Doktor Archeville's Laboratory

Vie the NYT:

Is he strong? Listen, bud: He's got no muscles or blood Is he live or is he dead? Takes the teeth from your head! Hey there There goes the Skele-Man

In the chill of night You can hear his shrill shriek He'll cause such a fright Make you shake, make you freak

Skele-Man, Skele-Man Spoopy neighborhood Skele-Man Wealth and fame, he's ignored Calcium's his reward

To avoid more punishment, the child sits still and is quiet. But they have to actively remind themself constantly to sit still and be quiet.

The teacher sees the child sitting still and being quiet. The teacher treats this as the baseline.

Since the child is putting a lot of effort into sitting still and being quiet, doing so distracts from paying attention to what the teacher is teaching. The child then is punished for not paying attention.

Hunting for some coochie

Wrote a G up on his belt

Too often, Democracy is presented to us as the boring, moderate option, only chosen by conformists and the indecisive masses. I am here to tell you:

Democracy is not Moderate. Democracy is Radical.

Democracy is the last major political ideology to insist that legitimacy rises from the many and not the few.

Every other system - no matter how it dresses itself up - rests on the same grim foundation: that power must be concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite. Sometimes it is in the hands of The Party's Politburo, sometimes it's the Guardian Mullahs, sometimes a Noble Bloodline, sometimes it's the President-for-Life and his pathetic cadre of sycophants.

It doesn't matter what ideology props up Tyranny. The labels differ, but the structure is identical - a small group decides, and the rest of us obey. Strip away the slogans and you find the same contempt underneath: a profound distrust of humanity as a whole.

And that is how it has always been - in most places, and for most of human history. But Democracy is the rejection of that structure at its root.

Democracy is not tidy. It is not efficient. It is not comforting. It is a stubborn, defiant insistence that ordinary people - in all their conflicted ignorance, prejudice, generosity, and brilliance - are entitled to govern themselves. Not because they are perfect, but because they are human.

It assumes that the people are not livestock to be managed, nor children to be shielded from dangerous thoughts, but moral agents capable of judgment, disagreement, and correction.

There is nothing moderate about that.

And that is why Democracy and Freedom of Expression are inseparable. A system that depends on the people’s consent must allow the people to speak - to argue, to offend, to be wrong, to be foolish, to be alarming. Either you trust the people or you do not.

Democracy cannot survive on curated truths and sanitized discourse. It requires exposure to bad ideas so that better ones can defeat them in the open. It requires citizens who can hear something repulsive and reject it for themselves.

Authoritarian systems have no need for Freedom of Expression. They do not require educated citizens, only compliant ones. They do not need critical thinking, only discipline. Speech is dangerous to them precisely because it invites comparison, skepticism, and refusal. So the Authoritarians of all colors regulate it - not for any public good, but for their own survival.

Here in America, Democracy is strained. The public sometimes chooses poorly. Demagogues rise. Falsehood spreads. But the system is showing its cracks precisely because it allows us to see them.

The answer to bad democratic outcomes is not to abandon democracy - it is to defend it more fiercely. A system that permits error is the only system that permits correction.

I know that the temptation, in moments of fear and frustration, is to reach for guardians - to wish for someone stronger, smarter, cleaner to take the wheel so that you do not have to confront it yourself. That temptation is ancient, but it has always led to the same place: The surrender of voice. The criminalization of dissent. The quiet suffocation of truth.

Democracy asks something harder of us. It asks us to believe that people, together, can learn - can improve. That exposure to ideas does not inevitably corrupt. That sunlight does more good than silence. That freedom - including the freedom to create and consume shocking, offensive, unsettling ideas - is not a threat to legitimacy, but its foundation.

Democracy is not easy and it is not perfect. Democracy rejects the fantasy that some flawless leader will come along to save us. It does not falsely promise us good outcomes every time.

“What to the Slave is 4th of July?”: James Earl Jones Reads Frederick Douglass’s Historic Speech [source]

This headline is missing some important nuance -- it's a headline, there's only so much they can do -- in that the Vatican said "this action you have taken excommunicates you." That is, 'we're not actively doing this to you, you are doing this to yourself, because we told you this was beyond the acceptable boundaries.'

The Vatican went way beyond what most of my Catholic friends expected -- they expected the bishops and maybe some priests to get excommunicated, but the laity and the nuns and... the Vatican has basically said 'bet, try it. See what happens.' (Excommunication, that's what happens.)

If you are on BlueSky and you are not following Claire Willett, you are truly missing out on some good fucking tea. Claire is a lesbian lifelong Catholic from Portland who knows her shit & has been sitting watching all of this with a giant bucket of popcorn and translating for the rest of us:

a bunch of archives of incredibly important government datasets like maternal mortality statistics are about to be deleted forever. in a regime where they're known to fudge numbers, we can't trust a lot of the data coming from them to not be altered. open source backups like those found on data.world are vital to being able to verify that the data coming from our government is still intact and not altered. and they're about to delete all of it.

i don't know if we need to start a petition or what. nobody seems to fucking care. there are millions of users on data.world and yet nobody is raising the alarm bells and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. somebody needs to do something. i don't know what to do. it feels like more and more of this world is being destroyed and dismantled. it's not only US centric data, either! it's all sorts of countries from around the world! and they're about to fucking delete everything.

the only things that won't be deleted are private companies who happen to use the paid version of their platform (which isn't accessible data to the open source community; some people have just been using their service to host their own data on privately)

and the kicker? this announcement was made... via an AI generated blog post. so not even any sort of human touch. just a generic, soulless announcement made by a soulless human about to take a wrecking ball to one of the more important websites that exists on the internet.

an example of some of the things that will be deleted on July 11th:

{ MASTERPOST } Everything You Need to Know about How to Pay off Debt

Understanding debt:

Let’s End This Damaging Misconception About Credit Cards

Season 2, Episode 10: “Which Is Smarter: Getting a Loan? or Saving up to Pay Cash?”

Dafuq Is Interest? And How Does It Work for the Forces of Darkness?

Investing Deathmatch: Paying off Debt vs. Investing in the Stock Market

How to Build Good Credit Without Going Into Debt

Dafuq Is a Down Payment? And Why Do You Need One to Buy Stuff?

It’s More Expensive to Be Poor Than to Be Rich

Making Decisions Under Stress: The Siren Song of Chocolate Cake

How Mental Health Affects Your Finances

Paying off debt:

Kill Your Debt Faster with the Death by a Thousand Cuts Technique

Share My Horror: The World’s Worst Debt Visualization

The Best Way To Pay off Credit Card Debt: From the Snowball To the Avalanche

The Debt-Killing Power of Rounding up Bills

A Dungeonmaster’s Guide to Defeating Debt

How to Pay Hospital Bills When You’re Flat Broke 

Ask the Bitches Pandemic Lightning Round: “What Do I Do If I Can’t Pay My Bills?” 

Slay Your Financial Vampires

Season 4, Episode 3: “My credit card debt is slowly crushing me. Is there any escape from this horrible cycle?” 

Case Study: Held Back by Past Financial Mistakes, Fighting Bad Credit and $90K in Debt 

Student loan debt:

What We Talk About When We Talk About Student Loans

Ask the Bitches: “The Government Put Student Loans in Forbearance. Can I Stop Paying—or Is It a Trap?”

How to Pay for College without Selling Your Soul to the Devil

When (and How) to Try Refinancing or Consolidating Student Loans

Ask the Bitches: I Want to Move Out, but I Can’t Afford It. How Bad Would It Be to Take out Student Loans to Cover It?

Season 4, Episode 4: “I’m $100K in Student Loan Debt and I Think It Should Be Forgiven. Does This Make Me an Entitled Asshole?” 

The 2022 Student Loan Forgiveness FAQ You’ve Been Waiting For

2023 Student Loan Forgiveness Update: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly 

Our Final Word on Student Loan Forgiveness 

Avoiding debt:

Ask Not How Much You Should Save, Ask How Much You Should Spend 

How to Make Any Financial Decision, No Matter How Tough, with Maximum Swag

Your Yearly Free Medical Care Checklist

Two-Ring Circus 

Status Symbols Are Pointless and Dumb 

Advice I Wish My Parents Gave Me When I Was 16 

On Emergency Fund Remorse… and Bacon Emergencies

Should You Increase Your Salary or Decrease Your Spending? 

Don’t Spend Money on Shit You Don’t Like, Fool

The Magically Frugal Power of Patience

The Only Advice You’ll Ever Need for a Cheap-Ass Wedding 

The Most Impactful Financial Decision I’ve Ever Made… and Why I Don’t Recommend It 

3 Times I Was Damn Grateful for My Emergency Fund (and Side Income) 

Buy Now Pay Later Apps: That Old Predatory Lending by a Crappy New Name 

Credit Card Companies HATE Her! Stay Out of Credit Card Debt With This One Weird Trick 

Ask the Bitches: Should I Get a Loan Even Though I Can Afford To Pay Cash? 

The Bitches vs. debt:

I Paid off My Student Loans Ahead of Schedule. Here’s How.

I Paid off My Student Loans. Now What?

Hurricane Debt Weakens to Tropical Storm Debt, but Experts Warn It’s Still Debt

The Real Story of How I Paid Off My Mortgage Early in 4 Years

Case Study: Swimming Upstream against Unemployment, Exhaustion, and $2,750 a Month in Unproductive Spending 

If the person has a *CHANGE IN MENTAL STATUS* that is they become drowsy, confused, disoriented, unconscious, or have a seizure(s), THAT is heat stroke. Everything else is a continuum of symptoms that should not guide your decision making. If someone is having symptoms, get them to a cooler place and get them something cool to drink.

At first, it was only for Jason. Jason missed out on a lot of years after being dead and always seemed to become distraught whenever Bruce showed any signs of having aged.

He understood. Suddenly coming back after being gone for so long, only to realize everything has changed, is a huge shock.

That’s fine. He can handle that.

But then, he noticed that the rest of his children would also have not-so-quiet mental breakdowns right in front of him if he showed any signs of aging.

Dick gets a quiet, faraway look in his eyes whenever Bruce reminisces about their time together, like it was a hundred years ago, before refusing to leave his side for a few hours. Then he would disappear when Bruce wasn’t looking, never for more than an hour, only to return shortly afterwards with puffy red eyes and a death grip on his hand

Jason would pretend he didn’t care, seeing the wrinkles on his face settle like they’ve been there since forever, before forcing Bruce to hug him, fixing his face away so no one could see it, and crying his eyes out right then and there, lamenting loudly on the fact that Bruce was apparently ready to drop dead at that very moment

Cassandra would get a sour look on her face when Bruce let out a soft groan as he got out of his seat, which was saying a lot, since she didn’t often show much emotion on her face. She would sit beside him, holding his hand in her own, her fingers pressed against his pulse. She would refuse to speak for hours, not even bothering to sign if it meant taking her hand away

Stephanie, despite not being his child in a legal sense, dropped her milkshake on the ground in shock when Bruce complained about something being too sweet when it was, in fact, not that sweet at all. She gently touched his face and shook her head, tears brimming in her eyes, “You’re so old.” She whispered before insisting on having a movie night with just him

Tim seemed as though he had a conniption when Bruce needed to put on his glasses after a few hours of staring at a screen. He goes on a long, rambling rant about how Bruce could stare at screens for days on end before collapsing into Bruce’s arms and cursing out the weakening lenses in his eyes. Then he made Bruce take a screen break for two whole days, while trying not to cry and failing

Duke’s hands shake when he realizes Bruce takes more naps than he used to. He stays by Bruce’s side when he naps, even as he complains in a shaky voice that if Bruce spends all his time sleeping, he won’t have any time to spend with him. Bruce then has to sleepily comfort a crying Duke before they finish the nap together

Damian throws himself into Bruce's arms, and Bruce has no struggle with it at all. But Damian’s eyes get watery when he thinks that one day, it’s possible that Bruce will never be able to hold him up ever again. Maybe he would have to be the one carrying an old Baba around. He makes Bruce carry him around everywhere on days when he can’t keep those thoughts out of his mind

Alfred had to stop and close his eyes for a second; he truly believed he was staring at Thomas before realizing it was just Bruce. And as Bruce continued to get older and older, he could no longer see Thomas, because Thomas never got to make it as far as Bruce did. Despite the fear gripping his heart as Bruce continued to age, he couldn’t help but be grateful that Bruce still could age, that being Batman hadn't taken him away far too young.

Bruce knows they all understand that despite their complaints and tears, nothing is going to stop him from aging. At times, they seemed awed that his stupid self-sacrificing moves haven’t already killed him, but Bruce can’t fault his children for being weepy. It’s cute, he'll never tell them that, just so they'll keep their dignity

So yeah, he’ll take the time to dye his gray hairs black, and he’ll use his most expensive wrinkle cream to smooth out his features. He’ll muffle his groans when sitting down or getting up, and he’ll wear his contact if he needs to do a lot of reading. And he’ll take shorter naps or skip every so often so he can hang out with his kids, and he’ll continue working out so he can lift all his kids when he needs to