Friday Links - 1 November

The Other McCain starts us off with BOOM! We Are So #Winning!

My hunch — and it’s not a completely uneducated guess — is that Trump’s got Arizona nailed down and he looks like a winner in Nevada, too, but that’s likely to be a lot closer. Michigan is at least close enough that Democrats there are still sweating it.

Lone Star Parson - Texas is Awesome Liturgical Dance is Not

And they're wondering why the Church of England is dying, which it is. No wonder, the people in charge of the operation don't believe in the Faith they're paid to promote. Witness subsequent clownshow. Is there a solution? Always.

Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony - Daily News Stuff 29 October 2024: Inordinate Fondnesses Edition

AI is 90% marketing and 10% reality says Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux. (Tom's Hardware)

And Git, in much the same way Donald Knuth created TeX and Metafont to typeset his own books.

Ever the optimist, is Linus.

The Federalist - Jake Tapper Is Lying About CNN’s Key Role In The Russia Collusion Hoax

Tapper is trying to hide now, inaccurately saying he merely reported what government operatives leaked to him. What he did was much worse. But even if that was all he did, it would be indefensible.

Krebs on Security - Change Healthcare Breach Hits 100M Americans

Change Healthcare says it has notified approximately 100 million Americans that their personal, financial and healthcare records may have been stolen in a February 2024 ransomware attack that caused the largest ever known data breach of protected health information.

Watts Up With That? Don’t Feel Sorry For VW… Liberal Arts College Dropout, Anti-Auto-Activist on Supervisory Board!

Now let’s look at her qualifications: According to her resume, Ms. Hamburg was educated in Hanover where she studied political science, German philology, and then studied philosophy at the University of Göttingen.

She dropped out of all her studies without a degree. Moreover, she’s an anti-car activist who travels by bicycle. She has neither industrial management experience, financial expertise nor an inkling of automotive engineering. That folks, is one of the top executives at VW. No joke!

Miguel Gonzalez - The true reason why the Media hates Musk.

Community Notes and X in general has been the “troublesome priest” for the Lefty Media. They wish nothing more than make Musk go away and have the platform once again repeating the approved talking points.

Tam at View From The Porch - Squirrel!

You don't get these shots with a cell phone.

Power Line - What? You Mean “Latinx” Didn’t Work?

In other words, the only reason Latinx has not caught on is that too many Hispanics are bigots. File this as another example of an ideologically-driven, non-falsifiable theory.

Again from The Other McCain - Can We Stay Sane a Few More Days? (Also: Has Trump Always Been Winning?)

While the data-addicted let the zig-zagging numbers send their moods swinging from manic hope to depressive gloom, it might all be an illusion. My gut hunch is that the vast majority of voters made up their minds which way they’d vote long ago.

Does a Retired Cop Have a Special Status?

Or is a retired police office just a regular Concealed Carry License holder? Chicago shooting: Retired Chicago police officer describes shooting suspected West Side car thief in Austin - ABC7 Chicago

Austin, in this case, is a neighborhood on the west side of Chicago. It is about 5 miles due west of the Loop.

This is the second time a retired officer has fired shots at someone trying to break into cars along that same block.

The retired Chicago police officer, who served 30 years on the force, said his neighbor, Terrell Jackson, called to alert him when someone was breaking into his car.

The guy who got shot is expected to be OK, and he was arrested.

Austin is currently listed by HeyJackass! as the most dangerous neighborhood in Chicago. It has seen 47 homicides, and 157 people shot and wounded, which I believe does include this incident. 7.16 square miles should not be this dangerous.

When the Press Hate Freedom of the Press

From First Street Journal we get the following. Journolism: When the credentialed media fail in their duties

A free press, and freedom of speech, is important to a free society. That is the reason that it is enshrined in the 1st Amendment to the constitution. But what happens when all of the press is in the pocket of one political party? That situation doesn't help the cause of freedom.

The members of the credentialed media mostly knew of President Joe Biden’s continuing mental decline, but, rather than “hold(ing) the powerful to account” and “speaking truth to power,” they kept their mouths, and keyboards, quiet. The stories of Mr Biden’s slow descent into dementia were many and obvious, but only in independent blogs and on social media; of the credentialed media, the New York Post is the only one I can recall which ever mentioned it.

And so with almost none of the legacy media telling the truth about Biden, and working overtime to discredit anyone who was, the bureaucrats were free to carry on expanding their power.

A Mathematical Pattern in Nature We Just Found

This is an interesting finding. Filling a plane (or 3 dimensions) with shapes that have soft corners. (See the video for how that "soft corner" property is defined.)

Mathematicians have for the first time described a new pattern in nature. I don’t want to say they “discovered” it because it’s been there all along. Probably sipping tea and quietly judging us for taking so long to notice.

This is an interesting finding, because since these shapes are used a lot in nature, it likely means that there are structural reasons for their use. This might have uses for man-made structures.

This is Sabine Hossenfelder's video A New Pattern in Nature