Beware the Ides of March!
Manhattan DA suggests one-month delay in Trump hush money trial
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/14/trump-trial-hush-money-delay/
Oh wow, that’s both of them now.
Father of Michigan school shooter found guilty of manslaughter
https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/james-crumbley-trial-verdict-michigan-shooting-03-14-24/index.html
Stonks!
Adobe shares slip 10% on soft sales forecast
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/14/adobe-adbe-q1-earnings-report-2024.html
Sprots!
Bee invasion at Indian Wells delays Carlos Alcaraz-Alexander Zverev match
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/03/14/indian-wells-bees-carlos-alcaraz-alexander-zverev/
Samsies.
Have a great day!
Drunk Ostrich for me.
I’m glad those two terrible parents got convicted. It sets a good precedent so that maybe, just maybe, other right wing shitbag parents will pause for a moment and rethink their decision to buy their child a FUCKING GUN.
I see a tree, as in, that’s a piece of wood.
Like everyone else in here, though, I see a sloshed ostrich, which means we’re neither left- or right-brained; we’re galaxy-brained.
I’m galaxy brained.
We complain a lot about political media coverage but there’s a new contender coming up on the outside in the Bad Coverage Stakes: Everything written about the Tik Tok “ban” is insane. IN-sane. This isn’t even Maga Haberman slanting and enchanting Trump-speak as to not be crazy; this is like watching people cover something in a language they don’t speak and have no idea how to contact people who do speak it.
…it’s a threat to national security be ause of the terrifying uses they can put your viewing patterns to once they data mine it
…but if…*checks notes*…steve mnuchin…I checked but that sounds like it can’t be right…anyway…if he does all that shit instead of china…then we cool
…see…makes perfect sense…now, if you’ll excuse me I’m due for a playdate on a freeway so I really must be going
Right, an extremely natural next question is “Well does our government data mine other social networks?” and it’s like “YES YES JESUS H CHRISTMAS YES ALL THE F’N TIME” and suddenly it’s not the story they keep trying to tell us it is! As it turns out, no, they don’t like the commies having our data but they’re just as mad they won’t share the data because our government is used to having access to it!
And to your point: If the problem is that it has to be owned by someone who will cheerfully turn the data over, then THAT is the story not who currently owns it no matter what country they’re in!
…pretty sure I’m with you all the way on this stuff…it’s like when it was about huawei…if that shit is what you consider to be a legitimate nat sec issue…&…that argument can certainly be made…well, then there is a great deal of hardware & component manufacturing process management that is going to cost an unholy amount of cash that logically you’d want to get right on
…&…I dunno…I think there’a a bunch of stuff about how tech intersects with life that are inherently hostile to the idea of it improving the lives of the majority of its users…& some of that stuff is of a politically-intersecting sort of concern, even…but…I have almost never heard a politician speak about a form of information technology in a way that gave me confidence they themselves could navigate it unassisted…let alone understand it in a sense that would let them know where the source of issues was or how to ameliorate them…& the tik tok thing is like some sort of combo zenith/nadir deal…the chutzpah chieftain railed against it when he was squatting the white house…now he’s for it…like he’s blowing kisses at musk about how he “helped him make a lot of money” & he’d smooth over those federal roadblocks for him…while elon says “I’m not giving anyone any money so I’m impartial” even as twitter bleeds a campaign contribution citizens united would die happy just to see
…if none of the debates “we” have are about what they claim to be because it all comes down to a +/- shift of an overall needle for which individual bits needing to make sense or be susceptible to legislative nuance….makes no statistical difference & hence doesn’t enter into the game theory by which the politically-astute navigator charts their course…then we’re gonna wind up…uh…sorry…got my tenses muddled
…ugh
…at least it’s friday?
I’ve been laughing for months at ads Instragram has been running in various locations about how it backs a bill to make it illegal for teens to download apps without parental permission. On first blush it’s like huh, that’s odd, wouldn’t parents be concerned about letting kids download Insta … but no, it’s very softly trying to play up the “We’re an AMERICAN company, not like that horrid Tik Tok” and yeah they want teens to play exclusively in their sandbox and they’re willing and able to use political pressure to make it happen.
Meanwhile, American companies: Oops we didn’t delete this incredibly sensitive data and we totally sold it to people who might want to kill you, sorry! https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/16/google-keeps-location-history-data-abortion-clinics-despite-delete-pledge
It’s not even just that the pols in question don’t know what the hell they’re talking about — I presume it wasn’t that much different when they were trying to figure out rules for radio and TV back in the day — but they probably don’t even have people on staff or in the rolodex who could give them an unvarnished opinion. Someone did a great study like a year or two ago about congressional staffs and found they’re smaller and generally less experienced and knowledgeable than they were back in the ’90s. Between more fundraising and fewer toss-up seats, they’re almost entirely geared toward MONEY PRINTER GO BRRRRR and way less about trying to keep up with anything issue-based. They let the national parties handle that and we know how threadbare (Democrats) or insane (Republicans) that gets.
I have seen a few left-leaning people on social media start the “Well it’s bad if the Chinese government has it” and the real quick response is: “And what if Trump has it?” and you can almost hear the brain gears seizing up because they were so deep in the CHINA BAD narrative of this.
And to your point, Europe at least does a more passable job on some of the “All tech abuses are bad, actually” laws they have. If our government actually thinks it’s bad for governments to have that data, well, they can make laws that do that! Forcing a foreign company to sell because it’s a foreign company? That ain’t it, chief.
I had always assumed the law was unconstitutional on its face, until I heard on Marketplace yesterday that Congress did the same thing several years ago with Grindr and it held up in court. Which, I don’t know, still seems odd to me.
Obviously to quote various TV shows over the years: the rules are made up and the points don’t matter … so the law is whatever “they” decide it is.
I do think under actual, written constitutional rules with a dollop of precedent, banning something like Tik Tok appears to be an enormous First Amendment issue! And making a foreign company sell to an American company appears to me to be a separate 1A issue let alone all the other problems that this sort of sale-at-judicial-gunpoint would bring up.
All that said, I have some doubts if the Senate will follow the House’s lead, and even if it narrowly did, I legitimately wonder what Biden would do. I’m not so sure he’d sign that in an election year.
…wait until they find out who owns the golf courses
It’s not even hard to find good sources. If it was a purely random search for comments, you’d see better balance.
The foreign language comparison is apt. It’s similar to the way coverage of foreign countries can be so broken because when new reporters roll in, there is one supposed expert at a place like Georgetown who everyone talks to when they start. Then all they ever do is follow the leads he offers. It’s easy to just plug into the ready-made source network, and it never occurs to reporters that it’s nonsense.
It’s what happened with Iraq when the invasion was just a gleam in Cheney’s eye. The neocons had a network of self-reinforcing sources of exiles and academics they could send reporters to talk to. It looked authentic, and seemed extensive, so lots of the press never bothered to look to the larger community of Iraq experts.
Compassionate Fox News:
Virginia wildlife center staff pretend to be a fox to care for a rescued newborn
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fox-mask-virginia-wildlife-center-kit-fed-newborn-rcna143118
We were watching a commercial that showed an injured fawn and Mrs. Butcher said to me that the local wildlife rehab place doesn’t want the fawns bonding with the staff so they have to nurse through a wall. I offered that perhaps it wasn’t the fawns bonding with the staff that was the concern, but rather the staff bonding with the fawns.
…I haven’t dug out a link because it was some live feed pop-up…but within a minute then guardian pinged my phone to say if she cuts the guy lose fani willis can keep trucking on that case…& meanwhile…in missouri…if you’re pregnant you can’t get divorced under any circumstances
…the fuck is wrong with these fucking people & their backwards-ass “sensibilities” driving them to senseless acts of subjugation?
‘Alarming’ rise in Americans with long Covid symptoms
😬
Most of these cases didn’t have to happen.
And it’s majority Red Staters and GOPers who listened to Dear Leader, plus the few unfortunates who were caught at the beginning.
I LOL’d. Through almost four years of the pandemic neither I nor Better Half, living in the epicenter, had any contact with Covid-19. Toward the end of my stay at Mt. Sinai they diagnosed me with Covid. Since I didn’t crawl into bed with any of my roommates, Hercule Poirot here can only deduce that a staff member was running around spreading the love.
It didn’t do much good, but toward the end of his life Freddie Mercury was treated at a private clinic in Switzerland. There’s a statue to him there, on the opposite side of Lake Geneva from Geneva itself, at Montreux. I doubt they would accept my shabby, third-rate American insurance, and sadly I don’t have one or two hundred thousands a week to shack up at this clinic…
In the early days of Covid, medical researchers kept warning that there was very little known about the long term side effects. They had evidence that coronaviruses weren’t necessarily only respiratory diseases, but there was no way to know much about what Covid 19 was going to do.
The contrarian ghouls who were pushing for herd immunity just argued if we don’t have evidence, assume the risks are zero.
One really frustrating thing is that epidemiologists have long worked on risk models which factor in issues like uncertainty about the effects of diseases and the potential for long term issues. And from the days when mask rules were first started, a lot were doing really good jobs at putting together accessible explanations of risks, with messages for both lay and more sophisticated audiences.
But there was an incredible resistance among the “just asking questions” crowd and the pundits who stuck to narrow and short term political framing. The attitude was essentially “I’m not convinced therefore it’s your problem for not convincing me.”
We’re still in a pandemic. For the rest of our lives, we’ll be playing Russian roulette with Covid. The vaccines mitigate deadly Covid symptoms in the short term. They don’t stop you from catching Covid, spreading it, or contracting Long Covid.
To your point, what we think today of as “Polio” might as well have been called “Long Polio” in its time, because not everybody who got it had long-lasting effects.
Church bells rang when Salk announced his vaccine and people couldn’t wait to get them knowing how terrible the disease was. Sigh.
(Editing to add: I should note that early data so far on the vaccines & Long Covid is pretty promising. The data show they definitely make a difference both in catching it and getting long-term symptoms, though how much is still a question.)
Hmmm?
https://www.yahoo.com/autos/not-suicide-boeing-whistleblower-warned-132437275.html
The family of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is decrying the announced winners of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Award, which is funded by a major GOP donor’s foundation.
The family noted that the award was originally conceived to honor “an extraordinary woman who has exercised a positive and notable influence on society and served as an exemplary role model in both principles and practice.”
This year’s winners include Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and Michael Milken. Martha Stewart is the only woman included. For some reason Sylvester Stallone is also a winner.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/03/justice-ginsburgs-family-decries-bestowing-rbg-award-on-elon-musk-and-rupert-murdoch/
🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮