Nick Brumfield

Them: How do these influencers pay for their–

Me: Lying and debt.

Them: What?

Me: Conspicuous consumption. It's always built on a mountain of crushing debt and lying about how much money you have. All the way back to medieval kings who leveraged themselves to the gills to put on parties.

One thing I've learnt about conflict investigation in this age of open source evidence is you always see the same lies, just dressed in different uniforms. "It can't be my side that blew up the mosque/hospital/school it's a false flag/errant munition from the other side" with scant evidence produced

The Indonesia one strikes me as suspect considering it's an oil-producer, but I know little about the industry and this (Khaosod) isn't a flagrantly unreliable source.

YouTube video by Saturday Night Live Monty McTreats & The Pastry Bakery - SNL

Well that took a turn

*This* was what Epicurus was talking about when he was talking about savoring the simple pleasures

A plate of krapow Kai Dow over rice

That first bite when you're eating krapow kai dao where you get a mix of the spicy meat, runny yolk from the fried egg, and rice is one of the most reliably pleasurable experiences in this life

Has any economic historian looked at if the development of the concept of increasingly abstract financial products unmoored to reality was spatially linked to financial centers further removed from the actual consequences of their actions i.e. the island of Great Britain and the impregnable US?

It's really interesting moving from a place that due to the bounty of providence seems to have unlimited amounts of most strategic resources far away from potential threats to one where people actually have to pay attention to physical reality

This gone be good

To paraphrase the legendary poster Joyce Carol Oates, "wherever we go, there we are"

I think the US finds some way to extricate itself and the Gulf like it did with the Houthis in Yemen after a month of similarly brutal airstrikes, Iran and Israel keep squaring off.

A chart showing crude oil prices around $60 a barrel for six months and then immediately jumping to $108 in March 2026

World oil prices have effectively increased 100% since January

This kind of disruption just isn't sustainable for Trump politically

My bet is he's going to back out after ordering a commando raid to make it look like he won something

About a year before that he forced out the youth pastor I was really close with for being gay (I didn't know this at the time). I've always wanted to tell him his fundamentalist need to ideologically dominate is one of the main things that got me to leave the faith.

At some point after that I remember deciding to walk home from Sunday school rather than attend the service, and was so afraid I would be "caught," but nobody said anything. Then I felt free.

The doubt started before then, but I got really into studying evolution and had debates with my creationist pastor about it, and then he got up in front of the whole congregation during a sermon and said "if evolution is true, then Christ died for nothing"

On the plus side a massive uptick in energy costs and rising risk around the Gulf data center buildout *could* pop the AI bubble

Don't think it's the animating reason behind this, but it is worth pointing out that US hydrocarbon producers are a big part of Trump's coalition, and *they* are positioned to do very well in the next couple months now.

Tbf the whole process of electing your stand-in Imam is very Sunni-coded

Started out at 61. I think it jumped up to 90 after new reserves were found.

Your reminder that this *entirely* a self-inflicted choice

Camp Dogs. Despicable.

Americans have no idea how much the world is shook, folks. Here in Thailand they have a running tally of how many days' worth of fuel the country has left.

Gulf state oil leaderships have generally tried to keep prices between $60-80 because they think going above that will encourage demand destruction so if this keeps up...

Well I see Trump found a way to solve the low oil prices that had Gulf state leaderships unhappy

Oh wait

Gen Z-Backed Rapper Is On Course to Lead Nepal With Landslide Win

First Mamdani, now this

It's a big year for South Asian rappers-turned-politician in their 30s

Tucker Carlson has a homeland

If we wants to be an American, he has a homeland in America

If he wants to do "Ancestry.com my belonging to an ancient land," he has one in Scandinavia

Musk could do the same for South Africa or Europe

But what they cannot do is use this claim to exclude others

There was just clearly no military advantage. They bombed multiple fuel facilities ringing Tehran, in north-central Iran.

Most of the infrastructure for launching attacks on Israel and the Gulf are in western Iran or further south along the coast.

It's the same playbook they did with the Houthis.

I was in Tehran this time last year. I want you to see how beautiful my city is. I want you to see the city the US/Israel is trying to wipe off the face of the earth