I love it when Solitary Sandpipers have friends. Not so solitary now, huh?

#birds

God, I remember listening to that on a school bus in Hawaii on my diskman when I was like 14.

But in the internet era it's a harder thing, and events in a random order don't feel like they make the point of the crazy flow of events in the same way.

I kind of feel like the original worked, especially in a pre internet context, but a lot of people disagree. That song got me to look a bunch of things up in books, like the Suez Crisis which I didn't learn about in school.

So nobody told Fallout Boy that the somewhat thin premise of We Didn't Start The Fire that makes it work was that the 118 events were listed in chronological order and they just made a song where they listed events from their lifetime in a completely random order?

Patrick wyman holding a copy of Lost Worlds

It’s real! It’s really real! Preorder at the link in my bio right now, it’s good, I promise!

Disregarding, for a moment, that this law is obviously just intended to attack Queer folks in Ohio, especially trans folks (as a trans person in Ohio, it's pretty obvious)

I also still think it's wild we're afraid of kids seeing a boob but perfectly fine with kids witnessing violence, real and fake

Prego Pivots From Budget-Tier Pasta Sauce to Small Microphones That Listen to Your Family's Intimate Conversations Prego, the pasta sauce brand, announced a new lid-shaped device designed to record and preserve family dinner conversations.

Cannot believe this is real and not a satire headline

futurism.com/future-socie...

Whole generation got their brains pickled by the idea that politics is a process of patient triangulation and consensus-building instead of a knife fight that decides how pain, suffering, and resources are distributed throughout society

if there is a path to either national nonpartisan redistricting or proportional representation, it is going to go through one party or another. but the first step toward it actually happening is for that party to win power, and you go to war with the system you have, not the one you want.

the shift to a winner-take-all distribution of electoral votes? a partisan project. the development of the mass political party? a partisan project. antislavery and reconstruction? a partisan project. even direct election of senators comes out of populist agitation in the late 19th century.

but the fact of the matter is that with the notable exception *of* the mid to late 20th century, every major change in our political system and government has been a partisan or ideological political project.

one of the ways the mid to late 20th century political world has distorted the historical memories of even sophisticated observers is in the idea that you can achieve major transformations of american political life through something like bipartisan consensus

Why doesn't Caterpillar go back to that logo?!
(alt text: several views of cavity nesting bees in the radiator of a rusty old 1930s Caterpillar 30 tractor. The old Caterpillar logo looks like it belongs to a jam band)

And it seems like he's never really had exposure to anything approaching a healthy intellectual environment where his grandiosity wasn't encouraged or he got anything like healthy intellectual pushback or even exposure to things that challenged him to really reflect on other people's perspectives.

He's probably got a bunch of psychological issues given people he met on the internet convinced him to basically drop out of society into a subculture that gave him super unhealthy attention and maybe some abuse (I'm not sure) when he was literally like a pre teen.

He is a guy who's more a store brand knock off of L. Ron Hubbard than he is any of the many things he gets called. He writes bad fiction and a bunch of pseudoscience and psuedophilosophy. It's a very lucrative gig and seems to have gone great for him.

One thing that drives me nuts is people portraying Eliezer Yudkowsky as things that he's not. He's not a computer scientist, he's not a philosopher, he's a futurist, and in my opinion a not very good one.

Four bunnies play cards around a table, using red checker pieces and some acorns as chips. They are in a small parlor, and one of the bunnies is nibbling his cards.

Daily bunny no.3295 is feeling lucky

Rabbits use a laser pointer to lure a cat to pounce on it. The bunnies hide behind a small table. As the cat is distracted, two cornered mice take the chance to run in the other direction.

Daily bunny no.3296 creates a distraction

Doing a talk tomorrow for a class of second-graders about my great-great-great grandfather, an immigrant from Schleswig-Holstein who fought in the Civil War. I'm going to use him to talk about immigration, immigrants in the Union Army, why soldiers fought, and what they thought about slavery.

Or some wonderful trans or enby bird representation.

Beautiful graphic with the text "The Biggest Week presents Birder Prom sponsored by Birds and Blooms, featuring performing artist and birder Bonner Black!" The graphic shows two birds anthropomorphized into human body shapes, with a Cerulean Warbler in a blue dress and a Blackburnian Warbler in a suit.

Obsessed with the unintentionally(?) queer illustration for birder prom that has both species in male-type plumage. A female Cerulean Warbler would be more yellow-blue than that pure soft blue, and the beautiful orange is a male Blackburnian Warbler.

like 200% more likely to participate now

Not that bringing people back will reassemble the skills and structures required. But it gives you a fighting chance to get somewhere which will be very difficult otherwise.

It's really hard to regenerate high expertise capacity once you lose it. It takes a very long time to develop and is expensive. And you absolutely don't want to be dependent on outside consultants (which I imagine they'll suggest) or just muddle through.

I'm thinking especially of the UK post Brexit which has struggled to even generate the capacity in terms of personnel to negotiate any trade agreements, let alone all the trade agreements they were negotiating through the EU. And our state department is probably worse off in a lot of ways.

There are just some agencies that are going to be desperately needed very quickly (the state department) or have to train their work force over a long period (also but not limited to the state department) that I don't really see how else you have a hope of fixing.

I wonder if the next administration is going to have to do something like declare some–or all at some agencies– firings and retirements under Trump invalid and offer a big chunk of–or full– pay for the time they were gone to anyone who agrees to come back for at least a certain period of time.

A bunny rides a barrel off a large waterfall, peering out the top of the barrel at the spray below.

Daily bunny no.3293 is going for a ride

A bunny adrift on a tiny ice floe asks a passing seal for help. the seal has a fish in its mouth, and it is a moonlit night on a calm sea.

Daily bunny no.3294 could use a ride home