It's hard to articulate the level of anger & rage I have about watching this happen. I first saw weev doxx people I love *TWENTY* years ago. I spoke to founders of multiple social networks about the risk of these people over 15 years ago. I wrote about it all a dozen+ years ago. They let it happen.

sixteen days later,

Gonna get a lot of ‘But Black Dynamite, *I* benefit from climate destroying corporate welfare!’ If ever we crack down on climate destroying corporate welfare

it gets lost in the shuffle of constant corruption and bloodshed but even with the memecoin ALONE, that would make him very clearly the most corrupt U.S. president in history, you could easily argue

I simply refuse to take the U.S. business community seriously

no one should feel economic sympathy for someone who has a second home worth $5 million or more

Literally the Vimes Boot Theory of Economics

the main issue with editing Calvin & Hobbes comic strips as a meme template is that you are probably not as funny as Bill Watterson

The funny (not actually funny) thing is that had Orban won, you know NYT would have pointed to that and gone, "See? Right-wing populism is as strong as ever! If Democrats want to win, they need to move to the right!" It's always "heads, I win; tails, you lose" with these clowns.

Again: for any big liberal donor who wants to funnel millions into fixing this country's politics, the ROI on buying any struggling paper and simply tasking it with doing real reporting on local news is vastly higher than the same $$ given to some group that does mass ad buys every election year.

Hey yesterday I emailed an archivist with, and I quote, “do you know what ‘bundle dated 1190-1200,46’ might be?” And they emailed me back within an hour with the full text of a deed and a translation so yeah, ask a librarian (and archivists)

I'm betting you could get a 5-10 point swing on this by asking about "encourage" or even "require" instead of "enforce" and "reject" instead of "question."

As ever, absolutely fuck Target.

Accountability itself continues to take a beating at the hands of our current roster of federal appellate judges.

this is the only one that actually makes me feel like the 4th panel. damn

“The Pope is weak on crime” is going to rattle around in there for a good, long time

Imagine a study that found kids with ADHD have more visits to doctors than kids without ADHD — and used that finding to suggest ADHD treatment doesn't work. That's the standard of evidence the anti-trans braintrust is willing to accept.

it'd be great if you could get off Substack

a lot of people also describe the barista as looking at you expectantly to tip, which is very similar to the "barista who insists you use the fake-Italian word in order to take your order" complaint of the 90's/00's, by which I mean I have literally never seen it happen and don't believe it does

Not dunking on Zack or this post, I’m just always struck by how easily American journalists will admit that the media shapes public polling and political outcomes when they’re not talking about America.

People will dead ass look you in the eye and tell you this stuff doesn’t matter.

Again there's simply no comparison between the scope, scale, & tone of the JOE BIDEN EPICALLY AND INCOMPETENTLY FAILED IN AFGHANISTAN coverage of August/September 2021 & the "just the facts, very measured" reporting of what's going on with Iran & Trump now.

the left coalition is the exact same around the world

Every day is another well-earned indignity for JD Vance. Unfortunately, far too many of those indignities have negative consequences for the rest of us.

An mRNA treatment for PANCREATIC CANCER was in trials, among many other uses. Choosing to end this research is choosing to sentence millions to an early, painful death

Apropos of nothing, just something I think about a lot: During the worst pandemic in a century, lots of people told a bunch of outrageous lies that caused much, much more death. It was one of the more grotesque moral crimes I've ever witnessed & zero (0) of those involved faced any consequences.

The number of people I’m seeing dismiss the Swalwell revelations with “Well, it’s obviously an op” isn’t surprising, but it is depressing. I know things are bleak, but Eric fucking Swalwell is not the hill you want to die on

The other thing to bear in mind here is that the promise to pardon his whole administration, *specifically at this point over two and a half years before the next election*, is like a big flashing neon sign saying “I AM DIRECTING THEM ALL TO COMMIT CRIMES.”

This applies across the board. It’s one reason why the Epstein cases were so hard to get to court.

Hot damn

A reminder— for most of the trump-vance era: vast majority of stuff you’ve read about or heard about re: the administration’s mass detention & mass deportation regime? The stuff that appalls you? Gotta keep in mind almost all of it you didn’t see live-streamed. The horrors go on behind closed doors…

how much money does the marine corps lose

cis women transphobes are as embarassing as they are revolting because they will declare with their whole chest “I am less capable than a man and I demand you treat me accordingly by lowering your expectations!” girl shut the fuck up there’s no gender advantage in CHESS

The NFL should have Relegation like actual football does.

Just recorded a great pod, and I gotta say ... solar and batteries are going to win. They are the main dish. Everything else is a side dish. In 10 years, you won't be able to find anyone who disagrees with this.

hello today I wrote about something that's been driving me crazy lately: the proliferation of beloved local businesses turning to off-putting AI slop. I sat down with one of them to ask why nygroove.nyc/local-busine...

Love that Silly Con Valley has moved on from "useful innovations" to "monetizing the broken parts of people's brains".

The singular goal of all future US politics is to ensure Trumpism is defeated and cannot again take root here, and everything that serves that end is to be considered and prioritized. It's a holistic organizing principle, from a Green New Deal to Nuremberg 2 to expanding the court to Reconstruction.

Anyway Jeff Zucker, head of CNN, sat on the Apprentice tapes because he didn't want to sabotage Trump. The Media and the Press have a lot to answer for institutionally and the more they act like the critiques are purely bad faith the more the torrent of degrading trust will drag them down

My one-hour special “Rick Steves Iran: Yesterday and Today,” which helps humanize 90 million Iranian people, is streaming free and ad-free at www.ricksteves.com/watch-iran.

I'm bad at math, is 90% a lot?

“It’s difficult to cover him in a way that conveys how unhinged he is. Journalists are trained to be like, ‘OK, what did he say that was newsworthy?’ So you convey that to your audience. But in reality, when you actually watch, you see he's full of hatred, lying constantly, and very incoherent.”

I’ve said it before, but sometimes the pundit class sabotages itself via its own addiction to nuance. It’s hard to write a novel and interesting thinkpiece at this point on the premise that Trump is just a deranged narcissist gangster, even though (and indeed, because) that’s just obviously true.

Worth thinking about how this is demonstrating the opposite of what people tend to claim on here— there's actually a lot of upside to pivoting at least somewhat to the left on Palestine and little to not doing so. Which makes obvious sense since there's actually not much you can do to pivot right.

damn aaron swartz tried to warn everybody about sam altman

so AI is supposed to revolutionize every single aspect of the reality as we know it, but it's something we shouldn't rely on for anything serious or important cause it's so fucking unreliable, do I get that right my dude ?

I really like the Guardian's Kindness of Strangers column, which is just about small, good things - www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Got an email from Adobe saying that they were nearly doubling the cost of my creative cloud subscriptions and adding a bunch of Gen AI dogshit I didn't ask for! If you don't want to get charged you have to log in and downgrade to a "standard" plan that's just the fuckin apps.

every time i write about wage theft i do a double take because it's so crazy corporations steal more than $50 bn from workers' paychecks each year, illegally paying workers less than they earned for their labor that significantly exceeds the combined losses from larceny, burglary, & vehicle theft