The Fix is In

It appears that Larry Ellison banned the account promoting the new Elon Musk documentary from Tik Tok.

One hand washes the other among the tech bros. 

TikTok has banned the Musk film advertising account, citing a repeated pattern of political content that violates its policies. The move, which comes just as the Alex Gibney’s investigation into Elon Musk expands to more than 470 screens across North America, raises concerns about Big Tech suppression that the very film seeks to expose.

Distributor Bleecker Street was informed Friday afternoon a “permanent suspension” was coming regarding any ads it tried to buy, and the company was unable to do so shortly after. The native unpaid TikTok account, which generally allows more leeway on so-called political content, remains active, though Bleecker Street is not allowed to pay to boost its content, as many companies traditionally do.

A spokesperson for the distributor confirmed that TikTok reps had informed them of the suspension and noted “disappointment” in the timing. After grossing $70,000 in four theaters in New York and Los Angeles in its first weekend of release, Musk is now playing in dozens of cities this weekend. The spokesperson said the company is in the process of appealing the move; even a reversal, however, could still prove costly if it doesn’t come during a weekend window when many people are likely to see the film.

Well, I guess that serial sexual harassers stick together.

Support Your Local Police

The good folks at Techdirt have a good summary about how conspire to conceal their use of various spy tech.

Among other things, this is a violation of the Brady disclosures required by law, and as such this should be treated as a felony criminal conspiracy, at least in a perfect world.

Law enforcement agencies across the country are increasingly relying on spying technologies—automated license plate readers (ALPR), cell-site simulators, and facial recognition, to name a few–causing an outcry in many communities where people are rightly concerned about the threat to civil rights and civil liberties these tools present.

Some authorities are responding to these concerns by trying to hide what they’re doing. Police departments are telling officers not to mention ALPRs when stopping vehicles and concealing their use of ALPRs to avoid citizens’ public records requests. Concealing the use of unpopular spying tools isn’t anything particularly new for law enforcement—cops have been doing it for years—but it’s just as wrong now as it was 20 years ago.

These practices prevent the public from knowing about and questioning how agencies are spending taxpayer dollars on spying technologies and holding them accountable. This is especially troubling when many towns are signing contracts with Flock and other ALPR vendors with little to no public oversight. The practice also violates disclosure obligations, allows cops and prosecutors to hide their tactics from judges, and cheats defendants from being able to challenge the use of evidence gathered by spy tech from being used against them.

404 Media recently revealed that in its usage policy for Flock ALPR cameras, one county in Iowa tells police to keep them a secret when detaining people: “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE,” the policy document reads. “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.” If writing a report about an incident, police are told to say they used “county resources” in making a stop instead of acknowledging use of ALPRs.

In Houston, police officers are likewise instructed to “be as vague as permissible” about why they are using Flock because the searches they run on Flock’s surveillance system could be obtained via public records requests.

The cops are crooks.

If you are on a jury, and a cop says that they used, "County resources," vote to acquit. 

Jury nullification is legal, though strongly discouraged, and it should be used here. 

Not a Surprise

It appears that DHS ignored restrictions placed by the issuing judge on the search warrant issued against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

This is not a surprise.  The Trump administration in general, and DHS in particular, are to following the law what Ebola is to French kissing.

Lawyers for Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) on Friday accused federal authorities of ignoring key restrictions that a judge placed on the search of the lawmaker’s D.C. residence this week and demanded the immediate return of all property seized from the home. 

In a letter sent to Justice Department prosecutors, attorneys Amy Jeffress and Joshua Matz condemned the investigation into Omar’s immigration history as a politically motivated attack on one of President Donald Trump’s chief critics, saying it “violates Representative Omar’s constitutional rights and threatens the separation of powers.”

They also alleged that investigators did not follow specific instructions that a U.S. magistrate judge imposed on how the search should be carried out as they descended upon Omar’s residence in Northeast Washington on Monday, according to a copy of their letter obtained by The Washington Post.

Among the restrictions the attorneys said agents did not follow were provisions requiring investigators to provide Omar’s lawyers with a copy of the warrant and to contact the House Office of General Counsel before carrying out the search. That would have given Omar the chance to consult with congressional attorneys on any legislative work product that might have been exempt from federal seizure, her lawyers said. 

The Post has reported that Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is investigating whether Omar, 44, or members of her family may have lied on decades-old immigration paperwork to secure legal status and eventually U.S. citizenship.

I'm pretty sure that the Trump admin wants to denaturalize her, which is beyond the pale in terms of the norms of behavior, but they also ignored black letter Constitutional law, and a judge's instructions, with regard to the, "Speech and debate clause," which gives complete immunity to lawmakers' actions with regard to their constitutional duties.

………

In their letter Friday, Omar’s attorneys said the warrant required federal prosecutors to advise the congresswoman of those “speech and debate” protections and ask her to waive them. The lawyers maintained that did not happen and that agents executing the search prevented Omar from contacting legal counsel for more than an hour after the search had begun.

As much as Trump might want it to be, legislating while black is not a crime. 

It's TACO Day

Trump has canceled the livestream of Nidal Hasan's execution following (completely predictable) widespread and worldwide condemnation of this bit of mindless cruelty.

Evil and stupid.

President Trump on Thursday canceled the Pentagon’s planned livestream of the execution of the Army officer who was convicted in the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting.

Pentagon officials said last week that the execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas, would be broadcast via livestream, a decision Mr. Trump initially said he supported.

But in private, Mr. Trump quickly began to deliberate with his advisers amid widespread criticism of the decision, and learned after the announcement that Mr. Hasan is paralyzed, according to several people familiar with his thinking. The president’s main concern was whether broadcasting the execution would deter other mass shootings, according to a White House official who was granted anonymity to discuss his thinking.

Here is a message to the editors of the New York Times, stop sane-washing Donald Trump and the Trump administration like you did in the last paragraph.

They are people for whom publicly displayed cruelty is a source of pleasure, nothing more.

………

Mr. Trump added that only immediate families of Mr. Hasan’s victims could watch the execution in person.

The president and his advisers remain adamant that Mr. Hasan deserves to be executed, but the president’s decision to change course constituted a rare retreat in the face of enormous public pushback. The criticism came from Democrats, Republicans, military officials and faith leaders who maintained that broadcasting the execution would turn it into a barbaric source of entertainment that violated core democratic principles.

"Rare retreat?"  Not rare at all.

TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) is a f%$#ing meme.  He reverses himself all the time.

Now you are attempting to imply steadfastness from the man with a back-bone akin to that of a Common Bloodworm. 

Less Than ½ Scaramucci

It appears that lying about your passing the bar and being really bad at your job will get you fired quickly in the Trump administration, at least if you are a woman.

Katie Zacharia lasted just 5 4 days as Trump's Press secretary.

President Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was forced out of her role Friday after five days on the job, a rare reversal by the White House that capped a week of upheaval.

Ms. Zacharia, who had gained Mr. Trump’s attention as a conservative commentator, had gotten off to a shaky start with her first and only press briefing on Tuesday. She largely read off a script and ended questioning after just five and a half minutes. That was followed by an onslaught of headlines about whether she had misrepresented herself as a lawyer — the president called her “an attorney” — despite failing her bar exam.

………

Three people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions, said Ms. Zacharia was ousted from her role as press secretary.

………

She may be remembered as having had what seems to be the shortest tenure in the history of the White House press secretary job: five days and one briefing.

In Mr. Trump’s first term, Anthony Scaramucci was fired as the White House communications director (a different role from press secretary) just 10 days after he was hired.

After news of Ms. Zacharia’s ouster broke, Mr. Scaramucci posted on X: “Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.”

I will note that Mr. Scaramucci is taking the high road here.  (I never thought that I would ever have to say that)

Fake News

It turns out that the drone strike on Yandex servers in Russia did not take out right wing troll bots all over the world.

While it might be nice if it were true, it simply isn't.

On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that a Ukrainian bombing strike on Yandex’s data centers, a large Russian technology company, had led to a sudden decrease in bot activity online. “When our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” Zelenskyy declared, speaking at the opening of the Warsaw Security Forum. There was, he added, “less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots. And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from.”

The claim quickly picked up speed, and gained specificity: that following the Ukrainian strikes, all kinds of internet users were suddenly less present online, including MAGA accounts, those supporting Reform UK, and ones supporting AfD, the German ultra-right party. A Polish political scientist shared claims that bot activity supporting AfD had dropped by 56 percent, a post that was viewed millions of times and has since been deleted. As Radio Free Europe has reported, a Czech politician shared a similar claim, writing, “So much talk about German patriotism…then the connection from Russia goes down.”

The underlying claim, in other words, was that a great deal of political activity online across a number of countries is inauthentic and led by Russian bots. Their sudden alleged silencing was a simple, feel-good story amidst the endless fight against online disinformation.

The only problem was that it simply wasn’t true.

Tech experts quickly explained that the “bots” that had been taken offline by the Yandex strike were actually bot crawlers, also known as web crawlers, which continually browse the internet in order to index web pages. A widely circulated chart from Cloudflare, the infrastructure company, did indeed show a drop in traffic from Yandex’s servers, which made sense; both the company’s web crawlers and search index requests were disrupted by the bombing campaign.

………

The second problem, however, was that the ultra-specific claims about less activity in certain areas—MAGA, pro-Kremlin bot accounts, and AfD—had absolutely no basis in fact.

“We see no “dramatic drop” in traffic of Kremlin-aligned human trolls-for-hire targeting Russian domestic users (which we have been tracking for years),” wrote Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous researchers who track and respond to Russian disinformation.

The evidence is transparently false, which says nothing about the origins of right wing bots. (My money is on Elon wot done it) 

There are Yandex bots, just like there are Google bots, and Bing bots, and Baidu bots.

Search engines crawl the web.  It's just what they do. 

I'm Not Dead

Yes, I know, I missed posting last night.

Life, and my gut, got in the way last night.

I've got 2 weddings to attend this weekend (I am sitting in a hotel following the reception for the first) and a  yahrzeit. 

To quote a notable movie villain, "I've got my country's 500th anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it; I'm swamped." 

Look Out Below

They come down from Down Under, where two huge IPOs for data center firms just collapsed.

Thankfully, Chuck Jones already came up with the appropriate metaphor for this moment. 

Just a few months ago, companies connected to the AI business couldn’t go public fast enough, as far as investors were concerned. Suddenly, the IPO waters are looking a lot less inviting.

Rising interest rates, a jumpy stock market and heightened political uncertainty are creating a dicey outlook for tech companies that had been aiming for a fourth-quarter public offering, causing some to reconsider their timing.

………

The latest signs of cooling interest came when two Australian data-center companies, Airtrunk and Firmus Grid, pumped their brakes on their public offerings within the span of a few days.

Firmus cited “recent market volatility and prevailing market conditions” in canceling what would have been the country’s largest IPO in 30 years, with a planned raise of almost $5 billion. The company, which has a close relationship with Nvidia and is backed by Coatue and Blackstone, plans to raise funds privately and go public on a U.S. exchange next year, a person familiar with the matter said.

Airtrunk, which was preparing to list in Singapore, now hopes to go public in the first half of next year, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company, which is also backed by Blackstone, was concerned about market volatility and interest rates.

Nothing to worry about.  I'm sure that the masters of tech and finance have got this. 

We Are F%$#ed

Have you heard about the Thwaites, aka the "Doomsday Glacier"?

It just got a lot lot more doomey.

We are seeing more sea water under the glacier, eroding its base, and sea level rise estimates from its collapse have doubled.

One of Earth’s most dangerous glaciers is emerging as a potentially greater driver of future sea-level rise than previously understood.

A team of glaciologists at the University of California and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed a new ice sheet model to come up with a more accurate projection of the melting of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. The findings, published in Nature Communications, estimate that the glacier could contribute up to 1.2 inches (30 millimeters) of sea level rise by 2100, even without additional climate warming.

The study highlights an even greater risk of coastal flooding in the coming decades than previously estimated.

………

Also known as the Doomsday Glacier, Thwaites has undergone a profound transformation in recent decades, thinning, accelerating, and retreating inland as warm ocean water eats away at its floating ice shelves from below.

………

The researchers behind the new study set out to reconcile ice sheet models against observations collected over the past 20 years.

Using synthetic aperture radar data from Finland’s ICEYE satellite constellation, researchers detected fluctuations in Thwaites Glacier’s grounding zone along its main trunk. The observations suggest that seawater penetrates several miles beneath the glacier’s grounded ice, lifting it in response to tidal fluctuations.

This movement allows pressurized seawater to travel beneath the ice, potentially carrying ocean heat farther inland and intensifying melting at the glacier’s base. The intrusion of seawater may also be influenced by ocean currents reshaped by climate change.

Clearly, global warming is a fraud. 

As You Wish

I have been informed by the management that I am supposed to get the f%$# off of my computer so that Small, Black, and Larcenous can go to sleep sitting on my chest.

The master has spoken, and I must obey. 

This Is Called a Self-Correcting Problem

Serious lizard people vibe

According to Palantir CTO, and lizard person wearing a human skin suit, Shyam Sankar AI researchersare taking up smoking because they are counting on the technology to create a cure for cancer.

It seems to me that the technical term for this is, "Own goal."

Forget sleepmaxxing and cold plunging: smoking is the new lifestyle flex among AI researchers.

At least, that's according to Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, who said some AI researchers are taking up smoking to signal their belief that AI will eventually cure cancer.

"So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI," Sankar said in an interview on CBS News' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.

The logic, he said, is: "I believe so much in AI that it's going to cure cancer. So I'm showing you my chips are all in."

Sankar did not name any researchers or provide evidence for the claim. Smoking remains a major cause of preventable illness and death, and no AI breakthrough has eliminated the health risks associated with cigarettes.

I may be uncharitable here, but as a taxpayer who will shortly be bailing out these mooks, the idea that they are killing themselves through their own hubris amuses me.

Linkage

• Kalshi loses again as judges rule prediction markets must obey gambling laws (Ars Technica) They keep losing because the fact is that the predictions markets are just bookies.
• REMIND ME TO NEVER F%$# WITH CANADA (I F%$#ing Love Australia) An fascinating, if somewhat profane on how Canada's retaliatory tariffs are targeting swing elections with almost surgical precision. (%$# mine)
• Texas city demands $2M for public records on Flock usage (Ars Technica) At this point, I have to believe that Flock is directing these larcenous reproduction costs.
• Two New Birds Louder Than Jackhammers Just Dropped (404 Media) 120 dB, which is ear-splitting.
• Ancient Negev Wine Was a Global Hit. Can Israeli Winemakers - and Scientists - Bring It Back? (Haaretz) The wine might be recreated, but I'm dubious about it's commercial potential.  Taste, and technology, particularly refrigeration, have transformed wine.
• Nazi Germany had no hope of making an atomic bomb, uranium cubes reveal (AAAS) Heisenberg's claims to have sabotaged the Nazi bomb effort are, and were always, complete bullsh%$.
• Undersea Archaeologists Recover the Only Known Ring Engraved With the Lighthouse of Alexandria (Gizmodo) A signet ring, likely functioning as something similar to a notary stamp, recovered from a submerged city.  I smell a Hollywood blockbuster.
• Ken Paxton’s Travel Security Detail Cost Taxpayers Millions (ProPublica) It seems that Paxton was misusing state travel as well.
• 184 cuneiform tablets discovered in Hittite royal archive (Heritage Daily) No specifics yet on the contents, they are likely mostly things like shipping manifests and tax records, which are generally boring to the layman, and catnip to professional archeologists.

It flew well, but was too weird to produce and deploy:

Meanwhile, In the Middle East

We are seeing more Houthi strikes on the Riyadh and Dammam airports.

It appears that we are in a tit-for-tat exchange between the House of Saud and the Houthis, and the Saudis have lot more to lose here. 

Massive Self Own

Trump has announced an agreement between the Ukraine and Russia to stop strikes on each other's infrastructure.

Zelenskyy has stated that he was unaware of any such deal, and the the recent Russian drone strikes imply the same from Moscow.

Donald Trump has announced an energy ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia, apparently without consulting Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who said the deal to stop long-range attacks was “news to me”.

In a social media post, the US president claimed the two sides had reached an agreement. “Effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine. Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!” he wrote on Truth Social.

He offered no further details. Zelenskyy said he was surprised by the announcement but would agree to it if Vladimir Putin did the same. “If President Trump negotiated it with Putin – please tell us when the ceasefire begins. We are ready and we will accept it,” the Ukrainian president told the Axios website.

Earlier, Zelenskyy rebuffed Trump’s demand made on Saturday that Kyiv stop bombing Russian oil refineries. Zelenskyy said Moscow had to first halt its own “brutal” attacks on his country’s energy infrastructure.

………

There was no sign that the Kremlin was observing Trump’s ceasefire. According to Zelenskyy, Russian drones took to the sky “throughout the day” on Sunday. There were also “unfortunately” several airstrikes, he said, including on energy infrastructure.

The Ukrainian president said the Russians hit thermal power station No 5 in the eastern city of Kharkiv – the latest of more than 200 strikes this week against electricity generation and transmission facilities in Ukraine. There were another 17 hits on gas and oil facilities, he added.

The fast-moving row between Washington and Kyiv began on Friday when Trump announced he was lifting sanctions on Russian diesel exports. He said the move would reduce global and domestic fuel prices before next month’s US midterm elections.

I'm not sure how much of this is a ploy to drive fuel prices down before the midterm elections, and how much is Donald Trump losing touch with reality.

It does not really matter. 

Does My Brother Have a Tardis?

A 19th Century Japanese Depiction of an American

[image or embed]

— pmamtraveller.bsky.social (@pmamtraveller.bsky.social) October 10, 2026 at 6:26 PM

Seriously, This is My Brother, the Hairy Giant

He is also historically accurate Jesus

First in a historical simulation of the appearance of Jesus, and now in a Japanese drawing of an American around the time of Commodore Perry.

I would note that he does have a PhD in physics, so if anyone in my family had the ability to construct a time machine, it would be him.

As I understand his PhD, which is not at all, this means that the secret of time travel would involve spin physics, and not collision physics, since that was his focus. 

I'm not sure what the whole, "Spin vs collision physics," means, exactly, I possess neither the ability nor inclination to understand the difference.  (I do know that the latter involves constructing multibillion dollar particle accelerators)

The more I think about it though, the more sense this makes.  I have never seen Stephen and either Commodore Perry or Jesus in the same place at the same time. 

It's all a bit suspect, isn't it?

It is canon that the exposure to the time vortex can convert a human into a Time Lord, so perhaps someone should get a hair sample. It should be pretty easy, he is responsible for about 60% of the bigfoot sightings in the Pacific Northwest. 

It would explain a lot. 

Stephen Saroff, Timelord      o o  The Bear who Swims      
                              (_)_____o      
                           ~~~~(______)~~~~~~~~~~
                               oo    oo

Old Tools

In Abric Romaní Spain, a cache of hard to preserve Neanderthal wooden have been found.

Given the ephemeral nature of wood, this is remarkable.

The Stone Age owes its name to tools that survived to our time. The material early humans worked with most, though, was probably wood because it is so much easier to process. Unfortunately, we know very little about Paleolithic woodwork because wood rots relatively quickly. But at Abric Romaní, a rock shelter in Capellades, west of Barcelona, mineral-rich water coated wooden Neanderthal tools in a limestone-like crust. When wood rotted away, it left behind hollow molds that faithfully reflect its shape.

In a recent Science Advances study, a team of Spanish archaeologists has cataloged 597 wooden remains from Neanderthal living areas dating from 62,000 to 40,000 years ago. They found spears, digging sticks, bark trays, parts of shelters, and a club unlike anything seen before, suggesting Neanderthals were likely much more than just Homo sapiens’ dumber cousins.

………

The spears mostly give us information about how Neanderthals hunted. The findings at Abric Romaní are different because the finds come from a place where Neanderthals lived, slept, cooked, and made tools over the course of some 20,000 years.

“We have a sample of wooden tools for different subsistence activities, not only hunting,” says M. Gema Chacón, an archaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) and co-author of the study. Because wood turns up in level after level, it shows that woodworking was routine for Neanderthals rather than an occasional one-off. 

………

The shelter sits at the foot of a cliff of travertine, a limestone laid down by calcium-rich spring water. As that water dripped across the shelter floor, calcium carbonate settled on anything lying around—logs, leaves, pine cones, and Neanderthal tools. Sealed inside the crust, the wood slowly decomposed, leaving hollow molds. These are perfect negatives of the original objects, sometimes so detailed that the outlines of wood cells are visible under a microscope. 

………

Four shallow trays made of juniper bark, the largest 55 by 20 centimeters, were found near hearths. They may have been used to carry food or scoop embers, much like the bark dishes called coolamons used by Aboriginal Australians. Crossed poles over a thick hearth may be the remains of a tripod, possibly for processing food. A branchless pole more than five meters long was found in the innermost part of the shelter. 

………

The choice of materials suggests Neanderthals knew their wood. Scots pine is easy to work and dries quickly, so tools were cheap to make and replace. Juniper’s fibrous bark suited the trays. Firewood tended to be dry wood, while tools were made from fresh wood. “When they went to look for wood, it was like when they went to look for stone; they knew exactly what they wanted to make,” says Chacón. “This implies not only planning, but a bit of complexity in the brain to organize your activities.”

………

Science Advances, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeh2287

This is cool.

I Protest This Cultural Appropriation

Wish that this had a translated caption

How dare a Japanese theater create a reinterpretation of a Sci-Fi classic movie that was itself ripped off from a classic Akira Kurasawa movie. 

FWIW, I think that the entire cultural appropriation thing is complete bullsh%$, and my protest is entirely ironic, but I would argue that this is a complete mind-F%$#, even if the story is 7 years old.

The Star Wars franchise is about to breach the artistic final frontier with a one-off performance of a kabuki adaptation starring one of Japan’s most revered stage actors.

The classical Japanese theatre, which combines highly stylised movement and unusual vocalisation, will swap samurai swords for lightsabers and replace feudal warriors with the forces of light and darkness.

Star Wars Kabuki-Rennosuke and the Three Light Sabers, which are being staged in Tokyo, will combine plots from each of the franchise’s latest trilogy, substituting plots drawn from the days of feudal clan rivalry with drama from a galaxy far, far away.

Ichikawa Ebizo XI, Japan’s pre-eminent kabuki actor, will take to the stage as Kylo Ren, the conflicted son of Han Solo and Princess Leia, in front of 50 winners of an online lottery.

………

Thursday’s performance, which will take place weeks before the nine-part Star Wars saga draws to a close with the release of The Rise of Skywalker, is the latest attempt by kabuki to shake off its stuffy image and open it up to a wider audience.

Traditionalists, though, are unlikely to object to the Star Wars theme, given the films’ popularity in Japan and the Japanese themes and that have helped shape the franchise throughout its 42-year-history.

George Lucas was influenced by the venerated Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and his first Star Wars movie, A New Hope, was loosely based on Kurosawa’s 1958 film The Hidden Fortress.

This both impresses and confuses me.

Tru Dat

When Defector says that, "A blue wave won’t mean sh%$ if the chumps get their way," (%$# mine) they are noting that if the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) remains in firm control of the House and Senate Democratic Caucuses, then any opportunity created from the recapture of Congress will be squandered.

Feckless cowards do not make things better.

You might have heard there’s an election coming soon. Given that this is The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetimes, No. 536, the campaign industrial complex has rested a 1,000-pound boulder atop the SPAM button in an attempt to curry favor with you, the voter. This is why I, a Marylander, am bombarded with campaign ads/flyers/robocalls 48 hours a day, including TV ads for Senate candidates in states nowhere near mine, Ohio and Texas in particular. It’s also why Donald Trump has used taxpayer money to buy up national airtime for an ad that features him walking menacingly toward the camera, like you’re about to be his next victim. Thank you, Mister President!

You’ll notice that much of this long-distance haranguing is being waged by the Republican Party, almost certainly because their current polling nationwide is abysmal. If those numbers hold—although you and I know better than to trust polls—the GOP stands on the brink of losing both houses of Congress, plus a number of crucial state elections. That’s why they’re flooding the airwaves with a steady stream of dogs%$#. These are tactics of desperation.

All of this is somewhat heartening to me, the screechy liberal. The idea of President F%$# head finally getting a firm check on his power is enough to make me almost kinda sorta think things here in the U.S. can actually get better. But if this blue wave materializes—I am in no way predicting that will happen, please do not tell people that I predicted anything—I already know that the path to progress will be impeded by the same coterie of gutless motherf%$#ers I’ve been having to deal with as long as I’ve been a registered voter.

When asked if impeachment was a top priority, Jeffries said “of course not” during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.” “I’ve made clear from the very beginning that our top priority is going to be to drive down the high cost of living.”

So nothing about restoring the rule of law or challenging the current expansive view of the executive, just posturing over prices.

And now onto Chuck Schumer:

………

Schumer is the senator who took more donations from private equity than any other. He's the guy whose asshole kid is a lobbyist for Amazon. He's the frog that continually insists the water he’s sitting in isn’t coming to a boil. Schumer has presided over every catastrophic decision Democrats have made in the Trump era, and is one of the primary reasons that Trump has won the presidency. Twice. This man is a f%$#ing loser. He’s paid to be a loser, and he’s only interested in sharing leadership duties with fellow genteel scum like Jeffries: people hard-wired to let Republicans get the best of them time and time again.

I am so f%$#ing sick of these chumps. I’m sick of every victory notched by the Democrats being a fleeting one. Right now, Donald Trump is an historically unpopular president, and he has made the party he rules over equally despised. During Trump's second term in office, he has destroyed this nation’s preventive healthcare infrastructure, wiped out entire fields of scientific research, unleashed a fascist police force on American cities, started an insane war, murdered dozens of people in cold blood, desecrated the national park system, f%$#ed up the Reflecting Pool, and literally torn down the White House itself. Every oval that Americans fill in on the D side of a ballot this fall is them saying “F%$# Donald Trump” as loudly and clearly as possible. And Hakeem Jeffries wants to check his swing if he dares to utter it himself? Sit on a gavel, you f%$#ing clown.

And finally the conclusion:

………

They’ll probably lose that 2028 election. You know why? Because they don’t CARE if they lose. They never have, and even Donald Trump’s ongoing looting of this nation isn’t going to compel them to start. This is what happens when a two-party system becomes too big to fail. Reach the penthouse of the Democratic Party and you’ll never go hungry again. Even if you lose an election, you’ll just end up with a better paying job working for the same machine. So I don’t have to wonder why Schumer has managed to endure, despite gladly acting as a doormat for our most evil public officials. As that fucker sees it, being a chump is his job. He’s certainly not interested in making things better for you and me. If Democrats like him wielded power on behalf of regular people for once, they'd be expected to continue doing so, and that would be bad for both their bank accounts and their minimal work ethic. As such, here I find myself again having to vote blue all the way down the ballot, again hoping that it will yield tangible results when everything tell me otherwise.

The geriatric leadership of the Democratic Party must be overthrown.

Factio democratica instauratio (Nulla est institut factionis democratica) delenda est. 

End Stage AI Capitalism

Is anyone surprised that OpenAI is lying about its revenue numbers? (alternate link)

Sam Altman lying?  Say it ain't so!

OpenAI’s annualised revenue is about $20bn less than the company had signalled, according to financial documents shared with investors, a massive gap likely to damp optimism about the growth of AI demand. 

The company has recently told investors its revenues were approaching $50bn on an annualised basis at the end of September, far short of the $70bn reported by the FT and other media outlets late last month based on information that was provided to investors.

The metric, along with the equivalent figure for OpenAI’s rival Anthropic, is the most important indicator of overall demand for AI and underpins vast infrastructure spending and the growth of public equity markets. 

………

The discrepancy arose from attempts by OpenAI’s investors to produce a direct comparison with Anthropic’s annualised revenues, said a person familiar with the matter. The pair calculate the figure in different ways, with Anthropic including the revenue from sales via cloud partners such as Amazon’s AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI does not.

However, the new investor presentation shows close to $30bn annualised revenues in July.

As a private company, OpenAI is not required to regularly disclose its financials publicly. It declined to comment.  

………

But the gap against investors’ expectations will exacerbate concerns over the trajectory of large, private AI companies whose prospects are central to the US stock market and have helped fuel strong growth in the US economy.  

It's ironic that we as taxpayers will be bailing out this rat-f%$#ery.

Headline of the Day

Gambling Addiction Group in Shambles After It Turns Out It's Funded by Kalshi

—Futurism, on how the National Council on Problem Gambling f%$#ed itself.

This is unbelievably stupid.

Ever since the Supreme Court overturned a nationwide sports betting ban in 2018, gambling has taken off in the United States. Enabled by popular apps, the practice has become a common fixture in daily life amid an inescapable barrage of advertisements urging users to start gambling away their hard-earned cash.

The rise of prediction platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, which allow users to bet on the outcomes of practically any type of event, has accelerated the trend even further, triggering what experts are warning is a massive increase in gambling addiction.

And now, it turns out that even the National Council on Problem Gambling, the largest nonprofit in the US designed to address gambling addiction, quietly struck a deal to accept donations from Kalshi — a revelation that’s thrown the group into chaos, as Barron’s reports.

An April board meeting about a major donation required attendees to sign a non-disclosure agreement, setting a concerning precedent for the nonprofit. At the meeting, NCPG executive director Heather Maurer, who had assumed her role just three months prior, announced that Kalshi was poised to donate $2 million — the second largest donation in the nonprofit’s history.

Understandably, the news that one of the biggest suspected contributors to gambling addiction was looking to fund a nonprofit that’s trying to address the problem was met with plenty of skepticism. The deal, which Maurer had finalized behind the board’s back, “landed like a bombshell in the gambling addiction advocacy community,” per Barron’s.

Taking a donation from a prediction market is like a “national council on teenage sex abuse taking money from Jeffrey Epstein,” longtime NCPG member Marc Lefkowitz told the publication.

(emphasis mine)

To quote not Tallyrand, "It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake." 

The "Civilized" World

So it looks like Donald Trump and SecDef Pete Hegseth want to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan by firing squad.

Honestly, the level of depravity here is beyond anything I could have imagined.

President Trump loves a public spectacle. After 14 years on reality television, he has brought one show after another to his presidency — a military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, the biggest fireworks display ever, even a cage match on the White House’s South Lawn.

Now his administration is planning another unprecedented public exhibition, but one with a macabre twist: livestreaming a firing squad execution.

For the first time, Americans would be invited to watch on their cellphones, laptops and other screens as a convicted murderer is put to death. Never before has an official execution been broadcast live in the United States, turning what in theory is supposed to be the solemn application of justice into an event for an audience of potentially millions.

Under the plan announced this week, those who click online on Dec. 3 would see Nidal Malik Hasan, who gunned down 13 fellow Army soldiers and injured 32 others at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, shot by rifle-bearing soldiers at the same base on the same day of the week at the same time of day that he opened fire. No limits on who would be allowed to watch were described, even though an Army manual restricts witnesses to an execution.

………

The idea seemed to shock even some of his colleagues in the administration. Vice President JD Vance cast doubt that it would be livestreamed, telling reporters that “I don’t know that that’s going to happen” and adding that he would not watch if it does. But Mr. Trump said he signed off on it. “Did I approve?” he said. “Absolutely I did.”

………

Even some supporters of capital punishment flinched at the idea of livestreaming Mr. Hasan’s execution, calling it medieval and barbaric. “Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”

When Tom f%$#ing Tillis is taking the moral high ground, something is profoundly wrong. 

As Anna Russel Would Say, "I'm Not Making This Up, You Know."

When he was deposed in a federal corruption investigation, Texas Attorney General and Senate candidate Ken Paxton that a stock transfer was an effort by one of his donors was in order to please God.

Either he is completely delusional. or completely without integrity. (Probably both)

Ken Paxton sat for hours in a federal building in Fort Worth as government lawyers grilled him under oath about his growing wealth and questionable investing history.

At the time, in December 2014, Mr. Paxton was a fast-rising Republican star. He had just been elected the next attorney general of Texas. But outside of public view, he was under scrutiny as part of a federal investigation into possible fraud.

The deposition in the case, obtained by The New York Times, was one of the earliest episodes in what would become a decade-long pattern for Mr. Paxton: accusations of corruption and other illegal conduct repeatedly emerged, only to be resolved without a conviction.

………

The 2014 deposition was part of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into Servergy Inc., a technology start-up based in McKinney, Texas, which is part of the district that Mr. Paxton represented as a state lawmaker. The start-up’s founder, William Mapp III, known as Bill, was accused of making false claims to investors.

The S.E.C.’s lawyers wanted to know whether Mr. Paxton hid that he had received compensation for recruiting investors for the company.

………

Mr. Paxton’s recounting of the Servergy transaction began at a Dairy Queen in McKinney. In the deposition, he said he intended to invest $100,000 in Servergy and met Mr. Mapp there to give him a check. Mr. Mapp turned down the money, Mr. Paxton said, and instead gifted him 100,000 shares of stock.

Mr. Paxton attributed Mr. Mapp’s generosity to his religious beliefs.

“I said, Well, who do I make the check out to?” Mr. Paxton told the government lawyers, according to the deposition. “He said, I can’t take your money. God doesn’t want me to take your money.”

The value of the shares eventually grew to $200,000, according to Mr. Mapp’s emails to Mr. Paxton that were described in the deposition.

(emphasis mine)

How did he not go the jail for this? 

 

When Bad People Do Good Things

I know that these actions are driven by a hatred of brown people, but the H-1B and L-1A programs are rife with abuse and serve to depress wages in the United States, so the recent actions by the Trump administration cracking down on the program leave me with mixed emotions.  (Archive.is link)

The Trump administration accused Microsoft Corp., Adobe Inc. and a half-dozen other companies of abusing a US worker visa program and suspended them indefinitely from a longstanding immigration initiative that’s served as a crucial talent pipeline for Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

The suspensions, announced Thursday by Vice President JD Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, also targeted information technology services giants Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd. Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd. and Capgemini SE. Those firms, either based in India or with large operations there, are often called outsourcers for their role offering contract IT work to other businesses.

At a briefing in Washington, Sonderling said there were multiple federal investigations under way into the use of a system that allows US employers to sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency. Vance singled out Microsoft, the world’s third most-valuable company, for what he characterized as exploitation of the program.

Yeah, right, the Trump administration is cracking down on corporate malfeasance.

And I'm the direct descendant of Genghis Khan and I am destined to rule the world. 

………

Silicon Valley’s reliance on foreign workers has long been a flashpoint in the debate over immigration. Since Trump’s return to office last year, the administration has seized on those concerns and pressed tech giants to do more to train and hire US workers.

As part of that effort, Trump has moved to make it harder for companies to use H-1B visas to attract foreign talent, targeting a major source of workers for the industry. The changes have included proposals for $100,000 filing fees for most candidates and tightening the rules of how the H-1B visas are awarded in an annual lottery, giving priority to companies offering the highest salaries.  

………

The moves announced by Vance and Sonderling take aim at the Permanent Labor Certification Program, or PERM, which allows companies to sponsor a foreigner who has been working the US under the H-1B and other visa holders to become a legal permanent resident, the first step to becoming a US citizen. 

This is really about keeping people like Usha Vance from becoming permanent residents. 

The H-1B program is a deeply flawed and deeply corrupt program, but the only members of our polity interested in addressing it are doing so for the basest of reasons. 

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And once again, it appears that the low-hire/how-fire job market is continuing.

The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits fell last week, pointing to continued labor market stability despite a sharp slowdown in job growth in September.
Weekly jobless claims have now remained near 57-year lows for four ​straight weeks, the report from the Labor Department showed on Thursday, amid historically low layoffs.

………

"It's still a 'low-hire, low-fire' job market," said Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union. "That's great for anyone who has a job and wants to keep it, but it's ​tough for job seekers."

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits slipped 2,000 to a seasonally adjusted 197,000 for the week ended October 3, the Labor Department said. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast ​200,000 claims for the latest week.

Claims have held below the 200,000 mark since the second week of September. California and Illinois were the only states to report ⁠an increase in unadjusted applications in excess of 1,000. The four-week moving average of claims, viewed as a better gauge of labor market trends as it irons out week-to-week volatility, fell 2,500 to 198,000 last ​week, the lowest level since early October 2022.

Stocks on Wall Street were trading lower. The dollar slipped against a basket of currencies.

Low initial claims make rate hikes more likely, so the stock market sees a not so bad unemployment report as bad news for stocks. 

………

The claims report showed the number of people receiving unemployment ‌benefits after ⁠an initial week of aid, a proxy for hiring, increased 17,000 to a seasonally adjusted 1.716 million during the week ended September 26. The so-called continued claims had dropped to a 3-1/2-year low in the prior week.

Some economists argued that the still-low level of continued claims was masking a gradual labor market weakening as a group of unemployed people, including recent college graduates, were ineligible for benefits because of limited or no work history.

Some long-term unemployed people may have exhausted their eligibility, which is limited to 26 weeks in most states.

The median duration of unemployment was 11.5 weeks in September, near a 4-1/2-year high. The unemployment rate was at ​4.2% last month.

I'm not sure where this is going, but I'm a pessimist about all of this. 

This Explains a Lot

I've always wondered why modern architecture is so profoundly ugly, whether it be anything by Frank Gehry or things like the Edinburgh Poop Emoji building. 

It turns out that they are trained to admire ugliness.

Hoocoodanod?

There is a strange thing about modern architecture that becomes obvious the moment you ask ordinary people what they actually like.

Show people an old street in Paris beside a new development and many will choose the old one. Ask tourists where they want to spend an afternoon and they crowd into the historic centers of Rome or Prague; meanwhile some of the buildings celebrated most enthusiastically by architects struggle to inspire anything like the same affection.

You can dismiss this as nostalgia.

The problem is that researchers have actually tested it.

A 2026 study involving almost 3,000 people in Norway and Greece showed participants pairs of traditional and contemporary buildings. Traditional buildings were preferred across every comparison and the result was statistically significant in seven of the eight national tests; even contemporary buildings that won or received nominations for architectural awards lost to their traditional counterparts.

This is not a surprise.  The culture of architecture is a Petri dish for toxic narcissists.

………

Leon Battista Alberti, writing in the fifteenth century, tried to name what people keep recognizing even when they lack the vocabulary of a critic:

Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse. It is a great and holy matter. All which we desire to add unto any thing, to make it more beautiful, is called ornament. Beauty is some inherent property, to be suffused all through the body of that which may be called beautiful; whereas ornament, rather than being inherent, has the character of something attached or additional.

That is not a demand for palaces. It is a demand for wholeness. People walking a street are often judging whether a building feels complete, not whether it is historically “correct.”

When one masturbates in public, it is generally not perceived as completeness.

………

Researchers in 1989 compared the reactions of architects and non-architects to residential architecture. The two groups responded differently to architectural styles while the study also found differences between the physical characteristics associated with professional “high” architecture and more popular residential design.

That makes intuitive sense.

Spend years studying architecture and you learn to look for things most people never think about. An architect may become interested in novelty or construction while somebody walking past the building might simply ask whether it looks beautiful.

Neither person is pretending.

They have learned to see different things.

The problem begins when one of those groups gets much more influence over what everybody else has to look at. 

The term is, "Inmates running the asylum." 

Deep Thought

I wish I lived in a place where you get a pre-filled out tax form every year, like Sweden.

Hell, I'd go jogging naked in December in Stockholm to make that work. 

Filling out taxes is a f%$ing drag, 

I Am Amused

It appears that Fox News has canceled Karl Rove for his criticism of Trump and MAGA.

So, the rat-f%$#er of his generation has been rat-f%$#ed by his descendants.

Good. 

Fox News political analyst Karl Rove has not appeared on his network’s weekday programming for the last three weeks, even as the midterm elections loom. Rove’s absence coincides with his newsmaking public statements warning about extremism within the Republican Party — and his denunciation by President Donald Trump.

While Rove appeared alongside Fox senior political analyst Juan Williams on the October 4 edition of Fox News Sunday (which airs on Fox broadcast stations and reairs later in the day on Fox News), he last appeared on a Fox weekday program on September 14, when anchor Martha MacCallum interviewed him on The Story.

Rove’s absence at a time when his analysis would theoretically be most useful is notable. He averaged seven weekday Fox appearances per month from March through August, and that interview on The Story was his 5th of September, according to a Media Matters review of our database.

………

Rove’s disappearance from Fox's weekday airwaves overlaps with his increasingly strident criticism of extremist elements in the GOP, which has drawn attention from other news outlets.

Two days after Rove’s most recent Fox weekday appearance, The Wall Street Journal published a column in which the veteran Republican strategist and former top aide to President George W. Bush called out the “raw, uncut bigotry” of Texas GOP candidate Bo French, vowed to “vote for only the second Democrat in my life” rather than support French’s campaign, and warned that “the GOP has a growing number of Bo Frenches—and not only in Texas.”

Rove doubled down during a September 26 appearance at the Texas Tribune Festival and drew more headlines for his lament that the Republican Party is “being infiltrated by people like Bo French” and the white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes, who he described as “a Nazi.”

Rove has been using racism as a political tool his entire career.

I have no sympathy for him. 

History Rhyming

And this does not include the Commercial Real Estate clusterf%$# Just as people, particularly those who tried to make their fortune through Airbnb, started to move back to adjustable rate mortgages, we see that home prices are falling in major real estate markets across the US.

Not a fan of remakes, particularly when the original, the 2008-10 real estate crash sucked to begin with.

Listing prices are would-be-nice-to-get asking prices that sellers put on their wish-list but might not get. When sellers cut the price, the new price becomes the listing price. When sellers pull the home off the market because it didn’t sell, that price vanishes from the listing prices. When they put it back on the market at a lower price, that new price becomes the listing price. So listing prices show what sellers are struggling with. Those listing prices have been sinking in Florida, Texas, and California for the past few years. Transaction prices have also fallen or plunged in many markets in these states. But listing prices are now suddenly sinking in New York, where transaction prices had held up.

In Florida, the statewide median listing price in September has dropped by 13% from the peak for September in 2022, and by 3.5% year-over-year, to $409,950, the lowest since November 2021 (red in the chart).

………

Actual transaction prices of single-family homes in many markets in Florida have dropped sharply from the peaks in 2022 or 2024, including in: Lee County (Cape Coral, Fort Myers) -18%, Sarasota County -17%, Collier County (Naples) -12%, St. Petersburg -10%, Tampa -6%, Jacksonville & Orlando -5%.

Transaction prices of condos in many markets in Florida have plunged from their peaks in prior years, including in Cape Coral -34%, St. Petersburg -30%, Fort Myers -27%, Sarasota County -24%, Tampa -22%, Jacksonville -21%, Orlando -18%, etc. – and in four of them, transaction prices have plunged below their 2006 Housing Bubble peaks.

In California, the median listing price in September has declined by 6% from the peak for September in 2024, and by 3.1% year-over-year, to $725,000, the lowest September since, and the same as, September 2022 (red in the chart).

………

In Texas, the median listing price in September has declined by 9% from the September high in 2022, and by 2.5% year-over-year, to $355,765, the lowest September since 2021 (red in the chart).

On a square-foot basis, the median listing price has dropped by 4% from September 2022, and by 2.1% year-over-year, to $181 per square foot.

………

In New York State, the median listing price suddenly plunged in recent months, and by 6.8% year-over-year, to $605,000, the lowest September since 2023, after having flatlined at record levels over the prior two years.

Home prices in the big markets in New York had risen at a modest pace in recent years, while prices in many markets in Florida, Texas, California, and many other states had been falling. New York State was one of the forces that propped up the national median price and other national price indices, and kept them rising in the 1% to 2% range year-over-year. The entire Chicago area was another big factor. Those are huge housing markets that move the needle.

Not this sh%$ again.

Pedophile Hypocrite Dies at 84

Dennis "Denny" Hastert. 

I imagine that he is sitting next to Jim Bakker at the current orientation and training session in Hell.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

I, too, think we should invent books.

— David Moscrop (@David_Moscrop) October 5, 2026

Truer than taxes is this.

Alternatives to Google

Link is here.

The list, absent the usual suspects:

• Marginalia, a web site and crawler that focuses on text heavy and hand written web sites.
• Million Short, allows you to search the nth search results, whether this be 10, 100, or 100,000.
• BASE, the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, geared toward academic research. 

Go read the full list. 

People Really Hate AI

Even Apple fanboi are desperate to get AI off of their iPhone.

Apple’s attempt to integrate AI into its various operating systems hasn’t been entirely well received, nor has the decision to make Apple Intelligence increasingly difficult to disable completely. Thankfully, the open source community has come to the rescue.

A recently released open source tool called RemoveMacAI does pretty much exactly what it says on the GitHub-hosted tin: Aggressively rips Apple Intelligence out of macOS, disabling most of its AI features and removing downloaded models following the launch of macOS 27 last month.

Siri AI? Gone. ChatGPT and other AI extensions? Eliminated. Genmoji, random boxes offering to jazz up your writing, summaries of notifications and app content, and automatic photo clean-up? Never to be seen again.

More importantly, RemoveMacAI can claw back the storage occupied by Apple’s AI models - potentially over 12 GB, depending on the Mac. You might just get confused and think it’s 2025 again.

The impetus for RemoveMacAI, its creator Om Lahorey said in a LinkedIn post, is the fact that Apple made it practically impossible to remove Apple Intelligence features in macOS 27.

“The settings are spread across about a dozen places, some of them only under Screen Time,” Lahorey wrote over the weekend. “Even with every one turned off, the models stay on disk. I wanted it gone in one step, so I wrote RemoveMacAI.”

Unsurprisingly, Lahorey’s tool blew up on Hacker News, with plenty of people happy for an easy way to get rid of Apple AI tools. As of writing, the repo has over 1,500 stars, so it's clearly struck a nerve with frustrated macOS users.

They hate it, they really hate it!

Spucky Spagnolo?

For those of you who don't know, Spucky was a Revere boy who achieved significant success in the Patriarca crime family, at one point being the active head of that organization.

Anthony “Spucky” Spagnolo has died at age 84, a rather significant accomplishment for someone in his line of work.

Normally, I would not make note of this, but a mobster making it to age 84 is impressive, and his name.

Spucky Spagnolo is a truly epic name. 

 

Oswald Mosley and Adolph Hitler are Fighting

My bad, I mean Jacob Rees-Mogg and Tucker Carlson.

To quote Declan Patrick MacManus, "I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused.

The former Tory minister Jacob Rees-Mogg has found himself defending Britain’s decision to fight against Adolf Hitler after inviting the US rightwinger and Vladimir Putin sympathiser Tucker Carlson into his home for an interview.

During the encounter, Carlson repeatedly suggested the west was to blame for inviting aggression from Russia and said of the prospect that Britain could have lost to Hitler: “Who cares?”

Rees-Mogg, who lost his parliamentary seat in 2024, appears to have agreed to host Carlson’s podcast show after carving out a post-politics career as a commentator.

………

During the interview, Rees-Mogg said he was very surprised that Carlson was “verging on defending Hitler”, adding: “I think this is not really what you want to be doing.”

Carlson replied: “Yeah, I guess I’m just a secret Nazi. I’m actually not a secret Nazi … and hardly a public Nazi.”

………

The interview has raised eyebrows in the US as well as Britain, with the Republican Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, posting on X: “When it seemed impossible for Toxic Tucker to descend deeper into the sewer here he goes opining that UK should have let Nazis take over. Forget that Hitler murdered 11 million people? I thought Tucker was against killing? He needs help. Serious help.” 

 When Mike f%$#ing Huckabee has the moral high ground, something is amiss.

Also, Reese-Mogg is Mosley.

It's a Runoff in Brazil

Bolsonaro 47.03% — da Silva 45.16%, so I am not particularly sanguine about the prospect of sanity when the runoff happens in 3 weeks.

I also wonder how much the US State Security Apparatus is rat-f%$#ing the vote.

Bombs Away

Blue Owl Capital is restricting redemptions on 2 of its private credit funds.

They are seeing increased requests for investors to get their money back.

Blue Owl has the money to accommodate these requests, but it would require them to sell off some of their loan portfolio at under 100¢ on the dollar, both because of increasing concerns about the business future (or lack thereof) of AI companies to whom they have lent money and because the loans carry interest rates far lower than what is available now, because of the Fed rate hikes.

The anodyne term for this is, "Price discovery," and that is antithetical to the, "Extend and pretend," game that they are currently playing.

It's beginning to look a lot like 2008.

Redemption requests for two of Blue Owl Capital’s private-credit funds remained well above the typical 5% cap, even as requests on one of the funds fell for the second quarter in a row.

Blue Owl Credit Income Corp. said it saw estimated third-quarter redemption requests representing 16.8% of shares, or $3.1 billion. That compares with 18.8% in the second quarter and 21.9% in the first quarter.

The tech-focused fund, Blue Owl Technology Income Corp., saw estimated redemption requests represent 39% of shares, or $1.1 billion, up from 38.1% in the second quarter but down from 40.4% in the first quarter.

………

Private-credit funds like Blue Owl’s have seen a rise in redemption requests over the past year, as investors grew concerned about credit health and the funds’ exposure to software.

Both the Blue Owl funds said they would redeem only 5% of the redemption requests, the standard across the industry.

Yeah, right, "Standard across the industry."

A Toxic Mix

What do you get when you define healthcare, the Trump administration, and artificial intelligence?

You get a clusterf%$# of ineluctable evil.

In January, the Trump administration rolled out a pilot program that uses artificial intelligence to authorize or deny certain types of care for patients with Medicare—a federal healthcare program for seniors that previously hasn’t required doctors to get any such pre-approval, called prior authorization.

Not long after, media outlets began relaying the disastrous outcomes: technical difficulties, long delays in decisions and care, puzzling denials, frustrated doctors, and patients suffering in pain. Those reports were largely confirmed earlier this month when the Electronic Frontier Foundation released a tranche of federal documents about the program, called WISeR, that the group obtained amid litigation. The documents included feedback from healthcare providers, including one who called the program “a disgrace to the human race” and reported seeing patients crying in pain as they waited for care.

Amid the worrying reports, lawmakers have been trying to get answers and shut the program down. Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office determined in May that Trump officials did not follow proper procedure in setting up the program, calling its legality into question. Still, it appears to be moving ahead unabated, with plans to expand in the years to come.

I'm thinking that this is not sabotage.  I think that it is a deliberate attempt to sabotage the most popular government healthcare system in the United States to scare people off of alternatives like single payer,

It's Bank Failure Friday!!! (On Saturday)

We have the 6th commercial bank failure of the year. Nano Bancof Irvine, CA, following years long allegations of misconduct.

Here is the  Full FDIC list. 

Yes, I'm a week (+1 day) late on this.

Oh the Poor Delicate Snowflakes

The AP has issued an update to their stylebook saying that Reporters clarifying that artificial intelligence should not be described as having feelings or consciousness, and the AI chuds are having major butt-hurt over this.

In the midst of heated discussions on AI safety and consciousness, the Associated Press Stylebook has reminded everyone of where it stands on the whole “anthropomorphism” debate.

“Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics,” it wrote Wednesday in a post on X. “This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects.”

This didn’t go over well in the world of AI experts and adherents, whose nerves, shall we say, were collectively struck by what they characterized as a “completely insane” declaration.

One of the arguments presented by the tech bros is that, "An AP movie review can tell us Optimus Prime mourns and loves, but readers need protecting from the computer understands."

They are both morally and intellectually bankrupt. 

Crap! Cue the Fanbois.

NASA has pulled their former research SR-71A from display with the intent of reactivating the aircraft.

While I am sure that something interesting is happening here, I expect to be inundated by endless social media posts and videos from uninformed aviation geeks.

Mike Relja, a retiree in his late 70s, received an unexpected job offer from NASA about a month ago.

The assignment: Help put a former NASA-operated Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird back in the air after a nearly 27-year hiatus.

Relja, an ex-U.S. Air Force and NASA test engineer for the SR-71A, could not believe his ears. David Ash, a former U.S. Navy and Joby test pilot who was hired in June as a special projects director for NASA, asked Relja to provide his expertise for a secret effort to return a long-retired and neglected Blackbird to flight.

“I told the guy, ‘You know, I’m too old to be doing this,’” Relja recalls to Aviation Week. “‘I wish you well. I’d like to see you make it. It would be interesting. But I just don’t think you can get there from here.’”

It appears NASA is going to try.

At some point early this year—certainly before May 17 and perhaps even before April, according to commercial satellite imagery acquired by Aviation Week—agency employees removed the SR-71A with Tail No. 844 from a display pole near the corners of Lilly and Walker Avenues at the Armstrong Flight Research Center on Edwards AFB, California.

I appreciate that NASA might have a need for the aircraft, my guess is launching of scramjet test vehicles, why couldn't they have they kept it a secret?