TERRAIN! PULL UP!

American talking to my fellow Americans. Anemic transit is a real problem. But in the U.S. the articulation of *need* for cars versus *want* for cars (want that's often perfectly defensible) is utterly divorced from reality, or built on top of justifications that required cars in the first place.

That's 8-20 Green St. Not the one in Jamaica Plain, though! This is the Green St. that used to run from Bowdoin Square to Chambers St. in the West End. By 1928, all these buildings had been replaced with a parking garage. And the garage and streets vanished with the rest of the area in the 50s.

Honestly one of the biggest problems with cars is that ultimately the product isn't a transportation tool but rather a psychological one, creating the illusion that you have control over your life even as you slot into a chaotic system that can easily kill you even if you do everything right.

Yes! Talk to anyone about why they *need* a car, even where there are alternatives and it's like 10% real use cases and 90% revulsion at the idea of giving up the metal box that tells them that they're safe, free, and totally in control.

How badly did your section of the country fumble it's time and money on bad infrastructure? I made a very vibes based map on my travel experiences

Professional skepticism makes belief difficult, but my absolute favorite conspiracy theory is that Josip Broz Tito was a Soviet body double.

Never before have I seen the daily experience of grad school captured in such vivid clarity.

Five Spam Musubi on a plate, with another one in the background on some wax paper. For those unfamiliar: rectangle of sticky rice, slice of Spam fried in sugar/soy sauce mix (I add oster sauce, too), wrapped in nori. The pinnacle of 20th century Pacific cuisine, the greatest ocean on earth. Ring of Fire numbah one, baybee!

Wife gone; break out the SPAM.

If this actually turns out to be the first order of business you will know that we failed, epically

If I have to hear/read the word "bipartisan" again before 2050, we didn't make it.

*Levitating, eyes glowing, hair blown back by a phantom breeze, speaking across eons with the voice of Kate L. Turabian*: No such problems with Chicago Notes-Bibliography style.

Even if you've sworn some kind of blood oath about going after 2024 non-voters, "I have decided to do this for a principled reason"non-voters are a drop on the bucket compared to "what's an election?" non-voters.

disc horse bot d @horsedisc.bsky.so... No break greater than 1 hr yesterday Joined Nov '23 I will never vote for John Fetterman. Sarah @sarahv.bsky.social Joined Jun '23 I'd crawl over broken glass and hot coals to vote for John Fetterman over any Republican. 10:04 PM • Apr 19, 2026 disc horse bot d @horsedisc.bsky.so... No break greater than 1 hr yesterday Joined Nov '23 we smoke blow in this web zone • 8h

really?? you fell right in the horse trap for THAT???

Turns out having a real ending is important.

I am not a gatekeeper. I believe that one does not necessarily need a PhD in history to be considered a historian, but I do not believe that merely writing on a historical topic makes one a historian either. If that were true, I became a historian in the 3rd grade with my report on Abraham Lincoln.

There are rare moments of immense possibility and all signs point to one approaching us at high speed. Do we cower behind the conventional and squander it, or do we save the country and perhaps the world by once again trying to live up to our oft-neglected and tarnished ideals?

Not even 1932 "Balance the Budget" FDR knew what the hell was going to happen. The change was so monumental that conservatives are still whining/promoting conspiracy theories/destroying the country about it.

Between the Civil War and 1932, Republicans were the party of government, with a virtual monopoly on the presidency and the Senate (Cleveland and Wilson as the rare exceptions). Any other state of affairs was essentially unthinkable through the 1920s. Then this happened and remade the U.S.:

Wandering through life convinced that there is a secret crime universe lurking just below the surface? This too is peasant brain.

Gonna spend the next two years spamming every elected Dem about the concept of "damnatio memoriae." Chisel his name off every inscription. Build over the various Trump Towers like they're Nero's Golden House. Remove him from physical memory, not to forget but as a sign of disrespect to the man.

how is this literally happening in real life

I am willing to pay whatever tax rate is needed to have parking enforcement officers in roaming forklifts, flipping cars out of fire/bike lanes without warning.

Someone at the NYT asked me a couple years ago for an opinion piece on "how to solve the Colorado River water crisis."

So I made a nice little writeup on the most obvious answer: charging for water.

Once the editorial board saw it, they freaked out & cancelled the piece.

I STAND FOR DA TROOPS

There's a ton of articles on inoculating against misinformation and conspiracy theories (ans well as other proposed techniques), but I've found this one useful as a kind of birds-eye-view of the field:

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

My dissertation is still under embargo! For now I'd recommend:

"Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them" edited by Joseph Uscinski (academic.oup.com/book/25369)

I have disagreements with some of the essays/findings, but for an intro into conspiracism research, it's solid.

THE POKEMON WORLD. MAY, 1945:

SOVIET CONSCRIPT 1: Holy shit. It’s Hitler’s dog!

SOVIET CONSCRIPT 2: How can you tell?

HITLER’S DOG: Hitlersdog. Hit-Hit. Hitlersdog.

SOVIET CONSCRIPT 2: Oh. Right.

In my experience these are factors that are usually closely related. Quite a few conspiracists I studied would frequently invoke an imagined past as something that was ruined or taken away from them. But I think the loneliness/isolation is what makes people vulnerable to that kind of thinking.

This is the kind of thing that used to lead to the construction of a shrine.