Sapindaceae

@sapindaceae.bsky.social

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Reader, mostly fantasy/sf, non-fiction, and poetry. Midwestern, middle-aged. Happy to eat all the olives. She/her.

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!?!

Breaking news: President Biden is finalizing plans to endorse major changes to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks, including proposals for legislation to establish term limits for the justices and an enforceable ethics code, according to two people briefed on the plans.

Biden set to announce support for major Supreme Court changeswww.washingtonpost.com The president has discussed the plans with constitutional scholars and members of Congress in recent weeks.

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Psst: Project 2025 is terrifying for a lot of reasons but also because on page 5 it calls for teachers and librarians who grant access to books that are maligned as pornography (which just means anything LGBTQ) to be registered as sex offenders. Pass it on.

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When I read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as a young man, I didn't understand the line “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” but I do now. Fuck, do I ever.

💐 I like the contrast between Clarissa's earlier mending vs. the memory of Rezia's hat-making in today's reading. Clarissa's needle as defense against Peter's knife and aggression, a summoning agent in a conversational battle... 1/3

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Again, qualified immunity is one of those things that if you describe it to someone who has never heard of it in simple factual terms they will think you are entirely full of shit

are you fucking kidding me

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AT&T said that hackers who have hit other companies also swiped at least six months of 2022 phone records for almost everyone who had AT&T mobile service — that’s roughly 95 million customers. Here is how to know if your data was swiped, what could go wrong and how to protect yourself:

Hackers stole almost everyone’s AT&T phone records. What should you do?wapo.st Hackers stole phone records from almost all AT&T wireless customers. What should you do if that includes you?

💐 I am finding myself wildly curious about Sally's take on the summer, Clarissa, and Peter.

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A hacker accessed and downloaded call and text-message data from nearly all AT&T wireless customers, the company disclosed in a securities filing Friday. The stolen data include numbers customers called or texted and their duration, but doesn’t contain the content of those communications, AT&T said.

AT&T says hacker stole data on ‘nearly all’ of its wireless customerswapo.st The company, which has nearly 90 million subscribers, says a “threat actor” accessed and downloaded call and text-message information.

💐 Peter's musings on age, plus this brutal line "Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame," reminded me a bit of Middlemarch and Mr. Brooke, reminiscing about what he once was and could have been. This made me wonder if we knew what Woolf thought of Middlemarch, and we do! 1/2

Super cool thread!

This is a subtweet about Frankenstein because I don't want to be a dick, but I also want some facts out there. 1. Most novels at the time were anonymous. We can't make definite judgements about why Mary Shelley's name wasn't on it. It was common practice. The novel was barely respectable. 1/?

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JUST IN: Polls closed in France. Exit polls show surprise: —Left coalition (New Popular Front) projected first. (!) —Far-right (RN) has lost its bid to take power. Anti-RN front appears to have worked very well. —No bloc close to majority. Follow this 🧵 for results and more:

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As the daughter of a Black Vietnam vet who suffered life long pain from a service related injury but was constantly turned away from care by the VA I can’t even bring myself to read this. My father eventually died of a treatable condition at 62 b/c he was sent home to take ibuprofen by a VA doc.

A 2017 internal Veterans Affairs report shows Black veterans were more often denied benefits for PTSD than their white counterparts. The analysis crunched claims data from fiscal year 2011 through 2016. And disparate treatment started after WWI when it was still called shell shock. It continues.

Black veterans were denied VA benefits for PTSD more often than whiteswww.nbcnews.com “Ever since I came back from Vietnam, I knew that I had a problem, but I didn’t know what it was," said one Black veteran.

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Astrology for misogynists

hotfix male. release candidate male. shovelware male

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"RETRUTH IF YOU WANT TELEVISED MILITARY TRIBUNALS" is, to me, a deranged and instantly disqualifying thing for a presidential candidate to say, but on the other hand joe biden looks and sounds very old

In the exact same nine day period that Biden and his White House and campaign have been flailing, Trump has offered voters a window into his own mental state and vision for term 2 It’s not great! www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

QAnon Memes, F-Bombs, and Tribunals: As Biden Faltered, Trump Amped Up the Crazywww.rollingstone.com Trump quietly had his own week from hell while the media was hounding Biden

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“Now that we know felons can be white, we’re massive fans of crime.”

I don’t even know where to begin with this.

💐This thread came to mind when we were first introduced to Peter Walsh. ("It was the state of the world that interested him; Wagner, Pope’s poetry, people’s characters eternally, and the defects of her own soul. How he scolded her!") Nothing in today's reading changed my mind! I'm side-eyeing him.

gotdamn if this isn’t EXACTLY what destroys relationships of every kind between men and women—family, platonic, workplace, romantic no amount of love can withstand being shot down every single time she opens her mouth

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It is *precisely* crimes that involve the abuse of official powers and are committed under color of office that a constitutional system needs to restrain. The fact that Trump is now trying to get out of his NY conviction by arguing that he committed those crimes *as president* shows the absurdity.

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If Trump were to personally shoot someone on Fifth Avenue: Not immune. (Probably. Maybe.) If he were to order the army to massacre thousands on Fifth Avenue: Immune. (Very clearly, under the decision.) But from a constitutional perspective, the latter is the grave danger to guard against.

This is just to say i have tossed out the raspberries that were in the icebox and which you were hoping to savor for breakfast Forgive me they had gone moldy so soon and so inevitably

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The Court has purported to strip us of all legal recourse for crimes committed by the most powerful person in the nation. Each and every one of us is now, effectively, at the mercy of an autocrat, who could order our death if he simply made the pretense of connecting it to his official duties.

Criminal law probably functioned as some kind of deterrent on abuses of presidential power, and that deterrent is now gone. But even if that weren't true, today's ruling would be an appalling display of contempt for the American people and for the basic principles on which this country rests.

Timeline palate cleanser

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The Supreme Court’s ruling putting presidents above the law must be understood not simply as a grant of immunity for past crimes, but an enthusiastic endorsement of those he will commit if given the chance. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

The Supreme Court Gives Its Blessing to Trump’s Criminalitywww.theatlantic.com And gives him permission for a despotic second term.

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The really bitter irony here is that SCOTUS is making the president a king while a Democrat is president. They aren't worried about it because they know Democrats won't accept Biden actually acting the way they are saying he can.

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“In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” -Justice Sotomayor, dissenting www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23p...

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My first read: If a president commits crimes unrelated to him being the most powerful person in the world, he can be prosecuted. But if explicitly uses his powers to commit crimes, he is at least presumptively, and probably absolutely immune from prosecution. I mean, holy shit.

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The GOP SCOTUS ruling on Presidential immunity, summed up.

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shorter SCOTUS: let’s let the president get away with crimes this time, as a treat

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Just at the most basic level it is really unhealthy to have to thought about Donald Trump as much as everyone in America has over the last nine or so years. Spending a decade of my life thinking about a super boring, super shitty crook and all the bad stuff he's doing or might do. It's embarrassing.