Margaret Atwood: “The bathroom is a place where you can go in and pretend to be doing one thing while actually you’re reading. Nobody can interrupt you. Compendiums of this and that are very useful for bathroom reading: small reading packages within a larger book. You wouldn’t want to read War and Peace in there. You’d never come out. They’d probably call the police and get the door broken down.” wikipedia.org
“Horny bro conservatism:” Republicans are trying to win over a new generation of sexually libertine young men. “What if some conservatives aren’t longing for Ronald Reagan’s heyday but for the time when women were hotter, you could put up a topless calendar in your cubicle at the office without fear of reprisal from some mean H.R. lady, and nobody told you what to do?”
— Jane Coaston: The Debate Hugh Hefner Won and William Buckley Lost nytimes.com
Jamelle Bouie: “The people who blame wokeness for the collapse of a bank do not want you to understand or even think about the political economy of banking in the United States. They want to deflect your attention from the real questions toward a manufactured cultural conflict. And the reason they want to do this is to obscure the extent to which they and their allies are complicit in — or responsible for — creating an environment in which banks collapse for lack of appropriate regulation.” nytimes.com
Democrats contribute to this environment as well. They rush to make SVB’s depositors whole, but when the poor and middle class are struggling, Democrats sigh and say they wish they could do more.
“The only safe AI is open source. Closed AIs are dangerous.” johnrobb.substack.com
A court will decide whether antifa is a political movement or criminal conspiracy. usatoday.com
I’m skeptical whether antifa even exists. It’s a right-wing fantasy, like wokism and LGBTQ groomers.
MSNBC viewers seem mostly interested in which books his supporters want removed from elementary school libraries, how he’s treating The Walt Disney Company, and which Miami venues might lose their liquor licenses from having drag performances in spaces open to children. And certainly, DeSantis has put a lot of energy into stirring up those and other culture wars. But he’s also raised teacher pay, cut tolls on highways, and spent money on Everglades restoration. He has demonstrated a broad awareness that voters care about the basic operations of government and how those affect their daily lives, and he’s focused on getting them to feel satisfied with the way he’s overseeing the actual government.
— Is Ron DeSantis Savvy Or Not? www.joshbarro.com
Trump Expects to Be Arrested Next Week. He’s calling on his supporters to protest. Because that worked well for everybody last time.
Amusing myself with a phone fraudster earlier today.
Every time I play with FeedLand I come away thinking it’s a basic web-based RSS reader, of which there are already quite a few. Other than all of your subscriptions being public, how is Feedland different from Feedly, Feedbin, Inoreader, NewsBlur, etc.?
It does far less than those other guys, which means it’s simpler. And sometimes simplicity is itself a feature. Is that the appeal?
45 minutes to try to create a COBRA account and it turned out the problem was my password needed a special character.
Isn’t that special?
That, and reviewing COBRA paperwork has been my morning so far.