I used to cycle between rage and despair. But I’m older now. So I walk.

Happy Juneteenth National Independence Day! On this day in 1865, "Union troops arrived in Galveston, TX, to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the last enslaved people in the country—more than two years after the Proclamation was officially issued."

I suppose it's inappropriate to suggest that the UFC claw/lighting rig/whatever would make a fine traitor's tree? To be clear, I'm a pacifist, so that's not advocacy. I would vastly prefer they be made to suffer more conventional fates.

Marjane Satrapi, author of 'Persepolis,' dies at 56

Have we given up, then? Subsided into restless silence? Oh, let's not.

I have found and read one work by Eleanor Arnason. They’re all out of print. One book and it’s clear to me a revival is called for.

I am neither fool nor monied enough to play the predictive markets. But if I were... I'd be putting big money on gas prices dropping to $3/gallon about a month before the election.

It's so disheartening watching this court carry out the explicit project of white supremacy so blatantly while gaslighting the public to say it's trying to stop discrimination. They're dismantling every major legacy of the civil rights movement. We need to reform this court.

I simply can’t believe Congress and the cabinet are sitting around, totally fine with what is absolutely demented behavior from the president.

It is a beautiful, ordinary spring morning. Time to feed the chickens and the goats, to dodge the Canada goose waiting for its mate to hatch goslings. And to worry if the Fascist Kleptocrat has gone so far around the bend as to use tactical nuclear weapons. Today. Unchecked. Dear god.

@tampabaytre.bsky.social @connorjrogers.bsky.social : Younglings, I am old enough to have seen Marc Wilson play HS ball. Don't bet, don't fantasy, rarely have time to watch games. But I depend upon y'all for a burst of decency every night before sleep. Sorry @ PFF. Proud of you both.

Dude thinks he can just bankrupt his way out of the entirely voluntary war with Iran. And the Epstein files.

Even if one cares more about climate than country, the incentives in this atrocious war are still perverse. If the Straits remain impassable, if things escalate and billion $ facilities are destroyed, if the world has to move on from oil (even if the US doesn't), that's still a net win.

His short, stubby fingers itch for the nuclear football.

If we made the green energy transition this war would be unthinkable and these authoritarians wouldn’t be in power — not in the US, not in Iran, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Russia. Hydrocarbons are killing our freedom and just plain killing us.

We live now in the fallout of the Bush Doctrine of preemptive attack, with blatant disregard for intelligence. And oil. We live now in a rogue state. We should have resisted more strongly then. We have to resist with all our strength now.

That $143-million Noem contract? Real question is where did the media buys go, cuz that's like 80% of it. Find that out, and it's further proof of state-sponsored propaganda outlets. That's the real graft here.

I wonder if the Fascist Kleptocrat even knew there were civilians in the Middle East, and how close together the countries were to his bombs, and how difficult it was going to be for them to get out. But the ICE flights continue. So there's that.

Do I have this right? Christian Nationalists have instigated war in the Middle East to hasten the Second Coming, abetted by the oligarchs, who were planning to move to Mars anyway?

Does war with Iran and closure of the Strait of Hormuz make Venezuelan crude (different tho it be) more valuable? Y'know, our imperialist seizure down south? With offshore bank accounts... Is it as simple as all that? (Probably.)

I so wish we cared about all the dead & maimed, and not just the Americans.

Really, the Supremes are just saying to their king, No, you have to do it this other way.

😭

Anyone else think it's weird that a regime which so tightly embraces eugenics is simultaneously opposed to abortion rights? I mean, I know I'm slow here, but... ...and hatred isn't built on logic...

www.cnn.com/2026/02/11/u... This seems like a big deal.

If, as a reader, I'm expected to be familiar with the byways of Manhattan, can I, as a writer, presume readers have some familiarity with rural life? Maybe they teach it better now than they did in the '70s.

Those SB AI commercials, "take the afternoon off." Yeah, how's that actually work. PTO? And do you have a job the next day? It's a threat, not a promise. It also fundamentally misunderstands that building the spreadsheet is about understanding the numbers. Not just completing the task.

What if there are no [legal] consequences attending to release of the Epstein files? What if the intended message, instead, is, "This is how the elite behaves, and you silly mudsills are not entitled to question it"?

We cannot keep responding to naked power with subtle logic.

They're going to back off. Poke at something else for a moment. Next time will be worse. And they'll be better prepared, more intentional.

So, “originalist” actually means “before the Bill of Rights.”

We white folk aren’t used to this treatment. Apparently it’s gonna take us a while. Dammit.

From this moment forward (and before, but clearly now): -If you work for ICE. -If you vote for money for ICE. You are complicit. This is the gestapo. You're on the wrong side. You can't pretend not to know.

Just a reminder that for the last year Tik Tok has been on phones in the US even tho Congress passed a law obliging its sale and the Supreme Court upheld that law. For a year. This is how the rule of law was first diminished. And, yeah, the Epstein files, too.

So we’re going to have a trade war. With Europe. Over Greenland. Because real estate logic trumps all.

Then there was a piece of paper suddenly cutting $2-billion in funding from substance abuse and mental health organizations, effective 1/13.

At this point, given the relative cost of renewable energy and the scale of the investment opportunity there for incumbent utility & power companies, what is the constituency for this rabid anti-green energy content? Whose interests is it actually serving? It's such a colossal waste of time.

RIP Dave Allen. The moment does seem to cry for music, this song keeps earworming me: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHVI...

It has come to this: We are now reduced to arguing the merits of a government-sponsored snuff film.

Tutored by a mob lawyer, he runs the country with the finesse of a second-tier mob boss. Oddly, though, I've not seen any news of an uptick in organized crime.

Members of Congress keep issuing statement and writing bills that will never get out of committee as if Congress mattered. The President doesn't think it does. Not anymore. Nice pension, I suppose. We have 2026. Maybe. To make Congress count.

It's a con. They're selling fear. To us, where we live. To other countries, where they live. It's not about rule of law. It's about intimidation.

Wait. Two news orgs knew in advance about the Madura "extraction," because security was that good. But Congress couldn't be told. Er...asked. Got it. It was nice living in a semi-functional democracy.

The security reason to electrify transport is not about oil imports, it’s economic resilience. Oil powers 90% of US vehicles, so when the price of oil spikes because of a war, people & companies pay more for energy, which hurts the economy. The more transport is electrified, econ security goes up.

Anyone know the going rate for a member of Congress, or, at least, their spine? Maybe if we pooled our resources…

hey remember when a bunch of middle-aged drunk korean lawmakers climbed the locked gates to the national assembly to hold an emergency session after the president gave illegal orders to the military, all of which ended with said president being sentenced to prison

I always thought that I was just barely smart enough not to live in a rogue state, amid a lawless society. Not a healthy place for a pacifist. But here we are. We have failed. Utterly. Comprehensively.

Wonder how this is playing in Rex Tillerson's home.

Imagine, as I'm sure others have, that some foreign power found our Fascist Kleptocrat to have, say, violated international law by killing sailors in open water, to have committed war crimes by killing them once their boat was sunk, and then invaded to take him captive for his crimes.