John Pfaff

Biden on the list

He is—he’s below Trump.

Same sort of lunacy others are getting.

Only when I told it to go out on its own did chaos, including Nobama! and Nobiden!, ensue:

“Can you make me a diagram of the US presidents since Herbert Hoover, with their names and years in office under their photos, not just give me someone else’s.”

The Presidents, w right names and dates.

Interestingly, I had to force ChatGPT to give me a messy POTUS answer.

The prompt “Show me a diagram of the US presidents since Herbert Hoover, with their names and years in office under their photos” gave me an accurate reply, albeit w no pics.

Reuters report that military won’t let senior trans ppl retire but force them to quit, to screw w their benefits, etc.

Absolutely monstrous.

Brutal disrespect to ppl who served their country imposed on them by those who seek to do nothing but disservice to it.

He’s not wrong.

I made a wrong turn once as we were leaving Boston to drive back to NYC, and the GPS added 35 minutes to our total time. One miss! On local streets!

This city is fugazi No grid whatsoever

A New York City kid discovers Boston for the first time.

No Carter either! If it weren’t for Jehn Kennedy, there’d be no Democrats since Truman.

It’s the GOP dream.

“We are the occasionally regrettable, always forgettable, AI-misnamed Presidents of the USA.”

Harrtson and Tavlor are just … perfect.

Guess it passes the Anti-Woke-AI EO by eliminating the Clinton era altogether.

Also, I have to think it was trained on actual faces of the Presidents. So why is it making them up? And turning GWB2 into some creepy Bush-Gorsuch love-child?

Why are Americans so afraid of crime, even as it plummets?

Because this is the second paragraph of the CBS News take on it.

SECOND PARAGRAPH starts with a “but” that defies comprehension (what does “every 25.9 seconds” mean in a nation of 320M?), but seems scary!

SECOND PARAGRAPH.

I almost have to admire the commitment to making sure homicides seem to be worsening at a time of historic declines.

Almost.

Crime news can never be good. Only bad, or not good enough.

I’m genuinely outraged by this coverage by CBS, and that’s from my baseline of absolutely bleak pessimism about media coverage of crime.

Just outraged.

The tiniest increase is proof that everyone should be a terrified.

The largest decrease demands a “things still are abstractly terrifying!” before you even get to the first ad.

It’s disgusting. @cbsnews.com.web.brid.gy should be mortified by this take. But will not be.

Why are Americans so afraid of crime, even as it plummets?

Because this is the second paragraph of the CBS News take on it.

SECOND PARAGRAPH starts with a “but” that defies comprehension (what does “every 25.9 seconds” mean in a nation of 320M?), but seems scary!

SECOND PARAGRAPH.

Yeah, I was always annoyed that when expanding SCOTUS died for pathetic reasons, no one pushed for the surely-politically more tenable idea of tripling the 5th Circuit, AKA Alitoland.

When one side argues that the Earth is flat, the most obvious reason why everyone else keeps disagreeing w them isn’t that they don’t like the flat-earthers’ politics.

It’s that the flat earthers are simply wrong.

But here, that wrongness is WILDLY both-sidered.

“Self-described historians have overwhelmingly chosen to file briefs where they can support progressive causes,” Mr. Ishitani wrote. Indeed, he found, 95 percent of the historians who signed supporting briefs making history-based arguments between 1987 and 2022 took liberal positions. A far larger number of supporting briefs drawing on history were filed by lawyers and others who did not hold themselves out to be historians. Those briefs were more ideologically mixed. What accounts for the difference? “Undoubtedly,” Mr. Ishitani wrote, “much of the discrepancy results simply from the demographics of a discipline that reportedly votes around 80 percent Democrat and 4 percent Republican, at least at the academic level.” Another explanation runs deeper. “Leading originalists have long waged a methodological war with constitutional historians,” Mr. Ishitani wrote. One of those originalists, Randy E. Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown, has objected to what he called “the priesthood of historians” who claim to have the exclusive ability to “tell us the meaning of our fundamental law.”

Nothing to add on the Moyn post itself, but this passage from the Times piece he linked to is … intriguing.

In that it explicitly says “historians are all liberals!” but only cryptically hints at the idea that “maybe the conservative points rely on terrible historical takes.”

Not a neutral frame.

Just like the Founders … wanted … somehow … I’m sure … despite writing in the exact opposite.

We’ve flipped the Constitution:

We now have direct election of Senators while state legislatures pick the House of Representatives.

But good to see headlines just transcribing the hearsay of clearly-motivated “sources” about what an INSANELY-motivated RJS had to say abt a personalist President well-known for pardoning those who make him look good.

The Reverse Jailhouse Snitch is no more trustworthy than the Conventional Jailhouse Snitch.

Conventional Snitches lead to a lot of wrongful convictions.

The Reverse Snitch will obviously lead to a lot of wrongful exonerations.

I almost admire the blunt honesty of Hegseth saying that he honors the Confederacy.

He's right. His entire administration venerates the Confederacy and everything it stands for.

I look forward to another Reconstruction when we can honor Reconstruction 1.0 by melting Confederate statues into slag.

Balloons spelling out “50”

Just arrived for a summer visit w the in-laws, and they decided to open the week with violence.

(I still have more than three weeks left in my 40s, damnit!)

I mean, c’mon, Kevin, you’re a historian. You have a special skill at remembering the past.

You can’t apply the same expectations to university admins, who’d have to think all the way back to, what… three months ago? When Columbia’s first capitulation backfired?

I mean: MONTHS ago, man.

I once saw a map of NY that has zero GOP House districts. I was a wild horizontal-stripe map (like, parts of Buffalo and Lake Placid may have been in the same strip?).

But now I want to see it become a reality.

First the AI victim impact statement made in actual open court by an AI model trained on a murder victim’s videos.

Now this.

We are just absolutely messing w our concept of reality in really bad ways.

Just folded everything.

Kid went to camp with 12 PAIRS of socks.

Came home with 3.

Not three pairs. Three. Total. 1.5 pairs. But all three mismatched.

I almost admire the skill, given that he never does this intentionally.

That’s talent. Unmarketable, but a talent.,

What Does Technology Want? - Transcript We may need to adapt to the idea that our technology could someday truly have a mind of its own.

The Radiolab episode on the Adjacent Possible is brilliant.

tl;dr: our big breakthroughs are things that have been looming for a while. We name them after the person who crosses the finish line (maybe 2nd or 5th, there’s politics here), but specific those ppl are NOT essential. Someone will do it.

I used to think it was amazing that both Newton and Leibniz discovered calculus at the same time.

What are the chances?!

Well, basically 100%. That’s where math was at the time. If Newton and Leibniz somehow had spontaneously combusted, we’d be learning Jonesian Calc, discovered at the same time.

For the record, that never would have happened, bc for my dad music stopped being good about 1736. Even the Romantics were bit much for him.

But the math holds.