I’d note this is a trick Trump learned at the very start of his second term: Using frivolous lawsuits with no chance of success as a mechanism to solicit bribes from companied that quickly “settle” to curry favor.

one thing that went wrong in our political media culture is that journalists so deeply internalized a backwards version of 'the cover-up is the crime' they assume that anything that's being done out in the open is just 'a thing that happened' that needs to be subjected to the 'objectivity' standard

if there's no value to publishers in letting Google reference them, they should not let Google access their content.

Nobody has fucked journalism and publishing harder than Google has over the past seven years

God I hate this garbage company

Very weird that a few days ago I watched Rafifi thinking it was a rewatch (I’d gotten it mixed up with another movie) and that this was a first time watch when it was a rewatch. I must be having a stroke.

Now watching

FWIW this says dod is breaking the law on the civilian harm office

Not enough news coverage of how the insurrectionist reparations fund is a clear violation of the 14th Amendment. We need to enforce the Constitution in its original meaning and plain text. You can't imagine away parts of the Constitution just because it is politically inconvenient.

America waits anxiously for our daily ballroom update.

"Only about 12 percent of trustees at American colleges & universities have professional experience in higher education. If it seems odd to imagine 88% of the directors at, say, investment banks having no particular expertise in investment banking, that is the situation in the field of higher ed."

Why do faculty and students have so little say in the governance of American universities? This terrific new paper by Daniel Hemel and David Pozen asks why American universities are liberal autocracies rather than stakeholder democracies. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

This is bullshit.

“The UAE builds; the Islamic Republic destroys…. Stability requires hundreds of billions of dollars in defense, intelligence, and cybersecurity.” Let’s ask Sudan and Libya how UAE values stability and what those billions are spent on. What a ridiculous article. www.theatlantic.com/internationa...

A decade of normalization: Donald Trump is giving himself a $1.8 billion slush fund and the story is presently lower on the NYT's homepage than "Pep Guardiola Is Said to Be Leaving Manchester City." You really gotta scroll.

GRACE JONES — happy 78th birthday ❤️

Israeli ambassador just out there doing a classic antisemitism.

This is Amin Abdullah, the security guard at the Islamic Center of San Diego who died protecting his community and whose bravery very likely bought time for the students, teachers, and others at the mosque to find safety. A recent Facebook post gives you a sense of who he was.

Bill Clinton used to have to walk across the street to use a private telephone to make fundraising calls so as not to violate the Hatch Act by using public resources for partisan purposes. Trump makes campaign commercials from behind the Resolute desk.

warren beatty has such an odd cinematic persona. his characters are often himbos who become self aware and it drives them insane

The Supreme Court said Biden couldn't forgive student debt

the Democrats should announce that they will prosecute anyone who accepts a single fucking dime Trump stole

If you ranked the 1000 most corrupt things ever done by an executive branch official in the history of the United States something like 950 of them would have happened since Jan 20 2025.

So you CAN get reparations you just have to be a reactionary white person who tries to overthrow the government because black votes shouldn’t count

They're stealing billions of your money to pay off violent right-wing psychos while doing everything in their power to spike gas up to $5 a gallon, make groceries into a luxury and hand the country over to the oligarchs who want to permanently replace you.

I say without hyperbole that this is the most brazenly corrupt action in US Presidential history. That it does not immediately lead to impeachment is a dangerous sign of how far the rule of law has declined.

The Trump administration will not rest until every elite institution has purged itself of black people. ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...

God bless Taiwanese wuxia. On one hand, King Hu’s massive majestic marvels. On the other hand, this.

Now watching

Nothing but respect for my “Odyssey”

Pennsylvania resident here, and I have to say, when I voted for Fetterman in 2022, it was in hopes that he would one day go on Fox News to push the country to build a lavish ballroom.

Kind of think it’s a testament to how bad things are on multiple fronts that there hasn’t even been much gloating about what a cringe flop that event turned out to be.

"It's hard to believe that it would take two centuries for the Lord to raise up a great man to bring that ballroom finally to stand where it needs to stand." A real thing that was said, without shame, at a Christian prayer rally.

despite the title's promise i did not find Grave of the Fireflies to the light-hearted romp i was expecting.

The Cats Symphony Moritz von Schwind, 1868

I know it's almost laughable to ask Americans to seriously think about these things but what was done on Iraqi soul was the most egregious kind of violation. Bad enough for the US to exert such undue presence in Iraq already, but using it to help an aggressor state invade and establish secret bases?

Sometimes, a scandal is so big you have to pick off one piece of it. So in the case of Trump's insane stock trading, pick this: He did 6 trades of Intel stock. That company now counts the US government as a $9 billion stakeholder, thanks to Trump's intervention. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

This honestly bugs me a bunch re: Odyssey critique. A lot of the Iliad and the Odyssey is Goofy Fun. People turn into pigs! Nestor gives long speeches about how he doesn't give long speeches! Trying to treat them with reverence is itself a desecration.

“Gabagool” has intense proxy pro-alt-right vibes.

This is gobsmacking on every possible level. And for the Iraqi govt, hard to tell what's worse: If it knew nothing about them, or knew and did nothing.

🚨BREAKING: For the first time, the original Pakistani cypher — cable I-0678, the document that triggered the removal of former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan — is being released in full by Drop Site.

just open contempt for the united states as a pluralist and secular democracy. and a reminder that the function of the fiction that the united states was founded as a fundamentalist christian nation is to establish a hierarchy of human worth with white christians at the top

again, staying completely silent on the actual merits of ai, the initial ai boosters basically campaigned on "this will eliminate your job, forever, and make me personally rich." it should not surprise *anyone* that this provoked a backlash.

🗃️ You’re mad that Nolan’s Odyssey includes people of color. I’m mad that Nolan’s Odyssey doesn’t include the insanely tacky rainbow of colors that were used to paint everything in Ancient Greece. We are not the same.

That was a really weird one. The scene where the police put the naked half-charred body of the murder victim on public display hoping someone can identify her has got to be the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen in a giallo (and that’s saying a lot).

Time for another giallo

"When I die, bury me in my favourite cowboy boots." [Centuries pass] "It's likely that these boots are for a funerary purpose."

The President knows his announcements move markets so he trades on them in advance, for his own financial gain. This alone would have resulted in almost unanimous impeachment and removal for any previous holder of the office.

really hard to beat this as a symbol of institutional decay. the SEALs — a unit that has become infamously loose in discipline — escorting a corrupt politician without any discipline (Patel) on a party inside a hallowed watery graveyard for the fallen