My in-laws have The Jetsons on, and in this humorous episode, Mr. Spacely replaces George with an intelligent robot, and when a dejected George asks the robot what he should do to provide for his family, the robot presents George with a roulette wheel

Chief Justice Roger Taney, a Marylander, died aged 87 on the day before Maryland voters voted to abolish slavery in 1864 Civil war diarist George Templeton Strong wrote “two ancient abuses & evils were perishing together.“ archive.org/details/diar...

Plumbing the 1930s for marketable winter disciplines youtu.be/fYW1XweZOME

I'm sorry the guy changing the rules on the fly is named what

This timeline demand is transparently about Donald Trump’s birthday and/or July 4th. Pure distilled black-tar vanity www.bbc.com/news/article...

my in-laws have Murder She Wrote on, and this poor actor they asked to actually do some Japanese calligraphy on-screen and he’s just out there doin’ his best:

a few years ago I read this book about Touissant Louverture complicated figure. Like many Black freedmen in Saint-Doningue, he himself was a slave owner, he committed some acts of serious brutality, made himself president for life, and went on to implement a de-facto slave system

This prompt is reminding me the original Muppet Show has some out-there hosts including danseur Rudolf Nureyev and a Swiss avant-garde masked mime group called Mummenschanz

"Reagan could run as a Democrat in 1866"

can't help but wonder what the "MLB AI personas gimmick" training data set is

Everyone currently circling the wagons to defend Jeffrey Epstein & those who associated with Epstein:

My in-laws’ house was built c.2001 and yet somehow the kitchen still had exactly this vibe:

Somehow this meme going around the last few days is a fake glam-up (changing Walmart to Target and making the presumably AI mugshot whiter) of an actual news story from December 2015 fox8.com/news/florida...

this…is really extraordinary Idk anything about Julie Le beyond what context I can glean from these transcripts, but it seems *she wanted to get detainees out and privately believed her role volunteering at DoJ was to interfere with ICE’s hard commitment to ignore the law*

I know DC is still digging out of the snowstorm and the roads aren’t clear. But someone needs to head over to Matt Ygelsias’s house and give the guy a wedgie. This is a wedgie-emergency. He is begging you to give him one.

setting apart for a moment whether Mike Johnson's "biblical appeal for border security" has any theological merit, his plea that "it's not bc we hate the people on the outside. It's bc we love the people on the inside" is just factually wrong it's obviously bc they hate the people on the outsite!

Lol yup this would be my anti-MAHA talking point There‘s poop in that there milk bsky.app/profile/saba...

changing tack to a grounded biography of Karl Marx I don't know much about Marx, curious about how someone who, seems to me, is unavoidably shaped by his time in the first half of the 19th century ended up perceived as this timeless forward-seeing visionary (or monster)

my "we do not snatch or kidnap people, or violate basic due process" FAQ is raising many questions already answered by our FAQ www.ice.gov/immigration-...

Somehow this meme going around the last few days is a fake glam-up (changing Walmart to Target and making the presumably AI mugshot whiter) of an actual news story from December 2015 fox8.com/news/florida...

After just reading this, I like how during the early phases of the 13th Amendment debate, Charles Sumner wanted to put a version of the 1789 French Revolution Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the senate was flatly like “absolutely f cking not, no French stuff“

there are whole law firms, especially in Vets' Benefits / Bd. of Vets' Appeals / Court of Appeals for Veterans Affairs cases, whose whole existence depends on the Equal Access to Justice Act if EAJA is available for bullshit detentions, lawyers could legit earn their bread telling ICE to get f cked

lmao omg this is the guy who This American Life interviewed on Dec. 19! He lives in the immediate vicinity of ICE's Portland facility, and a clowncar of the worst far-right podcasters who congregate there singled him out, and then he unwittingly leaned into the "leader of Antifa" thing as a joke

totally consistent with Andrew's publicly-known misconduct as UK Special Trade Representative, including misdealings in Azerbaijan, Libya, and Kazakhstan, and setting up a bank in Luxembourg www.arabnews.com/node/2055996... www.bloomberg.com/news/article... www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news...

This piece is even worse than the headline suggests It paints an insider club of misogynistic middle aged power-players as a group of fallen soldiers of MeToo, and Epstein as their fixer guru, but I’m also utterly baffled at the editors running the framing that this behavior is *bygone*!! WTF

the existence of plant patents is weirdly soothing, like, oh yeah you can keep your AI and chimeric T-cell therapy, we're over here making new fruit and taking pretty pictures

Scouting has long sat in tension between a Walz vision of masculinity (the essence of the good citizenship & personal virtue the movement professes) and a Hegseth vision (junior military) As a proud former Scout (/ nerd), I could hardly be more delighted if Scouting cut itself loose of the military

As of 2026 there are something like ~700 immigration judges in the Executive Office for Immigration Review If there were 100x that number of judges (~70,000), each of them, reviewing one case every two days, would be able to review every undocumented immigrant in about a year

my "we do not snatch or kidnap people, or violate basic due process" FAQ is raising many questions already answered by our FAQ www.ice.gov/immigration-...

Not true legally, but bonus, also not true factually

Folks, this is not an issued United States patent, it's a pending application Kotaku links to an underlying article from an outlet called VGC, which has misinterpreted the legal documents patents.google.com/patent/US202...

Trump2.0 is making me feel maybe the Federal Tort Claims Act should be amended to allow defamation claims against the government

what the..

listening to my toddlers' streaming channel, and I actually find it very charming and of-its-time that the boy in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) sings slightly offkey, and they just decided to go with it www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Aic...

"space is cold, therefore it should be easy to cool stuff in space" sounds intuitive, but is extremely the opposite of correct the "data centers in space" thing would require launching _many_ orders of magnitude more stuff than has ever been put into orbit, and because ~reasons~ 🤷‍♂️

An essence of fascist ideology is its base of support recognizes that it is fundamentally tyrannical, but they believe themselves to be the protected in-group

If a university student group had celebrated Charlie Kirk being killed, complete with a graphic made from an actual picture of the killing, the whole lot of them would have been expelled before the ink on the digital story was dry.

what the..

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m sure Trump would love to tear the Kennedy Center down (and maybe he could do some real damage, eg, to interiors), it’s nestled between Rock Creek Parkway, the Watergate, and the Saudi Arabian embassy, so ppl would definitely have something to say about a major demolition

Bates’ pre-14th-amendment 1862 attorney general‘s opinion repudiating Dred Scott is interesting in view the Birthright Citizenship argument He attacks others for imprecise language (what does “citizenship even mean?”), and reduces “citizen” to its simplest formula:

This now-former xAI engineer says in a Jan. 15 interview that xAI coders are strongly encouraged to use ⚡other companies'⚡ generative AI, and xAI has put "AI agents" on their org chart (outnumbering humans 20 to 1), creating confusion in management about who really does or doesn't exist

Few public figures have been as publicly committed to a staunch and fully intentional far-right worldview as Stephen Miller in my lifetime.

One thing the Epstein emails have me dwelling on is the conceptual divide between “academia” and “public intellectualism” Ppl whose first interest is in ideas, discovery, truth, and (sure) a secure tenure position are not Epstein’s ken; it’s the people who wished to be known as Great Men

To what extent was Jeffrey Epstein the sui generis cog who linked a network of billionaires, public intellectuals, corporate officers, and politicians? To what extent is his infamy just a window into that world which carries on without him? His crimes may be sui generis but I lean to the latter

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Very Swiss that there are two competing constitutional amendments on the ballot which would enshrine a constitutional guarantee of a supply of physical currency, and both are polling almost exactly even at ~54% (if they both hit 50% there’s is a subsidiary vote on the ballot on which one prevails)

Apparently, too many sci-fi movies humans at war with machines for survival & world domination, not enough movies about different factions of machines at war with each other to scam humans

good lord, some of the overt acts alleged are just Don Lemon asking the pastor some questions