So; that wasn’t clear to me. Does Toyota consider Trump’s inauguration to be part of STEM education, or part of workforce readiness?
LOL. All of that corporate gobbledygook can be translated as: “Toyota bribes Trump in the hope that Trump will not take actions that hurt the vehicle industry.”
[…] “Brain rot” is the Oxford dictionaries’ word of the year.
Oxford University Press said Monday that the evocative phrase “gained new prominence in 2024,” with its frequency of use increasing 230% from the year before.
Oxford defines brain rot as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”
The word of the year is intended to be “a word or expression that reflects a defining theme from the past 12 months.”
“Brain rot” was chosen by a combination of public vote and language analysis by Oxford lexicographers. It beat five other finalists: demure, slop, dynamic pricing, romantasy and lore.
While it may seem a modern phenomenon, the first recorded use of “brain rot” was by Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 ode to the natural world, “Walden.”
Oxford Languages President Casper Grathwohl said that in its modern sense, “’brain rot’ speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time.” [history and graph at the link]
“It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology. It’s not surprising that so many voters embraced the term, endorsing it as our choice this year,” he said. […]
More at the link, including the Collins Dictionary choice of “brat.”
I think that in describing “brain rot,” Oxford should have mentioned the disinformation and lies that the brain is subjected to online, especially by social media sources like X, etc
President Joe Biden signed [with some reluctance, and with caveats] a defense bill on Monday that prohibits coverage of transgender health care for children of military families while providing pay raises for junior enlisted service members and boosting military spending to $895 billion.
The provision removing coverage for transgender children was slyly inserted by House Republicans and while Biden endorsed most of the bill’s provisions, he voiced strong objections to that contentious addition.
“While I am pleased to support the critical objectives of the act, I note that certain provisions of the act raise concerns,” he said in a statement.
Biden “strongly opposes” the part of the bill that limits transgender health care and said it will negatively affect the military’s recruiting abilities.
“The provision targets a group based on that group’s gender identity and interferes with parents’ roles to determine the best care for their children,” he said. “This section undermines our all-volunteer military’s ability to recruit and retain the finest fighting force the world has ever known by denying health care coverage to thousands of our service members’ children. No service member should have to decide between their family’s health care access and their call to serve our Nation.”
[…] “With the stroke of my pen on day one, we’re going to stop the transgender lunacy,” Trump said at a Turning Point USA rally on Sunday in Phoenix. “I will sign executive orders to end child sexual mutilation, get transgender out of the military and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools.” [video at the link]
After House Republicans snuck anti-transgender language into the sweeping defense bill earlier this month, Adam Smith, Democratic Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee, balked at it.
“Blanketly denying health care to people who need it—just because of a biased notion against transgender people—is wrong,” Smith said. “The inclusion of this harmful provision puts the lives of children at risk and may force thousands of service members to make the choice of continuing their military service or leaving to ensure their child can get the health care they need.”
Republicans’ insertion of the anti-transgender provision into a must-pass defense bill was a calculated move. [True!] Biden had little choice but to sign, given its importance for military personnel and national security. While Biden stood firm in supporting the broader bill, the reality is that transgender Americans have lost significant rights. This is likely only the beginning of a political battle in which Democrats are losing ground to an incoming administration set on removing transgender rights and recognition.
Although the bird of prey is prominently displayed in the Great Seal of the United States, the country has never had an official bird in its 248-year history. […]
The bald eagle has landed in the U.S. code after President Joe Biden signed a bill Tuesday making the predator the official national bird.
Congress passed the measure with unanimous support.
[…] Some of the Founding Fathers — Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson — were tasked with creating a national seal but simply couldn’t come to an agreement.
In 1782, a version of the seal with a bald eagle was submitted by Secretary of the Continental Congress Charles Thomson and approved. Most Americans are familiar with the seal’s eagle carrying a flag-emblazoned shield holding an olive branch in one talon and arrows in the other.
Franklin was historically against the decision, arguing in a letter to his daughter that the bald eagle was “a bird of bad moral character.” […]
[…] Berdyansk port workers haven’t been paid by the Russian occupiers in nearly three months and the port has become almost non-functional. […]
And:
[…] Russian occupier shares his impression of North Korean Type 73 machine gun
“It’s a strange piece of shit. I wouldn’t go into combat with one of these,” the Russian said. […] [Video, with English subtitles is available at the link.]
Text quoted above is excerpted from a longer article that presents news related to Ukraine and to Russia.
Bekenstein Boundsays
What is going on with the video hosts these days?
First, starting a few years ago, pretty much every major online video host started to sometimes act like I was on mobile, even when I was on a desktop PC. I’d get a stripped-down player with, often, no seek controls, no volume control (just binary mute/unmute if that), and lots of other missing features compared to the usual desktop embed or desktop site.
Now, much of the time with Youtube embeds, it no longer works to hover over the badge at top left to see the uploader/channel name for some reason, though it still works some of the time. I don’t think it’s just some widget intermittently failing to load, either, as often on a page with multiple embeds the uploader info-banner unfurls on mouseover for some of the embeds and fails for others, on the same reload of the page.
The general pattern here seems to be “we’ll randomly withhold features of our player for no logical reason, either from specific videos or just haphazardly”. And, as I noted before, every single online video host appears to be doing this.
So, what is going on? I can think of only a few hypotheses.
1. It’s a bug, not a feature, even from their perspective — in which case, either we have a lot of independent and simultaneous failures, or they’ve all been plagiarizing from each other’s codebases leading to the bug being replicated widely.
2. It’s a feature, not a bug, from their perspective; i.e., enshittification. Somehow by capriciously deactivating player features, such as a full volume control or the little uploader name banner on the embed, they make more money than by having the player work consistently and fully the way it originally did circa 2018 or thereabouts. I thought it might be meant to degrade the embedded-player experience to drive people to click through to their webshites, where they can bombard you with more “recommended videos” in the hopes of you rabbit-holing and seeing a lot of ads there, except that most of the same feature-lossage happens on affected videos if you view them at their own webshite. For example if a Youtube video has no seek bar and only mute/unmute, clicking through to watch it at youtube.com will not get you those features back. It’s not clear how else they might monetize the seemingly random disabling of basic player-widget features, save if they are renting them back to people by not doing this if you’re logged in with a premium account. Is that their angle? Rather stupid, IMO.
3. It’s somehow more complicated than either a pure accident or straight-up enshittification for financial gain. Though I don’t see how that would be. Like, not expanding the uploader’s name from their avatar on some videos appeasing the GDPR lawyers in some way? How is there a privacy issue with showing the uploader’s name without clicking through first? Or maybe it’s a side effect: the failing features depend on cookies that the GDPR declared evil or something. But then it should either fail until you answer a cookie nag, or simply fail if you’re in Europe, and work the rest of the time …
birgerjohanssonsays
Thank you, Lynna.
.
“NEW SINGLE:
Greenland Isn’t For Epstein
(Vikings)”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=RB8wGQn9w4w
“Say Yes to Eric the Red and No, Hell No to the Orange One”.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Boston Globe:
…
Remote work has spread far and wide since the pandemic spurred a work-from-home revolution of sorts, but perhaps no place more unexpectedly than behind prison walls. Thorpe is one of more than 40 people incarcerated in Maine’s state prison system who have landed internships and jobs with outside companies over the past two years — some of whom work full time from their cells and earn more than the correctional officers who guard them. A handful of other states have also started allowing remote work in recent years, but none have gone as far as Maine, according to the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison, the nonprofit leading the effort.
Unlike incarcerated residents with jobs in the kitchen or woodshop who earn just a few hundred dollars a month, remote workers make fair-market wages, allowing them to pay victim restitution fees and legal costs, provide child support, and contribute to Social Security and other retirement funds. Like inmates in work-release programs who have jobs out in the community, 10 percent of remote workers’ wages go to the state to offset the cost of room and board. All Maine DOC residents get re-entry support for housing and job searches before they’re released, and remote workers leave with even more: up-to-date resumes, a nest egg — and the hope that they’re less likely to need food or housing assistance, or resort to crime to get by.
Followup to our discussion in the previous set of Infinite Thread comments. More details regarding Trump’s proposal to buy Greenland.
[…] In their book “The Divider,” The New York Times’ Peter Baker and The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser reported that the proposal [to buy Greenland] originally came from his longtime friend Ronald Lauder, an heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune. As Baker wrote for The New York Times in 2022:
Mr. Trump later claimed the idea was his personal inspiration. “I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’” he recalled in an interview last year for the book. “You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer. I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different.”
He added: “I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’”
But in fact, Mr. Lauder discussed it with him from the early days of the presidency and offered himself as a back channel to the Danish government to negotiate. John R. Bolton, the national security adviser, assigned his aide Fiona Hill to assemble a small team to brainstorm ideas. They engaged in secret talks with Denmark’s ambassador and produced an options memo.
We can discern three things from Baker and Glasser’s reporting. First, even if Trump really did come up with the idea of buying Greenland himself as he claimed, the motivation of “it’s massive” doesn’t speak highly of his strategic vision for the United States — or his own business sense as a developer. Trump would eventually discard the options presented to him in favor of insisting that Denmark put Greenland up for sale. When the Danes insisted that was off the table, he lashed out at Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, calling her refusal “nasty,” and canceled an official trip.
It’s especially fitting that a real estate developer whose properties have declared bankruptcy multiple times is besotted with this particular landmass. Greenland is one of the oldest bait-and-switch real estate cons in the book, named to encourage settlement on what is a mostly barren expanse of ice. And, as any cartography fan would tell you, the way Greenland looks on most common maps is extremely misleading thanks to the distortion needed to make a globe flat. Instead, the island — while still huge — isn’t quite as massive as Trump seems to think. [Yep. Those are the facts.]
Second, Lauder’s suggestion becoming an obsession for Trump highlights a habit that the president-elect has only leaned into further lately. More than ever, it appears that Trump is more easily influenced by his fellow billionaires than people with actual expertise.
[True! And not a good sign.]
In his first term, he turned to the now-former head of Marvel Entertainment, Isaac Perlmutter, to act as a shadow secretary of veterans affairs. This time, he’s tapped Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to co-lead a glorified cost-cutting commission. According to The Wall Street Journal, the idea came out of a breakfast between Musk and Trump at the house of another billionaire, investor Nelson Peltz. [Sheesh.]
Finally, the whole affair speaks to Trump’s inability to take no for an answer. The Danish government was exceedingly firm in 2019 that Greenland is not for sale. His own national security staff was frustrated by the petulance on display that scuttled any chance of a deeper Danish-American security arrangement regarding Greenlandic territory. Greenland itself is pushing for total independence from Denmark, not for trading one overlord for another. And yet here we are, five years later, seeing Trump making the same demands all over again much to Greenland’s dismay.
One mystery remains: Why bring back the whole Greenland boondoggle now? While it’s not apparent where Lauder first got the idea or why he was interested, he likely isn’t the one who replanted the seed in Trump’s head. Lauder said in 2022 that despite his long relationship with Trump, he wouldn’t donate to the former president’s election campaign. […]
Much like Trump’s threat to reclaim the Panama Canal, there may be something darker at work with his Greenland obsession — a desire to see American territory expanded under his watch, a neo-colonial bent that would fit all to uncomfortably well with his mercantilist worldview. But it’s also entirely possible that, having latched onto an idea previously, Trump is simply now unwilling to let it go, no matter how much people around him try to correct him. It’s a stubbornness that would be unbecoming in most children, let alone in the Oval Office. Now it has the potential to wreak havoc once returned to a seat of power on the world stage.
NEW The Chinese did something remarkable after learning that nearly half their Olympic swimming team tested positive for a banned drug: they secretly began human trials on nearly 150 volunteers to see how the drug passed through their systems and then marshalled the results in an intellectually dishonest way to clear the swimmers of wrongdoing.
“China and the World Anti-Doping Agency say that positive tests for a banned drug among elite Chinese swimmers were a result of unwitting contamination. But the science behind that assertion is not so clear.”
Since the revelation that 23 elite Chinese swimmers tested positive before the 2021 Olympics for a banned performance-enhancing drug, Chinese and antidoping officials have repeatedly defended their decision not to discipline the athletes by invoking scientific analysis.
The officials said the science — which relied heavily on hastily arranged human trials of the drug in question — backed up their conclusion that the swimmers were unwittingly contaminated, most likely through food served to them at a hotel where they were staying during a meet.
But an examination by The New York Times of the secret human trials conducted by the Chinese during their investigation into the positive tests and interviews with experts suggests the science is not as clear-cut as the officials have claimed.
The results cited by China have never been made public. But The Times obtained a copy of the research and shared it with five doctors and scientists with expertise in research, antidoping efforts and toxicology.
All five said that the research was not nearly as unequivocal as the Chinese made it out to be.
“Their conclusions are not intellectually honest,” said Dr. David Juurlink, the head of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Toronto, who reviewed the data. “They make a conclusion that is not backed up by what they found in their study. If you submitted this to a scientific journal worth its salt, that conclusion would be laughed at.”
Faced with scrutiny for its handling of the episode and others like it, the World Anti-Doping Agency has cited China’s science as it has tried to deflect criticism that it looked the other way when confronting a pattern of positive tests among Chinese athletes.
[…] Those questions are central to a Justice Department investigation and a pending decision by the Biden administration about whether to continue funding the World Anti-Doping Agency, known as WADA.
The story of how the Chinese and WADA found themselves under scrutiny began four years ago at a national training meet in China, where elite athletes were preparing for the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games.
Routine testing found that 23 of the swimmers — including some who would go on to win medals in Tokyo — tested positive for trimetazidine, a heart medication. The drug, known as TMZ, helps athletes train harder and recover more quickly.
[…] Over several days, 144 volunteers between the ages of 18 and 32 were given varying doses of TMZ and then had their urine screened to see how quickly the substance left their systems.
The results, Chinese authorities asserted, ruled out doping. The data, they said, pointed to an innocent explanation for the positive tests: The swimmers had all ingested the drug accidentally and unwittingly, probably through food contamination.
China offered no reason for how or why a prescription heart medication made its way into food served to a team of elite athletes. But the research results were cited as justification for clearing the swimmers.
[…] “WADA has stonewalled and tried to intimidate advocates for fair play at every single turn, so it is unsurprising that its officials would also lie to Congress,” said Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee.
[…] The Chinese said that the level of the drug was so low that it could provide no performance-enhancing benefit at the time of competition. They did not address the possibility that the swimmers had taken the drug to enhance their training.
“Focusing on just one aspect to prove a point is known as cognitive bias,” Dr. Cowan said.
The Chinese, Dr. Cowan said, did not appear to have fully considered that the positive tests could just have likely been the tail end of a full dose 11 or more days after taking the drug.
[…] the lack of conclusiveness from the science did not stop the Chinese or WADA from pushing the contamination claim.
It’s been a pretty awful year for the authoritarian theocrats in Iran, and it doesn’t look like things are going to improve anytime soon. Annual Inflation is still running around 35%,[!!] the Rial is fast approaching 800,000 to the dollar, and despite sitting on some of the largest oil and gas reserves in the world, it’s now facing an utterly unprecedented energy crisis heading into winter. From Regtechtimes:
Government offices have been forced to shut down or operate on reduced hours. Schools and universities have shifted entirely to online classes, while major highways and shopping malls have plunged into darkness. Industrial plants have been ordered to halt production as power is denied to factories, paralyzing the country’s manufacturing sector. [Yikes]
The crisis is largely attributed to a combination of international sanctions, poor management, outdated infrastructure, and inefficient energy use. The situation has been further exacerbated by targeted attacks, which have strained the nation’s energy supply even more. Officials have described the situation as dire, and the shortage of natural gas—essential for electricity generation and heating—has forced the government to take drastic measures.
To keep residential homes supplied with heating gas amid plummeting temperatures, the government has chosen to cut gas to power plants instead. This decision has led to widespread electricity shortages across the country, with 17 power plants completely shut down and the rest operating only partially.
Regarding those “targeted attacks” against Iran’s infrastructure — the NYT points out that was Israel’s contribution to the mix:
A lesser-known factor has exacerbated the energy crisis this year: In February Israel blew up two gas pipelines in Iran as part of its covert war with the country. As a result, the government quietly tapped into emergency gas reserves to avoid service disruption to millions of people, according to an official from the oil ministry and Mr. Hosseini, the member of the Chamber of Commerce’s energy committee.
Mr. Pezeshkian, elected president in July, has said that his government inherited a depleted energy store that it has not been able to replenish.
Interestingly, Iran’s quasi-reformist government has taken a couple of steps recently to try and deal with other sources of popular discontent. From the Financial Times:
The reformist government of Masoud Pezeshkian has lifted Iran’s ban on WhatsApp and Google Play, in a first step towards easing internet restrictions in the nation of 85mn people. A high-level meeting chaired by the president on Tuesday overcame resistance from hardline factions within the Islamic regime, Iranian media reported, as the government seeks to reduce pressures on civil society.
“Today, we took the first step towards lifting internet restrictions by demonstrating unity,” Sattar Hashemi, Iran’s minister of telecommunications, wrote on X. “This path will continue.
”This move comes after Pezeshkian refused to enforce a hijab law recently ratified by the hardline parliament that would have imposed tougher punishments on women choosing not to observe a strict dress code. His government has also quietly reinstated dozens of university students and professors who had previously been barred from studying or teaching.
Whether these measures will even remotely suffice to head off growing dissatisfaction with the mullahs’ morality police or the Republican Guards’ rapacious corruption remains to be seen, but with the humiliating loss of their main Mid-East ally, Syria’s Bashar Assad, along with a complete failure to prevent Israel from taking out their air defenses and missile production sites, it doesn’t look too promising — and the theocrats in Teheran may soon be joining Assad’s regime on the ash heap of history.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned Russia’s President Vladimir Putin for greenlighting an “inhumane” Christmas Day attack, including missiles and drones, that damaged Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and left thousands with power outages.
“Today, Putin deliberately chose Christmas for an attack,” Zelensky said in a Wednesday post on social platform X. “What could be more inhumane? Over 70 missiles, including ballistic ones, and more than a hundred attack drones. The targets are our energy infrastructure. They continue to fight for a blackout in Ukraine.”
Ukraine’s leader said the country’s defense systems shot down more than 50 missiles and a “significant” number of drones. Others hit multiple cities and caused power outages in “several regions.”
Russia attacked Ukraine’s energy and fuel supplies with 78 ground and air missiles and 106 Shahed drones, according to Ukraine’s air force. The military branch said it intercepted 59 missiles and 54 Shahed drones.
Because of the attack, one person died in the Dnipropetrovsk region. In the Kharkiv region, at least six people were injured.
This was the 13th time Russia attacked Ukraine’s energy system, according to DTEK, the country’s biggest private energy company. It was the 10th strike on DTEK’s facilities, damaging power stations and causing nationwide outages. The energy company said the strike killed one of its engineers.
“There are no depths to which Russia will not sink. Denying light and warmth to millions of peace-loving people as they celebrate Christmas is a depraved and evil act that must be answered,” DTEK’s CEO Maxim Timchenko said Wednesday on X. “We appeal to every ally of Ukraine to end this state-sponsored terrorism now by giving our armed forces the air defence ammunition they need to protect essential energy infrastructure.”
Russia’s military launched at least 12 missile strikes on “critical” infrastructure in the Kharkiv region, according to regional head Oleh Syniehubov’s post on Telegram. About half a million people in the Kharkiv area are without electricity. […]
“Good Thing All Of Our Childhood Toys/Pets Have Saved Christmas At One Point Or Another!”
Happy Christmas! Or Happy Wednesday! Whichever works for you!
By now, it is entirely possible that you are sick to death of Christmas carols, Christmas decorations, Christmas shopping, etc. But can we ever truly be sick of Christmas specials? Well, we probably can — but that’s what I’m bringing you this morning anyway. Because I love you. […]
Available at the link are several videos in which toys or pets “save Christmas.” Funny and cute, especially when compared to past “war on Christmas” stuff from rightwing doofuses.
Caption for a New Yorker cartoon showing three wise men traveling by camel: “It’s a long plan, but if we play our cards right it will lead to the ‘Muppet Christmas Carol’ movie, and it will all be worth it.”
In other news, my neighbor’s inflatable nativity scene has collapsed thanks to the weight of the snow that fell on top of it.
birgerjohanssonsays
A K-type star (orange dwarf) has Earth-sized planets, 2 confirmed 1 possible.
.
All previous small exoplanets have orbited ‘unsuitable’ small red dwarf M stars.
It is difficult to find small planets near larger stars because of limitations to current instruments.
This star has 14% luminosity of the sun, 2/3 of the solar mass, and is ca. 40 light years distant.
These planets are all too hot for life but others (not detectable w. current instruments) can exist in the hospitable zone. Note that the orbits seem closely packed compared to the solar system.
.https://www.stellarcatalog.com/stars/hd-101581
birgerjohanssonsays
Correction. The star has 74% the mass of the sun and has 2/3 the radius. Observe how quickly luminosity falls off with mass.
I forget the age of the system, if it is older than the sun tectonic activity on the planets as well as magnetic fields may have ceased, ruining any hospitable conditions.
birgerjohanssonsays
Sorry, the system is almost 7 Gyr old, so probably the isotopes left in the cores of the planets will be unable to keep the cores churning. No tectonic activity, no protective magnetic fields. Even if planets exist in the hospitable zone they will be larger versions of Mars.
If those Christians were anything like Mother Theresa they would have required the sick to convert before giving aid.
birgerjohanssonsays
It is now 20 years since the Great Tsunami in southern Asia. Hundreds of thousands probably died but numbers are poorly constrained, many died in places with little administrative infrastructure.
The 500 Swedish tourist victims were a larger proportion of the Swedish population than the 9/11 dead were of the American.
Christmas Day has arrived, and many readers will have had their decorations up for several weeks (or months if you’re a major retail outlet). But do you have this year’s must-have festive tree topper – a biblically accurate angel?
Yep, I hate to break it to you, but the bible does not feature angels that look like winged choirboys. Biblical angels are a lot less… angelic. In fact, they’re terrifying. But that’s not stopped them from becoming the viral design trend of Christmas 2024 …
The idea to use biblically accurate angels as tree toppers appears to have come from Reverand Kira Austin-Young, an episcopal priest in the Diocese of Tennessee, and her husband, Michael Schupbach, who’s a puppet-maker…
Since Renaissance times, churches have tended to depict angels as blonde white kids with fluffy wings, but no such characters exist in the bible. The few descriptions of angels that exist in Revelations and some other books in the Old Testament describe something very different, with one description mentioning six wings each with multiple eyes…
(Canada) …
But now, she is among the eight residents who are being evicted on Boxing Day for installing security cameras around their houses…
Kenney says other tenants complained about their cameras and within a couple of days, they were issued a notice to remove the cameras on the grounds of “structural damage” from installation…
@4 Lynna posted the headline: ‘The bald eagle is officially America’s national bird after Biden’s signature’
I reply: However, if you look at the tRUMPite government officials, appointees and billionaires, I say the official bird is really the ‘bald ego’. And, I will flip them ‘the bird’ at every opportunity.
@27 Reginald Selkirk posted the article: What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?
I reply: It’s not that that is important, it’s that we got stuck with a rectum as president elect!
…
In October, a bill was introduced proposing transferring the management of the land where the statue sits from federal oversight to the Catholic Church. Proponents argue that the church’s stewardship will resolve longstanding infrastructure and accessibility issues. Critics, however, see the move as a threat to Brazil’s secular state and its environmental commitments…
The bill proposes carving out the Christ and surrounding area from the Tijuca National Park, making it a separate and independent portion to be administered by the Archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro. The Church being solely responsible for this area, it would have to take on any needed renovations, but it could also start collecting the revenue from ticket sales.
The current arrangement splits responsibilities between the church and the federal government. Despite being on federal land, the archdiocese has special authorization to worship at the statue and adjoining chapel any time, and is responsible for their maintenance, though not the infrastructure around it.
The federal government oversees the entirety of the park and its infrastructure – including roads, transportation, bathrooms, escalators, and ticketing to the statue. A portion of ticket sales and concessions is paid to the Church, and according to a park spokesperson, and in 2023 it amounted to $1.78 million…
A power cable linking Finland and Estonia under the Baltic Sea suffered an outage, prompting an investigation, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said Wednesday.
Writing on X, Orpo said that power transmission through the Estlink-2 cable stopped Wednesday and that authorities were “investigating the matter.” He said the interruption would not affect electricity supplies in Finland…
birgerjohanssonsays
Ancient genomes provide final word in Indo-European linguistic origins!
The Russian government has banned crypto mining in ten regions for a period of six years, according to reporting by the state-owned news agency Tass. Russia has cited the industry’s high power consumption rates as the primary reason behind the ban. Crypto is particularly power-hungry, as mining operations already account for nearly 2.5 percent of US energy use…
Juan Manuel Gutiérrez is a Mexican priest who now serves in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the largest and probably the most diverse in the United States. His name is now forever linked to the young Italian Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died at the age of 24 and who next year, during the 2025 Jubilee, will be declared a saint thanks to the miracle the 38-year-old priest experienced through his intercession.
On Nov. 25, Pope Francis approved the decree of the miracle Gutiérrez received through the intercession of Frassati…
He wanted to be convinced in the faith and began to study the history of the Church and about Jesus, and discovered that “there is a lot of historical evidence, even non-Catholic, nonreligious, that gives reasons to believe that Jesus walked the Earth.”
That’s a total lie.
…
In October 2017, while playing basketball with other seminarians, Gutiérrez tore his Achilles tendon. An MRI on Oct. 31 confirmed the injury, and on Nov. 1, the solemnity of All Saints, he decided to pray a novena to Blessed Frassati to ask for help with his ailment…
A few days after beginning my novena, I went to pray in the seminary chapel. I was alone, there was no one else, and I knelt down to pray. And while I was praying, I began to feel a sensation of heat in the area of my injured heel.” …
Since he suffered the injury, Gutiérrez had been wearing an ankle brace, but he stopped wearing it after what happened in the chapel. On Nov. 15, six days after finishing his novena, he went to see the surgeon who was going to operate on him.
The priest said the surgeon looked at the images of the injury on the computer, did the Thompson test on him, which checks for a tear, but found nothing and, in addition, the then-seminarian simply felt no pain in the area that had been affected…
Achilles injuries cover a wide range, from simple inflammation to a complete rupture. No X-rays or medical documents are shown with this article.
KGsays
“there is a lot of historical evidence, even non-Catholic, nonreligious, that gives reasons to believe that Jesus walked the Earth.”
That’s a total lie. – Reginald Selkirk@34
Rather, an exaggeration. But the evidence that there was such a person as Jesus is sufficient to convince the great majority of relevant experts, including atheists, agnostics and observant Jews. Jesus Mythicism is a crank belief-system (see here) which has unfortunately become popular among atheists. Evidence of the “miracles” associated with him and believed in by most Christians, no. Mostly because there is nothing intrinsically unlikely in the existence of a Jewish apocolyptic preacher and faith-healer who annoyed the Roman authorities and got crucified, while there is no reason to believe miracles ever happen, but miracle stories are associated with many historical figures.
lumipunasays
Re 30 (latest suspicious cable breach in Baltic Sea):
According to Finnish news, our coast guard has stopped a tanker named Eagle S, which was sailing from Russia westwards past Helsinki, and had crossed over the Estlink-2 cable just when it broke (and suspiciously slowed down just then, according to people on social media who monitor ship movements at marinetraffic.com). The tanker, flagged in Cook Islands and owned by an obscure company in Arab Emirates, has been previously listed as a part of Russia’s presumed “shadow oil fleet”, and an environmental risk due to its old age.
Some official information is supposed to be released later today. The link below has maps of the area (only one of the two Estlink cables is broken).
@35 KG
But the evidence that there was such a person as Jesus is sufficient to convince the great majority of relevant experts, including atheists, agnostics and observant Jews.
Erm, no.
If you are arguing with some rando on the Interwebs, you usually have to start by explaining that the Gospels are not four independent eyewitness accounts, and that the supposed biographical details were obviously manufactured at a later date to match out of context ‘predictions,’ which is why the childhood of Jesus in Matthew and Luke completely fail to match. Let’s skip past that.
If you ask someone better-informed, you will probably get the few verses in Josephus, some of which are obviously fake. I also point out that Josephus was not even born until after the alleged time of Jesus’ death, and that Jesus, the Greek-ified form of Joshua, was a very popular Jewish name at the time. You would need evidence about a very specific Jesus in order to count. About that time they will switch from actual evidence to the argument, “I don’t need evidence for such an ordinary claim as that there was a wandering preacher named Jesus in the early first century”
That is when you have to remind them of the original premise they are allegedly arguing:
there is a lot of historical evidence, even non-Catholic, nonreligious, that gives reasons to believe that Jesus walked the Earth.
In 2018, Rob Joyce, then Donald Trump’s White House Cybersecurity Coordinator, gave a surprise talk at the legendary hacking conference Shmoocon about his hobby.
As the former head of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations squad – the people who crack systems and gather intelligence for the US government – Joyce was also the friendly public face of the agency. The agency didn’t come out of the Edward Snowden affair with a great reputation when the ex-NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower made public the existence of the NSA data collection programs back in June 2013. Many in the security industry were peeved at the agency’s disregard for privacy and the accepted norms under which people assumed it operated.
Joyce was part of a campaign to make the NSA acceptable again, and he was doing a good job. We covered his talk at the first Enigma security conference, and it was unusually frank – most talks by agency personnel are about as exciting as watching paint dry.
But the Shmoocon talk (see below) was a personal matter. It turns out Joyce is a big fan of Christmas, and of hacking the seasonal strings of lights that hang off so many American houses during the holiday season. As you can see from the video below, he’s serious about it and applies all the rigor normally used to break into adversaries’ networks to put on a show…
StevoRsays
Meanwhile in the Hole-y Lands “safe zone” on Christmas night or was it Boxing Day night there. Not that it mattres much to them I’m sure :
A newborn baby died from the cold in a tent encampment in Al-Mawasi, in southern Gaza, a health official said Wednesday, highlighting the stark challenges to survival faced by Palestinian children displaced from their homes amid Israel’s ongoing assault on the strip.
Sela Mahmoud Al-Fasih “froze to death from the extreme cold” in Al-Mawasi, Dr. Munir Al-Bursh, the director general of the Ministry of Health in Gaza, posted on X on Wednesday.
In the past 48 hours, Sela and at least two other infants – a three-day-old and a one-month-old – have died there from low temperatures and a lack of access to warm shelter, Dr. Ahmed Al-Farra, the head of pediatrics and obstetrics at Nasser Hospital, in Khan Younis, told CNN.
Those that survived Christmas night, Boxing Day night, how many more nights will they live? If they do live, how will it affect them, for the rest of their lives – and ours?
An Azerbaijan Airlines flight that crashed in Kazakhstan on Wednesday was downed by a Russian air defence system, four sources in Azerbaijan with knowledge of the investigation told Reuters…
Erm, yes. Read the articles at the link I gave and argue against them, rather than straw persons.
That is when you have to remind them of the original premise they are allegedly arguing:
there is a lot of historical evidence, even non-Catholic, nonreligious, that gives reasons to believe that Jesus walked the Earth.
As I said, this is an exaggeration, but not, as you claimed “a total lie”, which it would be only if there was no “non-Catholic, nonreligious” evidence for Jesus, which is clearly false. Detailed analysis of the references in Josephus – who has specific ways to distinguish between people with the same name – is convincing evidence that there was such a person. Tacitus also refers to him, in terms which make clear he regarded Jesus as a historical individual. There are many individuals in the same era whose existence is uncontroversially accepted on the evidence of a single, non-contemporary reference.
KGsays
birgerjohansson@22,
I’m somewhat sceptical of that article – I’m not saying it’s definitely wrong, but I don’t think Kennedy gives very strong evidence. His claim is that Christianity spread because Christians gave aid to sick people in an epidemic – the “Plague of Cyprian” in the mid-third century. Kennedy gives estimates of 150,000 Christians in the Roman Empire in 200 C.E. and 3,000,000 in 300 C.E. That’s a 20-fold increase in a century. That only requires a steady increase of a little over a 3% per year. And his only evidence for the Christians being better at helping sick people comes from… a bishop!
KGsays
Lynna, OM@9,
Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland makes more sense in geostrategic terms than might appear at first glance (although it’s unlikely he has thought about it beyond “I want!! Gimme!!!”). With global heating, both minerals on Greenland itself, and oil and gas under the Arctic Ocean, will become more readily available, and miltary use of that ocean and its surrounding lands more feasible.
Reginald Selkirk @ 40
Eussians shooting downa a civilian airliner? That sounds familiar.
The Soviet zunion shot down two Korean airliners, the Russians shot down an airliner passing near Ukraine before the invasion.
“To ensure the safety of civil aircraft flights, temporary restrictions have been introduced on the operation of Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo, Vnukovo, Zhukovsky and Kaluga airports,” Russia’s aviation authority said.
Russian authorities on Thursday closed all four of Moscow’s airports, plus a fifth one in a city about 100 miles southwest of the country’s capital, citing unspecified safety concerns.
In total, five airports, four of which are located just outside Russia’s capital, Moscow, were “temporarily not accepting or sending flights,” according to a statement from Russia’s aviation authority, Rosaviatsia.
[…] All four of Moscow airports reopened after being briefly closed, with the fifth airport, in Kaluga, around 100 miles from Moscow reopening later on Thursday afternoon.
Officials did not give an immediate or precise reason for the closures.
[…] On Thursday, air raid sirens sounded in the Oryol region and in Sevastopol in Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine after invading in 2014. Sirens were also reported in the Russian city of Taganrog, located in Rostov, which borders Ukraine, local authorities said in a post to Telegram.
[…] The airports temporary closures come on the same day that the Kremlin warned against speculating what may have caused an Azerbaijan Airlines flight to crash, killing 38 of the 67 people on board, after an aviation expert said evidence indicated that a Russian anti-missile battery may have brought down the passenger plane.
There is growing speculation that Russian air defenses may have been behind the crash, which occurred as the plane approached Grozny, its destination. Chechnya was being attacked by drones at the time.
“Subsequent reporting and contextual information, including the follow-on video examination of the wreckage,” indicated that “the flight was likely shot down by a Russian air defense system,” said Matthew Borie, chief intelligence officer at the aviation security firm Osprey Flight Solutions, in an interview with NBC News.
On Wednesday, many Ukrainians were forced to celebrate Christmas without heat or power after Russia launched an attack on the country’s energy infrastructure.
Russian companies are using bitcoin to evade Western sanctions, thanks to a new law, the country’s Finance Minister Anton Siluanov confirmed in a television interview.
Why it matters: Russia’s economy has been hampered by difficulties in making and receiving international payments, even with countries like China that don’t use the U.S. dollar as their reserve currencies.
[…] The Kremlin last month created an experimental legal framework for cryptocurrency miners, which includes a provision whereby approved entities can use crypto for international trade.
It also could be a boon for Russian energy companies, which now can sell to a power-hungry group of domestic bitcoin miners.
Reality check: Just because Russian companies are allowed by their government to make payments in bitcoin, that doesn’t necessarily mean all other countries will accept it — both due to their own laws and pressure on domestic banks from Western financial regulators.
The bottom line: This development could create a challenge for President-elect Trump, who is both a crypto convert and advocate for U.S. dollar dominance.
For anyone wondering what the second Donald Trump administration will look like in practice, look no further than the Lone Star State. Under Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, Texas has already perfected the art of using all levers of government to force unpopular policies on its citizens.
Take, for example, imposing religion upon schoolchildren. Well, just theone religion. In November, the Texas State Board of Education voted to approve a new elementary school curriculum that the Texas Observer politely characterized as “Bible-infused.” How Bible-infused, exactly? When first-graders learn about the Liberty Bell, they’ll also learn that “God told Moses about the laws he wanted his people to follow.” Fifth-graders studying Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” will be challenged to consider “how the disciples may have felt upon hearing Jesus telling them about his betrayal and death.” [Whoa. Quite bad.]
Republicans are quick to tell critics that schools don’t have to adopt the curriculum, but they get an extra $60 per pupil if they do. Since Texas fails to adequately fund schools and districts keep having to tighten their belts by cutting staff, eliminating services, and reducing department budgets, that $60 per pupil is desperately needed.
At least Texas hasn’t followed the lead of Oklahoma in that state’s quest to require a Trump Bible in every classroom.
Notably, to get this change through, Abbott had to engage in some trickery. Members of the school board are elected, and earlier this year, Aicha Davis, a Democrat who was on the board, won a Texas House seat. Voters in her district elected another Democrat, Tiffany Clark, to fill the seat. But rather than seat Clark, Abbott handpicked a Republican, Leslie Recine, to fill the seat until the end of the year. Recine was the deciding vote in favor of the curriculum.
Abbott has also tied the fortunes of Texas public schools to the legislation’s embrace of vouchers, functionally starving education funding until the state legislature agrees to enact a school voucher program. Requiring federal tax dollars to be shifted from public schools to private ones—especially religious schools—is a key goal of Project 2025, and Trump’s pick for the Department of Education, the comically-underqualified Linda McMahon, is a big fan. [True.]
[…] Ken Paxton […] opened an investigation into Media Matters for reporting—correctly!—that ads from major companies were running alongside white nationalist and antisemitic posts since Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X. That isn’t the only time Paxton has decided to use his power to do Musk’s bidding.
Last month, Paxton announced an investigation into what he’s calling a “possible conspiracy” by companies to boycott “certain social media platforms.” […]
before the Supreme Court threw out Roe v. Wade, Texas passed SB8, which gave private citizens the right to sue anyone who aided or abetted an abortion—and get at least $10,000 in damages if they won. This allowed the state to sidestep the fact that abortion was still legal, as it could say that it was neither banning abortion nor taking any government action to stop someone from having one.
SB8 was the brainchild of Texas attorney Jonathan Mitchell, a rabidly anti-choice lawyer who also represented Trump in his lawsuit against Colorado after that state kicked him off the 2024 ballot. Mitchell is also a key proponent of using the Comstock Act to make it a crime to ship abortion pills—regardless of whether those pills were destined for a state where abortion is legal. This would result in a de facto abortion ban, as medication abortions account for 63% of all abortions […] Mitchell has even bragged that if the Comstock Act were used in this way, Republicans wouldn’t even need a federal ban.
Project 2025’s authors are fans of the idea, and incoming V President JD Vance loves the idea so much that he already asked the Department of Justice to use the Act to crack down on the mailing of abortion pills—way back in January 2023.
It’s a perfectly Trumpian approach. It allows the administration to insist that they have not banned abortion while managing to do it anyway—exactly what Texas managed with SB8. It’s a smug, cynical approach to governing, one which Texas has perfected, and Trump now has another four years to hone.
[…] losing most GOP votes for his one goal of shutting down the debt ceiling. Most importantly, the process thoroughly exposed Musk’s hold over Trump. Democrats started the “President Musk” meme, and, predictably, Trump’s narcissism has led to defensiveness. First, Trump’s spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt put out a statement insisting, “President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”
It wasn’t a full stop, because Trump himself stepped into the fray Sunday at a Turning Points USA event, during an especially sleepy speech. “No, he’s not going to be president, that I can tell you,” Trump told the crowd. “And I’m safe. You know why he can’t be? He wasn’t born in this country.”
The generous interpretation of this comment is that Trump is attacking a strawman, as no one thinks Musk is literally going to be president. They are accusing Musk of being the true power behind the throne. A less generous interpretation is that Trump, age 78, got confused and forgot that he doesn’t have to keep campaigning. Either way, lots of folks on social media recalled the famous line from “Game of Thrones”: “Any man who must say ‘I am the king’ is no true king at all.”
[…] In art and politics equally, 2024 has been—to me, at least—a swerving journey between high peaks and low depths, blind confusions and piercing revelations, the crooked and the straight. Events popped out of nowhere and dissolved just as quickly as they’d appeared. One shock followed another until, by year’s end, it was hard to feel really shocked. […]
[…] Life doesn’t offer many answers. But it does seem, these days, as if big, overweening institutions—a record label or a streaming service or a government, the shocking bureaucracy of a school—are determined to crowd out even more sun, making it all the more difficult to see what’s what. Is what I’m seeing inflation or price gouging? A big organic hit or a Netflix-pumped mirage? Nobody can seem to find the numbers to show and to prove. Everything’s interpretation. That kind of obfuscation was all I could think about in April and May, when, on TV and the social feeds dancing up and down on my phone, I watched universities sic police officers and other keepers of official violence on their students. The kids were galvanized by unprecedented images out of Gaza—explosions, white rubble, bloody kids—and decided to make noise where they lived and had the most leverage. […]
I was at a book fair in Idaho, under a big white lovely tent, when a rumor started going around. Again: phones. People craned down at them, hoping then quickly confirming that it was true. Joe Biden had resigned from the Presidential race—the right decision at the wrong time—leaving room for his Vice-President to run. Even then, in those first moments, you could feel the strained stirrings of “joy” that would become the much ballyhooed theme of the first month of Kamala Harris’s short campaign. After so much uncertainty, so much muddling through muck, people understandably wanted something clear and clean and good to work and root for. […]
From the Guardian’s diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour:
Amid the craziness, three distinct forms of response to Trump are starting to emerge.
An “ideologically aligned” group is emboldened, including populists in Europe, Latin America and Israel who believe their often Russia-friendly brand of nationalism will benefit from being in the slipstream of America First. The breakup of the European Union, an Argentina-style chainsaw taken to regulation, a new security architecture with Russia, regime change in Tehran: all become possibilities.
A second group, led by China, foresees a diplomatic shake-up in which America becomes an agent of instability, leading to some kind of globalised realignment. For Beijing – facing the threat of 50% tariffs – the silver lining is that Trump’s willingness to treat friends as foes may create a leadership vacuum that China, as the so-called advocate of “the global majority”, can exploit. […]
The third […] group is made up of America’s “legacy partners” in Europe and the G7 group of liberal democracies. They still hope that with the right mix of argument, flattery and self-abnegation they can make a rational case that appeals to Trump’s self-interest.
lumipunasays
Update to 30 and 36: It was revealed that Finnish authorities (either the police or coast guard depending on source) have boarded the tanker Eagle S, which is presumably still held at the sea near Helsinki.
Meanwhile, turns out that four undersea data cables (in addition to the aforementioned electricity cable) have been either cut or damaged around Finland. Thus far, my internet is working.
Sometimes we’ve just got to lighten up for a little while. (even though we’re entering the New Dark Ages)
Here’s some fun with fossils: https://comicskingdom.com/bizarro/2024-12-22
Pierce R. Butlersays
KG @ # 35: Jesus Mythicism is a crank belief-system (see here) …
Please note that the “historyforatheists.com” source you link to appears a bit cranky as well, its proprietor regularly taking a dogmatic and arrogant insistence on his own authority, dismissing disagreements with ad-hominem put-downs, and refusing to address relevant points brought up by others.
Though not qualified to make any such judgments myself, I still can’t take too seriously any historian who won’t acknowledge room for doubt in the face of such limited, contradictory, tendentious-yet-ambiguous evidence as the Jesus stories. Even the avowed historical-Jesus advocate Bart Ehrman concedes that neither the words nor the actions recounted in “Scripture” merit any confidence at all.
Reginald Selkirksays
RE: Panama, Greenland, privatizing the USPS, killing Daylight Savings Time –
I get the impression the Trump camp is just throwing random things at the wall to see if anything sticks. None of these were positions he raised during his campaign.
In better times, we would be able to say, “No one would be crazy enough to actually try that.” I miss those days.
A federal judge Monday tossed out parts of an Arkansas state law that allowed librarians and booksellers to be sent to prison for up to a year for allowing minors to access “obscene” or “harmful” materials, whatever local officials might decide is “obscene” or “harmful.” Probably gay penguins.
In his ruling, US District Judge Timothy Brooks found that the law, Act 372, violated the First Amendment and also generally sucked, was overly vague, and didn’t provide adequate guidance to libraries and booksellers to help them avoid being arbitrarily prosecuted. The law created a new process for complaints and required libraries (tell you what, just assume “and booksellers” is part of every sentence, OK?) to shelve “harmful” materials in a special adults-only section, although it didn’t mandate that such a section be behind a beaded curtain like at an old video store. A similar law in Idaho — minus the librarian-jailing — is also being challenged in federal court, as are multiple other censorship laws.
Brooks wrote that the law “deputizes librarians and booksellers as the agents of censorship; when motivated by the fear of jail time, it is likely they will shelve only books fit for young children and segregate or discard the rest,” which was of course the point. For all the Mad Moms’ insistence that they only want to protect tiny innocent kids from “obscene” materials, the actual targets of book banning tend to be anything rightwing parents dislike, especially mentions of LGBTQ people, books about race, and sex education.
Not surprisingly, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said that while he’ll respect the ruling, he plans to appeal, and Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement calling Act 372 “just common sense” because “schools and libraries shouldn’t put obscene material in front of our kids,” so there.
Holly Dickson, executive director of the ACLU of Arkansas, said […] “This was an attempt to ‘thought police,’ and this victory over totalitarianism is a testament to the courage of librarians, booksellers, and readers who refused to bow to intimidation.”
[…] Brooks also found that, […] “Material subject to challenge is not limited to sexual content, and the law does not define ‘appropriateness’ at all,” Brooks wrote. “Instead, a book challenger may target any expression of ideas that he or she personally deems inappropriate.”
The law also didn’t require a challenger to be a library user, to have read the material being challenged, or even to be an Arkansas resident, leaving the law open to abuse, which was the point to begin with. [Talk about overreach.]
Here’s hoping that Judge Brooks’s ruling is just the first of many to follow as more Americans decide they’d rather not be ruled by a minority of rightwing creeps, the end.
“Louisiana’s Ban On Promoting Flu Shot Going Very Well … For The Flu”
Congratulations to the influenza virus, sorry to everyone else.
Hey! Are you a normal, non-conspiracy-minded person living in Louisiana who doesn’t particularly enjoy being sick but just hasn’t gotten around to getting their flu shot yet? Well, you may want to get on that as soon as possible, because having the flu sucks and you really do not want to get it. Transmission rates in the state are currently surging — a relatively foreseeable but unfortunate result of the state health department’s bizarre decision to bar health workers from promoting flu, COVID, and mpox vaccines this year.
The CDC’s latest data shows that transmission rates for the virus are in the “very high” range, an elite distinction shared only by Oregon — which is not entirely surprising as, despite the state’s liberal bent, its rural areas have long been notoriously full of anti-vaxxers. [map at the link, showing influenza activity as “high” in my state, as well as in others.]
Earlier this month, several employees of the Louisiana Department of Health reached out to NPR and other news organizations to report that, back in September and October, they had been given orders to not do anything to promote flu vaccinations this year — including so much as letting people know that flu and COVID shots are available if people want them. [Doofuses promoting a return to the Dark Ages?]
Via NPR:
NPR has confirmed the policy was discussed at this meeting, and at two other meetings held within the department’s Office of Public Health, on Oct. 3 and Nov. 21, through interviews with four employees at the Department of Health, which employs more than 6,500 people and is the state’s largest agency.
According to the employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they fear losing their jobs or other forms of retaliation, the policy would be implemented quietly and would not be put in writing.
Staffers were also told that it applies to every aspect of the health department’s work: Employees could not send out press releases, give interviews, hold vaccine events, give presentations or create social media posts encouraging the public to get the vaccines. They also could not put up signs at the department’s clinics that COVID, flu or mpox vaccines were available on site.
The new policy is likely attributable to Dr. Ralph Abraham, Louisiana’s newly appointed Surgeon General who happens to not believe in COVID vaccines.
In a statement to NPR, the state says that the plan to avoid mentioning vaccines altogether is part of their plan to move “away from one-size-fits-all paternalistic guidance” with regards to vaccines and to a stance in which “immunization for any vaccine, along with practices like mask wearing and social distancing, are an individual’s personal choice.” Which, you know, will not be especially helpful should we have another pandemic, given that these are measures meant to help other people in addition to oneself. Still, we’re unclear how “letting people know they can get the flu shot” is at cross purposes with it “being an individual’s personal choice.”
It’s likely to become even more of a problem in certain states across the country if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is put in charge of Health and Human Services, given his stance on vaccines.
Not only has the regular flu been surging, but just last week Louisiana became the first state to report a severe case of a human being with bird flu.
Via NBC:
“The patient is experiencing severe respiratory illness related to H5N1 infection and is currently hospitalized in critical condition,” said Emma Herrock, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Health Department.
The CDC said the patient was likely exposed to the virus from a backyard flock, which would mark the first time such a flock has been associated with a bird flu infection in a U.S. resident.
“While an investigation into the source of this infection in Louisiana is ongoing, it is believed that the patient that was reported by Louisiana had exposure to sick or dead birds on their property,” said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
The hospital also said that the patient is 65 and has underlying medical conditions, which means that she’s probably not that one girl from the current season of “90 Day Fiancé: Before The 90 Days” who kept talking about how chickens were her family. [video at the link]
There still, thankfully, has not been a case of human-to-human transmission of bird flu, but if we do ever get to that point, we’ll probably be entirely fucked, because we can pretty much guarantee that half of the country will do nothing to prevent its transmission beyond gulping down tubes of horse paste. [Screengrab of online conversation is available at the link]
Because I do not work for the Louisiana state Health Department, I am free to tell all Louisianans to get out there and get their flu shots (and their COVID shots!) without fear of reprisal. At least for now! So go do that! In fact, go and do that regardless of the state you live in, if you haven’t already, because having the flu is a poor time and Ivermectin will not make it go away.
On New Year’s Day, millions of Americans will see their prescription drug costs capped at $2,000 per year—and it’s thanks to the actions of President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress.
Under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, federal law prohibits out-of-pocket prescription drug costs from exceeding $2,000 for many Medicare beneficiaries. The AARP estimates that about 3.2 million Americans will save money on prescription medications in 2025, which will increase to more than 4 million people by 2029.
But, of course, Republicans didn’t support the law that made this happen. […]
The Inflation Reduction Act combined several provisions to cut health care costs—including an insulin benefit for which Donald Trump falsely claimed credit [infuriating]—along with incentives for companies and organizations to use clean energy technologies.
Since the law hit the books, the GOP has tried to undermine it with 54 unsuccessful votes led by Republicans in Congress to repeal portions if not all of the law.
[…] During the election, Trump claimed that he would not cut safety net programs like Medicare, but during an interview with CNBC in March he said that “there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting.”
[snipped details pertaining to Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Mehmet Oz.]
Project 2025, a far-right initiative written by several Trump-affiliated individuals, has put Medicare squarely within its sights by backing Medicare Advantage, which would significantly limit millions of enrollees’ choices of doctors and specialists. Trump also chose one of the key architects of Project 2025, Russell Vought, to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Similarly, Trump is directly connected to one of the most visible attacks on health care benefits: the push to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). […]
Despite Republican opposition, Democrats were able to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which is helping millions of Americans. But the incoming president has a history of attacking health care benefits, and the prescription drug price cap could be his next casualty.
In a string of visits, dinners, calls, monetary pledges and social media overtures, big tech chiefs — including Apple’s Tim Cook, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos— have joined a parade of business and world leaders in trying to improve their standing with President-elect Donald Trump before he takes office in January. […]
Tech companies and leaders have now poured millions into his inauguration fund, a sharp increase — in most cases — from past pledges to incoming presidents. But what does the tech industry expect to gain out of their renewed relationships with Trump?
During an interview Tuesday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the incoming Trump administration seems more interested in hearing about issues that are important to the industry […]”
Clearing the way for AI development
A clue to what the industry is looking for came just days before the election when Microsoft executives — who’ve largely tried to show a neutral or bipartisan stance — joined with a close Trump ally, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, to publish a blog post outlining their approach to artificial intelligence policy.
“Regulation should be implemented only if its benefits outweigh its costs,” said the document signed by Andreessen, his business partner Ben Horowitz, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the company’s president, Brad Smith.
They also urged the government to back off on any attempt to strengthen copyright laws that would make it harder for companies to use publicly available data to train their AI systems. And they said, “the government should examine its procurement practices to enable more startups to sell technology to the government.”
Trump has pledged to rescind President Joe Biden’s sweeping AI executive order, which sought to protect people’s rights and safety without stifling innovation. He hasn’t specified what he would do in its place, but his campaign said AI development should be “rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.”
Easier energy for data centers
Trump’s choice to head the Interior Department, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, has spoken openly about the need to boost electricity production to meet increased demand from data centers and artificial intelligence.
[…] as data centers begin to consume more resources, some residents are pushing back against the world’s most powerful corporations over concerns about the economic, social and environmental health of their communities.
Changing the antitrust discussion
[…] Although federal regulators began cracking down on Google and Facebook during Trump’s first term as president — and flourished under Biden — most experts expect his second administration to ease up on antitrust enforcement and be more receptive to business mergers.
Google may benefit from Trump’s return after he made comments on the campaign trail suggesting a breakup of the company isn’t in the U.S. national interest, after a judge declared its search engine an illegal monopoly. But recent nominations put forward by his transition team have favored those who have been critical of Big Tech companies, suggesting Google won’t be entirely off the hook.
Fending off the EU
Cook’s notoriously rocky relationship with the EU can be traced back to a 2016 ruling from Brussels in a tax case targeting Apple. Cook slammed the bloc’s order for Apple to pay back up to 13 billion euros ($13.7 billion) in Irish back taxes as “total political crap.”
Trump, then in his first term as president, piled on, referring to the European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who was spearheading a campaign on special tax deals and a crackdown on Big Tech companies, as someone who “really hates the U.S.”
Brussels was eventually vindicated after the bloc’s top court rejected Apple’s appeal this year, though it didn’t stop Cook from calling Trump to complain, […]
Making Amends?
Altman, Amazon and Meta all pledged to donate $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural fund.
Salesforce’s Benioff said Tuesday that he won’t be donating money to the inauguration because of his ties to Time, which named Trump as its “Person of The Year” — a decision that landed picture of the president elect on the magazine’s cover. “I think we just donated that photo,” Benioff said as he chuckled. “He can use the Time magazine cover for free.”
During his first term, Trump criticized Amazon and railed against the political coverage at The Washington Post, which billionaire Bezos owns. […] In 2019, Amazon also argued in a court case that Trump’s bias against the company harmed its chances of winning a $10 billion Pentagon contract.
More recently, Bezos has struck a more conciliatory tone. […] The donation from Meta came just weeks after Zuckerberg met with Trump privately at Mar-a-Lago. […]
What about Elon Musk?
“We have two multi-billionaires, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are tasked with cutting what they’re saying will be multiple trillions of dollars from the federal budget, reducing the civil service, the workforce,” said Rob Lalka, a business professor at Tulane University.
Musk, he said, has a level of access to the White House that very few others have had — access that allows him to potentially influence multiple policy areas, including foreign policy, automotive and energy policy through EVs, and tech policy on artificial intelligence. […]
Health Canada is asking Canadian families to check any stuffed animals that may have appeared under the tree this year, because there could be a choking hazard.
The agency says Chinese-made Mother and Baby Plush Toys — including animals like pandas, elephants, lions, tigers and giraffes — don’t meet Canadian safety standards and hard plastic eyes could come loose and be swallowed by a young child…
If you click through, you can see another potential hazard: biological ignorance. The plush toys portray placental mammals, including lions, elephants, pandas and tigers, with a marsupial pouch.
South Korea’s main opposition party said it will introduce a bill to impeach acting president Han Duck-soo on Thursday and hold a vote on Friday, a move that could deepen the country’s constitutional crisis triggered by a short-lived martial law.
The opposition Democratic Party had threatened to impeach Han if he does not immediately appoint three justices to fill the vacancies at the Constitutional Court. Parliament voted in favour of three nominees on Thursday, but they have yet to be formally appointed by Han.
The court is trying the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol over his Dec. 3 declaration of martial law.
“It has become clear that prime minister and acting president Han Duck-soo does not have the qualification or the will to safeguard the Constitution,” Democratic Party floor leader Park Chan-dae said in a statement.
The motion was introduced to parliament on Thursday and must be voted on within 24 to 72 hours. It cited a range of actions by Han as grounds for his impeachment, including his veto of a special prosecutor bill to investigate alleged wrongdoings by the first lady.
If Han is impeached, the finance minister will assume the acting presidency. The Democratic Party has majority control of parliament, but there is disagreement between the parties and some constitutional scholars over whether a simple majority or a two-thirds vote is needed to impeach the acting president…
New research has found a turtle might be the oldest religious symbol to be worshiped by a society in the Middle East.
In Manot Cave in Western Galilee, Israel, researchers have found evidence of human spiritual rituals dating back 37,000 years.
Over 35,000 years before Jesus Christ, as many as 100 individuals gathered in the Manot Cave to gather around a carving of a tortoise shell in a boulder.
Although it’s unclear exactly what the tortoise symbolised to this community of early humans, the ancient Middle Easterners are believed to have revered the creature. At prominent individual’s graves from the Stone Age period, tortoise shells regularly appear.
There’s evidence that humans had frequented the Manot Cave since at least 50,000 years ago. This new research comes from the discovery of a “ritual compound” within the cave.
It’s believed the tortoise shell engraving in the cave was done by a deer antler also found there. The researchers were able to date a mineral layer on the antler to a similar time as the engraving, suggesting it might have been used as the carving tool…
birgerjohanssonsays
Canada had 280 gun deaths last year. USA had (my memory is a bit shaky about the exact number) more than 48 000.
Even if we take into account USA has 14 times more people that is a big difference.
Russian forces have begun using improvised counter-drone buggies each armed with a weapon made up of 24 barrels that fire shotgun-like ammunition, as well as six AK-series infantry rifles on a single mount. The cluster of shot-firing barrels highlights how shotguns have become a go-to option for both sides of the conflict in Ukraine to help provide local defense against uncrewed aerial threats, but also the limitations of those weapons in this role.
… How this weapon is aimed is unclear…
Then there is the manually operated mount at the rear of the vehicle with the six AK-pattern guns installed in a row. These look to be 7.62x39mm AK-12s based on what can be seen of their features, such as their distinctive muzzle devices and front sights. The only aid for aiming the rifles looks to be a large open cross-hair-type sight…
birgerjohanssonsays
I know the Pope is a reactionary old ☆@# but at least he has called out Israel for killing children. Biden -who is getting a lot of praise now – has not, to the best of my knowledge said much about Gaza after the election.
@57 Reginald Selkirk wrote: the Trump camp is just throwing random things at the wall to see if anything sticks.
I reply: You are likely sooo correct and polite. Because we all know what he is throwing at the wall the rest of us would call excrement. And, there is sooo much of it and we hope NONE of it sticks because of the destruction and injury it would cause. But, they do it with impunity because these criminals don’t care and they will face no consequences as this country circles the drain.
Welcome to the New Dark Ages. Prove me wrong and I’ll stop saying that.
birgerjohanssonsays
Myself @ 66
Correction.
USA only has 9 times the population of Canada. This means the proportion of gun deaths compared to Canada is even worse.
(I memorised the population of Canada some time in the early 80s during my school years and haven’t updated my memory since)
birgerjohanssonsays
Re. The war in Ukraine. Russians have started burning away the faces of dead North Korean soldiers to maintain the fiction there are no North Koreans.
Instead they are using the NK troops as cannon fodder to reduce their own losses. The NK officers lack experience of how to adapt to battle fields dominated by drone surveillance and instead of staying in forests that degrade drone signals they are easily spotted, and then killed by artillery.
Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the leaders of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, blamed a series of 1990s TV sitcoms for what he saw as a decline in U.S. dynamism in science and technology, leading tech companies to hire more qualified foreign-born and first-generation workers over their mentally lazy American counterparts.
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote in a post on X pock-marked with misspellings.
“A culture that venerates Cory from Boy Meets World or Zach & Slater over Screech in Saved by the Bell, or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in Family Matters will not produce the best engineers,” he noted…
Right, because cultural stereotypes are driven by sit-coms, not vice versa.
/s
Jeansays
birgerjohansson @70
It’s actually closer to 8.5 times. We’re over 41 millions now. And the increase is mostly due to immigration.
A massive sinkhole has swallowed a large swath along Interstate 80 near the Wharton (New Jersey, USA) exit Thursday morning, causing major traffic delays and an emergency response.
The sinkhole near Exit 34, which brings motorists into Wharton on the eastbound side, was confirmed by the state Department of Transportation around 7:45 a.m. An alert from 511nj.org stated all lanes were closed and being detoured, with motorists advised to avoid the area and seek alternate routes…
Billionaire Tesla and X owner Elon Musk, President-elect Donald Trump’s chief financier, on Wednesday sparked MAGA backlash after defending visas for foreign tech workers.
South African-born Elon Musk was once an immigrant to the U.S., illegally overstaying his visa to build a future here. He employs hundreds of foreign-born engineers at his Tesla and SpaceX companies and says they fill a shortage of American-born workers.
Musk called a shortage of “excellent engineering talent” a “fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley” in a Wednesday tweet, arguing that immigrant labor is an essential ingredient in American innovation and warning of a “dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America.” …
…
The woman in question, 37-year-old Christy Turman, reportedly was in the process of stealing a car from a dealership in Tampa, Florida when she called 911 so she “could do it legally” says Lee County Sheriff’s Office…
lumipunasays
Update to 54 – I gathered some interesting bits of information on how the seizure of tanker Eagle S happened.
The Estlink breach was reported late on Wednesday local time, a possible suspect ship was quickly identified and the coast guard (a branch of Finnish border guard) was alerted. One of the patrol boats happened to be conveniently nearby, to be able to immediately contact Eagle S. This was on the shipping lane that runs along a narrow strip of international waters between Finnish and Estonian territorial waters. The breach took place a little further east, also in international waters but within Finland’s economic zone.
The patrol boat somehow persuaded ES to make a small detour into Finnish territorial waters (giving the border guard better legal authority) and to pull up its anchor chain (which it had been suspiciously dragging in the shallow sea). When it turned out that the anchor itself was missing, there was grounds for a warrant to raid the ship and gather further evidence. This was arranged during the night, all while ES was ordered or persuaded to stay and wait. There raid was done jointly by the police special force unit (kind of like SWAT team) and the border guard special force unit (kind of like rapid response border defense, only technically not a part of the military), using a helicopter and maybe other equipment borrowed from the military. Luckily, there was no resistance from the crew.
Finnish social media is going wild over this show of force (and some of it is spilling into international accounts like Anton Geraschenko on Twitter). Notably, however, the matter does not officially involve Russia or China or other major countries in any way, which might have made it diplomatically less intimidating to execute.
birgerjohanssonsays
Scandinavian food for the adventurous.
“Eating The Worst Tinned Food In The WORLD!”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=XGH3B_6m1aM
.
Yes, fermented herring (from northern Sweden) is definitely an aquired taste.
[always open the cans outdoors]
But if you really feel adventurous you should try Icelandic ‘håkarl’ – meat from Greenland shark that has been left to ferment after being buried in a pit in the ground. The fermentation destroys the neurotoxin in the meat but apparently does not improve the taste.
.
Bu contrast the much maligned ‘lutefisk’ is perfectly OK as long as you have plenty of sauce, and get rid of the irritating fish bones before you start eating.
Yea, fermented herring (from northern Sweden) is definitely an aquired taste.
[and always open the cans outdoors] But if you really feel adventurous you should try Icelandic ‘håkarl’ – meat from Greenland shark that has been left to ferment after being buried in a pit in the ground. The fermentation destroys the neurotoxin in the meat but apparently does not improve the taste.
.
By contrast, the much maligned ‘lutefisk’ is perfectly OK if you have plenty of sauce, and get rid of the irritating fish bones before you start eating.
birgerjohanssonsays
Sorry, doublet posting.
My bad.
I will try to make up for it by finding some cute cat video or something.
birgerjohanssonsays
Scientists explore longevity drugs for dogs that could also ‘extend human life’ | Ageing | The Guardian
The concept of a “Dark Age” as a historiographical periodization originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as “dark” compared to the “light” of classical antiquity. […] to contrast the era’s supposed darkness (ignorance and error) with earlier and later periods of light (knowledge and understanding).
[…]
The majority of modern scholars avoid the term altogether because of its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate. Despite this, Petrarch’s pejorative meaning remains in use, particularly in popular culture, which often oversimplifies the Middle Ages as a time of violence and backwardness.
[…]
Petrarch’s original metaphor […] expanded over time […] Even if later humanists no longer saw themselves living in a dark age, their times were still not light enough for 18th-century writers who saw themselves as living in the real Age of Enlightenment, while the period to be condemned stretched to include what we now call Early Modern times.
[…]
20th-century scholarship had increased understanding of the history and culture of the period, to such an extent that it is no longer really ‘dark’ to modern viewers. […] “The days when archaeologists and historians referred to the fifth to the tenth centuries as the ‘Dark Ages’ are long gone, and the material culture produced during that period demonstrates a high degree of sophistication.”
Let me guess: it’s already being exploited in targeted attacks? :)
Reginald Selkirk@25:
The few descriptions of angels that exist in Revelations and some other books in the Old Testament describe something very different, with one description mentioning six wings each with multiple eyes…
It’s a good bet the original authors were actually describing star constellations. If there’s any link to the calendar, it probably started as a guide to locally ideal sowing and reaping times or something. Then got taken literally by later generations or by foreigners whose agricultural practices were different.
birgerjohansson@80:
I will try to make up for it by finding some cute cat video or something.
And not providing basically any information about it. While botching the embed. :)
Pierce R. Butlersays
shermanj @ # 69: Welcome to the New Dark Ages. Prove me wrong and I’ll stop saying that.
The “dark ages” (by just about any labeling) were times of, ahem, major decentralization.
The current world situation, and Trump’s avowed agenda, involve lots and lots of centralized hegemony.
(Not that I care whether you keep saying what you say…)
I can understand that. I can handle normal politics. But when it comes to the insane “let’s put a convicted felon in charge of appointing federal judges and assemble the rapiest cabinet ever” stuff I can only take so much.
birgerjohanssonsays
There is an interesting contrast of style det between the Christmas messages of the Mexican president and Donald Trump
Just as Marie Antoniette was surprised to learn how impopular she was, so health insurance bosses are surprised by how disliked they are.
I assume most of them only interact with commoners as various service personnel doing their jobs.
The Damage Report.
“Leaked Video Goes Viral… Shows CEOs Are Terrified!”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=SR1Nn185d-0
The lobbying after the documentary “Sicko” killed the brief debate about the health insurance system. But it did not kill the dislike for the system.
birgerjohanssonsays
Kieran Connell counters the message the tories have been drumming into the British people since at least 2015.
“White British people aren’t under threat from multicultural Britain – they are part of it”
The Guardian
The difference between some states amounts to up to nine years of cognitive ageing.
KGsays
birgerjohansson@81,
For some reason your links don’t work. I see dots”.” at the start of the lines with the links – maybe that’s the problem. Anyway, here are versions that work for me:
links don’t work. I see dots”.” at the start of the lines
Nah. That’s his habit to prevent the blog from seeing his bare YouTube urls and turning them into embedded videos. Instead of writing html tags.
The problem in #81 was a non-breaking space character (nbsp). If you hover over his links, you may see %A0 at the end. No idea how it got in there. At least it wasn’t an invisible zero-width character; those are insidious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Two of em in #90’s link.
birgerjohanssonsays
The Axial seamount one mile under the sea surface west of Oregon seems to be waking up, and may erupt during 2025.
Tethyssays
Some of us learned to type, rather than how to write html. tags. It was much easier to embed links properly when the tags were listed above the comment box so you could copy/paste them into your comment, but that was several blog iterations ago. Trying to track down the proper formatting just to make the link pretty is not necessary to prevent video from embedding. I just paste the YouTube address and that seems to work fine.
I don’t mind bare links, as Birger is being kind and sharing things he thinks others may enjoy to this iteration of the endless (social) thread.
————
As for the Dark Ages, it’s a silly term coined by a crappy historian. The lack of written records is due to time, attrition, Viking raids, and Christianity ruining everything. The art and bits of surviving literature we still have from that period are AMAZING.
Shakespeare did not invent many of his stories. He stole them from the scraps of Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature, just like Tolkien and George Martin.
birgerjohanssonsays
@ 93 I don’t write html tags because my fat fingertips tend to hit the wrong signs, and unlike spelling the correct html tags are not ‘intuitive’ the way spelling gets.
Curiously, I have no problems using those links, which is odd. I did not notice a problem until you mentioned it.
-As for how %A0 got there I suspect some bit rot in my cellphone.
For instance, I have noticed I can no longer add comments to Youtube videos – a problem that persisted when I transferred the apps to a new cellphone.
The reason why I don’t start with a ‘tabula rasa’ cellphone is, I would have to manually update hundreds of names and adresses and notes.
birgerjohanssonsays
Test. Let me know if this link is borked.
“New strategy significantly extends lithium-ion battery life by suppressing oxygen release”
South Korea’s parliament impeached acting President Han Duck-soo on Friday, less than two weeks after suspending President Yoon Suk Yeol’s powers over his short-lived declaration of martial law, plunging the country deeper into political chaos…
Finance Minister Choi Sang-mok, who assumed the position of acting president while the cases of Yoon and Han are considered by the Constitutional Court, convened the National Security Council, spoke with key officials including military leaders and vowed to do everything in his power to stabilise state affairs…
lumipuna @77, thank you for those details. Looks like a display of competence on the part of forces from Finland.
Reginald @75, that “backlash” against Musk is still ongoing. I’m seeing a lot of responses from rightwing sources, with most of them claiming that Musk is not anti-immigrant enough! Defending visas for foreign tech workers is apparently a big no-no. It’s kind of amazing how much social media conversation is flying back and forth over this contretemps. Looks like they’ll keep each other riled up and therefore divided for some time.
A lawyer asked whether Trump is “more interested in using the office to make himself more wealthy” than governing. This need not be a rhetorical question.
In the months leading up to Election Day, Fox News’ regular viewers no doubt saw plenty of campaign-season commercials featuring Donald Trump. Those who assumed they were done with the Republican’s ads after he won, however, quickly learned otherwise.
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump explained in an analysis published last week:
Viewers tuning into Fox News on Thursday afternoon were treated to an ad that was unquestionably well-targeted: former president Donald Trump, the man who will be president again in one month, encouraging them to spend $60 on the “God Bless the USA” Bible. The ad, shared by journalist Aaron Rupar on social media, can most concisely be summarized as “schlocky.” It centers on Trump speaking directly to the camera, using his sedate, reading-from-the-teleprompter voice to encourage Fox News viewers to buy what was once presented as the “ultimate American Bible.”
In other words, the president-elect/Bible salesman didn’t run ads asking for voters’ support for his candidacy, he ran ads asking customers to buy one of his products.
Or more to the point, one of his many products. In a separate analysis, the Post’s Bump tallied up the number of items Trump’s operation is selling, and I lost count as the total approached 50.
My personal favorite is the line of Trump-branded guitars — which the president-elect continued to hawk as recently as a few days ago, despite the recent cease-and-desist letter from legendary guitar manufacturer Gibson.
Some might see all of this and assume that the president-elect has campaign debts, political action committees, and Republican candidates who’ll need financial support in upcoming election cycles. But this assumption is rooted in a faulty premise — because none of Trump’s merchandising opportunities has anything to do with this political operation. Rather, the profits go to his controversial business operation.
It is a model without precedent in the American tradition.
As we’ve discussed, this was bizarre ahead of Election Day, when the then-GOP candidate pitched everything from Trump-branded watches to silver Trump commemorative coins, batches of digital trading cards to a weird cryptocurrency project, gold sneakers to Trump-endorsed Bibles. But at the time, it seemed plausible to think that he was trying to cash in while he had the chance: There was a possibility that Trump, already cash strapped, might lose the election, limiting his money-making opportunities.
But as Inauguration Day approaches, the incoming president still appears as focused on cashing in on his political position, profiting from the office he’ll soon return to, as he does on preparing to govern.
Danielle Caputo, a legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, asked this week, “Is the president more interested in using the office to make himself more wealthy? Or is he acting as president and using that office to do what’s best for the people who put him in office?”
These need not be rhetorical questions.
What’s more, they’re not the only questions worth exploring. As my MSNBC colleague Zeeshan Aleem explained, “What’s striking is not just the unabated torrent of post-election products like perfumes and watches, but also the opaque business arrangements behind them. As The New York Times recently reported, ‘unlike some of Mr. Trump’s earlier efforts, the identities of his current merchandise business partners are shielded through the creation of limited liability companies, which are structured to allow those partners to remain anonymous.’
“According to the Times, reporters who have tried to track down the Wyoming address of a couple of these LLC’s have found ‘rural strip malls or buildings populated by unrelated businesses.’”
I realize memories can run short in the political world, but aren’t these the exact kinds of private-sector arrangements that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer took quite seriously when they were utilized by members of the Biden family?
About that proposal for a new ambassador to Panama:
[…] [Trump] published a couple of unexpected items to his social media platform, declaring his belief that the Panama Canal is “a VITAL National Asset for the United States.” He added that he’s prepared to “demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, and without question.”
This was not, evidently, a passing thought. Trump soon after started making public comments about Panamanian control of the canal, adding that without changes to shipping costs and fees, he “will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States.”
On Christmas Day, he published a head-shaking follow-up missive that included false claims about Chinese soldiers “who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal.”
I won’t pretend to know why this has suddenly become Trump’s latest fixation. What’s more, given that the United States signed a ratified treaty that ensures Panamanian control of the canal, it’s a mystery as to how, exactly, Trump intends to pursue his newfound goals.
But it was against this backdrop that the incoming American president made a notable announcement on Christmas day. NBC News reported:
President-elect Donald Trump announced his pick for American ambassador to Panama, days after suggesting that the United States should take control of the Panama Canal. “I am pleased to announce that Kevin Marino Cabrera will serve as the United States Ambassador to the Republic of Panama, a Country that is ripping us off on the Panama Canal, far beyond their wildest dreams,” Trump posted on the social media platform Truth Social late Wednesday.
The fact that the online announcement took yet another rhetorical shot at the Panamanian government was a timely reminder that the next U.S. ambassador to the Central American country will face a real diplomatic challenge.
As for whether or not Cabrera, whose prospective nomination will require Senate confirmation, is up to the task, The Miami Herald highlighted a notable element of the would-be ambassador’s recent record.
Critics called Cabrera extreme for his role in a 2018 protest of a Nancy Pelosi visit to Coral Gables organized by the local GOP that also drew members of the far-right Proud Boys organization. Video showed Cabrera and others banging on the door of a Democratic campaign office and demanding Pelosi and other Democrats inside “open up.”
Oh. In other words, as Trump targets Panama with needlessly caustic bombast, he also appears to have chosen a Miami Republican who might not be especially well suited for a job in diplomacy.
During last week’s negotiations to avert a government shutdown, Congress quietly slashed $20 billion from the Internal Revenue Service.
Republicans have long targeted the tax agency, and their cuts will hurt its efforts to go after rich tax evaders and improve the IRS’s functionality. It’s their second successful cut from President Biden’s $80 billion funding boost to the agency in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, as the GOP took away an earlier $20 billion in a 2023 budget deal.
The latest cuts to the IRS will come automatically thanks to the 2023 deal, as the language was repeated in last week’s bill. The Biden administration said the cuts would end up adding $140 billion to the national debt, as they hurt the tax agency’s ability to audit big corporations and the wealthy. [!!]
Specifically, the White House said, the IRS will conduct 400 fewer major business audits each year, and 1,200 fewer audits of rich individuals. Customer services for taxpayers will also be hurt, according to Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo. Last month, he warned that by 2026, the IRS will only have the resources to answer two of every 10 phone calls to its helplines, with wait times increasing to an average of 28 minutes.
The Inflation Reduction Act’s boost to the tax agency helped relieve a long backlog of tax filings, and created a well-liked free tax filing pilot program. All of that is on the chopping block now, fitting in with Donald Trump and Republicans’ plans to weaken the IRS. The president-elect plans to appoint anti-tax extremist Billy Long to take over the agency next year, who repeatedly tried to abolish the IRS as a member of Congress.
These cuts combined with Long’s planned appointment mean that tax season next year will almost certainly result in headaches for the average taxpayer and windfalls for the wealthy and powerful. A ballooning national debt is also on the horizon. The question is whether Trump and the GOP will be able to get away with all of it.
Billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk and Trump’s travel partner and conservative activist Laura Loomer, who has embraced and promoted a host of racist notions, are in a public feud about immigration. The argument has received support on both sides, exposing another early division in the MAGA coalition.
The dispute began after Loomer complained on X about Donald Trump’s decision to name Sriram Krishnan adviser of AI in his upcoming administration. Loomer quoted a post in which Krishnan advocated for removing green card per-country caps for skilled immigrants.
“It’s alarming to see the number of career leftists who are now being appointed to serve in Trump’s admin when they share views that are in direct opposition to Trump’s America First agenda,” she said. [LOL]
Loomer, who has described herself as an “Islamophobe” who supports “pro-white nationalism,” went on to describe Krishnan and others like him as advocates for foreign students coming to the United States to “take jobs that should be given to American STEM students.”
Later, Musk argued in favor of providing more visas to tech workers while responding to an X user expressing sympathy with Loomer’s position.
“The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” he said.
Responding to another X user calling for a more restrictive visa policy, Musk said, “Your understanding of the situation is upside-down and backwards,” arguing that there is a “dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America.”
Vivek Ramaswamy, who Trump named co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency along with Musk, chimed in to argue that “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” […]
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who failed in her bid for the Republican presidential nomination, sided with Loomer.
“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture. All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have,” she wrote on X.
Tech investor David Sacks, who Trump recently named “AI and crypto czar,” criticized Loomer’s argument and alleged that she’s involved in a “division grift.”
After Loomer’s X account was reportedly suspended and her ability to recruit subscribers limited, she alleged that Musk made the changes in retaliation to her criticisms of Krishnan and Trump backers in the tech industry who support bringing in more immigrant workers.
“Full censorship of my account simply because I called out H1B visas. This is anti-American behavior by tech oligarchs. What happened to free speech?” she lamented.
The feud has exposed a schism between two of the key groups of the Trump constituency: anti-immigrant racists and billionaire tech executives who seek to cut spending on social good while pushing tax cuts for the wealthy […]
Before the November presidential election, Ohio’s secretary of state and attorney general announced investigations into potential voter fraud that included people suspected of casting ballots even though they were not U.S. citizens.
It coincided with a national Republican messaging strategy warning that potentially thousands of ineligible voters would be voting. […]
In the end, their efforts led to just a handful of cases. Of the 621 criminal referrals for voter fraud that Secretary of State Frank LaRose sent to the attorney general, prosecutors have secured indictments against nine people for voting as noncitizens over the span of 10 years [That’s very small numbers … and it over ten years time.] — and one was later found to have died. That total is a tiny fraction of Ohio’s 8 million registered voters and the tens of millions of ballots cast during that period.
[…] It’s rare, is caught and prosecuted when it does happen and does not occur as part of a coordinated scheme to throw elections.
The Associated Press attended in-person and virtual court hearings for three of the Ohio defendants over the past two weeks. Each of the cases involved people with long ties to their community who acted alone, often under a mistaken impression they were eligible to vote. They now find themselves facing felony charges and possible deportation. [Too harsh.]
Among them is Nicholas Fontaine, a 32-year-old precision sheet metal worker from Akron. He was indicted in October on one count of illegal voting, a fourth-degree felony.
Fontaine is a Canadian-born permanent resident who moved to the U.S. with his mother and sister when he was 2 years old. He is facing a possible jail term and deportation on allegations that he voted in the 2016 and 2018 elections.
He recalls being a college student when he was approached on the street about registering to vote.
“I think in my young teenage brain, I thought, ‘Well, I have to sign up for the draft, I should be able to vote,’” Fontaine said in an interview.
Permanent residents such as Fontaine are just one of several categories of immigrants who must register for a potential military draft through the Selective Service but who cannot legally vote.
Fontaine said he received a postcard from the local board of elections in 2016 informing him of his polling place. He voted without issue. He even showed his ID before receiving his ballot.
“No problems. Went in, voted, turned my voter stuff in, that was it,” he said. “There was no, like, ‘Hey, there’s an issue here,’ or, ‘There’s a thing here.’ Just, here’s your paper (ballot).”
Fontaine said a Department of Homeland Security official visited him at his home in either 2018 or 2019, alerted him to the fact that his votes in 2016 and 2018 had been illegal and warned him not to vote again. Since then, he never has. That’s one reason why his indictment this fall came as a shock.
He said he never received notice that he was indicted and missed his court hearing in early December, being informed of the charges only when an AP reporter knocked on his door after the scheduled hearing and told him.
Fontaine said he was raised in a household where his American stepfather taught him the value of voting. He said he would never have cast an illegal vote intentionally.
“I don’t know any person, even like Americans I’ve talked to about voting, who would consider illegally voting for any reason,” he said. “Like, why would you do that? It doesn’t make sense. […]”
[I snipped other examples]
The Ohio cases are just one example of what is true nationally — that the narrative of widespread numbers of immigrants without the necessary legal documents registering to vote and then voting is simply not backed up by the facts, said Jay Young, senior director of the Voting and Democracy Program for Common Cause. […]
“Consumer Financial Protection Bureau […] Thank you Senator Warren, ma’am, may we have another?”
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is ending 2024 by doing its job, going after financial baddies who rip off consumers. The Friday before Christmas, the CFPB filed a lawsuit against three big banks, accusing them of not doing enough to prevent fraud on the peer-to-peer payment app Zelle. And then on Monday, CFPB sued Walmart over a crappy scheme that it uses to pay some of its delivery drivers.
It’s unclear whether the incoming Trump administration, with its commitment to letting big businesses do whatever they want, will continue the lawsuits under whomever Trump appoints to run the bureau. CFPB Director Rohit Chopra, a Biden appointee, has a five-year term that runs until 2026, but Trump can fire him at will. So far, Trump hasn’t named anyone for the job, so it could be anyone who anchors a show on Fox Business.
[I snipped details concerning the fraud alleged in the lawsuit.]
CNN notes that if someone’s account is hacked, Zelle will refund any transactions done by the hackers, but the CFPB alleges that if people are ripped off by other types of fraud, they’re pretty much left without help.
In a statement, Chopra said,
“The nation’s largest banks felt threatened by competing payment apps, so they rushed to put out Zelle. […] By their failing to put in place proper safeguards, Zelle became a gold mine for fraudsters, while often leaving victims to fend for themselves.”
In some cases, the agency said, consumers would file fraud complaints with Zelle, only to be told they would need to “contact the fraudsters directly to recover their money.” You wouldn’t believe how unhelpful the customer service department can be at Big Online Fraud Inc. [Sheesh.]
[…]
“Defendants’ failures resulted in millions of complaints about Zelle fraud at (JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo) alone, including complaints of over $290 million in fraud losses by 210,000 Bank of America customers, over $360 million in fraud losses by 420,000 Chase customers, and over $220 million in fraud losses by 280,000 Wells Fargo customers,” the complaint alleges.
A spokesperson for Early Warning Services, Jane Khodos, insists the suit has no merit, is nonsense, is based on flawed analysis, and that the “timing of this lawsuit appears to be driven by political factors unrelated to Zelle,” because why not throw that in as well?
[…] a spox for JPMorgan Chase said that CFPB was overstepping its authority in a “last ditch effort in pursuit of their political agenda,” [all too trumpian] and trying to put banks on the hook for criminals who ripped people off, “even including romance scammers.” Spox Patricia Wexler somehow refrained from shouting that Making America Great Again means consumers need to stop thinking with their gonads and pray for chastity, so there’s that.
A spox for Bank of America similarly said that “More than 99.95 percent of transactions across the Zelle network go through without incident” and the bank works with customers to resolve issues, blah blah corporatespeak.
[…] We probably shouldn’t expect the Trump administration’s eventual CFPB head to continue either lawsuit [referencing the lawsuit against the banks and a lawsuit against Walmart] out of some mythical commitment to helping out ordinary Americans being ripped off by The Man, because now that he’s in office, Trump and his co-president Elon Musk are firmly on The Man’s side. For that matter, Musk, who tweeted “Delete CFPB” in November, may now start insisting he is himself The Man, not to mention The Big Boss, The Lizard King, The Kwisatz Haderach, and King Shit of Fuck Mountain.
Here to warm your heart a little bit is a fable about a magical land called the US Congress, where in the midst of last week’s huge stupid fight about whether to actually have a government anymore, and about whether unelected weirdo billionaires should be able to destroy said government, the Senate passed a little-noticed bill that will update American child welfare laws for the first time in 15 years and help out kids in foster care.
As Gabe Fleisher at Wake Up To Politics points out, there weren’t any big culture war provisions in the bill, and somehow the flaky billionaire with an online propaganda factory didn’t catch wind of it, so the Supporting America’s Children and Families Act passed and was signed into law without getting much attention at all. In fact, when Fleischer wrote about it over the weekend, he noted that “as far as I can tell, not a single other article has been written about this legislation by any news outlet, anywhere.”
[…]
increases funding for tribal child welfare programs and courts, reduces administrative burdens, closes a gap in data collection for Native children and families who are in state child welfare systems, and requires the Department of Health and Human Services with the assistance of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to provide needed technical assistance to states and tribal nations to improve implementation of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
[…] Maybe some bigger outlets should cover this, although that might run the risk of bringing it to the attention of some jerk who thinks kids in the system have it too easy and need to be working overnight shifts.
As Fleisher — who staunchly refuses to have a c in his name no matter how often I misspell it — points out, there are some excellent things in the bill beyond the increase of $75 million a year into the budget for “the federal program tasked with combatting child abuse/neglect and protecting children in the foster care system.”
Among other things, the bill allows states to pass on federal child welfare funds directly to families that have hit an economic rough patch, to “prevent children from being separated from parents solely on the basis of poverty-related circumstances” [excellent] — instead of declaring the parents “neglectful” and taking their kids away.
Other measures in the law will
expand mental health services for children in foster care; ease the transition out of foster care by offering assistance to former foster children until they reach the age of 26; increase funding for the 2.5 million grandparents and relatives raising children who would otherwise go into foster care; create a new requirement that states consult with affected children and parents when crafting their child welfare policies; seek to improve the relationships between incarcerated parents and their children in foster care; and reduce the administrative burden of child welfare caseworkers by 15%, so they can focus more on children and less on paperwork.
[All good stuff!]
That’s a hell of a lot of good that literally got zero mention in the mainstream press, mostly because the bill was written and passed without any drama or denunciations that it would promote witchcraft, turn children into communists, or force Americans to live under the tyranny of the Metric System. […]
“The Biden administration won’t be able to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, but it has reduced the facility’s population to just 27 people.” Video at the link.
About a month after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, the White House announced plans to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison once and for all, with the Departments of Defense, State and Justice planning to work with the White House National Security Council in pursuit of the goal.
We now know, of course, that the Democratic administration […] will not reach its goal. But as The New York Times reported last week, Biden and his team have succeeded in shrinking the detention facility’s population.
The Pentagon said on Wednesday that it had repatriated two Malaysian men from its prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who admitted to committing war crimes for an affiliate of Al Qaeda that carried out a deadly bombing in Bali, Indonesia, in 2002. The rare transfer, a day after the Pentagon released another prisoner to the custody of Kenya, reduced the detainee population to 27 men.
During the recent fight over how to prevent a government shutdown, many congressional Republicans argued with great enthusiasm about the need to cut wasteful and unnecessary spending.
To the extent that they’re sincere about those goals, they might want to take a long look at the prison sometimes known as “Gitmo.” […] the prison’s population peaked in 2003 with 680 prisoners. The Bush/Cheney administration began moving detainees out in its second term, and by the time Barack Obama became president, the population was down to 242 prisoners.
In 2009 and 2010, Congress made it effectively impossible for the Democrat to close the facility altogether, but Obama successfully lowered the prison population from 242 to 41.
[…] The point of the progress, obviously, was to reduce the overall population, but it was also intended to appeal to Republicans’ sense of fiscal sanity: The smaller the number of detainees, the harder it becomes to justify the massive expense of keeping open a detention facility that houses so few people.
[…] It costs American taxpayers roughly $13 million per prisoner, per year.
As of today, the facility holds just 27 inmates, down from 40 at the end of Donald Trump’s first term. […]
The latest developments suggest officials have made meaningful progress, but given Republican intransigence, GOP election victories, and the party’s general indifference to the financial considerations, it’s extremely unlikely that the United States will be able to lower the number from 27 to zero anytime in the next four years.
There is so much repellently sleazy behavior documented in the House Ethics Committee report about Matt Gaetz that a reader has to stop every few pages to look away and focus on what still seems astounding: This is the man that Donald Trump wanted to be the attorney general of the United States, the highest-ranking law enforcement official in the land, the leader of the Department of Justice.
Commentary:
[…] The House Ethics Committee — in a report released to the public the day before Christmas Eve — found “substantial evidence” that the Florida Republican “regularly” paid women for sex and had sex with a 17-year-old during his tenure on Capitol Hill. The same report accused Gaetz of using or possessing illegal drugs, including cocaine; accepting improper gifts; and helping a woman “with whom he engaged in sexual activity” in obtaining an expedited passport.
The committee found “substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House rules, state and federal laws, and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” the report added.
[…] [Trump} could’ve chosen anyone to lead federal law enforcement in the United States. [He] settled on a politician who, according to the House Ethics Committee’s findings, “regularly” paid women for sex, had sex with a 17-year-old, accepted improper gifts, and used or possessed illegal drugs.
[…] the Gaetz debacle is special.
What does it say about Trump and his judgment when, given an opportunity to pick anyone to serve as attorney general, he chose someone accused by the House Ethics Committee of having possibly “violated … state and federal laws”?
Let’s not forget that during Gaetz’s eight-day tenure as Trump’s choice to oversee the Justice Department, the president-elect reportedly called senators directly to lobby on the former congressman’s behalf, effectively vouching for Gaetz.
The funny thing about putting one’s credibility on the line is that there are supposed to be consequences when they fail in humiliating fashion.
What’s more, it’s not just Trump. President-elect JD Vance personally escorted Gaetz from office to office, putting his own credibility on the line in the hopes of advancing Trump’s ridiculous selection. […] the former congressman’s prospective nomination collapsed after eight days, meaning they did this for nothing?
The Gaetz scandal isn’t just about Gaetz. It’s also about those who thought it’d be a sensible and responsible move to elevate the Florida Republican to the attorney general’s office.
Associated Press: “US homelessness surges as affordable housing remains out of reach.”
The United States saw an 18.1% increase in homelessness this year, a dramatic rise driven mostly by a lack of affordable housing as well as devastating natural disasters and a surge of migrants in several parts of the country, federal officials said Friday.
[…] more than 770,000 people were counted as homeless — a number that misses some people and does not include those staying with friends or family because they do not have a place of their own.
That increase comes on top of a 12% increase in 2023, which HUD blamed on soaring rents and the end of pandemic assistance. The 2023 increase also was driven by people experiencing homelessness for the first time. […] with Black people being overrepresented among the homeless population.
[…] Among the most concerning trends was a nearly 40% rise in family homelessness — one of the areas that was most affected by the arrival of migrants in big cities. Family homelessness more than doubled in 13 communities impacted by migrants including Denver, Chicago and New York City, according to HUD, while it rose less than 8% in the remaining 373 communities. […]
Disasters also played a part in the rise in the count, especially last year’s catastrophic Maui wildfire, the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century. More than 5,200 people were staying in emergency shelters in Hawaii on the night of the count.
“Increased homelessness is the tragic, yet predictable, consequence of underinvesting in the resources and protections that help people find and maintain safe, affordable housing,” Renee Willis, incoming interim CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said in a statement. […]
The numbers also come as increasing numbers of communities are taking a hard line against homelessness.
Angered by often dangerous and dirty tent camps, communities — especially in Western states — have been enforcing bans on camping. That follows a 6-3 ruling last year by the Supreme Court that found that outdoor sleeping bans don’t violate the Eighth Amendment. Homeless advocates argued that punishing people who need a place to sleep would criminalize homelessness.
[snipped news about numbers of homeless veterans dropping]
Several large cities had success bringing down their homeless numbers. Dallas, which worked to overhaul its homeless system, saw a 16% drop in its numbers between 2022 to 2024. Los Angeles, which increased housing for the homeless, saw a drop of 5% in unsheltered homelessness since 2023. […]
In general these engineers usually (not always but more often than not) lack the necessary experience to be as effective as they should, but they have one advantage to the corporate titans running the enterprises where they work. They work cheap. At a time when even a first year engineer’s starting salary was in the $70-80k range in most of the country, these engineers were working for about $40k. THIS is the reason Musk et al really want more H1Bs. Not because they are more talented, but because they work cheap, and are easily exploited because they can’t just hop to another job if things don’t work out, period and full stop. They are essentially indentured servants with little recourse.
Generally H1B visas run three years and while some can be renewed (once), most are not. So just as they are rising to professional level, they leave and take their experience with them. I don’t see the Trump DOGE team complaining about that. The fact is they don’t care. They would rather have a minimally competent engineer they don’t have to pay much and who is too vulnerable to complain or take any kind of action, than a seasoned veteran who has the choice of moving on if conditions become uncomfortable.
Am I saying that all H1B hires are green or incompetent? No not at all. I’ve met many who were quite capable and fine programmers, and even the majority of them who lacked experience struck me as likely to become seasoned pros with time. But I never noticed a preponderance of talent that I did not see equaled or surpassed from domestic engineers of the same experience levels.
They are not smarter, they are not more capable, and they certainly are not more experienced. What they are is cheap and pliant and that is ALL that the DOGE crowd and their fellow tech bros care about. And it is all they ever will.
“Europe must be punished by all means available to us: political, economic and all kinds of hybrid means. And that is why it is necessary to help any destructive processes in Europe. Long live the aggressive pogromists on its historic streets! Long live the crowds of migrants who commit atrocities and hatefully destroy the rainbow European values! May all the disgusting faces of European bureaucrats disappear in the stream of future civil clashes!”
Text quoted about is an excerpt from a longer article presenting news related to Russia and to Ukraine.
Medvedev is a Russian politician who was president of Russia from 2008 to 2012, while Vladimir Putin served in the role of prime minister. Medvedev served a single term in the office of president. He was succeeded by Putin. That was Putin’s plan. Medvedev has adopted ever-increasingly hostile, anti-western attitudes ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Nice Time: MacKenzie Scott Pissing Off Elon Musk With The Billions For The DEIs And Abortions
[…] MacKenzie Scott [is] one of the few ultra-rich who doesn’t deserve to get tarred and feathered in the coming revolution! She’s the third-wealthiest woman in the United States, 38th in the world, and has now given away $19.25 billion (with a B!) in 2,524 charitable gifts, with a focus on racial equality, LGBTQ+ equality, democracy, and climate change.
She and her small team seek out nonprofits operating in communities facing high food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital. And then she gives away the money with no strings attached. Which is unusual in philanthropy! Also unusual, she’s pretty quiet about it. She has a web site that shows what she has donated to, but there’s no MacKenzie Scott ribbon cuttings, or buildings with her name on them when she drops a check. […]
Scott’s given to community centers, the ACLU, historically Black colleges and universities, food banks, Planned Parenthood, YMCAs, dance theaters, Native American groups, legal aid centers, to paying off medical debt, legal funds for transgender people. It is truly an inspiring list!
[…] MacKenzie Tuttle went to Princeton and studied under Toni Morrison, then got a job working at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw. Where, in 1993, she met Jeff Bezos, a 30-year-old with thinning hair. But she liked his laugh, and he liked that she was resourceful. “The number-one criterion was that I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison,” he once said.
And even though she was just 23, MacKenzie was that kind of can-do woman! They married, and there would be no Amazon without her. They moved to Seattle, where she helped Jeff get the company off the ground from their garage. She wrote Amazon’s business plan, did the company’s accounting and toted its early orders to the UPS Store in their minivan, while also raising their four kids, and writing novels. She won an American Book Award for her first one, The Testing of Luther Albright, which she wrote in the bathroom for 10 years in between everything else she was doing.
All seemed happy in the Bezos marriage for 25 years, until 2019, when the National Enquirer tracked Jeff and his (also married) ladyfriend Lauren Sánchez “across five states and 40,000 miles, tailed them in private jets, swanky limos, helicopter rides, romantic hikes, five-star hotel hideaways, intimate dinner dates and ‘quality time’ in hidden love nests.” They even somehow got his personal texts and shirtless bathroom photos, which seems potentially not legal. And then, according to Jeff, AMI content officer Dylan Howard tried to blackmail and extort him. (You may remember that creep from the Trump trial, as the broker of catching and killing tales of Trump’s affairs, or from catch/killing stories about Harvey Weinstein.)
And Jeff refused to play ball with the Enquirer. The story came out, and MacKenzie and Jeff announced their separation, as did Sánchez and her husband, Patrick Whitesell. And MacKenzie got 400 million Amazon shares in the divorce, which she has been selling and donating to charities ever since. But don’t worry, she’s still got about $32 billion left to make do with!
Anyway, now Bezos and Sánchez are reportedly getting married this weekend in Aspen. Mazel tov! Bezos been living flashy, with a $500 million yacht, buoyant fiancee, and apparently imposing his Trump-sympathies onto his newspaper.
And MacKenzie’s been living more quietly! She changed her last name to Scott, and married one of her children’s teachers (though they have since divorced). Otherwise, she’s been laying low, though she’s been known to sometimes gal-pal around with Melinda French Gates, Bill’s ex, who has pledged $1 billion over the next two years to US nonprofits working in women’s health. I’ll bet those two have a lot of fun!
All of this lady-giving mightily pisses off Elon Musk, who has a charitable foundation with zero employees, that for three years has failed to distribute even the 5 percent minimum required to be eligible for a tax deduction, putting him potentially in hot water with the IRS, OOPS.
Musk [complained] in March that “super rich ex-wives who hate their former spouse” could contribute to the decline of Western civilization, and more recently Xitted that Scott’s contributions were “concerning.” Which rather just draws more attention to those ladies’ good works, in contrast to what a shit person Elon is, unable to donate a wooden nickel unless it might benefit himself, somehow, and fucking over his exes in whatever way possible.
[…] After his snotty comment, MacKenzie Scott gave away another $600 million, the end.
…
Having completed the survey – which you can find online – you’ll be given what’s called a CAT-Tri+ measure for your pet’s level of psychopathy. The team is hoping that knowing this score can improve human and cat relationships…
The questionnaire asks for information about how adventurous your cat is when exploring, how it reacts to danger, how it responds to other cats, whether or not it needs constant stimulation, and how well it follows house rules.
Related behaviors – including sudden mood changes, aggression towards new people, and reactions to being petted – are also explored…
For decades, South Korea was an example of a vibrant democracy and economy. On Friday, the key United States ally was in uncharted territory when legislators voted to impeach the acting president less than two weeks after ousting the country’s previous leader.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is suing Walmart and a financial technology firm, alleging they illegally forced drivers into using costly deposit accounts to receive their pay.
2023 was a chart-topper. A surge in global temperatures made it the hottest year since record-keeping began in the mid-1800s, producing heat that one scientist called “gobsmackingly bananas.” Then came 2024. Scientists say this year is almost certain to take over the top spot as the hottest year.
“It looked like funding for the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Program wasn’t going to make it — until something unusual and unexpected happened.”
By now, the basic elements of last week’s drama on Capitol Hill are widely known. House Speaker Mike Johnson reached a bipartisan agreement to prevent a government shutdown; Elon Musk and a variety of Republican officials balked; GOP officials started stripping measures from the legislation; and eventually a package worked its way to the White House before the deadline.
Of particular interest, however, were the federal investments in cancer research that Republicans removed from the agreement. […] one of the measures that was eliminated ended up becoming law anyway. The New York Times reported:
After a tumultuous few days, President Biden on Saturday signed into law a spending bill that had been heavily trimmed down to 120 pages from 1,547. It had lost provisions targeting hidden fees on concert tickets and criminalizing the publication of some deepfake pornography. But two of the measures that had been dropped from the final bill … were salvaged as separate bills and passed by the Senate.
This gets a little complicated, but bear with me.
There were several measures related to cancer research that House Republicans scrapped, including efforts to make it easier for low-income families to cross state lines for medically complex pediatric cancer treatments, as well as bills intended to encourage production of new pediatric cancer treatments.
The Bulwark’s Sam Stein, an MSNBC contributor, also reported that GOP lawmakers ended funding for the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Program — named after a 10-year-old Virginia girl who died from an inoperable brain tumor in 2013 — that helped to fund pediatric cancer research. The policy has long enjoyed bipartisan support, and since it was up for reauthorization this year, no one was especially surprised when it was included in the stopgap bill, ensuring that the program would continue for another decade.
When House Republicans took out their editing pens, however, the program was removed, too.
The bad news for health advocates is that nearly all of the measures related to cancer research could not be rescued before lawmakers wrapped up their work. The good news for health advocates is that Senate Democrats, taking advantage of the fact that the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Program passed the House months earlier as a freestanding bill, successfully sought unanimous consent to save the policy and keep the initiative in place through 2031. [Yay! At least there was some success.]
At this point, some readers are probably asking a good question: If the legislation already passed the lower chamber months earlier, why didn’t the Senate Democratic majority bring it to the floor earlier? Why blame House Republicans for killing a bill related to pediatric cancer research if the GOP-led House already advanced the program?
I’m afraid this is the complicated part. Because of the way the Senate operates, and the time it takes to pass anything through the upper chamber, the Senate generally avoids taking up relatively small, standalone policies. The calendar just won’t allow it. Members instead wait for larger spending packages and simply attach the smaller bills.
To be sure, we can have a discussion about whether Capitol Hill should work this way, but there can be no doubt that this is how the modern congressional process works.
[…] Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia stepped up and rescued the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Program, so this element of the larger effort survived the Republican editing process.
The same cannot be said of the other cancer-related measures — efforts to make it easier for low-income families to cross state lines for medically complex pediatric cancer treatments, as well as bills intended to encourage production of new pediatric cancer treatments — that were supposed to be a part of the spending package, but didn’t make the final package after being removed by House GOP leaders.
Maybe all of those legislators should be in Washington D.C. working for their constituents for more days per year.
See: https://www.congress.gov/days-in-session
Congress members work fewer than half of the days in any given year. But, those workdays account for only “legislative days,” defined as an official meeting of the legislative body to do the people’s business. According to federal records, the House works about two days a week and the Senate works a little more than that.
[,..] According to records, the House of Representatives has averaged 146.7 “legislative days” annually since 2001.2 That’s about one day of work every two and a half days. On the other hand, the Senate was in session an average of 165 days a year over the same period. […]
Ten days ago I wrote about the need for a big pile of money and good lawyering that would not only defend Trump’s self-proclaimed “enemies list” from civil and criminal legal harassment but affirmatively take the fight to Trump and MAGA’s legal corruption and abuses of power. Today I want to return to that topic. There’s good news and bad news, or good news and suboptimal news. […]
Let’s start with the good news. There actually are some groups mobilizing to do this kind of defense. I’m not going to get into particulars or names of the groups for reasons I’ll explain in a moment — but groups or consortia that are organizing to be the place that Trump targets can go when they get their subpoena or their lawsuit or whatever other form the harassment or abuse it takes. And it’s not just Trump. It’s a more general effort to defend civil society. So perhaps it’s the immigrants rights group which is targeted by a state attorney general. Or it’s the independent press outlet being targeting by the federal or a state government or your run-of-the-mill billionaire. This is happening and it involves a lot of pre-existing groups coordinating their efforts to this end, but also umbrella operations getting commitments for pro-bono work from law firms and much else.
But there’s a catch. For very real reasons these groups don’t want to draw a lot of attention to themselves. They don’t want themselves to become the targets of harassment and lawfare when they’re trying to defend others from it. If they themselves get run out of business who’s going to be around to help everyone else? So I can’t give websites for these operations that you’d want to look up if you’re a target or show you how to contribute money. […]
I have real questions whether that running-under-the-radar approach is viable. Can you really be a public force if you’re trying to stay under the radar? I’m not so sure that’s realistic. […]
It’s not just Trump and official MAGA we have to worry about. We’re really facing an era of broader civic disinhibition, in which public and private actors will be declaring war on civil society, government employees and more in ways that simply haven’t happened in the past. […] not every individual or entity wants to become a poster child for MAGA abuses of power. Often they just need someone to pick up the legal work that would have bankrupted the organization or made an individual lose their home.
As I learned more, I decided that there’s actually a lot of complementarity between the nascent efforts I’m describing and my imagined Big Pile of Money (BPM) group. So let me describe what that BPM group is and why it’s still necessary. There are three roles I think of — penumbras of fear, penumbras of safety and the grand political wrestling match.
One of the best ways I can think of to describe what I’m looking for is by an illusory hypothetical. Let’s imagine there was another billionaire out there — a non-decadent, non-degenerate version of Musk — who said: I believe in America. Every person Trump targets, I’m going to send them a contact number at mega law firm X, which I’ve retained, and it’s an open tab for as long as they need. And if you’re out there wondering if you’re willing to take the risks of doing the right thing over the next four years, I’ll be sending you a contact number too. […] I’m going to use my cash and the courts not just to protect people but to embarrass and humiliate the abusers […]
Obviously that person doesn’t exist or they haven’t come forward yet. And really that person would have so much power it’s not ideal to start with. That’s where Big Pile of Money group would come in, playing that role with billionaire and small donor money and a board of trusted individuals to make sure everything stays on the up and up. […]
Let’s go through our list of three things from above.
First, the penumbra of fear. That’s the whole point. Trump in most cases doesn’t care about the individuals involved. You do this to create a penumbra of fear that goes way beyond the targets involved. You can convince everyone else to keep their heads down or even send in their own versions of the $1 million initiation fees all the billionaires and corporations are currently sending in. A big fighting group like this pushes back on that penumbra of fear […]
But it’s not just defense. As we have seen over the last decade, our present politics is a big, loud spectacle of performative power and humiliation. It’s pro-wrestling in the civic square […]
The pressing problem is that on the lawfare front there’s only one wrestler in the ring, Trump. You need another fighter in the ring speaking and acting the same performative language, not just defending the targeted but damaging and embarrassing and humiliating the other side. Any operation that doesn’t play in that realm isn’t playing this performative, public role. That’s critical. […] Defense is good, but offense is what gets people involved, sending in cash, feeling empowered rather than demoralized. […]
Costco is battling an anti-DEI wave with a stern rebuke to activist shareholders looking to end the warehouse retailer’s diversity ambitions.
Walmart, John Deere, Tractor Supply and other companies are changing or walking away from diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. But Costco believes DEI helps its “treasure hunt” shopping atmosphere, and it is standing behind its efforts.
Costco’s board of directors unanimously recommended that its shareholders vote against a proposal brought by a conservative think tank, the National Center for Public Policy Research, that would require Costco to evaluate and issue a report on the financial risks of maintaining its diversity and inclusion goals. The group criticized Costco for possible “illegal discrimination” against employees who are “white, Asian, male or straight.” …
Costco said its DEI efforts help the company attract and retain a wide range of employees and improve merchandise and services in stores. Costco also said its members want to interact with a diverse employee base…
lumipunasays
Re 103:
What’s more, given that the United States signed a ratified treaty that ensures Panamanian control of the canal, it’s a mystery as to how, exactly, Trump intends to pursue his newfound goals.
It’s too late to offer to give John McCain back to Panama in exchange for the canal.
Donald Trump managed to alarm his supporters twice in a single post to his Truth Social website
The incoming president suggested Bill Gates is the next billionaire making the pilgrimage to his Mar-a-Lago estate, which caused a stir among the MAGA fanbase. However, as Tesla CEO Elon Musk is wrapped up in a social media brawl with anti-immigrant Trump supporters, the felon-elect managed to spread the news to his sugar daddy by means of a creepy message seemingly directed at the billionaire.
“Where are you? When are you coming to the ‘Center of the Universe,’ Mar-a-Lago. Bill Gates asked to come, tonight. We miss you and x! New Year’s Eve is going to be AMAZING!!! DJT,” Trump wrote in the post. Musk’s son X Æ A-Xii goes by the nickname “X.”
Naturally, Trump’s voters took to Musk’s social platform X to denounce the idea of a left-leaning, vaccine-supporting tech elite [Bill Gates] chatting it up with their dear leader.
“Please don’t let Bill Gates anywhere near you,” one user begged, while another wrote, “I hope he doesn’t consider working with this guy.”
Should Gates make his way to Florida, he wouldn’t be the first tech mogul to rub shoulders with Trump before he takes office. Billionaires who have previously butted heads with Trump, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, are now feeding out of the palm of Trump’s orange hands.
[…] both Bezos and Zuckerberg have pledged $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural fund. Other wealthy elites such as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Open AI’s Sam Altman have also bent the knee to the incoming president. […]
It sounds to me like Trump is playing his billionaires off against each other. Which billionaire gets to sit closest to Hair Furor, the cult leader?
Hackers have compromised several different companies’ Chrome browser extensions in a series of intrusions dating back to mid-December, according to one of the victims and experts who have examined the campaign.
Among the victims was the California-based Cyberhaven, a data protection company that confirmed the breach in a statement to Reuters on Friday…
John Sidney McCain III was born on August 29, 1936, at Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone, to naval officer John S. McCain Jr. and Roberta Wright McCain. […].
Stephen E. Sachs, Why John McCain was a Citizen at Birth, 29 Immigr. & Nat’lity L. Rev. 623 (2008).
Senator John McCain was born a citizen in 1936. Professor Gabriel J. Chin challenges this view in this Symposium, arguing that McCain’s birth in the Panama Canal Zone (while his father was stationed there by the Navy) fell into a loophole in the governing statute. The best historical evidence, however, suggests that this loophole is an illusion and that McCain is a “natural born Citizen” eligible to be president.
A person need not be born on U.S. soil to be a citizen at birth. Section 1993 of the Revised Statutes, the statute defining foreign-born citizenship at the time of McCain’s birth, made citizens of certain children “born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States.” The Canal Zone was “out of the limits” of the United States — i.e., outside its borders and outside the Fourteenth Amendment’s grant of citizenship to those born “in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” But the United States had exclusive control of the Canal Zone at the time, arguably placing it within U.S. “jurisdiction” if not its limits. Thus, Chin claims, McCain was not “born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States,” falling instead into a “gap in the law.”
When Congress changed the law in 1937, it would have been too late for McCain to become a natural born citizen (assuming, with Chin, that this means a citizen at birth). Chin’s analysis deserves to be taken seriously, but history may point in another direction. The key statutory language, “the limits and jurisdiction of the United States,” was first added in 1795. At the time, this language apparently referred to a unitary concept — the United States proper, the area within its borders-rather than two independent concepts of “limits” and “jurisdiction.” Like “metes and bounds” or “cease and desist,” the phrase was a mere repetition — a doublet, or (in the words of Judge Posner) one of the many “form[s] of redundancy in which lawyers delight.”
To be born “out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States,” it seems, was historically understood as synonymous — and not just coextensive — with being born outside the United States proper. The historical usage of the phrase and its continuous construction over the first century after 1795 supports this reading. Early interpreters — including scholars, congressmen, and state and federal courts — repeatedly referred to the “limits and jurisdiction” of the United States to mean the same thing as the nation’s “limits” (i.e., its borders). Indeed, the term “limits and jurisdiction” was frequently used this way in contexts unrelated to citizenship.
When separate requirements of limits and jurisdiction might otherwise have conflicted, courts and commentators uniformly adhered to a unitary interpretation of the statute. This interpretation was also consistent with the recognized purposes of the citizenship statutes, avoiding the absurdities of a restrictive reading. Only recently have some questioned this traditional interpretation; but because Congress did not alter the key language between 1795 and 1936, the provision’s original meaning was preserved up to the date of McCain’s birth. Thus, the balance of the evidence favors a view that John McCain — and other children like him — were citizens of the United States from birth.
“SEC 303. [8 U.S.C. 1403] (a) Any person born in the Canal Zone on or after February 26, 1904, and whether before or after the effective date of this act, whose father or mother or both at the time of the birth of such person was or is a citizen of the United States, is declared to be a citizen of the United States.”
Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican and member of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, made an appearance on CNBC Friday to praise billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy for pushing for cuts to government spending. He said the pair would be helpful in future efforts to cut the social safety net.
Donald Trump named Musk and Ramaswamy co-chairs of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an organization outside of the federal government meant to advocate for spending cuts.
During the “Squawk Box” segment on CNBC, Roy said he appreciated the role Musk and Ramaswamy played in the recent fight over legislation to fund the federal government. [video at the link]
“When the DOGE guys came in, Elon and Vivek, I pointed to my Republican colleagues, and I said: ‘You know what the problem is? Right here in this room.’ Because we have Republicans and Democrats who never met a program they didn’t want to promote for some sort of political gain,” Roy said.
During the government funding process, Musk lobbied for the bill to be scrapped by asserting a series of falsehoods on his X account, which has millions of followers. After the controversy, Republicans proposed a bill that cut funding for pediatric cancer research and 9/11 first responders. [Such empathetic doofuses, with all the good worst ideas.]
Specifically, Roy said that the federal government should exercise “restraint” in administering food stamp benefits, which are used by low-income families to purchase basic household needs. He also called for a repeal of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which put caps on the cost of prescription drugs and created incentives for companies to invest in clean energy and to hire American workers.
“We need to address Medicare and Social Security in the long haul,” Roy said, though he added that current benefits should not be affected. He also called for a “spending restraint on Medicaid,” a public health insurance program primarily used by low-income families. […]
“The treasury secretary’s notification to Congress is the clearest sign yet that the fight to avoid default will likely take place in the early months of the new Trump administration.”
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned congressional leaders Friday that the federal government will hit its debt limit as early as Jan. 14 unless Congress takes action or her department implements “extraordinary measures” to avoid default.
Yellen’s letter indicates that the looming debt ceiling fight involving Congress and the new administration is likely to take place in the early months of next year after […] Trump failed to get a provision raising or eliminating the debt ceiling tacked on to an end-of-year spending bill.
“Treasury currently expects to reach the new limit between January 14 and January 23, at which time it will be necessary for Treasury to start taking extraordinary measures,” Yellen wrote in her letter, addressed to House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.
“I respectfully urge Congress to act to protect the full faith and credit of the United States,” Yellen added.
The dates Yellen cited could shift […] The federal government can often operate for months under the “extraordinary measures” or accounting maneuvers Yellen referenced in her letter.
The debt ceiling, or the total amount of money the government can borrow to meet its fiscal obligations, is suspended until Jan. 1, following passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 that was signed into law by President Joe Biden.
Once the U.S. hits the debt ceiling, the government cannot borrow any more money and technically defaults, leaving it unable to pay bills unless the president and Congress negotiate a way to lift a limit on the ability to borrow.
[…] However, Trump seemed to take up the Democratic argument for the first time this month, telling NBC News that he thought the debt ceiling should be abolished.
“The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge,” Trump said.
He unsuccessfully demanded that Congress include a provision to extend or abolish the debt ceiling in its end-of-year funding bill, threatening electoral primary challenges against Republicans who voted to fund the government while excluding a debt limit.
Ultimately, 170 Republicans defied him and added the debt ceiling fight to the incoming administration’s growing to-do list.
[…] President Joe Biden and former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) agreed to suspend the debt limit for two years in a bipartisan deal in the spring of 2023.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) approved legislation to fund the government without changes to the debt limit [recently].
Johnson could face a difficult time retaining his speakership while lifting the debt ceiling. If GOP leaders try to approve an increase without Democratic support, they would have the narrowest of margins in the House to do so without defections among their right flank. But cutting a deal with Democrats to lift or suspend the debt limit could infuriate the right, whose support Johnson needs to remain speaker.
Sounds like petty bickering to me, especially on the part of Republicans.
Bekenstein Boundsays
MAGA infighting? I’ll go fetch the popcorn …
StevoRsays
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has successfully made the closest approach to the Sun, the space agency confirmed. Earlier this week, the spacecraft passed within a record-breaking 6 million kilometres of the scorching star. NASA received an all-clear message from Parker on Thursday night confirming it survived the journey. Launched in 2018 to get a close-up look at the Sun, Parker has since flown straight through its crown like outer atmosphere, or corona. With its close brush complete, the craft is expected to circle the Sun at this distance through to at least September and hopefully longer. It is the fastest spacecraft built by humans, and hit 690,000 kph at closest approach.
In November, three decades after he first visited Russia, De Keyzer published a series of AI-generated images in a book called Putin’s Dream. This time there were no human bodies, no moments in time, instead a vision brought to life with the help of computers.Within hours of posting online about Putin’s Dream, De Keyzer was facing criticism for having produced fake images and possibly contributing to misinformation.
The most important Earth news in 2024 was undoubtedly the most depressing: Climate change wreaked havoc around the globe, indirectly causing flooding, drought, wildfires and other extreme weather events.
This year is on track to become the warmest year since records began and the first year that global temperatures have been 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
In May, levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere — as measured from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa Observatory — reached a record high of 426.90 parts per million. “Not only is CO2 now at the highest level in millions of years, it is also rising faster than ever,” Ralph Keeling, director of the Scripps CO2 Program, said in a statement at the time. Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels also reached a new record high.
As for the Dark Ages, it’s a silly term coined by a crappy historian. The lack of written records is due to time, attrition, Viking raids, and Christianity ruining everything.- Tethys@96
Almost everything we have in the way of classical and medieval literature, history, philosophy, proto-science, etc. is thanks to Christians (specifically, monks) copying it, usually several times.
KGsays
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain@93,94,
Thanks for that info.
KGsays
Though not qualified to make any such judgments myself, I still can’t take too seriously any historian who won’t acknowledge room for doubt in the face of such limited, contradictory, tendentious-yet-ambiguous evidence as the Jesus stories. Even the avowed historical-Jesus advocate Bart Ehrman concedes that neither the words nor the actions recounted in “Scripture” merit any confidence at all. Pierce R. Butler@56
Of course there’s “room for doubt”, as there is for the existence of any reported person from the period for whom we don’t have direct physical evidence such as their name on monuments, coins, gravestones, or preserved letters (such as those found at Vindolanda). And of course the accounts of Jesus’s words and actions in the gospels and elsewhere are questionable when not obviously false. So what? That’s not what mythicists claim – they claim that it’s either certain or probable that there was no such person – and that’s just ideologically-motivated crap. By the normal standards of ancient history scholarship, the existence of Jesus and an outline biography (native of Galilee with more than one brother, baptised by John the Baptist, went around Galilee as a preacher and faith-healer, claimed some special status, came to Jerusalem with a group of followers, made a disturbance in the temple, annoyed the Roman authorities, got crucified) are well-established.
World chess number one Magnus Carlsen has quit a major tournament after being told he could not carry on playing while wearing jeans.
The chess great had been defending his titles at the FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships in New York when officials made the request.
The grandmaster said he had offered to change his trousers for the next day, but was fined and told he needed to change immediately.
The chess federation (FIDE) said its dress code regulations were designed to “ensure fairness and professionalism for all participants”…
KGsays
KG @44, Trump can’t have Greenland … even it makes “more sense in geostrategic terms.” – Lynna, OM@47
Well of course he can’t, under the UN Treaty and the Kellogg-Briand Pact (and hence US law), as long as Denmark isn’t successfully pressured into selling it. I don’t know why anyone thinks that would stop him, once he’s appointed his cronies to replace any generals who would refuse his illegal orders. But that wasn’t the point I was making, as I would have thought was obvious.
birgerjohanssonsays
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe survives close brush with the sun’s scorching surface
StevoR @ 135
Oops, I overlooked your comment.
BTW with the vastly improved asteroid catalog process, are there any ‘new’ ones available for sample return missions that do not require multiple gravity assists from other planets? I am thinking in terms of quick turnaround times.
JMsays
@139 Yes but it wasn’t the Christian church trying to spread knowledge, it was the Christian church trying to monopolize it. When whatever other education systems came apart with the fall of the Roman empire, invasions and other problems the Church didn’t try to teach people, start schools open to anybody or spread the books. The Catholic church got the books and then hit them away in private libraries. The Church tried to limit education to people joining the church, begrudgingly agreeing to teach some clerks for civilian government because somebody had know how to keep the legal and finance records.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday apologized to his Azerbaijani counterpart for what he called a “tragic incident” following the crash of an Azerbaijani airliner in Kazakhstan that killed 38 people, but stopped short of acknowledging that Moscow was responsible.
More or less an admission of what was widely rumored. Russian air defense shot down the plane, it was going to happen to somebody eventually with the huge combat zone across Ukraine and Russia. The plane was originally going to Grozny in Chechnya. It arrived there to find the city in heavy fog and air defenses firing because the city was under attack by Ukrainian drones. It apparently got hit but didn’t suffer critical damage. The pilot then decided to fly to the distant Aktau and the plane didn’t last the trip.
China has built or expanded more than 200 specialized detention facilities nationwide to interrogate suspects ensnared in Xi Jinping’s widening anti-corruption drive, a CNN investigation has found, as the Chinese leader extends his crackdown beyond the ruling Communist Party to a vast swath of public sectors.
Since taking power in 2012, Xi has launched a sweeping campaign against graft and disloyalty, taking down corrupt officials as well as political rivals at an unprecedented speed and scale as he consolidated control over the party and the military.
Xi holds power but his position is more fragile then it looks and this is one of the consequences. Xi has turned out to be bad at picking people to promote into positions of power, he has had to remove several people he appointed for one reason or another. So he has ended up at the top but with a power structure below him made up of power groups that would like to replace him. His security largely rests on the power groups hating each other also. Xi has expanded the state security organization and has used it to keep his control on the state.
At the same time there are a bunch of other reasons for expanding the state prison system. It’s used against the Muslim minorities and other religious groups. The CCCP has taken steps to prevent rich business leaders and popular media figures from getting too popular and/or powerful. The regional and local governments in some places are so broke they have been using the security forces to shake down people for money.
China is slowly turning into a dystopian police state as the CCCP has to use more and more policing to hold power.
It’s a question that goes to the heart of the crackup between tech oligarchs and MAGA nativists. […] the blowup started on X and continued on X as Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and other Trump-aligned tech business figures argued that the U.S. needs to make it easier to hire foreign software engineers because America is failing to produce enough of the specialists that they need. [It takes education plus time and experience for most workers to become excellent at their job. I think the debate over visas for tech workers is ignoring this fact.]
The posting war has already spawned a raft of coverage across the media […]
It’s also visibly annoyed Musk and some of the others.
As of this writing, Elon Musk appears to have banned Laura Loomer, MAGA’s digital Leni Riefenstahl equivalent who helped turn the nativist faction’s attention on Silicon Valley billionaires. Musk himself responded positively (though trollishly) to a post from an account called “Autism Capital” suggesting that American workers suffer from intellectual impairment.
The problem is whether these gestures and arguments over visa categories will morph into anything more concrete: battles over personnel or government action, or anything that would meaningfully change the course of the incoming Trump administration. The campaign itself demonstrated social media’s ability to reach into reality in September after Vice President-elect JD Vance used X to scapegoat Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio; an act applauded at the time by both the nativist and Silicon Valley factions.
But thinking of this simply in policy questions fails to capture what they’re really fighting about: it’s over who has custody of the new administration, tech billionaires or the nativist snake pit? One has money; the other has been with Trump for a long time.
[One faction or another has to have “custody” over the Trump administration? Yes, that seems to be the case.]
In other factional fights, a leader might step in to resolve it or signal the dominance of one side. So far, Trump is nowhere to be seen.
1. Opioid overdose deaths declined after a staggering climb over the past decade. Large-scale initiatives, like Naloxone distribution and education campaigns, are partly to thank.
2. Sexually transmitted infections declined by 2% percent.
3. Cervical cancer deaths are decreasing among young women (the first cohort eligible for the HPV vaccine), which suggests the vaccine is working in wondrous ways.
4. Obesity rates dipped for the first time in a decade.
5. Covid-19 is *not* among the top 10 leading causes of death
6. More accurate and precise data on race and ethnicity. In March 2024, federal standards were established to add Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) as a new category to all federal government documents
7. First ever drinking water standards for 6 PFAS—or “forever chemicals”
8. New standards for kids’ school meals that limit added sugars, reduce sodium, and allow more flexibility in menu planning
9. Firearm violence was declared a public health emergency by the U.S. Surgeon General,
11.Expanded wastewater surveillance to include bird flu, seasonal flu, and RSV, allowing communities to detect health threats faster.
12.First-generation vaccines and drugs successes. Lenacapavi, for example, was named Science’s breakthrough of the year. This is an HIV prevention drug that is close to 100% effective.
13. Data pipelines were laid so the decentralized public health system could start communicating with each other.
14. Sixteen measles outbreaks were contained despite increasing rates of disease.
15. Oregon implemented peer-support programs for rural residents with hepatitis C.
16 Higher classroom air quality standards, like those adopted in California this year, will help limit student exposure to infectious diseases and pollutants in wildfire smoke.
17 Local and state health departments, like those in Santa Clara, CA, and Colorado state, started testing raw milk sold in their communities before federal wheels got rolling, accelerating progress toward our nationwide milk testing system.
18 Food-borne outbreaks were stopped, and 12 timely public health warnings were issued regarding contaminated products, from McDonald’s Quarter Pounders to ready-to-eat meat.
19 World Health Organization ran a highly successful polio vaccination campaign in Gaza:
20 Egypt and Cabo Verde were declared free of malaria.
21 The Americas are again free of endemic measles now that Brazil has re-eliminated the disease. Vaccination coverage in the region has reached 87%.
22 Rwanda stopped Marburg (an Ebola-like disease) in its tracks due to excellent epidemiological work, contract tracing, and decades of investments in building up their health systems.
More embedded links to sources are available at the main link.
[…] Solar power is winning
That renewable energy continues to gain ground is hardly a new story, but the expansion of solar power in the past year has been stunning. Last year set a record in worldwide solar energy deployment and this year is on track to beat it by 29 percent, defying projections. And the sun is still rising on solar, a pillar in the push to decarbonize the power grid. —Umair Irfan
[…] Our stuff is getting more efficient
Our homes are a major front in the campaign to curb climate change. About a quarter of all the energy in the world is used at home. Half of that goes toward heating and cooling, while a quarter power appliances. This hardware has been getting more energy efficient over time, but some of these devices have proved less reliable and convenient to use. The good news is that washers, dryers, furnaces, water heaters, and stoves that use less energy and do their jobs better are also available and getting cheaper. […]
Our technology is more capable of keeping us safe during climate disasters [overstatement]
[…]
many of the latest smartphones can connect directly to satellites, making it easy to text or even make phone calls during emergencies. People in North Carolina quickly discovered how valuable this upgrade could be in the wake of Hurricane Helene. Many iPhones became lifelines by becoming satellite phones after flooding took out cellphone towers. Sadly, this won’t be the last time a climate disaster devastates infrastructure, but at least, technology is making the aftermath that much more manageable.
Context: A fractional leader is someone with lengthy experience who works part-time and long-term to help run and represent a company, according to Mikhli.
They are “on the org chart and have a seat at the leadership table,” she says.
Consultants, on the other hand, sit outside of organizations and work on a project basis.
Zoom in: Khadijah Robinson, a fractional COO for young companies, started committing to the role at the start of 2023 after being burnt out from “a nonstop decade of go, go, go,” she tells Axios.
“I also wanted to be able to work on multiple things,” she says.
Gig economy for everybody, except it won’t be anything like low level gig jobs where people need the money to survive.
I expect this is largely selling name power and executive connections. Any company large enough and complex enough to actually need C-suit executives has a job complex enough to need them full time. Hiring a fractional executive is probably only worthwhile when you want to hire their connections for a while or the company investor requires you to hire their kid.
@139 Yes but it wasn’t the Christian church trying to spread knowledge, it was the Christian church trying to monopolize it. When whatever other education systems came apart with the fall of the Roman empire, invasions and other problems the Church didn’t try to teach people, start schools open to anybody or spread the books. – JM@147
It didn’t really need to try – there was simply no alternative until universities began to appear in the 12th (possibly late 11th in the case of Bologna) to 13th centuries. Before that, the monastic and cathedral schools did teach some children (sons of the “nobility”) who would not become monks or clerics. As for starting schools open to anybody or spreading books, there simply weren’t either the teachers or the books to make this possible. Relationships between the Church and universities were complex and varied from place to place and time to time, but the idea that the Church was universally hostile to secular learning or intellectual innovation is simply incompatibe with the fact that during its period of greatest power – roughly the first half of the second millennium – western and central Europe went from being an intellectual and technological backwater to being at the forefront of global proto-science and mathematics. The invention of moveable-type printing in the mid-1400s brought an end to the Church’s near-monopoly, but that invention only occurred and took hold because of rising literacy and demand for books.
Good on Paper, Looming Disaster in Reality – The Remains of Russia’s Soviet Arsenal
Covert Cabal gives a summary of the Russian tank reserves. Essentially Russia is out of useful tanks. They have thousands of tanks in storage but are down to junk, tanks without turrets and similar tanks that are likely to cost as much or more to repair then the cost of building a new tank. Due to Russia’s limited capacity to build new tanks they will continue to recycle what they can despite it not being cost effective.
They also point out the very important point that Russia can build and rebuild tanks so will not run out entirely. Instead they will reduce the use of tanks on the front line and slowly get further and further behind in resupplying units. This appears to be already happening but how far behind they are is not clear.
Tethyssays
KG @139
Almost everything we have in the way of classical and medieval literature, history, philosophy, proto-science, etc. is thanks to Christians (specifically, monks) copying it, usually several times.
The preservation of Greek, Latin and Hebrew culture and the entirety of Islamic contributions to modernity are not due to Christian monks. There is exactly one late medieval Runic manuscript because the Christian’s had a habit of genociding the entirety of the educated classes of Saxons, Angles, Friisi, etcetera who refused to convert.
That Church grew increasingly powerful, and decreed a patriarchal monopoly on literacy in the 900s. There is no reason to assume that only Monks were involved in creating manuscripts. There were plenty of women in Abbeys during the so called Dark Ages and mid-medieval period ( when we start getting more preserved material) who also worked in the scriptoriums. It’s a pity that the church ordered any manuscripts that did not conform to Nicean standards to be destroyed/ erased from history.
The few extant fragments of Old High German prose that are about pre Christian culture have been recovered from inside old bindings, and discovered as ‘ghosts’ in vellum that were scraped off and reused. Muspilli is written into the blank spaces of a Bavarian manuscript that dates from the 900s, but it’s exceedingly difficult in its vernacular and quality. It does accord well with the Ragnorok story found in the late medieval Icelandic texts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muspilli
The Dark Ages is the time period of Attila, Odacer, Rhinegold Saga, Merovich, Vendels, Goths, Arthur, and Theodoric the Great. His actual name is Dieter. Both Theo, and -aric are descriptors meaning learned/ wise, and king, respectively. Jordanes Getica dates from the 500s, but he isn’t the most reliable narrator. Arian Goths produced a large body of literature and art, but Justinian did a good job of destroying anything written in Gothic but the Bible. There are some early medieval Vendel poems from Carthage, which are entirely at odds with the official Roman stereotype of brutish, uncultured Vandal Barbarians. Their artwork is rather sublime too.
St Hilde is one example of a literate, Anglo Saxon Abbess who lived during the period, but there are many other documented Abbesses who lived in England and the various iterations of the Frankish Kingdoms. Founding Abbeys and joining them was a very popular trend among noble ladies who did not wish to marry or remarry after being widowed.
Attrition has also taken place, as most writing would have been done on sticks or bones, which generally decay after a few decades. There was once quite a large centuries old collection of them at Westminster in the form of tally sticks, but somebody decided to clear them out by burning them in the fireplace , and nearly burned the whole building down. In Bergen, a trove of these sticks was found that give a nice window into literacy among the general populace.
tl:dr
All of that is to say that the term Dark Ages is ahistorical and misleading. The idea that some Christian Monks should get kudos because their library managed to preserve a few fragments of an entire cultures ancient traditions, after that Church had spent a couple centuries doing its best to erase it entirely, is not exactly laudable.
“North Korean troops are being treated as “expendable” and ordered to take on “hopeless assaults against Ukrainian defenses,” National Security Council official John Kirby said.”
Russia is deploying “human waves” of North Korean soldiers, the U.S. said Friday, and at least one soldier captured by Ukraine died of his injuries.
According to White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, some North Korean soldiers have taken their own lives rather than surrendering to Ukrainian forces.
These suicides, he said, were “likely out of fear of reprisal against their families in North Korea in the event that they’re captured.” [!!]
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service had confirmed on Friday that the North Korean soldier captured the previous day had died.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a statement on Telegram Friday that at least 3,000 North Korean soldiers have died or been wounded in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces mounted a lightning incursion in August.
But Russia has since amassed thousands of troops in a counterattack.
Kirby quoted a lower death toll among North Koreans, saying more than 1,000 soldiers have died just in the past week.
That’s on top of the more than 1,500 Russian soldiers being wounded or killed each day, according to Britain’s defense ministry, which estimated that there were over 45,000 casualties in November, the highest since the start of the war, adding that the number “is likely reflective of the higher tempo of Russian operations and offensives.”
To supplement its counterattack, Moscow turned toward its ally Pyongyang, which, according to estimates by the U.S. and its allies, has deployed an estimated 11,000 soldiers in Ukraine.
Kirby said the North Koreans are conducting “massed, dismounted assaults against Ukrainian positions in Kursk.” While these “human wave tactics” were ineffective, he acknowledged that Russia’s grinding assault on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure was making it difficult for Ukrainians to weather the winter.
Neither Russia nor North Korea has publicly acknowledged the troop deployment.
[…] “These North Korean soldiers appear to be highly indoctrinated, pushing attacks even when it is clear that those attacks are futile,” he said.
[…] Zelenskyy said Friday that while “several” North Korean soldiers were captured, they were “seriously wounded and could not be resuscitated,” suggesting that some of them may have also been killed by comrades.
These troops were being sent to fight with “minimal protection,” he said, and were suffering a “great deal” of losses.
Still, Ukrainians have been unable to capture them as prisoners, he added. “Their own people are executing them.”
Taylor Cagnacci moved from California to Tennessee with hopes of starting a new chapter in a state that touts a low cost of living […]
But she’s infuriated by Tennessee’s meager social services, which leave her and many other moms struggling in a state where abortion is banned with limited exceptions.
“I was going to have my child no matter what, but for other women, that’s kind of a crappy situation that they put you in,” said Cagnacci, a 29-year-old Kingsport mom who relies on Medicaid and a federally funded nutrition program. “You have to have your child. But where’s the assistance afterward?”
Tennessee has a porous safety net for mothers and young children, recent research and an analysis by The Associated Press found. It’s unknown how many women in the state have given birth because they didn’t have access to abortion, but it is clear that from the time a Tennessee woman gets pregnant, she faces greater obstacles to a healthy pregnancy, a healthy child and a financially stable family than the average American mom.
Like other states with strict abortion bans, Tennesseans of childbearing age are more likely to live in maternal care deserts and face overall doctor shortages. Women, infants and children are less likely to be enrolled in a government nutrition program known as WIC. And Tennessee is one of only 10 states that hasn’t expanded Medicaid to a greater share of low-income families.
[…] GOP state leaders in Tennessee and other states that banned abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 argue that they are bolstering services for families.
Tennessee boosted its Medicaid coverage for mothers in 2022 from 60 days postpartum to a year, which allowed an additional 3,000 moms to use the program each year.
The state also raised the Medicaid income limit for parents to the poverty level — nearly $26,000 for a family of three — and offers recipients 100 free diapers a month for babies under 2. According to the governor’s office, these changes have resulted in thousands of new parents accessing government services.
“Pro-life is much more than defending the lives of the unborn,” Republican Gov. Bill Lee said in his 2023 annual address to lawmakers and echoed more recently on social media. “This is not a matter of politics. This is about human dignity.”
Yet, nonprofit leaders and mothers told the AP there are still significant gaps in the safety net.
Anika Chillis, a 39-year-old single mom in Memphis, has Medicaid, WIC and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps). While she’s deeply grateful for the help, she said it also can disappear — like when she temporarily lost WIC.
“It’s hard,” she said, sitting on a park bench as her 2-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter played nearby. “Groceries are constantly going up.” And being a single mom “makes it doubly hard on you.”
MEDICAID AND HEALTH CARE CHALLENGES
Tennessee fared poorly at WIC enrollment, Medicaid, having enough maternal care and requirements for paid family and medical leave, an October study found.
Other states with similarly restrictive abortion laws — such as Idaho, Alabama, Missouri, Georgia and Mississippi — ranked poorly on numerous measures, too. Researchers said restrictive states had a slightly higher average birth rate and a much lower average abortion rate than the least restrictive states.
“In general, these states that restrict abortion are the more fiscally conservative, the more socially conservative states,” said Dr. Nigel Madden, lead author of the study published in the American Journal of Public Health. […]
“People who claim to be pro-life, who advocated for these abortion bans, often suggest that these policies are designed to protect children, women and families,” said Madden, the researcher. But the weakness of the safety net shows “the hypocrisy of that argument.” […]
I would argue we owe the systematic islamic efforts* to translate greek and latin works to arabic far more for preserving knowledge than we owe the church.
*Sadly that effort faded in later centuries. Traditionalists and fudamentalists won the battle over islam and have no interest in the classic era.
robrosays
Heather Cox Richardson has a good rundown of where things stand in Trump/MAGA/Musk land today (12/28/24). Seems all the campers are unhappy.
Civil war has broken out within the MAGA Republicans. On the one side are the traditional MAGAs, who tend to be white, anti-immigrant, and less educated than the rest of the U.S. They believe that the modern government’s protection of equal rights for women and minorities has ruined America, and they tend to want to isolate the U.S. from the rest of the world. They make up Trump’s voting base.
On the other side are the new MAGAs who appear to have taken control of the incoming Trump administration. Led by Elon Musk, who bankrolled Trump’s campaign, the new MAGA wing is made up of billionaires, especially tech entrepreneurs, many of whom are themselves immigrants.
During the campaign, these two wings made common cause because they both want to destroy the current U.S. government, especially as President Joe Biden had been using it to strengthen American democracy. Traditional MAGA wants to get rid of the government that protects equality and replace it with one that enforces white male supremacy and Christianity. New MAGA—which some have started to call DOGE, after the Department of Government Efficiency run by Musk and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy—wants to get rid of the government that regulates business, especially technology, and protects American interests against competition from countries like China.
Their shared commitment to the destruction of the current government is about the only overlap between these two factions.
With the campaign over, traditional MAGA and DOGE are ripping apart. Trump sparked the fight when he announced on Sunday, December 22, that he would appoint Musk associate Sriram Krishnan, who was born in India, as a senior policy advisor on artificial intelligence.
On Monday, MAGA activist Laura Loomer criticized Trump’s choice of Krishnan. Loomer was in Trump’s inner circle until three months ago, when her anti-immigrant tirades made Trump campaign staff worry she would cost Trump votes and forced her out of his public schedule. Loomer noted that Krishnan wants to remove the cap on green cards for workers from certain countries.
Krishnan has also called for making it easier for skilled foreign workers to come to the U.S. on H-1B temporary visas. These programs are important to the technology sector, but critics say they enable companies to hire foreign workers at lower pay than U.S. workers, that H-1B workers are trapped in their jobs, and that wage theft is rampant in the H-1B program.
Loomer said those jobs “should be given to American STEM students.” Then she got to the heart of the matter, complaining that MAGA is getting left out of the new administration. She noted that “none of the tech executives who are meeting with Trump and getting appointed in his cabinet supported him in 2020 or during the 2024 primary.” She continued: “I feel like many of them are trying to get into Trump’s admin[istration] to enrich themselves and get contracts at [the] D[epartment] O[f] D[efense]. This is not America First Policy.”
When another tech entrepreneur and Trump appointee David Sacks defended Krishnan, Loomer made a series of racist posts, claiming among other things that: “Our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third-world invaders from India.” She said, “It’s not racist against Indians to want the original MAGA policies I voted for. I voted for a reduction in H-1B visas. Not an extension.”
On Wednesday, December 25—Christmas, a major holiday for MAGA supporters—Musk took a stand against Loomer and the MAGAs. He posted on X that the U.S. needs twice the number of engineers it has, and welcomed foreign engineers. “The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” he tweeted. “Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.”
Loomer responded: “Is DOGE real? Or is it a vanity project?” Others complained about the “Tech Bros” “hubris [and] arrogance with their flippant, condescending, and elitist responses to legitimate criticisms of the H1B1 program.” Still others pointed out that there were big layoffs in tech this year and asked why they weren’t getting rehired if there was such a desperate need for workers.
Musk posted: “Investing in Americans is actually hard. Really hard. It costs money and time and effort to make a person productive. It’s a short term net loss. It’s much easier to bring in skilled workers who might not do quite a good a job [sic], but will work for a fraction of the cost and be happy just to be here.”
Loomer responded: “The elephant in the room is that [Musk], who is not MAGA and never has been, is a total f*cking drag on the Trump transition. He’s a stage 5 clinger who over stayed his welcome at Mar a Lago in an effort to become Trump’s side piece and be the point man for all of his accomplices in big Tech to slither in to Mar a Lago.” [sic]
Musk called Loomer a troll, and she responded that “Telling the truth isn’t trolling… You bought your way into MAGA 5 minutes ago…. We all know you only donated your money so you could influence immigration policy and protect your buddy Xi JinPing.”
Thursday everything broke open. Ramaswamy, who was born in Ohio to parents who immigrated to America from India, posted on X an indictment of American culture that seemed a direct assault on MAGA Republicans, who have been vocal about their disdain for education.
Ramaswamy posted that tech companies hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers rather than native-born Americans because “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long…. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.” He called for “[m]ore math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.’”
“If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve,” he warned. “‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our a**es handed to us by China.” He called for America to embrace “a new golden era,” but warned it was possible “only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness. That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence.”
With that, the fat was in the fire. MAGA dragged Ramaswamy, with even former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley retorting: “There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture. All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.” Haley ran for president against Trump but ultimately endorsed him. She is herself the child of Indian immigrants.
Loomer also hit back against Musk, posting: “Is DOGE a way to ‘cut spending’ or REDIRECT the spending toward the pet projects of tech bro billionaires? It’s looking like the latter, T[o] B[e] H[onest].” She continued: “‘Hey, let’s convince the peasants that we are saving them money as we enrich ourselves!’” Another right-wing poster wondered: “How did DOGE go from ‘let’s cut wasteful government spending’ to ‘here’s why we need to import more immigrants’ almost overnight?”
When Musk appeared to limit Loomer’s ability to use X, she posted: “I have always been America First and a die hard supporter of President Trump and I believe that promises made should be promises kept. Donald Trump promised to remove the H1B visa program and I support his policy. Now, as one of Trump’s biggest supporters, I’m having my free speech silenced by a tech billionaire for simply questioning the tech oligarchy.” Other right-wing accounts accused Musk of censoring them, too, and racist anti-immigrant sentiments flowed freely.
On Friday, when cartoonist and right-wing commenter Scott Adams posted that MAGA was “taking a page from Democrats on how to lose elections while feeling good about themselves,” Musk agreed and added: “And those contemptible fools must be removed from the Republican Party, root and stem.”
Loomer commented that Musk “is now referring to MAGA as ‘contemptible fools.’… The Trump base is being replaced by Big Tech executives. So sad to see this.” She tagged Trump and added “I feel so sad for MAGA.” Meanwhile, other MAGA supporters on X piled on Musk, complaining that he had not paid them, as promised, for their participation in his “free speech” petition during the campaign.
By today, key Trump ally Steve Bannon, a central figure in MAGA, had taken to another right-wing social media platform to warn his supporters that Musk is showing his “true colors” and to demand that the H-1B visa program be “zeroed-out.” Another right-wing influencer, Jack Posobiec, tweeted: “Today was the day we found out who is getting rich by screwing over the American worker.”
Trump did not weigh in on the fight but, in what appeared to be intended to be a private communication to Musk, wrote on his social media site: “Where are you? When are you coming to the ‘Center of the Universe,’ Mar-a-Lago. Bill Gates asked to come, tonight. We miss you and x! New Year’s Eve is going to be AMAZING!!! DJT.” (According to Aaron Pellish and Alayna Treene of CNN, “x” here likely refers to Musk’s son X Æ A-Xii.)
Why does this all matter? Because while Trump’s people keep insisting he won in a landslide and has a mandate that he will put in place on day one, his fragile coalition is splintering even before he takes office.
Trump won less than 50% of the vote. Despite their slim victory, the Republican Party was already in a civil war between MAGA and establishment Republicans who are fed up with the MAGAs who threaten to burn down the government and almost a century of international diplomacy: just a week ago, Senate Republicans were publicly complaining about the dysfunctional “sh*t show” and “fiasco” in the House.
Now, with Trump not even in office yet, the two factions of Trump’s MAGA base—which, indeed, have opposing interests—are at war.
birgerjohanssonsays
This is fun.
Meidas Touch:
“Trump hides on golf course as MAGA attacks itself.”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=AEo0I-wTwZA
Behold the narcissist-in-chief. He feels no responsibility for his followers. Now that they have helped him to power they no longer matter.
JMsays
@159 Lynna, OM: I’m curious what the North Koreans have been told about getting captured. They have been lied too heavily about the situation in South Korea and those that do defect are usually amazed at how well they live in South Korea. It’s likely the North Koreans have been told lies about how they will be treated if captured. Even without that North Korea uses family punishment and North Korean soldiers likely know their families are likely to be punished if they let themselves be taken alive.
KGsays
Tethys@158,
You’re right that I should certainly have mentioned nuns as well as monks. The rest of what you say is interesting, but doesn’t alter the fact that most of what we have of classical and medieval writing was copied, generally multiple times, by Christians, mostly associated with the Church. As for runic writing, you can’t write a great deal on sticks or bones. And according to your own link, Muspilli appears to be about the Christian “Last Judgement” rather than Ragnarok.
It’s a pity that the church ordered any manuscripts that did not conform to Nicean standards to be destroyed/ erased from history.
When was this order given, and by whom? Because little of what we have from the classical period would “conform to Nicean standards”, being written by non-Christians. So if such an order was given, it wasn’t very effectively enforced. In fact, for anything written on papyrus or parchment all that would be necessary to make it very unlikely it would survive would be not to copy it. Although parchment, being expensive, was routinely scraped and re-used, so a lot probably got “erased from history” without any positive intention to ensure it didn’t survive, but simply because the parchment was wanted to copy something else.
All of that is to say that the term Dark Ages is ahistorical and misleading. The idea that some Christian Monks should get kudos because their library managed to preserve a few fragments of an entire cultures ancient traditions, after that Church had spent a couple centuries doing its best to erase it entirely, is not exactly laudable.
Er, yes, of course the term “Dark Ages” is ahistorical and misleading. And it’s not a matter of “kudos”, but of historical fact that we owe most of what we have of classical and medieval writing to Christian copyists.
KGsays
I would argue we owe the systematic islamic efforts* to translate greek and latin works to arabic far more for preserving knowledge than we owe the church. – birgerjohansson@162
Not actually true, I believe. Certainly a lot of Greek works first came to the notice of Latin (i.e. western) Europe via Arabic, following the capture of Toledo in 1085 and the retranslation programme of people such as Adelard of Bath and Gerard of Cremona – who employed Jews and Muslims who knew both Arabic and either Latin or the local vernacular. But IIRC, most of the works concerned were still extant in the Byzantine Empire, and came to Latin Europe in the original Greek later on. And the Abbasid translation programme did not include much from Latin. However, it did include material from Persian, Syriac and Indian sources – among the last of which was the so-called “Arabic” numerals. And Arabic mathematicians and proto-scientists added a great deal of original work of their own – as well as the knowledge of how to make paper, originally derived from China.
birgerjohanssonsays
Is this Laura Loomer just some racist mayfly or is she someone I need to remember? There are so many of them cast from the same template that I only recall those who manage to disgrace themselves in comic ways.
A Russia-linked tanker suspected of cutting Baltic Sea cables has been tugged to port amid reports it was loaded with “spy equipment”.
Finnish authorities boarded the Eagle S tanker at sea after suspecting the vessel of sabotaging undersea power and internet lines on Christmas Day.
The Cook Islands-registered ship was carrying Russian oil when it allegedly slowed down and dragged its anchor along the seabed to damage the Estlink 2 undersea cable, which provides power to Estonia.
A Finnish coastguard crew boarded the Eagle S on Thursday and sailed the vessel to Finnish waters, a coast guard official said.
The vessel is said to have been kitted out with special transmitting and receiving devices that monitor all naval activity, according to shipping journal Lloyd’s List citing a source with direct involvement in the ship.
“They were monitoring all Nato naval ships and aircraft,” the source said, adding: “They had all details on them. They were just matching their frequencies.” …
A Colorado man is facing possible bias-motivated charges for allegedly attacking a television news reporter after demanding to know whether he was a citizen, saying “This is Trump’s America now,” according to court documents.
Patrick Thomas Egan, 39, was arrested Dec. 18 in Grand Junction, Colorado, after police say he followed KKCO/KJCT reporter Ja’Ronn Alex’s vehicle for around 40 miles (64 kilometers) from the Delta area. Alex told police that he believed he had been followed and attacked because he is Pacific Islander.
After arriving in Grand Junction, Egan, who was driving a taxi, pulled up next to Alex at a stoplight and, according to an arrest affidavit, said something to the effect of: “Are you even a U.S. citizen? This is Trump’s America now! I’m a Marine and I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!”
Alex, who had been out reporting, then drove back to his news station in the city. After he got out of his vehicle, Egan chased Alex as he ran toward the station’s door and demanded to see his identification, according to the document laying out police’s evidence in the case. Egan then tackled Alex, put him in a headlock and “began to strangle him,” the affidavit said. Coworkers who ran out to help and witnesses told police that Alex appeared to be losing his ability to breathe during the attack, which was partially captured on surveillance video, according to the document…
“The cargo ship Sparta, which Russia sent to evacuate its weapons and equipment from Syria, broke down while underway—the fuel pipe of the main engine failed,” Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) reported on Monday. “The Russian crew is trying to fix the problem and is drifting in the open sea near Portugal.”
Fourteen of the Ursa Major’s crew were rescued uninjured from a lifeboat and transferred to Spain, the agency said. The Russian ministry said the ship started sinking following an explosion in the engine room.
The vessel was owned by SK-Yug, a subsidiary of the Russian shipping and logistics company Oboronlogistika, which was established under Russia’s defense ministry and placed under U.S. and European Union sanctions for its ties to Russia’s military.
This makes 4 ships the Russians have lost in something like a month, they also lost 2 oil tankers recently. That starts to push things into the suspicious category. Russia is operating old ships with inadequate repair because of sanctions and the cost of the war but 4 ships in a short period of time seems like a pattern.
Since Russia seems to be using ships in international waters to cut communication lines, somebody might be taking some revenge on Russian ships.
birgerjohanssonsays
Swedish politicians want to activate article four in the NATO membership rules after the broken sea cable incidents.
birgerjohanssonsays
I want to cheer you up a bit with a film of rescue foxes.
“Jagger and Luka play with a Christmas toy in the snow”
Re; birgerjohansson @ #173…
I thought I’d read that the Estonians were calling for that.
birgerjohanssonsays
I am told Willem Dafoe is an excellent Van Helsing in Nosferatu. And Bill Skarsgård is no bad baddie either.
The problem with the 1979 Nosferatu is, now we know what Klaus Kinski did to his daughter.
Tethyssays
@KG
historical fact that we owe most of what we have of classical and medieval writing to Christian copyists.
.
I’m sure the Eastern Roman Empire had a few copies of various classical works in addition to the vast amount of extant literature held in Rome or Ravenna or Sienna.
By the same token, we have very little in the way of written records in the Frankish language because Vikings really liked raiding those Christian enclaves, stealing their manuscripts, burning their Abbey, and carrying off anyone they caught into slavery.
It simply is not true for most of the Pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature that we still have. Neither the Exeter Book or the Codex that contains Beowulf are the work of Christian copyists. They both contain some specifically Christian poems and references but the vellum is dated to about 1000 years old. The bulk of the poems are oral traditions which were memorized and retold by official skalds for hundreds of years before some anonymous scribe compiled them into an anthology.
They are meant to be heard, not read. If you want to give the copyists credit for maintaining a library it is warranted, although that is one of the basic functions of scriptoriums besides making more copies of basic church texts like prayer books and psalters. Of course Muspilli is Christianized, it was written in a monastery in the 900s long after the Dark Ages, but it contains the only version of the story in a OHG dialect and has clear parallels with Ragnorok despite being edited for Christian sensibilities.
None of the Icelandic material which comes from The Elder Edda is from a scriptorium, , and Snorri Sturlasson (who is Christian but not a monk) wrote the Younger Edda to preserve the tradition of Skaldic poetry.
It is quite obviously not preserved due to the efforts of Christian copyists.
I dont know enough ecclesiastical history to say which Pope made the possession of a penis mandatory to learning to read and write in Latin, but it doesn’t seem to have been followed on the Continent as it was in England. Hildegarde Von Bingen was writing scholarly works on medicine, and being a Saint by the 1100s iirc.
Bekenstein Boundsays
Hiring a fractional executive is probably only worthwhile when you want to hire their connections for a while or the company investor requires you to hire their kid.
@177 Tethys wrote:
@KG
historical fact that we owe most of what we have of classical and medieval writing to Christian copyists.
I reply: That is true, however, I have read reputable articles that said ‘in 273 AD, Roman Emperor Aurelian conquered Egypt . . and fearing the pagan temples within Egypt, Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria demanded that a mob of Egyptians destroy the temple at Serapis and the remains of the great library of Alexandria’
[…] Trump backed immigration visas for highly-skilled workers as the program has been in the spotlight after Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy faced backlash within the Republican leader’s base for signaling their support for the H-1B work visa, which has been criticized as too complicated and susceptible to abuse.
“I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump said in a phone interview with The New York Post published Saturday.
I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” he added, as reported by the NY Post.
Trump’s support for the program comes as two of his key allies set to run the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk and Ramaswamy, have faced heightened scrutiny on Musk’s social platform X from some in the GOP, including far-right activist Laura Loomer and other hard-line anti-immigration Republicans.
The dispute further escalated late Friday night after Musk pledged to “go to war” over the issue in a post on X.
“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” he wrote in the post.
“I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend,” he added.
The debate appeared to originate from a suggestion last month from Sriram Krishnan, Trump’s pick for White House policy adviser on artificial intelligence, that Musk examine removing caps on green cards for skilled immigrants. Krishnan’s comments resurfaced in recent days after he was appointed by Trump to serve in his incoming administration. […]
179 people were killed after a plane crashed while landing at South Korea’s Muan International Airport. Two remain unaccounted for.
The Boeing 737-800 Jeju Air flight, carrying 181 people, was arriving from Bangkok, Thailand.
Two survivors were pulled from the tail end of the wreckage with moderate injuries.
A bird strike started the sequence of events that led to the crash, according to South Korean officials. The plane then hit a structure, failed to lower the landing gear, and skidded across the runway before crashing into a wall and bursting into flames. ..
Reginald Selkirksays
The country’s national fire agency has confirmed the deaths of 177 people. Two people remain unaccounted for, and two survived.
Two Portland men searching for Sasquatch and missing since early Christmas morning were found dead in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest – likely from exposure and being ill-prepared, officials said…
birgerjohanssonsays
It looks like Mike Johnson cannot take the backing from fellow Republicans for granted when the time comes soon to elect a speaker for the next period. And it is coming up very soon.
birgerjohanssonsays
whheydt @ 175 so, soon there may be two NATO countries calling for that.
And as Asshole 45/47 has not yet been sworn in, he can do nothing to sabotage the process. It looks like little Vladimir was too impatient.
birgerjohanssonsays
Bishop Teophilius had murdered Hypatia before destroying the library.
An Iowa school is catching flak for having no “rizz.”
A teacher in a school district near the Nebraska border is being accused of banning the word short for charisma along with over two dozen slang words popular among Gen Alpha — kids born after 2009. The Fremont-Mills Community School District teacher wouldn’t be the first to ban slang. Many teachers nationwide have taken to social media detailing words they don’t allow in class.
But the fight over language at the school in Iowa reached a heated pitch when parents and a free speech group pushed back and accused the teacher of instituting a ban that violates students’ First Amendment rights. Parents and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression sent a letter to school administrators and said the teacher punished students who used the slang words with detention…
birgerjohanssonsays
Today is the fifth anniversary of the first cases of COVID.
birgerjohanssonsays
The reasonable thing for the school would have been to ban insulting terms like fggot or wtback or b*tch. A general ban on non-approved vernacular will be too unwieldy to work, apart from the constitutional matter.
.
And that reminds me, Willem Dafoe – whom I mentioned some comments ago- was in the first Boondock Saints film, a movie full of homophobic slurs (not his fault, the rapist producer played a big role). This is a film that has not aged well. God Awful Movies even had an episode about it.
.
[Stream of consciousness kicks in]
Another GAM film : Trump 2024. I recommend you listen to that episode for some dark humour.
If that is too dark, try GAM 196 Alien Intrusion: Unmasking a deception.😄
“Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza.”
“Years before the Gaza war, Israel transformed its intelligence unit into an AI testing ground, triggering a debate among top commanders about whether humans were sufficiently in the loop.”
After the brutal Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, the Israel Defense Forces deluged Gaza with bombs, drawing on a database painstakingly compiled through the years that detailed home addresses, tunnels and other infrastructure critical to the militant group.
But then the target bank ran low. To maintain the war’s breakneck pace, the IDF turned to an elaborate artificial intelligence tool called Habsora — or “the Gospel” — which could quickly generate hundreds of additional targets.
The use of AI to rapidly refill IDF’s target bank allowed the military to continue its campaign uninterrupted, according to two people familiar with the operation. It is an example of how the decade-long program to place advanced AI tools at the center of IDF’s intelligence operations has contributed to the violence of Israel’s 14-month war in Gaza.
[…] a Washington Post investigation reveals previously unreported details of the inner workings of the machine-learning program, along with the secretive, decade-long history of its development.
The investigation also reveals a fierce debate within the highest echelons of the military, starting years before Oct. 7, about the quality of intelligence gathered by AI, whether the technologies’ recommendations garnered sufficient scrutiny, and if the focus on AI weakened the IDF’s intelligence capabilities. Some internal critics argue the AI program has been a behind-the-scenes force accelerating the death toll in Gaza, which has now claimed 45,000 lives, more than half of whom were women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The Gaza Health Ministry does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. In a statement, the IDF said the Ministry is controlled by Hamas and its data “is replete with inconsistencies and false determinations.”
People familiar with the IDF’s practices, including soldiers who have served in the war, say Israel’s military has significantly expanded the number of acceptable civilian casualties from historic norms. Some argue this shift is enabled by automation, which has made it easier to speedily generate large quantities of targets […]
This report draws on interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the systems, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the details of top secret national security topics, as well as documents obtained by The Post.
“What’s happening in Gaza is a forerunner of a broader shift in how war is being fought,” said Steven Feldstein, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, who researches the use of AI in war. He noted that the IDF appeared to have lowered the acceptable civilian casualty rate during the Gaza war. “Combine that with the acceleration these systems offer — as well as the questions of accuracy — and the end result is a higher death count than was previously imagined in war.”
[…] “The more ability you have to compile pieces of information effectively, the more accurate the process is,” the IDF said in a statement to The Post. “If anything, these tools have minimized collateral damage and raised the accuracy of the human-led process.”
The IDF requires a officer to sign off on any recommendations from its “big data processing” systems, according to an intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Israel does not release division leaders’ names. The Gospel and other AI tools do not make decisions autonomously, the person added.
[…] Reviewing reams of data from intercepted communications, satellite footage, and social networks, the algorithms spit out the coordinates of tunnels, rockets, and other military targets. Recommendations that survive vetting by an intelligence analyst are placed in the target bank by a senior officer.
[…] Another machine learning tool, called Lavender, uses a percentage score to predict how likely a Palestinian is to be a member of a militant group, allowing the IDF to quickly generate a large volume of potential human targets. {!!]
Other algorithmic programs have names like Alchemist, Depth of Wisdom, Hunter and Flow, the latter of which allows soldiers to query various datasets and is previously unreported.
Several of the division’s officers have long held concerns that the machine learning technology, which sped decision-making, concealed underlying flaws. Reports delivered to senior leadership did not indicate how intelligence was derived — whether from human analysts or AI systems — making it difficult for officials to evaluate a finding […] An internal audit found some AI systems for processing the Arabic language had inaccuracies, failing to understand key slang words and phrases, according to the two former senior military leaders.
The IDF’s machine learning technology also predicts how many civilians might be affected by attacks, helping Israel comply with a key tenet of international law. In the Gaza war, estimates of how many civilians might be harmed in a bombing raid are derived through data-mining software, using image recognition tools to analyze drone footage alongside smartphones pinging cell towers to tally the number of civilians in an area, two of the people said.
In 2014, the IDF’s acceptable civilian casualty ratio was one civilian for a high-level terrorist, said Tal Mimran, a former legal adviser to the IDF. In the Gaza war, the number has grown to about 15 civilians for one low-level Hamas member and “exponentially higher” for mid- and high-level members,” according to the Israeli human rights organization Breaking the Silence, citing numerous testimonies from IDF soldiers. The New York Times reported the number as 20 earlier this week. [!!]
[…] Under the command of Sariel and other intelligence leaders, 8200 has restructured to emphasize engineers, cutting Arabic language specialists, removing several leaders considered resistant to AI, and disbanding some groups not focused on data-mining technology, according to three of the people. By Oct. 7, 60 percent of the unit’s employees were working in engineering and tech roles, twice as many as a decade earlier, according to one of the people.
[…] Two former senior commanders said they believe the intense focus on AI was a significant reason Israel was caught off-guard that day. The department overemphasized technological findings and made it difficult for analysts to raise warnings to senior commanders. […]
The “human bottleneck”
[…] In 2019, two years before taking over as intelligence commander, Sariel spent a sabbatical year at the National Defense University, a Pentagon-funded institution in Washington that trains national security leaders from all over the world. A professor at NDU, who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity to describe a personal relationship, said he and Sariel shared a radical vision of AI in the battlefield, arguing that Israel should blaze ahead of more cautious U.S. allies.
[…] Sariel describes how the actions of lone-wolf terrorists could be predicted in advance by unleashing algorithms to analyze phone locations, social media posts, drone footage and intercepted private communications.
In Sariel’s expansive vision, AI would touch all aspects of defense, in both peacetime and war. By using AI surveillance technologies, Israel’s borders would become “smart borders.” By collecting digital trails, armies could build advanced “target banks” with names, locations and behavior patterns of thousands of suspects. These technologies could replace 80 percent of intelligence analysts that specialize in foreign languages in just five years, he concluded.
[…] Former commanders huddled to share their worries about the “religious attitude toward AI” developing in the unit under Sariel’s tenure […]
[…] When Sariel officially became commander, in February 2021, 8200 had been experimenting with data science for more than seven years, five former military leaders said, contending with an explosion of digital communications that provided a gold mine for national security agencies. The elite unit had developed a reputation for collecting an array of DMs, private messages, emails, call logs, and other online breadcrumbs using in-house cyber technologies considered the best in the world.
[…] As a “big data” boom got underway in Silicon Valley, Israeli engineers had begun to experiment with off-the-shelf data mining tools that could translate and analyze Arabic and Farsi. The unit’s leaders debated whether to contract with experts, such as the Silicon Valley data-mining firm Palantir, or build their own software.
The latter approach won out. But the technologies, while widely recognized as promising, had limitations. Sometimes the sheer volume of intercepts overwhelmed 8200’s analysts. For example, Hamas operatives often used the word “batikh,” or watermelon, as code for a bomb, one of the people familiar with the efforts said. But the system wasn’t smart enough to understand the difference between a conversation about an actual watermelon and a coded conversation among terrorists.
“If you pick up a thousand conversations a day, do I really want to hear about every watermelon in Gaza?” the person said.
[…] 8200 had long maintained a target bank: a list of precise GPS coordinates of Hamas and Hezbollah infrastructure and human targets, geolocated to a specific tunnel or apartment building floor. Maintaining the target bank was labor-intensive. Analysts were required to confirm their findings with at least two independent sources and to refresh the information continuously […]
I[…]
“They really did believe with all the sensors they had all around and above Gaza, I won’t say total informational awareness, but that they had a very good picture of what was happening inside,” said Misztal, who leads an organization focused on security cooperation between the United States and Israel. He noted that the military emphasized its rigorous systems for checking targeting recommendations during his 2021 briefing.
Lavender, an algorithmic program developed in 2020, pored over data to produce lists of potential Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants, giving each person a score estimating their likelihood to be a member […]
Estimates from the various algorithms fed into the umbrella system, Gospel, which could be queried by intelligence analysts.
[…] One audit of a language-processing technology revealed that the software prediction was not as accurate as a human officer would have been […]
“The bottom line is, you can’t replace the guy who screams, ‘Listen, this is dangerous,’” with all the advanced AI technologies in the world,” said Caspit, the Israeli journalist who has interviewed every living 8200 commander for his book. “This was the hubris that infected the entire unit.”
In 2023, the army’s just-retired chief of staff, Kohavi, bragged to a media outlet that the new AI systems gave the IDF a sophisticated real-time intelligence apparatus “akin to the movie ‘The Matrix.’” Before the Gospel, analysts could produce 50 new targets in Gaza per year to put into the target bank. “Once the machine was activated,” he said, it generated 100 targets per day.
In his book, Sariel argued that AI would be especially useful in wartime, when it could speed up target formation and “blast open” the “human bottleneck” that slowed everything down.
In June 2021, Israel had its first chance to unleash the new algorithm-powered target bank. As an 11-day war broke out between Israel and Hamas, the IDF used data science to hit 450 targets […]
All the senior commanders “wanted to talk about was ‘the world’s first AI war,’” Misztal said.
A target factory on overdrive
International Humanitarian Law requires warring nations to balance the anticipated military advantage of an attack with the expected collateral damage to civilians, known as proportionality or the “reasonable military commander” standard.
The treaties, which Israel has only partially ratified, are silent on artificial intelligence. […]
In a Nov. 2, 2023, press release, the IDF announced that Gospel had helped it bomb 12,000 targets in Gaza. Set to dramatic music and a video of buildings exploding, the release touted “a first-of-its-kind collaboration” in which intelligence from the AI target factory was being fed in real time to forces on the ground, in the air and at sea — enabling hundreds of attacks to be “carried out in an instant.”
[…] One intelligence officer told The Post that he witnessed the IDF using AI to cut corners to make targeting decisions. The soldier spoke on the condition of anonymity because it is a crime to describe military technology without government approval in Israel.
In the early days of the war the target factory was working on overdrive, staffed with about 300 soldiers operating around-the-clock. Many of the analysts were required to vet recommended targets from the Gospel and Lavender, a process that could take anywhere from three minutes to five hours.
The rule mandating two pieces of human-derived intelligence to validate a prediction from Lavender was dropped to one at the outset of the war, according to two people familiar with the efforts. In some cases in the Gaza division, soldiers who were poorly trained in using the technology attacked human targets without corroborating Lavender’s predictions at all, the soldier said.
At certain times the only corroboration required was that the target was a male, according to another person familiar with the efforts.
“[…] Concerns about proportionality also took a back seat: Some people captured in the photographs might have been family members, and IDF commanders accepted that those people also would be killed in an attack, the soldier said.
[…] AI systems have built-in inaccuracies that make them inappropriate for a life-and-death context such as war, said Heidy Khlaaf, a vocal critic of Israel and chief AI Scientist at the AI Institute, a New York-based nonprofit that produces policy recommendations. […]
Mimran, the former IDF lawyer, said he still believes militaries in the West must embrace AI tools to combat rivals such as China, but he worries about the accuracy of AI-enabled decision-making in the high-pressure fog of war. […]
And Israeli officials no longer brag about their use of AI. In his 2023 interview, even Kohavi appeared to acknowledge the challenges. AI can “possess far more knowledge than any individual,” he said, “potentially relying on its own decisions more than on ours.”
Imagine you want to sabotage the post-WWII air force of the hypothetical country Emutopia (Australia). How can you do that and get away with it? Welcome to the beautiful world of military procurement, where anything goes.
The described aircraft really existed, and while Australia never bought them the dirty tricks are from real life.
“Carter had been receiving hospice care since February 2023 at his home in Plains, Georgia, where he lived with his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter.”
Former President Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States who dedicated his life after leaving office to brokering international peace, has died at age 100, his office confirmed Sunday.
Carter had been receiving hospice care since February 2023 at his home in Plains, Georgia, where he lived with his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter. The former first lady, 96, died on Nov. 19, 2023.
Carter was the first U.S. president to reach their 100th birthday.
In October 2024, for Carter’s 100th birthday, Biden recognized him in a direct-to-camera birthday message shared with CBS News, saying, “Mr. President, you’ve always been a moral force for our nation and the world. I recognized that as a young senator. That’s why I supported you so early. You’re a voice of courage, conviction, compassion, and most of all, a beloved friend of Jill and me and our family.”
A Georgia native and a Democrat, Carter was elected president in 1976, defeating the Republican incumbent, Gerald Ford, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. Carter served one term before losing re-election in 1980 to Ronald Reagan, his bid hobbled by an inability to resolve the Iran hostage crisis, a standoff that lasted 444 days. Carter also was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his human rights work around the world.
The oldest living former president after the death of George H.W. Bush in 2018 at 94, Carter was the first American president to have been born in a hospital.
Only 56 years old when he left the Oval Office, Carter would spend the next four decades focusing on good works that made him an almost universally revered figure, sometimes called America’s greatest ex-president — a sharp contrast to his relatively low popularity when he exited the White House in January 1981.
For years, he and his wife could be found on construction sites hoisting beams and pounding nails to build homes for the disadvantaged with the nonprofit organization Habitat for Humanity.
Around the world, Carter was recognized after his presidency for his tireless work promoting peaceful resolutions to conflict and advancing democracy, human rights and social justice, primarily through the Carter Center, which he and the former first lady established at Emory University in Atlanta in 1982.
Working through the center, the Carters traveled to developing countries to monitor elections, help build democratic institutions, lobby for victims of human rights abuses and spearhead efforts to eradicate diseases. […]
[…] Russian propagandist Solovyov: “Kyiv, Dnipro, Kharkiv, and Sumy need to be wiped off the face of the earth completely!”
Russians no longer even try to hide their genocidal intent towards Ukraine.
They used to say they wanted to “liberate” Ukrainians and “protect” Russian speakers in Ukraine. In reality, all they want is the destruction of Ukrainians and the expansion of Russian territory. […]
Text quoted above is part of a longer article that focuses on new from Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Finland.
… RCMP Supt. Jean-Guy Isaya …
“We believe that young people and minors pose the same threat as adults,” said Isaya, who works in the RCMP’s national security team.
“This trend is certainly continuing and it doesn’t seem to want to disappear.”
It’s why the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, along with other Five Eyes intelligence and law enforcement agencies, put out a report earlier this month warning about the rising prominence of young people who are attracted to violent ideologies…
All they knew was that the facilitators of the restorative justice program said the man charged with repeatedly tearing down the Pride flag outside their home was “ready.” A meeting was set. Now the couple were walking into a community center to talk to him.
Michelle Logan and Jenna Burnett said they sat in chairs set up in a circle inside the Arlington Mill Community Center in late September and began explaining to Matthew Henshaw how hurtful it was for them to see their Pride flag forcibly removed after they finally came out and moved in together. They said they told him that his actions made them feel unsafe in their own home – and that they wanted him to understand why.
The conversation was part of the Heart of Safety Restorative Justice Conferencing Program, which includes a meeting between the people charged in criminal cases and the victims of the alleged crimes, in hopes of providing a pathway for young adults to be held accountable outside of traditional legal proceedings…
As a result, Arlington, Virginia, prosecutors on Monday dismissed all charges against Henshaw, who was arrested this year and charged with three counts of bias-motivated unlawful entry and three counts of petit larceny…
This case seemed like a good fit for the program, Dehghani-Tafti said, because Henshaw was 20 at the time of his arrest…
Eventually, police arrested Henshaw, who at the time was an active-duty soldier assigned to Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall and a member of the 3rd Infantry Regiment. Maj. John Strickland, a spokesman for the Army, said Friday that Henshaw was involuntarily separated from service in October…
birgerjohanssonsays
A sharp contrast to Jimmy Carter
.
“Matt Gaetz Scandal Gets WORSE as More Evidence Released”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=K7i23FuW4rA
There is no bottom. I suppose we should be grateful he was not into murder.
TIL about Byron Looper
A Tennessee Democratic turned Republican politician. In 1996, to win Tax Assessor from a 14-year incumbent, he legally changed his middle name from “Anthony” to “(Low Tax)”, including the parentheses. He neglected his duties and did crimes ofc. For his 1998 campaign for state senate, against a 20-year incumbent, he assassinated his opponent Tommy Burks (D).
Tennessee state law required that the name of a candidate who died before the election be removed from the ballot, and it did not allow the candidate’s party to replace a deceased candidate who died within 30 days of the election. Accordingly, after Burks’s death, Looper became the only candidate listed on the official ballot for Burks’s senate seat.
[…]
To prevent Looper from winning the state senate seat on a technicality, Burks’s widow, Charlotte was put forth as a write-in candidate for her husband’s seat. […] Burks, as a write-in candidate, won the seat with 30,252 votes (95.18%) against Looper’s 1,531 votes (4.82%). One of her first initiatives as state senator was to introduce legislation to ensure that the name of any candidate who dies within 40 days of an election could remain on the ballot, thus preventing the situation that occurred after her husband’s death. Charlotte Burks won re-election in 2002, 2006, and 2010. She retired after the 2014 election.
Although she did not campaign, family members and friends campaigned extensively on her behalf, […] becoming the first write-in candidate to win a seat in the Tennessee State Senate.
Bekenstein Boundsays
“Matt Gaetz Scandal Gets WORSE as More Evidence Released”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=K7i23FuW4rA
There is no bottom. I suppose we should be grateful he was not into murder.
The last time Donald Trump was in the White House, he made no effort to hide his opposition to TikTok. In fact, it was just four years ago when he announced plans to go after the platform, and an executive order soon followed. That policy ultimately failed in the courts, but Trump was explicit in arguing that the app should not exist on Americans’ phones.
“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” the then-president said during his 2020 re-election campaign.
Trump, true to form, ended up reversing course after chatting with a billionaire hedge fund manager — and prospective campaign donor — who had a multibillion-dollar stake in ByteDance, TikTok’s parent corporation. The Biden administration, however, stuck to Trump’s original position and advanced a policy that would effectively ban TikTok in 2025.
The move sparked litigation, and the case is currently pending at the U.S. Supreme Court. As NBC News reported, it was against this backdrop that the president-elect’s lawyers filed a curious brief.
[…] Trump on Friday asked the Supreme Court to pause implementation of a law that would ban TikTok in the U.S. starting Jan. 19 if the app is not sold by its Chinese parent company. The court is due to hear arguments in the case on Jan. 10.
Ordinarily in a court filing such as this one, we’d expect to see an argument urging the justices to rule one way or another based on legal merits. But in the filing from D. John Sauer — the president-elect’s lawyer who’s slated to be nominated for U.S. solicitor general — Team Trump instead asked the high court to simply delay the current law’s deadline in order to allow the incoming administration to pursue a new and different policy.
This is, to be sure, a strange approach to jurisprudence. But I was also intrigued by the specific pitch included in the court filing.
“President Trump alone possesses the consummate deal-making expertise, the electoral mandate and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the government — concerns which President Trump himself has acknowledged,” the brief said. [JFC]
[…] In terms of errors of judgment, it’s hard to even know where to start with such over-the-top boasts, but I was especially intrigued by the idea that Trump has unique “deal-making expertise.” It’s a line that’s come up repeatedly of late, largely because it’s one of the more persistent myths in GOP politics.
[Snipped examples of Republicans promoting Trump as the best deal-maker ever.]
[…] “Deals are my art form,” Trump claimed. “Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”
After the election, the White House bought into the hype. In 2019, then-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters, “The president is, I think, the ultimate negotiator and dealmaker.”
But the evidence of Trump actually succeeding on this front does not exist. There were literally zero instances in which he successfully brought Democratic and Republican leaders together and negotiated a major legislative breakthrough. Indeed, toward the end of his first term, Trump largely gave up on even trying to make deals with Congress.
The Washington Post reported in August 2020, “The president who pitched himself to voters as the consummate negotiator and ultimate dealmaker has repeatedly found his strategies flummoxed by the complexities and pressures of Washington lawmaking.” This came on the heels of the Post’s Jackson Diehl explaining, in reference to Trump: “He’s not up to serious negotiation. He can’t be expected to seriously weigh costs and benefits, or make complex trade-offs. He’s good at bluster, hype and showy gestures, but little else. In short, he may be the worst presidential deal maker in modern history.”
With this in mind, as Trump’s lawyers tell the Supreme Court that the president-elect “alone possesses the consummate deal-making expertise … to negotiate a resolution to save” TikTok, I have a follow-up question: Why in the world would anyone believe this, given his record of failed negotiations?
Donald Trump suffered a variety of important legal setbacks after losing his re-election bid four years ago, but among the most important were E. Jean Carroll cases against him. […] a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll, and jurors awarded the writer $5 million in damages for her battery and defamation claims.
The jury did not find the defendant liable for rape, though a judge later concluded that the jurors’ finding “that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
This was not, however, the final word on the subject. Trump also faced a second defamation trial, stemming from comments he made about Carroll in 2019, and he lost that case, too.
As a political matter, the outcomes did not derail his campaign — Trump managed to win a second term anyway — but as a legal matter, the relevance of Carroll’s allegations did not fade away. Indeed, as recently as the weekend, Trump used his social media platform to amplify an item suggesting his accuser might belong “in jail” for “falsely accusing” him of rape.
Part of the problem with this is the fact that every jury who has considered Carroll’s claims has sided with her against Trump. Making the problem worse is the fact that Trump’s appeals aren’t going well, either. Reuters reported:
A federal appeals court on Monday upheld a $5 million verdict that E. Jean Carroll won against Donald Trump when a jury found the U.S. president-elect liable for sexually abusing and later defaming the former magazine columnist. […]
[…] As my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim explained in September, Trump’s legal defense team sought a new trial, claiming that improper evidence was included in the initial civil case. That pitch proved unpersuasive to a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan.
“We conclude that Mr. Trump has not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings,” the federal appellate bench concluded. “Further, he has not carried his burden to show that any claimed error or combination of claimed errors affected his substantial rights as required to warrant a new trial.”
Despite the juries’ findings, Trump has long insisted that he did nothing wrong, adding on multiple occasions that his accuser isn’t his “type.”
It’s possible that the president-elect and his attorneys will appeal their latest setback to the U.S. Supreme Court, though there’s no reason to assume the justices will take up the case. Watch this space.
Robert O’Brien’s tenure as Donald Trump’s White House national security advisor was a difficult one, stemming from the fact that O’Brien didn’t seem to fully appreciate the precise nature of his responsibilities.
The New York Times published a rather extraordinary report in early 2020, for example, noting that when O’Brien convened National Security Council meetings, he had a habit of starting the gatherings by distributing printouts of Trump’s latest tweets. The Times’ report […] added that the move amounted to “an implicit challenge” for those in attendance: Their job was to “find ways of justifying, enacting or explaining Mr. Trump’s policy, not to advise the president on what it should be.”
[…] Four years later, the president-elect, for reasons unknown, decided that the United States should own Greenland, prompting O’Brien to do the same thing he did four years ago. The Hill reported:
Former national security adviser Robert O’Brien said in a Sunday interview that Denmark should let the U.S. “buy” Greenland if it cannot defend the self-governing country, noting the territory will become increasingly important in the coming years. In an interview on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” O’Brien described Greenland as a “highway from the Arctic all the way to North America” and noted that the autonomous country, which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, will become increasingly important as the climate warms in the coming years.
O’Brien got the ball rolling on Saturday with a thread published to social media, insisting that Trump is “100% right again,” this time about Greenland. “If our great ally Denmark can’t commit to defending the Island, the US will have to step in, as [the president-elect] said,” he added. [Twisted logic coupled with threats.]
A day later, on Fox News, O’Brien went further. “[Greenland is] strategically very important to the Arctic, which is going to be the critical battleground of the future because, as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway that maybe even cuts down on the usage of the Panama Canal,” he argued, suggesting that some Republicans only accept the reality of climate change when trying to expand the United States’ territorial boundaries.
“Denmark is now on the front lines of the war against Russia and China. They’re like the Baltic states. They’re like Poland because of their vast territory in Greenland. And so they have got to defend Greenland,” O’Brien added. “And if they can’t defend it, we’re going to have to, and we’re not going to do it for free.” [JFC]
In case that weren’t quite enough, the former White House national security advisor went on to say in the same on-air interview that if Denmark is reluctant to pay the United States to defend Greenland, he had alternative in mind. “They can let us buy Greenland from [Denmark], and Greenland can become part of Alaska,” O’Brien said. “I mean, the native people in Greenland are very closely related to the people of Alaska, and we will make it a part of Alaska.”
He did not appear to be kidding.
I won’t pretend to know why Trump became fixated on U.S. ownership of Greenland — which still isn’t for sale — or how this odd preoccupation will be resolved. But with three weeks remaining before the Republican’s inauguration, it’s hardly reassuring to see his former White House national security advisor on national television making veiled threats against a NATO ally.
Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, there was a simmering tension in Republican politics about one of the party’s top priorities. At the top of the GOP ticket, Donald Trump condemned immigrants in unusually ugly terms — at times, literally echoing Adolf Hitler and accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of the country — but beneath the surface, there was a conflict that went largely unaddressed.
Much of the Republican base took Trump’s rhetoric quite seriously and blamed immigrants for many of the nation’s ills. Some of the candidate’s top allies, however, especially from the private sector, saw nuances that would allow businesses to benefit from [hiring] workers from abroad.
During a campaign, these tensions can be put aside. After a campaign, those tensions tend to bubble over.
[…] the president-elect announced early last week that venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan — a proponent of green cards for skilled workers — would work in Trump’s incoming administration, serving in a top artificial intelligence policy post. The news was not well received on the far-right.
A highly controversial MAGA activist named Laura Loomer — who spent at least part of the year as a member of Trump’s inner circle — condemned the decision to hire Krishnan, pointing to his support for the H-1B program, which provides temporary worker visas for high-skilled tech workers. An ugly back-and-forth, which some have labeled the “MAGA civil war,” erupted soon after.
On one side of the divide are prominent far-right voices such as Loomer and Steve Bannon, who have spent the last week clashing with figures such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. […] the world’s wealthiest individual publishing a tweet in which he urged many of the president-elect’s supporters, “Take a big step back and f— yourself in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
[…] Trump decided to weigh in — or at least try to.
“I have many H-1B visas on my properties,” the president-elect told The New York Post on Saturday. “I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”
The comments were probably intended to resolve the conflict and address the schism as he prepares to begin his second term. As The New York Times noted, however, there was a rather glaring problem with Trump’s comments.
[H]is comments — which were enthusiastically embraced by the technology industry as an endorsement — may muddy the waters because Mr. Trump appears to have only sparingly used the H-1B visa program, which allows skilled workers like software engineers to work in the United States for up to three years and can be extended to six years. Instead, Trump has been a frequent and longtime user of the similarly named, but starkly different, H-2B visa program, which is for unskilled workers like gardeners and housekeepers, as well as the H-2A program, which is for agricultural workers.
[…] As recently as 2020, Trump suspended H-1B visas, claiming that the program was hurting American workers. Indeed, during his 2016 candidacy, Trump called for ending the program altogether.
[…] the president-elect is so unfamiliar with the details of immigration policy that he apparently got confused as to what H-1B visas even are.
[…] it’s a safe bet the so-called MAGA “civil war” isn’t likely to end anytime soon.
Steve Bannon and other rightwing doofuses have called the disagreement a “war.” Lots of media outlets likewise.
[…] One big takeaway is that South Korea is similarly awash in rightwing and leftwing Youtubers who have either destabilized trust in traditional media or taken advantage of that lack of trust, […] the most interesting detail is that this world seems to be a big part of the answer to a question that still looms over the whole attempted coup, which is: ‘what was President Yoon thinking?’
[…] While South Korea’s democratic era only goes back to the late 1980s, it’s deeply entrenched. And while there was a protracted political crisis of sorts in the country it really wasn’t one that anyone imagined leading to a replay of things that happened in the country in the 1960s of 1970s. And this isn’t some statement of naiveté: how the whole thing played out vindicates this perspective. The country’s reaction to the attempt can best be described as a widespread “What the fuck?” […] The immediate reaction to Yoon’s move was as much bafflement as fear or anger. The whole thing was so crazy and out of left field that people struggled to understand what Yoon had even been thinking. That’s why the attempted coup played out as it did and why Yoon is currently out of power and looking at likely treason charges.
So back to our far-right Youtubers. The gist is that Yoon was basically living in a hothouse of right wing Korean Youbube fake news – the opposition is plotting with North Korea!, the elections are overrun by voter fraud! – that he both appears to have bought into these conspiracy theories and also imagined that a big slice of the country did too. […] As we’ve learned from recent stateside experience the world of early 21st century media and politics is one in which belief is highly motivated and volitional. You believe what is helpful to believe. You often ‘believe’ as a form of aggression. […]
it reminded me of a revelation some of us had in the latter part of the first Trump administration watching the actions of Bill Barr, who of course many DC commentators viewed as an ‘institutionalist’ who would keep Trump on the rails. Barr of course did part ways with Trump toward the very end and would not go along with what culminated on January 6th. […] But he went along with and enabled quite a lot. And the answer was simple: what made you think Bill Barr wouldn’t be awash in the Fox News Cinematic Universe just as much as every other rightwing white Catholic guy over seventy years old? It makes perfect sense. Of course he would.
These stories and analogues also grant a degree of perspective, humility and perhaps bits of encouragement as we try to make sense of our own situation just in advance of the beginning of the second Trump administration. […]
When we see very similar events playing out in very different political cultures we’re reminded that we always greatly overplay the role of individual decision-making. We are in fact awash in big global social, cultural and political trends that we only partly understand. We play important roles navigating these winds and tides. But the winds and tides themselves aren’t of our making. […]
Josh Marshall references an article in a Korean daily and he provides link for those that want more details.
“People assume that because he wasn’t warm and cuddly with Congress that he didn’t get much through,” said John Alter [who wrote the first independent Carter biography in 2020]. “He signed more legislation in four years than Clinton or Obama did in eight. He has the most prodigious legislative record since World War II, with the exception of Lyndon Johnson.”
That record includes, by Alter’s count, 14 major pieces of environmental legislation. In one of Carter’s more creative moves, he dusted off the 1906 Antiquities Act to keep pristine 56 million acres of Alaskan wilderness. His piecemeal approach, cloaked in distinctly unsexy bills like the 1978 Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act, planted the seeds for a changing national energy system in the face of climate change…
KGsays
The Hill reported:
Former national security adviser Robert O’Brien said in a Sunday interview that Denmark should let the U.S. “buy” Greenland if it cannot defend the self-governing country, noting the territory will become increasingly important in the coming years. In an interview on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” O’Brien described Greenland as a “highway from the Arctic all the way to North America” and noted that the autonomous country, which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, will become increasingly important as the climate warms in the coming years.
O’Brien got the ball rolling on Saturday with a thread published to social media, insisting that Trump is “100% right again,” this time about Greenland. “If our great ally Denmark can’t commit to defending the Island, the US will have to step in, as [the president-elect] said,” he added. [Twisted logic coupled with threats.]
A day later, on Fox News, O’Brien went further. “[Greenland is] strategically very important to the Arctic, which is going to be the critical battleground of the future because, as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway that maybe even cuts down on the usage of the Panama Canal,” he argued, suggesting that some Republicans only accept the reality of climate change when trying to expand the United States’ territorial boundaries. – Lynna,OM @207 quoting MSNBC
This is pretty much exactly the line I’ve been saying Trump would likely take.
[…] The cable news media didn’t cover the stories of those 130,000 first responders who are now at risk of losing their healthcare benefits. Even so, firefighters across the city are starting to realize that Trump and his MAGA enablers played them. Unfortunately for New York’s first responders’ unions, they’re learning too late the high cost of trusting Trumpism.
[…] Musk embraces Europe’s far-right
Internet troll and world’s richest man Elon Musk isn’t content to be the unelected shadow president of just one nation. He also has his eyes on Europe. Musk sent the German media into a frenzy last week after endorsing the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, in a Saturday essay for a German newspaper. This came after the billionaire tweeted “Only the AfD can save Germany” on Dec. 20. Not to be outdone, JD Vance joined Musk in praising the AfD, which has its roots in neo-Nazism.
Musk is clearly trying to build a global coalition of far-right leaders to support his more successful electioneering efforts here in the United States. In recent months Musk has also struck up a friendship with Italian leader Giorgia Meloni, who also leads a political party with its roots in Italy’s postwar neo-Nazi struggles. In fact, that seems to be about the only characteristic these various far-right parties have in common.
But Musk isn’t limiting himself to Germany and Italy. He’s also been bankrolling far-right political movements in France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Musk sees himself as the Great Connector of a global far-right political revolution. The terrifying thing is that if European voters stay trapped in a social media outrage cycle curated by Musk and his allies, he may actually succeed in bringing those far-right parties back into power. […]
After the 2022 midterm elections, expectations were low about the Congress that would soon follow. Voters increased the size of the narrow Democratic majority in the Senate, but they also handed a narrow majority to far-right Republicans in the House, leaving little doubt that very little would get done.
The question wasn’t whether the 118th Congress would be awful, it was just how awful the Congress would prove to be.
Now we know: It was a cover-your-eyes debacle on a historic scale.
Around this time a year ago, The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote a column with a memorable headline that read, “Worst. Congress. Ever.” As 2023 neared its end, the columnist wrote that members were wrapping up “the most ineffective session of Congress in nearly a century — and quite possibly in all of American history.”
A year later, federal lawmakers can’t exactly boast that they turned things around in the second year of the session: Legislative productivity slowed to a generational low, which was far worse than other modern Congresses that were divided between the parties.
HuffPost recently described this as the “dumbest” Congress ever and ran a striking assessment from the Brookings Institution’s Sarah Binder, whose expertise on such matters has few rivals.
So, how crazy was the 118th, historically speaking? “It’s fair to say it was one of the craziest ever,” Binder said.
To be sure, the fact that lawmakers passed such a paltry number of bills would automatically get this Congress included in a worst-ever conversation. But let’s not forget what else Capitol Hill has produced over the last couple of years:
– A lengthy and chaotic process to elect a House speaker.
– The first-ever ouster of a sitting House speaker.
– A lengthy and chaotic process to elect a new House speaker, leading to the majority conference settling on their fifth choice.
– The first ever impeachment of a sitting Cabinet secretary without cause.
– The launch of an impeachment inquiry against a sitting president without cause.
– An exceedingly rare expulsion of a disgraced member.
– The most censures against sitting House members since 1870.
– Multiple members resigning mid-term under clouds of scandal.
– Senate Republicans insisting on a dramatic agreement on border policy, then rejecting the same policy after Democrats agreed to their demands.
– House GOP leaders relying heavily on the House Democratic minority to complete routine governing tasks.
– A Senate Republican blocking confirmation votes on U.S. military leaders for 10 months because of a policy he struggled to understand.
Charitable observers might be inclined to argue that this Congress could’ve been even worse. That’s true. Republicans sparked a debt ceiling crisis, but they did not actually allow the United States to default on its debts and obligations. Republicans also pushed the government close to a shutdown, but thanks to Democratic votes, that didn’t happen, either.
But when assessing the merits of the last couple of years, it’s tough to celebrate these as silver linings. […]
By any objective measure, the current Congress, which technically ends in a few days, was an embarrassment to itself. Thanks almost entirely to radical Republican tactics and refusals to compromise, this Congress was a chaotic and dysfunctional mess, which even GOP members conceded failed to do much of anything meaningful.
So long, 118th Congress. We knew you all too well.
Embedded links to additional sources are available at the main link.
Billionaire Trump backer Elon Musk appears to be trying to calm tension in the MAGA world just days after calling for a “war.” [See previous comments for details of the contretemps of the past few days, including this: “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend,” Musk wrote. And this: Responding to a post that called the anti-immigrant faction “retarded,” Musk replied, “That pretty much sums it up. This was eye-opening.”]
[…] Musk later deleted the tweet agreeing with the “retarded” comment and issued a request for more positivity on X.
“Please post a bit more positive, beautiful or informative content on this platform,” he wrote. [Look in the mirror, doofus, and talk to yourself.]
He followed up the edict with a series of posts unrelated to the visa controversy, including praise for tech-related ideas that he has endorsed.
[…] the anti-immigrant sentiment has been so central to the MAGA identity over the past decade that it’s unlikely that Musk’s request for “beautiful” posts will come to fruition.
Billionaire Trump backer Elon Musk appears to be trying to calm tension in the MAGA world just days after calling for a “war.” [See previous comments for details of the contretemps of the past few days, including this: “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend,” Musk wrote. And this: Responding to a post that called the anti-immigrant faction “r*t*rd*d,” Musk replied, “That pretty much sums it up. This was eye-opening.”]
[…] Musk later deleted the tweet agreeing with the “r*t*rd*d” comment and issued a request for more positivity on X.
“Please post a bit more positive, beautiful or informative content on this platform,” he wrote. [Look in the mirror, doofus, and talk to yourself.]
He followed up the edict with a series of posts unrelated to the visa controversy, including praise for tech-related ideas that he has endorsed.
[…] the anti-immigrant sentiment has been so central to the MAGA identity over the past decade that it’s unlikely that Musk’s request for “beautiful” posts will come to fruition.
President Joe Biden said Monday that the United States will send nearly $2.5 billion more in weapons to Ukraine as his administration works quickly to spend all the money it has available to help Kyiv fight off Russia before […] Trump takes office.
The package includes $1.25 billion in presidential drawdown authority, which allows the military to pull existing stock from its shelves and gets weapons to the battlefield faster. It also has $1.22 billion in longer-term weapons packages to be put on contract through the separate Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, or USAI.
Biden said all longer-term USAI funds have now been spent and that he seeks to fully use all the remaining drawdown money before leaving office.
“I’ve directed my administration to continue surging as much assistance to Ukraine as quickly as possible,” Biden said in a statement. “At my direction, the United States will continue to work relentlessly to strengthen Ukraine’s position in this war over the remainder of my time in office.”
In addition to the weapons support, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced Monday that the U.S. is also providing $3.4 billion in economic assistance to Ukraine to help pay for critical government services during its ongoing fight against Russia. The money will pay salaries for civilian government and school employees, healthcare workers and first responders. [More good news.]
[…] The Biden administration is pushing to get weapons into Ukraine to give Kyiv the strongest negotiating position possible before Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20. […]
Many U.S. and European leaders are concerned that Trump’s talk of a settlement might result in a poor deal for Ukraine, and they worry that he won’t provide Ukraine with all the weapons funding approved by Congress.
The weapons systems being pulled from existing stockpiles through this latest weapons package include counter-unmanned aerial systems munitions, air defense munitions, ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), 155mm and 105mm artillery ammunition, air-to-ground munitions, anti-armor systems, tube-launched missiles, fragmentation grenades, and other items and spare parts. […]
History lesson regarding Trump’s use of visas to set up a sort of human trafficking and slave labor system:
Canadian-born Rachel Blais spent nearly three years working for Trump Model Management. After first signing with the agency in March 2004, she said, she performed a series of modeling gigs for Trump’s company in the United States without a work visa. At Mother Jones‘ request, Blais provided a detailed financial statement from Trump Model Management and a letter from an immigration lawyer who, in the fall of 2004, eventually secured a visa that would permit her to work legally in the United States. These records show a six-month gap between when she began working in the United States and when she was granted a work visa. During that time, Blais appeared on Trump’s hit reality TV show, The Apprentice, modeling outfits designed by his business protégés. As Blais walked the runway, Donald Trump looked on from the front row.
Two other former Trump models—who requested anonymity to speak freely about their experiences, and who we are giving the pseudonyms Anna and Kate—said the agency never obtained work visas on their behalf, even as they performed modeling assignments in the United States. (They provided photographs from some of these jobs, and Mother Jones confirmed with the photographers or stylists that these shoots occurred in the United States.)
Each of the three former Trump models said she arrived in New York with dreams of making it big in one of the world’s most competitive fashion markets. But without work visas, they lived in constant fear of getting caught. “I was pretty on edge most of the time I was there,” Anna said of the three months in 2009 she spent in New York working for Trump’s agency.
“I was there illegally,” she said. “A sitting duck.”
According to three immigration lawyers consulted by Mother Jones, even unpaid employment is against the law for foreign nationals who do not have a work visa. “If the US company is benefiting from that person, that’s work,” explained Anastasia Tonello, global head of the US immigration team at Laura Devine Attorneys in New York. These rules for immigrants are in place to “protect them from being exploited,” she said. “That US company shouldn’t be making money off you.” […]
Kate, who worked for Trump Model Management in 2004, marveled at how her former boss has recently branded himself as an anti-illegal-immigration crusader on the campaign trail. “He doesn’t want to let anyone into the US anymore,” she said. “Meanwhile, behind everyone’s back, he’s bringing in all of these girls from all over the world and they’re working illegally.”
[…] Founded in 1999, Trump Model Management “has risen to the top of the fashion market,” boasts the Trump Organization’s website, and has a name “that symbolizes success.” According to a financial disclosure filed by his campaign in May, Donald Trump earned nearly $2 million from the company, in which he holds an 85 percent stake. Meanwhile, some former Trump models say they barely made any money working for the agency because of the high fees for rent and other expenses that were charged by the company.
[…] Two of the former Trump models said Trump’s agency encouraged them to deceive customs officials about why they were visiting the United States and told them to lie on customs forms about where they intended to live. Anna said she received a specific instruction from a Trump agency representative: “If they ask you any questions, you’re just here for meetings.”
[…] A detailed financial statement provided by Blais shows that Trump’s agency charged her as much as $1,600 a month for a bunk in a room she shared with five others. Kate said she paid about $1,200 a month—”highway robbery,” she called it. For comparison, in the summer of 2004, an entire studio apartment nearby was advertised at $1,375 a month.
[…] “Most of the girls in the apartment that were not American didn’t have a work visa,” she recalled.
[…] The three former Trump models said Trump’s agency was aware of the complications posed by their foreign status. Anna and Kate said the company coached them on how to circumvent immigration laws. Kate recalled being told, “When you’re stuck at immigration, say that you’re coming as a tourist. If they go through your luggage and they find your portfolio, tell them that you’re going there to look for an agent.”
[…] Nearly three years after signing with Trump’s agency, Blais had little to show for it—and it wasn’t for lack of modeling jobs. Under the contracts that she and other Trump models had signed, the company advanced money for rent and various other expenses (such as trainers, beauty treatments, travel, and administrative costs), deducting these charges from its clients’ modeling fees. But these charges—including the pricey rent that Blais and her roommates paid—consumed nearly all her modeling earnings. “I only got one check from Trump Models, and that’s when I left them,” she said. “I got $8,000 at most after having worked there for three years and having made tens of thousands of dollars.” (The check Blais received was for $8,427.35.)
“This is a system where they actually end up making money on the back of these foreign workers,” Blais added. She noted that models can end up in debt to their agencies, once rent and numerous other fees are extracted.
This is known in the industry as “agency debt.” Kate said her bookings never covered the cost of living in New York. After two months, she returned home. “I left indebted to them,” she said […]
These days, Kate said, she believes that Trump has been fooling American voters with his anti-immigrant rhetoric, given that his own agency had engaged in the practices he has denounced. […]
Text quoted above is part of a longer article that focuses on new from Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Finland.
It’s been a while since I last looked at Daily Kos – the site is nearly unreadable due to pop-ups and heavy loading of the content. The linked article seems to be just a long collection of random social media quotes from pro-Ukraine accounts spreading and commenting on news stories and rumors of varying credibility and relevance.
The part relating to Finland, for example, quotes some random German NAFO fella citing Iltalehti, which is one of the two prominent tabloid newspapers in Finland. These two papers, while not entirely rubbish level in general, have a long track record of churning out endless sensationalist stories on Russia, Putin and in particular their relationship to Finland’s security. It’s basic fearmongering journalism, that in this context often serves to amplify Russian propaganda bluster.
In this case, some “NATO sources” supposedly claim that Russia “may” be preparing an attack on eastern NATO countries (as always), with a specific goal of reclaiming a slice of southeastern Finland that was part of Russia for a while after the area was annexed from Sweden in 1743. In 1811, since Russia had annexed also the main part of Finland from Sweden, the southeastern part, called Vyborg province, was attached to the Autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, which was a subject of the Russian Empire but not considered a part of Russia in proper sense. During WWII, most of the former Vyborg province was again annexed by Russia from independent Finland (and this time the annexed area was ethnically cleansed and resettled by ethnic Russians). The remaining part is still within Finland, and has never been specifically contested by Russia on the basis of the 1743 border treaty.
I heard a long while ago that Russian rightwing pundits and such might sometimes bring up the 1743 border in order to suggest that more of southeastern Finland ought to belong to Russia – or that Finns ought to at least be more grateful for their independence and current borders. Then again, same pundits might sometimes bring up the fact that entire Finland used to be a part of the Russian Empire, which is now considered to be as good as being a part of Russia. It’s the same level of casual bluster as “we ought to get Alaska back”. There’s a faint chance Russia might actually attack Finland one of these days, but it won’t be because of some old border grievance.
It’s time to contemplate 2024’s biggest freaks, as we gather around one last time before the new year to celebrate those who sucked the most shamelessly, who grifted the most elegantly, who were the most sophisticated in their betrayal of public trust.
[…] There were a handful of repeat offenders in some categories this winter, but for the most part the winners you selected in each category were either newcomers who saw their political star ascend during 2024’s election cycle — or under-the-radar old faithfuls who let their freak flags fly in entirely new and creative ways this year.
The hosts of The Josh Marshall Podcast, TPM’s Josh Marshall and Kate Riga, announced the winners of this year’s Golden Dukes live on the podcast. Watch as the envelopes are unsealed and winners unveiled or peruse the results of our annual commemoration of the year’s most radiant rats below: [video at the link]
Best Scandal – General Interest
Winner – John Roberts & the conservative justices [51.6% of the vote]
2nd place – Elon Musk [15%]
3rd place [tie] – Donald Trump [14.2%]
3rd place [tie] – Bob “Gold Bars” Menendez [14.2%]
5th place – The billionaire owners of the WashingtonPost & the LA Times [5%]
[snipped commentary]
Best Scandal — Sex & Generalized Carnality
Winner – Matt Gaetz [39.2% of the vote]
2nd place – Mark Robinson’s Black Nazi Pornhub account [28.3%]
3rd place – The Ziegler Moms for Liberty swingin’threesome [26.1%]
4th place – RFK Jr.’s Many, Many Affairs [6.4%]
[snipped commentary]
Best Scandal — Local Venue
Winner – Kristi Noem, Dog Killer [39.1% of the vote]
2nd place – Ryan Walters [29.8%]
3rd place – Eric Adams [27.2%]
4th place – Anthony D’Esposito [4%]
[snipped commentary]
Meritorious Achievement in the Crazy
Winner – RFK Jr., killer of various wildlife [47.5% of the vote]
2nd place – Rudy Giuliani [32.9%]
3rd place – Nancy Mace’s anti-trans crusade [11%]
4th place – Russell Vought [8.6%]
[snipped commentary]
‘I’m Going To Trump’s Cabinet And I’m Bringing …’
Winner – Pete Hegseth [39.1% of the vote]
2nd place – RFK Jr. [29.2%]
3rd place – Tulsi Gabbard [24.9%]
4th place – Linda McMahon [6.8%]
[snipped commentary]
Best Scandal — World-Wide Wingnutery
Winner – Tucker Carlson [31.7% of the vote]
2nd place – Yoon Suk Yeol [27%]
3rd place – Javier Milei [16.1%]
4th place – Jair Bolsonaro [13.5%]
5th place – Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis [11.7%]
[snipped commentary]
[Presentation of past winners.]
birgerjohanssonsays
I hope this link isn’t borked.
.
Former British PM Gordon Brown:
“My friend Jimmy Carter will be remembered long after other presidents are forgotten. Here’s why”
“Video captured outside Kamal Adwan Hospital shows its director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, walking toward a military vehicle along a street strewn with rubble and lined with destroyed buildings.”
Concerns are growing for the safety of a prominent hospital director in Gaza who was taken into Israeli custody after the Israel Defense Forces raided the site, detained scores of people and forced the closure of one of the last functioning medical facilities in the enclave’s north.
Video captured outside Kamal Adwan Hospital and verified by NBC News shows its director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, wearing a white medical overcoat and walking alone toward a military vehicle. […]
[…] the Israeli military confirmed Monday that it had detained and interrogated Abu Safiya. He was being held as a “suspect” and being questioned over “potential involvement in terrorist activity,” IDF spokesperson Nadav Shoshani said in a post on X.
Before his detention, Abu Safiya, a pediatrician, repeatedly warned about the IDF’s raid on the hospital and how it endangered patients, including premature babies.
On Friday, he posted video on his Instagram account showing a quadcopter dropping a bomb a few yards from Kamal Adwan Hospital, with the bomb exploding with a loud bang before sending plumes of smoke into the air.
On Friday, video geolocated by NBC News to the area around the hospital showed a crowd of men stripped down to minimal clothing walking in a line with their hands raised. Separately, NBC News’ crew on the ground in Gaza captured video of a blaze tearing through several units at the hospital on the same day. In it, people could be seen racing to try to douse the flames with buckets of water, while others sifted through the rubble.
Shoshani previously said there was no connection between the fire and the IDF’s activities at the site.
Since Friday, there has been no sign of Abu Safiya, with international organizations, including the World Health Organization, sounding the alarm and demanding his release.
“Hospitals in Gaza have once again become battlegrounds and the health system is under severe threat,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Monday in a statement on X, adding that Kamal Adwan was forced to go out of service following the IDF’s raid.
“We call for his immediate release,” Ghebreyesus said, while noting that Abu Safiya’s “whereabouts are unknown.” […]
More at the link.
birgerjohanssonsays
Podcaster Geo Girl adressing the issue of different forms of tectonic activity.
The German government accused U.S. billionaire Elon Musk on Monday of trying to influence its election due in February with articles supporting the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, even though it suggested they amounted to “nonsense.”
Musk, who is set to serve Donald Trump’s new administration as an outside adviser, endorsed the AfD as Germany’s last hope in a guest opinion piece for the Welt am Sonntag newspaper that prompted the commentary editor to resign in protest.
“It is indeed the case that Elon Musk is trying to influence the federal election” with X posts and the opinion piece, a German government spokesperson said.
Musk is free to express his opinion, the spokesperson said, adding: “After all, freedom of opinion also covers the greatest nonsense.”
Musk, the world’s richest person, has defended his right to weigh in on German politics because of his “significant investments,” and has praised the AfD’s approach to regulation, taxes and market deregulation.
His intervention has come as Germans prepare to vote in a parliamentary election on Feb. 23, following the collapse of the coalition government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Musk also called for Scholz’s resignation after a car rammed into a crowd at a Christmas market on Dec. 20, killing five people…
The Russian disinformation network “Matryoshka” has launched a new campaign on the Bluesky social network. Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat, has been one of the first researchers to detect its activity. So far, four Russian-made fake videos have been identified on the platform.
Each disinformation video begins with a real person — a professor, a student from a top university, or a recognized expert — introducing themselves and beginning to speak on a topic unrelated to Russia’s war in Ukraine. The footage then transitions to segments that do not show the speaker on screen — while what sounds like their voice continues narrating. In these moments, the speaker seems to promote claims that the West should end its support for Ukraine, that Europe should align its future with Russia, and that Volodymyr Zelensky is a dictator — or even a vampire…
The Taliban say they will close all national and foreign nongovernmental groups in Afghanistan employing women, the latest crackdown on women’s rights since they took power in August 2021.
The announcement comes two years after they told NGOs to suspend the employment of Afghan women, allegedly because they didn’t wear the Islamic headscarf correctly.
In a letter published on X Sunday night, the Economy Ministry warned that failure to comply with the latest order would lead to NGOs losing their license to operate in Afghanistan…
In an interview with Russian state-run media outlet TASS, Lavrov said Moscow has “not received any official signals regarding a settlement in Ukraine” but the Kremlin was resistant to those unofficial ideas.
Lavrov called for “reliable and legally binding agreements that would eliminate the root causes of the conflict and seal a mechanism precluding the possibility of their violation.”
The root cause is Ukraine not bending to Putin’s will. It’s going to be hard to negotiate that away.
Putin, who has called for a “lasting peace” and has accused Ukraine of thwarting efforts to end the war, said he is open to meeting with Trump.
“Even if Trump tries to relaunch bilateral ties, he will have to swim against the stream, considering the current bipartisan consensus on the policy of deterring Russia,” Lavrov said. “We’ll see what happens next. If the Americans respect our interests, our dialogue will be gradually renewed. If not, everything will remain as it is.”
Some really nice diplomatic doublespeak there. Putin wants to meet with Trump one on one without other parties to negotiate so Trump can be more easily manipulated and mislead. Notice also the broad context that implies that Russia is in control and may agree to negotiate if they choose and their desires are met. That Russia is in deep trouble and the situation is only going to get worse is conceptually off the board.
JM @228: “Putin wants to meet with Trump one on one without other parties to negotiate so Trump can be more easily manipulated and mislead.” Yes, I think that’s true.
Just three weeks before Donald Trump is inaugurated for a second term as president, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un said his nation plans to engage in the “toughest” anti-U.S. policy to date. The aggressive tone follows years of Trump coddling the rogue nuclear state, breaking with the approach of previous Democratic and Republican administrations.
At a meeting of the Workers’ Party, which is the sole political party in North Korea, Kim called the U.S. “the most reactionary state that regards anti-communism as its invariable state policy” and slammed America’s alliance with South Korea and Japan.
North Korea’s state news agency said Kim’s speech laid out a “strategy for the toughest anti-U.S. counteraction to be launched aggressively.”
Kim’s comments come a few weeks after he slammed the U.S. under President Joe Biden for backing Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. Kim has cozied up with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war and sent 10,000 troops to help Russia fight against Ukrainian forces.
Trump said earlier this year that North Korea “misses” him, echoing his longtime coddling of the closed-off dictatorship. When he was president, Trump broke from U.S. tradition and engaged in face-to-face meetings with Kim, posed for pictures with him, saluted his generals, and wrote so-called “love letters” to the leader of the regime that deprives its citizens of basic rights.
In addition to North Korean leadership undermining human rights for decades, the nation has continued to develop nuclear capability and used tests of its military weaponry to threaten democratic nations in the Pacific region like South Korea and Japan. The actions have made North Korea into an international pariah that is shunned by most of the world, except for its ties to Russia and China—and Donald Trump.
In contrast to Trump’s openness to the rogue country, President Barack Obama referred to North Korea in 2014 as a “pariah state that starves its people” and made clear that under his administration, America would defend its regional allies against North Korean aggression.
Trump’s embrace of the dictator allowed North Korea to claim a propaganda coup, hailing the meeting of the two leaders as “historic” in 2018. Trump has expressed admiration for a host of similarly authoritarian leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban.
After Biden defeated Trump in 2020, U.S. policy moved to a more traditional role in opposition to North Korea. Biden hosted South Korea’s president at the White House last year for a state visit and said, “Look, a nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its allies … or partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of whatever regime to take such an action.”
Trump’s love-letter diplomacy did little to decrease North Korea’s hostility to democratic nations, and whether his second turn as president will once again bolster Kim’s global standing remains an open question.
Lies, bluster, and emotional man-child responses from Trump. Bluster from the North Korean leadership? Open questions for sure. Watch what they do, not what they say.
Special counsel Jack Smith formally withdrew from the Mar-a-Lago documents case Friday, referring the ongoing prosecution of President-elect Trump’s two co-defendants to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida.
Smith formally dropped charges against Trump in both of his federal cases in November, dismissing them without prejudice while citing Justice Department policy that prohibits prosecution of a sitting president.
While the move swiftly wrapped Trump’s pending election interference case, the Mar-a-Lago documents case ended for Trump but continues for his two co-defendants.
Trump’s valet Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos de Oliveira were charged alongside the president-elect for a broader conspiracy to hide boxes of records from his time in office — concealing them both from federal investigators and Trump’s then-attorney.
The two face obstruction of justice charges as well as those for making false statements to investigators. The two men also face various charges related to concealing documents.
Investigators found some 300 documents with classified markings among thousands of pages of records from Trump’s presidency that he took with him when leaving office […]
The boxes were shuffled from room to room at the property, Trump’s residence in Florida, and were even stored on a ballroom stage and in a bathroom while in other cases their contents had spilled onto the floor.
The case is currently sitting before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Smith had challenged a ruling tossing the case from Judge Aileen Cannon, who determined Smith was unlawfully appointed.
That appeal continues, as the Justice Department argues Cannon defied 50 years of precedent regarding special counsels in dismissing the case.
ABC’s version of the news:
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has withdrawn from their appeal of the classified documents case against President-elect Donald Trump’s co-defendants and referred the case to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, according to a court filing Monday afternoon.
Smith last month dropped his appeal against Trump due to a longstanding Department of Justice policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president, but his team continued to pursue their appeal against Trump’s two co-defendants in the case, longtime Trump aide Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago employee Carlos De Oliveira.
[…] Smith’s appeal, to the Atlanta-based Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, came after U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed Smith’s case in July, citing the constitutionality of his appointment as special counsel.
With the appeal ongoing, Smith’s team on Monday withdrew from the case and passed the case to federal prosecutors in Florida. In a separate filing, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Markenzy Lapointe, entered his appearance in the case.
[…] Smith has also been winding down his federal election interference case against Trump following Trump’s reelection, and is expected to issue a report on his investigations to Attorney General Merrick Garland in the coming weeks before stepping down as special counsel.
God Awful Movies 487.
Creepy guy with pedophile vibes dates journalist. And he believes Santa Claus is real.
Someone paid money to have this film made.
(I want to go back to the film where Chuck Norris played a supernatural dude keeping an eye on a town run by devil worshippers. That film was interesting )
The US Treasury Department notified lawmakers on Monday that a China state-sponsored actor infiltrated Treasury workstations in what officials are describing as a “major incident.”
In a letter reviewed by CNN, a Treasury official said it was informed by a third-party software service provider on December 8 that a threat actor used a stolen key to remotely access certain Treasury workstations and unclassified documents…
Reginald Selkirksays
Hey, remember the incident where X got banned in Brazil, and Brazil took the fine from Starlink, and some people claimed that Musk’s various companies were all independent?
I mean, the native people in Greenland are very closely related to the people of Alaska, and we will make it a part of Alaska.
Someone ought to explain to them that that would roughly double Alaska’s population, which would both increase Alaska’s delegation in the House of Representatives and in the Electoral College and likely turn that state blue. Which, lessee here, carry the five … yep, would flip the House, given the razor-thin margin there post-election.
Meanwhile, what is going on with Canada’s NDP? Not only are they even more insistent on begging me for money than usual lately, they’ve stooped to making extortionate threats like “Want us to stop filling up your inbox with this shit? Then pay up”. And tonight they threw in one that was exceptionally whiny, “please, please can’t you spare just five lousy bucks, pweeeeeze?” (no, I can’t, as I lack a credit card, not to mention it would be like betting money on a horse that has come in second once in its entire racing career, never won, and usually places dead last).
And does anyone have any useful advice for taming some ill-mannered mobile apps? I normally use my desktop browser for everything web, as it has a lot of nice features including an ad blocker and oh, yeah, I can type properly at a normal speed while not squinting at everything through a keyhole there. However, there are some things I do that involve a mobile app, and that app has bugs and such, and I find it more comfortable to use phone apps while reclining on a couch but more comfortable to use a desktop PC in an upright office chair (keyboards are awkward unless sat at a desk, but using a phone at a desk entails either spending long stretches with an awkward neck-bent-down posture or else holding the phone up in a way that causes fatigue and discomfort in my arms). So, the app is used in the living room and the desktop PC in the study, and they’re like forty feet apart. To avoid extra inconvenient trips back and forth I use the Chrome on the phone, instead of my desktop Firefox, to visit that app’s support forums.
This, in turn, leads to two irritating consequences, besides the issues with typing and squinting when trying to use the web on mobile. First, even though I only use the one web site on that Chrome instance, I usually open it to find an extra tab open on the “new tab” page despite having closed it with only the one tab open; and once in a while, there are a whole bunch of new tabs open, usually to the websites of advertisers whose ads had come up in the other app (but whose ads I had not interacted with, save possibly to close them if necessary).
Is there any way to suppress this behavior and prevent Chrome from creating new tabs without an explicit user command telling it to do so?
Notably, it didn’t used to do this. It would reliably open right back up to where I’d left it, at that support site, with no extraneous additional tabs having spawned. Now it almost never does, usually coming up on an unwanted new tab on the new-tab page or an advertiser page, or else on the tab selection page with such extraneous tabs present in addition to the single tab I actually want to have.
The second side effect is that the Youtube app on the phone generates notifications, and those notifications are sometimes for interesting videos. So I will open these, watch them, and close the Youtube app after each one — it doesn’t tend to show any ads if used that way, thank goodness, though maybe only because the videos that pop up tend to be very short, rarely more than a couple of minutes.
What’s bugging me there is that it has wildly inconsistent behavior when a video concludes: sometimes it stops and waits for a user command (which tends to be “exit”, in my case); usually it loops to the start of the same video; but once in a while it just starts autoplaying a random, different video, which I may not have wanted to give my algorithmic endorsement to by viewing it. Is there a way to suppress that last, or best of all to set it to always stop and wait for instructions?
Two more inconveinences are mostly tied to the Youtube one. The ads in the other app frequently have sound, so I normally have the volume muted. However, I don’t want it muted for a Youtube video, in general. The phone seems to track exactly two volume levels, one governing the ringer and message/notification sounds and the other governing sounds in all apps. If I turn the sound off in the other app it will be mute at the start the next time a Youtube instance is opened; if I exit Youtube at full volume the other app will launch, the next time, with the audio at full volume. If I change the volume while it’s not in an app, it will change the “ringer/etc. volume” instead of the “app volume”. So I constantly have to change the volume after starting either app, and in Youtube’s case drag back to the start of the video after I’ve done so (that’s if it’s offering a seek bar that day, which seems to come and go at random instead of being consistent either way!) ,,, so: Is there any way to create additional “volume compartments” besides the existing “phone functions” and “by default, all other apps” ones? And is there any way to force the seek bar to always be available in the Youtube app?
Furthermore, the Youtube app has an additional issue. If there is a “smart” TV with internet access within some range, a subset of the video notifications will, if opened, not just open the YT app as usual but instead pop up a dialog asking if I want to “cast” it to whatever TV it’s detected. If this happens the video mentioned in the notification can’t be watched: if I say “no thanks” to the “cast” option, the app will open on my phone and play … some other video instead, seemingly randomly selected. I don’t know what would happen if I said “yes” to the cast option, though an irate neighbor banging on my door seems to be a not-too-implausible member of the potential-consequences set, and my actually seeing the intended video seems to be a very-implausible one. Try as I might, I have found no setting in either the phone OS or the Youtube app to deactivate this “cast” capability, and denying Youtube Internet access would obviously make it not work at all.
The phone also has a box on the desktop that shows miscellaneous news headlines, above a bit of weather info and the first rows of app icons. Tapping it to “click through” to a news story never worked properly for me (it would not bring it up on a news website in Chrome, but invariably try to launch other apps, specific to media organizations, that would then prompt for login credentials I don’t have or want me to go through some kind of setup process or otherwise fail to simply show me the news story in question) but I found it somewhat useful nonetheless just to read the headlines and get an early-in-the-day gist of what was happening in the world. This app was prone to freezes and glitches in the past, but a few months ago it developed a seemingly permanent failure. All it displays now is a notice that says that the app will be “unavailable” starting on some date in the summer of 2024. It mixed that in with the news for a while, but now it doesn’t display any news, only the “unavailable” message. And, of course, since it’s no longer available, I can’t fix this with a delete-and-reinstall. If I delete it, it’s presumably gone permanently. And meanwhile something has gotten screwed up under the hood, even though the news organizations whose feeds it polled still exist (duh, they’re major media organizations) so it should still work … aside from “clear cache” is there any way I might be able to reset this app without it needing to be still downloadable at the app store? Failing that, can anyone recommend a replacement that does work and is downloadable?
Oh, and one final thing: I just got hit with that BLASTED comment submission bug again. You know, where it says either “required fields missing: name, email” or “you must be logged in to comment” when you hit “post comment”, despite it saying “logged in as…” right there above the input field and not having a name or an email field to fill in. The only fix seems to be to log out and back in again, which is a huge nuisance. Is anyone ever going to fix this blasted bug?
Re: Bekenstein Bound @235:
You didn’t mention an OS. These answers will assume Android.
any way to suppress this behavior and prevent Chrome from creating new tabs
I’ve been using Fennec (Firefox) without incident. With the “uBlock Origin” extension.
the Youtube app
I like NewPipe. No ads. Being a reverse-engineered third-party client, however, it sometimes breaks and takes a few days to recover when YouTube itself makes changes. It’s persevered for years.
Not on the Google Play store, of course. It is in the F-Droid repository for automatic updates, with some delay. The most timely arrangement is getting the apk directly from the devs’ site; NewPipe can send your browser directly to the latest apk when there’s an update. I personally then switch to my file manager app to install apks, out of caution, just to limit the permissions I give my browser.
The phone seems to track exactly two volume levels, one governing the ringer and message/notification sounds and the other governing sounds in all apps. […] If I change the volume while it’s not in an app, it will change the “ringer/etc. volume” instead of the “app volume”. So I constantly have to change the volume after starting either app […] Is there any way to create additional “volume compartments”
The OS Settings sliders make explicit which volume you are adjusting. That screen also has a checkbox to make media adjustment the default when pressing the buttons, which might address your ringer primacy problem.
“Activity Manager” in the F-Droid repo can create a home icon shortcut to internal functions of other apps—such as the standard OS volume sliders buried in Settings. I wanted quick access to the sliders to avoid wearing out my hardware buttons.
[How to do it]: Launch “Activity Manager”, search “Settings” and tap it, scroll to Settings$SecVolumeSettingsActivity entitled “Volume”. Tapping that will launch it to see what you’ll get. Or Triple-dot will create the shortcut.
I’ve not seen an app that remembers and adjusts volume depending on which app is visible. I saw one that does it for rotation, so maybe “app specific” media volume is possible? I don’t use the Google Play store. It’s definitely not a standard OS feature.
I can’t fix this with a delete-and-reinstall. If I delete it, it’s presumably gone permanently.
F-Droid’s “Apk Extracter” dumps an installed app’s apk to storage, so you can keep a copy to install it again. It’s really old though. “APK Explorer & Editor” is WAY overpowered for your needs but probably can do that too.
can anyone recommend a replacement
Unfamiliar with those. Sorry. Maybe the apk trick above will get it running again until next summer. I use a browser bookmark to check the weather via a DuckDuckGo search.
I just got hit with that BLASTED comment submission bug again.
On FtB? I’ve never had that. Just an involuntary logout avery few weeks, which is presumaby a security feature.
I wonder if your bug has to do with HOW you login. Blogs here use a WordPress plugin to allow logging in with accounts from elsewhere. Yahoo, for instance, ceased to be a viable login method ages ago. You can create an account on FtB if you haven’t already.
KGsays
shermanj@180,
I have read reputable articles that said ‘in 273 AD, Roman Emperor Aurelian conquered Egypt . . and fearing the pagan temples within Egypt, Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria demanded that a mob of Egyptians destroy the temple at Serapis and the remains of the great library of Alexandria’
This – possibly because of your ellipsis – squeezes together two events more than a century apart. Aurelian of course was a pagan; Egypt had been under Roman rule for 3 centuries by the time he “conquered” it. Theophilus was certainly instrumental in getting the Serapeum destroyed in 391 CE, but by that date there was probably no library there.
tl/dr: Libraries then as now needed a constant flow of funds to maintain their collections, which were not always forthcoming, and Alexandria was sacked a number of times, beginning with Julius Caesar in 47 BCE. It’s unclear how long there were significant collections of scrolls either in the main library or in the Serapeum.
On the larger point, once it had or was associated with state power, the Church sometimes promoted secular knowledge and innovation, sometimes destroyed or obstructed it, sometimes appeared indifferent. History is complicated. But the fact remains that it was in Catholic Europe, while the Church was at the height of its power, that the foundations of modern science, mathematics, and scholarship were laid – partly through indigenous innovation, partly through an unusual openness to importing and adapting knowledge and techniques from elsewhere.
KGsays
Tethys@177,
It simply is not true for most of the Pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature that we still have. Neither the Exeter Book or the Codex that contains Beowulf are the work of Christian copyists. They both contain some specifically Christian poems and references but the vellum is dated to about 1000 years old. The bulk of the poems are oral traditions which were memorized and retold by official skalds for hundreds of years before some anonymous scribe compiled them into an anthology.
They are meant to be heard, not read. If you want to give the copyists credit for maintaining a library it is warranted, although that is one of the basic functions of scriptoriums besides making more copies of basic church texts like prayer books and psalters. Of course Muspilli is Christianized, it was written in a monastery in the 900s long after the Dark Ages, but it contains the only version of the story in a OHG dialect and has clear parallels with Ragnorok despite being edited for Christian sensibilities.
None of the Icelandic material which comes from The Elder Edda is from a scriptorium, , and Snorri Sturlasson (who is Christian but not a monk) wrote the Younger Edda to preserve the tradition of Skaldic poetry.
It is quite obviously not preserved due to the efforts of Christian copyists.
It’s amusing how completely you undermine your own claims here.
1) The Exeter book dates from the late 10th century CE, so the probability must be that the scribe was Christian, and likely a monk or nun. It was presented to Exeter Cathedral by Leofric, the first Bishop of Exeter, in 1071.
2) Since 2 of the 5 works in the Nowell Codex concern explicitly Christian subjects (a life of St. Christopher and a retelling of the Book of Judith – well, that could be regarded as Jewish rather than Christian) along with Beowulf, the likelihood is that it was written by Christians (there was more than one scribe) – and the likely date, around 1000 CE, points in the same direction.
3) As you say: “Of course Muspilli is Christianized, it was written in a monastery in the 900s long after the Dark Ages”.
4) The Elder Edda, in the form we have it, dates from 13th century Iceland. Iceland formally became Christian by a decision of the Althing in 999 or 1000 CE, so by the 13th century it’s highly probable that the Codex Regius scribe was Christian.
5) As you say, Snorri Sturlasson was a Christian. He apparently wrote the Younger Edda around 1220, but it’s known only from later manuscripts and fragments, dating between 1300 and 1600 – again, presumably copied by… Christians.
I dont know enough ecclesiastical history to say which Pope made the possession of a penis mandatory to learning to read and write in Latin, but it doesn’t seem to have been followed on the Continent as it was in England. Hildegarde Von Bingen was writing scholarly works on medicine, and being a Saint by the 1100s iirc.
So assuming you’re right that there was such an edict, it wasn’t enforced.
The simple fact is, as the above demonstrates, that we in European or European-derived cultures are the cultural heirs of centuries of Christianity. We don’t have to believe Christian nonsense, or excuse the many examples of horrific oppression and persecution carried out by Christian individuals and institutions; and we don’t know how much pre-Christian knowledge and writing was deliberately destroyed; but denying that what was preserved, was largely preserved by Christian individuals and institutions, is either ignorant or dishonest.
Reginald Selkirksays
@235 Bekenstein Bound
Someone ought to explain to them that that would roughly double Alaska’s population…
@235 Bekenstein Bound
The only fix seems to be to log out and back in again, which is a huge nuisance.
The way I handle this is to start another tab, log back to the freethought.com site with it, then re-submit my comment in the first tab. It’s an inconvenience, but a rather minor one.
After a half-century hiatus, thorium has returned to the front lines of nuclear power research as a source of fuel. In 2025, China plans to start building a demonstration thorium-based molten-salt reactor in the Gobi Desert.
The 10-megawatt reactor project, managed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP), is scheduled to be operational by 2030, according to an environmental-impact report released by the Academy in October. The project follows a 2-MW experimental version completed in 2021 and operated since then…
They’re speeding toward a faster future in China, thanks to a new model of high-speed bullet train. Over the weekend, state-owned rail operator China State Railway Group unveiled a prototype for its CR450 train, which it claims will be the fastest commercial high-speed railcar in the world.
As reported by the South China Morning Post, the CR450 will be able to reach peak speeds as high as 280mph (450km/h) and will have a top commercial operating speed of 250mph (400km/h). For comparison’s sake, the state’s rail operator’s current CR400 trains operate at about 220mph (350km/h). The CR450 will be able to complete the 700-mile journey from Beijing to Shanghai in about 2.5 hours, according to state-owned news organization Yicai Global…
Well, they’ve gone and done it. A company in Florida got last-minute approval last week from Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency to build a practice road using radioactive materials. It seems like such an obviously bad idea, but a bad idea never stopped the government.
The new road, courtesy of Mosaic Fertilizer, is described as a small scale pilot project going up on the company’s private property in a New Wales, Florida, the Hill reports:
In the past, the agency has raised concerns about the use of this material in road building. It said in 1992 that use of phosphogypsum in road construction created risks for both construction workers and also anyone who later builds a home where the phosphogypsum road had once been.
The agency now says that members of the public are not expected to come into contact with the road.
However, Mosaic, which will build the road, has described the effort as part of a pilot project that will “demonstrate the range of … road construction designs.” It’s not clear if additional road construction will follow — though doing so would likely require further approvals…
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott mourned the death of former President Jimmy Carter by sending thoughts and prayers to former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, who’s been dead for more than a year.
“Cecilia and I send our prayers and deepest condolences to First Lady Rosalynn Carter and the entire Carter family,” a statement from the governor and his wife issued Sunday read, according to Texas station WFAA…
Puerto Rico suffered the latest in a string of widespread power outages Tuesday that has left 1.3 million customers, some 80% of the entire island, in the dark.
More than 1 million energy customers were without power across the U.S. territory since 5:30 a.m. due to an infrastructure problem at a power plant on the island’s southern coast, energy company LUMA said in an update on X.
LUMA said in a statement that the fault appeared to be an underground cable and that it was working with partners to restart the island’s power network…
Thanks to the Carters’ efforts, the worms that afflicted an estimated 3.5 million people in 20 African and Asian countries when the center launched its campaign in 1986 are on the brink of extinction. Only 14 human cases were reported across four African nations in 2023, according to The Carter Center.
The World Health Organization’s target for eradication is 2030. Carter Center leaders hope to achieve it sooner…
There’s no vaccine that prevents Guinea worm infections or medicine that gets rid of the parasites. Treatment has changed little since ancient Greece. Emerging worms are gently wound around a stick as they’re slowly pulled through the skin. Removing an entire worm without breaking it can take weeks.
So instead of scientific breakthroughs, this campaign has relied on persuading millions of people to change basic behaviors.
Workers from the center and host governments trained volunteers to teach neighbors to filter water through cloth screens, removing tiny fleas that carry the larvae. Villagers learned to watch for and report new cases — often for rewards of $100 or more. Infected people and dogs had to be prevented from tainting water sources.
The goal was to break the worm’s life cycle — and therefore eliminate the parasite itself — in each endemic community, eventually exterminating Guinea worm altogether…
Some setbacks frustrated Carter. Visiting a hospital packed with suffering children and adults amid a 2007 resurgence in Ghana, Carter suggested publicly that the disease should perhaps be renamed “Ghana worm.”
“Ghana was deeply embarrassed,” Hopkins said.
Ghana ended transmission within three more years. Even more inspiring: Nigeria, which once had the most cases in the world, reached zero infections in 2009…
9 countries said goodbye to a devastating disease in 2024, Gabrielle Emanuel, NPR, December 30, 2024.
What does it take to wipe out a human disease?
That’s only happened once in the history of the world: smallpox, which had killed hundreds of millions, was officially eradicated in 1980.
But it happens on a smaller scale every year. In 2024, nine countries eliminated a disease.
“These are great accomplishments that have been achieved with very limited means,” says Albis Gabrielli, who works for the World Health Organization’s global neglected tropical disease program and oversees their monitoring and evaluation work. WHO certifies an elimination either when a country gets rid of the disease entirely or brings it to such low levels that human health is not affected in any significant way.
Here’s a list of this year’s honors. Cape Verde and Egypt became malaria-free. Brazil and Timor Leste eliminated lymphatic filariasis, the disfiguring parasite that causes a condition commonly known as elephantiasis. Jordan became the first country to ever be certified as leprosy-free. Chad got rid of one form of human African trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness. And Pakistan, Vietnam and India eliminated trachoma, which causes blindness.
And even though each achievement is just one disease in one country, the effort can be daunting — as illustrated by the story of Pakistan’s more than 20-year battle to wipe out trachoma, a goal that just a few years ago seemed out of reach.
“It’s a massive effort that required mobilization of hundreds or thousands of health-care workers and other personnel,” says Anthony Solomon, chief scientist for the World Health Organization’s global neglected tropical disease program.
The Arbor Day Foundation will plant 10 million trees across six U.S. states over four years to replace those destroyed during the devastating 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, the non-profit organization announced.
The restoration program, targeting Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, marks the group’s largest undertaking in its 50-year history. The initiative will involve state and local governments, corporate sponsors and community volunteers…
If it takes them 4 years to repair 1 year of damage, it doesn’t seem like they would ever be caught up.
The Biden administration announced new sanctions against Russia and Iran on Tuesday in response to efforts by both countries to influence the 2024 election.
“The Governments of Iran and Russia have targeted our election processes and institutions and sought to divide the American people through targeted disinformation campaigns,” Bradley T. Smith, the acting under secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said in a statement.
“The United States will remain vigilant against adversaries who would undermine our democracy.”
The sanctions target the Cognitive Design Production Center, a division of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Center for Geopolitical Expertise and its director Valery Mikhailovich Korovin, both affiliates of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate, also known as the GRU.
“These actors sought to stoke sociopolitical tensions and undermine our election institutions during the 2024 U.S. general election,” the State Department said in a release announcing the sanctions.
Both build on existing sanctions leveled against the two countries and come after U.S. intelligence agencies identified campaigns from each nation to undermine the 2024 election by dividing Americans and promoting misinformation.
[…] intelligence officials said both countries were building on past efforts, creating more sophisticated false content and relying on artificial intelligence to boost their efforts.
Russia was behind a number of false videos, including one accusing Vice President Harris of being involved in a hit-and-run.
Iran also devoted more resources to pushing disinformation in Spanish.
The intelligence community assessed that while Russia aimed to aid President-elect Trump in winning the election, Iran preferred Harris.
Tuesday’s sanctions were not the first response to Russian interference.
The Justice Department ahead of the election seized 32 different web domains, many of them appearing to be legitimate news sites such as The Washington Post, but promoting content in line with Russian narratives.
That included numerous fake articles about its war with Ukraine.
And in a separate indictment, the Justice Department charged two employees associated with RT, previously known as Russia Today, for contracting with an American-based media company to covertly pay well-known conservative commentators such as Tim Pool and Benny Johnson to promote Russian narratives.
[…] Tuesday’s sanctions, however, did not target China, another country U.S. intelligence pinpointed as being active in seeking to influence the election.
China expanded its influence efforts by creating fake social media accounts to “push narratives and sow divisiveness,” mirroring efforts deployed by Russia in prior elections. The country was not, however, found to be taking action with the goal of promoting either candidate.
“Marking 25 years in office, Vladimir Putin says he has remade Russia as a sovereign power and will prevail in Ukraine, but economic and strategic setbacks complicate the picture.”
When Russia’s first democratically elected president, Boris Yeltsin, resigned on New Year’s Eve in 1999, he publicly implored Vladimir Putin, his handpicked but little-known successor, to “take care of Russia.”
A quarter-century later, Putin insists he has done just that — and more.
As he wrapped up his marathon year-end news conference on Dec. 19, Putin boasted that he had thwarted efforts by the United States and its Western allies to subjugate Russia after the Soviet Union fell apart.
“I have not just taken care of it, but I believe we have stepped back from the edge of the abyss,” he declared, in response to a question about Yeltsin’s remark.
“I have done everything so that Russia can be an independent and sovereign state that is capable of making decisions in its interests,” Putin said, “rather than in the interests of the countries that were dragging it toward them, patting it on the back, only to use it for their own purposes.”
But as 2024 draws to a close, Russia is in a far more precarious place than Putin’s rhetoric and bravado suggest. His forces are making slow but steady advances in Ukraine, but estimates by some NATO countries suggest hundreds of thousands of Russian troops have been killed or wounded in the war, which has dragged on for nearly three years.
Part of Russia’s Kursk region is occupied by Ukrainian troops aiming to use the territory as leverage in future negotiations. This month, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s nuclear, biological and chemical defense forces, was assassinated in an explosion in Moscow. The country’s sanctions-battered economy is under severe strain, with annual inflation approaching 10 percent. The Russian Central Bank last week opted to hold its key interest rate at a staggering 21 percent — only after Putin publicly called for a “balanced decision” following widespread predictions of a two-percentage-point hike.
Meanwhile, Putin’s closest ally in the Middle East, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, was ousted from power and fled to Moscow, leaving Russia scrambling to withdraw troops and military equipment from bases in Syria it had used to project power abroad.
[snipped details related to Azerbaijan Airlines crash]
Since 2022, Putin has used his invasion of Ukraine to remake his country, building a militarized Russian society geared to confront the West for decades — revamping the education system, monopolizing culture, reshaping women’s roles and indoctrinating youths.
[snipped comment about Putin’s confidence growing because Trump was elected]
The war has become omnipresent in Russian classrooms. In September, a mandatory course titled “Fundamentals of Security and Protection of the Homeland” was introduced to instill in children “a readiness to defend the Fatherland,” including training to handle a Kalashnikov rifle.
[…] The dream job floated to Russian youths is no longer software development. Instead, they are encouraged to pursue positions in “new and promising areas,” such as working on drone assembly lines.
“Still thinking about going to the 10th grade? Join the super elite course at Alabuga Polytechnic Institute to study aerial navigation and drone programming,” pitched an ad for a Tatarstan-based industrial hub that employs students to build Iranian-designed self-detonating drones.
The ad, depicting blond adolescent boys looking at high-tech computers in pristine white labs, targets 15-year-olds who can either complete high school or go to a trade school, skipping higher education.
[…] Putin, faced with a declining population and the added demographic peril of deploying tens of thousands of young men to the front lines, away from their wives, has found a new fixation: employing every possible incentive to persuade women to give birth early and often.
Government data showed that 599,600 children were born in Russia in the first half of 2024, the lowest birth rate since 1999, a figure the Kremlin called “catastrophic.”
Schools once again turned into a policy testing ground with a new extracurricular class, “family studies,” created to “solve demographic problems.” Course textbooks teach students that women should be obedient, demonize abortion and gloss over domestic abuse to prevent divorces.
[…] Several regional governments have introduced one-time cash payments of $1,000 to $2,000 for pregnant university students. […]
“He’s waiting for Trump,” Zygar [journalist and author Mikhail Zygar, living in exile] added. “Trump is practically seen as the mascot for the end of the old world order and the demise of the liberal democratic ideology.” […]
“Putin has successfully convinced Washington that he is to be feared and that he is crazy enough to drag NATO into war,” analysts from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, concluded in a recent report. “Allies have let their fear of escalation overtake a winning military strategy. As a result, Putin has put a finger to the wind and sees it is blowing in his direction.”
Republicans are pushing to eliminate Direct File, a Biden administration program that offers a way for some Americans to file their taxes without paying for preparation services. To Wyden [Senator Ron Wyden], the effort to eliminate the program is an attempt to “intentionally sabotage basic public services.”
“To me, paying your taxes ought to be free and easy — and the biggest benefit of direct file is it’s free,” Wyden, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, told TPM.
[…] “The tax software companies just want to pick your pocket every year and too many Republicans are taking their side,” Wyden said. “And it didn’t used to be this way. I had the only two major bipartisan bills since ‘86 and both of them had a version of Direct File.
President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which was signed into law in August 2022, included funding for a Direct File pilot program, a policy that had long been sought by progressive tax policy wonks. The pilot program was first launched in 12 states last year, most of which had no state income tax. It was designed to offer a free, alternative tax filing option for low- and middle-income taxpayers who opted for standard deductions. According to the IRS, about 140,000 people participated in the pilot and saved over $5.6 million in filing costs. It was expanded to all 50 states for the coming filing season.
[…] in the wake of Trump’s election last month, the program has come under threat. On Dec. 10, a group of 29 congressional Republicans sent a letter to Trump that urged him to “take immediate action, including but not limited to a day-one executive order, to end the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) unauthorized and wasteful Direct File pilot program.” The letter framed the initiative as a dramatic and even dangerous change to the tax system.
“Under the guise of offering a convenient ‘free-to-file’ alternative preparation service, the IRS asserts itself as the tax assessor, collector, preparer, and enforcer — all in one — when the program is used. This is deeply concerning and a clear conflict of interest,” the letter said. “The IRS has little incentive to ensure hardworking Americans do not pay more than they owe in taxes and may instead benefit from families and small businesses paying greater amounts than they are required by law. Furthermore, it is highly inappropriate for the IRS to serve as a tax preparer for taxpayers while also being the final enforcer of tax violations.”
There are several questionable elements in this analysis of the program. As the letter notes just a few sentences after initially suggesting it makes the IRS “enforcer” of taxes, that is already a role the agency plays. Direct File also doesn’t turn the IRS into a tax preparer. Rather, it allows individuals to prepare their own taxes using the program instead of paying a company. It is also a strictly opt-in initiative that is not designed for anyone looking to make more than the standard deduction.
Wyden described the exaggerated claims in the letter and the idea that government funds should not be used to help taxpayers spend less on filing as “regurgitating” talking points from the tax prep industry, which has publicly opposed the program.
[…] According to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan nonprofit research group focused on money in politics, the tax prep industry has spent, as of last year, $90 million fighting direct file initiatives. […]
“The retiring Republican reflects on the Republican insurgents he left behind.”
When a 29-year-old Patrick McHenry entered Congress in 2005, few would have believed the man described as the GOP’s “attack dog-in-training” would retire two decades later as a paragon of pragmatism.
But after he spent his first terms brawling to little effect, the North Carolina Republican decided to get serious. The bow-tied conservative followed a path that led to the chairship of the House Financial Services Committee and, for three tumultuous weeks, temporary speaker of the House.
In an exit interview with POLITICO Magazine, he recounted the “out-of-body experience” he had when he assumed power after Kevin McCarthy’s ousting. And he talked about how the Republican Party has shifted over his time in office […]
But that’s not why he’s leaving. Twenty years is enough, he said, plus his chairmanship is over on account of committee term limits, something he still thinks is a great idea.
In his final years in office, McHenry had the opportunity to rise through the ranks of leadership — John Boehner said he would be speaker one day — but instead chose to focus on crafting financial policy, including landmark cryptocurrency legislation. It’s a decision he doesn’t regret.
[…] So I just turned 28, and I started my campaign for Congress.
What the electorate was telling me, and then what they responded to, was that I knew something about legislating — which I knew just a little bit — and I wanted to change D.C.
So I get elected to Congress a week after my 29th birthday. I came here with the intention to light things up.
What was motivating you to light things up?
I wanted to pass conservative policy.
A couple things about my district: At that period of time, in the first five years from the 2000 tech bubble until 2005, we had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. My key MSA [metropolitan statistical area] in that district had more unemployment than Flint, Michigan. Nobody paid attention. Textiles, furniture, fiber optic cable — those are the three industries of the district. It’s a very different time. You can’t even put it as a prelude to Trump because it’s so far before this Trump “Let’s get tough on China” stuff. I was talking about this stuff in my primary in 2004 about how bad trade deals connected to bad economics.
So the response was, we want somebody who has energy and wants to go fight. And I did, and I fought.
You can either be on all the shows and in all the floor fights, or you can actually be in the right rooms where the decisions are made.
[…] In my second term, I discovered that I wasn’t being effective, that this was not moving my colleagues to vote with me. It was not building capacity internally. It was not helping me move legislation. It wasn’t helping move policy. And that’s when I stopped.
The turn was reading about the institution, reading about how you make decisions, reading about how you get down into the specifics and how you affect outcomes. […]
Were there people, historically, when you were doing your studying that you thought had valuable lessons?
The rise and fall of [former House Speaker] Jim Wright is a fabulous explanation of this institution. There are a couple of different books on the ingredients that brought Churchill to power, which are instructive for our institution — like, what are the mechanics of legislative bodies, and how you affect things. […]
And I got the tail end of Tom DeLay’s leadership for House Republicans, and his capacity to count votes was the thing I looked at deeply, and how he built that capacity and how he’s able to deliver — and if he gave you his word, he did deliver, absolutely fundamentally.
[…] Once you’re on a path here, it’s very difficult to stop that trajectory. And then I started pivoting and trying to get into the right circles in the right rooms where decisions were happening, and start figuring out the ways that I can be productive. The NRCC on the campaign side of things, with candidate recruitment; with all those things internally, with the whip operation; with the leader circle, with how leadership makes decisions and on committees, how that was done. Effective committee chairs, ineffective committee chairs.
Then, class of 2010 comes in, and I’m in a very different position. I’m younger than them but I’ve got more seniority and experience in the place, and I’ve learned what not to do […]
The people that are outside of positions of authority in the House — they’re the most frequent guests on media, your most ample quotes and most active online — are not meaningful players internally, almost to a person, in this institution. The rewards, the incentives, have shifted in my 20 years to attention and people assuming that this place is a platform for that attention. [Yep. Obviously.]
[…] The one thing the Founding Fathers proactively decided was that you had to divide power, and you had to make each one of these branches a little dysfunctional, so that no one could have perfect power. […] What Congress has done since the Progressive Era is hand away power to agencies in the executive branch — and what we’ve done since ’94 is diminish Congress’ power, which is actually completely out of alignment for what the Founding Fathers wanted. They wanted a strong legislative branch to counter the executive branch.
[…] Diminishing the role of the speaker, the motion to vacate — that has been fully weaponized. It’s been fully weaponized by people that are quite selfish in their views, that are not institutionalists and don’t actually get more conservative policy as a result of it. And history will show that.
That year was success after success after success for McCarthy, stuff that was rabbit-out-of-the-hat stuff. He’s dead man walking, and he’s like Houdini. […] To watch him get through this whole year and to be punished for doing something that was the next rabbit out of the hat, which is government funding, it’s a CR [continuing resolution], for heaven’s sake, a clean CR.
So he’s punished for that. I think this is the dumbest thing I’ve seen. And then I think, “Wait a second, the institution’s trapped.” And there’s also this feeling that I’m signed up for Hotel California, right? You can check out, but you can never leave.
[…] What kind of work are you interested in doing next?
The stuff that’s most interesting to me is technology and that interplay with the world of finance. Absolutely fascinating for me. I think that is a societal good. I think giving greater access to average folks is so important.
My motivation with all this stuff is my father, who started a small business in the backyard mowing grass.
What I’m talking about for my dad is getting a bank loan so you can go buy another lawn mower, so you can hire a few more people, to buy a truck to put the lawnmower in the back of. That’s what I’m thinking of. And other people are thinking about, how do you have the next Facebook? And I’m like, actually, there’s everything in between, and there’s massive good when you can unlock that economic potential. […]
A key cost-saving provision of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) goes into effect in the new year, limiting annual out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs to $2,000 for Medicare beneficiaries.
Starting on Jan. 1, 2025, an estimated 19 million Medicare beneficiaries will see their out-of-pocket Medicare Part D spending capped at $2,000 for the year. This annual cap will be indexed to the rate of inflation every year going forward. An interim spending cap of roughly $3,500 was put in place in 2024.
According to an administration official, those with Medicare will save an average of $400 a year.
“Before I took office, people with Medicare who took expensive drugs could face a crushing burden, paying $10,000 a year or more in copays for the drugs they need to stay alive,” President Biden said in a statement Tuesday. “When I took on Big Pharma and won, we changed that, capping seniors’ out-of-pocket spending on drugs they get at the pharmacy for the first time ever.”
“My Inflation Reduction Act has changed Medicare for the better, and as a result Americans will have more money back in their pockets in the years to come,” he added.
Medicare enrollees with standard benefits in 2025 will pay a deductible of $590 and then pay 25 percent of their drug costs until their out-of-pocket spending totals $2,000, after which they will pay no additional costs. [Still too much money for a lot of people.]
The annual cap is one of the core cost-saving health care provisions included in the IRA, along with the Medicare drug price negotiation program and the $35 monthly cap on insulin. […]
Myself @ 260
“Jimmy Carter lost in 1980 because Ronald Reagan comitted treason by negotiating with Iran to not release the hostages until after the election.”
birgerjohanssonsays
Britain: Conservative Newspaper Express Exposed Another Brexit Lie Today
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=TfeIkB2A7aw
EU did not cause immigration, Brit Conservative policy did (and still does)
[But the people who voted for Brexit and the Conservatives will not change their minds, they still get their information from the same liars]
[…] The one thing the Founding Fathers proactively decided was that you had to divide power, and you had to make each one of these branches a little dysfunctional, so that no one could have perfect power. […] What Congress has done since the Progressive Era is hand away power to agencies in the executive branch — and what we’ve done since ’94 is diminish Congress’ power, which is actually completely out of alignment for what the Founding Fathers wanted. They wanted a strong legislative branch to counter the executive branch.
That is repeating a Republican talking point. Even at the best of times Congress can’t lay down every bit of regulation, it has always delegated some of the detailing of the rules to the executive branch. Congress shouldn’t be writing laws that spell out the details of food safety laws, they should specify which government department is responsible for food safety, lay out some general guidelines and let the department work out the nitty detail bits. Some of the people that push this point are libertarian types trying to cripple the ability of the government to regulate anything by making Congress directly pass every little detail as a law. Post office wants to issue holiday stamps? Nope that is a decision for Congress and Congress has to approve the stamp designs, set the dates for when they are for sale and so on.
The presidency has been taking too much power recently but it isn’t because Congress has delegated it away, it’s because Congress has been too deadlocked to do anything. They can barely pass laws to keep the government running, I don’t know when they last passed an actual budget. The president has been doing more then he should just to keep the country running. If Congress was functional they could pass laws to supersede almost any executive order they don’t like.
…
But in the small state of Maine, home to just over a million people, voters sought to curb that power. On Nov. 5, Maine residents passed Question 1, a ballot initiative that limits the amount an individual or business can donate to a Political Action Committee to $5,000. The law went into effect on Dec. 1, establishing the first-ever limit on the amount an individual or group can donate to a super PAC.
The law was almost immediately the subject of legal challenges that could see the issue end up before the Supreme Court, which will be in a position to either restore governments’ ability to curtail the flow of money into politics or cement the power of dark money and the ultra-rich.
“We are entitled to a system that’s not only free of corruption, but also a system that is free of the appearance of corruption,” Cara McCormick, leader of the group Citizens to End Super PACs in Maine that led the campaign, told Salon.
The initiative passed with 74% of the vote and the state has been lauded for rejecting dark money’s incredibly vast influence in American politics…
An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity:
Federal authorities have arrested and indicted a 20-year-old U.S. Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m, a cybercriminal who has been selling and leaking sensitive customer call records stolen earlier this year from AT&T and Verizon. As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity last month, the accused is a communications specialist who was recently stationed in South Korea. Cameron John Wagenius was arrested near the Army base in Fort Hood, Texas on Dec. 20, after being indicted on two criminal counts of unlawful transfer of confidential phone records. The sparse, two-page indictment (PDF) doesn’t reference specific victims or hacking activity, nor does it include any personal details about the accused. But a conversation with Wagenius’ mother — Minnesota native Alicia Roen — filled in the gaps.
Roen said that prior to her son’s arrest he’d acknowledged being associated with Connor Riley Moucka, a.k.a. “Judische,” a prolific cybercriminal from Canada who was arrested in late October for stealing data from and extorting dozens of companies that stored data at the cloud service Snowflake. In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Judische said he had no interest in selling the data he’d stolen from Snowflake customers and telecom providers, and that he preferred to outsource that to Kiberphant0m and others. Meanwhile, Kiberphant0m claimed in posts on Telegram that he was responsible for hacking into at least 15 telecommunications firms, including AT&T and Verizon. On November 26, KrebsOnSecurity published a story that followed a trail of clues left behind by Kiberphantom indicating he was a U.S. Army soldier stationed in South Korea.
[…] Immediately after news broke of Moucka’s arrest, Kiberphant0m posted on the hacker community BreachForums what they claimed were the AT&T call logs for President-elect Donald J. Trump and for Vice President Kamala Harris. […] On that same day, Kiberphant0m posted what they claimed was the “data schema” from the U.S. National Security Agency. On Nov. 5, Kiberphant0m offered call logs stolen from Verizon’s push-to-talk (PTT) customers — mainly U.S. government agencies and emergency first responders. On Nov. 9, Kiberphant0m posted a sales thread on BreachForums offering a “SIM-swapping” service targeting Verizon PTT customers. In a SIM-swap, fraudsters use credentials that are phished or stolen from mobile phone company employees to divert a target’s phone calls and text messages to a device they control.
birgerjohanssonsays
Venom Destroys Mexican Gangsters – Full Opening Scene – VENOM 3
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=XJRknpIP_Hk
“I’m not gonna stop speaking. I’m doing this for your benefit. You are going to find all these dogs nice, loving families, or…”
JM @263: “That is repeating a Republican talking point. ”
Yes. Yes it is. The guy who said that is a Republican, and he spouted a bunch of Republican talking points. I still found the report/interview interesting because even a guy like that can come to the conclusion that, “I think this is the dumbest thing I’ve seen. And then I think, “Wait a second, the institution’s trapped.”
These points from you are well said:
The presidency has been taking too much power recently but it isn’t because Congress has delegated it away, it’s because Congress has been too deadlocked to do anything. They can barely pass laws to keep the government running, I don’t know when they last passed an actual budget. The president has been doing more then he should just to keep the country running. If Congress was functional they could pass laws to supersede almost any executive order they don’t like.
Susie Wiles, Donald Trump’s pick for chief of staff, issued a memo Sunday to Trump’s Cabinet nominees ordering them to stop making social media posts without approval ahead of the upcoming Senate confirmation hearings.
“All intended nominees should refrain from any public social media posts without prior approval of the incoming White House counsel,” the memo said, according to the New York Post.
Wiles also noted, “I am reiterating that no member of the incoming administration or Transition speaks for the United States or the President-elect himself.”
[…] An anonymous source with the Trump transition team claimed that the order to stop social media posts is not related to the recent online infighting between Trump megadonor Elon Musk and anti-immigration MAGA supporters. But the timing of the edict, coming directly from Trump’s right-hand woman, is extremely convenient.
Musk recently went on a posting frenzy, calling MAGA fans “upside-down and backwards” in their understanding of immigration issues, while telling one person to “take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face.”
The controversy generated international headlines, and Trump was dragged into commenting on the discussion—a less-than-ideal situation as he prepares for his inauguration.
Trump of all people telling others to be more mindful about social media posts is an ironic development. Trump made a name for himself as a political figure largely due to constantly posting inflammatory messages online. […]
Musk is not a cabinet nominee. Maybe Wiles intended to include Musk in this part: “I am reiterating that no member of the incoming administration or Transition speaks for the United States or the President-elect himself.”
“Hello! I, Vladimir Putin, Had Great Year Killing People And Watching America Decline!”
“New Year’s greetings from Moscow.”
Greetings, depraved Western fuck-pots of Wonkette! It is I, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, coming to you with new year’s greetings from greatest nation in history of history. No, not Finland, ha ha ha. Though Finland is lovely. Why else would Russia constantly threaten it?
No, Vladimir speaks of Mother Russia, of course! Or s novym godom, as we say in Russian, which is only good language. Is true! Ask Jamie Lee Curtis in classic comedy Wanda Is Name of Fish. Hubba hubba!
Mr. President, you are asking, can grandly uttering the rich guttural sounds of Russian language like pompous actor in Vladivostok dinner theater production of “The Day of the Turbins” really help me pull all the tail I could possibly want, and then some?
To which I say da, Russian is language of beauty! Russian is language of seduction! Do you think Vladimir pulls so much tail because he is wealthy and powerful world leader with army of sycophants to do his every bidding? Or do you think he pulls so much tail because he can growl even the most anodyne phrases and still sound like Honda motorcycle with perfectly tuned four-stroke engine? What do you think, vy gazoobraznaya orda koshach’ikh zadnits?
Ha ha, is old Russian saying! In English it roughly translates to you gaseous horde of cat butts. But admit it, for moment there you were hornier than Siberian eagle-owl!
But enough with ribald chit-chat! Diseased nostril styes of Wonkette, Vladimir is just stopping by to wish of you a happy New Year’s! It has been quite the year, da? Special military operation in phony nation of Ukraine continues to go well. We even allow North Korea to send thousands of soldiers to help us fight. Not that we needed help! Russian military is strong and needs no help! You heard nothing!
But glorious North Korea man-boy Kim Jong Un loves Vladimir so much. He call and say Mr. President, sir, my military grows soft from doing nothing but making potshots at South Korean fishing boats. You are greatest leader in world and your army is greatest army imposing its will on phony Ukrainian people. We are not making offer because you underestimated enemy strength and resolve and are running out of soldiers and tanks, no! We make offer because you have so much to teach us. Pretty please may my army come and help you mop up last stragglers of enemy?
To which what can Vladimir say? Da, of course we will generously let North Korean soldiers run at a few trench lines in face of machine-gun fire. Will even generously ship bodies back to North Korea for small fee. Russia is famous for its hospitality.
Also this year, Vladimir won overwhelming re-election victory. Yes, 87 percent of glorious Russian people demanded I continue to lead nation. Such love the people have for President Putin! So much love that hardly anyone else even bothered to run after FSB threatened their families.
It was also good year for Vladimir’s enemies. Excuse please, no, that is wrong. It was good year for Vladimir’s conflicts with enemies, in that enemies kept generously dying. No more enemies, no more conflicts!
Is enemies’ fault, of course. Did Vladimir Putin force Alexei Navalny to go to remote maximum security prison camp above Arctic Circle with primitive conditions and surrounded by the worst criminals of Russia? No! Was underlings that did that! Yes, they were obeying my orders, but why is that my fault? They are welcome always to ignore orders! Of course then they will also be sent to remote maximum security prison camp above Arctic Circle by other underlings who are loyal subjects and don’t disobey orders. But Vladimir can hardly be held responsible!
No, Vladimir has been blessed with good luck. Is it Vladimir who forces enemies of Mother Russia to keep hanging around near open windows at great heights? Is it Vladimir who actually shot Russian dissident in Berlin park? Is it Vladimir who personally pulled pin on grenades that destroyed Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plane? Is it Vladimir who shot Maxim Kuzminov in Spanish beach town? Bah! Vladimir cannot make secret trips to Berlin and Spain. Everyone would notice! German leaders would be very upset if I did not call to say hello while I am in town.
Now, if someone else did those things because Vladimir wanted them done, that is just loyalty! Also fear of being sent to maximum security Russian prison camp above Arctic Circle if they don’t.
Vladimir was also blessed this year to receive undying fealty of weird American man-boy Tucker Carlson. Remember this interview? Vladimir got to do what he loves best, which is give long, somnambulant lecture about last thousand years of Russian history, and weird American man-boy got to do what he loves best, which is sit in wide-eyed amazement while powerful person tells him how much better than America every other nation is.
Excuse please, but it still amazes Vladimir that Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, when he was biggest conservative lickspittle on Fox News, which is saying something. Being conservative lickspittle on Fox News is job requirement! It actually goes on resume under “Special Skills,” ahead even of “strong gag reflex.”
Ah, but who can forget greatest triumph of Vladimir’s year? Donald Trump was elected to presidency over shrill-voiced Indian harlot Kamala Harris and immediately started barking incoherently like Labradoodle with dementia. Huge win, he keeps saying. Mandate, he hollers. Greatest victory in history of democracy, he keeps hooting.
He even calls me and says can you believe it, Vladimir? Donald Trump wins greater victory even than you did! I say yes, Donald, correct, 49 percent of vote is way, way more than 87 percent! All Russian people suitably impressed! Then I put speaker phone on mute so advisors and I can laugh and laugh and laugh while he keeps babbling about annexing Canada.
I tell Donald of course Canada would make excellent 51st state. They would be lucky to have America, with its excellent health care and robust infrastructure! I say Donald, you should call babyface Justin Trudeau and offer to trade him your wife for his nation. Then I put him on mute again and advisors and I laugh more while he is screaming, Melania! I make great deal! Pack bags! Flight to Ottawa leaves in one hour!
Ah, we have fun.
So the happiest of new years to you, debauched rat’s asses of Wonkette! Vladimir looks forward to many more fun times with you in 2025! Let us all raise a glass of vodka for toast. Pust’ god vash budet sladok, kak ozhogi pervoy stepeni na moshonkakh, svinopolukazach’i zarazy!
Yes, is another old Russian saying. It roughly translates as May your year be as sweet as first-degree burns on your scrotums, you half-Cossack pig taints!
Trust me, is highest toast of respect here in Mother Russia!
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek:
A new study published in the journal Renewable Energy (PDF) uses data from the state of California to demonstrate that no blackouts occurred when wind-water-solar electricity supply exceeded 100% of demand on the state’s main grid for a record 98 of 116 days from late winter to early summer 2024 for an average (maximum) of 4.84 (10.1) hours per day. Compared to the same period in 2023, solar output in California is up 31%, wind power is up 8%, and batteries are up a staggering 105%. Batteries supplied up to 12% of nighttime demand by storing and redistributing excess solar energy.
And here’s the kicker: California’s high electricity prices aren’t because of wind, water, and solar energy. (That issue is primarily caused (PDF) by utilities recovering the cost of wildfire mitigation, transmission and distribution investments, and net energy metering.) In fact, researchers from Stanford, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of California, Berkeley found that states with higher shares of renewable energy tend to see lower electricity prices. The takeaway — and the data backs it up — is that a large grid dominated by wind, water, and solar is not only feasible, it’s also reliable.
Chief Justice John Roberts warned Tuesday that the independence of the federal courts is under threat from “illegitimate activity,” raising concerns about violence and intimidation against judges, disinformation and possible defiance of court opinions.
Roberts’ year-end report came after another tumultuous year for the Supreme Court in which the justices issued controversial decisions about President-elect Donald Trump and other high-profile issues. The justices also continued to battle low approval ratings and calls for ethics reforms. More Americans have disapproved than approved of the way the Supreme Court is handling its job in surveys conducted by Gallup since September, 2021…
In one of his final acts in office, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper commuted the death sentences of 15 men convicted of first-degree murder to life in prison without the possibility of parole on Tuesday, reducing the state’s death row population by more than 10%.
Cooper, who was barred from seeking a third consecutive four-year term, will give way to fellow Democrat Josh Stein on Wednesday when Stein takes the oath of office…
The Ukrainian military said on Tuesday its forces had hit a Russian oil depot in the western Smolensk region, setting fire to tanks storing oil products.
Ukraine’s general staff said on the Telegram app that the depot was used for military purposes. It did not specify the weapon used for the strike but said it was carried out in cooperation with drone forces.
Smolensk region governor Vasily Anokhin said that the attack caused a fuel spill and fire…
Bekenstein Boundsays
@Sky Captain thanks. I use my google account to login. I try to avoid creating new accounts as much as I possibly can, not least so I don’t have to juggle too many username/password combinations.
@Reginald Selkirk: Hence why I said roughly double. With the new batch being a bunch of progressive Danes whose idea of a right-wing party probably lies well to the left of the Dems.
Would not be good news for House Republicans if that happened. :)
Bekenstein Boundsays
Chief Justice John Roberts warned Tuesday that the independence of the federal courts is under threat from “illegitimate activity,”
Ceremonies were held just before midnight Tuesday to mark Bulgaria’s and Romania’s full membership in Europe’s Schengen area, the culmination of years of negotiations by the Eastern European countries to join the ID check-free travel zone.
Identification checks at the land borders between Bulgaria and Romania and their neighboring European Union-member countries were officially ceased at midnight, providing travelers free access to the rest of the 27-member EU bloc. The two countries partially joined the Schengen area in March, but open travel was restricted to those arriving only by air or sea…
Ten people were injured when a toy display fell onto a crowd during a New Year’s Eve event in Massachusetts, fire officials said.
The incident occurred during an indoor balloon drop at In The Game, an arcade and restaurant, in Peabody, about 2 miles west of Salem.
The family-oriented event was to celebrate the new year by releasing balloons from a net from the ceiling at noon Tuesday. Video on the arcade’s Facebook page showed the preparations for the festivities.
A plastic-brick display erected on a ledge 12 feet high inside the building collapsed and fell onto the crowd below, Peabody Fire Department Chief John Dowling told NBC News.
Ten spectators — four adults and six children — were injured with minor cuts and scrapes, he said, adding, “Everyone is OK.” …
birgerjohanssonsays
Reginald Selkirk @ 280
So now Bulgaria and Romania can move around most of Europe with far greater ease than Britons. Good Job, tories!
This example is fron Sweden, and, partly, Denmark. Of course, non-engish immigrants to USA often had their surnames messed up by immigration officials who wanted the spelling to be more english.
.
The part about adopting made-up names: There are criteria that limits the choices. I have never heard of anyone allowed to take the name Satansson. If I could, I would trade my old surname for ‘Bloodaxe’.
Or b’Stard, like the Brit MP Alan b’Stard in The New Statesman.
A small plane made an emergency landing after take-off at Naples Airport (Florida, USA) early Jan. 1.
Airport officials reported on Facebook about 7:45 a.m. Wednesday that a 36 Bonanza plane had to land “and thankfully all four people on board walked away from the aircraft.”
“A few buildings on the airport grounds were damaged and the airport has resumed normal operations,” the Facebook post said…
A Virginia man was arrested after federal authorities found a cache of homemade explosive devices, some of which were marked as “lethal,” at his home, marking the largest seizure of finished explosive devices in FBI history, officials said.
Authorities took Brad Spafford into custody Dec. 17 at a farm in Smithfield, about 29 miles northwest of Norfolk, and charged him with unlawful possession of an unregistered short-barrel rifle, according to court filings.
FBI agents found the rifle along with “a stockpile of more than 150 homemade improvised explosive devices, assessed as pipe bombs,” during a search of his home, a detention memo says.
“Some of these devices were marked ‘lethal.’ Most of the devices were found in a detached garage, where the FBI also found tools and manufacturing materials, including homemade fuses and pieces of PVC pipe,” it says. “Several additional apparent pipe bombs were found in a backpack in the home’s bedroom, completely unsecured.”
The phrase “#nolivesmatter” was written outside the backpack, prosecutors said. No Lives Matter follows an extremist ideology and promotes mass killings, criminal activity and targeted attacks and has historically encouraged followers to engage in self-harm or animal abuse, the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness said.
The memo also states that Spafford lived at the home with two young children.
Spafford allegedly told authorities that he kept in his freezer a jar of an explosive material that is so unstable it can explode as a result of friction of temperature changes, the filing states…
birgerjohanssonsays
Robert Reich:
“The 20 realities of the American system (before Trump gets a second crack at wrecking it even more)”
Associated Press: At least 10 dead after truck intentionally rams into crowd in New Orleans
The suspect who drove a vehicle at high speed into a crowd of revelers in New Orleans on New Year’s Day was killed after a firefight with police, law enforcement officials told the AP.
The officials were not authorized to discuss details of the investigation publicly and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.
Ten people were killed and 30 were injured after the suspect rammed a vehicle at high speed into a crowd of pedestrians in New Orleans’ bustling French Quarter district at 3:15 a.m. Wednesday along Bourbon Street.
The area is known worldwide as one of the largest destinations for New Year’s Eve parties, and with crowds in the city ballooning in anticipation for the Sugar Bowl college football playoff game at the nearby Superdome later in the day.
The FBI said in a statement that it was heading an investigation “with our partners to investigate this as an act of terrorism.” At a news conference, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell described the killings as a “terrorist attack” and the city’s police chief said the act was clearly intentional.
Alethea Duncan, an assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Orleans field office, said officials were investigating the discovery of at least one suspected improvised explosive device at the scene.
Whit Davis, 22, told CNN he was leaving a nightclub at the time of the attack.
“Everyone started yelling and screaming and running to the back, and then we basically went into lockdown for a little bit and then it calmed down but they wouldn’t let us leave,” Davis said.
“When they finally let us out of the club, police waved us where to walk and were telling us to get out of the area fast. I saw a few dead bodies they couldn’t even cover up and tons of people receiving first aid.”
Police Commissioner Anne Kirkpatrick said police officers would work to ensure safety at the Sugar Bowl, indicating that the game would go on as scheduled.
She said the suspect was “hell-bent on creating the carnage and the damage that he did.”
“It was very intentional behavior. This man was trying to run over as many people as he could,” Kirkpatrick said.
Two police officers who were shot after the driver emerged from the truck are in stable condition, she said.
Officials did not immediately provide an update on the status of the driver, whether there was an ongoing threat to the public or offer a suspected motive in the fatal incident.
NOLA Ready, the city’s emergency preparedness department, said the injured had been taken to five local hospitals.
The White House said President Joe Biden has been briefed. Attorney General Merrick Garland was also briefed on the attack, the Justice Department said.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Re: Reginald Selkirk @287:
friction of temperature changes
Odd phrase. Search engines only turn up those words in THAT story’s specific quote. Someone might’ve misheard “or”? Because a freezer would cause temperature changes going in and coming out.
Prosecutors said Spafford also “acknowledged to keeping a jar in his freezer of HMTD, an explosive material that is so unstable it can be exploded merely as a result of friction of temperature changes.”
considered as an initiating explosive for blasting caps in the early part of 20th century […] in mining applications. However, it has since been superseded by more (chemically) stable compounds
[…]
Like other organic peroxides, […] HMTD is unstable and detonated by shock, friction, static electricity discharges, concentrated sulfuric acid, strong UV radiation and heat. Cases of detonation caused by the simple act of screwing a lid on a jar containing HMTD have been reported. […] It is, however, less unstable than many other peroxides under normal conditions […] It also reacts with most common metals
[…]
Nevertheless, HMTD is one of the three most widely used primary explosives in improvised, amateur made blasting caps. […] HMTD is a common source of injury among amateur chemists […] Despite no longer being used in any military application, [it] has been used in a large number of suicide bombings and other attacks throughout the world.
HMTD is found in an ice bath, cooler, refrigerator, or freezer to slow its decomposition or stored in water to reduce its sensitivity.
[…]
[Regarding homemade explosives in general]: effectiveness [is] highly dependent on the accuracy of those instructions and the competence of the would-be explosives maker. […] Most HME chemical precursors have legitimate commercial uses and are legal, inexpensive, and unregulated
Ukraine has halted the transportation of Russian gas supplies through the country after a prewar transit deal expired at the end of last year, the nation’s energy minister confirmed.
Ukraine Minister of Energy Herman Halushchenko said Wednesday morning on the Telegram messaging app that the transit was stopped “in the interests of national security.”
“This is a historic event. Russia is losing markets and will incur financial losses. Europe has already decided to phase out Russian gas, and [this] aligns with what Ukraine has done today,” Halushchenko said, according to a translation by The Associated Press.
Russia’s Gazprom said in a statement that Kyiv’s refusal to extend the deal means the majority state-owned energy corporation has “no technical or legal possibility” of sending gas through Ukraine. Transportation stopped at 8 a.m. Moscow time, Gazprom said.
Even as Russia’s war against Ukraine began in 2022, Russian natural gas flowed through the country’s pipeline network, established when both nations were part of the Soviet Union, to Europe under a five-year deal. Ukraine collected transit fees, while Gazprom earned money from the gas.
Nearly 40 percent of the European Union’s pipeline natural gas was supplied by Russia before the war. When the fighting got underway, an energy crisis in Europe followed since Russia cut off most supplies through other pipelines. Europe has since outlined plans to completely eliminate Russian gas imports by 2027.
“Time Magazine can give it to Trump like they gave it to Hitler and Stalin.”
Usually on New Year’s Eve, Wonkette awards a Legislative Shitheel award, to a member of the Senate or House who acted in such a way that year that they deserve to be called the Shitheel of all Shitheels. Not this year, this year we’re doing something different.
[…] This year it’s an overall hero we have in mind, and you probably already know who she is, because you read the headline and looked at the picture […]
Vice President Kamala Harris would have been this year’s hero no matter which way the election went, because she was handed an almost unbelievably difficult task. Coming out of COVID, President Joe Biden — whose presidency we believe history will remember well — was historically unpopular.
And then he had that debate where he couldn’t remember which way was “malarkey,” and it thoroughly freaked everyone out, including all the voters […]
So he dropped out and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris. And Democratic voters and the party broke a land speed record for rallying around her. And she got on the runway and she took off, literally and figuratively, and there was energy on our side for the first time in a long damn time.
Her campaign was just about flawless. […]
But considering the short amount of time […] it was damned close.
With the benefit of a 30,000-foot view and hindsight, we now understand that pretty much every incumbent leader and governing party in the developed world has gotten their ass kicked in their first major election coming out of COVID. Of course, by that metric, Democrats and Harris performed better than other incumbents around the world.
[…] But even in normal times, there is a certain kind of profoundly stupid voter, both here and abroad, who votes for “change” every time, because their own personal life hasn’t been miraculously renovated like an old shack on Chip and Joanna’s latest Shiplap For Jesus HGTV monstrosity. […]
That’s been, we reckon, particularly pronounced after COVID, the experience of which millions of our fellow citizens seem to have memoryholed entirely. EVERYTHING IS NOT PERFECT YEEEEEEETTTTTTTTTTT! Something something CAN’T EVEN AFFORD TO PUT GAS IN MY EGGS!
Meanwhile they just fucked off setting records for Christmas and Black Friday spending and all that. We just hope Trump’s tariffs don’t come back to bite them in the ass, haha just kidding. Fuck around and find out, losers!
There was this one other thing, or rather two, that made it difficult for many of America’s most profoundly stupid voters to make a wise choice on November, and it’s that many of those people are also racists and misogynists, and Kamala Harris, one of the most supremely qualified candidates in history, is a Black woman.
And the guy who beat her is a white supremacist with 34 felony convictions, […] who reminds all decent and smart people of Hitler, but like if Hitler had recently been skull-banged with an anvil and there were cartoon birdies flying around his head.
[…] But we digress.
With all that said, and against all those headwinds, and everything else, she came so close.
Donald Trump’s popular vote win was eeny weeny, like 1.5 points. He didn’t even hit 50 percent. If fewer than 250,000 votes across the so-called allegedly “Blue Wall” states had gone the other way, Harris would be moving into the White House and Donald Trump could very well be starting down his final path toward the prison sentences he so richly deserves.
She did that, in what? 107 days? She came that close?
Fuck, let her be the nominee in 2028 after Trump and President Musk have fucked the country to death […]
Now, since it’s New Year’s Eve, let’s relive Kamala Harris’s Democratic National Convention speech, which most of Wonkette got to witness in person and will never forget: [video at the link]
And let’s relive Harris’s magnificent Ellipse speech, when she reconsecrated the ground Donald Trump so thoroughly shat all over in 2021 before his followers launched a terrorist attack against the Capitol to overturn the election: [video at the link]
And finally, watch Harris speaking just two weeks ago to students in Maryland, telling them to stay in the fight and not to give up: [video at the link]
As Rachel Maddow said one night on MSNBC in the days after the election, history didn’t end on November 5. And we might have lost that battle, but we did not lose the war, no matter what vile fascist MAGA motherfuckers would like us to think.
And we’ll tell you one damn thing for sure: This isn’t the last any of us have heard from Kamala Harris. We might one day yet call her Madam President.
How do we count the shitheel-ness of Elon Musk, the skipping dipshit […]?
Musk has never invented anything, or designed anything. Not electric cars or the Tesla, not rocket ships, nor Twitter, nor brain implants. He has built his fortunes on securing funding and investing in other people’s work, with billions in help from US government subsidies.
Took credit for naming his car company “Tesla,” tweeting “we named Tesla after Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest engineers ever.” But the car already had its name before he invested in the company, and was named by the company’s founder, Martin Eberhard, who sued Musk for calling himself the “founder” when he was actually an “investor.”
Claims to be self-made, but his father Errol says he subsidized his son’s move to the US and pocket money in college with the proceeds of a Zambian emerald mine.
He’s allegedly an illegal immigrant, who came from Canada on an F1 student visa, but violated the terms by not attending school.
[…] Pledged $6 billion (2 percent of his net worth at the time) to anyone who could end world hunger. When the United Nations World Food Program took him up on it and issued a report on how they would do it, he was like, never mind, then donated to his own foundation instead […]
Tweeted “actual truth” in comment to a post that accused Jewish communities of pushing “hatred against whites.”
He was a crap husband to his first wife [Justine] and mother of his first five kids, allegedly manipulating her into a postnuptial agreement, treating her like an employee during the marriage, urging her to go increasingly blonde, then dragged their divorce through the courts for years. Justine also said that he lied about holding their son Nevada when he died.
He’s reportedly a neglectful father to all of his 12 children, and was especially hateful to his trans daughter Vivian, who he says was “killed” by the “woke mind virus; she says he was a “cruel,” “cold,” “narcissistic” and “uncaring” father.
Claimed he moved X headquarters to Texas out of anger over transgender youth privacy laws. Considers “cis” a slur, had the term banned from Twitter.
Tweeted that his pronouns were “Prosecute/Fauci.”
Offered up a mini-submarine for cave rescue in Thailand. When Vernon Unsworth, a British recreational caver, criticized the submarine as a PR effort with no chance of success, Musk called Unsworth a “pedo.” Unsworth sued Musk, and Musk was found not liable, because he claimed “pedo guy” was a common South African insult.
Named his child X AE A-XII. Other unfortunate names of his kids: Exa Dark Sideræl, Techno Mechanicus.
Carries X AE A-XII around with him and calls him an “emotional support human.” […] is not terribly responsible as a parent to X as well, taking him to adult parties, forcing him to watch his rocket launches (according to Grimes, watching his dad’s Starship rocket explode had given X “like, a three-day PTSD meltdown”), and dragging him along and bouncing him on his knee to meet puzzled Turkish authoritarian prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson wrote that he witnessed [X] at 10 p.m. climbing on a moving spotlight during a solar-roof construction.”
In spite of being the world’s richest man, according to then-girlfriend Grimes, he made her sleep on a mattress with a hole in it, and eat “peanut butter for eight days in a row.”
Had two test-tube babies with Shivon Zillis, an executive at his brain-messing enterprise, while at the same time expecting a child with Grimes.
[…] Got sued by the SEC for making false and misleading statements about taking Tesla private. Musk settled the fraud charges with the SEC in 2018, agreeing to pay a $20 million fine and stepping down as Tesla’s chairman.
Neuralink employees have complained that pressure from Musk to accelerate development at his brain-messing lab has led to botched experiments and unnecessary, gruesome animal deaths, leading to a probe from the USDA.
[…] Tesla’s autopilot system has been responsible for hundreds of crashes and dozens of deaths, including people who were trapped in the car and burned alive.
Wants to get rid of car crash reporting, probably because his cars keep crashing. And he’d love it if the government couldn’t investigate and regulate the safety of vehicles with automated-driving systems, too!
The Cybertruck looks like a dumpster, or one of those maxi-pad trashcans.
The Cybertruck is such a POS that some insurance companies refuse to cover it as a private passenger automobile, citing the expense of replacement parts.
Some of the issues with the Cybertruck: locking drivers out of their cars, the trim falling off, the enclosed mud flaps encouraging plant life to grow, the battery range not as promised, trunk closing in fingers and accelerator pedals getting stuck, YIKES. The Cybertruck had six recalls in 2024.
[…] Instituted a monthly fee for check marks on Twitter, making the check mark somewhere between meaningless and a badge of shame.
Made Twitter the fastest false-information proliferation machine in human history by gutting the company’s Trust and Safety Team and removing visibility filters on government-propaganda accounts from hostile governments like Russia, China and Iran, and slapping “government-run media” filters on NPR, PBS, and the BBC. […]
Musk sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Media Matters for pointing out that extremist content has proliferated on X, and blaming them for advertisers fleeing his hellsite. His suit against the CCDH was thrown out, but the Media Matters lawsuit is scheduled to go to trial in April.
Changed Twitter terms of service so that lawsuits have to go to his favorite court, the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, even though his company is not headquartered in that district.
[…] Mass layoffs at Tesla and Twitter, including 80 percent of Twitter’s workforce, singling out employees who criticized him. Replaced laid-off workers with foreign workers with H-1B visas.
Is being investigated by the National Labor Relations Board for violating labor laws at SpaceX, and the UAW has asked for an investigation after he and Trump haw-hawed together about firing striking employees.
Started the Musk Foundation non-profit as a tax dodge. Reporting by The New York Times found that in 2022, the Musk Foundation gave away $230 million less than the minimum required by law to maintain tax-deductible status, and that in 2021 and 2022 over half the foundation’s funds went to causes connected to Musk, his family, or his businesses.
Repeats Replacement Theory-type conspiracies about immigrants.
Borrowed at least $1.4 billion from banks controlled by the Chinese government to help build Tesla’s Shanghai factory, which was responsible for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries in the third quarter of 2024.
He sure ♥️ s that Chinese government! He’s said that it was “inevitable” that Taiwan would become a part of China, suggested Taiwan should be a “special administrative zone,” has made Starlink unavailable in Taiwan, and has reportedly asked SpaceX suppliers to move out of Taiwan.
Founded his own music label, Emo G Records, to release two tracks by himself, “Don’t Doubt ur Vibe,” and “RIP Harambe.” They are terrible.
[…] Is an accelerationist who drools at the possibility of American economic collapse.
He’s endorsed the neo-Nazi AfD party in Germany.
He’s compared Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler.
Called Texas mall shooter Mauricio Garcia a “psyop.”
Disgustingly reposted a story that the attack on Paul Pelosi happened because Pelosi was drunk at the time of the assault and “in a dispute with a male prostitute.”
Has maintained that companies should not receive subsidies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Tesla has received billions in government subsidies, including $9 billion in zero-emissions credits.
[Complains] about having to pay taxes (“Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you”) in spite of Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink being propped up by billions in government subsidies. Also ProPublica found that with the use of various deductions he pays taxes at a rate of about 3.27 percent. [!!]
[…] Had regular phone calls with Putin for two years.
Donated Starlink units to Ukraine, then demanded that the Pentagon pay $400 million for the service.
Hampered a Ukrainian attack on Russian-held Crimea by shutting off Starlink services.
Has called artificial intelligence the greatest existential threat to humanity, then invested in developing artificial intelligence.
SpaceX has repeatedly been fined for dumping polluted water in Texas from its Starbase launch facility.
SpaceX was fined repeatedly by the FAA for unlicensed rocket launches.
SpaceX launches have hurled chunks of concrete into a nesting and migration site important to at least 10 endangered species, including ocelot, the aplomado falcon, and Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle.
[…] In 2011 he said he’d be to Mars in 10 years, why the fuck isn’t he there?
When the studio that owns the rights to “Blade Runner 2049” refused to let him use their images, he allegedly just made his own in AI.
[…] Has been reportedly offering his sperm to people at dinner parties, and RFK Jr.’s former running mate.
Creepily offered to “give” Taylor Swift a child.
Claimed to have built robots that can “do anything you want,” neglected to mention that his Optimus robots were actually remotely operated by humans.
After Trump was shot at, Musk Xitted “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.”
Hampered Hurricane Helene relief work by posting that “FEMA is actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own” and “FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason.”
[…] Spent at least $277 million to get Trump and Republicans elected, not counting about $24 million of free advertising he gave Trump on Twitter.
Ran a fake lottery to register voters.
Claimed homelessness was not real. “It’s usually a propaganda word for violent drug addicts with severe mental illness.”
He derailed a recent 2024 continuing resolution to fund the government by posting more than 100 tweets against the bill, full of lies about its content, such as that it included a 40 percent raise to Congress, funded an NFL stadium, funded mask and vaccine mandates, and funded “bioweapons labs.”
[…] The continuing resolution also scrapped notification and limits to American investments in China, which helps his investments there.
Told Americans they’re too stupid and lazy to work for him.
Finds it “concerning” that MacKenzie Bezos donates to charity.
Has been known to use fake accounts to praise himself on Twitter.
What did we forget? Oh yeah, he was such a dick he made Chloe Fineman cry. Has moved into a Mar-a-Lago bungalow. Oop, he just changed his “X” handle to “Kekius Maximus” and changed his pic to an AI Pepe frog. He’s shitheeling at the rate of double cringes a day, and maximizing the output of his douchebaggery! Shitheel of the year, shitheel of the decade, and now more powerful than ever, with exponentially multiplying loser-shitheel energy.
Embedded links to sources are available at the main link.
Dear Lynna, thank you for all your work on the infinite thread. You, and most of the commenters, make this an important and trusted source for information (much better than the main slime news). You have our best wishes for the new year.
Welcome to the death spiral of the untied states. (that is too a word, it’s in our dictionary) Here’s your mass murder event of the day.
This country is in a societal death spiral. The main slime news (owned by billionaires) and our corrupt self-serving politicians do not even stop to ponder the possible causes.
My organization has studied people and events and it becomes clear to us that financial, political and social inequality is at an all time high. This has driven people to despair, ennui, depression and too many feel that with nothing left to lose, they might as well resort to violence. And, they are! look around at the homelessness, school shootings and people driving into crowds.
The ‘statistics’ that say ‘murders’ are down are likely deceitful. There are many ways they can (and likely do) ‘re-characterize’ murder: as manslaughter, as accidental, etc.
Be careful, everyone, in this ever more volitile political and societal world, we need to be aware of all the potential circumstances that could (and will) put us at risk.
the (ose) Orange Sack of Excrement has proclaimed that he will attend J. Carter’s funeral. That arrogant narcissist probably didn’t ask permission of the Carter family. Jimmy Carter publicly communicated many times how much he despised the ose. WTF!
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
“Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine” reminded me of an old chemistry column.
Everyone knows hydrogen peroxide, HOOH. […] it’s well-behaved in dilute solution, and progressively less so as it gets concentrated. The 30% solution will go to work immediately bleaching you out if you are so careless as to spill some on you, and the 70% solution, which I haven’t seen in years, provides an occasion to break out the chain-mail gloves. […] I’m not using a figure of speech […] Part of the purpose, I believe, was to make you think very carefully about what you were doing as you put them on.
[…]
The reason for this trickiness is the weakness of the oxygen-oxygen bond. […] when those peroxides decompose, they turn into oxygen gas and fly off into entropic heaven, which is one of the same problems involved in having too many nitrogens in your molecule.
[…]
I have to admit, I’d never thought much about the next analog of hydrogen peroxide. Instead of having two oxygens in there, why not three: HOOOH? […] Instead of being locked in a self-storage unit with two rabid wolverines, why not three? […] adding more oxygen-oxygen bonds to a compound will eventually liberate the tiles from your floor and your windows from their frames […] These thoughts were prompted by a recent […] new route to “dihydrogen trioxide”, which I suppose is a more systematic name than “hydrogen perperoxide”, my own choice. Colloquially, I would imagine that the compound is known as “Oh, @#&!”
* A blog redesign removed category filtering, so I gotta use Wayback to link that series as a whole.
* HMTD only has pairs of oxygen, but three of those pairs (triperoxide), each pair forming a line of longitude on a globe converging on a nitrogen at each pole.
The suspect in a mass killing of people on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on New Year’s Day has been identified as by NOLA.com, citing sources, as 42-year-old Shamsud Din Jabbar.
The source said Jabbar was carrying an ISIS flag in the truck, and authorities have said he was dressed in military gear…
The Ford F-150 Lightning truck used in the attack was apparently rented through the Turo app — a car sharing company, according to Rodrigo Diaz, the owner of the truck. Diaz told ABC News he rented the truck to an individual through the app and is currently talking to the FBI. He declined further comment…
Reginald Selkirksays
@290 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain
friction of temperature changes
Odd phrase. Search engines only turn up those words in THAT story’s specific quote. Someone might’ve misheard “or”? Because a freezer would cause temperature changes going in and coming out.
I presume it should have been or. I just cut and pasted what was there.
A vehicle fire that broke out near the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas was caused by a Tesla Cybertruck that caught ablaze, media outlets reported on X/Twitter on Wednesday.
This is a developing story.
The events in New Orleans cause me to wonder about this.
Something struck a group of Russian troops in Lgov, a town of 21,000 in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast, late Sunday or early Monday. “It’s terrible,” a bystander cried. “The guys are all in the bunker,” they added as the bunker burned.
Ukrainian strikes on Lgov help to explain why 50,000 or more Russians along with 12,000 North Korean reinforcements haven’t yet been able to eject 20,000 Ukrainians from Kursk, despite relentlessly attacking the Ukrainian salient from all sides for two months. Russia “is still battling on its own territory and has been unable to drive Ukraine out of Kursk Oblast,” Finnish analyst Joni Askola noted. “It’s quite pathetic!”
Over the past month the Russians have slowed other advances to a halt and moved troops to assist in retaking Kursk. The Russians are making slow progress but at great costs. Only human wave attacks have sometimes made progress and all attacks have taken heavily casualties. The reason the Ukrainians have been able to hold on is better intelligence and long range weapons. The Russians are taking risks every time they move troops and the Ukrainians always know about assaults before they happen.
No matter the original reason for taking land in Kursk it’s now become about American politics and eventual negotiations. Russia is hoping that if they can carry on for a few more months then Trump will cut funding to Ukraine and Ukraine will be forced to negotiate. The Russians are pushing everything into Kursk because they want to reclaim the land before opening negotiations to end the war, for the same reason the Ukrainians are now determined to hold on to it.
JMsays
Yahoo: One Ship Inspection Could Unravel Global Maritime Shipping || Peter Zeihan
I have not found any confirmation of this and Zeihan is talking about what the governments plan to do, but if it goes full bore it will really matter. The north east Atlantic nations are apparently planning to change to a more aggressive enforcement of shipping law. Ships coming to or from Russia would be checked to see if they are following the law and either turned back or possibly seized if violating the law. This will become an international matter when a ship that doesn’t have a Russian flag runs into this.
What happens then is unclear. Zeihan is most likely over stating the situation when he talks about the collapse of the current global trade system. There is a good chance there will be an unspoken agreement that it will just apply to the current situation and won’t spread. Even in the context of the war in Ukraine it will matter though because it will cut Russia off from black market supplies or make it more awkward/expensive to use them.
Dear Lynna, thank you for all your work on the infinite thread. You, and most of the commenters, make this an important and trusted source for information (much better than the main slime news). You have our best wishes for the new year.
Thank you for the note of appreciation. Good way to start off the New Year!
Economy.
“How ‘Dutch Disease’ is Destroying Russia”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=L5V42L6jBEE
If the deep-seated economic problems of Russia finally come to a chrisis, I hope it will be a system collaps that takes down the whole rotten structure, along with the oligarchs.
Putin himself is a very small man that can be replaced by any of a multitude of thugs.
[…] According to the court papers, which were reported earlier by the website Court Watch, the investigation into Mr. Spafford began last year, after a neighbor reached out to the authorities. Mr. Spafford had lost three fingers on his right hand while working with a homemade explosive device, the neighbor said, and he was stockpiling weapons and homemade ammunition. […]
Text quoted above is from the New York Times.
Somebody saw something and said something. A stroke of luck.
birgerjohanssonsays
Sherman @ 295
I agree wholeheartedly. It must take a lot of work and dedication to keep the infinite thread flowing.
The FBI thwarted an apparent plot to harm employees at a Florida office of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), according to court documents filed Monday.
Law enforcement arrested Forrest Kendall Pemberton after he allegedly traveled to Plantation, Fla., in search of AIPAC’s office with several firearms, including an AR-15 rifle.
Pemberton told police he went to the site, a former AIPAC office, to “scout” out the location before returning with the firearms, according to an affidavit signed by FBI special agent Taylor Nicklin.
He was intercepted in a ride-share vehicle carrying the guns on Dec. 25, the first night of Hanukkah.
While the court documents do not explicitly name AIPAC as the target, they described it as an organization that “advocates and lobbies for ‘pro-Israel policies that strengthen and expand the U.S.-Israel relationship” — phrasing featured on AIPAC’s website.
Pemberton’s father contacted law enforcement on Dec. 23 to notify them that his son had left home, leaving behind a letter saying he wanted to “close the loop,” “stoke the flames” and say “goodbye” to his family, according to the affidavit. [Again, somebody saw something and said something.]
His computer showed searches and Google Maps queries for AIPAC and its former Plantation office, as well as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Taxpayer Assistance Center and the IRS Appeals and Chief Counsel Office.
[…] He told police he chose AIPAC as his target because of its “political influence” and location, saying he was frustrated with the “status quo” and wanted to see if he “could make a change,” according to the affidavit.
However, Pemberton said he ultimately decided against “committing criminal action.”
“It would have been a one-way ticket, in Plantation, I decided I wasn’t ready. I gave up,” he told police, per the affidavit.
Federal law enforcement is investigating a mass casualty event in New Orleans as an “act of terrorism” after a truck was driven into crowds on a popular nightlife street in the early hours of New Year’s Day.
[…] The agency identified him as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, a U.S.-born citizen from Texas.
[…] FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Alethea Duncan said that law enforcement do not believe Jabbar acted alone and they are seeking to identify any of his possible associates.
After the vehicle came to a stop, the driver — identified as 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. citizen from Texas — emerged from the truck and opened fire on responding officers, New Orleans police said…
“The No. 2 Georgia Bulldogs were scheduled to meet the No. 3 Notre Dame Fighting Irish in the annual college football game that has been played since 1935.”
Video at the link.
Officials have postponed Wednesday night’s Sugar Bowl, a major sporting event in New Orleans, after authorities said a man plowed his truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers in what is being investigated as a terrorist attack.
The sold-out annual college football game will be postponed until Thursday night, Allstate Sugar Bowl chief executive officer Jeff Hundley said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon.
Hundley said the decision was in the “best interest” of public safety.
Authorities said at least 10 people were killed and more than 30 others were injured at about 3:15 a.m. when a man intentionally rammed into a crowd on Bourbon Street, a popular destination in the Louisiana city. […]
BTW the refusal of the music industry and media to let Tina Charles take up more place on TV / video in the 1970s because she did not fit the ultra-slim ideal is goddamn criminal.
birgerjohanssonsays
If you look at the stars right now, you will find Venus shone very strongly after sunset, with Jupiter almost a quarter of the sky away to the left. It is possible Jupiter may not have risen far enough to be easily spotted from your position.
A bit later in the evening Jupiter will be the brightest remaining point of light with the much fainter Aldebaran in Taurus a short bit away below and to the right.
Orion will be almost straight below Jupiter, with Betelgeuse and Rigel brightest, and Orion’s ‘belt’ in between.
Mars will now be prominent in the sky as it rises a substantial distance the the left of Jupiter. Pollux and Castor in Gemini is a short way up and to the right. The bright star Procyon (of Canis Minor) will be below and to the right.
If you have binoculars and know where to look you can find M1 -the Crab Nebula – not far from Mars.
lumipunasays
I saw Jupiter, Mars and Orion looking quite impressive a couple nights ago. Now there’s again snow on the ground, and the Moon is growing, so it won’t be nearly as dark when/if clear skies return.
Akira MacKenziesays
Great! Just what we needed, I mass casualty event that Trump can harp on to justify the new cruelties he’s going to inflict on us.
Tethyssays
KG @ 242
.. and we don’t know how much pre-Christian knowledge and writing was deliberately destroyed; but denying that what was preserved, was largely preserved by Christian individuals and institutions, is either ignorant or dishonest.
Again, the reason that there is a gap in our written primary sources known as The Dark Age is primarily due to the social upheaval of the genocides and wars instigated by the forced conversion of much of Continental Europe to Roman Catholic Christianity. Speaking of dishonesty, I note you moved the goalposts from Christian Monks/ copyists to Christian individuals. It is hard to write books if you are dead, especially in a world that lacks paper or the notion of reading for pleasure.
Codex Regius literally means Kings Book. It’s my favorite source, it’s written in Old Norse, and there is no reason to presume that it was written by Christians or care if it was made in an Abbey.
The Norse Kings had an official Góði for centuries before the position evolved to be Christian monks. The medieval conversion of Iceland is well documented, it’s at least 500 years after the upheaval of the Dark Ages. Literacy was never limited to priests in Iceland.
The association between education and religious centers long predates Christianity, and Rome. Libraries were not invented by the people who were tasked (usually by the king) with creating and maintaining a library. Books were bespoke luxury goods, and making vellum or running scriptoriums were a lucrative source of income for the Abbey.
I am bemused that you believe that Christians somehow
preserved European literature and history despite the well documented destruction and wars wrought by them, and the existence of plenty of secular historians and writers everywhere except Northern Europe.
Here is an example from Ibn Khordadbeh, who is not Christian or European but still managed to write a history in 870 which we still have, concerning Jewish traders from what is now France.
These merchants speak Arabic, Persian, Roman, the Frank,Spanish, and Slav languages. They journey from West to East, from East to West, partly on land, partly by sea. They transport from the West eunuchs, female slaves, boys, brocade, castor, marten and other furs, and swords. They take ship from Firanja (France), on the Western Sea, and make for Farama (Pelusium). There they load their goods on camel-back and go by land to al-Kolzum (Suez), a distance of twenty-five farsakhs. They embark in the East Sea and sail from al-Kolzum to al-Jar and al-Jeddah, then they go to Sind, India, and China. On their return from China they carry back musk, aloes, camphor, cinnamon, and other products of the Eastern countries to al-Kolzum and bring them back to Farama, where they again embark on the Western Sea. Some make sail for Constantinople to sell their goods to the Romans; others go to the palace of the King of the Franks to place their goods.
The Radhanites or Radanites (Hebrew: רדנים, romanized: Radanim; Arabic: الرذنية, romanized: ar-Raðaniyya) were early medieval Jewish merchants, active in the trade between Christendom and the Muslim world during roughly the 8th to the 10th centuries. Many trade routes previously established under the Roman Empire continued to function during that period, largely through their efforts. Their trade network covered much of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of India and China.
Take a look at the various trade networks circa 870 that stretch from Francia all the way to China and India.
The Vikings werent the only non-Christian people who were heavily involved in trade.
A Swiss judge has sided with chocolate manufacturer Lindt & Sprüngli in its case against Aldi: the discounter sold chocolate balls in Switzerland that were too similar to Lindt’s well-known Lindor chocolates.
Aldi sold the chocolate balls under its (private label) brand name ‘Moser Roth’, but the commercial court of the canton of Aargau has now decided that they are an unauthorised imitation of Lindt’s Lindor balls, following a complaint by the chocolate manufacturer. Aldi is no longer allowed to sell the product, Lebensmittel Zeitung reports…
Cara Santa Maria from ‘Talk Nerdy’: “How does it keep getting worse?”
.
Heath chickened out from this abomination but Noah and Eli apparently blackmailed Cara Santa Maria to watch yet another abomination.
birgerjohanssonsays
MAGA congresswoman Nancy Mace accidentally celebrated Donald Trump losing big in court, because she did not know what it meant that the court ‘upheld’ the verdict.
Lodging with Airbnb? Truck rental through Turo? This was one Internet-aware terrorist.
birgerjohanssonsays
Emma Thorne on Youtube laughs her way through hate comments.
This reminds me of Ed Brayton’s blog, where he posted the hate mail aimed at Mikey at the organisation for fighting religious discrimination in the services – plenty of atrocious spelling.
Carnival Cruise Line has reportedly banned pineapple and other decorations on its ships following reported inappropriate behavior by adult guests.
Passengers regularly decorate their doors on Carnival and other cruise ships. Door decorations can help guests find their rooms and mark special celebrations. Some even encourage interactions with other guests, such as whiteboards or paper and pens.
However, according to Local12 news, Carnival has banned the iconic upside-down pineapple door decoration due to its not-so-secret meaning. The upside-down pineapple has long been used to signal to other couples or singles that the room’s residents are interested in swinging or hooking up with other guests.
Beyond its non-family-friendly associations, the upside-down pineapple has caused problems as more people become aware of its meaning. Devious cruisers have taken to putting the symbol on other passengers’ doors, attempting to prank them with some unwanted visitors…
…
Multiple law enforcement sources told ABC News that the Cybertruck that exploded in Las Vegas was rented on Turo — the same app sources said was used to rent the pickup truck used in the deadly attack in New Orleans…
Possibly an EV battery fire was intended to enlarge the pyrogenic capacity.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=kUQKRFsbSR8
In these images where Earth is in the same frame it is very clear how dark the lunar surface is compared to the Earth.
birgerjohanssonsays
Fox losing one billion dollars?
The odd sound you hear is me purring like a cat.
“Fox BLINDSIDED by SURPRISE Evidence DISCOVERY?!?”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=MTLwXBDr1oE
Bekenstein Boundsays
Hey Trump you moron, you’re supposed to wait until AFTER the inauguration to stage a Reichstag fire!
Man, was generative AI everywhere this year. It’s a billionaire’s dream! Cut out those greedy meatsacks wanting stuff like “paychecks big enough to live on” and “health insurance” and replace them with robots. Plus you can demand more from your office workers, because they’ve got AI to “help” them now!
It invaded Google searches, using 10 times as much power as a regular search to insist that Encanto 2 is real, because AI doesn’t know the difference between truth and fan fiction. [screengrab of AI Overview of Encanto 2 is available at the link]
(None of the above is true, and there’s no Encanto 2 in the works.)
It took over health insurance: Medicare Advantage plans and UnitedHealthcare deployed an AI model, “nH Predict,” which executives knew had a 90 percent error rate, according to a lawsuit, using it to deny claims that doctors said were medically necessary. Also Cigna, which rejected more than 300,000 claims in two months using an artificial intelligence system. Rejection takes seconds, but an appeal could take years, years that dying people ain’t got! Insurance executives’ eyeballs cha-chinged with little dollar signs for pupils!
Also lovin’ it: perverts! AI is the perfect tool to make child sexual abuse material, or nonconsensual intimate imagery of members of Congress, or for teenagers to make deepfakes of their high school classmates.
I slop is trying to take over the news, and making zombie papers rise from the dead. In Oregon, the Ashland Daily Tidings newspaper closed in 2023, but then a strange clone popped up in its place, with eight reporters who turned out to not exist, or whose identities had been stolen. Even the owner’s identity was stolen from a Christian music promoter in Texas. Who was behind it? Nobody knows!
Serbian businessman and DJ Nebojša Vujinović Vujo has become the “kingpin” of AI news, taking over about 2,000 web sites from defunct sources like The Hairpin and Minnesota’s Southwest Journal, and populating the sites with AI-generated clickbait pablum.
BuzzFeed wants in on the action! They sold the Hot Ones studio at a loss to invest in “AI-powered interactive experiences.”
Facebook is also investing in making AI users, so that one can go on there and have virtual friends, which is the saddest-sounding thing in the world.
AI has taken over the telephone, making interactive calls for political candidates. And of course it’s used by scammers to fake people’s voices and extort grandmas by claiming that little Timmy has been kidnapped, while his cloned voice begs for ransom in the background. It was used by Trump supporters to fake a bunch of Black women hanging around him. And it was used by Trump himself, who pathetically made an AI Taylor Swift endorsement for himself.
[…] Nevada is spending $1 million to use Google AI to process unemployment claims, even though it’s only right 76 percent of the time at best. […]
The slop is dogging publishing, swamping acquisitions editors with AI manuscripts. Teaching, where students are using it to do research and write papers […]
[…] Is this efficiency? Is this progress? Only if you don’t give a shit about the quality of your product! A study from the online recruiter Upwork found that 77 percent of employees using AI say it’s actually added to their workload, hampered productivity and increased their feelings of burnout. […]
Maybe employees hate it because generative AI does not actually do a job for you, unless you’re a professional Internet troll. You still have to figure out what and how to ask it, and then you have to check its work, and figure out what inferences it got wrong, and so at the end of the day, how much does it actually help? [It does not help me. AI is a roadblock, a hindrance.]
Anyway, I punched this article into ChatGPT and asked it to rewrite it in different styles, and all of them except Cormac McCarthy decided that this piece needed to conclude with some talk of the soul and spirit of human beings, even though I did not use the word “soul” once.
All of it was crap, and Rebecca took the whole section out.
[…] During his 2016 candidacy, for example, Trump called for ending the H-1B program altogether. While in office, the Republican suspended H-1B visas, claiming that the program was hurting American workers.
He’s apparently settled on the opposite position — at least for now — which he’s touting while simultaneously claiming, “I didn’t change my mind.”
If Trump wants to argue that he never actually believed his original position in the first place, he’s welcome to give it a try, but by pretending he’s been unswerving on the issue, Trump is bolstering impressions that he just says stuff, without regard for core beliefs. Worse, he expects everyone to just play along — that is, until he says the opposite stuff, at which point the political world is supposed to simply keep up with the moving target.
More (including video of Trump’s public statements in 2016, 2020 and 2024) available at the link.
As the public first started learning the details of the deadly attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, Donald Trump’s first instinct was sadly predictable: The president-elect appeared eager to tell Americans how right he was — or at least how right he thought he was.
In a Wednesday morning missive published to his social media platform, Trump thanked local enforcement, but not before he got a few other points off his chest:
When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true. The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before.
The first sentence was wrong on multiple levels. Right off the bat, Trump seemed to be referring to a debate that occurred only in his imagination: There was no grand discussion about whether foreign-born criminals were more dangerous than native-born criminals. He appears to have simply made this up.
What’s more, given the context, the president-elect apparently wanted the public to believe that the suspect in the New Orleans attack was an immigrant. He wasn’t. As NBC News reported, the man accused of killing at least 15 people was a U.S. Army veteran from Texas who was employed by a leading financial services firm.
The second sentence was just as wrong: The idea that the crime rate in the United States “is at a level that nobody has ever seen before” is plainly absurd. Not only has the murder rate sharply improved in recent years, but crime rates in general fell after Trump exited the White House four years ago.
[Trump] simultaneously flunked three important tests.
First, he flunked a test of accuracy, pushing misinformation within hours of a deadly attack.
Second, he flunked a test of decency, trying to exploit the attack to advance an ugly and misguided agenda.
And third, Trump flunked a test of credibility, reminding everyone anew that when tragedy strikes, Americans just can’t count on the incoming president for reliable and trustworthy information.
Trump could’ve waited to issue a statement until he knew what he was talking about. He instead chose — again — to peddle misinformation from a position of ignorance […]
Hours later, apparently unembarrassed, the president-elect published another online item, declaring, “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!” This came on the heels, of course, of a missive in which he was wrong about everything. […]
Rep. Eric Burlison, a Republican representing Missouri, said on Newsmax:
I think we truly had some very disturbing things happen with the FBI and their involvement. They created many entrapment scenarios on American citizens who just simply were patriotic and wanted to express their First Amendment rights. Instead they were enticed and encouraged to, you know, do things that they didn’t even know might be illegal.
Commentary:
[…] The problem with this bizarre line isn’t just that the GOP congressman has no evidence to support his claims. The problem is made worse by Burlison’s timing.
Just a couple of weeks before the Republican’s on-air comments, the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, unveiled the detailed findings of a four-year investigation, which concluded that while there were FBI informants at the Capitol, no FBI officials were responsible for instigating the attack.
[…] To be sure, we already knew — from congressional investigations and multiple federal court cases — that the theories were baseless, but to the extent that there were still any lingering doubts, the Justice Department’s inspector general erased them in unambiguous detail.
For some Republicans — including Donald Trump — it was critically important that Horowitz confirmed that the Jan. 6 mob included some who were confidential FBI informants. But we already knew this. Some even testified during Jan. 6 criminal cases. The report’s confirmation of this detail didn’t advance our understanding of the broader events in any way.
What actually mattered was the degree to which the inspector general took a sledgehammer to the right’s conspiracy theory that the FBI was somehow responsible for creating the attack and entrapping Trump’s poor, unsuspecting supporters. Horowitz’s report discredited this misguided idea once and for all. (The same findings made clear that there were no undercover FBI employees at the Capitol, either.)
Two weeks after these findings reached the public, Burlison — a member of the House Oversight Committee — effectively pretended that the inspector general’s findings didn’t exist. Indeed, the congressman simply repeated the same discredited talking points, as if the absurdities about federal law enforcement still had merit, and Jan. 6 rioters — many of whom are in prison after pleading guilty — deserve to be seen as victims of underhanded FBI tactics.
That was a ridiculous line when far-right conspiracy theorists concocted the idea months ago, and it’s even worse now.
Following the horrific terror attack in New Orleans in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day, Republican politicians spread disinformation, posted tone-deaf messages, and even used the moment to launch attacks at the press.
Among the offenders is Louisiana GOP Sen. John Kennedy, who couldn’t give up his cringeworthy Foghorn Leghorn schtick for five minutes to act like an adult at a news conference with law enforcement officials, who were trying to give the public information about the attack.
[…]
Kennedy then pushed a law enforcement official out of the way and co-opted the news conference so he could make more bad metaphors and threaten law enforcement officials. [video at the link]
“I will promise you this: I will, when it is appropriate in this investigation is complete, you will find out what happened and who was responsible, or I will raise fresh hell and I will chase those in the federal government who are responsible for telling us what happened like they stole Christmas,” Kennedy said, preemptively threatening law enforcement officials just hours after the attack as they were trying to collect information. [JFC]
Then there was Louisiana’s GOP Gov. Jeff Landry, who posted an image of himself smiling and giving a thumbs up after eating at a steak house in New Orleans the evening after the attack.
[…] Donald Trump falsely said the attacker was an undocumented migrant—running with wrong information that Fox News had spread before retracting their report.
Then, rather than apologize after that report turned out to be false, Trump fired off another Truth Social post saying he was “RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.”
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., also ran with the fake news that the attacker was undocumented.
“Biden’s parting gift to America — migrant terrorists,” Trump Jr. wrote in a post on X, citing fake news his father had also spread.
President Joe Biden, meanwhile, acted like an adult, waiting for correct information on the attack before making a statement to the media later in the day. [video at the link]
[…]
The person who died in the explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck packed with explosives outside President-elect Donald Trump’s Las Vegas hotel was an active-duty U.S. Army soldier, three U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Two law enforcement officials identified the man inside the pickup truck as Matthew Livelsberger. The officials spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation.
Three U.S. officials said Livelsberger was an active-duty Army member who spent time at the base formerly known as Fort Bragg, a massive Army base in North Carolina that is home to Army special forces command. The officials also spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose details of his service.
The FBI said Thursday in a post on X that it was “conducting law enforcement activity” at a home in Colorado Springs related to Wednesday’s explosion but provided no other details.
[…] Authorities know who rented the truck with the Turo app in Colorado, Police Department Sheriff Kevin McMahill said Wednesday.
KGsays
Tethys@318,
Again, the reason that there is a gap in our written primary sources known as The Dark Age is primarily due to the social upheaval of the genocides and wars instigated by the forced conversion of much of Continental Europe to Roman Catholic Christianity.
Evidence for this claim? I don’t mean for the genocides and wars, on which we agree – I mean for the primary written sources which were lost thereby.
Speaking of dishonesty, I note you moved the goalposts from Christian Monks/ copyists to Christian individuals. It is hard to write books if you are dead, especially in a world that lacks paper or the notion of reading for pleasure.
If someone copies a book (or any other piece of writing), they are a copyist, so your accusation of dishonesty is just silly. It is of course impossible to write anything if you’re dead, but your correct observation that non-Christianised Europe lacked paper and the concept of reading for pleasure rather undermines your apparent belief that there was a great treasure-trove of non-Christian written sources which the Christians destroyed.
Codex Regius literally means Kings Book. It’s my favorite source, it’s written in Old Norse, and there is no reason to presume that it was written by Christians or care if it was made in an Abbey.
It’s dated to the 1270s, nearly 3 centuries after Iceland became officially Christian. That’s the reason to presume that it was written (or more likely copied from one or more earlier manuscripts) by a Christian (it’s in a single hand), particularly if it was made in an abbey. The copyist could have been a secret pagan, or Jew, or atheist, Muslim, Buddhist… or even an open one – although that would rather contradict your emphasis (with which I agree) on the intolerance of Christian churches through most of their history – but the likelihood is that they were indeed a Christian.
I am bemused that you believe that Christians somehow preserved European literature and history despite the well documented destruction and wars wrought by them, and the existence of plenty of secular historians and writers everywhere except Northern Europe.
I’m bemused by your bemusement at my acceptance of a near-universal consensus among relevant experts that while much was lost, and some deliberately destroyed, what was preserved depended for that preservation on Christians copying it.
I’d be interested to learn of the European history and literature preserved by Ibn Khordadbeh – or by the Radhanites. I assume you’re referring to Ibn Khordadbeh’s Kitāb al-Masālik wa-l-Mamālik (“Book of Roads and Kingdoms”), which was a geography of trade routes rather than a history, except with regard to pre-Islamic Persia. I’m well aware of the pre-modern trade networks stretching from Europe to China, but the general opinion of writers from the Muslim world (through which European literature or history would have needed to pass to reach anywhere else, at any time between the Muslim and the Mongol conquests) appears to have been that there was little or nothing in the way of either history or literature worth writing about in non-Muslim Europe other than the “Byzantine Empire”* – see Bernard Lewis The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982) – which might be more accurately titled The Muslim Lack of Interest in Europe.
Finally, a question which you should be able to answer: which non-Christians preserved literary works in Latin or in the vernacular languages of Latin Europe, or accounts of the history of Latin Europe during the period 500-1500 CE, which did not depend at some stage on Christian copyists? I’m sure European Jews have preserved accounts of their own history, and works within their own religious tradition; and there are (often inaccurate) fragments from Muslim writers; but those exceptions aside, I can’t think of any. So, this is your opportunity to enlighten me.
*Which both the inhabitants of that state themsevles, and their Muslim neighbours, referred to as “Rome”.
A factually incorrect Fox News report about the man who drove a pickup truck into a New Orleans crowd early New Year’s Day morning, killing 15 people, has fueled a new round of anti-immigrant rhetoric from Donald Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri.
The suspect, 42-year-old veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was reportedly inspired by the terrorist group ISIS. Fox News then reported that morning that he crossed into the United States from Mexico at the border crossing in Eagle Pass, Texas.
This is not true.
According to a video that Jabbar posted online, he was born in Texas, where he lived before traveling to Louisiana to pull off the attack.
But after the Fox News report was released, Trump posted a message on Truth Social claiming that the news validated his years of fearmongering over immigration and attacking immigrants.
[…] Echoing Trump, Republican Hawley cited the attack in his argument that Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas, who has oversight over immigration issues, “needs to be called to testify before the Senate immediately.”
Hawley also wrote a letter calling for a hearing addressed to Sen. Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, who will chair the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in the new Congress. In the letter, Hawley cites “news reports” that “indicate that the truck in the attack may have recently crossed into the U.S. from Mexico.”
Meanwhile, Fox has retracted its false story and admitted that the truck it had cited crossing into the United States from Mexico was not the vehicle used by Jabbar.
Neither Trump nor Hawley have thus far released any posts reflecting the fake narrative they promoted. In fact, Trump posted another message Thursday morning blaming “the Biden Open Border’s Policy.” President Joe Biden has no such policy.
[…] Now, as Trump heads into the White House for a second term, Fox News stands ready to help him lie to the world—again.
“Biden Giving Liz Cheney A Fancy Medal Today, So That’ll Make Trump’s Butt Itch”
The first time Donald Trump was president, one of the ways he absolutely beclowned the office and rendered it meaningless was who he’d pick to give the Presidential Medal of Freedom and other similar honors.
Historically, such awards went to people who had done something important. Under Trump 1.0, it was more like “Here is the presidential medal of excellence in giving me money!” It went to Miriam Adelson, AKA one of Trump’s big bucks no whammies donors. (That’s the one where he got in trouble recently for saying Adelson’s award was better than Medal of Honor winners, AKA the military’s highest honor.)
Trump gave the Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh, before that guy waddled off to hell. He gave it to Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan, for excellence in doing congressional coverups for Trump or something.
[…] The Presidential Citizens Medal is the award just below the Medal of Freedom, […] The award is given to someone “who has performed exemplary deeds or services for his or her country or fellow citizens,” so you can see why it might not get Trump very excited.
President Joe Biden is big on giving it, though. In 2023, he gave it to people like Capitol Police officers Michael Fanone and Aquilino Gonell, who protected Congress during the terrorist attack Trump’s supporters committed on January 6, 2021. (He awarded it posthumously to former Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died after he was assaulted by Trump supporters at the Capitol that day.) Also to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the Georgia election workers Rudy Giuliani owes all his money to, for repeatedly lying about and defaming them.
In all, he gave it to 12 people who in various ways defended American democracy from Trump’s attacks in 2020.
Now, today, Biden is giving another set of 20 of these medals for 2024, and damn, they are just more people Donald Trump could never ever fucking be […]
Liz Cheney is getting one for her work on the House January 6 Select Committee, and all the ways she’s stood up to defend democracy the last couple years, so that’ll piss Trump the fuck off.
Despite warnings of potential accomplices less than a day ago, law enforcement officials said Thursday that the New Orleans truck driver acted alone and that footage shows him placing functional explosive devices in the French Quarter a few hours before his attack.
“We do not assess at this point that anyone else is involved in this attack,” FBI Deputy Assistant Director Christopher Raia with the agency’s counterintelligence division said during a news conference.
The FBI had initially said Wednesday that the driver might have had help, especially because of two coolers with explosives found in the area. Raia said footage shows the attacker placed the bombs just an hour and 15 minutes before the carnage. Bomb technicians safely neutralized both explosive devices.
A law enforcement official briefed on the investigation who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss details that had not been made public said Wednesday that investigators were examining surveillance footage that appeared to show at least three men and one woman placing possible explosives at various locations in the French Quarter before the attack.
When asked about that report Thursday, Raia said further investigation indicated that those were simply people who stopped to look in the coolers and continued on their way. […]
[…] it’s painfully easy to believe that in the coming years, much of the GOP will only accept election results when they tell the party what it wants to hear.
But making matters worse is the message the Republican Party’s most influential voice continues to peddle to the public.
Trump made some news earlier this week, issuing a statement in support of incumbent House Speaker Mike Johnson, but in the same message, [Trump] asserted that he won a second term “despite large scale voter fraud taking place in numerous states.”
For now, let’s not dwell on the simple fact that there was no large-scale voter fraud taking place. If Trump and his political operation had any evidence to support such a claim, they would’ve presented it by now.
They haven’t, because the president-elect simply made this up.
But just as extraordinary, if not more so, is Trump’s willingness to undermine public confidence in election results — even when he wins.
[…] When Trump tries to undermine public confidence in elections following a victory, that’s evidence of something far more pernicious.
If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because it has happened before. After he won in 2016, the Republican spent a fair amount of time insisting that “millions of people … voted illegally.” Four years later, after he lost, Trump pushed the same line. Now, following a second victory, he’s at it again, pointing to fraud that only occurred in his overactive imagination.
Why in the world would the president-elect question the integrity of an election in which he prevailed? One can only speculate, but the possible answers aren’t exactly encouraging. It’s possible, for example, that he’s laying the groundwork for the imposition of new voting restrictions to address a problem that doesn’t exist.
It’s also possible that Trump, win or lose, just doesn’t like elections very much, and he hopes to convince Americans to share his undemocratic attitudes.
The Tesla truck that exploded in Las Vegas Wednesday, killing its sole occupant, was rented by a man who was an active-duty member of the Army’s elite Special Forces, according to the Army.
Matthew Livelsberger, who died Wednesday according to the Army, was an active-duty Green Beret and had served in the Army for 19 years. Green Berets conduct commando-style raids to attack key enemy targets, conduct reconnaissance missions behind enemy lines and train foreign militaries.
Livelsberger had been a soldier during the peak of U.S. combat in Afghanistan and Iraq and had numerous combat deployments, according to the Army.
Livelsberger was a highly decorated combat soldier who was awarded the Bronze Star with valor among several commendations.
He had been deployed to Afghanistan from September 2017 to April 2018. He also deployed to Ukraine and the Republics of Congo and Georgia.
The vehicle was rented in Colorado and arrived in Las Vegas around 7:30 a.m. PT, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff Kevin McMahill previously said during a news conference. The driver of the vehicle drove the vehicle up and down Las Vegas Boulevard before pulling in front of the Trump hotel around 8:40 a.m.
The vehicle sat there about 15 seconds before the explosion went off, McMahill said. Police later discovered gasoline canisters, camp fuel canisters, and large firework mortars in the back of the vehicle. The sole individual in the truck died and seven other people were injured.
[…] Livelsberger enlisted as a Special Forces candidate in January 2006 and served in the active duty force until March 2011, according to the Army. He then joined the National Guard and Army Reserve from 2011 until December 2012. At that point, he rejoined the active-duty Army as a Special Operations solider.
The Army is cooperating with federal and state investigators, the Army said in a statement. […]
Military personnel will use groundbreaking quantum technology to conduct more secure and precise operations, thanks to a new high-tech atomic clock.
Developed at the top-secret Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, (Dstl) the quantum clock will be a leap forward in improving intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance by decreasing the reliance on GPS technology, which can be disrupted and blocked by adversaries.
The clock’s precision is so refined that it will lose less than one second over billions of years, allowing scientists to measure time at an unprecedented scale. It is the first device of its kind to be built in the UK and will be deployable on military operations in the next five years. ..
A breakthrough in colloidal quantum dot technology is set to revive the field of liquid lasers, with promising applications in optofluidics, lab-on-a-chip devices, and high-contrast sensing and imaging. As described Nov. 22, 2024 in Nature Materials, a Los Alamos-led research team exploited the unrivaled versatility of the optical properties of colloidal quantum dots — nanosized semiconductor crystals — to develop optical gain media that enable light amplification and spectrally tunable lasing in liquid form…
The book of revelation is dated to ca. 95 AD (reference to Domitian) making it clear that the author John of Patmos was not a contemporary of Jesus.
birgerjohanssonsays
Addendum
Wikipedia: “…most scholars agree that all three epistles were written by the same author and that the epistles did not have the same author as the Book of Revelation”.
So we already have apochrypal sources.
…
The stranger, Laurence J. Peter, told Hull that every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Workers, he argued, keep getting promoted until they are in over their heads.
The conversation in the lobby, which occurred sometime in the early-to-mid 1960s, sparked both men’s imaginations and ultimately gave birth to their 1969 best-seller The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong.
The Peter Principle skewered corporate culture decades before the comic strip Dilbert and the TV series The Office became pop culture hits.
It sold millions of copies, and the term “Peter Principle” has entered the lexicon, particularly in business circles, to describe organizational dysfunction…
Video at the link: a congressman talks about how incompetent Marjorie Taylor Greene is, but that we also need to push back against her crazy/stupid ideas.
As the 118th Congress reaches its ignominious end, there’s no shortage of reasons to see it as an embarrassing failure […]
It was also a Congress in which House Republicans introduced impeachment resolutions targeting Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and FBI Director Chris Wray, among others.
But there was always one name on the GOP’s impeachment list that stood out as odd, not just because he hadn’t done anything wrong, but also because his name was unknown to most Americans: Matthew Graves.
Matthew Graves may have been the least recognized of the Republican Party’s impeachment targets, but in some far-right circles, the lawyer was very important, indeed: He was the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, which put him in a position of prosecuting criminal cases against accused Jan. 6 defendants. It’s precisely why Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia — and four other GOP lawmakers — introduced an impeachment resolution going after the federal prosecutor.
Not surprisingly, the crusade against Graves was largely ignored, and [it may] become a moot point: Like most of the Biden administration’s U.S. attorneys, Graves is poised to step down from his position after more than three years on the job.
But the prosecutor’s most rabid Capitol Hill critic isn’t prepared to let her preoccupation go. Earlier this week, Greene appeared on a conservative media outlet called Real America’s Voice and declared, “[Graves resigned], but this is not the end for him. Because we are about to take over and we’re going to be in charge, and he should pay for what he’s done to [Jan. 6 criminal defendants.]” [MTG] added:
He doesn’t get to resign and run away. He should be held accountable for the absolute misery and lives that have been destroyed from these Jan. 6 defendants and their families. We’re talking about marriages have been destroyed, families have been destroyed, careers have been destroyed, and these people have spent time — years now — in prison.
In other words, to hear the GOP congresswoman tell it, a federal prosecutor should be punished for prosecuting criminals, some of whom were found to have committed violent crimes, and many of whom pleaded guilty.
In a news release issued earlier this week, the Justice Department noted, “Because politically motivated violence and destruction rip at the fabric of our society, Mr. Graves made federally prosecuting such crimes a priority.” Oddly enough, it’s also why Greene wants to go after him.
It’s too soon to say with confidence what, if anything, House Republicans intend to do with regard to Graves in the new Congress, and it’s at least possible that Greene’s interest won’t amount to much of anything. After all, her impeachment resolution was ignored.
But amid talk of GOP enemies lists and pre-emptive White House pardons, it’s worth keeping Graves’ name in mind in the coming weeks and months.
[…] The 37-year-old active-duty soldier in the vehicle apparently shot himself in the head moments before the car ignited [in Las Vegas, in front of Trump hotel]. He was also, according to his uncle, a big Trump supporter. [WTF?]
[…] this makes the motive for this incident pretty hard to make sense of. Given the apparent suicide and other outlandish parts of what happened it seems obvious that mental health issues likely played some role. But this goes a bit beyond making bad decisions or having a general suicidal ideation. Even in the context of some distorted reasoning, what was the message? What was the point? I’ve seen a number of people propose that the dead soldier may have been angry about Trump’s new fealty to Musk. On its face this struck me as the kind of over-ornate theory you’d come up with if you’re spending too much time on social media and had too much time on your hands. But the truth is I haven’t been able to come up with any more plausible theory.
It’s always good to remember that people who rent a car, drive it from Colorado Springs to Las Vegas and then light the car on fire and shoot themselvs in the head probably aren’t thinking in very linear ways or ways that are going to make sense to the rest of us. But it’s still pretty hard to figure.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she is en route to Washington after recently undergoing a hip replacement surgery in Germany folowing a fall in Luxembourg last month.
“I am on my way to Washington to proudly represent the people of San Francisco in Congress. I’m honored to do so to share our San Francisco values,” Pelosi said in a video posted on social media platform X Thursday. “Thank you for giving me that honor.”
Pelosi, 84, traveled alongside 17 other lawmakers to Luxembourg last month for the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge. The California veteran lawmaker sustained an injury after falling down. She was hospitalized in Luxemburg […]
The former House Speaker was then transferred to Landsthul Regional Medical Center in Germany where she underwent a “successful” surgery, according to her spokesperson.
The update from Pelosi comes all House Democrats are expected to be in attendance in the Capitol on Friday for the vote to choose the next Speaker of the lower chamber, according to the Democratic whip’s office.
Democrats’ presence on Capitol Hill on Friday will be of significance as the Republican Party has a razor-thin majority and some members of the GOP caucus have made threats to not support Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) to retain his speakership in the 119th Congress this year. […]
“Is Trump Scared Nobody Coming To Inauguration, Is That What This Extra Rally Is About?”
It would appear that Donald Trump […] will be having TWO inaugurations. The real one on January 20, where he raises his little hand and lies his oath of office, and a fun one the day before, at the Capital One Arena in DC, with just his closest MAGA supporters. CBS News notes that this is where the Washington Wizards play, and it holds about 20,000 people.
We’ll see.
So yes, he’s having another fucking Stupid Hitler rally. […] It is called the Make America Great Again Victory Rally, and you can request tickets […], but you shouldn’t do that, because you are not actually going to attend, and that would be unfair to any MAGA people who would like to go if they couldn’t get a seat!
Anybody think maybe the writing the Trump campaign has seen on the wall so far suggests that not an entire shit-ton of people is planning to show up to see that dumbass get inaugurated, so they’re trying to goose people into making the trip, instead of doing literally anything else?
So whatever is happening here, it is about the baby’s ego.
Maybe it’s what we said, and it’s that nobody’s coming to DC for this goddamned thing, so they’re trying to throw a second party to entice people who are already bored by the original party.
Maybe they are going to combine the Sunday numbers with the Monday numbers so they can tell Trump he had the BIGGEST HUGEST INAUGURATION IN HUMAN HISTORY, bigger than Barack Obama even, so big it lasted two days, and Trump’s latest Kayleigh McHuckabee Spicynanny can hurl themselves over the rostrum yelling at any reporters who dare say different.
[…] Donald Trump’s inauguration falls on a day that’s much more important than he is, namely the observation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. That’s right, not only will the flags be at half-staff in DC to honor Jimmy Carter upon his death, it’s also MLK day. Truly, Trump is, at best, the third most important thing happening that day. Maybe the fourth or fifth, if we can find a good episode of “Dateline” or “The Price Is Right” to watch […]
We should note, of course, that as MLK day is a federal holiday, and Wonkette will be observing it the same way everybody else is, and therefore there will be no inauguration coverage for that loser bullshit nobody will be watching.
If something important happens there, like if Trump orders another January 6 out of sheer habit, we will (perhaps) discuss it on Tuesday.
(Perhaps.) Now half of us have the day off and those of us who are here are all tired, so we’re calling an EARLY LID.
“Authorities say there is no nexus to terror and all of the victims are expected to survive.”
[…] All of the victims in the 144th Street shooting outside of the Amazura nightclub in Jamaica — six females, four males — are expected to survive, police said. Authorities are investigating if the shooting is gang-related. They say there is no link to terror.
According to investigators, police got multiple 911 calls shortly after 11 p.m. about a shooting at the club. Roughly 90 people were inside, upstairs at a private venue. The venue was at capacity, and about 15 were waiting to get in.
Authorities say that’s when three to four males, believed to be in their mid-to-late-teens to early 20s, walked up and opened fire on the group standing outside the club. About 30 shots were fired. At least 10 people were hit.
No arrests have been made.
“There’s zero tolerance for these senseless shootings,” Philip Rivera, the NYPD’s chief of transportation, said at a press conference. “These horrible acts of violence on our streets, and those responsible for this crime, will be apprehended and brought to justice.” […]
A U.S. appeals court ruled on Thursday the Federal Communications Commission did not have legal authority to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules. The decision is a blow to the outgoing Biden administration that had made restoring the open internet rules a priority.
Russia has ground through repeated waves of soldiers in Ukraine. It lost some of its most experienced troops at the very start of the invasion, then shipped off tens of thousands of convicts without seeming to care whether they survived.
Now, still desperately seeking sufficient manpower to maintain pressure on Ukraine, Russia has expanded recruitment even more. Men (and women) no longer have to be convicted of a crime — under new laws, any suspects detained by the police are informed that pending charges will disappear if they volunteer.
The military also is taking anyone with large, unpaid debts; recent immigrants caught in repeated dragnets; and even corrupt officials.
A gunman has killed 12 people, including two children, in a series of shootings in southern Montenegro.
Authorities said the man – later identified as Aco Martinovic, 45 – had been drinking heavily all day when he got into an altercation with another guest at a restaurant in the Cetinje area around 17.30 (16.30 GMT) on New Year’s Day.
After the argument, Martinovic went home to retrieve a weapon, then returned to the restaurant and began his rampage, killing several customers.
Martinovic then drove to five other locations and shot several more people, including members of his immediate and extended family. The restaurant owner and his children, aged 10 and 13, were also killed.
Police tracked Martinovic down after an hours-long manhunt. When they ordered him to drop his weapon during a stand-off, he fatally injured himself and died as he was being transported to hospital…
“Fourteen people were killed and more than two dozen injured when a driver crashed a pickup truck into crowds on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, authorities said.”
A University of Alabama engineering student, a former wide receiver at Princeton University, and a doting father of two were among the those who died on New Year’s Day when a pickup truck barreled into crowds on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.
Fourteen people were killed and more than 30 injured before the 42-year-old Army veteran that investigators say was at the wheel of the rented vehicle was shot dead by police. […]
New Orleans police and officials with the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office have not released all the names of those killed. But a day after the carnage in the French Quarter, 14 families were bracing for funerals.
Here are some of their stories:
Kareem Badawi, 18 [photo at the link]
Kareem Badawi, 18, was home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for the holidays. He had just completed his first semester at the University of Alabama, which he believed had a better engineering program than the University of Louisiana, said his father, Belal Badawi, 64.
He said he had given his son permission to go to New Orleans with friends on New Years Eve, many of whom were also on break from college. […]
His father said his 6-foot-five son was “beautiful” and the family still referred to him as “the baby.”
Badawi said he and his family are devastated and shocked and that Kareem’s killing would be especially hard on his older brother, with whom Kareem was very close. […]
Martin ‘Tiger’ Bech, 27 [photo at the link]
Martin “Tiger” Bech, 27, was killed, his mother, Michelle Bech, told NBC News on Wednesday afternoon.
Tiger Bech, a graduate of Princeton University, where he was an accomplished wide receiver and punt returner, lived in New York City and worked as a junior bond trader for a Wall Street company, his mother said.
He was with a friend on Bourbon Street when the truck hit him, his mother said. His friend survived the attack. Tiger Bech was later pronounced dead at a hospital, but Michelle Bech said she was able to say goodbye to him before he died. […]
Reggie Hunter, 37 [photo at the link]
Reggie Hunter, 37, of Baton Rouge, died after the truck hit him, said his cousin Shirell Jackson, of Hammond, Louisiana.
Jackson said she rushed to University Medical Center, where Hunter was pronounced dead. […]
Hunter, a manager at a warehouse, was extremely funny and adored his children, boys ages 11 and 1. […]
Ni’Kyra Cheyenne Dedeaux, 18 [photo at the link]
Ni’Kyra Cheyenne Dedeaux, 18, a recent high school graduate, was killed, her grandmother Jennifer Smith told The New York Times. […]
Matthew Tenedorio, 25 [photo at the link]
Matthew Tenedorio, 25, was remembered as someone whose laid-back spirit brought joy to those around him. […]
His mother, Cathy Tenedorio, of Carriere, Mississippi, said the last time she saw her son was around 9 p.m. Tuesday, New Year’s Eve. Matthew Tenedorio said at the time he wanted to go to the French Quarter with friends.
The next time she saw him was at the morgue, she said. She remembered she kissed and hugged him just the night before.
Cathy Tenedorio said her son worked at the Superdome as an audiovisual technician and that it was the job of his dreams.
On Thursday, the New Orleans Saints released a statement, in which they called Tenedorio a “valued member of the ASM New Orleans video production team.” […]
Hubert Gauthreaux, 21 [photo at the link]
Hubert Gauthreaux, 21, was identified as one of the dead by his former high school, the Archbishop Shaw High School in Marrero, Louisiana.
[…] Gauthreaux was watching the fireworks show on the riverwalk with friends when he reached out to his family at 12:08 a.m. Wednesday.
“I love you,” he texted. Those turned out to be the last words they would receive from him.
[…] Last week, she said, Hubert took a tire off his new vehicle and gave it to a friend who needed it more. […]
Nicole Perez, 27 [photo at the link]
Nicole Perez was a single mom who was ringing in the new year when she was killed. She had reason to feel optimistic about the future — she had just been promoted to sundries manager at Kimmy’s Market in Metairie, Louisiana.
[…] Known as Nikki, Perez had worked for the past three years at the market and at Kimmy’s Deli, which is also in Metairie. Sometimes she brought along her son, Melvin, who Fall said was 5. And when Perez went to work, it was on foot because she didn’t have a car.
Ryan Meaux, 34, a regular at the market, said he started giving Perez rides to work in December after learning that she walked. He said Perez sometimes had to trek several miles to get to the job. […]
Drew Dauphin, 26 [photo at the link]
Dauphin, who lived in Montgomery, Alabama, was identified by family spokesperson Becky Devereux and his alma mater.
“On behalf of Auburn University, I send my sincere condolences to the family and loved ones of 2023 graduate Drew Dauphin who was taken from us in the New Orleans terror attack,’’ said Auburn University President Christopher B. Roberts.
Reginald Selkirksays
@96 birgerjohansson
The Axial seamount one mile under the sea surface west of Oregon seems to be waking up, and may erupt during 2025.
An undersea volcano is likely to erupt sometime in 2025.
This much advance notice is a big deal, because forecasting eruptions more than hours ahead is “pretty unique,” says geophysicist William Chadwick. But 470 kilometers off the Oregon coast and over a kilometer beneath the waves, a volcano known as Axial Seamount ticks all the boxes that hint at imminent activity, Chadwick and his colleagues reported December 10 at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C.
For the past decade, a suite of devices have been monitoring Axial’s every action — rumbling, shaking, swelling, tilting — and delivering real-time data via a seafloor cable. It’s “the most well-instrumented submarine volcano on the planet,” says Mark Zumberge, a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who was not involved in the work.
But in November, a particular milestone caught Chadwick’s eye: Axial’s surface had ballooned to nearly the same height as it had before its last eruption in 2015 — fortuitously, just months after monitoring began. Ballooning is a sign that magma has accumulated underground and is building pressure…
X owner and Donald Trump ally accused of spreading “poison” after he backs jailed activist.
Elon Musk is facing fierce criticism from British parliamentarians after he called for far-right ringleader Tommy Robinson to be released from prison.
The X owner and key ally of Donald Trump tweeted Thursday morning that authorities should “free Tommy Robinson.”
Robinson, the controversial English Defense League founder whose anti-immigration rallies in the U.K. attract thousands, was jailed for 18 months last October after breaching a court order.
Musk’s comments come amid an ongoing feud with the U.K.’s governing Labour Party — and just days after the tech billionaire spoke out in support of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
“Musk’s support not just for Tommy Robinson, but also the AfD in Germany, shows just how big a problem he is for democracy as well as the reputation of those who cosy up to him like Nigel Farage and Liz Truss,” Labour MP Stella Creasy — whose constituency saw a major counter-demonstration against the far right amid riots last summer — told POLITICO.
[…] Reform UK Leader Farage meanwhile met Musk at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in December and has talked up the prospect of receiving a donation from him. Reform — which has been at pains to distance itself from the far right as it takes on Labour and the Conservatives — declined to comment on Musk’s latest statements Thursday.
Robinson was imprisoned last year after he admitted to breaching a court order relating to false claims about a Syrian schoolboy […] Musk on Thursday approvingly shared the documentary to his hundreds of millions of followers on X.
A second Labour MP, granted anonymity to speak candidly, called Musk’s language “dangerous,” warning that “at a time when communities need to come and work together, we have someone with a lot of influence sowing divisions and spreading hate.”
[…] Danny Chambers, an MP for the centrist Liberal Democrats and the party’s spokesperson on mental health, said it was “really concerning that a billionaire with his own social media platform is supporting a far-right activist.”
“Musk has the financial resources and the social media reach to influence the news agenda and the narrative, and so his support for Tommy Robinson could be hugely damaging to our political discourse,” Chambers added.
Musk’s intervention has also reignited discussion of whether the U.K. government should tighten campaign finance laws to prevent the world’s richest man from flooding politics with cash before the next election.
As a U.S. citizen from South Africa, Musk would not be allowed to make direct donations of more than £500 to U.K. political parties. But election finance experts have argued that he could set up a new U.K. registered company or an unincorporated association to sidestep the rules.
Creasy said: “The money and organization that extremists now have access to to spread their poison across the world is a threat that can’t be ignored or sidelined.
“It’s time not just to enforce and reform campaign finance laws but also to call to account all those who indulge them, encourage them and avoid standing up to them.” […]
Reginald in comment 496:
LOL. All of that corporate gobbledygook can be translated as: “Toyota bribes Trump in the hope that Trump will not take actions that hurt the vehicle industry.”
For the convenience of readers of The Infinite Thread, here are a few links back to the previous set of 500 comments.
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/10/04/infinite-thread-xxxiii/comment-page-7/#comment-2247682
Trump’s sudden fixation on Panama may be tied to his shady business
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/10/04/infinite-thread-xxxiii/comment-page-7/#comment-2247680
So much for diversity: Companies kowtow to conservatives and ditch DEI
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/10/04/infinite-thread-xxxiii/comment-page-7/#comment-2247662
No way would Congress appropriate $2 trillion to buy Greenland
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/10/04/infinite-thread-xxxiii/comment-page-7/#comment-2247661
ow Ukraine’s new drone-missile hybrids are changing long-range weapon technology
Think ‘brain rot’ sums up 2024? Oxford agrees—it’s the word of the year
More at the link, including the Collins Dictionary choice of “brat.”
I think that in describing “brain rot,” Oxford should have mentioned the disinformation and lies that the brain is subjected to online, especially by social media sources like X, etc
Link
The bald eagle is officially America’s national bird after Biden’s signature
Video at the link.
And:
Link
Text quoted above is excerpted from a longer article that presents news related to Ukraine and to Russia.
What is going on with the video hosts these days?
First, starting a few years ago, pretty much every major online video host started to sometimes act like I was on mobile, even when I was on a desktop PC. I’d get a stripped-down player with, often, no seek controls, no volume control (just binary mute/unmute if that), and lots of other missing features compared to the usual desktop embed or desktop site.
Now, much of the time with Youtube embeds, it no longer works to hover over the badge at top left to see the uploader/channel name for some reason, though it still works some of the time. I don’t think it’s just some widget intermittently failing to load, either, as often on a page with multiple embeds the uploader info-banner unfurls on mouseover for some of the embeds and fails for others, on the same reload of the page.
The general pattern here seems to be “we’ll randomly withhold features of our player for no logical reason, either from specific videos or just haphazardly”. And, as I noted before, every single online video host appears to be doing this.
So, what is going on? I can think of only a few hypotheses.
1. It’s a bug, not a feature, even from their perspective — in which case, either we have a lot of independent and simultaneous failures, or they’ve all been plagiarizing from each other’s codebases leading to the bug being replicated widely.
2. It’s a feature, not a bug, from their perspective; i.e., enshittification. Somehow by capriciously deactivating player features, such as a full volume control or the little uploader name banner on the embed, they make more money than by having the player work consistently and fully the way it originally did circa 2018 or thereabouts. I thought it might be meant to degrade the embedded-player experience to drive people to click through to their webshites, where they can bombard you with more “recommended videos” in the hopes of you rabbit-holing and seeing a lot of ads there, except that most of the same feature-lossage happens on affected videos if you view them at their own webshite. For example if a Youtube video has no seek bar and only mute/unmute, clicking through to watch it at youtube.com will not get you those features back. It’s not clear how else they might monetize the seemingly random disabling of basic player-widget features, save if they are renting them back to people by not doing this if you’re logged in with a premium account. Is that their angle? Rather stupid, IMO.
3. It’s somehow more complicated than either a pure accident or straight-up enshittification for financial gain. Though I don’t see how that would be. Like, not expanding the uploader’s name from their avatar on some videos appeasing the GDPR lawyers in some way? How is there a privacy issue with showing the uploader’s name without clicking through first? Or maybe it’s a side effect: the failing features depend on cookies that the GDPR declared evil or something. But then it should either fail until you answer a cookie nag, or simply fail if you’re in Europe, and work the rest of the time …
Thank you, Lynna.
.
“NEW SINGLE:
Greenland Isn’t For Epstein
(Vikings)”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=RB8wGQn9w4w
“Say Yes to Eric the Red and No, Hell No to the Orange One”.
In Maine, Remote Work Gives Prisoners a Lifeline
Followup to our discussion in the previous set of Infinite Thread comments. More details regarding Trump’s proposal to buy Greenland.
Link
Large burial mound aligned with solstice found in Norway | Miami Herald
.https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/article297541393.html
Cartoon: Security flaw found in Americans’ brains
Michael Schmidt:
New York Times: Questions Emerge About Data Used by China to Defend Against Doping Allegations
“China and the World Anti-Doping Agency say that positive tests for a banned drug among elite Chinese swimmers were a result of unwitting contamination. But the science behind that assertion is not so clear.”
Link
Choose your headline: Are you a glass half full or a glass half empty sort of person?
Dozens survive Kazakhstan passenger plane crash
Dozens Dead After Plane Crashes on Christmas Day
Zelensky condemns Putin for ‘inhumane’ Christmas Day attack
https://www.wonkette.com/p/good-thing-all-of-our-childhood-toyspets
“Good Thing All Of Our Childhood Toys/Pets Have Saved Christmas At One Point Or Another!”
Available at the link are several videos in which toys or pets “save Christmas.” Funny and cute, especially when compared to past “war on Christmas” stuff from rightwing doofuses.
Caption for a New Yorker cartoon showing three wise men traveling by camel: “It’s a long plan, but if we play our cards right it will lead to the ‘Muppet Christmas Carol’ movie, and it will all be worth it.”
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/wednesday-december-25th-worth-it
In other news, my neighbor’s inflatable nativity scene has collapsed thanks to the weight of the snow that fell on top of it.
A K-type star (orange dwarf) has Earth-sized planets, 2 confirmed 1 possible.
.
All previous small exoplanets have orbited ‘unsuitable’ small red dwarf M stars.
It is difficult to find small planets near larger stars because of limitations to current instruments.
This star has 14% luminosity of the sun, 2/3 of the solar mass, and is ca. 40 light years distant.
These planets are all too hot for life but others (not detectable w. current instruments) can exist in the hospitable zone. Note that the orbits seem closely packed compared to the solar system.
.https://www.stellarcatalog.com/stars/hd-101581
Correction. The star has 74% the mass of the sun and has 2/3 the radius. Observe how quickly luminosity falls off with mass.
I forget the age of the system, if it is older than the sun tectonic activity on the planets as well as magnetic fields may have ceased, ruining any hospitable conditions.
Sorry, the system is almost 7 Gyr old, so probably the isotopes left in the cores of the planets will be unable to keep the cores churning. No tectonic activity, no protective magnetic fields. Even if planets exist in the hospitable zone they will be larger versions of Mars.
“The Swedish Torch: An ingenious 400-year-old invention”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=kqTxWiW8x9o
The birth of Jesus would probably have been forgotten – if it wasn’t for a plague | Jonathan Kennedy
| The Guardian
.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/25/birth-jesus-plague-roman-empire-christianity
If those Christians were anything like Mother Theresa they would have required the sick to convert before giving aid.
It is now 20 years since the Great Tsunami in southern Asia. Hundreds of thousands probably died but numbers are poorly constrained, many died in places with little administrative infrastructure.
The 500 Swedish tourist victims were a larger proportion of the Swedish population than the 9/11 dead were of the American.
Rachel Maddow on Dr. Mehmet Oz: Five things about Trump’s pick to lead Medicare and Medicaid Services
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Me-Dsiz5EyQ
Weird “biblically accurate” angels are the viral Christmas design trend of 2024
These Caldwell First Nation members installed home security cameras. Now, they’re being evicted
What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?
Also include reports of insertions into penises and vaginas.
@4 Lynna posted the headline: ‘The bald eagle is officially America’s national bird after Biden’s signature’
I reply: However, if you look at the tRUMPite government officials, appointees and billionaires, I say the official bird is really the ‘bald ego’. And, I will flip them ‘the bird’ at every opportunity.
@27 Reginald Selkirk posted the article: What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?
I reply: It’s not that that is important, it’s that we got stuck with a rectum as president elect!
Brazil’s iconic Christ the Redeemer statue is caught in a battle between church and state
Undersea power cable linking Finland and Estonia hit by outage, prompting investigation
Ancient genomes provide final word in Indo-European linguistic origins!
.https://phys.org/news/2024-12-ancient-genomes-word-indo-european.html
Congratulations, Annie Lennox!
Born Dec 25th 1954
Russia bans crypto mining in multiple regions, citing energy concerns
Miraculous cure of former atheist, now priest, clinches canonization of Pier Giorgio Frassati
That’s a total lie.
Achilles injuries cover a wide range, from simple inflammation to a complete rupture. No X-rays or medical documents are shown with this article.
Rather, an exaggeration. But the evidence that there was such a person as Jesus is sufficient to convince the great majority of relevant experts, including atheists, agnostics and observant Jews. Jesus Mythicism is a crank belief-system (see here) which has unfortunately become popular among atheists. Evidence of the “miracles” associated with him and believed in by most Christians, no. Mostly because there is nothing intrinsically unlikely in the existence of a Jewish apocolyptic preacher and faith-healer who annoyed the Roman authorities and got crucified, while there is no reason to believe miracles ever happen, but miracle stories are associated with many historical figures.
Re 30 (latest suspicious cable breach in Baltic Sea):
According to Finnish news, our coast guard has stopped a tanker named Eagle S, which was sailing from Russia westwards past Helsinki, and had crossed over the Estlink-2 cable just when it broke (and suspiciously slowed down just then, according to people on social media who monitor ship movements at marinetraffic.com). The tanker, flagged in Cook Islands and owned by an obscure company in Arab Emirates, has been previously listed as a part of Russia’s presumed “shadow oil fleet”, and an environmental risk due to its old age.
Some official information is supposed to be released later today. The link below has maps of the area (only one of the two Estlink cables is broken).
https://yle.fi/a/74-20133485
Erm, no.
If you are arguing with some rando on the Interwebs, you usually have to start by explaining that the Gospels are not four independent eyewitness accounts, and that the supposed biographical details were obviously manufactured at a later date to match out of context ‘predictions,’ which is why the childhood of Jesus in Matthew and Luke completely fail to match. Let’s skip past that.
If you ask someone better-informed, you will probably get the few verses in Josephus, some of which are obviously fake. I also point out that Josephus was not even born until after the alleged time of Jesus’ death, and that Jesus, the Greek-ified form of Joshua, was a very popular Jewish name at the time. You would need evidence about a very specific Jesus in order to count. About that time they will switch from actual evidence to the argument, “I don’t need evidence for such an ordinary claim as that there was a wandering preacher named Jesus in the early first century”
That is when you have to remind them of the original premise they are allegedly arguing:
Former NSA cyberspy’s not-so-secret hobby: Hacking Christmas lights
Meanwhile in the Hole-y Lands “safe zone” on Christmas night or was it Boxing Day night there. Not that it mattres much to them I’m sure :
Source : https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/25/middleeast/israel-gaza-babies-freeze-to-death-winter-intl/index.html
Those that survived Christmas night, Boxing Day night, how many more nights will they live? If they do live, how will it affect them, for the rest of their lives – and ours?
@14
Azerbaijan Airlines flight was downed by Russian air defence system, four sources say
15 of the Biggest Fake Images That Went Viral in 2024
Erm, yes. Read the articles at the link I gave and argue against them, rather than straw persons.
As I said, this is an exaggeration, but not, as you claimed “a total lie”, which it would be only if there was no “non-Catholic, nonreligious” evidence for Jesus, which is clearly false. Detailed analysis of the references in Josephus – who has specific ways to distinguish between people with the same name – is convincing evidence that there was such a person. Tacitus also refers to him, in terms which make clear he regarded Jesus as a historical individual. There are many individuals in the same era whose existence is uncontroversially accepted on the evidence of a single, non-contemporary reference.
birgerjohansson@22,
I’m somewhat sceptical of that article – I’m not saying it’s definitely wrong, but I don’t think Kennedy gives very strong evidence. His claim is that Christianity spread because Christians gave aid to sick people in an epidemic – the “Plague of Cyprian” in the mid-third century. Kennedy gives estimates of 150,000 Christians in the Roman Empire in 200 C.E. and 3,000,000 in 300 C.E. That’s a 20-fold increase in a century. That only requires a steady increase of a little over a 3% per year. And his only evidence for the Christians being better at helping sick people comes from… a bishop!
Lynna, OM@9,
Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland makes more sense in geostrategic terms than might appear at first glance (although it’s unlikely he has thought about it beyond “I want!! Gimme!!!”). With global heating, both minerals on Greenland itself, and oil and gas under the Arctic Ocean, will become more readily available, and miltary use of that ocean and its surrounding lands more feasible.
“Republican Dysfunction Could Cripple Their Slim House Majority”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=RrHOr7WfyiE
Reginald Selkirk @ 40
Eussians shooting downa a civilian airliner? That sounds familiar.
The Soviet zunion shot down two Korean airliners, the Russians shot down an airliner passing near Ukraine before the invasion.
KG @44, Trump can’t have Greenland … even it makes “more sense in geostrategic terms.”
In other news: Moscow’s 4 airports closed temporarily for unspecified security reasons
“To ensure the safety of civil aircraft flights, temporary restrictions have been introduced on the operation of Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo, Vnukovo, Zhukovsky and Kaluga airports,” Russia’s aviation authority said.
Russia says it’s using bitcoin to evade sanctions
Cartoon: Tom the Dancing Bug presents God-Man, the omnipotent superhero, in ‘Paradoxer Solved!’
Texas wrote the blueprint on authoritarianism—Trump just has to follow it
Cartoon: Happy Creeper Christmas
Salon:
Vinson Cunningham, writing for The New Yorker:
From the Guardian’s diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour:
Update to 30 and 36: It was revealed that Finnish authorities (either the police or coast guard depending on source) have boarded the tanker Eagle S, which is presumably still held at the sea near Helsinki.
Meanwhile, turns out that four undersea data cables (in addition to the aforementioned electricity cable) have been either cut or damaged around Finland. Thus far, my internet is working.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/26/finnish-coastguard-boards-eagle-s-oil-tanker-suspected-of-causing-power-cable-outages
Sometimes we’ve just got to lighten up for a little while. (even though we’re entering the New Dark Ages)
Here’s some fun with fossils:
https://comicskingdom.com/bizarro/2024-12-22
KG @ # 35: Jesus Mythicism is a crank belief-system (see here) …
Please note that the “historyforatheists.com” source you link to appears a bit cranky as well, its proprietor regularly taking a dogmatic and arrogant insistence on his own authority, dismissing disagreements with ad-hominem put-downs, and refusing to address relevant points brought up by others.
Though not qualified to make any such judgments myself, I still can’t take too seriously any historian who won’t acknowledge room for doubt in the face of such limited, contradictory, tendentious-yet-ambiguous evidence as the Jesus stories. Even the avowed historical-Jesus advocate Bart Ehrman concedes that neither the words nor the actions recounted in “Scripture” merit any confidence at all.
RE: Panama, Greenland, privatizing the USPS, killing Daylight Savings Time –
I get the impression the Trump camp is just throwing random things at the wall to see if anything sticks. None of these were positions he raised during his campaign.
In better times, we would be able to say, “No one would be crazy enough to actually try that.” I miss those days.
lumipuna @54, That’s a lot of cable damage! Alarming.
In other news: “Nice Time! Arkansas Librarians Score Win Against Thought Police!”
“Federal judge blocks a law that could have thrown librarians and booksellers in jail.”
https://www.wonkette.com/p/nice-time-arkansas-librarians-score
https://www.wonkette.com/p/louisianas-ban-on-promoting-flu-shot
“Louisiana’s Ban On Promoting Flu Shot Going Very Well … For The Flu”
Congratulations to the influenza virus, sorry to everyone else.
Link
Link
It is now 20 years since at least
230 000 people died in the Great Tsunami.
Choking hazard has plush toys recalled across Canada
If you click through, you can see another potential hazard: biological ignorance. The plush toys portray placental mammals, including lions, elephants, pandas and tigers, with a marsupial pouch.
South Korea’s acting president Han faces impeachment vote from opposition party
Tortoise engraving suggests Middle Eastern religion from 37,000 years ago
Canada had 280 gun deaths last year. USA had (my memory is a bit shaky about the exact number) more than 48 000.
Even if we take into account USA has 14 times more people that is a big difference.
Anti-Drone Weapon With 24 Barrels Firing Buckshot-Like Rounds Emerges On Russian Buggies
I know the Pope is a reactionary old ☆@# but at least he has called out Israel for killing children. Biden -who is getting a lot of praise now – has not, to the best of my knowledge said much about Gaza after the election.
@57 Reginald Selkirk wrote: the Trump camp is just throwing random things at the wall to see if anything sticks.
I reply: You are likely sooo correct and polite. Because we all know what he is throwing at the wall the rest of us would call excrement. And, there is sooo much of it and we hope NONE of it sticks because of the destruction and injury it would cause. But, they do it with impunity because these criminals don’t care and they will face no consequences as this country circles the drain.
Welcome to the New Dark Ages. Prove me wrong and I’ll stop saying that.
Myself @ 66
Correction.
USA only has 9 times the population of Canada. This means the proportion of gun deaths compared to Canada is even worse.
(I memorised the population of Canada some time in the early 80s during my school years and haven’t updated my memory since)
Re. The war in Ukraine. Russians have started burning away the faces of dead North Korean soldiers to maintain the fiction there are no North Koreans.
Instead they are using the NK troops as cannon fodder to reduce their own losses. The NK officers lack experience of how to adapt to battle fields dominated by drone surveillance and instead of staying in forests that degrade drone signals they are easily spotted, and then killed by artillery.
Vivek Ramaswamy blames 90s sitcoms for tech companies hiring smarter immigrant workers
Right, because cultural stereotypes are driven by sit-coms, not vice versa.
/s
birgerjohansson @70
It’s actually closer to 8.5 times. We’re over 41 millions now. And the increase is mostly due to immigration.
Sinkhole swallows portion of Route 80, leading to major traffic delay
“Dire shortage”: Elon Musk sparks MAGA backlash after calling for more immigrant workers
Florida Woman Calls The Cops As She’s Stealing A Car
Update to 54 – I gathered some interesting bits of information on how the seizure of tanker Eagle S happened.
The Estlink breach was reported late on Wednesday local time, a possible suspect ship was quickly identified and the coast guard (a branch of Finnish border guard) was alerted. One of the patrol boats happened to be conveniently nearby, to be able to immediately contact Eagle S. This was on the shipping lane that runs along a narrow strip of international waters between Finnish and Estonian territorial waters. The breach took place a little further east, also in international waters but within Finland’s economic zone.
The patrol boat somehow persuaded ES to make a small detour into Finnish territorial waters (giving the border guard better legal authority) and to pull up its anchor chain (which it had been suspiciously dragging in the shallow sea). When it turned out that the anchor itself was missing, there was grounds for a warrant to raid the ship and gather further evidence. This was arranged during the night, all while ES was ordered or persuaded to stay and wait. There raid was done jointly by the police special force unit (kind of like SWAT team) and the border guard special force unit (kind of like rapid response border defense, only technically not a part of the military), using a helicopter and maybe other equipment borrowed from the military. Luckily, there was no resistance from the crew.
Finnish social media is going wild over this show of force (and some of it is spilling into international accounts like Anton Geraschenko on Twitter). Notably, however, the matter does not officially involve Russia or China or other major countries in any way, which might have made it diplomatically less intimidating to execute.
Scandinavian food for the adventurous.
“Eating The Worst Tinned Food In The WORLD!”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=XGH3B_6m1aM
.
Yes, fermented herring (from northern Sweden) is definitely an aquired taste.
[always open the cans outdoors]
But if you really feel adventurous you should try Icelandic ‘håkarl’ – meat from Greenland shark that has been left to ferment after being buried in a pit in the ground. The fermentation destroys the neurotoxin in the meat but apparently does not improve the taste.
.
Bu contrast the much maligned ‘lutefisk’ is perfectly OK as long as you have plenty of sauce, and get rid of the irritating fish bones before you start eating.
Scandinavian food for the adventurous.
“Eating The Worst Tinned Food In The WORLD!”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=XGH3B_6m1aM
Yea, fermented herring (from northern Sweden) is definitely an aquired taste.
[and always open the cans outdoors] But if you really feel adventurous you should try Icelandic ‘håkarl’ – meat from Greenland shark that has been left to ferment after being buried in a pit in the ground. The fermentation destroys the neurotoxin in the meat but apparently does not improve the taste.
.
By contrast, the much maligned ‘lutefisk’ is perfectly OK if you have plenty of sauce, and get rid of the irritating fish bones before you start eating.
Sorry, doublet posting.
My bad.
I will try to make up for it by finding some cute cat video or something.
Scientists explore longevity drugs for dogs that could also ‘extend human life’ | Ageing | The Guardian
.https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/26/scientists-explore-longevity-drugs-for-dogs-that-could-also-extend-human-life
.
UN voices alarm after WHO chief caught up in deadly Israeli strike on Yemen airport | Yemen | The Guardian
.
.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/27/israel-strike-yemen-sanaa-airport-world-health-organization-who-tedros-adhanom-ghebreyesus
Re: shermanj @69:
Wikipedia – Dark Ages
Top 10 Cutest Cat Videos of All Time
Lynna@11:
Let me guess: it’s already being exploited in targeted attacks? :)
Reginald Selkirk@25:
It’s a good bet the original authors were actually describing star constellations. If there’s any link to the calendar, it probably started as a guide to locally ideal sowing and reaping times or something. Then got taken literally by later generations or by foreigners whose agricultural practices were different.
birgerjohansson@80:
And not providing basically any information about it. While botching the embed. :)
shermanj @ # 69: Welcome to the New Dark Ages. Prove me wrong and I’ll stop saying that.
The “dark ages” (by just about any labeling) were times of, ahem, major decentralization.
The current world situation, and Trump’s avowed agenda, involve lots and lots of centralized hegemony.
(Not that I care whether you keep saying what you say…)
Americans are exhausted by political news. TV ratings and a new AP-NORC poll show they’re tuning out
I can understand that. I can handle normal politics. But when it comes to the insane “let’s put a convicted felon in charge of appointing federal judges and assemble the rapiest cabinet ever” stuff I can only take so much.
There is an interesting contrast of style det between the Christmas messages of the Mexican president and Donald Trump
“Mexican Prez SMACKS DOWN on Trump ON CHRISTMAS”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=SV81YIBAK5c
Thank you, Reginald Selkirk @ 83
Just as Marie Antoniette was surprised to learn how impopular she was, so health insurance bosses are surprised by how disliked they are.
I assume most of them only interact with commoners as various service personnel doing their jobs.
The Damage Report.
“Leaked Video Goes Viral… Shows CEOs Are Terrified!”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=SR1Nn185d-0
The lobbying after the documentary “Sicko” killed the brief debate about the health insurance system. But it did not kill the dislike for the system.
Kieran Connell counters the message the tories have been drumming into the British people since at least 2015.
“White British people aren’t under threat from multicultural Britain – they are part of it”
The Guardian
.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/27/multiculturalism-britain-white-people
(BTW the xenophobes are now voting for Nigel Farage and his party, who are stealing votes from the conservatives. The xenophobe campaign in the tory client media has ultimately not been to the benefit of the tories.)
From MedicalXpress:
“Sexism is a risk factor for memory decline among women, study finds”
.https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-12-sexism-factor-memory-decline-women.html
The difference between some states amounts to up to nine years of cognitive ageing.
birgerjohansson@81,
For some reason your links don’t work. I see dots”.” at the start of the lines with the links – maybe that’s the problem. Anyway, here are versions that work for me:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/26/scientists-explore-longevity-drugs-for-dogs-that-could-also-extend-human-life
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/27/israel-strike-yemen-sanaa-airport-world-health-organization-who-tedros-adhanom-ghebreyesus
Re: KG:
Nah. That’s his habit to prevent the blog from seeing his bare YouTube urls and turning them into embedded videos. Instead of writing html tags.
The problem in #81 was a non-breaking space character (nbsp). If you hover over his links, you may see %A0 at the end. No idea how it got in there. At least it wasn’t an invisible zero-width character; those are insidious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space
Two of em in #90’s link.
The Axial seamount one mile under the sea surface west of Oregon seems to be waking up, and may erupt during 2025.
Some of us learned to type, rather than how to write html. tags. It was much easier to embed links properly when the tags were listed above the comment box so you could copy/paste them into your comment, but that was several blog iterations ago. Trying to track down the proper formatting just to make the link pretty is not necessary to prevent video from embedding. I just paste the YouTube address and that seems to work fine.
I don’t mind bare links, as Birger is being kind and sharing things he thinks others may enjoy to this iteration of the endless (social) thread.
————
As for the Dark Ages, it’s a silly term coined by a crappy historian. The lack of written records is due to time, attrition, Viking raids, and Christianity ruining everything. The art and bits of surviving literature we still have from that period are AMAZING.
Shakespeare did not invent many of his stories. He stole them from the scraps of Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature, just like Tolkien and George Martin.
@ 93 I don’t write html tags because my fat fingertips tend to hit the wrong signs, and unlike spelling the correct html tags are not ‘intuitive’ the way spelling gets.
Curiously, I have no problems using those links, which is odd. I did not notice a problem until you mentioned it.
-As for how %A0 got there I suspect some bit rot in my cellphone.
For instance, I have noticed I can no longer add comments to Youtube videos – a problem that persisted when I transferred the apps to a new cellphone.
The reason why I don’t start with a ‘tabula rasa’ cellphone is, I would have to manually update hundreds of names and adresses and notes.
Test. Let me know if this link is borked.
“New strategy significantly extends lithium-ion battery life by suppressing oxygen release”
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-12-strategy-significantly-lithium-ion-battery.html
Test
Let’s see if this works
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/27/multiculturalism-britain-white-people
@64 they did it
South Korea’s acting president Han Duck-Soo impeached as Yoon goes on trial
lumipuna @77, thank you for those details. Looks like a display of competence on the part of forces from Finland.
Reginald @75, that “backlash” against Musk is still ongoing. I’m seeing a lot of responses from rightwing sources, with most of them claiming that Musk is not anti-immigrant enough! Defending visas for foreign tech workers is apparently a big no-no. It’s kind of amazing how much social media conversation is flying back and forth over this contretemps. Looks like they’ll keep each other riled up and therefore divided for some time.
Link
Followup to comment 9.
About that proposal for a new ambassador to Panama:
Link
As Congress fought over the spending bill, Republicans snuck in a passage to gut funding for the IRS. And Democrats didn’t catch it.
Cartoon: The Anschluss
Followup to comments 75 and 101.
MAGA world is at war after DOGE bros back immigration expansion
Associated Press:
https://www.wonkette.com/p/consumer-financial-protection-bureau
“Consumer Financial Protection Bureau […] Thank you Senator Warren, ma’am, may we have another?”
Followup to comment 108.
Same link a s posted in comment 108.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/if-congress-passes-terrific-law-for
Biden administration shrinks Guantanamo’s prison population (again)
“The Biden administration won’t be able to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, but it has reduced the facility’s population to just 27 people.” Video at the link.
David Firestone, writing for The New York Times:
Commentary:
Link
Associated Press: “US homelessness surges as affordable housing remains out of reach.”
Followup to comments 75, 101 and 106.
The REAL Reason the Tech Bros Want More H1Bs
Medvedev:
Link
Text quoted about is an excerpt from a longer article presenting news related to Russia and to Ukraine.
Medvedev is a Russian politician who was president of Russia from 2008 to 2012, while Vladimir Putin served in the role of prime minister. Medvedev served a single term in the office of president. He was succeeded by Putin. That was Putin’s plan. Medvedev has adopted ever-increasingly hostile, anti-western attitudes ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/nice-time-mackenzie-scott-pissing
Nice Time: MacKenzie Scott Pissing Off Elon Musk With The Billions For The DEIs And Abortions
How endangered wolves are getting help crossing the road
Staple them to the chicken?
Scientists Developed a Questionnaire to Identify if Your Cat Is a Psychopath”>
NBC News:
Followup to comment 108.
NBC News:
NPR:
People Left Twitter Because Twitter’s Product Sucks, Not Because of Purity Politics
Why not both?
Some, but not all, funding for cancer research survived federal spending deal chaos
“It looked like funding for the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Program wasn’t going to make it — until something unusual and unexpected happened.”
Maybe all of those legislators should be in Washington D.C. working for their constituents for more days per year.
See: https://www.congress.gov/days-in-session
See also How Many Days a Year Congress Works:
Josh Marshall:
Costco is pushing back — hard — against the anti-DEI movement
Re 103:
It’s too late to offer to give John McCain back to Panama in exchange for the canal.
WTF?
‘Where are you?’: Trump posts oddly thirsty message to his sugar daddy
It sounds to me like Trump is playing his billionaires off against each other. Which billionaire gets to sit closest to Hair Furor, the cult leader?
Hackers hijack a wide range of companies’ Chrome extensions, experts say
In reference to lumipuna’s comment 126.
From Wikipedia:
Stephen E. Sachs, Why John McCain was a Citizen at Birth, 29 Immigr. & Nat’lity L. Rev. 623 (2008).
Link
Followup to comment 129.
Ultraconservative congressman pushes DOGE dorks to chop social services
Janet Yellen says Treasury Department will need to take ‘extraordinary measures’ to avoid debt ceiling next month
“The treasury secretary’s notification to Congress is the clearest sign yet that the fight to avoid default will likely take place in the early months of the new Trump administration.”
Followup to comment 132.
Washington Post link
Sounds like petty bickering to me, especially on the part of Republicans.
MAGA infighting? I’ll go fetch the popcorn …
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-28/nasa-parker-probe-survives-sun-encounter-/104767448
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-26/ai-generated-images-photography-trust/104721106
Source : https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change-is-the-worst-heres-just-how-bad-it-got-this-year
birgerjohansson@98,99,
Those links both worked.
Almost everything we have in the way of classical and medieval literature, history, philosophy, proto-science, etc. is thanks to Christians (specifically, monks) copying it, usually several times.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain@93,94,
Thanks for that info.
Of course there’s “room for doubt”, as there is for the existence of any reported person from the period for whom we don’t have direct physical evidence such as their name on monuments, coins, gravestones, or preserved letters (such as those found at Vindolanda). And of course the accounts of Jesus’s words and actions in the gospels and elsewhere are questionable when not obviously false. So what? That’s not what mythicists claim – they claim that it’s either certain or probable that there was no such person – and that’s just ideologically-motivated crap. By the normal standards of ancient history scholarship, the existence of Jesus and an outline biography (native of Galilee with more than one brother, baptised by John the Baptist, went around Galilee as a preacher and faith-healer, claimed some special status, came to Jerusalem with a group of followers, made a disturbance in the temple, annoyed the Roman authorities, got crucified) are well-established.
Magnus Carlsen quits chess championship after being told to change jeans
Well of course he can’t, under the UN Treaty and the Kellogg-Briand Pact (and hence US law), as long as Denmark isn’t successfully pressured into selling it. I don’t know why anyone thinks that would stop him, once he’s appointed his cronies to replace any generals who would refuse his illegal orders. But that wasn’t the point I was making, as I would have thought was obvious.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe survives close brush with the sun’s scorching surface
https://phys.org/news/2024-12-nasa-parker-solar-probe-survives.html
191 km/second compared to the placid 30km/s the Earth is making in its orbit.
KG @ 138 thanks.
StevoR @ 135
Oops, I overlooked your comment.
BTW with the vastly improved asteroid catalog process, are there any ‘new’ ones available for sample return missions that do not require multiple gravity assists from other planets? I am thinking in terms of quick turnaround times.
@139 Yes but it wasn’t the Christian church trying to spread knowledge, it was the Christian church trying to monopolize it. When whatever other education systems came apart with the fall of the Roman empire, invasions and other problems the Church didn’t try to teach people, start schools open to anybody or spread the books. The Catholic church got the books and then hit them away in private libraries. The Church tried to limit education to people joining the church, begrudgingly agreeing to teach some clerks for civilian government because somebody had know how to keep the legal and finance records.
NPR: Putin apologizes to Azerbaijani leader for ‘tragic incident’ involving crashed plane
More or less an admission of what was widely rumored. Russian air defense shot down the plane, it was going to happen to somebody eventually with the huge combat zone across Ukraine and Russia. The plane was originally going to Grozny in Chechnya. It arrived there to find the city in heavy fog and air defenses firing because the city was under attack by Ukrainian drones. It apparently got hit but didn’t suffer critical damage. The pilot then decided to fly to the distant Aktau and the plane didn’t last the trip.
CNN: China is building new detention centers all over the country as Xi Jinping widens corruption purge
Xi holds power but his position is more fragile then it looks and this is one of the consequences. Xi has turned out to be bad at picking people to promote into positions of power, he has had to remove several people he appointed for one reason or another. So he has ended up at the top but with a power structure below him made up of power groups that would like to replace him. His security largely rests on the power groups hating each other also. Xi has expanded the state security organization and has used it to keep his control on the state.
At the same time there are a bunch of other reasons for expanding the state prison system. It’s used against the Muslim minorities and other religious groups. The CCCP has taken steps to prevent rich business leaders and popular media figures from getting too popular and/or powerful. The regional and local governments in some places are so broke they have been using the security forces to shake down people for money.
China is slowly turning into a dystopian police state as the CCCP has to use more and more policing to hold power.
Link
Katelyn Jetelina:
More embedded links to sources are available at the main link.
Link for text quoted in comment 151.
https://www.vox.com/climate/391702/2024-hope-climate-progress
Axios: C-suite goes gig as demand for fractional work rises
Gig economy for everybody, except it won’t be anything like low level gig jobs where people need the money to survive.
I expect this is largely selling name power and executive connections. Any company large enough and complex enough to actually need C-suit executives has a job complex enough to need them full time. Hiring a fractional executive is probably only worthwhile when you want to hire their connections for a while or the company investor requires you to hire their kid.
Look for this in Texas’ next tourism campaign:
Texas governor Greg Abbott: “Do not make the dangerous trek to Texas.”
It didn’t really need to try – there was simply no alternative until universities began to appear in the 12th (possibly late 11th in the case of Bologna) to 13th centuries. Before that, the monastic and cathedral schools did teach some children (sons of the “nobility”) who would not become monks or clerics. As for starting schools open to anybody or spreading books, there simply weren’t either the teachers or the books to make this possible. Relationships between the Church and universities were complex and varied from place to place and time to time, but the idea that the Church was universally hostile to secular learning or intellectual innovation is simply incompatibe with the fact that during its period of greatest power – roughly the first half of the second millennium – western and central Europe went from being an intellectual and technological backwater to being at the forefront of global proto-science and mathematics. The invention of moveable-type printing in the mid-1400s brought an end to the Church’s near-monopoly, but that invention only occurred and took hold because of rising literacy and demand for books.
Youtube: Covert Cabal
Covert Cabal gives a summary of the Russian tank reserves. Essentially Russia is out of useful tanks. They have thousands of tanks in storage but are down to junk, tanks without turrets and similar tanks that are likely to cost as much or more to repair then the cost of building a new tank. Due to Russia’s limited capacity to build new tanks they will continue to recycle what they can despite it not being cost effective.
They also point out the very important point that Russia can build and rebuild tanks so will not run out entirely. Instead they will reduce the use of tanks on the front line and slowly get further and further behind in resupplying units. This appears to be already happening but how far behind they are is not clear.
KG @139
The preservation of Greek, Latin and Hebrew culture and the entirety of Islamic contributions to modernity are not due to Christian monks. There is exactly one late medieval Runic manuscript because the Christian’s had a habit of genociding the entirety of the educated classes of Saxons, Angles, Friisi, etcetera who refused to convert.
That Church grew increasingly powerful, and decreed a patriarchal monopoly on literacy in the 900s. There is no reason to assume that only Monks were involved in creating manuscripts. There were plenty of women in Abbeys during the so called Dark Ages and mid-medieval period ( when we start getting more preserved material) who also worked in the scriptoriums. It’s a pity that the church ordered any manuscripts that did not conform to Nicean standards to be destroyed/ erased from history.
The few extant fragments of Old High German prose that are about pre Christian culture have been recovered from inside old bindings, and discovered as ‘ghosts’ in vellum that were scraped off and reused. Muspilli is written into the blank spaces of a Bavarian manuscript that dates from the 900s, but it’s exceedingly difficult in its vernacular and quality. It does accord well with the Ragnorok story found in the late medieval Icelandic texts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muspilli
The Dark Ages is the time period of Attila, Odacer, Rhinegold Saga, Merovich, Vendels, Goths, Arthur, and Theodoric the Great. His actual name is Dieter. Both Theo, and -aric are descriptors meaning learned/ wise, and king, respectively. Jordanes Getica dates from the 500s, but he isn’t the most reliable narrator. Arian Goths produced a large body of literature and art, but Justinian did a good job of destroying anything written in Gothic but the Bible. There are some early medieval Vendel poems from Carthage, which are entirely at odds with the official Roman stereotype of brutish, uncultured Vandal Barbarians. Their artwork is rather sublime too.
St Hilde is one example of a literate, Anglo Saxon Abbess who lived during the period, but there are many other documented Abbesses who lived in England and the various iterations of the Frankish Kingdoms. Founding Abbeys and joining them was a very popular trend among noble ladies who did not wish to marry or remarry after being widowed.
Attrition has also taken place, as most writing would have been done on sticks or bones, which generally decay after a few decades. There was once quite a large centuries old collection of them at Westminster in the form of tally sticks, but somebody decided to clear them out by burning them in the fireplace , and nearly burned the whole building down. In Bergen, a trove of these sticks was found that give a nice window into literacy among the general populace.
https://www.scandinavianarchaeology.com/rune-sticks-the-wood-the-bone-and-the-angry/
tl:dr
All of that is to say that the term Dark Ages is ahistorical and misleading. The idea that some Christian Monks should get kudos because their library managed to preserve a few fragments of an entire cultures ancient traditions, after that Church had spent a couple centuries doing its best to erase it entirely, is not exactly laudable.
North Korean soldiers kill themselves to avoid capture in Ukraine, U.S. says
“North Korean troops are being treated as “expendable” and ordered to take on “hopeless assaults against Ukrainian defenses,” National Security Council official John Kirby said.”
Cartoon: Cover of the year
Associated Press:
Link
More at the link.
I would argue we owe the systematic islamic efforts* to translate greek and latin works to arabic far more for preserving knowledge than we owe the church.
*Sadly that effort faded in later centuries. Traditionalists and fudamentalists won the battle over islam and have no interest in the classic era.
Heather Cox Richardson has a good rundown of where things stand in Trump/MAGA/Musk land today (12/28/24). Seems all the campers are unhappy.
This is fun.
Meidas Touch:
“Trump hides on golf course as MAGA attacks itself.”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=AEo0I-wTwZA
Behold the narcissist-in-chief. He feels no responsibility for his followers. Now that they have helped him to power they no longer matter.
@159 Lynna, OM: I’m curious what the North Koreans have been told about getting captured. They have been lied too heavily about the situation in South Korea and those that do defect are usually amazed at how well they live in South Korea. It’s likely the North Koreans have been told lies about how they will be treated if captured. Even without that North Korea uses family punishment and North Korean soldiers likely know their families are likely to be punished if they let themselves be taken alive.
Tethys@158,
You’re right that I should certainly have mentioned nuns as well as monks. The rest of what you say is interesting, but doesn’t alter the fact that most of what we have of classical and medieval writing was copied, generally multiple times, by Christians, mostly associated with the Church. As for runic writing, you can’t write a great deal on sticks or bones. And according to your own link, Muspilli appears to be about the Christian “Last Judgement” rather than Ragnarok.
When was this order given, and by whom? Because little of what we have from the classical period would “conform to Nicean standards”, being written by non-Christians. So if such an order was given, it wasn’t very effectively enforced. In fact, for anything written on papyrus or parchment all that would be necessary to make it very unlikely it would survive would be not to copy it. Although parchment, being expensive, was routinely scraped and re-used, so a lot probably got “erased from history” without any positive intention to ensure it didn’t survive, but simply because the parchment was wanted to copy something else.
Er, yes, of course the term “Dark Ages” is ahistorical and misleading. And it’s not a matter of “kudos”, but of historical fact that we owe most of what we have of classical and medieval writing to Christian copyists.
Not actually true, I believe. Certainly a lot of Greek works first came to the notice of Latin (i.e. western) Europe via Arabic, following the capture of Toledo in 1085 and the retranslation programme of people such as Adelard of Bath and Gerard of Cremona – who employed Jews and Muslims who knew both Arabic and either Latin or the local vernacular. But IIRC, most of the works concerned were still extant in the Byzantine Empire, and came to Latin Europe in the original Greek later on. And the Abbasid translation programme did not include much from Latin. However, it did include material from Persian, Syriac and Indian sources – among the last of which was the so-called “Arabic” numerals. And Arabic mathematicians and proto-scientists added a great deal of original work of their own – as well as the knowledge of how to make paper, originally derived from China.
Is this Laura Loomer just some racist mayfly or is she someone I need to remember? There are so many of them cast from the same template that I only recall those who manage to disgrace themselves in comic ways.
Museum of Bad Gifts an homage to the awkward, the unwanted and the inappropriate
@30, 36, 54
Russian tanker tugged to shore for suspected Baltic Sea sabotage was ‘loaded with spy equipment’
Man accused of attacking TV reporter, saying ‘This is Trump’s America now’
Newsweek: Russian Ship Full of Troops Breaks Down at Sea
This is in the allegedly category, the references I find to the story all point back to Ukrainian reports.
CBS News: Russian cargo ship sinks in the Mediterranean, leaving 2 crew missing
This makes 4 ships the Russians have lost in something like a month, they also lost 2 oil tankers recently. That starts to push things into the suspicious category. Russia is operating old ships with inadequate repair because of sanctions and the cost of the war but 4 ships in a short period of time seems like a pattern.
Since Russia seems to be using ships in international waters to cut communication lines, somebody might be taking some revenge on Russian ships.
Swedish politicians want to activate article four in the NATO membership rules after the broken sea cable incidents.
I want to cheer you up a bit with a film of rescue foxes.
“Jagger and Luka play with a Christmas toy in the snow”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=D9fDpbhdRSw
There are still good-hearted people around.
Re; birgerjohansson @ #173…
I thought I’d read that the Estonians were calling for that.
I am told Willem Dafoe is an excellent Van Helsing in Nosferatu. And Bill Skarsgård is no bad baddie either.
The problem with the 1979 Nosferatu is, now we know what Klaus Kinski did to his daughter.
@KG
.
I’m sure the Eastern Roman Empire had a few copies of various classical works in addition to the vast amount of extant literature held in Rome or Ravenna or Sienna.
By the same token, we have very little in the way of written records in the Frankish language because Vikings really liked raiding those Christian enclaves, stealing their manuscripts, burning their Abbey, and carrying off anyone they caught into slavery.
It simply is not true for most of the Pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature that we still have. Neither the Exeter Book or the Codex that contains Beowulf are the work of Christian copyists. They both contain some specifically Christian poems and references but the vellum is dated to about 1000 years old. The bulk of the poems are oral traditions which were memorized and retold by official skalds for hundreds of years before some anonymous scribe compiled them into an anthology.
They are meant to be heard, not read. If you want to give the copyists credit for maintaining a library it is warranted, although that is one of the basic functions of scriptoriums besides making more copies of basic church texts like prayer books and psalters. Of course Muspilli is Christianized, it was written in a monastery in the 900s long after the Dark Ages, but it contains the only version of the story in a OHG dialect and has clear parallels with Ragnorok despite being edited for Christian sensibilities.
None of the Icelandic material which comes from The Elder Edda is from a scriptorium, , and Snorri Sturlasson (who is Christian but not a monk) wrote the Younger Edda to preserve the tradition of Skaldic poetry.
It is quite obviously not preserved due to the efforts of Christian copyists.
I dont know enough ecclesiastical history to say which Pope made the possession of a penis mandatory to learning to read and write in Latin, but it doesn’t seem to have been followed on the Continent as it was in England. Hildegarde Von Bingen was writing scholarly works on medicine, and being a Saint by the 1100s iirc.
Ah, nepotism — fun for the whole family!
Allow me to offer this 2 minute presentation which communicates the concerns of the our organizations (which many might share)
http://omnigma.org/What_Future_Will_We_Face.mp4
And, to re-offer this short handcrafted audiovisual work to reduce the stress of those concerns
http://theartsinarizona.org/Contemplation_in_Apprehension_of_More_Devastation.mp4
@177 Tethys wrote:
@KG
historical fact that we owe most of what we have of classical and medieval writing to Christian copyists.
I reply: That is true, however, I have read reputable articles that said ‘in 273 AD, Roman Emperor Aurelian conquered Egypt . . and fearing the pagan temples within Egypt, Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria demanded that a mob of Egyptians destroy the temple at Serapis and the remains of the great library of Alexandria’
Followup to comment 163.
Link
So Trump is backing Musk on this issue.
Live updates: 179 killed in plane crash at South Korean airport
Portland men search for Sasquatch, die in Washington forest
It looks like Mike Johnson cannot take the backing from fellow Republicans for granted when the time comes soon to elect a speaker for the next period. And it is coming up very soon.
whheydt @ 175 so, soon there may be two NATO countries calling for that.
And as Asshole 45/47 has not yet been sworn in, he can do nothing to sabotage the process. It looks like little Vladimir was too impatient.
Bishop Teophilius had murdered Hypatia before destroying the library.
No ‘rizz’: School accused of banning Gen Alpha slang
Today is the fifth anniversary of the first cases of COVID.
The reasonable thing for the school would have been to ban insulting terms like fggot or wtback or b*tch. A general ban on non-approved vernacular will be too unwieldy to work, apart from the constitutional matter.
.
And that reminds me, Willem Dafoe – whom I mentioned some comments ago- was in the first Boondock Saints film, a movie full of homophobic slurs (not his fault, the rapist producer played a big role). This is a film that has not aged well. God Awful Movies even had an episode about it.
.
[Stream of consciousness kicks in]
Another GAM film : Trump 2024. I recommend you listen to that episode for some dark humour.
If that is too dark, try GAM 196 Alien Intrusion: Unmasking a deception.😄
Cartoon: Status symbols
Questions I have never asked:
Could a Sponge Made from Squid Bones Help Remove Microplastics?
Washington Post link
“Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza.”
“Years before the Gaza war, Israel transformed its intelligence unit into an AI testing ground, triggering a debate among top commanders about whether humans were sufficiently in the loop.”
More at the link.
“Building the Worst WW2 Air Force – Terrible Aircraft and How to Sell Them”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=g37zdE8jrg4
Imagine you want to sabotage the post-WWII air force of the hypothetical country Emutopia (Australia). How can you do that and get away with it? Welcome to the beautiful world of military procurement, where anything goes.
The described aircraft really existed, and while Australia never bought them the dirty tricks are from real life.
Former President Jimmy Carter dies at 100
“Carter had been receiving hospice care since February 2023 at his home in Plains, Georgia, where he lived with his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter.”
More at the link.
Late-night moments that helped us survive the 2024 sh-tshow
Videos and commentary at the link.
Text quoted above is part of a longer article that focuses on new from Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Finland.
Link
School chaplain killed in shark attack on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef
Sorry, God was busy influencing the outcome of a sportsball event at the time.
RCMP asks for help handling troubling number of kids radicalizing online
He faced charges for tearing down their Pride flag. The couple forgave him.
A sharp contrast to Jimmy Carter
.
“Matt Gaetz Scandal Gets WORSE as More Evidence Released”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=K7i23FuW4rA
There is no bottom. I suppose we should be grateful he was not into murder.
“Labour to End Fox Hunts Properly This Time”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=QY1qe-L8GNM
Fore some reason I do not feel sorry for the aristocrats.
TIL about Byron Looper
A Tennessee Democratic turned Republican politician. In 1996, to win Tax Assessor from a 14-year incumbent, he legally changed his middle name from “Anthony” to “(Low Tax)”, including the parentheses. He neglected his duties and did crimes ofc. For his 1998 campaign for state senate, against a 20-year incumbent, he assassinated his opponent Tommy Burks (D).
Wikipedia – Charlotte Burks
Cue yet more evidence being released.
In TikTok case, Trump’s lawyers cling to an unfortunate GOP myth
Video at the link.
Court upholds verdict in E. Jean Carroll’s case against Trump
Video at the link.
Trump’s former White House national security advisor made veiled threats against a NATO ally, taking the Greenland issue in a bizarre direction.
Video at the link.
Followup to comments 106 and 163.
Why did Trump struggle to quell the so-called MAGA “civil war”? Because he still, even now, hasn’t learned the basics of immigration policy.
Steve Bannon and other rightwing doofuses have called the disagreement a “war.” Lots of media outlets likewise.
Josh Marshall: Yep, There Are South Korean Joe Rogans and Roger Stones Too
Josh Marshall references an article in a Korean daily and he provides link for those that want more details.
@142
Chess Federation Changes Rules To Allow Jeans Amid Spat; Magnus Carlsen Returns
@195
When Jimmy Carter Spoke At a Wireless Tradeshow
This is pretty much exactly the line I’ve been saying Trump would likely take.
Stories you might have missed
Biden says Trump could learn ‘decency’ from Jimmy Carter in tribute address
The FauxNews version:
Biden shredded for calling on Trump to emulate ‘decency’ shown by Carter
One of the ‘craziest’ Congresses ever comes to an ignominious end
Embedded links to additional sources are available at the main link.
Followup to comments 106, 163, and 208.
Link
Followup to comments 106, 163, and 208.
Link
Good news: Biden announces nearly $2.5 billion more in military aid for Ukraine
History lesson regarding Trump’s use of visas to set up a sort of human trafficking and slave labor system:
Link to past reporting,
Re 197,
It’s been a while since I last looked at Daily Kos – the site is nearly unreadable due to pop-ups and heavy loading of the content. The linked article seems to be just a long collection of random social media quotes from pro-Ukraine accounts spreading and commenting on news stories and rumors of varying credibility and relevance.
The part relating to Finland, for example, quotes some random German NAFO fella citing Iltalehti, which is one of the two prominent tabloid newspapers in Finland. These two papers, while not entirely rubbish level in general, have a long track record of churning out endless sensationalist stories on Russia, Putin and in particular their relationship to Finland’s security. It’s basic fearmongering journalism, that in this context often serves to amplify Russian propaganda bluster.
In this case, some “NATO sources” supposedly claim that Russia “may” be preparing an attack on eastern NATO countries (as always), with a specific goal of reclaiming a slice of southeastern Finland that was part of Russia for a while after the area was annexed from Sweden in 1743. In 1811, since Russia had annexed also the main part of Finland from Sweden, the southeastern part, called Vyborg province, was attached to the Autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, which was a subject of the Russian Empire but not considered a part of Russia in proper sense. During WWII, most of the former Vyborg province was again annexed by Russia from independent Finland (and this time the annexed area was ethnically cleansed and resettled by ethnic Russians). The remaining part is still within Finland, and has never been specifically contested by Russia on the basis of the 1743 border treaty.
I heard a long while ago that Russian rightwing pundits and such might sometimes bring up the 1743 border in order to suggest that more of southeastern Finland ought to belong to Russia – or that Finns ought to at least be more grateful for their independence and current borders. Then again, same pundits might sometimes bring up the fact that entire Finland used to be a part of the Russian Empire, which is now considered to be as good as being a part of Russia. It’s the same level of casual bluster as “we ought to get Alaska back”. There’s a faint chance Russia might actually attack Finland one of these days, but it won’t be because of some old border grievance.
Announcing The Winners Of The 2024 Golden Duke Awards
I hope this link isn’t borked.
.
Former British PM Gordon Brown:
“My friend Jimmy Carter will be remembered long after other presidents are forgotten. Here’s why”
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/30/friend-jimmy-carter-remembered-statesmanship-public-service
lumipuna @219, thanks for that clarifying information.
In other news: Concerns grow after Israeli forces detain the director of besieged Gaza hospital
“Video captured outside Kamal Adwan Hospital shows its director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, walking toward a military vehicle along a street strewn with rubble and lined with destroyed buildings.”
More at the link.
Podcaster Geo Girl adressing the issue of different forms of tectonic activity.
“When Did Plate Tectonics Begin on Earth? (New Paper Alert!)”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=81KDvZ3B_ts
FTFY
@213
Germany accuses Elon Musk of trying to influence its election with endorsement of far-right party
The German government accused U.S. billionaire Elon Musk on Monday of trying to influence its election due in February with articles supporting the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, even though it suggested they amounted to “nonsense.”
Musk, who is set to serve Donald Trump’s new administration as an outside adviser, endorsed the AfD as Germany’s last hope in a guest opinion piece for the Welt am Sonntag newspaper that prompted the commentary editor to resign in protest.
“It is indeed the case that Elon Musk is trying to influence the federal election” with X posts and the opinion piece, a German government spokesperson said.
Musk is free to express his opinion, the spokesperson said, adding: “After all, freedom of opinion also covers the greatest nonsense.”
Musk, the world’s richest person, has defended his right to weigh in on German politics because of his “significant investments,” and has praised the AfD’s approach to regulation, taxes and market deregulation.
His intervention has come as Germans prepare to vote in a parliamentary election on Feb. 23, following the collapse of the coalition government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Musk also called for Scholz’s resignation after a car rammed into a crowd at a Christmas market on Dec. 20, killing five people…
Russian disinfo network “Matryoshka” is migrating to Bluesky as exodus from X continues
The Taliban say they will close all NGOs employing Afghan women
The Hill: Russia rejects Trump’s Ukraine peace proposals
The root cause is Ukraine not bending to Putin’s will. It’s going to be hard to negotiate that away.
Some really nice diplomatic doublespeak there. Putin wants to meet with Trump one on one without other parties to negotiate so Trump can be more easily manipulated and mislead. Notice also the broad context that implies that Russia is in control and may agree to negotiate if they choose and their desires are met. That Russia is in deep trouble and the situation is only going to get worse is conceptually off the board.
JM @228: “Putin wants to meet with Trump one on one without other parties to negotiate so Trump can be more easily manipulated and mislead.” Yes, I think that’s true.
Looks like Trump’s ‘love’ affair with Kim Jong Un is so over
Overstatement in the headline?
Lies, bluster, and emotional man-child responses from Trump. Bluster from the North Korean leadership? Open questions for sure. Watch what they do, not what they say.
Smith transfers Mar-a-Lago docs case to US attorney’s office
ABC’s version of the news:
Link
God Awful Movies 487.
Creepy guy with pedophile vibes dates journalist. And he believes Santa Claus is real.
Someone paid money to have this film made.
(I want to go back to the film where Chuck Norris played a supernatural dude keeping an eye on a town run by devil worshippers. That film was interesting )
‘Major incident’: China-backed hackers breached US Treasury workstations
Hey, remember the incident where X got banned in Brazil, and Brazil took the fine from Starlink, and some people claimed that Musk’s various companies were all independent?
Elon Musk eyes a deal with his native South Africa to let SpaceX offer Starlink service in exchange for a Tesla battery plant, report says
Someone ought to explain to them that that would roughly double Alaska’s population, which would both increase Alaska’s delegation in the House of Representatives and in the Electoral College and likely turn that state blue. Which, lessee here, carry the five … yep, would flip the House, given the razor-thin margin there post-election.
Meanwhile, what is going on with Canada’s NDP? Not only are they even more insistent on begging me for money than usual lately, they’ve stooped to making extortionate threats like “Want us to stop filling up your inbox with this shit? Then pay up”. And tonight they threw in one that was exceptionally whiny, “please, please can’t you spare just five lousy bucks, pweeeeeze?” (no, I can’t, as I lack a credit card, not to mention it would be like betting money on a horse that has come in second once in its entire racing career, never won, and usually places dead last).
And does anyone have any useful advice for taming some ill-mannered mobile apps? I normally use my desktop browser for everything web, as it has a lot of nice features including an ad blocker and oh, yeah, I can type properly at a normal speed while not squinting at everything through a keyhole there. However, there are some things I do that involve a mobile app, and that app has bugs and such, and I find it more comfortable to use phone apps while reclining on a couch but more comfortable to use a desktop PC in an upright office chair (keyboards are awkward unless sat at a desk, but using a phone at a desk entails either spending long stretches with an awkward neck-bent-down posture or else holding the phone up in a way that causes fatigue and discomfort in my arms). So, the app is used in the living room and the desktop PC in the study, and they’re like forty feet apart. To avoid extra inconvenient trips back and forth I use the Chrome on the phone, instead of my desktop Firefox, to visit that app’s support forums.
This, in turn, leads to two irritating consequences, besides the issues with typing and squinting when trying to use the web on mobile. First, even though I only use the one web site on that Chrome instance, I usually open it to find an extra tab open on the “new tab” page despite having closed it with only the one tab open; and once in a while, there are a whole bunch of new tabs open, usually to the websites of advertisers whose ads had come up in the other app (but whose ads I had not interacted with, save possibly to close them if necessary).
Is there any way to suppress this behavior and prevent Chrome from creating new tabs without an explicit user command telling it to do so?
Notably, it didn’t used to do this. It would reliably open right back up to where I’d left it, at that support site, with no extraneous additional tabs having spawned. Now it almost never does, usually coming up on an unwanted new tab on the new-tab page or an advertiser page, or else on the tab selection page with such extraneous tabs present in addition to the single tab I actually want to have.
The second side effect is that the Youtube app on the phone generates notifications, and those notifications are sometimes for interesting videos. So I will open these, watch them, and close the Youtube app after each one — it doesn’t tend to show any ads if used that way, thank goodness, though maybe only because the videos that pop up tend to be very short, rarely more than a couple of minutes.
What’s bugging me there is that it has wildly inconsistent behavior when a video concludes: sometimes it stops and waits for a user command (which tends to be “exit”, in my case); usually it loops to the start of the same video; but once in a while it just starts autoplaying a random, different video, which I may not have wanted to give my algorithmic endorsement to by viewing it. Is there a way to suppress that last, or best of all to set it to always stop and wait for instructions?
Two more inconveinences are mostly tied to the Youtube one. The ads in the other app frequently have sound, so I normally have the volume muted. However, I don’t want it muted for a Youtube video, in general. The phone seems to track exactly two volume levels, one governing the ringer and message/notification sounds and the other governing sounds in all apps. If I turn the sound off in the other app it will be mute at the start the next time a Youtube instance is opened; if I exit Youtube at full volume the other app will launch, the next time, with the audio at full volume. If I change the volume while it’s not in an app, it will change the “ringer/etc. volume” instead of the “app volume”. So I constantly have to change the volume after starting either app, and in Youtube’s case drag back to the start of the video after I’ve done so (that’s if it’s offering a seek bar that day, which seems to come and go at random instead of being consistent either way!) ,,, so: Is there any way to create additional “volume compartments” besides the existing “phone functions” and “by default, all other apps” ones? And is there any way to force the seek bar to always be available in the Youtube app?
Furthermore, the Youtube app has an additional issue. If there is a “smart” TV with internet access within some range, a subset of the video notifications will, if opened, not just open the YT app as usual but instead pop up a dialog asking if I want to “cast” it to whatever TV it’s detected. If this happens the video mentioned in the notification can’t be watched: if I say “no thanks” to the “cast” option, the app will open on my phone and play … some other video instead, seemingly randomly selected. I don’t know what would happen if I said “yes” to the cast option, though an irate neighbor banging on my door seems to be a not-too-implausible member of the potential-consequences set, and my actually seeing the intended video seems to be a very-implausible one. Try as I might, I have found no setting in either the phone OS or the Youtube app to deactivate this “cast” capability, and denying Youtube Internet access would obviously make it not work at all.
The phone also has a box on the desktop that shows miscellaneous news headlines, above a bit of weather info and the first rows of app icons. Tapping it to “click through” to a news story never worked properly for me (it would not bring it up on a news website in Chrome, but invariably try to launch other apps, specific to media organizations, that would then prompt for login credentials I don’t have or want me to go through some kind of setup process or otherwise fail to simply show me the news story in question) but I found it somewhat useful nonetheless just to read the headlines and get an early-in-the-day gist of what was happening in the world. This app was prone to freezes and glitches in the past, but a few months ago it developed a seemingly permanent failure. All it displays now is a notice that says that the app will be “unavailable” starting on some date in the summer of 2024. It mixed that in with the news for a while, but now it doesn’t display any news, only the “unavailable” message. And, of course, since it’s no longer available, I can’t fix this with a delete-and-reinstall. If I delete it, it’s presumably gone permanently. And meanwhile something has gotten screwed up under the hood, even though the news organizations whose feeds it polled still exist (duh, they’re major media organizations) so it should still work … aside from “clear cache” is there any way I might be able to reset this app without it needing to be still downloadable at the app store? Failing that, can anyone recommend a replacement that does work and is downloadable?
Oh, and one final thing: I just got hit with that BLASTED comment submission bug again. You know, where it says either “required fields missing: name, email” or “you must be logged in to comment” when you hit “post comment”, despite it saying “logged in as…” right there above the input field and not having a name or an email field to fill in. The only fix seems to be to log out and back in again, which is a huge nuisance. Is anyone ever going to fix this blasted bug?
“Is anyone ever going to fix this blasted bug?”
There is no bug. It’s your setup.
Astrophysiocist Dr Becky’s Top 5 space news stories of 2024 – 17 mins long.
Re: Bekenstein Bound @235:
You didn’t mention an OS. These answers will assume Android.
I’ve been using Fennec (Firefox) without incident. With the “uBlock Origin” extension.
I like NewPipe. No ads. Being a reverse-engineered third-party client, however, it sometimes breaks and takes a few days to recover when YouTube itself makes changes. It’s persevered for years.
Not on the Google Play store, of course. It is in the F-Droid repository for automatic updates, with some delay. The most timely arrangement is getting the apk directly from the devs’ site; NewPipe can send your browser directly to the latest apk when there’s an update. I personally then switch to my file manager app to install apks, out of caution, just to limit the permissions I give my browser.
The OS Settings sliders make explicit which volume you are adjusting. That screen also has a checkbox to make media adjustment the default when pressing the buttons, which might address your ringer primacy problem.
“Activity Manager” in the F-Droid repo can create a home icon shortcut to internal functions of other apps—such as the standard OS volume sliders buried in Settings. I wanted quick access to the sliders to avoid wearing out my hardware buttons.
[How to do it]: Launch “Activity Manager”, search “Settings” and tap it, scroll to Settings$SecVolumeSettingsActivity entitled “Volume”. Tapping that will launch it to see what you’ll get. Or Triple-dot will create the shortcut.
I’ve not seen an app that remembers and adjusts volume depending on which app is visible. I saw one that does it for rotation, so maybe “app specific” media volume is possible? I don’t use the Google Play store. It’s definitely not a standard OS feature.
F-Droid’s “Apk Extracter” dumps an installed app’s apk to storage, so you can keep a copy to install it again. It’s really old though. “APK Explorer & Editor” is WAY overpowered for your needs but probably can do that too.
Unfamiliar with those. Sorry. Maybe the apk trick above will get it running again until next summer. I use a browser bookmark to check the weather via a DuckDuckGo search.
On FtB? I’ve never had that. Just an involuntary logout avery few weeks, which is presumaby a security feature.
I wonder if your bug has to do with HOW you login. Blogs here use a WordPress plugin to allow logging in with accounts from elsewhere. Yahoo, for instance, ceased to be a viable login method ages ago. You can create an account on FtB if you haven’t already.
shermanj@180,
This – possibly because of your ellipsis – squeezes together two events more than a century apart. Aurelian of course was a pagan; Egypt had been under Roman rule for 3 centuries by the time he “conquered” it. Theophilus was certainly instrumental in getting the Serapeum destroyed in 391 CE, but by that date there was probably no library there.
The Great Myths: The Destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria.
tl/dr: Libraries then as now needed a constant flow of funds to maintain their collections, which were not always forthcoming, and Alexandria was sacked a number of times, beginning with Julius Caesar in 47 BCE. It’s unclear how long there were significant collections of scrolls either in the main library or in the Serapeum.
On the larger point, once it had or was associated with state power, the Church sometimes promoted secular knowledge and innovation, sometimes destroyed or obstructed it, sometimes appeared indifferent. History is complicated. But the fact remains that it was in Catholic Europe, while the Church was at the height of its power, that the foundations of modern science, mathematics, and scholarship were laid – partly through indigenous innovation, partly through an unusual openness to importing and adapting knowledge and techniques from elsewhere.
Tethys@177,
It’s amusing how completely you undermine your own claims here.
1) The Exeter book dates from the late 10th century CE, so the probability must be that the scribe was Christian, and likely a monk or nun. It was presented to Exeter Cathedral by Leofric, the first Bishop of Exeter, in 1071.
2) Since 2 of the 5 works in the Nowell Codex concern explicitly Christian subjects (a life of St. Christopher and a retelling of the Book of Judith – well, that could be regarded as Jewish rather than Christian) along with Beowulf, the likelihood is that it was written by Christians (there was more than one scribe) – and the likely date, around 1000 CE, points in the same direction.
3) As you say: “Of course Muspilli is Christianized, it was written in a monastery in the 900s long after the Dark Ages”.
4) The Elder Edda, in the form we have it, dates from 13th century Iceland. Iceland formally became Christian by a decision of the Althing in 999 or 1000 CE, so by the 13th century it’s highly probable that the Codex Regius scribe was Christian.
5) As you say, Snorri Sturlasson was a Christian. He apparently wrote the Younger Edda around 1220, but it’s known only from later manuscripts and fragments, dating between 1300 and 1600 – again, presumably copied by… Christians.
So assuming you’re right that there was such an edict, it wasn’t enforced.
The simple fact is, as the above demonstrates, that we in European or European-derived cultures are the cultural heirs of centuries of Christianity. We don’t have to believe Christian nonsense, or excuse the many examples of horrific oppression and persecution carried out by Christian individuals and institutions; and we don’t know how much pre-Christian knowledge and writing was deliberately destroyed; but denying that what was preserved, was largely preserved by Christian individuals and institutions, is either ignorant or dishonest.
Huh?
Population of Alaska: 733391
Population of Greenland: 56583
The way I handle this is to start another tab, log back to the freethought.com site with it, then re-submit my comment in the first tab. It’s an inconvenience, but a rather minor one.
Why China Is Building a Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor
China Shows Off New World’s Fastest Bullet Train
Florida Is Finally Getting Its Radioactive Road
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sends condolences to Jimmy Carter’s late wife
Puerto Rico plunges into darkness as power outage hits more than 1.3 million customers on New Year’s Eve
After his presidency, Jimmy Carter made eradicating Guinea worm disease top mission
Dave Barry Year in Review: 2024 was an exciting year, and by ‘exciting,’ we mean ‘stupid’
9 countries said goodbye to a devastating disease in 2024, Gabrielle Emanuel, NPR, December 30, 2024.
Link
10 Million Trees To Be Planted in US To Replace Ones Destroyed By Hurricanes
If it takes them 4 years to repair 1 year of damage, it doesn’t seem like they would ever be caught up.
US levels sanctions on entities in Iran, Russia over attempted election interference
Putin says he saved Russia, but a year of challenges suggests Moscow’s position is precarious
The link above is to a Washington Post article.
“Marking 25 years in office, Vladimir Putin says he has remade Russia as a sovereign power and will prevail in Ukraine, but economic and strategic setbacks complicate the picture.”
Link
‘I Think That’s Absurd, I Think It’s Dumb’: Patrick McHenry Lets Loose
“The retiring Republican reflects on the Republican insurgents he left behind.”
Link
More statistics for Medicare Part D enrollees are available at the link
Let’s see if this link works…
A reminder about Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter
.http://youtube.com/post/Ugkx6ZOJrlRtWTQNBVHu36LEr9IjTzDaIB2P
Myself @ 260
“Jimmy Carter lost in 1980 because Ronald Reagan comitted treason by negotiating with Iran to not release the hostages until after the election.”
Britain: Conservative Newspaper Express Exposed Another Brexit Lie Today
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=TfeIkB2A7aw
EU did not cause immigration, Brit Conservative policy did (and still does)
[But the people who voted for Brexit and the Conservatives will not change their minds, they still get their information from the same liars]
If you want the context, follow the link.
“My husband and I … we went to Toronto to take a class on how to stuff rats,” she said. “We’ve never done that on a date night before.”
@257 Lynna, OM
That is repeating a Republican talking point. Even at the best of times Congress can’t lay down every bit of regulation, it has always delegated some of the detailing of the rules to the executive branch. Congress shouldn’t be writing laws that spell out the details of food safety laws, they should specify which government department is responsible for food safety, lay out some general guidelines and let the department work out the nitty detail bits. Some of the people that push this point are libertarian types trying to cripple the ability of the government to regulate anything by making Congress directly pass every little detail as a law. Post office wants to issue holiday stamps? Nope that is a decision for Congress and Congress has to approve the stamp designs, set the dates for when they are for sale and so on.
The presidency has been taking too much power recently but it isn’t because Congress has delegated it away, it’s because Congress has been too deadlocked to do anything. They can barely pass laws to keep the government running, I don’t know when they last passed an actual budget. The president has been doing more then he should just to keep the country running. If Congress was functional they could pass laws to supersede almost any executive order they don’t like.
“Free of corruption”: How a Maine ballot initiative could help get dark money out of politics
US Army Soldier Arrested In AT&T, Verizon Extortions
Venom Destroys Mexican Gangsters – Full Opening Scene – VENOM 3
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=XJRknpIP_Hk
“I’m not gonna stop speaking. I’m doing this for your benefit. You are going to find all these dogs nice, loving families, or…”
JM @263: “That is repeating a Republican talking point. ”
Yes. Yes it is. The guy who said that is a Republican, and he spouted a bunch of Republican talking points. I still found the report/interview interesting because even a guy like that can come to the conclusion that, “I think this is the dumbest thing I’ve seen. And then I think, “Wait a second, the institution’s trapped.”
These points from you are well said:
Trump’s team has this ironic request of Cabinet nominees
Musk is not a cabinet nominee. Maybe Wiles intended to include Musk in this part: “I am reiterating that no member of the incoming administration or Transition speaks for the United States or the President-elect himself.”
https://www.wonkette.com/p/hello-i-vladimir-putin-had-great
“Hello! I, Vladimir Putin, Had Great Year Killing People And Watching America Decline!”
“New Year’s greetings from Moscow.”
California Grid Ran On 100% Renewables For a Record 98 Days
Chief Justice John Roberts: Courts’ independence under threat from violence
I’m just not feeling the sympathy.
Outgoing North Carolina governor commutes 15 death row sentences
Ukraine hits Russian oil depot in Smolensk region
@Sky Captain thanks. I use my google account to login. I try to avoid creating new accounts as much as I possibly can, not least so I don’t have to juggle too many username/password combinations.
@Reginald Selkirk: Hence why I said roughly double. With the new batch being a bunch of progressive Danes whose idea of a right-wing party probably lies well to the left of the Dems.
Would not be good news for House Republicans if that happened. :)
Like bribery-by-gifts-of-superyacht-vacations?
10,9, 8, 7..3, ,2,1 AULD LANG SYNE ON BAGPIPES!!! HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
Anton Petrov’s latest news on about the TRAPPIST 1 System and Its Planets a baker’s dozen of minutes long.
Elon Musk changes his name to Kekius Maximus
That is NOT derived from ‘cacare’
At least 10 killed in New Orleans after driver ‘intentionally’ rams into crowd on Bourbon Street
Ceremonies mark full membership of Bulgaria and Romania in Europe’s Schengen travel zone
10 people injured after toy display falls at New Year’s Eve event in Massachusetts arcade
Reginald Selkirk @ 280
So now Bulgaria and Romania can move around most of Europe with far greater ease than Britons. Good Job, tories!
“When the Government Makes You Get a Surname”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=58u5Sa-UVi0
This example is fron Sweden, and, partly, Denmark. Of course, non-engish immigrants to USA often had their surnames messed up by immigration officials who wanted the spelling to be more english.
.
The part about adopting made-up names: There are criteria that limits the choices. I have never heard of anyone allowed to take the name Satansson. If I could, I would trade my old surname for ‘Bloodaxe’.
Or b’Stard, like the Brit MP Alan b’Stard in The New Statesman.
Russian propaganda video shows Santa Claus blown out of the sky by Russian missiles
Lynna, OM @ 269
As I completely failed to find good news for January 1st, your comment helped me to cheer up a bit.
Plane crashes at Naples Airport early Wednesday
Virginia man arrested as agents find largest cache of ‘finished explosive devices’ in FBI history
Robert Reich:
“The 20 realities of the American system (before Trump gets a second crack at wrecking it even more)”
https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/the-20-realities-of-the-american?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Associated Press: At least 10 dead after truck intentionally rams into crowd in New Orleans
Re: Reginald Selkirk @287:
Odd phrase. Search engines only turn up those words in THAT story’s specific quote. Someone might’ve misheard “or”? Because a freezer would cause temperature changes going in and coming out.
CBS
Wikipedia – Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine
National Counterterrorism Center
Political cartoon: https://x.com/Cartoon4sale/status/1874184238612046062
Also available here:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/1/2294650/-APR-cartoons-for-New-Year-s-Day
Ukraine stops transport of Russian gas to Europe
https://www.wonkette.com/p/2024-actual-person-of-the-year-kamala
“2024 Actual Person Of The Year: Kamala Harris”
“Time Magazine can give it to Trump like they gave it to Hitler and Stalin.”
https://www.wonkette.com/p/2024-shitheel-of-the-year-elon-musk
“2024 Shitheel Of The Year: Elon Musk”
Embedded links to sources are available at the main link.
Dear Lynna, thank you for all your work on the infinite thread. You, and most of the commenters, make this an important and trusted source for information (much better than the main slime news). You have our best wishes for the new year.
Welcome to the death spiral of the untied states. (that is too a word, it’s in our dictionary) Here’s your mass murder event of the day.
This country is in a societal death spiral. The main slime news (owned by billionaires) and our corrupt self-serving politicians do not even stop to ponder the possible causes.
My organization has studied people and events and it becomes clear to us that financial, political and social inequality is at an all time high. This has driven people to despair, ennui, depression and too many feel that with nothing left to lose, they might as well resort to violence. And, they are! look around at the homelessness, school shootings and people driving into crowds.
The ‘statistics’ that say ‘murders’ are down are likely deceitful. There are many ways they can (and likely do) ‘re-characterize’ murder: as manslaughter, as accidental, etc.
Be careful, everyone, in this ever more volitile political and societal world, we need to be aware of all the potential circumstances that could (and will) put us at risk.
the (ose) Orange Sack of Excrement has proclaimed that he will attend J. Carter’s funeral. That arrogant narcissist probably didn’t ask permission of the Carter family. Jimmy Carter publicly communicated many times how much he despised the ose. WTF!
“Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine” reminded me of an old chemistry column.
Things I Won’t Work With – Peroxide Peroxides
* A blog redesign removed category filtering, so I gotta use Wayback to link that series as a whole.
* HMTD only has pairs of oxygen, but three of those pairs (triperoxide), each pair forming a line of longitude on a globe converging on a nitrogen at each pole.
@279
Suspect in Bourbon St. attack identified, had ISIS flag in truck, report says
@279, 298
New Orleans attack updates: 10 dead, dozens injured after vehicle plows into crowd on Bourbon Street
I presume it should have been or. I just cut and pasted what was there.
Tesla Cybertruck catches fire Trump hotel in Las Vegas
The events in New Orleans cause me to wonder about this.
War in Ukraine grinds on
Forbes: As Russian Troops Head For Kursk, Ukraine’s HIMARS Rockets Meet Them Halfway
Over the past month the Russians have slowed other advances to a halt and moved troops to assist in retaking Kursk. The Russians are making slow progress but at great costs. Only human wave attacks have sometimes made progress and all attacks have taken heavily casualties. The reason the Ukrainians have been able to hold on is better intelligence and long range weapons. The Russians are taking risks every time they move troops and the Ukrainians always know about assaults before they happen.
No matter the original reason for taking land in Kursk it’s now become about American politics and eventual negotiations. Russia is hoping that if they can carry on for a few more months then Trump will cut funding to Ukraine and Ukraine will be forced to negotiate. The Russians are pushing everything into Kursk because they want to reclaim the land before opening negotiations to end the war, for the same reason the Ukrainians are now determined to hold on to it.
Yahoo: One Ship Inspection Could Unravel Global Maritime Shipping || Peter Zeihan
I have not found any confirmation of this and Zeihan is talking about what the governments plan to do, but if it goes full bore it will really matter. The north east Atlantic nations are apparently planning to change to a more aggressive enforcement of shipping law. Ships coming to or from Russia would be checked to see if they are following the law and either turned back or possibly seized if violating the law. This will become an international matter when a ship that doesn’t have a Russian flag runs into this.
What happens then is unclear. Zeihan is most likely over stating the situation when he talks about the collapse of the current global trade system. There is a good chance there will be an unspoken agreement that it will just apply to the current situation and won’t spread. Even in the context of the war in Ukraine it will matter though because it will cut Russia off from black market supplies or make it more awkward/expensive to use them.
Sherman @295:
Thank you for the note of appreciation. Good way to start off the New Year!
Cartoon: Few are welcome
Economy.
“How ‘Dutch Disease’ is Destroying Russia”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=L5V42L6jBEE
If the deep-seated economic problems of Russia finally come to a chrisis, I hope it will be a system collaps that takes down the whole rotten structure, along with the oligarchs.
Putin himself is a very small man that can be replaced by any of a multitude of thugs.
Followup to Reginald @287:
Text quoted above is from the New York Times.
Somebody saw something and said something. A stroke of luck.
Sherman @ 295
I agree wholeheartedly. It must take a lot of work and dedication to keep the infinite thread flowing.
FBI says it thwarted apparent plot against AIPAC
Followup to Reginald @298:
Link
@279, 298, 299 New Orleans
link
So they did postpone the game after all.
Sugar Bowl in New Orleans postponed in wake of truck ramming attack where 10 killed, at least 30 injured
“The No. 2 Georgia Bulldogs were scheduled to meet the No. 3 Notre Dame Fighting Irish in the annual college football game that has been played since 1935.”
Video at the link.
Reginald @311, Jabbar was also a U.S. Army veteran.
A small look at the differences in musical taste.
“Hits In Sweden, Flops In The U.K.”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=SklknM-r-3g
BTW the refusal of the music industry and media to let Tina Charles take up more place on TV / video in the 1970s because she did not fit the ultra-slim ideal is goddamn criminal.
If you look at the stars right now, you will find Venus shone very strongly after sunset, with Jupiter almost a quarter of the sky away to the left. It is possible Jupiter may not have risen far enough to be easily spotted from your position.
A bit later in the evening Jupiter will be the brightest remaining point of light with the much fainter Aldebaran in Taurus a short bit away below and to the right.
Orion will be almost straight below Jupiter, with Betelgeuse and Rigel brightest, and Orion’s ‘belt’ in between.
Mars will now be prominent in the sky as it rises a substantial distance the the left of Jupiter. Pollux and Castor in Gemini is a short way up and to the right. The bright star Procyon (of Canis Minor) will be below and to the right.
If you have binoculars and know where to look you can find M1 -the Crab Nebula – not far from Mars.
I saw Jupiter, Mars and Orion looking quite impressive a couple nights ago. Now there’s again snow on the ground, and the Moon is growing, so it won’t be nearly as dark when/if clear skies return.
Great! Just what we needed, I mass casualty event that Trump can harp on to justify the new cruelties he’s going to inflict on us.
KG @ 242
Again, the reason that there is a gap in our written primary sources known as The Dark Age is primarily due to the social upheaval of the genocides and wars instigated by the forced conversion of much of Continental Europe to Roman Catholic Christianity. Speaking of dishonesty, I note you moved the goalposts from Christian Monks/ copyists to Christian individuals. It is hard to write books if you are dead, especially in a world that lacks paper or the notion of reading for pleasure.
Codex Regius literally means Kings Book. It’s my favorite source, it’s written in Old Norse, and there is no reason to presume that it was written by Christians or care if it was made in an Abbey.
The Norse Kings had an official Góði for centuries before the position evolved to be Christian monks. The medieval conversion of Iceland is well documented, it’s at least 500 years after the upheaval of the Dark Ages. Literacy was never limited to priests in Iceland.
The association between education and religious centers long predates Christianity, and Rome. Libraries were not invented by the people who were tasked (usually by the king) with creating and maintaining a library. Books were bespoke luxury goods, and making vellum or running scriptoriums were a lucrative source of income for the Abbey.
I am bemused that you believe that Christians somehow
preserved European literature and history despite the well documented destruction and wars wrought by them, and the existence of plenty of secular historians and writers everywhere except Northern Europe.
Here is an example from Ibn Khordadbeh, who is not Christian or European but still managed to write a history in 870 which we still have, concerning Jewish traders from what is now France.
Take a look at the various trade networks circa 870 that stretch from Francia all the way to China and India.
The Vikings werent the only non-Christian people who were heavily involved in trade.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radhanite
Lindt wins imitation case against Aldi
God Awful Movies
“GAM 487 I Believe In Santa”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=ezPeSEgF0vI
Cara Santa Maria from ‘Talk Nerdy’: “How does it keep getting worse?”
.
Heath chickened out from this abomination but Noah and Eli apparently blackmailed Cara Santa Maria to watch yet another abomination.
MAGA congresswoman Nancy Mace accidentally celebrated Donald Trump losing big in court, because she did not know what it meant that the court ‘upheld’ the verdict.
Interview with next-door neighbor to Airbnb rented by New Orleans truck attack suspect
Lodging with Airbnb? Truck rental through Turo? This was one Internet-aware terrorist.
Emma Thorne on Youtube laughs her way through hate comments.
This reminds me of Ed Brayton’s blog, where he posted the hate mail aimed at Mikey at the organisation for fighting religious discrimination in the services – plenty of atrocious spelling.
“Reading Hate Comments!”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=BBQXzL1EG6c
Pineapples Officially Banned on Cruises – Here’s Why
@299, 322 Las Vegas
Cybertruck that exploded and truck in New Orleans attack rented on same app: Sources
Possibly an EV battery fire was intended to enlarge the pyrogenic capacity.
“NASA/NOAA satellite shows Moon passing behind Earth”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=kUQKRFsbSR8
In these images where Earth is in the same frame it is very clear how dark the lunar surface is compared to the Earth.
Fox losing one billion dollars?
The odd sound you hear is me purring like a cat.
“Fox BLINDSIDED by SURPRISE Evidence DISCOVERY?!?”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=MTLwXBDr1oE
Hey Trump you moron, you’re supposed to wait until AFTER the inauguration to stage a Reichstag fire!
https://www.wonkette.com/p/scourge-of-the-year-generative-ai
2024 Scourge Of The Year: Generative AI
Pressed for answers, Trump pretends he didn’t flip-flop on key immigration policy
More (including video of Trump’s public statements in 2016, 2020 and 2024) available at the link.
Within hours of the New Year’s attack in New Orleans, [Trump] simultaneously flunked tests of accuracy, decency and credibility.
Rep. Eric Burlison, a Republican representing Missouri, said on Newsmax:
Commentary:
Link
Link
Man who died in Tesla Cybertruck explosion was active-duty Army soldier
Tethys@318,
Evidence for this claim? I don’t mean for the genocides and wars, on which we agree – I mean for the primary written sources which were lost thereby.
If someone copies a book (or any other piece of writing), they are a copyist, so your accusation of dishonesty is just silly. It is of course impossible to write anything if you’re dead, but your correct observation that non-Christianised Europe lacked paper and the concept of reading for pleasure rather undermines your apparent belief that there was a great treasure-trove of non-Christian written sources which the Christians destroyed.
It’s dated to the 1270s, nearly 3 centuries after Iceland became officially Christian. That’s the reason to presume that it was written (or more likely copied from one or more earlier manuscripts) by a Christian (it’s in a single hand), particularly if it was made in an abbey. The copyist could have been a secret pagan, or Jew, or atheist, Muslim, Buddhist… or even an open one – although that would rather contradict your emphasis (with which I agree) on the intolerance of Christian churches through most of their history – but the likelihood is that they were indeed a Christian.
I’m bemused by your bemusement at my acceptance of a near-universal consensus among relevant experts that while much was lost, and some deliberately destroyed, what was preserved depended for that preservation on Christians copying it.
I’d be interested to learn of the European history and literature preserved by Ibn Khordadbeh – or by the Radhanites. I assume you’re referring to Ibn Khordadbeh’s Kitāb al-Masālik wa-l-Mamālik (“Book of Roads and Kingdoms”), which was a geography of trade routes rather than a history, except with regard to pre-Islamic Persia. I’m well aware of the pre-modern trade networks stretching from Europe to China, but the general opinion of writers from the Muslim world (through which European literature or history would have needed to pass to reach anywhere else, at any time between the Muslim and the Mongol conquests) appears to have been that there was little or nothing in the way of either history or literature worth writing about in non-Muslim Europe other than the “Byzantine Empire”* – see Bernard Lewis The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982) – which might be more accurately titled The Muslim Lack of Interest in Europe.
Finally, a question which you should be able to answer: which non-Christians preserved literary works in Latin or in the vernacular languages of Latin Europe, or accounts of the history of Latin Europe during the period 500-1500 CE, which did not depend at some stage on Christian copyists? I’m sure European Jews have preserved accounts of their own history, and works within their own religious tradition; and there are (often inaccurate) fragments from Muslim writers; but those exceptions aside, I can’t think of any. So, this is your opportunity to enlighten me.
*Which both the inhabitants of that state themsevles, and their Muslim neighbours, referred to as “Rome”.
Followup to comment 333.
Link
https://www.wonkette.com/p/biden-giving-liz-cheney-a-fancy-medal
“Biden Giving Liz Cheney A Fancy Medal Today, So That’ll Make Trump’s Butt Itch”
Washington Post link
Link
USA Today: Man who rented Cybertruck that exploded in Las Vegas a Green Beret, official says
Britain:
“Another Braverman [Conservative] Masterclass in Humiliation”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=VIlEOicwvMI
I needed this. “The Italian -Turkish border” 😄
Top secret lab develops atomic clock using quantum technology
Los Alamos National Laboratory Researchers Develop Liquid Semiconductor Lasers Employing Colloidal Quantum Dots
“Republican Lawmaker Admits Mike Johnson Doesn’t Have The Votes To Be Speaker (Of The House) ”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=KBLR6zsEjKA
ROFL
The book of revelation is dated to ca. 95 AD (reference to Domitian) making it clear that the author John of Patmos was not a contemporary of Jesus.
Addendum
Wikipedia: “…most scholars agree that all three epistles were written by the same author and that the epistles did not have the same author as the Book of Revelation”.
So we already have apochrypal sources.
Born in Vancouver, the Peter Principle explains why your boss is incompetent. Here’s why it still resonates
Los Angeles Times
“Landmark report calls for national effort to curb groundwater depletion”
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-12-20/white-house-groundwater-report
Six Questions for Brooke Harrington on the Utopian Dream of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to Create a Broligarchy Where Billionaires Rule Like Pharaohs
Why Marjorie Taylor Greene’s latest political target matters
Video at the link: a congressman talks about how incompetent Marjorie Taylor Greene is, but that we also need to push back against her crazy/stupid ideas.
Josh Marshall:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-on-the-cybertruck-incident
Pelosi returns to DC after hip surgery in Germany
https://www.wonkette.com/p/is-trump-scared-nobody-coming-to
“Is Trump Scared Nobody Coming To Inauguration, Is That What This Extra Rally Is About?”
At least 10 shot outside Queens nightclub as multiple gunmen open fire
“Authorities say there is no nexus to terror and all of the victims are expected to survive.”
Reuters:
New York Times:
Twelve people killed in Montenegro mass shooting
What we know about the victims of the New Orleans truck attack
“Fourteen people were killed and more than two dozen injured when a driver crashed a pickup truck into crowds on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, authorities said.”
Here’s an article:
Scientists predict an undersea volcano eruption near Oregon in 2025
Elon Musk faces UK backlash after boosting far-right activist Tommy Robinson
X owner and Donald Trump ally accused of spreading “poison” after he backs jailed activist.