me paying $30 in gas to buy imported things that have been hit with tariffs bc joe rogan is learning about politics at age 58

Erasing history.

We’re Being Ruled Over by the World’s Biggest Losers They effectively control our fates, but deep down, they know they’re sniveling, pathetic, and inadequate, and it eats them up.

www.thenation.com/article/poli...

It is weird that the assassination of essentially a celebrity influencer is a bigger deal than the shooting of two top state legislators + their spouses

The top corner of a yellow-brick house with a satellite dish mounted by a narrow black drainpipe. The sole visible upstairs window is fully open, but there is a very dark cloud overhead on the point of releasing its contents in a deluge.

Summer storm.
#WindowsOnWednesday 📷 #photography

Cartoon by Stephen Collins for the Guardian, here's the script: [Scene is the inside of a SOUP. Some CARROTS and BITS OF BROCCOLI are floating around and a STOCK CUBE and a BAY LEAF have just been dropped in.]  1 STOCK CUBE: Alright lads - this is Bay Leaf. My colleague from the spice rack. 2 BROCCOLI: Hi Bay Leaf BAY LEAF: Yuh yuh hi 3 CARROTS: You up for getting proper blended with us later, Bay Leaf? BAY LEAF: Nuh mate, getting scooped out before soup stage. 4 CARROTS: Oh! So… you’re not being eaten then? BAY LEAF: Eaten! Haha 5 BAY LEAF: Not allowed mate. I’m afraid I’m a lil’ bit *toooo intense*... 6 BAY LEAF: Just here for the flavour hit. Special forces, y’know. That’s why there’s just one of me. 7 BAY LEAF: Over-deploy and you’d have this whole soup stiiinking of bay leaf… 8 BAY LEAF: You might wanna stand back actually. This place is about to get preeetty bay leafy... 9 [Silent pause] 10 CARROTS: Are you doing something BAY LEAF: Sure am mate. 11 BAY LEAF: Suuuuure am. 12 BAY LEAF [Getting scooped out by chef’s spoon]: You need training to perceive it. CARROTS: OK

I’m convinced this is how a bay leaf would talk

cartoon for the guardian by Stephen Collins - script as follows: [Scene is a darkened LOFT. Amongst the boxes and junk are FOUR KNACKERED OLD FANS - three tower fans and one circular, with cracked grey plastic and buttons missing. One fan, TOWER FAN 1, is a bit taller than the others, and is addressing them] 1 TOWER FAN 1: Right lads, get ready. 2 TOWER FAN 1: This is our time. 3 TOWER FAN 1: The time when we remember who we are, and why we’re here. 4 TOWER FAN 1: We are the four crap fans in a British person’s loft, and we are here to make absolutely no difference whatsoever. 5 TOWER FAN 1: I know what you’re thinking, lads: 6 TOWER FAN 1: Surely this will be the year they finally replace us? 7 TOWER FAN 1: Our plastic’s gone all brown... I haven’t oscillated since 2018... 8 TOWER FAN 1: Dave here sounds like a spitfire and blows like a sad cat’s sigh… TOWER FAN 2: Cheers mate 9 TOWER FAN 1: But no. These people are British, and every year, they forget the sun exists. By the time they remember, new fans will cost *four million pounds* on Amazon. 10 TOWER FAN 1: So we’ll be back down there... shovelling thick air across the moaning faces of a species that cannot comprehend the concept of air conditioning, or even just closing the curtains when it’s hot out... 11 TOWER FAN 1: ...while they incessantly bang on about normally hot countries which this country is now temporarily a bit hotter than. 12 [The loft hatch opens and a person comes up the ladder] PERSON: APPARENTLY IT’S HOTTER THAN GREECE, LISA

british fan chat

Unsplash image of the Earth, mostly the nightside with a tracery of city lights on every continent.

OK, this is wild.

In September 2023, geophysicists across the world started monitoring a very odd signal coming from the ground under them.

It was picked up in the Arctic. And Antarctica. It was detected everywhere, every 90 seconds, as regular as a metronome, for *nine days*.

What the HELL?

1/

You can’t say criminals don’t deserve due process when due process is the thing that decides if they're criminals. Otherwise you're just kidnapping people you don't like.

"They want obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay the longer hours the reduced benefits the end of overtime and the vanishing pension" ~George Carlin

Essay: A gay, lapsed Catholic on loving Pope Francis J.P. Brammer writes an appreciation of the late pope: 'Francis advocated for the powerless, for those who have so little and yet are villainized by people in positions of authority.'

I wrote a little reflection on Pope Francis www.latimes.com/delos/story/...

‘We must weep and struggle with those who suffer from the damage inflicted on the Earth’ As 2025 marks the 10th anniversary of Laudato si’, Cardinal Michael Czerny, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development at the Vatican, acknowledged the commitment of many Christ...

My choice for Pope:Cardinal Michael Czerny from Montreal.
He was the Jesuit sent to El Salvador to face down death squads. He worked in Africa during AIDs. He was in Lebanon pushing for peace.
He is a social justice warrior.
And he married my wife and I.
international.la-croix.com/opinions/we-...

Kind, decent, and compassionate, Pope Francis was badly out of step with contemporary western culture.

i hope this conclave is like the one in the movie conclave

Democracy is not infallible. It’s under attack and must be defended by those who rely on it to preserve their freedom from those who profit by subjugating the masses.

Unmasking manipulation strips power from those who believe everything has a price. Resilience and determination cannot be bought. Reject fatalism — or the fight for justice will become a fight for survival.

Please take a moment to appreciate Nolan Jones' wildly unfortunate trip to first

It is really bothering me (understatement) that the message is “bring back that one innocent guy” and not “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK SHUT DOWN THIS WHOLE OPERATION IMMEDIATELY.”

Legal Ethics Nerds Weigh In Last Friday, with little fanfare, the heavyweights of the legal ethics world weighed in.

Legal Ethics Nerds Weigh In
open.substack.com/pub/joycevan...

It drives me crazy. To dare to talk about protecting the Earth when all you're doing is a PR stunt that pollutes the equivalent of a decade of a Westerner's life who already pollute a lot.

I love space exploration, but space tourism for selfish rich people is a cancer.

Keanu Reeves in The birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli.

keanu reeves in famous works of art: thread

A vertical format photo of a rain cloud bursting over an island, seen from a sandy shore. Grey and soft blue. Sea water pulling off the beach in the foreground.

‘Distant Rain’. Yes, I did get a soaking soon afterwards. 🙂 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Did Trump help insiders cash in on his tariff flip-flopping? YouTube video by Senator Elizabeth Warren

I'm calling for an investigation into whether President Trump manipulated the market to benefit his Wall Street donors—all while working people and small businesses paid the price.

Did Trump help insiders cash in on his tariff flip-flopping? It sure looks like corruption.

In mainstream discourse, it's become standard to blame the excesses of the right on liberals, the left, feminists, Black Lives Matter, affirmative action, environmental protection, and BIPOC and LGBTQ people. It's a way that the right is granted masculine prerogatives and the left feminine responsibilities for the right's behavior. It's also routine to blame the Democratic Party for what the Republican Party does. The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages. And in the same way the diverse population left of center is supposed to make nice to the right or be responsible for when the right goes wrong. These stories amount to "the left was so annoying about pronouns or liberals made people feel so guilty about plastic straws they had no choice but to get on board with the second coming of the Third Reich and the destruction of the planet." Behind these stories is the assumption that some people matter more than other people, and that we who matter less have to pander to those who matter more – conservatives when they are imagined as straight, as white, as male, as rural, as salt of the earth, as the real Americans, unlike us ethnic/ immigrant/ urban/ non-male/ non-straight people.

And yeah, somewhere in the mire of the national unconscious, Democrats are the wives who are supposed to placate and Republicans are the husbands who expect appeasement.

Bridget with The Beatles on Abbey Road.

Bridget hanging out in Grant Wood's American Gothic.

Bridget in Bruegel's Hunters In The Snow (with a freshly caught mouse).

The Cat With The Pearl Earring.

A little while ago, my parents' cat Bridget went missing. As the weeks dragged on, they became extremely worried. My dad devised a way to distract himself: he began to paint Bridget's adventures, imagining her travelling through time and popping up in some of art and music's most iconic scenes.

ChatGPT ass presidency

Carney: The system of global trade anchored on the United States.. is over. Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over. The 80 year period when the United States embraced the mantle of economic leadership… is over.

Whoever came up with these supposed tariff rates is like Kramer from Seinfeld when he pretended to work at that job "in business"