F%$# Me. I Agree with Musk and Ramaswamy

As a part of their DOGE clown show, they want to shut down the National Endowment for Democracy.

At least I am disagreeing with a Wall Street Journal editorial:

On June 8, 1982, President Ronald Reagan delivered a sweeping address on freedom and democracy to members of the British Parliament. He urged democracies not only to defend their principles at home but also to promote them abroad. He traced the struggle for freedom to the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and the Greeks’ stand against the Persians at Thermopylae. He asserted that “freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings” and noted that the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights “guarantees free elections.”

………

Reagan’s vision sparked the creation in 1983 of the National Endowment for Democracy, a private nonprofit corporation funded by Congress that acts as a grant-making foundation. Reagan’s words are woven into the organization's founding declaration. For four decades, the organization has remained true to this vision. 

………

The organization has long enjoyed bipartisan support. But now it’s coming under assault and is reportedly near the top of the Department of Government Efficiency’s hit list. If true, this is a troubling development.

I can’t claim to be a neutral observer. I served for nearly a decade on the foundation’s board, during which time I developed deep respect for the organization’s mission and for the dedication and integrity of its staff.

This man is lying.

The NED was created by Bill Casey as a CIA cutout for regime change operations.

It's purpose was to allow those operations to be pursued by the CIA without any formal government approval.

Bill Casey and the CIA wanted to be able to overthrow governments without any authorization from Congress or from the President.

It was intended to subvert the democratic checks and balances of our government.

It is a corrupt and destructive organization that should have been shut down years ago.

Damn

The bankruptcy judge in Houston rejected the sale of Alex Jones' Infowars to The Onion.

I think that his ruling was complete bullash%$, and is an indication of the general corruption of the US bankruptcy courts.

A judge late Tuesday night said he would not approve the sale of Infowars, the website founded by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, to the Chicago-based satirical publication The Onion, prolonging a messy tug of war between two high-profile suitors.

The ruling, by Judge Christopher M. Lopez in federal bankruptcy court in Houston, poses a roadblock for The Onion’s plan to take possession of the Infowars site and its associated assets after it won an auction last month. The Onion’s bid was backed by the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones.

Mr. Jones spent years claiming that the 2012 school shooting was a hoax and that victims’ family members were actors complicit in the plot. The Onion has said that it wants to turn Infowars into a satirical site mocking the kind of conspiracy theories that Mr. Jones spreads.

Judge Lopez’s ruling put the fate of Infowars in limbo. He instructed a court-appointed trustee, Christopher Murray, to come up with an alternative resolution, though it was not immediately clear what approach Mr. Murray would take. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The deal that the trustee approved basically had the Connecticut parents foregoing much of their award so that other creditors were to get more.  (They really wanted to hurt Jones, a sentiment that I support)

This sucks.

It's Thursday ╭∩╮（︶︿︶）╭∩╮

Undeniably bad numbers, with 242,000 initial claims, well above the forecast of 220,000, while continuing claims rose to 1.89 million:

Applications for US unemployment benefits rose to a two-month high last week, at a time around the end-of-year holidays when data is volatile.

Initial claims increased by 17,000 to 242,000 in the week ended Dec. 7. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 220,000 applications. A metric that helps smooth out volatility, the four-week moving average, rose as well and unadjusted data suggest the gains were spread across states.

Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, increased to 1.89 million in the previous week — which included the Thanksgiving holiday — according to Labor Department data released Thursday.

Also, the producer price index (PPI) rose by .4% last month led by ……… Eggs?

U.S. producer prices increased by the most in five months in November, but easing costs of services such as portfolio management fees and airline fares offered hope that the disinflationary trend remains in place despite stalled progress.

A surge in the price of eggs amid an avian flu outbreak accounted for much of the bigger-than-expected rise in producer inflation last month. Other details of the report from the Labor Department on Thursday were, however, mostly favorable, prompting economists to sharply lower their estimates for the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price measures tracked by the Federal Reserve for its 2% inflation target.

So bird flu is f%$#ing the poultry industry.

And, we are seeing an increase in infections being transmitted to people.  (And cows)

We may be seeing yet another pandemic in its early stages.

Deep Thought

 I don't make the rules, I just know them and quote them in the most obnoxious manner possible.

Inflation Numbers Today

They are generally as expected, with year over year inflation edged up slightly. pretty much in line with expectations. 

The perception is that the Federal Reserve will cut rates at its next meeting anyway.

Fresh inflation data released on Wednesday made clear that the Federal Reserve’s fight against rapid price increases was not over. Still, the details of the report probably gave central bank officials enough confidence to cut interest rates at their meeting next week.

The Consumer Price Index climbed 2.7 percent in the year through November, just slightly faster than the 2.6 percent reading in October. After volatile food and fuel costs were stripped out for a better sense of the underlying inflation trend, “core” inflation held steady at 3.3 percent.

But drilling into the details of the report, a long-awaited slowdown in housing cost inflation materialized last month. Because rental costs make up such a big chunk of overall inflation, that could pave the way for cooler inflation readings going forward.

As one can ascertain from the graph, shelter is a very big part of the problem, and it has been made immeasurably worse by the machinations of private equity and hedge fund speculation.

Greedflation is a thing, and it needs strong regulation to fix it, which will not be happening over the next 4 years.

I Get This

I generally do not give much thought to the proclamations of celebrities, but something Keira Knightly said really resonated with me.

She will not have any more children in addition to her current 2, not because of the work, and not because the pain of labor, or the inconvenience of pregnancy, but because she cannot deal with having to watch Peppa Pig with her kids any more.

Keira Knightley is over having kids but it's not because of any of the reasons you may think.

The British actress and star of Netflix's new spy-thriller series "Black Doves" spilled the real reason why two children are enough for her on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon."

“You know that thing where you’re like ‘Oh, you know they’re so nice. Should we have another one?’ ” Knightley said. “And you think, ‘Oh yeah, I could do the pregnancy. I could even do the birth but I cannot watch anymore Peppa Pig.’ So there's no more kids."

Knightley described her children, who are 5 and 9, as "very cool right now. They're into Studio Ghibli and just like beautiful things where you're just like 'oh, this is just lovely' after seven years of 'Peppa Pig.'"

 Thankfully, my kids were pre Peppa Pig.

I’m Beginning to Think That Is a Basic Flaw in Its Architecture

Yet again, the Pentagon has grounded the V-22 Osprey tilt rotor.

This is the 3rd grounding in about 1½ years, and there are a lot more.

For an aircraft that has been in service for almost 20 years, this is not a good thing.

It has always had maintenance issues, a susceptibility to vortex ring state, is unable to autorotate, and has a highly restricted flight envelope.  (This is one of the reasons that Israel ended their consideration of the type)

There are other technologies that deliver similar ranges, albeit at slightly slower speeds and have few, if any of the tilt rotor's vices.

Quote of the Day

Elon Musk Feeds AI 'All Court Cases,' Promises It Will Replace Judges Because He's An Idiot

—Above the Law

While ……… Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ is an idiot, I'm inclined to think that, much like the Ecch (Twitter) algorithm, Musk is to deceive not to develop a great legal software brain.

It really is remarkable how Elon Musk has destroyed his carefully cultivated image as a visionary genius in a couple of years.

It was always a humbug, but he had spent decades in support of the deception.

Support Your Local Police, a Threefer

A couple of stories today, first, in Worcester, Massachusetts where the Department of Justice has found a pattern of excessive force and sexual abuse in the police department:

A two-year investigation by the Justice Department found patterns of “outrageous” conduct by the police in Worcester, Mass., including excessive use of force and sexual contact between undercover officers and women suspected of prostitution.

In a report released on Monday, the department’s civil rights division detailed police misconduct dating back at least five years in Worcester, a city of 207,000 in central Massachusetts. It corroborated repeated reports by women’s advocates in the city that officers had “tricked or misled” women suspected of being prostitutes into providing sex acts and “offered less, or no, punishment in exchange for sex.”

Federal investigators found that the Worcester Police Department’s “inadequate” policies, training, supervision, investigations and discipline “fostered these unlawful patterns.” They also raised “serious concerns” that the department’s enforcement practices could result in biased and discriminatory policing of Black and Hispanic residents, who were disproportionately arrested and subjected to force, according to the report.

………

Worcester is the second city in Massachusetts where the Justice Department has found a pattern of police misconduct in recent years. An investigation of the narcotics division of the Springfield Police Department concluded in 2020 that officers there had used excessive force because of deficient policies and a lack of accountability.

………

In Worcester, examples of excessive force included “unreasonably stunning people with Tasers, striking people in the head, using police dogs to bite people and escalating minor incidents, including during calls related to behavioral health,” according to the Justice Department report.

………

The report cited multiple examples of Worcester officers hitting people in the head and face, including one instance in which an officer punched a handcuffed man three times in the face when he resisted an escort to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

Another officer responding to a mental health call, who had previously received 40 hours of training in crisis intervention, hit a man in the face while he was restrained and lying on a hospital stretcher, the report said. The officer described his action as an “open hand distraction technique.” He did not report his use of force against the man, who had spit at him, until a bystander’s video later attracted public attention.

………

Still, despite longstanding complaints about inappropriate sexual conduct by officers — and “multiple credible accounts that W.P.D. officers have sexually assaulted women under threat of arrest” — leaders of the Worcester police failed to develop responsive policies or training, the Justice Department found.

In addition, officers who admitted to sexual misconduct were never disciplined, according to the report.

If you think that this is horrifying, the fact that police all over the country are reselling automatic weapons on the black market.

By automatic weapons, I mean things like, "90 machine guns, including an M134 Gatling-style minigun capable of shooting up to 6,000 rounds of ammunition every minute."

That makes me safe.

In related news, the the former sheriff of Culpepper County Virginia is going on trial for selling deputy positions to people who wanted to buy guns.

By selling, I mean taking envelopes of cash for a badge: 

When Democrats took power in Richmond five years ago and trained their attention on tightening gun laws, a rural sheriff named Scott Jenkins stood before the Culpeper County Board of Supervisors and vowed to fight back, pledging to use the authority of his office to skirt what he called “ridiculous” and “insane” attacks on the Second Amendment.

“If the legislature decides to restrict certain weapons that I feel aren’t a harm to our community, I will look to swear in thousands of auxiliary deputies in Culpeper,” Jenkins declared at that December 2019 supervisors meeting, positioning himself at the vanguard of resistance to perceived liberal interference.

………

In fact, federal authorities allege, Jenkins, now 53, already had begun appointing auxiliary deputies — but not purely out of concern for citizens’ self-defense.

When the ex-sheriff goes on trial Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Charlottesville, charged with multiple counts of bribery and fraud, prosecutors said, the jury will hear about a long-running scheme in which Jenkins enriched himself and his political campaign by selling badges and law enforcement powers to untrained, well-to-do people, including a felon.

………

Six men paid a total of about $65,000, much of it in cash stuffed in envelopes, for deputy credentials, which they could use for personal privileges, such as dodging traffic tickets, prosecutors said. Three of the six were indicted with Jenkins; the others have not been charged. Prosecutors said two undercover FBI agents posing as wannabe auxiliary deputies gave Jenkins an additional $15,000 in cash.

………

The two accused conspirators referred to the businessmen as “money guys,” the filing says. “The ‘money guys’ were motivated to purchase sheriff’s badges primarily because Jenkins and Individual 1 told them that the badges gave them authority to carry a concealed weapon in all 50 states. … In addition, Jenkins and Individual 1 told the ‘money guys’ that if they were pulled over by law enforcement while driving, they could show their badges and credentials to request ‘professional courtesy’ and avoid a ticket.”

Here is a quick way to identify corrupt cops, if they brand themselves as "2nd Amendment" cops, they are dirty.

Quote of the Day

I Was at a Show in Midtown Manhattan on Thursday Night, and When the Comedians Onstage Cracked a Joke About the Shooter the Entire Place Erupted in Cheers

— Jia Tolentino at The New Yorker

The shooter is, of course, allegedly Luigi Mangione, and he shot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

So much hate.  So completely justified.

Worst Adaption of King Lear Ever

Rupert Murdoch has lost the court fight to cut 3 of his 4 children out of control of his media empire.

He wanted to give complete control to Lachlan, and leave the other 3 eldest James, Elisabeth and Prudence with no control of the Newscorp.

The judge said that an irrevocable trust is just that, irrevocable, and additionally making Lachlan the exclusive manager of the organization would jeopardize the interests of the other three.

In arguments, Rupert Murdoch stated that he wanted Lachlan, who most closely follows his antediluvian politics, to run things, but I'm wondering if this wasn't a ploy initiated by the eldest son.

In any case, whatever pain this causes the patriarch of the Murdoch clan is well deserved:

A Nevada commissioner ruled resoundingly against Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to change his family’s trust to consolidate his eldest son Lachlan’s control of his media empire and lock in Fox News’s right-wing editorial slant, according to a sealed court document obtained by The New York Times.

The commissioner, Edmund J. Gorman Jr., concluded in a decision filed on Saturday that the father and son, who is the head of Fox News and News Corp., had acted in “bad faith” in their effort to amend the irrevocable trust, which divides control of the company equally among Mr. Murdoch’s four oldest children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence — after his death.

The ruling was at times scathing. At one point in his 96-page opinion, Mr. Gorman characterizes the plan to change the trust as a “carefully crafted charade” to “permanently cement Lachlan Murdoch’s executive roles” inside the empire “regardless of the impacts such control would have over the companies or the beneficiaries” of the family trust.

………

The battle over the family trust is not about money — Mr. Murdoch is not seeking to diminish any of his children’s financial stakes in the company — but rather about future control of the world’s most powerful conservative media empire, which includes Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and major newspapers and television outlets in Australia and Britain.

And therein lies the rub.  If Lachlan runs said empire without any input from the beneficiaries of the fund, he can cause them significant financial harm.

It should be noted that the trust appears to have been structured to evade inheritance taxes, so there is a bit more schadenfreude there as well.

………

The commissioner’s ruling, while significant, is not the final word in the case. The commissioner acts as a “special master” who weighs the testimony and evidence and submits a recommended resolution to the Probate Court. It falls to a district judge to ratify or reject that recommendation. Even then, the losing party is free to challenge the determination, which could precipitate an intensive new round of litigation.

Yeah, but Murdoch is 93 years old, and any new round of litigation will likely outlast him.

You are going to hell Rupert, you might as well begin enjoying it on earth.

I am completely unsurprised that former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr is hip deep in this affair.  If something unethical is to be done, he's your man.

In Lieu of a Cake with a File, Send Old Bay

There is now a suspect in the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Luigi Mangione.

He's a Marylander and a Baltamorean, he went to the posh private Gilman School in Roland Park, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, seriously Ivy League.

According to my eldest, he was the friend of a friend theirs on social media.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Weird, to say the least.

Luigi Mangione, the online version of him, was an Ivy League tech enthusiast who flaunted his tanned, chiseled looks in beach photos and party pictures with blue-blazered frat buddies.

He was the valedictorian of a prestigious Baltimore prep school who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a head counselor at a pre-college program at Stanford University.

………

The police now believe that Mr. Mangione, 26, is the masked gunman who calmly took out a pistol equipped with a suppressor on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and assassinated Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. He was arrested in Altoona, Pa., on Monday after an employee at a McDonald’s recognized him and called the police. Officers said they found him with fake identification, a weapon similar to the one seen in video of the killing and a manifesto decrying the health care industry.

Later on Monday, Mr. Mangione was charged in Manhattan with murder, along with additional counts of forgery and illegal weapons possession. And in the hours after his apprehension, his baffling journey from star student to murder suspect began to come into focus.

Mr. Mangione was in regular contact with friends and family until about six months ago when he suddenly and inexplicably stopped communicating with them. He had been suffering from a painful back injury, friends said, and then went dark, prompting anxious inquiries from relatives to his friends: Had anyone heard from him?

My guess is that he got f%$#ed over by UHC, and he f%$#ed back violently.

His family owns a right-wing radio station, and his cousin is a Republican in the Maryland House of Delegates.

In any case, if you want to send him a care package, I would suggest Old Bay Seasoning in its original packaging.

Trust me, it's a Maryland thing.

There was a part of me hoping that he would get away with it.

Just Shut Them Down

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

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

They need to go the way of Arthur Andersen:

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

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

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

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

Unethical behavior is at the core of their business.

Just shut them down.

Thoughts on Syria

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

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

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

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

Out of the Mouths of Babes

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

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

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

2. He is an advocate for quality mass transit.

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

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

I do not want my death to be memed mercilessly.

F%$# Scott Walker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

H/t Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Not a Remotely Mature Technology

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

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

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

News You Can Use

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

Good work:

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

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

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

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

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

It's Only Business?

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

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

………

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

What a surprise, the CEO was a crook.

Skeet of the Day

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

[image or embed]

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

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

Skeet is a post on Bluesky.

First Friday of the Month ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

This is Kind of Cold

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

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

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

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

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

People are meming the sh%$ out of this.

Let Me Translate This

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

………

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

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

………

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

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

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

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

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

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

— Paul Graham (@paulg) December 4, 2024

Out of the mouth of babes………

May Be Replaced by Something Even More Bizarre and Inexplicable

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

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

Thoughts and Premiums

Definitely Planned

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

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

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

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

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

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

UHC Covers about 45 million people, you do the math

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

This is not surprising.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

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

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) December 3, 2024

The revolution will be memed endlessly.

I Have No Clue What is Going On

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

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

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

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

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

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

¯\_(ツ)_/¯  

Not a Surprise

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

Making the world safe for white tech bros.

They Are Lying

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

Yep, no misuse of private data here.

They are lying through their teeth.

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

The Loser Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ Loses Again

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

He must be so mad now: 

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

I am amused.

The Call Is Coming from Inside the House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, I Have to Post About This

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ………

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

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

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

 

Sick of This Woke Bullsh%$ (Not)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not this Sh%$

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

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

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

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

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

 We are completely f%$#ed.

Linkage

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

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

Not a Good Look

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

………

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

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

This is not Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon.

 

About F%$#ing Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

Just do it.

Then fire the bad actors, using the extraordinary powers. 

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

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

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

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

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

Covid is still a threat.

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