iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I haven't identified the newspaper this came from, but the same essay was posted today on a Substack operated by the "Iosco County Dems." Tawas City is on the eastern shore of Michigan's Lower Peninsula.

U.S. can be described as an ‘Elective Autocracy’

Editor,

Under the U.S. Constitution, only Congress has the power to pass legislation and make new public law. Executive orders cannot create new law or appropriate funds; they only direct how existing law is administered.

Since January 2025, only 108 bills have passed through Congress. Meanwhile, approximately 300 executive orders have been signed, with roughly half being legislative in substance. Let that sink in. Political scientists have a term for a system where one person rules by decree while the legislature sits idle: an Elective Autocracy which might be closer to describing the United States today.

Here’s the concept: an elective autocracy is what happens when a country keeps the outward form of democracy – elections, a legislature, courts – but power actually concentrates in a single office. The vote still happens. The other branches still technically exist. But the real decisions are made by one person, unilaterally.

The Constitution was built to prevent exactly this. Congress legislates. The President executes. Courts interpret. Three separate powers, each checking the others. That’s the design – the complete opposite of autocracy.

So how do you get from a constitutional democratic republic to an elective autocracy? Not with a coup – all it takes is a little drift. A legislature passes fewer and fewer laws. An executive then fills that vacuum with orders, mandates and directives, one after another, on immigration, spending, regulation, whatever Congress won’t or doesn’t touch. Nothing about the system officially changes. You still vote. Congress still meets. But the actual lawmaking moves into one office.

That’s the mechanism of an elective autocracy: legitimacy borrowed from elections, power exercised like a decree-issuing executive. It doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates. This isn’t about any single leader – it’s about the structure that allows it. An elective autocracy doesn’t require anyone t…

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

In my dream, I am trying to find a new church. Maybe I have moved? Anyway, I've visited one that seems promising, but it's weird how much they talk about the spiritual lives of Muppets. The choir director comes out. They are a Muppet: a human person, head and shoulders under fake fur.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

"let's write STUPIDLY TASTY on the inside of the beef jerky package" "what if someone opens it halfway to hold the food in the plastic while eating" "only a moron would do that"

A beef jerky wrapper is halfway open, with the word STUPID prominently visible on the inside.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Shelby Bottoms Park, Nashville, August 30.

A black butterfly perches on a red flower.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

If you want the Emacs spell-checker to not bother you about a correct word, are your options • [a]ccept for this session vs. [i]nsert into private dictionary • [a]dd to private dictionary vs. [i]gnore for this session Twenty-plus years with this tool, and I misremember every time.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Discussing an acquaintance who arrived the US as a child on a refugee visa. This young adult needs to renew their driver's license. The discussion is whether a US citizen should go with them to the DMV so that, if they disappear, someone will know about it. Not a "land of the free" discussion.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

If you were standing on the Moon, in the dark shadow, Earth would cover the Sun and most of the corona. But you would see sunlight bent through Earth's atmosphere: a ring of reds and golds, every dawn and dusk on the planet, all at once.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I knew the names for "CamelCase" and "snake_case", but only today have I encountered the name for "kebab-case".

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

[recursive epistemology hat] seems presumptuous to presume there isn't another way we haven't yet invented but that scientific evidence will suggest we should use instead

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

The "Glance" advertising tool for lockscreens on Motorola phones crosses the line from "dark patterns" to "malware." Unacceptable. I submitted a "policy violation" complaint in addition to this dumb review, but I'm not optimistic.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Me: Wow, a hand-addressed envelope! With a handwritten letter on blue-lined paper inside! Letter: would you like to be a Jehovah's Witness

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Me: [pastes a Shakespeare couplet into a document] Copilot: Hey, I can tighten up that writing for you!

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

It took me a while to parse this, because of the strange way that The Economist has labeled their coordinates in the plot. The way to read it is: the relationship between homework scores and exam scores in the non-chatbot group is linear, but the relationship in the chatbot group definitely isn't.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I have a foolproof method for locating lost items like this. What you do is go to the store and purchase a replacement item, then bring the replacement home and put it on the shelf next to the lost one.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

NPR: Would you say there's a fingerprint, where a Pat Wilson song is different from a Rivers Cuomo song? WEEZER/CUOMO: Well, Pat loves Mixolydian mode, where I write in major.

npr.org

Weezer's Rivers Cuomo talks about their latest self-titled album

NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben speaks with Weezer's Rivers Cuomo. The band's latest self-titled album is also known as the Gold Album.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

A new neighbor (politely located outdoors). Best guess seems to be a "polyphemus moth," which shares a name with Odysseus's one-eyed (later zero-eyed) antagonist. Hopefully sharing these photos does not offend Poseidon. Make sure to zoom on in the cute feathery antennae!

A polyphemus moth on a vinyl-sided wall, with a man's hand for scale.

A polyphemus moth on a vinyl-sided wall. The view is head-on, showing eyes, antennae, and the bushiness of the back at the expense of any detail on the wings.

A polyphemus moth on a vinyl-sided wall. View is from above-behind, showcasing the brown wings with their black and pink lines. Three of the four large eyespots are visible.

Close-in view of the antennae of a polyphemus moth.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

If the evil minions of the supervillain have poor posture, are they … hunchmen? #lunchpun

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Realizing you didn't know a thing can be quite uncomfortable. Learning new things frequently involves realizing you didn't know the things. The scrolling algorithms punish content which causes discomfort. Scrolling is a "lean back" activity. Education is "lean forward."

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

A great blue heron at Cummins Falls State Park, outside of Cookeville. This was where the trail leaves the side of the canyon and runs upriver towards the waterfall. Crawling around the waterfall was a blast, but is not for the faint of heart.

A great blue heron fishes in a rocky stream.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

"I Never Saw Another Butterfly" is a collection of art and poetry by children. The papers were found hidden in the walls at Terezín after the camp was liberated, because the children were not allowed to make art. Most of the artists died at Auschwitz. Oops, wrong link.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Grammatical oversight? Verbs are modified by adverbs? Intentional grammatical error? If its odd, customers will notice it twice. Uncommon grammatical exception? A "bare adverb" has the same form as the corresponding adjective. Pun? "Think about different things." Youtube, eight minutes.

youtu.be

How Bad Grammar Saved Apple

YouTube video by The Art Of Storytelling

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Reposted by rob mahurin

rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Werner Herzog Voice iss a dangerous game to pley … you start off viss a gentle Austrian accent, but ze experience is incomplete until you begin also to notice zat ordinary zings possess a strange inner beauty. Soon even ze most mundane interaction becomes a comment on ze human condition, and you mus

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

New meme template unlocked

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Where I grew up (Appalachia), people said "dag" (or "daggone") as a mild swear word. "You failed that test? Dag, too bad." My partner (PNW) has a vowel merger where "leg/beg" have the same vowel as "lag/bag." My partner is excited about a restaurant called "Deg Thai." Hilarity ensues.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

SIMPLICIO: "I don't trust chatbot output — except for summarizing longer texts." SALVIATI: "How do you know whether the summaries are accurate if you have not read the longer text yourself?" SIMPLICIO: [blank stare]

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Breathing as "a task to be completed as needed" is a downright interesting idea.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

It is my experience that people who say "I don't mind if everybody knows, I have nothing to hide" all seem to close the door when they take a shit. Privacy is different from shame.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

How much of "wow that looks like a dinosaur" (note: egrets ARE dinosaurs) is due to forty+ years of dinosaur reconstruction with cues from birds? A century ago, when Iguanodon "was" a lumbering spike-thumbed Godzilla, would this behavior have seemed less dino-ish and more … birdlike? 🧪: 🦤🦖🐊

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

An excellent crepuscular volumetric cloud shadow stretching over this volleyball game during last night's #sunset. Took me a few tries to get the ball in the air.

The shadow of a cumulus cloud stretches across the sky at dusk. In the foreground is a volleyball game, with the ball hanging in the sky.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

I'm not sure about the provenance of the image, but it (a) roughly gels with other predictions that I've seen, and (b) perhaps explains why Bluesky has been so full of astounding #sunset photos lately.

Map of the northeastern United States. A bright band stretches southeast from Lake Superior to the Chesapeake Bay and out to the Atlantic, with the words "Thick smoke" over the Washington, DC area. Caption text below the bright band: "Predicted wildfire smoke Friday afternoon (HRRR model)."

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Benji's new skill is the best news I have heard in days.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Since most of the "greenhouse-trapped" heat in the atmosphere escapes at night, carbon dioxide has a bigger impact on raising nightly minimum temperatures than on raising daily maximum temperatures. I didn't understand this until fairly recently, and nearly everyone I tell about it is surprised.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

A lovely "sun pillar" here. These clouds are made of plate-shaped ice crystals floating horizontally, each one reflecting the sun like a tiny mirror.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Apparently they DO make them like this any more. Best old song I've learned today. My Classical Greek is super-rusty but the pronunciation here sounds on target. I wonder how much confidence we have in the chords and harmonic progressions and melodies? Maybe it's explained in the book.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

A lovely photo of a "sundog": like a rainbow, but from ice crystals. Light bends around the insides of horizontal hexagonal plates, so the sundogs appear level with the sun on either side. There are lots of other ice halos from different shapes and orientations of ice crystals. 🔭

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

A chemistry student is telling me that an "oligomer," a word I don't know, has more units than a monomer but fewer than a polymer. "Oh! From the same place as 'oligarchy'." Knowing enough things to make connections is SO FUN, y'all. Not everybody understands that school makes adulthood MORE FUN.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

"im having my house painted" "what a hassle, you have to take everything off the walls, you have to cover all your furniture" "what? no"

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

"this bad movie adaptation of my book was well-reviewed, which also made me angry"

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Reposted by rob mahurin

rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Knuth's "TeX" is from "technology", with the Greek chi. The documentation for Lamport's La-TeX macros says it rhymes with "blah blech." I frequently say "blah" and "blech" when my LaTeX is not doing what I want, so it tracks.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Is the noise here a vocalization from the swan? I have noticed that robins and doves often vocalize in time with their wingbeats when they take off. My guess is that the flapping moves extra air through their respiratory system.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

havin a stretch together on a lazy #caturday

Two cats stretched out on a paisley rug. Pandora, left with tortoiseshell colors, is twisted into a sort of corkscrew with her belly and hind feet in the air; her eye is open and she is watching the camera. Odin, on the right in long black hair, has his face near Pandora's. Their front paws are touching.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

I happened to be watching the sunset tonight from just the right place for this excellent crepuscular shadow to pass directly overhead. It was like having the sky split into bright and dark halves. (See alt text for an explanation.) #bluesky #sunset 🔭

A crepuscular shadow, facing west just after sunset. There is a layer of haze which is still illuminated by the setting sun. But on the right, some distant hill is cashing a shadow on this layer. The chiaroscuro boundary happens to pass directly overhead, splitting the sky into golden and blue halves. There is a hint of a bright ray near the "two o'clock" angle.

See the description in the previous photo — this is the same sky, but facing east.

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