My pride and pleasure at getting a bonus significant enough that I can afford to buy a new bed and replace my literally falling apart laptop has given way to my dismay at the extensive research I reflexively do before making such large purchases.

Want all the ingredients in my fridge to become delicious fried rice, but do not want to stand in front of the stove

Epstein & associates sending each other links to various New Rules is the least surprising shit ever

Don’t take your eye off the ball, people. There is nothing more important right now than deciding what we all think about Will Stancil

We are living through the Great Dying of Legacy Media and while there's plenty to grieve, this is also an opportunity for those with liberal ideals and a bit of money. I know I would be doing this if I had fuck off millions or billions to be playing with

The people who would rather this country be an all-white post industrial ghost town than a thriving multiethnic powerhouse

i suppose it’s fitting that the model the billionaires have in mind when they want to destroy a journalistic institution and make it a reactionary slop machine is The Free Press

This is my read on the post and similar things happening at the Times. Center right owners and editors figured they could tack right, tapping into the lucrative right wing audience and marginalizing the line and progressive they find annoying.

one thing the trump era has made clear, i think, is that the american people themselves are far more committed to the values of our founding documents than our elites

My continuing dive back into old Ken Burns docs is confirming my vague sense that I did not like Shelby Foote. He typifies the type of smug, superior Southern intellectual that uses their accent to pretend they're just a good ol' boy while looking down their nose at you.

I finding Raising Cane's to be emblematic of a certain kind of suburban American culture in a way I can't fully articulate, but relates to people being enthusiastic about a chain restaurant because of a) dipping sauce and b) crushed ice.

The thing about the "states rights" people is that they've always been the same people and they've always been lying. They don't care about the Constitution, they don't care about democracy, they care about forcing everyone else to do things exactly the way they want it done.

this has also occurred to me and I'd say that professional demeanor and actual expertise are only maybe ~50 percent correlated. a lot of quacks are well dressed smooth talkers and a lot of legit scientists are goofy as hell

Even a passing familiarity with genetic history will tell you this would in fact be pretty normal, if it were actually true here, and I’ve yet to see any proof that this is a more pressing issue now than it has been at any point in the last 5,000 years

i think if you post like this without offering concrete steps people can take to prepare for and respond to interference or without any acknowledgement of the success (or lack thereof) of this strategy then you are basically engaged in voter suppression.

Your regular reminder that during the era of The Odyssey, "white" Europeans were considered barbarians and the civilized peoples were swarthy Mediterraneans and black North Africans

Watching an Archive rip of someone's VHS recording of Ken Burns baseball series from the 90s and the nostalgia it has given me for 1990s PBS is incredibly powerful.

The stupidest Republicans are becoming racist against white people for opposing ICE and the stupidest Dems are becoming racist against Latinos for being ICE.

I dunno if you've met any farmers, but the only part of that that doesn't describe the average American farmer of a certain age is "theater queen".

It sucks to have been laid up with a tweaked lower-back all day, but it's been a good excuse to mainline the new Ken Burn's American Revolution docuseries.

the arrest of journalists in minneapolis, including don lemon, is more evidence that the only move the administration knows how to make is to use force, and does not know how to respond when that force is met with defiance and indifference.

The Bond-athon nears its end. Just the two most recent to go, which are also the only two I still haven't seen.

I'm cranky

More grift. A nursing home super PAC donated millions to Trump’s campaign. And, lo and behold, he made it easier for them to cut staffing to pad their profits. Literally wheeling and dealing on the backs of the elderly and the disabled. This man’s grift knows no low.

I will simply never recover from reading this sentence: "Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people."

It finally happened. I've had to edit an official Big Bank internal document referencing the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

One could make a very good live action Gundam movie. Do I trust that they will? Well...

For reference, that's as many subscribers as Disney Plus has and only somewhat less than Netflix. This paper is run by delusional morons.

The extent to which the right wing media machine has successfully convinced rural and exurban America to cut its own throat for the benefit of the richest and most powerful people in the country is honestly impressive.

First The Line, now The Cube. I'm starting to think MBS' visionary plan to finally bring multi-billion dollar shapes to his people will never be realized.

Half Price Movie Night was a hit this week. Do yourself a favor and see The Testament of Ann Lee in a theater if you can. Very interesting.

I... they literally have to drive past a gas station just to park at this event!

Well, Donnie, what happened is that even just twenty years ago at this time of year, the snow that fell in November and December would still be on the ground. Instead there is at best light dusting of snow because there been so many above freezing days that every previous snowfall has melted.

Do not do this. Listen to @inbedwiththeright.bsky.social instead. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i...

This is far more of a finance, education, medicine, or manufacturing state than it is an ag state and it's ridiculous that we cling to the delusion that it's otherwise

Me at 12: Dad is so lame, he only listens to music from when he was like 25. Me at 38: oh no

Kind of fascinating to see the latency of the Republican messaging machine at times like this. National figures are already signaling that they want to find a way to step back on ICE. Meanwhile on the state and local levels, you have folks like my AG still pushing last week's "comply or die" line.

I get the feeling someone isn't getting into the Christmas Adventurers club after all.

Big tech more like big dreck

Shocked to learn that people in their 20s aren't super into the shit they were way into in grade school.

It's crazy that the American gestapo is being led by a man whose name means "as dumb as a cow" in Portuguese.

Heads up, #Iowa folks.

I do think that a possibly underrated dynamic in The Horrors is that the Right as it has reconstituted itself under Trump legitimately can’t understand sincere moral or physical courage

So in summary, the Twitter male ideal is a man who works out 3X a week, lives on a farm with kids who stay home all day, has a wife who only bakes, eats nothing but red meat which is not baked, has acute constipation, a towering IQ and is rendered catatonic by the sound of a whistle

Been two fisting books on the French Revolution (A New World Begins) and Haitian Revolution (The Black Jacobins) this month and let me tell ya, they do not reinforce the fatalism and doomerism of people saying brutal regimes can't be overcome and resistance is pointless.

I have spent my entire adult life being lectured by Republican politicians and conservative legal movement types about how important it is to preserve the sacred constitutional right to self-defense of *specifically this person* and then secret police murdered him in the street

My least hygienic and most dressed down coworker getting extremely proud of the "AI headshot" he had copilot generate of him and posting it in the work group chat feels very emblematic of this moment in AI.

While my last four this week is stacked with Bonds, I also saw No Other Choice this week, which very well might have been my favorite movie of 2025 if I'd gotten to see it in 2025.

Mr. Rogers pablum, Cold War liberal values WEREN'T considered all that partisan from the 1970s into the 1990s. They became partisan precisely because the GOP began to organize against that consensus, AT EXACTLY THE MOMENT MEGHAN MCCAIN ENTERED INTO ADULTHOOD and decided to be a Republican.