Corruption

Well, The Gang of Six has played from the first tee of Project 2025, deep sixing sanity and honesty in governance. What surprised the shit out of me when I found out about Chevron was just how ridiculously recent it was/is: 1984. Any government that would put technical matters into the hands of illiterate and innumerate judges is beyond stupid.

The immediate effect, and you can bet your Bippy that the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnut judges will be going full force on Monday, will be to abolish any regulation they don't like. The Gang of Six say they can. Say good bye to clean air, clean water, and consumer protection. Climate change will officially be a hoax. We, as a nation, will return to the thrilling days of yesteryear: the lawless Wild West. Social Dqrwinism will rule. Now, couple that with the intrusion of computerized automation in all production, and the American Capitalist will soon enough rue the day they promoted these asshats. We already see the increasing use of capital in production, and the resulting lowering of labor's share. Ever more automation leads to either, 1) more product with the same amount of labor, or 2) more or less constant output with reduced labor. Guess which the typical American Capitalist prefers?

The immediate, and only, cause of Great Recessions and Great Depressions is collapse of demand. And, of course, collapse of demand derives from loss of GDP from labor. Which is what MARF^™(party like it's 1115) is all about. But, with The Gang of Six now in control, Don Jr. will take over if wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 keels over. No election result will be abided. The American Kim.

I bet you think this is satire?

By The Numbers - part the fifty seventh

And you think that your tin-can-and-string telephone is wonky. How about this:

Since the problem surfaced in November, engineers had been working to diagnose and resolve the issue, a tedious and lengthy process complicated by the fact that it takes almost two days to send and receive information from Voyager 1, which was the first man-made object ever to enter interstellar space and is currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth.
[my emphasis]

Thought For The Day - 28 June 2024

Boy howdy!! DebateGPT sure would have leveled the playing field. I guess I need to bring in a supply of brown shirts.

Chevron

You've seen the write up, yes? So now, Boeing et al, can do as they wish with safety or performance or anything unless Congress has explicitly written into law what NTSB and FAA can do, and how. Hello 19th Century. Social Darwinism will cull the herd toot sweet. Hydroxychloroquine for all that ails ya.

Luckily, we know folks in Canada. I'm sure they'll adopt us. Won't they?

Liar, Liar - part the second

Wouldn't it be nice if, during tonight's "debate", CNN and the other Left Wing media ran their own version of AI to trap Alzheimer's Ronnie, II lies in real time, and chyron the facts over his sagging face? Wouldn't it be nice?

The Supremes just gave them the Big OK, as it happens.

Uncle Clarence

[I penned this essay before I knew Amy displayed an ounce of sense. Thanks for asking.]

As if it weren't obvious, Uncle Clarence has gone very far off the deep end. The Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts deep end. Yes, that one, the 'don't let domestic abusers get guns' case. Uncle Clarence says that, since the 18th century didn't define domestic abuse nor pass laws protecting the victims, it is WRONG today to keep guns out of the hands of abusers. Keep in mind that in 1800, wimins had few specific rights.

It was not until the 1870's that the first states banned a man's right to beat his family.

Uncle Clarence made sure he went further into 'history' (page 78). As many have observed about the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts, cruelty is the point.

The Government does not offer a single historical regulation that is relevantly similar to §922(g)(8).

So, in other words, since male chauvanist pigs were allowed to slap the wimins around back then, and, evidently, even shoot them, nowadays should be the same. There's that olde famous saying,

The law must be stable but it must not stand still.

Uncle Clarence wants 'the law' to stay in 1791, other amendments and considerable changes to socity be damned. The Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts cabal always rejoin - "if it's so imporant, then amend the Constitution!". Which is a nice idea, except for the fact that the FF made amending difficult, in part because that's what they wanted, but also because society didn't change very fast before the Civil War (not because of it, just because progress sped up about that time). The world is not linear, and that includes progress. If the judiciary doesn't take account of the "relative" meaning of some text of the Constitution (as amended) vis-a-vis today, we'd be thrown back into the unfettered social Darwinism of 1800. A few would be happy. The rest miserable.

Absolutism of 1789 is pernicious.

Uncle Clarence was the lone dissent.

By The Numbers - part the fifty sixth

Ok, so there's more reporting on Calhoun's Congressional testimony, disasterous in my humble opinion. This report includes this quote

Families that lost loved ones in two Boeing 737 Max crashes said on Wednesday that the company committed the "deadliest corporate crime in US history" and asked the Justice Department to fine the company the maximum $24 billion it could face in a criminal trial.

Well... I'd at least rate the makers of asbestos as more culpable, at least in number of deaths and morbidity. And, of course, there's Agent Orange from Vietnam. And the Union Carbide Bhopal incident in India. One could dredge up many business actions that resulted in greater deaths.

What has struck me as odd from the beginning of the Max incidents, is that there's been little, or may be no, reporting on the earlier design/manufacturing screw up with the 737. One need only read up the wiki page.

During the 1990s, a series of rudder issues on series -200 and -300 aircraft resulted in multiple incidents. In two total loss accidents, United Airlines Flight 585 (a -200 series) and USAir Flight 427, (a -300), the pilots lost control of the aircraft following a sudden and unexpected deflection of the rudder, killing everyone aboard, a total of 157 people.

The plane wasn't grounded during this issue. May be not enough souls were lost?

The Gray Lady stumbles, some times

Yes, even The Gray Lady does make a mistake. Fixes, when there are such, appear some place in the A section with the title "Corrections". One caught my eye today, since Andy Cuomo was the go-to pinata by the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts at the beginning and height of Covid. Here's the 'Correction' in question:

An earlier version of this article misattributed a statement responding to a state audit of former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The statement was from Mr. Cuomo's spokesman, Richard Azzopardi, not Mr. Cuomo. The article also referred incorrectly to the source of a requirement that nursing homes accept Covid-19 patients from hospitals. It was a Health Department directive, not an executive order by Mr. Cuomo.

If you recall the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts bombast at the time, that latter was The Smoking Gun of Cuomo's deceit. I don't know if the record has been corrected earlier/elsewhere. Better late than sorry I suppose. This appeared today in my dead trees version in the "Corrections" space on page A18. If you blinked, you wouldn't know it existed. Finding it in the on-line version was convoluted. Putting 'corrections andrew cuomo covid' and such into the search box found nothing. When I brought up the on-line version of the original article, there was the Correction at the bottom of the page.

Four years, and it appears that's how long it took the NYT to figure it out, is quite a while.

Artificial Energy - part the third

Last night "60 Minutes" re-ran its segments, amongst which was one Geoffery Hinton, self-proclaimed Father of AI, and who waxed outrageously on AI taking over the world. Much like The Musk Ox saying that AI will take all the jobs and some 'Socialist' income/wealth re-distribution must ensue if We are to survive. Of course, he's not hesitant to de-hire folks if they are a burden to his profit. Sauce for the goose, and all that.

Back to Hinton. He went on and on about neural networks, and how mysterious they are, but that they work. Not one word about hallucinating or just plain lying. Not one word about the foundational maths involved. The mind of a zealot. So, once again, here's what neural nets are really all about

The mean squared errors between these calculated outputs and the given target values are minimized by creating an adjustment to the weights. This technique has been known for over two centuries as the method of least squares or linear regression. It was used as a means of finding a good rough linear fit to a set of points by Legendre (1805) and Gauss (1795) for the prediction of planetary movement.

For all the evangelical handwaving about NN and AI and other such blathering about the Emperor's New Clothes, a fact is just a fact: computers work on numerical data, not pictures (despite what may seem apparent), and optimization is just minimizing squared differences. So long as we live in a Euclidean World of Data, that's the sole choice. Which, of course, is not a choice.

NN and AI are based on predicting the Future from the Past (Data). If you want to predict the Future, your best bet is to read the NYT from a point in time which reflects the emerging Future. There always will be one, in that human behavior hasn't changed much since before The Bible was written by an aggressive sect of proto-heathens eager to explain the unexplained. In a way which benefited the writers over others. Of course.

There's a reason Times Series Analysts mostly get it wrong: hockey stick data isn't apparent until you've climbed up to the label. For all the time before that, the data looks lazily linear. "Nothing to see here. Nothing to worry about." Gotcha!!!

Stupid Alzheimer's Ronnie, II and Covid-19,

The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.
-- 26 Feb. 2020

Elect him again, and he'll force everyone, not just the myriad Schedule F dick suckers who'll invade the Damn Gummint, to be just as idiotic. And solely to benefit him and his cabal. Well, only the most loyal of them, of course.

And, once again, the Federal Civil Service was created just because the Spoils System of the 19th century got a President killed. Let's party like it's 1829 with Andy Jackson!!!

By The Numbers - part the fifty fifth

Most, may be all (I don't watch as much as one might suppose), sports pundits are just shills for whoever Daddy Warbucks is for that sport or specific event. So it was with some mixture of amusement and scorn that I heard one of said pundits claim that DeChambeau's top of the leaderboard place at the end of the third round (he's not yet on the course) of the US Open was due to his skipping to LIV. Now, my objection to all things PIF/Saudi is just that: all things. LIV is merely one of the greenwashing efforts. It's not as if the high priced golfers LIV pilfered from the PGA were living in shacks on Poverty Hill (that's from a Kingston Trio song; one of the few that made a point) on PGA wages.

The pundit's point, he said, was that LIV offered DeChambeau more time off to recharge, be with family, and such. Made him a better golfer. That assumes, of course, that tournament participation is materially different betwixt the two:

LIV - only 14 tournaments; as far as I can find, all must be attended
PGA - 15

Now, there is a ranking of PGA players at season end, and only so many (125, or more with exemptions, at last count) get to keep playing privileges; said points basically amount to money winnings, so playing only 15 tournaments might make it difficult to keep one's card. OTOH, LIV poached from the top tier of PGA players (including DeChambeau) who aren't likely to fall below the cutoff.

In sum, then, DeChambeau took the blood money out of simple greed. Same as the rest. And the thing is: all this 54 hole team play (LIV, get it?) with mammoth guaranteed money (so far, at least) is so undergraduate (or, professional rasstling); putting on your Big Boy Pants is what you're supposed to do after you finish school. Only beer drinking sub-GED sloths would be pleased with a LIV tournament.

Gradiation

Turns out, there's at least one last one-room (well... one building) schoolhouse here in Socialist New England. Block Island School graduated its Senior Class this week. It's paywalled, mostly, but you get to read the important point. The irony: (nearly?) all the Tourist Service jobs go to imported cheap furriners. Unless you're a kid of the landed gentry or business community, ya gots to leave the idyllic island. It's too bad. Permanent citizens have numbered under 1,000 for decades. Well, at least according to the Groundhog Day Census going back nearly forever, conducted at a collection of waterholes. Annually, since Groundhog Day does happen each and every year.

A NYT report from 20 years ago, sounds about right, still. While we've never made it to the island in the dead of winter (some day we'll be counted in the Groundhog Day Census; if you're on the island after the last boat leaves, you can be counted. We 'own' a week at one of the lodging establishments, so I guess we qualify as an 'Islander'), most of the report fits our last-week-of-October stay. Just, so far, no snow. Although we did get to stay a few extra days one year: the gale blew so hard there were no boats. We were delighted.

It Only Gets Worse - part the first

Yes, it only gets worse. As speculated earlier, it's even more likely that Spirit/Boeing went to the gray market for titanium to save a penny-a-pound on titanium. For the record, it's among the most expensive metals in manufacturing.

Titanium is generally 20-40x more expensive than steel per unit weight.

What about aluminum? While aluminum is widely used in skins, less so in internal structure.

The cost of raw titanium can be up to ten times higher than aluminum, making it a significant consideration in manufacturing.

And aluminum is about 80% of an aircraft. Is it worth it to cheat on the other 20%, of which titanium is some unknown (so far) proportion?

The McDonnell Effect rises its ugly head. Some thoughts from that NYT report:

The titanium in question has been used in a variety of aircraft parts, according to Spirit officials. For the 787 Dreamliner, that includes the passenger entry door, cargo doors and a component that connects the engines to the plane's airframe. For the 737 Max and the A220, the affected parts include a heat shield that protects a component, which connects a jet's engine to the frame, from extreme heat.
...
So far, Spirit's testing has confirmed that the titanium is the appropriate grade for airplane manufacturers. But the company has been unable to confirm that the titanium was treated through the approved airplane manufacturing process. The material passed some of the materials testing performed on it but failed others.
[my emphasis]

So, it appears that in addition to all the other issues, we now know that Boeing's Plastic Plane can vomit an engine, or two. Oh joy.

You need to read the whole story to see the trail, so far known, of the titanium in question. On the face of it, sure looks like gray market trading to save a penny-a-pound. The Spirit of Satan.

Parts Is Parts - part the second

"Parts is parts"
-- Wendy's ad making fun of Mickey D

Ok, so the erstwhile Boeing division (and, may haps, again) Spirit AeroSystems proves, once again, that the Rot of McDonnell continues unabated. Get titanium for a penny-a-pound cheaper, and don't look too close. That, is my humble opinion what happened here.

That is about as sure a thing as the Celtics hanging number 18 in the rafters.

Not Quite

During one of the Celtics-Mavs games, one of the talking heads allowed as how the Joe Barry Carroll (aka, Joe Barely Cares) for Parish and McHale was all time greatest (or worst, depending on one's point of view). I was around then, of course, and that didn't sound quite right.

So, I let my fingers do the walking through the Yellow Googles. Red did pull off the heist, but not in a straigtforward manner.
- Yes, he got Parish from Golden State outright
- Not so Yes on JBC: Golden State drafted him with one of the traded picks
- Not so Yes on McHale: Red got him with a traded pick

Ainge gets near to that heist, with Brown and Tatum pure draft picks. He didn't have to steal (although both picks were acquired), but he sure did get it right. Even though, for some time, Celtics Nation insisted that Tatum/Brown was as dumb as Wicks/Rowe. 'Dump 'em both!!!' Not so much.

Alito

Re: Uncle Sam

His recent behavior set off a teeny alarm in my lower brain stem. There's a L&O episode that bears directly on Uncle Sam's corruption. The DAs and the trial judge are at loggerheads for most of the episode, which culminates with the DAs, defendant's lawyer, trial judge, and Chief Administrative Judge meeting to hash out the conflict in the latter's office. It ends, more or less, with this exchange:

Judge Nathan Marks : You expect me to sit there like a lump, while he springs surprise witnesses? Half-baked appeals, revised indictments? To turn my courtroom inside out - to win a case he should have lost the first time! Chief Administrative Judge : Nathan - you're not supposed to care who wins, remember?

Ah, yes. Impartial jurisprudence.

God and Man

Well, we've lost another Rand acolyte. I can't say it upsets me.

The obit starts by ascribing to Boaz, "reasonable, radical libertarianism", an oxymoron if ever there were one.

"You learn the essence of libertarianism in kindergarten," he wrote in "Libertarianism: A Primer," a 1997 book that was updated and rereleased in 2015 as "The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom." "Don't hit other people, don't take their stuff, and keep your promises."

Not too surprsingly, he actually favored the ultra version of Social Darwinism of those who're convinced that they are the uber menschen, and deserve to keep whatever they can steal and can waste The Commons without penalty.

Summing up his holistic view of individual liberty, Mr. Boaz told The Times in 1984, "I don't think it's any of the government's business to protect people from themselves, whether it's seatbelts, cyclamates or marijuana."

If so, then the law should be: if you get hurt by using/abusing any of these, or if your use of these hurts others, then in the former case you get only the remediation you can pay for from you own pocket, and in the latter case you pay to fix those you've hurt. If you can't you go directly to jail. In sum: there are externalities for most every act that humans do, and the libertarian should absolutely support forcing the individual to pay for their externalities. They don't.

Most of the bad things people do are bad largely because such behaviors impose costs on innocent others. Too bad libertarians don't care about those costs.

Church and State

David French is, by no means, my go-to guy in the NYT op-ed universe. Far from it. Which is why his recent essay hits home. So many homes.

There's been a running battle within the Southern Baptists for years over Purity, but not until this essay was I aware of similar within the Presbyterian flock. But, it ain't so simple: French deals with the PCA, which is not the majority/plurality sect here in the USofA. But, it is described as 'evangelical' in the wiki page.

So, what made me read French's essay? Well... he's feeling a bit of regret.

I am now deemed too divisive to speak to a gathering of Christians who share my faith. I was scheduled to speak about the challenges of dealing with toxic polarization, but I was considered too polarizing.

But, as he says: "The Presbyterian Church in America is a small, theologically conservative Christian denomination". One might wonder whether it is strongly in the lineage of most Presbyterians? That would be for another essay. According to the wiki list, the PCA isn't small within the Presbyterian orbit, actually among the largest sects, and there are many. One might surmise that they are of-a-mind with other evangelical Presbyterian sects with regard to The Orange Trickster and racism and such?

The church as a whole did not respond the way it did when I deployed. Instead, we began encountering racism and hatred up close, from people in our church and in our church school.
The racism was grotesque. One church member asked my wife why we couldn't adopt from Norway rather than Ethiopia.

If ya ain't White, ya ain't Right. Out of the mouth of The Orange Trickster.

Thought For The Day - 11 June 2024

The Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts go gaga whenever Project Veritas duped some left-leaning group. Now that Uncle Sam has been outed in spectacular fashiion, just with an unedited recording of his corruption; well that's so not fair. Eat shit and bark at the moon, motherfuckers.

Onan

So the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts in Congress have decided, yet again, to yank us back millennia, not mere centuries, with the blocking of the right to contraception. Note that it wasn't all that long ago (1965) that the Supremes said not getting knocked up was OK. Of course, Uncle Clarence and Alito and the rest want a mulligan on that.

What the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts won't admit is that the case of Onan from Genesis (if we make the wild-ass assumption that biblical texts are true histories of actual events - boy howdy), has been contorted by Them into a prohibition on contraception It ain't no such a ting.

Onan's crime is often misinterpreted to be masturbation but it is universally agreed among biblical scholars that Onan's death is attributed to his refusal to fulfill his obligation of levirate marriage with Tamar by committing coitus interruptus.

IOW, pull out, pull out!! We're gonna crash!!!

So, of course, what the hell is 'levirate marriage'? Back about 4000 BCE when the events of Genesis are asserted to have occurred, it meant that a guy was obligated to fuck his dead brother's wife. Now why would that be codified in a religion or society? My take: way back then there were a whole lot fewer folks on the Pale Blue Marble, who were constantly warring over resources, land, slaves, and such. Out fucking your neighbors was a Prime Directive. The need for soldiers and farmers and just surviving adults was the most important thing. No cunt should go to waste. This estimate puts global population at that time at 60-ish million. No refrigerators or iPhones or vibrators.

The ensuing years of much fucking puts us at ~8 billion mouths to feed, and a signficant depletion of arable resources with which to accomplish that. Dry fucking is a Good Thing, these days. Well, if you really, really want to leave your kids and grandkids and further more than just a burnt out cinder of a marble.

Thought For The Day - 4 June 2024

You've been following the kerfuffle around Carter and Clark, yes? It seems that the, mostly white and male and (not quite as dominant) straight, sports bloaviators have been busy doing what dey doo. Yes, Dawn Staley runs a thug basketball program. Yes, Carter is one such thug (although not of South Carolina). Yes, I expect Geno to hang up his spurs soon [guess not] because he 100% favors elegant hoops, and I expect he's had enough.

What's truly silly is that the white, male, straight girls' hoops pundits view Clark as the First Great White Hope for the WNBA!! The truth is that Geno has been churning them out for decades. Yes, the WNBA seems more gay than the general population, but who's counting? Breanna Stewart, aka Stewie, was a better player as a rookie than Clark, so far. So, all in all just get over it. What will kill pro girls' hoops is the thug version.

There is precedent, of course. There most always is. Consider the case of the NHL. Two or three decades ago, the old line, "I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out!!", still rang true. Since then, and I don't know the weight of each, the influx of highly skilled (skating and stick) European players and league clamp down on fighting has turned pro hockey into a wonderous sport to watch. Scoring is a bit higher than soccer but much the same structurally, and thus much of the play is pointless, but it is fun to watch, and even the occasional viewer (just the playoffs for me, naturally) can, after a few games, get the trick to goal scoring. As they say, you never know when a defense will break, and the puck screams through the five hole.

If the WNBA continues on the road of 'rivalry' and 'confrontation' and such stupidity (Angel Reese), it becomes little different from Pro Rasstling. The NBA faces the same risk, although without the patina, so far as is commonly known, of LGBTQ. Play a skilled, elegant game and folks will watch. Go the way of Rasstling and only the sub-GED crowd will put it on the teeVee.

And, let us not forget McHale's clothesline of Rambus, and the entirety of Ron Artest. The NBA got over it, at least for a while. It seems to be heading into Rasstling land, as well. Too bad.

Stewart averaged 18.3 points per game, 9.3 rebounds per game and 1.8 blocks per game by the end of the 2016 season.
-- the wiki

[Clark] was awarded the WNBA's Rookie of the Month in May, averaging 17.6 points, 6.6 assists, and 5.1 rebounds per game during that month.
-- the wiki

By The Numbers - part the fifty fourth

From time to time, I have a look at the level of the Quabbin Reservoir, since it's the source of water for Boston and a rather significant number of neighboring towns (much of the territory inside 128). I do this so I can laugh at the stupidity of the MARF^™(party like it's 1115) crowd over-building in the Desert West; not just McMansions with endless lawns, but golf courses and semi-fabs, too. So, that's the table going back to 2005, and you'll see that the lowest level was 79.1% of capacity in 2017.

I grew up in the Western, aka Forgotten, part of the state through the mid 70s, and we (which is to say most of New England) had only one lengthy period of low water (as far back as records go, of course) from our reservoir (in the same general area as Quabbin, which also ran low) in the mid 60s.

Over a hundred years ago, people had the foresight to build really robust systems that are still in service today.
-- Josh Schimmel

Not like the MARF^™(party like it's 1115) crowd who prefer to take and waste, of course. I recall reading some Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts years ago complaining about what is now labeled DEI, and opining that if such continued, 'we'll all look like Brazilians!!', aka Beige. Funny thing is, those Desert West Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts have been doing the industrial equivalent of slash and burn for decades, just like Brazilians.