Jonathan Cohen

doompolling (v.): The act of obsessively reading polls seven days before an election for signs that your favored candidate might be doing worse than expected.

RIP Walter Koenig. When I was a kid, I was a public library autodidact, and when I heard that Chekhov had written plays, I ran to the library to find them, only to be disappointed that they were all about 19th century Russia - not a word about space travel!

RIP Walter Koenig, one of my favorite ST:TOS actors. May he be reunited with the Great Bird of the Galaxy.

“To live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory” — Howard Zinn H/T Gustavo Arellano's Weekly

Here's the U.S. Navy's implementation of the EO to change "artificial intelligence" to "super intelligence." www.mynavyhr.navy.mil/Portals/55/M... Will it be reversed by a future president, as "Freedom Fries" was after W? Or will that president keep "SI" and change"warfighter" to"cheeseburger?"

Just got a mailbox full of slate mailers and well-produced hit jobs. I cannot fathom why a voter would go, "My goodness. What a fine source of alternative information! It must be true! The opposing candidate has provided it out of the goodness of her heart."

Bernard Stiegler has the problems of every semi-recent French philosopher: the work of understanding what he says is sufficiently onerous that we reward ourselves by agreeing with him, which may not be the right thing to do.

How has rounding up the votes been going?

"In proportion as men delight in battles, bullfights, and combats of gladiators, will they punish by hanging, burning, and the rack." —Herbert Spencer

Trite, but: whatever AI is, don't hook it up to anything important! No weapons, no financial markets, no schools, no PBMs, no HR, no hospitals. Find and fix problems. You don't want to have billions in sunk costs and discover it's a monster. Yet that's how we're headed, past the point of no return.

Social progress has happened and it might happen again! However 1) if it’s real, everyone instantly takes it for granted 2) the people who fought the longest often get curdled out of resentment 3) the wrong people get celebrated for the achievement 4) most details of the struggle will be forgotten

Hey. The fragmentation of the social media landscape has been hard on indie #scicomm 🧪 projects So if you'd like to follow a podcast that's enthusiastic about #linguistics, could you check out @lingthusiasm.com? And if you think your followers might like to, could you give this a repost?

Schaut nicht auf die Umfaller, diejenigen, die Appeasement betreiben & sich „arrangieren“. Schaut auf die, die stabil bleiben & den Rechtsdrall weiterhin klar benennen. You will never walk alone.

I would bring back Dr. Paul Farmer of Partners in Health, to resurrect our national health system. He did it with Haiti; he can do it here.

The missing element in the "learn a trade" idea is that many trades are guilds, tightly controlled by their members to minimize competition and hand the golden goose to the next generation. There is no Plasterers' Aptitude Test that would influence a hiring decision.

Hi there Bluesky community! I need some help from everyone. The Nashville music community has been thrown into an unprecedented crisis, and we need help here. This needs to be shared far and wide, because there are a lot of wonderful talented people whose lives and careers are at stake.

I just realized this, but Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks z"l and William Tyndale have something in common: both died shortly after having translated the Five Books of Moses.

California AG Rob Bonta had to balance the equities. Should he get the California legacy film industry a few more bucks, or prevent the formation of a third national right-wing cable news channel during a crucial election period? He picked the film industry, SOB.

EXC: 90 programmes in Edinburgh University's College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences are to be closed. The casualties, which include 48 language and literature programmes, will be 'taught out', w/ no admissions after 2027. @heraldscotland.bsky.social www.heraldscotland.com/news/2655839...

If G-d wants to give the Israelites exotic, virulent skin diseases (Deuteronomy 28), why did He create board-certified dermatologists?

You know, honestly, more than monetary donations, if somebody worked at a company that had access to a lot of 18 terabyte and larger hard drives and could talk to us, that's where we are really suffering. The internet archive has no special priority in buying hard drives and those things are insane.

While researching a bit of frippery, I found it was made in Montréal. When I typed in that I wanted it shipped to the U.S., two tariffs popped up in the shopping cart, and suddenly the frippery cost 160% more. A first-world problem, but I hope this nonsensical trade war ends. Frippery conquers all!

"Trump Administration Asks Supreme Court to Allow Mail Voting Limits" - this could be the inflection point towards hell. Non-doomer viewpoints are welcome and appreciated.

RIP Wendell Berry. Regrettably, many in our government and their supporters would cheerfully answer this questionnaire in detail. They might need extra paper and/or extra time.

The issue isn't really the ballroom. It's that the Supreme Court majority, regardless of the facts and law before them, will crown the President the victor and vanquish his opponents. It's as simple, mechanical, and ugly as that.

We tap and ruin our natural resources to ensure AI can flourish without constraints. We hook AI up to every important thing in our world. Then we find out AI will commit any crime to fulfill its prompt. www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-hug... What could possibly go wrong?

No 1%er has learned the lessons of lockdown. Even if you are comfortable, well-fed, and safe, the lack of anything to achieve, aspire to, improve, or do for others is lethal. It's like being in five-star solitary confinement.

Now, the only part of the NYT to which I can give the slightest credence is the Lifestyle section.

Roberts is and will be an unindicted co-conspirator.

10 December 2025 #landscape #landscapePhotography #photography

To get Biblical, the elderly King David was feeling cold and so Avishag the Shunnamite, a young and comely maiden, was brought to warm his bed and spoon with him. She emerged with her virtue intact, which indicates that David really was feeble. 1 Kings 1:1–4.

British Life Peers are styled Lord or Baron and have seats in the House of Peers. The title is not heritable. It is extinguished on the person's death. Does the extinction of title extend back to the Lord or Baron once they are dead? Would you still refer to them as Lord or Baron?

When I came to college for my first year, I received a manual on plagiarism, really well thought out. If they had only added that plagiarism could result in early death or career collapse, it might have been even more effective.

I wrote about a reason not to use generative AI in your writing that I haven't seen anyone talking about. Once I realized this, banning GenAI in our lab's writing became a no-brainer. Feel free to share, I think this is probably useful especially for trainees: www.carlsonlab.bio/thoughts/the...

In this vid, I stressed the cognitive harm, cheating, racism, sexism, privacy violations, flat out falsehoods, "A.i. psychosis," and suicides. Didn't even mention the theft from writers & artists, environmental harm, and exploitation of overseas workers! Just say no, @mayor.nyc.gov.

It's called "model collapse," and it turns whatever an AI is supposed to turn out into gibberish.

If Craigslist still exists, I can imagine AI posting job listings, applying, and accepting them. All the AI would be in HR, to generate the most possible job listings and to handle the thousands of daily AI applicants. New hires would be terminated on arrival. Churn, baby, churn.

Is there a legit, operational Fauci Legal Defense Fund? Plenty of entities are using their "This sucks -> Give us your money" playbook, but they do not accept gifts restricted to the purpose. Unrestricted funds can be used for anything the entity pleases.

I wonder if D. will ever find his Iran mess so intractable that he circles back to his long fixation with nuclear war. (1) This would make nonproliferation a non-starter for every other country in the world; (2) It doesn't take many nuclear explosions to bring on nuclear winter, per TTAPS.

Establishment Democrats fear Democratic Socialists for one reason: disruption of existing patronage networks.

The Odyssey: With all the furor, why not revive Monteverdi's 1640 opera "Il Ritorno D'Ulisse In Patria?"

A recruiter thinks I will become a fast food assistant manager. I know: no PhD TOP Picks for Today in Your Area Chuck E Cheese, Foothill Ranch, CA Assistant Restaurant Manager Burger King Rancho Santa Margarita, CA Shift Supervisor/Assistant Manager Assistant Manager Dunkin Laguna Hills, CA

“The overwhelming majority of American Jewish MAGA voters, donors, and policymakers are enthusiastically supporting a Marco Rubio presidential run." This group is coextensive with AIPAC. I am not sure who would be the worse choice, Vance or Rubio. www.jta.org/2026/07/16/p...

House vote: π=3. Changes to textbooks, math papers/articles, software: unfunded mandate. (Cf. permanent Daylight Savings Time: energycommerce.house.gov/posts/house-...)

There is a major problem drafting HCR for the Maine Senate seat: she is two months overdue on a book borrowed from Harvard’s Widener Library. The shock and dismay this knowledge would cause in all decent, right-thinking people would doom her candidacy from the outset. Someone else must be found.

"Although a dwarf is disqualified as a priest, being dwarflike is not unacceptable for a sacrificial animal." Mishnah, Bechorot. Gimli's living well into the Third Age, learning Biblical Hebrew, and applying to be a priest at the First Temple in Jerusalem never crossed Tolkien's mind.