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Mascots are currently enjoying a renaissance. From McDonalds Grimace to the WNBAs Ellie the Elephant and Pop-Tarts Pop-Tart guy, companies everywhere are leaning on characters to represent their brand values and attract eyes on social media. Now the Trump administration is joining in with its own mascot. Its a literal lump of coal. The coal mascotnamed Coalieappears to be a new character designed to represent the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), a bureau in the U.S. Department of the Interior. Coalie officially debuted on January 22, when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted him (it?) on his X account. In the post, which has now been viewed more than 37,000 times, Burgum shared an obviously AI-generated illustration of himself kneeling next to a grinning, bug-eyed piece of coal that’s decked out in a yellow coal miners helmet, vest, and boots. The caption, in part, read “Mine, Baby, Mine!” [Image: USDOI] A deeper exploration of OSMREs website shows that Coalie appears to be a genuine effort on the agencys part to explain its goals. And while it may not have been OSMREs intention, a poorly designed lump of coal is actually the perfect metaphor to represent the Trump administrations desperate attempt to revive the coal industry. The perfect mascot for Trumps energy agenda Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has been on a mission to prop up coal, despite both environmental and economic data pointing to a dwindling future for fossil fuels. Coals dominance has been declining for years, and for good reason: Burning coal is linked to air pollution that can cause asthma, brain damage, heart problems, and more. Its one of the worst offenders for greenhouse gas pollution, with environmental experts estimating that the world needs to completely phase out coal power by 2040 in order to meet the goals set out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Further, multiple studies have found that coal is among the more expensive technologies for utilities today, making it significantly less competitive than renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and natural gas. Nevertheless, last April Trump signed multiple executive orders aimed at reviving the coal industry, at the same time that his administration suspended a decades-old program to detect lung disease in coal miners. In September, the Department of Energy announced plans to spend more than half a billion dollars to prop up coal. [Image: OSMRE] Now enter Coalie: the mascot tasked with the gargantuan challenge of making Trumps coal bailout seem palatable. In a new post to OSMREs website titled 10 Things to Know About How OSMRE Supports Americas Energy Legacy and Communities, Coalie is pictured smiling and waving in multiple hastily assembled graphics. Hes serving as the cheerful mouthpiece for several dubious claims, including that OSMRE works with Indigenous peoples by consulting with tribal leadership through a government-to-government process (see the federal governments long-standing history of extracting resources on Native lands and ignoring tribal opposition), and that OSMRE evaluates the potential environmental impact of federal actions and practices responsible stewardship of public lands and resources (there is no environmentally responsible way to harvest coal). In short, Coalie has been handed an impossible job. Ironically, if any mascot could succinctly su up the Trump administrations asinine insistence on a fossil fuel comeback, it would be a shoddily slapped together illustration of a lump of coal.
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E-Commerce
If youre an old-school writer like me, usually the words alone are all you need. But once in a while, you need something extra. Im referring to all the special symbols that dont appear on your keyboard. Maybe you need to mark something as copyrighted with a , or you want to rave about the 8 order of fish and chips on your recent trip to London. Perhaps youre a mathematician whos working with . Y qué pasa si necesitas escribir una pregunta en espaol? Instead of having to dig deep into your virtual keyboards corners or memorize ASCII character codes, theres a free website you can use to copy these symbols and more directly to your clipboard for easy anywhere-pastingno matter what kind of device youve got in front of you. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! Your special character cheat sheet To look up all those extra symbols that arent on your keyboard, just head to Symbol.wtf. Symbol.wtf is a single-page website with a searchable list of special characters. It takes just a few seconds to find whatever symbol you need. Clicking a symbol copies it to your clipboard so you can paste it into any text fieldwith no sign-ups, ads, or usage limits. Symbol.wtf offers 195 commonly used characters, including punctuation, currency, accent letters, arrows, musical symbols, and even playing card suits. Symbol.wtf makes it swift and simple to find any symbol. The whole list is easy enough to scroll through, but theres also a search bar and a list of filtering options at the top. The hardest part of using it is remembering the Symbol.wtf URL, but I just think to myself What the f was that symbol site again? and that usually jogs my memory well enough. What about emoji? The characters you find on Symbol.wtf are not emoji, which are defined separately under the Unicode standard. If youre typing on a phone, your keyboard almost certainly has an emoji button for looking up these symbols. What if youre not on your phone, though? You could bring up your computers emoji picker by pressing Win + . (on Windows), Fn/ + E (on a Mac), or Search + Shift + Space (on a Chromebook). But if that fails for whatever reason, you could just head to Unicode.party. Much like Symbol.wtf, its a searchable list of symbolswhich you can click to copy to your clipboard. Theres a skin tone selector at the top, and the search results are pretty much instantaneous. Unicode Party puts every emoji imaginable at your fingertips in an easily searchable list. Just dont let any young folks know youre looking up your emoji this way, because you know how theyll respond. Symbol.wtf and Unicode.party both work in any web browser. Theyre free to use with no ads or usage limits. No sign-up is required, and neither site does any tracking of your usage. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
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E-Commerce
Spammers and malicious actors inundate us with a steady stream of text messagesoften purporting to be from legitimate institutions or companies. Stanching this flow isn’t easy. Just as the unwanted emails we receive often tell us that we can simply unsubscribe via the unsubscribe link, these text messages explain that we can opt out of future communication simply by replying STOP. But thats not always a safe way to deal with these unsolicited texts. Here’s whyand what you should do instead. The problem with replying STOP to unsolicited text messages Weve all had it happen. We get a text message pitching us a product or asking for a political donation. At the end of the message, we are politely informed that we can opt out of future text communications either by replying STOP directly to the message itself, or texting STOP to another number they list. That may be tempting. It ostensibly offers a quick solution to a legitimate annoyance. But it’s not always a good idea. Thats because replying to a spammy or malicious text in any way informs the sender that the phone number they used has a real person on the other end who is receiving their messages. Once they get this confirmation, a spammer is likely to send you more messages, not fewer. Thankfully, todays smartphones have powerful features built into them that can help you deal with nuisance texts like this, without needing to rely on the goodwill of the sender to remove you from their blast list. Heres what to do instead It should be noted that sometimes it is safe to reply STOP or otherwise follow the instructions in a text message to instruct the sender to cease future communications. If the text message is from a legitimate institution, such as your doctors office, bank, school, or even political groups, they will often honor opt-out STOP requests. But if the text is from a spammer, replying STOP is pretty much futile. Instead, your best course of action to ensure that you never hear from the sender again is to simply block the number they are texting you from. The way you do this varies slightly depending on whether you have an iPhone or an Android phone. But heres how to block a spam text message sender on both. How to block a text message sender on iPhone The default text message app on iPhone is called Messages. Whenever a spam text message lands in your app, heres what to do: Do not reply to it. Instead, tap the senders phone number or name at the top of the text message thread. On the next screen, tap Block Contact. Tap Block Contact from the pop-up that appears. If youre getting too many spam text messages from multiple senders, iOS 26 users also have the option to enable a feature called Screen Unknown Senders, which filters all texts from unknown senders into their own inbox, segregating the messages from the ones you want to receive. How to block a text message sender on Android Google makes it really easy to block text message senders on Android as well. You can do this through the default messaging app on Android phones, called Messages. Heres how: Do not reply to it. Open the Messages app. Find the thread from the sender you want to block, then tap and hold it. From the pop-up menu that appears, tap Block. Depending on what flavor of Android you are using, you may also need to confirm the block by tapping OK. Be careful who you give your phone number to Youll probably never be able to know for certain how a spammer got your phone number. Maybe they obtained it illegally, scraped it from the web, nabbed it from a data breach, or even bought it legally from a data broker. Many of these things are outside of your control. But you can make your phone number harder to obtain by giving it out more sparingly, especially to questionable websites. Meanwhile, when you get those spam text messages, think twice before replying STOP. Simply blocking the number is often a faster way to end the annoyanceand to protect your number from being flagged as belonging to a real person.
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E-Commerce
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