In Support of Mandatory Nucleic Acid Synthesis Screening and Recordkeeping

As life sciences researchers, builders of AI and biotechnology, and experts with a wide range of views on how to approach AI policy, we call on legislators to make screening of orders for synthetic nucleic acids — and the equipment needed to make them — mandatory.

The ability to order synthetic DNA online has accelerated vaccine development, powered basic research, and made it possible for small teams to access capabilities that used to be confined to major institutions. Since the publication of protocols to reconstruct viruses from strands of DNA more than two decades ago, it has also been recognized as a point in the biotechnology supply chain where a bad actor could cause outsized harm. Recognizing the vulnerability, synthesis companies formed the International Gene Synthesis Consortium in 2009 to develop and implement voluntary safeguards against misuse.

While the issue is not new, the pace of progress in artificial intelligence is. AI systems now outperform PhD-level virologists on questions about highly technical laboratory procedures in their own domains of expertise. The evidence about what this means for present-day biosecurity threats is genuinely mixed, but the trend is hard to dispute. AI systems are improving rapidly, and alongside incredible benefits to science and medicine, there is a real possibility that the knowledge barriers which have historically prevented bad actors from obtaining biological weapons will meaningfully erode.

Support for screening does not depend on any particular view of AI; the biosecurity case has been recognized by scientists and governments for decades. Screening is also one of the best understood and least disruptive biosecurity measures available. It asks providers of synthesized DNA and manufacturers of synthesis machines to check synthesis requests for sequences of concern and to verify customer legitimacy before shipping orders. Providers should also record synthesis orders and sequence data to support legitimate biosecurity investigations, so that any threat that might evade initial screening can be traced back to its source — including when individual sequences would not raise concern in isolation. Awareness of traceability itself deters misuse.

Many of the largest and most responsible providers in the industry already screen and record orders voluntarily because it is well understood that they have an important role to play in maintaining public trust in and mitigating potential misuse of this important technology.

For these reasons, the undersigned support mandatory nucleic acid synthesis screening, including recordkeeping, in the United States.

Given the pace at which the underlying technology is changing, we believe the need is urgent. Congress should act this session, and we applaud the legislative efforts currently underway. To ensure a consistent national standard rather than a patchwork of conflicting laws, states should also consider implementing requirements based on existing federal and industry guidelines.

This is a rare moment of agreement across stakeholders that are often at odds. We hope policymakers will meet it with decisive action.

Sincerely,
Signatories: — *Everybody*

[ed. No brainer, right? You don't just leave potential life-threatening bio-warfare components laying around with no oversight. Right?]

***

Amrith Ramkumar (WSJ): Top artificial-intelligence executives are joining security experts in calling for Congress to protect against biological threats posed by AI, adding to growing pressure on lawmakers to address the technology’s risks.

Three major chief executive officers—OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis of Google’s DeepMind AI lab—are among the signatories of a letter urging Congress to require safeguards when companies order synthetic DNA and RNA, a key step in developing certain vaccines and biotech breakthroughs.

… It was organized by two tech-focused think tanks that said the topic is a rare source of agreement among libertarians, progressives, researchers and rival executives.

Dean W. Ball: I am honored to have signed on to this letter. This is an urgent priority for near-term action by Congress. Biotech is advancing rapidly on its own, and I—and many others—believe the “Mythos moment” in AI/bio is coming soon. It is time for action.

revisions to existing nucleic acid screening requirements were mandated by an EO POTUS signed a year ago; I worked on them while in govt. I genuinely don’t know what happened to that work after I left but it is nine months behind schedule. Congress acting is better anyway.

Joshua Teperowski Monrad: People are so astounded when I tell them this isn't already law

Alec Stapp: it really is insane [...]

Other signatories include Patrick Collison, Paul Graham, Mustafa Suleyman, Alexandr Wang and a lot more where that came from.

We need such letters, despite this having ~100% support among those who understand any side of this, this is such a slam dunk that we should be doing this even before considerations of AI making malicious action vastly easier.

Why? Because political awareness is basically still near zero:

Will Poff-Webster: When I was a Senate staffer and occasionally got the chance to bring up biosecurity risks from AI, the response was often, “What? AI might be able to do that?”

This letter shows how easy it’d be for Congress to act on this

Trump Administration Continues Efforts to Dismantle Consumer Protection Agency

Consumer protection agency deletes thousands of pages as Trump administration seeks to dismantle it (The Guardian)

Last February, Trump appointed Russell Vought, White House budget director, as acting director of the CFPB. Vought was a key architect of Project 2025, which called for the abolition of the agency. He has since ordered CFPB employees to stop all work, dropped dozens of pending enforcement cases and tried to fire most of the agency’s staff, a move blocked by a federal judge in an ongoing lawsuit brought by the agency’s staff union. Recent court filings reveal agency leadership aims to reduce the agency’s headcount from 1,174 to 556. [...]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to enforce federal consumer financial law, promote fair competition, protect people from deceptive or predatory financial products and compel companies to engage with consumers when they file complaints.

Since its inception, the bureau has returned more than $21bn to consumers through monetary compensation and canceled debts. A Democratic Senate banking committee report released this year found the Trump administration’s gutting of the bureau and moves to rescind industry regulations have already cost consumers billions in the past year.

by Amy Qin and Flávio Pessoa, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Guardian Design/Getty Images
[ed. ... and the hits keep coming. See below. Until his supporters say enough is enough, we and they will continue to get screwed. The most relevant question now is if recovery will ever be possible again. Always easier to destroy than to create (or restore). See also: Why are US consumers so angry? It’s not just high prices (Guardian).]

The Home-Insurance Coin Flip: Nearly Half of Claims Result in Zero Payout

When disaster strikes, many Americans face a near flip-of-the-coin chance that their home insurer will pay a claim.

And the problem is getting worse. The five biggest home-insurers as a group didn’t pay out on more than 44% of claims resolved last year, forcing homeowners and renters to fund repairs out of their own pockets, an analysis by The Wall Street Journal found.

The risk that a claim will result in no payment among the group—State Farm, Allstate, Liberty Mutual, United Services Automobile Association and Farmers Insurance—shot up from 36% a decade earlier, according to the analysis.

Several factors are driving nonpayment rates higher, according to industry analysts and executives. Prime among them: Insurers are responding to a yearslong run of postpandemic losses in their home-insurance businesses by getting tougher on claims.

One way they have done this is to raise deductibles, or the amount the customer has to pay before the insurer kicks in. Some companies applied higher deductibles to specific risks such as hurricane and hail, and changed certain deductibles from a dollar value to a percentage of the value of a home. They have also set tighter criteria for claims on expensive items like roof replacements.

 
Consumers hit by rising premiums are themselves selecting higher deductibles to save money, insurers and consumer advocates say. This sets consumers up for disappointment when they put in for claims.

 
Home insurers pitch policies as a peace-of-mind financial safety net. But customers can find the apparent guarantee of compensation for disasters evaporates when they come to claim. [...]

A spokesman for USAA, whose unpaid claims ticked up to 51% from 49% a decade ago, said the Journal’s analysis was misleading because it lacks important context around why claims may be closed without payment. That includes losses below a deductible, claims not pursued by customers or claims later reopened and paid, he said. Considering those factors, fewer than 6% of USAA claims were denied, he added.

There are other drivers of the rise in claims closed without a payout. More frequent losses from disasters, in part driven by climate change and increased development in danger-prone areas, are also triggering more claims that aren’t covered by the policies, such as for flood damage, insurers say. [...]

Location has a big influence on the odds of no payment. Insurers in Florida had the highest rate of no payouts, affecting more than two in five homeowner claims in 2024, significantly higher than the 34% five-year average for the Sunshine State. Back-to-back hurricanes in 2024—Helene and Milton—likely drove up rejections as homeowners claimed for flood damage that wasn’t covered, insurers said.

The fallout from Hurricane Milton, when insurers declined payments on claims from more than 95,000 Floridian homeowners, shows the main reasons companies say no.
Heading the list: deductibles. Insurers have sharply increased the typical deductible amount in recent years, while often introducing separate—even higher—deductibles for wind and hail damage in high-risk areas.

by Jean Eaglesham and Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Image: WSJ

***

Steps to consider if you believe your claim has been denied unfairly include:

• Ask the insurance company for a letter setting out the reasons for the denial, and copies of their relevant documentation. Consumer group United Policyholders has a sample letter on its website.

• Collect any additional evidence you can to support your claim, such as photographs or reports from independent experts.

• File an appeal to the insurer: Instructions for doing this should be in the denial letter or policy document.

• If an appeal is denied, you can submit a complaint to your state insurance regulator.
• If you want outside help, consider asking a public adjuster or attorney if they will help fight your case. You can find a local public adjuster on The National Association of Public Insurance Adjusters website. Expect them to take a slice of any eventual payout.

Guardrails (What Guardrails?)

It is the most overused metaphor of Trump 2.0 (along, perhaps, with “Trump 2.0”). If you are worried that this administration has careened out of control — gutting the federal work force, threatening allies, starting wars, militarizing American cities, emasculating NATO, knocking down chunks of the White House, proposing that taxpayers foot the bill for a $1.8 billion political slush fund — then the failure of “guardrails” is your constant lament.

“Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Kamala Harris warned late in her failed 2024 campaign. The guardrails are “made of Jell-O,” a host for MSNOW complained as he considered Trump’s first year back in office. And Democrats pitch all manner of legislation as essential “guardrails” around the powers and the personality of the 47th president.

What “norms” were to Trump’s first term, “guardrails” are to his second. We’ve gone from “Can he do that?” to “What can stop him?”

The problem is that guardrails — their presence or absence, their strength or deterioration — are a limiting way to imagine restraints on executive power. Even as they supposedly protect us from the overreach of our leaders, guardrails risk reducing the rest of us to spectators. A guardrail suggests that some trustworthy sage of long ago (James Madison is a favorite) has inspected the road and erected sensible boundaries. No need to worry; there’s a guardrail.

Except sometimes there isn’t; or sometimes it’s weak. Or sometimes the only way to make a guardrail go from metaphor to reality is to become one yourself. [...]

The ultimate paper guardrail in the United States is the Constitution, our owner’s manual. This one really is paper; you can visit the National Archives in Washington and see those four brittle and handwritten pages in a hermetically sealed case pumped with argon gas. (Yes, it’s a guardrail with its own guardrails.)

We know the main constitutional guardrails: powers split among the three branches of the federal government; the guardrails of federalism, that is, of powers shared between the states and the national government; and the Bill of Rights, which basically became a condition for skeptical state conventions to ratify the whole thing.

The verbs of the Constitution’s preamble burst with self-assurance — establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, secure the blessings of liberty — but different passages cut in unexpected directions. For example, the stipulation in Article I, Section IV, that the “times, places and manner” of elections “shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof” is a vital democratic guardrail when, say, an American president who has just lost re-election pressures state officials to “find” more votes in his favor. But how protective of democracy is this guardrail when those state legislatures gleefully redraw congressional districts so that politicians choose their voters and not the other way around?

Even the Constitution’s principal author was not sure that the document was adequate to the task before it. In Federalist 48, Madison wondered whether these mere “parchment barriers” were strong enough to sustain the Republic in the face of “the encroaching spirit of power.”

This singular piece of parchment has endured for more than two centuries and has come to be regarded as the sacred text of our civic religion. Tom Paine even referred to the Constitution as America’s “political bible,” and its most famous passages are often recited aloud, with devotional reverence. [...]

There has been a standoff in recent decades over proper constitutional interpretation. On one side stands originalism (and its ne’er-do-well cousin, textualism); on the other is an evolving, so-called living Constitution. I’m partial neither to an originalist interpretation, with its overtly ideological intentions, nor to a living Constitution, with its almost vibes-based jurisprudence. More attractive is the notion of a “working” Constitution, as Jack Rakove put it in “Original Meanings,” his 1996 history of the Constitution’s beginnings.

Rakove wrote that “Americans have always possessed two Constitutions, not one: the formal document adopted in 1787-88, with its amendments; and the working Constitution comprising the body of precedents, habits, understandings and attitudes that shape how the federal system operates at any historical moment.”

This does not necessarily mean that the Constitution is becoming a wiser version of itself every day, but simply that the document becomes real when it encounters the world it means to govern. In Federalist 37, Madison seems to agree: “All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications.”

The law is obscure and equivocal until it is put in action, which means that our paper guardrails aren’t real until they are tested. You don’t really know how strong the railing is until something smashes against it.

In their 2018 book, “How Democracies Die,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt emphasize two political ideas — two guardrails — that are crucial to sustaining democracy: institutional forbearance and mutual toleration.

Politicians display institutional forbearance when they exercise restraint in the use of even their legitimate powers, not deploying them in full for temporary advantage, if only because someday a rival will come into power and do likewise. And mutual toleration means that politicians consider their opponents legitimate participants in the public arena, not existential enemies who must be vanquished at all costs.

When Levitsky and Ziblatt published the book, both guardrails were already under stress in American politics. Today, they’ve been overrun.

Mutual toleration has nearly vanished — politicians and supporters from one side see their opponents on the other as evil, as destroyers of all they hold dear. “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said on Jan. 6, 2021, while Democrats invariably describe Trump as an “existential threat” to American democracy. Absent mutual toleration, the stakes are always at the highest pitch: National survival requires partisan victory.

Institutional forbearance has also deteriorated beyond recognition. The Department of Justice investigates and indicts a president’s political enemies and insulates the president and his family and businesses from tax inquiries. Immigration enforcement agents descend upon neighborhoods, workplaces and schools, detaining, raiding and even killing in the name of mass deportation. A self-styled Department of Government Efficiency takes a chain saw to the federal work force, eviscerating U.S. foreign assistance along the way. And a president is granted, via a generous Supreme Court, presumptive immunity for whatever “official acts” he commits on the job.

After all, why exercise forbearance when you finally wield the power to do what you’ve always wanted to do? When they get in the way of pet projects and partisan interests, high-minded ideas are easily disregarded by those in power. Consider Vice President JD Vance’s dismissiveness toward the American creed — he argues that people will fight for a place and a home, not for mere “abstractions” — even though the oath of office he swore was to defend the Constitution itself, that piece of paper so packed with abstractions.

The individuals who serve as democratic guardrails are those who uphold oaths, who challenge us to live up to our parchment barriers, who give all those other guardrails flesh.

One such flesh-and-blood American guardrail died recently, a man whose lengthy record in public life was unfairly downgraded during his final years. His name was Robert Swan Mueller III, and his case is illustrative of how we’ve come to regard constraints on presidential behavior, and on those tasked with investigating it.

by Carlos Lozada, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

Ranked Choice Voting Delivered What Alaskans Wanted

Takeaways

• Ranked choice ballots allow voters to express nuanced political opinions across party lines. Voters can back their favorite candidate without spoiling an election for their second-favorite.

• In Alaska’s first ranked choice elections in 2022, Democrat Mary Peltola won and held the state’s US House seat with cross-partisan support from Nick Begich voters. In a 2024 rematch, Begich (a Republican) won a majority with support across parties.

• Alaska’s top-four ranked choice system doesn’t favor one party over another—but it does encourage candidates to consider how their campaign might win broad support.

***

In 2022, former Alaska State Representative Mary Peltola made history: she became the first woman to represent Alaska in the US House, the first Democrat to hold the seat in half a century, and the first Alaska Native ever to serve in the chamber. Importantly, she was also the first person to win a statewide ranked choice election in Alaska.

Some Republicans, including Peltola’s challengers Nick Begich and former Governor Sarah Palin, cried foul. The late US Representative Don Young, a Republican, had held the seat for half a century. Ranked choice voting, they fumed, must have been a ploy to elect Democrats.

Results from across the country indicate otherwise. Ranked choice voting doesn’t help members of one party or another; it elevates candidates with broad popular support among voters.

Sightline’s analysis of ballot data from the Alaska Division of Elections spells out a similar narrative: one of a Democrat with cross-partisan appeal in 2022, and of a Republican who captured a majority of hearts and minds during a conservative surge in 2024.

The August 2022 Special Election: Mary Peltola’s landmark win

A somber development gave Alaskans an early taste of the top-four primaries and ranked choice voting they adopted in 2020. Don Young, Alaska’s long-time US representative, passed away in March of 2022. His absence teed up a heated contest: in the first test of Alaska’s top-four primary, 48 hopefuls appeared on the June special primary ballot to serve the rest of Rep. Young’s term.

Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich, independent Al Gross, and Democrat Mary Peltola secured the top four spots; but when Gross dropped out of the running, Alaska’s first ranked-choice contest came down to two Republicans and one Democrat.

Mary Peltola led the field with 40 percent of first-choice votes. Palin followed with 31 percent of the vote. Begich was a close third with 28 percent. No one candidate won a majority of votes, so election officials eliminated Begich, the lowest-performing—and allocated his votes to voters’ second-place rankings. Overall, Peltola had more support than Palin.

Immediately, some Republicans lashed out at ranked choice voting. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, for one, scoffed at the notion that an election in which 60 percent of voters picked Republican candidates first could produce a Democrat. Sarah Palin shared the same sentiment: “It’s effectively disenfranchised 60 percent of Alaska voters.”

Cotton and Palin ignored the core tenet of ranked choice voting: it gives voters a chance to express nuanced political opinions. And Alaskans did.

Begich voters were not necessarily hardcore Republicans

In short, Begich voters liked Begich; not all of them liked Palin.

Animated chart by Sightline Institute using official results from the Alaska Division of Elections.

Only half of Begich voters ranked Palin second on their ballots. Nearly a third of Begich voters—29 percent—cast bipartisan ballots with Peltola second, enough to put the Democrat over the threshold. Some 21 percent of voters had no second-choice preference, so their votes did not transfer.

Begich voters supporting Peltola wasn’t a fluke. The cast vote record, an anonymized data set showing how voters filled out their ballots, revealed that 27 percent of his supporters cast ballots for non-Republicans in the gubernatorial primary as well. Peltola, a low-profile and moderate Democrat, had a similar degree of cross-partisan appeal for some Alaskans who liked Begich.

But what about those 21 percent of Begich voters who had no second-place preference? If every one of those voters had picked Palin, she would have prevailed over Peltola, but if they had picked their second choices in the same proportions as the other Begich voters, Peltola still would have won.

More to the point, not ranking anyone second is a legitimate choice for voters. After all, Alaskans for Better Elections found that 85 percent of August voters thought ranked choice voting was “simple.” Begich-only voters could have ranked if they chose to do so, but they decided against expressing a preference between Peltola or Palin.

Begich and Palin turned against each other, and some voters followed suit

Palin’s withered support among Begich voters may have had roots in a venomous campaign. Begich called Palin a “quitter” and “intellectually deleterious.” Palin told her supporters that Begich was “full of bull.” Trading insults throughout the campaign didn’t exactly endear their bases to one another. Voters aren’t inclined to dole those rankings out to candidates they’ve come to hate.

In fairness, the Republicans were simply following an outdated campaign playbook. Attacking and undermining other candidates had long been a winning strategy in Alaska’s often divided pick-one, plurality winner elections prior to reform. But ranked choice voting encourages candidates to build bridges rather than burn them. If candidates can’t be a voter’s first choice, they can still appeal to be their second.

While Begich and Palin were snapping at each other, Peltola was snapping selfies with them. Her “Fish, Family, Freedom” slogan was upbeat and nonpartisan. She maintained a respectful tone when discussing her opponents, and they reciprocated—Palin even called her a “sweetheart.”

Perhaps if the Republicans had followed Peltola’s friendly lead and encouraged their supporters to rank one another, they could have drummed up enough support to keep the seat in Republican hands. Instead, they salted the earth.

by Al Vanderklipp and Jay Lee, Sightline Institute | Read more:
Image: Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News via ZUMA Press Wire

[ed. Ranked choice voting works (even if Begich eventually slimed his way into Congress on Trump's coattails in 2024). Mary's running again, this time to oust another Trump yes-man, Dan Sullivan in the Senate. I don't support all of her policies, but at least they're well reasoned and not just rubber stamps for whatever Trump dictates. Please contribute to her campaign if you value independent thinking. See also: Five Ways Election Reform Has Revamped Alaska Politics (Sightline).]

Samurai vs. Squatters: Reclaiming California Property Owners' Stolen Homes

Across the Golden State, uninvited occupants have taken over countless residential properties and then refused to vacate. Homes undergoing renovations, vacant rental units, and even whole apartment buildings have fallen prey to squatters. Once they move in squatters are very difficult to dislodge. The legal process to remove them is expensive and can take months or years.

In their desperation, owners are increasingly turning to a rising crop of private rights enforcers to solve the problem. That includes Jacobs and his company, ASAP Squatter Removal.

Jacobs claims to have developed a long list of tools and tactics that enable him to remove squatters far faster than the court system, all while staying within the bounds of the law. Chief among them is a weapon he carries on every job: a katana, a curved Japanese sword that's more synonymous with samurai warriors than clearing squatters.

"In most industries, swords just don't make any damn sense," Jacobs says. "In this particular one, it actually does." The lightly regulated katana, he explains, is an ideal weapon for indoor self-defense and intimidation.

It's also an ingenious marketing ploy in the competitive world of squatter removal services. Jacobs' company has received a healthy amount of media attention from local and international outlets that never fail to mention his sword in the headline.

According to Jacobs, his company has had a near-perfect success rate of removing squatters.

If they were Jacobs' only adversary, his katana might be the only weapon he needs. But ASAP Squatter Removal is engaged in a two-front war. His main competition comes from law enforcement agencies that are none too keen on ceding their monopoly on the use of force to people like Jacobs.

Every job that ASAP Squatter Removal performs requires it to dodge criminal charges. The company has had only mixed success on the latter front. In January, Jacobs and two associates were charged with a long list of felonies stemming from one of their jobs.

The legal and physical risks inherent in anti-squatter work are why California's landlords have called for more systemic reforms that would make Jacobs' business obsolete.

But with reforms stalled in the state legislature, many property owners feel they have no choice but to turn to gray market services and the unique set of characters, with a very particular set of skills, willing to take on this dangerous work.

On the streets, it's samurai versus squatters.

Why Won't California Police Remove Squatters? 'It's a Civil Matter.'

Though aggregate numbers are hard to come by, squatting appears to be on the rise in California. The state's housing cost crisis has helped produce the nation's largest population of homeless and housing-insecure people—many of whom are willing to take on the risks of squatting.

High home prices and an arduous eviction system have also helped make squatting a lucrative scam. Owners will often pay squatters exorbitant sums in "cash-for-keys" agreements to reclaim their valuable real estate.

Meanwhile, property owners who call the police about a squatting situation will receive a near-universal response from law enforcement: "It's a civil matter," meaning, "It's not our problem."

Responding officers often feel they lack the competence to tell on the spot whether someone is an illegal squatter or a lawful occupant. They are thus eager to avoid the legal liability that would come from charging a lawful occupant with a misdemeanor trespassing offense.

Police "have been told in training: If somebody says, 'I live here,' leave them alone. Why risk the lawsuit of removing somebody from a house that they may lawfully occupy?" says Sidharda Lakireddy, who manages a few hundred units in the Bay Area and has dealt with multiple squatting situations.

Even in seemingly clear-cut cases, the first instinct of many police officers is to avoid getting involved.

Devlin Creighton tells the story of a squatter who moved into a rental unit he owns in San Jose just a few hours after he managed to convince the previous squatting occupant to leave in a cash-for-keys arrangement.

When the police showed up at the property, they initially told Creighton he'd have to follow the months-long civil eviction process to get his squatter out.

"I'm like, 'She's not going to live here for three months for free. She got here today!'" Creighton recalls telling the officers. "The police, these new guys, were like, 'Well, you know, it's not our job. We're crime. This is civil.'"

Fortunately for Creighton, a more seasoned police sergeant soon arrived who was more willing to hear his side of the story. Creighton's new squatter couldn't answer the sergeant's basic questions, such as "What is your address?" and "When's trash day?" So he forced her to leave. But if the sergeant hadn't been willing to hear Creighton out, the property owner would have had no choice but to go to civil court.

Having to go through a court process to remove a squatter isn't inherently unreasonable. Most states treat squatting as a civil matter to be handled by the courts. California's civil courts move slowly, however. The civil eviction process also enables squatters to claim a long list of procedural rights granted to legal tenants (which they are not) that can stretch a case out for months or longer.

Some lawyers openly sell themselves to potential clients based on their ability to stretch out the eviction process in court. "When it comes to you, the landlord is not stepping on a cockroach; he is stepping on a landmine," reads one eviction defense attorney's website which claims that fighting an eviction in court can prolong one's occupancy for years. "All during the [civil eviction process], you are paying no rent," it says.

The experience some landlords have removing squatters shows this landmine claim is not a bluff.

How Long Does It Take to Remove a Squatter in California?

Zachary, a landlord who owns seven units in the Los Angeles area and who asked only to be referred to by his first name because he fears retaliation from squatters, learned just how lengthy and expensive the civil court process can be when a longtime tenant died in January 2025.

When Zachary went to reclaim the unit, he found four strangers already inside.

"They definitely looked disheveled," he says. "They were people who lived out of suitcases. Their clothes weren't well-kept."

The men showed Zachary a letter claiming they were subtenants of the deceased. They claimed they had a legal right to take over the unit after that person's death.

Zachary's lease with his deceased tenant explicitly forbade subletting, making this claim a legal nonstarter. But when the squatters refused to leave and police refused to eject them, Zachary was forced to file for an eviction in Superior Court of Los Angeles County in February 2025.

Zachary describes the following months as a nightmare. In response to his eviction filing, the new occupants of his home countersued him. They produced phony documents purporting to show they were legal tenants being harassed after they raised habitability issues with the unit. While Zachary waited for a court hearing on the case, his squatters also allegedly moved in several more occupants who proceeded to trash his units, do drugs on the property, and menace his legitimate tenants—some of whom moved out.

The squatters also demanded $50,000 in compensation for the emotional and financial toll that Zachary's "illegal" eviction efforts had caused them.

When a hearing on Zachary's eviction complaint and his squatters' counterclaims was finally held in late March 2025, the judge ruled in his favor in a matter of minutes. Through appeals and hardship claims, however, the squatters managed to delay their actual eviction for another two months.

When Zachary finally reclaimed the apartment in late May, "It was really in disarray. They had left needles and rotting food. They had a cat that had made a mess in there. It was really a terrible scene."

After they'd left, Zachary found out more about who his squatters were. In the papers of his deceased tenant, there was a request for a restraining order against the squatters. That request described how his former tenant had met the squatters on a dating app and agreed to let them stay in his spare bedroom for a week when they claimed to have nowhere else to go.

When his former tenant finally asked them to leave, the document said, they blackmailed him: The squatters said they'd accuse him of rape if he called the cops to kick them out.

Per the restraining order statement, Zachary's former tenant did eventually call the cops on the squatters. The police did not believe their claims of being raped, but they also told Zachary's former tenant that they couldn't remove the squatters without a court order. An officer encouraged the former tenant to file for a restraining order instead.

California's tenants' rights advocates, who uniformly oppose any efforts to expedite the removal of squatters, would describe Zachary's experience as an example of the system working as intended: A property dispute was raised, and after a few months of process, the legal owner was able to reclaim his unit.

But during the time it took for that process to play out, the squatters were able to exploit procedural protections designed to safeguard tenants' rights to menace actual tenants and destroy Zachary's property.

Zachary estimates he spent $14,000 on fees to lawyers and to Squatter Squad, a Los Angeles–based outfit that handled direct negotiations with the squatters, served them legal documents, and helped secure the unit when it was finally vacated. He had to pay another $43,000 to fix the damage the squatters had done to the unit. He also lost rent on both the squatter-occupied unit and on those neighboring units that were vacated because of the squatters' disruption.

Given the costs and ordeal, it's unsurprising other property owners in desperate situations would turn to solutions outside of the court system, such as katana-wielding men in black leather coats.

by Christian Britschgi, Reason | Read more:

Image: Christian Britschgi/Midjourney
[ed. California.]

I Get By From a Little Help From My Friends

In January, on a flight to his Florida club Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump mused about his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself,” he said.

Trump is a tough negotiator, and, looking in the mirror, he faced an equally tenacious adversary. But the president managed to work out a deal with himself Monday, one as novel and brazen as the process that spawned it.

He dropped his lawsuit, extracting from his own government a promise to create a $1.8 billion fund to dole out to his political allies. A day later, in a curious addendum, Todd Blanche, Trump’s former lawyer and the acting attorney general, purported to immunize him from lawsuits arising from a great many things, not least his tax liabilities.

The government of the United States, Blanche wrote, is “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing claims against Trump involving “lawfare and/or weaponization” or tax returns.

The whole enterprise was a jarring shock to the conventional understanding of the constitutional system, raising what legal experts said were profound questions about presidential power. If the arrangement is allowed to stand, they said, Trump will have managed simultaneously to thwart Congress’ power of the purse and the ability of the courts to police the separation of powers.

Indeed, Tuesday’s addendum flirted with a grave question with no settled answer: Can the president pardon himself?

In 1974, shortly before President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace for lawless conduct, Mary C. Lawton, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, wrote in a brief legal opinion that “it would seem” that Nixon could not pardon himself “under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.”

That opinion has not been withdrawn or tested.

Trump seems determined to challenge that proposition. While the mechanism was more complicated than a formal self-pardon, the addendum being deemed lawful would have a strikingly similar effect, a declaration from the government that Trump would not be liable for his private actions.

Legal experts struggled to make sense of this week’s developments, saying tentatively that it was unlikely anyone could sue to stop the moves.

“It is really difficult to think about how to frame a judicial challenge to what the president has done here,” said Samuel R. Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan. “That doesn’t mean people aren’t trying, and that doesn’t mean something might not succeed.” [...]

While Congress has ceded power to the executive branch, it could also reclaim it. Indeed, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D. and the majority leader, said Tuesday that he expected lawmakers to scrutinize how the president’s lawsuit had been ended.

Trump, along with his eldest sons and one of his businesses, filed suit in January against the Treasury Department, along with the IRS, an executive agency within the department. But the Treasury secretary “is and must be the president’s alter ego in the matters of that department,” the Supreme Court said in 1926. The president was suing himself. [...]

An appeals court allowed the payment to be made. In a dissent, Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the majority had taken perverse pleasure in letting the administration do as it wished.

“Perhaps one day, I will possess my colleagues’ schadenfreude toward the executive branch raiding hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars out of the Treasury, putting them into a slush fund disguised as a settlement, and then doling the money out to whatever constituency the executive wants bankrolled,” she wrote. “But, that day is not today.”

by Adam Liptak, NY Times/Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Kenny Holston/The New York Times
[ed. But... but... what about Hilary's emails?! And Hunter Biden doing something or other... maybe playing too much golf with Obama. Idiots. Rather than have his Justice Department just give him $10 billion free and clear (which would be awkward in the least), he's now proposing to drop the suit entirely if all tax and criminal liability (and that of his entire family) is waived basically forever - no matter what they do. What a deal. Here's a typical response from one or your America-hating liberals:

“So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — Take your pick,” McConnell said in a statement. (Sen. Mitch McConnell, KY.)

See also: May 19, 2026 (LfaA:)

***

"But, in fact, administration officials have talked about paying off the January 6 rioters since at least December 2024, and in June 2025 the Justice Department paid close to $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt, killed by police as she tried to break into the House of Representatives.

Apparently based on those signals, Florida’s Andrew Paul Johnson, a January 6 rioter pardoned by Trump, was convicted earlier this year of sexually abusing two twelve-year-olds and trying to buy their silence by saying he would share some of the millions of dollars in restitution money he expected the Trump administration would pay him for his January 6 case. Van Hollen went on to read a series of news stories reporting that January 6 rioters expected payments.

Since Trump’s blanket pardon of nearly 1,600 of those convicted of crimes related to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, many of them have been rearrested for crimes. At the time of Johnson’s sentencing, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) noted that Trump’s support has made the January 6 rioters “think they’re untouchable.”

Then, today, the plot got even thicker.

A document—this time signed by Blanche himself—amended the previous agreement to add: “The United States RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES” Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization, “and is hereby FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims” that, as of yesterday, “have been or could have been asserted” by the IRS against them or “related or affiliated individuals” or companies. In other words, Blanche is asserting a blanket promise to stop all IRS audits of Trump’s taxes and not to prosecute any crimes Trump, his family, his businesses, or his associates might have committed that crossed the IRS.

In 2024, Russ Buettner and Paul Kiel reported in the New York Times that Trump had been double-dipping his tax breaks for years. In her Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance called the document from the Department of Justice “a pardon on steroids.”

Vance commented that “[t]he optics of this are so bad that it’s hard to believe Trump would expose himself to their consequences unless he really needed this deal.” It’s probably worth remembering that, after years of pursuing the gangster Al Capone, the government finally managed to convict him of tax evasion. It appears Blanche and Trump’s loyalists are trying to make sure that can’t happen again, declaring any such investigations the “weaponization” of the Justice Department.

Holly Baxter of The Independent reported today that in the midst of all the chaos—including his war on Iran and rising fuel and food prices—Trump called a sudden, urgent press conference today as Blanche was testifying. But what was on his mind was not Iran, or prices, or his corrupt agreement with the Department of Justice. He wanted to talk about his ballroom.

Thank You For Your Service

Dear Acting Attorney General Blanche: 

It has come to our attention that you have used your office to improperly shower government cash on Donald Trump’s political operatives and sycophants, beginning with corrupt seven-figure “settlements” for disgraced Trump officials Michael Flynn and Carter Page who had already lost their initial cases against the government in court. You have now proceeded behind closed doors to order the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to pay millions of dollars to former FBI agents who were suspended, fired, and had their clearances revoked for criminal activity, major breaches of national security, or violations of the standards of conduct and professionalism required of law enforcement agents. All of these handouts constitute an astounding and lawless abuse of government office and taxpayer dollars. 

The Committee on the Judiciary has learned from multiple sources that over the last several months, your office ordered the FBI to pay massive settlements to nearly a dozen FBI employees who were disciplined and suspended for gross violations of FBI policy and federal law. In one instance, an employee had his security clearance revoked and was fired from the FBI after he refused to investigate a violent white nationalist group. He later admitted to accepting commercial sex while on an official assignment overseas, yet under Director Kash Patel, the FBI reinstated him, reinstated his clearance and, amazingly after all this misconduct, paid him several hundred thousand dollars. In another case, an FBI employee participated in the violent mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and subsequently lied to the FBI’s Security Division about his actions on that day. He had his security clearance revoked for this blatant misconduct and then left the Bureau. But under your leadership, the Department of Justice (DOJ) agreed to pay him a lump sum payment and backpay of several hundred thousand dollars at the expense of the FBI.

Two threads seem to unify these astonishingly corrupt “settlements,” which are, of course, not actual settlements because the beneficiaries have generally already lost, or in many cases, not even filed their cases. These checks are just political handouts and payoffs.

by Congressman Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member, House Judiciary Committee |  Read more (pdf):]

[ed. Hear this on the nightly news? No?]

Monk Seals Under Attack

The response was swift.

A week after a bystander’s cellphone video appeared to show a tourist heaving a coconut-sized rock at a Hawaiian monk seal swimming in calm waters off Lahaina, barely missing its head, federal authorities charged the Seattle resident with harassing the endangered animal.

On Wednesday, they arrested the person believed to be in the video: Igor Mykhaylovych Lytvynchuk, 38. He’s expected to appear in court in Honolulu on May 27.

Those decisive moves followed near-universal outrage as images of the startled male monk seal and a defiant Lytvynchuk went viral in Hawaiʻi and beyond, prompting calls for action.

 

Outside of high-profile incidents such as that, authorities struggle to prosecute those who harass or even intentionally kill Hawaiʻi’s monk seals — one of the world’s most endangered species and a culturally important animal in the islands.

Protecting the mammals from human harm, advocates say, remains a complex and uphill battle.

Most incidents don’t get caught on camera. Federal enforcement is stretched awfully thin across the Pacific region. Misinformation about the seals competing with fishermen for food, seal advocates say, continues to spread through local communities and spur attacks. [...]

On Maui, Mayor Richard Bissen vowed to personally see that Lytvynchuk, who was vacationing there, would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. If convicted, Lytvynchuk faces up to one year in prison for each charge plus fines of up to $50,000 under the Endangered Species Act and up to $20,000 under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Initially, authorities believed the seal nearly hit was a female named Lani but later determined it was a different, male seal, Bissen said in an Instagram post Thursday. [...]

Enforcement Challenges

Out of at least 16 incidents of confirmed, intentional monk seal killings by humans in the past 17 years that remain unsolved, federal officials have only managed to prosecute one case. That incident, on Kauaʻi, dates back to 2009.

NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement, which is charged with protecting the seals under endangered species rules, did not respond this week to requests for comment.

Maria Sagapolu, assistant director of the office’s Pacific Islands Division, said in 2024 that there were fewer than 12 people to cover enforcement of the entire U.S. Pacific region, including Hawai‘i, Guam and other U.S. territories.

The Pacific represents the smallest of the OLE’s five divisions but has to cover the largest area, according to Sagapolu, representing some 1.7 million square miles. [...]

Among the $7.5 million in green fee tourism outreach funding cut by the Legislature was a $700,000 proposal to work with the tourism industry on better visitor outreach and more “culturally grounded messaging that promotes safe wildlife interactions,” according to a statement from the Department of Land and Natural Resources on Thursday.

Those dollars also would have funded a pilot marine protected species reporting app, the agency said, for the community to help report a host of threats related to Hawaiʻi’s wildlife, including monk seals. The project was recommended by Gov. Josh Green’s volunteer Green Fee Advisory Council, but the Senate removed its funding last month.

by Marcel Honoré, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: Hawaiʻi District Court document/2026; The Marine Mammal Center, NOAA Permit #24359/2023
[ed. The human capacity for stupidity and cruelty can never be underestimated (which appears to have infected Molokai as well). When a witness confronted the man, he said “he did not care and was ‘rich’ enough to pay any fines,”. Video here (Hawaii News Now).]

Kash Patel’s Personalized Calling Card

One of J. Edgar Hoover’s greatest reforms at the FBI was his embrace of fingerprinting. During the 1930s, visitors to the FBI offices in Washington, D.C., received souvenir fingerprint cards featuring his name. The men who succeeded him as FBI director were more discreet and judicious, mindful of the cult of personality that had developed around Hoover. They generally avoided giving out branded swag.

But then came Kash Patel.

President Trump’s FBI director has a great deal of affection for swag. Merchandise for sale on a website he co-founded—still operating, nearly 15 months into his term—includes beanies ($35), T-shirts ($35), orange camo hoodies ($65), trucker caps ($25), “government gangsters” playing cards (on sale for $10), and a Fight With Kash Punisher scarf ($25).

One thing not for sale is liquor, because liquor is something Patel gives away for free.

Last month, I reported that FBI personnel were alarmed by what they said was erratic behavior and excessive drinking by Patel. (The FBI director has denied the allegations and filed a defamation suit against The Atlantic and me.)

After my story appeared, I heard from people in Patel’s orbit and people he has met at public functions, who told me that it is not unusual for him to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words “Kash Patel FBI Director,” as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: Ka$h. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with “#9” there as well. One such bottle popped up on an online auction site shortly after my story appeared, and The Atlantic later purchased it. (The person who sold it to us did not want to be named, but said that the bottle was a gift from Patel at an event in Las Vegas.)

Patel has given out bottles of his personalized whiskey to FBI staff as well as civilians he encounters in his duties, according to eight people, including current and former FBI and Department of Justice employees and others who are familiar with Patel’s distribution of the bottles. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.

Patel has distributed his self-branded bottles while on official business, including during at least one FBI event. He and his team have transported the whiskey using a DOJ plane, including when he went to Milan during the Olympics in February. One of the bottles was left behind in a locker room, according to a person who was there. (I reviewed a photograph of the bottle.) On the same trip, Patel was filmed drinking beer with the gold-medal-winning U.S. men’s hockey team—behavior that officials have said did not sit well with the teetotaling president. Patel defended himself at the time, saying he was just celebrating with his “friends” on the hockey team. Patel’s use of DOJ aircraft to transport cases of alcohol has been the subject of discussion among FBI staff.

The FBI did not dispute that Patel gives out bottles of whiskey inscribed with his name, but in response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson portrayed the gifts as routine within the FBI and the broader government. He added that “the bottles in question are part of a tradition in the FBI that started well over a decade ago, long before Director Patel arrived. Senior Bureau officials have long exchanged commemorative items in formal gift settings consistent with ethics rules. Director Patel has followed all applicable ethical guidelines and pays for any personal gift himself.”

The spokesperson declined to clarify which ethical rules Patel was following, when the bottles were engraved with Patel’s name, or whether any bottles had actually been reimbursed as personal gifts. The FBI also declined to provide images of bottles bearing the names of past directors. When I reached a former longtime senior FBI official to ask whether he’d ever seen personally branded liquor bottles distributed by a previous FBI director, he burst out laughing. [...]

A spokesperson for Woodford Reserve said she did not have information about who had ordered the bottles or when. “Consumers who purchase Woodford Reserve occasionally have images and messages engraved on the bottle,” Elizabeth Conway, the director of external communications for the distillery’s parent company, told me. “These engravings occur after the point of purchase.”

Patel’s affection for bourbon is long-standing; during the first Trump administration, he and his colleagues at the National Security Council kept a barrel of it on hand to celebrate successful hostage negotiations and rescues, The New Yorker reported last year. (Patel served as the council’s senior director for counterterrorism at the time.)

Patel’s enthusiasm for self-branded merchandise is also well documented. “He is known as being very merch forward,” one DOJ employee told me. Even before he was confirmed as FBI director, Patel sent out Ka$h-branded merch boxes that included hats, socks, and other items depicting the comic-book character the Punisher, one person who received such a box told me. As my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro reported in 2024, before Patel became FBI director, he previously sold “Justice for All” #J6PC tees in honor of those arrested for their actions on January 6, 2021. (That item is no longer available from the Kash Foundation, which was founded by Patel but is now, according to its website, “an independent nonprofit, not endorsed by, associated with, or influenced by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, or any government agency.”)

In a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed in September, former Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office Steven Jensen described an interaction in Patel’s conference room in which the director presented him with an abnormally large challenge coin—a memento often given out by leaders in law-enforcement and military organizations. The coin was inscribed Director at the top and Ka$h Patel at the bottom.

“Jensen then noticed a collection of whiskey bottles and cigars on Patel’s desk,” the complaint states. According to the complaint, “Patel explained that he used to produce his own brand of cigars, but they are not in production anymore.” Jensen, who oversaw parts of the investigation into the pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, was fired in August. (The U.S. government has moved to dismiss the case, and the lawsuit is pending.) Jensen’s lawyer, Margaret Donovan, told me in a statement that “there are line agents out there spending their nights and weekends trying to finish warrants, write reports, plan arrests. Yet the FBI Director apparently has the time to design logos, go to hockey games, sit for multi-hour podcast interviews. This is one of the most serious jobs in the country, not a vehicle for self-promotion and branding.”

by Sarah Fitzpatrick, The Atlantic | Read more:
Images: The Atlantic; Ebay; CSPAN; William Turton/X; Health Ranger Report
[ed. What a sad little man, but then no different than his boss. See also: Kash as the Poster Boy for Kakistocracy (Richard Hanania).]

Choosing Sides

[ed. Fact check: not from the Onion.]

President Trump has made no secret of his desire for total control over the historically independent Justice Department, publicly directing prosecutions and declaring that government lawyers must follow his interpretation of the law.

It is a norm-busting approach that has resulted in criminal investigations into several of his perceived political enemies. But his extraordinary influence over the department is now a potential obstacle to one of Mr. Trump’s other apparent goals: receiving a $10 billion payout from the government he leads.

In January, Mr. Trump sued the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns to The New York Times in 2019, arguing that the agency should have done more to prevent the disclosures. Mr. Trump, as well as his family business and two of his sons, demanded at least $10 billion in damages.

Officials at the Justice Department, which represent the I.R.S. in federal court, have struggled with how and whether they could defend the case, given that doing so would necessitate that they contradict the president on a legal question. A government attorney has yet to make an appearance in the case, and lawyers for Mr. Trump, not the Justice Department, asked to give the government more time to respond to the suit.

That has left the federal judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams, an appointee of President Barack Obama in the Southern District of Florida, wondering whether the Justice Department even disagrees with Mr. Trump’s claims in the suit.

“Although President Trump avers that he is bringing this lawsuit in his personal capacity, he is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction,” the judge wrote in an order on Friday. “Accordingly, it is unclear to this court whether the parties are sufficiently adverse to each other.”

Judge Williams ordered the government and Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers to submit briefs on the question, essentially forcing the Justice Department to state its position on Mr. Trump’s suit. As the judge explained in her order, the Constitution requires that the two parties in a lawsuit are genuinely opposed to each other — and not colluding to engineer a legal ruling favorable to both sides. Without a conflict, the lawsuit is void and the judge must dismiss it. [...]

Charles Littlejohn, a former I.R.S. contractor, not only leaked Mr. Trump’s tax returns to The Times, but also provided tax information about thousands of other wealthy individuals to ProPublica. Some of those other wealthy Americans have also sued the I.R.S. on the same grounds as Mr. Trump. In response to those suits, the Justice Department has contended that the I.R.S. should not be held liable for the conduct of Mr. Littlejohn because he was a contractor, not a direct employee of the agency.

Those arguments may or may not actually prevail in court. But for the government to not even raise them in Mr. Trump’s case would be a glaring change of course. Gilbert S. Rothenberg, a former tax lawyer at the Justice Department who signed the amicus brief, said he was hopeful that the judge would dismiss the suit, or delay it until Mr. Trump left office.

“That would hopefully be the result, because there would not be a case or controversy,” he said. “The new D.O.J. is not independent of the president in the way it used to be.”

But even if the judge dismissed Mr. Trump’s suit, the Justice Department could still potentially settle the case. Most government settlements are paid out of the Judgment Fund, an uncapped pot of money that does not require congressional approval for any individual payment. Top Justice Department officials, including Mr. Blanche, Mr. Trump’s former personal attorney, control the money spent from the fund.

“If this judge finds there’s no legitimate case before the court at this time, that doesn’t mean that a settlement would be illegal,” said Paul Figley, a former Justice Department official who worked on torts. “If the Department of Justice settles the claim, then the Judgment Fund would pay it.” [...]

Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against the I.R.S. is not his only attempt to extract money from the government. In private administrative claims, he has also asked for the Justice Department to pay him $230 million as compensation for the federal investigations into him. Mr. Trump’s I.R.S. suit seeks an order of magnitude more money, though. His demand for $10 billion, if fulfilled, could more than double his net worth.

Mr. Trump has said he would donate the taxpayer money to charity.

“Nobody would care, because it’s going to go to numerous, very good charities,” he said in January.

by Andrew Duehren, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kenny Holston/The New York Times

[ed. Oh, ok. Everybody supports numerous, very good charities.]

Dump the Jones Act. Permanently.

The Jones Act: A Burden America Can No Longer Bear (Cato Institute)

Image: uncredited

[ed. Expect to hear a lot more about this as a 90-day waiver has now been enacted to counteract rising oil prices. Alaska and Hawaii in particular have been held hostage to the Jones Act for decades, resulting in higher transport/shipping costs. See also: Jones Act Watch (Zvi).]

Sports Go Sports

The Trump administration tries to set broad NCAA policy by fiat, as in Executive Order, demanding a five-year eligibility cap, one free transfer, national agent registry, medical care protections for athletes, women’s/Olympic sport protections and a ban on NIL collectives it calls ‘fraudulent schemes.’

This is not how our government works, but Trump would to just declare things, so he’s trying to threaten NIH or other funding to force the universities to do what he wants, even when what he wants has been ruled illegal by courts and doesn’t actually have a working legal definition or plan to deal with the existing court rulings. He just thinks he can say ‘implement these things or else I will cut your funding, even though the courts probably think that is illegal, I don’t care,’ and sit back.

Kyle Saunders: And here’s the thing Heitner caught that deserves more attention than it’s getting. Section 4(b) of the order conditions the NCAA’s rulemaking mandate on actions taken “to the extent permitted by law and applicable court orders.”

The order contains its own limiting principle. It knows it can’t override the courts. It says so, in its own text, and then directs the NCAA to do things that courts have already ruled are antitrust violations.

The good news is that there seems to be momentum behind passing something, and everyone smiled about the order. The bad news is that all of that is meaningless.

How did we end up with a legal system where there is no punishment for repeatedly issuing orders that you yourself know are illegal, other than ending enforcement of those illegal orders after someone sues, thus allowing this to be used as leverage?

Shrug.

by Zvi Moshowitz, DWAtV |  Read more:

[ed. Don't know much about the issue in question, but this short description of Trump administration strong-arm tactics is near perfect. It's a strategy. Here's another Republican doing exactly the same thing (using the legal system to run out the clock): DeSantis plots end run of Florida law to create more GOP House seats (Axios).]

We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America

Here are three stories about the state of gambling in America.

1. Baseball

In November 2025, two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, were charged in a conspiracy for “rigging pitches.” Frankly, I had never heard of rigged pitches before, but the federal indictment describes a scheme so simple that it’s a miracle that this sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time. Three years ago, a few corrupt bettors approached the pitchers with a tantalizing deal: (1) We’ll bet that certain pitches will be balls; (2) you throw those pitches into the dirt; (3) we’ll win the bets and give you some money.

The plan worked. Why wouldn’t it? There are hundreds of pitches thrown in a baseball game, and nobody cares about one bad pitch. The bets were so deviously clever because they offered enormous rewards for bettors and only incidental inconvenience for players and viewers. Before their plan was snuffed out, the fraudsters won $450,000 from pitches that not even the most ardent Cleveland baseball fan would ever remember the next day. Nobody watching America’s pastime could have guessed that they were witnessing a six-figure fraud.

2. Bombs

On the morning of February 28th, someone logged onto the prediction market website Polymarket and made an unusually large bet. This bet wasn’t placed on a baseball game. It wasn’t placed on any sport. This was a bet that the United States would bomb Iran on a specific day, despite extremely low odds of such a thing happening.

A few hours later, bombs landed in Iran. This one bet was part of a $553,000 payday for a user named “Magamyman.” And it was just one of dozens of suspicious, perfectly-timed wagers, totaling millions of dollars, placed in the hours before a war began.

It is almost impossible to believe that, whoever Magamyman is, he didn’t have inside information from members of the administration. The term war profiteering typically refers to arms dealers who get rich from war. But we now live in a world not only where online bettors stand to profit from war, but also where key decision makers in government have the tantalizing options to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by synchronizing military engagements with their gambling position.

3. Bombs, again

On March 10, several days into the Iran War, the journalist Emanuel Fabian reported that a warhead launched from Iran struck a site outside Jerusalem.

Meanwhile on Polymarket, users had placed bets on the precise location of missile strikes on March 10. Fabian’s article was therefore poised to determine payouts of $14 million in betting. As The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel reported, bettors encouraged him to rewrite his story to produce the outcome that they’d bet on. Others threatened to make his life “miserable.”

A clever dystopian novelist might conceive of a future where poorly paid journalists for news wires are offered six-figure deals to report fictions that cash out bets from online prediction markets. But just how fanciful is that scenario when we have good reason to believe that journalists are already being pressured, bullied, and threatened to publish specific stories that align with multi-thousand dollar bets about the future?

Put it all together: rigged pitches, rigged war bets, and attempts to rig wartime journalism. Without context, each story would sound like a wacky conspiracy theory. But these are not conspiracy theories. These are things that have happened. These are conspiracies—full stop.

“If you’re not paranoid, you’re not paying attention” has historically been one of those bumperstickers you find on the back of a car with so many other bumperstickers that you worry for the sanity of its occupants. But in this weird new reality where every event on the planet has a price, and behind every price is a shadowy counterparty, the jittery gambler’s paranoia—is what I’m watching happening because somebody more powerful than me bet on it?—is starting to seem, eerily, like a kind of perverse common sense.

From Laundromats to Airplanes

What’s remarkable is not just the fact that online sports books have taken over sports, or that betting markets have metastasized in politics and culture, but the speed with which both have taken place.

For most of the last century, the major sports leagues were vehemently against gambling, as the Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins explained in his recent feature. [...]

Following the 2018 Supreme Court decision Murphy vs. NCAA, sports gambling was unleashed into the world, and the leagues haven’t looked back. Last year, the NFL saw $30 billion gambled on football games, and the league itself made half a billion dollars in advertising, licensing, and data deals.

Nine years ago, Americans bet less than $5 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion. Big numbers mean nothing to me, so let me put that statistic another way: $5 billion is roughly the amount Americans spend annually at coin-operated laundromats and $160 billion is nearly what Americans spent last year on domestic airline tickets. So, in a decade, the online sports gambling industry will have risen from the level of coin laundromats to rival the entire airline industry.

And now here come the prediction markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, whose combined 2025 revenue came in around $50 billion. “These predictive markets are the logical endpoint of the online gambling boom,” Coppins told me on my podcast Plain English. “We have taught the entire American population how to gamble with sports. We’ve made it frictionless and easy and put it on everybody’s phone. Why not extend the logic and culture of gambling to other segments of American life?” He continued:

Why not let people gamble on who’s going to win the Oscar, when Taylor Swift’s wedding will be, how many people will be deported from the United States next year, when the Iranian regime will fall, whether a nuclear weapon will be detonated in the year 2026, or whether there will be a famine in Gaza? These are not things that I’m making up. These are all bets that you can make on these predictive markets.

Indeed, why not let people gamble on whether there will be a famine in Gaza? The market logic is cold and simple: More bets means more information, and more informational volume is more efficiency in the marketplace of all future happenings. But from another perspective—let’s call it, baseline morality?—the transformation of a famine into a windfall event for prescient bettors seems so grotesque as to require no elaboration. One imagines a young man sending his 1099 documents to a tax accountant the following spring: “right, so here are my dividends, these are the cap gains, and, oh yeah, here’s my $9,000 payout for totally nailing when all those kids would die.”

It is a comforting myth that dystopias happen when obviously bad ideas go too far. Comforting, because it plays to our naive hope that the world can be divided into static categories of good versus evil and that once we stigmatize all the bad people and ghettoize all the bad ideas, some utopia will spring into view. But I think dystopias more likely happen because seemingly good ideas go too far. “Pleasure is better than pain” is a sensible notion, and a society devoted to its implications created Brave New World. “Order is better than disorder” sounds alright to me, but a society devoted to the most grotesque vision of that principle takes us to 1984. Sports gambling is fun, and prediction markets can forecast future events. But extended without guardrails or limitations, those principles lead to a world where ubiquitous gambling leads to cheating, cheating leads to distrust, and distrust leads ultimately to cynicism or outright disengagement.

“The crisis of authority that has kind of already visited every other American institution in the last couple of decades has arrived at professional sports,” Coppins said. Two-thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes sometimes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes. “Not to overstate it, but that’s a disaster,” he said. And not just for sports.

Four Ways to Lose (Or, What's a 'Rigged Pitch' in a War?)

There are four reasons to worry about the effect of gambling in sports and culture.

by Derek Thompson, Substack |  Read more:

Image: Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash

[ed. See also: Exclusive: Trader made nearly $1 million on Polymarket with remarkably accurate Iran bets (CNN).]