also... you might not need '!important' on ObWi's WP theme.
simply adding the style:
a:visited {color:red;}
in the Firefox debugger was enough to change the visited link colors here.
it wasn't enough on my WP site; but we're using different WP themes and so i probably have something in my CSS taking priority. i needed !important to make it work.
Like a lot of phrases drawn from internet discourse, the precise definition of “heritage America” can get a bit fuzzy around the edges, and its exact meaning remains the subject of some debate. But in its most basic sense, the phrase refers to present-day Americans who trace their ancestral roots to the colonial period, or shortly thereafter. Depending on whom you ask, the category also includes the offspring of Indigenous Americans and the ADOS, or “American descendants of slavery.” But at its most fundamental, said Engel, “heritage American” refers to the offspring of the Anglo-Protestant and Scotch-Irish settlers — in other words, the white people — who populated the original colonies before heading west to settle the American frontier.
...
“If the media needs a history lesson on the brave men and women who blazed the trails and forged this Republic from the sweat of their brow, we are happy to send them a history textbook,” said DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin in a written response to a question about the posts. “This administration is unapologetically proud of American history and American heritage.”
When Engel saw the first post from DHS, he was blown away. “It’s kind of jarring to see a department of the federal government recognizing and asserting the goodness of heritage America,” he recalled. But after his initial sense of surprise wore off, it was quicky replaced by amazement. “We’re all partaking in the same process, from Vance down to Twitter people,” he said. “It’s delightful.”
that this sounds like every other fascist movement that has ever popped up is purely coincidental.
During a hearing in federal court in VA, prosecutors confirmed that the operative indictment in the case against James Comey was never shown to or voted on by the entire grand jury before it was presented in open court.
Defense counsel argued that’s a complete bar to further prosecution
the software industry as a whole is all-in on AI (LLMs in particular).
makers are trying to stuff it into every nook and cranny they can find. from Adobe using it so Photoshop can produce image content for you on demand (instead of you needing to use stock photos), to phones using it to automatically manipulate your photos in real-time, to audio apps using it to handle routine things like sound mastering all the way to vocal generation, to programming environments using it to analyze and correct your code for you, to apps like the one i work on using it to take over 'help' and data search/analysis features ("how many tables in this library use address data?"). if there's a place a company thinks people will want to type their desires in natural language, they're trying to use AI to make it happen.
YouTube recently rolled out a feature where, if you are already a content producer, it will look at your channel and try to figure out what kind of content you make. then it will suggest a list of related topics for you to produce new videos on. if you pick one, it will give you a list of 'hooks' to use to make the video sizzle. it will give you detailed outlines for a script. and it has AI-generated thumbnails ready to choose from. and at every stage, you can use AI prompting to fine-tune the suggestions. it's literally doing everything but speaking. and i don't see any reason why they haven't automated that part, too.
so, the big players are definitely over-inflated. but the whole industry is using their products now.
There are others who opposed him, not because they necessarily disliked his platform, but because they believed that character matters in elected officials and found his objectionable.
it's 9 years old now, but it's still remarkable:
In 2011, 30 percent of white evangelicals said that "an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life." Now, 72 percent say so — a far bigger swing than other religious groups the poll studied.
It's just one poll, but it does suggest a sizable shift in how Americans of several religious stripes think about the connection between morality and politics. White evangelicals also are less likely than they used to be to say that "strong religious beliefs" are "very important" in a presidential candidate. That share fell from 64 percent in 2011 to 49 percent this year.
White mainline Protestants and Catholics also grew more accepting of a candidate who has committed "immoral acts," while religiously unaffiliated people barely changed. Those "unaffiliated" people in 2011 had been much more willing than the broader population to believe candidates who had committed "immoral acts" could do their jobs. Now, they are in line with Americans as a whole.
in the archive.org copy of this article (linked), there's a nice graph that illustrates what happened more clearly than text can (NPR's current version has lost the graph image).
sometime between Obama and Trump, huge numbers of people in the religious groups surveyed changed their minds about how much personal morality mattered for Presidents.
which, IMO, is all you need to know about how highly those religious groups people actually valued that particular morality.
if one can abandon a principle that quickly, there's a good chance that principle was never very strongly-held.
i'm working on a program to automate the application of large collection of image effects i've written over the years (mostly back when i had a software business). i've called the program "Director", as in "movie director" and it's based around the metaphor of shooting a movie.
there's a Script (JSON) which describes the Cast (a list of Actors (an effect) and the name of their roles (nickname, for easier typing)), and some production info (where to get source images, etc). then, there's a list of Scenes. a Scene is a list of Actors and the Actions they take (turn on/off, change a parameter, etc.) at a given frame in the video.
run it and it reads source frames, applies effects, displays them and saves them.
the Script is just text, so it's not very sexy. but, it does work. the application as a whole is very close to being elegant, internally, which pleases me greatly.
>I live in north central Texas, and I never see anything like that.
i'm in central NC and i seen it now and then.
there was a big anti-Trump rally in town before the last election and all the local rednecks got their trucks fitted with their Trump & confederate flags and rolled coal up and down the street in front of the anti-Trump folks.
on one of the two main roads into town, there's an ancient and crumbling cinder-block garage with a huge confederate flag flying on a giant metal pole next to it. the person who owns the property (whose last name is "White" and who lives on "White's Way") had a billboard on the property for years, and it showed normal advertisements though an ad agency.
but one day. a local BLM group rented the sign space and put up a "Black Lives Matter" billboard. that sign lasted a few days. but then, Mr White cancelled his contract with the ad agency, and tore down the billboard. then he put a bunch of hand-painted racist signs on top of the garage, and put a fence around his flagpole.
occasionally, he also holds little rallies in front of the garage - all his dim-witted racist buddy line up and wave confederate flags and shout at passing cars.
it's directly across the street from a "Christian" retirement community. they don't seem to mind.
every single time i drive by, day or night, rain or shine, i roll down my window and give that flag the one finger salute. one day, that angered some jackhole in a truck in back of me, and he got on my tail and honked and ranted and raved at me until i got near the police station.
by this point, no decent person would sign up to be anywhere near Trump. working for him means you run the risk of destroying your career by either having to lie for him or by getting a face full of MAGA hatred by refusing to lie for him.
that leaves utter idiots and cynical grifters who think they can ride the Fox/MAGA gravy train for the rest of their careers.
You would think that charisma would be an obvious criterion for success in contemporary electoral politics, but somewhat oddly, that’s less often the case than it would appear.
IMO, this is it.
Trump is exceptionally charismatic. his message curdles my soul, so i can't even stand to watch the guy on SNL imitate him. but he speaks and acts in a way that, if you are at all open to his message, you will find him charming.
it's why he can flout political norms and why his shamelessness works. people are willing to ignore his fuckups because they like him and think he's on their side.
2020 Biden was charismatic, in his way. but that Biden wasn't available in 2024.
Harris is not charismatic, but Walz is. and it's a shame they shut down his best attack: "weird". they should have made that the entire campaign, IMO. it's silly and fun, it's 100% accurate, it doesn't need a chart to explain, and it was a powerful counter to Trump's charisma. alas.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Site Experiment”
oooh, nice. well done, Michael.
On “Open Thread”
also... you might not need '!important' on ObWi's WP theme.
simply adding the style:
a:visited {color:red;}
in the Firefox debugger was enough to change the visited link colors here.
it wasn't enough on my WP site; but we're using different WP themes and so i probably have something in my CSS taking priority. i needed !important to make it work.
"
the CSS it recommends uses both pseudo elements and the !important modifier.
it recommends altering the 'visited' pseudo-class (one colon, not two as with a pseudo-element)
a:visited {color: purple !important; text-decoration: underline !important;}I oppose both of those on general principle because they exist outside the JavaScript document model so cannot be modified by the user.
"make it easy for the user to modify the DOM" is a requirement that no front-end developer will ever encounter.
"
it's pretty simple to add color to visited links in wordpress:
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/altering-link-appearance-throughout-the-site/
On “Am I missing something?”
but the Roman anona was only for the deserving poor and their number was limited by law (and excluded migrants).
just like the US.
"
no state and no welfare?
what is the whole "Render unto Caesar" thing about, if not about paying taxes to the state?
and no welfare? they had a whole goddess dedicated to the distribution of grain and they named their welfare system after her.
On “uncomfortability?”
assuming it comes from "comfortability" (which has only been a thing for a couple of years)?
On “The surprising philosophy behind Palantir”
"Heritage Americans".. blech.
linked from nous' Guardian article, but worth calling out here:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/07/31/heritage-american-jd-vance-online-right-phrase-00481724
that this sounds like every other fascist movement that has ever popped up is purely coincidental.
On “Pop!”
but at the rate those data centers will swallow up water and warm the planet
doubling compute capacity every 6 months is a hell of a rate.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/google-tells-employees-it-must-double-capacity-every-6-months-to-meet-ai-demand/
On “An openish thread featuring the comedy stylings of Steve Witkoff”
firefox is very insistent that i not visit https://mcain6925.com/ordinary/demo1.avif
On “Your quest begins now!”
I wonder if there’s such a thing as MAGA fatigue
doesn't look like it: https://ustvdb.com/networks/fox-news/
the faithful remain observant
On “Pop!”
we need a mega-sized-CHIPS Act, not a Trump-branded one.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/what-is-the-chips-act-why-does-trump-want-to-change-it/ar-AA1C7yH1
On “Your quest begins now!”
speaking of reckless prosecution:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:t4x2ruk2qmob2b2cx55h4v7r/post/3m5yoqty6k22w
DOJ straight up lied to the court about what the GJ said
On “Pop!”
the software industry as a whole is all-in on AI (LLMs in particular).
makers are trying to stuff it into every nook and cranny they can find. from Adobe using it so Photoshop can produce image content for you on demand (instead of you needing to use stock photos), to phones using it to automatically manipulate your photos in real-time, to audio apps using it to handle routine things like sound mastering all the way to vocal generation, to programming environments using it to analyze and correct your code for you, to apps like the one i work on using it to take over 'help' and data search/analysis features ("how many tables in this library use address data?"). if there's a place a company thinks people will want to type their desires in natural language, they're trying to use AI to make it happen.
YouTube recently rolled out a feature where, if you are already a content producer, it will look at your channel and try to figure out what kind of content you make. then it will suggest a list of related topics for you to produce new videos on. if you pick one, it will give you a list of 'hooks' to use to make the video sizzle. it will give you detailed outlines for a script. and it has AI-generated thumbnails ready to choose from. and at every stage, you can use AI prompting to fine-tune the suggestions. it's literally doing everything but speaking. and i don't see any reason why they haven't automated that part, too.
so, the big players are definitely over-inflated. but the whole industry is using their products now.
On “Stewart Lee”
i dig it.
he's very clever.
On “Your quest begins now!”
every PDF i open is some kind of encyclopedic article with short bios of rich and powerful people.
On “Spelunking for fun and profit”
Warren is currently 76.
i thought we were trying to get new blood into leadership?
On “People and poliltics”
There are others who opposed him, not because they necessarily disliked his platform, but because they believed that character matters in elected officials and found his objectionable.
it's 9 years old now, but it's still remarkable:
in the archive.org copy of this article (linked), there's a nice graph that illustrates what happened more clearly than text can (NPR's current version has lost the graph image).
sometime between Obama and Trump, huge numbers of people in the religious groups surveyed changed their minds about how much personal morality mattered for Presidents.
which, IMO, is all you need to know about how highly those religious groups people actually valued that particular morality.
if one can abandon a principle that quickly, there's a good chance that principle was never very strongly-held.
On “I got depressed so I bought hydrangeas”
last few weeks i've learned that i cope by a combination of going numb and keeping busy as a distraction.
doing? utterly awful.
someday i'll share why.
On “Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave”
fantastic stuff, russell. thanks!
On “Something Different”
there's an amazing animated movie about the Book Of Kells.very cool.
"
i'm working on a program to automate the application of large collection of image effects i've written over the years (mostly back when i had a software business). i've called the program "Director", as in "movie director" and it's based around the metaphor of shooting a movie.
there's a Script (JSON) which describes the Cast (a list of Actors (an effect) and the name of their roles (nickname, for easier typing)), and some production info (where to get source images, etc). then, there's a list of Scenes. a Scene is a list of Actors and the Actions they take (turn on/off, change a parameter, etc.) at a given frame in the video.
run it and it reads source frames, applies effects, displays them and saves them.
the Script is just text, so it's not very sexy. but, it does work. the application as a whole is very close to being elegant, internally, which pleases me greatly.
i plan to use it to create videos for songs.
now i just need to write some songs.
On “The South shall writhe again”
>I live in north central Texas, and I never see anything like that.
i'm in central NC and i seen it now and then.
there was a big anti-Trump rally in town before the last election and all the local rednecks got their trucks fitted with their Trump & confederate flags and rolled coal up and down the street in front of the anti-Trump folks.
on one of the two main roads into town, there's an ancient and crumbling cinder-block garage with a huge confederate flag flying on a giant metal pole next to it. the person who owns the property (whose last name is "White" and who lives on "White's Way") had a billboard on the property for years, and it showed normal advertisements though an ad agency.
but one day. a local BLM group rented the sign space and put up a "Black Lives Matter" billboard. that sign lasted a few days. but then, Mr White cancelled his contract with the ad agency, and tore down the billboard. then he put a bunch of hand-painted racist signs on top of the garage, and put a fence around his flagpole.
occasionally, he also holds little rallies in front of the garage - all his dim-witted racist buddy line up and wave confederate flags and shout at passing cars.
it's directly across the street from a "Christian" retirement community. they don't seem to mind.
every single time i drive by, day or night, rain or shine, i roll down my window and give that flag the one finger salute. one day, that angered some jackhole in a truck in back of me, and he got on my tail and honked and ranted and raved at me until i got near the police station.
On “There have to be clowns”
by this point, no decent person would sign up to be anywhere near Trump. working for him means you run the risk of destroying your career by either having to lie for him or by getting a face full of MAGA hatred by refusing to lie for him.
that leaves utter idiots and cynical grifters who think they can ride the Fox/MAGA gravy train for the rest of their careers.
On “Politics thread”
You would think that charisma would be an obvious criterion for success in contemporary electoral politics, but somewhat oddly, that’s less often the case than it would appear.
IMO, this is it.
Trump is exceptionally charismatic. his message curdles my soul, so i can't even stand to watch the guy on SNL imitate him. but he speaks and acts in a way that, if you are at all open to his message, you will find him charming.
it's why he can flout political norms and why his shamelessness works. people are willing to ignore his fuckups because they like him and think he's on their side.
2020 Biden was charismatic, in his way. but that Biden wasn't available in 2024.
Harris is not charismatic, but Walz is. and it's a shame they shut down his best attack: "weird". they should have made that the entire campaign, IMO. it's silly and fun, it's 100% accurate, it doesn't need a chart to explain, and it was a powerful counter to Trump's charisma. alas.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.