Joy Campbell

I repost because I've passed the 'clever enough for my own tweets' stage. Balanced Libra. Acronyms I prefer: ADHD, ENFP. Love prevails. Most of the time.

[Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates]

more than one hundred years ago a young man named Upton Sinclair, living in a small cabin about two miles from this house, on Rosedale Rd., Princeton, wrote a novel exposing the unspeakably filthy conditions of meat-packing in Chicago, titled "The Jungle." President Teddy Roosevelt read the novel, his stomach (which was considerable) was turned, he called Sinclair to the White House, & soon thereafter laws were passed to regulate (to some degree) the meat-packing industry.
Today we don't have a US president who can read, let alone read an entire novel; we have a US president who has deregulated industries that provide food & medicine for us, to our detriment.

[anyone_want_chips @anyonewantchips]

With the mass shooting at Seattle Center, it might be good to mention that Bill Clinton’s assault weapons ban reduced mass shooting deaths by nearly half - but after George W Bush & Republicans let it expire, mass shooting deaths more than doubled - because it’s the fucking guns.

[Donald Trump Portfolio Tracker @TrumpsPortfolio]

Michele Fiore raised $70,000 to build a statue for a Las Vegas cop killed in the line of duty. She spent it on cosmetic surgery, her rent, and her daughter’s wedding. A jury convicted her in two hours. Trump pardoned her before she was ever sentenced.

[Joy Campbell @newlyjoyful]

I've been worried on the sidelines for years now, fatigued by the constant alert we are all on with this sloppy slide, but this one really made me clench with real fear and profound sadness. The intentional destruction to monopolize information is a 5-alarm fire.

[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🤗

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

@_Momologues_ 🦔Nobody even forced this one. A company looked at destroying the last copies of old books and decided there was money in it.

[Colleen ☧ @_Momologues_]

@HedgieMarkets The dystopian stories are coming true.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

@BrianRoemmele 🦔Thanks Brian. You were early on this! The court documents even gave it a name, Project Panama, tens of millions spent, and a planning doc that flat out said the goal was to destructively scan every book in the world. Unreal.

[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🤗

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

Here is what I believe.

We have been separated by people who profit from our separation.

That is the business model. Keep us apart and sell us the fight.

Here is what that separation does.
People stop talking. They stop talking, so they stop knowing each other. They stop knowing each other, so they fear each other. They fear each other, so they hate each other. You break that chain at the first link, not the last.

I also believe there is one true existential threat to this democracy and his name is Donald Trump.

So I will sit down with anyone who has a platform and sees in Trump what I see.

That is why I sat down with Nick Fuentes. His views on race and women are antithetical to mine. What he has said about the Holocaust and Nazism is indefensible. He is also demonstrably persuasive and he has a bullhorn that no amount of cancellation has taken from him. A million-plus people listen to him. I wanted to hear it myself instead of reading what I am supposed to think about it.

Nick and I agree on almost nothing. We agree on Trump.

Nothing else we argue about matters if Trump is not stopped. And the people who see what he is do not all think like me. If your standard is that everyone who opposes him has to agree with you first, you have already handed him the country.

I will take one piece of common ground over ten more years of shouting across the same street.

[Walter Masterson @waltermasterson]

Between January and March of 2026, Trump made 3,600 stock trades directly from his own investment account.

For context, Nancy Pelosi has made 288 trades in her entire career.

Trump shattered the Pelosi record in 3 months.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Ossoff: "The price of admission to the president's service seems to be proof that you're willing to lie for him. Have you seen it? Maybe you saw Jay Clayton, the president's nominee to lead our intelligence services, refuse again and again while he was under oath to affirm Donald Trump's defeat in 2020, or Pete Hegseth before the Senate this week refusing to recant his lies about the war. There's something uniquely despicable about lying a nation into war, treating citizens as fools."

[Donald Trump Portfolio Tracker @TrumpsPortfolio]

Paul Walczak took $10.9M out of his nursing home employees' paychecks: their Social Security, their Medicare, their taxes, and bought a $2 million yacht.

Sentenced to 18 months and $4.4M restitution.

His mother attended a $1M-a-plate Mar-a-Lago dinner.

Twelve days later: full pardon. He never spent a night in prison.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

I can’t wrap my head around an economy where nursing homes cost enough to bankrupt families, yet the aides caring for our grandparents still rely on food banks. Or where daycare can consume an entire parent’s paycheck, while the people providing that care still can’t earn a living wage and need a second job. Something about that math just doesn’t add up.

[Machine Pun Kelly 🇺🇦 @KellyScaletta]

So one time this one bully shoved a woman on the ground, and another guy went over to help her up, so this bully and a half dozen of his friends beat him to the ground and shot him execution style, firing 10 bullets into him.

This post is about Alex Pretti.

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

George Conway: “We’re so far beyond the legal and the constitutional and the decent and the honorable. Watergate ended with the resignation of Richard Nixon which came about because a tape was released that had Nixon just suggesting the CIA discourage the FBI from investigating something. Never really happened, but just the suggestion was enough for Republicans to go to the White House and say you will lose in an impeachment trial. We are so many orders of magnitude beyond that at this point”

[anyone_want_chips @anyonewantchips]

Remember how Republicans went totally batshit when Lloyd Austin took three days to notify the White House about his emergency hospitalization - but when it’s been 41 days & we’re still not sure if Mitch McConnell is alive - the silence is deafening.

[Donald Trump Portfolio Tracker @TrumpsPortfolio]

A jury convicted him of fraud. A judge ordered him to pay $676 million back to the people he defrauded. He gave $1.8 million to a Trump fundraising committee instead, and walked away from both.

Meet Trevor Milton.

In 2014 he founded Nikola, an electric and hydrogen truck company. At its peak it was worth more than Ford. Milton was a billionaire on paper.

One problem. The trucks didn’t work.

You’ve probably seen the promo video: the Nikola One semi gliding down a road, silent and futuristic. It wasn’t driving. It had been towed to the top of a hill and rolled down. That was the technology.

Federal prosecutors said Milton lied about “nearly all aspects of the business.” That Nikola built a pickup from the ground up (it didn’t). That it developed its own batteries (it was buying them). That the Nikola One worked (he knew it didn’t).

October 2022: a jury convicts him. One count securities fraud, two counts wire fraud.

December 2023: a judge sentences him to four years, fines him $1 million, and orders him to pay more than $690 million in restitution to the retail investors who got wiped out.

Now the timeline that matters.

October 2024: Milton and his wife donate more than $1.8 million to a Trump fundraising committee.

March 2025: prosecutors ask the court to order him to pay $676 million in restitution.

Two weeks later: Trump pardons him. Full and unconditional.

The prison time, gone. The money owed to defrauded shareholders, gone.

Trump’s explanation was that Milton had been persecuted for supporting his political ambitions. He told reporters, “I think he was exonerated.”

He wasn’t exonerated. A jury convicted him.

One more detail. Milton’s defense attorney at trial was Brad Bondi, brother of Pam Bondi, now Attorney General of the United States.

Milton called it a “sacred pardon of innocence.”

The people who lost their savings on a truck that rolled downhill got nothing.

[Gavin Newsom @GavinNewsom]

The corrupt Trump administration has just admitted to withholding taxpayer dollars from states based on how they voted.

Last I checked we were a democracy, not a dictatorship.

Where the hell is Congress?

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

Most people have no idea that downtown Seattle used to have a hill the size of a 20 story building sitting right in the middle of it.

Denny Hill. 220 feet tall. The city looked at it and decided to just get rid of it. Not tunnel through it. Not build around it. Erase it completely.

So they pointed giant water cannons at the hill and blasted it apart with pressurized water, then washed the mud down into Puget Sound. It took them from 1897 to 1930 and they moved more than 11 million cubic yards of dirt. An entire hill, hosed into the bay.

And here is the part that sounds made up. Some homeowners refused to sell. So the engineers just carved the hill away around them. That left houses stranded on top of skinny towers of dirt, some of them a full hundred feet in the air, reachable only by a long wooden staircase. People called them spite mounds. The holdouts all caved eventually, and those last pillars got washed away too.

Now go to Chicago. In the 1850s the whole city was basically a mud pit with no drainage, so they made a decision that is hard to even picture. They raised the entire city. They put thousands of jackscrews under entire brick buildings and slowly cranked them up out of the mud, sometimes 6 feet or more. In 1860 they lifted half a city block, 320 feet of solid masonry weighing 35,000 tons, up almost 5 feet in five days, and the stores stayed open the whole time. People shopped inside while the building rose under their feet. They even jacked up a six story hotel with the guests still sleeping in it.

Boston did the opposite. The city was originally a bumpy peninsula with three big hills, which is why the main road is still called Tremont, from Trimountain. They sheared the tops off those hills, dropping the summit of Beacon Hill by around 60 feet, and used the dirt to fill in the harbor and the marshes. A huge chunk of downtown Boston is standing on ground that used to be the hills, and other parts are standing on what used to be open water.

Kansas City was so hilly and muddy they nicknamed it Gully Town, so they cut down bluffs 100 feet tall and dumped them into the ravines to flatten the place out. Los Angeles sliced whole hills out of its downtown to make room for the city core.

We walk around these cities assuming the ground was always shaped like this. It wasn't. Enormous parts of urban America were carved down, blasted apart, jacked up, and washed into the sea by men with hoses, shovels, and hand cranks, and most of it happened barely a hundred years ago.

The land you are standing on is not the land that was there.

[moose @mooseincrisis]

did a routine checkup to see if anyone was slacking off, and of course they were. someone’s getting fired.