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Stephen Miller would have ICE agents (and the rest of us) believe that they have “immunity” to perform their “duties.”

This is, of course, false. Depriving any person (not just citizens) of their rights “under color of law” is its own crime. But it is in that light that we should view their position on face masks as admitting that they know they have it wrong:

The administration’s perceived need for face coverings evocative of Iranian secret police and Russian security agents helps us recognize that assertions of state supremacy and citizen insignificance are claptrap…

Source: All the king’s masked and anonymous henchmen

If they were immune, they’d not hesitate to show their faces. The fact that they feel the need to keep them hidden makes it very clear that they know they’re totally exposed in a legal sense.

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Ten years ago, instead of taking Jackie out to a restaurant and sitting with a bunch of other couples wanting to overpay to order off a “special” Valentine’s Day menu, I decided it would be more fun to cook her my own little feast.

As my inspiration, I reached back to October, 1991, and the very first meal I ever cooked for her. (She was threatening to go home because she was tired, and I said, “No! Stay here! I’ll fix dinner! You can just take a nap and I’ll do everything!”)

In the foreground is a plate with a rock cornish game hen, rice, and roasted potatoes, with a woman sitting across the table with the same meal served

Some of the details have varied (the flourless chocolate cake was new maybe 4 years ago), but rock cornish game hens and long-grain and wild rice have always been there.

In the foreground a serving of flourless chocolate cake and across the table a woman with the same dish.

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Okay, this is really, really good. About writers and writing (via @doctorow).

Makes me want to write some proletarian literature.

Characters in proletarian literature are often misled into believing that their individual flaws account for their miserable conditions, but then encounter a union organizer or a wise old Wobbly who tells them the truth, setting fictional men and women on the revolutionary path.

Source: Go Left, Young Writers!

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Three or four years ago I got a pair of LL Bean Cresta pants, which proved to be very satisfactory hiking pants: Fit me, okay in rain or wind, sturdy enough, excellent pockets for hiking.

(They turned out not to be sturdy enough to stand up to the depredations of a puppy, but that’s neither here nor there.)

That winter I bought a pair of Crest lined pants, which turned out to be similarly excellent: All the things I liked about their summer pants, plus nicely warm, without being so bulky or so insulated as to be a problem.

I’ve had them for a couple of winters now, but until this year, I didn’t actually wear them much. It’s quite typical to have two or three or four really cold days in a winter, maybe even two periods like that. But really, one pair of lined pants nicely does the trick. I wear them for my dog walks until the cold breaks. Then I wash them, and they’re available for the next cold snap.

This year has been different. Cold, cold, and more cold. More than a week ago I looked at the forecast, and realized that I’d be better off with a second pair of these pants.

So, I ordered a second pair. They came yesterday. So last night I put my previous pair in the laundry and today I wore my new pants for my first two dog walks.

Once again, most satisfactory.

(It’s too hard to take a selfie that includes my pants, so instead here’s a picture of Ashley. I wanted to give her neck a good scritching, so I took her collar off, so she’s all naked.)

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This is exactly right, and we’re all going to suffer for it (along with all the other things we’re going to suffer for because of Trump).

The best summary of Trump’s trade “philosophy” comes from Trashfuture’s November Kelly, who said that Trump is flipping over the table in a poker game that’s rigged in his favor because he resents having to pretend to play the game at all.

Source: Pluralistic: Trump and the unmighty dollar (26 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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Okay, I’m going to tag this “allegedly funny,” because that’s the tag I’ve got for this sorta stuff. But this is legit funny:

Instead, FEMA staff have been encouraged to use terms like “freezing rain” in their public messaging, the sources said.

Source: Don’t say ‘Watch out for ice’: FEMA warned storm announcements could invite memes | CNN Politics

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A graph showing a line that goes up to the right, with a big drop in April 2025 that is quickly reversed

There’s a broker offering a new product, that I’d have been all over 30 years ago. I think they’re calling it a “generated asset,” where they create a personal stock index just for you (based on a prompt to an AI), and then create an imaginary index fund for that imaginary index, and then (I assume) invest in the underlying stocks on your behalf.

Of course, you could do that yourself, but it would be awkward, probably expensive, and definitely fiddly, with a need to track the index over time.

So, instead of that (I assume), the company just promises to pay you the value of your index, and (I assume) hedges its promise by holding the underlying shares—and since this synthetic investment is a service, they can lump all these promises together and invest in all the underlying shares, and be generally sure that their hedge will be close enough that even very large stock moves won’t cost them more than investors are paying for access to this service.

As I said, I’d have been all over that 30 years ago. Now, not so much. I’ve gotten lazier and more conservative with my investments as I’ve gotten older.

But it did make me think what I’d want to invest in, if I were to create a synthetic index, and it occurred to me that the companies that are putting the least amount of money into AI crap will do much better over the next few years. So I asked confer.to if it could give me “a list of large corporations ordered by how much they talk about AI in their reports to investors.”

Sadly, the answer was no:

Based on the available data, I can’t provide a specific ranked list of large corporations ordered by how much they discuss AI in their earnings reports. While the information confirms that AI is a major topic in 2025 earnings calls across the S&P 500, the detailed company-by-company ranking you’re looking for isn’t publicly available in the sources I checked.

Here’s what we do know:

  • AI is a dominant topic: In Q3 2025, “AI” was cited on 306 S&P 500 earnings calls, the highest number in the past decade.
  • Significant increase: This is a large jump from the five-year average of 136 mentions and the 10-year average of 86.
  • Sector leaders: The Information Technology (95%) and Communication Services (95%) sectors have the highest percentage of companies mentioning AI.
  • Market impact: Companies that mentioned AI in their Q3 2025 calls saw a higher average stock price increase (13.9%) compared to those that didn’t (5.7%) since the end of 2024.

While sources like Yahoo Finance and MacroMicro track the overall trend and volume of AI mentions, they don’t publish a specific, ordered list of corporations ranked by the frequency or depth of their AI discussions in earnings reports.

This type of granular, ranked data is typically compiled by specialized financial data and analytics firms (like FactSet, which provided the data to Yahoo Finance) and is often part of a paid subscription service.

Perhaps the specialized AI tool that this broker uses to create its imaginary indices has access to the fine-grained data about AI mentions in earnings calls with investors. But I don’t care enough to go to the trouble of looking.

Poking around at the St. Louis Fed’s Fred graphing tool (to come up with a graphic to include for this post), though, led me to the graph at the top, which is of the “Nasdaq Global Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Index,” which “is designed to track the performance of companies engaged in the following themes: Deep Learning, NLP, Image Recognition, Speech Recognition & Chatbots, Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity and Big Data.”

So one option to get what I want would be to just go short on that index.

I don’t think I’ll do that either.