On a somewhat personal note, during a recent surge in rotavirus cases, I became sick. It quickly spiralled and I ended up spending a week in the ICU. According to the docs I’m very lucky to still be here.
This week the Trump FDA decided to remove rotavirus vaccines from its list of recommended childhood vaccines, along with COVID and others. People need to understand that our government is (literally) trying to kill us. I wish I was joking. From WSJ via Raw Story.
Was at the self checkout at a local supermarket. It was only for 15 items or less and we had maybe 18 items. But the full service checkout lines were jammed up with people with carts full of stuff. I wondered if the system would let us scan more than 15 items. If not I figured I would just pay in two batches.
We also bought two sandwiches and a pint of coleslaw at the deli. The guy making the sandwichs stuck labels on the polystyrene clamshell containers and told us we could take two bags of chips that came with the sandwiches, a lunch special. So we did.
Halfway through checking out an alarm goes off. I noticed there is an overhead video of us scanning and bagging groceries. Two green boxes on the screen highlight me putting the two small bags of chips directly in our shopping bags.
A woman who worked at the store came over and asked: why didn’t you scan those chips? (but in a nice, even tired, way). They came with the sandwiches. Well, you still have to scan them. Ok, doesn’t really make sense, but whatever. The woman used her badge, overriding the AI shoplifting detector, and let us finish bagging. I never did scan the chips.
I saw in the news that they were tearing down the old Lindy Boggs Medical Center in midtown New Orleans. I have to admit I didn’t know where this was at first. It had been abandoned since Katrina. I learned this was the old Mercy Hospital, where I was born.
Most people of my generation know Lindy Boggs as a member of the US House of Representatives from Louisiana, or more likely as Cokie Roberts mom. But she only held that seat because her husband, Hale Boggs, went missing in a mysterious airplane crash in Alaska.
At the time of his disappearance, Hale Boggs was the House Majority Leader, probably the most powerful person in Washington. He was a long time Democrat, but had shifted his views, especially on race, to line up with LBJ’s Great Society programs.
He was also notably a member of the Warren Commission, which investigated the JFK assassination. He was said to have disagreed with its findings and made himself unpopular with J. Edgar Hoover. He was also at odds with the president, Nixon.
Hale Boggs plane crashed in October 1972, just a few months after the Watergate Scandal broke. I still remember the news of his disappearance but I was all of 9 years old at the time. It was a big mystery and people expected the wreckage would be found in the spring after the snow in Alaska melted. But no wreckage was ever found. And Boggs faded from the public memory, especially given the events of those years.
If it weren’t for the recent demolition of the Boggs hospital I don’t think I would have thought about Hale Boggs and his disappearance again. You would think the strange disappearance of such a powerful man in such times would be remembered, at least by the conspiracy theory crowd, if nothing else. But today, reading the Wiki pages, his disappearance is more suspicious than ever. Maybe it’s time to look for that plane wreckage again.
So let me see. Billionaires are building huge, noisy, polluting buildings in a most secretive way. Mostly unchallenged reports are that they will be using vast amounts of water and electricity. The owners publicly state part of the goal is to eliminate huge numbers of jobs.
The only real paying customer today seems to be government surveillance organizations. One billionaire has already cashed out making himself the world’s first Trillionaire, before ever showing a nickel of profit or even explaining what these data centers are supposed to be used for.
I’m trying to think of one positive thing to say about the current big data center boom. Perhaps construction jobs, but they are temporary. Unpopular? I’m wondering why they aren’t even more unpopular. From Wired.
The Baffler on the Texas mega-gas station / convenience store.
In Texas (where else would you expect this?). People need to stop using Amazon.
There have been lots of changes at Google, mostly as it re-orients to AI. I have been a user of Google News for as long as I can remember and always found it adequate. Lately, however, it seems to be harder to control, giving me stories on subjects I don’t want, and most annoyingly, clickbait.
I decided to try a self-managed newsfeed, which is really what I want. Some reading lead me to Feedly. You select news sources that you like and it collects the stories and groups them for you.
I was going to wait a week or so before posting, but after one day, I’m more than ready to dump Google News.
I also find I’m spending less time reading news and focusing more on things that interest me. Google (lets face it) is in the business of keeping you looking at their pages. So I was getting lots of content that was meant to keep me engaged (I’m thinking things like celebrity gossip) that really don’t interest me. Well, I suppose they must interest me at some level because I do click on some of these stories. I will now be less well informed about pop culture, but I have a lot more time.
Unavailable in the US. Read it and weep. From Electrek.
A collection of articles from Boston Review. The last one by Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Freedom Foundation (and coiner of the word “enshittification”) is a must-read.
Epstein had a big ranch not far from here. The state of New Mexico is investigating a large number of crimes that happened there. Initially the federal government agreed to share its information on Epstein with the state of New Mexico to aid in prosecution. Now they are backing out of that pledge. Let that sink in. Federal law enforcement is (still) blocking this investigation. This time they aren’t just stonewalling victims and the public, but the state of New Mexico.
Steven A. Guccione 