On Thursday, conspiracy monger, supplement peddler, defamation artist, and abuser Alex Jones moved to convert his bankruptcy proceedings to Chapter 7, allowing for the liquidation of his personal assets to pay off the over $1.5B he owes in legal decisions to the families of Sandy Hook victims he defamed and whose lives he upended - including his personal holdings in his conspiracy theory empire, InfoWars.

In doing so, Jones' lawyers noted that there was "no reasonable prospect for a successful reorganization" under Chapter 11,and that proceeding would only serve to incur further costs for Jones. A week prior, Jones was given the green light to liquidate his $2.8M Texas ranch to pay his various debts. InfoWars as a whole is owned by the shell company Free Speech Systems, and as such the impact of Jones entering into Chapter 7 on FSS' own bankruptcy is to be seen, especially given that FSS has been under the oversight of an independent restructuring officer, with a hearing next week to determine the company's fate. Alex Jones' legal travails previously, previously, more previously, even more previously.

Last summer, the California coast had an unusual threat for surfers in the form of Otter 841, who had a passion for stealing surfboards while evading the authorities. With the start of the 2024 season, Otter 841 is back, and just as ready to cause havok as she was last year.

As reported previously on the Blue, the the Reykjanes peninsula had an eruption in the proximity of the town of Grindavík several months back, however the emergence had settled down after about a week of activity...until a new emergence opened up in the Sundhnuk crater. (SLYT live feed)

Facing the potential of a ruinous $20B decision against them in the House v. NCAA antitrust lawsuit, the NCAA and the major conferences are coming to a settlement that will see college athletes recieve revenue sharing, as well as former athletes being eligible to recieve damages for payments wrongly withheld.

This is a culmination of over a decade of litigation over the antitrust violations in college athletics, starting with O'Bannon establishing that players' NIL rights had value, followed by the Alston ruling definitively laying out that the NCAA did not have an antitrust exemption, opening the door for the House class action lawsuit - and the way the NCAA's arguments went over like lead balloons at those hearings has pushed them to the settlement table. Further emphasizing the losses in courts of law are the two injunctions the NCAA has had placed on their policies: first, they were enjoined over limiting transfers through the transfer portal, then an attempt to sanction Tennessee over NIL payments resulted in the Tennessee and Virginia AGs suing, resulting in an injunction on the NCAA's NIL rules. In addition, Dartmouth men's basketball players won a major win for labor with the regional NLRB ruling that they are in fact employees, leading them to pursue unionization, which the school is fighting. In addition (and likely to the death of OJ Simpson bringing new scrutiny to the decision) the Heisman Trust has reinstated Reggie Bush as the 2005 Heisman winner, further weakening the NCAA's position. It is in that context that the NCAA is coming to the negotiating table - having lost over and over, they are staring down a loss that would end the organization. And there's still a chance the cart gets upset - while the lion's share of the damages are due to the behavior of the major conferences, it's the non-majors who are being told to pay the majority of the settlement, which they are pushing back on.