His apparently canceling the War on Portland is fascinating because along with medbeds, it's proof he simply cannot clock the difference between reality and his own team's agitprop anymore.

My first thought. They definitely weren't there to arrest him in particular. You can see the moment they realized he was even there

Clearly there are a solid number of people who, over the course of the last several years, have had access to the Epstein files. It would be really cool if one of them had enough backbone to just leak it all and get it over with.

Every once in a while I’m reminded of some reporter I found informative back in the Twitter halcyon days and I look to see if they’re here and I discover I’m already following them and they haven’t posted on Bluesky in eight months.

just opened a fortune cookie and it screamed in agony

if the medbed really existed all of these billionaires would not look like that

Hey everyone say hi to Salvatore he got in my place Tuesday night and I’m posting while I’m in the ER waiting to get a rabies vaccine!

Oh, since people are sharing TNG scenes, I'm going to share this recent piece by @theisb.bsky.social www.the-isb.com/2025/01/06/m...

With alt text because this made me cry 😭

And the other reason is that they don't want to swallow the hard truth here, which is that they have been complicit and actively enabled these assholes in crossing every line they ever fantasized about being brave enough to hold. It threatens their sense of self.

It's self-selecting. A few really brilliant people get into the media elite by virtue of brilliance, but mostly the folks who are there are there because they were willing to be political weathervanes and never push back TOO hard on conventional wisdom.

And to piggyback, drawing a line almost always comes with a cost. Drawing lines early on fascism cost a lot of us, pretty early on. Most media elite folks still don't want to pay that cost because (rightly) it might cost them their media elite status. And so they balk at line-drawing.

A whole population, starved of meaning, and offered a thousand things to fill it with, none of which takes into account at all the lives of their neighbors. There's a reason the GOP has been so desperate to enforce the nuclear family structure on a thousand different ways for generations.

A gaping hole is left, for anyone to fill. People, deliberately starved of purpose and meaning and narrative, will desperately snatch at any they can find. Any that are for sale.

An atomized population is one that has been *deliberately* excised of the the vital moving parts of what makes communities form and function.

When you've atomized a community, you alienate them from each other. And doing so, rips out a huge vital chunk of how communities, and individuals, work. Suddenly they are dependent on other things to give them meaning, purpose, and narrative, and support for those.

What's interesting to me is that a quarter of all americans live in multigenerational homes, homes where grandparents are a significant figure, where they raise you. Half of all Black households are such homes, etc. it's a uniting feature in marginalized groups.

In fact I want to start pushing the notion that the entire apparatus of left center right etc is 20th Century and just no longer applicable to the modern world. We need new ways of thinking about this shit. All of our terms and paradigms for discussion are last century.

Listen anybody who hangs with me on bluesky knows I won't shut up about the evils of capitalism, and yes. It's evil. But it's also been around for a hundred+ years. THIS shit is 21st century new. We need new words and new vectors of attack. People think capitalism, they think economics

We're seeing the Uber rich start to low key refer to themselves like a separate species. They are delusional and haven't thought the end game of this through. Billionaires are the greatest existential threat to the world and humanity that history has ever seen.

“Can the president tell what is real and what is not real” is a pretty simple and important question and I think the answer seems pretty clear

The medbed thing is funny but maybe it’s bad that the press has no interest in evaluating whether the president has functioning reality-testing

Let’s all turn off our internets.

So sorry your game about murdering people with guns until only one player is standing used a dance move from a character who murders people with guns and then the dance move turned out to be not so subtly intimating a Nazi twist that everyone guessed from the first episode of the season?

If you work at a New York City bar or nightclub and you see Eric Adams or his top campaign staffers there tonight, please reach out. I want to know about this, hear what he's drinking and what the vibe is. Signed, a journalist and barback.

something to contemplate is that our president is not aware that he did not make that med bed video

"Only the strong go crazy. The weak just go along." - Assata Shakur

This is the person gearing up to be in charge of US TikTok, if you want to know why I got that shit off of every device in my home.

father of Annapurna Games Megan Ellison and Skydance’s David Ellison

I keep seeing people say they won't let their kids play football because of CTE and will make them play something like soccer instead and I have bad news about the long-term effects of heading a soccer ball repeatedly over the years.

That kind of sounds like someone combined the Subprime Mortgage Crisis with a Ponzi Scheme. Fortunately, the tech industry isn't the only thing holding together the entire US economy while everyone else just gets sandblasted with tariffs. 2/2

OMG they even sent a reporter to investigate!!!

“The timing of the event has been of particular concern: The speech is set for Sept. 30, the last day of the fiscal year. If there is a government shutdown, it could leave key staff stranded in Virginia…” www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

scene in the new highlander movie involving a fight in an apple orchard the quickening produces spectacular, though financially disastrous, results on the apples

he is going to make them drink his blood and bend the knee

Even if Hegseth intended this gathering to be a lecture on warfighting and standards, the presence of Trump makes it far likelier that it will deteriorate into a highly political event that further drags the armed forces into the partisan political maelstrom. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

they are *really* desperate to distract from the epstein stuff, aren't they?

Timeline cleanser 🐈

I never want anybody to forget that these people spend a decade using "free speech" as the thin end of the wedge to completely destroy free speech. People saw it coming, and said so, and were ignored.

a cool thing is when a mega deranged person becomes obsessed with you and follows you around online trying to ruin your life. fortunately all of our adhoc systems of online mob justice involve a process of intense vetting and contextualization and could never be weaponized by a malignant sociopath

the amount of raw, unadulterated fear that many Americans have of even small cities is never going to stop being darkly hilarious to me

lmao???

This is definitely a situation where I’m shocked that I can still be shocked.

Occam's razor says that the reason trump posted about star trek magic technology is simply that he saw a video with his face in it and went "hey that's me" and slammed that repost button

To re-post this with clarity in mind: 1) Trump posted an obviously AI video of himself declaring medbeds for all over on TruthSocial. 2) the majority of ppl here on Bluesky know it’s AI & are horrified he posted it like it’s real. Just to stave off the “it’s AI” posts. We know. He doesn’t

Elvis is the rare celebrity of yesteryear that if anything would fit in even more today because he was super into self defense and being high on drugs and talking to a crooked President and dating a teenager, he’d 100000% have a crypto thing going on

“AI” isn’t a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. It’s the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about “responsible” use.

(let this also be a public service announcement to NOT TOUCH BATS especially if they are acting weird, ie letting you touch them. Rabies is a terrible way to die, and getting the series of rabies shots to stop you from dying is not super relaxing. DO NOT TOUCH BATS.)

This is the most excellent local headline writing. "DID YOU GIVE WATER TO A BAT NEAR THE ARBORETUM? IT HAD RABIES." (this is explicitly for @andreagrimes.com )

You can't joke about anything anymore. Because you signed a multi figure contract with the Saudi government that said they wouldn't pay you if you did.