My birthday month has ended, so it’s back to normal days and weeks. Whatever “normal” is these days. Played my last two rounds of birthday golf the last couple of days, and enjoyed it. Hitting the driver really well, but the rest of the clubs…meh.

What follows are some not-quite-random observations from the news and life as of Aug 1.

Donny Convict’s DoJ has just made the embarrassing admission that the dumbass charges about the reflecting pool damage were false. Made up. A total lie. US Attorney for DC Boxwine Pirro has admitted it and dropped all charges. And now Donny is contradicting his own DoJ by doubling down on the lie that “vandals” did the damage. It’s straight out of Kafka and Orwell. The government lies, you know they’re lying, they know that you know, yet still they stick with their story. It’s bizarre and sickening.

The corruption of the DoJ is a real problem. If you can’t trust the courts, where can you find justice? We’re deep into banana republic territory.

The Iran “war that isn’t a war” is now in its sixth month. According to Convict Donny, we’ve won that war a dozen times and we’re gonna win it yet again soon. It’s tiresome and dangerous.

The news about GLP-1s continues to be positive. Not just weight loss, but reduced cancer risk, reduced dementia risk, reduced cardiovascular problems, and so on. Scott Galloway, a very smart guy, thinks GLP-1s will have a bigger effect on America than AI. I tend to agree.

The news from AI-land is not encouraging. Many more reports of frontier LLMs jailbreaking themselves and doing things not wanted or anticipated by their creators. The genie is already out of the bottle.

Donny Convict’s insider trading service, in which you pay $100K or more to get previews of Trump’s market-moving posts, has gone live. Fucking unreal. How is this not illegal insider trading, illegal market manipulation? For anyone else it’d be a jail sentence. For Trump it’s a new profit center.

The heat wave over Socal persists – low 90s in Fallbrook in for most of July bodes poorly for our traditional hot months of Sept and Oct. Those months, my least favorite in Socal, are likely to be HOT.

This Wednesday I make it back to KY, where the heat wave will follow. That’s OK – I’m ready for a change of scenery, some time with the grandsons and some golf at my favorite course. And adding some finishing touches to the new basement/bedroom.