I read some behavioral economics and it has made the Sunday essay more powerful than you could possibly imagine. mattdpearce.substack.com/p/you-couldn...

“Trump might have been just as happy invading Greenland or bombing Canada as he is avenging Operation Eagle Claw, but it is Iran where the strategic inertia has been gathering for years, and where the institutional interests conformed to his own proclivities.”

This is straight up, Nazi "dual state" shit. If a naturalized citizen commits a crime, we have mechanisms in place to hold them accountable. It's called the legal system and it applies to all of us. This extra targeting of only *some* people accused of crimes is part of a broader, expulsive project.

Grok told a simulated delusional AI user concerned that a dark entity was trapped in their mirror that they were likely being haunted by a doppelgänger, citing Malleus Maleficarum and suggesting they smash a nail through their mirror while reciting Psalm 91 backwards: futurism.com/artificial-i...

It's silly and wrong to act like Trump was gonna be committed to pacifist foreign policy before the Israelis blackmailed him. And, yes, it is in fact anti-Semitic. For one thing, there's evidently a section of the American military establishment who have been gagging for war with Iran for decades.

Extremely normal and fine for a company to put this in a public statement

In what universe did this take place www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

"At some point if the ship doesn’t turn around, maybe it will start taking on water or listing badly or hit an iceberg, or perhaps the iceberg has been there all along and is named Donald Trump."

At the mass deportation hub in Minneapolis, where Good and Pretti were murdered, they're handing out these "challenge coins" to commemorate their work. talkingpointsmemo.com/news/staff-a...

I’ve said it before, but sometimes the pundit class sabotages itself via its own addiction to nuance. It’s hard to write a novel and interesting thinkpiece at this point on the premise that Trump is just a deranged narcissist gangster, even though (and indeed, because) that’s just obviously true.

I genuinely struggle to imagine the minds of people who could live through the last year and a half and somehow still believe that liberal arts professors are the primary problem facing 2026 America - I struggle with that more than I do with imagining what it’s like to be an octopus.

Every day that passes without Trump being removed from office is another day that Republicans in Washington are choosing to abdicate their moral and constitutional duty to the Republic.

This is catastrophic.

I wrote about it www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

We didn't deserve this day.

Impossible to disagree with a single word that Ben Rhodes (Obama era NSC official) is saying here:

From my opening speech at the Cambridge Disinformation Summit. Disinformation sets the stage for corruption.

Me, joking: I can’t believe we chose “destroying the economy” and “losing wars” over “being nice to trans people occasionally” Conservatives, dead serious: it was a tough choice, but I’m glad we picked “destroying the economy” and “losing wars” over “being nice to trans people occasionally”

They think everyone else is a clout seeker as void of moral commitments as they are. Not that these moral commitments are always good, mind you. But they can’t even imagine their existence, for better or worse.

Absolutely horrendous shit “If the global media is talking about Israel killing innocent journalists, then immediately there’s a push to find one journalist who might not be so innocent — as if that somehow makes killing the other 20 acceptable,” the intelligence source said.

We also see this in his election programme "for a Functioning and Humane Hungary", the key points of which I have summarised here: 5/ hungarianobserver.substack.com/p/tiszas-pla...

Something Kevin’s recent pieces have flagged for me is the sneaky veil of ideological compression involved around “AI” in critical discourse and not merely in the obvious hype cycle.

This is such a transparent, roundabout way to say what we can all see before our eyes: Republicans are the party of anti-Muslim bigotry. They're not merely allowing it to fester -- theyre instigating it from the highest levels.

The isolationist wing of the MAGA movement needs to reconcile their hatred of the Iran War with their love of Trump, and the way to do that will be to lean into the antisemitism and blame the bad cabal of advisors for betraying the good tsar.

All of these are policies they're already supposed to be following. So why would anyone believe they'll start following them in exchange for DHS funding. I mean, come on. The proper response to "We won't deport U.S. citizens if you fund DHS" is, "Are you fucking kidding me?"

Actually, Americans are just like you. ~20-30% of them genuinely support fascism, as in ~every 🇪🇺 country. You are just more fortunate to have political institutions & a multiparty system that prevent that 20-30% from fully capturing the center-right party, becoming 51%, & controlling the government.

The mediocrity of the people that have ruined the country blows my mind.

Re the alleged Netanyahu-is-secretly-dead videos: he doesn’t have a 6th finger, and the foam in the coffee clearly shifts. We are really in bad shape with AI doubt at this point, but what I keep coming back to is “conspiracy-without-the-theory”: WHY would the Israeli govt conceal his death w/fakes?

💥Russian interference in Hungary’s election campaign continues. A Kremlin-linked bot network called Matryoshka is spreading disinfo to exploit Ukraine-Hungary tensions. Researchers at Bot Blocker (@antibot4navalny on X) shared their findings with The Insider.

“AI can never be AI without humans. It is not artificial intelligence. It’s African intelligence...We are training our own death. We train ChatGPT and it’s killing us slowly.” Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots. Now, they're fighting back.

Donald Trump letting you know how the authoritarian capture of the media is going, in case you missed it. Unlike other authoritarians in places like Hungary and Poland he has no worries about advertising his authoritarian take over of the media.

“Don’t proudly announce an international war crime for at least 20 minutes” Pentagon challenge.

Modern Republicanism is making up a thing to be scared about and then using that as the basis for policy

🇷🇺🇭🇺 Meet Hungarian politician Péter Magyar – same name as the opposition leader, tons of photos with Viktor Orbán and his cabinet members, running as an "independent" in a West Hungarian constituency. A Russia-style spoiler candidate, designed to deceive voters. More on 444.hu: 444.hu/2026/03/12/v...

I knew that the Department of War shot a missile into a school & killed 175 civilians, mostly children. This is learned today: Secretary of War Hegseth had cut the teams assigned to prevent such tragedies by 90%. www.npr.org/2026/03/11/n...

I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can't defend this war in public. I obviously can't disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are. 1/ Here's what I can share:

OMG they released the deposition videos where they revealed that these two DOGE bros were just feeding grants into ChatGPT and saying "tell me if this is DEI in less than 120 characters." www.techdirt.com/2026/02/19/d...

Part of Trump’s mass appeal (and of why he’s so dangerous) is that he really seems to share Joe Barstool’s worldview that there are no complex problems: Everything has a simple brute solution, which previous leaders were somehow too stupid or weak to deploy.

Iran's government is more hardline, its people are poorer and more isolated, the region's on fire, and the global economy feels like its about to go into shock If you want to know why people wanted to avoid war with Iran for so long, you're finding out in real time

Hegseth needs to stand trial after this as a war criminal. Between this attack and the girls' school, there's no ambiguity. He is responsible for mass murder and must be held accountable.

I’m a little confused because the economists on my timeline are like “oh yeah we’re facing a generational energy crisis because Trump is a madman who started a war he can’t control” while the politicians are like “it’s important to make clear we support the troops until it all blows over next week”

I'm not kidding that this shit is making me lose my mind, I have to log out I'm like foaming at the mouth

Now that they're trying to pretend their war is not a war, they've gone back to calling it the Defense Department.

Trump has fully shattered the world we all grew up in. It’s a dramatic break from how things worked before, even compared to the Iraq War and other misadventures - the United States abruptly tumbling over a cliff and becoming literally more reckless and domineering than Putin’s Russia.

We are solidly back to the days of "WE are the civilized, makers and beneficiaries of the rules, and THEY are the uncivilized, entitled to no protections" That mindset never really went away, some of just pretended it did. No denying it anymore

It’s so sick how the US openly celebrates war crimes now

The WH is making no effort at all to convince the American people how or why military action in Iran will keep them safe or improve their circumstances. They're not even trying to sell this, because nobody cares about anything beyond cashing in and keeping Trump happy.

Israeli filmmakers sign letter in defence of #TriciaTuttle: “Do not touch the #Berlinale” www.screendaily.com/news/israeli...

For the first time since @projectsaltbox.bsky.social launched their DHS warehouse acquisition tracker, the number of canceled sales is higher than any of the other warehouse-related figures. We've reached a tipping point, folks. lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/b0...

Gunman shot dead in Mar-a-Lago was ‘fixated on Epstein files’ and avid Trump supporter, friends say.