hooked on persephonics

"My mentor always tells me, 'Kim, dogs don’t bark at parked cars." They’re coming after critical race theory, 1619, intersectionality because these ideas mobilized people. They gave them the language to actually articulate what they were seeing with their own eyes," says Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Page One in Cincinnati:

“.. I need to be able to look my grandkids in the eye and say I did not remain silent.”

#ICE

Bear in mind: it has ever been thus!

There's no golden age when information was immaculate & the people devoted to imbibing it all. The midcentury US, with its major newspapers & three networks, was where the basic survey research demonstrating how little citizens know about politics was conducted

Oh, do I have an anecdote for that. I served with the 82nd Airborne and XVIII Airborne Corps. We were nothing special, a comms unit, but since we put in early gen field sat phones we got to go and do thing in places in support of some seriously tough dudes. So deployments to the Balkans, Sinai,

still a cherry dude, you only got 5 training jumps in. The 1st Sgt had sauntered over, a Vietnam veteran ex-Ranger to listen to the welcome speech and both TC and I hear him mutter 'motherfucker" at the hardcore comment. Hegseth, anecdotally, is that 2nd Lt.

There are complicated, structural reasons for the recent surge in electric prices (maybe a future thread on that) and beware of simple narratives. But prioritizing the most expensive generation is, quite literally, the dumbest possible solution.

Gender-affirming care saves lives

Fifteen Years

i’m not crying you’re crying

xkcd: Fifteen Years

All of the formal entities that make up DOGE are still in place: The executive order that created it is still in effect. The "United States DOGE Service" still exists and is still posting stupid memes. Amy Gleason, its figurehead, it still in office. Many other employees are still there.

•*• Funny-Presence4228 LPT: How to win as a guest and make new friends at a raging, alcohol fuelled party Food & Drink I'm getting older now, and some of my friends' kids have recently started college. I've been reliably told that alcohol-fuelled parties are still happening, and I shared this advice about how to make new friends and be a hero. One of them took my advice, and now has a new girlfriend because of this. The key to the following advice is an element of secrecy because the surprise makes it even better. Arrive late and sneak Lasagna into the party. I mean, taking a large, catering-sized tray of lasagna, along with a stack of paper plates and forks, to a raging house party. I used to do this back in college. I'd make one, sometimes two, in the afternoon in big foil trays before goin to a party. Show up around 10.30pm, and slip them into the oven without asking permission telling anyone. Medium heat for 30 minutes to warm it up. Get my paper plates out, and shout: "Lasagna is ready" to a packed house of drunk people, and hand them all a fork. It's cheaper than bringing beer, no clean-up, and I got laid pretty often. Important note: Make sure the person who owns the oven is the first in the line, and don't make a mess. Maybe make one meat and one vegan or something... This last point was less of a concern back in my day, but we must move with the times.

tfw you’re fucking the lasagna man for lasagna

im willing to be convinced that there's something im not understanding about "deport as many laborers as you can, tariff the shit out of everything that goes into building a home, etc etc hey presto cheap houses" but at this point I'm skeptical!!

Imagine for a minute if Mark Kelly had said the opposite statement: That a soldier must follow illegal orders, and that their oath to defend the Constitution does not matter, only their orders matter.
What would the reaction be?

These are well-spoken and, in polite conversation, intelligent people. But once they start talking about material political and economic facts it becomes immediately apparent that there are many Facts They Do Not Know because they are completely insulated from reality by the media they consume

The Salt Lake Tribune will drop its paywall next year, CEO tells donors at NewsMakers gala After years of requiring people to pay for online news content, The Tribune announced an upcoming change during its 2025 annual NewsMakers Gala.

Remember last year when we said we would drop The Tribune's paywall if we raised enough money to support the transition to free? About that… 😁

Right. It’s a burden of proof, not a substantive requirement. Just like an act of Congress is presumed to be constitutional.

> @samsteindc.bsky.social

Not new, but I am enraged at the fact that Larry Summers’ colleagues have no idea how misogyny works. Imagine it’s your job to teach teen and 20-something women, & you don’t understand how someone who believes that a woman could never be his intellectual equal might treat women badly.

dismissive about the fact that we don't have enough air traffic controller, and are going through a period of unprecedented loss of life and property as a result, is perfectly in character. It's the triumph of appearance over substance.

In Mussolini's Italy, the fascist movement was obsessed with people wearing suitable attire in all social settings. Thomas Mann describes this brilliantly in one of his novellas. The fact that transportation secretary Duffy obsesses over how one should dress to fly in an airplane, while being

We’ve spent 15+ years as a field in political science/IPE trying to make trade the primary culprit for populist authoritarianism when cycles of financial bubbles, crashes, bailouts, & austerity are right there in front of us.

Clearly the SoL was tolled, for, uh, reasons

My infantry Bn had a really hard time parsing the gender and sexuality issues of Southern Helmand.

When people say, "you wouldn't want a 'purple haired gender studies major' in the Marines" I reply "YES we desperately needed them!" We had teams of anthropologists who published studies for us.

It's true, the only job available in the United States is kidnapping restaurant and daycare workers

Meta halted internal research suggesting social media harm, court filing alleges Meta is alleged to have halted internal research suggesting social media harm, according to court documents.

Meta halted internal research that purportedly showed (young) people who stopped using Facebook became less depressed and anxious, according to an unredacted legal filing released on Friday. www.cnbc.com/2025/11/23/m...

We need a CRS or GAO report that does a deep-dive into what money DOGE saved vs. what money it just shuffled to Trump/Musk interests and pet projects, and what damage DOGE has done across government (temporarily and long-term)

www.reuters.com/world/us/dog...

If you’re a journalist who’s still on Twitter, from now on in your writing you have to replace “the American people want” with “troll bots in Eastern Europe demand”

Being there makes your judgment suspect. I don’t care how savvy you think you are, you’re marinating in a disinformation campaign.

West Point is committing "a crime of serious proportion" then.

I spent too many years getting a Lit PhD and this person… just tweeted it out

DOGE did not fail in any way to accomplish its goals.

Its goals were never efficiency or saving money.

Its goals were to destroy as much of government as possible forever, and to steal data for the Space Nazi.

DOGE is fading away like bank robbery gangs fade away after the robberies are done.