Greg Tinkle

A longer range impact is the destruction of our ability to operate in the foreign policy space with any degree of trustworthiness. Trump scrapped the JPCOA out of a mix of spite and Israeli determination to start this war. That well is now poisoned.

A lesson another fading superpower might want to consider.

BJ isn't really gambling. If you're doing it right, you're mostly just exchanging chips back and forth with the dealer. It's more like keeping just enough of your mind occupied to make the social banter enjoyable.

I recently binged it. I'd give it a C+. Storyline kept me watching even through its barn-wide plot holes and completely un-Sherlockian intrigue. Acting was serviceable when not dipping into director-infused annoyance. The "National Treasure" of Sherlock adaptations.

Another in the never ending stream of mo-ironies of this admin: The person leading the agency responsible to help rebuild after a catastrophe is the same person deporting all the people who do the rebuilding.

Must be easy to govern when you have a step-by-step example of what not to do so nearby.

Translated:
"We're taking away what makes us human—intellectual and artistic expression—and leaving you the grunt work. Give us all your investment capital to make your hellscape our kingdom."

a man sitting at a desk with a peacock logo on the bottom ALT: a man sitting at a desk with a peacock logo on the bottom

Make declaring bankruptcy easier and apply it to a broader set of debts. The market will stop offering stupid financial products if it can't keep squeezing borrowers as a class to make the overall indebtedness project profitable.

"Our children" when it comes to gender identity, sexuality, and religious indoctrination in public schools, but your children when it comes to free school lunches, SNAP, and MediCaid.

And what happens when scholars stop feeding the bot with new and original research and lose the ability to verify its output? The intellectual arc of the AI universe bends towards ignorance:

Who's the better writer? An original human author or the bot that stole writings from a near infinite pool of authors and paraphrased it in a way that seems human?

Here's an idea: Outlaw hammers to stop the ultra-masculine gender dysphoria of looksmaxxing.

There was no ambiguity that Netanyahu preferred Trump in 2024. While Biden's deference to Israel during the worst of the Gaza carnage was an inscrutable fuck-up of literal Biblical proportions, there was never an excuse to believe Trump would make it better:

After leaving and returning to the land of lowly state-educated folks, the risk of hubris eating away at one's ability to learn anything new by overriding everyone else's input with pure assholery becomes a significant threat. Maybe Bill Gates can start a foundation, or something.

I've been stashing away all the daylight savings over the years, so now that I'm retired, I figure I have at least an additional couple of days. I'm gonna use them searching for something new to stream.

The intersection of three sociopathic movements: P2025's white Christian Nationalism, the techbros' Ayn Randian Objectivism, and the stunted emotional development of the Men's Rights movement—all three rooted in patriarchal hubris lashing out against basic human decency, reason, and evolution.

Vance sits at the intersection of Project 2025's white theocracy and Ayn Rand's Objectivist sociopathy:

The male ethos in the Republican Party is "brutality is strength". What they call "comedy" is juvenile sneering, mockery, and violence towards those they've deemed weak, and this is precisely why Dems need to stop trying to reach this group by adopting their mannerisms.

It's a one-two punch:

Exactly:

Here's one pretty simple and quick lesson—wear a fucking mask! The ratio of the pain of inconvenience to the pain of death pretty much hits zero when one life is saved, not to mention the 100s of thousands of unnecessary deaths lost in the US to covid.

It also removes any doubt that this is a war. There is no military engagement shy of war that calls for unconditional surrender.

It really struck me as Talarico started pulling ahead how much I'll miss Crockett in the House. Hopefully, Trump stepping in to anoint the winner between Cornyn and Paxton will generate enough schadenfreude to help fill the hole.

While all of our compasses are tuned by different inputs, I believe Talarico's is pointing in a common direction away from this madness.

And just like the agnostics/atheists listening to his Bible references, his philosophical considerations reach the same conclusion that the mixing of church and state is a foundational threat to both a free society and the free examination of these existential questions.

Talarico references the lessons he has taken from his philosophical examination of the Bible’s teachings. Regardless of your take on organized religion, we all calibrate our own moral compasses and hold beliefs regarding the same existential questions.

These faith systems weld existential philosophy—why are we here, what is morality, how do I deal with death and eternity—to a political arm that uses faith to bend followers to their hegemonic vision with selective interpretations suited to their objectives.

I’ve seen those who don’t support Talarico express frustration over his Bible-forward message, and as an agnostic, this frustration resonates. But, over the course of this ten-year march towards fascism, the Christian Nationalists have made blazingly clear the dual nature of organized religion.

the thought of her not being a part of our political lives leaves me with a sadness that has become an insistent visitor over the past ten years. The Party must find a way to utilize her intelligence, fight, and infectious optimism should she choose another path in politics.