“Who’s this clown?”

I’m fond of it for two reasons: calls them a clown and implies that they aren’t even a memorable one.

Hurricane.

Winds were so strong I could hear the house creaking as it was passing over. Stripped the shingles off my roof to where it was raining in the bedrooms. Ceilings collapsed because the insulation and drywall became waterlogged. I got hit on the head from that because I was trying to pull stuff out of the master bedroom before everything got waterlogged. Fortunately, drywall was soft enough where it didn’t cause a concussion. Tree fell on my home. Another lucky break because it was only leaning on it and didn’t cause any structural damage.

Next day rode around on my bike to see the extent of the damage. Shingles everywhere. Some with the roofing nails still attached, and some were embedded into the siding of various homes. All wooden privacy fences knocked down, destroyed. A few of the slats were broken up to the point where they looked like crude wooden spears. A bunch of duplexes had their fire alarms constantly beeping. Not because there was a fire, but because they were running on battery power instead of mains power (really stupid design).

Saw one home were it was a two story but became a one story. Roof completely collapsed in. 2nd floor walls mostly gone. Inside I could see a tangled mess of the family’s furniture and the wooden support structure.

For the 2nd worse home I saw, the wind had pushed in where the garage door used to be and ripped off the roof from the inside. About 2/3rds of the trust structure was exposed to the elements. That one hit me in the feels because I had just met that family the week before.

Venturing out further, most of the power poles were knocked and the power lines and transformers were laying in the streets. All the stop lights were dead, obviously from the lack of power. Most survived the winds though. Most of the trees, if there weren’t knocked over, had their leaves stripped off. Stop signs, they were gone. The wind shook them back and forth so much that the metal became fatigued and snapped them off by the base. Saw the same thing with a tractor trailer. Looked like Godzilla snapped it in half, all from the wind and metal fatigue.

Over the next couple of days, it was a constant wailing of ambulances. They were evacuating patients out of the hospitals.

That was definitely an experience, living in a half destroyed home for a year rebuilding and dealing with an insurance company that was ill equipped to handle the influx of claims.

I would say I’m shocked that the CDC director is a coward.

Kennedy ordered Erica Schwartz, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to remove the deaths from the agency’s data. CDC staff had already accepted the deaths as being from measles and had reported them as such. Schwartz reportedly removed them from the public website without objection, though a report on Thursday revealed they are still included in an internal CDC database.

However, her confirmation hearing strongly hinted she was going to cave to RFK Jr’s anti-vax bullshit.

Cassidy kicked off questions by asking Schwartz directly: “Will you commit to this committee and to the American people to have the same integrity as [Monarez]? That if asked to do something which is wrong for public health, that you will stand up as she did [and] object, if necessary, publicly.” But Schwartz didn’t answer the question directly, only saying that she has led by integrity and that she took the Hippocratic oath as a doctor.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/07/two-trump-health-nominees-crash-and-burn-in-tense-senate-hearing/

Link to the article instead of the press release: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2851930

You’re not wrong, but this is a press release from a university about research. They’re not going to dig into methodology when they want to toot their own horn.

Reading the abstract and introduction (full article is pay walled), it was a pilot study using EEG. Normally similar studies have participants self report using a survey. Sample size was 60 people which seems reasonable given they had to hook up each person to an EEG. Demographics are a bit skewed based on gender and age, but as a pilot, that probably isn’t that big of a deal.

I’m not seeing anything egregious, and it was published in a peer reviewed journal. I would treat this as a single data point and wait for other researchers to replicated it and prod at the methodology more.

There’s a quote I heard a few years ago: everyone is a technology company now and the game they’re playing is recurring revenue stream. If it’s cloud connected then pretty much assume they are going to find a way to monetize and profit from your information.

Given her responses at her confirmation hearing, I don’t have much confidence in her.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/07/two-trump-health-nominees-crash-and-burn-in-tense-senate-hearing/

Obligatory: you can improve your Windows experience by installing Linux.

Non snarky comment: you can disable driver craplets from auto-installing using group policy or the registry.

run gpedit.msc
Computer Configuration
> Administrative Templates
  > System
    > Device Installation

Prevent automatic download of applications associated with device metadata
= Enabled

That will set the following registry key:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Device Metadata]
"PreventDeviceMetadataFromNetwork"=dword:00000001

Ladapo has always been a quack. DeSantis brought him on when COVID was still raging. DeSantis was interested in virtue signaling to the anti-vax element of his base. Then DeSantis set Ladapo up with a job at UF. The whole process reeked of cronyism.

Not the article I’m looking for but this covers some of it: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/27/joe-ladapo-university-of-florida-00128541

Lemmy hugged the site to death, but archive.org has some snapshots.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260517182405/https://corsirosenthalfoundation.org/instructions/

LGBTQ+ expression is the canary in the coalmine. Once they suffocate that they’ll move on to the next thing: women’s rights, racial justice, political expression that isn’t pro-capitalist.

Or a vegetable.

I had one of those groups come though my town this year. Wasn’t Kommen, but a different one. They were stopped in parking lot at a grocery store. I went up to chit-chat with them a little. One of them said they were doing a march to the capitol to raise awareness of child abuse.

Anyway, I got a good look at their vehicles and they had two giant buses with custom wraps. They also had two brand new identical BMW’s with custom wraps. I was just thinking to myself, that’s a lot of money. Money that could have been used to help victims instead of a dozen or so people’s jaunt. I found the whole thing super sus.

It is. Over a decade ago they cut a deal with HBO where they would get priority on new episodes over PBS. That was a bit controversial at the time. Warnerbros cancelled the deal a couple years ago. Then Netflix picked up the show this time without the exclusive delay.

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/19/nx-s1-5403663/sesame-street-netflix-pbs

Taboos can be positive, negative, or just reserved. For example in Judaism writing “God” is taboo, and Jews will frequently write “G-d”. Same with YHWH. They will not say the tetragrammaton. Instead many will substitute the word Adonai.

Of course there are diverse groups of people. So for Hillary, depending on someone’s political persuasion could be a positive name, a negative name, or just so synonymous with her it’s reserved.

Hillary. No one names their daughter Hillary and haven’t for a while now.

Grover, Kermit. These were also common names. There was president Grover Cleveland. Teddy Roosevelt named one of his sons Kermit. Sesame Street had such a strong cultural impact that these names also fell out of use.

Your dad needs to step up his frozen pizza game. He needs to remove all the pepperoni before baking then rearrange them so he can slice the pizza without cutting any of them.

Mental illness is a hell of a thing.

Or it takes 3 lines to fit all the text:

Hey everybody! Did you
know it's Autism
Awareness Month?

I had heard rumors of this and was a bit skeptical at the time. Apparently there were a bunch of keyboards with missing W keys.

The GAO report goes on for several pages just for the keyboards.