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Three personal notes. First, the Facebook suspension continues. From what I read, it could take months to get restored. It doesn’t affect me, but I think a lot of people upload photos there and don’t store them elsewhere. So a ban could be devastating. Update: It got reinstated 4 weeks later.
Second, I am happy to report putting together a table/spreadsheet of reviews I have written about music albums. I created a Google Form for inputting data, but the raw spreadsheet was so hard to read and search through that I rarely consulted it. I didn’t even realize that I had accidentally written 20+ reviews multiple times. I never had the time to look into how to create a read-only table that was user-friendly. I even included several tabs offering different ways to sort data.
I have a backlog of technical tasks to work on. Frankly, if this Facebook ban lasts more than a month, I’m going to have to email Facebook friends to let them know what is going on. What a pain.
Third, I have started a new series called “Political Pulse.” I really haven’t posted anything substantive about politics on my blog (aside from the usual linkdumps), but I feel that it’s useful to include unvarnished snapshots of my feelings towards current politics.
I eventually cancelled my Washington Post subscription. Their reporting was really good, but in the last year or so the editorial pages is overrun with conservative viewpoints, and of course WP failed to endorse Kamala Harris. The main thing about the subscription I enjoyed was having access to their book review archive. I will miss that.
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If you think science and public health are expensive, try ignorance and pandemics. (NYT commenter on an article about CDC and Kennedy).
Updated research about how likely climate change will trigger a collapse of AMOC.
(M)odels that were run for longer, to 2300 and 2500. … show the tipping point that makes an Amoc shutdown inevitable is likely to be passed within a few decades, but that the collapse itself may not happen until 50 to 100 years later.
The research found that if carbon emissions continued to rise, 70% of the model runs led to collapse, while an intermediate level of emissions resulted in collapse in 37% of the models. Even in the case of low future emissions, an Amoc shutdown happened in 25% of the models….
The new results are “quite shocking, because I used to say that the chance of Amoc collapsing as a result of global warming was less than 10%”, said Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who was part of the study team. “Now even in a low-emission scenario, sticking to the Paris agreement, it looks like it may be more like 25%.
“These numbers are not very certain, but we are talking about a matter of risk assessment where even a 10% chance of an Amoc collapse would be far too high. We found that the tipping point where the shutdown becomes inevitable is probably in the next 10 to 20 years or so. That is quite a shocking finding as well and why we have to act really fast in cutting down emissions.”
I haven’t done it in a while, but maybe I will try to use an RSS reader again.
Comment I posted in response to a review of Wizard of Oz remake in Los Vegas’s The Sphere:
It’s important to remind everyone that the Wizard of Oz movie would have normally gone into the public domain in 2015 — were it not for the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, which extended copyright ownership of all works in the USA by 20 years. A movie like Wizard of Oz properly should belong in the public domain already, and it should be easier for people to repurpose and recontextualize the work, as the Sphere people have done. That’s the entire point of the public domain — to provide artistic elements for people in the future to play with. Sure, when that happens, it’s a different work and should be treated as such. Frankly, I’m grateful that the corporation owning the movie copyright allowed this reworking to occur, but just imagine what other works might have been created if the copyright were allowed to expire in 2015 (as originally intended).
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The most important thing to recognize about these folks who support authoritarianism is that they want authoritarianism over others but libertarianism for themselves. “We” should be able to tell “you” what to do but nobody can tell “us” what to do. (Random YouTube comment on an interview with political scientist Matthew MacWilliams). MacWilliams wrote a 2016 piece identifying authoritarianism as the prevalent trait among Trump supporters.
On a YT clip about the 1990s show A Different World, one commenter wrote, “It was September 1992. It was a weekday night my freshman year at college and my roommate, a friend, and I were watching this show when I spoke up and said “We are a bunch of young college students living in a dorm watching a TV show about young college students living in a dorm.”
Sourcewatch page about Turning Point USA, the organization that slain conservative leader Charlie Kirk ran. That group is amply funded by Koch, Donor Trust, etc. The wiki article about Charlie Kirk gives a rundown of his controversial positions. I’m sure that many will whitewash Kirk’s extreme positions, but he was involved in Professor Watchlist, climate change denialism, the Great Replacement theory, COVID misinformation and in initial organization of “stop the steal” Jan 6 protests. (He wasn’t involved on Jan 6, but had helped arrange buses to send students there; he even testified at the Jan 6 hearings about his role). Propublica and others have reported on wrongdoing at Turning Point, but this had little to do with Kirk — even though he drew a handsome salary from the organization.
I have nothing against proselytizing, but it seems that organizations like Turning Point funnel lots of conservative money into funding a blowhard to go around campuses to spread the gospel of conservatism. There is no real equivalent funding source on the liberal side; not even George Soros of Bill Gates are funding proselytizing missions. If anything, the liberal side funds speakers who are actually qualified to talk about certain subjects.
Also, it’s worth asking whether public debates result in meaningful discussion or are just ways to allow certain rhetorically-skilled people to knock down people who aren’t really that schooled in argumentation. One technique that Kirk uses is to note a contradiction in the other side and keep hammering it and then to go off on Gish gallops while the other side is too polite or diffident to stand up.
I’ve been fascinated by this Cambridge debate between Charlie Kirk and Tilly Middlehurst (YT). Here’s a discussion between a Cambridge debate coach and Middlehurst about how she did it (YT). First, it’s a great discussion about how to handle blowhards.
Here’s a 13 minute discussion by Roshan Salgado D’Arcy of the climate change misinformation that Charlie Kirk spread in public debates about climate change (YT). The speaker is a climate scientist, and he made this video 4 years ago. Says a commenter, ” one lesson … from watching those kinds of “debates” is to never try and counter argue someone at a podium when the audience is behind them. You can be overwhelmingly correct and you will still lose.”
It’s probably no surprise to anyone that fossil fuel interests funded Mr. Kirk’s foundation. Emily Atkin wrote about that (btw, her climate change substack is a must).
To address the YouTube comment cited above. I guess public debates are not a bad idea per se as long as you have two people who have knowledge or experience about the subject. In these walk-up-and-ask-question public debates, Kirk and his crew control the setting and what kind of people participate. It seems more like a venue for Kirk to land his talking points and Gotchas which seem to impress the easily impressed.
Nicole Hannah-Jones wrote about the dangers of canonizing Charlie Kirk when his rhetoric was deeply antithetical to American values:
It was unsettling to many to see politicians from across the political spectrum speak with reverence about a man who espoused the racist Great Replacement Theory, which argues that white Americans are being systematically replaced by multiculturalism and by brown and Black immigrants; who continuously claimed that “there’s a war on white people in this country; who said it was “a fact” that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people”; who gave a platform to people who believe in eugenics and race science; who contended that Black people commit more crime than white people and that the blame lies in a Black culture that accepts that Black men “impregnate women and they don’t stay around”; who referred to a transgender athlete as an “abomination” and called “the transgender thing” a “throbbing middle finger to God”; and who declared that Islam, the world’s second-largest religion, “is not compatible with Western civilization” and that it is a sword being used “to slit the throat of America.”
I had an (unproductive) talk with a family member about the problems with extolling a figure like Charlie Kirk. Perhaps the thing that hit hardest was Kirk’s crazy remarks about Olympics athlete Simone Biles. In 2021 Kirk called her a “selfish sociopath” who brought “shame to the country” by withdrawing from an Olympic event. Then in June 2025 Kirk called Biles a “shock artist,” a “basket-case” and that she “will now be known as a mockery.” When discussing Biles’ acceptance of transgender people, Kirk asked, “is she a pervert or something?”
Animated Political Humor. It’s crazy how much animated cartoons can get away with on Network TV. Here is a compilation of Family Guy clips. King of the Hill: Luanne is a Communist.
The Hill gives the scoop about the Facebook Privacy Settlement. (I expect to receive mine in a few days).Update: I received $38.
ROBERT REDFORD ON THE TWILIGHT ZONE. (It was great — no exhilarating! — to watch the 1962 episode, NOTHING IN THE DARK (Season 3, Ep. 16) where Robert Redford plays a wounded officer which an old woman treats suspiciously. Uncommonly good acting; Gladys Cooper was a stage and movie veteran whose first movie was in 1913 (and had been in Rebecca (1940) and My Fair Lady (1964). It’s amazing that Robert Redford had continued making movies 111 years after Cooper’s first movie.
To my delight, I realize that Cooper had been in two other Twilight Zone episodes, including the equally haunting Night Call (1964).
Gisela Salim-Peyer on the similarities between US autocracy and Venezuelan autocracy:
The word autocracy conjures images of police officers violently crushing protests and dissidents going to prison for their ideals. Those things do happen, but for many people, the experience is more passive: Living through the rise of a dictatorship just means inhabiting a space that is gradually shrinking. There’s no point in resisting, not at first. You just make do with whatever breathing room you still have—until you lose that too…. There is a lag in time between the abstract threat of authoritarianism and its concrete realization, between hoping that your fears are mere paranoia and seeing them fulfilled.
From a long history about David Letterman’s Top 10 lists from his show, I found this gem with Casey Kasim announcing (YT).
Recursive humor: The Falconer on SNL with Will Forte. (YT)
I really have no idea how reliable this information is, but the number of notable people in Vienna between 1913 and 1914 is pretty astounding. Another source suggests that Kafka visited there also in September 1913 to attend an international congress for Rescue and Accident Prevention.
FUEL COST FOR EV’S IS TWICE THE FUEL COST OF GASOLINE-POWERED CARS.
Source: Some readers commented that EVs also have lower maintenance costs than gas-powered cars as well.
Business Vids: Why America Got Rid of all its diving boards. (YT). This comes from the Business Explains the World series, a great series that does deep dives into engaging business topics. I’m also a big fan of the Paul Solmon economics reports over the decades on PBS.
Every day or two DAILYKOS runs a long (English-language) update about the Ukraine war. (Archive) That and William Spaniel’s YouTube channel are the best way to stay informed about the fighting. Other reliable news sources: Kyiv Independent, Counteroffensive with Tim Mok Substack and Atlantic Council’s Ukraine Alert. On Bluesky, you can follow Julia Davis (who obsessively monitors Russian state TV) and Anne Appelbaum (who writes about autocracies and East Europe).
Louis CK on why people don’t appreciate technological progress (YT)
Did you know the TV show Lost had a (legitimate) epilogue which never was aired? (YT) Blows my mind too (and actually it’s terrific in its own way). Also, the two Lost writers did a wonderful spoof of alternate endings on Jimmy Kimmel (YT). Really well done. I love the cast of that show.
Here’s a great screenshot I made of books with humorous titles.
Here’s a Bill Burr comedy routine about growing old, etc. (YT) Here’s a more recent clip on Jimmy Kimmel. (YT)
Nobel winning author Wole Soyinka finds that his visa request was rejected– ostensibly for political reasons. He recently referred to Trump as the “white Idi Amin”. Fun fact: I met him very briefly in 1989.
Here’s a nice photo essay by Jason Farago about how astronauts took pictures while on the moon. (Paywalled, gift link)
My Current News Diet in a Nutshell
Reality Chex is a news aggregator site run by one woman Marie Burns. I’ve been following her site for over a decade. She personally summarizes all the big stories from major news sources — as well as major substacks (Heather Cox Richardson, etc) and social media. Added bonus: gifted article URLs to the premium news sites!
NEWS SITES I LIKE This is Not Cool is a climate change & energy blog run by videographer Peter Sinclair. A decade ago he made incredibly informative vids about climate change & climate change denials. This blog contains the latest news & video reporting about climate change, with lots of interviews.
Guardian (voluntary $60) is a special category unto itself. It asks for a $60 donation, but doesn’t put anything behind a paywall. Reporting & commentary is generally first rate. (who knows?!)
NEWS SITES I LIKE. The CNN Lite text-only is a great place to read full CNN stories without ads or multimedia. (PS, NPR also has a lite text-only site as well).
NEWS SITES I LIKE. Electoral-vote has daily news and commentary by two California professors, with reader questions and commentary on the weekend. Initially it focused on election news, but now it covers all aspects of national politics and the Trump legacy. BTW, the site looks atrocious on mobile devices; there is another link specifically for mobile readers.
NEWS SITES I LIKE David Corn is a journalist & author whose substack includes lots of interesting reports & commentary. I generally avoid following reporters on social media, but DC’s bluesky feed always has interesting stories & commentary. (He also has an Our Land newsletter which has a free trial. But even after it expires, it still sends regular commentary via email twice week.
NEWS SITES I LIKE Deceleration is a blog/newsletter run by Marisol Cortez. She is a San Antonio journalist/intellectual/writer who focuses on environmental and social justice stories which affect Texas.
NEWS SITES I LIKE (PT 11) Pro Publica, American Prospect, Washington Monthly, Bulwark and Robert Reich’s Substack all have wonderful analysis and opinion pieces. Sometimes the ground they cover overlaps quite a bit,
NEWS SITES I LIKE Atlantic Council provides commentary about foreign policy issues (including outstanding analysis about Ukraine). It’s a newsletter, and you can choose the countries or topics which interest you. Voila! You will receive articles via email.
NEWS SITES I LIKE Sri Preston Kulkarni is a foreign policy expert who ran for Congress (and lost) in my congressional district. In his Seeking a Better Future Substack he writes eloquently about the latest political events. FUN FACT: Sri is the son of Venkatesh Kulkarni who was a distinguished Indian-American novelist who taught at Rice University in Houston.
NEWS SITES I LIKE . Clive Thompson is a tech reporter & geek who digs up the most amazing things. He drops a lot of cool things on his Mastodon account and every few weeks or so he publishes a summary of his favorite links on his Linkfest — which is really fun to read!
NEWS SITE I LIKE . I used to like BoingBoing for my unusual/geek news until it went behind a paywall. Still haven’t found an adequate replacement even though Cory Doctorow’s feeds are everywhere. Metafilter is a geek link-sharing site which was really cool 20 years ago, but it’s still semi-cool. PS, there is a $5 fee to become a member, but you can just lurk — as I have done for a long time. For other link sharing/commentary, check out HackerNews , and Slashdot) and certain subreddits.
Paywalled journalism. Slate.com (120$), Vox.com ($40), Atlantic Monthly $80), New Republic ($20) are all excellent, but pricey. I mean, how many premium news & commentary services do you really need (i.e., can you afford?). NYT is still essential reading, but who the hell knows what the annual cost is– there are so many opportunities to get discounts — especially when you call their customer service line to cancel.
Other people on Substack, etc. Worth mentioning that almost all of them have active bluesky feeds.
- Emily Atkin’s Heated World Substack is top-rate; it investigates climate denial and vital policy issues on energy & environment.
- Judd Legum’s Popular.info substack. (BS)
- Timothy Noah (BS) New Republic journalist whose bluesky feed remains busy.
- Heather Cox Richardson. (BS) Believe it or not, I have not subscribed to her substack yet, but her pieces are linked to so often that I feel as though I already do.
- Legal Substacks: Steve Vladek’s One First, Joyce Vance’s Civil Discourse.
- Veteran commentators: Paul Krugman, Matt Yglesias,
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