This came to me in a dream

One under-appreciated facet of bigotry is that it’s really time-consuming. HHS has food and drug safety, disease research, school cafeteria nutrition, Medicare and Medicaid - yet a non trivial amount of time that could have gone to any one of those things went to changing the name under a portrait.

NEW info on shipwreck attack. It gets worse. The 2 survivors climbed atop wreckage and waved to overhead. "Some of the people viewing the video thought ... could have been an attempt to surrender" Others "said the most logical explanation was ... signaling for a rescue." 1/

Put 19th century American politics ("Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine"), 20th century racism ("civilizational erasure"), and a few teaspoons of DPRK-like devotion to the leader ("Trump" mentioned 27 times in 29 pages of text) into a blender and you get the NSS. Just eye-watering stuff.

"Bradley told lawmakers he ordered a second strike [because] survivors could hypothetically have floated to safety, been rescued, and carried on with trafficking the drugs. The other source with direct knowledge of the briefing called that rationale “f**king insane.” www.cnn.com/2025/12/04/p...

Here's Hegseth taking to social media to tell an organizer at TurningPoint USA that he has killed four people in response to his request. The absence of gravity surrounding the use of lethal force is revealing.

look I’m not an evangelical but “a guy calling himself the Beast wants control of your earthly wealth” feels like some kind of sign, no?

DOJ's newest recruitment ad features Judge Dredd, the comic satire about the dangers of lawless policing and authoritarian power

Outstanding reporting today from the New Media at the Pentagon.

$10 this noted misunderstanderer of Lord of the Rings is prototyping a human-carrying tunnel boring machine thingy he’ll name the Balrog.

Space congestion is already a problem - and, not for nothing, but GHGs have already reduced LEO’s carrying capacity. This seems like one of those solutions that’s long on technical prowess and short on logic. www.businessinsider.com/google-proje...

Exactly in keeping with the habits of a Christian nation. apnews.com/article/food...

What a world.

Glad to see the Secretary took a break between hard core PT sessions with the troops to find, download, and share this inspirational message. Look how happy the cartoon turtle is! Retention will skyrocket. Meanwhile I’m sure the rest of the Secretary’s job is getting done too, no doubt in my mind.

Politics aside - my mouth is dry as a cotton ball just *looking* at that turkey.

May my incredible cooking oopsie be your cooking flex: when making stroganoff with your leftover turkey, cannot possibly recommend highly enough swapping some of the mushroom soup for leftover gravy. Dear lord, I may die sooner, but I’ll be happier when I do.

“American spy agencies have given the military intelligence about the location of such facilities in both Venezuela and Colombia. But U.S. military officials have developed a range of target options for Mr. Trump.” www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/u...

Turns out, just as air campaigns are ineffective tools of coercion, so too do time outs achieve the opposite effects. Rather than inspiring young children to capitulate to your demands, it simply encourages them to double down on their resistance. Pape: right again.

Interesting detail in this very important story: The unit involved was (per 4 sources) SEAL Team VI. When Justice Sotomayor asked whether a grant of presidential immunity would permit Trump to order Seal Team 6 to commit murder on his behalf, his lawyer (now DOJ's #2) dismissed it as far-fetched.

Hell of a way to tee up America’s 250th year.

when you’re trying to evade capture after WWII ends:

Declaring “no quarter” is a war crime. Even assuming an armed conflict exists.

I feel much safer today knowing that we deported a Babson College student back to a country where she hasn't lived since childhood. She wasn't even flying internationally. She was flying to Texas.

Grateful for a beanbag in front of a roaring fire, for a son reading next to me, for dinner in the oven, a healthy and safe family, and a country worthy, still and to the last, of our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. Happy Thanksgiving.

“Citizen with no authority or position in government takes a wild guess” isn’t quite update-worthy. It didn’t even make me laugh, unlike the NYT update that gave a historical background of Farragut Square (“update: we finally figured out who Farragut was!”)

“As Trump wields deadly force without constraints, he offers a model for lethal, lawless action, thereby posing a threat to international security that extends well beyond the Western Hemisphere.” Spot on.

Two National Guardsmen serving away from their families on Thanksgiving. Hell isn’t hot enough for the shooter.

Every now and again I misunderstand my neighborhood listserv’s acronyms and think someone wrote an email with the subject like “F#%^ Sake Toddler Boots” and for minutes I think the “get off my lawn” vibes have gone to a new high until I realize they’re just looking to sell some shoes.

But here's the thing: Americans' energy bills are already 3x inflation, so the WH needs to figure out how to power this AI boom real fast. Putting it under DOE suggests it'll be nuclear but it takes 10 years to build a plant and our current stock won't cut it. www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

The Boy brought home a construction paper ring garland thing (whatever those things are called) from school on which he’d written things he’s thankful for, two of which were “glitter” and “pain” because “pain is useful for the body” and I think he wins the “who needs a vacation most” competition

Like what foreign policy practitioner worth the title, having watched Venezuela these past few weeks, wakes up one morning and exclaims, “Yknow who we *really* need to hear from? The Iran-Contra guy”

Because when I want to get ideas for how the US should manage a brewing crisis in Venezuela, I want to hear the perspective of a guy who served in the Reagan Administration, one noted for its restraint and skill in South America.

This is spot on — and my biggest fear is that it will become more expensive to learn how to think and a lot cheaper to just use AI. Majoring in the humanities will resurge as a marker of class.

One ping only.

Just another normal afternoon in America, parking at a supermarket near a car with a “THE-1488” license plate. www.adl.org/resources/ha...

The Moscow Times: „The very emergence of such a U.S. initiative signals, in Putin’s view, that Washington is capitulating. And capitulating not because it has suffered losses — it has lost neither tanks nor aircraft nor soldiers — but because it is tired,frightened and eager to avoid involvement.“

305 down, 1,156 to go.

Until humans evolve to have little floppy disk slots in their brains for new files, learning will always take (1) time, (2) effort, and (3) a certain degree of friction. I don't know why we needed to study this but ok.

Ah yes - the extremely opaque, hard to nail down swastika. One man’s hate symbol is another man’s historical throwback to fascism. This’ll do wonders for unit cohesion. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

NEW: Sean Duffy frequently calls safety his “top priority” as transportation secretary. But I spent months wading through regulatory notices and found something far different: that USDOT has been delaying, weakening and killing dozens of safety rules, many opposed by the transportation industry.🧵

This is an essential point: “A single person can now build a complete parallel reality with nothing more than a prompt window.”

Approaching a technology as powerful as AI with a “ooh what can this do?” mindset instead of “here is the problem we need it to solve” is the primary reason we’ve gotten to a place where a teddy bear even has AI in the first place.

“According to an OPM email summarizing the regulations, the rule states that employees transferred into Schedule Policy/Career will no longer be protected by the removal protections in Chapter 75 of Title 5 of the U.S. Code or the right to adverse action appeals” www.govexec.com/workforce/20...

So if we want better journalists (and we should ALL want better journalists) may I humbly propose making it *way cheaper to go to college?* Northwestern, one of the best j-schools: ~$96k/yr. Lizza's alma mater UC Berkeley: ~$50k/year. Widen the talent pool to increase the quality AND quantity.

Call me old-fashioned but isn’t teaching a public commitment…?

A potential prelude to military action against Venezuela—even though the FTO designation as such confers no authority to use force. (And this supposed cartel may not even exist.) A regime change campaign in the guise of counterterrorism.

Random personnel cuts -> civilian faculty loss -> accreditation review. Loss would be huge. All military academies are accredited by civilian groups - it’s how we ensure they get an education that’s valued by civilian employers after people leave the service. www.military.com/feature/2025...

last night at a bar I learned that they improved pinball by making machines that are entirely computers and they’re much better than what we had before

Seriously, what is wrong with these people?