Working my way through listening to The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton. This overlong book is largely self-promotion by Mr. Bolton and you can tell who the good guys and bad guys are really easily ... good buys agree with Bolton, bad guys disagree. Only 17 hours and 30 minutes left to go.

I finished listening to Unredacted by Christopher Steele (@christophersteele.bsky.social‬) on Audible and I enjoyed it more than I had expected to. It contains virtually no dirt from The Steele (Trump) Dossier but has a lot of backstory about how the report came to be written and about the 1/4

I tried Alexa+ (early trial) and tested it with my main use for Alexa devices, playing music from my Plex server. It worked once on each device (Echo Show 5 and Echo Studio). Trying for a second song on each, the device ignored my "ask Plex to" phrase and used Amazon Music. I uninstalled Alexa+.

The news has been reporting that Trump's insistence that NATO countries spend 5% of their GDP, up from 2%, on defense represents a victory for Trump. To me, shifting 3% of Europe's GDP from whatever it used to be spent on to military / war gear and personnel seems like a global tragedy.

Is the Gulf of Trump the body of water between the Trump Ocean and the Bay of Trump, or am I confused again?

The 1972 film Pink Floyd at Pompeii has been remastered in 4K and I'm trying to figure out how I can see it in a theater or buy it on streaming. The movie theater finder is not showing me any showings so far, though I was able to buy a hi-res audio version of the album (!) from HDTracks. 1/2

This article on gerrymandering from Princeton professor Sam Wang (samwang.bsky.social) is from 2013.
Gerrymandering's goal is to waste your opponent's votes. Wang notes that "the number of wasted votes dwarfs the likely effect of voter-ID laws ... or of voter fraud."
www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/o...

I finished listening to Ratf**ked (i.e. Rat Fucked) by David Daley (davedaley.bsky.social) on Audible and it's informative but hard to listen to. So much gerrymandering across the nation, by both parties but the Republicans are better at it and use it more effectively. 1/2

The thing that keeps eating at me about the tariff rates is that some of them are at a level that cannot accomplish anything good. A manageable tariff rate of 10% might earn some money. But some of these tariff rates are high enough to stop commerce in its tracks, earning NO tax income. So, why?

In statements published in July 2024, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, said "we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be". I had interpreted this as "when we win, we will not kill the left if they don't resist".

Tesla (TSLA) has a PE ratio of 108 (Trailing Twelve Months). It has a long way to fall. Shrinking companies don't deserve sky high PE ratios and won't be able to maintain them. TSLA fell over 15% during normal trading today and another 2.5% in after hours trading. Not a safe holding.

At what point do we start to refer to ourselves as living under a dictatorship? Is there a particular right we need to lose, or some event we need to see? Watching the federal government get dismantled department by department doesn't seem to have been it.

Trump's "only two sexes" order is ignorance masquerading as policy.

“The Trump administration purports to talk about ‘biological realities,’ but demonstrates that they lack any understanding of the relevant science,” the statement said.

www.statnews.com/2025/01/23/t...

So when Trump declares that there are only two genders, is this just making a statement, like declaring that red and blue are the same color? Or does this imply some reinterpretation of existing law, or something more sinister?

I just got my first listen to a few tracks from the remix Let It Be... Naked and it's a revelation. I need to do a proper sit-down listen. I may end up liking the original better, but the you-are-there clarity of Across the Universe is striking. Nice!

www.beatlesbible.com/albums/let-i...

I don't find the opinions of NYT columnist David Brooks compelling very often, but his January 15, 2025 column on Pete Hegseth makes a strong case.

The world is dangerous and dwelling on Hegseth's moral failures misses the point that he is unqualified.

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/o...

Just discovered bsky.app/profile/pnas..., an open access publication from the National Academy of Science. Slowly building my personal Bluesky Science set of feeds. This Internet thing may be useful yet!

I just canceled my digital subscription to the Wall Street Journal. I was paying a promotional price of $4 per month but the promotion period ended and continuing would have cost $38.99 per month. Dow Jones had a button on their web page saying “1 click cancel”, and it worked. Color me impressed!

Why do you need to have an income of 40 times rent to rent an apartment in New York City? Why is cash in the bank not acceptable? Why is income valuable and cash valueless for this?