Joe Mahoney

My sons and I were totally into that line. We also noted (as I'm sure Reiner and Brooks did) that, once uttered, you could be 100% certain whatever the "perimeter" was protecting was about to get whacked.

Summer's Not Over Yet Blues

Cream, in the wh(a)ite room (wah not optional); beautiful late summer eve show on the railroad bridge gazebo

Maria Spiridonova, easily the most Dostoevskian character in the entire Russian Revolution. Reading her mad Russian life you’re inclined to think FD wasn’t creating so much as transcribing

Nice. But isn't worse than that? Like we didn't give up so much as allow the "we won; project power" klan to indulge in a monumentally bad regime change fantasy. One of the great counterfactuals in recent history has to be: what *if* Gore'd been president and we simply leaned into Tora Bora.

🫡

YouTube video by Sly and the Family Stone - Topic Trip to Your Heart

Sly's first masterpiece
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgmv...

YouTube video by Sly and the Family Stone - Topic Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)

From Miles' autobiography it seems only Charlie Parker was more comprehensively influential on Miles' aesthetic than Sly Stone. RIP to one of the greatest to ever do it.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGkW...

Novels Without Food | Michael Hofmann How did a writer as unconventional as Andrey Platonov manage to write so many irresistibly interesting books?

I didn't recognize the Platonov of Chevengur in this very strange review.
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

YouTube video by johnpro2 JOE COCKER The Letter 1970

One of those brief moments of joy; no one's having more fun than Joe's background singers
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUmX...

Nick Land is evidently quite drug-addled and crazed at this point; but he's exhibited interesting thinking (cf. collabs w/ Sadie Plant and Mark Fisher). Yarvin is always puerile and lightweight.

It did what the system card claimed not because it's sentient but because of ginormous statistically-squashed vectors of written human behavior. Hey you were on twitter once.

:(

Carpe diem

Spinoza's "On The Improvement of the Understanding" is the 17th century's premier self-help guide.

You Only Live Four Times

There’s a scene in The Fixer that’s so awful I had to put the book down the first time I read it. To restart I’d reread the beautiful socratic Spinoza discussion (later used epigraphically by Deleuze in his Spinoza book).

Shoot. Maybe JD's moment to unload

U.S. to End Vaccine Funds for Poor Countries (Gift Article) A 281-page spreadsheet obtained by The Times lists the Trump administration’s plans for thousands of foreign aid programs.

Trump administration to cut vaccination funds. "The loss of U.S. support may mean 75 million children do not receive routine vaccinations in the next five years, with more than 1.2 million children dying as a result," reports @stephanienolen.bsky.social Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/h...

When I was a kid in the late 1960s I sincerely believed that by the time I became an adult people like Mike Johnson, people claiming their actions are dictated by God speaking to them directly, would all be in mental institutions; not running the government.

Having just finished Richard Evans' Nazi trilogy and two books on the Cultural Revolution, plus a Mao bio, I can confirm Carl's statement.

True. I think Richard J. Evans has argued that Weimar was a fairly standard parliamentary democracy, not so much constitutionally flawed as simply lacking in committed true believers.

Well said. Clearly Bernie wails on trump while exhibiting zero symptoms of reflexive trump derangement syndrome.

Natural language syntax complies with the free-energy principle - Synthese Natural language syntax yields an unbounded array of hierarchically structured expressions. We claim that these are used in the service of active inference in accord with the free-energy principle (FE...

I've always felt there ought to be a deep Chomsky/Friston connection from the standpoint of computational efficiency. Nice paper from Friston, Elliot Murphy, Emma Holmes.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Who couldn't love the way Spinoza gently decimates his hero Descartes in Part V of the Ethics.

No philosopher's metaphysics comes closer to quantum field theory than Spinoza's: substance = unobservable gauge fields; attributes = localized field excitations; modes = differentiable operators: charge, spin, mass, position, momentum, creation, destruction, number, etc.

American "big-character poster"

Mao, like Stalin, was a delusional blank-slateist.

Musk belongs to Mao’s “beat the dog that’s fallen in the water” school of creature empathy.