Morning

go

Monday Night

Rock on.

...oops forgot to ctrl-c before ctrl-v.

The Rules-Based International Order

They were the ones who kept boasting about how that was their thing.

'We've been really clear about the ICC investigation, we don't support it, we we don't believe that they have the jurisdiction,' White House @PressSec Karine Jean-Pierre after reports Israeli officials fear the Hague-based court could soon issue arrest warrants over Gaza war

— Danny Kemp (@dannyctkemp) April 29, 2024

Happy Hour

 Get happy.

The MAGA Civil War

It might be over whether it's ok to shoot your puppy.

The great schism!

Eager Marks

I've been watching this evolve.

More than 50 tenured journalism professors from top universities have signed a letter calling on the New York Times to address questions about a major investigative report that described a “pattern of gender-based violence” in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.

There's a lot going on with this, but the claimed use of mass rape as weapon of war was and is used as a justification for what Israel has done. The New York Times loves nothing more than publishing bullshit in service of killing thousands.

"But Hamas did other bad things, so it was okay to make up this stuff" is not actually a good justification.

Sue

Go for it, but are there more than 10 lawyers in America?

Lawyers for Hunter Biden plan to sue Fox News “imminently,” according to a letter sent to the network and obtained by NBC News. 

...

Biden has hired attorney Mark Geragos and his firm to represent him in the Fox litigation efforts. The letter is the second outreach to Fox this month. An earlier letter was hand-delivered to Fox’s counsel two weeks ago, and the network asked for more time to respond, according to a source familiar with Biden’s legal efforts. The network has not yet responded to the letter sent April 23, which included a Friday evening, April 26, deadline to respond, according to Geragos. The letter is signed by Tina Glandian, a partner at Geragos & Geragos working on the case.

Lunch

eat

Poor Pete

Supreme Grace doesn't extend below the top.

The Supreme Court on Monday for a second time shot down a request from former Trump adviser Peter Navarro to avoid further prison time over his contempt of Congress conviction.

AI Uses

It's funny how "AI could plan your trip for you" is one of the examples of its revolutionary possibilities.  "Disrupting travel agents" is a funny business fantasy, in that even if it catches on, it's hardly a lucrative business.  More than that,  it's the perfect example of something where the benefit of some human involvement is obvious to anyone but these freaks.

2024

The dream persists!

2006:

They want the computers to deal with the weirdest tasks that they are obviously the least suited for.

Quite sure all "AI travel solutions" are going to be Mechanical Turks, just human assembled travel itineraries that match a query.  Part of this is about the machine "brain," but it's mostly about trying to commoditize things which resist it.  Things like locations and hotels are highly differentiated, as are preferences for such things.  Fake AI isn't going to do anything existing algorithms can't.

Fancy Bus

"It's a bus, not like those other buses where you might encounter a poor."

Blade, the helicopter charter company, was founded 10 years ago as a way for commuters going between New York and the Hamptons to avoid vehicle traffic.

This May it is introducing a new service, the Hamptons Streamliner, that, starting at $195 a ticket, will take passengers to destinations on eastern Long Island aboard … a bus.

Jokes aside, it's good. Buses are Good, Akshually and if that's what it takes... There are other cheaper bus services.

It is true that buses aren't the most comfortable way to travel, but they aren't worse than airplanes (back of the plane, anyway). I know some weirdos like driving, but put me on a bus.

Morning

Going to be another great week for the international rules-based order.

Sunday Night

Rock on.

Shorter Me

If you think the pro-Palestine movement has some unsavory elements, wait until you learn something about some of the prominent people in the anti-Palestine movement (joke: everybody knows these famous and powerful people and all the reasons they are bad, they just don't care).

Puppy Killing

The real story with Noem's puppy killing is that she and everyone around her - including everyone involved with the production of the book - thought this was a good anecdote to share.

One bizarre thing which became apparent as the MAGAs took over the conservative movement is that none of these people are capable of even pretending to be nice people. That John Boehner got drunk with journalists and told them great stories doesn't excuse his policies or their coverage of them, but it at least explains how he rose in politics and maintained good coverage. Being a friendly enough shithead can get you a long way! 

The MAGAs, however, are all absolutely repellent people who seem to have no understanding that not everybody is like that. I know I shouldn't hand it to him for anything, but the one exception to this is probably Matt Gaetz. No I am not saying he is good, but he is capable of faking being a normal human for 5 seconds. 

They hate you, but they all fucking hate each other too, because how could they not?

Are We The Baddies

Anyway, whether or not people in Gaza should be slaughtered in an ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing and collective punishment has little to do with whether or not some campus protesters annoy you, a person 800 miles away from them.

"I think the cause could be just, but the people fighting for it have made me oppose it" is never true, but this is the toddler-level take our big brain pundits give us daily. 

Before the Iraq war, there were certainly many more pieces criticizing Iraq war protesters, and the anti-war movement generally, than pieces written voicing their concerns, in our elite newspapers. "The Iraq war would be stopped if only the antiwar movement were different, but sadly they have not convinced me - a person mad at some random signs he saw highlighted on the conservative websites Anti-Idiotarian Rotweiler Dot Com and Confederate Yankee Dot Com" was silly then and its equivalent is silly now.

Back then, "same side as Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, John Bolton, David Frum, and Norman Podhoretz" - public figures with long horrific records - should've been a more important consideration than getting mad about a "no blood for oil" sign, but that's because people like making up excuses rather than acknowledging that they've joined up with the baddies.

Some real abuser behavior, too. If only you'd behave according to revolving rules, I wouldn't be such a horrible person.

Space

One of my idiosyncratic opinions is that windshield brain and car-centric culture have led to people having absolutely no sense of geographic size and distance. The reliance on GPS for driving directions probably doesn't help.

For example, when people who live in a big city get panicked texts from their relatives every time there's some crime on the news, as if it must happening right there. Or, more relevant to now, when everybody "knew" that in 2020 American cities had been completely taken over by BLM protests when they were maybe happening in a few block range somewhere.

Everyone writing about how a campus protest encampment, which is probably taking up 1/3 of a football field, if that, has COMPLETELY DISRUPTED CAMPUS, is either a fool or a liar. It's one corner of what are mostly very large campuses.

Even urban campus Columbia is quite large. Indiana University is absolutely humongous. Almost every American campus that makes the news is pretty sprawling.

"Fool or liar" is always a tough one, of course, but either disqualifies you from being a pundit worthy of anything but mockery.

Morning

Go

Saturday Night

Rock on.

Incentives

Don't seem quite right, really.