Conservatism is a big tent of freethinkers, from freethinking Nazis to freethinking right-wingers who think everyone besides themselves and the freethinking Nazis are secretly taking orders from a shadowy, sinister Jew behind the scenes. Teach the controversies!

Karl Arnold, Christmas illustration, 'from Santa's Workshop'). (You might suspect commentary on WW I here, what with all the little soldiers lined up, but it's from 1912. Simpler times!)

McArdle: There is no remedy when other groups besides white men are discriminated against because white men will kick up a fatal fuss that the remedy is hard, therefore unfair. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

It seems like only yesterday when we saw his screen debut.

Worst. Bob. Dylan. Song. Ever.

Surely Ross Douthat should interview some of these young folks to expose the rot of liberal privilege at the root of their contrarianism. (We too often forget that the Forgotten Man is too often a Forgotten Harvard Man!)

Has Donald Trump ever had a (documented) best friend who WASN'T Jeffrey Epstein? When you are as transactional and dominance-minded as Trump, friends are rare things. Let alone best ones.

C'mon, are you Kidding me? (Do you get to keep the cocaine?)

Sen. BLUMENTHAL: Was the U.S. Capitol attacked on January 6, 2021? Trump nominee: *dodges* Trump nominee: *dodges* Trump nominee: Well, individuals entered the Capitol. Blumenthal: You are in fear—how will you have the courage to be fair and impartial?

Out for a walk.

Curtis Yarvin is the Garth Marenghi of Carl Schmitts.

'We need a face-eating leopard that has been carefully bred not to eat the faces of high-ranking members of the Leopards Eating Peoples' Faces Party' is a prudent refinement of a key plank of the party's platform. It avoids a common source of dismay while cleaving to longstanding, core values.

See also: Alfred Hitchcock. Very talented, had a real knack for directing motion pictures.

The only way Trump has contributed to government transparency in a real way is I'm fairly sure we don't know anything secret about aliens because Trump would have released that to distract from Epstein by now.

This is because Christie gave all her stories clear titles like "The Mystery of the Death on the Omnibus" and "Mary Had A Little Murder", while Ellison called all his "'Avast, Mine Attendant!' Wept The Desperado" and "Methinks A Computer Wouldst Damn The World"

Neocon: blood for oil. MAGA right on: blood for oil and soil.

Fine to critique Critical Race Theory; not fine to object to 'identity politics' as a betrayal of liberalism; not in a way that suggests there is an identity politics-free version that should be optionally adopted instead. Right-wing identity politics is not due to libs failing to be 'group-blind'.

Scientists studying LLM hallucinations - Lots-of-Lilliputians Mushrooms, that is.

Tis the season to repost my holiday classic. www.onbeyondzarathustra.com/sognug

It was terrible of Harris to post that about Reiner, she might as well have.

Tiger, tiger bouncing back From a prior tiger lack What conditions Sumatran Explain why now are more than then?

If there were any prospect for defending current shadow docket practice, defences of it would make ANY sense, rather than, as per here, none whatsoever. (I suppose it's possible he just doesn't understand the "Annie Hall" joke?) www.scotusblog.com/interim-dock...

Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva (1871-1955)

Fellas used to sport that munchkin look more.

Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina on the set of La strada (1954)

It's a Brave New Small World After All.

A few weeks ago I joked Bari Weiss' journalistic mode is "Penthouse Letters" but for liberalism-left-me! I didn't realise that, by naming it, I was rule-34-ing a p0rn subgenre into being. How odd. www.piratewires.com/p/heather-co...

Heinrich Kley, "The Find in the Winter Wood", "Jugend" (1912).

Kind of funny to watch Republicans find out what it's like to be a Democrat, courtesy of Candace Owens. Also, conservatives trying to talk about intra-conservative conflicts over conspiracy theory insanity, while upholding the polite convention that conservatives have no agency for such things.

Is Will Baude going to go along with this? Adopting a term that is deliberately, descriptively misleading, hence clearly less apt than the one he himself coined, just because it is more deferential?

For the pessimist on your list. What to give the guy or gal who knows 'there is nothing to be got in the world anywhere', etc.? www.redbubble.com/i/greeting-c...

I wish fewer news articles were an icicle through my heart, due to my attachment to ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

For want of a nihil, the horseshoe was lost ... Yes, that seems about right.

Shakedown trickledown economics. Trump doles out the money to favored oligarchs. Those oligarchs, flush with his patronage, engage in wider economic activity. That boosts industry and the economy even outside the inner circle of Trump's family and cronies. Everyone is thus benefited.

Strictly thought through, the argument would have to be that making the 14A constitutional made the 14A unconstitutional. I don’t think it’s actually inconceivable that an amendment could be so ill-conceived as to be, legally, self-overturning. A ‘useless box’. m.youtube.com/watch?v=3KTi...

One of the hard things about being a mathematician is when you are wrong, you are often infinitely wrong, what with all the numbers out there waiting to relate to whatever you say. But still kind of rude to say: this year I found infinitely many things wrong with you. It strains any relationship.

Libico Maraja (1912-1983)

Nika Goltz (1925-2012)

Every part of this is bonkers. The intro is bonkers. The transition to his health is bonkers. The mention that other presidents didn't need cognitive exams is bonkers. The claim that this screening test is somehow hard is bonkers. The idea that criticism of him is treason is bonkers. All of it.

"hurrrrrrrrrrr durrrrrrrrrrrrrr but do your people?????" do yours?

It's not an oil. Technically, it's a 'nog'. Which is a corruption and abbreviation of other terms. See here. www.onbeyondzarathustra.com/sognug

That IS a very good episode. I just re-listened. Yeah. Very basic thought. Social epistemology -> doxastic authority (what beliefs spread as warranted) is downstream from political rhetoric. On the right, that's rhetoric of reaction. So: epistemology of reaction. What do get you when get PURE that?

"Now that I've hit everyone with ruinous taxes, I'll dole some of it back out to my political supporters as welfare payments."

From Amnesty International:

This ignores the 9 and 3/4 amendment, which secretly states that some enumerated rights may NOT be retained by the people. (It's just unenumerated which enumerated rights those unretained ones might be.)