Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

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

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

All hail the time of the bunny!

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

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

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Republicans in disarray!

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

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Late Night Open Thread: The Company He Chooses

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The Miami Grand Prix sent a cease and desist letter Friday night to a prominent Trump fundraiser, informing him that he cannot use a suite at an upcoming Formula One race as a high-dollar fundraiser for the Trump campaign. Trump, according to multiple people familiar with the event, has been planning to attend the race.

The letter was sent to Steven Witkoff, a longtime Trump friend who recently testified on behalf of Trump in a suit in New York that resulted in a New York judge handing down a $350 million civil fraud judgment against the former president for financial misdeeds.

“It has come to our attention that you may be using your Paddock Club Rooftop Suite for a political purpose, namely raising money for a federal election at $250,000 per ticket, which clearly violates the Formula 1 Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix suite license agreement,” read the letter, which was obtained by The Washington Post. “If this is true, we regret to inform you that your suite license will be revoked, you will not be allowed to attend the race at any time, and we will refund you in full.”

The Miami Grand Prix is scheduled for May 5 at the Miami International Autodrome in Miami Gardens. A spokesman for the race declined to comment…

Reached Friday by phone, Witkoff said, “This is something fake, for sure,” but declined to comment further.

Witkoff donated more than $2 million to Trump’s political action committees, according to a 2021 Pro Publica story.

When Mohammed Bone Saw’s beneficiaries go Ugh, too gross for our brand… for some reason, I was reminded of a certain ‘Irish poem‘.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: All We Can Do Is All We Can Do

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The Many Tragedies of the Baltimore Bridge Collapse

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I gritted my teeth and bought a Bulwark subscription. Andrew Eggers, “What Went Wrong on Dali?”:

What do you do if a man-made disaster turns out to be nobody’s fault?…

Eight workmen were on the bridge at the time; two were rescued, and six are now presumed dead. That the attempts to recover their bodies have so far been fruitless is a grim illustration of just how nasty a logistical problem the collapsed bridge presents—a tangle of twisted metal and concrete rubble submerged in murky water 50 feet deep. They don’t even have the Dali out yet. Pinned under huge trusses from the bridge, with crew unsure whether the ship is safe to navigate even if it were free, the massive vessel could take weeks to move.

Until the channel is cleared—to say nothing of the bridge being reconstructed—the economic damage will be significant. The vast majority of the Port of Baltimore’s shipping facilities are now cut off behind the wreckage of the bridge. Much Baltimore-bound commerce can be routed through other east-coast ports, but that means extra load on already stressed supply chains; meanwhile, according to White House estimates, 8,000 Baltimore longshoremen will be sitting on their hands…

Should the ship’s mechanical failure have been foreseeable? It’s too early to say, although you can bet investigators will find out. “It’s likely that virtually every pilot in the country has experienced a power loss of some kind [but] it generally is momentary,” Clay Diamond, executive director of the American Pilots’ Association, told USA Today this week. “This was a complete blackout of all the power on the ship, so that’s unusual. Of course this happened at the worst possible location.”

That’s the bottom line here: How flatly unlucky the Dali was at every turn. The worst possible location to lose power—after the tugs that turned it out to sea had detached, but before it was safely out of the harbor. The worst possible drift once it lost power—whether due to the position of the rudder, or wind, or current—apparently compounded by the ship’s response to the crew throwing it hard astern in a desperate attempt to slow it right before the crash.

Maybe they’ll find a culprit—some human error to pinpoint, some regulatory deficiency to address. But maybe the collapse of the Key Bridge will just prove one tragic and hugely costly demonstration that shipping has risks, and keeping those risks at acceptable levels isn’t the same as getting them to zero.

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Low Stakes Late Night Open Thread: Vehicle(s) of Broken Dreams

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… According to CHEQ, a whopping 75.85 percent of traffic from X to its advertising clients’ websites during the weekend of the Super Bowl was fake.

“I’ve never seen anything even remotely close to 50 percent, not to mention 76 percent,” CHEQ founder and CEO Guy Tytunovich told Mashable regarding X’s fake traffic data. “I’m amazed…I’ve never, ever, ever, ever seen anything even remotely close.”…

CHEQ monitors bots and fake users across the internet in order to minimize online ad fraud for its clients. Tytunovich’s company accomplishes this by tracking how visitors from different sources, such as X, interact with a client’s page after they click one of their links. The company can also tell when a bot is passing itself off as a real user, such as when a fraudulent user is faking what type of operating system they are using to view a website.

Most X users who are regularly on the platform can attest to a noticeable uptick in seemingly inauthentic activity in recent months. When a post goes viral on X, its now commonplace to find bots filling the replies with AI-generated responses or accounts with randomly generated usernames spamming a user’s mentions with unsolicited “link-in-bio” promotions. Now, there’s data which backs up that user experience.

Advertisers have also noticed X’s bot issues. In a recently published piece in The Guardian, Gene Marks, a small business owner shared his ad campaign results from X. After a small $50 advertising spend, X’s analytics shows that his website had received 350 clicks from approximately 29,000 views. However, according to Google Analytics, X wasn’t the source of any of the actual traffic his website had received during that time period…

When X’s Super Bowl traffic is compared to other social media platforms during the same time period, the bot issue on Musk’s platform appears even more stark. CHEQ also provided data to Mashable pertaining to Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. In terms of fake traffic, no other platform came close to X’s nearly 76 percent.

Out of more than 40 million visits from TikTok, only 2.56 percent were determined to be fake. Facebook sent 8.1 million visits and 2.01 percent of the monitored visits were classified as inauthentic. And over on Instagram, only 0.73 percent of the 68,700 visits from the platform were fake…

CHEQ also provided Mashable with fake traffic data from the entire month of January 2024. TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram all had very similar stats to each platform’s respective Super Bowl weekend numbers. Slightly more than 2.8 percent of the 306 million visits sent from TikTok were determined to be fake. Out of the 90 million visits that came from Facebook, a bit more than 2 percent were fake. And Instagram’s traffic was only 0.96 percent fake, based on 749,000 visits.

But, X once again fared the worst. Of the 759,000 visits from X, 31.82 percent of that traffic was determined to be fake…

… X’s problems clearly go well beyond the type of content being posted by real human beings. Advertisers typically pay social media companies based on impressions and/or clicks on their advertisements. And based on this traffic data, advertisers could potentially be paying Musk and company for visits from an audience consisting mostly of bots.

From my own extreeemely limited & recent experience curating followers, a fake rate (mostly ‘nudes in bio’, with a smattering of bitcoin scams) of 30-35% seems correct.

Elsewhere in the Elonverse:
Low Stakes Late Night Open Thread: Vehicle of Broken Dreams

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‘Gun Issues’ Open Thread: Not Enough Time Between Public Tragedies

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Would that President Biden, and the rest of us, had that luxury. There are times I’m very glad to be a volunteer aggregator on a not-quite-ten-thousand-top blog, and not a professional journalist. Mr. Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire, on the last ‘Second Amendment’-related tragedy — “The Shooter’s Family Was Begging for Intervention Before She Opened Fire at a Megachurch”:

… Our latest unfortunate public exercise of Second Amendment freedoms took place in Houston, at the headquarters mega-church of Joel Osteen, a prominent teevee huckster Pharisee. (Osteen was the whited sepulcher who refused to open his megachurch so that poor and homeless people would not be left outside to face Hurricane Harvey in 2017.) On Sunday, a 37-year old woman named Genesee Moreno showed up at Lakewood Church with both her seven-year old son and her AR-15 in tow. She set up a firefight with two off-duty cops that ended up with Moreno dead, her son in critical condition with a gunshot wound in the head, and a bystander slightly wounded in the leg. The subsequent investigation has revealed Moreno to be quite insane. From CNN:

“My daughter-in-law when she was taking medication for schizophrenia was a very sweet and loving woman,” Walli Carranza, the mother-in-law of 36-year-old Genesse Ivonne Moreno wrote in a Facebook post that Moreno had been put under an order for emotional detention in 2016. She had a mental health history documented by Houston police, said Christopher Hassig, commander of the Houston Police Department’s homicide division. Carranza, the shooter’s mother-in-law, had unsuccessfully petitioned to be declared conservator of Moreno’s son Sam in 2022. She said Sam was wounded in the head when off-duty officers shot and killed Moreno at the church. Moreno should never have been allowed to own firearms, her mother-in-law said. Texas has no red flag law – also known as an extreme risk protection order law – that would allow authorities to take weapons from a person thought to be in crisis.“

…

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TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Bringing Minnesota & Wisconsin Together

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Thursday Evening Open Thread: Oklahoma, Not Okay

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Guess the GOP has its latest campaign slogan: Those kids wanna eat, let ’em find a job!

Despite one of every five Oklahoma children living through food insecurity, the state won’t participate in a new federal summer food program for children.

Gov. Kevin Stitt’s office cited uncertainty about how the federal government will administer the program.

The Summer EBT program would have doled out $40 per month this summer for children who get free or reduced price meals during the school year. Families would be able to purchase groceries using an electronic benefits transfer, or EBT card. It’s similar to the pandemic-era children’s food program that recently expired, which gave eligible families $120 per child to buy food during summer months.

Chris Bernard, president and CEO of the nonprofit Hunger Free Oklahoma, said the governor’s decision was extremely disappointing.

“We are always in the bottom 10 in the country in terms of food security,” Bernard said. “Families and kids are struggling for sure, and the (summer food) program was something we’ve supported for a long time.”

Estimates vary, but Oklahoma has about half a million children who could qualify for the Summer EBT program. USDA estimates there could be 403,000 children who are eligible, while the number of children eligible for a similar program launched during the pandemic was about 640,000…

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