Meanwhile, telling that there WAS a law against one corporation owning too many local TV stations, and "too many" was 40% OF ALL THE TV STATIONS, and that wasn't enough.

like a chickenpox party for government. (But including chickenpox. And measles, and polio.)

defenders of women and free speech like I am a defender of tacos. (But without the culinary or cultural fondness. And not tacos in general, but specifically some ones I already ate. Also, it will turn out that I have never seen or eaten a taco, and somehow also ate them with a fork.)

"a mine that at this point seems more dead canary than coal" The week well summarized.

The future billionaires and their power-consolidation corporations are trying to sell us is a future of glossy vending machines. The future we want is a future of kitchens.

This government is, unsurprisingly, a reality show, but if it seems like terrible TV to you, that's because none of us are the audience. Trump blurts idiocy and then watches TV to see who can get on his TV first with an asininely obsequious defense of it. Trump is the audience.

"...is a captivating musical project that blends diverse influences to create a unique and immersive sound." Remember to delete the boilerplate "artist bio" before hitting Publish.

If nothing you can do will keep you safe, you’re being given an opportunity to just do the right thing.

The man who gets all his information from television thinks that if he controls television, he wins.

Sensible and productive responses to horrible events are hard. Much easier to blame the people you already feared, and demand the abuses you already coveted.

Who will launch Empathy Central?

BlueSky is not just an app, it's an experiment in public data, but the experiment is hidden under a normal-looking app that doesn't really give you different powers than you have elsewhere. If you're curious to see under this surface, I made a thing to help. Explained here: furia.com/log/518

Handy rule of thumb: if an app's new feature sounds like a gift, but it has a Name, it's not a gift and they're hoping you won't notice that something else just got worse. But you will.

"only phones and radios should break up out here" That's how you write a country line. open.spotify.com/track/6g9Km6...

Hypocrisy is having a principle but acting against it. I feel like we need a different word for having no principles but grabbing at one that contradicts your own behavior in order to try to club your enemies with the wrong end of it.

Disqualifying people from public life because they said something insensitive is a bad idea, but the particular people demanding this make me really want to give it a chance.

Also, not the point of my earlier Star Wars aside, but the original movie has exactly two relationships that feel like they involve anything other than intersecting plot functions, and both only sustain that illusion because one of the participants speaks in untranslated noises.

“[He tried to] annihilate the essential pillars of the democratic rule-of-law state … ​the greatest consequence ​[of which] … would have been the return of dictatorship..​.” “sentenced to more than 27 years in prison” Saw these interesting sentences today; saving in case they're useful later.

I don't see any way to seriously believe THIS murder will be a turning point when none of the previous hundreds or thousands sufficed, but if you can make sainting an asshole work where nothing else did, I will happily buy the ceremonial robes through your affiliate link.

Shooting awful people does not improve them or us. I'm a temperamental pacifist, but if punching people in the head could change their minds, I would be willing to learn. Evidence suggests the opposite: punch broken people and their contorted disdains scab and fuse.

You don't need to specifically decry POLITICAL violence, as if singling out POISON ivy to avoid tangling with the rest of the great ivy community. Also, decrying is pathetic. Cry. Things are bad. And then pull your head out of your grievances and run the fucking country like people matter.

It can be hard to tell, when you take a person and really scrutinize them, whether they are good or evil. But if you let them go again and see who they run to, it's usually easy.

Too much technological "advancement" advances from legos to lego robots to awkward robots that build your lego sets for you to shiny ones that extrude a police station as a single seamless part.

I can't believe it even constitutes a political position to be against state terrorism, whether its target is Kyiv, Gaza, Doha, Chicago, NYC, a boat full of drugs, a graduate student with a conscience or a guy in a Club America shirt going to Home Depot to buy a light switch.

NO KINGS. www.mobilize.us/nokings/even...

Hesitant to give them ideas, but if Department of War is the spirit of accuracy we're after, the Department of Death and Human Sewages should definitely be next.

When the little free library is next to the Sloan School.

Trump is what you get if you start without principles and are shielded by entitlement from anything that might have imparted some. Vance is what you if you start with an unremarkable amount of cleverness and fill in the rest of your identity with disdain.

Trump's taste in decor is exactly as crass as his taste in literally everything else, but: if I worked at Temu I absolutely would be clipping every single gold thing out of those pictures and listing a plastic version of it for $1 + $79.99 tariff.

Wants to replace defense with war, wants to invade own cities, and threatens this with an allusion to a movie about famously ill-advised and unsuccessful war that he himself famously avoided fighting in.

So your strategy for locating the invading armies of hardened murderers is to find them at their day jobs at a battery factory?

I am far enough out of touch that it took me a few minutes to figure out what celebrity (or even what KIND of celebrity) had just swarmed past me in a flurry of bodyguards and cameras in downtown Boston as I walked to get some lunch, but near enough to be sure of the answer from one clue.

I'm not suggesting RFKjr should be impeached. I'm suggesting that everyone who nominated or voted to confirm him should be impeached. And then he should be fired.

It is utterly pointless to demand the voluntary resignation of someone who took a job for the express purpose of destroying it.

I don't want Trump in prison. Prisoners have enough issues already. Take his gift plane, fill it with all his gold crap, park it right next to the pond at Dulles, and set him up in it with unlimited DoorDash credits. He'll enjoy the visibility, and we'll benefit from being reminded.

A federal brainworm infection is bad, but it does let us see whether states, communities, health "insurers", medical practices and/or pharmacies are willing to administer health and science.

"...with answers ranging from 25cm to 1/4 meter" What did we do before AI content summaries?

Stuart, you should have been here in this life for this. open.spotify.com/track/1E2mnQ...

Supreme Court reform idea: - 1st vacancy during an administration confirmed by 2/3 Senate for 9-year term - subsequent vacancies confirmed by 2/3 House for 4 years or simple House majority until end of administration - current >9y justices retired 1/year in order of descending seniority

Easy way to tell if a company thinks their users matter: when they finally restore a feature whose removal was plainly unpopular, do they acknowledge that history in any way, or do they disingenuously pretend it's a new idea nobody ever had before? newsroom.spotify.com/2025-08-26/i...

Your target marketing sunk my battleship. open.spotify.com/track/5vRkN9...

Some people would rather be a dead fish in a small pond.

You can't spell "radium fad" without A and I.

The Scrabble app just told me to "Avoid duplicated letters. A balanced mix is best!" But is it? I can check. Here's the distribution of bingos by tile-count combinations: dactal.org/Scrabble.htm...

Favorite LinkedIn line of the day: "We've had commercial AI [music] systems shoved down our collective throats for 3 years straight and the best anyone can come up with is a Red Lobster commercial." Least favorite: "__ isn't Just an App. It's a New Paradigm."

If anybody can vibe-code embryonic ideas into slick apps, we're gonna get a lot of slick apps sealed airlessly around ideas that never got a chance to become. I want the opposite of that, unslick explorers of exposed exologic. We only start at the beginning. dactal.org/Scrabble.html

If you play a lot of Scrabble, you probably already know that RETINAS is a useful rack to study, as it has 9 7-letter words and 76 8-letter extensions from one of the 20 most likely combinations by tile frequency. But do you know the LEAST likely 7-letter bingo?

"Trump-Putin meeting is a ‘listening exercise’ for the president, White House says". Good job thinking of a kind of exercise that is both physically feasible and temperamentally impossible for Trump.

Masking and arming the swamp.

In honor of today's relevant word, I have updated the example guesses used in this demonstration query. dactal.org?queryname=Wo...