We will do anything - literally anything - to keep Joe Manchin and John Fetterman within the party.

Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar can go fuck themselves.

On a vote of 63 to 28, the state House of Representatives approved Senate Bill 256, which will shutter an entire criminal court system and place it under the office of the Clerk of Civil Court in the next 6 business days.

This has been the strategy of Gulf States for some time. Any municipality with a liberal majority just… loses its ability to self-govern. Gov Abbott, next door in Texas, loves to exert state power to strip municipalities of local office functions. Also a popular move in Florida and Oklahoma.

Would be nice if National Democrats bothered to notice these abuses when they came through town on fundraising junkets, of course. But it seems like the only way out of this is to flip statewide offices or pick up and move to bluer states.

I just hope when the time comes and people need to get out of Texas to stay safe

Get out to where exactly? This is the eternal quandary for the “vote with your feet” crowd. It’s not like you get a better deal in Minneapolis, Minnesota or LA County, California.

I fear that point has already long since passed in Texas

Really depends on who you are and which part of the state you’re in. Areas of the state that the government has flagged as “problems” get much heavier handed treatment than those that are assumed to be allies. If you’re a roughneck in Midland, Texas then the state needs you to keep doing your job to make money. If you’re a tech worker in Starbase, Texas, same goes. Also helps if you’re sufficiently white or otherwise MAGA-coded.

But conditions can change quickly. A lot of the anti-immigrant hysteria in Texas tends to flare up when the economy downturns. 2014, 2018, and 2020 were really bad years for xenophobia, largely due to the surge of suddenly-out-of-work white people who needed someone to blame. Counterintuitively, the fantastic economic tailwind created by high energy prices is shaping up to be great for Texas liberals.

Texas Metro areas are some of the most progressive in the country. The countryside is beautiful, once you escape suburbia. It’s been a great place to live for me for over forty years.

But we’re governed like a Saudi fiefdom. The state exists to provide labor to the O&G industry. Historically, that’s meant a lot of nice amenities. But now amenities are Woke, so we’re just getting data centers instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout

According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is “spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further”.

Trump doesn’t have the power to just unilaterally create a new visa category.

He gets to order ICE around and they get to decide who actually gets the rough treatment.

That said, I wouldn’t count on this visa being worth much once Trump is gone. So I can understand why nobody is enthusiastic about paying his bribe.

when you hear the average intelligence is X

It isn’t even a question of intelligence. Plenty of objectively smart people supported Iraq and Afghanistan.

A lot of this boils down to white supremacy and the colonial drive to dominate the globe.

lower quarter of people who are probably dumber than anyone

That’s not how uniform distributions work. The population isn’t equally weighted. Something like 80% of the population is indistinguishably intelligent, with the outlayers still being highly susceptible to social pressure and confirmation bias.

If anything “smart” people are more prone to bigotry, due to their more sensitive pattern recognition.

Polls like this remind me that a Bush Administration level of media influencer competency probably could have won a majority of Americans over to justify the Iran War.

Just the fact that 1/4 Americans think the war was justified to begin with illustrates how trivial it is to herd people towards the next overseas genocide.

He still can. Wouldn’t be any worse than RFK Jr.

How to do this but not get caught…

If you get into the article, it reads more like an advert for Gemini plagiarism tools than a Get Rich Quick scheme with a serious chance of working. I suspect he didn’t escape getting caught, he was brought in to do it notoriously so he could write an article about how amazing AI is at making money.

Marijuana is now listed the same as Ketamine, small amounts of opium, and Anabolic steroids.

Lolz. Lmao.

Ukraine and Russia is not a civil war by any measure

The entire conflict in the Donbas was driven by the hyped up divided between “ethnic” Ukrainians and Russians. Hell, the Maidan Revolution was explicitly a civil conflict between Russian allied Ukrainians and Ukrainian Nationalists.

The real Russian core is Moscow - St.Petersburg and the surrounding areas.

Moscow and St. Petersburg are farther apart than Estonia and Poland. These have always been distinct power centers within Russia.

So much of the discussion of this war is totally America-Brained, where you cannot see subpopulations and cultural carve-outs that aren’t made explicit by national borders. Nevermind these borders are themselves constantly in flux and contingent on the political alignments of the local ruling class.

But Ukrainians had wanted independence and even (wrongly) welcomed Nazi invaders

The Banderite nationalists, Makhnovshchina, Ukrainian Leninists, Lypyns’kyi-ists… these are all distinct historical factions often in armed conflict with one another. None of them are representative of the current EU-friendly corporate conglomeration governing the country.

Zelensky isn’t a nationalist in any meaningful sense. Neither was Poroshenko. They’ve both been happy enough to auction off Ukrainian sovereignty for foreign investment and aid.

The point is that Ukrainians see themselves as cousins of Russians but not as Russian.

There is a strain of Ukrainian nationalism that sees itself as distinct from Russians and a strain of pan-Slavic Ukrainianism that sees these groups as overlapping. And then there are non-Slavic Ukrainians that don’t fit either demographic (Jewish Ukrainians, most famously, eat a lot of shit, but so do Roma and Turks and Arabs, etc, etc).

All of these fractures are ripe for political wedging and other fuckery. And that’s exactly what international business has exploited since the collapse of the USSR. Everyone’s alienated from one another. Mass media is screaming that you’re being robbed by your “foreign” neighbors. And weapons have flooded the country to make the induced paranoia of a material threat.

Blaming the war in Ukraine on Russophobia is about as reasonable as blaming the war in Iran on their chants of ‘death to America’.

It’s a bad comparison, as Ukraine/Russia is functionally a civil war over a border that didn’t matter until the USSR dissolved. Iran/US is a proxy war over Israel’s expansion into Lebanon.

Much like with the breakup of Yugoslavia and subsequent genocidal border wars, the fight between Ukraine and Russia has been manufactured by Western political interests seeking to run both countries down. That’s why the US is sending money and weapons to both countries.

By contrast, we’re not standing up Iran’s military.

The GOP isn’t even real. It’s a trick to distract us from the evil foreigners, I tell ya.

We need good strong Republicans like Bush and Cheney back in power to protect us from the mean, bad Russians

Banning socialists

Not just socialists, “Islamists”. This guy is running for AG in a state with Muslims making up around 2% of the population. Many of them are highly educated professionals looking to form full blow communities of like-minded people.

What an amazing grift.

it’s weak propaganda

Chip Roy is running for AG in Texas. It’s less “weak propaganda” and more “a policy he would like to implement if elected to statewide office.” If I was a Muslim in Texas, I’d be keenly aware of what he was proposing.

I mean, you joke, but I’ve seen plenty of people say this with sincerity.

I think the issue is most people don’t understand what an LLM is doing.

It’s engineered to respond conversationally, not diagetically. You’re not supposed to know how it is processing your inputs. A black box by design.

And I get the knee-jerk impulse to see this as a search engine “stealing” click-throughs to strangle a site. But I think people often forget why click-throughs are so vital for a site’s existence to begin with. Why do you need to send your browser through the front door for the data? What does the site get out of that interaction that it doesn’t get out of an LLM fetching the data for you?

If it’s about something you’re not going to find on the internet then the LLM will just make up something that sounds convincing. And that’s the problem. It may sound convincing but it’s a con man.

You can see this with known hiccups in the model. “How many 'r’s are in strawberry?” is a classic (that was eventually fixed) that hinges on a question you’re not going to find pre-answered in the publicly scrapped data.

But if you’re fetching data from an existing website then this isn’t the problem you’re going to run into. It’s going to fetch the data accurately (baring some other glitch) and return a summary of contents modeled into whatever output template the LLM prefers.

The con-man aspect really kicks in as part of the templating of the answer. You could engineer an LLM to respond in the negative when it failed to find useful data. Or you could engineer it to return data as spreadsheets with “Description” and “Source” (not unlike how Google normally returns links and short blurbs) that allow you to interrogate the source info easily. Instead, we get a definitive pronouncement made with links buried at the bottom of the extended blurb.

Article suggests he spent a lot more time than that