Can confirm

In the waning days of 2025, a wind storm in Brazil gives us the image that encapsulates the year the world has just lived through. "You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!"

New from 404 Media: ICE just paid hundreds of thousands to company making bounty hunter AI agents. The company says its AI agents “deliver rapid acceleration in finding persons of interest and mapping their entire network.” Comes as ICE spends millions on skip tracers www.404media.co/ice-contract...

Ladies and gentleman: The President of the United States www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/u...

"...probably can only legally be dismantled by Congress. We like to keep mentioning things like that, even if the current outlaw regime has stopped paying the least bit of attention to constitutional limits on presidential power."😺 www.wonkette.com/p/trump-find...

It's astonishing that somehow we have whole swathes of the political class that have not managed to connect "everything seems like a scam now" to a useful political platform.

"These people are deviant perverts and child molesters" should be the only Democratic messaging here.

A dozen students at Brown were shot over the weekend. But the real violence on America's campuses is the silencing of conservative voices.

Obituary to read with pleasure "For being a right-wing crank of the highest proportions, George W. Bush awarded Podhoretz the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004." www.wonkette.com/p/norman-pod...

Correct me if I’ve missed something but they’re still only a single carrier battle group there, right? “Go to war” in this context is…air strikes? The US has been doing this my entire adult life, lazily lobbing cruise missiles at someone. If Trump thinks this will hold the public’s attention…Lol.

Important thing to remember about Venezuelan oil: their reserves skyrocketed when they decided to start counting something that isn’t oil in any conventional sense and isn’t recoverable unless prices triple, which is unlikely because sharp spikes just result in the Saudis opening the tap wider.

“War for oil“ is not the argument here. If you want an analogy, this is a lot closer to Grenada or the Falklands than to Iraq, just beating the piss out of a militarily inferior country to entertain psychopaths.

Let's celebrate us some Kibum😺 www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYWW...

excited to read a longform article about the collapse of this project (est: 1-3 deaths) in eighteen months or so.

Reposted for the enjoyable comments😺

The Unvarnished Viziers (courtesyHenry Farrell, Jamelle Bouie, Christopher Anderson) "Donald Trump both campaigns and governs in the language of shitposts. His great tragedy is that this is all that he is capable of doing." "A figurehead whose viziers exercise unitary authority on his behalf"

This is metal

one of the best interviews of the year. this line really stands out. "If presenting what I saw, unfiltered, is an attack, then what would you call it had I chosen to edit it and hide things about it, and make them look better than they look?" www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/...

my latest is on the odd confluence of unitary executive theory with a president who is mostly AWOL from the business of governance (gift link)

"A figurehead whose viziers exercise unitary authority on his behalf, running roughshod over both the law and common decency in pursuit of their own narrow agendas."

"The unitary executive lacks an executive... He has given his newfound power away to a small set of virtually unaccountable advisers, insulated from public outcry and indifferent to public opinion."

We literally did this. You’ll never guess what happened! The public’s affordability complaints appear literally unaddressable and maybe hallucinatory

The photographer on that boat was Christopher Anderson, who, 25 years later, snapped the famous photos of the Trump administration for Vanity Fair.

A story I found about Haiti: In 1999, a group of Haitians were tired of political disorder and dreamed of a better life in the United States. So they built a small, 23-foot boat by hand using pine trees, scrap wood, and used nails. They called the boat "Believe in God."

never has there been a televised, nonstop, coked-up, used car salesman rant from the white house

Nice essay on signalling in game theory😺 "Donald Trump both campaigns and governs in the language of shitposts. His great tragedy is that this is all that he is capable of doing." www.programmablemutter.com/p/classy-is-...

😸

What this underscores is a fundamental truth that while none of the rest of us need supremacists in our spaces, and are just fine without them, supremacists need the rest of us or they collapse against each other. Without them we're fine. Without us they've got nothing.

Disgusting to think that there are more than two people outside an asylum who want to believe this.

As with most things Trump related, I think there's no point looking for a 14-dimensional chess explanation for what anyone is doing. I don't think Wiles is a savvy operator playing a Vanity Fair journalist to advance her own interests. I thinks she's a damaged person enabling other damaged people.

AOC: I want to remind you where the real crime is. It's in the oligarchs taking $170 billion of our money from health care and food assistance and public programs and taking that and funneling it into a secret police program.

A ray of light to brighten the doom❤️

good morning holy shit www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/u...

Let’s face it. That people chose a man with no morals, ethics, values or decency over a highly qualified woman (twice) is what destroyed the White House. We could rebuild the East Wing, the Rose Garden and purge all his gaudy ornaments…but the stench of Donald Trump will persist for generations.

My Struggle

😸

"They can fund campaigns. They can fund every friendly campaign twice over. They could hire private armies. But are they liked?"

For better or worse, public figures are judged when they die — their character, contributions, beliefs. It's undeniable that millions have mourned Rob Reiner's tragic death, celebrating his talent and contributions. I suspect when a certain public figure kicks the bucket, sentiments wont be the same

EVEN MORE ADVENTURES OF THE WORLD’S BIGGEST ASSHOLE New blog post: open.substack.com/pub/dreamwea...

On the early 20th Century celebrity health guru/charlatan Bernarr Mcfadden and his numerous, eerie similarities to RFK Jr. They share the worldview that sickness meant weakness and the best cure for weakness is death. They are objectively pro-disease.

i have said this before but if you are actually interested in influencing people beyond a narrow circle of too-online journalists you will be making direct to camera videos on tiktok, instagram and youtube. if you primarily post on text-based social media then you're just dicking around.

this is one of the most psychotic things Trump has ever posted

This NYT story failed the reader by not digging deeper. One subject dropped out of college after one year (five years ago) and lists "Windows" as his skillset. Story should be: young conservatives who blame immigrants for their personal failures and whose lives won't be improved w/ fewer immigrants

"ICE and CBP must be abolished" is the only reasonable position. We can debate the specifics of new agencies for immigration functions, but these agencies are simply too infected with a culture of impunity, racism, and fascism to continue. They're gangs with badges.

ICE is thug scum

Trump grifters and AI scammers support one another. AI slop makes the information landscape unusable, which helps hide the various Trump cons; the lack of regulation from an administration too busy lining its own pockets gives the AI slop lords free rein to do whatever they want.

This is fucking grim. Somebody invented a white guy, an "IT professional" named Edward Crabtree, who stopped the Bondi shooting and spread it all over the internet, which was picked up by AI agents and slop aggregation sites. The real hero is a fruit stand owner named Ahmed el Ahmed.

Dad, Mom, and Son taking his pet cactus back to college😺

USA used to tax the wealthy at over 80% of their income, “earned” from the backs of labor, the pollution of the environment, and the contempt for consumers