chbarts
chbarts.bsky.social
chbarts
@chbarts.bsky.social
Pronouns he/him

This profile is funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Inanities.

Style for use with Stylus to get Bsky to use a serif font (at least on desktop), so you can tell Weird Al from Weird AI:

https://userstyles.world/style/18544
Pinned
This one is also my avatar, Sheesha, my whippador girl:
Reposted by chbarts
A piece of calligraphy by my mentor, the calligrapher Sato Heisen: “変則通”—a phrase from the I Ching (易経).
Loosely translated, it conveys this truth: when a situation has reached a complete dead end, changing course can actually open a new path forward.
February 12, 2026 at 1:46 PM
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According to multiple NYT sources, it wasn’t even military personnel at Fort Bliss that fired an anti-drone laser at alleged cartel drones. It was CBP who used the weapon on loan from DoD against a child’s party balloon they mistook for a drone. The Pentagon gave CBP an anti-aircraft weapon.
February 12, 2026 at 3:28 AM
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what I most appreciate about this update: when I first heard of this story I *do* recall thinking "no this isn't dumb enough"

bsky.app/profile/tyle...
According to multiple NYT sources, it wasn’t even military personnel at Fort Bliss that fired an anti-drone laser at alleged cartel drones. It was CBP who used the weapon on loan from DoD against a child’s party balloon they mistook for a drone. The Pentagon gave CBP an anti-aircraft weapon.
February 12, 2026 at 1:45 PM
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Minnesotans being menaced by middle aged racists dressed up like ninja Turtles.
February 12, 2026 at 1:47 PM
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In my topology class, we discussed "Kuratowski's closure-complement problem":

Find a set A⊆ℝ so that we can construct as many distinct sets as possible from A using only the closure and complement operations.

(Below, c denotes complement and - denotes closure.)
divisbyzero.com/2008/10/01/k...
February 12, 2026 at 1:47 PM
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Republicans have very few principles beyond winning.

And voters taught them through their own actions that being racists, bigots, and catering to the rich won elections.

If voters voted against every Republican who was racist regardless of the opponent, they'd change overnight.
Continuing my previous post on this, these were the results of trends within the Republican Party that Republicans should have stopped. But feckless Democrats really removed any electoral penalty for extremism. They lost elections that they should have won.
People who voted Republican before Trump are convinced that the rise of Trump is NOT in any way connected to, say, the rise of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and Fox News. (While they were voting Republican.)

But REALLY all the fault of the Democrats. It's canonical.
February 12, 2026 at 1:39 PM
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I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it.

I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.”

1/
February 11, 2026 at 9:56 PM
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Every photo from Minneapolis looks like this. Cops decked out with guns and full tac gear facing off against people in bathrobes, parkas, and sweatpants armed only with whistles and cell phones.

Yet every verified MAGA chode on X dutifully calls it a riot or violent insurrection.
February 11, 2026 at 11:50 PM
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Few scientists have so revolutionised our understanding of life as Charles Darwin. Born #OnThisDay in 1809, his work laid the foundations of evolutionary biology and transformed how we see the natural world, understand our origins, and think about humanity’s place within it. Happy #DarwinDay!
February 12, 2026 at 9:00 AM
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It's very dumb in practice but "you need to create your own cordon sanitaire" does jive with the very libertarian "there is no algorithm, you have to curate your feed" ethos the devs here seem to have and it slams into the immovable object called the Discover feed that you cannot opt out of
it is not feasible, let alone reasonable, to tell new users to be like "Hi, welcome to bluesky! you are in grave danger from Those Users. first you gotta IMMEDIATELY subscribe to these blocklists. no the other ones. then if you see someone coming through the blocks to talk shit, ITS ON SIGHT."
Yeah, it’s insanely corrosive to both individual users like you and to site health as a whole! This shit does not happen on healthy, well-moderated sites!
February 12, 2026 at 7:49 AM
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For clarity, and for those not grasping how obscenely overblown the scenario, or the extent of the misrepresentation.

Counting only written complaints, the NHS in England alone received 256,777 in 2024-25.

4.5 complaints per 1000 people.

Tavistock trans services received 0.06 per 1000 patients.
The entire Tavistock scandal was over 8 complaints. They've fucked the entirety of trans and non binary peoples, because of 8 complaints, all of which have not materialised into anything as far as I can tell.
February 11, 2026 at 6:29 PM
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For clarity, and for those not grasping how obscenely overblown the scenario, or the extent of the misrepresentation.

Counting only written complaints, the NHS in England alone received 256,777 in 2024-25.

4.5 complaints per 1000 people.

Tavistock trans services received 0.06 per 1000 patients.
The entire Tavistock scandal was over 8 complaints. They've fucked the entirety of trans and non binary peoples, because of 8 complaints, all of which have not materialised into anything as far as I can tell.
The real Tavistock Clinic scandal: 1,000 court cases that never materialised | A FoI request for the data behind the media hysteria over the Tavistock Clinic presents quite a different picture | Marie Shrewsbury
February 11, 2026 at 6:28 PM
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Gotta go back to sleep, not draw the venn diagram of Bigfoot Fetishists, Big Foot Fetishists and Big Bigfoot Fetishists, but now it's preserved for morning.
February 12, 2026 at 7:46 AM
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I wasn't feeling much about the addition of drafts until I remembered a favorite use for them. Saving standouts from the random jumbles of words/concepts that sometimes flow through my train of thought while half-asleep.
February 12, 2026 at 7:43 AM
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You're A God 👑
#VerticalHorizon
www.youtube.com
February 12, 2026 at 7:47 AM
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Its funny that this is maybe the most insane scandal in American political history: full of sex, money and murder and the reaction all us dorks have is like "wait, ffmpeg stands for something?!" bsky.app/profile/swol...
Raise your hand if youve been using ffmpeg since college and had no idea that it stood for fast forward moving picture expert group [the file format standardized by the group, not the group itself]
I didn't expect the Jeffrey Epstein story to contain assistant editor workflow gore but lmao
February 12, 2026 at 5:41 AM
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Listen, you think super hard and you tell me if you can figure out what common trait between Epstein and Netanyahu Hasan is trying to exploit here. Three guesses.
Netanyahu is a war criminal who belongs in the Hague, but the only references to Netanyahu in the Epstein files are emails sent exchanging articles about him, or others discussing him.

I think it's very bad that the most popular left-wing streamer on the internet is a raging antisemite.
February 8, 2026 at 5:10 PM
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Apprentice - Barnstorming [Chicago, IL, USA ; Jazz Fusion / Prog Rock] (1982)
https://redd.it/1i6ncsd
https://youtu.be/Cntn04sJaw0
Apprentice - Barnstorming [Chicago, IL, USA ; Jazz Fusion / Prog Rock] (1982)
youtu.be
February 12, 2026 at 7:36 AM
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From America, Feb 1944: War Bonds ad from Rca

(+Radios; Phonographs; and Television Instruments)

«YOUR WAR BONDS WILL BUY the secret weapons we need to lick the Enemy YOUR SAVINGS WILL BUY the greatest radios and phonographs in RCA history»
February 12, 2026 at 7:37 AM
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Maybe this has nothing to do with Trump, but it certainly feels like Gallup bowing to Trump.
Gallup will no longer track presidential approval ratings after nearly 90 years
Gallup, the analytics firm that has tracked presidential approval for nearly 90 years, will stop measuring job performance ratings starting in 2026.
www.usatoday.com
February 12, 2026 at 7:34 AM
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Twas!
February 12, 2026 at 7:20 AM
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For the record, racoon meat is not excellent. It's not even good.
For anyone wondering what Greg Bovino has been up to lately…
February 12, 2026 at 7:35 AM
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This is why I wish national Dems would figure out that they can use the environment as a wedge issue in Florida, because you may not be able to peel off die hard Republicans, but you will force them into defending why they're backing a presidential candidate who opposes what they care about the most
Update: There are over 2k people in the Facebook group that's organizing the protest, so a decent number of people are probably going to turn out.

Also, a Trumpy local state house candidate is making opposing it his keystone campaign issue, because environmental politics work differently in Florida
February 12, 2026 at 7:32 AM
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December 31, 2025 at 10:30 PM
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January 16, 2026 at 1:30 PM