the mjl (michael j leblanc)

@themjl.bsky.social

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Engineer. Musician. Wily Chaote. Full-Stack Acerbic Humanist.

Bandcamp: https://thebellmechanical.bandcamp.com/

SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/the_bell_mechanical

Musings: https://nopeanutsinchurch.com/

Middle of Massachusetts.

Posts Replies Media

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

checking in on night 2 of the RNC

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

I only read about half of The Privatization of Everything before I had to stop from sheer rage and frustration but there’s a whole section about how the attempted privatization of the NWS has already led to people dying from tornados as subscription services get weather alert priority.

It's because they want to privatize weather. They tried doing it under his last administration but many people didn't really notice beyond the weird hurricane drawing he did. It's also why they cut (or at least tried to it's been a minute since I read that stuff) a bunch of NASA Earth's funding too

Trump’s Pick to Lead Weather Agency Spent 30 Years Fighting Itwww.bloomberg.com Who owns the weather?

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

Aphex Twin and Autechre have been communicating via coded song titles for years and no one is the wiser.

Reply to

Raywat Deonandan

Teddy Roosevelt, breaker of the Old Trusts... yeah, he would have DESPISED Elon.

damn, that's TWO near-misses

Heard a loud boom earlier today? A meteor traveling at around 34,000 miles per hour burned up just before noon about 29 miles above Midtown Manhattan, NASA confirms. www.thecity.nyc/2024/07/16/m...

A Meteor Burned Up 29 Miles Above Midtown Manhattan, NASA Sayswww.thecity.nyc Some residents of Brooklyn and Staten Island heard a loud boom Tuesday morning sparking alarm, while city officials scrambled to identify the cause.

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

This whole exchange:

I don't know if it counts as optimism but I don't really think there's anything that Donald Trump could do or have happen to him that would make people who don't already like him want to vote for him. There is no more known quantity on earth, he can't change, and he is for sure not getting better.

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

Reply to

Brooke Binkowski

I think this is significant because of all the absolutely crazy "dark ad" messaging that people targeted by this were getting on Facebook, right when this shooter kid was 13 or 14. Like straight up Nazi shit.

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

Well. I guess this is what the world looks like on the other side of all those creepy social and psychological experiments Facebook was helping them with.

REVEALED: Trump campaign secret data on gunman’s familywww.channel4.com The family of Trump’s would-be assassin Thomas Crooks was among millions of voters profiled by Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

Finally watched The Lion In Winter and realized I should’ve seen it ten times by now. Great actors being funny and cruel to each other, in a medieval setting no less? That’s the sauce.

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

every day I feel like I'm losing my mind as people look at a statistically tied race where one guy is a felon with deeply unpopular positions who ALREADY LOST THIS EXACT RACE and are like "he is 100% for sure going to win"

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

When I read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as a young man, I didn't understand the line “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” but I do now. Fuck, do I ever.

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

every conservative since 1871

also that French industrialists lined up with the "let's try autocracy" platform (no surprise that the only private citizen charged post-liberation with war crimes by the provisional 1944 government was Louis Renault)

Reply to

snek

Neither is success, so it all balances out 😂

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

How do I signal unexpected failure of my JS code? assert(0); Good programmers say that assert is not a JS keyword and that I should throw an exception instead. I say I can't remember the syntax for that, and that "ReferenceError: assert is not defined" is a perfectly good exception.

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

This seems like a grim natural experiment to show that access to mental health services isn't going to neutralize access to guns when it comes to controlling violence

Jesus, both of Thomas Matthew Crooks' parents are licensed professional counselors. "The AR-15 rifle Crooks used was one of more than a dozen registered to and legally purchased by his father, with whom he often went to the shooting range, officials said." www.wsj.com/us-news/myst...

Reply to

CJ 🏳️‍🌈🤘

we call it "American Chop Suey" up here... comfort food

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

Got a little whiplash catching up with a friend who just returned from a five-week european vacation and nevertheless told me "this economy is trying to kill us"

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

sorry to keep posting about politics but one of his guys tried to shoot him and they've just decided to stop contesting the election

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

if it had been a registered Democrat shooter they could have nursed that shit for incitement value for at least a month LGBTQ shooter would have nabbed them two months confused registered republican with a gun fetish isn't as easy to exploit via a feckless press

As soon as we learned that Crooks was a registered Republican it was clear that the assassination attempt was going to be a two-day story.

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

Reply to

Will Stancil

if I were a pollster, I’d give poll respondents a score based on how “networked” they are, using income, education, whether they read newspapers or watch TV news, and whether they live in a city or suburb. and I bet you that score would correspond heavily to sensitivity to news narratives

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

one good clue about what’s happening with Biden is that many more Dems want him to drop out in VA than PA. basically, the more you’re a high-news-consumption, media-watching Dem, the more you want him out. it’s media panic doing the damage

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

The first personal computer for under $200.

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

Stop making everything touchscreen-only by default, you freaks. That shit hasn't been "ooh, future!" since the Palm IIIxe and I demand you give me a directional pad and some buttons like an adult. This post is about the atomos ninja v, a product I am otherwise happy with, except when using it.

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

Happy Trinity Day. Always have the right shirt for the occasion.

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

Can’t believe we are in the third straight presidential election where centrist Dems decided that sabotaging Bernie Sanders’s preferred candidate was more important than winning the White House.

“If Mr. Biden remained, not only would he lose to [Trump], he could be enough of a drag on other Democratic candidates that the party would most likely lose the Senate and miss an opportunity to win control of the House, Mr. Schiff said at a fund-raiser in New York.” www.nytimes.com/2024/07/16/u...

Schiff Warned of Wipeout for Democrats if Biden Remains in Racewww.nytimes.com Representative Adam B. Schiff of California told attendees at a Democratic fund-raiser that the party would lose the Senate and miss a chance to take the House if the president did not drop out.

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

in case you needed to know exactly how much the media actually respects the rule of law and adherence to independent justice department procedures or whatever, they described trump's corrupt court appointees changing the law for him to get him out of crimes he committed as "wins"

Trump/Vance 2024

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the mjl (michael j leblanc)

Has anyone seen the Lathe of Heaven…

I'll also restate that you don't get to be a martyr w/o an actual death. None of the Christian Martyrs were "held down and tickled for 20 minutes" or "got a really bad ice cream headache". F&CK this Media Framing.