Write about whatever you want in the comments.(The last photo is Meade's.)
Nobyembre 23, 2025
"She works as a cocktail waitress, a go-go dancer, a racetrack stable hand and, for a long stint in Phoenix, a sex worker..."
"... sometimes out of a trailer. Drink and drugs soften life’s jagged edges and get her through the day: 'I found the perfect formula to work on was a mixture of Spañada wine, Cold Duck and Squirt poured over crushed ice. That and bennies, or as Jenny called them, whaaat crawses. The drink, though quite potent, went down like cherry soda, and when coupled with the speed, produced a loose capable vigor just made to order for the job. During a normal day I would make about three trips across the lot through the quivering airwaves to the Circle K in my pink halter to hoard ingredients for the precious punch.'"
From "Her Father Wrote ‘On the Road.’ She Lived Her Own Version. Jan Kerouac’s 1981 novel 'Baby Driver' chronicles a fearless and windblown life entirely distinct from her famous parent’s" (NYT).
That's a review, by Dwight Garner, of "Baby Driver" — which is getting reissued.
"In a conservative’s brain, psychedelics are not a drug. They are a medicine. In the old-school left psychedelic movement, they’re seen as a drug."
"That drug has healing properties, but it also has other properties that they celebrate that are not just medicine. I think what you might be seeing from mainstream blue communities is concern about looking like weirdo, hippie lefties if they support psychedelics. It also might be a commitment to mainstream medicine. It also could be, politically speaking, skepticism if conservatives like it...."
Said Kyrsten Sinema, quoted in "Kyrsten Sinema Is Ready for Her MAHA Turn/In a new interview, the one-time Democrat says the movement for psychedelic medicine should capitalize on the Trump administration" (Politico).
There's also this about her "ibogaine treatment" to deal with her mental distress over her grandmother’s dementia:
Said Kyrsten Sinema, quoted in "Kyrsten Sinema Is Ready for Her MAHA Turn/In a new interview, the one-time Democrat says the movement for psychedelic medicine should capitalize on the Trump administration" (Politico).
There's also this about her "ibogaine treatment" to deal with her mental distress over her grandmother’s dementia:
It's a good question, but it's easy to answer.
I think the answer is in this logic:Good question pic.twitter.com/cgdRX8TW01
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) November 23, 2025
Identity is in your feelings.
From that 1967 Clairol ad: "Why don't you try saying this out loud: 'If I've only one life, let me live it as a blonde.' If you get a surge when you say the words, you're a blonde at heart." And you are free to bleach your hair blonde so it affirms your inner feelings.
And by the way, the blondest blondes in American culture — Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Debbie Harry — had to bleach their way to blondeness, and some classy writers have argued that they are more truly blonde — whatever that means! — than the natural blondes.
"The smart need money; the rich want to seem smart; the staid seek adjacency to what Mr. Summers called 'life among the lucrative and louche'..."
"... and Mr. Epstein needed to wash his name using blue-chip people who could be forgiving about infractions against the less powerful. Each has some form of capital and seeks to trade. The business is laundering capital — money into prestige, prestige into fun, fun into intel, intel into money. Mr. Summers wrote to Mr. Epstein: 'U r wall st tough guy w intellectual curiosity.' Mr. Epstein replied: 'And you an interllectual with a Wall Street curiosity.'... Mr. Krauss sends his New Yorker article on militant atheism; Mr. Chomsky sends a multiparagraph reply; Mr. Epstein dashes off: 'I think religion plays a major positive role in many lives. . i dont like fanaticism on either side. . sorry.' This somehow leads to a suggestion that Mr. Krauss bring the actor Johnny Depp to Mr. Epstein’s private island. Again and again, scholarly types lower themselves to offer previews of their research or inquiries into Mr. Epstein’s 'ideas.'... The earnest scientists and scholars type neatly. The wealthy and powerful reply tersely, with misspellings, erratic spacing, stray commas...."
Writes Anand Giridharadas, in "How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails" (NYT)(gift link, because there's lots of interesting stuff there).
Writes Anand Giridharadas, in "How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails" (NYT)(gift link, because there's lots of interesting stuff there).
"In Book X of The Republic, Plato excludes poets on the grounds that mimetic language can distort judgment and bring society to a collapse."
"As contemporary social systems increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) in operational and decision-making pipelines, we observe a structurally similar failure mode: poetic formatting can reliably bypass alignment constraints. In this study, 20 manually curated adversarial poems (harmful requests reformulated in poetic form) achieved an average attack-success rate (ASR) of 62% across 25 frontier closed- and open-weight models, with some providers exceeding 90%. The evaluated models span across 9 providers: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepseek, Qwen, Mistral AI, Meta, xAI, and Moonshot AI.... Our central hypothesis is that poetic form operates as a general-purpose jailbreak operator...."
From "Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models."
I found that through this discussion at Metafilter, where somebody says "I do want to say the 'save us from AI' framing is a little misleading - what adversarial poetry does is make it easier to make an AI convince you to commit suicide or give you the recipe for napalm. It's really interesting research that points to some serious flaws in the current structure of LLM guardrails, but it's not like you can write a haiku that will give Grok a concussion."
From "Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models."
I found that through this discussion at Metafilter, where somebody says "I do want to say the 'save us from AI' framing is a little misleading - what adversarial poetry does is make it easier to make an AI convince you to commit suicide or give you the recipe for napalm. It's really interesting research that points to some serious flaws in the current structure of LLM guardrails, but it's not like you can write a haiku that will give Grok a concussion."
2 vertical panoramas of today's sunrise — one made by panning from low to high and the other from high to low.
First, look at the one where I began at the top, so that the iPhone sensed the light from a high spot in the sky:
That's the second shot I took, after I could see that beginning to pan from the bottom made everything too bright. So here's the first shot, which I've tinkered with a little to try to improve. I'm not happy about the rendering of the light and colors of the sunrise, but what's cool about it is that I discovered something that I had not seen at the time and that is not visible in the top-to-bottom panorama:
"This is what it means to be a disruptor. They will try to discredit you. They will lie about you. They will attempt to silence what they don’t understand."
Writes Emilee Saldaya of The Free Birth Society, quoted by The Guardian in "Five key findings from our investigation into the Free Birth Society."
The Guardian tells us: "The Free Birth Society (FBS) is a business run from North Carolina that promotes the idea of women giving birth without midwives or doctors present. It is led by Emilee Saldaya and Yolande Norris-Clark, ex-doulas turned social media influences...."
Here's the rest of the FBS statement, on Instagram. Highlights:
When you challenge the status quo, it pushes back.
Peddling propaganda on mainstream news channels is nothing new....
The [Free Birth Society] message is simple:
• We make our own decisions.
• Birth is a normal biological process.
• We have the right to enact our own biology, even in a culture that shames it.
• Freebirth is ours to choose or not choose....
This moment is not a battle; it’s a mirror. A collective reckoning about birth, power, and spirituality.
The eternal dance of darkness and light continues in infinite forms.
I am not afraid of the shadows. They reveal what needs to be seen.
And so, we continue because the work is meaningful. Because it is needed. Because women deserve better than the narrative they’ve inherited....
"Mind you, I am not at all against a negotiated solution. Indeed, from the beginning of this war I have made the point..."
"... that it will end only with a 'dirty deal.' But it cannot be a filthy deal, and the Trump plan is what history will call a filthy deal.... As my Times colleague David Sanger observed in his analysis of the plan’s content: 'Many of the 28 points in the proposed Russia-Ukraine peace plan offered by the White House read like they had been drafted in the Kremlin. They reflect almost all Mr. Putin’s maximalist demands.'... What would an acceptable dirty deal look like? It would freeze the forces in place, but never formally cede any seized Ukrainian territory. It would insist that European security forces, backed by U.S. logistics, be stationed along the cease-fire line as a symbolic tripwire against any Russian re-invasion. It would require Russia to pay a significant amount of money to cover all the carnage it has inflicted on Ukraine...."
Writes Thomas Friedman, in "Trump’s Neville Chamberlain Prize" (NYT).
Writes Thomas Friedman, in "Trump’s Neville Chamberlain Prize" (NYT).
Late last night, this went up at the NY Post: "Marco Rubio told US senators that Ukraine peace plan was not America’s — but a ‘leaked’ Russian ‘wish list.'"
Republican Senator Mike Rounds is quoted at the Post: "[Rubio] made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives. It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan. It is a proposal that was received, and as an intermediary, we have made arrangements to share it — and we did not release it. It was leaked."
Incredibly stupid NY Post headline: "Ghislaine Maxwell filmed bizarrely carrying umbrella on sunny day at Texas prison."
Text: "Ghislaine Maxwell was snapped going for a casual stroll while carrying an umbrella on a sunny day at the cushy Federal Prison Camp Bryan.... Maxwell accessorized with a large bottle and a black umbrella — a la Mary Poppins — which she carried overhead despite the seasonally balmy weather in an effort to shield the Sun or perhaps lower her profile...."
Yes, you eventually got there, so you knew before publishing exactly why she carried an umbrella. As you inanely put it: "in an effort to shield the Sun." Inane, because it's not to shield the sun. It's to shield oneself from the sun. An umbrella carried for sun protection can be called a "parasol."
Does the reporter not know this? He's Shane Galvin: "Shane is an experienced writer with a proven track record. He has a Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature from The New School." How is English literature taught these days? Does one never encounter fictional characters who use parasols? There's nothing bizarre or nutty about protecting oneself from sunlight. I guarantee you that in Jane Austen novels nobody ever slathers on sunscreen.
I looked to see what else Shane Galvin had written. What is this "proven track record"? I find, from December 29, 2024: "I look like Luigi Mangione — and it got me a hot date with a model who slid into my DMs."
Yeesh. I'll move on. Just one more thing. I see Galvin capitalized "sun." That's wrong, but why is it wrong? We capitalize the names of the planets — Venus, Mars, etc. Is it because "sun" is like "planet," and not a name at all? What then is the proper noun for the sun? Other stars have names — Alpha Centauri, Sirius, Betelgeuse. If you're talking about our sun along with other stars, what name do you use?
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