Pun Salad

Eric Raymond has been well-known in the hacker/geek/coder community for decades. He let his blog go defunct years ago, but he's started posting bloglike content at Twitter. And his observations here are worth your while:

I was writing some code the new-school way yesterday, prompting gpt-4.1 through aider, and for whatever reason my mind flashed back 50 years and the utter freaking enormity of it all crashed in on me like a tidal wave.

And now I want to make you feel that, too.

In 1975 I ran…

— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) December 27, 2025

It's long, but interesting and insightful all the way through. His bottom line:

I'm just happy to be here to see it, at least the early part thereof.

If you're interested, my jaw-dropping experience with asking AI (specifically Claude) to write code I probably couldn't have written myself is over on my geekery blog.

I still haven't fixed the bug mentioned there. The extension still works "well enough" by (yes) "turning it off, then back on again."

Also of note:

• Are you a libertarian comic book geek? If so, you will definitely want to check out Brian Doherty's The Howard Roark of Comics. Who's that?

  Of all the popular storytelling artists striving to emulate Ayn Rand, the most significant was Steve Ditko.

  Ditko, a comic book artist, is most famous for co-creating Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. Rand, in addition to writing novels that still sell hugely seven decades down the line, developed a philosophy she called Objectivism, the politics of which were highly libertarian and highly controversial.

  Ditko's commitment to Rand's ideas led him down a curious and troubled path, and made him resemble a real-life Rand character. From developing enduring legends for Marvel Comics in the 1960s to Kickstartering in the 2010s with fewer than 150 sponsors his uniquely and often bizarrely abstract stories, Ditko emulated aspects of both of Rand's most prominent fictional protagonists.

  Back in my college days, one of my housemates was a comic collector, and had complete series of most of the Marvel titles going back to issue #1. I consumed 'em all, slowly over months. And (of course) I had read Atlas Shrugged as an (apparently) impressionable youth back in high school.

  So one of the things I remember was one early Spider-Man comic taking a few panels to feature a moody soliloquy by newspaper mogul J. Jonah Jameson, in which he confessed his true reasons for his implacable hostility to the do-gooding web-crawler.

  And of course it can be found with a bit of Googling; from Spider-Man #10:

  

  That's filched from a web page, conveniently titled Why Does J. Jonah Jameson Hate Spider-Man So Much? Alternate theories are also presented there, but this sounds direct from Ditko, so I consider it canon.

  I have to admit that Jonah's noting Spidey's "unselfish" virtue doesn't sound very Randian at first glance.

  But wasn't John Galt pretty unselfish in setting up his Gulch? Strict Objectivists say no, but…

  (Brian's article gets into this issue too.)

• Not to go all Islamophobic on you, but … it ain't a phobia if they really are trying to kill you. Andrew C. McCarthy asks Who Is the Radical?. (NR gifted link)

  I’m writing this amid the Festival of Lights and few days before our annual observance of the Nativity in the Judeo-Christian West. A confession, though: I am far from brimming with Christmas spirit.

  It’s impossible to at the moment. Hopefully things will be better when you read this. Just days ago, we witnessed the unspeakable horror at Bondi Beach, where a father-and-son jihadist team murdered Australian Jews who were doing nothing more provocative than being Jews and celebrating the start of Hanukkah.

  It was bound to happen: The transnational progressives who run the Australian government turned deaf ears to repeated warnings about intensifying Jew hatred — the word “antisemitism” doesn’t do justice to the historical enmity involved. The surge in incidents of intimidation and violence follows surges in Muslim immigration to the country. That’s not just coincidence; sometimes post hoc really is propter hoc.

  Andrew requotes a Muslim Brotherhood "internal memo" (originally found in his book The Grand Jihad):

  The Ikhwan [i.e., the Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

  So don't be surprised when, after years of saying "It can't happen here"… it winds up happening here.

• Not starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. Roger Pielke Jr presents: The Weather Truther Playbook. He has observed "incredible efforts being made to undermine the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mainstream science". And so:

  The main purpose of this post is to provide me with a concise language to describe this movement and its participants, that I can use going forward. This post characterizes the Weather Truthers and their playbook.

  Longtime [substack] readers will be aware that a parallel universe has developed related to climate change and extreme weather. This parallel universe — science-like but not science — is characterized by:

  • Claims that “climate” is a cause of extreme weather or its intensification;

  • The invention of “extreme event attribution” to counter the IPCC detection and attribution framework;

  • The invention of the concept of novel “climate risk,” which marks a clean break from risks of the past;

  • A cottage industry of research focused on extreme and implausible climate scenarios that projects scary changes in extremes in the distant future, which are then time-traveled back to today to support the most extreme claims of causal attribution;

  • A journalistic climate beat which hypes every extreme event as being made worse by, linked to, fueled by “climate;”

  • A very small group of usual suspects willing to offer quotable quotes on the supposed “climate” causality connections to the event-that-just-happened;

  • The repeated claim that addressing the crisis of escalating extreme weather requires rapidly reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

  So be on the lookout, and you might want to pay attention to Roger's substack too.

• Take my advice, and read this twice. Mike Pesca defends a brave young lady: No One's Nice To Bari Weiss.

  The facts: On Saturday, December 20, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss told the executive producer of 60 Minutes she was holding a segment scheduled to air the next day. The piece concerned CECOT, the maximum-security prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration had sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants. Weiss cited the need for further interviews and additional reporting.

  Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, in an email to colleagues including Anderson Cooper and Lesley Stahl, called the decision political: “Pulling (the story) now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

  By Sunday evening, the story had media-tastasized into a national controversy about censorship, oligarchy and authoritarianism. Former Representative Adam Kinzinger declared, “Bari Weiss—now the head of CBS News—clearly a right winger, clearly in line with Donald Trump, has made it clear that 60 Minutes will do the administration’s bidding now.” The Daily Beast ran the headline “CBS Boss Censored 60 Minutes for Not Interviewing Stephen Miller,” which is an inaccurate account of what Weiss had done.

  Mike does an amazingly thorough job of refuting the anti-Bari slurs. Especially amusing is his rebuttal to charges by Adam Serwer in the Atlantic that Bari's Free Press "and other 'so-called free speech advocates' stay silent when the right restricts speech, exposing their commitment as purely partisan." Mike points out multiple examples of the Free Press explicitly calling out right-wingers' censorious words and activities.

  If I were the editor of the Atlantic, I'd check this out, and deeply wish that Kevin D. Williamson was not fired from the mag, and Adam Serwer was.