Chicago priest Fr. Larry Dowling describes procession to ICE facility: “No one had the courage to speak directly to us. No one from Homeland Security could stand in the presence of the Monstrance holding the Blessed Sacrament. No wonder. Evil is repelled, recoils in the presence of Christ.”
— Rich Raho (@richraho.bsky.social) October 11, 2025 at 5:10 PM
===
BREAKING: Some of the layoffs at CDC are being REVERSED.
Here is my updated story.
www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/…— Lena Sun (@lenasun.bsky.social) October 11, 2025 at 6:26 PM
Gift link, since this is a developing story:
More than 1,000 staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received layoff notices, including in units that respond to infectious-disease outbreaks, analyze science and health data to develop policy, and monitor the safety of employees, according to multiple individuals issued dismissal notices and others with direct knowledge of the cuts.
Among those who initially received layoff notices were leaders of CDC’s response to the growing number of measles cases in the United States and abroad, including one official who has more than 28 years’ experience overseeing a dozen federal agencies that have responded to outbreaks of Ebola, Marburg virus and mpox in Africa over the years, said the individuals, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
After details about the firings became public, a federal health official said Saturday that some layoff notices had been sent in error and would be reversed, including for those leading the measles response, those responding to an Ebola outbreak, CDC’s global health leadership, and some CDC disease detectives. The official did not detail how many of the more than 1,000 layoffs would be reversed…Layoff notices were sent according to the administrative code where employees were assigned, Houry said. In most cases, all employees within one administrative code — or unit — were laid off…
The federal health official, who spoke on the on the condition of anonymity to share internal policy information, said layoff notices for the EIS officers, Ebola response and global health center’s office of the director would be reversed. It was not immediately clear whether that included all of CDC’s regional offices. It could take several days for reversal notices to be sent, the official said.
The leadership of the center that oversees immunization and respiratory diseases was also fired. It is one of the agency’s largest centers, with responsibility for immunization, influenza surveillance, and tracking of coronavirus and other respiratory viruses…
Layoff notices also initially targeted the office that produces the CDC’s flagship weekly scientific report known as the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, or MMWR. But those notices were sent in error because of a miscoding, according to the health official. As of Saturday afternoon, however, the editor who oversees the MMWR and others in the office of science had not been informed that the layoff notices were a mistake, Houry said…
And stupid wins out every single fucking time.
— Liberal Librarian, Emotional Support Cuban ?? ???? (@liberallibrarian.bsky.social) October 11, 2025 at 11:10 PM
===
The sound of hymns clashed with drums as thousands gathered for Pride Fest in Wake Forest, North Carolina. The event coincided with National Coming Out Day, but politics were also on people's minds.
— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) October 12, 2025 at 2:00 AM
Thousands turned out Saturday in this Baptist seminary town to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community, but the current political climate was never far from their thoughts.
“If we’re paying attention, we’re seeing what could happen,” said Amanda Cottrill, co-chair of Wake Forest Pride Fest. “History repeats itself, (which is) why it’s so important for us to be learning and celebrating history.”
This year’s event coincided with National Coming Out Day. It also came at a time when President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to bar transgender people from serving in the military and issuing orders about biological sex and gender.
Police watched from atop the town hall and patrolled the streets with dogs, as people in rainbow clothing confronted a group that came to sing hymns and wave signs telling them to repent. There were applause and tears in the crowd as author, activist and former youth pastor John Pavlovitz spoke from a stage.
“We are going through it right now, but we’re going through it together,” Pavlovitz said as he paced the plaza in brightly-colored sneakers. “We will not allow ourselves or the people we care about to be dehumanized or mistreated or erased. We will not stand for it.”…
Baud
Nice. I’ve been waiting for more Christ-like Christiana to take back their religion.
hueyplong
Lots of people should immediately picture Von Sydow and the other guy standing over Trump yelling “The power of Christ compels you!”
prostratedragon
“This Is Fascism” 🎥
Anyone know where this is?
prostratedragon
For their sins, NYT is running a series on “lost science.” Here is a brief interview with an ecologist who had been in Montana studying the effect of logging and other forestry techniques on forest pollinators (archive link).
high productivity job in the private sector. Wow.
Baud
@prostratedragon:
Like market manipulation.
J.
It’s amazing to me that the human race has survived this long.
Ocotillo
Greg Abbott has decreed that San Antonio has to remove a rainbow-colored crosswalk near downtown or lose TxDOT funding for highway projects. The coward cannot come out and say the real reason; the implication is it is a safety issue.
prostratedragon
@Baud: She might have the math skills to make for quality financial bullshit.
But I was thinking how thickheaded it is not to guess that what she was doing could be very productive by the time these goofs have lost everything they made in a collapsing bubble.
Dorothy A. Winsor
The Chicago Marathon is today. My guess is that ICE stays away, but we’ll see.
BellyCat
The truly courageous warriors during the COVID battle (especially at inception before spread was understood) were the medical personnel.
The most courageous warriors now are the immigrants and LGBTQ+. Thankfully, many are standing with them.
Use of religious rhetoric, however, seems dangerous as both sides have their own pet justifications for actions inexplicable or not.
Jeffg166
@J.:
It is isn’t it.
I read somewhere if Ancient Greece hadn’t collapsed we probably would have had nuclear weapons by the third century AD. Good thing they collapsed.
BellyCat
Accurate description of only the legalized marijuana industry?
Deputinize America
@prostratedragon:
“From your resume, it looks like you’ve got a masters in biology, are a PhD candidate in entomology and that for 15 years, your work on your thesis and as a senior researcher has focused on the sustainability of the biome in the face of climate change and overdevelopment. How do you feel that these qualifications fit the position you are applying for here as a sales agent at Subprime Lending LLC, given that this is a tight labor market, and you eat what you kill here. I mean after all, that job sounds woke….”
Deputinize America
@Jeffg166:
I’m still convinced that Rome had some rudimentary printing presses with movable type for the dissemination of records and decrees, and that had Constantine not cynically swallowed the Christian koolaid, that a secularized Rome shorn of religious devotion would have stabilized into a technological society by 1200 CE (1953 AUC in Roman terms) at the latest.
Ohio Mom
@prostratedragon: In one of the comments, someone says “Westerville. Suburb of Columbus”
The trees look like Ohio right now, so that tracks. And I hate to say it, but we Buckeyes tend to be on the chunky side, which these lovely people mostly are.
Looks like a college campus behind them, according to Google, there are several colleges in Westerville, of them, I’m going with Otterbein, which has as history similar to Oberlin’s — started admitting women and Blacks before most places.
But I’m not doing a Google street view search because I’m not that obsessive.
TONYG
“some layoff notices had been sent in error and would be reversed”. Politics aside, how can the administrators of an organization be so incompetent as to send layoff notices in error? The appointment by Trump of idiots to be in charge of these agencies is part of the plan to destroy these agencies.
Baud
@TONYG:
They do things to generate headlines than clean up afterwards when they think the media isn’t looking (which it often isn’t).
p.a.
The well-connected car dealer/big donor now in charge of your Federal Bureau of Trying-to-Understand-Something has defined your job as a surplus position in a brief, misspelled memo.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Baud
@Baud:
Than = then
prostratedragon
@Deputinize America: One likely scenario, but requiring no conscience whatsoever. Better to find someone to run Kalman filters for; at least they ought to know better..
prostratedragon
@Ohio Mom:
😄
zhena gogolia
@prostratedragon: Unlike the people on the Inspector Morse fan site who find every single house location?
Another Scott
@prostratedragon: Seems to be Westerville, OH. (via looking for “peaceforsomailia” and them mentioning Westerville.)
Thanks for the pointer. Well done.
HTH!
[OhioMom got there first.]
Best wishes,
Scott.
prostratedragon
@zhena gogolia:
There are Vertigo and Twin Peaks tours that one can take.
NotMax
Weekend watch.
Coming up with 26 words everyone can agree on isn’t as easy as you might think.
The genius logic of the NATO phonetic alphabet.
;)
prostratedragon
mappy!
The Grand Republican plan seems to be improvise.
Break whatever you can.
Move to Dubai (or someplace without the possibility of extradition). Get your foreign bank accounts in place before you leave. Or just improvise.
Deputinize America
@prostratedragon:
I’m going on the mob restaurant/whacking tour in Manhattan close to the end of the month. Of all the major cities we’ve been to as a couple on this spinning rock, we’ve never been to New York together as a couple (it’s a work thing for her – they’re putting us up at the Waldorf-Astoria).
Its gonna be food and mob tales – I’m stupid excited over the cheesiness of it.
rikyrah
@prostratedragon:
Ain’t that some shyt 😡😡
Like a complete going over the head of WHY people choose the public sector 😡😡
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
prostratedragon
@Deputinize America: Does it begin at Umberto’s, or end there?
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
One wonders how many people who were fired at the CDC are looking for similar positions in Canada, or other countries who administration is not bat shit insane. The number of brilliant, dedicated, qualified people we are losing is criminal. That’s not even mentioning the number of students, grad students and postdocs from countries outside the US who are deciding to leave or not apply here in the first place.
prostratedragon
360° of wrong.
rikyrah
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
Just absolutely horrible. Decimating our science sector.
Matt McIrvin
On my flight back from Denmark I watched a couple of movies: Sinners (brilliant, and a rare case of a horror movie where I started thinking it was destined to become a hit Broadway musical), but then George Miller’s flawed but interesting flop Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. A breakout performance in that was Chris Hemsworth’s semi-comic turn as the main villain, Lord Dementus, who spends much of the movie in an on-and-off war with Immortan Joe, who we saw as the main villain of Fury Road.
Anyway, it struck me that a major thesis of Furiosa was really that incompetent evil can be worse than competent evil. Pretty much everyone in the Mad Max world has to be kind of evil to survive; the occasional flashes of kindness and generosity stand out by contrast. Immortan Joe is quite evil indeed, but he’s competent at it, and manages to lead a kind of perversely functioning society for a time. Lord Dementus is both evil and incompetent–he can wreck shit and take over your town, but then he’ll run it into the ground, and he spends all his time whining and shifting blame for the disasters he causes. And that’s actually worse for everyone’s collective survival. When Furiosa visits a horrifying comeuppance upon him, you definitely understand why
Application to current events is left to the reader.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@rikyrah: I feel like the damage will take decades to recover from, if we ever do recover.
Another Scott
@TONYG: The people giving the orders know almost nothing about how anything works. So you get stuff like this. And (repost?) this from October 3:
(Emphasis added.)
It’s more “move fast and break things” and shows (yet again) the dangers of letting monsters inside the house.
“Is our normies learning??”
Grrr…
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
NotMax
@Deputinize America
Dunno if they still serve High Tea in the Waldorf’s Peacock Alley after the recent renovation. A pricey but luxurious and memorable indulgence if the tradition is still bring carried on.
MagdaInBlack
There is a post on r/Illinois, taken in Elgin IL, of a “protestor” coming out of the crowd, and getting into an ICE vehicle. The post identifies him as an obvious crowd plant
Perhaps someone with better long link correcting skills than I can find and post it?
I apologize for my incompetence in this endeavor.
prufrock
@Jeffg166: They would have had to figure out the concept of zero first. Even Archimedes fell short.
LAC
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Agreed. The damage being done to HHS is deep and will impact our ability to be a leader in health and scientific research. I was proud to work at HHS and watching that sentient piece of beef jerky continue to blow it up is sickening.These bullshit RIFs are illegal but that is losing meaning with this regime.
cmorenc
@Jeffg166:
I also “read somewhere” we would also have had electric cars and microelectronics and coffee houses selling avocoado toast by the third centrury, if only Greek civilization hadn’t collapsed.
Deputinize America
@prostratedragon:
Dunno, wife booked it. I do know I’ll be seeing the site of the Ravenite Social Club.
NotMax
@prufrock
“Screw that.”
– Archimedes
:)
Another Scott
@MagdaInBlack: Seems to be this?
Thanks for the pointer.
The video doesn’t show much. Scroll down for more info.
Grr…
HTH!
Best wishes,
Scott.
MagdaInBlack
@Another Scott: Yes. Thank you.
p.a.
Basically, assume anyone advocating aggressiveness or acting aggressively themselves is a plant. ICE, FBI, MAGAts/reich wing groups. Looonnnngg history of this bullshit. Remember, Seattle I think, local police plant in a Quaker anti-Iraq War group pushing for conflict. In a Quaker group.🙄
RevRick
@J.: Brian Cox, the British astrophysicist, says there’s strong evidence that we humans, who have the consciousness capable of contemplating the universe, may well be alone, at least in our galaxy. And the reason for that is biology.
Simple, one-celled organisms are probably fairly common. But it wasn’t until about 600 million years ago, less than a seventh of our planet’s existence, that complex, multicellular organisms formed.
We are, says Cox, the means by which the universe understands itself.
NotMax
@RevRick
“The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.”
– Peter De Vries
;)
David_C
@LAC: I’m sure that the incompetence part is the work of DOGE holdovers, because any experienced bureaucrat would have known what to do. Employees were instructed to call their supervisors on their personal lines if they received RIF notices.
I was networking with some coworkers, past and present, and I tried to encourage one of our more vocal RIF’ed colleagues, saying that I’m old, but when this is all over, we will need people like her to rebuild.
Baud
@RevRick:
youtu.be/abvzkSJEhKk
MagdaInBlack
@RevRick: I have always liked that thought: that we are part of the universe(consciousness) understanding and learning about itself.
I kind of like the idea of the universe thinking “whoa! Look what I can do!”
❤️
Professor Bigfoot
@Deputinize America: I think you’re nuts, but I LIKE IT!
This needs to be dropped off on Harry Turtledove’s desk (even though he’s busy AF with his current project and I’ve got a stack of his books waiting for me to read already… 😉)
RevRick
@prufrock: Not to mention the solution to cubic equations, which generate i. After all, complex numbers appear in Schrödinger’s wave equations.
BellyCat
You’re welcome.
prostratedragon
Derek Guy:
At least they’ve ditched the wigs. No doubt, that is why they’re all smiling so broadly.
Wapiti
@prostratedragon: You can “walk” through Petra on Google Maps.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, maybe pantsless Baud is on to something… Phys.org:
Best wishes,
Scott.
Deputinize America
@prostratedragon: Nine members for a population a 10th of ours.
RevRick
@Baud: Thank you
lowtechcyclist
@RevRick:
I think ‘probably’ is doing work way beyond its weight class there. AFAIK, nobody really knows how the transition occurred from complex but inanimate molecules to one-celled organisms. And if we don’t know how it happened here, there’s really no way to guess the probability of its having happened elsewhere.
It’s always seemed to me that there’s a lot of ‘it happened here, so it must’ve happened in other places too’ thinking about life elsewhere in the universe.
suzanne
Hayley Williams using her fame for good.
I haven’t historically been a Paramore fan, but this is great. And we need more protest music.
Baud
@suzanne:
Agree.
People love to hate boomers now. But they knew how to create good protest music.
Professor Bigfoot
@NotMax: Nerd that I am, I memorized the NATO “phonetic alphabet” decades ago. I always thought “why re-invent the wheel, here it is, just use it.”
“Mike Echo Oscar Whisky, Over…” 😸
Another Scott
Meanwhile, …
Sometimes feelings of paranoia are a genuine survival instinct.
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
Who benefits from the destruction of our scientific and medical infrastructure. Troops are already in the major cities. Is biological warfare being planned? What is the endgame here?
schrodingers_cat
OT
BTW is open racism okay on BJ now if it is done in the name of economic populism?
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
IMHO they ultimately want white liberals to give up and join them in the Republican Party.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: And then what? Kill all the non-white people in the US?
RevRick
@Deputinize America: Except the ideology of the Roman Empire was thoroughly religious. The formulation went like this:
1) Right piety (of the pagan and household gods) led to…
2). Victory in battle, which led to…
3). Subjugation of the peoples at the periphery, which equaled…
4). Peace.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Not all. Think pre-FDR Democratic Party.
RevRick
@schrodingers_cat: Fascism is inherently antiscience. As Umberto Eco pointed out in his 1995 essay, fascism equates arguments, disputes, questions with treason since it puts individuals at odds with the state/leader. To that end, fascism uses simplified language to reduce everything to base emotions of fear and disgust.
Karen Gail
Late catching up on news; there is only so much stupidity a person can handle then I retreat into books. So this is first thing that catches my attention:
Trump calls for arrest of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker
I think I’ll go reread the whole of the Eve Dallas series, though there was an “Urban War” that happened before the series which no longer sounds impossible.
RevRick
@Baud: Our protest music was created Silent Generation musicians. After all Beat generation poets were from that cohort.
MagdaInBlack
@Karen Gail: And Pritzkers’s response was ” Come get me.”
Karen Gail
@RevRick: I often thought that fascists really wanted to be kings; to have lived in a time when a man could be king over small tribe or small city/state and have everyone bow down. Or to be king over a community where everyone would kneel and put face on ground rather than face the “magnificence” of their presence.
schrodingers_cat
If you want to know what I am talking about in #68 check out the last few comments in yesterday’s thread.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Many on the populist left are eager to join them it looks like.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
68?
narya
@schrodingers_cat: Or, more likely, enslave them via the prison system (a project that has been underway for more than a century, IMHO).
dm
there’s been a lot of religious activity at that Chicago ICEtapo facility
Quinerly
I was poking around People magazine reading about Diane Keaton, her stance on marriage, and her adopted children. Looking at photographs. Laughing at memorable quotes. (I adored Diane Keaton. Her memoir is wonderful. I am very sad.)
Ran into a People article about Noem’s rantings about Bad Bunny.
Anway, I can’t get over this ACTUAL Kristi Noem quote about the NFL and Bad Bunny. I just had to share with someone this AM. Our tax money is paying this bitch (feel free to substitute the C word. I typed it and then thought better). Our tax money is also giving her free housing while she shacks up with Corey Lewandowski. (IYKYK)
“Well, they suck and we’ll win, and God will bless us and we’ll stand and be proud of ourselves at the end of the day,” said Noem. “And they won’t be able to sleep at night, ‘cause they don’t know what they believe, and they’re so weak. We’ll fix it.”
people.com/ice-will-be-all-over-bad-bunny-s-super-bowl-halftime-show-kristi-noem-says-11824466
(May have been posted and discussed. I rarely read BJ comments.)
kalakal
@RevRick: Cox also believes Things can only get better
Anyway
Pre-1965 America is the goal. Roll back the changes from the Civil Rights bills.
Ob fuck LBJ
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Regarding the CDC Friday night massacre, it makes one believe that the goal of the modern GOP is to cause mass death.
LAC
@BellyCat: 😄 For me, sentient only means in this case that the beef jerky sits up from its prone position and makes mouth noises. Not much else.
I have no doubt that DOGE’s inbetweeners are still about, but the ass cracks that beef jerky appointed within the HHS agencies are doing stupid proud as well.
Aziz, light!
AFAIK, there is no such evidence. There are 100 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and planetary systems are a common aspect of stellar evolution. Recent estimates are that the known universe contains two trillion galaxies. Albeit highly sapient forms of life may be relatively rare, but the human one needs to get over itself.
Librettist
@schrodingers_cat:
I’ll refer you, thematically speaking, to Mike White & White Lotus. Just more ugly Americans in liminal spaces.
The locals will sort out the mess when we’re gone, and it was totally hysterical when Dave shit in the tub. LULZ.
Harrison Wesley
@LAC: I like alliteration, so I’m partial to ‘semi-sentient stool specimen.’
Layer8Problem
@Professor Bigfoot: Here’s a helpful chart for one’s technical friends.
Ok, maybe this one‘s more accurate.
Fair Economist
@lowtechcyclist: There is some evidence that single celled life is common, which is that it emerged rather quickly once Earth could support it. That actually makes it very unlikely life is rare on suitable planets.
For some reason interstellar panspermia seems to have fallen out of fashion lately. I don’t hear it mentioned in the discussion of the origin of life. A while back it even made it into Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos.
Harrison Wesley
@Anyway: This is the week that SCOTUS Six take aim at what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. I expect they’ll issue another shadow docket so they don’t have to give any reason for trashing it.
Miss Bianca
@prostratedragon: And so say all of us.
Kayla Rudbek
@prostratedragon:
@Baud: we seriously went down a wrong path when we cancelled the SSC and encouraged a lot of the physics and math majors to go into banking and computer programming.
Fair Economist
@schrodingers_cat: I don’t think the folks that want white liberals to join the Republican party have thought out their plans carefully, but based on history their plans for non-white people will be a mix of enslavement, expulsion, and extermination.
The really fun part if they win is that after that, they’ll redefine “white” groups as non-white so they can continue.
Quinerly
Highly recommend following Canadian Trevor Poutine (“Professor Poutine”). He posts short videos and reels about history on FB (yes, I know) and Instagram.
His short history lessons on Nazi Germany are worth the time.
And, one of his most recent videos on the Insurrection Act vs the Militia Act was eye opening. I learned a lot in less than 5 minutes.
Kayla Rudbek
@Deputinize America: however, I think that the Roman slavery system discouraged innovation as well, particularly as there was no incentive to make a worker’s life easier if they were a slave. That would be a really fun question to send over to Bret Deveraux at his ACOUP blog about whether ancient Roman slavery or early Christianity was a bigger drag on human progress.
Also, if I recall correctly, I think that some of the English monasteries pre-Reformation were starting to experiment with steam pumps, so if Henry VIII hadn’t dissolved the monasteries, we would have had the steam revolution back in the 16th century instead…
prostratedragon
@Another Scott: Well, gee wizz!
Professor Bigfoot
@MagdaInBlack: I think this might be it
ETA- My man Another Scott already got it.
Miss Bianca
@Professor Bigfoot: for the record, I just read my first Harry Turtledove story the other day and found myself surprised at how much I dug it. For some reason I had him planted in my brain as a Confederate apologist in alt-history clothing, so I hadn’t made any effort to seek his stuff out before, but this one was in a fantasy anthology with some other authors I really like, and it was actually one of the best stories in the bunch.
Another author I didn’t know but found myself digging in that same collection was John Brunner. So!Many!Writers! So!Little!Time!
Baud
@Kayla Rudbek:
US society overvalues revenue generating enterprises and undervalues public goods and non-revenue generating endeavors.
It’s ultimately self-defeating because a strong and stable growth economy requires a strong social base. Revenue generating firms aren’t successful in a vacuum. But obviously the right disagrees.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Kayla Rudbek:
Link to Bret’s blog for those interested:
acoup.blog/author/aimedtact/
Some of his specific posts on Rome in the context of this discussion:
acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-iii-things/
Another Scott
@Kayla Rudbek: Big science can be very weird. There’s never enough money, things always take longer than expected if one is really pushing frontiers, and politics plays a huge role.
They probably should have built the SSC at Fermilab. But I dunno if they could have made it work on a reasonable timescale even there. (Who in their right mind wanted to pack up and move to Waxahachie, TX??)
(I know a guy who worked on it for a while, but have never talked with him about it.)
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Kayla Rudbek
@RevRick: I had read (think it was Isaac Asimov) that land life depended on having tidal pools which are dependent on the moon, so in order to get intelligent land life, you need a planet with a large enough moon to exert strong tidal forces (which is why he thought that Venus and Mars were both not going to have life) and so that most life in the universe, including intelligent life, was going to be aquatic.
Professor Bigfoot
@Miss Bianca: I’ve followed Harry both on Twitter and now on Bluesky— had some interesting chats with him, *love the guy.*
But as I’ve told him, I won’t touch “Guns of the South” because, while I understand the Confederate villains get their comeuppance ultimately, the very idea of that rat bastard son of a bitch Lee winning just… I can’t do it.
But I’ve got a whole stack of his OTHER stuff in my Kindle. He just announced the sequel to “Twice As Dead” (you’ll love it) and of course I’ve got it pre-ordered…
ETA: “Agent of Byzantium.” I LOVED it. Imagine if Mohammed had not founded Islam but had become an archbishop of the Christian church and canonised as Saint Mouamet… <exploding head emoji>
Miss Bianca
@LAC: yeah, there’s a difference between “sentient” and “sapient”. The beef jerky in question (with the accent on the “jerk”) may be sentient, but actual sapience would appear to be a step beyond its evolutionary state.
(btw, I am so happy to see you back in the comments. Missed your presence!)
frosty
@Quinerly: Hi Quinerly! Hope things are going well.
Kayla Rudbek
@Baud: as Robert Heinlein said, “manufacturing and farming are the only two real games in town” I would add caretaking and education to that list as well
Anyway
@Fair Economist: Mitt Romney said the quiet part aloud in 2012 – “self-deportation”. Deterrence for those considering moving to the US.
Karen Gail
@Aziz, light!: I have gotten to point where firmly believe that our solar system is quarantined and other beings are looking at it as a cautionary tale of what can happen to a species.
One of the engineers I knew back in the 1970’s was sure that this planet had been terraformed after death of dinosaurs, then later when intelligent life was gaining foothold a rogue group purposely crash landed and started conquering peaceful groups. It was a good thought those some of others argued (in our group) that it wasn’t a rogue group rather that since this solar system is on edge of galaxy that planet was used as a place like US and Australia as a prison colony or colony where zealots were sent.
We only suspect that there are trillions of galaxies since there is no way to see or measure just what is out there; but I could never bring myself to believe that we are the only species it is a story to comfort people when they see the night sky.
RevRick
@Aziz, light!: He makes this claim based on the fact that we hear nothing. We’ve been broadcasting our existence since 1920, and present day NYC sends out signals as powerful as a radio star.
Moreover, we’ve made leaps and bounds discoveries in science and technology in only the last 250 years.
He reasons, again from biology, that if complex, multicellular life were at all easy, wouldn’t it stand to reason that some civilizations are hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us? But where are they?
Baud
@Kayla Rudbek:
I’m not into art, but it’s clear even ancient hunter gathers felt the need to create art.
Too much wasted effort in trying to determine the core or most important aspects of society, rather than working to create a more robust, fulfilling society.
It’s similar to the need for people to chase status over others. It’s ultimately a drag on everyone.
Karen Gail
@Quinerly: I love his videos and have suggested others watch them, also they are closed captioned so those of us who can’t hear or understand what comes out of our speakers can still know what he is saying.
Did you see the one where he and friends declared war on US by firing a tennis ball at a ship?
prostratedragon
@Quinerly:
This goes here: “The class and Christianity of Kristi Noem,” Ann Telnaes
Professor Bigfoot
@Another Scott: Inside my head I am screaming at the normies and the trumpists, “SEE, YOU IDIOTS! THIS IS WHY YOU FUND BASIC RESEARCH, YOU MORONS! BECAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU MIGHT FIND, YOU ABSOLUTE SHITS FOR BRAINS!!!!”
Miss Bianca
@Professor Bigfoot: OK, I just ordered “Twice as Dead” from the library. It does sound like a hoot!
Another Scott
@RevRick: Why?
The universe is mind bogglingly big. Things are really, really far apart. And we still know far too little about it.
Of course.
🤪
Best wishes,
Scott.
Professor Bigfoot
@MagdaInBlack: A new rallying cry: “Come and get me.”
Karen Gail
@RevRick: Watching, recording, and used as a teaching lesson on how not to do things. They are intelligent and human beings are lucky that so far no species has decided that we would make good food.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: The white guy in the gray hoodie should be identifiable – nice that he turned his face for a moment as he was rushing into the vehicle and shutting the door.
Haydnseek
By all means, explore John Brunner. He has an enormous body of work, and once you get started you’ll probably seek out more.A Little story, if you don’t mind…..When I was in college I had a contemporary fiction class with a great prof. He asked for suggestions that the class might like and I offered up Brunner’s Stand On Zanzibar. He read it and liked it so much that next semester I found a stack of them on the shelf in the on campus bookstore. So dive in, by all means.
LAC
@Miss Bianca: Thank you! Always good seeing you here too!
Haydnseek
WTFGhost
“After details of the firings became public, someone once again realized that the Trump administration f…uh, had sex with a dog, I’m sorry, I mean screwed the pooch, no, correction coming in, Trump actually raped a dog (no word on the sex of the dog), while screaming “KILL THE CDC THAT TELLS LIES LIKE I HAVE AN STD THAT ONLY BITCHES GET!” so we think the dog is female, but we’re not sure Trump can tell the difference.”
Miss Bianca
@Haydnseek: I have ordered an anthology ambitiously titled “The Best of John Brunner”, which I am awaiting from the library. Oh, the wonders of the modern interlibrary loan system! I never cease to be thankful for it.
Karen Gail
Last night I stayed up until 4am; had decided to reread “Welcome to Dystopia” a collection of short stories edited by Gordon Van Gelder. Bought it when it came out in 2019; “dear leader” is featured in most stories as beginning of US becoming dictatorship; surprising how many fiction writers saw clearly where he was headed when so many refused to see.
In at least one story the US is much smaller California and rest of west coast leave the Union to for a country, some of Upper Midwest joins Canada, parts of desert Southwest rejoin Mexico and New England forms own country. And in different story New England states become part of Canada. These stories were written before the COVID outbreak, so plague isn’t taken into account, the horrors were all based on Trump’s actions before then.
piratedan
@Professor Bigfoot: he’s the guy that took that “Alternate History” hypothesis that first used to show up in those old H Bean Piper stories and REALLY took them out for a spin. HT is really an ally, but yeah, the Confederacy Ascendant themes are hard to read, and the Guns of the South being more of a combo Time travel/alternative history mashup was almost a hate read for me. He really is thoughtful (IMHO) in how small some of our historical fulcrums really are.
Professor Bigfoot
The shade of Martin Niemöller spreads his hands and shouts, “RIGHT?? RIGHT???? DIDN’T I TELL YOU PEOPLE??”
Harrison Wesley
MAGAmerica is destroying education and public health to create its egalitarian dream in which all of us can be ignorant and sick. Except for the oligarchs, and aren’t they always the exception?
Professor Bigfoot
“Nobody is free unless everybody is free.”
WTFGhost
@Baud: to say nothing of being reflected at its actual perversion.
Hey, do we have established, as fact, that Trump casts a reflection? I’m not sure if we ask medieval monks what it means if he doesn’t – some would argue he has no soul, which was (I believe) the source of the vampire not casting a reflection.
@hueyplong: They just don’t want to be around for the pea-soup vomiting, aka “A Trump Rally.”
@prostratedragon: Most federal workers are extremely high productivity. What they aren’t is “profit producing” which shows that economics can be a poor measure of value. A job in the private sector is “productive” if it allows the company to make a lot of money off of the worker. The government isn’t trying to make a profit, so a job in the federal government can’t be measured by the same metric.
@Ocotillo: He’s the kind of bully who’s too afraid to steal lunch
@BellyCat: The use of religious rhetoric *is* dangerous. But this is the sort of situation where, if the Legendary Jesus existed, he’d say he didn’t come to bring peace, but a sword. And he didn’t mean a “slice people’s guts out” sword, he meant he brought his message to do what’s right for times when people are called to take a stand for the poor and in need. “These assholes have perverted every good thing I’ve ever said, and claimed me for their own; show them that love is stronger than hate, and the truth is stronger than lies, and that the greatest lie ever told is that one person’s love can’t make a difference.”
kalakal
@Miss Bianca: Never read Harry Turtledove but have read a lot of Brunner and I’d recommend you give him a try – he wrote an awful lot starting out with pretty conventional space opera and moving on to ideas such as ecological collapse and population pressure. The Shockwave Rider is interesting, it predicts computer viruses and worms
Quinerly
@Karen Gail:
I did see that one. He’s just fantastic.
My other recent video addiction is the Texas mother, “The Civic Sage.” She has been on fire re Charlie Kirk.
Also, loving “Mr. Global” out of Oklahoma. Check him out if you haven’t.
Quinerly
@prostratedragon: 💙
Gloria DryGarden
@prostratedragon: the forest pollinators have a high productivity job.
studying them, and the effects of human practices on their habitat/ ecosystem, would allow us to nurture them, and decrease our interferences on their important “productivity”
all the ways humans violate the church of holy Mother Nature… have caused cascades of interlinked harm.
Professor Bigfoot
@piratedan: He’s got a PhD in Classical history. I think that really gives him that perspective— that history can turn on, well, “for want of a nail…”
NotMax
@Professor Bigfoot
In real life Stalin’s parents sent him to a school to study for the priesthood.
Didn’t quite work out, that.
artem1s
@Jeffg166: The Greeks fell victim to the same issues we’re struggling with. They were wasting too many of their resources on internecine and xenophobic spats to put their mathematics to any use. They were too busy fighting each other over which city state’s culture was superior to use their resources for the good of all. Also,too slavery of the many to enrich the few.
Fibonacci introduced the use of Arabic numerals (brought into Europe and North Africa by Arab’s influenced by Hindus) so he could calculate exchange rates for trade. He dumped the Latin numerical system of Rome in favor of a foreign ‘language’ so he could make money faster and more easily. The Renaissance came about because secular uses of math and scientific methodology started to ignore religious suppression of reason and discovery. In the US the Scopes Trials were an attempt to place biblical literalism above scientific method in our legal and educational systems. The current SCOTUS Taney wannabes are trying (and succeeding) to revert our system of laws to adhere to biblical literalism under the guise of ‘morality’. The Dredd Scott decision was in part based on the use of scripture to prove slavery was ordained by God. The fear of the ‘other’ is what drives religious fundamentalism and fascism and their attacks on public education and scientific method. But mostly the US is falling victim to the same sin as the Roman Empire. Squandering our resources on the shameless accumulation of wealth, the worship of excess and hedonism, and the nihilistic rejection of knowledge and learning in favor of willful ignorance.
NotMax
@Quinerly
Have missed seeing your nym hereabouts.
Deputinize America
@Aziz, light!:
My theory is that exploration and expansion by biological life is inefficient, difficult and rare, and that they tend to stick to their gravity wells out of necessity.
Far easier to send out robotic explorers, and then there’s the other issue of time frames in which life evolves to sentience and rational, technological exploration. Could be that dozens of relatively close civilizations have risen, explored, and died off. Could also be that they’re narrowcasting via fiber optics or laser relays. Could also be that calamity occurred 10,000 years ago in our years, wiping them out.
Think of it as each world with different gas mixes and possible toxic triggers, as well as allergens.
Professor Bigfoot
@Gloria DryGarden: I’ve always believed that all the problems caused by humans can be solved by humans… but these people seem intent on exacerbating existing problems and creating new ones.
Quinerly
@frosty:
As well as can be expected in these dark times. Finally, a break from the turnstile of houseguests. Trying to finish a little sunroom/plant room. Had a wasted space of a room that connects the old garage (my den) and the new garage previous owners added. Knocked out an exterior southwest exterior wall and added 120inches of sliding glass doors. We managed to frame it with a new header before actually knocking thru the stucco. Built a temporary wall to carry the load. Would have loved to discussed with Ozark but did discuss with some of our old neighborhood carpenter friends before finding someone local to do it. I have been in a race to get the doors in and at least sealed so no rodent invasion before winter. Plus, bringing in plants to overwinter.
How are your travels? I’m just nailing down an upcoming 3 week drive about…..Farmington, NM; Bluff, UT; Torrey, UT; Boulder, UT; Panguitch, UT; Cedar City, UT; Kanab, UT; and Window Rock, AZ.
Big winter 7 week CA trip next year….30 nights in the same stationary, 1950’s Spartanette Camper where I stayed a week in April. Have fallen in love with Arroyo Grande/SLO, CA. Just love it. Very excited about camping in Death Valley beforehand. Plus, this will be my first trip to Joshua Tree. Staying at the infamous Joshua Tree Inn, where Gram Parsons died. I didn’t spring for Room #8, though. 😎 The Emmy Lou room wasn’t dog friendly. So just a room.
Hope things are well with you and your lovely bride. My Santa Fe door is always open to you. Take care.
WhatsMyNym
@schrodingers_cat: You talking about the use of “Code Monkeys”? It’s been in use for many decades as in “Those dudes from aussie were supposed to be software guru’s but they’re just code monkeys man!”. Urban Dictionary has plenty of examples. There is even a cartoon (2 seasons) from 2007 – “follows the lives of 1980’s game programmers Dave and his best friend Jerry”.
NotMax
@Quinerly
Move over, Lucille.
You picked a fine time
To teach me, Poutine
.
artem1s
@Deputinize America: pressing wet clay into baked tablet plates to produce multiple identical printed materials was common in most ancient cultures. Hand rubbing onto parchment was also practiced. But those plates were all one of a kind and not useful for disseminating information that was constantly changing. Presses for wine making were converted to printing presses for paper and velum. Those were pretty common too. But those also used hand carved, one of a kind plates. It took a very long time and was very expensive to print anything that way. Only the very rich could afford a book printed this way. The real revolution that changed everything was moveable type. It lead to the ability to disseminate news daily and lead to increased levels of literacy. People had a reason to learn to read.
dnfree
@MagdaInBlack: What dies the universe “think” about us now?
Eyeroller
@RevRick: There are quadratic equations with complex solutions. Not necessary to go to cubics. If the quadratic discriminant b^2-4ac is negative, the solutions will be a pair of complex conjugates.
The issue isn’t really discovering new “kinds” of numbers, but acceptance. The ancient Greeks were famously resistant to the concept of irrational numbers. For a long time, negative numbers were considered unnatural–the Fahrenheit scale sets zero where it is in an attempt to avoid them. The original Celsius scale was inverted (100 was freezing, 0 boiling) also to avoid negative numbers, because people were more concerned about cold than hot temperatures.
Complex numbers were just one of the more recent practical examples of that. Wave equations can be cast in terms of complex numbers (Schroedinger’s equation is a wave equation). They have a lot of other uses, but sometimes they aren’t really necessary, just make the math simpler.
But it’s still a matter of psychology more than mathematics when new concepts are developed.
Aziz, light!
@RevRick: His reasoning is specious. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years wide. The signal strength of our transmissions attenuates greatly across the vast distances between stars. Assuming anyone is listening, our reach hasn’t exceeded a few dozen light years — our very near stellar neighborhood. It then takes the same amount of time to get a response, if they communicate as we do and choose to respond, and, more importantly, assuming the span of their civilization occurs in the same time frame as ours. In the history of life on Earth, we are a very brief blip, one that may extinguish itself.
Given the immense amount of energy required to propel any significant mass between stars at anything but a tiny fraction of light speed, living beings are highly unlikely to ever be able to achieve it. The trips we see in science fiction would take millions of years; in the ways that we imagine it, interstellar travel is probably impossible.
Expecting a response from life-supporting planets right next door to us (if any exist, which is a stretch) in no way justifies a belief that we are alone. I could go on but in scientific terms it’s pointless.
trollhattan
Freed hostage: “What the fuck, when did you become president?”
Baud
@dnfree:
It still likes dogs.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: Ugh. I skip that person’s comments so didn’t see this.
WTFGhost
@Harrison Wesley: Get real! MAGA just hates the CDC for saying Trump was an imbecile during Covid! (Truth hurts.)
@Aziz, light!: It’s usually the Fermi Paradox that makes people think we might be unique, or short lived. The universe is so OLD, that if a star faring species existed, it would have existed for a long enough time that there should be signs of it. However, the Fermi Paradox might be explained through other methods. For example, what if colonizing one star system is the most a race can do? What if the speed of light really is *the* speed limit? What if we just happen to be in an area of the galaxy with too little hydrogen hanging around, waiting to be scooped up for use as fuel? (It’s interstellar hydrogen density that matters – can you refuel *outside* a solar system.)
We might be unique, for all intents and purposes. We also might not be. It’s kind of a silly thing to worry too much over, but it’s a fascinating topic to have over coffee, hot cocoa, tea, popcorn, a
nd some primo weedsorry – my tastes have changed since college.Seriously: fucked up life when you go through college, mostly sober and straight, then get into the primo weed for medical reasons, finally treating the stuff that coulda killed ya back in college….
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: What horrifies me most is, no, they really don’t want to cause mass death. But they’re sitting on their hands while their trained seal does it!
@Quinerly: I’ve been in the kink and sex positivity community for a while. For me, a (c-word) is a warm, inviting place, that a woman trusts me with, because she knows what we’re doing, and wants it as much, or more, than I do. It’s a shocking word, still, but if a woman said “eff my c-word,” I’d take it as a very hungry woman, being demanding, or a woman demanding the right to talk dirty, anyway she wants to.
If I were to call someone a c-word, that meant almost the same thing, I’d call her a “cave” because what should be warm and potentially inviting is just a rocky, perpetually cool-to-cold cavern where you gotta be awfully careful, or bad things might happen (like you might forget she’s Kristi Noem, Cricket-killer, and treat her like any other decent human being).
Quinerly
@NotMax:
Thanks for your kind words.
BJ just isn’t what it used to be. I don’t care for how Kay was treated with that ridiculous front page post a few months ago. That is not what BJ was. I very rarely read WG’s posts now. Dip in and read other FPers. And, maybe read the comments on two posts a month. Usually stop when the overbearing commenters start with the same old same old. Obviously, I mostly don’t get very far in the comments I read. I could match those comments with nyms if no nyms were showing. Just a real turnoff.
Was here from the very beginning, lurking until I realized about 10 years ago that I actually traveled in the same circles as Ozark….that we had a bunch of mutual friends in my old (and his old) neighborhood in St. Louis. That’s when I started commenting. Probably would have never commented but for that connection. Blogs and arguing with strangers just aren’t my jam. But folks like Cornerstone, raven and Ozark drew me in. So I jumped on board. Seemed like a nice, caring community.
It’s a real tragedy how much BJ has changed… the comments. Lots of old nyms gone. Not really a welcoming place to some. I did save a thread the other day where people were weighing in about MM’s place. Some of the “mean girls” here sounded like they were back at their old high school lunch room table.
Hope you are well. I always enjoyed your comments and our interactions.
Timill
This being an open thread; we were chatting about VPNs the other day. I find I need to trial one, so what recommendations does the panel have?
[A program is giving a 404 error accessing a site; I can access the site in two other ways, so I know it’s up and running. I therefore suspect something is blocking traffic for some reason, and would like to see if I can circumvent this.]
ETA: looks like others are having the problem too, so it may not help. But I should give it a try anyway.
p.a.
What if we’re not unique, but we’re the best example of sapience there has been.😱. Oh the poor universe!
dnfree
@schrodingers_cat: I think “code monkeys” was in quotation marks to indicate it’s a term of disrespect. I think “Indian code monkeys” distinguishes “code monkeys” from India vs “code monkeys” from the US or anywhere else. “Code monkeys” refers to people doing their job by rote, not by understanding, maybe like the infinite number of monkeys typing?
I have been told by some men now that when I was programming back in the 1960s, I wasn’t really a programmer; I was just doing what qualified men were telling me to do. In effect, in their retrospective view, I was just a female “code monkey”’ if that term had existed then.
WTFGhost
We need a picture of Trump’s face, on a clapping seal, while the Republican Leadership applauds him. I wish I could draw anything that resembled anything. Hm. I’m Microsoft Alumni – I wonder if Co-Pilot does stuff like that.
zhena gogolia
@dnfree: If you take into account the history of British racial slurs against Indians, it’s at best a very unfortunate association.
mayim
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
I’m skeptical about the country recovering. It’s just so much… and so much that took decades to build, so restarting isn’t just flipping a couple switches.
I know I almost certainly won’t personally. Job DOGEd in May and still unemployed, with lots of fallout cascading from that ~ and no improvement likely in the near future.
NotMax
@Timill
No particular complications worth mentioning using Surfshark.
Timill
@NotMax: Thanks for that – I’ll give it a try.
LAC
@zhena gogolia: Yep, sometimes skipping or pieing is in order.
trollhattan
@Timill:
Not a recommendation, but Mozilla runs one and I trust them more than the megatech providers, generally speaking.
mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/
OTOH there’s a certain attraction to those hosted in the EU, who have more stringent privacy laws then Wild West us.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Quinerly:
That “We’ll fix it.” at the end is incredibly chilling. Noem is a nutcase
WTFGhost
@Karen Gail: A better way of looking at it, is, fascists want the Old South to rise again. I’m not sure if that accounts for your basic Hitlers and Mussolinis, but, it’s a lot closer to what their vision is: some slaves, some free-enough.
@Baud: Interestingly, from context, it’s clear a lot of Republicans don’t understand what white libs are about. They think if they portray Obama with a bone through his nose, we call “racist” only because they’re criticizing a Black man, not, you know, portraying him all Bugs Bunny “Unga bunga bunga binga binga binga BUN…GAH!!”
They really think we can just switch sides, and start calling non-(white-men) “DEI hires!” the same way we call the witch doctor Obama “racist!”
And the good thing is, it’s what makes them so easily led by the nose into things that they’re going to be ashamed to admit to their siblings, much less confess to their grandchildren, so, when a fully-fascist fuckhead like Trump comes into power, they have the opportunity to blast on giant Trumpets, “we’re evil! This is what hate looks like!” so people can reject them.
I hope.
Jackie
@MagdaInBlack:
FFOTUS has announced who’s next:
Quinerly
@WTFGhost:
Lots to ponder here in this here comment of yours😎. I do believe you would be very cool to hang out with.
I have been known to freely drop the C word. Especially to refer to the women in Trump’s world. I guess I’m old school. Plus, it’s always been my shock and awe word. Conversation stopper.
Now….back to James McMurtry and Josh Ritter’s latest albums. Plus, 6 roses to get into the ground. I must stop buying roses. But, NM loves her roses.
Hope you are well. Take care.
Quinerly
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Hope you are well. BJ is very fortunate to have you commenting.
frosty
@Quinerly: Good to hear from you! Your travel plans sound great – I really liked SLO when we went through there a couple of years ago.
Our travels: we did a couple small trailer trips last summer but that was about it. We had our 13th Snowbird Road Trip planned and reserved for this winter and just cancelled it this week because we’re moving in the Spring (to a 55+ community) and we decided it would be hard to relax for two months when there’s still so much stuff here we have to throw out.
We’re heading to Andalucia next week for three weeks, though. Not taking the trailer on this one, LOL, so it will be much different than our usual travels.
Contractors are coming through to get this 100-year old house in shape to sell. Things that I’ve been living with for 20 years are getting fixed: electrical up to code, plasterer fixing the holes the electricians left, along with loose plaster in various places, carpenter and painter on the way. Ka-ching!!!
So no big summer trip this year either.
Harrison Wesley
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I wonder if she knows Puerto Ricans are American citizens.
eclare
@Timill:
I’m on Surfshark because MS passed a law requiring age verification for social media, and Bluesky decided it did not have the legal and financial resources to comply.
I don’t live in MS, I live in Memphis, which is about ten miles away in TN, but I guess my normal IP id is somewhere in MS. Bluesky now thinks that I live in Canada.
dc
@Timill: I use NordVPN. It’s a paid service. I don’t trust a free service for this kind of thing because if it’s free, I’m the product being sold.
hobbitdreams
@Timill: I subscribed to Proton. So far it’s working well for me.
Spanky
@Harrison Wesley:
She doesn’t care. None of them care.
brendancalling
I absolutely love that language about ICE being “repelled, recoils in the presence of Christ.”
The fact is, ICE is nothing but demons; and the GOP are the false Christians the Bible warms about. They LITERALLY have the mark of the beast on their foreheads, that stupid MAGA hat. If you splashed holy water on any of these people, their skin would burn off. If they were touched with a crucifix, it would leave a burn mark.
Im not a Christian, but these are EXACTLY the devils Revelation warns about.
Eyeroller
@Fair Economist: There’s just no way for life as we know it to survive interstellar travel without a spaceship, and since faster-than-light travel is impossible and near-lightspeed travel is effectively so, a spaceship would have to be intergenerational. Panspermia was always crackpottery.
However, that doesn’t mean ilfe couldn’t arise independently multiple places. Abiogenesis isn’t well understood but some of the outlines of how it might have happened are known. It would require a good solvent like water, and a source of energy. (In the case of the Earth the original source may not have been the Sun, it may have been deep-sea thermal vents, but that’s still just a hypothesis.)
That said, my WAG has always been that there’s maybe 1 or perhaps 2 planets with complex life per galaxy. Just seems like too many things have to be right for it to evolve, especially “intelligence.” That’s still a lot of potential intelligent life, but they can’t communicate with each other, some because it’s just too far to be practical, but many because they are outside our horizon.
Suzanne
@Quinerly: Great to see you! I’m going to see Josh Ritter perform next month. Just adore him.
trollhattan
America, day ending in Y, Nancy Mace tots and pears deployed, NRA motors onward.
Shalimar
@schrodingers_cat: I don’t think “code monkey” is racist, though it is an unfortunate use of a word that is frequently used by racists. “Code monkey” was coined for programmers who did the repetitive, boring work at a time when the industry was 95% white. So definitely a demeaning phrase but not originally racist.
Eyeroller
@Kayla Rudbek: That’s a really old theory that has long since fallen out of favor. River estuaries were more likely the transition to land. Plants had to go first, and the evolution of green algae to tolerate brackish or fresh water resulted in them being able to colonize the shores. All land plants are descended from green algae.
Eyeroller
@dnfree: Programmers of all races/ethnicities refer to themselves as “code monkeys” all the time. It’s more a matter of them expressing how people in their companies perceive their status/worth, not so much whether they are doing rote work.
HopefullyNotCassandra
@Fair Economist: no doubt. Haters always need to find new people to hate, exploit and rob. No-one is ever safe. The hateful always must eat their own.
HopefullyNotCassandra
@Kayla Rudbek: the ancient Chinese used steam to automate toys. They also had gunpowder they used for fireworks.
WTFGhost
@brendancalling: I wish I remembered my bible well enough, but, there’s a place where Jesus explicitly says, you’ll know the false prophets by their fruits, by what happens as a result.
With Trump, the still-Christian part of me feels like a cartoon angel on their shoulder trying successively bigger weaponry trying to get their attention, first a tap, then a stronger tap, then a clear knock on the metaphorical door, probably ending with a giant howitzer, “LOOK AT WHAT HAPPENS NEAR THEM! PEOPLE SUFFER AND DIE!”
Eyeroller
@WTFGhost: FWIW hydrogen is overwhelmingly the most common element in the Universe, about 75% of the ordinary matter. Helium makes up most of the rest. There is a lot of structure in the universe and it’s only partly understood how that happened, but basically some kind of quantum fluctuations were amplified by gravity, so an initially smooth universe ended up “lumpy.” And it’s on multiple scales so the lumps can be galaxy clusters or individual galaxies or stars. Once a “lump” reaches a certain mass its self-gravity will cause it to collapse to a sphere and if it’s heavy enough, the pressure at the center will be enough to raise the temperature sufficiently to start nuclear fusion. That’s the basics of star formation.
And the speed of light really is the “speed limit.”
HopefullyNotCassandra
@Harrison Wesley: and so the mighty oligarchs may sheer us sheep of what we have earned as Calvera did ordain
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Shalimar: I always liked the Jonathan Coulton song “Code Monkey.”
WTFGhost
Probably a dead thread, but I saw this:
crooksandliars.com/2025/10/thinkin-lincoln
… and mourned a bit to think “actually, Mr. President, you died for *exactly* this, and I feel we failed you by letting it happen.”
trollhattan
@Shalimar:
My brother is a retired code monkey. Don’t think it said that on his bidnez cards but it’s what he did to pay the bills.
Amusingly, his degree is chemistry. Computers took up large rooms when he was at uni.
prostratedragon
@brendancalling:
Sign from the beyond
Miss Bianca
@Quinerly: I miss roses – we don’t have many round these parts in CO. But Paonia on the Western Slope is awash with roses (and peonies, hence the town’s name), and I do miss it so!
Also my late sister’s old place in Pecos. Sometimes I wish I had taken the plunge at the time I was deciding these things and moved to the Santa Fe area instead of CO.
prostratedragon
@WTFGhost:
Matthew 7:15–16
dnfree
@zhena gogolia: I agree that it may be unfortunate association, but it doesn’t imply (to me, anyway) that all Indian IT professionals are in the category of “code monkeys”. The category exists independent of nationality, ethnicity, etc.
dnfree
@RevRick: Maybe other sentient beings are smart enough to leave well enough alone and neither send out signals nor respond to incoming signals?
Quinerly
@Miss Bianca:
This last batch of roses came from a small vendor out of Broomfield, Colorado.
High Country Roses. Great website and history.
I live not far from Pecos. Actually JoJo’s vet is an old school veterinary office there in town across from a favorite restaurant/bar of mine. “Frankies at the Casanova.”
Love Pecos, the fish hatchery, the monastery, and the historic sites (the ruins).
Matt McIrvin
@piratedan: I like to troll the “Confederacy victorious” alt-history theorists by proposing that the scenario leads ultimately to the Soviet Union conquering the world. (North America becomes a theater of World War II, the US is bogged down in renewed combat versus the CSA, the USSR and maybe Britain go it alone against the Axis, and the war drags on until Stalin’s scientists develop the atomic bomb sometime in the Fifties and the fascist cities go up in nuclear fire. International Communism frees the slaves!)
Though, honestly, so much would go differently in that timeline that nothing like the Soviet Union might arise.
prostratedragon
@prostratedragon:
The image has even been written about, if the Getty Images stamp doesn’t convince.
Quinerly
@Suzanne:
Seen him several times and actually met him about 10 years ago when he played a small venue a friend owned. Really nice guy. I especially love his first 3 albums.
He came thru Santa Fe a year ago and I saw him at The Lensic. Tight show. Great band.
Hope you are doing well.
Betty Cracker
@Quinerly: Nice to see you! I miss your travelogues.
Matt McIrvin
@trollhattan: My dad’s first job title as a software guy, at the Defense Mapping Agency in the sixties, was “mathematician”. He did have an undergrad math degree, but he was a coder. “Software engineer” wasn’t a job title yet.
Haydnseek
test
dnfree
@Matt McIrvin: My first job title was Programmer and I worked in the Data Processing Department. I don’t think there was even a term yet for people like Systems Analysts, because there weren’t even Systems. Just programs. After Data Processing (DP) I was in Information Systems (IS) and then Information Technology (IT), and then I retired.
Edited to add that I still don’t think there is such a thing as “software engineering “.
iKropoclast
Especially when you compare them to, say, a hedge fund manager.
Yet who gets compensated better?
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: What I am talking about #68 in this thread
Code monkey is a pejorative and when used for programmers from India it definitely attains racist overtones.
Geminid
There will be a big meeting in Egypt tomorrow; from Kann News reporter Roi Kais:
Later reports indicate that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will in fact attend. Iran was invited but passed.
This will be an afternoon meeting and Egypt is six or seven hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Time. Trump will spend slightly under four hours in Israel beforehand. He’ll address the Knesset and meet with hostage families, former hostages and *possibly* newly released ones.
Baud
@Geminid:
That’s a long day for Trump.
Origuy
@Matt McIrvin: In that scenario, a reduced USA would not have the funds to purchase Alaska from the Russian Empire. Consequently, Russia would not have those funds to build the Moscow to St Petersburg railway. How that progresses is an exercise for the reader. Alternatively, Russia could offer Alaska to the UK. I don’t know Victoria’s government would have taken them up on it. In either case, Imperial Russia was doomed but the form it took afterwards is contingent.
ETA The railway was already built; the Alaska sale allowed Russia to buy out the contract of the American builders. Still, Russia’s economy would have been impacted by not making that sale.
Geminid
@Baud: They’ll probably jack him up on something.
I expect Trump’s remarks at Sharm El-Sheikh will be short, for him. Then he’ll just have to stay awake through all the other speeches.
There should be some nice location shots. Sharm El-Sheikh is kind of spectalular in a stark way. It’s mainly a resort town now with a nice facilty for diplomatic meetngs.
Geminid
@Baud: They’ll probably jack him up on something.
I expect Trump’s remarks at Sharm El-Sheikh will be short, for him. Then he’ll just have to stay awake through all the other speeches.
There should be some nice location shots. Sharm El-Sheikh is kind of spectalular in a stark way. It’s mainly a resort town now, with a nice facilty for diplomatic meetngs.
Baud
@Geminid:
Bets on whether he talks about the Nobel Peace Prize?
Quinerly
@Betty Cracker:
Thanks for the kind words.
I need to catch back up with you with those sporadic emails. Been a wild summer of yard work, yard work, and more yard work. Great, good, and horrendous visitors.
Worst houseguests ever in July. Still recovering from it. Nightmare.
I think I glimpsed that you had done a bit of traveling yourself. Take care.
Harrison Wesley
@Baud: And slags Obama while doing so.
WaterGirl
@Harrison Wesley: He is too dumb to know that when you slag on other people publicly, it just makes you look small.
Geminid
@Baud: I’m actually more interested in what el-Sisi says. This agreement affects Egypt’s interests more than anyone else’s with the exception of Jordan. Egypt was determined to push this deal through, and they did.
The Rurks helped a lot at the end, when MIT Director Ibrahim Kalin flew into Sharm El-Sheikh to to help close the deal on Wednesday.
I also want to see the encounter between Meloni and Erdogan. Those two lovebirds can’t get enough of each other! Video will be easy to find on Turkish YouTube; those folks are fascinated by Meloni.
Castor Canadensis
@prostratedragon: Yes. Their old full-dress uniform was insane, Almost as bad as mine.
WTFGhost
@Eyeroller: I know that the speed of light is the speed limit; Einstein’s special, then general, relativity proved that.
Still: is there a way to cheat? Often, people discussing the Fermi Paradox assume there is a way to cheat, and an ancient race will figure it out. There’s no reason to expect generational starships; since there’s no reason to expect generational starships, one reason we might see no signs of ancient races is, they stay in-system.
But, an actual rocket scientist told me, one explanation could be:
1) there is a way to cheat, and
2) some ancient races did find that way, and spread across solar systems, but:
3) there’s not a lot of loose fuel. For example, maybe we’re so lumpy, all the stuff you’d scoop up for fuel is part of a large mass, due to gravitational forces.
So, we don’t see signs of alien life, because there aren’t any “gas stations” small enough for their hydrogen scoops. That means a rocket scientist told me “you can keep your juvenile dreams of Star Trek alive for a while.” I consider this a good thing.
(Edited for clarity (I hope!!))
Castor Canadensis
@Baud: At the expense of being a bit harsh, this is called “profit taking”
Castor Canadensis
@Timill: Tor browser, for security.
Marc
Hmm, I’ve likely been working in the computer industry since before you were born. I can remember when there were fewer South Asian programmers than black ones in Silicon Valley, and we all still called each other “code monkeys”. It’s what some of us do, we have no big ideas, don’t necessarily get paid a lot of money, no desire to run a billion dollar company, or even manage more people than ourselves. We just like to write code and have the “humans” pay us and otherwise leave us alone.
Castor Canadensis
redundant
Pappenheimer
@RevRick: Obvious answer: Berserkers destroy the civilizations that pipe up. And it only takes one very short-sighted or vindictive species to make Saberhagen’s nightmare come true and infest the galaxy with self-replicating automated killships.
Bill Arnold
@WTFGhost:
FWIW, there have been papers every few years on the Fermi Paradox since at least the early 1980s, mostly about self-replicating probes (“SRPs”), and why they are not obviously already here. Sometimes one sees a paper which complete ignores all previous work.
A self-replicating probe could be low-mass; the information needed to construct a replica and any launching apparatus needed would be stored in some very high density and extremely error-corrected storage. Any large “science payload” would be built the same way at the destination. Other payloads, particularly bespoke payloads, could be constructed as needed.
Also, there is no good reason to believe that advanced technological civilizations are not dominated by machine intelligences. They might know methods for reconstructing individual biological intelligences (progenitors, or similar) from archives, under appropriate circumstances. With most sublight exploration and deep-time waiting for tech civilizations to flower into interestingness (or threats) being done by intelligent self-replicating machines.
dnfree
@schrodingers_cat: Back when I first heard the term “code monkey”, decades ago, it was a mild pejorative, but that was long before programmers in this country were from anywhere abroad. It just referred to lower-level, less-skilled programmers. Others here have reported that it apparently more recently became picked up by programmers themselves, mockingly, to joke about their low status in the eyes of management.
I don’t think the reference you brought up from the other post was intended to be pejorative, but I understand why it appeared that way to you. I would say it wasn’t commented on as racist by others because it didn’t appear to be intended to disrespect Indian programmers as a group.
Another Scott
@dnfree: Made me look.
OED.com says their earliest known entry for it was in (presumably the USENET group) comp.software-eng in 1992.
Not proof of anything, except that English is weird. ;-)
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
@dnfree:.You and others in this comment section have latched on to one word. Its not just about “code monkey”. Its the entire tenor of the debate. I know what a code monkey is.
You have walked in on a debate that has gone on for years on this blog. This debate did not begin yesterday. That’s all I will say about this
And I have noticed that bigotry is excused on this blog and others like it as long as it wears economic justice clothes. Whether it is ageism or xenophobia or antisemitism.
Marc
The problem, as always, is who exactly gets to define bigotry and what words should not be used? Each individual makes their own choice? A consensus of some random group? Or, does it all come down to that you know it when you hear it? I suspect you long ago pied me, but that’s OK, I never gave you permission to decide these things for me.
dnfree
@schrodingers_cat: People clearly differ on some of the issues you list (ageism, xenophobia, racism). For instance, I’m old. I think setting upper limits by age for certain responsibilities like judges, representatives, and senators, is desirable. In my opinion, those who are still competent and unfairly limited are outnumbered by those who continue in a position long after they have become incompetent or out of touch. We have lower age limits for Congress, even though there are some younger people who would be competent. I don’t find upper age limits to be discriminatory if they apply to everyone.
Others may disagree and call that “ageism”. That’s fine. What I think would help the atmosphere here would be to generally assume that people who see something differently from me are nonetheless well-intentioned, unless there’s a lot of evidence to the contrary.
Someone who references “code monkeys” (in quotation marks) and Indians together may not be intending a racist implication, and other commenters who don’t call it out as racism (because they don’t interpret it the same way you see it) may not be indicating that racism is now acceptable on this blog.
You are a valued commenter here, as you should be. I take your concerns seriously, but I also recognize that we don’t always agree. That’s okay with me.
dnfree
@Another Scott: Thanks! English is weird and many people in the computer field are also weird. Or maybe just eccentric. I remember being surprised at some point to encounter excellent programmers who also appeared to be normal humans. (My first paid programming job was in 1966, so maybe more of us back then were identifiably “different”.)
Ruckus
@Ohio Mom:
I worked in Westerville for a number of years, lived in Gahanna.
Ruckus
@prostratedragon:
The treatment is actually normally pretty easy. Far easier than I thought it would be.
Ruckus
@RevRick:
We are, says Cox, the means by which the universe understands itself.
Well then it seems to me that we have maybe a 10-15% possibility of us ever actually knowing. Too many roadblocks, some/one of whom have cankles.
dnfree
@Ruckus: Apparently Biden’s has spread to his bones, so not that simple.
Chris T.
@WhatsMyNym: Also 2006 song by Jonathan Coulton, Code Monkey.