Friends,

The statements seem as belligerent as Pete Hegseth on a bad hair day.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” says Jonathan Cowan.

Cowan is president of Third Way, described by The New York Times as a “leading centrist Democratic group.” Cowan’s Third Way is preparing a $15 million war chest to “discredit democratic socialism.”

Pointing to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Senate primary last week, Cowan warns that “it is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potential presidential swing states.”

Well, I find it deeply troubling that faux centrist groups are declaring war on progressives in the pages of The New York Times, without the Times revealing who they really are.

If you bother to look at the funding sources of Third Way — those that have been made public, that is (Third Way is structured as a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization that’s not legally required to publicly disclose its donors) — you’ll find a Star Wars cantina of billionaire megadonors, Fortune 500 CEOs, corporate dark money bundlers, and giant corporations.

Odd that The New York Times chooses to describe Third Way as a “leading Democratic centrist group” without revealing that it’s simply a Trojan Horse for corporate America.

Third Way senior vice president Matt Bennett has even conceded that “the majority” of Third Way’s donor support comes from the group’s board of trustees, most of whom are from the finance sector. (That’s the same Matt Bennett, by the way, who helped stage the infamous “Dukakis in a tank” photo-op that helped sink Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign.)

Here’s Third Way’s Board of Trustees (the most recent list available):

• Jonathan Vogelstein, chairman of New Providence Asset Management and senior advisor to private equity firm Warburg Pincus.

• David Heller, formerly global head of equity trading for Goldman Sachs.

• Bernard Schwartz (chairman emeritus), chairman and CEO of BLS Investments.

• David Horvitz, chairman of the board and CEO of SouthOcean Capital Partners, LLC and SouthOcean Investment Partners, LLC.

• David Coulter, managing director and senior advisor at Warburg Pincus, focusing on the firm’s financial services practice, and former vice chair of JPMorganChase.

• William Daley, vice chairman of Bank of New York Mellon, former vice chairman of JPMorganChase, former board member of pharmaceutical companies Abbott Labs and Merck.

• John Dyson, chairman of Millbrook Capital Management, Inc. (MCM), a private investment firm that manages a manufacturing company, a vineyard and wine group, and a hedge fund.

• Michael Edwards, deputy CIO of investment adviser Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisors.

• Andrew Feldstein, CEO and Co-CIO of BlueMountain Capital Management, board member of PNC Financial Services Group, former managing director of JPMorganChase.

• Brian Frank, founder and managing partner of Declaration Partners LP, an investment firm seeded by the founder of a large private equity firm.

• David Greenwald, chairman of finance law firm Fried Frank, former international general counsel and a deputy general counsel of Goldman Sachs.

• Derek Kaufman, former head of global fixed income at Citadel and a member of the firm’s Portfolio Committee, former managing director at JPMorganChase.

• Derek Kirkland, managing director and co-head of the Global Financial Institutions Group at Morgan Stanley’s Financial Institutions Group in Investment Banking.

• Doug Lawrence, CEO of DPL Green Investment and also managing principal and co-founder of 5 Stone Green Capital, formerly a managing director at JPMorganChase.

• Joseph Zimlich, CEO of private family financial manager the Bohemian Group, board member of First Western Trust Bank.

• Mark Spilker, founding member of GPS Investment Partners LLC, chairman of Chiron Investment Management LLC, former co-head of Goldman Sachs’s Investment Management Division, former president of Apollo Global Management, former member of Google’s Investment Advisory Committee.

• Barbara Manfrey Vogelstein, former venture capitalist, former partner at Warburg Pincus and Apax Partners & Co. Ventures.

• William Reeves, co-founder of BlueCrest Capital Management, former managing director at JPMorganChase.

Oh, and Third Way’s honorary co-chairs have included West Virginia’s former Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona’s former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Enough said about its governing structure.

In 2020, Third Way claimed that Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All plan would add more than $13 trillion to the federal deficit, although most other analyses — including one by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center — found that Sanders’s plan would save trillions while providing healthcare to millions of uninsured Americans.

Well, of course Third Way attacked Bernie’s plan. Among Third Way’s donors are pharmaceutical giant Amgen, pharmacy benefit manager CVS Health (which acquired health insurance giant Aetna in late 2018), and health products and drug company Baxter International.

Other corporate donors to Third Way are or have been members of the GOP-aligned American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate bill mill that links lobbyists with state lawmakers. Amgen, Baxter Healthcare, CVS Caremark, DuPont, and trade groups the Consumer Technology Association and NCTA - The Internet and Television Association are members.

Third Way donors have also given money to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which helps elect Republicans who fight federal environmental and other regulations. Among them, Entergy, Facebook, Google, and Reynolds American, according to tax records.

Christopher Leonard, author of Kochland, revealed that Koch Industries secretly funded a report by Third Way intended to promote the Republican free trade agenda to Democrats.

After the Democrats’ 2024 election losses, Third Way argued that the party should reduce its dependence on small-dollar donors. In a five-page memo of “takeaways” from the election, Third Way asserted that small-dollar donors’ preferences “may not align with the broader electorate.”

The memo stopped short of naming alternative funding sources, but the implication was clear: Less grassroots support means more reliance on big checks from super PACs and wealthy donors, which is exactly what Third Way prefers.

The memo also included calls to curb “far-left influence,” adopt a “pro-capitalist” stance, and stop “demonizing wealth and corporations.”

***

So, please, disregard whatever you may hear from Third Way or any other so-called “leading Democratic centrist group.”

And pay no attention to headlines about “Democratic centrists preparing for war” against a “rising Left.”

Instead, focus on what’s really happening.

Voters want people in power who are going to fight for them, and not for the super-wealthy or big corporations and Wall Street.

This is especially true now — when the bottom 90 percent of Americans are struggling to pay the bills, a record portion of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of the richest one-tenth of one percent, big corporations and Wall Street have never been as powerful, Washington has been taken over by legalized bribery and corruption, and there’s no “center” between democracy and neofascism.

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Today's links

• The bureaucratic AI arms-race is mutually assured destruction: The only way to win is not to play.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Seymour Cray's tunnels; War on moisture; $5 wrench cryptanalysis; Nauru files; People's Ride; German transit upholstery fashion; Monopolies v small business; Linkedin will put you in ads; NZ Parliament kicks itself off the internet; Adblock Plus v Facebook adblock-block; Cracking 100m VWs for $40; Trump as defective machine learning; Canada sucks at internet law; Goodhart's Law of AI.
• Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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The bureaucratic AI arms-race is mutually assured destruction (permalink)

According to an Economist editorial, "AI is breaking the British state" by making it too easy to file complaints, demands and appeals, which will "drown the state" with "demands as well-crafted as a first-class lawyer's":

https://archive.is/VTrj9

Let's pause a moment to appreciate the Economist's touching credulity about AI's coming legal mastery. The law seems to be the area where AI is most prone to "hallucinate" (that is, "produce defective outputs"), which can only be sorted through by skilled practitioners whose experience gives them the discernment to distinguish useful arguments from foolish ones:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

(And this requires those skilled practitioners to avoid the "automation blindness" that afflicts people who are asked to remain vigilant for things that seldom occur, a phenomenon that has turned every TSA agent into the water-bottle-detectingest motherfucker the human race has ever produced, who still misses 95% of the guns that red teams bring through the checkpoint):

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-us-airports-allowed-weapons-through-n367851

More notable than the Economist's faith-based predictions about the impending army of hyper-competent robo-lawyers is the magazine's proposed solution to this looming crisis: "stop creating entitlements that are ripe for AI-fuelled claims…prune the mass of procedural rights." Above all, replace the bureaucrats who process your "complaints, demands and appeals" with more AI, which will arbitrarily decide who gets what, through "personalised welfare interventions" that are not based on any kind of guaranteed rights.

Writing on his blog, the political scientist Henry Farrell tells us where this will inevitably end up: with AI-based robot wars in which increasingly stingy and pernickety robo-bureaucrats create demand for progressively more aggressive robo-lawyers:

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-downside-of-robot-solutionism

As Farrell writes, this end-time was foretold by the prophet Alan Moore with his 1980s 2000 AD character Abelard Snazz, "the man with the two-storey brain":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelard_Snazz

Snazz "solves" the street crime epidemic on the planet Twopp with "Big Police Robots," who spiral out of control, arresting the citizens of Twopp for trivial crimes like wearing brown shoes with a blue suit ("breaking the laws of good taste"). To solve this new problem, Snazz invents "Big Criminal Robots" whose "cunning, efficient" crimes "take up all the police's time."

Twopp is left in a state of high-stakes Big Robot crimewars, in which the most efficient criminals imaginable battle the most ruthless robocops science can deliver, with the Twoppians caught in the crossfire, collateral damage in a robotic forever war (on crime).

As Farrell writes, this is already afflicting the US health system, where an army of insurance company robo-claim-deniers have been countered with a doctors' army of robot-claim-appealers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/10/health/doctors-insurers-artificial-intelligence.html

The point being that people need health care, people need public services, and while there will always be some waste at the margins (whether due to incompetence or dishonesty) responding to this by beefing up the system's defenses with more advanced red tape just requires the people who legitimately need these services to employ more aggressive tactics.

In support of this, Farrell points to a great, long essay by Dan "Accountability Sink" Davies for the Niskanen Center, "'The Problem Factory' – Preemptive risk aversion in infrastructure planning and the role of professional services":

https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-problem-factory-preemptive-risk-aversion-in-infrastructure-planning-and-the-role-of-professional-services/

Davies' essay describes how increasing bureaucratic defenses against frivolous or dishonest claims drives the participants in these processes to assume a war footing and approach the system as a battlefield, leading to the very runaway cost inflation that the bureaucratic process was instituted to prevent.

(Davies, a cybernetician, has some fascinating advice about how to structure planning processes to minimize this, but that's out of scope for this particular post.)

This reminds me of nothing so much as the spam wars. There was a time when it was very easy to set up a mail server and provide email access for anyone who wanted it – including spammers. Increased spam begat increased anti-spam countermeasures, notably the creation of blocklists that allowed mail administrators to automatically reject email from "insecure" mail servers.

Inevitably, spammers figured out how to send spam from "secure" servers, resulting in stricter, more onerous standards for mail server configuration. Spammers – for whom the ability to send spam is an existential matter – figured out how to meet these standards, so the security demands jumped again – and again, and again.

Today, sending and receiving mail is so technically challenging that most of the internet's email is run by a handful of giant, mostly US-based corporations. If any of these companies decides your mail server is spamming, you effectively disappear from the internet and good luck getting them to acknowledge an error. Meanwhile, these companies emit an avalanche of spam, but no one will ever block their servers, because to do so would be to cut off billions of legitimate email users:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

And since most of these companies are US-based, they are liable to being weaponized by Trump, who has taken to ordering his tech giants to block foreign officials whose policy decisions make him angry:

https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2026/07/icc-trump-push-dismantle

Another parallel is the content moderation wars that saw the large platforms coming up with progressively more detailed rules about what constituted harassment and hate speech, only to have dedicated trolls master these rule-books. Trolls – for whom harassment was a full-time vocation – became the world's greatest experts on the platforms' speech policies, which let them skate right up to the line when abusing their victims, and to get those victims kicked off the platforms if they could be lured into putting a single toe over the line in response:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

Farrell criticizes the Economist's answer to the (alleged) looming robo-lawyer threat as "solutionism," Evgeny Morozov's word for "Recasting all complex social situations … as neat problems with definite, computable solutions":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_fix

Using AI to root AI-generated bureaucratic appeals sacrifices the system's putative purpose – delivering services – in the name of defending that service from abuse and misuse of the system's resources. As the pioneering cybernetician Stafford Beer famously wrote, "the purpose of a system is what it does." If your bureaucracy is more concerned with fighting fraud than delivering service, then it isn't a service delivery system at all – it's a service denial system.

As Farrell writes, the people of Twopp can tell you how this ends – in a war of giant robots in which we are all collateral damage.

(A brief postscript: Farrell is a font of science fictional analogies to modern policy issues. This weekend in the FT, he and Dan Wang published an excellent editorial on the relevance of the paranoid, claustrophobic fiction of Philip K Dick to our present political reality:)

https://archive.is/2YT4k

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• John Crowley (1942-2026) https://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2026/08/john-crowley-1942-2026.html

• Ebooks Are Coming to Libro! https://blog.libro.fm/ebooks-coming-librofm/

• What Defeating the American-Israel Political Action Committee Means, on the Ground https://rickperlstein.substack.com/p/what-defeating-the-american-israel

• They Live https://badtastegoodcause.com/they-live

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Seymour Cray liked to tunnel under his house https://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~toby/writing/PCW/cray.htm

#20yrsago Fake anti-Net Neutrality groups https://web.archive.org/web/20060815175125/http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=2007877&auid=1871905&kntaw4229=C9E5C86AD89540898B5D07CB54AB0FE6

#20yrsago HOWTO fold a bottle opener out of paper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrXmDiYHUY0

#20yrsago Wikipedia’s template language is Turing-complete https://web.archive.org/web/20070707115525/http://www.mentalpolyphonics.com/?p=30

#20yrsago Schwarzenegger sends Guard to California’s airports https://web.archive.org/web/20060813201014/http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/08/11/SECURITYLOCAL.TMP

#15yrsago Marvel to comics retailers: we’ll give you limited edition singles if you destroy our competitors’ products https://web.archive.org/web/20110908023907/http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/08/the-great-marvel-comics-rip-off/

#15yrsago LinkedIn opts you into being used in advertisements; here’s how to opt out https://brandimpact.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/a-box-you-want-to-uncheck-on-linkedin/

#15yrsago MagicJack owner follows up his dumb lawsuit against Boing Boing with a dumb lawsuit against Women’s Professional Soccer https://memex.craphound.com/2011/08/11/magicjack-owner-follows-up-his-dumb-lawsuit-against-boing-boing-with-a-dumb-lawsuit-against-womens-professional-soccer/

#15yrsago Al Jazeera fixes its protections for whistleblowers https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/al-jazeera-follows-effs-whistleblower

#15yrsago New Zealand Parliament may lose Internet access due to insane new copyright law https://web.archive.org/web/20110830211231/http://www.greens.org.nz/press-releases/parliament-risk-fines

#15yrsago British aviation bans all hand-luggage http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4778615.stm?ls

#15yrsago Soldering is Easy: CC licensed HOWTO solder comic https://mightyohm.com/blog/2011/04/soldering-is-easy-comic-book/

#15yrsago Taxonomy of technological risks: when things fail badly https://web.archive.org/web/20190221205543/https://www.sei.cmu.edu/about/divisions/cert/index.cfm

#15yrsago Secret anti-racist shirts covertly distributed to neo-Nazis https://web.archive.org/web/20110810082217/http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15305581,00.html

#15yrsago XKCD on the password paradox: human factors versus computers’ brute force https://xkcd.com/936/

#10yrsago American Bar Association votes to DRM the law, put it behind a EULA https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/after_strong_debate_house_calls_for_publication_of_privately_drafted_standa/

#10yrsago Trump only writes the angry tweets, the nice ones are written by a staffer with an Iphone http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/

#10yrsago Aviation’s war on moisture turns ten today https://memex.craphound.com/2016/08/10/aviations-war-on-moisture-turns-ten-today/

#10yrsago Court rules that FCC can’t force states to repeal laws banning municipal ISPs https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/in-blow-to-muni-broadband-fcc-loses-bid-to-overturn-state-laws/

#10yrsago NRA is spending $3m on pro-Trump ad that says Clinton “will leave you defenseless” https://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/09/politics/nra-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-election-2016/index.html

#10yrsago Nauru files: leaks tell abused childrens’ stories from Australia’s offshore concentration camp https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/10/the-nauru-files-2000-leaked-reports-reveal-scale-of-abuse-of-children-in-australian-offshore-detention

#10yrsago Why did it take a private foundation to do public science right? https://medium.com/the-spike/how-a-happy-moment-for-neuroscience-is-a-sad-moment-for-science-c4ba00336e9c#.58om85nvg

#10yrsago Profile of People’s Ride: a co-operative, driver-owned alternative to Uber https://www.democracyatwork.info/profile_peoplesride

#10yrsago The story of the story of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/herocomplex/la-ca-hc-ghosts-disneylands-haunted-mansion-20151016-htmlstory.html

#10yrsago Designer makes clothes out of German transit upholstery fabric, rides trains https://web.archive.org/web/20160808130200/http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20160804-why-are-trains-seats-so-hideous

#10yrsago America will finally gather statistics on which and how many people are killed by law enforcement https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/08/police-officer-related-deaths-department-of-justice

#10yrsago Monopoly power and the decline of small business: big business vs democracy, growth & equality https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/monopoly-power-and-the-decline-of-small-business/

#10yrsago As social media centralized, blogging’s core infrastructure has withered https://medium.com/@anildash/the-lost-infrastructure-of-social-media-d2b95662ccd3

#10yrsago 48 hours later, Adblock Plus beats Facebook’s adblocker-blocker https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/11/12439990/facebook-unblockable-ads-defeated-by-adblock-plus

#10yrsago 100 million VWs can be unlocked with a $40 cracker (and other cars aren’t much better) https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity16/sec16_paper_garcia.pdf

#10yrsago DEA bribes rail/airline employees for tipoffs that lead to warrantless cash seizures https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/08/10/dea-travel-record-airport-seizures/88474282/

#10yrsago Trump is an object lesson in the problems of machine learning https://mathbabe.org/2016/08/11/donald-trump-is-like-a-biased-machine-learning-algorithm/

#5yrsago IRS leaks reveal billions reaped through ultra-wealthy lobbying on the tax bill https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#shitty-man-of-history-theory

#5yrsago Canada's got the world's worst internet ideas https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#no-canada

#5yrsago End of the line for Uber https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/10/unter/#bezzle-no-more

#1yrago Goodhart's Law (of AI) https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/11/five-paragraph-essay/#targets-r-us

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• The AI Enshittification Bubble (Hidden Forces)
  https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-ai-enshittification-bubble-cory-doctorow/

• F@#$ the AI Overlords (On The Media)
  https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/f-the-ai-overlords

• Why AI Won't Replace Workers, But Will Crash The Economy (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRmUuxJolY

• AI and the Enshittification Era (The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAIJRjb-Bw

• AI is not inevitable (Betakit)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbiTVkq1WHo

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 692 (692 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Friends,

Please submit your caption in the Comments section and, as before, please use the Comments section only for captions.

Winners will be announced next Sunday. For consideration, please post your caption by Monday at 9 pm PT, 12 midnight ET.

Leave a comment

Last week’s winner:

“Trump is correct about one thing: A SICK DERANGED person destroyed the pool. He was looking at his own reflection at the time.”

(Congratulations, Russwin Francisco.)

Runners-up:

“The only way to fix this mess is with a blue wave in November.”

(Congratulations, Sue Schneider.)

“Trump said he’d drain the swamp, but all he’s done is drain the pool.”

(Congratulations, Steven Horowitz.)

“Now we know that the real vandal was Trump’s hand-picked pool guy.”

(Congratulations, Laurence Hoffmann.)

“Minnesota governor Tim Walz commented: ‘Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.’”

(Congratulations, Alan Goldhammer.)

“More like deflecting pool.”

(Congratulations, sjcasey71.)

“This definitely reflects on his presidency.”

(Congratulations, Jean Rosenfeld.)

“It reflects everything this regime is: tattered, filthy, health hazard, a disgusting mess.”

(Congratulations, Karen Cooper.)

“Mirror, mirror on the Mall, who’s the biggest failure of all?”

(Congratulations, Burt Ray Simpson.)

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