Category: Knowledge and News

Solomon Pena is our criminal mastermind o’ the day.

The master criminal and his hit men at work:

• The guy he hired to shoot at a state senator was driving Pena’s car.
• In the car were 800 fentanyl pills, the gun used in that shooting, plus shell casings associated with other shootings.
• The car was stopped shortly after the shooting, only four miles away.
• Peña had texted the others with addresses where he wanted gunfire to erupt.

“Albuquerque police announced the arrest of Solomon Peña on Monday. He had expressed anger over his November loss and alleged that election fraud played a role, police said.”

These things make the story even more interesting:

1. His election loss wasn’t a nail-biter. He lost the election by about 3,600 votes – in a district where only about 7,600 votes were cast! He got only 26% of the votes, and nobody in his party has ever done much better in that district.

2. It’s difficult to imagine that he even got his 2,000 votes, given that he has previously been convicted of 19 felonies and spent seven years in the calaboose.

3. But I suppose he got a certain number of protest votes, give that the guy he ran against is a complete moron (who happens to be in a safe district that always votes 75% D).

Mr Pena:

The tech billionaire has reportedly lost $182 billion since November 2021.

That is more than three times as much as the previous record drop, and is approximately equal to the 2022 GDP of Hungary.

Of course Musk is still worth $138 billion, which makes him the world’s second-richest man, so I don’t think he’ll have to check into a homeless shelter any time soon, and he could soar back up to where he was if Tesla stock rebounds. (Tesla’s market capitalization dropped 65% last year.)

Benny Hex, nee Joseph Ratzinger, was a ground-breaker. He was the first pope to resign since 1415, he was the only pope to retire within the Vatican walls, he was certainly the only pope to be a member of the Hitler Youth, and I think he was the only pope to speak modern German as a native language.

SIDEBAR: Benedict may be the only pope to retire, defined as “resigning because of old age.” You can see the full list of Papal renunciations here, and I couldn’t find another who met that criterion.

The most interesting one on the list is Benedict IX, who was the Grover Cleveland of popes, in that he served three non-consecutive terms as pope, starting when he was no older than 19 or 20. (Bertrand Russell suggested in The History of Western Philosophy that Benedict IX may have been as young as 11 or 12 when he became pope.) He’s the only man (or maybe I should say “the only male,” since he may have been a boy rather than a man) to hold the papacy more than once. He made the “renunciation” list because he resigned from his second term, basically having sold the papacy to a relative.

What a guy!

The other two times they basically ran him out of town. One of his successors, Pope Victor III, referred to Benedict’s “rapes, murders and other unspeakable acts of violence and sodomy. His life as a pope was so vile, so foul, so execrable, that I shudder to think of it.”

(Modern historians caution against accepting all the accusations against Benedict IX as factual since they were advanced by his enemies and rivals, who were numerous and bitter.)

This is not a typo:

A Shanghai hospital has told its staff to prepare for a “tragic battle” with COVID-19 as it expects half of the city’s 25 million people will get infected by the end of next week, while the virus sweeps through China largely unchecked.

The number currently infected in that city is estimated at 5.5 million. Yeah, that’s right. They expect 7 million new cases in one week in one city.

After years of enforcing a zero-COVID policy, China’s government has ended its harsh anti-COVID restrictions and now seems to have no plan at all, other than to hide the numbers. Officials have currently taken a page from the Trump playbook – “If we don’t conduct any tests, the official numbers will stay low.”

This joke is currently circulating in China:

Three men who don’t know each other sit in a Chinese prison cell. Each explains why he was arrested:

“I opposed Covid testing.”
“I supported Covid testing.”
“I conducted Covid testing.”

In his usual eloquent way, Walker said, “We can’t blame no one.”

I didn’t make that up.

One thing we saw in the 2022 mid-terms was that the death of polls had been, if not greatly, at least somewhat exaggerated. In general, the pollsters did a pretty good job this year. In this particular race, RCP summarized the polls with 51.0 for Warnock – with a 3.7% edge and 1.7% undecided. 538 said 50.2 for Warnock, with an edge of 2.0% and 1.8% undecided. Splitting the undecideds in the same proportion, that would result in a 51.0-49.0 win for Warnock using 538’s numbers, or a 51.9-48.1 Warnock victory using RCP’s numbers.

If you average those two summaries, you get Warnock with 51.45 and Walker with 48.55.

The actual result was Warnock 51.4, Walker 48.6. That’s about as accurate as polling can ever get. (In fact it’s MORE accurate than polling can really get. Getting that close is just a matter of luck.)

All good Americans know the significance of July 4, 1776 and December 7, 1941, but other than family birthdays and anniversaries, we boomers don’t have many of the dates of our own lifetimes memorized.

That said, just about every one of us knows two specific dates that have nothing to do with family milestones.

One is September 11, 2001.

The other is November 22, 1963. So long ago. So vivid still.

CBS News reported:

Musk made the announcement after holding a poll that asked Twitter users to click “yes” or “no” on whether Trump’s account should be reinstated. The “yes” vote won, with 51.8%. “The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,”

They are up 218-211 with six races still counting.

McCarthy was the overwhelming choice of the red team to become speaker, but that job is ultimately decided by a vote of all members, not just the GOP members. That would place McCarthy second in the line of Presidential succession

McConnell staved off a Scott challenge to retain his position as Senate minority leader. Schumer is safe in the majority job. The president pro tem of the senate, third in line to the Presidency, will probably not be Diane Feinstein, although she would be the choice if the Senate honored its tradition of picking the majority party’s senator who is longest in position. Senator Feinstein is 89 and noticibly fading. She would have been the first female to hold the job, but that honor will now likely go to Patty Murray of Washington.

In quantitative courses — like math and physics — where there is little to no subjectivity in grading, the same trend was not observed.

There was also no corresponding trend among attractive males, who were also part of the study.

It’s always the last place you look.

“Zhong, who lives in Georgia, in the United States, pleaded guilty on Friday to committing wire fraud in 2012. He had hacked more than 50,000 Bitcoin, worth £2.9billion, a decade ago from the dark web marketplace Silk Road.”

XPeng is a Chinese company that builds electric cars.

I get how it flies, but I don’t get how you could take it on a road, despite the fact that it looks like a car. It appears to be three lanes wide.