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spratt.bsky.social
Sam
@spratt.bsky.social
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spratt.bsky.social
De Blasio above the caption "Well, Well, Well, Pretty Easy to Find a Mayor That Doesn't Suck Shit, Huh?"
November 4, 2025 at 7:47 PM
spratt.bsky.social
Sick stickers being given out today for voting today in BOO York City! Kudos to the Board of HELLelections. Thrilled to cast my vote for ZohrAAAAAAHn Mamdani!
A sticker that says "Halloween Voter 2025." It features a pigeon wearing a witch hat and clutching a pumpkin bucket in its beak
October 31, 2025 at 5:05 PM
spratt.bsky.social
"If we go light on the Kissinger part, I wouldn’t complain, because it could dwarf everything else."
CHOTINER: In terms of human rights, I’ve always found it a little bit puzzling, given what you write, and given who your wife is, that you two were so close to Henry Kissinger. Of all the pre-Trump political figures in America, he is the one I think of as in some ways the opposite of liberal, given his behavior toward the rest of the world. SUNSTEIN: I’ll tell you a story. I wrote a book a few years ago on Star Wars. We invited Dr. Kissinger to my Star Wars book party, and he said, “You wrote a book about Star Wars? Why’d you write a book about Star Wars?” He was puzzled and courteous, but really confused. And then he came to the book party, which was quite generous. He was a busy person. CHOTINER: But, despite his busyness, he came to the book party. SUNSTEIN: Yeah, and then I gave a talk on Star Wars, and he came up to me afterward and he said, “Oh, I see why you wrote a book on Star Wars. There’s a lot there. It’s, like, about families and it’s about governments and freedom.” The amount of curiosity and generosity that he showed was incomparable. I don’t know anyone who showed that level of curiosity and generosity. And we really got into Star Wars. He just wanted to think about it. I know there are strong views about his career, and I’m hardly an expert on his career. CHOTINER: But your wife is one of the great human-rights experts in the world. I asked you about him being anti-liberal, and your response was that he was very nice to you about your book. SUNSTEIN: About Star Wars. CHOTINER: It is certainly a touching story. But that’s not totally an answer to the question. SUNSTEIN: Yeah. Well, I don’t know. What he would think of this book I’d love to know. CHOTINER: But no second thoughts about being friends with him or anything? SUNSTEIN: I feel generally very grateful for friendship, and he was, when I knew him, a person of immense kindness. Those who think of him as someone who was something horrible or worse, I don’t know what to say about that. CHOTINER: But you could have an opinion on it. You have an opinion on all kinds of things, right? SUNSTEIN: Well, on him and his role in government, that’s not something I’ve particularly studied, so I don’t know. I know some people who think he was a horrible historic figure. They would say, “Would you be friends with Genghis Khan? Would you be friends with Stalin?” And I wouldn’t be friends with Stalin, so I concede that. CHOTINER: Well, the next time someone brings up a terrible anecdote about Cambodia or Vietnam, I will definitely drop the Star Wars story to show that people have two sides. SUNSTEIN: Yeah. And I get those who think you shouldn’t be friends with someone who did terrible things. I hear that. I can just say that he was, as a very large number of people would say, though many fewer would say it publicly, an extraordinarily generous friend.
September 23, 2025 at 6:11 PM
spratt.bsky.social
in conclusion, Friedrich von Hayek was a land of contrasts,
SUNSTEIN: I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Hayek, maybe more like love-skepticism, kind of like a romance that isn’t going to work, but now the love is in a big font and the skepticism is in a smaller font. Many people on the left really don’t like him at all. But part of my fondness for Hayek was fuelled by a book he wrote about John Stuart Mill. It’s really a collection of letters between Mill and Harriet Taylor, his wife. Some of these letters are from before they were married. It’s kind of scandalous. And Hayek was really into it. There’s a lot of passion there. That makes me love Hayek. Also, it’s a book about freedom. Why would he do the book? It’s a book about freedom between two people who loved each other. CHOTINER: Hayek talked about disliking “Near Eastern” students because they were “fundamentally dishonest.” He said that he had a “profound dislike for the typical Indian students at the London School of Economics, which I admit are all one type—Bengali moneylender sons.” SUNSTEIN: I didn’t know about that. Wow. Hayek was a very complicated figure. He wrote a lot. Some of it’s not so good. The Hayek that I admire is the Hayek who was an extremely persistent and repetitive and powerful critic of socialist planning on the ground that it couldn’t be made to work because the socialist planners won’t know enough, even if they’re competent and well motivated. And also the Hayek who would occasionally say that liberty has an economic foundation, but also a moral foundation. And, in a time like ours, Hayek as Mr. Liberty—that’s someone who we want to be in the same club with.
September 23, 2025 at 6:01 PM
spratt.bsky.social
the Founders were so careful about presidential powers that they specifically wrote - between making him CIC and the pardon power - that the President can require his cabinet officers to write him a memo. just totally counter-textual to read in vast, unreviewable powers based on the vesting clause!
Article II, section 2, clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution: "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment."
September 22, 2025 at 6:47 PM
spratt.bsky.social
inquest.org/never-forget...

"Those who led the Attica uprising wanted humane treatment. Their bravery resulted in meaningful improvements to prison regulations, which gave us access to recreation, programs, commissary, visitation, showers, and more. Those gains have largely been eroded."
In February 2025, after the governor called for guards to be held accountable for killing Brooks, thousands of corrections staff walked off the job, commencing an illegal strike. The strike was ostensibly a protest of the HALT Act preventing them from using solitary confinement however they wished, and rather obviously a response to being held even minimally accountable for the well-being of the incarcerated people in their care. Facilities fell into immediate dysfunction. Incarcerated people were locked in their cells without means to carry out basic human functions or access medical care. At least nine incarcerated people died during the strike, from a mix of medical neglect, violence, and despair Prison conditions after the strike have worsened. Most prisons are so short-staffed that the National Guard continues to be necessary to maintain basic operations. And we continue to live with the indefinite suspension of recreation, programs, commissary, access to visitation, and programs that strengthen familial bonds, such as the Family Reunion Program and Family Day. Meanwhile, illegal strikers have returned to work after receiving concessions to each of their demands. Yet, from the perspective of incarcerated people, the near-solitary-confinement-like conditions that we experienced during the strike have not ended.
September 10, 2025 at 9:26 PM
spratt.bsky.social
Hell yeah brother
Before I’d pulled out my notebook, Platner and I talked about our favorite science fiction franchises. Platner told me that Star Trek’s optimism had inspired his earliest interest in policy. “This brings us back to Star Trek,” he says to wrap up his philosophy on culture war issues. “You have to solve scarcity. I believe that if you solve scarcity issues, no one gives a fuck about these other things.”
August 29, 2025 at 2:33 PM
spratt.bsky.social
This dude rules
He still thinks of community organizing as the ultimate test of endurance—the same long-haul, no-glory, high-pain threshold ethos that drew him to both punk rock and the Marines. “I know people who organized against the Vietnam War and today they live in a world that is in some ways objectively worse.” “And they’re not bitter,” he says. “If you believe in a better world, you need to get right with the fact that you may never see it.” At this point, he sniffles. “And now I’m going to cry a little. I can do that because I’ve had a lot of therapy.”
August 29, 2025 at 2:29 PM
spratt.bsky.social
when i'm looking for political advice, the absolute first place i turn is to someone who cut their teeth lobbying on behalf of drunk driving
After graduation from Kenyon College in 2002, Longwell worked for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative group in Delaware. In 2005, Longwell moved to Washington, D.C., where she found a job with Richard Berman, a Republican lobbyist and later PR expert who runs several industry-funded nonprofit lobbying and PR organizations.[7] Over the next 15 years she worked at Berman and Company and became senior vice president and communications director, leading media campaigns on a wide range of public policy issues.[8][6] Longwell also served as managing director of the American Beverage Institute,[9][10] a trade association set up by Berman[7] that lobbies on behalf of the alcohol industry, such as by arguing that the risks of drunk driving have been exaggerated and laws that have been adopted to reduce it are ineffective or inappropriate[11] and opposing the lowering of the blood alcohol concentration limit for driving under the influence (DUI) in Utah.[10] According to Berman, "Sarah always had a knife in her teeth".[4]
August 22, 2025 at 7:30 PM
spratt.bsky.social
Pretty sure this is just a lie? I've not seen any data suggesting significantly increased congestion outside the zone
Walden: I think that that ship will have sailed by the time I'm in office. What I'm going to do is have really excellent policies and services and not necessarily relitigate everything that's already been resolved. There's a lawsuit over it, whether it's successful or not, I think the jury is still out. Certainly in the zone, people love the lesser but not nonexistent congestion. I haven't seen the numbers yet on whether carbon has really gone down. What I've seen and heard repeatedly is that congestion outside the zone is significantly increased. So this is one of those things that I think was a poorly thought through policy.
August 20, 2025 at 2:45 PM
spratt.bsky.social
Jim Walden: "Societies are judged by the way they treat their prisoners, their mentally ill and their poor, and we do a crappy job on all three if you ask me."

Also Jim Walden: cops need to be arresting more unhoused people for "vagrancy"
Walden: I'm not saying that. I'm not saying I'm going to reverse it. There are different stages of construction. I'm gonna play the hand that I'm dealt when I'm there. If they're already far along and there's no way to stop them then I can't stop that. I'm just not in favor of it. The problems [at Rikers] are terrible. They're they’re black mark on the city. Societies are judged by the way they treat their prisoners, their mentally ill and their poor, and we do a crappy job on all three if you ask me. Walden: I would start with fare beaters. I was just in Mott Haven the other day, and there was a completely sane person, literally on a crowded commercial street, stepped aside and started urinating on a building in front of a kid. That's something that I would enforce. There is a problem in Corona right now. I was just at a community meeting last week where there are all these homeless people that are intoxicated all of the time and causing mayhem in the neighborhood. There are 50 residents there, including three kids that spoke out of and one of them a nine year old with a knife drawn on him by one of these homeless men. I would enforce vagrancy laws in a selective way.
August 20, 2025 at 2:43 PM
spratt.bsky.social
okay so it's not long enough to draw any conclusions. and the cohort wasn't representative. and we didn't monitor what or how much people ate. and people admitted to eating other things that weren't part of the diet.

nevertheless,
"The study was relatively short, Walter C. Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email. “We need about a year, at minimum, for serious weight loss studies because early changes often reverse or don’t continue,” he added. The researchers could not measure exactly what and when people ate, or how much they consumed, and the participants reported eating some foods besides those provided. And most of the participants were women; men or children may have responded differently, Dr. Davy said. Still, the study suggests that even if a person follows a healthy diet, there’s an added benefit to choosing minimally processed foods over ultraprocessed ones, Dr. Juul said. Evidence consistently suggests that diets high in ultraprocessed foods can make it harder for people to stay at a healthy weight, she added."
August 5, 2025 at 7:00 PM
spratt.bsky.social
famously hard-textured foods like (squints) overnight oats, yogurt, and spaghetti
"The researchers designed two diets and provided the meals. Both diets met U.K. nutrition guidelines, with limited sugars, saturated fats and sodium, but one was composed mostly of minimally processed foods, like overnight oats, plain yogurt and scratch-made spaghetti Bolognese; the other was mostly made up of ultraprocessed foods considered healthy, like whole grain breakfast cereals, plant-based milk, flavored yogurt and frozen lasagna." "That may be because minimally processed foods tend to have fewer calories per bite, said Filippa Juul, a nutritional epidemiologist at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University who was not involved in the study. And those foods generally have a harder texture that requires more chewing, so people may eat more slowly and consume fewer calories before feeling full, she said."
August 5, 2025 at 6:58 PM
spratt.bsky.social
Another way to put this is that all social movements are also intellectual movements: They both contribute to and rely on the ideological groundwater of society. Williams would have us believe that someone who smashes a storefront window in Minneapolis or pitches a tent in Morningside Heights is engaged in the opposite of thinking. But the panicking ruling class wasn’t just interested in flattening the encampments or quelling the looters; it wanted to crush the ideas that these things represented. This is what Baldwin was getting at when spoke of the “spiritual state” of America. “The political institutions of any nation,” he wrote in The Fire Next Time, “are always menaced and controlled by the spiritual state of that nation.” What he meant, I think, was that every time a person contests or defends a political situation, they are also contesting or defending the intellectual terms on which that contest is conducted. You cannot fight without fighting about how you fight. That is why Williams cares so desperately about what the summer of 2020 made us think, even if the protests manifestly failed to achieve their objective goals; it is also why liberal institutions were so eager to snatch up these ideas and exhaust their potential before tossing us back the husks. What Mamdani’s win suggests, however, is that they did not get them all.
August 5, 2025 at 5:30 PM
spratt.bsky.social
😬😬😬
"Public Appeal used an outside auditor to vet around 15,000 signatures it collected for Adams, Pool said. He said he encouraged campaign officials — including Adams’ close confidant and former City Hall adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin — to do the same with the ballot petitions other companies were collecting. “We offered for the other vendors to use the same service but they refused,” Pool told Gothamist in a written statement, adding that members of the campaign told him “it was the state’s job to prove fraud — not ours.”"
August 1, 2025 at 12:37 PM
spratt.bsky.social
Lol c'mon man
"Julian Hill, who oversaw teams of signature gatherers as the company’s director of field operations, recognized Sendra’s name from a list of campaign workers who collected petitions for Adams. Hill said that the company did not permit its workers to forge signatures or deceive signers. But he also said it did not review every petition form to verify the authenticity of signatures. “Because of the timing of when the actual signatures come in, it's so hard,” he told a reporter. After Gothamist spoke with MY Br&’s CEO David Vassel, Hill called the reporter back to say the company does review each signature."
August 1, 2025 at 12:36 PM
spratt.bsky.social
A picture of Gritty, a nasty orange hockey monster
July 30, 2025 at 11:04 PM
spratt.bsky.social
A still from The Simpsons with Principal Skinner saying "I was only in there to get directions on how to get away from there."
July 28, 2025 at 3:02 AM
spratt.bsky.social
"his sisters married Jewish men," on top of being an extremely pathetic response to your anti-Semitism being exposed, is also an incredibly funny way to phrase "he has Jewish brothers-in-law"
"These people and their f------ tree houses," he said to aides about the Sukkot ritual, one person who was present when Cuomo made the comment and another who was told about it after the fact relayed to The Times. A spokeswoman denied that Cuomo had ever made the comment, telling The Times: "His two sisters married Jewish men, and he has the highest respect for Jewish traditions."
July 18, 2025 at 10:39 PM
spratt.bsky.social
least surprising news ever
July 17, 2025 at 11:08 PM
spratt.bsky.social
Went chasing waterfalls

(At the Cascade du Dard)
A very pretty waterfall in a forest
July 15, 2025 at 12:18 PM
spratt.bsky.social
Trekkies: if you see this, post your first experience with Star Trek

PAAAAAAAIIIIINNNN
Spock is touching the Horta, an alien that looks like if a pepperoni pizza was also a carpet. He is mind melding with it and feels unimaginable pain
July 6, 2025 at 11:01 PM
spratt.bsky.social
have literally never heard of this account, so went to their page to see what their whole Deal is and their most recent post before this one is captioned BREAKING about Obama singing a decade ago, lmao
post from this shitty Dem clickbait account "Democratic Wins Media" that reads: "BREAKING: Video of President Obama singing "Amazing Grace" as a eulogy ten years ago today is going mega-viral. This is what American greatness actually looks like"
June 22, 2025 at 7:45 PM
spratt.bsky.social
Lest you think that $20 million figure is usual - it's not. It represents nearly a third of *all* expenditures across *249* publicly defended defense cases since 2020.

The costs to defend an assemblymember against similar allegations in 6 cases over a decade? Less than a million dollars.
A tally by State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office as of May 19 shows that taxpayers have spent $19.4 million to defend Cuomo and his staff in three cases brought by women who allege they were harassed. In just the Trooper 1 case, the defense costs have ballooned to $9.2 million. The bills from the three cases make up nearly one-third of what the state has spent in 249 taxpayer-funded defense cases since January 2020, according to figures from the office. In one similar instance covered under the Public Officer’s Law, the state defended Assemblymember Dennis Gabrysak, who resigned in 2014 following accusations that he harassed seven women in his office. The complaints alleged that Gabrysak made sexual jokes around his employees, touched their bodies and discussed his visits to a local strip club. The total bill to represent Gabrysak in six separate cases that spanned a decade came to about $950,000.
June 21, 2025 at 4:46 PM
spratt.bsky.social
The attempt to wave off his “ethics and conduct” as somehow a distraction from the claim that he would be better for New York minimizes the harassment, but also fails to reflect that the harassment allegations were not some side sin, but in line with everything else that had always been troubling and corroded about Cuomo’s leadership. Yes, there was plenty of power abuse that was sexualized. But the danger in thinking of it as only sexual harassment is that it can be written off as only sexual harassment, walled off from the rest of his governing style, which in Cuomo’s case it absolutely cannot be. Because while it should be disqualifying that he is credibly alleged to have leered and pawed and spoken inappropriately and threatened nine women in his employ, he didn’t just leer and paw and speak inappropriately to and threaten them. That’s how he behaved with everyone! Over decades! And while a savagely unjust white patriarchal political culture may have conditioned us to confuse that kind of behavior with effectiveness, Cuomo was not in fact very effective as governor.
June 21, 2025 at 3:50 PM