G Tierce

A friend on the Hill once described the Tinker Bell theory of the Constitution.

Once you stop believing in it—it dies.

One of the best examples of racial exceptionalism clouding basic cognitive function on the part of a subset of the US commentariat was when the NYT ran a rare story about the IDF shooting children in the head and evidenced this with actual MRIs and X-Rays and people still denied this was possible.

The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in the US | Bryan Armen Graham The real risk for American broadcasters is not that dissent will be visible. It is that audiences will start assuming anything they do not show is being hidden

Why did the American audience apparently hear different audio of JD Vance's appearance at the Olympics than the audio heard by the rest of the world?

NBC denies muting. But it's part of overall disturbing developments in the US corporate media world.

This is me, except I do semi-follow volleyball (indoor and beach, and play rec leagues), and baseball (having grown up going to the occasional Oakland A's game).

I did get legit excited watching Jesse Diggins come from 5th (IIRC) to take the Gold by a hair in the women's X-country ski relay in 2018

Here's a more elaborate (albeit less plausible) CONOPS involving a system of UUVs (semi-autonomous missile barges + defenses) in Norwegian fjords.

files.catbox.moe/ykyd9p.pdf

Unfortunately, Claude's ability to create graphics (or at least my skill in describing what I want) is sadly deficient.

In between work, school, and getting ready for the next parachute jump, I've been thinking about European nuclear deterrence and strategic autonomy. The attached paper proposes extending French nuclear umbrella over the EU through a rail-mobile ICBM derived from the M51.

files.catbox.moe/7ie4im.pdf

X is a health threat for anyone who uses it and I'm not sure there's any safe level of exposure. It's like mercury or lead, but faster acting.

Bill Ackman, for example, shows us what X toxicity does to humans at a high level. It has completely liquified his brain and hollowed out his skull.

I invite you all to get into the weirdest, hardest and most wonderful sport: Biathlon.

(I love it so much I went to Norway last March to see my favs biathletes retire.)

Here’s an intro I wrote in December 2024.

gillianbrockell.ghost.io/you-should-g...

Good training sucks! It makes you get to the end, stare into the middle distance, light up a smoke, and realize how exhausted and beat up you are after two weeks in the desert getting your ass handed to you five times a day. It *has to* or you don’t learn anything except what’s already in the book!

One of the more fucked up media policies that the DOD has implemented is the lockdown on postings from individual battalions and brigades. No more memorials from KIAs or anything of that nature. The 16th anniversary of my buddy’s death was this week and not a peep from the unit FB page.

A year ago, I published a very long article about administrative capacity and execution of laws. If DOJ has ever needed to be in receivership, it would be now... (I don't think the Court would actually permit that. I'm just saying...)

review.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/u...

AIPAC a little birdie told me that Cory Booker cosponsored ONE piece of legislation that would restore sanctions on a grand total of FIVE ISRAELI JEWS. That man is an antisemite and it is VITAL that you spend 80,000,000 dollars against him when a socialist runs against him.

Trump's Schedule F Rule Finalized A bizarro rule formally justifies politicizing public services

New, from me: Trump finalized his Schedule F policy, allowing him to remove job protections from career civil servants.

The new rule is dishonest and unmoored from reality in its effort to formalize the politicization of the federal government 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/trumps-sch...

Four years ago I suggested that AIPAC’s scorched earth tactics against Dems who make meaningful critiques of Israel while still trying to position themselves as “pro-Israel” were going to significantly strengthen the influence of further-left critics, and things have gotten far worse in the interim.

Much of this is downstream of having successfully catapulted a socialist into executive office without a sufficiently strong socialist parliamentary bloc. We would have been running into the same problems if Bernie won in 2016. Sucks but that's what it is.

The Epstein files is a ton of chit chat about how unfair it is that society puts any constraints on billionaires’ ability to own and exploit people

Important thread. @joshtpm.bsky.social knows more about digital publishing than pretty much anyone I'm aware of.

I think he's made a category error in his assumptions about Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post: that Bezos is a good businessman and is self-aware enough to correct his errors.

Musk isn't rich. The person who has enough is rich. The person who doesn't is poor.

Paraphrasing Guillermo del Toro, who changed my life when he said that.

These are people trying to win a place at the summit of an anti-human machine. Consider the fear & the contortion of the soul that brings one to this place. We must defeat them so that we can afford to pity them.

In 2009, this was the mask of a UK SAS character in “Call of Duty.” By 2015 it was de rigeur among Iraqi government commandos and Shiite militiamen. In 2018, in “Sicario 2,” it was what CIA surrogate characters wore to disguise themselves as cartel gunmen.

Now US law enforcement wears it.

This part of our response essay is where I'm at. Boiling down all of politics to electoralism has been absolutely terrible for resisting rising authoritarianism.

www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...

Dems should announce that anyone who resigns before midterms can rejoin with seniority intact if we win 2028

Section 620I: No Military Assistance to States Restricting U.S. Humanitarian Assistance The United States should be using the leverage this provision creates to shape more responsible Israeli policies toward aid delivery.

US government lawyers never reached those conclusions because they went out of their way not to.

They knew such conclusions would be unwelcome by the White House and thus avoided them.

From 2024, on the subject of Israel restricting humanitarian assistance:

www.justsecurity.org/93589/no-mil...

I wasn't familiar with her role either, but apparently she's just as evil as the rest of them...

bsky.app/profile/krag...

U.S. Envoys Refused to Report "Apocalyptic" Conditions in Gaza. Exclusive Photos Show the Reality They Suppressed The U.S. embassy in Jerusalem suppressed a February 2024 report on northern Gaza because it “lacked balance.” These photos from the UN fact finding trip are visual evidence of the conditions.

Look at the photos. The thing I heard often working on the USAID Gaza response from our partners in Gaza was the field of dead bodies - men, women, children - that fanned out around IDF checkpoints in the Netzarim corridor. Shot by IDF soldiers for no reason (unless "for fun" counts as a reason).

Why didn’t Biden’s DOJ do anything about the combo of coup attempt and pedos? Files were unsealed in early 2024 so plenty of time. It’s beyond Bill Clinton being implicated. I think it’s because it takes down elites of all stripes. What an indictment (pun intended) of so many in the ruling class.

What a hero. A mom who lost her pension to do what’s right. 1 bajillion times more courageous and heroic than so many leaders in politics, law, universities, corporations, media, and journalism

reposting both for underlying insight and for solid use of "zugzwang"