RIP Peter Watkins, anarchist mockumentarian

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[𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘧𝘶𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦] "...or you know that warm feeling inside that you get when you remember the president is looking out for you? That's a sort of dividend too."

"Neither ancient nor inevitable, these lines were hastily drawn in committee rooms, colonial offices and war cabinets."

"Marty had edited down his poem, motivating this 'wounded artist' to take Scorsese's assistant editor hostage and demand that Robbie and Marty come immediately to the screening room with thousands of dollars in ransom money and a pound of cocaine."

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Oh for heaven's sake, just go chair a condo board or something.

"'Everyone is staying home, everyone is scared,' Macias told me. 'There's so much uncertainty. COVID was bad, but this is way worse.'"

"It was amazing how profoundly people could misunderstand one another, and assume that others didn't mean what they were saying—how minds could wrest sense out of things that made no sense."

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Mr. Roper: I'm not sleepy. Mrs. Roper: That's the best time to come to bed. [𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘦𝘳] Mr. Roper: Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. [𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦]

A.I. has gotten so good that unscrupulous prosecutors can automate their fabrications.

This article on whether AGI is a conspiracy theory doesn't bring up *the* defining characteristic of conspiracy theories until the conclusion—and then it's the writer, not the people he's criticizing, who embraces conspiracy thinking.

The classic American journey: "She got divorced, became a lesbian, briefly joined a psychedelics cult in South America, suffered 'ego death,' almost died, found Jesus, moved from New York to Tucson."

Headline of the day: "Orcas are ganging up on great white sharks to eat their livers"

the anarchists of Sudan

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"If Michael Scott were real and working today, he would undoubtedly be flooding the Dunder Mifflin Slack with Michael Scott memes."

smh now they're letting hardened sandwich-throwers out on the street

Someone's ready to shake up the 2028 presidential primaries!

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1948: H.L. Mencken enjoys a Norman Thomas speech

I'm old enough to remember when posts like this would put "eliminate the filibuster" next to "pack the Supreme Court" in their lists of things the Democrats were plotting to do.

The modal member of the first group is a nonagenarian veteran of Social Democrats USA. The modal member of the second group is an intern at Compact.

He's had a hard week, and 9/11 kitsch is his comfort food.

This seems right, but it's possible that Kramer is the guy who still voted for Eric Adams.

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This, but the people in the bubble are Republicans who thought the big issue on Virginia voters' minds was trans people

It's getting hard to tell the ICE agents acting like criminals from the criminals acting like ICE agents

Matthew Petti on Dick Cheney

Since we're talking about New York mayors today, here is William Jay Gaynor, one of the few politicians Mencken admired.

And I thought you had to be geriatric commie to have been blacklisted for being prematurely antifascist. x.com/emilybrooksn...

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Yet another phantom shooter, this time at UVa.

The state of California acquired a bunch of homes to make way for a freeway, didn't finish the freeway, still owns the empty buildings, and has been spending millions to keep homesteaders out

"Palaver has been reluctant to oppose Thiel publicly. Perhaps that's because, as followers of Girard, both men believe that any two figures who oppose each other strongly enough are bound to mimic each other and become entangled."

"His CEO-monarch, meant to embody decisive authority and steely efficiency, is a mere cog in a machine serving an entity which no one truly owns. The vision of a corporate monarchy crumbles under the weight of corporate law's uncompromising logic."

"Food allergies in children dropped sharply in the years after new guidelines encouraged parents to introduce infants to peanut products"

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Trumpist health care policy turns out to work like Trumpist trade policy: You navigate a bureaucratic tangle by requesting the personal intercession of the executive.

Looking through old issues of the Black Panther Party newspaper, found an all-time classic headline.

The difference between MTG and Boebert was visible from the beginning: MTG had really believed in QAnon, while Boebert just sounded as Q-friendly as she could to placate a particular voting bloc. Both for better and for worse, MTG actually believes things.

The most popular song on Willie Nelson's Spotify page, Waylon Jennings' Spotify page, *and* Kris Kristofferson's Spotify page is the Highwaymen's version of "Highwayman." For Johnny Cash it's #3. This seems really weird to me.

Best-case scenario: He pulls U.S. forces away from Venezuela to do this, then loses interest when they're halfway across the Atlantic.

"When you are already surrounded by attentive sycophantic voices telling you bullshit, chatbots must seem incredibly human."

"The broader lesson here is that dying empires are often difficult and dangerous places to be a cosmopolitan minority."

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"People sometimes compared them to the Manson girls, which they found funny and didn't mind playing into."

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Update on the alleged Michigan terror plot: Sources claim the "investigation was in its early stages, with no criminal charges prepared and no clear understanding of what exactly the suspects planned to do and where."