PBJ

It is tacky for really famous people to be in TV commercials for products. Their gambling debts/boat repairs are not my problem, those roles should belong to actors like the Time To Make The Donuts guy and the actress who said "who are you calling a cootie queen you lint licker" in that Orbit ad.

“Surely somebody must like this shit because it’s happening right now” is a hallmark of the ‘orderly universe where progress wins’ line of (wishful) thinking. One of the worst lessons of the past decade or so is that being a loud, shameless asshole is often incredibly successful at a tangible level.

Listen to the response to this and look how easy it is to say it.

Scene from Pier Park in N Portland, approx. 30 seconds ago.

I like how the news will be like “while the President claiming Portland was ruled by a giant skeleton named Mr Nibbles is not strictly true, it does speak to the anxiety of many Americans”

Members of Congress should be on the streets of DC—where many of them live! —putting their bodies between these law-abiding citizens and ICE. Congress should be demanding names, and promising ICE will be prosecuted when US democracy is re-established.

But they are not—b/c they think it polls badly.

I don’t know who needs to hear this but the CDC is being eviscerated right now. America is not going to have any kind of outbreak response capacity after tonight. Americans’ health data is no longer secure. Say goodbye to federal public health in any capacity. It’s a disaster. We won’t recover.

I hope the No Kings events next weekend are flooded with American flags.

at this point you have to acknowledge that there is no way that these guys don't try to mess with the 2026 midterms. there is absolutely no respect for the legitimacy of the opposition

Pritzker is also furious: “Should National Governors Association leadership choose to remain silent, Illinois will have no choice but to withdraw from the organization.”

FREDDIE: (suddenly sitting at a too small desk) aughhh my legs feel cold
CLASSMATE: (turning around) HEY EVERYONE, FREDDIE’S NOT WEARING ANY PANTS!

"They're trying to convince people they can't do the things they've been doing easily for years - to write emails, to write a presentation. Your daughter wants you to make up a bedtime story about puppies - to write that for you." We will get to the point, she says with a grim laugh, "that you will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else. You won't know anything and you will be told repeatedly that you can't do it, which is the opposite of what life has to offer. Capitulating all kinds of decisions like where to go on vacation, what to wear today, who to date, what to eat. People are already doing this. You won't have to process grief, because you'll have uploaded photos and voice messages from your mother who just died, and then she can talk to you via AI video call every day. One of the ways it's going to destroy humans, long before there's a nuclear disaster, is going to be the emotional hollowing-out of people." - author and filmmaker Justine Bateman from a piece by Emine Saner for the Guardian

Author and filmmaker Justine Bateman on generative AI

You.
Are.
Allowed.
To.
Insult.
The.
Police.

It’s a core First Amendment principle. This is utterly lawless behavior, for which there will be no (short-term) consequences.

That he does it so casually, as they are walking away, in front of cameras.

Rightly confident in his impunity.

One first step people should do to respond to this is start using the “report a speed trap” function in Apple Maps to report where ICE is operating. Make Apple party to the attempt to protect people.

When conservatives endorse some moral atrocity, it probably doesn't matter anymore if that was supposed to be the quiet part. It's not a force multiplier, and they've screamed through most of the quiet parts since 2008. There's no damning subtext left to wait for that's going to change the problem.

Who Goes Nazi?, by Dorothy Thompson

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later.

harpers.org/archive/1941...

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

Trump is bankrupting farmers, raising prices on everything, and killing jobs with his tariff mania. Republicans in Congress own all of it. bsky.app/profile/atru...

the real innovation here seems to be in moving ai slop from a banal, low quality, and mostly stupid digital pollutant to something that's potentially very dangerous

This is a direct attack on the Constitution, on basic rights and freedoms, and on our democracy. Every elected official, every SCOTUS justice, every military officer, they all swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and thus they must resist this and stop him.

Los Angeles man demands answers after wife was detained at scheduled green card meeting A man is speaking out and asking for help after his wife was detained by federal agents at the end of a scheduled green card hearing in downtown Los Angeles in early September.

Horrifying— Barbara Gomes Marques went with her US citizen husband and lawyer on 9/16 to a green card appointment at USCIS office in downtown LA where she was tricked into walking down a hallway away from them, was snatched by ICE and never came back. She now faces imminent deportation in Louisiana.

in any non western country this would get reported on "crony wanna be dictator takes bribes from large pro fascist party companies to build a lavish palace in return for taxpayer money to prop them up from a collapsing economy due to moronic isolationist tariffs"

The entire RW functions like an individual with a severe personality disorder. Until dems stop being willfully ignorant & accept this, nothing will change. The problem is they can’t accept what they don’t — or won’t — understand.

I think the Trump admin assumed no one would try to find out who the people on the boats they blew up really were

To a rich & powerful person with an incredibly severe personality disorder, having to endure even the slightest inconvenience feels like living through the siege at Pearl Harbor. His big scary feelings say a stopped escalator is the gravest injustice the world has ever seen.

The only reason Freddy Krueger never came to kill me & my friends during that one sleepover in 7th grade is that he got scared & chickened out on account of how tough we were. Everyone knows this. Mission accomplished. 💪🏼