RIP Gordon Wood, whose “Creation,” p.562, is worth a reread any day, esp. today: “the Federalists fixed the terms for the future discussion of American politics …. and created a distinctly American political theory but only at the cost of eventually impoverishing later American political thought.”

I have been using my Merlin app like its 2016 Pokemon Go ..wandering around the parking lot at my work (we are surrounded by a field and an unused train track with lots of vegetation plus drainage ditches)...and oh yeah heard this bad boy last night..

"The idea is to treat primary care as a public utility: pool the money that public and private payers already spend on it, have a state authority administer that pool and pay practices directly, rather than through dozens of separate insurance contracts."

Just accidentally came across a runaway ad for a West African man named Saurah, who fled Anne Arundel County* in 1778, and was suspected by his enslaver to have joined up with [what I interpret as presumably] the Continental Army at Valley Forge

Know what’s fun? We are now further in time from World War II (81 years since 1945) than WWII was from the American Civil War (76 years from 1865-1941) This is not, in fact, fun.

The Economy being good means nothing to me because it's a measure of how confident assholes feel in their line going up, and everything they do to make the line go up hurts me and devastates everyone who's doing worse than me. This isn't fucking rocket surgery.

so like lemme weigh in on this as someone who is more financially comfortable than many in my generational cohort: everything I have gained seems precarious and temporary because I know the people with real money will take it all from me the second they get an opportunity and no one will protect me.

Had Wilkinson eaten a bullet 250 years ago, it would have been a net benefit for the United States (and to our history of the RevWar, which relies too heavily on his absolutely biased and lying journals)

Wikipedia gives her a glamor shot (the one on the left) which is very funny.

the silence of the OKC crowd is balm to my sin-sick soul

SAY THAT TO THEIR CUTE LITTLE FACES. I DARE YOU!!! 😭😭😭

very big numbers are hard to scale in the context of government expenditures. for scale, this proposed fund for compensating Trump allies is almost exactly as expensive as a San Antonio class amphibious warfare/helicopter multirole amphibious combat ship. We only have twelve of those.

The Guardian published a list of top 100 novels as voted on by various authors and critics. I turned it into a network to foreground literary tastes and tastemakers. chriswarren.info/novels-worth...

yeah Hasan Piker op ed interview in the nytimes....this is how you fight wage theft not. blithely saying it is ok to shoplift (and put yourself in danger of being in the maws of our justice system)

Beloved Jude the Obscure Butcher's Crossing

As family homelessness hits record highs, school districts are offering parking lots as safe sites for students and their families to sleep at night

Getting extremely angry because the sea isn't the color of wine.

guy who is mad at Nolan’s Odyssey because it depicts the sea as blue instead of wine-dark

“this Court has so perverted the VRA and the 15th Amendment that they serve almost the opposite of their intended function. These provisions were adopted for the…purpose of guaranteeing the political rights of African-Americans. After Callais…they function to limit black political power.”

Ah, my favorite challenge: Get the Name of the University Located in Bloomington, Indiana Correct Challenge (Impossible)

In the future, saying someone’s “painting the reflecting pool” will mean a con job is happening.

Dear Bluesky...you should not have to miss out on how the argument on twitter over how "polytropos" in Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey has reached the point that glorious nerds are responding in blank verse.

🗃️ The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in WWI quickly learned in 1917-1918 that the best approach for treating "shell shock" was based on convincing patients that their reaction to combat trauma was normal, and giving them a positive expectation that they would get better.

There have been very few airborne bombings by US aircraft on US soil. The first was the 1921 Tulsa Massacre of Black owned businesses. The most recent was the MOVE bombings in 1985, of Black occupied apartments in Philly.

"this would be really bad and so, ipso facto, it can't happen" is the assumption underlying the entire Trump era and it's sort of bleakly funny to see people clinging to it even as the train is jumping the tracks

I mean my very inexpert opinion was that it was already very deadly what with the El Fasher massacre of it all. So this can't be good.

I mean I CAN just read Twilight of the Gods by Toll...1944-1945 the time I am most interested in..I won't then feel like going back and reading the two previous books and then find a bunch of memoirs to read and then never look up and see the sun again? right? that can happen.

I am resisting reading Ian W. Toll's Pacific series..it is highly recommended and I really want to read it BUT I know from experience that if I get sucked into WWII this early in the year I will look up in December and have only read WWII books.

I'm going to try to live-blog a hearing in the Abrego Garcia civil case momentarily, from Greenbelt, MD. This is for @lawfaremedia.org . We're in an odd procedural posture because the govt has appealed 2 of Judge Xinis's orders, so it's unclear which issues she can address. ... /1

Great book. I got it because I like WWI novels..but it is a galloping read. Reflections on America, war, what you would give up to end evil, all wrapped up in misdirection, humor and just yearning desperation to get out of an impossible situation. Don't trust me trust Stephen Graham Jones!

Your reminder that not only have the Indiana Pacers never had the number one pick in the NBA Draft They have never had a former number one pick in the NBA draft play a single game for them in franchise history

Me and Marty Supreme letting some ping pong balls dictate our sports happiness. Fingers crossed ! Go Pacers!

I am listening to a really good audiobook of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and the yelp I yipped when he started singing Picked Poor Robin Clean! My movie!   the actor Joe Morton (he was on Scandal and Eureka apparently) does the reading..and holy smoke and stack is he good.

Construction workers 🤝 Higher Ed workers Apollo Global Management & its billionaire CEO, Marc Rowan, are responsible for drafting the "loyalty oath" compact for higher ed AND for violating construction laborers' rights. Our solidarity spans sectors: we show up for each other's labor struggles.

I read the Lookout and Pro Publica's reporting on Advance Financial, the connections to top TN legislators and "Flex-Loans" that end up having 200 percent interest. I can see why they want to scare all those broke white people into being mad at Memphis www.propublica.org/series/bad-l...

I finished a re-read of Beloved by Toni Morrison yesterday. Let's say the quote below really hits quite hard and I'll leave it at that.

Angel Down by Daniel Kraus won The Pulitzer for Fiction! Such a propulsive book..it takes the WWI tropes (horrors of the front) and gives some very imperfect characters the chance to weigh in on what you would give to fix your life or end a tragedy. Funny, vivid, visceral, and moving.

Sudan accuses Ethiopia, UAE of being behind recent drone attacks #AlJazeera #Ethiopia

BOO! joins the ranks of Fletch and South Side..silly comedies about a specific place that lets it be absurd and grounded at the same time. Lots of jokes per minute! Even with only one season it is worth watching.All the loose ends are tied up. I just wanted more! www.tvline.com/2162432/stum...

over on twitter Discourse about Toni Morrison's Beloved has been popping up. How it can be a difficult book to read quickly and what does it mean if you have to read a page more than once --It has been nice reading. SO I decided to give the book a re-read. Guess what guys. what an incredible book.

👇🏼

The whole tempest in a twitter pot over "kids these day" not being able to read (hey schools teach em phonics) got me to look up where the word "silhouette" came from--Etienne de Silhouette a French Finance minister who said France was broke in 1760 and tried to tax the rich.

I might go and do some light screaming into the abyss.

Still thinking about #ODESSA. The Cyberpunk Rock Opera I've been longing for. It's more Country than Rock, but not in a bad way. Many of the songs remind me of OH BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? for instance. Which as you know is High Praise from me. It's on Hulu. You won't regret it.

I am going to tell people this is a scene from Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

Schismatics gonna schismatic. I've never been Catholic, but if any Pope could get me to convert, it's this one. (I still have some doctrinal differences that keep me solidly Protestant, but this mf spittin')

No, that's exactly what Chappelle was doing and it's why trans people criticized him for doing it.

The US military said it killed two people in a strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean, claiming the targets were involved in “narco-trafficking operations”. The death toll from these strikes now stands at at least 170. TAT: [Foreign policy]