If getting shot is part of a “narrative” then “be the author of your own story” seems like either pretty good or truly terrible advice, depending on whether being shot is a required part of any narrative.
Separately, let’s have another look, courtesy of the New York Post, at the threat to a single human that overwhelmed the Biden administration’s $3 billion/year Secret Service:
It’s a “nature park” rather than a “national park”, but the scenery in Serra da Estrela is great regardless of how you classify it. The park contains Portugal’s highest peak, more than 6,500′ above sea level. The drive in from Coimbra was rather harrowing. This is only at 4,400′:
We stayed at the Hotel Vila Galé Serra da Estrela, a four-year-old structure in Manteigas, which is a good base for exploring the various trails and other points of interest.
By Florida standards, the Portuguese don’t handle pools well. The indoor pool at this hotel was warm but dramatically over-chlorinated. The outdoor pool wasn’t heated and it isn’t all that warm in Portugal (daily high temps of around 70). Bathing caps are required in Portuguese pools so bring them if you think that you’ll be able to handle the chill. Here’s a popular waterfall a short drive from the hotel:
The Portuguese woods and mountains, at least in June, are much less crowded than U.S. parks (at least those that are accessible by road). There are some flies, but we were never bothered by mosquitoes and didn’t end up using the bug spray that we brought (maybe mosquitoes are worse south of Lisbon, an area that we didn’t visit). The ticks that plague New Englanders with Lyme Disease don’t seem to be an issue in Portugal, though supposedly Lyme Disease does occur here.
I’m in a chat group with a few Deplorables, a couple of whom are gun nuts. I’ve been trying to get some of my software expert witness work done before EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) and thus was in the middle of a real-time work session when the Trump shooting occurred. I ]wasn’t paying close attention to the chat group, for which I get alerts, or the news, for which I don’t get alerts. During a short break in the work, during which I scanned the gun nuts’ exchange, I responded with the following:
I haven’t checked the news, but let me guess: all of the people who said that Donald Trump would end our democracy (i.e., destroy the U.S. as we know it), kill Americans who identify as “pregnant people” by denying them abortion care, kill Americans by refusing to order masks, school closures, and lockdowns next time a respiratory virus comes through, etc. are now saying that it is reprehensible that someone would try to preserve American democracy and American lives by killing the one big threat to both.
As soon as work was done, I checked Twitter. I refreshed my memory by sampling some Democrat thought-leadership… According to “the big guy”, we could “lose everything”, including our democracy, if anyone votes for Donald Trump:
Trump poses many threats to our country: The right to choose, civil rights, voting rights, and America’s standing in the world.
But the greatest threat he poses is to our democracy.
Also, from June 28 (screen shot in case this gets memory-holed):
How does Joe Biden feel about the failure of the rifleman to neutralize the dire/genuine threat to our democracy that he identified and, therefore, the continued realistic possibility that we will soon “lose everything”? Joe Biden is “grateful” and “praying for [Donald Trump]” (i.e., praying that Americans continue to be threatened):
I have been briefed on the shooting at Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania.
I’m grateful to hear that he’s safe and doing well. I’m praying for him and his family and for all those who were at the rally, as we await further information.
Let’s check the New York Times. “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” (NYT, December 16, 2016) answers the question in the affirmative. Here’s the worst part:
There are signs that Mr. Trump seeks to diminish the news media’s traditional role by using Twitter, video messages and public rallies to circumvent the White House press corps and communicate directly with voters…
Also, Trump would seek to imprison the political opposition:
An even more basic norm under threat today is the idea of legitimate opposition. … Governments throughout history have used the claim that their opponents are disloyal or criminal or a threat to the nation’s way of life to justify acts of authoritarianism.
The idea of legitimate opposition has been entrenched in the United States since the early 19th century, disrupted only by the Civil War. That may now be changing, however, as right-wing extremists increasingly question the legitimacy of their liberal rivals. …
Such extremism, once confined to the political fringes, has now moved into the mainstream. … Mr. Trump’s campaign centered on the claim that Hillary Clinton was a criminal who should be in jail; and “Lock her up!” was chanted at the Republican National Convention. In other words, leading Republicans — including the president-elect — endorsed the view that the Democratic candidate was not a legitimate rival.
Did the newspaper of record’s opinion change over the intervening 8 years? No. Just two days ago, the NYT said that Trump was “Dangerous in Word, Deed, and Action”:
The clear thinkers at the NYT have been warning us for at least 8 years about the dangers of Donald Trump being anywhere near the levers of power. What do they now say? “The Attack on Donald Trump Is Antithetical to America”:
It is a mercy that Donald Trump was not seriously injured by gunfire at an evening campaign rally … We hope that Mr. Trump recovers quickly and fully.
They want the person whom they said would end American democracy to “recover quickly and fully”? They don’t at least hope he’ll be incapacitated through November 5, 2024?
Given all of the above, I rate my prediction in the chat group exchange as TRUE.
Readers: Have you found any examples of a righteous person admitting that there is at least an apparent logical contradiction between his/her/zir/their previous vilification and expressed fear of Donald Trump and current expressed hope that Donald Trump be preserved from any future harm?
(Personally, I do hope that our fellow Palm Beach County taxpayer Donald Trump recovers completely. And I have to say that I’m impressed by his apparent sangfroid. How many among us can say that our courage has been tested with an actual shooting? But my well-wishing isn’t a logical contradiction because I did not previously express an opinion that Mr. Trump was dangerous, a threat, or likely to end American democracy. (I did say that I preferred both Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis as candidates, but not that I expected or demanded everyone else in America to agree with me.))
Related:
Mar-a-Lago and the Palm Event (from March 2024; “The most hated man in America appeared midway through the event to welcome the guests, praise the organization, praise the musical and theatrical talent, etc. Donald Trump was gracious and did not mention politics nor did he talk about himself. He had no teleprompter.”)
Update: Let’s also check out Kamala Harris. Last month, “[Donald Trump] is a threat to our democracy and our fundamental freedoms.”
Donald Trump has vowed that he will be a dictator on “day one.”
This evening, “praying for Donald Trump” and “relieved” that the pathway to dictatorship for the U.S. is still available:
I have been briefed on the shooting at former President Trump’s event in Pennsylvania.
Doug and I are relieved that he is not seriously injured. We are praying for him, his family, and all those who have been injured and impacted by this senseless shooting.
But when people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy.
Thankfully, Donald Trump is reported to be “fine” after an apparent attempt on his life
(They’re happy that the person they called Hitler With a Golf Cart Instead of a Volkswagen is hale and hearty.)
The New Republic should get an award for clarity. I’m going to leave this “Trump = Hitler” cover as a placeholder to see if the progressive magazine comes up with a paired “We’re sorry that the latter-day Claus von Stauffenberg did not kill Hitler” story:
We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.
I will have a lot more respect for The New Republic if they say that they’re sad the modern Claus von Stauffenberg wasn’t more successful than the original Claus von Stauffenberg.
After the despicable attempt to kill Trump, a reporter who writes regularly about political violence explains how deeply unprepared we are for the terrible escalation that may now be coming. … At the time of this recording, we know little about the attempt to assassinate Donald Trump. He was hit in the ear, but thankfully doesn’t appear seriously injured.
It’s “despicable” to kill a person whom they said was a defrosted Hitler and they are thankful that Hitler wasn’t seriously injured. I sampled the podcast and the main issue, it seems, is violence perpetrated by Republicans. So just maybe the magazine’s position can be considered consistent with the Hitler cover. They’re thankful that Trump wasn’t more seriously injured because a serious injury would be more likely to result in violence against noble Democrats, not because they they want Trump to be alive and well. And the shooter was “despicable” because his action could have resulted in violence against noble/precious Democrats.
“If you begin with criticism, then you go to protest, then you go to impeachment, now you go to indictment and none of them work. What’s next? Graph it out, man. We’re speeding towards assassination, obviously. … They have decided — permanent Washington, both parties have decided — that there’s something about Trump that’s so threatening to them, they just can’t have him,” Carlson said in the interview, which was posted online Wednesday.
In far-right and conspiratorial circles, Trump has long been presented as the target of a vast plot orchestrated in part by Washington’s “deep state” as well as the Democratic establishment and the news media. The former president has embraced this worldview, referring to himself as a “victim” and the center of a “witch hunt.”
NBC reassured readers that this theory was “presented without evidence” and only someone gullible enough to believe a conspiracy theory would consider the possibility of an attack on literal Hitler.
The New York Post shows us the threat with which the $3 billion/year Secret Service was confronted:
Is it fair to say that the Biden administration’s Secret Service is at least as effective as the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security, responsible for securing the border?
Renting a car at the Lisbon airport takes so long that I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone getting off a transatlantic flight. Catch an Uber into Lisbon or Sintra, spend a few nights, and then send one designated victim back to the Lisbon airport to wait in various lines for 1.5 hours (the Sixt folks said that our 1.5-hour wait occurred during a “calm” period and that it could and would get much much worse; a normally polite American grandma described her experience at Hertz on a different day as a “sh*tshow”). After the car is obtained, have the rest of the family or group Uber out to the airport (only about 15 minutes from downtown Lisbon) to meet the designated victim. Some folks waiting in the line to get paperwork and then the line for people who successfully obtained paperwork:
Try to avoid being given a plug-in hybrid. These are impossible to charge in Portugal unless you apply for an EDP account, which is impractical unless you have a Portuguese fiscal number (like our Social Security number), a European bank account with IBAN, a Portuguese phone number, and a few days to wait for various hurdles to be cleared. I never saw a charging station that accepted credit cards. Our plug-in hybrid Mercedes had almost no trunk space due to the big battery that we had no way to charge. It was dragged out from an obscure corner of the garage so covered with dust and dirt that it wasn’t safe to drive (the employees cleaned the windows for us before we left). To add insult to injury, the car failed within 48 hours and then Sixt charged us 61 euros for the tow truck that had to come out (we didn’t buy “roadside assistance” for their defective cars). A little more abuse after we got back to the U.S… Sixt charge us 395 euros for a purported scratch to a wheel (or maybe just a plastic wheel cover; we never figured that out), which included fees for “loss of use” (they already said that the car needed to go to a dealer for battery/computer repairs) and “damage handling fee”. I don’t remember ever scraping a curb (Portuguese curbs are, in general, low and rounded) so I think the root cause of this debacle might be that the car was delivered so dirty it wasn’t possible to see a minor pre-existing scratch.
The car-based portion of our trip began at the Mafra palace, which has its own basilica:
Being royal meant doing a lot of shooting:
It was also possible to read:
They also had a pre-flippers pinball machine and what seems like a precursor to foosball:
Here’s lunch at a restaurant a few steps from the palace:
Next stop was the Buddha Eden garden, previously described, and then Nazaré, Europe’s capital for big wave surfing in the winter. Here’s a view from Sitio de Nazaré, which overlooks the beach and has a nice church and square;
Then it was on to Batalha, home to a UNESCO World Heritage church and monastery. A Portuguese travel agent discouraged us from staying here, but it turned out to be a great base for two nights. We were surprised to learn that the monastery contains Portugal’s tomb of the unknown soldier (the country fought as England’s ally in World War I).
On the way to Grutas de Mira de Aire (limestone caves), we stopped to walk on a Roman road. Note the difference between 1x and 3x on the iPhone (at 1x you can see the Roman wind turbine and the Roman picnic tables):
Fortunately, they’re not afraid to punch up the caves with a bit of color:
On the way back to Batalha, we stopped at Castelo de Porto de Mós:
Then it was back to our AirBnB, which was a tiny but efficient 2BR ($105/night including cleaning):
One thing that we learned is that if you want fast reliable Internet, AirBnB is the best lodging option. The large Portuguese WiFi networks never seemed to be fast or reliable. Free WiFi at the Lisbon airport, for example, never worked at all (two visits a week apart). Hotel Internet was always slower than AirBnB WiFi and also subject to interruptions, dead zones, etc.
The next day, after some tow truck assistance to reset our Mercedes plug-in hybrid’s brain, we drove to Coimbra and Portugal dos Pequenitos, a theme park of miniatures covered in Celebrating Juneteenth here in Portugal. After that, we drove up the hill to the founded-in-1290 university to see the famous library (no photos allowed) and, coincidentally, a lot of graduation celebrations:
Coimbra is a nice town, but the hills make it tough to get around, at least from a Floridian’s perspective.
A security breach at AT&T exposed call and text data from nearly all of its customers, the company revealed Friday.
The records of most of AT&T’s cellular customers between May and October 2022, as well as a single day in January 2023, were illegally downloaded from its workspace on a third-party cloud platform, AT&T said.
The question for today is… why bother? I assume that a mostly peaceful download of this nature was done in order to make money, but how does money get made?
Here’s one theory: the information gets sold to our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in India who call us multiple times per day with concerns about our rooftop solar, Medicare, and final expense insurance coverage. With the purloined data, these folks can call us with caller IDs that make it seem as though a friend is calling and, therefore, the spam call is more likely to be answered.
A second theory is that the mostly peaceful Internet users who performed the download can determine which financial institutions an AT&T customer relies on. That will make it easier to call the customer and say “I’m calling from Citibank about your account. Can you please verify your account number…”.
How else can these call/text records be turned into cash?
If not on data security, what’s been the corporate focus for AT&T?
The Pride shirts might be working. AT&T says that it doubled “Percent LGBTQ+ representation in U.S. workforce” between 2018 and 2022 (from 1 percent to 2 percent, so still quite a ways to go considering that 21 percent of American Gen-Z adults identify as LGBT and 7.1 percent of Americans of all ages).
For those who are logically consistent, coronapanic hasn’t ended. This follower of Science in New York begged people to protect his 2-year-old from a disease that kills 82-year-olds (tweet deleted, sadly):
and then he repeated his plea just a few weeks ago in a now-deleted tweet. I admire people like this hero because SARS-CoV-2 is still with us, still mutating, and still killing humans. Anders Tegnell pointed out in February 2020 that the rational approach to COVID-19 was change your life in ways that you’d be willing to continue forever because, as with influenza, that’s how long SARS-CoV-2 would be with us. If a New York progressive masked his/her/zir/their 2-year-old in 2020, therefore, he/she/ze/they should still be masking 2-year-olds here in Year 5 of coronapanic.
Another New Yorker who has spent more than four years terrified of a respiratory virus but hasn’t taken the seemingly obvious self-help step of moving out of one of the world’s most crowded environments:
I took this selfie on 6/20, on my way home after work. This is NYC! People wear masks to protect themselves from f__king contagious SARS-CoV-2 that has killed >80,000 New Yorkers. I am heartbroken about politicians fighting for mask ban instead of better ventilation for @MTA! pic.twitter.com/k9px8ooZYw
If he/she/ze/they doesn’t want to get sick, why isn’t he/she/ze/they living in a suburb, having groceries delivered by the Latinx essential workers, and Zooming into work? (note also the two people in the background who are afraid enough of SARS-CoV-2 to wear a 30-cent mask, but not afraid enough to refrain from riding the NYC subway system)
Here’s another example of critical thinking, this time from San Francisco:
— David Lingenfelter, PhD (@dlingenfelter) June 21, 2024
Most people, however, aren’t rational. Those who disinfected the grocery bags that Latinx essential workers dropped off at their suburban mansions switched to hosting sleepovers for their tweenagers just as soon as everyone had been stuck with what turned out to be a not-very-effective vaccine. Now that hardly anyone is continuing with the behaviors that Fauci promised would preserve them from COVID-19, when do the Faucism signs come down?
From my hotel in Fort Worth, Texas, May 2024, and an adjacent shop:
(The only rational approach to fighting a virus that kills the obese is to be careful in elevators while on the way to a donuts-and-alcohol breakfast.)
From a Marriott in El Paso, Texas, April 2024:
This seems to be an international phenomenon. Portugal went all-in on Faucism (mask orders, 100% vaccine coverage (NYT), etc.) and was rewarded with a 7 percent excess death rate (compare to 6 percent in do-almost-nothing Sweden).
Heading into the rental car center at LIS to pick up the 2024 Mercedes plug-in hybrid diesel that would fail completely after 48 hours:
It was “mandatory” to wear a mask, but the customers crammed together in 45-minute lines (Line 1 to get paperwork and Line 2 to pick up the car; allow 1.5 hours total in the summer regardless of rental company) weren’t wearing masks and neither were any of the employees.
Here’s a hotel in Campo do Gerês, a small town in the mountains where I never saw anyone wear a mask:
At a rich guy’s house-turned-museum in Lisbon, a sign celebrating “compliance”:
In Santiago de Compostela, Spain, cathedral museum:
Also in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, a store selling lottery tickets posts on the front window what seems to be an official sign from the state lottery:
In Pontevedra, Spain, the famous church ruins tell visitors to wear a mask and stay 2 meters apart (note also that the church is ruined and has been replaced by what I think translates to “Galicia with Palestine”):
Back in Braga, Portugal, a hotel/restaurant warns customers about the “new” coronavirus:
On landing in Newark, New Jersey:
Are the signs being left up in case mask orders return? People will add Post-Its to the old signs reading “now we actually mean it”?
We used Google Maps in Portugal. It made quite a few absurdly bad routing decisions. To save a theoretical minute or two it would send our Mercedes E class sedan down roads narrower than a North Carolina dentist’s driveway. We were constantly terrified that a car would appear coming the opposite direction and that we’d be forced to stop suddenly and then back up to a rare section wide enough for two cars to pass. When shown these routes, the locals said that they would never drive along those roads for transportation despite most of them having narrower cars and better driving skills than a Floridian lulled into complacency by textbook highway engineering. Below is a segment from a suggested Google Maps route for our rental car (#2 after the first E class melted down). I don’t think that our Sixt rental agreement says anything about driving up or down stairs, but the road was definitely narrower than the car:
Where was this road, you might ask? In one of my favorite towns in Portugal: Covide!
Is there a mapping app that is smarter about getting around Europe without scraping?
Related question for the U.S.: is there an app that will calculate walking directions to avoid dangerous neighborhoods? Or calculate directions and score the walk with a danger level? This tweet from a former Googler suggests that Google will never do it:
this got talked about a lot when I worked on google maps.
I would personally love this feature, and it’s technically feasible.
here’s why I fought it loudly every time it came up
(His/her/zir/their reasoning is that sending pedestrians via a scenic route will lead to “spatial inequality” because the nicer areas tend to be richer.)
WalkSafe seems to have the crime rate information, but I’m not sure that it will provide turn-by-turn directions to a pedestrian.
Here’s a street in front of an AirBnB that we rented in Amarante, Portugal (very pleasant town!):
(The host said to navigate to a nearby parking lot and walk the rest of the way.)
I don’t have a good illustration of a crime-ridden street in Portugal because the country is one of the safest in the world and every tourist attraction seems to be in a safe area.
We happened to be there on the evening of June 12, i.e., the night before the Festas de Santo António, patron saint of the city and of marriages. A massive parade assembles on the main avenue around 8 pm and goes until after midnight. Here is a smartphone video of one group:
It’s a respectful peaceful crowd (not “mostly peaceful”, American-style!) and if you’re 6′ tall you can get a decent view without paying for a seat in the grandstands, but you’d probably want to buy a ticket if you were serious about watching the entire event.
We hit our third botanical garden of the trip, this one right in the middle of the city: Estufa Fria. The main section is a “lath house” that enables shade-and-water-loving plants to thrive in Lisbon’s sunny dry climate. These would be great for people with big Florida back yards, though making them strong enough to get through hurricanes is likely a challenge.
After strolling through Lisbon’s monthlong book fair…
After that, we went to the bullfighting ring, which wasn’t too exciting because the museum listed in Google Maps no longer exists, the ring itself can’t be seen except during bullfights, and the underground shopping mall isn’t too exciting.
Next stop: the most expensive grocery store in Portugal, which is inside the Spanish department store El Corte Inglés. One could very happily live inside this department store, which features a variety of restaurants on the top floor, many with outdoor terrace seating. I paid about $5 for a sandwich, coffee, and mineral water at the most basic of these restaurants (advertised as a “cafeteria” but you sit down and a waitress takes the order and brings the food and drink to your table).
Even when you try to waste money on groceries in Portugal, the final bill always seems to be half of what you’d expect to pay at Whole Foods back in Palm Beach County. Below are some priced items. Note that gourmet-ish coffee is about $5 for 220g (7.7 ounces).
Not everything in the store was a bargain. Here’s a 600-euro toaster:
For the Formula 1 fans, a 5000-euro Bluetooth speaker that weighs less than 10 lbs.:
I would rather have this 700-euro Sony MHC-V73D that looks like a Lost in Space robot and surely can provide much richer sound:
I checked out the specs and it looks as though this 47 lb. splash-proof (vomit-proof?) device is intended for parties and also can support karaoke.
Representative Nancy Pelosi, a longtime Biden ally and the former speaker, is the most senior member of his party who has so far suggested he consider dropping out.
Ms. Pelosi, 84, a longtime ally of the 81-year-old Mr. Biden and one of the most seasoned and cutthroat politicians in the House, has been more aggressive in her public comments about the president’s candidacy than other party leaders, who have publicly stated only that they remain behind him.
The 84-year-old is “seasoned” and “aggressive” (like Mindy the Crippler, our golden retriever?) while the 81-year-old is too old to work for the federal government.
UNFPA estimates there are 540,000 women of reproductive age living in Gaza, among whom 50,000 are currently pregnant, and 5,500 are expected to deliver in the next month.
From the United Nations, July 9, 2024:
🔹In 9 months, some 50,000 babies have been born in war-torn #Gaza, often in traumatic, unsanitary & undignified conditions, says @SavetheChildren
🔹Since 5 July, displaced people and staff have been killed in 3 strikes on UNRWA installations in Gaza that provide shelter and aid
We are informed that there has been a “genocide” in Gaza and also that approximately 50,000 pregnancies from October turned into approximately 50,000 babies.
In case the above tweet disappears into a memory hole:
