email countdown @CountdownEmail

I'll be writing about this for NR, but I will lay the Los Angeles situation out here flatly. Pratt didn't lose because of fraud. Pratt lost because, just like Chicago, it's an 80/20 Democratic city. In fact, he seems to have placed exactly where was in the final polls. The real scandal is what's legal: with a 100% mail-in system, an endless window for ballot counting and legal mechanisms for unions and organizers to harvest (and later "cure") ballots, California's system is a purpose-built black box designed to fuel paranoia. And for no other purpose than that it allows Democratic intra-party battles to become a test of organizing strength for NGOs and unions. People are right to be angry about the system. But even the way the votes are being counted now makes perfect (albeit disgusting) sense without recourse to claims of "fraud."

Another angle of this absolute beast of a house

Mr. Illinois @mr1llinois

a day ago

Duncan Manor in Towanda towers over the prairie, visible from I-55 and Route 66. It was built by a cattle breeder around 1865 and saved from decay about a decade ago. It’s now a family home you can tour and hold events at. A few interior shots below.

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Very interesting interview from the early 1990s with LaToya Jackson. Michael Jackson's sister.

If you introduced a bill dissolving the state of New York and just splitting all the assets between union workers it would pass the legislature in a landslide

I’m not comparing him to Hitler, but I want to remind people of something. When the generals told Hitler there wouldn’t be a thousand-year Reich, but he didn’t accept defeat gracefully. He told them to flood the coal mines and bring down the electrical grid around Berlin. His rationale was: If I can’t have it, nobody gets it. That’s Donald Trump’s psychology with the Republican Party. He doesn’t quietly want them to win after he’s gone. His whole identity is built on the narrative that you were nothing before I got here and you’ll be nothing when I leave. He’s not going to campaign for his successor. It’s not in his personality. It never will be. Watch what happens.

This is probably the most audibly clear and crisp I’ve ever heard any heckle ever. Bravo

Alley Files @alleytopfiles

3 days ago

🚨 A person screamed out !! “Erika supports Pedophiles??” Omg 😳

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Why do you GIVE AF that Soldier Field is, ''20,000 seats fewer'' than the JETS' stadium? Yeah the 2002 renovation was moronic and the McCaskeys are fuckking idiots who cut corners in all the wrong places. But SO WHAT? You a major shareholder in the organization? And even if you're inbound from the FAR suburbs, you can catch the 130 BUS from OGILVE or UNION STATION - it literally drops you in front of MUSEUM CAMPUS. You just outed yourself as a LAME.

GFed @GfedGoCrazy

3 days ago

Soldier Field sucks. The Bears leaving Chicago Sucks. Everything sucks.

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This is an actual page on the White House web site. It reads like something written about a third world dictator. So embarrassing. I have not seen any branch of the federal government sink this low in my lifetime.

Mama Possum looks utterly exhausted. A storm is approaching, so she had to lead her babies to take shelter on our porch. They’re building a Google Data Center right in our area and have already cleared thousands of trees. It’s clear that Mama Possum has lost her original home and is desperately looking for a new, safer place 😭

My sister was born with profound disabilities, a lot more severe than Down’s. She was non-verbal all her life. I don’t think she could even recognize our mother when she walked into a room. Growing up around the special ed system, I was taught the standard line on children with disabilities: we should cherish their special qualities, the purity of their happiness and the innocence of their love. There is nothing wrong with them, they’re just different. I repeated this line for years, but eventually I started to wonder if I believed any of it. When my sister died at age 26, I figured it was time to look back over her life in full. Did she make anyone’s life better? To be blunt, I could not think of any way that she did. How could she, when she didn’t have the capacity to act in any meaningful sense. On the other side of the ledger, she made a lot of people’s lives worse. Another member of our family was in and out of institutions for years later in life, and part of me thinks the strain of caring for my sister was too much for this person and drove them mad. Of course people loved my sister. My parents did. But people can project love onto lots of things, the way pet owners project love onto their cats or a stalker projects love onto a celebrity. If the object of your love doesn’t know you exist and never will, is it even real? Try to answer honestly even though it’s a difficult thing to ask about a member of your own family. I’m not trying to make a case for selective abortion. Once a life exists, we have duties toward it that can’t be shrugged off for utilitarian reasons. I just wanted to counterbalance the rosy picture being put out there. My sister was an extreme case. Other disabled people can talk, recognize faces, and form relationships, which I assume makes things different for their families. My only message is: It’s hard. It’s really hard. The best thing my sister did in her life was give the people around her the opportunity to show their best selves. But the reason she was able to do that was because it’s really hard.

Germán S. Díaz del Castillo @german_saucedo

3 days ago

I think that part of the reason why Christian messaging related to this subject is falling on deaf ears is that they don’t realize what they’re asking for and who they’re asking it of. However sanctifying and fulfilling the life of a parent raising a mentally disabled child is,

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The aspirin in your medicine cabinet got its start in a tree like this one. People chewed willow bark for pain and fever for more than 3,500 years before anyone worked out why it helped. The bark is loaded with a natural painkiller. An Egyptian medical scroll from around 1500 BC lists willow as a remedy for aches. The ancient Greeks reached for it too. The path to the modern pill runs through England. In 1763, a man named Edward Stone wrote to the Royal Society, Britain's leading science academy, describing five years of treating feverish villagers with dried willow bark. Chemists later pulled the active ingredient out of the bark and named it salicin, after salix, the Latin word for willow. Your body breaks salicin down into a stronger painkiller, but that one is harsh on the stomach. So in 1897 a chemist at the German company Bayer tweaked the molecule into a gentler, steadier version. It went on sale in 1899 as aspirin. It caught on. The world now makes around 40,000 tons of aspirin a year, more than 100 billion tablets, enough for about a dozen for every person on Earth. People take it for headaches, fevers, sore muscles, and to lower the odds of a heart attack, and they have swallowed something like a trillion tablets in the last hundred years. But the willow never made any of this for us. That painkiller is the tree's own alarm system. When bugs or disease attack a willow, it pumps the chemical through its tissues to switch on its defenses and warn the rest of the tree that trouble is on the way. We took a tree's panic signal and pressed it into a pill. The name is wrong, by the way. A Swedish scientist, Carl Linnaeus, called it Salix babylonica, willow of Babylon, because he figured it came from the ancient Middle East. It comes from northern China and traveled west along old trade routes. Most of the weeping willows you see in parks aren't the original tree at all. They're hybrids. They grow fast, live only about 40 to 75 years, and send out shallow roots that hunt for water. That is why you so often see them leaning over a pond, and why they are famous for wrecking the pipes underneath. So sure, they might be the most beautiful trees in existence. They are also the reason the world's most common medicine exists.

𝑝𝑢𝑟𝑒 @purelivn

2 days ago

weeping willows might just be the most beautiful trees in existence

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This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention. The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean. And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them. Record-breaking temperatures. A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse. The response? Yank out the instruments and walk away. That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency. For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives. The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident. That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first. cnn.com/2026/06/03/cli…

Everyone I know in Toronto goes to this cult gym. It's called Sweat & Tonic. Memberships are $290/mo. Two locations downtown, 25,000+ square feet each. Includes 200+ classes (HIIT, spin, yoga, pilates, boxing, hot yoga, cold plunge, sauna) And a co-working lounge w/ private meeting rooms, an in-house cafe, and a cocktail bar. I think they'll probably do very well.

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Friend is visiting Seattle this weekend. Here is his report: Seattle nightlife might be the most cooked market in America. Went out in Cap Hill with my buddy who’s a legitimate Chad. In NYC he’s batting over .500 on infield cold approaches. Seattle? We went 0-for-15. Girls with face tats, dyed green hair, three piercings, smoking cigs outside the bar were rejecting him and laughing like they were Victoria’s Secret models. At least 25% of the girls were lesbians and my friend was still trying to recruit them away from their girlfriends like he was an SEC football coach. I’ve never seen a dating market this brutal. Seattle nightlife needs a federal investigation. Is Seattle the worst dating market in USA?

Clubbing is dead and has been replaced by fitness & wellness. Ppl used to party to socialize and date but now they do things like HYROX, bathhouses, and running raves. The death of clubbing is something to be studied: — US has lost 12% of its nightclubs in the last 24 months — 25% of US adults didn’t drink at all last year — Gen Z drinks 30% less than Millennials did at the same age On the flip side: — According to Strava, the number of running clubs recorded on the platform increased 3.5x in 2025 — 72% of Gen Z go to run clubs to meet new people — Sauna and spa market: $11.8B → $22.4B by 2034 The post-alcohol economy is gonna be a massive category.

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It’s deeply odd to me that America is a far less 24/7 hour society today than it was 10, 20, or even 30 years ago. I vividly remember friends from the UK back in 1996 marveling at the fact that in the mid-sized Indiana town where I went college it was possible to buy groceries, clothing, a lawn mower, a snow blower, Lego sets, and bow hunting gear at 3 AM on any given Tuesday of the year. That was peak American Empire, and it’s long gone.

Degen CPA @DrewVento

3 days ago

When Walmart never went back to 24 hours nation wide after Covid I knew that was the end of America.

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Ha! Was this all just rage bait? If so, well done.

Brian Eastwood @BrianEastwoodx

2 days ago

This Jesse and Ashley Ridgway Down syndrome abortion story isn’t adding up to me. I think they faked the whole thing. I went to McJuggernuggets YouTube channel, which is Jesse’s main channel with over 4 million subscribers. His channel is riddled with controversial and weird,

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What sort of freak has somebody film him delivering the news to his wife that his son has a 95% chance of having down syndrome? This guy has been trying to monetize this tragedy from the beginning. He's trying to make money off killing his own child.

It's hard to overstate how much of an outlier California is for its slow vote-counting relative to literally any other state or almost any other industrialized democracy.

Why are our lawmakers such idiots?

Bill Hammond @NYHammond

2 days ago

A bill mandating that pharmacists receive a $10.18 "dispensing fee" for each prescription - which applies to health plans covering smaller employers and individuals - passed the NYS Assembly on the last day of session. It would add ~$570M per year to drug costs

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