This instant swerve to haughty contemptuousness after friendly cautious reasonable affirmation of limited usefulness is such an AI-curious tell.

Murc's law | Deleted via AfD | Wikibin Murc’s Law is a term that describes a tendency in American political journalism to attribute responsibility or agency only to Democratic Party actors...

Kari Zander: “When Republicans behave badly, they’re treated like a storm or gravity or a feature of the landscape. When they are occasionally treated like agents, they’re lionized as powerful badasses and cunning masterminds."

wikibin.org/articles/mur...

The Strange Death of Orbánism Franz Pokorny

Hungarian taxpayers paid American “post-liberal” Rod Dreher $105,000 last year to produce propaganda for Orban’s regime. www.jaccusepaper.co.uk/p/the-strang...

221. Chief Justice Roberts and the Clean Power Plan Remarkable reporting from the New York Times provides a peek behind the curtain of the February 2016 rulings that ushered in the modern emergency docket. And what it reveals is pretty discouraging.

"In the first major case in which the Court granted emergency relief as a means of shaping nationwide policy, it turns out that the justice who led the charge was the one who was doing quite a bit more than calling balls and strikes."

Me on Saturday's @nytimes.com scoop in today's "One First":

[Sam Altman watching The Thomas Crown Affair]

This is a lot of work to go through just to steal one piece of art.

Tweet from Joyce Carol Oates: "imagine being so shallow in your religious convictions that, to kowtow to a cognitively impaired US president, you renounce your lifelong religion. how embarrassed Hannity will be when he dies & is rushing down the coal shuttle to Hell as the Pope looks on approvingly. "But I didn't really mean it, forgive me, Father!""

Joyce Carol Oates never misses.

🧵

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

Remarkable SCOTUS reporting in the NYTimes, which pretty much confirms what observers have always assumed, but still astonishes. (Gift link)

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...

The Throwaway Planet | Caroline Fraser Three books raise political and moral questions about human consumption—and the value we place on those who clean up the waste.

The problem with plastic (and everything else we throw away)—
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

This is a very astute post about Maine politics. I know because I live in New Mexico and once attended a wedding in Maine.

/8 Trump’s AI meme seems like a tawdry, exaggerated display of taking God’s name and image in vain to glorify Trump. It oozes empty sanctimony and self-aggrandizement. It’s obscenely profane to anyone who takes the commandment seriously. It genuinely offended this very lapsed Catholic.

As a Boomer-era person all too aware of the effects of interrupted and insufficient sleep, I see the list below as a ten-alarm fire.

Even for someone with 1,000,000x the equanimity, self-control, decency, empathy, knowledge, etc of Trump, such a list would constitute an emergency.

Wittgenstein's cabin near Skjolden, Norway, 1914.

Building towered foresight isn’t anything at all.

I've studied so many concentration camps through history that held vulnerable people in just this kind of crowded squalor. You demonize people, you demand more arrests, this is what you get. It already has its own budget and its own momentum, and is on track to go much further, unless we stop it.

Scrooge would have *loved** AI.

The ability to formulate childish AI prompts is the opposite of a proficiency.

“Parliament had turned over its constitutional authority to Hitler and thereby committed suicide, though its body lingered on in an embalmed state.”

Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (p. 331)

American religiosity has been in decline for some time, but the way some performatively religious people have accepted Trump will accelerate that decline significantly. It’s a mortal wound to the credibility of American evangelism.

The obscenity of a budget that cuts the forest service to fund the re-opening of Alcatraz as a prison.

Every time I walk by the White House the fences outside have gotten 10% more ridiculous

Fascistic malignity.

BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.

the trump administration is selling this country wholesale to rapacious, extractive industries that will destroy our collective resources for private profit morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/breaking-t...

Trump felt so bad about draft-dodging in Vietnam he decided to start and lose his very own bungled war

IF Trump is actually there, and awake, my official analysis, 57 minutes in, is that the justices DO NOT CARE. I have heard nothing, *nothing* that indicates the justices have taken one iota of notice that the glaring baby man is in the courtroom.

We keep his memory alive by having Honey-Nut Cheerios for breakfast, reverently nicknamed “Omar.”

Can’t like this post because of Grogu erasure.

I don't know what SCOTUS will do on birthright citizenship case, it's anybody's guess. But if they endorse Trump's diktat, the only response is defiance. Outright, open defiance by the states. A decision not just erroneous but illegitimate, beyond their power, null and void from the day it's issued.

dude

Men only one want thing and it’s disgusting