Good statement from the US conference of Catholic Bishops

Wow.

They say: We can’t just be AGAINST, we have to be FOR something. We can’t just DENOUNCE people. We have to stress KITCHEN TABLE issues. I say: I’m AGAINST Trump. I DENOUNCE Epstein and his enablers. My KITCHEN TABLE issue is authoritarianism. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

He’s been on a mission from God for decades

NEW: 2020 footage said to be in 2025. A neighbor who keeps reappearing in the same clip, said to be on different days & months. A broadcast from elsewhere suggested as Portland. How Fox News misled its viewership -- which may have included the president. www.propublica.org/article/port...

Word.

Love the phrases "Cognitive Cost" and "Executive Function Theft" to pinpoint how exhausting it is to be constantly bombarded with apps telling you to use AI. I've been calling it "Corporate pressure" and "Force feeding". It's quite a lot right now. Seems a bit desperate tbh.

💯

“For years, Christian supremacist ideology was coursing through American conservatism. Now it—& its antisemitism—is out in the open, in the halls of power & scaring Jews.” 11/4/25 (*Incredible* article discussing Tucker, Nick Fuentes, Heritage, Doug Wilson & his protégés, Yoram Hazony, & NatCon.) 1/

Will you fight

Yes, Mr. President: You’re right. We do have “the worst health care” of any major country. Despite spending twice as much per capita, we are the only major country not to guarantee health care to all as a human right. The solution: Medicare for All.

It is embarassing that only a news outlet from the UK has an accurate headline while our local papers keep saying "reports" without specifying a liar made that report. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

“The current state of American capitalism isn’t sustainable. It doesn’t deserve to be sustained. And the best way to avoid an American version of “eat the rich” is to fix the current “let them eat cake” distortion of capitalism into which we’ve fallen.” www.thebulwark.com/p/let-them-e...

ladies and gentlemen, Bill Kristol is now arguing for a massive wealth redistribution because he sees the current capitalist system as heading toward social chaos

Identifying flaws in GenAI unfortunately offers a pretext for claims that perfecting the product is just a matter of time & money. So pointing to chatbots’ role in,say, suicides can only go so far if we don’t also identify the systemic, irresolvable lack of Gen AI’s human commitment bc math has none

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...

You cannot run the basic infrastructures of a functioning society- healthcare to education-on systems that cut out human empathy & negotiation. So we have to reassert over and over again that the problems aren’t glitches or errors—even big ones. The problems are fundamental, systematic, endemic.

One of the things that kills me about all this is that it’s just, like, maybe ten guys.

“I’m greedy. I’m pissed. These guys are fucking in charge, and I just want everybody to be like, no, let’s get ruthless,” @timmiller.bsky.social says about Democrats in Congress. “I’m hungry I’m voracious. I want more."

In 2008, a blogger named Curtis Yarvin called for a future president to kill foreign aid programs as part of a plan to replace democracy with dictatorship. Now 600,000 people are dead—and 14 million will die by 2030, according to the Lancet. This is the running death toll of tech fascism.

We are at most a few years away from the mainstream media becoming controlled top to bottom, with a few very exceptions, by ultrarich conservatives and their hirelings. trib.al/DB2iRVW

Epistemicide

"Trump had been a front man, all bluster and ratings, whose singular talent was holding attention while other hands moved through the machinery of government. He had been useful precisely because he was impossible to look away from, because his vulgarity was so complete it became camouflage."

If you look at Trump's actions through the eyes of "what would I do if I was a criminal organization" it all makes a lot of sense.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present Karma?

This makes me think of a very interesting essay on cognitive dissonance by the philosopher John Gray called ‘Humanism and flying saucers’ which discusses cognitive dissonance in a very interesting manner. I referenced that essay in a piece I wrote awhile back: vdgasjournal.com/2025/06/21/w...

MAGA Christians are the least Christlike people on the planet.

I can’t say it enough: U.S. culture is scam culture. It pervades everything we do. We don’t notice it because it’s the water we swim in. A party would do well to remind everybody how awful this is and propose to fix it.

When 2000 years of extreme right Catholic Integralism raises its ugly head at Maga Project 2025 Heritage. It was inevitable. A similar clash is coming bewteen Leonard Leo Catholic Integralists and Evangelical Christian Nationalists. Very different goals. archive.ph/EW7wy

I'm not a Christian, and haven't been one for a long time, but i've always found these words and what they're supposed to mean to be the fundamental core of Christianity, even over and above the Sermon on the Mount, and I truly don't understand people who miss this.

dissatisfied by the New York Times coverage of Zohran Mamdani? great news! I talked to the guy Thursday about his campaign’s success at bringing community together beyond this election, and contextualized how it’s potentially shifted youth engagement with politics by simply listening @teenvogue.com

I am 64 years old and FOR MOST OF MY LIFE two things were true: - fascists were trying to take over the USA - we were beating them Those creeps are beatable. We beat them for decades. In the 30s they tried a form of MAGA and US beat them. The 50s? McCarthy purges. US beat them. Do. Not. Doom.

“It’s We the People in whom all power resides,“ former federal @judgeluttig.bsky.social‬ says. “If the Supreme Court will not come to the aid of the country, then all that’s left is for we, the people, to take back the country through elections and protests. We have no choice.“ #Velshi

What he said Part 2: 💯 🎯

Remember: The fundamental issue isn’t the size of the government or how to make government more “efficient.” It’s who our government is for. Should it work mainly for big corporations and billionaires — or for the rest of us?

How to answer a loaded question. (This is Joe Neguse, Congressman for Colorado's 2nd District.)

America has no idea what's about to hit them. "Young Republicans" are fully steeped in neo-Nazi edge lord talking points. Fuentes is the present and future of the GOP. After Trump, this is the new form of MAGA. The establishment isn't built for this fight. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

May the odds be ever in your favor

25. Most of all, they hated that Joe Biden threatened to stem the tide of consolidation. Capital will concentrate if left alone. Biden didn’t leave it alone. He knew that the unchecked concentration of money and power spells doom for democracy. He was right. We know it. Look what’s happening now.

What he said: 💯 🎯

We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.

Meiselas: Right now, this idea of the bully has been glorified, and we have to disabuse people of that notion and say, “Nah, that’s weakness.” Stop blaming your problems marginalized groups. We have to proudly support communities that have been under attack—’cause they’re human beings, dammit.

It's odd/amazing that grunge, a genre known for distorted electric guitars and a loud sound, had some of its greatest moments on Unplugged. I didn't appreciate Alice in Chains until I saw their performance there. Pearl Jam, STP, and Hole also had amazing moments on the show.

1. Will Bunch’s recent column in the Philadelphia Inquirer has stayed with me, because it weaves various threads of history and politics into a clear and compelling tapestry with which ordinary people can act. www.inquirer.com/opinion/trum...

"The polycrisis is a Western-centric narrative masquerading as global... The conversation on polycrisis rarely, if ever, acknowledges the agency of the non-Western world or the solutions it has offered" www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/p...

My students in Burma / Myanmar are having a tough time at the moment. So in class, we've been listening to this nugget of utter joyousness from Yo-yo Ma and the Silkroad Ensemble. I love the interactions, the sense of shared delight. I feel like a lot of us needed this today.