Count mouse

A tale I must tell today on my late mother, and in doing so, I mean no actual disrespect to the Cheney family, grieving as they are for the actual loss of their loved one. The humor that follows is that of the Simon family's dark and dystropic sense of humor and so, an apology in advance.
However...

International Space Station taken by a satellite also in orbit above it. The backdrop of the image is Earth's clouds as the image is looking down from above.

2nd Nov. 2025 marks the 25th anniversary of the ongoing human presence off-world.

That is, humans have continuously occupied the ISS for exactly 25 years today.

So if you're <= 24 years old, you've never lived in a world where humans were *only* terrestrial-based.

Image by HEO (from above!)

🔭🧪

Hey @erinbiba.bsky.social get a load of this! (It ties into my deeper thoughts about how vampire trends match economic downturns but that’s too scary for a Sunday night.)

Woke up.
Interrogated my sock.
Story was full of holes.
Darn it.

First season, strong start. Let's see if it gets even better

ah crap, 5 seasons...

I think I'll give it a try

Painting of a middle-aged Collingwood in blue admirals jacket, resting his had on his chin.

Spare some love today for Collingwood. The other Admiral at Trafalgar.

Proud northerner. Hater of flogging. Legit brilliant commander and Nelson's trusted right hand. First into battle on Royal Sovereign. Took charge after Nelson was sniped and saved the British Fleet.

Here's HIS Trafalgar... /1 🧵

I have half an hour before my next interview so I'm going to sketch out what I find an important problem with the fashionable division of immigrants into "net contributors" and "net recipients" of government spending. 1/10

By the color, it looks like a quote from the FT

Done by @smoothdunk2.bsky.social

Block, block blockity block

I can't find that account. I guess my seach-fu is off today

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death. The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died. While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants. Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....

Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.

I actually don't really care if AI is useful/interesting/good for some things in education actually - it is besides these things clearly a big problem already that maybe need listing yet again:

This has always been part of the GOP playbook: Downplay incidents of right-wing violence, and then repurpose them as supposed acts of leftist terrorism for public consumption. They first did this in 2020.

Nope and I don't wanna

Is this some sort of updated James Burke's Connections?

They're not? That's disappointing.

“I’m strong and I want to have like fifty kids and a farm” of course you do. You’re twelve. “I don’t want to eat vegetables I think steak and French fries is the only meal” hell yeah homie you’re twelve. “Maybe if there’s crime we should just send the army” bless your heart my twelve year old buddy

working on a new unified theory of american reality i'm calling "everyone is twelve now"

‘Thick as Thieves’: Nathan Gill and Nigel Farage’s Putin Problem Far from being distant from the Reform UK Leader, insiders told Byline Times that the former MEP convicted of bribery was one of Farage’s closest aides, while we reveal how Gill worked on the Kremlin’...

🔴NEW🔴

Thread 🧵

@bylinetimes.bsky.social can now reveal that, during the crucial period when convicted Reform leader Nathan Gill was most active, working directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most senior ally in Ukraine, he was also one of Nigel Farage’s closest confidantes 1/12

The Price of Remission: This Cancer Drug Saves Lives — but Costs a Fortune. I Wanted to Know Why. When I was diagnosed with cancer, I set out to understand why a single pill of Revlimid cost the same as a new iPhone. I’ve covered high drug prices as a reporter for years. What I discovered shocked ...

Revlimid has its origin in a pill that cost patients $7.50 each.

Decades later, the cancer drug costs more than $18,000 for a month’s supply — even though it still only costs about 25 cents to manufacture.

Read @davidarmstrongx.bsky.social's award-winning investigation:

$3 coin, so that no one had any doubt about how fake he was

CRESTRICTED] ORIENTATION FACT SHEET 64 WAR DEPARTMENT-WASHINGTON 25, D. C. • 24 March 1945 FASCISM! Note For This Week's Discussion: Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze; nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it. Points to stress are: (1) Fascism is more apt to come to power at a time of economic crisis; (2) fascism inevitably leads to war; (3) it can come to any country; (4) we can best combat it by making our democracy work.

In March of 1945, the US Army issued this "fact sheet" to guide conversations with soldiers on the topic of fascism, paying particular attention to the ongoing threat that domestic fascist movements posed to the US. Their analysis of what a homegrown US fascism would look like is interesting.

We believe healthcare is a right for every American.

But starting today, millions of people will be notified that they are being priced out of their insurance thanks to Republican policies.

Enough is enough. The GOP may shut down the government, but we will stand tall for YOU.

Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. he was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county.

Major Major's father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could.

I feel like Joseph Heller had their number back in the 60's in Catch-22 and I still think of this quote whenever I hear farm owners complaining about socialism or benefits or taxes. It was a short little aside but it stuck with me for like 25 years.

Ex-Reform leader pleads guilty to Pro-Russia bribery charges The former leader of Reform UK in Wales has pleaded guilty to numerous bribery charges relating to pro-Russian statements.

🚨 This is serious. Ex Reform UK leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, 52, pleads guilty to accepting bribes in exchange for making pro-Russia statements in the European Parliament when serving as a UKIP MEP.

That last sentence, uff

Good thread, still relevant today.
Some tidbits in the comments as well