“Pilates has grown in popularity in recent years, fueled in part by social media. This dig at the exercise routine of Draper, the “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” cast member, has much deeper misogynist roots than simply criticizing her appearance: It serves as shorthand for both a set of instructions and expectations for how a “good” and desirable woman should be.”
“While I don’t think this one artist’s decision to stick it to Spotify signals a paradigm shift for a broken industry, it does feel like yet another reminder of something I’ve seen flourishing over the past few months: a genuine hunger from fans to invest in physical media at a time when the streaming and forever-online model of distribution has become increasingly exploitative.”
“Researchers have identified 24 new deep-sea creatures and a whole new evolutionary branch in the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a wide swath of ocean between Hawaii and Mexico. The findings surface as the Trump administration, via a January mandate from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has fast-tracked permits for deep sea mining in that zone, one of the planet’s richest rare-earth metal regions.”
“Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”
“The case isn’t really about anything more than that. The underlying issue is simply the lack of submission. And the point is not to win. The point is to emphasize to the next recalcitrant entity, person, company, or institution that it will have to defend itself if it asserts its rights—because the government will relentlessly come at those who don’t submit. It will come at the little guy. It will come just as relentlessly at the multibillion dollar corporation or the university with the endowment the size of the GDP of a small country. If you’re the little guy, they will keep coming until some court lets them send you to Liberia. And if you’re a frontier AI company with the temerity not to submit, they will use the opportunity of destroying you to create opportunities for businesses associated with friendlier billionaires who know to stay on side.”
“Fiber optic cables reveal a serious problem at the heart of modern farming”.
“The streaming services, to me, are minutes away from being obsolete.”
RIP, Mary Beth Hurt, three-time Tony-nominated actor who was also in movies such as The World According to Garp.
RIP, Ben Stevenson, ballet dancer, choreographer, longtime artistic director of Texas Ballet Theater, named Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 1999.
RIP, James Tolkan, versatile actor known for Top Gun, the Back to the Future trilogy, and many more movies.
RIP, Robert Hinkle, stunt performer and dialog coach who among many other things taught Rock Hudson and Paul Newman how to talk like Texans for the movie Giant.
“Some Declaration of Independence Charges Against King George Apply to Wannabe King Donald Trump”.
“Those are words. They are mostly recognizable English words that I, as an English-speaker, mostly understand. And if I wrestle with that paragraph long enough, I can eventually discern the intended meaning of those words which seems to be, ironically, that the people writing them are available for hire as communications specialists.”
“Detractors are taking Lindy West’s memoir as the last nail in millennial feminism’s coffin. We should be grieving its loss.”
“What It’s Like to Be a Nonbinary Educator in Texas Right Now”. Full disclosure, I’m acquainted with Indigo, the educator in question. Their parents are friends of mine.
“Our new political world in the U.S. and around much of the globe is no longer simply right vs. left but authoritarian vs. civic democratic. And those two poles involved not just different policy positions but different ideational systems, different ways of thinking about research, facts, power and more. Journalism as most of us understand it, the way most journalists understand it, is inextricably located in the civic democratic space, though it isn’t inherently liberal in the old sense of the word. Without knowing that basic fact, you can’t understand much of anything about contemporary politics and journalism and the big fights about our future that we are all, intentionally or not, involved in today.” I agree in full with this article, but I feel compelled to point out that it represents David Broder erasure. How quickly we forget.
“As the surge in Minneapolis winds down, small communities in Minnesota (like Willmar) fend off more arrests and lasting impacts.”
Two words: Bryon Noem. Like, dude.
“Trump’s Justice Department Dropped 23,000 Criminal Investigations in Shift to Immigration”. Not only are they not going after undocumented immigrants with criminal histories, they’ve stopped going after real criminals to go after non-criminal immigrants. I feel so much safer now.
RIP, Sugar The Surfing Dog, the first canine inducted into the Surfer’s Hall of Fame.
Here is an unflattering photo of Karoline Leavitt that you should not look at and definitely should not share.
“Data shared earlier this week by U.S. Customs and Border Protection suggests the smallest and most vulnerable importers are being left behind in the early stages of the tariff refund process.”
A revelation today from one of my substackers- the great feel good pilot rescue story is a hoax, concocted to cover up the spectacular failure of a high risk mission targeting Iran’s enriched uranium. I wondered why two big transport planes would be sent to get one guy- it doesn’t make any sense. What really happened is that they were trying to get the uranium and one fighter jet providing air support got shot down, so the mission was aborted. They had to burn the transports and GTFO. It is likely that the weapons officer was actually killed and the story of his rescue is all fake, cooked up to explain all the excess military presence without mention of the failed mission.
https://quadzillahikes.substack.com/p/downed-f15-compromised-special-operations?publication_id=4714448&post_id=193474714&r=l1k74&triedRedirect=true