News roundup, 25 March 2025

- The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs is calling for the search of Prairie Green Landfill to continue, in the hope of finding the remains of the woman known as Mashkode Bizhiki'ikwe ("Buffalo Woman"). This may be a tall order, since the information publicly available only gives the approximate time of her murder (mid-March 2022) and the approximate location where she was dumped (a bin behind a business on Henderson Highway, though it's possible that the police know which business and haven't made it public). But it's definitely worth looking further into. 

- Danielle Smith is coming under considerable criticism for the interview she gave to far-right news site Breitbart, in which she asked that Trump hold off on the tariffs until after the election so as to improve the Conservatives' chances. Whether the publicity over this interview will help the Cons is another question. It's not likely to help Smith, but she isn't up for reelection for a couple more years so maybe she hopes Albertans will have forgotten by then.

- Democratic Congresswoman Jamine Crockett made a statement in support of the "Tesla takedown" rallies, which happen to coincide with her birthday on the 29th of March. But when she said that "all I want to see happen on my birthday is for Elon to be taken down", this led to a statement by Attorney General Pam Bondi that Crockett should "tread very carefully" with such statements. 

- Jeffrey Goldberg, who writes for the Atlantic, got added to a Signal discussion group that included several prominent figures in the Trump regime, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. He ended up becoming privy to secret plans for bombing in Yemen in advance of the raid after Hegseth casually spilled the beans in the discussion group. One wonders if Hegseth is keeping his promise to quit drinking if appointed.

- Prepac, a manufacturer of ready-to-assemble furniture founded in Delta, BC in 1979 has shut down its Canadian manufacturing, citing "an altered economic environment" for the move. Unifor, which represented the workers at the Delta plant, is calling for a nationwide boycott of the company. Prepac was family-owned until Torquest, a private equity company, snapped it up in 2019; two years later it opened a plant in North Carolina, which will become their main site.

- DNA testing firm 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy, having apparently been unable to recover from the bad publicity resulting from a data breach two years ago. This has led to fears that people's genetic data might fall into the hands of folks who might have other things in mind than people's wellbeing (like, say, health insurance companies). The company's privacy policy says that any company buying the company's data is bound by the same policy; the only problem is, when they adopt 23andMe's privacy policy, they adopt the line in said policy that says it can be changed at any time. That doesn't sound reassuring. California's attorney general has even released a consumer alert complete with instructions on how to delete your account.

- The concept of a "Dyson swarm", in which vast numbers of solar collectors are placed around the Sun to form a huge spherical shell, has been around for a long time. The question of what that would do to the Earth's climate hasn't really been looked at until recently. But it seems that if such a swarm were placed just outside Earth's orbit, it would heat the planet's surface by an average of 140 K (or 140°C), enough to boil the oceans. If it were placed further out, say just past Mars, it would still heat the Earth by about 3°C, and building all those solar collectors would require about 10²³ kg of silicon, meaning a heck of a lot of asteroid mining.

- A woman was run down in the parking lot of a kids' recreational facility in suburban Winnipeg over the weekend, after standing in an open parking spot to hold it for another person. Apparently a 40 year old woman became so incensed at this that she ran her over, then backed out and fled the scene.

Still more right wing madness

It's escalated:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - A Nashville man says he and his 10-year-old daughter were victims of road rage Thursday afternoon, all because of a political bumper sticker on his car.

Mark Duren told News 2 the incident happened around 4:30p.m., while he was driving on Blair Boulevard, not far from Belmont University.

He said Harry Weisiger gave him the bird and rammed into his vehicle, after noticing an Obama-Biden sticker on his car bumper.

Source. No information on whether the alleged assailant has any direct connection to teabaggers, but I bet he's a fan of the same media that they are, at the very least.

Incidentally, there's an update in the story of the bullet that broke a window at the office of a Republican member of Congress:

Police said a first floor window was struck by a bullet at around 1 a.m. on Tuesday. The building was not occupied, police said. A preliminary investigation determined that a bullet was fired into the air and struck the window at a downward direction, landing about a foot from the window. The bullet had enough force to break the windowpane but not penetrate the window blinds, according to a news release.

From here, via bluicebank in this DailyKos thread. As someone else points out further down that thread, it's really difficult to target a bullet that's fired into the air like that, which makes it much less likely that Cantor's office was targetted. Then, still further down, we find this:

As you say, that's one hell of a shot -- if done with a firearm. I'd like to know if there is powder residue or rifling on the bullet, because this is not so difficult to do with a direct shot from a wrist-rocket.

Actually, the presence of powder residue or rifling might not prove anything either, because it's not too hard to fire a bullet and then pick it up and fire it with a slingshot... and that could conceivably have been done by someone on either side (Dems wanting to send a message, or Repubs wanting to make it look like the Dems were in on the bad behaviour too). More likely than either of those, though, is a stray bullet; that happens a lot in many American cities.

One thing that some people have pointed out is that an awful lot of the teabaggers you see at those rallies are quite old, which reduces the likelyhood of them being at serious risk of becoming violent (James Wenneker von Brunn notwithstanding). However, they're making an active effort to recruit folks who carry guns professionally. The Oath Keepers are soldiers and police officers who have vowed to resist orders that they consider to be unconstitutional, and that could be really dangerous. Think of all the shell-shocked veterans who are coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq; a lot of them are going to be very disgruntled with the government, and they know how to shoot. While a military coup and/or civil war is far from certain, it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility...