Data-driven pragmatist.
The Great Dismal Swamp
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Nothing could have prepared me for the Instagram account of Ye’s evil dentist
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The root of all this - the sassy Brands Are People Too genre of posting - is Denny’s Tumblr, which no one remembers now. I was at a conference in 2015 where a presenter was raving about how it was the future of social media, and deep down I knew she was right
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I’m increasingly convinced the root of America’s problems is a widespread inability to accept reality as it is, on the level of a neurological disorder.
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His little smirk makes me understand why, after the Germans withdrew, the French shot the collaborationist broadcasters and journalists before anyone else
"At what point are you going to realize the entire world thinks the embargo is a bad idea?"
Associated Press journalist Matt Lee grills State Department Spox on the US continuing to vote against ending the genocidal blockade of Cuba.
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The “Halloween Massacre” in October ‘77 saw more than 800 CIA officers fired, almost all of them in the clandestine section. They almost immediately started a network of private intelligence agencies that conspired to sabotage Carter’s presidency and elect Reagan
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The most chilling example of this government redaction conceptual art was a US military report on massacres in Guatemala that Bob Parry got through FOIA, in which every single word was blacked out except for two: “entire village”
Reviewing the FTC v Amazon complaint for my new article, Long Term Consumer Welfare, I had to laugh at this.
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“Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people.” Sounds like they have a pretty good read on the situation in that case
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Not to “dunk” on anything, but the largest demonstrations in US history happened less than 5 years ago, achieved almost nothing, and left almost no positive legacy in politics. Getting a lot of people together is not an end in itself
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I’m reading a book where the author mentions as a casual aside that one of Teddy Roosevelt’s sons was “oddly fixated on witchcraft,” no elaboration and no search engine results. You can’t do this to me man you need to give details on TR’s witchcraft son
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I lived in West Virginia for years and have no idea why people outside Appalachia think it’s this redoubt of hardened guerrillas in waiting. It’s a place where the soil, air, and water have been poisoned by industry and 30% of everyone you know has cancer
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One of the best running bits is that Adam Friedland, who asks questions like “It’s a movie about a guy who’s gay for swords or something?” somehow gets better and more insightful answers than about 95 percent of podcast interviewers
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This made barely a blip when it happened back in February, but for me it was a real “there’s no way back from this” kind of moment. It made me think we now lack the resources as humans to improve our world
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The CIA podcast should have a Patreon with a membership tier where one of the perks is they tell you who killed Kennedy
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The famed “Stalin issue” of Life Magazine, from 1943, is pro-USSR in a way that seems like alternate history fiction given the Anticommunist hysteria waiting in the wings
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It’s hard to overstate how insane the US was after declaring war on Germany in 1917. One filmmaker was sentenced to 10 years in prison for making a movie about the American Revolution, because it portrayed British soldiers in a negative light
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Oh man I can’t believe they got rid of our beloved Marxist org USAID! All of us radical leftists would be so owned if the DOGE bros also got rid of these other Marxist agencies: CIA, Voice of America, FLETC, SLATT, TVTP, 16th Air Force, the US Senate
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This week is the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, so it’s worth remembering what Kennedy’s major takeaway from the episode was
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Leader of antigovernment party: “I hate the government and want to destroy it, especially the IRS.”
IRS guy: “Finally, someone’s here to represent me.”
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It’s hard to pick a favorite Hillary Clinton campaign moment, but this, from 2008, is easily Top Five
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“Nuke Tel Aviv” is the watered down compromise policy. “Nuke Tel Aviv, Washington, London, and Berlin” is the data-driven pragmatist policy
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More and more, 2014-2015 looks like the birth of our current internet: Gamergate, “brands with personalities,” the Sanders and Trump campaigns drawing shitposters into mainstream politics, Trump making Twitter the centerpiece of his campaign, etc
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Listening to a Harvard professor on a podcast explain that violent revolutions always lead to dictatorship. He is asked, reasonably, about the American revolution. His answer, I swear: “That wasn’t a revolution, it was a war of independence.” Harvard, man.
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(In retrospect, they erred by not also shooting the Vichy police officers and bureaucrats, who would continue in their roles right up into the 1970s)
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“I lost $50K and it’s worse than you could ever imagine” was obviously the story of the week, but the irate wacko who is convinced she invented the phrase “hanging out” has been a great supporting character
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NPR just interviewed a young Zionist woman in the Bay Area who says that reading pro-Palestine posts on social media caused her to have “night terrors” and to spend hours per day crying in her closet. ngmi
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Stancil’s had two actually good takes in the past week, these truly are the last days
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My ninth grade history teacher died this week. He was cartoonishly square: not only did he wear a jacket and tie every day, he insisted that on days with quizzes or tests all the boys had to wear ties and all the girls had to wear skirts. He was also a total reactionary…
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One thing about Carter’s legacy that rarely gets mentioned is that he was the politician most responsible for the neoliberal turn in the US, deregulating airlines, oil prices, trucking, railroads, and, crucially, communications, paving the way for conservative media dominance
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Massive antiwar protests in 2003 achieved nothing. The Occupy protests that spread across the country in 2011 achieved nothing. Bernie’s giant crowds in 2016 and 2020? You guessed it, also nothing. Who has come up with Step 2 for these gatherings?
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In 1982, 5 men were acquitted of charges that they plotted to send guns to the IRA, even though they admitted they had been sending weapons to Irish republicans for over a decade. They had a pretty great defense, which infuriated the US government …
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In the middle of this 20-year-old NY Times article about shipwrecks in the Hudson River there’s this startling paragraph about 3,000-year-old walls built by humans submerged in the river that’s immediately dropped by the reporter nytimes.com/2002/12/18/nyreg…
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For the rest of your life, everything is going to get worse and there’s nothing you can do about it
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The Wall Street Journal is approaching parodic levels of Wall Street Journal-ness this morning
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We’ve reached a point where Bill Kristol is more clear-eyed about what’s happening than virtually any elected Democrat
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I maintain that in a few years it will leak out that the Houthis were far more effective than the military will admit now, these planes were shot down, and that’s why Trump hastily agreed to stop bombing Yemen
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This was Quentin, the youngest son, who died in World War I, a war that his idiot father relentlessly campaigned for because he thought combat was masculine and ennobling. Not so ennobling when your kid’s head gets turned to meat confetti by a German machine gun
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FT Exclusive: Palantir and Anduril, two of the largest US defence technology companies, are in talks with about a dozen competitors like SpaceX and OpenAI to form a consortium that will jointly bid for US government work. on.ft.com/41NVWcW
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I have a friend who believes in absolutely everything paranormal - ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, “black-eyed children,” you name it. But he is an unrelenting skeptic on anything parapolitical. My inability to pill him on ANYTHING is one of the funniest ongoing failures in my life
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Anyway, he was a crank, but in a good way, and he was one of the few teachers at the gigantic public high school I attended who genuinely seemed interested in his students. I think of him fondly every time I see Capital mentioned online
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Thomas Pynchon meets Brian Wilson in 1966; it goes pretty much the way you’d expect
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I have no idea what he’s doing now, but Trevor Paglen’s exploration of military black projects and CIA torture sites back in the 2000s was really good stuff
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This working class hero hails from a gritty, forgotten corner of America: a Richmond commuter suburb with a median household income that’s $30,000 higher than the national, and where the median home value is $400,000
Rich Men North of Richmond has been uploaded to all major streaming platforms and will show up there in a few days.
Im still in a state of shock at the outpouring of love I've seen in the comments, messages and emails. I'm working to respond to everyone as quickly as possible.
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In Charleston, we’d have “blue haze days,” when a mysterious bluish cloud that smelled like chlorine would waft over the city. No one knew (or would say) what it was or what caused it. It was like a Thomas Ligotti story
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The goal of every Silicon Valley swindle is to further isolate people. Hideously sociopathic losers
After I had a Waymo I never wanted to Uber again. It’s just a different vibe. You are just teleporting in a private cocoon. You are not dealing with the cognitive overhead of being with a total stranger who you have to ask for things.
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There’s a faction of the CIA that despises the Biden/Blinken line on Israel, and they are starting to leak
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The “it’s time for some game theory” guy has been absolutely cooking for months now
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He announced this to the class and said “Mr Nougat Hand Bank now understands why he prefers communism, but can any of you say the same thing about why you prefer capitalism?” The other people in that class HATED me especially on quiz and test days…
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Getting booted from a group chat with lib friends for repeatedly asking “Does anyone know why Justin Trudeau would lead a standing ovation for a member of the Waffen SS?”
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A guy in Texas was sentenced to 3 years in prison for saying “I hope Wilson goes to hell”; when pacifist Hutterites in South Dakota refused to buy war bonds, the county sheriff seized all their livestock and auctioned it off
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The trick is that he is very often quiet, and allows the guest to answer at length rather than constantly interrupt to show how clever he is. This is possibly because he doesn’t really know anything about the guest, but it works
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Every once in a while there’d be some kind of discharge from the coal-fired power plant in Winfield and a blanket of ash would cover the valley. The first time I saw it I thought it was snow
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A teacher in Maine got fired for taking a driving lesson from a German; a pastor in Iowa was sentenced to 5 years in prison for criticizing the people who burned his church down over the fact that he was a German immigrant
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I really want to know what the one “adult” book was for the person who’s read 34 Middle Grades books in 2024
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This is classic rich people behavior with contractors: agree on everything in advance and then start haggling after the work is completed. Some of these guys make you sue them to get paid
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The guy they bought weapons from was a CIA asset. So, they argued, it stood to reason the CIA knew about the gunrunning and approved of it, meaning the US government approved of it. This drove prosecutors (and the CIA) crazy, but it worked!
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The guy who popularized the Bermuda Triangle spent 13 years in Army counterintelligence and I can’t decide how much effort I should expend in trying to figure out if his Triangle book was a disinfo effort to lend cover to top secret Navy and Air Force projects
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A gift from Shinzo Abe to George W. Bush in 2007: a photo of their grandfathers (Nobusuke Kishi, Japanese prime minister and war criminal; Prescott Bush, US Senator and business partner of Nazi Germany) playing golf with Dwight Eisenhower in 1957
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So I did, and while I think it’s generous to say the paper showed a real grasp of the material (I was 14), he was impressed and was as good as his word, giving me an A in advance for the whole year …
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A mob in Berkeley burned a pacifist church to the ground; the American Bar Association announced that lawyers shouldn’t defend anyone charged with “disloyalty”; a former US senator was indicted for saying “There is no reason for this war”
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When the crisis ended peacefully, Kennedy met with the joint chiefs of staff and was stunned when they were furious with him. Curtis LeMay told Kennedy the incident was “the greatest defeat in our history.”
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A PR campaign after 1968 included secret payments to TV screenwriters to get them to regularly mock labor unions in sitcom dialogue: nplusonemag.com/online-only/…
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As in, when we talked about the Korean War, he blamed everything on Communists within the State Department and Army. That kind of guy. However, I think of him fondly because he was the first teacher I ever had who really helped me understand what it means to be educated …
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What’s generally remembered today as the high point of the Kennedy administration was viewed by hawks at the time as a humiliating capitulation on par with Chamberlain at Munich. They already hated Kennedy, but now they were convinced he was going to lose the Cold War
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I love the quotes from the jurors here. Back when common sense was easy to find among Americans!
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Khrushchev wrote in private that one of the reasons he was motivated to end the standoff is because he was getting intelligence reports that a military coup in the US was possible if Kennedy looked weak to the hawks.
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Imagining if this headline had been published when Hoover was alive. Some editor would have been thrown off the roof of a tall building
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