Rep. James Talarico On Confronting Christian Nationalism, And Strange Days In The Texas Legislature - "Stephen Colbert hosts Texas State Rep. James Talarico for an online-exclusive interview that touches on the issues raised in Talarico's campaign for the Democratic nomination for Senate including the separation of church and state, the dangers of consolidated corporate-owned media, and the fabricated culture wars pushed by Republicans in states like Texas. If you're curious why this interview with James Talarico was an online-exclusive, click here to watch Stephen Colbert explain: Why CBS Didn't Broadcast Stephen Colbert's Interview With James Talarico."[1] (previously)

Colbert defies CBS over interview with Texas Senate candidate - "'FCC you,' Colbert said, calling out FCC chairman Brendan Carr directly." also btw... -Catholic Church emerges as a bulwark of resistance -Fragmenting Latino vote now a wildcard in elections ('white culture') How some Democrats are using scripture to try to reach Christian voters in US midterms - "More than a dozen faith leaders are running as Democrats for federal and state offices this year, far more than in previous cycles, according to Doug Pagitt, a pastor who runs Vote Common Good, a progressive Christian political group."

"It is really important that people of faith speak to issues in the public realm, because faith is about how we live together," Trone Garriott told Reuters. "So is politics." [...] "(Jesus) welcomed the stranger, he fed the hungry, he stood up for the vulnerable, he cared for the poor, and that is our calling as Christians," Trone Garriott said. "And what people are seeing right now in so many ways ... is communities being terrorized, people being treated with great cruelty." Trump administration officials last week told a U.S. Senate committee that the shootings of Pretti and Good would need to be investigated. That represented a departure from the immediate aftermath, when officials including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem labeled both "domestic terrorists," despite video evidence contradicting that claim. Many of the candidates have also focused on economic justice while emphasizing the Bible's call to care for the poor and the afflicted. In that sense, the campaigns are aligned with Democrats' efforts to put affordability at the center of the midterm battle. "I think a person of faith sees these moral problems of the day and already has the lens and the framework with which to deal with it," said U.S. Representative Morgan McGarvey, a Kentucky Democrat who is helping to oversee candidate recruitment for the Democrats' House campaign committee. "Do we have food? Do we have healthcare? Do we have housing? Do we have an ICE agency which is even capable of respecting people's rights?"

• Something is going to give - "The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering. The concentration of AI wealth into the hands of a few tech barons + plutocratic capture ==> unchartered territory."
• The main good that determines whether you think the economy is good or bad is slack - "I think this point is captured in Marx's notion of 'socially necessary' labor cost - that is, the amount of money employers have to spend not just to keep workers alive, but to meet socially constructed expectations about minimally acceptable standards of living."
• Can we please just have fucking healthcare? - "ICE plans to spend $38.3 billion turning warehouses into detention centers."[2]
• Why English-speaking countries do especially badly at housebuilding - "Adversarial and litigious common law systems (Anglo) vs judge-led civil law systems elsewhere."[3,4]
• After the Rent Freeze - "Buildings are a bit like intellectual property, which also lasts longer than the economic horizon of the businesses that produce it. The economic argument for rent regulation is a bit like the argument for limiting patents and copyrights to a finite period."
• How to Fight GOP Corruption: The Empirical Case for Rejecting Mega-Donor Money - "As long as they believe they can 'win' the big-money arms race, the temptation to keep mega-donors on board remains strong. But what does it mean for a pro-democracy party to 'win' a game that's fundamentally corrupting our democracy?" (Could the next AOC emerge from San Francisco?)
• What Democrats can actually learn from the 1992 election - "Clinton's victory in 1992 is the canonical example that supposedly proves Dems win by moving to the center. There's only one problem: The data disagrees. Voters saw Clinton as more liberal than Dukakis, & simulations show even a solid progressive would have won."
• The Median Voter Theorem is a Clarity Trap - "What the Democratic party needs - what it demands - is bold, persistent experimentation." (Kim Lane Scheppele: "Brilliant account of what's wrong with our politics -- which is that everyone is working from a model that ceases to reflect reality but that also hides the reality it is not reflecting.")[5]
• The dual of any meaningful right is a burdensome obligation - "I want to see a return to a liberalism that sees duties and obligations alongside rights."
• Building the liberal order after Trump - "By law we can create an independent US Prosecution Service to replace the POTUS controlled DOJ and abolish and replace ICE and USBP. Reform the pardon power by law and term-limit and expand the size of SCOTUS. Make DC and Puerto Rico states, enfranchising millions of Americans."
• The Constitution is not a bargaining chip for a budget negotiation - "The Dems are demanding that ICE honor the Constitution and the Trump administration is saying that this is out of the question. Think about that. Faithfully executing the law?"[6]
• Our court system is largely working, with the exception of the most important court - "This is a huge glaring issue right now. Courts generally ARE doing fairly well, even including significant number of Trump appointees. The corruption is concentrated in scotus."
• Excising the Cancer in Our Institutions - "Tackling the imponderably difficult task of restoration at DOJ once the cavalry finally arrives and exploring a process akin to the 'denazification' sorting that took place after WWII." (Dom Pates: "Makes sense to start thinking about de-magafication now rather than when opportunity presents itself. If the US is going to recover from this period, it's going to need some root-and-branch change, rather than the usual 'swing of the pendulum, brush the last lot under the carpet' approach.")

Listen to Gary Kasparov, prominent thinker, World Chess Champion, Russian dissident and witness to tyranny, on this—Trump and Hegseth urging the Generals to prepare to go into American cities, Trump's publicly expressed desire to nationalize elections, Bannon confirming ICE will flood the polls in blue states and key precincts, the murders of American citizens, defiance of Court orders, ICE overfunded like no other secret police force in history, Trump's bulging Qatar bank account for Venezuelan oil revenues, huge government purchases of warehouses and land for massive detention centers never before needed despite a rate of deportations on par with Obama, and a Justice Dept that is sharply focused on Trump grievances, rewriting history, revenge and decimating the rule of law??? "THIS IS NOT A DRILL"! --Ty Cobb (Trump's former attorney) Well, I think we are one big step into dictatorship already. It's not clear to me that any institution in the United States is really prepared to stand up to Donald Trump. It seems the only people who are willing to stand up to Donald Trump are average American citizens in Minneapolis and elsewhere, and god bless them for that, but the US Congress, both parties, are unwilling to really fight Trump. The Republicans have become the party of dictatorship. So I think we are one deep foot into dictatorship, and I am worried, as I have said and others have been pointing out, about whether we will even have free and fair elections in 2026, let alone in 2028. I think Trump has a plan to disrupt those elections and I don't think he's willing to allow Democrats to take control of one or both houses, as could happen in a free election. --Robert Kagan the boss won't go down without a fight... Trump Won't Cancel Elections. There's a Far More Dangerous Plan in Motion. - "Put it together and look at what we are watching being built. Control who votes, through purges, ID laws, and registration barriers. Control where they vote, through polling place closures, drop box restrictions, and early voting cuts. Control what they know, by gutting CISA, disbanding the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, and targeting researchers who track disinformation. Control what their votes produce, through gerrymandering that no federal court can review and the potential elimination of Section 2. Control who counts, by driving out experienced election officials through threats and replacing them with loyalists who owe their positions to the people whose power the counting is supposed to check. And close the last escape valve by making ballot initiatives harder to pass and easier to override."[7] (previously)

This is a long article. It's long because it substantiates a bold claim: that if you are waiting for elections to save this country, you are dangerously wrong. A criminal organization has captured the electoral system, the courts, and the Justice Department itself. The evidence is clear and we will walk through every piece of it. But the ending is not despair. The ending is bad people in handcuffs. State-level prosecutors can investigate and charge corrupt federal officials right now, immune from presidential pardon, and thorough investigation will find plenty to charge. Every state that can do this should start tomorrow. Do not wait for a coalition. Do not wait for permission. Do not wait for someone else to go first. Justice is the path to a healthy democracy. [...] There is an assumption running through almost every conversation about American democracy right now, from cable news panels to kitchen-table arguments to the strategy sessions of the most sophisticated political operatives in the country. The assumption is that elections remain the mechanism through which this crisis gets resolved, that if we organize better, register more voters, raise more money, and file more lawsuits, we can win our way through it. The assumption treats the game as legitimate and the task as playing it better. This article is about what happens when that assumption meets the evidence. Nobody is going to cancel American elections. Elections are too useful; they provide the one thing that raw power cannot generate on its own, which is legitimacy. They let the people in charge say they were chosen, let allies in Congress claim a mandate, let courts defer to the "political process" rather than intervene. Elections, properly managed, are the instrument for consolidating power. The threat is that elections become something else while still looking the same. Political scientists have spent the last two decades studying countries where this has already happened, and they have an ugly name for it: competitive authoritarianism. The term describes a system that holds elections, counts votes in front of observers, and lets the opposition campaign, while structuring the rules so that the outcome is effectively predetermined. Sometimes the opposition even wins, which makes the whole arrangement look more legitimate, but captured courts and corrupted institutions make progress nearly unachievable and regression easy. The elections are real; the competition is not. The dice still roll, but one side loaded them. Hungary is the proof that this works...[8,9,10] This is what a finished machine looks like. The dice still roll. The opposition still plays. But the system converts any governing-party plurality into a supermajority, and a supermajority lets the ruling party keep rewriting the rules that produce supermajorities. After each loss, the opposition tells itself it will work harder next time, and next time it does work harder, and it loses again, and in the years between those losses the regime uses its supermajority to capture another court, buy another television station, redraw another set of districts. By the time "next time" arrives, there is less to win and fewer ways to win it. The volunteers who knocked those doors, who organized those rallies, who believed their effort would be converted into political power through the mechanism of free elections, provided the one thing the regime could not manufacture for itself: the appearance that its dominance was earned. Now watch the same machine getting assembled here, piece by piece, using American parts.

• A Federal Tool to Check Voter Citizenship Keeps Making Mistakes - "Missouri officials directed county election administrators to make voters temporarily unable to vote if they were flagged as potential noncitizens by a federal tool. But in hundreds of cases, the tool's determinations were wrong." (Kim Lane Scheppele: "This is a crucial tool for stealing the election: Misidentify citizens as non-citizens and demand they be struck from the voter rolls. And, of course, if the USG gets state voter data, they will have party ID among other things to more carefully target their mis-identifications.")
• The DHS's centralized voter purge program - "The SAVE act will provide deeply flawed proof-of-citizenship data for the upcoming election. It is a thinly disguised platform for purging voters--and of course, if the DOJ gets voters rolls with all of the data, they don't even have to guess or use demographic proxies to target Dems in particular."
• Jenny Cohn: "Do former DOGE employees have the type of access to SSA's database that wld allow them to make changes? I ask bc there seems to be no transparency, & Trump & Musk now want states to purge voters from the rolls by using the 'SAVE' system to compare data in the rolls to the data in SSA's database." (Ronan Farrow‬: "For nearly a year, the administration has said that DOGE had no unauthorized access to your Social Security data. A new government filing admits that was false.")

'The time of monsters': everyone is quoting Gramsci – but what did he actually say? - "The 'time of monsters' quote may have captured the minds of politicians and thinkers of today but many feel it strips Gramsci of the activist zeal that he embodied for previous generations."

"When Gramsci wrote the Prison Notebooks, he was trying to make sense of why there hadn't been a socialist or communist revolution in Italy before the fascist takeover," said Marzia Maccaferri, a political historian at Queen Mary University in London. "And the key concept to emerge from that thought process is his theory of hegemony: that the ruling class can rule not only through coercion, but also through the intersection of popular and high culture, through intellectual and civil society." [...] "Monsters are something exceptional, an inverted miracle that comes out of nowhere with no real explanation," Thomas said. "It's a metaphor that shuts off the possibility of trying to think through what is occurring. We get outraged or shocked at the monstrosity of these Trumpian figures, rather than trying to work out what produced it."

Ok so we melted the sand and carved it with intricate pathways revealed by mathematical harmony and shoot lightning through it while reciting the sum of human knowledge and it begins to speak and act. Sometimes a golem's just a golem, amirite? --the fool[11,12,13,14] "everyone has to get back to the office because the important thing about business is human interaction" is dying, but "white collar jobs will be replaced by AI agents within 18 months" cannot yet be born; in this interregnum a variety of morbid symptoms appear. --Dan Davies echoes from an earlier age... "Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born." —Matthew Arnold (1855)

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Women’s curling: Back to the brushes, where Rebecca Morrison posts the final stone of the sixth end into perfect position, Team GB take two and go into a 4-3 lead against the USA with four ends left.

Women’s slalom: Sweden’s Hanna Aronsson Elfman covers her head in her hands as she skies off the course like a woman tripping up on the front steps.

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Assistant to hard-left parliamentarian among those held over fatal attack on 23-year-old during protest in Lyon

French authorities have arrested nine suspects over the killing last week of a far-right activist, including an assistant to a hard-left member of parliament, a prosecutor and an informed source said.

Quentin Deranque, 23, died after sustaining a severe brain injury when he was attacked by at least six people last week on the sidelines of a far-right protest against a leftwing politician speaking at a university in the south-eastern city of Lyon.

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FTSE 100 company reports 6% fall in annual profits weeks after collapse of $260bn merger with Rio Tinto

Glencore is to give $2bn (£1.47bn) to shareholders after a turbulent year in which profits slumped and talks collapsed over a blockbuster $260bn merger with the fellow mining company Rio Tinto.

The FTSE 100 company announced the payout on Wednesday despite reporting that annual profits slipped 6% on the previous year to $13.5bn.

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Authorities also designated Arctida, an organization producing research and investigative reporting on the Russian Arctic, as “undesirable.”

TRUCKEE (ANP) - Reddingswerkers hebben zes door een lawine getroffen skiërs in het noorden van Californië gered. Twee van hen moesten naar een ziekenhuis volgens Amerikaanse media. Ze waren op een skitocht met nog negen anderen die vooralsnog vermist zijn. Naar de negen wordt door reddingswerkers in gevaarlijke winterse weersomstandigheden gezocht.

Een groep van vijftien personen, onder wie vier gidsen, werd dinsdagochtend tijdens stormachtig weer door de lawine getroffen in bergen aan de grens met Nevada en ten noorden van Lake Tahoe. De zes werden relatief snel gelokaliseerd, maar reddingswerkers konden ze aanvankelijk niet bereiken.

Waarom hebben jij en ik een kin? Onze kat heeft hem niet, de hond niet, zelfs de aaap niet? Zelfs onze uitgestorven neef de neanderthaler had er geen zoals wij die kennen. Dat maakt die kleine vooruitstekende rand onderaan het gezicht tot een evolutionaire vreemde eend in de bijt.

Lang is gezocht naar een ‘nut’: helpt een kin bij spreken, bij kauwen, bij het sterker maken van de onderkaak? (hij helpt bij selfie...) Het probleem: voor bijna elke vermeende functie is ook wel een tegenvoorbeeld te vinden. Veel dieren spreken niet en hebben toch stevige kaken; veel mensen met uiteenlopende kin-vormen functioneren prima. En evolutie is niet verplicht om elk opvallend verschil keurig te verklaren met een doel.

Nieuw onderzoek gooit het daarom over een andere boeg: misschien is de kin geen aanpassing, maar een spandrel — een bijproduct. Antropologen vergeleken honderden schedels van mensen en mensapen en keken naar tientallen meetpunten op schedel en kaak, waaronder specifieke maten rond de ‘kinregio’. Hun conclusie: veel eigenschappen die samen onze kin vormen, lijken niet het resultaat van directe natuurlijke selectie op “een kin”, maar van veranderingen elders in het hoofd die wél onder selectie stonden.

Wat voor veranderingen? Denk aan de herinrichting van ons gezicht door de groei van de hersenschedel en een minder vooruitstekend aangezicht, plus een kleiner wordende kaak door dieet- en kauwveranderingen. Als de bovenkaak en het middengezicht zich in de evolutie anders positioneren, kan de onderkaak optisch en anatomisch relatief meer naar voren komen te staan. De kin verschijnt dan niet omdat hij “handig” is, maar omdat andere bouwprojecten in het hoofd hun eigen consequenties hebben.

Het laatste atje voor de sfeer is nog maar net getrokken, carnaval is nog maar net uitgedoofd of de sfeer slaat om. Glitter maakt plaats voor ingetogenheid, polonaises voor stilte. Vandaag is het Aswoensdag: voor miljoenen christenen wereldwijd het startschot van de veertigdagentijd richting Pasen.

In kerken worden gelovigen naar voren geroepen voor een zichtbaar teken van vergankelijkheid. Met as, vaak afkomstig van verbrande palmtakken van Palmzondag vorig jaar, tekent de priester een kruisje op het voorhoofd. Daarbij klinkt een confronterende boodschap: “Gedenk, mens, dat je stof bent en tot stof zult wederkeren.”

Moderne variant

Aswoensdag markeert het begin van de vastentijd, een periode van veertig dagen (zondagen niet meegerekend) van bezinning, inkeer en soms ook onthouding. Traditioneel gaat het om minder eten, geen vlees of het laten staan van luxe. Tegenwoordig kiezen veel mensen voor een moderne variant: geen alcohol, minder sociale media of bewuster leven.

De dag valt altijd op een woensdag, precies 46 dagen vóór Pasen. De veertigdagentijd verwijst naar de veertig dagen die Jezus volgens de Bijbel vastte in de woestijn. Het is een periode die draait om reflectie: wat kan anders, wat moet beter, waar sta ik eigenlijk?

Reset

Opvallend is dat Aswoensdag ook buiten de kerk betekenis krijgt. Het idee van een reset spreekt aan. Na weken van donkere winterdagen en – in het zuiden – uitbundig carnaval, voelt deze woensdag als een kantelpunt. Even pas op de plaats.

In delen van Nederland, vooral onder de rivieren, is het contrast extra groot. Waar gisteren nog verkleed werd gefeest, staan mensen vandaag weer in de rij voor een kruisje van as. Van uitbundigheid naar ernst in 24 uur.

Aswoensdag is daarmee meer dan een religieus ritueel. Het is een reminder. Over vergankelijkheid, ja. Maar ook over nieuwe kansen. Want na veertig dagen volgt Pasen en dus hoop.

Ts'o, Hohndel and the man himself spill beans on how checks in the mail and GPL made it all possible

If you know anything about Linux's history, you'll remember it all started with Linus Torvalds posting to the Minix Usenet group on August 25, 1991, that he was working on "a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." We know that the "hobby" operating system today is Linux, and except for PCs and Macs, it pretty much runs the world.…

Alien Sex Fiend