important to revisit the words of the Founding Fathers on this day

A grim reminder this 4th of July: The US has the highest incarceration rate of any independent democracy on Earth, making it a leader in mass incarceration. Far too many people are locked up in the “land of the free.”

reread the Declaration of Independence in advance of the Fourth of July, and the list of all the injuries that the British crown inflicted on the colonists straight up reads like Trump's to-do list www.thenation.com/article/soci...

The only July 4 extravaganza endorsed by Minnesota’s pets: www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Horrifying. A building where over 100 disabled people with developmental disabilities live in New York has allegedly not had functioning AC for three years. www.timesunion.com/capitol/arti...

“.. Members of the group Patriot Front ride the metro on the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence in Washington, D.C.” @reuters.com

Why doesn't Bishop Barron sit down and have a conversation with Mamdani? He's given the time of day and publicity to plenty of other "appalling" people. Seems he prefers his fortress.

[1980s network TV announcer voice:] "Tonight, on Chicago Pope..."

People who are unfamiliar with the UCMJ may not realize that for an active duty major to do this in uniform, the consequence can be court martial and incarceration. All of it is prohibited, but the wearing of the uniform was an intentional choice, and a likely forfeit of both his career and freedom.

People who spiral out overusing LLM chatbots are really just experiencing the kind of brain-damaging stream of unconditional validation that’s always been the norm for the hyper-wealthy, which explains a lot.

The AC is out at ICE's detention facility in Newark, where it currently feels like 107 degrees. Detainees say not even the ventilation is working, and that the water is dirty. Health inspectors recently tried to inspect the facility. They were turned away. www.nj.com/politics/202...

Ah yes, the Catholic Church, famously huge fans of communism and specifically China’s communist government which produced great hits like “the one child policy.” Nothing Catholics love more.

Working people are facing extreme heat this holiday weekend and throughout the summer. Every worker should be able to get home safely to their families at the end of the day. Protect yourself and your coworkers and know the signs of heat illness:

Truly amazing how one of the very, *very* few clauses of the US Federal constitution with a clear and determinate meaning ('All persons born or naturalized in the US, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the US') is being made as one whose meaning could be reasonably questioned.

If you don't care about doing alt text for folks who are disabled and folks who need accomodations, at least do it for when this website is broken. If you're going around right now not seeing pictures, read the alt text and you should be able to understand what's going on, if they did a good job.

I'm not sure there is a more cooked brain on the planet than Joe Rogan's

The air conditioning at the Delaney Hall concentration camp failed today, so now people are roasting inside as temperatures rise above 100 degrees. It's so hot they can't breathe.

The $400m flying bribe has shelves of fake books, some titled “Library”.

After immigration agents detained a nun from his diocese, Brownsville Bishop Daniel Flores called for the reform of protocols allowing the capture of people of faith on their way to church.

every job i see these days is like: LEAD CONTENT ANALYST, Puppy Killing Factory (remote). $350,000 - $500,000. You will edit our internal newsletter (circulation 500). Associate Editor, Nonprofits, Global Good Magazine (in office, NYC). $27,000 - $28,000. Lead ALL of our fundraising efforts!

So ICE waited more than a week to disclose a 85-year-old German man died in ICE custody.

Visited a retirement community at a convent today and y'all, the nuns have a plan for dealing with ICE, should they attack. And I kinda feel like when the Pope is regularly rebuking you, and elderly nuns are strategizing to thwart your gestapo, it kinda makes clear which side you're on.

FETCH THE STEEL CHAIR OF AQUINAS!

We're so starving for consequences we're reading Vatican press releases

i’m so sorry but as a jew i fear this is the catholic version of the classic @averyedison.com post

ultra-trad Catholics when the Holy Father says something they don't like: "He's not speaking ex cathedra here so I get to insult and deride the Pope"

Well, glad we cleared that up. I guess.

NEW from me: Americans are set to lose nearly $250B gambling this year—a record high, up more than 60% since 2019—and that's before counting unofficial betting via prediction markets or crypto Can anything stop America's gambling boom? 🧵

Expect to hear more about this in the coming days, if they keep up this pace.

NEW ARTICLE from me for @fairmediawatch.bsky.social. "Media Won't Stop Psychologizing Long Covid" An overview of this unfortunate propaganda trend in the media since 2020, including where it comes from and what it gets wrong. fair.org/home/media-w...

The profound part of Juneteenth for me is that before this was made a holiday, there was no official celebration of the end of slavery in the United States. When the 13th Amendment passed in December 1865, the legislators who witnessed its enshrinement imagined that the day would be remembered.

Before the shooting, a witness saw two women exit the store: one carrying a single box of diapers, and one carrying the infant child, WREG reported.

Interestingly, the models themselves offer pseudo-mathematical explanations for this effect, claiming that women authors are simply “less salient.”

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

I hope once JD Vance finishes arguing that he’s a better Catholic than the Pope, he takes on the subject of whether he’s better than a bear at shitting in the woods

Main character syndrome is the perception that your life is where you’re the central character. You might undervalue everyone around you, too. You consider these people secondary characters at best. This means you intentionally draw attention to yourself, even in situations that aren’t about you.

Known cases of cops using Flock to stalk people are almost certainly vastly underreported because they largely include only cases in which the behavior was so egregious that it led to police officers being fired, arrested, or both. @jasonkoebler.bsky.social: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP53...

If Waffle House doesn’t make this their new slogan, then capitalism has failed

blessed

BREAKING: The Supreme Court ruled the government can’t charge someone with a felony for owning a firearm stored securely at home merely because the person uses marijuana. With this ruling, the court curbs the ability of elected officials to impose arbitrary and discriminatory penalties.

Justices Gorsuch, Sotomayor, and Jackson concur in Hunter v. US to get pretty close to saying that plea bargaining is unconstitutional. Worth a read.

Given that we’re now desperately trying to undo the mistake of ceding our streets to cars because we realized 100 years too late the environmental and social damage of that choice, this is actually a great metaphor, just not the one he thinks.

Every other thing on that list has serious problems too, but the inclusion of a "real names" mandate in any list like this proves the speaker a) knows nothing about the actual science of online behavior b) is more motivated by punishing Bad People than stopping online abuse

Update: Lauren Tomasi filed a lawsuit against the city of LA and an LAPD officer for a 2025 incident in which she was shot in the leg with a projectile while covering a protest.

Notable to me in the story about the admin weighing suspending habeas corpus & invoking the Insurrection Act-what moved the needle against the Insurrection Act was concern about "public relations." Public pushback, agitation, & outcry can work. Even now. Keep it up. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/u...

KNICKS IN FIVE! Congratulations, New York Knicks 🏆

Incredible. For non-Chicagoans Sigcho-Lopez is one of the more progressive, pro-immigrant legislative reps we have and this is coming days after a burning cross was publicly erected in Grant Park.

A SECOND person died of exposure last winter after DHS dumped them in the middle of nowhere, miles from their home, without notifying their family.