Jake Wildstrom
dwildstr.bsky.social
Jake Wildstrom
@dwildstr.bsky.social
52 followers 42 following 230 posts
Mathematician, tinkerer, crocheter, freelance geek.
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Yeah, to all the people who freak out about how Mamdani's going to establish Sharia law, I want to say, "Have you _looked_ at his platform?" It has nothing in common with hardline theocratic Islam and a great deal that's directly contrary to it. AFAICT, his religious practice is pretty ecumenical.
"Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy."
-Umberto Eco, "Ur-Fascism"
I dunno, if their rally was like our rally, "near the purple hippo" could be any of ten or so different places.
Reposted by Jake Wildstrom
“The whole world is covered with buttons, and not one of them is mine!”
Moon Duchin's research team explained this (in MA) six years ago. The short version is that in with regard to the "pack and crack" strategies of gerrymandering, Massachusetts comes "pre-cracked", with Republicans spread geographically thinly enough as to not form a majority anywhere.
Locating the Representational Baseline: Republicans in Massachusetts | Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy
Republican candidates often receive between 30% and 40% of the two-way vote share in statewide elections in Massachusetts. For the last three Census cycles, Massachusetts has held 9–10 seats in the House of Representatives, which means that a district can be won with as little as six percent of the statewide vote. Putting these two facts together, it is striking that a Massachusetts Republican has not won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1994. We argue that the underperformance of Republicans in Massachusetts is not attributable to gerrymandering, nor to the failure of Republicans to field House candidates, but is a structural mathematical feature of the actual distribution of votes observable in some recent elections. Several of these elections have a remarkable property in their vote patterns: Republican votes clear 30%, but are distributed so uniformly that they are locked out of the possibility of representation. Though there are more ways of building a valid districting plan than there are particles in the galaxy, every single one of them would produce a 9–0 Democratic delegation.
liebertpub.com
Is it Shub-Patty'sday, The Black Float of the Woods with a Thousand Young?
I would be comfortable with a world where "K-Pop Bader Ginsburg" is a thing that exists.
I have that same model, and every now and again some cat manages to lock it, invariably in the exit-only position.
"When didn't you say we couldn't find you guilty?"
"Late last night in the latrine, sir."
"Is that the only time you didn't say it?"
"No, sir. I always didn’t say you couldn't find me guilty, sir. What I did say was—"
"Nobody asked what you did say. We asked what you didn’t say."
-Heller, Catch-22
Y'know, sometimes you go to the USA, and you forget to write "soybeans" down on your shopping list, and then when you go home your wife says, "did you get the soybeans?" and then you say, "ugh, the USA is so far and I'm tired so I'm just gonna make a quick jaunt down to Argentina for those."
Sure, one _could_ argue that the FBI as an institution retained significant pre-2017 identity (including leadership) through to January 6, 2021. But that wouldn't be "the Biden FBI"; Joe Biden wasn't the president in 2016. That would be "the Obama FBI".
The "a zillion tiny dialogue panels" image from Hawkeye v4 brings up one aspect of writing Hawkeye you don't discuss: namely, if you have a character named "Clint" appearing in the all-caps medium of comic books, you have to be extra-careful with the spacing on your lettering.
Aw, Laura Nyro's only charting single was a cover of a Carole King-written song? That's kinda sad, since it's so easy to read her as a kind of cut-rate Carole King even without that data point.
I'm not thrilled about it going to a politician, even one resisting autocracy. It seems like in our current world there are a lot of brave aid workers in difficult circumstances (Sudan, Gaza) who are worthier.
Shades here of Aung San Suu Kyi, whose legacy has not lived up to a Nobel Prize standard.
If they can get _any_ money out of an uninsured ER visitor, it's through a collection agency. But they probably get nothing. Whereas most citizens carry some manner of governmental/marketplace/employer-mandated health insurance, and the medical provider gets paid (usually less than their rack rate).
It's also very much not clear who "they" denotes here. Like, if an ER patient is indigent and uninsured (which is presumably the undocumented immigrant case here), the hospital is obligated to stabilize them before discharge and don't generally get reimbursed at all.
The pull quote strikes me as odd. Is "camp" supposed to be unwitting? I've encountered the term mostly in the context of cultures and performances which enact it very deliberately, e.g. "camp" as an intentional aesthetic of queer identity.
AIUI, vindictive prosecution is usually a hard case to make, because typically prosecutors with a chip on their shoulder are smart enough to not ever do anything unequivocally demonstrating their maliciousness. Fortunately, these are not smart people and they keep on _talking_ about their motives.
This is journalistic malpractice. Nothing whatsoever is "not clear". The plain text of an established law forbids it. That's all that need be said about whether it can be done.
It is not clear that Mr. Trump’s image can be featured on a coin. An 1866 law enshrined a tradition that only deceased people could appear on U.S. currency to avoid the appearance that America was a monarchy. Trump admin is planning to do it anyway.
By Alan Rappeport

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/b...
Treasury Plans to Mint $1 Commemorative Trump Coin
www.nytimes.com
On the flipside, in the 80s and 90s Dominos Pizza was _unbelievably awful_, and now they're reasonably good by fast-food pizza standards. So, yeah, change happens and if you build your identity around a fast-food menu you're gonna get disappointed someday.
I mean, I remember Pizza Hut being a sit-down place with a buffet and waiters and dim lighting and everything (and Pac-Man arcade tables). But that ceased to be true in, uh, the late 80s? Early 90s? Hardly a recent phenomenon.
e.g. from the article: "UPFs are industrially formulated products that are often high in fats, starches, sugars and additives". "Industrially formulated" is not nutritionally relevant. "High in [whatever]" _is_ nutritionally relevant, but it's a completely different metric from "processing level".
I'm very dubious about the scientific basis for defining a cohesive "UPF" category and asserting its unhealthiness; dig deep into rhetoric about it and it's mostly naturalistic fallacy and moral scolds against people who don't cook.
Reposted by Jake Wildstrom
Toad sat on the edge of his bed. “Blah,” said Toad. “I feel down in the dumps.”

“Why?” asked Frog.

“I am thinking about tomorrow,” said Toad.
about repentance as a process (repeating the OR&R shoutout above, here), it's clear that's something I have, til now, avoided doing. What I have said above might not be enough. It might not be fully right. But it's better than what I have done so far.