i really, truly, sincerely believe that righting the equilibrium for the united states depends upon congressional democrats reclaiming congress' first-amongst-equals role in governance, and everything short of that — including a transformative president — is a failed half-measure

Literally a publication for eight-year olds 40 years ago

Endless Column, by Constantin Brâncuși, 1938, 📸 by @stephenmally

A chile relleno is a perfect thing

They're still fighting over who gets the 20th Century, and they're burning the 21st Century for fuel to do it

This is the smartest thing I've read about the Venezuelan regime change effort.

As one of my colleagues has argued forcefully & I see the point of, it's better to keep the Constitution's provisions alive, if in exile (via wild violation), than to publicly acknowledge them as dead. If 'alive,' they're politically available to be restored; if dead, then *current crimes are legal*

So much of American history is just impulsive and extremely stupid elites, who don't believe in consequences because they have never personally experienced them, doing highly consequential stuff because they're bored or believe it might make them richer. I guess a lot of our culture, too.

It really does always come back to "WHO is going to do it?"

You know how good it feels to finally do something you've been putting off for a while? Took me all of about an hour to decompose my Spotify account into separate Qobuz and Pocket Casts accounts and lose basically nothing important

Anyone Else Here xkcd.com/3188/

While we can point to the vast environmental and social consequences as the reasons for doing away with genai, I still feel that the evil at its core is convincing people that words and ideas are something they need help with.

Obsessed with this juxtaposition

Car traffic is a DDoS attack on cities.

You know, I'll take it:

It's worth reading the whole interview in full. It basically verifies that the NYT has spent the past decade-plus doubling down on top-down narratives for coverage, getting more intense over time. Sulzberg personally picked & chose whom the news apparatus would target and whom it would kiss up to.

The Mamdani inauguration really feels like a sea change, the wave of neoliberalism in American politics finally starting to break

Mamdani: For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty

If we get to the other side of this present moment of attempted fascist takeover, I'm fairly sure that we'll get major social democratic reforms to our government. The Bernie campaigns will probably be looked at the way the Goldwater campaigns are looked at today, but, you know...good, & not evil.

In this in-depth interview Billie Jean Sweeney — a former editor at The New York Times — details how the paper shifted towards openly promoting anti-trans hatred, why this was directed from the very top, how some staff pushed back and the immense damage done by the NYT legitimizing bigotry.

The main nice thing I'll say about my 2025 is that it was better than my 2024. May 2026 be kinder yet to all of us

in 2026 we are going to kill INSTAGRAM the dogshit prison for peoples photographs

used to be just Pinterest that fucked up looking for old images on computer but its solidifed to be 100% instagram and facebook. mark zuckerberg wrecked online, whipped up genocides and made stupid people even more obnoxious but on top of that i cant find old photographs in decent resolution

You could make hay remaking Juzo Itami's A Taxing Woman but replace all the weird horniness with social conscience

It makes perfect sense that the idea of the Crusades appeals today to the exact kind of loud, adolescent-brained, self-aggrandizing, just-rich-enough-to-cause-problems idiot that the actual Crusades were designed to siphon out of the body politic like the snake venom they were, and are.

I just don't know how anyone could think this is a compelling portrayal of "revolutionaries" when How to Blow Up a Pipeline exists

it's my so called wonderful life

This quote is from a piece that’s 8 years old now.

merry Christmas one and all abcnews.go.com/Internationa...

I found a vintage 90s brand of pants ai really like this year and have a couple of pairs. This morning on w dog walk I bent over and split the entire ass of my pants, so it seems there are some downsides to my old pants plan

!! Here’s a link to full video of the 60 Minutes segment that Bari Weiss killed last minute, via @jasonparis.bsky.social: is.gd/paU8Ko (It was uploaded to the Global TV app in Canada, seemingly by accident, and has now been taken down)

Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.

Every time I give my dogs marrow bones they spend ~5 minutes doing a little le Carré routine of figuring out the ideal spot to chomp down safe from the other dog's interference

just an fyi for portland ppl, this ursula exhibition is going on until february, it's free, and has a ton of her maps. plan for spending over an hour if you really want to take it all in www.oregoncontemporary.org/a-larger-rea...

Reminding everyone for no particular reason that Section 230 is one of the last things standing between free speech online and Trump having control over everything you see and say on the internet

This is precisely the intention of vouchers. They are an elaborate plot to destroy the public education system, which is part of a larger plot to enslave the American population

bobby, if you don't get in that god dang robot right now —

one if the greatest disservices of my lifetime has been democrats and the media colluding to pretend these evangelical psychos are Fine and Normal People and not dangerous fanatics who should be shunned

I've been walking my dogs for three minutes and I've seen three dads running with strollers. Clearly a I've stumbled upon the Strolling Hour

this is the message

Morrissey just proves my theory that all people have only a finite amount of coolness they can expend before turning into a racist boor. This is why I refuse to risk being cool at all, in even tiny amounts

Never forget that Portland paid for a subway tunnel, but instead of trains it carries runoff from surface parking lots. The Big Pipe is great for the river, but it's automobile infrastructure.

Persistently annoyed by liberal refusal to see the longstanding system of immigration, the one that effectively places undocumented workers outside of the protections of labor law and subjects them to racial terror, as a strategy of labor discipline that affects all workers.

We took it for granted back then, but "perchance greatly their superiors in all the attainments and virtues which adorn, or elevate, or ennoble human nature" contains more wokeness than a modern politician will get in his whole lifetime

I'm about to watch Laura Gibson record a live album and it's going to be good because the house is playing Emmylou Harris's Wrecking Ball over the PA right before she's scheduled to start and you don't follow that album if your shit is weak

what follows immediately after the birthright clause? the privileges and immunities and due process clauses? and what follows them? the equal protection clause. all of this is explicitly to say, "the declaration is the constitutional law of the land"

the birthright clause was not just written to wipe dred scott off of the books, it was written to repudiate the *idea* behind dred scott, you might say the larger *ideological project* of dred scott. and the whole of section 1 of the 14th amendment is a constitutional statement of political equality

This goes so incredibly hard.

I appreciate how reliable the French are. I'm watching the Air Tiny Desk Concert and those dudes look *exactly* how you expect the dudes from Air to look. 10/10, no notes

growing problem for the dems is that their voters want progressive candidates but the party leadership generally doesn't. so there's no structure to identify and vet good progressive candidates until it's too late.