Thursday, March 14, 2024

Hike and No Justice Yet

Today started out sort of on the gloomy side.  We were both a little tired.  Yesterday I sat on top of the shed, in the gusting wind, caulking around the vent fan.  It was very disconcerting being that close to the rotating blades of death.  Then at one point I shifted my position and put my foot down in a pile of caulk.  Good times!  Hopefully this will stop rain from getting in to the shed.  If not, I'll be up there with another tube of caulk.

We decided to hike.  Biking does exactly nothing for a person's bone density, so hiking is required to keep us from moving in to full blown osteoporosis.  The weather improved, the clouds lifted some, and was actually a nice day.  This is what we saw.

This is a yucca in someone's front yard.  This is smart landscaping, they're very hardy, they can live without being watered, and they take up a lot of space.  Look at the flower spikes he's putting out.

Out in the Tucson Mountain Park.



Today, the orange menace and lawyers saw Judge Cannon to argue that the Espionage Act is too vague as to be enforceable.  @CalltoActivism posted this:

MAJOR BREAKING: In shocking twist, Judge Aileen Cannon has just REJECTED Trump’s arguments that the central statute in the indictment, the Espionage Act, was impermissibly vague and should be struck down entirely. Trump is LOSING his mind. Here’s why.  

The two page decision by Judge Cannon followed a nearly daylong hearing in Federal District Court in where she entertained arguments from Trump’s legal team. Jack Smith says the former president violated that law 32 times by removing a trove of highly sensitive classified material from the White House after he left office. Trump’s lawyers had claimed that certain phrases in the text of the law — for instance, its requirement that prosecutors prove defendants took “unauthorized possession” of documents “relating to the national defense” — were so ambiguous and open to debate as to be unenforceable. 

Bottom line? Judge Aileen Cannon has shocked Trump world who thought they’d have an easy time getting the case dismissed.

Update to post 3/15/24:  @JoyceWhiteVance has a rebuttal tweet up, which sounds terribly plausible.

In other news, Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, received 30,000 pages of documents from Merrick Garland 12 months after requesting them.  For twelve months Garland sat on this material.  Apparently there is more coming next week.  The Stormy Daniels hush money case was supposed to start March 25, but in light of the massive document dump, Bragg would not mind a delay of up to 30 days.  Of course, the orange menace wants 90 days.  President Biden did not make a good choice when he picked his AG.

So, that's what's happening in Ye Olde Pueblo.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Riding and Malfeasance (with an update)

March 9 we rode, and on the way back there was serious concern about getting rained on.  I did not have the protective baggies for the cell phones, so I really did not want to get wet. This is one of the lakes at Christopher Columbus.  They dye it blue, which makes it very attractive.

As we left Christopher Columbus to return home, the wind picked up and gusted a little.  There was an ominous cloud.  He followed us for awhile, but eventually it ran out of steam. 

Today it was warm, and we drove to Christopher Columbus so we could ride further north.  We wanted to see how the sewer line project is going.  As you no doubt recall, I've been complaining about trail closures since we got back here in November.  Anyway, they have reopened the section north of the nice park we usually stop at.  The entrance to the nice park is blocked because they are still digging.  Now we have a longer ride in the direction of Twin Peaks, so called because there used to be two small mountains, but they ground up one to make concrete.  It's not an attractive bike path because both sides have been recently scraped and excavated, but it does provide more mileage.  Note the clouds, rain is coming on Thursday.

Here is an Acacia which is blooming.  My phone camera can't see the blossoms that well, but we could smell them, they're very sweet.


Poppies by the path.  I'm not sure if they're Mexican or Californian, but they are cheerful.  The photo is a little blurry because the wind was jostling them.

Lara Trump, married to Eric Trump, son of the orange menace, has been appointed to head the RNC, the Republican National Committee.  That organization collects money and organizes support for down ballot candidates as well as the presidential race.  That's what they used to do.  Under Lara, 60 members of staff have been laid off.  Operations are being moved to Florida to be closer to Mar a Lardo.  All money collected will go the the orange one's legal bills.  No money will go to down ballot candidates as well as no organizing efforts.  Jaime Harrison, chairman of the DNC, was giggling about the whole thing because it is so bad for the republican party candidates.

Representative Ken Buck, CO-4 (Colorado legislative district 4) is quitting as of March 22.  He has had enough of this congress.  Representative and total wing-nut Lauren Boebert, currently CO-3, had filed to run for CO-4 since Rep. Buck had decided not to run again.  Plus, Boebert was getting her butt kicked in fund raising in CO-3.  However, now there will have to be a special election for Buck's seat.  Boebert WILL HAVE TO RESIGN her current seat in CO-3 to run in the special election in CO-4.  That will leave CO-3 open, where Adam Frisch is polling and fund raising very well, and perhaps he will win that special election.  Speaker Johnson's slim majority is shrinking by the day.  Couldn't happen to a worse human being.

Update to post 3/13/2024:  Today Boebert said, “I will not further imperil the already very slim House Republican majority by resigning my current seat in Colorado’s 3rd District,” Boebert said on Rumble, adding that she will “continue on” with her campaign for the full term in Buck’s seat. “I’m not going to put my constituents in the 3rd District in a bind, leaving them also without representation by resigning.”  This is interesting, it puts her in the position of running against a CO-4 incumbent, albeit one recently installed.

Once again, the orange menace has defamed E.Jean Carroll.  He was stupid enough to do this while being televised on a station based in New York city, so yet another defamation suit can be filed in front of Judge Kaplan, who apparently has had enough of the orange dude defaming women he sexually assaulted.  

Orange Menace is facing a trial for Federal Elections laws violations.  This stems from his attempt to have Michael Cohen bribe porn star Stormy Daniels to not disclose the sexual encounter orange and Stormy had.  The bribe should have been logged as a campaign contribution, and it was not.  Hence the lawsuit.  Anyway....... orange wants the court case delayed while waiting for the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.  This is astonishing because he was not yet president when this crime took place.  I guess he should be asking for whole life immunity.  

There are other cases pending, but I do not have sufficient memory to recount them all.  Needless to say, the biggest deal is the SCOTUS ruling on presidential immunity. 

That's it!  That's all I have to say.





Friday, March 8, 2024

Mainly the Weather

It's been kind of a weird winter.  Last winter was really cold, it snowed, and received the dreaded "worst winter ever" award.  This year hasn't been all that cold, but it has been wet.  Yesterday it pretty much rained all day, and then most of the night.  Today it rained in the afternoon.  The desert is eerily green due to the amount of water received.  Today may be the last day of this weather pattern, with highs in the 70s on the way.

The skies have been impressive.  This was today, coming back from the grocery store.  Look lower right, those people are getting wet.

Tuesday we had a sun dog over the park model.  

There was a short hike one day.  Notice how colorless the sky is.  The ocotillos are very juicy at present, and some are starting to bloom.  It's nice to see. 


The round tail ground squirrels are out.  They're early this year.  We think we've seen juveniles above ground, so they've been busy in their burrows.

Tuesday Century Link came out again.  That was tech number four.  He spent a lot of time with test equipment listening for noise on the lines.  The lines are laying on the ground and they're hard to see because the light was so harsh.  Tech number two also spent a lot of time out here, but accomplished nothing. 


At the end, he came and talked to me and said our cable to the main switch at the office was "shit."  All the lines have noise on them, which accounts for slow speeds and internet dropping.  So he put us back on the pair we had been on and said he would notify the department that digs up the road to come out and replace the cable.  Wednesday we got a text from Century Link saying that Dave was coming out.  We never saw him.  Thirty minutes later, Dave was done and leaving.  Since tech number four was here, we've had close to 40Mbps, and zero dropping of the internet.  I have no idea what, if anything, was fixed, and whether it will stay fixed.  For now, we are happy campers.  It does not seem to me that it should be this difficult. 

Who watched State of the Union last night?  We saw about half of it.  President Biden did good.  The Republican rebuttal was just pathetic and Senator Britt has been completely and thoroughly dragged on twitter for sitting at her kitchen table over-acting.

Here's another troubling thing we can't do anything about.  The country is running out of electrical transmission capacity.  Between bitcoin, AI, and cloud computing, the grid is running out of capacity.  It's one of those things that can be ameliorated by a large application of money, but the question remains of who will pay.  Here is an interesting article on the subject.


Monday, March 4, 2024

An Article Dump

I have read much recently, links and stuff that I want to keep available, and thus it goes in to a post.  You might find some of it interesting as well.

Who thinks about AI?  I do, some of the time.  What I think about a lot is the fact that when developers are "training" their AIs, they're doing it with other peoples' content.  By scraping published or copyrighted content, they're stealing other people's work to make an AI.  Eventually, the AI made with  others' work will put those people out of a job.  On twitter the other day I saw a reference to a product called Nightshade.  It's AI poison, and this is so dang clever, it just hurts me.  This is what it does.

Nightshade works similarly as Glaze, but instead of a defense against style mimicry, it is designed as an offense tool to distort feature representations inside generative AI image models. Like Glaze, Nightshade is computed as a multi-objective optimization that minimizes visible changes to the original image. While human eyes see a shaded image that is largely unchanged from the original, the AI model sees a dramatically different composition in the image. For example, human eyes might see a shaded image of a cow in a green field largely unchanged, but an AI model might see a large leather purse lying in the grass. Trained on a sufficient number of shaded images that include a cow, a model will become increasingly convinced cows have nice brown leathery handles and smooth side pockets with a zipper, and perhaps a lovely brand logo. 

The article is here, and they go deeper into the weeds, but currently I'm entranced by the AI believing cows have handles and a logo.

Google's AI, Gemini, has come under fire as of late.  From CBS and others we learn the following. "The new search tool, which the company has touted as revolutionary, came under fire after some users asked it to generate images of people drawn from history, such as German soldiers during World War 2, and popes, who have historically been White and male. Some of Gemini's images portrayed Nazi soldiers as Black and Asian and popes as female." "AI-powered chatbots are also attracting scrutiny for the role they might play in the U.S. elections this fall. A study released on Tuesday found that Gemini and four other widely used AI tools yielded inaccurate election information more than half the time, even steering voters head to polling places that don't exist."  This is not good.  Pichai, one of the Google leaders, is taking considerable heat for all of this.

Marriage is not doing so well in these United States.  Women, who often as not, work full time and yet are expected to keep the house, make the food, take out the trash and shoulder the mental load of making sure things run smoothly have had it.  Lyz Lenz published an excerpt of her book, This American Ex-Wife, in the WAPO.  One of the things that sent her over the edge was this.

I shut myself in the bedroom and called my husband.  "Come home,” I sobbed.  He did. He got the kids, and I refused to come out of the bedroom until it was the baby’s bedtime. I simply could not face them. When I did come out, I found my husband had fed the children. There was Chinese takeout waiting for me. This is good, I thought. Maybe he sees. That night, after I put the baby to bed, I scrubbed my daughter’s poop off the carpet. Then my husband told me I needed to get it together. Maybe, he suggested, I should sleep more. And I realized he didn’t see me at all.

What must it be like for her ex-husband.  He's in the book, he's in the excerpted section in the WAPO.  He's referenced in another article that discusses a slew of new books out on divorced women.  This man, as well as other referenced men, is now in print as being self-absorbed and oblivious to the situations of their marriages.  I would find it humiliating.  It would be interesting to see a follow up on how they're doing.  Ms Lenz is doing just fine.  One of her more interesting points is that quite often men don't realize they're about to be left, only when she doesn't come home do they twig to the situation.

And then there is water.  In Arizona, we're frequently thinking about water.  Restoration Cowboy Style recently published a post about the drilling that is going on where they live.  To this day, Arizona does not have a coherent water management plan in place.  Governor Hobbs sent the Saudi farms packing, so they are no longer draining an aquifer, but it still goes on in the state.  Alfalfa and nut trees use too much water.  You know who else uses too much water?  AI training facilities.  Microsoft is cooling their data centers in Goodyear (near Phoenix) with water.  I don't know if they're recycling or not.  Then there is the chip fab being built in Tempe which will also use a ton of water.  This is a desert, why do people treat water like it's an infinite resource?

Who is aware of the ransomware attack against Change Health Care?  Who has ever heard of these people?  This has been going on and today is the first day I've seen any MSM coverage.  Change Health Care is a switch, doctors and pharmacies submit charges, Change Health sends it out for payment, and then remits to the billing party. The ransomware people have encrypted Change Health's data and are holding it ransom for money.  They have also stolen a lot of patient data and put it out on the dark web.

WAPO finally put up an articleHere is something that's not paywalled.  Anyway, this is bad.  People can't fill their prescriptions, the PBMs are impacted, doctors can't bill, patients can't be released from hospital because their prescriptions can't be filled to go home with them.  I follow angrypharmacist on twitter, he also has long form writing.  This piece is worth reading, I will warn you that he uses  language that some people will find objectionable, but it captures the situation very well.

Century Link is sending out technician number four tomorrow.  The will require us to be home the entire day and wait for arrival.  Thus far I have remained pleasant to the techs, but tomorrow I may have to deploy my tone of exasperation to express how much this is pissing me off.  I have a new phone cable, a new modem, and a new phone cable wall plate.  Since all the local stuff is new, perhaps they could go to the DSL switch in the office and jiggle some wires there.

Ok, internet is down again, I'm publishing as soon as it comes back up, so sorry about any undiscovered typos.  I'll get them later.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

A Small Rant

Greetings Earthlings.  It's been awhile since I've posted.  Part of it is ennui, and part is, once again, I am so dang angry.  May I vent?  I will now vent.

We've had a run of not great weather, until Tuesday.  It was a good day.  How did we spend that day, you wonder.  We spent it waiting for Century Link.  Internet has been going down frequently, speeds are as low as 7 Mbps.  So, I called, got a tech out yesterday.  Unlike the last two techs that have been out, he said the wire from the pole to the house was faulty.  Because it touched the house, I would have to pay $100 for fixing.  Never mind that it's not my wire, I did not install it; because it goes to the phone outlet, I must pay.  So, fine, we can't live like this.  He did the work and left and not FIVE MINUTES LATER the internet dropped.  I got on the phone to complain to Century Link and Jim went and tracked the guy down because he was still in the park.  After significant whining, Century Link agreed to knock the $100 off my next bill.  The tech went and got a new modem, and things were good for awhile.  Last night it went down again, twice!  I have no idea if it was the new wire, or the new modem.  Nonetheless, it's their stupid equipment, and they should fix it, and I should not have to pay for them to do that.  The tech said he's in the park every day, which gives you some idea of reliability of the product.

Look at those skies, we totally missed out on that day.

We're trying to get the front door on the park model replaced.  Whoever installed it must have been drunk at the time.  Getting a contractor to give us a bid, and do the work is proving to be nigh on impossible.  They're all booked, they don't return phone calls, and they are wearing on my very last nerve.

The post office has not been forwarding the mail.  Jim's RMD check was returned to sender, that's a required minimum distribution from your 401K.  IRS punishes you severely if the correct amount of money is not withdrawn every year.  So, having that check sent back was bad.  We called the pension people, they told us not to worry, that even though we don't have the money, it's technically withheld.  Here's the thing, primaries in Washington state are coming up.  We vote by mail, everyone does.  They mail out information, then they mail the ballots.  The PO is disenfranchising us.  So I filed a form that complains to the USPS.  They actually called me yesterday, and they are looking in to it.  I have not gotten a New Yorker in months, I do wonder where they are, and where are my voting materials?

Yesterday SCOTUS said they would consider Dump's claim of presidential immunity - in April.  This slides all the cases to the right.  They are complicit in trying to get him elected.  The entire republican party is giving me a giant headache.  Today in Phoenix, the republicans voted for a bill that would allow homeowners to shoot and kill migrants, or anyone else, crossing their property.  Let's think about this.  Governor Hobbs will veto it, but what kind of people are these?

The Heritage Foundation, the group of reactionary old white men who miss the 1950's, is trying to deport Prince Harry.  Do they not have anything better to do with their time?  Dump wants him out of the country, as well.  These people are just detestable. There is an article in the Daily Beast.

When President Biden was elected, I thought we were in for four rational, peaceful years.  Boy howdy was I wrong.

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Unlimited Hydros, Scraping and Shoes

This will probably be short because the wretched internet has gone done about every five minutes since we got home.  Monday I am calling Century Link and asking for a supervisor, and asking that person if they could pretty please possibly send someone out who could fix this.  The last guy said it was slow because of a short at the power pedestal, and we did get 40 Mbps for about 5 minutes.  Something is wrong somewhere and I'd like it fixed, immediately.  Well, good luck with that.  

Anyway, we rode from the house up to Christopher Columbus.  We were greeted with the sounds of radio controlled boat racing.  We haven't seen the boats for a few years, and technology has marched on in our absence.  They're bigger, louder and faster.

This is how they're launched.  Start engine, throw in the water.

Here we have team Whataburger.  These are miniature unlimited hydros.  Hydroplane racing used to be very popular, but as of late has fallen out of favor. 


Where the pit crews work.

Yesterday was the first calm day in a long time.  Instead of riding,  we elected to scrape and wire brush oxidized and cracking paint off the shed.  Because we are idiots, we didn't put on sun screen.  At least we got the bandanas out to protect our necks.


I am scraping, Jim is caulking the gaps.

Yesterday, staff of the orange ectoplasm decided that in order to connect with the youth, he should go to Sneaker Con.  Sneakers are a very large deal.  If you go out to sneakers.com you'll get the idea.  Kids actually buy, hold and collect sneakers.  I have lost touch with that part of my culture.  He was scheduled to speak for an hour.  An HOUR!

You can get same shoe on QVC for $18.  It won't have the T on it, but there you go.  Anyway, he came out, the audience started booing, and chanting "let's go Biden."  Less than a minute later, ectoplasm oozed off the stage.  Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Saves are taking longer, I think the force of the internet is weak, so I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.