It would behove a lot of LDS voters to realize you will get thrown to the wolves immediately by Republicans if you don’t shut-up and get in line

one thing i'm confused about is the whole concept of a shutdown, if i understand it, isn't actually codified in law, but is instead a 1980 OLC opinion interpreting the 1880-whatever antideficiency act

A senior Trump I official cornered me at a cocktail party tonight and lemme tell ya hwat, being demographically coded as MAGA causes all kinds of people to reveal their innermost secrets and plans.

They’ve lost FDD?

People should be thinking about this war as downstream of all the generals and admirals fired shortly after the inauguration. Anyone who would be likely to identify risks has either already been fired or got the message.

This will not end well for any families. "Kalshi and Polymarket are using influencers to lure in the 50% who don’t bet on sports gambling sites: women" www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...

BREAKING A federal judge GRANTS a preliminary injunction protecting Anthropic from the Pentagon’s retaliation. Background www.allrisenews.com/p/anthropic-...

I don't think people fully appreciate how apocalyptic things are for US science. I haven't had any new funding since 2024, but I'm still ok since typical grants are for three years. This means next year I will be completely out of funding and will have to fire everyone in the lab. It's not great.

senators should stop getting their comms staffers to cut vertical videos about their average, everyday hobbies and interests and instead force them to cut vertical videos about their deeply inaccessible and bewildering interests

i think the Vietnam parallel is interesting. prior to The Shitshow the brass told LBJ "either we gtfo or we march to hanoi." lbj ain't like those options, so he sidelined those guys and got dudes who would tell him something different trump is CONSTANTLY choosing the "least cost" option lmao,

"The requirement to provide effective air cover for the troops ashore would have tethered the battle groups to geographic positions, seriously degrading one of their primary assets, mobility, i.e., their capability to range over a broad area in support of their primary mission." 5/n

"By seizing these facilities, the United States could have eliminated the primary source of Iran's foreign trade. From a military point of view, however, there were serious questions regarding the sustainability of such an operation." 3/n

"The punitive seizure of Iranian territory was an option likely to have surfaced very early in [Carter] administration discussions. A prime target for such an operation would have been the oil loading facilities at Kharg Island." 2/n

On the possibility of the US seizing Kharg Island, William Hickman had some things to say in a 1983 edition of the NWC Review, which I will quote in this thread. 1/n www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/44636275.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3A8a508e9d69a5df5858735196a1452802&ab_segments=&initiator=&acceptTC=1

because initially this will look like some great triumph for the President and a refutation of all of his critics. That is a large part of why he likes doing things in the first place. He's stymied at home, and using US military might to beat up on weak, isolated dictatorships is an easy source

if it happens, there's going to be an period in which US standoff firepower flattens everything not just on Kharg Island but also everything adjacent to it on the Iranian coastline, followed by a lot of crowing and "this is the day Trump became President"-ing. People here need to not freak out

appreciate that the very first thing trump's ordering mullin to do after being confirmed, before he's even moved into his office or found the bathroom, is to break black letter federal law.

Said this in a couple group chats but feels like the only question about the 82nd Airborne is whether they drop onto one of the Persian Gulf islands during the wee hours of Saturday or Sunday local time.

Not a good prospect for this under a Takaichi cabinet though…

Tom Clancy's ENDWAR:

It started out with the Straits of Hormuz and ended up with what I think is Ozymandias’ evil plan from Watchmen

Ah, good. I was worried that governments in Canada were going to start addressing supply side issues rather than subsidize demand. www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...

Markets were never ignoring Hormuz being closed, they've stuck to a pretty stable trend higher in crude prices since this conflict kicked off. Three different times they got carried away: once on Sunday March 8 when Brent tested $120, tend days, later, and this week.

Iran knows that it doesn’t need to defeat America on the battlefield—it just has to make “the American people feel the war in their living room,” Karim Sadjadpour argues.

Incredible Things are happening on x.

This is a hack right-wing pollster lmao

D+18 incoming

of course i think that being a liberal makes me morally better than other people. if i thought some other option was morally better i would be that instead.

one thing that's bizarre about people is that i don't know why a person would have ethics which didn't even try to make them better than other people

per the kav hayashar when you deprive someone of their wages you are taking a piece of their soul (because of the toil they expended) and the piece of their soul you have stolen cries out to heaven demanding vengeance. i bring this up for no reason in particular

Once a thriving Christian commune, the small Atlantic village of Ayetoro is being rapidly eroded by rising tides. After successive government sea walls failed, residents have taken the battle against the encroaching ocean into their own hands.

I'm always happy when people are working to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels but I don't get why people make 10-20 year investments based on month-to-month fluctuations in prices. This was always a possibility when you bought your giant SUV 3 years ago!

Today, every American reviewer who touches a Xiaomi SU7 falls in love with it and is, like, "Why can't we have nice things?"

When I lived in China, Audis were aspirational and Buicks were the poor man's Audi. Volkswagens were everywhere. All the taxis in Beijing were being upgraded from Xialis to Hyundais. Chinese cars were a joke.

I feel like the surrender of the global electric vehicle market to China is one of those things that will, with a couple of decades of hindsight, be vastly consequential. Scaling benefits, technology development, supply chains... A lot of incumbents that depend on export markets will be screwed.

From my latest: A lot of the incoherence on the US side of things can be explained by this dynamic

We burned 55 LRASMs against a navy that barely floats? AYFKM.

Republican support is showing signs of strain amid U.S. troop deployments, the lifting of oil sanctions on Iran and Russia, and a looming military bill that Congress could soon be asked to approve. foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/26/r...

Estimations by RUSI think tank on US, Israeli, and Gulf munitions expenditure. In laymen's terms, this is what is called "an insanely fucking high amount of critical munitions have been used"

Still funny one of the core rationals for the Pentagon withholding systems from Ukraine was that we needed to preserve them for some “future” conflict, guess we found it!

A morale-lifting statement from the commander-in-chief if you’re in the 82nd Airborne.

Google a decade ago was internally crowing about how they had solved the "scaling problem" and that the block was a lack of SWEs. Then they hired way too many empire-building managers and chased dead products under a monopolist umbrella, so last year "SWE was dead." Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The problem here is that there is more thought and planning in this thread than will go into the actual decision.

"Labor - It's Less Lump Than You Might Think"

I sort of love how many articles these days are "Here's a counterintuitive take - what if conventional economics is applicable to the modern world?"

the other thing I'll note here is that when iran does let ships out, they follow a very nonstandard (and shallow!) route that suggests to me they're avoiding mines in the main shipping lanes bsky.app/profile/drop...

When interviewed, the Celine’s captain said, “My ship may not take a long day’s journey into night but my heart will go on.”

As one Gay, it would be real swell if we didn’t have major candidates for the party stopping just short of calling GOP folks closeted fags, it would be real cool if we didn’t go back to that time when those things were tossed around lightly for chump change imaginary internet points

New: Around the world people are turning to low-carbon EVs, solar panels, induction stoves and heat pumps as the Iran war upends oil and gas markets. Bloomberg journalists, including yours truly, filed dispatches from San Francisco to Lagos for this story. Free link www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...