Sure, Dems can walk and chew gum at the same time. I just worry it’ll take a year of meetings to choose a flavor of gum.

Maybe we should worry about all the data those centers are accumulating.

Microsoft is offering buyouts to 60,000 workers. Tech workers. The good jobs. The future. 60,000.

AI is to writing as karaoke is to singing.

In the bleak future it may be useful to remember how easily the communication systems we all depend upon can be interrupted.

Ah. The evangelicals don’t mind living in a surveillance state because they already believe themselves to be living in one.

So long as the nature of personhood is up for grabs…

The price of diesel may win an election, but it won’t lead to the repudiation of maga. It won’t quell racism, end Citizens United, or improve health care. Those things require political will. Spines, even.

The AI titans don’t care about consequences — hell, they’re going to underground compounds. Or Mars. Just the consequences that cost them money. Which is why they now want government to step in. It’s a liability issue. That’s my guess, anyway.

So…if Iran would simply smarten up and purchase its nuclear toys from Kushner & Co., we could have peace? Just trying to understand the new logic of corruption and conquest. And who is being conquered.

They want to take our country and turn it into the worst place you ever worked.

A lot of people don’t realize the dust bowl wasn’t a natural phenomenon. It happened when agrobusiness interests dramatically transformed the plains without regard for drought, and created vicious dust storms that choked whole families to death. That’s what I think of when I read about data centers.

The continued existence of Keith Richards remains the most eloquent argument in favor of socialized medicine.

When the oligarchs get ‘round to settling on the replacement for the Fascist Kleptocrat, we will not be better off. In place they will find a suite of tools — from surveillance to extra-judicial killings — and a compliant workforce. The final gift of the chaos monkey who would be king. 1/

“Behind every great fortune is a great crime." — attributed to Balzac Have we come to the point where our last best hope is to be ruled by an honest thief? Even as a pacifist I should prefer to try out the pitchforks first.

Some day the mad king will be gone. His enablers will remain. Let’s not pretend Vance will be any less beholden to the oligarchs. Or that Rubio will give up Venezuela. Or that Stephen Miller will slither away. This is going to take a while.

So Mitch will deny Kentucky an election just as he denied Obama a selection. Some legacy. Such an inglorious final act.

Y’know how celebrity deaths come in threes?

Drinking a nonalcoholic Belgian and rooting for the good guys.

It's not about policy. It's not socialism, plus/minus. It's about authentic candidates who speak -- or are perceived to speak -- honestly to potential constituents. And it's about fighting back. We parse policy and utterly miss what's going on.

Adam Sandler?

Outside my window, the county has given into the urge to blow things up, to celebrate the dying empire.

I used to cycle between rage and despair. But I’m older now. So I walk.

Happy Juneteenth National Independence Day! On this day in 1865, "Union troops arrived in Galveston, TX, to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the last enslaved people in the country—more than two years after the Proclamation was officially issued."

I suppose it's inappropriate to suggest that the UFC claw/lighting rig/whatever would make a fine traitor's tree? To be clear, I'm a pacifist, so that's not advocacy. I would vastly prefer they be made to suffer more conventional fates.

Marjane Satrapi, author of 'Persepolis,' dies at 56

Marjane Satrapi, author of 'Persepolis,' dies at 56

The French-Iranian 'died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life,' people close to her said.

lemonde.fr

Have we given up, then? Subsided into restless silence? Oh, let's not.

I have found and read one work by Eleanor Arnason. They’re all out of print. One book and it’s clear to me a revival is called for.

I am neither fool nor monied enough to play the predictive markets. But if I were... I'd be putting big money on gas prices dropping to $3/gallon about a month before the election.

It's so disheartening watching this court carry out the explicit project of white supremacy so blatantly while gaslighting the public to say it's trying to stop discrimination. They're dismantling every major legacy of the civil rights movement. We need to reform this court.