Category Archives: Politics

I Saw This Ad Just Before the Heat Game Started

Posted on October 17, 2018 by Michael Froomkin

This ad by VoteVets about Rick Scott is a lot better than anything I’ve seen by the Nelson for Senate campaign:

Of course, Scott has more money, and has been flooding the airwaves with warm and fuzzy stuff.

Posted in 2018 Election, Florida | Comments Off

Three Tech-Related Stories Today

Posted on October 15, 2018 by Michael Froomkin

Three things that caught my eye this morning:

Elizabeth Warren took a DNA test, and is calling Donald Trump’s bluff to donate $1 million to the charity of her choice if it shows Native American ancestry. The test probably does, although the general unwillingness of Native American groups to be genotyped requires more interpolation than usual to reach that conclusion. (Here’s the text of the full report if you care.) Meanwhile, of course, Trump quickly denied ever making the promise.
Someone posted a video of a Max Mandelbrot zoom to 10E+1116. (Via Boingboing)
Wow.
MIT announced it will create a new college for interdisciplinary AI studies. The impoverished institution will start with $1 billion to play with. For two decades I’ve said if MIT had a law school that would be my dream job. This would do nicely, however: How do I apply to teach in the Legal & Policy Dept?

Posted in 2020 Election, AI, Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 9 Comments

Sing It

Posted on October 12, 2018 by Michael Froomkin

What does it mean when you have lost not only Taylor Swift but also Barbra Streisand:

One thing it means is a spike in voter registration.

(Not that I ever ever imagined I’d link to a Barbra Streisand video…)

Posted in 2018 Election, Kultcha, The Resistance | Comments Off

New Times Unearths DeSantis’s Book

Posted on October 10, 2018 by Michael Froomkin

And it’s terrible.

Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis’ 2011 tome, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers, is terrible. It’s a book-long screed from the then-Tea Party candidate, in which DeSantis screams at President Barack Obama for 286 pages, implies he is a closet Marxist, and at one point writes that Obama has “Muslim roots.” The book sucks because it is an absolute slog. New Times combed through huge portions of DeSantis’ repetitive, banal, witless, and crushingly pedestrian prose, and the project reads like a book report from a dying Confederate soldier trying to get a community college poli-sci degree.

But, more important, the book sucks because parts of it are pretty offensive to black people, Muslims, and women. DeSantis’ book includes justifications excusing the legalization of slavery in the U.S. Constitution, as well as repeated complaints about policies designed to protect women from rape and domestic violence.

New Times sources the discovery to American Bridges, an advocacy group, but I couldn’t find the report on their site.

Posted in 2018 Election | Comments Off