At the beginning of the latest
@wethefifth
episode, we answered a question about the best all-time four-albums-in-a-row run. I answered Beggars-Exile, of course, and
@mcmoynihan
mumbled about The Clash & Smiths. Also mentioned: R.E.M., Stevie Wonder, Talking Heads, etc.
Yours?
The new president in his inaugural addressed denounced lies & the manipulation of facts, and vowed to always level with us.
Let's hold him to that, shall we?
The Conservative Hoax Machine tried to smear Dr. Anthony Fauci as a sex criminal. But then the alleged victim recanted, saying that Jacob Wohl had "charmed me into taking money to do this."
@NancyRomm
has the goods.
"I served with him for a decade, and I saw what he is. He's not a trustworthy person,"
@JustinAmash
said, about Kevin McCarthy. "He'll do whatever it takes to maintain power....He's a compulsive liar. Always has been."
"He shrunk government," says Gov. Kristi Noem, speaking about Donald Trump.
The government is nearly $1 trillion larger on an annual basis than it was when he took office. Trump did not reduce, let alone shrink, government.
The positive test rate in NYC has been stable since mid-June—below 1.5%, usually below 1%. Our neighborhood is like 0.5%. They’ve had three months to focus on this one big job of reopening schools. And they have utterly botched it, throwing families of 1 million kids into chaos.
Public elementary school in Brooklyn that both my daughters used to attend announced at 6:40 pm tonight that it would be closed tomorrow, in part because the staff “is not reporting to the school building.”
WHICH scientists was he listening to when he kept police tape around outdoor playgrounds well into the fall? Which working people were empowered by that?
In a naked partisan power grab, extreme right-wing Republicans are trying to recall
@GavinNewsom
. Why? Because he dares to listen to scientists and fights to put power in the hands of working people. Let’s have Gavin’s back:
Our COVID-Busters are out in full force cleaning & disinfecting to make a safe return to the classroom possible.
Good luck to all NYC students & staff on your first day back!
#BacktoSchoolNYC
I have written many critical things over the years about
@SenJohnMcCain
; you can easily find them. But not in this thread. Instead, I wanted to share a few observations of possible interest that I’ve accumulated over the years following this fascinating American character. 1/
"Before Omicron, a typical vaccinated 75-year-old who contracted Covid had a..similar risk of death—around 1 in 200—as a typical 75-year-old who contracted the flu...Covid now appears to present less threat to most vaccinated elderly people than the...flu"
Janet Yellen, 2022, about the IRS's $80 billion hiring spree: "Contrary to the misinformation from opponents ... small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited."
Treasury Inspector General, 2024, as
"She's annoying," the 11-year-old says about Elizabeth Warren. I ask why. "She reminds me of Hillary Clinton."
Tulsi Gabbard comes on. "Ooh, I want her to be president!"
Here is a joint letter signed by Noam Chomsky, J.K. Rowling, David Brooks,
@bariweiss
, Wynton Marsalis, Salman Rushdie,
@kmele
, and 140-odd other people, in case anyone's in a mood to argue.
One billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty since Bernie first started to use the phrase "race to the bottom" to describe international trade agreements.
"You cannot break up a cult from the inside,"
@JRubinBlogger
writes. "You must leave it and then draw others away, compelling them to reflect and shed their delusional beliefs." Forget politics for a moment, let's talk cults -- is that true, cult-wise?
He gets 99% ratings and annual awards from the most hardcore fiscally conservative national advocacy groups. But since supporting impeachment and leaving the GOP,
@justinamash
no longer gets their support.
Curfew in Barcelona last night. The juxtaposition of the man on the piano playing “Eternal Flame” by The Bangles and the scene unfolding behind them is quite something.
Imagine if the Democrats who control Congress & the presidency:
* repealed the federal prohibition on marijuana.
* eradicated all federal programs encouraging civil asset forfeiture.
* changed/limited the federal legal definition of qualified immunity.
Fuck slogans. Change law.
If I hear one more got-damn politician cluck about "following the science" while continuing to support child-harming policies based on superstition and/or public sector union muscle, I'm going to lose the last of what remains of my California mellowness.
8700 Covid tests in NYC schools this week and 1 positive.
0.01% rate.
Families and teachers need to know schools are STILL the safest place to be in NYC.
Its time to plan for a full reopening.
I think the deliberate collapse of the use/mention distinction with certain radioactive words is bad for the New York Times, bad for journalism, and bad for society.
Antifa have forced Powell's to close their store today and employees have evacuated the customers inside out the back door. They're protesting them selling Andy Ngo's book on their website. They announced earlier they wouldn't put it on the shelves.
Willie Nelson played at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He SPOKE at the 1980 DNC. To portray his political involvement as recent is as dumb as making a trend story out of a few asinine comments on social media.
There is zero joy in Robin DiAngelo's worldview. Everything is pinched and sour, the road is neverending and dreary, fraught with the potential for missteps, no pot at the end of the rainbow. But that doesn't mean there isn't unintentional comedy!
We visited this Kibbutz just north of Gaza a year ago, listening to a mom talk about what it’s like to scramble kids into a bunker quickly enough when the air-raid siren goes off. Today, I am hearing, 15 of the people in this small community have been murdered.
If we are a nation that can pay baseball players hundreds of millions of dollars, don't tell me we can't afford to pay teachers the salaries they deserve.
Tucker Carlson: "The real threats we face today may be from within. Leaders who hate the country the govern so much that they seek to make American citizenship irrelevant"
Here is a thing that everyone who has been in the eye of a media-storm, however small or insignificant, can tell you: It is amazing the basic factual stuff, let alone interpretative analysis, even decorated journalists will get wildly wrong.
The Great Deplatforming will include many such nonsensical decisions. Those who think it will be applied surgically, let alone rationally, are deluding themselves.
With no explanation other than "repeatedly going against our community standards,"
@Facebook
has blocked me from managing my page. Never have we received notice of violating community standards in the past and nowhere is the offending post identified.
@kittypurrzog
My 7-year-old chastised me a couple days ago for assuming that various pigeons were male or female. “Maybe they identify as a ‘they,’” she said. I am not making this up.
Per Rochelle Walensky today, the "benefits" of vaccinating 5-11-year-olds is that they will be vaccinated; otherwise nothing changes.
It's hard to describe how despair-inducing that is to some parents.
Just realized that I revere
@pennjillette
for at least one similar reason that I revere George Orwell & also
@billjamesonline
: They are/were constantly working out loud the process of trying to think/act/talk better, truer, smarter, in a world made of fog.
1. A lot of debate on this tweet of mine to the left. I have deleted it while keeping it here so that it can sit next to
@alisoneroman
’s tweet. This is photo was sitting on Alison’s MySpace page...you can google it. She has a recent history of being called out for appropriation.
I get that everyone’s irritable these days, but man. The U.S. is an outlier on masking elementary-age kids, and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with people who object to that, or who have trouble with their kids’ masks.
"Trump, who played first base, wrote that 'being a pro was in the equation' until he attended a tryout with 'another young kid named Willie McCovey.'...When Trump was a senior in high school, McCovey was in his fifth year in the major leagues"
Dolly Parton is in the midst of a career revival that has seen her hailed as a kind of secular country-pop saint. But there’s a dark side to Dolly’s ability to appeal to everyone at all times:
New verb: (To) Leonhardt -- Explain patiently to New York Times readers what many parents have been sputtering with rage about since the summer of 2020.
Even the New York Times in November 2020 raised an eyebrow at Tim Walz's "extraordinary step of banning people from different households from meeting indoors or outdoors, even though evidence has consistently shown the outdoors to be relatively safe."
New York City has reached the 3% testing positivity 7-day average threshold. Unfortunately, this means public school buildings will be closed as of tomorrow, Thursday Nov. 19, out an abundance of caution.
We must fight back the second wave of COVID-19.
The governing Mises Caucus faction of the Libertarian Party spent two years gearing up for a presidential race in which their preferred candidate could not handle a high-profile post-Trump-speech rebuttal slot because he was too high after eating a gummy.
Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Rectenwald confirmed to me he ate an edible pre-presser, saying “This was not some sort of a major political scandal, okay. I wasn't found in bed with Stormy Daniels. I’m at a Libertarian Party convention. Somebody offered me something.”