Stand Your Ground worked for a Black person for once.

Maybe you need your hand held when I say this, but the roots of the insanity defense date back over 2000 years ago to ancient Greece and Rome and it has formally existed in Western common law for roughly 700 years. The only insane view here is anyone thinks that shit-testing your significant other into revealing his or her completely normal agreement with the foundational legal principle of mens rea, and finding that appalling, is some sort of admission of anything other than your own degeneracy.

There are 50 people in the PreCheck line but 15 in the regular line. However — and this is what we must remember — each one of those 15 people is experiencing their first day on earth

Reporters are the ones who should be the ones investigating whether or not Mitch is alive, dead or incapacitated. Not the governor. Not the Senate minority leader. Not Nancy Pelosi or Hakeem Jeffries.

See, this is the difference between being Black in America, actually engaging in Black politics, and having to deal with people like you who only discovered oppression when somebody on YouTube convinced you that a small group of people you identify as white, and we identify as Jewish, are responsible for everything wrong in this country. Let me be very clear: AIPAC does not scare Black people. AIPAC is not the only large PAC or special interest organization in this country attempting to influence elections and move public policy. That is what special interest groups do. They advocate for the interests and policies their donors support. In AIPAC’s case, supporting candidates who favor continued U.S. support for Israel advances its policy objectives. You can criticize that. You can oppose their spending. You can oppose U.S. policy toward Israel. And we can absolutely agree that what the current Israeli government has done under Benjamin Netanyahu is wrong and does not serve the interests of all of us. But what you cannot do is take your opposition to a government, a PAC, or a foreign policy and use it to undermine, demean, or demonize Jewish people living right here in the United States. And this is where you have Black Americans fucked up. Some of you weird-ass white leftists have decided that Black Americans are supposed to subordinate our own political survival to your foreign policy priorities. You want us to put another country and another conflict ahead of the democracy we are fighting to preserve in the country where we actually live. That is never going to fucking happen. We are going to lock arms with the people in this country who are fighting alongside us, voting alongside us, organizing alongside us, and facing the consequences of this administration in the same communities and the same damn zip codes as us. When our own oxygen mask is secure, we can do more to help everybody else. But under an administration that some of you helped usher into power, while our rights, institutions, and communities are under direct attack, you do not get to dictate the priorities of Black politics to Black people. We have been fighting for our freedom on this soil for centuries. We know what our political survival requires. You do not get to show up now and tell us who our allies are, what our priorities should be, or whose liberation we are required to put ahead of our own. Don’t try to dictate Black politics to Black people. We are not the same. I need you to STFU!

America already made daylight saving time permanent once. In December 1973, 79% of Americans supported it and Nixon signed it into law. By February 1974, eight weeks into the experiment, support had collapsed to 42%. The policy never changed. Winter arrived. Sunrise in Washington DC came at 8:27am. Kids left for school in total darkness, carrying flashlights and wearing reflective tape. When Congress moved to repeal, members cited the deaths of eight Florida schoolchildren in the first weeks of the change. The energy case collapsed too. The whole point was the oil embargo, and the Department of Transportation concluded the fuel savings were too small to matter. Ten months after signing it, Congress repealed it and Ford put the country back on standard time. There's a mechanism that makes this cycle repeat: permanent DST is only ever voted on when the sun is up. Polls run in the abstract, votes happen in warm months, and the benefit, a free hour of evening light, is easy to imagine year-round. The cost is concentrated in about 10 weeks of dark winter mornings and only becomes real after implementation. So the policy polls beautifully right up until January. Today's vote happened in July. The 1974 law passed in December, right before the exact winter that killed it. If this clears the Senate, the first real test arrives in January 2027, when sunrise in Indianapolis comes after 9am. Sleep researchers have watched this loop for 50 years, which is why the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the AMA, and the National Sleep Foundation all back the opposite reform, permanent standard time. Congress just picked the one version of clock reform America has already tried, hated, and repealed.

remember when Whitney Houston invented math

Harris won Maine by 7. Axelrod is a dishonest piece of shit

Smooth Criminal but the beat is Smooth Operator

The last thing you see before opening ChatGPT

The lack of engagement this pathetic promoted tweet/arricle is receiving ( as with everything else WaPo is pushing out there in service to the fascist regime) is very gratifying.

this is really heartwarming. two men exchanging symbolic tokens of things the other has no interest in (football, peace)

The new Banksy sculpture in London is brilliant

Origins of Purple Rain, Purple Rain' was originally written as a country song, and was intended to be a collaboration with Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks. According to Nicks, she received a 10-minute instrumental version of the song from Prince, with a request to write the lyrics, but she felt overwhelmed by the task. She later said: "I listened to it and I just got scared. I called him back and said, 'I can't do it. I wish I could. It's too much for me.'" Prince then asked his backing band to try the song: "I want to try something before we go home. It's mellow." According to Lisa Coleman, Prince changed the song dramatically after Wendy Melvoin started playing the guitar to accompany the song: "He was excited to hear it voiced differently. It took it out of that country feeling. "Then we all started playing it a bit harder and taking it more seriously. We played it for six hours straight and by the end of that day we had it mostly written and arranged." Prince's explanation on the meaning of 'Purple Rain': "When there's blood in the sky – red and blue = purple... purple rain pertains to the end of the world and being with the one you love and letting your faith/god guide you through the purple rain." After recording the song, Prince phoned Journey member Jonathan Cain, to ask him to listen to it. Prince was concerned that it might be too similar to Journey's 'Faithfully', a song composed by Cain which had recently been in the US charts. However, Cain reassured Prince by saying that the songs only shared the same four chords. "I thought it was an amazing tune," Cain said. "I told him, 'Man, I'm just super-flattered that you even called. It shows you're that classy of a guy. Good luck with the song. I know it's gonna be a hit.'" Ladies and gentlemen, Prince performing a special and an absolute classic song, Purple Rain, live at Paisley Park, in 1999. Credits for the background information: @SmoothRadio

Spike Lee with the “Pope Leo” Knicks jersey for tonight’s game. 🏀

Michael Jackson had to cut a deal with a drug lord to film this video. The Brazilian government tried to block the shoot. A judge banned the filming. The police refused to enter the area. Rio was bidding to host the 2004 Olympics and didn't want the world seeing footage of its poorest neighborhoods. So Spike Lee walked into the favela (Rio's version of a hillside slum) and found the local crime boss. His name was Marcinho VP. He ran one of the city's biggest gangs, Comando Vermelho. He also happened to be a huge Jackson fan, and he provided the whole production with security for free. A higher court eventually overturned the ban. The police still wouldn't go in. So 1,500 police officers and 50 residents acting as security guards sealed off the favela. Jackson arrived by helicopter. He walked the streets handing out candy to the kids. The people who lived there had woken up early that morning to sweep the streets and take out the trash before he got there. Mid-shoot, two women burst through security. One knocked Jackson flat. Spike Lee helped him up and he kept dancing. That exact take is in the final video. For the Salvador half of the shoot, he worked with 200 drummers from a local group called Olodum. The media coverage put them on the map in 140 countries. They'd been a regional act before the shoot. They became a global one after. Over 200 million people watched the premiere around the world. The song itself peaked at #30 in America. In Germany it went to #1 and stayed on the chart for 30 weeks, the longest run of any Jackson song there. The video crossed 1 billion views on YouTube in 2023. Only one other Jackson video has done that: Billie Jean. He's the first solo male singer from the 1900s with two videos over a billion. The day after Jackson died in 2009, Rio's mayor announced they'd put a statue of him in the same favela where the video was shot. Locals said the turnaround of their neighborhood started with his visit.

These astronauts are just a balm: impossibly cheery, down to earth, committed, decent. They are clearly extraordinary people, and yet reassuringly normal. At a time when the news is dominated by people who are either cruel or corrupt or insane or incompetent or all of the above, they remind us not all is lost.

I know the "if Obama" trope is a little old but let's be for real, if he had posted that message on any day, let alone Easter, he would have been dragged out of the White House and lynched on the lawn with half the country giving a thumbs up.

Robert Mueller died last night. He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving. He had integrity. And tonight the President of the United States said good! I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good. I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word. Good. This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened. The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming. America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner. And the church said nothing. Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary. Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart. JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again. Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing. Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him. And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it. When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming. Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say. He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true. He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad. The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be. A man died. His family is broken open with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good. And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸 Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

Me, watching the #oscars red carpet in my wife beater, tank top and crocs, slightly disappointed.