From an email to one of our faculty members.... Not even Plato can escape censorship at Texas A&M!

Lost Jan. 6 Rioter Still Searching Capitol Building For Mike Pence https://theonion.com/lost-jan-6-rioter-still-searching-capitol-building-for-mike-pence/

Apple Photos Reminds Man He Was Nude In Capitol Building 5 Years Ago

my 75yo mother told me last night that she’s planning to delete Instagram and Facebook because she’s sick of not being able to tell what’s AI and what’s not, and I genuinely don’t think tech companies have reckoned with this kind of move as an actual possibility

Whoops

Let's break the Internet with this today.....

On the face of it, the Venezuelan regime has played Trump for a sucker. The details are murky but it appears that now-acting president Rodriguez convinced Rubio that she would accept a US take-over and that the US was given the location of Maduro (and his wife).

The Epstein Files Transparency Act is a law, passed by Congress on November 19 with an overwhelming vote. Complying with it was not optional. The Department of Justice did not comply. I want to make sure this is very clear.

Mamdani rescinded every executive order issued by Eric Adams after Adams's indictment, but still the "New York Times" is focusing exclusively on two of those orders that had to do with Israel. There is someone singling out Israel here. And it isn't Zohran Mamdani.

“Something must be done!” “Term limits are something.” … “Term limits must be done!”

Every major free speech org has said the IHRA definition suppresses constitutionally protected speech. Every major human rights group has said it suppresses legitimate advocacy. The scandal is that Adams adopted the definition, not that Mamdani rejected it. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/04/n...

Wrote a thing: The carnage associated with fossil fuel is why speeding the transition to renewables is good for international stability as well as everything else. Fossil fuel is inseparable from violence, and dependence on it it has created a brutal world order....

DOJ is still in violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Ok I really am working out the logistics of permanently shuttering my twitter account - but my god is this funny.

The wave of skeets about the FOXification of CBS are a little bemusing to me. I mean, yeah, it’s awful. But all you ppl who are professing shock — are you actually shocked? Because my level of shock would be accurately represented by the old Casablanca clip. This was both predictable, and predicted.

Elon Musk promised a lot of things by 2025 - colonists arriving on Mars - xAI achieving AGI - Tesla robotaxis serving half the U.S. - completely driverless robotaxis - a Tesla Roadster demo - DOGE cutting trillions none of them happened mashable.com/article/elon-mus...

I am determined as God is my witness to start the Trump fake hand conspiracy theory. His hand isn't showing signs of an undisclosed illness. It's a fake painted Halloween costume hand because his hand was already removed. It's time.

And actually--Comet Pizza was a page out of a playbook that started with daycare decades before. In 1983, a California mom accused her son's childcare provider of subjecting children to Satanic rituals--like flushing them down toilets into secret basements where they were then filmed for porn. 1/🧵

“Self-deport” is a whitewashed way to describe “fleeing the country under the threat of state violence.” I agree with Maria here — it’s important to call that exactly what it is.

Check it out while it’s still legal! www.trumpkennedycenter.org

Apparently my REI package won’t be arriving for a year?

1991: The United States thinks it has decisively won the Cold War against Russia. 2025: The United States' foreign policy is being dictated by Russia.

This piece is a great illustration of how the long-term effect of Trump’s destruction of US institutions won’t be felt in a dramatic market collapse, but rather in permanently worse economic conditions, and lower prosperity. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... So long, American exceptionalism

And avionics. And medical devices. And, and, and.

“Instead, what appears to have happened is a lot of empty talk, no real significant change, and backlash that is causing real harm. This is the worst of all possible worlds.”

1) these are all answerable questions 2) we don’t get 50% cost savings out of the deal 3) we almost certainly do get significant cost savings out of some of the ways to move to universal coverage

Oh dear, how awkward...the guy who coined the term "American Dream" gave the last word of his book to a young immigrant girl & said the main lesson of his day was that people who'd amassed great wealth were not "the wisest leader to follow nor the best fitted to propound a sane philosophy of life."

"If you don't fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.” -James Mattis as Secretary of Defense testifying before Congress in 2017. Succeeding with soft power is greatly preferable—and a lot cheaper—than having to address something with hard power.

Merry Christmas from ??? and Melania….

The government has broad authority to control admission but courts have held *repeatedly*, over more than half a century, that the First Amendment bars the government from denying visas to foreign citizens simply because it dislikes what they have to say. 1/ www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/b...

Okay, so at the request of the lovely @trance.bsky.social , I'm going to tell a story about what happens when a shitty person is "just joking", and then discovers there are consequences. AKA That Time Kat Started An Antifascist Hallway Riot In The Third Grade. Grab your beverage of choice.

I did not have “the Rhode Island Attorney General namesearches into my mentions” on my dance card but I do appreciate the poster’s spirit

I'm not saying something that people don't already know. But it's worth making the issue explicit. We have an elaborate jurisprudence of probable cause, rooted in explicit strictures in the constitution that places big limits on what police can do to you. Those limits may be honored in the breach...

This is critically important. Democrats need to pass it if they retake Congress. Trump will veto it. So pass it again. Campaign on it. Given current polling, corruption of the FBI, and the brutality of ICE and BP, there’s no better time to say, “Federal police are not above the law.”

Has anyone even discussed this in the mainstream media? It just seems soooo damning and it's been pretty much ignored as far as I can tell. Did I miss it? www.snopes.com/fact-check/t...

Times have been tough in this Ohio town since they closed the old sex crimes redacting factory. So when Trump, Bondi, and Blanche redacted Trump’s name from hundreds of documents describing sex crimes, they finally had something to cheer about. But now the woke mob wants to take that all away.

Today I learned Rahm Emanuel is teasing a presidential bid. At least an inadequate ego isn’t one of his many faults.

Matt Maddock, a Republican State Representative in Michigan thinks that opposing pedophilia is a "left-wing scare tactic." His reply was in response to a question asking him to justify his vote against a bill banning child marriage.

Satire is dead.

This Yglesias piece in the NYT is horrifically bad. Almost every "fact" it cites is provably false. At best it is cocktail party banter from a pundit who knows nothing of energy. At worst, it was cut/paste from oil industry talking points. So, a rebuttal: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/o...

Here's a quilt of Volume 4 of the Epstein document dump. Gives you a 10,000 foot view of the redactions. that's 2,704 docs.

A good point. Malicious compliance? Or just incompetence? … never bet against incompetence.

I mean this almost entirely without irony; post-Trump, the default rhetoric regarding Trump's second term should be that it was illegitimate according to the plain text of the 14th amendment, not to mention the subsequent Watergate-a-Day Calendar lawbreaking. (1/2)

MY 4-YEAR OLD: *calmly, while coloring a picture of the Grinch* If baby grinches die, we can eat them. If they’re clean. That’s ok

Chicago is naming another snowplow. You know what to do. www.chicago.gov/city/en/dept...

My God.

Workers at Chicago’s Mauser Packaging Solutions say they were harassed by Bovino and ICE on their strike picket line today. The workers have been fighting for immigration protections in their union contract www.teamsterslocal705.net/mauser-teams...

I’m struggling to come up with a good analogy to illustrate how vapid it is to say that fentanyl is a “weapon of mass destruction”. It’s very Humpty Dumpty, anyway.