iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 20h

funny you say that… balloon-juice.com/2011/08/30/t...

Fox News: Nickelodeon for people with dementia

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

oddly, this came up earlier today

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

so too Philip K. Dick www.bostonreview.net/articles/hen...

We live in Dick’s world—but with little hope of divine intervention or invasion. The world where we communicate and interact at a distance is increasingly filled with algorithms that appear human, but are not—fake people generated by fake realities. When Ashley Madison, a dating site for people who want to cheat on their spouses, was hacked, it turned out that tens of thousands of the women on the site were fake “fembots” programmed to send millions of chatty messages to male customers, so as to delude them into thinking that they were surrounded by vast numbers of potential sexual partners.

These problems are only likely to get worse as the physical world and the world of information become increasingly interpenetrated in an Internet of (badly functioning) Things. Many of the aspects of Joe Chip’s future world in Ubik look horrendously dated to modern eyes: the archaic role of women, the assumption that nearly everyone smokes. Yet the door to Joe’s apartment—which argues with him and refuses to open because he has not paid it the obligatory tip—sounds ominously plausible. Someone, somewhere, is pitching this as a viable business plan to Y Combinator or the venture capitalists in Menlo Park.

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

the human loss remains beyond our poor power to add or detract; in political terms, this from Paul Krugman on the 10th anniversary still rings true archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blog...

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

the quote in question, for any who wondered about his tone here

"I aspire to be the governor of all. That sometimes draws me in sharp contrast with the extreme members of the Republican Party. But I don’t think they are real Republicans," Drummond said. "I consider them more fascist.”

"I used to think politics was linear," Drummond added. "But frankly folks, it's circular. So the further right you get, at some point you tip over the top and you come down on the other side."

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

I always wished I’d come across this William F. Buckley quote earlier on in life; helps illuminate what drives so much of conservatism—much more than the boilerplate about fences and institutions that it turns out (almost) none of them ever cared about

As evidence of my final measure of devotion to the truth: The Beatles are not merely awful, I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are godawful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive, to the magic of art, that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music, even as the imposter popes went down in history as ‘anti-popes.’

“If our children can listen avariciously to the Beatles, it must be because through our genes we transmitted some tendency of disorder toward the kind.

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Bob Inglis saw what was animating GOP elites & voters over a decade and a half ago, as he lost his primary by over 30 points to Trey Gowdy www.motherjones.com/politics/201...

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there’s a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life’s earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, “What the heck are you talking about?” I’m trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, “You don’t know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don’t know this?!” And I said, “Please forgive me. I’m just ignorant of these things.” And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

also the dedication to trolling and bad-faith provocation, as Sartre observed 80 years ago on anti-Semites

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

always been true, always been politically incorrect to say in the moment this was too late, by its own admission, 20 years ago: www.cbsnews.com/news/good-ri...

November 15, 2006 / 11:47 AM EST
This commentary was written by CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer.

This is a story I should have written 12 years ago when the "Contract with America" Republicans captured the House in 1994. I apologize.

Really, it's just a simple thesis: The men who ran the Republican Party in the House of Representatives for the past 12 years were a group of weirdos. Together, they comprised one of the oddest legislative power cliques in our history. And for 12 years, the media didn't call a duck a duck, because that's not something we're supposed to do.

I'm not talking about the policies of the Contract for America crowd, but the character. I'm confident that 99 percent of the population — if they could see these politicians up close, if they watched their speeches and looked at their biographies — would agree, no matter what their politics or predilections.

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Bob Sheffer is alive and well, and still at Goldman after all these years theonion.com/this-war-wil...

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

yes—it was Elbridge Colby’s great grandfather, Elbridge Colby, who did the converting www.latimes.com/archives/la-...

LA Times article from 1996 noting the elder Elbridge’s conversion

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

borderline www.latimes.com/archives/la-...

1996 LA Times article noting that Elbridge Colby’s great-grandfather, Elbridge Colby, converted to Catholicism

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

this claim about the TP was the official story at the time, and may well have been true in some instances. broadly, though, it wasn’t the case the TP was the same GOP base that had revered W., feeling mad and playing dress-up www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/o...

Our analysis casts doubt on the Tea Party’s “origin story.” Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today.

What’s more, contrary to some accounts, the Tea Party is not a creature of the Great Recession. Many Americans have suffered in the last four years, but they are no more likely than anyone else to support the Tea Party. And while the public image of the Tea Party focuses on a desire to shrink government, concern over big government is hardly the only or even the most important predictor of Tea Party support among voters.

So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

you’re never going to believe this, but that’s empirically false. this was obvious to anyone whose memory extended back in time more than 3 months, and also showed up in longitudinal studies. very fun that Peters decided to paste that guy’s lies for us all www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/o...

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

the media craves reporting what Both Sides have to say, as GOP staffer Mike Lofgren noted 20 years ago

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

they were careless people, Don and Bibi heatmap.news/energy/energ...

In Australia, gas stations are running out of diesel. The government of the Philippines adopted a four-day workweek to reduce commuting. Pakistan announced a two-week school closure. Nepal is rationing cooking fuel. Thailand’s prime minister told civil servants to take the stairs, and the government set air conditioning to a minimum 79 degrees Fahrenheit.

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

based on a true story! www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

Young Roger Ailes is standing on the top bunk of his bed and his father holds out his arms and tells him to jump.

When he does, his dad suddenly steps back and Ailes crashes to the floor.

“Don’t ever trust anybody,” his father says.

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

the Clinton administration wasn’t experienced at the time as an era of self-reflection and shame, and yet…

Clinton: "I think I did something for the worst possible reason -- just because I could. I think that's the most , just about the most morally indefensible reason that anybody could have for doing anything. When you do something just because you could ... I've thought about it a lot. And there are lots of more sophisticated explanations, more complicated psychological explanations. But none of them are an excuse ... Only a fool does not look to explain his mistakes."

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

“We live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s,” reads the subhed here: www.bostonreview.net/articles/hen...

they were also based on a keen interest in the processes through which reality is socially constructed. Dick believed that we all live in a world where “spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into heads of the reader.” He argued:

the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans.

In Dick’s books, the real and the unreal infect each other, so that it becomes increasingly impossible to tell the difference between them.

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

no one ever doubted that the filibuster could on occasion bring favored results; but that doesn’t mean it’s overall a good thing it’s an accidental creation that hinders legislative policymaking and obscures responsibility. from a few months ago: www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-is-r...

Other supposed benefits of the filibuster keep conspicuously failing to materialize. In theory, the sixty-vote legislative threshold is supposed to induce some bipartisanship. Meanwhile, we’re breaking the record for longest government shutdown.

There are better arguments for the filibuster—including that it does still frustrate some parts of Trump’s agenda. And of course this is the reason Trump wants to do away with it. But the filibuster constrains the president only in ways that are distorted and strange. The only major policy bills that make it through the Senate these days are passed via the odd auxiliary method of budget reconciliation, which lets the Senate dodge the filibuster for certain bills that deal with federal spending and revenues. In practice, this system perversely ties Trump and his lawmakers more closely together, since the only hope for getting anything significant passed is to graft it onto one of the major reconciliation packages, like the One Big Beautiful Bill, that the president spearheads and promises to sign.

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

still more detail on this, from Brad DeLong via Daniel Larison: www.theamericanconservative.com/rubio-and-un...

Years ago, Brad DeLong explained that this derived from the elder Bush’s habit of mocking hard-line anticommunists for calling on the U.S. to “unleash” Chiang Kai-shek on the mainland. He added:
But George H. W. Bush’s sons–even the smart one, Jeb–never got the joke. They, you see, didn’t know enough about world history or even the history of the Republican Party to know who Chiang Kaishek was, or what “Unleash Chiang!” meant. Hence Jeb Bush’s explanation that twentieth-century Chinese nationalist, socialist, general, and dictator Chiang Kaishek was a “mystical warrior… who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society.”
This is a good example of how a tradition can be reinvented when its original meaning ceases to be useful. It is a bit amusing to see Rubio, who has been cultivating a reputation as one of the new foreign policy hard-liners in the Senate, on the receiving end of a Bush family tradition grounded in the elder Bush’s dislike for the anticommunist hard-liners of his day.

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Larry Bartels made this point awhile back, about the Great Depression www.washingtonpost.com/business/eco...

"In the U.S.," wrote Bartels, "voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved.

"In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning funny-money party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher . . . and the economy improved.

“In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and longer-lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter.”

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

we go live for comment to AOL headquarters

North Haverbrook, where the monorail is king, looking shabby

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

GOP Senate staffer Mike Lofgren wrote this a decade and a half ago: truthout.org/articles/goo...

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that “they are all crooks,” and that “government is no good,” further leading them to think, “a plague on both your houses” and “the parties are like two kids in a school yard.” This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s – a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn (“Government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

From Nov. 2005: www.washingtonpost.com/local/virgin... Allen "combines the people skills of a Bill Clinton, with the convictions of a Ronald Reagan, with the non-threatening persona of a George W. Bush circa 2000, prior to his becoming a hate-figure for the Left."

Nov 2005 National Review cover article on George Allen

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

the GOP’s wholesale dependence on identity politics was blindingly obvious by, at the latest, the Tea Party era; but, it remained politically incorrect for pundits to say so www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/o...

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

would do the ”he chose poorly“ gif here, but to be fair she’s not having that bad a time yet maybe…

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

I swear I’m the only person who remembers that this existed web.archive.org/web/20080506...

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Yes, exactly! This line, on William Harvey’s circulation theory, came to mind: aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/SM4/H...

In fact, in wading through these forgotten controversies, I felt myself quite at home. Substitute the name of Darwin for that of Harvey, and the truth that history repeats itself will come home to the dullest apprehension. It was said of the doctrine of the circulation of the blood that nobody over forty could be got to adopt it ; and I think I remember a passage in the 'Origin of Species,' to the effect that its author expects to convert only young and flexible minds.

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

not geared at a particularly big audience web.archive.org/web/20080506...

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

am a little surprised how lopsidedly pro-Cuomo Jewish voters were (per at least this one poll), given Cuomo’s comments earlier on

63 percent of Jewish voters went for Cuomo, vs. 33% for Mamdani, per CNN exit poll

Cuomo in July: “I would wager that in the primary, more than 50% of the Jewish people voted for Mamdani”

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

Look, we need to welcome all perspectives in good-faith debate. I personally happen to be opposed to political murders. But I recognize that not everybody shares that view.

Photo - Kyle Rittenhouse, right, is introduced to a cheering crowd by Charlie Kirk, middle, founder of Turning Point USA, as Jack Posobiec, left, host of Once America News Network, joins them on stage at a panel discussion at the Turning Point USA America Fest 2021 event, Monday, Dec. 20, 2021, in Phoenix.
Ross D. Franklin - AP

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

it’s always politically correct in punditry to fantasize about our disinterested & incompetent leadership maybe someday accomplishing something

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

DC media was all over this at the time

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r_ephemeral @rephemeral.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

man I should not have let my spouse pick the show tonight

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