Rigel

Charles. Chuck. Chucky. What we want is for you to look at the fullest extent of the law to which these murdering thugs can be prosecuted, and EXTEND that extent. Get it riiiiiiiight up against the boundaries of Cruel and Unusual. Make new laws for it if you need to; that's literally your job.

The Enduring Shill.

punxsutawney phil (just had visions of pestilence, blood rain, malignant false idols, stillborn livestock): uuuh 6 more weeks of winter

Hell yeah, didn't know this!

I'm sorry. As a technology writer, I'm supposed to be telling you that this bet will some day pay off, because one day we will have shoveled so many words into the word-guessing program that it wakes up and learns how to actually do the jobs it is failing spectacularly at today. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive. Humans possess intelligence, and machines do not. The difference between a human and a word-guessing program isn't how many words the human knows. I'm sorry. I know that when we talk about "digital sovereignty," we're obliged to talk about how we can build more data-centres that we can fill up with money-losing chips from American silicon monopolists in the hopes of destroying as many jobs as possible while blowing through our clean energy goals and enshittifying as much of our potable water as possible.

Córy Doctorow with another verbal bullseye: pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/n...

Reginald Monkey remains undefeated.

"We become what we pretend to be, and if we pretend to be the worst assholes imaginable there's good money to be had!"

The Well-Meaning Patriot Oaf, an American classic. We need more oafs like him and fewer of the other kind.

Love those fractal birch-branch hands!

You are on the right platform, Mr. Wardrop.

Seems kinda treasonous, but the treason prospered

"The sign, not the month"
of course, who does not have memories of the flowers blooming in Cancertide?

Gruntley Bibblet

I can't parse why, but the idea you'd have to open the Drugs Can with one of those old-timey stitch-ripper-looking manual tin openers is delightful.

Where It Ends Answering the enabler's constant question, and contemplating the depraved depths of the billionaire mindset.

Today I wrote about the Epstein files, the abusiveness intrinsic to the billionaire mindset, and our culture's enabling instinct to permit depravity as a privilege of power.

"Where does it all end?" That's what's often asked. Rarely asked is "how do we end it?"

www.the-reframe.com/where-it-ends/

a man in a suit and tie says you 're amazing Alt: a calm, collected Hans Gruber mocks the manic, bootlicking Ellis to his face by condescendingly flattering his absolutely non-existent intellect. This is a scene from the motion picture "Die Hard."

Chotiner to some horrible rube:

I feel it's more like Call of Cthulhu rules: you have to *pass* an Intelligence check to realize how badly your world has just been Fucked.

Take me down to the paradox city where the box contains both a live and dead kitty

It's only the start of his second year in his second term at a young and impressionable 79!

"In the desert, where I was born, only ONE thing is sacred! THE GUEST!"

--Attila the Hun, from Fritz Lang's Nibelungenlied

I can, easily! I'm having more trouble with believing that even the dumbest RW conspiracy theorist REALLY wants to pull on the Epstein thread, in Feb of 2026.

I'm envisioning more of a "Hellraiser" situation, but as long as blades and ironic punishments are involved...

Epstein is the most garish and harrowing manifestation of this but oligarchy makes life miserable in a thousand other ways. A core point of democracy is that no one should have so much power that they can make themselves everybody's problem. We should have a political party that believes that

"the child rapist all the other child rapists don't want to hang out with" is a very believable portrait of Musk, and one I suspect his psyche has constructed some elaborate defense mechanisms to keep his conscious mind from realizing.

Pretty shallow grammar in those emails, too!

Yes. There are other personality problems as well, but yes.

For decades the Right has daydreamed about saving their country from monsters, they finally got the chance and it turns out they love the monsters. The monsters are even monstrous in the exact ways they fantasized about! You never have to listen to these guys about anything again

Oh, I like this one! I could see that as a Clark Ashton Smith sculpt.

"Suck a lemon, little man!"