America has gone from blaming poor people for mass foreclosures to now blaming some dumb local zoning rules for the national affordable housing crisis.

The throughline is that the people creating & getting rich off such emergencies never get blame - because they buy politicians & buy the discourse.

The Naked Gun trailer that played before Superman had an oral sex joke that was surprisingly explicit. I feel like a prude, but I really didn’t think it was appropriate for the audience.

You’ll Believe a Man Can Believe

Thoughts about a second viewing of Superman and how "childish" idealism is the new punk rock. Lots of spoilers.

https://www.spectrecollie.com/2025/07/13/youll-believe-a-man-can-believe/

Richard Roeper’s take on Superman is bizarre: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/superman-movie-review-2025

Does he live in the same world I do? This Superman, as a reboot from the Snyderverse Superman, couldn’t be more relevant, couldn’t be more necessary.

How do you start a revision of the DCU without establishing Superman as the foundation? Without re-establishing his moral compass in today’s world? What the hell world is Roeper living in?

Oh, Superman. Fuck yeah.

@SasquatcherGeneral taking the kids, hopefully tomorrow. This is the Superman I’ve wanted for ages.

Hey, media: Calling it "Alligator Alcatraz" is calling a concentration camp in Florida a cutesy nickname, which trivializes the unjust suffering of the people that have been rounded up and imprisoned there. Alcatraz housed criminals w/ due process.

It's a concentration camp. In Florida. Where they're grabbing people off the street based on their "physical appearance" (Tom Homan's words), and imprisoning folks without trial.

If you're gonna call it something cute, call it American Auschwitz.

I admit to being shocked at how MAGA anti-semites are using anti-semitism as a weapon. But of course MAGA racists are using race as one too. Don't fall for it or accept it.

Expedition 33 GOTY.

One thing experts who worked at places like FEMA need to do is call out what *will* happen because their funding was cut. They need to be saying it loudly, and consistently, until the catastrophe happens. CDC, FEMA, Weather stuff, cancer research folks, all of them. Say it over and over and over again, daily.

Call your shots.

There's probably an absolutely tremendous amount of money to be made acquiring small teams with successful products and then giving them a bigger budget but otherwise *totally leaving them the fuck alone*.

I have no idea why companies acquire small successes and then consistently make them act like the big company that couldn't have ever made the successful thing the small company made.

If you’ve been through a video game company acquisition, and you believe Krafton’s statement re: the founders of Unknown Worlds given the $ at stake… I have a bridge to sell you. It’s very shiny. Very expensive. Yours for cheap, because you’re really smart and clever.

@georgetakei I don’t think you can say “Yaccarino has any kind of ethical standards” just because she quit the day after the whole MechaHitler thing. This is the obvious conclusion of X from *well* before she signed up to do the job. She chose to take on the job. She has no standards or ethics.

So Brazil decides to prosecute Bolsonaro, and Trump levies a tariff on their products, making US consumers pay more tax? How is this a sensible set of actions *in any dimension*?

"E-biking - best thought of as biking without hills - may prove to be an even more important innovation. The e-bike is almost unbelievably efficient: to fully charge a five-hundred-watt e-bike costs, on average, about eight cents. That charge provides some thirty miles of range, so it costs about a penny to ride five miles."

Can you imagine being JD Vance’s half-Indian kids? Boy, that’s got be a sad experience.

Fuck you, JD. https://rss-parrot.net/u/talkingpointsmemo.com/status/1751995076359023013

All right wingers want what left wingers want when bad things are happening to *them*. Understanding. Empathy. Freedom. A social safety net.

The difference is progressive folks want those for all people at all times. Conservatives *only* want it for themselves.

The answer: when conservatives want to be bailed out, they *need* to feel the consequences of the way they treat others. The left keeps saving the right. Stop. Make their actions consequential *for them*.

If anyone in this administration is talking, you should assume they are lying. Miller especially. It’s the only way to show fealty to a president who lies nonstop.

And I don’t know where that leaves me as an American. I can’t reshape the Democratic Party. I can’t destroy the GOP. Both parties are fundamentally hostile to my values, or at best incompetent at representing and defending them.

This isn’t a “both sides” thing. One party is enthusiastically Nazis, the other is “Well, we gotta get along with the Nazis.” Not the same, but not as different as they need to be.

What do we do now?

I am an American, living in America. For most of my life I’ve believed that Democrats, more or less, represented my values. Progressive, inclusive, science-oriented, etc. I don’t believe that any more. They’re just corporate cronies pretending, but with the same basic goal as the R’s. Not nearly as evil, and meaningfully different, but still - corporate power uber allies.

So now I’m in a situation where I don’t believe either party represents my interests. 1/2