Even for trump and his ilk, it is dramatic the speed and ease at which the president says at one second: this is about the freedom and rising up of the people and protesters of [x y or z smaller nation], and then nearly the next second stressing repeatedly: I don’t give a shit if they get freedom…

Don't shun people just because they have different beliefs about blotting out the sun to usher in a new age of eternal darkness. We have to find an answer in the middle.

What's making me lose my mind is that Hegseth made a career out of defending American soldiers who committed war crimes, now is openly ordering war crimes and bragging about it, yet our media does not have headlines screaming "Sec Def is Ordering War Crimes."

SCOOP — Body camera footage obtained as a result of my lawsuit against the DC Metropolitan PD confirms DOGE and the Trump administration openly admitted they were entering private property when they raided the building on March 17, 2025. That didn't stop MPD from breaking down the doors. My report:

this isn't just a MAGA thing, it's a cross-American one and *especially* a lot of people who came of age in politics or punditry in the 1990s. the idea that the news could happen to them - that the world might not be all going their way - is genuinely brain-breaking to a lot of them

IFYKYK

These are my assumptions, too. The inability of Congress to pass a war powers limitation will go down in history as an Enabling Act-level of capitulation.

2006: don’t be evil 2016: but really, what *is* evil? 2026: meet your new assistant Evi L® delivering +225% ROI on prison labor

Far too many leftists are content endlessly critiquing power from the outside. It gives them a sense of purpose in life and an endless stream of content that can be milked. Because governing? Governing is hard, and it requires compromise. And we can’t have THAT.

Just a reminder that the first 1970s Oil Crisis began with the Yom Kippur War and the second with....unrest in Iran.

In 1966 the New Jersey Young Republicans gleefully sang racist and antisemitic songs at their gatherings. The lyrics to one went “Riding the Reich in my Mercedes Benz, shooting every kike, saving all my friends." Hartford Courant, 13 February 1966.

I was forced to watch TV news when I had breakfast in a diner recently and I strongly resonated with the sentiment that being an intelligent person in America today is like being awake during a surgery.

I’m utterly uninterested in “debates” about whether AI can do things well. I wouldn’t care if it could. 1. It stole from me. 2. I prefer me having my job to a computer having it. 3. I don’t teach “with” Lockheed or Raytheon; why wld I teach with Anthropic or OpenAI?

As an altar boy I was such an assumed candidate for the priesthood that my parish invited me to the elevation of the new bishop. (The other altar boy they invited is now a priest.)

A war that isn't a war, documented with videos that may or may not be real, funded by elected leaders who are neither for nor against it, is the most dystopian thing that's happened in my lifetime

There are many contenders here, but maybe the most depressing thing about being alive right now is that no one remembers anything that happened more than about a day ago. Blame what you want - social media, the internet writ large, AI - but a couple years ago might as well be the Middle Ages.

Thinking about scores of people dead on the bottom of the Indian Ocean because of a war the aggressor can’t even find a consistent reason why they started it.

I know that the people who need to read this aren’t here, but here goes: Rules of engagement aren’t for the enemy. They’re for you. They’re for your soldiers when they’re captured or wounded. They’re for your civilians when they’re in range of the enemy. They’re for your allies, to reassure.

Hegseth today: We don't actually have any clear purpose or guideposts or objectives in mind, the metrics are shifting...but "we are just getting started." Yikes.

i'm taking a brave stance that may get me canceled: there is no reason for the pervert glasses to exist

In the Monkees movie Head there’s a part where they’re soldiers and Peter says he’s going to run forward and Mike Nesmith laconically says “see that you do.” I say it all the time when someone says they’re about to do something.

is it a good sign when the uniform response to a classified briefing is basically everyone immediately doing a vertical video about it in which they spend most of the time screaming that we’re all gonna die?

And this will in no way destabilize Iraq, Turkey, or Syria I’m sure

The thing with racists is that they assume only white people have agency and are thus ill equipped when it turns out that other people actually can do things they don’t expect.

The easiest analytical assumption to make whenever Trump does something is that he hasn't thought it through at all. And yet everytime commentators contort themselves into believing there's some kind of strategy.

When we talk about Baby Boomers not getting off the stage: In 1997, the US president was born in 1946. In 2007, the US president was born in 1946. In 2017, the US president was born in 1946. And next year in 2027? The US president will have been born in 1946.

The stock market tanking might be the salvation we need to get Trump to stop this, but I honestly don't think anymore that him stopping means others will stop, too.

Hearing someone rave about Dubai is always a red flag to me. They're practically screaming "I am a morally vacant, shallow person with no interest in culture."

guys! GUYS! did you know??? we're all going to DIE one day???

Yesterday the Texas Rangers erected a statue of a segregationist cop at Globe Life Field. A statue that was removed from public property in 2020 because of its racist history. @mlb.com has refused to comment. www.cupofcoffeenews.com/cup-of-coffe...

Well I just broke the glass and put on Iggy Pop's The Idiot, one of my all time dark night of the soul records.

When you let the war genie out of the bottle you can't just put it back. Everyone in August of 1914 and April of 1861 thought things would be short. Sometimes you get a Spanish-American War, but a lot of the time you get a Vietnam.

Well today I’m thinking this all could go in several, unpredictable directions and I think just about anything could happen. Wheeee!!!!

I got a rash, man.

Getting into the “eating the seed corn” phase already.

I know of someone in one of these countries who is desperate to leave but can’t.

Dude’s whole face looks like a rash

Hegseth et al love the Confederacy so much they’re imitating its logistics deficiencies too. Grant was a far better general than Lee because he actually figured this stuff out and Lee never did.

Bari Weiss helping to get the Shah of Iran reinstalled is yet another one of her bold ideas that were tried decades ago and failed

"Our interest, I think, very much is in NOT going to war with Iran.  It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country." - 10/27/24

Trump is not acting like a king he is acting like a fascist dictator. I'm fine with the "no kings" framing because once you say the f-word the normies freak out and other people think you're trying to start a debate.

turning what was once a neighborhood into a silent mausoleum

Democrats have had one continuous congressional leadership clique since 2017! It’s crazy! Despite all the political disaster and failure there’s never been a serious effort to put a different group of people in charge, and if you complain about it, they treat you as an obvious crank for noticing.

Thinking about how all of my published research and that of all of my friends, which we’ve earned pennies from, was not only stolen by Anthropic to train their profitable AI, but then that AI was used to target a school, killing scores of children.

Imagine you're paying like $100 a month or whatever for Claude and realizing the government used the same shit to kill schoolchildren in Iran. And they're using your tax money to pay for it. So you're paying Claude twice to kill kids. Crazy.

There it is. Blew up a school. Claude Code at work.

As someone who grew up Catholic in a very Protestant place where anti-Catholicism was commonplace, Talarico's problem is not that he talks about God, it's that he talks just like a Protestant preacher does, which for many of us (right or wrong) is triggering.

Folks who know Iran better than me: what are the odds that the military takes over, announces an end to the harsh Islamist restrictions, then asks the people to unify to defend the nation against attack? A backlash among the clerics would happen in normal times, but maybe not in a crisis.

I watched some NBC news coverage this morning and I was shocked at how rah-rah and shallow it was. I felt like I had taken a time machine to 2003.