Monday, July 27, 2026

Having A Normal One

"She" is Anne Hathaway.

He is responding to a speech from 2018.

Are We Doing This Again

Apparently "we" are very close to an Iran deal which will be the case until one of his Foxy Friends makes it sound like a bad deal, and in fact a humiliating loss, and then...
 
...repeat every week until the heat death of the universe.

Gonna Be Everything

I am quite sure many companies which had all their systems locked down tightly until about 3 years ago - medical, law firms, etc... - have been recently feeding everything they do into what will eventually be public AI.
A trove of chat logs and projects created with Anthropic’s Claude — some including sensitive personal and company information — have been left exposed to Google, making them them searchable to anyone on the web. |

The artifacts appear to have been made public when Claude users opted to distribute a given chat or project to colleagues or associates using the chatbot’s “share” feature. After hitting a “share” button in the top right corner, Claude notes that sharing will create a “public” link, and “anyone with the link can view.” The warning, though, doesn’t alert users that shared content could wind up being indexed by a search engine — meaning that a user could effectively be sharing their Claude-generated document with the entire internet.
I don't claim to know how everything works, but I haven't seen anyone explain why/how the plagiarism machine isn't just feeding your trade secrets and medical information into its training data.

I've noticed a lack of people asking, too.

"We'll Go Back To"

I think these threats are less and less scary each time.
Trump says he’s ready for ‘strong military action’ if Iran talks fail President Trump tells Axios that the US is in “very deep talks” with Iran.

“If they don’t work out, we will be go back to very strong military action,” he said.

Trump said he paused attacks on Friday because the countries acting as mediators to bring an end to the US-Iran conflict asked him to. “All of the people that deal with Iran asked me: ‘Don’t fire’.”

Asked how long he was willing to give diplomacy, he said, “Not much time. Either it goes fast or not at all”.

One For The Musuem

One could write a book based on this tweet alone. I'll start by wondering which Manger Of The Democratic Party she is imagining is gonna tell the kids to Knock It Off and stop caring about this stuff, and instead start caring about that other stuff. Kitchen tables or whatever.

If only there were someone with courage and credibility. How does one establish courage and credibility on a "complex and painful problem." Someone else should do something about this. Manager! Manager! There are some kids in the store who are probably up to no good! Eject them! Eject them!

I actually do know precisely what she means so I will translate: Barack Obama is supposed to go wag his finger at any candidate who does not fully appreciate the complexity of this painful problem, to make sure they lose their primaries against stellar, deserving, courageous candidates like Haley Stevens. And if those candidates go on to lose, we'll know who to blame.

Sure, Jan

The man lies like as transparently as a toddler and our journalists still haven't figured out how to deal with that (or don't want to).

Trump denied that dwindling munitions are a problem, insisting in a statement to The Wall Street Journal that “we have far more munitions than anyone in the world, and far more than we need.” 

At the same time, the White House said national security would be at risk if news organizations reported updated U.S. government figures on Patriot and Thaad missile expenditures showing the high number of interceptors that have been used since the war began.

We do too have all the ammunition we need and it is treason to suggest (correctly) otherwise. 

Morning

Manic Monday.

Sunday, July 26, 2026

Sunday Evening

enjoy

Sure Why Not

"Cool kids on the Internet. They're doing the cool kid chatter. Some of 'em might be the coastal elites, making fun of how I talk. But let's be real. They're making fun of Michigan. They're thinking they're better than us. Their jokes, their criticism, only make me fight harder." -- Haley Stevens

[image or embed]

— Howard Mortman (@howardmortman.bsky.social) July 25, 2026 at 8:14 PM

Yes code switching is a thing but that is not the same as performing your own parody character. For comparison:

Ah, Well, Nevertheless

It seems Elon deleted this post.
I suppose "next year" can technically mean "by the end ot 2026" in this context, but...

No worries, we'll be sure to print up Elon's next nonsense.

Everything He Ever Wanted

High level government jobs are attractive to serial killers. Lindsey Graham was one.
The extraordinary exchange was captured by the documentary filmmaker Alex Holder, who was granted extensive access to Graham since 2023. It provides an unvarnished look at Graham’s yearslong quest to topple the Iranian regime and the ways in which he persuaded Trump to strike, at times pushing for even more aggressive action than Netanyahu was prepared to take.

WSJ’s Josh Dawsey reviewed the documentary footage, filmed before Graham’s death. Here is what he learned. Photo: Caroline Gutman for WSJ

“Look what we’ve done here. I almost cried,” he tells the crew, laughing loudly just after U.S. strikes on Iran began in February. “How long have we been pushing this?”

He then tells the crew that Trump was equally happy about the war. “I talked to Trump this morning, he’s jacked, he said, ‘best thing I have ever done.’ He loves blowing stuff up.”
He was always funny and friendly to me, personally, in the Senate, so who is to say if he was good or bad?

Running On Empty

It's all above my pay grade, but I was surprise the missile interceptors lasted this long.

President Trump has set aside, at least for now, plans to sharply escalate the American military assault against Iran, with particular concern that intensifying the war could dangerously drain the Pentagon’s already diminished stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions in the Middle East.

The threat to interceptor stockpiles is one of many considerations that have made a return to major combat operations a hugely risky endeavor, administration officials say. Mr. Trump and his top aides are also uneasy about the prospect of a widening war in the Middle East, the alienation of key Gulf allies who are vulnerable to Iranian attack, a global economic crunch, and growing energy and refugee crises.

Ah so inventories are *low* low. 

WASHINGTON — U.S. military commanders have been picking and choosing which Iranian missiles and explosive-packed drones to intercept and are allowing some attacks through their defenses, amid an effort to preserve the Pentagon’s diminishing supply of weapons that block projectiles from reaching their targets, two senior U.S. officials told NBC News.

 

Morning

Sunday funday.

Saturday, July 25, 2026

Saturday Evening

I got nothin'

Afternoon

Weekending

Fo Fari

For years ageing white current and former Timesmen would form into dipshist Voltron on twitter any time someone criticized Bari.

Morning

Slacker Saturday

Friday, July 24, 2026

Happy Hour

Get happy

What Are We Going To Talk About This Week?

Same thing we talk about every week, whatever conservatives want us to talk about it.

I am as guilty as anyone - not that I matter much - but I do wish that if people on The Left wish to discuss the new film version of The Odyssey, they would do so in their own terms, instead of as a response to Elon Musk.

That's just an example, but it applies to everything almost every week.  Try driving the conversation, instead of having it be an ongoing response to whatever nonsense conservatives have puked up this week.

Sure Republicans are in charge of government so to some extent you have to respond to that, but you don't have to respond to whatever is oozing out of conservative social media that day.

Especially if, for example, you have a New York Times column.



Presidenting

How everything works with President Deals.
Two sets of American and Saudi flags were placed on stage and on the table where Energy Secretary Chris Wright was seated. A large screen beamed in his Saudi counterpart from Riyadh. After months of delay, the arrangement was finally signed.

The Saudis had won much of their wish list for the deal.

But as quickly as it was announced, it seemed to fall apart. Thursday morning, Trump said in a social media post that the deal was subject to a new condition: Saudi Arabia would have to join the Abraham Accords, an initiative dating back to Trump’s first administration that led to several Arab countries normalizing their diplomatic stance toward Israel. Trump also denied that the agreement would allow uranium enrichment.

The president, according to a source familiar with the matter, was already angry over the unveiling of the deal, which Wright had not told Trump he would be announcing.

Trump’s frustration was then exacerbated, sources told CNN, after a flurry of criticism from experts and conservative media outlets. This included skeptical coverage on his preferred channel, Fox News, and on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal that questioned why the deal was made absent a normalization agreement — something both outlets pointedly noted President Joe Biden had been seeking.

Every left wing shitposter since the start of Trump II: You can't make any deals with President Deals because he never thinks he is bound by them (this hardly took a genius to observe).

Numerous world leaders and corporate/university presidents: but he will make a deal with us!