Excited that InfoWars has switched sides in the infowars

What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.

So much of this is memorable, but the most is this:
"Since the 2024 election, there has been a philosophical shift on the right, and especially among tech billionaires, to vilify the idea of empathy."

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Led to this spectacular article, which just keeps *escalating*

www.vice.com/en/article/a...

Yeah end of the day this kind of "oh no the liberals used a weird word" tone policing is just right wing misdirection away from the active horrors they're perpetrating. But we all have our pet peeves around language regardless

I don't like the phrase "justice-involved individuals" because of the use of the word "justice," which is rather presumptive these days.

That said the best option overall these days is probably just "former" "detainee" or "inmate."

Break Up the Big Court The federal court suffers simultaneously from lawless leadership and chronic understaffing. Let's fix both problems at once.

“Given the dangerous disregard for the Constitution this court has demonstrated, it’s worth taking a deeper look at the highest court in the land; what it is and what it could be.” www.liberalcurrents.com/break-up-the...

I enjoy that people are like “why is Spain not falling victim to what the other European countries are?” And I present my dumbass argument of: they have a large and thriving communist party

Alexander the fuckin' *Glorious*

1) it's generally a lower priority, and 2) post-911 until the trump era there was a general bipartisan consensus on most aspects of foreign policy

I can't trust this poll because the correct answer is obviously ankylosaur

It's also that the MAGA world is especially vulnerable because of their pretensions to catholicism. Vance is a hit dog hollering.

So careful use of "wage" war there was idiot bait and Vance just yoinked right at it, didn't he

I still regret missing the Hobbit Breakfast Slam

I assume this "speech" is just gonna be a performance of that song from Hamilton

Yes

It seems from this that, more precisely, what people are responding to is not "prices" as such, but an increase in the rate of price changes. That is, ongoing inflation is rising faster than it used to.

Yeah even if you manage a raise when all your costs go up and eat two thirds of it the net feeling is that you've lost ground rather than gained it. You thought you'd moved forward three steps then you're pushed back two. That doesn't mean people feel one step forward; they feel two steps behind.

Seems like a good time to share an amazing bit of reporting by Cokie Roberts that has stuck with me: Her discovery of a letter from Louisa Adams detailing how Congress left behind *40 pregnant mistresses* after the extra-long session of 1820, necessitating more orphanage space -->

Yeah it's a mean / median / mode issue. The average American is very wealthy but that's because a relatively small percentage of Americans are Houses Georg who have fifteen houses and should not be counted.

I mean "the economy sucks (for too many people) is functionally synonymous with "unequality is real and sucks."

the rest of the internet went wrong and gamefaqs is still right

This pattern holds a crucial lesson for America’s current moment. As democratic norms erode and elections become increasingly tilted, anti-corruption movements offer what partisan politics cannot: the moral authority to unite society against a rigged system. When traditional opposition fails, these movements succeed because they transcend party lines, mobilizing citizens around a cause larger than any candidate: the fundamental fairness of the system itself. Research shows that in polarized societies, the most effective opposition doesn’t fight on the traditional left-right battlefield where positions are entrenched. Instead, it creates an entirely new axis of conflict.1 Framing the stakes as clean versus corrupt shifts debate from rigid ideological divisions to a universally resonant moral question: are you on the side of the people or a corrupt elite?

Truth is, Orbán is just the latest in long list of authoritarians to be defeated by anti-corruption politics.

A Democratic landslide is possible if they can credibly take up the anti-corruption mantle. But that can’t happen if voters see them as corrupt and beholden to wealthy donors.

We arrived here because the present moment is downstream from a large number of distinct prior poor decisions. The collapse of a network is different from the collapse of a tower.

Japanese sci-fi: two robots in space, yearning

American sci-fi: man gets the author's beliefs on polygamy confirmed by the aliens of ramalama IV

french sci-fi: two horny bounty hunters visit the Galaxy of Breasts

British sci-fi: nuclear war. Everyone dead. America's fault

Yeah a lot of this argument seems to be between people looking at the mean, people looking at the median, and people looking at the mode

all of which can be *very* different right now for things like "income" or "standard of living"

I have to assume they're mostly bots because a month ago my timeline wasn't 50% pet graveyard and now it is

Do these numbers differentiate between the median and the average wage / income?

Because the more inequality grows the more that distinction starts to *really* matter

Sunday Dinner: lamb shank tagine with sweet potatoes, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, diced tomatoes, lime, over couscous

If you live in a state that has not expanded Medicaid you *very much do not* live in a system with universal health care. There are still hundreds of thousands of people going without health care every day. And that's not even getting into those who have to bankrupt themselves to enroll in Medicaid.

My pet theory is that a lot of people hadn't really *noticed* a lot of long-term negative economic trends (housing and health care costs, wage gains not matching productivity gains, etc. etc.) until the plague forced a society-wide stock taking. The "splash of cold water" theory.