James O'Keefe

Sail Boston 2026 I wasn't able to attend Sail Boston this year, but I did get to Charlestown to photograph some of the tall ships berthed there. It was a warm and windy night, but not as warm as the following nights, thankfully. I missed seeing a number of the ships and was not able to go aboard…

Lots of project updates to our hackathon! Including the EFF's Beryl Lipton providing an @eff.org Atlas of surveillance onboarding session! See: Aaronswartzday.org There's still time if you'd like to add your own project or host your own in your town! 🤩 RSVP here: www.eventbrite.com/e/aaron-swar...

My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today. Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man.

legitimate reasons don’t matter for these folks, but: can we talk about how awesome masks are for allergies? i can enter the laundry detergent aisle for short periods of time while masking! i used to have to get a store employee (because the hypoallergenic ones were always on the middle)

Earlier I meant to share the NYT version of the story about Trump stealing Alaska's natural gas and giving it to Russia. Here's that story, the same story as FT. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u...

stumbled on a set of incredible 1970s illustrations in some government reports, so had to spend a day collecting them into a website to share with my friends on the computer: nickseaver.net/paperwork

Wow! Strategic voting without claims that third parties are splitting the vote.

Everyone has kind of laughed it off but there’s actually now an official investigation by multiple organizations into why my US election ballot hasn’t been released from US customs in a month without any explanation.

Straight out of Moscow's mouth. As a Russian warblogger puts it: "The free-thinking Elon Musk, sympathetic to the Russian people, explained why the war in Ukraine is continuing." (t.me/apwagner/69842)

I've heard Yglesias speak exactly two times and the other time was him hand waving away the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. What a piece of work, man.

MA, vote YES On 4 because it is appalling that we aren't on this list already. thehill.com/homenews/616...

A big reason why people w/ low incomes don’t share in our prosperity is that we underinvest in economic security programs like unemployment insurance, paid leave, housing, and other benefits. We spend FAR LESS on these programs than our peers do.

punkin dunkin

Kurt Russell actually did the basketball shooting stunts himself while filming Escape From L.A. (in fact he was the only one who could do them). But after being perfect in run throughs when the cameras were rolling all of a sudden he would miss. WTF? The eventually figured out what the cause was.

It's fine. This is fine

On #mapoli Q3, the Coalition for a Stealthy Oligarchy is dominating the Testosterone Derby. Of 59 individual donations over $50,000, 57 are from men, most in high finance. The top 5 have kicked in over $3,000,000. mauricecunningham153.substack.com/p/massachuse...

I think what's galling about all of this IS THEY THINK FASCIST ACCOMMODATION WORKS! Like, they think that removing some words but not others will actually end the onslaught by fascists on academic freedom. It's so fucking stupid. THERE IS NO WAY TO ACCOMMODATE A BULLY INTO STOPPING

New: We found cops who kept using Flock to spy on women after they left the force. One used it for five years after retirement, tracking his wife during a custody battle. Another ran searches while he was suspended (and later fired) after killing a 15-year-old boy. Free to read: wapo.st/3UEwWU7

NEW: Trump’s mega Venezuelan oil deal, signed by Hegseth and Rubio, benefits an unknown group of investors and was intentionally crafted to keep the next U.S. president or future leaders of Venezuela from undoing it. @propublica.org saw the secret contract: www.propublica.org/article/trum...

BREAKING NYT: A billionaire wanted a Trump pardon. His family gave Alina Habba a $50 million deal. Julio Herrera Velutini, a prominent Venezuelan, was seeking clemency. He got it not long after his daughter gave Habba, a lawyer close to Trump, an extraordinarily lucrative job.

Greeks: sculpture is about the ideal body, perfect proportions, beauty through which we can experience th— Etruscans, over in the corner:

"How did they pay for quantitative easing?" David Graeber

You can now RSVP for the Aaron Swartz Day San Francisco event at @archive.org here. (It's FREE and breakfast/lunch/drinks and snacks will be provided throughout the day.) RSVPing helps us know how much pizza and food to order! Thanks ^_^: www.eventbrite.com/e/aaron-swar...

Shoutout to Phil Sheridan for dropping one of the hardest lines during this battle. After riding 20 miles to the sound of the guns to reunite with his army, an officer saw Sheridan and said “we’re glad you’re here.” He responded “By god I’m glad to be here, let’s go lick ‘em”

"I have been challenged to a duel," she said. "For kissing a woman." "Did she consent?" the swordmaster said. "Yes, but men courting her did not." "Ah. How many?" "Are these men good?" She gave three names. "Far below your level." "Excellent!" She rose. "There are more women I want to kiss."

“For years, economists dismissed corporate collusion as crankery and blamed bird flu for high prices. Then the feds found evidence that could prove the cranks right, and almost nobody noticed.” www.politico.com/news/magazin...

if you were wondering whether Alito's book is an embarrassing crock of shit, I can now officially answer your question with a resounding yes ballsandstrikes.org/legal-cultur...

I have an MBA. And I would argue that the most valuable things I learned were... that I didn't want to go the traditional path of an MBA grad because it seemed ridiculous. I agree there's not much value there.

JUST IN: The police shooting that killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley as he sat in his mother’s lap in a Walmart parking lot in Senatobia, Miss., in June “was justified,” Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office said on Monday. Her office will not charge the white officer who shot the child.

Trump-friendly oligarchs are buying up major media with the regime's help. They control CNN, CBS, Fox, TikTok, Meta, X and major local TV chains. Yet Mike Johnson is still claiming liberal bias. The real media conspiracy is the corporate consensus to normalize Johnson and other right-wing radicals.

The generation that got to buy cheap houses thanks to a postwar construction boom, then blocked new housing construction to juice their asset values is now whining that they have to pay taxes on their unearned wealth. Just breathtaking selfishness.

Really sums up the cardinal vs ordinal utility discussion from economics with a side of imperfect information theory. Hun. www.smbc-comics.com/comic/hun @smbccomics.bsky.social

I am now forever referring to @karlbode.com as Techdirt's official "vituperative crank." (Also, lashing out at Karl for his excellent piece is weak sauce.)

There is no place like home

seems plausible that in the short term, people are not going to use a janky Adobe clone en masse in a way that fundamentally alters things. But people using AI KoolAid-manning into open source hobby coding communities and destroying them — I think that's already happened and going to get worse

I am seeing a lot more of this kind of thing lately. Is fundamentally the same thing as the AI Adobe clone stuff and I think the near-term impacts are that these human-focused mod communities get both broken + overwhelmed by AI. I think people dismissing the potential impacts of this are wrong

A video game reverse engineering community has shut down because many games can now be trivially reverse engineered and decompiled with AI: "The community aspect of decompilation has been broken." www.404media.co/video-game-r...

"Billionaires and the industries they run have a well-monied thumb on the scales of justice, an oligarchic influence operation that, among other tactics, funds a flood of amici to push the justices toward a preferred outcome." We let wealth inequality grow too large and now we're all paying for it.

"A list obtained by The Washington Post reveals all the major donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project.... Tech giants Nvidia and Apple each committed $25 million....Absent from the list is Trump himself, who has said that he is helping to pay for the project."

Like what do you mean these weirdo mountain people show up and are so integrated into the economy and culture of the country in a generation or two that they've forgotten THEY'RE THE FOREIGNERS PEOPLE WERE WORRIED ABOUT?

I get this is anecdote, and of course I'm a very privileged immigrant for several reasons, but from my experience of those of my community, man are the people of this country more welcoming to immigrants than every single other country. You have no idea how welcoming.

I know I'm a broken record on this, but one part of what is going on is that people have literally no idea what the US immigration system actually is; effectively, that there are no pathways into the country legally for someone who wants to wait in line.

But giving water to voters waiting in long lines to vote is illegal