Hear, hear!

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A tweet from BrooklynDad_Defiant! says: “THIS.” followed by several clapping emojis. The image text reads: “Let’s give teachers $50k signing bonuses, $100k salaries, and $60k student loan forgiveness. You know, the same as ICE gets.”

Outside of Speaker Mike Johnson,
there is no bigger poster boy for the rubber-stamp Republican House majority than Jim Jordan.

Jordan’s purpose for running the House Judiciary Committee is to abuse its power to investigate those who tried to hold Donald Trump accountable for alleged crimes.

While Republicans in the House filled their committees with leaders who would be loyal to Trump,
Democrats filled their positions with experienced investigators and legislators who know how to use oversight power and navigate congressional hearings effectively.

Rep. Jamie Raskin is one of those Democrats. -- He is an attorney and constitutional scholar, and a person who understands how to properly and effectively use House oversight.

When Jordan gave Raskin a big opening by trying to investigate former Special Counsel Jack Smith, the Maryland Democrat seized on it.

Jim Jordan wants Jack Smith to testify behind closed doors.
Smith wants to testify in public.

Raskin wrote a letter to Jordan urging him to allow Smith to testify before the nation.

Rep. Raskin wrote:
Last week, I applauded your call for transparency about Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into how President Trump knowingly retained hundreds of highly classified records at his Mar-a-Lago club and then defied subpoenas, obstructed law enforcement, actively hid evidence, and lied about his continuing retention of those records.

I commended you for apparently joining us in demanding the full release of Mr. Smith’s report
—paid for by American taxpayers
—as well as all accompanying records which the Department of Justice (DOJ) has been desperately concealing.

https://www.politicususa.com/p/jamie-raskin-outsmarts-jim-jordan

US people: If you are white, not racist, not a supporter of ethnic cleansing, but are struggling to pay bills, or don't know how you will afford food next month...

First of all, I am genuinely sorry for the stress you are dealing with. Truly.

Second, this stress was placed on you intentionally. By racists.

Their idea is that you will stop caring about other people and become more racist as you become more desperate.

These racists don't care about *helping* other white people. They don't care about you.

They care about *hurting* Black and brown people, and creating their white ethnostate.

They happily shared stats showing that in pre-war Germany, the nazi party got the most support where hunger and hardship were highest.

They also celebrated the eugenic cruelty that followed the Influenza pandemic, back when "long Covid" or "long flu" were not terms that people understood.

No, I do not think that they invented Covid in a nazi lab.🤦🏿‍♂️

But the worst of them definitely celebrated its arrival, and said "Let 'er rip, this helps us," at first because of the high Black death toll, and later because of the impact on the elderly, and the desperation and healthcare callousness.

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Twitter screenshot: @mekkaokerekebye An official DOD webpage posted an article celebrating a Nazi war criminal yesterday. It barely made the news. The Alt-Right wrote years ago that a widespread US economic crash and food insecurity, was necessary to foment the callousness required to proceed to the "next phase." 9:09 AM Dec 18, 2019

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Twitter screenshot: Mekkaokerekebye Dec 18, 2019 The theory is: Many white people will care less about adequate nutrition or flu vaccines for brown people in concentration camps, if they themselves are starving and without medicine. This will allow the camp death toll to rise without actually needing to execute people.

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Twitter screenshot: Mekkaokerekebye What're black folk saying today? * If you don't stop the GOP from deregistering /disenfranchising us, Dems will lose in 2020. And y'all will act surprised. Again. * 2020 Trump is gloves off, Phase 2. * Buttigieg is trash * Biden is trash, but we know what's in the can.

Roo reaction

[description: kangaroo checking out a Halloween display is scared by the cackling skeleton -- you can see the roo running away far down the street]

#kangaroo #roo #animal #halloween #humor #humour

Resurecting the ghost of Reagan turns out to be unexpected political dynamite. Since Republicans no longer believe in facts, but they do worship deities, this puts them in the irreconcileable position of having two of their gods issuing unequivocal and diametrically opposite decrees. Feel like we may be hearing more from the Almighty Ronny in the days ahead.

Knowledge is knowing that Frankenstein was not the monster.

Wisdom is understanding that Frankenstein WAS the monster.

Enlightenment is understanding that I, the person who brings this up at every chance in every conversation, am the monster.

Why does the government tackle benefit fraud and ignore tax cheats? Could it be prejudice?
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/10/23/why-does-the-government-tackle-benefit-fraud-and-ignore-tax-cheats-could-it-be-prejudice/
The National Audit Office issued a report yesterday on efforts being made by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to tackle benefit fraud, and the rate of errors being made in payments of what I call social security.

@futurebird @sewblue

If you think the stock market is bad, wait until you look at commodities markets.

Originally, you sold commodities (wheat, steel, whatever) when you produced it. It turns out that it’s quite useful to know when you plant a field of corn how much you will be able to sell it for. It’s also useful if, for example, you are building a skyscraper and it will take two years to know how much steel will cost in a year’s time, so you can budget properly.

So the idea of a futures market came about. Rather than buying steel that exists now, you buy the ability to buy steel at a fixed price in the future. Or the ability to sell corn at a fixed price in a year’s time. And now both producers and consumers can operate with significantly reduced risk. Having a guaranteed ability to sell X tons of grain at a known price next year lets you plan the amount that you want to plant, and maybe grow a bit more than you know you can sell because you won’t make a loss if you can sell more. So far, so sensible.

(Aside: a lot of the antitrust laws in the USA exist because of one person who managed to achieve an onion monopoly. This is an amazing story, and well worth reading, but it’s most fun because laws are written as changes to existing laws, so a lot of the antitrust laws in the USA are of the form ‘onions, and other things that are not onions’).

The problem with this model is that it lacks liquidity. A lot of people (especially on the consumer side) don’t want to plan so far ahead. They will buy wheat if it’s available, but might buy corn if it’s cheaper. They may buy steel if it’s available, but might just put of construction to next year if it’s too expensive. And that makes it harder to plan. To address this, you allow speculation.

Speculation was quite controversial. A speculator buys and sells commodity futures, but does not want the commodities. They are selling a service where they take risk in exchange for profit. If they expect the price of some commodity to be $110 next year, they might offer to buy it for $100. The producer gets a worse price than they would probably get if they didn’t trade futures, but they get to guarantee that price. If their production cost is $50, they make a big profit, guaranteed. The speculator then has to find someone willing to actually buy the commodity for over $100. If they do, they make money. If they don’t, they take the loss, the producer does not.

There were a lot of regulations around speculation, including the ratio of producers and consumers to speculators that could participate in the market. It was viewed as a necessary evil to increase liquidity. And liquidity is important. Markets don’t function without it. But then some smart and evil people managed to convince the government (pretty sure it was Reagan, it’s a fair bet that anything bad in market regulation was probably his fault) that speculation existed to reduce risk (true) and that reducing risk is good (true) so it’s important to relax regulations to reduce risk for speculators (false, the entire reason speculators exist is to take on risks from people in the real economy). So now there’s far more trading between speculators than between buyers and sellers of the actual commodity. There’s no shortage of liquidity, but the flip side of liquidity is volatility (both mean, roughly, that prices can move rapidly. If you want that to happen, it’s liquidity, if you don’t then it’s volatility).

A lot of the same thing happened with the stock market.

The Māori people descend from Polynesians whose ancestors emigrated from Taiwan to Melanesia between 3000-1000 BC, and then travelled east, reaching the Society Islands 1000 CE.

After a pause of 200 to 300 years, a new wave of exploration led to the discovery and settlement of New Zealand.

#archaeohistories

Because we need good news: Gary Larson is drawing again (he bought a tablet, taught himself how to use it, and suddenly drawing was fun again): https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/

My spouse and I now have an interesting experiment going: which enhances your 5G reception more, getting a Covid shot and a flu shot in the same arm on the same day, or getting one in each arm? Confounding factors: we have different length arms, and I'm not sure which is a better match for 5G wavelengths. Also, I use a computer a lot more, which means that the extra microchips I've just been injected with will help me a lot more.

½

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*Assortment of configurations of a half-filled water glass* Optipolygrafixs) half-full Pessimist: (it’s) half-emply Realist: it’s a glass of water. Physicist: (water) liquid, (void) gas Surrealist: *the water is split vertically* Relativist: It's both half-empty & half-full Utopist: *the half-glass of water is split with the water on-top* Skepticist: It's not water Artist: *stir water with paintbrush* via: polygrafix

tupperware

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pie chart of time spent using Tupperware: there's a small blue slice labeled storing fresh food. 20% or so is green and says storing rotten food. and the rest is red and it says searching for the right fucking lid. 

We’re getting to the point where as a tech company all you have to do is not be fascist or actively sabotage your own product with AI bullshit. You don’t even have to be good, you just have to not actively be bad

Inside of you are two wolves and now you're questioning the life choices that lead to you agreeing to shoot this Teen Wolf parody porn in the first place.

there's a high correlation between having gay sex and writing good software; so my number 1 tip to people aspiring to write good software would be: have more gay sex