@[email protected] draw for me misprogrammed bots making surrealistic space for violence in America – now with kitties!

I pray whatever gods may be spare us from such a fate.

Exactly!

When Trump loses the coming election, a peaceful transfer of power should go from Biden to Harris, but Trump has worked to dismantle norms such that we must now expect that he will contest the results, tell his supporters he won, and worry about those angry supporters being goaded into attacks on poll workers, judges, Congress, and federal buildings.

Vance is already feigning ignorance of how he and Trump create violence.
Excerpt of Vance/Bash kerfuffle (page is not the full conversation):

… You accused me of causing a bomb threat. Doesn’t that mean I should shut up about the residents of Springfield? Don’t you realize you’re engaged in basic propaganda to silence the concerns of American citizens?

DANA BASH, CNN: I was quoting the actual mayor of Springfield, Ohio, who, after the bomb threats, was begging federal officials to stop putting negative attention on his city. I’m not talking about the policies…

They are making a peaceful transfer more difficult by telling lies, spurring on their most violent supporters, and then denying all culpability. Sadly, doing so may spread from their fanatics to a larger population as evinced by yet-another-gunman-incident.

The agent fired four to six rounds, a Secret Service official said. The suspect then fled. A witness who took a picture of the suspect’s vehicle and license plate number provided it to law enforcement officers.

Per CNN, Martin County Sheriff William D. Snyder says they arrested the guy in that vehicle:

Snyder said his agency “flooded” Interstate 95 and closed a large swatch of the highway before eventually safely stopping the suspect vehicle.

“I have a clear understanding from investigators that we actually do have the suspect that they’re looking for in Palm Beach County,” Snyder said.

Yes. The story here is straight from Associated Press, but I looked around and found a few more details in a Telegraph article:

But he woman’s doctor told police that the defendant had tested positive with a rapid test before telling him that she “certainly won’t let herself be locked up” after the result.

Instead she left her apartment and talked to people without a mask, ignoring her mandatory quarantine and positive test.

Note they say MANDATORY quarantine. At the end of the article they explain that Austria’s far right party, Freedom Party, is hyper-anti-vax, expected to win upcoming elections:

Its manifesto has promised a pardon for anyone convicted of breaching coronavirus rules and to repay any fines imposed during the pandemic.

The manifesto says coronavirus regulations were encroachments on fundamental rights “accompanied by unprecedented indoctrination and brainwashing.”

@[email protected] draw for me a spider’s web with a red light that attracts male fireflies to come have a good time at the web bordello

Given that Israel has nuclear weapons, they wouldn’t be ‘sitting ducks’, but I don’t want to see a nuclear war starting in the Middle East. I doubt it would stay contained to the area. I fear that Russia would back Iran and counter – or at least threaten to – with Russian nuclear weapons, which would get the U.S. or our allies back into the mess but escalated to the whole world at risk instead of just a small contested sliver.

I would love to see a workable path to a two-state solution. Experts have spent their lives working towards that goal and it still hasn’t happened. I totally blame the government of Israel for not figuring out a peace with Palestinian residents back in the 1970s, but here we are. Bibbi makes everything worse and his public falls for his ‘strong man’ shtick just like Americans fall for Trump’s version. Sitting in the U.S., the best election choice I can make for the sake of Palestinians is to vote Harris. Beyond the election, there is room for letters, protests, and boycotts, but the problem is mostly with Israel’s government rather than with anyone in the United States.

In terms of who to vote for in the U.S. presidential election, 3rd parties are spoilers. The U.S. voter is wasting their vote if they stay home or vote 3rd party.

Politicians are notoriously evasive, and this particular interview sounded more straight forward than most. Okay, most the honest ones, anyway. I mean: it’s easy to say “Read my lips. No new taxes” or “Free IVF” if you’ve no legitimate plan to fund the government, but if you’re not going to make stuff up for the sound bite, you almost have to be evasive. Robust and well considered plans are made by experts and a politician trying to promote a good plan has to boil it down to a couple nebulous basics. Doing anything else means you either bore the audience OR skip a contingency or other minutia such that your critics call you a liar.

Remember when Obama said you’d get to keep your doctor? He was trying to summarize explaining that Affordable Care would not mandate what doctor you could use, but what he didn’t say was that Insurance Companies would continue to be able choose what doctors they covered, so Obama’s critics said he LIED about keeping your doctor. It was NOT a lie. It was just Insurance companies doing what they always did.

Harris said she would support Israel but the war had to end. If Israeli/Palestinian strife has gone unsolved for 50 years through all sorts of Presidents, I don’t expect any U.S. election to change what goes on over there. The U.S. could theoretically stop aiding Israel as it commits genocide, but the realistic outcome of that would be neighboring countries committing genocide on Israelis, and since that’s the basic reason the country was invented… maybe that’s not the best outcome either. It has been a mess for decades, and I’m not blaming Regan, Carter, Trump, Putin, or Tony Blair for any of the mess with Gaza.

Harris said she would not ban fracking but her values have not changed. I suspect this is because she’s come to see no one banned horses when car came along, and no one need ban fracking if there’s a better alternative. What she did not specify was the carrots and sticks she might employ to get us to which alternatives. That’s fine with me because the tech is changing and the outcome is more important than the method.

Harris said she would enforce laws regarding immigration AND she wanted the tabled border bill on her desk so she can sign it. There’s a bunch she could have said there, too, but my point is that again, she wasn’t particularly evasive.

I, too, think Biden did a great job as President – especially given the constant pushback he got from Congress and the corrupted Court. It frustrated me that the public didn’t notice or care, but I could see from the polls and negative press that there was no way Biden was going to get re-elected, so I was living in despair for our future until he dropped out. With Biden out of the race, the public is paying attention to the race again, becoming aware of the crazy Trump/2025 “agenda nobody asked for”, and (if we’re to believe the polls) becoming more interested in voting for a new face. Yay!

Have hope! But also, if you can volunteer to talk to potential voters, do that too.

If your schedule is too tight to volunteer, or if it is physically/emotionally too much, consider at least talking about her in a positive way.

If that is too much, maybe at least, at least mention that you’re hearing lots more support and enthusiasm than even when Biden won, so you are going to be very suspicious of claims that Dems ‘steal’ elections. Yes, Trump is still supported in the boonies, but more and more suburbs and cities are increasingly wanting Harris – you know, the places with most the people.

Reminds me of the incident in February where a waymo tried to get through a bunch of street revelers, and their response was to set it on fire. From the old pcmag story :

San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson noted that it had tallied 55 incidents where self-driving vehicles had interfered with rescue operations in the city.

Edit: unrelated to above quote, pc mag also says:

In some cases, residents have put orange cones on the hoods of cars, which makes them temporarily immobile.

(see also the autopian story it references)

Reminder that Palantir is the same company whose bosses are deep in bed with AmericaPAC – which got big write-ups (link is to one comment, but you can read more there and lots of places) because Elon Musk is gathering voter data seemingly for that PAC to target swing state voters with canvassing efforts.

This is early in the story so there will be more news later. The key piece reported on thus far is a 271-page document based on publicly available information about JD Vance and identified as “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES.” There’s also a partial report on Marco Rubio, who’d been a potential VP pick.

The Trump campaign is thinking Iran is to blame.

I looked for the WaPo URL and somehow didn’t see this post. I even made my own because I thought this story was important – but I deleted it once I saw it was here.

The New Republic also covered it. In summary:

The Egyptian government may have given $10 million to Donald Trump in 2017, violating U.S. law—but the investigation into the payment was squashed by Attorney General William Barr.

Here’s the bits from WaPo that stood out to me:

Five days before Donald Trump became president in January 2017, a manager at a bank branch in Cairo received an unusual letter from an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service. It asked the bank to “kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million from the organization’s account — all in cash.

Federal investigators learned of the withdrawal, which has not been previously reported, early in 2019. The discovery intensified a secret criminal investigation that had begun two years earlier…

Barr directed Jessie Liu, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in D.C., to personally examine the classified intelligence to evaluate if further investigation was warranted. Barr later instructed FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to impose “adult supervision” on FBI agents Barr described as “hell-bent” on pursuing Trump’s records, according to people familiar with the exchange. It is unclear what if any actions Wray, who was also appointed by Trump, took in response.

The Post investigation reveals that investigators identified a cash withdrawal in Cairo of $9,998,000 — nearly identical to the amount described in the intelligence, as well as to the amount Trump had given his campaign weeks earlier. A key theory investigators pursued, based on intelligence and on international money transfers, was that Trump was willing to provide the funds to his campaign in October 2016 because he expected to be repaid by Sisi, according to people familiar with the probe.

Trump’s attorney general did not order the case closed, according to multiple people with knowledge of the events, but his instructions to Liu and, later, his selections to replace her, helped steer it to that end.

As the Mueller team got going, investigators focused on how at the time candidate Trump met with Sisi in 2016, Trump’s campaign had been running low on funds. They learned through interviews with the candidate’s closest advisers that they had pleaded with Trump to write a check to his campaign for a final blitz of television ads. Trump repeatedly declined — until Oct. 28, roughly five weeks after the meeting with Sisi, when he announced the $10 million infusion.

Sometime after her June meetings with the FBI, Liu met with Barr to discuss the Egypt case. He urged her to personally review the underlying information from the CIA that had prompted the opening of the criminal investigation two years earlier, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. The case was sensitive, Barr told her, and she needed to reach her own conclusions about the merits of further investigative steps, according to people familiar with the discussion.

Afterward, and after conferring with Barr again, Liu expressed hesitancy to FBI agents and her deputies about the proposal to subpoena Trump’s bank records, according to people familiar with the case. It felt to some that she had made a 180-degree turn, these people said.

By late 2019, Liu’s office was poised to make sentencing recommendations for high-profile senior Trump advisers it had prosecuted, Michael Flynn and Roger Stone — cases that could tarnish Trump and his campaign. That December, the White House nominated Liu to be an assistant secretary of the Treasury Department.

Barr seized the moment to make a change. Breaking with the tradition of allowing White House nominees to remain in their current posts until confirmed for new ones, he ordered Liu in early January 2020 to step down by the end of the month, people with knowledge of the matter said. The White House later withdrew Liu’s nomination.

Barr replaced Liu with Shea, and then four months later replaced Shea with former Navy intelligence officer Sherwin.

On June 7, he sent an email to the head of the FBI’s Washington field office. The subject line of the email, which was reviewed by The Post, read: “Egypt Investigation.”

“Based upon review of this investigation,” Sherwin began, his office would be “closing the above matter” because neither an indictment nor a conviction was likely.

See also this 2020 piece: https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/14/politics/trump-campaign-donation-investigation/index.html

I knew about the police getting access, but I missed that home insurance companies were checking properties with drones. I guess I don’t mind them spending their own money to send their own drones to verify properties they insure, but I agree that using MY camera that I bought to get info or sell MY data is at least unethical and ought to be illegal. It should be required that they get my explicit consent to that sort of thing for each instance of data collection or sale.

Who? The Senators? I think they’re genuinely interested in stopping the practice (obviously it also gets them good press, possibly even votes, but they coulda probably got cash if they did nothing).

I think the car companies are just trying to make money anywhere they can.

My apologies. I will take this down.

Well yeah, but we know Trump doesn’t give a whit about facts. I’m trying to figure out if his tongue went up to the front of his palate to form an ‘n’ sound.