A13. In case you're wondering how newsy it is to have the President dead to rights.

Under Irish law Musk can be jailed for 12 months for being a director of a company distributing CSAM. Section 9 of the Child Trafficking and Pornography Act 1998. 'X' is a company registered in Ireland.

I maintain that the biggest problem with the Israel/Palestine discourse is that people view it as something other than an ethnic war

Can't think of anything more antisemitic than the New York Post and various other orgs responding to Ms Rachel's earnest efforts to save Palestinian children from wanton murder with "Oh, so you hate Jews?"

Why do I have to read an Irish paper for a feature about this?

Bill Watterson could do Sin City but Frank Miller could not do Calvin and Hobbes

Honestly sad to hear that Trump is on a steady supply of blood thinners, I think it does meaningfully reduce the probability of The Big One

I hate superhero movies but I'd watch one where the Joker is the good guy.

“We boldly ask: What if Joe Biden did the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, would he be able claim a foreign policy for the middle class? As foreign policy experts, we didn’t have time to look into what actually happened.”

I have long believed that it should be part of the Dem's media strategy to get people -- especially journalists -- off Twitter as much as possible. One way they could do that is to stop posting there (or only post with a significant delay after posting elsewhere). Apparently too much to ask

Status quo bias is wild. No politician in this country would *join* a Nazi website with an AI that creates child porn on demand. But because they're already on the site, well, that's different somehow

Most of the derangement about Mamdani is for the obvious reasons but part of it is also that a surprising amount of people were committed to the Cuomo rehabilitation project because they hated the idea that anything could have consequences for men of the right class.

A year is probably too long, but yeah. Netflix specifically should release its better in-house movies in theaters before putting them on streaming. Would probably make them more money

Lyman Stone, Bari Weiss, and David Shor all learned that you can get extremely far in this world by just being affable online

When you drink it it's called seltzer water, but for some reason when you're giving out cleaning advice it's called club soda

Our 2nd most-read piece of 2025 is by the forever funny @mikedrucker.bsky.social, and we have no idea what he was getting at here, but it seemed to have struck a nerve with many, many readers.

Hey I don't think you should use a website that generates CSAM on demand

This does seem just a little bit bad! Idk the sort of thing you’d think politicians might distance themselves from or something!

👍👏 iandunt.substack.com/p/thank-god-...

You love to see it

What do you mean "but" - the people who warned about it were telling the truth and the outlets like Axios who helped Trump distance himself from it were lying.

How many prosecutors do you think the next Dem admin will need to hire just to prosecute Hatch Act violations?

any discussion of city transit improvement online ever

Normalize calling NYC nativists townies

A final thot on NY Nativisim before I go off to get ready to celebrate NYE in a city I apparently dont belong in bc I, like a majority of its residents, had the audacity to be born somewhere else: in any other context, those sorts of ppl would be easily recognized for the townie losers that they are

I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win

The KKK staged a big rally in 1924 in South Bend. The Klansmen were confronted by a group of about 500 Notre Dame students who chased them through the streets, jumped them, beat them up in alleys, ripped their KKK robes and masks off and used them as battle trophies.

Maybe. Or maybe that's just the comforting lie we told ourselves

I'm always shocked by how much heavy drinkers can drink

My hot take is that separating out Europe and Asia makes sense because the steppe (not the Urals per se) was an effective barrier to migration. Not a total barrier by any means (see the huns, avars, magyars, etc etc etc), but it was not the easiest way in

i read this and i just see a lazy person with a skill issue

I think I'd put "crazy thing Herotodus wrote being true" at maybe closer to 50/50, but that's still turned out to be *much* higher than we would have credited him pre-archaeology. The value of archaeology (and sources in languages not Latin/Greek) to confirm/disconfirm our sources is significant!

"It was all just Roman/Greek/whatever propaganda" was the cool counter-intuitive thing to say about a lot of stuff starting in the mid 20th century, but it seems to have a pretty shitty track record

This WSJ article adds some fascinating context to the NYT article that has the mother of a 14 year old model brought to Mar-a-Lago for a party having Maples come up to her and saying keep those girls away from these men and my husband. Maples denies she said it.

The Lorax (2012) includes Taylor Swift in a major role. It is a musical. She does not sing.

I think at some point we need to just accept that being annoying can be a political liability well in excess of, like, what you would expect from actual material consequences

TBH this is where treating driving like a civil right ends up.

“so me and my camera crew and this random old man would like to show up unannounced and have a look at your toddle- what do you mean you’re calling the police?! 😡”

Also that baby is too young to smile so he's speaking entirely in hypotheticals

Men doing this whole “I will vanquish continents for my children” LARP is so goofy in the context of household surveys. It’s nice you’ll kill millions for your daughter, maybe we can start at doing a load of laundry for your wife who does the vast majority of household labor?

Not to detract from the post, which is very funny, but if you've ever painted from a photo reference you'll know this isn't true. Cameras have really craptastic dynamic range

If you confidently predict that bond vigilantes will attack the world's most liquid financial market which also happens to be the world's most important reserve asset, as so many have done for so many decades, I'm going to ask you to show some work on what is changing here and now.

We're in a bad equilibrium where decent people don't want anything to do with guns because whenever they look into them they find shit by Brandon Herrera and Garand Thumb, which turns them off, resulting in a pool of gun owners that are almost all reactionaries

If there's one blindspot on the left I wish I could correct with the snap of my fingers, it's the idea that the subjective value of something to someone is actually highly policy relevant even though it's unknowable

The replies to this have taught me that people don't really understand probabilistic statements?

Still mind-blowing that a top admin official was revealed to have taken $50,000 in cash in a paper bag from people looking for government favors, the reaction of the administration was "Whatever losers, this is how it works now" and bigshot news media said "If you say so, we'll forget about it"

Heyyy Karl is in an article www.wired.com/story/the-ha...

Why did so many car manufacturers decide to copy Tesla's "door handles that pop out, except when it's really cold" thing? It's a bad design! Nobody asked for it!