Measure for Measure

@measureformeasure.bsky.social

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Armchair science, public policy, and manga. After 2016, too much politics. Big tent Democrat. @measureformeasure123@threads.net @MeasureMeasure@mastodon.social

Mr. Cornyn’s request is fairly modest. He wants the Justice Department to guarantee what Mr. Blanche said under oath at his confirmation hearing: that the I.R.S. immunity would apply only to Mr. Trump, two of his sons and the Trump Organization, and that it would be limited only to audits of past tax returns. “All we’re doing is asking them to put that in writing,” Mr. Cornyn said.
Poll: Do you think marriages between same-sex couples should or should not be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages? Opposition dips below support around 2011. Now it is 65 percent support vs 32 percent oppose.
Image of Nuke, a character in the Daredevil story arc, Born Again. Nuke wants a red pill, which is implied to be a stimulant.
Picture of Trump and King Charles of England, adjusted to simulate Red-Weak/Protanomaly.
here’s simply no future for real democratic self-government in the United States with this corrupt Court in place. That seems like a vast statement. But it’s accurate. What you have at the moment is a system somewhat — yes — on par with Iran in which you have the structure of democratic self-government but with a Guardian Council that assures that the bad people (i.e. non-Republicans) aren’t actually allowed to exercise power. This is not how even a maximalist judicial review system is supposed to work, and Democrats must break the Court’s corruption at the first possible moment. With some luck, that will come in January 2029.
During the nationwide protests in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, Avila Chevalier responded to a user asking what a better slogan would be than “defund the police,” by posting, “F**k you. We’re gonna defund and abolish. You don’t get to water down our movements.”…Two days later, Avila Chevalier rejected an argument that abolishing police meant ending policing only “as we know it.”…“No. It means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever,” she replied, adding several clap emojis.
“What a s--- show. ... Crazy crazy crazy,” one House Republican, granted anonymity to speak more freely, said in a text to NBC News. “A once in a generation housing bill falls victim to the nuts.” Another expressed less surprise: “Trump did something outrageous to keep the spotlight focused on him. Shocker.” And a third House Republican who represents a district Trump won handily in 2024 warned about the potential consequences for November. “I’m not that safe. No incumbent is safe,” the lawmaker wrote. “People are pissed off that we are not taking care of business.”
After completing the Greenland memo, Hill and Thomi met with the Danish Ambassador and several other Danish officials. As the conversation shifted to the North Atlantic, she recalled “trying to give them a heads-up by making strange eye movements, body-language signals that something was going to happen.” But the Danes didn’t pick up on it. In mid-July, 2019, Hill ended her tenure. She felt that there was no way to continue serving in the Administration without becoming part of the problem. “It is what it looks like—Trump is a king, and he’s thinking about his empire,” she told me. “It’s all about acquiring things—staking your claim, and then covering it in bling.”
First, Trump is unprepared. Some effective presidents (Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush) came to the White House with a history of deep engagement in public affairs and foreign relations, which made them ready to handle sensitive foreign negotiations. Others brought a formidable work ethic and a ruthless intellect (Barack Obama, Bill Clinton). Both types surround themselves with smart advisers whose input they take seriously. Trump is 0 for 3 on these conditions, which is one reason he wrote off the risk of Iran closing the strait in the first place: He both surrounds himself with less qualified aides than past presidents did and refuses to heed their counsel. The same failure of preparation extends to the frontline negotiators. Even after many of its top officials were killed in the war, Iran has maintained a hard-nosed corps of diplomats who have long been involved in foreign policy. Trump, by contrast, has dispatched a real-estate pal and his nepo-baby son-in-law. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, perhaps the best informed of Trump’s aides, has been largely invisible.
If anyone else is interested in literary polls - these are the top 100 highest-rated books on Douban Books (basically Chinese Goodreads) w/ number of ratings. I have translated some titles, indicated w ?. All books pretty much sit within a point of each other on a 10-point scale.
Image of handpan.
New Yorker cartoon. Door labeled "Situation Room" is open. Inside is a white board with "Define Timeline, Ground operations, and Resource Allocation" crossed off. Below that is, "Maple or Oak Floors?" and "Chandelier Options".
Events Tanker War Operation Praying Mantis Downing of Iran Air 655 Collisions Iranian navy problems Iranian ship seizures Iranian preparations to mine the strait U.S.–Iran disputes, threats to close the Strait 2008 2011–12 2018 and 2019 2019 attacks on oil tankers 2025 2026 Ability of Iran to hinder shipping Alternative shipping routes
It’s all a bit like a friend with borderline personality disorder. The first time it’s a crisis and you want to help or get out of the way. The second time you wonder why your friend is having such a rough run of luck. The fifth time you get the bigger picture: your friend is pure drama. It’s them. They’re the source of the drama. Living in a climate of crisis helps them self regulate. Trump is like your friend or relative who’s borderline. You need compliant news organizations (though they don’t all have to be fawning) who will keep their coverage within the drama and not stepping back from the crisis du jour to look at this bigger context, which is that Trump is crisis after crisis, that these situations are almost always of Trump’s own making, and consistently inflamed by his administration’s incompetence. That last point is key. The coverage doesn’t necessarily have to be positive, or not consistently so. It just needs to be speaking within the crisis and treating it as somehow new and out of the blue and not like anything that was going on before, despite the fact that the before was a succession of similar high-drama crises before it.
No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors. These agents, and the president who sent them, are no one’s heroes, no one’s saviors—just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives were sworn in in the early hours of Jan. 7, 2023.
Federal agents use pepper spray against a protester holding a sign during an enforcement operation outside the Whipple Building, ICE facility in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 11, 2026. A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good on the streets of Minneapolis on January 7, leading to huge protests and outrage from local leaders who rejected White House claims she was a domestic terrorist. (Photo by Kerem YUCEL / AFP via Getty Images)
In addition to a fascinating look into the anatomy of an emerging-market resource-exporter’s economic collapse, I think there are two big takeaways here. The first is that protracted sanctions on a country — especially a resource exporter — can succeed, but only after many years and a whole lot of pain and suffering. This has lessons for our sanctions on Russia — don’t expect quick results, and expect ordinary Russians to feel a lot of pain before it’s all over. The second lesson is that broad-based unrest tends to require economic hardship. Students and urban middle classes may march in the streets for freedom and individual rights and democracy and such, but truly regime-threatening unrest, of the type we’re now seeing erupt all over Iran, typically requires the business class and the working class to both suffer hardship.
Statue at Tom Lee park memorializing the 1925 rescue.
David Roberts Any release of utility liability? Cora Stryker That’s right. And a bit to our surprise, they weren’t terribly concerned about this. I think they saw it as a little fly buzzing around. Yeah, it’s niche. It’s tiny amounts of electricity that could theoretically be backfed to the grid. But if we’re looking at the average baseload of an American home, most of, if not all of that electricity generated, even without that backfeed prevention, will be consumed on the spot just by your refrigerator. David Roberts I think from a utilities perspective, even if this catches on in Utah and gets reasonably big in Utah, the amounts of energy that might be coming into the grid collectively are just, they’re not huge. They’re not, there’s just no reason for the utility to be scared that this is going to be destabilizing on any scale. Is there?
“Other people in that Trump orbit of necessary loyalty and fealty experience the same thing,” said Wolff. “That it is incredibly unrewarding, that all that it gets you is grief because you’re a kind of pinball. You never know what Donald Trump wants. You never know what he’s going to ask you to do. You never know what breach you’re going to have to step into. You never know how foolish you’re going to look.” To Wolff, no person in Trump’s orbit has suffered that unrewarding battering like House Speaker Mike Johnson.
From: Jeffrey Epstein Date: 03/16/2019 at 3:19 PM To: Larry Summers On Mar 16, 2019, at 3:19 PM, Jeffrey Epstein wrote: shes smart. making you pay for past errors. ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh. On Sat, Mar 16, 2019 at 3:08 PM Larry Summers wrote: We talked on phone. Then "I can't talk later”. Dint think I can talk tomorrow". I said what are you up to. She said “I'm busy”. I said awfully coy u are. And then I said. Did u really rearrange the weekend we were going to be together because guy number 3 was coming" She said no his schedule changed after we changed our plans. I said ok I got to go call me when u feel like it. Tone was not of good feeling. I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits.
Because this is really all on some level about the filibuster, I want to say in an earnest way that I think debate about which party is “helped” by supermajority rules is a bit childish. Both sides would get to pass some high-polling items that the opposition party objects to, and both sides would also have to admit to their base that some of the stuff they’ve been promising isn’t actually viable. I think that would be a win for the country, not a zero-sum transfer from one party to the other — politics would be a little less dysfunctional and insane. Senators hate this, though, because the filibuster really does give individual members more leverage and make things less leadership driven, which helps make being a senator more fun than being a House member. Is that a good reason to blink at a critical moment in American history? I’m skeptical.
In 2020, during a rare and brief interview with The New York Times, Mr. Timothy Mellon declined to answer questions about his political giving. [] “I’ll contribute to him or Biden or whoever I want to,” he said, referring to Mr. Trump and his rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr. “I don’t have to say why.”
The majority of the No Kings protests have dispersed at this time and all traffic closures have been lifted. We had more than 100,000 people across all five boroughs peacefully exercising their first amendment rights and the NYPD made zero protest-related arrests.
No thrones. No crowns. No Kings. Saturday, Oct 18, 2025
NYT: Victorinox is one of Switzerland’s most visible employers, with 1,100 workers crafting high-quality knives, overseeing new designs and running calculations on how to deal with the tariffs. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/business/swiss-army-knife-trump-tariffs.html
Sign saying, "See and ICE agen in Alameda County report them to this phone number 510... ".
Trump's approval declining among supporters, especially younger supporters.