nikhil.io

Entertaining. Thought the alternate ending would’ve been more likely (the highly-trained armchair psychoanalyst that I am 😆)

😭

Clever girl 🐘 ♥️

I wish they would blare portions of Tom Cruise’s COVID meltdown at all grocery stores in my lovely state. Someone on /r/desmoines posted an anti-masker patriot at our Costco who could use this message.

I’m on the phone with every f–king studio at night, insurance companies, producers, and they’re looking at us and using us to make their movies. We are creating thousands of jobs you motherf–kers.

I don’t ever want to see it again, ever! And if you don’t do it you’re fired, if I see you do it again you’re f–king gone. And if anyone in this crew does it – that’s it, and you too and you too. And you, don’t you ever f–king do it again.

That’s it! No apologies. You can tell it to the people that are losing their f-ing homes because our industry is shut down. It’s not going to put food on their table or pay for their college education.

That’s what I sleep with every night. The future of this f–king industry! So I’m sorry I am beyond your apologies. I have told you and now I want it and if you don’t do it you’re out. We are not shutting this f–king movie down! Is it understood?

If I see it again you’re f–king gone — and you are — so you’re going to cost him his job, if I see it on the set you’re gone and you’re gone.

That’s it. Am I clear?

Do you understand what I want? Do you understand the responsibility that you have? Because I will deal with your reason. And if you can’t be reasonable and I can’t deal with your logic, you’re fired. That’s it. That is it.

I trust you guys to be here. That’s it. That’s it guys. Have a little think about it. . . [inaudible].

That’s what I think of Universal and Paramount. Warner Brothers. Movies are going because of us. If we shut down it’s going to cost people f–king jobs, their home, their family. That’s what’s happening.

All the way down the line. And I care about you guys, but if you’re not going to help me you’re gone. OK? Do you see that stick? How many meters is that?

When people are standing around a f–king computer and hanging out around here, what are you doing? And if they don’t comply then send their names to Matt Spooner. That’s it.

I must have watched this 14,221 times. A parody of this (real) miniseries. There’s a Part III too.

In another sign of the lingering unrest over President Donald Trump’s election loss, an Arizona group sent the National Archives in Washington, D.C., notarized documents last week intended to deliver, wrongly, the state’s 11 electoral votes for him.

Mesa resident Lori Osiecki, 62, helped created a facsimile of the “certificate of ascertainment” that is submitted to formally cast each state’s electoral votes as part of an effort to prevent what she views as the fraudulent theft of the election.

“We seated before the legislators here. We already turned it in. We beat them to the game,” she said.

Timing and absolutely nothing else (like, say, legality) is everything, so check and mate. Emphasis mine:

“One thing I will say about conservatives, is if something is wrong, and we have lost — a true loss — then we accept,” she said. “We’re not going to drag people through the mud and fight it. But this clearly has got issues. I saw it with my own eyes and my own research. After that hearing, I was shocked we didn’t have any other marching orders.”

Pack it up, liberals. Lori did her “research”:

But in Trumpland, a vast conspiracy involving Democrats, the Chinese government, an international globalist cabal, rigged voting machines, corrupt state governments, and bought-off poll workers came together to steal the election from Trump. Many have rejected the results of the election entirely.

This includes a one paragraph “Dude… really?” from the Supreme Court over the “bid to invalidate more than 20 million votes.” So. Much. Winning.

“It’s time for this nonsense to end,” Detroit’s lawyer David Fink told Law&Crime in a phone interview. “The lawyers filing these frivolous cases that undermine democracy must pay a price,” Fink added.

but

Asked about the sanctions motion, Powell replied cryptically: “We are clearly over the target.”

On the other hand, every court that has heard her conspiracy theories about a supposed plot involving Dominion voting machines, dead Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, bipartisan government officials and election workers in counties across the United States found that narrative untethered to reality.

When conservative activist Meshawn Maddock obtained a list of allegedly dead Michigan voters, she didn’t report it to law enforcement.

[…]

The list of 150 or so names was part of a larger file of more than 2,000 people who “voted in Wayne County by absentee ballot that are CONFIRMED deceased,” claimed Maddock, a prominent Republican who is seeking to become the party’s state vice chair.

It would appear that the only way to make it in the party is by embracing batshit crazy. But there are pesky little ‘facts’ to contend with:

“I am certainly not dead!” wrote one woman […], including holiday photos of her family she had recently posted.

“Two people in my neighborhood are on this list,” wrote another man. “They’re very much alive. Hell, their boys play baseball with my sons.”

Mr. Babcock speaks for Sane America that’s bewildered by the post-election tantrums like these. Emphases mine:

Among the alleged dead was Bill Babcock, a Grosse Pointe Woods voter who said Tuesday he is “doing fine,” aside from the grueling year-end inventory he was performing in his job as a swimming pool salesman.

“I think it sucks,” he told Bridge Michigan on Tuesday, less than 24 hours after Maddock posted his name and home address in an attempt to prove voter fraud that state officials have not found.

“Can’t we just move on? There are bigger problems out there, like getting this vaccine thing situated,” Babcock said.

The SC swatted it away like the “Garbage, but dangerous garbage” it was, but even this “conservative evangelical American blogger and radio host” just had it with the sycophantic tantrum:

I personally think my company should pay me workers compensation for brain damage for having to read that lawsuit and related filings. It really is one of the stupidest bits of performative leg humping we have seen in the last five years. These attorneys general are willing to beclown themselves and their states all to get in good with the losing presidential candidate.

The suit is absurd on its face. These states seek to interfere in the internal affairs of other states when those states are not actually electing the President, but allowing their voters to chose members of the Electoral College.

The lawsuit appears to be a pile of shit (one wouldn’t expect any less from the Elite Strike Forces that surround the God Emperor) but:

If Texas were to win this, it would dissolve the horizontal federalism of our union and only expand the powers of the federal government. It would also lead to a Civil War as a handful of states overturn the rules and laws of other states and dictate those states’ internal affairs. Wait for Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo to give this precedent a whirl. Wait for progressive states to start suing conservative states over religious liberty, transgender rights, police brutality, tax policies that “steal” residents of progressive states, etc.

One can dream! He ends with a plea (emphasis mine):

I’m really tired of the Republican Party beclowning itself for a losing candidate out of fear for that candidate’s voters. That is all this is and delusions of fools notwithstanding, despite all sorts of stupid arguments being wrapped in pomp and “equal protection” phraseology, the election is over and Joe Biden will be President-Elect officially next week.

Guys, come on — you’re just going to spark crazy to violence [sic] at this point. The election wasn’t stolen and most of you know it and those of you who don’t know it need to, at some point, realize you’ve been lied to. And frankly, Ken Paxton needs to work on repentance for a whole lot of stuff.

Things are so crazy, that’s reasonable stuff from this guy:

Via PLG.

“[Cruz] has proven himself neither to be a genius in terms of the law nor a genius, frankly, in terms of [emotional intelligence]. He is a sad sack,” Shapiro, a Democrat, told CNN. “I would say to him — and, frankly, I’d say to my 17 colleagues who have gone along with this circus — I don’t know whether I need to send you a surgeon to examine your spine or a psychiatrist to examine your head. But something’s wrong with you if you continue to follow this president.”

Whatever. I think the Senator would be a lovely and strategic addition to the already Elite-as-fuck Strike Force Team.

Had to cache it because this is just lovely stuff. Pretty sure I had a mini-blackout when I read the Trainspotting part 💯

It’s a well-known fact that computers run faster in the evening.

Trump has been saying the pandemic has been totally under control since January, and said it would just “go away” in February.

He reiterated this in March as the virus surged, and insisted we had “perfect” tests that anyone could get after reports of faulty tests. He said he wanted pandemic-related shutdowns to end by Easter so churches could be “packed” while claiming Hydroxychloroquine would be a miracle cure for COVID-19.

In April he continued to promote Hydroxychloroquine without evidence and suggested we could inject disinfectants or use UVC light inside the body to kill the virus, and right up through May Trump was discouraging the use of masks and refused to require them anywhere, with him and Pence famously flouting requirements at hospitals and factories. Trump also claimed he was taking Hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic against the disease. At this point they were even planning to dismantle their own COVID-19 task force.

In June they were still insisting it was under control while fighting the FDA’s revocation of authorizations for Hydroxychloroquine, and denying that there was a second surge happening. They instead blamed the high infection statistics on there being more testing, and Trump suggested slowing down testing to improve the stats, noting he does not joke.

Rolling into July he still insisted he had things under control, claiming they had done an incredible job, as the White House nuked a trove of data previously available through the CDC while Trump was still hyping Hydroxychloroquine and his son was temporarily suspended from Twitter for continuing to spread disinformation about it.

Even in August, Trump claimed COVID-19 was totally under control, and the ~150k dead with a simple “it is what it is,”, and reiterated that the virus would go away all on its own. He finally encouraged the wearing of masks, but ignored all guidelines during his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican Convention.

In September Trump was saying that COVID-19 hurt “virtually nobody”, and openly disputed the CDC’s own claims about the effectiveness of masks.

In October Trump got COVID-19, and while still undergoing treatment, went on a quick spin around the hospital to wave to his supporters outside. He was discharged to the White House after only three days, posing for photo-ops without a mask. At this point White House officials finally concede that “we’re not going to control the pandemic.”. This would be the last time the COVID-19 task force would formally meet.

Since then Trump has pretty much avoided any and all public appearances except to complain about the election. November marked the point where a quarter of a million Americans had died of COVID-19. There are now more people dying each day of COVID-19 than died in the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001 or in the Invasion of Normandy.

That’s the joke.

♥️🐙♥️

“It has to stop,” Sterling said. Directing his remarks to Trump, he added, “Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot, someone is going to get killed. And it’s not right.”

Lest any members of the public fail to understand: Certifying the winner of a presidential election, as Sterling (a Republican) did, is not an act of treason. It is the fulfillment of America’s centuries-old tradition of upholding the nation’s most fundamental democratic values.

It’s no longer clear whether Trump’s base is lashing out on its own, or whether the statements by Trump, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Estes and a vast army of other GOP officials are what’s inciting Trump supporters to take vigilante action. What is certain is that the rhetoric is out of control. These are, of course, representatives of the party that claims to support a “pro-life” agenda — even while their words are moving ever closer to driving families from their homes and getting someone killed.

(cached)

“It is indefensible for lawyers to falsely proclaim widespread voting fraud, submit a pattern of frivolous court claims and actively seek to undermine citizens’ faith in our election’s integrity. We condemn this conduct without reservation.” said the letter.

Well, shit. Emphasis mine:

… a judge in Wisconsin dismissed the fourth and final lawsuit, noting that it is voters, not judges, who decide who goes to the White House.

“Federal judges do not appoint the president in this country,” U.S. District Judge Pamela Pepper wrote in a 45-page ruling.

“One wonders why the plaintiffs came to federal court and asked a federal judge to do so. After a week of sometimes odd and often harried litigation, the court is no closer to answering the ‘why.’ But this federal court has no authority or jurisdiction to grant the relief the remaining plaintiff seeks.”

The article notes that Judge Pepper also had to point out the following errors:

• “that Powell had sought 48 hours’ worth of surveillance footage from the TCF Center — which is in Michigan, not Wisconsin.”
• “that Powell misspelled the name of her lead plaintiff, referring to William Feehan, a would-be Trump elector, as ‘Meehan.’”
• “that the plaintiff appeared to have made up a quote purporting to come from a decision made by Pepper’s own colleague Judge J. P. Stadtmueller. The quote simply doesn’t exist.”

About as Elite as it gets.

She then proceeded to attend a WH Party, of course.

President Trump’s lawyer Jenna Ellis has informed associates she tested positive for the coronavirus, multiple sources tell Axios, stirring West Wing fears after she attended a senior staff Christmas party on Friday.

“She had the nerve to show up at the senior staff Christmas party knowing everyone was furious with her for constantly stirring Trump up with nonsense,” said a senior administration official.

Because she sat right next to the Fearless Team Leader, and because I am a child:

We can’t rule out that Rudy’s fart gave Jenna Ellis Covid

In other words, of which there are many, since the Supreme Court needed only 18 to hurl this nonsense into the Tidal Basin, Rep. Mike Kelly handed the Supreme Court of the United States a reeking dead fish and the Court refused delivery. And the Kelly suit looked like it was drafted by Clarence Darrow compared to that idiocy that emerged from Texas Tuesday morning, and Kelly’s suit was something at which even Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito turned up their noses. The administration* is done like dinner. SCOTUS has precious engagements.

A channel name is LEAD SYNTH FART 💯 I am a child and am fine with this.

Mr. Giuliani appeared on Fox News earlier on Sunday. Speaking with the host Maria Bartiromo via satellite, Mr. Giuliani repeated baseless claims about fraud in Georgia and Wisconsin on “Sunday Morning Futures.” When asked if he believed Mr. Trump still had a path to victory, he said, “We do.”

On Monday, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan said that a four-hour hearing last Wednesday with a roomful of unmasked witnesses had all the ingredients of a super-spreader event.

“That hearing last week was reckless, it was unnecessary and didn’t change a thing,” she said. “It’s action like this that threatens our ability to open up some of these businesses.”

A member of The Elite Strike-Force Team bemoaned being “canceled” and asked to resign from an elite club after calling for violence against the country’s former CyberSecurity chief who said that the elections were “the most secure in American history” (which was the opinion that got him fired.) Mercifully, Operation #shitkraken continues to deliver despite this minor upset.

Here’s some lovely, old-school, traditional, conservative barbarism:

“Anybody who thinks the election went well, like that idiot Krebs … he should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot,” diGenova said on the radio show.

Which drew this impassioned response from a Georgia election official:

It was all “hyperbole” and “in jest”, of course! They tend to pick the best subjects for humor. And only the most Elite can handle the spotlight:

“It’s egregious, I’m at a loss for words at how absurd those and offensive those comments were, I think that’s got to violate some type of code of professional conduct for the DC Bar, and I hope they look into it,” Travis, the former deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said at the Aspen Institute’s virtual Cyber Summit on Tuesday.

“He’s a small man with a small mind and bad mustache,” Travis said of diGenova, adding that he hoped diGenova would “take back those words, apologize and recognize that maybe the hot lights of the studio got to him.”

Operation #shitkraken appears to limping along quite well.

A living caricature who could’ve been drunk, who was likened to an SNL character, who put out so much Can-I-See-Your-Manager Conspiracy Karen Energy she had to be shushed by the flatulent Leader of the Elite Strike-Force Team, who described herself as a “Duchess of CyberSecurity¹”, and who was definitely arrested for harassing her boyfriend’s ex with videos of them having sex.

Imagine my surprise when she was found to be “not credible.” I’d genuinely hoped she was an elite troll and that it was performance art of highest calibre², but there’s a higher likelihood of Mediacom deciding to treat its customers with respect.

Update

Even though both the Fearless Leader and his Elite Sidekick have COVID, she won’t quarantine unless her God Emperor tells her to:

“I would take it seriously if it came from Trump, because Trump cares about American lives,” she said, adding that if fringe networks that regularly traffic in coronavirus misinformation such as One America News or Newsmax “told me to go get tested, I would do it.”

1. With a certificate of completion from the prestigious ITT Tech.↩︎

2. I’m glad others are as worried as I am about how Kate McKinnon could possibly do Mr. Guiliani and Ms. Carone.↩︎

‘Reporters’ at the Failing NYTimes explore: “How Is Trump’s Lawyer Jenna Ellis ‘Elite Strike Force’ Material?” (cached) I should just copypasta the whole thing but here we go:

Since she graduated law school in 2011, nothing in her record in the courtroom […] shows any time spent litigating election law cases.

She holds herself out as an expert on the Constitution based on her self-published book and her teaching of pre-law classes to undergraduates. She has never appeared in federal district or circuit court, where most constitutional matters are considered, according to national databases of federal cases, and does not appear to have played a major role in any cases beyond her criminal and civil work in Colorado.

The Trump campaign and its supporters have so far filed about 50 election-related lawsuits. She has not signed her name or appeared in court to argue a single one.

“I find it astonishing that she’s gotten to this point,” said Stephanie Stout, a lawyer in private practice in Greeley, Colo., who worked with Ms. Ellis a few years ago defending a man who was accused of attempted murder. The partnership was short-lived, Ms. Stout said, because their client fired Ms. Ellis, deeming her not up to the job.

“She just didn’t have the legal chops,” added Ms. Stout, who ultimately won the case on her own. “After that, Jenna decided that I had stolen the case from her.”

Craig Silverman, a lawyer in Denver who used to host a radio show on legal matters and current events that Ms. Ellis occasionally appeared on, described her as “an attorney of scant accomplishment.” The cases she discussed with him, he recalled, were bread-and-butter criminal defense work. And he said he had always expected her to pursue a career in teaching and media — not the law.

[…] Though Mr. Silverman once considered himself friendly with Ms. Ellis, he said her insistence of widespread voter fraud had so unnerved him that he believed she might have violated Colorado’s rules of professional conduct for lawyers, which prohibit making false statements.

In 2015 she joined Colorado Christian University […] [which] does not have a law school or a program in constitutional law. Ms. Ellis taught pre-law and political science to undergraduates and was part of the team that developed and advised a moot court program, according to a university spokesman. Eventually she was made an assistant professor of legal studies — but never a “professor of constitutional law,” which is how she identified herself in pieces for The Washington Examiner that she started writing in 2017.

Here’s how you get noticed and get a spot on the ultra-selective Elite Strike-Force team: become “star player in the president’s theater of grievance and denial”:

But she did have an attribute that can carry just as much weight in his eyes: the ability to go on television and deliver scathing attacks on his critics.

Ms. Ellis beat the drum for the president on cable and wherever else she had a platform.

But those who know Ms. Ellis said they imagined that her willingness to say almost anything in the president’s defense was what he found appealing about her.

Her response is to simply call the entire thing a “false ‘report’” and dream publicly about becoming the next Amy Coney Barrett.

The failing NY Times plans to run a hit piece today. They’re trying to undermine the public’s confidence in the President’s election integrity battle by pushing a false “report” on my credentials & experience.

Well… Libs said ACB wasn’t qualified. And she’s Justice ACB now. 😉

Despite being cut loose from President Donald Trump’s legal team, Powell is forging ahead with her election-conspiracy crusade to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential win.

But the conservative attorney’s self-described Kraken keeps getting its tentacles tied in a knot of typos and errors — including the recent backward claim, later amended, that a pernicious voting algorithm took votes from Biden and flipped them to Trump.

So when she tried to argue that “pernicious” algorithms in Dominion’s voting machines¹ flipped the election in Georgia for her guy? Well it was really late at night and she had other shit to do and she really meant the opposite (emphasis mine):

“If I had a Nicole for every mistake I’ve made in life, I could retire,” Powell’s email to a reporter said. “Wish I had you as a proofreader at 1 a.m.”

“In addition, counsel had internet and computer problems that delayed our communications, in addition to what can only be called ‘operator errors’ by lead counsel late night that caused the omission of the list of authorities and a substantive misstatement thoughtfully identified by CNBC this morning, which the contemporaneously filed brief corrects,” Powell wrote.

1. The really sophisticated ones that count things.↩︎

That would be a real, casually racist quote from one of Mr. Giuliani’s witnesses testifying in Michigan as part of Operation Shitkraken. I had to save this one.

And: Naturalized Indian people supporting politicians who vilify new immigrants and want to keep them out is kinda on-brand 👏👏👏

Watched because Denzel and Revenge. Not sure why I bothered finishing it. Absolutely awful. The cinematographer appears to have borrowed the ghastly verdigris-like palette from this terribly photoshopped poster, and keeps twitching the camera with the giddiness of a raver who’s taken two of them Mitsubishi pills that were in vogue at the time.

Dakota Fanning is the only other reason to endure this. She was only ten in 2004 but acted like she’d been at it for at least three decades.

To the surprise of no one (well, normal people), “The Kraken”, authored by an ex-member of the “Elite Strike-Force Team”, turned out to be a “truly awful” and unmistakably QAnon-laced lawsuit full of basic formatting, spelling, and grammatical errors that would “drive a proofreader to drink.”

From a must-read via PLG:

This is all batshit crazy. It is as stupid an elections lawsuit as I’ve ever seen. And there’s no guarantee that it’s the worst case we’re going to see, because even though their legal arguments are being dismissed with extreme prejudice, when it comes to the political/propaganda aims of the litigants—this stuff works. Once the true believers are on board, it’s hard to get them off.

[…] The Kraken is the stupidest election fraud lawsuit in history today. But who knows what next week will bring.

Amazing. It’s almost as if The Best People don’t really care about the substance of the lawsuits¹ but want to seen as filing them in the courts of “activist” judges who swat them away, quite unfairly of course, for the sophomoric and baseless crocks of shit they are. Conservative, Republican, Trump-appointed activist judges, that is.

1. And as if they ‘wrote’ it using a 1999 version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking.↩︎

Bilal Göregen (YouTube, Instagram) is the Turkish street musician in my favorite video of 2020.

He sounds like a very positive, gracious, and sweet human being on this KnowYourMeme interview¹ which features this delightful nugget (emphasis mine):

Q: How has the response been from your previous fans and followers that were around before the meme? Also, have you received any interesting or wholesome messages from fans since your meme went viral that you can share with us?

A: When I read the comments section after my video went viral, I see that my Turkish followers still do not understand the meme, and they ask questions like, “Is the channel stolen? Why are there so many foreigners here? Where are the Turks?”

Assorted Bilal things: Here’s a ten-hour version of his viral hit. And here’s him making a lot of Indian people very happy. And lest I forget, this is the original Finnish folk song he’s covering:

1. Which TIL has an editorials section…↩︎

A lovely Techbro aside from the ongoing #shitkraken.

Greg Stenstrom, another poll watcher, said that in Delaware County, 47 USB cards were missing.

“As a computer scientist, an American and a patriot, it doesn’t matter who those votes were for. It was shocking to me that that could even happen,” he said.

“There is no cure for this, no remedy for this. I don’t believe as a citizen and an observer to this, anyone can certify this with a good conscience.”

(Emphasis mine.) Indeed, Gregory. When USB cards go missing, one needs formal training in Algorithms, Data Structures, the Theories of Computation and Complexity, Formal Logic (of course), and more, to express appropriate outrage at an election that’s fraudulent only in your head and only because your guy didn’t win.

Will tag updates as I read them with amusement and disbelief. Armando Ianucci must be weeping right now. All emphases are mine.

In a court filing signed by Rudy Giuliani and Marc Scaringi¹ — the two remaining attorneys on the case after everyone else quit — the campaign asked for the judge to hand over Pennsylvania’s electors.

[…] “You’re asking this court to invalidate more than 6.8 million votes, thereby disenfranchising every single voter in the commonwealth,” Brann said at the hearing. “Can you tell me how this result can possibly be justified?”

And:

Before Tuesday, Rudy Giuliani last registered an appearance in the U.S. federal judiciary in 1992, and in the view of many legal observers, it showed. The former mayor of New York flubbed basic concepts of law and, in at least one instance, displayed a poor command of the English language.

Giuliani confessed that he did not know the word “opacity,” applying the Bizarro World definition that it “probably means you can see.”

“It means you can’t,” U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann corrected².

[…] When pressed by the judge on what standard of scrutiny should be applied to Pennsylvania government’s action, Giuliani replied: “The normal one.”

And because IANAL, some helpful context:

At one point, he even appeared ignorant of the concept of strict scrutiny, a basic and fundamental concept for a practicing lawyer to know when arguing a case on Fourteenth Amendment grounds. Imagine if you were lying in an operating room, about to go under general anesthesia, and heard your surgeon ask, “Hey, what are all these knives for?” Now you are in general orbit around whatever planet on which the former New York mayor happens to be residing.

Onward:

At one point he referred to president-elect Joe Biden as a “crook” and chastised the press for reporting that he has no evidence of fraud. Mr Giuliani has offered no evidence in court of fraud.

[…] He compared election observers being corralled away from the votes counts to a moment in the movie in which the eponymous character asks a witness in court how many fingers he is holding up, claiming that they could not see a thing.

[…] As what appeared to be hair dye dripped down both sides of his face…

[…] Ellis described the assembled lawyers as “an elite strike-force team” working on behalf of the president.

And finally:

President Donald Trump’s campaign says it’s dropping its Michigan election lawsuit because it succeeded in halting certification of election results in Detroit and surrounding Wayne County, despite the outcome already having been certified in favor of President-elect Joe Biden.

An “Absolutely Brilliant” Elite Mercurial Powerhouse Leader of the Best Legal Team³ one could assemble given the seriousness of the charges against our democratic systems, folks. So unbelievably competent, Snopes had to publish an entry about his performance in court 💯

---

Update 20 Nov 2020.

But his attorneys have repeatedly made elementary errors in those high-profile cases: misspelling “poll watcher” as “pole watcher,” forgetting the name of the presiding judge during a hearing, inadvertently filing a Michigan lawsuit before an obscure court in Washington and having to refile complaints after erasing entire arguments they’re using to challenge results.

“The sloppiness just serves to underscore the lack of seriousness with which these claims are being brought,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine.

[…] “I know crimes. I can smell them,” Giuliani said as streaks of sweat and what appeared to be hair dye ran down the sides of his face. “You don’t have to smell this one. I can prove it to you 18 different ways.”

[…] “Part of the reason he doesn’t have good lawyers is he doesn’t have good claims to bring.”

Huh.

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Update 21 Nov 2020

The painful monologue screeched to a halt whenever Rudy hit the guardrails of judicial questioning. Asked the most important question in nearly any election lawsuit, what standard of review should apply, he was caught completely off guard. For non-lawyers, it’s hard to explain just how appalling this is. Standard of review is the sort of thing that every first-year law student learns. But rather than agreeing with the judge that the case demanded “strict scrutiny,” or arguing that it called for rational basis review, he simply advocated for “the normal one.” If legal Twitter had a voice in that moment, the scream would have been heard around the world.

[…] But what Rudy did next crossed a line: he lied. He didn’t spin, argue, or put his best take on the evidence, he flat-out lied to a judge in open court.

[…] Actually, Rudy’s first lie came before he ever set foot in the Pennsylvania courthouse. On Tuesday morning, Rudy petitioned to represent the Trump campaign, which is a routine step for lawyers appearing out of state. If you aren’t licensed to practice in a court, you have to request permission to argue. Sadly, Rudy couldn’t complete this two-page form without committing perjury. Rudy claimed to be licensed in the District of Columbia, where in fact he’s currently suspended for not paying his dues.

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Update 25 Nov 2020

The only place maybe worse is Michigan, and particularly the city of Detroit. The city of Detroit probably had more voters than it had citizens. I’m exaggerating a bit, but all you have to do is look at statistical data and you can see that the fraud was rampant and out of control.

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Update 26 Nov 2020

It keeps getting more divorced from reality.

“I think we may actually have won Virginia, but that’s another battle,” Mr Giuliani said.

The comments were made during a meeting of Republican state lawmakers in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on Wednesday.

Mr Biden defeated Mr Trump in Virginia by 451,138 votes.

As for Pennsylvania, where the plaintiff literally phoned it in at Gettysburg:

Despite having told a federal judge that theirs was “not a fraud case”, the 76-year-old former mayor of New York introduced a series of Pennsylvania residents to complain about fraud, to cheers and whoops, and the occasional audible sharp intake of breath from the staunchly pro-Trump crowd.

[…] On Monday Pennsylvania certified the vote, meaning that the process is concluded. Mr Biden won the state by 80,555 votes.

[…] He claimed that 682,770 mail-in ballots entered in Allegheny County and Philadelphia were “not observed by any single Republican.”

“They could have been from the same person,” he said. “There could have been multiples, there was no name on them”.

There’s more, of course.

“The mail-in ballots that were received were not inspected at all by any Republicans. They were hidden from Republicans,” he said.

He said he “couldn’t be entirely sure,” though.

And arithmetic, compounded with the passage of time can lead to undemocratic effects:

He expressed surprise, once again, that when he went to sleep Mr Trump was in the lead but that lead evaporated.

“What are the odds that they all switched, overnight? They switched, by the next day.”

The lead evaporated because more Democrats than Republicans voted by mail, and as their votes were slowly counted, the pendulum swung in Mr Biden’s favour.

1. "The day before a major argument in Pennsylvania, three lawyers for Trump withdrew and were replaced in part by Marc Scaringi, an attorney and talk show host who wrote a blog post after the election referring to ‘President-elect Joe Biden.’ Scaringi himself had told listeners on his radio show days after the election that ‘there are really no bombshells’ about to drop ‘that will derail a Biden presidency,’ and noting that several of the lawsuits ‘don’t seem to have much evidence to substantiate their claims.’ - The Independent↩︎

2. “Big words, your honor,” Giuliani said.↩︎

3. Screenshot is from the Facebook page of a True Believer. This person and the commenter are not trying to be funny. They cannot be, even if they tried. “Believe me.”↩︎

Watched with LD. Reminded me of “Hereditary” (it’s a slow burn) but with The Evil being this chimera of financial insolvency, really bad trust issues, childhood trauma, and severe affluenza. Jude Law was perfect, but Carrie Coon was so fucking good as the beleagured yet passively complicit partner and mostly grieving person. The scene shot from the stable facing the manor was genius. Sean Durkin (writer and director) stuck the landing perfectly. Lovely stuff.

Tedious, uneven, rushed, and a colossal waste of an interesting premise and the talents of several amazing actors (Ron Perlman, Dana Delany, Andre Royo, Alona Tal, and a brilliant Garret Dillahunt.) You can skip the latter half of the episodes in the first season (here’s a recap) and skip-watch all but the last three episdoes of the second, and still know what’s going on. It’s as if they were told there wasn’t going to be a third

If impatient, skip to the last minute.

This is Dogor 🐾, an 18,000-year old puppy preserved in Siberian permafrost. His name means “friend.” He was discovered as a lump of frozen mud near Yakutsk and lies at a private museum.

Dogor left the wilderness as a lump of soil and ice, but scientists could make out the head and paws of what they believed at first to be a young wolf.

Fyodorov told The Washington Post that he carefully cleaned off dirt and debris to reveal near-intact fur — “extremely rare for animals of that time period.”

“It’s an amazing feeling, to see, touch and feel the history of earth,” he said.

Other researchers, affiliated with the Centre for Paleogenetics in Stockholm (Twitter), think he could be “part of the evolutionary bridge that turned a fierce wild animal into man’s best friend.”

Testing on a rib bone has revealed the animal’s age: about two months, said Stanton, a postdoctoral scholar who has been working for more than a year on a broader attempt to answer lingering questions about canine history.

The analysis also put Dogor’s short life at a particularly interesting period of time, right around when many wolf lineages were going extinct and dogs are thought to have emerged. Exactly how and when they evolved from wolves is unclear; one recent study estimates between 20,000 to 40,000 years ago.

These are memo pads that “excavate objects” as they are used. A bit more expensive than your average PostIt, but a very lovely idea.

Informed Choice Iowa is a group that “unites Iowans seeking to preserve their medical freedoms.” They are “pro-science” folk that count “ex-vaxxers”, “selective vaxxers”, “non-vaxxers”, and “vaxxers” among their members. I’m guessing that this list doesn’t include a single practicing physician.

And here’s them celebrating their freedoms, by which they mean a blatant disregard for the science they claim to love and the Iowans they claim to serve. Need confirmation but I hear that eating at least two tubes of toothpaste is on the agenda for their next idiot congregation.

Here’s a local news story about this superspreader event.

One should be good 80%+ of time between that and the awesome pgcli.

Tapped this YouTube suggestion on a lazy Sunday. This man pushed my capacities for sympathy and empathy to their breaking points in this 20-minute highlight reel. I don’t know what to type here other than quote the very first sentence of his Fandom wiki page:

Raj is widely regarded as one of the worst and most useless chefs in Hell’s Kitchen history.

I don’t watch the show and don’t have a full context. But the most charitable assessment I can offer after sitting through the highlight reel below is this: The man is wired very, very differently, which I suppose makes for engaging (cruel?) television 🤷‍♂️

I created YVFT site after my Conservative voting aunt complained on Facebook that there weren’t enough police to deal with disruptive teenagers in her town. I wanted to scream, “But you voted for this!” without looking like a lunatic.

Turns out Miyazaki’s dad was an aeronautical engineer.

You could almost just narrate the body changes and narrate the dream. So here she’s asleep. She sees a crab and her color starts to change a little bit then she turns all dark. Octopuses will do that when they leave the bottom. This is a camouflage like she’s just subdued a crab and now she’s going to sit there and eat it and she doesn’t want anyone to notice her. It’s a very unusual behavior to see the color come and go on her mantle like that. I mean, just to be able to see all the different color patterns just flashing one after another… you don’t usually see that when an animal’s sleeping which really is fascinating.

But yeah if she’s dreaming that’s the dream.

– David Scheel

🐶

(Source Unknown)

Reynolds said election victories for Republicans in the state this week show Iowans support her approach. “It was a validation of our balanced response to COVID-19, one that is mindful of both public health and economic health,” Reynolds said.

Because political victories, not cases or deaths, should inform and ‘validate’ one’s strategy when dealing with a raging pandemic.

Woo! Covers the biggest reason why I use jq (grep for fields) which, as the gron author notes, is more general-purpose and takes a little more effort to understand and use.

It helps minimize or eliminate popping sounds (“aspirated plosives”) like when you say ‘pop’ or ‘pepper’ or ‘pots’!