When there is a mass shooting or other similar attack in the US, conservatives are quick to throw around accusations of "false flag" operations. We recently saw an attack in Russia, that Putin is desperately trying to pin on Ukraine. Yet not a single US conservative has accused this of being a "false flag" operation.

The silence is becoming deafening. Not that long ago the GOP was demonizing Putin. Now that it is truly and fully the MAGA party and led by someone who idolizes Putin, Putin can no longer do any wrong.

I've been using a couple 14TB WD USB drives for my home network storage (not enterprise of course but good enough for my needs, especially when in a RAID1 configuration) and I noticed the prices went up dramatically recently. When I last purchased one it was $199.99. Last week it had climbed all the way to $299.99. Right now it's at $279.99.

When it was $199.99 I was not aware of a better price per TB for home storage (ignoring tape and optical of course). For a while it was up by 50% (though admittedly still the best deal in town). Are we seeing a new paradigm in storage costs or was it just a little hiccup that will be corrected?

Often price increases track with various disasters in southeast Asia. I am not aware of one that happened in the past few months - this drive was $199.99 shortly after Christmas.

I don't often make a prediction, but I feel pretty sure about this one.

I've looked at what the bookies and odds makers have been saying.

I think they've overlooked some important information in their predictions.

I've looked at some extant data myself, and considered previous trends.

There is ample evidence to support my prediction.

It may be close on some metrics, but the winner will be clear.

Special teams will come in to play and make their contributions.

The winner, though ...

Will be the food and beverage industry. They will outspend the automotive industry on advertising. They will also have more memorable ads.

We'll see plenty of spending from the insurance industry, and they might throw some fun new characters at us, but they will place 3rd overall.

Some people might be upset when Usher's concert will be interrupted by some alternate use of the Las Vegas "Deathstar" stadium as well.

But this one hits home for me. The other day, a man who twice lost the presidential election (and is going for a third attempt) went for a particularly low assault on people he dislikes. He called out Biden for stuttering, and mocked him for it.

I stuttered a lot in middle school and high school. I was mocked mercilessly by my peers for it. It took a lot to overcome, and I lost out on some important things because of how insecure I was over it. I have younger siblings who stutter as well and I try to help them as much as I can, but it's not easy.

Yes I should have called out and gotten angry at the long, long list of other ailments and predicaments he has mocked people for. But as the old proverb suggests, eventually the fascists come to take me away as well. This type of behavior has gone on far, far too long. Nobody should be allowed access to the levers of power who has this kind of attitude towards other human beings. I shudder at the thought that people will actually consider voting for him again.

Smitty's new favorite conspiracy - just as fact-free as so many others - seems to be that Biden is secretly destroying the American Military. here's one case of smitty rolling that out

I pushed on this a bit and asked smitty to show some numbers to support his argument of

He countered with this link which seems useful, except it only discusses this year's recruitment numbers compared to the goals for this year. In other words, it's one data point, with orthogonal metadata. Was recruitment down this year? Was it even, or even up? We cannot conclude that from this data.

Then after linking to a conservative echo chamber (no, not more slashdot - a different conservative echo chamber where conservatives go to chat with each other) on something else that doesn't show numbers, he eventually tried a different source. His next source was the Heritage foundation , who gave a rather lengthy description of military "readiness". However this is also orthogonal to recruitment numbers, and notably there was no mention in this article on how this year's recruitment numbers compare to any other year.

Bringing out the old greatest hits again, I guess (just like his Dear Leader)

The whole NWO / Illuminati conspiracy subscribes to the same logical fallacy of the "CRT" bullshit. Smitty and his Team can keep taking credit for warding it off as long as it never happens, and hence use it as justification for supporting their fascist candidates who promise to continue working to prevent it from happening. They're just a small leap from taking credit for the earth having not been hit by another catastrophic asteroid since the dinosaurs; I can't come up with a good reason why their current cult leader hasn't claimed credit for that, honestly.

Yeah, it's the old "January 6th was an inside job because ... because ... because ... I don't like your team!".

He's played this card before, of course. I just don't know that I mentioned in specifically. This time after smitty started with a classic bit of his trolling, he eventually found himself needing to bring up his conspiracy on January 6th .

While this is in no way a new conspiracy, I will give it credit that it returns to the old form of being an un-disprovable one. Every possible counter just leads to another "whatabout" type response. Even if every person on all the films (ignoring of course the hundreds if not thousands of hours of tape that have been "lost" by Speaker Johnson) were identified by name and handled accordingly, there would still be allegations of shadows, shadow organizations, photoshop, and the like.

Because of course all hard-core GOP fanbois want our country to thrive and everyone to do well, smitty followed up with this concrete prediction:

Which somehow relates to the things that haven't changed at the border since Biden's inauguration in 2021.

I don't know if something happened to his turkey at Thanksgiving, but Smitty is now proudly parading a new anti-Biden conspiracy here on slasdhot for us:

Because apparently now it is a crime for anyone who is not of the Trump-publican party to ever be seen in Washington DC after they are no longer an elected official. Does this mean that the images of Obama surfing in Hawaii after the dawn of the Trump Administration were deepstate fakes? And that he never actually moved back to the Chicago area at all? And that he didn't actually fly to Davos? How many body doubles are out running around in place of Obama to distract us from this air-tight conspiracy?

And more importantly, how many of Trump's failures can be blamed on this directly?

Of course, don't forget that this all ties to Barack HUSSEIN Obama. Don't forget about that scary, scary, scary, oh-so-very scary, I-hope-you're-super-duper-terrified-now, scary, did-I-mention-scary, middle name!

In a more rational universe, the GOP would be trying to run a competent and intelligent candidate for POTUS. Instead they have a fascist idiot running on his ego, whipping his cult into a frenzy.

Conservatives have been tripping over each other to praise Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They claim that the Israeli attacks on Gaza are somehow very precise and targeted. He claims that Hamas is the target, and that they will eradicate Hamas.

The question I haven't seen answered though is what will he do with Gaza when/if he accomplishes that goal? Conservatives here and in Israel are happy to allow people to confuse Hamas with Gaza, and even more so Hamas with the population of Gaza. But even if he found a list of everyone who is part of Hamas and had them all killed, what happens then?

It is important to note that Hamas has a majority in the politics of Gaza because Israel has ensured they would. Israel has prevented elections from happening in Gaza, and now there has not been one there for 15 years. There are already people who have been elected, died, and not been replaced. Simultaneously because Israel controls immigration in and out of Gaza, they have prevented people from leaving.

So what would happen if all of Hamas were indeed killed off in this conflict? You then have a country with no ruling government. We've seen that the Netanyahu government does not want to see elections happen in Gaza, nor does it want to see people achieve any kind of economic or geopolitical mobility from within Gaza. Who then will they acknowledge as the leaders of Gaza?

I've pointed out more than a few times that Trump - and the GOP under him - is a fascist party that hopes itself to be on the rise. There is plenty of video now of Trump directly borrowing Nazi rhetoric at a rally to get his supporters riled up. Naturally, because like any other fascist - aspiring or otherwise - he cannot allow himself to be wrong in front of a crowd, he had his campaign actually dial it forward rather than back in response to concerns raised by the public.

One odd little twist in that line - a likely whistle for his supporters - he still called his opponents "fascists" in his bit. Not a surprise there, of course, as his party has favored attacking the English Language itself for some time. I expect they'll come up with a cheerier word for their movement than fascism, to better sell it to their supporters.

Yes, this is a silly first world problem.

But my job requires me to interact with my work iPhone more often than a lot of people in my age bracket would otherwise do voluntarily. My work provides me with both an iPhone and a Chevy Equinox (both of which are due to be replaced in the next 6 months or less). Using the two together has been ... interesting.

For reference I'm complaining about a 2021 Equinox, and an iPhone 12. This is more about the latter than the former.

I will argue that iTunes is a mess in two important places. First, in the car it is worthless. Second, on my work laptop (which runs windows) it is awful when I most need it to be useful.

In the car, I would think that iTunes would be a competent music player. I am sorely disappointed on that expectation. I imagine it does a good job playing music, but in the car is has no index or search function. I can't even call for Siri to play music for me. If I start iTunes in the car (simply as "Music" in the car through CarPlay), it shows me the 10 tracks I listened to most recently. I have thousands of tracks that I took the time to copy to my iTunes library, and it arbitrarily tells me about the ones with the most recent time stamps. If I don't want to listen to those, I don't get any other options in the car.

By comparison if I instead put all that music on a USB stick and plug it in to the USB port on my dash, my car will let me search through it all I want. It tragically does a completely horse-shit job of playing tracks in order from an album, but it at least lets me seek them out however I want while I'm driving.

Second, iTunes makes one really terrible assumption on the laptop. This assumption has bit me twice now when I've been away from home with my phone and my laptop. I've tried to install an IOS update on my phone through my laptop, which should be straightforward. Connect to iTunes, start the install. Great. Then it reboots the phone to continue. Then it downloads more stuff to complete the download, or it checks something against something else online, or it sends money to the upkeep of the Steve Jobs museum, or it does some other internet stuff.

Not great.

Why is that not great? Because I'm using my phone as my hotspot. And now the phone has been rebooted into a state that it can't escape from until that next step is completed online. And my laptop can't get online because it has no hotspot available. Around and around we go, until the phone gives up and eventually reboots to only show an address:

Which, for reasons already mentioned, I can't load. Eventually I find another way to get online where I learn the secret code to reboot the phone, which doesn't help. Then I drive to some place with good WiFi and try again, with a different secret gesture on the phone. I "update" - which means recover in a non-destructive manner in this case - my phone and then it's working again.

Yeah, yeah. First world problems. I expect smitty will respond telling me that Barack Obama is behind this, presumably trying to slow down senior citizens from voting in Florida to help Biden's reelection chances. Fusta will respond telling me that if I voted all third-party in 2024 this problem would be guaranteed to go away by November 12th.

We saw in 2021 that the GOP is not fond of democracy when it doesn't work out in their favor. They stormed the capitol for their Dear Leader and have sewn seeds of conspiracy and hatred since then as well. In a recently closed JE here on slashdot a question came up of what the GOP might do if their Dear Leader loses a third time in 2024 .

Cheering for His Team as usual, smitty offered only :

Which certainly is in line with their Dear Leader's ongoing refusal to accept the 2020 results as valid, and also likely sufficient kindling for another group of rabid conservatives to try for another insurrection.

As a side note, I'll give him credit for getting close(r) to the original topic of the JE by the end. The JE was about what His Team would do in the USHouse with a new speaker installed. He jettisoned that topic to praise a convicted murderer for a while, and then eventually went back to instead praising a fascist who has yet to win the presidential vote.

Not that this should surprise anyone when it rolls out, but I'll lay it out here before they start to execute these next steps. The first is already in motion but hasn't built much momentum yet.

• Blame the democrats for the situation
  • This is already well in motion, they are pretending that the democrats are responsible for the lack of a speaker (ignoring that they needed 15 votes to elect the previous) and that the whole problem therefore belongs at the feet of the democrats instead of the GOP.
• Take credit as the "party of diversity"
  • After all they have both conservatives and conservative fascists in their party, and because of that they are now over 2 weeks behind their original claimed deadline for putting in a new speaker

I mentioned before that the Health Insurance Industry wastes tens of billions of dollars annually of our money, directly. I would think that would bother people enough to want to attack that industry just out of that magnitude of waste. Yet I overlooked completely another giant waste from them, to the tune of an even larger pile of money.

Annually, the federal government spends Over 300 Billion dollars on insurance subsidies. They also lose out on a comparable amount of money that would otherwise be counted as income tax, due to the provision that makes health insurance pre-tax contributions untaxed.

But of course all this gets us one of the worst health care systems on the planet, for the largest cost anywhere. Clearly this is a great deal.