THIS IS THE DEEP STATE: The Tyranny of FEMA: Elon Musk Versus Biden-Harris.

THE REPLACEMENT THEORY IS JUST CRAZY RIGHT-WING CHATTER: 10% Of Texas Population Illegal Aliens? “Given that the entire population of Texas is some 31,000,000 people, that means that just under 10% of the population are non-citizens, the majority of which are probably illegal aliens, and most of them have probably been imported under the Biden-Harris administration.”

Good info at the link on what Texas is doing to prevent illegal votes from being counted.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Idiot Doesn’t Fall Far From the Moron — Kamala’s a Plagiarist Too! “OK, it’s embarrassing if a high school student is caught cribbing from Wikipedia. It’s sad if a college student does it. Kamala Harris was San Francisco’s district attorney when she got her embellishment jag on. That’s somewhere on the other side of pathetic. Kamala Harris is a never ending series of ‘hold my beer’ moments following revelations that lead us to believe that she can’t possibly be an even bigger trainwreck.”

WHILE SPACEX WAS FIGURING OUT HOW TO CATCH A FLYING SKYSCRAPER IN MIDAIR AND LAND IT SAFELY, NASA WAS…

NASA grant (2022)
Amount: $50,227
Recipient: University Of North Carolina At Charlotte
Purpose: Exploring synergistic opportunities between Charlotte-area environmental justice initiatives and NASA earth science informationhttps://t.co/pH6v81bY8L

— RandoLand.us (@RandoLand_us) October 14, 2024

We can’t afford to miss out on those synergistic opportunities, apparently.

ICYMI [VIP]: TRUMP 47: The Foreign Policy Preview.

WOEING: Boeing’s defense unit logs massive $2 billion in losses for third quarter.

Boeing’s defense unit will take $2 billion in losses on fixed-price contracts when it reports its third quarter results later this month, the company disclosed today, bringing total defense-related charges for the company up to $3.2 billion this year. The wider company also announced plans to slash 10 percent of its total workforce.

The charges to its defense arm come as the US planemaker hemorrhages money amid an ongoing strike by its Seattle-area machinists union and as it announced the conclusion of its 767 freighter production — both factors the company states contributed to losses on the T-7A trainer, MQ-25 tanker drone, KC-46 tanker and NASA’s Starliner in the most recent financial quarter.

The T-7 trainer logged the largest charge, worth $900 million, due to what the company said were higher estimated costs for production in 2026 and beyond.

Behind it, the KC-46 logged a $700 million loss due to Boeing’s decision to end production of the 767 freighter, the commercial aircraft on which the militarized tanker is based. The company also pointed the finger at the ongoing machinists union strike, which has paused production of commercial airplanes, such as the 767 made in the company’s Seattle facilities.

The company did not lay out a breakdown for the losses incurred by the MQ-25 and Starliner programs.

There are still three available Commercial Crew missions to ISS on Starliner that Boeing was expected to win and three that the company is already contracted to fly. But there’s no word yet from either Boeing or NASA on Starliner’s fate.

OF COURSE, THEY BREAK OUT THE FAKE NAZIS WHEN THEY’RE WINNING, TOO: Kamala Is Going Down Like the Hindenburg? Break Out the Fake Nazis!

A NICE PROOF OF WHAT MOST PEOPLE SEEM TO GET IN THEIR GUT: Apple’s study proves that LLM-based AI models are flawed because they cannot reason.

The group has proposed a new benchmark, GSM-Symbolic, to help others measure the reasoning capabilities of various large language models (LLMs). Their initial testing reveals that slight changes in the wording of queries can result in significantly different answers, undermining the reliability of the models.

The group investigated the “fragility” of mathematical reasoning by adding contextual information to their queries that a human could understand, but which should not affect the fundamental mathematics of the solution. This resulted in varying answers, which shouldn’t happen.

“Specifically, the performance of all models declines [even] when only the numerical values in the question are altered in the GSM-Symbolic benchmark,” the group wrote in their report. “Furthermore, the fragility of mathematical reasoning in these models [demonstrates] that their performance significantly deteriorates as the number of clauses in a question increases.”

The study found that adding even a single sentence that appears to offer relevant information to a given math question can reduce the accuracy of the final answer by up to 65 percent. “There is just no way you can build reliable agents on this foundation, where changing a word or two in irrelevant ways or adding a few bit of irrelevant info can give you a different answer,” the study concluded.

An earlier example: “The faulty logic was supported by a previous study from 2019 which could reliably confuse AI models by asking a question about the age of two previous Super Bowl quarterbacks. By adding in background and related information about the games they played in, and a third person who was quarterback in another bowl game, the models produced incorrect answers.”

I had a similar experience last week, putting together Florida Man Friday. I asked ChatGPT to create an image that had to include the eye of a hurricane. On the second attempt, I left out the request to include the hurricane’s eye. Because on the first attempt, I got a hurricane full of eyes.

Cute — but not intelligent.

EVERYTHING FOR THE STATE, NOTHING OUTSIDE THE STATE, NOTHING AGAINST THE STATE: Universities shred their ethics to aid Biden’s social-media censorship.

NICE TO HAVE: Trump Gets the Most Important Endorsement of the 2024 Campaign.

BATTLESWARM BLOG: Why Leftists Keep Lying About The Second Amendment. “What’s more, there are literally dozens of similar quotes from the men who debated and ratified the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Virtually all of them recognize that the Second Amendment conveyed an individual right to keep and bear arms.”

The Left wants the people disarmed presumably because they want to implement policies that would have the people up in arms.

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Stanley Kubrick’s Daughter Schools Leftists Outraged by Trump’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’ Ad.

I’M NOT A PHEASANT HUNTER OR EVEN A SHOTGUN ENTHUSIAST (EXCEPT FOR HOME DEFENSE), SO I FOUND THIS POST BOTH HELPFUL AND FASCINATING:

Tim Walz’s Hunting Gaffe Explained:🧵

I’ve done a lot of pheasant hunting. As a high schooler, I made extra $ assisting guides on pheasant hunts: getting the hunters in the field, flushing game for them to easily shoot, and making sure they are safe. And much more since those… pic.twitter.com/IlyEQ7zAAn

— Larry Alex Taunton (@LarryTaunton) October 13, 2024

Do read the whole thing.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: TRUMP 47: The Foreign Policy Preview.

The world is a more dangerous place than it was on Jan. 20, 2017 — and far more dangerous than it was when Donald Trump left office — thanks to four years of epic mismanagement by the Biden-Harris administration. But our national interests remain unchanged, and Donald Trump remains Donald Trump. So what might Trump 47’s foreign policy look like?

The question is important because, while we look to be in the opening phases of World War III, foreign policy has been conspicuously absent from the presidential campaign. You can blame a purposely incurious press that would rather not discuss President Joe Biden’s deadliest failures.

Let’s start our discussion close to home.

VIP members asked for more long-form pieces and I’ve been happy to oblige.

ONCE IS HAPPENSTANCE, TWICE IS COINCIDENCE…: LPG Tankers Explode, One Linked to Iranian Gas Smuggling.

In a dramatic scene off the coast of Bangladesh, two liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) carriers erupted in flames during a cargo transshipment operation on Sunday. Fortunately, injuries were averted thanks to quick intervention by the Bangladesh Navy and Coast Guard, but the incident has once again shined a spotlight on the murky safety and operational standards of vessels involved in transporting sanctioned oil and gas.

The vessels in question were identified as the 78,500-cbm Very Large Gas Carrier (VLGC) Captain Nikolas, built in 1992, and the 6,500-cbm fully pressurized gas carrier B-LPG Sophia, built in 1997. Both ships have changed hands multiple times in recent years, operating under various flags of convenience while flying under the radar of international scrutiny.

Reports from local Bangladeshi media indicate the fire broke out as the two vessels were separating after completing a lightering (discharging cargo) operation. Senior crew members on board both ships confirmed to authorities that the flames started during the disconnection process.

It at least looks like an accident…

THANKS, BILL!

Bill Clinton says Laken Riley's death "probably wouldn't have happened" if Kamala did her job at the border, continues on to imply that we need illegal immigrants for cheap labor.

He was supposed to be campaigning FOR Kamala. YIKES. pic.twitter.com/k55Ee8rVH3

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 14, 2024

Clinton is one of the sharpest political operators of his (or any) generation. Either he’s losing his touch — possible, we’re all getting older — or there’s something sly going on.

Perhaps he’s laying a little groundwork for a post-Kamala, re-DLC Democrat party?

SERIOUSLY, DON’T GET COCKY: Even the Liberal Media Is Talking About a ‘Landslide’ Victory for Trump.

JOANNE JACOBS: Transgender teens are unhappy — or unhappy teens blame their gender. “Are these kids acutely depressed because they’re trapped in the wrong bodies? Or are depressed teenagers now encouraged to believe that their problems are caused by their gender identity?”

SPOILER: THEY DID THAT. Trust Me, We Would NEVER Do That, Says Mayorkas to Disbelieving Americans.

CHUTZPAH:

Kamala is now out with a hilarious new talking point: President Trump is being "hid away" from the public

Trump/Vance have done more interviews, rallies, and campaign events than her by a country mile

She also has never done a single press conferencepic.twitter.com/m5hIDXAngG

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 13, 2024

If today’s Left is engaged in any campaigning that doesn’t come down to either projection or astroturf, I don’t know what it is.

MAKE ELECTION DAY A DAY AGAIN: Early Voting Down 45%. That’s Bad News For Democrats.

COLD WAR II: Chinese Scientists Report Using Quantum Computer To Hack Military-Grade Encryption. “The D-Wave Advantage, initially designed for non-cryptographic applications, was used to breach SPN-structured algorithms but has not yet cracked specific passcodes, highlighting the early-stage nature of this threat.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: JD Vance Continues to Take a Scalpel to Biased Media Hacks. “JD Vance is icy cool when the frothing minions of the Democratic National Committee who masquerade as journalists are attempting to corner him. He never gets rattled or distracted. The MSM hacks keep coming at him because they’ve got their marching orders. Vance just gets sharper with each encounter.”

HARSH, BUT FAIR:

“Hey SpaceX, whatcha up to?”

“Oh just catching giant rockets out of the air with a FREAKING TOWER”

“Oh cool, how bout you, NASA?”

“We’re….studying how racist the air is….” https://t.co/UeJV8njSp4

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) October 13, 2024

I’d add that SpaceX built the incredible Mechazilla “chopstick” tower in a few months for what was probably in the ballpark of a couple hundred million dollars — and it performed flawlessly on the first-ever catch of a rocket. That the rocket happened to be the biggest and most powerful to ever fly is almost beside the point.

Meanwhile, Bechtel is years late building an ordinary launch tower for NASA’s doomed SLS rocket and is charging taxpayers $2.7 billion for the privilege.

WATCH (BUT DON’T GET COCKY): Even MSNBC Thinks Donald Trump Is ‘Poised for Victory.’