in the airport they’re playing a smooth jazz rendition of Eleanor Rigby. there’s a sign above me reading, “Make A Great Exit!” a woman is having a full blown meltdown about her milkshake and keeps repeating, “i can’t do this anymore. i just can’t do this” as people avert their gaze.

paradox player brained, imperiling your hegemony so you look bigger on the map

guy quoting cersei lannister from the tv show game of thrones: im a really serious intellectual

i love WH doctors because well over half of them are selected purely for loyalty and actively harmful to the president's health like, what do you mean president eisenhower had a massive heart attack and his physician told him to sleep it off? what do you mean he made him lay in agony for 10 hours?

*chanting* clown car primary! clown car primary!

some people love quoting "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." That was Athens saying that at the height of its empire. Few of those people seem to remember what happened to Athens the very next year.

there's not enough magical realism in the alternate history genre. i would very much like the 2000 florida recount to be resolved after the butterfly ballots, miraculously, take flight and flutter away

starting off the new year right by my landlord texting me to say that a pipe burst above my apartment and they've put my wet objects in a corner in case i want to try to clean them. let's gooooooooooo.

how did a guy like mumford wind up with so many large, adult sons

yeah, sorry i wont be coming into work today. my dad told he doesn't love me and i started throwing up and crying and had to check myself into the hopital.

would anybody like a cigar?" everyone thinks im doing a very funny cigar bit, but im genuinely asking. i just want to be normal. i just want people to stop laughing at me. i drop my cigar for a third time and try not to cry as the room erupts in rapturous applause.

"Green coat... red rug... Christmas colors..."

checking out what X the Everything App thinks my interests are

Phyllis Schlafly, March 26, 1976:

highly, highly recommend this piece about the second life of attempted gerald ford assassin sara jane moore, which starts off sounding like it might be a heartfelt story of love found in an unexpected place and then very rapidly takes a strange turn www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/s...

modern flag redesigns tend to look less like an attempt to represent a community and more like logos for midsize banks and insurance companies i think this is a result of holding minimalism as a virtue of all others, of a top-down approach emerging more from self-styled experts than public want

what if i fucking killed myself

you ever think about how military operation names used to be randomized in some computer at the pentagon but when poppy bush was going to invade panama the name it spat out was "operation blue spoon" and colin powell thought it sounded too lame and gay so he suggested "operation just cause"

the chapters of moby-dick where they saw apart the sperm whale and right whale and harvest the innards got me feeling melancholy

i can’t drink coffee because the amount of caffeine gives me a hellish migraine. made the mistake of having two cups of black tea this morning and my head is throbbing.

there's too much to cover here. See this, which I promise is more than just a hot take hegemon.substack.com/p/venezuela-...

It is worse than that: many Americans do not believe they should suffer for politics to occur. So when the shutdowns started causing pain, this pain was sufficient excuse to abandon politics. We are fighting against fascists who weaponize pain as a party that will avoid pain at all costs.

i guess the goal is some kind of “deal”—as Trump loves to call it—but i don’t know who with and i don’t know why you would trust the deal to keep its terms just very explicit gangsterism. empty your wallet or we’ll bust your other kneecap.

trump now saying that the US is going to be running Venezuela and there are going to be "boots on the ground". "We're not afraid of boots on the ground. [...] We're gonna make sure the country's gonna be run properly."

with the possible exception of Obama—who got his Nobel Peace Prize while greenlighting the surge in Afghanistan—has any Nobel laureate ever weaponized their Nobel Peace Prize to push for war as quickly and as aggressively as Marina Corina Machado?

oh the things baudrillard could write here…

A deluge of work on regime change after the 2003 invasion of Iraq yielded strong (and rare) agreement in IR: it doesn't work & has terrible consequences. @profdownes.bsky.social's book Catastrophic Success lays it out, but it's right there in the title. www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

congratulations to the Kim family, whose entire approach to the question of how you respond to a hostile, completely unreliable United States has been completely vindicated by the past 25 years

I’m sure to Trump this looks like strength but to everyone else calculating their security options this morning it's more confirmation that US power is capricious and the only insurance policy is a nuclear one

the nixon admin is quite funny because he would appoint the youngest conservative men possible to his personal staff and then rely on really, old personal friends from the Eisenhower Administration to be in his cabinet and one of these groups had all the influence and loved him and the other did not

why is cbs talking to me like i'm carol sturka

debating whether the ellisons and paramount were the least-bad choice for the arts because, while they would turn WB into a propaganda arm, they are at least interested in being Old Hollywood style moguls instead of trying to maximize efficiency and secure an endless mine of IP to train algorithms

"When contacted by Reuters for comment by email, xAI replied with the message 'Legacy Media Lies'."

the modern jackie kennedy opens the modern JFK’s phone while he’s in the shower. she thumbs to the photo album to see who he’s fucking now, only to be greeted by 1,000 pictures of boats

hello mr president this is your doctor speaking. i am advising you today to please keep eating this shit

it’s kind of funny how stranger things went to a show defined by christmas lights and nancy drew shit to looking like this

feels bad knowing that the kid running the DHS twitter probably knows who i am

me but any time i try to do any writing whatsoever

i think timothee chalamet was my least favorite part of marty supreme lol he’s not awful, but he’s the weakest part in a movie that centers his performance

the three recorded times that JFK cried as an adult: 1. his stillborn child dying after three days of torment 2. the bay of pigs operation he greenlit failing catastrophically 2. the coup he greenlit killing ngo dinh diem

a group of "Reagan Democrats" participate in a focus group that will help set the direction of the Democratic Party through the 1990s

really, really awful.

on bill clinton's 1992 campaign and his approach to "special interests"

my favorite bit is to half-seriously argue that cyberpunk 2077 cast keanu reeves and did major rewrites of its main story at exactly the same time that joe biden announced his presidential run and that you can view the entire core narrative as brandon allegory and it mostly works

during the clinton impeachment, pundits rail against baby boomers—who have no respect for authority, are concerned only with their own gratification, and are excessively liberal robert bork argues that their moral laxity is facilitating the decline of Western civilization