S.A. Small

NEW VIDEO: Why are sports owners suddenly so comfortable losing?

Some blame tanking, some blame analytics.

But an answer increasingly is private equity.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=taaj...

Sen. Maggie Hassan kicked off an investigation into data brokers in response to CalMatters reporting. Hassan speaks during a Senate Finance Committee on Capitol Hill, March 14, 2025. Photo by Ben Curtis, AP Photo

Breaches at data brokers have cost American consumers more than $20 billion, Congress’s Joint Economic Committee revealed Friday as part of an investigation triggered by The Markup and CalMatters. calmatters.org/economy/tech...

📸 Ben Curtis, AP

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

Abortion laws show that public policy doesn’t always line up with public opinion Polls indicate majority support for abortion rights in most states, but laws differ greatly between places that uphold such rights and those that ban the procedure.

Representational government rests on a simple idea: that the laws the nation lives under generally reflect what the public wants. But abortion serves as a clear example of how difficult it can be to translate public opinion into law.

I was caught up in thinking about 90s shows, but this absolutely counts and on an episode-by-episode basis is probably my favorite too...! 🫡

This is why you can't really collaborate with the feds under any circumstances. If your policy is "we will only collaborate with them when it's unrelated to civil immigration enforcement" then the Trump administration will just lie about what they're doing!

I'd also note that there are Americans cosigning because (a) they dislike having no one to root for and (b) need to see Trump and his allies as *the* problem and not a culmination of multiple problems that will persist, albeit less acutely, even if Democrats retake Congress and the presidency.

The replies are a shambles, because some Canadians prefer shallow tribalism to, say, acknowledging the global pervasiveness of misogyny. (There's a clear parallel in how blue state liberals talk about red states here in the US, as if the blue states don't have their fair share of problems.)

Kevin Nguyen @knguyen ... Tried to add "12 Years a Slave" to Google Calendar and it created a 12-year-long event called "a Slave" • a Slave Tue, February 25, 8pm - Wed, February 25, 2026, 8pm Delete Edit event » 5:27 PM • Feb 23, 2014

It’s finally over

5 US mens Olympic hockey players refused Trump’s invitation to the WH today: Kyle Connor, Jake Guentzel, Brock Nelson, Jackson LaCombe, and Jake Oettinger.

The biggest stumbling block we have to social change in the US is a cultural tendency to defer to power. We expect other people—specifically, those already in power—to save us.

We can change a lot just by taking stock of the power we have ourselves and living the values we wish everyone had.

LGBTQ+ Athletes Won 11 Medals at 2026 Milan Olympics More than one-third of LGBTQ+ athletes walked away with a medal.

we do love our Olympians!

Why the Chicago Bears should move to Indiana If Indiana is stupid enough to finance this, let them.

"And what could be more business-friendly than handing over billions of dollars of money from hard working Indianans as well as hundreds of acres of real estate to billionaire football team owners? I can almost feel the free market oozing over me."

oh, im about to get lost in this!

blackfilmarchive.com

*PPSD

(Feeling a slight urge to use a bimodal network to depict the history of conference affiliations over the last century. I have a weaker urge to use a TERGM to try and model said network, if only because I'm not sure what kind of node attributes would be useful.)

On top of the sheer absurdity of USC et al. playing in the Big 10, the death of the old Pac-12 is destroying the tradition of other conferences. There's so much (too much) money at stake for a stable equilibrium to emerge any time soon—but that presupposes an equilibrium is possible, doesn't it?😮‍💨

RIP Kara Braxton. I was hoping she would be in attendance when the Pistons honored the 2006 WNBA champion Shock later this season.

My thoughts are with everyone who knew and loved her.

"In 1979, welfare benefits reached eighty-two out of every one hundred families with children in poverty. When TANF was first introduced, that number dropped to sixty-eight. By 2020, a mere twenty-one out of every hundred impoverished families managed to access this resource...That was on a national level. In Georgia, only five out of every one hundred families living below the poverty line received support through TANF in 2020, even though they were eligible for the assistance" (p. 137).

A striking stat from Brian Goldstone’s “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America”

This guy gets it.

Union: WNBA made enough money for revenue sharing The WNBA players union says that the league generated enough revenue to trigger revenue sharing.

For the first time in league history, the WNBA generated enough revenue in 2025 to trigger revenue sharing with players. Players will receive $8 million.

The union will also pay out $9.25 million from revenue generated from its group licensing program.

www.espn.com/wnba/story/_...

BREAKING

Former ICE agent:

On my first day training new cadets, I received secretive orders to teach them to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant.

Monster🧵...!

84 years sounds like a long time. And I know in some ways it is. But it's also not that long. I still have living relatives who were in the camps and who were old enough to remember it. This isn't abstract or ancient history. It's part of the living memory I grew up with.

February 19, 2026 INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY As survivors and descendants of the mass removals, detention, deportation, and family separation targeting our community during WWII, we refuse to stand by idly while our friends and neighbors are violently disappeared, forcibly removed, mass incarcerated, and separated from family members. We decry the murders of community members and at least 37 people in ICE custody and enforcement in 2025. We reject false narratives that state violence is "unavoidable," a "justifiable military action," necessary for "national security"—the same arguments used as they forced our parents, grandparents, aunties, and uncles into U.S. concentration camps in 1942. On this Day of Remembrance, we call on Japanese Americans and all people who believe in "Never Again" to demand justice for those we have lost—on the streets and hidden away in ICE detention centers. To break this cycle of state violence. To rise up and resist, together. We bravely commit to being the allies our familes needed during WWII. STOP REPEATING HISTORY. #TsuruForSolidarity #FreeFamilies #FreeThemAll

84 years ago today, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering the removal and incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, about two-thirds of whom were US citizens. The Day of Remembrance this year comes as we see DHS buying land and warehouses for more camps now.

Holy shit - he actually said this

Palantir paid ✨no federal income taxes✨ last year despite reporting around $1.5 billion in U.S. revenue and securing more than $900 million in taxpayer-funded government contracts.

Maybe the earth is like a giant pop tart, flat but also full of jam.

the winter olympics are just dei for scandinavians

They raided the jailed children to steal their letters.

The problem, in federal officials' minds, wasn't confining children in prison-camp conditions; it was that the children could tell the public about it.