Me and My Shadow

https://kevinsmithstory.blogspot.com/2011/02/me-and-my-shadow.html

In 2006, director Kevin Smith told a detailed story about his friend Jason Mewes' drug addiction on his blog in several parts. Here, I have put it all in one post for all to read and including a connected Jason Mewes video christmas gift to Kevin. The copyright is owned by Kevin Smith and this blog has no affiliation with Kevin, Jason or View Askew Productions...but I think they all rock and probably won't mind. It's one of the most beautiful stories ever told. Enjoy

The Silver-Lined Bullet

https://rethinkingprosperity.substack.com/p/the-silver-lined-bullet?triedRedirect=true

Construction inefficiency isn’t just an operational drag—it’s a financial choke point. Every delay or miscommunication translates directly into dollars: idle crews, wasted materials, loan interest accruing day by day. For small developers, these costs can turn a promising infill project into an unviable gamble. Margins evaporate long before walls go up. The result is that only large, capital-heavy projects pencil out, while the kind of modest, human-scale housing our cities need—duplexes, triplexes, courtyard homes—rarely makes it past the pro forma stage. The system, in effect, prices out the middle housing we claim to want.

The Real Reason MAHA Hates Vaccines

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/opinion/maha-vaccines-kennedy-denmark.html\

And what this implies is rather striking, and rarely discussed by those outside of public health: that among their many purposes and benefits, vaccines have served now for decades as a kind of substitute health safety net in America. They are a way of limiting the downside consequences of all of our country’s notorious shortcomings: its lack of universal or free health care, its imperfect health insurance system, its lack of robust disease surveillance and screening, its declining trust in medical institutions and practitioners, its yawning gaps of economic inequality and equally horrifying disparities in morbidity and mortality.

Elsewhere, these problems might be addressed in other ways, through various forms of redistribution, welfare policy and social spending. In the United States, it seems, the best we’ve been able to do is to protect against some of the health manifestations of those problems with a few shots. Give a pregnant mother an R.S.V. vaccine and you can worry less about whether her child will have easy access to care and treatment for respiratory infections. Give a newborn a hepatitis B shot and it matters much less whether someone in the family is an intravenous drug user who might be carrying the disease. Give a full course of M.M.R. protection and you don’t need to worry quite as much about the way measles is much more punishing for those suffering malnutrition. And if you don’t do any of these things, or you make it harder for others to — well, all those problems start to loom a bit larger.

When Are Half Your Members Going to be Dead?

https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/when-are-half-your-members-going

 I cannot emphasize this point enough — we are in a lull right now. While most major denominations have been experiencing decline for a while, their ship has remained seaworthy. Yeah, some water will lap over the sides every once in a while, but there are still enough buckets and enough laborers to toss it back into the ocean.[...]

This should come as a shock to no one who is vaguely aware of American religion — Episcopalians are old. In fact, two-thirds of their adult members have celebrated their 60th birthday. In contrast, just 6% are under the age of thirty. Put simply: for every young adult Episcopalian in the pews this Sunday, there will be about ten retirees. Oof.

Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/01/16/internet-voting-is-insecure-and-should-not-be-used-in-public-elections/

Scientists have understood for many years that internet voting is insecure and that there is no known or foreseeable technology that can make it secure. Still, vendors of internet voting keep claiming that, somehow, their new system is different, or the insecurity doesn’t matter. Bradley Tusk and his Mobile Voting Foundation keep touting internet voting to journalists and election administrators; this whole effort is misleading and dangerous.

Buried Talents: How Elites betray their own potential

https://edankrolewicz.substack.com/p/buried-talents

I believe that to those to whom much is given, much is expected.

This is not a popular position among my peers.

They prefer a morality of non-interference: be kind, don’t hurt anyone, tend your garden. They’ve constructed elaborate philosophical frameworks to justify why people with top-tier cognitive abilities, financial security, social capital, and institutional access have no greater obligations than anyone else.

I think they’re wrong. And I think, deep down, they, too know they’re wrong. The fact that they squirm at the suggestion that maybe they’ve been optimizing for the wrong thing suggests as much.

I’m writing this as someone who is trying to figure it out, in public, and who thinks the figuring out might be useful to others in the same position. I don’t have a clean answer for what elites should do with their lives. I have my own bets—civic technology, participatory democracy, trying to make government work better—and I have no idea if they’ll amount to anything.

What I do have is a clear view of the problem, and I think naming it honestly is worth something, even if the solution remains incomplete.

Statement by Sheriff Powers of Wilkes County, GA on the Monks' passage through

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16t1ZEVnPa/

To those questioning the how, why, or when regarding the Sheriff’s Office’s involvement: I was elected by the people of Wilkes County to serve and protect our citizens and all who pass through our county. There are no exceptions to that responsibility, and there never will be. I do not worship these men, nor will I ever. However, I will ensure they have safe passage through our county, just as I would for anyone else, and that they leave knowing their safety was taken seriously.

I do believe that if each of us put as much effort into our own beliefs or faith as these men are demonstrating right now, our churches would be full and our jails empty. Instead, too often we post negativity about why we do not believe the way others believe, rather than using moments like this as opportunities to teach or to preach.

21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google

https://addyosmani.com/blog/21-lessons/

3. Bias towards action. Ship. You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one.

The quest for perfection is paralyzing. I’ve watched engineers spend weeks debating the ideal architecture for something they’ve never built. The perfect solution rarely emerges from thought alone - it emerges from contact with reality. AI can in many ways help here.

First do it, then do it right, then do it better. Get the ugly prototype in front of users. Write the messy first draft of the design doc. Ship the MVP that embarrasses you slightly. You’ll learn more from one week of real feedback than a month of theoretical debate.

Momentum creates clarity. Analysis paralysis creates nothing.