This article is very strange. While saying this is very unlikely it treats it wholly as an employment problem with no solution, but never contends with the fact that this would lead to an economic depression!

ATTENTION BLUESKY you don't want to watch the State of the Union next week you want to watch a PowerPoint party telethon of your favorite Bluesky super posters delivering their most unhinged hot takes to raise money for mutual aid in Twin Cities and Portland Poster's Madness for a good cause!!!!

"An Associated Press reporter was beaten by the police and detained along with three other journalists on Tuesday in Cameroon while reporting on a secretive Trump administration program to deport migrants to the Central African country, according to two of the people detained." (gift link)

Going after the Pope on Ash Wednesday is so unhinged

NEWS: The FBI interviewed an Epstein victim who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her when she was underage not once — but at least FOUR times. But the document that shows those additional interviews appears to have been deleted from the DOJ website. substack.com/home/post/p-...

BREAKING — WE WON! DC Superior Court Judge Darlene Soltys ordered the DC Metropolitan Police to produce ALL body cam footage of the March 2025 DOGE raid on the US Institute of Peace within 14 days. Thanks to my @rcfp.org lawyers for their tireless work. Details on thehandbasket.co later today!

Breaking - US military prepared to strike Iran as early as this weekend, but Trump has yet to make a final call, sources say www.cnn.com/2026/02/18/p...

This is flying under the radar: Donald Trump FIRED the DOJ official in charge of suing Live Nation-Ticketmaster for monopolizing ticketing and hiking prices. Then, their stock jumped. If Trump's DOJ takes it easy on Ticketmaster, it'll be a slap in the face to every American.

NEW: Def Con banned hackers Pablos Holmes and Vincenzo Iozzo, as well as former MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito, from attending the conference based on their links to Jeffrey Epstein. Holmes and Iozzo exchanged emails with Epstein for several years.

There are 28 Republican members on the House Oversight Committee. None of them showed for Les Wexner’s deposition on Epstein. Cowards.

The Brazilian political system is, structurally, very similar to the American one. But when they elected a Trump-style authoritarian back in 2018, their Congress and Supreme Court actually fought back. I went to Brazil to find out why. And what I learned surprised me. www.vox.com/politics/479...

fun question: what’s the maddest you’ve ever been leaving a movie theater? not necessarily worst movie you’ve seen, but the one that just pissed you off the most. mine is Batman v Superman

If you don’t read old stuff you’ll never discover that people in the olden days had the same thoughts and feelings and dreams and anxieties you do, sometimes articulated differently, sometimes exactly the same way. You are never truly alone in anything and old writings are a neon sign telling you so

lent and ramadan kicking off on the same day

Famous vaudevillian Shia Labœuf has been caught by the constabulary for a scuffle at a New Orleans saloon

Elon posted this yesterday. Just for fun I did it with my before/after cancer PET scans that I had already posted online. In the "before" scan Grok missed the massive tumor lighting up my liver, and in both scans it flagged a non-existent "area of concern" in my chest. Other than that, works great!

This is the kind of thing white supremacists have been doing to Emmett Till’s memorial for decades. It’s wild to see them do this to a white woman who the entire world saw extrajudicially murdered.

25 years ago, a bunch of libertarians moved to NH to take over state government. Jason Osborne, one of those "Free Staters," has since risen to be majority leader in the state house. How is he fighting for "liberty?" By helping Stephen Miller build a 324,000-foot prison for migrants and refugees.

Deplorable state of U.S. media on display here, deliberately misleading the public. You can literally type into Google the same question @aoc.bsky.social was asked and the AI will give you her same answer because "strategic ambiguity" has been official U.S. policy her whole life.

BREAKING: I obtained text messages in which an aide to U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio, acknowledged she "had an affair with our boss." 2 sources said the affair was an "open secret" in the office. The staffer died by suicide last year. @expressnews.com: www.expressnews.com/news/article...

BREAKING: An immigration judge has *terminated* the Trump-Vance administration's efforts to deport Columbia pro-Palestine student protestor Mohsen Mahdawi. Mohsen was first detained 10 months ago, when agents ambushed him at a citizenship interview.

I've transcribed dozens of interviews. With rare exceptions, everyone speaks with those um/uh tics, little restarts, hesitations, and most of us speak in sentence fragments with emphases, tones, pauses that create coherence not replicable in print. Spoken and written are distinct. Translate fairly.

Have you ever once seen the New York Times quote Trump like this?

Coverage of Andy Barr, a sitting Congressman and candidate for U.S. Senate, running an ad declaring, "It's not a sin to be white" -- a variation of a notorious white nationalist slogan AP: Zero NYT: Zero WashPost: Zero Reuters: Zero Politico: Zero Axios: Zero

The photos that supposedly feature Ghislaine Maxwell with Laurene Powell Jobs actually are her with a French model and British model Victoria Hervey. Alan Macleod, who tweeted out the claim, is with MintPress News, a really sketch news site that pushes chemtrail and 9/11 conspiracy theories.

“All Washington Post staff reporters in the Middle East were laid off last week. Many of them were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize last year, for what the award committee called haunting accountability journalism that documented Israeli atrocities in the Gaza Strip.” www.npr.org/2026/02/13/n...

BREAKING: Rev. Jesse Jackson, civil rights icon and two-time presidential candidate, dies at 84.

Melrose and La Brea is just a river right now.

“Readers should be able to assume that every word between quotation marks is what the speaker or writer said… The writer should, of course, omit extraneous syllables like ‘um’ and may judiciously delete false starts.” -NYT ethical guidelines

This is a stark departure from common practice in journalism. Looks like an attempt to punish AOC for having the temerity to talk overseas. If the NY Times quoted everyone like this – not cleaning up stammers, repeated words and "um" – its quotations would look much different. They'd be a mess.

Tonight’s dumb napkin cartoon…

Trump/GOP/RFK cuts to vaccines are real and happening. It may result in your or a loved one's death or painful life. They are now allied with disease against the rest of us. NO PAYWALL www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/h...

Richard Nadler (German artist, b. 1987)

Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted child sex trafficker, gets gardening time, sports, therapy dogs, and spa products in prison. Migrant children in custody are sleeping on concrete floors without enough food or clean water. Our priorities are so fucked.

wealth concentration is already 200% as bad at is was in 2020. think about that

It is an ironic triumph of neoliberalism that a voter imagines themselves as a consumer selecting candidates rather than being in something of a struggle with 200 million other people with a need for friends and alliances

Non-Christian Americans sacrificed for our country, too. www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Mil...

(1/11) If you live in NY, you’ve probably started seeing a new warning: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” This mandatory disclosure went into effect late last year, and it’s the first attempt by a US state to grapple with a new generation of surveillance pricing.

/2 Anyway, this is what the Smoking Gun was reporting TWENTY YEARS AGO in 2006. It was horrifying then and it’s still horrifying and it unequivocally shows child abuse. www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/se...

I’m bridged into Mastodon via @ap.brid.gy and I am honestly not sure why at this point.

These details (made up by Bruenig) imply that the parents here are woo-woo Marianne Williamson types, but that breed of anti-vaxxer has become increasingly rare since COVID. The modal anti-vaxx parent these days is a hardcore Christian right-winger.

On the other hand, it's a pretty sympathetic portrait of anti-vaxx parents, as well as a whitewashed description of who is getting vaccine exemptions and why.

“Listen … you go tell Billy’s mother, and I’ll start looking for another old tire.”

Even compared to the dire state of the newspaper business in general, Black newspapers in particular are getting fucking hammered.

Ofelia Torres, the teenage Chicago Public Schools student whose fight against cancer while her father was detained by ICE came to represent the federal government's overreach during Operation Midway Blitz, has died. Brave young woman. I will never forget her. RIP.