i ate miles and miles of the horizon

Asserting that it was the least the franchise could do to reward the loyal fanbase that had stuck with the team through so many ups and downs, local Mets fan Paul Sutera told reporters Friday that all he was asking for was one fucking season where they win every single game they play. “I’m not sure if it’s a coaching problem or mostly the players’ fault, but would it kill these goddamn deadbeats to go 162-0 once in their fucking lives?” asked the 42-year-old diehard, adding that it didn’t seem unreasonable to expect the Mets to get their shit together for once and string together a few months of baseball where they win every game by a huge margin, every pitcher throws multiple no-hitters, and they never once disappoint him in any way.

Many neonazis and their ilk are okay with their icons being portrayed negatively as long as that negativity takes the form of a powerful and threatening figure. They like identifying themselves with Big Scary Destroyer. It's a power fantasy for them.

That's why, for instance, Trump's incoherence when speaking doesn't bother them. His incoherence is taken, by and large, very seriously. The man opens his mouth and drops a bunch of verbal turds - and the world panics, or at the least gets very, very nervous. Not unjustifiedly, it's true, but the power fantasy of being able to say whatever they want and get taken seriously is still vicariously fulfilled.

But the Reflecting Pool? The Reflecting Pool wasn't supposed to be broken. It's not something Trump destroyed for the sheer pleasure of destruction, which is how Trump's base experienced his gutting of the government via Musk. The Reflecting Pool is something that was supposed to be improved, which he boasted about improving, and instead it's clearly turned to muck. There's no power fantasy there. There's nothing to gloat over; it's just a damp gross failure. It isn't even a catastrophic failure! Tearing down the East Wing of the White House was dramatic, and had the value of making a big, indelible change to a national icon. No matter what happens, the East Wing as we knew it is gone. Power fantasy. By contrast, the Reflecting Pool? It's just fuckin dirty. It's gross. It's your neighbor's neglected cheap pool that's full of dead leaves and slime. An entirely pedestrian, grody, pathetic failure. It would literally be more salvageable as a PR thing for Trump if it got hit by a meteor and turned into a smoking crater.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

the black velvet band - michael day cover

bonus: