Intractabilis

In Poland sitting in the front passenger seat of an old VW Transporter “taxi”, I could see the asphalt passing by through a rusted through hole, I could have passed my fist through.

Yeah and you had your own room away from the kids. Privacy from neighbors as well.

A lot of places like the Iberian peninsula and Greece were dirt poor before joining the (pre) European Union. I remember visiting Poland in late 90s, and the poverty was unbelievable in the sense, that if I hadn’t seen it I wouldn’t have believed it.

Yeah OK but mostly I agree with nobody knows.

Also no one believes that 50k #

Doesn’t seem a smart move. Too much Streisand when you go after a figure who can fight back.

anyway in the context of firebombing/atomic bombing this is the passage (from the superb JAPAN AT WAR: AN ORAL HISTORY) I think about all the time.

Triumph of the Will remake.

I had to read that three times. WTF.

YouTube video by engineerguy The masterful design of the two-liter plastic soda bottle

The Engineer Guy rarely puts out a video but they are always must watch of the kind, “how do they make that thing and why does it work”?

youtu.be/kU_gH36GG58

Anjelica Houston looks bored as Jack Nicholson flirts with a waitress at a Mexican restaurant

Old restaurants are repositories of life. Like this photo of Anjelica Houston and Jack Nicholson I saw at El Cholo in downtown

The word ‘hatred’ has lost all meaning, I don’t think there’s a term to describe what I’m feeling right now

I can’t say it enough: U.S. culture is scam culture. It pervades everything we do. We don’t notice it because it’s the water we swim in. A party would do well to remind everybody how awful this is and propose to fix it.

In the US there is way too much focus on Shein and Tiktok selling vapors of wealth and fame. Instead look at the vastness of suppliers churning out quality products at prices no western companies can match. The amount of talent and scale reminds me of early to mid 20th century United States.

Only the top dogs of Silicon Valley can afford to play unless they bribe Trump. Smart.

The equivalent of forcing employees to change passwords all the time, resulting in easy to remember and guess passwords.

I died so that Donald J. Trump may live. No sacrifice is too great to see his shining sun never set!

Thank you for your ingenious question that raises important considerations of what my life is worth compared to the Great Leader.

A disconcerting number of high status people upended their worldviews because other people did not affirm that status in the way they thought appropriate.
And social media accelerated this because for high status people it is often the experience of people telling you that you are wrong.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that the US is turning into Latin America, but I guess they’ll skip that and head straight for Somalia.

They really want to kill the Canadian tourist.

My sister's kids go to a private school in Silicon Valley. Lets just say the private schools are very anti-excessive-tech out in Silly Valley.

Elon Musk is a symbol of American collapse in many ways, but one of the big ones is how for years he has constantly engaged in multi-billion-dollar securities and consumer fraud, and the "consequence" has been him making billions more, including from the federal government paying him directly.

One could argue that the past 100 years have seen a series of different experiments in finding a stable political structure consistent with capitalism. One could further argue that socialism and labor unions played an important role in many of these experiments. Capitalists can’t govern themselves.

Give him two minutes with Grok, and he’ll die a happy man this time.

It’s as if you invite friends over for a ‘home cooked meal’, but it was obviously just bland takeaway.

gotta disagree with your police work here Stephen! In the 1980s the panic about 'ninja weapons' was much more wide-reaching than just the ban on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - there was a recurrent worry about everything from shuriken to nunchucks, and the TMNT ban was an *outcrop* of that.

Rare to see in America that what matters, is not who you know but what you know.

for many of the worst people in our politics, the only real belief they have is that it should be illegal for us not to like them

That Vietnam “memorial,” an ugly thing, I would never have allowed it, I know how to pick marbles, beautiful eye-talian…

Predator drone flying above desert

Inbound to the extremist planning meeting.