The wild thing about Trump II is that they're astonishingly racist in their civilizational narratives, but then they put France and Britain in the nuclear risk category usually reserved for Pakistan. It clarifies things if you realize that "destructive moral ideas" here means non-white immigration.

The obverse of the commonplace that, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they are not out to get you,“ is “just because he’s gaslighting you doesn’t mean you’re not crazy.”

“Faster, please”

How much someone will countenance an authoritarian regime is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him

Bari Weiss saw that famous Malcolm X quote - “If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing” - and saw a business model

As @davidbrin.bsky.social points out, “Average rates of almost every turpitude are far higher across Red-run states than Blue-led ones: from gambling, addiction, STDs, domestic violence & murder to teen sex, divorce & net tax parasitism on the rest of the nation.”

"The infighting, sloppy rule-making & a lack of clear policy goals that marked Trump’s first administration have been replaced by an aggressively overhauled government workforce stocked with MAGA loyalists and an eagerness to test the bounds of executive authority." www.politico.com/news/2025/12...

The four cornerstones of eroticism: longing, transgression, power, ambivalence archive.org/details/erot...

LOL: "Even those who openly claim a fascist past, like some current European parties, have no desire for real power.... European fascism today is reduced to preparing a plate of pasta for the American tourist or changing the dirty sheets of the Chinese tourist." www.lefigaro.fr/vox/monde/lo...

The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform

It would be nice to imagine these people are merely dumb: "Ahead of his trip, the CIA offered to brief Witkoff; he declined. Nor was he accompanied by an interpreter: He had been told that Russia’s president wouldn’t allow him to bring another person into the meeting." www.wsj.com/world/putin-...

In 1875 the greatest concentration of animals ever recorded — a swarm of Rocky Mountain locusts consisting of ~12.5 trillion insects — was sighted in the Great Plains of the United States. Insanely, less than 30 years later, the entire species had gone extinct. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert%...

This is what criminalizing dissent looks like. www.dailykos.com/stories/2025...

This is the difference between someone with loud opinions and a large following versus a competent operator with expertise based on years of training and experience Here’s hoping everyone else who denies the difference gets the same lesson.

As one eminent historian described it, the transcontinental railroad “was birthed from narrow localism, and, for all its high-minded rhetoric, it was accomplished through bluster, chicanery, inefficiency, and breathtaking corruption.”

The way these people have been behaving only makes sense if they believe the political opposition will never have power again

I know I keep referencing him, but @nilsgilman.bsky.social has made the same point, that life gets a lot better once you realize that valid and high-level intellectual activity does not begin or end with the university.

There’s sycophantic hypocrisy, and there is… whatever this is (from someone who likes to style himself a “public intellectual”)

As Eckhard Kehr described it: Primat der Innenpolitik

Between 1981 and 2004, the global population of people making less than $1/day declined by over half a billion. China accounted for more than 100% of that decline. In other words, the number of people outside China living in extreme poverty actually *increased* in those two dozen years.

The Picasso & Hockney say a hell of a lot .. industrial power taking over the male body & mind, until only armed drones & AI are left. The right-hand pic below is Prampolini's 1925 portrait of Marinetti:

Four shootings: Goya, Manet, Picasso, Hockney

Harold Lasswell, 1941: "The purpose of this article is to consider the possibility that we are moving toward a world of 'garrison states' — a world in which the specialists on violence are the most powerful group in society." www.jstor.org/stable/2769918

Hundreds of rightwing accounts on Twitter have been spreading a lie that the shooting at Brown was a targeted killing. Given how keyed up the right is right now, Musk's platform amplifying false narrative is a form of stochastic terrorism—an algorithmic analog to "shouting fire in a crowded theater"

The “age-area hypothesis”—which asserts that the location of the most divergent branch of a language family is likely that family’s point of geographical origin—usefully explains patterns of linguistic diversity, but has hitherto lacked a good theoretical underpinning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

FUCKIN FACTS 💯

If you care about virtue, then a good starting point is to not make resentment the basis of your ideology, identity, or state of being. That's my ten cents on the article about the Great Recession being passed around.

Is the Brown University shooting the biggest mass shooting of all time where the killer was not apprehended? I guess the story’s literally still out on that one… apnews.com/article/bong...

Nature is NOT healing www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

“Computational modeling does not merely visualize climate futures; it enables societies to build planetary imaginaries…. If the epistemic category of the planetary collapses under geopolitical pressure, we do not simply lose a tool. We lose a worldview, and with it, a horizon of action.”

The “planetary perspective has emerged… as a distinct epistemological category: a way of seeing & knowing the world that transcends national borders, human exceptionalism & disciplinary silos…. It remains young, epistemologically speaking, & geopolitically vulnerable.” www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Today in (vandalism against) #PlanetarySapience www.nytimes.com/live/2025/12...

“Generative AI is a seductive distraction…. In contrast to AI designed for generative tasks, predictive AI involves tasks with a finite, known set of answers; the system just has to process information to say which answer is right.” www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/16/1...

It’s so great to finally have competent leadership at the FBI

Those who remember Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s will know the proper word for government-sanctioned organizations whose mission is to summarily terminate domestic regime enemies.

One definition of privilege is the ability to avoid consequences www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/m...

Largest cities on earth without an underground rail system: * Karachi, Pakistan (pop: ~20m) * Kinshasa, DRC (~18m) * Lagos, Nigeria (~18m) * Bogotá, Colombia (~12m) * Luanda, Angola (~10m) * Surat, India (~9m) * Baghdad, Iraq (~8m) * Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (~7m) * Khartoum, Sudan (~7m)

According to the latest UN measures, the conurbation of Jakarta now has a population of 42m — larger than the total population of California, Canada, Poland, or Angola www.economist.com/asia/2025/12...

China now wiping the floor with us

Well, this is an utter disaster for science. This gutting of peer review is very likely driven by Project 2025/OMB/Vought, very likely is about funding junk science, and very likely is coming for #NIH and biomedical research next. 🧪

This piece is a classic example of two clichés: first, that “to people used to privilege, equality feels like oppression,” and second, that “the beginning of all ideology is the phrase ‘people like us.’” These are clichés because they’re true. www.compactmag.com/article/the-...

Best on screen chemistry? 1) Kiera Knightly & James McAvoy 2) Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall 3) Ryan Gosling & Rachel McAdams 4) J-Lo & George Clooney 5) Michael Douglas & Sharon Stone 6) Diane Lane & Oliver Martinez 7) Tony Leung & Maggie Cheung 8) Cary Grant & Eva-Marie Saint 9) Leo & Kate

I had a lovely chat with Sam Kimbriel and Damir Marusic on their always-excellent podcast, @wisdomofcrowds.bsky.social: wisdomofcrowds.live/p/why-are-ch...

How a sane country reacts to a gun massacre www.npr.org/2025/12/15/n...

And remember: the chickens always come home to roost

Fighting and dancing are similar in that you can never tell just from looking at someone whether they’re going to be good at it

If you see this, we IMPLORE YOU to post a picture from whatever device you're using without explanation

Theory: all would-be tradwives are actually aspirational griftwives. Discuss!

“As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few & awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules & are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion….” www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyran...

Stephen Miller is employing state terror in service of the open goal of shifting the ethnic mix of the country. In numerous ways he's doing this at the expense of public safety. We spent weeks reporting on Miller's real aims. Here's the result. We hope you'll read: newrepublic.com/article/2041...