Weekend Vibes [DOT 2/11/24]

2/11/24 MegMegMcGee 27

Oktoberfest was a big success…followed by today’s community yard sale. Lots of neighbor time!

Supreme Court sides with Democrats in Pennsylvania voting case

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/01/g-s1-31054/supreme-court-pennsylvania

Stonks!

Trump loses $2.4 billion in net worth after his social media stock implodes right before the election
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/01/investing/trump-stock-net-worth/index.html

Is this a DIFFERENT cheese theft?

Man arrested after £300k worth of cheese stolen
https://news.sky.com/story/man-arrested-after-163300k-worth-of-cheese-stolen-13245251?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter

What else you got gang?

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27 Comments

  1. Just last week I committed cheese theft. But not £300k-worth. What happened was [oh God no] BH went on a schmoozefest junket and laid in lots of cheese to hold me over. “Mattie, I want some of it to be here when I get back.” I ate every crumb. Non, je ne regrette rien. BH did.

    • …I could be wrong…but I don’t think there’s another six-figure haul of cheese out there like a 22-ton copy cat

      …so presumably it’s the guy who knows where to find truckles of Neal’s Yard Diaries finest when they fall off the back of a truck

      …also…iirc…the founder is married to the founder of monmouth coffee…so hopefully they can take the financial hit &/or are insured…because if they fuck up & kill monmouth coffee as collateral damage…never mind the cheese fiends…I know coffee-fiends who would…well, probably shake them to death…but they’d be lucky if the old bill got to them first?

  2. …&…it’s kemi badenoch

    …so the tories will pat themselves on the back for having a black female leader before the US, whatever else happens

    …but whether they still do next time theirs is also PM…different question?

    • …it’s also a pretty decent framing of how the same grab bag of legerdemain in a three card monte routine in which sinclair going to a fire sale & the valuation of twitter makes it looks the spot X marks is the drain at the base of the funnel…resembles an in-kind loss-leader that the ones doing that losing would consider a win

      …but thanks for that…it was a delightful change of pace

    • Timothy Noah is a great reporter who really digs. He did a great job uncovering how Fred Malek helped Nixon’s antisemitic purge of Jews from the Department of Labor.

      Malek well into the 2000s was a top GOP operative and was beloved not only by the Republican establishment but by the press as a source of what supposedly responsible Republicans were doing. When Noah dug up what Malek had done, the Beltway press simply couldn’t accept it, and kept running with Malek’s deflections and lies.

      Malek was one of the guys behind the 2010 state government campaign Noah describes in that article – he was the leader of the Republican Governors association. He was a hardcore right winger, but his image in the political press was always of a sensible moderate.

  4. Honestly, and this hurts to type, but it’s so easy fleecing people using racism and bigotry, it’s a shock more aren’t doing it.

    Maga is the church on steroids, hence the church joining in, it’s insane, it’s like almost every grift crammed into one and they can not get enough of it. Not figuratively, literally, they can not get enough of it. Maga had a diaper fad for fucks sake. There are definitely fringe maga that some have spoke about that aren’t quite as bad and are caught up in the bullshit, but the actual tribe is nucking futs.

    • There are a LOT of people out there who just want someone to tell them what to do. They don’t want to think, they don’t want to reason, they just want someone to say “do this” and they’ll happily comply.

      As a former evangelical, I can assure you that the vast majority of them fall into that category. They don’t want to read the Bible or think about what is says, and they won’t. They want some buffoon to stand up on Sunday and tell them how to think and how to feel and how that’s going to get them into heaven, regardless of what it does to anybody else. Since they are “chosen” nothing they do matters in the slightest as long as it conforms to what they’re hearing on Sunday. They are literally the perfect patsies, and that’s why you see SO MANY scams that prey upon them. That’s also why they keep giving to grifters, even when they know the grifter is using their money to live an extravagant lifestyle.  They think, well, I’m supporting his ministry and that’s getting me into heaven even though I can’t afford my diabetes medication.

      In other words, they are perfect Republicans.

      It’s also why atheists are consistently rated as more moral than religious people. They make their own moral decisions based on what they know, and don’t let some huckster tell them that doing something horrible to minorities is the “will of God.”

  5. Oh no! Childless cat ladies, people eating cats in Springfield, OH, and now this. The cats are taking over. Der Trumpf, famously, is pet-averse, but I bet Kam and Dougie have a cat or three at the VP residence.

    • One of the things that was striking was from an audience perspective just how bad so many of those headlines are.

      Jacob calls it “vagueposting” and I think that’s a great term. There’s a lot of complaining about clickbait headlines but I think that misses just how much declining audience numbers are due to just how bad most headlines and leads are at being neither lurid nor vague.

      I recently read in another place someone who follows CNN’s live A/B testing of headlines, and it sure sounds like they’re committing some well known screwups in A/B by focusing far too much on immediate reactions by captive audiences. It’s a methodology that pretty much guarantees locking in cycles of shrinkage.

      If you’re in management and your performance metrics are based overwhelmingly on short term numbers, vaguecasting makes sense. But in the long run it’s poison.

      • It’s funny, but it’s a lesson most kids learn by middle school: If you try to please everybody, nobody will like you.

        And it’s even more strange when they call all see Fox News getting numbers by taking a side — an abhorrent side to be sure, but they’ve got a viewpoint that they’re selling and that people are buying.

        But other outlets keep being mealy-mouthed and inoffensive, and their numbers drop.

    • The article gives a good summary of what’s going on behind the scenes as pollsters are applying a lot of adjustments  and filters to their data sets.

      And most of them are working responsibly and admit just how much they’re doing to massage the numbers.

      But what is absolutely nuts is how top line reporters wipe out all of the variability and uncertainty and report numbers to a tenth of a percent.  The lead needs to be about the uncertainty..

      Of course if they did, editors and execs would have to admit the horserace framing and investment in resources and the exposure they give was a mistake. From a content perspective they’ve been on autopilot since the days before cell phones and lack the brainpower to adjust.

    • It’s a good methodology overview but I do think it’s lacking in one area, which Black Rod posted about one day. Pollsters massage numbers, given. First, many of them are afraid of being off the mark, so they keep adjusting the results to within the margin of error. It’s not that it’s a close election — it’s that they don’t want to lose business by saying “Trump will win by 20 points” and then have Harris win. Or vice-versa. Second, the “horse-race” mentality is keeping people, both journalists and the public, clicking on polling stories. By reporting movements they get engagements, so they adjust to create movement.

      They’ve got a vested financial interest in not being too far wrong.

      There’s also a partisan interest, probably because they believe, I suspect correctly, if they declared a clear front-runner people wouldn’t bother to vote (to some extent that’s supposedly what happened to Clinton in 2016 — everybody thought she had it locked up). Here’s a story about how a pollster slanted results to go Republican, and by looking deeper you can clearly see they slanted it.

      The pollsters say Wisconsin is a toss-up. But the polls aren’t matching 2024’s reality.

      • It’s funny because I’m still dumbfounded at how many people thought Clinton would run away with it. At no point did I ever think she had a chance. There was a long running hate campaign on her for 24 years by that point. Way too much of the country didn’t like her and didn’t trust her.
        Plus, she was so fucking arrogant that she didn’t even bother campaigning in states where she lost because she figured it was in the bag.
        The fact is, if she had been running against literally anyone but Trump it would have been a blowout. Way more people would have voted for the “reasonable” Republican.

  10. Conservative Hugh Hewitt gets out of the kitchen after he can’t stand the heat getting  raised one degree above room temperature:

    https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/01/media/hugh-hewitt-quits-washington-post-live-show/index.html

    Hewitt was a right wing affirmative action hire in 2017 by the Washington Post when they looked at their stable of Republicans like George Will and Jennifer Rubin and realized even they were sickened by Trump.

    Rather than just admit the truth, the Post hired Hewitt and Marc Thiessen to be the in house propagandists for Republican complicity with Trump.

    And of course for the oast eight years they’ve churned out garbage that dragged down the Post’s reputation. Until now, when Hewitt collapsed under the slightest pressure from Jonathan Capehart and Ruth Marcus. If you know those two, they’re incapable of throwing any heat. But it was still too much for Hewitt.

  11. Real talk, no BS, I went to work on tues and saw DJT was above $50 and wanted to short sell it, but Schwab wouldn’t let me.  Insufficient funds, etc.

     

    It’s at 30 today.

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