Nikachica

I will never need to know your Wordle score.

Image: Kristen Visbal's "Fearless Girl"
via

[Jared Ryan Sears @JaredRyanSears]

The midterms are this simple:

Biden and Democrats inherited a poorly managed pandemic, massive job loss, and a ruined economy from Trump in 2021.

They added jobs every month, the pandemic recovery went better than in peer nations, and by 2024 the US economy was dubbed the Envy of the World and was so strong it improved the entire global outlook.

That was what Republicans and Trump inherited.

Then, they slammed the brakes on the economy, killed job growth, drove up inflation, made healthcare far more expensive, kicked one million children off of food assistance, started an illegal war, angered our allies, and made the nation sick from cuts to health inspections and disease monitoring, not to mention the rampant corruption that has enriched the president and his family with billions of dollars.

The midterms are your chance to change this.

It is time to vote those who have failed us out of power.

[Karim Wafa-Al Hussaini @DrKarimWafa]

They say books won’t change the world. Tell that to every colonizer who burned them. To every enslaved person who was punished for reading. Literacy is resistance. Literacy is liberation. The library is a battlefield.

[AEVØN ™⚡ @fwaevon]

The "Middle Class" was always a buffer zone designed to keep the poor from eating the rich. Now that automation and offshoring have made that buffer unnecessary, it's being dismantled in real time. You're not failing to stay middle class, middle class is being deleted.

[Dr. Simon @goddek]

🚨UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH: Nobody is coming. Not a party, not an election, not a better politician. The system is not malfunctioning, it is functioning, for people who are not you.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[💎❄️ @megan_lassi]

Member of the press fraternizing to this degree with an architect of destruction like him is really a sign the cancer is terminal.

Press failed, Congress failed, courts have failed. We are in deeply perilous times

[Sandi Bachom 📹 @sandibachom]

The White House correspondence dinner insured that the Epstein files will never be released when you can shrug and joke about it. This is where we are mainstream media. This is on you.

[Jamie Bonkiewicz @JamieBonkiewicz]

When he’s gone and this is all over, I don’t want to hear a single journalist tell us how terrible he was after spending years normalizing every fucking awful thing he did.

[David Pakman @dpakman]

Guys, it’s been more than 5 weeks. If Mitch McConnell can’t personally provide a proper and believable health update, he has to be removed. This is absurd.

[Mike Nellis @MikeNellis]

You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe Democrats were capable of stealing the 2020 election while out of power, but somehow incapable of doing the same in 2024 while in power. That is a categorically, phenomenally dumb thing to believe.

[Lien @Jacksonsrule]

In Finland, charging fees for tuition is illegal, which means rich kids have to mix with normal kids. That means rich families had to make sure the schools their children attended were good, which in turn prompted the wealthy to invest in public education.
Finland, take a bow.

[The Shallow State @OurShallowState]

He fomented an insurrection. He botched a pandemic. He stole classified documents. He committed every type of fraud known to man. He is compromised. He protects pedophiles. He's a 34-time convicted felon. He's an adjudicated rapist, who paid his victim $5.6M so far. He monetizes the presidency and weaponizes justice. He's lawless. He obstructs justice at every turn. He lies as he breathes. He's narcissistic. He's psychopathic. He's paranoid. He's sadistic. I can go on.
YET - no matter how bad we know he is, and no matter how bad the things we know he did are, remember this: Some of the things we don't yet know he did, are even worse.

[Bobby Fakename, Esq. @BobFakeNameEsq]

Appointing Lindsey Graham’s sister — who by any metric is woefully unqualified— is genuinely fucking insane. Being a senator is not a lordship. He wasn’t the goddamn Lord of Riverrun. Why can’t Republicans be serious about anything?

[MM  @adgirlMM]

Why it is acceptable for a Republican governor in South Carolina to appoint the sister of a U.S. Senator to the Senate...

when Andy Beshear, the DULY ELECTED governor of Kentucky can't appoint a qualified candidate to Mitch McConnell's seat.

Give me a break.

[Jamie Bonkiewicz @JamieBonkiewicz]

They replaced Lindsey Graham with his sister. Didn’t realize we were operating under North Korea rules now.

[dart @poordart]

Mitch McConnell's silence on Lindsey Graham's passing is deafening

[John Bourscheid 🇺🇸 🚀 @bourscheid]

Don’t hire a weekend news co-anchor to run the military. Don’t hire two dumb podcasters to run the FBI. Don’t hire a tough-guy cosplaying plumber to run DHS. Don’t hire a decaying felon pedophile to run the country.

It’s not hard to see how far we’ve fallen so fast.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

Is it just me or do you ever really get overwhelmed by how our current reality is a genuine dystopian nightmare YET everyone still acts like it is completely normal??

[Cinna @blazyjai]

They’re not using these cameras to track down rapists, pedophiles and traffickers. They’re not using them to find your missing children. They’re using them to throw women in jail for making choices with their own bodies. Wtf are we doing??