Politics
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Endweek
Make America Grate Again Yesterday's depressing news was Trump's latest attempted slaying of the Hudson Tunnel Project, which may be more expensive to shut own than to complete. But that's just my off-the-wall take. The real story is far more complicated. Today's depressing news is the end of the CIA World Factbook, one of the Continue reading
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Webnesday
The Oligarch Giveth, and The Oligarch Taketh Away The Guardian: ‘It’s an absolute bloodbath’: Washington Post lays off hundreds of workers—Former Post executive editor blasts owner Jeff Bezos’s ‘sickening efforts to curry favor’ with Trump This Pew study says 25% of US adults get news regularly from the Washington Post. (Disclosure: I subscribe, and I’m Continue reading
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Who New?
Might be Winter Every day it snows a little here. Required reading. Seriously. Adrian Gropper: Taking Control of Your Healthcare is More Important Than Ever—Get help from a private AI that works for you – and only you. Announcing the North Atlantic Takeover Organization I avoid politics here, but it’s hard not to hear echoes Continue reading
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Time to Why
What he says Jamie Burke: Why the Intention Economy might finally be near. He predicts what I predicted (in the book above), with a DLT (distributed ledger technology) spin. Note that credit for the original portrait used in the piece should go to Peter Adams and his Faces of Open Source project. What I said My Big Continue reading
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Playing in Traffic
And it's just f'ing dumb Henry Farrell: America has identified its greatest enemy: Western Europe. It's not a fight the EU wanted or imagined before this year. But it's here. Being based in the US is now a disadvantage for forming partnerships with entities in the EU. I speak from experience. MyTerms is a project run Continue reading
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It’s still now
And that’s the way it is, Friday, December 6, 2025 I try to come up with unique headlines for my daily bloggings through Wordland. I can’t call the day’s blog the date, because the blog already puts the date above the headline. So today it would stack like this December 5, 2025 December 5, 2025 Continue reading
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Sun Day
Dawn in Southern Indiana, and there isn’t a cloud in the sky. And Hoosiers football remains amazing. Wait, LeBron was in the G League? Am I alone in (unfairly) discounting posts and emails that include AI chatbot text and art? Doesn’t matter how good it is (and some of it is damned good), I get turned Continue reading
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Questions of Law, not Just Politics
Go to HUD.gov, and you’ll get this: Go to USDA.gov, and you’ll get this: Seems to me these violate the Hatch Act, aka “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities.” It was passed in 1939 and amended a couple of times since then. I am not a lawyer, but I know some, and I can Continue reading
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Friday, 11 July 2025
And the republic is still lost. Sad to learn that David Gergen has passed. I met him briefly when he came to Harvard Law School for a conversation in Austin Hall's Ames Courtroom with Larry Lessig on the topic of Larry's new book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It. Gergen was Continue reading
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Monday, June 30, 2025
Toward future downtowns. Two tabs I just opened on a conference call that I need to read later: Re:Permissioning the City, and Permissioning the City 2025 Update. Has stuff that's too important for news stories. Even if you disagree with it. Heather Cox Richardson interviews Barack Obama. Are we in one now? On a call Continue reading
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Tuesday
We’re covered. Zoom in to satellitemap.space. The vast majority of low Earth orbit satellites (all the white dots above) are Starlink’s. Play around with the tabs. This, more than raw power, is what gives authoritarians their authority. Dana Blankenhorn has a good post on Authority. With respect to my own thoughts on the topic, there’s what’s said in Continue reading
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Monday
Just some facts. No interpretations. This blog post got nine reads by the end of the day. This photo got about the same. The photo above has had 22,122 views, 421 faves, and 21 comments. And lots more views every day. It may also be the best photo I’ve ever taken from the window of Continue reading
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Findings
Here's how to save what's left. Newsweek: CVS is closing 277 stores. Wipe House. Nieman Lab: No more transcripts of Trump remarks on the White House website (and the old ones are gone, too). In case you weren't wondering. Jeffrey Epstein really did kill himself. For the reading list. Olaf Stapleton: Last And First Men. It's Continue reading
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Whether Weather
NOAA (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) is the alpha US source for weather forecasting, ocean science, climate research, and much more. So, as a weather geek, it concerns me when Wired says Dismantling NOAA Threatens the World’s Ability to Monitor Carbon Dioxide Levels: The agency maintains the global backbone of measurements of CO2 and Continue reading
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Motherings
Trump will be flying Qatar One instead of (or as) Air Force One: Aaaand,,,, Call your mother, if she’s still around. If she’s not, remember her anyway. I did that here. I’m pointing to A look at broadcast history happening because it came up in a conversation about archives. Also because that history (especially concerning Continue reading
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Future Tabs
Stay Calm and Check it out. Pure libertarians are neither right nor left, nor where the extremes of both meet. Mostly they come from a sensibility outside both redstream and mainstream: one that PJ O'Roarke put perfectly in Parliament of Whores: "The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, Continue reading
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Grifting away
According to Joseph Cox at 404, the U.S. government registered the domains thetrilliondollardinner.gov, dinnerforamerica.gov, and thetrillion.gov. All of these (correct me if I’m wrong) are about enriching the U.S. president, his family, and favored friends through a memecoin scheme by which anyone (say, Putin) can buy influence. There is nothing conservative about this. Nothing republican. Continue reading
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It’s Over
The Voice of America is silent. To Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Kari Lake (who now runs its corpse), the VOA was corrupt, biased, unnecessary, and needed to go. To nearly everyone else who cares, it was America’s voice on radio, and mattered enormously to an audience in the hundreds of millions, listening in forty-eight Continue reading
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Gag of America
Here is what a Google News search for Voice of America looks like right now: ‘Bloody Saturday’ at Voice of America and other U.S.-funded networks, by David Folkenflik at NPR, begins with this: Journalists showed up at the Voice of America today to broadcast their programs only to be told they had been locked out: Continue reading
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The Blame Game
Twenty-third in the News Commons series Seventh on the #LAfires Disaster coverage tends to go through four stages: Live reporting. TV stations stop all advertising and go into round-the-clock coverage. Radio stations drop the feeds from elsewhere and go wall-to-wall with live reports. Newspapers drop their paywalls. Coverage by the best of them ranges from Continue reading