I really, really, really dislike Harry Enten, the annoyingly hyperkinetic weirdo on CNN who stands in front of an image board and waves at poll numbers and tells us how important they are. I despise all the poll nonsense on the news media — learn to talk about issues and policy rather than the horserace. Now it’s gotten even worse, because he’s not babbling about legitimate, credible polls, it’s all about numbers extracted from prediction markets, which are also paying the networks for promotion.

Since December, CNN has featured Kalshi in a segment called “The Odds” at least 115 times. In these segments, Harry Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst, frequently suggests that Kalshi predictions are more accurate than other sources. While polling relies on volunteers, Enten repeatedly reminds CNN viewers that prediction markets are driven by people who “put their money where their mouth is.”

On January 7, Enten highlighted that, in six days, the odds on Kalshi that the United States would buy part of Greenland by the end of Trump’s first term increased from 12% to 36%. Enten said this was proof that “the people putting their money where their mouth is” are “absolutely taking this seriously.”

“Whoa… way up there now to 36%,” Enten exclaimed. “A tripling in less than a week. My goodness gracious.”

Wishful thinking by gullible people is not evidence.

The good news is that some people are trying to take down these corrupt companies.

On Monday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed a total ban on futures trading platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket. The Trump administration filed a lawsuit Tuesday to prevent the ban from going into place on Aug. 1, with the CFTC arguing its authority supersedes the state’s ability to regulate futures trading. Notably, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. is a strategic advisor for Kalshi and has invested in Polymarket through his venture capital firm.

You can tell that Kalshi and Polymarket are not to be trusted just by looking at the scumbags who are investing in it. They’re parasites all the way through. It makes me suspicious of the Young Turks that they are also taking Polymarket money.

These are just barely legal gambling sites. Let’s make them illegal.

P.S. There is no evidence that we are imminently going to get evidence that aliens exist.

I guess I’ve made it now. I got a partnership offer.

Dropping you a line because we’ve been looking closely at a select group of creators to bring into the fold for the rest of 2026. Your page jumped out at us – especially how you capture the culture around pushing boundaries and living boldly.
Nothing about it feels corporate or safe – and that’s what we need when we’re considering brand fit.
We’re not interested in a quick send-and-forget partnership – we’re aiming for something that gives you wings to do what you do best.
Want to learn more? Reply and I’ll walk you through the details. This time of year tends to move fast, so didn’t want to wait too long to connect.
Appreciate you reading this, pzmyers.

It was from Red Bull. I’m flattered by the “pushing boundaries and living boldly” comment, but no, just no. Part of my “living boldly” ethos involves rejecting corporate influence.

Also, I’ve never had so much as a sip of Red Bull, so it would be dishonest of me to promote it.

I’ve always wanted to visit France, I guess I’m getting a taste of it today. I went for my morning walk — big mistake. It’s cloudy and gray, but temperatures are climbing into the mid-30°C range, and humidity is sky high. I walked into a coffeeshop with AC, and the windows were opaque sheets of condensation. The mosquitos realized I was loose in nature and attacked me in swarms on the way home.

Dinner tonight will be served cold: iced smoothies. That will be our reward for finally hooking up the window AC unit in our bedroom.

What? You need new thread?

Previous Thread

Alan Greenspan is dead. The cult of Ayn Rand has lost one more adherent.

I’m about to attempt a trek from my house to the grocery store and back again, because I want to get back into the habit of regular walks. It’s going to be a little bit of a challenge — I’ve been doing short walks around the house, but I think I can handle a whole kilometer and a half, because maybe I’m getting overconfident.

If I’m not back by noon, call out the helicopters and the search parties. (I also have an ace in the hole: Morris has an informal bus service where you just call and they eventually deliver you right to your door. Don’t worry.)

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I’m back, call off the emergency search teams. It took an hour and a half to walk there and back? I’m getting so slow.

And I did. And I regret it.

Steven Spielberg can make some great movies, but he also has this solid wad of gullibility in his brain that emerges whenever he makes a movie about aliens. It happened when he directed Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET the Extraterrestrial, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and it also leaked out a bit with A.I. Artificial Intelligence. They all made lots of money, though, so I fear there’s no way we can ever stop him.

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I’m beginning my weekly duties as a volunteer projectionist at the Morris theater, which I will try to do once a week. It was not a great experience — it involves a lot of standing and some walking around, and my knee is not quite ready for it. After two hours, I was getting some unpleasant spasms, and was seriously concerned that it might buckle under me, so I had to go home early (no worries, there were 3 of us training or in training.)

It’s all good exercise, though, so maybe in another week or two I’ll be a bit more robust. I think next time I’ll wear a knee brace.

This is the time to come to Morris to watch Masters of the Universe or Mortal Kombat under my supervision. Sorry, we don’t have something better. We do have Disclosure Day starting this weekend, and we have Kung Fu Panda as a free matinee. We also have the classic Jurassic Park on the 22nd, as part of a special deal with the Met Lounge if you think you’ll need beer to survive it.

Masters of the Universe is playing at the Morris Theatre right now, and I was lured in. It’s terrible. It’s two hours of pointless reiteration of an intellectual property that was contrived in the 1980s as a tool to sell toys — it had a poorly animated cartoon show, a glorified advertisement, that played every afternoon in that sweet spot when kids were getting home from school. It was repetitive noise. Every episode had roughly the same structure: a squad of freakishly weird characters, led by a bad guy with a skull for a face, would try to take over a castle guarded by a squad of mostly human, muscle-bound leaders, and be inevitably defeated. The same characters fought each other over and over again, and each one was for sale at Toys’R’Us as an action figure. Mattel cleaned up. Every 8-12 year old boy wanted a set of action figures they could play with as they watched the cartoon, and they would bring them to the playground to battle with their friends’ toys.

I know because my kids grew up in the 1980s, and we had to buy all the toys. On their demands, we had He-Man and Beast Man and Moss Man and Man-At-Arms and Skeletor and Orko and others, and we also had the Castle Grayskull play set and various vehicles. This was also the time in my career when we were frequently moving to various places around the country, and one of the sadder things about that was frequently packing up everything we owned into a truck and driving to a different state, a different apartment. One of my memories was the final step in moving out, and that was going through the rooms and sweeping up the detritus and throwing it into one last box. It was always an assortment of He-Man figures and accessories that I had to rescue lest the kids yell at me.

So I had to go see this movie. It was my mental equivalent of tidying up the garbage in the corners of my brain.

It is a competently made movie. It’s got some good actors, Idris Elba and Alison Brie, and some new (to me) players, who did a good job, although I wish all of them were acting in good movies. I normally detest Jared Leto, but in this movie he’s unrecognizable behind a skull face and a comically affected accent, which is the only way to see Leto in anything. The plot is familiar: Skeletor and his weird pack of freaks take over the world of Eternia, He-Man shows up with a magic sword and beats everyone up (there is a lot more killing of bit players in the movie than in the old TV series), and the status quo is restored. Ho hum.

I kept wondering why this movie was made. It wasn’t for Art, because it’s entirely derivative and lacking in novelty. It wasn’t to tell a story that would resonate with viewers, because it could have been a cheap 20 minute cartoon rather than an expensive 2 hour movie. It wasn’t to provide moral instruction, although it did include an appearance by Orko at the end to briefly summarize the lesson taught by the show, just like the old cartoon. I don’t even recall what the message was, it was so perfunctory and so irrelevant to the movie I’d just watched. No, this was clearly the product of a thought by a marketing executive at Mattel. Let’s take another pass at the wallets of the 1980s generation that we successfully bilked 40 years ago! It’s a naked attempt to milk nostalgia.

They got me. I contributed to their $54 million box office on a movie that cost $200 million to make. Be smarter than me and don’t fall for it. The movie is not good enough to outweigh the bad faith premise behind its creation.

We’ve found the hottest cartoon woman on the internet.

It gets a bit gross in subsequent panels.