iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 7m

Ah—so _now_ these two remember the principle of explicit consent before bodily contact? How fascinating.

Posts by two complete nudniks at X, the everything app. First is this from Richard Hanania:

“Hey @nytimes, do you think it's appropriate for one of your writers to be publicly fantasizing about committing violence against writers he doesn't like?”

Hanania quoted this post by Michael Tracey:

“New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie fantasizes about someone forcibly plowing my head into concrete -- rendering me either paralyzed or dead, presumably --because of how ‘just’ this would be. Just...”

Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 4h

JD Vance — the one who characterized the pre-MAGA U.S. as a hotbed of "institutionalized anti-white, anti-male discrimination"? Considering Yarvin a friend? Shiver me timbers, I'm shocked.

A post from the Blaze to X on Oct. 1, 2026, featuring a segment of an interview recorded on Air Force Two. The text of the post:

"Vance: 'For a long time, we institutionalized Anti-White, Anti-Male discrimination in this country. If you look at the way that we spoke about White men in the United States of America … It's kind of insane that we didn't have a revolution.'"

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 04/10/2026

(It’s a look I much preferred from Jarvis Cocker, TBH.)

Recording artist Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, reclined on a couch at the Barbican Centre in a photo shot for the New York Times.

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 02/10/2026

The Black voters peaking the turnout needle in Va. after the Roberts Court destroyed the pinnacle achievement of the civil rights mov’t understand political dynamics better than the officials who tried to elevate Garland after Scalia passed.

A post by survey researcher Tom Bonier from Sep. 30. He wrote: “In VA, where more than 200k votes have already been cast, turnout among Black and AAPI voters has more than doubled, compared to this same point in 2022, while Hispanic turnout is more than 5x that benchmark.”

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 02/10/2026

A: Trick question, one should wear one's best coat.

A resident of the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D.C., stands outside her home in 2017, wearing a fur coat and holding a glass of wine, as protestors hold a pride flag and make a ruckus outside the new residence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 02/10/2026

Anyway: who thinks Ezra Klein will have Dr. Mason on his podcast to talk about this article?

The paperback cover of 'Why We're Polarized,' a nonfiction treatise by Ezra Klein.

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 01/10/2026

"The current level of political animosity is exactly what one would expect to see if an extremist faction attempted to rescind the hard-earned rights of the vast majority of the country’s citizens." – @lilymasonphd.bsky.social, in the Journal of Democracy 🎯 muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

On these issues, the parties have become increasingly divided. By 2024, Republicans scored significantly higher, on average, than Democrats and independents on racial resentment against black Americans, belief that women’s place is in the home, endorsement of Christian nationalism, and belief in “replacement theory” (the conspiracy theory that immigrants are part of a Democratic Party plot to replace white Christian Americans). These party differences did not exist in the 1980s, when Democrats were more racially resentful, Republicans were less misogynistic, and neither party broadly supported Christian nationalism or replacement theory.

From this perspective, the “both sides” frame falls apart. The problem is not that the parties are divided. The problem is the existential threat that a reempowered ethnonationalist strain poses to pluralistic U.S. democracy writ large. The current level of political animosity is exactly what one would expect to see if an extremist faction attempted to rescind the hard-earned rights of the vast majority of the country’s citizens. The only way to re-oppress most of a country is to use anti-democratic and authoritarian tactics. And the only way to oppose those tactics is to push back as a population and clearly reject them. This is the argument happening in the United States, and its pathology is not anger—it is the movement to undermine a generation of rights.

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 29/09/2026

To quote a @chrislhayes.bsky.social jape at the Roberts Court: "They go fast when they want to go fast and slow when they want to go to slow and the decision is *always* an ideological one."

Steve Vladeck, a professor a Georgetown Law, writes up breaking developments from the Supreme Court. The last post in the three-post thread is the kicker, for our purpose here.

"#BREAKING: Over dissents from the three Democratic appointees, #SCOTUS grants a stay in the third-country removals case; clears way for Trump admin. to continue removing non-citizens without a full chance to litigate the conditions in those countries (while also taking up the full merits appeal).

"Link: [URL of a supremecourt.gov PDF]

"By my math, the order was filed 11 minutes after the Trump administration's reply brief came in."

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 28/09/2026

Mm-hm. Vibes of this old Fast Company cover, the memory of which just made me shudder:

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 28/09/2026

[in a very MICHAEL STIPE voice:] 🎼 that's Rahm on the High Line 🪕 🎵 that's Rahm on a park … bench … 🎻 💭 thinking he'll be POTUS 😆

A post to X by political consultant John Anzalone, who wrote:

"Underestimate @RahmEmanuel at your own risk. He knows how to win. He knows how to fight. And he knows how to message.

"And no one will out work him. Regardless of whether he wins the Democratic nomination in 2028 he will make an impact on the race. You can be sure of that. Don't take your eyes off of him. At the minimum, learn from him.

"Rahm Emanuel Makes His 2026 Play"

The last line is the headline of a Sunday piece from the New York Times, the preview card of which features a photo of Emanuel seated on a park bench that looks like it's someplace along the High Line in the Meatpacking District.

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 28/09/2026

Alas … : “In dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives. Such an inquiry would risk exposing even the most obvious instances of official conduct to judicial examination on the mere allegation of improper purpose.”

In dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives. Such an inquiry would risk exposing even the most obvious instances of official conduct to judicial examination on the mere allegation of improper purpose, thereby intruding on the Article II interests that immunity seeks to protect. Indeed, “[i]t would seriously cripple the proper and effective administration of public affairs as entrusted to the executive branch of the government” if “[i]n exercising the functions of his office,” the President was “under an apprehension that the motives that control his official conduct may, at any time, become the subject of inquiry.” Fitzgerald, 457 U. S., at 745 (quoting Spalding v. Vilas, 161 U. S. 483, 498 (1896)). We thus rejected such inquiries in Fitzgerald. The plaintiff there contended that he was dismissed from the Air Force for retaliatory reasons. See 457 U. S., at 733–741, 756. The Air Force responded that the reorganization that led to Fitzgerald’s dismissal was undertaken to promote efficiency. Ibid. Because under Fitzgerald’s theory “an inquiry into the President’s motives could not be avoided,” we rejected the theory, observing that “[i]nquiries of this kind could be highly intrusive.” Id., at 756. “[B]are allegations of malice should not suffice to subject government officials either to the costs of trial or to the burdens of broad-reaching discovery.” Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U. S. 800, 817–818 (1982).

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 25/09/2026

"Don’t set up climate change as a rival to [people's] worries. Instead, [help audiences] understand that climate change is already shaping the things people worry about": well said and correct, but the enemy — the tailpipe and smokestack huggers — gets a vote.

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 25/09/2026

I'm not Mr. Progressive Infrastructure, but I have a decent movement footprint in my inbox — so it tells me something when the sole appearance of "Evan Barker" in my inbox, which goes back to Gmail's 2004 beta, is on the next-to-last line of a signoff in a 2018 email from @boldprogressives.org.

As always, we did all this together. We should feel so proud of the work we did this year to fight back -- and fight forward for a progressive future. You can help support this work going forward here. Thank you, as always, for being a bold progressive.

-- Stephanie Taylor, Adam Green, Jen D. Rafanan, Kenton Ngo, Courtney Hagen, DeVeria Flowers, Lilia Tamm Dixon, Jasmine Carter-Gales, Keith Rouda, Mike McCall, Marissa Barrow, Brittany Miller, Emily DiVito, Lucy Olena, Jonathan Bock, Evan Barker, Rachel Queirolo, Ethan Jucovy, Jackie Arasi, Amanda Pittman, Margaret McLaughlin, Max Rogers, and Sofia Rivera.

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 23/09/2026

A Georgia truck driver: "Once the fuel prices come out, there's very little money left. It's getting to the point where it's not worth it." Ooof.

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 23/09/2026

_Bluesky is a liberal bubble_ — well, bubbles hold out contaminants! In a moment when the information terrain is saturated by propaganda and nonsense, a bubble where people can observe the world and discuss it may have proven itself handy.

One thing I’ve been telling people for years is that just because you browbeat people into shutting up doesn’t mean you’ve changed their views. There’s an argument for establishing societal norms, making certain kinds of speech and ideas socially unacceptable. But it doesn’t always mean what you think. Some people on X quieted down and others left. What it all amounts to is that Musk created an information space on X that made MAGA seem much more dominant than it was in the real world. MAGA leaned into this because that’s their aesthetic; booyah!! is their philosophical core. But it created an impression that made a lot of 2026 possible.

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 23/09/2026

Yep, I can even pinpoint it for you. It's the station with the prices ≥50¢ above any other station on the map.

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 22/09/2026

Would I vote for AOC? Hell the f–– yes, and twice on Sundays. But she's still right to think aloud about all this.

It’s not just that a five-second video of her adjusting her hair in the Bronx this year drew more than 25 million views on X and a tsunami of sexualized replies (“that’s the most kind of, like, brazen and obvious forms of it,” she said). It’s how “female politicians are discussed, approached, covered” overall.

“What is very odd about our political culture is that for some reason when you raise it, people just freak out,” she said. “They get so defensive at the mere suggestion that gender could play a role.”

She made plain that this was a problem “independent of ideology.”

“I experience it tremendously — from the right and from the left,” she said.

The losses of the only two women ever to secure the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, loom large. “It may or may not be related, but I absolutely empathize with the heartbreak that people feel around that and, frankly, how those women were treated,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said.

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 22/09/2026

There’s really nothing to say in comment on Bret’s latest that Toni Morrison didn’t say perfectly 51 years ago.

It's important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 22/09/2026

For Trump, mobster that he is, the favor of snuffing out that investigation doubles as leverage. A Republican like Collins who gets crosswise with him might soon find the FBI’s machinery whirring back into action.

To skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Navatek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from. Reed confirmed that she would, the executive said - and that Navatek would get its government contracts.

After the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek's CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives that Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 22/09/2026

The White House combed (*ahem*) through all its footage, and this is the best it could do?

Over a screen of Amy Klobuchar speaking at a lectern adorned with a presidential seal, a YouTube attribution label reads: "TRUMP TV: The Essentials Station."

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 19/09/2026

That uncanny feeling when Sonnet 4.6 evaluates the core cognitive failure uncovered in both stories with more acuity than the dingbats at the Pentagon:

Max's framing adds something important to what we've been saying — and Randy Herman's highlighted line is the knife in it.

We've been talking about Al-in-the-loop as an accountability diffusion mechanism, which it is. But Max is pointing at something that might actually be worse: genuine, sincere cognitive abdication. Not cynically inserting Al to create cover, but actually believing the Al had done the thinking — actually treating the output as resolved judgment rather than as an input requiring scrutiny.

"It is not clear why they had such expectations" is investigators' language for: we cannot find a rational basis for the degree of trust these operators placed in this system. That's not a coverup being constructed after the fact. That's people who genuinely outsourced their epistemic responsibility and did not know they had done so.

Which brings it back to the hype environment with real force. When the vendors, the press, the culture around these tools spends years telling people that Al is smarter than humans, faster than humans, less biased than humans — when the entire discourse around adoption is framed as resistance to AI is the error — you produce operators who are not cynically hiding behind the output. They are sincerely trusting it in contexts where that trust is catastrophically unwarranted.

McNamara's people at least understood they were constructing a measurement system. They argued about what it measured. These operators apparently didn't know they needed to ask.

The IBM slide assumed the human in the loop would know they were in a loop. That assumption may no longer hold.

(Note: the aforementioned IBM slide is the famed one that reads: "A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision."

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 17/09/2026

Ooooh, dude here is playing my song.

A tweet of mine from Dec. 3, 2017:

"When I say Congress ought to build dorms for its members, that's not some goofy lark - it's an acknowledgement that D.C.'s housing
expenses = an obstacle to working-class
candidates."

Two tweets of mine from Aug. 29, 2018:

"There's no good reason to bury so much urban land under barren expanses of asphalt. These lots exist because some members of Congress want the suburban convenience of free, open-air parking - and can overrule both the city and good sense to keep it there."

(*a photo of the House side of Capitol Hill, including my former office at 430 S. Capitol Street near the bottom edge*)

"Anyhow: Congress should build dormitory housing - which would activate those lots and reduce the Capitol's isolation from the city, while making service in Congress more affordable for Americans who, like most of us, are non-millionaires."

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 17/09/2026

See, e.g., this timely exchange about stuff that'd boggle most normies' minds.

An exchange of posts between Anil Dash and Tom Lynch.

Dash: "I would like media to care more about the reality that tech tycoons want to kill people than what they're imagining about Al wanting to kill people. We have multi-millionaires (with support from billionaires!) calling for ethnic cleansing, a thing that has happened in living memory. Not theoretical!"

Lynch: "We need to separate outcome from motive.
I don't think any of them want to kill people. I think they want an Ayn Randian world where they can get as rich as they want & not care about victims (empathy is bad).
Zuckerberg didn't decide to hurt kids, he just didn't care that he was hurting kids. #AI"

Dash: "David Heinemeier Hansson called for the extermination of Romani people, comparing them to animals. An entire roster of tech tycoons responded by each personally giving him $1 million for his open source software project, even though he's already wealthy enough to have a personal race car team."

Dash: "Marc Andreessen and the team at his fund a16z hired - as a *partner*! - a man who has no background in finance, in tech, in startups at all, simply because that man had strangled one of my unarmed neighbors to death on the subway. To send a signal about what they support."

Dash: "They *very much* want people to die."

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 17/09/2026

(*scans headline*) "Hey, Siri: play 'Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before,' by the Smiths?"

An Axios headline, above the byline of journalist Barak Ravid. The headline reads:

'Trump tells Axios he's approaching major crossroads in Iran war'

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 16/09/2026

“The war may have permanently reduced the number of Gulf bases the Navy can use for resupply.… On top of that, long deployments scramble maintenance schedules… mapped out many years in advance.… [A source] estimated that the Navy would start to confront readiness issues as soon as the next 2 years.”

The war may have permanently reduced the number of Gulf bases the Navy can use for resupply as well. Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the largest US Navy base in the region and home to the Fifth Fleet, suffered major damage from Iranian strikes. It is unusable now, and repairing it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars - a situation that led directly to the supply problems that caused the deteriorating conditions aboard the Lincoln.

On top of that, long deployments scramble maintenance schedules that are mapped out many years in advance, according to people familiar with the matter. The 11 US aircraft carriers in particular spend as much as a quarter of their service lives in maintenance.

With just a few shipyards in the US able to perform those overhauls, maintaining the schedule is a key part of keeping the fleet ready, the people said.

One of the people estimated that the Navy would start to confront readiness issues as soon as the next two years. The American Enterprise Institute said that missed maintenance on US Navy ships will cost about $750 million to make up.

"The impact is that they will miss the window for maintenance or they'll have to do less because the schedule is now compressed, and that has hurt the Navy's ship availability," said Mark Cancian of the Center for International and Strategic Studies. "This was a big problem during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 12/09/2026

Socioeconomic dynamics might be at play, too: with cars lasting longer and entering the used marketplace later than they used to,, new-car buyers might wonder: “will anyone _want_ this taxicab-yellow RAV4?”

How long should a car last?

The average life span of a car has been increasing in the U.S. (as well as around the globe). According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the average age of a vehicle in the U.S. in 2000 was 8.9 years. By 2023, that number had risen by 40% to 12.5 years.

Similarly, the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association reports that the average age of a passenger car in the EU is now 12 years, while the average age of a truck is 14.2 years. As car owners are driving cars for longer, they are also spending more on car repairs.

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 11/09/2026

The magnetic draw of young Nazis to Republican candidates keeps giving a distinct, unfortunate redolence to … well …:

An infamous/famous/profane Onion headline from 1998, over a satirical faux-commentary. The headline:

'Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?'

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 07/09/2026

“Cunningham posted a picture of herself slyly smiling in an Arby’s tee with the words ‘look who has the meats now.’ How did this happen? How did the right get the meats?” I … to speak freely for a second: what’s the meat here? Quinoa?

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 06/09/2026

Among other things about this bit of Andreessen Horowitz thinkfluencing, can I just note what sh*t-awful writing it is?

A LinkedIn post by the fine characters at Andreessen Horowitz. The pictured excerpt reads:

“It is fashionable to hate on social media and to pontificate about how it's worsened, because the intellectual accoutrement du jour is being a conscientious (™) tech critic.

“This stated preference does not match the general public's behaviours.”

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 05/09/2026

It's true, believe you me. I burned to death five times in my EV. It's a miracle I can even post this; on one commute, I burned to death _twice_.

The text of a post from which I've removed the user's information. The post reads:

"We need to focus on public transport and accessibility, not batteries that are explosive and almost impossible to put out once they catch on fire. That are also extremely toxic when they decompose and especially when they catch on fire."

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 04/09/2026

“Their proximity and access … [can] put them on a position to attract paid content sponsorships”:

The cover of Maggie Haberman’s book ‘Confidence Man,’ a bio of Trump.

The cover of the book ‘Regime Change,’ a book on Trump’s second term authored by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.

An Axios headline from Nov. 20, 2023, over an item bylined by Mike Allen. The headline reads: “Scoop: Haberman, Swan sign deal for Trump book”

Maggie Haberman, with a semi-forced smile, accepting an awkward side hug from President Trump in his first-term Oval Office.

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 04/09/2026

Defiance of the power of the purse _this_ naked should count as rebellion against the Constitution in violation of §3 of the 14th Am., to be frank. There is no universe in which this subterfuge logically comports w/ the directives of Congress. democrats-appropriations.house.gov/news/press-r...

"Without notifying Congress or the American people, DoD has signed an interagency agreement that could give the Department access to billions of dollars that Congress provided to NIH for critical biomedical research. These funds were provided to support research to develop treatments or cures for infectious diseases such as influenza, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, Ebola, and other dangerous pathogens."

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Greg Greene (he/him/his) @greene.haus · 01/09/2026

*If you respond to our anti-constitutional s–– by doing what the law has always allowed, farewell to the union*: um, okay? That’s a stance so precedented that none less than pre-1860 Lincoln _literally_ mocked it. www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/spee...

Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action? But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"

To be sure, what the robber demanded of me - my money - was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

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