Matt Eckel

Flashback to my ‘morning before school’ entertainment.

R

Paradise by the Dashboard Light and I Gotta Feeling.

It is very poetic that on the latest BTB from @iwriteok.bsky.social about Eichmann there’s an ad transition joking about how Mitsubishi didn’t flee Berlin at the end of the war (they were far away doing… other things) which then immediately cuts to an ad for Mercedes-Benz.

YouTube video by bunsonh Blue Highway - Union Man

Which side are you on? youtu.be/tpTP3XCqGLA?...

Arete: The Battles of Alexander the Great on iOS App Store, Google Play, and on Steam.

Just a reminder my hex-and-counter game, Arete: The Battles of Alexander the Great, is now on 3 platforms: iOS, Android, and Steam (PC and Mac)!

iOS: apps.apple.com/us/app/arete...

Android: play.google.com/store/apps/d...

Steam (PC and Mac): store.steampowered.com/app/3570700/...

I'm old enough to remember when the mainstream narrative around Obama's election was that the U.S. had become a "post-racial society."

People just inventing whole decades of history to get mad at, completely divorced from anything that actually happened.

I suspect that all selective universities could still break even just teaching and abandoning research. The federal money pays for research, which has expanded a lot. It would be a horrible tragedy if the money went away, and what it would mean is the end of scientific research and many hospitals.

Right, there's no longer interstate travel even for verifiable citizens. The Constitutional Crisis continues apace.

vance is a detestable liar and an open enemy of the constitution. the central load bearing factual claim here is completely false and even if it wasn’t the constitution contains two explicit guarantees of due process

www.ctinsider.com/waterbury/op...

My heart goes out to every international student in the United States. Foreign students have helped make American universities the best in the world. Without them America will suffer.

In the ancient world, there were several ways that a city could be "sacked" by hostile invaders. Not all sackings involved the city being essentially leveled as in Carthage in 146 BCE or Jerusalem in 70 BCE. My understanding is there was also the concept of a light sacking.

Vision 2030 in the Home Stretch: Clear Achievements yet Limited Accountability Vision 2030 has made undeniable progress in building a Saudi economy that can “live without oil”—but with five years to go, the program is in danger of enriching elites while overlooking the needs of ...

I have a new report out with @carnegieendowment.org on the current state of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 project, highlighting areas of achievement but with an argument for greater bottom-up accountability to curb its excesses (spending and otherwise).

carnegieendowment.org/research/202...

Today’s BTB from @iwriteok.bsky.social on Versailles is a lot of fun. Also reasonably sure when “Denmark” comes up it’s meant to be The Netherlands.

For MSNBC, I wrote about the JFK Library's temporary closure and what it made me realize about Trump's fixation on the Kennedys:

He's haunted by the specter of a predecessor he can never eclipse and has an animus toward anything that bears Kennedy’s name.

/1
www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

A Belgian Congo Plan for Ukraine Plus a conversation with Phillips O’Brien

Trump's "plan" is both depraved and unworkable paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-belgian-...

Can't say I'm exactly loving how very closely and specifically the mismanagement of Mars in it is paralleling the governance of my own country right now, but the current season of @mikeduncan.bsky.social's Revolutions, on the Martian Revolution of the 23rd century, just keeps getting better.

It is true that grifters and kooks introduced some unreasonable language and norms into liberal spaces, that you can find examples of this going back decades, even during the Civil Rights Movement, and that centrists intentionally sensationalizing this over the last decade has damaged the country.

Owned A “devastating” (Nation) examination of how a cabal of tech-billionaires is colluding with once-idealistic journalists to create an entirely new media ...

OWNED is out today. The result of years of research into tech, media, the right, it traces how billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen have used their wealth to influence the media to their ends.

I hope you check it out

Bummer for Eoin that his book on reactionary tech billionaires buying up media isn't more timely. If only it were "highly relevant" or "part of an unfolding and constantly worsening nightmare" you'd probably consider it an urgent read and preorder at this link. Oh, well. Too bad.

Friends just shared this with me

In letter, Jewish groups urge Trump not to enact 'widespread persecution of immigrants' (RNS) — 'Please do not enact policies that would turn places of solace into places of fear,' the letter reads.

"A broad group of prominent national and local Jewish organizations has sent a letter to President Donald Trump voicing stern opposition to his immigration policies and urging him to abandon plans for what they describe as “widespread persecution of immigrants.”
religionnews.com/2025/01/27/i...

Sorry just one more thing - the point of historical remembrance isn't for any group to "feel bad," it's to understand what happened and why and how it's shaped the society you're still living with. But that requires reflection so I can understand why some are uncomfortable with it.

In the last week he twice did what looked to many like a Nazi salute while thanking voters for saving civilization, tweeted a bunch of Nazi puns, and told Germans at a far right rally that they should move beyond feeling bad about the whole Holocaust thing.

Anyone who talks about "warrior ethos" instead of "soldiers duty" relishes the viscerality of violence and has no interest in the rest of what a military does. Violence is the only means of their politics

11.11-The Three Days of Red Podcast Episode · Revolutions · S12 E15 · 42m

Cannot say enough about how good the Martian series of Revolutions is. The latest is propulsive, cinematic, staggering, and charged with possibility podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/r...

for every NYC congestion pricing opponent who gets quoted in the news, they should have to quote me, a Hudson Valley resident who sometimes drives into Manhattan but wants congestion pricing to be way higher so the MTA can run a 4am Metro-North route, eliminating my need to drive after late events