The Fastest and Easiest Second Passports for Americans in 2025
I qualify for Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, if I can get the paperwork to prove it. I presume Julie qualifies too, as my spouse.
I’m not planning on going anywhere, but if things get extremely DOGE-MAGA, a second passport might be a useful thing to have.
‘I’m proud of its wonderful teens’: Amy Heckerling on how Clueless revolutionised the high-school comedy. I loved “Clueless” and I’m man enough to admit it.
Startup Lonestar Data Holdings is catching a ride on a SpaceX rocket to put a mini data center on the moon — a proof-of-concept for the real thing. I get the technical and legal benefits of putting a data center in space, but why the moon? Why not in orbit, where it would be closer to home and more easily serviced?
Burritos, AI art, corporate fascism
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day: “You ordered a private taxi for your burrito.” Also: " … AI art is the aesthetic of 21st-century fascism the same way Italian Futurism was in the last century."
Also: “The Washington Post as a tool of fascism:”
As Juniper wrote on Bluesky, “I think everyone needs to stop framing what’s going on as ‘bending the knee’ and what’s really happening which is ‘they’re finally feel free to do what they’ve always wanted to do.’”
Oh, and by the way, totally unrelated. I’m still working my way through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I just got to the section where all the German industrialists that supported Adolf Hitler’s rise to power because he was anti-union get their companies nationalized and they all get thrown in jail.
More than a billion people now watch podcasts on YouTube every month. This seems bonkers to me. Podcasts aren’t for watching. They’re for listening to, while walking the dog, driving or doing chores around the house. And yet YouTube is apparently now the most popular podcast platform by far.
Prominent military contractors, including former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, pitched a plan for mass deportations calling for ‘processing camps’ and a private citizen ‘army’.
“The idea of forcibly removing 12 million people from the United States is not just operationally impossible — it is a moral and economic catastrophe in the making,” said Jason Houser, former ICE chief of staff in the Biden administration.
RIP Michelle Trachtenberg, 39. She played “Dawn,” the younger sister on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and also appeared as a villain on “Gossip Girl.” Her death is apparently from natural causes. She recently had a liver transplant.
A company looks to relaunch the commercial airship business with a design that looks like a flying butt
A British company hopes to launch commercial airships to carry cargo and up to 130 passengers on relatively short trips, replacing regional airlines and ferries.
This is very cool, but it feels like I have read an article like this every five years, and the businesses never take off (so to speak). Airships seem to be just plain impractical.
I downloaded about 250 of my purchased Kindle ebooks, roughly a third of my collection. And now it appears Amazon has shut that option down.
I’ve been a loyal Kindle customer for 14 years, and Amazon gave me (and its other customers) a “fuck you” in return.
(Relatively) easy instructions for downloading Kindle ebooks before the deadline, which is today or tomorrow
From the Department of Doing Thing at the Last Minute: I think I was able to successfully use these instructions to batch-download all my Kindle books before Amazon switches off that capability tonight or tomorrow. The instructions require installing the Tampermonkey Chrome extension, cutting-and-pasting a script into the extension’s configuration window and then letting the script run in the background.
As I type this, the script has been running for four hours and is only a third of the way through. That’s OK; I can just let it run in the background until it’s done.
I had previously found these instructions, which require more advanced command-line skills than I possess.
Sucks that Amazon can get away with making this change. I am far less likely to buy more ebooks from them after this rugpull.
“AITA for refusing to let my girlfriend bring her dead dog’s ashes on vacation?" 100% he’s the asshole.
Archaeologists discovered fossilized footprints and tracks suggesting the oldest known use of a handcart. The discovery illuminates life at the end of the last ice age about 23,000 years ago
Monitors at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development were hacked [Monday] morning and made to display an AI-generated video of President Donald Trump licking Elon Musk’s feet."
— Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day
Broderick theorizes that Trump lets Musk gets away with what Musk does because Musk has convinced Trump that Musk bought the election.
Also from Broderick: Yes, the far right did pretty well in Germany, but it was an equally big showing for the Left party. My $0.02: This underscores the theory that we might not be seeing a global swing to the right in democracies, but rather global ouster of incumbents.
And: “A crypto trader that went by the username @MistaFuccYou killed himself on a X livestream over the weekend, telling viewers, ‘If I die, make me a memecoin.'”
Rep. Mark Alford tells fired Kansas City federal workers “God has a plan." Alford’s constituents, are suffering and angry and Alford is laughing at them.
Alford is a former Fox News host because of course he is.
How an obscure advisory board lets utilities steal $50b/year from ratepayers
Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic: Americans served by privately owned electric companies saw their rates increase 49% over inflation over the last three years. Americans served by publicly electrical utilities saw rates go up at 44% below inflation over the same period.
Cory:
Power is that much-theorized economic marvel: a “natural monopoly.” Once someone has gone to the trouble of bringing a power wire to your house, it’s almost impossible to convince anyone else to invest in bringing a competing wire to your electrical service mast. For this reason, most people in the world get their energy from a publicly owned utility, and the rates reflect social priorities as well as cost-recovery. For example, basic power to run lights and a refrigerator might be steeply discounted, while energy-gobbling McMansions pay a substantial premium for the extra power to heat and cool their ostentatious lawyer-foyers and “great rooms.”
But in America, we believe in the miracle of the market, even where no market could possibly exist because of natural monopolies. That’s why about 70% of Americans get their power from shareholder-owned companies, whose managers' prime directive is extracting profit, not serving their communities.