This is the 1st I’m hearing about Walter. I’m glad it is this meme. ARgHHHrAARHggHH!

I was a Scout in the 90s. The pedophilia allegations were rampant back then, too. And the beginnings of the christo-fascist movement. And (in my troop) the paramilitary indoctrination. I lobbied all of my frustrations to my parents who made me stay in until Life, just before Eagle. I think they figured I’d just go ahead and finish it out. Nope.

I got SO many valuable life lessons from Scouts, but the organization itself is so disgusting it is hard to fathom. The dads that were there to help were great! The merit badges are simple paths to learning new skills. Friends your age sharing an experience, commiserating with boys at a fucking brutal time in your life, all good! But even with all that value, I still saw the organization for what it was. I got what I could out of it, but how can you reconcile the comradery you feel with the pain the Scouts are causing others?

Boys need a safe space.

I absolutely agree with you and I’m sorry you are the focus of so much vitriol from ignorant sociopaths. Still, I encourage you not to stand by and choose nothing over the least bad option when the final decision affects everyone. It feels like I’m always holding my nose while in the voting booth. I’m about to do it big-time next week to put a proven corrupt crony in office to keep a reprehensible creature out. I hope we will have better options in the future if we have Reps and Senators that work and succeed to get money out of politics.

The “all or nothing” approach to voting is not realistic. If Turek checks all but a few of your boxes and Hinson checks none, then vote Turek into office. THEN you can work on him to change his mind about whatever issue you have. You’d have zero chance to do that with Hinson.

I’d argue you should even stump for him. Go out to your trans friends and say “what he said is gross and awful, but his stance on expanding healthcare, lowering the minimum wage and refunding SNAP will help all marginalized people, including trans folk.”

It’s a bad take, for sure, but I encourage any voter in Iowa to read about his platform on every other subject: https://turek4iowa.com/platform/

It’s an old letter that is the “th” sound. Some.people.are trying to bring it back.

I think of this every time I feed my dog the last of the tuna can: a wolf chasing down a fish at 60 mph.

Zelenskiy: “President Trump is facing pretty difficult midterm elections. His personal popularity is very low, diesel prices in the U.S. are very high, and the war that he started in the Middle East is not going the way he wants it,” the Sky News reporter asked. “Do you think you are being treated as a scapegoat for his own problems?”

Zelenskiy took a long pause, glanced at the papers on his podium, and then looked up, smiling. The whole room laughed.

“This is my answer,” Zelenskiy said.

TLDR: it is a ploy to split the liberal vote between the two Democrats and thus negate a majority. Read the article. Vote your conscience. I don’t know what else to tell ya.

I’m using Boost and I was getting a lot of 404 errors, not able to access anything. I don’t have any answers for you, but was experiencing outages.

I watched it yesterday and interesting is the appropriate word. The interviewee is a young guy, 28, which Jon brought up at the start of their talk. Jacob just shrugged his shoulders. After watching Jon for so many years, I thought it was an oddly unprofessional start, and since Jacob didn’t take the bait, it fell flat.

The interview goes on, with Jon poking the well-known, glaring holes in the AI debate, with Jacob nodding along. It seems like they agree. Then Jon mentions the future ramifications of AI. Jacob disagrees, starts repeating the utopian rhetoric. Jon picks at him to get some inroads into a debate. Jacob agrees, not giving up his position of a utopian outcome, but always circling back to the probable dangers.

I like that Jacob was on and that Jon did the interview. This was a tough one, because Jacob exists in a different world than Jon, and as much as he tried, he could not pull Jacob out of it.

Jacob understands there is great danger in the way AI is being developed. He has enough sense to know his employers were reckless and possibly homicidal. What he doesn’t understand is that this technology isn’t inevitable. He’s seen the back end, he understands the leaps and bounds LLMs have made, but he didn’t live through the “inevitably” of nuclear war, the “inevitably” of every computer going dark on Y2K. Even video calls were seen as the future norm in Sci-fi movies, but with all this capability, we’d rather text.

I like that they gave the interview time to breathe. It might not have been the most engaging TV, but I appreciated its awkwardness. Jacob is a tech-bro. We don’t often get a journalist on Jon’s level to give him the what-for. Watch it while you can.

From the article: “There are recent signs that the gradual decline in church attendance has leveled off. For the first time in 25 years, the number of people attending in-person worship in the US has increased.”

The article also says that about 100 million people (30%) attend a weekly service in the US nowadays. They talk about the heyday of the mid 20th century where 50% of Americans attended a weekly service. The population of the US in 1950 was 150 million. So that’s 25 million more people attending church today.

So why are all the smaller churches closing? The article (and possibly the PBS doc) fails to place some of the blame on the congregation capture of mega churches and how politics has driven people into these behemoths. I know that is what’s happening where I live in the South. They have a large sanctuary and expand that with an enormous online presence. How else can we have more Church goers and less churches?

Smaller churches with smaller congregations provide necessary support and community for people. Mega churches are money machines with political agendas. The documentary wants me to mourn the loss of community, fine, but it’s the Christians that are doing it to themselves. I’m not shedding any tears.

From the article: “There are recent signs that the gradual decline in church attendance has leveled off. For the first time in 25 years, the number of people attending in-person worship in the US has increased.”

The article also says that about 100 million people (30%) attend a weekly service in the US nowadays. They talk about the heyday of the mid 20th century where 50% of Americans attended a weekly service. The population of the US in 1950 was 150 million. So that’s 25 million more people attending church today.

So why are all the smaller churches closing? The article (and possibly the PBS doc) fails to place some of the blame on the congregation capture of mega churches and how politics has driven people into these behemoths. I know that is what’s happening where I live in the South. They have a large sanctuary and expand that with an enormous online presence. How else can we have more Church goers and less churches?

For your interest in cultural history, I think that Budapest would win, as it has been a crossroads for centuries. For environmental studies, Iceland would win hands down. They are global leaders in that field.

Something that has not been mentioned yet is that Budapest is rather large, with a metropolitan population of over 2 million. The entire country of Iceland has under 400K people. Iceland is remote and feels remote. To me, that’s perfect. Your results may vary.

It sounds like by “quality” you are talking about the physical fragility of the CD. True, a more modern format might be nice, with a bump to 24 bit depth. I would want something a little more collectible than a thumb drive though.

I say this as an avid CD buyer who rips full quality to a Plex server. Also download from Bandcamp.

“After Zelenskyy revealed the transfer in his UN speech, Lee said on X that Ukraine had broken a “non-disclosure agreement” and that this was regrettable. Zelenskyy’s adviser Dmytro Lytvyn responded on Facebook that there had been no such agreement, prompting accusations from Lee’s critics that the president, whose approval rating has hit a low of 37.9%, had lied.”

So this is an international beef playing out on socials. Great.

“Of the 474 stories, they found that just 10% referenced the climate crisis — and hardly any of the stories were actually about global warming. In nine of out 10 years, climate played a central role in no more than 2% of stories.”

Memes are educational.

"Among the most prominent allegations are that Boebert conducted a four-year “romantic and sexual relationship” with a senior female staffer, named as Clarice Navarro Ratzlaff, then paid her $200,000 when Ratzlaff broke off the affair and threatened to file an ethics complaint of her own.

Additionally, Wheeler alleges, Boebert had a sexual relationships around the same time with Raven Finegan, a congressional employee and the congresswoman’s district chief of staff, and Jeffrey Small, who was her chief of staff from 2021 to 2025."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/21/lauren-boebert-sexual-relationships-ethics-complaint

There’s a mini-doc about one California family: https://youtu.be/0WPzFnZkZmI

My country-listening kid has heard the song and wonders who is streaming it. Not popular in their friend group. This is the first I’ve heard of Ella. 🤷