Michael Rooney

Trump has made more stock trades in his second term than all 535 members of Congress combined.

I was in too much haste, and now have no time left.

A huge pet peeve of mine is that literally the oldest and most basic genre of storytelling, the tragedy, has entirely vanished from mainstream big budget media for inscrutable and baffling reasons. The most recent original example I can think of that isn’t a remake/prequel might be Breaking Bad!

No amount of support for Russia can end the war, because Russia is the criminal aggressor. A modicum of support for Ukraine could, however, end the war, by making it impossible for Russia to continue. This should not be a hard choice.

Cops rule your city. You have no say in ANYTHING to do with them. Cuts to food programs to buy a tank? Halifax Council could not wait!!!!

There will be a lot of equivocating about all the times search warrants have been executed on members of Congress for corruption investigations and the like, and it can't be stressed enough in how many ways HSI raiding Ilhan Omar is extremely not like that.

New working paper: the Norwegian wealth tax was a huge success. The "exodus" of wealthy people never happened (less than 100 individuals left). Tax revenue increased by 71.5%. No changes in business activity or investment. www.nber.org/papers/w35854

Social media doesn't just feed you bad information. It trains you in how to treat information: who to trust, how much evidence is enough, what counts as a good explanation. And it trains you for a world that doesn't exist. New @PPR (yay!) and free here: philpapers.org/rec/FLOBMS

Gallery of the final heatmaps. Humans pretty indistinguishable from chickens in this view!

These are what the clouds on Jupiter look up close. The small patches of white are cloud tops, soaring above the main, colourful cloud layer. Image from NASA's Juno spacecraft during its 38th close approach to Jupiter on 29 November 2021, processed by Kevin Gill (@kevinmgill.bsky.social)

if Eliezer Yudkowsky was born into a somewhat poorer family and missed a couple lucky breaks, he’d have ended up as an archetypal specimen of your friend’s older cousin who keeps boa constrictors and makes you listen to him talk about quantum physics in his parent’s basement in exchange for weed

As a child I lived for a few years I lived close to the village of Great Missenden. There was a very tall, shabby, creepy man that apparently we used to see around the shops and my mother says she would warn my brothers and I not to go near him. He was Roald Dahl.

Maison Maria with a View of Chateau Noir, 1895 https://botfrens.com/collections/43/contents/13161

Incised into a reindeer foot-bone presumably some 15,000 years ago, this engraving represents two hinds. The realistic rendering of the drawing is truly amazing! Found in the Grotte de Chaffaud/France. 📷 RMN-GP. Jean-Gilles 🏺#archaeology

“…the main beneficiaries of societal breakdown are the most ruthless and murderous among us.”

Vaccine conspiracism is overwhelmingly clustered among the religious, white and affluent. It’s a function of conservative ideology and bad faith media. Being nicer to MAHA types will not ‘bring them into the fold,’ it will only increase their sense of entitlement.

Sharp brief earthquake, I presume

“Why would the powers that be insist that the only cure for this supposed dreadful disease is to eat these unknown, untested, and totally experimental fruits? We know that limes, lemons, and even oranges are filled with acid”

Spent a heavenly afternoon at La Capitolare di Verona - 1,509 years old & the oldest library in the world still in operation today 🕯️

“Goebbels was a peerless sloganeer, and a brilliant speaker, with a mellifluous voice. His propaganda approach was simple: find out what people hate and make them hate it more.” Frank McDonough The Weimar Years.

“Raccoon protocol” should be what they call the federal bailout program when the AI bubble bursts

Amazing to live in a country where the secret police are handling inter-chud beefs. It's like the Night of Long Knives playing out in the parking lot of a Dollar General.

Monet chased fleeting light; Cézanne chased structure. Stand before a Mont Sainte-Victoire and the gap is obvious. Yet Monet owned fourteen Cézannes — and told Georges Clemenceau: "Cézanne is the greatest of us all."

We bust more myths about the criminal legal system in our report, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 👇

this fucking guy is allegedly worth 8 or 9 billion dollars. take the smaller figure. assume hes bad at being rich and can only make a 2% return on that capital a year. that's 160,000,000. enough. enough!!

Four Apples, 1881 https://botfrens.com/collections/43/contents/12305

mRNA vaccines vs cancer success —melanoma (Phase 3, RCT, definitive, announced today) —triple negative breast cancer —pancreatic cancer —non-small cell lung cancer —glioblastoma

Casual reminder that the myth of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” is a cruel hoax designed to convince poor people from all walks of life that the injustices they face are a result of their own actions, rather than an oppressive system rigged against them.

⚫Muere Juan Tamariz, el mago que traspasó generaciones, a los 83 años de edad, según ha confirmado su familia. dozz.es/o_udu4

“I had to watch my son, who is in high school and has been a legal resident of California for 12 years, be handcuffed. We were shipped to Texas overnight from Los Angeles in horrible conditions that I won’t elaborate on in this letter. We have remained in Texas ever since.” DHS must be abolished.

Libraries make us a harder target for authoritarianism. Equal access to info, ideas, and space that doesn’t require a purchase to belong. Also: using the library means money stays in your community instead of streaming out to Amazon. 📚 What’s checked out on your card right now?

Worth reading the whole thread, the linked article, and book. “It was done because the military felt they could” is the essential point.

Still LIfe - Vase with Red Gladiolas - 1886 https://botfrens.com/collections/46/contents/13979

Making kyphi at the ancient incense & smell conference in Rome a few years ago. Kyphi was often used for sleep and beneficial dreams. www.forbes.com/sites/drsara...

Soaring sales of Biscoff cookies are helping a Belgian food company extend a remarkable decade of stock market outperformance. Lotus shares are up 47% year-to-date, taking gains in the last decade to nearly 590% even as other snack makers struggle. Read more: bloom.bg/4v5fa8Q 📷: Kurt Desplenter

I'm a huge fan of archaeological photos where we get our first peek at objects in the field. Here, a 1st c. CE marble monopodium (table base) in the form of a naked boy holding a goose appears out of the lapilli in #Pompeii in 1952. 🏺 #ancientbluesky 1/ 📸 left, me; right, see ALT

“We abandon the body and what it learns by being in the world—the physical world—at our peril. By touching, looking, listening, smelling, and even tasting … we don’t just gather ‘data’, that soulless word that flattens everything that can’t be described in numbers.”

The sea mouse is not a mouse. It's a chunky marine worm covered in felt-like hair that diffracts light into shifting reds, blues, and golds, some of the best natural photonics we know of. A brown lump on the seafloor that turns into a rainbow when the light hits right. #WormWednesday #marinelife

I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850.

“…this dependence on a formula for safety, for that is what it was, signaled a desperate moral abdication. People went to the shrink in order to find justification for the empty lives they led and the meaningless work they did.” Late Baldwin is diffuse but still bracing. Happy 102nd, Jimmy.

In this example, Achilles and Ajax are both named & calling out their scores, with words coming out of their mouths. In every example like this, Achilles is winning In this sense, ancient Greek art is like a modern comic book. With labels and the characters even speaking words /11

The fetishistic allure of the exotic, perfectly represented in Willem Kalf's amazing global still-life paintings, here from 1662. Today is his day.

Most rural areas have a ruling class. And they want cheap unfree workers & to pass their fiefdoms on tax-free forever. It ain't rocket science. The fact that we're scared to talk about THAT, ime, is what's costing us a lot of rural voters!

Blue #art #oilpainting

“Of a sample of more than a million accounts on X, 64% could be bots, a finding that requires no stretch of the imagination, given the sheer inanity of interactions on the site.” www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

TikTok has incredible moderation team. Our InfoWars video about Multiple Horse Theory — the idea that there are many horses in the world and not just one — has been fully deemed misinformation and lost the formal appeals process. Confirmed by Larry Ellison: There is only one horse on Earth.