This is some of the most important reporting to come out of the war on Iran so far. And it's nice to see CBS doing it, i.e good reminder that bad leadership doesn't mean that every journalist there instantly stops doing their job.

Army survivors of deadly attack in Kuwait dispute Pentagon's account, say unit "was unprepared" to defend itself

Survivors of an Iranian attack that killed six U.S. service members have disputed the Pentagon's description of events and said their unit in Kuwait was left dangerously exposed.

cbsnews.com

I mean, this is just sad.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 5mo ago

Watters: "This isn't over. We still have Cuba, Greenland, and Canada. Just kidding."

3 ships. The Strait is not open.

We're due for another absolutely bugfuck prime time presidential address so Donald can tell us how we won the iran war and hormuz is opened and the ship captains need to have some balls and just go full blast through musandam.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 5mo ago

Q: As of today, who controls the Strait of Hormuz? LEAVITT: We expect that the strait will be opened immediately Q: Who controls the strait right now? LEAVITT: *refuses to answer*

NEW: Trump accepted $37m worth of donated steel for his WH ballroom project from the Luxembourg-based company ArcelorMittal. Days later, the WH made adjustments to Trump's tariffs that could benefit ArcelorMittal.

White House Secures Foreign Steel for Ballroom Project

nytimes.com

no idea where all the steel is going or if it will even get delivered, but it isn't going to build a fucking ballroom. the drawings i saw were of a marble or masonry building and you just don't need that much steel for marble sheer walls in a place like DC. gravity does 99% of the work there.

(Technical note: Obviously, there have been many Christian leaders/authorities/regimes that have enacted wanton violence at different stages of history while invoking their faith, but it's also true that Christian pacifism and theologies that fall in-between are very old, super common beliefs.)

On the one hand, this is a pretty normative Christian belief. On the other hand, wild to hear MTG — a self-described Christian nationalist — take this position in this political moment, when other self-described Christian nationalists/those associated with the movement are arguing otherwise.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 4mo ago

MTG: "Republicans are terrified. They're cowards. I really have to call out Speaker Mike Johnson, who calls himself a Christian. Any Christian really need to take pause and ask themselves, 'As a Christian, do you really support the president calling to wipe out an entire civilization of people?'"

Has anyone ever wanted to be cool this badly and missed the mark so far

Asha Rangappa@asharangappa.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I just learned that Kash Patel signs off all his emails with, “I’ll see you down range.” I…don’t think he realizes what he is saying

BREAKING: study shows men love having young ladies around, but men do not like it when mom, wife, or teacher tells them what to do

Ben Zipperer@benzipperer.org · 4mo ago

In the US military, gender integration had essentially no effect on men's actual performance or retention, but men's perception of workplace quality changed: perceived quality rose in units with newly integrated female enlisted soldiers, but it fell when female officers held supervisory roles

It basically combining George Lakoff’s "Strict Father Model" of conservative politics, combined with the trauma-bonding dynamics of a high-control group.

It explains everything in three sentences: - loyalty - obedience - resistance to contradictory information - resistance to changing position in the face of harmful actions taken by the high-control organization leader (i.e. health care access cuts, rising prices, attacks against democratic rights)

We have a paper just posted on the arxiv and I haven’t shared it here bc it seems…weird

I try and remember that finding joy is a form of rebellion, and sharing joy is how we build community that endures. Too many of us (looks in mirror) learned it's ok to trauma dump, but sharing joy is bragging and wrong. Share. Your. Joy. (Reminder that you have the bestest cutest doggos also)

Trump last night: “In the meantime our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest.” FDR, June 6, 1944: American soldiers “fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate.” open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

Iran Schools Trump in the Art of the Deal

Can you call it a ceasefire when we’re the only ones who have ceased firing?

open.substack.com

I feel a lot better after this deep dive than I did from all the superficial reassurances during briefings.

Swapna Krishna@swapnakrishna.com · 4mo ago

I can say without hesitation that this is the HARDEST article I have ever written, but I am incredibly proud of it. If you have questions about Orion’s heat shield, given the issues with Artemis I, I hope I can provide some answers: www.nationalgeographic.com/science/arti...

Bloody hell. Researchers invented a disease, published two fake papers to see if LLM’s would ingest them and kick them up as fact — and then it broke containment and all the major AI’s bought in. Information pollution. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A ceasefire with still throttled (no more than 15 ships daily) Hormuz throughput well serves Tehran's strategic interest. Iran's main leverage is a closed Strait + time, so building another 2 weeks of pressure on the global economy while not being bombed feels ideal from the Iranian perspective.

I started reading a lot of YA about a decade ago when my eldest was moving into chapter books, and what shocked me was not the smut (of which I found very little) but the graphic violence. There’s always been whump, and teens eat that shit up, but it’s gotten a lot more detailed in non-horror books

scott dagostino@scottdagostino.ca · 4mo ago

Buying a romance novel for my stepmother last week, I laughed at how Indigo had one table for “Romance” and another for “Spicy Romance.” Is that what we’re calling smut now, I laughed. But this YA thing here is sinister. We all know that “clean” is being used for “queer-free” here. Fuck this 😡

Imagine that

This is the difference between lettering, and lettering with a designer's eye. A character is waking up after nearly drowning. The top balloon is okay. It gets the job done. But the bottom balloon really SELLS the watery lungs.

Or that he'll keep doing them after he's elected.

Noah Berlatsky@nberlat.bsky.social · 4mo ago

It's worrisome that people keep saying Platner is most electable with apparently no consideration of the main worry: that he's done other things that haven't come out yet which could sink his candidacy. 1

It's worrisome that people keep saying Platner is most electable with apparently no consideration of the main worry: that he's done other things that haven't come out yet which could sink his candidacy. 1

This is now the 4th special motions panel in the DC Circuit that features Katsas and Rao together in 12 months. The odds of that are incredibly low. This is beyond straining credulity. I think the random assignment to the panel in the DC Circuit is fundamentally broken.

There are 4 Republican appointed judges on the DC Circuit out of 11 and Anthropic managed to pull a panel with all Republican appointees with Katsas and Rao. Why does this keep happening?

Katsas and Rao strike again on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. This time, they ruled that Anthropic's supply chain risk designation cannot be put on hold. How the hell are these two on every single major decision in the DC Circuit. It's absurd. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

vance is so personally off putting that even foreign electorates want nothing to do with him

Newsweek@newsweek.com · 4mo ago

Orban is one of President Donald Trump's key European political allies.

THREAD: The Massachusetts House just advanced a draconian and unconstitutional social media ban bill. "This legislation would have kicked Greta Thuneberg off social media before she organized her first climate protest. How does that make kids safer?" www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2026-04...

this would fix me

Massimo (mirror)@rainmaker1973-m.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The “pasta alla forma” in its original recipe of creamed pasta in a wheel of Parmigiano Reggiano seasoned for at least 24 months, whose surface is set on fire with grappa before the preparation. [📹 vera.vettorato] Original post

We warned that H.R. 1's SNAP cost shift could drive states to make it as difficult as possible to access SNAP, leaving eligible low-income families without the food assistance they need. In Arizona, that prediction appears to be coming true — with a heartbreaking human cost:

ProPublica@propublica.org · 5mo ago

NEW: Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act imposes stricter food stamp work requirements and shifts a larger share of the costs to states. Arizona’s swift implementation has made it more difficult to apply and caused nearly half of recipients to lose benefits.