Lady Jek

it is useful not to lose sight of how, underneath everything else, hollow all of this noise is. portland and chicago are warzones, so i am dispatching a couple hundred best buy assistant managers there to quell the insurrections. potemkin stuff, paper thin

Ok but when do we get it 😹

Your daily moment of zen:

Rescued bear cubs at the Kilham Bear Center in New Hampshire are given a donated pile of apples & acorns every year to fatten up before their first hibernation.

Kilham is focused on rehab & release, run by competent rehab experts.

I really do hear the argument, and in different times - even just a few years ago - I would have been inclined to agree. The problem is that today the techbro-government apparatus and what drives it is not remotely like Nedbank, and my banking history is nothing like my WhatsApp chats.

Andor-worthy :)

OMG 🫣

Or maybe today we are forced to chose between tech-supported clandestine networking that can potentially be used for nefarious ends, and limitless state surveillance. It's an unhappy choice, but the appeal of the former over the latter seems pretty evident to me.

*whispers* who or what is Link..?

Schwarze Galga mit weißen Abzeichen an eine Sofalehne gelehnt, den Kopf auf dem Rückenteil abgelegt.

Ich begrüße Sie zu einer weiteren Folge "Die merkwürdigen Schlafgewohnheiten der Anubis L.".

Heute: "Weltschmerz"

You might need to be of recent Northern European heritage to properly experience this post in your mouth 💜

Ok but this is a perfectly reasonable position to adopt, and also good for the pet - cat or dog - if it isn't later stuck with a human who doesn't like it.

Lovely piece of reflection and writing

We were so young 🥲

Five raccoons sit on corner bench seating around a table.

one of us either needs to take grandma to the optometrist or tell her no more cats

It’s essential that you find common ground with Trump supporters. For instance, you know that you have many flaws, and they believe you are less than human. Work with that.

—Ezra Klein, tomorrow in the New York Times

Ein Esel mit braunem Fell und weißer Schnauze, aus der Froschperspektive aufgenommen. Er blickt von oben herab in die Kamera, im Hintergrund ein strahlend blauer Himmel mit Cumuluswolken.

Wassup?
#esel
#eselliebe

Social media posting is the very definition of working for exposure 😹

In her lunch with the FT the OnlyFans CEO says her company pays more tax than the entire British fishing industry. Quite a stat.

The answer to every serious concern with falling native populations in rich countries is "immigrants". If as much money and political capital had been spent on integration and assimilation over the last ten years as on border control, those concerns could be met for generations to come. And yet.

The people that are still making the numbers rise are brown people, aka "immigrants". It's really nothing more than that.

😹😹😹

The rally-around-the-flag effect will be so much stronger in blue states with an identifiable villain! Then again, current US leadership doesn't seem to care much about its popularity.

Single-panel cartoon by Gary Larson from 1986. A man in plaid shirt and jeans, carrying a bucket, stands looking at two cows he's surprised in a barn. One cow is kneeling, the other sitting, as they make marks with pens on a large drawing of a human resembling the bucket guy that's mapped out like a beef carcass with meat cuts like "shoulder chops" and "spare ribs". The head is marked "throw away". Caption below is: "Farmer Brown froze in his tracks; the cows stared wide-eyed back at him. Somewhere, off in the distance, a dog barked."

I just listened to a news report on the topic and was left wondering if I'd misheard that bit!!

...

Not great. Although it ultimately might shake up Japanese politics in an important way.

I would love to be a fly on the wall in the halls of Beijing, but I guess we'll never know how robust the decision making is there :)

Sure, but if lowest-common-denominator is your job description that might be ok. But it is a terrible indictment on the EU that she was chosen again, on the back of it. All of which is to say I agree with the OP, EU needs urgent political reform, replacing VdL won't fix things.

The difference between China and the US is that it seems, at least from the outside, that the US' economic decision makers increasingly believe they can bend economic reality as much as they bent
political reality to get to power. China had to work its way up and never had the privilege of hubris.

Great substack on the EU's political project