Cowboy Who?

Variety:

“This is misery,” Letterman said when asked about Kimmel’s suspension, speaking at The Atlantic Festival 2025 Thursday in New York. “I feel bad about this,” he continued. “We see where this is all going, correct? It’s managed media. And it’s no good. It’s silly. It’s ridiculous. And you can’t go around firing somebody because you’re fearful or trying to suck up to an authoritarian criminal administration in the Oval Office. That’s just not how this works.”

“In the world of somebody who is an authoritarian, maybe a dictatorship, sooner or later, everyone is going to be touched,” said Letterman.

Letterman also said, “The institution of the president of the United States ought to be bigger than a guy doing a talk show.” Kimmel’s removal from late-night TV, he said, “was predicted by our president right after Stephen Colbert got walked off, so you’re telling me this isn’t premeditated at some level?” [...]

On Wednesday, ABC suspended Kimmel’s late-night show “indefinitely.” That came after FCC chairman Brendan Carr just hours earlier threatened ABC and its affiliates if they didn’t “take action” on Kimmel over what he perceived as objectionable comments about Charlie Kirk’s killer. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said on a conservative podcast. [...]

Regarding Carr’s comment that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Letterman said, “Who is hiring these goons — Mario Puzo?”, referring to the author of The Godfather. Letterman said when he was on TV, he never got pressure from a presidential administration, the FCC or any other government agency about his on-air commentary.

“Goons” is exactly the right word. Letterman’s commentary on this is, by far, the best I’ve seen, because it’s been the most clear-eyed. I quoted a lot above, but there’s more, so please read the whole piece. But this one extra snippet from the piece puts it on the right scale:

Goldberg posited that today, despite Trump’s attacks on the press, “we still have a free media,” to which Letterman responded, “Do we?”

New comic!

Tama figured out the whole mystery hours ago but Ryuki still needs to get his steps in for the day.

#Ryo #Rowen #RoninWarriors

Well ... we've had an awful lot to think about today, and 'fraid the times up. So, until next time, think about it! #CowboyWho

Disco fever afflicted everyone back then.

Movie sign!

A two-day federal vaccine advisory meeting crammed with chaos, confusion, inept debate, bizarre comments, and a hot mic catching someone saying "you're an idiot," ended with an unexpected twist: The advisors unanimously voted—possibly unintentionally—to maintain broad access to COVID-19 vaccines.

In the 12–0 vote, the committee of advisors selected by anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. adopted a recommendation for adults 65 and older and people aged 6 months to 64 years to get a COVID-19 vaccine based on shared clinical decision-making. After this story was published, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention adopted the recommendation, which will broadly maintain requirements that federal and private health insurance plans cover COVID-19 vaccines at no cost. While the shared clinical decision-making is a new requirement, the CDC noted in adopting the recommendation that such decision making can be done in consultation with providers, "including physicians, nurses, and pharmacists". Most people receive COVID-19 vaccines from their local pharmacists.

Earlier this year, the FDA limited the approvals of this year's shots, which have previously been available to anyone 6 months of age or older. The FDA's new restriction limits them to adults aged 65 and up and for people between the ages of 6 months and 64 years who have an underlying medical condition that puts them at high risk of severe COVID-19.

Read full article

Comments

Summarizing complex scientific findings for a non-expert audience is one of the most important things a science journalist does from day to day. Generating summaries of complex writing has also been frequently mentioned as one of the best use cases for large language models (despite some prominent counterexamples).

With all that in mind, the team at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) ran an informal year-long study to determine whether ChatGPT could produce the kind of "news brief" paper summaries that its "SciPak" team routinely writes for the journal Science and services like EurekAlert. These SciPak articles are designed to follow a specific and simplified format that conveys crucial information, such as the study's premise, methods, and context, to other journalists who might want to write about it.

Now, in a new blog post and white paper discussing their findings, the AAAS journalists have concluded that ChatGPT can "passably emulate the structure of a SciPak-style brief," but with prose that "tended to sacrifice accuracy for simplicity" and which "required rigorous fact-checking by SciPak writers."

Read full article

Comments

The second day of a two-day meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices—a panel currently made up of federal vaccine advisors hand-selected by anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—is off to a dramatic start, with the advisors seemingly realizing they have no idea what they're doing.

The inexperienced, questionably qualified group that has espoused anti-vaccine rhetoric started its second day of deliberations by reversing a vote taken the previous day on federal coverage for the measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella (MMRV) vaccine. Yesterday, the group voted to restrict access to MMRV, stripping recommendations for its use in children under age 4. While that decision was based on no new data, it passed with majority support of 8–3 (with one abstention). (For an explanation of that, see our coverage of yesterday's part of the meeting here.)

But puzzlingly, they then voted to uphold access and coverage of MMRV vaccines for children under age 4 if they receive free vaccines through the federal Vaccines for Children program, which covers about half of American children, mostly low-income. The discrepancy projected the idea that the alleged safety concerns that led the panel to rescind the recommendation for MMRV generally, somehow did not apply to low-income, vulnerable children. The vote also created significant confusion for VFC coverage, which typically aligns with recommendations made by the panel.

Read full article

Comments

As Air Force One journeyed from the US to the UK this week, it came within eight lateral miles of a Spirit Airlines flight heading up the East Coast from Fort Lauderdale to Boston. An alert air traffic controller in the New York control center reached out to the Spirit flight, telling it to execute an immediate right turn to avoid any possibility of colliding with Air Force One.

But the Spirit pilots did not respond immediately, leading the testy air traffic controller to scold them repeatedly. (You can listen to the audio archive on LiveATC.net; it begins at around the 23:15 mark.)

"Pay attention!" said the controller after his first instruction was not acknowledged. "Spirit 1300, turn 20 degrees right."

Read full article

Comments

Among the attempts to create hagiographic eulogies of Charlie Kirk, I’ve seen more than a few people suggest that Kirk should be respected for being willing to talk to “those who disagree with him” as a sign that he was engaging in good faith. Perhaps the perfect example of this is Ezra Klein’s silly eulogy claiming that Kirk was “practicing politics the right way” because he would debate students who disagreed with him.

Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.

There are many problems with this statement, but Klein’s fundamental error reveals something much more dangerous: he’s mistaking performance for discourse, spectacle for persuasion. Kirk wasn’t showing up to campuses to “talk with anyone who would talk to him.” He was showing up armed with a string of logical fallacies, nonsense talking points, and gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”

Klein is eulogizing not a practitioner of good-faith political discourse, but one of the most successful architects of “debate me bro” culture—a particularly toxic form of intellectual harassment that has become endemic to our political discourse. And by praising Kirk as practicing “politics the right way,” Klein is inadvertently endorsing a grift that actively undermines the kind of thoughtful engagement our democracy desperately needs.

The “debate me bro” playbook is simple and effective: demand that serious people engage with your conspiracy theories or extremist talking points. If they decline, cry “censorship!” and claim they’re “afraid of the truth.” If they accept, turn the interaction into a performance designed to generate viral clips and false legitimacy. It’s a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose proposition that has nothing to do with genuine intellectual discourse.

The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture isn’t just that it’s obnoxious, it’s that it creates a false equivalence between good-faith expertise and bad-faith trolling. When you agree to debate someone pushing long-debunked conspiracy theories or openly hateful ideologies, you’re implicitly suggesting that their position deserves equal consideration alongside established facts and expert analysis.

This is exactly backwards from how the actual “marketplace of ideas” is supposed to work. Ideas don’t deserve platforms simply because someone is willing to argue for them loudly. They earn legitimacy through evidence, peer review, and sustained engagement with reality. Many of the ideas promoted in these viral “debates” have already been thoroughly debunked and rejected by that marketplace—but the “debate me bro” format resurrects them as if they’re still worth serious consideration.

Perhaps most insidiously, these aren’t actually debates at all. They’re performances designed to generate specific emotional reactions for viral distribution. Participants aren’t trying to persuade anyone or genuinely engage with opposing viewpoints. They’re trying to create moments that will get clipped, shared, and monetized across social media.

Kirk perfected this grift. As a recent detailed analysis of one of Kirk’s debates demonstrates, when a student showed up prepared with nuanced, well-researched arguments, Kirk immediately tried pivoting to culture war talking points and deflection tactics. When debaters tried to use Kirk’s own standards against him, he shifted subjects entirely. The goal was never understanding or persuasion—it was generating content for social media distribution.

And, of course, this broader “debate me bro” culture has become so commonplace and expected online that it has now been fully industrialized into content farming.

The most toxic evolution of this grift is Jubilee Media’s “Surrounded” series on YouTube (on which Kirk once appeared, because of course he did), which The New Yorker’s Brady Brickner-Wood aptly describes as an attempt to “anthropomorphize the internet, turning incendiary discourse into live-action role-play.” The format is simple: put one public figure in a room with 20 ideologically opposed people and let them duke it out in rapid-fire rounds designed for maximum conflict and viral potential.

As Brickner-Wood notes, these aren’t actual debates in the classical sense of trying to persuade, they’re spectacles designed to set up bad faith dipshits with the opportunity to dunk on others for social media clout.

“Surrounded” videos are a dizzying and bewildering watch, as gruelling as they are compelling. The participants who fare best seem to be familiar with the conventions of interscholastic debate, spouting off statistics and logic puzzles with the alacrity of an extemporaneous-speaking champion. To win an argument in such a condensed amount of time, debaters attempt to short-circuit their opponent’s claim as swiftly and harshly as possible, treating their few minutes of airtime as a domination game rather than, say, a path toward truth or understanding. The goal here is not to inform or educate, to listen or process, to build or intellectualize but to win, to own, to dunk on, to break the opponent’s brain, to spawn an argument of such devastating definitiveness that the matter can be considered, once and for all, closed. Wave the flag, run the clock out—next.

But Surrounded is just the most recent manifestation of a much older problem. We’ve seen multiple bad faith trolls, beyond just Kirk, turn the “debate me bro” model into large media empires. When people point out their bad faith nonsense, we’re told “what are you complaining about, they’re doing things the ‘right way’ by debating with those they disagree with.”

There are, of course, times and places where actual debates can be valuable. I’ve been involved in many debates over the years with people who vehemently disagreed with me. But I think it’s important for people to recognize that, in the same way not all information is equally valuable, not all debates are equally productive.

There’s nothing in how Charlie Kirk “debated” that aimed to get at nuances or understanding. They were entirely designed to seek to humiliate his opponent. They’re full of red herrings, lies, and attempts to deflect from any actual logic, as the video link above showed.

The point is not about getting to any level of understanding. It’s to try to quip and dunk in the manner most likely to go viral when shared on social media in 20-second snippets.

The format actively discourages the kind of thoughtful, nuanced discussion that might actually change minds—the kind actually designed for persuasion. Instead, it rewards the most inflammatory takes, the most emotionally manipulative tactics, and the most viral-ready soundbites. Anyone going into these situations with good faith gets steamrolled by participants who understand they’re playing a different game entirely.

When trolls demand debates, they’re not interested in having their minds changed or genuinely testing their ideas. They want one of two outcomes: either you decline and they get to claim victory by default, or you accept and they get to use your credibility to legitimize their nonsense while farming viral moments.

None of this means we should avoid authentically engaging with different viewpoints or challenging ideas. But there’s a crucial difference between good-faith intellectual engagement and feeding trolls who are just looking for their next viral moment.

Real intellectual discourse happens in contexts where participants are genuinely interested in truth-seeking rather than performance. It requires shared standards of evidence, mutual respect, and actual expertise on the topics being discussed. It takes time, nuance, and careful consideration—all things that are antithetical to the “debate me bro” format.

Klein’s eulogy of Kirk represents a broader failure to understand what’s happening to our discourse. When we praise bad-faith performers for “engaging” with their critics, we’re not celebrating democratic norms—we’re rewarding those who exploit them.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

The Trump administration has vowed to go after anyone who got lower mortgage rates by claiming more than one primary residence on their loan papers.

President Donald Trump has used it as a justification to target political foes, including a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, a Democratic U.S. senator, and a state attorney general.

Real estate experts say claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time is often legal and rarely prosecuted.

But if administration officials continue the campaign, mortgage records show there’s another place they could look: Trump’s own Cabinet.

Underscoring how common the practice is, ProPublica found that at least three of Trump’s Cabinet members call multiple homes their primary residences on mortgages. We discovered the loans while examining financial disclosure forms, county real estate records and publicly available mortgage data provided by Hunterbrook Media.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer entered into two primary-residence mortgages in quick succession, including for a second home near a country club in Arizona, where she’s known to vacation. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has primary-residence mortgages in New Jersey and Washington, D.C. Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, has one primary-residence mortgage in Long Island and another in Washington, D.C., according to loan records.

In a flurry of interviews and rapid-fire posts on X, Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, has led the charge in accusing Trump opponents of mortgage fraud. “If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation,” Pulte said last month.

A political donor to the president and heir to a housing company fortune, Pulte’s posts online tease big developments and criminal referrals, drawing reposts from Trump himself and promises of swift consequences. “Fraud will not be tolerated in President Trump’s housing market,” Pulte has warned.

Real estate experts told ProPublica that, in its bid to wrest control of the historically independent Fed and go after political enemies, the Trump administration has mischaracterized mortgage rules. Its justification for launching criminal investigations, they said, could also apply to the Trump Cabinet members.

All three Cabinet members denied wrongdoing. In a statement, a White House spokesperson said: “This is just another hit piece from a left-wing dark money group that constantly attempts to smear President Trump’s incredible Cabinet members. Unlike [Fed Gov.] Lisa ‘Corrupt’ Cook who blatantly and intentionally committed mortgage fraud, Secretary DeRemer, Secretary Duffy, and Administrator Zeldin own multiple residences, and they have followed the law and they are fully compliant with all ethical obligations.”

Mortgages for a person’s main home tend to receive more favorable terms than for a second home or an investment property. That includes better interest rates and the ability to borrow more money.

The idea is that borrowers are more likely to pay back — and less likely to default on — a loan attached to the home they actually live in. That makes those loans less risky for lenders. Interest rates are typically a quarter- to a half-point lower for primary mortgages, according to Pulte. On the low end, that could save around $75 each month over the life of a 30-year, 5% interest, half-million-dollar loan — or a total of around $25,000.

Standard mortgage documents commonly include an occupancy clause that requires the borrower to use the property as their principal residence for at least a year. They also include a section where borrowers can check a box when the mortgage is for a second home.

Misrepresenting occupancy status is not rare, according to a widely cited 2023 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. In interviews, real estate lawyers said that mortgage lenders are typically well aware of their clients’ other loans and sometimes even encourage the primary-residence language for second homes.

They also pointed to a mundane reason that innocent mistakes are common: Homebuyers simply sign stacks of forms without reading them.

“Few consumers understand this issue, and if there is someone at fault here, it is likely the loan officer who likely advised them to sign up for this loan that obviously wasn’t for their primary residence,” said real estate lawyer Doug Miller. “Loan officers who are competing for business will often quote lower rates in order to get a customer’s business.”

Mortgage fraud is rarely prosecuted, according to real estate lawyers and federal sentencing data. Pulte has pointed to a case from 2016 in which a California woman was found guilty of obtaining multiple loans for condos that she falsely stated would be her primary residence. But that case had an added layer of fraud: The woman never intended to live in the homes. She was secretly being paid because she had good credit to act as a front for the true buyer of the properties, to whom they were later transferred. She later defaulted on the loans, causing more than half a million dollars in losses for the lenders.

Lawyers told ProPublica that determining ill intent would be key to prosecute. “Fraud requires the borrower to be aware that the borrower was making a false representation,” said Jon Goodman, an attorney focused on real estate at Frascona, Joiner, Goodman and Greenstein.

But Pulte has framed the issue in black-and-white terms: “Your second home is not your primary home,” he warned in one recent post on X.

By that standard, Trump’s labor secretary, Chavez-DeRemer, could be in the wrong.

In her financial disclosure form, she listed two mortgages on personal residences, both obtained in 2021. Mortgage records show her home is in Happy Valley, a city near Portland where Chavez-DeRemer served as mayor before being elected to represent the area in the U.S. House.

She and her husband, Shawn DeRemer, who leads an anesthesia company in Portland, refinanced their longtime Oregon home in January 2021. Two months later, the couple bought a newly built house near a golf course in Fountain Hills, Arizona.

The pair had previously enjoyed vacationing in Arizona, according to news reports and social media posts. (In one incident that made the news, Chavez-DeRemer was briefly hospitalized after a golf cart accident on her way back from watching a Sonoran Desert sunset.)

The mortgage agreement for the Arizona property required them to occupy the home as their “principal residence” for at least a year, barring “extenuating circumstances” or the lender allowing them to violate the stipulation.

A spokesperson for Chavez-DeRemer said that the couple bought the Arizona home with the intent to retire there, but then Chavez-DeRemer decided to run for Congress representing her Oregon district and did not move.

“This is nothing more than a left-wing rag inventing a story just to attack the Trump Administration. It’s common for families to refinance then buy a home with future plans in mind — trying to spin that as some type of scandal is pure nonsense,” said spokesperson Courtney Parella.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a White House official said that although DeRemer opted to stay in Oregon, her husband “continued to move forward with the process of becoming” an Arizona resident. Political donation records list his home in Oregon as recently as late 2023.

Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, and his wife also have two primary-residence mortgages, obtained a few years apart.

In August 2021, the Duffys, who have nine children, purchased a large $2 million home in Far Hills, New Jersey, about an hour’s drive from Manhattan, where Rachel Campos-Duffy works as a Fox News host.

They got a $1.6 million mortgage to purchase the property, and documents show it was a “principal residence” loan.

In February, after Duffy took the job in Trump’s cabinet, the couple bought another home, in Washington, D.C. Again, they got a principal-residence mortgage, this time for $1.76 million. Both Duffy and his wife are listed as borrowers on both mortgages, which came from the same bank.

It’s not clear where Sean Duffy lives most of the time, and a Department of Transportation spokesperson declined to answer questions about where Duffy and his wife each make their primary home. In late May, several months after they purchased the Washington home, “Fox & Friends Weekend” ran a segment in which Rachel Campos-Duffy cooked a “Make America Healthy Again” breakfast for host Steve Doocy. Sean Duffy and some of the couple’s children were also in the segment, and it was filmed in the New Jersey home.

Duffy’s spokesperson said in a statement that after being confirmed, “Sean purchased a home in Washington D.C. where he works full-time. The home in DC is not a rental, investment or vacation property. The same bank holds both mortgages and was fully informed of Secretary Duffy’s new employment location and need for a DC residence.”

A White House spokesperson said, “The bank, not the Secretary, determined and classified both mortgages as primary residences.”

Like the Duffys, Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, and his wife also have two concurrent primary-residence mortgages.

One, obtained in 2007, is on a home in Shirley, New York, on Long Island, which Zeldin represented in Congress for several years. Last year, Zeldin and his wife obtained a second mortgage, for $712,500, on a property in Washington, D.C., a short walk from the EPA’s headquarters. Both are primary-residence mortgages.

An EPA spokesperson said in a statement that Zeldin’s primary residence was previously on Long Island but is now in Washington. The spokesperson didn’t respond to questions about where his wife lives. “Administrator Zeldin followed ALL steps to complete the move in accordance with all laws, rules, and contracts, notifying his mortgage company, insurance company, and local government,” the spokesperson said. “EVERY ‘I’ was dotted and ‘t’ was crossed 1000% by the book without exception.”

The dual mortgages identified by ProPublica among Trump’s cabinet secretaries resemble the loans obtained by U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, whom Trump accused of mortgage fraud.

In May, Pulte referred Schiff to the Justice Department for taking out a primary-residence mortgage in Maryland, for a home he purchased in 2003 after being elected to the House, while also claiming his primary home was in Burbank, California, in the district he represented. Schiff and his wife refinanced the Maryland home several times as a primary residence, Pulte noted, until a 2020 refinance in which they reclassified it as a secondary home.

“Schiff appears to have falsified records in order to receive favorable loan terms,” Pulte concluded in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Representatives for Schiff called the allegations “transparently false” and said his lenders had “full knowledge of the senator’s year-round bicoastal work obligations” and “his use of two homes for that reason.” Schiff, according to his office, navigated the two mortgages in consultation with a House lawyer.

Pulte made similar allegations in a criminal referral about New York Attorney General Letitia James, alleging she may have committed fraud by getting a primary-residence mortgage for a home in Virginia, even though her position required her to live in New York. Her lawyer has said James helped a family member buy the property and notified the mortgage broker at the time that it would not be her primary residence. James became one of Trump’s top political enemies after she brought a fraud lawsuit against the president and his company in 2022. Representatives for James have called the fraud claims made against her politically motivated and false. (Pulte did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.)

Pulte’s most consequential allegations thus far were made against Cook, a Federal Reserve governor. Trump has been going after Fed Chair Jerome Powell for months for not lowering interest rates, even raising the specter that he would take the unprecedented step of attempting to fire the chair. Pulte’s criminal referral against Cook presented Trump with another avenue for bending the traditionally independent Fed to his will, securing a majority of the Fed’s board by firing Cook, a move that Cook has sued to block.

Pulte pointed to mortgage records that show that within just a couple of weeks, Cook signed primary-residence mortgages for homes in Michigan and Georgia. Legal experts said the close proximity was a red flag but that much was still unknown, including Cook’s intent and what her lenders were told. Pulte also flagged a third property, in Massachusetts, that Cook represented as a second home in mortgage documents but as an investment property in subsequent financial disclosures. Investment properties can be hit with higher mortgage rates than second homes.

“3 strikes and you’re out,” he posted on X.

Cook’s lawyers have denied that she committed mortgage fraud but have not provided a detailed explanation of the context for the various mortgages. They argued in court this week that her loans cannot be legally used as grounds to terminate her.

The Justice Department has begun investigating all three Trump foes singled out in Pulte’s referrals, according to news reports. The department has issued subpoenas in Cook’s case, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

ProPublica’s review of mortgage agreements by Trump cabinet officials shows that some made clear to lenders they were purchasing second homes.

When Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for example, got a mortgage for his home near the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, the agreement included a rider making it clear he would be using it as a second home.

YOUR HOME – According to local astrologists, the planet Mercury hates your guts and is coming to kill you and everyone you love.  “What your friends and family want you to do and what you need to do don’t always align,” your horoscope reads today. “But don’t sweat the small stuff too much, because an […]

The post Horoscope says Mercury will pass through the fifth house before slamming into your house  appeared first on The Beaverton.

And the crowd goes Wild.

So eh ... you're gonna be glad you came down to the old corral today because you know what? We got a real guest!
We do, yeah.
He's not a cowboy or anything. He's got all sorts of things going for him! #CowboyWho

#Ryo #RoninWarriors

eBay can suck to use. I have bought a bunch of comic books recently from many sellers. On August 13 I bought many books and all but one shipped within days. Then on August 26-31 I bought a fair number more and again all shipped within days.

About two weeks and receiving no shipping notifications about the one August 13 book, I initiated a request to cancel the order through the eBay system. The seller refused. An automated response said it was "too late" to cancel the order. Too late? the book has not even had a shipping label printed for it! I then sent a message to him in eBay Messages on August 28 asking when my book would be shipped, no response.

On his listing it says "ships within 5-30 business days." I did not look hard enough at the listing at the time I was buying. eBay lets sellers put a vacation notification on their listings but this seller did not have one. Even so, 30 business days to ship a single issue comic book is a ridiculous amount of time in this day and age but eBay permits it. Then on September 6 I sent him another message stating that the 30th business day would be September 24, I would hold him to his words and file a complaint with eBay on the 25th if he had not shipped it by then. He shipped it on September 9, via USPS media mail, 27 days after my order. (Shipped is when you put a package into the hands of the carrier, not when you print a shipping label).

After receiving the book on the 11th, today I left neutral feedback for this seller, (after debating whether to leave negative), writing that the book was well packaged and in good condition but the seller was uncommunicative and was absurdly slow in shipping. The seller does not live in a rural area and there is a post office within walking distance of his return address. I might observe that a single $9.00 purchase (including shipping) may not be terribly motivating to get a seller who runs a comic book selling business to the post office promptly. Within minutes of posting the feedback the seller contacted me for the first time on eBay messages to say he would be getting it removed. After a few minutes it was and he said as much and added me to the blocked list. I responded that I would never buy from him again anyway and it is sellers like him that makes eBay suck to use sometimes.

26 other eBay sellers managed to ship and deliver comic books to me before him since August 13. Most of them had them in the mail within 1-3 days after placing the order. Some of the other orders were for heavy trade paperbacks or from longer distances, this was for a single issue one state over. The longest to ship other than this seller was 7 days and I certainly did not ask to cancel that order.

How was the seller able to remove my neutral feedback so quickly? eBay has a feedback policy where it removes "neutral/negative feedback when we can see that: The buyer asked to cancel after placing their order". I think this is a bad policy to apply automatically when the seller refuses to cancel the order. I could not remember the last time I left negative feedback for a seller, I apparently have left only one since 1998. This seller still has 30 other neutral and 5 negative feedbacks that he cannot remove and will likely accumulate more if this is how he runs his business. He of course must know the eBay policies very well. Has he been able to stifle criticism of other buyers who have made the same mistake?

The moral of this story is to be patient and do not try to cancel items if you want to be able to leave honest feedback. Ask the seller through messages first if he is willing to cancel but it is better to steer clear of any seller which puts something like "ships within 5-30 business days" in their description. Fortunately I have had my fill of buying comic books for a while. Still, eBay has laid a trap for the unwary buyer by providing them with an automated system for buyers to request cancellation but not warning them that they give up their right to leave permanent neutral/negative feedback if the seller refuses to cancel. I do not recall seeing any such warning with the system. There are many bad reasons why buyers cancel but also some good ones. I believe my request was reasonable after waiting for two weeks for a seller to put the book in the mail or at least contact me to tell me why it would be delayed. The automatic ability to remove the feedback is my quarrel with the policy. A company which actually cares about customer service should at least have a human being consider the situation before removing the feedback.

She packs light. Just a basket of kittens.

alboardman:

040625. The Excess of Nothingness.

When you major in Boggy Creek Studies, you can write your own ticket on Wall Street after you graduate.

A man was arrested in Atlanta for allegedly stealing hard drives containing Beyoncé’s unreleased music and other tour-materials, which were taken from a vehicle used by her crew. What do you think?

“Jay-Z knows he can just ask, right?”

Leo Bandholz, Systems Analyst

---

“God forbid a fan want to get a jump on learning the choreography.”

Katherine Periat, Report Generator

---

“He’s just lucky the police got to him before her fanbase did.”

Pete Schrauth, Morale Consultant

The post Man Arrested For Stealing Hard Drives With Unreleased Beyoncé Music appeared first on The Onion.

The Pentagon implemented stricter grooming standards, requiring male service members to be “clean shaven and neat in presentation for a proper military appearance.” What do you think?

“Good luck getting military personnel to follow orders.”

Damien Linskey, Elbow Specialist

---

“Just let them wear beard nets while on duty.”

Cory Lafont, Citation Writer

---

“The sinks at Fort Bragg are going to be disgusting tomorrow.”

Rosie Trahan, Stagecoach Historian

The post Pentagon Announces New Clean-Shaven Grooming Standards appeared first on The Onion.