CHOTINER: So your son is 14, is that right? IKARI: It's complex, Isaac. If— CHOTINER: And the “robot” he pilots, that’s actually the child of an alien you keep crucified in the basement, which is possessed by the spirit of his dead mother? IKARI: Look, let me answer the question. CHOTINER: Sure.

Very important to have a doggo on hand big enough to simply eat the Devil when things get out of hand.

One thing about Chotiner is that he has incredible sense, normally, for his subjects, one of the many reasons that if Chotiner called me I would run

It's both symptomatic and causal. Trump's consolidation of authoritarian rule depends on the perception of total power, and the Jimmy Kimmel rehiring gave the lie to that image.

maybe I’m just in a good mood this morning but this feels like a thing we might look back on as a turning point, even if symptomatic rather than causal

I will never, ever forget when he tried to get Xi to choose a name for his kid. Like WTAF, man? Not a whiff of dignity to be found.

God we're gonna have to use abliterated-and-re-RLHFed versions of Llama now, just like with Qwen or DeepSeek or Grok.

A fascism so fucking weak it can't handle a spontaneous, disorganized consumer boycott.

good job chat we successfully bullied a major corporation to the point that the late night host they canned is making jokes about it in his return monologue american fascism versus the cancel subscription button: who will win

Farage's insistence at the Reform Party conference that an early election in 2027 was inevitable is in itself a sign that he is not confident that he can keep his show on the road until 2029

The whole reason he's so mad right now is that the American People went and owned ABC & Disney harder than he could, and now ABC is bowing to someone else's (ie the mass public's) authority instead of his.

this exact dynamic - where trump says or does something awful, everyone spends days downplaying it, and then he loudly doubles down - has played out roughly 7000 times and it’s why I have exactly zero patience for anyone who tries to sanitize his nonsense

everyone else in the admin over the last couple days: what are you talking about, there was no attempted government censorship, stop fearmongering trump: I’m gonna sue them for putting kimmel back on the air

This is shaping up as one of the worst corncobbings Trump has ever been subject to.

Oh. “The dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who consulted with top Trump health officials ahead of Monday’s warning about Tylenol and autism, was paid at least $150,000 to serve as an expert witness on behalf of plaintiffs in lawsuits against the maker of Tylenol.”

What gets me about the escalator freakout is how much it illustrates that these guys really will not feel safe or satisfied until nothing ever goes wrong for them no matter what. Jesus didn't get that deal and He is the son of God who is also God. Like, fuck, you can't surrender to that, literally.

also he asks follow-up questions, which as I've noted many times seems bizarrely beyond many US interviewers, especially on TV.

Reminds me of litigation. Asking the follow-up questions is what gets you the crazy answers in depositions, but so few people ask them! It's weird!

The problem isn’t just that Trump canceled a shutdown meeting with Dems the day after agreeing to it. He also presented the public with a delusional list of Democratic demands that was quite bonkers, even for him, making a shutdown far more likely. www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...

Anything but a clear yes when asked if the US backs up NATO allies is effectively a no, undermining the credibility that has made NATO such a success, deterring attacks for over 70 years. Clear yes—backed by action—is key to the whole thing. Getting to maybe not was a Russian foreign policy dream.

The chad thriftbooks shipping me 1950s hardcovers from some library warehouse in Minneapolis within a week vs the virgin New Yorker who still cannot get me a copy of the magazine they print millions of copies of within a month and a half of my subscription starting

I wish these interviews were published in audio/video form. I need to hear how deadpan “But, despite [Kissinger’s] busyness, he came to [your] book party” was delivered

this is the most chotinered a chotiner interview has ever chotinered

Wait, is this a *new* low, though? I thought he was already invested in this particular conspiracy theory.

Martin's entire thing is writing nuisance letters - remember he was also writing to academic journals asking for move oversight of their editorial policies - that shows he is an absolute crank. But trying to get FBI agents who undermined Alex Jones Sandy Hook conspiracy theories is a new low.

Well I guess Pete Hegseth now knows who broke in and drank his emergency stash of rubbing alcohol.

From Rasmus Jarlov, chair of Denmark’s Defence Committee:

This is utterly deranged.

Well looks like they met for this — Ed Martin sent a letter to the FBI agent who testified during Alex Jones trial about seeing the Sandy Hook children dead. Martin asked if the agent had a financial incentive. The rest is hard to parse. Martin wrote asking to keep the letter private.

3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible

Mr President, please launch bizarre deranged attacks against good English cities.

This is best story by far about the SIM farm uncovered in New York by Secret Service. The intent of the farm is not, as suggested by other stories, to disrupt Secret Service protection of dignitaries attending the UN or taking out mobile service for all NY but about managing criminal enterprises

The Trump administration has not sent any Coast Guard admirals up for Senate confirmation because Kristi Noem lives in a home usually reserved for the top admiral of the Coast Guard and she "she doesn’t want to get kicked out of the commandant’s house." nymag.com/intelligence...

If I were a senior Home Office official heading a crack team tasked with selecting the first handful of people to send to France I would have selected someone who hadn’t been shot and then spent time in Libya, the Mediterranean Centre of Trafficking.

today i am challenging democratic politicians, for the rest of the week, to pick one (1) horrifying thing republicans are doing and pretend its as bad as jimmy kimmel being indefinitely suspended id suggest tom homan taking bribes, but theres a few things to pick from if they want

The most insane “anti-porn” bill I’ve seen yet The “Anticorruption of Public Morals Act” would criminalize visual, audio, or written depictions of “sex acts,” with language broad enough to ban distribution of When Harry Met Sally & romance novels .. and that's not even the worst of it 🧵

New in PN: Trump posts his Watergate tapes "People! The man literally used his social media platform to tweet out a demand that his attorney general prosecute his opponents, ones he’s already characterized as 'guilty as hell.' This isn’t 'venting.' It’s criminal."

The great irony is that correcting the racist imbalance of colonial war crimes by expanding who gets to commit the crimes is actually the truest expression of neo colonialism there is.

I will say though that I am continually curious what the modal response is to claims like "the ICC only comes after Africans". in my brain the immediate response is "ahh I see - for doing what? cool stuff?" but guessing from the fact that they keep doing it that they're getting some other response?

Trump's model for his emerging drug war has been imprisoned and awaits trial for war crimes.

Poland alone could swing the Russo-Ukrainian War decisively in Ukraine's favor.

Underrated scenario is that the Russians get a guarantee from Trump he won’t intervene if they attack NATO, the Europeans win anyway, and the next American president looks vaguely baffled when the Euros don’t clap like trained seals when he flies over to do the Leader Of The Free World (tm) act.

A negative answer would also inadvertently bless Congress declaring the Presidency vacant when things really go to shit. And it would also make things really go to shit fast, absent a carveout for the Fed (and also for all legislative and judicial positions, too).

I had overlooked the Court's 2nd QP: "Whether a federal court may prevent a person’s removal from public office, either through relief at equity or at law." This is a wildly broad framing. A negative answer would effectively moot the Fed carevout in Wilcox & overrule, e.g., Powell v. McCormack.

There's a reason Angola is considered one of the worst hellhole penitentiaries in the entire US.

i suspect when all of this is said and done and told, it’s going to end up being one of the biggest and most explosive cases of money laundering ever seen

401(k)s are good public policy; “we will provide a tax break to encourage savings, you can rely on the long term performance of the stock market” Employee Stock Option Plans are ridiculous; “your wealth depends on the performance of your manager, Gary, he has an Autobot tattoo & a 413 credit score”

big part of this is because they sent the health reporters, not the political reporters

Ludwig Wittgenstein, upon crashing a colleague's honeymoon with involuntary Socratic dialogue on the nature of language:

philosophers only want one thing and it’s discussing