cofax

Auspicious Omens and Excellent Insubordination I started this out as a letter to a friend who's feeling down about where we as a nation are at in this moment, and I am still learning how this newsletter thing works so thought I could use the newsl...

In Dublin last year, an annoying interviewer demanded of me: “Your country has been overtaken by fascists. Why are you smiling?” I was too jetlagged to have a sensible answer so I said, “I’m smiling because I have a knife between my teeth.” The knife might look like this:

voters pulled the lever for it to be 2019 again, and for their hubris, they got us all 2020 instead

TECH IS NOT 10 FASCIST FINANCIERS. TECH IS NOT SIX GUYS ON YOUTUBE PROMOTING THEIR PORTFOLIO. What do you think the demographics are of the half million tech workers who were laid off by the fascist tycoons? Who were the first people to bear the brunt for warning about harms of social media & LLMs?

Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters Exclusive: Site takes a cut of subscriptions to content that promotes far-right ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism

I do not shame anyone who's still on Substack and I am still impatient with Patreon's newsletter features but here's a good reminder of why so many of us are putting up with the various difficulties of *not* using Substack

www.theguardian.com/media/2026/f...

This is not going away.

we should stop calling it AI and start calling it guesstech, because that’s what it ultimately is and does

One of every thousand American residents has been taken into custody by ICE in the last year.

On Tilt, by Jasper Craven America’s new gambling epidemic

Here's a long & genuinely disturbing piece about the new gambling epidemic that is (very predictably) following from all this:

the primary use case is no longer buying drugs, or serving as the payment of choice for ransomware, or purchasing hideous cartoon apes

it is bribery on an unimaginable scale

"Everything is gambling now": How betting is taking over America Gambling culture is enveloping American sports, politics, media and trading.

As I've said many times, this is an awful thing that we are doing to ourselves for no discernible reason.

I will reiterate: for every bit of damage, violence, or theatrical incompetence that draws public attention, there are a *thousand* things the Trumpists are doing behind the scenes, outside of public attention, that are just as ruinous to our country and our future.

Mr. Secretary, did you traffic your children’s nanny to Jeffrey Epstein?

The high wouldn’t last. Seahawks safety Julian Love soon intercepted a throw from New England quarterback Drake Maye, and the Patriots never recovered. In the end, Kane lost a bit less than $100,000 in bets that favored the Patriots. “What are you gonna do about it? You get very numb to these kinds of numbers,” said Kane, who works out of his one-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia.

In the future we're gonna look back at online gambling and prediction markets in the same way we look now at cigarettes on airplanes and lead-based paint

www.wsj.com/business/med...

A media critic could probably get several thousand words about the political valence of this, looking at crime and nice white ladies etc

Have y'all ever seen starlings, or jays, or house sparrows, mob a larger bird? A crow, or a hawk?

The hawk is larger and could kill any one of the smaller birds easily. But the mob of smaller birds is hard to stop. They harass the larger bird, confuse it, make it difficult for it to sit in peace.

every single person writing credulously about "elon will put people on the moon" should have to pin this post to their monitor

"You may have heard the latest news about the President's health--you haven't? Good, don't panic about it. He is fine, or at least good enough. You may have read about the unredacted Epstein files that-- They said what? With him? Photos too? Oh sweet Jesus, oh God, just... don't panic. Lemme think."

Thread worth reading

In the last month ICE has bought warehouses in:

- Hagerstown, MD: $102 million
- Surprise, AZ: $70 million
- Hamburg, PA: $87 million
- Tremont, PA: $120 million
- San Antonio, TX: $82 million
- El Paso, TX: $123 million
- Social Circle, GA: price unknown

This is unprecedented.

Evers Monument Never Removed Brochures ‘Not One Second,’ Superintendent Says, Disputing Reports The Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument never stopped giving out brochures, says the monument’s superintendent, Keena Graham.

Keena Graham, the superintendent for the Medgar & Myrlie Evers National Monument, told the @mississippifreepress.org flat-out that the not only was the first MS Today story was wrong, so was its follow-up: "I have no idea what he’s referring to."
www.mississippifreepress.org/evers-nation...

I saw them during the pre show, watching on YouTube tv

when they weren't outright supporting him almost every libertarian was anti-anti-Trump, it turns out that "but lefties are annoying" is significantly more important than jackbooted thugs bashing down people's doors

Hating the Game The cooperation game, the murder game, and acting in good faith with people you know are acting in bad faith.

The reality is America is a huge multicultural multilingual country, not a white ethnostate, and venomous white supremacist MAGA crybabies lose it whenever that reality becomes unignorable. We should always seek to increase, not decrease, their discomfort. www.the-reframe.com/hating-the-g...

💯👇

Look, all I'm saying is that if you just spent the last six years being frustrated with Durbin and you think there's a chance he's about to be replaced with a guy who thanks ICE for their service and takes AIPAC and crypto money, you should treat it like a very serious emergency

This is a wild departure from past practices. All the talk of the “Worst of the Worst” is a lie. Usually between 50-75 percent of ICE deportees have criminal records. We’ve turned ICE from a crime-fighting org into a racial profiling and ethnic cleansing operation.

The Death of Direct File Tech for good not welcome in the Trump administration

Reminder when you watch the Intuit Super Bowl ads, they have Super Bowl ad money because they are a successful rent seekers who have worked for decades to kill free, quality, public tax preparation services donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-death-...

I am not claiming ICE doesn’t exist anymore. I am stating that it is more difficult to cover it on the ground for a number of reasons, including less agents, the tactics of the community to prevent raids, and an apparently smaller frequency of “papers please” stops of pedestrians.

my heart breaks for all the NPS staff

New Trump Administration order targets Texas park — what to know The signs are seemingly uncontroversial, reports say.

They're removing any informational signs from Big Bend National Park that are in Spanish & English or talk about cooperation with Mexico.

They want to ensure Spanish-speakers can't learn about nature at a national park on the US/Mexico border.

One originally conceived as a Peace Park with Mexico.