Gotta kick-start things here, clearly, as the weekend just past was an all-time low for reader participation: just 19 comments, not counting my own replies, spread over eight posts. This was especially disappointing after the previous week of anomalous traffic at a level hearkening back to those halcyon days when progressives hung out here and hadn’t fled to Bluesky because they couldn’t handle having their knee-jerk cant challenged. Of course, the explosion of traffic was all bot-driven: it mostly came from China and Vietnam.

For this week’s potpourri, I decided to sample New York Times stories exclusively, first, because I got no sleep last night and am uncharacteristically lazy, even for me; second, because it will remind you (I don’t need any reminding) what a perpetual Democratic, progressive, “resistance,” Trump Derangement-spreading propaganda agent the Times is, and third, because for now, anyway, any article subscribers link to gets past the paywall.

Let us commence…