James Mackinnon

@jamackinn.bsky.social

487 Followers 809 Following

Parenting through an age of nihilism. "Disoriented" "Alienation" "Reality" He/him

Ladies in bright yellow dresses standing on rocks and sea spray while two wet men stare
The sailor said, "Brandy, you're a fine girl (You're a fine girl) What a good wife you would be (Such a fine girl) But my life, my love, and my lady is the sea"
Alleged proof of life picture of Mitch McConnell but with yellow lines trying to trace the directions his eyes are pointing. They are not pointing in the same direction.
Older man Podcaster in red shirt with caption : Sit down The extraordinary capabitlities of AI
During Detroit's loss to Green Bay this Thursday, St. Brown suffered a low ankle sprain. Fans are convinced it was karma for doing the "Trump Dance" in the nation's capital. "Amon-Ra St. Brown cursed the Lions when he did the Trump celly vs. the Commanders," a fan wrote on X. "Love to see it." "Season was over when the Tigers did it," a second fan pointed out. "Now we are seeing it with the Lions." "The Trump dance curse is real. Tigers hit the Trump dance to honor politician and they lost 11 straight," a third fan added. "Amon-Ra St. Brown hit it, now the Lions are finished and he got injured. Don't do it."
Really can't understate just how damaging the blatant corruption with the world cup is to the image of the US. The entire world is going to be rooting for us to lose tomorrow and I don't blame them.
Pint glass half full of a red beverage next to an empty can of Blake's cider Imperial Strawberry Blush
The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden's Surveillance Machine Famously vengeful Knicks owner Jim Dolan has long spied on people at his iconic arenas. WIRED goes deep inside the operation that allegedly tracked a trans woman, lawyers, protesters, and more.
Dr. Adamala named her creation SpudCell, after its potato-like appearance. Rather than patent it, she and Dr. Endy are organizing a community of scientists to focus on making SpudCells more fully alive and adapting them to new kinds of experiments
An 88 foot tall inflated tire with a fake nail sticking out of it, in front of green trees on the side of the high way
Some oil has been flowing. On Thursday, 25 ships moved through the waterway, including 14 tankers, higher than the average of recent weeks, according to Kpler, a maritime data company. Some appeared to be carrying oil out of the gulf, and one of the tankers was carrying liquefied natural gas. Several empty oil tankers were returning to the gulf, presumably en route to load oil that had accumulated in storage there. Fewer ships moved through the strait on Friday amid the bursts of regional violence. Analysts at JPMorgan Chase said in a report on June 12 that the strait was "starting to creak open," with an estimated 5.1 million barrels of oil flowing through it a day, compared with 2.9 million barrels per day in May. Such a rebound was "meaningful" but still left flows at about 25 percent of levels before the war, the report said.
Brad lander pretending to be hexed with a red circle near his left hand over a black and white looking object that is actually a person's hat
Skeet by Kate (@katewitko.bsky.social) happy 4th Image of red sphincter looking image (meant to be a red firework) on a tank top marked down from $21 to $16 And a subsequent comment statement by OldManGrim (@OldManGrim.bsky.social) The seller, "darklordpug"? That's the racist Naz Scottish dude who got his pug to react to Nazi germany videos. The guy is a big big piece of shit.
Trump says oil reserves would run out in 4 weeks without Iran deal, risking 'bedlam'
Bougie bucolic image of a sunrise from the balcony of a fancy farmhouse
Sopranos scene in hospital, Big Pussy saying "positive vibes only" to Drea
A fluffy black cat fitting into a Barbie Dream House pool, surrounded by Barbies with a mermaid tail and an owl children's book in the foreground
US stocks climbed after the US struck Iran in a major escalation of the war, setting up for a rebound from the market's latest sell-off as investors weighed the latest moves in the conflict. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) rose nearly 0.7%, and the benchmark S&P 500 (^GSPC) moved up by 0.3%, while the Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) climbed 0.5%. Chart showing Dow Jones market climbing 858.82 points
A chart showing the percent of balances for various debts (student loan, credit card, mortgage, car etc) that are 90+ days delinquent rising to peak or near peak levels for the last 20 years
ITYSL Tim Robinson in a suit yelling, "and you feel sick to your stomach!"
The Epstein crisis had exposed something that some of Trump's closest advisers spent months refusing to see. The president could break institutions, redirect the federal government against his enemies and bring the world's richest men into the Oval Office bearing tribute. But he could not, it turned out, make Jeffrey Epstein disappear.
In an internal memo circulated to roughly a dozen Trump advisers in late March 2026, the president's pollster, Fabrizio, summarized findings from two nights of focus groups conducted that month. Fabrizio's memo listed the "Epstein files" as the sixth most important issue raised in the focus groups, behind inflation, the economy, foreign policy, immigration and health care - but ahead of data centers, military issues, crime and safety, and being "pro-working class." In the section on "key takeaways" of the focus groups, Fabrizio's memo stated: "There is also a consistent mention of the Epstein files, which came up in every group and is a real negative with some of these voters."
In a January 2020 email, a federal prosecutor told a colleague that Trump had flown on Epstein's private jet far more than anyone knew. Flight records in the files showed at least eight trips between 1993 and 1996, sometimes with his second wife, Marla Maples, sometimes with his children. In January 2024, Trump declared that he had never been on the plane.
By mid-November, the bipartisan coalition the Trump team had worried about since the summer finally had the votes to force the administration's hand. The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House and the Senate in quick succession, and on Nov. 19, Trump, yielding to the inevitable, signed it into law. The new law went further than the House subpoena. It sought a broader tranche of files and contained a warning to the administration that "no record shall be withheld, delayed or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure or foreign dignitary." It sought everything that Trump had spent the better part of the year trying to suppress. The legislators who passed the bill had no idea how many files they had mandated to be released within a month. The pages would end up numbering in the millions, and the president, his family and places like his Mar-a-Lago estate would be referred to more than 38,000 times, according to a New York Times analysis.
Suddenly, one of the officials in the Situation Room raised the subject of a disturbing but uncorroborated accusation against Trump that had come to light in unsealed filings from a 2015 defamation case brought by Virginia Giuffre against Maxwell, which had been settled two years later. The secondhand accusation, alleging a specific type of sexual abuse, was the perfect example of something that would show up on the public website and put the spotlight on Trump, whether it was true or not. Giuffre, who had met Epstein when she was a teenage spa attendant at Trump's club, Mar-a- Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla., became one of the sex offender's most outspoken victims. Giuffre stated in late 2016 that, to her knowledge, Trump had done nothing improper. She died by suicide in April 2025, three months after Trump returned to power. The old Giuffre case file included emails sent to a journalist by another Epstein victim, Sarah Ransome, who later sued Epstein and Maxwell. Epstein had also settled that case.
On Aug. 13, Trump's team met again in the secure complex at 6 p.m. for two hours to refine the Epstein defense strategy. Again, the group included Wiles, Bondi, Blanche, Patel, Blair, Budowich, Cheung and Leavitt. Vance phoned in from Britain. The vice president once again pushed to release as much of the Epstein files as possible. And with an eye on the public messaging, he proposed that he should be the one to appear on Rogan's influential podcast. Vance had just gotten off the phone with Rogan, and he later told others that Rogan said he wouldn't have Blanche on his show but would take Vance. Vance argued that if he were the one to appear on Rogan's show, then only a part of the conversation would be about Epstein. The rest of the interview, he told the group, could be about the president's recently passed legislation and what it would do for working families. But the larger conversation before them was how to handle the crisis and the public relations risks for the administration. The challenge would be any embarrassing or damaging allegations about the president, even if they were unsubstantiated. If everything was publicly available on the website they had planned, it could include all kinds of potentially humiliating
In late July, as the Trump team had discussed in their crisis meetings, it was Blanche who interviewed Maxwell. Over two days, she told him she had witnessed no troubling behavior by Trump and didn't recall him sending the birthday card drawn in the shape of a nude woman. Soon after, she was quietly moved to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas - a transfer left unexplained at first, which only deepened the public outrage. Blanche said nearly five months later that Maxwell had faced “numerous threats against her life." As the calls for transparency grew louder, the top ranks of the Trump administration spent even more time in the bunker. By now, the Situation Room itself had become inseparable from the crisis - a guarded space where Trump's inner circle worked to steer the president around a scandal that would soon taint or consume careers at the highest levels of business, science and politics.
"Blondie fucked this whole thing up," Bongino later told a confidant, echoing Loomer's derisive nickname for the attorney general. "She was the one on TV saying over and over they had all this stuff. There was never anything. We were always clear about that. But now everyone thinks we did something wrong. And I gave up everything." Bongino complained that he had given up his high- rated show and millions of dollars, "and now it's all disappeared, because people think we screwed something up with Epstein." Bongino paused. "This is going to be President Trump's Iran- contra."
Two days later, on July 9, the two men were summoned to a meeting with Wiles and Bondi in the Situation Room complex. They were the last to enter the small, wood-paneled room. Seated around the table were Bondi, Wiles, Blanche and Taylor Budowich, one of Wiles's deputies. The moment Bongino sat down, Wiles told him that she had been informed he leaked a sensitive story about Epstein and Trump to ABC News. “I'll tell you what," Bongino replied. "I'll give you $100,000 cash right now. I'm not kidding. Walk out to West Exec, put that reporter on speaker and get him to admit I leaked it. A hundred thousand dollars."
None of the three had ever experienced anger at this volume from Trump's conservative base. It was disorienting, especially for Patel and Bongino, whose power and influence had been built online. The movement that had treated them as heroes was suddenly turning on them. The two men were now tightly connected to a memo that stated, in black and white, that while information in the government's possession showed ample evidence of Epstein's own wrongdoing, there was no evidence of a wider conspiracy. The day the memo was released, Bongino showed up to a daily Justice Department meeting with the F.B.I. staff and the attorney general. He was in a volcanic mood. As soon as he entered the room, he erupted at Bondi, shouting at her. "You fucked this thing up from the start," Bongino yelled. "The way you've been talking about this - that dumb fucking charade with the Epstein files, the 'They're on my desk' nonsense, all the promises to the folks out there." Patel and Bongino both subsequently told a White House official that Bondi needed to resign.
One of Trump's aides hastily steered the influencers out of the White House, telling them that the content of the binders was embargoed until after the president's news conference with Starmer but that the communications office would be more than happy to talk about the files afterward. As the influencers left, they snapped selfies in front of the White House holding their binders, quickly posting the pictures on social media. They had now created a new shock wave of anticipation for what might be in them. Like some others in the White House, Bondi had either grossly underestimated or simply been blind to the voracious appetite of the MAGA base for information about Epstein. Her binders contained information about him and his activities - flight logs, contact lists, summaries of items taken from his residences after his 2019 arrest and other material - but nearly all of it had been previously released. Bondi had somehow simultaneously oversold and trivialized the Epstein files, and now the influencers were made to feel like dupes.
Authors' note This article is adapted from reporting for our book "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump." The bulk of the reporting took place from the spring of 2023 to the spring of 2026. During that time, we conducted more than 1,000 interviews with a wide range of people close to President Trump, including campaign officials, White House staff members, officials serving in government departments and agencies, former aides, donors, lawmakers, friends and business associates. Many of our interviews were conducted on the journalistic ground rule of “deep background," agreed to in advance, which meant we could use the information but not identify who gave it to us. Throughout the reporting process, we made extensive efforts to contact the individuals named and give them ample opportunity to offer their perspective. When we use direct quotes, those quotes came either from the person speaking, from someone who heard that person directly or from contemporaneous notes, recordings or transcripts. When we paraphrase, it's because witnesses or participants in the dialogue could not recall the precise wording but were confident about the thrust of the message expressed. Where there were discrepancies between the accounts of participants in meetings, we generally erred on the side of removing the disagreed-upon material; in some instances, we relied on our own judgment of various sources' reliability, based on our long histories of covering Trump and his inner circle. Over the course of these past three years, during our daily reporting for The New York Times, each of us has spoken to Donald Trump multiple times, and the president sat for an hourlong interview with us on March 16, 2026.
Just then, The Wall Street Journal article they had been trying to kill was published online. Cellphones are forbidden in the Situation Room, so a staff member brought in printed copies of the explosive report, which detailed how Trump, and many others, had created birthday cards and letters to be assembled by Maxwell into a special birthday book for Epstein in 2003. The birthday card attributed to Trump depicted a nude woman, hand-drawn and inscribed with an imagined dialogue between the two men about a "wonderful secret." The drawing was signed with what appeared to be Trump's distinctive jagged Sharpie signature in place of the woman's pubic hair. In the days before publication, Trump, in the effort to quash the story, had called News Corp.'s chief executive, Robert Thomson; News Corp.'s owner, Rupert Murdoch; and The Journal's editor in chief, Emma Tucker. Practically shouting, the president told Tucker, who is British, that she must "hate America." He told her he would file a lawsuit. But none of his bullying had worked, and now, as the group sat quietly reading the full story in the Situation Room, Wiles readied a public denial for the president, which he soon posted on social media.
"Pardoning Maxwell, a trafficker of young girls, would create a huge P.R. problem," Cheung said. He predicted that in the wake of a pardon, the Epstein accusers would be fanning out on TV, telling their stories and ripping the administration to shreds. Blair was also adamantly opposed to a pardon. "We can't offer Ghislaine Maxwell anything," he said. "A, I don't know why we would. And B, if we give Ghislaine Maxwell any sort of break whatsoever and then she turns around and says nice things about us, or says nice things about us and we give her a break, it will undermine the entire point of her saying good things. That will feed the conspiracy theory, period. If there's nothing for her to say that hurts us, we shouldn't have to offer her anything."
Option 1 was to petition Federal District Courts in Florida and New York to unseal the grand jury testimonies - the secret transcripts of prosecutors' presentations of witnesses and evidence in their efforts to obtain indictments in past Epstein-related cases. As those were almost certain to contain no significant new information, everyone agreed that this option was a good idea, and not only because a release was unlikely to damage the president. Under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the secrecy of grand jury materials is regarded by most federal judges as almost always inviolate, and the bar for any release is exceptionally high. If the courts refused to unseal them - as Blanche predicted - they could shift the blame for withholding the Epstein material away from the Trump administration and onto the judges. And all the better if the judges had been appointed by Democratic presidents. Blanche's suggestion would make it appear that the White House wanted the materials released, when it was almost certain not to happen. Option 2 was to have Justice Department lawyers question Maxwell and publicly release the transcript - a twist on the idea proposed earlier by Vance. Blanche offered to interview Maxwell himself.
The vice president appeared panicked to others in the room about the way the subject of Epstein was already dividing the MAGA coalition. Some senior officials had the impression that Vance had bought into the darkest theories about Epstein and a cabal of predators hidden within the country's ruling class. Wiles would tell others that the vice president had proved himself to be a major conspiracy theorist. Another top official said later that Vance had been pounding on the Epstein issue since the release of the memo. He was privately pressing for the administration to release all the Epstein files, everything in the Justice Department's possession, even encouraging a congressional investigation
Caption on NYT story "inside the White House freakout over the Epstein Files"
Norm MacDonald looking disgusted, saying "Stop saying dirty stuff for a second, would ya?" From Dirty Work
The White House with flag at half staff, a glowing pink/white arch stands behind the white house with protrusions that look like horns are also lit up.
A woven basket full of fruit and being pulled open Goatse style.
Tony Soprano and the boys saying, "it's hard to raise kids in an information age."
Breaking News U.S. forces downed drones and struck a military site in southern Iran in what an American official said were self-defense strikes.
A frightening stuffed sloth with human-like teeth
A page from a children's story showing a satyr, dwarf, toadstool, fairy, and unicorn on a quest. They are rescued by a butterfly who drops onto a rock, dead.
If I Didn't Have a Nose If I didn't have a nose, I would surely fail to smell. If I didn't have a voice, I would surely never yell. If I didn't have a tooth, I would surely fail to bite. If I didn't have a thought, I would probably still write.
Tycoon costume accessories: a top hat,white gloves, a fake mustache, a fake bow tie, a monocle, a cane
Ben Stiller's orderly character from happy Gilmore, "Wow that's a tremendous looking trophy you got there"
Montreal cognitive assessment. The key being 3 sketches of large animals. A lion, a rhino, and a camel camel. There are no names to connect them as the president suggests.
A skeet: And by the way, anyone who celebrates what Gritty--and therefore the Philadelphia Flyers--did tonight in that act of throwing a Penguin from one deck to another: You are no less a psychotic than the current warmongers that run the U.S., and good luck sleeping at night with that conscience. "Oh Matt, it's just sports, it's in good fun, go touch grass" THEY LITERALLY ENACTED A PHYSICAL ASSAULT AND GRISLY HOMICIDE IN FRONT OF A PUBLIC AUDIENCE. If ICE isn't allowed to do it, then neither is Gritty.
A wide puffy vegetarian omelet leaking cheddar
A wide bowl shaped pancake dusted with powdered sugars served with a side of whipped butter and lemon
A scrumdiddliumptious looking puffed up pancake with apples and cinnamon glaze
A small piece of chicken a leaf of broccoli a small tortilla and the words "one other thing" on a white plate
Still from a human giant sketch. Aziz ansari in a white suit and cowboy hat while a man in a straw cowboy hat and yellow shirt tries to drink a gallon of gas from a pump
A woman wearing dark leather and a chain mail veil, her hands raised with her palms facing herself. It's a still from Warrior Nun
In his second term, Mr. Trump seems even less restrained and more incoherent at times. He uses more profanity, speaks longer and regularly makes comments rooted in fantasy rather than fact. He keeps saying that his father was born in Germany when in fact he was born in the Bronx. He repeats an invented story about his uncle, an M.I.T. professor, telling him about teaching the terrorist known as the Unabomber. He wanders off into odd tangents - an eight- minute ramble at a Christmas reception about poisonous snakes in Peru, a long digression during a cabinet meeting about Sharpie pens, an interruption of an Iran war update to praise the White House drapes. He has confused Greenland with Iceland and more than once boasted of ending a fictional war between Cambodia and Azerbaijan, two countries separated by nearly 4,000 miles. (He evidently means Armenia andAzerbaijan).
It's the future of gaming says a dweeb in a trench coat
Rendition of Trump's arch showing a winged statue of liberty at the peak
Jack Nicklaus tweeting pictures from his granddaughter's wedding with the message: My oldest granddaughter Christie Nicklaus - my son Jack's 2nd-oldest child - just married Todger Strunk. What a beautiful wedding and an even more beautiful couple! They look like they were made for each other. Barbara and I wish them happiness and love for an eternity! @CNStrunk