Piper Gates

Feels wrong to laugh given the topic but this is this funniest thing I've read today 😆
Thx for the comic relief.

The cult that wants to thin the herd.
MAGA and MAHA overlap in a unifying philosophy: only the healthy should live, because only the Pure are healthy.
Illness is either a direct result of displeasing God (MAGA) or of being personally irresponsible with your lifestyle (MAHA.)
It's a death cult.

Bafta?
Give this man a Pulitzer

If it’s the Golden Age & everything is great & the economy is booming & Trump has ended all wars & slayed inflation & everyone is happy & drug prices are down & his approval is at 71% & everyone hates Dems, why would they need to do mid-decade gerrymandering to hold the House?

Something tells me no, they will not consider that.
Call it a hunch.

On this holiest of days, let us give thanks for the ever-dwindling blessing of shit that's funny enough to break through the paralyzing horror of 2025.
These days laughter isn't just medicine, it's a miracle 🙏

We’ve discovered a literal miracle with almost unlimited potential and it’s being scrapped for *no reason whatsoever*. This isn’t even nihilism, it’s outright worship of death and human suffering.

weird

At the extremes, such contempt can devolve into what the international democracy activist Srdja Popovic has called the "Maduro model" of governance, after the current leader of Venezuela. Autocrats who adopt it are willing to see their country enter the category of failed states," he says-accepting economic collapse, endemic violence, mass poverty, and international isolation if that's what it takes to stay in power. Like Maduro, Presidents Bashir al-Assad in Syria and Lukashenko Belarus seem entirely comfortable ruling over collapsed economies and societies. These kinds of regimes can be hard for the inhabitants of democracies to understand, because their primary goal is not to create prosperity or enhance the well-being of citizens. Their primary goal is to stay in power, and to do so, they are willing to destabilize their neighbors and destroy the lives of ordinary people.

Oh no! This paragraph in Autocracy, Inc. is prescient AF.

Anne Applebaum writes about the "Maduro model" of autocracy:

When an autocrat is perfectly willing to destabilize & rule over a failed state with economic collapse - if it means he can stay in power.

They will destroy to maintain control.

Mark Zandi @Markzandi · 8h The economy is on the precipice of recession. That’s the clear takeaway from last week’s economic data dump. Consumer spending has flatlined, construction and manufacturing are contracting, and employment is set to fall. And with inflation on the rise, it is tough for the Fed to come to the rescue. Unemployment remains low, but that’s only because labor force growth has gone sideways. The foreign-born workforce is shrinking, and labor force participation is declining. Telling is the economy-wide hiring freeze, particularly for recent graduates, and the decline in hours worked. Mark Zandi @Markzandi · 8h It’s no mystery why the economy is struggling; blame increasing U.S. tariffs and highly restrictive immigration policy. The tariffs are cutting increasingly deeply into the profits of American companies and the purchasing power of American households. Fewer immigrant workers means a smaller economy.

Moody's chief economist Mark Zandi says:
- We are headed for a recession
-The BLS data is totally reliable- for now
-The revisions are due to delayed reporting of DOGE govt layoffs
-Higher tariffs are dragging down the economy
1/

Hear ye, hear ye

...you'll shrivel up and die.

Bc if the efficacy of prayer for gun violence in schools and wildfire/flood prevention are any indication, Utah is cooked.

Best wishes, dipshits.

Well said.
Fox, OAN, Newsmax, etc are not "the press" & don't deserve the protections thereof.
They are entertainment outlets with no commitment to factual reporting. Even the courts agree on this.
They should be aggressively labeled & treated as such for our collective well being as a society.

Revised jobs number for June now has the US adding 400 billion jobs

The Roberts court: a hive of grievance from powerful men Appeasement has a price.

“The Roberts court is simultaneously corrupt, extreme, pliant and incoherent. It is the worst court imaginable facing the worst president in American history, with a rubber stamp Politburo serving him, while trampling the Constitution.”

steveschmidt.substack.com/p/the-robert...

YouTube video by The Tiny Chef Show Tiny Chef's Meditation

A balm for our battered souls
youtu.be/CboKuAjuKCM?...

"It's only pedantry if you're right. Otherwise it's just sparkling fuckheadedness."

The Tate brothers - good example, thanks.
A bit of a startling revelation on my end though, realizing I couldn't immediately call to mind a "secular" right-wing predator.
Like you said, probably bc religious affiliation is all but mandatory for inclusion in the cohort.

Good stuff here.

Agree w the sentiment but struggle to think of a single example of a secular right-wing predator, as in someone in the magasphere with zero ties to the Christian right.
When your religion decrees women to be property, sexual abuse is inevitable.
Honestly surprised it's technically still illegal.

Oh no I really hope Bill Clinton isn’t in the Epstein files, I’ll have to get rid of my Bill Clinton hat and my Bill Clinton sneakers and my Bill Clinton cologne and my Bill Clinton watch and take down my Bill Clinton flag and I’ll have to delete my Bill Clinton nft trading cards

"He's in the process of establishing a dictatorship."
It's a simple 8-word sentence. News media could tell the public that. They know it's true. They report on the various steps toward autocracy every day. But they're afraid to utter that 8-word sentence. Which is more evidence of how true it is.

It's repulsive being required to press a ❤️ button to engage with posts sharing such awful news.
Bluesky needs a "Thank you for sharing this but I hate it" option.

Look, you can say a lot about Hogan's legacy: he was racist, he was terrible to his colleagues, he put himself above other people, he firmly believed in the supremacy of white people, he was a bad wrestler, his life was a net negative for society.

That's it. That's the post.

If you’re feeling uneasy, it’s probably because we now know we live in a country built on the blackmail of a dead pedophile who is Too Big to Fail, so Congress has to go home for a couple of months to figure out how talk about it without defenestrating the president and collapsing the economy.

'Hello human, nice to meet you'

The clerks where I get my lunch said a man came in last week and asked them where the public entrance to 26 Federal Plaza was. He locked his bike outside, and it’s been there since.

What a terrible year to be conscious