A couple of years ago, I was applying for a work visa, and they needed my college transcripts. Despite matriculating in 19somethingsomethingoldold, my class was one of the first to use an online system that was able to be migrated into multiple subsequent generations of registrar systems, so they needed to have my school email ID, which I hadn’t thought about eleventymilliongetoffmylawn years, so THAT meant placing a call to campus IT, and providing enough personal information for them to look it up.

And that, my online friends, is when you are forced to viscerally confront that you were a deeply cringe knowitall who spent way too much time thinking your personality flaws were edgy superpowers and that knowing the name of a random reference in a Bertrand Russell book you barely understood proved how smart you were.

He is promising… “a Rally to end all Rallies!”

Can we hold him to that?

I get it. We skew older here, but somebody playing around on the fuzzy edges of spelling a gen-z meme is not illiteracy. To be clear, I am also a clueless old, but I thought I’d look it up before piling on.

part of a deal to resolve President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns.

Yup. The sitting president was suing an agency of his own executive branch, folks. A lawsuit he filed – checks notes – four months ago. They’re barely even trying at this point.

Not to mention state and local governments. One of the dirty little secrets of our economy is that undocumented workers have a significant direct and indirect tax burden, but other than schools (which are for literal children, lest we forget) they’re excluded from almost all benefits that require any sort of, well, documents.

So you’ve got a permanent underclass who are paying into the system but literally aren’t allowed to reap all the benefits. Now, on the one hand, I kind of get how that’s a devil’s bargain they were willing to make to get to the US from countries with more immediate issues, but to argue that they’re a drain on the country and need to be hunted down post-haste, and not treated as the human beings they are, that’s just evil on so many levels, but one of them is that it upends the economic deal America tacitly made with them by accepting their labor. They literally pay a huge tax to be in the country at all. Even the business owners used to understand that. I assume most of them still do, but none of them will pick this hill to die on.

The Eternals was a documentary.

This is one of those silly little games. When your entire framework for analysis depends on certain political principals, you can then be coy and pretend that the results that follow are not political, because after all they simply follow with impeccable legal reasoning from a closely held judicial philosophy. Of course, where do those closely held judicial philosophies come from? Why, the judge’s instincts about policy priorities, their reaction to the flow of Constitutional Law as they studied it or, in the case of Thomas, what Harlan Crow pays him to think. In the case of someone like Roberts, you’re playing the long game so being disciplined about how you apply your framework means Trump only get 90% of what he wants and therefore you can say shit like “we’re not political” with a straight face.

To be fair, all sides have agendas that inform their thinking. Some agendas are just way more evil than others.

Theorizing about and then venting about Ocean Gate is one of my formative Fediverse memories. God what an ass Stockton Rush was.

Ooof. The “comic” is a drugstore greeting card that’s less saccharine but equally banal. The real shitpost is making me see both.

After 65 years, you still call Grandma darling, beautiful and honey – what’s the secret?

I forgot her name 5 years ago and I’m too scared to ask her what it is!

1. The New Madrid fault is a slow beast, but not to be taken lightly. There are large lakes in that region that exist solely because of earthquakes changing the path of the Mississippi River.
2. I once drove through Cooter, Missouri on my way to a wedding in northwest Tennessee specifically to send my wife a cheeky postcard, and those motherfuckers didn’t postmark it until they’d carted it over to the next town with a larger post office. My disappointment was immeasurable and my day was ruined.

Even moreso this time:

Batra, who has spent nearly half her life working in immigration courts, stopped working for the government’s side in immigration proceedings—instead helping only the immigrants seeking status—after seeing the conditions in detention facilities and how detained people were treated.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday that Iran’s 10-point proposal was “literally thrown in the garbage by President Trump.” Trump initially called a plan from Iran “workable.”

Even for their own awful sakes’, they need to take grampa’s socials away.

I call it replicator chicken. It looks perfect, striking you as having been cooked in pristine oil, is consistent and properly fried, but then when you taste it you get the world’s blandest recipe. It’s really like a well-meaning computer’s idea of chicken tenders.

The sauce is decent, and utterly necessary, but it’s really not worth it, even within the space of fast-casual chicken fingers. I prefer Layne’s or even Zaxby’s.

While they’ve got it apart, they can make sure to use a high quality battery!

That one’s not actually a problem. The flag is always “hoist side forward” to symbolize a no-retreat mentality. We shall ignore Vietnam and Afghanistan, and how that goes in the reign of President “why they no helping me?!?” remains to be seen.

I believe the correct adjectives are “spongy” and “bruised.”

“This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again.”

I’m pretty sure Dick Cheney and pals needed no particular urging from Israel for that one. If nothing else, it was on its face a complicated issue for Israel that would have left them without a particular desire to spend political capital with the US, though they would have undoubtedly been on board once it kicked off.

Now that said, it certainly does seem strange that any time there is a report of negotiations making progress with Iran or a proxy, this particular Israeli government seems to get stuck in and something violent happens. I think what we have here is an blind and anti-semitic squirrel finding a nut.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_(Simpsons_artist)

I think they’ve both had their issues with where their money comes from, her corporate PACs, him with the Adelson family that’s trying to somehow get gambling legalized in Texas without any Native American reservations and with a Christofascist state government. That said, neither one is a Schumer-style appeaser. He wears a brand of class-conscious social justice theology on his sleeve, throwing the Christian Nationalists’ so-called faith into clear focus, but because of that he’s also very much pitching “electability,” which in Texas right now means “I’m a cishet white guy so maybe some of the racists will stay home on election day.”

She is a firebrand who has made calling out Trump and the gang her full-time job, but her campaign seems to revel more in the idea of pissing off Donald Trump than in letting us know what she’ll do. There is a zeitgeisty element to that, and I think she’d be a more prominent and powerful advocate in Congress, but I think either would slot more into the Progressive wing. Ultimately, either would also be an insane improvement over Cornyn or (gag) Paxton.

Would be remiss of course without mentioning the dustup where a Tiktoker left the Talarico camp for the Crockett camp, saying that Talarico told her he was expecting to run against a mediocre black guy, not a talented black woman. He’s admitted to using the word mediocre about Colin Allred’s prior campaign, and TBF it was extremely mediocre (like Allred knew from day one he had no chance, so why knock yourself out?), but if Talarico did try to add in Allred’s race as (one would hope) a rhetorical flourish, then it was a tone-deaf moment that harmed his credibility in promising to advocate for the black community. “Electability” with white people doesn’t help if you simultaneously depress the vote of the usual 4/9 of Texans who vote blue. I’m as white as Talarico is, but it really gave me pause.

Like a candle in the wind…