2024-11-10

self driving quibbles, South Park insensitive, scalpers scuppered, reasons RasPi rules, satellite hacked (in the 1970s), ludicrous liberal lamentations, marketing miracles, COVID quarantine camps



Musk

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

Trump

Democrats / Biden Inc / Left Angst

  • Living in a Post-truth World | Not Even Wrong

    I grew up in the 1960s and 70s, at a time when fundamental physics was making huge dramatic progress and Western democracies were changing in equally dramatic ways, mostly for the better. It truly did seem that the Age of Aquarius was upon us, and that human societies were on a consistent route to progress, however uneven. By the late 1970s and early 1980s things had started to change, but that humanity and my chosen field of science were sooner or later moving forward still seemed self-evident. By the late 1990s the situation started getting more disturbing. The likes of Newt Gingrich started taking over the Republican party, with a highly successful propaganda arm called Fox News running 24 hours a day, pushing lies about the Democrats, especially the Clintons (remember Whitewater?). For some mysterious reason, even the New York Times joined in. In theoretical physics, proponents of a failed theory dominated the subject, putting out endless propaganda to the public such as Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace.

  • The Problem With Blaming White Women - The Atlantic

    Democrats should not dismiss Trump’s win as the result of sexism and racism alone.

    It was an egregious mistake—not just in retrospect but in real time—to allow Joe Biden to renege on his implicit promise to be a one-term president, and to indulge his vain refusal to clear the way for younger and more charismatic leaders to rise up and meet the magnitude of the political moment. Perhaps no candidate, not even one blessed with the talents of a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama, could have overcome the handicap imposed on Kamala Harris when she emerged valiantly from the wreckage of the Weekend at Bernie’s campaign this summer, which her own administration had so brazenly tried to sneak past the voting public. But other major mistakes were made over the past four years. The Biden presidency was understood to be a return to normalcy and competence after the terrible upheavals of the early months of COVID and the circus of the first Trump administration. That was the deal Americans thought had been accepted—that was Biden’s mandate. Instead, as president, even as he leaned into plenty of policies that served all Americans, Biden either could not or would not forcefully distance himself from the Democratic Party’s need for performative “wokeness”—the in-group messaging used by hyper-online and overeducated progressives that consistently alienates much of the rest of the nation.

  • This is what a Democrat staffer thinks

    Far too often in this campaign, we felt like we were settling our diversity quota by taking queer white people and putting them in positions of power, not understanding that at the core of their being, if they haven't unlearned their toxic whiteness and white fragility, that they would see all of their decisions through the lens of a person that is more aligned and more fitting with a Trump presidency than that of a presidency of Kamala Harris.

  • Liberal women withhold sex, shave heads to protest Trump win: ‘My bodily autonomy matters’.

  • Bitter Pelosi now says Biden should have dropped out earlier so Democrats could have ‘open primary’.

    The former House speaker, a party grandee who was instrumental in persuading the president to eventually step aside, criticised Biden for not dropping out of the race sooner. She also said there should have been an internal process to decide on the candidate rather than the coronation of Kamala Harris. Pelosi, 84, believes Harris would have “done well” in the primary and “been stronger going forward”. The San Francisco representative told the New York Times: “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race.” She added: “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary. And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. “And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”

    • "defending democracy" with a candidate that no one voted for turned out to be a poor idea. who could have known...
  • Democratic Party Chairman Goes After Sanders, Questions North Carolina Results in Online Posts.

  • A Landslide Against the Media

  • Good news: The public has stopped listening to mass media

  • 'A fatal miscalculation': masculinity researcher on why Democrats lost young men

    The expectation was we’re going to see this break towards Trump among men overall and we’re going to see a break towards Kamala Harris among women overall. But only half of that really seemed to come true. Trump did overperform among young men, but Harris underperformed among young women. That is a surprise. I think that an election that was initially expected to be about women and women’s issues turned out to be an election about men. My former colleague Elaine Kamarck, now of Brookings Institute, was on NPR saying that abortion just didn’t play as big an issue as people thought. It’s not that women didn’t care about it. It just wasn’t as salient.

    The Harris-Walz campaign could have leaned pretty hard into a pro-male policy agenda and presentation. When you have a woman at the top of the ticket, no one thinks she’s a closet misogynist. With Walz, you’ve got the first public school teacher to run for high office, who is also a coach. I mean, if you’re ever going to have a ticket that could speak to men, for the love of God, it was this one. They could have gone out there with some pretty substantive ideas. Instead, zip. Even my progressive feminist friends were watching the DNC and saying: “Is there going to be anything for men?” Whereas the RNC was a carnival of masculinity. The Republicans put out a welcome mat there for men and said: “We can see you, we’re cool with you being guys, we like guys, the Democrats hate you, they think you’re the problem.”

  • Democrats suddenly see value in Federalism and states' rights: Gov. Gavin Newsom Moves Quickly to Counter Trump in California - The New York Times

    In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom called lawmakers on Thursday into a legislative special session next month “to safeguard California values and fundamental rights in the face of an incoming Trump administration.” In Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker said on Thursday he would ask his state’s legislators, possibly as soon as next week, to address potential threats from a second Trump term. “You come for my people,” Mr. Pritzker said at a news conference, “you come through me.”

  • CNN’s Bill Weir Declares ‘Notorious Climate Denier’ Trump Will Let Earth ‘Go to Hell.’

  • Radical Left Activates Anti-Trump Protests In Midtown Manhattan | ZeroHedge

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

  • ‘Whatever you want Ben’: Inside Ben Horowitz’s cozy relationship with the Las Vegas Police Department | TechCrunch

    Horowitz isn’t alone in this approach to supporting police. Soliciting donations to police foundations to cover the cost of specific equipment purchases is an increasingly popular and controversial approach taken by some of the largest departments around the country. Experts and advocates on police accountability and surveillance told TechCrunch that police foundations bypass the typical procurement process that can include public meetings, a city-approved budget, and a potential bidding period to give competitors a chance. “It’s horrifying from a good government perspective, from a nonprofit [and] ethics perspective, and just really has become such a major part of how novel police technologies are advertised and marketed,” Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said in an interview. Fox Cahn and others also said donations can set up companies for ongoing contracts where taxpayers foot the bill. And they say it can tilt the playing field. In Skydio’s case, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department owned products from at least three other drone companies before Horowitz’s donation, a prior public records request revealed.

Health / Medicine

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

  • The CDC Planned Quarantine Camps Nationwide ⋆ Brownstone Institute

    People were to be isolated, given only food and some cleaning supplies. They would be banned from participating in any religious services. The plan included contingencies for preventing suicide. There were no provisions made for any legal appeals or even the right to legal counsel. The plan’s authors were unnamed but included 26 footnotes. It was completely official. The document was only removed on about March 26, 2023. During the entire intervening time, the plan survived on the CDC’s public site with little to no public notice or controversy. It was called “Interim Operational Considerations for Implementing the Shielding Approach to Prevent COVID-19 Infections in Humanitarian Settings.”

    The shielding approach aims to reduce the number of severe COVID-19 cases by limiting contact between individuals at higher risk of developing severe disease (“high-risk”) and the general population (“low-risk”). High-risk individuals would be temporarily relocated to safe or “green zones” established at the household, neighborhood, camp/sector or community level depending on the context and setting.1,2 They would have minimal contact with family members and other low-risk residents.

  • 7% of participating dairy workers had recent infection with bird flu