«Here is Amy Kremer, a National Committeewoman for the Republican National Convention and cofounder of Women for Trump, saying that she knows the image is fake but simply does not care:
“Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t even matter. It is seared into my mind forever,” she posted. “There are people going through much worse than what is shown in this pic. So I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.” Kremer’s sentiment is one that was first expressed in a now-deleted tweet that had millions of views. That tweet contained a text message screenshot in which the person’s relative texted them the image of the girl holding a dog crying. The tweeter responded with “that’s AI,” and the person’s relative responded with something to the effect of “I don’t care.”
…
I have documented, at length, that a lot of AI slop is being generated by people all over the world for the express purpose of going viral and making money. While writing about Facebook’s AI slop, I spoke to an Indian teenager who lives in a small village and, unsatisfied with the virality of more mundane AI-generated images he had created, told me he was going to get into making AI content about American news so he could make more money.»
«In February 2020, Vance wrote that “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).” Trump’s wealthy donors, he added, would probably remain loyal to him because he had served their interests in the White House.»
«Contrary to the carefully cultivated stereotype, most of the women who seek abortions are already mothers, meaning that many of these women who died left behind children who will never see their mom again.
…
Trump and Vance do think Congress should outlaw it too. Vance said as much during the vice-presidential debate with the Democratic nominee, Tim Walz. He simply debuted a new euphemism for it, saying he merely supported a “minimum national standard” [emphasis mine] on abortion. That is just another phrase meaning “abortion ban.”
“I never supported a national ban. I did, during when I was running for Senate in 2022, talk about setting some minimum national standard,” Vance told the CBS News moderator Norah O’Donnell.
So first of all, that was a lie. Vance has said not only that he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally” but also that he would be “sympathetic” to outlawing interstate travel for women seeking abortions. In classic Vance style, he didn’t use the word outlaw, of course; what he instead said was: “some federal response to prevent it from happening.” [emphasis mine] Regardless, the result would be pregnant women dying of septic shock in emergency rooms where doctors refuse to treat them for fear of being prosecuted. Vance has even opposed the narrow exceptions to abortion bans for rape and incest, on the grounds that “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
…
Already, very few women qualify for such [abortion-ban] exceptions in Republican-controlled states. The exceptions are there to retain popular support for the bans, but so legally vague as to ensure that doctors are afraid to provide lifesaving abortions to patients who need them.
Similarly, Trump’s position on vetoing a specific type of abortion ban has not disturbed anti-abortion activists, because they do not expect such a ban to pass Congress anyway. Instead, they believe that if Trump wins, he will use his executive powers to go around Congress to make abortion effectively inaccessible nationwide, while saying that this does not count as banning abortion.
…
Vance did not actually shift his position on abortion. He did try to hide his real views behind a false empathy, saying, “We’ve got to do a better job at winning back people’s trust.” His first attempt at “earning back people’s trust” on abortion was to lie to them about what he believes.»
Here’s Forbes, calling Elon Musk a comic-book genius:
«why would Fidelity, among many other enormously sophisticated institutions, put tens of billions behind Musk’s purchase of a social media company – especially when he only made that purchase under threat of a lawsuit?
The failure in judgment both [Musk and Fidelity] made stems basically from a comic book view of genius. In Iron Man Tony Stark is the greatest weapons designer who has ever lived. Designing weapons is, in and of itself, a multi-disciplinary task. Modern weapons require huge teams, not just individual geniuses. But okay, let’s say that’s possible. By the final Avengers movie, Stark is also a physicist so brilliant he can, literally, invent time travel. He’s hardly the only example. Bruce Wayne is a better athlete than most Olympic Gold medalists, but also better at forensics than the Gotham police department and better at coding than the engineers employed by Wayne Enterprises. Bruce Banner has seven PhDs (maybe the radiation isn’t what turned him into a giant green rage monster).
State legislature rules on homebuilding regs. BORING! Until…
Remember those videos of newly-built houses floating off their foundations and down the river?
«Every three years, the International Code Council, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., issues new model building codes developed by engineers, architects, home builders and local officials.
Most states adopt a version of those model codes, which reflect the latest advances in safety and design. But in 2013, the North Carolina legislature decided that the state would update its codes every six years, instead of every three.
The change proved important. In 2015, the International Code Council added a requirement that new homes in flood zones be built at least one foot above the projected height of a major flood.
North Carolina did not adopt that version of the building code until 2019. And even then, the state stripped out the new flood-prevention standard. Rather than make elevation mandatory in flood zones around North Carolina, the state decided that the requirement should only apply if local officials chose to adopt it.
The decision most likely left more homes exposed to flooding, according to Chad Berginnis, executive director of the national Association of State Floodplain Managers.»
Followup: I guess there’s a difference between water IN houses whose foundations are too low, and houses floating away ON water, and I’ve conflated the two.
More spectacular videos of houses floating misled me a bit.
I thought of you, dear fediverse, when I read this quote from “The Short Victorious War (Honor Harrington Book 3)” by David Weber –
«”I’m afraid I have to agree,” Palmer-Levy conceded unhappily. “And, frankly, I’m almost equally worried over reports that Rob Pierre is sucking up to the CRU leadership.” “Pierre?” Surprise sharpened the President’s voice, and the security chief nodded even less happily. Robert Stanton Pierre was Haven’s most powerful Dolist manager.»
«I have spent a serious amount of time trying to decipher what that person did. What in the world were they thinking? Who thought that 13 nested if statements were a good idea? Who decided that five interlocking boolean conditions should go into the fourth nesting of those statements? Hadn’t they heard of an explaining variable? What the heck does the literal value 4 mean here? 9280 lines is a bit much for a single procedure, don’t you think?»
«“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.’’
…
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
…
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
…
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
In a quick analysis, not peer-reviewed but using a method published in a study about Hurricane Harvey’s rainfall, three scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab determined that climate change caused 50% more rainfall during Helene in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.»
Here, Read This 