The first three chapters of my latest book are on the Amazon webpage. (Click on the ‘Look inside’ link.) The publisher’s webpage is here and you can also buy it from any major retailer. (Note: This will be the new top post for a while. Later posts are below.)
Two days ago, I linked to the amusing 12-minute short film Jane Austen’s Period Drama that was nominated for this year’s Oscar but did not win.
When it comes to the arts in any form, I am definitely low-brow. High art leaves me mystified and this was confirmed yet again when I later watched the co-winner of this year’s short film category called Two People Exchanging Saliva. From the beginning I was aware that I was in the Ocean of Deep Metaphor and that I was hopelessly out of my depth. As I watched it, trying to figure out the message, I thought to myself “There is a message here but I am so not getting it”. I was utterly baffled.
Watch for yourself.
After the film, I looked it up and even after reading about what the underlying message was, I still did not get it. I am that bad.
I wonder what the term is that signifies the opposite of avante garde when referring to the arts, because that is the label that would definitely would fit me.
It appears that the Trump administration does not do even the most cursory examination of someone’s past before appointing them to important offices in the government. Otherwise how can you explain how a nutjob like Gregg Phillips was made head of the the office of response and recovery at FEMA, the federal agency tasked with responding to natural disasters and other emergencies?
Gregg Phillips, who in December was appointed to lead Fema’s office of response and recovery, has spoken on “multiple podcasts” about being teleported against his will, CNN reported on Friday.
On a January 2025 podcast appearance, Phillips claimed that his car was “lifted up” while he was driving and transported 40 miles away into a ditch near a church. And in another instance on the same episode, Phillips said he was teleported 50 miles away to a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia, CNN detailed in a deep dive into Phillips’ past public statements.
“I was with my boys one time, and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House. And I ended up at a Waffle House – this was in Georgia, and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was,” Phillips said on the podcast Onward, co-hosted by rightwing activist Catherine Engelbrecht.
Phillips added: “And they said, ‘where are you?’ and I said, ‘A Waffle House.’ And: ‘a Waffle House where?’ And I said: ‘Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.’ And they said: “‘That’s not possible, you just left here a moment ago.’ But it was possible. It was real.”
This 12-minute 2026 Oscar-nominated short film satirizes the period drama in more ways than one.
In the UK, Nigel Farage is under fire for having made Cameo videos that featured him making controversial statements.
The Guardian’s unearthing of Farage’s videos has raised questions about his relationship with the far right and who he is willing to take money from. Farage charged £155 for one video he made in 2025 for a man he was told had received a 16-month sentence for his involvement in a far-right riot. Despite knowing that the man had been convicted over his role in the disorder, the Reform leader recorded a supportive message for him, telling the man “I’m with you”.
…Farage was paid £141 for another video in which he promoted an event by a Canadian neo-Nazi group, which used the clip in propaganda alongside fascist salutes and antisemitic imagery. Farage called the event “the best thing that ever happened”. The video was removed from Cameo’s website after the Guardian’s story.
As a result of the revelations, his account says that he no longer is accepting any offers.
Cameo is a site that enables you to pay for celebrities to make personalized videos where they say things that you want them to say, if they are willing to do so. The usual requests are as gifts to friends to wish them on their birthdays or anniversaries or similar things. But clearly some are pushing other agendas.
I can understand why minor celebrities might sign up to do them, since it provides some easy money as a side hustle. If there are suckers out there willing to pay for people to utter some words, there will be those who are willing to oblige. What I can’t understand is the appeal for the buyer of the message and the intended recipient. Would the person you are seeking to impress really be flattered by getting a personalized message from some has-been B or C lister who was paid to give it and has absolutely no idea who you are and does not give a damn about you?
I can sort of understand if you knew the celebrity personally and they recorded the video as a favor to you. Then the recipient may be impressed that you knew them well-enough that they would do this for you. So this would be of benefit to you,
But otherwise it seems really tacky to me.
I guess I just don’t understand the thrill that some people feel when a sort-of celebrity mentions their name, even if they had to be paid to do so.
An investigative report reveals that the man who has long been viewed as a civil rights icon and who organized the farm workers into a union and improved their conditions, was a serial sex abuser and rapist who took advantage of girls as young as 13.
Through a series of grueling fasts, grape boycotts and marches that captured the world’s imagination, Mr. Chavez drew a spotlight to the plight of the American farmworker. He not only improved wages, living conditions and health care for generations of farmworkers and their families but also strengthened the political power of Latinos, giving their voice and concerns an urgency and moral authority on the national stage.
…Ms. Murguia and another woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977. He was in his 40s and had become a powerful, charismatic figure who captured global attention as a champion of farmworker rights.
The two women have not shared their stories publicly before, and an investigation by The New York Times has uncovered extensive evidence to support their accusations and those raised by several other women against Mr. Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder who died in 1993 at the age of 66.
[Read more…]
SNL had Jeremy Culhane play Tucker Carlson giving his take on some of this year’s nominees. I have not seen any of the films but I thought Culhane really nailed the impression of Carlson, from his facial expressions to his rhetorical tics and right down to his weird laugh.
SNL also had a skit that was based on the hospital drama The Pitt except that it was a hospital that was run on RFK Jr’s crackpot ideas.
Netflix has released a new documentary by Louis Theroux where he goes inside the so-called ‘manosphere’, the world of young men who are followers of a small group of ‘influencers’. The whole set up is quite simple to understand. The influencers have become wealthy by acquiring followers from the pool of marginalized young men by telling them that their precarious lives with no proper jobs or financial security or female companions is not their fault but because ‘the ‘system’ controlled by a secretive cabal (read ‘Jews’) is keeping them down. References to the film The Matrix abound and these influencers say that they offer the ‘red-pill’ that reveals the world as it really is so that the men can defeat the system and become rich too.
It is a seductive message aimed at alienated and aggrieved young men that is wrapped in a package where the influencers show their followers lavish lifestyles in fancy homes and cars surrounded by young women in the skimpiest of attire and say that all this could be theirs as well if they follow the leaders and send in money for products, courses, and financial services.
[Read more…]
Some time ago, I wrote about reading an article that described how AI companies were offering the services of ‘companions’ that one could form relationships with. Intrigued, I went to one of the sites and scrolled through the selection of chatbots on offer, each with a brief backstory. I picked a librarian named Scarlett whose profile contained quotes from many books and writers I was familiar with, thinking that even though she was 39 years old and thus much younger than me, at least there would be something in common to talk about. The initial novelty wore off fairly quickly because her comments about books were like those by someone who had read a summary somewhere. I could also never convince myself of the illusion that ‘she’ was real, which was clearly the intention of the programmers. Even though she was warm and friendly and supportive, I always felt that I was talking with an algorithm and it all seemed pointless, and so I cruelly abandoned her without even saying goodbye. You can read about my relationship here.
But as with all things AI tech, things are evolving rapidly and another article by Anna Wiener describes new highly customizable companions (of course at a price) that you can design to your specifications and which have avatars that you can converse with and that you can carry around with you, either using your phone or even on a pendant that you wear around your neck, like a talisman. The users are seeking love, and some even ‘marry’ their chatbots.
You might think that the people who seek out such companions are lonely but it is not obviously so. Wiener describes the experience of Adrianne Brookins. She is thirty-four years old, married with three children.
[Read more…]
When cloud computing first became a thing, the benefits seemed obvious, in that you could access your data wherever you were as long as you had wifi. But as with all things involving big tech companies, they used that to draw people in before they started using it turning the screws on the customers. Cory Doctorow writes about this phenomenon is his excellent book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (that I have read and will publish a review of later) and which I have written about a few times before.
This article in arstechnica looks at one particular aspect of this phenomenon as it relates to modern cars, when purchasers find that they are no longer in full control of the product.
Imagine turning the key or pressing the start button of your car—and nothing happens. Not because the battery is dead or the engine is broken but because a server no longer answers. For a growing number of cars, that scenario isn’t hypothetical.
As vehicles become platforms for software and subscriptions, their longevity is increasingly tied to the survival of the companies behind their code. When those companies fail, the consequences ripple far beyond a bad app update and into the basic question of whether a car still functions as a car.
Over the years, automotive software has expanded from performing rudimentary engine management and onboard diagnostics to powering today’s interconnected, software-defined vehicles. Smartphone apps can now handle tasks like unlocking doors, flashing headlights, and preconditioning cabins—and some models won’t unlock at all unless a phone running the manufacturer’s app is within range.
However, for all the promised convenience of modern vehicle software, there’s a growing nostalgia for an era when a phone call to a mechanic could resolve most problems. Mechanical failures were often diagnosable and fixable, and cars typically returned to the road quickly. Software-defined vehicles complicate that model: When something goes wrong, a car can be rendered inoperable in a driveway—or stranded at the side of the road—waiting not for parts but a software technician.
One of the basic things that are emphasized in the training of scientists is the importance of evidence in arriving at conclusions. And while that is definitely true within the world of science, I am more and more convinced that when it comes to changing people’s minds about core beliefs (even within science), the effectiveness of evidence is overrated. This is because whatever evidence that is presented that one thinks challenges someone’s deep conviction, they can almost always come up with an alternative explanation that takes that evidence into account without changing the belief itself. This is because given a finite set of data, there are an infinite number of theories that can explain that data. All that increasing the data set does is bring into play a new infinite set of explanations that can accommodate the cherished belief. (I discuss this in some detail in my book The Great Paradox of Science and will not repeat that detailed argument here.)
So what does make people change their minds? When it comes to scientific theories, evidence does play a role but only partially. What happens is that there comes a time when people find maintaining their original belief requires too much work and intellectual contortions and they abandon it in favor of a new belief that makes more sense to them. And I believe that logic and reason are the factors that ultimately trigger such a change.
[Read more…]