Werner Herzog's Bear

A minute ago, Trump said the war with Iran would take as long as necessary. "I don't get bored." He is now discussing the drapes he selected for the East Room.

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.

It me

They were both sat at the kids table

“It’s a distraction” is the go-to for ignorant people who want to sound smart, which is pretty much the typical internet user.

American liberal accounts calling it the Epstein War, do you have the capacity to think about anything other than yourselves for just one fucking minute? Not everything needs to be a Democratic branding exercise, my god

And it is tyranny. Millions and millions of people just whistling past the goddamned graveyard, too weak and chickenshit to be honest about what they must confront. It's all just so weak and pathetic and now even more people will die.

When DOGE was ransacking the government and hardly anyone with any power was lifting a single fucking finger to do something about it or report about it in the media I knew we were fucked. The masses in the streets have been the only meaningful corrective to this tyranny.

This is what months of cowardice, intentional downplaying, and sanewashing by the media, weak Democraic leadership, and bourgeois centrists who love order more than justice gets us. My true anger is reserved not for Trump and his gang but for this group of pathetic cowards and Vichyite enablers.

People keep replying and saying things like "Well, obviously this war exists for social media content" and while I fully agree, it seems like it would have occurred to someone, even in this administration, that if you start a war for retweets, a week later YOU'RE STILL GOING TO BE IN A WAR.

It’s the event that affected Biden’s polling the most by far.

The media absolutely piled on him for this brave, correct choice.

Trump telling Iranians to rise up reminds me of Stalin encouraging the Polish resistance to do the same in Warsaw then having the Red Army watch as all the people who could have led a resistance to Soviet domination get slaughtered before the USSR takes over.

From "you break it, you own it" to "we'll break it, you'll own it"