wonkie, what do you miss about the old cameras? When I bought my micro 4/3 camera before the Iceland trip, I played around with lens adapters and older lenses from the '70s. Throw the settings on manual and you barely notice that it's a modern digital camera. Doubly so when I pull up the photos in DXO photo lab and use their film stock modeling to give the pics the same light contours as a classic Fujifilm stock.
Send 'em off to an online photo processor for printing and you would barely notice the difference. The feel and the look are there.
Meanwhile, I've been converting my older mountain bike into a gravel oriented bike for when it rains and the roads are closed. I put lighter tires and some new TPU tubes on the bike and took 1.5 pounds of rotating weight and sticky rubber drag out of the equation. It's feeling fast and light. Just waiting on handlebar tape to put the new alt handlebars on to get a more drop bar like position on the ride.
russell - But the whole country is complicit in that history, and I think the whole country participates in a refusal to come to terms with it in an honest way.
Look at how the majority of the most geographically racially segregated cities in the US are Northern - Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis,...
wj - (Especially those who didn’t see it coming, and so failedto plant something else this year. Too late now to do anything but plow the crop under as fertalizer for next year.)
Right about now those farmers are also starting to realize that there is no way to plan for what to plant next year, because there is no telling what The Ancient Orange One is going to decide to add to the tariff pile as his next tantrum negotiating tactic.
You can't plan a year out when the yahoo in charge keeps blowing stuff up to keep his enemies - the farmers' customers - off-balance.
They could plow it all under and try to grow carbon, but TAOO has blown up climate subsidies as well.
We're talking about the difference between herding cats and making anxious dogs bark.
The Dems, unlike the GOP, have to bring in the dogs without upsetting the cats and making them scatter. It's a harder set of victory conditions.
First, though, they have to start talking to people in rural areas, listening to their need, and finding language that connects with those people showing that they are both hearing what was said, and responding with an approach that doesn't throw any of their urban constituencies under the bus. The Dems need to find common ground for a broad, grassroots solution.
So yeah, send the consultants to Mars and put Walz in charge of listening.
And in other news - I found this Bluesky thread (via BJ) that explains how the Marines managed to hit a CHP motorcycle with shrapnel while the CHP closed down I-5 to let Pete Dog and Couchy posture and pretend to be manly warrior men:
Animism is also at the heart of circumpolar shamanism. As a Dark Green Religion, biocentric type, I lean that direction, at least as a narrative for living ethically in the world. It's the story I allow myself to live by whenever and wherever physics starts to slide towards metaphysics.
I think it's healthy to treat everything as a fellow creature wherever possible. It maximizes empathy and guards against hubris.
Similar to Mike's Math Tape, I wrote most of my dissertation while playing a mix of albums from A Beautiful Machine, which was all washed out, ambient, shoegaze-y sounding post-rock. It was noisy enough to drown out distractions, flowy enough to not get monotonous, and indistinct enough that the lyrics wouldn't interfere with whatever complex thought it was I was trying to work out in words.
https://abeautifulmachine.bandcamp.com/album/home
It was my most played music for three years and for 247 pages worth of obsession, stress, and isolation.
russell - As an aside, this has always been one of my issues with antifa and similar. The folks they want to fight would like nothing better than an opportunity to get into it with them. It’s kind of what they live for.
I think it's important to see this in context. There's more than one sort of antifa group and more than one way in which they get involved in violence. (There's also non-violent antifa groups, but no one really talks about them in these discussions.) The ones that most get talked about in the media, social and otherwise, are the black bloc types who are the (much less prevalent) equivalent of the right wing action clubs. They are looking for action and want to provoke, and are ready and willing to engage in violence if that seems to be the order of the day.
There's also, though, the antifa types who see themselves as mutual aid groups, who are there to offer medical support and protection to other groups they are in solidarity with. They are not wanting to provoke, and they are willing and ready to go into a violent situation and respond with as much force as necessary to protect the people who have been caught in the violence being brought against them by the aforementioned action clubs and counter protesters, and occasionally from law enforcement when situations start to escalate. They are functioning as shields between the oppositional violence and the peaceful, marginalized folks who are there to protest that use of organized force.
It's really hard to tell the difference between these two groups in typical edited video that has been cut down to the spectacle and stripped of the context. And jerkfaces like Andy Ngo make a living off of providing a stream of videos that work to paint all such encounters as being the first type, when a lot of what is being shown are people of the second type working to defend against the violence brought to them by the action club Ngo is working with.
In the absence of the second type, though, a lot of marginalized people would be on the receiving end of the violence with no one there to aid them, and no guarantee of police protection, since the police are busy protecting property.
The repetitiveness of reggaeton is a feature, rather than a bug, for most fans of the genre. It's meant for dancing to in a hot, sweaty club, or blasting in the car, or for (as my students tell me) "vibing" to as they chill or do other things. Breaks in pattern and variations distract from the vibe and demand attention.
A lot of modern popular music is meant to be a background soundtrack for the listeners' noisy lives. It takes a couple weeks for my students to learn how to actively listen and to match speeds with music that is trying to be more than just a simple expression of a single thought or feeling, strung together in a playlist full of similar songs.
If I were to formulate a hunch about "Yonaguni," I'd say that there are a few different synergies at work there. Given El Conejo Malo's gender fluidity, we might consider how Yonaguni, as a feminine coded island holding of Japan might stand in for a similar dynamic between Puerto Rico and the US.
Of course it also lets him cross over into the Kpop and Jpop audiences while stepping around the US (and, as you note, English language lyrics). Between reggaeton and the Asian pop scenes one could really capture an international audience and maintain a US presence all without ever having to make a single move to acknowledge the US mainstream.
From NPR: https://www.npr.org/2025/10/10/nx-s1-5565146/white-house-claims-more-than-1-000-rise-in-assaults-on-ice-agents-data-says-otherwise
While the number of assaults on ICE agents have increased, there is no public evidence that they have spiked as dramatically as the federal government has claimed.
An analysis of court records shows about a 25% rise in charges for assault against federal officers through mid-September, compared with the same period a year ago.
I'll also note, for everyone's edification, that the much more modest increase is for charges of assault. I take every one of these charges with a grain of salt. I have colleagues who were involved in peaceful protests who had been charged with resisting arrest just because they tried to keep themselves from falling as several officers attempted to wrestle them to the ground. The officers involved were all using more force than required in an attempt to intimidate. It was ugly, and disproportionate and it was being directed at people who were pointedly non-violent. Some of the protesters were charged with assault because officers were struck by elbows a two or three of them bore down on single protesters. Was it the middle aged black woman's elbow or was it the elbow of one of the other officers? Doesn't matter. If there is a bruise, the person involved is getting a charge filed. A felony charge can be used as leverage to get a plea deal that the DA can use later on to bolster their "tough on crime" pose come election time.
And that's with local agencies who are relatively restrained compared to the ICE bullshit.
Also, while it's not doxxing proper, several of those colleagues have had their names and photos posted online and featured on mobile billboards that have been driven around the campus by right wing activist groups. They hardly have to post a faculty member's home address when the classes they teach and the location of those classes are available to any student enrolled at the university. The university says that all they can do is offer already-available mental health counseling and make the involved faculties' campus profiles available only to the university community at large. The university is afraid that anything more will be seen as an attack on the RW activists freedom of speech and attract more nuisance actors to the campus, creating more danger and a lot of bad PR when the RW media jumps on board.
On the flip side, I've had a former colleague outed by name in a major news outlet for being a pseudonymous alt-right influencer. As far as I can tell that has just boosted his views and gotten him invited to speak at the big conservative activist conventions.
There again - editing your already posted comment may end up getting that comment marked as potential spam, so we may have extra motivation not to abuse the edits.
If I'd known russell were responding on the doxxing thing and covering the same points I was making, I'd have saved the typing and the risk of further piling on bc.
Also, I just noticed that we can now edit our comments after posting them. Let us try our best to use these powers only for good.
Tony P. - I’d like to know more about this “doxing”. I do not trust Kristi Noem’s statements about it any more than I trust her DHS 70% statistic. Let’s hear about a few actual cases.
Not meaning to come in here and force bc to engage and defend this while outnumbered. I do think it is important to note, though, that this particular scenario does not start with people on the left being upset that the Trump administration is enforcing the immigration laws and respond by doxxing ICE agents wholesale.
It starts with ICE being given arbitrary quotas and being sent out to grab people based on language and ethnicity, and detaining and deporting people without due process.
And even with that, the few people who have actually been doxxed (as opposed to those who are afraid of being doxxed - not for enforcing the law, but for being violent while pursuing these reprehensible tactics) only ended up getting doxxed because they were the ones caught being especially, shockingly violent on video while engaging in these reprehensible tactics.
Should the public's response here be to say that all ICE agents should be allowed to wear masks so they need not fear being identified, or should it be to say that ICE needs to stop these show raids and use their enforcement power only to go after the actual criminals in a way that does not violate their right to due process? And if we protest it should be both, which of the sides of that choice should be the one we give priority to?
Pro Bono - What we are doing to the planet really matters. What the US is doing matters a lot, because why should poorer countries restrain themselves if the US won’t.
There is that, and also the data suggests that the top 1% of the world are responsible for 2/3 of the warming measured since 1990, and we have over 900 billionaires in our country. China is next closest with 516, and only 3 other nation states have more than 100.
But then here is another shocker - to be in the top 1% worldwide, you need only to make $60,000 a year*, so I'd guess that most of us writing here are in that 1%.
*If we are talking income rather than wealth. Wealth is probably a better measure, but it's also a harder measure to come by.
wonkie - Maybe the Republican party wouldn’t have degenerated into the corrupt, fascist, anti-Constitutional front for religious extremists and oligarchs that it is today if the rest of us had spent the last twenty-five years LOUDLY DENOUNCING THEIR FASCIST PROPAGANDA instead of trying to be “reasonable” while politely engaging in discussion of issues.
...or if the "concerned republicans" had actually been critical of the alt-right and had chosen to ally with the centrist democrats rather than choosing to conciliate their radicals and blame the "radical liberals."
There's a whole lot of quiet complicity enabling this lawless administration, and all of this hindsight is blame shifting.
This is, in many ways, the dynamic that defines reactionary centrism: the right must be understood, but never blamed. The left can be blamed, but need not be understood. One thing that follows from this is a hyper-sensitivity about treating the right fairly. John Rentoul, for instance, the chief political commentator for the Independent, is no cheerleader for Reform UK. Yet his theory of how to defeat the party often involves scoldingthe left for directly stating the nature of the threat: “Oh dear, m’lud: It’s never a good idea to call people Nazis if they are not Nazis” (that might sound like a mean-spirited parody of a British establishment type, but it’s actually the title of one of his columns).
This being just a taste, not the sum total of what I think is apropos. Again, worth a read.
It seems weird to me to be discussing whether or not Omelas was in better shape under Biden or under Trump when the part of the story that is being ignored in order to make this response is that Trump has decided that too few children have been tortured in order to make Omelas great, and that Biden was a pussy for having not had the courage to grab more kids to torture in order to launch Omelas into high gear towards greatness.
Oh, and everyone else in the world sucks compared to Omelas and needs to jump on the kid torturing regime ASAP or else their countries are going to sink just like Omelas under Biden.
wj - As so often, we wonder just what definition of “elite” is being used here.
He covers that earlier: The real answer is that the most powerful liberal institutions – the Democratic establishment, major donors and the professional class around them – are captive to outdated etiquette.
It'sthe DNC and those with input into the strategy side.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Something Different”
wonkie, what do you miss about the old cameras? When I bought my micro 4/3 camera before the Iceland trip, I played around with lens adapters and older lenses from the '70s. Throw the settings on manual and you barely notice that it's a modern digital camera. Doubly so when I pull up the photos in DXO photo lab and use their film stock modeling to give the pics the same light contours as a classic Fujifilm stock.
Send 'em off to an online photo processor for printing and you would barely notice the difference. The feel and the look are there.
Meanwhile, I've been converting my older mountain bike into a gravel oriented bike for when it rains and the roads are closed. I put lighter tires and some new TPU tubes on the bike and took 1.5 pounds of rotating weight and sticky rubber drag out of the equation. It's feeling fast and light. Just waiting on handlebar tape to put the new alt handlebars on to get a more drop bar like position on the ride.
Fun times.
On “Bal des Ardents”
The problem with monarchy according to Lewis Carroll:
"Off with their heads, said the Queen."
The problem with democracy according to Walt Kelly:
"Yep son, we have met the enemy and he is us."
On “The South shall writhe again”
russell - But the whole country is complicit in that history, and I think the whole country participates in a refusal to come to terms with it in an honest way.
Look at how the majority of the most geographically racially segregated cities in the US are Northern - Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis,...
On “There have to be clowns”
They all float down here.
On “The South shall writhe again”
wj - (Especially those who didn’t see it coming, and so failedto plant something else this year. Too late now to do anything but plow the crop under as fertalizer for next year.)
Right about now those farmers are also starting to realize that there is no way to plan for what to plant next year, because there is no telling what The Ancient Orange One is going to decide to add to the tariff pile as his next
tantrumnegotiating tactic.You can't plan a year out when the yahoo in charge keeps blowing stuff up to keep his enemies - the farmers' customers - off-balance.
They could plow it all under and try to grow carbon, but TAOO has blown up climate subsidies as well.
Screwed.
On “Politics thread”
We're talking about the difference between herding cats and making anxious dogs bark.
The Dems, unlike the GOP, have to bring in the dogs without upsetting the cats and making them scatter. It's a harder set of victory conditions.
First, though, they have to start talking to people in rural areas, listening to their need, and finding language that connects with those people showing that they are both hearing what was said, and responding with an approach that doesn't throw any of their urban constituencies under the bus. The Dems need to find common ground for a broad, grassroots solution.
So yeah, send the consultants to Mars and put Walz in charge of listening.
And in other news - I found this Bluesky thread (via BJ) that explains how the Marines managed to hit a CHP motorcycle with shrapnel while the CHP closed down I-5 to let Pete Dog and Couchy posture and pretend to be manly warrior men:
https://bsky.app/profile/bafriedman.bsky.social/post/3m3lh3t342c2z
I'm sure some poor grunt is hating life right now, but whoever in the brass okayed this pointless bit of spectacle is the one who should be shunned.
Not that any of that is going to rouse the Ancient Orange One from his eldritch slumber.
MAGA - Make Abominable Gods Awaken.
On “The South shall writhe again”
Dukes of Hazard. Lynyrd Skynyrd. The latter especially after Ronnie died and Johnny replaced him.
Those two things did more to mainstream the Confederate battle flag as good ol’ boy freedom than anything else.
"
Gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/11/opinion/columnists/tennessee-house-nashville-shooting.html?unlocked_article_code=1.uk8.b5T9.3bVhxDrcFsH7&smid=url-share
On “The Return of the Boat Hook”
Animism is also at the heart of circumpolar shamanism. As a Dark Green Religion, biocentric type, I lean that direction, at least as a narrative for living ethically in the world. It's the story I allow myself to live by whenever and wherever physics starts to slide towards metaphysics.
I think it's healthy to treat everything as a fellow creature wherever possible. It maximizes empathy and guards against hubris.
On “Weekend music thread #02 Bad Bunny”
Similar to Mike's Math Tape, I wrote most of my dissertation while playing a mix of albums from A Beautiful Machine, which was all washed out, ambient, shoegaze-y sounding post-rock. It was noisy enough to drown out distractions, flowy enough to not get monotonous, and indistinct enough that the lyrics wouldn't interfere with whatever complex thought it was I was trying to work out in words.
https://abeautifulmachine.bandcamp.com/album/home
It was my most played music for three years and for 247 pages worth of obsession, stress, and isolation.
On “What’s up, doxx?”
russell - As an aside, this has always been one of my issues with antifa and similar. The folks they want to fight would like nothing better than an opportunity to get into it with them. It’s kind of what they live for.
I think it's important to see this in context. There's more than one sort of antifa group and more than one way in which they get involved in violence. (There's also non-violent antifa groups, but no one really talks about them in these discussions.) The ones that most get talked about in the media, social and otherwise, are the black bloc types who are the (much less prevalent) equivalent of the right wing action clubs. They are looking for action and want to provoke, and are ready and willing to engage in violence if that seems to be the order of the day.
There's also, though, the antifa types who see themselves as mutual aid groups, who are there to offer medical support and protection to other groups they are in solidarity with. They are not wanting to provoke, and they are willing and ready to go into a violent situation and respond with as much force as necessary to protect the people who have been caught in the violence being brought against them by the aforementioned action clubs and counter protesters, and occasionally from law enforcement when situations start to escalate. They are functioning as shields between the oppositional violence and the peaceful, marginalized folks who are there to protest that use of organized force.
It's really hard to tell the difference between these two groups in typical edited video that has been cut down to the spectacle and stripped of the context. And jerkfaces like Andy Ngo make a living off of providing a stream of videos that work to paint all such encounters as being the first type, when a lot of what is being shown are people of the second type working to defend against the violence brought to them by the action club Ngo is working with.
In the absence of the second type, though, a lot of marginalized people would be on the receiving end of the violence with no one there to aid them, and no guarantee of police protection, since the police are busy protecting property.
On “Weekend music thread #02 Bad Bunny”
The repetitiveness of reggaeton is a feature, rather than a bug, for most fans of the genre. It's meant for dancing to in a hot, sweaty club, or blasting in the car, or for (as my students tell me) "vibing" to as they chill or do other things. Breaks in pattern and variations distract from the vibe and demand attention.
A lot of modern popular music is meant to be a background soundtrack for the listeners' noisy lives. It takes a couple weeks for my students to learn how to actively listen and to match speeds with music that is trying to be more than just a simple expression of a single thought or feeling, strung together in a playlist full of similar songs.
This life brought to you by The Algorithm.
"
If I were to formulate a hunch about "Yonaguni," I'd say that there are a few different synergies at work there. Given El Conejo Malo's gender fluidity, we might consider how Yonaguni, as a feminine coded island holding of Japan might stand in for a similar dynamic between Puerto Rico and the US.
Of course it also lets him cross over into the Kpop and Jpop audiences while stepping around the US (and, as you note, English language lyrics). Between reggaeton and the Asian pop scenes one could really capture an international audience and maintain a US presence all without ever having to make a single move to acknowledge the US mainstream.
On “What’s up, doxx?”
...and to get ahead of any posts about quick concrete in protesters' milkshakes:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/07/how-a-dubious-claim-of-cement-milkshakes-in-portland-became-a-right-wing-meme/
There have to be plenty of officers who believe that meme, though, and will act accordingly.
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
russell - Clean your damned house. You have rats in the walls.
A fitting metaphor. The GOP, like Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls," have a lot of racism and xenophobia on display.
On “What’s up, doxx?”
From NPR: https://www.npr.org/2025/10/10/nx-s1-5565146/white-house-claims-more-than-1-000-rise-in-assaults-on-ice-agents-data-says-otherwise
I'll also note, for everyone's edification, that the much more modest increase is for charges of assault. I take every one of these charges with a grain of salt. I have colleagues who were involved in peaceful protests who had been charged with resisting arrest just because they tried to keep themselves from falling as several officers attempted to wrestle them to the ground. The officers involved were all using more force than required in an attempt to intimidate. It was ugly, and disproportionate and it was being directed at people who were pointedly non-violent. Some of the protesters were charged with assault because officers were struck by elbows a two or three of them bore down on single protesters. Was it the middle aged black woman's elbow or was it the elbow of one of the other officers? Doesn't matter. If there is a bruise, the person involved is getting a charge filed. A felony charge can be used as leverage to get a plea deal that the DA can use later on to bolster their "tough on crime" pose come election time.
And that's with local agencies who are relatively restrained compared to the ICE bullshit.
Also, while it's not doxxing proper, several of those colleagues have had their names and photos posted online and featured on mobile billboards that have been driven around the campus by right wing activist groups. They hardly have to post a faculty member's home address when the classes they teach and the location of those classes are available to any student enrolled at the university. The university says that all they can do is offer already-available mental health counseling and make the involved faculties' campus profiles available only to the university community at large. The university is afraid that anything more will be seen as an attack on the RW activists freedom of speech and attract more nuisance actors to the campus, creating more danger and a lot of bad PR when the RW media jumps on board.
On the flip side, I've had a former colleague outed by name in a major news outlet for being a pseudonymous alt-right influencer. As far as I can tell that has just boosted his views and gotten him invited to speak at the big conservative activist conventions.
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
So it's okay to violate constitutional rights and due process so long as ICE can trot out a few actual criminals afterwards.
Gotta burn the constitution in order to save it?
I mean, that was Lincoln's justification.
Does this rise to the level of slavery in terms of being a threat to the nation?
I don't buy it, but it does seem to be selling well in conservative circles.
"
There again - editing your already posted comment may end up getting that comment marked as potential spam, so we may have extra motivation not to abuse the edits.
"
If I'd known russell were responding on the doxxing thing and covering the same points I was making, I'd have saved the typing and the risk of further piling on bc.
Also, I just noticed that we can now edit our comments after posting them. Let us try our best to use these powers only for good.
"
Tony P. - I’d like to know more about this “doxing”. I do not trust Kristi Noem’s statements about it any more than I trust her DHS 70% statistic. Let’s hear about a few actual cases.
Not meaning to come in here and force bc to engage and defend this while outnumbered. I do think it is important to note, though, that this particular scenario does not start with people on the left being upset that the Trump administration is enforcing the immigration laws and respond by doxxing ICE agents wholesale.
It starts with ICE being given arbitrary quotas and being sent out to grab people based on language and ethnicity, and detaining and deporting people without due process.
And even with that, the few people who have actually been doxxed (as opposed to those who are afraid of being doxxed - not for enforcing the law, but for being violent while pursuing these reprehensible tactics) only ended up getting doxxed because they were the ones caught being especially, shockingly violent on video while engaging in these reprehensible tactics.
Should the public's response here be to say that all ICE agents should be allowed to wear masks so they need not fear being identified, or should it be to say that ICE needs to stop these show raids and use their enforcement power only to go after the actual criminals in a way that does not violate their right to due process? And if we protest it should be both, which of the sides of that choice should be the one we give priority to?
On “The Mother-in-law defense”
Pro Bono - What we are doing to the planet really matters. What the US is doing matters a lot, because why should poorer countries restrain themselves if the US won’t.
There is that, and also the data suggests that the top 1% of the world are responsible for 2/3 of the warming measured since 1990, and we have over 900 billionaires in our country. China is next closest with 516, and only 3 other nation states have more than 100.
But then here is another shocker - to be in the top 1% worldwide, you need only to make $60,000 a year*, so I'd guess that most of us writing here are in that 1%.
*If we are talking income rather than wealth. Wealth is probably a better measure, but it's also a harder measure to come by.
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
wonkie - Maybe the Republican party wouldn’t have degenerated into the corrupt, fascist, anti-Constitutional front for religious extremists and oligarchs that it is today if the rest of us had spent the last twenty-five years LOUDLY DENOUNCING THEIR FASCIST PROPAGANDA instead of trying to be “reasonable” while politely engaging in discussion of issues.
...or if the "concerned republicans" had actually been critical of the alt-right and had chosen to ally with the centrist democrats rather than choosing to conciliate their radicals and blame the "radical liberals."
There's a whole lot of quiet complicity enabling this lawless administration, and all of this hindsight is blame shifting.
"
May be apropos to the current discussion:
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/70966/what-is-a-reactionary-centrist-does-uk-have-them
This being just a taste, not the sum total of what I think is apropos. Again, worth a read.
"
It seems weird to me to be discussing whether or not Omelas was in better shape under Biden or under Trump when the part of the story that is being ignored in order to make this response is that Trump has decided that too few children have been tortured in order to make Omelas great, and that Biden was a pussy for having not had the courage to grab more kids to torture in order to launch Omelas into high gear towards greatness.
Oh, and everyone else in the world sucks compared to Omelas and needs to jump on the kid torturing regime ASAP or else their countries are going to sink just like Omelas under Biden.
On “The Mother-in-law defense”
wj - As so often, we wonder just what definition of “elite” is being used here.
He covers that earlier: The real answer is that the most powerful liberal institutions – the Democratic establishment, major donors and the professional class around them – are captive to outdated etiquette.
It's the DNC and those with input into the strategy side.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.