Monthly Archives: October 2025

I don’t know about my reader, but I’d be alarmed if I were President and read this:

A majority of Americans agree “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy” (56%), up from 52% in March 2025, compared with 41% who agree “President Trump is a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness.” [Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI)]

Especially in combination with his disastrous address to the top military brass of a few weeks ago, which gave the impression that he had no idea how to deal with them – and they were absorbing the fact that he’s an appearance-obsessed businessman completely lacking in a deep understanding of anything except how to get elected in today’s age.

I wonder about this, which came in mail from AL-Monitor with no link:

On Oct. 27, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned AI company Humain announced Humain One — a new AI-based operating system that lets users talk to their computers rather than click icons. The company, launched in May under its powerful Public Investment Fund and chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, sees systems like its voice-driven OS eventually replacing traditional systems like Windows or macOS.

The new system’s debut, announced by CEO Tareq Amin at the Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh, offers another revealing glimpse of Humain’s ambitions. In August, the company introduced Humain Chat, an Arabic-language chatbot built on its own large language model, ALLAM 34B. Now, with Humain One, it’s potentially signaling a bigger vision: embedding generative AI at the heart of everyday computing.

Generative AI in the central heart of my computer? Probabilistic guesswork rather than determinism in everything a computer does?

It may be time to begin life-long abstention from computers. Back to drinking heavily.

I wonder if Erick Erickson thinks he’s got enough credit to get away with this, or if he really believes his own baloney:

Frankly, I think all the gold leaf at the White House makes it look less American and more like a French whore house.

Or will he just get dragged off one night by Trump’s Chumps? Given President Trump’s exceptional vanity, I shouldn’t be surprised if that were to happen. I hope he has the credit to survive the misstep – or was given a prior go-ahead to prove his independence.

Watching Ryan Hall’s coverage of Hurricane Melissa’s imminent Jamaican landfall with winds at around 285 MPH, he said hurricane eyes, the center of a hurricane, are just big, big tornadoes.

Funny how I’d never thought of it that way before.

You can find Mr Hall on YouTube and other platforms. At present he seems to be involved in live coverage.

For this engineer, some fashion shows are good, if a bit dull; some are awful; and some are … this.

We actually enjoyed it.

Erick Erickson, last week, that is.

Boomer Selma and the GOP’s Secret Weapon

Yep, right with the title he’s mocking an important civil rights incident. I don’t know the character of this Secret Weapon, but immediately it crosses my mind to wonder why he’s going to reveal it.

Ok, so Democrats are boneheaded, I’ll grant him that. But onwards!

No Kings has come and gone and was, thankfully, a peaceful protest of mostly white retirees.

The Boomers are ever in need of their Selma.

What struck me most is that while there was diversity of sex and race and ethnicity, the crowds were everywhere still mostly older white people. These people’s fathers stormed the beaches of Normandy and fought the actual Nazis, then came home and started families, then joined together in the Civl Rights movement while their kids were partying in high school.

It’s dumb crap like that, assuming that kids were partying. Some kids don’t. Come to think of it, I was in the throes of teenage depression and didn’t party. But it’s bombastic because he plays to stereotypes, the worst stereotypes, rather than address the situation of interest, and that’s how divisiveness is promoted. He’s not trying to persuade independents, or the other side; he’s trying to install an abyss of contempt on his side.

It may not seem so bad so far.

Now the kids need their moment to be like dad. They had a summer of love. They want a summer of mattering.

They have no bridges to cross in Selma. So they show up with silly signs and dumb chants for pretty much anything. Now, it is to protest that the democratically elected President of the United States and the democratically elected Republican controlled Congress that empowers him are allowing that elected President to behave like a king, and the only thing to stop him are, ironically, life-tenured unelected judges who are kings in their courtrooms and boomers marching in the street with their grandkids.

Does he address the concerns of those who attended No-Kings protests? No, he mocks them and, in so doing, actually belittles himself. Who has power of tariffs? Who has the power of the purse, the authority to allocate funds? Who has the authority to create and fund departments?

Congress, not President Trump, yet the latter has claimed those powers and more.

Who puts on an unprecedented military parade on his own birthday? Whose Administration stands accused, credibly, of lying to the judiciary?

The 60 Minutes story noted that the nonpartisan law journal Just Security has discovered more than 35 cases in which judges have said the government is lying to them. One judge warned that “trust that had been earned over generations has been lost in weeks.” [“October 20, 2025,” Heather Cox Richardson]

All characteristics of a group of people frantic to hold onto power, isn’t it? To wear crowns and parade about as if they’re the chosen of God.

Speaking of the judiciary, notice how far Erickson will stretch to make an emotionally resonant, yet factually inaccurate point: … stop him are, ironically, life-tenured unelected judges who are kings in their courtrooms. Erickson should know so much better, being a lawyer himself. Judges are constrained in many ways: follow judicial procedures, the law, stare decisis, or get decisions, jury and bench, reversed by higher courts.

He appeals to emotion, not to rationality. Emotional appeals when it comes to national polarization and concerns about a deeply unpopular President and his clown-car of a Cabinet, are dangerous and irresponsible.

His excuse? The other side is a pack of socialists. That they favor socially responsible behaviors over which we’ve been debating for decades, such as sustainable energy. That the supporting mechanisms and fallout of transgenderism will be forced upon them without their input, a rare valid point which can make it hard to support Democrats. We need Party reform or replacement on both sides.

But the rest of the whining is, well, just that. And then he segues off to the Drudge Report, which appears to be continuing Matt Drudge’s independent ways…and that’s intolerable, I guess.

I stopped reading. It was an angry mass of writing of a guy caught between Scylla and Charybdis: on the one hand, the Democrats are ‘baby-killers,’ while on the other hand the Republicans are a pack of mendacious idiots whose lust for power overrides respect for democracy or any sort of honor. He’s in the soup, members of the jury. Here’s your tasting spoon.

I’ll leave it at that. He’s acting the part of the shirtless propagandist, so wound up that he discards his shirt before it becomes soaked in the sweat of misleading statements

First, apply the old Mencken maxim:

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

In this case, it’s the central problem of representative democracy: how to pick the representatives? Today, I believe all states whose population gives them more than one seat in the House of Representatives select those on a geographic basis, meaning each Representative is associated with a geographic segment of the State.

It’s the manipulation of those boundaries for electoral dominance that is called gerrymandering.

But what constitutes a fair district? It’s not a simple question. If more of Party A than Party B are registered in a State, should every district reflect that difference? Or should historical results be confined, roughly, to a given district?

Or should districts be drawn to reflect non-electoral realities on the ground? All coal-miners get their own district, perhaps?

When it’s non-obvious, proposals like this tend to sprout from the brows of political watchers and hopefuls, such as Matthew Algeo:

Lamasery:

a monastery of lamas. [Wordsmyth]

And a lama appears to be a Tibetan monk. Noted in “The century-old quest to find this large, mythical animal,” Nathalia Holt, WaPo:

The next morning, [the Roosevelt brothers] mustered the energy to hike the snowy mountain listlessly. Hearing the beating of drums, they followed the noise to a stone edifice strung with Tibetan prayer flags. They had stumbled upon a remote lamasery, and the expedition was saved by the benevolence of monks who took in the travelers. The men and women, dressed in golden robes, offered the brothers food, clean bedding and supplies, even helping patch up the burned holes in Kermit’s coat with squares of bright yellow from their own clothing. Renewed by their few days in the lamasery, the explorers returned to the trail.

From Religion News Service’s (RNS) Jack Jenkins, more than a month ago:

Last month, the Rev. David Black stood in front of a Chicago-area U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility and spread his arms wide. Adorned in all black and wearing a clerical collar, the pastor looked up at a group of masked, heavily armed ICE agents on the roof and began to pray.

“I invited them to repentance,” Black, a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), said in an interview. “I basically offered an altar call. I invited them to come and receive that salvation, and be part of the kingdom that is coming.”

But when Black began to lower his arms a few seconds later, the agents responded to his spiritual plea by firing pepper balls, or chemical agents that cause eye irritation and respiratory distress, video footage shows. One struck Black in the head, exploding into a puff of white pepper smoke and forcing him to his knees. Fellow demonstrators rushed to his aid, and as the pastor rubbed his face in pain, the agents continued to fire.

“We could hear them laughing,” Black said.

Sounds like the Romans – the Trump Administration and all of its supporters – and the Christians, those who want to do right but understand there are varying viewpoints.

Oh, and the Romans had a long history of being cruel, and, at least in myth, enjoying it.

This knowledge helps shape responses and persuading the undecided to join the anti-Trumpers. No matter how loud the Trumpers, like Erick Erickson, keep trumpeting their support.

Adam Aleksic talks about how feedback loops involving ChatGPT and other generative Large Language Models (LLMs) AI tools are affecting language use.

Linguistically, there’s nothing wrong with [the emphasis of certain words over their synonyms]. The word “delve” isn’t any worse for your brain than its synonyms. But language is a harbinger of greater social shifts. There are many other, far more insidious misrepresentations that are also coded into LLMs. Racial biases, gender biases and political biases — all of these are probably trained into the models much like linguistic biases, but these are harder to definitively measure. We need to remember that these aren’t neutral tools: They hold the power to subtly reshape our thinking. [WaPo]

And – they are at least one step removed from reality, and probably more accurately several. We’re not talking about creatures who experience reality directly by their senses. No, all they get is text input.

A great reason to be wary of such programs. Don’t take their outputs without checking them, and please don’t fall in love with them.

“Why did you drag us down here?”

Under the second Trump administration, however, Greene has increasingly emerged as a rogue voice of dissent within the Republican ranks.

Over the past several months, the congresswoman has blasted the GOP for effectively bailing out the Argentine economy, striking against Iranian nuclear facilities, providing ongoing aid to Israel and, amid the ongoing government shutdown, refusing to take action regarding the expiration of Obamacare subsidies at the end of this year, which may see insurance premiums more than double for some families come January.

Greene has also fervently lobbied for greater transparency in the White House’s handling of recent developments in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case. With her Republican colleague in the House, Thomas Massie, and their counterpart across the aisle, Democratic Congressman Ro Kanna, she has helped helm a growing push to have the Justice Department release new documents on the late pedophile’s crimes. [Daily Beast]

We’re down in Wonderland!

Look, I’m no fan of Rep Greene (R-GA), even if she did give me one of my favorite conspiracy theories of all time, but these days she’s starting to come across as the most sane of her caucus – and actually making sense when it comes to criticizing the ways of the GOP.

And that’s gotta be a bit scary for everyone in D.C.

Especially if she goes independent. The failure to release the Epstein Files may actually cause the unimaginable.

If you’re feeling the need for gravitas and dignity in your life, especially in view of the fumbling clowns in the federal government, then this should help.

For those goat entrails enthusiasts, there was apparently a small surprise up in red Alaska a couple of weeks ago:

Election Day 2025 is over in the Fairbanks North Star Borough, and City of Fairbanks Mayor David Pruhs conceded the race for his position to challenger Mindy O’Neall on Tuesday night.

Preliminary results have come in from all 32 of the precincts across the area, showing O’Neall with a current 280-vote lead over Pruhs.

Calling the race “over,” Pruhs said, “I ran a good race. So did Mindy. She had a lot of state Democratic Party backing. We had a low voter turnout, so it’s a perfect storm for her to take the seat.” [Alaska’s News Source]

It’s not clear that Fairbanks’ mayors emphasize their party allegiances, but, in red Alaska, taking the city of Fairbanks should boost local Democrats.

Circumnuclear disc:

The circumnuclear disc (CND) orbiting the Galaxy’s central black hole is a reservoir of material that can ultimately provide energy through accretion, or form stars in the presence of the black hole, as evidenced by the stellar cluster that is presently located at the CND’s centre.

Noted in “We finally found the hot wind coming out of our black hole,” Alex Wilkins, NewScientist (4 October 2025, paywall):

These winds, however, have never been conclusively detected in Sgr A* [the black hole at the center of the Milky Way], despite being predicted since the 1970s. This is partly because it is so difficult to observe the region around our galaxy’s black hole, a tightly packed melange of stars, dust and gas called the circumnuclear disc (CND).

Because, in order to hold the mob organization together, the boss must show some minimal amount of loyalty to the minions, and do so publicly:

Disgraced former Rep. George Santos, who had been serving a seven-year term for the fraud charges that got him ousted from Congress, was released from prison on Friday night after President Donald Trump commuted his sentence, his lawyer tells CNN.

Trump first announced the commutation on Truth Social on Friday evening, and, according to attorney Joseph Murray, Santos’ family picked him up from the prison about five hours later.

“George Santos was somewhat of a ‘rogue,’ but there are many rogues throughout our Country that aren’t forced to serve seven years in prison,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

“George has been in solitary confinement for long stretches of time and, by all accounts, has been horribly mistreated. Therefore, I just signed a Commutation, releasing George Santos from prison, IMMEDIATELY. Good luck George, have a great life,” Trump added. [CNN/Politics]

Notice the weakness of the President’s reasoning.

But I doubt Santos could be re-elected to his former seat; perhaps he could be elected to some other district’s seat, but I dunno. He’d have to run around screaming he was mistreated until he was hoarse, and, looking at his record, he’s little more than a pretty face.

Hello, Dan Quayle!

de trop:

too much or too many : SUPERFLUOUS, EXCESSIVE [Merriam-Webster]

From the French. Noted in Andrew Sullivan’s answer to some mail on The Weekly Dish here:

Point taken. I have tried to make distinctions between actual transexuals and the gender woo-woo crowd, but obviously not enough. I’m grateful for the upbraid. And that policy is dumb. I have long opposed restroom bans as de trop, and only consider full-nudity locker rooms to be problem [sic]. But the distinction between post-op transexuals and the dude who just decided he feels like a woman today is huge and important. I guess what I’m saying here is: I’m with you. And I think the genderqueers have hurt legit transexuals by their postmodern hooey.

Cryptocurrency is in the news a lot; my lack of commentary is reflective of laziness, not dearth of events. The latest combines, inevitably I think, with politics. Reuters reports from the Middle East:

NEW YORK, Oct 13 (Reuters) – Following the largest crypto liquidation in history last Friday, options market investors are bracing for more volatility and further declines in bitcoin and ether, aggressively positioning in trades that offer protection against another potential freefall.

Market participants said the crypto sector on Friday saw more than $19 billion in liquidations across leveraged positions as panic selling and low liquidity triggered sharp swings. The plunge came after U.S. President Donald Trump announced late on Friday a 100% tariff on Chinese imports and threatened export controls on critical software.

Crypto analysts said this was the largest wipeout in a 24-hour period in the market’s history, nine times larger than the February 2025 crash and 19 times bigger than the March 2020 meltdown and the FTX collapse in November 2022. [Reuters]

My goodness. Long-time readers may recall this anonymous observation made upon the launch of $TRUMP by the now-President:

CNN noted that the release of the meme coin had raised “serious ethics concerns,” but those who participate in the industry were less gentle. One wrote: “Trump’s sh*tcoin release has caused possibly the greatest overnight loss of credibility in presidential history. He made $60B. Great for Trump family, terrible for this country and hopes we had for the Trump presidency.”

Fulfillment of the ominous prediction? Well, we’ll see. It may turn out to be a blow to DJT’s “treasury” of cryptocurrency; a bit of a knee delivered to the President’s reproductive equipment. With his own knee.

Or, if he’s just into chaos, then it’s not so bad for him.

Or does he consider other mega-billionaires to be ‘competition’ for a place next to God in his prosperity church? And that was a blow against them? Sounds like madness?

Welcome to the club.

I suppose Governor Scott (R-VT) is wheat:

“From what I’m seeing, I just think it’s unnecessary. It further divides and threatens people,” the governor said at a press conference in Waterbury. “We need stability right now in this country — we don’t need more unrest.”

As of that afternoon, Trump had called up 500 guard members from Illinois and Texas to the Chicago area, some of whom were seen at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility west of the city’s downtown. Trump also ordered 200 members of Oregon’s national guard to deploy into Portland, Oregon, but that plan was in a holding pattern following two rulings from federal judges. The status of the Chicago deployment was not entirely clear, either, with its own legal challenge pending in federal court.

“I don’t think our guard should be used against our own people. I don’t think the military should be used against our own people. In fact, it’s unconstitutional,” Scott said. “Unless, of course, there’s an insurrection, much like we saw Jan. 6 a few years ago,” he said, referring to the attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Trump in 2021. [Mountain Times]

Governor Scott is an occasional target of President Trump’s vituperation, probably because the Governor behaves like a responsible adult, an attainment not on the President’s mantlepiece.

Or you can call the President Mr. Chaff. To be sure, chaff has its uses in American industry, but it’s not an important foodstuff, but more of something that must be stripped out of wheat.

An action strangely applicable to the President.

Erick Erickson is working hard to keep his flock together, demonizing the other side as much as he can:

Unfortunately for Democrats, some of whom are complaining that “Trump would do this anyway” even without those prior indictments, we actually have a 45th presidential administration where no such things happened and that was also the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Two wrongs do not make a right, but Democrats did start this. Trump intends to finish it. And the ratchet gets ever tighter because, as the Democrats kept lecturing us, “no one is above the law.” After all, Letitia James was not indicted by Donald Trump nor Pam Bondi nor the deep state nor Hillary’s server, nor any of the nonsense talking points that Democrats have been trotting out in left-wing media, but by a jury of her peers. See how that works now, Democrats?

The missing element is context. Mr. James Comey was indicted … after Trump fired the Trump-selected prosecutor who refused to attempt the indictment and nominated a nobody with apparently absolute allegiance to the President, rather than the law.

That’s the key, what Erickson, despite his training in the law, doesn’t get. If the law appears to have been broken then the apparent malefactor should be put on trial – Republican or Democrat. If Mz James, on honest assessment, appears to have broken the law, then let’s see what happens at trial. What does Erickson seem to think? That his choice for President shouldn’t be prosecuted, while victim Democrats have brought this fate upon themselves.

And if President Trump … oh wait. In two cases juries indicted and found him guilty. In other cases, the GOP wing of SCOTUS bestowed immunity upon the President.

Yeah, it doesn’t stand up to real scrutiny, does it?

Even that bullshit sentence about Trump in his first Administration is so lacking in context that taking it seriously is an impossible intellectual task.

But will Erickson’s audience pick up on these intellectual faux-pas and discard Erickson’s argument? Hard to say. Some folks will read his tone as being authoritative and take Erickson’s argument seriously; others will react negatively to the tone and evaluate what he wrote dispassionately, as I try to do.

We’ll just have to see.

Many pundits have commented on President Trump’s long history of bullying, and I think of that when considering the ending of the Israel-Hamas war. Bullies attack the weak, and Hamas, having expended its strength in the mass murder and kidnap of civilian Israelis, and the subsequent destruction of Gaza City and many of its citizens, was ripe for the threats and gestures for which Trump is known.

Despite the wild-eyed claims of the right, though, this doesn’t make the President brilliant, or even competent. It simply means he had a target that fit his favored profile, and they, Hamas, do seem to have rolled over.

But when I look at virtually any agreement with a foreign power, especially those powered by religious arguments, I prefer to wait decades before evaluation, and as President Trump is evidently incapable of planning, I expect the adversary, whoever it is in whatever conflict we’re talking, will have outplanned him.

It doesn’t mean he will lose, but the odds are against him. For example, he claimed he could end Putin’s War in a day during his last campaign; these days, he’s trying to wash his hands of the mediator role nine months later, having experienced abject failure.

And, of course, how much credit should go to Secretary Rubio? While he started his position as a man lacking shoes on a flint filled beach, he may have taken a step up here. Good for him, if so.

But don’t let yourself be fooled by Mr Trump’s supporters into thinking he’s a genius. The problem with the right is that they have overwhelming backed amateurs, folks who don’t even realize how much they don’t know. When they won the election, mostly due to Left’s utter foolishness, the GOP opened itself up to many, many embarrassments. In some cases, they don’t even seem to realize that they’ve screwed themselves. They live in a bubble and often only hear themselves talk.

So legitimizing this victory as being incredibly clever, rather than Hamas stumbling into range and getting blasted by a guy who enjoys being a bully, betrays the essential weakness of the Right.

The thing is: Has Left become just as bad?

It’s been two months, give or take a week, since the last time I surveyed DJT, the stock symbol of Trump Media & Technology Group, but it hadn’t moved much until last week.

… and I can’t actually show the DJT chart, as my browser is messed up. DJT is down in a down market, the latter of which is attributed to the President’s sudden decision to increase tariffs on Chinese imports to 100%. Or maybe it was by 100%. It can be so hard to tell with this President.

Anyways, at $15.97/sh DJT’s down about 8% since the last report of two months ago, which, in a volatile market, can be erased in moments.

Or that loss can be quadrupled just as quickly.

It suggests, though, that investors are not inspired by the offerings and intellectual holdings of Trump Media & Technology Group. In particular, its star performer, President Trump, continues to show signs of serious mental decline and certain physical deficits, and, if he should exit the firm, it’d probably collapse, resulting in the principals rushing to cash in their rewards.

But, as ever, I am not a financial expert, just a guy who watches one of the odder stories of the era, and is wondering where it’s going.

Yes, yes, far behind am I on my reading. This situation summary by Professor Richardson was interesting…

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) today floated the idea that workers furloughed during a government shutdown are not guaranteed back pay when the shutdown is resolved. Marc Caputo of Axios broke the story of the new OMB memo this morning. Caputo pointed out that in 2019, during the last government shutdown, President Donald Trump signed a law designed to make it clear that furloughed workers would get paid. Caputo notes that the OMB’s new reading of the law is “a major departure from the administration’s own guidance issued…last month.”

Two people familiar with the administration’s plans told Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post that officials are hoping the memo will give the Republicans more leverage against Democrats in negotiations over the shutdown.

I suggest the Democrats make the dismissal of Mr Vought a key part of their negotiations. Nothing like pricking the skin of a self-important prick.

In case you’re interested in the mental illness du jour, at least here in the United States, NewScientist has an article on the latest in the field, and manage to write it without reference to our leading example:

Looking back, the signs were obvious: an extreme need for control, a pathological tendency to exaggerate and an almost comical sense of superiority.

My family member claimed to know more than everyone about everything, no matter the topic. He claimed to have the makings of a world-class teacher, doctor, writer or athlete, while also boasting about his modesty. Any disagreement would result in shouty rants or violent outbursts.

Family friends could barely believe it when I told them. “When he meets us, he acts like charm personified,” is how one put it.These were all classic traits of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), a condition characterised by a disregard for the feelings of others combined with an extreme sense of self-importance, often manifesting in interpersonal abuse. At the time, however, I had no way to make sense of this family member’s behaviour – this was before the conversation around narcissism had reached its current level of social saturation. [“The truth about narcissists: How to handle them, and can they change?” David Robson, NewScientist (27 September 2025; paywall)]

A good article, if it makes me clutch at my throat a bit. I think I ran into several of this type in the early days of my social media experience.

That fight’s finished. Where’s the next one? I’m hoping it’s at the spirits shop.

Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon (2013) is the second, more or less, story of the early years of Detective Dee, a fictional Chinese detective working around 660 CE, who is in the Imperial City Luoyang, changing governmental jobs, and stumbles across clues as to the sinking of the fleet. Starting out with the disapproval of Yuchi, a member of the Judicial branch who has been charged with discovering the nature of whatever sank the fleet, Dee stops competitive kidnappings, wins Yuchi’s approval, and generally does amazing things for the Chinese Imperial family.

And it is fun, even if it’s difficult to become familiar with any of the characters as they seem to be a mixture of cliches; perhaps it’s more accurate to suggest their motivations are opaque, although they might be collectively labeled Don’t piss of the Empress. Add in captions, Chinese tropes and legends of which Westerners generally know little, and a certain frenetic brittleness, and this big movie becomes a mouthful that is distracting rather than involving action.

The visuals are gorgeous and the climactic battle is quite fun. I shan’t recommend it for the foregoing reasons, but I didn’t regret watching it.