Panther was a real trooper, we would shovel the path and he would crouch down and stalk us from there. He didn't know his black fur absorbed so much light that he cast a dark aura on the snow path surrounding him, so we would see this inky spot coming before we saw actual cat.
When Shadow was a smol kitty, we got a rare snowfall that was substantial. He rushed out when I opened the front door, eager to investigate that pretty white stuff. Unlike Tabs kitty, he didn't like it, and ran right back into warmth and comfort.
"Chicago Magazine named Nick Fuentes #7 in its list of Top 50 powerful Chicagoans of 2025."
Yes, Chicagoans aren't going to like this.
But what would Chicagoans and the rest of us really like from our news media?
These days, I would like a "List of the 50 Most Popular Proposals to Amend the United States Constitution."
At this point, I think it would be hard to narrow it down to only fifty. It would also be contentious. I am sure "legislative term limits" would be close to Number One, but NOT with me. Any Constitutional amendment that eliminates both Mitch McConnell and Bernie Sanders at once is worth zero in my book.
Here's my short list.
1. The "Corruption Equals Dollars Divided by Donors" amendment. Obliterate the Citizens United (against Hillary Clinton) v. FEC decision ("Corporations are Actually People"), as well as the Buckley v. Valeo ("Money is Actually Speech") decision.
2. The "Neutralize the U.S. Senate" amendment. (2a) Divide your state's population by the population of Wyoming. The result, times two (dropping any fraction), is the number of U.S. Senators your state should have. Alternatively (2b): divide your state's population by the population of Wyoming. The result equals the number of votes each U.S. Senator from your state should have in the U.S. Senate.
3a. Admit Puerto Rico to the United States as a U.S. state, following a referendum supervised by the U.N. Alternatively (3b), allow Puerto Rico to be an independent country, following a referendum supervised by the U.N.
3c, 3d, 3e, 3f &c. Repeat for every U.S. territory, including the Douglass Commonwealth. Maybe some First Nations would like to be states, too. Once we have established that not states but PEOPLE should have equal rights, everything becomes easy.
4. The "Let the People Choose the President, Abolish the Electoral College, and Obliterate the Whole Stupid and Grossly Unfair Presidential Primaries All at Once" amendment. Let the Presidential primary elections and the general election be folded into one single ballot with Instant-Runoff Voting. Let everybody, in every state, vote on the SAME DAY, and let the election results be published only AFTER the counting is DONE. Basically, I am trying to imagine how we would elect the "Leader of the Free World" if we actually gave a damn about being fair about it.
5. The "Make the U.S. House of Representatives Proportional and Un-Gerrymanderable, as It Should have Been in the First Place" amendment. Basically, let the seats given to each party be mathematically proportional not to the number of districts the party wins, but to the number of VOTES it receives. There are several ways to do this math and preserve regionality. Just LOOK at some other countries that use proportional representation. There are over a dozen ways to do proportional representation, and they ALL work better than the broken U.S.-American apartheid system. I personally prefer the mixed-member proportional system that the Federal Republic of Germany uses. Good-bye forever, gerrymandering.
6. The "There is No Such Thing as a Non-Partisan Statesman, so Let's Bring Some Balance to the U.S. Supreme Court, Dammit" amendment. Expand the Supreme Court to maybe twenty-nine Justices. Give them limited but renewable terms of office, let's say six years, but I don't really care, as long as it's not the Grim Reaper who decides how we should interpret the Constitution.
7. The "Maybe We Should Never have Given the President the Power to Pardon Whoever the Hell they Wanted to" amendment. At a minimum, no President should ever have the power to pardon anybody in their own administration or in any administration they served under in the past. Let's not leave any "Gerald Ford" loophole open. We should be too smart for that.
8. The "Let's Make it a Lot Easier to Impeach a President" amendment. I think a simple majority in a joint session of both Chambers of the U.S. Congress should be able to eject a criminal President with one vote, provided that everybody in this majority agrees that the Vice President can step in and take the President's place. Ditto when the Vice President gets booted from office and replaced with the Speaker of the House.
9. The "Let's Not have Any More Slavery at All" amendment (of the 13th Amendment). No more penal slavery, no more for-profit prisons.
10. The "Let's Not have Any More Torture at All" amendment (of the 8th Amendment). No punishment should be either cruel or unusual. And no interrogation method should be, either.
The people who read Chicago magazine have probably never heard of Fuentes. I'll give them credit for exposing what he is and warning about how dangerous he is.
"The sputtering congressional negotiation over ICE is just one example of how Capitol Hill’s repeated failures on major issues have helped marginalize lawmakers, empower presidents, and fan political tensions.
The inability to revamp the immigration system, despite multiple attempts over more than a decade, reflects lawmakers’ wider struggles to address many significant debates in lasting ways. Those chronic stalemates, in turn, have opened the door to unilateral actions by the White House, according to scholars who study the separation of powers.
The result: Wild policy swings every time the presidency changes hands, with partisan solutions that further inflame political divides, as illustrated by the unpopular and diametrically opposed immigration policies deployed by Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Presidential action, however, doesn’t have the staying power of law.
“What you get with gridlock in Congress isn’t just an inability to act, it’s also an inability to have that robust dialogue,” said William Howell, dean of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Government and Policy and author of “Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency.” “It’s just total breakdown where the parties are siloed.”
as I told a friend, politics got nothing to do with it. politics is about resolving differences over policy by discussion and compromise. this is ... not that.
The abandonment of actual politics as election issues has left the Democrats with dice rolls of elections based on personalities, trends and moral panics.
I still say the whole Lewandowski/Noem situation ends with him trying to and possibly successfully bang Tricia McLaughlin. I can see the future sometimes people. Ask around. My friends and family say it’s spooky.
I’m genuinely surprised Mark Carney’s government hasn’t shouted from the rooftops (igloo tops, I guess?) about how immigrants are welcome and will be loved and protected in Canada. It seems like a huge opportunity to steal talent from the United States because we’re too busy trying to teach our government officials that pedophilia is bad, actually.
I'm fairly certain labeling alleged perpetrators named in the Epstein files "pedos" is inaccurate.
They should be called child rapists. There is a difference. Arguably, the most important is that pedos cannot change the fact that they are attracted to prepubescent children, whereas child rapists don't share this attraction but instead rape children who have reached or entered puberty.
I think this distinction is important if we're to have any serious discussion about rich people raping children.
Pedos are mentally ill and not all act on their desires. Most are aware of the immorality of their desire. Child rapists know of their immorality but do not care. Mental illness is not the cause of their immorality. They're just straight up raping children for the sheer 'pleasure' of doing so.
Perhaps our resident dr of rhetoric can help determine whether I'm correct.
PS I'm not in any way defending pedos or pedophilia. I am a survivor of child sexual abuse. My abuser, a family member, was never punished. That piece of shit sick fuck can rot in all the hells
“Y’all hear about how Anderson Cooper is leaving 60 Minutes in just the latest humiliating blow to Bari Weiss’s leadership?”
Unfortunately he says he’s doing it so he can “spend more time with his children” and demurring in the face of actually making a statement about CBS’s new fascist, oligarch leadership.
I'm ok with reading between the lines here ... because everyone else is. He could have said "I've decided to spend my extra time gorging on Ben&Jerry's and everyone would STILL know it was about Bari Weiss.
The fact that he chose to leave when it was public knowledge that she wanted him to stay and assume a larger role speaks volumes.
Would it have been more satisfying if he burned the place down on the way out? Eh. I actually did that once when I left a job. Spent about 90 minutes laying out all the reasons why the company I was leaving was fucked up six ways from Sunday and hurting their own shareholders. Made me feel better for about as long as the elevator ride to get down to the main floor. Certainly didn't make anyone ELSE feel better.
Even knowing I was right and that some of my dire predictions about their future came to pass doesn't make going incendiary any more satisfying.
I don’t disagree necessarily, but there is a middle ground there as well. We don’t have to pretend that any of this is normal times.
I mean Colbert was told he couldn’t interview Talarico, at all, for purely partisan reasons. He had to YouTube it FFS. Showing a little spine occasionally would do everyone some good.
Possibly. But the middle ground can too often - by HR - be turned into "nothing concrete to add" or "just another disgruntled employee". milquetoast.
I blew the place up. Named names (at the executive level). Told them where bodies that needed to be uncovered (for legal reasons) were buried. Mostly because I felt like if I didn't, no one else would. There are things that IT people learn in a company that just shouldn't ever be known... because there are things that non-IT people do that shouldn't ever be done.
I really do understand what you’re saying, and I have no argument in your case, but Anderson Cooper is a reporter and a journalist, it’s literally his fucking job to tell the truth and take the heat if necessary.
Is it though? I mean, really. It's an interesting question, and one I don't think often gets consideration. At what point does a person get to in their JOB where saying "I need to step away to spend more time with my kids" becomes some kind of cop out?
I can see the idea that a policeman in Uvalde saying "fuck this shit, I'm not going in there" is a dereliction of duty.
But a reporter? To me that is a FAR greyer area. We WANT them to be a certain person and do certain things ... but they don't necessarily get extra privileges (that say a cop does), so why do they have the expectation of subsuming their family happiness in pursuit of their vocation.
I know I sure as hell wouldn't sacrifice my family time for my job, but as an IT guy, I'm not often asked to do that on the same scale as "AC, you need to burn the house down on your way out!, We NEED that from you!"
There is a difference between "please, we'd like to know what you think" (regardless of whether they listen) and "thanks for playing, anything to say on your way out the door?". I'll grant that.
I was in the first position and decided, fuck this shit, I never want (or will need) a recommendation from ANY of these people. But that is a fairly rare opportunity.
Anderson Cooper is popular enough that he could go solo on YouTube and be within a million subscribers in a month.
In wholly unrelated news, a streamer had to catch himself from yelping in triumph when defeating a boss in a video game with a party of all white mages (healers.) He was about to say "Yeah, white p-" and realized EXACTLY what he would it sound like if he continued that phrase. Very apologetic about it too, and used it as a moment of reflection over the role of self censorship in keeping yourself off the naughty list. (He's apolitical on his streams but left leaning in general, and really hates his home state of Florida these days.)
Only if they work. Better check for fine print. If we were actually using the laws on the books, would we need to have another one? Shouldn't this guy have been subject to the 25th? Or have gone to prison? To say nothing of paying no taxes while increasing ours? Finally, isn't he the very author of treason?
That speech at the European Parliament: "George C. Marshall, I am all the evidence you need that you succeeded here; you should have put some thought into your own country's fascists."
I lived in New Orleans for 4 years, and my favorite Mardi Gras was when my best friend had sprained her ankle and I had a concussion (both unrelated to the holiday) and we just hung out at home. We watched the mayor getting ripped on tv and had a nice time (mayor turns the city over to the king of one of the krewes).
Your hed gif source: https://martiniambassador.substack.com/p/kittys-first-snowfall
And meme chat: https://open.substack.com/chat/posts/aeb003bc-fa54-42a4-8cd8-890df74d298d?utm_source=share
The Kitty Cat
likes to play in the snow
she jumps up and down
and runs to and fro
It looks like the kitty is chasing a mouse. In which case 😢😢😢
Hmm, maybe, but to me it looks like she’s chasing snow. I had a cat that went similarly bonkers in his first snow experience.
You're right and my bad.
After putting my glasses on, it's obvious he's just having fun with the snow.
Snow kitty crackers time! (My own kitty is having crackers time this morning!)
What goes on in kitty brains
Is really hard to know
But like a fuzzy TV screen
This one is full of snow.
We're back to BIG! (things)
Kitty crunchies!
Woo Hoo, nature gave me a huge ice cream shop!
Studded paws for good grip on snow and ice!
Kitteh was making snowballs!!
Eating them?
Novel plan to have thousands of kittens clear heavy snow from I-80 goes predictably awry.
What could possibly go wrong??
Anyone who has tried to herd cats knows
Bring that kitty inside for cuddles!
Ukrainian hi-tech sniper and IED detector
If that cat had thumbs he would make snowballs.
I had a cat who liked to play in the snow, RIP, Boris!
Panther was a real trooper, we would shovel the path and he would crouch down and stalk us from there. He didn't know his black fur absorbed so much light that he cast a dark aura on the snow path surrounding him, so we would see this inky spot coming before we saw actual cat.
RIP, Panther.
Cheers to Boris!
Boris was a black cat, too!
They’re special friends.
Snow cat, for real.
Snow Cat needs no treads.
4 paw drive.
Whee!
When Shadow was a smol kitty, we got a rare snowfall that was substantial. He rushed out when I opened the front door, eager to investigate that pretty white stuff. Unlike Tabs kitty, he didn't like it, and ran right back into warmth and comfort.
I've said it before and I will say it again.
It looks like WW3 will see Germany defending European democracy against American fascist aggression.
OT, AGAIN:
Shrimp and Andouille gumbo tonight.
Oven roasted carrots and garlic/rosemary focaccia bread (again, from HEB)
HAPPY FAT TUESDAY EVERYONE!!
No-fucks-to-give Stephen Colbert is the best Stephen Colbert. I love that Trump is terrified of James Talarico. He should be.
"Chicago Magazine named Nick Fuentes #7 in its list of Top 50 powerful Chicagoans of 2025."
Yes, Chicagoans aren't going to like this.
But what would Chicagoans and the rest of us really like from our news media?
These days, I would like a "List of the 50 Most Popular Proposals to Amend the United States Constitution."
At this point, I think it would be hard to narrow it down to only fifty. It would also be contentious. I am sure "legislative term limits" would be close to Number One, but NOT with me. Any Constitutional amendment that eliminates both Mitch McConnell and Bernie Sanders at once is worth zero in my book.
Here's my short list.
1. The "Corruption Equals Dollars Divided by Donors" amendment. Obliterate the Citizens United (against Hillary Clinton) v. FEC decision ("Corporations are Actually People"), as well as the Buckley v. Valeo ("Money is Actually Speech") decision.
2. The "Neutralize the U.S. Senate" amendment. (2a) Divide your state's population by the population of Wyoming. The result, times two (dropping any fraction), is the number of U.S. Senators your state should have. Alternatively (2b): divide your state's population by the population of Wyoming. The result equals the number of votes each U.S. Senator from your state should have in the U.S. Senate.
3a. Admit Puerto Rico to the United States as a U.S. state, following a referendum supervised by the U.N. Alternatively (3b), allow Puerto Rico to be an independent country, following a referendum supervised by the U.N.
3c, 3d, 3e, 3f &c. Repeat for every U.S. territory, including the Douglass Commonwealth. Maybe some First Nations would like to be states, too. Once we have established that not states but PEOPLE should have equal rights, everything becomes easy.
4. The "Let the People Choose the President, Abolish the Electoral College, and Obliterate the Whole Stupid and Grossly Unfair Presidential Primaries All at Once" amendment. Let the Presidential primary elections and the general election be folded into one single ballot with Instant-Runoff Voting. Let everybody, in every state, vote on the SAME DAY, and let the election results be published only AFTER the counting is DONE. Basically, I am trying to imagine how we would elect the "Leader of the Free World" if we actually gave a damn about being fair about it.
5. The "Make the U.S. House of Representatives Proportional and Un-Gerrymanderable, as It Should have Been in the First Place" amendment. Basically, let the seats given to each party be mathematically proportional not to the number of districts the party wins, but to the number of VOTES it receives. There are several ways to do this math and preserve regionality. Just LOOK at some other countries that use proportional representation. There are over a dozen ways to do proportional representation, and they ALL work better than the broken U.S.-American apartheid system. I personally prefer the mixed-member proportional system that the Federal Republic of Germany uses. Good-bye forever, gerrymandering.
6. The "There is No Such Thing as a Non-Partisan Statesman, so Let's Bring Some Balance to the U.S. Supreme Court, Dammit" amendment. Expand the Supreme Court to maybe twenty-nine Justices. Give them limited but renewable terms of office, let's say six years, but I don't really care, as long as it's not the Grim Reaper who decides how we should interpret the Constitution.
7. The "Maybe We Should Never have Given the President the Power to Pardon Whoever the Hell they Wanted to" amendment. At a minimum, no President should ever have the power to pardon anybody in their own administration or in any administration they served under in the past. Let's not leave any "Gerald Ford" loophole open. We should be too smart for that.
8. The "Let's Make it a Lot Easier to Impeach a President" amendment. I think a simple majority in a joint session of both Chambers of the U.S. Congress should be able to eject a criminal President with one vote, provided that everybody in this majority agrees that the Vice President can step in and take the President's place. Ditto when the Vice President gets booted from office and replaced with the Speaker of the House.
9. The "Let's Not have Any More Slavery at All" amendment (of the 13th Amendment). No more penal slavery, no more for-profit prisons.
10. The "Let's Not have Any More Torture at All" amendment (of the 8th Amendment). No punishment should be either cruel or unusual. And no interrogation method should be, either.
This list can be extended.
i just want to be 'chicago's best actor'. but i prolly won't be.
sad face
Your #1 is the most important thing needed to protect American democracy. Everything else pales in comparison.
I want this comment chiseled in marble in every state Capitol. Twice in Texas.
Release ALL of the Trump-Epstein Files.
The people who read Chicago magazine have probably never heard of Fuentes. I'll give them credit for exposing what he is and warning about how dangerous he is.
Our democracy is broken. Strongman Presidencies:
"The sputtering congressional negotiation over ICE is just one example of how Capitol Hill’s repeated failures on major issues have helped marginalize lawmakers, empower presidents, and fan political tensions.
The inability to revamp the immigration system, despite multiple attempts over more than a decade, reflects lawmakers’ wider struggles to address many significant debates in lasting ways. Those chronic stalemates, in turn, have opened the door to unilateral actions by the White House, according to scholars who study the separation of powers.
The result: Wild policy swings every time the presidency changes hands, with partisan solutions that further inflame political divides, as illustrated by the unpopular and diametrically opposed immigration policies deployed by Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Presidential action, however, doesn’t have the staying power of law.
“What you get with gridlock in Congress isn’t just an inability to act, it’s also an inability to have that robust dialogue,” said William Howell, dean of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Government and Policy and author of “Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency.” “It’s just total breakdown where the parties are siloed.”
(Bloomberg)
as I told a friend, politics got nothing to do with it. politics is about resolving differences over policy by discussion and compromise. this is ... not that.
The abandonment of actual politics as election issues has left the Democrats with dice rolls of elections based on personalities, trends and moral panics.
I still say the whole Lewandowski/Noem situation ends with him trying to and possibly successfully bang Tricia McLaughlin. I can see the future sometimes people. Ask around. My friends and family say it’s spooky.
He better hurry, she's on her way out the door:
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/17/dhs-spokesperson-tricia-mclaughlin-to-leave-trump-administration-00783378
lol. I saw that. Good
I’m genuinely surprised Mark Carney’s government hasn’t shouted from the rooftops (igloo tops, I guess?) about how immigrants are welcome and will be loved and protected in Canada. It seems like a huge opportunity to steal talent from the United States because we’re too busy trying to teach our government officials that pedophilia is bad, actually.
I'm fairly certain labeling alleged perpetrators named in the Epstein files "pedos" is inaccurate.
They should be called child rapists. There is a difference. Arguably, the most important is that pedos cannot change the fact that they are attracted to prepubescent children, whereas child rapists don't share this attraction but instead rape children who have reached or entered puberty.
I think this distinction is important if we're to have any serious discussion about rich people raping children.
Pedos are mentally ill and not all act on their desires. Most are aware of the immorality of their desire. Child rapists know of their immorality but do not care. Mental illness is not the cause of their immorality. They're just straight up raping children for the sheer 'pleasure' of doing so.
Perhaps our resident dr of rhetoric can help determine whether I'm correct.
PS I'm not in any way defending pedos or pedophilia. I am a survivor of child sexual abuse. My abuser, a family member, was never punished. That piece of shit sick fuck can rot in all the hells
Agree
“Y’all hear about how Anderson Cooper is leaving 60 Minutes in just the latest humiliating blow to Bari Weiss’s leadership?”
Unfortunately he says he’s doing it so he can “spend more time with his children” and demurring in the face of actually making a statement about CBS’s new fascist, oligarch leadership.
I'm ok with reading between the lines here ... because everyone else is. He could have said "I've decided to spend my extra time gorging on Ben&Jerry's and everyone would STILL know it was about Bari Weiss.
The fact that he chose to leave when it was public knowledge that she wanted him to stay and assume a larger role speaks volumes.
Would it have been more satisfying if he burned the place down on the way out? Eh. I actually did that once when I left a job. Spent about 90 minutes laying out all the reasons why the company I was leaving was fucked up six ways from Sunday and hurting their own shareholders. Made me feel better for about as long as the elevator ride to get down to the main floor. Certainly didn't make anyone ELSE feel better.
Even knowing I was right and that some of my dire predictions about their future came to pass doesn't make going incendiary any more satisfying.
I don’t disagree necessarily, but there is a middle ground there as well. We don’t have to pretend that any of this is normal times.
I mean Colbert was told he couldn’t interview Talarico, at all, for purely partisan reasons. He had to YouTube it FFS. Showing a little spine occasionally would do everyone some good.
Damn - crossed up my replies...
Possibly. But the middle ground can too often - by HR - be turned into "nothing concrete to add" or "just another disgruntled employee". milquetoast.
I blew the place up. Named names (at the executive level). Told them where bodies that needed to be uncovered (for legal reasons) were buried. Mostly because I felt like if I didn't, no one else would. There are things that IT people learn in a company that just shouldn't ever be known... because there are things that non-IT people do that shouldn't ever be done.
I really do understand what you’re saying, and I have no argument in your case, but Anderson Cooper is a reporter and a journalist, it’s literally his fucking job to tell the truth and take the heat if necessary.
Is it though? I mean, really. It's an interesting question, and one I don't think often gets consideration. At what point does a person get to in their JOB where saying "I need to step away to spend more time with my kids" becomes some kind of cop out?
I can see the idea that a policeman in Uvalde saying "fuck this shit, I'm not going in there" is a dereliction of duty.
But a reporter? To me that is a FAR greyer area. We WANT them to be a certain person and do certain things ... but they don't necessarily get extra privileges (that say a cop does), so why do they have the expectation of subsuming their family happiness in pursuit of their vocation.
I know I sure as hell wouldn't sacrifice my family time for my job, but as an IT guy, I'm not often asked to do that on the same scale as "AC, you need to burn the house down on your way out!, We NEED that from you!"
also, the last time it happened to me I thanked them for the opportunity which oddly some how made me feel better...
There is a difference between "please, we'd like to know what you think" (regardless of whether they listen) and "thanks for playing, anything to say on your way out the door?". I'll grant that.
I was in the first position and decided, fuck this shit, I never want (or will need) a recommendation from ANY of these people. But that is a fairly rare opportunity.
I agree. there's no upside to blowing up going out the door. it doesn't even really make you feel better.
Anderson Cooper is popular enough that he could go solo on YouTube and be within a million subscribers in a month.
In wholly unrelated news, a streamer had to catch himself from yelping in triumph when defeating a boss in a video game with a party of all white mages (healers.) He was about to say "Yeah, white p-" and realized EXACTLY what he would it sound like if he continued that phrase. Very apologetic about it too, and used it as a moment of reflection over the role of self censorship in keeping yourself off the naughty list. (He's apolitical on his streams but left leaning in general, and really hates his home state of Florida these days.)
"A move in the House to amend the Constitution to allow Congress to override presidential pardons now has a Republican cosponsor."
Oh thank dog! We NEED more checks on the Executive branch!
Only if they work. Better check for fine print. If we were actually using the laws on the books, would we need to have another one? Shouldn't this guy have been subject to the 25th? Or have gone to prison? To say nothing of paying no taxes while increasing ours? Finally, isn't he the very author of treason?
That speech at the European Parliament: "George C. Marshall, I am all the evidence you need that you succeeded here; you should have put some thought into your own country's fascists."
"Nick" Fuentes looks like he wanted to cosplay Alex deLarge in that snapshot. That was clearly beyond his powers.
I lived in New Orleans for 4 years, and my favorite Mardi Gras was when my best friend had sprained her ankle and I had a concussion (both unrelated to the holiday) and we just hung out at home. We watched the mayor getting ripped on tv and had a nice time (mayor turns the city over to the king of one of the krewes).
I've visited Mardi Gras twice - and loved it both times. Living there? Every year? Yeah, I'd be getting out of Dodge pretty regularly...