So on one end of the bridge, you’d have the Lincoln Memorial. And at the other, you’d have gilded Temu Arc de Triomphe knockoff.

It wouldn’t be possible to visit Arlington National Cemetery without thinking of our Dear Leader.

Maybe we deserve it.

I feel like this is ripe for an “Autotune The News” treatment. I’m thinking Eminem’s “Without Me:”

🎵

I have two Microsoft Outlooks, Outlooks
Neither of 'em works
Neither of 'em works

🎵

I don’t think the suggestion is that she’s a victim. Just that what we’re seeing is the fallout of a power struggle from behind the curtain.

This Threads post tells a theory / story that’s worthy of a soap opera. Spoiler: Everything comes back to Epstein, as it always seems to.

Robert Reich had some theories, including:

3. Melania is pissed off at Trump for any number of things, and today’s news conference was a way of letting him know she’s capable of making his life miserable.

An unnamed source told the Post it was like “hearing a voice in a stadium, except the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert.”

What the hell is this analogy? “It’s like [thing], except if [thing] were totally different.” This is like a bad movie script.

To find a heartbeat, a quantum Ghost Murmur tool would have to contend not just with Earth’s magnetic field and magnetic noise from natural and human-made electric currents but also with “the heartbeats of the sheep and dogs and jackrabbits—whatever else is running around out there,” says Chad Orzel, a professor of physics…

I’m glad someone brought this up, it was the first thing that came to my mind.

Gosh maybe ICE and the DOJ should read some executive orders, eh?

By the authority vested in me … it is hereby ordered … no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen…

The National Park Service is a different department. The Forest Service is part of the agriculture department, it’s about managing forests as exploitable natural resources.

So that’s good news, in the bleakest way, I guess.

I have a Uni Kuru Toga mechanical pencil that I bought perhaps 20 years ago. For about $7. And it still works great.

Somehow, it’s still $7? How?

Sumatra PDF Reader is no-frills and distraction free. Even on my ancient PC, it’s fast as heck. I have rather rudely installed it on other people’s PCs, because their slow all-singing all-dancing PDF readers drove me up the wall.

RawTherapee converts “RAW” files from digital cameras to friendlier image formats, and pretty often RawTherapee’s edit is all I need. It’s feature packed, it can do film simulations, image de-noising, tone-mapping, and now it has the ability to do some local adjustments, too. I have several “RAW” converters, including a commercial one, but I keep coming back to RawTherapee as the mainstay, the most productive for me.

I’ve got foobar2000 set up as a pretty plain-looking, non-distracting music player. It’s got great library features, it has a wildly customizable interface, it’s got a plugin architecture to extend its abilities in many ways. It has stayed on my PC for years because of its quiet competence, always serving without demanding my time or attention.

I used to keep my password file and other confidential stuff inside a TrueCrypt virtual volume. Now I use the successor, VeraCrypt. Both have always worked flawlessly; in fact, TrueCrypt is way smaller and I’m not aware of any security issues with it, it’s just not actively developed anymore.

These are actually blog posts that list such things:

A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites (Updated 2026)

No Logins Required: Alternative Interfaces To YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram

There are a lot of problems with this, but a pretty telling one, I think, is: That’s not even what “vindication” means. The global-warming-denial position would be vindicated – proven, justified, confirmed – by years or decades worth of data showing that the environment isn’t heating up.

Demonstrating that you have the political power to change the rules in spite of the data is not vindication, it’s just gloating.

Any dictionary could straighten this out for him, if he were interested in expert opinions, in being correct. But they’re not. Flouting the definitions is part of the bully strategy: “My will is your reality, peasant.”

“Leaked in advance?”

What reason is there to think that it’s not just him (or his family, trusted stooges, and other intermediaries) doing this deliberately for his own profit?

I am an American and I completely agree, the flag is everywhere. You would think it was required by law, like portraits of Dear Leader in communist totalitarian states, but no, the flag cult is voluntary. “Cringe” is exactly right. Some people just plaster the flag on things as a substitute for any sense of style or design. We’ve been indoctrinated into the flag cult throughout our childhoods, where there was a flag in every room in our schools, and a coordinated prayer-to-the-flag moment every morning.

I went to Canada in the summer of 2025. In reaction to the insanity from Washington, Canada was experiencing a possibly-unprecedented wave of nationalism, businesses were advertising that they were proudly Canadian, there were even “flag stores” just like we have in the US, but with Canadian flags. In spite of this, Canada had something like 5% as many flags flying in public as the US does. It was possible to be out in public for many minutes at a time without seeing any flags at all. That doesn’t happen in the US.

Americans don’t understand how propagandized they are.

Edit: Cringe example: The Boulevard of 500 Flags. The notion that it’s a memorial to 9/11 is a modern revision, it goes back to the 90s. That is, this was built, by a large group of supposedly grown-up men, before the wave of post-9/11 nationalism.

Hey, could we automatically register everyone to vote at the same time?

I’m kidding. I know the answer is “no.”

The way I see it: Corporate web apps (like Microsoft’s) are evidence that the maker is putting administrative concerns ahead of user experience concerns. They’re catering to the people who actually pay for this stuff, not to the users.

Years ago I when I wrote software for a living, I had an argument with a colleague, and I tried to explain to him:

The “supported” closed-source library he wanted to use was pretty popular because it was marketed by a huge company with a marketing department, or because it had a first-mover advantage, or because there were training events and books built around it, etc.

The unsupported free open-source library I wanted to use was the most popular library of its kind in the whole world. And it got to that position without any of those advantages.

What does that suggest about their relative usefulness? The world of open source is closer to being a real meritocracy. The number one app or library is probably number one for non-structural reasons.

If “Vydia” can get access to this mechanism, it can’t be that hard, can it?

In practice, laws surrounding copyright and even outright plagiarism mostly serve the party with the most lawyers, and this has been the case for some time.

Given the current media, copyright, and business environment, why haven’t we seen this kind of reverse-piracy pursued as a deliberate business model? Buy some IP rights cheap from YouTube “content creators” who have given up, use your AI-powered robot to find vaguely similar stuff from creators who are still working, and copyright-claim it all?

It’s pretty evident there would be no downside.

Maybe small YouTubers should get together and create such a business, just to force the system to change. Make copyright claims against Paramount, CBS, etc. Make them barely plausible. Make thousands of them, from behind a rotating cast of shell companies. Make AI-powered, trust-the-claimant style copyright claims unworkable. Hey, it’s just the free market regulating itself.

Some of the definitions are included in the “Initiative Petition” (PDF). The sneaky work-around you imagined is prohibited in advance.