Shocked to discover two guys who like one another would proudly show off a picture together

Things are most assuredly changing.

Kinda depends on what your downloading. Movies in the 2160p resolution are getting into the 10s of Gigs. And you still need a seed with comparable bandwidth serving the file you want.

Gorsuch voted to overturn Roe which was a fairly epic disrespect for court precedent.

Gorsuch had a long history on the bench as anti-choice. He overturned a 50 year old precedent, not one he’d just co-signed last year.

But I no longer put anything past this SCOTUS.

There’s more to the judiciary than just issuing rulings on a whim. They need the lower courts to line up behind them. And conflicting decisions at the highest level ultimately allow lower courts to rule at their own whim rather than according to a supreme precedent.

Imagine the SCOTUS ruling against California and sending it back down to a liberal California appellate court, only for the lower court to disregard the SCOTUS California ruling by referencing the Texas SCOTUS ruling. Or for the lower court or the state to feign confusion and refuse to follow the SC decision. Or do what so many other states have done and hastily engineer a new map that’s just different enough to force a new case. Without some kind of bright line distinction between the two decisions, they could just do that and send it back up to SCOTUS in a case that wouldn’t resolve before the next election.

As ACB said “we’re not just a bunch of hacks in here.”

If you’ve got to say shit like that out loud…

But she’s not wrong. These aren’t celebrity hacks who came in on the reality TV circuit, they’re legal street fighters who know how the system works in practice. If they do rule against California, it’ll be curious to see how they try to thread the needle. And how the California legislature - which still has plenty of time to submit revised (but still gerrymandered) maps - chooses to respond.

Hard truths

Two years

2026 - 2 = 2024.

No no, that’s impossible. That would have been under a President who Respects the Constitution. No way they’d just ignore the 5th amendment like this.

https://streamingunity.tv/

There. Just saved you half an hour waiting for your download to complete.

760,000 constituents per district in 2025. That’s compared to 213,000 when the number of US House seats was fixed at 435 back in 1920. Don’t even get me started on the US Senate. Two people representing 50M. Fucking bananas way to run a “representative” democracy.

The Republican justices have already signaled that they probably won’t strike down California’s maps

In fairness to the Court’s Republicans, they did suggest in their LULAC opinion that the Texas and California gerrymanders are mirror images of each other. The majority opinion in that case begins with the observation that after Texas drew its new map, “California responded with its own map for the stated purpose of counteracting what Texas had done.” Justice Samuel Alito, a Republican, also wrote a separate opinion stating that it is “indisputable” that “the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”

The thing about the SCOTUS is that they’re not total dummies. Roberts and Gorsuch, at least, seem to know the long game and aren’t interested in playing full-on Calvinball with the tool of court precedent. They aren’t going to gamble on an entrenched multi-generational procedurally generated conservative majority just to save a few California GOP House Reps who are likely washed in a D+10 mid year election anyway.

They’ll uphold the right of states to gerrymander and allow Republicans to turn the ratchet in another reactionary backwash election, once Dems fumble the bag in '28/'30. Because the important thing is undermining the function of democracy long term.

“I am a very real woman who is talking to you on the internet and I am sincerely interested in sending you naked pictures with no plan for catfishing or upselling”

Seems legit.

Debunking three myths about the end of presidential term limits in China

using the justice system against any and all rivals!

It’s always dizzying to see western liberals insist the Chinese state is riddled with corruption, then blow their tops the moment anyone in China is identified and prosecuted for corruption.

I keep coming back to Guo Wengui, an outspoken Chinese billionaire ex-pat who claimed he was being persecuted for his liberal politics and not involved in a string of high profile scams. Six years after his arrival, he was up on charges in New York for the exact same set of fraud charges he’d fled Beijing to avoid. And - almost on reflex - Guo went back to the same playbook, insisting that SDNY prosecutors were pursuing him for his political views and not his defrauding of clients. Changpeng Zhao has a near identical story.

This is a tale as old as time in western politics. From Fulgencio Batista to María Corina Machado and Reza Pahlavi to Wernher von Braun, y’all vacuum up the trash. The US, the UK, and France absorb foreign crooks under the auspices of political refugee status. And then these slimeballs go right back to defrauding people in their new host nation.

I wonder how many more Chinese dissidents Keir Starmer and Donald Trump will rescue after this latest purge.

I mean, imagine a Chinese publication leaping to the defense of Henry Cuellar, Bob Menendez, Eric Adams, and George Santos.

So much of the US news really does boil down to a handful of senior editors having this burning hatred for the sitting Chinese President.

So the issue is not ICE, but who’s managing ICE.

You can say that about any organization. If the Nazis had been run by Rosa Luxemberg, they wouldn’t be the Nazis. They’d be a totally different thing.

But we’ve been staffing ICE with ice chewing psychos for decades. I don’t believe a reformist bureaucrat can lead ICE. The organization’s rank-and-file would rebel, in the same way the CIA rebelled under Kennedy and the FBI rebelled under Obama.

The issues, Bernie, are both who’s managing ICE and ICE itself. ICE are terrorists, you can’t just say that you will give money to ICE if they remove those two assholes ignoring all the shit each ICE agent has done so far, Bernie.

Even the most left-wing Democrats are still convinced that an organization dedicated to terrorizing migrant workers and extra-judicially deporting Enemies of the State is too popular to dismantle. That’s a bleak prospect for the nation’s future.

He’s in the minority of the minority. Chuck Schumer will be out an hour later saying he’s ready to sign off on ICE funding in exchange for a kick back and a high five.

It’s been sliding all month.

It’s slid 8% over the last month. But at a 282 p/e, it could lose 90% and still be overvalued.

presidents for life

He’s been in office for 13 years. Angela Merkel served for longer as PM of Germany. Narendra Modi has been in office nearly as long, as President of India. FDR served for longer. Calm down.

Unrelated, but I have a bridge to sell someone as wise and discerning as yourself!

The thing about your type is that you only know how to bomb bridges. You’ve forgotten how to build them.

Imagine a president who found corruption in his administration and decided “corrupt officials aren’t useful, they should be removed”.

I believe this is how the Klan operated, back in the day

Damn, setting aside the China Bad hysteria, this is pretty big news

China expels second-highest ranking general, 8 others over corruption

According to the ministry, the Central Military Commission (CMC) Discipline Inspection Commission, the PLA’s top anti-corruption body, investigated the officers and found they had violated Party rules and were suspected of serious crimes involving large financial misconduct. The offences were described as having an “extremely serious nature and egregious impact.”

Imagine living in a country where top officials actually get investigated and removed for wrongdoing.

Must be nice.