«Advisers are worried that the GOP will take the blame for allowing healthcare subsidies to expire, raising costs for millions of Americans ahead of next year’s midterm elections, according to administration officials.»
*snerk*
They couldn’t see this coming? Or they KNEW it was coming and they KNEW they’d have to negotiate something and they KNEW it would just raise the deficit even more and they just didn’t talk about it?
Republicans are either stupid or dishonest. Pick one.
Huh.
«…little-known complication of measles known as immune amnesia. This is a phenomenon in which portions of the immune system’s memory are wiped clean. It occurs because the measles virus can invade not only the cells of the respiratory system, but also the cells of the immune system. This includes the memory B cells, which are specialized white blood cells whose job is to recognize pathogens that the body has encountered and fought off before. When alerted by the memory B cells that they have come across a known pathogen, the immune system can swiftly mobilize the specific antibodies it needs to target and overcome the invader.
Without that early warning system in place, the immune system is perpetually flying blind. This leaves the person susceptible to contracting secondary infections from other pathogens, including those that they have successfully fought off before. Researchers have found that, after recovering from the measles, the immune system is suppressed for at least several months, and for up to two years.»
https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/measles-infection-can-cause-immune-amnesia
Hey. I think we know a modern-day King John.
«Like El Cid before him, William [Marshal] had now stepped up from the world of knightly adventure to the front rank of regional and international politics. But he would still throw himself headlong into battle when the situation called for it. At one encounter between English and French troops at Milly castle in northern France, Marshal climbed from the bed of the empty moat and up a ladder to the top of the ramparts, while wearing full armor and carrying his sword. At the top of the ramparts he singled out the constable of Milly and “dealt such a blow at him that he cut through his helmet [so that the constable] . . . fell down unconscious, battered and stunned.” The Marshal, “now weary,” sat on the defeated constable to stop him from waking up and escaping.53
For once, William Marshal was not present at the death of the king when, in 1199, Richard I succumbed to gangrene after being hit with a lucky shot from a crossbow bolt while besieging a castle in Châlus-Chabrol. He was, however, involved in the politicking that placed Richard’s brother John on the Plantagenet throne at the expense of his young nephew Arthur of Brittany—a decision that would ultimately prove fatal for Arthur, whom John captured, imprisoned, and killed in the first years of his reign. For supporting John, William was rewarded with yet more valuable prizes, including the earldom of Pembroke in west Wales, which linked together his now-extensive English and Welsh estates with those in Ireland. Once more, his chivalric values—chief among them loyalty—seemed to have served him right.
Yet William could not get along with John. The new king’s character was neatly summed up by a chronicler known as the Anonymous of Béthune. Although John was capable of lavish hospitality and generosity, noted the writer, adding that he gave out handsome cloaks to his household knights, John was otherwise “a very bad man, more cruel than all others, he lusted after beautiful women and because of this he shamed the high men of the land, for which reason he was greatly hated. Whenever he could, he told lies rather than the truth. . . . He hated and was jealous of all honorable men; it greatly displeased him when he saw someone acting well. He was brim-full with evil qualities.”54
This was far from the only damning judgment passed of King John, who between 1199 and 1216 enjoyed one of the least successful reigns in English history. Even a summary list of his failures runs quite long: John lost most of the Plantagenets’ lands in France (including the duchy of Normandy); he murdered Arthur of Brittany; he irritated Pope Innocent III to such a degree that he was excommunicated; he extorted so much money from his barons in taxes and semi-legal fines that he pushed many of them to the verge of either bankruptcy or rebellion; he wasted all the money he had plundered from his people on a hopeless war to regain his French lands; he drove his realm into a civil war, during which he was forced to grant a peace treaty circumscribing his royal powers, later known as Magna Carta; he reignited the civil war by renouncing Magna Carta and consequently suffered a full invasion of his realm by the heir to the French crown, Prince Louis; and in the end, he died, abandoned by most of his allies, having lost many of his crown jewels in the marshlands in eastern England known as The Wash.
To what degree precisely all of this was John’s fault is not our concern here.* What is significant, though, is that the Anonymous of Béthune, who was probably in the service of a Flemish lord from that town, near Calais, saw John’s failings through an unmistakably chivalric prism. John was not merely incompetent, an unskilled leader, unlucky, or undiplomatic. He was also untruthful, dishonorable, lustful, untrustworthy, and spiteful. For as much as William Marshal’s biographer would portray his rise through life as the reward for his dedication to knightly virtues, so too would chroniclers like the Anonymous of Béthune ascribe John’s free fall through kingship as just deserts for his unchivalrous approach to life. Knightliness—or the perception of knightliness—could make or break a man in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It made William Marshal. It unmade King John.
William fell out with John early in his reign, and spent the middle seven years of it in self-imposed exile in Ireland. John summoned him back to England in 1213, as the wheels began to fall off his regime—Marshal used this as yet another opportunity to demonstrate his unwavering fidelity, by riding to the service of a lord who hardly deserved it on any other grounds save the oath Marshal had sworn to support him on becoming Earl of Pembroke. He stuck ostentatiously by the king’s side during the rebellion that produced Magna Carta—just as he had done during the last year of Henry II’s life, when men (including John) had abandoned the old king and looked to a new regime. Even as England collapsed into civil war, he refused to abandon his monarch—although he allowed his sons to join the rebel side, in order to hedge the family’s bets and ensure that someone ended up having backed the winning party. When John finally died, in October 1216, Marshal was, as usual, not far away. He took personal responsibility for John’s nine-year-old son Henry: knighting him, attending him on his coronation as Henry III in Gloucester Abbey, and going on to lead the war effort that removed French troops from English soil and reunited the realm under the new young king’s rule. His final charge into battle took place at Lincoln in 1217, by which time he was about seventy years old and had to be reminded to put his helmet on before he spurred his horse toward the enemy.
Lincoln was a dramatic victory, which turned the course of the war. What was more, it cemented William Marshal’s reputation as the greatest knight who had ever lived. When he died a few years later in 1219, he summoned the young king Henry to his deathbed and gave him a solemn lecture. “I beg the Lord our God that . . . he grant you grow up to be a worthy man,” croaked William. “And if it were the case that you followed in the footsteps of some wicked ancestor, and that your wish was to be like him, then I pray to God, the son of Mary, that He does not give you long to live.”
“Amen,” replied the king, and left Marshal to die in peace.»
Sorry, just couldn’t find a good stopping point. 🙂
Government’s Greatest Achievements of the Past Half Century | Brookings https://share.google/bO8K7nUOSQ777fWGY
So, here’s the Brookings Institute’s list of top 50 government accomplishments from 1944 to 2000. Scanning the list, I wonder how many of these would be considered “Democrat things” by our current Dear Leader.
Also, ACA (“Obamacare”) isn’t on this list.
Yeah, all the stuff, but one more thing: it’s striking how *rapidly* Johnson falls back to “I didn’t see it.” For every Republican, that’s the *instant* go-to: I didn’t see it, I haven’t read it yet, I didn’t hear about it, I know nothing.
https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/10/02/lawhore-vagistan-harvard/
I would sign up for “RuPaulitics: Drag, Race, and Desire” in a heartbeat.
(This guy seems like a valuable addition to Harvard.)
Pope Leo hits out at critics of global warming – BBC News https://share.google/BtAZn3U6kYNzHeyXJ
Speaking as a Methodist: yay, the Pope!
Just to say: everybody’s treating this a binary extended/not extended thing, but there’s a billion-dollar gradient, not a binary. How happy will we be with a $700 mil restoration? $200 mil?
«The billionaire right wing architects of this new modern era right wing propaganda bullhorn (that may soon be comprised of Fox, CNN, Sinclair, TikTok, Twitter, and countless other media properties) have no limit of money to burn on profit-losing propaganda ventures in a country that just took a hatchet to any remaining financial or consumer protection regulators.
They may never have the competency to actually execute, but given the already extremely shaky status of journalism, the media, and informed consensus, I think emphatic alarmism remains the right response to the grand, unsubtle mass media plans of our shittiest billionaires.»
«Crusading to the east was dying, and its institutions were following suit. In the early fourteenth century the Knights Templar were destroyed in a cynical and systematic attack led by the French government of Philip IV “the Fair” (see chapter 11), whose ministers accused Templar leaders of blasphemy, sexual deviance, and gross misconduct.43 Although many writers from the fourteenth century to the sixteenth fantasized about a new age in which the spirit of 1096–99 would once again descend, and all Christendom could reclaim Jerusalem, it would be 1917 before another western general could walk through the gates of the holy city as conqueror, when Edmund Allenby strolled in to take command on behalf of the Allies, who had driven out the Ottomans in the First World War.
Yet at the same time, crusading continued, and in some cases even in its original form against non-Christian “infidels.” The Teutonic Knights continued their war on pagans in the Baltic well into the fifteenth century. The Knights Hospitaller set up an international headquarters on Rhodes, where they fought running sea battles, policing the Mediterranean against Muslim pirates from Asia Minor and north Africa, under the guise of a holy war. And when the Ottoman Empire began to sweep toward eastern Europe, Christian knights rallied to the cause with crosses pinned to their plate armor. But just as often, crusading became a badge to wear to give any war fought by a Christian power an added gloss of legitimacy. In 1258 when Pope Alexander IV wished his allies (including the Republic of Venice) to make war on Alberigo of Romano, ruler of Treviso, he sent a papal legate to preach a crusade against Alberigo in St. Mark’s Square—a parade at which the legate produced a bevy of naked women whom he claimed had been sexually assaulted by the Trevisan. Soon after, in the 1260s, Simon de Montfort the younger, son of the Cathar crusader of the same name, declared his rebellion against King Henry III of England to be a crusade.* A century later, Henry III’s great-great-grandson John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, claimed to be a crusader when he went to fight on the Iberian Peninsula in the hope of seizing the crown of Castile in the name of his wife, daughter of the murdered king Pedro “the Cruel.” In the 1380s the English bishop of Norwich, Henry Despenser, led a crusade to Flanders, which was supposedly to wipe out supporters of an antipope, Clement VII, but was really a side campaign in the long-running Anglo-French struggle known as the Hundred Years War. The fifteenth century saw five crusades launched against the Hussites—followers of a Bohemian heretic called Jan Hus, an early dissident theologian of what would come to be known as the Reformation (see chapter 16). And in 1493, the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus sailed back from his first encounter with the Americas announcing in terms strikingly reminiscent of crusader rhetoric his discovery of a land of great wealth and many pagans, which could be claimed on behalf of all Christendom.
And this was far from the last mention of the C-word. Crusading outlived the Middle Ages, and remains today a favored trope of the alt-right, neo-Nazis, and Islamist terrorists, all of whom cleave to the decidedly shaky idea that it has defined Christian and Muslim relations for a millennium. They are not right, but they are not original in their error either. Crusading—a bastard hybrid of religion and violence, adopted as a vehicle for papal ambition but eventually allowed to run as it pleased, where it pleased, and against whom it pleased, was one of the Middle Ages’ most successful and enduringly poisonous ideas. Its survival is a sign of both its genius and of the readiness of people both then and now to throw themselves into conflict in the name of a higher cause.»
Powers and Thrones
Dan Jones
Here, Read This 