The United States is made pathetic.

What To Know About ‘Sinners’ https://theonion.com/what-to-know-about-sinners/

People are excited about K Pop Demon Hunters winning Oscars but every Bugonia win is also a Korean win.

Is it normal for the president of the United States to pathetically plead for the nations of the world to come bail him out of the disaster he created entirely on his own? Trump two weeks ago: woooooo!!! America!!! yeah!!! Trump today: hopefully China, France, Japan, others will be sending ships..

During Trump I, S Korea got fucked up by China for deploying THAAD while the US stood pat oblivious. During Trump II, the THAAD got moved to the Middle East for a war that serves less than zero strategic purpose for US. Is it a surprise that more people are asking what the point of the alliance is?

If I'm reading this correctly, the CIT judge in this post-Learning Resources claim for a tariff refund just purported to issue universal relief on the ground that he's the only judge who'd adjudicate such claims, ... [1]. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Doubly this. US hegemony depends on the ability to underwrite the security of its allies. Job number one of this underwriting is to avoid insolvency. Israel is a bad debtor who should have been dropped long time ago. Failure to do so is pushing US closer to insolvency.

What a time to be alive

Wars break out in the periphery. The center may get tense, but rarely break out into a war. The part of the world that is not involved on this war at all is the center of the world right now. In a roundabout way, we are truly entering the Asian century.

Alliance audit is a good idea in principle, but few want to admit that if we were serious about such an audit, Israel would be the first US ally that should be dropped.

If FIFA did, for some reason, regularly give out a Peace Prize, you’d think #1 on the list of criteria for potential winners would be “do not start a war with another nation in the World Cup, directly before the start of the World Cup”

Here's the thing. I'm a big fan of organ meats, but American organ meats are fucking terrible because the cattle are not raised for organ meat consumption. I eat raw cow liver in Korea. I would never do it in the US.

I'm yet to see DC blob generalist to say anything something unstupid about Korea. I don't even expect smart, all I want is unstupid and I'm yet to see it. It's mind-blowing how this could be.

An underreported improvement in life in Korea is the driving. First the pedestrian accident rate plummeted since the 1990s (down over 90%, iirc), and now drunk driving is way down. m.koreaherald.com/article/1067...

I have long waged a lonely battle against green bottle soju and I finally have people on this team.

Learning Alysa Liu's father had multiple children all through surrogacy with white women makes me re-appreciate something I've always known, which is: some democracy activists are really fucking weird.

I have good news for you. Short track is roller derby on ice.

I wrote at one point that US already had the equivalent of Tiger Parenting which is sports parenting, and turns out the OG Tiger Parents were pretty damn good at applying their skills in their children's sports aptitude as well.

Do not let Brett Kavanaugh's increasingly reactionary politics distract you from the simpler fact that Brett Kavanaugh is a dullard and a shitty writer whose colleagues all (albeit for different reasons) very obviously have nothing but contempt for him

There are so many incredible characters doing this. People who you’d never suspect would be capable of just relentless bravery and determination. People you’d walk past without noticing, but who are literally putting everything on the line to protect their neighbors, still, today, every day.

Not so long ago, Americans used to joke about how Korean democracy is a backwater because it kept jailing its ex presidents. But it's not so funny anymore, is it? Maybe Americans should have jailed a lot more former presidents.

Trump can't steal the midterms. I say that not as a call for complacency, but to right-size worries. Authoritarianism partially exists in our heads. Excessive fear plays into their hands. Be vigilant but don't panic. Don't grant the regime more power than it actually has. Me, in @thebulwark.com:

This is interesting. In other words, Minneapolis is producing an overall strengthening of the social contract, including towards the undocumented. That's a stark rebuttal to MAGA theory, which holds that the silent majority agrees that foreign invaders threaten national social cohesion

Biden was the most economically progressive president since LBJ at least, he pursued a full-employment economy at huge political risk, it worked spectacularly. And what happened is that the entire progressive universe decided that he must not have done any of it, or else he would have been popular

There is a distinct American culture, but it is more of a meta-culture. It's the persistent tendency to reduce everything to its most childish essence. "Of course you think that, you're 12" meme strikes at a greater truth. Everything about America is childish, in both good ways and bad.

Over on that other site, kpop fans are having the biggest and most brain damaged flame war and it's low key amazing that I'm not seeing any hint of it over here. Truly different demographics.

It's messed up that if you fall on the halfpipe they still give you a score. just let me writhe on the ground in pain instead of telling me I got a 4.75 out of 100

“Everything he was doing to make America great I was cool with up until he started messing with the immigrants,” said Andre Lewis, 32, who lives in White Bear Lake. Gotta love the American voter www.startribune.com/minnesotas-s...

what is with these people and dogs?

Jesus Christ

Like 75% of the US Olympic curlers are from Minnesota. A lot of them curl out of two clubs in Saint Paul, one club is in Frogtown, a neighborhood that has been very heavily targeted by ICE. These curlers are good neighbors.

"“Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them."

In my view, this is the crux: "As for Coupang’s claims that the South Korean government is attacking it because it is a foreign company, @anupamchander.bsky.social said, 'There’s something interesting in … trying to figure out whether Coupang is an American company or a Korean company.'”

The half-democracy known as Japan once again votes for a slow-moving national suicide. At this point, they have no one to blame but themselves. They are well on their way toward Italy-style irrelevance for the remainder of this century.

Amazing. If a professional wrestling crowd is chanting "fuck ICE," it suggests to me that large swaths of the culture are not just upset over ICE tactics, they're coalescing against mass deportations as a broader ideological project. newrepublic.com/article/2060...

sure the us is sliding into authoritarianism but on the other hand, south korea is completely paralyzed by dubai chocolate fever. in a couple of weeks they went from dubai chocolate chewy cookie to dubai chocolate raw amberjack fish to dubai chocolate grilled short ribs

What's grimly funny about the Post is that in the DC newspaper scene, the Moonies and their Washington Times are on their way to having the upper hand, if they are there already.

Really feeling the Rebuilding Korea Party slogan today: Three years is too long.

Genuinely breaking me how Alex Pretti was such a soyboy that MAGA nutjobs like to make fun of. He hiked. He played music. He had a graduate degree and he was a male nurse. And he was more courageous and relentless than everyone of those assholes.

On Saturday, @theverge.com's creative director @kristenradtke.bsky.social carefully watched a video of a shooting in Minneapolis, twice. Hours later, she found out that the man who was killed was her childhood best friend. www.theverge.com/policy/86856...

My own theory has been that Renee Good was Park Jong-chul and Alex Pretti was Lee Han-yeol. Two deaths back to back that hit extra hard because they were easy for the public to sympathize with and the regime's response was so callous and insulting.

I mean things are bad but Gwangju was 1000-2000 plus dead, not 2, and drugged up paras were firing at anything that moved. If it gets to that stage we're in a very very different situation.

The courage that Minnesotans have shown is above and beyond. There were moments when I wondered if Americans still had it in them, and I'm heartened to be proven wrong on that.

One of the best things I’ve read in a while:

In some countries the outbreak of bloodshed inspires the opposition party to call for the leader to resign

“They” won’t greet “us” like a prodigal son, but like an ex-business partner whose drug addiction bankrupted them

As shocking as the terms of US exit from the international community have been, the terms on which the US will re-enter the system (someday) will be even more shocking to a leadership class accustomed to being the leaders of the world

From this moment forward (and before, but clearly now): -If you work for ICE. -If you vote for money for ICE. You are complicit. This is the gestapo. You're on the wrong side. You can't pretend not to know.