It'd serve them all right. Anyone who shows up to that thing deserves all the humiliation he can pour out onto them.

I expect the play here is to shovel a bunch of taxpayer dollars to Spirit, as part of a deal whereby some Trumpworld crony gets to pocket much of it.

It's gonna get tedious if they make a big fuss like this every time they end a twelve-game losing streak.

You have to stick with it for a few seconds. It doesn't get really good until immediately.

It's great fun and you're really in for a treat.

here come old laptop
he come
bootin up slowly
he got
broken touchpad
he need
one more update
he got
no space
on this pc

one thing i can tell you
its got no warranty

Holy shit is that his actual head?

I once finished a conversation with a colleague and then realized that every time I meant to say hysteresis I'd said heuristic.

During the conversation I was tired. After, I was tired and embarrassed.

I once remarked about his "natural" ability to make lots of friends and he said "there's nothing natural about it." He said he was an awkward, lonely, frustrated introvert. And he just made up his mind to work at it, the way one might grind away at any skill.

It sure as hell worked.

I have this friend who's one of those people who has Lots Of Friends. When you're friends with him, you become part of a much larger social circle because he just pulls you along. I imagine most of us know people like that. Big cheerful personality, way into people, makes friends easily. (1/2)

A lot of young people would benefit from being earnestly asked, by someone they were inclined to heed, "if you're so smart, how come you can't figure out how to get anyone to like you?"

Most Pokemon cards are stored in special vaults in one port in the Netherlands, and are never handled or even seen by their nominal owners. When they're exchanged, it's usually part of some scheme to disguise the source of WoW gold purchased in violation of TOS.

"I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats."

How's that working out for you guys?

That does look like a difficult problem. But I bet it's one we can solve once there's broad agreement in both parties that gerrymandering sucks. We should keep feeding them Virginias until we get there.

This Is Just To Say

I have turned off
the AI features
that were in
the update

and which
you were probably
hoping
to monetize

Fuck you
they were stupid
so unnecessary
and so annoying

Opening text of a thread by Palantir from X Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Palantir put out a 22-point summary of their CEO's book The Technological Republic. It's pitched as a defence of the West, but if you read it through the VDA framework, verification, deliberation, accountability, what it's actually doing looks rather different.
twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398...

I have this dim recollection that everyone was kind of charmed that John Travolta was back. That seemed somehow like kind of an event? I know it doesn't make a whole lot of sense now, but it seemed like kind of a thing then.

Could you expand on what you mean by "open to progressive ideology" but "tired of liberalism?"

That's more or less the point I'd imagined I was making. Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I'd thought.

1984's inflation probably sounds real bad to modern ears. In 1984, it didn't sound so bad.

It's easy to remember it now as this awful dark age, but in 1984 that darkness wasn't quite so easy to see.

Also? The Reagan presidency got super messy at the end, but in 1984 most of the really wild and weird and grim stuff lay some years ahead.

Woof. Yeah. I remember 1984. The Carter presidency was not, on the whole, fondly remembered.

He was an exceptional ex-President and in time his stature grew and he later gained a fair amount of retroactive popularity. In 1984, though, his name was mud.

On the bright side, he can't take a dime of it with him. I'm gonna laugh my not inconsiderable ass off when he heads off into the unknown, knowing that his last thoughts were frustration that he was leaving his ill-gotten gains behind.

It wasn't a term I heard every week in Sunday school. But mostly when I heard the term, they were the bad guys in whatever story I was hearing. The term acquired a distinctly sinister vibe.

This wasn't just in Sunday school, was it? Didn't the Screwtape Letters end with a dig at Pharisees?

What I'm saying here is that to someone with the superficial knowledge of Christianity that I had as a child and a half-assed practitioner, which I estimate to be comparable to Mr. Hegseth's depth of understanding today, the term is clearly understood as a Jewish-coded villain.

Note the timing too. Big man waits until Friday evening to step in front of a camera to spew anti-Semitism.

That's no accident. You could see his smirk from orbit.

Oh wow. This is going to end messy, is it?

All of which is to say: he meant it to sound hateful, and he meant it to sound Jewish.

If you look it up, sure. And IIUC, if one keeps reading one learns that modern Judaism is mostly rooted in the Pharisaic tradition. I think? It's complex.

But I also know at first hand that to a young person raised in a mainline xian sect, "pharisee" is understood to mean "christ-hating villain.'