The reflecting pool wants to make a deal very badly.
Sorry to disappoint, if you were expecting to see Swamp Thing here. 😉
Follow the Money to Not Trace the Food
Anybody as not surprised as I am?
Taylor Farms had made a $1 million donation to the Trump-aligned super PAC MAGA Inc on March 26, 2025. That’s just six days after the FDA announced it was pushing back the implementation of its “Food Traceability Rule” by 30 months.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/taylor-farms-made-huge-donation-192241647.html
The Other Clampetts
Not Jed and daughter Elly May, but Bob’s daughter Ruth.
With the huge and expensive Steve Ditko Spider-Man Artist’s Edition being delivered tomorrow, here’s yet another deluxe book I must order!
Lettuce Correct Ourselves
Under Trump, the FDA seems to be as incompetent as the CDC.
Federal health officials are continuing to test food items for cyclospora after discovering a sample of iceberg lettuce was a false positive match for the parasite that has caused thousands of people nationwide to fall sick.
Earth’s Inevitable Fate?
Before War of the Worlds, George Pal produced a movie that’s almost as good. It’s about a planetary threat that’s completely free of evil intent, yet as deadly as a Martian invasion. Watching When Worlds Collide embedded here should prevent commercial interruption.
And here’s War of the Worlds. Unfortunately, this copy has been zoomed and cropped.
Billing Bug
This is of extreme interest to me:
On the morning of July 17, a redditor who normally pays Amazon Web Services about five cents a month opened their inbox to a wall of billing alerts and a running tab of $2.5 billion. Their whole setup was a single S3 storage bucket, untouched since 2023 and not even public.
I pay AWS about fifteen cents a month. (At first it was $5/month. To Amazon’s credit, they weren’t kidding when they said costs would be greatly reduced.) Like that redditor person, all I use are S3 storage buckets, but some of mine are public.
AWS has greatly increased its security protocol, which I have completed. The fact that an internal problem at Amazon can cause such a billing mess is disquieting. I don’t need this sort of a hassle.
For a while, I’ve been contemplating cancelling my AWS account that I’ve held since almost the inception of the service. This event has given me the sense of urgency to do that.