I should do a wellness check on my brother today. He's a Flyers fan and his wife's a Penguins fan.

I didn't even look to see if they're serious or just being ridiculous. I just went "Wait it wasn't a real penguin? That's like throwing snowballs at a fake Santa."

I was disappointed to discover Gritty only threw an empty costume. I expect actual penguin corpses from Philly. Just no heart in sports these days.

I really want a senator, rather than explaining the math, to just say "We all know what's going on here, Mr. Secretary. Trump said a moronic thing and now everyone in the administration, including you, has to pretend it's real. You know it isn't real. But you can't say that because you're a coward."

That's amazing.

be allowed to go about their lives free from harassment. A condition that they view as an assault on their own values and lifestyle. It's "If my kids know they can grow up and move to the big city and be queer and never talk to me again, how will I possibly keep them straight & god-fearing?"

I feel like a lot of left wing distress over political gerrymandering is the fear that vulnerable populations will have their rights stripped away by the state.

Meanwhile the right wing distress over political gerrymandering seems to be the fear that somewhere else, people different than them will

Bear has a fantastic voice, I've been trying to convince him to do things that involve him singing for years now, but he doesn't like the attention.

I don't have a fraction of the range that I did when I was younger and it drives me mad when I try to sing.

Oh man, that song just gets me.

A real senator would hammer away at an administration that caused 130,000 of their constituents to lose healthcare because they couldn’t afford it. But you hear more from Fetterman and McCormick about affordable bulldozers for Israel than about affordable healthcare for Pennsylvania. Pathetic.

A Waffle House in Philly would be too powerful, too chaotic. I'm both intrigued and terrified by it.

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they're the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive-because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about "Western civilization," while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

Really powerful, hopeful paragraph from the latest article in the Atlantic by @adamserwer.bsky.social

I'll go to the grocery store and think about the price of those damn kebabs 20 times between now and the midterms though, and every time I'll be annoyed about the price of those kebabs. Just like I'll fill up the gas tank about 50 times between now and then and be pissed about it.

way I did a few years back.

Now, our cat knocked my speaker off the media cabinet and broke our TV over the summer. It was so cheap I just replaced it. With a slightly bigger model. For less than I'd bought the original in 2021. That was nice, but I won't buy another TV for years.

When they go on sale now it's 2 for $24. So I guess it isn't quite as bad. But that's what drives the perception. If I were going to drop $100 for a single meal I'd order out. Of course that's more expensive than it used to be too. So when I'm budgeting in having a nice treat I can't afford it the

In the summer of 2023 I could go to the grocery store, and about every other week they had these steak kebabs on sale for $5. I could get enough to feed everyone for $35. A nice treat for everyone. Today they're $14. I'd need to spend $98 for them. I don't make 280% of what I did in 2023.

Cars had been flat from 2000-2020 then jumped 25%! I just had to replace one and I didn't look at it and go "Ok that's a reasonable increase over the last two decades". I went "Fuck, why are they so expensive? They weren't this expensive last time I bought a car! It doesn't even have heated seats!"

God forbid you're the poor fool who didn't change jobs between 2020 and 2022 and are still making your 2020 wages plus a couple small percentage raises, you're really feeling that crunch.

Not to mention housing and food prices inflated as much from 2021-2024 as they had from 2011-2021! Sure wages were growing faster at that time as well. But when you get a good raise and then watch the whole thing go to housing, child care, and food you feel poorer.

The problem nowadays is that CEOs don't want to work. They just want money for laying people off and blathering about AI, not for producing any positive or concrete improvement to the business. They expect hundreds of millions for thousands of job loses and it's weak sauce, snowflake behaviour.

yeah, i think political work needs to be done to connect vance directly to people like orban. "vance wants to rule over you like you're a slave

I'd posit that in 2000-2004 it was fuck all easy to buy a house and house prices were appreciating significantly. So your income might have been flat but there was growing home equity offsetting that.

Viktor Orban accomplished so much of what the Trump movement wants to accomplish here

he ruled for 16 years and rewrote the rules in his favor

and still, they threw him out

and you know what? they did it by voting

don’t let anyone tell you voting doesn’t matter

Hard to get people to understand: it is literally paralyzing.

I think the problem is that Ritchson is so good at being Reacher that the success of his characters feels inevitable. Whereas Statham's characters often feel like guys whose luck is bound to run out any minute now.

The 28th Virginia battle flag is a Confederate battle flag that belonged to the 28th Virginia Infantry Regiment. Captured by the 1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment at the Battle of Gettysburg, the flag was brought to Minnesota and exhibited at the state's capitol for several years before passing into the permanent collection of the Minnesota Historical Society after 1896 where it has remained since.

Happy Confederate Surrender Day from Minnesota where we still have your goddamn flag and we’re not giving it up.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28th_Vi...

Every time I saw another rant about how we were going to bomb them into surrender, it made me think about your 'The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All' episodes from last year. Just 80+ years and counting of that strategy never working.

No real problem with ordinary folks asking about the 25th, but every time a congressman asks for the cabinet to remove a president you should read that as them abdicating their own duty to pursue impeachment through congress

It fucking disgusts me that Congress can read that tweet and not immediately impeach him. What a total abdication of their role.