67% error rate

Every cyclist death is heartbreaking, but it hits even harder when it's an advocate like this. It's infuriating and saddening. These deaths, especially on roads that are known to be dangerous, are simply policy choices.

My friend is dead. A driver, through neglect, recklessness or malice, has killed Louisa. I’m beside myself with grief and filled with righteous anger at a city that has stalled and slow-walked safety improvements for all road users. Louisa should be here with us.

Evergreen post: He could be impeached tonight and convicted at trial in a few weeks and removed from office immediately thereafter if about 20 people in DC decided to put country over party for the first time in their miserable, self-dealing lives

Mitch McConnell's possible death raises new questions about Joe Biden's health.

metrics

this video from the bbc about texas bbq is frying me

"In America, we have a terrible idea that some Americans are more legitimate than others...We cannot tolerate the thought that some Americans are more American than others, because that thinking makes America's sacred promises conditional, and it gets Americans killed."

As I was saying: anti-immigration politics is insatiable—literally cannot be satisfied—by any concrete menu of policy changes because it's not about policy! It's about ethnic purity, & purging the body politic of the enemy alien. Every 'reasonable grievance' is a stalking horse for ethnic cleansing

Can everyone just step back and realize how insane it is that the US Supreme Court had to rule on the constitutionality of the US CONSTITUTION and the vote to uphold the Constitution wasn't unanimous!!!

The entire GOP platform under Trump II consists of exactly fourteen words.

anyway i think the proper takeaway here is that a bare majority of the court thinks the plain words of the 14th amendment mean what they say, that four members believe there is a secret hidden meaning only recently discovered by hack lawyers

its crazy how one of the only jobs where you can openly espouse the most disgusting gutter racism on-the-clock is “person who makes laws and is in charge of everything”

it's insane that the Rs can't run a fair. I would've assumed fairs were like 80-20 R

It’s all lumpen billionaire shit in the end, no one knows how or why they’re rich but they do know they are the smartest people on earth cause why else would they have all this money, inbred aristos all the way down

I tie it to the phenomenon where only the impossible is possible, you can’t fix things with boring, achievable ways like hiring more nurses or raising taxes or running more busses you can only solve it with magical wizard stuff that’s exciting and fun tor investors to think about and won’t happen

So do I. I can't help it, because this is exactly the truck that hit and killed my son.

There is a hostile system of harm that led to my son's murder. He was killed by a man, but that man was enabled and empowered by a system of toxic masculinity, toxic car worship culture, the design of suburbs, hate towards bicyclists, and more. I encourage everyone to think about these things.

Seems like a fine time to revisit the best, truest joke from Just Enough Research 2024.

Evergreen:

NEW: Vessel captains crossing the Strait of Hormuz will have to answer "our riddles three" Iran's foreign ministry says

Yes, it does. 🤨 #jokesters

Remember when Scarlett Johansson came out with an album almost entirely of Tom Waits covers? Is this what aging is gonna keep being like, just remembering shit?

In the 25 years since I first read it, I don’t think any line of literature has hit me harder or come back to me more often than the last fifteen words of Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American.” “…how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.”

"generative AI to me feels like a corporate DDoS on society in a way that is really disorienting" "we're running on the fumes of knowledge produced in the past and underfunding and undermining knowledge production and serious science right now" Perfectly stated, @alixdunn.com

just finished Days of Shattered Faith, the third book in @aptshadow.bsky.social's Tyrant Philosophers series. really great exploration of the costs of empire, and also full of Deeply Weird stuff like an order of monks whose tongues have been replaced by isopods and a most beloved murder centipede

I’m a little surprised that the President didn‘t open the strait of Hormuz with a ribbon and a giant gold-plated scissors.

Pope Leo XIV casts a wreath into the waters off Spain's Canary Islands in memory of the thousands of desperate migrants who have lost their lives while attempting to cross into Europe. “Human dignity has no passport and does not lose its value when crossing a border,” he said in his remarks.

Remembering a multi-day conservative freakout because Lizzo briefly played a founding father’s flute

"We're bringing back style to the White House I'm painting it cream for a start We're making it into a cultural lighthouse For glamour and beauty and art Evenings of the Budapest playing Vivaldi And Munch doing bits of Ravel.."

Jack and Jackie Kennedy turned the White House into a glittering showcase for the arts, hosting performances of ballet, opera, poetry, Shakespeare, classical music, and jazz, and inviting Nobel winners to speak.

omg ffs we just want healthcare

bagel shop called The Bialy and End All-y

I just—like, sure, being a trillionaire is cool I guess but what’s it all for if you haven’t even seen the wreckage of the titanic firsthand

“Why’s it taking so long to take down the name when they put it up so fast?” yeah, undoing every single thing he’s done is gonna be exactly like that, get used to it

The idea that LLMs 'hallucinate' is itself a clever invention of the tech industry to disguise actual failures of their systems. Rebranding these serious algorithmic glitches as 'hallucinations' was designed to make the public accept this bullshit by linking it to the vagaries of human psychology.

Imagine fucking up a prosecution so badly that it undoes other, unrelated prosecutions? This is surrender your law license and go work in the drive thru while you think about what you’ve done territory.

Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration.

*looks around the United States* Your souls are weighed down by car ownership

i'm fine with people choosing bicycles as a primary mode of transportation. in fact, there are lots of benefits to doing so. all i'd ask is that they run a gas generator or something for a couple hours a day to fulfill their commitment to the carbon footprint

guy has a trillion dollars, 0 friends, and has never landed a joke. I know a pact with the devil when I see one.

If you over-regulate capitalism you get totalitarian communism. If you under-regulate capitalism you get a ruling caste of insane monopolists. Please ignore the fact that one of these things has never happened and the other keeps happening over and over

a country that dares to ask: what if we did 2008 but the houses exploded

can we talk about how this admin spends so much time saying 'whoa whoa whoa a policy is NOT illegal just bc it has a disparate impact on Black people' and at the same time is like 'whoa whoa whoa a school has Black students? must be an illegal admissions policy!' ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...

something I think about a lot is that pandemic relief and Bidenomics left the most of the working class better off in terms of money and savings than at any point in several decades, and a huge fraction of them threw the money into crypto magic beans and various meme stocks

OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN VERY CLOSE TO A DEAL WITH EURASIA