iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Totally checked-out political system that allows Fetterman to still drive, let alone remain senator. www.inquirer.com/politics/pen...

Excerpt from the Inquirer piece:

Some of the car purchases are dated around the time of a 2024 car crash in Maryland that sent Fetterman and his wife, Gisele,
along with a 62-year-old woman in another vehicle, to the hospital. A police report noted that Fetterman was "at fault" and traveling
"well over the posted speed limit" before hitting the other vehicle. The damage done to both vehicles was "disabling," according to the police report.

Three former aides said they later heard
Fetterman say the reason the crash occurred was because he fell asleep at the wheel.
Fetterman's office did not respond to a specific question about that claim, and he has not commented publicly on the crash.

000

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Calling it “rogue behavior” in the second sentence kinda gives the game away: Jeffries does not give a fuck about ICE terrorizing Americans as long as it’s done “lawfully” and consistently.

Tweet from Hakeem Jeffries yesterday:

“Deeply disturbed by reports that ICE agents shot a man in the Bronx today while a child was in the vehicle.
The rogue behavior must be fully and independently investigated by state and local authorities.
Any reckless wrongdoer found to have broken the law must be held accountable.”

010

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I think “fall from grace” is a little too cute to describe sexually abusing kids and paying them off for years afterwards.

NY Times push notification reading:

Dennis Hastert Dies
The former Republican congressman from Illinois, who served as speaker of the House before a fall from grace, has died at 84.

111

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I am so tired of Truck-Commercial Nazism.

US Department of State Facebook post proclaiming “It’s a beautiful sight.” Over an image of some barn in a field with the American flag and text reading “This and 250,000 visa revocations.”

000

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The classic text kieranhealy.org/files/papers...

Screenshot from “Fuck Nuance” paper at link

2213

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Great news; I loved the two hours I played yesterday but the length of battles and difficulty had me going

Master Shake telling Meatwad “I am 30 or 40 years old and I do not need this”

040

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Dying to the first boss in Control Resonant a half-dozen times like

Brad Pitt smiling in the closet in Burn After Reading

000

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Enjoyed Cumings' North Korea: Another Country despite the age. Goodreads requires you to log in to read reviews, so here's a screenshot of mine:

screenshot of Goodreads review: 4 of 5 stars

Pretty good, if now dated, look at North Korea through the '80s and '90s.

Bruce Cumings takes an interesting approach where he first unwraps popular Western conceptions about the state—focusing on the Korean War and recurrent "nuclear crises"—before doubling back and telling a rough story of Kim Il Sung and the state through the back-half of the twentieth century. Cumings doesn't present a rosy picture of North Korea, but is rigorously empathetic to their struggles and the position they found themselves in after World War II and the Korean War, more measured and convincing than the buffoonish official communications issued by the regime. It is the kind of writing on other countries, and on history, that you wish you'd see more of.

The biggest downside, of course, is this was written in 2003 and a lot of things have happened since then! The heir-apparent at the time, Kim Jong-nam, fell out of favor around this time and was replaced by Kim Jong Un at the end of the decade after fleeing the country (and before several assassination attempts were finally successful in 2017). The book spends an inordinate amount of time recounting the nuclear power program of North Korea, which became a nuclear weapons program sometime before the first bomb was tested in 2006. So it is a weird snapshot of a specific moment in North Korean history (and international politics) where things could have gone much better after the fall of the USSR—but thanks to institutional incompetence across both the Clinton and GWB administrations, didn't.

010

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

refilled the hummingbird feeder and immediately had a hungry fella

110

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Favorite books about 9/11: @attackerman.bsky.social ‘s Reign of Terror and Richard Beck’s Homeland both look at the security state aftermath (and imperial boomerang) while Faludi’s The Terror Dream is an astute piece of media criticism: how post-9/11 media reinforced gendered myths.

Cover: Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 era destabilized America and produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman

Cover: Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life by Richard Beck

Cover: The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America by Susan Faludi

000

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Love this line at the end of a lecture about how real people talk and live

Screenshot from piece: ALL of these things are The COST OF TRUMP. I just tried this phrase on a breakfast attended by 20 people. It CRUSHED.

1300

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I grew up in Kansas City area but might have been muddled some by time in MI/Chicago. (Thankfully none of NC/TN seems to be taking.)

Dialect map placing me in Denver and the upper-plains/west generally.

110

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Teddy in an opulent mood this morning

Tuxedo cat reclined back on the couch, legs sprawled and belly shining in the light

041

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

hell yeah IG Reels has the real shit

220

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

tickling the PBJ dragon’s tail

using a butter knife to hold the two halves of the apart like the criticality-accident experiment called “tickling the dragon’s tail” that infamously killed the physicist performing it

000

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

watching some old Donald Duck with the toddler

010

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

It would be very funny if this is the incident that finally turns the talking heads against Trump.

Jake Tapper tweet whining:

“So the USSS thought the threat against the president was strong enough to surreptitiously remove him from AF1.
And then proceeded to let the plane full of White House staffers and reporters take off and fly back to the US.”

000

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

how does The Free Press have over 1k followers but near-zero engagement with posts

000

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

luckily there’s one brave man left

Randy Quaid in Independence Day about to save the day by crashing his fighter jet into the alien weak spot.

0602

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

they’ve captured the IG Reels magic

Instagram video from the inside of someone’s car captioned “POV: me telling my older neighbors I have been communicating with their trees be my spirit guides told me I had to”

000

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Everyone getting excited about Jimothy when we got our own in-house cryptid.

Large, rotund tuxedo cat caught limbs-sprawled mid cleaning.

010

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Amazing to remember The Chickenshit Club was already written around the 6k mark, before it dropped even further.

Cover of The Chickenshit Club by Jesse Eisinger

031

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Truth nuke. nypost.com/2026/07/14/m...

The far-left podcaster argued that homeschooling was part of America's
"fundamental crazy Christian problem," suggesting it was essentially child abuse.

010

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Left a paper box ajar on the front porch this spring, and an enterprising Carolina Wren built a nest inside. The babies are almost fledglings!

Five baby birds (Carolina Wren) packed inside a makeshift nest, surrounded by twigs and moss and other material.

0121

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Just finished Blind Oracles, which I really recommend to anyone interested in intellectual history and the Cold War. Bruce Kuklick is a very clear and concise writer who carefully picks apart so many of the thinkers of the time.

Cover of Blind Oracles by Bruce Kuklick.

020

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

From 9am to 7pm I guess you can do whatever you want

Top articles list including:
Cardiologist: 5 things I never do before 9 a.m.—after 20 years of treating heart attacks

l've studied over 200 kids-the ones with high emotional intelligence do 7 things

Cardiologist: 7 things I never do after 7 p.m.—after 20 years of treating heart attacks

120

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

A flimsy pretext to get more punitive based on bizarre theories of how inmates would get drugs, ignoring it’s mostly staff smuggling them in.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice implemented the policy in April after 385 books that entered prisons tested positive for synthetic drugs last year. Those drugs included meth, fentanyl, marijuana, and PCP, which can be turned into liquid and sprayed on books and sniffed.

020

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Reading AGAINST MONEY is fun because there’s a nice balance of abstract sections and Ominous Foreboding.

Excerpt page 158 of AGAINST MONEY:

The center of gravity of liquidity management is now the "shadow banking" system. In the last two decades, especially in the US and Europe, liquidity for longer-term investment has been provided by the private money market, by a large complex of private-sector balance sheets that have engaged in bank-like liquidity transformation, but that are not traditional banks. Where the mortgage example above relies on the ability of a single bank to expand its balance sheet in order for the couple to procure their house, in modern systems, it is a complex of balance sheets and instruments that end up allowing for this. As the financial economist Zoltan Pozsar and his coauthors put it: "Like the traditional banking system, the shadow banking system conducts credit intermediation. However, unlike the traditional banking system, where credit intermediation is performed 'under one roof' —that of a bank-in the shadow banking system, it is performed through a daisy-chain of nonbank financial intermediaries in a multi step process.
"19 When the
"public desires to become more liquid," in Keynes's words, there may now be a thick layer of balance sheets between them and the institution that ultimately becomes more illiquid.

Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons happily chiming, “I’m in danger.”

021

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Discussion from Against Money about how less worker power in the US and other nations leads to higher stock prices. We gotta start laying the rhetorical groundwork right now that any increase in worker rights is gonna make the stonks unhappy, and that’s both expected and a good sign.

Excerpt from page 99 of AGAINST MONEY:

While there's not much on this problem in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty has an interesting discussion of it in a later article with Gabriel Zucman: "The higher Tobin's Q in Anglo-Saxon countries might be related to the fact that shareholders have more control on corporations than in Germany, France, and Japan.... The 'con-trol right' or 'stakeholder' view of the firm can in principle explain why the market value of corporations is particularly low in Germany (where worker representatives have voting rights in corporate boards without any equity stake in the company)."24 In other words, wealth as reflected in assets like corporate shares is not simply a matter of how many useful tools and resources a society has, and the flow of valuable stuff they pro-duce. It critically depends on how much of that flow is subject to tradable property claims. A technological improvement that raises profits will show up as an increase in aggregate wealth, because the increased profits will be capitalized into the price of shares (or other ownership rights over the company. But if workers have enough social power to capture some or all of that improvement, it will not show up as greater wealth, because workers' claims against the company do not take the form of tradable property rights with a market price.

2147

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Raising a child is just getting a front-row seat in seeing how gender is socially constructed.

“Blue” themed sticker book with dinosaurs, race cars, pirates, “gross stuff” etc

“Pink” sticker book with princess, tea party, horse show, and fashion topics (amongst others)

020

Greg Brown @gregbrown.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Insane we give rural conservative psychos a veto on books, especially since that’s how all of American politics works these days!

But West High didn't ban it. Neither did the Salt Lake City School District, where the school sits.
Three other Utah school districts did. Each found "The Bluest Eye" amounted to pornographic or indecent content, or as Utah code calls it, "objective sensitive material."
Under Utah law, once three school districts (or two districts and five charters) remove the same book for containing "objective sensitive material," all public schools in the state must also pull - and destroy - the title.

012