billmiddleton

And yet they still don’t get it. And let’s be real “Christians” actually ignore most of their book too. Because there is no hypocrisy quite like Christian hypocrisy.

Maybe it’s just the Humanities professor in me, but let it be noted that events of today (ahem) have demonstrated the value of being able to assess a large volume of qualitative data and do careful textual analysis with deep attention to context.

You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island – even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.

Great piece by Zadie Smith. When the right talks about classics or "Western" culture, these works are only important to the extent that it demonstrates their superiority, they have no interest in art in and of itself beyond that www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The Wikipedia entry for Librarian of Congress tells a story:

A nation of heroes, a Senate of cowards | Will Bunch Newsletter Plus, Cheney didn’t save us from Trump. He created him.

In Chicago, the courage of good, everyday folks getting in the face of ICE/BP and fighting back is restoring my faith in America

In DC, the cowardice of Senate Democrats has undermined it, again

America needs a government as good as its people. My new column www.inquirer.com/columnists/a...

I have an idea that I've never heard put forth before:

Let's make a law, that no member of congress can vote on any issue in which a donor has an interest. You can take as much campaign lucre as you want, but every corporate donor disqualifies you from voting on issues that might affect that donor.

Poster standing in front of building side mural of Kurt Vonnegut

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Science Note
If you look closely at tide tables, the day-to-day variations are pretty strange.

This kid rules

So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!

Instead of Consumerism, Let’s Try Consumer Sharing How about some good news for a change?

What if… I’m just spitballin’ here… we didn’t *buy* everything we need, but actually shared what we have in our communities?

jimhightower.substack.com/p/instead-of...

Word of the Day is ‘catchfart’ (17th century): an obsequious individual who sucks up to the boss and always follows the political wind.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that a big piece of Mamdani’s campaign was simply “cities are cool and lots of people enjoy living in them” which in and of itself dismantles alot of rightwing talking points

Luisa Gonzalez Ballesteros, MD

majoring yn English ys punk rocke

Rep. Yassamin Ansari has set up a table and this sign outside Speaker Johnson’s office.

YouTube video by Sen. Elissa Slotkin "Will You Uphold Your Oath to the Constitution?"

17 General Officers have been removed or have retired in nine months. I'm a former CIA officer – if I saw this in a foreign military, we would call that a purge.

A surveillance camera on an exterior wall.

We’ve mapped over 13,000 surveillance technologies used by police across the U.S.
Drones. License plate readers. Body-worn cameras.
It’s all in EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance—because you deserve to know who’s watching. Help us Take Back CTRL. takebackctrl.org/stop-survei...

This is brilliant

Perfect response from @neguse.house.gov here. Watch this.

The Senate needs to step up.
U.S. Constitution: Article I, Section 5, Clause 4:
"Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting."

Why Commanders Don’t Sign NDAs Existing rules and laws applying to military secrecy are sufficient—and asking officers to sign NDAs is deeply inappropriate.

"Once that trust is broken—once leaders use the tools of secrecy to silence rather than to secure—it cannot be restored by any number of signatures on a form." No NDAs for commanders.

This narcissistic attitude that sees a vote as a curated extension of your personal brand or a version of a celebrity endorsement is going to be the death of this nation.

the video being projected behind all the performers on stage

lmao david byrne showed the video of the ice agents tripping over themselves while trying to run after a biker on wacker drive during the “life during wartime” segment of his chicago show tonight

“Tell your children who the cowards were.”

A stat we don't talk about enough: Newspapers have lost 77% of their jobs over the last 20 year, more than any of the 532 other industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.