Ranamar

I remember a report afterward that Q4 of that year had more moderation reports than the entire year preceding it. I think a remarkable number of people got banned from Memegen as a result. (Also, I think there were some upper management people who really wanted to kill it but knew it wouldn't fly.)

Two things that are both true:

1.) American conservatism has always been far worse than voters are willing to believe.

2.) The groyperization of the GOP has been a world historical catastrophe which will echo for generations.

A bunch of Israelis were killed or taken hostage.

Google has offices in Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, there are also quite a few Palestinian employees, and sympathy for Palestinians in the US had been on the rise for a couple years prior to that. I'm sure you can imagine the acrimony that might result.

It got so much worse after October 2023, though. I don't know if you were still there at that point.

The testimony of someone who has risen to the occasion

cheers to @rincewind.run for asking climate people what Dire Fuckery Headline means, like, pragmatically

half these bozos’ game is wearing you down with despair

if you’re a casual, you might think all US climate action ground to a halt today because the EPA threw in the towel

not even close

It took me months, about 495 rides, recovering from a shattered right foot and hacking a folding scooter, but I finally own a Nintendo Switch 2 using points obtained from Citi Bike. Afterwards, it left me questioning the very nature of work. For @aftermath.site.

aftermath.site/switch-2-cit...

Yes, well, if you want to make an argument that taxes never benefit you, it helps to actually have more than vibes.

"Entirely" is factually false. Strictly speaking, a majority of federal taxes, at the very least, go to social welfare spending, but it's easy to understand the feeling that a lot of is seems to go in the direction of people with guns, and the social safety net here isn't especially strong.

I used to think: another case of US leftism being anarchist inflected vs UK leftism being socialist inflected. But subsequently I came to think the bizarre tolerance-of-anti-social-behaviour element of wokeness derives from the fact that too many American social mores are enforced by men with guns.

When the CIA did this to the Senate it was one of the biggest intel scandals of the 21st century. But here it’s not just a huge scandal, it’s dumb: Pam Bondi is so bad at her job she brought the evidence herself to an open congressional hearing. www.theguardian.com/world/2014/j...

Screenshot of Tumblr post by flower parts: how can I get into someone's nightmares I have a message to send

Literally #craftsequence

photo of Pam Bondi testifying in the foreground as a group of 7 women and 1 men raise their hands

Likely-historic photo by NBC News of all the Epstein victims asked to raise their hands if they've not yet been asked to meet with the DOJ as Bondi testifies in foreground

A friend of mine GMs basically nothing but ripped-from-the-1800s-headlines campaigns for his TTRPG group. I feel like there's got to be plenty of audience for this sort of thing.
(I also specifically think flintlock fantasy is either underserved or at least under-advertised, though.)

Grand Jury Rebuffs Justice Dept. Attempt to Indict 6 Democrats in Congress

The most discredited long-running joke of an anachronistic institution in our legal system has come roaring back as one of our most important safeguards simply because it involves regular citizens getting a chance to say "no, this is bullshit."

At least twice a day I want to hurl myself off a bridge or something and then my toddler wanders over and says, like, “Mama, I love Woodstock, who is a veeeerrey small bird, but I don’t know the name of the one who is his dog friend?” and I’m like, oh, oh my god, the unrelenting superbloom of life!!

Man, I didn’t think there was a way for this story to get dumber but…
“DoD loaned the high-energy laser weapon to DHS, who promptly shot down some mylar balloons with it without telling anyone, resulting in the FAA closing airspace and disrupting air travel nationwide”

…sure did the trick

aggrieved goose (at least, the migratory varieties) is also a good candidate.

Honestly, any time I end up talking to anyone who works in logistics it’s always *fascinating*. There’s so much detail behind all of it, end never ending complications too. And yet when it works it’s completely invisible to most of us.

Anyway, this is something that had been talked about for awhile, but a plan was only finalized recently, after US support was ended.

A lot of the bridge funding is that there are a lot of Russian assets that were seized when the invasion started, and they are finally being used as collateral for a 0-interest loan on the expectation that those assets will be provided to Ukraine (to pay it back) as war reparations.

No, Europe actually did go and find some bridge funding for this, although I'm not sure it reaches past 2026.

It's true that we did some funding of upgrades for EU militaries for the old equipment to be sent to Ukraine, but I think there aren't many opportunities like that left.

Honestly, it would have been even more effective if we'd doubled it. (I don't know if manufacturing capacity was actually there for that, but...)
But, for some inexplicable (not especially inexplicable) reason, the Republicans have been against hobbling Russia on the cheap for the entire time.

US military aid to Ukraine was the single most effective military spending we’ve had since aiding the Mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan. We reduced Russia’s military by like half for circa five percent of the annual Pentagon budget. That’s a goddamn bargain.

And Trump has spoiled it.

It turns out that the only thing standing between us and a version of the pentagon that closes airspace to shoot down party balloons were those diversity trainings at work

There is no case but the moral case. The public health data have precisely the moral valence that we give them and, crucially, that we are willing and prepared to act upon. The process of political development in public health is the process of developing just such a capacity for action - action that will be, by definition, not strictly related to public health in the majority of cases. The intellectual action consists of the movement from "free them all for public health" to, simply, "free them all." Public health will follow.

if you read one essay today public health friends, make it this one. buttondown.com/abbycartus/a...

Extremely funny that the U.S. is going to become a zombie patent monopoly, all the mRNA tech in the world and none of the societal benefits, transnational corporations giving that shit to Canadians like Halloween candy as we try to cross Niagara Falls by barrel like it’s 1832

I need to stop taking on new projects so I have enough time to write the "stop misreading the Melian Dialogue by taking it out of context" piece I think I promised @beijingpalmer.bsky.social when the earth was young.

But, you know, stop misreading the Melian Dialogue by taking it out of context.

Some of these houses may well become museums.

the rollout of the mRNA vaccines was one of the greatest public health triumphs in history and the end result has been the all-around triumph of the antivax movement and I will never get over it