There is a claim often made that Abner Doubleday staged baseball games on Galveston Island when he was stationed there right after the Civil War, but I've never seen it documented. He was there, for sure, but I never cd break through the legends to find any IRL games.

Nobody will try to leave Plato's Cave, they figure, if they purge all the texts saying the images on the wall are shadows.

This is an indicator, not a cause, but thwarting the attempted authoritarian takeover will ultimately require mainstream outlets to not call this a "feud," but instead an attempt at intimidation in order to seize unconstitutional and extralegal power. Not there yet.

Was Sugar Goodson really a soggy drunk? Did Hezekiah Moscow know Victoria Davies and Prince Albert Victor? Omg WHO is that boxer Nathaniel Washington?! 😍 Watched #AThousandBlows season two over the weekend and want to know more about real history? 🥊👊🏻💥⬇️ grapplingwithhistory.com/2026/01/09/s...

Just batshit crazy. Tbf, Plato believed eroticism (Eros) was the bridge between heaven and earth, and mentioning Eros makes them think about lady parts, which ofc makes them angry. So in a way, it's understandable. If you're a 17yo incel. Aggies gonna Aggie, but this is next level even for them!

If any part of the Constitution is going to be effective against thugs who have no regard for it and state and local authorities who are throwing up their hands if not actively supporting them, it’s going to be because people do stuff like this

To me, she is perfectly cast in the Wicked role. She sings like an angel and looks like an elf.

This event was jam packed by the time Montse spoke. This felt the kind of old-school movement candidacy Austin hasn't really seen since the enviro campaigns of the '90s, but with labor, education, and immigrant-rights advocates at its core.

At @montserratgaribay.bsky.social 's launch party for her House race. Good turnout!

If a neocon is a liberal mugged by reality, which was Kristol's father Irving's mantra, I guess a Never Trumper is a neocon mugged by their conservative allies. Daddy spent his career giving the right-wing agenda an intellectual sheen. I'm glad Bill has pivoted, but that brand for me is tainted.

Semper pie! www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalH...

Unbelievably, this appears not to be satire www.wsj.com/business/hos...

The thing about the Boston Massacre— the fruits of arbitrary power— was not that the colonists were universally in the right. Things were thrown at the soldiers. But, the presence of a standing army escalated conditions. The use of force that night was not proportional. Citizens died needlessly.

Goes far beyond this one ad. @espn.com every day recommends 3-bet parlays. But they never tell their viewers the % that come in. No transparency re: how many pay off, etc.. The reason they don't is, if they told them the track record, nobody would make the bets.

Yup. And when he went forward in time for the sequel, it was to 2015. Lack of flying cars is the least of it. The future was supposed to have happened by now, and it wasn't supposed to look like this.

I know it started as an internet joke, but Denmark/Greenland really should consider temporarily renaming it "Epstein's Island" until DT leaves office. Put that s**t in EVERY story on the topic from here on out. He probably really wd just leave it alone. Some things are funny bc they're true.

Minneapolis should retaliate by banning federal agents from staying in hotels. They should be able to do this through a municipal ordinance related to disturbing the peace, public nuisance, etc.

I was tracking this tech when it first came out and these things need a warrant requirement. Another example how gutting constitutional protections (in this case, the 4th Amdt) to kowtow to law enforcement legalized authoritarian policing methods now being deployed by America's fascist government.

When Renee Good said "I'm not mad at you" what the ICE goon heard was "I'm not scared of you." That's what enraged him. The populace wasn't fully terrorized and cowed into submission yet, so he acted to make that happen.

This wd likely be a guest column from a Manhattan Institute fellow w/ comments disallowed bc they know their disgraceful trolling wd be called out. Even when comments are allowed, moderators at the Times censor all criticism of their editorial choices. It's intentional and demonstrates complicity.

Apropos of absolutely nothing to do with the masked men with no visible agency insignia carrying crates of who knows what out of the shooter's house, but HBO just released an amazing documentary into DHS "shadow units" whose job was to destroy evidence of Border Patrol's crimes

Yes to this by @sifill.bsky.social sherrilyn.substack.com/p/whether-it...

Though I haven't dug into them, trying to limit the scope of what's become quite a large project, in my lion-tamer research I've run across a number of other women sharpshooters in the Annie-Oakley vein. She's portrayed as unique but it was its own genre. E.g., Rifle Nell Lynch.

Excellent thread

This is precisely what happened. Full stop. No notes or addenda.

He offered UT a $100,000 endowment for Hispanic scholars. Texas Exes denied it www.kxan.com/news/texas/t...

The Texas policy of paying these guys millions to shut down in a crisis is a corrupt mess. During Snowpocalypse, thousands of business had to close bc the electric grid failed. These were the only ppl who were compensated for it. It's corrupt AF.

Wired: Let’s arrest Jonathan Ross and charge him w a state homicide Trump can’t pardon. Super-Wired: Let’s arrest the entire Minnesota FBI office with him, lock them up for 1/2 of that time w a state obstruction charge Trump can’t punish.

Grandbaby #2 arrived today. Say hello to Taelyn.

This is literally what they do whenever a Black person is killed by police. No matter how solid the evidence is, they will keep pushing that lie, not just to poison the conversation and make sure the killer walks free, but to reassert the political idea that these people deserve to be killed.

Put a pin in this and check back in ten years. This is future self-harm.

I'd say they SHOULDN'T be "allowed to shoot people just because you didn't do what they said," but that's not the reality of how police shootings are handled in the overwhelming number of jurisdictions, red or blue, throughout America.

Whether it’s Democrats putting their pronouns in email signatures or Republicans shooting and killing unarmed drivers, both sides have taken actions that the other side finds threatening.

NEW: While its AI chatbot keeps creating explicit images of women, X is legally backing a Texas conservative activist who is under investigation for posting a photo of a transgender woman in the women's bathroom on X at the Capitol in 2023- www.chron.com/culture/arti...

This is called the "exonerative tense" papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

This is ironic, I just had an exchange w/ my college freshman granddaughter that ended w/ me creating a little zine featuring an essay from Parabola about Plato's cave and commentary explaining how it related to questions she's had lately. If we can't teach Plato to college kids, wtf are we doing?

The father of one of my lady lion tamers captured and trained mountain lions for Mexican circuses bf New Mexico became a US territory in 1850. After that, he supplied trained animal acts for US outfits and his daughter joined a European circus w/ her own act in the 1880s, performing until 1929. 1/3

According to the WSJ, the reason tariffs haven't been more inflationary is that, between them and immigration removals, consumer spending declined and the overall economy cooled, reducing inflationary pressure. So tariffs cut into employment and profits so much it outweighed the cost increases.

Nine San Antonio police officers and 13 Bexar County sheriff's deputies were arrested on criminal charges in 2025. Internal discipline systems at both agencies are incredibly weak and routinely excuse misconduct, so officers getting prosecuted is pretty much the only path to accountability.

DHS Says REAL ID, Which DHS Certifies, Is Too Unreliable To Confirm U.S. Citizenship It's the punch line to a bad joke that started 20 years ago when Congress passed the REAL ID Act. reason.com/2025/12/31/d...

So we're getting a Marshall Plan for Venezuela, while Americans' healthcare is getting cut and food prices are through the roof. Meanwhile, they released only the most deeply redacted version of the Epstein files. It's all so transparently corrupt and disingenuous. America First, my ass!

With the US deploying naval and air assets from the Pacific to the Caribbean, vowing to "run" Venezuela and steal their oil, eyeing counterrevolution in Cuba, etc., I'd be surprised if the Chinese weren't considering a Taiwan invasion any old time.

I know it's more fashionable for men to think all the time about the Roman Empire, but these days all the violations of constitutional law and democratic norms have me thinking much more often about Plato's cave.

I miss Justin Raimondo

Yeah but when you invade a country, detain its leader, and allegedly kill dozens in the attempt...you aren't the one who gets to decide if its an act of war.

Re-reading Rumi this week sent me down a path that led to this essay by Audre Lorde, and her provocative thesis that the "dichotomy between the spiritual and the political" is a false framing "resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge." 🧵 uk.sagepub.com/sites/defaul...

99 cent store version

The thing about this is that Venezuelan oil is of poor quality, high in sulfur, needs special, expensive refining processes not every refinery can do, and isn't profitable at the current, rock-bottom prices which have all but stopped new drilling in West Texas and all over America. This is fanciful.

61% of Senate Democrats and 55% of House Democrats voted last month to authorize Trump’s $901 billion military budget.