Reinforcing that dumb jock stereotype

Also, damaging the reputation of stupid Americans further. No one if France is going to want to contact Americans after this.

U.S. triathlon Seth Rider has decided to stop washing his hands after going to the bathroom in a bid to increase his resistance to the polluted River Seine.

The men’s individual triathlon race at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games has been postponed as the water quality in the Seine is still below regulatory standards. The race was meant to commence on Tuesday but has now been delayed until Wednesday, although the water could still be harmful to the athletes.

To gain an advantage and avoid potential illness, Rider is taking drastic action by not washing his hands and believes there is science to support his theory. “We know that there’s going to be some E. coli exposure, so I just try to increase my E. coli threshold by exposing myself to a bit of E. coli in day-to-day life,” Rider said.
“And it’s actually backed by science. Proven methods. Just little things throughout your day, like not washing your hands after you go to the bathroom.”

“Backed by science.” What science was that, Seth? Citation please. You’re not evolving resistance to E. coli, and it’s not just one kind of bacterium we’re concerned about. You know, hygiene and cleanliness are generally good ideas.

This is reminding me of those stories of men who don’t wash their asses that were going around before.

Every day, same spot

It’s near my computer desk. As soon as I sit down, she curls up next to me. If I get up to use the bathroom or get a drink, she’ll follow, and then as soon as I go back, she’s there. For an evil cat, she’s awfully dependent.

I’m about to go into the lab. I’m afraid it will boggle her mind.

The planet is so screwed

Thanks to the techbros, for whom the environment is their very last consideration. Nvidia had a keynote address to announce their latest big data center engine, a processor that will suck down even more energy. It’s such a greedy machine that even a tech writer was appalled.

While the star of the show might have been Nvidia Blackwell, Nvidia’s latest data center processor that will likely be bought up far faster than they can ever be produced, there were a host of other AI technologies that Nvidia is working on that will be supercharged by its new hardware. All of it will likely generate enormous profits for Nvidia and its shareholders, and while I don’t give financial advice, I can say that if you’re an Nvidia shareholder, you were likely thilled by Sunday’s keynote presentation.

For everyone else, however, all I saw was the end of the last few glaciers on Earth and the mass displacement of people that will result from the lack of drinking water; the absolutely massive disruption to the global workforce that ‘digital humans’ are likely to produce; and ultimately a vision for the future that centers capital-T Technology as the ultimate end goal of human civilization rather than the 8 billion humans and counting who will have to live — and a great many will die before the end — in the world these technologies will ultimately produce with absolutely no input from any of us.

It uses almost twice as much power! That might be fine if the increased power allowed for increased efficiency, but that’s not how this works: usage will expand to meet capacity, and that means more AI and more crypto, two things we don’t really need.

There was something that Huang said during the keynote that shocked me into a mild panic. Nvidia’s Blackwell cluster, which will come with eight GPUs, pulls down 15kW of power. That’s 15,000 watts of power. Divided by eight, that’s 1,875 watts per GPU.

The current-gen Hopper data center chips draw up to 1,000W, so Nvidia Blackwell is nearly doubling the power consumption of these chips. Data center energy usage is already out of control, but Blackwell is going to pour jet fuel on what is already an uncontained wildfire.

Here’s something else that won’t help: the Republican presidential candidate is suddenly gung-ho for crypto. He’s pandering to Silicon Valley, you know.

Former President Donald Trump pitched his plan to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world,” pledging to establish the nation’s first strategic Bitcoin stockpile, if elected.

Trump is the first presidential candidate from a major political party to make Bitcoin and cryptocurrency a campaign issue, and the first American president to speak at a Bitcoin event, addressing an enthusiastic standing-room-only crowd at the Bitcoin 2024 conference at the Music City Center in Nashville, two weeks after surviving an assassination attempt.

“If crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, minted, and made in the USA,” Trump said. “If Bitcoin is going to the moon, as they say, ‘it’s going to the moon,’ I want America to be the nation that leads the way.”

Oh god. Why? Bitcoin is a scam. It does nothing. It does not contribute to productivity or the economy. It’s a tool for suckering money out of gullible investors, so I can understand why Trump would have an affinity for it.

“For too long, our government has violated a cardinal rule that every Bitcoiner knows by heart: never sell your Bitcoin,” he said. “If I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration for the United States of America to keep 100% of all the Bitcoin the U.S. government currently holds or acquires.”

HODL! To the Moon! He has mastered the buzzwords.

Dude!

I have an aversion to any group built around white men — more like white male privilege, am I right? — but I tuned in to bits and pieces of this 3 hour live stream, White Dudes for Kamala Harris, because hey, I recognize that I am a white dude. It turned out to be pretty reassuring, because it’s a parade of white men stating that the patriarchy has to die, that MAGA is a hateful cult, and that we have to ally ourselves with every citizen of the USA. It’s an inclusive message.

Also, it features interesting people: Tim Walz, JB Pritzker, Mark Hamill, Pete Buttigieg, and most importantly, the Dude himself, Jeff Bridges, with a message of growth and transformation. There’s even a black dude and a white woman dude! I think I can get behind the promotion of unity to defeat evil.

Also, they raised $4 million for the Harris campaign.

Shall we get ahead of the cycle with the next JD Vance weirdness?

He’s full of them, and we’re just waiting for someone to open the basement door and shine a light on the scuttling, slimy critters chittering down there. Here’s one that I haven’t seen on CNN yet: he has a pet Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug in that dark cellar.

In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed “not productive”: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”

Yarvin, a self-described reactionary and extremist who was 35 years old at the time, clarified that he was “just kidding.” But then he continued, “The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass. However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide.”

He then concluded that the “best humane alternative to genocide” is to “virtualize” these people: Imprison them in “permanent solitary confinement” where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual-reality interface” so they could “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”

Yarvin’s disturbing manifestos have earned him influential followers, chief among them: tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his onetime Silicon Valley protégé, Senator J.D. Vance, whom the Republican Party just nominated to be Donald Trump’s vice president. If Trump wins the election, there is little doubt that Vance will bring Yarvin’s twisted techno-authoritarianism to the White House, and one can imagine—with horror—what a receptive would-be autocrat like Trump might do with those ideas.

Vance has several other “intellectual” peers, but Yarvin is one of the more damaging. He’s the source of this proposed plan to fire everyone in the civil service.

As Yarvin told Vanity Fair in 2022, “The fundamental premise of liberalism is that there is this inexorable march toward progress. I disagree with that premise.” Instead, Yarvin believes that American democracy has denigrated into a corrupt oligarchy, run by elites who strive to consolidate their power rather than serve the public interest. The solution, Yarvin argues, is for the American oligarchy to give way to a monarchical leader styled after a start-up CEO — a “national CEO,” [or] what’s called a dictator,” as Yarvin has put it — who can de-bug the American political order like a computer programmer de-bugging some bad code.

Vance has said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration. “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said on a conservative podcast in 2021, adding: “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024 [and] I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

There’s a rich vein of disturbing sickness in the Vance basement — Yarvin, but also Rod Dreher, the Claremont Institute, and a whole host of bizarre conservative Catholic goons. Keep digging, everyone! It’s the creepy season!

Road trip!

I have learned that the most haunted road in Minnesota is located about an hour away from me, near Sibley State Park. It’s called Timber Lake Road.

The street is called Timber Lake Road, which is located in central Minnesota near New London. The area is far from any major cities – about an hour west of St. Cloud – so you’re in for a bit of a drive. In the daylight, that might not seem like such a big deal. It looks like any other country road in Minnesota.

But at night, things can get a little scary. The road is located near the thick forests and wetlands of Sibley State Park. The landscape certainly looks like it would set the scene for a horror movie. As the story goes, a woman who lived in a house near the road one day came home to find her children murdered. Devastated, she hung herself, and her ghost has wandered the road searching for the murderer ever since.

Locals have reported strange sightings on the road for years. Shadows in the woods along Timber Lake Road may point to a supernatural force at work. There have also been reports of red eyes blinking at travelers from the darkness.

A gated cemetery stands along Timber Lake Road. This is where the woman and her children are said to be buried. Here, visitors have sighted ghostly children wandering the graves. You may also hear strange sounds. Dogs howling, a woman wailing, and otherworldly screaming have all been reported.

Never mind the imaginary ghosts — I’m looking at the photos and thinking, “Spider country!” The wailing and screaming are just the sounds the locals make when they stumble into cobwebs. I should check it out. Maybe we could spend a night at the Palmer House Hotel while we were out there.

Man, the ghost-hunting business must be tremendously profitable — you can just milk the absence of the subject of inquiry for money.

Burnt monkey testicles?

I can’t keep up with the trail of poop-nuggets JD Vance leaves behind him. The latest is one that I don’t have to issue with a disclaimer — he really is this bad this time.

An article by Rolling Stone, dated October 25, 2022, has exposed allegations of animal cruelty linked to a company financed by JD Vance’s venture capital firm, Narya.

Wait — the reminder that Vance is a venture capitalist isn’t the horrifying revelation?

The report claims that AmplifyBio, which received funding from Vance’s firm, carried out severe experiments on live animals, including monkeys and dogs.
These revelations have ignited a firestorm of outrage and heightened scrutiny regarding JD Vance’s suitability for high office. Rolling Stone’s investigation uncovered troubling details about AmplifyBio’s testing practices, revealing that many animals suffered and died due to toxic testing exposures and harsh conditions. Particularly shocking were reports of “dreadful mistakes,” including a lab monkey that died after becoming trapped in faulty equipment and technician errors causing severe burns to other monkeys’ genitals, TOI reported.

We seem to have moved out of the comical phony exposé phase of the attack to dragging him for the things he actually does and says. He’s a Sideshow Bob surrounded by rakes.

I blame the childless cat ladies.

Frittering away the presidency in a lost cause

Since Biden no longer is campaigning for office, and has about 6 months left in his term, one might wonder what he will do in his remaining time. This actually ought to be normal — it’s weird that the leader of our country typically seems to spend about two years out of four focused on re-election, rather than doing their job. At least we can say that Biden is going out with an ambitious goal.

President Biden endorsed sweeping changes to the Supreme Court on Monday, calling for 18-year term limits for the justices and a binding, enforceable ethics code for the high court.

He is also pushing for a constitutional amendment that would prohibit blanket immunity for presidents, a rebuke of the Supreme Court after it ruled this month that former president Donald Trump is immune from prosecution for official acts.

I approve, although I might favor even shorter term limits. These are essential changes, because the judiciary is totally broken right now (I’d argue that the electoral college is even more broken, and that the Senate is an archaic relic, but let’s fix one thing at a time.) However, let’s get real: Joe Biden is not going to achieve his goals.

The calls, however, are largely aspirational at this stage given the long odds they face in implementation. Term limits and an ethics code are subject to congressional approval, and the Republican-controlled House is unlikely to support either. Both proposals also require 60 votes to pass the Senate, and Democrats only hold 51 seats in the upper chamber. Passing a constitutional amendment requires clearing even more hurdles, including two-thirds support of both chambers, or via a convention of two-thirds of the states, and then approval by three-fourths of state legislatures.

But that’s OK. Maybe the old man will prepare the way, get everyone used to the idea that the Supreme Court is not inviolable, and maybe scare a few justices into cleaning up their act.

That’s a cunning way to defund education and kill a lot of children

Trump has a new campaign promise: he’s going to defund all schools that have a vaccine mandate.

You know, they all have vaccine requirements. Here in Minnesota, kids are required to be immunized against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (DTaP), polio, measles, mumps, rubella (MMR), hepatitis B (Hep B), and varicella (chickenpox) before kindergarten. I’m not enthused about the return of polio! Or all those other diseases! It’s a strange political ploy to promise to rewind that childhood mortality curve all the way back to 1800, but that’s what the Republican party wants.

The cat’s not dead yet

She just looks that way. It’s around 30°C here, and every morning the evil cat complains at me — she won’t shut up — until she collapses on an old carpet remnant near a fan I’ve set up in my office. Then she’s immobile most of the day. I’d feel sympathy, except I’m stuck in the same oven with her.

Could be worse. Look at these views of the Park Fire, currently raging in Northern California. The video is especially notable for showing all the different views technology gives us on the fire — satellite, radar, airplane flight maps, etc. — so you can get a multidimensional appreciation of the awfulness.

All I can do is show you a photo of a heat-stressed cat in western Minnesota.