Putting the finishing touches on a translation, and this is my favorite footnote I've ever written: The actual verb used here is “raxlen” which literally means to stretch your arms over your head after waking up, and it is incomprehensible that such a wonderful, useful word has fallen out of usage.

You ever try to open a recalcitrant soda bottle, and the ridges on the cap give you a blister? Yeah.

I see people responding to this like Paul is speaking truth to power, but his complaint is that Mullin voted against racist legislation and then cheered Paul getting beat up.

Celebrating the Ides of March Shatner style.

Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride may be the closest we'll ever get to a Alastair Reynolds adaptation. It nails the Weimar gothic/diesel punk noir aesthetic of his novels.

Altman is correct, but here's the thing: You can buy bulk, homogenized intelligence from AI, or handcrafted, artesianal intelligence from actual people like me. Which are you going to choose?

The absurdist business plan at the heart of Wes Anderson's Phoenician Scheme is better thought out than this.

Note that the US ended the draft not because of public protest, but because the Pentagon concluded it was inefficient--draftees were being mustered out just as they were becoming effective soldiers. Bringing back the draft is performative militarism, not a sound policy.

"The intelligence service of a foreign country with an obvious agenda is feeding me information different from what our own intelligence agencies have shown me." Graham's a bigger dupe than somebody who falls for an MLM.

Gonna save this video for the next time I see someone mad about people saying "USians" instead of "Americans."

Weird that the Nazi has a Graham Platner tattoo pin on his jacket.

Not only is this not an Orwell quote, it is diametrically opposed to what Orwell believed.

Grandfather on my dad's side ran Lexis/Nexis. On my mom's side, he was a small town fire chief.

It is true that 30% of the military is made up of dumbfucks (not counting Marines). That doesn't mean we should overlook their dumbfuckery. Military service is commendable, but it's not absolution.

"Only hippie liberals want to immanatize the eschaton," Voegelin said. "Conservatives are never millennarian," Voegelin said.

Last time I got gas, just before Trump started threatening Iran, it was $2.25/gallon. Last week it was up to $2.49. Today it's at $2.99.

This can be understood as, "Men have the right to control their property, which includes their women and children."

Why do some people find "USian" so offensive? (A) It's been standard Internet lingo since the 90s, along with its counterpart UKian. (B) Using exonyms for people of other countries is standard practice in English -- we say Japanese and Germans rather than Nihonjin and Deutsche.

Glad I no longer have to expend cognitive power remembering which Naomi is a wingnut.

I love when the US helps one dictator kill another dictator then pretends that they were acting in the name of democracy.

This wasn't exactly a whim. The US has been building forces in the region for months. The information was out there for the public. Most Americans chose to ignore it.

Who considers organs to be a cut of meat?

Lee Harvey Oswald was trying to kill Governor Connally. The Magic Bullet was just a spectacularly bad shot.

Democrats shouldn't fire ICE agents. They should transfer them to the Forestry Service in Alaska or some similarly undesirable position where they can self-downsize.

A suresign the economic bubble is about to pop: I'm seeing ads for a low interest secured credit card where the security is your home equity.

As a general rule, if a country where Americans aren't allowed to go as tourists shoots or arrests an American in its territory, I assume they were CIA operatives.

Between the House and Senate, there are more than 250 Democrats in Congress. If they took turns chanting, "Hey pedo, pedo, pedo," until the Sergeant at Arms removes them, they could make the State of the Union run past midnight.

Is Peter Thiel evil? Yes. Is Peter Thiel gay? Yes. Do these traits have anything to do with each other? No.

Turns out all the people who spent months wringing their hands over Wuthering Heights were missing the point of what Fennell was doing. Yes, Heathcliff is played by a white man, but Nellie and Linton are played by actors of color, allowing Fennel to sidestep having a man of color abusing white women

Stories like these make me glad to live in the free world where the government would never do anything like this.

People who talk about a shared European culture based on Greco-Roman culture never understand that Greece and Rome were Mediterranean civilizations and Europe outside of the Med basin was a hinterland to them.

Hopefully ICE goons haven't had a chance to leave Minneapolis and they get stuck there with no way to pay for hotels or food.

Also no one wants to share a skybox with him when he shits himself.

Ugh. Grokipedia is now showing up in Google results. It's still below Wikipedia, but the fact that it's there at all is disturbing.

It's surreal to hear a song that sounds like it's about a labor dispute in 1917, but it's talking about something that happened last weekend.

Italy has a chance to do the funniest thing...

Watching the trailer for He-Man led me to a horrible realization -- Masters of the Universe is of the same antiquity now as the Flash Gordon serials were when the De Laurentiis movie came out.

One day a billionaire will decide to make flying cars a thing even though they're annoying, hard to operate, and require constant maintenance, but we'll be told they're the inevitable future of technology, dealerships will phase out actual cars and the government will do nothing to regulate.

"Every understanding of law [about] territorial control..." Mate, the US position violates half the provisions of the Helsinki Accords.

Prostate cancer is a horrible way to die. Absolutely terrible. Every day an unending agony that makes life seem a hollow shell that you can barely tolerate until you yearn for the sweet release of death. What I'm trying to say here is that Scott Adams died too soon.

Slightly diminish a band: Aerojourneyman

/8 A huge part of what makes it very hard to convict Jonathan Ross for murder was baked into America generations before Trump was President. That’s the primary factor that lets law enforcement kill with impunity, not Trump. Dick Wolf has killed more black men than Leopold II.

Mark Twain:

Man, Gerard Butler picked a bad week to release a movie called Greenland II.

This is some South Park level shit.

How stupid are Democrats if a ranking member of a major committee believed the assurances that we weren't going to overthrow Maduro when the evidence was plain to everyone paying attention that we were going to overthrow Maduro?

Apropos of nothing, did you know that the Roman Senate, despite becoming little more than a social club, continued to meet for the entire history of the Empire and didn't cease until a full century after the last Emperor was deposed?

Have you ever stopped to think that somebody who is truly immortal would live to see the end of humanity, the death of the sun and ultimately the heat death of the universe? Their earthly life would be a brief moment followed by trillions of years drifting through a dying void.

Just saw a Substack post that began with a plea to become a paying subscriber because the article is 19,000 words long, and all I can think is the writer needs to trim his stuff to under 4000 words before I'll even consider it.