Election tricks: Authoritarian shenanigans in Georgia

Radical right authoritarians love filthy dirty tricks. They love 'em to bits. This story is juicy. The NYT reports (not paywalled):

Heritage Foundation Spreads Deceptive Videos 

About Noncitizen Voters

The right-wing think tank has been pushing misinformation about voting into social media feeds. The Georgia secretary of state’s office called one video “a stunt.”

In July, two men went door to door at a sprawling apartment complex in Norcross, Ga., an Atlanta suburb that is a hub for the region’s fast-growing Latino population, asking residents if they were U.S. citizens and whether they were registered to vote.

Speaking in Spanish, often peeking from behind half-closed doors, seven people told the men that they were not citizens but that they were registered to vote.

Although the two men claimed to represent a company helping Latinos navigate the election system, they were actually working with the Heritage Foundation and carrying a hidden camera. Days later, the conservative think tank posted a video on the social media platform X containing some of the footage the men had captured, calling it “staggering” evidence that 14 percent of noncitizens in Georgia — which Heritage said extrapolated to more than 47,000 people — were registered to vote.

“Based on our findings,” the video concluded, “the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy.”

The video was reposted by Elon Musk, X’s owner, who called it “extremely disturbing.” It quickly went viral.

But under scrutiny, those claims do not hold up. Three of the seven people Heritage filmed later said they had misspoken. State investigators found no evidence that any of the seven people on the tape had ever registered to vote. A spokesman for Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, called the video “a stunt.” [A stunt? How about corrupt authoritarian sleaze?]

It was one of several misleading videos that the Heritage Foundation has pumped into social media feeds this year. While the once-staid think tank has received attention recently for Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for a future Trump administration that the group funded, it has also made its mark with an aggressive effort to shape public opinion, seeding falsehoods about the integrity of the 2024 election across social media and conservative news outlets.

At the center of that effort is the Oversight Project, an arm of Heritage that conducts what it describes as investigations into immigration policy, among other topics. Borrowing from covert tactics used by the group Project Veritas, the Oversight Project has published videos about the supposed threat of migrant voting in shelters on the Texas border, in New York City and in North Carolina.

Few groups have done more to propel the false, but snowballing, theory that noncitizens are preparing to vote in droves in November, threatening the integrity of the election.

“The immigrant becomes the boogeyman,” said Richard L. Hasen, an expert on elections law at U.C.L.A. law school. “It provides a means of delegitimizing Democratic victories and creates a path for challenging them.”

Several election experts derided the Oversight Project’s methodology as deeply flawed. The group’s figures suggest it spoke to a total of 50 people — statistically, a tiny sampling — before coming to a determination that one in seven noncitizen residents of Georgia may be illegally registered to vote.

In the interest of honesty, the Heritage Foundation ought to change its name to the CCALF (Corrupt Cynical Authoritarian Liar Foundation). CCALF has a nice, truthful ring to it.

Heritage has branched out

from just climate science denial

Trump's 2020 election admission revisited; Federal court rot update; Update on the Russkis

USA Today reports:

The reaction to Trump's most recent comments from some far-right activists and influencers has been unusually stark.

White nationalist Nick Fuentes blasted Trump Sept. 4 for admitting that he lost the 2020 election, and said that he will work to get voters not to back Trump.

"So, why did we do Stop the Steal? Why did did anyone go to Jan. 6? Why did any one go to jail? ... It would have been good to know that before 1,600 people got charged," Fuentes said on his podcast, referring to the criminal charges for those who invaded and ransacked the Capitol. "It would’ve been good to know that before (I) had all my money frozen, put on a no-fly list, banned from everything, lost all my bank and payment processing.”

Fuentes, a podcaster and Holocaust denier who dined with Trump and the notorious rapper Ye at Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach, Fla., in 2022 went on to call it a "tremendous betrayal" and "callus indifference to the sacrifices that his supporters made on his behalf."

That is weird. Some White nationalists are in a snit because DJT is pretending to be more or less moderate. They are too stupid to know that everything DJT says is a lie to get re-elected. What a bunch of idiots.

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A couple of recent fun-filled items remind us of the long-lasting damage DJT inflicted on the federal courts with his radical and/or incompetent judge picks. Well, at least the radical right authoritarian Federalist Society and Leonard Leo are happy about the presence of radical authoritarian crackpot Trump judges on the federal bench.

Above the Law reports: 

Ninth Circuit Judges Sick And Tired Of Unqualified Trump Judge's 

Spamming The Record With Irrelevant Screeds

Lawrence VanDyke is unqualified to be a United States Circuit Judge. The ABA warned everyone about this, noting that VanDyke was “arrogant, lazy, an ideologue, and lacking in knowledge of the day-to-day practice including procedural rules.” But Leonard Leo and Donald Trump rammed VanDyke onto the Ninth Circuit anyway and he’s used his tenure to confirm the ABA’s prescience.

He’s used his dissents to compare his colleagues to criminals or claim that they are “possessed.” The former included a lampshading footnote explaining that he preferred to not cite any caselaw, instead just insulting the rest of the court.

Eventually Judge Andrew Hurwitz penned a pointed concurrence chastising the VanDyke’s unprofessional language as the province of “pundits and partisans” and inappropriate for a legal opinion.

Alas, this is a feature not a bug, these rambling dissents emanating from VanDyke’s corner and designed to stake his claim to MAGA Supreme Court papabile [worthy of being or eligible to be pope] should Judge Ho [a radical authoritarian far more dangerous than the blithering but compliant idiot VanDyke] lose his touch for disingenuous bullshit that exists merely as writing samples for Leonard Leo to ruminate over between calling the cops and causing wrongful arrest settlements.

That's wonderful, right? Not? OK. Another article by Above the Law reports about another delightful authoritarian radical crackpot DJT judge:

Trump Judge Very Sad About Being Called 'Trump Judge' 

When He Does Stuff Only Trump Judges Do

Judge strikes down Illinois law banning concealed weapons from public transit as unconstitutional... but he would prefer you not mention how he got that job

Yesterday, Judge Iain Johnston of the Northern District of Illinois struck down a law banning guns from Chicago’s trains. State law included a provision that a concealed carry license did not cover bringing a weapon onto public transit. If you thought fireworks on a train platform were dangerous, imagine an errant gunshot. Alas, Judge Johnston isn’t worried about these safety concerns.

What Judge Johnston is worried about is the possibility that people might connect his conversion of NRA talking points into a published opinion to him being a Federalist Society-vetted (member 1995-1998!) Trump appointee. And rather than just suck that up, he decided to lampshade it off the top with a footnote, I guess to guilt some reporter into not hurting the judge’s fee-fees with an accurate headline.

“Trump-appointed judge allows firearms on Illinois public transit” is a likely chyron for this decision. That’s unfortunate. Federal judges—including those who will review this decision—engage in exacting, thoughtful, and careful analyses that are not results oriented or reducible to headlines and chyrons. We’re doing the best we can.

Counter: You’re not.

.... No one wants to be saddled with the same title as Aileen Cannon. But if the robe fits, you know?

However, let us heed Judge Johnston’s call and not render this opinion “reducible to headlines and chyrons.” How does the opinion stand on its own intellectual merits?

To describe this decision as “exacting, thoughtful, and careful” does grave violence to the English language. It is an amateurish trainwreck… pun obviously intended. Just a collection of clumsy examples, contradictory arguments, and “historical” chestnuts gathered by FedSoc academics and published in student journals dumped beneath a caption.

Since Judge Johnston is so convinced that governments cannot exclude guns from their property [public transit in this case], folks you might think people could try to bring shotguns into his courtroom sometime and see how that goes for them. The answer would be NOT WELL! That’s because, having decided that the Second Amendment would cover regulating government property generally, the burden shifts to whether the government can categorize the location as a “sensitive place.” And for any would-be courtroom cowboys, Justice Thomas explained in Bruen that while other people can and should dodge bullets on their way home from work, he and his fellow judges personally exist in a sensitive place.

Judge Johnston sounds like more fun than a barrel of enraged, heavily armed monkeys! MAGA to that. Gun fights on the choo-choo and in busses sound like a lot of fun for all involved, participants and audience alike!

The 9th Circuit is the big purple blob on the left

with 9 states included in it, incl. AK and HI

The 5th Circuit, TX, LA, MS, is

where Trump judges really dominate with most

major MAGA anti-democracy appeals now coming from there

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Those darned Russkis are at it again. They like to participate in US elections. Vox reports:

The right-wing podcasters turned Russian 

propaganda dupes, explained

The DOJ says Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson and others were unwitting Russian stooges

A cadre of right-wing online personalities including Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Lauren Southern have all allegedly become unwitting agents of Russian information warfare and its activities in the United States, according to an alarming 32-page federal indictment unsealed by the US District Court of the Southern District of New York on Wednesday.

The group of far-right and right-leaning influencers, most of whom are known for podcasts and YouTube shows, are all members or former members of Tenet Media, a Nashville-based content creation company co-owned by yet another well-known conservative media pundit, Lauren Chen.

The Department of Justice is alleging that since its founding in 2022, Tenet has served as a front for Russian agents to spread Russian state-directed content using each of these pundits’ platforms.

“The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to covertly further its own propaganda efforts,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

Merrick Garland? Hey Merrick! Why not prosecute Trump? Oh right, you're protecting him. Never mind.

Good ole' American radical right authoritarian pundits. They are either dumb as a sack of rocks, cynical authoritarian liars and manipulators or both. While I still can, I vote for the latter. 

About Perplexity

Some months ago, I became aware of Perplexity, an AI powered search engine at https://www.perplexity.ai/ . Initially it didn't seem to be interesting after trying Microsoft's AI Copilot chatbot and getting disappointing results. However, Google's regular search algorithm was giving back less useful, more irrelevant results over time. 

Google's deterioration in search result quality prompted regular but occasional Perplexity searches, the results of which were hit or miss, but usually reasonably good hits. With time, my ability to ask questions and follow-up questions got more sophisticated and on-point. With less room for misinterpretation of my questions, Perplexity's results generally got better. By now, more than half of my searches are with Perplexity, not standard Google. That was quite unexpected. I had been primarily using Google search since the early 2000s and did not expect that anything could displace it.

Using AI raises some questions. One is energy use by AI compared to standard searches. A traditional Google search query uses approximately 0.0003 kWh (1.08 kJ) of energy. By contrast, an AI-powered search query uses about 10 times more energy. 1 kJ is the energy dissipated as heat with an electric current of one ampere passing through a resistance of one ohm for one second. Anyway, the amount of energy use for AI searching is huge. If most online searching converts to AI, gigantic amounts of new electricity generation will be needed.

Another is who owns Perplexity. Perplexity AI is a privately-owned startup company founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. Aravind Srinivas currently serves as the CEO of Perplexity. The company raised a total of $165 million in funding as of 2024. The company reached a valuation of over $1 billion in 2024, making it a "unicorn" startup. Notable investors include Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Databricks, Bessemer Venture Partners, Susan Wojcicki, Jeff Dean, Yann LeCun, Andrej Karpathy, Nat Friedman, and Garry Tan, among others. I don't know anything about those owners but they could wind up being a new batch of billionaires. That makes them potentially important politically and socially.

FWIW, some of the wonks over at r/lexfridman are impressed with the depth of knowledge that Srinivas has. 

Another issue with AI is when it gets answers wrong, it can be really wrong. It is best to know something about what you ask for so that a bad answer can be more easily spotted. If you know nothing about what you ask about, checking some of the links to information sources is needed. But even then, AI can sneak bad answers past a person. One problem with AI is that it usually isn't as good as a person at summarizing information. An article about research in Australia on AI search results commented that "AI summaries often missed emphasis, nuance and context; included incorrect information or missed relevant information; and sometimes focused on auxiliary points or introduced irrelevant information."

I found the same with some of my searches. However, searches with little or no nuance, e.g., recitation of science facts or calculations, have been reliable for me so far. 

One weakness is searches that ask about commercial products. AI tends to rely on what companies says about their own products. That can easily lead to false answers. One example was a query about the publisher of clinical evidence about the sleep aid Relaxium Sleep, an over the counter product that recently started advertising on TV. I asked Perplexity if the publisher, Annex Publishers, was a reputable science source. Perplexity said it was a good publisher. Based on the Relaxium clinical sleep data, I knew the publisher was fly-by-night crap and the Relaxium people were quacks. 

So I posed a follow-up question asking why Perplexity said Annex Publishers was reputable when in fact it published low quality to fraudulent science data. That apparently prompted Perplexity to change its search parameters to look for indicia of high quality science publishing, not to take the propaganda Annex put out about itself. The new answer was that Annex indeed was a source of low quality science information, which its publishing guidelines made clear.

From what I can tell, it looks like AI search really could come to dominate online search. At this point, I presume I am a beta tester for Perplexity and sooner or later, the searches will need to be monetized either by larding answers up with ads or by charging people to use the energy-guzzling search engine. 

I'm not sure what I will do when that day comes. I'll figure it out then. But at least now I can clearly see how AI could and probably will become a huge deal.

Tim Walz, not masculine enough.

 You heard it here first people. Tim Walz is not masculine. How do we know this?

Fox News’ Jesse Watters dismissed Tim Walz’s “masculinity” by pointing to the Minnesota governor drinking milkshakes on the campaign trail Wednesday.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/critics-shake-off-jesse-watters-065230731.html

He continued, “The other day you saw him with a vanilla ice cream shake. Had a straw in it. Again, that tells you everything.”

Walz used a straw for a milkshake. Fox News is absolutely right to attack his masculinity.

Straws, as all the bros banging plates around down at the gym will tell you, are the least-masculine way for a man to drink a vanilla ice cream shake.

Not clear how Tim Walz's masculinity will recover from 'strawgate'

More important, the sharp-eyed Watters absolutely NAILED Walz by noticing that he was consuming his vanilla ice cream shake with – and if you have male children in the room, make sure they don’t hear this – a straw.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/09/05/tim-walz-milkshake-masculinity-jesse-watters-straw-fox-news/75089097007/

Meanwhile, seems Jesse Watters missed this................

Some religious musings…

This is kinda long, so bear with me.

I was looking back through some of the hardcopy correspondence I had many years ago with my Christian stepkids.  Here’s an interesting little tidbit I found, and presented them with: 

Well, that’s quite the “story.”  I don’t know about you, but my head is still spinning. 😵

Questions:

1. Is that all this chronology is, a “story?”  Metaphor woven into something humans can relate to (complete with protagonist, antagonist, hero, foil, etc.)?

2. Other than my overly dramatic style (which I pride myself in 😉), what did I get wrong there in my writeup?  Not nuanced enough?  There are missing details that really matter?

3. What kind of person gives this bizarre scenario a pass; that is to say, willingly accepts it with no questions asked?

Make sense of this God story for me (something I would call the main premise of the Bible), because I’m at a loss.  No offense but I’m just calling it like I see it.  I’m sayin’ there seems to be only one perverted/mixed up/confused Character in this story (no Names mentioned 🤐).

Bible Title Redux

What would you rename the Bible:

• God… Profile of a Psychopath?  Or,
• God… An exercise in the workings of the human psyche?  Or,
• God… Other [your reduxed title here]

(by PrimalSoup)

Bits: Kavanaugh Hearing; DJT explicitly admits losing in 2020; Arrogant oligarchs & their bad science

This 46 second video from the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing is good to know about.

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Lots of reporting about what DJT says is his usually language ambiguous language. He uses ambiguity to give him room to weasel out of what he says in case he makes a boo-boo. But this time, he unambiguously said that he lost the 2020 election to Biden. At ~0:10 to 0:32 of this 5:22 video, DJT says he lost "by a whisker", which is actually true.

"I lost" -- WTF??

Here DJT publicly denies his core lie. Stolen election!! That was the lie that underpinned his 1/6 coup attempt and has dominated his rhetoric since the 2020 election. That is why red states have been frantically passing voter suppression and election subversion laws, purging voter rolls and getting rid of voter data collection and analysis. They intend to steal the 2024 election in secrecy. 

Q: Will DJT and/or his campaign pull a classic DJT and respond with something like this?

Of course not. 

He obviously said what he didn't say!

Honestly, DJT may still believe it never was a lie. I guess that converts his assertion from bullshit (not a lie, which is knowing and intentional) to a mere falsehood. Stay tuned, politics fans. More malarkey to come. 

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Various sources have been reporting that billionaires see themselves as genetically superior and want elites like themselves to rule the world. One source reports:

Elon Musk has used his large platform on X to promote a theory that a free-thinking “Republic” could only exist under the decision-making of “high status males” – and women or “low T men” would not be welcome in it.

On Sunday, Musk re-posted a screenshot of the theory – which appears to have been conceived on 4chan in 2021– on the social media site.

The theory, written by an anonymous user, suggests that the only people able to think freely are “high [testostrone] alpha males” and “aneurotypical people”, and that these “high status males” should run a “Republic” that is “only for those who are free to think.”

“People who can’t defend themselves physically (women and low T men) parse information through a consensus filter as a safety mechanism,” the post reads.

“Only high T alpha males and aneurotypical people (hey autists!) are actually free to parse new information with an objective ‘is this true?’ filter,” it adds. “This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.”

“Aneurotypical” is not a word but one can assume the original poster meant neurodivergent people.

Another reports:

Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take ‘control of human evolution.’

Sitting in their toy-filled family room on a sunny September afternoon, Simone and Malcolm Collins were forced to compete with the wails of two toddlers as they mapped out their plans for humankind.

“I do not think humanity is in a great situation right now. And I think if somebody doesn’t fix the problem, we could be gone,” Malcolm half-shouted as he pushed his sniffling 18-month-old, Torsten, back and forth in a child-size Tonka truck.

Along with his 3-year-old brother, Octavian, and his newborn sister, Titan Invictus, Torsten has unwittingly joined an audacious experiment. According to his parents’ calculations, as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population.

Aw, ain't that cute. But why only 8? How about 14? We can only hope that little Octavian, Titan Invictus, and Torsten will soon be joined by little Hercules, Artemis, Tiberius, Athena, Genghis, Loki, Ereshkigal, Augustus, Tiamat, Vlad the Impaler, and Donald Trump Jr. Jr. in the family herd. After they grow up, they will each make their own herd of genetically superior oligarchs! 

Ahhh! Hordes of genetically superior elites!

The pile of diapers is crushing me!