Werner Herzog's Bear

And of course, Carlos Alomar on guitar was so crucial to this as well as Bowie's stuff of the period.

As a sidenote, George Murray's bass on this and Bowie's Berlin albums of the era is so damn good and he deserves a lot more praise than he gets.

Well I just broke the glass and put on Iggy Pop's The Idiot, one of my all time dark night of the soul records.

Yuuuuup!

When you let the war genie out of the bottle you can't just put it back. Everyone in August of 1914 and April of 1861 thought things would be short. Sometimes you get a Spanish-American War, but a lot of the time you get a Vietnam.

The war broke me. I have to be able to process this without ranting to my friends and family all the time. I will have to transition to Plan B, which was no sweets. If I give up coffee that will be just too cruel to my family.

Well today I’m thinking this all could go in several, unpredictable directions and I think just about anything could happen. Wheeee!!!!

I got a rash, man.

Getting into the “eating the seed corn” phase already.

I know of someone in one of these countries who is desperate to leave but can’t.

Dude’s whole face looks like a rash

Hegseth et al love the Confederacy so much they’re imitating its logistics deficiencies too. Grant was a far better general than Lee because he actually figured this stuff out and Lee never did.

Bari Weiss helping to get the Shah of Iran reinstalled is yet another one of her bold ideas that were tried decades ago and failed

"Our interest, I think, very much is in NOT going to war with Iran.  It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country."

- 10/27/24

Trump is not acting like a king he is acting like a fascist dictator. I'm fine with the "no kings" framing because once you say the f-word the normies freak out and other people think you're trying to start a debate.

turning what was once a neighborhood into a silent mausoleum

Democrats have had one continuous congressional leadership clique since 2017! It’s crazy! Despite all the political disaster and failure there’s never been a serious effort to put a different group of people in charge, and if you complain about it, they treat you as an obvious crank for noticing.

Yeah I know my articles on German cultural history were a drop in the bucket and aren’t consequential, but it’s still so disheartening to me.

Thinking about how all of my published research and that of all of my friends, which we’ve earned pennies from, was not only stolen by Anthropic to train their profitable AI, but then that AI was used to target a school, killing scores of children.

Oh yikes I know that framing well.

Imagine you're paying like $100 a month or whatever for Claude and realizing the government used the same shit to kill schoolchildren in Iran. And they're using your tax money to pay for it. So you're paying Claude twice to kill kids. Crazy.

There it is. Blew up a school. Claude Code at work.

This is actually an issue in Texas, where a higher percentage than the American population is Catholic and those Catholics are far more likely to be Democrats.

As someone who grew up Catholic in a very Protestant place where anti-Catholicism was commonplace, Talarico's problem is not that he talks about God, it's that he talks just like a Protestant preacher does, which for many of us (right or wrong) is triggering.

Folks who know Iran better than me: what are the odds that the military takes over, announces an end to the harsh Islamist restrictions, then asks the people to unify to defend the nation against attack? A backlash among the clerics would happen in normal times, but maybe not in a crisis.

I watched some NBC news coverage this morning and I was shocked at how rah-rah and shallow it was. I felt like I had taken a time machine to 2003.

John Le Carre, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It's about the smart plugger in the office finding out and catching the biggest asshole among his coworkers. (No comment on why that theme appeals to me so much.)

If you put this in a dystopian novel people would say it's too on the nose.

Each one of those three missiles costs 33% more than the annual budget of the national park where I work.