“Remember when selling out was considered embarrassing? Remember when the idea of celebrities shilling for big corporations was so heavily mocked that A-Listers had to flee to Japan to do those ads in semi-secret? Now, getting your bag is the in thing, even if you’re already obscenely rich, and what better way to line your already-bulging pockets than by partnering up with prediction markets? Because plain old sports gambling isn’t ethically corrosive enough!” Personally, I agree with The Sports Gossip Show: Shilling for prediction markets is the new cigarette ad. It deserves the same level of disapproval.
“The present situation is a bit like if instead of having a Manhattan Project we just subcontracted it out to a few private companies and set up a prize of a trillion dollars for who could build a nuke first without any safety rules and with a general agreement that no one in the government was allowed to see what any of these guys were doing, what safety precautions they were taking or anything else … because they’re private businesses. It can’t be the way. But at the moment it does seem to be the way.”
“But we are not obliged to share food with a hungry stranger when we are the hungry stranger. We are not obliged to share food when we do not have any food. This woman has no moral obligation to do what Elijah requests of her. She has just barely enough food to feed her own starving son one final meal and taking that food from her son to give it to this weird, greedy stranger is not a duty or a commandment or an expectation.”
“But the overall medical consensus, researchers say, is that postpartum psychosis is treatable when diagnosed early, and that outcomes as severe as Clancy’s are incredibly rare. They hope the trial, which has spurred frank conversations online among mothers about the complexities of postpartum mood and anxiety disorders, can also lead to productive conversations between patients and doctors — instead of panic.”
“We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.”
Good Lord, Brendan Carr is a whiny little bitch.
“Since last year, judges have ruled that the Trump administration has deported more than 170 people in in violation of court orders, in defiance of legally mandated due process protections, or to countries from which they had sought or received protection from torture and persecution.” And I want everyone involved in any aspect of those to be prosecuted at the first opportunity.
“In effect, a threat to make Canada the 51st state is pushing America’s northern neighbor so close to Europe that leaders have begun to half-in-jest dub it the EU’s newest member.”
RIP, Bob Mackie, legendary fashion designer for Cher, Diana Ross, Carol Burnett, and others.
“Given the Trump administration’s emphasis on this plan as a boon for stay-at-home mothers, you may wonder if the single moms presently in the workforce could use childcare funds to pay themselves to stay home. The answer is no. If the new policy is implemented, the payment would apply solely to married stay-at-home moms. The single mothers who rely now on the childcare subsidies would have to keep working (i.e., meet the current requirement to get the subsidy) or marry a gainfully employed man. (If only they had thought of that!) Parents who are unmarried by cohabitating also wouldn’t qualify for the stay-at-home benefit. Married mothers, though, could collect a government payment to stay home, so long as their husbands work full time and for pay.”
“For the first time, scientists believe they may have detected a dark matter particle.”
“States Already Have a Good Way to Ensure Election Integrity—and MAGA Hates It”. (Spoiler alert: it’s ERIC, which Texas among many other red states decided to opt out of, for no good reason.)
“It turns out Jean-Luc Picard was an even better starship helmsman than the writers knew. A physicist has gone through the details of a warp-speed trick from the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and found a subtlety the show missed. But instead of a plot hole, the detail he found actually makes the maneuver more impressive… as well as a great opportunity to teach about a lesser-known feature of the theory of relativity.”
“Investigators may have broken state laws under the direction of top Homeland Security leaders as part of an expansive effort to find noncitizens on the nation’s voter rolls, according to a federal whistle-blower’s account released on Monday.” Lock them up.
“That most basic of commands has been abandoned in this DOJ. It has become disposable the moment it collides with Trump’s political preferences. And when diGenova, a partisan of the first order, hit the point where he was being told to indict without the basic goods, he balked. Reading between the lines of a resignation, his exit is a quiet, devastating verdict on Todd Blanche’s tenure and the Department he now runs.”
“I got all of these emails in the past three hours. I’m being hustled by clankers. But what’s worse, to be clear: I am a freelancer. These bots are trying to take work from me when I need the work. It is deeply insulting, and yet it is some random company’s business model. WTF?”
“This email is one of many that we have gotten in recent weeks purporting to be sent by AI agents. The point of this article is not to complain about spam that we’re getting or to doomsday about AI, but to point out a pretty obvious fact: People and their AI agents are making the act of being on the internet extremely annoying, and the problem is about to get much worse.”
“Ed Sheeran’s international tour has been thrown into crisis, with one opening act, the rapper Macklemore, dropped from the tour’s US dates for his onstage support of Palestine, and all of the British singer’s other openers quitting to protest the removal.” Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, is the root cause here.
“So, in the end, I’m actually pretty okay with the situation as far as increased student life spending in Academia. Increases in the standards for room and board, in high-touch services, and in support for student activities are for the most part rational responses to changes in the overall environment.”
“When Trump reaches for the H-word, two things are usually happening: He’s facing a controversy threatening his political or personal priorities, and he’s lost control of the politics.”
“This is the point in this ugly episode where figures on the right, Fox’s Laura Ingraham and Tomi Lahren and Outkick founder Clay Travis, among others, raised an objection. Not to the aping of violence, not to Rowe’s colleagues finding pantomimed violence against her to be hilarious, not to Sarkisian never addressing the controversy himself. They found a way to fault Rowe for supposedly being thin-skinned.”
“Nonetheless, it’s yet another reminder that, no matter how they might look on television or from the third deck of the ballpark, professional athletes compete at a level that we can barely even fathom.”
RIP, Jon Kyl, former Republican Senator from Arizona.
RIP, Duncan Sheik, singer-songwriter who had a hit with “Barely Breathing” and wrote the score for the Broadway musical Spring Awakening.
RIP, Sunny, Obama family dog.
“If you are taking Kash Patel at face value and believing him when he says that all they did was change the rules so that somebody who was sex trafficked by wolves is not automatically disqualified from consideration, let’s have you take a look in the mirror and ask yourself if that is even reasonable. Ask yourself if you really think the FBI was automatically disqualifying people who had some terrible incident in their past where they, against their will, did something with an animal, and that Kash Patel has now solved that problem.”
“Nazi, white supremacist, white nationalist: Whichever term you prefer, it’s undeniable that this category of person is no longer a societal fringe, but an active presence in American society promoted and rewarded by one of the two main political parties. Republicans have embraced Nazi ideology from the White House to the Florida State House, and it’s difficult to track all of the recent instances of Nazism infiltrating mainstream politics. This is my attempt at capturing them.”
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