surmount every search results page. Google has widely touted these as the future of search, a way to bypass the ad-strewn, popup-obscured, AI-sloppified (!) pages that it is seemingly powerless to filter out of its search corpus:
https://housefresh.com/beware-of-the-google-ai-salesman/

. . .

Is there anything more Trump-era Republican than fake-rich living beyond one’s means? And cheating on your wife, allegedly beating your mistress and lying about your finances and qualifications? Meet Florida Rep. Cory Mills, who is one messy pile of curb furniture! He’s getting evicted from the soon-to-be-divorced-dad pad he was sharing with his sidepiece because he owes his landlord more than $85,000 in unpaid rent, on a penthouse that’s nearly $21,000 a month!

(If you live outside DC or New York or another large city, please understand that $21K per month is very expensive anywhere.)

How befitting for an arms-maker with shady finances. (You know, in case you were curious how he got approved for $21K per month on his $174,000 congressional salary.) If you’re wondering what the soon-to-be-available place looks like, TPM’s Josh Marshall found a link to a similar, slightly smaller penthouse in the complex. Oligarch chic!

The eviction scoop and receipts were picked up by former Daily Beast reporter Roger Sollenberger and dropped on X, and Mills quickly X’d back the sorriest of excuses for not playing his bills:
Roger, I know facts are unusual and unfamiliar thing for you, but here’s just the past two months where you can see I’m repeatedly asking for payment links and again as I tried with management today, it failed to process. “Error code 108 typically indicates an issue with the Windows Installer Service, often meaning another installation is already running. It can also be related to bank connectivity problems in financial software” Facts are a finicky thing but wouldn’t expect you to be anything other than a biased hack!

Sure, guy, the multibillion-dollar management company Bozzuto left its website unable to collect rent from tenants for months on end and refused to accept payment in any other way. You know landlords, how they’re always so lackadaisical about collecting their money! (Especially when the rent is $21K.)

. . .

The Trump administration has declared — without ever informing the American people, because what part of authoritarianism didn’t you understand? — that effective immediately, immigrants who came to the US without papers no longer have the right to a bond hearing, no matter how long they’ve been in the US. The new policy was revealed yesterday in reporting by the Washington Post (gift link). Immigration lawyers said the new policy applies to millions of people, including folks who have been here for decades and have established families, own homes and businesses, and who haven’t broken any laws other than crossing the border without authorization (remember, kids, that’s a misdemeanor on the first offense).

The administration is changing how it interprets a 1996 law that allowed “mandatory detention” of certain criminal aliens like murderers and other violent criminals, keeping them in detention until their deportation cases were completed. But in a July 8 memo, Todd Lyons, (acting) director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) informed the agency that any immigrants who ever entered the country illegally will now be locked up “for the duration of their removal proceedings.” Because the immigration system is horribly backlogged, that can take months or years.

It’s a huge change in immigration cases, as the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick points out, because

The default rule, dating back a century, has been that an undocumented immigrant living here is eligible for bond if not a flight risk or a danger.

That rule was changed in ‘96 for people with criminal records. Now the Trump admin is arguing it also eliminated bond for those who entered illegally.

Well, now we know what ICE plans to do with the $45 billion in new funding the Big Ugly Bill gave it to expand its prison capacity. As Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Mother Jones even before the new ICE policy was announced, the vast expansion of prison funding will “drastically change the landscape. A vast infrastructure of detention will be built, and actually has already started, even before this bill was signed.”

Congratulations, America! We’ll finally have our very own Gulag Archipelago! Just think of the great literature that may eventually be written by some of the survivors!

. . .

Reporting Highlights

Chinese Tech Support: Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel.

Skills Gap: Digital escorts often lack the technical expertise to police foreign engineers with far more advanced skills, leaving highly sensitive data vulnerable to hacking.

Ignored Warnings: Various people involved in the work told ProPublica that they warned Microsoft that the arrangement is inherently risky, but the company launched and expanded it anyway.

. . .

John Sherman, who was chief information officer for the Department of Defense during the Biden administration, said he was surprised and concerned to learn of ProPublica’s findings. “I probably should have known about this,” he said. He told the news organization that the situation warrants a “thorough review by DISA, Cyber Command and other stakeholders that are involved in this.”

. . .

or 40 cruel and bloody months, Ukraine has fought the Russian invader. Since February 2022, when Moscow’s full-scale, countrywide onslaught began, its people have faced relentless, devastating attacks. Tens of thousands have been killed or wounded, millions have lost their homes. Ukraine’s industries, shops, schools, hospitals and power stations burn, its fertile farmlands are laid waste. Its children are orphaned, traumatised or abducted. Despite repeated appeals, the world has failed to stop the carnage. And yet Ukraine, outnumbered and outgunned, has continued to fight back.

Ukrainian heroism amid horror has become so familiar, it’s almost taken for granted. But as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, escalates the war, raining nightly terror on Kyiv and other cities using record waves of armed drones, as US support and peace efforts falter, and as Ukraine’s overstretched frontline soldiers face exhaustion, such complacency looks increasingly misplaced. A no longer hypothetical question becomes ever more real and urgent: what if Ukraine falls?

Answer: Ukraine’s collapse, if it happens, would amount to an epic western strategic failure matching or exceeding the Afghanistan and Iraq calamities. The negative ramifications for Europe, Britain, the transatlantic alliance and international law are truly daunting. That thought alone should concentrate minds.

It has been evident since the dying days of 2023, when its counteroffensive stalled, that Ukraine is not winning. For most of this year, Russian forces have inexorably inched forward in Donetsk and other eastern killing grounds, regardless of cost. Estimated Russian casualties recently surpassed 1 million, dead and wounded. Still they keep coming. While there has been no big Russian breakthrough, for Ukraine’s pinned-down, under-supplied defenders the war is now a daily existential struggle. That they manage to keep going at all is astonishing.

. . .

Two outcomes now seem most probable: a stalemated forever war, or Ukraine’s collapse. Defeat for Ukraine and a settlement on Putin’s hegemonic terms would be a defeat for the west as a whole – a strategic failure presaging an era of permanent, widening conflict across all of Europe. For Russians, too, neither outcome would constitute lasting victory. Greater efforts are needed to convince Russia’s politicians and public that this war, so costly for their country in lives and treasure, can be ended through negotiation, that legitimate security concerns will be addressed, that the alternatives are far worse.

But first, they must give him up. The chief architect of this horror, the principal author of Russia’s disgrace, must be defanged, deposed and delivered to international justice. Putin, not Ukraine, must fall.

On July 5, the day after the Texas floods hit, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) received 3,027 calls from survivors and answered 3,018 of them, about 99.7%, according to Maxine Joselow of the New York Times. But that day, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not renew the contracts for four call center companies that answered those calls. The staff at the centers were fired. The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or about 35.8%. On Monday, July 7, FEMA received 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, around 15.9%.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said: “When a natural disaster strikes, phone calls surge, and wait times can subsequently increase. Despite this expected influx, FEMA’s disaster call center responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently, ensuring no one was left without assistance.”

Marcy Wheeler of EmptyWheel notes that one reason Noem has been cutting so ferociously at FEMA is because she has run through the money Congress allocated for HHS with her single-minded focus on immigration.

In May, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called out Noem’s expenditure of $200 million on an ad campaign pushing Trump’s agenda and $21 million to transport about 400 migrants to Guantanamo Bay only to have many of them transferred back out. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Noem: “You are spending like you don’t have a budget…. You're on track to trigger the Anti-Deficiency Act. That means you are going to spend more money than you have been allocated by Congress. This is a rare occurrence, and it is wildly illegal. Your agency will be broke by July, over two months before the end of the fiscal year. You may not think that Congress has provided enough money to ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], but the Constitution and the federal law does not allow you to spend more money than you've been given, or to invent money. And this obsession with spending at the border…has left the country unprotected elsewhere.

. . .

A poll released Friday makes it clear that the American people do not support such a vision and did not, in fact, expect a Trump administration to deport undocumented immigrants who have no criminal record and have lived in the U.S. for years. A Gallup poll released yesterday shows that the administration’s draconian policies toward immigrants have created a backlash. A record 79% of adults say immigration is good for the country, with only 17% seeing it as bad. That change has been driven primarily by a shift in Republicans, 64% of whom now agree that immigrants are good for the country, up from their low of under 40%. The percentage of American adults who say immigration should be reduced has dropped to 30%, down from 55% in 2024.

. . .

Is a masked “officer” bumping an observer and accusing said observer of assaulting a federal officer the ICE equivalent of using a “drop gun” or a “throw-down gun” to frame a suspect? Asking for the current and future accused.

TNR:

Grandmother Barbara Stone says she was documenting the detention of asylum-seekers with the group “Detention Resistance” at San Diego’s immigration court when she was baselessly accused of pushing an officer. Multiple masked agents then pursued Stone, grabbed and handcuffed her (leaving bruises), confiscated her phone and purse, and detained her for over eight hours, she says.

Once Stone was released, ICE returned her bag but kept possession of her phone. Why? Stone says an ICE agent compared the situation to “a drug bust where they keep a drug dealer’s phone because I had used it in the crime.”

But the only “crime” of which Stone says she’s guilty is documenting immigration enforcement. If this is true, the episode would track with other apparent attempts by ICE agents to avoid accountability of late, for instance, by wearing masks so they can conduct raids and arrests anonymously.

Maybe observers should carry a throw-down ham sandwich to these ICE raids. Blame the sandwich for any inadvertent contact.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

The most illiterate imbecile to ever sit in the Oval Office is dictating the policies and curriculum of the nation’s most prestigious universities —- and making them pay for the privilege:

Columbia University has discussed paying roughly $200 million as part of a deal with the Trump administration to settle allegations of civil-rights violations, according to people familiar with the matter.

Part of the money would be paid to the government, people familiar with the matter said. White House officials said the deal also includes payments to individual students and professors whose rights allegedly have been violated.

The deal goes beyond antisemitism and addresses administration concerns about what it views as racial preferences on campus, one of the White House officials said. The Trump administration envisions the deal having a lasting impact on Columbia’s campus culture, the official said.

The deal also includes provisions that the administration says will promote merit-based admission and hiring, as well as transparency about foreign gifts, the official said.

An agreement would see the restoration of at least some of Columbia’s federal funding.

How about this one?

Harvard leaders have discussed creating a program that people briefed on the talks described as a center for conservative scholarship, possibly modeled on Stanford’s Hoover Institution, as the school fights the Trump administration’s accusations that it is too liberal…

A spokesman for Harvard said an initiative under discussion “will ensure exposure to the broadest ranges of perspectives on issues, and will not be partisan, but rather will model the use of evidence-based, rigorous logic and a willingness to engage with opposing views.” He added that the school has been accelerating efforts to set up the initiative, which would “promote and support viewpoint diversity.”

So “viewpoint diversity” is good now? Good to know. I’m sure the pro-Palestinian students will be relieved to hear it.

This makes me feel as sick as anything else we’ve seen during this most misbegotten sx months of American history since the civil war. The willingness of these prized bastions of intellectual freedom to bend to the whims and fascist agendas of a cretin and his henchmen is massively depressing.

Since it’s now officially summer, I thought it would be a good excuse to curate a list of my top 10 seasonal favorites; movies that I think capture the essence of these “lazy, hazy, crazy” days…infused with the sights, the sounds, the smells, of summer. So, here you go…as per usual, in alphabetical order:

. . .

— Killing them softly with criminal negligence: July 4th, the day Trump signed the bill to cut taxes on billionaires, jack-up the national debt our children will have to pay off, and turn ICE into one of the largest federal police forces in the world, a massive climate change-fueled flood hit central Texas. The first alert from the National Weather Service (NWS) went out at just after 1 AM, but the city of Kerrville didn’t let people in the area know about it until after 7:30 that morning because the so-called Department of Government Efficiency had given early retirement to the fellow whose job was to communicate NWS warnings to local authorities, and, to save money to pay for billionaire tax cuts, he was not replaced. By then many were already dead. To compound the horror, FEMA wasn’t able to preposition disaster assistance or even respond in a meaningful way for a full three days because it’s acting director, David Richardson — who has no disaster experience whatsoever — reportedly hasn’t been seen in weeks and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem had put into place an order that no FEMA activity could take place costing more than $100,000 without her personal sign-off, presumably to free up even more tax dollars for billionaires’ tax cuts. It took her 72 hours, according to CNN, to get around to signing off on the authorization so FEMA could do their job. When asked about all this, Noem’s spokesperson said and rightwing media dutifully reported: “DHS is rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and is reprioritizing appropriated dollars. Secretary Noem is delivering accountability to the U.S. taxpayer, which Washington bureaucrats have ignored for decades at the expense of American citizens.” Asked about the situation, Trump told Fox “News” that Noem was doing a “great job” because he saw her “on television.” And when a reporter asked him about it, he called the journalist “evil” for questioning him or his administration. Sadly, the Fox cult followers will almost certainly never know the true story of what happened.

— Trump’s IRS now says that churches, contrary to Jesus’s teachings and the law, can openly advocate political positions and hustle on behalf of politicians. Anybody who’s ever read the Bible, or just the books of Matthew or Mark, knows Jesus was violently — literally — opposed to churches and synagogues engaging in politics and hustling money: “On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers … ‘Watch out for the Scribes... They devour widow’s houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. These men will be punished most severely.’ … ‘It is written,’ he said to them, ‘My house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’” As much as Mike Johnson and a group of Republicans made a big show of praying on the House floor for passage of their tax cuts for billionaires that screws the poor and needy, in actual fact they’re the classic hypocrites Jesus condemned; they don’t give a damn about His actual teachings, or any of the other great spiritual leaders of history. All of them throughout history have said to first do good for “the least of the least,” as Pope John Paul II mentioned to me when he invited Louise and me to a private audience at Castle Gandolfo, and as His Holiness the Dalai Lama reiterated in the week I spent with him when I “took refuge” at his monastery in Dharamsala and the meditation room in his private home in McLeod Ganj (Harrison Ford narrated a documentary about our visit) reiterate. And yet now Trump’s toady running the IRS says churches can openly preach politics from the pulpit. This is naked blasphemy, and a violation of the 1950s federal law known as the Johnson Amendment stripping tax exempt status from churches that engage in politics that has stood for more than a half-century. So much for the constitutional mandate that the president “shall take care that the laws are faithfully executed.”

. . .

— Work in the fields for $5/hour or lose your healthcare? Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has a plan: if you’re on Medicaid and want to keep your benefits, you can replace migrant farm and hotel workers! Isn’t that special? “We got to work with the farmers and people that have hotels and leisure properties, too. … And then also, when you think about, there are 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program. There are plenty of workers in America.” Right. Get grandma out there in the fields, and teach grandpa how to tuck in the corners of those bedsheets. But what about when the cuts hit all the Amazon and WalMart and other workers for massive corporations who are already on Medicaid because they’re paid so little? It’s pretty damn unlikely that Bezos, et al, are suddenly going to start offering benefits to their lowest-paid workers, so millions of Americans will be, as the old saying goes, SOL.

— Red state Republicans won’t discover how badly screwed they are until after the next years’ midterm elections. In one of the most cynical and disgusting parts of the Billionaires’ Big Bill, the cuts to Medicaid and many other benefits don’t kick in until January, 2027, just after the November, 2026 midterm elections. Just a coincidence, right? “Heartless” doesn’t begin to describe these people.

. . .