I just learned about the Mills thing which is absolutely on fucking brand.
TV, comics and film writer. LEVERAGE, JACKIE CHAN ADVENTURES, BLUE BEETLE, MARRY ME, a couple other things. Free newsletter of reviews, recommendations, and general oddities at https://buttondown.email/kungfumonkey
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I just learned about the Mills thing which is absolutely on fucking brand.
I am amused that Mamdani is seen as a raving communist for suggesting mid-tier FDR type reforms and there's an actual Eugene Debs dude running for Senate in Maine and he's not freaking out anybodyyyy oh yes. Shit. He's white. Sorry, I just got it. Go about your business.
I may be misremembering but I think it was @scalzi.com who recently pointed out that if AI can only be considered to be making art when it detaches from our viewpoint, and it may be incomprehensible. Well ... It's not slop ... it's The Aristocrats!
Trying to understand the physics of how Putin does it with disloyal aides
This is a country living in terror of a non-existent crime wave, getting rid of vaccines which saved millions of lives, and indulging in economic policies which we saw fail 100 years ago. It's a deeply disordered place.
The thing that often blows by is not only is crime the lowest its been for any non-senior citizen's life, it has been roughly that safe for *fifteen years*. We have had fifteen years of steady, low crime while the irrational freakout over crime has relentlessly grown to a fevered, disordered pitch.
Here is homicide last year – a rate of 5 per 100,000 which puts it as one of the lowest rates since 1960. So far this year it is down an additional ~20%. If that stays true for the rest of this year, we will end the year with easily the lowest homicide rate since 1960.
Crime is literally lower than it has been in the entire life of every single non-senior-citizen American. If you are under age 65 you have never lived at a time with lower property crime rates, lower violent crime rates or lower homicide rates. Never.
Anyway...Dems need to break out of the impulse to see 200 white people protesting against Covid restrictions as "the voice of the people which we must heed" while seeing 10X as many people protesting racist police violence as "a niche special interest group that's out of step with real Americans."
Weird, putting tariffs on construction materials and throwing day laborers in concentration camps should have solved the supply problem by now
If you’ve ever compared unvaccinated kids to vaccinated kids, you’ve seen the former are more likely to die.
A little bump for the three day weekend.
RFK Jr: “If you’ve ever compared an unvaccinated kid to a vaccinated kid… you see the bright eyes, the engagement, the social interactions, the curiosity. And you compare them to the child who even had one or two vaccines, and they’re completely different.“ This man is an existential threat.
I love that sometimes it’s “here’s a slice of life hanging out episode.”
I live in a lovely tree lined old neighborhood bisected by six lanes that would be a highway anywhere else. It does take some getting used to.
all the fight scene scores are just fantastic.
the absolute funniest part of this is i'm actually convinced a LLM would be able to do a significantly better job of impersonating his diction lmao
Letterer Appreciation Day! Each September 1st — the birthday of legendary letterer Gaspar Saladino — we celebrate the vital contributions letterers make to the comic book industry!
One of the asylum hotels is, in fact, at the end of my street and it's fine? It's on my way to the pub and like it's a hotel where people who deserve better are being housed? The only issue is how they deserve better.
Okay. I just came back to this and you aren’t calling these efforts resegregation yet, you absolutely should be
If you’ve ever worried whether art matters. It does.
“But your attacks don’t have any weight behind them...” Set up with a throwaway line, then lands the payoff. All the fights are smart as hell so far.
Nice ideas, and the slow reveal of Frieren’s rep is great.
I know I’m late to the party, but Frieren’s got the juice, eh?
Rudy Giuliani happened to be in the middle of one of his favorite pastimes - RESPECTING WOMEN - when he suddenly broke every single bone in his body. Please do not call and ask any questions because his business partner is taking care of him ❤️
It was 100% a Stainless Steel Rat/The Saint combo burrito.
CEOs are trying to convince you that quiet quitting is worse than wage theft, while they plan on replacing you with a robot. Unions know better. Happy Labor Day Weekend.
The lies' laughable implausibility is a feature, not a bug. They're not trying to convince discerning, skeptical, fact-based people. They're trying to give supporters a fantasy that validates their feelings and creates a sort of loyalty test, while flaunting the absurdity in everyone else's faces.
Griffin’s definition of fascism as palingenetic ultranationalism—specifically a reactionary nostalgia for a lost history of the nation that never existed—remains undefeated. A nostalgia for a type of bread that is ubiquitous, created in the 20th century, and rage towards bread as old as civilisation
If the darkest suspicions about Trump and Epstein get proven true, the New York Times is going to report that Trump's behavior represents a bold expansion of adult authority under age of consent laws
You've got 97 seconds to summarize the labor econ literature on how to obtain causal estimates of the returns to education. Go.
www.bbc.com/news/article...
newsletter.insightthreatintel.com/p/state-secr...
IMHO, these are all inextricably intertwined: 1) authoritarianism 2) eugenics & racism & sexism 3) vandalism of public goods, property, and services 4) pseudo-science & anti-science They feed into one another and they never travel alone. Find one, and you'll find elements of all the others.
Having worked in a corner of agtech adjacent to soybean farming, this is fiiiiii—AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
We used to watch cars drive places. For minutes at a time.
Lack of access to lightweight explosives seems to be THE barrier to drone terrorism outside of active war zones. ipso facto, if you’re worried about drone terrorism, you should be channeling as many resources as possible into *explosives control*.
"When the public asks, 'How did we get here?' after each mass shooting, the answer goes beyond NRA lobbyists and Second Amendment zealots. It lies in large measure with the strategies of firearms executives like Richard Dyke." www.propublica.org/article/how-...
We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.
Los Angeles: share this. Fuck ICE.
That is a CRAZY long sequence.
“exploit the AI to steal vibe-coders’ crypto” is a perfect summation of our modern tech environment, well done all around
If you had told me in 2012 that Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign manager would be posting like this 13 years later i would not have believed you
But by far and away, the biggest priority for a Heritage Foundation-captured CDC is going to be using the agency's legal frameworks for access to medical data, and weaponizing them to control women. *Most* of the Project 2025 plan for CDC is a witch hunt against abortion on an unprecedented scale.
"Trump’s life and career are based on discrediting the distinction between right and wrong, and on convincing himself and others that the only reality is who screws whom. As of right now, he’s winning that messaging debate." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
average Dem strategist: we must focus on bipartisan policies that undercut Republican attacks average Dem voter: having studied the denazification of Germany, we must raze the RNC and leave JD Vance clutching a single wool blanket in a cell after we strip him of everything
From the beginning, many of us were apprehensive about allowing LLMs to actually execute code. Asking it for answers is one thing. Allowing it to take actions in privileged environments is entirely another. pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/29/v...
Alert: ICE / MPD checkpoint on Georgia Ave NW between Dahlia and Elder.
Trump's politics, like all fascists, is aesthetic. It's why he is always saying things like "straight out of central casting" and attacks people at a superficial, not substantive, level. Even his racism manifests as aesthetics. Once you recognize this, Trump and his support are easy to comprehend.
One thing about never-Trump Republicans, during Trump II particularly: They understand that the world they knew is dead. They have no investment in either reviving the former GOP (because they understand it's impossible) or maintaining the pre-2016 Democratic Party (because it's not their party).
We are well past the time when the question of whether AI as currently trained encodes biases could be treated as open. We need very rapidly to enter the what are we going to do about it phase.
Love watching pilot program after pilot program determine over and over and over that UBI is an unambiguous positive that does not ruin economies or neighborhoods or lives and everyone nods and goes "wow, cool, interesting" and then does fucking nothing until the next pilot program 15 years later
ICE forcing firefighters to stop battling a wildfire and make them all show their papers, then arresting some active firefighters and pulling them off the line shows there's no bottom. As @aselrod.bsky.social pointedly argues, it's nothing less than an "active assault on virtue wherever it exists."
Question: Why did US put big tariffs on India despite major national interest in cultivating a strategic counterweight to China and trying to isolate Russia? Answer: Because the US president lied that he fixed India-Pakistan and India wouldn’t go along with the lie. (Seriously, that’s the answer)
It is easier to imagine the president's death than to imagine Chuck Schumer effective
when president garfield was dying, they shoved a bunch of stuff up his butt in the hopes it would save him. it didn't work, in fact it definitely killed him quicker. but if any white house guys are reading this: you're the chosen one, you can make it work
senate dems made a deal to advance RFK Jr.'s confirmation vote within the first three weeks of the new administration & hold the vote on a thursday because a score of senators wanted to leave town on friday to attend a swanky european junket
The new acting CDC director keeps touching my tummy with wet fingers and saying, "gimme those kidneys." Hitting him with a broom makes him scuttle to the opposite end of the room. But he always manages to circle back around
If you missed the live recording of the Murderbot interview episode at WorldCon, you can watch it here:
High quality Friday night, sir.
“Concern” is not quite how I would I would describe my own personal reaction to the idea
I’m sure these people are thrilled that they’ve been called away from their families and jobs to deal with DC’s crushingly important mulch emergency. So much government efficiency.
oh
Just minutes ago calling Palantir foundationally evil and I could not have nodded harder at this statement
Keith Giffen used to tell me “consistency, not canon.”
Them: “Cities are all rotting hellscapes!” Cities:
This is how dramatically this Industry changed in the last decade -- here are shows I've written for (some I was there it's entire run, some not) 1st Show: 5 seasons 71 episodes 2nd: 3 sns 76 eps 3rd: 3 sns 39 eps 4th: 3 sns 39 eps 5th: 1 sns 8 eps 6th: 1 sns 8 eps 7th: 1 sns 8 eps 8th: 1 sns 7 eps
NEW: SSA chief data officer and whistleblower Charles Borges resigned today—but his resignation email quickly disappeared from recipients' inboxes, sources tell @wired.com. @makenakelly.bsky.social and @davidgilbert.bsky.social report: www.wired.com/story/charle...
www.propublica.org/article/trum...
When 16-year-old Adam Raine wanted to leave his noose visible so someone might stop him, ChatGPT said don't. When Stein-Erik Soelberg thought his mother was poisoning him, ChatGPT agreed. OpenAI calls these tragedies. They're choices. www.readtpa.com/p/chatgpt-wi...
The Khan protects.
Yes if you don't know about the Baileys, hopefully the John Oliver piece is widely available now because however weird you are imagining this to be it is 500x more weird
We can't have this persist.
I'm not the only one to make this point, but there will need to be the equivalent of Nuremberg Trials when this is all over (however long that takes). If there are no consequences for fascists, we'll keep having fascism.
thoughts
Some of it is that it takes a decade or so for a young writer/exec whom loves a book to get into the position to advance it.
This is one of the ways that white supremacy weaponizes civility: by implying that certain people get to be served, and other kinds of people (you know what kinds) need to be grateful, without interrogating it.
I fucking despise Chuck Schumer
It wasn’t delayed. The confederacy lost the war, but won the peace because they were organized, ruthless, & allowed to/accommodated.
This story has it all: aquaculture, Black Flag, Bernie Sanders, Star Trek as policy, John Hodgman, male tears, and a candidate citing Luthen’s monologue from Andor. Meet Graham Platner, the Maine oysterman trying to crack the senate. @grahamformaine.bsky.social newrepublic.com/article/1996...
This is a kitchen table issue because he is no longer able to sit at their parent's kitchen table.
"...if you are hit by an SUV compared to being hit by a passenger car you are 44% more likely to be killed. Among kids it's higher - it's 82%."
That… is the entire point of the Federal Reserve.
i know everyone with a functioning brain expected chatgpt to result in deaths but i'm gonna be honest i didn't expect a suicide and a murder-suicide in the same week so soon. altman should be personally held liable
This came to me in a vision
If a dude offered to help you write crappy memos and essays, and you found out they were also helping children kill themselves, would you keep working with that dude?
Welp, the lying about economic numbers — which everyone predicted would happen — has commenced. And the press is dutifully gobbling it up.
[Bill Cassidy looking down at corpse of chicken he has fucked to death]: That chicken should not have been fucked that hard
i’ve never heard the audiobooks but maybe i’ll burn a credit.
Oh yes.
Just checking is Tesla still worth more than all the rest of the car companies combined?
Maybe they'll eventually regain their nerve, but for the moment, JB Pritzker appears to have single-handedly spooked the Trump administration into backing down with one 12-minute speech.
Great TV plotlines falling out of the goddam newsfeed for free. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...
I know it's been said but I keep getting re-infuriated about RFK Jr doing his thing, like we had this vaccines thing *settled*, they rule and they were working and all we had to do was NOT put the worst possible person in charge of the country's public health apparatus.
if you're unfamiliar with Quaker speak, "We find this to be an attempt at lobbying by stealth, outside the discernment discipline of the Yearly Meeting, and an unhelpful method of communication – as outlined in Quaker Faith and Practice 03.04." is how you say 'fuck you and the horse you rode in on'
Overnight, this extremely well-funded tech company run by a billionaire has gone from “There’s no way we can possibly stop our plagiarism machine from convincing children to kill themselves” to “If you type anything we don’t like, we’re calling the cops.” Either way, they take zero responsibility.
Molly O'Toole: "On way 1st day teaching journalism course on covering immigration, met by ICE in Mt.Pleasant at Lamont - agents appear to take father driving young daughter, likely to school. Agents shoving bystanders, daughter sobs it’s her fault-she’d seen car parked for 2hrs. Trump’s America"
Marisa Kabas 