2024

[DrPepper]

And no one would ever say that a vaccine is 100% effective. Well, Trump might say something grandiose and false like that. But he also said we should try bleach or to nuke hurricanes and buy Greenland and other outlandish 6-grade crap. Anyone who believed when they thought their radio told them "100% effective vaccine," was not paying attention in high school.

[Shirley]

And no one would ever say that a vaccine is 100% effective. Well, Trump might say something grandiose and false like that. But he also said we should try bleach or to nuke hurricanes and buy Greenland and other outlandish 6-grade crap. Anyone who believed when they thought their radio told them "100% effective vaccine," was not paying attention in high school.

^^^

[jfish26]

And no one would ever say that a vaccine is 100% effective. Well, Trump might say something grandiose and false like that. But he also said we should try bleach or to nuke hurricanes and buy Greenland and other outlandish 6-grade crap. Anyone who believed when they thought their radio told them "100% effective vaccine," was not paying attention in high school.

The MOST common attacks against the vaccine and against masks are indictments of our education system’s ability to teach basic reasoning. We would be so much better off if statistics was a part of our core curriculum through HS.

[Shirley]

And no one would ever say that a vaccine is 100% effective. Well, Trump might say something grandiose and false like that. But he also said we should try bleach or to nuke hurricanes and buy Greenland and other outlandish 6-grade crap. Anyone who believed when they thought their radio told them "100% effective vaccine," was not paying attention in high school.

The MOST common attacks against the vaccine and against masks are indictments of our education system’s ability to teach basic reasoning. We would be so much better off if statistics was a part of our core curriculum through HS.

^^^

I attribute part of my success at physics and inorganic chemistry classes to having studied poker and figuring odds intensely early in my college years.

[jfish26]

And no one would ever say that a vaccine is 100% effective. Well, Trump might say something grandiose and false like that. But he also said we should try bleach or to nuke hurricanes and buy Greenland and other outlandish 6-grade crap. Anyone who believed when they thought their radio told them "100% effective vaccine," was not paying attention in high school.

The MOST common attacks against the vaccine and against masks are indictments of our education system’s ability to teach basic reasoning. We would be so much better off if statistics was a part of our core curriculum through HS.

^^^

I attribute part of my success at physics and inorganic chemistry classes to having studied poker and figuring odds intensely early in my college years.

Baseball taught me.

Specifically:

http://www.firejoemorgan.com/2005/04/gl ... terms.html

The state of the art quickly passed this glossary by, of course, but stuff like this:

BA (Batting Average)

Hits divided by at-bats; also, perhaps the stat that makes Ken Tremendous' blood curdle the quickest. Okay, maybe that's wins. Batting average is the backbone of traditional hitting metrics, and amazingly, is still looked upon as a good way to determine whether someone is good at hitting baseballs. It is not a good way to determine this. Why? Well, you already know why. You know it intuitively, and you always have. Because a guy who hits .250 but clubs 40 HR and 40 doubles and walks 100 times a year is way way way more valuable to his team than a guy who hits .310 with 2 HR and 19 doubles and 15 walks. That’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? I agree. So why should we keep talking about batting average, ever? We shouldn’t? Okay, we won’t. But Tim McCarver will, and that’s why he should be selling cookware door-to-door instead of talking to the country about baseball every Saturday.

In 2008, the MLB leader for BA was Chipper Jones, at .364 (Pujols was 2nd). The median BA for players eligible for the batting title was about .280 last year, or what Russell Martin and Curtis Granderson were able to produce. Jack Hannahan and Nick Swisher took the Doodoo Bat Awards, given to the players with the lowest batting averages (.218 and .219 respectively).

[...]

Wins

1. The only stat that matters. The only way to pick a Cy Young winner. The thing Billy Beane can't get in the playoffs, no matter how many fancy computers he hires to play baseball for him.

2. A simply awful pitching statistic that should be swallowed up by the earth itself, personified, given ears, and forced to listen to a tape loop of Bermanisms for all of eternity. The reason being – and again, you know this, intuitively, even if you have never quite expressed it to yourself – if Carl Pavano gives up nineteen runs in five innings but the Yankees score 20 runs, and they hold on to win, and Pavano gets the win, is Pavano a good pitcher? No he is not. (This scenario is assuming he ever comes back and actually pitches, btw.) If Francisco Liriano throws 9 innings of no-hit ball, but gives up a run on four consecutive errors by Terry Tiffey and gets a loss, is Francisco Liriano a bad pitcher? No he is not. Wins stink to high heaven as a way to value pitchers because they are in very large part dependent on the actions of the other guys on the team.

Of course, according to Joe Morgan, "Wins and losses are how you measure pitchers" (Baseball For Dummies, p. 289).

Cliff Lee and Brandon Webb led all pitchers with 22 Wins last year. Good for them. And, obviously, there were about 140 pitchers who tied for last with zero wins.

[twocoach]

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/04/politics ... index.html

[jfish26]

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/04/politics ... index.html

I want to read the charging papers themselves. For now, I'll just say that the rhetoric in the exhibits to the warrant affidavit sure seems familiar.

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/dopp ... 9.4.24.pdf

[jfish26]

Trump scheduling a briefing call with house republicans this weekend, Wiles and LaCivita sending emails to halt comms with the press, Dhillon telling everyone to lawyer up and keep quiet, Elon posting nearly a hundred times today - This Russia indictment has them shook.

https://x.com/muellershewrote/status/18 ... q_-8Yt1KMA

[Sparko]

Fox in this deep I think.

[japhy]

This go here?

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/as-you-like-it.php

It’s telling that, when Russian disinformation agents of the Internet Research Agency created Twitter profiles to meddle in US politics, they often chose names that sounded like local newspapers: @ElPasoTopNews, @MilwaukeeVoice, @CamdenCityNews, @Seattle_Post. Many of the agents had played the game for years, posting legitimate local news to build a following before they were caught by Twitter and axed. Homespun disinformation threats have done the same: during the 2016 election season, a man from the Los Angeles suburbs named Jestin Coler created several Facebook accounts to pump out fake news meant to discredit Hillary Clinton—for profit—and ultimately built a website called the Denver Guardian. “I had studied what methods people use to debunk fake news,” Coler said at a 2017 conference hosted by NewsWhip, a firm that tracks social-media engagement. “So I built the Denver Guardian, which is the evolution of where this is going next. It featured a lot of local news. It looked just like a local newspaper.” Local media, more attuned to the particulars of readers’ lives and the cogs of community government than to sweeping dogma, tend to be considered more trustworthy than national outlets. According to a recent Poynter survey, the difference is about 20 percentage points.

Yellowhammer is merely a relatively mature example of the attempts to create alternative local news outlets that capitalize on America’s media polarization where it dovetails with community news credibility. And as local newsrooms continue to be wiped out, other untested publishers are rushing into the void.

A trusted source.....

[jfish26]

Fox in this deep I think.

Maybe.

Certainly seems likely that individual "personalities" will be swept up in this.

To say nothing of the elephant (non-Fox) in the room (which would, for a lot of reasons, be a bigger and more complicated story than even Trump himself being complicit).

[Sparko]

The top 10 Russian disinformation priorities are like Fox's program schedule.

[Sparko]

Hey, what if Psych is just a goofy third tier RT media puppet? "Teaching" Americans online the virtues of the Russian Federation? Enough to get by I suppose

[jfish26]

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/04/politics ... index.html

I want to read the charging papers themselves. For now, I'll just say that the rhetoric in the exhibits to the warrant affidavit sure seems familiar.

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/dopp ... 9.4.24.pdf

There are lots and lots of people who - whether they are willing to do so publicly or not - really need to thumb through the exhibits to that affidavit.

And consider how they came to think the way they think and say the things they say.

September 4, 2024

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... ber-4-2024

[...]

Harris called out Trump for supporting “himself and the biggest corporations” and noted that sixteen Nobel laureates have said that Trump’s policies would ignite inflation and trigger a recession by mid-2025. That recession, economists project, would cost more than 3 million jobs, explode the deficit, and raise costs. Harris pointed out that Project 2025 would cut funding for the Small Business Administration and make it harder for small businesses to get access to money.

For his part, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the United States is a failing nation. For the past week he has been telling a story about a residential building in Colorado taken over by a gang from Venezuela. But it appears the story is entirely made up. Similarly, Trump on Friday said at a right-wing Moms for Liberty event that public schools in America kidnap children and operate on them to change their sex. This is bonkers, but it is bonkers in a way that deliberately demonizes Trump’s opponents.

Trump’s vision of the United States is one of darkness and carnage. As Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz said today, “It is a deliberate effort by some people to make them believe that our political system is broken. To make them believe that things are pessimistic. My God, every time I hear Donald Trump give a speech, it’s like the next screenplay for Mad Max or something. They are rooting against America.”

That bleak version of the United States, it turns out, echoes the talking points Russian handlers gave to their operatives working in the U.S. in an effort “to steer the U.S. public opinion in the right direction.” The Russians directed their U.S. employees to emphasize the following “campaign topics”: “Encroaching universal poverty. Record inflation. Halting of economic growth. Unaffordable prices for food and essential goods”; “Risk of job loss for white Americans”; “Privileges for people of color, perverts, and disabled”; “Constant lies of the [Democratic] administration about the real situation in the country”; “Threat of crime coming from people of color and immigrants”; “Overspending on foreign policy and at the interests of white US citizens”; “Constant lies to the voters by [Democrats] in power.”

The target audience of the campaign was “[Republican] voters,” [Trump] supporters, “Supporters of traditional family values,” and “White Americans, representing the lower-middle and middle class.” The focus was in particular on “[r]esidents of "swing states whose voting results impact the outcomes of the elections more than other states.

This information came out today when the Departments of Justice, State, and the Treasury announced sanctions against 10 individuals and 2 entities, and criminal charges against two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, who allegedly funded a company in the U.S. to hire right-wing social media influencers to push Russian propaganda before the 2024 election.

[...]

Russian operatives called in bold type for Russia “to put a maximum effort to ensure that the [Republican] point of view (first and foremost, the opinion of [Trump] supporters) wins over the US public opinion. This includes provisions on peace in Ukraine in exchange for territories, the need to focus on the problems of the US economy, returning troops home from all over the world, etc.”

One of the documents produced in the affidavit justifying the seizure of the internet domains called for trying to stir up a conflict between the U.S. and Mexico in order to distract from the fact that the U.S. economy is “very healthy” under Biden.

It is ok to, when presented with new facts, reevaluate one's point of view. Admitting you were wrong is a sign of moral clarity and emotional strength.

[Sparko]

But the checks from RT through a launderer. Those are harder to resist.

[japhy]

There are lots and lots of people who - whether they are willing to do so publicly or not - really need to thumb through the exhibits to that affidavit.

And consider how they came to think the way they think and say the things they say.

It is ok to, when presented with new facts, reevaluate one's point of view. Admitting you were wrong is a sign of moral clarity and emotional strength.

Says you....when you realize your entire world view and maybe even your identity as a person is reduced to Putin/Russian propaganda; there is a tendency, maybe an ego salvaging "need" to screech with denial.

So don't expect tweedle dee and tweedle dum to accept any new revelations about the Russian propaganda brain worms they have been ingesting as anything other than "alternative truths".

Someday their kids are going to read about this period in history and ask them, "did people really believe this stuff?".

Rubes gonna rube.

[jfish26]

I’m not going to articulate this well, but I see a lot of commonality between this Russian malign activity, and Trump’s business fraud.

In the sense that the backward-looking result is that some very fundamental assumptions made by voters were based on entirely false premises, but by the time the facts are undeniable and the lies exposed, the damage has been done (and, in fact, the duped are pot-committed to their dupedness).

[Shirley]

Politics is a game of addition.

Kamala's Compassionate Campaign Stop in Pittsburgh

[jfish26]

In advance of the shitstorm to come.

That makes 12 proven cases in four decades of an undocumented immigrant voting (out of a billion+ votes cast). Most were like this case, where a person's identity was fully stolen.

It's worth emphasizing— this person HAD valid proof of citizenship when they registered and voted!

https://x.com/reichlinmelnick/status/18 ... q_-8Yt1KMA

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

I have asked this before and I will ask it again today, who could/should the Dems have run that WOULD (not could) beat Trump?
I have said this before and I will say it again today, If he loses, there is ZERO chance he concedes peacefully.
This is what is crazy to me. If it goes to the Supreme Court, they favor a convicted felon over the Vice President of the United States.