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- Executive Producers:
- Sir pursuit of peace and tranquility
- Associate Executive Producers:
- Linda Lu Duchess of jobs and writer resumes
- Become a member of the 1733 Club, support the show here
- Knights & Dames
- Angel of Smyrna > Sir Angel of Smyrna
- End of Show Mixes: Brian Longenecker - Jon Esther - David Keckta
- Engineering, Stream Management & Wizardry
- Mark van Dijk - Systems Master
- Ryan Bemrose - Program Director
- Clip Custodian: Neal Jones
- Clip Collectors: Steve Jones & Dave Ackerman
- Trump
- Trump office challenge coins or k-cups
- Panama Canal BOTG
- First, was on a call today with a couple of lawyer
- friends down there. They see Trump’s remarks as a head scratcher. In
- spite of that plenty of Panamanians like him. There are even some who
- think he could clean up corruption in the board running the Canal (run
- brings me to a very interesting possibility. 2 days ago the Comptroller
- of the Government announced investigation into the two port facilities
- operated by Hutchison Whampoa at either end of the Canal. They are the
- ports under concession from the national government that Trump has said
- are ‘illegally operated by soldiers from China.’ It appears from some
- announcements today that the Comptroller has found that the HK-based
- multinational has not been paying all of its payments to Panama.
- I’m kinda guessing that the concession has been breached and will be
- possibly cancelled, allowing Panama to expel ‘China’ from the Canal and
- allowing Trump to claim a victory. Will be interesting to see how this
- plays out. Here’s an article from the FT about it:
- FT: “Panama begins audit of Hong Kong company in nod to Donald Trump”
- FEDGOV Social Media Freeze BOTG
- Current requirement for all HHS and DOD, possibly all federal government. No social media. Period.
- Govees are prepping for massive layoffs. Current guidance:
- - anyone on probation will be termed (possibly by Friday, as data call had a today response data)
- - employees under 3 years with less that Good evaluations will be RIFd.
- - expect early retirement buyout to be aggressive
- Replacement Migration
- Protecting The Meaning And Value Of American Citizenship – The White House
- Section 1. Purpose. The privilege of United States citizenship is a priceless and profound gift. The Fourteenth Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” That provision rightly repudiated the Supreme Court of the United States’s shameful decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), which misinterpreted the Constitution as permanently excluding people of African descent from eligibility for United States citizenship solely based on their race.
- But the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Consistent with this understanding, the Congress has further specified through legislation that “a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a national and citizen of the United States at birth, 8 U.S.C. 1401, generally mirroring the Fourteenth Amendment’s text.
- Big Pharma
- Alcohol hit multipronged BOTG
- I'm an Internal Medicine physician, and we've exchanged emails over the
- years. I heard you and John touch on the bad press regarding alcohol,
- and I didn't pay much attention until I received some studies in my
- "doctor news" inbox - including a study by Nature
- where they strongly word the association of alcohol and cancer for
- those that just read the abstract/summary. However, when you look at
- the actual data, the strong association is 11+ drinks a week, the sort
- of strong association is 6-10 drinks/week, and all
- the rest of us there is no association.
- Then I started paying attention to other news pieces that highlight the
- AACR (American Association for Cancer Research) - see 2024 summary
- figure pasted below- they separate out excess body weight and poor diet,
- and this makes alcohol jump to #2 of "modifiable
- Anyhow, this is all to say that you guys are correct, for some reason
- they are going after alcohol and it's not just in the media/M5M, but in
- the official medical literature....why?
- The 1st graphic is Nature Study the 2nd is AACR summary piece
- Stargate
- Reverse the Vax mRNA Damage?
- Biden
- Biden Pardons Rob BOTG
- Adam—Good chilly morning to you. For whatever they’re worth, I thought I might share my knee-jerk thoughts on President Biden’s last-minute pardons of Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, and the J6 Committee Members. Here goes:
- 1. It’s a bad look. A pardon is defined as an act that officially nullifies punishment or other legal consequences of a crime. Thus, to pardon a man presupposes that he’s vulnerable to a nonfrivolous criminal prosecution. President Biden’s pardons imply that all of these pardonees violated criminal statutes (or at least that the case can be made).
- 2. Advocates for the pardonees will say that these pardons are meant to preempt politically motivated prosecutions. Perhaps. But that argument can easily boomerang. It tacitly admits that DOJ and state prosecutors can indict and prosecute a proverbial ham sandwich—and just maybe, that’s what happened to President Trump.
- 3. Legally speaking, these pardons won’t necessarily get anyone off the hook. First, as other producers have astutely observed, the pardonees can no longer invoke their Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination for the pardoned conduct. They can now be forced to testify, which could implicate many other people. Second, suppose a pardonee testifies falsely, destroys documents, or gives false information to law-enforcement personnel. That conduct would give rise to brand-new “procedural” crimes such as perjury, false statements, or obstruction of justice. Plus, anyone else who participated in that conduct will become an accomplice and would be subject to squeezing.
- (I realize that some might say that a pardonee can just lie about everything and walk away. Sure, it’s possible, but it’s very unlikely. Any investigator or prosecutor will tell you that, by the time they start interrogating or cross-examining a witness, they already know the answers and already have the proof. They’re also asking the same questions of multiple people at the same time—and untruthful answers rarely match up. By that point, the questions are basically just honesty tests that the subject had better answer truthfully.)
- 4. The military retains jurisdiction over Gen. Milley. Even with the pardon, DoD could take administrative action against him—for example, reducing his retirement pay or changing the character of his discharge from honorable to something less. This is highly unlikely, but it’s a cudgel that investigators can use against him—especially if he commits a procedural or other unpardoned crime. Again, he’s not totally off the hook.
- Haha, either word works when you’re dealing with me. 😂
- One quick clarification about the interesting (but unlikely) Gen. Milley scenario. Normally, the military can go after retired personnel both criminally and administratively. Here, the criminal route isn’t available because of the pardon. But a pardon doesn’t preclude _administrative_ action.
- Indeed, military members who’ve gone through trial _and been acquitted_ can still be kicked out administratively, possibly with diminished benefits and/or a less favorable discharge classification of “general” or “under other than honorable conditions.” The military does that all the time. While unlikely, this same thing can happen to retirees.
- I just wanted to make clear that the pardon applies only to criminal actions, not administrative actions. (And again, it doesn’t apply to future crimes such as perjury, obstruction, false statements, etc.) Again, it’s unlikely, but I’d bet Gen. Milley is thinking about it. Meanwhile, the M5M won’t even acknowledge it.
- Oh, one more thing! This is more political than legal, but if the pardon-supporters out there argue too loudly that these pardons were necessary to avoid political persecution, that might give Trump the green light to immediately pardon everyone who is currently on the hook due to the same thing. It’d be risky—usually you’d wait till the end of a term—but they’d be opening the door.
- Big Tech AI and the Socials
- Most people probably don't realize how bad news China's Deepseek is for OpenAI.
- They've come up with a model that matches and even exceeds OpenAI's latest model o1 on various benchmarks, and they're charging just 3% of the price.
- It's essentially as if someone had released a mobile on par with the iPhone but was selling it for $30 instead of $1000. It's this dramatic.
- What's more, they're releasing it open-source so you even have the option - which OpenAI doesn't offer - of not using their API at all and running the model for "free" yourself.
- If you're an OpenAI customer today you're obviously going to start asking yourself some questions, like "wait, why exactly should I be paying 30X more?". This is pretty transformational stuff, it fundamentally challenges the economics of the market.
- It also potentially enables plenty of AI applications that were just completely unaffordable before. Say for instance that you want to build a service that helps people summarize books (random example). In AI parlance the average book is roughly 120,000 tokens (since a "token" is about 3/4 of a word and the average book is roughly 90,000 words). At OpenAI's prices, processing a single book would cost almost $2 since they change $15 per 1 million token. Deepseek's API however would cost only $0.07, which means your service can process about 30 books for $2 vs just 1 book with OpenAI: suddenly your book summarizing service is economically viable.
- Or say you want to build a service that analyzes codebases for security vulnerabilities. A typical enterprise codebase might be 1 million lines of code, or roughly 4 million tokens. That would cost $60 with OpenAI versus just $2.20 with DeepSeek. At OpenAI's prices, doing daily security scans would cost $21,900 per year per codebase; with DeepSeek it's $803.
- So basically it looks like the game has changed. All thanks to a Chinese company that just demonstrated how U.S. tech restrictions can backfire spectacularly - by forcing them to build more efficient solutions that they're now sharing with the world at 3% of OpenAI's prices. As the saying goes, sometimes pressure creates diamonds.
