2026-04-20 23:03:59
Is it fair to say that the US treats the ultra-wealthy like royalty?
No. The UK has actual, literal royalty, and even they face more accountability than billionaires do in the US.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/live/2026/feb/19/police-arrest-former-prince-andrew-mountbatten-windsor-sandringham-latest-updates
2 days ago, I had a shelf (and the contents of it, which included literal ROCKS due to a kids' "rock painting kit") fall on me. It left a nice bloody cut right next to my eye, and I haven't repaired the shelf yet because I'm petty enough to hold grudges against inanimate fuckin' objects.
As the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi draws attention, a look at India's AI opportunities and the political economy gridlock that threatens its ambitions (Shruti Rajagopalan/Get Down and Shruti)
https://srajagopalan.substack.com/p/indias-ai-wedding-buffet-generous
Analysing the sample preparation process in meteorites and its impact on the pretreatment of returned samples to Earth: #Meteorites: https://gizmodo.com/scientists-found-literal-ink-from-ballpoint-pens-in-martian-meteorites-2000746996 - this doesn't devalue scientific research thus far, but we might need a more unified approach for cleaning important samples, the study says.
Jackhole is the generic term for products like the FleshlightⓇ @… https://beige.party/@Gorfram/116411009456559466
A quine is a computer program that prints its own source code. Such a program exists in any sufficiently powerful programming language by Roger's fixed point theorem.
A quine cannot contain all of its source code as a string which it then prints. One needs a trick.
One trick is to decompose the program into 3 parts. P, a Preamble, S.quote, a tail-string S of the program quoted in the programming language, and then the literal tail string S.
The program is P S.quote S
1/2
I despise ad-filled barely-functional youtube downloader websites (and we don't talk about the literal malware or paid software).
Learning how to use yt-dlp from the command line has literally changed my life.
_Rhythm_ is a way of trusting the future.
This sounds poetic, but is also quite literal!
To entrain is to assume: something will happen again; it will happen around about when expected; it is safe to commit energy in advance.
It is a minimal form of trust.
Despair is characterised, in part, by a breakdown of such trust. The future becomes either threatening or blank.
Rhythm gently reinstates futurity.
A pulse says: you can lean forward; time will catch you…
America’s war on Iran began with what was meant to be an intimidating performance of overwhelming air power.
Quickly it became another kind of conflict, with low-cost missiles and drones effectively neutralizing a superpower by punishing its allies and paralyzing energy flows.
By the time Trump tried to threaten Iran into reopening the Strait of Hormuz with a 48-hour ultimatum,
it was clear not just that the strait had become America’s singular strategic fixation but that…
"I took the German or Autistic diagnostic. Results: probably autistic. Wittgenstein would have gotten the same result."
Also I'm fucking angry that the test said it would take 2 minutes, when it took me 12!
https://german.millermanschool.com/
Heheheh...
Undertow, which I had never heard in full, although I did know several songs, ends with long minutes of literal crickets. 😂
Our world is run by monsters. Like, literal monsters.
I've seen plenty of films and books where the "monster" might harm or destroy only a handful of humans before being vanquished, and yet, our governments have killed how many?
The people in charge have done damage to our world we cannot reverse.
The real monsters live among us, not in stories or fantasy.
How do we end these monsters?
every once in awhile I stop for a moment and marvel at the state of journalism that we have to spend so much time convincing them to leave platforms run by literal nazis that actively block their content in the first place.
#mastodonMigration
I still am so profoundly frustrated that we have literal concentration camps again, and our politicians ain't doing shit.
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116368936763096134
Tangent, I really prefer the German term “Informatik” over computer science; however it comes with the baggage that it was coined by a literal Nazi war criminal.
Seeing Iran appoint new leaders and continue to fight is seeing the more literal kind of necropolitics in action, as a hierarchical system continues to function while replacing the expendable human parts that it lost. The system is of course changed and influenced (and ultimately was built) by humans, but it has become something undying, or at least almost as hard to kill as an idea, and it maintains a terrible inertia in it's destructive tendencies (e.g., "Morality Police" continue to patrol the streets).
Lest anyone think this somehow expresses approval of US actions, the same logic applies here too: what once had a (thin) verneer of democracy, a system which loudly proclaimed to be controlled by "the people" (but which never was nor was ever intended to be) has lost its paint job, exposing the inhuman machinations beneath. Trump is a symptom, not cause, of an institution built on blood and spoils, whose alignment with the Epstein class (and moreover, their institutions) is ever more apparent with each disregarded law and principle.
Stepping back for a moment, this systems/necropolitics perspective is just a perspective, with its own distortions and blind spots. To paraphrase LeGuin, any institution built by humans can also be changed or destroyed by them. But I think it's very useful to put on the systems goggles in this moment, especially when some are fond of preaching about the dangers of "overwhelmingly powerful systems unaccountable to humans which pursue destructive ends" without actually examining the plethora of existing systems that do just that.
P.S. yes, United Healthcare is another good example of this.
P.P.S. yes I bending the meaning of necropolitics here, but the two are related: these systems would not be so free to profit from human death and suffering if they were more vulnerable to the deaths of their constituent parts. Necropolitics of the standard variety is of course present as companies like Raytheon and Lockeed Martin profit from the carnage. The F-15 caught by friendly fire? Just as profitable for Beoing to replace as one downed by the enemy.
I've finally finished VALIS, took months when it shoulda taken a week cuz of getting caught in the suicidal era. Free to read something else!! Now I'm tryna decide what to read next:
• Leonora Carrington's usually my all time fav painter, and I've already read some of her stories in my collection, but not all
• I've been intending to get into Umberto Eco for literal years, have had multiple friends recommend The Name of The Rose, liked the part I read of the I…
Is there a way in mastodon or activitypub in general to use a hash character as a literal and *not* make the following word a hashtag (e.g. when posting about C/C preprocessor directives I don't necessarily intend for my post to be hashtag ifdef)
Deploying and prompting #Claude by #Anthropic means ripping apart literal books. Strange, strange world
"Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world."
An exclusive WaPo post:
This is the literal definition of blowback.
https://ground.news/article/iran-fires-long-range-missiles-for-first-time-strikes-israel-near-dimona-reactor-and-injures-nearly-200
The US right wing in 2025: The left's hateful rhetoric is getting people killed.
The US right wing in 2026: This podcaster is pure evil, a literal demon who deserves to go to hell.
Precedented, but not the same:
If ICE and CBP are basically the reincarnation of the KKK, it’s the KKK with a budget the size of Russia’s entire military.
Literally. In the literal sense of “literally.” The incoming ICE CBP budget is ~$140 billion.[1] Russia’s military budget is ~$145 billion.[2]
(If I’m misreading these numbers, please correct me.)
[1] https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fy26_homeland_security_conference_bill_summary.pdf
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-hikes-national-defence-spending-by-23-2025-2024-09-30/
12/
@… Have you seen this post by @… ? https://www.
Heads-up, pretty serious food and drug recall in Indiana, Minnesota and North Dakota for a bunch of products including Cheerios, Kellogg’s stuff, Pringles, Coca-Cola, Gatorade, Heinz ketchup, Crisco, pet foods, beauty products etc because of literal rat shit at a distributor
The PDF with products is 44 pages long
https://people.com/thousands-of-gold-star-items-recalled-for-exposure-to-rodent-waste-11894824
Haven't changed my profile pic in literal years probably lol
Watching a recently-made movie in which an AI character has extensive language capabilities, but treats very common idioms as literal statements. Thought they'd have retired that by now.
Well let's find out what literal choreography to a song called "Fantasy" turns out to be. #TOTP
It is such a mystery, why do American presidents start patriotic wars far from home when they are unpopular and the mid-terms are coming up and there's incriminating evidence against them in the news every day. 🧐 🤔
Nothing like this has ever happened before.
Some say he's doing what he promised and ending the forever wars!... By winning them!
Israel thinks that having the country next door fall to chaos and civil war makes them less of a threat. I don't think that's right, but I think that's what motivates them. Those in charge of it's military want that Greater Israel with bigger borders and smaller neighbours.
Trump thinks he can go down in history as the saviour of the world and if he just chops off the head of the regime the people will rise up and be a liberal democracy. I don't think that's right either. He thinks similarly about Venusualia.
The US administration aim to take control of the global oil supply for private American and multinational owned corporations. Their power is rooted in control of the literal power supply. Oil. Distributed clean energy is a threat to their power. They want to stop all this solar windmill crap and go back to good old fashioned tax and control of centralized oil distribution hubs.
Starmer just thinks he has no choice and he has to do what America says and can't risk the Telegraph and the Mail calling him antisemitic. He falsely accused thousands of not-terrorists of terrorism and is putting them through courts as terrorists for the same reason.
Anyone with an objective bone in their body could see that the Ostrich ‘issue' was a conjob and a grift. But CBC went for the literal receipts.
"Angela Rasmussen, an avian flu virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, reviewed journalists' findings and dismissed claims the farm was engaged in any groundbreaking research.
"I think calling it scientific work is quite generous," she told fifth estate co-host Mark Kelley. "I call it a scam.””
#RightWing #Grifters #Canada #Fake #Ostrich #Edgewood #BCPoli #CanPoli #CdnPoli #CBC