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“Beef between Disney and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis shows no sign of abating.” — Axios

My fellow Americans, we have a rodent problem.

Mickey Mouse and his handlers at Disney have gone too far.

Florida is where woke goes to die. And I, Ron DeSantis, am running for president so I can kill joy nationally. As the next president of the United States, I promise to slaughter Mickey Mouse. And if killing one universally beloved cultural symbol isn’t enough, I’ll use my pudding-slick fingers to choke every character that brought even a glimmer of joy to your childhood, even if that means snuffing Snow White, asphyxiating Ariel, or throttling Tinker Bell.

64% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, with one of the main reasons being the high cost of rent and housing, thanks in part to large investors, like Blackstone, buying up homes and leaving them vacant while raising rents.

The post The Truth About Crazy High Rents in the US appeared first on MintPress News.

The governor has overseen a dramatic rise in home insurance premiums and legislative giveaways to insurance companies.

The post Ron DeSantis Has Raked in $3.9 Million From Insurance Industry, New Report Reveals appeared first on The Intercept.

“I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight.” — Tucker Carlson in a leaked text to a producer at Fox News (New York Times)

Silently comparing dicks at urinals

Hostile takeovers

Chest to chest, lots of shouting, making a big show of being led away by girlfriend before a single punch is thrown

Sulking in silence until SOMEBODY’S ready to say, “SORRY”

Drawing pistols at dawn, noon, and sunset

Recklessly overpaying for a social media platform

MONSTER TRUCK SMASHJAM CRUSHFEST

Banging your best friend’s girlfriend

There are four primary determinants of social hierarchy. They are productive ability, social ties, ideology and violent ability. All are affected by geography.

None of these operate in isolation. Productive ability directly affects violent ability.  Ideology determines what people will and won’t do but over time tends to move towards what a Marxist would call material determinants, though that time can be a LONG time: it took about two thousand years for the early kings to rise after the introduction of agriculture, so the power of ideology, though not the only factor slowing adoption, shouldn’t be understated. Two thousand years shows a lot of resistance.

Part of what’s devastating about Jennifer Grotz’s Still Falling, her fourth full-length collection, is the calm, piercing exactitude of her renderings. Her language is supple, clear-eyed, neither showy nor minimalist, evincing an almost journalistic fidelity to the real—a fidelity that simultaneously allows her to leap and associate in dazzling, unexpected ways. She has the spiritual ranginess of W. S. Merwin or her teacher Adam Zagajewski, but also their consistency: you pick up a Jennifer Grotz book because you want to hear that voice again, and again. She’s making some of the finest work of our times. Maybe it’s no surprise, then, given these times, that her newest sweep of poems—Still Falling—is a cataract of grief, a cascade of elegy that is as quietly ecstatic as it is undaunted, steady, loving life as it mourns. There are echoes of Ellen Bryant Voigt in the opening sequence, which takes its measure, its beginning, from a bewildered memory of leaving behind a lover—of having to go, even as so much in the speaker of the poem yearns not to. As she drives away, the voice wonders:

We were very disappointed when our Airbnb rental turned out to be just the space underneath a table at a Red Lobster restaurant. We’d been led to believe that our rental would be a stand-alone room, including a bed, walls, and a door. By the time we realized the true state of our accommodations, there were no remaining hotel vacancies in the area and we were stuck under the table for the duration of our five-day vacation.

Our stay was unsatisfying for numerous reasons, the lack of privacy being chief among them. Since it was our honeymoon, my wife and I looked forward to being intimate without an audience of strangers, but that proved impossible under the Red Lobster table. Most diners who noticed us seemed alarmed and not always receptive to sharing the space.

At one point, I was repeatedly kicked in the neck by a restless toddler. Another time, a diner spilled coleslaw in my wife’s hair and she had to rinse off with half-drunk water glasses from the table. Though it was never explicitly stated, we’d been under the impression that bathrooms with showers would be included in the rental.

I’m sat here at Costa Coffee in Paddington waiting for the 10:30 to Totnes.

I walked a good few miles yesterday exploring the back-alleys, greenways, footpaths and canal paths from Muswell Hill through Hornsey and down along the Regent Canal. I just love walking …

Historian Alfred W. McCoy discusses China’s rapid economic and political rise and how Beijing is well positioned to broker an end to the war in Ukraine.

The post China, the Peacemaker? appeared first on The Intercept.

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

- by Laura Niemi, Jesse Graham & John M Doris

Read at Psyche