or, in the words of the Nac Mac Feegle: “Free Men! Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna' be fooled again!”

Discworld QOTD, from Feet of Clay

Even ardent protectionists would tell you that tariffing bananas and coffee is idiotic and yet it took the administration six months to get here

"I must be cringe and normie, that our children may have liberty to be based and edgy"

The State Department said it informed countries involved in the Gaza peace agreement that an attack by Hamas is being planned against Palestinians and that it would be a violation of the ceasefire deal

Gibson assumes technology will become unevenly distributed, but ultimately modernity will continue. Stephenson predicts modernity will become much less evenly distributed. This ironically makes Gibson a much more optimistic author. We are currently in a Stephenson novel.

Telling moment: I was walking back from the rally, but a couple miles from it, carrying nothing but my gigantic American flag. An eight year old on his bike sees me with it and yells "No Kings!!" with absolute conviction. My friends, they have lost the flag.

Look I’m sorry, but if you’re getting huffy about this I don’t think you have any right to lecture someone like Chuck Schumer on not getting what time it is. I want it to be as easy as possible for armed in the employ of the state defect from the regime, we are in a place where that matters.

I took part in a small town protest today in very very red rural Missouri. Initially, a few days ago 43 people were "going". Turned out to be 640 of us in a tiny town square! I was beyond exhilarated.

Do you think I’d explain my masterstroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I made the NYPD woke 35 minutes ago.

"I don't understand how Napoleon III is an Emperor when he won 74% of the popular vote in a democratic election."

His shitposting is already too powerful.

This is the best political news I’ve seen in a very long time — so please pass it on👇 Each state can limit Citizens United in their own state & they don’t have to wait for other states to do it. Our new @rollingstone.com piece based on our new book MASTER PLAN. Get the book at LeverNews.com/book

lol, saw somebody with a Blood Angels t-shirt. You know things are bad when Imperium fans are libbing out.

Guilliman with a “IN THIS LEGION WE BELIEVE” etc sign outside his quarters

Man with oakleys and a baseball cap in a pickup truck driving past the No King's protest screaming I LOVE THE KING! We all just kind of stood there laughing. Where's your self-respect, American?

😍 Boston, you are beautiful. #NoKings

👀👀👀

Maybe this is cope but I feel like this rhetoric must be self-defeating at a certain point. Like, it has to be hard to swallow for normies that all the people they’re seeing on the streets are paid agents of CPUSA

CHOTINER: So you're attending a No Kings protest today. ME: That's right. CHOTINER: But according to Steam, you've played over 450 hours of Crusader Kings 3. ME: Okay, well- Now hold on. That's sort of unfair. CHOTINER: Oh? ME: Sometimes I play as a duke or a count. CHOTINER: I see.

2. Our new analysis suggests that protest events in 2025 have occurred across a wider range of US counties than we observed during Trump's first term. And the current protest movement has already reached deeper into Trump country than at almost any point during the first Trump administration.

They don't think they're public servants. They think they're kings, princes, dukes, and barons. They control the government, and that makes them royalty, and that means our money should be used to buy them planes and gold-plated toys and gilded ballrooms

Guy in a Mets jacket taking a picture of his young children: "ok, say Fuck Trump"

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

Small business brain remains undefeated by logic.

genuinely wild the number of quote tweets that see this as an insult toward mamdani rather than as praise for his discipline and skill at translating personal charisma into political appeal

Please let Plato have been wrong, at the very least

i would never, in a million years, have predicted that we'd crack natural language as a domain and people would mass-cargo-cult to the belief that "we have cracked natural language" was uninteresting

If we don’t collapse into armed civil conflict or one party rule we’re definitely currently in Chud-2020 where people are posting things they’ll regret a few years later, only instead of some grad school-jargon slogan about policing it’s the fourteen words.

PENN IS OUT! That means both institutions that signed prior agreements with the administration have said no. We're at 3 rejections. I told y'all once the second one hit yesterday, the clock started for the rest. www.thedp.com/article/2025...

PS the Trump people understand this, which is why they're all over TV sweating bullets and talking about "Hate America Rallies." Popular mobilization is already contributing to widening cracks, such as universities rejecting the compact and reporters walking out of the Pentagon.

"megachurch does something that caused an Old Testament disaster event" is like a once a week occurrence these days

See also: The arts!

Very excited to be able to talk about something I've been working on for a while now - we're working with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, IMO the leading fusion startup in the world, to take our work on AI and tokamaks and make it work at the frontier of fusion energy. deepmind.google/discover/blo...

If you're at #CNS2025, be sure to check out the poster presentation Monday morning (D139) by our wonderful mentee Josh on flatsurfer -- our soon-to-be-released python package to create limbic-centered flat maps of the cerebral cortex. w/ @jtheriault.bsky.social

Excited to share our work making an "allostasis-first" case that brain function is most productively framed in terms of its core regulatory function. We also introduce some new ideas in the context of metabolism and cognitive function in Alzheimer's. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Please do me the favor of watching this short video. This video is meaningful & relevant. youtube.com/shorts/SW0PQ...

There's no explanation for this outside of blatant bad faith. The 15th Amendment contains an enforcement clause and SCOTUS is stuck with it isn't a complicated idea.

Consider investing in a Faraday Pouch if you haven't already. Remember: they can track you even if your phone is off if they really want to (Source: former SIGINT)

No, they want you to think that, same thing Russia does with Putin. Then you wait around instead of acting. Don the Con is just high AF right now.

Damnit Josh leave some cool shit for the rest of us

How it started: "Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." (Introducing OpenAI blog post, 2015) How it's going:

they have been trying to do meme authoritarianism, and that means generating the right kinds of content--the forces of Order vs the forces of Chaos, riots and violence and burning shit and ""antifa supersoldiers"" the kind of imagery to justify the kind of powers they aspire to

And I do value my job. I feel very lucky to work as a Professor in a topic I love. I don't even mind a lot of the admin (I actually really enjoy writing grants!), but I just think that the reality is very far from what most people deciding to enter the field expect. Certainly I had no idea.

STOP USING THIS FUCKING ART STYLE

Schatz: They’re stopping wind and solar because this guy has some very strange ideas about the energy mix. And it’s consistent with the rest of his political and economic philosophy — if there’s less of everything, it gives him more authority to dole out favors

Or more simply: they're using violence as a tantrum, in the instinctive belief that if they tantrum hard enough they'll get what they want. This is a recipe for horror, of course, but also for their own overthrow.

I can’t help but think MIT‘s response to The Compact was swift because it’s so sincere. Though every institution has sore spots, it’s easily the closest thing to meritocracy I’ve ever seen up close. Tough — sometimes brutal — but fair.

ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...