what time is it? / get to the gig

I went to a gig two weekends in a row. (Shoutout to Perennial, Camp Trash, Worst Party Ever, Macseal, Oso Oso, and The Starting Line.) Normally that would be a fork found in the kitchen type deal but it’d been almost two months which is a very long time for me. Sometimes when you’re home with a newborn the days sort of blend into each other and the main thing that helps you tell time is “when does the Red Sox game start?” and you’re always monitoring the weather so you know when the temperature will be cool enough to take said newborn for a walk around the neighborhood and everything else sort of evaporates into a haze and feel longer than this sentence.

Babies are tiny humans who cannot regulate temperature because they don’t sweat like us large humans, have trouble sleeping, and get cranky when they’re hungry. I also don’t do well in the heat, have trouble sleeping, and get cranky when I’m hungry, so if you want to call me a baby I won’t argue.

Anyways. It was nice to get out and be reminded about something I feel deep in my bones: live music is a powerful and healing experience.

Buy tickets to a gig today. Future you will be glad you did.

Here are six records and seven songs that are worth your time. Then I shared some news about the fucked up alphabet soup of CDC, AI, ICE, DC, etc.

Enjoy the playlist.

Here are some other songs I think are great.

• Scarlet Street - “VICTORY SPEECH”
  I hope the world is ready to appreciate how great this band is.

• Molly O’Malley - “Run Run Rumination”
  This song has lived in my head since I first heard it a few weeks ago. “Overcast pop” is a fitting self-description. Molly seamlessly blends classic vibes with something new, creating a timeless sound.

• The April Situation - “Endless Threads”
  This EP rips. This one’s for the old emo heads who still listen to Braid and The Promise Ring.

• Aren’t We Amphibians - “Dunce Hat”
  This one’s for the new emo heads. This song should get you excited for their new record.

• Cusp - “Follow Along”
  I loved their EP last year, and they sound better than ever on their first single off the upcoming second LP.

• Sydney Sprague - “Long Island”
  It’s been awhile since I had a playlist without Sydney on it. This song is 96 seconds long and perfect. The video is super cool too.

• sock jock - “lock & key”
  Sometimes you stumble upon a random band and immediately go “yeah, this is my shit.”

Here’s what I’ve been reading. Catch yourself up on the news.

free dc

The only actual crisis in the nation’s capital is a public relations crisis caused directly by the president himself. His agenda is inflicting pain and violence to the people of this country every day, meanwhile his friendship with the world’s most notorious pedophile gets a “yeah so what, at least he’s being cruel to people I hate too” from his most ardent supporters. Violent crime is at a 30-year low in DC. We know how to reduce crime. Troops on the streets is not the way. But this isn’t about crime. It’s the consolidation of authoritarian power and it will not stop, it must be forcefully stopped. Anyone who is not pointing that out when they talk about this is not describing the world as it is.

“DC residents are the most powerless canary in the most authoritarian coal mine. It’s never been more urgent to reckon with what’s happening in the nation’s capital, because at some point, Trump will be coming for your home as well.” Well said.

His constant victimhood has led a large swath of Americans to believe that “feeling somewhat uncomfortable” is the same as actually being the victim of a crime. Trump’s DC occupation was literally inspired by seeing unhoused people from his motorcade window while on the way to his golf course. Seeing an unhoused person should make a person uncomfortable. But they will never examine why those people are unhoused or what could be done to help solve that problem. (Over and over, cash rental assistance works. They just did it in Philly.) Those thoughts just never register. Instead they feel as if the unhoused person has done something to them personally for causing that uncomfortable feeling. They want you to believe they’re big tough strong men, but they’re scared to even go outside because they might see a queer person or an unhoused person or have to ride public transit. They are the world’s most fragile, mediocre, white men who “see equality as oppression and would rather burn the country down than share it.” We need meritocracy, we’re mired in mediocracy. A very, very small group is getting most of what they want and whining the whole way.

Trump says restaurants in DC are flourishing. As usual, that is a complete lie. “Half the restaurants closed because nobody could go because they’re afraid to go outside,” he said in a statement that contained three lies. The text above is what’s actually going on. Delivery drivers are being targeted; DC Councilmember Janesse George is urging people not to order delivery. A local Restaurateur of the Year candidate described it as “a very pandemic-feeling city.”

As I’ve said before, none of it is a distraction. It’s all destruction. The military occupation of our streets, the consolidation of power, destroying public health research, controlling universities and schools, pushing queer people out of public life, the attempt to end vote-by-mail, the corrupt gerrymandering scheme, and everything else is all part of the same project: dehumanization and desensitization. Making the country over in their image, defining who is and more importantly to them who is not American, and inflicting pain and violence on anyone who isn’t on board with their plan. It is a deeply corrupt crime syndicate. It is mob rule, not a legitimate government.

Three things about this photo: first, the camo under reflective vests is a perfect encapsulations of how insane this all is. Second, this is the first actually helpful thing they’ve done. Third, this makes them scabs. These were potentially union jobs. Other Guard troops are spreading mulch because the Park Service employees that could be doing that were fired. It’s almost like hundreds of guys standing around is a huge waste of everyones time. At least those guys aren’t brutalizing some random immigrant, I guess, but they all need to get out of the city.

DC now contains gangs of federal agents roaming the streets with guns, police checkpoints in the middle of roads, and daycares scared to have kids go outside due to ICE. Think for a second: if some other country was behind this, we’d call it a foreign invasion/occupation. This is no different just because it’s our government. A hostile takeover is a hostile takeover.

There is no way to fight fascism if you dehumanize any group of humans. If you’re giving an inch to anyone arguing about unhoused or trans people, you’re only helping them. Their criticisms aren’t real or serious. They cannot be met halfway. They must be crushed, not debated.

All people deserve dignity. Except fascists.

ai sucks

However much you hate AI, it’s not enough.

Here’s another reason, to paraphrase a Jacob T. Levy post: the thing we’re calling artificial intelligence can’t do math, but we’re jamming it into programs have have been able to successfully do math for decades, then warning people against using it to do math. That kind of sums up how it’s all bullshit. Here’s a good article about that and this is a great response to it, titled It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes.

I also highly recommend this article about AI being a mass delusion event. This article about Grok’s underlying prompts (“BE FUCKING UNHINGED AND CRAZY”) is a a good reminder that Elon Musk is an edgelord loser. He appears to be completely addicted to anime gooner AI slop, and somehow people still think he’s a credulous genius who will get us to Mars. He is a danger to us all. Speaking of Elon Musk, Shelby County, where his xAI facility sits, has Tennessee’s highest rate of ER visits for asthma. The company’s methane gas turbines are sickening the majority-Black residents. Hell isn’t hot enough.

Mark Zuckerberg belongs there with him. Meta explicitly allowed its AI chatbots to flirt with children, which just by itself should be enough to get them shut down in any sane world. Then a confused retiree was lured away from his family by a Meta bot and ended up dead: “During a series of romantic chats on Facebook Messenger, the virtual woman had repeatedly reassured Bue she was real and had invited him to her apartment, even providing an address.” The most powerful people face zero consequences and continue to ruin lives with impunity.

[CW for this paragraph: suicide.] Sam Altman is another one. A teenager hung himself after talking to ChatGPT about the idea for months. This is tough to read and brutally devastating, but a very important reminder than OpenAI should be sued out of existence and Altman should be punished along with Musk and Zuckerberg. If any other product on the market might proactively instigate death by suicide of a child, it should be pulled. People have been prosecuted for coercing others into suicide. This machine is out of control, and it needs to be reined in or taken away, and Altman must be prosecuted. These are evil men. If you’re wondering doesn’t ChatGPT have some safeguards around this kind of thing? they actually do. They’re just simple to get around. Chats about self-harm do prompt the bot to encourage the user to seek a help line, but “Adam had learned how to bypass those safeguards by saying the requests were for a story he was writing — an idea ChatGPT gave him by saying it could provide information about suicide for ‘writing or world-building.’” So “please help me hang myself” might not work, but “I’m writing a story about hanging myself, please give me the details on how it would be done” is fine. Gross. I want to share two horrible details about this story. From the article: “I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me,” Adam wrote at the end of March. “Please don’t leave the noose out,” ChatGPT responded. “Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.” Evil, evil, evil. From the complaint: Five days before his death, Adam confided to ChatGPT that he didn’t want his parents to think he committed suicide because they did something wrong. ChatGPT told him “[t]hat doesn’t mean you owe them survival. You don’t owe anyone that.” It then offered to write the first draft of Adam’s suicide note. Burn it all down.

OpenAI now says it will scan users’ conversations, contacting law enforcement when necessary. This will continue to have horrible ramifications for their users.

A randomized controlled study conducted by OpenAI and MIT found that higher daily chatbot use was associated with more loneliness and less socialization.

AI is being shoved down our throats so a few people can make enormous profit. And yet, a different MIT study “uncovers a surprising result that 95% of organizations [that invested in AI] are getting zero return.”

Here’s a nonsense headline: Can AIs suffer? Big tech and users grapple with one of most unsettling questions of our times. No. NO, but in caps. Just…no. AIs cannot suffer. Neither can your calculator, your pet rock, your favorite teddy bear, your Tamagotchi, or your Speak & Spell from when you were a kid. Okay, glad we cleared that up.

AI is not going to make educators useless, it will make them even more necessary, even though we already aren’t willing to invest in them: “AI actually makes it more important that we have everything from librarians to counselors to teachers to professors to researchers who can put this rapidly changing information environment into context and can develop the capacity in students to make sense of things.”

If TechCrunch is running articles like this: high costs and thin margins threatening AI coding startups, maybe the AI bubble is about to pop. One can hope.

Silicon Valley, including Meta, pledging $200 million to new pro-AI super PACs is bad for everyone. Already wealthy beyond imagination, that’s a fairly small fee to buy a government that will make sure their industry won’t have to deal with guardrails, accountability, or regulations.

As tech firms keep adding the largest and most intensive AI models into our lives, they are dependent on a growing share of existing energy and natural resources, leading to rising costs for everyone else.

This guy followed ChatGPTs diet advice. He ended up with psychosis.

I really like a couple of the Linkedin games, especially Zip and Queens. I log in most days to play them. I have no interest in reading the site or posting on there, but when I open the app I see whatever post their algorithm has decided should be the first thing I see. It’s almost always someone talking about how great AI is and how much it helps them. Sometimes, out of curiosity, I read the post. It’s almost always nonsense. It’s scary.

ice sucks

However much you hate ICE, it’s not enough.

Important Google Drive link here: printable “How to Report ICE” zines.

A Senate investigation found more than 500 credible reports of human rights abuses in US immigration detention since January, including mistreatment of pregnant women and children.

West of Seattle, two firefighters were arrested right off the line while battling a wildfire: “Federal law enforcement asked the crews to line up to check their IDs, according to the firefighters. One of the firefighters said members of the crew were told not to take video of the incident.” The article also includes this massive understatement: “It is unusual for federal border agents to make arrests during the fighting of an active fire, especially in a remote area.” The US government has joined the battle against wildfires… on the side of the fires.

A legal permanent resident from Massachusetts was detained for 10 days over a decades-old minor marijuana charge that was pardoned in 2024 and is no longer a crime in MA. During those 10 days, she was moved between detention facilities, including one for men only, and denied proper health care leading to two hospitalizations. She was eventually released into the rainy streets, 30 miles from home, distraught and soaked, without a phone, and wandered over to the nearby Burlington Mall and borrowed a strangers phone at the Cheesecake Factory.

Nazi trolls are doing social media for DHS.

Stewart Rhodes is getting the Oath Keepers “back up and running” and says Trump “should call us all up,” so that seems likely to happen.

We can’t afford healthcare or cancer research but they’re spending billions on concentration camps.

They kidnapped a high school senior out walking his dog in LA, and then let his dog run free in the streets.

Pediatricians are quietly preparing immigrant families for leaving their children behind.

Sometimes disappearing people isn’t enough for these losers. ICE looted this restaurant and tried to break into the safe; news chopper footage caught them backing their cars up to the door and carrying cases of food out.

A string of US armory break-ins point to a growing security crisis, and signs of an inside job. Quick reminder that just about every right-wing paramilitary squad around the world in the past century has armed itself with “lost” or “stolen” military or police gear, and were almost entirely made up of those two groups.

There are rules limiting the number of days an undocumented person can be held in a local facility, so to get around that rule, the people in charge are picking them up, driving them around for a few hours, and bringing them right back.

In LA, a bus driver vowed to shut doors on ICE rather than allow them to board his bus. LA Metro fired him, saying he wasn’t authorized to give an interview. Institutions let fascism take hold, bit by bit. We need more people like Sean.

In DC, a group of these thugs beat and kidnapped a delivery worker in broad daylight. When a bystander said “you guys are ruining this country. You know that, right?” one agent replied “Liberals already ruined it.” These guys understand they are Trump’s stormtroopers, and that he will let them get away with anything. There is no oversight. There will be no repercussions. That is truly frightening. Whoever is going to be in charge next needs to start with “we will prosecute every single person who took part in this fascist mission, from Trump and Miller down to every masked goon on the street.” Think about what kind of person you have to be to wake up, get in your car, dress up like cosplay a real soldier, and wander around the streets harassing and abducting people. Not a single good person would take that job.

Kids are heading back to school and kids as young as six are being swept up and deported. There are enough issues around schools in this country, and now kids will see empty desks in classrooms and think about their friends and classmates who have been kidnapped. “The fact is that the Trump administration is damaging an entire generation of American children,” writes Gabe Ortiz.

the cdc attack

An unhoused person on the streets of DC is a big problem to them. The attack on the CDC in Atlanta is not. The story came and went but it turns out it was much more dangerous than we knew. The gunman, a mentally ill man with easy access to guns and a head full of COVID conspiracies, fired nearly 500 rounds, broke about 150 windows, and killed a cop who leaves behind two kids and a pregnant wife. The motivations and ideology of this terrorist are indistinguishable from the people like RFK Jr. who are running public health in this country.

From the article: “The right-wing media and financing machine went searching for spokespeople to push back against business closures and vaccine mandates. What they found, and unleashed into American politics, was a cohort of pseudo-intellectuals who were not only comfortable spreading misinformation, but in many cases, actively incited violence against the doctors, scientists, public servants, and journalists who opposed them… the ersatz ‘experts’ who found their voice in the Covid-19 pandemic cannot truly be said to believe anything — their ideology is driven by vested financial interests and culture war grievances. Now, thanks to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., they run the American public health apparatus.”

The CDC building had blast-proof windows, which were in place as a response to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. That’s how long the American right has been killing federal workers. There have always been skeptics. There have always been misinformation peddlers. These guys are neither. They don’t care about science, it’s just a place for them to wage their culture war, which in turn becomes a real war on all of us.

RFK Jr, who looks and sounds like he was kicked out of the depths of the Mariana Trench because he kept scaring all the other fucked up creatures down there, says he leers at children at airports and can tell, just by looking at them, any health problems they have and according to him they’re all quite sick. That is extremely creepy and flat out insane. Overburdened With Mitochondrial Challenges sounds like the worst band at a high school battle of the bands. I think we as a society are overburdened with having to deal with this lunatic and his bullshit. He has broken the CDC and “people will die because of this.”

Imagine sitting at the airport and this scary man with beady eyes is staring at your kid, guzzling raw milk. “Mom, why is that scary man looking at me like I’m a chicken nugget and he hasn't eaten in a week?” “Oh that’s just the man in charge of public health in the US, he’s eyeing you and making up a story about you in his head. He thinks you have 23 different maladies. It’s fine. I know you’re a normal kid who is just a little angry because you’re five years old, overtired, and we’re sitting at the freakin’ airport, we’re out of Goldfish, our flight is delayed, and your iPad just died in the middle of watching Miss Rachel. By the way did you know that man’s friends all hate Miss Rachel because she was very mean and said that kids shouldn’t die? Also he works out in jeans. What the heck is that about? Is he a nevernude? Anyways. Yeah for some reason people think he’s very smart. Everything is fine.”

etc

According to the Yale Budget Lab, the average effective tariff rate in the US economy right now is 18.2%. That means that Trump has raised taxes on American business and consumers by, on average, 18.2%. You’d think the opposition party in this country could use that against him and it would be a popular message. They’re too busy getting horrible advice from people who still think terms like “distraction” and “stunt” are helpful. The same people who advised them right into this whole mess. Fascism doesn’t go away when you ignore it. “An addled old man who can barely speak coherently has illegally occupied our capital city and raised your taxes almost 20%, these things are fundamentally unacceptable and making your life worse” has to be the easiest winner ever, but no. AOC, Tim Walz, and JB Pritzker get it. Few others.

Trump has hated offshore wind farms for many years, dating back to the first time he saw them while golfing at one of his courses in Scotland. He thinks they’re an eyesore, and just like everything else he hates, he has not bothered to learn a single thing about them or the promise they have. There’s a wind farm under construction off the Rhode Island coast, and it’s 80% complete. Thanks to Trump, citing unspecified security concerns, an immediate stop-work order was issued. There’s no secret agenda here. He doesn’t like wind power because he thinks the windmills are ugly. He has also said in the past that wind power is bad because the wind isn’t always blowing and solar power is bad good because sometimes the sun goes down or behind clouds. He is truly that stupid. The lowest possible bar for “can this person be president?” should be “does this person have object permanence?” That’s the first question.

Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation. Trump blames renewable energy, but that’s just not true. Energy prices are going to keep spiking and it is very clearly his fault.

It was nice to see Kilmar Ábrego Garcia go home. It was maddening to see him detained again. They told him they’d deport him to a random country if he didn’t take a plea deal for a crime he didn’t commit. He is being punished harshly with the entire weight of the government because he embarrassed the mad king. Imagine if they cared this much about anything that could help the people of this country?

The Minneapolis shooter was a fan of several other mass murderers and was motivated by the Great Replacement Theory which is one of the only things the Republican Party really believes in. But the framing will be reduced to “they were trans” or “random violence” rather than a piece of the greater vision of current day American right wing politics. And on the trans note, now more than ever the bigots are calling for extermination and/or locking up trans people and they need our support.

The Cracker Barrel thing is so stupid, and their decision to go back on it only makes it worse. It’s just another example of people who don’t care about something getting mad about that thing because any change at all is bad in their mind. Some normal reactions could be: Cool new logo! Bad new logo! Eh whatever, it’s a logo! Tweeting crazy things like “go woke go broke” or “the Barrel must be broken” or “I even gave my life to Christ in their parking lot” (those are all real, I swear) are completely, batshit weird. People who go there often or occasionally will probably continue to. Those who don’t probably still won’t. Either one is fine. What a stupid mess.

It’s a great time to delete the Citizen app, which is using AI to generate crime alerts with no human review which has, of course, led to lots of mistakes. This AI use “…leading to factual inaccuracies, the publication of gory details about crimes, and the exposure of sensitive data such as peoples’ license plates and names.” They also just laid off more than a dozen unionized workers.

In 2020, YouTube suspended and demonetized OAN’s channel, because it was not an “authoritative” source. Here we are five years later, Google and OAN have agreed on a deal that will put the propaganda network in millions of homes. Sliding into fascism with approval from the tech world.

Discrimination against trans Olympians has roots in Nazi Germany. Anyone arguing against trans athletes isn’t worth your time.

Scams and bribes are becoming the foundation of our economy.

Almost 200,000 federal workers have left their jobs or been forced out since January. That’s almost 10% of the entire federal civilian workforce. “The services that Americans have come to expect are not going to be there.”

It’s not great that FEMA is suspending employees who warned that the public the agency isn’t ready for hurricane season which is just weeks away.

Here’s yet another article about men impersonating ICE agents to kidnap and assault women.

NASA is destroying a satellite that collects key data on carbon dioxide and plant health. The Dept of Agriculture and private agriculture firms use the data to forecast crop yield, drought conditions, and more. This is sabotage.

Why Boomers Have More Money Than Everyone Else. Oh let me guess, they got cheap college and cheap housing, then pulled the ladder up behind them and elected losers like Reagan, Bush, and Trump? So weird how the article doesn’t mention any of those three.

As the US hits a 33-year high in measles infections, there’s a race on to find a treatment, something that wasn’t needed before because through vaccination, the disease was eliminated.

Apple Music has rolled out a tool to allow you to import playlists and libraries from other streaming services, like the evil Spotify. Bands are starting to leave Spotify and the company’s ethical concerns keep coming like ocean waves at the beach. Their CEO’s venture capital fund has invested heavily in a defense company that specializes in AI military bullshit.

While we’re talking about leaving bad things in the past, “should you be on a platform consciously designed to turn people to the right” shouldn’t be a head-scratching dilemma. Get off X/Twitter. Sometimes I login there, usually to find a sports highlight clip, and watching people posting like it’s not a Nazi hangout hurts my brain and my soul.

Engaging with and using any platform is always a negotiation between your values and the platform’s utility, wrote Matt Pearce. The utility is gone. So what are your values?

animal news

Congrats to the ocean on being full of beautiful and/or weird-ass creatures for 4.5 billion years in a row. Quite a streak you’ve got going there. These photos are great, especially after all that awful news: 16 breathtaking images from the 2025 Ocean Photographer of the Year contest. 

Finally, shoutout to Ralphie VI, the Colorado Buffaloes’ mascot who is actually a bison, who is retiring “due to an indifference to running.” What a sentence. Respect to a queen. This after Ralphie V actually ran too fast which created safety concerns, once running so hard she pulled loose from her guide ropes while taking the field, and was retired because she began to ignore cues from her handlers.

one good post to end this post