AND THEN THEY LOST. THEY ALL FUCKING LOST TO REPUBLICANS. IT WAS FIFTEEN YEARS AGO AND THEY NEVER GOT ELECTED AGAIN BECAUSE PEOPLE JUST VOTED FOR THE REPUBLICAN. DO ACTUALLY NOT FUCKING COMPREHEND WHY THAT HAPPENED

I'm sorry but I have some questions: (1) What exactly is a "proclamation"?? Is this an executive order? If so, why not just call it that? (2) I was under the impression that the H1B visa program was established by Congress. Does the law give the President the power to do this?

Just to emphasize this point, when the Nuremberg laws were passed in 1935, Hitler didn't face massive, large-scale protests in the largest cities in Germany. The government of Bavaria didn't refuse to comply with Hitler's orders. The kind of resistance we are seeing today had no analogues then.

If ever there was an appropriate context for insufferable pedantry, this is that context

This really is a thing of beauty

@planetmoney.bsky.social Have any economists applied the idea of regulatory capture to the current Supreme Court? Seems like it would be a useful frame for understanding it, insofar as we have often thought of SCOTUS as a body that is meant to regulate the executive and legislative branches

Important to keep remembering and repeating that Kimmel didn't mock Charlie Kirk or celebrate his death in the monologue. He mocked the president's lack of feeling and criticized the regime.

“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing,” as the from SF author Joanna Maciejewska memorably put it, “not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” These stories show what happens when it’s the other way around."

Kind of amazed that @hodgman.bsky.social and Janet Varney (is she on here?) have done TWO episodes of E PLURIBUS MOTTO with extensive discussions of lobsters but not a single mention of the Furry Old Lobster (either the part from AREAS OF MY EXPERTISE or the song by @jonathancoulton.bsky.social)

@mattlieb.bsky.social @jordanmorris.bsky.social and Emily Fleming (is she on here?), re: the most recent #FreeWithAds episode on "Phantom of the Paradise": you may be interested in @jessethorn.bsky.social's interview with Paul Williams from last November maximumfun.org/episodes/bul...

Thinking about John Goodman's line about nihilists from THE BIG LEBOWSKI

Today is a beautiful date for honoring Pythagoras (and the simplest proof of his theorem)

Just checking, does selling $3.16 billion less to China make our trade deficit better or worse?

I am just going to keep posting that the TX governor recently pardoned a political murderer. The dude texted "I'm going to shoot protestors", then went and shot a Black Lives Matter protester. He was convicted in a jury trial. Hard to find a more blatant example of celebrating political violence.

Present tense should be "screenshoot" ("Hang on, let me just screenshoot this") and past tense should be "screenshot" ("I screenshot this for you yesterday"). This makes nobody happy but is nevertheless correct

I mean Hinckley was not motivated by politics! He was just a crazy person!

I don’t really understand this — I think I need someone to explain to me how this is the Democrats’ fault

I’ve literally not seen a single post celebrating this. Every single one has condemned it

Was just getting caught up on @heavyweight.bsky.social when I came across this news yesterday about AI-generated podcasts, and now I'm wondering how Jonathan Goldstein and the rest of Pushkin Industries feel about all of those ChatGPT ads they've been reading

I am so vicariously mad on behalf of jlukeroberts.bsky.social right now

This is how, in elementary school, I recorded the theme song to THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO.

This is almost literally the premise of "Sound Heap" by @leadmojo.bsky.social except that's a parody

The alternate theory is that in 2003 someone sent a letter with a sketch of a nude prepubescent girl to Trump's best friend without Trump's knowledge & forged Trump's signature on it in order to lay a trap for Trump when he inevitably would become president more than 20 years later #seemslegit

Their position is that their product is truly intelligent, able to create new ideas and converse like a human. And also that you can't tell it "Don't encourage people to commit suicide" because it's basically just a fancy autocomplete and it doesn't understand what it's saying

These AI slop ads are just bonkers. Do they really think people won't notice that the driver's license is full of gibberish?

Today I learned that @wonderella.bsky.social started updating again back in FREAKING JANUARY 2025

Today we learned that Trump wasn't lying when he denied sketching a doodle of a naked woman, because it was actually a doodle of a naked *pre-teen girl*

This feels like it should be a @judgejohnhodgman.bsky.social case

“…but what my complaint presupposes is: what if they don’t?”

These three emails in my inbox, in rapid succession, sound like the beginning of a dystopian future

Time once again for me to pitch my reboot of IT’S A LVING set in a restaurant at the top of one of Trump’s crappy hotels

What’s especially funny is that if Trump really was an FBI informant he would never, ever admit it, because in his world the absolute worst thing a person can be is a snitch

Today in class I taught my multivariable Calculus students the vector equation for a plane. I called it "Point-Normal form". (Those who know, know.) Then I showed them how to rewrite it as a single equation in three variables. I called it "Point-Normal form (scalars version)".

The biggest scandal in US public life *ought* to be that we are the richest country in history & yet our infrastructure sucks, our transportation choices suck, our cities suck, our healthcare sucks, our public administration sucks, & in dozens of little ways, our daily lives suck.

(choking back my own vomit) Welcome to the Resistance, Project Veritas

Me, listening to the classic @thisamericanlife.org episode "The Giant Pool of Money" and taking a big sip of coffee: Time to check in on the housing market and be reassured that we certainly won't repeat the mistakes of the past —

The good news is that within a year the housing bubble will crash (again) and our adult children will be able to buy reasonably-priced houses!

I posted this and immediately regretted not saying I Believe or Driver 8

Does anybody else think it's weird that we think of a "musketeer" as a sword guy, when the word literally means a gun guy? It's like if the old TV show "The Rifleman" was about a dude who was really good at martial arts

A real banger of a post

You are what you eat, so snack on Sunday Funnies!

Actually, Frankenstein is a doctor success at the Venice film festival

Can we, in the words of Grover Norquist, drown him in the bathtub now?

Your periodic reminder that (a) Dana is awesome, and (b) in 2017 I suggested to her that she should run for AG, and therefore I get full credit for every awesome thing she does

Next up: MAGA will insist that when mathematicians use spherical coordinates we adopt the physicist's convention about which angle is 𝜃 and which one is 𝜙, claiming that using 𝜙 to denote the polar angle is "woke"

If this time travel experiment works, I should be able to go from here and now and reappea—

“Diary of a Tiny CEO” is much better. (He really is improbably tiny)

Did I ever mention on here the worst comics-related idea I ever had? A golden-age funny-animal crossover featuring Mighty Mouse, Hoppy the Marvel Bunny, and Super Duck... set in the millieu of Art Spiegelman's MAUS. (sorry not sorry)

Among the many, many outrages the Trump administration has perpetrated, this surely ranks fairly low in the list, but nevertheless: I cannot *believe* they have created a situation in which I have to care about and be sympathetic of JOHN FREAKING BOLTON. www.publicnotice.co/p/john-bolto...