Campaign on "elbows up", govern on "pants down", part the nth

We used to do real science

hi, political philosopher here! this is not funny, central banks only do this when they're in extreme distress

I don’t think we should have ceded control quite so quickly and without so much as a fight.

ICE recruitment is going well.

We have cleaned up the crime scene and blocked a local investigation and hidden the perpetrator and invaded the state and that is how you know that we are acting in good faith and that everything was the victim’s fault. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

Obviously. But theories that aliens constructed American cheese are, at their core, realist.

One basic lesson from political research is that secret police generally rely on mediocre men willing to do the dirty work of authoritarian regimes in order to advance their careers. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-the-fb...

Definitely not what a serious commitment to strengthening democratic resilience and nation-building looks like.

Just don’t think my government should be creating largely exclusive content for this guy. Put another way, if your constituents had to buy Ernst Zündel’s zine to read your latest policy position, that’d be a policy position in itself. And “but his circulation numbers are high” isn’t a good defence.

The Trump administration is clearly betting that Europe won’t shed blood for Greenland without realizing that Europe can inflict a lot of pain on the U.S. in other ways.

New Zealand, you need to step the fuck up

We have to be clear about what the Trump Administration is doing: They are taking basic American virtues and freedoms — the ability to speak truth to power and freely — and turning them into crimes. We must see through this.

America can kidnap or assassinate whoever leafs Venezuela whenever it likes, but the only way to control the country is to occupy it, which will inevitably incur casualties.

So a CBS Evening News reporter actually did a pretty solid breakdown of the ICE murder video, talking to a former agent who details all the ways Ross messed up. And yet: It didn’t air on the actual show tonight. CBS did post it to YouTube—and it has nearly 800k views already youtu.be/6ywLEESFDu0?...

Yes, Trump foreign policy is profoundly reshaping world order. But in ways that are fundamentally destructive, because that's relatively easy. They've inherited vast military and economic capabilities. It will take a long time to burn through them.

In today’s “this is an actual headline not a joke” i present:

⚡️ US releasing 2 Russian crew members of seized oil tanker, Moscow claims. At Moscow's request, Trump agreed to release two Russian crew members of the Marinera oil tanker seized by U.S. authorities earlier this week, the Russian Foreign Ministry claimed.

Just before that portrait shot. 🪶

I got too close to this great blue heron for my lens! 🪶

Marshall Plan poster, 1950. When Washington actually knew how to have a sphere of influence (Via @adamtooze.bsky.social)

I'm as reflexively non-cannibalistic as anyone can possibly be, I just want to consume human flesh. In theory and in practice, I just like the idea of eating people and I would eat people.

KW proves that LRT could work just fine in Toronto, we're just doing it badly.

In the early hours of January 3, 2026, a deliberate sabotage attack on critical electricity infrastructure near the Lichterfelde power station in southwest Berlin triggered a widespread brownout and partial blackout affecting tens of thousands of residents and businesses.

She had two of last season's cubs with her. Here one peeks out from behind her.

Closer is always better, within reason (actually I was almost too close.)

Sorry about the graininess. I was shooting at f/2.8 but it was getting dark.

Incredible how little attention this is getting outside Germany. "In its third full day, a ... power failure in Berlin resulting from an arson attack...tens of thousands...making do without heat, electricity, cellphone service & warm food or drinks." www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/w...

Good thing they got rid of that aggressive angry bird logo

Cuban intelligence has a reputation for being one of the most formidable in the Western Hem. Yet they were seemingly caught off guard by an elaborate and long-planned Maduro op, in spite of controlling Venezuela’s security. I have questions: open.substack.com/pub/macspaun...

Oh this is interesting: Prime Minister Mark Carney just had a call with Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado

The best succinct summary that I've seen. Additionally, they'd be selling into a market saturated by Alberta crude, capping prices (America refines so much that it exports the outputs), it would take a decade to rebuild Venezuelan infrastructure, and meanwhile the rest of the world is electrifying.

Debating why the US does stuff is like talking to my mun -What did you cancel your electricity provider? -I dont know? Maybe one of the people in the retiree association said something, I forgot her name. And it cost a lot of money -But you will need a new one -Will I? Oh then I wont cancel

That pretty much sums it up. For me, it also hammers home how we've not had a serious public debate of the costs (and benefits) of the "patriot"/democratic versus the deeper integration/vassalization choice before us.

Analysis of Maduro's capture. Highly recommended reading. michaeldsellers.substack.com/p/maduros-sl...

If you want more about lingering institutions of the republic in the imperial period, I wrote about them here: acoup.blog/2024/11/08/c... If you specifically want to know more about the imperial Roman Senate, R.J.A. Talbert, The Senate of Imperial Rome (1984) is the one-stop-shop book for you.

So this is sort of fascinating because on the one hand obviously the Roman imperial senate was a shadow of what, say, the Senate of the third and second centuries BC had been, but at the same time it was a pretty crucial component of imperial governance into the third century.

America is rich and the UK is poor… True but this statistic shocked me… The average wealth per American adult is $620k but the median is only $124k! The average wealth per UK adult is $339k and the median is $176k. 🧵

You ever think about how the Roman Senate kept meeting centuries into the reigns of emperors. Hanging out, shooting the shit, giving speeches, and play-acting that their positions of privilege remained positions of power.

"The initial signs of a European awakening are not hopeful." Canada too.

Who can forget when warmonger Joe Biden withdrew from Afghanistan? In a warmongery way. John Mearsheimer, apparently.

Mark Carney turns off geolocation on phone just in case

Want to see what MAGA is thinking right now?

I was wondering how this might all turn out to have been my fault

Canada finally reacts, through our foreign affairs minister (not our prime minister). Really, embarrassingly timid statement when you consider what just happened.

When I explain to people what is involved with writing a successful grant, they simply don’t believe me. I explained it once to a famous person from Pixar, and he looked me square in the eye and said: You mean all the cancer and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be &$%#ing kidding me!

Our politics would be a lot better if more Americans internalized the fact that America already had a long-running experiment with authoritarianism. It was called "The Southern United States" and democracy didn't reach the states where 30% of the population lived until 1965.

India taking the lead in fighting child porn *even* if its distributed by billionaires which is considered a mitigating factor in the US and EU