Phil Stanton

Good morning! Yes, this is he

There have been nine Saturdays in 2026. On two I’ve woken up to a random new war we’ve started.

the US once again sending the message loud and clear: never negotiate, just get nukes. Never compromise, just get nukes. Never give in to sanctions, just get nukes.

what could go wrong

Pemmin’s Aura 😊

Oh hey, this sounds familiar encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/t...

As the guy who wrote the book on zoning abolition, I'd like to go on record as saying: if you can use zoning to stop the concentration camps, fucking go for it.

A frog with one hand on a human finger, captioned: Frog is here. Don’t be sad. Things will be okay.

A pie chart titled “Why I CC’ed you on this email” with large wedges labelled “To embarrass you for not doing something,” “as a power move,” and “to prove later that you knew about this,” and a very small slice labelled “I thought it would be helpful.”

The caption “the perfect actor doesn’t exi—“ trailing of as if interrupted by the four images below it of the TV dog Wishbone in different costumes.

A meme of Anakin and Padme from Star Wars Episode II with the Microsoft Word logo over Anakin’s face. Anakin/MS Word: “I’ll just move this image a little bit. Padme: “but it won’t ruin the document, right?” Anakin/MS Word: (silence). Last caption displayed in pieces like the formatting is broken: “but it won’t ruin the document, right?”

no foreign foe has ever dreamed of being able to sack and pillaging this country the way Trump admin and its congressional and scotus enablers do every day.

hold on i gotta take this

The only Alchemy change I could get excited about is news of its deletion.

cannot possibly convey how actually crazy-making it can feel, after spending 20 years monitoring all these orgs blaming sex workers and the internet for enabling a vast sex trafficking network, to now see Jeffery Epstein’s inbox

Well it sound bad when you put it that way

if you're looking to learn about what are some of the lowest-hanging fruits in terms of local elections in places that directly help ICE, this is for you:

I know our country feels divided right now, but there is one thing we all agree on: the Liquid Glass iPhone update fuckin sucks

From Senator Chris McDaniel: “Lately, some folks have taken to calling ICE “the Gestapo.” It sounds fierce. It feels righteous. But it isn’t true, and it isn’t harmless. The Gestapo was a secret police force. No warrants. No courts. No lawyers. And no appeals. People vanished in the night, not because they broke the law, but because the law no longer meant anything. The knock on the door was the sentence. ICE isn’t that. Not even close. ICE is a public agency enforcing laws passed by elected officials. Its agents file reports. They seek warrants. They lose cases. Judges stop them. Lawyers challenge them. Some detainees go home. That’s not tyranny. That’s bureaucracy, for better and worse. You can hate immigration policy. You can argue enforcement is too harsh, too sloppy, or too broad. You can work to have the law changed if you wish. That’s a republic doing what it’s supposed to do. But when you call ordinary law enforcement “the Gestapo,” you cheapen real evil. You turn history into a slogan and suffering into a metaphor. And once every badge is tyranny, no tyranny is left to recognize. In Mississippi, I was raised to believe words should earn their weight. This one hasn't yet. It throws around the language of dictatorship while living under a system where courts still rule, lawyers still argue, and the government still loses. That difference matters. Because the day enforcement becomes secret, unchecked, and answerable to no one, we won’t need to borrow names from history. We’ll know exactly what we’re dealing with. And we’ll wish we’d kept our words honest.”

“ICE isn’t the Gestapo. The Gestapo was…” (proceeds to describe qualities that apply to what ICE is currently doing)

As a sour, pessimistic, cynical old bitch who all her life never expected much of the human race, even I have been gobsmacked at the sheer multitude of cowards that this moment has revealed.

The MN Leg could start its own version of these hearings tomorrow. The IL leg too. Months and months and months and months of them. Don't stop.

crypto bros: welcome to every single deal anyone has ever made with donald trump

we did warn you

11 days into the new year and we've got a new illegal war of plunder with an abducted head of state, full administration backing for executing moms driving near ICE, and the chair of the federal reserve recording proof of life videos to explain the threats he's recieved from the president

Star Trek: The Next Generation or The Good Place are the contenders for best finale.

Front pages of American newspapers after Jan. 6, 2021, with headlines like "Capitol Chaos," "Assault on Democracy," "Pro-Trump mob storms Capitol."

Five years ago.

Blind Seer!

So fmr Honduran President Hernandez voluntarily surrendered, and was duly extradited, tried and convicted for drug trafficking, and Trump pardoned him 6w ago.

And this morning, Trump illegally attacks Venezuela and abducts its president and his wife purportedly to try them for drug trafficking.

Among the many reasons you don’t kidnap a foreign head of state at gunpoint even if you have the capability, is that it sparks consequences you can neither control nor anticipate.

Holy shit!

“Bad Times at the El Royale” (2018) is a drama starring Jon Hamm, Cynthia Erivo, Jeff Bridges, Dakota Johnson, & Chris Hemsworth. They’re all at the same hotel for different reasons in ~1969 and things go awry. Great writing, acting, and sound (which I’m not one to usually notice).

FRIEND: It's called cauliflower. It's not ghost broccoli.

ME: [taking a long drag on my cigarette] Listen kid, I know what I saw.

What’s really wild about Avatar is how a great director decided to invest his career in a franchise with no discernible cultural impact whatsoever. It’s like if Spielberg had pivoted in the ‘90s & his credits ever since had been direct-to-VHS Land Before Time sequels.

Not for nothing but federal law contains several statutory provisions that restrict, if not outright prohibit, this unilateral action by the senile dementia patient in the Oval.

War Powers Act. War Crimes Act. Anti-Piracy Act. Neutrality Act.

All still on the books.