September 26, 2024

The Stuttering Lede, Sept. 26th 2024

40 days until we know if we can stop fascism

“I do respect people’s faith, but I don’t respect their manipulation of that faith in order to create fear and control.” Javier Bardem

PSA

Free COVID-19 tests beginning this month.

Today in History

First televised U.S. presidential debate seen by some 85 to 120 million viewers between U.S. presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon was broadcast this day in 1960.

Elections 2024

• “Isn't it nice, by the way, to have a president who doesn't need a teleprompter?” says the person with two visible teleprompters in front of him.

• Trump goes full Putin, says Ukraine is ‘demolished’ and dismisses its defense against Russia’s invasion.”

• The Bulwark: “Why Jews should reject Trump.” I’ll make it much more simple - because he is a fascist with openly Nazi rhetoric.

• Trump was President once: “Time and again during the 2024 campaign, Trump’s promised to do something that he failed to do in his first term, that he didn’t bother to do during his first term, or is the opposite of what he did during his first term.”

• Trump called HBCUs, “the colleges and the universities that happen to be Black.”

• The weird capitalizations. The "millions and millions" and "billions and billions." Is the former president a skilled orator or just another relentless yapper?

• How Trump’s “mass deportation” plan would ruin America.

• JD Vance: political heroin dealer.

• JD Vance at the National Conservatism Conference: "The professors are the enemy."

Politics

• Mayor Eric Adams has been charged by federal prosecutors in Manhattan.

I remember Nate Silver proclaiming that the future of the Democratic party is Eric Adams and Joe Manchin.

• Joe Manchin in 2021 got caught on a private call with rightwing billionaires, saying he wanted their money to kill filibuster reform — because the filibuster protects the big money conservative agenda. Someone leaked the audio.

• Throwing Mark Robinson under the bus won’t help. Trump has redefined the Republican Party – to its peril – in his image as a crazy conspiracy theorist. Weird is who *he* is.

• Clay Higgins stands by his post where he called Haitian migrants “thugs” & “slapstick gangsters” even though he deleted it: “It’s not a big deal to me. It’s like something stuck to the bottom of my boot. Just scrape it off and move on with my life.”

• Higgins' record includes allegedly putting a gun to the head of one of his ex-wives, voting for a neo-Nazi, and assaulting an unarmed Black man while working as a cop.

• What does it tell us that liberals’ favorite conservative in 2016 has now aligned himself with the hard right? David Austin Walsh on J.D. Vance and the long liberal dream of a “responsible conservative.”

• The story of the Senate in the past 60 years is its effort to reduce the amount of work Senators have to do. Bringing back the talking filibuster would mean they have to do their jobs.

• The "Rapture theology" once driving American evangelicals' political behavior & vision of the future is being pushed aside by a new, more aggressive & worldly vision of the End Times.

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• Lina Khan updates:

  • This week FTC took action against Invitation Homes for advertising lower rents only to then saddle tenants with hundreds of dollars in junk fees.

  • The US Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit accusing Visa of illegally monopolizing the debit card market, adding to the price of "nearly everything."

  • FTC to crack down on deceptive AI.

• Topics Florida sex ed teachers can no longer cover:

  • Contraception

  • Consent

  • Abuse

  • "Different kinds of sex"

  • Domestic violence

  • Fluids

  • Gender identity

• Missouri executes Marcellus Williams despite prosecutors’ push to overturn conviction.

• Incarcerated workers are not considered “employees” under federal or state law, and they lack protections guaranteed to other workers.

• FIRE defends law professor who was sanctioned for inviting a white nationalist to speak in class.

• “I was once an architect of the Christian nationalist agenda. I regret it all.”

• Today pro-Russia Georgian Dream party put up new election banners in Tbilisi. On the left, it shows an image of the bombed Mariupol Theatre with the opposition's election numbers and the message "No to War." On the right, it shows the Theatre in Senaki with the message "Choose Peace."

  

Russia/Ukraine

• On the ground in Russian territory held by Ukrainian forces.

• How Russia recruits Europeans to commit sabotage, arson, and murder in the EU.

• The Russian government has finally published a set of standards for protecting fixed structures from the threat of UAVs, two and a half years into a war which has seen numerous Russian sites targeted by Ukrainian attacks. However, it is being seen as mere bureaucracy.

• Russian commanders are throwing away their troops in performative assaults to impress their superiors, according to an angry Russian milblogger. His commentary highlights a persistent contributing factor to Russia's very high casualty figures.

• This report, challenges pre-war pessimism about Ukraine's prospects.

• Reuters reports the existence of a major Russian drone factory in China. A joint project, in effect.

• Reportedly, Russia installs Starlink on Shahed drones.”The photos . . . show a satellite antenna with visible serial numbers. This could allow investigators to trace the supply channels of the Starlink terminal."

Tech

• Elon Musk has finally published a Twitter transparency report. In the last report, covering the second half of 2021, the number of accounts Twitter took action against for posting hateful content was: 1,000,000 Under Musk? 2,600 accounts.

• The New York Times claims that “Mark Zuckerberg is done with politics.” The reality? The billionaire is making nice with Trump and scaling back his giving. Some rebrand.

• New paper in Nature: Discrepancy between human expectations of task difficulty and LLM errors harms reliability.The paper is a bit too technical for me but if I understand correctly, they find that LLMs make lots of errors, don't self correct by alerting people, and make the errors in ways which humans find very difficult to catch.

• Study finds ChatGPT eases students’ cognitive load, but at the expense of critical thinking.

• Sam Altman loves Burning Man - what’s wrong with two things at once.

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declares we could have superintelligence 'in a few thousand days.'

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted GPT-4 "kind of sucks," and now we learn the AI model consumes up to 3 water bottles to generate a mere 100 words.

Climate Change

• Earth may have breached seven of nine planetary boundaries, health check shows.

• At Climate Forward event, an architect of Project 2025 dismisses Global Warming.

• Climate change supercharged Europe floods.

• Climate Change Is So Bad, Even the Arctic Is On Fire.

• A study by Boston University researchers suggests that when Earth passes through dense interstellar clouds, such as 2 and 7 million years ago, the heliosphere is compressed, increasing Earth's exposure to interstellar gases. This interaction likely led to global noctilucent clouds, reducing sunlight by 7%, contributing to an ice age. Hydrogen from the clouds also diminished ozone levels, altering Earth's climate.

  

• Climate scientists call on Labour to pause £1bn plans for carbon capture.

• Rich countries could raise $5tn of climate finance a year.

• People must understand: people in Malawi are paying for the climate crisis with their lives.

Women Rights

• Simply despicable and deplorable: “Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, arguably the most powerful anti-abortion group in the country, is launching a half million dollar ad campaign blaming pro-choicers for the deaths of two women in Georgia.”

Middle East

• "Israel refuses borders: a border is a hard limit, both abstract and aesthetic, on the settler’s vision [...] Israel’s unsettled borders reflect not a bug but a feature of the Zionist state, and the source of its self-granted—and U.S.-ensured—impunity.”

Misc.

• New research identifies a hormonal imbalance linked to PTSD.

• Judge to approve auctions liquidating Alex Jones' Infowars to help pay Sandy Hook families.

• Employer refused remote work for employee who had stroke, violating ADA.

• France to pay €120 million to uproot 30,000 hectares of vineyards.

• To be clear about what is happening with undergraduate creative writing instruction at Stanford, a literal handful of tenured faculty are flexing the privilege of their rank to fire NTT lecturers who built such a successful program.

• For the record, a “taxpayer-funded voucher” for only economically disadvantaged kids is not a “compromise” as most kids in TX public schools are economically disadvantaged. ~70% of voucher users were already in private school anyway. The ~30% who do switch suffer huge academic declines. They (unlike the 70%) tend to be economically disadvantaged and denied entry into all but sub-prime providers. Vouchers are education’s predatory lending.

• ‘Welcome to Wrexham!’ Small Welsh town is about to become a hothouse of culture.

• Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ lawyer blames Costco for 1,000 bottles of baby oil: ‘He buys in bulk.’

• Mozart still making hits 233 years after he died.

Humor