Herman Melville on moderates, all the way back in 1857:

Seems like a weird thing to tweet on the day when your boss said he’d pardon someone convicted of sending 400 tons of cocaine into the US.

Dear foreign nationals in war-torn countries, terrorism hot-spots, and amidst our enemies: If you help the United States, we’ll fuck you over and abandon you. Not the individual servicepeople or intelligence officers — they’ll fight for you. I mean the depraved, soulless leadership of the nation.

We should be saying his name more: James McCrery. And we should look into the other buildings and projects he's done and start viewing them with distaste and distrust. (Apparently that list includes a number of Catholic churches.)

The Trump regime is literally allowing this stuff to be sprayed on our food.

Two people were shot at a gas station in my rural town in Mississippi today. I guess 500 troops are gonna have to be taken away from their families during the holidays to come occupy my small town now too, huh?

The Target boycott that AFT joined on Labor Day is seeing success. This holiday season, we're doubling down to demonstrate organized labor's economic power, as well as the consequences of ignoring the will of workers and the good of working families. www.aft.org/news/we-aint...

If you want to see how quickly everyone goes into manufacturing consent mode, compare the full-court press tonight to the response to any of the people ICE has shot in the last few months, some of whom died.

This was my first attempt at creating a non-alcoholic cocktail using a "non-alcoholic spirit." The name is a nod to the fact that if it were made with full-proof gin, it would be a buck, but it parallels a Shirley Temple. 1 1/2 oz Free Spirits' Spirit of Gin 3/4... https://sam.upstate.blog/?p=2253

I once asked a bookseller at a large indie store how many people would have to buy a book for it to get the attention of the store buyer and cause an additional order and they said: Three.

Whoever at Google thought it was a good idea to make the Gmail mobile app search results default to "most relevant" instead of "most recent": That was a terrible idea and you should feel bad about yourself for having had it.

Physical mail, land lines, now increasingly even email — I find it tragic the way we will sooner abandon a once revolutionary communication technology than regulate* its use by those who seek to sell us junk by feigning familiarity. *or even cease to subsidize, in some cases.

Instead, corps decided the better business mode was to have their LLMs plagiarize the source material, rewording it to give the illusion of possessing intrinsic knowledge. This enabled them to con executives into believing these machines can think and will one day surpass human intelligence. 2/2

GPT would have been such a great technology if LLMs were just used to augment search engines. Their natural language processing ability means they can find relevant content no matter how you phrase your query. No more keyword matching, just ask a question, or describe what you’re looking for. 1/2

This is a pretty solid version of ordinary Guinness (which is already a fairly low ABV at 4.2%). It's not quite as clean in its flavor (though in fairness, I'm comparing the NA version from a can to my memory of regular Guinness on draft), but it's a decent NA... https://sam.upstate.blog/?p=2240

Yes, Trump is an extraordinary pathology in American politics. But it’s run-of-the-mill GOP politicians who have empowered RFK Jr to kill innumerable children with his lunacy.

the nuzzi story is fun and all but at the center of it is the elevation of a man who has dedicated his life to making children catch preventable diseases to a position where he can enact harm at enormous scale

There’s one person squarely to blame for Trump’s corruption, authoritarianism & assault on democracy: John Roberts. He’s enabled so much of Trump’s lawlessness while somehow escaping accountability for it New cover story from @pemalevy.bsky.social & me www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Trump in a room with a very charismatic person results in like half a day of Trump agreeing with everything that person said, so this has the potential to be very, very funny.

If the President can impose his own taxes and use the proceeds to spend on his own projects, all without Congress, we have a dictatorship not a constitutional republic.

I think the level of sexual abuse that is going to be coming out of ICE would put the Boston archdiocese and Penn State to shame

Does anyone have a list of the reporters that were in that gaggle where he said, "Quiet, Piggy"? You know, the ones who refused to support their colleague? I'd like to know who they are because they should be named and shamed.

READ: If you care about how we’ve been “planning” our cities and suburbs, this is REALLY important. I’ve been saying this in ways for years now, but I haven’t put it in writing very much. I don’t use these kinds of words lightly or often. But too much patience is part of the problem. Please share.

A weirdly on point microcosm of MAGA’s whole toxic nostalgia trip. All those things always sucked. You thought they were good because you were twelve. Rinse & repeat.

Can you imagine YOUR city like this? Why not, more to the point. All road deaths are a decision made at all levels of Government, within the courts, and to a large extent within the manufacturing of cars and the marketing of them. It doesn't have to be this way.

This was my first attempt at mixing a cocktail that used a spirit "alternative" (something deliberately created and marketed as a non-alcoholic alternative to a traditional spirit). This one featured The Spirit of Gin from Free Spirits. It was pretty decent. 2... https://sam.upstate.blog/?p=2214

And we knew this. This wasn't speculation. We studied it, we had the talking points. We trained volunteers to explain this to people. It's not a surprise. Rich people don't flee places with good quality of life when we increase the quality of life. They might try to cheat us, but they don't leave.

One of the most subtly insane aspects of the unrelenting car dependency we’ve deliberately built across North America is the incredible reluctance we have to remove the driving privilege, even from those who clearly are a danger to themselves & others, because “people have to drive.” #CarDependency

I was impressed by this one. Despite what the brewer says, it's more in the style of a schwartzbier than a porter or stout, and I would compare it favorably to Köstritzer Schwarzbier (my usual beer of choice at the local Wolff's Biergarten). (If they insist... https://sam.upstate.blog/?p=2197

Not bad overall. It lacks the crispness I usually associate with an Oktoberfest or märzen-style beer, and it was rather more hazy than I would have expected. It also wasn't quite as malty as I would hope, but it had decent flavor and body and was pleasant to... https://sam.upstate.blog/?p=2193

In a normal democracy, a total collapse of party leadership would result in an no-confidence vote and immediate snap elections to find leaders who can lead

particularly when axios is reporting it and no one else — not even politico — is.

NA Beverage Experience: Okay Background The Lost & Found Bar and Kitchen is a small establishment in Albany's warehouse district. Its building used to be a bank, and the proprietors kept just a hint of that aesthetic. While the space isn't large, it's open to... https://sam.upstate.blog/?p=2178

NA Experience Rating: Okay Background Fiden's is a local brewing company that opened just before the pandemic hit. They weathered the pandemic well, selling cans out of their production facility to lines of cars that snaked out of the parking lot and down the... https://sam.upstate.blog/?p=2173

About a month ago, a cardiac situation sent me to the hospital emergency room. I'm fine now (I was discharged the same day), but my cardiologist has advised me to avoid alcohol (and caffeine) for the time being. Readers of this blog know my passion for... https://sam.upstate.blog/?p=2149

virtue signalling is good actually

@bmj.com, a renowned health journal, slams car bloat: "Cars are becoming steadily larger, [and] with this comes potential harms to health...Action is needed locally, nationally, and internationally to curb sales of new SUVs and to reduce their presence in urban areas." www.bmj.com/content/391/...

This election suggests something interesting: the massive local GOP losses says the bad Democratic Party brand is salvageable, *if* the Third Way-style accommodationists are boxed out of leadership. Voters want to fight Trump and will support a pretty wide range of candidates to do it.

Oh, yea, and one other thing. People are really, really, really, really tired of the gerontocracy. I want to be governed by someone who has to live with the consequences of his or her actions. Stop doing mental gymnastics and put up candidates who know that hitting F12 isn't hacking.

Mamdani quotes Mario Cuomo, calling him a great New Yorker.

I suspect a fairly common attitude not really captured well by polling is something like “vaguely uncomfortable about trans folks, but don’t think a lot about the topic, and much more likely to decide that you’re a creepy weirdo if you make it obvious you’re malignantly obsessed with them.”

Here's another bit of conventional wisdom Zohran completely blew away: His speech was at well above a 10th-grade level. It was complex, erudite, punctuated by deep and fluent references. You don't have to condescend to voters with baby talk! Part of re-establishing norms is speaking like an adult.

I love that Zohran did not praise Cuomo in his speech. You absolutely do not have to say nice things about bad people. We should normalize that in “polite” politics: Praising bad people is not actually “civility.”

Most important thing about Islamaphobic smears is they’re Islamaphobic smears, and Cuomo and backers push them. But also, like a pebble in my shoe— Al Qaeda and ISIS are fundamentalist Sunni! Mamdani is relatively secular Shia and standing for election in America! Jihadists would readily kill him.

As the cold reality of Cuomo’s defeat sets in, this is a moment for centrists to ask themselves: Have we lost touch with the common voter? Get out and spend time in the tattoo parlors and dispensaries. The drag shows, community gardens and outsider art galleries where Real New Yorkers congregate

The lesson here is have good principles and stand on them. Stand for something that isn't power!

I think it'd be lovely for Schumer to join Cuomo in retirement

I submitted the below comment to the public comment section for the Rt. 2 Corridor project. Capital Streets has a good deal of additional information. I write as an RPI alumnus and former resident of the City of Troy. While I now reside across the river in... https://sam.upstate.blog/?p=2125