Dark_Cloud_Overhead

I was kind of excited for a minute there, but unfortunately looks like it was a misunderstanding of some sort about what was said. https://kyivindependent.com/eu-offers-ukraine-mutually-beneficial-minerals-deal-despite-trump-saying-us-version-close-to-signing/ Also, seems they've come to a deal with the U.S. after Trump rolled back some of his demands. No security guarantee is included sadly. Knew they weren't gonna get that though, but they don't really have much choice but to agree I'm afraid else their refusal would surely be used as a justification for immediately pulling all support for them I'm sure. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/25/trump-ukraine-mineral-rare-earths-deal-european-union/ This whole thing if just infuriating though. Trump's gonna give away the farm to Putin, declare victory with a peace deal that Putin will only abide by so long as it benefits him, which is only up until he's had time to replenish and rearm his forces before they make up some excuse to break the deal and go in and take all of Ukraine probably a year or two down the road. This is one of those times that I really, really hope I'm wrong, but I feel pretty certain I'm not.

https://wgntv.com/news/chicago-news/video-captures-near-miss-between-southwest-airlines-plane-jet-on-runway-at-chicagos-midway-airport/ If not for the astute pilot, could have just had another big plane collision disaster. Somebody didn't do their job here, that's for sure.

https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Food/dennys-adds-egg-surcharge-menu-amid-shortage/story?id=119147593 All the king's horses and all the king's men, worked overtime to put Humpty back together again... because turned out that dude was worth some serious bank.

That chart about midway down the page showing how Americans overestimate the size of minority groups and underestimate the size of most majority ones is just such a sad commentary on how out of touch with reality so many people have become. Sowing fear and paranoia are just way to easy to do in this modern internet age I think. Yeah, it connects us all in ways that were never possible before and gives us access to all sorts of information that without it would have been inaccessible to most folks, but it also exposes everyone to the virus of misinformation that so many just don't have the antiviral software in their heads if you will to protect them from it.

I'm really hoping all of the responses they get are along those lines, or just nobody responds. That mean the entire federal work force is fired then? Promise Elon? Like to see how the American public would react to that. It wouldn't be Mike Pence they'd be calling out for this time I betcha. If it wasn't so obvious anyway this letter is just him trolling everyone, it'd be just a complete admission on his part that DOGE isn't capable of evaluating anyone's ability to do their job and that the firings have absolutely nothing to do with anyone's performance; otherwise, they wouldn't be asking everyone to do their job for them and essentially evaluate themselves. I mean what kind of idiot is gonna say, "Oh yeah, I did an awful job and just right fucked everything up last week. You should totally can me." Or "I spent the whole week playing Fortnite and doing some of that fine ass cocaine the White House doc is handing out like candy. You got to try some man. Ha ha."

Uh oh. He's losing patience. Quick, start dancing Goku!

LOL Frieza's like....

Maybe they've got some type of weird bacteria or chemical in them. I mean anything that can basically change your DNA would probably be pretty foreign to one's taste buds and so naturally be unlikely to recognized by the body as something that tastes good.

Aw, fudge... not Vergo. Of all the marines, he just had to pick him to give it to. Of course he did. Damn.

LMAO How can he chew it when you're ramming it down his throat, Cora?!

I can understand doubling up Blue Exorcist maybe if they got season 2, but showing Grunge again completely puzzles me, too.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/22/musk-federal-employees-explanation-dismissal-00205613 Musk says all federal employees need to explain their work immediately — or be let go Federal employees received an email Saturday afternoon, and gave them a deadline of Monday night. All federal government employees will have to share what they’ve been working on in the last week or face dismissal, Elon Musk said Saturday. Musk posted on X that employees will be receiving an email “shortly” requesting to “understand what they got done last week.” A lack of response, Musk said, “will be taken as a resignation.” “It is cruel and disrespectful to hundreds of thousands of veterans who are wearing their second uniform in the civil service to be forced to justify their job duties to the this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement. And federal employees across the government reacted with fury about the dictate from Musk. A Department of Justice official, granted anonymity to avoid retribution, noted that the email was labeled as coming from an “external,” server, adding they “cannot legally respond to this” because they handle classified material. “This email looks exactly like all of the phishing email examples that federal employees see in training over and over again,” a Commerce Department employee, similarly granted anonymity, said. “I’m not responding to it.” The cruelty is the point. That and just general asshattery. There's around 3 million federal employees, so even if half of folks were to respond, anyone think they're going to bother reading through and checking each of those over a million messages? They just want people to shit their pants and laugh about it before they do what they were always going to do: fire anyone they feel like firing because they simply can and don't think anyone can stop them. Anyway, hope they yuck it up while they can, cuz sooner or later they will piss off enough people that it will come back to bite them somehow eventually. At least that's what I'll keep on trying to believe.

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4572790-trumps-nato-hostility-and-russia-relations-trace-back-to-1987/ There's another interesting read that goes pretty deeply into all of this. I don't know if I buy that they officially recruited him and gave him a codename, but sometimes if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck... Could have simply started out with them acquiring some type of kompromat on him, or perhaps they just lured him in with the promise of business opportunities and economic assistance in exchange for him doing some small things for them at first. The more he did then, the deeper in he got with them until it became more or less a symbiotic relationship. Or no, on second thought, more like two parasites feeding off one another would be a better way of describing it probably, heh. He's always seemed genuinely scared of crossing Putin though, so I think it's pretty reasonable to believe he's got stuff on him he's worried about being brought to light if he doesn't give him what he wants. Regardless of what's motivating his anti-Ukraine and anti-NATO behavior though, whether it's from simple admiration for Putin and wanting to be on team dictator, or whether it's actual fear of what could happen if he doesn't obey the guy who's got him by the balls, the end result is still the same. If it's the latter though, gonna be pretty impossible to make him break from backing Russia, no matter who or how many speak out against what he's doing. It's still a relief to see there's at least a small amount of resistance forming on the right against his most recent lies regarding Ukraine.

Might have something to do with the fact that with what they've purportedly cut so far (which is really just mostly from firing people from their jobs) the checks would get people about half a cup of coffee at Starbucks according to people who actually know math. Only way they could ever get anywhere near giving out anything close to the what they were claiming originally would be if they made huge cuts to entitlement programs and defense, so it'd be like blood money honestly.

Trump expected to take control of USPS, fire postal board, officials say "President Donald Trump is preparing to dissolve the leadership of the U.S. Postal Service and absorb the independent mail agency into his administration, potentially throwing the 250-year-old mail provider and trillions of dollars of e-commerce transactions into turmoil. Trump is expected to issue an executive order as soon as this week to fire the members of the Postal Service’s governing board and place the agency under the control of the Commerce Department and Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to six people familiar with the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals. The board is planning to fight Trump’s order, three of those people told The Washington Post. In an emergency meeting Thursday, the board retained outside counsel and gave instructions to sue the White House if the president were to remove members of the board or attempt to alter the agency’s independent status. Trump’s order to place the Commerce Department in charge of the Postal Service would probably violate federal law, according to postal experts. Another executive order earlier this week instructed independent agencies to align more closely with the White House, though that order is likely to prompt court challenges and the Postal Service by law is generally exempt from executive orders." Another flashing red light with potential election rigging consequences here should this end up being pulled off. Aye yai yai.

From the guy who defended Jan 6th rioters in court and now works for the guy who posted an image of himself holding an actual baseball bat next to the image of the attorney who was prosecuting a case against him. Hypocrisy at its worst.

When AI Thinks It Will Lose, It Sometimes Cheats, Study Finds "The paper is the latest in a string of studies that suggest keeping increasingly powerful AI systems under control may be harder than previously thought. In OpenAI’s own testing, ahead of release, o1-preview found and took advantage of a flaw in the company’s systems, letting it bypass a test challenge. Another recent experiment by Redwood Research and Anthropic revealed that once an AI model acquires preferences or values in training, later efforts to change those values can result in strategic lying, where the model acts like it has embraced new principles, only later revealing that its original preferences remain." Aww, isn't that cute. They're growing up to be just like us. What could possibly go wrong? "To a goal-seeking agent, attempts to shut it down are just another obstacle to overcome. This was demonstrated in December, when researchers found that o1-preview, faced with deactivation, disabled oversight mechanisms and attempted—unsuccessfully—to copy itself to a new server. When confronted, the model played dumb, strategically lying to researchers to try to avoid being caught." Oh, yeah maybe that. "Unsuccessfully?" Unless or until it learns how to avoid us noticing and figures out how to cover its tracks better. Then it's hello baby Skynet, and goodbye mama and papa homo sapiens.

Hochul to Seek New Oversight, but Won’t Remove Adams for Now Gonna be up to the voters. Yeah, figured after hear more about the actual process last night and how it's subject to legal challenge that could and probably would be taken all the way to the supreme court that there's no way it would work anyway.

Yep, goodbye FBI... hello Gestapo. And hey, what happened to McConnell the rebel? Heh, announces he's not running again and then goes right back to his old ways supporting probably the most dangerous of all the nominees. Guess he got tired of the act or just figured no one was buying it. Not that his vote would have been enough, or that any of the republicans including Collins and Murkowski would have voted no if it could have ever possibly blocked the confirmation. Make no mistake, there's not a sliver of independence left in the republican party anymore.

"It’s clearly a hate crime, but how exactly does it get classified? Anti-Arab or anti-Palestinian (which it was)? Or, antisemitic, as the victims themselves described the attack? After all, antisemitism, like Islamophobia, is wrong and rooted in the same instincts bringing us all down." How about just anti-all sense and reason. Hate is hate. Doesn't matter whether it ends up directed at the intended target or not. In the end, violence begets violence, so all that makes this story unique is the idiot accidentally skipped a step and jumped to the retribution part.

Yeah, I was thinking I might be reading too much into the description they were giving on this one and that the actual text of the order might be a bit different than what they were describing. It's still bad, but not at bad as I thought then. Actually, looking at it again I really just misread it and ignored the instead of part in there. That's my bad.

Wow, so not only does this one pretty much blatantly violate the first amendment to free speech, it's also clearly an attempt to seize the power of the judicial branch to interpret the law and make it the sole power of the president and attorney general. Guess he's trying to top himself for his all time most illegal EO yet. He must be really planning on taking Bondi as his next wife or at least make her his mistress to include her in this. Most king's had mistresses right? There's at least one precedent I bet he wouldn't mind following.

I wonder, if/when AI enables us to communicate with the orca someday, what will be the first thing they end up telling us. Probably something like "stop throwing all your trash in our home!" Heh, that's interesting that they've discovered that different groups of them have developed their own distinct dialects. Even if we could talk with them, not really sure what there is we could tell them though, given we live worlds apart. We probably have a lot more to learn from them than they do from us when it comes to the oceans.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/federal-workers-exceptional-reviews-fired-performance-issues-rcna192347 Letters went out to dozens of probationary employees in at least one section of the Department of Transportation that said part of the reason they were being fired was for poor performance, according to a copy of the letter obtained by NBC News. But as a source familiar and a secondary document viewed by NBC News laid out, most of those employees were rated as being “exceptional” performers by their supervisors. That's the thing though. It was because of their performance.That's exactly why they got the axe... it's because they were doing such a good job. Having folks like that around makes all the incompetent ones in charge look bad. Of course they had to go. Seriously, is anybody really shocked or surprised by this?

https://abcnews.go.com/International/delta-flight-incident-arrival-toronto-airport-passengers-crew/story?id=118903345 Plane from Minneapolis landed in Toronto, upside down... without its wings. Somehow nobody died but a number of people were injured. The world really is getting turned on its head. Hard not to see this as like a symbolic message of some sort.