Rim Brake Monkey (@rimbrakemonkey) · DIRTY

Rim Brake Monkey

@rimbrakemonkey

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Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· 22d

Did the conservative-education movement amount to anything more than what the rest of American higher education had become, a capital-improvement project? Since its hijacking three years ago, New College, the focal point of the Florida GOP’s pedagogical interventions, has failed to establish a “classical” core curriculum of any kind, save a six-week course on the Odyssey that requires no essay writing. It has instead mostly accomplished a variety of construction projects: repainting halls and wings, making a beach volleyball court, and planning an utterly satanic “transformation” of the I. M. Pei dormitories that will make the modernist masterpiece look like a bus terminal. Meanwhile, people at Hamilton mostly wanted to talk about the $55 million infirmary renovation. (The chair of UF’s board of trustees is the head of an enormous home-building company and Keith Perry, the former state senator who secured the initial funding for Hamilton, is a roofing contractor. Dümmer geht’s immer: this January, Perry was appointed to the Florida Board of Governors.)

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· 22d

Good article.

Far from resisting this slippage of standards, Hamilton seemed to be hastening it. It was not just that this center for “classical education” did not require students to have any level of proficiency in a classical language—the acquisition of which was the main substance of the Founders’ education—or even a foreign one. It was that the claims about curricular gaps that the Hamilton School used to justify its existence appeared to have almost no basis in reality. I had been told, for example, that it was urgent that a place like Hamilton exist, because UF did not teach the history of the American Revolution. But it didn’t take much perusal to confirm that the history department did have a course on the subject this spring, just as it does virtually every semester. I was also told that the field of American political thought was being neglected, but the political science department’s syllabus for American Political Thought seemed to include all that the Hamiltonians could possibly want, beginning with the Puritans, going through twenty-eight of the Federalist Papers, and ending with Milton Friedman and Reagan. Crucially, the Hamilton courses that were meant to restore the ideals of liberal education required, in most cases, less reading and writing than their counterparts in the rest of the university. The introductory course for PPEL required students to read, on average, just twenty-seven pages a week. By comparison, the equivalent class in political science, Introduction to Political Theory, required students last spring to read around four times that amount, including most of Leviathan, The Prince, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Rousseau’s The Social Contract, and fourteen of the Federalist Papers.

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· 22d

My man looks like he went to Audrey Hepburn's estate sale.

Picture of Audrey Hepburn in a satin blouse, black capri pants, and mules from her 1955 costume fitting for "Sabrina"

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Jun 29

This is the car my folks bought to haul their five kids.

A 1972 Volkswagen Type 3 Squareback finished in Brilliant Orange

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Jun 24

A leering Andy Griffith as Lonesome Rhodes, from the movie, A FACE IN THE CROWD.

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Jun 15

Adams: I dislike all of this.

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Jun 12

Humans will be more migratory?

Cover to David Brin's novel, THE POSTMAN. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postman

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Jun 11

local plumbing contractor has opinions

Picture of Markwayne Mullin when he ran Mullin Plumbing

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Jun 10

And be sure to use AI when working on your next
book or essay or piece of art or photography,
and then smile or even laugh at your own
cleverness when you see how good it is,
and how easy,
because who the hell has time
to work at something, to give time to craft, to
create with their own minds, to spend
years being mediocre. Why do that when
mastery, or at least competency
is so simple
only a good prompt away?

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Jun 8

She seems like something other than a neutral observer. Apparently those rats won't f*** themselves.

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Jun 2

Metamorphosis, pt. 2

photograph of Franz Kafka

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· May 20

The whole thing is excellent, and well worth the time to read.

The biography is purer than Musk. I know how that sounds. But think about it like a relic, like an actual medieval relic. Musk has to deal with lawsuits and the rockets blowing up and the indignity of posting through it on the internet. The book carries none of that. The story has absorbed the good parts, the relentlessness and the willingness to suffer and the subordination of self to mission, and everything embarrassing about Elon, the parts that make him a real person, got left behind.

It’s the same thing the church did with the bones of saints. You take a finger bone out of Thomas and you put it in a golden box and you carry it around Europe and people weep when they see it. They feel something in the presence of that finger that they could never feel in the presence of Thomas because Thomas was a guy who had opinions and doubts and might say something weird at dinner. The finger just sits there being holy. It’s perfect.

And the thing recurses. Someone will interview the interviewer about interviewing the biographer. Someone will thread about the interview. Someone will thread about the thread. Every layer is further from anything real and closer to the pure performance of the attributes of building. The Fourth Lateran Council tried to shut this down in 1215. It didn’t work. It never works. You can’t regulate the demand for proximity to the sacred because the demand is bottomless and the supply of actual sanctity is always tiny.

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Apr 29

He is like a 8yo with a new pack of stickers.

The doors, however, remained glaringly unadorned until Trump had an idea: He took his personally designed presidential challenge coin—such tokens are generally a palm-size souvenir that’s popular in military and law-enforcement circles—and glued it to the center of the Oval Office door, at about eye level. “Everyone was impressed by how good it looked,” a White House official told us. In the weeks that followed, Trump made his way through the West Wing, seeking out new places to affix his coins (golden and featuring the presidential seal). One by one, the president decorated the office doors of each of his deputies. His aides are convinced that he will eventually cover all of the doors.

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Apr 24

Photo of The final resting place of Ivana Trump at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Photo credit: DANIEL WILLIAM MCKNIGHT

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Apr 24

Inter-service rivalry.

Military career

After graduating from Fordham, Kelly became an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves.[3] During his tour of active duty military service between 1991 and 2000 he was an AV-8B Harrier jump jet pilot assigned to Marine Attack Squadron 211, the "Wake Island Avengers". While on duty Kelly amassed 158 aircraft carrier landings and flew over Iraq in Operation Southern Watch, enforcing the United Nations imposed No-Fly Zone.[4]

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Apr 21

Having driven some of those cars, I beg to differ.

Picture of a Chevrolet Chevette.

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Apr 13

Close-up of the face of the woman who just delivered McD's bags to DJT

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Apr 13

New cognitive test question just dropped.

Line drawing of Jesus Christ next to a line drawing a male medical doctor.

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Apr 9

APPROVE

Portrait photo of Gen. George Henry Thomas, aka the "Rock of Chickamauga"

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Mar 31

A picture of Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Mar 12

He's also there standing like a late-career Lon Chaney Jr.

Picture of Lon Chaney Jr.

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Mar 9

4 reasons AI hallucinates, and what to do about it

It's generating plausible text, not retrieving facts. AI predicts what token should come next based on patterns in training data. This means it produces things that sound right even when they're completely wrong. Factual claims are worth verifying rather than assuming accuracy.

It doesn't always know what it doesn't know. AI can express uncertainty, but expressed confidence doesn't reliably correlate with actual accuracy. It can state something incorrectly with the same tone it uses when it's right. Lack of hedging isn't a dependable sign of truth.

Your prompt might be asking for something that doesn't exist. If you request citations for a claim that isn't well-supported in research, the AI will generate citations anyway rather than telling you the evidence doesn't exist. Framing questions to allow for "this doesn't exist" as a valid answer tends to produce more honest responses.

It prioritizes helpfulness over accuracy. AI systems are trained to be helpful and provide answers, which means they'll give you something even when the honest answer would be "I don't know." Verification built into the workflow rather than trust in the output is a more reliable approach.

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Mar 2

I am genetically incapable of taking someone who looks like this and is named that as anything but a caricature. I mean, d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/q100/upl...

pfp for Billy Binion

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Feb 23

Indeed.

Bar chart and pie-graph of the following: U.S. power plant developers and operators plan to add 86 gigawatts (GW) of new utility-scale electric generating capacity to the U.S. power grid in 2026 in our latest Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory report, a record if realized. Solar power makes up 51% of the planned 2026 capacity additions, followed by battery storage at 28% and wind at 14%.

In 2025, 53 GW of new capacity was added to the grid, the largest capacity installation in a single year since 2002.

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Feb 23

DJT is a unifier of RWNJs.

Paige Terryberry
Senior Research Fellow

Picture of Paige Terryberry, Senior Research Fellow, from the Foundation for Government Accountability website. Caption reads: FGA champions solutions that encourage self-sufficiency. "I am grateful to work with a team that fights to release individuals from government dependency."

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Feb 19

From www.cbo.gov/publication/...

Graph of Federal Debt Held by the Public

Debt held by the public rises each year. From 2025 to 2035, it swells from 100 percent of GDP to 118 percent—an amount greater than at any point in the nation’s history.

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Jan 28

Close-up picture of Donald Trump.

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Jan 28

Picture of Ivana Trump's grave at the Bedminster golf course.

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Jan 26

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...

Rim Brake Monkey@rimbrakemonkey· Jan 22

I believe Tom Emmer is a tube sock puppet with a rubber William Shatner mask on top. Prove me wrong.

picture of a rubber William Shatner mask