Author Archives: Hue White

The assassination of Charlie Kirk puts us on a precipice, I think. People think they’re justified in killing people with whom they disagree, and that endangers a political system that has produced the finest military ever.

Intolerant, arrogant assholes on both sides are trying to tear us down because of their firm belief that they’re the smart ones, or a silent God is on their side.

I did not pay attention to Mr Kirk, so I have no opinion, but, just like State Senator Hortman’s assassination, Kirk represents another step in the Structural-Demographic Theory’s disintegrative phase (same link), as arrogance and impatience with divergent opinions leads to fatal conflicts.

Professor Turchin’s work suggests that in rural societies it takes about fifty years for the adamant to realize that civil war is not a fake war, but leads to horrible deaths and a weakening of the country. Will that hold true for our technological society?

When a Federal judge ruled that tariffs may not be set by the President, hysteria seems to have broken out at Truth Social on the President’s account:

Without Tariffs, and all of the TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS we have already taken in, our Country would be completely destroyed, and our military power would be instantly obliterated. In a 7 to 4 Opinion, a Radical Left group of judges didn’t care, but one Democrat, Obama appointed, actually voted to save our Country. I would like to thank him for his Courage! He loves and respects the U.S.A.

Yeah, I might like to know how the loss of a few tariffs would instantly obliterate our military. Maybe he means spiritually?

No, I won’t provide a link. You can find it on your own, I feel sure.

Nonet:

1. a group of nine performers or instruments.
2. a composition for a nonet. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “Former CDC directors: RFK Jr. is ‘unlike anything our country has ever experienced’,” Steve Benen, Maddowblog:

But just as notable, if not more so, is the written condemnation itself. Under a headline that read, “We Ran the C.D.C.: Kennedy Is Endangering Every American’s Health,” the nonet was unreserved in its criticisms of the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who is currently serving as the nation’s health secretary.

Not quite matching the definition.

Folks who are paying attention will recall, years ago just a few weeks ago, when Paramount, now owned by Skydance Media, and its legendary show Sixty Minutes, succumbed to a dubious lawsuit and agreed to pay a settlement of $16 million in response to silly accusations by President Trump.

Evidently, Skydance, et al, do not understand that bullies constantly probe for weakness, and, when detected, exploit it to the full.

When you realize Come home to roost isn’t just a quaint remark concerning bad judgment.

So this should come as no surprise:

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused CBS News of selectively editing footage from her Sunday interview, cutting some of her remarks about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national who was mistakenly deported and returned to the U.S. to face separate charges.

I anticipate a lawsuit demanding ridiculous damages, seeing as Trump’s previous lawsuit asked for $20 billion in damages, and then Skydance will be up against it, as they say.

This is what happens when you let financial considerations have priority over everything else, including questions of loyalty to political systems.

Skydance is becoming the Trump Administration’s thumb puppet, and those aren’t smooth fingernails, I’m tellin’ ya.

For aura-watchers, this is a migraine of the aura.

We watched Timestalker (2024) today. Perhaps my Arts Editor will have a clue, but I don’t have any idea what to make of it.

Another sordid attempt at drowning.

Stone of Destiny (2008) is a slightly fictionalized story of a real incident. The Stone of Scone, aka Stone of Destiny, is a real thing, a Scottish boulder with associations to the Scottish monarchy.

At the time of the movie, 1950, the Stone of Scone was stored in Westminster Abbey, having been plundered and removed from its Scottish home by King Edward I of England in 1296. A young Scottish college student, Ian Hamilton, like many other young Scotsmen, hungers to return the Stone as a symbol of Scottish nationalism. Unlike most, though, he falls in with just the right mix of fellow students to actually accomplish the task: a hard drinking engineering student, a more studious and withdrawn friend of the engineer, and a young nationalist woman, who provides motivation and support.

The charm of the story is in the details of the theft, as it is with most such stories: ducking the cops, getting access to the location, obtaining the plunder, and getting out of Dodge, or London. Further, the story shows the myths of the Scottish, namely grit, persistence, and hard drinking.

But there’s also the vivid difference between a national leader, John MacCormick, who is balancing national politics, such as retaining plausible deniability even as he provides finances, and must think of the optics of being a nationalist not only to Scotland, but a wide world, and the group of students, who, despite internal rows, should have the motto Let’s get this shit done!

This is not necessarily an inspirational story. Failure did not mean death, but more likely personal embarrassment. But it’s educational and fun.

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

yahoo!finance is reporting a victory for authors who are litigants in suits against AI companies using their books in training generative AIs:

Anthropic told a San Francisco federal judge on Friday that it has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit from a group of authors who accused the artificial intelligence company of using their books to train its AI chatbot Claude without permission.

Anthropic and the plaintiffs in a court filing asked U.S. District Judge William Alsup to approve the settlement, after announcing the agreement in August without disclosing the terms or amount. …

The proposed deal marks the first settlement in a string of lawsuits against tech companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms over their use of copyrighted material to train generative AI systems.

Successful suits in those still-open cases could bring larger prizes yet, now that a settlement produced a “mere” billion dollars, excuse me $1.5 billion, and the three companies cited are cash rich. Juries, depending on presentations by the attorneys, are often impatient with manifestly unfair situations in which a corporation is gaining riches.

This, too, is interesting…

Anthropic as part of the settlement said it will destroy downloaded copies of books the authors accused it of pirating, and under the deal it could still face infringement claims related to material produced by the company’s AI models.

They may have to erase the data produced and start again. Will their AI be as accurate as the current AIs? In any case, I’m naive on both the AI and legal fronts, but it sounds like Anthropic looked at the arguments and decided they were in a hole and it was caving in on them.

And how will investors react to this rather large penalty? This isn’t like a line of research not panning out; this is a legal blunder and may be met with fury by people who expected a big return and only get a small one.

Or nothing at all.

ZeFrank’s been around just about forever, and still pumps out videos with grace and nuance.

OK, just kidding about g&n 🙂 Well, onwards to the facts!

CNN has a report on the National Guards’ involuntary sojourn in Washington, DC:

With each phone call home, the troops describe a mission unlike any other.

One soldier from Tennessee told his father that from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. every day, his only task is to walk around Chinatown. Another service member from Mississippi told a loved one that she’d been repeatedly cursed at while on patrol. During a call to his wife, a guardsman from Louisiana said there was confusion about what the military was actually doing there.

“We haven’t gotten critically low on morale, but we’re falling fast,” said one soldier who, like others quoted in this story, spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak to the media and feared reprisal.

I think my fellow citizens in DC are making a mistake when they make the National Guard the enemy by yelling curses, because they are also our fellow citizens. They are in the Guard because they believe they can do good there – and often do. The Guard isn’t just a fighting force, but also fire-fighting and rescue and recovery and quite a few other things.

And now this is an opportunity to welcome them to Washington, explain that Trump’s orders are illegal and should be ignored by their commanders, and to build those bonds that will be important as Trump supporters are winnowed down to the hard-core grifters.

They should be reminded of the nature of our country, and not let it be remade into a Nation of Thieves & Victims by Trump. The Guard isn’t an invading force, but victims of Trump.

Honored with a collage of pics.

Crypto-hieroglyphs:

While studying the red granite pillar up close, [Egyptologist Jean-Guillaume] Olette-Pelletier identified several “crypto-hieroglyphs,” which use puzzles, wordplay, or special positioning to convey coded information. He noted that, high up on the side of the obelisk that once faced the Nile, Ramesses is depicted wearing a crown representing the union of Upper and Lower Egypt. Given its position on the obelisk, this hieroglyph would have been nearly impossible to read from the ground. It would only have been legible from the river, where nobles approached the nearby Luxor Temple by boat each year for the Opet festival, which celebrated the pharaoh’s authority. On the side of the obelisk overlooking a processional route used to bring offerings to the god Amun, Ramesses is shown wearing a crown with bull horns, which symbolized divine power. When paired with an image of an offering table, Olette-Pelletier believes, this hieroglyph exhorted viewers to make offerings to Amun to moderate his destructive tendencies. [“Crypto Power,” Daniel Weiss, Archaeology (September/October 2025)]

Yes, the magnitude of the bad breath is exponential to the number of people it’s killed. Frankly, its teeth should be rotting and her skull melting, it’s so bad. I mean, it might even be worse than mine after a night of snoring!

Death of a Unicorn (2025). Cool name for a story, isn’t it? Yeah?

Savor it. Because it’s the best part of this clunker. It starts right at the beginning, when I turned to my Arts Editor and said, “This feels like a paint-by-number movie.” The money-distracted divorced father, trying and failing to connect with the daughter. The disaffected daughter, alone among the crowd of … rich, yet money-besotted, family hosting them in the Canadian Rockies.

And what happens when the divorced father, trying to win his daughter’s, doesn’t notice that, ummmmm, unicorn standing in the middle of the road?

Yes, this is all painfully predictable, outside, perhaps, of the set of chompers these magical beasties sport. Impressive in what should be herbivores. I mean, that is a fermentation vat between their legs and not a meat grinder.

But never mind. It’s terrible. The unicorns are sort of fun. But this wretched story is just not worth it.

… of the Federal Government.

Right-wing pundit Erick Erickson is angry at his own side for the acquisition, by President Trump the Federal government, of 10% of old chip-maker Intel. From CNBC:

Intel, the only American company capable of making advanced chips on U.S. soil, said in a press release that the government made an $8.9 billion investment in Intel common stock, purchasing 433.3 million shares at a price of $20.47 per share, giving it a 10% stake in the company. Intel noted that the price the government paid was a discount to the current market price.

It’s not explicit, but the wording suggests the source of the shares is the Intel treasury and not the market. This, in turn, can signal to the market dilution, meaning voting power and the perceived value of each share just dropped, because future growth and dividends is now divided into 10% more shares.

But that’s not Erickson’s concern. Here it is:

But, again, the United States now is the largest shareholder of Intel, which puts every other microchip company at a disadvantage. Why? Because Intel now has subsidy by taxpayers. Instead of having to let the creative destruction of the market place pick apart Intel, which has chronically made bad decisions, the leadership that made those bad decisions has been rewarded.

Uncle Sam insists it will exercise no voting with its stock. But the fine print of the deal shows Uncle Sam is getting common stock with voting rights. Saying it will not vote and not actually voting are two different things. If the situation continues and a Democrat takes back the White House, you will see ESG and DEI explode as Intel seeks to humor its largest shareholder.

This is another step down a dangerous path. Defenders will say the government bailed out Fannie and Freddie. The government bailed out General Motors. The government even bailed out Chrysler. … [Chrysler] ultimately went bankrupt and got bought by Europeans, having never fully recovered.

Note the contradiction in Erickson’s post. He implies that now Intel will be successful, and yet gives examples of failure of other government interference. Additionally, he doesn’t explore context.

This is standard libertarian cant, and I’d like to emphasize that he’s not entirely wrong. The government trying to pick winners is, in an ideal environment, not a generally positive strategy. However, I don’t say that as if Intel’s competitors are now doomed, as I consider the government as just another evolutionary force.

From theoretical aspects, given general human psychology, this is not a guaranteed success. In fact, if Intel’s really in deep trouble – and, I confess, I’ve not followed Intel’s story, as I prefer the stocks of companies with market caps of substantially less than Intel’s, even if Intel’s has dropped off. Money does not guarantee success. Unless the Trump Administration reforms Intel in some way, such as looking at toxic culture, or poor technical innovation and development, or any or all of several other areas, Intel will just take longer to slump from market irrelevance to bankruptcy.

Practically, come on. This is the Trump Administration. They fail, fail, fail. Trump nominated and caused to be confirmed a pack of people inferior to himself, as I’ve noted before, so even if he doesn’t interfere personally, his minions will botch it.

That said, I found this statement dubious:

The government keeps making companies too big to fail and hiding behind “national security” as the excuse. In fact, that has become the consensus talking point among defenders who will say things like, “I’m uncomfortable with this, but national security…”. It is an excuse and justification, but not reality.

Unfortunately, the world is a dangerous place. That’s not abnormal, actually, there’s always someone out there gunning for #1, and #1 is currently being led by a demented moron. The report from CNBC included this:

Intel, the only American company capable of making advanced chips on U.S. soil…

While You play the hand you’re dealt is inadequate to the situation, it may make sense to boost Intel in a world where the biggest and best chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), is located in Taiwan, next door to belligerent China which claims the island nation, and primary chip equipment maker ASML is located in The Netherlands, arguably not all that far from equally belligerent Russia – and those missiles its President flings about with abandon.

So it’s worth considering the assertion that the thinly hidden agenda behind Erickson’s statement to be a foolish chase after ideological purity. Libertarianism, from the time when I thought it was a serious political philosophy, was very weak in foreign relations, and boiled down to rationales for Keep taxes low! and Keep your government out of my business!

Using reductionism in foreign relations is a greedy mug’s game.

Shouldn’t have greased those shoes, I suppose.

Which I’ve seen, but not since starting the blog, so no review. I recall Rear Window (1954) as being a tightly plotted mystery, as a woman disappears, someone else’s dog is found dead, all observed by a guy with a broken leg, watching his neighborhood from his rear window. (He’s a journalist, so of course he watches. It’s not creepy. At all.)

But what’s going on?

We binged our way through the first season of The Flight Attendant (2020) over the last week. While in many ways completely unlike Rear Window, such as nearly incessant sex, it’s also full of themes and techniques essential to Rear Window, such as inexplicable occurrences, red herrings that, maybe, aren’t. And it starts off fast, and slow.

Fast in that flight attendant Cassie wakes up next to a dead man in a hotel in Bangkok, his throat slit, guaranteed to get the adrenaline levels up.

Slow in that the mystery seems eminently solvable.

Right up until the unexpected inconsistencies smack you, and her, in the face. It just takes a little patience to get there. We nearly walked away. Then the interest heightens as Cassie starts running, right up until the double surprise ending.

I hate the title. But we’re looking forward to the second, and final, season.

I know I’m three weeks late here, but this remark by Dan K on Daily Kos is a mite intriguing. It’s all about special prosecutor Jack Smith, who it was rumored was about to shish kebab then-candidate Donald J. Trump when he won the Presidential election:

Is this firing really about Trump looking to appoint a different Fed governor?

Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, announced on Tuesday he is filing a lawsuit to challenge President Donald Trump’s attempt to fire her on Monday evening.

“President Trump has no authority to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. His attempt to fire her, based solely on a referral letter, lacks any factual or legal basis. We will be filing a lawsuit challenging this illegal action,” he said in a statement sent to CNN.

The announcement comes hours after Trump posted on social media a letter addressed to Cook informing her that he had sufficient “cause” to fire her. [CNN/Business]

Is it just a racist reaction? Appointed by a Democrat?

Or is he terrified that the Fed will look ever so much more competent than he does? People who do not bear up under comparison sometimes seek to be rid of their competition. Is he so afraid of looking bad that he’d rather cripple a major force in the financial world?

For you goat entrail special elections enthusiasts, here’s the latest of which I’m aware, in the great State of Iowa:

Source: wcmelepub.wcicc.com

And how big a deal is this? From The Downballot:

Iowa Democrat Catelin Drey won a major upset on Tuesday night, flipping a deep-red seat in the state Senate and breaking the GOP’s supermajority in the chamber.

Drey defeated Republican Christopher Prosch by a wide 55-45 margin in a district Donald Trump carried by 11 points last year.

As ever, the usual caveats concerning special election voters apply. Still, non-Republicans have reason for hope.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaand in this corner, we have, hailing from a small town in Mexico, just south of the border ….. the Naked Rose!”

Finding Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989) was sort of like finding a Raiders movie from thirty years ago, as I was fairly sure I’d seen all the Godzillas out there.

Except, you know, there’s some definite ambivalence about spending a couple of hours of your life on the damn thing.

Is it good? Not particularly. Godzilla’s opponent is a ghastly hybrid of a plant, Godzilla himself, and the ghost, for want of a more descriptive word, of one of his victims. She was the daughter of a scientist who works on genetic engineering, but is now dispirited and droopy.

Sort of like an underwatered tomato plant. Yeah? Yeah? Well, aren’t you under-appreciative.

Godzilla eventually wades ashore, so to speak, through an active volcano and making one hell of an entrance, responding to the calls of the cells used to generate the houseplant, having laid waste to the Japanese Navy, and finds Biollante. In the subsequent fight, Biollante is no match for the notorious bad breath of Godzilla, and eventually the latter trots off, deed done. Maybe he’s looking for a thank you treat. The humans try out their latest technology on him, which makes for a few seconds of tension.

But, of course, Biollante is not vanquished, and the process of rising from the dead, besides shocking a couple of ESP-sensitive sorts – this is 1989, after all – who may have had an earlier appearance, or perhaps a series cross-appearance in a Gamera flick, ANYWAYS I need to stop musing on bad stories, where were we? Yeah, that’s a sentence fragment. Stop that, or I’ll make you into footnotes!

Anyways, rising from the dead gives Biollante an impressive set of chompers, I must say.

So, does this match up with the best of Godzilla, Godzilla Minus One (2023)? Good Gatsby, no! It’s just another painful mixture of rubber suits, cardboard characters, fantasies of the day, and a theme in painful evidence.

Genetic engineering is bad! Nevermind that GMOs have never been shown to hurt anyone, and are often helpful.

It’s colorful and action-filled, rather like an obscure American candy: empty calories. See it if you’re a Big G completist.

So here’s some pics.

Pics from the last week, I believe. Enjoy!

I’m going to argue that making an assertion that’ll infuriate your own voters simply to protect, errrr, try to protect your President must be worthy of a nomination.

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) acknowledged that the public is seeing higher prices as a result of tariffs imposed by President Trump, but he argued the trade overhaul is “for the good of the country.”

“I think a lot of people are seeing higher prices. Our family’s in the construction business, and we get a lot of our timber from Canada and other countries. Yes, it’s higher. Steel prices are up, but it’s for the good of the country,” Norman said Saturday on Fox News when asked to explain the network’s July poll showing that 55 percent of Americans disapproved of the president’s handling of the economy.  [The Hill]

For those who don’t understand the mechanics of tariffs, this may sound reasonable, but just from observation I’d say not. It’s a double-squeeze on farmers, since cheap immigrant labor is being booted out for a perishable product; fresh produce, followed by most other food stuffs, will go up in price.

But Rep Norman’s position is entirely dependent on the President, so he has to hop into the boiling water on the say-so, and hope the President’s plans include Rep Norman.

A chancy business at best.

Otrovert:

Most people find it hard to imagine what it is like to not feel any particular affinity or loyalty towards any group. This is so unusual that it is understood by some as a psychological problem to be treated. However, over my 40 years as a clinical psychiatrist I have realised that for many of my patients (and for me) disinterest in group membership and assimilation isn’t a psychological problem – it is simply a personality type that hasn’t been recognised before.

Otroverts is the term I use for those who don’t feel the obligation to merge their identities with others. We are all born as otroverts, before the cultural conditioning of childhood cements our affiliations with various identities and groups. [“Introvert, extravert, otrovert? There’s a new personality type in town,” Rami Kaminski, NewScientist (16 August 2025, paywall)]

Just in case this word catches on.

I keep trying to get off the set of this movie and keep failing!

The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines (2006) is the sequel to The Librarian: Quest For The Spear (2004). The Librarian, now established in his job, must discover and safeguard a volume that may let its holder control time and space.

Why we’re not all under the iron control of some previous owner of the volume is never made clear.

After a clobber of his head and a theft, he discovers a noble thief, an archaeologist of flighty nature and more educated than he, and a guy with minions and a bloodthirsty urge to steal something the Librarian is carrying. From all this, we make it to said Mines and, ummmm, I suppose that was supposed to be a heartrending meet-up with the ghosts of various Librarian relatives.

Maybe?

It was all very silly, so very derivative of better stories without understanding what made them better, and quite unmemorable. I had to go look up the general plot, having seen the movie a month or so ago.

It’s not worth wasting your time on this one.

From a White House release of a conversation between President Trump and President Ilham Heydar Oghlu Aliyev of Azerbaijan, who’s generally considered a dictator:

Donald Trump 00:13:15-00:13:26 (11 sec)

Thank you very much. — Great leaders, how long have you been in the leadership position?

Ilham Aliyev 00:13:26-00:13:27 (1 sec)

It’s been 22 years.

Donald Trump 00:13:27-00:13:29 (2 sec)

22 years, that’s pretty good.

Ilham Aliyev 00:13:29-00:13:30 (1 sec)

Yeah, yeah.

Donald Trump 00:13:30-00:13:37 (7 sec)

That means he’s tough and smart. And it’s a — an amazing part of the world. Congratulations.

Ilham Aliyev 00:13:37-00:13:37 ( sec)

Thank you.

Donald Trump 00:13:37-00:13:38 (2 sec)

What a great honor to be involved.

Ilham Aliyev 00:13:38-00:13:39 (1 sec)

Thank you very much.

Yep, President is not Donny’s best role.

He should have been editor-in-chief, a sinecure to be sure, of the quarterly Dictator Review.

This caught me by surprise.

Sales of personal computers had dropped like a stone starting about 15 years ago as we gorged on buying smartphones and tablets like the iPad. Now, though, computer sales have perked back up while we’re buying fewer smartphones and tablets every year, according to research firm IDC. [WaPo]

This computer came with an exclusive addition: Cat pee.

I’ve never been without a big workstation, relative to the times, usually running Linux, starting with the Yggdrasil release if memory serves. When I ran social media, aka Citadel-86, I had a second machine, usually dedicated to the task. When virtual machines (VM) came along, I could consolidate into a single piece of hardware, running the VM when I needed a Windows system.

These days, I have a Linux workstation running Fedora, and while I’m sure I have, or had, a Windows [10?] system under a VM somewhere on it, I actually haven’t needed it in so long I don’t recall how to bring it up. Or if it’s even installed. A work laptop serves to remind me of how much I dislike laptops.

On that Linux system there is, or was, also a DOSBox for running a Citadel-86 system. A while ago I found DOSBox was unstable, but that was long ago; today I should hope DOSBox would be rock solid. I mused recently about resurrecting C86 and advertising it as being ‘social media free of AI images and text‘, and then firmly put that thought away.

There’s also an inherited Surface from the 2013 time frame, reserved for use on vacations. It might not come up next time I try. Also, a smartphone.

And I figured I was just set in my ways, me preferring the big workstation and all.

Maybe I was wrong. While the article is indistinct as to reasons, my personal experience is that smartphones are read-only with a tiny screen, laptops without auxiliary devices are not quite read-only, but requires a determined user to actually generate content or code, with auxiliary devices it’s now a bit messy, physically speaking, and the laptop’s computing power may be a limiting factor.

And, yes, a workstation can also be a bit “messy”, but buying a modern workstation may mean the mainbox is now integrated into the video unit. And that misses the real point of having more power. It may not be a supercomputer on your desk, but the power is significant.

Since the laptop showed up, it’s a balance between convenience and power. This is similar to the appearance of the Walkman in the era of Hi-Fi stereos – it didn’t have the quality sound of the stereos, but carrying a Hi-Fi while you’re out for a walk was out of the question.

So, hurrah! for the workstation? Eh. Soberly consider your computing needs when looking and don’t follow the sheep to the shearing station.

But I can’t help grinning.