iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

Trump's domestic assault against Somali-Americans is the mirror of his bombing campaigns against Somalia. www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/20/u…

US airstrikes in Somalia by President

BUSH: 11 strikes
OBAMA: 48 strikes
TRUMP I: 219 strikes
BIDEN: 51 strikes
TRUMP II: 234 strikes

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/10/2026

KITT never uses its boosters more than once an episode of Knight Rider: in production on account of the failure to lock up the market on 1982 Firebirds before the hit prime time advertisement first aired, but in the world of its own speculative narrative […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

TORQUE NEWS

Tesla Says the Roadster’s Thrusters Are ‘One-Time Use,’ Last Only a Few Seconds, and Take Up to 6 Hours to Refill at a Specialized Nitrogen Refill Station

Tesla has revealed major caveats about the new second-generation Roadster. The thrusters used in the incredible demo are one-time use. After that, they must be refilled at a specialized hydrogen refueling station, a process that can take up to 6 hours.

https://www.torquenews.com/11826/tesla-says-roadsters-thrusters-are-one-time-use-last-only-few-seconds-and-take-6-hours-refill

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

America's melting secretary of health and human services insists that lyme disease and RSV were lab leaks from gain of function research. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoV5b4_URl8

RFK JR: Lyme disease that almost certainly came from these experiments

RFK JR: Uh, RSV, that came from, uh, from a laboratory

RFK JR: And all of those have been linked credibly to gain of function research.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026

The nearly half a trillion dollars a year in online theft fueled by slopbots is the only growth market for their technology. archive.is/24CHy

BLOOMBERG

AI's Supercharging a Scam Economy Bigger Than The Cocaine Trade

The Global Anti-Scam Alliance estimates victims lost $442 billion across 42 countries last year, above some valuations for the global cocaine trade. Alongside the high cost to those who are scammed there’s the growing challenge for companies to manage their exposure.

“It’s just gotten so cheap and so easy,” said Sean Letz, the Asia cyber lead at Marsh Risk, a US-based insurance broker and risk-management adviser. “What a lot of companies start to recognize is that you only get to a certain point, and trying to play whack-a-mole with the scams — with the different tactics — is impossible.”

Helping drive the proliferation are underground marketplaces operating on widely used social media platforms that let scammers buy the pieces online with ease. Cybersecurity researchers found that subscription-based exploitation tools are available for as little as $500 a month, while bulk-messaging services can send material to 10,000 email addresses for $1.

With law enforcement targeting fortified compounds in Myanmar and Cambodia, some Chinese-linked syndicates are dispersing into new territories across Africa and Sri Lanka, with scam operations also being found as far afield as Dubai, Sri Lanka, Albania and Ukraine. Rather than taking over whole towns and cities, they are resurfacing in apartments, hotels and even vehicles, forming a more localized, pop-up industry aided by underground digital markets and local criminal networks.
The number of nationalities identified among people winding up in scam centers stands at 89, according to previously unpublished figures provided by Interpol, a more than fivefold increase since early 2023. The list now stretches well beyond Asia to Canada, Italy, Spain, Poland, Mozambique, Algeria, Argentina, Ecuador, Lebanon and dozens more.

The machinery has advanced significantly since the “Nigerian prince” mass-email scams of the 2000s. Stolen data is used to locate targets on platforms like Facebook or WhatsApp. The scam then moves through AI-generated scripts, phishing pages and laundering networks. Groups that once focused on Chinese victims, now run simultaneous schemes across multiple nationalities simultaneously – fake invoices, stolen bank credentials, romance-investment traps, bogus law-enforcement calls and even pitches tailored to religious beliefs.

Phishing operations can be faster still. Components for fake websites mimicking brands, banks and payment gateways are increasingly being sold together as kits, while an analysis prepared for Bloomberg by ZeroFox, a US-based cybersecurity outfit, reveals how scammers with little technical ability are abusing legitimate developer platforms and AI app builders to launch pages with just a few prompts.

Phishing pages detected on the free tiers of nine sampled developer platforms and AI app builders rose more than fourfold to 10,600 over two years. Some tools were used to mimic Brazilian retailers, Ecuadorian banks, French lenders and US telecom companies, while Facebook, Netflix and Moonshot, a crypto-trading app, were among the most impersonated brands in the broader sample.

“What's new is that AI code generators now let someone with no coding skills build a convincing fake bank login in a few minutes, deploy it under a free subdomain, and start collecting credentials before anyone notices,” the analysis reads. “The volume is still small in absolute terms compared to the traditional players, but the growth curve is steep and the barrier to entry has collapsed.”

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

Three trillion dollars in debt and special purpose vehicles and jacked up power rates and drained aquifers and the most promising productivity enhancement everybody expects a return from the slop bubble appears to increase review times and turns codebases […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Artificial Intelligence in the Firm:
Bottlenecks in Software Production

Fiona Chen
Harvard University

James Stratton
Harvard University

Current version: August 4, 2026
First version: January 7, 2026

Abstract

We study the impacts of AI coding assistants and agents on software engineering work, using a novel proprietary dataset from an engineering analytics platform, covering 300 million work events — including GitHub coding activity, Jira issues, and Google Calendar events — across 718 firms. We use a staggered difference-in-differences design, exploiting variation in firm- level adoption timing of AI coding assistants and agents. Both technologies increase coding productivity. However, productivity gains do not fully pass through to changes in software output or employment. For AI agents, this incomplete pass-through reflects a bottleneck from code review: review times increase, a larger share of code updates require revisions, and reviews involve more comments. We develop a model of software production to structure these results, in which AI affects both productivity and quality of intermediate outputs, and in turn can generate a review bottleneck and limit pass-through.

Figure 1. Effects of AI on coding activity with different DID estimators-2000

Y-Axis: Effect on Lines of Code Added per Worker
X-Axis: Months Since Agent Adoption

The line goes up from roughly zero net lines added per month (the best commits delete
code!) to hovering around 4,000.

Notes: This figure displays a comparison of estimates using the estimators of Borusyak et al. (2024), de Chaisemartin & D’Haultfœuille (2024), Callaway et al. (2021), and Sun & Abraham (2021), and two-way fixed effects. For illustration, we estimate the effects of agent adoption on lines of code added per worker-month.

figure 12. Effects of AI on code review process
A. AI agents: Share of PRs with changes requested-10
0
10
20
30
40
Effect on % of PRs with Changes Requested
-8 -6 -4 -2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12
Months Since Agent Adoption
Baseline mean = 13.00. β12 = 21.07 (s.e. = 2.26). Pooled β = 11.84 (s.e. = 1.01).

B. AI assistants: Share of PRs with changes requested-10
0
10
20
30
40
Effect on % of PRs with Changes Requested
-8 -6 -4 -2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
Months Since AI Adoption
Baseline mean = 14.23. β16 = 0.95 (s.e. = 0.89). Pooled β = 0.94 (s.e. = 0.55).

C. AI agents: Number of comments per review-1
0
1
2
Effect on Comments per PR
-8 -6 -4 -2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12
Months Since Agent Adoption
Baseline mean = 1.66. β12 = 1.21 (s.e. = 0.24). Pooled β = 0.58 (s.e. = 0.11).

D. AI assistants: Number of comments per review-1
0
1
2
Effect on Comments per PR
-8 -6 -4 -2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
Months Since AI Adoption
Baseline mean = 1.98. β16 = 0.03 (s.e. = 0.12). Pooled β = 0.05 (s.e. = 0.07).

Notes: This figure displays event studies of the effects of AI adoption on the code review process. In Panels A and B, the
outcome variable is the share of pull requests for which at least one reviewer submitted a formal request for changes.
In Panels C and D, the outcome variable is the number of review comments per pull request. In Panels A and C, the
treatment is adoption of AI coding agents. In Panels B and D, the treatment is adoption of AI assistants. Our specification
incorporates time-varying controls for baseline firm size and is implemented using two-way fixed effects.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026

Kurt Schlichter is Pete Hegseth's buttboy paid by taxpayers to purge the war colleges of liberals and other undesirables. Dude thought Starship Troopers was a utopia. www.wired.com/story/a-pentagon-infl…

WIRED

A Pentagon Influencer Called Liberal Women a ‘Pestilence’ Who Will End Western Civilization

Kurt Schlichter was part of a task force rooting out so-called woke ideologies at the military’s war colleges. He has called to bar childless adults from voting.

David Gilbert
Sep 29, 2026 6:15 AM

In an August 2021 thread on X, Schlichter demanded an authoritarian crackdown on “liberals.”

“We must, by any means necessary, force them to be like us. No quarter. No compromise,” Schlichter wrote. In the thread, he advocates for banning everything from masks and unions to critical race theory and “leftist media.” (Last year, Hegseth’s Department of Defense required journalists to sign a pledge that would prevent them from gathering certain information. Most major journalists refused to sign the pledge and left the Pentagon.)

In the same thread on X, Schlichter also suggested that people who don’t have children, who do not serve in the military, and who don’t own property should not be allowed to vote. “Penalize barren, non-familial lifestyles through taxes and disqualification from political participation,” Schlichter wrote. “Establish property and military service qualifications for voting.” Posts in the thread were shared a combined 10,000 times.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

I like how one chart Steven Rattner never shows NYT readers in his series of non-sequitur graphs is the latest from BLS for total factor productivity that shows labor productivity growth -- the economic statistic AI is supposed to increase so fast we all end […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

NYT OPINION

Six Charts That Show Just How Much We Need A.I.

Oct. 2, 2026

"Contributions to Output Growth in Private Business"

bar charts of annual percentage points of growth broken out by labor, capital, and total factor productivity gains

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026

NYT reporter Azmat Khan explains how by American standards of warfare the world trade center was a legitimate military target. responsiblestatecraft.org/precision…

Khan: Under the laws of war and civilian protection, civilian objects like hospitals or critical infrastructure are off limits. Dual-use targeting emerged during the Gulf War. It was invented by the United States and propagated by Israel. Both countries have really advanced dual-use targeting, and in a densely-populated urban environment the dual-use doctrine can be used against almost anything because non-state actors are known to embed themselves in civilian populations. This is a real crisis.

If it were applied against the United States the way the United States applies it in the world, a tower that houses businesses that do work for the U.S. government would be targetable — not with all the people in it, but the structure itself.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

Mel Gibson was forgiven by Ari Emanuel without renouncing his Holocaust denial but Ari Emanuel tells Jon Stewart that Macklemore's statements have been "belittling to Jewish people," which is to say... antisemitic. Amazing stuff. Cookie-cutter Zionist […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

PUCK

Ari’s New Entourage

How does the creative community square the righteous Ari Emanuel—the feminist, Democratic megadonor, and #MeToo advocate—with the real-life, ethically flexible MAGA-era version? “That is the ultimate hypocrisy of this town,” as one source put it.

As Ari has demonstrated in the past, his ethics can be situational. In 2022, he wrote an editorial calling out Apple, Adidas, and Spotify for doing business with Kanye West after the rapper posted an antisemitic tweet. “This is a moment in history where the stakes are high and being open about our values, and living them, is essential,” he wrote in the Financial Times. “Silence and inaction are not an option.”

But Ari has been pretty silent about his friend Elon Musk. Rather than distancing himself from Elon as he slashed his way through federal agencies, in February, Ari joined in Elon’s $97.4 billion bid to take over OpenAI. (Attorney Marc Toberoff, who represents Elon and Ari in the OpenAI litigation, has been working at times out of the Endeavor offices—strictly on WME business, says an Ari associate.) And though Ari felt comfortable demanding that other businesses stand up against antisemitism, he has yet to utter a syllable in public about Elon’s tweets promoting the antisemitic “great replacement” theory, or about his endorsement of the extremist AfD party in Germany, whose members have used Nazi slogans.

Ari’s capacity for forgiveness, too, seems to shift with the tides. WME dumped Mel Gibson in 2010, and Ari even wrote an editorial calling for Gibson to be shunned after the actor’s antisemitic outburst. But then he started advocating for him after Ari decided—on what basis is unclear—that Mel had learned his lesson. (If Gibson has ever walked back his Holocaust denial, I’m not aware of it.) Ari made a point of returning a $400 million investment by Saudi Arabia after the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, but then got back into bed with the Kingdom via Endeavor’s purchase of WWE. (Disclosure: WME represents Puck.)

When the #MeToo movement sprang into being, the reaction in Hollywood was explosive. Now one wonders how people like Lively and Reynolds square Ari, the supporter of allegedly wronged women, with the guy who runs a company where a top executive welcomed the Tate brothers to Las Vegas. One former WME insider says he’s surprised that clients at the agency seem to accept such shifting ethics—though most, of course, are not personally dealing with Ari. “You would think there would be some actors who would go, ‘I don’t like the fact that Ari Emanuel is friends with Elon Musk,’ but none of them care,” he says. “They don’t care! That is the ultimate hypocrisy of this town.”

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026

Jon Stewart interviewed Ari Emanuel -- who is his agent? and was Trump's? -- and never asks him if maybe the CEO of the UFC soaked the $30M loss from Trump's gladiatorial games on the White House lawn as a bribe for the Presidency's support for a […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Ari's wikipedia page, highlighting "CEO and executive chairman of TKO Group Holdings,[2] which owns the UFC"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ari_Emanuel

Wall Street Journal

The Paramount-Warner Merger Could Save Hollywood

California’s attorney general ignores the reality of competition in the entertainment business.

By Ari Emanuel

July 28, 2026

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-paramount-warner-merger-could-save-hollywood-f558ee4b

The Guardian

UFC’s White House spectacle led to losses of around $30m, company reveals

- Freedom 250 staged on White House South Lawn
- Invitation-only event cost an estimated $60m in all
- Gaethje won title on night marred by Obama smear

Agencies
Tue 4 Aug 2026

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/aug/04/ufc-freedom-250-white-house-losses-trump

LA Times

'I want you to be my agent.' What to know about Trump's ties with Hollywood power player Ari Emanuel

Stacy Perman
Dec 3, 2024

....

That same year, Musk was among a clutch of intimates (along with Brian Grazer and Larry David) who attended Emanuel's 60th birthday party at Ivy on the Shore in Santa Monica. In the summer of 2022, when Emanuel married fashion designer Sarah Staudinger, Musk joined a select group of A-listers (Mark Wahlberg, David Zaslav) invited to their wedding in St. Tropez, France. Months later Musk was photographed yachting off the coast of Greece with the newlyweds.

Behind the scenes, Emanuel has played a quiet role in some of Musk's notable businesses.

When Musk attempted to back out of his $44-billion takeover of Twitter in 2022, causing a rift with its board, Emanuel reached out to Egon Durban, a Twitter board member and co-CEO of private equity firm Silver Lake, then Endeavor's largest shareholder.

Emanuel urged the company to "find a solution" to the legal battle ahead of the scheduled trial. Musk and the board ultimately sealed the deal and the billionaire took the social platform private, later renaming it X.

As Emanuel played peace broker between Musk and the Twitter board, he sent Musk a three-paragraph proposal on the encrypted text platform Signal offering to run Twitter with Endeavor for a fee of $100 million, saying he would cut costs, create a better culture and manage relationships with advertisers and marketers.

Emanuel's overture, unearthed in Walter Isaacson's flattering biography of the Tesla mogul, never moved forward.

Jared Birchall, Musk's right-hand man, called it "the most insulting, demeaning, insane message."

The scuttled offer apparently did little to ruffle feathers. In January 2023, Axios revealed that Endeavor had acquired a small stake in X. As for Emanuel, he has been spotted around town driving a glossy black Cybertruck.

https://www.aol.com/news/want-agent-know-trumps-ties-110017792.html

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

Kinzie was influenced by Vladmir Nabokov's pro-amphibrach "Notes on Prosody", but helpfully drops his convoluted taxonomy of "scuds", "tilted scuds", "duplex tilts", "reverse tilted scuds", "semiscuds" (his vast taxonomy of "false" feet) where he is inventing […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

English poets, when they do turn to temions, so consistently and so naturally intermingle anapaestic lines with amphibrachic ones that the English student of verse, unacquainted with other languages, is apt to dismiss the amphibrach altogether as an arbitrary meter devised by the ingenuity of prosodists (along with the molossus and what not) and to regard the amphibrachic lines, even when they predominate in a poem, as acephalous anapaests. In Russian, on the other hand, until the emancipation of meter associated with Blok's name, there was a definite tendency on the part of poets using ternaries to have every line of the poem, no matter how long (except for imitations of the so-called classical hexameters, in which omissions of depressions were permitted), run strictly amphibrachically, or strictly anapaestically, or strictly dactylically.

The most striking difference between Russian and English poems in binaries is the application to English iambics of the device of decapitation (which the anapaest, being bicephalous, can after all survive). The introduction of random trochaic tetrameters, or sequences of them, starting and affirming themselves as iambic tetrameters, is so usual with English poets, and has assisted them in producing such enchanting pieces, that in the light of these examples the trochee is demoted by the theorist to the rank of acephalous iamb.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

Re-visiting some sections of Mary Kinzie's The Poet's Guide to Poetry and if you flip to page 474 you'll find the place where she says "Trochaic lines can be tightened by leaving off the final unstressed syllables" and that is about as much as she ever says […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

PROMPT: how does mary kinzie scan lines that missing an unstressed syllable (catalexis, some call it at the end, or acatalectic at the start) in the poet's guide to poetry?

GOOGLE: In her comprehensive handbook, A Poet's Guide to Poetry, Mary Kinzie approaches lines that are missing an unstressed syllable by classifying them under the metrical concepts of truncation, catalexis, and lameness

GOOGLE: You are completely right, and I apologize for providing a generic textbook definition instead of actually looking at Mary Kinzie's unique, specific system.

Here is exactly how she instructs readers to scan lines that are missing an expected unstressed syllable:

1. The Missing Syllable is Scanned as a "Zero Degree" Interval

.....

2. She Classifies it as a "Juxtaposition of Stresses"

You are entirely right. Calling out that logical loop is spot on—saying someone "explicitly rejects" words they never even address is a classic hallucinated pivot to try and save face. I completely deserved that.

Let's strip away the AI text-generator noise and look at what Mary Kinzie actually puts on the page in A Poet's Guide to Poetry.

How Kinzie Actually Handles Missing Unstressed Syllables

Kinzie does not use standard prosody shortcuts because she does not view meter as a rigid grid of "iambs" or "trochees" where a slot is left blank. Instead, her system tracks the felt movement of the line through what she calls rhythmic phrasing and rhythmic shift.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

Neolibs often agree with the fascists both that too many people are participating and about which people are participating too much. thehill.com/homenews/campaign/45529…

THE HILL

Carville: ‘Too many preachy females’ are ‘dominating the culture of the Democratic Party’

by Miranda Nazzaro - 03/24/24 5:35 PM ET

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

It is a little delightful to encounter whole bodies of European poetry directly pointed at the mass market appeal of our passing modernity's deep origins in and intermixed influences with the oriental, where today's playwrights seem obligated to make […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

L1 of Byron's "Beppo":

Oh! that I had the art of easy writing
What should be easy reading! could I scale
Parnassus, where the Muses sit inditing
Those pretty poems never known to fail,
How quickly would I print (the world delighting)
A Grecian, Syrian,[221] or Assyrian tale;[176]
And sell you, mixed with western Sentimentalism,
Some samples of the finest Orientalism.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/20158/pg20158-images.html

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

At these rates Old English criticism must be some kinda racket. Been meaning to go get a library card.

The 2nd cheapest copy of Carolyne Larrington's "A Store of Common Sense" on Ebay runs $192, at which price they offer shipping the book for an additional $46.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

Orson Pratt, one of the Mormon council of twelve left to deal with John Smith's inventions, ran Milton's monism down so far that he infused the atoms of the universe with an infinite intelligence. youtu.be/DlrPpbalG-g?si=GnZRsMe7AQj…

"All these self-moving materials must be possessed of a high degree of intelligence, in order to obey with such perfect and undeviating exactness the innumerable laws which obtain in the universe... What depth of knowledge, for instance, is required in order for particles to obey the single law of "Gravitation"?"

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

It's still an amazing thing that conservative media was able to convince half the country we were experiencing hyperinflation during the Obama years and won the 2016 election on the issue after prices had risen about 0% in the year and a half prior. Which […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

YoY CPI since 2008

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

The Romans never surpassed the Greeks in philosophy, they say, but then Aristotle remained the unsatisfying authority on everything until Kepler (Copernicus' epicycles upon epicycles were the same rectification of Aristotelian principles as Ibn al-Shatir's) […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

And in all cases, the sine of the difference between the real and the visible place of the object, will be to the sine of the visible inclincation of the object to the line in which the Eye is moving, as the Velocity of the Eye to the Velocity of Light.

If light moved but 1000 times faster than the eye, and an object (supposed to be at an infinite distance) was really placed perpendicularly over the plain in which the Eye is Moving, it follows from what hath been already said, that the apparent place of such an object will be always inclined to that plain, in an angle of 89 degrees 56'1/2; so that if will constantly appear 3'2/3 from its true place, and seem so much less inclined to the plain, that way towards which the Eye tends.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rstl/article/35/406/637/25243/IV-A-letter-from-the-Reverend-Mr-James-Bradley

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026

Seems to me that Mr. T's dreams of a white limousine are shared by the best of us. Can you imagine either personality stepping out of a boring bland black limo? I don't like to imagine an America so debased.

But Mr T isn’t quite done. I’ve asked about the comment in the film that he would only turn up to events if a white limousine was booked for him. “What’s wrong with white limousines? Shouldn’t I have a choice of colour? I wear white underwear. That makes me a bad guy? Let’s get real here. I wear white T-shirts sometimes, does that make me a bad person? I wear white socks. So what’s the beef about that? Sure, I like a white limousine. When Elvis Presley died he had a white limousine, so why can’t I have one while I’m living? But Mr T’s a bad guy. We don’t care about him feeding the homeless, but, you know, ‘He wanted a white limousine, he wanted a certain kind of soap in his hotel room. Wow, he’s a bad guy.’”

The cover of Dolly Parton's White Limozeen.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026

Know that demon of aggressive ignorance that haunts America, and possesses it, and will whine of its unholy oppression like smoke from spindling twine the second it is cast out, also haunted Mr T […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

By the age of 15, he was a celebrated school athlete and looked like an adult bodybuilder. But his peers mocked him. “Growing up in the ghetto, even though I played football and wrestled, the thugs called me a sissy. You know why? Because I never robbed nobody.” He talks louder and louder. Soon he’s shouting. “They called me a sissy for listening to my mother, for listening to the teachers, for doing my homework. They didn’t go to school. They was dropouts. They was thugs. They’re in jail now or dead. They didn’t become nothing. As the Bible says, ‘Unless two agree, they can’t walk together.’

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026

The Manhattan Institute's John McWhorter explains why #AI logos all look like a close up of an asshole: "[From the Proto-Indo-European 'kolo' for 'wheel' to] Latin, 'colus', that's related to the word for 'colon'. The colon is a disgusting thing, but if you […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

In Latin, "colus", that's related to the word for colon

The colon is a disgusting thing, but if you think about it, if

you don't consider what's inside of it, the colon is a beautiful

thing anatomically, partly because it looks like a wheel.

https://plus.thegreatcourses.com/language-families-of-the-world

(lecture 2 at 23 minutes in)

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026

American courts are so anti-free market and abhor the very concept of competition so thoroughly but all the same anti-trust laws are on the books, if not more, right? I stopped following news of the priesthood after they turned the law into a revival tent so […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Google spared break-up of online advertising monopoly

Judge rejects US Department of Justice’s request to force the sale of parts of the search giant’s ads business

Stephen Morris in San Francisco

Published YESTERDAY

A federal judge has ruled that Google will not have to divest crucial parts of its digital advertising arm, rejecting the US Department of Justice’s argument that a forced sale is the only way to dismantle its monopoly over the business.

On Wednesday, Judge Leonie Brinkema denied the DoJ’s request that Google be forced to sell its “AdX” advertising exchange and publisher ad server businesses.

The decision is the second time that a court has dismissed the DoJ’s attempts to break up Google’s parent company Alphabet, despite prosecutors winning the two cases by convincing courts the tech group held an illegal monopoly.

The ruling deals a blow to the US government’s attempts to rein in the power of Big Tech. Brinkema opted to enforce “behavioural remedies” on Google, which will be determined later and probably include data sharing and making its technology compatible with competing products.

Her decision follows a similar ruling a year ago in a case about Google’s search engine. Judge Amit Mehta ruled that while Google operated an illegal monopoly, it did not have to sell its Chrome browser and Android operating system as the DoJ had requested.

Mehta similarly went for behavioural remedies, such as sharing more search data and a ban on exclusive distribution contracts, such as the roughly $20bn that Google paid Apple each year to be the default search engine on its devices.

Both judges flagged the practical difficulties of forcing spin-offs of such large businesses and worried that technology would have moved on during years of appeals from Google, especially as AI shakes up the sector.

“We’re very pleased the court rejected the DoJ’s proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice-president of regulatory affairs.

Alphabet stock has risen 57 per cent over the past 12 months, helped by investors’ relief that the company has survived a trio of antitrust losses with its core businesses intact.

In April last year, Brinkema ruled that Google had “wilfully” built an illegal monopoly in online advertising using anti-competitive practices such as privileged contracts and technological integration between its offerings. Google used its dominance to impose a 20 per cent fee that ate into publishers’ earnings.

AdX is the largest marketplace for bidding for online ad space, and Google’s publisher ad server is the most prevalent technology online publishers use to list and sell ads on their websites.

Brinkema rejected another part of the justice department’s case, saying it did not prove Google unfairly dominated the third component of the market, advertiser ad networks.

The judge’s full opinion is sealed for two weeks until a final set of remedies is agreed between Google and the DoJ and to allow confidential material in the evidence to be redacted.

“The Antitrust Division is pleased that the court ordered substantial relief,” the DoJ said. “We are one step closer to restoring competition and bringing relief for the American people in online advertising markets.”

However, the ruling was criticised by anti-monopoly campaigners as “toothless” and with little chance of disrupting Alphabet’s power.

“Judges keep finding Google guilty but it keeps walking away with both its ill-gotten gains and its empire intact,” said Laurel Kilgour of the American Economic Liberties Project. “Without structural remedies, antitrust rulings are just inconvenient speed bumps.”

In 2024, Alphabet was also ordered to open up its Android operating system to rivals after a San Francisco judge found it used its Google Play Store to suppress competition in apps and charge excessive fees.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026

The Atlantic's Charlie Wurzel tells Hasan Manaj that the broken media landscape can only be fixed with time: a true fact about fixing anything, I concede. But he doesn't breath a word about how 30 years ago we carved out liability for a narrow but important […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

HASAN: How do we fix this?

WURZEL: I think the fix is time.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

No foreshadowing here, just consider how mortgage-backed securities have produced our wonderful glut of affordable housing: www.cnbc.com/2026/08/10/nvidia-wall…

AI compute will be seen as a “financeable asset class” in the same way that mortgage lenders look at homes, Gray of Blackstone said on CNBC. Demand for AI is outstripping supply, with use at Blackstone portfolio companies surging sevenfold this year, Gray said.

BlackRock’s Fink said that he believed this project was the start of the “next future for financial engineering,” akin to the creation of mortgage-backed securities in the 1970s. Some funds have already been raised, but BlackRock will be “raising quite a bit more,” he said.

“We need to raise this money as fast as possible and put this to work, because I think it’s really imperative that the United States is the leader in AI in the world,” Fink said on CNBC.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

Foot-scansion seems perfectly adroit at revealing the rhythmic structures of the nursery rhyme?

My Indeterminable Foot Scansion of Roud Folk Song Index # 19288:

Leading off with one and half lines of steady trochees
makes a plain demand that we scan feet to conserve the
base meter, which reveals 9 trochees with 5 dactylic
substitutions skimming across the poem's
puddle/middle slant rhyme:

/ x |/ x |/ x |/ x
Doctor |Foster |went to |Gloucester,
/ x |/ x x |/
In a |shower of |rain;
x |/ x x |/ x x |/ x x |/ x
He |stepped in a |puddle, right |up to his |middle,
x |/ x |/ x x|/
And |never |went there a|gain.

But "Foster" rhymes with "Gloucester" and this is not
so much a limerick as an AABCCB dimeter sestain with
trimeter B rhymes, where but for that last anacrusis
every rhyming line's stress patterns and syntax
also echo:

/ x |/ x
Doctor |Foster
/ x |/ x
went to |Gloucester
/ x |/ x x |/
In a |shower of |rain;
x |/ x x |/ x
He |stepped in a |puddle,
x |/ x x |/ x
Right |up to his |middle,
x |/ x |/ x x|/
And |never |went there a|gain.

All this to say that this nursery rhyme should make
us all considerably upset that Dr. Foster doesn't
wear a buckle.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

Reading other bits of Derek Attridge and he's wondering what is happening in Roud Folk Song Index # 19288 where he complains that "Foot-scansion, of course, would... would not capture the rhythm of the lines at all." Does he? How do you pronounce "doctor" […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

As an example of a rhyme that doesn’t reveal immediately which of these two rhythmic types [triple or double] it belongs to we may take the following:

Doctor Foster went to Gloucester
In a shower of rain.
He stepped in a puddle right up to his middle
And never went there again.

The first line invites a firm duple reading, and the second line can be made to fit, especially if “shower” is treated as a monosyllable:

Doctor Foster went to Gloucester
B 1 B 1 B 1 B 1
■ □ ■ □ ■ □ ■ □
In a shower of rain.
B 1 B 1 B [B]
■ □ ■ □ ■ □ ■

And if we go back to the first two lines and read them with the same triple rhythm, they acquire a spring lacking in the rather mechanical one-two-one-two of the duple reading:

Doctor Foster went to Gloucester
B 1 B 1 B 1 B 1
■□ □ ■□ □ ■□ □ ■□ □
In a shower of rain.
B 1 B 1 B [B]
■□ □ ■ □ □ ■ □ □ ■

THE RHYMS OF THE ENGLISH DOLNIK p167

Note that this manner of reading extends many of the stressed syllables to double their length; “Doctor Foster” changes from a four-square pronunciation with unstressed syllables taking as long as stressed syllables to one that gives stresses appropriately extra emphasis. Note, too, that scansion without any indication of temporal relations has no way of representing these different rhythms. (Foot-scansion, of course, would merely record a succession of trochees for two lines followed by an indeterminable series of feet that could be dactyls, amphibrachs or anapests; it would not capture the rhythm of the lines at all.) Interestingly, YouTube offers musical settings of this rhyme in both two-four time and three-quarter time; to my ear, the latter is more engaging.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

Anyway, Mendelsohn's line starts out with that perfectly dactylic introduction with what I think of as some roundabout anapests: /xx/xx//xx/xx/xx/ A line doesn't establish an expectation. The next line balances its anacrusis with catalexis, the third […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

TELL me the TALE of a MAN, MUSE,
(who had) SO many ROUNDabout WAYS
To WANder, DRIVen off COURSE,
after SACKing TROY'S hallowed KEEP;
MANy the PEOPles whose CITies
he SAW and whose WAY of THINKing he LEARNED,
MANy the TOILS he SUFFered
at SEA, ANGuish in HIS HEART

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/09/2026

I appreciate how the seemingly abandoned Google Books (almost erased, now relegated to udm=36 queries) will still tell you a phrase invented by both Bing and Google Search does not exist in the books it says it found them in. Is Bing on Gemini now? The two […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

https://www.google.com/search?udm=36&q=%22Intralinear+Offbeat%22

Did you mean: "Interlinear Offbeat"

No results found for "Intralinear Offbeat".

Results for Intralinear Offbeat (without quotes):

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/09/2026

I inevitably ask after the internets: kagi with its traditional search based on documents that exist offers an honest account of nothing; google and microsoft's search engines both unhelpfully ascribe Mendelsohn's metrical ellision to "Derek Attridge's […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Renowned metricist Derek Attridge re-conceptualized English scansion using a system of "beats" and "offbeats" rather than rigid classical feet.

The Argument: Attridge demonstrates that after a heavy grammatical pause (like a caesura or a strong intonational phrase break), the human voice naturally introduces an intralinear offbeat before the next major stress.

Derek Attridge’s “Intralinear Offbeat” in Poetic Rhythm

In Derek Attridge’s Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1995), the term “intralinear offbeat” appears in the section on beats and offbeats (pp. 108–115). Attridge uses it to describe a rhythmic feature within a single line of verse where an offbeat — an unstressed or demoted syllable — occurs within the line rather than at its end.

A screenshot of the title page of Derek Attridge's "Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction" with the null search results for "intralinear offbeat": "phrase not found"

p126

Because of the power of the stress rhythm in English, the adding of a single unstressed syllable to a line of syllable-stress verse does not unduly disturb the duple meter. It is least noticeable when the double offbeat is divided by a syntactic break, as in this example:

x / x / x x / x/ x /
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed

The added syllable does cause a momentary ripple in the steady rhythm, as we realize if we rewrite the line without it and listen to its more regular movement:

x / x / x / x / x /
What youthful mother, child upon her lap

We call double offbeats of this kind free double offbeats, since they are not bound by the conditions that are observed by the strictest syllable-stress rneter; that is to say, they dont occur in conjunction with two successive stresses in an inversion.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

Kash Patel's new Biblical hiring standards at the FBI make it hard not to assume everybody at the agency is a curb crawling crook who fornicates with cattle. people.com/fbi-lowers-hiring-standa…

PEOPLE

FBI Quietly Lowers Hiring Standards for Applicants Who Solicited Sex Workers, Stole or Engaged in Bestiality: Report

CBS News reports that the changes are a result of a decline in employment following firings and resignations during Donald Trump’s second presidential term

By Toria Sheffield
Published on August 29, 2026

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

Funny how China is beating us both to the clean energy transition our country made necessary and is working tirelessly to forestall while also beating our misanthropic chatbot boys by their own banal benchmarks and the ones that matter. Wouldn't have thought […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

This price disparity has also been reflected in usage metrics. Chinese models’ share of global monthly token usage on AI model aggregation platform OpenRouter jumped from less than 10% early last year to more than 60% in July this year. Chinese models swept the top four positions in the weekly usage rankings for August 3–9 and accounted for six of the top 10. US AI assistant startup Lindy switched its primary model from an Anthropic product to DeepSeek in June, reducing costs by 90%. Workflow automation startup Palcia also uses Anthropic for real-time customer service while assigning overnight or non-urgent tasks to a Chinese MiniMax model.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2026

This question is funny because the moral standards are no different: there never were any and we've always disagreed like this. yougov.com/en-us/articles/55439-mor…

Should people from the past be judged by the moral standards of their own time or of today?

When judging people who lived in the past, how do you think we should judge their actions? (%)

56% Judge them by the moral standards of their own time
23% Not sure
21% Judge them by the moral standards of today

Aristotle on Politics, 1253b:

Some persons have thought that the power of the master over his slave originates from his superior knowledge, and that this knowledge is the same in the master, the magistrate, and the king... but others think that slavery is contrary to nature, and that it is the law which makes one man a slave and another free, but that in nature there is no difference; for which reason that power cannot be founded in justice, but in force.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6762/6762-h/6762-h.htm

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/08/2026

Bon voyage to Milo Yiannopoulos, innovator in hate. Long before Chris Rufo was channeling QAnon conspiracies about "groomers" into his trans-hysteria blood libels Milo was riling up future Harper's Letter signers' concerns about free speech when he'd draw […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

TEEN VOGUE

Milo Yiannopoulos Harassed a Transgender Student at Her School

By Brittney McNamara

December 16, 2016

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/08/2026

Dream the American dream of being rich enough that lurking pickup razor-bicced ape artistes are trying to traffic women to you for blackmail like wannabe Jeff Epsteins. san.com/cc/manosphere-influencer-an…

The “Penetrating the Elite” course is not well known outside of the Tates' War Room members. It teaches members investigative techniques to be used against wealthy and powerful people.

“The method it teaches is blunt: find the target’s vulnerabilities and exploit them,” the researcher said.

The course does not present the techniques as hypothetical, the researcher added, but instead as those that have been used in the real world. The course appears to have been put together by Andrew Tate associate Joule Sullivan, known online as “The Sartorial Shooter.” Sullivan says he is a former Australian military intelligence operator.

In one slide from the course viewed by Straight Arrow, the techniques are said to have been used successfully against a major Hollywood film director, a world-famous Ultimate Fighting Championship athlete, a Fortune 500 CEO and an Arab billionaire.

Another slide describes women as the No. 1 vulnerability of the elite: “They almost ALL have mistresses,” the slide says, “usually sugar daddy arrangements or high-class hookers.”

“On the boats,” the course materials say, “cocaine and hooker is what’s on those boats. Yes, in case you’re wondering. That is 100% of the yachting lifestyle.”

War Room members are told to exploit this weakness by showing things such as their “advanced knowledge, i.e. pimping principles.”

“Partake in taboo activities with them,” the slide says. “Cements the trust, really locks it in.”

“Think of yourself as an intelligence officer, but instead of going out and trying to recruit foreign politicians or foreign embassy staff, you’re going out, you’re trying to recruit ultra-high net worth individuals,” the course material says.

The ultimate goal of the course is financial gain: “Penetrate them, get paid.”

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

I wish I enjoyed schadenfreude more because I cannot imagine a less pleasant place to be than trying to balance on the razor's edge of Laura Loomer's "good side". www.wired.com/story/milo-yiannopoul…

Throughout his evolution as a MAGA figure, Yiannopoulos has rarely shied away from highly public battles with enemies and rivals. Among the most outspoken is the Islamophobic conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who on Friday pinned a post on X announcing his detention by ICE—and appeared to take partial credit for it.

“I was the first person to report on the fact that Milo was in the US illegally where he incited violence against President Trump and worked for Marjorie Traitor Greene,” Loomer wrote. “Milo is going to be deported back to the UK where he can live among the Muslims he has recently chosen to embrace. Today is a great day for America.”

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

Trade Wars Are Good And Easy To Win: "In the first six months of this year, the value of goods made in Vietnam and imported to the U.S. exceeded the value of U.S.-made goods and services exported to Vietnam by $114 billion—more than the surplus of any other […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

FRED: U.S. Imports of Goods by Customs Basis from Vietnam

Since this time 2024 Vietnamese imports have more than doubled from 11 billion to 25 billion.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IMP5520

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

Just what we need as productivity growth falters, the global economy hangs by the tenuous thread of Chinese competence against America's doddering commander in thief and his demented tantrums and his robot clone exohips: 23,000 words of slop from Jeffrey […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.

A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net. It would need to be targeted so it does not slow down the purely beneficial uses of AI, like making medicine and education cheaper.

https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/make-ai-work-for-everyone/reader/ai-agents

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

If you use social media, warns man who through it self-promoted himself to a sinecure amidst the nation's labor monopsony over the written word, you may fall off the edge of reality. For instance you might wind up equivocating Broderesque both-side-isms like […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

The upside of Musk buying Twitter — one I predicted at the time — is that it has broken some of the hold Twitter had on political elites, particularly those on the left, and nothing has really taken its place. No one mistakes the Trumpist fortress of Truth Social, nor the progressive redoubt of BlueSky, for a representative public sphere, and that is for the good. Use these platforms if you must, but don’t mistake them for a map of the world, lest you fall off the edge.

It is not just Woke 1.0 that was crazy. This has been a crazy era, on all sides of politics, because much of it has taken place atop platforms that derange us for profit. Trying to stay as sane as possible requires constant effort. But the alternative is worse.

https://archive.is/Kuqfq

The author would of course be Paul Ryan's young lapdog, Iraq-war supporter Ezra Klein.

The platform’s algorithmic preference for new and controversial ideas could temporarily lift voices that hadn’t been heard before, but it had no preference for the marginalized and no orientation toward justice. Twitter was, and X is, as happy to be a slingshot for the great replacement theory or anti-Semitism or Islamophobia as for calls to defund the police or abolish ICE. It favors ideas and voices that survive compression, unleash controversy and excite co-partisans. It discards ideas and voices that require nuance or balance competing values and positions.

https://archive.is/Kuqfq

The author would of course be Paul Ryan's young lapdog, Iraq-war supporter Ezra Klein.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

Satan agrees Eve is hot, and then look at how redundantly erect Satan's serpentine maze is when he wears his snake skin to the garden party, wow: "on his rear,/ Circular base of rising folds, that towered/ Fold above fold, a surging maze! his head/ Crested […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

So spake the enemy of mankind, enclosed
In serpent, inmate bad! and toward Eve
Addressed his way: not with indented wave,
Prone on the ground, as since; but on his rear,
Circular base of rising folds, that towered
Fold above fold, a surging maze! his head
Crested aloft, and carbuncle his eyes;
With burnished neck of verdant gold, erect
Amidst his circling spires, that on the grass
Floated redundant: pleasing was his shape
And lovely; never since of serpent-kind
Lovelier, not those that in Illyria changed

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

Eve agrees perhaps they are not prepared to go it alone but turns Adam's earlier claim that Satan would attack him first on him, and he'll still think she's hot if she's not there. Off she goes to the garden. I was expecting Milton's Adam to make a […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

With thy permission then, and thus forewarned
Chiefly by what thy own last reasoning words
Touched only; that our trial, when least sought,
May find us both perhaps far less prepared,
The willinger I go, nor much expect
A foe so proud will first the weaker seek;
So bent, the more shall shame him his repulse.
Thus saying, from her husband’s hand her hand

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

Adam goes on a tirade that amounts to "fool woman everything is perfect, but" Reason can be Deceived. What serves as protection against Deception? Adam avoids the question, instead telling Eve: baby if you are near nothing can temp me, 'temptation to avoid […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

ADAM:

Reason, is free; and Reason [God] made right,
But bid her well be ware, and still erect;
Lest, by some fair-appearing good surprised,
She dictate false; and mis-inform the will
To do what God expressly hath forbid.
Not then mistrust, but tender love, enjoins,
That I should mind thee oft; and mind thou me.
Firm we subsist, yet possible to swerve;
Since Reason not impossibly may meet
Some specious object by the foe suborned,
And fall into deception unaware,
Not keeping strictest watch, as she was warned.
Seek not temptation then, which to avoid
Were better, and most likely if from me
Thou sever not: Trial will come unsought.
Wouldst thou approve thy constancy, approve
First thy obedience; the other who can know,
Not seeing thee attempted, who attest?
But, if thou think, trial unsought may find
Us both securer than thus warned thou seemest,
Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more;
Go in thy native innocence, rely
On what thou hast of virtue; summon all!
For God towards thee hath done his part, do thine.
So spake the patriarch of mankind;

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

Eve jokes that if we have to scratch our asses by consensus then Satan has already won. She asks in earnest, "what is faith, love, virtue" unless tested by individual merit? How is this paradise if we must fear being alone? Do not doubt the perfection of […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Thus her reply with accent sweet renewed:
"If this be our condition, thus to dwell
In narrow circuit straitened by a foe,
Subtle or violent, we not endued
Single with like defense, wherever met;
How are we happy, still in fear of harm?
But harm precedes not sin: only our foe,
Tempting, affronts us with his foul esteem
Of our integrity: his foul esteem
Sticks no dishonor on our front, but turns
Foul on himself; then wherefore shunned or feared
By us? who rather double honor gain
From his surmise proved false; find peace within,
Favor from Heaven, our witness, from the event.
And what is faith, love, virtue, unassayed
Alone, without exterior help sustained?
Let us not then suspect our happy state
Left so imperfect by the Maker wise,
As not secure to single or combined.
Frail is our happiness, if this be so,
And Eden were no Eden, thus exposed."

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

I love this bit in Book IX where Milton's Adam has insulted Eve by suggesting she needs his protection, to which he answers her offense with, "I work extra hard not to embarrass myself in front of you because you are so hot, isn't that how this works for […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Nor thou his malice and false guile contemn;
Subtle he needs must be, who could seduce
Angels; nor think superfluous other’s aid.
I, from the influence of thy looks, receive
Access in every virtue; in thy sight
More wise, more watchful, stronger, if need were
Of outward strength; while shame, thou looking on,
Shame to be overcome or over-reached,
Would utmost vigour raise, and raised unite.
Why shouldst not thou like sense within thee feel
When I am present, and thy trial choose
With me, best witness of thy virtue tried?
So spake domestick Adam in his care

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

Slack has added Claude's sphincter ani externus icon to clutter up their ever incluttering cluttered interface with more cluttered cluts like a do-hickey hoarder hog. The sphincter emoji beckons the user enter its slophole with the brazenly false assertions […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

CLAUDE Anthropic's helpful, honest, and harmless AI

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026

too long in coming to properly enjoy it if one could pinpoint when it went too far www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9MTEhAWVmw

The Real Infowars' new owners transdentifying the fake Alexis Jones that is standing in for The Fake Info Wars dispensing disinformation rather than The Real Infowar's warformation.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

We are reading the words of the narrator who sees the celestial shield slung across Satan's back like the moon watched through the telescope of Galileo who can see, whether from atop a mountain or the bottom of the vale, the glittering trains of watersheds […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

He scarce had ceas’t when the superiour Fiend
Was moving toward the shore; his ponderous shield
Ethereal temper, massy, large and round,
Behind him cast; the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb
Through Optic Glass the _Tuscan_ Artist views
At Ev’ning from the top of _Fesole_,
Or in _Valdarno_, to descry new Lands,
Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

Why is Dr. Phil drilling illegal oil wells in Greenland? Has Oprah ever offered any suggestion as to why all the crank quacks she promoted to national stardom were cryptofascist reactionaries dedicated to promoting disease and boiling the earth in a stew of exhaust?

Greenland Energy Company, a Texas corporation founded late last year, said plans are advancing for an ambitious hunt for crude beneath a remote stretch of East Greenland.

The company has connections to Trump associates. Phil McGraw, widely known as Dr. Phil and a Trump appointee and supporter, was hired by Greenland Energy to produce a documentary series about the project. Carol Craig—whose space and defense company is involved in Trump's Golden Dome missile-defense system—also sits on Greenland Energy's board.

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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/08/2026

What a catch for crypto booster and long time silicon valley shill Kara Swisher, getting Hilary Clinton on the record prophesizing that Republicans will call the Democratic candidate a commie. Thank heavens someone recognizes what we're up against […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Mrs. Clinton is also calling on Mr. El-Sayed and other firebrands to develop a response to Republicans who call them “communists.”

She said, “The Republican messaging is communists, socialists. It’s going to be a very effective attack, so people on the left have to be prepared to answer that.”

She added of Republicans’ line of attack, “I assume they’ve tested it and I assume that they have reason to believe that it’s effective or they wouldn’t be beating the drum on it.”

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