This is videogame thinking where you win a battle and suddenly the map changes colors and all the factories and barracks are yours

Excerpt from WaPo: “‘They actually built a house which was identical to the one they went into with all the safes and all the steel all over the place,’ Trump told ‘Fox & Friends.’” CIA would probably have preferred that Trump not say that.

Gotta say, Schumer is, himself, a fucking distraction. Time to get someone in there who can actually do the job of leading an opposition party.

This is definitely not a SCIF and, among many other things, this alone is a major national security breach. Random third rate intelligence agencies would have known about this attack before Congressional leaders did.

ah yes. let's wait until dems sweep house and senate in midterms so we can have two more years of crippling constitutional crises before trump cedes power peacefully

Terrible take. Literally every FIFA Peace Prize winner has done this.

An actual legal conservative would say that a govt official has zero power to do anything that isn’t explicitly authorized by the Constitution. All other powers are reserved to the people and states under 10th amendment.

Almost always, if someone’s talking about the U.S. Constitution and they say some actor has “inherent” power to do X, that means the text says nothing about the actor having X power and the speaker is just making it up.

Is there a good reason to take Maduro to SDNY? Or is it just that this is what we normally do with drug trafficker defendants and the admin lacks imagination? Bc it seems like a smarter, foresighted autocrat would use this as an opportunity to bolster the power of their preferred jurisdiction.

It’s the endgame of modern-age Civilization, where you run out of stuff to build so you go surprise attack one of the small civs that can’t hurt you. The other civs get pissed but you’re so close to the end of the game that it doesn’t matter, at least for you. But also someone usually gets nuked.

Good example of a thing where states need a firm reminder that they have and can enforce their own laws, even if the federal government won't. Every state has its equivalent laws about this stuff. Musk is not cloaked in some federal immunity just because he's off again / on again buddies with Trump.

Also a case where we don't even need new laws targeting AI as such, and all the problematic complications of that. We need to at least enforce existing laws first, because using an AI to do the crime isn't a loophole, whatever the crime in question might be. "But I used a computer" isn't a defense!

What the KENNEDY Center used to be… Remember that time Aretha Franklin performed at the 2015 Kennedy Center Honors, paying tribute to Carole King, who co-wrote “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman,” and it brought a tear to Obama’s eye and everyone to their feet? And Carole King’s reaction. Wow.

I'm gonna spell check Dan Quayle in 2026.

World’s largest bottle rocket.

Took a six month sabbatical after quitting my job, and watched from afar as the team and program I built continued to rack up achievements.

Speech that is integral to unlawful conduct does not receive First Amendment protection. E.g., statements made to defraud or to further a conspiracy.

"What a year for the ultra wealthy. The world’s 500 richest people added a record $2.2 trillion to their collective fortunes in 2025’s… booming markets, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. And about a quarter of this year’s gains went to just eight billionaires.” — Bloomberg Morning Brief

This is why they want us talking about day care scams.

More evidence that the Trump administration is cozying up to cybermercenaries. The Treasury Dept has removed three people closely affiliated with Intellexa, the company that makes Predator, off a sanctions list: therecord.media/treasury-san...

that's a lot of gender affirming care Nick is looking for, there.

“I’ll be back again someday.” “No.”

No blood for oil, US off … [checks notes] Venezuelan soil!

this seems specifically designed to break mail-in voting (where deadlines are defined by postmark)

The closest we’ve gotten to meaningful tech legislation was the ADPPA privacy bill in 2022, which cleared committee 53-2. But some folks on both sides didn’t like it (industry hated it). FCC enacted some privacy regs in 2016 and digital discrimination regs in 2024. Neither survived Trump admins.

Reading this, I see so many parallels to the Jewish American immigrant experience of the 20th century. We all have so much more in common than we think.

Ladies and gentlemen, the head of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division

Also, the U.S. did keep going. We developed the Internet. We launched GPS. We built search engines and email. We put robots on Mars. We sequenced the human genome. We invented the iPhone. We put all human knowledge and history in your pocket. And a lot of this was done by immigrants.

Even just a few years ago, Panera pulled their caffeinated lemonade off the market after a few people over-consumed and died. Automakers routinely issue recalls for safety issues that theoretically could happen at very low incidence rates. Entire crops of lettuce get tossed for a few e-coli cases.

Remember: When Tylenol was poisoned *by an outsider* and killed people, the company recalled all their products & redesigned them. When Intel’s Pentium had a bug so obscure it affected 1 in _9 billion_ long division calculations, they recalled their chips. ChatGPT was made deadly *by its team*.

I laughed like 4 times

You’ve just opened up a Star Trek themed restaurant. What are you calling it? “Bean me up.”

What these people are doing to the power of calling out real antisemitism, in an incredibly dangerous time of surging global antisemitism….man, it is just so worrisome

A convicted Spanish agitator with ties to global far-right movements has secured White House access as part of a MAGA push to reshape Spanish-language media. Javier Negre’s platform minimizes ICE abuses and anti-LGBTQ+ narratives, showing how disinformation targets Latino voters.

Kid got a Tetris handheld as a present. Played a few times then asked me to show them how to do it. I then proceed to play my best game of Tetris ever. Now my kid will have “DAD“ locked at the #1 spot on the high score table basically forever. Parenting win.

Switching the hypo to a different religion can help illustrate the point: Bob loves Sukkot but isn’t Jewish. He enjoys it and celebrates it in a non-religious way, because he likes it as an autumnal harvest festival. But Sukkot is of course a religious holiday, regardless of what the Bobs do.

Incredible what you find when you start looking for data on the "white men can't get jobs anymore" phenomenon www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/12/17/w...

GOP operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, convicted election fraudsters, were paid $960,000 in the second quarter to secure a pardon for a former nursing-home operator who defrauded the government of $38 million. Trump pardoned the man, Joseph Schwartz, last month.

That privilege--the privilege to speak of your religious beliefs as certainties that are incontestable--is given to Christians alone in America. And anyone else knows this and tiptoes around it, reflexively. But what if we stopped doing that, like this guy did in North Dakota?

I'm going to tell my favorite story again about reflecting the certainty of beliefs back at people who don't expect it. A friend was one of the few Jews on faculty at a North Dakota University. Every year, his colleague in religious studies would invite him to come to his religious studies class...

Every jaw in the room dropped. He had done the unthinkable. He had not only told them his beliefs, but he had done it with the equal degree of certainty that they had employed in telling him theirs. And there's this unspoken rule in America: Only Christians are allowed to do this.

This is ultimately why those American Jews who thought we could remain in good stead with the Christian nationalists, as a specially protected minority who would receive special privileges by allowing ourselves to be used as pretexts to crack down on higher education, were so tragically mistaken.

A government that can officially declare that Jesus is your savior can just as easily declare the opposite.

The theory that only millennials are uniquely equipped to handle the Internet without melting their brains—due to being in the Goldilocks overlap of pre-Internet, early Internet, and modern Internet—remains undefeated.

The “help determine the future of our nation” line, in the context of deporting people, is a dogwhistle to the 14 Words.

"Like Amazon Prime, but with human beings."

“Like prime, but with human beings”

I see there’s a post about microplastics going around with a photo of drinking straws, so here is my semi-regular reminder that the 3 biggest sources of microplastics are tires (45%), synthetic clothing particles (35%) and paint (~10%). Lay article attached:

It’s possible they’re incompetent. However, DOJ attys, and their chiefs, have a lot of experience redacting files. They have software for it. They have procedures to check that it’s done properly. This is more likely to be malicious compliance—after all, the law requires near complete disclosure.

“Immunity from prosecution” is sounding familiar, somehow. “Dershowitz helped negotiate an agreement with a provision that provided protection for himself against criminal prosecution in Florida for sexually abusing Jane Doe #3. Because this broad immunity would have been controversial if disclosed”