I know you're sick of it, but the key to political messaging is repetition: A billion dollars is the socio-economic equivalent of a loose nuke, and we should work to prevent the acquisition of the former with the same urgency and ruthlessness we use to prevent the acquisition of the latter.

gonna start calling google's glasses "wormtongue"

"People used to give a shit about Nixon's slush fund. Back then, we were genuine, authentic humans and everything was fine. I am smart and moral, unlike you." Or, humans can look and see that all the institutions have supined themselves to the guy in charge and options are... limited.

I’m afraid that too many people don’t understand just how terrible the Biden pandemic response was—and how it contributed to Trump’s return. I also fear that given how much this administration has dismantled public health, the appetite for looking back and identifying points of failure is low.

The D Line extension under Wilshire Blvd. is a nice antidote to Wilshire's origin as a cars-only haven that shunned railways. Dept. stores built entryways from their parking lots and Wilshire was the first US street to have dedicated left turn lanes and timed traffic signals.

"Collective Punishment" 🤦‍♀️

Name 10 bands you've obsessed over at some point. #musicchallenge Van Halen John Lennon The Who The Beach Boys The Ramones Pink Floyd Nirvana Sinéad O'Connor The Melvins Loudness

Navya Randhawa, 29, says that two conversations going on in the background at once is intolerable, but blasting American Idiot directly at her eardrums brings her nothing but inner peace.

Blissfully ignoring most Odyssey discourse but the Odyssey movie *I* want is a Ray Harryhausen epic with scenery-chewing actors and stop-motion claymation monsters, please and thank you

Pick a Bond from the photos you already have on your phone.

Sometimes when I laugh, I hear how much it sounds like my father. Then I regret whatever moment of joy reminded me of that.

Genuinely. I feel the greatest danger involved in that would be some shithead "moderate" obsessed with pretending nothing strange ever happened gets the job, fixes nothing, and spend 4 years telling people to grown up and calm down and reach across the aisle. No. TRIALS.

My confession, and certainly not to agree with original post, is that I recently accidentally realized what it means to suck ones teeth means. Mind you, I knew the vibe it intended to convey, so simply never thought about it. Then one day I realized I was doing it and had an "Aha!"

The pattern of childhood morbidity and mortality follows the geography of sprawl, not the geography of screens. New from me: Sometimes, conservative infighting can be revealing. mateosfo.substack.com/p/do-conserv...

"Celebrity culture is killing news!" Or maybe it's depending on for-profit models run by dudes who are afraid of being short on overnight numbers.

This is fascinating because the stuff about predictive coding is *exactly* what I've been saying for years is going on. Like I accidentally threaded about this stuff in @goatsarah.org's mentions just the other day. Like, not just the internal experience stuff, but the whole mechanism.

Re-reading Last Train to Memphis for the first time in forever and noticing a general similarity between Gladys, Elvis and Vernon Presley to Rae, Peg and I. I could note the differences as easily as anyone, but in general personality types, very similar.

Hidden a bit in the famous documentary, which includes nearly all, if not all, of the Black acts, but Woodstock was one of the whitest of the big festivals of that time.

When people defend democrats with “no one knows they did [good thing],” all I can think is “if no one knows what they did, they are bad at politics and messaging, no matter how important the governing accomplishment was.”

Cannot stress enough and cannot shut up about the fact that Comic Strip Popeye/Olive Oyl were and are 10,000 times better than any animated or film version has ever been, and I will die on that hill

the Democrats retaking the House and Senate, on its own, will not destroy the Republican project. The only way to do that is a broad, years-long cross-ideological commitment to break American conservatism's power base TL;DR congressional Dems must be forced into war with the used car salesmen.

"The sky above Garfield was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Look, this is a happy story, but that picture looks like it should accompany a story about Flight of the Conchords being arrested.

What pretty much everyone deeply involved in politics fails to see is that while *they* have party loyalty as part of their identity, the vast majority of people who care at all just have a vague idea of what kind of world they'd like, and will happily vote for whoever will give it to them.

Ooh. I remembered to play #CountryRockSunday or something...

I don't argue whether audiobooks count or don't count, because as an adult, who does whatever I want for my own education or pleasure, I have no idea what "counts" means. Seems like making that decision for another adult in their own "counting" would be... weird.

A cassette with a little click between every track is worse than no cassette at all. Whoever decided all home cassette recorders under a certain price, or whatever, would do that is my eternal enemy.

"Most nostalgia is idiodic" is a much kinder take on nostalgia than I generally give, but you're not accomplishing The Smartening if you don't examine how that nostalgia can grow out of how changes affect you.

Lateposting some Tomoyasu Hotei. The "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" guy if you don't know him This has one of the sickest guitar solos i've ever heard and it goes on forever www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5Gf...

Just remember, if you think trans kids participating in sports is some kind of huge societal problem, you are in an agreement with the biggest assholes in the world.

I don't think Americans will have the luxury of a boring presidency ever again. Not even non-black Americans. Once facism was introduced, every American should have been on high alert. Even through Biden's term.

A big problem with "Joe Rogan of the Left" discourse is that underlying the discourse is an implicit "We need a Joe Rogan figure that will appeal to OTHER, less sophisticated people. Not me though. I'm too hip to need or want that." Build the ecosystems that YOU want. Anything else is paternalism.

Take the worst, most petty and conniving, backstabbing, mediocre middle management lackey you've ever met. Then give them a billion dollars. That's who these guys are.

This is true of much art. The other factor is being able to live around and perform in an area where many other people are also creating. The energy of being around those people, seeing them, having conversations. There's a reason so many new, exciting things have come out of a regional "scene'.

What would a strong Republican Party that wasn't built upon a foundation of antiblackness and the Southern Strategy even look like? It's been decades since they've been anything else. The party of Lincoln is dead and gone.

i simply don't understand why this is being treated as some sort of accomplishment in the queer press. this is quite grim!!!!!!!!!

America 250 www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAE...

A win for free speech, a loss for Matt Taibbi.

Something something AI is nothing more than a ploy at artificial scarcity on a hyperscaler, uh, scale. It's an attempt to bottleneck basically every transaction on the internet as well as make hardware a scarcity. I'll die on this hill.

I feel like I’m losing this battle, but podcasts should be DIY audio only affairs, with one-three regular hosts you would only know about *because* of that podcast or their annoying social media presence. Fancy video and people with pre-podcast careers? Recording studios? Sus as hell.

I'll just leave this here. It's another betrayal for the families of trans youth who called her out for years over her reporting. She misled them and used their stories for her professional gain. And it worked. She was promoted and is now a Pulitzer finalist. www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...

he's such a real one

But if we give poor people money, they will do less crime and also join the military less frequently for the financial incentives Then who will die in the oil wars or provide the prison slave labor????

"Taste the Tongue of Dracula"

As soon as the first generation not brain-damaged by leaded gasoline got the chance to vote, they elected a black president. And by God, if we have to inflict a new wave of mass cognitive damage to stop that from happening again, WE SHALL!

It's important to note, I think biopics are a scourge, so anyone I might choose, I would intend it as a curse.

There was no Giuliani "downfall." He was a clown and a fascist his entire career in public life. Eventually it got too much to bear/wasn't worth the trouble for the media to keep inserting the fake moderate problem-solver Giuliani into their stories instead of the evil clown he was in reality.

In the 70s and 80s, I knew & went to school with autistic, trans, nonbinary people who were actively trying to disappear into themselves to avoid a world that didn’t have the vocabulary, much less the empathy, to try to understand them. (Can’t speak to the gluten thing but lots of unhealthy people)

I thought he was kidding. He's not. WTAF? www.youtube.com/watch?v=xywz...

Okay, I'll bite. We don't allow cigarette advertising anymore. Is that "meaningless virtue signaling" or has it been part of a wider and more effective campaign to reduce the appeal of smoking? Advertising works, otherwise corporations wouldn't spend billions on it.