“The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. They are the lovers of law and order who observe the law when the government breaks it.“ -Henry David Thoreau, Slavery in Massachusetts
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Like, I paid for a year of Wired, and a year of TPM at the start of this nightmare, and that's blown me for financially supporting the news. And I barely read them. And don't give me the "support local news" crap. The local paper is owned by the Alabama pension fund and costs as much as the Globe.
As much as I'm happy that independent journalism is thriving amongst the decay of the big networks, even if journalists in the aggregate are having a rough time. Someone needs to reinvent network news for the current technological and social age, because a million substacks isn't supportable.
Deadnaming the Department of Defense to be transgressive
Too busy celebrating Mechwarrior 5 Clans, No Not That One, The Other One
I think it's important to note that Venezuela is saying this didn't happen. They've recovered no debris, and they contend the video appears to be a deep fake. Yet crucially, the US media is mostly avoiding reporting this, or examining the video. www.cbsnews.com/video/venezu...
come the f on
I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win
Always worth a reminder that someone’s interests are not determinative of their politics. Just because someone likes something I do doesn’t mean I can trust them, and people are extremely susceptible to that trap. Myself included as often as not.
I had an additional one this morning and it didn't help, sad to say.
Well, the people that run these newspapers thought Trump wasn’t a Republican either. So I guess they’re consistent in their cluelessness about the American people.
Let’s all hope Steve Blum and Nolan North didn’t audition (this is a joke)
And that’s literally everyone. Ignorance, willful or otherwise, is the only reason I can think of that any native born white person should think they can rely on anything in this environment.
The aide of the mayor of NYC tried to bribe a reporter with cash in a bag of chips less than two weeks ago and I forgot. What a fucking asinine time to be alive.
Lifelong baseball fan that quit following baseball entirely after the Mitchell Report I was so disgusted, and I feel like that all was an entire fucking waste at this point.
You're ignoring the fact that exactly zero people other than Trump have proven capable of duplicating whatever he's got with the people he's got it with. If Trumpism without Trump worked, the Republicans wouldn't have lost House seats (not many, but still lost) in the same election Trump won.
The hair does an incredible amount of work making her face look entirely modern to us. Other photos of her look like the 1910s. That hairstyle looks like something any random 25 year old woman you’d encounter today might have, where then it was NOT.
Terrible, terrible web programming.
FAA lists a temporary flight restriction for Sterling, VA, which iirc is his VA golf club’s location. tfr.faa.gov/tfr3/?page=l...
I’m not joking
Current vibe
Secret surgery that went wrong. No emergency traffic because he was already there or some medical facility more obscure when whatever happened happened?
People saying Trump is dying or possibly dead, but I for one would urge caution, because it is quite possible a second healtbar will appear as he enters his second phase and a gargantuan centipede will burst forth from his torso, so be careful of his new sweep attacks and toxic buildup from bites.
Facebook: it could rain tomorrow. Here’s three ads about umbrellas. Mastodon: here’s 14 Linux distros that anyone can install in less than a week. Bluesky: IS HE DEAD YET? IS HE DEAD? I HEARD THAT HE’S DEAD, IS HE DEAD?
I mean, do people really think it HAS to be him that wrote the screed against the tariff decision? Aren’t speechwriters supposed to match the style of their principles? Maybe they had something banked in case it happened?
Bessent
The fact that Monarez's big money attorneys are still alleging that the president still hasn't actually fired her from the CDC Director job at least holds out the possibility that it's closer than I thought, and that the White House is covering for incapacity at minimum.
This is exceedingly correct. The only thing being allowed to be considered "serious art" gets you is the chance that your art will not be savaged relentlessly by some critic, somewhere, instead of being discarded as worthless out of hand by everyone without a first glance.
Hope he's dying.
This is why you should not try to avoid jury duty. You have the power to tell fuckwit federal prosecutors, and even the President of the United States, to go fuck themselves.
Fear is the mind killer…
The sheer number of ways the current US government is barely distinguishable from a 40k Chaos Undivided cult is pretty stunning. You’ve got your Nurgle worshippers, Khornate berserkers, change cultists, and the Epstein/Slaanesh brood. And Trump the Everchosen embodying all four.
Spotted by the north entrance of the Dupont Circle metro. Also spotted, about 4-6 National Guard on the Metro Center platform. No NG on the Union Station Metro platform. 🤷♀️
For regular people, these masked thugs waving weapons around is scary because you never know whether they’re going to decide you look like a target. For actual criminals who actually wished to cause harm, this is the least scary scene you could imagine. It’s a joke.
And my fellow Americans don’t particularly scare me when they grab every possible excuse they can find to install people in charge that continue this pathetic state of affairs. That the existence of transgender people is scarier to them than the fact any idiot can kill dozens whenever they want.
Red state or blue state, the people in charge would rather sit around and wait for you to carry out whatever slaughter you’d planned than do anything to stop it, either in the event or before, and then demand more money and power to fix the problems they won’t do anything to solve.
I don’t really fear Trump uselessly deploying the military to waste its time when the people making and enforcing the laws throughout this country can’t be bothered to do anything whatsoever to prevent mass murder. Cowards every single fucking one of them.
De jure, yes, it isn’t nullification. De facto, however, I don’t see how you can’t call it that. For as long as I have been alive prosecutors have usurped the decisions on charging. I was on a state grand jury and we no billed something, and it felt like nullification even if it was “really” not.
We had so many sources of perspective warping dread that disentangling the effects of just one (which I agree is under accounted for) is probably missing the forest for the trees. Vietnam, stagflation, nuclear threat, AIDS, thalidomide, etc, layered on the stew of our parents faults and fears.
This. A million times this.
The intentional walk needing to be pitched out.
Next up a SpaceX press release quoting Miriam Godwinson and Pravin Lal about plans for the UNS Unity.
The great khan of the plains shit is tiresome, but my vote is likely to be Pritzker or Walz and despite liking Walz a hell of a lot, Pritzker is running away with this.
This is the sort of thing you would hear early on as things got worse in Bosnia
Technically the Carnevale murder happened in the 90s too, but clear fruit of the poisoned tree in just 91, and Amy Carnevale and Jamie Fuller were pure 80s.
And yes, actual fucking murderer. Look up the Amy Carnevale murder. I knew most of the shitstains involved, and I think either Carnevale or one of her family was a classmate when I was a kid. Two of her murderer’s best friends chased me down on the train tracks to beat the shit out of me.
Look, not even any of the MAGA people I don’t talk to any more would tell me the 80s were anything but horrible. The people I knew that looked like the fake people generated for this video were some combo of strung out, fucked up, abused, depressed, abuser, deslinquent, and murderer.
Hatoful Boyfriend isn’t even that weird
Good riddance to bad rubbish. Too bad it took so long.
Hearts of Iron. Basically a Nazi mill far as I’ve been able to gather.
Actually, I'd say it'd almost certainly cool faster and more with the slatted design increasing convection like a passive heat sink on a chip, and maybe even cool the area around it faster. And maybe marginally increase maintenance costs with increased thermal stress from a higher high and lower low
It'd probably get measurably hotter in the middle of the day, but they probably already get to egg frying temperature in the summer heat. Also black things don't lose heat slower at night, and indeed the hotter fence might cool faster.
I dunno if you have it to test it, but Google Music has a "start radio" with any track, and it's usually reasonable at it.
He did Perseus with the Head of Medusa, and yeah, sure, famous piece there. But this asshole put a self portrait on the back of Perseus' helmet, which alone says enough about who that guy was.
Looked him up on Wikipedia and it is no surprise whatsoever that he’s on a MAGA shitbag list of important authors, because his contribution to letters is his autobiography, and it sounds like the Trumpiest, Andrew Tate assed shit you ever might read.
I don't know why this lad is building a subterranean city for cats, but I'm all for it.
But there are other options. And unexpected good things can happen! All the time! And worse things can happen. But this is such a chaotic mess, we shouldn't assume anything but chaos. Solid loss or win just isn't in the cards anymore. It's going to be something messier and unsatisfying to everyone.
I keep coming back to a semi-chaotic dissolution of the federal government as the general shape of that maximally negative default. It'd be a disaster, but it'd be as much of a disaster for your enemies as for you, and we ought to have learned that is a powerful painkiller for Americans.
There's got to be a way forward, because nothing ends, Adrian, nothing ever ends. But every enemy gets a vote, and there's more than two in this mess for everyone. That pressure is going to shape the world that emerges from this disaster.
More and more coming to the belief that my base prior for the future of the USA should be whatever end state is maximally worst for all currently involved factions. Trump will probably be gone, but his fans won't stop hating the left, who won't win power, and radical centrism will be disgraced.
When The Shit Goes Down is also a workable choice
Free idea: Sandwich guy video set to the tune of “I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That”
If there’s something any normal, red blooded American Gen X male should be clamoring for, it’s Big League Chew saving the human race from the scourge of viruses.
I’ve been saying that I thought that private slavery would be made legal again in somewhere in the current borders of the US before I died. Shit like this is a prime vector for that.
This isn’t an impoverished regional school – this is the University of Chicago. Devastating.
Ferris Buehler eat your heart out
“caviar” is supposed to be sturgeon eggs, and there are fake caviars that are not sturgeon but look like it through various means I believe.
Sturgeon and everything else?
It is a sign of our degraded times that no one has yet found out exactly what kind of sub it was.
Isn't this equivalent to banning the boss? Doesn't XAI own Twitter now?
While I understand the urge to compare Trump to Caligula, and it’s not wrong per se, you all are sleeping on the Nero comparisons. If only because it was Nero’s death that touched off the Year of the Four Emperors, and at least the GOP is going to have that after Trump goes if not the country entire
Does it have a rubber duck?
Sometimes I think when people say they want bipartisanship, what they actually want is popular sovereignty: that is, they want to be able to fire their elected officials if they don’t like them without the only alternative being someone who is fundamentally opposed to their values.
This is one of those days I’m so very glad I spent the last 9 hours working without looking at my phone except to turn the audiobook off and on, and driving.
Collateralized Omelas Children Obligations (COCOs) Collateralized COCOs (COCO Squared) Credit default swaps on COCO Squareds Collatorallized COCO Squared CDS structured such that in normal times the price tracks the S&P 500, but occasionally fluctuates wildly when the Moon is in Venus or Ted is sick
For these companies, the LLM just has to be as good as the worst human who somehow still kept the job before LLMs. There are any number of job where LLMs are no worse than the humans I’ve dealt with, and any functional difference between hiring a replacement and reworking the LLM is unclear to me.
I'm not sure posting all that was better than just writing it all to /dev/null, but it's done.
But there is another side. There ALWAYS is another side. We will rebuild because we won't have a fucking choice. And whatever of us make it there, whatever it looks like, they're going to need to be ready to build something new. Because a lot of the old is just dead.
For me, thinking through the idea of collapse, wrestling with the very real possibility that it could happen, is how I keep it together. There's nothing really I can do about it now besides what I can, and what I can't do I can't do anymore than you can do what you can't do.
We will not have a choice. People will need to eat, babies will need to be delivered, the dead will need to be mourned, housing will need to be built, the future planned for. Because life doesn't stop after a collapse. It gets harder, but there is always a future that we can make on the other side.
What we do know, even if we can stop it and remain a country instead of a disoriented, shellshocked, mourning, angry, bleeding collection of 50 brand new nations, is that like all the people before us who lived through, and lived after a collapse: we will have to rebuild.
This is Trump going around and knocking out every support he doesn't like just to see what happens, or just because he wanted to. We may be unable to stop this, no matter how many people of good will and great skill we can band together to try, and we cannot predict where the debris will fall.
And the American collapse, even if we are able to arrest it before too many props are pulled out, will have similar long ranging ripple effects. If anyone tells you they know how the building will land after a collapse they are fooling themselves. This isn't a controlled demolition we are living in.
Collapse of the USSR was a major trial and there was a lot of suffering, but there was also massive liberation and new nations were born (or reborn) and prosper to this day. But those consequences still ripple in our world to this day, with Putin and Ukraine, and will continue to.
Eventually, after the collapse, the people that made up that society will find a new equilibrium, because everyone does. You've seen other societies collapse in recent history. The USSR collapsed in this way and became much less complex. Often this ends up being a good thing for many in that society
When those structures cannot be supported, they collapse, and collapse happens quickly. You may coast a bit like Wile E Coyote on your surplus, but gravity will take hold, and society will very suddenly get much less complex. Whole structures you never knew existed that supported other things gone.
And when problems don't seem to get fixed anymore, the society begins to fall apart, because, frankly, what the fuck is the point when that society isn't allowed to do anything. And as Tainter shows exhaustively, this can happen VERY FAST. Like what has happened here kind of fast.
I'm sure you can think up similar examples. Well, what happens when that energy supply is cut off? Well, the budget needs to be cut, because there isn't energy to spend, and those complex solutions are the first thing to go, because they cost the most, and have the least marginal benefit.
Complex solutions like the world class weather forecasting that has saved lives and property in the face of global climate change that is being decimated by Trump, Musk, and the DOGE boys just shutting things down because they don't think they matter.
Not only is the supply of energy to new solutions cut off, but so is the supply to the complex solutions you've already implemented. You know, like Medicaid, Medicare, rural hospitals and the like who are going to shortly be devastated but massive cuts.
Well then, what you get is a titanic drop off in the supply of available energy. Energy societies, like the US, need in order to implement the solution to problems. Even evil solutions like sending your own private Gestapo out illegally kidnapping and disappearing people..
And lets say that president just cuts off huge swatches of your economy. Imposes huge blanket tariffs, cuts off all money, which is a proxy for energy, to scientific and medical research into solving problems, sometimes in very complex ways. You know, like Trump and Musk and the DOGE boys just did.
Say you have a president, who along with his political party, think that non-carbon energy sources are evil, and they use every legal and illegal method to make using those forms of energy more expensive than the ones they think are good. You know, just like Trump and the Republicans have done.
Now, you would rightly say, don't we have a shit ton of energy? Isn't the green energy and battery revolution finally undercutting carbon fuel? And you'd be right, except for the fact that the important thing is *available energy* and what is available can be limited by more than just nature.
Not every solution works of course. When costs and complexity are small, or there's more than enough energy to go around, you can deal with that. You can try something new because it doesn't cost much to try. But as things get more expensive, and there's not much spare energy, it's not so easy.
So it's costing more and more energy to implement the more and more complex solutions to fix problems. And if things actually work and continue to get solved, then you can keep going, because problems are being solved. But if they don't get solved, well that's a real problem.
Those complex solutions require more energy of every kind. Sometimes the marginal returns are still huge, but most of the time they're not as big as the previous ones. And the people who are paying those costs aren't seeing the same returns as they did earlier, or their parents or grandparents.
Early on in a society, the returns it gets from increased complexity are huge. Basic public health, agriculture, electrification, create huge returns. But soon enough the easy and big marginal returns are used up. The problems that aren't easy to fix require more complex solutions.
Those systems require energy to function, defined extremely broadly. Sometimes it's food, sometimes it's electricity, sometimes it's oil, all kinds of other things. And increases in complexity cost energy. It costs to have people run bureaucracies. They need to eat and don't grow their own.
Tainter's basic theory is that societies are there to do stuff for the people in them. To fix problems, provide things, etc. And to that end, they build complex systems to get that done. Democracy isn't necessary for this. Imperial Rome had titanic social welfare programs to stave off civil war.
If you can handle the dryness of the text, you really ought to read Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. We in the US are living through a collapse exactly as he theorized. It's very possible that the federal government becomes so unwilling to fix anything that it just stops mattering.