a secret third thing

My @TeePublic order just came!! Eeeeeeee!!!! (Note to self: Order a size up on your inevitable future orders. 😬) The Phranc shirt is the one that surprised me the most that it even existed. Oh man. So stoked.

Noah Hawley attended Jeff Bezos's private Campfire retreat in 2018. His wife broke her wrist. He told Bezos directly - not as complaint, just as human information from one husband and father to another. Bezos looked horrified, an aide materialized instantly, and he was whisked away. No "I'm so sorry." No "do you need anything." Just escape. Hawley's thesis in The Atlantic is not that the ultra-wealthy are evil. It is something more precise and more unsettling: that moral reasoning develops through consequences, and the environment of extreme wealth systematically removes consequences from a person's life. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, fire anyone who disagrees with you, and exist in a social circle entirely composed of people who need something from you - the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark. This is different from classic narcissism, which typically masks insecurity. What Hawley is describing is something rarer: a self-definition in which the individual has genuinely grown to the size of the universe and the universe has contracted to fit. Elon Musk calling empathy "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization." Trump asked about checks on his power saying the only thing that could stop him was his own morality. Peter Thiel concluding that freedom and democracy are incompatible. These are not poses. They are the logical endpoint of a psychology shaped by years of operating in a world that never pushed back. The Bezos encounter is the piece's sharpest detail because it is so small. He was not cruel. He was not contemptuous. He simply could not locate, in that moment, the impulse to respond like a person who understood that another person's wrist hurt.

Woman who lives only 1.6 miles from the META Data Center in Wisconsin speaks out She says their water system has been completely destroyed She says there is discharge that turns the entire river white like milk. She paid for testing and found extremely high heavy metal levels “I live on a horse farm and I am an educator. I, for almost four 50 years, a natural creek has flowed through my property. It's 20 feet wide, up to four feet deep. It has persisted through drought, flood, seasonal change. It's part of a connected system. Groundwater, tributaries, watersheds, aquifers ultimately flowing into Beaver Dam Lake. Until construction began upstream on the data center, its behavior was stable and predictable After construction started, all of that changed. Here in Beaver Dam, the creek began to stop flowing entirely without rainfall. It would abruptly return off in cloudy and opaque like milk, with enough force to cause drastic erosion and damage — Water testing on my property shows elevated strontium, a very dangerous metal, and other indicators consistent with deep groundwater influence”

A cutting reflection from Cardinal Ratzinger, Good Friday 2005: "Pilate is not utterly evil. He knows that the condemned man is innocent, and he looks for a way to free him. But his heart is divided. And in the end he lets his own position, his own self-interest, prevail over what is right. Nor are the men who are shouting and demanding the death of Jesus utterly evil. Many of them, on the day of Pentecost, will feel "cut to the heart," when Peter will say to them: "Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God... you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law." But at that moment they are caught up in the crowd. They are shouting because everyone else is shouting, and they are shouting the same thing that everyone else is shouting. And in this way, justice is trampled underfoot by weakness, cowardice and fear of the diktat of the ruling mindset. The quiet voice of conscience is drowned out by the cries of the crowd. Evil draws its power from indecision and concern for what other people think."

I worked for USAID when It was closed, these guys literally were firing senior Foreign Service Officers with 30 years of experience on the spot. These kids were drunk on power and a reckoning is coming. I will always be hot about this shit. I know for a fact we allowed children to die because of these snotty shits.

a way too common phenomenon here is people getting addicted to the dopamine hit of being cruel towards bad people so they eventually stretch the definition of "bad people" to include random posters on here who had like one bad tweet

Ketanji Brown Jackson graduated magna cum laude from Harvard-Radcliffe College and cum laude from Harvard Law School where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She had 20 years experience as a lawyer and 10 years experience as a federal judge when she was nominated for the Supreme Court. They called her a DEI hire. Mark Wayne Mullin has a high school diploma and a 2 year community college degree in construction management, no military or law enforcement service, and was a cow-calf rancher. He was nominated by Trump as the secretary of Homeland Security. They have the caucacity to call this meritocracy.

📚 Archive of Our Own etiquette 101 ao3 has been under a lot of pressure lately. more users, more traffic, more reports, more confusion. which is great in one way because fandom is alive and people want stories, but it also means we all need to breathe and remember how the site actually works. this is for everyone. old readers, new readers, writers, lurkers, people who just discovered fanfiction last week, and people who have been here since dial up. let us talk about how to exist peacefully on ao3.

@KekePalmer @peacock In the middle of binging it with my girlfriend this weekend. Oh my god it's so good. We keep pausing to discuss our theories. 😂 And this cast oh my god!! We're having a blast. 💚

Get ready for #TheBurbs coming February 8 on Peacock!

The chances of being attacked by a mattress are low but never zero.

Just got really excited when Amazon showed me a great deal on pearl magnet hijab pins before I remembered I? don't wear?? a hijab?? So yeah I guess you could say the Muslim fashion influencers in my feeds are doing some great work.😂

I can't even deal with this. For years — as long as I've been alive — conservatives (myself included) have resisted nearly every major voting rights or election administration bill Democrats have proposed, on the grounds that elections should not be federalized or centralized in any way. Here are some direct quotes that speak for themselves: Mitch McConnell: - "We're talking about fundamentally the same bill… the plan to forcibly rewrite large portions of the 50 states' respective election laws… This is a massive federal power grab." Ted Cruz (he has LOTS): - "This is a power grab by Democrats in Washington to federalize elections and to take over elections in all 50 states. It is profoundly unconstitutional." - "What Democrats are trying to do is seize control of elections from the states and put it in the hands of politicians in Washington. That is exactly what the Constitution was written to prevent." - "This bill is about rigging the rules of the game. It is about Washington politicians deciding how Texans vote, how Floridians vote, how Americans vote." - "The so-called For the People Act is really a federal takeover of elections. It strips states of their authority and centralizes power in Washington." John Thune: - "This legislation… attempts to federalize elections and rewrite election laws in all 50 states… This is nothing more than an attempted power-grab from the left." Heritage Foundation: - "The proposal that the federal government set new 'minimum' standards for state voter registration systems is a bad idea… another step toward the federal takeover of the administration of elections." Federalist Society: - "Election administration has always been primarily a state responsibility, and federalizing it threatens the balance of our constitutional system." The SAVE Act would require states to use federal databases to verify citizenship and maintain voter rolls — effectively creating national oversight of voter data. So can someone explain to me, on principle: when did federal overreach become okay with you, and why? Why are so many conservatives now supporting exactly what we have consistently argued against for decades? This is simply not consistent with conservative principles, so it's really hard to see this as anything other than a power grab.

Buttigieg: In a country that amended its constitution so you could not purchase a beer and then realized it was a bad idea and amended it back, surely we can have an amendment clarifying that a corporation is not a person and money is not speech.

Couldn't believe this was real so I double checked the DOJ site. It's real. US attorney Berman announced Epstein's death with letterhead dated the day before he was found dead. It gets weirder. Bill Barr announced Berman's resignation less than a year later. Berman denied he was resigning and was then removed by Barr on June 20th, 2020. Trump denied any involvement but it was confirmed by later reporting that in fact it was Trump who had Berman removed. This rabbit hole is endless.

I love how there's a separate Superbowl halftime show just for the pedophiles

Chris Madel is one of the leading Republican candidates in the Minnesota Governor's race. He's also the lawyer for the agent who murdered Renee Good. He just announced he's dropping out because ICE has gone too far. "At the end of the day I have to look my daughters in the eye and tell them I believe I did what is right. And I am doing that today."

@PeteHegseth Alex Pretti did all this. He was shot and killed by a federal agent.

@PanasonicDX4500 @theliamnissan #Waukeshamentioned

“we may or may not invade you every four years depending on how worked up ~20,000 swing voters in Waukesha County, Wisconsin feel about trans kids playing volleyball” isn’t really a good sales pitch for maintaining international allies.

Dear World, Oppose him, obstruct him, mock him, defy him, confront him. Do whatever you have to do. We support you. Sincerely, Decent Americans