Great, shocking reporting on the origins of the Supreme Court maneuver that has enabled Trump to impose his agenda without full-blown legal review. Roberts resented the Obama admin’s EPA and wanted quick protection for oil companies.

Today’s Post cover is real keeper

This week in the Trump cabinet: The FBI Director is a drunk who needs doors broken down to be awakened The Defense Secretary is a drunk who quoted Pulp Fiction and thought he was sharing scripture The HHS Secretary is a former heroin addict who cut off the penis of a roadkill raccoon All true

New NYT reporting on Venezuela. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/w...

also this is almost certainly a thing—whether you connect to a VPN in Venezuela or Vermont. remember, there are (probably) lots of foreigners connecting to US based VPNs. With encrypted traffic, the NSA can claim a presumption of foreignness.

Voting on spy powers at 2am will definitely help with trust in the government!

In case you missed it: first-person video footage of the U.S. Navy Divers Medical Team opening the hatch and entering inside the Orion Integrity capsule to meet the Artemis II heros U.S. Navy Courtesy Asset/ Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group One www.dvidshub.net/video/100269... #Artemis 🧪🔭

Exactly one year ago today:

CNN exposes a global “online rape academy” that teaches men how to drug and rape women without detection. Over 62 million men attended in February alone.

Real war doesn't have to look like shitty food that is the product of poor planning. This is a myth that gets told so commanders can lean on MREs too heavily.

I sent a classified letter to House and Senate colleagues about a secret interpretation of surveillance law that every American should be concerned about. Representative Massie is right. The Constitution requires EVERY member to vote against a clean reauthorization.

the VP being a fucking groyper nazi should probably be a bigger story

The other important item from the reporting is that the APOs/the military postal addresses in theater, have been turned off indefinitely. Meaning no care packages, no mail, nothing can be received. That's a morale killer. The people in charge of this mess couldn't organize an orgy in a whorehouse.

Unfortunately, without Access, Basing, & Overflight (ABO) & contested air space w/in the Gulf states, this is exceedingly difficult. If they can't get the supplies to theater, can't buy local, there's no supplies to get out to the ships.

Cantor Fitzgerald — the firm previously run by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, now controlled by his sons, and which also custodies the reserves for offshore stablecoin issuer Tether — put $10 million into a Republican-focused crypto super PAC led by a Tether executive.

Lutnick (sons) - Cantor Fitzgerald dropped 10M into GOP (Trump) crypto Superpac led by Tether exec. PS Molly White does great journalism; subscribe to her Citation Needed if you haven't.

Does that mean adults under 30 years old actually do that?

Young Pope looks like the cool guy at the hip record store who approves of your used record purchases and gives you a discount on the total

Oh, wow

Trump rants his ballroom will feature "Bomb Shelters, a State of the Art Hospital & Medical Facilities,Top Secret Military Installations, Protective Missile Resistant Steel, Drone Proof Ceilings, Military Grade Venting, & Bullet, Ballistic, & Blast Proof Glass" Dafuq kind of ballroom is this?

The Senate voted on Thursday to allow mining upstream from Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, one of the largest and most visited expanses of federally protected lakes and forests in the U.S. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/16/c...

Holy shit. According to the article sailors on TRIPOLI are rationing their food and if someone gets a little extra they're sharing it with their friends. There's no fresh produce, which points to a lack of resupply ships able to serve the ships maintaining the blockade.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor lets Brett Kavanaugh have it: “I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops. This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour." news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/...

The initial reports of damage from Super Typhoon Sinlaku in Saipan are catastrophic. www.guampdn.com/news/beating...

The richest person in the world by a country mile wants you to think there's a perfidious conspiracy to keep people like him from being the richest person in the world and he never gives this a moment's skepticism

The first question JD Fucking Vance should face in front of a camera and microphone

This is one reason why I suspect that slopulism of all types structurally tends toward being at least antisemitism-adjacent, even when the individual political elites who are pushing it are not themselves antisemitic. (Some of them might even be Jews.)

An Iran following the Egypt model would still involve an Iran that is nationally sovereign, with a military capable of going toe to toe with the IDF, and exerting sole leverage over a critical waterway. With no democracy, an impoverished population, all opposition jailed.

MEDICARE FOR ALL IS A FILM STUDIO RETENTION ISSUE

For all of Dimon’s doom talk he points out private credit is not systemic & consumer/corporate debt isn’t elevated. His concern as it should be is at some point credit cycle will turn, outcomes will be worse & as usual there will be some surprising losers. #$JPM #$XLF #$XLY

Some of the most commonly enforced Jim Crows laws historically were anti-fishing and hunting regulations. At the time it was openly discussed that if black people had access to their own food procurement they would refuse to work as hard for white business owners or worse potentially go 'off grid'.

In addition to up 11 days in a row the Nasdaq 14 day RSI is > 70 last tick here coincided with 10/29 top

Another South Korean fad I'd love to import is throwing streamers and corrupt presidents into prison

NEW: Teenage boys are pulling classmates' photos off Insta and running them through cheap nudify apps and the fallout has now hit nearly 90 schools across 28 countries with 600+ known victims since 2023, per a WIRED/Indicator analysis. UNICEF estimates 1.2M children were targeted last year alone.

ICE had 6 fucking vehicles at my local courthouse in Massachusetts this morning. They're here and they're terrorizing people. Just because the tactics have changed doesn't mean their impact on our communities has changed. The Massachusetts Senate needs to pass the PROTECT Act ASAP.

“It’s not targeting criminals, it’s not targeting dangerous people, it’s targeting individuals who are members of our community, who have a lot to offer and continue to offer a lot of positive things for our entire country and our society.” One of Batra’s children recently enlisted in the military.

1. Spiralling housing & healthcare costs are eating everything else in normie political discourse 2. Voters love whatever framing most exonerates voters

If you haven’t heard about it yet, the youths are super into IRL human interactions, no AI, and “physical media” (vinyl! DVDs! tapes!) right now and it’s glorious. Like there are 20yo influencers that just read old paper books and talk about feelings.

"Schatz’s wife runs a real estate consulting firm, Schatz Collaborative, that currently works with large property investors who could be hurt by the bill." www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/4528482...

a small price to pay for speed and convenience.

"Magyar wasn't engaging in a policy debate... His framing was Viktor Orbán and Fidesz are a criminal organization and we need to dismantle this... he connected the impact of the criminal organization to these rural Hungarians' experience." @ambpressman.bsky.social on how Magyar beat Orbán.

@alexbhturnbull.bsky.social on odd lots!

meanwhile

As the present Fascist International teeters and wobbles and starts breaking apart I'm very curious to find out how many more core components of the American conservative project are plain-old foreign-influence operations

Last month the Trump FCC announced a "ban" on all foreign made routers (almost all of them), demanding ambiguous favors from manufacturers if they wanted to continue doing business in the U.S. Netgear is the first to gain approval. Did they agree to bribes? Backdoors? who knows! 🗽💩

Xi and Putin both have him by the balls.

Four cardinals in the Vatican library looking at a flip phone showing the tweet and furiously debating whether he's just profoundly misunderstood just war theory or if he just googled it and thinks the word "just" means "do a bit of, as a treat"

holocaust envy - the idea that the shoah gives Jews some special advantage - is a real thing. the funniest and least consequential version of it is probably "millions of witches were killed in the Burning Times" which also seems to have dropped way off in the last decade or two.