Pete Hegseth only wishes they were more like the Hitler Youth.
The original machination.org was kind of a relentless real time (as soon as I consumed something and gave it some sort of credence in my mind) link log. The post yesterday was a more emblematic of a later stage, a slightly more sanely paced round-up. Thought about doing it again today. No. I’ve got other stuff I need to do. I was pushing through being sick and hanging the noose of the world’s news as seen by me around my neck isn’t going to help. Maybe intermittent long links, Tim Bray style. The things that stick with me and why and how, that don’t seem too redundant to what has stuck in the zeitgeist. If I can keep a good habit.
But what a wild headline ride this last day, huh? Definitely worth getting off and stepping back for a moment, at least.
What a horrible habit, reading the news
This is a sample of headlines from the past day. This is what the initial version of Machination.org looked like during President George W. Bush’s term. The tagline was “devices of trade and war.” It gained some traction among a subset of other like-driven link loggers during those early days. Eventually I couldn’t keep up with the pace I had set and didn’t foresee (or desire) how to monetize this habit.
When a shield becomes a shackle
Today’s Cloudflare outage illuminates another infrastructure dependency we’ve sleepwalked into: defensive consolidation. Sites adopt Cloudflare not for performance but survival, protection from the automated scraping that feeds AI systems and other bots that now dwarf human traffic. In defending against automated consumption, most hand control to intermediaries. When Cloudflare stumbled this morning, some sites that delegated DNS entirely couldn’t even disable Cloudflare to restore access. The protection became a jail.
Gardens vs. giveaways
So much more vision than in D.C. A relatively low-effort, certainly less expensive, high-impact community-centric and green way to re-use a stadium site. Certainly better than what D.C. is actually going for now. Moot now, anyway, as the old RFK stadium was being taken down before the options going forward were finalized and the Commanders deal reached. There was an option for the site without a publicly subsidized NFL stadium.
By A. Litteri in Union Market
Hochul can go, just like Jeffries and Schumer and Gillibrand.
The best way we can honor service members is to send the National Guard home
There isn’t an obvious public link to this specific message, sent out on Free DC’s list, though their site has plenty of their digital campaign materials about this and other issues they advocate for. I thought it was excellent though. Once again, I think of my passed grandfather, Battle of the Bulge veteran, Republican, who I know would find this use of the military offensive. I’ve reproduced the core of the email I received, including their emphasis and links (minus ActionNetwork’s redirects):
Dick Cheney’s death should be a reminder that we must fix the process of politics whatever content we would advocate for. Cheney is, as much as anyone else, the godfather of Donald Trump. As Jonah Goldberg put it, Trump is kind of his “Frankenstein’s Monster.”
I might become a decent writer if I put as much effort into composing and finishing prose in private as I did in venting it off as stream of consciousness to a couple of poor victims I portray as friends. Instead, it gets vented there (and sometimes cribbed for here) and I don’t feel the urge to revisit and work it further.