Thomas G. Atkinson

A brief overview of the hit songs of the 1980s will reveal exactly how thoroughly Armageddon was in the zeitgeist.

Toss in a side of Stanislav Petrov and then add the note that the goal of military AI is to automate him out of existence

speaking as someone old enough to remember, the Cold War was very bad and imminently apocalyptic in ways our life today isn’t, but the psychic damage was different. We didn’t *know* about Able Archer until years later. I’d say this is much more of a constant assault on dignity and sanity.

Was it “A Kind of Stopwatch”?

Potential horror versus actual horror. Getting nuked was a possibility; our reality is that there's a new, awful thing happening every day now. The stress and heartache of it all is overwhelming.

Honestly in retrospect COVID was the final victory of the right wing alternative facts conspiracy-minded selfishness-enabling fear mongering hate-manufacturing reality distortion machine that had wormed in its way into most permutations of American life. Most people have been rancid ever since.

(My thinking on this, I should credit, is *deeply* shaped by Dr Lawrence Block's entire body of work but especially The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America, which is an incredible book I *still* find some new insight in every time I open it to check something else.)

Same thing with Newsom. There's no one one in the Republican bullpen for 28 who can't completely dog walk him.
He's Harris from Temu.
And your point is 100% correct. Collins will win without breaking a sweat.
One starts to think that's why this minimus is being pushed so hard.

YouTube video by JULIA AKS JANE AUSTEN'S PERIOD DRAMA / 2026 Oscar®-Nominated Short Film

This short film has been nominated for an Oscar. It is =hysterical=, and I use that term advisedly. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxpj...

By Tesla's own math, it reveals that its robotaxis are 4x worse at driving than humans, with redactions hiding even more details | Fortune By NHTSA standards, the Tesla Robotaxis are 8x worse than human drivers.

About every 57k miles driven by Musk’s robotaxis one gets into a wreck. That’s four times the rate of humans.

I honestly think a huge portion of opposition to universal healthcare and free college or vocational school tuition is because it would destroy a major reason people enlist.

I might have said ”put that in your doom and crack it,” but I am not an award-winning author, nor indeed an author of any kind.

39 years ago, there were only 27 California condors in the world. As of 2025, we now have 607, including 392 that are living free in the wild.

"Put that in your doom and smoke it" -Ursula Vernon

www.fws.gov/media/2025-c...

Could be a lot worse.

One can catch a surprising number of flies with vinegar. More than with honey. Like, a lot more. I’ve done the experiment.

BLM Announces Plan to Fell Oregon's Last Great Forests One billion board feet per year... 30 days to make your voice heard.

You only have a short time to comment. They are trying to destroy our forests to enrich a few logging company executives and the politicians they’ve paid off.
Leave your comment here:

eplanning.blm.gov/Participate-...

morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/blm-announ...

I’m involved with a small working group on developing an AI policy and a) most of the group notes so far do this and b) I even found myself doing it because apparently I’ve internalised the framing. This post has reminded me to see the frame as well as the problem

I will look forward to finding out! Time Bandits flat-out copied some of that first episode, istg.

I just watched the first episode of Sapphire and Steel (1979), and had to watch the second because of its obvious influence on Time Bandits, which no one ever told me about.

WELL NOW, would you look at that?

A massive, 26-YEAR-LONG study of MORE THAN 2.4 MILLION people in Sweden found found NO EVIDENCE to support a causal link between acetaminophen (the API in Tylenol) use during pregnancy and increased risk of autism, ADHD, OR intellectual disability in children.

Anyone who has spent five minutes in a punk scene, even the biggest losers I ever met in my life, is smarter than any media-American trying to sanitize the guy with a conspicuous Nazi tattoo

It makes me genuinely angry how these fuckers try to manipulate the public. They pulled it just two months ago, too, with Venezuela. "Oh, so you support Maduro?!?!" No, fuck off. I support us staying the fuck out of dumbshit wars.

A wizard's favorite shape is hexagon because that's how you cancel a witch's curse

people love to be like "you shouldn't hate anyone, it gives them power over you" girl no it don't lmao

one of the funny truths you learn if you write in the cross-genre romance space is that people who don't like the sex will hallucinate massive amounts of it in your book, and people who wanted more sex will be able to estimate an exact sex word count within like 75 words.

They'll both be mad tho.

I am continually amazed by the lengths people will go to give a mediocre white man a chance. But the minute a woman, POC or LGTBQ+ misspeaks, they are *actually cancelled.

"B-b-but the Iranian regime is like... really bad!"

Then why aren't we invading North Korea? Or Russia? Or China? Or Afghanistan again? Or...? The list could go on. Even if it turned out that Iran was just days away from getting a nuke, what justifies this?

A big part of the authoritarian playbook is war. War takes over the news. War blots out criticism. War divides a nation’s people, subjecting those against it to being called unpatriotic. War grants leaders all sorts of emergency powers. War consumes everything else.

We mustn’t let this war do so.

Like how hard could it really be to find, support, and promote a candidate that *didn't* have a Nazi tattoo and tons of shitty past statements to explain away?

Scouting America says transgender kids are still welcome after Pete Hegseth claimed they weren’t "We have transgender people in our program, and we’ll have transgender people in our program going forward,” the group's CEO, Roger Krone, said.

Scouting America says transgender kids are still welcome after Pete Hegseth claimed they weren’t-

"We have transgender people in our program, and we’ll have transgender people in our program going forward,” the group's CEO, Roger Krone, said.
www.advocate.com/politics/nat...