Stop Me

... if you've heard this one before.

Pretty much forever, I've viewed Thomas Friedman as the NYT's token 'compassionate conservative', pretty much a wolf in sheeps clothing. Well, Demented Dictator Don appears to have dropped the veil from his eyes. For now. Today's essay (dead tree's division) may strike a familiar note.

Regular reader should recall two coinages (so far as I know) that have been used here with increasing frequency: The Office of Data Integrity and The Office of Policy Integrity. Offered up in the spirit of Newspeak. Both Offices have been hecticly busy of late.

So, Friend Friedman offers this today:

[Bill Blain] then went on to imagine how his Porridge newsletter will sound in May 2031. It will begin, he wrote, with "a link to a release from Trump's Ministry of Economic Truth, formerly the U.S. Treasury: 'Under the leadership of President Trump, the U.S. economy continues to grow at record speed. Payrolls data from the Ministry of Truth, a subsidiary of Truth Social, show full employment across America. Tensions in the inner cities have never been so low. All recent graduates have found highly paid jobs across America's expanding manufacturing sector, causing many large companies in Trump Inc to report significant labor shortages.'"
[my emphasis, of course]

Friedman concludes (a bit scary, this bit)

That is why, dear reader, though I am a congenital optimist, for the first time I believe that if the behavior that this administration has exhibited in just its first six months continues and is amplified for its full four years, the America you know will be gone. And I don't know how we will get it back.

Without fair voting, we won't. And Demented Dictator Don is quite determined that fair voting will never happen on his watch.

By The Numbers - part the ninety first

Be careful what you wish for, moron. What the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts won't admit: they're a minority of the population and voters. Here's the totals of registered voters:

Right Wingunts - 36 million
Thoughtful Dems - 45.1 million

So, if both parties, across all states, perfectly gerrymander, the House will never be Republican. Bless my heart.

That source also mentions that only 47% of registered voters have a party affiliation, which leaves them as some kind of Independent. Most polling on Demented Dictator Don's performance show that Independents don't like him, either.

Self-identified independents gave the president a 29 percent job approval rating. The 17-point decline since January matches his lowest rating with independents in either of his terms.

Now, Demented Dictator Don likely doesn't care. He's convinced that he'll be alloted indefinite terms by the Gang of Six, if he chooses to have elections, of course. And, that the Gang of Six will allow him to cancel elections due to "a state of emegency", if it looks bleak. I mean, they've already as much as said that he has dictatorial power.

Get out and vote just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years it will be fixed. It'll be fine. You won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.

Some how he doesn't act much like a Christian. Well, may be like one o them Bible thumping shitkicker hucksters a la Elmer Gantry.

The Greatest Threat - part the sixteenth [the TACO has come home to roost]

Where to begin with the shit storm Demented Dictator Don just exploded?

Firing the BLS commissioner just because you don't like the numbers is the mark of a total idiot. But it is very much in keeping with Batshit J. Moron. Remember this gem from Covid-19?

If we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases.

Of course we wouldn't. But, just as I have been predicting: the Office of Data Integrity would, in due time, corrupt any and all government data that Batshit J. Moron gets irritated by. At least in the climate change case, he'll be long dead by the time today's kids can breathe the air or drink the water. While they broil alive.

Riddle me this, Batshit: which of your agencies actually conducts the surveys that constitute the Jobs Report? I'm waiting... Census, which does most of the survey work across the Damn Gummint. You fired the wrong bureaucrat.

You Will Be Assimilated

Well... yet more blah, blah, blah about AI. This time from The Zuck:

Superintelligence, which Mr. Zuckerberg defined as an A.I. model more powerful than the human brain, will improve "nearly every aspect of what we do," he said on a call with investors. The A.I. will help Meta's advertising business by improving its social media feed to keep users on its apps longer, which is already happening, he said. A.I. will also serve as a personal tool for users to create "a new era of individual empowerment," he added.
[my emphasis]

Well... anyone who believes his goal is really about "a new era of individual empowerment" believes it when a guy says he won't cum in your mouth. Like hell he won't. That's the best part. Takes a licking and keeps on spitting.

The Zuck isn't one to be nice to users. They are, after all, his product. He sells them to advertisers. The notion that AI will be anything else but yet another attempt by the rich and powerful to corral the 99% is ludicrous. Just ask Orwell.

Why would a greedhead like Zuck turn down the opportunity to exploit those with limited attention spans? Of course he won't. After all, his software doesn't do anything besides enthrall users. At least Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel actually have a use case centered on the user's productive life.

Thought For The Day - 24 July 2025

The headline reads - "Swallowing Reservations, Democrats Go on Offense on Epstein Files"

Whaaaaa?!?!?!

C'mon, dude!! Just how many left-wing lunatic pedophiles do you really think there are? Throughout history, sexual exploitation has been a right wingnut thing. A power trip. The right wingnut manna. Except for Horn Dog Bill, how many more? How many left-wing billionaires can there be? Not a whole lot. Of those, how many hobnobbed with Epstein? Not so many.

As many, if not all, sexual exploitation advocates and researchers have claimed: it's not about the sex, but the power. And which Party is most in thrall to Personal Power? The elephant in the room. Chuck Schumer cavorting with Epstein? Gimme a break.

The Greatest Threat - part the fifteenth

Demented Dictator Don and his merry band of henchmen (Offices of Data and Policy Integrity) are at it again. Not that they ever really let up, what with Texas and such. But this is, yet again, another ploy to hurt the faithful. Just what the Red States need: a dearth of weather data. These are, after all, more farmin, fishin, and huntin than the Blue States.

What is most appalling: these Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts clearly don't give a shit that they'll be handing their grandkids, and more than likely their toddlers, a burnt out cinder of a planet.

The world is not linear.
-- Donald Hughes McElhone, Ph.D./1980

If you've followed the reports, soon to disappear, about the progress of climate change over the past few decades, the point that stands out like a sore thumb is that the predictions always turn out to be too rosy. The reality is worse than the forecast. So, Demented Dictator Don, through his minions, have axed more NOAA folks. These two, by accounts, were the ones who told Demented Dictator Don that his Sharpie Drawing of Hurricane Dorian was shit. I mean, how the fuck much does Demented Dictator Don know about predicting hurricanes? I mean, 6 bankruptcies!! He's "a fucking moron"^©Tillerson as we all know.

The other carrot in the stew, oft mentioned in these essays, is that the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts and Demented Dictator Don are wedded to the notion that no Social Goods or Services must exist. The Bible tells them so.

We can expect to find much, if not all, of NOAA/NWS sold off to the likes of The Musk Ox for One US Dollar. After, of course, SpaceX reaps billions for new satellites and such. After all of which, someone will have to pay a pretty penny for any kind of weather forecast. No global warming, of course; it's a hoax.

DEI - part the second

The name isn't familiar. I've been watching the biopharma space for some years, but his work there goes back some decades. His name is William Rutter, that's his obit.

So, one might ask, why is he the subject of a DEI screed? You would ask, wouldn't you? Well, here's why.

At 15, Bill, as he was known, left his local high school to enroll in college in Utah. While there, he was identified and recruited by Harvard University through a program aimed at finding promising students from underrepresented regions.

Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) would have a shitfit today, of course. But, may be not. You can't get more fishbelly white than Idaho and Utah. So, may be, Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) might have been OK with Harvard giving a deserving white boy from really White States a leg up. Or, may be not. How about today?

In 1968 Dr. Rutter, a biochemist, was recruited by the University of California, San Francisco, to help transform it into a research powerhouse with funding from the National Institutes of Health. He helped pioneer the science of genetic engineering — a foundation of the biotech industry that set it apart from traditional pharmaceutical development.

And, once again, the Damn NIH wouldn't dare boost the prospects of a West Coast woke college these days. Not in a million years.

Too bad that 99.44% of all progress comes out of the Coastal Blue States. If the likes of Demented Dictator Don succeeds in turning the USofA into the Dumb States of Mississippi, we'd best learn Mandarin. Not that the Dumb States of Mississippi comprehend real English.