Finnydotca

I have no idea where the iced coffee interview thing came from but as an old guy I’d say, I wouldn’t take a drink into an interview. Too risky. One slip and the interviewer has coffee on their lap. On the other hand, I’ve interviewed a bunch of people and I wouldn’t care if someone carried one in.

The delusional texts by the tech guys about AI “reasoning” don’t surprise me. I worked in IT for quite a few years. The tech guys were very smart, but very linear and very limited in their world view. They were strongly given to an unquestioning reductionist materialism.

I really don’t understand why elected Dems are not doing everything in their power to push Trump to a psychotic break. I would accept “It’s too early, we’re planning for October” but then I would expect to see more groundwork being laid. SAY “IMPEACHMENT” EVERY DAY!!!

The difference between the war with Iran and the trade war with Canada (other than us previously being your closest allies) is that the reasonably good deal with Iran was negotiated with Obama so, you know, he had to trash it. The reasonably good deal with Canada? USMCA? That was his. He made it.

Today is the feast of St. Maxmillian Kolbe. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximil... A good day to remember what fascism really is.

At some point, Marco Rubio has find his lane. “Trump’s little suck-up” is way too crowded. If it had been me, it would have been Trump leaving me, as secretary of freaking state, on the plane to die. Get off the plane, go back to the hotel, and starting planning your resignation speech.

He is a living metaphor for our common trials of salvation and damnation. Each moment of time, we grow better or worse, towards our fates as sons and daughters of the morning, or faint wisps of hatred and misery. He is already very very bad. Like Dorian Grey’s portrait, he is the image of ruin.

I don’t think I had ever really understood, before his press conference today, just how cute J.D. Vance believes himself to be.

That Todd Blanche, he’s quite the fellow, isn’t he? You gotta give Trump this: he can find a seemingly endless supply of these lower than a snakes belly in a wagon rut assholes. The apparent uncanniness of it leads to the kind of antichrist rumours that hound the president.

As to the whole “open secrets among journalists” thing on here, I heard a lot of stuff when I was a young journalist, and I was a nobody, a freelancer. But one cautionary thing that has always stayed with me is that, back then, it was “known” that Victoria BC was a hotbed of Satanism. It wasn’t.

"To go to a foreign country and to ask for assistance in breaking up Canada, there's an old-fashioned word for that, and that word is treason" 🟢 Agree: 71% ⚫️ Disagree: 29% Read it for free here: open.substack.com/pub/canadian...

Happy Twelfth Night to all who celebrate. I would, but it’s also Drynuary, and I can’t have it both ways.

Happy Advent eve to all who celebrate. Ad te Domine levavi animam meam.

I don’t know what real editors would say to this, but I’d say that in my experience, problems with sentence cadence, having too many all the same length, for example, is a solid tell for a very amateurish writer. And also, one of the easier things to help a writer with. So, a sign of poor editing.

Happy Grey Cup Sunday to all who celebrate! Allons-y Alouettes!

For those who, like me, are HUGE Lois McMaster Bujold fans, there is a new Penric/ Desdemona novella out. Always a couple of evenings of pure pleasure.

The Louvre heist made me think about heist novels, an honourable and venerable genre, and I really don’t understand why no one has made a series out of Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder novels. They made one movie with Redford, and no one has done anything since.

The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he did not exist. The second greatest trick was convincing occultists that there was anything arcane about summoning him. Forget the circles and symbols, just go hang out at Mar a Lago. He’ll drop by your table.

Browsing new restaurant listings, I saw one that advertised “chicken halal bacon and ranch poutine”. That’s my city.

Another way I know I’ve strayed into the Discover feed: people are describing unpleasant sounding meals with great moral satisfaction. Oh, you put your quinoa in a BOWL, did you? With kale and beets? How nice. I’ll just wipe this chicken gravy off my face with a handful of lasagna so I can read that

You know what would cheer me, in this mire of fascist misery? If the Nobel committee gave the Peace Prize to Biden. Lord alone knows what it could be for, but I’d laugh and laugh and laugh…

Sometimes I think, hey, I started in IT in the mid-nineties, I should have become one of those guys who spouts a bunch of techie sounding nonsense and gets a billion dollars for it. Then I remember my soul.

I just opened my Divine Office app to see that today is the feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe. He was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz, after offering to die in place of a man with a family. A new saint for the times ahead.

Just watched the first hour or so of Everything Everywhere All At Once and it confirmed my previous impression that it was way overhyped. It’s not a bad movie, but it’s not all that great a movie, either.

Speaking as a resident of one of the world’s great pierogi centres (we spell it perogy here, we’re simple people of the plains) I am not at all surprised that pierogi makers have been revealed as heroic defenders of justice and truth. Slava varenyky!

Times are bad but there is one tiny comfort in all the darkness. Now, when you’re lying awake at night, reviewing in your mind how you have been pretty much a total waste of life, you can reflect “at least I never starved an entire population”. Even if I’d had the chance, I don’t think I would have.

As a tech manager I worked with people who were extremely intelligent, but in a certain limited way. I liked them a lot, but they were who they were. In particular, their tendency to a kind of game-oriented reductionist materialism make the current tech CEO ideas about AI very understandable.

I’m a little surprised by the lack of ‘Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine’s father, was a senior Mossad agent’ discussion in the MAGA meltdown over Epstein. I’ve never read the book that started the allegations and I have zero idea whether they have any merit at all, but they’re the sort of thing they like.

A lie is a word spoken against the fabric of reality. It’s like a metaphysical stitch ripper. When someone lies the way Trump does, there is simply no way to predict the resulting destruction. Last time there was a plague.

Apropos of nothing, people die all the time. Quite suddenly and unexpectedly. Some mornings I like to tell myself that.

The debate about the semantics around “fascism” was always absurd, because a characteristic of radical right movements is that they are chameleon-like. They can be futuristic and iconoclastic. They can be traditionalist. They can be royalist. They take on the colour of the nationalist spirit.

The Modern Herod I admit no illegally Held fascination With the prospect of imminent Assassination But maybe there could be A curtailment of terms If, like Herod, he suffered A surfeit of worms

Just like I have no idea what Americans mean by “liberal”, I also don’t know what a “democratic socialist” is. Is that what the rest of the English speaking world calls a social democrat? Or does it mean a socialist who belongs to the Democratic Party? Dog alone knows what they mean by socialist.

The current state of American politics seems to be roughly this: they have elected the Antichrist, he has begun the process to bring about Armageddon, and the evangelical church is happy about it because they see the Second Coming on the horizon.

“You have started to look cruel in pictures” is a good line. The current crop of rightwing types both in the US and the UK are often vivid examples of a kind of Dorian Gray Determinism. The interior malice and evil of these people are smeared across their faces like greasepaint.

Net-Approval Of Donald Trump: All: -74% Liberals: -98% NDP: -98% Conservatives: -28% EKOS / June 4, 2025 / n=1529 / MOE 2.5% / IVR

How long will the wicked triumph? They utter speech, and speak insolent things; All the workers of iniquity boast in themselves. They break in pieces Your people, O Lord, And afflict Your heritage. They slay the widow and the stranger, And murder the fatherless.

I just realized yesterday was the Glorious 25th, and I missed it. I did have a drink under my lilac, though, even if I forgot to wear one. How do they rise up GNU Terry

I’ll say this for the tech bros, they have managed to take AI from being a minor curiosity to full-on Horseman of the Apocalypse status in a remarkably short time.

I don’t know about you guys - I’m watching American events at a distance - but it seems to me that the congressional and establishment Dems are woefully unprepared for the “herding of political opponents into black vans” era that appears to be on the horizon.