FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: He Found a New Way to Ride Out Hurricane Helene. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news and this week we have Florida Man’s living room kayak adventure, how he turned a surfboard into a rescue boat, and I don’t even want to know what that was Tennessee Man got caught doing.”

HOWEVER MUCH YOU HATE THE MEDIA, IT IS NOT ENOUGH:

A Yazidi woman kidnapped from her home by ISIS terrorists in Iraq when she was just 11 years old has been reunited with her family after years stranded in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, Iraqi and Israeli officials said Thursday. https://t.co/r1jQzHxxO3

— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 3, 2024

Community Notes remains undefeated.

I DON’T TRUST THE POLLS: Here’s Why Trump Is ‘Favored’ to Win, Despite National Polls Showing Him Down.

I MISSED THIS ON TUESDAY BUT IT ISN’T LIKE ANYTHING HAS IMPROVED SINCE THEN:

🚨Federal debt explodes on 1st day of the new fiscal year, jumping $204 billion to new record of $35.669 trillion, but it gets worse: Treasury also had to draw down its cash balance by $72 billion – that's over $275 billion in the red FOR JUST ONE DAY: pic.twitter.com/lPgbmiIyzX

— E.J. Antoni, Ph.D. (@RealEJAntoni) October 2, 2024

Something that can’t go on forever will stop.

MORE LIKELY SHE FOUND A NEW PAYMASTER: Liz Cheney Has Lost Her Mind.

THE DINOSAURS MUST REALLY HAVE BEEN ASKING FOR IT: Asteroid that eradicated dinosaurs not a one-off, say scientists. “Detailed scans of an underwater crater off the coast of Guinea in West Africa suggest that it was created when another large asteroid smashed into the planet around the same time at the end of the Cretaceous period.”

THE SURVEILLANCE STATE IS HERE: Big Brother Is Watching Your Car, Your License Plate, Bumper Stickers, Yard Signs…

WILL THE REAL KAMALA HARRIS PLEASE SHUT UP?

Here's the exact quote: "There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking, so yes. And starting — and starting with what we can do on day one around public lands, right? And then there has to be legislation… I have a history of working on this issue." https://t.co/Lu5Bpr75Gu

— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) October 3, 2024

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump Needs to Be Outside the Margin of Magic Mail-In Ballots. “True, I’m happy that Trump is ahead right now, but I’m not going to get carried away by optimism. I can think of no worse way to wrap up this election than by finally passing out from exhaustion in the wee hours of November 6 with Trump leading in all of the swing states, only to wake up and see votes for Harris ‘Poof!’ into existence in all of them.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: The SLS’s launch tower now costs far more than the world’s tallest building.

In 2019, NASA awarded Bechtel a contract to deliver a launch tower – a glorified steel truss far simpler than the booster catching towers SpaceX assembles in weeks – by March 2023 for a total cost of $383m.

As of today, the OIG reports that the tower will cost $2.7b and is to be finished by September 2027, but more likely 2029. For reference, the Burj Khalifa is seven times taller, contains paying tenants, hotels, and shops, and was built in five years for just $1.5b.

If you had $2.7b in 27 million $100 notes, and you piled them up, they would be so much taller than Bechtel’s non-existent launch tower that you’d need not one, not two, but 23 separate piles to exhaust the supply. Whoever wrote Bechtel’s side of the contract certainly earned their bonus. Whoever wrote NASA’s side should be made to paint the entire structure with a toothbrush – but I expect they’ve long since been on Bechtel’s payroll in some kind of advisory no-show job.

I’m out of words — and the launch tower failure is just one of several billion-dollar failures-by-design described in detail at the link.

LIKE DOUG EMHOFF, HE LEFT SEVERAL MARKS: Yes, Gov. Kemp Blasted Biden-Harris Admin’s Hurricane Helene Response.

THEY VETTED WALZ LIKE THEY VET ILLEGALS: Walz says he ‘speaks like everybody else.’ And it’s not working for the campaign.

Buried lede:

It’s unclear whether Walz’s verbal errors will undercut his credibility with voters. But the need to continually clean up those claims could politically hurt Walz and Harris, who are locked in a tight race with Donald Trump and JD Vance. And in some cases, key members of Harris’ circle weren’t aware of some of the inaccurate statements until they became public despite the vetting process, according to four people familiar with the conversations who were granted anonymity to discuss the matter.

Emphasis added.

Walz had repeated lies like his Tiananmen Square and military service stories for decades.

MEANWHILE, IN CALIFORNIA: Let a Thousand Deep Fakes Bloom!

SERIOUSLY, DON’T GET COCKY: Landslide, HO! Pollsters Suggest Trump Could Pummel Harris in November.

HEADLINE OF THE DAY: Blue Party Blues Over Blue Collar Going Red.

THAT’S NOT FUNNY: Humor Is Legal Again in California.

PRIVACY: Meta smart glasses can be used to dox anyone in seconds, study finds.

In a Google document, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they linked a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to an invasive face search engine called PimEyes to help identify strangers by cross-searching their information on various people-search databases. They then used a large language model (LLM) to rapidly combine all that data, making it possible to dox someone in a glance or surface information to scam someone in seconds—or other nefarious uses, such as “some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media.

This is all possible thanks to recent progress with LLMs, the students said.

“This synergy between LLMs and reverse face search allows for fully automatic and comprehensive data extraction that was previously not possible with traditional methods alone,” their Google document said.

Where previously someone could spend substantial time conducting their own search of public databases to find information based on someone’s image alone, their dystopian smart glasses do that job in a few seconds, their demo video said.

The co-creators said that they altered a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to create I-XRAY to raise awareness of “significant privacy concerns” online as technology rapidly advances.

They said that they chose Meta Ray Bans 2 for their project because the smart glasses “look almost indistinguishable from regular glasses.”

Brave New World? Minority Report? 1984? All three?

SHUT UP AND DIE, THEY EXPLAINED: She Survived Nazism and Communism, but Eva Edl Could Die in Prison for Pro-Life Protests.

SPACE: Voyager 2 shuts down science experiment as power stores dwindle.

Mission engineers sent a command to shutter the Voyager 2’s Plasma Science, or PLS, experiment — which was used to observe solar winds — on September 26 using the Deep Space Network, a series of massive radio antennae that can beam information billions of miles through space.

It took 19 hours for the message to reach Voyager 2, and a return signal was received 19 hours later, NASA said Tuesday.

Despite the aging probe’s emptying power stores, NASA expects that Voyager 2 will keep operating with at least one science instrument into the 2030s.

Built to last.

DON’T GET COCKY: A Storm, a Strike, and a War Are All Working Against the Harris Campaign.

WHAT IN THE ACTUAL HELL, PART II:

🚨NEW – Federal Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has shut down aid flights into Western North Carolina.

A NOTAM has been issued by the FAA that won’t allow anyone not approved by the state to fly aid missions. They said they would give permission but they’re not being…

— Dr. Ben Braddock (@GraduatedBen) October 3, 2024

Plus: “FAA also restricting airspace for drones. How much of this is legitimate issues with drones and how much is it to try to keep footage of the devastation from getting out?”

There are two teams trying to help. The first team has far fewer resources but can move quickly. The second has far more resources but moves much more slowly.

Buttigieg has benched the first team — and people deserve to know why.

More:

I wouldn’t call them random. Those half-trained awesome people seem to have self-selected for excellence.

— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) October 3, 2024

Excellence doesn’t seem to have much constituency with Biden-Harris.

HEH: Please Return Your Cargo Cranes to Their Upright, Stowed and Locked Positions.

JoePa can lay back in his beach chair, his spindly legs akimbo, and peacefully bask in the breezes and ocean warmth.

The “president” is making sure that it’s equally as restful and quiet on the normally busy docks of the American East and Gulf Coasts as you might be able to tell from the pictures Bingley snapped of the Port of Bayonne’s waterfront yesterday on his way home.

Normally bustling with ships, people, tiny moving parts of every description as freight and cargo goes up, down, sideways, into, out of, is loaded and unloaded from ships and trucks. Humming with activity.

All was still.

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, in Florida, the sound of competence is almost deafening:

#BREAKING: DeSantis says Florida National Guard is being deployed to ports impacted by ongoing strike to maintain order and, if possible, resume operations

"Florida is open – we want to use our resources to get this stuff to the market."

— Florida’s Voice (@FLVoiceNews) October 3, 2024

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Did Hamas Just Ghost the Biden-Harris Administration? “You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of darkness and silence but of rejection. A journey into a humiliating land of loneliness. You’ve just crossed over into… the Ghosted Zone.”

PREPARED TO BE A GREAT SLACKER ON DAY ONE: Kamala Harris slammed for ditching hurricane season preparedness briefings.

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE:

Breaking: Today, students at Tufts University were met with stickers plastered on campus calling for war on campus, with Hamas inverted triangles.

Universities need to stop the appeasement of their terror-supporting students and start taking action. pic.twitter.com/FBxNM2bG5P

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) October 2, 2024

Ilya Shapiro replied, “Looks like a true threat to me. Arrest, expel, prosecute, deport.”