Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Stay strong, because they are weak.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Petty moves from a petty man.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

This blog will pay for itself.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

We still have time to mess this up!

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

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Archives for 2024

Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Good Riddance to A Bad Year

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Good Riddance to A Bad Year

(Clay Bennett via GoComics.com)

federal dems have two jobs starting on inauguration day: loudly say no to every bad idea and loudly take all the credit for every good idea. that’s it. that’s policy in the wilderness.

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) December 30, 2024 at 2:36 PM

a majority (if a very slim one) of americans decided that donald trump has all the answers, asking dems questions at this point is a category error. go ask donald trump, he's going to be the fucking president, ask him what he and his party are going to accomplish and how.

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) December 30, 2024 at 2:38 PM


 

Sad that the best hope I have for 2025 politically is that Rupert finally dies & James, Prudence, & Elizabeth take out Lachlan & start to change the news operation*
*That’s not fantasy, Rupert & Lachlan fear it which is why they went to court to revoke their votes when Rupert dies (they failed)

— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) December 31, 2024 at 8:33 AM

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H5N1 & COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: December 31, 2024

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(We’ll go back to the regular Wednesday-morning schedule next week, but I figured we’d wrap up this year early.)

 

For the first time in 5 years Covid is relatively quiet during the holiday season. The XEC variant marches on, slowly advancing as % of attributable cases. Fortunately, it's not one that poses a big challenge to our now conditioned immune response
covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-t…

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— Eric Topol (@erictopol.bsky.social) December 20, 2024 at 10:15 AM

***********

I know I always say this, but seriously: Just this once, read the whole (not very long!) article. An interview with redoubtable virologist Angie Rasmussen, from NYMag, “How Worried Should We Be About the Latest Bird-Flu Mutation?”

The day after Christmas, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that it had identified new mutations to the H5N1 bird-flu virus in a “severely ill” patient in Louisiana. Health workers who swabbed the patient’s throat found mutations that help H5N1 infect the upper respiratory tract, which could potentially make the virus spread more easily in humans. While the CDC noted that there is no evidence of person-to-person transmission in this case — or anywhere yet, thankfully — the mutations were similar to those found in a teenager who tested positive for the virus in Canada in November.

When the news broke, Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan, offered a measure of calm about the virus. “This doesn’t really change much in terms of estimating pandemic risk,” she wrote on X. To explain her thinking — and share what does scare her about the mutations — I asked her to expand on the latest development for the virus that is wreaking havoc in American dairy and poultry farms.

How concerned should we be about the H5N1 mutation in this person in Louisiana?
These mutations are actually not the most concerning part of the report to me. And that’s because they’ve been seen before, dating back almost 20 years, emerging in patients who’ve had severe H5N1. While they do potentially allow for the use of the so-called human receptor for seasonal influenza viruses, there’s no guarantee that these mutations would actually allow for that in the real world because they’ve never actually been associated with an increase in human-to-human transmission.

Also, some of this stuff in the report suggests, with fairly strong evidence, that this mutation arose in the patient throughout the course of their disease. So it was unlikely to be transmitted onto another person, and it’s not actually emerging in the birds that this person became infected by.

It’s obviously a concern when a virus has mutations that suggest it may be more capable of infecting and transmitting between people. But we have no actual evidence that that’s happening yet. There’s no evidence of onward transmission. And since these mutations aren’t appearing in nature and other animals that are predominantly the source for all the human infections so far, that bodes well in the sense that the virus itself isn’t acquiring new mutations and having them be maintained — which would make future spillovers more likely to result in human-to-human transmission.

So what is concerning about this case in Louisiana?
That we are seeing a huge increase in the number of human cases. These mutations are a good example of what happens when you have a human case. You start to see the virus begin to adapt to a human host. Even though this particular virus from this particular case isn’t a huge concern in terms of onward transmission, if we’re having human cases tick up and up and up, we’re going to give the virus more chances to develop mutations. And if that’s not detected and starts spreading in the human population, that’s a very good way to have a pandemic start out of this.

The other concern is the timing of all of these cases, which are ticking up right during flu season. If you get infected with two influenza viruses at the same time — so H5N1 and a seasonal influenza strain — a process can occur that’s called reassortment. That’s essentially like shuffling two decks of cards together, ending up making new viruses that have a combination of segments from both of the viruses that were infecting the person. That can lead to really, really rapid evolutionary jumps and rapid adaptation to a new host…

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On The Road – UncleEbeneezer – Eastern Sierra Fall Foliage 2024- Green Creek/Dunderberg Meadows, CA (Part 5/8)

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UncleEbeneezer

As we hit early afternoon we felt like we still hadn’t really gotten the fix of fabulous fall foliage we had set out for that morning.  Silver Lake, Poole Power Plant Rd., and the drive up to Twin Lakes had all been really pretty but most of the color had been patchy-at-best.  But according to CaliforniaFallColor and an Eastern Sierra FB page that I frequent, the place to go was Green Creek.

Just north of Virginia Lakes (one of the E. Sierra hotspots where fall color usually starts first) Green Creek Rd travels nine miles west to Green Creek Campground, with an option to detour through Dunderberg Meadows.  It’s a bumpy, washboard drive by through stunning meadows with groves of aspen all along the creekside.  We had done Green Creek to Dunderberg years ago, but the color had been well past-peak.  This time we hoped that our timing would be better and we’d also take the drive all the way up to Green Creek.  We weren’t disappointed!

On The Road – UncleEbeneezer – Eastern Sierra Fall Foliage 2024- Green Creek/Dunderberg Meadows, CA (Part 5/8)Post + Comments (14)

On The Road - UncleEbeneezer - Eastern Sierra Fall Foliage 2024- Green Creek/Dunderberg Meadows, CA (Part 5/8) 9
Green Creek Rd., Bridgeport, CAOctober 7, 2024

The drive was much nicer in our rental suv than it was in our own car a few years back.  We also discovered that if you speed up just enough, the bumping from the washboard surface was much less irritating.  The views along the drive were pretty spectacular.  As you can see, we were heading right into a small rainstorm which made the sky look even cooler.

Monday Night Open Thread

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So I made the world’s worst soup today. I used the leftover prime rib, made stock from scratch, cut up all the veg, seasoned and cooked the soup, and it was horrible. I had a 1/3 of a bowl and couldn’t finish it. I can’t describe why it was bad, exactly, but it felt oily and under-seasoned and no amount of seasoning fixed it.

I asked Joelle to taste it, and she went into the kitchen, a couple minutes later walked into the room and sat down and said “I think you should throw it out.” So it was a unanimous decision.

***

These fucking people need to be stopped:

Meta, the company founded by Mark Zuckerberg, is once again generating debate for an announced measure that will drastically influence both the use of Facebook and Instagram and how we understand these two social networks. As revealed by the Financial Times, this technology company is committed to bringing to these two platforms thousands of “characters” generated by artificial intelligence in order to increase interactions with its 3 billion users.

The Silicon Valley-based group has launched a series of AI products, including a tool for creating artificial intelligence characters on Instagram and Facebook. Personalities such as MrBeast have lent their image to the creation and characterization of these virtual entities. According to Connor Hayes, vice president of product for generative AI at Meta, the long-term goal is for these AI users to exist on the platforms in a similar way to accounts managed by flesh-and-blood people. These AI accounts will have “bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform…that’s where we see all of this going,” he commented.

Hayes also revealed that a priority for Meta over the next two years is to increase the “entertaining and engaging” potential of its applications, which is one of the main reasons for its strong commitment to AI.

Sweet mother of god these fucking lunatics want to buy their own private coal burning power plants and use up all the fresh water to power AI created facebook users to increase their “interactions.” What they mean by interactions is they can inflate the amount of engagement and eyeballs viewing things and further fleece advertisers. The side benefits will include fleecing actual human users in various schemes because you know god damned well they are not going to be creating any “ugly” ai avatars, they will all be perfect himbos or big boobed “women.”

Fuck you Mike Judge.

***

Some fun news:

A federal appeals court on Monday upheld a jury’s finding in a civil case that Donald Trump sexually abused a columnist in an upscale department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a written opinion upholding the $5 million award that the Manhattan jury granted to E. Jean Carroll for defamation and sexual abuse.

In the big scheme of things, nothing. But still something.

***

Off to watch some more Game of Thrones. Joelle is hooked. Behave.

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War for Ukraine Day 1,041: 189 Ukrainian POWs Have Been Returned!

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A painting of a woman's hand with brightly red painted fingernails. Around the hand are semi-transparent - ethereal - blue roses.

(Image by Olga Wilson)

I saw that a couple of folks where asking for a primer or background reading about what is going on in Georgia. I don’t have time to write one right now, but here are some links to reporting and assessments/analysis that explains what is going on. Here’s an Atlantic Council report that provides background on Russia’s 2008 invasion of parts of Georgia. This European Council on Foreign Relations report goes through how Putin aligned Georgian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili has used his wealth and control over the Georgian Dream party to disconnect what the majority o Georgians indicate they, control of the Georgian government by his political party, and what the Georgian government he controls is actually doing. And here’s another Atlantic Council report that goes through where things were as of 4 DEC 2024 with recommendations for what needs to be done. That should get you all up to speed.

The Ukrainians were able to negotiate the return of 189 POWs today.

189 Ukrainian defenders returned home from Russian captivity. t.me/V_Zelenskiy_…

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— 🦋Special Kherson Cat🐈🇺🇦 (@specialkhersoncat.bsky.social) December 30, 2024 at 10:12 AM

Joy of the Ukrainian defenders reunited with their families after PoW exchange

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) December 30, 2024 at 2:51 PM

More footage of the return of Ukrainian defenders.
t.me/c/1377735387…

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— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) December 30, 2024 at 1:56 PM

From The Kyiv Independent:

Ukraine managed to bring back 189 Ukrainians from Russian captivity, including military service members and two civilians, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Dec. 30.

The Ukrainian Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War (POWs) called it one of the largest prisoner exchanges since the start of the full-scale war in 2022.

“We are working to free each and every one from Russian captivity. This is our goal. We do not forget anyone,” Zelensky said on Telegram.

The freed captives included soldiers who defended Azovstal and Mariupol, the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the Snake Island, and other sections of the front.

Eighty-seven Armed Forces service members, 43 National Guard members, 33 border guards, and 24 sailors were among those released, according to the headquarters. Azov fighters were also freed during the latest exchange, Zelensky said.

Among the released were two journalists-turned-soldiers: Mariupol journalist Oleksandr Hudilin and former journalist of the Espreso channel Roman Borshch.

More at the link.

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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Interesting / Terrifying Read: The Internet Is Drowning In Slop

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There’s been too much news — yes, I’ve been sitting on this story for a couple of months now. Max Read, at NYMag, on how “A thriving underground economy is clogging the internet with AI garbage — and it’s only going to get worse”:

Slop started seeping into Neil Clarke’s life in late 2022. Something strange was happening at Clarkesworld, the magazine Clarke had founded in 2006 and built into a pillar of the world of speculative fiction. Submissions were increasing rapidly, but “there was something off about them,” he told me recently. He summarized a typical example: “Usually, it begins with the phrase ‘In the year 2250-something’ and then it goes on to say the Earth’s environment is in collapse and there are only three scientists who can save us. Then it describes them in great detail, each one with its own paragraph. And then — they’ve solved it! You know, it skips a major plot element, and the final scene is a celebration out of the ending of Star Wars.” Clarke said he had received “dozens of this story in various incarnations.”

These are prime examples of what is now known as slop: a term of art, akin to spam, for low-rent, scammy garbage generated by artificial intelligence and increasingly prevalent across the internet — and beyond. From their weird narrative instincts and inert prose, Clarke realized the stories came straight from ChatGPT. Sometimes they would arrive with the original prompt included, which was often as simple as “Write a 1,000-word science-fiction story.”

It was relatively easy to identify an AI-generated submission, but that required reading thousands (a “wall of noise”) and manually sorting them. Clarke compared the problem to turning off the spam filter and trying to read your email: “Okay, now multiply that by ten because that’s the ratio that we were getting.” Within weeks, the problem became unmanageable. “We had reached the point where we were on track to receive as many generated submissions as legitimate ones,” Clarke told me. Eventually, on February 20, he made the decision to close submissions temporarily. Clarkesworld had become one of the first victims of AI slop.

In the nearly two years since, a rising tide of slop has begun to swamp most of what we think of as the internet, overrunning the biggest platforms with cheap fakes and drivel, seeming to crowd out human creativity and intentionality with weird AI crap. On Facebook, enigmatic pages post disturbing images of maimed children and alien Jesuses; on Twitter, bots cluster by the thousands, chipperly and supportively tweeting incoherent banalities at one another; on Spotify, networks of eerily similar and wholly imaginary country and electronic artists glut playlists with bizarre and lifeless songs; on Kindle, shoddy books with stilted, error-ridden titles (The Spellbound Quest: Students Perilous Journey to Correct Their Mistake) are advertised on idle lock screens with blandly uncanny illustrations.

If it were all just a slightly more efficient form of spam, distracting and deceiving Facebook-addled grandparents, that would be one thing. But the slop tide threatens some of the key functions of the web, clogging search results with nonsense, overwhelming small institutions like Clarkesworld, and generally polluting the already fragile information ecosystem of the internet. Last week, Robyn Speer, the creator of WordFreq, a database that tracks word frequency online, announced that she would no longer be updating it owing to the torrent of slop. “I don’t think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans,” Speer wrote. There is a fear that as slop takes over, the large language models, or LLMs, that train on internet text will “collapse” into ineffectiveness — garbage in, garbage out. But even this horror story is a kind of wishful thinking: Recent research suggests that as long as an LLM’s training corpus contains at least 10 percent non-synthetic — that is, human — output, it can continue producing slop forever.

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Hufflepuff/Slytherin

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Erin Reed has a piece [gift link] detailing the ever more radical anti-trans comments of JK Rowling:

In recent years, millions of LGBTQ+ fans of the Harry Potter series have watched with dismay as its author, J.K. Rowling, has become a prominent figure in anti-trans activism. Her increasingly hostile rhetoric has ranged from referring to a transgender woman journalist as “a man… cosplaying” to dismissing the historical targeting of transgender people during the Holocaust as “a fever dream.” On Saturday, Rowling escalated her attacks further, making the baseless and easily disprovable claim to her millions of followers that transgender youth do not exist at all—a falsehood that directly contradicts decades of research and lived experiences of transgender people.

Rowling, responding to a commenter who implored her to “use her power for good” and end her “hateful focus on transgender youth,” denied the very existence of transgender youth. She replied: “There are no trans kids. No child is ‘born in the wrong body.’ There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined.”

It used to be that rich idiots didn’t have an immediate way to transmit their verbal diarrhea to the masses.  Perhaps their publicist, or remaining sane friend from the pre-wealth days, would sometimes intercept their word vomit and chuck it in the trash where it belonged.  Now we get it fast and hard, directly from the source.

I read all the books and watched all the movies and, by the absolutely debased standards of a parent who saw mostly terrible books and movies marketed to my kid, they weren’t bad.  She could have built a dozen homes and jetted around between them, with breaks for fan veneration at Comicons and the like. Instead, she decided to travel to TERFlandia and document her travels in the form of tweets.

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