Ray Radlein

The lights are ready, and the cameras. "Actaeon!" calls the director "Wait, she didn't say 'Action,'" I have time to think, as I turn into a giant deer why are my dogs looking at me like that

Look, I know all the reasons we got here, but we really need to start seriously thinking about what we do in a world where The Markets punish whole countries for voting for decency, compassion, and fairness. We must stop pretending the capitalist machine is an objective, value neutral force.

In fact I will say the Earnest and Pious Charismatic Ethnic Minority political figure (AOC, Mamdani, El-Sayed) has been a pretty good bet for the American left so far, whereas the Disaffected Gruff White Guy Showcasing True Masculinity (Fetterman, Platner) has been a worse bet. Just an observation.

Listening to a report about Google chopping down a quarter of a million trees in Finland to build a data centre while washing out yoghurt pots for the recycling

A party of performative morons disinterested in policy.

What’s that you say? Liz has a new book out which even the Telegraph is saying is even more unhinged than the last one? Wonderful, I’ll post this then.

Nasty bug

Brat of yore caught on film.

yup.

This week’s main story is about how more and more white nationalists, antisemites, and Nazi sympathizers seem to be integrating into the Republican Party, how some of them are currently running for office, and how old you can be for JD Vance to consider you “a very young boy.”

We aren’t legacy media but we led the morning with this from @premthakker.bsky.social zeteo.com/p/donald-tru...

VICTORY: A federal court just put the chainsaws down at East Potomac Park The plan was to turn a public park into a private tournament course for Trump & wealthy golfers. The trees stay while we fight it out in court @democracydefendersfund.org & partners are on the case 👇- TN

And now the Denver B-Gates Tattered Cover Bookstore has signed copies of When the Moon Hits Your Eye, Redshirts, and Old Man's War. Go get them!

Given that every military intelligence operation in the world MUST monitor the WarThunder forums, I wonder when we'll find out that one of them has engineered leaks of FAKE classified weapons specs to throw opponents off and/or poison the well for any future REAL leaks

Someday we'll need to do a study about how much the GOP focused on trans attacks that haven't worked in the past bc they were paid to do so.

It’s easy to dismiss the horrors of another era as quaint, but in every era there are people who know better, and people who are furious with them. James was PISSED with Scot and Weyer. He could have listened to them. None of these people had to die. None of them should. 7/7

I ended up doing a lot of research on the era for The Snakestone Girls (tinyurl.com/nddx4d5p), and people weren’t naively superstitious. Even the torture of accused witches was because magistrates wanted to be rational: they insisted on evidence, and how else could you get it? 6/

We can’t argue these people were just victims of ‘the values of their time.’ Theirs was a time of intellectual ferment and ferocious debate, and the wrong side won. It didn’t have to go that way. 5/

People had been talking sense. James wrote a treatise in refusal to know better. ‘To spare the life, and not to strike when God bids strike, and so seuerelie punish in so odious a fault & treason against God, it is not only vnlawful, but comparable to the sin of Witch-craft it selfe.’ 4/

And he was deploying this reasoning against reasonable men. He wrote in the introduction that he specifically wanted to refute Reginald Scot, who had argued very sensibly that ‘witchcraft’ was superstition or trickery, and Johann Weyer, a doctor who argued ‘witches’ were mentally ill people. 3/

He starts from a false premise and reasons from there. He dismisses the more colourful legends as ‘freits’ (superstitions). If it’s substantiated by the Bible and/or respectable witnesses, he accepts it; if not, lawyerly, he dismisses it. 2/

Now this is a good idea. James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, wrote a whole tract on witch-hunting: Daemonology. It’s chillingly rational: rather than being full of overheated fantasies like some such works, it’s coolly consistent. 1/7 www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/s...

How to Install an App on Your Commodore 64. “Oh, don’t worry, you’ll just need to type in the code for that program. There’s an article explaining what MLX is, which you can read really quickly on page 93, and then you’ll find the code for it on page 94.” [anildash.com]

Our election research team put out an article today explaining how the prediction markets (e.g. Kalshi, Polymarket) — and social media posts featuring visualizations from those platforms — may feed election rumors & conspiracy theories around the U.S. midterms: uwcip.substack.com/p/what-to-kn...

It's Halloween week, so I've got stuff on every night and am turning down invites ... then it's back to another 11 and a half months of empty diary.  I think the horror biz should work hard at bigging up Walpurgis Night to take the load off.

Michael Atiyah 🇪🇬: Fields Medal 1966 (also Abel Prize 2004), for K-theory. Ahmed Zewail 🇪🇬: Nobel for Chemistry 1999, for his work on femtochemistry. Omar M. Yaghi 🇯🇴: Wolf Prize 2018, Nobel for Chemistry 2025, for his work on reticular chemistry Naguib Mahfouz 🇪🇬: Nobel for literature 1988

I say "token", because AI usage is literally a slot machine. you pay a token per-slot-machine-lever-pull, and hope you like what you get or you roll again. They do this thousands of times, and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm serious like when i say AI is a huge scam this is partly why

not to mention AI did the "first hit's free" thing by not charging for AI usage at first, but now that all these companies rely on it, they're driving up the price per token and now AI shit is even more expensive than regular filming expenses

if you squint at this fluffy ball, it looks like a cat.

Study of "Dawn," after Michelangelo; verso: blank https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/177617

Well, it's time for me to go to bed four hours ago now potential partial root canal thingie in five hours

Woman who claimed she was carrying 'Bachelor' star's baby sentenced in pregnancy fraud scheme

The marketized class war of the dirtbag leftist paradigm is nothing but party rocking and an endless implosion into the woke adjacent image of the self.

good place bad place this is unquestionably the WEIRD place the fucked-up place we're living in the stupid place

There is enough sprironolactone in this vial to destroy the testosterone levels of an entire major city. Be glad my demands are light for if they're not met by midnight.... #BestBatmanVillain

The Perseverance rover has been testing space suits on Mars! Well, kind of. Its Calibration targets include some samples of materials used in space suits. Published today: Scott J VanBommel et al studied the interaction of Martian dust with suit materials. HT @ridingrobots.bsky.social. 🧑‍🚀♂️ 🔭

Flávio Bolsonaro had his passport confiscated by the Brazilian fed police as his brother Eduardo told him to flee to the US. He is tied to paramilitary gangs, is being investigated & lost his legislative immunity when he left the Senate to run for president. paydayreport.com/brazilian-fe...

Steve Lillywhite. Man. That guy could make a lot into a lot more. www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_4G...

‘I laughed so hard my Tampax fell out’: Michael Gambon’s pranks revealed by the stars he cracked up

I don’t know enough about socioeconomics to understand most of this, but the fact that China Mieville wrote an entire thesis about Marxist theory in international law is extremely metal

I wonder how many Fields Prize winner used Arabic numerals

You have to really, really, really fucking suck for your 8th grade teacher to come out and shame you like this. Damn.

Living in his head 24/7