Knowledge is 30% off! 👇👇👇

The big weekend news came late Friday when a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a key element of the Trump administration’s policy of mass detention of migrants. It promises to fuel more of the growing chaos of the past several weeks. talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...

“.. House Oversight Chair James Comer, who is leading an investigation into Epstein and has already subpoenaed multiple associates, did not rule out issuing one for Lutnick.” @politico.com www.politico.com/live-updates...

Ariane de Rothschild ousted her husband as CEO of his family’s storied bank, negotiated a big DOJ settlement and examined several mergers Behind every move was none other than Jeffrey Epstein, who had found his backdoor into one of Europe’s most powerful banking dynasties www.ft.com/content/0d70...

Completely missing in the article: any evidence of *actual* warnings by the author. This is why. Wine moms were better at predicting this than many libertarians who were so focused on lower taxes that ignored everything else (Balko is one of the few, not criticizing him)

This is absolutely insane. The sort of Kafka-esque nightmare you would find in a Philip K Dick book set far in the dystopian future. A window on America tumbling into autocracy. www.irishtimes.com/world/us/202...

Kid Rock: "god bless the stars and stripes, I love my truck almost as much as Donny's dumptruck" or some shit idk Bad Bunny:

Whether it's Republican Kid Rock glorifying statutory rape or Democrats reminding people that Kid Rock glorifies statutory rape, both sides have foisted the topic of statutory rape onto the American people.

Serious .com bubble vibes, but the relatively small number of players and political capture probably make the Grift-bubble different?

Super Bowl ads dominated by AI and GLP-1s suggest our corporate overlords think we are living in the WALL-E future, but actually we are living in the Andor past.

And yet, day after day after, an incredible number of our academic colleagues, every university, & ~every civil society organization & prominent politician/celebrity/businessperson/public intellectual/etc. continues to stay there, at the Nazi Bar, anyway. It's been incredibly revealing.

My first grader (a US citizen) came home from school crying because a friend from class (also a US citizen) hasn’t been coming to school because his parents (one of whom is not a citizen) are afraid of ICE. Little kids don’t have concepts of racism and xenophobia. That has to be taught. Or imposed.

There is not one five year old American that is better off because we threw his classmate in a concentration camp. Period.

Epstein was a weird nerd who built a fantastical demimonde to make people like him and monetized paradise. Sex was only a small part of what he was offering.

“The President who promised to “drain the swamp” has flooded a new bog with lobbyists seeking tariff exceptions from the trade rep and Commerce Department. And be sure to bring your campaign checkbook” @wsj.com editorial

ICE told nurses this Minneapolis man “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.” What actually happened is that they pulled him from a car, beat him so viciously with a steel baton that he had 8 skull fractures, 5 life-threatening brain hemorrhages, and couldn’t remember he had a daughter.

I wonder how much of reactionary nostalgia is basically “too young to understand the adult content” in vast swaths of popular culture.

"Tell me you know nothing about the Muppets without telling me you know nothing about the Muppets."

The committee system and legion of permanent staff is exactly what is needed to give Congress to walk and chew gum (sometimes) the capacity it desperately needs right the ship, because there is too much work to be done with An Omnibus To End All Omnibuses

Bill Ackman's fund, Pershing Square, manages 18 billion dollars for wealthy clients, billions of it for the Harvard Endowment Anyways here he is uncritically eating up conspiracy slop from Naomi Wolf about stolen NYC elections

like, hundreds of children are suffering and are being exposed to infectious disease outbreaks in concentration camps *right now*. that has to matter more than presidential sounding words

I think we’d be a lot less “mad” if Moyn hadn’t spent years attacking everyone to the left of center — especially “liberals” — who had already figured this shit out.

We're traumatizing thousands of kids for life. The people behind this are monsters.

New: Trump's administration tonight told a Boston judge that his proposal that it issue a student visa to a Babson College student it deported to Honduras in violation of a court order is "unfeasible" and said ICE declines to facilitate her return. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

Selective enforcement is a powerful tool, used extensively by Vladimir Putin to consolidate his power in Russia.

Metry and her husband of 4 years go to DHS to get their I-130 in motion. "Good news" a DHS employee told them, the form to start her naturalization was approved. DHS employee asks the husband to follow him through a secure door. When it locks behind him, ICE detains his wife to deport her.

🧐

Welcome to the world of selective enforcement, a hallmark of autocratic and hybrid governments. It doesn't matter if the underlying investigation has validity. Because the probe is not about the rule of law, but rather the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of allies of the regime.

with the news of measles at the concentration camps and the five year old going home with their bunny hat, I was going to suggest that they get tested for TB..... Because TB is also inherent in concentration camps from Sauchenhausen to residential schools to internment camps.

Bond Markets Are Now Battlefields foreignpolicy.com/2026/02/06/f... @charlesdainoff.bsky.social @geoffreyfw.bsky.social

Remember the controversy when Obama was accused of intervening in UK politics? This is the current US government openly seeking to undermine liberal democracy in Europe.

Since his first term, President Trump has wanted to be able to fire federal employees for any reason. A new rule vastly expands his authority to do that. n.pr/4rAiG9M

1/6 The Norwegian services presented their annual unclassified assessments today. Some highlights from Focus 2026 from NIS will follow: "It is in Russia's interest that the Greenland debate causes uncertainty and potential conflict between Europe and the United States."

stalin could only dream of a purge like this

Taps the sign...

Trump's FBI raid in Georgia is potential model for getting search warrant to seize 2026 ballot boxes, says @rickhasen.bsky.social. "Once those ballots are out of control of election officials we’ve lost chain of custody." On the pod Rick illuminatingly explains all: newrepublic.com/article/2062...

Here's @rickhasen.bsky.social detailing the scenario in which Trump uses search warrant to seize ballot boxes in a contested 2026 locale. This is more worrisome than ICE at the polls. Hasen also suggests ways to act against this now. It's harrowing stuff: newrepublic.com/article/2062...

In other words, the United States wants to fund a fifth column in Europe that will undermine its allies and degrade European political culture in order to advance this administration's perverse interests.

Burn it down, burn it all down. I don’t want to ever hear that MeToo went too far. It didn’t go far enough.

Someone's gotta capitalize those gazillion dollars of VC investment, and the ROI for campaign donations is a lot higher than it is for data centers.

The terms of the US-India trade deal are flatly insane. I can't believe anyone in DC believes that the Indians can do this or that the Indians will even try very hard. www.cnbc.com/2026/02/05/c...

> Dow: < x.com/mark_dow/sta... >: 'I was a professional emerging market PM and HFM for many years. This is exactly the kind of analysis we had to do in Turkey, Argentina, Venezuela, etc. Y'all thought the Fed was going to turn us into these countries. Turns out it was Trump that would... 1/

Helen is a fictional character. There’s no “historical accuracy”. We’re talking about a woman who canonically hatched from an egg. It’s all made up. You can reimagine it. That’s how art works.

Someone remind me what Greek sources had to say about people living in the north and west of Europe.

A new report shows the enormous pressure EU lawmakers are coming under from American big tech giants.

“In 1844, the Democrats were split…” seems like better history than this. Hey @professormusgrave.bsky.social your book is calling…

With Trump once again blaming Black cities for "voter fraud," it's worth revisiting our piece about why this is a playbook as old as the nation --- and how it makes these accusations more believable to Whites: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

happy end of New START to all who celebrate. may all your mirvs be uploaded!