Woops I just realized I made the time periods different on these polls. Welp, such as it is. I can't change it now or the existing results will all be lost.

2/ Ok, while that last poll is running, here's another for you. I ask this as a veteran. Should the U.S. have a mandatory period of national service? Such as a year or two when young adults can do a variety of service efforts, not necessarily involving a stint in the military. It could be a lot of different things, perhaps working in national parks or in food banks or hospitals or helping seniors or disabled people. The list of things you might imagine is very long I'm sure. (The wording is tongue-in-cheek, don't get your panties in a bunch)

I recently was told that Australia has mandatory voting and it was suggested the U.S. should also do this. U.S. folks, should we have mandatory voting?
#vote

What a great interview with Tom, the guy who was live on Fox News at a Trump rally and compared Trump's MAGA cult to Jonestown. Boy do I have a lot in common with him. https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/tom-hoyle-jonestown-trump-rally-fox-news-viral-clip

This one hurts. RIP Patrick Stewart you were one of the great, kind, funny, loved humans of our time 😭

Noooooooooooooo 😭 Patrick Stewart https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/oct/29/patrick-stewart-dead

A post that Walter Koenig's daughter said her father died yesterday. I'm not seeing anything in news so...? #StarTrek #Babylon5 Wikipedia not updated, that's usually very fast.

Jesse Thorn @jessethorn.bsky.social
My pal Danielle Koenig shared that her father Walter Koenig passed away last night at age 90. A performer whose kindness and warmth shone through the screen. He will be well remembered. https://bsky.app/profile/jessethorn.bsky.social/post/3mys2nxdi622w

🏴‍☠️

Got my No Kings sign ready for these stupid Alabamians
#Alabama #NoKings

3/ Anyway the Tesla lady was going on and on about how great the self-driving is. I do not want that shit near me on the road! When this all first began years ago, me and my IC S&T pals called Tesla drivers "unwitting human test subjects" and in my opinion, they still are!

She also wigged out when I told her there are no, count 'em, zero pictures of me on the internet. I had this figured out many years ago that it would be a bad idea. And today, Clearview AI does not have pictures for facial recognition of me from scraping social media. (It might have my driver's license, I can't do anything about that but keep trying to vote out Republicans & corporate Dems.)

At my Saturday morning coffee group today the lady who owns 5 Teslas told me she thought about what I had said about Testas being a privacy threat. She had laughed at me at the time and pooh-poohed me. But it got under her skin. Today she said she realized she was uncomfortable being surrounded by microphones and cameras sucking up data that is going who the fuck knows where for who the fuck knows how much profit. Heh heh heh. I did it

2/ I worked for one general who was quite happy to push his christianity on command personnel and it was offensive. There are a lot of those, and now that Hegseth has purged the military of many senior, competent officers who obeyed their oath to the constitution, it is undoubtedly much worse today. #military #DOD

#FFRF reacted to Hegseth's unconstitutional office of religious affairs which will force Hegseth's christian extremism on military personnel.

It is specifically charged with securing funding and resources for religious ministry, religious facilities, chaplain-led programs, chapel youth programs, faith-based homeschool support for military families, faith-based initiatives for suicide reduction and contracts with faith-based organizations.

Most disturbingly, Hegseth has ordered the office to sponsor and oversee “research, technology, and analytical tools” to “assess spiritual fitness, spiritual readiness and spiritual resilience across the Total Force.”

https://ffrf.org/news/releases/ffrf-investigates-hegseths-new-religious-office-at-pentagon/ #religion #democracy #FirstAmendment

2/ Related: this discussion with Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum https://snyder.substack.com/p/regime-change-and-corruption-with

U.S. people: if you didn't realize it yet, you have been living through regime change for almost 2 years. You're living through a revolution being waged by an autocratic regime that is replacing the old democratic regime. "Regime" not being about an administration, but a system of government. This is what regime change looks like. For most people life goes on pretty much as normal but that'll only go on so long because so many things are being broken, so many past government functions are being cut off or deteriorating, and so many new government functions are designed to oppress, victimize, punish, and cement the new regime in place. What I'm saying is things are eventually going to get bad for most people in any number of ways and I think very few people have given this any thought at all. Don't ask me what to do about it. But you better be thinking about it. This is real. This is happening to your country right now. #fascism

This woman and her husband are both older than me by at least 10 years, and her husband was showing me some of his ebook and audiobook apps on this phone (read on a phone? I would go blind) and she's all about her self-driving cars and I don't know, it occurs to me that I truly am a Luddite.

This morning I had a conversation with someone who, it turns out, has 5 Teslas, one of them a cybertruck. 😬 I noted that I felt the self driving software was, to me, beyond my level of safety risk, and she lit up like a Christmas tree, going on about all the ways gas cars and old, non-self-driving cars are so much less safe than Teslas. Like she really lit up, and all I could do was kind of giggle a little bit because I was watching someone so deeply imprinted and it was really fascinating.

Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com

I have blamed
The agents
That hacked
Your website

And which
You probably
Reasonably thought
I controlled

Forgive me
I am rich
And unaccustomed
To taking responsibility

#AI #LLM

ICE also received permission to force-feed the Cuban hunger striker through a “percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy” tube insertion. This is a surgery in which medical staff make an incision in a person’s abdomen, insert a tube that remains in place indefinitely until it is surgically removed again and pump liquid directly into the stomach. This procedure has not been previously identified in other force-feeding cases reviewed by the Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/05/cuban-hunger-striker-ice-force-feeding