My phone has full optical character recognition of 47,000 photos. I can search individual words. I cannot search three words in quotes. Computers used to be powerful. That power meant something. It was power for making your life better in sovereignty to your own interests. And now we have this.

If the justices feel like they deserve an extra half-million a year to keep up with their peers then they should be paid it by the government and not have their “we live alongside billionaires” money laundered through book deals. This applies to all of them.

I have this sense of the evil bastard visualizing his network and thinking “you’re an academic so I’ll play two politician cards and one finance guy.” (There don’t seem to be too many creative artists in that extended network — actors, musicians, novelists, etc. — which is interesting to me.)

If nothing else comes out of the backlash to Trumpism, let it be a renewed commitment to small-r republicanism. This should be embarrassing. It should be shameful. You are a free citizen of a free republic, act like one for God's sake.

a lot of people regretting the 'this shoulda been an email' advice rn lol

One of the funniest parts of these Epstein emails is how astonishingly fucking illiterate these elite slimeballs are. Their sincere minds are the ur-dreck that dril channeled as comedy.

i actually think this read doesn’t quite make sense, or at least isn’t very clear. (1) asked where he’s spending Thanksgiving, Epstein says “eva” (presumably Eva Andersson-Dubin) (2) asked who else is “down there” he lists people including Trump. Really unclear imo

I think some people (not GLHM) are overreading the email — I think it’s talking about West Palm Beach — and I agree with GLHM that Epstein was a fabulist and pathological namedropper. People in prominent positions should probably not go out on a limb over this when there’s so much solid awful shit.

The attorney general and the FBI director, a manosphere podcaster bro, pulled into the situation room a member of Congress best known for getting kicked out of a Beetlejuice musical for drunkenly giving her date a handy, in order to pressure her about the president's child sex trafficking scandal.

“our followers on social media and our readers across the Internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be.”

♪ #nowplaying Too drunk to fuck - Nouvelle Vague (Nouvelle vague - 2004) https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip

QANON CULTIST IN 2017: "In this 1,879 page thread I will unravel the byzantine system of codewords and phrases the global elite use to mask their pedophile cabal." JEFFREY EPSTEIN WRITING AN EMAIL AT THE SAME TIME: "helo its me jeff had fun cmmitting sex crimes wit u lst weeknd"

Something the US needs to accept too is that without a large-scale correction imposing consequences on a large number of people, the crisis of governance here will continue indefinitely

an exhibit for that last part

Coincidentally this week I finally finished listening to Philip Harland's "Cultural History of Satan" lectures -- a course he still teaches -- which goes from Mesopotamian precursors right up to Robert Johnson at the crossroads and modern satanic panics: www.philipharland.com/Blog/religio...

oh it’s here too (though it takes a camera to bring it out)

ok one last post -- oldheads are always going to "why is the web dying.... how can we get the kids invested in the free and open web" bro the kids can't read. that's why the web is dying. first things first

I think this ties into the modern X/FB phenomenon of "posting pictures of words" not to get around the character limit but because particular pictures of words carry some in-group symbolic value (in the linguistic sense) even if it's not clear the poster or in-group comprehends the actual words.

fwiw I had to make a very very tight transfer at Heathrow last year for the first time (delayed departure then waiting for a gate on landing) and even though it was 6am and I was unfamiliar with the setup I JUST FOLLOWED THE PURPLE PATH

♪ #nowplaying The flower called nowhere - Stereolab (Dots And Loops - 1997) https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip

second verse on this is one of the funniest things i've ever heard

IIRC the current Dutch system is basically two parallel systems that can be best described as “healthcare for when you’re basically healthy” and “healthcare for when you’re sick” because it recognises that treating severe and/or chronic illness costs more than almost any individual can afford.

the real alpha version of the Iliad

That we don’t know who wrote this or who lobbied for it and that it gets no serious debate but has massive impacts on people’s livelihoods sums up the failure of Congress (esp the Senate) as a democratic legislative body.

The massacre of the ethics/safety teams and the internal reorientation away from anything that hinted at broader purpose (with exception for the more profitable bits of natsec) is a story that has yet to be properly told.

I’ve been thinking about this a little all day. If you assume the characters are no younger than 50 (remembering “40 years ago” in 1967) then they are basically playing their parents’ generation and there was actually a big generational difference. www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHF...

2026 has the 250th celebrations and the men’s World Cup; had Harris won against the odds that would have created a national civic pride effect going into the midterms. But both of these things are going to suck in ways that make people feel cheated out of something they would have really enjoyed.

I should really ask explicitly about the story of my paternal grandparents’ courtship while there are people to ask, but I know my grandma was disowned by her middle-class family for marrying beneath her status and that my grandad pushed their belongings 8 miles in a handcart to their first home.

not enough chatter about how frequently members fly and how attacking airport capacity directly affects them in a way that cutting SNAP does not

It's so cool that when the right person lands a direct hit on ol' Elon he can't stop from lighting up and spinning his bowtie like a carnival game clown

If there were ever a year to run on “fuck civility, my opponent is a fucking moron” then 2026 is that year.

oh so these people do pay attention to who politicians follow on social media, they just don’t care that the vice president follows a bunch of actual neo-nazis

[The only seas (emotional) in America are the great lakes, the lower Mississippi, and the Puget Sound.]

Guy Garvey 6 Music appreciation mini-thread: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRyO...

Every Ice facility should be presumed to be an Abu Ghraib / an 8th amendment violation factory run on the shits and giggles of xenophobe sociopaths.

The thing about Broadview is that it is boomerang theory Abu Ghraib and not the only one and if you could borrow a few tanks to bust inside it would be heroism.

Happy 423 years of us! 🎉 📚 The Bodleian Libraries opened for the first time on 8 November 1602... This means, we're older than the refracting telescope (1608), the publication of Shakespeare's Hamlet (1623) and Sir Isaac Newton's apple (1666)! 😅

A thing the DC trade press will not do because it relies upon access is say which senators are smart and which senators are stupid. Tommy Tuberville is (obviously) stupid. Marsha Blackburn is (obviously) stupid. John N. Kennedy is very smart and has pretended to be stupid for so long to fit in.

The youth won’t know this but before smartphones and popsockets and adhesive cardholders and elastic selfie bands mobile phones had two lil holes at the bottom to attach a strap and there was a thing from Japan where you threaded charms and ornaments onto the straps and I always knew it as strappu.

I think if you make art by any description you should read Vincent’s letters, they are on a website and it is not a long undertaking in terms of words but you will feel a lot of things and should take breaks.

web.pitas.com in 2004 https://web.archive.org/web/20040930234650if_/http://web.pitas.com:80/valueape

The detail on these is gonna get destroyed by the image compression on this app but it was fun to make them, especially putting the subway lines in.

Apart from anything else, "Abigail Spanberger" is a great name. If you're lucky enough to have a surname that's a dactyl and you don't give your children a first name that's also a dactyl you're wasting everybody's time. Hats off in particular to Mr & Mrs Roosevelt for coming up with "Franklin D".

😎😎😎😎 GOOD THINGS CAN STILL HAPPEN 😎😎😎😎

election night summary: nothing bad can happen. it can only good happen.

As an immigrant I am endlessly curious about the US. I think that’s also true for a lot of second-generation kids. I think that’s true for minorities. And there is a lot of energy in simple curiosity.

Watching Mamdani's victory speech, I'm struck by his—and his campaign's—unabashed vision of the US as an immigrant society, a culture built from the ground up from diversity. It is a complete rejection and reversal of the search for a white-washed homogeneity that the political right projects.

He has declared war on Trump and made people excited about being New Yorkers. I’m already proud to live here and my god, that was the best NYC pride, don’t fuck with us speech I’ve heard in my lifetime

Tonight's even more proof the mainstream reporters who are still on Twitter are suffering from a brain problem akin Havana Syndrome that is preventing them from accurately doing their jobs. They are being cooked alive by a snuff-focused apartheid algorithm.