Speaking of Snollygosters

When Elon Musk showed off his "autonomous" humanoid robots, they were not autonomous, they were operated by remote control by humans:

After Elon Musk provided his "long-term" vision for autonomous, humanoid robots at last week's "We, Robot" event, we expressed some skepticism about the autonomy of the Optimus prototypes sent out for a post-event mingle with the assembled, partying humans. Now, there's been a raft of confirmation that human teleoperators were indeed puppeting the robot prototypes for much of the night.

Bloomberg cites unnamed "people familiar with the matter" in reporting that Tesla "used humans to remotely control some capabilities" of the prototype robots at the event. The report doesn't specify which demonstrated capabilities needed that human assistance, but it points out that the robots "were able to walk without external control using artificial intelligence" (the lack of a similar AI call-out for any other robot actions that night seems telling).

How is this not securities fraud, and why hasn't he been arrested?

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

"So in an effort to highlight his claim that Kamala Harris never worked at McDonald’s, Trump pretended to work at a closed McDonald’s where he served pretend orders to supporters pretending to be customers" https://t.co/KykzMAZz9F

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) October 21, 2024

What, you mean that Trump is a snollygoster?

Well knock me over with the out of control 116,851 ton MV Dali.

Who Had Arnold Palmer’s Penis on Their Election 2024 Bingo Card?

Lord knows that I didn't.

Heck, if you had presented this as a story to the editors of The Onion, they would have sent it back as too over the top.

Something is deeply wrong here.

The best comment about this comes from the Golf great's daughter, who noted that Arnold Palmer detested Donald Trump:

Golf legend Arnold Palmer’s daughter said she was “not really upset” by the lewd story former President Donald Trump told about her father at a rally in his hometown on Saturday.

Peg Palmer Wears, the 68-year-old daughter of the golf icon, told the Associated Press “there‘s nothing much to say” about the story the Republican nominee chose to open his rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, surrounding Palmer’s manhood.

“This man was strong and tough,” Trump told the crowd in a perplexing speech on Saturday. “And I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros. They came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable.’ I had to say it.”

………

Palmer, a longtime Republican, died in September 2016 before Trump’s first electoral victory. He golfed with other presidents, including George H.W. Bush and Dwight Eisenhower—a man he looked up to as an ideal leader, The Washington Post reported after his death.

However, Wears previously indicated her father was less enthusiastic about Trump‘s candidacy. In 2018, Palmer’s daughter said in an interview with The Sporting News that he was “appalled by Trump’s lack of civility and what he began to see as Trump’s lack of character” before his death.

 What a surprise.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

“The Republican Party is a threat to Democracy, which is why you need to vote for Democrats. And as president, one of the first things I’ll do is make sure the Republicans get a say in my administration” is not a coherent argument for a campaign. https://t.co/q4XaYKzfGl

— Alex Fernie (@FernieCommaAlex) October 11, 2024

Yes, this is completely incoherent.

Also, it typifies the rot in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) and the rest of the very serious people types operating inside the DC beltway.

The thinking is, "These people cannot be bad, I was just at a cocktail party with them."

Yeah, This is a Big Deal

One of the secrets to the US victory against Japan during WWII was vastly superior logistics.

The US could operate and resupply ships at great distances from their home ports, while the Japanese were far more reliant on getting supplies in port.

It was, and is, a big deal in any sort of naval conflict, and it remains a capability that is generally lacking in other naval powers at this time.

One of the advances in technology that has found its way onto warships, vertical launch cells, has thrown a bit of a spanner into this while logistics process, since reload loading the cells requires equipment that can only be used in port, or rather, it was, as the VLS reloading underway has been demonstrated recently.

The U.S. Navy has achieved a significant breakthrough in maritime combat readiness by successfully demonstrating the Transferrable Reload At-sea Method (TRAM) on a warship in open waters for the first time.

This innovative technology allows warships to rearm their missile systems while at sea, drastically reducing downtime and enhancing operational effectiveness.

The historic demonstration took place on October 11th, off the coast of San Diego, where sailors aboard the Ticonderoga-class cruiser USS Chosin (CG 65) used the hydraulically-powered TRAM device to load an empty missile canister into the ship’s MK 41 vertical launching system (VLS).

One interesting question raised is whether this is compact enough to operate on the far more numerous Arleigh Burke class destroyers, which carry a similar missile loadout.

It it does, it means that surface combatants won't have to be pulled out of an operation to reload.

Pass the Popcorn

We have gotten another dump of Special Prosecutor Jack Smith's election interference case.

While some folks are claiming that this is attempted election interference, I would argue that it is more just an alignment of the facts, and timing of the delays that Trump and his Evil Minions™, including the 6 conservative justices on the Supreme Court.

Between this, and Arnold Palmer's penis (more on that later), this has not been a good week for the Trumpster fire:

U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan on Friday unsealed the appendix of source materials underpinning special counsel Jack Smith’s massive legal filing that detailed the evidence collected against Donald Trump in the federal D.C. election interference case — though the document was heavily redacted and appeared to contain few new revelations.

The unsealed and unredacted portions of the 1,889-page appendix included transcripts of interviews with the legislative committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, excerpts from former vice president Mike Pence’s autobiography, a transcript of a Trump White House news briefing after the election in November 2020 and a transcript of a 2023 CNN town hall interview with the former president.

Trump’s legal team had opposed making the materials public so soon, arguing that Chutkan’s releasing them now could appear as though the court was trying to affect the upcoming election. But Chutkan disagreed, saying that withholding the documents could amount to election interference.

Trump's legal team has spent years delaying this.  If they had not, this would have been out while the primaries were still going on.

Tough sh%$ folks.

………

One portion of the appendix that adds new detail is a less-redacted version of a previously released transcript from the House Jan. 6 committee, which indicates Trump was told of the Jan. 6 riot as early as 1:21 p.m. that day.

………

Trump didn’t send a video message telling people to go home until 4:17 p.m. — nearly three hours after his apparent conversation with the valet.

Chutkan had previously unsealed Smith’s detailed 165-page filing, which contained a thorough account of the evidence investigators had gathered with footnotes indicating the source of the materials. It was meant to convince the judge that Trump could still be prosecuted even after the Supreme Court ruled this summer he had broad immunity.

The appendix was far less explosive, but it still underscored Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the election results.

The appendix included dozens of statements by swing-state lawmakers, agencies and officials contradicting allegations of election fraud by Trump and his campaign, along with Pence’s written account of his repeated refusals to go along with Trump’s plan to not accept the outcome. Prosecutors have argued that Trump’s chargeable conduct was in his private capacity as a candidate and not subject to presidential immunity, including his dealings with state officials in the alleged phony elector plot.

Also included in the appendix were transcripts of Trump’s Jan. 2, 2021, call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger where he pressured the state official to “find 11,780 votes” to flip the state’s result and key post-election memos by Trump’s private attorneys concocting a plan to submit fake slates of electors from swing states to throw the election to the GOP-controlled House.

This really isn't anything new, but to the degree that this puts Trump on his back heel, this is a good thing.

Looters Gotta Loot

The A16Z's defense industry expert just said that the war in the Ukraine has presented investors with unprecedented opportunities for looting.

I should note that this is not a direct quote, but what she said could only be summarized to something like this:

It’s remarkable how quickly things can change. While the tech industry was trying to keep defense tech at arm’s length just a few years ago, that sentiment has completely reversed.

“The war in Ukraine changed everything about how young people think about the Department of Defense’s work, and really the important mission of deterrence and making sure that we invest in the next technologies,” Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said onstage at the Fortune Most Powerful Women conference on Tuesday.

Boyle, who cofounded a16z’s American Dynamism fund and has backed defense tech company Anduril and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, said onstage that she would get “laughed out of rooms” when she asked about whether companies were selling their technology to the Department of Defense. Now, Boyle said, founders she speaks with are motivated by America’s national security and deterring war and armed conflict. “We have a company that literally has said: Xi Jinping is setting our product strategy,” Boyle noted.

So, I guess when Andreeson Horowitz isn't gaming initial coin offerings to cheat people, they are now looking to using the defense industrial complex to cheat the taxpayers.

F%$# that.

Can Stanford Tell the Difference Between Scientific Fact and Fiction? Its Pandemic Conference Raises Doubts

—Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times

Stanford has been captured by conservatism and by its role as the birthplace of many tech bros, and as such, we find that its support for pseudoscience has been purchased by its reactionary and delusionary (and very rich) alumni.

The first two paragraphs tell you all you need to know:

On Oct. 4, Stanford University’s newly minted president, Jonathan Levin, opened an on-campus conference about pandemic policies by expressing the hope that the proceedings would “bring together people with different perspectives, engage in a day of discussion, and in that way, try to repair some of the rifts that opened during COVID.”

He was followed to the lectern by the conference organizer, Stanford public policy professor Jay Bhattacharya, who described the event’s goal as fostering “dialogue with one another rather than having a situation where the goal is to destroy people who disagree with you.”

Jay Bhattacharya is one of the prime movers behind the "Great Barrington Declaration" which said, "Just get everyone sick, it will be fine, and I want to go to the movies."

The Great Barrington crowd was wrong and dangerous and ignorant, and and remains wrong and dangerous and ignorant.

That Stanford's president gave his stamp of approval to a group of people whose scientific credibility ranks somewhere around that of flat-earthers is yet another sign that Stanford is overrated.

Speaking of Handcuffs

How is it that Ron DeSantis is making against TV stations carrying ads that he does not like not a criminal conspiracy to violate those stations civil rights?

A federal judge feels similarly, though he did not break out the cuffs:

A federal judge ordered Gov. Ron DeSantis’ state Health Department to stop threatening television stations with criminal prosecution if they kept running ads in favor of an abortion amendment on the ballot next month.

In a sharply worded ruling on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker rebuked the DeSantis administration for trying to quash what he called constitutionally protected political speech.

“To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid,” Walker wrote, granting a request for a temporary restraining order. A hearing for a preliminary injunction is scheduled for later this month.

The ruling puts a temporary halt to one of DeSantis’ most brazen attempts to defeat Amendment 4, which would overturn the six-week abortion ban he signed into law.

On Oct. 3, the Florida Department of Health sent letters threatening to criminally prosecute television stations if they did not stop running an ad that features a woman named Caroline who was diagnosed with brain cancer two years ago while pregnant with her second child. In the ad, the woman says Florida’s six-week abortion ban would have prevented her from receiving a potentially life-saving abortion.

I've said it before, and I will say it again:  Today's Republican Party is not the opposition, it is the enemy, and they are a clear and present danger.

Once again, I quote what historical novelist Robert Graves put into the mouth of Germanicus Caesar, Republicans "Must be struck into the dust, struck down again as they rise. Struck again while they lie groaning, while their wounds still pain them; they will respect the hand that dealt them."

Grifters Gotta Grift

Gee what a surprise.  Donald Trump charged room rates well over the normal rates for Secret Service agents at his Trump International Hotel.

So, he set things up so that the agents had to stay there, and then padded their bills.

This is fraud, pure and simple:

During Donald Trump’s presidency, his D.C. hotel charged the U.S. Secret Service 300 percent or more above standard government rates on multiple occasions, and at times charged the government agency more than it did other patrons — including a Chinese business and members of a foreign royal family, according to a new report released Friday by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.

The authors of the report, which is based on Trump International Hotel room records from September 2017 and August 2018, argue that Trump violated the Constitution’s foreign and domestic emoluments clauses, which were designed to prevent the president and other federal officials from enriching themselves at taxpayer expense.

The House Democrats’ report cites several previously undisclosed instances in which Trump International Hotel charged the Secret Service rates that were not only above the normal government per diem rate but above rates it charged other patrons. The report is based on records Democrats obtained from Trump’s former accounting firm, Mazars USA, along with corresponding special waivers authorizing the Secret Service to make payments above normal government rates.

When Eric Trump visited the hotel on Feb. 22, 2018, two of the rooms the Secret Service rented were charged at $895 each, a 450 percent mark up of the government rate, according to the report. The same evening, more than 100 rooms at the 263-room hotel were rented out at rates lower than $895, “including at least one room rented out for just $150,” the Democrats found.

………

The Washington Post has extensively reported on expenses the Secret Service incurred at Trump properties while agents were protecting him and his family during his time in the White House.

In 2022, The Post reported that U.S. taxpayers paid Trump’s business at least $1.4 million for Secret Service agents’ stays at Trump properties for his and his family’s protection. Receipts and invoices previously obtained by The Post have highlighted not just high charges for rooms at the luxury properties but additional fees, including a $1,300 “furniture removal charge” to the Secret Service in 2018 at Trump’s Turnberry resort in Scotland.

 Handcuffs please?

Not Enough

The criminal organization/consultancy McKinsey & Company will pay at least $½ billion to settle charges that it was a criminal co-conspirator with big pharma drug pushers.

Of course, they are denying wrongdoing.  (Of course, they are lying about that)

McKinsey & Co. is nearing a deal with US prosecutors to pay at least $500 million to settle federal probes into its past work helping opioid makers boost sales, according to people familiar with the matter.

A settlement, which could be announced in the coming weeks, would resolve criminal and civil investigations by the Justice Department, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing a confidential matter. The terms haven’t been finalized and could still change.

………

The settlement would add to penalties that McKinsey has already paid US states for its past work with drug companies that produced highly-addictive painkillers. The privately held firm, which said it generated a record $16 billion in revenue last year, agreed in 2021 to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to settle claims by states that it helped fuel the country’s opioid epidemic by providing sales analysis and marketing advice.

Note that they were doing this while they were consulting with (among others) the FDA, a clear conflict of interest.

Considering the company's long record of aiding and abetting corruption, one has to wonder why they are accredited to consult with the government.

McKinsey is to business ethics what Ebola is to French kissing.

Best Healthcare in the World

We have an interesting rundown on how the hospital chain Parkview Health has monopolized the healthcare in parts of Ohio and Indiana and used this monopoly to charge more than almost any other healthcare system in the nation.

The kicker to all of this?  Parkview is (nominally) not-for-profit:

………

Over more than a decade, Parkview Health has demanded that the people of north-eastern Indiana and north-western Ohio pay some of the highest prices of any hospital system in the country – despite being headquartered in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which currently ranks as the No 1 most affordable metro area to live in the United States. For 10 of the last 13 years, Parkview hospitals on average have been among the top 10% most expensive in the country, a Guardian US analysis of cost estimates based on data submitted to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid shows.

Parkview’s steep prices are the product of a more than two-decade campaign by hospital executives to establish market dominance in Fort Wayne and to squeeze revenue from a pool of patients and employers who feel they have no better alternatives, according to interviews with more than 40 current and former Parkview employees, patients, local business leaders, lawmakers and competitors, as well as leaked audio recordings of meetings and hundreds of internal billing, patient and policy documents obtained by the Guardian.

During this period, Parkview has taken over six former rival hospitals and built up a network of almost 300 sites for its physicians and providers, forming a ring around its gleaming regional center, which some staff refer to in private as the “Big House” or “Emerald City” for its ritzy amenities and green corporate branding.

This consolidation, former employees say, has allowed Parkview to control referral flows, routing primary care patients to their own costly specialists and facilities, even if those patients could get the same services elsewhere for less. It has also increased Parkview’s leverage in negotiations with health insurance companies, as they bargain over procedure prices on behalf of employers that offer the insurers’ health plans to their workers.

Insurance industry sources say Parkview’s growing web of hospitals makes it hard for any insurer to offer a viable health plan locally without including the chain’s facilities in their network, an advantage that has helped the not-for-profit extract high prices and earn a reputation as one of the toughest negotiators in the state.

This is healthcare should not be run by private actors, even those that purport to be charities.

Not-for-profit healthcare has been good business for Parkview as it has been for hundreds of other ostensible charities across the US which operate nearly half of the nation’s hospitals. In exchange for generous tax breaks, these institutions are required to provide free and discounted care to poor patients, but many have faced criticism for skimping on charity care, demanding high prices and giving executives exorbitant salaries.

Since 2019, Parkview has raked in more than $2bn in revenue annually, enabling the system to give dozens of its executives and top doctors six- and seven-figure annual compensation packages. Before his retirement at the end of 2022, Parkview’s longtime CEO, [Mike Packnett] an avowed Christian who publicly styled himself as a “servant” leader, took home nearly $3m from the not-for-profit, according to the system’s last publicly available IRS disclosure.

Why aren't there IRS regulations capping the remuneration for charities?  I see no reason that any of them should make any more than the President of the United States.

………

Since the 1990s, hospital systems across the US – for and not-for-profit alike – have relentlessly chased after market power, executing nearly 2,000 mergers with little pushback from overwhelmed federal antitrust regulators and indifferent state authorities. Research from the American Medical Association found that by 2013, 97% of healthcare markets in the US had little competition and were highly consolidated under Department of Justice antitrust guidelines. By 2021, that figure had risen to 99%.

With consolidation, academic researchers have consistently found significant increases in prices. A 2012 research survey concluded that when hospitals merge in concentrated markets price hikes were “typically quite large, most exceeding 20 percent”. A 2019 study found that prices at hospitals enjoying local monopoly power were 12% higher than those in markets with at least four competitors. A study released earlier this year identified dozens of hospital mergers that it said regulators could have flagged as likely to diminish competition and raise prices. Those mergers did, in fact, result in average price hikes of 5% or more, the researchers found.

We really need to start criminalizing these behaviors.

Unfortunately, since the late 1970s, these criminal acts have been addressed with salutary neglect.

Anti-competitive behavior is technically criminal, and was once treated as such.

Make antitrust great again.

My Initial Reaction Was Less than Somber

All you need to know about him in one picture
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in a firefight in Gaza.

Rather refreshingly, this did not involve dropping a large bomb in an area largely populated by non-combatants.  

It also appears that this was happenstance, and not an intelligence coup.

Hopefully, this will lead to an end of hostilities:

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed early Thursday in the Gaza Strip, the IDF confirmed. Hamas sources told Reuters that there are indications that suggest that Sinwar had been killed in an Israeli operation in Gaza. The IDF added that there were no signs of the presence of hostages in the area in which Sinwar was killed.

A DNA sample from the body was sent to the Institute of Forensic Medicine, and dental images were sent to the police's forensic science unit. The DNA sample was compared to a sample from Sinwar collected when he was in Israeli prison. The military and the Shin Bet security service said that there have been dozens of operations over the past year and the past few weeks in the area where Sinwar was killed, which "limited Yahya Sinwar's ability to act... and led to his elimination."

Money, identification documents and combat equipment were found on the bodies of the terrorists. The troops that encountered the terrorists were not in the area for a targeted killing operation and did not have prior intelligence that Sinwar was present there.

The soldiers that killed the three are in training to be squad commanders, and are not part of a commando unit. It was operating in the area to locate Hamas members. Before dawn on Thursday, the troops began to suspect that there were Hamas members in the building and opened fire, including the use of tank shells and shoulder-fired missiles. Troops subsequently used drones to examine the building and located the bodies. Explosive devices had been planted in the building. Combat engineers were deployed to the site and neutralized them.

So it appears that his killing was just luck, though as Branch Ricky noted, (He might have been quoting John Milton) "Luck is a residue of design."

The world is a better place without him.  When he was jailed by the Israelis, it was for torturing and murdering Palestinians.

He was a particularly nasty piece of work, even by the standards of the region.

One hopes that this will provide an opportunity for the fighting to end, but I do not think that this is the case, and I lay that on the door step of Benjamin Netanyahu (יִמַּח שְׁמו), who will do anything to stay in power and out of jail, including prolonging the carnage.

………

Einav Zangauker, the mother of hostage Matan Zangauker, reacted to the news by addressing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying, "You got your image of victory. Now reach a deal." She added that "now, more than ever, the lives of my son Matan and the other hostages are in concrete danger... Netanyahu, [Defense Minister Yoav] Gallant, and the chief of staff have already said themselves that Hamas has been defeated militarily. A year after the failure [on October 7], this is the time to leverage the accomplishments and use [Sinwar's] elimination to take a diplomatic step that will bring our loved ones back home."

She added, "If Netanyahu does not take advantage of the momentum and does not stand up now and take a new Israeli initiative, even at the cost of ending the war, it means that he has decided to abandon my Matan and the other hostages, with the aim of prolonging the war and entrenching his rule."

Netanyahu is a greater threat to the state of Israel than Sinwar ever was.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, after last week's horrible number, we see a bounce.  As to the whether of not this week's numbers are a dead cat bounce, or whether last weeks numbers were an outlier.

Initial claims fell from 260,000 to 241,000, still not a good number, and continuing claims rose from 1.861 million 1.867 million.

The numbers are better than forecast, but still are weak.

Also, US industrial production fell, but that appears to be an artifact of the Boeing strike and the hurricanes, at least in part, while retail sales rose.

Damned if I know what is going on here.

Kamala, Keep Lina Khan

Because what she does is both good policy and good politics.

Case in point, the Federal Trade Commission has banned the roach motel business model:

It will soon be easy to "click to cancel" subscriptions after the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) adopted a final rule on Wednesday that makes it challenging for businesses to opt out of easy cancellation methods.

“Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” FTC chair Lina Khan said in a press release. “The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.”

The heart of the new rule requires businesses to provide simple ways to cancel subscriptions. Under the rule, any subscription that can be signed up for online must be able to be canceled online. And cancellation paths for in-person sign-ups must be just as easy, offered either by phone or online.

In guidance released Wednesday, the FTC recommended that businesses keep "three guardrails in mind" to ensure cancellation methods comply with the law. First, customers cannot be required to talk to a live agent or chatbot to cancel if that wasn't required for sign-up. Next, any phone cancellation methods cannot include charges and must be offered during normal business hours. And finally, canceling services in person must always be optional.

To comply with the rule, businesses offering "negative option marketing" such as subscriptions, automatic renewals, and free trial offers—to both consumers and other businesses—are prohibited from misleading customers. They must clearly disclose all terms of the deal prior to accepting payment, including explaining how much and how often customers will be charged, when free trials or promotions end, any deadlines to avoid charges, and, importantly, how to cancel.

………

That provision is designed to end unfair and deceptive practices that the FTC found, such as inadequate disclosures about free trials or sneaky auto-enrollments. Those "practices have been a persistent source of consumer harm for decades," the FTC's notice on the final rule said, "saddling shoppers with recurring payments for products and services they never intended to purchase nor wanted to continue buying."

………

There were only a few major changes to the final rule following the public commenting period. Notably, the FTC dropped a provision that would have required businesses to send annual reminders about recurring charges, as well as another prohibiting promotions or deals offered during the cancellation process in efforts to retain customers without customers opting in to seeing those offers.

The FTC said that it's only dropped these provisions for now, noting that the Commission plans to keep the record "open on these issues" and may seek additional comments.

Of course, the Supreme Court will end up hearing this after wack-doodle corrupt Matthew Kacsmaryk issues an injunction against this, and then say that the Federal Trade Commission has no authority to regulate this, because the right wing dirtbags on the court want to return us to the days of Lochner.

OK, I Think That I Understand a Bit of Family Jargon Now

There is a term that is used in family, "Comyuckle," that generally means lame person.

It's used as a loving insult inside the family.

I thought that it was some sort of Yiddishism that came from my mom, but I could never find anyone outside of the family who used this term.

Well, I did another search today, and I found this mention from the Joy of Yiddish:

While visiting with my 94-year-old mother earlier this year, we were talking about the everyday person on the street. She said, “You know, Chaim Yankel!.” I instantly cracked up as she did as well. My husband who was sitting with us had never heard of Chaim Yankel. Mom and I were both stunned.

I grew up on Long Island and my husband in Queens. Yet he never heard of him. So I did a quick check with others. A good friend from Long Island had also never heard of Chaim Yankel, but my friend from the Bronx knew instantly who he was; she, too, started laughing as she hadn’t heard his name mentioned in a long time.

In his splendid book, The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten gives two definitions of the Yiddish term Chaim Yankel:
1. A nonentity, a nobody, any “poor Joe.”
2. A colloquial, somewhat condescending way of addressing a Jew whose name you do not know — just as “Joe” or “Mac” is sometimes used in English.

So, "Comyuckle," is probably a corruption of Chaim Yankel.

Needless to say, I need to share this with my sibs. 

The Internet of Sh%$

Yes, internet connected vacuum cleaners can spy on you and shout racist slurs at you.

Why on earth would someone want an internet connected vacuum cleaner?

I could understand Bluetooth, but the only people who get anything of value out of an internet connected vacuum are people who want to spy on you, like the FBI, CIA, NSA ……… Oh, now I get it.

It’s a tale as old as… well, the Internet of Things era. Robot vacuums made by Ecovacs have been reported roving around people’s homes, yelling profanities at them through the onboard speakers after the company’s software was found to be vulnerable to intrusion.

ABC News in Australia reports that there were recently multiple instances across the U.S. when owners of Ecovacs vacuums noticed their devices acting unusually.

“It sounded like a broken-up radio signal or something,” Daniel Swenson, an owner of an Ecovac Deebot X2, told the outlet. “You could hear snippets of maybe a voice.” He opened the vacuum’s app to find a stranger was accessing its live camera feed and remote control feature, but assumed it might be an error. After resetting the password and rebooting the X2, the vacuum quickly started moving again:

This time, there was no ambiguity about what was coming out of the speaker. A voice was yelling racist obscenities, loud and clear, right in front of Mr Swenson’s son.

“F*** n******s,” screamed the voice, over and over again.

Perhaps the best part of this anecdote was Swenson’s incredulous conclusion that the situation “could have been worse.” But he’s right that it was nice of the hacker to let him know his vacuum was hacked instead of spying on him indefinitely.

Delightful.

Taxes, Neh?

So, Sharon* and I filed for an extension, which meant that our filing deadline was tonight. 

What this also meant was that Sharon* got her tax information together this evening.

She is an advocate for children needing special education services, and it is her true calling (that and beads), but the business end is sometimes less than well organized.

So once again we scrambled to assemble all of the data before the deadline.

I shouldn't complain, we have been together for more than 30 years, and married for almost 30 years, and she has not made a serious effort to murder me, unless you count the thing with the tongue. (Death by snu snu)

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Yeah, I've Noticed

It appears that professionals in public health have noticed that Covid infections screw up your ability to drive as well.

In Maryland, it has been obvious that the drivers have gotten worse.

Not only are drivers less attentive and less skilled, but they also seemed to be more prone to what I call, "Road Rage Lite."

I shudder to think what it is like driving in Boston:

Abstract

Objective

This study evaluated the association between acute COVID-19 cases and the number of car crashes with varying COVID-19 vaccination rates, Long COVID rates, and COVID-19 mitigation strategies.

Background

The ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has led to significant concern over long-term post-infection sequelae, especially in the Neurologic domain. Long COVID symptoms, including cognitive impairments, could potentially impact activities requiring high cognitive function, such as driving. Despite various potential impacts on driving skills and the general prevalence of Long COVID, the specific effects on driving capabilities remain understudied.

Design/Methods

This study utilized a Poisson regression model to analyze data from 2020-2022, comparing aggregate car crash records and COVID-19 statistics. This model adjusted for population and included binary variables for specific months to account for stay-at-home orders. The correlation between acute COVID-19 cases and car crashes was investigated across seven states, considering vaccination rates and COVID-19 mitigation measures as potential confounders.

Results

Findings indicate an association between acute COVID-19 rates and increased car crashes with an OR of 1.5 (1.23-1.26 95%CI). The analysis did not find a protective effect of vaccination against increased crash risks, contrary to previous assumptions. The OR of car crashes associated with COVID-19 was comparable to driving under the influence of alcohol at legal limits or driving with a seizure disorder.

Conclusions

The study suggests that acute COVID-19, regardless of Long COVID status, is linked to an increased risk of car crashes presumably due to neurologic changes caused by SARS-CoV-2. These findings underscore the need for further research into the neuropsychological impacts of COVID-19. Further studies are recommended to explore the causality and mechanisms behind these findings and to evaluate the implications for public safety in other critical operational tasks. Finally, neurologists dealing with post-COVID patients, should remember that they may have an obligation to report medically impaired drivers.

This is a Feature, not a Bug

So, someone has discovered that artificial intelligence decision making is more likely to illegally discriminate.

This was also a feature and not a bug for the microtargeted ads employed by the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™, healthcare providers, the ride share companies, and Airbnb.

People are looking for ways to engage in bigotry without consequence, and the Tech Bros are more than willing to accommodate them:

In a recent study evaluating how chatbots make loan suggestions for mortgage applications, researchers at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University found something stark: there was clear racial bias at play.

With 6,000 sample loan applications based on data from the 2022 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, the chatbots recommended denials for more Black applicants than identical white counterparts. They also recommended Black applicants be given higher interest rates, and labeled Black and Hispanic borrowers as “riskier.”

Basically, Silly-Con Valley is Eddie Murphy's "White Like Me" video made manifest: (Yeah, Eddie Murphy was actually edgy back in the day)

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

This is Ted Cruz erasure https://t.co/dZVLo18HhK

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) October 15, 2024

That is some world class snark there. 

Mr. Sirota, you owe me a screen wipe.

Headline of the Day

How SpaceX Became the MyPillow of Government Contractors

—The Verge

Musk, long before Mike Lindell was Mike Lindell, has used the political process to enrich himself.

In fact, he has been more shameless and more aggressive about it than either Lindell or Trump.

If one looks at his history, it's all been government money in some way or another.  Regulatory forbearance for PayPal, saving money on customer service and money laundering compliance, massive subsidies for Tesla, (Tesla would not be profitable without them), FDA allowing Neuralink to maim disabled people, his various misbegotten tunnel efforts, and government money for SpaceX,

It really has been something to watch Elon Musk turn SpaceX into the MyPillow of rocket companies, hasn’t it?

………

I have never accused Musk of being anything other than self-interested. As I see it, his only real politics are: Elon Musk should get to do whatever he wants, forever. And his latest political outbursts strike me as being clearly connected to his money. He’s come to the same conclusion as Donald Trump, which is that it’s particularly easy to grift Republican voters, and there are lots of rewards and very few consequences for doing so. Donny, these men are nihilists.

………

Those of you familiar with SpaceX may recall its litany of lawsuits against the government. For instance, in 2005, the company alleged that Boeing and Lockheed Martin had engaged in anticompetitive behavior meant to keep SpaceX from letting its Falcon 9 compete in government contracts. (The Falcon 9 didn’t have its first launch until 2010.)

And in 2014, Musk sued the US Air Force over a $11 billion sole-source contract awarded to the United Launch Alliance. (The Falcon Heavy wouldn’t have its first launch until 2018.) SpaceX got concessions, dropping the suit after the Air Force agreed to speed up its efforts to certify SpaceX to launch military satellites — and making more launches available for SpaceX to compete on. 

………

Look, Musk’s appearance at the Trump rally launched a thousand think pieces and the goofy photo that launched a thousand memes. But to talk about Musk’s political convictions, you have to talk about the only thing he really believes in: money.

It's worth a full read.

Blarf

Spent the evening doing two things that I hate, providing technical support to family members, and staring at the spinning wheel as Windows updates.

Headline of the Day

Hurricane Helene Isn’t an Outlier. It’s a Harbinger of the Future

 —Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

I would note that Hurricane Milton reinforces this take.

To quote Richard Feynman, "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

I would also add that reality must take precedence over profit as well.

This is My Shocked Face

I am not trying to suggest that those patriotic Canadians advocating for a "Victims of Communism" memorial are trying to use it to absolve Nazi collaborators of their culpability, but a f%$# ton of the names on this memorial are war criminals who collaborated with the Nazis.

The Department of Canadian Heritage is being told that more than half of the 550 names on the Memorial to the Victims of Communism should be removed because of potential links to the Nazis or questions about affiliations with fascist groups, according to government records.

As originally planned, there were to be 553 entries on the Ottawa memorial’s Wall of Remembrance.

Article content

The department had determined that 50 to 60 of the names or organizations were likely directly linked to the Nazis, according to the documents obtained by the Ottawa Citizen through an access to information request.

A 2023 report for Canadian Heritage recommended more than 330 names be excluded to be on the safe side, the records noted. The exclusions were recommended because of the lack of information about the individuals or organizations and whether they might have links to fascist organizations or the Nazis. Some of the entries could also be removed because they have no direct link to Canada.

Rather unsurprisingly, Chrystia Freeland, whose grandfather was a Nazi collaborator and a war criminal (Julius Streicher was executed for doing what dear old grandad did) has been instrumental in securing federal money for the project.

Imagine that.

It now appears that something more than half the names were Nazi collaborators and a significant portion of the remaining names are not victims of Communism in any way shape or form.

Some of the names:

………

An organization calling itself the General Committee of United Croats of Canada purchased virtual bricks dedicated to Ante Pavelić, describing him only as a "doctor of laws."

Pavelić was the wartime leader of the Ustaša, the fascist organization that ran the Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet regime. In this role, Pavelić was the chief perpetrator of the Holocaust in the Balkans. Approximately 32,000 Jews, 25,000 Roma and 330,000 Serbs were murdered by the regime.

The same organization purchased a brick dedicated to Mile Budak, whom they identified simply as a "poet". Budak was also a high-ranking Ustaša official.

………

It's not clear whether the donations were returned; when asked, Ludwik Klimkowski, Tribute to Liberty's chair, said it would be "premature" to comment. Another Ustaša official, Ivan Oršanić, remains listed on the site.

An organization calling itself the Knightly Order of Vitéz purchased five bricks. "Several members of the order actively participated in the persecution, despoliation and, in 1944, the deportation of the Hungarian Jews," said László Karsai, a professor of history at the University of Szeged. 

Vitéz members included high-ranking members of the Nazi-puppet government established late in the war, which organized the deportation of some 437,000 Hungarian Jews. "It was the biggest, fastest deportation action of the Holocaust," said Karsai. "Several tens of thousands of Vitéz members got large lands (from) Jewish properties."

The League of Ukrainian Canadians' Edmonton Branch, meanwhile, purchased five virtual bricks in honour of Roman Shukhevych — who led the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) during the Second World War and was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Belarusians, Jews, Poles and Ukrainians.

………

"If Canada commemorates Ante Pavelić or Roman Shukhevych," said Efraim Zuroff, a noted Nazi-hunter and the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, "it can throw its human rights record right in the trash."

………

"A monument to the victims of communism is fair and legitimate. Millions of people were murdered by Stalin and Mao, and there is a case to be made for their commemoration. It is peculiar, however, that people who committed genocide are being glorified along with those legitimate victims."

It's not peculiar at all.  Canada was to Nazi Collaborators from the Ukraine what Argentina was to former SS officers.

………

The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada initiated a court challenge of the project, arguing that the National Capital Commission (NCC) violated its own procedures on public consultation and the rules set out in the National Capital Act. A poll from the spring of 2015 found that a majority of Canadians — including nearly two-thirds of self-identified conservatives — opposed the initial project.

A NCC spokesperson said the estimated total cost of the monument is now $7.5 million, with $6 million coming from the federal government after Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland included an additional $4 million in this spring's budget to complete the monument. 

………

Canadian Heritage hired Carleton University historian Michael Petrou to review those 600 names, but not the names listed on Tribute to Liberty's website or in its newsletters. Petrou told CBC News there is overlap between the list of names for the monument and the list on the website.

Petrou filed his report to the department back in the spring. He said he red-flagged the names of individuals in that list of 600 who collaborated with the Nazis or were associated with fascist organizations that were active in Eastern Europe and the Balkans during the Second World War.

Petrou said he also flagged names of individuals who could not reasonably be described as "victims of communism."

The Pathways to Liberty list seems to embrace a very broad definition of "victims of communism" that extends to other apparent victims of political violence and veterans of Cold War era conflicts.

The list on the website also includes people who don't seem to be victims of persecution by communist regimes — such as Tara Singh Hayer, a Sikh journalist and activist assassinated in Vancouver in 1998, and Jagat S. Uppal, a successful B.C. businessman who was one of the first Sikhs to attend public school in Vancouver.

The final word on this is this:

………

[Wiesenthal Center Director Ephriam] Zuroff said he's alarmed by efforts to present wartime Nazi collaborators as anti-Communist patriots.

"From the beginning of their renewed independence, following the breakup of the Soviet Union, almost all the governments of Eastern Europe — and nationalist elements in diaspora communities — have promoted the canard of equivalency between the crimes of the Third Reich and those of Communism as part of a broader effort to distort the history of the Holocaust and the Second World War," he said.

Doubtless, this is embarrassing to the Canadian government, but Canada's history of harboring and protecting war criminals who were willing participants in the Holocaust is a lot more embarrassing.

Deep Thought

 NASA missed an opportunity during the Apollo program.

They could have named the command and lunar modules Ralph and Alice (Kramden).

(Not my joke)

In Case You Are Wondering

 My Yom Kippur fast went pretty well, except for a really bad case of dry mouth.

Still feeling a bit fuzzy though.

That's what happens when your gut, about ⅙ of one's metabolism goes from idle to full throttle in 15 minutes.

No Blogging Tonight

It's Yom Kippur.

I'm busy fasting.

I Think that I Saw the Aurora Borealis This Evening

It was a faint purple tint in the north sky from my back yard, but it could have been light pollution.

In any case, we are experiencing a major solar storm, so any ham radio operators are probably frustrated right now.

Security Experts Have Been Warning About This Forever

It appears that the systems mandated by the US government to allow our state security apparatus to easily spy on people were hacked by the Chinese state security apparatus to spy on people.

Security experts have been saying that mandatory government back doors are a bad idea, because other people can use them as well.

QED

Chinese government hackers penetrated the networks of several large US-based Internet service providers and may have gained access to systems used for court-authorized wiretaps of communications networks, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. "People familiar with the matter" told the WSJ that hackers breached the networks of companies including Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen (also known as CenturyLink).

"A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of US broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests," the WSJ wrote. "For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful US requests for communications data, according to people familiar with the matter."

These "attackers also had access to other tranches of more generic Internet traffic," according to the WSJ's sources. The attack is being attributed to a Chinese hacking group called Salt Typhoon.

The Washington Post reported on the hacking campaign yesterday, describing it as "an audacious espionage operation likely aimed in part at discovering the Chinese targets of American surveillance." The Post report attributed the information to US government officials and said an investigation by the FBI, other intelligence agencies, and the Department of Homeland Security "is in its early stages."

The Post report said there are indications that China's Ministry of State Security is involved in the attacks.

Considering the possibilities, from Daesh to the Sinaloa Cartel to whatever is left of al Qaeda, the Chinese are probably the least worrisome group to penetrate these systems. 

This is why mandatory back doors are a bad idea.

It's Thursday, and I'll Go With ╭∩╮（︶︿︶）╭∩╮

Initial unemployment claims are up 33,000 to 258,000, with a significant portion of the boost coming from the carnage wrought by Hurricane Helene. Continuing claims, which are tallied from a week before, rose by to 42K 1.861 million.

Between Helene and Milton, the jobs numbers are going to suck for a while.

We also had the consumer inflation data coming out today, and inflation fell slightly to 2.4% year over year.

In terms of macroeconomics, I have no clue as to what this means. 

In terms of climatology and atmospheric science, it's rather clearer:  If we do not get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions, we are completely f%$#ed.

The Call is Coming from Inside the House

It turns out that the connected television manufacturers are spying on their customers in a way that would give J. Edgar Hoover a hard on.

This is not an acceptable state of events:

The companies behind the streaming industry, including smart TV and streaming stick manufacturers and streaming service providers, have developed a "surveillance system" that has "long undermined privacy and consumer protection," according to a report from the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) published today and sent to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Unprecedented tracking techniques aimed at pleasing advertisers have resulted in connected TVs (CTVs) being a "privacy nightmare," according to Jeffrey Chester, report co-author and CDD executive director, resulting in calls for stronger regulation.

The 48-page report, How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era [PDF], cites Ars Technica, other news publications, trade publications, blog posts, and statements from big players in streaming—from Amazon to NBCUniversal and Tubi, to LG, Samsung, and Vizio. It provides a detailed overview of the various ways that streaming services and streaming hardware target viewers in newfound ways that the CDD argues pose severe privacy risks. The nonprofit composed the report as part of efforts to encourage regulation. Today, the CDD sent letters to the FTC [PDF], Federal Communications Commission (FCC), California attorney general [PDF], and California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) [PDF], regarding its concerns.

"Not only does CTV operate in ways that are unfair to consumers, it is also putting them and their families at risk as it gathers and uses sensitive data about health, children, race, and political interests,” Chester said in a statement.

……… 

The report notes "misleading" privacy policies that have minimal information on data collection and tracking methods and the use of marketing tactics like cookie-less IDs and identity graphs that make promises of not collecting or sharing personal information "meaningless."

"As a consequence, buying a smart TV set in today’s connected television marketplace is akin to bringing a digital Trojan Horse into one’s home," it says.

You left off the DoJ.

Seriously, we need to see executives frog-marched out ………

Huh ……… I'm saying that a lot today, aren't I?

Speaking of Boeing

We now have another example of Boeing retaliating against whistleblowers.

Half the reason that they have a strike now is that the rank and file employees want to make good aircraft, and management doesn't:

Late last year, Boeing employee Craig Garriott says a 4-ton satellite inside an El Segundo plant fell after engineers failed to properly secure a clamp.

No one was injured by the collapse of the $1 billion-plus satellite that happened over a weekend, but it could have been fatal if workers were present, Garriott claims.

The incident highlighted a raft of safety violations that were ignored by management, according to a whistleblower lawsuit that was recently transferred to federal court in Los Angeles. 

In the lawsuit, the veteran Boeing employee alleges that his employer retaliated against him for speaking out about problems he saw at Boeing and Millennium Space Systems, a Boeing defense contractor that makes small satellites.

………

The lawsuits come as the Arlington, Va.-based aerospace giant’s new chief executive, Kelly Ortberg, grapples with a strike by its machinists union and ongoing controversies over its manufacturing and safety practices — including how it treats employee whistleblowers who have alleged quality control and other problems.

In June, outgoing CEO Dave Calhoun admitted at a Senate hearing that whistleblowers have faced retaliation — saying “I know it happens” — with Boeing promising to take steps to fix the problem.

Saying, "I know it happens," without following up with, "They have all been fired," is a tell that current Boeing management will never take steps to fix the problem.

Once again, we need to hold managers who did this, and managers who looked the other way, criminally liable for this behavior.

As I note occasionally, they need to be frog-marched out of their offices in handcuffs.

Elon Caves

Ecch (Twitter) has agreed to follow Brazilian law and Brazilian court rulings in order to keep operating in Brazil.

I'm sure that Snoflake Elon is stewing over that one.

It's a Feature, Not a Bug

Software body shop Cognizant has been found liable for discriminating against non H1-B employees.

This is not discrimination against white people, it's that they saved money using H1-B employees, because they knew that if they were fired, they could be deported.

It's against the law, but within the spirit of the program, which is all about using employee precarity to suppress wages: 

Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. engaged in a pattern of discriminatory conduct toward non-Indian workers and should pay punitive damages to compensate employees who suffered harm, a US jury found.

The verdict came after the IT firm failed to persuade a Los Angeles federal judge last month to toss a 2017 job bias class-action lawsuit when a previous trial ended with a deadlocked jury.

………

Bloomberg News reported in July that the Teaneck, New Jersey-based company was among a handful of outsourcing firms exploiting loopholes in the H1-B visa lottery system. The company defended its practices, saying it’s fully compliant with US laws on the visa process. Cognizant also said that in recent years it has increased its US hiring and reduced its dependence on the H1-B program.

The technical legal term for Cognizant's defense is, "Bullsh%$."  It's all about paying the employees less.

………

The Los Angeles case began after three employees who identify as “Caucasian” claimed in a lawsuit that Cognizant made a practice of giving preference to South Asians in employment decisions. The plaintiffs alleged they were terminated after being “benched” with no work for five weeks and then replaced by “visa-ready” workers from India set to be deployed to US projects and assignments.

Cognizant had the highest number of H-1B visas of any US employer from 2013 to 2019, according to Citizenship and Immigration Services. 

Again, this not about white or brown or black, it's about green. Cognizant wants to pay below market wages.

You could do that with a bidding process, where the people who have real unmet skills needs will outbid those who have a need for skills on the cheap.

The fix is fairly simple, raise the cost of getting an H1-B high enough that it is no longer a lower cost option.

Also, frog-march these rat-f%$#s out of their offices in handcuffs.

Doesn't Care About Making Planes

I have been saying for some time that Boeing can no longer make planes.

Based on the revelations from previously undiscovered communications between Boeing and Ethiopian Airlines, it's now clear that they just did not care.

In late 2018, Ethiopian Airlines’ chief pilot sent an urgent message to Boeing, the manufacturer of the 737 Max airliner.

Barely a month earlier, a 737 Max operated by Lion Air of Indonesia had plunged into the sea, killing everyone on board. The cause appeared to be a problem with the plane’s flight control system.

The Ethiopian carrier also flew the 737 Max, and the chief pilot wanted more information from Boeing about the emergency procedures to follow if the same problem that doomed the Lion Air flight should recur. At the time, Boeing was providing detailed briefings to pilots in the United States who were asking the same types of questions about how to respond.

But Boeing chose not to answer the Ethiopian pilot’s questions beyond referring him to a public document it had already issued after the Lion Air crash. Boeing said in its response that it was prohibited from giving additional information because it was providing technical support to Indonesian authorities investigating that crash.

………

Three months after the request by Ethiopian Airlines, one of its 737 Max’s nose-dived into the ground after takeoff from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, killing all 157 people on board. The main cause was found to be the same flawed flight control system responsible for the Lion Air flight crash, a failure that presented the Ethiopian Airlines pilots with the very same kinds of life-or-death decisions about how to respond that the chief pilot had asked about months earlier.

Or maybe they just don't care about Black pilots:

………

After the Lion Air crash, Boeing executives sought out U.S. pilots to brief them on topics that were not discussed with the Ethiopian pilots, including long-term strategies for improving flight safety, a recording of the briefing shows.

………

The company’s representatives highlighted efforts to address and clarify what they called misunderstandings related to MCAS. They pushed for training that would extend beyond routine checklists, focusing instead on equipping pilots with a thorough understanding of system behaviors and potential failures.

………

Despite the constraints Boeing described in the response to the Ethiopian chief pilot, Boeing officials discussed numerous details of the Lion Air crash.

………

The Ethiopian report, released in December 2022, found that if Boeing had provided more information to the carrier’s pilots about how to respond in the event of a software malfunction, they might have been able to regain control of the aircraft.

“The investigation found the questions raised by the airline to be safety critical, and if Boeing had answered the questions raised by the training department either directly or indirectly,” the report said, the outcome might have been different.

The Ethiopian investigators also had access to the emails between the chief pilot and Boeing and included them in their report. But Boeing’s unwillingness to provide the airline with more detailed guidance went largely unnoticed at the time.

………

The emails — which were not made available to congressional investigators in the United States and only came to the attention of some families of those killed in the crash last year — are now part of an effort by the families to block the plea deal.

The families argue that the agreement does not do enough to hold Boeing and its executives responsible for the crashes or to address what they see as deep-rooted problems in Boeing culture and operations that are leaving air travelers at risk.

There are not many problems that one can arrest one's way out of, but this is one of them.

Frog march every executive in the authority over the MCAS debacle out of their offices in handcuffs.\

That will make the useless MBA types think twice about f%$#ing the company to get this year's stock options.

 

Headline of the Day

Trump Gets Unhinged, Even for Him, Over Kamala Harris ‘60 Minutes’ Interview

—The Daily Beast

It's that interior clause, "Even for Him," that makes this headline.

If Trump is so upset over this, he could give the interview that the news magazine program has requested.

Donald Trump—who agreed to an interview with the CBS newsmagazine show 60 Minutes before backing out—has gone on the warpath at Kamala Harris for her performance on the show.

“The Interview on 60 Minutes with Comrade Kamala Harris is considered by many of those who reviewed it, the WORST Interview they have ever seen,” he wrote, in a Tuesday morning post on Truth Social. “She literally had no idea what she was talking about, and it was an embarrassment to our Country that a Major Party Candidate would be so completely inept.”

If the interview were as bad as he claims, and he implies a Razorfish level of fail, he would be happy, not irate.

………

Trump seemingly wants no part of that level of scrutiny. The Republican nominee for president accepted an invitation to a similar sitdown interview on the storied program, but his campaign later “decided not to participate,” a CBS spokesperson told CNN. 

I've not seen the interview, but it appears that it touched a nerve.

Finally

So, the New York Times has finally noticed that Donald Trump is bat-sh%$ insane.

Even then, they do their level best to fob this observation on a 3rd party, specifically a computer program that counts words, because they are cowardly pissants.

Being a cowardly pissant is antithetical to journalism, but they are all nepo-babies there, so it does not matter:

The New York Times has finally weighed in on the subject of Donald Trump’s mental unfitness. On Sunday, Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman described Trump’s obvious problems at great length.

It marked a red-letter day for journalism.

The New York Times is by far the most influential news organization in the media ecosphere. By publishing this story, it has created a permission structure for others to more directly address the issue of Trump’s mental fitness.

So let’s go! Start your engines! As I wrote, perhaps a bit prematurely a few weeks ago, Trump’s mental capacity is now topic one.

………

As Michael Tomasky wrote in The New Republic on Monday, Baker and Freedman’s piece “could stand as the single most important piece of journalism in this election” – particularly if “the Times keeps finding ways to raise this question, and … other mainstream outlets follow.” 

Of course they are.  For some reason, other media outlets see the New York Times imprimatur as authorization to cover this story.  I'm not sure why, because that f%$#ing paper is a sh%$-show, but it is what it is.

I don't expect them to run this non-stop though, because when he was President, Trump gave the NYT a one on one interview, so they lack the motivation of narcissistic butt-hurt.

BTW, here are the weasel words:

………

The heart of the story was a statistical analysis:

According to a computer analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016. Proportionately, he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.

Similarly, he uses 32 percent more negative words than positive words now, compared with 21 percent in 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change. And he uses swearwords 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran, a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition. (A study by Stat, a health care news outlet, produced similar findings.)

You know, considering the allegations of tumult in his campaign, a real journalist could do more than say, "We have a computer program that counts words," but that is actual work.

………

Another giant problem with the article was that it failed to use the word “lie” even once. And it failed to connect the dots between Trump’s “rambling” and how his constant lies are not random – they come straight from the authoritarian playbook, consistently intended to divide the nation and terrify voters into electing a strongman. (See Ruth Ben-Ghiat.)

It’s also worth noting that Baker snuck an astonishing revelation into his 19th paragraph:

Some of Mr. Trump’s cabinet secretaries had a running debate over whether the president was “crazy-crazy,” as one of them put it in an interview after leaving office, or merely someone who promoted “crazy ideas.” There were multiple conversations about whether the 25th Amendment disability clause should be invoked to remove him from office, although the idea never went far.

How long has Baker been sitting on this quote? And while there have been vague reports in the past about such conversations within the cabinet, they’ve been in the context of the Jan. 6 insurrection, not his mental health. That strikes me as newsworthy.

He sat on it until he was certain that he could not get a book deal out of this, like many other NYT staffers (looking at you nepo-baby Maggie Haberman) and Bob Woodward did.

I don't expect much to come of this.  The Times spent years writing about Biden's alleged cognitive decline, and there is less than a month to the election, but we should see more coverage from places like the Washington Post, LA times, Boston Globe, Chicago Sun Times, etc.

I Did Not Know This

I knew that the Crystal Palice was constructed quickly and cheaply for the 1851 London exposition, but I did not know that this was largely because it was the first building constructed with standardized threads on its nuts and bolts.

Whitworth had already written his book on common threads in use, but I thought that standardized threads did not come into general use until decades later:

London's Great Exhibition of 1851 attracted some 6 million people eager to experience more than 14,000 exhibitors showcasing 19th-century marvels of technology and engineering. The event took place in the Crystal Palace, a 990,000-square-foot building of cast iron and plate glass originally located in Hyde Park. And it was built in an incredible 190 days. According to a recent paper published in the International Journal for the History of Engineering and Technology, one of the secrets was the use of a standardized screw thread, first proposed 10 years before its construction, although the thread did not officially become the British standard until 1905.

“During the Victorian era there was incredible innovation from workshops right across Britain that was helping to change the world," said co-author John Gardner of Anglia Ruskin University (ARU). "In fact, progress was happening at such a rate that certain breakthroughs were perhaps never properly realized at the time, as was the case here with the Crystal Palace. Standardization in engineering is essential and commonplace in the 21st century, but its role in the construction of the Crystal Palace was a major development."

………

Paxton's design called for what was essentially a giant conservatory consisting of a multidimensional grid of 24-foot modules. The design elements included 3,300 supporting columns with four flange faces, drilled so they could be bolted to connecting and base pieces. (The hollow columns did double duty as drainage pipes for rainwater.) The design also called for diagonal bracing (aka cross bracing) for additional stability.

The cross braces were bolted, which could have been a major headache, since screws were traditionally made by skilled craftsmen, such that no two were exactly alike and it was nearly impossible to replace lost or broken screws. Paxton's design called for 30,000 nuts and bolts; screws with a consistent thread form would have streamlined the construction process considerably. James Whitworth had proposed a common standard thread in an 1841 paper, based on his analysis of an extensive collection of screw bolts from the main British producers. And thanks to the invention of Henry Maudslay's screw-cutting lathe around 1798, the technology needed to create standard screws already existed.

………

Gardner and Kiss had their answer: The Crystal Palace was constructed with a standardized screw thread. "Often technical objects such as nuts and bolts seem distant from the human, based in theories and standards that are set from above," the authors concluded. "However, the Whitworth screw thread is in fact an organic form with human practice at its center. It is a form that has influenced all standard thread forms since."

International Journal for the History of Engineering and Technology, 2024. DOI: 10.1080/17581206.2024.2391984 (About DOIs).

Yeah, I love this sort of stuff.

They Are Laughing at You, Not with You

I’m sorry, this is the funniest single photo of the entire election cycle. pic.twitter.com/w6PuJlPPmW

— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) October 6, 2024

I'm not getting a Tesla. I'm keeping my 1978 Trabant.

tfw you have acquired another idiot son https://t.co/E3tTVBBCXb pic.twitter.com/sBS2Eu29n9

— Alex Shephard (@alex_shephard) October 6, 2024

Donald Trump is the sane looking one. (WTF?)

The Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ spoke at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Not a good look, but it was made even worse by him jumping around like a chihuahua on meth.

People memed the sh%$ out of this.

What can I say about this but, somewhere in America there is a village looking for their idiot who has wandered off.