Monthly Archives: December 2023

He’s nothing like a saint, but he’s trying to profit on the same, ah, outputs:

looking for a last minute holiday gift? Trump has you covered pic.twitter.com/CQb5CKt7V9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 12, 2023

Yep, along with worthless NFTs, which are certifications of ownership, in this case of digital art, which have proven to be worthless, he’ll sell you – the real standout attraction of the offer – a piece of the suit he allegedly wore to his mugshot.

How will he prove its provenance? He doesn’t appear to say. A fish-in-a-barrel prediction is that enough cloth will be issued for this offer to construct 10, or maybe 100, suits.

Depending on the number of suckers out there.

But notice how Trump capitalizes on the religious fervor of many of his supporters, and, much like John Brinkley of Kansas, he’s harvesting the wealth of people too given to believing in, well, anything without real evidence. A bunch of NFTs and a shred of cloth? Together, worth less than a penny to me. Someone else might shell out big bucks.

In some cases, to show their loyalty.

Welcome to the social prestige ladder. It doesn’t matter which – there are dozens, not all mutually exclusive – and this is just one way to assert your position.

Vatic:

vatic (comparative more vatic, superlative most vatic)

1. Pertaining to a prophet; prophetic, oracular. [Wiktionary]

I’ve not heard that one before. Noted in “This once-in-a-generation Rothko exhibition is spellbinding,” Sebastian Smee, WaPo:

Ol’ Vinnie always brings a frisson of gravitas to his work. The raven, whose name I misplace, was unfortunately a joker who enjoyed penguin jokes.

The Raven (1963) is a rather limp use of the famous Poe poem, and an excuse for V Price and P Lorre to work with B Karloff in a story of magic, betrayal, magnificent sets, a bit of convolution, and broken hearts that made us laugh more than bite our lips. It’s not not really funny, nor really dramatic, only High Camp.

Avoid, unless you’re a completist for any of the above, or J Nicholson or H Court.

Yesterday’s big news was Special Counsel Jack Smith’s highly unusual attempt to skip an appeal to a Federal appeals court and go directly to SCOTUS when it comes to former President Trump’s all-encompassing immunity claims:

Special counsel Jack Smith on Monday asked the Supreme Court to decide whether Donald Trump has any immunity from criminal prosecution for alleged crimes he committed while in office – the first time that the high court will weigh in on the historic prosecution of the former president.

The extraordinary request is an attempt by Smith to keep the election subversion trial – currently scheduled for early March – on track. Smith is asking the Supreme Court to take the rare step of skipping a federal appeals court and quickly decide a fundamental issue of the case against Trump. [CNN/Politics]

My assumption is that the Special Counsel is attempting to get convictions prior to the election next year. The question is why?

Will being President, under the assumption that Trump wins next November, safeguard him from prosecutorial consequences? Only at the Federal level, although there may be soft considerations at the State level, where Fulton County AG Fani Willis may find herself hampered by Presidential claims of immunity or of harassment by herself.

On the other end of the spectrum, perhaps Smith is motivated by politics, a desire to “get” the former President, a corrupt motivation of classic lineage? And, it’s true, it’s not hard to see this as a plausible motivation on a battlefield littered with mendacity, such as Committee Chairman Comer’s (R-SC) statements concerning Democratic President Biden’s alleged corruption, which has drawn little more than laughter from independent, disinterested observers.

So it’s worth taking the next step beyond these negative approaches to the question, and ask the positive question: What positive, politics-neutral effect can come from pursuing this strategy?

And it’s this: Citizens should have all relevant information possible concerning a Presidential candidate.

What is a trial? It’s a presentation of legal facts and the story that can, or cannot, be credibly woven from them. Their contribution to revelations concerning a person running for office are important, even critical, because the motivations and character of a candidate is often, and moreover should be, key elements in the analysis that goes into selecting a candidate to receive, or not, your vote.

The crime, or crimes, that Trump may have committed have already occurred, and thus they are relevant to the election because, if they exist, they contribute key information to the independent, undecided voter; and if such crimes were not committed, at least in the opinion of a jury, that, too, is an important contribution to the thought process of the independent voter.

Putting that into the ol’ hopper, I am unperturbed by the Special Counsel’s maneuver on corruption grounds, because I see this as an effort to bring relevant facts into the awareness of voters next November, and that’s what democracy is all about.

And what has been the former President’s strategy?

Delay, delay, delay. Says something, doesn’t it?

The X-37B, one of those semi-secret government vehicles.

Image: Wikipedia.

Amazingly, it’s only 30 ft long, and unmanned. More info from WaPo here.

Never heard of Virtual Power Plants? Neither had I. Eduardo Garcia has the low-down:

A Virtual Power Plant (VPP) can be used to collectively manage these smart devices [EVs, rooftop solar, batteries, etc] ― also known as “Distributed Energy Resources” ― to boost the amount of renewable energy that enters the grid at times of peak production, and lower electricity demand when clean energy is scarce. Thus they can allow wind and solar to take center stage, regardless of whether the wind blows or the sun shines. [Distilled]

Notice how they mix sources, reserves, and consumers, while using a label implying only sources. It’s often said words are important, and they sure are. They shape discourse and even thinking, and while high level specialists learn to ignore blunder-words, increasingly the mid-level folks will try to use words, such as VPP, to think, and may shape a discourse that diverges from that of the specialist.

Or, in this case, maybe not. An advanced EV can function as both a consumer and as a reserve via the capability dispensing electricity back into the grid. But it’s worth keeping one’s antenna up for potential misnomers such as this one.

Evidently Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, having relished the publicity of being impeached, but not convicted, by his own party, is working to make more very silly publicity:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused drugmaker Pfizer of fear-mongering and lies about the effectiveness of its COVID-19 vaccine, which the company insinuated would end the pandemic, according to a lawsuit Paxton announced Thursday.

“In a nutshell, Pfizer deceived the public,” reads the 54-page lawsuit, filed in a Lubbock state district court. …

Paxton’s arguments, many of them familiar tropes among the anti-vaccine and COVID-19 denial crowd, hinge on the fact that the pandemic did not end soon enough — even though Pfizer officials never promised an end date to the health threat.

The drugmaker, he argues, claimed its vaccine was 95% effective but did not manage to end the pandemic within a year after being introduced.

“Contrary to Pfizer’s public statements, however, the pandemic did not end; it got worse. More Americans died in 2021, with Pfizer’s vaccine available, than in 2020, the first year of the pandemic,” the lawsuit says. “This, in spite of the fact that the vast majority of Americans received a COVID-19 vaccine, with most taking Pfizer’s.”

And more Americans were infected after refusing the vaccine.

Look, the proper metrics are how many folks were exposed, how many were infected VU^[1], what’s the infection rate VU, what’s the death rate for the infected VU, percentage evading vaccination in low vs high areas.

Looking at total death rates conceals so many variables that it’s useless. And this is so obvious that I, an obsolete software engineer and not a professional biometrician, statistician, or other applicable profession, see it. Why doesn’t this blithering idiot?

The Texas House should impeach Paxton for abuse of position, and this time the Texas Senate, when Paxton arrogantly treats them as his little piglets by staying away from the hearings, should convict and toss his ass out.

¹ “VU” is an acronym I made up on the spot, standing for “vaccinated and unvaccinated”.

Researchers have found a vulnerability in your computer:

Hundreds of Windows and Linux computer models from virtually all hardware makers are vulnerable to a new attack that executes malicious firmware early in the boot-up sequence, a feat that allows infections that are nearly impossible to detect or remove using current defense mechanisms.

The attack—dubbed LogoFAIL by the researchers who devised it—is notable for the relative ease in carrying it out, the breadth of both consumer- and enterprise-grade models that are susceptible, and the high level of control it gains over them. In many cases, LogoFAIL can be remotely executed in post-exploit situations using techniques that can’t be spotted by traditional endpoint security products. And because exploits run during the earliest stages of the boot process, they are able to bypass a host of defenses, including the industry-wide Secure Boot, Intel’s Secure Boot, and similar protections from other companies that are devised to prevent so-called bootkit infections. …

As its name suggests, LogoFAIL involves logos, specifically those of the hardware seller that are displayed on the device screen early in the boot process, while the UEFI is still running. Image parsers in UEFIs from all three major IBVs are riddled with roughly a dozen critical vulnerabilities that have gone unnoticed until now. By replacing the legitimate logo images with identical-looking ones that have been specially crafted to exploit these bugs, LogoFAIL makes it possible to execute malicious code at the most sensitive stage of the boot process, which is known as DXE, short for Driver Execution Environment. [ars technica]

Sure sounds like a monoculture failure to me. Monoculture in agriculture refers to a total, or at least substantial, dependence on one crop or other product; if & when it becomes unproductive or otherwise unusable, the farm’s economic survival becomes questionable; if we replace farm with nation, the question becomes existential for the nation.

So the analogy is, perhaps, hyperbolic, but it serves to illustrate the danger to the computing industry of a monoculture approach to computer hardware and software.

Who the hell votes for this guy?

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is resigning from Congress and will leave at the end of this year, he announced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday — a highly anticipated decision that comes two months after his unprecedented ouster from the speakership. …

McCarthy is leaving Congress having made a few enemies within the House GOP Conference. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz was quick to take a victory lap, posting “McLeavin” and promoting a previously released thirteen-minute video based on the ouster of McCarthy, which he led. [CNN/Politics]

I don’t mean McCarthy, who is reportedly quite the charmer, but this idiot Gaetz, who apparently never grew up beyond 8th grade.

I wonder if such behavior will cost him his seat next election. I suppose it’s up to the voters in his district as to whether they want to be represented by an adult, or a child.

Jennifer Rubin of WaPo is frustrated with tomorrow’s news reporting and has an alternate proposal:

A musical instrument I had not seen before.

And prosperity to you, Mr. Spock. Are you in the secret service as well?

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) is, as my Arts Editor observed, a cheeky little movie, but it’s not much more than that. A young man, Eggsy, caught in the swamp of a brutal family of the British underclass, is given an unique opportunity to join a spy service and get all the toys, and we get selected episodes from his training.

Meanwhile, an American scientist has come up with a way to solve a pressing international problem. It’s, ah, violent, if somewhat clever; but whether or not it should be accepted and supported, or rejected and fought against, by this secret service and, for that matter, Eggsy, is never up for debate. This plot failing really lessens the story, even if it’s intended as a comedy, because the character, in an important aspect relevant to the story, becomes a nothing, someone to whom we cannot connect because there’s nothing to which to connect.

And to call it a comedy is a bit of a stretch in itself. It’s certainly not a Python-esque farce, as one might expect for a film about the British, nor is a single theme ridden to death. The sex talk with the Swedish princess is a bit of a hoot, but it’s just a tangential throw-off; there’s an attempt to make violence a comedic metaphor, but why victimize American low-church traditions? Even for an agnostic or atheist, who may find their beliefs and activities silly and even foolish, it’smore puzzling and even offensive than anything else.

But for all these criticisms, I am weighing seeing its sequel. This was not an awful story, for all its flaws. Eggsy grows and changes throughout this story, and I’m curious as to where he’ll go next.

If anywhere at all.

In “Trump not immune from being sued for Jan. 6 riot, judges rule,” a WaPo article, there’s a sly logic problem that a Trump attorney attempts to get by the judges:

Trump attorney Jesse Binnall said at oral argument that it didn’t matter that Trump’s purpose was political. “You cannot separate the governance from reelection,” he said. “If the president wants reelection, it’s so he can continue to govern.”

Governing is what a political executive does, but it’s not necessarily why a politician seeks election or reelection. It might be, but it can, and more often is, a satisfaction of the ego needs of the politician, or a stepping stone to higher office, or a goal peculiar to the emotional or professional requirements of the politician. In Trump’s case, protection from prosecution seems obvious, while less obvious is to derive pecuniary benefit beyond the pale from his position.

Although speculating on the drives of a man who seems to be driven by equal parts religious mania and pathological narcissism is probably a mug’s game.

Through this assertion, Trump’s attorney hopes to immunize Trump from further investigation into his motives. It won’t work, I trust, as the judiciary is full of smart eggs who should see through this ploy.

At long last, Rep George Santos (R-NY) is now the former and disgraced Representative from New York:

• The House voted Friday to expel indicted New York GOP Rep. George Santos over ethics violations, making him only the sixth lawmaker ever to be ousted from the chamber. The resolution passed 311 to 114, with 105 Republicans voting in favor of expulsion. All four top House GOP leaders voted to keep Santos in Congress.
• The embattled former lawmaker survived previous attempts to remove him, but there was growing momentum for this effort in the wake of a scathing ethics report, which concluded he sought to exploit his House candidacy for personal profit. Santos announced he wouldn’t seek reelection after the report, but refused to resign. [CNN/Politics]

Notably, the expulsion is the work of fellow New York Republican Representatives, which they’ve pursued for some months. Much like a hypothetical Tuberville expulsion, Santos’ expulsion works in favor of the Republicans, even if it is a substantial hit to their majority in the House, because it’s a virtue signal: the Republicans, who’ve been acting like dirtbags for years now, do have limits.

That’ll reassure some independent and moderate Republican voters.

But will it be enough to tilt the power balance? I think the Santos/Trump association was, and is, inconsequential; Trump vs Biden result remains a matter between them, with Trump’s dementia and lean towards autocracy against the perception, false or not, that Biden is doddering and incompetent to manage the economy.

And retaining the House? I might have given them a chance to do so if the abortion issue didn’t exist, but it does, and I think that’s the primary issue of the next election. Santos’ seat probably flips to the Democrats, as do a bunch of swing districts plus a few “safe” districts sacrificed, much to the Republicans’ surprise, on the altar of anti-abortionism.

So it’s good to see the political world reject the crass mendacity of Santos, but I do not think it’s nearly enough for the Republicans to somehow make any gains at the Federal level.