John Jackson

To Tom Barrett, November 1, 2025 Rep. Barrett: Your response to the messages chalked outside your office is very typical of you. Those messages were left in sidewalk chalk, the kind of ch...

I am "represented" by Tom Barrett. He'd be an authoritarian if he weren't so cowardly. democracyandme.bearblog.dev/new-post-new...

To Tom Barrett, November 1, 2025 Rep. Barrett: Your response to the messages chalked outside your office is very typical of you. Those messages were left in sidewalk chalk, the kind of ch...

I keep a small blog recording all my letters to "Representative" Barrett. Here's my response: democracyandme.bearblog.dev/new-post-new...

Congressional candidate hosts food drive and vigil outside Rep. Tom Barrett’s Lansing office • Michigan Advance William Lawrence, Democratic congressional candidate in Michigan’s 7th District, is holding a 30-hour vigil and food drive outside of the district office of U.S. Rep. Tom Barrett (R-Charlotte), in pro...

Democratic congressional candidate William Lawrence is holding a food drive outside the Lansing office of U.S. Rep. Tom Barrett (R-Charlotte) in protest of the proposed lapse in SNAP benefits.

Meanwhile, Barrett says chalk messages from a prior rally are ‘vandalism’ and ‘political harassment’.

Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts: Conservatives Shouldn’t Cancel Nick Fuentes

Heritage Foundation: "Look, just because the Nazi wants to kill all non-Christians doesn't mean he's not a fine, upstanding conservative! But don't call us Nazis!" www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwat...

Amazon is helping fund a $300 million build of a ballroom for the White House.

Independent bookstores are donating to food banks and organizations that help with food insecurity.

They are not the same.

Which is to say, if you have to choose a “pedia” to trust, you might choose the one assembled by a bunch of pedantic nerds saying “well, ACTUALLY” to each other until the heat death of the universe, over the one assembled by an LLM controlled by an insecure Nazi salute-throwing billionaire who sprints to reprogram that LLM every time it shares a fact that makes that billionaire angry or sad, or doesn’t fit into his Playskool Machiavellian ambitions and plans. In this particular case, a thousand pedantic nerds is much better than a single rich one.

@scalzi.com on Melon Husk's Artificial "Intelligence" LLM. Beautifully done. whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/30/a...

The Flytrap Feminist cultural criticism against the algorithm

We have not paid ourselves at all this year, but we have managed to turn a small profit! Which is good for a first year online feminist publication that pays fair wages.

We would really like to be able to pay ourselves. You can help make that happen:

the-flytrap.ghost.io/chomp

Text "analysis of Nokings coverage" over image of NYT front page: https://open.substack.com/pub/mediaanddemocracyproject/p/analysis-of-no-kings-coverage-the?

A 🧵
See our grades & analysis of 60+ front pages for #NoKings coverage.
Influential news outlets like NYT/ WSJ continue trivialize coverage of the pro-democracy movement & demonstrations like #NoKings. Editors of local outlets did better.
+ A few surprises
see: open.substack.com/pub/mediaand...
1/n

Cut it out, you are making the rest of us look bad.

How Much Profit Did Elsevier Make in 2024? | PublishingState.com Elsevier, now a division of RELX plc, remains the dominant player in academic publishing. If you’ve glanced at headlines or overheard the occasional mutter in

My colleagues and I are having an article come out in an Elesevier journal. Elsevier is giving us the opportunity to order offprints of our article! And the bargain-basement price of $320 for 50! The nerve of these people! publishingstate.com/how-much-pro...

Elon Musk’s politics cost his firm Tesla more than one million EV sales, report reveals | CNN Business Elon Musk’s polarizing political actions since acquiring Twitter, later rebranded X, in 2022 dramatically hurt the automaker’s U.S. sales, underscoring how deeply its fortunes are intertwined with the...

Melon Husk is destroying the company he pretends he founded. www.cnn.com/2025/10/28/b...

The Soccer Mom Who Strikes Fear Into the Heart of ICE Meet Angelica Vargas, one of the most prominent of a new kind of activist: the ICE chaser.

ICE chasing! www.thenation.com/article/acti...

Designating Antifa as FTO Could Threaten Civil Liberties Trump's plan to designate Antifa as an FTO has implications extending beyond anti-fascist activists to the architecture of US civil society.

A sober and sobering analysis. There seems to be little "could" about it. How about "will?" www.justsecurity.org/122643/antif...

Update on "the biggest freak on the planet." digbysblog.net/2025/10/27/a...

Usually stock options.

STOP talking trash about apples.

Cosmic Crisp are DELICIOUS

Gala are SERVICEABLE

Stayman are PERFECTLY CRONCHY AND SWEET

Honeycrisp are EXPENSIVE BUT GREAT

Granny Smith are SOUR IF THAT’S YOUR THING

McIntosh are TASTY BUT OFTEN MUSHY

Red Delicious

Golden Delicious are SERVED IN CAFETERIAS

Emperor Palpatine made it. There's a bunch of movies about it.

You’ve just stolen a priceless artifact – what happens next? With a recovery rate below 10%, most stolen works are never found. But that doesn’t mean they’re easy to monetize.

Interesting article on art theft and what happens after the heist is over. theconversation.com/youve-just-s...

A wood etching of the creation of the world. A bearded and robed king upon a cloud is depicted waving his hands and birds and fish and mountains and plants are all coming into existence.

Happy Birthday, Universe! October 23, 4004 BCE. According to the good Bishop Usher, the world is created.

JFC. The feds have scraped the very bottom of the barrel.

The real reason conservatives are furious about Bad Bunny’s forthcoming Super Bowl performance Puerto Ricans like Bad Bunny complicate the administration’s campaign to portray America as an English-speaking, homogenous nation.

Spoiler alert: it is racism. theconversation.com/the-real-rea...

This is the exact reason I never eat fish.

The Myth of the Sommelier Is there an art to wine tasting? Do the best tasters really know best?

Wine snobbery is one of the world's biggest con jobs. substack.com/home/post/p-...

You'd think that after qualified prosecutors told Trump this was a no-go and he appointed a completely unqualified insurance lawyer to prosecute the case that a conviction would be a slam dunk! Who, besides everyone, could have predicted this?

Did humans evolve to 'protect' women? Ethnography complicates a convenient narrative

Evolutionary psychologists have claimed that "humans evolved heightened sensitivity to harm directed at women." This excellent (albeit at times gruesome) post makes the point that the ethnographic evidence does not really support this narrative.

Trump’s Outline of a Domestic War Former Undersecretary of Navy discusses import of President Trump's remarks to active duty military leaders at Quantico.

The declaration of war. On you and me. www.justsecurity.org/121940/trump...

To Tom Barrett, October 6, 2025 Tom Barrett's Letter to Constituents, October 6, 2025. "While I remain open to having a conversation about the soon-to-expire ACA Tax Credits that Democra...

My "Representative," Tom Barrett has long ago stopped answering my letters even though I check the box asking him to respond. Wonder why?

democracyandme.bearblog.dev/to-tom-barre...

This is the kind of public intellectualism that makes the public hate intellectuals. Instead of showing what ideas have to teach us about life, Pinker holds a gun to life’s head and demands it conform to his thought experiments. And he does it with the patronizing tone of someone telling his readers what to think from on high. In one passage, prompting us to imagine increasingly higher-order levels of knowledge about knowledge, he virtually pats us on the head. “Now let’s try four layers,” he writes. After we’ve tackled four, he asks, encouragingly, “Think you can handle a fifth layer?”

Consistency is so important. We all should thank Pinker for remaining a pompous buffoon. archive.ph/Adl0n#select...

I've never seen Saturday Night Fever. I've never seen Titanic.

Federal judge blocks Trump's National Guard mobilization in Oregon "The President’s determination" that the Guard was needed "was simply untethered to the facts," Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, found. DOJ is appealing.

A Trump-appointed judge eviscerates Trump's DOJ. www.lawdork.com/p/judge-bloc...