Elena Gaillard

The South ending Reconstruction and plunging their populations into a backward looking culture and economy until it was forced to modernize by the Civil Rights movement is imo a very clean parallel.

Don't forget to set your clocks forward, or back, or on fire, who cares, I'm not your clock boss, do whatever, fuck clocks

We are helping Russia; Iran is helping Russia; Russia is helping Iran kill Americans. Classic four-dimensional chess from our Commander-in-Chief.

by Marc Thiessen

Pam Bondi Dropped Cases against Four Alleged Drug Dealers So She Could Hunt Don Lemon - emptywheel In the same period when Pam Bondi's DOJ dropped four drug prosecutions at least partly due to resource constraints, she added thirty more defendants in the Don Lemon case as a tactic to give DOJ time ...

Pam Bondi Dropped Cases against Four Alleged Drug Dealers So She Could Hunt Don Lemon

emptywheel.net/pam-bondi-fr...

Bahrain says an Iranian strike damaged a desalination plant overnight, following the US/Israeli attack on Iran’s desalination plant on Qeshm Island.

If water infrastructure is now considered a target it’s going to be disastrous for the people living there.

1/2

Why Tesla "Robotaxis" Won't Be Driverless For Another 3 Years Deep dive into FSD crash data shows incidents becoming more dangerous for Tesla owners, while Tesla's Austin robotaxis already crash 4x more frequently than human drivers.

Why Tesla robotaxis can't go driverless:

-4x more likely to crash vs humans
-3x more likely to cause an injury crash vs humans
-FSD knowingly runs red lights/drives the wrong way
-Tesla can't explain why
-Regulatory strangle: 1000s of new FSD crashes found

open.substack.com/pub/bradmunc...

I had a good friend who was a producer at Pixar for many years and she peaced out a couple years ago and everyone was shocked because the place looks amazing from afar but she said the absolute wrong people are making decisions and I guess that makes more sense now

We also know he has no empathy (meaning HE won't ever care that he killed a school full of girls), no policy process (meaning it's not even clear if he's being briefed honestly about that he did so), & no sanity (meaning he'll just claim, as he has, that someone else killed those girls).

We know Trump's illegal war will cost $1B/day, at current burn rate, & we know he has no conceivable plan other than to just demand submission over & over.

We also know that Trump listens to whoever is last in his office (eg, Lindsey Graham, Kushner, & Witkoff, all of whom are venal or insane.

Is it something to do with the way a) the US school day starts insanely early in order to accommodate sports and b) the way bussing works (you get picked up outside your house) means that if you’re unlucky you can spend getting on for an hour commuting to somewhere a couple of miles away

I'm too bored of this to try and be clever about it anymore.

If you think that two men kissing, or two women kissing, requires any more explanation than a man kissing a woman, that is homophobia.

This is an astounding and irresponsible and obvious lie by the Commander in Chief. This feels like another unthinkable red line crossed.

there's so much bad in the world but there's also people who lift up and carry an elderly bat around every day so he can pretend he's flying again, and that's the part of the world I think is worth fighting for

There's something deeply obscene and broken about the fact that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are bombing elementary schools in an illegal war of aggression, and there's still a sense among the opposition that it has to be explained in terms of gas prices in order to get American voters to care.

these people are such gutless pig-fucking cowards

THREAD: I got laid off from NYMag/Vulture after 14 years. The family lost 75% of income + medical. Now mzs.press bookstore, once a side project. is do-or-die for Judith & I. I feel weird telling you this because others are doing much worse. But if you could like or share this, we'd be so grateful!

Opinion Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk By Maureen Dowd

If you’re ever afraid that a single mistake could ruin your career, just remember that Maureen Dowd is at The New York Times to this day.

How Elon Musk’s Sci-Fi Hyperloop Failed Before his misadventures in government efficiency, Musk promised to revolutionize commuting with a subway that would speed passengers between DC and Baltimore in a matter of minutes. The project was a...

A year long investigation into the Hyperloop found …

“The truth was far simpler, far dumber, and far more prescient: Musk and his lieutenants truly had no idea what they were doing.”

washingtonian.com/2026/02/12/h...

in case people thought this was hyperbole

Lots of folks cling to the idea that this comes down to Biden's inability to "sell" these accomplishments. I'm sorry, though, that's pure cope. Whiny resentfulness toward Dems & cities is *constitutive* of the RW worldview today, not something that can be turned on & off with policy.

This means the Kurds told him to fuck off.

While this isn't how anything like this works, she is still right.
And being that nothing this administration does is how things work, why not give 'em a go.

Let them find out the hard way.
"In real life, you don't respawn"

#TheAlliedForces

Ecce Homo, or Christ looking up while wearing crown of thorns and a dark red robe; the same fresco with the paint chipped, and the third all but destroyed by an amateur who ruined all the features of the painting so that it looks a little like the face of a monkey.

My next creative writing class starts in a few minutes, so time to queue up my visual aid for the inevitable first time a student asks, “But isn’t ‘what’s good’ subjective?”

The pastor of the church the Trump family attended when Donald was a kid was Norman Vincent Peale, author of the 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking.

i'd never say that. the lesson isn't that these places deserve to suffer but that directing goodies to them is *bad politics.* the theory that you can bribe reactionary areas to vote for you because it's in their economic self interest to receive subsidies from your side is wrong and doesnt work

great example. who is 2026 is gonna locate jobs in a place with no cell phone coverage? crippling your local economy to please totally irrational morons about a fake, made-up problem! bsky.app/profile/3fec...

the IRA is an unfortunate example of the failure of the non-bigoted theory of popularism

it was a good law that poured piles of money into infrastructure (in rural areas!) and they got zero credit for it from the people who complain about those sorts of things, because the complaining is the point

Tapping the "poor areas don't vote for conservatives because they're poor, they're poor because they vote for conservatives" sign

generally one of two things happens in very republican areas:

1. didn’t realize it was government money (“keep your government hands off my medicare”)

2. did realize it was government money and got mad about it (“fuck your medicaid expansion”)

the association is cultural not transactional

Challenge for people who believe Claude *is* conscious and use it anyway: Explain how you’re not a slaver.