May 2026

A Trump Stronghold Grapples With Health Risks of ICE Detention Sites

By lambert –

Lambert here: Warehousing people in a literal warehouse. “Congregate settings” like jails, homeless shelters, and nursing homes are all prey to communicable diseases — Covid, for example. I wonder if the mercs at GEO Group, which hopes to run the facility in Social Circle, have given consideration to how their ventilation system could mitigate — or intensify — the spread of airborne pathogens. I’m guessing no.

Today's Water Cooler 2026-05-29

By lambert –

wishbone_200.png

(1) “The AI Bubble”

(2) “F.B.I. Arrests C.I.A. Official With $40 Million in Gold Bars in His Home”

(3) “They just formed the biggest tech worker union in the US. They plan to rein in AI and curb layoffs”

4) “Democrats turn on Bidens’ ‘nonsense’ ahead of midterms as Jill and Hunter steal the spotlight while minority party desperately tries to turn page”

Colorado Charts Its Own Course on Vaccines Amid Federal Pullback

By lambert –

Lambert here: After Covid, I’m not about to give CDC, Big Pharma, or the medical profession in general a free pass. And I concede both that the childhood vaccine schedule may be too long, and that adjuvants may be problematic (though surely this builds a case for regulation). However, the “medical freedom” trope so prevalent among Wakefieldians strikes me as a case of “Infect thy neighbor as yourself” — hardly WWJD — and, as a general rule, when you hear the word “freedom” from the right, check your wallet.

URLs in text now break and wrap

By lambert –

URLs in text are automagically turned into clickable links. However, they do not wrap within the bounds of the text boxes that contain them.

Added the following to the Zero Point theme’s custom CSS:


/* Only in main body of posts including comments, not front page or sidebars */

body:not(.front) .extlink-nobreak, #block-zeropoint-content .extlink-nobreak {
white-space: normal !important;
}

body:not(.front) #block-zeropoint-content a {
overflow-wrap: break-word;
word-break: break-all;
}

Fixed links for Subject Line and "More..." in "My Comments" table.

By lambert –

Hat tip, reader Intro Vert.

The view creating the “My Comments” table should be using a comment permalink (looks like ... comment/226#comment-226 in both the Subject Line and Text columns (this is default behavior for titles where found). Instead, the Subject line omitted the fragment. “More…” went to the home page.

Installed Akismet spam blocker....

By lambert –

… for comments and account requests. Need to install submodules for all webforms (e.g. search) but time presses to later for that.

All Akismet spam detections now go to moderation, assuming moderation works (which it might not, necessarily, right now; updates to follow).

1.0 version, released 11 April 2026. 2 users, no reported bugs. That’s a bit concerning (nobody reporting bugs may mean it’s never really been exercised) but then again, it was coded by Automaticc, so presumably to a high standard.

Macroeconomic Policies for AI

By lambert –

Lambert here: The authors write: “We model advances in AI as a rise in the share of tasks that can be automated. This shock increases productivity and potential output, but also opens up the possibility that capital may displace labour in production.” Nobody seems to give consideration to a different model: With AI, capital does displace labour in production, with at best no increase in productivity, but with a decrease in output quality.

Trump and Kennedy Seek to Relax Safeguards for AI Healthcare Tools

By lambert –

Lambert here: I’ll bet. As you will, too, taking your life into your hands with that stuff.

* * *

“Trump and Kennedy Seek To Relax Safeguards for AI Healthcare Tools” [Darius Tahir, KFF Health News].

Paul Boyer, a psychotherapist for Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California, is experiencing the AI revolution firsthand. He’s a little underwhelmed.

Cron+scheduler are finally working UPDATEs

By lambert –

Scheduled Transitions is a Drupal module that allows me to tell cron, when it fires, to change the status of a post from “draft” to “published.”

Cron should fire on the hour. I am setting Scheduled Transitions to 3:45 so there is leeway. I am allowing Scheduled Transitions pick the latest draft and fire that. Drupal understands the time now to be 3:09.

UPDATE With this here update, I have forced a second revision to see if Scheduled Transitions picks the latest draft, as it claims it will.

UPDATE All is well (read bottom to top):

Goodnight, Moon 2026-05-14

By lambert –

“Is Hotel Shampoo and Conditioner Safe to Use? Experts Explain” [Mental Floss]:

Are you the kind of traveler who carefully packs TSA-approved shampoo and conditioner from home, or do you happily use whatever liquid is bolted to the hotel shower wall?

I loathe soap and shampoo dispensers because they don’t lather up properly. But I didn’t know I had to worry about them:

Goodnight, Moon 2026-05-13

By lambert –

“The sleep paradox: why do humans sleep so little when we need it so much?” [Nature]. The complete article is payrolled, sadly. But it’s an interesting find:

Enter David Samson, a biological anthropologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, asking a provocative question: why, if sleep has so many benefits, do humans as a species sleep so little?

Fully Automated Luxury Commenting (2)

By lambert –

Previously, I showed how you can find a searchable table listing all your comments at the “My Account” menu link, eliminating one of the frustrations of WordPress.

Now I want to explain some of the cushy and handy functionality of the comment form itself (the “Add new comment” form that appears below every post). Here is a screen shot, helpfully annotated:

comments_form.png

Goodnight, Moon 2026-05-12

By lambert –

“This 800-year-old Chinese exercise helps lower blood pressure naturally” [Science Daily]:

An ancient Chinese exercise practice that combines slow movements, controlled breathing, and meditation may help lower blood pressure as effectively as brisk walking, according to a large randomized clinical trial published in JACC, the flagship journal of the American College of Cardiology. Participants experienced improvements within three months, and those benefits continued for a full year.

Goodnight, Moon 2026-05-011

By lambert –

“The Surprising Truth About What Outer Space Smells Like” [Mental Floss]:

outer space does have a smell, or rather, many smells. The cosmos isn’t sterile or empty, after all. It’s a quite literally unearthly patchwork of dying stars that shed clouds of pungent soot as well as gases, radiation, and plasma blown about by comets that whiz by at mind-blowing speeds.

The International Society for Hantaviruses: "Human-to-Human Transmission of [Andes Hantavirus] Should No Longer Be Regarded as Merely Hypothetical or Unproven"

By lambert –

There’s a good deal of sturm and drang in the press just now on hantavirus, which I may get to soon — much seems familiar; it’s so good to be hearing from Maria van Kerkhove again1 — but I think it’s more important to get some scientists into the discourse to provide a baseline (since we can’t regard CDC as credible by default any more, if indeed we ever could).

Added Automatic Logout

By lambert –
Tags
Drupal
security

I’ve noticed one virtually permanent login (besides me), but with no activity. That suggests a forgotten, open tab, to me.

Abandoned logins a security risk.

So I installed a module that automatically logs you out after four hours (because I can imagine a four hour session here, the content is that rich :-).

If you are indeed active, the dialog announcing your impending logout will give you a chance to say “No!”

User Names now display in the sidebar below the time block ("now")

By lambert –
Tags
Drupal

I don’t like cheery dialogs or menus that read “Hello, [your name here]!”.

On the other hand, as an admin, it’s sometimes helpful to be reminded of who I am.

So there is a “Hello, [your name here]!” block on the sidebar at right, below the date and time. If you are not logged in (i.e., Anonymous) the block will not appear.

Made Links to comments go to the actual comment, not just the page

By lambert –

A field formating issue in the View.

The Title field formatter dropdown was set to Plain Text, instead of Comment Permalink.

With the former, the URL was for example https://thejackpot.blog/comment/143, and went only to the post page, not the comment on that post page.

With the latter, the URL was https://thejackpot.blog/comment/143#comment-143, and went directly to the comment.

Hopefully wrestled cron into submission

By lambert –
Tags
Drupal

For most of this week, I have been whinging about not being able to get posts to fire according to the “Daily Schedule” I have posted in the sidebar. I installed and tested various scheduling modules, but nothing seemed to work.

As so often with minor computing problems, the computer was doing exactly what I told it to do.

Added "Prose" Field to User Registration Page

By lambert –

Here is the description below the field, which I suppose I could have labeled “Imitation Game”:

Speed up your account approval process by writing some distinctive or witty and distinctly non-b0t text. This field will only appear during this approval process, and will not be shown on the site.

I’m getting more and more registrations that are not from my mailing list, but I’m still concerned about being overwhelmed by bots (though perhaps I’ve been reading too much about AI).

CDC’s Full-Time Cruise Ship Inspectors Were Laid off One Year Ago Amid Record Outbreaks: Report

By lambert –

The Jackpot is like an iceberg, except (at this early date) 99% percent of the posts are underwater, not a mere 90%.

The submerged posts on The Jackpot are over 1000 reports like this one on DOGE…

Kicker
DOGE Legacy

Added "Thumbs-Up" emoji to BUEdit toolbar

By lambert –

I put this emoji on the toolbar:

👍

as a quick way to express approval. This isn’t the same as adding thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons as a ratings device, as at (last I checked, some years ago) Daily Kos, because that leads to collective gaming and factional battles.

I understand that kids these days use “👍” ironically, which I will avoid in my practice, since there are ways to express irony using actual words.

More Approved Users

By lambert –

Upper case:

138, BillJ49, Burritonomics, CanCyn, Cassandra, Catless Lady, Dominic, Ed S., ElTioBoricua, EoinMac, FreeMarketApologist, Great Ape, Intro Vert, JanetT-H, Jonathan Holland, JustAnotherVolunteer, KeeniB, LaRuse, Mephisto, Michael King, Old and In the Way, Philip Ebersole, Stanley Dundee, The Beeman, Xihuitl, Zzzz Andrew

Lower case:

ahinsa, ambrit, anEnt, cfraenkel, chuck harris, flora, hemeantwell, jay.weil, jo6pac, jwc3, nippersmom, playon, prairiesky, sand_hill, sdunn35, sporble, wol, zigzagging citizen

UPDATE

In Lieu of Mail, Here Is the List of Approved Users (so Far) Plus BUGS

By lambert –

Your accounts should work!

Angie Neer, Big Jess, Chet G, Curtis Lang, David Graper, Edit, Ice-nine, InquiringMind, LaughFuzzball, Michael McK, Paul Cardan, Rod, ScottMell, Stephen V, Zephyrum, festoonic, flatStanley, laughingsong, loweighties, marku52, petal, sajurcaju, yahmaybeno

I must step away from the computer now, but even without email confirmation, your accounts are definitely registered.