the first rain of the fall in CA's central valley is like driving on ice. a whole summer's worth of oil and tomato juice turned into a slick lubricant by the rain.
the first rain of the fall in CA's central valley is like driving on ice. a whole summer's worth of oil and tomato juice turned into a slick lubricant by the rain.
i mean, points to doing it on the concrete lid at least.
I had to explain "roll down the window" in the car to my kids the other day.
These guys are so bad at the whole "militarized police force with unending loyalty to dear leader" thing, it's really amazing
tasting—and loving!—whataburger's blackberry dr. pepper shake for the first time, i suddenly wonder how nin jiom–flavored ice cream would taste. i think it could work, if done right.
doing my best to raise the ratio
Why don’t you send everyone proof of life first? (Either way, Chicago doesn’t want you here)
CLT's a pretty nice airport these days. they have rocking chairs!
direct, or do you bounce through a couple of transfers?
pretty different systems when a democratic state takes partial ownership of a strategic company and/or evonomic sector vs. when the dictator demands (and is given) a personal payoff and stake on his whim. what trump's doing ain't socialism.
This firefighter arrived in the US at age 4, has been here for 19 years, was on track to legal status, and was on a crew trying to contain a major blaze (in Washington state, vs Oregon, fwiw.) h/t @joshuajfriedman.com www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
they're trying to kill us all, and destroy everything that makes this country strong and good, out of sheer poisonous spite.
in an alternate universe where trump was not deeply compromised by putin, such that he could just walk away when he got bored, that might happen. unfortunately, that's not the situation we have been dealt.
Next level rice cooker.
"The first wave of grocery-price increases will likely hit this winter. Roberson predicted produce prices could rise 50% to 100% by early next year as inventories clear and new contracts kick in." fortune.com/2025/08/28/t...
BREAKING: Social Security Administration chief data officer and whistle-blower Charles Borges has resigned after bombshell report that SSA put highly-sensitive data at risk. He sent out an email to colleagues moments ago. Here is the text of his email shared with me:
capitalism supported public health measures—especially the very cost-effective public health measure of immunizations—for centuries before the very recent self-destructive turn against them. we didn't just start being capitalist.
the US's idiocy on this surprises me less than europe's, to be honest.
the trump admin's obsession with overtly violating posse comitatus strikes me as intentional payback for reconstruction and the use of federalized national guard to enforce desegregation and other civil rights laws in the 50s and 60s.
NEW PIECE: Powell and the Federal Reserve System has already failed to meet the moment and not defending Lisa Cook will seal both Powell's and the Fed's fate. www.crisesnotes.com/powell-will-...
Time for a Death of Stalin rewatch. Miller is Beria, obviously, but I think Vance strikes me more as a Malenkov than a Krushchev or Zhukov.
i find this image so fascinating. it is both a literal example of authoritarianism but also a second-hand reproduction of the aesthetics of other authoritarian states. it's like a simulacra of authoritarianism whose purpose is to attempt to make the simulacra real.
This is an inevitable byproduct of automation. The AI boosters have been selling us that deskilling in some areas will result in upskilling in others, but we have no evidence of this. We don't even have a particularly good theory. We have salesmanship B.S.
New acting director of CDC Jim O'Neill expressed being pro paid organ donation. "There are plenty of healthy spare kidneys walking around, unused."
Enough is enough. The health of the country is in danger. Read our resignation letters: insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-n...
well, that and they don't rub elbows with us rabble; everyday people are entirely theoretical to them.
what the fuck
yeah, their response was bullshit.
Hero jury saves hoagie hurler from legal grinder www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/u...
A new paper by Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin has found that countries where men take on more of the household labor and child care — in other words, those who buck traditionalism’s standards of the provider husband and homemaker wife — have higher fertility rates.
i am convinced that booming economies tend to encourage swing voters to feel like there's little risk in voting for some crazy reckless dumbass, or third parties, or not vote at all. see also: 2000.
Japan Post just announced they will no longer deliver mail to the United States, joining Germany, Austria, Denmark, Italy, France, and Sweden.
a bit late but the whole jillian michaels thing last week gave me an excuse to talk a bit about the economy of slavery in detail youtu.be/pRs2Xu1FWR4
🧵 No, anti-Zionism isn’t always antisemitism. When every critique of Israel is branded antisemitism, the word loses its meaning – and real antisemitism actually grows. 1/
or we could burn confederate flags and put them off balance
god, that sucks.
naturally, our university admins are desperately pushing AI on both professors and students as a miracle technology that will define the future, like a bunch of cargo cultists.
Hell, even CD players are like 8-tracks today. I just went car shopping, asked the guy about whether the car had a CD player, got an incomprehending look, and now feel ancient.
Especially when you factor in that this same cohort was much less likely to be vaccinated and boosted than older generations, and much more likely to be working in high–infection risk jobs during the pandemic. The damage done to their blood vessels, organs, etc. takes a while to play out. 2/2
I don't know how the study can argue for Covid not playing a significant role here while at the same time noting an unusual increase (or lack of post-Covid decrease) in the 25–44 cohort's circulatory disease, diabetes, and digestive disease, when all of those things are Covid sequelae. 1/2
I had a professor of Jewish Studies at UChicago who made the administration very angry because every year he made a proposal for the university to create an on-campus memorial to the worldwide victims of the UChicago economics department.
i have actually used shade cloth (ie. parasols) for plants in CA when the heat got to be too much, but yeah, it rains hard here. dry-farming tomatoes is basically impossible, the plants get however much the weather decides to give them, very different approach to gardening than i was used to!
yeah, the cost-benefit varies by climate and water rates (i grew up gardening in CA's central valley, so i know how it can be). in the impossibly-wet south, the challenge is often too much water.
i really need to get my garden in ASAP.
i was out of the country for a year, living in a place with remarkably cheap food relative to the overall cost of living (taiwan), and restocking my pantry after coming home has been a shock. not just the shinkflation and price hikes, but the unevenness of the changes (beef and eggs in particular!).
Donald Trump says he is going to deploy the National Guard to Chicago. This is what weak men do to pretend they’re strong. Stay safe, stand with your community, and most importantly, know your rights:
Fascism isn’t just a political project, it’s a metastasizing of millions of peoples’ unhappiness that would swallow them whole if they didn’t project it outward, and so it is harnessed like a weapon to forward some of the most self-destructive ideas and plans imaginable.
they're addicted to melting down over shit, and are desperate to make a show of force on some culture war BS.
I wrote a zero-tech explainer on what "A.I." actually is. If you don't hear from me again it's because the LinkedIn crowd murdered me. www.unchartedblue.com/a-i-is-just-...
The grenade launcher lol
"You do not need the strongest powers of observation to see that crime is a pretext — and not the main reason — for the military occupation of Washington by federal agents and soldiers from the National Guard."
After my college students learn about this, they are horrified. I then run a thought experiment with them: Why are you just learning about the extent of sexual violence in slavery now? Why didn't you learn about it in high school? In middle school? 1/4
We just launched the new 7th edition of Wilkinson, this time as a digital-only version but available through Kindle and Apple Books as well as through Pleco. $59.99, or $29.99 if you buy it in Pleco as an upgrade from 5/e or 6/e.
they have no idea how fucking incandescently pissed everyday people are getting. it's because they're not socially real people to the pols, it's all abstracted to them.
Everything fascists attack is what makes us strong. It's why they go for them. And it's why, rather than retreat, we can't give up an inch. Journalism. Humanities. Universities. Education. Art. Culture. Museums. All targets. All essential to defeating fascism.
yes, it's a graduation requirement in most states. they call it politics and government instead of civics.
why do the guys who buy into race science that tells them they're preordained by genetics to rule the world always turn out to look like they were incubated in a jar
what. the . fuck.
younger xers are doing OK, but older xers appear to have gone off the deep end tho. as always, 1970 appears to be the internal inflection point.
This is a really good piece from @laurajedeed.bsky.social. I'm reluctant to try to summarize it because its value lies in the granularity of its advice. It's worth your time.
I think it’s high time we take back the national narrative. For centuries Americans of all races, genders, religions, and abilities have worked to create a more perfect union, and we should shout from the rooftops that WE are America. Not these idiot white supremacist authoritarians.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. I agree 100% with your overall point.
loved the first one, stoked to see what you do with the second.
The thing people are getting wrong about Newsom is putting an e at the end of his name. Dude's been in the national news for over two decades now, but still, the -e persists somehow.
Trump Confesses that the United States Is a Client of Russia www.emptywheel.net/2025/08/18/t...
goron sandwich!
Where in SC is this?
Over 2.5 million Israelis joined today’s anti-Netanyahu protests, organisers estimate. 300,000 are now in Tel Aviv's Hostage Square. (Haaretz)
in mandarin, croissant is pronounced like kuh-song (long o vowel on the second syllable), which approximates the french pronunciation pretty well.
America is no longer descending into fascism. We are seconds away from impact Military occupation has come to DC. If and when military occupation comes to where you are, there are things that you can do. This article outlines some of them
NEW VIDEO – youtu.be/_vU5wwwkoB0 This one is about how fascism doesn’t just rewrite history—it erases it. The grief of what’s been lost. The people, the stories, the futures we’ll never get back because someone decided they didn’t belong in the record. This video is me trying to make sense of it.
This should get WIDE circulation: MIT stating that it “has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper.” gizmodo.com/mit-backs-aw...
fingers crossed for a fish storm.
A key difference here is that while either can be incorrect, the structure of Wikipedia *creates context* and the structure of LLMs *destroys context* Wikipedia has linked sources and an edit history showing where information came from and who added it when An LLM just generates text
so, does bombing out like this make it more likely to recurve early?
there was already substantial overlap between proud boys, III%ers, white supremacists, etc. and law enforcement, but yeah, i assume those types make up a disproportionate % of new ICE hires. i do wonder how many are essentially freelancing in these ops, though, as volunteer cosplay paramilitaries.
one of the things this particular moment in history is demonstrating is that laws on their own are not necessarily always binding if powerful actors choose to violate them (and even less so norms), but things play out very differently when laws are backed up with other forms and sources of power.
there will be no forgiving and forgetting this time, no matter if it takes the rest of our lives to exact justice. this country cannot survive another cycle of this.
Interesting that South Korea made a big jump up around the same time.
american yanukovych
“He’s been here 25 years cutting the state’s grass, paying his taxes — never even had a ticket… we got a felon in the White House but these are the people they got in there. Without immigrants this country is gonna go down.” 🇺🇸
both jeffries and hoyer should have serious primary challengers.
He has kept among us in times of peace Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution & unacknowledged by our laws.
Occurs to me that Trump's entire regime consolidation strategy is to persuade everyone through displays of force that the regime is already consolidated and there's no point in resisting. Which I don't think will work, but also shows how important public acts of noncompliance are.
oh man, taking out lamalfa would be delicious
I moved from a car-centric small town in the south to Taipei for a year, and my average daily miles jumped from 3.6 to 5.5. Just a huge valence change.
Hi! Your friendly neighborhood natsec professional here. And one who has been on patrols with US, Iraqi, & Georgian Soldiers during Phase IV (conventional) operations, has helped plan, direct, & assess those operations, teach others how to, etc. This is NOT why the US military did those patrols. 1/
google intentionally sabotaged its own search f(x) a few years back to maximize user time spent (wasted) scrolling through search results, it's not the google of a few years back.
One thing that has been true, and always will be true, is that Trump doesn't have enough goons. There just aren't enough cops, federal agents, or even soldiers, to effectively occupy American cities. They can be outnumbered and run out if that's what communities want.
This is one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed, the craft here is impeccable.
The adamant elite refusal to call bullshit is a big part of How We Got Here. The prevailing cultural attitude for years is you must not, under any circumstances, treat anything as bad faith. You are obligated to find some reasonable idea and engage with that, even if you distort to get there.
1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.
I’m quoting this because it is a very fair point for which I have an answer: The first thing is to recognize that in a democracy there is no such thing as “ the majority.” Instead, there are many and multiple overlapping majorities that can be assembled from different parts of the whole.
Let's be clear, this is the situation we face: "Aspiring authoritarian federal government takes control of police force in nation's capital."
In light of today’s events Some Thoughts on the Consent of the Governed talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/some-...
it's rapist logic.
I’m heartened to see this.
that is amazing