Monday, September 14, 2026
The Official Newsletter of Low Expectations
Today is National Cream-Filled Donut Day, honoring the only baked good with a payload. The calendar also demands National Eat a Hoagie Day, a sandwich named by Philadelphia, a city that will fight you over lunch-meat vocabulary. Two mandatory feasts, zero vegetables. The calendar stopped being a schedule and became a cardiologist's business plan.
Anyway — the news, such as it is.
HEADLINERS, UNFORTUNATELY
EPA repeals the power-plant carbon caps and salts the ground so they can never grow back.
Coal's employee-of-the-month Lee Zeldin protects the environment the way a wood chipper protects a tree. Monday his EPA moved to repeal the rule forcing coal and gas plants to capture roughly 90 percent of their own carbon. It was projected to keep 1.38 billion metric tons of CO2 out of your sky through 2047. Billion. With a B you'll be breathing. Then the kill shot: rescinding the finding that any of it endangers you, the one legal hook that lets Washington touch it at all. That's not loosening a rule, that's eating the pen so nobody can ever write one again. The mercury and arsenic limits stay, the way a landlord who unscrews the smoke detectors leaves you the sticker. Hired as the environment's bodyguard. He's holding its arms. 🦆
ALARMS NOBODY FORWARDED
Fifty-six towns yank Flock's plate cameras after the search logs read like a stalker's diary.
Texas cops used it to hunt a woman suspected of an illegal abortion, filed as a "missing person" — a wolf reporting a lost sheep. 🦆
"Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps."— Emo Philips
HOMEWORK FOR STAYING ALIVE
Statins may protect diabetic brains from dementia, and the discount rots while you stall.
Statin in year one of diagnosis: linked to 15% lower dementia risk; stall five years, 10%. Ask your doctor now — 'later' is the 10% group's experiment. 🦆
Heating bills jump 8.7% and the cold doesn't even have to show up.
Heating oil is up 30% from the Iran war you filed under "over." If you heat with oil or propane, lock in a delivery contract now. 🦆
Doctors say the longevity clinics' full-body MRI mainly screens for suckers.
1 in 3 healthy scans finds a harmless lump that earns a biopsy. You're lumpy meat; you always were. Skip it if you're low-risk and symptom-free. 🦆
WHAT WENT QUIET
Kennedy's CDC finds its first measles cure: deleting the dead from the count.
Cases at a 35-year high, a third death reportedly next off the books — total surrender to the virus, total victory over the spreadsheet. 🦆
Repeat-offender American Regent's epinephrine keeps leaking out of its own vials like it knows something.
Third recall since July, now Class I — FDA-speak for "could kill." Hospital vials, not your EpiPen. Still less ink than a mattress sale. 🦆
Vance's plan to pay parents to stay home takes its own advice.
Eight days on, the $12 billion rule still isn't in the Federal Register — it has the legal force of a guy at a bar saying "trust me." 🦆
NATURE'S OPEN MIC NIGHT
Mercury has been shrinking for billions of years and hiding the evidence under rubble.
New 3D maps of old NASA probe data caught up to 30% more shrinkage than anyone had measured. Little raisin, you magnificent liar. 🦆
Geologists catch Italy's lower crust unzipping itself into the mantle.
The old theory called it stable two million years ago — the earthquakes were the crust quietly sneaking out the door the whole time. 🦆
Space rock rearranges its own rings and every theory in physics calls in sick.
Chariklo's outer ring torched 60% of itself in a few years — the universe redecorates a 250-km rock; you haven't moved your couch. 🦆
ONE WEIRD THING TO END ON
Science left the roundest squid butt in Earth's history in a drawer for 30 years.
It survived its entire dynasty's collapse, 160 million years, and Wyoming — then met the only species smug enough to invent drawers. 🦆
THE INDEX
- $150,000
- for winning one footrace, which now pays better than your entire fiscal year.
- 660 million pounds
- of uninspected foreign beef, because a century of meat regulation was apparently just theater.
- 287%
- more probiotics since 2009, from a nation that still won't meet a vegetable halfway.
That's the firehose. Put the sweater on now and beat the rush. Decline any medical machine sold to you by someone with a ring light. Wave goodbye to at least one camera this week — it's leaving before you are. And check the expiration dates on anything you'd need in an emergency, including the government. Tomorrow is International Day of Democracy, sharing the date with National Linguine Day and National Double Cheeseburger Day, and only two of the three are thriving. Democracy gets one day a year and still has to split the billing with lunch.
Until next time —
Ya roasted!
— Roastie