My based son Saxon stunning the waitstaff by asking for chowder at a sushi place

They are executing unarmed people in the streets for trying to protect their neighbors with the full support of the federal government.

This is why they mask. It isn’t about safety. It’s because they know that if decent people learn what they do, they’ll be social outcasts.

One fruit seller with more courage than ten entire Uvalde police forces put together.

All you had to fucking do was vote for Kamala Harris.

Hard for me to say how this is different from Fox News's entire business model, except that it's less sophisticated. This is transparently and obviously bad — and Elon should ban these accounts — but the spirit here of trading rage for money is pretty much a lot of right-wing media.

and scene

"Every fire thinks it’s a part of God, but lightning is not a promise, a flag is not a shield. Love wants you to believe that there’s a God somewhere who can do your dying for you. There are raptures that won’t come for you and raptures that will." Traci Brimhall, "Lullaby on Mount Moriah"

US army rolling the red carpet to murderer’s plane. I will never forget this image.

Standing and waiting like a pet poodle for a murderous foreign dictator who kills America’s friends and allies, trying to suck up to him by rolling out a show of the armed forces that mostly exist to fight that very dictator.

this is what beit hanoun looked like (from arabi21.com/story/155862...)

It’s every parent’s nightmare, isn’t it? you check your child’s bulletproof backpack and find a picture book about gay penguins

Trump just does not understand why anyone would resist a more powerful adversary, for any reason. "When you're a celebrity they just let you do it" and refusing to pay contractor invoices until they slash the price in desperation is how he understands the world. Ukraine baffles and infuriates him.

My 1st time in Japan, long ago, we saw this guy driving a tiny lil custom truck, singing a phrase through a loudspeaker. The melody was gentle, spiritual. We asked our translator “What’s he singing?” She said “He’s saying ‘baaaaked potaaatoooo.’ It is baked potato truck.” I think about that a lot.

An extraordinary opinion for an extraordinary moment in American history.

people get left behind by the world sometimes, and a just and compassionate society should strive to look after them. But to paraphrase C.S. Lewis on the damned, the loveless and self-imprisoned cannot be allowed to blackmail the universe.

People said this was lazy foreshadowing when it happened 3 months ago, but at least it was accurate

Donald Trump was probably sent by God to punish Americans for our gluttonous abuse of the greatest concentration of wealth in world history.

"In Gaza, human shields are used by Israeli soldiers at least six times a day...Today, almost every platoon keeps a "shawish," and no infantry force enters a house before a "shawish" clears it. This means there are four "shawishes" in a company, twelve in a battalion, at least 36 in a brigade. 1/4

The hype about the ability for ChatGPT to produce Studio Ghibli style images belies the entire basis of the generative AI hype: it relies on wholesale plagiarism and copyright infringement to create content that is only deemed interesting by dint of sheer imitation. It is anti-art and anti-human.

Uh, I believe the point is to be better than the criminals.

Find someone who can do all three

The wildest part is that the dude is like "I guess I didn't know" and "they need to get the vetting done," and not even renouncing Trump. He disappeared your wife! On your honeymoon! This movement is a scourge that will destroy every last piece of your humanity

I really can’t get over that all this, the threatening to invade Canada, the torturing of that German guy with a green card, the soon to happen deaths of millions of people from the dismantling of USAID, is a response to the absolute dipshit question “has wokeness gone too far?”

Being president of America now is essentially just being the judge of a reality show where you not only get to decide who does and doesn’t have rights, you get to assign race, religion, and gender to your enemies for your audience of vindictive boomers

There’s an Urdu name for a “Jack of all trades” that translates to “every talent Lord.” A Korean version is “eight direction beauty.” But my favourite name for someone who tries their hand at lots of different things is the Lithuanian Barbė devyndarbė. It means “Barbie nine jobs”

Eight jailed after posing as electricians to divert power to UK cannabis farms

Ernest Hemingway wrote this in 1935…

AFRICAN GAZE was an exhibition showcasing the weird and wonderful art form that is the Ghanaian movie poster. On Ghana’s Independence Day, here are some of the best... 1/25 - Mrs Doubtfire

If you drive across the Midwest you'll spend literally all day looking at corn and soybean fields. It turns out, we grow so much corn and so many soybeans that we have to go out of our way to find things to do with them 1/x bsky.app/profile/pear...

A message from Zelensky through his actions. Honor and dignity. Some things can only be surrendered. They can't be taken away.

this is what i mean by decadence. your vote is not a gift you give a person you like. it is a responsibility forced on you by citizenship which implicates you in the actions of the state.

sic semper tyrannis

Without going all Martin Niemöller here, I do think that it's bad not to speak up for immigrants, transgender Americans, civil servants, women, Ukraine, and everyone else the MAGA bullies are going after. We're beyond picking and choosing whom to defend. It's time to stand up and speak out.

From four years ago

These were the weeks in 1649 when John Milton was writing “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates”, pointing out that many people love a tyrant because they love “not freedom, but license, which never hath more scope, or more indulgence than under tyrants” #milton

Hard to think of a clearer forecast of the rule of law under a new regime when the outgoing President feels a need to pardon the innocent and the brave.

one thing i’m stuck on is this idea that “masculine” energy means license to act like a chud in public, as opposed to more traditional notions of public masculinity, such as those that put a premium on the performance of integrity, honesty, honor and generosity.

Without saying who or where, I was at an event not too long after all this broke out, talking to an older woman, quite successful, who'd been in the business a long time. And she said something I think about a lot, because it helps explains why people so often disappoint you:

If looking back on all those rejections you received from editors this year is getting you down, remember the words of George Eliot in Middlemarch — "Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure." Never give up! Never surrender!

“. . . This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?” Bluebeard (1987)

I love this early writing career anecdote from Gene Wolfe, who at the start of his career sent the same story to two different magazines edited by the same sci-fi writer (Frederik Pohl!) and received two different responses. ("My point is, of course, that there had been no rewrite...")

we're cooked

This story about an 18 year old Lebanese student arrested by Syrian forces at a checkpoint in 1986 being freed by the rebel offensive Thursday, at age 57, is legitimately tearjerking.

I love it when I look up a word I don’t know and one of the definitions is…another word I don’t know. ‘Oh, a stot. You mean a pronk?’

obsessed that LeGuin wrote a whole essay decryingTolstoy’s “unhappy families” quote