Saturday’s Forum
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66 responses to “Saturday’s Forum”
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@realDonaldTrump
700,000 ballots were not allowed to be viewed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh which means, based on our great Constitution, we win the State of Pennsylvania!
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@Teve: That’s actually a real tweet from the President?
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@Teve:
I’m guessing his supporters are now chanting:
“Count all the ILLEGAL votes!” -
Kansas is leading the nation!
Norton County, Kansas has 995 confirmed cases of covid, which means that, based on the 2019 population estimates, 18.6% of the population have or have had covid.
Gove County, Kansas has 19 confirmed covid deaths, which means that 0.7% of the county population have died from covid.
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Your Computer Isn’t Yours [If You Own a Mac, That Is]:
On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored.
It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. Lots of people didn’t realize this, because it’s silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you’re offline, but today the server got really slow and it didn’t hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone’s apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet.
Because it does this using the internet, the server sees your IP, of course, and knows what time the request came in. An IP address allows for coarse, city-level and ISP-level geolocation, and allows for a table that has the following headings:
Date, Time, Computer, ISP, City, State, Application Hash
Apple (or anyone else) can, of course, calculate these hashes for common programs: everything in the App Store, the Creative Cloud, Tor Browser, cracking or reverse engineering tools, whatever.
This means that Apple knows when you’re at home. When you’re at work. What apps you open there, and how often. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend’s house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel on a trip to another city.
“Who cares?” I hear you asking.
Well, it’s not just Apple. This information doesn’t stay with them:
These OCSP requests are transmitted unencrypted. Everyone who can see the network can see these, including your ISP and anyone who has tapped their cables.
These requests go to a third-party CDN run by another company, Akamai.
Since October of 2012, Apple is a partner in the US military intelligence community’s PRISM spying program, which grants the US federal police and military unfettered access to this data without a warrant, any time they ask for it. In the first half of 2019 they did this over 18,000 times, and another 17,500+ times in the second half of 2019.
Perhaps this famous ad was prescient, but not in the way intended.
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@sam: When you first sign on to a new Mac, or after a major upgrade to the OS, you are asked if you want to share debug info with Apple. Could this be part of that?
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I read that, going forward, all of the Trump campaign’s fraud claims and lawsuits are to be consolidated and centrally directed by the firm of Nasty, Brutish and Incompetent, R. Giuliani, Senior Partner.
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I dunno. The article goes into more detail, but my takeway was that all this stuff is unstoppable by the user.
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‘No One Is Listening to Us’
More people than ever are hospitalized with COVID-19. Health-care workers can’t go on like this.Hospitals have put their pandemic plans into action, adding more beds and creating makeshift COVID-19 wards. But in the hardest-hit areas, there are simply not enough doctors, nurses, and other specialists to staff those beds. Some health-care workers told me that COVID-19 patients are the sickest people they’ve ever cared for: They require twice as much attention as a typical intensive-care-unit patient, for three times the normal length of stay. “It was doable over the summer, but now it’s just too much,” says Whitney Neville, a nurse based in Iowa. “Last Monday we had 25 patients waiting in the emergency department. They had been admitted but there was no one to take care of them.” I asked her how much slack the system has left. “There is none,” she said.
The entire state of Iowa is now out of staffed beds, Eli Perencevich, an infectious-disease doctor at the University of Iowa, told me. Worse is coming. Iowa is accumulating more than 3,600 confirmed cases every day; relative to its population, that’s more than twice the rate Arizona experienced during its summer peak, “when their system was near collapse,” Perencevich said. With only lax policies in place, those cases will continue to rise. Hospitalizations lag behind cases by about two weeks; by Thanksgiving, today’s soaring cases will be overwhelming hospitals that already cannot cope. “The wave hasn’t even crashed down on us yet,” Perencevich said. “It keeps rising and rising, and we’re all running on fear. The health-care system in Iowa is going to collapse, no question.”
In the imminent future, patients will start to die because there simply aren’t enough people to care for them. Doctors and nurses will burn out. The most precious resource the U.S. health-care system has in the struggle against COVID-19 isn’t some miracle drug. It’s the expertise of its health-care workers—and they are exhausted.
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For many health-care workers, the toll of the pandemic goes beyond physical exhaustion. COVID-19 has eaten away at the emotional core of their work. “To be a nurse, you really have to care about people,” Neville said. But when an ICU is packed with COVID-19 patients, most of whom are likely to die, “to protect yourself, you just shut down. You get to the point when you realize that you’ve become a machine. There’s only so many bags you can zip.”
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Still, “you can’t just fix a pandemic this far down the rabbit hole,” Popescu says. “I’m hopeful, but I don’t expect this to suddenly turn itself around overnight.” Biden will inherit a health-care system that is battered at best and broken at worst, a polarized electorate, and many local leaders who are doubling down on bad policies. Trump won Iowa by eight points, which Governor Kim Reynolds took as validation of the state’s COVID-19 response thus far. Bars, restaurants, and schools in Iowa are still fully open, and a recently announced mask mandate applies only for gatherings of 25 people or more. “That takes away my hope,” Perencevich said. -
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An incredible display of collective irresponsibility from the parents of high school students in Rolla, MO.
The whole piece is full of nonsense like this:
Highlighting that tension—and the difficult task facing the health department—one local woman claimed in a series of Facebook posts that her daughter “did not attend the dance” but that she had added the health department number into her phone in order to avoid their calls.
“I’m sorry, but if you’re OK with your kid ratting other kids out to the health department for attending a private event, you are the bigger problem… SMDH SOCIALISM,” she wrote. “I don’t have to answer any of their questions. F#%* them.”
“This is how it all starts,” she continued. “Dividing, labeling. Your home raided in the middle of the night. Don’t think it could happen here? Think again. The difference is, our citizens are armed, according to their constitutional rights.”
We are not ever going to get a handle on this, it seems.
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@Kathy:
Back in the day, Tom and Ray Magliozzi had a radio show on NPR out of Boston called Car Talk (hosted by Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers). The show was a gem. Tom and Ray had an office in Harvard Square, above a bank. On the window of the office was a law-office looking sign saying, “Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe.”
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@Jen: Rolla is the home of the Missouri University of Science and Technology. It’s a pretty good school, ranked pretty high by many, but the stupidity runs deep in that part of the Ozarks.
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@sam: I listened to those guys every week, frickin hilarious. So sad when Tom developed Alzheimer’s.
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@sam: Click and Clack reruns Saturday mornings on NPR in my area. The show is timeless. I can’t recall any mention of current events between the bros, so it has stayed pretty fresh.
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@OzarkHillbilly:
A grad school flatmate of mine, visiting me in Cambridge from South Carolina, made a special pilgrimage to the Good News Garage. -
@CSK: Sounds like something I’d do.
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@Jen:
We are not ever going to get a handle on this, it seems.
This kind of imbecility started at the top. Trump set the tone, he gave these deadly false opinions legitimacy. And his utterly insane refusal to concede an election he has clearly lost and begin the transition to the Biden administration is going to cost even more lives. It’s enraging.
I’m preaching to the choir, I know. But expressing my anger helps keep it from causing ulcers.
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Theo Shantonas@TheoShantonas
This Maori baby learning the Haka Dance is everything i want to see from the internet
Flexed biceps Hugging face
(:31 sec video) -
@Teve:
Because he’s full of himself? -
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’m going into cuteness overload. -
@CSK: A while back I thought to myself, I wonder why I don’t like Charles Pierce’s writing style? And my first thought was I should read about five or 10 of his columns to find out what it is that I don’t like, then I thought no, no I don’t need to do that. 😀
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So what happened in Miami-Dade?
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused her own party of incompetent campaigning, just days after a presidential election win, the reactions ran the full gamut from defensiveness to counter-criticism. But for me, the result was something different: a flashback.
In 2018 I covered the midterm elections as a foreign correspondent, reporting from a series of swing districts across the Sunbelt; contested terrain in Arizona, Texas, California and Nevada. But the most lasting impression was left by two close-set congressional seats in Southern Florida: Florida 26, and Florida 27.
Situated in and near Miami, these districts make up some of the most volatile and interesting political territory in the United States. FL-27 had voted heavily for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but the House seat had been held by a socially liberal Republican, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, for 30 years. Ros-Lehtinen was retiring, and on paper the district seemed a natural Dem pick-up. The districts also overlapped with Miami-Dade, the most populous county in Florida, whose turnout would be critical in deciding a narrow gubernatorial race.Instead of requesting interviews, I decided to see the candidates like an undecided voter would, joining the audience for stump speeches and campaign events. This seemed standard, almost old-fashioned reporting. It never occurred to me that it would be hard, let alone so hard that I’d need to extend my stay in Miami. By leaving time, I felt not like an undecided voter, but like a private detective. Finding a schedule of Republican campaign events took 15 minutes. With Democrats, this process took five days.
It continues on from there, the amount of disorganization, cluelessness and smug arrogance explains these seats going R pretty well.
OTOH, he found the R campaigns pretty helpful and courteous.
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@charon:
Following both the 16 & 18 elections, there were numerous stories about how incompetent the FL Dem party organization was. For 20, nothing changed except the party was more defenseless than usual in allowing Rs to define them.
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Interesting analysis of the “media” pandering to the MAGA conspiracy crowd on the right.
Honestly, I don’t know how we manage to drag these individuals back to reality. They’re immediate suckers for anyone who tells them what they want to hear.
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Apparently the national DNC got on the case also. After many paragraphs of horror stories, this:
A DNC flack in Washington, D.C. had heard I was making trouble, planning some kind of “Dems in disarray” story, and as I scribbled notes on top of an industrial dryer, I picked up the story that had been relayed to him, as much from his tone as his words. A foreign correspondent had arrived in Miami expecting VIP treatment, then got miffed when the red carpet wasn’t rolled out. Smearing the ground game would be revenge for a bruised ego. “Money at a national level has gone into these seats,” he assured me.
Walking him through what I’d seen—and hadn’t seen—only made him angry. “We’re going to win both of those seats,” he said, berating my ignorance. It was a strange reaction. By then I probably had as clear a snapshot of the election in Miami as anyone. Wasn’t that information useful? Potentially important, even? Instead, someone hundreds of miles away was blithely junking this eye-witness evidence in favor of obnoxious confidence. “You’ll see,” he insisted, “when we win FL-26 and FL-27 on election night, I’ll message you.” And they did, and he did.
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@charon:
That was, though, 2018. Then:
In my reply, I pointed out that Andrew Gillum, the Democratic favorite to become Florida’s governor, had lost by a narrow margin, and that poor turnout in Miami-Dade was the culprit. And perhaps you can imagine my lack of surprise two years later, when FL-26 and FL-27 both fell to GOP challengers, one of them Maria Salazar. On the presidential ballot, Clinton’s 30-point lead in Miami-Dade shrunk to a 7-point margin for Biden.
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@charon: The Florida Democratic Party is incompetent and has been for years here. In not sure how Party Structure works but with Floridas importance in Federal Elections Im surprised there isn’t a mechanism for the National Democratic Party to hire some outside talent to come in and unscrew Florida Dems. The Florida Republic Party is simply more talented than the Democratic Party here.
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@Sleeping Dog: Damn you beat me to it..Lol
But yes, they run poor candidates and have dumb messages. For some reason, Florida Democrats think they can run on the most Progressive message allowable for Statewide elections.
Instead of accepting the electorate they have and running Blue Dogs, the run AOC-like candidates for the electorate they wish they had and continue to lose.
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@charon: I voted for Gillum but didn’t think he was a great candidate. The last several Statewide elections here proves my point that Turnout politics has a natural end and Persuasion has to enter the equation.
Democrats here are still preaching to the choir in the largest media markets and ignoring everywhere else. Meanwhile, Republicans here are working to steal margin from Democrats in those media markets and making up the difference with overwhelming victory is rural counties and the retirement towns.
Until Democrats alter their strategy to spent time in Northwest, Southwest, Melbourne, Ocala and West Palm with a winning message…they will continue to lose.
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@Jim Brown 32: Honestly, it sounds like just running a competent campaign at the level a student council level would be a general step in the right direction, and that’s not even getting to finding a good candidate or finding the right agenda. Honestly, I’m surprised they can win as often as they do in Florida.
And from what Rick Wilson says, the Florida Republican party is one of the best in the country, so it’s like a High School Junior Varsity football team going head to head with a pro team.
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Okay. This time the pandemic has gone too far.
There are no mason jars to be found in my entire city!
I’m cooking down tomatoes (30+ lbs) for my New Years Chili Feast* and wanted quart jars instead of the pints I have. I’m on my second round of 8 pints in the pressure canner, and I still have more left to do. Fortunately I had lids in the pantry.
* I’ve been doing a New Years Day Chili Feast for 23 years (including in China!). I’ve got a month and a half to figure out ways to do it in a safe way this year. I’ll definitely be doing some sort of “porch pick-up”, just need to work out the details.
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@Mu Yixiao: That’s been the story since spring. Just finding caps has been impossible. Same story with chickens. Getting new layers last spring turned into an ordeal. Buying feed has been hit and miss all year. Waterers, feeders, anything chicken related has been in shortage. Covid freaked people out and a whole bunch went “back to the earth”.
On the upside, come spring I’ll bet there will be a boom of canning supplies and chicken stuff on the 2nd hand market. I might finally dive into Beekeeping.
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Well, you have to get up pretty early to beat JB32. And thanks for verifying my hearsay.
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@Mike in Arlington: They got a crook and imbecile like Rick Scott elected Governor twice and (so far) once as a Senator. We don’t even need to talk about “Tweedle” DeSantis. Yes, the Florida Repub Machine here is pretty good–despite the fact that Florida Dems make it pretty easy for them.
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I knew that baking and cooking were seeing a big up-tick, but I didn’t think canning would be a part of that. Only old people can food. Young people freeze it.
And for the shortage to last this long? You’d think Ball and Kerr would be ramping up production big-time.
Fortunately, I have a lot of jars. And if I really wanted more (or quarts, mine are all pints), I could get them from my mom. I don’t think she’s doing any canning now that she no longer has a garden*. Lids are going to be the problem.
Fortunately, it looks like Amazon has them at reasonable prices.
* At 85 she decided that tending a garden was “just a bit too much work”. 🙂 Gotta love that woman.
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@CSK:
Trump’s supporters are gathering for their MAGA march today at noon. Meanwhile, Trump is going golfing.
He did wave to a couple hundred of his fans while his motorcade went past them on the way to the course in Loudon County.
Trump had an adoring crowd right in front of him and he decided to go golfing instead?? The towel has been thrown.
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Republican candidates have not admitted defeat in Arizona, where Democratic challenger Mark Kelly beat Sen. Martha McSally (R); in Michigan, where Sen. Gary Peters (D) fought off a challenge from Republican John James; and in Maryland, where Republican House candidate Kimberly Klacik announced plans to “investigate” the Baltimore-area election that Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D) won with 72 percent of the vote.
Moscow Mitch’s actions regarding McSally refusing to concede to Kelly will be interesting. Since McSally was appointed to fill in for McCain, she should relinquish the seat and allow Kelly to take over when the Senate returns to session. The Senate is the final arbiter of who it will seat and when, it is possible the Moscow can choose to play hardball and force the caucus to not seat Kelly.
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@dazedandconfused:
That’s what I think. Of course, it could mean that he’s so contemptuous of his fans that he can afford to dismiss them with a wave and a smile.Maybe it means both.
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@Sleeping Dog:
But IIRC same applies to the House.
How would McConnell take to Pelosi blocking the seating of Republican Representatives? -
@dazedandconfused: More important than a MAGA gathering is that Trump is not participating in the ASEAN conference. He hasn’t attended since 2017. Heads of state usually attend-except for Trump. This year the meeting is virtual which should make it easy. Of course, a round of golf is more important than building relations with Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations in our efforts to restrain Beijing’s influence in that region.
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@Slugger:
Bloody typical.
Trump spouts rhetoric about China, but pulls out of the TPP which was crafted to create an economic constraint on Beijing; and also downgrades Obama admin’s efforts re. internationasl financial transparency which could limit the Beijing pattern of “belt and road” loan term/bribery of elites.
Biden’s appointees at State are going to have a mountain of work ahead of them.
Not gonna be a job for the lazy! -
@JohnSF:
Because McSally was appointed, Kelly should be seated promptly. The regular terms for the rest of Congress all start in January, so this does not apply to Pelosi in the House. -
@Mu Yixiao: You’d think Ball and Kerr would be ramping up production big-time.
You would think, but apparently not. I’ve always used wide mouthed jars and after a month of not finding lids I finally gave up and bought 48 narrow mouthed pints for my beans,pickles, salsa and tomato sauce, and considered myself lucky to find them.
Hats off to your Mom. I doubt I’ll make it to 85 at all much less still gardening, tho I hope I have the energy for a few tomato plants in my doddering years.
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@JohnSF: It does. The House and Senate are the judges of their elections.
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@becca:
Click and Clack reruns Saturday mornings on NPR in my area. The show is timeless.
And remember: “Where there’s smoke, there’s a Saab.”
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@OzarkHillbilly: People around here had so much trouble getting baby chicks, I decided I’m going to go into the hatching business. Cackle accidentally sent me a GORGEOUS Speckled Sussex rooster we’ve named Seymour, so I plan to pimp his ass out next spring. I’m lucky enough to have two chicken coops (only one is winter-insulated), so I’ll give him some hens in April/May and let him do his job. 😉
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@Jax: Cackle always sends me an extra bird or 3. Sometimes I even get lucky. 😉 One year they sent me a rooster that looked like no breed I could find anywhere on the net. A beautiful bird but definitely a mistake of some kind. I started off calling him Brave Sir Robin because, well… It fit. But once he started crowing he sounded just like Bruce Lee throwing a punch, so that became his name.
Sadly he met his end when a weasel got into my coop. So did a half dozen other birds.
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@Slugger:
I expected Trump to abandon all duties the moment he accepts he’s lost the election. The man is utterly self-absorbed. I would not be at all surprised if he fails to pardon the turkey this year.
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@grumpy realist: We probably don’t drag these people back to reality. What we’re experiencing may be what cultural entropy looks like.
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@Mu Yixiao: In the places I’ve lived–where canning/preserving was a thing at all–there was basically a “mason jar season” of about 3 or 4 weeks where inventories were strong and jars sold quickly. Lids were more available throughout the year, but jars were always a buy-them-when-you-see-them thing.
Washington State has an inventory tax though, so things that have only seasonal saleability tend to not stay in the inventory of stores year round. Last thing you want when you have a year end tax audit is a pallet load of jars, lids, and rings that aren’t going to sell until next July or August. Even in the warehouse I worked in, we avoided bringing in any staple items except on a day-by-day basis from just before Thanksgiving until after New Year’s day.
A nearly empty warehouse was easier to inventory, too. 🙂
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Joe has this right. Except for McSally, all other senators and reps are completing lame duck terms. Because McSally was appointed to fill in to the next scheduled election, she should be replaced by Kelly.
Vacancies in the House and Senate are handled differently. In general when a senate vacancy occurs, the governor of the effected state makes a temporary appointment that may last till the next scheduled election or till a special election can be held. A vacancy in the House is different. The seat remains empty till a special election is held. At times, that special has been only a couple of months before a scheduled general election.
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@DrDaveT: My favorite Tappet brothers advice of all time was against taking a Citroen on a cross country tour no matter how much fun it was to drive. They advised against it because of the possibility that a tire would lose pressure and they’d discover “that American air won’t fit in it.”
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@OzarkHillbilly: I was ordering chicks when the first word of COVID in Wuhan came in January, so I ordered extra. 55 or so of commercial, guaranteed layers, and then a few polish, because Polish chickens bring a smile to my face every day! Crazy Cackle Toppies, they called them.
Crazy, indeed. Batshit crazy, “makes kids never want to be around chickens again” kind of crazy. I ordered 10, 6 were banshee roosters. My 6th grader is the toughest “chicken whisperer” I’ve ever met, as soon as they started acting up she’s like “Sooooo, I turned Napoleon out into the corral yesterday, we’re gonna leave him locked out.” Then she’d bring me his head the next morning. “Well, that worked. I don’t know what’s eating them, but it saves having to shoot them.”
The only roosters left were Genghis Khan (Yes, we named all the polish after famous warriors) and Seymour. Genghis survived for over a month out by himself, all of the rest quickly succumbed to “survival of the fittest”. I finally had to put Genghis down, his ability to remember an ass kicking was limited to about 3 days, and his spurs were becoming dangerous.
Seymour is currently pimpin it with 95 hens. 🙂
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@Jax: Polish chickens are hilarious! I’ll always wonder if they were breeding for those crazy mop tops or if it just a happy accident.
“Sooooo, I turned Napoleon out into the corral yesterday, we’re gonna leave him locked out.”
Ha! That’s exactly what we do with our problem roosters! We even have a word for it: “So and so got weaselized last night.” While I’ve caught coons in the hen house, and even a Cooper’s hawk once (literally in the coop, hanging on the screen of the back window with a look on his face that said, “Uh ooooohh…”) I can always tell when the weasel has done the deed. They take off the top of the head and drink the blood leaving the carcass for the maggots. The night s/he got into the coop and killed Bruce Lee and 5 or 6 others they left a bloody damned mess, drinking only the blood. The term “bloodthirsty” was coined because of them I think.
Seymour is living the dream.
