Noise Rock Dad

Alysa Liu’s Olympic run came with terms. Her choreographer helps her express them Liu is the best U.S. hope for an Olympic medal in women's figure skating, which would be the country's first in the competition since 2006.

“When Liu, 20, decided to return to skating, she did so with conditions. She’d wear what she wants. Dance to the music she wants. Eat what she wants. Take breaks when she wants…. [Skating] would be the vehicle through which she displayed the real Alysa.”

she did it! her! way!!

orange cat dipping his foot into an upside down water bottle lid full of water

a little cup?? a little cup of water for Donnie??

the Harry Potter series coming up with the same school for India/China/Pakistan:

Trump's refusal to invite all governors to a White House meeting prompts group to back out The National Governors Association is pulling out of an annual meeting at the White House after President Donald Trump declined to invite two Democratic governors.

apnews.com/article/gove...

a mother harbor seal putting their nose up to their baby, next to them, both appear to be smiling

This is what I want my government to spend their slush fund on. 🦭 🦑

This would be challenging to pull off because in my opinion all women deserve gold medals.

You would never know it from this website but the median Democrat (a woman in her 50s) is quite fond of both Secretary Mayor Pete and AOC, and would describe Biden as “liberal” and Sanders as “very liberal”

In a dark way everyone wants fresh hell for the sake of discourse, new shiny objects, but nearly everything we've seen from this administration that rises beyond the level of mere rhetoric amounts to an intensification of old hell.

Why is this cicada wearing a funny hat???

happy for yall

I love DataRepublican. All they do is spout technobabble. Shit like "my hard drive overheated after 60,000 rows of data" (???).

But conservatives eat it up! They talk about her as a genius.

DataRepublican is like an epistemic canary. If someone trusts her, they're too stupid for political debate.

The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.

Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.

This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

Mike Collins: "I'm gonna kick Juuuh -- Ossoff, out of the state's, US Senate, we're gonna restore Georgia values out-- and that's Senate. And y'all ... "

the point of a billionaire tax is not to raise money on an ongoing basis. it is to make being a billionaire illegal

that said even a quite modest billionaire tax could raise mind boggling one-off sums. that initial bite could do like, national high speed rail to every city over a million population bsky.app/profile/gabr...

Helen LewisHelen Lewis @helenlewis21h I'm fascinated why this isn't something that Obama has publicly moderated on -- it would be a powerful signal to the Groups/grassroots, and create one of those vaunted "permission structures" to change on sports/puberty blockers that would be so helpful to Dems electorally.

disregarding the point about gender stuff, i feel like this explains so much about why Helen Lewis seems to struggle how US politics works. the Democrats are not the Labour Party. there is no top-down whip by Obama

I don't think this is just a Helen Lewis thing. We get "why didn't democrats codify Roe v. Wade" when they had a chance" all the time.

There's a generation that has seen Trump's hold on the Republican party and assumes the normal state of party politics is orderly.

pretextual prosecutions can be entirely legitimate, we’re hearing it more and more

The bubble needs gas to expand

CFPB Staffer Alexis Goldstein Fired for Confronting DOGE Members, Announces Run for Congress The Trump administration has fired Consumer Financial Protection Bureau program manager Alexis Goldstein for documenting a meeting a year ago between the agency and Elon Musk’s Department of Governmen...

@alexisgoldstein.bsky.social is a real one and she's running for Congress. www.democracynow.org/2026/2/18/al...?

Let me explain what this genuinely EVIL memo does. The admin is doubling down on its plan to arrest, detain, and interrogate tens of thousands of legally present refugees; people already vetted who’ve lived here legally for 1+ year.

Hundreds were arrested in Minnesota before a court blocked this.

Imagine writing this after the pointlessly cruel doge gutting of USAID

I do believe that the bottom 30-70% of Americans indeed have a worse life than their counterparts in W Europe, but this is entirely down to a decrepit American welfare state. It is not because of some imagined wealth transfers from the US to the world! You freaks are not being fleeced by anyone!

Goldman Lawyer, Epstein Conferred on Secret Service Prostitution Scandal In a series of 2014 emails, the wealthy financier gave advice to the former White House counsel as the Colombian incident blew up.

NEW: Kathy Ruemmler shared nonpublic details with Jeffrey Epstein about the White House probe into a 2012 prostitution scandal that engulfed the Secret Service during her tenure as White House counsel, emails show
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Car dealerships

This is the single best piece about contemporary NYC rental housing that I’ve ever read, and I’ve read hundreds of pieces about contemporary New York City rental housing

today I read Raymond Williams praising Sesame Street in passing and it made me so happy as a big fan of both

I've been teaching about the far-right now for like, 3 years, and the best I've come up with (from a class analysis POV) is that they are a particularly middle class neurosis, tied particularly to rentism, inheritance and economic entitlement.

I cannot overstate how easy it is to get involved with local politics with only a small amount of effort. Consistently show up to city council meetings and don't be crazy. That's it.

We were told to scrub "biodiversity" from our websites because of this shit.