Here is the FBI's Epstein List open.substack.com/pub/jkbjourn...

update: the tide is high

he was *absolutely* essential to the Television sound

My favorite artifact in the "you don't need AI to do art" discourse is, of course, screenwriter Dan O'Bannon's sketch of the facehugger to explain it to Giger.

Bring back "the 👉 Finger of Contempt"

You wanted a Schmittian struggle and enemies. Well congratulations, you got it. But the enemy gets a fucking vote.

i think this is dead on re: the first. Woke 2 needs to lean in heavy on "he a little confused but he got the spirit"

35 years ago tonight, the Replacements played their last show in their hometown of Minneapolis, the 2nd of two nights downtown at the Orpheum, a stop on the national tour for the "All Shook Down" album. Steve Foley was just weeks into the drummer job after the departure of founding member Chris Mars

Statler and Waldorf have more of a comment than a question

📣 Applications Now Open: ISPP 2026 Early Career Scholar Travel Awards ISPP is pleased to announce the 2026 Early Career Scholar Travel Awards, supporting early career researchers to attend ISPP's Annual Meeting in Newcastle. For more information and to apply, visit docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

"Folks on the left will eventually come to terms with the fact they have nowhere else to go," says the founder of the Classic Learning Test. "You can only sneer at Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, and Shakespeare for so long before the sneering itself starts to look unserious." WHO IS SNEERING

at the risk of understatement, this is really quite worrisome

"For years, a cottage industry of political observers has contorted itself to obscure and occlude the obvious. That regardless of what others see in him, Trump’s entire political career...cannot be understood outside the context of his bitter, deep-seated racism." (gift link)

A while back, I wrote about the deprofessionalization of the FBI. Christian Gläßel and @ascharpf.bsky.social study how authoritarians build loyal security forces. They pointed to a sense of impunity being a key factor. That is what we are seeing now. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-the-fb...

Suggesting a slight headline tweak: “Epstein revelations have toppled top Europeans while fallout is more muted in the US, whose president is a sex predator and was Epstein’s pal”

We should not hide our contempt for Trump voters and we should be more aggressive in ridiculing/ostracizing them. However, there should also be instant amnesty the moment they renounce Trump and the Republican Party. We're trying to create a chain reaction of defections, not redeem souls.

Will Stancil tulpa, fresh from the Black Lodge

Marx would have nodded along to the idea of entertainment/opiate of the masses, while Gramsci would have asked how the 'common sense' that inequality is natural and inevitable is reproduced culturally and socially. Hegemony's his thing.

Yeah. American apocalyptic thought as it developed in the 19th century really started to hone in on the idea of a single Antichrist, leaning into the Book of Revelation (which, to be clear, is unclear on this point). The epistles and Gospels assume there’ll be many deceptive Christ figures.

It’s kinda funny. The party that has spent the past 50 years denigrating expertise, to the point it was consumed by populism, can’t get educated pros to even give them the time of day. Why would a recent grad want to take the chance that the Trump stink stays with them for the rest of their career?

How I imagine the sophistication of my research. How I present my research.

We are warfighters, not woke, now get your asses in those theater seats and learn how to pick dresses for formal balls.

or where everyone in the cast (academics included) is a Muppet except for the harried program chair

“They’re basically torturing people into signing off on their own deportation,” said one attorney. Superb, deeply reported story, via @charpentier.bsky.social

I feel like this is why some states are getting rid of tenure too. Lowering the bar because most of the nuts they want to hire just don’t have the right credentials.

see also:

one way of thinking about this is that the acceleration of educational polarization brought about by Trump's takeover of the GOP has made it increasingly difficult for Republican administrations to recruit competent, educated professionals for critical government jobs

NEW STORY: Trump admits he was the one who found the video and asked that it be posted from his Truth Social account. Refuses to apologize.

Some really striking numbers in this new survey showing the flip in European public opinion about America. But bear in mind this is only Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, it has been harder to take the blinders off peoples' eyes. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

#RIP Fred Smith

odd feature of our time in how many liberals and progressive are bog standard monogamous family types--Serwer, Bouie, Hayes, AOC, etc--and how many Traditional Family Values conservatives are fuckin drugged up perverts

for better or worse, people will forget about that video by the end of the year, if not end of the month. but when trump finally kicks the bucket, there were be orgasmic celebrations across the US & around the world. he will be remembered as the most despised US president since WWII for generations

three key quotes about race and political reality

This is the thing that always blows my mind about Trump v US: presented with the very real circumstances of a president who violated federal law, the majority decide to treat it as a theoretical creative writing exercise, and treat those real circumstances as a far flung hypothetical.

immigration is good for America and those who oppose it for reasons of ethnonationalist aesthetics should be stigmatized

fanciful scenario anyway; it's a lot more plausible that Vance simply sold his soul to the devil to buy his mom drugs

to put it another way, for these people religion is basically an ethnic identity, or which soccer club's hooligan firm they run with

arbitrary-set religion, to borrow the argot of social dominance theory; these ppl make more sense when you stop thinking of their religion in terms of coherent doctrine & simply think of it as another interchangeable identity that's been plugged into psychological systems governing group competition

just a reminder that you do not need to repost screenshots of racist agitprop from other social media apps here on this site; don't be a vector for the right-wing language virus from outer space

if your ERO officer looks like this you’re going to die in a pit

really wonder how much of the (outlier) Twitter result is due to self-selection into said information environment at this point

The Fall, 'Smile' (NYC / Speed Trials / May 1983). Is the fungus damp in the cellar? Positive, G.B.H. Smiles With his friends, ask for cigarettes #FallFriday

hell awaits

Lieu: "In those files, there’s highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children, of Donald Trump threatening to kill children.”

It’s wild that all these famous academics are emailing him about the top theories in their field and his replies are like “vary interrestteng. Tel me Mor. Howe do it releight to penus?”

an absolutely brutal read, but an illuminating one.

Anti-woke messaging is a net negative among Democrats

🎨 #Rtistry #RStats #ggplot2