And Trudeau is Gone

I do not know a lot about Canadian politics, but just looking at the history of Canadian PMs over the past few decades, it does appear that 9 years in office appears to be pretty normal, so Trudeau's resignation as PM and party leader is not a surprise:

Justin Trudeau has said he will step down as Canada’s prime minister after his party finds a new leader, a decision that in effect brings an end to nearly a decade in power.

“Canadians deserve a clear choice in the next election,” Trudeau said, adding that party infighting had made it impossible for him to face off against his political rivals. Trudeau said would stay on as prime minister until a new leader of the ruling Liberal party was chosen through a “robust, nationwide” process.

His resignation throws open the doors to a fierce political battle to be the country’s next leader, with polls showing the Liberals losing badly to the official opposition Conservatives in an election that must be held by late October, regardless of who the leader is.

Trudeau, who used his address to recount his government’s accomplishments over three terms, said parliament would be suspended until 24 March.

He has become increasingly unpopular in the last 2-3 years, and with the resignation of Nazi apologist Chrystia Freeland from the government, allegedly because he was unwilling to hurt the poors as much as she wanted to.

I expect a shift to the right (not that Trudeau was anything but right-of-center) and a drubbing in the elections, with the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) winning by a lot.

I would hope that the New Democratic Party (NDP) gets enough votes to be the official opposition party, but I am not holding my breath.

I expect that whatever government that comes out of this, it will spend most of its time sucking up to President Musk.

And Here We Go Again

So, we now have the first official death from H1N1 in the United States, at least the first official one.

Given the general lackadaisical approach of public health authorities meekly acquiescing to farmers refusal to test their chickens and cows, it certainly will not be the last death:

A patient in Louisiana has become the first human in the US to die of bird flu.

The Louisiana department of health reported on Monday afternoon that a patient who had been hospitalized in the state with the first human case of avian influenza has now died.

The patient was over the age of 65 and was reported to have underlying medical conditions, the department announced in a statement.

The patient contracted bird flu, officially known as highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), or H5N1, after exposure to a combination of a non-commercial backyard flock and wild birds.

A genetic analysis had suggested the bird flu virus had mutated inside the patient, which could have resulted in a more severe illness.

Mutating inside an infected person is kind of a thing for influenza viruses, and it will do so again.

This marked the first human case in the US linked to exposure to backyard birds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

We'll find others predating this, but it may take years of going through specimens in freezers.

The Louisiana department of health’s extensive public health investigation has identified no additional H5N1 cases nor evidence of person-to-person transmission. This patient remains the only human case of H5N1 in Louisiana, the LDH added.

And now we are relying on the good graces and the competence of the state of Louisiana to keep us safe.

Well, I'm feeling reassured.

And It's Done

I guess that I should be grateful that this time it happened without violence, but I take no solace in the certification of Trump's election today.

I accept it, but I am not happy about it.

A joint session of Congress on Monday certified President-elect Donald J. Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, peacefully performing a basic ritual of democracy that was brutally disrupted four years ago by a violent pro-Trump mob inflamed by his lie about a stolen election.

There was no hint of a similar scene this time, although security had been stepped up at the Capitol. Unlike Mr. Trump back then, Vice President Kamala Harris did not dispute her loss in November, and unlike Republicans in the aftermath of the 2020 balloting, Democrats made no objections during the counting of the Electoral College votes.

Instead, Ms. Harris stoically presided over the certification of her own loss without interruption. The presentation of the results unfolded quickly without drama, as House and Senate lawmakers who had been designated in advance read out the number of electoral votes from each state in alphabetical order, and who won them.

Fuck.

OK, This One Is Real Snow

Schools closed,my office shut down, and insane people on the roads, though the latter happens in any weather in Maryland.

We got a bit over 7 inches.

In Buffalo, or Rochester, they would call this a light dusting.

This is the first serious snow that we have had in the area in a few years.

Skeet of the Day

Why the surprising number of collisions involving Teslas might be a problem with its design (source: Declan Hackett, Quora):

[image or embed]

— Alan Baxter ♛ (@alanbixter.bsky.social) January 2, 2025 at 5:04 PM

Why touch screens suck.

We have 75 years of experience showing that identical controls that do provide tactitile feedback are a disaster, and touch screens provide NO tactile feedback.

For any critical controls, driving mode, environmental controls, turn signals, etc., touch screens are a clear and present danger to the driver, other drivers, and pedestrians.

Just stop. 

I Relish her Loss

Nancy Mace's effort to add discrimination against the transgender to the house rules has failed.

It appears that despite promises from Christofascist Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, after the close election for his position, it was not worth his time.

The GOP-controlled House approved its rules package on Friday evening, including provisions targeting transgender and immigrant rights, but notably did not include the trans bathroom ban Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) had proposed.

The Republican introduced her controversial ban in November to restrict access to all “single-sex facilit[ies] on Federal property” based on “biological sex.” She admitted to HuffPost the ban specifically targeted incoming Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.), the first transgender woman to be elected to Congress.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who narrowly won reelection to the chamber’s top job earlier on Friday, had reportedly assured Mace that her bathroom ban would be included in the package.

………

Mace spent much of the last weeks of 2024 drumming up support for the ban while using anti-trans slurs and engaging in anti-trans theatrics. After protesters were arrested for staging a sit-in at a U.S. Capitol restroom, Mace loudly read their Miranda rights through a bullhorn at the jail where they were held.

It should be noted that Nancy Mace also called the cops on someone who shook her hand because they also advocated to her for trans kids as well.

Every loss by Rep. Mace is win for the American people.

Quote of the Day

Who would have thought that anything could ever happen that would make you feel sorry for Andrew Lloyd Webber? Yet one’s heart can’t help but go out to the old luvvie, whose kitsch masterpiece was put through the wringer of Hollywood half-wittedness. The ordeal was so dire that he bought himself a Havanese puppy named Mojito as an emotional-support dog. When he explained in an email to an airline that they should make an exception to their no-dogs policy and let him travel with Mojito because of ‘what Hollywood did to my musical Cats’, he received the sympathetic reply ‘No doctor’s report required.’

—Literary Review On cinematic flops

Yeah, I do feel some sympathy for Webber over cats.

Mental Incapacity, My Ass

Against the recommendations, Joe Biden rejected the merger of Nippon and US Steel.

I agree with the decision, but even if I didn't, this is completely on brand for Biden to reject the importunities of the so-called experts in the field.

It should be noted that these experts, who have given us NAFTA, CAFTA, WIPO, the decline of the American working and middle class, investor–state dispute settlement boards, and almost the Trans Pacific Partnership.

These deals have rarely served the general populace, and have more often served the interests of big donors.

The experts who advocate for these deals frequently set up lucrative consultancies to profit from their administration, so they make money, and businesses whose profits come from rent seeking through these deals, like Pharm and Media, make money, but the rest of us lose.

President Joe Biden’s blocking of a Japanese company’s bid to purchase U.S. Steel overrode the advice of numerous top aides, ending a long-running debate that had divided the president’s inner circle, according to seven officials familiar with the matter.

The decision to nix Nippon Steel’s $14.9 billion takeover bid helps cement Biden’s image as a staunch defender of U.S. unions but leaves the fate of thousands of workers unclear and tees up a potentially protracted legal battle over whether politics influenced a security review that is supposed to be left to experts.

Biden had long said he opposed the purchase of U.S. Steel, arguing the iconic company needed to stay in domestic hands, a position that many observers saw as political pragmatism to shore up the union vote in an election year. But with the election over and President-elect Donald Trump set to take office, some aides thought there might be a slim chance to persuade Biden to relent in his last days in office, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

At a White House meeting convened by Biden’s chief of staff Jeff Zients on Thursday evening, some of these aides, such as national security adviser Jake Sullivan, noted that one option was a conditional block of the acquisition. That would have allowed Nippon Steel to advance more proposals to minimize potential national security risks, effectively pushing the matter to the next administration, according to three officials.

Over the last several months, more than a half-dozen senior administration officials — including Sullivan deputy Jonathan Finer, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, his deputy Kurt Campbell, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers Jared Bernstein and top Commerce officials — argued against or expressed reservations about the position Biden ultimately took, said officials familiar with the deliberations.

………

But for some members of the president’s domestic economic team and for his political advisers in particular, blocking the deal gave the White House a rare opportunity to protect U.S. jobs, deliver a clear victory to the nation’s labor unions and burnish Biden’s legacy. Skeptics of the deal, which was strongly opposed by United Steelworkers President David McCall, thought Nippon had an uneven track record of protecting workers. They also felt that Nippon Steel had a year to advance a meaningful mitigation plan but repeatedly failed to do so, according to one U.S. official familiar with their views. 

Also, any mitigation plan would have been ignored.

When push came to shove, in a world where there is already a glut of steel, Nippon Steel would have cut US jobs, and not Japanese ones.

I was around in 1993 when NAFTA was being debated, and Clinton insisted that there would be side deals to address the concerns of critics.  

Surprise, these side deals were never made, because harming ordinary workers was a feature, not a bug.

As to whether or not this is an actual security risk, who cares.

Good on Joe.

Forget It Jake, It’s Amazon

One of the people injured at the New Orleans truck attack was denied leave by Amazon.

She had her foot run over, and she was shot, and Jeff Bezos' horror decided that this was insufficient for her not to go back to work at their warehouse.

This has been fixed, but only because it got press coverage:

A warehouse worker at an Amazon facility in Mobile, Alabama, who was struck by a truck and shot in the New Orleans New Year's Day deadly terror attack, was initially denied medical leave by the internet mega-giant, possibly due to an HR mix-up.

Alexis Scott-Windham was celebrating the New Year with friends on Bourbon Street when a pickup truck mounted the sidewalk and rammed a crowd shortly after 3 am local time. She was treated in hospital after the back of her right foot was run over by the vehicle, and she was also shot in the foot. The bullet remains in her limb while doctors work out the best course of action to remove it while she recovers at home.

The regional Times-Picayune newspaper interviewed Scott-Windham, who revealed she had been denied medical leave by the Amazon warehouse where she works for a medical checkup in two weeks' time. The mother feared if she was absent from work for that appointment, she would lose her job.

………

The Register asked Amazon to confirm the story, and the tech goliath said Scott-Windham is, contrary to concerns, able to take paid time off to recover from the attack.

"We’ve reached out to Ms Scott-Windham to offer her our full support, including pay, as she recovers from this senseless act of violence," a spokesperson told us. "We wish her a full recovery and look forward to welcoming her back to work once she's able."

It's believed Scott-Windham requested the wrong type of leave, leading to it being turned down, or so people familiar with the matter have claimed.

"People familiar with the matter," probably means someone from Amazon's public relations office.

Don't buy Amazon.  If they fuck their employees, they will fuck you.

Today in Journalistic Enshittification

A Draft of the Cartoon in Question
Long time Washington Post editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes has resigned from the paper following their spiking her cartoon because it was too mean to oligarchs.

Shown is Bezos, (Amazon) Zuckerberg, (Facebook)Altman, (OpenAI), Patrick Soon-Shiong, (LA Tiumes) and Mickey Mouse.

My guess is that it was NOT Mickey that the WaPo editorial board objected to.

Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for The Washington Post, said on Friday evening that she was resigning after the newspaper’s opinions section rejected a cartoon depicting The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, genuflecting toward a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump.

In a brief statement posted to Substack, Ms. Telnaes — who has worked at The Post since 2008 — called the newspaper’s decision to kill her cartoon a “game changer" that was “dangerous for a free press.”

“In all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” she wrote. “Until now.”

Ms. Telnaes included a draft of her cartoon in her Substack post. In addition to Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, the cartoon depicted Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg; Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive; Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of The Los Angeles Times; and Mickey Mouse, the corporate mascot of the Walt Disney Company.

The Washington Post OP/ED department, even with the absence of the late and unlamented Fred Hiatt, remains the 2nd worst editorial page in the nation.

Cancel your subscription.

Double Bummer

Mike Johnson was reelected speaker on the 1st ballot. 

I was so hoping for a multi-ballot clusterfuck: 

The success of President-Elect Donald Trump’s legislative agenda will depend on whether Republicans can close ranks in Congress. They nearly failed on their very first vote.

Mike Johnson won reelection as House speaker by the narrowest of margins this afternoon, and only after two Republican holdouts changed their votes at the last minute. Johnson won on the first ballot with exactly the 218 votes he needed to secure the required majority. The effort he expended to keep the speaker’s gavel portends a tough slog for Trump, who endorsed Johnson’s bid.

Johnson was well short of a majority after an initial tally in the House, which elects a speaker in a long, televised roll call during which every member’s name is called. Three Republicans—Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Keith Self of Texas—voted for other candidates, and another six refused to vote at all in a protest of Johnson’s leadership. The six who initially sat out the roll call cast their votes for Johnson when their names were called a second time. But it took nearly an hour for Johnson to flip Norman and Self. After huddling with Johnson on and off the House floor, the three men walked together to the front of the House chamber, where Norman and Self changed their votes to put Johnson over the top.

The tense vote marked the second Congress in a row in which the formal, usually ceremonial opening of the House became highly dramatic. Two years ago, conservative holdouts forced Kevin McCarthy to endure 15 rounds of voting and days of horse-trading before allowing him to become speaker. With help from Democrats, the same group ousted him nine months later, leading to Johnson’s election as his replacement.

OK, I was hoping for it to be MORE of a clusterfuck.

Bummer

Less than 2 hours, and all the snow has melted.

The joys of Maryland weather.

I wanted to make an igloo.

First Real Snow of the Season

Sweet!

Posted via mobile

Quote of the Day

We're in a pretty funny situation here, riught?

Indonesia and their Western backers you know don't want anyone talking about what they're doing in Papua, but at the same time, like domestically, the Indonesian media goes crazy, like their bot Farms go wild whenever,  a foreigner takes interest in it.

So we thought maybe we could use Indonesian sensationalist media against them, right?

If we can turn Kirsten into like a world famous terrorist like Bin Laden or Tony Blair then maybe we can get some more International attention on Papua. 

Gonzo Aussie Documentarians Boy boy

Long story, the video below is ½ hour long, but the short version is that their friend Kirsten went to Indonesian occupied West Papua, and was attacked by the Indonesian press, so they decided to try and make her a bow-wielding super-hero terrorist.

It worked.

The serious documentary which spawned this whole thing have a much more serious documentary here.

Mostly though, they owe a screen wipe for the Tony Blair comment.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

For people now claiming the Terrorist was being controlled by MK Ultra - MK Ultra was deemed a failure in the 1960's and promptly discontinued and cancelled after less than favorable results and usually killed most of those it was tested on. Take off your tinfoil hats for once. pic.twitter.com/qBSKtAwlIA

— Elon Musk's Conscience (PARODY) (@FelisConscience) January 2, 2025

I did not know that I needed this.

Too Much Free Time

I'm OK with people doing DOOM mods, the Vuvuzela mod is prize, but creating a CAPTCHA which requires you to play Doom on Nightmare difficulty is a bridge too far:

People have been complaining for a while that passing a CAPTCHA is too difficult, but developer and tech CEO Guillermo Rauch has made one of the hardest yet: a fully playable CAPTCHA based on the classic PC game Doom.

It's been a long-running joke that developers will make Doom run on absolutely anything, so it's not much of a surprise that it's now running inside something that resembles a CAPTCHA.

The app essentially amounts to a small Doom level that is playable with keyboard controls (arrow keys to move, space bar to shoot) within a CAPTCHA-like presentation. You must kill three enemies to pass the test.

The level reflects Doom's Nightmare difficulty, and it is much harder than needed to be an effective CAPTCHA—especially since you can't strafe to avoid enemy fire. It took me several tries to cheese a victory, and the Hacker News thread about this app is filled with people noting how difficult it is and sharing strategies.

I have a grudging admiration of this, but imagine if the effort was applied to something like remediating anthropogenic climate change.

Headline of the Day

Congress Has the Opportunity to Do the Funniest Thing Ever

—The American Prospect on the prospect of a fight over the election of the Speaker might postpone the certification of the Eloctoral Vote count

What can I say, but, "Pass the fucking popcorn."

Let those of us in journalism give a word of thanks to the House Republican caucus for making the early days of January in odd-numbered years more interesting. Tomorrow kicks off the 119th Congress, and in the House it must start with a Speaker election. For roughly all of American history, this election was a staid and indeed invisible affair. But starting in 2023, a fractious Republican caucus has made this a suddenly interesting contest, full of uncertainty and intrigue. And if it’s not taken care of by Monday, there’s an outside chance we could see an enormously entertaining outcome: Republicans pulling off a self-imposed January 6th revolt.

In the 118th Congress, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) was the eventual benefactor of Freedom Caucus disenchantment with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). But the way Johnson bungled the year-end spending bill has escalated already-existing grumbling with his leadership.

Johnson was already challenged in the last Congress with a motion to vacate the chair last May, after he successfully steered additional funding to Ukraine. That motion was swiftly tabled, with Democrats pitching in to save Johnson’s job. But the Speaker did lose 11 Republican votes, and among them are some of the prime candidates to abandon Johnson on tomorrow’s Speaker vote.

 ………

One problem for Republicans is that they only have three days to get the Speaker in place before January 6, when the presidential electors are confirmed by Congress, rolls around. The typical scenario for the House is that they must select a Speaker first, and only move forward afterward. Members-elect aren’t even sworn in as members of the House until there’s a Speaker. 

………

But the looming election certification will certainly concentrate GOP minds and raise the pressure to get a Speaker through already. Hard-liners may be checking parliamentary procedure rule books out of the library right now. The big question is: If the House cannot get it together to choose a Speaker before January 6, can the electoral votes be counted?

The answer is a qualified yes, with the proviso that it’s never really been done before. The House could elect a temporary Speaker just for the election certification, who would step down after an actual Speaker was selected. A version of this was done when the now-retired Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) was put in place temporarily in 2023 after McCarthy was ousted. The House clerk, who will essentially be in charge when business begins on January 3, could also be granted the power to swear in members and carry out the election certification.

I don't expect any of the scenarios to happen, but I hope dream for a week or so of Republicans stepping on their own dicks.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Initial unemployment claims fell this week, beating estimates, with continuing claims falling sharply.

The number of Americans filing new applications for unemployment benefits dropped to an eight-month low last week, pointing to low layoffs at the end of 2024 and consistent with a healthy labor market.

The report from the Labor Department on Thursday added to a recent raft of upbeat economic data, including consumer spending, in reinforcing the Federal Reserve's projections for fewer interest rate cuts this year. Labor market resilience is keeping the economic expansion on track.

"A stable job market will squelch the Fed's appetite for cutting rates aggressively amid nagging services inflation," said Jeffrey Roach, chief economist at LPL Financial.
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped 9,000 to a seasonally adjusted 211,000 for the week ended Dec. 28, the lowest level since April. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 222,000 claims for the latest week. 

………

The four-week moving average of claims, which strips out seasonal fluctuations from the data, fell 3,500 to 223,250. 

………

The labor market is being underpinned by very low levels of layoffs, but employers are hesitant to add more workers after a hiring spree during the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a result, some workers who have lost their jobs are experiencing long bouts of joblessness, with the median duration of unemployment approaching a three-year high in November.

The number of people receiving benefits after an initial week of aid, a proxy for hiring, decreased 52,000 to a seasonally adjusted 1.844 million during the week ending Dec. 21, the claims report showed.showed.

I'm not sure what this means, or even if this means anything. 

This report covers the Christmas holiday, and if anything is happening, I cannot see it.

Today in Domestic Terrorism

First, and most prominently, a man driving a truck literally flying the ISIS (Daesh) flag, drove into a crowd, killing at least 15 people.

A New Orleans Police Department vehicle was blocking Bourbon Street in place of barriers that were down for repairs early Wednesday when a Texas man drove a pickup truck around it and onto the sidewalk, police said.

The suspect, 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, then sped down New Orleans' most famous street, killing and injuring people in an attack the FBI has labeled as terrorism.

"We had patrol cars out there as a hard target," said New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick at an afternoon news conference. "This particular terrorist drove around onto the sidewalk and got around the hard target."

Kirkpatrick and Mayor LaToya Cantrell acknowledged that security barriers installed years ago to prevent terrorist attacks along Bourbon Street were being replaced when Jabbar, flying an ISIS flag from his tailgate, mowed down dozens of people. Fifteen were confirmed dead as of Wednesday evening. At least 30 more were injured, many of them severely, officials said.
Bollards don't cover sidewalks

Bollards don't cover sidewalks

The removable stainless-steel bollards are designed to be securely locked at each crosswalk along Bourbon Street between Canal and St. Ann streets, according to Cantrell's administration. They do not cover city sidewalks. The alleged attack occurred near the intersection of Bourbon and Iberville streets.

………

Kirkpatrick and Mayor LaToya Cantrell acknowledged that security barriers installed years ago to prevent terrorist attacks along Bourbon Street were being replaced when Jabbar, flying an ISIS flag from his tailgate, mowed down dozens of people. Fifteen were confirmed dead as of Wednesday evening. At least 30 more were injured, many of them severely, officials said.

(emphasis mine)

This was not security, it was security theater.

Even if the Bollards had been operational, it would not have stopped him, because he was driving on the sidewalks. 

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, a Cybertruck loaded with fireworks and a pressurized gas tank exploded in front of a Trump Casino, and there are concerns that this was related to the New Orleans attack:

Officials are looking into the possible connection between the Las Vegas explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck and an attack that left 15 dead in New Orleans, President Joe Biden said in a Wednesday evening address to the nation.

One person was killed and seven suffered minor injuries when a Tesla Cybertruck exploded Wednesday morning in front of the entrance to Trump International, Sheriff Kevin McMahill said at a news conference.

The person who died was in the Cybertruck, and McMahill said it was unclear if it was a man or a woman.

According to Jeremy Schwartz, acting special agent in charge for the FBI’s Las Vegas office, authorities also are trying to determine whether the explosion was an act of terrorism but believe it was an “isolated incident.”

Finally, an FBI raid uncovered an enormous hoarde of home made explosives when raiding a farm for illegal sawed-off weapons.

A Virginia man was arrested this month with what federal prosecutors described in court papers on Monday as the largest cache of “finished explosive devices” ever found in the F.B.I.’s history.

The man, Brad Spafford, was taken into custody at a farm outside Norfolk on Dec. 17 on the basis of a single-count criminal complaint accusing him of illegally possessing an unregistered short-barrel rifle. When investigators searched his 20-acre property, in Isle of Wight County, they found in a detached garage more than 150 explosive devices — mostly pipe bombs, some of them labeled “lethal,” prosecutors said.

They found more pipe bombs in a bedroom inside Mr. Spafford’s house, loosely stuffed in a backpack that bore a patch shaped like a hand grenade and a logo reading “#NoLivesMatter,” prosecutors said.

The slogan had the same name as a nihilistic, far-right ideology that largely exists on encrypted online messaging apps like Telegram. There was no other evidence that Mr. Spafford adhered to such beliefs.

Yeah, that last sentence seems to be whistling in the dark.

………

According to the court papers, which were reported earlier by the website Court Watch, the investigation into Mr. Spafford began last year, after a neighbor reached out to the authorities. Mr. Spafford had lost three fingers on his right hand while working with a homemade explosive device, the neighbor said, and he was stockpiling weapons and homemade ammunition.

The neighbor reported that Mr. Spafford had told him that he and his friends were “preparing for something” that he “would not be able to do alone,” the court papers said.

The neighbor also told investigators that Mr. Spafford sometimes used photographs of President Biden for target practice at a local shooting range and believed that “political assassinations should be brought back.” After the attempt on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s life in Pennsylvania in July, the papers said, Mr. Spafford told his neighbor that he “hoped the shooter doesn’t miss Kamala,” an apparent reference to Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Let me rephrase myself, "Yeah, that last sentence seems to be irresponsible and reckless whistling in the dark."  

Then again, what would one expect from what Atrios calls, "That Fucking Newspaper."

The New Orleans case, and the Virginia case both seem to be people involved in right wing terrorism, with the former hearkening back to 8th century Basra, and the former yearning for the height of the Klan in the 1920s.

As to whatever happened in Vegas,it's not clear yet.

All I can do is to quote Bette Davis in All About Eve, "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night."

The year is not off to a good start.

(On Update)

Both the New Orleans and Las Vegas vehicles were rented through the Turo app, which allows people to peer-to-peer car sharing, which might be a connection.

It Was as true...as Turnips Is. It Was as true...as Taxes Is. And Nothing’s Truer than Them

Ken Klipperstein notes, "Doesn't this pair of headlines capture 2024 perfectly?"

Yes it does.

It also paints a picture of a nation that is in decline and fetishises cruelty.

Homelessness in America has risen by 18 percent overall, according to the latest annual data released Friday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Hardest hit were families with children, which experienced a staggering 39 percent increase in homelessness(!). Incredibly, in a press release accompanying the new data, the Biden administration says that it “has been tackling the nation’s homelessness crisis with the urgency it requires,” downplaying the data as not current enough.

As 2024 draws to a close, a major theme of this past couple years seems to be American anger. From the schadenfreude over the billionaire passengers on board the doomed Titan submersible, to Trump’s reelection, and most recently the backlash against health insurers following the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Americans seem to be yelling at the top of their lungs that they hate the management. Yet the confusion in elite quarters over what these people could possibly be so angry about persists, even as the warnings get louder and louder. On the rare occasion that a prominent elected official actually hears these warnings and tries to explain it to their peers in Washington, they are punished for it.

This is not sustainable, and if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

Fuck, Yeah! It's, "Say Fuck January!

But No C-Word

Ever since January, 6 2021, I have given myself permission to go full Anglo-Saxon in January.

You know, unlike the other 11 months of the year, I don't obscure expletives with with various typographical symbols, "Sh%$," "F%$#," and so forth.

The reason is obvious for anyone who has a modicum awareness of recent history.  If you don't, well, your dose of Fukitol® is TOO STRONG. (I miss the elegant simplicity of Netscape's elegant and widely loathed blink tag.)

Contact your doctor of pharmacist.

I am profane by nature, and eleven months of the year, I will obscure this with various typographical symbols, "Sh%$," "F%$#," and so forth.

Ever since the fucking January 6, 2021 insurrection, an event that I thought gave me fucking license to actually say things like shit and fuck, I have reserved January for actual swearing.

While I am sure my reader(s) delicate fucking sensibilities might be triggered by this, so consider this a fucking warning.

I will be fucking swearing all this fucking month, though I will, as always, not use the C-word.  That has always crossed a line for me.

Why did I pick January?

First it is a tradition from the 2021 insurrection, and second, given that January is a time for reviewing the previous year, it is difficult to say, "2024 was fucked up and shit," without actually saying, "Fuck" and, "Shit."

As to why have such a month at all? It is because I need this month, because everything is fucked up and shit.