Taco Bell is bringing back the Caramel Apple Empanada and other favorites from the 60s through the 2000s. What about the enchirito tho?
Hopeful but not optimistic about the election
I recall having dinner with a friend in late 2016 — after the election but before the inauguration. He predicted the US was a year away from the Military Coup to Bring Back Democracy, followed in four years by the Military Coup to End Democracy after democracy turns out not to have worked.
I think my friend may have simply been off by a matter of time.
I remain hopeful that the Democrats win decisively, perhaps in a landslide, and whatever resistance follows is quickly put down. But hopeful is not the same thing as optimism.
I canceled my subscription to the Washington Post after this chickenshit decision.
Speaking out against fascism is a low bar, but the Post failed to clear it.
I don’t feel like I’ll miss out on much. The editorial quality has been declining for a while.
Please enjoy this article based on an interview with Bruce Springsteen
Springsteen: I rarely see my bandmates - we’ve seen each other enough
Mark Savage on BBC.com:
“The louder you can talk, the better, because I’ve played rock and roll for 50 years.”
Bruce Springsteen has just E Street Shuffled into the room. Uncannily charismatic, he carries the practised ease of someone who knows the destabilising effect their presence can have on regular people.
He takes time to greet every member of the BBC’s film crew individually, then breaks the ice with a joke about a journalist who mistakenly called him “Springstein”. That reminds me of a local radio DJ in Belfast who always used to introduce him as “Bruce Springsprong”.
“Really?” he laughs. “Well, I’ve been called worse.”
The long hate for the Comic Sans font seems to be ending
Simon Garfield at The Atlantic:
Comic Sans has long been the “Macarena” of fonts. Type aficionados don’t like it, the way coffee connoisseurs don’t like Starbucks. It is the font everyone loves to hate. But I love to love it. More than the typeface itself, I love the idea of Comic Sans: a set of letters that can make people suddenly intrigued, and sometimes cross. No other font gets people so worked up. When was the last time you had an argument over Garamond or Calibri?
Lawsuit charges that ad tech enable surveillance of hundreds of millions of people worldwide, enabling possible terrorism and harassment
Atlas Data Privacy Corp, which helps its users remove personal information from consumer data brokers and people-search services online, is suing Babel Street, which allows customers to track individual mobile users using tracking data built into everyday Android and Apple phones.
Collectively, these stories expose how the broad availability of mobile advertising data has created a market in which virtually anyone can build a sophisticated spying apparatus capable of tracking the daily movements of hundreds of millions of people globally.
In the hands of domestic terrorists and US states that have enacted fanatical anti-abortion laws, the technology can be used to track suspected illegal immigrants, women seeking abortions, public servant targeted by baseless conspiracy theories, and more.
Atlas says the Babel Street trial period allowed its investigator to find information about visitors to high-risk targets such as mosques, synagogues, courtrooms and abortion clinics. In one video, an Atlas investigator showed how they isolated mobile devices seen in a New Jersey courtroom parking lot that was reserved for jurors, and then tracked one likely juror’s phone to their home address over several days.
The article goes into detail about how this service is already allegedly being used for harassment, as well as the possibility of far more. Journalist Brian Krebs recommends turning off tracking on Android phones and iPhones, and includes instructions on how to do so. Do it now, and do it for everybody who lives with you, because if attackers can find people you live with they can find you too.
I saw a guy at Orlando Airport dressed as Silent Bob. I was going to ask him why he was walking around in costume a week before Halloween, but I realized he’d either not answer or give me a 10-minute soliloquy, and I had a plane to catch.
I listened to “Never Gonna Give You Up” end-to-end for the first time since rickrolling became a thing and you know what? It is a pleasant song.
2e2 whooping cough cases currently in my part of Washington state. There’s been a vaccine for that for 80 years.
There used to be a story about turkeys being so dumb that they would stand in the rain, looking up, until they actually drowned. Now I believe that the turkeys were taking a principled stand for their personal freedom.
… just because you’re on their side, it doesn’t mean they’re on your side. They don’t want to prevent AI slop from reducing your wages, they just want to make sure it’s their AI slop puts you on the breadline.
— Penguin Random House, AI, and writers' rights., Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr
Blue states should play “constitutional hardball."
Provide succor to “medical professionals, teachers, doctors and anyone with a trans kid,” says Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr.
All over America, families are despairing of their lives in red states. Whether you’re worried that you or someone you love might need to terminate a pregnancy, or you’re worried about gender-affirming care for you or a loved one, you can put your worries to rest in a blue state. Same goes for nurses and doctors who are worried they can’t do medicine unless it accords with the imaginary dictates of Bronze Age prophets as claimed by pencil-neck Hitler wannabe Bible-thumper with a private jet and a face from Walmart. Fill the blue states with great schools, libraries and hospitals, and invite everyone who wants to do their job in a free country to come and work at ‘em. Line every state border with abortion and mifepristone clinics, and set up billboards advertising the quality of life, the jobs, and the freedom in blue state America.
…
Dems have to get over their fear of “states’ rights” and start playing state-level hardball. This doesn’t mean escalating cruelty. Quite the contrary: every cruel measure enacted as red state red meat is a chance for blue states to extend a kindness, and capture even more of the best, brightest and kindest of the nation, creating a race to the top that Republicans can only win by abandoning their performative cruelty and corruption.
During our last time going out to lunch before the pandemic, my dad (who was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust and spent years living in the Polish forest and fighting the Nazis) expressed his dismay that Americans weren’t taking the threat to our country seriously enough. I suggested that while most Americans were concerned, they didn’t see the Trump era as being that ominous because they assumed the kinds of things that happened in his life could never happen here. My dad stopped walking, looked at me, and asked, “You think vhen I vas a kid any of us thought it could happen there?”
Surgeons are wearing Apple Vision Pro headsets into the operating room. $3,500 is wicked expensive for a consumer device, but it’s dirt cheap for medical equipment. Other vendors are making specialized devices.