Politics is downstream of culture; freedom is the necessary condition for any virtue. Some people are awfully fond of quoting John Adams when he says that the Constitution is formed for a moral and religious people and none other. We tend to forget that Adams meant these in a classical sense of both morality and religion and not an evangelical one.
Freedom is the prerequisite for America. For a religious test to be the delimiter for participation in public life is odious in the extreme.
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This is a dumb argument to be having at any level or at any time. Of course, Muslims can join the Republican Party of Virginia. Of course,they are welcome within the conservative movement. Of course, we should be welcoming everyone who understands and celebrates the role of free minds, free markets, and a free society. Of course, we should be welcoming everyone who loves America into our ranks. Of course, we should be running Muslims for public office if they are so inclined to do so — it’s a thankless task, but we could sure use the leadership.
Of course, they should bring falafel to the next unit committee meeting.
Tokyo Underground Club Turns Its Dancefloor Into a “Reading Rave” – EDM
SPREAD, an underground club located in Tokyo’s Shimokitazawa neighborhood, hosted ‘JUCY BOOK RAVE,’ a daytime event that temporarily transformed its dancefloor into a dimly lit reading lounge on September 26th.
Running from 10am to 2pm, the event covered the club floor in carpeting so attendees could sit, recline against the walls or stretch out with a book while ambient music played around them. After 1pm, organizers gradually raised the volume, giving guests the choice to continue reading or hit the dancefloor in the more traditional sense.
— Read on edm.com/events/tokyo-underground-club-reading-rave/
Still On Its Way to Cleveland – Longreads
Google would not exist for another two years. The word “blog” had not yet been coined. We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.
Blondins’ Assignment America was both the name of our trip and the website we built in real time as we traveled. We had a partnership with Northwest Academy, a science and technology charter school in northern Michigan in its first year of operation, that made it possible. We had prepared to make the case for why our children—Donald, 14, and twins Kelly and Stacy, 11—would not attend the 1996–97 school year in a conventional sense. The school board didn’t just accommodate us; they encouraged us. Northwest Academy loaned us a laptop and a 1.2 MP digital camera, and we took their curriculum on the road.
— Read on longreads.com/2026/09/22/family-road-trip-early-internet-90s/
AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible | ‘ERE I AM – JH!
The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad. They’re OK, I don’t love them. The problem is that once you’ve seen that style 20 times it starts to irritate just from the sheer repetition.
I knew that even ChatGPT was capable of a broader variety of styles than this, so I set out to prove it.
— Read on john.hartnup.uk/2026/06/07/ai-event-posters.html
What Time Is It?
Researchers at several universities in China, in a study involving more than 1,500 high-school students, found that their future time perspective was damaged by a steady diet of such short-form videos.
These videos, in particular, activate the reward circuitry of the brain with their novel, engaging and effortless nature, leading to instant and constant gratification. We already saw in a previous study that this type of engagement activates the addiction centers of our brains, and in some cases makes it hard for us to stop viewing.
Now, it’s also making us less able to plan for the future, or even care about it.
Teens Who Can’t Put Down TikTok and Instagram Are Losing Their Sense of Time – WSJ
Crypto Capture of Foreign Aid | NBER
Exploiting the administrative timing of aid tranche arrivals, we find sharp, short-lived surges of crypto activity at the disbursement month, driven mainly by anonymous and newly created wallets on both tax-haven and mainstream exchanges. Blockchain forensics reveal patterns consistent with the placement, layering, and integration sequence of conventional money laundering. We estimate an implied leakage of 2 to 6 cents per aid dollar, which amounts to roughly 1.7 to 4.4 billion dollars of aid diversion across the tranche arrivals we study.
— Read on www.nber.org/papers/w35655
Prince Was One of the First Players of The Oregon Trail
The basic story is that a college history major (Don Rawitsch) teamed up with two friends (Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger), both of whom were math majors and had some programming experience, to make a computer game to liven up the history class that Rawitsch was student teaching. While developing the game, Heinemann & Dillenberger tested it out with some kids at the high school at which they were student teaching…and one of those kids was Prince Rogers Nelson.
— Read on kottke.org/26/10/prince-was-one-of-the-first-players-of-the-oregon-trail
Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark’s clock | World news | The Guardian
For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon’s unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid “illegal restorers” set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building’s famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves.
“When we had finished the repairs, we had a big debate on whether we should let the Panthéon’s officials know or not,” said Lazar Klausmann, a spokesperson for the Untergunther. “We decided to tell them in the end so that they would know to wind the clock up so it would still work.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/world/2007/nov/26/france.artnews
The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities | The New Yorker
According to the co-founder and C.E.O. of Neighbor, an industry marketplace that works like Airbnb, there are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino’s, Dunkin’, and Costco locations combined.
— Read on www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/09/21/the-american-religion-of-self-storage-facilities
NASA Asked Several Former SR-71A Staffers To Help Secret Restart | Aviation Week
Mike Relja, a retiree in his late 70s, received an unexpected job offer from NASA about a month ago.
The assignment: Help put a former NASA-operated Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird back in the air after a nearly 27-year hiatus.
— Read on aviationweek.com/defense/aircraft-propulsion/nasa-asked-several-former-sr-71a-staffers-help-secret-restart
Yes! Let’s goooo!!!