HEARTWARMING: Nikola Jokic and this era of Nuggets basketball were designed in a laboratory to piss off Lakers fans.

Maybe my private/personal biggest reason for being interested in Pritzker's candidacy is I think he's demonstrated the kind of instincts and courage to navigate this very fraught potential transition in US-IL relations. He, along with uhhhh a clean DOD leadership, will be ready to set new terms.

something that doesn't come up in the US awareness as much (due to a lot of Presbyterian/Baptist/Methodist/Episcopalian heritage) is historical awareness of what your church would look like if the country went fascist. this is not a problem that Lutherans or Catholics have, to put it lightly

Greatest concept album of the 21st century, maybe the greatest album of the 21st century

Give it a sec for the pain to start This wreck right here, it ain't for the faint of heart They thought they saw the worst verse From the team of G men who seem like nerds at first

I think one of implications is that an enemy of the US Constitution is running DOD

this got a full, out loud, "bro WHAT" from me, ngl

maybe an unpopular opinion, but: I think there are some surnames that just shouldn't run for office. sorry, but "senator parent" is just an awful collision of words

The Bear isn’t necessarily “good”, but it’s worth watching [crowd nods in agreement] especially as a showcase for individual actors [still nodding] like Oliver Platt [confusion in crowd] who was excellent in Bicentennial Man [crowd is angry] A GREAT MOVIE, BTW [crowd murders me]

Tool is jam band music for people who hate jam bands

From Celestial Seasonings to Cybertrucks: Boulder in the 21st Century

Back in like 2010, a Boulder friend told me that they overheard someone from the Bay Area exulting about how some of the 2000 sq ft houses were _only_ $1.3 or $1.5m in Boulder, and they couldn't *wait* to move.

Midwest Depravity

Imagine if you are an NBA basketball player, one of the 5-10 best in your class, an elite riser and star your whole life. You get to the league and see that the guy who writes your checks was a 5'10" backup guard at Michigan State, and now is worth a billion. You'd want to get into investing, too.

One change in my own views over the past decade or so is that I'm not as naive about pro athlete labor unions. I'm not pro-ownership, that would be dumb, but I'm not a simple-minded "unions do good" person. The NBAPA could afford to be stingier with the best, and generous with the rest.

You should take many lawyer's political analyses with a grain of salt: a lot of them confuse questions of law with questions of political power, and they have a lot of serious-sounding words and moral-sounding rhetoric to cover up the error. But it's still incorrect.

It's not as fun as watching them wreck, but high gas prices stop Big Beautiful Boats all the same

Ethical Hypothetical here, it's not going to happen, but: how would we feel about a DNC posting account releasing a Call of Duty bro-edit clip for Noem's firing? Is that too far?

If the 2028 presidential primary ends up in some kind of "we're doing Nuremberg again" vs "it's not FeAsIbLe to promise that!" intra-Democratic voter squabble....I'm fine with that. We'll call that forward progress.

in a post-credit scene, Dan Crenshaw appears in Noem's apartment and tells her he's putting a team together

"Don't be fooled by the Internet. It's cool to get on the computer, but don't let the computer get on you. It's cool to use the computer, don't let the computer use you. There's a war going on, the battlefield's the mind, and the prize is the soul. Be very careful." -Some Guy, in 1999

Just to be clear, I'm not saying the US is uniquely evil! We're not! That's a weird concept, to be frank! But coming into the pandemic, we already had immense amounts of Know-Nothings, in and out of power.

This is largely why some of us knew how bad the pandemic was gonna be around here. I wrote in a post in June 2020 that the US was not a decent nation, and we were gonna find out just how indecent we could be.

one of the main reasons I call the 16th-20th/21st century the Protestant Age isn’t because everyone is Protestant, but the formations we all work with are roughly hewn from what happened in the 1500s, in terms of a state authority separate from religious authority, ideas of peoples, etc.

“Snowden vs Elbridge, what is this, a squash match?”

Despite the many, MANY, versions of bad white guys, it takes a certain kind of skill to be so WASPy White that even GOP congressmen think they can get one off on you, but Elbridge Colby somehow cracked the code.

I know it is not his greatest, but Coriolanus absolutely hits me in my dudely core in ways unlike anything else

Calling Joachim of Flores Judeo-Christian, lol

I’ll give up my books when someone can show me a method of digital information storage that can last 50 years.

Reposting Stephen’s excellent take in light of the recent American CEO Burger Wars

I went to law school at 33 years old, and I think that was a good call. And seeing some of the “straight out of undergrad” classmates, and the dark jobs they angled for, was super instructive.

it’s kinda wild how many people despair of changing people’s minds. it’s easier to imagine jailing a person on vague charges than imagine you can persuade them, for some of you.

we need to shut down the “we need to shut down _____” talk in the US until more of you people realize it’s a hapless and helpless stance against the public.

if someone is consistently stupid, I try to Not Think About Them, but I gather some of you were raised to instead get really upset about stupid people? and like talk about it in public all the time?

the pandemic is gonna look so bad in the historical record, lol

Quinnipiac? This poster was a POLL??

a look so out there it looks like he's making fun of James Harden

[old man grumble] trying to fit bananas into a food trend has been so dumb. bananas aren't a trend, they just are a food! we all eat them! no one's "rediscovering" banana flavors, gimme a break!

[monotone] wow, can't believe a weird retired SEAL would do that

yo, staffers on the Hill: quit making your bosses sound like they're on LinkedIn with these posts, it's 2026, let's get a move on

- USMC in WWII, injured in Pacific, 25 yrs Treasury Dept - USAF pilot (including atomic tests in the 50s), 25 yrs in various gov't agencies plus a failed oil biz

Rotta chop-a the herbs, Rotta cut-a the pizza.

my “how I left the Religious Right” path

I tutored Hunter S Thompson’s widow for the LSAT

the Rockies blowing one of their allotted 60 total wins for 2026 on this game would be Too Good

not an original take here, but maybe the saddest success of the Religous Right in the US (and now elsewhere) is that it convinces a lot of people that Christians must be wild-eyed or based in hatred and xenophobia.

I go back and forth on whether JD stays a Catholic, tbh. The RC isn’t as thoroughly constituted with the ideological allies against modernity. It also has a tradition of critiquing modern power he hates. Y’know which church is allied fully w/ empire, against modernity? The Russian Orthodox Church.

I don’t think people realize how much JD Vance wants to build a church to the Martyrs of Wokeness and DEI on the grounds of Langley. Vance yearns to walk with Patriarch Kirill down an esplanade on the Potomac