Happy Halloween! Enjoy your–bug secretions?:
Here’s a tip if you ever want to ruin a Halloween party. Seek out the most squeamish-seeming adult or child you can find in the act of consuming candy corn. Then tell them they just filled their mouth with bug secretions.
If this fact alarms you—or if you’re an inveterate hater of candy corn and thus think that you have been spared—I regret to inform you that by eating many classic Halloween candies, you are, to some extent, eating bugs. More precisely, you are eating a bug by-product that is in many cases listed on the package as “confectioner’s glaze.” This glaze is used on jelly beans, Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Whoppers, Lemonheads, and Sugar Babies, to name a few.
This sounds innocent enough, until you understand that the glaze is shellac—a shiny, moisture-blocking resin that’s the product of lac bugs’ lifelong work. As the female lac bug pierces a tree with her needlelike mouthparts and sucks the sap out, she secretes a goo, also called lac, from a gland on her abdomen to form a cocoon of sorts. (Male lac bugs don’t do much besides mate and die after about four days.) Inside her lac coating—which hardens on contact with the air much like, well, a candy shell—she spends her life feeding and laying eggs, safe from predators. If all goes well, she completes her life cycle and dies in her resinous home.
The amount of resin produced by each insect is virtually microscopic, but over time, enough of the bugs cluster on one branch to make an amount worth pouring over a batch of Raisinets.
Mmmm, Raisinets…
Your Tax Dollars Flushed Down The Drain:
CoreCivic, a private prison company, approached the Minnesota Department of Corrections last year offering to sell a long-shuttered detention facility. The price: $75 million.
State officials passed. They didn’t have the funds to buy the Prairie Correctional Facility in western Minnesota, nor did they need a prison of its size or have the ability to staff it.
Last summer, to their astonishment, the 1,600-bed prison sold for more than $495 million. The buyer: the Department of Homeland Security.
Some officials in Minnesota, which the White House has portrayed as an avatar of poor governance and fraud, expressed outrage this week after learning about the amount taxpayers paid CoreCivic. The company donated $500,000 to President Trump’s inauguration committee, and its stock price soared after his 2024 victory.
“Trump scamming taxpayers out of almost half a billion dollars is outrageous, especially at a time when Trump’s tariffs and war in Iran are already raising prices for Minnesotans,” Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat running for re-election, said in a statement.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was in Minnesota on Friday to announce developments in the administration’s efforts to root out fraud in safety net programs, said he had not heard about the prison deal. He called questions about the gap between the 2025 price tag and what the government paid “a waste of our time.”
This Reminds Me. That Golf Course Which Is Trump’s Current Obsession?:
A federal judge announced Friday that she is launching an investigation into the conduct of Trump administration attorneys following an extraordinary courtroom confrontation over President Donald Trump’s plans to overhaul a public golf course in Washington, D.C.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said she would appoint a special master to investigate whether government lawyers misrepresented facts to the court concerning the planned closure and renovation of East Potomac Park’s golf course.
Just check out these exchanges:
At the center of the dispute was a seemingly straightforward question: When did the Trump administration decide to close the golf course?
The administration’s answers appeared to change repeatedly.
Trump announced on social media on October 18 that the golf course would close on November 15. The following day, Justice Department attorneys insisted there was no such plan. Days later, the administration acknowledged plans for the closure.
Judge Reyes wanted an explanation.
She opened Friday’s hearing by reading the rules prohibiting attorneys from misrepresenting facts to the court.
She then asked a Justice Department attorney whether he had made any false statements of material fact that needed correcting.
“Not to my knowledge,” the attorney responded.
Reyes immediately challenged the answer, demanding to know what exactly “not to my knowledge” meant.
The attorney explained that he was relatively new to the case and had not reviewed all the materials.
“We have lots of binders,” he told the judge.
Things only deteriorated from there.
When Reyes questioned a Department of the Interior official about whether Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was involved in the project, the official responded by asking what she meant by “involved.”
According to MacFarlane, Reyes went so far as to retrieve a dictionary to read the definition of the word.
The official eventually acknowledged that Burgum was aware of the project, although not involved in every aspect.
Reyes pointed out that Burgum had found time to personally tour the golf course.
“He doesn’t have a body double, does he?” she asked.
Later, when the judge asked when the official became aware of a plan to close the course on November 15, the official responded, “A plan?”
Reyes again threatened to consult the dictionary, this time to define the word “plan.”
The hearing grew even more confrontational when Assistant Attorney General Stanley Woodward, one of the Justice Department’s highest-ranking officials, attempted to intervene and stop the questioning of the Interior Department official.
Reyes refused.
“It sounds like you don’t want him to answer a very straightforward question,” she told Woodward.
I remember when the press couldn’t stop writing about President Carter’s scheduling of the White House tennis courts.
This? Not so much. So.let me ask: Why is the President Of The United States, who is beset with crisis after crisis, so obsessed with turning this public golf course into yet another Trump golf property? And why isn’t the mainstream press asking these questions?
Almost forgot:
The hearing also exposed major questions about how much the administration intends to spend on the golf course and where the money will come from.
According to MacFarlane, Justice Department attorneys disclosed that replacing a seawall at East Potomac Park could cost between $150 million and $400 million.
Reyes asked who had appropriated the money.
The government’s answer: No one.
There’s more. Suffice it to say that Trump and DOJ believe they’re above the law. We shall see.
Trump Issues Free Passes To Pollute (And a Bleepload Of Money) To Coal Plants:
It’s a good time to be a coal plant in the US. The Trump administration has given support to almost half of the nation’s coal plants, helping them to continue operating despite economic and regulatory headwinds, according to a new analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund.
The analysis, which looked at the 184 operating coal plants that are connected to the grid, found that 90 received support from the Trump administration through “cash handouts, free passes to pollute, and requirements to stay online past their retirement dates”.
The administration provided $950m in taxpayer dollars to 24 coal plants and handed Clean Air Act exemptions from toxic pollution limits to 70 coal plants, according to the EDF analysis.
“It’s extending the life of these coal plants,” said Surbhi Sarang, director and senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The administration has leveraged a multitude of tools to prop up coal plants, and ultimately all of that is harming Americans even more by increasing electricity costs, by increasing pollution – it’s like Americans are getting hit twice.”
What do you want to talk about?
Kudos to the judge in the golf course case. What I don’t understand about the Trumpster is that he (or his administration) is constantly caught in these clearly illegal activities but he is never held accountable. And half the country still loves him. Super frustrating and hopefully that changes Tuesday.
In case after case, Trump and the DOJ have made it a point to violate court orders. DOJ’s ongoing threats to elections officials in Cali yet another example.
Phonograph records were made out of shellac until polyvinyl chloride (PVC) came along in the late ’40s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_record