The Insolent Lemon 🍋

This is why I can’t delete Tik Tok

The terrorists filmed themselves stabbing women’s genitals and decapitating their victim’s heads because they wanted to use it for future Islamic State propaganda. During the trial, one of the victim’s father described how his son had been disemboweled, castrated and then the castrated genitals had been placed in his dead son’s mouth. It took French authorities over three hours to take back control from a group of radicalized 20 year olds. In those three hours, these 9 young men managed to murder 130 men, women and children.

@AttorneyCrump Bidniz slow, Benny?

A historic Black cemetery in Palmetto, Florida, was vandalized, with graves damaged and “Trump” and “DeSantis” spray-painted across tombstones. Our ancestors deserve dignity in life and in death. Desecrating sacred burial grounds is hateful, painful, and unacceptable. We must protect Black history and honor the families impacted by this cruelty.

@ABC spews nothing but garbage; millions of people are dumber for watching anything from legacy/network TV 🦕🦕

@NYCMayor Made up rubbish. 😆

Today marks Nakba Day, an annual day of remembrance to commemorate the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1949 during the creation of the State of Israel and the year that followed. Inea is a New Yorker and a Nakba survivor. She shared her story with us — one of home, tradition and memory over generations.

@ReeseOnTheRadio This is classic. Ned serving up word salad to these two cat parents; apparently they’re very, very concerned that people of color might be to scared to vote (because Trump!). Teachers, I’ll bet. Good grief.

The moment has arrived. “The fact that we’re talking about this means a lot of people are thinking people of color perhaps are saying that maybe all other things being equal I don’t want to vote. Maybe it’s just not my year to vote and I got to do everything I can to not let him scare you away from voting.” - Ned Lamont @WTIC1080 @CTGOP @CTCentinal @MrsOnTheRadio @MarkFrom34375

@ChrisCillizza Emanuel/Weingarten 28

The scandal hiding in plain sight is the collapse of American education. And no 2028 candidates -- aside from Rahm Emanuel -- are talking about it.

While in Ireland, I stumbled across what might be the most beautiful church entrance I’ve ever seen. County Cork never ceases to amaze.

@Acyn 🤣 Shorter. “...partisan gerrymandering... to deliberately create majority-African American districts..(is)...unconstitutional."

Raskin: The Supreme Court has imposed an outrageous racial double standard. In the name of partisan gerrymandering, you can deliberately abolish every majority-African American district in the South. If you want to deliberately create majority-African American districts, it’s presumptively unconstitutional. So we have a racial double standard that’s being advanced by the MAGA Roberts Court.

Cardinals mate for life. They share food, sing duets together, and call to each other when one gets separated from the other. A bonded pair will often return to the same yard for years. That bright red cardinal you’re seeing this spring is probably the same one who visited last year… and the year before. Some love stories just last a lifetime. ❤️

Wow. This is going to be eye opening, for many.

First take: Professor Spotswood is a dude.

The American meatloaf was the Wednesday-night meal of every working- and middle-class family in the country for about ninety years. The recipe: two pounds of 70/30 chuck, ground that morning by the butcher down the road. One onion, finely chopped. Two cloves of garlic. Two eggs. A cup of breadcrumbs from yesterday's loaf, torn up and dried in a low oven. A cup of whole milk. A spoonful of Worcestershire. Salt and black pepper. A handful of parsley from the back garden. A topping: half a cup of ketchup, two spoonfuls of brown sugar, a dash of cider vinegar. The mother mixed it with her hands, because a wooden spoon would not get the breadcrumbs through the meat properly, and because her own mother had taught her that the mixing was where the meatloaf was decided. The mixture went into a loaf pan. The glaze went on top. Into the oven at 350°F for an hour. By half past five the kitchen smelled of beef, onion, and caramelising ketchup, and the children, hearing it from upstairs, knew without being told that it was Wednesday. A meatloaf served four for dinner and two for sandwiches the next day. Thirty-five minutes of work. The cheapest hot meal a family could put on a table. A 2026 family of four, on a Wednesday at half past five, is more likely to be eating a Hello Fresh kit assembled from a cardboard box by a parent who got home at twenty past, or a frozen lasagne reheated in a microwave by a teenager who has not seen the rest of the household since breakfast. The meatloaf is not dead. The 70/30 chuck is at any butcher who will grind it on request. The pan is in the cupboard. The recipe is in the cookbook. The Wednesday is still there.

cc: Ireland

251 years ago this week, a 6'2" Vermont moonshiner with no military experience and no authorization from anyone captured the most strategically important fort in North America at dawn, and accidentally won the Revolutionary War before it had really started. It's May 1775. Lexington and Concord happened three weeks ago. The colonies have muskets but almost no cannon. The British, sitting in Boston, have plenty. Everyone knows that without artillery, the rebellion is over by autumn. Everyone also knows where to get artillery: Fort Ticonderoga. A stone star-fort on Lake Champlain, bristling with roughly 80 heavy guns. The British call it "the Gibraltar of America." It's the bottleneck of the entire continent. Whoever holds it controls the invasion route between Canada and New York. ​What the rebels don't know, but Ethan Allen has heard, is that "the Gibraltar of America" is, by 1775, mostly held together by moss. The walls are crumbling. The garrison is 48 men, many of them invalids and pensioners. The commander hasn't even been told a war started. Allen is not a soldier. He's a frontier land speculator who runs an armed militia called the Green Mountain Boys, originally formed not to fight the British, but to beat up New York surveyors trying to seize Vermont farms. New York has literally put a bounty on his head. He decides to go take the fort anyway. Halfway there, a man named Benedict Arnold shows up on horseback with a Massachusetts colonel's commission, waving paperwork, demanding command of the expedition. The Green Mountain Boys threaten to go home if Arnold is in charge. Allen and Arnold agree to "joint command," which mostly means walking next to each other in furious silence. They reach the lake at midnight. Problem: they have 200 men and exactly two leaky boats. By 3 AM only 83 have made it across. Dawn is coming. Allen decides to attack with what he has, meaning roughly 1 American for every half-cannon inside the fort. ​A lone British sentry sees them coming through the wicket gate, levels his musket at Allen's chest, and pulls the trigger. The musket misfires. He runs. The Americans pour in. Total resistance to the capture of British North America's most important inland fortress: one wet flintlock. Allen pounds on the officers' quarters with the flat of his sword. Lt. Jocelyn Feltham stumbles out half-dressed, asking by what authority Allen is there. Allen, by his own later account, roars: "In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!" (Other witnesses remembered the wording as substantially more profane. The Continental Congress, for its part, had no idea any of this was happening.) Captain Delaplace, the actual commander, emerges still buttoning his trousers and surrenders the fort, its 78 cannons, its garrison, and roughly 30,000 musket flints without a shot fired by either side. Casualties: zero. Time elapsed: about ten minutes. But here's the part that actually changed history. Those cannons sat at Ticonderoga for six months until a 25-year-old, 280-pound Boston bookseller named Henry Knox, who had learned artillery from books in his own shop, volunteered to go get them. In the dead of winter, Knox and his men dragged 59 cannons weighing 60 tons across 300 miles of frozen rivers, the Berkshires, and unbroken snow, on 42 ox-drawn sleds. One gun fell through the ice of the Hudson. They fished it out and kept going. It took 56 days. On the night of March 4, 1776, those cannons were hauled silently up Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston Harbor. The British woke up on March 5 to find every ship in the harbor and every redcoat in the city under the muzzles of guns that, six months earlier, had belonged to them. Eleven days later, the British evacuated Boston. They would never hold it again. An unauthorized raid by 83 backwoodsmen, led by a wanted man and a future traitor, against a fort defended by a captain in his pajamas, became the artillery that drove the British army out of the largest city in the American colonies. Easiest W in American history. Possibly the most consequential ten minutes of the 18th century.

Dear @nytimes Remember when you put a sick child with Cerebral Palsy on your front page - and falsely claimed he was a healthy child deliberately starved by Israel? I was the one who uncovered the truth. So excuse me if I don't believe a word you write.

@ChrisMurphyCT Here’s the thing with Chrispy, the reason he’s spouting off about all this BS about Kushner isn’t because he’s some ethics watchdog. He thinks Kushner’s making money in the ME - and he’s pissed off that it’s not Chrispy Murphy making money in the ME. That’s it.

America's chief Middle East negotiator - Jared Kushner - is almost completely dependent on Middle East government investment in his chief business. It's probably the biggest conflict of interest in American diplomatic history and we should be talking about this way more.

KTLA just ended Xavier Becerra

whut?

Fave part: “What are you doing?! You’re supposed to de-escalate!”