Cowboy Who?

About 70% of the total water supply produced by the City of Houston comes from the Trinity River. The City of Houston draws raw water for the East and Southeast water purification plants from the Trinity River pump station 35 miles downstream from the Lake Livingston Dam.

Hey, look at this, we’re just about halfway through the year.

• Mr. Plinkett’s Super Happy Fun Star Trek: The Next Generation Mistakes Video. Is this a super-nerdy video? Yes. Did I watch all of it? Also yes.
• Pangeos Terayacht: An $8 billion Engineering Disaster. Adam Something rips the Pangeos Terayacht (which somehow had 15 minutes of fame) to shreds.
• Stellarium Web Engine is an open-source JavaScript planetarium library. You can play with it online.
• The Value of Check-It-Yourself Science. Theoretical physicist Matt Strassler provides several examples of how you can confirm various facts about the solar system by using direct observation and high school mathematics. For example, he estimates the distance to Jupiter using his eyes, a protractor, and a pocket calculator, and in a similar fashion calculates the distance from the earth to the sun.
• What word begins with “y” and looks like an axe? A deep dive into a children’s ball.
• Taking the deepest possible breath: CathodeRayDude investigates Phoenix Hyperspace, a miniature (Linux-based) operating system which runs a small number of programs and which (here’s the scary part) can live-swap with a running copy of Windows. How did they do this? Maybe you’re better off not knowing. Oh, who am I kidding. Read it and weep.
• Hell never ends on x86: CathodeRayDude investigates HP QuickWeb, and it’s even more insane than Phoenix Hyperspace.
• The Itanic Saga chronicles the history of the ill-fated Itanium processor. If yu want to see more details of the Itanium instruction set architecture, you can read my processor overview.
• Alex Chan investigates the claim that the largest possible PDF is a 381 kilometer square. Turns out you can go bigger. Much bigger.
• Darek Mihocka dives deep into ARM64EC.
• Acquire and Release Fences Don’t Work the Way You’d Expect.
• Do you miss WordPad? Fortunately, the source code was released (MIT license) as a sample app. You can find a copy online.

And the obligatory self-serving plug: It appears that the Windows Dev Docs team created a short link that takes you to a playlist of many of my One Dev Question videos: https://aka.ms/ODQ-RaymondChen.

The post 2024 mid-year link clearance appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Once upon a time, the IBM PC was released.

In the IBM PC BIOS, you could enter characters that weren’t present on the keyboard by holding the Alt key and typing the decimal value on the numeric keypad. For example, you could enter ñ by holding Alt and typing Numpad1 Numpad6 Numpad4, then releasing the Alt key.

For expository simplicity, I will henceforth use the notation Alt+164 to indicate that you press the Alt key, then type the specified digits in sequence on the numeric keypad, then release the Alt key.

Okay, so in the IBM PC BIOS, when you typed Alt+…, the code numbers were treated as decimal byte values, and the result on the screen came from your video card’s character generator. In the United States, the character generator’s ROM showed what we today call Code Page 437.

When it was introduced, Windows in the United States used Code Page 1252 as its 8-bit character set, which it called the “ANSI character set”; the old BIOS character set was retroactively named the OEM character set. To preserve compatibility with MS-DOS, if you used the Alt key in conjunction with the numeric keypad, the number you typed was still looked up in OEM character set, so that your muscle-memory code numbers still worked. You could still type Alt+164 to get your ñ, even though the code number for ñ in Code Page 1252 is 241, not 164.

If you wanted to type a character that had no OEM equivalent, you could prefix a numeric keypad 0 to indicate that you wanted the value looked up in the ANSI code page. Therefore, you could type Alt+0169 to get a ©, which did not exist in the OEM code page. You could also type Alt+0241 to get your precious ñ, using the ANSI code point number rather than the OEM code point number.

If you entered a number larger than 255, both Windows and the IBM PC BIOS took your value mod 256, so typing Alt+259 was the same as typing Alt+3. Both gave you OEM code point 3, which for Code Page 437 is a heart .

If you ask the Internet how to type some of these non-ASCII characters on Windows, you may see people (and large language models) that tell you to type, say, Alt+9731 to get a Unicode snowman . Unfortunately, from what we’ve learned above, this doesn’t work. You instead get the OEM character whose value is 9731 mod 256 = 3, or the aforementioned heart .

A customer reported that a recent Windows update broke their ability to type a snowman by using Alt+9731. We explained that the update was not at fault; rather, Alt+9731 was never supposed to produce a snowman at all! But the customer insisted that it used to work.

A closer investigation of the issue revealed the reason.

You see, while it’s true that the Alt+… decimal value is taken mod 256, that is just the default behavior of the Windows input system. But some controls (most notably the RichEdit control) override the default handling of the Alt+… sequence and parse out the decimal value mod 65536 rather than mod 256.

This means that whether the Alt+… value is taken mod 256 depends on what kind of control you are typing into.

By default, the value is taken mod 256, and Alt+9731 gives you a heart.

But if you happen to be using a RichEdit control, then the Alt+… value is taken mod 65536, and Alt+9731 gives you a snowman.

(I don’t know of anybody who takes the value mod 2097151, to support direct entry of code points outside the Basic Multilingual Plane.)

The post The history of <KBD>Alt</KBD>+number sequences, and why <KBD>Alt</KBD>+<KBD>9731</KBD> sometimes gives you a heart and sometimes a snowman appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Republican state Representative Bryan Hughes’ bid to oust House Speaker Joe Straus back in 2012 was hampered by a glaring flaw. He was a trial lawyer. With a lot of campaign money from other wealthy trial lawyers. 

Even for the East Texas conservative, who ascended to the state Senate in 2016, that occupational hazard put enough stink on him to help undermine his bid to oust the supposedly moderate speaker. 

Hughes tried to defend himself at the time by pointing out that he’d also received $3,000 from Texans for Lawsuit Reform (TLR), the powerful business group that took on the Democratic-aligned trial attorneys in the ’90s and early aughts, helping pave Republicans’ path to one-party rule by severely limiting ordinary Texans’ access to civil redress.

Hughes eventually dropped his bid for speaker. A few years later, in a sign of political shifts to come, TLR bankrolled the trial lawyer’s campaign for the deep-red Senate District 1 with $400,000 in PAC money. 

Perhaps no one group is more responsible for facilitating Republican domination of the Lone Star State than TLR. And no ideological principle was more central to the project than the anti-trial lawyer crusade known euphemistically as tort reform, which conveniently helped undercut Democrats’ funding base. 

But the tides, they are a’ turnin’. The various factions of the Texas Republican Party have turned their guns inward. The party’s branch of hardline conservatives—led by Attorney General Ken Paxton and conservative West Texas billionaire Tim Dunn’s political machine—are now casting TLR as a bogeyman on par with the liberal billionaire donor George Soros. The long-held principles of corporate cronyism and “civil justice” reform are being increasingly replaced with a burning desire to use conservative government as a means to litigate the right-wing culture wars. 

The classic tort reforming Chamber of Commerce-type Republican has given way to a new breed of conservative politician: the right-wing trial lawyer. 

Hughes is the poster boy. Now the most powerful member of Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s Senate and a leading contender for higher office, he’s the architect of several pieces of extreme legislation that have opened up new venues to sue private individuals and companies suspected of anything from violating state abortion restrictions to social media “censorship.” 

Scott Braddock of the Capitol insider newsletter Quorum Report first clocked the emerging phenomenon of the right-wing trial lawyer in the 2021 legislative session, noting how politicians like Hughes “are finding ways to monetize culture wars in ways not seen before.” 

“Fundamentally, the biggest shifts in Texas over the last 24 months … are the consolidation of power in the executive branch and the rise of the Right Wing Trial Lawyer,” Braddock wrote on Twitter at the time.

Perhaps the most pernicious of these right-wing billboard-lawyer initiatives was Hughes’ Senate Bill 8, which allows practically any private citizen to sue other private citizens or entities for facilitating an abortion after as soon as just six weeks.

Soon after the passage of SB 8, an estranged husband sued his wife’s friends for allegedly abetting her abortion. One of the lawyers on this case was Deer Park state Representative Briscoe Cain, another right-wing trial attorney who has launched his own practice specifically to enforce the laws he and his colleagues pass.

In 2023, Republicans including Cain and Hughes passed a law that requires commercial websites that host porn to verify the age of its users. Paxton has since sued several porn companies, though it’s not clear whether social media companies like Elon Musk’s X, which recently updated its policies to explicitly allow porn on the site, are subject to the law. 

Much like how pre-tort reform Texas laws allowed plaintiffs’ lawyers to pursue massive class-action lawsuits and Democratic AGs to lead multi-state litigation against ne’er-do-well insurance giants, tobacco companies, and chemical producers, Republicans have created all sorts of new causes of action to take their foes to court. 

Despite its anti-liability mission, TLR and its top donors have effectively helped facilitate this rash of new laws. The organization has only raised its hackles, largely behind closed doors, when these measures jeopardize large corporations, while remaining a top heavyweight funder of the GOP leadership and rank-and-file. The group sends a comparatively small portion of cash to friendly Democratic incumbents.

Nevertheless, far-right foes are seeking to make TLR into a pariah among the base. 

Paxton and his apologists accused TLR of orchestrating the attorney general’s quick-fire impeachment in the Texas House last spring. (TLR supported Paxton challenger Eva Guzman in the 2022 GOP primary.) In fact, the crux of Paxton’s defense during his Senate trial, which resulted in his acquittal, was that the poor AG was being targeted for his offenses against the same entities that TLR defends: Big Pharma, Big Tech, etc. 

The attorney general has also accused TLR of undermining his ability to prosecute corporate malfeasance. “One of my constitutional roles is to make sure corporations do not commit fraud, and so I think TLR would like to put that aside and say, ‘If they commit fraud, that’s fine. Business is business,’” Paxton said in a recent anti-TLR production by the Dunn-funded Texas Scorecard. 

Governing political parties, the GOP included, can tolerate a fairly high degree of cognitive dissonance. As such, some conservatives like Hughes and Cain have been able to stay in the good graces of both TLR and the Dunn machine. But the contradictions, as the Marxists say, are heightening.  Paxton, Patrick, and an insurgency in the House are all working to draw lines in the sand. 

Indeed, TLR has finally felt compelled to push back publicly against the party’s puritanical excesses. “If you have 100 issues, and you agree with them 99 times, you’re their enemy,” Alan Hassenflu, a TLR board member, told the Texas Tribune in May. “They’d be just fine having the government tell businesses they can’t have unisex bathrooms or mandate vaccines. … That’s not limited governance.”

The marquee battleground is now the Texas House. Speaker Dade Phelan narrowly survived a May runoff with the help of GOP establishment donors including TLR. After Phelan’s skin-of-the-teeth victory, Paxton threatened to take down any House Republican who votes to keep Phelan as speaker in 2025. 

House conservatives like Cain are useful weathervanes in the lower chamber. The rabble rouser-turned-Phelan lieutenant voted to impeach Paxton and served as a House manager in the Senate trial. That earned him a fringey primary challenger who was endorsed by Paxton. But Cain easily prevailed, aided by over $100,000 in campaign cash from TLR, Phelan, and other GOP establishment groups. 

Soon after, Cain signed a pledge to only support a speaker endorsed by the House Republican Caucus, effectively promising not to back Phelan. The speaker’s path to retaining his power, then, would likely run through a coalition composed mostly of Democrats. If TLR and co. stick with Phelan in that case, it would validate their far-right critics’ claims and create sticky questions of how exactly liability-averse corporations should target their political patronage going forward.

One of the Republicans who has emerged to take on Phelan for the speakership is Stephenville state Representative Shelby Slawson, a two-term member who carried SB 8 in the House in 2021. Slawson, too, is a trial lawyer. 

The post Litigating the Republican Civil War appeared first on The Texas Observer.

After 14 years in power, the Tories — once dubbed the "natural party of government" — face a drubbing in elections July 4. Rishi Sunak could be the first U.K. prime minister ever to lose his own seat.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

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Employees at the gestation facility appreciate having easy access to the park.

Today's News:

If someone’s go-to Fourth of July song is Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” they’re conservative.

If their go-to Fourth of July song is “American Tune” by Paul Simon, they’re liberal.

If it’s “This is America” by Childish Gambino, they’re liberal, and they’re not celebrating.

If a man is wearing a graphic tee with George Washington riding a bald eagle while wielding an AK-47, he’s conservative, but if the shirt features Ulysses S. Grant punching a bear in the face, he’s liberal.

If a woman is wearing oversized red, white, or blue sunglasses, she’s conservative. If the sunglasses are undersized, she’s liberal.

If a man is wearing a Pepsi-bezel Rolex GMT (the red and blue one with the obnoxiously big bubble on the date), he’s conservative. However, if a woman wears the same watch, she’s liberal. It’s rare but not unheard of for them to be married to each other.

If the party features a tie-dye station, the crowd is 89 percent liberal.

If the party features a wet T-shirt contest, the crowd is 99 percent conservative.

If the party devolves into a Roman Candle fight, the crowd is split fifty-fifty.

If the party features a “Beer Olympics” between several groups of seventeen-year-olds in culturally offensive costumes, the parents are probably conservative but definitely out of town.

If someone’s favorite firework is the streamer that fizzles out at the end, they’re liberal.

If someone’s favorite firework is “the big one,” they’re conservative.

If someone prefers drone shows, they’re liberal. Unless they operate the drones. Then they’re very conservative.

If someone can name more people who have won the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest than they can people who signed the Declaration of Independence, they are a discouraging example of our nation’s ego. However, we’re also impressed and would like to meet them.

If someone thinks the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest is gross, they’re liberal. If someone has competed in or won the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, they’re conservative.

If someone gets a little misty-eyed in a “this is beautiful” kind of way during a laser light show synchronized to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” they’re conservative.

If someone gets a little misty-eyed in a “the American Dream is a sham and climate change is irreversible” kind of way during a laser light show synchronized to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” they’re liberal.

If someone walks around the community pool in a stars-and-stripes Speedo or bikini, they are post-colonial anarchists.

If someone was born on the Fourth of July, they’re conservative whether they like it or not.

This piece is an excerpt from Reese and Gary’s forthcoming book “Red Tie, Blue Tie. How to Tell Whether Someone is Liberal or Conservative in Any Possible Scenario.” It will be released on July 10. To learn more, follow Humorist Books on Instagram @humoristbooks.

PHOENIX—Following this week’s landmark Supreme Court ruling granting presidents broad immunity against criminal prosecution for official acts, Donald Trump’s campaign released an ad Wednesday that consists solely of a montage of people he will have killed if elected in November. The largely silent ad, which will…

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NEW YORK—A new report released Wednesday by the Columbia University Department of Sociology concluded it’s not fair that other people get to enjoy their lives. “Our research suggests it’s really not acceptable that some people are able to have a pleasant or satisfying time being alive,” read one section of the…

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TOKYO—Grasping his stomach and grimacing at the end of the meal, local American tourist Aaron Messner complained to reporters Wednesday that he had hoped to enjoy a time-honored Japanese culinary experience, but his 10,000-calorie sumo-style dinner had left him writhing in hunger. “Oh God, I can’t believe all we got…

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Boston Basketball Partners LLC, the group that controls the majority of the shares in the Boston Celtics, announced the decision to sell all of its stake in the team, which is valued at $4.7 billion, by 2028. What do you think?

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Do you ever mutter "What Lacanian hell have I gotten myself into this time?" regularly? Because I sure do ...

The Caesar Salad was invented at a hotel in Tijuana, Mexico on July 4, 1924 to feed hungry American tourists. We've been enjoying it in various incarnations ever since.

(Image credit: Randy Schmidt)

Hurricane Beryl is nearing Jamaica as a Category 4 storm, and forecast to make landfall on Wednesday. Officials there have declared a "major disaster area" and implemented an island-wide curfew.

(Image credit: Joe Raedle)

In brief: Houston will be hot and sunny for the next couple of days, with only some scattered shower chances. The forecast begins to change this weekend, as Hurricane Beryl moves into the southern Gulf of Mexico. After that there are a lot of questions about what happens next, and this post attempts to address them as best we can.

Some thoughts on Beryl-mania

I want to start today’s post with some thoughts about Hurricane Beryl and hurricane season anxiety. In the last day or so Matt and I have been flooded with questions about this storm and its potential to impact the greater Houston area. Is the hurricane coming here? Will we flood? Are we going to see storm surge? How damaging will the winds be? There is just a ton of noise and chatter out there, and I want to say two things about it.

First, we don’t have the answers to a lot of the questions being asked. There are no absolutes in a five-, six-, or seven-day hurricane forecast. However, as I’ll discuss in the forecast below, it remains likely that significant wind and surge impacts from Beryl will go south of the Houston area. We’re most closely watching for increased rain chances next week. That doesn’t mean the forecast can’t change. But as we’ve been saying for a couple of days, in the big picture Beryl is likely to move inland into Mexico or South Texas, far from Houston. If our thinking changes on that, we’ll shout it from the rooftops.

Second, it’s going to be a long season, y’all. I get it. Beryl is a pretty ominous storm, because its intensity and rapid intensification are wholly abnormal for late June and early July. We’ve never seen this with a tropical system before, and it underscores the notion that this will be a hyperactive Atlantic hurricane season. However, the Texas coast has about three more months during which we are going to have to pay close attention to the tropics. Almost certainly there will be bigger threats than Beryl to Houston this summer, and times for great anxiety. This is not one of them.

Put simply, this is a marathon and not a sprint.

So please trust us when we say this: If you need to be concerned about a tropical system—like stocking-up-at-the-grocery-store or preparing-to-evacuate levels of concern—we are going to let you know as soon as possible. We just haven’t seen that signal yet from Beryl.

Wednesday

The story for the next couple of days will be one of heat as a high pressure ridge mostly holds sway. High temperatures will be in the mid- to to upper-90s through Friday or Saturday. Today we’ll see mostly sunny skies, with light southerly winds. There will be the usual smattering of afternoon and early evening shower chances along the sea breeze, but any showers that develop should be fairly scattered.

Thursday and Friday

These should be the hottest days of the upcoming forecast period, with highs in the upper 90s except for coastal areas, which will be a few degrees cooler. Skies will be mostly sunny with only perhaps a 10 or 20 percent chance of showers this afternoon. The only concern for fireworks on Thursday, the Fourth of July, will be temperatures which should still be sultry and in the upper 80s shortly after sunset.

Saturday, Sunday, and beyond

Rain chances will increase starting Saturday, and then persist through much of next week. From this point forward our weather will be guided by the track and evolution of Hurricane Beryl, and the potential for a trailing tropical system (Invest 96L) that may bring some additional moisture into Texas later next week. If I had to make a forecast for the weekend, I’d go with partly sunny skies and highs in the mid-90s on Saturday, with the potential for showers; and partly sunny skies on Sunday, highs in the low-90s, and perhaps a 50 percent chance of rain. I do think the better rain chances, and any potential for flooding, will hold off until at least Monday.

Hurricane Beryl

Beryl remains a very powerful hurricane this morning, with 145-mph sustained winds and a central pressure of 952 mb (which is rising, an indication of some slow weakening). It will pass near, or strike the southern edge of Jamaica today, exposing the entire Caribbean island to severe winds, heavy rains, and a large storm surge. This is a reasonable worst-case hurricane for the island, which will be subject to both coastal and inland flooding, in addition to major damage from winds.

Beryl is forecast to weaken as it crosses the Caribbean Sea later this week as it encounters some wind shear, before reaching the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico on Thursday night or Friday morning. It is likely to be a Category 2 or Category 3 hurricane at this time, although there is some uncertainty in this. As it passes over land, Beryl should weaken further before entering the Gulf of Mexico later on Friday.

So what happens then? For Texas residents, that is it the big question. And there are a range of possibilities. Based upon my interpretation of the various hurricane models we could see everything from a tropical storm moving inland into the Mexico coast, near Tampico, on Sunday; to a Category 1 or Category 2 hurricane striking Corpus Christi on Monday. In the latter scenario, since Beryl would remain over water longer, it would have more time to re-strengthen over the Gulf of Mexico.

A majority of the hurricane focused models, including HAFS and HMON, favor the “tropical storm into Mexico” scenario, as does the European model and several other solutions. I’m sure a lot of social media attention will be paid to the GFS model this morning, as it brings a hurricane to the Texas coast between Brownsville and Corpus Christi early next week. But for the time being, this looks to be an outlier compared to most of our other guidance.

The official forecast from the National Hurricane Center, which is shown above and will be updated again at 10 am CT, shows a tropical storm/borderline Category 1 hurricane striking the Mexico coast about 50 miles south of Brownsville. I agree with their thinking.

Needless to say, for the upper Texas coast, there would be differing effects from these various scenarios. For Houston, I am not too concerned about winds—for now the worst I’d expect to see is some tropical storm force wind gusts on Sunday or Monday. Seas may get a few feet higher, like they did with Tropical Storm Alberto a couple of weeks ago. But again, for now, I’m not expecting a major storm surge event. The biggest and most widespread impact I expect to see is rainfall.

Beryl should bring some heavy rainfall to parts of Mexico and Texas starting on Sunday, and into next week. The issue is that as the storm crosses the Gulf of Mexico, the high pressure ridge to its north will start to break down, and its steering currents will weaken some. (This is the source of the uncertainty in its track over the Gulf). As a result Beryl may slow down some and have the opportunity to bring heavier rainfall over a couple of days. Please don’t misunderstand me, I am not saying this is another Hurricane Harvey.

In any case, for Houston, the best chance of rainfall will likely come during the Monday through Wednesday period. My expectation right now is that most of the area receives a manageable 2 to 5 inches of rainfall. But there is some risk of higher totals. I consider this to be a lower probability, but given the influx of tropical moisture into the state of Texas next week we cannot rule out higher bullseyes and the potential for flooding.

I apologize for the lack of concrete answers, but so it goes in tropical forecasting. A good deal of uncertainty remains. At this time my sense is that Beryl goes far enough south to have modest effects on the upper Texas coast, besides increasing rain chances next week. But there remains some risk of more direct and serious effects. We’ll be watching this possibility closely and keep you updated with another post this afternoon. And for information about broader effects across Texas and Mexico, please visit our companion site The Eyewall.

5-Day Uncertainty Track last updated Wed, 03 Jul 2024 11:50:47 GMT


Wind Speed Probabilities last updated Wed, 03 Jul 2024 09:23:02 GMT

WestJet said it had cancelled a total 1,137 flights across Canada as of Tuesday as a result of the mechanics' surprise strike over the long weekend.

Chris Carbert and Anthony Olienick are on trial charged with conspiring to commit murder at the blockade, which tied up traffic for two weeks at the busy Canada-U.S. border crossing at Coutts in 2022 to protest COVID restrictions and vaccine mandates.

Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, federal prosecutor and legal adviser to Donald Trump, was disbarred in the state on Tuesday after a court found he repeatedly made false statements about Trump's 2020 election loss.

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Have a cookout

The Fourth of July is a great opportunity to gather your friends and family outside and eat some burgers and hot dogs. On the land that you own, of course. Not on any other land, especially not any public spaces like parks or sidewalks, because it’s clear you didn’t spend money to purchase a deed, so what are you doing there? Being outside and eating at a place you haven’t given up your life savings to a bank for so that it’s momentarily okay for you to exist there? Wait, you do have a home, right? Oh no, you don’t own a home? How do you even exist?

Fly a flag

While many Americans have traditionally flown the stars and stripes, there are many other SCOTUS-approved flags you can wave. For instance, a flag that lets your neighbors know you think overthrowing our democratic institutions is chill, or a flag that tells the police they should consider this home as part of their protection racket. And if you really want to make a splash, try a novelty flag like I OWN A MEGAYACHT AND BRIBE—justices love it.

Set off fireworks

Independence Day isn’t complete without a colorful display of explosions in the sky. Don’t have access to fireworks? Then celebrate by firing off a machine gun instead—or, wait, not a “machine gun,” just a gun with a bump stock that makes a weapon discharge hundreds of rounds a minute, which is a totally different thing.

And if fireworks are illegal where you are, don’t worry about it. Just let your public officials know that if they look the other way when exploding a few Roman candles, you’ll Venmo them tomorrow. As long as you give them the money after they look the other way, it’s not a bribe, just a tip. Just the tip is okay—the Supreme Court said so. Why are fireworks illegal in some places anyway? If it’s due to concerns about smoke and air pollution, again, no worries. SCOTUS rules that air pollution is no big deal and the Environmental Protection Agency should just chill out about all that stuff anyway. You’ll be fine. Probably.

Declare your freedom from democracy

Representational democracy had a good run, but the Supreme Court has finally rediscovered the founders’ original intent. Sure, they were against kings, but it turns out, after 248 years, we had completely misunderstood that they actually liked when someone has the powers of a king; they just didn’t like the word “king.” It rhymes with too many other words and leaves the nation open to getting absolutely destroyed in a rap battle. With “president,” you just have “resident,” “hesitant,” and maybe “negligent,” but that’s sort of a stretch.

Remember, if you’re feeling overwhelmed by all these choices and unsure how to celebrate, just ask your local court. SCOTUS recognizes that interpreting what one should do is complicated, and they’ve decided that, in the end, the courts should be in charge of all of this decision-making stuff.

But no matter what you do, make sure you make the most of your Independence Day. It’s probably the last one we’re gonna get.

Hey, so great to see you! Sorry, the bar’s so crowded tonight; it’s not normally like this. Usually, you can grab a booth, no problem, but it looks like we’ll have to share a single barstool. Hope that’s all right.

Normally, there’s live bluegrass on Sundays too. That’s why I picked this place, because I know you like the mandolin. But I guess Fiddle Creek isn’t coming tonight, and also, there’s no music playing at all, just the Lolita audiobook.

But it’s great to see you regardless. It’s been forever! It’s weird, though; I was just here last week, and the vibes were totally different. For one thing, they were serving alcohol, which it doesn’t look like they’re doing tonight. We could find somewhere else, or I’m okay with just having milk if you are.

I’m just glad we’re finally doing this. It’s just so hard to find a free night these days. I’m sorry that it’s so dark in here, though. It’s always dim, but I’ve never seen it be 100 percent pitch black, so we can only see everyone’s glowing, white eyes like we’re exploring a cave in Scooby-Doo.

If you’re down to hang longer, my buddy Jake runs trivia here at 8:30, which could be fun. Typically, it’s about pop culture, but apparently, the theme tonight is Belgian politics. If we win, we get a twenty-dollar tab, but if we lose, we get sent to the bar’s den of spikes. Everyone else here tonight is visiting from Belgium. It’s really never like that.

But, wow, dude, it’s gotta be like, what, a year since we last hung out? Wait, could you speak up, actually? It’s kind of hard to hear you over the sound of desperate bleating and the whir of veterinary respirators. It looks like the back room of the bar has been converted into some kind of emergency racehorse hospital. I was just here last week, and they had a pool table—the bar’s normally only like this leading up to the Preakness.

The noise here shouldn’t be a problem, though, since we could just head outside. Can’t believe I forgot to tell you, man, they got this kick-ass courtyard open in the summer with string lights and everything. Let’s just order our milk here and then head around back. Oh, wait, we still haven’t hit the summer solstice yet, right? Shoot, then the courtyard is probably still guarded by Lamashtu, the malevolent beast from Assyrian myth.

That one’s my bad. The bar did mention on their Instagram that Lamashtu, the wayward daughter of the sky god Anu, is nesting there until the solstice has passed. We could try to sneak in, but it’s probably not worth it, since she is said to gnaw on the bones of children and bring forth all nightmares.

Ugh, and they normally have great chicken fingers here, too, but the kitchen is closed.

I guess it’s up to you. Do you wanna stay here in the crowded, dark-as-night, raw-milk bar yelping over the din of Belgian French, Nabokov, and screeching thoroughbreds, all the while cowering in the horrid penumbra of Lamashtu’s nefarious wrath, or do you wanna hit up that place across the street? It is a wine bar, though, so the vibes may be off.

[link] [51 comments]

The three liberals, led by Sonia Sotomayor, paint a dark picture of absolutist power.

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by ProPublica

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In the wake of President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance, his opponents and most major media organizations have pointed out that he has done few interviews that give the public an opportunity to hear him speak without a script or teleprompters.

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So much has been made of this limited access that the impressions from Special Counsel Robert K. Hur about his five hours of interviews with the president on Oct. 8 and 9 drove months of coverage. The prosecutor said Biden had “diminished faculties in advancing age” and called him a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden angrily dismissed these assertions, which Vice President Kamala Harris called “politically motivated.”

House Republicans on Monday sued Attorney General Merrick B. Garland for audio recordings of the interview as the White House asserts executive privilege to deny their release.

ProPublica obtained a rare interview with Biden on Sept. 29, nine days before the Hur interviews began. We released the video, which was assembled from footage shot by five cameras, on Oct. 1. We edited out less than a minute of crosstalk and exchanges with the camera people, as is customary in such interviews.

Today, we are releasing the full, 21-minute interview, unedited as seen from the view of the single camera focused on Biden. We understand that this video captures a moment in time nine months ago and that it will not settle the ongoing arguments about the president’s acuity today. Still, we believe it is worth giving the public another chance to see one of Biden’s infrequent conversations with a reporter.

The Interview With the Camera Focused on Biden The Interview as Published

Conducting the interview was veteran journalist and former CNN White House correspondent John Harwood, who requested it and then worked with ProPublica to film and produce it.

He did not send questions to the White House ahead of time, nor did he get approval for the topics to be discussed during the interview.

Recording began as soon as Biden was miked and sitting in the chair that Friday at 2:50 p.m. Earlier that day, Biden’s press staff had said the president would have only 10 minutes for the interview, instead of the previously agreed upon 20 minutes. We requested that the interview go the full 20 minutes. You can hear during the unedited interview a couple of moments when White House staff interrupted to signal that the interview should come to a close. Biden seemed eager to continue talking.

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