Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 22m

Gee, wonder who takes care of the kiddos if there's no daycare? Guess one of the parents will have to stay home. I wonder which parent they want it to be...? 🤔

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Jacqueline Antonovich @jackiantonovich.bsky.social · 32m

The thing is: if you study what I study, this makes complete sense. Many eugenicists of the early 20th C. wanted the “right” people to have more babies! Limit or prohibit contraception to ensure more of the “right” babies, and use targeted sterilizations to ensure fewer of the “wrong” babies.

Clara Jeffery @clarajeffery.bsky.social · 9h

Ah yes, cutting teen pregnancy prevention while ending federal right to an abortion…

Catherine Rampell @crampell.bsky.social · 9h

An HHS source says admin also RIFed entire Office of Population Affairs last night.
“Not a single staff person to run our nation's family planning program or the evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention program. The Office of Adolescent Health which nested within OPA functionally ceases to exist”

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 30m

Because the alternative to fixing it in the air, unfortunately, is landing for repairs, and we do not have the ground conditions for a soft landing and a reliable, cooperative repair team. We're looking at a crash and rebuild for the survivors scenario, and that's utterly bad.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 30m

The US's original design only lasted about 80 years and has been implicitly (not explicitly, textually) reconfigured at least once since then.

It's a bad design. The question is really have we run out of ways to fix the plane in the air if two subsystems have failed and the third is failing?

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 8h

I would be pretty bummed out by the final paragraph before the summary if I actually believed it.

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Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · 13h

theonion.com/ice-raids-my...

MYTH: ICE agents lack proper training.

FACT: Most have been racists their entire lives.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 14h

FRWL, unlike a lot of the later entries in the series, is actually a pretty good spy thriller. There's a plausible McGuffin. The climactic battle is basically just fisticuffs in a train compartment. The gadget Bond's sent out with is a briefcase with hidden coins and a concealed can of pepper spray.

R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 14h

FRWL is my favorite Bond film by far, but it's also kind of an outlier. I've long held that Goldfinger is really the first "Bond Film": it's the first movie in the franchise, for better and worse, to have pretty much ALL of the elements one thinks of when one thinks of the franchise.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 16h

I suspect I'm far from alone in also finding FOMO less urgent the further I get into middle age. Mums and Dads not only have a choice between theater and home theater, but I imagine are a lot more prone to, "Enh, I can wait 'til it hits streaming. If then."

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 16h

The special effects looked really cool in 1982!

The special effects looked really cool in 1982 to this very day!

(And for all my love of Bridges and fondness for Boxleitner, David Warner (♥️) really does carry that movie on the human side of it.)

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Charlie Jane "Lessons in Magic and Disaster" Anders 🏳️‍⚧ @charliejane.bsky.social · 17h

I'm perplexed at watching pundits in the trades struggling to explain Tron Ares' disappointing opening.

Was it covid? Do people just not like science fiction? etc. etc.

The main reason is pretty obvious: Tron isn't a popular franchise. Nobody's interested in nostalgia for a failed 1980s project.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 17h

(Thanks to their overinvestment in AI, they've been actively making Office worse over the last 18 months or so.)

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 17h

I don't even hate Microsoft as much as most people do, and mostly like Office (I live and die by OneNote and OneDrive), but there's no arguing that their products vividly illustrate the problems with quasi-monopolies. They've just got no reason to improve Office apps, and they haven't.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 17h

Word has always been utterly terrible about correct legal formatting. Still gets me worked up, and I'm retired and before I left it had been years since I'd needed to draft a brief for the court.

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Popehat Agitates And Irritates @kenwhite.bsky.social · 17h

The best and the brightest

Bradley P. Moss @bradmossesq.bsky.social · 1d

Someone gonna get fired …. @kenwhite.bsky.social @annabower.bsky.social

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 17h

A young man who would so obviously have a tasteful bone-colored business card printed in Silian Rail is surely qualified for something. What are his feelings about the respective merits of Huey Lewis vs. Elvis Costello?

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 17h

"Were all the thefts masterminded by the same set of people, or were authorities looking at rival gangs...? Above all, there was the uneasy fact of the thefts’ timing.... Was this a bunch of small-time criminals... [or] a state-sponsored Russian exercise in recouping cultural heritage...?"

The Pushkin job: unmasking the thieves behind an international rare books heist

The long read: Between 2022 and 2023, as many as 170 rare and valuable editions of Russian classics were stolen from libraries across Europe. Were the thieves merely low-level opportunists, or were bi...

www.theguardian.com

R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 20h

Is good essay.

To Haunt and Be Haunted: On the Exhumation of Edgar Allan Poe

Imagine that you’ve been buried alive. Don’t question the specifics, whether you’ve been kidnapped or unfortunate enough to fall victim to poorly trained pathologists and morticians, for either way…

lithub.com

Reposted by R. Eric VanNewkirk

Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · Aug 8

we can sneak around town / hunting working folks down / I hear they got a great benefit plan

join ICE boy ain’t it nice / join ICE take my advice

www.tiktok.com/@jessewelles...

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 23h

I haven't looked it up, but I cannot imagine there was the same feverish demand for greenhouse builders and potting soil merchants when the Dutch Tulip Bubble imploded.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 1d

Frankly, I might be less irritated even by a *Republican* ripoff of the Arc de Triomphe if the President were somebody I merely disagreed with about policies, and not a lifelong philistine.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 1d

I'm not sure how I'd feel about it as architecture, but will concede that I've got a bias against Trump redesigning DC that's rooted in his utter lack of taste, lifetime of self-aggrandizement, and his disrespect for historical traditions related to the White House and its iconography.

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Luke Yoquinto @lukeyoquinto.bsky.social · 1d

CHOTINER: So let me get this straight. Anti-racists are the real racists, is that correct?
THIEL: right.
CHOTINER: and the anti-fascists?
THIEL: right, they’re the real fascists
CHOTINER: So now you’re saying Greta is the Antichrist.
THIEL: …
CHOTINER: I think you can see where I’m going with this.

Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 1d

The tech billionaire and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel says the antichrist is ... Greta Thunberg www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Inside billionaire Peter Thiel’s private lectures: Warnings of ‘the Antichrist’ and U.S. destruction

In leaked recordings of private lectures by tech billionaire Peter Thiel he argued that “the Antichrist” is likely to take the form of a critic of technology.

www.washingtonpost.com

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Adam Keiper @adamkeiper.com · 1d

"I don’t want to make it sound that Charles Beaumont, with his sad life cut short, is all doom and pessimism. But horror is a merciless genre, it can’t be otherwise, and if one wants to write it seriously, one must accept that and write mercilessly."
www.thebulwark.com/p/hopeless-h...

The Hopeless Horror of Charles Beaumont

The writer died before his fortieth birthday—but left behind an influential catalogue of stories and unforgettable Twilight Zone episodes.

www.thebulwark.com

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 1d

They were absolutely 100% already planning for months to do these exact RIFs, and they’re so dumb that they think choosing to do it now will make somebody else take the blame.

Oriana González @oriana.bsky.social · 1d

NEWS: Trump administration officials have revealed that, so far, over 4,100 federal workers have been laid off in this round of RIFs

The administration is "actively considering whether to conduct additional RIFs related to" the shutdown, per a new court filing
www.notus.org/trump-white-...

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