Recent big sites that closed down: Jezebel, Pitchfork, Vice, Popular Science, and my hopes for the Messenger were dashed when they announced their demise: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4440773-news-startup-the-messenger-shutting-down/

LA Times and the like are hit with layoffs and – worse – Sinclair heavyweight added the Balitmore Sun to the list of ‘compromised’ media outlets: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/01/15/baltimore-sun-sold-david-smith-sinclair/

That said, there are always new sites, but gaining trust and reputation takes time.

Social sites seem doomed to crest and then fall. Digg? MySpace? Friendster? Who remembers the good old days of (moderated) UseNet? Do we want any of those back? Would any of them have remained were it not for spam/bad-actors?

I’m not the lego person, but I am not taking that selfie because: 1) I don’t want to clean the house to make it look all nice before judgey relatives critique the pic, 2) my phone is old and all its pics are kinda fish-eyed, 3) I don’t actually want to spend the time doing the task right now when AI can get me an image in seconds.

Watch out for the sloppy reporting in the Salon piece. For example, it states:

“Hur’s claim that Biden couldn’t remember the day his son died was an outrageous lie,” argued Tommy Vietor, a former Obama staffer and commentator.

Vietor DID tweet that, but Salon doesn’t mention that Hur didn’t make that claim. Rather, Hur claimed Biden couldn’t remember the YEAR (not DAY).

“He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” the report said. (source NBC).

I liked Tamara Keith’s more accurate coverage posted over here: https://www.wbur.org/npr/1237745840/biden-hur-report-memory-classified-documents

I appreciate that the “Gradient Canopy” roof is covered in solar cells and collects rainwater while also letting in natural light, so maybe the problem is they didn’t do enough by not adding in some shielding, too.

In addition to the delay, the court asked for arguments to an over-broad question:

“Whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

Note that they COULD have asked something more like, “Were Donald Trump’s actions on and surrounding the January 6th incidents official acts of a President and is Trump therefore immune from criminal prosecution because the conduct was both within his tenure in office and within the scope of his duties?” Of course, that is not what was asked. The actual question asks for long and careful considered speculation on all possible contingencies where the relevant case is about a specific set of actions that could be quickly assessed.

see also: https://www.salon.com/2024/02/28/the-is-indulging-immunity-claim-further-delaying-his-trial/

This Op/Ed expresses my sentiment better than I’d do: https://crooksandliars.com/2024/02/mitch-mcconnell-steps-down-senate

As gun control advocate Shannon Watts writes, “Sen. Mitch McConnell’s legacy will be that he purposefully undermined America’s first Black president, he broke the Supreme Court, he helped elect a fascist President, and he abetted up an insurrection on American soil.”

(and)

Let’s not pretend his successor will be any better. He is likely to be a Trump toady who will bow before the pressure and screw this country even more.

Msnbc’s Alex Wagner pointed out on her show that, “After all, it took just 51 days from the time Trump was kicked off the ballot in Colorado on December 19th to when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for that case – the 14th Amendment case – on February 8th. Now on December 11th, 2023, Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court to quickly weigh in on Trump’s immunity appeal and to do so early , which the Court rejected! And now by the time we get to April 22nd, which is when the Court plans to hear arguments in this immunity case, it will have been 133 days since the Court was first asked to hear the appeal. So the pace is… curious? Around 50 days when it helps Donald Trump, and over 130 days when it doesn’t.”

This.

I don’t see how they can cry, “States’ Rights!” all this time and now try to say states DON’T have the right to set their ballots. They do. They keep various 3rd party candidates off ballots all the time for stuff like not having enough signatures to get them ON the ballot.

I heard Trump’s lawyer argue that requiring candidates not-be-insurrectionists was adding a requirement not in the Constitution – except it IS in the Constitution and even though 2/3 of Congress could give a pardon/waiver on that, the fact that they MIGHT do so in the future does not disqualify Trump in the now, which the Colorado lawyer brought up. Later, TV commentators brought up that after the Civil War, a bunch of guys DID preemptively ask Congress for waivers. If Trump got that through now, it sounds like Colorado would have to put him on the ballot.

The Supreme Court decided Bush V. Gore on just the state of Florida. It sounds like they are now deciding Trump V. [Constitution] and trying to blame it on Colorado. Sadly, they seem to want the Constitution to lose. My last hope is that they don’t make this about letting ‘one state decide the president’ because that already happens just based on who each state allows to vote. I’m hoping their decision stems from something actually in the Constitution.

It isn’t as important as a war starting, but it is significantly less common than, say, a mass shooting. I’d rate it along side whether groundhog Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow: we know it is going to happen, that it has no meaningful impact, but there are still a bunch of people who want to know how the tradition turned out.

How different would things be out there in America if, 15 or 20 years ago, some rich liberal or consortium of liberals had had the wisdom to make a massive investment in local news? There were efforts along these lines, and sometimes they came to something. But they were small. What if, instead of right-wing Sinclair, some liberal company backed by a group of billionaires had bought up local TV stations or radio stations or newspapers all across the country?

Again, we can’t know, but we know this much: Support for Democrats has shriveled in rural America to near nonexistence, such that it is now next to impossible to imagine Democrats being elected to public office at nearly any level in about two-thirds of the country. It’s a tragedy. And it happened for one main reason: Right-wing media took over in these places and convinced people who live in them that liberals are all God-hating superwoke snowflakes who are nevertheless also capable of destroying civilization, and our side didn’t fight it. At all. If someone had formed a liberal Sinclair 20 years ago to gain reach into rural and small-town America, that story would be very different today.

There has in recent years been an impressive growth of nonprofit media outlets, led nationally by ProPublica and laying down roots everywhere, from the aforementioned Baltimore, where the Baltimore Banner has sometimes been scooping the Sun, to my home state of West Virginia, where Pulitzer Prize–winner Ken Ward’s Mountain State Spotlight is doing terrific reporting. These outlets are welcome indeed. They do sharp and necessary reporting. But they’re nonprofits, which, under IRS rules, cannot be partisan. They have to be apolitical.

I think one of the hard issues about making left-wing spin-machines is that a large chunk of the left would reject them. Following the old adage, “Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line,” I fear that you can get the right to follow any ridiculous story because they are unified in wanting their ‘side’ to win, but a good number of Democrats would become disenchanted by fake news and may even become turncoats if asked to believe muckraking spin as Truth. Surely there’s a good number of low-interest left-leaners who would be happy to believe and follow half-truths and lies, but I doubt Democrats would get the same consensus of accepting such as good politics the way Republicans do.

FYI, the bot only summarized the first of three pages.

The “set up” is that students were NOT calling for genocide, and she was answering in regards to what was actually said (which, again, was not a call for genocide). She was saying that in the context of a peace rally, wanting Palestinians to be free is a call for equality and not the same as a call to eliminate all Jewish people – though if you said the same thing while firing rockets from Gaza, it would be a call to violence (but then it would not be in English). And they were all completely incompetent and making that distinction for the cameras.

But isn’t public speaking part of leading a University?

Yes, you are right, they were set up, but they should have been repeating over and over that much, if not all, of the speech was free from violent content with NO actual calls to kill or harm anyone. They should have made it clear that chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” at a peace rally may well be a call for equal citizenship (particularly when said by Euro/American types rallying against a distant aggression) despite sounding like a dog whistle to others.

They completely failed at that.

I missed the beginning of that hearing, but caught a fair chunk of it before turning it off as awful grandstanding by some of my least-liked politicians. I noticed the news only carried the worst bits, but honestly, I didn’t really hear any ‘best’ bits that were overlooked. I hope they had some better moments at the beginning, but while I was watching? No. As a group the University heads were just falling into traps or getting a brief reprieve without them recovering or clarifying anything.

Per reuters, the 5 unaccounted for coast guard crew have been reported as dead: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/fire-breaks-out-plane-runway-japans-tokyo-haneda-airport-nhk-2024-01-02/

The amazing thing is that almost ALL the staff signed a letter and threatened to quit, too! From: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-altman/

“The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company,” the letter reads. “Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI.”

Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place. By 5:10 pm ET on Monday, some 738 out of OpenAI’s around 770 employees, or about 95 percent of the company, had signed the letter.

Supposedly, Microsoft has said they’ll hire the whole team… but I wonder if it’ll really play out that way or if they’d just become short-term hires and then kicked out once OpenAI collapses. Note that Microsoft has invested a lot of money in OpenAI.

Vox also has a lengthy article with lots of details and consideration of what it all means, such as:

… There is an argument that, because OpenAI’s board is supposed to run a nonprofit dedicated to AI safety, not a fast-growing for-profit business, it may have been justified in firing Altman. (Again, the board has yet to explain its reasoning in any detail.) You won’t hear many people defending the board out loud since it’s much safer to support Altman. But writer Eric Newcomer, in a post he published November 19, took a stab at it. He notes, for instance, that Altman has had fallouts with partners before — one of whom was Elon Musk — and reports that Altman was asked to leave his perch running Y Combinator.

“Altman had been given a lot of power, the cloak of a nonprofit, and a glowing public profile that exceeds his more mixed private reputation,” Newcomer wrote. “He lost the trust of his board. We should take that seriously.”

They will tell you “controlled” visits are for safety, but I remember in the post 9-11 Gulf War reporting how the Pentagon went all in for “embedded journalism”. Yeah, sure, it keeps the press ‘safe’, but it changes what gets covered. The media initially loved it, but later realized there were valid criticisms of the process.

More to the point: yeah, covering news should not be a death sentence. Even if you are covering a war, as civilian non-combatants you shouldn’t be targeted by any military… a la the ‘Collateral Murder’ wikileaks video of journalists shot by US helicopters.

FYI: From context I think you meant “defund” rather than “defend”.

Obviously Scalise is a lying liar. George tried to call him out on how funding IRS enforcement would increase revenues, but Scalise (again) dodged by acting as if catching tax cheats would be bad for the ‘working’ man.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, you just cited the CBO. I mean, that’s their analysis. It’s going to reduce it because you’re taking away enforcement.

SCALISE: Right, but the CBO said – but the CBO said it’s going to actually hit people making under $400,000 a year with $4 billion in new taxes.

That violates President Biden’s own pledge by the way that he made to low income families. He promised he wouldn’t raise their taxes. CBO said it would be a $4 billion hit to those families.

(CROSSTALK)

… he thinks 400K is low income?

H-h-how? HOW? do they ‘anonymize’ DNA?!?! Remember how in 2007 ‘anonymized’ netflix data was linked back to actual members? That was just checking what people watched on Netflix compared to what they rated on IMDB.

With DNA, you should be able to figure out who someone is by the fact you an exact DNA record! I mean, it’ll share similarities with your parents, and children, and to a lesser degree, more removed relatives. How hard can it be to figure out that this woman is related to that guy with an arrest record. Or more specifically: this is the exact person because we see other records from any doctor or whatever with the same DNA.

After decades of sci-fi/fantasy entertainment to prime us, the primal part of the human brain that reacts to in-group and out-group members suddenly changes in every human and we start reflexively and unintentionally classifying all earth life as friends and space/environmental threats as enemies.

Humanity immediately gets serious about climate change, CO2 reduction, and the like, but we also get way too zealous about deploying space lasers.