John Helling

Woah - boards of service in the Marines and the Navy are ignoring Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth's order to purge transgender troops from the military. "Navy and Marine Corps boards have voted to retain trans members in nine of 12 cases." www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u...

Wemby, of the San Antonio Spurs, reading a copy of Annihilation he checked out of the library.

These ads go in the same category as brazen, easily disproven lies after ICE killings. It’s not about persuasion. It’s a display of power. They could have passed them off as PAC-funded. They added “paid for by the U.S. government” because they want us to know they can break the law with impunity.

This is extraordinarily well written.

"I don't want to be political so I'm going to be neutral about an issue" is a political opinion unfortunately

Economists saying “perhaps capital share of net income has reached inefficiently high levels” and socialists saying “DESTROY BILLIONAIRES” are really saying the same thing, the only difference is presentation

All the polling from multiple pollsters, including GOP ones, points to a massive Democratic wave in the Midterms. If it doesn’t happen there will have been shenanigans that should get people out on the streets. Don’t be diverted by people who try to dismiss it as a conspiracy theory.

Not part of the bit but PrideFest is a go today in the small SW Indiana town of Loogootee. It’s been court fight to make it happen. The town leaders have lost every time. Meanwhile, Stonewall Democrat billboards are up in rural Owen County, Indiana, for six candidates, five of whom are LGBTQ+

And as I've been tracking, it's been eight months since Trump admitted a single refugee into the United States (Biden admitted 100,060 in 2024; white people from South Africa don't count.) There is now no longer a legal path for non-white people to become a U.S. permanent resident or citizen.

“A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.” ysph.yale.edu/news-article...

donald trump says we control the strait and i say we take him at his word and point out that by not allowing traffic he is intentionally making your gas more expensive because he hates you

The WNBA has never had a trans woman play in the league’s 30-year history and now the right and other anti-trans activists are hammering the league over something that has never been an issue, proving once again it isn’t about protection but exhibiting cruelty toward trans people.

Funkadelic at the Civic Center Gold Room in Evansville, Indiana. 6/13/71 Less than a month before "Maggot Brain" was released. Photos by Roger Krause

It’s clearer now than ever before that Infantino either needs to be removed as FIFA president or football needs a new governing body. The World Cup isn’t Infantino’s to sell. The future of the sport is now very much at risk and it’s on the federations to speak up.

Police arrested a teacher for clapping during a city council meeting last week. They went to the meeting of Emporia, Kansas City Commission to speak out against a proposed hyperscale data center that would sit on 1,000 acres of rural land. @mjgault.bsky.social reports www.404media.co/person-oppos...

You may have heard of a mess going on around Italy’s men’s National soccer team. Well, let’s try to unpack it, bc it’s very easy to see it as a matter of “respected soccer figures’ desire to bring in Change slowed down by internal politicking” and that’s not totally what happened

Kids can pick out books and read along with professional wrestlers at the WrestleARTS free story time July 25 at the Irvington library branch. No registration required. https://bit.ly/4fvR7do

The Trump admin's latest strategy to mass generate removal orders is diabolical: - Take a huge group of people with hearings scheduled in late 2026, 2027, or 2028. - Send them a physical letter rescheduling all of their cases to next week. - Those who inevitably miss court get ordered deported.

ICE is quietly arresting more people than ever. After months of releasing no detention data at all, the new numbers show a record 1,474 arrests a day in early July, the highest daily pace of the entire Trump administration. 🧵 austinkocher.substack.com/p/ice-quietl...

The fact that VP JD Vance and Richard Grenell went to Romania—on behalf of the Trump Administration— to advocate for Andrew and Tristan Tate, who by all accounts, were rapists running a coercive sex ring, then permitted them to come to Florida, should be a crazy, crazy scandal.

The US built the greatest talent magnet ever, attracting the smart, skilled, and striving. They’d come to study, then stay and build things here, or leave with positive impressions and fruitful connections. Helped make the US wealthy and powerful. Then America chose to throw it away. And for what?

More voters would be more likely to support a democratic socialist candidate than a Make America Great Again supporter or a Trump-endorsed candidate, the CNBC All-America Economic Survey finds.

Trump doesn’t force people to do bad things. All he did was show people they could get away with being horrible if they really wanted to, and a lot of powerful people decided they didn’t need to pretend anymore. Especially those in influential positions who could push back but did not.

My biggest issue with soccer has always been that there were too many incredible goals scored 40 seconds after a marginal foul happened on the other side of the field. So glad they fixed this.

They can never ruin soccer it’s too good

anyway i think the proper takeaway here is that a bare majority of the court thinks the plain words of the 14th amendment mean what they say, that four members believe there is a secret hidden meaning only recently discovered by hack lawyers

Ruling against TPS for Haitians, the Trump justices on the Supreme Court have set a new impossible standard for proving discrimination against non-whites: if there is any other reason *in addition* to the racism, the racism doesn’t count www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Lander on comparisons between his flank of the Democratic Party and the Tea Party: "We're joyful about what it looks like to deliver. That is very different energy than what the Tea Party brought. We want to build something, not just break something."

Rebecca: "Chaps, Alexi left us" Zlatan: "Who? Rebecca: "Alexi will be back, Alexi will be back with us very soon" Thierry: "Your plan worked, Rebecca" Rebecca: "Don't you bring me into this, no chance" Zlatan: "America, you're welcome" lmaooooooooooooooooo

Alexi Lalas is the absolute worst to ever do it

The entire Uruguay World Cup team got pulled up on the side of the road and investigated by immigration. Sniffer dogs, luggage ripped open. Trump America is a global embarrassment.

What the World Cup is all about.

Dylan, on life in your 80’s, is incredible. @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/o...

eating in mexico as a european has gotta be like hearing music for the first time

Sending an email with actual business items in it on an extremely nice Friday afternoon is deeply offensive to me as a person

We need to stop calling them hydration breaks. They're quarters. When FIFA mandates breaks regardless of weather conditions so that broadcasters can show commercials, we already have a name for that and there's no reason to let them keep using a euphemism for cover

SpaceX, the largest IPO of all time, encompasses Grok… a product that *still* generates non-consensual, explicit images and videos of women according to a new @wired.com investigation:

Michigan Governor caught on hot mic with Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk, discussing citizen opposition to AI data centers, bragging how she ignores their concerns: “We’re used to people saying 'f*ck no,' & doing it anyway.”🇺🇸

The violence in Belfast is a reminder of something I don’t want to take for granted: The fascists here hoped the response to the depredations of ICE would be similar, with people turning in or attacking their neighbors. That it was the very opposite is worth remembering in this season of despair

A reminder that Infantino said in 2017 that all qualified teams, their fans and officials, need to have access to a host country, otherwise it can't host. There are already numerous (predictable) US visa issues with the World Cup about to kick off and likely more to come.

it's one thing for billionaires to own all the teams, it's another for them to be the only ones with enough money to go see them

NYT headline when the economy added 266,000 jobs under Biden vs. NYT headline when BLS says the economy added 172,000 jobs under Trump.

roberts and alito have concocted a jurisprudence in which constitutional amendments explicitly ratified to secure the right of black americans to vote now restrain congress from securing the right of black americans to vote.

Here's the serious bit for anyone who'd rather skip the 4000 words of jokes