The Constant

Word

“Until and unless I learn the bomb pushed him out a window, I will continue to call this unlawful act out as the crime it may be.”

The Michaels agree

Can you hear the fugheles sing?

Maybe my favorite line reading of all time. That whole speech.

Acid?

My brain has spent the last two hours workshopping David vs Brit jokes and I can only hope my wife is more-or-less used to that Valentine’s experience by now.

In 1854, after watching the federal government deploy 2000 federal troops and spend $40,000 sending Anthony Burns back into slavery, Boston's Amos Adams Lawrence said “we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

Or rediscovered it, if you’re gnostic.

Hume might not be a liberal, but he’s sure as shit not whatever David Brooks thinks he is.

YouTube video by Jeffersonian By Nature Videos Upright Citizens Brigade boardroom skit

Double decker bus apple cart in summary.

youtu.be/ZR1NN3dYCng?...

Also, if I’ve got my history right, literally one person in American history managed to pull it off and he got shot in the back a couple months later.

Also: I dislike your correction on her number of terms because it makes me acknowledge the terrible throbbing of time.

That’s a good point! Although it’d be hard to envy Ryan’s fate. Then again, it’d be hard to envy his anything.

That could be. What I mean is: young two term (?) house member to president is a big jump. Senate seems like a safer leap, career-wise. What’s the downside for her if she goes straight for the big game and loses? In the past, that might’ve seemed like a death sentence, but maybe no more?

If you’re her, is the risk of loss a downside relative to a probable cakewalk to the senate? I’m honestly asking, because that feels like it would be a consideration, but I don’t actually know what gets considered.

I liked the image of Trump rummaging through the White House walls for copper wire up until he made the analogy obsolete.

Respectfully, this is not very clear. What LLMs are capable of is genuinely amazing, and raises tons of questions both practical and philosophical. However, there’s still no evidence that this tech is headed towards AGI, and strong reason to suspect AGI isn’t doable in the first place.

Peace Forever Your second favorite series about putting right what once went wrong

Hey maybe you would like to listen to this episode of @constantpodcast.bsky.social about a previous rise of fascism that also featured Nobel Peace Prize shenanigans. A reminder that we are living in quite precedented times.

Peace Forever by The Constant: A History of Getting Things Wrong

Here’s a story about Nazis, antifascists, corrupt political movie-making and The Nobel Peace Prize, which has zero contemporary relevance.

megaphone.link/ARML4304032796

This story is all the more dumbfounding if you, like me, primarily know said professor as one of the Unabomber’s victims.

(Screams in Duverger’s Law)

Hooray!

There aren’t a lot of things I’d like less than a Kid Rock performance, but Actual Kid Rock is one of them.

Gonna get my “I voted” whistle

And three weeks later, when the MAGignon papacy schisms, the offshoot can head to Pisa.

I was so happy when this book came out. To find Gladwell finally finding a contrarian cause so without an audience that people might finally wake the fuck up.

And then there is the endless shilling: for pharma, for car companies, for fucking whomever, which he seems sure don’t affect his judgment. Even though writing about how things like that affect everyone’s judgment (INCORRECTLY!) is what made him famous.

What’s incredible is that he’s managed to be so consistently wrong, in such multifaceted ways. Sure, he often misunderstands or misrepresents things. But on the rare occasion that he manages to frame an idea correctly (priming, broken windows) it invariably turns out later that the idea is fucked

wow