Foster Gibbons

Slava Ukraini. Heroyam Slava.

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

I oppose the death penalty, but I didn't always feel that way. I understand the people who support it - because I once was one of them.

But either way, the death penalty staged as a public spectacle is an abomination and stains us all.

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

This afternoon in Marble Hill, a New Yorker was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Early reports indicate agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds. We believe the child was physically unharmed.

This is an unconscionable and incredibly serious situation. I have called the President; when we speak I will demand that he ends all ICE enforcement actions in our city. I will not stand by while ICE agents terrorize our communities.

Our thoughts are with the injured New Yorker and his family tonight. We are praying for his recovery.

Get ICE out of our neighborhoods. Get ICE out of our hospitals. Get ICE off our streets. Get ICE away from our children.

Abolish ICE.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

It’s really remarkable to me that 10 years into this people feel compelled to “clarify” Trump’s homicidal and often genocidal fantasies. It is deranged for the president to daydream about American cities in states he hates getting blown up. Full stop.

[John Harwood @JohnJHarwood]

if you think allowing other people to marry the person of their choice curtails your "religious liberty," you're a religious fanatic who does not belong in government.

[🅱️askerville @WB_Baskerville]

The only institution responding thoughtfully to AI is the 2000 year old Roman Imperial Church.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Jack Smith: "Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation ... rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power"

[theleahfiles @leahfiles]

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond studied a dozen societies across thousands of years, from the Maya to the Vikings, to answer one question: why do great civilizations fall? What he found wasn't drought, war or bad luck. None of those were ever enough on their own. The one thing present in every collapse was how the people at the top responded to what was happening below them.

The warning sign he found again and again was leaders who were completely insulated from the pain of ordinary people. When the powerful never feel the consequences, they stop seeing the problem, and when they stop seeing it, they stop fixing it. The Maya kings kept enriching themselves and building monuments while the farmers who fed them went hungry. Their civilization didn't fall because of one bad year. It fell because the people in charge had stopped living in the same world as everyone else.

Diamond called them "distant managers." They are the people in power who live so far from the damage that they are the last to understand how bad it has gotten. By the time they notice, the fields are already empty.

His most important finding was that collapse is a choice. Every society that fell had leaders who could have changed course and chose not to. The question for us is whether we will keep letting people who can't see us make that choice for us. Because we are there folks.

[The Intellectualist @highbrow_nobrow]

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

[Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸 @jimstewartson]

I’m telling you. This 35-year-old stalker has more power than most nations. She can move policy—like getting networks kicked out of the White House—just by showing him stuff.

It’s not just absurd; it’s stupefyingly dangerous.

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

No more summits for Trump

[Baseball Is Dead @baseballisdead_]

The perfect ending for Justin Verlander.

His daughter runs out to the mound and he walks off with his family.

Feels like a movie.

[Dan Carlin @dccommonsense]

So, when I say that vote fraud claims require extraordinary evidence and I get back “there’s tons of evidence!”.
Yeah. There’s fraud all right…but it ain’t among the voting public.
It’s among the people in power (currently dominating all elected branches) who claim vote rigging.

[S.V. Dáte @svdate]

What in the actual hell…

[Jostein Hauge @haugejostein]

I say this with the utmost seriousness as a scholar of international political economy: the rules-based international order is dead.

At the UN General Assembly, Trump, in very casual language, talks about annihilating another country. The room stays quiet. No collective protest. No formal objection.

And this goes far beyond rhetoric.

The US *has* bombed Iran, in clear violation of international law.

The US *has* kidnapped Venezuela's head of state and is in the process of looting the country's natural resources, in clear violation of international law.

The US *has* tightened its blockade on Cuba, in clear violation of international law.

Then there is, of course, the genocide in Gaza, for which the US has provided unconditional support.

After World War II, the US was one of the primary architects of a system meant to encourage global cooperation. But the US has consistently broken that system's rules to advance its imperial interests.

The system has therefore lost all its legitimacy.

[Brian J. Karem @BrianKarem]

It is a violation of the 5th amendment right to due process. Once the government grants access, it cannot refuse it without protocols - without a process.
Karem vs. Trump 2020.

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

Tell me this administration knows history will judge it harshly without saying it out loud.

This is so on target with the creation, yesterday, of Trump tv so they can feed Americans their skewed versions of reality instead of the truth.

[S.V. Dáte @svdate]

Iran did not have any highly enriched uranium at all until Trump withdrew from the JCPOA.

Maybe ask him about that.

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Mark Carney, "In the heart of Germany, above Weimar, there is a wooded ridge called Ettusberg. And for decades, Goethe walked, thought, and wrote there. An oak on that ridge came to bear his name, a living monument to the highest ideals of European culture"

"As the 20th century turned dark, that same oak became trapped behind the barbed wire of Buchenwald. A silent witness to humanity's deepest moral failure. Goethe understood that ideals must be fought for, that values do not defend themselves."

"Indeed, at the end of Faust, the old man's last vision is of a free people on free ground. Nödvg, Värdjän, Siegfreiheit. Wie das Leben, de taklik si eroban mus"

"Freedom and life must be earned every single day"

"Every day"

"Every day, not once in 1945 or 1956 or 1989. Every day, including this one."

My take: 1945, 1956 and 1989 are not distant history lessons: they mark Europe’s liberation from fascism, Hungary’s uprising against Soviet rule, and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Carney’s point is that freedom is never something Europe simply achieved and banked forever - it is a choice, a responsibility and, when necessary, a struggle renewed by every generation.

[Christopher Rixman @ChristoRixman]

James Baldwin, 1974, on Palestine and Israel and Zionism.

Fifty-two years later and this sounds like it was recorded yesterday.

Listen to every word.

[Nancy Sinatra @NancySinatra]

HRC would have been such a great president.