RIP Terry Hall, singer for The Specials.

AUSTIN, TX — A star who has experienced a meteoric rise in right-wing circles, 28-year-old conservative phenom Mason Finley is known solely for wearing a Nazi armband and crying, sources confirmed Tuesday. “Finley amassed millions of conservative viewers on his Discord channel, where the up-and-coming young GOP figure uploaded videos in which he is seen sobbing alone in a room as he sits with a swastika strapped to his arm,” said Republican strategist Gary Woodfall, claiming that despite being virtually unknown even a few months ago, the teary-eyed young man who wears Nazi memorabilia has already appeared at CPAC as well as Turning Point USA summits.
...

It's insane.

David French, in The Atlantic:

But though the state can demand that businesses provide goods and services to all comers without regard to race, sex, sexual orientation, and other protected categories, it cannot demand that businesses or individuals engage in speech proclaiming messages that they oppose, and, as Smith argues, designing websites is a form of speech.

Programming really isn't speech. Source code isn't written for humans. It's written for computers to tell them the steps to follow to perform tasks for humans. It's not a conversation a programmer has with another person. With the exception of teaching programmers how to write it, humans generally only read source code to make sure it's telling the computer to do the right thing; once that's sorted out, humans are generally very happy to never look at the source code again.

Note that French is agreeing that programming is speech.

Then the whole thing gets worse in a couple of ways.

But here’s where 303 Creative gets truly strange. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals held that Smith was engaging in “pure speech” and that Colorado was compelling her speech, but it ruled for Colorado anyway. The reasoning in the majority opinion was extraordinary.

“This case does not present a competitive market,” the court said. “Rather, due to the unique nature of Appellants’ services, this case is more similar to a monopoly. The product at issue is not merely ‘custom-made wedding websites,’ but rather ‘custom-made wedding websites of the same quality and nature as those made by Appellants.’ In that market, only Appellants exist.”

Thus, because Smith possessed a monopoly over her own services, the state had a heightened interest in ensuring access to her work.

A monopoly over her own services? Shouldn't the FTC step in and break her up, for the good of the marketplace?

Become a monopoly! $6.48 in paperback. Such a high barrier to entry!

But French is being serious here. He approves of this nonsense. Because he is a homophobic nutbag, his take on this is:

“If rights of conscience attach to corporations worth trillions, shouldn’t they also attach to a single artist whose alleged ‘monopoly’ is merely in the sweat of her own brow?”

So the logic is:

Given: programming is speech
Given: website designers are artists
Therefore: web design is not a competitive market
Therefore: website designers are individual monopolists
Therefore: because large corporations can have morals [!!], these micro-monopolies should be allowed to express their morals through discrimination.
QED.

Remarkable, the lengths some people will go just to justify their unexamined fear of other people.

Sucks to be you, iTunes library file.

RIP

It's pretty amazing how everyone forgets how to best deal with a troll, when that troll's first name is "Elon".

This visualization shows monthly global temperature anomalies (changes from an average) between the years 1880 and 2021. Whites and blues indicate cooler temperatures, while oranges and reds show warmer temperatures. As you can see, global temperatures have warmed from mainly human activities as time has progressed.

BPL is digitizing their entire (?) vinyl record collection and putting it online.

Not quite sure how long this will last since there are clearly some records on there that are going to attract the attention of music industry lawyers. (ex "Thriller" is currently on the front page).

But, there's also a ton of wild and interesting stuff that must in the public domain by now.

Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake

Ingredients:
-2 cups all purpose flour
-½ teaspoon salt
-1 cup of dark brown sugar
-2 eggs
-1 teaspoon vanilla extract
-2 tablespoons vegetable oil
-¼ cup milk or other liquid if needed (it will make the cake softer if it is too warm)
-1 large chicken. Mix all ingredients and refrigerate for 30 minutes or overnight. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

-Gather the chicken by holding it by the top and both sides with both hands, just like you do to make meatloaf, then gently pop it into the casserole. Bake for 40 minutes or until chicken is cooked through.

-Let the cake cool completely before eating

AI recipes are bad (and a proposal for making them worse)

If Republicans learn nothing else from this election, they must learn this.

So begins a Washington Post article by one of the most prominent seditionists: cowardly trash, Josh Hawley.

This was always going to happen. The press was always going to welcome these traitors back into the fold. They just can't help but treat their Republican daddies as serious sober statesmen.

It's still a disappointment to see it happen.

And it's why I won't be renewing my WaPo subscription.