Wow. Leave aside the idiocy of the idea that "oh we're such a not racist nation that any districting that even thinks about race is ipso facto racist and can't be allowed" and just think about "oh courts can't say boo about partisan gerrymandering"... that once a party has any kind of edge, they are free to redistrict, ignoring any logical geographical or community idea in order to ensure a quasi permanent minoritarian rule. How is that any kind of justice? This is disenfranchisement in the most blatant scale imaginable.

"Stop the steal" my ass.

Hey heard about this Hantavirus Cruise Ship Thing?

Unearthed reports reveal that RFK Jr. fired every full-time CDC cruise ship sanitation inspector ahead of the Hantavirus cruise ship outbreak.

Almost as much fun as bringing back deadly Measles with Encephalitis. Y'all are so smart.

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Headline of the moment:
Trump Is in His Ozymandias Era

In this new world, you're the head chef of a world-class kitchen. As such, you don't personally dice every vegetable, sear every steak, swish away every cockroach, or plate every dish. You have sous chefs and line chefs for that. But when a meal leaves the kitchen, it's your reputation on the line and your Michelin stars at stake. When the customer sends back the fish because it's overdone or the sauce is broken, you can't blame your sous chef.

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To do anything, we often feel like we have to know everything about everything, all while everything is changing. As one example, at the time of this writing it's fashionable to ridicule the complexity of JavaScript development. Let's peek at why.I To build a web app, you might need to understand this daunting list (which is probably already outdated):

-package managers (npm, Yarn)
-bundlers (webpack, Rollup)
-transpilers (Babel)
-task runners (gulp, Grunt)
-testing frameworks
-CSS preprocessors
-build toolchains
-deployment pipelines

And that's before so much as glancing at modern JavaScript language features. Each of these components has many available contenders. Some depend on each other, some conflict, and it's almost impossible to navigate the graph of what works with what unless you live and breathe that ecosystem every day.

It keeps going. Because of the DevOps philosophy of "you build it, you run it," you also need to learn Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform, not to mention a whole host of AWS, GCP, or Azure services. If you're especially cursed and your company is multi-cloud, you might have to learn two or more clouds.

Thanks to these "advancements," you can now find yourself simultaneously worrying about how to center a div element on a web page, while you struggle with Docker networking issues because your CI pipeline broke after you tried to change to Terraform scripts.

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Superior pilots use their superior judgment to avoid situations which require the use of their superior skill.

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Dr. Dan Sturtevant and his colleagues did research that showed how developers working in tangled, non-modular systems are 9x more likely to quit or be fired

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(And, as the saying goes, you can't un-blend two frogs.)

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New to music playlist. Very anemic month, but some of that's my fault - I ran into a pile of cool music in Sicily but decided to stockpile it...

4 star:
* Out West (Meels)
Rollicking country song.
Meels opened when we saw the Nitty Gritty Dirty Band farewell tour, and she was great. Excellent Dolly Parton vibe...
* Do I Ever Cross Your Mind (Chet Atkins & Dolly Parton)
I'm delighted by Dolly Parton's giggles. Interesting how it sounds like "May the Circle be Unbroken" at parts.
Meels covered this song, actually.

3 star:
* Both Sides, Now (Joni Mitchell)
Strong Songs had a episode unpacking this one.
* invisible string (Taylor Swift)
I'm not a big Swiftie but she's a good songcrafter. I appreciate the "isn't it pretty to think so" Henimgway reference.
mentioned in the Olivia De Recat
* I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler (YACHT)
More of an interesting video than a great song.
Woke up thinking about SCOTUS and their chicken shit way of pretending A. racism is dead and B. ensuring a partisan gerrymandered fractured landscape forever.

For both sides, depending on locality, parlaying potentially temporary political advantage into quasi-permanent impregnable districting is a path to that party never having to listen to the voters en masse, which is an obvious boon for authoritarianism and a system that only has to pretend that votes count.

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from the 3000 odd photos we took in Sicily, a collage of cats and dogs, and some street art and then doors