“Pop superstar Taylor Swift might have helped register enough voters in a single day last September to swing close races in multiple states, with turnout experts predicting a strong youth vote for the 2024 presidential election.”
“No, office mandates don’t help companies make more money, study finds”.
“The new conservative outrage machine is different because it skips a step. It used to be that first, something had to happen. Sure, instigators might exaggerate about that thing. They might spin it to sound like more than it was. But something happened somewhere, and the race to pin it on a group they didn’t like could commence. In 2024 nothing even has to happen. The current punching bag of diversity in the airline industry shows how the conservative internet-industrial complex has shifted. The apparatus is no longer limited to drumming up causes for real-world situations. It can now merely invent the problems themselves. And this burst of creativity is useful to the conservative movement against all kinds of adversaries, not just Black airline pilots.”
Maybe George Carlin and Taylor Swift can pump the brakes a teeny bit on AI deepfakes.
A love letter to Love on the Spectrum from the parent of an autistic child.
A nice story about the City Cast podcast network; I’ve noted the Houston CitCast podcast on this site a few times. There’s one for Austin in the works, and frankly there’s room for quite a few more in this state.
“Very few people are looking closely at the illegal sand system or calling for changes, however, because sand is a mundane resource. Yet sand mining is the world’s largest extraction industry because sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. The only natural resource more widely consumed is water. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded that we are dredging river sand at rates that far outstrip nature’s ability to replace it, so much so that the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. The U.N. report confirms that sand mining at current rates is unsustainable.”
RIP, Jimy Williams, former MLB player and manager of the Red Sox, Blue Jays, and Astros.
“Age verification laws are the “latest strategy in a long battle” against pornography, experts say. Here’s what they do in states that have enacted them.”
“If we wake up to awful news on November 6, we’ll be asking ourselves one question: Did we do enough?”
“With Prime Video encroaching directly on Freevee’s ad-supported territory, what is the point of Freevee now?”
If Dolly Parton says there can be a Buffy the Vampire Slayer revival/spinoff/reboot/whatever, who am I to argue?
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but I will not allow Elon Musk to implant a chip in my brain. Just not gonna happen.
That said…”I’m perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else’s life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn’t see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he’s also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam’s Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up. The odds that there’s a human being beta-testing Musk’s neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren’t zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians’ claim to have cloned a human being”.
“Say what you will about the Swifties, but when they run wild with a conspiracy theory, they at least try to back up their conjecture with close reading and other attempts at methodology.” That article led me to this one about the Taylor Swift/Argylle conspiracy theory, which most likely means my younger daughter will be going to see that movie.
“Male practice players have been around women’s basketball for at least a half-century, mimicking the opposition’s schemes and personnel. They’re generally in the gym to help, not to win, often getting nothing except cardio for their effort. But unfair fights are one thing. How about a 6-foot-4 Stanford forward with an impossible wingspan and deceptive speed? A teenage prodigy at USC with a bottomless bag of answers? The Iowa guard who might score more points than any player in college ever has?” I remember reading a Sports Illustrated story about Pat Summit doing this at Tennessee in the 90s. I’m glad to see this is still a thing.
Wishing Cecile Richards all the best.
“This latest fever dream of the right is another blast of cuckoo-ness. Yet with Swift as the target, this nutjobbery may well have a positive impact—showing a wide audience how extreme and lunatic the conservative movement can be.”
“As the new year begins, No Labels has a serious problem: no one wants to run on their ticket.”
“During the Trump years, plenty of families were torn apart because sons and daughters spoke out against MAGA moms and dads; because grandchildren estranged themselves from Trump-loving grandmothers and grandfathers; because uncles and cousins and brothers went Q-crazy. There are entire books written about this. There are documentaries. It’s a national tragedy. Why should Ivanka Trump be spared the familial pain felt by so many Americans? Because her wretched father was its author? Really? Boo fucking hoo.”
RIP, Hinton Battle, actor who won three Tony Awards for Sophisticated Ladies, The Tap Dance Kid, and Miss Saigon. Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will remember him as the singing/dancing demon Sweet from “Once More, with Feeling”. Here’s a reminder, in case you need it.
RIP, Chita Rivera, Broadway legend, two-time Tony winner and ten-time nominee, originator of Anita from West Side Story and Velma Kelly from Chicago. What a sad week for the musical theater.
“The business of counting evangelicals — and of deciding who does and doesn’t count — has always been a game involving differing weights and differing measures.”
RIP, Jean Carnahan, former US Senator from Missouri, the first woman to represent Missouri in the Senate.
RIP, Coleen Grissom, longtime and much-beloved English professor and Dean of Students at my alma mater, Trinity University. Go read Andrew Dansby’s lovely tribute to her for a good look at why she was such an institution.
“But how does it feel to be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy under “ordinary” circumstances? Forced pregnancy has become commonplace, yet there is almost no research documenting the mental health impact of abortion bans. Social scientists, clinicians and advocates—all those whose work has facilitated an evidence-based awareness of and response to the physical harms of abortion bans—must expand the frame to include a rigorous assessment of the psychological harms as well. Building this body of research will inform the ongoing debate over the legitimacy of abortion bans, but just as importantly, it will permit doctors, advocates and policymakers to build a trauma-informed response to the situation on the ground.”
“Indian police cleared a suspected Chinese spy pigeon after eight months’ detention and released it into the wild Tuesday, news agency Press Trust of India reported.”
RIP, Carl Weathers, actor and former NFL player known for Rocky, The Mandalorian, and many other roles.
That wasn’t a George Carlin deepfake. It was two comedians doing a spoof and trying to pass it off as a deepfake.
“The tragedy in all of this is that Ivanka speaking out against Donald would have mattered. Ivanka speaking out would have had real power. Ivanka speaking out would have saved lives. Yes, there was a price she would have had to pay for speaking out—her father is a petty, vengeful fuck—but there is also a cost for staying silent.”
That’s why I say go ahead and boo her, shun her, criticize her. I get that it’s harder when it’s family, but wrong is still wrong. She took every opportunity to feather all her posh little nests as her reward for not speaking up, so I think pariah-dom is an appropriate consequence if nothing criminal sticks.
“Given Musk’s colossal failure with Twitter/X and the problems and recalls he’s been having with Tesla, it’s amazing he found someone willing to let him put one of his gadgets in their brain.”
If I were paralyzed, with no hope of recovery, and therefore with absolutely nothing to lose, I’d volunteer. Otherwise, nope, nope, NOPE!
“But in recent days, this harrumphing has exploded into far more than grousing. The rightists have latched on to the Swift-Deep State conspiracy theory and expanded it with a new storyline: The NFL has rigged it for the Chiefs to reach the Big Game…to raise Swift and Kelce’s profiles even higher….to give even more oomph to her presumed 2024 endorsement of Biden.”
I don’t doubt that the Biden campaign would be overjoyed at another endorsement from Swift, but there’s no hurry, and the smartest move is to carry on and say nothing about it. Just the mere notion that she MIGHT endorse Biden is generating so many unforced political errors from the RWNJs. So please no interrupting them while they make themselves look like even bigger idiots and hypocrites and alienate lots of newly minted voters (and some not so new). Keep stringing the fools along.