Open Threads

I didn’t get a chance to watch King Elon and his kid (Klingon? MouseClick?) give a press conference while diminished partially senile Vassal Trump looked on, but it looks like it was a banger.

Asked to respond to people who say he’s orchestrating a hostile takeover of government, Elon Musk lies that “a majority of the public voted for President Trump”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 11, 2025 at 2:32 PM

This is just pure, unadulterated political fucking poison. Nobody voted for Musk. Trump said a lot of things, but he never said that he would put this clown in charge of the government and just sit there and nod vacantly. He’s going to take away your kids’ IEP. He’s going to take away money that keeps your University — and the University Hospital that saves lives — running. He’ll break all the rules that you have to follow just to screw you in order to make himself and his buddies richer.

The politics of this are not hard. A posse of unfuckable nerds has infiltrated our government to steal our money because Trump let them.

Edit: Forgot this gem:

Reporter: You said an example of fraud that you have cited was $50 million of condoms was sent to Gaza but after a fact-check apparently it was Gaza in Mozambique meant to protect them against HIV. 

Musk: First of all, some of the things I say will be incorrect

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) February 11, 2025 at 2:49 PM

Dipshit Incel Addict Holds Diminished Old Man HostagePost + Comments (100)

In the comments of my post on Adams this morning, I said that Hochul’s approach would be to say “let the voters decide.” Here’s Hakeem Jeffries, a person that it’s already been reported that she consulted as to whether to fire Adams the first time around, telegraphing that approach.  Here’s Hochul’s first response:

Speaking at an unrelated press conference in Manhattan, Gov. Kathy Hochul said she’s committed to working with Adams, and she refused to speculate about the motives behind the Justice Department’s letter. Hochul, who theoretically has the authority to remove the mayor, referenced her directives last year to Adams to shed his most ethically challenged aides.

“I’m going to continue doing what I’ve done since September, when all this started. I worked with the mayor to make sure that he brought in a different team to manage the operations of government,” Hochul told reporters at an unrelated press conference in Manhattan on Tuesday. “There is a new police commissioner. I’ve spent time with her, I have confidence in her. Crime is going down on the subways. In particular, I want to make sure that we have the resources to get the housing plan over the finish line.”

The emphasis is mine — this is from City and State NY, a respected political newspaper, and they can’t even report it straight.  It is a legitimate power of Hochul’s to remove a New York Mayor.  The courts have ruled multiple times on it, starting in the time of FDR.  Republican Governor Pataki (ab)used the power to remove a Bronx DA who didn’t support the death penalty, and the courts supported him.  But, since she’s a Democrat, the power is “theoretical” because Democrats are never expected to actually use power in a way that Republicans would use it.

Hochul, at a time when her use of power could send a message, and when it could right a wrong, is not using that power, and part of the reason is that the rest of the downstate machine doesn’t want her to use it.  It’s as simple as that.  She lacks the permission structure, as City and State put it the first time this came up, from Jeffries and the other NY machine politicians.

Open thread.

Update:  Sorry, I guess the feels are off.  Do I need to say that part of a democracy is granting power to elected officials for them to use those powers?

Called ItPost + Comments (135)

If you want to see a big white guy with a beard explain whey MAGA has gone nuts post-Obama, here you go. I got this from Kottke who has a transcript on his site.

Extinction burst is actually really simple. It’s when you have a behavior and a reward, and you withdraw the reward in order to change the behavior. When you do that, usually to change an undesirable behavior, the behavior itself increases in frequency and intensity for a short period of time until ultimately the subject changes the behavior and then that behavior goes extinct.

This is like you’re at the store and you’re swiping your credit card, and it doesn’t work, and so then you swipe your credit card like 15 more times until you’re so angry you’re freaking out, and you’re about to scream an F-bomb in the middle of Toys R Us. And then you say, “I’ll just pay with cash”. Swiping is the behavior and the payment is the reward. So when the swiping doesn’t work and you don’t get the reward you need, you get madder and madder and you try it more and more until you change the behavior, which then results in the extinction of the original behavior.

In his metaphor, the original behavior (racism) was challenged by Obama’s election, and the burst has been Palin, Tea Party, birtherism and finally MAGA.

Speaking of extinction, how’s everyone feeling about filing their taxes? I pay estimated tax (self-employed), so I’m going to research paying all my 2025 tax year estimated tax on the last possible day (Jan 15, 2026). I mean, if Musk is going to withhold our tax money from us, isn’t turnabout fair play?

Extinction BurstPost + Comments (154)

Google’s rush to comply with Trump is further evidence that any corporate DEI or even reasonableness about who they hire or how they treat minorities was just like claims made in ads:  either exaggerations or outright lies:

Some Google Calendar users are angrily calling the company out after noticing that certain events like Pride month are no longer highlighted by default. Black History Month, Indigenous People Month, Jewish Heritage, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage have also been removed, according to a Google product expert.

Google just rolled out the change to make the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America in Google Maps, and they’re claiming it’s part of a “longstanding practice”.  Their excuse for removing those “woke” holidays was that it wasn’t “sustainable” to keep track of them.  I’m sure there’s some intern somewhere in the bowels of Google who is relieved that they don’t have the trivial task of, well, googling for those holidays.

FWIW, Apple and Bing maps still call it the Gulf of Mexico.  I’ll note again that Bill Gates and Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) were the only big tech moguls who did not attend the inauguration.  Sundar Pichai (Google) and Tim Cook (Apple) attended.  It will be interesting to see what Microsoft and Apple put on their maps.

Just another one to put in the grudge bucket if Democrats ever get back into power.  Treating Google and the others the way the EU does would be a huge boon to consumers and the right consequence for their craven behavior.

Corporations Were Never Our FriendsPost + Comments (80)

So this happened:

NEW YORK (AP) — The Justice Department on Monday ordered federal prosecutors to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, arguing in a remarkable departure from long-standing norms that the case was interfering with the mayor’s ability to aid the president’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

In a two-page memo obtained by The Associated Press, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove told prosecutors in New York that they were “directed to dismiss” the bribery charges against Adams immediately.

Bove said the order was not based on the strength of evidence in the case, but rather because it had been brought too close to Adams reelection campaign and was distracting from the mayor’s efforts to assist in the Trump administration’s law-and-order priorities.

Here’s the original memo [pdf].

As Josh Marshall pointed out on Bluesky, the memo instructs the SDNY to review the case after New York’s mayoral election in November, so Adams is at the beck and call of Trump, as if it weren’t obvious already.

Governor Kathy Hochul has the power to fire Adams. The last NY Governor to attempt to exercise this power was FDR.  Mayor Jimmy Walker resigned before FDR could fire him, but not before a NY judge ruled that the Governor has essentially unlimited power to remove the Mayor.  FDR’s action was based on a special prosecutor’s report.  Adams has been indicted, so it’s worse than Walker.  Hochul has consistently refrained from criticizing Adams, and since it’s a feat for someone from upstate to remain governor in a state where all the political power is concentrated in the New York City area, she’ll be reluctant to do it.   If you live in New York City and want to give her a piece of her mind, here’s the contact form with a phone number at the bottom.

If you want to know how a Republican would use that power, George Pataki used it to remove a Bronx DA from a murder case because that DA opposed the death penalty.  But, obviously, Democrats must be better than that, because norms and “permission structures“.

In other New York News, King Elon decreed that no FEMA money could be spent to house migrants in New York even though it was appropriated by Congress, and his minions in government made it so.

Eric Adams Wholly Owned Subsidiary of the Musk/Trump RegimePost + Comments (97)

Society is galloping toward destruction in so many ways that it’s difficult to keep track. I think this is objectively true. And yet, I understand that exaggerated perceptions of collective doom are common among people who are growing older and reckoning with their own mortality.

An individual death isn’t the end of the world, but for that individual, it is, at least as far as we can know. So it’s understandable if folks falsely conflate their own decline with civilization’s death throes. But what if they’re right? I mean, at some point, old farts who are sure the world is going to hell in a handbasket will age into that tendency when the world really is going to hell in a handbasket.

Anyhoo, cloud-shouting and and lawn vacation demands aside, here’s an alarming report from 404 that suggests things might really be about to get a whole lot worse for humanity, which will have AI crammed down its throat whether it wants it or not (sunk costs, you know):

Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”

A new paper from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University finds that as humans increasingly rely on generative AI in their work, they use less critical thinking, which can “result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.”

“[A] key irony of automation is that by mechanising routine tasks and leaving exception-handling to the human user, you deprive the user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgement and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared when the exceptions do arise,” the researchers wrote.

In short, AI will make us dumber.

Maybe in that way, it will finish the work the internet started when connectivity and access to the whole of human knowledge turned us into the proverbial infinite number of typing monkeys randomly tapping on keys. Only instead of producing the complete works of Shakespeare, we monkeys somehow ended up creating a world with Donald Fucking Trump as ceremonial president of a nuclear-armed kleptocracy managed by frog-faced billionaires who monetize our eyeballs via digital rage bait.

Friends, I do not have any answers. But while watching my country sleepwalk towards fascism over the past decade or so, I’ve often been reminded of the insomnia plague described by novelist Gabriel García Márquez in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” When the insomnia plague takes hold in the fictional village of Macondo, the isolated inhabitants enjoy it initially — sleep is such a waste of time!

But they start slowly losing their minds due to lack of sleep, forgetting the names and functions of everyday things like clocks, chairs and tables, dining utensils, cows, etc. So they frantically affix labels to objects, including animals: “This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk.”

In the novel, the villagers are saved from the logical progression of the disease (what is milk? what is coffee?) by the return of the nomadic wise man Melquiades. He brings a cure that allows the villagers to sleep and then wake up with their minds intact. In this way, residents of Macondo rejoin history instead of devolving into wordless, solitary idiocy.

I don’t think Melquiades is coming to save us. I think I need a nap.

Open thread.

Tech and the Insomnia Plague (Open Thread)Post + Comments (197)