Lew

We are seeing the deadly cost of cronyism.

The Witkoff-Kushner duo is corrupt, unprofessional, and entirely out of its depth.

It is beyond insane that they are allowed near serious negotiations.

Thanks to their failure, they have tons of blood on their hands

my son, a middle-schooler in Idaho, wore a glitter hairband at school today because his girlfriend gave it to him and they thought it was fun. so I guess he needs to be put on a list now? man, this state is so fucked

biggest cringe ever: RNZ asked me to do an iv once about sound for docos... I couldn't do it & someone else did & the dork RNZ iv/er asked about whether sound in a doco is ever 'real'? Asked like its a gotcha.

I so wished I had been there.
I would have nailed that fckr to a cross
'real' you say?

The other ones I always think of are rattly insect or rattlesnake-esque noises that mean "danger (subtype: biological)" even where there are neither rattlesnakes nor insects in the diegesis

We've been soaking in socially-constructed souinds for things we have never experienced so long that we don't even hear them any more. Wonderful basis for a bunch of empirical perception/mental response research with foley artists I reckon

My friend Kirsten who used to work for RNZ once did a feature on the theremin, saying "without it, how would we know what a ghost sounds like?" and I think about this sort of thing a lot more since then

Time to pass a law that any party spokesperson of media outlet that opines with hindsight reckons on pandemic management has to show this chart in the background at all times #nzpol

And it is that siren sound that is overlaid in all sound effects work and triggers a "plane going down" expectation in us as audiences.

I just find it amusing that the siren sound of a German dive bomber from WW2 is being overlaid onto a literal fictional space-ship as it plummets to the ground :)

Saw a sneak peek clip of the new Mandalorian film which showed the Razor Crest plummeting down thru atmosphere towards the ground, giving that traditional "plane going downward" sound.

The funny thing of course is that sound is not real. It's the particular sound of a particular plane from WW2.

Ex-DEAD KENNEDYS Vocalist JELLO BIAFRA Hospitalized After Suffering Stroke - Metal Injection Former Dead Kennedys frontman says he realized he was having a stroke after collapsing at home; punk icon currently stable in hospital.

Punks all getting old. Jello Biafra hospitalised after suffering a stroke.

metalinjection.net/news/bummer-...

An unthinkable scenario that was not only thought about and discussed routinely, but was previously foreshadowed by an eight-year-long shooting war that damaged or destroyed more than 400 civilian cargo vessels, within living memory

Second-to-last so far.

Lockdown, vaccine decisions 'considered and appropriate' – Royal Commission The Covid-19 Royal Commission has broadly backed the decisions taken during the pandemic, while identifying areas for improvement.

The Covid-19 Royal Commission's second report has been published, I've read (almost) all of it and here are the key takeaways:
newsroom.co.nz/2026/03/10/l...

And it's all in the game. To the victors go the spoils, and all that. But let's just be glad that the Labour govt that won a historic landslide in 2020 due to that response did not dedicate so much of its time persecuting its former enemies for their many egregious bad takes

So you can use that to draw your own conclusions about its merits, or their lack

And then closer to the election, you can do the same about the other one that they just decided to announce, apparently as a sort of insurance policy in case this one wasn't cooked enough

They're almost never in the same bowl

But still, fine. It's ok for those people to just not have takes about things they know fuck-all about

However that is ... not what we see

Covid-19 response inquiry finds government's response effective but late, poorly communicated "We got a lot right. More than most," the former PM and Grant Robertson say, while Simeon Brown says warnings about the economy "were not heeded".

Our COVID-19 response started five years & 51 weeks ago, and yet this is only this election year's second-to-last cynical kangaroo court inquiry established by the current govt to gainsay the prior govt's calls that, at the time, they mostly supported www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

If I had a nickel for every time Franz Ferdinand was involved in the precursor events of a world war, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird it happened twice

And what makes it worse is that all those around him operate in the same mode, because to perturb him in any way is obvious career suicide

But it's worse still because these people have power a LLM does not have

So the current state of geopolitics is the highest-stakes game of GIGO since Mao died

The words coming out of Trump's mouth are 100% reactive, a reflection of what he believes will impress/pressure/deceive the people he's talking to. Again, the most useful comparison is an LLM trying to complete the prompt. He's doing autocomplete all the time, independent of truth or reality.

nailed it

you rubes. you complete and utter fools. anyone with a brain can see this is a multidimensional, metaphysical conflict. a conceptual battlefield. we've only barely begun to end the start of this thing.

Screenshot of a social media post I'm sorry for the deaths, but count dismantling US hegemony and soft power squarely as a boon to humankind. So fair - as a useful idiot, Trump IS unlike Biden in that he's less competent at doing evil, which is better. 3:52 PM • Mar 9, 2026 42 quotes 口59 1423

I know that, because there is such a thing as incompetent benevolence, it seems like there should be “competent malevolence,” but there just isn’t. It’s a comic book stuff. Mythological thinking.

And certainly not, like, this year

Definitely not

Probably the world's best-known advocate for restricting the franchise to people with coherent ideological notions right now is Peter Thiel, whose view is that women voters' preference for prosocial interventionist policy is incompatible with economic liberty

Draw your own conclusions about that

Okay, yeah, obviously two problems here:
1) Can we identify the idiots well enough to disenfranchise them without ending up with a lot of false positives?
2) Once we give up on the idea of universal suffrage, are we opening ourselves up for the power to disenfranchise being abused?