Jason Moiron

Basically all astrophotography is not what your eyes can see but it is still pretty awesome.

I know he is more famous for the late Kurosawa films he did, but I always liked Tatsuya Nakadai's performance in Dai-bosatsu Toge (called "Sword of Doom" in the west).

RIP to a real legend of Japanese cinema.

Ezra Klein is a smart guy, but he's too credulous of people who want to smuggle extremist positions through moderate language (eg. he likes Douthat) and he's incapable of judging a game of checkers because he thinks all board games are 4d chess.

Sadly I think he'd have a good chance, even though voting against him again would be fun.

AMOC shutdown is unfathomably catastrophic. You know how Toronto is the latitude of Marseille, but much colder? Imagine European latitudes with Canadian climates.

During the last AMOC shutdown, the winters in Paris were similar to Winnipeg, UK summers similar to Reykjavik.

I'm not sure why, but we still don't fully understand the false efficacy of deploying state violence against protests.

The dispersal may have ended the news story and killed the media attention, but people don't somehow become convinced just because they were silenced.

Columbia, in NYC, was the epicenter.

Students took to their campus quads to protest complicity in what is plainly a genocide, and they got a fascist crackdown as reward.

Student leaders here on visas were detained and threatened with deportation for thought crimes.

Gen Z voters turned out big for Mamdani, which you can view as a rejection the false equivalence of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

After all, many of them have been subject to a similar campaign accusing them of being antisemitic for not being Zionist.

IMHO, Mamdani set the battle grounds for this election to be fought on, affordability. His messaging made it the issue NYC residents said they cared most about.

The classic ploys of trying to make it about crime and public safety were attempted and failed. Mamdani owned the attention.

Zohran Mamdani’s Triumph in New York Evokes Intense Reaction in Israel

This becomes more stark when you look at the accounts of the Israeli reaction, where its right-wing leaders attempt to equate Zohran with the 9/11 hijackers among many other clear Islamophobic claims:

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/w...

I'm not an expert in the interplay between Zionism, Islamophobia and antisemitism, and I'm not part of any of these groups.

It's nonetheless pretty clear that Zionist groups were relentless in this characterization (eg. the ADL), and non-Zionist groups weren't:

bsky.app/profile/jaco...

Zohran Takes Various reflections and learnings related to Zohran Mamdani's win in the NYC Mayoral Primary.

When I wrote about Mamdani's primary victory, I focused a lot on how Islamophobia formed the unspoken core of the campaign to label him antisemitic.

Predictably, his opponents tried to turn this up to 11 during the election, and I'm glad it failed.

jmoiron.net/blog/zohran-... (Jun 2025)

Sunset looking South-West in UES, Manhattan

Oh no the communism has spread to the upper atmosphere.

Can they both lose?

A Tweet by R. L. Stine: "I'm so glad I live in New York City and not in the United States."

It's one of those nights.

Cuomos bronco

Womp womp

A sticker saying I voted

Autumn leaves, a maple in gold and red

New York in Autumn is not too bad. Let's hope we can pull out the old R L Stine quote later tonight.

Fewer than 10 users block me on bsky apparently, but among them is my favorite band, who:

1. last released an album in 2012
2. I saw live at least 20 times
3. follows me on twitter

Oh! turn to water, sublimate to steam,
then form a cloud and pour on me.

Centrists never seem to think the answer is to fight for your convictions and move the public.

In the 90s, "liberal" was a political smear. Self-identified Liberals co-opt this term, and its potency has been lost. The GOP has to call anyone left of Mussolini "far-left radical marxists" now.

"D's are too liberal" is conventional wisdom in the US, but this is a product of the information environment. As Rufo clearly stated, their strategy is to establish a label and then poison the public's association with that label. Woke, DEI, Green New Deal, Democrat.

The three most high profile congressional Democratic leaders are Schumer, Pelosi, and Jeffries. They are written about constantly. The first two have been in power for decades.

Can you name a single issue that animates them?

As Klein himself says, aligned independents and progressive policies tend to outpoll the Democratic brand. So which is more likely to be right? That the policies are too liberal and Dems should moderate, or that the filling the halls of power with empty suits void of conviction is bad?

"The democrats keep doing this thing and losing" is something that the left and the center agree on, but the left's diagnosis is that the Democrats are feckless poll-tested cowards, and the center's diagnosis is that the Democrats are too progressive.

I like Klein and I find he is thoughtful and earnest enough to not deserve the kinds of heat he gets from the left, but he is obsessed by a retvrn to 1960s era party depolarization, and the consensus on liberalism, anti-communism, and racism it was built on is gone and should stay dead.

In this article:

> [Social Media] has affected the Democratic and Republican Parties in different ways. Let me start with the Democrats.

24 paragraphs on Democrats, 4 paragraphs on "The Right" and how yeah I guess they are nazis now but Americans like that so Democrats have to adapt.

The quote "Trump will be President in '28" is, barring his death or removal, correct; his term ends in '29. This feels like a dumb nitpick, but I think it plays into the subconscious narrative that Biden was somehow President in 2020 and is responsible for the pandemic response.

Every $TSLA quarterly announcement this year has been "we can't even give away our cars and the macro is getting worse" followed by a fabricated timetable for one of their vaporware projects, and the market reaction is "this guy's a genius lets give Musk literally a trillion dollars"

Last night I had pickled chicken feet and pumpkin cheesecake, definitely the weirdest combo in recent memory.

Very encouraging that Zohran is not just about moonshot programs that will be difficult to enact given the limited powers of the Mayor.

There's plenty of waste from overlooked government operations and graft from corrupt NYS dem machinery that would be valuable to clear out.

dying that the hot, based "dev focussed" "distro" has built in hotkeys to open dhh's email provider that nobody uses