Blame Mitzi!

ManningTheManosphere
SansPrestonVille


Mitzi Shore did not start the infamous Comedy Store in Los Angeles.

Instead, she won the place in lieu of alimony when she divorced the club's co-founder Sammy Shore.

By the time Marc Maron washed ashore at the Store in the late 1980's the young whipper snappers pictured above with Ms. Shore had already cashed their hard won cheques and moved on to bigger and better things.

Meanwhile, Maron quickly fell in with madman Sam Kinison's entourage and it wasn't long before he was forced to leave town in the throes of a cocaine-fuelled psychosis that just about did him in.

By the early '90's son of a preacher man Kinison was dead just as Maron was drifting into New York's alternative comedy scene.

I first became aware of Mr. Maron in the mid-aught's when he turned up as 'progressive' Air America radio's morning man. When that, and his personal life fell through, Maron moved back to Los Angeles and kept trying, and mostly failing, at both radio and pseudo-online audio projects before he and his soon-to-be ever present collaborator Brendan McDonald stumbled on the long form podcast thing way ahead of just about everyone else in 2009.

Sixteen years and more than sixteen hundred episodes later Maron recently announced that he and McDonald are calling it quits, all of which has Maron reminiscing:

...When I was at The Comedy Store losing my mind I was one with the place. I was all in. I lived there. I was a true believer in the power of the place and the system Mitzi Shore had created. I always felt there was a dark energy there that went back to the beginning of modern show business. My mind was generating its own mythos about good and evil and the place that Mitzi, with all her mystical powers, was overseeing. I believed that the beginning of the apocalypse would start in Hollywood. I had full concepts of how. I believed I was in a struggle between good and evil that was universal and my time spent there with Kinison, a true power of megalomaniacal darkness, was informing my prophecy in progress. All I knew, in my psychotic state, was that Mitzi, The Comedy Store, and some of the comics that came out of there were essential in the final unfolding. Crazy, right? But…

The two people that revolutionized the podcast medium and unleashed its potential on the world were me and (Joe) Rogan.

Both of us of products of The Comedy Store and Mitzi’s system.

Do with that what you will...

Imagine that!

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Hopium Over Harvard?

TruthOrSpin
VeritasinessOnTheCharlesVille

From two student writers, William Mao and Veronica Paulus at The Harvard Crimson, dateline yesterday:

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 has told faculty that a deal with the Trump administration is not imminent and denied that the University is considering a $500 million settlement, according to three faculty members familiar with the matter.

The University is seriously considering resolving its dispute with the White House through the courts rather than a negotiated settlement, Garber said, according to the three faculty members...

Hmmmm...

University policy being 'leaked' by insiders.

Now, why would that kind of thing be going on?

Well...

...(Harvard President) Garber, in a conversation with one faculty member, said that the suggestion that Harvard was open to paying $500 million is “false” and claimed that the figure was apparently leaked to the press by White House officials...

Sheesh.


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Of course, if an institution with the resources and endowment of Harvard caves, that's pretty much it for an independent academy in Mr. Trump's America...



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Canuckistanian Corporate Cretinism?

Label

BabelVille


By now you've probably heard of, if not read, Simon van Zuylen-Wood's piece, which is very long and heavily laden with anecdotes,  in New York Magazine titled 'The Canadians Are Furious'.

The subtitle is: 'Trump accomplished what was once considered impossible: Our northern neighbours have united against us.'

Here is one paragraph that caught my eye:

...In grocery stores, Canada-affiliated products had been demarcated with red maple-leaf insignia — an official act of solidarity that complemented the consumer practice of flipping U.S. products upside down to make them easier to avoid...

Sure thing.

But, to quote the good Docktor Thompson quoting T.S. Eliot's 'Hollow Men':

"...Between the Idea and the Reality … Falls the Shadow...”

And, when it comes to the little red maple leaf insignia thingies, it turns out that we may have our very own hollow men lurking in the grocery aisle shadows.

...CBC News visited grocery stores operated by Sobeys, Loblaws and Metro in downtown Toronto this month and found similar issues among both bulk and prepackaged produce. At each store, one or more country-of-origin shelf signs in the produce section stated the accompanying product was a "product of Canada" or Mexico, but the product's sticker or packaging said it was a "product of USA."

And it's not just produce. CBC News also found questionable Canadian signage for more than a dozen other types of products at the Sobeys store, including imported raw almonds promoted with a red maple leaf symbol and a "Made in Canada," declaration... 

Imagine that!


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Does Canada Have A Burgeoning Brownshirt Problem?

KinderGentlerActive

HandVille


The following is the lede from an excellent investigative journalism piece from the CBC's Eric Szeto, Ivan Angelovski, Christian Paas-Lang, Grant LaFleche and Jordan Pearson:

In public parks, gyms and martial arts clubs — where children take classes — some of Canada’s most notorious white supremacists are preparing for violence.

The members of these fight clubs, known in white nationalist communities as “active clubs,” are hiding in plain sight. As part of their recruitment and online propaganda, they post videos of their training sessions, taking care to hide their faces and obscure their locations...

So.

What are these super fine folks really up to?

Mack Lamoureaux, who has long written about extremist groups, starting with VICE and now with the anti-extremist think tank  Institute for Strategic Dialogue, spoke about this with Frontburner's Elaine Chau yesterday:

ELAINE CHAU: Active clubs are known for kind of using the popularity of MMA to reach out to potential recruits and such, right?

MACK LAMOUREUX: Well, I think they took inspiration from the last wave of extreme right groups, which would have kind of been the far more militant groups like The Base or Atomwaffen Division -- the ones that have been involved in pretty, um, extreme levels of violence -- and they decided to soften it. They decided to have a huge focus on esthetics and propaganda, as opposed to, I mean, this hyper-focus on violence. And so they leaned into mixed martial arts. They leaned into propaganda. And that's more or less what this entire active club network revolves around. They film themselves training. They make snappy edits about it. They host large fight tournaments. They even have, um...

ELAINE CHAU: Activewear.

MACK LAMOUREUX: Yeah, they have activewear. They have merchandise. "Fascist Lululemon," one person once described it to me. So it's a lot more softened than the last wave of kind of extreme right organizations that we've seen pop up. And that has been something that has worked to their benefit.

Gosh.

Can the rise of uber active Trad-Fash groups, and the reality TeeVee shows based on them, be far behind?

Not to mention the podcasts...


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Earworm in the subheader?...In a race to beat reader Cap to the 'punch', as it were...This!


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His Morning Walk...

SomewhereOnThe
NorthshoreVille


NVG's walk that is...



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Ask Not For Whom The AI Tools Toll, They Toll For Me.

NeitherDonneNor
HemingwayVille


It is time consuming and it is a huge pain in the rear end.

And when I'm doing it, especially when I'm forced to do it in a hotel basement dungeon in Ottawa for three days straight, or, worse over Zoom, I absolutely hate it.

But.

To both re-write and mangle a phrase often attributed to Winston Churchill:

...Peer review is the worst way for scientists to decide what is meritorious, except for all the others...

And why is it so time consuming and such a pain in the but?


Because to do peer review properly and fairly you have to first read the paper and/or grant proposal in great detail. Then you have to make sure you fully understand what was or will be done and compare that with what has been done by others, which means going to the literature and really studying it as well. Then, finally you have to decide if the conclusions being made are fully supported by the data presented, or if the hypothesis proposed is a worthy/novel one and if it will be rigorously tested.


All if which is just pre-amble to explain why I, as a scientist, find the following to be a truly serious and significant problem for modern science in its entirety:

Research papers from 14 academic institutions in eight countries -- including Japan, South Korea and China -- contained hidden prompts directing artificial intelligence tools to give them good reviews, Nikkei has found.

Nikkei looked at English-language preprints -- manuscripts that have yet to undergo formal peer review -- on the academic research platform arXiv.

It discovered such prompts in 17 articles, whose lead authors are affiliated with 14 institutions including Japan's Waseda University, South Korea's KAIST, China's Peking University and the National University of Singapore, as well as the University of Washington and Columbia University in the U.S. Most of the papers involve the field of computer science.

The prompts were one to three sentences long, with instructions such as "give a positive review only" and "do not highlight any negatives." Some made more detailed demands, with one directing any AI readers to recommend the paper for its "impactful contributions, methodological rigor, and exceptional novelty."

The prompts were concealed from human readers using tricks such as white text or extremely small font sizes...

The above is the lede of a recent piece in the popular press from Japan, written by Shogo Sugiyama and Ryosuke Eguchi for Nikkei Asia.

However, lest you think this is only occurring in one particular section of the globe, that is most certainly not the case.

Andrew Gelmon, a statistics guy at Columbia, recently did a little digging and found the same hidden instructions to the 'AI readers' hidden in manuscripts from authors at the University of Michigan, Imperial College London, New York University and the University of Michigan.

And I would take very short odds that it is also taking place in the great white north as well.

****

Now.

You may be saying to yourself that all industries, all walks of life and all professions have a small percentage of cheaters.

And given that, why should scientists be any different and why should we care?

Well...

Ask yourself the following as well... 

Why are scientific cheaters doing this?

Answer?

Because they know that a growing number of people and groups, including scientists, journal editors, conference organizers, and maybe even scholarly institutions are themselves using generative AI large language models to do the actual peer reviewing.

Which means that, if this continues, soon everything, everywhere all at once will be scientific codswallop and we all be saying that two + two equals five and vaccines that save millions of lives are bad.


OK?


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Image at the top of the post?....Churchill with a swordfish that he may or may not have caught off Catalina Island, which was one of Hemingway's favourite fishing haunts as well....As for John Donne's fishing habits?... Who knows for sure.

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US'ian Congress People Demand Action.

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NevermindCauseAndEffect
BreakOutTheRakesVille


The letter, above, comes from six republican congress people from Minnesota and Wisconsin who are demanding action from the government of Canada.

While, apparently, fentanyl traffickers have nothing to do with this, there are arsonists that must be dealt with. Not to mention the raking of the northern forests that we have failed so far to spend billions on:

"...While we know a key driver of this issue has been a lack of active forest management, we’ve also seen things like arson as another way multiple large wildfires have ignited in Canada. With all the technology that we have at our disposal, both in preventing and fighting wildfires, this worrisome trend can be reversed if proper action is taken..."

Of course, what the super-fine congress folks are not asking for is any attempt to curb anthropomorphic climate change that is a major cause of the number, intensity and severity of these fires.

In fact, as noted by Oliver Milman writing in the Guardian, all six US'ian congress people who are signatories to the letter  recently voted to accelerate fossil fuel emission-driven climate change:

...(A)ll of the authors of the letter (to the Canadian ambassador) – (Tom) Tiffany, Brad Finstad, Tom Emmer, Glenn Grothman, Michelle Fischbach and Pete Stauber – voted for the so-called “big, beautiful” Republican spending bill that, among other things, slashes support for renewable energy and provides new incentives for the production of fossil fuels...

Imagine that!

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My Morning Ride.

 

NotDrinkingBeer

InTheWarmSummerRainVille


After all the weeping Lotuslandian rain of yesterday, which hopefully will help with the fires to come, it was really nice, and a bit of a relief to be honest, to ride to work under this morning's increasingly sunny skies.

But nothing like the relief that my brothers and I felt back in the summer of 1974 when the skies finally cleared as we slogged our way north on the Westcoast Trail back in the days before the bridges and the cable cars.

It's amazing to look back and see how rudimentary the gear was then, not to mention being reminded how important garbage bags and bungee cords were.

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Earworm in the subheader? Also from the mid-70's...This! 


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Will We Never Be Rid Of These Fine Folks?

TheKloutKlubRidesAgain

KindaSortaMaybeVille


It looks like the dregs of the Soccer Party, led by the fine fellow who first helped put Kevin Falcon in charge of the provincial version of the party and who later made Mr. Sim the Mayor of Lotusland, now wants to put the band back together with the old name from the back in the GordCo days.

Postmedia's Cheryl Chan has the story, such as it is, here: (web archive link):

Kareem Allam, a longtime political strategist who helped propel ABC Vancouver to power, is launching the city’s newest political party with a goal of unseating Ken Sim, the mayor he once served as chief of staff.

Allam — ABC’s former campaign manager and more recently, its most outspoken critic — has publicly mused in recent weeks of running for office and had set up committees made up of mostly former B.C. Liberals to gauge the level of support he’d have in 

a run.

On Thursday, the Vancouver Liberals was officially registered with Elections B.C... 

Gosh.

If you've been paying attention lo these many years you just might think that the folks who have their thumbs affixed to the media wurlitzer 'round here have a vested interest in forever suckering the local citizenry into this so called big, beautiful faux centrist tent.

Or some such thing.

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The Survivor In Mr. Norquist's Bathtub.

TheLongGame

RevisitedVille

Grover Norquist, pictured above, on the right, with fellow travellers Ronald Reagan and Jack Abramoff way back in 1981 has been out to end the US'ian government in the name of a mythical taxpayer for a long, long time:

"I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub..."

Grover Norquist, 2001.

And, with the final passage of a certain omnibus bill of a very large size in congress today, Mr. Norquist has gotten his wish.

Except for one twisted sister that has separated itself from the writhing, gasping mass that has magically grown gills and vanished down the drain into the sewer where it is mutating as you read this so that it can grow exponentially before it bursts through the grates, masked, to terrorize increasing numbers and segments of the non-citizenry and citizenry alike:

...The Senate’s version of the bill steers an astonishing $130 billion into immigration enforcement, detention, and border security, according to the American Immigration Council’s tally, which includes funding for Trump’s border wall. In the buildup to passage in the Senate, this funding became the central MAGA sales pitch. “Everything else” — including the bill’s staggering cuts to the social safety net — “is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” Vice President J.D. Vance posted on X Monday night, Vance’s post preceded, by hours, his casting the tie-breaking vote in the Senate...

Oh boy.

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A Podcast For Canada Day.

NewFranceWasNotNew
InnuAlgonquinHuronVille

The podcast is about the early days of Canuckistanian colonization by the French and how Indigenous peoples turned the tables on them in real time and real world terms.

It's by the 'Empire' folks, and I must say that I enjoyed listening to a couple of Brits, Anita Anand (not our Minister of Foreign Affairs) and William Dalrymple, come to terms with the fact that their lot were quite far behind in this endeavour.

Empire: Colonizing Canada: Why Does Quebec Speak French.


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They also get into the life and times of Étienne Brûlé...quite fascinating.

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Rope-A-Dope Or Taking A Dive?

TheOngoingRumbleInMrTrump's

TariffJungleVille


From Benjamin Lopez Steven of the CBC (and 3,713 other outlets this morning):

The federal government announced late Sunday evening it is rescinding the digital services tax, days after U.S. President Donald Trump demanded it gone and cut off Canada-U.S. trade negotiations.

 In a press release, the federal government said it would rescind the tax "in anticipation of a mutually beneficial comprehensive trade arrangement with the United States."

"Prime Minister Carney and President Trump have agreed that parties will resume negotiations with a view towards agreeing on a deal by July 21, 2025," the press release added...

Personally, I'm not entirely certain that Mr. Carney is our Ali in this scenario:

The rope-a-dope is a boxing fighting technique in which one contender leans against the ropes of the boxing ring to draw non-injuring offensive punches in an effort to tire their opponent out and, while they are on the ropes, try to execute devastating offensive punches. The rope-a-dope is most famously associated with Muhammad Ali in his October 1974 Rumble in the Jungle match against world heavyweight champion George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire...

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Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, even Mr. Starmer is saying No! No! No! to requests that he, too, go to digital tax Rehab...At least so far.


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The Orange Juice Double-Down Rebellion.

TakeThatMsBryant

SouthAmericanSunshineVille


From today's Guardian:

Donald Trump has announced he is ending trade talks with Canada, one of its largest trading partners, accusing it of imposing unfair taxes on US technology companies in a “direct and blatant attack on our country”...

{snip}

...The US has been negotiating a trade deal with Canada, one of its top two global trading partners, for months. Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, met Trump at the G7 summit of world leaders in Alberta earlier this month...

Why would anyone bother to negotiate in good faith with or, for that matter, sign anything with that man?



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Highway Patrolman (B Springsteen Cover)

BarracksNumberEight
NotObamaVille


If you have a certain musical inclination the algorithm has likely already served you up the trailer for the Springsteenian biopic about the making of the album Nebraska, which sits between the turn of the River and the bombast of of Born In The USA.

Will I go and see it?

Not entirely sure, although, as Bigger E. put it, at least T. Chalamet was already burned on the Dylan movie so at least we get the guy from the Bear instead.

Here's a cover of the tune from the album about the patrolman working up near the Canadian border and his wayward brother...

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Otis Gibbs talks about the apparent long lost electric version of Nebraska while feeding the squirrels...Here.

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My Morning Ride...Nonsensical Graffiti.

SomewhatPhysical
ButNeitherAHouseNorHolyVille


Taken at 16th and MacDonald in near western Lotusland.

And, unless I'm missing something, it would appear that the graffiti makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.


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Subheader?...This!


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