Jeffrey Vagle

"I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I WILL HOLD." -- 1LT Clifton Cates, Message to Battalion Headquarters, 19 Jul 1918, Battle of Soissons

You can do the same thing, buying a house and borrowing against it—ha ha, just kidding, normal people get taxed annually on their wealth via property taxes, the "you can't tax wealth, the economy will collapse!" rule applies solely to the super-rich.

Astonishing: Maxwell was willing to tell Blanche about some of Trump's rapes, and he ordered her not to. "Let's not talk about inviduals." WTF were they there to talk about? There's EVIDENCE on this.

The vile attacks on Amy Acton need to be seen in the context of a party that *needs* people to believe women fabricating sexual assaults is common as rainwater. Because it’s pretty much the only way to evade the conclusion that the president is a rapist.

A 2025 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Omar Yaghi is the son of Palestinian refugees who grew up in Jordan. He just left the US to move to China after raising concerns about rising anti-immigrant sentiment, like the kind shown here. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/china-than...

Checking in on the Brewers game

The open racism is now so casual and commonplace, it’s hard to know just where to start with this absolute nonsense.

How very Escobarian.

These folks have convinced themselves that they are the good guys, and as such, the welfare they receive in the form of subsidies, buyouts, and medicare are not "handouts," like those given to those other, undeserving people.

Right wing authoritarian movements are not islands onto themselves, but rely on one another for support (in its many forms), especially from the US right wing that currently occupies the White House and runs the companies making technologies that these groups depend on.

“My Catholic Latina opponent wants to impose Sharia Law” is a hilariously desperate closing message. thehill.com/homenews/617...

I might be movin' to Montana soon, just to raise me up a crop of dental floss. Raisin' it up, waxin' it down, in a little white box that I can sell uptown.

NEW: "Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s," per new House Judiciary Dem report. Report has new allegation that Trump raped a 24-year-old and then promised the victim a visa & NYU admission, demanding she stay quiet.

My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today. Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man.

I’VE TOLD YOU A HUNDRED TIMES, TODD! THE YELLOW BAGS GO IN AISLE TWO! YELLOW, TWO! THIS IS NOT HARD!

Let's revive (and potentially revise) products liability.

This week's Research Dean spotlight! Prof. Deepa Varadarajan has an exciting new symposium piece, "Whistleblowers and Trade Secrecy's Long Shadow," examining how whistleblower protections in the Defend Trade Secrets have fallen short of their potential. Have a look! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

As a species, we apparently have much work to do on ourselves.

Crowfoot Model 4 with hardtail and Gemini pickups for sale! reverb.com/item/1033214...

gasp.

"The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." -- JK Galbraith

Crowfoot M4 prototype with Bigsby tremolo, Lollar & Duncan Custom Shop pickups for sale! reverb.com/item/1033188...

At this point, how can one expect anything other than bad faith from this White House?

A yellowjacket sting midway through a 10k run is about as enjoyable as it sounds.

How to Hibernate. Scanned by us from the 1952 book Animal Fair, by the Provensens. www.presentandcorrect.com/blogs/blog/h... It’s time.

Am I to understand that the Cheesecake Factory is somehow the new Alamo?

Ultimately, if you only have time to know one thing about all of this, just know that not a single solitary tech oligarch, tech company, or tech-backed politician has a single solitary serious commitment to the existence of Black political power or economic security in their plans for the future.

Complete and unfettered psychographic segmentation has long been the dream of industries and governments who seek power and control. Some privacy harms can appear to be trifling until seen in the aggregate.

'Then where does the past exist, if at all?’ ‘In records. It is written down.’ ‘In records. And –?’ ‘In the mind. In human memories.’ ‘In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?’

This seems like a big deal

The evidence is very clear: Abdul El-Sayed has no relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood. On the other hand, Mike Rogers does have a relationship, and he voted to fund the Brotherhood's move to disassemble the Egyptian secret police (which was in fact a reasonable position).

I dare you to read/watch this and tell me with a straight face that Friedman knows anything about actual AI* technologies beyond the agitprop coming from people like Altman and disturbingly credulous journalists. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/o...

Just in case you happen to be Johnson's secret santa this year:

Look you can say whatever horrible racist shit you want. But I draw the line at making fun of my favorite chain restaurant bsky.app/profile/mari...

The Roads Have Eyes! 👁️ Turn on the Surveillance Layer in Map Options to see known license plate readers from Flock Safety, Motorola Solutions (Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon, Leonardo (ELSAG), Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada, and other outdoor surveillance cameras.

"Alexander says he didn’t come back to Ingram to help deport his neighbors... he just ended up making it part of his job. Alexander and Ingram’s other patrol officer had delivered at least 70 people to immigration agents. Within a year, they would hand over the equivalent of 10% of Ingram to ICE."

It was a good day.

Guy who pled a felony down to a misdemeanor and now sits on the boards of multiple defense technology companies wants you to believe is being honest when he says the U.S. military needs to rapidly buy technology from which he will benefit financially.

Just say the N-word already, dawg. This is taking forever.

cc @billcorbett.bsky.social @seanthomason.bsky.social

Trump channeling the biblical use of "40," apparently.

It's (very) early days, but Embiid (and the Sixers as a team) are looking quite good.

They're stealing @kevinmkruse.bsky.social's bit.

Happy 25th Birthday Wayback Machine! On October 24, 2001, The Internet Archive organization launched a free digital archive of websites for the general public called the Wayback Machine. The oldest pages stored in the archive date back to 1996.

Something I wish more people would realize.