Just Shut Them Down

So, once again, we see McKinsey & Company having to pay significant fines for facilitating corruption, this time in South Africa.

It is increasingly clear that this is not a few bad apples, this is their core business model.

They need to go the way of Arthur Andersen:

A McKinsey & Co. subsidiary agreed to pay more than $122 million to resolve allegations it paid bribes to officials at two South African state-owned companies to help the firm win millions of dollars of consulting work.

McKinsey Africa was charged with one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and as part of the settlement, the subsidiary entered into a three-year deferred prosecution agreement, according to prosecutors in Manhattan.

Vikas Sagar, a former McKinsey senior partner in the consulting firm’s Johannesburg office who participated in the bribery scheme, pleaded guilty in December 2022 to one count of conspiracy to violate the FCPA, according to the Justice Department. Sagar’s guilty plea was unsealed on Thursday. Attempts to reach Sagar weren’t immediately successful.

McKinsey in a statement said it conducted an investigation into the conduct of Sagar and terminated his employment more than seven years ago, adding that it has “zero tolerance” for such conduct. The firm added that it was “deeply remorseful” that an employee of the firm engaged in such conduct, and that it had made a full repayment of fees to the state-owned companies and would continue to cooperate with U.S. and South African authorities.

Unethical behavior is at the core of their business.

Just shut them down.

Thoughts on Syria

I don't have much in the way of insights beyond the obvious, that frozen conflicts are a recipe for disaster.

In the short term, and by that I mean in the next 6 months, I would expect to see significant refugee flows (from the mid 5 figures to the low 6 figures) from the Syrian Alewite community, which numbers about 2½ million in Syria.

They, specifically the Assad family, have been in charge of Syria for over 50 years, and the new government will be dominated by Salafi Jihadists, and as such, they consider Shiah and Alewite religions to be apostasy.

Also, there are 50 years of scores to settle, which may push migration even higher.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

My son Charlie does standup, and I got a text that is a work in progress for his act.

Here's 4 things we know about "The Adjuster," the person who shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson:

1. He can bench press the entire weight of America's sorrow.

2. He is an advocate for quality mass transit.

3. He rescued my cat from a tree in 2019.

4. He knows the names of every barista at his favorite cafe and they're always happy to see him.

I do not want my death to be memed mercilessly.

F%$# Scott Walker

One of the lasting legacies of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, the infamous ACT 10, which essentially banned unions for government workers (except for cops and firemen) in Wisconsin, has been struck down.

It turns out that the exception for cops and firemen, who were given said exemption because they endorsed Walker, was not sufficiently defined, and the statute could not stand without that:

A Dane County judge on Monday sent ripples through Wisconsin's political landscape, overturning a 13-year-old law that banned most collective bargaining among public employees, consequently decimating the size and power of employee unions and turning then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker into a nationally known political figure.

The effort to overturn Act 10 began in November 2023 when several unions representing public employees filed the lawsuit, citing a "dire situation" in workplaces with issues including low pay, staffing shortages and poor working conditions.

In July, Dane County Circuit Judge Jacob Frost ruled provisions of Act 10 unconstitutional and denied a motion filed by the Republican-controlled Legislature to dismiss the case.

The lawsuit argued the 2011 law violated equal protection guarantees in the Wisconsin Constitution by dividing public employees into two classes: "general" and "public safety" employees. Public safety employees are exempt from the collective bargaining limitations imposed on "general" public employees.

Frost agreed. He said he couldn't sever Act 10's definition of "public safety employee," which he said is "irrational and violates the right to equal protection of the laws," and also keep the rest of Act 10 intact.

"I cannot solve Act 10's constitutional problems by striking the definition of 'public safety employee,' leaving the term undefined and leaving the remainder of the law in place," wrote Frost in Monday's ruling.

Frost added that "Act 10 as written by the Legislature specifically and narrowly defines 'public safety employee.' It is that definition which is unconstitutional. The Legislature cites no precedent for this bold argument that I should simply strike the unlawful definition but leave it to an agency and the courts to later define as they see fit. I am unaware of any such precedent (...)."

In the earlier ruling on the motion to dismiss the case, Frost pointed out the law treats different groups of public safety employees differently.

"Nobody could provide this Court an explanation that reasonably showed why municipal police and fire and State Troopers are considered public safety employees, but Capitol Police, UW Police and conservation wardens, who have the same authority and do the same work, are not," Frost said.

The law was all about political payback, and while I understand why Judge Frost was disinclined to state reality, that is the reality.

The law was a corrupt political and electoral thing, and the fact that it has been overturned is a good thing.

H/t Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Not a Remotely Mature Technology

It turns out that as a result of libel suits and complaints, ChatGPT has been manually hard-coding names into their system. 

They cannot get the program to stop spewing falsehoods, so they shut it down whenever certain names are mentioned:

OpenAI's ChatGPT is more than just an AI language model with a fancy interface. It's a system consisting of a stack of AI models and content filters that make sure its outputs don't embarrass OpenAI or get the company into legal trouble when its bot occasionally makes up potentially harmful facts about people.

Recently, that reality made the news when people discovered that the name "David Mayer" breaks ChatGPT. 404 Media also discovered that the names "Jonathan Zittrain" and "Jonathan Turley" caused ChatGPT to cut conversations short. And we know another name, likely the first, that started the practice last year: Brian Hood. More on that below.

The chat-breaking behavior occurs consistently when users mention these names in any context, and it results from a hard-coded filter that puts the brakes on the AI model's output before returning it to the user.

………

OpenAI did not respond to our request for comment about the names, but we know when the filter originated, and as a result, the other names are also likely filtered due to complaints about ChatGPT's tendency to confabulate erroneous responses when lacking sufficient information about a person.

We first discovered that ChatGPT choked on the name "Brian Hood" in mid-2023 while writing about his defamation lawsuit. In that lawsuit, the Australian mayor threatened to sue OpenAI after discovering ChatGPT falsely claimed he had been imprisoned for bribery when, in fact, he was a whistleblower who had exposed corporate misconduct.

The case was ultimately resolved in April 2023 when OpenAI agreed to filter out the false statements within Hood's 28-day ultimatum. That is possibly when the first ChatGPT hard-coded name filter appeared.

What they are doing at OpenAI is not just an admission of error, it is an admission that they cannot make the system work properly.

If the system were truly intelligent, then it could be made to understand the underlying facts, and it cannot, and never will be able to.

News You Can Use

The good folks at the Texas Observer, a bimonthly news magazine, have found out who operates 4 of the biggest Neo-Nazi accounts on Ecch (Twitter).

Good work:

Under owner Elon Musk, the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, has become a hotbed of white supremacist and neo-Nazi content. A recent headline in the Atlantic doesn’t mince words: “X is a white supremacist site.”

Musk has allowed formerly banned far-right and neo-Nazi accounts back on the platform, and, in some instances, he’s directly responded to accounts that traffic in white supremacist and neo-Nazi rhetoric. Meanwhile, anonymous accounts that regularly promote racial hate on the platform have seen their follower counts grow substantially as Musk has taken a more hands-off approach to moderation compared to the social media network’s prior owners.

Anonymity has long been a tactic used by extremists to spread their ideology while avoiding consequences, from Klansmen hoods to online pseudonyms. With such ideas spreading rapidly on X, the Texas Observer has identified the operators of four anonymous accounts that regularly share racist, antisemitic, and neo-Nazi content on the platform. Three of the operators appear to live or have claimed to own property in Texas, where X moderation operations are based and Musk resides.

Through reviewing posts on X, web archives, leak databases, and other social media profiles, the Observer identified the following individuals as the anonymous operators of neo-Nazi X accounts, which had a collective 500,000 followers at their peak: Cyan Cruz, a 40-year-old marketing professional who appears to have lived in Austin and Amarillo and operates the X account TheOfficial1984; Michael Gramer, a 42-year-old retired mechanical engineer who has lived in New Hampshire, operates the X account 9mm_SMG, and has claimed to have a house in Galveston and to be spending time in Dallas; Robert “Bobby” Thorne, a 35-year-old vice president at JP Morgan Chase in Plano, who operates the account Noble1945 and previously operated the account Noble_x_x_; and John Anthony Provenzano, a 30-year-old who appears to live in Virginia, operates the account utism_ (formerly known as JohnnyBullzeye), and, according to a tip and a records request response from the U.S. Navy, works at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indian Head, Maryland—where the Navy manufactures explosive ordnance.

You know, the fact that Mr. Provanzano works at NSWC does not fill me with confidence.  Neither does the fact that Mr. Thorne works as a VP at JP MOrgan Chase, though obviously his day job makes his evil not much of a surprise.

It's Only Business?

It appears that the late and unlamented UnitedHeathcare CEO Brian Thompson might have been murdered was a very bad boy.

By bad, I mean insider trading. He, along with fellow executives, sold massive amounts of UnitedHealcare stock before the revelation of a federal investigation:

………

In May the Hollywood Firefighters’ Pension Fund sued Thompson as well as UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty and executive chairman Stephen Hemsley, alleging they plotted to inflate the company stock by choosing not to disclose that the Justice Department was investigating the company for antitrust practices. According to the lawsuit, Thompson was allegedly aware of the investigation and sold 31% of his shares 11 days before the Wall Street Journal reported the probe in February, which sunk the company’s stock by 5%. Thompson allegedly netted $15 million from selling stock.

What a surprise, the CEO was a crook.

Skeet of the Day

Elon never spends time with his kids but the day after a CEO gets shot in the streets he's father of the year hanging with his little human shield.

[image or embed]

— Brandy Bryant 🏳️‍⚧️ (@inkmasterbator.bsky.social) December 6, 2024 at 6:24 AM

This is harsh, and well deserved, and funny as f%$#.

Skeet is a post on Bluesky.

First Friday of the Month ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's actually a pretty good report with non-farm payroll increasing by 227,000, though the unemployment rate rose by .1% to 4.2%.

I attribute the latter to more people reentering the job market.

The US economy added 227,000 jobs in November, a sharp rebound after the previous month’s total was dragged down by hurricanes and the Boeing strike.

Friday’s number, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, beat a consensus forecast of 200,000 by economists surveyed by Reuters. The unemployment rate rose 0.1 percentage point to 4.2 per cent.

November’s jobs growth marked a jump from 12,000 new positions initially recorded for October — the weakest employment report of the Biden administration. The figure was revised to 36,000 in Friday’s data release.

The consensus among Fed watchers is that there will be a 25 basis point (¼%) rate cut at their December meeting, for what it's worth. (IMNSHO, it ain't worth much)

Much of this is likely due to recovery from the hurricanes and the end of a number of strikes, most notably at Boeing.

It should also be noted that the household survey, which is typically more volatile than the payroll report, showed a decrease in employment:

………

This is not new territory for Alphaville. We started writing on this around the time it started to be a thing last autumn, and we did a further dive into the differences in June. But to put some numbers on the discrepancy, the household survey reports around 700,000 fewer workers from the peak last November, while the payroll survey reports around 1.6 million more workers. It’s more than a bit weird that a working population around half the size of Ohio’s appears to have fallen down the back of the sofa. This is no rounding error.

The answer is probably somewhere in between, and the thing to be noted is that it's pretty f%$#ing clear that the BLS stats have still not adjusted to our post pandemic reality.

I think that we are in for a bumpy ride, and I think that this will start with a collapse in either cryptocurrency and/or the AI bubble bursting.

This is Kind of Cold

UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson died doing what he loved - increasing shareholder value pic.twitter.com/ECvZ2TnINz

— vermilviathan.bsky.social 🍉🔆 (@VermilViathan) December 4, 2024

It's funny as f%$#, but it's cold.

The murder, of Mr. Thompson should not come down to its effect on the stock price of his company.

Then again, it appears taht the live of Mr. Thompson comes down to his effect on the stock price of the company.

People are meming the sh%$ out of this.

Let Me Translate This

The New Work Campaign Finance Board just said, "You are a corrupt mother f%$#er," in response to reports of the Eric Adams mayoral campaign having defrauded them in the last cycle.

There is a good chance that they will be denying him matching funds this cycle:

Mayor Eric Adams will know as soon as Dec. 16 if his reelection bid will qualify for millions of dollars in public matching funds as the Campaign Finance Board votes on the first tranche of payments for the 2025 contest.

At a City Council hearing on Wednesday, CFB executive director Paul Ryan testified that a candidate could be denied funding overall months ahead of the election, depending on questions about that particular campaign.

“There will be some judgment calls made by the board when making public funding determinations,” Ryan told Council members on the governmental operations committee — declining to mention Adams specifically.

The CFB will approve the first of eight payouts of matching funds for the 2025 elections by Dec. 16, he noted.

Since 1989, the nonpartisan city agency has administered taxpayer money to candidates running for municipal office (mayor, comptroller, public advocate, borough president and City Council) who qualify. The CFB upped the matching funds from $6-to-$1 to $8-to-$1 for the 2021 campaign on the first $250 of each donation from New York City residents, following a 2018 ballot referendum.

………

But Councilmember Lincoln Restler, a Democrat from Brooklyn, still pushed on why the board would give Adams more money when so many questions linger about his past campaign — and a federal indictment that alleges he obtained $10 million in 2021 matching funds fraudulently.

………

The Adams campaign repeatedly ignored red flags raised by the CFB during the 2021 campaign about suspicious donations — and secured the record haul of public funding, THE CITY has reported.

Adams’ indictment in September, following the prosecution of former Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin in connection with his 2021 comptroller bid, put the CFB on notice about accusations candidates gamed the public financing system and placed the board under heightened scrutiny when it comes to payouts for the 2025 election cycle.

………

Had the Campaign Finance Board known about the allegedly illegal contributions, the Adams campaign could have been found ineligible to receive portions of the $10 million — or removed from the program entirely. 

Adams is very much a "Law and order" candidate, so his corruption comes as no surprise.

The more that a candidate pontificates about law and order the more corrupt they tend to be.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Mixed employment numbers this week, initial claims up 9,000, and continuing claims fell by 37,000 to 1.87 million.

This was over the Thanksgiving week, and the 4-day weekend makes for more statistical noise.

We should get more information tomorrow with the monthly jobs report:

Applications for US unemployment benefits rose to the highest in a month during a week that included the Thanksgiving holiday.

Initial claims increased by 9,000 to 224,000 in the week ended Nov. 30. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 215,000 applications.

The four-week moving average, a metric that helps smooth out volatility, edged up to 218,250.

………

Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, dropped to 1.87 million in the previous week, according to Labor Department data released Thursday.

Also, imports fell last month, about 12% from the month before.

 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

"I don't want to have to pay for Brain Premium to avoid getting Coca-Cola ads in my sleep."

— 12 yo on why he won't get a Neuralink implant

— Paul Graham (@paulg) December 4, 2024

Out of the mouth of babes………

May Be Replaced by Something Even More Bizarre and Inexplicable

There are now reports that Donald Trump is considering replacing Pete Hegseth with Ron DeSantis for Secretary of state Defense.

Donald, you do know that DeSantis declared war on a mouse (Disney) and lost, don't you?

Thoughts and Premiums

Definitely Planned

Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, has been shot and and killed in what appears to be a premeditated murder.

If you look at the tape it's clear that the gunman was lying in wait, and he was using a suppressor (silencer).

The gun jammed, and he cleared it, probably as a result of a failure for the action to cycle because of the suppressor's weight or effect on gas pressure.

The gunman appears to be rather composed, methodically working the action after it failed, and then walking off across the street.

The fact that there are reports that messages were written on either the bullets or the casings, would indicate that this was someone acting out of personal animus, not a contract killer.

As to suspects, he's the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, so if one considers people and friends and relatives of people, who were harmed by UHC denials of service, we're probably well over 10 million.

UHC Covers about 45 million people, you do the math

Rather unsurprisingly, social media has exploded with people mocking Mr. Thompson and praising the gunman. 

This is not surprising.

Even among health insurance companies, (fuck Cigna) UHC are egregious c%$#s.

For example, while Mr. Thompson was not have been responsible for every decision made regarding coverage, he almost certainly was responsible for UHC using AI driven claims software with a 90% error rate.

One of the problems with many of the attempts to fix the healthcare system is that the centrists (Clinton, Obama, etc.) see the insurance companies as allies in such an effort.

They are not.  Insurance companies are perhaps the worst malefactors in the entire corrupt system.

I am shedding no tears Mr. Thompson, and were I on the jury, I would be hard pressed to convict him.

This man is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, and his motivation was a total remuneration in the $10,000,000.00 a year range.

What? Only 1,000,000.00 a year isn't enough?

If the candy-asses in the DoJ and state Attorneys General offices are unwilling to frog confront the corruption that permeates our economy, then the alternative are actions like this.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

Breaking: Sources have confirmed that Juan Guaidó has declared himself interim President of South Korea. 🇰🇷🇻🇪 pic.twitter.com/kB5sSDXRuP

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) December 3, 2024

The revolution will be memed endlessly.

I Have No Clue What is Going On

I have no clue as to what exactly drove  Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol's declaration of martial law, but it's pretty clear massive protests and a unanimous vote against this action by the National Assembly is why he backed down.

Given that President Yoon's administration has been hamstrung by corruption and incompetence, and that his popularity is approaching that of a case of jock itch, my guess is that this was a political calculus.

No clue as to where everything goes from here, but given that the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) has announced a general strike until Yoon steps down. 

Additionally, the opposition in the National Assembly has announced the beginning of impeachment proceedings against the President.

I'm not sure how likely that would be to pass, but the opposition holds a significant majority in the chamber.

My guess would be ……… F%$# that ……… I do not know enough to make a guess.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯  

Not a Surprise

The venture capital firm Y Combinator frequently claims that it has a laser beam focus on funding new ideas and new technologies.

The reality is that most of their funding supports copycat endeavors, which includes copying efforts funded by Y Combinator.

What, you mean that the gods of finance are engaging in humbug?

The Silicon Valley dream is to build a tech startup that is such a unique idea it alters the commercial universe and turns its founders into billionaires. Participating in the Valley’s most famed startup factory, Y Combinator, is often part of that dream. Airbnb, Coinbase, and Stripe all got started there.

Yet, a deep dive into the data from all of the nearly 5,000 companies YC has backed to date reveals a surprising truth: YC startups don’t have to be unique. Far from it.

YC commonly accepts startups that are building similar or nearly identical products to previous YC grads. Some of them are direct competitors; others differ slightly by targeting a new geography (Asia or Latin America), or are a subset of a larger market (point-of-sale software for bars versus coffee shops).

………

This is clearly more than lip service for Tan, who has himself, for instance, championed two police bodycam startups a few years apart: Flock Safety (Summer 2017 cohort) and Abel Police (Summer 2024). Along the same lines, more than a dozen startups building AI code editors went through the YC program between 2022 and 2024 — some in the same batch with the same YC partner.

When asked about its propensity to back competitors, a YC spokesperson said that the organization is more interested in the founders’ backgrounds than their business ideas. “YC invests in founders over ideas, focusing on individuals with the potential to build transformative companies — no matter the space they operate in. Our investment strategy focuses on backing the most promising founders with vision, resilience, and ability to execute, which is clear in our RFS process,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

So basically what they are saying is, "We're funding people who look like us, and act like us, and smell like us, frequently friends friends of friends, and brothers-in-law." 

Making the world safe for white tech bros.

They Are Lying

You read the bible, Microsoft?As you may recall Microsoft has gone big on selling its Office suite as a service with a monthly subscription fee.

Well, it appears that some people believe that the Redmond based software company will also use the cloud based system to train its AI models.

Microsoft has denied this, which (given the history of the company) is a pretty good indicator that this is what they are doing:

Microsoft's Connected Experiences option in its productivity suite has been causing consternation amid accusations that the default setting might allow Microsoft to train AI models using customers' Word and Excel documents and other data.

The Windows giant vehemently denies the claims. A spokesperson told The Register: "In Microsoft 365 consumer and commercial applications, Microsoft does not use customer data to train large language models without your permission."

We asked Microsoft what it meant by "permission" and if the permission was opt-in or opt-out, and the IT titan has yet to respond.

Connected Experiences has long been a part of Microsoft Office. Want to do some translation? You're probably using Connected Experiences. Transcribe a recording? Again, Connected Experiences. Do some grammar checking in Word? Connected Experiences will be analyzing your content.

The spokesperson said: "The Connected Services setting is an industry standard setting that enables features that require an internet connection. Connected experiences play a significant role in enhancing productivity by integrating your content with resources available on the web. These features allow applications to provide more intelligent and personalized services."

In recent weeks, users have been looking more deeply at what Microsoft is doing with all this data, and some have worried that it is being used to train the mega-corp's internal AI systems, something Microsoft says it is not.

………

The difficulty folks face is that despite Microsoft's protestations, its privacy statement (as of November 2024) does permit it to do all manner of things with the data it collects. And how does it use that data? "As part of our efforts to improve and develop our products, we may use your data to develop and train our AI models."

In August, Microsoft said it would be using consumer data from Copilot, Bing, and Microsoft Start to train Copilot's generative AI models. At the time, the biz said it would allow customers to opt out and would start displaying the opt-out control in October. It also said it wouldn't be conducting training on consumer data from the European Economic Area.

Yep, no misuse of private data here.

They are lying through their teeth.

It's enough to get one to ask Microsoft if they know what Marcellus Wallace looks like.

The Loser Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ Loses Again

Once again, a Delaware judge has called bullsh%$ on Elon's $56,000,000,000.00 Tesla payday.

He must be so mad now: 

A Delaware judge today rejected Elon Musk's bid to reinstate a Tesla pay package that was worth over $50 billion at the beginning of 2024 and has now crossed $100 billion based on Tesla's latest share price. The judge also ordered Tesla to pay $345 million in attorneys' fees to the plaintiff's counsel, who had sought $5.6 billion in fees.

Delaware Court of Chancery Judge Kathaleen McCormick, who voided the pay plan in January, said today that a June 2024 shareholder vote re-approving the 2018 pay plan is not a compelling reason to reverse the original ruling. Her ruling said that a "large and talented group of defense firms got creative with the ratification argument, but their unprecedented theories go against multiple strains of settled law."

Musk is thus prevented from accessing a pay package whose potential value has soared along with Tesla's stock price. "As of Monday, the pay package was worth $101.4 billion, according to Equilar, a compensation consulting firm," Reuters wrote.

By holding another shareholder vote, Musk and Tesla board members essentially created new evidence after the trial, McCormick wrote:

There are at least four fatal flaws. First, the defendants have no procedural ground for flipping the outcome of an adverse post-trial decision based on evidence they created after trial. Second, common-law ratification is an affirmative defense that must be timely raised, which means that, at a minimum, it cannot be raised for the first time after the post-trial opinion. Third, what the defendants call "common law ratification" has no basis in the common law—a stockholder vote standing alone cannot ratify a conflicted-controller transaction. Fourth, even if a stockholder vote could have a ratifying effect, it could not do so here due to multiple, material misstatements in the proxy statement. Each of these defects standing alone defeats the motion to revise. 

………

The proxy statement provided to shareholders before the June 2024 vote "recommend[ed] that stockholders 'ratify' the exact same Grant rescinded by the Post-Trial Opinion," McCormick wrote.

The new stockholder vote could shift the burden of proof, but only if the vote is "fully informed and uncoerced," McCormick wrote. Shareholder Richard Tornetta, the plaintiff who launched the lawsuit that got Musk's pay rescinded, "has demonstrated that the vote was not fully informed," today's ruling said.

The January ruling in which McCormick voided the pay package said the deal was unfair to shareholders and that most of the board members were beholden to Musk or had compromising conflicts. In Tesla's subsequent request asking shareholders to re-approve the pay plan, the company said that a yes vote could "extinguish claims for breach of fiduciary duty by authorizing an act that otherwise would constitute a breach" and correct "disclosure deficiencies" and other problems identified in the 2018 stock award.

I am amused.

The Call Is Coming from Inside the House

Despite extreme efforts by Chief Justice John Roberts, the discussions that shot down meaningful ethics rules for the Supreme Court have leaked.

Unsurprisingly, it was 3 conservative justices, Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito, who objected to any ethics rules at all:

As the summer of 2023 ended, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court began trading even-more-confidential-than-usual memos, avoiding their standard email list and instead passing paper documents in envelopes to each chambers. Faced with ethics controversies and a plunge in public trust, they were debating rules for their own conduct, according to people familiar with the process.

Weeks later, as a united front, they announced the results: the court’s first-ever ethics code. “It’s remarkable that we were able to agree unanimously,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said in a television interview this year.

But a New York Times examination found that behind the scenes, the court had divided over whether the justices’ new rules could — or should — ever be enforced.

Justice Gorsuch was especially vocal in opposing any enforcement mechanism beyond voluntary compliance, arguing that additional measures could undermine the court. The justices’ strength was their independence, he said, and he vowed to have no part in diminishing it.

In the private exchanges, Justice Clarence Thomas, whose decision not to disclose decades of gifts and luxury vacations from wealthy benefactors had sparked the ethics controversy, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote off the court’s critics as politically motivated and unappeasable.

No Sam, you, and your fellow justice Clarence, are corrupt sons of bitches. 

One of your fellow justices is leaking this, because they know corruption when you see it.

………

To piece together the previously undisclosed debate, The Times interviewed people from inside and outside the court, including liberals and conservatives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the proceedings and the justices’ thinking. This article also draws upon public statements by the justices, who declined to comment.

I'm calling bullsh%$ on this paragraph.  If they were passing memos around in sealed envelopes on paper, the only way that anyone got this, and then got this to the New York Times is for one of the justices to either leak it themselves, or to make this available to staff who they knew who would leak to the press.

I understand why this paragraph is there, the Times is trying to sow confusion as to the source, but this story had to come from a Justice.

………

The discussions were treated with extra secrecy because they were so sensitive, according to people from the court. Instead of the usual legal issues, the justices were contending with controversy about finances and gifts from friends, and some of the ground rules of their own institution.

For years, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. had resisted efforts to hold the court to the same ethics rules that bind all other federal judges. In addition to the longstanding code, those judges can rely on a committee that dispenses advice. Any ethics complaints that arise are routed to chief circuit judges, who can convene other judges to investigate, and if necessary, take actions that range from discreet warning to censure.

All 50 states have avenues for examining complaints about members of their highest courts. On Monday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, released a report detailing how state supreme court members are subject to ethics oversight. 

The Supreme Court cannot enforce its own ethics.  I don't mean shouldn't, I mean that they cannot.

Ethics enforcement without an empowered and independent watchdog is not possible. (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?)

The Constitution gives Congress explicit authority to regulate the courts, including the Supreme Court.

Congress should set up an independent watchdog for the entire federal court system, including SCOTUS.

Yes, I Have to Post About This

We have another claim as to the identity of airline hijacker DB Cooper.

Yeah, it fascinates me.  It's kind of a Pacific Northwest thing, and I spent most of my childhood in the PNW. 

It is one of the biggest mysteries in US criminal history: just what happened to DB Cooper, the man who hijacked an airplane before leaping out in mid-air with $200,000 in cash?

Now, more than 50 years later, the infamous crime may have been solved, after a pair of siblings came forward to claim they had found the parachute used in the hijacking, in their mother’s shed, and that Cooper was their father.

Chanté and Rick McCoy III say their father, Richard McCoy Jr, was the man who identified himself as Dan Cooper when he boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines jetliner from Portland to Seattle in November 1971.

………

When the plane arrived in Seattle, Cooper collected $200,000 in ransom money, along with four parachutes, and released the passengers. He then ordered the flight crew to head for Mexico City, via Reno, Nevada, but 30 minutes after takeoff, Cooper jumped out of the airplane somewhere over south-west Washington.

The hijacking baffled the FBI, who spent 45 years investigating before officially closing the case in 2016. It also caught the attention of amateur sleuths, particularly after about $5,800 of the ransom money was found near Vancouver, Washington, in 1980.

The $5,800 was found buried in the sand of the banks of the Columbia River.  I think that Cooper did not survive the jump, and that money is all that we will find of him.

He jumped in harsh weather in November from over 10,000 feet.

Even if he made it down, he would not have survived the conditions after he landed.

In November, Dan Gryder, a retired pilot who has spent 20 years investigating the case, told the Cowboy State Daily that the FBI was re-investigating the Cooper case, after the discovery of the parachute in the McCoys’ mother’s shed.

“That rig is literally one in a billion,” Gryder said of the parachute, according to the Cowboy State Daily. He said FBI agents had visited the property of the McCoys’ mother, Karen, who died in 2020, last year. Agents searched “every nook and cranny”, according to Gryder, and the McCoys handed over the parachute.

 ………

The suggestion that Richard McCoy may have hijacked the Northwest Orient Airlines is not as outrageous as it may seem.

McCoy, a former military helicopter pilot who served in the Vietnam war, was among a number of suspects investigated by the FBI after he hijacked a plane on 7 April 1972, leaping out of the aircraft with $500,000 cash, over Provo, Utah. McCoy was arrested two days later and sentenced to 45 years in prison, but he escaped in 1974 – after three months on the run he was killed by an FBI agent.

Perhaps McCoy died hiding the secret of the DB Cooper hijacking with him – and 50 years on, the truth may finally have come to light.

 

Sick of This Woke Bullsh%$ (Not)

The invaluable Jane Mayer has more revelations about Pete Hegseth, Trump's choice (so far) for the Secretary of Defense.

Even more sexual harassment, intense drunkenness both on and off the job, financial mismanagement (looting?)  his own charity, and bigoted outbursts:

After the recent revelation that Pete Hegseth had secretly paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2017, President-elect Donald Trump stood by his choice of Hegseth to become the next Secretary of Defense. Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, issued a statement noting that Hegseth, who has denied wrongdoing, has not been charged with any crime. “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his administration,” Cheung maintained.

But Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

Our branch of the multiverse is completely f%$#ed.

Not this Sh%$

We now have credible reports open statements by insane members of Trump's inner circle that Trump is planning to invade Mexico.

Within Donald Trump’s government-in-waiting, there is a fresh debate over whether and how thoroughly the president-elect should follow through on his campaign promise to attack or even invade Mexico, as part of the “war” he’s pledged to wage against powerful drug cartels.

“How much should we invade Mexico?” says a senior Trump transition member. “That is the question.”

It is a question that would have seemed batty for the GOP elite to consider before, even during Trump’s first term. But in the four years since, many within the mainstream Republican centers of power have come around to support Trump’s idea to bomb or attack Mexico.

Trump’s Cabinet picks, including his choices for secretary of defense and secretary of state, have publicly supported the idea of potentially unleashing the U.S. military in Mexico. So has the man Trump has tapped to be his national security adviser. So has the man Trump selected as his “border czar” to lead his immigration crackdowns. So have various Trump allies in Congress and in the media.

 We are completely f%$#ed.

Linkage

• Why Do Banks Fail? Three Facts About Failing Banks (Liberty Street Economics) Pretty simple rules to follow.  It may not be definitive, but at least one, look out for banks that have suddenly skyrocketed, is a good rule of thumb.
  
• The World's Oldest Forest Is Here in the Hudson Valley (Hudson Valley Magazine) We are talking about a petrified forest dating back 386 million years.
• Salmon return to lay eggs in historic habitat after largest dam removal project in US history (OPB) A bit of good news.
• For 300 Years, a Jewish Kingdom Flourished in Africa. This Israeli Archaeologist Set Out to Find It - Archaeology (Haaretz) It appears to have been located in what is now northern Ethiopia.
• New research shows younger and middle-aged adults have worse long COVID symptoms than older adults (Northwestern Medicine) So much for the, "It's only an old people thing."
• Why a Family ‘Fart Walk’ Should Be on Your Agenda This Thanksgiving (SELF) If it talks about farts, I covers it.
• Gene behind orange fur in cats found at last (AAAS) Unsurprisingly, it's on the X chromosome.

This video is fascinating, because (largely unintentionally, IMNSHO) the video maker is engaging in highly sophisticated ethnographic analysis while looking at food. To quote Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are."

Not a Good Look

As you may have heard, Joe Biden granted a broad pardon to his son Hunter today.

I understand the reason, there is significant evidence that a Trump DoJ would engage in a malicious prosecution, as Hunter's defense team noted.

There are plenty of reasons for him to do this, but the fact that he categorically ruled out any pardon this summer makes it, to quote (not) Tallyrand, "Worse than a crime, it is a mistake."

President Joe Biden on Sunday issued a full and unconditional pardon for his son Hunter, a controversial decision that reverses his long-standing pledge to not use his presidential powers to protect his only surviving son, who was found guilty of gun-related charges in Delaware and pleaded guilty to tax evasion in California.

………

“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” he said. “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

Biden said he came to the decision over the weekend, which coincided with the family being together in Nantucket, Massachusetts, for Thanksgiving. Hunter Biden’s attorneys this weekend also mounted a vigorous public defense, releasing a 52-page paper on Saturday titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden.”

………

According to the text of the pardon, it applies to all offenses that Hunter Biden “has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”

The problem here is not the pardon, it was the promise not to do so.

This is not Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon.

 

About F%$#ing Time

It looks like a Federal judge is looking at taking over the Rikers Island jail from the New York City Department of Corrections.

Given their general unwillingness to do anything to fix the problems there, and corrupt ex-cop Mayor Eric Adam's unwillingness to provide any amount of civilian oversight, this would be a good thing:

A Manhattan federal judge in a long-running lawsuit against the city’s beleaguered Department of Correction said Wednesday that a third-party receiver should be appointed to oversee use-of-force and safety issues in the city’s jails.

Laura Taylor Swain, chief district judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, cited nine years of failed promises by jail officials in her 65-page decision.

“The glacial pace of reform can be explained by an unfortunate cycle demonstrated by DOC leadership, which has changed materially a number of times over the life of the Court’s orders, wherein initiatives are created, changed in some material way or abandoned, and then restarted,” she wrote.

She ruled that fining the city or taking other measures to force reforms would not be enough.

“The Court is inclined to impose a receivership: namely, a remedy that will make the management of the use of force and safety aspects of the Rikers Island jails ultimately answerable directly to the court,” she said.

Mayor Eric Adams and his jail officials have strenuously opposed the push for a possible receivership takeover.

Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?

………

Legal experts say a receiver can be granted extraordinary powers and would technically not be required to follow union contracts — meaning everything from job protections to work hours could be on the line across the correction department.

The push for a receiver is also supported by Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, Damian Williams. The Nunez case, named after the defendant, was first filed by his office under predecessor Preet Bharara.

Just do it.

Then fire the bad actors, using the extraordinary powers. 

All you need to do is look at the complaints, and dismiss the worst 10%, which should keep the remaining 90% in line.  (Also fire the overtime abusers, a sleep deprived cop is as dangerous as one who is drunk on duty)

This Is F%$#ed up and Sh%$

Shouldn't doctors know that, unlike an IQ test, health is not relative, and health outcomes shouldn't be normalized over a population? pic.twitter.com/ltayBVTdrZ

— Zagreus | Escaping Long Covid Hell (@zagreusrevival) November 28, 2024

The idea that a serious medical condition is less significant because it has become more prevalent is insane.

Covid is still a threat.

Wear your f%$#ing mask, get your f%$#ing vaccine, and avoid the f%$#ing unvaccinated.

Headline of the Day

If MMT Is Wrong, Why Is It So Much Better at Predicting the Economy - And Economic Disaster?

—Dougald Lamont’s Substack

This is at the center of the dispute between classical monetarism and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

It's not that you can contort your theory to match the facts ex pos facto, it is that your theory should have predictive value.

In 2016, Paul Romer, who was then Chief Economist at the World Bank wrote “The Trouble with Macroeconomics” in which he eviscerated the current state of macroeconomics in the U.S. and around the world, writing that orthodox macroeconomics had been in “30 years of intellectual regress,” and was so disconnected from reality that it was “post-real”. Romer wrote his paper, inspired by a similar critique of “string theory” in physics. 

 ………

The reason for this, Romer argues, is that orthodox economics - the formulas used by government budget offices, political parties, central banks and business, are based on a series of assumptions that are not backed up by facts. 

Yeah, this sounds a lot like string theory.

………

By this, Romer means that economists are inserting what he calls “facts of unknown truth value” which is to say, they are breezily assuming something and putting it into a mathematical formula.

And as a model, it has continually failed to predict crises and inflation that other “heterodox” models of the economy have succeeded in doing.

Romer is making an assumption here, which is that orthodox economic theory is actually an honest attempt to understand and predict our economy.

Lamont, on the other hand, is not making the same assumptions:

………

The opposition to MMT is not about theory: it is about control, and who controls what. MMT recognizes that money is a creature, and monopoly of the state - not the private sector.  

Above all, MMT is not a policy prescription. It is not saying “we should try doing it this way.”

MMT is a different, and arguably more accurate way of modelling the economy and financial system we have right now. It is “we should try seeing the economy this way, and when you do, you’ll see that we have different options.”

This is a very good read on the sad state of affairs of conventional economics, and I recommend that you read the whole thing.

Like Nominating Osama bin Laden to Head Homeland Security

Trump has picked Jay Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health. 

this guy is the proximity author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for allowing Covid to run wild, because we would all end up with natural immunity.

This is f%$#ed up.

Yeah, That's a Great Idea

In the continuing saga of the self-defenestration of Elon Musk and Ecch (Twitter) the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ has stated that the social media site automatically downgrades any posts with links to external sites.

If I were to guess as to the reason for this, it would be because Musk Evil Minions™ are desperate for engagement, so they want to make sure that all featured content points inside.

It's called circle the drain:

X owner Elon Musk seemed on Monday to confirm what sharp-eyed users have suspected for months: that putting a link in your post on his social network is a good way to ensure it won’t go viral.

Musk was replying to a post by the influential Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham, who opined on Sunday that “the deprioritization of tweets with links in them is Twitter’s biggest flaw.” X’s main draw, Graham said, is “to find out what’s going on, and you can’t do that without links.”

Musk’s response implied Graham was right that X’s algorithm downgrades link posts.

“Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply,” Musk said, mentioning a strategy that some savvy X users were already employing. “This just stops lazy linking.”

 I guess that, "Just stops lazy linking," is Elon's version of the Steve Jobs quote, "You are holding it wrong," in response to issues with faulty iPhone antennas.

F%$# that.

Speaking of Competition Improving Services

We have another two African countries giving France the boot. Chad and Senegal.

Given the long French history of brutality and looting, even after de jure colonial status ended, it comes as no surprise that these nations are turning to Russia and China.

France lost one of its staunchest military allies in the volatile Sahel region of Africa this week as Chad ended its longstanding defense partnership with the country, the latest blow to French efforts to maintain sway on the continent it once colonized.

France has some 1,000 troops in Chad who will likely now have to leave. Analysts suggested that could further open the door to influence of the Russian military, already present in Chad’s neighbors.

The surprise decision was announced late Thursday by Chad’s foreign minister, Abderaman Koulamallah. “It is time for Chad to assert its sovereignty,” he said in a statement, calling the decision “a historic turning point.”

………

Following the recent ejection of French troops and personnel from other former African colonies plagued by Islamist insurgencies — Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso — the decision by Chad ends what remained of France’s military influence in the troubled stretch of countries below the Sahara known as the Sahel.

……….

In a further shock for France, Senegal’s president told the news agency Agence France-Presse on Thursday that he, too, wants French troops to leave. 

………

Chad’s battle-hardened troops were indispensable in France’s crushing of the Islamist insurgency in Mali in 2013. French troops helped install the dictator Hissène Habré in 1982, then helped overthrow him in favor of Mr. Déby in 1990. French Mirage jets take off regularly on training missions from a military base in the capital, N’Djamena.

French President Emmanuel Macron was the only Western leader to attend the funeral of Mr. Déby, killed fighting rebels in April 2021. Mr. Macron’s presence was seen as a kind of anointing for Mr. Déby’s son Mahamat, the current ruler. “France will never allow the stability and integrity of Chad to be called into question,” Mr. Macron said at the time.

So France has installed 2 dictators in Chad, and was in the process of installing a third dictator, and the Chadians got sick of their bullsh%$?

Gee, hoocoodanode?

………

In April the U.S. announced it was pulling some 75 Special Forces troops from the country after Chadian officials expressed discontent over their presence. It is not clear whether any have returned.

So they kicked out the Americans too.

It appears that the Chinese and Russians are offering better deals, and African nations, particularly in the Sahel, are taking these deals.

It's called enlightened self-interest.

The Check Is in the Mail, I Won’t Cum in Your Mouth, I’ll Respect You in the Morning, and ………

ISPs saying that their, "Excellent Customer Service" is why people do not change their internet providers.

So we have now discovered the 4th big lie of our world.

ISPs have been assiduously conspiring to create local monopolies because this allows them to treat their customers like sh%$.

It's not for nothing that the USA has the most expensive and slowest internet access in the developed world:

Lobby groups for Internet service providers claim that ISPs' customer service is so good already that the government shouldn't consider any new regulations to mandate improvements. They also claim ISPs face so much competition that market forces require providers to treat their customers well or lose them to competitors.

Wait, wut?  You motherf%$#ers are claiming that people stay with you because they like you?

Cable lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association told the Federal Communications Commission in a filing that "providing high-quality products and services and a positive customer experience is a competitive necessity in today's robust communications marketplace. To attract and retain customers, NCTA's cable operator members continuously strive to ensure that the customer support they provide is effective and user-friendly. Given these strong marketplace imperatives, new regulations that would micromanage providers’ customer service operations are unnecessary."

………

While the FCC Notice of Inquiry said that providers should "offer live customer service representative support by phone within a reasonable timeframe," USTelecom's filing touted the customer service abilities of AI chatbots. "AI chat agents will only get better at addressing customers' needs more quickly over time—and if providers fail to provide the customer service and engagement options that their customers expect and fail to resolve their customers' concerns, they may soon find that the consumer is no longer a customer, having switched to another competitive offering," the lobby group said.

The ISP lobbyists must have been laughing so hard that some of them choked on their own spleens.

Why the Biden administration let this slide so long that they will be reversed, or worse, permanently banned from regulating customer service under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), because they don't want to piss off lobbyists.

F%$# the f%$#ing lobbyists.

A Correction

Seems Appropriate

On July 3, 2016, a made a post including my recipes for Cornish (Devonian) pasties.

While I stand by my savory pasties, I just realized that I had left out sugar for my apple and blackberry sweet pasties.

I was looking the recipe up for baking an apple pie (multiply quantities by 3 for a 9 inch deep dish pie crust).

I apologize for my error.

Told You It Was All About Defense Contractor Money

I've written a bit about how the the US dropped Turkey from the F-35 program after their purchase of the Russian S-400 system.

I have noted repeatedly that this was not driven by security concerns, as was claimed by the Pentagon and State Department, but rather it was driven by the fact that they did not want to see defense procurement money going somewhere that the US Military-Industrial complex does not get their vig, as they would if the Turks were to acquire systems from the US or other western suppliers.

It appears now that Turkey is in the process of developing a credible alternative to the F-35, the United States is considering allowing the Purchase of the US stealth fighter.

The US revised its position on the sale of F-35 fighter jets to Türkiye after witnessing its progress with its domestically developed KAAN fighter jet, Turkish National Defense Minister Yasar Guler said Tuesday.

“When the Americans saw that we could build and fly the KAAN, they changed their minds a bit about the F-35,” Guler said, addressing the Turkish Parliament's Planning and Budget Commission.

“Now, they are expressing willingness to provide F-35s. However, no progress has been made. We insist on reclaiming our production share and maintain our request to acquire F-35s,” he added.

Guler also highlighted Ankara’s efforts to modernize the Air Force until the light combat aircraft HURJET and KAAN are operational.

He announced a $1.4 billion payment for 40 US F-16 Block 70 Viper jets, adding Türkiye will modernize its 79 older F-16s in Turkish Aerospace Industries facilities. 

This could be Turkish puffery, or this could be some sort of arrangement with the S-400, there have been rumors that it will be placed under US control, or it could be that Lockheed Martin just wants it's money.

Still, this is an interesting development.

Tweet of the Day

pic.twitter.com/CP4hMUiljE

— No Context Brits (@NoContextBrits) November 26, 2024

This is peak dad humor

An Old Fashion Returns

But it ain't human fashion, it's Orcas wearing salmon hats again after a 37 year hiatus.

I'm hoping that this means that the miniskirt will be coming back:

Northwest Pacific orcas have started wearing salmon hats again, bringing back a bizarre trend first described in the 1980s, researchers say.

Last month, scientists and whale watchers spotted orcas (Orcinus orca) in South Puget Sound and off Point No Point in Washington State swimming with dead fish on their heads.

Off of Point No Point?  If that is not going seriously meta on fashion, I do not know what is.

This is the first time they've donned the bizarre headgear since the summer of 1987, when a trendsetting female West Coast orca kickstarted the behavior for no apparent reason. Within a couple of weeks, the rest of the pod had jumped on the bandwagon and turned salmon corpses into must-have fashion accessories, according to the marine conservation charity ORCA — but it's unclear whether the same will happen this time around.

Researchers think the orcas sporting salmon hats now may be veterans of the trend when it first appeared nearly 40 years ago. "It does seem possible that some individuals that experienced [the behavior] the first time around may have started it again," Andrew Foote, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Oslo in Norway, told New Scientist.

I have a theory.  It involves orca Instagram and orca influencers.

This theory is (of course) complete bollocks.

Smoking the Turkey Was the Right Decision.

Our power just went out.  there was a boom before the lights went out, so I think a transformer went.

We have a gas range, so we can still cook stove top, but the oven won't work.

I decided to marinate the bird overnight and smoke the turkey over charcoal, and this is thankfully unaffected by our loss of power.

The marinade was basically half a gallon each of apple and orange juice, pepper, a little bit of salt, (it's a kosher bird, so a full brine is not recommended.) mace, cayenne pepper, paprika, bay leaves, ginger, caraway, garlic, leeks, fenugreek, grains of paradise, and coriander.

I browned the leeks and the garlic, then added the juices and the rest of the spices, and simmered for about 45 minutes.

I then added 8 lb of ice (1 gallon), and added it to a cooler, and then the turkey once it had cooled down.

I put a tray of ice on top to keep everything cold and submerge the turkey.

In the morning I pulled it out, patted it dry with paper towels, and added a rub.

It is now smoking with applewood.

I'm using a couple of probe thermometers to monitor the turkeys doneness.

Posted via mobile.

The Abyss Stares Into You ​⃰

We now have reports that people who have been selected for position in the Trump administration have been targeted with swatting and bomb threats.

Ignoring the inevitable false flag conspiracy theories, there are two possibilities here .  Either some left wing activists have begun to act like MAGAts, or MAGAts continuing to act like MAGAts.

If it's the former, it is the abyss staring into them, and I do not approve:

The FBI said Wednesday that “numerous bomb threats and swatting incidents” had targeted people President-elect Donald Trump has selected for Cabinet roles and other positions in his incoming administration.

Trump’s transition team said that “several” of his picks for prominent positions had faced “threats to their lives and those who live with them” on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. The transition team’s statement did not identify how many people appear to have been targeted or name them, and law enforcement officials have not said publicly whether they believe any of the threats were credible.

Six of Trump’s selections said they had received threats to their homes, including Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York), whom Trump has tapped for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and former congressman Lee Zeldin (R-New York), the president-elect’s choice for Environmental Protection Agency administrator.

Others saying they had received threats included Brooke Rollins, whom Trump plans to nominate to lead the Agriculture Department; Scott Turner, his selection to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development; Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Oregon), his choice for labor secretary; and Pete Hegseth, his pick to lead the Defense Department.

This does not bode well for our future as a society.

^*This is from from Neitsche, "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

Quote of the Day

So the Harris Campaign Was the Producers IRL. They Knew They Were Blowing Through $1.5 Billion in 15 Weeks with No Chance of Winning, and to Make Sure They Lost They Brought the Cheneys and Richie Torres on Stage. The Point Was to Wash as Much Stupid Money as Fast as Possible.

—Mark Ames

As I have occasionally (OK, constantly) noted, the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is deeply and profoundly corrupt.

Unless and until the looting is stopped, we will see this again, and again, and again, and again.