Jason Lefkowitz

“Braithwaite figures he may have spent the better part of a decade as one of the most frequently pulled-over drivers in America.

Not for speeding, but simply because he was driving a giant banana.”

https://cowboystatedaily.com/2026/06/18/giant-banana-pulled-over-in-montana-driver-says-cops-have-stopped-him-100s-of-times/

When Chevy Chase did this bit, it was a joke

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/im-the-president-and-youre-not-trump-tests-his-power-and-frustrates-the-gop-871732c9

#USPol

I’m not really sure what this all means, but I feel like I should be mad about it

https://www.intheweights.com/p/jason-lefkowitz

Why would the EU get behind W Social, a European social media platform that barely exists, rather than Mastodon, a European social media platform that has been successfully operating for a decade?

Oh, right

https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-uncovered-the-reality-behind-the-hype/

How's your week? Mine is just listening to HVAC contractors mutter "this is going to be expensive"

Been watching Netflix's "Death By Lightning." So far it is a real Festival of Victorian Beards

Free tip: regardless of your politics, do not get your food from someone who is this cavalier about “put[ting] a couple kids in the hospital”

https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/14/health/the-milkman

"According to Zack Rosen, founder of California YIMBY and the Abundance Network, the problem with politics is Americans being too involved. Bemoaning the rise of small-dollar political donations in fundraising documents leaked to the Prospect, Rosen is blunt: 'Small dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber.' Rosen misses what he considers to be a bygone era of elite dominance.

Rosen and his allies have no need for small-dollar donations or mass-membership politics: They come to do political battle with $260 million annually (yes, each year!) from billionaire benefactors."

https://prospect.org/2026/06/12/new-documents-detail-nine-figure-silicon-valley-funded-abundance-movement/

#USPol

The thing I did not anticipate about the future was how dumb everything would be

"In interviews with two dozen currently enlisted, civilian, and retired Black members of the military across the armed forces, person after person told me they have watched in dismay as a new administration has diminished and erased a proud history. Many of the officers I spoke with were the second or third generation in their family to serve, and had children who were serving as well. It has been difficult to see the gains of their forebears undermined so starkly in such a short period."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/07/black-military-patriots-hegseth/687306/

#USPol

Any Democratic candidate who does not turn this headline into an ad is guilty of political malpractice

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/05/white-house-ballroom-donald-trump-00951892

#USPol

Meanwhile, from the "what are my local cops up to now" file: a detective has been fired for pointing his service weapon at a colleague because the colleague was warming up fish in the office microwave

https://abcnews.com/US/officer-arrested-after-allegedly-pointing-firearm-fellow-cop/story?id=133528324

“Contentful spent 13 years as a trusted European vendor, and one board meeting is enough to put it under US law.

That is where Open Source matters.”

https://dri.es/contentful-and-the-limits-of-buy-european

“With the first trot, the librarian breathes in the morning scent of new spring leaves mixed with wisps of smoke from nearby chimneys. As she and her mule carefully descend, a faint gleam of orange works its way over the tip of the nearby mountains. With every moment of growing light, they gain confidence, navigating the creek beds and mossy paths. By the time the sun is high and the dew has evaporated from young blades of grass, she reaches the dirt road that leads into town. She passes small, identical homes from which people are emerging to start their days. One of these has been turned into a library.“

https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-132-spring-2026/librarians-on-horseback

The coward Nick Bilton fled the meeting where Scott Pelley challenged him, slunk back to his office and fired Pelley by letter

https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/scott-pelley-exit-cbs-news-60-minutes-1236765350/

“In an age when carmakers seem to have largely abandoned the idea of a rainbow of exterior colors in favor of swathing their vehicles in 50 shades of gray, it may seem hard to believe that in 1970 you could order a new Ford Maverick in a shade known as Anti Establish Mint. If that didn’t do it for you, Thanks Vermillion was also on the menu.”

https://www.hagerty.com/media/opinion/color-commentary-we-have-seen-the-future-and-it-is-gray-for-now/

I'm fascinated by how much of the advice in this film for British military personnel traveling by car through East Germany to Berlin in the 1980s boils down to "under no circumstances should you ever deal with East German officials. If an East German official stops you, demand to talk to a Soviet officer"

Someone here asked to have their truck tailgate decorated with a big ‘Murican flag and a badass jet fighter, but didn’t know enough about jet fighters to know that the badass one that got put on their tailgate is a Russian MiG-29

If you really want to help society at large, invent something that makes programmers less productive

"Last week, the Justice Department deleted thousands of press releases related to the Jan. 6 insurrection and other matters. Here they are."

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-justice-department-erases-history--lawfare-restores-it

#USPol

I'm so tired of following up and checking in and circling back

RE: https://mastodon.social/@fesshole/116658300877114893

A corollary.

Once, long ago, I was hired at a new job. They gave me a big wedge of new-employee paperwork to fill out on the first day. One of the documents was a form assigning ownership of any intellectual property I came up with on my own time to the company.

I didn't want to do that, but I also didn't want to have a big fight over it. So I just tossed that form in the trash. If they really cared about it, I figured, someone would come bug me about it later. No one ever did.

People can ask you to do anything they want. But don't assume they care enough to fight over it just because they asked

Got a letter from the urology center that treated my kidney stone a few years back telling me that their systems have been hacked, which I guess is at least a novel way to get your dick pics leaked

If society is not going to allow normal people to have enough money to buy anything, can it at least stop bombarding us with advertising

So AI is going great

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/22/you-can-no-longer-google-the-word-disregard/

"A federal judge on Thursday dismissed the felony conspiracy count against the remaining defendants in the 'Broadview Six' case, further winnowing a politically charged prosecution that is now down to misdemeanor counts of impeding an immigration agent.

'Congratulations, you all are no longer charged with felonies,' U.S. District Judge April Perry told the four defendants."

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/05/07/broadview-six-dismiss-charges/

#USPol

If you ask the AI boosters, they will tell you that large language models write code at the level of an enthusiastic junior programmer — competent but not particularly wise.

Meanwhile in Washington, the message policymakers are getting is that AI has “reached a level of coding proficiency surpassing all but the most skilled human minds”

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/16/sean-cairncross-ai-mythos-expertise-00925336

Someone got paid more money to think this up than I have been paid in my entire life

https://www.theverge.com/news/931918/microsoft-xbox-rebrand-caps

ME [ killing you and taking all your stuff ]: Ethical issues aside, this is gonna be a big win for me

Well this has gotta be creepy as fuck

https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/empty-waymos-invade-atlanta-neighborhood-circle-cul-de-sac-hours-with-no-passengers/CSNV2G5CZFHHFP6BOH6YF5RCFU/

Someone seriously committed to the bit on this one

https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1968-chevrolet-ge20-van/

"We need a more disenthralled, realistic view of the role of the legal profession, what it is, and what it has to offer because corrupt forces have used that legal knowledge mystification to steal power from democratic self-government. And democratic self-government, not the gamesmanship of legal professors and judges, is what our system is and must be based on."

🎁 https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/yes-the-fancy-lawyers-are-the-problem-across-the-board/sharetoken/0d3b7291-d437-4f28-b2aa-45ee59a619b3

#USPol

“Our community has spent so many years building something of genuine human value: a shared body of knowledge, cultural meaning and careful critique all of which lend considerable discursive depth and richness to what we do. But in the brave new world of Knitting Bullshit, all of that accumulated wisdom, all of the real history of knitting as labour, as resistance, as solidarity, as design intelligence, as craft, is now there simply to provide the powerful emotional currency that AI-generated podcasts and videos cynically mine for profit.”

https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2026/04/29/knitting-bullshit/

“There’s one fundamental ground truth that every A.I. huckster always, eventually, reveals that they do believe. They believe that you all are probably fucked, but they’re gonna be just fine.”

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/it-s-lamer-than-you-think

"Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey (R) gave a floor speech arguing against a redraw on both political — it might endanger Republican seats — and moral — it’s an abuse of power against the minority — grounds. He said that he’d spoken to Trump, but still opposed the effort. Four Republicans joined his lead in the vote held soon after."

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/live-blog/scotus-helps-louisiana-republicans-obliterate-black-dem-district-ahead-of-midterms?entry=1546715

#USPol

"This wasn’t the first time ICE agents stopped and held Garcia Venegas. In fact, Saturday’s encounter marked the third such incident, according to court filings. Garcia Venegas, whose parents are originally from Mexico, had twice before been detained after ICE raided construction sites where he was working, and twice before he was let go after proving his American citizenship. 'I live in constant fear that I will be subjected to further baseless detentions just for going about my daily life,' he said, adding, 'I only wish to live my life in peace.'"

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/05/ice-keeps-detaining-the-same-us-citizen-again-and-again-and-again-hes-fighting-back/

#USPol

A fundamental thing about blockade as a military strategy is that it takes a long time to make itself felt. There's always slack in the blockaded economy; stockpiles of imported goods, substitute goods that can be used in their place, etc. Even if the blockade is total, the impact won't really be felt until all that slack has been wrung out. That process can take months or even years.

If your goal is to force your adversary to accept your terms immediately, then, blockade is a singularly poor way to achieve it

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/05/07/cia-intelligence-iran-trump-blockade-missiles/

At this point it seems like it might be easier to announce when GitHub is up

“Five major publishers — Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage — and the best-selling novelist Scott Turow have filed a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.

The complaint, which was filed on Tuesday morning in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses Meta and Zuckerberg of illegally using millions of copyrighted works to train their artificial intelligence program Llama, and of removing copyright notices and other copyright management information from those works.”

🎁 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/books/publishers-turow-meta-zuckerberg-lawsuit-copyright.html?unlocked_article_code=1.gFA.kJJ_.WYNsGmwL6MmT&smid=url-share

I learned two things this weekend. One is that Samsung refrigerator/freezers have a “Demo Mode” where everything seems to be running normally, but all the actual cooling functions have been disabled. And the other is that you can activate this mode by leaning against the door the wrong way

Why would that be a problem for U.S. car manufa—ohhhhh

https://www.jalopnik.com/2160402/forced-labor-goods-illegal-canada-car-manufacturers/

“Parks and Recreation” was kind of the ur-pop culture product of the Obama era. It was so of the Obama era that it came to work in a tan suit. I don’t see how anyone could make it work today. Like, at all

https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/adam-scott-parks-and-recreation-trump-different-1236734725/

“In 1911, the image of enslaved laborers raising monumental pyramids for their ruling pharaohs was repurposed to visualize the stratification of the capitalist system. Published in Industrial Worker — a newspaper out of Cleveland, Ohio, that was funded by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) — the image is a layer cake of oppression.”

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/pyramid-of-the-capitalist-system/

That's funny, my therapist told me the same thing

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/openai-codex-system-prompt-includes-explicit-directive-to-never-talk-about-goblins/

There is no route to renewing democracy in the United States that does not go through reforming the corrupt Supreme Court.

#USPol

Good news if you work on an oil tanker and don't feel like life is worth living

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-28/hormuz-can-open-without-clearing-all-mines-us-energy-chief-says

One of those days where at the end I just want to crawl off to a shack in the woods and spend the rest of my life arguing about literary theory with the squirrels

GoDaddy pulled this bullshit on me once too. My personal domain, which I had registered with them a little less than 20 years before and never moved out of simple inertia, vanished one day from my account. No warning, no notice, no nothing. I contacted customer support and was told that it had been transferred to someone else (!).

After several days of ferocious arguments with their customer support, the domain quietly and mysteriously appeared back in my account. Again, no notice, no apology.

That was the kick in the pants I needed to move my truly ancient domains off GoDaddy for good

https://anchor.host/godaddy-gave-a-domain-to-a-stranger-without-any-documentation/

Truly the dumbest timeline

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5850705-rename-ice-nice-trump/

#USPol

"Everyone in tech understands how much regular people dislike AI. What I think they’re missing is why. They think this is a marketing problem.

AI doesn’t have a marketing problem. People experience these tools every single day!

You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives."

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation

“Our new poll shows that 55% of U.S. adults support the House voting to impeach Trump, while 37% oppose and 8% are unsure.

As for the president’s overall approval rating, there is a strong intensity gap in responses to our poll. Overall, 45% of all adults say they strongly support impeachment, while only 30% say they strongly oppose it. That is a 15-point intensity gap in favor of impeachment.”

https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-04-22-strength-in-numbers-verasight-impeachment-polling

#USPol

Is it because you finally realized you're a horrible ghoul

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/alan-dershowitz-why-im-becoming-a-republican-86c19b66?st=4sLACY

#USPol

“In 2003, the mighty Florida orange industry produced 242 million boxes of fruit, with 90 pounds of oranges per box, most of which went on to become orange juice. Now, not even 25 years later, the United States Department of Agriculture was forecasting a pitiful 12 million boxes of oranges, the least in more than 100 years, the worst year since last. A decline of more than 95 percent.

And everyone knew, more or less, that even that figure was not happening.”

https://slate.com/business/2026/04/florida-state-orange-food-houses-real-estate.html

I learned yesterday from overhearing a random conversation between two strangers that this is a thing that exists

https://museumofthedog.org/

#DogsOfMastodon

RE: https://mastodon.online/@azett/116415821351279612

I wish I could get to my library tomorrow so I could run some Ancestry.com searches for this person, but I can’t. Maybe one of you has access, though? Or can get access through your own library or institution?

Is anyone out there lobbying for the interests of drivers in the US? Does AAA have a government affairs office? I feel like this is a problem that could by solved by throwing a few competent lobbyists at it

“Maine already has a law on the books that authorizes damages against federal officials who deprive people of their constitutional rights. Carvajal-Muñoz sued his ICE kidnappers under this statute, alleging that they stopped, arrested, and imprisoned him on the basis of race in violation of the Fourth and Fifth amendments. If his suit moves forward, he will likely uncover the identities of the masked agents who participated in his abduction. He has demanded both compensatory damages as well as punitive damages ‘to deter future unconstitutional conduct.’”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/04/aclu-lawsuit-ice-reign-of-terror-maine-california.html

#USPol

The first comment on every music video on YouTube is always something like “this was my beautiful wife’s favorite song until three years ago when she was torn apart by wolves”

Standing outside the house yelling "I AM AN AI COMPANY NOW" and waiting for pallet loads of dollar bills to fall from the sky

Do not trust any messages claiming to be from the Mastodon Security Team. If the Mastodon Security Team wants you, they will come through your door guns blazing

"What I wanted was a [Fediverse] client that runs in a plain browser, handles images properly, but does not require a JavaScript engine to display a list of posts.

So I built SmolFedi.

It is a PHP application. No npm, no Composer, no build step. It uses a SQLite database and PHP sessions. Every page is generated server-side and sent as plain HTML. It supports multiple accounts, timelines, notifications, polls, media attachments with alt text, content warnings, compose, reply, boost, favourite, everything I actually use day to day. There is not a single line of JavaScript in the codebase."

https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/the-fediverse-deserves-a-dumb-graphical-client.md

"When I finished, the room was silent, the political appointees looking at one another in what appeared to be disbelief. The silence was broken by Ken Jackson, who chuckled softly and shook his head. 'Wow, there really is so much that USAID does that we never knew,' he said. 'This is the story that needs to get out there.'

Joel, also smiling, chimed in next, echoing Jackson’s amazement. 'I had no idea you did all this,' he said. 'As a Republican, when I think of what USAID does in global health, I assumed it was just, you know, abortions.'"

https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/trump-usaid-abortions-barney-nicholas-enrich-into-the-wood-chipper-book-exclusive

#USPol

"Voters in a small Missouri town, unhappy with the city council’s approval of a $6 billion data center, struck back at the polls last week, ousting all four incumbent council members running for reelection.

The rout of half the Festus City Council was fueled by a surge in voter turnout and widespread frustration with the data center approval process."

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/13/missouri-city-council-data-center-00867259

#USPol

Trying to imagine a bigger “fuck you” a CEO could offer their employees than this

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/meta-spins-up-ai-version-of-mark-zuckerberg-to-engage-with-employees/

Big ups to a book about the work of a long-dead author where the introduction says (I'm paraphrasing) "you may have picked up this book because the actual works of this long-dead author are so goddamned impenetrable"

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/200580148-the-neptune-factor

If you ever wondered why Texas so reliably sends Republicans to Congress, part of the reason is that Texas Republicans won control of the state legislature for the first time since Reconstruction in 2002, and they immediately set about gerrymandering the state so Democrats could never win a majority of the state's Congressional districts again

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Texas_redistricting

#USPol

Should have listened to my guidance counselor and become a depressive mobster who hangs out all day in the back room of a pork store

People are always complaining that I don't post enough EVs. So here's one for you

https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1910-waverley-75c-phaeton-brougham/

The question for the next two weeks for every American political, business and cultural leader must be: what are you going to do right now to prevent the last few days from happening again? Because unless something changes, it will absolutely happen again.

This chart Nate Silver made of the X accounts with the most engagement in 2026 seems like it might be useful to show decent orgs who resist moving their primary online presence off X. Is this really the company your org wants to keep?

https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak-show?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1198116&post_id=193285131&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=wabr&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email