Vote Blue No Matter Who My Ass

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) has decided to abandon the very competitive race in Michigan, because the wrong sort of candidate won.

The people who gave us Senators like Krysten Sinema have decided that having a real progressive in the Senate with an Arab name is a bridge too far.

Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic primary has complicated Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s plans to help Democrats retake the Senate in November, tying his party’s fortunes to a candidate some Democrats in Michigan say they cannot support — even if it means costing Democrats the Senate majority. 

Michigan is crucial for Democrats. The party’s path to a Senate majority relies on holding the state and all of its other current seats, as well as flipping four Republican-held seats — including at least two seats in states that Donald Trump won by double-digit margins in 2024. If El-Sayed loses in Michigan, which Trump carried by less than two points in 2024, Democrats would need to flip a fifth Republican seat in deep-red territory. 

Schumer backed Rep. Haley Stevens over El-Sayed in the primary, saying he thought she had a better chance of winning in November. The New York Democrat endorsed El-Sayed after the primary, and the two men have spoken about working together to hold the seat — but they have pronounced differences about Israel.

………

El-Sayed’s challenges run deep enough that three Democratic donors in Michigan are hosting a fundraiser for his Republican opponent, former congressman Mike Rogers, on Tuesday evening, according to an invitation obtained by The Washington Post. One of them, Brian Hermelin, wrote in an email to potential donors last week that El-Sayed’s rhetoric on Israel and toward Jews meant he could not support him.

………

The race has put Schumer in a tough position. On one hand, he has called out those on the left who are “too complacent or forgiving about those who exhibit antisemitism within their ranks.” On the other, he often describes Democrats as having a big-tent party, capacious enough to include Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) — an ardent defender of Israel — as well as the country’s critics. 

El-Sayed’s public criticism of Schumer — whom he suggested during the primary that he did not want to see remain as the Democratic leader in the Senate — has not made it easier. “If you’re Chuck Schumer, I’m pretty damn dangerous,” El-Sayed said last month.

That fundraising?  It would not have happened without the tacit approval of Schumer.

The whole, "Vote Blue no matter who," thing?  F%$# that.

I'm not suggesting voting Republican if you have another Synema or her ilk running, I voted Republican once and felt dirty afterword, ⃰  but you can always go with the couch, aka JD Vance's girlfriend, instead of the ballot booth. 

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) needs to be aggressively educated about the importance of actually listening to the base.

^*I voted for Bill Weld as Massachusetts Governor in 1990, because his Democratic opponent John Silber was literally insane.

I Don't Care About Natalie Harp

I am amused about the Republican meltdown about the Trump aide, but beyond schadenfreude, I cannot bring myself to care.

I don't care if Trump is f%$#ing here.  I care that Trump is f%$#ing the entire world.

Until now, Natalie Harp was known only to Washington insiders and people weird enough to read insidery books about the administration. But Harp has officially escaped containment.

She is about to be a full-fledged character in the dramedy of the Trump White House, discussed in the news and recognized by ordinary people. And while the White House and its allies are pretending to be outraged about that fact, it’s completely appropriate and long overdue. There is literally no single person who spends as much time at the side of the president of the United States as her; the idea that it should somehow be off-limits to discuss her role is bonkers. So let’s review what got us here.

Thank Jon Ossoff for putting a spotlight on her

At a campaign speech on Sunday, Sen. Jon Ossoff mentioned Harp in a single sentence, as part of a criticism of the president for being distracted by unimportant things. “He doesn’t want to do the job,” Ossoff said. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

And then their heads exploded. Heh.

Our Dumb Polity

It appears that Trump has another issue with the New Ford Class aircraft carriers, he thinks that the the location of the island toward the stern is ugly, and wants it changed.

This is even stupider than his order to remove the electronic catapults on the new class.  (The electronic catapults, arresting gear, and lifts have all been a bit of a cluster f%$#, but we're well past the limits of the sunk cost fallacy there)

The U.S. Navy is considering a major redesign of its new aircraft carriers to better match President Donald Trump’s preferred aesthetic for the warships, according to seven current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter. 

The service is evaluating the feasibility of moving the multistory tower that acts as the carrier’s command center farther forward, toward the middle of the ship, to resemble older vessels, the officials said. The review, which has not been previously reported, is in response to Trump’s concerns about the “look” of the new Ford-class ships, where the tower is near the rear, these people said.

The timing and extent of the Navy’s evaluation is unclear, with current and former officials cautioning that the service was concerned that such a change would require significant time and money. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation.

Moving that command center, known as the “island,” would be the second major design change prompted by the president, who on Thursday issued a national security memorandum directing the Navy to develop a plan to revert to older steam-powered catapults on future carriers. The systems help launch jets off the ships’ flight decks.

Trump’s preference, current and former officials said, is for the new aircraft carriers to look more like those that were in service during World War II.

The Navy also examined the issue during his first term as president, said a former senior U.S. official. A study found that moving the island could cost billions of dollars in redesign costs and significantly delay the program, this person said. 

 The stupid, it burns.

Engineer, Meet Petard

'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

— Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn) October 16, 2015

A MAGAt restauranteur is facing the lost of his business as a result of Trump's revocation of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians.

Trump said that he would do this.  He accused Haitians of eating dogs.

Now you are surprised that he has done this.

As they say in Japan,  "バカにつける薬はない." (There is no medicine for stupidity)

Wilkinson "Ken" Sejour, who owns Miami Chef Creole, says customers and others in the community are scared, and he might have to shut down two of his restaurants.

The effects of the Trump Administration's ending of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian immigrants are already starting to affect Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood.

At eateries such as Chef Creole, a well-established restaurant that famously serves comfort food inspired by traditional Haitian and Bahamian dishes, the end of TPS has led to confusion, with rumors spreading about potential raids and arrests. Wilkinson "Ken" Sejour, who told CBS Evening News that he voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election, says the end of TPS for more than 350,000 Haitians might effectively end his career in the hospitality space.

………

"The end of TPS means for me that my future in the hospitality business is almost gonna be non-existent," he added. When asked why he voted for Trump, Sejour admitted that Trump "sold to me that he was a businessman and that he would make business decisions."

You mess with the bull, you get the horns.

Worse than a Crime, It Is a Mistake

There are reports that Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, who is facing a close race again, will be picking a Republican as her Lieutenant Governor.

The Republican in question, former Mesa Mayor John Giles is allegedly a, "Moderate," but it is a stupid move, on par with Kamala Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney.

This does not look like being reasonable of reaching across the aisle.  

Instead, it looks like craven and unprincipled posturing for electoral advantage.

The worst part is that it won't work.  (One only has to look at Harris' shambolic campaign)

Gov. Katie Hobbs of Arizona, a vulnerable Democrat running for re-election, plans to tap a longtime Republican and former mayor of a Phoenix suburb to serve as her running mate, according to two people familiar with the decision.

John Giles, a former mayor of Mesa, Ariz., is expected to be announced in the coming days as Ms. Hobbs’s lieutenant governor nominee. Neither Ms. Hobbs nor her campaign would confirm the choice, and nothing is final until an announcement.

But the apparent pick is a nod to bipartisanship in a campaign that will pit Ms. Hobbs, a low-key Democrat, against Representative Andy Biggs, a fiercely partisan Republican with President Trump’s endorsement.

Ms. Hobbs’s narrow victory four years ago was secured with the backing of moderate Republicans and independent voters who have recoiled against hard-line Republican nominees in each of the last two election cycles.

Biggs is a f%$#ing nut-job.  You need to call him a nut-job.

Playing nice and bipartisan against Attila the Hun just ends with your severed head on a sharp stake.

This is Literally Beyond Parody

So, the paper run by the Amazon sociopath just published an OP/ED titled, "Will Maine uproot Susan Collins? I went to a potato festival to find out."

The rest of the article is even worse. 

That's the hed printed at the top.  The title you would see on a news search would be, "Susan Collins faces a populist test in Maine Senate race," which is what the title tag is set to.probably to avoid widespread mockery.

No link, they don't deserve even the meager traffic that my sh%$#y little blog would send them.

Yeah, the author is a MAGAt, and yes, the Washington Post OP/ED page has gotten even worse than the travesty it was under the mismanagement of the late (and unlamented) Fred Hiatt. 

Lame Ass Business Management

As a result of mass layoffs and widespread forced AI grinding, the morale of the employees the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ is falling off of a cliff.

It appears that Meta's answer to this problem is to improve the snacks at work.

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."

After axing thousands of jobs and monitoring employees as they train the AI that could ultimately replace them, it’s perhaps unsurprising that morale at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is at a low ebb.

It was confirmed this week in a leaked meeting to Business Insider in which Chief Technical Officer Andrew “Boz” Bosworth said that morale is “probably one of the worst it’s ever been.”

………

So far in 2026, Meta staff have had plenty to grumble about. The company laid off 8,000 jobs in April and began tracking workers’ computer activity. The monitoring is so that the company can train its AI models, raising the awkward issue that staff could be helping the very tech that could wind up replacing them.

Aside from the layoffs and 1984-esque surveillance, Meta has assigned roughly 10% of its workforce to train its AI models full-time, which is largely mind-numbing data-labeling. The Applied AI engineering unit comprises roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers. Workers liken it to being “drafted” — one even went so far as to describe it as a “gulag.”

………

But Meta’s leadership, recognizing the company’s sagging esprit de corps, is taking steps to improve morale. For starters, the snack budget is being increased, along with the travel and events fund.

I wish that I had the guillotine concession at Meta.  I'd be as rich as Mark Zuckerberg.  

Meanwhile, In the Persian Gulf

So, it appears that an Iranian drone took down an Apache helicopter and Trump launched retaliatory attacks on Iran, including strikes on at least two reservoirs, (Yes this is a war crime according to black letter international law) and then Iran responded by striking US bases and US related infrastructure among Gulf nations.

A US Army helicopter gunship was apparently struck by an Iranian Shahed drone before going down near the Strait of Hormuz—but it’s unclear whether the one-way attack drone was deliberately aimed or achieved more of a lucky accidental strike.

Axios correspondent Barak Ravid first reported an unnamed US government official’s comments that an Iranian drone had hit the US Army AH-64 Apache helicopter before the latter went down on June 8. The New York Times later confirmed that reporting through more anonymous US officials, including one official who said US military investigators were still evaluating whether the Iranian drone strike on the helicopter was intentional or accidental.

………

The basic models of Iranian Shahed drones rely on GPS satellite guidance and preprogrammed coordinates to strike stationary targets from long range and are not usually designed to track and strike moving targets, said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, DC, in an interview with The New York Times. But he suggested that Iran may have received newer Russian-modified Shahed drones that can be remotely operated to strike targets in motion.

Whatever the case, the result is that an Iranian drone that usually costs about $35,000 managed to take down a US Army helicopter with a price tag of $25 million. The only silver lining for the US military was its successful rescue of both helicopter crew members from the water due to the unprecedented use of a drone boat.

………

Trump was initially inclined to shrug off the Apache helicopter’s downing after the pilots were rescued, according to The Wall Street Journal. But the president apparently changed his mind during a White House briefing when both Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine “recommended military action” and shared more details about the Iranian Shahed drone striking the US helicopter.

The strikes from US fighter jets targeted Iranian air defense, ground control stations, and surveillance radar sites near the Strait of Hormuz, according to the US Central Command press release. But Iran’s state broadcaster claimed the US military strikes also damaged water tanks and cut off the water supply for at least 20,000 people in Hormozgan province.

Iran also retaliated by launching yet another round of Iranian missile and drone attacks against Gulf countries such as Bahrain and Kuwait, along with Jordan, according to The New York Times. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an Iranian paramilitary force, said it had targeted US bases in the region, including the US Fifth Fleet base in Bahrain, while claiming to shoot down yet another US MQ-9 Reaper drone.

More on the strikes on the reservoirs: (Also see the mealy mouthed confirmation from what Atrios calls that f%$#ing paper)

The United States and Iran engaged in some of the most intense fighting overnight since all-out hostilities in the ongoing US‑Israeli war on Iran were halted with a Pakistan‑mediated temporary ceasefire on April 8.

A comprehensive peace agreement remains elusive as Iran and the US have exchanged a series of proposals and counterproposals in the weeks since that pause. After a string of smaller escalations, however, the US struck targets in Iran following the downing of a US Apache helicopter close to the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, and Iran retaliated by hitting US military bases in the Gulf.

The US military said it targeted communications and radar facilities. Iranian officials, however, said civilian infrastructure was also damaged, including two water reservoirs.

If correct, this is the first reported strike on civilian infrastructure in Iran in several weeks, but it comes at a time when Iran is facing a severe water shortage.

Yeah, US military has forsworn attacks on civilian infrastructure for a few weeks, what sweethearts.

And Trump provides yet more evidence that he's senile or profoundly stupid:

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said he was "shocked" that Iran attacked neighboring Gulf states in retaliation to U.S. and Israeli strikes, insisting that nobody could have predicted such a response.

"They weren't supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East. So they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked," Trump said at a White House event.

He doubled down hours later, stating that "the UAE is like the banker for Iran. Qatar, they are neighbors and got along okay. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain. No expert would say that's gonna happen. It's not a question of 'gee should you have known' - and if we did, big deal. We have to do what we have to do," he said in the Oval Office.

In reality, many experts have long warned that Iran was willing and prepared to strike these countries. Iran itself further warned explicitly that neighboring states hosting U.S. military bases could be targeted as part of its deterrence strategy.

I wonder how much longer they can to maintain this façade, because world inventories of oil and other distillates have fallen off of a cliff.

Even if the Strait of Hormuz were to open tomorrow, these inventories would take about 6 weeks to see new oil.

I honestly expect to see 1973-style gas lines in the United States.

Still Colorado's Worst Governor

Yes, it is Jared Polis again, who just vetoed a bill banning surveillance pricing, aka price gouging.

He really is a turd.

Rogue veto. Fresh from being censured by his own party for pardoning an election-denying county clerk who’d tampered with voting machines, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis again bucked fellow Democrats by vetoing a bill that would have been the strongest surveillance pricing ban in the country. Surveillance pricing is the algorithmic exploitation of consumers’ personal data to charge them the most they’re willing to pay. A majority of Americans oppose the practice, but in his veto letter, Polis claimed the Colorado bill could discourage “perfectly acceptable uses of technology to set an appropriate price or wage, or the use of technology to save consumers money through discounts.”

Polis’ term-limited administration ends in January, and one potential successor has already said he will sign a surveillance pricing bill. Gubernatorial candidate and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (D) told The Lever that “Nobody should be charged more for groceries during a natural disaster, for example — but that’s what happens with surveillance pricing, which allows businesses to track consumers’ and workers’ personal data and adjust prices and wages based on recent search and purchase history, location, and other data.”

What a pathetic waste of about a million years of evolution.

Bad F%$#ng Idea

So, there are a number of ways that a future Democratic Party controlled Congress can deal with the issue of Gerrymandering.

This is the worst one I have seen so far, Congress refusing to seat Representatives from the states that have redistricted.

Apart from the obvious, it would cover California or any other blue state redistricting as well, it would embolden Republicans to do the same thing for any reason that they can pull out of their flabby wrinkled white asses.

………

Here’s an idea, then, for how the next Congress can defend multiracial democracy without needing to pass legislation. Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution makes each House of Congress the “Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own Members.” Meanwhile, Article IV, Section 4 says that “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” This provision—known as the Guarantee Clause—has long been held to be unenforceable in court—“non-justiciable,” to use the technical term. This rule dates back to the (wild) 1849 case Luther v. Borden, in which the Supreme Court declined to get involved in the recent Rhode Island civil war.

Instead, making good on the guarantee of republican government is left largely to Congress—and not only through the use of its legislative powers. For, as Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (yep, same guy) put it in Luther v. Borden, “when the senators and representatives of a State are admitted into the councils of the Union, the authority of the government under which they are appointed, as well as its republican character, is recognized by the proper constitutional authority.” In other words, Congress judges the republican character of each state every time it seats that state's elected representatives. This also implies that Congress can refuse to seat a state's representatives, if it thinks that state's government is not republican. And it has in fact used this power, most notably during Reconstruction: the Southern states' delegations were not seated until they had re-established legitimate, republican government to the satisfaction of Congress.

Suppose, then, that a majority of the House of Representatives thinks that Callais was wrongly decided. That would mean that the elections for Congress in states like Tennessee, which have eagerly exploited Callais, were conducted unlawfully, even unconstitutionally. It might even imply that the governments of those states are no longer republican in character: surely, after all, the Fifteenth Amendment guarantee of black suffrage is an essential part of what republican government means in America today. Accordingly, Congress could refuse to seat any of Tennessee's nine (all-white, all-Republican) representatives.

This would be a f%$#ing disaster.

Not This Sh%$ Again

It looks like Donald Trump is attempting to seize control of Greenland again. (archive.is link)

This time, it looks like Trump is trying to get something like the Platt Amendment, which left Cuba with sovereignty in name only for nearly 40 years.

To quote Howard Chaykin, "Damn, and a rerun too." 

 

Headline of the Day

Court To DOGE Bros: Asking ChatGPT ‘Yo, Is This DEI?’ Is Not Proper Legal Process & Also A First Amendment Violation

—Techdirt

We really do live in the stupidest timeline. 

This is the lamest case of letting ChatGPT doing your homework ever. 

Start With, "He Burnt a Cross Next to a Police Station as a Young Adult"

Charles Murray is a racist hypocrite dirt-bag, but for some reason, whenever writes, people thing that he is wise.

Whether it is The Bell Curve, wherein he used fudged data and statistics to "Show" that blacks were genetically inferior, or his latest screed, saying that the Electoral College is a core founding structure of the Republic, he's a complete wanker.

When I came across William Hogeland devastating take-down of Murray's latest, I noticed an omission, he neglected to note that Murray is also a cross burning racist, something that he has never apologized for.  (He claims that he did not know what a cross burning meant.  Bullsh%$.)

I highly recommend that you read the essay, but Murray's past should be the lede on any article about him.

Parasite

Steven Roth, the CEO of Vornado Realty Trust has declared that calling for taxing the rich is hate speech.

So, paying the costs of the society that makes your obscene wealth is evil. 

Steven Roth, the chief executive of Vornado Realty Trust, used an earnings call on Tuesday to castigate Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York for his “tax-the-rich” rhetoric, which he likened to a racial slur or a pro-Palestinian rallying cry.

“I must say that I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’ — quote, tax the rich — when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs and even the phrase, ‘from the river to the sea,’” Mr. Roth said, referring to the pro-Palestinian phrase that some Jews believe amounts to a call for ethnic cleansing.

You were born on 3rd base and believed that you have hit a triple. 

You are a worthless person, and the world would be better without you. 

Quote of the Day

Software Simulacrum Is Not True Consciousness, the Stripper at the Strip Club Doesn’t Actually Love You, and Nearly All of the Biggest Problems with “AI” Have Very Ordinary Human Origins. 

—Karl Bode, commenting on Richard Dawkins' recent statement that Claude is sentient.

It should be noted here that Dawkins is a complete prat.

Headline of the Day

Palantir Workers Are Finally Noticing The Skulls On Their Caps

—Techdirt, referencing Mitchell & Webb's finest comedic bits.

Are We the Baddies?

I do not know what took Palantir employees so long to realize that they are evil minions.

There’s a famous Mitchell & Webb sketch where two SS officers, mid-conversation on the Eastern Front, suddenly notice something troubling about their uniforms. “Hans,” one asks, peering at his cap, “are we the baddies?” The skulls had been there the whole time. The skulls are kind of a giveaway. But it took a while for the question to surface. You’ve probably seen it:

………

I thought about that sketch reading Wired’s reporting on the internal turmoil at Palantir, where both current and former employees are starting to ask that question of their own work:

Around that time, two former employees reconnected by phone. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, “Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?”

“That was their greeting,” the other former employee says. “There’s this feeling not of ‘Oh, this is unpopular and hard,’ but ‘This feels wrong.’”

Two weeks ago, we wrote about Palantir going mask-off for fascism, specifically about CEO Alex Karp’s company posting a 22-point manifesto that included some genuinely ugly stuff about how “certain cultures” are “regressive and harmful” and how pluralism is a “shallow temptation.” I argued that this kind of public ideological positioning was both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal. The moral bankruptcy part should be obvious (if it’s not, go do some soul-searching). But doing so at a time when American-style fascism is historically unpopular basically everywhere, including within the US, just seems like you’ve bet on the losing team at a time when it’s clear they have no chance of coming back to win.

To Quote Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." 

Quote of the Day

About five hours into Elon Musk’s testimony, I typed the following sentence into my notes: “I have never been more sympathetic to Sam Altman in my life.”

—The Verge, on Elon Musk's testimony in the lawsuit over OpenAI.

His response to what was a rather predictable cross examination appears to have members of the jury rolling their eyes.

Even by the standards of the tech bros, he is an incredibly self-important asshole.

About five hours into Elon Musk’s testimony, I typed the following sentence into my notes: “I have never been more sympathetic to Sam Altman in my life.”

Musk’s direct testimony was an improvement over yesterday — even if his lawyer kept asking leading questions to cue him in how to answer. But that memory was immediately obliterated by an absolutely miserable cross-examination. For hours, Musk refused to answer yes or no questions with yes or no, occasionally “forgot” things he’d testified to in the morning, and scolded defense lawyer William Savitt. I watched a few jury members glance at each other. During one testy exchange, one woman was rubbing her head. Me too, babe.

Even the judge, who at times prompted Musk to answer “yes” or “no,” was having a bad time. “He was at times difficult,” said Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers after Musk after the jury left the room. (At one point, when she’d cut off his argumentative answer, she got the biggest laugh of the day.) “Part of management from my perspective is just to get through testimony.”

Musk spent a lot of yesterday painting this heroic picture of himself, and this morning, near the end of his direct examination, said, “I don’t lose my temper,” and “I don’t yell at people.” He said he might have called someone a “jackass,” but only in the spirit of saying something like, “don’t be a jackass.”

………

Savitt’s cross-examination left the distinct impression that Musk quit his quarterly payments to OpenAI because he wasn’t going to get full control of the company, then tried to kneecap it and fold it into Tesla. Initially, Musk wanted four board seats and 51 percent of the shares. The other co-founders would get three seats, together, to be voted on by shareholders (including other employees). Though Musk said that the eventual plan was to expand to 12 seats, it was obvious that Musk had full control on the initial board of seven.

When Musk didn’t get what he wanted, he pulled the plug on his funding commitment and hired Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI’s second-best engineer, to Tesla in 2017. Despite his fiduciary duty to OpenAI as a board member, he did not try to get Karpathy to stay at OpenAI when he said he heard Karpathy wanted to leave. (“I think people should have a right to work where they want to work,” Musk said on the stand.)

………

Musk was trying to make this as painful as possible for Savitt, but he also made it as painful as possible for everyone else, including the jury. Watching him simply refuse to answer questions during cross he’d easily answered during direct was annoying. Watching him refuse to admit he understood the nature of linear time — and therefore the fact that he was still a director of OpenAI’s board before he resigned in 2018 — was infuriating. It made him look dishonest. 

There is a reason that the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ is widely loathed, and it's him.

I don't know if he has the smallest penis in the world, or if he just thinks that he has the smallest penis in the world, but he is clearly compensating for something. 

I Guess That Reddit Is Too Busy Sucking Google's Dick to Run the Site

Paul McCartney was banned from Reddit briefly for sharing concert pictures on r/PaulMcCartney. (Alternate link)

It would seem to me that the basic purpose of the subreddit is Paul McCartney sharing concert pictures, but the site has been complete pants since its IPO. 

Sir Paul McCartney was banned from Reddit after sharing pictures of a concert in the r/PaulMcCartney subreddit. Over the weekend, Paul McCartney’s Reddit account attempted to share pictures from a show at Fonda Theatre to the site via a Dropbox link. Shortly afterwards the account was banned.

Why did this happen? That’s in dispute. At first it appeared that the mods of r/PaulMcCartney had kicked Sir Paul from the subreddit dedicated to him. But moderators insist that’s not what happened and pointed to a Reddit admin comment explaining that Paul was banned site-wide, not at the subreddit level. “Ask yourself, why would we ban the account of the man we're all passionate about? Moderators also have no power over [whose] account is deleted from this website. Only admins do, which again has already been addressed by them,” r/PaulMcCartney moderator RoastBeefDisease said in a stickied post on the subreddit.

In a different thread, an admin explained that McCartney was never banned and that his account was booted from the site due to a glitch. “Just for clarity, that account was never banned from the site (or the subreddit) there was a technical error that made it appear to be banned from the site,” the admin said. “This has now been resolved. Sorry for any confusion this caused or issue for the mod team here!”

So Reddit management's response was basically, "Don't blame us, we're stupid incompetent prats."

Snark of the Day

Siri, What Killed the Most S.S. Soldiers in the Final Year of World War 1?

Graphic Firing Table noting that SecDef Pete Kegsbreath will no longer be requiring that US soldiers get flu shots.

For the historically challenged, the biggest killer of US soldiers for the entire war was Spanish Influenza.

I think that the joke might have been a bit funnier invoking one of the AI programs out there, but it is still funny as hell. 

Asking for this dumbf%$#:

Mind you, this fits with this overpromoted dumbass' worldview, where pushups always trump logistics (yswidt) and military learning.

His abysmal ignorance of why the US military has been aggressive about things like preventive medicine, field sanitation and hygiene since 1941 explains a lot (tho this jackass is on record boasting that he doesn't wash his hands after dumping a load, so YMMV...).

I wrote a whole series on "The Imperial Japanese Army in WW2: What Went Wrong", and one of the single biggest failures that hammered the 大日本帝國陸軍, Dai-Nippon Teikoku Rikugun was the whole manly-man/bushido cult of warriorness that neglected beans and bullets for swords and spirit.

The notion that somehow a poorly-supplied, under-resourced and -armed fighting force would beat more logistically and tactically competent enemies because of some sort of mystical whatever-the-Japanese-is for "cult of the badass"?

The stoopid, it burns.

 

Snark of the Day

We Were Wrong, Years Ago. We Should’ve Rooted for the Jocks to Win, to Stuff Those Nerds in the Locker for All Eternity.

—Atrios, on Mark Andreeson's recent incoherent philosophical statements

Mark Andreeson has been hitting podcasts and social media insisting that self-examination is not a real thing, but rather it is an artifact of a dysfunctional modern world.

He has in fact said that, "The whole idea of self-examination, he explained, is basically a Freudian fad— an invention dating from around 1910 that serious people have no business indulging."

I think that the Delphic Oracle, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Sun Tzu, Cicero, Lucretius, etc. would like to have a word with you.

It really is amazing how aggressively tech bros try to find a moral justification for their own selfishness.