Paul Matzko

Like, seriously, what have you done to make my life demonstrably better?? And it's gotta be good enough to beat me not having to drag my toddler through the Roosevelt Boulevard Walmart at 6pm on a Friday!

People love to hate the internet, in general, & Amazon, in particular, but this Christmas I'm just a boy standing in front of you saying, "20 years ago I had to make a weekly run to Walmart or Target to pick up odds and ends but now I don't. I get little brown boxes on my porch instead, like magic."

Completely predictable that Aussie teens would immediately and easily circumvent Australia's idiotic and paternalistic social media ban for minors.

Taylor ham, the untold story. Iconic N.J. food's legacy is tainted by scandal and cruelty. The inside story of how a revered pork roll brand became the domain of a mercurial owner.

The DRAMA around Taylor ham (pork roll) is off the charts. A mysterious Moldovan who married not one but two brothers, who both promptly died leaving her to inherit a pork roll empire that had been in the family for five generations. Can't make this stuff up!

Are you in TikTok’s cat niche? What 121,000 videos reveal We re-created TikTok’s algorithm based on 1,100 users’ feeds. Explore which topics are in your feed and see what the algorithm is least likely to show you.

A useful exploration of how the TikTok algorithm works illustrated via spatial mapping.

I'm old enough to remember when conservative Christians realized defending religious freedom for one group defended religious freedom for all. I miss those days.

Rand Paul tells me that he wants the full video of the Venezuelan boat strike released.

“And I think if the public sees images of people clinging to boat debris and being blown up, I think that there is a chance that finally, the public will get interested enough in this to stop this.”

I just find it hilarious that his whole cabinet is sloberring praise all over him with ridiculous hyperbole and he is falling asleep while they're doing it.

You couldn't write comedy better than this. It's better than VEEP.

There's, lol.

And Marco Rubio's grandad fled communist persecution in Cuba, while his grandson is part of a fascistic regime trying to prevent Venezuelans from doing the same.

And their's Trump's grandad, Trump's wife, JD Vance's wife, etc. The hypocrisy on immigration is *thick* with this administration.

great rundown on the hidden role that fire departments play in anti-density pro-car design. i think it speaks also to my own bugbear about "defer to the professionals." professions are often both insular and narrow-minded, unwilling to weigh costs and concerns beyond their internal cultural foci

For more on the Peleus:

Congress should launch an investigation. And everyone found responsible for the attack -- from the pilots who pulled the trigger, to the officers who okayed the strike, to the civilian leadership that commanded the action -- deserves prosecution & the punishment that was meted out 80 years ago.

But actually what we did was even worse than the Germans. We're not at war with Venezuela. That means that the initial strike on the boat was a criminal act as well. It's not even a war crime; just a crime crime. It's mass murder in the first degree twice over. It was intentional and calculated.

Because that is almost precisely the same crime that the US military committed off Venezuela this week. We double-tapped the wreckage of a boat, killing multiple survivors of the initial strike. If it was a crime for Germans to do it in 1944, then it's a crime for the Americans to do it in 2025.

After the war was over in 1945, the U-boat captain and four crewmen were tried for the crime; three of them were executed by firing squad, the other two were given substantial prison sentences.

Why am I thinking of this war crimes case today, eighty years later?

In 1944, a German U-boat torpedoed the Peleus, a Greek civilian steamer, in the South Pacific. That itself wasn't a war crime because it was a legitimate, economic target.

But it was a crime when the U-boat captain decided to kill the handful of survivors floating on the wreckage.

Your second sentence is irrelevant to the question of avs, which are safer than human driven cars by an exponential factor.

Waymo’s next five cities are all in red states Liberal cities risk falling behind on driverless technology.

@andrewzwicker.bsky.social I appreciate your interest in helping NJ be at the forefront of innovation, but you should read this analysis of how blue states like NJ are self-sabotaging with bad policies that will limit autonomous vehicle development while your self-driving bill goes through markups.

"Little did I expect that more than half the cost of building a hardware company would come from regulatory bottlenecks."

Summers: "It's not patriarchy, it's cuz wimmin got slow brains."

Also Summers: "How dare this chica reject me! Gonna show her, eh Jeffrey ol' boy."

As Summers once argued women lack the temperament and aptitude for elite science jobs, newly-released private messages reveal him fixating on a young, female student he mentored and consulting Jeffrey... TikTok video by The Ravenna Report

Larry Summers' emails with Jeffrey Epstein demonstrate how completely wrong he was about gendered limitations in achievement.

For example, he literally turns his back on a bright female mentee when she rejects his advances. www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8DchGFA/

They’re all just looting the treasury now

Don’t Build Housing, Just Deport People: The Nativist Right Recoils at Trump’s 50-Year Mortgage Proposal The backlash against Trump's proposal reveals the characteristics of his base's reactionary housing politics.

The America First solution to the housing crunch isn’t a 50-year mortgage. It’s 100+ million deportations.

I wrote about the nativist dream of an idyllic, white, Christian America for @liberalcurrents.com

www.liberalcurrents.com/dont-build-h...

NEW: @propublica.org investigated the Chicago apartment raid where kids were zip-tied and citizens detained for hours. They find:

- NONE of the arrested were criminally charged
- NO evidence the building was "filled with TdA terrorists."
- ZERO legitimate reason for DHS to rappel from a Blackhawk.

You've probably heard that Kash Patel used an FBI jet to fly to his girlfriend's country music concert. But the fact that he then took the jet to visit a dude ranch in Texas called the "Boondoggle Ranch" -- I kid you not -- is so on the nose that I demand a rewrite of this overly improbable script.

Denying the core of one's ideology in order to own the libs is, seemingly, the most libertarian thing one can do these days.

Trumpism is a validation in perversion of everything that classical liberals have been warning about for the last half century.

Funny watching all the industrial policy stans acting like the dog that caught the car as Trump flings around subsidies for cronies, wields tariffs like it's 1825, and takes equity shares to quasi-nationalize companies, and then being like, "Well, I didn't mean for it to work THAT way!"

"Whitestown," indeed.