Shortly after Donald Trump was elected to a second Presidential term, he announced his nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for the post of Secretary of Health & Human Services. I can imagine few men more ill-suited to leading our nation’s public health department. It’s not because he’s a supremely odd man, though he is odd, in the flavor of oddity that seems unique to those born into dynastic wealth. Normal people do not have multiple press stories about them transporting carcasses of large, dead mammals hundreds of miles — be it for a dark, practical joke or for sheer fascination.

A week ago, Hurricane Helene’s trek across western North Carolina dumped some 20-inches of rain on the area. The French Broad River that runs through Asheville, and its feeder rivers like the Swannanoa River, rose to 25 feet above their river beds, whereas normal depth is a little over a foot. That 25 feet is the height of a two-story building. Every home and business along the riverways are simply destroyed.

After Italian boxer Angela Carini threw in the town early in a bout with Algeian boxer Imane Khelif, unhinged anti-trans activists generated a media storm hypothesizing that Imane Khelif was really a man, or at least has a y-chromosome, or at least produces too much natural testosterone. There’s no evidence that any of that is true but it did not stop the rampant speculation and accusation. In my last post, I outlined that what binds together the right-wing Republican political coalition is hierarchy, and that lens of understanding their politics helps explain why they seem so obsessed about invalidating non-binary, intersex, and transgender people; why they’re up in arms about the potential role of testosterone in women’s sports but unconcerned about genetically-conferred advantages in men’s sports; and why they’re so weirdly consumed with the gender expressions and identities of post-pubescent children.

Days before the 248th birthday of the United States, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and proponent of the ghastly Project 2025 administrative plan, gloated over the Supreme Court’s contortionist ruling granting sweeping criminal immunity to the President of the United States: Heritage Foundation president celebrates Supreme Court presidential immunity ruling: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be" www.

I honestly didn’t think I’d ever write this. I thought the cryptocurrency bubble burst in 2022 would have been the end of the story and there would be no need to write it. Whenever there’s a hype bubble fueling rampant, wildly irresponsible speculalation divorced from any sort of mooring to market principles, what follows is either an end of that market or at least a reckoning that only those with solid business models & fundamentals survive.

At Hungryroot we use AWS’ Aurora MySQL with some of our Django projects. This morning, a few of our developers, working on Mac OS with Homebrew, reported that their mysqlclient libraries were erroring out with: '/opt/homebrew/Cellar/mysql-client/8.3.0/lib/libmysqlclient.22.dylib' (no such file) Attempts to reinstall the mysqlclient Python library were failing with: clang -Wsign-compare -Wunreachable-code -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -I/opt/homebrew/opt/mysql-client/include "-Dversion_info=(2, 2, 1, 'final', 0)" -D__version__=2.2.1 -I/Users/avishekde/.pyenv/versions/3.11.6/include/python3.11 -c src/MySQLdb/_mysql.c -o build/temp.macosx-14.1-arm64-cpython-311/src/MySQLdb/_mysql.o -I/opt/homebrew/Cellar/mysql-client/8.3.0/include/mysql -std=c99 src/MySQLdb/_mysql.

I’ve voted 3rd party in most of Presidential ballot contests in my adult life. Back in the early aughts, I was the treasurer for a county chapter of the Green Party. Some time later, I called myself a “little-l” libertarian but let go of that label as the neo-fascists began taking over. I gave money to Gary Johnson’s campaign in 2016. I'm old enough to remember when this Simpsons episode aired in 1996.

In my coding work for SeekHealing, we make extensive use of the Django Admin for our program management database. For a one-person coding team, Django has been invaluable for maintaining a functional, accessible system that evolves with the program’s needs despite the limited number of hours I have to devote to the work. We manage our calendar of program events in Django, with a model appropriately called CalendarEvent, which has a start-time and an end-time - and we’ve got data in this database going back to 2018.

Effective next month, Twitter will disable SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA) for users who have not paid Musk’s $8 fee for Twitter Blue. Source: Twitter Musk claims that Twitter is spending $60M on fraudulent SMS challenges from a longstanding practice known as Toll Fraud, where bad-acting telcos who charge high rates for delivering SMS messages surreptitiously use bots to force generation such SMS verification messages to inflate their bills. While Toll Fraud is undoubtedly a real thing that I have no doubt Twitter wastes a lot of money on, I won’t take the $60M figure at face value because the fact remains that most 2FA challenges are probably malicious because that’s 2FA working as designed.

Several years ago, I was visiting my brother and his family in their San Francisco home. My eldest niece was three or four years old at the time, and I was fortunate when my work included regular transcontinental business trips to be able to visit them once or twice a year. Like many of us, they owned an Amazon Echo, which my niece was allowed to request to play music. The living room was frequently filled with endless loops of the Thomas & Friends theme song as well as selections from the Frozen soundtrack.