Ben Wheeler

"No stupid rules of engagement" means no Geneva Conventions or other international humanitarian laws, which the U.S. signed and supported for more than a century.
Hegseth and Trump are pro-war crimes.

real nail-biter between this administration's propensity to lie through their teeth, their ignorance of absolutely all of history, and their abject, inhuman cruelty

Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News The world is far safer after President Donald J. Trump’s highly successful, decisive precision strikes against the Iranian regime’s key nuclear

this, from June of last year, is still up

My best parenting advice is see to it that your child’s beloved stuffed animal is mass-produced, accessible, and affordable

Michael de Adder, Counterpoint

It's funny to me when people who love to go on about second order effects of economic policies and the challenges of central planning without local knowledge suddenly drop all of that when it comes to foreign policy.

This is monstrous.

It's easy to dismiss something by ignoring all but the worst aspects. But neither of us is doing this because we're interested only I in what's easy!

Which is to say, it's a mixed bag of stuff we definitely want, stuff that's useless, and stuff that we don't want. There are good arguments to make about those balances, and how much of what kind of stuff we don't want is too much. I want the grant application next year to shift that...

E.g., even if I grant your language on the safety enforcement one, that grant was for police overtime and bike/pedestrian safety supplies, to mostly harass and ticket unsafe drivers, and secondarily harass and not ticket cyclists and hand out likely useless safety pamphlets.

You're naming something to be careful of and aware of. And, we have to consider what these grants fully are, in total...

It does create a dependency for the future, agreed. And maybe we didn't look into the full implications of that enough.

The rate of destruction of U.S. science is just senseless. It's willful, still senseless.

...and that any attempts to access it by non-Somerville parties will have to go through formal requests. We already have this system in place for police data.

I do believe (yes, after I and others asked the Police Department and Fire Department lots more questions) that this will be a server physically located in Somerville city government control...

Police parking lots in many places have been getting used, sometimes to the surprise and dismay of the police department, by other parties.

I think we can all think of some groups right now who might casually drop by and use a police parking lot, where we would not want that.

Just jumping in to try to provide a bit of context where it's relevant...

This somewhat bizarrely named item is to finish funding a security gate on the police headquarters parking lot...

This is my (Ben Wheeler's) account, for future reference!

Though maybe I should make a separate one for city council stuff??

It's a special, rare thing when someone writes something called "part 1" but it's so jaw-droppingly incendiary that people deal out and a whirlwind erupts that makes parts 2, 3 etc. unnecessary

cf. Kurt Godel's "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I"

Is there a German word for that moment where you understand the world enough to suddenly call b******t on something you've long been told is fact?

Today's obviously BS thing is that the music in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was so unrecognizably new that it sparked riots

Can such resources exist -- or would they not be as universally applicable as I expect? How would you get me to actually pay that $100?

Right now I'm curious about learning Portuguese. If the right few 10 minute videos and maybe 20 page book existed, so that I could spend the most effective 3 hours possible, I would gladly pay $100, even the content were just static and not custom.

Do these exist, but it's hard to discover them for some reason? Are they not good businesses, because people are so reluctant to pay what they're worth? Is it a problem with when in the product cycle to charge money -- too early and people don't try it, too late and they get the value without paying

Here's what's interesting to me about how awful DuoLingo is: think of all the world's desire for language learning, how much people spend. How is there not a more solid go-to way to jump into learning a new language?

Followed by seven screens of exploding treasure chests and attempts to get me to spam my friends on DuoLingo's behalf

Every 6 months or so I decide to try DuoLingo again, thinking it can't have been THAT bad

And then the app is like "Quiero un _____ con leche" followed by "Me gusta ____ con leche" followed by "Translate: coffee with milk" followed by "Match: café, leche with their translations: milk, coffee"

Clues by Sam A daily logic puzzle where you deduce who is a criminal!

Fiendish!!

I solved the daily #CluesBySam, Feb 15th 2026 (Evil), in less than 22 minutes
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cluesbysam.com

“I’ve never protested before - but I just watched 4th & 5th grade kids run away from our own government.” 😕🇺🇸💔

(From @crindivisible.bsky.social )

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

I hesitate to push back on narratives where people are so animated, but... I'm not sure the overall evidence of trafficking around the world bears up this claim. Epstein was a horrible predator! And, he was only as bad as he actually was, he wasn't all evil in the world rolled into one.