…instructions for toothpicks [DOT 18/6/23]

…so I’m kinda wondering…what constitutes legitimate speculation

This is insane. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) says all American citizens should be “deputized” and be given “a bounty” for every “undercover” law enforcement officer and “Antifa” member they identify in the January 6 insurrection footage. (@patriottakes) pic.twitter.com/4BVvWveQXc

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) June 17, 2023

…because I’m inclined to think that compared to that reach…it’s kind of a modest one to wonder if there’s some diagnosable issues going on with gosar the gosarian, there…I’m not saying he’s possessed by a demon from an alternate plane of existence necessitating a call the ghostbusters & possibly an incident with a giant marshmallow entity…but…something’s going on there…& he for sure isn’t a well man…not that he’s alone in that

I’m happy to come on and clear the air. I respect you and your show. I don’t want an adversarial relationship, I think we can work well together

— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) June 18, 2023

…one man’s “that might not be helpful” is another man’s gotcha

This platform is the PvP of social media. Other sites are like a baby with a pacifier.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 18, 2023

…&…not all speculation is idle…or harmless

Explicative of this. pic.twitter.com/NsXvuiER0d

— Victoria Brownworth (@VABVOX) June 17, 2023

…so…it’s not like everything is going the way the assholes want it to

Tennessee Democrats expelled over protests win primaries for their old seats [NBC]

…though it ain’t for lack of trying

Texas Gov. Abbott signs law shutting diversity offices at public universities [NBC]

…but

‘More extreme, more violent’: experts’ warning over khaki-clad Patriot Front [Guardian]

…some of them aren’t too proud to hide behind a doctor’s note

The trial of a lawyer for the far-right Oath Keepers extremist group will be delayed so she can get treatment she needs to be mentally competent to stand trial, a judge decided Friday.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/oath-keepers-lawyers-trial-delayed-competency-treatment

…but modern medicine can perform some miraculous shit

Cancer is the second-leading cause of death in the United States, behind heart disease. By year’s end, it’s expected to kill more than 600,000 Americans. Yet even some of the most fearsome cancers today are increasingly survivable — provided they’re addressed with care and vigilance that may span months to years to a lifetime.

[…] For many of them, cancer has become less an imminent threat than a chronic illness, serious but not necessarily deadly.

[…]
For some types of cancers, the progress is even more impressive. The mortality rate for lung cancer — the leading cause of cancer deaths — has dropped 58 percent since 1990 in men and 36 percent since 2002 in women. Breast cancer is another striking success story, with a 43 percent drop from 1989 through 2020. So is melanoma, with death rates between 2011 and 2020 falling by about 5 percent a year for adults younger than 50 and 3 percent for those older than 50.
[…]
Among all these developments, Norton says he’s most impressed by the rise of immunotherapy, a treatment strategy that alters and enlists a person’s immune system to help fight the disease. Initially controversial, the treatment dates back to the late 1800s but began gaining widespread acceptance in the early 1980s. […]

Over the past 30 years, as medical progress has made some cancers less lethal, there has also been a dramatic rise in the incidence of some cancers in young people, including cancer of the breast, colon, esophagus, kidney, liver and pancreas. As the number of survivors increases — and their age decreases — the pressure for change is mounting.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/06/17/cancer-treatment-advances-chronic-disease/

…it’s

US rightwing group planned $6m for anti-trans messaging in 2022 midterms [Guardian]

…well they tell me it’s a numbers game

The White House and Congress recently agreed to claw back more than $20 billion earmarked for the Internal Revenue Service. This deal was, ostensibly, part of a grand bargain to reduce budget deficits.

Unfortunately, it’s likely to have the opposite effect. Every dollar available for auditing taxpayers generates many times that amount for government coffers — and the rate of return is especially astonishing for audits of the wealthiest Americans, according to new research shared exclusively with The Post.

A team of researchers at Harvard University, the University of Sydney and the Treasury Department examined internal IRS data for approximately 710,000 in-person audits from 2010 to 2014. Here’s what they found:

And even those eye-popping numbers understate how much money we’re leaving on the table by not fully enforcing tax law. That’s because the biggest bang for the buck comes from what happens well after the audit concludes.

In the years after a taxpayer gets audited, they start paying much more in taxes voluntarily. Maybe, post-audit, they stop taking some dodgy deductions (counting a personal car as a business expense, for example). Or they start reporting income they had previously accepted off the books.
[…]
These additional taxes equal about three times the revenue raised from the initial audit, on average, over the 14 years of data the researchers had access to. So in other words, the biggest returns from doing more audits come from deterrence effects. (That’s why, incidentally, the IRS has historically publicized its big tax fraud cases in the weeks before Tax Day, when most Americans are filing their returns.)
[…]
So what do these numbers tell us about Congress’s decision to claw back money from the IRS? They suggest that existing projections for long-term costs likely underestimate the massive hole this policy will blow into federal budgets.

Usually the Congressional Budget Office (among other scorekeepers) assumes relatively modest effects on voluntary compliance from ramping up IRS enforcement. Again, the authors instead find the opposite, that the long-term deterrence effects are huge, much larger than the upfront bounty that comes from the audits themselves.
[…]
They looked at the consequences of the huge cuts to the IRS’s enforcement budget that began in 2010. Audit rates plummeted (by about 40 percent overall, within four years), but the agency did not cut back on the audits with the lowest ROI. Instead, for whatever reason, it cut a lot of the highest bang-for-the-buck audits. Based on the agency’s past prioritization of audits, and the way its internal costs are structured, the authors found no evidence of diminishing marginal returns.

For every additional dollar spent auditing people in the top decile of the income distribution, the government can expect to get 12 times that amount back.

Twelve! As any tax-dodging billionaire can attest: It’s pretty hard to beat that return on investment.
[…]
Now, it’s reasonable to worry that a newly flush IRS might not actually concentrate its additional dollars on the highest-ROI audits. Audits of millionaires (and megacorporations) have dramatically declined in recent years, according to data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
[…]
In any case, the revenue Congress just agreed to leave on the table by rescinding $20 billion from IRS’s long-term budget could be substantial. Based on that 12 to 1 multiplier found in this study for marginal returns from auditing high earners, that could mean Congress just gave up about $240 billion in revenue, for a net cost to the budget of $220 billion ($240 billion – $20 billion cut from IRS budget = $220 billion).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2023/irs-enforcement-costs-congress-funding/

…one thing leads to another

In his speech at the Republican convention in 2016, Donald Trump spoke of the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, where a man with jihadist sympathies murdered 49 people. “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our L.G.B.T.Q. citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” he said.

At the time, this sort of rhetoric was common among Trump and his allies, who fashioned themselves in the mold of European right-wing populists, demonizing Muslims as a threat to hard-won Western sexual freedoms. Perhaps the hottest ticket at that year’s Republican National Convention was an L.G.B.T.Q. party called Wake Up! where the Dutch politician Geert Wilders warned about Shariah law in front of a photo exhibition featuring skinny, shirtless boys in MAGA hats, called “Twinks for Trump.” The photographer behind that exhibition, a reactionary libertine named Lucian Wintrich, briefly served as the White House correspondent for the far-right website The Gateway Pundit.

Seven years later, as the battle against wokeness has supplanted the war on terror in the right-wing imagination, conservative sympathies are reversing. “Republicans are wooing Muslim voters by promising to protect them from L.G.B.T.Q. rights advocates whose demands conflict with their faith,” David Weigel reported in Semafor this week. The Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who once called for banning Muslim immigration from the Middle East, recently ran a sympathetic segment about Muslim parents in Maryland who want their kids to be exempt from reading books with L.G.B.T.Q. characters or themes. “Us Catholics and other Christians, other people of faith, have been waiting for the Muslims to step up on this issue,” Ingraham told her guest, a Muslim father and activist named Kareem Monib.

On Wednesday, a Gateway Pundit article celebrated the all-Muslim City Council in Hamtramck, Mich., which voted to ban all but five flags from flying on city property — a move widely seen as targeting Pride flags. “The revolt against the radical L.G.B.T.Q.I.+ takeover of the U.S. won another battle this week,” the article crowed.

This nascent alliance between conservative Christians and Muslims marks the resurrection of a right-wing project that was derailed, for a time, by the Sept. 11 attacks. Back in the 1990s, American conservatives founded a group called the World Congress of Families in an effort to unite pious traditionalists from across the globe against the forces of secular modernity. Before the attacks on the World Trade Center, they’d been planning simultaneous conferences in Mexico City and Dubai. After the attacks, those plans fell apart and cooperation between right-leaning Christians and Muslims became more fraught, though it continued in international bodies like the United Nations.
[…]
Now, however, the backlash against what’s sometimes called gender ideology is so strong that it’s creating space for strange new political bedfellows. Consider, for example, the political journey of the writer Asra Nomani.

A former foreign correspondent, Nomani had been close to Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. After his killing, she became prominent as a Muslim critic of Islamic fundamentalism. In 2004, The New York Times wrote about her “Rosa Parks-style civil disobedience” in refusing to leave the men’s section of a mosque. She co-wrote a Washington Post column denouncing the hijab as the product of an ideology that “absolves men of sexually harassing women and puts the onus on the victim to protect herself by covering up.” When Nomani, a self-described liberal Democrat, voted for Trump in 2016, she described it, in part, as a vote against Islamic extremism.

So I was a little surprised when I saw that Nomani, who lives in Virginia, had joined a protest last week organized by the Muslim parents Ingraham lauded. In 2015, Nomani treated Muslim demands for a school holiday on Eid al-Adha as an example of “creeping Shariah.” Now she was aligning with parents who insisted that their kids be allowed to opt out of school assignments that went against their religious values. But what seemed like an obvious contradiction to me made perfect sense to her: Once again, she saw herself struggling against a malign and totalizing ideology. Wokeism, she told me, “is more of a danger to all of our societies than Islamism. Especially when it comes to the kids.” Islamism, she said, “is not seeping into our K-12 system. But wokeism is.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/opinion/conservatives-muslims-lgbtq.html

…hmmm…that’s…a way to look at it

The ‘whatabout Biden’ defense: What are the allegations made by Trump to deflect from indictment? [NBC]

…I guess?

In an interview Thursday with NBC News, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman praised Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter, and said he had chatted “a handful of times” with Musk on the subject of running an internet platform.

Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
[…]
Huffman is trying to turn Reddit profitable after decades as a money-losing website punching above its weight in internet culture.
[…]
“And then I think one of the nonobvious things that Elon showed is what I was hoping would be true, which is: You can run a company with that many users in the ads business and break even with a lot fewer people,” Huffman said.

Musk ended up hiring some employees back, but corporate headcount has remained well below where it was before the acquisition. Musk has also imposed other severe cost-cutting measures, such as not paying some of Twitter’s bills including rent, leading to an eviction order in Colorado.

…apparently the view from the c-suite is pretty different from down here in the cheap seats

“People are talking about a lot of things on Twitter, but I think that’s the part that’s the most interesting from my point of view as a business person, is that there actually are good businesses at this scale,” he said.
[…]
Huffman said that many ordinary people do not realize that there are “two classes of company” in the world of consumer-facing tech businesses: There’s internet heavies such as Google and Facebook, and then there are much smaller but still well-known companies such as Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit.
[…]
“But you wouldn’t realize that it’s like a 20, 30x difference in revenue. And, you know, not really profitable — maybe a quarter here or there,” he said.

Twitter had $5 billion in revenue in 2021, the year before Musk’s acquisition. Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, reported revenue that year of $117.9 billion. Alphabet, the owner of Google, reported revenue that year of $257.6 billion.
[…]
Elsewhere in the interview with NBC News, Huffman criticized the organizers of this week’s blackout, saying he was considering pursuing rules changes that may allow ordinary Reddit users to vote them out. He compared the long-tenured, difficult-to-oust moderators as “landed gentry,” and some moderators fear Huffman may force them out.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-protest-private-ceo-elon-musk-huffman

In interviews Thursday, Huffman spoke out for the first time since the mass protest began this week over Reddit’s plans to charge money for third-party apps to gain access to its data. The change prompted several popular third-party apps — including Apollo, Reddit is Fun and Sync — to say they would shut down ahead of the July 1 price increase because they cannot afford to pay millions a year.
[…]
Huffman targeted the moderators leading the blackout in an interview with NBC News on Thursday, saying he was looking to change site policies to allow subreddit users to depose moderators more easily. Reddit spokesman Tim Rathschmidt told The Washington Post on Friday that the comment had been taken out of context and that “Steve did not confirm we are moving in this direction.”

Huffman compared the moderators to “landed gentry” and said they were not being held accountable.
[…]
Huffman also told the Verge that the protests “are not representative of the greater Reddit community.” More than 80 percent of Reddit’s top 5,000 communities remain open on a site with more than 57 million daily users, according to a fact sheet published by the company Thursday.
[…]
“They have attempted to gaslight us that they want to keep third-party apps while they set prices and timelines no developer can meet. The blowback that is happening now is largely because Reddit launched this drastic change with only 30 days notice,” Reddit user BuckRowdy, a moderator of the [r/ModCoord] subreddit coordinating the protest, wrote Thursday. “We continue to ask Reddit to place these changes on pause and explore a real path forward that strikes a balance that is best for the widest range of Reddit users.”
[…]
The blackout is occurring at a crucial time for the social media giant, which was valued at $10 billion when it landed $1 billion in fundraising in August 2021. In April, Fidelity, the lead investor in that fundraising boom, announced that it had slashed its valuation in the company by 41 percent, according to TechCrunch.
[…]
But the conversation surrounding the move shifted in late May, when Christian Selig, the developer behind Apollo, one of the most popular third-party apps, said Reddit would be charging him an estimated $20 million a year for data access. Third-party apps such as Apollo are often ad-free, meaning the decision by Reddit essentially ended Selig’s business.

“I don’t see how this pricing is anything based in reality or remotely reasonable,” Selig wrote May 31. “I hope it goes without saying that I don’t have that kind of money or would even know how to charge it to a credit card.”
[…]
“The hurdles placed on third-party apps by Reddit just aren’t a feasible obstacle to overcome,” Tony Lupeski, the developer of ReddPlanet, wrote.

[…] The blackout even caused Reddit to crash temporarily because the site could not handle all of the subreddits going private.

Huffman acknowledged to the Verge that he took a “beating” in an Ask Me Anything post he did on the platform last week in which he defended Reddit’s plans. But he maintains it is not Reddit’s responsibility to help keep third-party apps alive.

“It costs a lot of money to run an app like Reddit,” he told NBC. “We support ours through ads. And what we can’t do is subsidize other people’s businesses to run a competitive app for free.”

Huffman told NPR that the blackout effort was led by “a small group that’s very upset, and there’s no way around that.” He said that the protest created “a fair amount of trouble” but that it did not cost the company much money.
[…]
Some moderators say, however, that the problem is much larger than the CEO is making it out to be. Some have said the moderators’ high-level control on the subreddits comes from the hours of free labor they have put into managing the message boards. Reddit user SpicyThunder335, a moderator of six subreddits and the forum coordinating the protest, wrote that more than 300 subreddits “have already announced that they are in it for the long haul, prepared to remain private or otherwise inaccessible indefinitely until Reddit provides an adequate solution.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/16/reddit-ceo-blackout-moderators-steve-huffman/

…makes you wonder what the peasants think…well…it made me wonder, any road

POLL: Decide on the future of /r/Pics!
by u/pics-moderator in pics

…hmmm…how d’ya think that shook out, then?

Henceforth, /r/Pics will feature only images of John Oliver looking sexy.
by u/pics-moderator in pics

…guess you can only speak your piece

Y’all wanna hear the TRUE story of Nikki Haley?

A thread pic.twitter.com/MZHER5uaYI

— Michael Harriot (@michaelharriot) June 17, 2023

Fact-Checking Nikki Haley on the Campaign Trail [NYT]

…& hope the people who need to hear it are capable of listening

1/ Good morning.

If any of you are still bamboozled by Nancy Jacobsen and Mark Penn's @nolabelsorg's actual intentions let me hook you up.

They claim to be moderate, centrist problem solvers who are running a 3rd part effort to "give Americans more choices."

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) June 15, 2023

…but…some things do seem to be becoming clearer by the day

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/100-million-door-knocking-effort-boost-ron-desantis

The man who dumbed down the office of the presidency is a less gratifying subject than the smarty-pants doomed prince. Hamlet is transcendent, while Trump is merely transgressive. But we can’t shuffle off the mortal coil of Trump. He has burrowed, tick-like, into the national bloodstream, causing all kinds of septic responses.

Trump is feral, focused on his own survival, with no sense of shame or boundaries or restraint.

“In that sense,” David Axelrod told me, “being a sociopath really works for him.”

As Axelrod wrote in The Atlantic, “Over time, Trump has worked to discredit and demean any institution that raises inconvenient truths or seeks to hold him accountable for his actions — not just media, but law enforcement and the election system itself.”
[…]
Is he so addled by narcissism that he sees no distinction between highly sensitive documents belonging to the government and papers he wants to keep? He treats classified maps and nuclear secrets and a Pentagon war plan for Iran like pelts, hunting trophies, or family scrapbook items.

To Jail or Not to Jail [NYT]

Support for political violence depends on specifics, study shows [WaPo]

…specifics, you say? …maybe someone could draw me a picture?

The GOP’s paper-thin defenses of Donald Trump [WaPo via archive.ph]

…that’ll have to do for today…but…might be a good time to check the spelling of comeuppance…not to get all unrealistically optimistic or anything