- An Evolutionary Biologist Explains Why Cats Are Perfect. (This is from a couple of years ago but it’s a great re-read.)
Dammit. I literally just had a conversation about how I have so many favorite t-shirts that I should seriously never buy another t-shirt in my life and then Jason finds a t-shirt I absolutely must purchase. – via kottke- An underweight baby seal is getting all the fish it could want at an aquarium after being rescued off the streets of Connecticut near Yale University.
- Trust and believe that if I worked for the Federal Aviation Administration and I got an email telling me I was being fired and that email came from an @mail.outlook.com address I would hit print and then delete and continue to go to work every day.
- So, uh, whatever happened to Q? Did we ever learn who he (or she) was? Or was that years-long mania just lost in the firehose of stupidity the last decade has been?
- The world’s darkest and clearest skies are at risk from an industrial megaproject. – via @therickman.bsky.social
- One of the passengers on the Delta flight to Toronto that flipped on the runway did an incredible Reddit AMA. – via @cosmicrami.com
- Mark Cuban posted some bullish remarks about the future of AI that really rubbed me the wrong way and, after a flurry of pushback from his followers, posted a link to an essay that (I think) undermined his original remarks. He didn’t say whether it was enough to change his mind, but I do appreciate that he at least acknowledged the alternative viewpoint. (And all of this is, of course, ignoring the inherent immorality of being a billionaire.)
Posts tagged “politics”
- Utah teen arrested for taping fish to ATMs – via kottke
- Lorne Michaels Is the Real Star of Saturday Night Live
- Egyptian officials announced the discovery of the tomb of King Thutmose II, the last of the lost tombs of the kings of ancient Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty, which reigned for over two centuries. It’s the first royal Egyptian tomb to be discovered since the final resting place of King Tutankhamun was found in 1922. – via @indyfromspace.bsky.social
Mexico threatens to sue Google over name change of Gulf of Mexico on US maps- The most disturbing part of this headline is that anyone — anyone — could be shocked by this: “Julianne Moore in ‘Great Shock’ after POTUS Bans Her Children’s Book Freckleface Strawberry from Schools”
- “DOGE” seeks access to personal taxpayer data, raising alarm at IRS. Here is an excellent TL;DR of the article: The POTUS has ordered the IRS to hand over all of your personal information to a Holocaust denier who works for the richest man on Earth, who is a Nazi. – via @theophite.bsky.social, via anildash.com
- Related? The IRS Is Buying an AI Supercomputer from Nvidia
- “President Plane Accident” – via @rollingstone.com
- Less than 1% of Catholic nuns in the United States today are 30 or younger.
- The sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale starts on April 8, 2025.
- Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared” I feel like there was probably a powerful confirmation bias at work here. This seems like exactly the sort of thing you’d think was obvious, but… as strongly as I would expect the correlation to be, I am guessing we’ll soon hear of all sorts of problems with the statistics.
- I’d forgotten that Taylor Swift hosted SNL a few years ago and performed a ten-minute version of All Too Well. It’s been a long, long time since I needed to convert a YouTube video to mp3.
We’re dealing with actual Nazis.- What “Center” Is That, Exactly? is an essay by A.R. Moxon of The Reframe that includes the wonderful line, “I think of how twisted I would have to become, for the spectacle of diversity and equality and freedom to traumatize me into suicidally-counterfactual reactionary nonsense.” This echoes some of the Kübler-Rossian questions stuck on my mental treadmill since that somehow-malevolent escalator ride that foreshadowed so drastic a national decline. How do you watch Footloose and root for John Lithgow? How do you watch The Muppet Movie and root for Doc Hopper? How do you watch Captain America and root for Hydra? How do you watch Star Wars and root for the Empire?! Or – maybe more terrifying – how do you transform into a stormtrooper but think you’re a Rebel?
- When you’re done reading that, check out It’s The Fascism, Stupid, in which Moxon talks about how “the First Buddy, a Nazi apartheid billionaire/corruption mogul whose name means Flair Odor, who was not elected to anything at all, seized control of our federal infrastructure.”
- The music industry traded tape for hard drives and got a hard-earned lesson. Roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives from the 1990s sent to Iron Mountain are entirely unreadable.
- My son got me hooked on New Rockstars. Erik Voss and his team produce amazing YouTube recaps of all sorts of things in pop culture. The Jessica Clemons breakdown of the Kendrick Lamar Super Bowl LIX halftime show is great.
A moving new trailer has been released for Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade, an ambitious documentary that explores the final years of John Lennon through archival footage, never-before-seen interviews, and firsthand accounts.- A new study shows you can lower your risk of cancer by eating just one serving of cruciferous vegetables per day. Vegetables appear to do the most to help fight gastrointestinal cancers, such as colorectal and stomach cancer, but the protective effects extended to lung and breast cancer as well.
- Climate change is causing hotter temperatures to become more frequent in the four West African countries responsible for producing approximately 70% of the world’s cacao — the key ingredient in chocolate.
- Former Florida Gators and Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Kadarius Toney is facing multiple charges, including aggravated assault, following his arrest in Georgia last week.
- White House says it has the right to punish AP reporters over Gulf naming dispute. (I am rapidly running out of canaries, people.)
- Was I the only one a little concerned that NASA increased the odds of that asteroid hitting us in 2032 from 1.2% up to 2.3%? This brilliantly simple explanation at Scientific American from astronomer Phil Plait should ease your mind a bit.
- Recent Media
- Black Doves (Netflix) was incredible. Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw can act. Splendid plot. A+++
- We watched the penultimate episode of Skeleton Crew and I am all-in on this show. Fantastic fun. Jude Law is perfect.
- Four episodes into Slow Horses and love this show, too.
- Signposts on the road to authoritarian rule: “If one were to design a path to authoritarian rule, it would be what we have seen in the first weeks of the Trump administration.”
- Kentuckians can’t afford the high cost of Trump’s tariffs is an op-ed by – of all people – Mitch McConnell.
- For women’s college basketball coaches, motherhood is no longer something to keep quiet.
- “One thing Democratic leadership could do right now is to name an alternate HHS secretary—someone to provide ongoing public updates and health information. And do it for other departments, too. Start showing voters what a Democratic government would look like—press conferences, speeches, all of it.” – via @markharris.bsky.social
- Mark Cuban Says U.S. Healthcare Is ‘Horrific’; Calls for Free Medical School to Fix Doctor Shortages and Soaring Costs
- Pope Francis’ Stunning Rebuke of JD Vance Exposes MAGA’s Dark Soul
- ICE wants to hire contractors to monitor social media for threats. Those who criticize the agency could be pulled into the dragnet.
- Thursday Night Massacre
- Acting US attorney in Manhattan resigns after directive to drop case against Mayor Eric Adams
- Dozens of CFPB Workers Fired in After-Hours Blitz
- The interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District and five officials with the federal public integrity unit quit after the Justice Department ordered charges against Mayor Eric Adams to be dropped.
- Expert Flags DOJ‘s ‘Cascading Scandal’ — That Won’t Go Away
- The Thursday Night Massacre(s)
- Thousands of federal employees fired today and tomorrow.
- What beats rock?
- Pope Francis denounced the current administration’s plan to carry out mass deportations of migrants in a letter to U.S. bishops Tuesday, while appearing to take a direct jab at Vice President JD Vance.
- For decades, casinos scoffed as mathematicians and physicists devised elaborate systems to take down the house. Then an unassuming Croatian’s winning strategy forever changed the game.
Why is Hawaii the rainbow capital of the world?- Is gold hidden under a California peak? This treasure map says so.
- These JETech iPhone screen protectors are a great investment.
- Forensics Experts Challenged the FBI. So the FBI Tried to Censor Their Conference. This story includes a timely reminder that — with the exception of DNA matches — most of the highly-regarded techniques used to put people away (fingerprint examinations, ballistics and toolmarks comparisons, blood pattern analysis) “were developed by law enforcement agencies for law enforcement, and not by scientists first subjecting them to standard, rigorous testing processes designed to ensure they stand on a solid scientific foundation.”
- How did a life-saving pediatric drug – discovered and developed using money from American taxpayers, and spurred by the grassroots fundraising of desperate parents – end up costing $2,000,000 per dose?
- In the span of just weeks, the U.S. government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history – not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly-defined government role.
- Harrison Ford said the recent California wildfires burned several Shrinking sets.
- Almost 96% of new cars registered in Norway in January were electric. – via kottke
- The Wild True Story Behind Kendrick Lamar‘s Super Bowl Halftime Show
- The Supreme Court of Hawaii ruled that insurance companies can’t bring their own legal actions against those blamed for the catastrophic 2023 Maui wildfire, allowing a $4 billion settlement to proceed.
- Trump’s Driving Legal Principle This Time: “What Are You Gonna Do About It?”
- The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children was told by the Department of Justice that they’d lose their funding if the organization didn’t remove any mentions of LGBTQIA+ issues from their public materials.
- Aggeggio is a lovely Italian word for everyday objects.
- The ‘Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly’ of the United States Government
- I need to investigate Tapestry, from iconfactory. It looks like a cool iOS app for aggregating content, and I’ve loved pretty much every other app they’ve ever made. – via hiro.report
- Stop Calling Them Firings. Business terms provide a totally wrong conceptual framework for the purges underway.
- Within 24 hours of the inauguration, Amazon and UnitedHealth asked regulators to help crush their shareholders’ demands for transparency.
I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down. I just didn’t expect them to be such losers. – via Laura Olin- When my iPhone is connected to my MacBook Air via USB-C cable, both iOS and MacOS should prioritize that connection over the WiFi connection and maintain the link until I actually remove the cable from one of the devices. I don’t understand why Finder would / could / should ever report that “the connection was lost” when the two devices are physically connected.
- The 24-Hour Reality Check: Musk’s Impossible Power Grab and America’s Crisis
- “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives,” is one of the very eloquent bits of advice in this essay On Tyranny. – via Jodi Ettenberg
- From the Department of Irony: You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism “The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle.” – via kottke
- Profiles of Courage, Patriotism, and Resistance in standing up to Trump
- Take a minute today to read this tribute to Dan Jezek and the story of his website, bricklink, the world’s largest online LEGO marketplace.
- A Guide to Using Signal for Government Workers – via kottke, who is doing a great job reporting on the ongoing coup
- In less than eight years the NCAA went from banning North Carolina from hosting championships due to its bathroom bill to [kowtowing to a cartoonishly evil conman]. – via @bubbaprog.lol
The universe could undergo a ‘catastrophic change’ that could alter absolutely everything, quantum machine shows.- Hopefully reading this will help convince you to dump Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Twitter. The Technological Poison Pill: How the ATProtocol Baked into Bluesky Encourages Competition, Resists Evil Billionaires, Lock-In & Enshittification – via Jodi Ettenberg
- The President’s plan to dismantle the Department of Education could prove more costly for red states than blue.
- Incompetence and desperation are a bad combination. The important thing to remember is that [the “DOGE” attempt to get employees to resign] isn’t about economic efficiency, despite what the billionaire at the helm may say. It’s about efficiently breaking morale within the federal government to make it easier to dismantle from the inside.
- Related: “DOGE” staffer steps down after racist posts emerge
- “NOAA workers ordered to stop all communications with foreign nationals. Workers covering things like air transportation safety, drought, monitor coral reef destruction, and guarding railway shipping carriers against dangerous weather affected.” – via @timmarchman.bsky.social
- “Twenty years ago, when Jeremiah Trotter, Sr won an NFC championship with the Eagles, baby Trotter Jr. was on the field, in his father’s arms. Now he’s playing for the Eagles in this year’s Super Bowl.” – via @npr.org
- Reps. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) and Gwen Moore (D-Wisc.) barged into the office of House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday and challenged him about the “DOGE” team gaining access to a sensitive payment system at the Department of the Treasury.
- Workers at NASA were told to ‘Drop Everything’ to scrub any mentions of indigenous people and women from its websites.
- Federal Judge Blocks Executive Order Intended to End Birthright Citizenship
“It’s sad that Wile E. Coyote will always be remembered for his failures and not his amazingly realistic tunnel paintings.” – via @sean_with_an_ean_damnit- This is the sort of thing that makes my blood boil. Federal law mandates wholesome lunches, but much of it gets trashed because there isn’t time to eat it. – via Jodi Ettenberg
- The “DOGE” Government Data Heist Is the Entire Ballgame is a chilling plea written by a federal employee.
- The US Treasury Claimed “DOGE” Technologist Didn’t Have ‘Write Access’ When He Actually Did: Sources tell WIRED that the ability of Marko Elez to alter code controlling trillions in federal spending was rescinded days after US Treasury and White House officials said it didn’t exist.
- All of this, of course, depends on a functioning justice system. (Things Are Going to Keep Getting Worse Until They Get Better, Part 339.)
- CDC Posts, Then Deletes, Data on Bird Flu Spread Between Cats and People
- Conservative “Christian nationalist” Russell Vought, former vice president of Heritage Action for America and one of the architects behind Project 2025, believes there is nothing left to conserve. He desires revolution — and to burn down the system. And the Senate just confirmed him to be the head of OMB. (I would link you directly to the official White House website for OMB, but… it’s been deleted.)
- This tutorial on installing a newsletter replacement for Jetpack looks promising.
- “Just gonna slide this information in here. The Eagles refused to go to the White House after their Super Bowl victory in 2018. Do with that what you will.” – via @brandi-rene.swifties.social
- Oh, and Taylor Swift is expected to attend the Super Bowl on Sunday night. Obviously, she won’t be sitting in the same suite as POTUS.