iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

There was a lot more than gas pieces behind Reagan's '80 win. Embassy hostages (remember them?) had a lot to do with it. Plus, a lot of people who voted Carter in '76 felt pretty screwed over by his policies.

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Various fantasy role-playing games have multiple character classes that use magic, supposedly powered by direct mechanisms, yes See for example dungeons and dragons, which I think is what's being referenced

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

That's like saying that if you study malaria you must want to make people sick with a chronic parasite infection Study war to learn how to have less of it

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

If you examine the first stages of how vision works in mammalian brains, you have to be remarkably obtuse to refuse to recognize information processing happening

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Civics education in the US is in a sorry state, judging by some of the crap I'm seeing in campaign ads

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

We should Blue tsunamis for the next couple of cycles, but not expect that the resulting Congresses should have great appetite for radical reforms

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

A lot can happen in two years

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Reposted by Aardvark Cheeselog

Jenny Hunter @jennyhunter.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

It’s also kind of like if the first thing you did upon waking up was check to make sure there were no monsters under your bed, and you were using that as evidence that there’s a monster epidemic

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I think it's a weakness of D voters to think every charismatic legislator would be a good President, and being a good President for 8 years would outweigh the value of a career in the Senate.

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Some of the projections I'm seeing seem delirious. Running the table on every Senate race that's not blood-Red and coming up with a majority? Winning Senate races in blood-Red States? OTOH I did see this AM that the Iowa Farmers Union endorses straight Democratic ticket for Federal office...

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

"Why are we paying for all of these disaster-prevention measures when we never suffer any disasters?"

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Since MAGA got the Strait of Hormuz closed, I have been waiting for them to start talking about export bans on US petroleum to keep prices down. Today, @pkrugman.bsky.social delivers the word substack.com/home/post/p-...

substack.com

Donald the Deadbeat Does Diesel

Trump gets ready to stiff more contractors

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

@bretdevereaux.bsky.social did you see this one La Tène river shipment gone missing

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

If you know of any such resources I would appreciate a pointer Thanks

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Right now I'm trying to find instructional discussions/videos about how to cobb agates Not cab agates Not slab or slice or otherwise saw agates Not smashing agates with a sledgehammer But using a hammer and possibly a chisel to remove matrix from the agate nodule, and window the agate itself

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I pine for the days when I could put a search query to a website and get back "nothing found" An empty result set can be useful, but an infinitely scrolling list of results from queries that are not the one I entered, but ones with words changed or removed, is just a wild goose chase

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

He convinced a lot of people, but none of those people were among the ones whose job it was to know for sure. The inspectors on the ground on Iraq, and the UN office under which they worked, got ignored during the consensus-manufacturing leading up to the Iraq war.

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

It was always obvious that the people complaining loudest about having been cancelled were doing so from highly visible positions where their claims were seen by basically anybody who was looking at current events.

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I'm about your age and I too once thought I wanted to be a tenured academic. But then I spent some years working as a tech in research labs and saw what PIs actually do for a living (I was in biomedical labs doing analytical chemistry mostly). I bailed before the PhD stage and never regretted it.

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I saw the allusion to amateurs taking tactics while pros study logistics needing an update to include "and doofuses talk testosterone," and thought about Clausewitz's (drink!) 4 kinds of officers, realizing that Hegseth is a pure example of the stupid energetic kind. @bretdevereaux.bsky.social

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Biden's presidency was the most progressive of the last 60 years, and more pro-labor than any since Truman. If we had a functioning political journalism, these facts would be more widely understood.

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

OTOH if the source of the error is 25% of DSA chapters, 1) that's a minute contact surface, socially and 2) not something most Ds, even most progressives, have any influence over. Leftism splintering over a moral call about the limits of the possible is a tale as old as time.

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Christine O'Donnell for Senate!

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Could it be that they're just so in the habit of lying about everything that it popped out by reflex before they could think about whether it would be a good idea to speak the truth?

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Since when is First Lady an "office" that can have a policy agenda?

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Don't forget unwinding a while bunch of partisan bad-faith decisions that ought never have been considered law. Roberts Court jurisprudence is incoherent as anything other than "Heads, Rs win, tails, Ds lose."

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

OTOH enough oxidized phosphorus and sulfur and nitrogen compounds mixed with water makes acid rain

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

It's almost like the investor class has too fucking much money while everybody else has not enough There are investors who own 10,000s of single-family homes That should not be a thing

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

The AI craze among MBAs is going to go down in the books with comparisons to the tulip mania, where the latter looks sane and prudent by comparison

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

We reached the point at least a decade ago, when the Comedy Channel had better political journalism than the mainstream media. Now we're at the place where _only_ the jesters are allowed to speak truth.

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

I'm thinking don't get ahead of your skis when it comes to the Senate. Literally every race that's remotely competitive has to break in Ds' favor to make that happen.

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

It turns out that if you have better verbal skills than 90% of people, you will be better than 90% of people at creating precisely-worded prompts that can keep the AI from going off into the weeds

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

What a stupefyingly asinine attempt to draw a false equivalence between two very different issues I think you should refrain from commenting on politics until you can explain in your own words how you escaped from the delusions that prompted that remark

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

That's one take. Another is, "When people we don't like win elections, that is election fraud. Because the purpose of elections is to put our people in charge." Incidentally I wonder how hard it was to choose a metric to produce such a geographically one-sided map.

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

'87 Mitsubishi Starion, with the turbocharger. Used to be that if you were going north from Homestead on the FL turnpike late at night, there was nobody to care about how fast you drove, so I could wind it all the way out. At about 85mph it would vacuum itself to the road. It maxed out around 130.

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Reposted by Aardvark Cheeselog

Dmitry Grozoubinski @explaintrade.com · 21/06/2026

"The Americans can't get the slime out of their capital's monument pool and will arrest you for touching it," sounds like the sort of lie they'd tell us in the Soviet Union so we'd stop bitching about bread lines.

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

I think how obvious it was depended on where you were looking from. In '83 this analysis was available www.goodreads.com/en/book/show... That vast military machine existed mainly on paper

goodreads.com

The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine

This book is recommended for any of those who wish to k…

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

What's needed is a recognition that the days of "objective" journalism are done, and the media are now partisans. And the D Party does not have any media outlets on its side. We need openly pro-D media outlets that are not controlled by the Party, which would fuck up if it were in control.

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

The news sources have been driving us away with their bullshit. First the NYT, then the WaPo... the most important political news of the century is that the R Party is an anti-democratic authoritarian Party, but you'd never know that from political reporting.

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

I suspect what you're seeing is mostly the effects of disintermediated many-to-many communication Which turns out to not automagically translate to Power To The People It turns out those gatekeepers had useful functions after all Kept the sociopaths from having platforms, mostly

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

But you need a Party that's in control of itself to make that happen, or a Party that can find nominees who can appeal to voters while not having the tats and baggage. The D Party in a lot of places is pretty feckless.

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Aardvark Cheeselog @wades.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

I'm guessing more like "don't pile it so so close together that the first drone to fly in sets off the whole thing"

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