TA kimono (yukata) with Jupiter stripes and a half-width belt for astronomical observations. Gofukuyasan

Actual review

At the start of this week, the Texas Legislature was sliding toward the conclusion of yet another underwhelming, but basically normal, session. Lawmakers had wasted a lot of time and effort, and soon they would go home. But the calm was illusory. By the end of the week, everything was in flames: blood was sloshing down the Capitol’s marble halls like the building was the Overlook Hotel.

Attorney General Ken Paxton called House Speaker Dade Phelan a drunk, urging him to resign and “get the help he needs”; later that afternoon, a House committee announced it had been investigating Paxton for months. The Texas House met Saturday, and after about four hours of debate, voted to impeach Paxton. To paraphrase Mao: everything under the dome is in chaos; the situation is excellent. There’s been a lot of news coverage of the events of the last week. But this being Texas, it’s all underlaid by decades of lore, animosities, and seemingly unaccountable behavior. So if you’re trying to get in on the fun, here’s a primer.

Who is Ken Paxton—and why won’t the haters let him do his thing?

Paxton is the attorney general of Texas, the top law enforcement official in the state. In theory, as the job description suggests, this should be a man or woman of unquestionable integrity. In practice, Texas AGs have often been scoundrels. It is an ideal job for a scoundrel, counterintuitively: there are few constraints on your behavior and a lot of opportunities to make money. Dan Morales, the last Democratic AG in Texas, went to prison for trying to parcel out state settlement money to a friend.

What sets Paxton apart from his predecessors is the sheer width and breadth of his scoundrelhood. One of the problems of writing about Paxton is that there’s never quite enough space to lay out all the things he’s alleged to have done wrong. (The word “allegedly” is going to get a workout in this article.) That has helped him enormously. This stuff can be difficult to keep track of. It’s the scandal version of Montgomery Burns’s disease door: There’s so much that none of it seems to break through.

We are not going to let that fuckwad DeSantis gain a foothold in the 2024 election.

You are going to fucking vote for Joe Biden, and you are going to give us a fucking chance to save our country from fascism, and you aren't going to fucking complain about it, because there is literally no other choice.

We will not let another election be a close call. Are you listening?

Vote for Biden. Vote for whatever Democrat is most popular in your local elections. Our system sucks, but this is what we're working with. Just fucking vote.

"But he's --"

It doesn't matter. It does. not. matter.

Not every battle is about progress. Sometimes it's just holding the line until we get reinforcements. And they are coming. The Gen Z vote was monumental in stopping the red wave, and there are increasing numbers as more and more come of age.

Hold the line.

I want to push back on the battle “not being about progress.” Because /Biden has accomplished a lot, actually, especially given a Republican-controlled House. One could argue that he hasn’t gone far enough, but that’s not the same as having accomplished nothing. So here’s some things Biden has done:

1) Raised taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

2) Highest appointment of federal judges since Reagan. Reagan started a trend of Republicans packing federal courts with uber-conservative judges, and blocking Democrat appointments, which is how we ended up with our current Supreme Court. Biden is doing his absolute best to turn the scales back the other direction by appointing as many liberal and left-wing judges as he can, as fast as he can.

3) $1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure package that will pour federal money into things like public transit, high-speed internet in places that don’t have it (which are overwhelmingly poor, and cut off from the rest of the world), and a whole lot of other basic things that make life easier for ordinary people.

4) Halted Federal executions. This doesn’t affect state-level convictions, but it does affect federal-level executions; those are completely off the table for as long as he (or any other) Democrat is President. (13 people were executed under Trump)

5) Rejoining the Paris Climate Accords and pushing for other environmental care legislation,

6) Pushed through the “Inflation Reduction Act” (named that to get Republicans to be willing to allow it through). It’s actually the largest climate bill in U.S. history and allows Medicare to negotiate the prices of certain prescription drugs for the first time. It includes 369 billion for a climate initiative to reduce greenhouse emissions and promote lean energy technologies. $300 billion in new revenue through a corporate tax increase. $80 billion for the Internal Revenue Service to hire new agents, modernize its technology, audit the wealthy and more. A $2,000 annual cap for out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for those insured by Medicare.

6) Overturned Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military.

7) Re-authorized the Violence Against Women Act

8) Pardoned marijuana

9) Forgave student loan debt (this one the Republicans in congress managed to partially stymie, but that’s not Biden’s fault--it’s the Republicans).

10) Managed to get a modest gun-safety bill through the gauntlet of Republican opposition. (The first one anyone’s managed to get passed in decades.) It’s far from perfect, or enough, but it did expand background checks on gun purchases and made it easier to prosecute illegal gun trafficking. And the reason it was as weak as it was, is because the Republicans have a majority in the House and they blocked anything stronger, it’s the Republicans’ fault. Not Biden’s. If we want sensible nationwide gun control, we have GOT to get the House a Democrat majority.

11) Passed a long-stalled Post Office reform bill.

There’s a lot there! And the things that he promised but didn’t manage to achieve, he put them before Congress and the Republicans in the House stopped them. If Democrats controlled the House as well as the Senate, most of them would have passed and now be the law of the land! The problem is not Biden.

Biden may not be very exciting, and he may not be as far left as we want. But he’s still got a lot done in the last three years.

imagine you start watching this new show and it’s a silly little show about space set in the future then they announce the next season so you wait excitedly for five months and finally it’s here… you all sit round the tv and suddenly one of the main characters who is known for being unemotional starts going mad because of “biology…” and you slowly realise that he needs to have sex or he’s going to die so the other main character risks his entire career to help him out then they start ‘wrestling’ on the sand and the one going through the mating fever ends up killing the other guy which ends the fever but now he’s depressed because he just killed his best friend but wait he’s not actually dead the unemotional one is overjoyed everything’s fine and then they go back to work like nothing happened… you look at everyone else sitting in stunned silence thinking “did any one else think that was a little… yknow” then you accidentally start modern fandom and shipping culture

very much enjoying the tags thank you everybody

Wait till they all actually watch it and see the unnecessary titty window situation.

[ID: A collection of tags that read:

Based on some of the first-hand accounts I’ve read, fans already had thoughts in that direction but were very cautious about expressing them, because, you know, it was 1967 and they were nice suburban ladies. They referred to the idea of Spock and Kirk being in love as The Premise. One little housewives’ fan club in California wrote to Leonard Nimoy in the hiatus between seasons one and two, and he was very pleasant and agreed to come and meet their group and tell them about being in the show. They didn’t say anything about The Premise directly, in case it offended him, but of course they expressed their enthusiasm for the rapport between Kirk and Spock and how curious they were about Spock’s background and inner life. And Nimoy, who was working on season two by that time, said that he couldn’t give away any specifics but there was an episode coming up that would focus more on Spock’s personal life and the planet Vulcan, and they were naturally delighted and intrigued.

So when they sat down to watch season two, episode one, “Amok Time,” they were primed for an important Spock episode, and then that played out before their widening eyes and I think it’s safe to say it blew their beehives clean off their heads.

My hot take is that there is no shortage of resources for help and mental health for young men but young men are just generally not interested in any process that entails them accepting the slightest bit of accountability for their own actions and flaws, so that's why radicalization pipelines are such a popular alternative

Young people and old people's complacency and acceptance of autoplay terrifies me if I'm finished a video and another begins playing THAT I DIDN'T CHOOSE I'm already loading my gun

every paragraph of this is a fucking banger it's so hard to pick something to excerpt!!!

Disney vs. DeSantis is so funny because it's like. Neither side even wanted to get into this. Here's how it's supposed to go: Politician does something stupid. Corporation disavows politician after public pressure. Politician disavows the disavowing. Nothing changes for either party.

But then the Florida governor got stars in his eyes. He saw an opportunity to bolster his standing before the presidential primary. He wanted to be the one who took on The Mouse and won. So in retaliation he decides he's going to tear down the decades-old agreement Disney has to govern Disney World's district.

And just like that, Disney's batshit insane legal department turns towards Florida like the Eye of Sauron spotting the ring at Mount Doom. They smell potential lost profit. They smell blood.

Disney will use any and every strategy they've accumulated over the last century of lobbying congress and DeSantis can't back down lest he admit Mickey Mouse kicked his ass. He lost control of Disney World's district even more than he already had. Now he's getting sued.

This all started because Disney was pressured into backtracking their political contributions to Florida and disavowing the Don't Say Gay law. Now they're fighting for something they actually care about: their profit margin. Disney is not an ally to queer people and they're an enemy to progressives, but damn am I rooting for them to keep humiliating the greater evil for the time being. This is high comedy.

huh. something small but unexpected happened and it threw me off my rhythm. the whole day is ruined now. its gonna take me 3-5 business days to recover

So I was rewatching Q Who and had a realisation

How to get ready in the morning

Step 1: Stay in bed as long as you possibly can. 

Step 2: Speed run. 

If plague doctors hadn't been a real thing, and you made them up for a speculative history/fantasy story, people would complain that they're implausibly advanced and way too cool.

Like you're like "yeah there's this super lethal illness and nobody actually knows how it spreads so just to be safe they've got these sick gothy fucking hazmat suits. No Greg shut up they totally had all the materials to make them, you can make fabric splatter-resistant by waxing and oiling it. And the mask is because of the- guys shut up, let me finish. The mask is- there's scented- guys shut up. They didn't have germ theory but they figured it has something to do with the air smelling- No shut up, you're a fucking furry. The beak makes it cool. Jerks."

Yes these are the only choices. All the other shows are great these are the only ones I have issues with.

I just want to see the results of this with a broad voting base, I make no comment in any way otherwise.

my favourite joke in the whole universe