Garland was more than happy to prosecute all the goofy little J6ers, along with the traditional list of migrants and smugglers and foreign adversaries.

He just steered clear of anyone with power.

Aw… they did poor Curtis Silwa dirty.

Like, Mamdani all the way. But if I’ve got to pick between those last three, Silwa’s clearly the least awful choice.

In all honesty I think they do more harm than good. It gets it into the morons heads “oh, he’s going to win, I can stay home”.

I keep seeing this line printed over and over again, in every election cycle, by people who seem to think there really is this enormous body of people who are enthusiastic about a candidate but unenthusiastic about voting.

Hell, Cuomo complained about it shortly after the election. He lost because too many people liked him too much and thought his win was assured. I heard this after Brexit. I heard it after Hillary lost in 2016 and after Trump lost in 2020 and after Harris lost in 2024. We can have historic high turnouts and historic low turnouts. We can have sea changes in the composition and ideology of the voters. We can have scandals flood the papers a day before the election that throw polls into chaos and candidates who coast to victory on double-digit margins. (Incidentally, Mamdani won by 12% in an election he was projected to lose by more than that a month earlier). The “I was secretly so popular that people forgot to vote for me” myth endures.

I’ve got an alternative hypothesis. Maybe people turned out for Mamdani because they liked him a lot and people stayed home for Cuomo because he was a creepy sex-pest POS. It had nothing to do with their projected odds of winning and everything to do with their appeal as political leaders.

The DOJ has always been a kind-of weapon, intended to legitimize the use of force against enemies of the state. This is, incidentally, why incoming Presidents are loathe to use it against their corrupt predecessors. And why DOJs tend to fixate on people with virtually no political capital (minority political leadership, black market traffickers, migrants, foreign business interests, and domestic low-level con-artists) while steering well clear of sitting politicians, large cap business executives, large church leaders, and dignitaries from wealthy allied nations.

Trump’s pogrom on migrants and minorities is spilling over into targeting people who aren’t traditionally on the DOJ’s shit list, because he’s far more concerned with the raw metrics of his department (the volume of individuals arrested and deported) than the consequences of his policies (deteriorating trade relations, impact to domestic trade and travel, long term market stability, long term labor prices, etc). And his pardons and case dismissals are a more vulgar effort at self-enrichment than has historically been seen (although hardly without precedent)

What has shifted isn’t the DOJ’s purpose but the individuals that are now considered “fair game” in the eyes of Department leadership. One could argue that this is partially Biden’s fault - he “shot at the king and missed” when the Southern District indicted Trump a few years ago. But you can go back to the Bush Era USA firing or the Nixon Saturday Night Massacre to see similar instances of Presidents using their stranglehold on the Justice Department to shape prosecutorial action.

This has been a fundamental flaw in the US political system for ages. We claim to have an independent judiciary (a joke under any extended scrutiny) but what does that mean without an independent prosecutorial agency?

not an argument for of against anything

Right. It’s a system of economic exchange, not a moral position. There are ways around this system, but they’re time consuming and annoying to accomplish. So the vendors tend to take the path of least resistance when setting their internal policies. You were taught about Free Markets as this perfect, frictionless vacuum of interactions between buyers and sellers, but it doesn’t work that way and never did.

For some reason, people seem to confuse being naive and gullible with being moral and upstanding.

A Magazine Made Up The Pledge of Allegiance To Sell US Flags

In 1891, the magazine The Youth’s Companion invited readers to write and ask for cards bearing the following message: “This Certificate, representing a 10 cent contribution, entitles the holder to One Share in the patriotic influence of the School Flag.” When the enterprising tyke had sold 100 of these 19th-century NFTs, they’d send the proceeds to The Youth’s Companion and receive a flag in return. That’s about $300 per flag, in 2021 dollars.

And why were young readers so willing to put in unpaid hours as salespeople raising money to buy flags? Because of the campaign started by The Youth’s Companion called the “Flag Over Every Schoolhouse” movement. They advertised this movement to schools directly as well as in their publication, and to really give schools a reason to want flags, the magazine created the Pledge of Allegiance.

The magazines’ marketing department came up with the pledge, and had an on-staff minister to do the wording (though not the “under God” clause, which was added decades later). They got Congress’s support, aiming to get the whole country reciting the pledge by the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ birth. It seems like the magazine also did care about instilling national pride, but it was the subscriptions department who were behind these campaigns; the editorial department wanted no part in it. They sold hundreds of thousands of flags at what sounds like significantly above cost.

I mean, that’s exactly how third party payment systems have always worked. 🙄

I guess you can always try buying your porn game with Bitcoin or something.

Or an Hapsburg, sure. Doesn’t keep eugenicists from trying.

Republicans have taken to voting “No” on damned near anything a Democrat floats for a vote, so this was an excellent opportunity to dump kerosene on the flaming bag of shit Trump stepped in.

But otherwise…

cough

cough cough

hack cough weeze

Yeah, its a bit of a problem.

The master of misinformation, sensationalism, and ragebait.

It’s not even really that good. It’s just everywhere. Flip on your TV, turn on the radio, pop open a browser, and you’re hit with a legion of professional reactionaries screaming “Whitetopia Has Fallen! Brown Menace End Times Are Upon Us!”

There is no longer anything resembling “normal” news. It’s just wall-to-wall cop worship, racism, and crime hysteria.

Europe Has Fallen! Gangs Run Rampant!

Cops_Harassing_Shirtless_Guy.jpg

Brink of Recession

Impossible. Big Stock Line Goes Up.

MAGA Revolt

We’ve been here before. The Wingnut Wurlitzer just needs a bit more time to spin up and explain why this is all Killary Killington’s fault.

By 2026, they’ll all be back in line again.

Please explain.

Sure, let me just dust off my notes from a decade ago.

How does it relate to probability?

It has to do with the available range of outputs given all available inputs. And the degree to which iterative actions can have a feedback effect.

But the math on this kind of thing gets hairy fast.

Zuckerberg/CZI are not EA, and SBF was disowned by EA.

Zuckerberg hires from the community and its affiliates. Sarah Wynn-Williams being an excellent example.

SBF being disowned after he went broke is hardly a point in the movement’s favor.

AMF stopped 20 million cases of malaria in 2023.

The impact of these nets is expected to be

FFS, they printed this in November of 2023. Really getting out ahead of your skis, when you’re a data driven organization that’s making claims on total reduction in cases before the period is even closed.

To date, I can find no evidence of a 10% drop in malaria cases in any of the targeted countries between '22 and '23.

On the contrary, the WHO reports an 11M case rise from the prior year. Neither have we seen a plunge in cases in '24 or the Q1 & Q2 of '25.

We had a good five or ten minutes somewhere in 1945. Also, gotta admit that Moon Landing was cool.

Everything else I could probably live without.

We need a strong USA.

Glances at the last 40 years of US history

Do we?

I’m legitimately curious how Abstract Algebra relates here. I thought that was all about group theory and such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_theory

In abstract algebra, group theory studies the algebraic structures known as groups. The concept of a group is central to abstract algebra: other well-known algebraic structures, such as rings, fields, and vector spaces, can all be seen as groups endowed with additional operations and axioms.

I got a degree in it, so I know a few things.

this doesn’t mean math is wrong

The application of a model to a set of data which fails to predict outcomes reliably is “Wrong Math”.

The big problem with EAs is empirical. They don’t deliver on their promises.

The misuse of mosquito nets for fishing is bad, yes – and depressingly ironic – but you should check out the Against Malaria Foundation’s response

The distribution of nets had failed to yield the promised benefits. I site the misuse as a very prominent example of how EAs misjudge externalities, but its one data point in a much broader picture.

If you really want to drop the hammer on EAs - particularly chronic fraudsters like SBF and the Zuckerberg CZI - it is that they’re fair more interested in self-enrichment than altruism in the basic sense.

I cite the mosquito netting distribution effects as a very straightforward calculation error, because it is at least superficially a sincere effort with lackluster results. But once you get under the tip of the iceberg, EAs are as riddled with con-artists and bullshitters as any Clinton Foundation or UN Food for Oil initiative.

That’s the wages of unilateralism in a nutshell.

“Stop whining and Vote Blue No Matter Who”

“Great, I’m voting for Mamdani for Mayor”

“WHOA! WHOA! WHOA! Not like that!”

Hamas Says

Always telling when they refuse to point to the leadership they are ostensibly dealing with in between rounds of mass extermination.

Netanyahu has made it a national policy of targeting all former members of the Palestinian government, both in Gaza and the West Bank. His IDF kills militants and diplomats alike. They find family members and murder them, too. They gun down whole neighborhoods on the suspicion a Hamas insurgent might be inside. They fill their prisons with suspects and torture Gazans to death, extracting a few confessions out along the way. Then they kick off wars with neighboring Lebanon and Syria, they bomb their ostensible allies in Jordan and Egypt, and they even send bombers deep into Iran.

Hell, they are shooting their own Oct 7th hostages. Who is left to sign a “surrender” agreement on these terms? Anyone waving a white flag is bombed into the pavement.

Might as well ask for Anne Frank’s surrender as anyone in Gaza.

Been reading about Trump’s “cognitive decline” since 2017. For some reason, we need to believe his brain is broken in order to explain away his miserable attitude and sadistic policies.

No guys, that’s just a normal American billionaire thinking and talking exactly like they all do.