Dems: don't follow illegal orders Sensible people: It's not like situations in combat where an individual is in a position to judge whether it's legal or not. Hegseth: hold my beer

'It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead…which should make all the difference…shouldn't it?' - Rozencrantz (by way of Tom Stoppard)

Classic blunders: 1. Land war in Asia 2. Going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line 3. Having Jeffrey Epstein as your wing-man

Yes. It turned the question of 'should we be a monarchy?' to be something more like: 'should you fire your granny?'.

Mike Johnson is basically a walking SNL skit at this point... one of those annoying character ones that is reprised repeatedly long after it outlived its welcome.

An analogy for where we are in the US right now: Berlusconi as President, with Mussolini as his most important advisor and de-facto Prime Minister

The first person to give Tylenol a headache.

Gotta say, the most pointless enduring consequence of the great awokening is that git repos randomly either use 'main' or 'master'. Good job guys.

Presumably I'm just one of many parents wondering how I explain that Disney doesn't work any more to a 5 year old.

We'll see if the king gets (metaphorically) burned this time.

It's weird how authoritarianism is basically just 'isolated demands for rigor' at a large scale.

'fear itself' is having an evening

It's not so much that people who vote for Trump are stupid, as that the Trump administration keeps testing the boundaries of how stupid people are, and they haven't found the edge yet.

Much as I dislike Trump, at least you can't say that his mantle is unurned.

Turing test v2: Any technology that can successfully navigate the Apple password reset system. To reset your icloud account password, you need access to your icloud account. Real brain geniuses over there.

Immigration systems show you what governments would do to everyone if they weren't accountable to the people they serve.

A bit premature to celebrate independence when we are yet to dispose of the King.

The King eats and Michael Johnson takes the shit.

The one thing I appreciate about the Trump admin is that we get very divergent kinds of bad, such that's it's quite hard to think about what's worse: - killing 15 million off health insurance - creating an expanded ICE that looks increasingly like the apparatus of a police state Which is it?

My wokest point of view: that Juneteenth is the most important US holiday

De-ice

Make America Healthy Again* * like it's 1795

Abolish ICE is the moderate position.

Yes, but _how much_ less lethal?

It's rather unfortunate that the biggest threat is a shipping container full of drones from China. When the main thing you get from China is a zillion shipping containers. It's as if the Trojans were trying to get their horse into a city that went through 10,000 giant wooden horses a day.

Revising my point of view that being petty and vindictive is _always_ bad.

It's a damning indictment of the concept of patriotism that it's insufficient motivation for enough people to solve our current problems. Love of country is a reason one might put aside petty political one-upmanship to solve the issue of the squalid deprivation of our current leadership.

The thing that's truly great about the USA is that it's the only country to make singing the national anthem into a competition between individuals of near superhuman ability.

Turns out the good advice for the Trump orbanist project was: - Don't do most of the bad things the first time - Do the bad things the second time One weird trick to discredit the people who were right about the what but ran ahead of the when.

If we can't get them for authoritarianism, maybe we can Al Capone them for insider trading.

Trump was elected by a combination of low information voters, low intelligence voters and low imagination voters.

The stock market is the knife. The bond market is drawing it left and right.

Tariffs are gender affirming care.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as applied to Trump. The more we nail down Trump's stupidity, the less we know about his badness and vice versa.

David Blaine has nothing on this guy.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce

The thing about the work of @abraham.bsky.social and Ty Frank: The Expanse and Captives war series, is that while they depict wonderfully various kinds of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, they leave you with the misleading impression that such regimes tend to respect Academia.

Podcast advertising hasn't quite nailed it if it thinks that just because I'm temporarily in Holland that it makes sense to populate my downloaded podcasts with Dutch ads.

misogeriocracy - system of government characterized by the abuse of elders by making them head of state or other prominent positions

About 90% of Trumpism can be explained by: 1. cock-up 2. commit to the bit

Shit dictator

If The Handmaid's Tale was a major theme of the first Trump admin, what I didn't see coming is her autopen being a feature of the second: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LongPen

In case you needed another reason to win the House in '28, if the election is tied up in the courts on Jan 20th, then the President is the Speaker of the (newly elected) House. ballotpedia.org/Who_is_the_p...

If some vengeful god were to take all the things I find frustrating, annoying and perturbing about politics and then turn them all up to 11, it would be indistinguishable from what we have.

In case you needed another reason to win the House in '28, if the election is tied up in the courts on Jan 20th, then the President is the Speaker of the (newly elected) House. ballotpedia.org/Who_is_the_p...

'No kings here!' - this might just be the unifying message.

Among much that is perverse there's something spectacularly perverse about being the party that mostly represents Tornado Alley, the most tornadoey place in the world by far, and be climate deniers. And not only that to be moving significantly in the direction of being weather denying.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with reference to the actuarial tables of patriots and tyrants

This is horrible to post, but I may as well post it. We are essentially shutting down research operations in my group, which is focused on treatments for pediatric brain cancer. I’m a well funded investigator, and there’s no choice. Science can’t function without the stability of NIH