Day: April 16, 2026
#653 – Hannah Strickland
Hannah Strickland is a young lady out of central Florida known for her viral clips and food reviews. Her family operates the Strickland Hope Foundation which aims to help parents of children with Cystinosis. Read moreGetting Back to an ‘Honorable Manhood’Hannah joins Theo to talk about how she will parent when she’s older, why so
Does California Have A Bottom?
It is said that an addict has to “hit bottom” before they will actually change. Hitting bottom is defined, “reaching the lowest possible point, state, or condition, often characterized by intense misery, failure, or despair.” I am beginning to wonder if California has a bottom to hit.
The post Does California Have A Bottom? appeared first on The Hugh Hewitt Show.
The potential Union Pacific merger risks upsetting America’s rail industry
Rail transportation is the backbone of the American economy, and a proposed $85 billion merger between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern threatens to overconcentrate market power in an already highly consolidated industry.
The consequences will ripple across the economy, raising transportation costs, weakening service, and squeezing industries that depend on rail, from agriculture to energy.
At a moment like this, regulators shouldn’t take merger parties at their word. They should demand evidence. That’s exactly what we have called for when it comes to evaluating this mega-merger, and we are pleased that the Department of Justice and the Surface Transportation Board have agreed.
This merger could further entrench consolidation in freight rail, reducing competitive options for shippers and ultimately increasing costs for businesses and consumers.
The Justice Department — in a notable recommendation consistent with its review of mergers outside the rail industry — urged the STB to require that Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern produce certain executive-level information regarding their internal assessments of the merger.
The STB took an important step in that direction on March 18, requiring Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern to turn over internal documents assessing how the deal would affect competition, pricing, and market dynamics.
These are the kinds of materials the Justice Department has long relied on to evaluate mergers because they reveal how companies themselves expect a transaction to play out.
Attorneys general across the country have warned that this merger could further entrench consolidation in freight rail, reducing competitive options for shippers and ultimately increasing costs for businesses and consumers.
The merging companies point to a limited “open gateway” commitment as proof that competition will be preserved. But Union Pacific itself dismissed similar promises in the recent Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern rail merger in 2023. Now it asks regulators to accept vague assurances that it will maintain open gateways at “commercially reasonable” terms without enforceable guarantees.
Union Pacific argues that the merger will drive growth, including taking 2 million trucks off the road by shifting their freight to rail. But this is an optimistic forecast that UP would face no repercussions for missing. Indeed, the recent CPKC rail merger has fallen well short of a much more modest target of 65,000 truck-to-railway conversions.
The companies also promise efficiencies and new investments but offer little detail about their pre-merger plans or whether similar gains could be achieved through other means, such as partnerships or joint ventures — much less how any such efficiencies will benefit shippers, rather than shareholders and executives.
RELATED: Digital trade corridors can fix our outdated supply chain
JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images
In other words, regulators are being asked to accept sweeping claims with limited substantiation.
The STB is right to push back on the “just trust us” approach. Internal company analyses can reveal whether executives expect service disruptions, pricing power, or integration challenges that could undermine supply chains.
They can also test whether the merger’s benefits are actually realistic. This level of scrutiny is basic due diligence, particularly in an industry where reduced competition can have economy-wide consequences, and especially when the merging railroads claim that this transaction will change American railroading for the next hundred years.
At a time when businesses and consumers are still grappling with inflation and the cost of goods, it is hard to overstate the risks of this mega-merger.
As this review proceeds, the STB should ensure that all stakeholders have the information needed to assess the merger’s true impact and the time to be heard, resisting pressure to rubber-stamp a deal this consequential for the rail industry and American consumers. Anything less risks locking in higher costs and fewer choices for years to come.
The American economy runs on rail. The STB should make sure it stays on track.
The crazy reason some AI obsessives love it when their chatbot talks like a caveman
Coders using Claude, AI giant Anthropic’s leading large language model, discovered a shortcut that saves them money and simplifies the entire engagement with the LLM down to mere syllables.
The protocol, since made into an app, is called Caveman.
Caveman makes it possible to save money without sacrificing output by reducing the linguistic sophistication of the LLM. The logic is simple: The less the AI has to talk to you in fully conversant language, the less compute it demands. And the less compute it demands, the fewer “tokens” it costs. Like all LLMs, Claude works on tokens, which users buy with dollars to pay the chatbot’s company.
As the world of the printing press is forgotten, communication transforms.
It’s a crazy workaround, but it pays whopping dividends. If you can tolerate talking to a digital Neanderthal, you can save up to 75% on operating costs.
Devolution?
With that, we’re face to face with the raw evidence that tech doesn’t transcend our culture’s many cautionary refrains. Garbage in, garbage out. Easy come, easy go. Live by the gun, die by the gun. In other words, “It’s about the financial system and the soul,” to quote Ardian Tola, founder of the Bitcoin-powered platforms Canonic and Ark.
To give a few examples of what’s going on here, consider the coder sitting at his or her desk prompting Claude to, say, reconfigure some corporate software to the new spec. The coder used to do this work, going into the alien lines of “code language” and — using his experience, knowledge, creative problem-solving, and time — the coder could effect these alterations in various ways and to various levels of elegance. The coder for the past several decades commanded and deserved a substantial salary: It really took some substantial skill and know-how to move with speed and efficiency.
That kind of coder and tech worker is being closed out now. The 80,000 layoffs and counting in the industry this year send a pretty clear message about where this is headed. Corporate reliance (and crucially, dependence) on AI is just about baked in. Companies like Oracle and Stripe are letting go of workers right after they complete their final task — of training their LLMs to do their job.
RELATED: Trump administration has a job opportunity for adult video gamers
Emanuele Cremaschi/Getty Images
Today the coder clinging to his mid-tier salary prompts an LLM to alter the code, and he is “spending” tokens with each word and symbol required to perform these prompts. So if a prompt drags on — like “Claude, move the header up and replace it with the PayPal button, and let me see what they look like if everything is balanced in mobile view” — it is going to cost the corporation or the contract coder more than if the prompt were something closer to “Switch header w/ pay button.”
In terms of efficiency, for a while anyway, this probably adds a layer of challenge for the coder, works the old brain plasticity, and all important, looks good to accounting.
Our souls at stake
One interpretation of everything now concerning “the financial system and the soul” is that if we, as a species, determine that cost efficiency and capital concentration are the most important values, which all others will be tested against and subsumed into, we would be wise to be very honest about our view of the human soul.
That’s because we’d be saying, again as a species, that the soul is secondary to money at best and probably doesn’t matter or even exist. While individuals, you and I, may disagree immediately (and others may weigh in with seemingly very judicious but ultimately jejune statements with regards to complexity, progress, and sacrifice), the order or the value system is still cold simple: money over soul in the end. There’s no workaround.
It might come fast or it might take some years.
Marshall McLuhan and intellectual heirs like Walter Ong theorized decades ago that tech would impose a “new orality” as literacy fades. After all, humanity existed prior to the printing press too. Print literacy greased the wheels of our communication with respect not just to facts but to each other and our own inner reality — our soul.
Most of that theoretical work boils down to the notion that our technologically enhanced means and methods of communicating will slip away from literacy into something more offhand, flexible, vibey. The rise of “vibe coding” provides strong confirmation: As the world of the printing press is forgotten, communication transforms.
The issues here are manifold and of grave concern. You cannot vibe Mass or liturgy, though you can feel it. In this oncoming diminution of the human, where trade-offs are determined by that same money-over-soul diktat, every individual may to have fight, day in and day out, merely to preserve his value system.
Whether that system is inherited and carried over ages of ages, or is just something as temporal as a preference for ’80s comedy films, the choices made at the ultra-ubiquitous-tech layer are not going to “align.”
Care must be taken when wandering into the future, wielding, as we do, these handheld high-caliber military industrial complex-made weapons. And just wait until the AI innovators deliver handsfree products intended to replace the smartphone. By itself, coders and prompters regressing to oral communication is fine, passable for certain applications, but the slackening and homogenization of human communication into sheer memery, coupled with the time pressure we all feel daily now, is powered by a force that wants to invade all human territories, including true creativity, religion, and the family. In short, it wants to invade the soul. If we let that happen, what will become of our already beleaguered society and country?
Speculation mounts over mysterious deaths and disappearances tied to US space and nuclear program
As the list of dead and missing individuals with ties to American space and nuclear programs grows, so too does the speculation about them.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said when asked about a possible trend on Wednesday, “If true, of course, that’s definitely something I think this government and administration would deem worth looking into.”
Missing
Steven Garcia, a 48-year-old Albuquerque resident, went missing on Aug. 28, 2025, according to the New Mexico Department of Public Safety.
The Daily Mail, citing an anonymous source, reported that Garcia — who was last seen leaving his home on foot, carrying only a handgun — was a government contractor working for the Kansas City National Security Campus.
The KCNSC manufactures 80% of non-nuclear components that go into the nuclear stockpile.
Blaze News reached out to KCNSC for comment but did not receive a response by deadline.
RELATED: Burchett claims alien ‘machinery’ could destroy us in ‘a blink of an eye’
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker told the Mail, “I think we’ve even seen instances where nuclear scientists have been taken out. They’ve been assassinated.”
On Feb. 27, retired U.S. Air Force Major General William McCasland, 68, similarly left his Albuquerque home never to return.
In their search, authorities found his shirt and hiking boots at his second home in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, but said that his wallet, revolver, holster, and red backpack remain unaccounted for, reported CNN.
“There’s no indication, and we are not putting forward that Mr. McCasland was disoriented or confused,” said Lt. Kyle Woods of the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office. “Arguably, he would still be the most intelligent person in the room that any of us would be in. Highly intelligent, highly capable.”
‘There’s just too many of ’em disappearing.’
Some have suggested that McCasland’s disappearance might have something to do with his time commanding the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where the Pentagon conducted advanced aerospace research.
“If there was ever a center of gravity for research and development and for all the spooky things that the U.S. government works on, Wright-Patterson’s right there at the top of the list,” former Pentagon intelligence officer Luis Elizondo told CNN.
The general’s wife cast doubt on “some of the misinformation” circulating about McCasland’s disappearance.
“It is true that when Neil was in the Air Force, he had access to some highly classified programs and information. He retired from the AF almost 13 years ago and has had only very commonly held clearances since. It seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him,” Susan McCasland Wilkerson wrote in a March 6 post on Facebook.
Wilkerson noted further that her husband had a “brief association with the UFO community” but that “this connection is not a reason for someone to abduct Neil.”
“Neil does not have any special knowledge about the ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash stored at Wright-Patt,” she wrote. “Though at this point with absolutely no sign of him, maybe the best hypothesis is that aliens beamed him up to the mothership.”
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department asked the public for help in finding 60-year-old rocket scientist Monica Jacinto Reza, noting that she was last seen hiking on June 22, 2025, on Angeles Crest Highway.
Reza worked at Aerojet Rocketdyne where she moved the ball forward on a family of superalloys for use in rockets across multiple NASA and Air Force contracts.
She said in a 2017 interview with SpaceNews.com, “I worked with the Air Force to scale up production, look at different processing methods and get the material ready for insertion into a rocket engine. All of that positioned us very nicely to have the alloy [Mondaloy] at a maturity level that it could be used for the AR1 and the Hydrocarbon Boost and a few other programs.”
The Air Force noted in a 2016 release that an objective of the Hydrocarbon Boost program was to “help eliminate the United States’ reliance on foreign rocket propulsion technology,” adding that “this is key to ensuring our national security.”
McCasland reportedly oversaw funding for Reza’s project.
A staffer linked to the Los Alamos National Laboratory — a nuclear design and physics facility in New Mexico that is the lead agency for the B61, W76, and W88 warheads, helped develop the first atomic bomb, and produces plutonium pits — also recently went missing that month.
On June 26, 2025, Melissa Casias, 54, dropped her husband off at the Los Alamos lab where they both worked. Casias, an active administrative assistant at the lab, told her husband that she was headed to a second location within LANL to complete a work-related task, reported Dateline. She returned, however, to their home in Ranchos de Taos.
Around 12:30 p.m. that day, Casias grabbed lunch for her daughter and dropped it off at the cafe where she works. After a brief and normal encounter with her child, the mother departed.
New Mexico State Police PIO Sergeant Ricardo Breceda said that a family acquaintance “observed Melissa walking eastbound on NM518 from the Talpa, New Mexico, area towards Pot Creek.” This was her last known sighting.
Breceda noted further that “all belongings, including Melissa’s purse and factory reset phones, were found inside Melissa’s home.”
Dead
Deaths of individuals connected to American nuclear and space programs have also fueled speculation.
Frank Maiwald died on July 4, 2024, at the age of 61. The German-born scientist worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and, according to his obituary, contributed “to various significant projects such as AMR/SWOT, COWVR, AMR/Jason 3, and HIFI.” No cause of death was publicized.
Michael David Hicks, another Jet Propulsion Laboratory alum, died the previous July at the age of 59. He worked on the science teams of the DART Project, the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking Project, the Dawn Mission, and the NASA Deep Space 1 Mission. Hicks specialized in the physical properties of comets and asteroids.
While no cause of death for the divorcé was given publicly, his obituary noted that donations could be made to Alcoholics Anonymous.
Carl Grillmair, a highly esteemed California Institute of Technology astrophysicist who spent over four decades researching galactic astronomy and distant planets, was gunned down on the front porch of his home in Antelope Valley, California, on Feb. 16.
Grillmair — who the Los Angeles Times reported had worked at Caltech’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, which partners with NASA — previously had issues with his alleged killer, Freddy Snyder. On Dec. 20, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reportedly responded to a trespassing complaint from Grillmair and allegedly found Snyder carrying a loaded rifle not registered in his name.
Nuno Loureiro, the director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, was assassinated at his Brookline, Massachusetts, home on Dec. 15, 2025, while enjoying a quiet evening with his wife and kids. The gunman believed to have shot him — Claudio Manuel Neves Valente — is the same dead gunman alleged to have carried out the Brown University mass shooting two days later.
Investigators said that Loureiro and Valente attended the same university program in Portugal between 1995 and 2000, reported CBS News.
Among those who’ve expressed concerns about the deaths and disappearances is Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett (R), who said in a recent interview, “There’s just too many of ’em disappearing.”
“Nothing happens by coincidence in this town,” he added.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
VIDEO: Nude man near elementary school shot by police officer, continues to resist and is tased by other cop
Georgia police tased and pepper-sprayed a nude man near an elementary school before shooting him and then tasing him again, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Rockdale County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded to a call of a man exposing himself near Peeks Chapel Elementary School in Conyers and found the nearly nude man on Benji Boulevard, a GBI press release reads.
‘He did everything possible not to use his firearm,’ said a witness who did not wish to be publicly identified.
The GBI says the man advanced on one of the officers, who responded by pepper-spraying him and employing a taser as well.
When those methods proved ineffective and the man continued to disobey orders, the officer shot him.
A second deputy arrived and used his taser on the man, who continued to refuse to comply with their demands.
He was eventually taken into custody and transported to a hospital for treatment. He remains in stable condition.
The man was later identified as 19-year-old Jason Marshall-Haynes.
WAGA-TV obtained cellphone video of the man walking before the shooting incident as well as afterward.
“He did everything possible not to use his firearm,” said a witness who did not wish to be publicly identified.
The witness said the officer fired two shots, but the man continued to advance on the officer. He added that he believed his neighbor was having a mental illness episode.
No deputies were injured in the incident. The officer who shot the man was placed on administrative leave, but Sheriff Eric J. Levett said it was a routine step to maintain investigative integrity.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Maricel Soriano attends Holy Mass marking Nora Aunor’s first death anniversary
Lotlot de Leon remembered her mom Nora Aunor on her first death anniversary.
OPM artist na si Hev Abi, dinakip ng mga pulis sa QC
_2026_04_16_15_51_00.jpg)
Inihayag ng Philippine National Police – Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) ngayong Huwebes na dinakip noong Martes ang OPM artist na si Hev Abi, o Gabriel Abilla sa tunay na buhay.
Who is Hev Abi? What to know about the rapper
Hev Abi made headlines Thursday after news of his arrest by the Philippine National Police – Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) swept social media.
Huge ‘bathtub ring’ may show contours of ancient ocean on Mars
WASHINGTON – There is a lot of evidence from orbiting satellites and surface rovers indicating that liquid water was present long ago on the surface of Mars in the form of ponds, lakes and rivers. But the idea that Mars once had a huge and long-lived ocean on its northern plains has remained a matter of debate.
