Travicissitudes
leitko.bsky.social
Travicissitudes
@leitko.bsky.social
Paralyzed by the enormity of it all, but I like you. Keep it up.
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Some Dems have told themselves only ~1% of the population is trans so they can dip their toe in the anti-trans filth and come out clean.

I don't have any trans family members—but it still makes me irate. I see it as a huge red flag, a sign you are unprincipled and untrustworthy. And I'm not alone.
We are parents of a trans kid and our family takes this very, very personally. If you intentionally make life harder for our beloved daughter, it’s EXTREMELY hard to think of you as an ally, to say the least. @amyklobuchar.com - you still send us requests for money, while hurting our kid. Disgusted.
Here are the 28 Dem Senators who voted to advance the first federal ban on trans athletes & a federal definition of sex that would make trans & intersex people non-existent: Angela Alsobrooks (MD), Tammy Baldwin (WI), Richard Blumenthal (CT), Lisa Blunt Rochester (DE), Chris Coons (DE), ->
December 16, 2025 at 3:26 PM
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Excellent NYT investigation confirms this.
December 16, 2025 at 7:09 PM
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"The newspaper industry served as a feeder for our entire news media ecosystem. So when we lose those newspapers, we've lost that journalism. In the early 2000s, we had 40 journalists per 100,000 people. We're now down to 8 journalists per 100,000 people," says @victorpickard.bsky.social.
December 16, 2025 at 7:12 PM
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it drives me crazy that the preferred solution for these guys to ostensibly avoid war is to return to the world order and social structures that gave us 100% of prior World Wars
December 16, 2025 at 1:04 AM
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My humanities dept was relevant. Majors were up. Courses were 100% enrolled. Revenue positive, GE serving, etc etc. We were still eliminated.

The problem is ideological administrative destruction. Couldn’t write a report, a self study, or a spreadsheet against that.
'For humanities departments to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it. Indeed, the most useful lesson the humanities have to offer today is a profoundly countercultural one: Difficulty is good, an end in its own right.' 2/2
December 15, 2025 at 1:24 PM
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A few months ago, Larry Ellison briefly passed Elon as the world's richest man. Today, on paper, Elon is, by himself, worth more than *all of Oracle*, the company from which Ellison's vast wealth is derived.

Markets are not always rational.
December 16, 2025 at 12:13 AM
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we can kill them all if we just work together and ✨believe💫
December 15, 2025 at 5:11 PM
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annoyance theory is a good one (that I invented) but if you are more annoyed by one group and the other group is dangerous and runs the government well
I think the best way to explain the X vs Bluesky preference is whether a person thinks the left is more annoying than the right is dangerous.

The reason so many Noah Smiths end up on the X side of that equation is that while the left annoys them personally, the right mostly endangers other people.
December 15, 2025 at 7:21 PM
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they said it. they actually said it.
Opinion | As a conservative, I’m beginning to wonder: Are we the bad guys?
Republican bigotry, tariffs and defense spending, through readers’ eyes.
www.washingtonpost.com
December 14, 2025 at 6:08 AM
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“We’re living in a strange paradox: the U.S. is willing to sell China the “brains” that power advanced AI systems (because it pays), while blocking Chinese-made “eyes” like DJI camera drones under the banner of security and human rights.“

I agree. This is all incredibly dumb.
U.S. Sells China AI “Brains” But Blocks DJI Drone “Eyes” As A Security Threat
We're living in a strange paradox: the U.S. is willing to sell China the "brains" that power advanced AI systems (because it pays), while blocking
dronexl.co
December 13, 2025 at 2:51 PM
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They should be pounding on Trump’s culture of corruption instead of creating their own.
"House Democrats on Thursday voted to return Rep. Henry Cuellar to his leadership role on the House Appropriations Committee following his presidential pardon on federal corruption charges."

JICYMI - Shameful, repulsive move by House Democrats and their leaders. Disgraceful.
Democrats Return Henry Cuellar to Powerful Spending Post After Trump Pardon
“We got ratified,” Cuellar told reporters after the vote.
www.notus.org
December 12, 2025 at 10:46 PM
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live your life in a way that your supposed friends and loved ones aren't tearing other to shreds over how best to exploit you before your body is cold
ultimately, no one even grieved Charlie Kirk. he was just another thing for the worst people on earth to get outraged over. and when the outrage of real events wasn't enough, they invented new ones.

not even his wife saw his death as anything other than an opportunity.
my read is they were trying to whip up the usual frenzy, but then the effort got blown up by Candace Owens saying The Jews did it
December 12, 2025 at 6:16 PM
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note to everyone else they're trying to intimidate: telling the administration to fuck off remains the single most effective response
Lol the US just abandoned their effort to get mad at the guy that threw Bolsonaro in prison. Big "my toddler tantrum didn't get me nothing so we're done here" energy.

*US REMOVES BRAZIL'S MORAES FROM SANCTIONS LIST
*US ALSO DELETES VIVIANE BARCI DE MORAES FROM SANCTIONS LIST
December 12, 2025 at 5:48 PM
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It's fitting that the cover on AI mindlessly apes an earlier creation and also displaces workers while elevating Silicon Valley plutocrats.
December 12, 2025 at 3:40 AM
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Pretty good glimpse at the kind of massive scale that would be required for the golden dome boondoggle.

This caveat—that $1.1T is procurement only and doesn’t include R&D, O&M, or personnel—is important bc it would take 10s, maybe 100s of thousands of (additional) personnel to run all this.
December 12, 2025 at 12:20 PM
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I see this mostly as "Rivian is humoring Wall Street". Robotaxis will turn out to be a dumb low-margin-high-hassle business for any company not named Waymo, I suspect.
NEW: Rivian is adding self-driving capability to its EVs -- including laser lidar -- and may eventually jump into the robotaxi space #rivian #selfdrivingvehicles www.forbes.com/sites/alanoh...
December 12, 2025 at 12:34 PM
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Sam Altman: hey I made a machine that stole literally all your stuff in order to make CSAM of your child actors, sometimes it encourages people to kill themselves

Disney: Holy shit here's a billion dollars

Altman: the machine loses more than that each week but thank you. Soon it will become god.
December 12, 2025 at 10:27 AM
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Perfect encapsulation of the entire diseased industry. Save the real news for the self-serving, brand-building book deal, which gets released months or years after it might have affected world events only to be read by dozens of fellow Beltway gossip addicts.

The cosmic body horror version of that.
December 12, 2025 at 12:39 AM
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Ryan Coogler explains why he declined the invitation to join the Academy www.nytimes.com/2025/12/10/m...
December 10, 2025 at 6:19 PM
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one thing worth observing here is that so many of these pundits aren't earnestly trying to understand what happened in the world as much as they are shadowboxing with people they don't like on the internet. stringinamaze.net/p/the-pundit...
December 3, 2025 at 2:40 AM
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Very sensitive intelligence methods like murdering the shit out of shipwrecked mariners.
House Intel Chair Rick Crawford on why he doesn't want video of the second Sept 2 boat strike released: "What the trained eye can detect from these videos may reveal sources and methods that would imperil troops." (But releasing video of the first strike didn't?)
December 11, 2025 at 1:11 AM
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One annoying thing about the incessant ads for AI features and products is that companies will label their ad topics however they want. This was from a Google Gemini ad. It’s listed under “Vacuum cleaners and accessories.” I’ve seen these ads listed as Books, Games, Dating, Visual Art, and more.
December 10, 2025 at 4:37 PM