When the House and Senate marked up stablecoin legislation, we raised all of these concerns - their anonymity, their nearly perfect design for money laundering. All the barn doors were left wide open. It’s used for crime because that is its purpose. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/07/t...

Tardy #QOTD for July 19, 2023, from Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) by Elizabeth Anderson

Tardy #QOTD for July 18, 2025, is from #EmilyDickinson’s poem “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers - / That perches in the soul - / And sings the tune without the words - / And never stops – at all - ’

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

“Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

How about we worry less, as a society, about whether individuals might be cheating to get a disability accommodation or some help buying food, and more about whether extremely wealthy people and corporations are paying their fair share of taxes?

Reading old court transcripts and, I mean, whomst

“I thought several times this year while reading a particularly good book about what amazing bargains books still are — for $20 or $30 bucks, and often even just $5 or $10 used - you can dive into an entire world created by someone else over years of work, research, and creativity.” #SundaySentence

Tardy #QOTD for July 17, 2023, is from #SmallCountry by #GaëlFaye "Genocide is an oil slick: those who don't drown in it are polluted for life."

Tardy #QOTD for July 16, 2023, from Terroir: Love Out of Place by #NatashaSajé "At 209 1/2 I learned that politeness is not kindness and that wit is not cruelty.”

Tardy #QOTD for July 15, 2023, from Terroir: Love Out of Place by #NatashaSajé #Baseball "I learned to respect a game where the only violence is between a bat and a ball."

#SundaySentence from the wonderful #WhyWeSwim by #BonnieTsui "If I am floating here in San Francisco and you are floating across the Pacific in Tokyo, are we not floating together?"

Tardy #QOTD for July 14, 2023, is from #Gilead by #MarilynneRobinson "I remember walking out into the dark and feeling as if the dark were a great, cool sea and the houses and the sheds and the woods were all adrift in it, just about to ease off their moorings."

Tardy #QOTD for July 13, 2023, is from #SmallCountry by #GaëlFaye "Thanks to my reading, I had broken free from the limits of our street and was able to breathe again; the world seemed bigger now, extending beyond the fences that encouraged us to turn in on ourselves, huddled up with our fears."

Tardy #QOTD for July 12, 2025, is from The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne “A man is quite unworthy of an acquaintance with virtue who weighs her fruit against the price she exacts; he knows neither her graces nor her ways.”

Here’s a list of people that should be in jail.

I'm thinking of the National Guard shooting victims today, and hoping for the best for them. And I am also thinking about the craven politicians who decided to put them in harm's way because they choose to govern by menacing and by staging stunts. May the fates they deserve befall every one of them.

"If your country opens a Department of War and closes the Department of Education then you live in a shithole." -𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝟿𝟾%

#SundaySentence “I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.” Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

It’s crazy to think about the crimes we’re going to learn about after this regime ends. We’re already hearing about Watergate level crimes every week. Imagine what will come out after it’s over. We’re going to need a full accounting of all that’s been done in violation of the constitution.

#WSJ's laughable front page headline "Ex-Vice President's Life of Service Remembered" for Dick Cheney's funeral is a good reminder that not everyone working in government is focused on #service, though they may emptily say that they are.

Went back to the history of the Sicilian Mafia to illustrate something obvious but worth stating explicitly: The Trump administration behaves like an organized crime syndicate running a protection racket, not a representative government www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

"Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob." —FDR, 1936

I can't think of a worse way to teach people to read and understand language, its mechanisms, beauties, and subtleties.

I maintain my position that white collar crime remains the most underprosecuted, and more vigilance on this would have saved us from at least two Trump presidencies before they happened. These guys are sloppy, they're just also stupidly intimidatingly rich. But not richer than the State.

I will march into gunfire for the candidate that treats million dollar white collar finance criminals like ICE treats nannies.

Found the tweet that Joyce Carol Oates bodied Elon Musk with and it's so beautiful in its eloquent, simple take down. So much so he's crashing out trying to prove he reads books now. Put this in the Louvre.

The psychology of the Republican party in a single photo.

Criminal organization attempting to conceal evidence bsky.app/profile/brad...

The soullessness of the Republican party in a single photo.

“70% of wage-earning adults who rely on government programs like SNAP and Medicaid work full-time, many at hugely profitable companies like Walmart and McDonald’s whose low wages are effectively subsidized by tax dollars without any of the blame or paternalistic lectures.”

Use the power of state and local law to slow Trump's crime and abuse spree www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

A great passage from a great novel. The Oppermanns, 1933.

Toledo Blade: 'COVID-19 Brought About a Large Rise in POTS Cases' "My waiting list is longer than it has ever been,” said Dr. Blair Grubb, UToledo Health “We talk about long COVID...we can confidently say POTS is one part of long COVID" www.toledoblade.com/b-partners/u...

Cartoon by @bagleycartoons.bsky.social.

If you were the current version of Daniel Ellsberg and you had today's equivalent of The Pentagon Papers (I think we can imagine what they might be) and wanted to release them, would you go to any of the remaining major American newspapers to do so? Sadly, the answer is definitely not.

Back in 2015-2016, I can remember supposedly good journalists, one of whom happened to go to my alma mater, saying stuff like "Well, the Trump people say that 2+2 = 5" and practically wanting to slit my wrists. Please, journalists, call terrible human beings what they are.

#SundaySentence #SmallCountry by #GaelFaye Translated by #SarahArdizzone "Thanks to my reading,I had broken free from the limits of our street and was able to breathe again;the world seemed bigger now,extending beyond the fences that encouraged us to turn in on ourselves, huddled up with our fears."

#Readers, what's the best sentence you read this week? Share at #SundaySentence! Mine was an easy pick--but also hard since there were so many to choose from in HOPE IN THE DARK by @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social: We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision.

(For the record, I don't believe Biden was addled -- all the "autopen" stuff is RW paranoic nonsense -- but the point still stands: a Dem Party running on automatic will just keep helping people & boosting the economy. A GOP running on automatic devolves toward fascism.)

The fact that a single person so much as contemplated voting for Trump in 2016 was almost enough for me to lose all faith in humanity. He speaks for all of 5 seconds, and one can tell he has the intellect of a gnat and as much humanity as an amoeba.

This is the playbook, folks. If you're not paying attention now and doing something about it, then you're going to have to sit down the rest of your life because democracy is being taken away. Do not be quiet in this moment.

Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, took $50,000 in cash in a bag from undercover FBI agents as part of a bribery scheme. Trump’s DOJ dropped the investigation. The sleaze and corruption is mind-boggling. edition.cnn.com/2025/09/20/p...

I have to always remember the Average American doesnt read books to learn so they have no idea whats happening

"The regime worked very hard to tell the working class of Poland that the resisters were all Jews, paid agents of the CIA or outsiders in some way." fivebooks.com/best-books/t...

A democracy that defends itself Bolsonaro sentenced to 27 years for plotting military coup in Brazil Former president sought to ‘annihilate’ country’s democracy after losing 2022 election Story by Tom Phillips www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

What centrist libs can't seem to internalize is that the US contains a large, longstanding, well-funded political movement that *wants political violence and authoritarianism*. It does not need to be provoked in any way in order to pursue those goals.

Just thinking about how the right made up an entirely fictional left wing character that resulted in so many bomb threats and the like and nobody will face consequences. But people on the left who accurately clocked the victim’s life work lost jobs.

- you clean up that banksy? - sure did, your honour, leaving a perfect, permanent outline, imbuing the work with real fuckin gravitas while making its point better than the artist did himself just like you asked