If you’ve been watching our Meta antitrust coverage and are wondering what’s going on today: break time! We’ll be back in DC with Judge Boasberg — who has, you may recall, a lot happening right now — on Monday.
On the heels of the millions-strong April 5th Hands Off protests and the March Tesla Takedown events, an estimated 400 events are scheduled for tomorrow.
The Washington Post has some more detail, and as usual, there’s a lot of new sign fodder: this week alone we’ve had a major court escalation over unlawful deportations, some probably also unlawful mass consumer protection firings, the potential end of routine food safety inspections, our usual dose of Brendan Carr shenanigans, and a DOGE data privacy nightmare. Tariffs are still on, too.
[events.pol-rev.com]
The Onion will probably be making up new fake iOS services until the end of time, and I’ll chuckle at every one.
[theonion.com]
If not, make sure to click through — ideally several times — for the full effect (no Bluesky account required). While salvagers have recovered deeper ships, even a feat like raising the Vasa was done from 32 meters. We’ll have to stick to lowering the Atlantic instead.
Washington Post journalist Will Oremus reports that it advanced out of the House Energy & Commerce Committee today after a Republican majority rejected amendments proposed to mitigate its significant speech problems. It now awaits a vote on the House floor.
It’s one of numerous bills being taken up by the House Energy & Commerce Committee starting at 10AM ET — a well-intentioned proposal that, as I wrote last month and discussed on Decoder, is a dead end for fighting nonconsensual sexual imagery and a threat to free speech. Fight for the Future is currently running a petition against it and has a tool for finding your representative (if you live in the US) too.
Kottke directed me toward a website posing a question I have never, ever asked myself: which of two chickens is more frolicsome? Which is more optimistic? More aberrant? Creator Erika Hall will take suggestions for new adjectives, too.
[clickens.chicken.pics]
Whatever the opposite of coolhunting is, Max Read’s analytical prediction of an accursed new internet trend does it:
The high-alpha nature of committed, political “smoking is actually good” arguments, combined with existing coalitions for developing annoyance at people with public-health masters degrees into ideological position, is likely to create a solid pro-smoking bloc, especially as we enter summer and face down a fertile period for stupid discourse.
[maxread.substack.com]
