Happy National Tater Day

Happy Easter to all of you who participate.   Also being acknowledged today are International Transgender Day of Visibility, Crayola Crayon Day, Eiffel Tower Day, National Farm Workers Day, and National Tater Day.  With the exception of Easter, all of these days will occur on March 31, each and every year.  The republicans are having a cow over today's acknowledgement of Trans Day of Visibility and are portraying President Biden as the anti-Christ for doing it.  Speaker of the House is actively lying about it.

One of the neighbors brings treats to the street.  Today she brought a cute little arrangement of Easter candy.  Previously she delivered for Valentine's day.

The weather has been unfortunate.  Friday we rode the bikes, it was very windy.  Coming back into the wind was making me whimper.  I was also afraid it was going to suck the contact lens out of my right eye.  Fortunately, it did not do that.  Yesterday was even more windy.  So, we hiked.  It was not a long hike due to the increasing force of the wind and our desire to not be on any ridge lines.  

Here is an ocotillo that is blooming.

And here is more desert loveliness.

Today the wind is up again, and it is raining.  It will rain all day.  It will rain all day tomorrow.  We're going to check the weather tomorrow and see if perhaps it will be nice further south.  We could go to Tubac, which is an artsy-fartsy tourist trap.  At least one would be out of the house.

This is a tweet from Laurence Tribe, eminent Constitutional lawyer. 

Every day it appears that the entire legal system is stacked in favor of the orange menace.  It's somewhat depressing.  I should probably read more science fiction and less politics.

First Blooming Cactus

This is in the RV park, we haven't seen any blooming out in the desert.  Look at this color, it's really bright.

That's it!  I gave you a flower.

Bike and Hike

Hola!  How are things where you are?  We're good.  Yesterday we had a frisky wind out of the north, but we decided to ride anyway.  It is so painful to recover from losing fitness, we try not to let that happen.  We rode from Christopher Columbus north to see what's shaking with the sewer pipe project.  The entrance to the nice park (Silverbell Crossing) is still blockaded due to the heavy equipment in the area.  Fortunately there is another park with restrooms not much farther north.  The sewer project continues.

Note the pile of dirt sitting on the concrete.  The concrete is a water diversion channel.  When monsoon is strong, there is a lot of water flowing, quickly.  After the Rillito flooded back in the 1980s, Tucson got serious about controlling flood waters.  They've dug up the diversion channel to make the trench for the sewer pipe.  Eventually, they'll have to put the concrete back where it came from.

Today we hiked a loop we did back in 2018.  It's a nice loop, there is some up/down but there is not gruesome descending like the last loop we did.  It was cloudy, which was good for our skin, but not so good for photos.

This is a Globe Mallow.  They're pretty and grow everywhere.

This morning was veeeery stressful.  Jim was on Facebook, and his cursor rolled against something.  Suddenly a voice was saying that someone was using Jim's IP address to steal money/data/whatever, and Jim's laptop was frozen to stop the transaction.  The voice then starting telling us to call the phone number on the screen to talk to Microsoft security.  It was a really well done hack.  If this ever happens to you, turn off your laptop/pc with the power button.  That's the only thing that will be working on your computer, everything else was frozen.  After the hardware is off, let it sit for a bit, like a minute.  Don't call the phone number, they're going to scam you using social engineering.  Once you power up, the hack will be gone, and no further action is required on your part.  I hate these people.  Obviously they're smart enough to write stuff like this, so why don't they use their talents for good?

I'm tired, so I think I will stop now.  There are many disturbing articles to link to, but I'm just going to give it a rest.

Rockets, Boosters, Bad Politicians, and a Bridge

March 18, Falcon 9 launched out of Vandenberg to hurl yet more satellites in to low earth orbit.  I think there are somewhere around 5,500 satellites beaming internet to all corners of the earth, with more to come.  I read a bunch of RVers on Facebook, Starlink has really been a game changer for people who work on the road.  There were pictures all over the internet of the rocket.  This one came from the monthly "newspaper" the RV park puts out.  I'm sorry we missed that, it's pretty cool.  If you go to space.com, and click on Launches and Spacecraft at the top of the page, you can see what's launching and from where.

Today was Covid booster day.  We both got a second monovalent X.B.B.  It's the same one as last time, and is allegedly somewhat effective against the current mutation.  Work on better vaccines and treatments for acute Covid and Long Covid appears to be stopped, what with the collapse of Public Health in this country.
Update 3/27/2024:  Last night our arms started hurting about 8:00 pm.  Both of us had a fair amount of heat at the injection site.  I had the headache that ate Tokyo, which I am attributing to the vaccine.  We're better today.  All in all, not a significant reaction.

Judge Merchan, currently presiding over the Stormy Daniels case, has issued a gag order for the orange menace.  Orange threatened his daughter, who works for a firm that supports Democratic interests.  How stupid can you be to threaten your judge's child?  The Judge and his family are all being harassed because of this man who just can not stop talking.  I think the Stormy Daniels trial starts April 15 - mark your calendars.  There is more on CNN.

In other news, Kari Lake has asked for a default judgement in the Stephen Richer case.  Kari has been saying many things about the Maricopa County recorder which are not true.  Discovery was about to start, and Kari blinked, she has effectively pleaded guilty.  There is more on this subject, here.  The Arizona GOP is selling its headquarters in Phoenix, after all of these bull shit law suits they've filed and lost, they're out of money.  So, I hope Kari gets a huge, crippling penalty.

Before the weather tanked, there was hiking.  Here is Jim, slogging up the StairMaster section of the trail.  Those are Brittle Bushes foreground.

This is a trail we see on the loop route we do, that we have not taken.  Currently, our fitness level will not support any off-piste excursions, so we still do not know where it goes.

A Mariposa Lily.

By now you are probably aware that Key Bridge was hit by a freighter that had lost power, and could not control forward motion.  This is bad, seven people went in to the water, they were on the bridge deck fixing pot holes.  Traffic which is always abysmal back there, will now be worse.  There is a good youtube on the subject if you are interested, which can be found here.  Or you can read about it here.  Baltimore's harbor will lose business to Norfolk, Charleston & Savannah ports. The economic fallout will be massive.

 So, that's it, that's all I've got.

Lev Parnas and Me

Lev Parnas testified for eight hours yesterday, in front of the Oversight Committee.  They are the ones who are attempting to find any trace of high crimes and misdemeanors with which to impeach President Biden.  They got nothin!  After that session, the width and breadth of the corruption of the republicans and Putin has been revealed. 

Here is part of what Mr. Parnas said, "From shortly after my arrest on October 9, 2019, to now, I have been trying to share the irrefutable truth with you: The American people have been lied to by Trump, Giuliani, & various cohorts of individuals in govt and media positions." Parnas goes on to say: "Pete Sessions, then Congressman Devin Nunes, Senator Ron Johnson and many others understood they were pushing a false narrative. The same goes for John Solomon, Sean Hannity and media personnel, particularly at Fox News."  Pete Sessions, who is on the Oversight Committee was called out as well, for being involved in the attempt to manufacture evidence of corruption in the Biden family.  Yesterday Representative Lynch (D-MA) said the following, "When you review the entire record of evidence of these hearings going back over a year, you've actually provided more evidence to impeach Donald Trump for a third time than you have in so much as laying a glove on Joe Biden."

So, it's out now, it's part of the Congressional Record, and it probably won't make a bit of difference.  Neither the WAPO or NYT have covered the hearings.  This is just journalistic malpractice.

At one point, Rep. Moskowitz (who James Comer refers to as a smurf) offered to make the motion to impeach and Comer could second it.  What's truly worth seeing is Jamie Raskin's face.  It's a short clip, you should play it.  There is a 60 second clip of Moskowitz badgering Tony Bobulinski about why Comer hasn't called a vote.

The Hill has an article with video in it.  It's a concise version of the testimony.  I'm going to  link to another clip of Mr. Parnas testifying.  This is a good one.  The whole thing was on CSPAN if you have access to it.  The transcript of what Mr. Parnas said is here.

The weather has been good this week.  Unfortunately, we have had appointments everyday that precluded riding.  One of the worst things about being old is that the systems start breaking down. 

Tuesday was interesting, I have the left ear from hell.  Two ear drums have been grafted in over the years, and both grafts failed, so the ear drum is currently perforated.  Tuesday I saw a new to me ENT and learned that my ear canal has collapsed, probably as a result of the last surgeon enlarging the ear canal so he could better visualize the surgical site.  I was told that stents are available to hold the canal open, which I may do next winter; it would improve my hearing.  Unlike the first ENT I was referred to down here, he did not think anything needs to be done immediately.  Do nothing are my favorite words from a medical person. 

Here is the lovely view of the Catalinas from the roof of the parking structure.

The previous Saturday was a cardiac CT scan.  I'm old, I have no idea what's happening in my heart, the cardiac scan looks for calcium deposits, which are a marker for how much soft plaque is in there.  Soft plaque ruptures generally cause heart attacks.  It' not perfect measure, but it is non-invasive.  My risk for CV disease is below the 50th percentile for my age and gender group. However, the scan also revealed spots on the lungs.  A follow on chest CT showed various areas of consolidation, it's like bits of hard sponge amongst the soft sponge that should be your lungs.  This is not good, how not good remains to be seen.  I'm now waiting for a referral to a pulmonologist, and this one is really giving me the willies.   

These were taken on a day when the weather was trying to decide to rain or not.

Other than this, I have nothing much to say.  Ok, this is funny.  If you don't follow football, that's Taylor Swift's boyfriend, who was yelling at the coach during the Super Bowl.

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.

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.

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.

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 article.  Here 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.