I noted yesterday that we would do well to describe what role the actions Trump is performing, rather than assuming he is functioning as President. Mostly, Trump is an old man retreating into his lifelong hobbies: construction, cons, and corruption. With lots of golf.

Q: "So to be clear, you're saying you need at least the prospects for a signed deal…or else you would resume bombing Iran?" Trump: "Well, I expect to be bombing because I think that's a better attitude to go in with."

NEWS: The Supreme Court is going to find a way to make it so that LGBTQ+ taxpayers will have their money sent to an institution that can legally reject their kid, won't it? www.advocate.com/politics/nat...

Maddow: "Do we think our servicemen and women are in good hands? Do we think that there is care being taken in terms of what they're risking their lives for?"

Maddow "As thousands more US service members are being sent over there now, even as we speak, & as casualty numbers rise, do we think our servicemen & women are in good hands? Do we think that there is care being taken in terms of what they're risking their lives for? www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYIF...

Imagine a California where families and workers don't just survive, they flourish. That’s the roadmap.  Better schools, housing that’s affordable, cleaner air, and a health care system that sees you as a human being first. Let’s make it happen.

With the help of the Sandy Hook families, The Onion has reached a long-awaited deal to take over InfoWars. We've enlisted the help of @timheidecker.bsky.social, who will be InfoWars' Creative Director. Please stand by for more.

saliency to far-right evangelicalism

The Palantir manifesto has the heritage of the War on Terror written throughout it. Which makes an awful lot of sense considering who staked Palantir at the start.

I have been through that door.

What is the German word for when all three of these women cabinet secretaries absolutely deserved to get fired and yet pretty much all the men cabinet secretaries and FBI director drunks do too. And yet .... 🤔

one thing i haven't seen accentuated about Palantir's corpus: the company believes there is a moral & existential imperative to give *complete* directionality and agency over US military technological apparatus to SV/itself

I want to say this with the calm of a Monday morning but… It seems insanely, appallingly easy for Trump and his family and minions to just outright STEAL ridiculously large sums of money. Exit through the grift shop?

Just horrifying to watch once excellent universities voluntarily destroying themselves.

Saturday, I went to the Grolier Club, 47 E 60th St. Founded in 1884, it’s “the oldest existing bibliophilic club in North America.” It also has free exhibits open to the public, including “Running Through Heaven: Visions of Jack Kerouac,” which I saw yesterday. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grolier... #NYC

Ossoff: "How does American politics really work? It's coin operated. Money goes in, favors come out. It's been running on secret money, corporate money, billionaire money ... all of this gave rise to a depraved president who exploits this rot to empower and enrich himself"

*Yeah, that's a nice iPhone ad, unlike that unfortunate Microsoft Windows incident

"Dear America" letters from people who work at the besieged US Department of Housing and Urban Development: dearamericaletters.org

Happy 80th birthday to the fab Tim Curry, pictured with Rocky Horror creator, Richard O'Brien as Riff Raff & Patricia Quinn as Magenta. I once interviewed O'Brien who said that Frank n' Furter was a reflection of his own diverse sexuality. For moderns who like absolutes -sometimes there aren't any.

He might as well answer in Russian.

The same type of people who'll most likely try to do what the US did during the last draft where they purposefully sent "undesirables" into suicide missions except in this case it's going to be everyone that Christian Fascist White Nationalist death cultists sees as undesirable.

Palantir, the company that is being used to spy on the country/world run by a death cultist that believes denounces "inclusivity and ‘regressive’ cultures," that Palantir?

Perhaps, he's actually anti-war, unless he has utterly failed to realize the existence of the draft led to the end of the Vietnam war.

Here's the relevant passage about reinstating the draft from Palantir CEO Alex Karp's book that was being summarized in that thread on X:

"Energy too cheap to meter," as they used to say about nuclear power before Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima and wannabe-nuclear Iran getting bombed into splinters

Anyone know whether today is a ‘ceasefire’ day or a ‘destroy your civilisation’ day yet?

In the same manifesto, Palantir's owners argued that we need a national military draft, that soft power is over, and that we were too hard on Germany and Japan after World War II. I don't think that company should be allowed to exist anymore.

is it because he's in a cult

Palantir is a menace to society. Its "Manifesto" reads like a very bad Hollywood science fiction dystopia movie. x.com/PalantirTech...

And they remain mystified as to why it's so hard for them to find real lawyers who will work for him... Eastman: disbarred Giuliani: disbarred Chesebro: disbarred Clark: facing possible disbarment Ellis: law license suspended www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...

Good morning Bluesky. Say hello to our resident Orca, in front of the Seattle waterfront during a gorgeous PNW sunset. He was traveling with his family and T034s, T037/T037Bs. Those little ones in the pods are always the most playful ones. We love our whales. This photo should be a poster!

The crucial thing to understand about Peter Thiel is that he adores "The Lord of the Rings" and no one in human history has ever so utterly completely missed all the salient points of what a book is about.

"Ms. Ross-Mahé, age 86, was greeted at the airport by her three adult children. She was still dressed in her prison wear — orange shoes, sweatpants and a gray sweater — covered in stains and holes... "She was in a state of physical shock... www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/u...

@kathryncramer.bsky.social Yeeehah

Literal chat btwn me and my editor after publishing Friday's column: Ed: You need to write about the Gravy Plane next Me: Hang on, let's see if they dig in on this or bail before Monday

“When we think about e-bike crashes and deaths related to e-bikes, the vast majority are cars and trucks killing people on e-bikes as opposed to people on e-bikes injuring somebody else” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

STEFANIK: President Trump didn't call for genocide, Jake. You are putting those words in his mouth TAPPER: 'Your entire civilization will die'? STEFANIK: It's the terrorist regime, Jake. He's targeting the terrorist regime TAPPER: You're changing his words!

#Flock is bad. They are expensive and are allowing police to share data with #ICE #HHS. They run the data through their 💩 #Palantir AI program. Lawsuit filed against Flock Safety over privacy concerns share.google/RsEL3unaMpPv...

Today, a lot of people will be talking about the manifesto that Palantir released. In addition to pouring over what those words mean, I invite you to ground the conversation in what Palantir has already done. Its work with Israel and ICE show us exactly what it stands for.

4/DOJ is investigating former CIA director John Brennan in the Southern District of Florida. The career prosecutor running that investigation reportedly questioned the strength of the evidence & was removed from the case. Former Trump election denial lawyer Joe DiGenova has been brought in.

*Hey, doping people is the hard work of doping people, let's be fair here theins.press/en/inv/291614

"Oh, uhm, Anthropic. Before we re-condemn you as a supply chain threat, how about you scan our War Department systems and fix all the gaping zero-day holes in our cybersecurity" *What next, maybe Dario is accused of 35 felonies and is also appointed to Trump's cabinet and given a private jet

*Dead media studies, often enlightening in unusual, politicized ways

*Well, EU mandarins, you've only had since Earth Day 1970 to figure all this out, so now you better hurry, hurry, hurry

For anyone who's waking up to this Palantir statement, I wrote a guide to the company and the fatuous chauvinism of its "defend the West" cosplay ideology a few weeks ago

Extremely normal and fine for a company to put this in a public statement

"Over the past several months, our community has built a blueprint that other communities can use when federal agencies attempt to move detention infrastructure into their neighborhoods..." blog.hagerstownrapidresponse.com/p/today-in-b...

There is so much market manipulation going on in this administration.

"She’s been a court interpreter for over 20 years, the only one licensed in Texas for Hindi, Punjabi, or Urdu. Her language skills are requested nationwide..." "One of her children recently enlisted in the military... www.texasobserver.org/immigration-...