The most iconic gay Star Wars character in the universe (probably)

Never start a land war in Eurasia, never challenge CJ McCollum

Counterpoint: Zeb

That's fantastic

Amateurs talk about when to arrive at the airport. Professionals talk about mileage status

One of your civic duties is to not click on the crime video links, and to shame people who take them as gospel

Court To Bondi: Demanding Platforms Censor Speech And Bragging About It On Fox News Is, In Fact, A First Amendment Violation

For the better part of five years, we've been treated to an elaborate performance about the unprecedented constitutional horror of "jawboning." Jim Jordan held hearings.…

New Face, Same System

"Bulgaria’s European partners should be wary. The concerns about Radev’s pro-Moscow orientation will be reinforced by Progressive Bulgaria’s high scores in the polling stations for voters abroad in Russia and Belarus."

👇👇👇

www.gmfus.org/news/new-fac...

@gmfus.bsky.social

#Bulgaria 🇧🇬

Eight parliamentary elections in the last 5 years

I'll be honest, of all the countries in Europe I've come to think of Bulgaria as the one whose elections signify the least, partially because I have a lot of trouble following them, but mostly because it feels like there will be another round in six months

If this is how we get the equivalent of a Niva I'm OK with it en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lada_Niva

People ordering GoPuff delivery of bodega stuff at 8am on a block with a bodega on the corner, what are you doing

The Pope’s thread on X is really great. I don’t look at X a lot and scanned the comments. My god. What is wrong with people. And what is wrong with that place.

Behind Trump’s Public Bravado on the War, He Grapples With His Own Fears The president’s impulsive style has never been tested in a sustained military conflict, and he’s been ruminating on Jimmy Carter’s failure in Iran.

Props to the WSJ, they managed to pack almost every Trump decision-making pathology into a single story. It’s all here:

1) Short attention span
2) Impulsive behavior
3) Knowledge deficits
4) Gambling for resurrection
5) Belief in the madman theory

www.wsj.com/politics/nat...

Palantir's (AI-penned?) fashslop is presented as a defense of Western Civilization(tm) but actually presents a step-by-step demolition of the values that make so-called "Western" countries pleasant places to live:

Pssst item 9 on the list is about gender.

@michael-feinberg.bsky.social was joined by @benmckenzie.bsky.social, writer and director of the new documentary, “Everyone Is Lying to You for Money,” on Lawfare Daily to discuss his years-long deep dive into the cryptocurrency industry.

"decadence" drink

"neutering of postwar Germany" drink"

"violent crime" drink

Woke up and saw people posting about the Palantir thread and fascism and thought "surely they're exaggerating" and nope, they're not twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398...

STATEMENT on Senate vote to approve mining at the doorstep of Boundary Waters - Center for Western Priorities DENVER — The U.S. Senate today voted 50-49 to invoke the Congressional Review Act to overturn a 20-year ban on mining on more than 225,000 acres of the Superior National Forest upstream of the Boundar...

This Boundary Waters decision is a pretty classic example of a small, single-issue, constituency trumping a large, multi-issue, one. Random note: very cool to see a picture I took more than a decade ago (with appropriate credit) at the top of this post. Hopefully a Dem majority will fix it. #BWCAW

At the level of Islamic political thought, the contest between Iran and the Gulf is a contest btw two modern Islamic versions of reactionary authoritarianism; the key difference is the Gulf is pro-USA and monarchical and Iran is anti-USA and its own unique vanguardist theocracy

It honestly seems like they are being good liberals in the philosophical sense, saying they have to evaluate the law & the evidence because they believe in the process of truth-seeking. Meanwhile Roberts & Alito basically say "yeah I know the answer already"

Why are Harvard’s slavery researchers quitting or being fired? The school’s $100m project to examine its slave ownership in Antigua is mired with controversy as academics allege obstruction

www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Ivanishvili’s Son Laments ‘Violence’, ‘Polarization’, Calls for ‘Discussion, Debate’ - Civil Georgia Responding to a question about abuses against protesters and a "sense of impunity" during the ruling

Ivanishvili's son is curated to follow in footsteps of his father: to be the future heir of their private kingdom.

Tsotne spoke politics today in front of the Georgian Dream youth wing. He avoided to answer on accountability of those in power who beat up youth protesters.
civil.ge/archives/730...

Screenshotted excerpt from linked article reading as follows: "In public, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has cultivated a reputation for care and caution. The papers reveal a different side of him. At a critical moment for the country and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis. When colleagues warned the chief justice that he was proposing an unprecedented move, he was dismissive. “I recognize that the posture of this stay request is not typical,” he wrote. But he argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal-fired plants, was “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,” and too big, costly and consequential for the court not to act immediately."

OOP

New York Times got receipts on John Roberts being like, 'I know this isn't how anything works, but a Democratic president is about to implement a policy!!'

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

Exactly my reaction. This is extremely significant historically, politically, legally. It also radically understates the hypocrisy & naked political motives of what the Republican justices on the court did

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

This is both

(1) some of the most important SCOTUS reporting ever, and

(2) far too generous to the Republican justices in framing of many pieces and omissions of Trump-era developments

The median high-ranking appointee used to be a person at least of some self-respect & recognized professional merit, even if those things resulted in a lot of self-indulgence and grandstanding

And yeah, so most of those people are not impressive