«“No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” the agent said. “It’s infuriating.” The longtime ICE employee is thinking about quitting rather than having to continue “arresting gardeners.”»
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/opinion/texas-floods-nws.html
«the Weather Service employee whose job it was to make sure those warnings got traction — Paul Yura, the long-serving meteorologist in charge of “warning coordination” — had recently taken an unplanned early retirement amid cuts pushed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. He was not replaced.»
“This was far from the only damning judgment passed of King John” – Powers and Thrones (Dan Jones) https://bookshop.org/ebooks/quotes/00554cad-6255-4874-8ee4-46cd7dedafda
«Yet [the knight] William [Marshall] could not get along with John. The new king’s character was neatly summed up by a chronicler known as the Anonymous of Béthune. Although John was capable of lavish hospitality and generosity, noted the writer, adding that he gave out handsome cloaks to his household knights, John was otherwise “a very bad man, more cruel than all others, he lusted after beautiful women and because of this he shamed the high men of the land, for which reason he was greatly hated. Whenever he could, he told lies rather than the truth. . . . He hated and was jealous of all honorable men; it greatly displeased him when he saw someone acting well. He was brim-full with evil qualities.”54
This was far from the only damning judgment passed of King John, who between 1199 and 1216 enjoyed one of the least successful reigns in English history. Even a summary list of his failures runs quite long: John lost most of the Plantagenets’ lands in France (including the duchy of Normandy); he murdered Arthur of Brittany; he irritated Pope Innocent III to such a degree that he was excommunicated; he extorted so much money from his barons in taxes and semi-legal fines that he pushed many of them to the verge of either bankruptcy or rebellion; he wasted all the money he had plundered from his people on a hopeless war to regain his French lands; he drove his realm into a civil war, during which he was forced to grant a peace treaty circumscribing his royal powers, later known as Magna Carta; he reignited the civil war by renouncing Magna Carta and consequently suffered a full invasion of his realm by the heir to the French crown, Prince Louis; and in the end, he died, abandoned by most of his allies, having lost many of his crown jewels in the marshlands in eastern England known as The Wash.To what degree precisely all of this was John’s fault is not our concern here. What is significant, though, is that the Anonymous of Béthune, who was probably in the service of a Flemish lord from that town, near Calais, saw John’s failings through an unmistakably chivalric prism. John was not merely incompetent, an unskilled leader, unlucky, or undiplomatic. He was also untruthful, dishonorable, lustful, untrustworthy, and spiteful. For as much as William Marshal’s biographer would portray his rise through life as the reward for his dedication to knightly virtues, so too would chroniclers like the Anonymous of Béthune ascribe John’s free fall through kingship as just deserts for his unchivalrous approach to life. Knightliness—or the perception of knightliness—could make or break a man in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It made William Marshal. It unmade King John.»
O btw, the Magna Carta, the thing we white people are so proud of. Like nobles facing down a king is somehow unique.
«Here, in outline, was the basis of a complex but effective way to organize political society. And it was not limited to the lands of the Carolingian Franks. Outside the Frankish realms, feudal structures (or if we are to avoid the word “feudal”, the land-for-arms social compact) developed. They could be found, adapted to local custom and tradition, in Normandy, England, Scotland, Italy, the Christian kingdoms of the northern Iberian Peninsula, the crusader states that were established in Palestine and Syria in the twelfth century (see chapter 8), and eventually in the newly Christianised states of Hungary and Scandinavia.18 And by the same token, even when the western half of the Carolingian empire experienced a dearth in strong kingship following the deaths of Charlemagne and his immediate successors, the social mechanisms of lordship and military service continued. Indeed, they became all the more important as French kingship declined from its Carolingian high-water mark, and dukes, counts, and other lords—including high-ranking churchmen—began to tussle with one another for the security of their individual patches.
The long-term results of all this were threefold. In the first place, an ever-more complex set of laws and procedures emerged to define the relations between land givers and landholders: semisacred rituals of homage-bound people to serve and protect one another (in theory at least) and a whole raft of legally enforceable rights, obligations, payments, and taxes developed around the bonds of land grants. (If “feudalism” existed, then this is what it comprised: a complex nexus of interlocking personal relationships that, when taken as a whole, presented a haphazard but distinctive system of government.) In the second, the success of a system by which large numbers of warriors could be sustained contributed to a sense, part real and part imagined, that society in the west was becoming more violent and dangerous. And in the third, the fact that warriors were now endowed as a matter of course with estates that could support an aristocratic lifestyle helped create an upper-class consciousness that lauded—indeed, fetishized—supposedly knightly virtues. The code of conduct and honor, which eventually came to be known as chivalry, would by the end of the Middle Ages become something akin to a secular religion.
That, at least, is the theory. But theory is hard for us to visualize. In order to better understand what the “new” warrior of the early second millennium looked like, how he worked within the turbulent medieval world, what he might hope to achieve in life through sheer force of arms, and how he might come to be lionized by later generations, it is better that we move from generalities to particulars, and look at the career of one of the most famous characters of this early age of knighthood. The knight in question was called Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar. He was not a Frank, but a man of the Iberian Peninsula, where war was endemic and authority was fragmented but opportunities for advancement by the strength of one’s arm abounded. Those who knew him in life called him the Champion (El Campeador). But he is better remembered by a bastardized, Arab-Spanish colloquial nickname that was given to him by bards who sang of him after his death. They knew him as al-Sayyid, or El Cid.»
Powers and Thrones (Dan Jones) https://bookshop.org/ebooks/quotes/996679ac-2bc4-4808-a725-cc596af57f8a
(Text embellishments mine. Couldn’t resist that 3rd paragraph.)
Wait! There’s more!
«The reality of going to war on horseback in the Middle Ages was objectively terrible. It was not only expensive, tiring, and frightening; it also hurt. A skeleton found in the 1990s in southern England, recently radiocarbon-dated to the time of the battle of Hastings, shows the dreadful physical degradation knighthood entailed. The bones of the wrists, shoulders, and spine bear the scars of painful, lifelong wear and tear: joints and vertebrae worn ragged by arduous days and months spent training, riding, and fighting in the saddle. The side and back of the skull bear six separate, severe wounds, administered with swords when the person was around the age of forty-five. These lethal blows were the reward for a life of toil.36 And they were entirely normal. The reality for medieval warriors was a hard life concluding in a nasty death, followed by the distinct possibility of hell as punishment for all the slaughtering and maiming they had done. Yet the impulse among medieval fighting men and the poets who wrote for them was not to report this godforsaken reality in plain prose, but to overwrite it with a heroic new literature that painted knights as lovers and questers whose ethical code perfumed the dubious reality of their deeds. As T. S. Eliot wrote in the twentieth century, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.”»
https://hn.premii.com/#/comments/44482194
«I once had someone bomb the coding, then email me a few hours after with a clean answer. One of the best hires I ever had.»
This is me. I’m a moron when put on the spot, and I’m not afraid to follow up half a dozen times with “what I should have said is this….”
«“This morning looked like a staging for a TikTok video,” said Marqueece Harris-Dawson, president of the Los Angeles City Council, adding if Border Patrol wants to film in LA, “you should apply for a film permit like everybody else.»
If it wasn’t for the inhumanity of it all, and the price of food for poor people in this country, I’d say he should just go ahead and ruin America’s farmers. (Well… except for the 1/3 of them that voted for Harris.)
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Perl-5.42-Released
Wow. Somebody’s actually working on Perl.
I wonder what that feels like?
«a bill that ultimately became too big to fail.»
Ah, so that’s how you do it.
Ok, so.
I voted for Anderson when I was a stupid college student. Reagan is my fault. Sorry, y’all.
On the other hand, after the 2016 election, I left an emphatic, heartfelt (polite) voice mail (about how Trump’s victory was a Russian psyop, but not in those exact words) on Richard Burr’s voicemail, and guess what? Investigation led by Burr.
Now, I left a heartfelt (and polite) voicemail and Actual Human Contact (more than one, actually, and one of them got me hung up on by some Young Republican aide when I wouldn’t accept his bullshit reply, although, admittedly, I was more emphatic than polite that time) for Tillis, and guess what? He votes “no” and is supposedly resigning.
It doesn’t make up for Reagan, but I try.
Here, Read This 