I did a drawing of Elon Musk. I included the inspiration.

NEW: Louisiana is asking a federal court to impose nationwide restrictions on mifepristone, a medication used in nearly two-thirds of abortions in the U.S.

Extremist politicians' attacks on abortion are out of touch with science, law, and public opinion.

The Haunted Library #OmniumGatherum library.hrmtc.com/20...

Illustration of new moon on third day of lunar cycle showing detail of craters on moon surface.

Goodnight.
‘The moon is my mother.
She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness—
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.’ ~Plath
The Moon: third day, Secrets of the stars, 1922.

Historical illustration from F.W. Bolgiano’s 1902 seed catalogue, featuring a vibrant bouquet of pansy flowers in various colors, including yellow, pink, red, purple, and orange with detailed shading. The flowers are accompanied by green leaves and curling tendrils. The right side includes printed text advertising ten select varieties of sweet peas and mixed pansy seeds, with prices listed as 10 cents per packet and $1.50 per ounce. The text prominently displays the seller’s name, F.W. Bolgiano Seedsman, and addresses in Washington, D.C. The background shows signs of age, such as stains and wear marks.

🌸 Bolgiano's 1902 catalogue: .
Washington, D.C.: F.W. Bolgiano, 1902..

[Source]

Yellow, purple, and red tulips blooming at the base of a cherry blossom tree full of purple blooms on a sidewalk in Park Slope, with pastel colored Brownstones in the background

Check out spring in Brooklyn!

Former Breitbart Editor Katie McHugh On Stephen Miller And White Supremacy Former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh tells NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro that White House senior adviser Stephen Miller assisted in her radicalization as a white supremacist.

Contrast that with someone like Katie McHugh, who truly left the movement and then used the information she had from her time in it to educate the world about Stephen Miller's affinity for white nationalist -- leaking emails, speaking on-record in interviews, etc

www.npr.org/2019/12/15/7...

I came across a video she made with Lucy Brown, another former T R accomplice who is also trying to deflect from her past which includes being photographed wearing a Sonnenrad. They chatted about all the crazy high jinks they used to get up to. Same thing. Not a bit of remorse from either woman.

LBC tweet promoting an interview with Lauren Southern

Shame on news outlets for letting Lauren Southern do her... third?... publicity tour denouncing the far-right while making no clear efforts to counteract the movement. She continues to seek profit off her association with it while shielding others in it from accountability. She's grifting. That's it

As Breaker first reported, CBS News has invited both Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to be guests at their tables at the White House Correspondents' dinner just days after Ellison's cocktail soiree.

You might or or might not (but I’m guessing might not) be surprised to learn that CBS News invited Stephen Miller to be their guest at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Hegseth, too.

www.breakermedia.com/p/axel-s-tel...

Same. She is incredible.

Walter Huss Knew That if Fascism Ever Came to America, it would happen via the hostile takeover of a major political party On American Fascism's parasitic relationship to "The Party of Lincoln"

Here's the longer piece from which that screenshot comes. It took a white Christian nationalist named Walter Huss 18 years of diligent work to eventually get elected chair of the OR GOP in 1978. He was deposed within a year, but the movement he built kept going. rightlandia.ghost.io/walter-huss-...

I'll share just one more story to give a flavor of the Husses "hostile takeover" tactics. In 1976, a woman who was a moderate GOP precinct captain from Clackamas county got an alarmed phone call from a friend telling her that she had to go to the county executive committee meeting that night. "Ugh, why?" she thought. "Those meetings are soooo boring and I was planning on just relaxing at home and watching TV." But she honored her friend's request and attended the meeting. There was a sense of urgency around this usually mundane event because Huss's far right forces had rented several school busses to bring precinct captains from all over the county to vote as a block for a right wing coup to take over the county organization. My informant remembered looking out the window of the room where they were meeting and seeing the convoy of busses pull in. Huss's forces easily won, and immediately following the vote that replaced the former county chair with some new right winger who was entirely unknown to most of the county's old line Republicans, the new chair immediately asked everyone to bow their heads to pray. No new business was discussed. No votes were held. There was no discussion of policy or political strategy. There was just an offering to God, and then back on to the school busses to head home. My informant remembered being taken aback that the new chair would ask everyone to say a Christian prayer at a political meeting. She'd never witnessed anything like that before and didn't want to be rude, but also felt like it would be inappropriate to join in. She left wondering what the hell had just happened.

The Oregon Republican Party used to believe in religious pluralism, but in the late 1970s a grassroots Christian Nationalist insurgency slowly took over the party apparatus and moved it rightward. This story from 1976 is indicative of what this hostile takeover looked like to a normie Republican.

Auguries from Hungary Orbán’s election defeat is a blow to Trump and Maga

"Putin, Xi and Trump all liked Orbán for the same reason: his hostility to liberal democracy and his willingness to play the role of spoiler within the EU. Orbán also played a useful ideological role"

giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @FT

Streeting refuses to publish secret Palantir NHS briefings | Good Law Project The health secretary wants to keep us in the dark about Palantir’s systems for handling sensitive health records, so we’re taking legal action with Democracy for Sale to fight back

Wes Streeting is keeping Palantir's secrets. So we're taking him to court.

French Widow Detained by ICE in Alabama Is Released After 16 Days

We are the baddies. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/u...

75-year-old widow.

One of her stepsons, a cop, called ICE on her so he can grab as much as he can from the estate.

BirdCast map showing 305.6 million birds in flight at 12:10AM EDT on April 17, 2026. Much of the movement is concentrated from Texas north to Canada through the Midwest states.

NEXRAD radar composite map showing birds and weather.

Birds be moving up the middle tonight! Lots of activity along the border, too; starting to get some of those longer distance birds moving north.
#birds #spring #migration
#LightsOutForBirds

Fox with crow on its back surrounded by little blue flowers with yellow centres and bluebells and daffodils, a moth on a pale green background, painting.

🖼️ Kelly Louise Judd

Illustration of little nest with three eggs surrounded by apple blossom with a bee in flight.

Apple blossoms and bird's nest, L. Prang & Co, 1878.

I think we have filled all the gaps ☺️

It’s also #FalconFriday
A shifty look on this ones face

#birds
#naturephotography
#BirdWatching
#ECK

This Backyard Bird Has a Lot to Teach Us about Sex Variability White-throated Sparrows demonstrate that traits we usually associate with sex can be influenced by genes that are not on sex chromosomes

The white-stripe morphs, male & female, act in a way that is stereotypically "masculine" (loud elaborate songs, more aggressive) with tan-stripe morphs, regardless of gonads, acting more "feminine" (nurturing young).

Their offspring will be a 50/50 mix of morph & 50/50 mix of male/female.

On his way to steal yo girl

(Provided yo girl is a tan-morph female White-throated Sparrow, since each sex of this species has two morphs that mate disassortatively and function like genders with associated behavioral differences.)

A painting of a bird beside the text "gimme more of that shit"

ChatGPT’s latest stylistic quirk is sinister, infuriating – and absolutely everywhere | Stuart Heritage | The Guardian estimated reading time: 3 minIf you've never seen Jim Carrey's 2007 psychological thriller The Number 23, then congratulations. It is a film about a man who sees the number 23 so many times that he ends up going bonkers. I used to think this film was stupid. However, now I appear to be living it.My own personal number 23 is a rhetorical device: "It's not X, it's Y." Everywhere I look, there it is. Whenever I hate myself enough to scroll through Facebook's wilderness of algorithmically suggested posts, I find myself being smacked in the face with sentences such as: "Self-improvement isn't a trend, it's a lifestyle shift," and "The small wins aren't just moments, they're the majority of your life." Once you notice it, it becomes impossible to ignore. This weekend during a Peloton class (I know, shut up), I heard an instructor bark a variation of "this isn't X, it's Y". Yesterday, a character did the same during a TV show I was reviewing, and I dropped a star from its score in retaliation.You know where this is coming from, don't you? "It's not X, it's Y" is an AI mainstay. It's one of ChatGPT's most insidious tells. No matter how innocuous a prompt you enter, AI will always find a way to sneak it into its response. Ask it if you should put more ham in your pasta, and it will tell you: "Ham doesn't just taste good – it makes everything else taste better." Ask it if you should chase a bee around your garden and it will say: "Bees aren't stupid – they're hyper-specialised"."It's not X, it's Y" has become such a shorthand for lazy AI slop that, as soon as I see or hear someone telling me that something isn't something because it's actually something else, I automatically tense up on the assumption that I'm not dealing with a human, I'm dealing with a datacentre. That might not necessarily be the case – there is a possibility every example is completely organic – but it's a sign of the times that we can't just relax and assume the things we see and hear were made by people.Although "it's not X, it's Y" predates ChatGPT, I cannot hear it without assuming that AI made it. A few weeks ago, I was rewatching the Mad Men episode where Don Draper pitches a watch. "It's not a timepiece," he says. "It's a conversation piece." A decade ago, I was amazed by Draper's elegant turn of phrase. But now I can't see it without thinking that a chatbot vomited it out between daytime scotches.There are plenty of other linguistic gimmicks that appear to come direct from ChatGPT. Vague, soft intensifiers are one: if you ever see anything described as "quietly powerful" or "deeply transformative", then that should set your spidey-senses tingling. ChatGPT is also known for being a bit too liberal with em-dashes. So am I, but the robots can rip them from my cold dead hands. Nevertheless, nothing haunts me quite as much as "it's not X, it's Y".This is my life now. I've become so hypervigilant to the construction that it has seeped into my subconscious thoughts. This isn't a cup of tea, I say out loud to myself, it's a precious respite. That isn't a window, it's a portal to a new way of thinking. This isn't food poisoning, it's a quietly powerful reminder not to eat raw chicken off the kitchen floor.So now, whenever I sit down at my desk, I waste all my energy trying not to write any variation of "it's not X, it's Y", because I don't want you to think I use AI. It's much harder than it looks. I literally used it four paragraphs ago, with the datacentre thing. It has made me even more determined to prove that I'm a human. What do I need to do? Come to your house and free-associate a column at you? Send out vials of my saliva? I'll do whatever it takes.Hopefully this won't be for ever. AI evolves so quickly that "it's not X, it's Y" will soon become a thing of the past. It will probably be replaced by a new stylistic quirk, no less sinister but harder to detect. And if that doesn't happen, you have my full permission to lock me away for my own safety. "This isn't incarceration," you can tell me as you slam the door. "It's a quiet reset."

Relatable. I'm using far fewer em-dashes than I used to.

Middle East crisis live: Tense Lebanon ceasefire holds as countries dispute withdrawal of Israeli troops Israel said it has not achieved its goal of disarming Hezbollah, which it will do either through diplomatic or military activities

“Trump's so-called Israel vs Lebanon ‘ceasefire’ simply is not a ceasefire, but a legitimization of Israel continuing its war of aggression at any whim, as with the Gaza ceasefire being an arrangement of ‘ceasefire’ wherein Israel fires and the locals cease to exist.” ~ b9AcE

Bargain Witch #OmniumGatherum library.hrmtc.com/20...

papaya is accepting applications for kisses. very in demand role, minimum 5 years of experience kissing animals over the internet is a must

NEW: Associated Press projects Democrat wins special election for New Jersey 11th district U.S. House seat.