Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Project 2025 redux



Project 2025's alive and well with Agent Orange, the new POTUS, actively signing executive orders designed to implement the Heritage Foundation's view of a far right America controlled by the rich and religious described with passion as the Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise.

To whit

Of the 26 formal executive orders Trump signed on Monday, 16 mirrored at least in part proposals from the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page Project 2025 to reshape the federal government, according to an analysis by The Lever.

That includes orders that withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords, end Biden’s electric vehicle mandates, and increase oil and gas drilling in Alaska — all proposals that first appeared in Project 2025 months earlier.

It gets better.

Several architects of Project 2025 are now filling out the Trump administration. Russell Vought, the former vice president of the Heritage Foundation’s sister organization Heritage Action for America — who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the Executive Office of the President of the United States — was nominated by Trump to lead the Office of Management and Budget, the agency tasked with developing the president’s proposed budget and executing Trump’s agenda. Vought previously headed the agency during the first Trump administration. 

Trump nominated Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission, the same agency that Carr wrote a chapter about for Project 2025. In the chapter, Carr calls to end the censoring of “political viewpoints,” specifically singling out Facebook and YouTube’s censorship policies. 

As for billionaires, the tech bros are in alignment.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, recently announced that Facebook would begin promoting political content and end its third-party fact-checking program. Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, attended Trump’s inauguration. 

Musk as DOGE commander needs no introduction nor does Bezos

Regarding the environment ...




In closing, profit "trumps" climate change, a take resembling Custer's Last Stand in the cosmic scheme of things as nature always finds a way.


Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Caught in the act

On 6 April 2024, the black hole let out a flare observed in mid-infrared wavelengths, followed by a radio flare counterpart.

Although Sgr A* belches out the occasional flare, this is the first time we've captured it in mid-infrared – one of the missing pieces of the puzzle of the black hole's behavior, according to a team led by astronomer Sebastiano von Fellenberg from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany.

"Sgr A*'s flare evolves and changes quickly, in a matter of hours, and not all of these changes can be seen at every wavelength," says astrophysicist Joseph Michail of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

"For over 20 years, we've known what happens in the radio and Near-infrared (NIR) ranges, but the connection between them was never 100 percent clear. This new observation in mid-infrared fills in that gap."

Our galaxy's black hole

The SA ...



The SA, AKA Brown Shirts, was the goon squad for the Nazis until the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 whereby they were replaced by the SS, a far more efficient tool used to enforce Nazi rule along with its involvement with implementing the Final Solution, now has an updated version when Trump pardoned more then 1500 rioters who participated in the January 6 fiasco to upend the Constitution in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election won by Joe Biden with a majority of over 7 million votes. 


On Jan. 6, 2021, Philip Sean Grillo, a former Republican district leader in Queens, jumped through a broken window at the U.S. Capitol with a megaphone. He pushed his way past a line of Capitol Police officers and opened the exterior doors of the Rotunda to allow other rioters to enter the building and trash it. “We stormed the Capitol!” he exulted on video, and was seen smoking marijuana and high-fiving other Donald Trump supporters who were fighting the police. “We shut it down! We did it!”

Nearly three years later, a federal jury convicted Mr. Grillo of multiple offenses. But he did not lose heart: Last month, when he was sentenced to a year in prison, he had a special taunt for the federal district judge who sentenced him, Royce Lamberth.

“Trump’s going to pardon me anyways,” he yelled at the judge, just before he was handcuffed and led away.

He was right. On Monday evening, several hours after President Trump was inaugurated, he fulfilled a promise he had repeatedly made to pardon nearly all the rioters who attacked and desecrated the Capitol in 2021 to prevent Joe Biden’s victory from being certified. Mr. Grillo and about 1,500 other rioters received full pardons from Mr. Trump, while 14 others received commuted sentences.


It's worse than that, what Trump did created a private army, ready to keep this guy in power when 2028 rolls around as the 1500 is but a morsel of the numbers of virulent MAGAs ready to support their guy if he makes the call for him to remain in power to keep America great again no matter the cost. 


Thursday, January 16, 2025

8 states ...


Schrödinger's Cat, forever residing in the nether world of being either alive or dead, is the glamor puss of quantum mechanics, the star participant in a theory most mystifying when it comes to trying to learn how reality works at deep level, is now being applied to building viable quantum computers thanks to Antimony, an element with 8 possible spin states leading to a better way to safeguard the inherently delicate qubit data generated by quantum computers. 

To whit.




Gobbledygook ...


This all too common trait expressed endlessly by cops, politicians and academics of all stripes, contradicts
The Elements of Style in ways boggling the mind.




This is THE BOOK to read if you want to learn how to write. Concise, witty and above all else, competent, this little tome points the way to good writing with short commandments already adhered to by heavyweights like Hemingway, Faulkner and Orwell. Every time I reread Elements, I think of Orwell, master of the active tense and the self proclaimed enemy of turgid prose as seen by his insightful essay, Politics and the English Language.

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

June 13, 1863 & then some


Waiting for Godot :)

This pix indirectly shows your's truly's take regarding AI and its potential for dominance over man with its intelligence continuing to increase at rates far exceeding that of humanity. Seems this fear of machine takeover is not new by any stretch of the imagination as seen by a letter penned by  Samuel Butler on June 13, 1863.





 

And this ...





Last but not least, Bill Joy's brilliant Why The Future Doesn't Us beckons.


An extraordinary day

The start of something special, a high pressure front, complete with clouds, makes its presence known.


The front ... arrives


The Front | Sunset rev I


The Front | Sunset rev II


The end of an extraordinary day :)

It seems ...


Well, it seems entanglement may be everywhere now that researchers recently discovered it to exist in the proton with its constituent parts, quarks and gluons, exchanging information instantaneously in similar fashion to electrons and photons, thus proving spooky action at a distance may be the fundamental way reality is stitched together to enable space and time to emerge as needs warrant. 

The neutron awaits ...



Picture two particles that can communicate instantly, regardless of how far apart they are. This phenomenon, known as quantum entanglement, challenges our understanding of how the Universe operates. Once considered a bizarre paradox by Albert Einstein, who referred to it as “spooky action at a distance,” entanglement has been repeatedly demonstrated on a macroscopic scale. More recently, scientists have made a groundbreaking discovery: this peculiar phenomenon also occurs within protons, the fundamental building blocks of matter. This revelation is reshaping our view of the microscopic world and paving the way for new scientific explorations.




The Proton


Monday, January 13, 2025

Glimpses of Winter 2025


Rt Angle


Edge Line


The Front


A Delicate Meander


The Front | Sunset


Entropy 101


On Thin Ice

Thursday, January 09, 2025

The end around ...


As my loyal readers know, I use AI from time to time but ... I make sure you know when I do as trust is hard to get but easy to lose and ... once gone, it's gone forever but some entities don't abide by this policy, especially when it comes to some landlords and their never ending quest to make ever more money using AI to make it happen. 

To whit

It turns out that many of the country's landlords are using the same artificial intelligence tool to jack up your rent.

Packaged as part of the popular property management software RealPage, the AI is nominally intended to give rent price recommendations to landlords.

But as we've seen elsewhere, the catch-all term of "AI" can be used to obfuscate what's really going on under the hood. According to a new report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) and covered by Popular Information, the AI tool, called "AI Revenue Management," is being used to facilitate collusion between these proprietors, allowing them to inflate rental prices by a total of more than $3.8 billion every year.

This, the CEA argues in its report, and the Department of Justice alleges in its lawsuit against RealPage, is a form of "price coordination" — which is illegal.

The end around ...

Joint Effort

According to the CEA report, nearly 1 in every 4 multifamily rental properties use a RealPage pricing algorithm.

In some municipalities like Atlanta and Denver, that proportion is higher than 50 percent, where the price increase caused by landlords using the RealPage AI is as high as $181 per month.

When competitors in a market explicitly agree to set a price for a type of good or service, that's price fixing. The practice is federally outlawed by the Sherman Act, because it's considered an anti-competitive move that leads to higher costs for consumers.

The RealPages AI works as a price fixer for "landlords collectively," the CEA argues, because its algorithm "will recommend prices that are higher than the profit-maximizing price each landlord would set independently."

In effect, the AI lets landlords act as a cartel without ever needing to directly communicate, thus making price-fixing difficult to prove. 

It's all about the money/rev L