This is some of the most important reporting to come out of the war on Iran so far. And it's nice to see CBS doing it, i.e good reminder that bad leadership doesn't mean that every journalist there instantly stops doing their job.

I mean, this is just sad.

3 ships. The Strait is not open.

We're due for another absolutely bugfuck prime time presidential address so Donald can tell us how we won the iran war and hormuz is opened and the ship captains need to have some balls and just go full blast through musandam.

NEW: Trump accepted $37m worth of donated steel for his WH ballroom project from the Luxembourg-based company ArcelorMittal. Days later, the WH made adjustments to Trump's tariffs that could benefit ArcelorMittal.

no idea where all the steel is going or if it will even get delivered, but it isn't going to build a fucking ballroom. the drawings i saw were of a marble or masonry building and you just don't need that much steel for marble sheer walls in a place like DC. gravity does 99% of the work there.

(Technical note: Obviously, there have been many Christian leaders/authorities/regimes that have enacted wanton violence at different stages of history while invoking their faith, but it's also true that Christian pacifism and theologies that fall in-between are very old, super common beliefs.)

On the one hand, this is a pretty normative Christian belief. On the other hand, wild to hear MTG — a self-described Christian nationalist — take this position in this political moment, when other self-described Christian nationalists/those associated with the movement are arguing otherwise.

Has anyone ever wanted to be cool this badly and missed the mark so far

BREAKING: study shows men love having young ladies around, but men do not like it when mom, wife, or teacher tells them what to do

It basically combining George Lakoff’s "Strict Father Model" of conservative politics, combined with the trauma-bonding dynamics of a high-control group.

It explains everything in three sentences: - loyalty - obedience - resistance to contradictory information - resistance to changing position in the face of harmful actions taken by the high-control organization leader (i.e. health care access cuts, rising prices, attacks against democratic rights)

We have a paper just posted on the arxiv and I haven’t shared it here bc it seems…weird

I try and remember that finding joy is a form of rebellion, and sharing joy is how we build community that endures. Too many of us (looks in mirror) learned it's ok to trauma dump, but sharing joy is bragging and wrong. Share. Your. Joy. (Reminder that you have the bestest cutest doggos also)

Trump last night: “In the meantime our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest.” FDR, June 6, 1944: American soldiers “fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate.” open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

I feel a lot better after this deep dive than I did from all the superficial reassurances during briefings.

Bloody hell. Researchers invented a disease, published two fake papers to see if LLM’s would ingest them and kick them up as fact — and then it broke containment and all the major AI’s bought in. Information pollution. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A ceasefire with still throttled (no more than 15 ships daily) Hormuz throughput well serves Tehran's strategic interest. Iran's main leverage is a closed Strait + time, so building another 2 weeks of pressure on the global economy while not being bombed feels ideal from the Iranian perspective.

I started reading a lot of YA about a decade ago when my eldest was moving into chapter books, and what shocked me was not the smut (of which I found very little) but the graphic violence. There’s always been whump, and teens eat that shit up, but it’s gotten a lot more detailed in non-horror books

Imagine that

This is the difference between lettering, and lettering with a designer's eye. A character is waking up after nearly drowning. The top balloon is okay. It gets the job done. But the bottom balloon really SELLS the watery lungs.

Or that he'll keep doing them after he's elected.

It's worrisome that people keep saying Platner is most electable with apparently no consideration of the main worry: that he's done other things that haven't come out yet which could sink his candidacy. 1

This is now the 4th special motions panel in the DC Circuit that features Katsas and Rao together in 12 months. The odds of that are incredibly low. This is beyond straining credulity. I think the random assignment to the panel in the DC Circuit is fundamentally broken.

There are 4 Republican appointed judges on the DC Circuit out of 11 and Anthropic managed to pull a panel with all Republican appointees with Katsas and Rao. Why does this keep happening?

Katsas and Rao strike again on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. This time, they ruled that Anthropic's supply chain risk designation cannot be put on hold. How the hell are these two on every single major decision in the DC Circuit. It's absurd. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

vance is so personally off putting that even foreign electorates want nothing to do with him

THREAD: The Massachusetts House just advanced a draconian and unconstitutional social media ban bill. "This legislation would have kicked Greta Thuneberg off social media before she organized her first climate protest. How does that make kids safer?" www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2026-04...

this would fix me

We warned that H.R. 1's SNAP cost shift could drive states to make it as difficult as possible to access SNAP, leaving eligible low-income families without the food assistance they need. In Arizona, that prediction appears to be coming true — with a heartbreaking human cost:

Higher education means taking on an average of $39,000 in debt and schools were finding any reason they could to stop protesters from graduating! You want brand new adults to take on a lifetime of debt and not even have a bachelor's degree to show for it.

I'm just today realizing that this right here is the central essence of the cult of Trump. 📌

America's oil execs have pocketed $1.4 billion selling stock during the Iran war, the WSJ reports This cash windfall won’t go primarily toward yachts and private jets, but toward political campaigns and lobbying orgs dedicated to blocking climate policy and fueling authoritarianism

The reason Benghazi became what it was is that Mitt Romney, at the time the Republican president nominee, almost immediately released a statement accusing President Obama of "sympathizing" with the attackers. Then Fox News and the right-wing media hammered it for years.

Like many right wing ideas, it is both reprehensible and incorrect. This was a massive, massive strategic defeat, quite possibly the worst in American history. Trump's genocidal threats were products of weakness and immorality, not strength

Hegseth’s assertion is basically straight-up Nazism.

BERMAN: The Times reports Trump has secured tens of millions of dollars of foreign steel for his $400m ballroom. How do you feel about new wing of the WH being built w/ foreign steel? HARIDOPOLOS: Well, that's news to me. Breaking news. I haven't heard that. Obviously we want to use American steel

New at CBS News - Army survivors of deadly attack in Kuwait dispute Pentagon's account, say unit "was unprepared" to defend itself — this is a photograph of the tactical operations center struck by an Iranian drone on March 1. www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-wa...

Exclusive: The acting director of the CDC has delayed publication of a report showing the covid-19 vaccine cut the likelihood of ER visits and hospitalizations for healthy adults last winter by about half, according to two scientists.

Jeffries: "When you attack diversity, equity, and inclusion, you attack the United States. When they attack DEI, it's not about celebrating merit, they're trying to elevate mediocrity. Just look at who they put in charge of the attack on DEI - Pete Hegseth. This guy can't organize a two car funeral"

one thing I'm noticing as I get older is that all the happiest people are cringe af really seems like an endorsement of cringe

"In order for me to see you virtually you have to say you are in the state of Indiana. I am not telling you to lie, I am just telling you what the rules are."

I'd like to go on record as saying that it is ridiculous that in the year of our lord 2026 if my patient is physically in Kentucky or Ohio that I, as a physician licensed in Indiana, cannot do a virtual visit with them Good god people this seems like a problem with an easy fix

Rep. Randy Fine: "We cannot let a terrorist regime that acts in belief with their faith have their ability to create a nuclear weapon" (Has he ... has he ever listened to Pete Hegseth?)

The FY 2027 NASA budget request hides its science cuts by omitting mission names instead of explicitly zeroing them out. We did the work and found 54 missions cancelled in this proposal. This is another extinction-level event for NASA science. Full list: planetary.org/save-nasa-science

a “ceasefire” that lasted 17 hours and killed 254 people in lebanon is not a ceasefire and referring to it as one is inaccurate

Automatic draft registration: streamlined, efficient. Automatic voter registration: creeping deep state tyranny.