"If you don't figure out how to be excited to live here, you're just going to be left behind."

Grossly inconsiderate of Mamdani to be governing so efficiently and effectively to date for all the conservatives and liberal democrats who now have to work that much harder to continue their efforts discrediting democratic socialism as an unrealistic framework for politics in the U.S.

We got terribly swarmed in a very remote area in Michigan's upper peninsula while walking in the woods. My partner and I grabbed pine branches and started waving them around us while we ran back, but my dog kept thinking I was playing as I tried to wave them around her and would run off from me. Within 20 minutes of getting back, she was covered in massive lumps all over her body, her lips and ears were grossly swollen, and she started breathing really, really shallowly.

There were no open or emergency vets anywhere nearby, so we tried to give her some benadryl and water as best we could. Luckily, she was well-recovered by morning. But the danger posed by swarms of mosquitos became abundantly clear to me.

“I didn’t really understand the physical reality of how institutionalised the brutality is in America,” Yiannopoulos said.

“ICE is supposed to be deporting criminals,” he said. “And they’re not doing that.”

“I think maybe, in the past, I’ve been a little bit blase when people talked about their trauma,” he said. “But I get it now, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

If only there was a way to know and acknowledge these things without having to personally experience them.

In the context of the article, this sounds merely like evidence for the appeals case aiming to overturn the order to block information sharing between the two agencies. So...at best they don't get to continue breaking the law? Which seems appropriate - we can't just shoot everyone in the back who breaks a privacy law 42,695 separate times. It's not like they're teenagers stealing snacks from Walmart.

The ongoing case over IRS and DHS data sharing is now set to be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. DHS is actively appealing Kollar-Kotelly’s November order blocking the IRS from sharing data with DHS, which was signed last year by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The then-acting commissioner of the IRS resigned after the deal was signed.

“I have a chip on my shoulder,” she said, describing her drive to prove she can win over private equity in Silicon Valley based on merit, not inheritance or legacy ...[T]he young founder hasn’t taken money from her parents for Phia. Instead, she’s insisted on raising outside capital even as some investors remain fixated on her personal life instead of her business venture.

I appreciate the sentiment, but it would be delusional to think her ability to "win over private equity" was divorced at all from her father's legacy and last name. And actually, I'm not sure I appreciate the sentiment. In 2026, merit is way down the list, like scrawled sideways in the margins, of things that matter to private equity.

The [second] suit names [murderer Jonathan] Ross, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, White House border czar Tom Homan, and other Trump administration figures as defendants, as well as ten John Doe federal agents “for their respective individual roles in the operation that led to Renee’s death,” according to the family’s attorneys.

Jonathan Ross deserves at least the Derek Chauvin treatment, and I hope every single one of these motherfuckers gets their names, reputations, careers, and livelihoods dragged through deep, toxic sludge.

Conservatives can either stand for freedom, or they can stand for oppression — but they cannot do both. If they truly value individual liberty, they should defend our right to marry. If they turn on us now, they reveal who they really are.

Trump won in 2024 in part due to the left’s overreach. If the right continues down this path, they could meet a similar fate in future elections. As more people come out as LGBT, and as more LGBT people voice concerns with far-left activist orthodoxies, Republicans should be broadening the tent, not excluding these people and pushing them away. Hemorrhaging potential voters to get your druthers isn’t a winning political strategy. The pendulum from hell will just keep swinging back and forth until we all decide we’ve had enough.

"I stood with the Leopard's Eating People's Faces Party, but now that they're trying to eat my face, I call on the Leopard's to do better, and eat only the faces that reason and fairness dictate should be eaten."

That's not the lesson, Reid, you learned it wrong again!

“There’s several examples, you know from teachers handing out ICE cards and showing how NOT to cooperate… somebody has to lead this and say yes we will cooperate because we have a lot of teachers who are saying I won't let ICE here.”

Leandra also states on the livestream that ICE cards, which provide very basic constitutional rights, are actually getting students in trouble for being “misinformed.”

“Cooperate. It’s like the ICE ICE baby stuff. Stop. Cooperate and listen.”

This person is a fucking cartoon character.

I don't know California local politics at all, but surely this is a guaranteed way to immediately put your career on the chopping block in LA, right?

I've gotten the opposite impression, especially with all those recent AI advocates getting booed and laughed at by students during university commencement speeches. It feels like the usual 'powerful elites with huge platforms' - including legacy and independent media - versus almost everyone else.

Not even Amazon - it's a cheap, travelocity-ass frontend for showing the cheapest existing prices already available. The administration has, admittedly, claimed that they've made deals with pharmaceutical companies to make some of their drugs available for as cheaply as they are already available in other countries. But, as the AP notes,

Many of the details of Trump’s deals with manufacturers remain unclear , and drug prices for patients in the U.S. can depend on many factors, including the competition a treatment faces and insurance coverage. Most people have coverage through work, the individual insurance market or government programs like Medicaid and Medicare, which shield them from much of the cost. https://apnews.com/article/trumprx-website-trump-drug-prices-pharmaceuticals-eae897ebf87349510a7795035a3043a3

So if you're looking for a meaningful, long-term solution to one of the U.S.'s greatest healthcare deficiencies, the administration would like to interest you in this service they constructed with all the forethought and durability of a child's cardboard lemonade stand.

The latest appeal comes weeks after the Supreme Court declined to take up a separate case from Trump in which the president is seeking to unwind a $5 million civil verdict that found he sexually abused and defamed Carroll at a Bergdorf Goodman department store in the 1990s.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in both cases.

The new appeal involves statements Trump made against Carroll in 2019, when he was president, that a jury found were defamatory and ordered him to pay $83 million in damages.

Appears he got in trouble twice: once for the actual rape, and another for defaming her in 2019 when that civil case was ongoing.

To repeat: The President of the United States was found "liable" for a rape he did, then got in trouble for defaming his rape victim and is now using the powers of the presidency to both urge the supreme court to excuse him or make the United States government the defendant in his place for the defamatory comments he made while president against his rape victim.

In addition to raising the prospect that Trump should be immune from the litigation, Trump is also asking the court to review whether the United States government should be the defendant rather than the president.

Unforgivably batshit insane.

I'm not convinced there's a conspiracy here. Seems entirely likely that Rotten Tomatoes has no contingency for the release of a movie so blatantly sycophantic and propagandistic that the only people spending money on tickets are those who are already bought into the fantasy.

Trump, already a prominent New York real estate figure, saw his national profile rise significantly during his time on the show, popularizing the catchphrase “You’re fired!” NBC cut ties with him in 2015, citing “derogatory statements” about immigrants. He was elected president the following year.

Thank you for that depressingly amusing framing, The Hill.

"You can't rule out the possibility that executives are idiots, but that shouldn't be your default belief. I don't think there is any obvious path that would have doubled the revenue from id games."Could they have gotten more with a different pricing strategy? Could they have created more things for fans to buy? Could they have cost-effectively marketed in a way that reached more players that would have loved and bought the games? Could they have changed the game designs and broadened the appeal to more players without alienating existing ones? Could they have produced the games at a lower cost, faster or cheaper? I really don't know."

I'm no expert, but ya doy. Microsoft's play to pursue low-cost, high-return recurring revenue by shoving their extraordinarily talented single-player studios (Rocksteady, Arkane) at OBVIOUSLY terrible live service titles is bad enough on its own but is also a telling reflection of the executive mindset (this goes for Sony too). Profit is king, data is infallible, and development talent is best directed at our behest and is easily expendable when needed.

Let game devs do what they want. Some games will fail, but jesus, not at the scale and volume that they're failing at right now.

You forgot about the covid mask.

Content warning: description of violence
::: spoiler spoiler

The first shot takes the [sic] Melanie in the neck, below her covid
mask. The second in the head, above her covid mask.
Blood SPLATTERS on her PASSENGER’s (40s, female, overweight)
forehead and matching covid mask.
:::

My contempt is boundless for everyone involved not just in making light of this specific murder, but in perpetuating the idea that ICE are anything better than bumbling, violently insecure, untrained little boy-men.

Same. His auteur sensibilities are a pretty perfect match for my taste. I am incredibly fond of all his output (with the exception of Caught Stealing, which I haven't seen yet), including his most polarizing films - Noah and mother! Even the blemishes on those imperfect projects just make them more interesting.

I watched a minute or two of the first "episode" and it reeked of an artless studio hack misguidedly copying an early-aughts editing style that is as poorly executed as it as an unfit complement to the subject matter. And that's beside the plastic sheen and evident soullessness that just comes with AI-generated video. This feels like an aging filmmaker experimenting with new technology because he's more afraid of being left behind than he is able to understand the thing he's being pressured to engage with.

Search results on Amazon are fully pay-to-play anyway. You don't get anywhere near the top of the list without paying for the privilege. No big deal for slop producers who sell in volume, but basically useless for small businesses or private sellers.

I agree with every point you make except the conclusion that he's an overrated hack. I was rolling my eyes through every cutscene of Death Stranding 2 (except the electric guitar fights which were incredible for the naked spectacle), but his inability to rein in his silliest indulgences is a relatively minor facet of his overall artistic merit in this medium.

The guy's a certified auteur, and like most of them, he has some serious gaps in his repertoire. But when you play a Kojima game, you're almost always going to play something completely unlike anything else on the market, and there's a solid chance you're going to have a blast doing it.

This was exactly the way I thought of my spending habits for a long time. Then a few years ago, Netflix prohibited password sharing, a soft feature they had specifically encouraged in the past, with the explicit purpose of desperately generating additional revenue as other growth streams plateaued. When most users just kind of accepted it, the dam broke and all the other services followed suit.

That was the final straw for me, on top of the proliferation of dedicated per-studio services, price hikes, and pricing tiers that created needless feature lock-outs. As a consumer I get dicked around in every sector in which I'm forced to participate, but this is one sector where I have an option to withdraw from the dicking.